# data[].attributes.body
“Reports are sketchy and unconfirmed at this time. We are receiving conflicting data. We hope to have a better opinion within a few hours, if time permits us, but the possibility of this is beginning to look increasingly unlikely. Until then, we at KGPL News Station are going off the air for the foreseeable future. Before we say goodbye, we’d like to read to you, once more, the U.S. Government’s official emergency advice guidelines. Remember, it is absolutely crucial that these guidelines are followed. More lives than your own may depend on it.”

STAY IN YOUR HOMES.
SHUT AND BARRICADE ALL WINDOWS AND DOORS.
AVOID GOING OUTSIDE AT ALL COSTS.
DO NOT LET ANYBODY ELSE INTO YOUR HOME.
IF YOU DETECT A PRESENCE IN YOUR HOME, DO NOT ATTEMPT TO INVESTIGATE.
DO NOT LOOK AT THE SKY.
DO NOT LOOK INTO MIRRORS.
TERMINATE ALL SOURCES OF LIGHT IN YOUR HOME.
DO NOT MAKE LOUD NOISES.
STAY WHERE YOU ARE. LAW ENFORCEMENT AND MILITARY PERSONNEL HAVE BEEN DISPATCHED AND WILL PROVIDE EMERGENCY AID.
GOD BLESS AMERICA.

# data[].attributes.body
The clouds, which in the morning had been held back now moved in and formed a dark mantle over the beach and over the city behind. They were pushed up from the sea and the sea grew angry and lashed in its waves like a cornered animal. He was walking down the beachfront. The way in which he walked was swift and the way he held himself was with confidence and his legs and his gait suggested purpose and power. The stones underneath him were shifted and some skirted to the sides while others shot forward and made impact with other stones and sent them even further from him and the dirty heavy boots he wore. He didn't bother to brace himself against the the onset of the rain and his coat was inadequate anyway and thin and mostly useless. Then the rain erupted out and came down hard and he was soon soaked through. But he continued to wander along like a feral dog looking for food. Though he strode with all his affected surety his body made involuntary shudders deep within from the rain and the cold as it went through him with the subtlety of a butcher's knife entering fresh meat. But he felt alive, as only a strong shower can do. He was not cautious. He became more determined to increase pace and reach the centre of the beach so that it would not yet be midday and he would not be late.

# data[].attributes.body
Omamori

I bought an omamori on my last trip to Tokyo.  A small fold of patterned silk; an envelope of luck the size of a credit card.

On the plane home, I ran the piece of stiff fabric between my fingers. A prophylactic against misfortune that will last a year: omamori, from the Japanese verb mamoru, to defend, to protect. I played the pocket like a plectrum, strumming the veins of my stretched stomach. The baby swam, chasing the luck of the omamori as I swept it in arcs across my body, enjoying the skin shiver. He soaked up the luck. Basted in it.

I once heard about a conveyer belt at Naritasan temple near Tokyo that deals with omamori drained of their divinity. The notice said at the terminal moment, fire consumes sacramentally the spent omamori. An industrial absolution.

The months ran out. With the flush of amniorrhexis, my luck percolated.

In London, my omamori becomes soft and strange in my hand. Limp now, it smells of handbags and handwipes and hands that aren’t mine anymore. I imagine it seeps. O ma mori. The sounds fall apart in my mouth. I can no longer taste sakura. Omamori.  In London, the syllables mutate into something cold and Latinate. O god, or maybe gods. O goddess? O ma. O mother. An apostrophe to the absent, or the dead. O ma mori. Mori. Morir to mori. Translate the Latin conjugation: about to die. My Japanese trinket is born again in a toga. A Latin inscription:

O ma mori.

O mother who is about to die.

--------

Untaken

He bought me a ring that didn’t fit.

And now the diamond cuts my palm.

It castanets next to the cheap yellowed stopper-ring,

The tin-rhythm clicking to the twitch of my finger

Which folds and releases as though it returns blood to my heart.

I look at my hands like an artist with a sketch book.

Here are the fat veins of hands that are not young anymore.

These hands have collected: flat rounds of burned skin

Smoothed to cigarette circles; misshapen nails that are

Half-mooned with dirt; skeins of old scratches and blisters

Twisted together, the warp and weft slumpen and sagging.

Paired palimpsests, I want to skin my hands

And make kid gloves that stretch fresh and bloody

And write rivulets of red that pool in my palms:

Great lakes beneath the oblique arch

Bridging thumb and four fingers.

Take my hand, it is untaken

And it is sheathed in blood.

# data[].attributes.body
I wasn’t having this much sex when I was fifteen. I stopped looking at them then, because I didn’t want to think about fifteen-year olds or their sex lives or my sex life or the itch. But there were a lot of them.

“Edward to room five, please.”

Edward had chlamydia. I felt bad for eavesdropping, but I figured if he was willing to announce his symptoms down the phone, he didn’t much care who knew. I didn’t tell him he had chlamydia, just in case. I’m not a doctor. My friends just don’t understand contraception. I can only say that I would guess Edward had chlamydia, based on his telephone sermon. Edward may well not have had chlamydia, Edward may well have been suffering from another ailment altogether, which simply happened to manifest itself in ways very similar to chlamydia. Edward was, at best, in a sort of chlamydia limbo. Schrodinger’s chlamydia. Edward both did and did not have chlamydia. But it was probably chlamydia

A girl shuffled back into the waiting room, face to her feet as her friend giggled. “I told you they check your address.”

“Shut up. You’re sure they don’t ring ho-“

“It’s not a fucking detention, Kayleigh.”

I had five. At six, things start to go blurry. At six, I re-downloaded Grindr and the order gets a bit out of whack. Robert, George, the Finance student in the hard to find building, Mike Maguire, Michal, -----. I could place thirteen to twenty two in pretty much chronological order too. There’s just a blip, a little gap where hands and legs and hair and teeth stop standing up as solitary figures and all get a bit too close for distinction. Where the skin gets a bit melted.

“Miranda to room 12, please.”

I waited here for an hour and a half with Zoe once. We were fourteen and she wanted to go on the pill. Talking about the pill takes a very long time, apparently. At that point, Zoe had one. The chronology is simple at one. I knew the hour and the front door and the bedroom small talk at one. I don’t know what Zoe’s on now. I imagine the chronology is more complex for her now too. I tried to imagine the sort of person Zoe would sleep with, but the itch got bad, so I had to go the loo and scratch it. I asked a girl sitting next to me to tell them I was in the loo if they called my name.

I could not get to eight. If I put Ben after Michal and Andy after Ben, I could get to seven. I could reach a compromise with my memory and my niggling certainty that actually, I’m pretty sure Dan was next and get to seven. Just about. Then two faces swam behind my eyes, tricking and whispering to me, each insisting they came next. I washed my hands and gripped the sink. – find building, Mike Maguire, Michal, Ben, Andy, ----- AdamSam or SamAdam. Samdam. DamaSam. One of them gave me a hickey that drove my mother mad.

On an old phone, I had the note a French man and I used to communicate in a loud nightclub before we went to the toilet and he slotted himself somewhere between eight and eleven.

# data[].attributes.body
Catherine was washing the dishes absentmindedly 24 hours beforehand. She wasn’t entirely sure whether there was much point, but she thought it might be nice to go out with the house tidy. The sky was already getting rather dark, although it was only 2pm. Her husband, Gary, came up behind her and kissed her on the cheek.

‘You’re a star.’ He told her, reassuringly. Catherine let out a single un-reassured cackle which sounded exactly like someone who had almost accepted that herself and everyone she loved, and then everyone she didn’t love, was eventually going to die, which they were, but a lot sooner than anyone had expected. Gary did that thing with his upper lip that his wife hated, and raised his eyebrows as if to say ‘yeah we’re doomed’. He reached for the open wine bottle next to the still full sink. The bubbles had turned a sort of soapy brown, a grim reminder of their less than average Bolognese that neither of them enjoyed. Catherine slapped Gary’s hand away before it could reach the finish line, and in one swift motion picked it up her self and took a sizeable gulp. Gary waited patiently for his turn, looking rather sheepish and a bit embarrassed, and then he matched his wife in taking another rather sizeable gulp. Surprisingly, neither of them actually liked wine, but they had always pretended to like it, as it was something they both believed adults were supposed to like. Nonetheless, the two took it in turns to chug the yucky grape juice until the bottle was empty, without saying a word to each other. When it was over, Gary left the kitchen and Catherine thrust her hands back into the murky sink to finish scrubbing their plates, but it all seemed a bit fucking pointless now.

