Suppose this man with his sovereign ring doesn’t punch you square in the face, and the bridge of your nose—pierced only Wednesday on a whim for your twentieth birthday—doesn’t pop like a champagne cork, your blood Jackson Pollock the ground. Suppose you’ve not burst from the bar onto Clapham High Street, like a Catherine Wheel …

Girls Night Out by Kathryn Aldridge-Morris Read More »

You are not scared of the dark – your eyes have grown accustomed to it, to night’s cloaking and masking, its unsteadying of day’s clichés, day’s commonplace shapes and sounds and songs monotonous. You are not scared of the dark; you comply with its growing fascination with form, its gradual dissolution of colour, draining all …

The Making of the Ink: the first mark by Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou Read More »

Nose: Sweet wafts of honey on buttered toast. I’m alone in this thicket of people, I glide around the party, stream along with the ripple of hellos and sugared air kisses. Watching you, I hold my whisky glass close, a hard roundness, comforting and warm, the buttery smokiness rising. You meet my eyes, your face …

Your Tasting Notes by Joyce Bingham Read More »

When the Fiat breaks down—as it often does—I think, in my bad luck, I might be lucky.  Stuck in a no-parking zone but right opposite a garage with its whining-pop sound of air-torque wrenches and reassuring smell of engine oil. Maybe my presumption—they will help me, a woman stuck on her own—results in my failure.  …

Annus Horribilis and a Blue Fiat Strada by Emily Macdonald Read More »

When he is at his most human, the minotaur is overcome with shame. Follow the thread and we’ll find him, hunched at the join of two walls, snout pressed to the brick. They let this one loose in an old seaside town hoping the knackered streets would be enough to remind him of the labyrinth, …

Shame-Shadow-Threads by David Hartley Read More »

You rip my claws from me. One by one. I snarl but I don’t rear. You smirk, never one to show your disappointment, your desire for more. More agony. More pleading. More caving in. No. Oh, how I curtail your satisfaction, flatten it beneath my paws; they bleed – incomplete and raw, over you and …

Tigress, in a Cell, Somewhere in France by Emma Venables Read More »

At the end of the day everyone stopped. They stopped screwing around behind their partners’ backs. They stopped leaving them for other men and women. They stopped picking up STDs and going nuts. They stopped pretending they were speaking to Carine or Geoff from work. They stopped saying they couldn’t have sex that night because …

The Era of Content by Catherine McNamara Read More »

‘The trick,’ she says, ‘is to loosen the roots. It helps with growth.’  I glance at the kid. He’s watching the display intently, a crease between his eyebrows.   ‘Loosening roots is good practice,’ she states, while her fingers tease the soil. From where I’m standing – me leaning against a wooden pillar, the kid with …

That’s where the life is by Emily Harrison Read More »

I can’t remember how long it’s been there. Probably forever. A constant weight on my shoulder – sometimes the left, sometimes the right; always there, always pushing down. I call it The Burden. Sometimes it’s almost tolerable; forgettable even, for a while. Sometimes it’s just crushing: grinding me into the ground, bending my back this …

Portrait of the artist as an out-of-shape middle-aged failure with an expanding waist, receding hairline, shrinking horizons and the feeling of living through the Beginning of the End Times (again) while struggling to make sense of a world he has long since given up even trying to understand by Terry Holland Read More »

I’ve found some decent-sized nuggets over the years. But today I’m not detecting in the goldfields. No, I’m about fifty kilometres south along the Old Melbourne Road. That’s where he said it was. It was hard looking into those eyes, the way they always lacked something. Luckily, I didn’t inherit that trait. He knew I …

Digging Up the Past by Michael Mcloughlin Read More »