It’s me. Please call back, we should talk. I’m walking a trail right now and the sky is pink with cold. Behind me the hills rise from the mist like the scaly back of a sleeping dragon. I couldn’t sleep and came here early to scream where no one would hear. I heard the news …
Because she’d said, be there, and the boys are new to this, they turn up early and stand on the corner, waiting. Expecting a late summer night, they are dressed in jeans, t-shirts, and near-identical Trimm Trab trainers. They weren’t to know that August would be turning itself inside- out, blowing and drizzling its way …
Your mom is the sun to your moon, all the more so the Christmas your parents give you a Celestron FirstScope with a 76 mm reflector optical tube. Mom explains how CHNOPS—carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur—are the building blocks of stars and life. “Including humans, baby girl,” she says. You name your telescope …
[TW: Suicide reference.] It arrived in a big black box. Thinking back, she wishes she had left it there, closed her ears to the whispers, shut the door on the ghostly garment. Left it well alone. There was no note, no card, just the plain black box adorned with a thick gold ribbon, sitting on …
That’s how Nanna explains it to Suki whenever her mum cries. “Storms rile up the waves inside her, and tears happen when the spray breaks free.” Her moaning, Nanna says, is the sound of the wind whipping wild salty air over the sea. Suki wonders about gulls and shipwrecks and sea monsters. In her exercise …
To move the sofa you have to first shift the pile of books balanced rickety on the coffee table, then the half-read gardening magazines with their seed packets – the uninspiring ones – still stuck sadly on the covers. You feel worse about binning the seeds than you do the books you will never read …
Standing by the window, she stares out at the dark country lane. Electric blue lights pulse through the night. The young policeman was back, despite her rudeness to him earlier. ‘We need to evacuate you now, ma’am,’ he’d said, standing at her front door. ‘We’ve been advised that the river will breach its banks imminently.’ …
She calmly enters the room and says, “I’m going to see the Lord.” It’s best to avoid the eyes. No one knows that more than me, but I just can’t help looking into hers as she sings Amazing Grace. I can usually tell if they’ve accepted it. This young woman has accepted it with …
I chain you first in our womb, sink my teeth flesh-deep and tear off a piece. Skin and tissue trail from my mouth to your bloodied arm and I listen to you crying in the darkness until you finally hear me, finally stop, finally curl up close. We aren’t twins, not in the usual sense, …
It’s Only A Cell if You Call it One, And We Never Did by Gaynor Jones Read More »
The green-eyed monster invited us to afternoon tea. His abode is not what you are expecting; it is graced with beauty and net curtains made of interlaced asparagus spears. He sauteed a hole a few months ago to watch his neighbour’s willows belly dancing in the breeze. He tells us this without allowing the dialogue …
It’s been five and a half hours and the hospital still hasn’t called. They said it might take six, or more. Trevor was second on the list, but he might get bumped by an emergency. Snow falls in sticky, wet clumps that drift like feathers shaken from the sky. The flakes alight on the edges …
Aunt Pook says Mum was hit by lightning when she was little, when they all lived together on Four Oaks farm, that’s why Mum has frequent electrical surges and sags and dips in power. Lightning struck the big oak tree, then a slice of the current jumped onto Mum and fried her brain. She was …