‘It’s all a bit fucking pointless now’ She grumbled to herself.

‘You’ve got that right’ the world seemed to agree in unison, as pretty much everyone alive on the planet Earth had been made aware that in 24 hours the world was going to slip effortlessly into a black hole, all except for some undiscovered tribes dotted around that were in for quite the surprise.

Existence is a strange thing, and for many, the idea that it was pretty much over seemed even stranger. Interestingly, only two of the beings on Earth that had fully come to terms with the end of the world were Catherine, and a frog in Cambodia. The latter realised that individual-existence was a lie and just a by-product of the universe trying to achieve consciousness when he watched his entire family get mauled one-by-one by a rather sadistic house cat called ‘Benny’, whereas Catherine was rather lucky and just happened to be born at the exact moment that the universe had a breakthrough and was imbued with an unknown acceptance of what it truly means to exist. This meant that the whole Black Hole thing wasn’t that hard to get to grips with. Gary coincidentally was pretending that he too understood this as his wife seemed to be keeping it cool, when in reality his inner-monologue currently sounded a lot like the sound a frog makes when his entire family is tortured in front of him.

# data[].attributes.body
What is held in cloth? Has cloth ever saved you? I never thought an extended piece of cloth would save my life. Who knew that this decorated piece, this ordinary cloth, changed by the way it is stitched and decorated, could bear the weight of an entire culture within it. The day I swapped out my cultural cloth for another cultural cloth was the day I truly counted all of my blessings. And what if I hadn’t decided to change my usual outfit that day for another? I probably wouldn’t even be here to retell my story. What if that day, I had chosen to look like a Hindu instead of a Sikh? And what if my son… What if my son had done the same? What if he hadn’t tied a cloth around his head that day? Would he still be alive? Would they have smelt the Punjabi mustard oil in his beard? Or seen the kanda tattoo through the layers of ordinary cloth on his arm? Would they have heard the Punjabi harsh tone in his voice when trying to speak his best Hindi? What distinguishes Sikh cloth from Hindu cloth? What distinguished Sikh skin from Hindu skin?

--

“Mummy, let’s go to the dhaba before you take me to the station.” Inderjit, my son, told me before we left. He was going to college in Delhi. Whilst we were not too far from Delhi, he still had to catch a few trains before reaching his campus. It was my son’s first day and he wasn’t embarrassed to have me take him to the station to wish him well before he embarked on this new journey, this new experience. I marvelled at the idea of him making all new friends, finding out what he wants to do with his life. It was always something I wish I had the opportunity to do. I grew up in a small village in Punjab. The closest thing I had to an education were the various lessons my mother would teach me: how to make the roundest roti, how to make the best curry, how to best fold clothes. Luckily I had married well, my husband worked as a bank clerk, and I managed to make some money looking after my neighbour’s children. We were able to send Inderjit to college, and nothing could make me feel prouder. He would have everything I didn’t.

That morning I woke up, dressed my hair in almond oil and tied it into a plait; the essence of my faith hidden within the long, thick black locks that I was forbidden to shear. That morning, I ditched my usual, casual salwar kameez, a cotton tunic and billowy trousers, for something more decorated and less casual. Stashed away behind the rainbow assortment of different salwars and kameezes I had accumulated over the years was a red saree I had been gifted on the birth of my son, a whole 18 years ago. It had never been worn until now, never has something looked so sad but felt so appreciated. I fumbled tying it. I’d never been confident tying a saree, I simply wasn’t used to it but I managed.

“Ah, my beautiful queen.” my husband said, creeping up behind me as I looked at myself in the mirror.

# data[].attributes.body
Frost snapped under my feet as I closed the trail gate, and the crackling made me turn my face toward the blue and green frozen grass. A gust blew past my back, so I tugged my hat down tighter. As I set off again, my vision was blurred by the wind on flashing into my eyes.

I gradually descended a hill. The wind slowed and died, I pulled my eyes away from the ground and was dazzled a second time by a flood of yellow. The birch and alder trees of the Downs had apparently gone bats while I’d been away. The trail snaked through a low valley, almost black against the bright yellow. The trees reared up in great waves over the valley walls and twisted away in the distance. I walked slowly down the trail, and the trees undulated gently along on either side. Wind groaned over the hilltops.

I was a little shaky, and my nose felt congested from the remnants of a cold. Even at a trot, the walk from the train station to my dad’s house without a scarf had been long enough to give me a cold. I’d lost it in September, when I hadn’t needed it. Third-year exam stress, an unusually warm October, and the looming spectre of the job search meant I hadn’t bothered to buy one. Now, it was just a beanie, a brown cardigan, and my bony physique against the chill, and I had a feeling the battered cardigan was losing confidence in the whole enterprise. I wasn’t extraordinarily enthused either—I had more long-term-useful things to do. That morning, I’d managed to waste 45 minutes of job search time on eBay searches and Facebook memes, and I needed to make it up! A dull, dynamic feeling of déjà vu settled on my stomach and began to spread upward, wringing itself in knots in my chest. I began tramping faster, and the little clouds of breath puffed out in quick succession. I was tightening up again after the momentary release from the view and cursing myself for that anxiety.

A blasting screech high up in the trees rang out. I sprang almost a foot in the air, like the cats confronted with cucumbers I’d seen while I’d meant to be sending a letter to the Krispy Kreme downtown. I let out a confused wheeze and spotted a sharp-beaked magpie in the branches.

# data[].attributes.body
Kate sat quietly in the passenger seat of the brand new, cherry-red convertible, a look of gentle contemplation on her smooth face. She was a pretty girl. She had her prized, naturally blonde hair tucked behind a tortoiseshell headband, each of its gossamer-thin strands rolled into painstaking curls. She held a sleeping baby in her arms, swaddled closely in a powder-pink blanket.

The man in the driver’s seat looked old enough to be her father, handsome in an uninteresting, typical sort of way. He had a chiseled face and neatly gelled hair, the faintest five o'clock shadow beginning to crop up along his jaw. His name was Richard Davis, a banker from the Bronx. He was somewhat disheartened by Kate’s silence, and had begun to worry that he had upset her in some way.

“Hey-a doll,” he said, glancing away from the road to look at her. “Why don’t you talk to me a bit? Tell me what’s on your mind.”

She snapped from her trance, turning to smile at him lovingly. She had a way of looking at him like he was the most enchanting thing she’d ever seen, excitement and wonder sparkling in those big, sea glass blue eyes. He liked that about her. He couldn’t remember the last time anyone had looked at him quite that way. She was a true American dream, everything he’d ever wanted.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” she said. Her voice was breathy and light, like the affected speech of a Hollywood starlet. She fussed absentmindedly over the baby, tucking and untucking the blanket beneath its chin. “It’s just, I hope we’re doing the right thing here.”

Richard clucked his tongue. “I told you, dollface. Everything we’re doing is absolutely necessary if you and I are ever gonna be happy.”

She nodded, pacified. “I know, darling. Oh, we’re going to be so happy, aren’t we?”

“We sure will,” he replied, unable to keep the grin from his face. “Just you and me, a big old house in the country.”

“And the baby,” said Kate, snuggling the bundle in her arms closer to her chest. “Don’t forget about the baby.”

“‘Course not, how could I forget about the baby?” He gave a half-smile, his eyes wandering over the road. “How about a dog, too? Would you like a dog, Katie-bug?”

Kate’s jaw practically dropped through the floor of the brand new convertible.

“Why, a dog!” She squealed with delight, clasping her well-manicured hands to her chest. “Of course I’d like a dog! Mama never let me have one, said they were too messy.”

“You can have anything you want, doll. Name it, and it’s yours.”

Kate blushed and grinned to herself, stroking the expensive cashmere scarf he had bought her. She had it looped delicately around her neck. It was a lovely pale pink color, and she felt like an absolute movie star in it. Richard said it was the color that suited her best.

She always knew she wanted a man who would take care of her, and she always told Richard that he was just that. Everything she wanted and more, really. The circumstances had seemed so impossible for them, yet they’d managed to overcome everything that stood in their way. They were driving toward the final step of it now. Soon, all the ugly business would be left far behind them.

Silence fell once again, but it was more comfortable this time. The baby cooed softly in its sleep. Richard was on edge, as he had been all day, and would be till the job was taken care of. But at least Kate was happy. She was humming to herself, stroking that sorbet-colored scarf and gazing at the baby’s placidly rosy face.

“Say,” said Richard, breaking the silence once more. “Have you picked out a new name for yourself yet?”

Kate nodded eagerly, smiling with all her pearly teeth. “I have, and you’re going to love it,” she paused for dramatic effect, taking a deep breath. “Lola.”

Richard made a face. “Lola? You’re sure?”

“Of course I’m sure! It’s a lovely name. Low-lahh. I just trickles off the tongue, like honey.” She giggled, delighted with herself.

Richard scoffed. “What are you,” he asked, “some sort of Puerto Rican dancer?”

She pouted. “No,” she said, sulkily. “I just think it’s a nice name is all. You don’t have to be so mean.” She turned her body away from him and toward the window, her pout deepening.

“Aw, Katie-bug. I didn’t mean it like that.” He reached for her, resting his hand on her knee and keeping the other on the steering wheel. “It’s a very nice name, I just think it’s a bit...conspicuous, for an all-American girl like you. And you know we can’t be conspicuous.”

She harrumphed, refusing to look at him.

“How about something a little more traditional?” he continued, careful to keep the exasperation out of his voice.“Like… Cynthia! That’s a real pretty name, I think. It sparkles, listen: Cyn-thia.”

Reluctantly, she turned to face him. “Cyn-thi-a,” she repeated, pronouncing each syllable with a deep concentration. “Yes, I think I like that. Cynthia.”

“Wonderful!” said Richard, a quiet relief washing over him. “For myself, I’ve decided to be Mr. Thomas R. Wendell. Sounds official, doesn’t it?”

“Sure does,” said Kate. “What’s the R stand for?”

“I haven’t decided yet,” Richard replied. “Can’t be R for Richard, though.”

“No, it can’t be. Because then they’d start to wonder, wouldn’t they... ?” Kate trailed off. He could tell she was beginning to get caught up in the nasty details of their great escape once again.

“You’ll be Mrs. Cynthia Wendell. Doesn’t that sound lovely?”

“Yes it does,” she breathed. “Oh, I’ve scarcely thought of the wedding!” Richard winced. He hadn’t thought of the wedding either, as he had been trying his hardest not to. “We’ll need to make some new friends when we get there, so they can to come to it, of course. And a wedding planner, certainly. Oh, what a shame it is my parents can’t—.”

“Don’t worry about that now, darling,” he said firmly. “But whatever it is, we gotta keep it small. We’re gonna have to live pretty quiet from now on.”

“Yes, yes. I know.” Kate sighed. “If only it didn’t have to be this way. If it were just you and me from the beginning, and none of her…”

“I was half crazy when I married her, that’s for sure.” Richard felt a renewed rush of anxiety that made him grip the wheel. “Let’s not talk about that now though. I changed my mind, why don’t we talk about the wedding some more—.”

“Did you ever love her?” asked Kate. She’d blurted it so suddenly, Richard half expected her to clamp her hands over her mouth after saying it. But she didn’t. She just stared intently at him with those big, oceanic eyes. “You must have loved her once. Why else would you have done it then?”

Kate was usually very easy to distract, to assuage, to convince. But Richard knew there was no real way of talking himself out of this one.

“I thought I loved her,” he replied, choosing his words very carefully. “But I was lying to myself. The marriage was convenient, that’s all there was to it. It was nothing like when I met you—when I met you, it was like I was struck by a bolt of lightning, or a freight train or something. I’ve never loved anything or anyone like I love you.” He looked at her very seriously, leveling his eyes with hers.  She nodded slowly, awestruck by the power of his conviction.

“I’ll be a great mother,” said Kate, with a sort of finality. She ran her thumb gently over the baby’s cheek. “The best. Better than she ever was, I bet.”

“I don’t doubt that for a minute,” Richard replied. “Just look at you, you’re a natural. I’ve never heard the thing quiet for so long.” Kate beamed.

“She’s an angel, isn’t she?” she breathed. “So peaceful. She’s like a little living babydoll.”

The peace was temporary, Richard knew, but he nodded. “It’s the motion of the car,” he said. “Soothes ‘em and puts ‘em right to sleep.”

“We’ve got to start shopping right away, when we get where we’re going. The nursery walls will be pink, of course, with a white lace canopy over the crib. All the soft, bright things in the world, just for her. Oh, I had the most beautiful mobile when I was a girl. We’ll have to find one just like it.”

“Of course,” said Richard. His mind was straying elsewhere.

They turned onto a soft dirt road, passing a sign that said “Access To Lake”. The sun had set, giving way to a thick darkness. The road had no street lights, and it was as if the world ceased to exist beyond the dim glow of headlights.

Richard brought the car to a stop in a makeshift parking lot, the individual spaces marked by logs. “This is it,” he said. “This is where we’ll do it. Then, we’ll be free.”

Kate nodded in solemn understanding.

They got out and circled to the back of the convertible, leaving the baby to sleep in the passenger seat. Richard popped the trunk. He held the hatch in place for a moment, giving Kate a stern, steady look. “Now Kate,” he said. “Don’t be scared. There’s nothing to be scared of, now.”

“I know,” she said, nodding. “I’m not scared. I’m not scared of nothing anymore.” He opened the trunk, revealing the pale, battered corpse that lay inside.

At thirty-three years old, Mrs. Lydia Davis was a tough woman. She’d refused to die without a fight. This was evident from the mottled bruises on her arms and wrists, the telltale defensive scratches on Richard’s arms, hidden beneath his shirtsleeves. The largest bruises were two hand-shaped ones on her neck, in mirror symmetry like a purplish-green inkblot test.

Richard had planned to strangle her to death, but Lydia was too strong to allow that. She’d struggled free, and it was then that Kate hit her over the head with a shovel, delivering the blow that killed her. It produced a deep gash on the side of her head, red and open like the innards of a pomegranate. There had been quite a lot of blood, more than Kate had ever seen.

“Let’s toss her in,” said Richard, turning toward the black, glassy surface of the lake.

“Did you bring something to weigh her down with, hun?” she asked, her voice strangely flat like soda with the bubbles gone out of it. “So she won’t float back up?”

Richard turned toward his paramour, surprised. She knew that bodies floated, not sank, particularly after a few days of decomposition. It was a certainty that he himself seemed to have forgotten, as he had not, in fact, brought anything to weigh the body down with.

“Chains!” said Kate suddenly, clapping her hands together like a triumphant game show contestant. “You brought chains for the tires, remember darling? To wrap around them if it started snowing when we got up to the mountains. We’ll just chain her to a big old rock.”

Richard smiled slowly, a deep embarrassment beginning to burn in the pit of his stomach. “Of course, doll.” He reached out to stroke her cheek. She accepted the gesture like an eager house pet, tilting her head into his palm. “What would I do without you?”

With some difficulty, Richard managed to wrap the length of chain around Lydia’s waist. The body was stiff and unwieldy, flopping this way and that as Richard tried to lift it. The whole operation would have been easier if Kate had agreed to hold the body up from under the arms while Richard wrapped the chain around, but Kate worried about staining her sweater with congealed blood. She opted instead to bounce the now-conscious baby in her arms and watch as Lydia put up one last fight.

Once that job was done, Richard began to wrap the other end of the chain around a rock. He was sweating now, the front of his shirt soaked through and spotted with blood from the gash on Mrs. Davis’s head. To make matters worse, the baby was starting to fuss in Kate’s arms.

Surely it was hungry. Kate bounced and cooed, but to no avail. Richard remembered with misery the diaper bag they’d left on the counter of his and Mrs. Davis’s former home. It was filled with everything they possibly could have needed: formula, diapers, pins, baby powder. Now, it was only a matter of time before Kate’s angelic little babydoll became a waking nightmare.

“Richard?” she asked, nervousness creeping into the edges her voice. “She doesn’t seem so happy. What do you suppose she wants?”

Richard didn’t respond. The rock was secured, and it was time to be rid of the past.

“Help me throw her in,” he said.

The baby, wailing now, was placed back in the car as Kate and Richard prepared the grim, unceremonious burial.

“The rock goes in first,” said Richard. “I can lift it. Can you handle the body?”

She nodded, reluctantly. “Yes, I suppose.”

Two splashes, and Lydia Davis disappeared forever below the glassy black surface of the lake. The couple gazed at each other through the darkness, panting softly from their exertion.

“I love you more than anything, baby,” said Richard.

“You’re my whole world, Richard.”

The couple stood and kissed in the moonlight, the baby’s cries barely audible through closed car doors. All seemed right with the world in that moment—they’d done it. Against all odds, they’d done it. Now, all that was left to do was pick a beautiful place to live out their beautiful new lives.

Once back in the car, the baby was inconsolable.

“Formula,” said Kate, raising her voice over the baby’s cries. “We’ll have to pick up formula right away.” Her face was twisted with worry. “She looks awfully red in the face, don’t you think? Will she be alright?”

Richard was grimacing, squeezing the steering wheel so tightly it looked as if the bones of his knuckles might break through the skin. “She’ll be fine. She’s just hungry.”

He cursed himself for forgetting the diaper bag, for being so careless, but most of all, for not doing a better job of convincing Kate to leave the damn thing behind. Surely someone would have found it and taken it in, sooner or later. But Kate’s mind was long made up by the time the plan was carried out. The baby was part of the deal. He remembered the tight set of her jaw, the deep pout on her lips when he suggested that they forget the kid and go.

“Not such an angel now, huh?” said Richard. He could no longer keep the bitterness out of his tone. Kate’s jaw fell ever so slightly, but she was silent.

In that moment, the baby released the contents of its bowels, along with a fresh wave of miserable wails. “Oh,” said Kate. “Oh.” She covered her nose with her hand, looking at Richard with drowning eyes.

“There isn’t a store for miles around here,” said Richard. “Roll the window down and sit tight.” Kate obeyed, her face seeming to collapse in on itself.

The future stretched out before them and the past was left far behind, but there was a tiny piece of it contained within that baby. Richard sighed to himself. We’ll get rid of it eventually, he thought to himself, Kate won’t put up with this much longer.

Then, he thought, then everything will be perfect.

# data[].attributes.body
Tree trunks. Their legs intertwined. Thighs prickling each other. Heaving breaths. They lay. Separate.

Welcome back to the guilty feminist.

Their chests touched briefly as their breathes , in unison, sung with anticipation. Like electric shock with every touch their hands roamed each other’s bodies, tenderly mocking the other with the tickling contact. Lips embracing, heavily and pulling away, gasping, drowning in each other. Their eyes locked. Then away in panic. Don’t. They kissed again. Harsh at first, forgetting their eyes mingling. Then tender, they held each other, their bodies moved. It was a feeling of safety that filled up the chest so fully, almost in danger of exploding, spilling the entrails of their feelings like muddy spleens onto their bare skin, the grey sheets stained by the exposure of such emotion.

This is the paranormal preyer’s podcast

Preyer’s or prayers?

Moving against the tide of their motion they danced. Turning and shifting together. A battle. Forceful. Pushing, Their faces touching. Sweat amalgamating on their foreheads, lips grasping each other like scared children reluctant to let go. Their breathe became rapid.

Preyers… as in preying on your fears. The hunter and the prey.

Are we the prey?

Relief. Panting like dogs from a battle. They lay there. Not speaking in the silence. Listening to the thump of their hearts, pleading to escape their chest and join the other.

# data[].attributes.body
She felt nothing other than the undulating beat in her head. The beats, attune with her steps, integrated themselves into the rhythm of her body as she walked – clunked down the street alone. Her eyes-dull-blinked painfully in to the morning sun as she walked, flicking the crust from the corners. Puffy. Eyelids folding over themselves like melting leather…she tripped. Stumbled, only for a second, then righted, defeated and categorically determined to be miserable.

Welcome, welcome, welcome to the distraction pieces podcast.

But she had no intention of feeling distracted.

I am your host, Scroobious Pip and today I’m joined with…

she paced on, down the road, her body tilted backwards against the slope of the hill, instinct preventing a fall, though she wished for the hill to take her, for her to run, flowing with the momentum of her anger. The air was smotheringly fresh. Freshness engulfed, demanding it’s right to overtake her, to breathe in it’s toxicity. Her chest felt tight. The pressure in her head invaded her, forcing its way through her body with each determined, meaningless footstep. Face vibrating from within, she pushed, pleaded out tears, the pressure in her head building further. Suddenly turning, she glanced at herself in the unforgiving, blurring reflection of a dusty ford focus. Almost smiling at her own wretchedness she moved on, tears, slowly, painfully escaping her eyes and reluctantly dribbled from her cheeks into the abyss.

This weeks podcast is brought to you by mental health UK

She scoffed. Of course it was. She tuned it out again. Irrelevant.

The hill, flattening slightly, gave way to a view, miles of houses, lights, a town waking in the early morning. Silent but alive.

Yeah we had a really good chat about it actually, it really brought to the light the importance of….

Sighing, she paused her Iphone, nicking her finger on the deep cracks in the glass. The silence surrounded her deafeningly.

A light, dainty birds song. Inoffensive, it trickled through her ears, dancing through her brain. First just one noticeably. Then another. Suddenly like an orchestrated performance five birds in unison flew above her, spinning and moving in perfect rhythm. They performed their ballet over the rooftops as she moved, accompanying her sorrow. Next a magpie. By itself. A bad sign, like black cats or walking under a ladder or new shoes on the table. She sighed. Of course. One for sorrow. Perfect. As she began to succumb to her hopelessness she noticed, the bird again. Hopping from one weedy foot to another it bounced around her on the pavement. Suddenly startling her, it flew, dramatically and quickly, hopping up onto the fence and over the side, on the gutter of a quaint house down the path. It sat for a moment, peering at her in curiosity when a second magpie danced, springed from the corner to join its partner. The two of them acknowledged each other, as they sat together, comfortably together in the quiet, with only their calls to one another permeating the air. Suddenly, all at once, they flew. So swiftly it was like she dreamed it. Two for joy. How inconvenient.

# data[].attributes.body
Roberto Andrés Peña the Argentinean writer best known for his works The Fisherman Pampas as well as his poetry collection Knock Louder Ye Dead has died He was 60 years old His contemporary Leandro Alvarez said that "He represented a generation of Argentines who had seen the modernist 'boom' of Arlt and Cortazar and passed through to Sabato and others What Peña managed to do was to distill a certain experience of what it means to be Argentinan and what it means to be South American in this Century with beauty and humour and the insight of a real poetic voice" He is survived by his wife and three children

He dropped his hat in the same cafe he always went to when he had to write. He sighed. Then he picked up his hat and then he left. The door swung lightly behind him and the waiter came by and picked up the empty coffee cup and plate.

# data[].attributes.headline
Do you dare to see beneath my skin?The who stares From the dark corner across the hallFollow me all you likeYour hot panting breathWon’t make my skin slide offMy skin is sacredI have woven it myselfOf course, my mother and father have helped a little tooBut I did most of the workUnlike youI perforate my skin with charmsAnd brand it with spellsAnd still you comeScurrying alongTeasing at my hangnails and papercutsScars and scabsI wouldn’t look if I was youDon’t taunt the unknown In fact, do lookI implore youCast your eyes towards my naked centreSeek my warm pulsing fleshI dare you Can you face the truth?Bare the horror lying underneath?I can tell you now what you might findTear it off and try to faceThat which does exist between me and my skinYou will encounter your lack of comprehensionYou cannot and will not know meWhat’s that?You’ve ripped it off?Fool!What you triumphantly graspIn those talons of yoursIs a replicaA figment of your own weavingAn ignorant mistakeYour claws may pierceIts fake flimsy frameBut my gauzy skin lays hereIn my arms, not yoursMy skin lays inside meOutside meIn between meI transcend all my skinAnd all your filthy understanding!How dare you try to see beneath my skin

# data[].attributes.subject
Do you dare to see beneath my skin?The who stares From the dark corner across the hallFollow me all you likeYour hot panting breathWon’t make my skin slide offMy skin is sacredI have woven it myselfOf course, my mother and father have helped a little tooBut I did most of the workUnlike youI perforate my skin with charmsAnd brand it with spellsAnd still you comeScurrying alongTeasing at my hangnails and papercutsScars and scabsI wouldn’t look if I was youDon’t taunt the unknown In fact, do lookI implore youCast your eyes towards my naked centreSeek my warm pulsing fleshI dare you Can you face the truth?Bare the horror lying underneath?I can tell you now what you might findTear it off and try to faceThat which does exist between me and my skinYou will encounter your lack of comprehensionYou cannot and will not know meWhat’s that?You’ve ripped it off?Fool!What you triumphantly graspIn those talons of yoursIs a replicaA figment of your own weavingAn ignorant mistakeYour claws may pierceIts fake flimsy frameBut my gauzy skin lays hereIn my arms, not yoursMy skin lays inside meOutside meIn between meI transcend all my skinAnd all your filthy understanding!How dare you try to see beneath my skin

# data[].attributes.body
September
He had just had a birthday. What struck me the most about him wasn’t his stories or his money or the crisscrossing self-harm scars on his body, but the startlingly boyish openness of his face.
I was sitting in a posh two-bedroom apartment on one of the city’s most expensive residential streets, holding a flute of £50 champagne in my hand and wondering how exactly I’d come to be there. I knew how it happened logistically: a Tinder match, boredom, the self-destructive tendencies and near-sociopathic tendencies my psychiatrist had warned me against falling back into whilst abroad but I’d just nodded and smiled and collected my Lexapro prescription as usual. My date for the evening was, at the very least, interesting. 
            Lucas was a self-described ex-drug kingpin. It seemed that drug money was the only thing that could have afforded the place I was sitting in, besides a well-paying career. In the dim light of the sitting room’s half-extinguished chandelier I could make out a circular indentation in the exact center of his chest where a 22-caliber bullet had bounced off his sternum. A dispute over drug territory gone wrong. I traced it with my finger, feeling the warmth of his skin and the soft waves of cauterized scar tissue. He had the phrase “Kill your mind” tattooed on his collarbone.   
             He’d done so many bad things in his life, had so many bad things done to him, yet I’d never met anyone so disarmingly kind and trusting. Maybe it was just because he liked me. He came from old money, was a trust fund baby. I’d always assumed these things came with a certain kind of softness you couldn’t shake. Lucas had certainly tried hard, but he’d decided to calm down and stop dealing after a Xanax overdose had taken the life of a close friend. 
            He was looking at me, entranced. He couldn’t figure me out, he’d said, and he liked that. I should have told him that there wasn’t much to figure out, that I was depressed and attention-starved and trying to seem more twisty and dark and intriguing than I really was. But instead I sat smirking at him over my champagne glass, wearing my transfer-proof red lipstick and batting my eyes and milking my luck for all it was worth. I didn’t recognize myself, I felt like some kind of self-assured demonic presence with no sense of consequence had wrested control of my body and had no intention of giving it back until I was either dead or genuinely happy. Since neither of those were likely to happen any time soon, I decided to let the demon go where it may.
 
 
July
            The boy sitting across from me is adorable. Not necessarily in a sexy way either. He’s all rounded cheeks, big green eyes, and baby doll lips. He has freckles and that swoopy Justin Bieber cut everyone had in middle school. But he’s not in middle school. He’s studying law, which I find hilariously ironic considering the fact that he just had to appear in court for a domestic disturbance involving his mother. A real inside look at the system. I wonder if the cop had to choke back laughter, expecting to find yet another asshole beating on his girlfriend but stumbling upon a pretty boy having a nonphysical argument with his mom instead. 
            Steven, the flavor of the month. Or, at the rate I’ve be going lately, of the week. He’s talking, shoveling IHOP pancakes into his mouth between sentences but I’m not particularly listening. I’m studying his eyelashes. They’re long, and I’m jealous. Boys always have the longest eyelashes and they hardly deserve them. His are the same caramel-brown color of his hair, and feathery. They add to the overall elfish quality of his face. 
I hear my name. Steven has just asked me a question. I blink at him. 
            “What?” 
            “Is it good?” He gestures to my stack of pancakes with his fork. 
            “Not considering how long we waited for it,” I grumble. I take a sip of water, level my eyes with his. He stares back, fascinated. I don’t think he’s ever been with a girl like me. It’s good news. It means I can be as sardonic and bitchy as I want and he’ll somehow think it’s sexy and exciting. He mentioned earlier that he usually goes for bubbly, well-endowed blondes under 5’5”, so I must be a real departure from the ordinary for him. He must feel so adventurous. 
 
October
            “God, you’re such a little whore,” says the Instagram message on my lock screen. Under very specific circumstances, that might have been a compliment. But in this case it’s all wrong. In this scenario, I am the bad one. My ego could hardly take it. 
            As my mind lurches between manic amusement and that visceral brand of agony that signals that my feelings have been hurt by someone that I didn’t think was capable of hurting them, I type out my reply: “Thanks.” 
            “Had to be said,” comes the response, almost instantly. I can practically see him staring at the screen, fuming, wishing he could hurt me worse, maybe even physically. 
            He has a point. My constant need to be one step ahead, always poised to be the one who hurts rather than the one who is hurt, has finally made me the bad guy. Or perhaps I always had been. Who am I supposed to be, if not the victim? Apparently, the victimizer. 
            The conversation escalates, combusts. He knows how to get inside my head. Somehow, the conversation winds down. He wants me to come over, sleep in his bed with him. 
            “Not after all the things you said.” 
            “Fine. I just wanted a body pillow.” 
            That was a new one. 
            Lucas, my fallen angel turned demon. I file him away with the others. 
 
August
            Seattle hardly gives me time to think. I’m being flipped over one minute, dragged to the edge of the bed by my thighs the next. Hands on my throat, fingers in my mouth. He wants to try everything. We mean nothing to each other and it’s exactly what I needed. 
            It’s desperate, frantic. I’ve lost count of how many times he’s been over. I’ve never seen him before 10:30, never before my roommates are asleep. He doesn’t want them to know he even exists. Sometimes he keeps his hand clamped over my mouth. 
            He doesn’t know why he’s named after a rainy city in Washington. His parents have never even been there. Neither has he. I ask him if they’re hippies. They’re not, they just liked the sound of it. Seattle. It doesn’t suit him at all. 
            I try to keep the conversation going while he blows vapor clouds at my ceiling, not because I’m particularly interested in what he has to say but because his silence feels dangerous somehow. He takes a long time to leave after we’re done, and it always surprises me. He shows me YouTube videos on his phone. We laugh about things. Then he’s gone, and we’re dead to each other until he calls for me again. 

# data[].attributes.body
September

He had just had a birthday. What struck me the most about him wasn’t his stories or his money or the crisscrossing self-harm scars on his body, but the startlingly boyish openness of his face.
I was sitting in a posh two-bedroom apartment on one of the city’s most expensive residential streets, holding a flute of £50 champagne in my hand and wondering how exactly I’d come to be there. I knew how it happened logistically: a Tinder match, boredom, the self-destructive tendencies and near-sociopathic tendencies my psychiatrist had warned me against falling back into whilst abroad but I’d just nodded and smiled and collected my Lexapro prescription as usual. My date for the evening was, at the very least, interesting.

Lucas was a self-described ex-drug kingpin. It seemed that drug money was the only thing that could have afforded the place I was sitting in, besides a well-paying career. In the dim light of the sitting room’s half-extinguished chandelier I could make out a circular indentation in the exact center of his chest where a 22-caliber bullet had bounced off his sternum. A dispute over drug territory gone wrong. I traced it with my finger, feeling the warmth of his skin and the soft waves of cauterized scar tissue. He had the phrase “Kill your mind” tattooed on his collarbone.

He’d done so many bad things in his life, had so many bad things done to him, yet I’d never met anyone so disarmingly kind and trusting. Maybe it was just because he liked me. He came from old money, was a trust fund baby. I’d always assumed these things came with a certain kind of softness you couldn’t shake. Lucas had certainly tried hard, but he’d decided to calm down and stop dealing after a Xanax overdose had taken the life of a close friend.

He was looking at me, entranced. He couldn’t figure me out, he’d said, and he liked that. I should have told him that there wasn’t much to figure out, that I was depressed and attention-starved and trying to seem more twisty and dark and intriguing than I really was. But instead I sat smirking at him over my champagne glass, wearing my transfer-proof red lipstick and batting my eyes and milking my luck for all it was worth. I didn’t recognize myself, I felt like some kind of self-assured demonic presence with no sense of consequence had wrested control of my body and had no intention of giving it back until I was either dead or genuinely happy. Since neither of those were likely to happen any time soon, I decided to let the demon go where it may.

July

The boy sitting across from me is adorable. Not necessarily in a sexy way either. He’s all rounded cheeks, big green eyes, and baby doll lips. He has freckles and that swoopy Justin Bieber cut everyone had in middle school. But he’s not in middle school. He’s studying law, which I find hilariously ironic considering the fact that he just had to appear in court for a domestic disturbance involving his mother. A real inside look at the system. I wonder if the cop had to choke back laughter, expecting to find yet another asshole beating on his girlfriend but stumbling upon a pretty boy having a nonphysical argument with his mom instead.

Steven, the flavor of the month. Or, at the rate I’ve be going lately, of the week. He’s talking, shoveling IHOP pancakes into his mouth between sentences but I’m not particularly listening. I’m studying his eyelashes. They’re long, and I’m jealous. Boys always have the longest eyelashes and they hardly deserve them. His are the same caramel-brown color of his hair, and feathery. They add to the overall elfish quality of his face.

I hear my name. Steven has just asked me a question. I blink at him.

“What?”

“Is it good?” He gestures to my stack of pancakes with his fork.

“Not considering how long we waited for it,” I grumble. I take a sip of water, level my eyes with his. He stares back, fascinated. I don’t think he’s ever been with a girl like me. It’s good news. It means I can be as sardonic and bitchy as I want and he’ll somehow think it’s sexy and exciting. He mentioned earlier that he usually goes for bubbly, well-endowed blondes under 5’5”, so I must be a real departure from the ordinary for him. He must feel so adventurous.

October

“God, you’re such a little whore,” says the Instagram message on my lock screen. Under very specific circumstances, that might have been a compliment. But in this case it’s all wrong. In this scenario, I am the bad one. My ego could hardly take it.

As my mind lurches between manic amusement and that visceral brand of agony that signals that my feelings have been hurt by someone that I didn’t think was capable of hurting them, I type out my reply: “Thanks.”

“Had to be said,” comes the response, almost instantly. I can practically see him staring at the screen, fuming, wishing he could hurt me worse, maybe even physically.

He has a point. My constant need to be one step ahead, always poised to be the one who hurts rather than the one who is hurt, has finally made me the bad guy. Or perhaps I always had been. Who am I supposed to be, if not the victim? Apparently, the victimizer.

The conversation escalates, combusts. He knows how to get inside my head. Somehow, the conversation winds down. He wants me to come over, sleep in his bed with him.

“Not after all the things you said.”

“Fine. I just wanted a body pillow.”

That was a new one.

Lucas, my fallen angel turned demon. I file him away with the others.

August

Seattle hardly gives me time to think. I’m being flipped over one minute, dragged to the edge of the bed by my thighs the next. Hands on my throat, fingers in my mouth. He wants to try everything. We mean nothing to each other and it’s exactly what I needed.

It’s desperate, frantic. I’ve lost count of how many times he’s been over. I’ve never seen him before 10:30, never before my roommates are asleep. He doesn’t want them to know he even exists. Sometimes he keeps his hand clamped over my mouth.

He doesn’t know why he’s named after a rainy city in Washington. His parents have never even been there. Neither has he. I ask him if they’re hippies. They’re not, they just liked the sound of it. Seattle. It doesn’t suit him at all.

I try to keep the conversation going while he blows vapor clouds at my ceiling, not because I’m particularly interested in what he has to say but because his silence feels dangerous somehow. He takes a long time to leave after we’re done, and it always surprises me. He shows me YouTube videos on his phone. We laugh about things. Then he’s gone, and we’re dead to each other until he calls for me again.

# data[].attributes.body
Potential. That’s who I am. An opportunist, perhaps. I am one in a million, or even more. My patience knows no bounds and I wait in silence to be noticed. I evolve and morph in the darkness. Do you recognise me yet? I am your grandfather and your mother. I am my elder brother and my sister who is not yet here. Perhaps I even have the potential to be me. But not yet, it’s too soon to tell, and I am anything but rushed.

A bud must struggle a while in the dark, unseen, before it breaks through. Before the world notices the fresh green, sweet thing that has come into existence. But it was already there. Underground. In the skin of a naked tree. It waits. The audience does not view the play into existence. Standing in the doorway of life I look outwards.

Is this life or death? What colour are my eyes? Will I fear clowns, or water, or violence, or war? Am I taller than my brothers? Will I understand my sister? Am I a Frost? Or will I be like my father? Will I be loved?

Oh yes. They will love me. Of this I have no doubt. Wanted. That is also who I am. I am so wanted it pains me. I cannot escape how wanted I am. I could be anything. At the moment I am the perfect child. Fully formed. Not yet realised to be a person.

I also have the ability to be nothing. To remain a creature of potential forever. I come into your world the same time I slip out of it. I’m sorry I can’t help it. But here it comes. The door opens.

Still, I am born.

# data[].attributes.body
The birds woke me up again today. Stupid, stupid, why are they so loud? Went to work, I really don't know why they hired that Ben, no point to him. Spilt his tea on his desk and ruined the the the

Had dinner. Stupid birds kept cawking. Should just shoot them. Daphne called. Anne's dead. Pity. Well no, didn't like her anyway, stupid cow deserved it. Dinner was alright dinner was dinner was something

Birds still loud. Springs broken, need a new mattress. It's on the side I don't use. Forgot water, no point anyway. Can hear the stupid birds, why are there so many why are they here why won't they shut. up. I'm so tired I just want them to go why won't they go why won't they why won't why won't

why is no one here

# data[].attributes.headline
Dusty brown coffee cup // Dusty brown eyes

# data[].attributes.subject
Dusty brown coffee cup // Dusty brown eyes

# data[].attributes.body
Sitting on a bench in between students with books and students with tea, cardboard cups and steps. I don’t feel creative and I’m exhausted all the time, my shoulders feel tied in and my tummy’s heavy with the toast I forced down on the train, sticky honey and clogged up peanut butter.

The heavy mid term’s blanketing campus round and round, spirals in the sky. Walking to the trains, lost tickets fall off trees as things I want to tell you fall through nights.

I’m laughing cos I feel silly and I’m not sure how to tell you I’m feeling like I don’t know if this is what I want, or where I want to be.

I change my mind as often as I lose my keys

We start talking about how quickly things are going, and how strange the space of right now is, outlined in herbal tea drops and falling asleep on half settled thoughts.

‘I don’t enjoy waking up every morning to go to work darling!’

back home, old sounds and comfy arguments, then non-comfy arguments.

‘Where are u headed?’

Twisting my rings round and round, spirals below the sky

“Towards like, adult life’

didn’t we say adulthood started at 18? Maybe we’re in A big kid inbetween window, silky blinds with little peek-through holes for clouds of loud music and burnt toast.

Peak- through, peaking (pushing, pulling) through

‘Adult life is like um, basically exiisting outside of people taking care of you, of uni, having jobs having a responsibility’

‘Last time i felt safe and protected, I mean like when I was a kid I guess, before you have to go out into the world and be judged and shit, just bopping about, doing your ting’

bopping about doing your ting, my sheets just went pink gotta give mum a ring ! !

‘Parents cooking you food shit like that’                                                                                 ‘I’d say its scarily close’

‘Actually kind of, if I, kind of, fuck up, in a sense…’

‘It’s on me’

‘You ain’t really got anyone, um, like a saftey net’

It’s started raining, gently, an out-breath of silver and my coffee cup’s still warm, even though I’ve been fidgeting with the dusty brown paper wrap that matches your eyes.

# data[].attributes.body
the rain beat down on the cold concrete as I stepped out onto the street. I was drenched instantly, the cold breath of the wind chilling me to the core. Shivering, I clutched my thin cotton cardigan to my body, trying to preserve what little heat I had left. My hands shook as I tucked them away. Blinking against the rain, I began to walk down the empty street. I could hear cars and busses pass by on an adjacent road, hear the water being splashed up from the gutter up onto the sidewalk, hear the strangled cries of those unfortunate enough to be hit by the onslaught of gutter water. I heard all of this as I continued my lonely path down the street.

I didn’t know where I would end up tonight, all I knew was that I needed to get away from that house, from those people.

I looked down decrepit alleyways as I passed them by. Rain poured down my face, obscuring my vision, but I knew what I would see without having to look. People, old, young, and everything in between sat under what little shelter they could get – dumpsters, cardboard boxes, newspapers, anything they could get their hands on. They sat huddled together for warmth, using the light from the lampposts as their beacon of hope. Huddled under the dumpster covers, you could see the barest glimmer of light shining in their eyes. They had hope for a better tomorrow.

I knew better.

I turned away from the sad little alleyway and continued on my never-ending journey, head bent against the rain. I had no hope for my future, no belief in a better tomorrow. I knew only pain and sorrow were to come my way, I had only to question when. The road was becoming more populated now. I saw sparkly high heels and white running shoes walk by my hunched form. I heard the laughter of young privileged people as they began their trek home after a night out on the town. I saw the shoes stumble as they caught the edge of the sidewalk, drunk. And still, I continued on my path.

In a city of thousands, no one stops to question the huddled figure out in the rain. No one asks about those in thin sweaters out at midnight on a cold winters day. No one thinks about those less fortunate that themselves. No one sees them. We are invisible.

In a city of lights, no one looks for the shadows.

I walked for what seemed like hours, and yet the darkness never dissipated. No light filled the sky, no red-golden hues formed above my head to signal the beginning of a new day and the ending of the night. The night, which always seemed so foreboding and hollow, always seeking something to destroy. Something to kill.

I reached an impasse when a brick wall stood in front of me, preventing me from going any further. I stood staring at the wall, not fully comprehending what had become of my, of my path. The red brick had turned a dark muddy brown in the rain, blurring its imperfect texture. I stood still, waiting for my body to pick a path, turn in a direction and continue walking in the cold. Yet, my body refused. I stood staring at the wall, my body shaking, fingers trembling. There was silence.

Suddenly, I heard the faint sound of screaming coming from the direction I had walked.  My body shook harder, as I stood listening. The wails of police and ambulance sirens will soon be heard. The people will be discovered, and soon so will I.

The rain began to dissipate as the night sky finally began to lighten. Still, I stood by that red brick wall. My hands trembled as I slowly touched the rough brick. The red on my hands blending in with the dark colour of the wall. A church bell chimes in the distance. The Lord come to reclaim the darkness and let the light shine through.

He is too late. I have already been claimed by the darkness.

# data[].attributes.body
“You look like you went for a run in a Mumbai July.”

“Ooh, cheers hun.”

“Sorry, just mean – you’re a bit – you’re very fuckin’ sweaty, Daniel.”

“We were doin’ the garden. How was the journey?”

“Mum gave us a lift to Birko and then just got the 423. Sorry, did you say you were gard’nin’?”

“Remember when it was dead windy back in May? Do you want a drink?”

"Can I’ve a black coffee, please? Yeah?”

“Continental. Anyway, me mum’s baby willow just went over. Buds bloody everywhere. So we’re replanting it.”

“Went down in May?”

“Ye.”

“It’s November.”

“You’re very fucking perceptive today, Mikey love.”

“Why’d it take so long, I mean?”

“We can’t all be bloody Heswallite socialites, ladies o’ leisure what lunch. Some of us are busy and then summer was just gone.”

“It’s fucking Pensby. I’m literally opposite Pensby High School. Can we turn the lamp off, it’s givin’ me them eye spots.”

“Yeah, sure. Sorry, love. I’ll go make ye coffee.”

“Actually, d’ya mind if we just get on with it?”

“Yeah, sure. Sorry, sure. Yeah. Did you bring a –“

“Yeah, giz a sec.”

“Left, then right, then up the neck. Right ear, left ear, lips.”

“You’re chatting shit.”

“Am I wrong?”

“Yes.”

“Bullshit.”

“You’re actually a nob you, you know?”

“Didn’t say I didn’t like it. Nice and consistent. You know, like some things get shit after a while, but not you. Not even after the hundredth identical time.”

“I’m a game-changer, me. Never know what’s comin’.”

“Then you go back to the left nipple.”

“I’m gonna bottle you one day.”

“Nice bit o change.”

“Speaking of change, I need to get dressed.”

“In a rush, are we? Lawn tennis match to referee?”

“It’s a fuckin umpire in tennis.”

“Do you want that coffee?”

“No, I, er, I can’t sorry. Gotta be off.”

“British summertime stays longer than you.”

“Yeah, suppose.”

“I was just – “

“Gotta get back and help mum.”

“Yeah, course.”

“Tea with Nan, needs a hand like.”

“Yeah, yeah. Course. I was only joking like.”

“We’ll get that drink some time though?”

“Yeah, some time soon. Alright love, piss off now. I’ve got green fingers to manicure.”

# data[].attributes.body
Lucas’s Mama had a normal voice, low and earthy and sighing gently whenever she took her shoes off, and then she had a “telephone voice,” high, chatty, and perpetually rushing up to serve the latest guest, customer, or visitor. When the…(Lucas hears his mom talking to Mickey’s dad, who’s letting her know that he’s coming to pick up Lucas)

He bent over his desk, and his hands prickled as they wrapped his Barbie dolls, Christmas presents from three years ago, in their pink-and-yellow sequined winter cloaks and shoved them into the bottom drawer of the desk. He pushed back his chair and snapped to his feet, setting the swiveling seat spinning, and reached up on tiptoes to pull down his rocket ship-patterned curtains. These went into a plastic container, rumpled and unfolded, tucked behind the winter shoes where his Mama and Mimi would never find them. After a edged glance at the driveway, he pulled the beige shade closed, in case Mickey’s dad’s silver SUV chanced to arrive early to pick him up. Lucas scanned the bedroom, his focus roving from the ticking Spider-Man clock by the wardrobe, to the crimson bedspread, to the pale yellow walls, and to dark wood of the bed frame before fixing on a tiara with two rhinestones worn off on the left side that hung from one of the posts.

He sucked his breath in and wheezed out a quick “ohmyjeez” before rushing over, hooking the tiara with his fingertips, flipping it off the post and losing his grip. The tiara flew, end-over-end, toward the floor, but Lucas dove forward and slid along the carpet on his front to grab the thing before it hit the floor.

The kid lay on the ground with the tiara in his fingers, his nose buried balefully in the tan carpet fibers. He sighed heavily and

# data[].attributes.body
As experienced a hiker as Henry was, it was unlikely that he’d misread the map. Although, he supposed, not outside the realm of possibility. No, more likely it was just his mind playing tricks on him, he thought. After all, it was unusually hot for the time of year, he was probably just dehydrated, or perhaps suffering from heatstroke.

And yet, try as he might to explain them away, there they were, the two roads that diverged away from the main track in front of him.

They weren’t meant to be there. That is, this was just supposed to be a straight trail. And yet stood before him a fork in the road, one track continuing on to the left and one to the right.

This was most definitely not on the map, and Henry knew the forest like the back of his hand.

The two trails looked to be more or less the same fas far as he could tell; fairly narrow pathways carved out of the wall of Douglas firs that made up the majority of the forest. The only real difference was that the lefthand track seemed much less worn by foot traffic, the grass that grew on the forest floor there was noticeably shorter than that of the righthand trail.

Henry stood there for a moment, utterly bewildered. For a moment he considered just turning back the way he had come. He’d only been going for a few hours so it wouldn’t be so bad to turn back now, and who knew what was down either of those paths. It wasn’t uncommon to come across wolves in this part of the forest, or bears even.

He stood in silence for a moment longer and then breathed a heavy sigh. No, he wouldn’t go back, couldn’t go back. Despite the possible perils, curiosity had gotten the better of him. That same dangerous curiosity that had gotten Henry into plenty of less that ideal situations as a younger, less experienced hiker. Perhaps it was an unwise decision, but he’d made it now, and when Henry Sommer made a decision, he made a decision. There was no going back now.

Before he could think more rationally about it he started down the left hand side of the fork, compass in hand.

Who knows, he thought, perhaps, if I make it out of here alive, this’ll make a great story for me to tell one day.

And what a story it was.

# data[].attributes.body
Much a sweet nothings exchanged from lip to ear and lip to ear.
A shout into the void will receive a reply, my love, I promise you this.
The moon is our moon, the sun belongs to us.
The reason for the universe is simply for us to be.

# data[].attributes.body
Use my life in its transience for thoughts or for worse, brave soldiers. We might face the smoulder brave as warriors in the wastage but we emerge punctually. Ready to fight or to die we write the night sky with blood tonight, my men. But remember it’s just a fleet of a skit of a film or a cartoon that we watched so long ago that day one bright December. Remember the wars, he told us. And out our window, in the street that billboard with5 that grinning smile and his pearly teeth try so hard to please; down staring he waits. Below the cars, they charge: men in the night to their jobs, sons and daughters, brave soldiers.

Don’t forget, don’t lose it. I once would remember the day that we sat, plotting and scheming oh now we’re all here still breathing, a little worser off though these days. Baby’s teething, motors greasing smells like empires sleeping. Burning through our time wheel free and lose it in the motion. Amongst the commotion outside the shop, in the pub or in the parks we sit we could sit still just for a time, for a little while we may. Mostly still the same buildings in the photo in the kitchen of our home town all those years back then. Trapped in the frame it stays. Those busses surely crashed but I heard it was ok- the photos false the papers true, yeah I reckon that copper in blue sorted it, or black now as I see it. I hope he did. Burn that picture, throw it away, it happened so long ago and my towns gone to the dogs and the snakes, lost in that moment of the chase.

# data[].attributes.body
The night folded over into silence; nothing but the pathetic rise and fall of the bed sheets that covered us limply could be heard. My body ached and throbbed with lust for your body, a landscape of wild fruits and berries yet to be eaten, but I could not bear another round of ‘come one, it’ll be fun’, and ‘I should really get home.’ Things were looking one-sided until we both started itching our skin – giving my mattress the most movement it would get that night – and I realised that we had been bitten, sucked, for what felt like endlessly, of our blood. I thought about the little bugger, drunk happily on the sanguine juices from our flesh, and I was enraged by the liberties it took from your body that you’ve been denying me all night. I accused you of your cruelty yet reached for you to stay as you got up to leave. Then you did the worst thing of all: kill the damned thing, smacking the air, and with that destroying the second most erotic way for our bodily fluids to have mingled. The room was now a grave for two innocent souls, and you departed, having deprived me, and my fantasies, of existence.

# data[].attributes.body
If ever there was some art to being alone, it is one yet to be learned by almost any from this species. If you can't find an individual rich within the spiritual, tireless in effort to calmness and benevolence then one who can be alone in their entirely must be heavily scrutinised. For does it not speak of some hatred for those of whom they should love to shun company and instead incase themselves in a bloodless solitude?

Real isolation was not prepared for, nor anything more than an abstract and impossible event till the moment of its sudden arrival. The closest experience to death before that terrible and similarly impossible event occured. The silent house became so in one moment and then remained forever still. What about Karen's life? She felt sure she had been loved, in fact she knew she was. Right until the moment he left. His absence felt to her as though she had been dissected and then left to rot in the fading embers of her joy and passion, left only with a simple will to live. At night she lay down in her bed and greeted the wind outside and what she noticed most of all was she was the only one there and she no longer felt him beside her and it wasn't just an expectation of his presence but also the reassurance that would bring her to be able to sleep and the house was ignorant and gaping and silent. But she knew, her dreams knew.

# data[].attributes.body
Her arms are adorned with 48 bangles in red and white ivory. The white stud that formerly existed in her nose has been replaced with a highly decorated ring with a chain looped to her ear. Her body is weighed down by the heavy red velvet garments, sewn with sweat and blood. The items are all so heavy that they have the ability to weigh down both her present and her future.

She doesn’t even understand the words that the priest is singing at the altar as she walks in with 200 eyes following her every step. In fact, for her, the entire room seems empty. There is nothing but the echo of the words of a God she doesn’t believe in alongside the drums and the harmonium. She kneels before the altar and bows her head down. A feeling surrounds her mind and then her body that she will not be able to sit back up. If it was up to her, she could keep her head down on the white cloths dressing the floors of the temple and just sleep. The irony hits her then; the same white cloths used to line the floors for this wedding resemble the white cloths used to pave the house when someone has died. Hah. Death would be a kind of resting, right? That’s all she can think about right now, resting.

Resting from the expectations and from all the traditions. Resting from the life she knows she will have now. A new routine of preparing roti for her husband and his parents every day and smelling like curry until she dies. Knowing now that she is voiceless, knowing she is now just a cliché: a caged bird. She just wants to close her eyes and sleep, but she knows she can’t even do that for her bed is now more fearful. Now it is simply a place for her to conceive the child that everyone will wish is a boy. A child of expectation and demand, not of love and want.

She’s is pulled back by her bridesmaids. “Hey, sit up. Everything’s okay we’re right behind you.” her younger sister whispers in her ear as she helps her back up and sets her skirt and veil neatly behind her. The priest’s words are muted and everything she does now is simply directed by what her soon-to-be husband does. When he rises, she rises. When he walks, she follows. When he sits, she sits. She realises then: that’s why she’s heard so much reassurance today, that everything will be okay. Well, why wouldn’t it? The ceremony leads her up for her forever. As she walks and does the final lap around the altar, holding on to her man’s scarf as he walks her into her new life. The fourth circling is over. He is man and she is simply, wife.

Written by Behein

# data[].attributes.body
Standing outside 12 Ochre Street, briefcase in hand, spectacles on nose, I counted ten long breaths. This was my standard routine before entering someone’s home. I felt much more focused, each intake of air sweeping any irrelevant, wandering thoughts under a mental rug. What would I eat for dinner? Irrelevant. Where would I stay tonight? Irrelevant. Who would I kill tomorrow? Very irrelevant (although, for the record, head of sales and marketing, Richard, was extremely high on the list). All of them were bridges to cross when necessary. Right now, my only task was to get into this person’s house using as many ridiculous skills of persuasion as I had to, and then end their life.

After the tenth breath, I rapped my knuckles coolly on the door. A grand mahogany entrance, much like the other houses in this neighbourhood, with tall potted plants on either side. Richard mentioned this was a wealthy neighbourhood. I wonder if he was being nice by sending me here for my first sales, or if the aim was to humiliate me by having me come back to the office with no sales. Obviously, it doesn’t matter either way. I don’t care if I make the sale or not.

The door swung open to reveal a 20-something woman with straight blonde hair and a weird smile. It was a broad, toothy smile that radiated good intentions and innocence.

“Hi. Are you the delivery guy?” she asked, still grinning strangely.

“Afraid not.”

Her face fell. “I thought you were the pizza guy.” She turned on her heel and stalked back into the house, leaving the door wide open. “I’m making coffee, if you want some. What was your name?”

I hesitated, maintaining my position on the porch. She was inviting me in. Just like that, with no idea who I am and what I’m here for. How could it be that easy? I thought door-to-door sellers were always rejected about a bunch of times before getting anywhere. I thought I’d have to employ a string of the brainless tactics Richard had explained to me earlier this morning. To be honest, I was slightly disappointed. The build-up is almost as fun as the killing itself.

The woman poked her head around the kitchen doorway inquisitively. “Hello? You coming in?”

“Yes, alright. Thanks. My name’s Harold.” I stepped over the threshold, shut the door gently and followed her into the predictably impressive kitchen.

“Jesus,” she scoffed. “Harold? Really? Your mother must’ve hated you. Although, Carmen isn’t much better, is it?”

I cleared my throat and perched awkwardly on the edge of one of four seats around the kitchen island. “Your name’s Carmen, then?”

“You can’t even shorten it, you know?” Carmen continued, ignoring my question and pouring coffee into two basic white mugs. “Like, I’m not about to call myself Car, or Carm. That would sound really stupid.” She swiped something into one of the mugs and handed it to me – presumably, I wasn’t meant to see – then leant against the counter and regarded me. This didn’t faze me much – my mission was still the same. Carmen smiled. “So. Why were you on my doorstep, Harold?”

“Oh, yes. To ask you about your security alarms,” I replied. I’ll admit, Carmen caught me off guard by inviting me in so quickly and I lost my focus. Not very professional of me. I began to pop open the briefcase. “Do you feel safe in—“

“Are you not thirsty?” I glanced up; Carmen’s gaze had drifted to my mug, her smile thinning. She took a sip of her own coffee. “It’s really good stuff.”

# data[].attributes.body
‘Campbell Locke, 22, of 157 Maddison Avenue, sadly passed away on this last Wednesday the 7th of June. Campbell’s was a face that will be deeply missed by many around town. He was an Invaluable and much loved staff member of the Salty Seal diner, the Hangerton Hammerhead’s class of 93’ star player and much missed Son, Brother and partner. The investigation surrounding the circumstances of Campbell’s death is still ongoing. Please contact Sheriff Edmunds on 503-971-4581 if you have any information at all that might aid the investigation.’

Captain Albert Haddock is a man of many stories. He tells stories of ships lost in unfathomable storms, and the crews that played sea shanties as their vessels disappeared. Stories of riches beyond all earthly possibility, and the men that lost their minds in searching. Stories of the horrors that haunt the shores not so far from home as you might imagine. The creatures that go splash in the night.

Most that hear these tall tales dismiss them as the ramblings of an old man driven mad by isolation and the sea. But those who know him well enough, know every word to be true.

Alice Clearwater was born on the 4th of December 1950 in Hangerton Beach, Oregon. She married Aubrey Carston on the 30th of August 1975. Their first child, Ethan Clearwater was born on the 5th of February 1980. Their second child, Isabelle Clearwater was born on Wednesday the 17th of July 1991.

# data[].attributes.body
I am scared to sleep.

My eyes are the barrier to the next world. As soon as they flicker shut, all the light of the outside realm is abolished, and I am locked in the black box of my hellish mind. This sphere is untraversed, undiscovered, unknown, and it is completely unpredictable. It is the dark side of the moon to me, and no advancement in science or technology will ever breach its macabre pools.

Sometimes when I shut my eyes, everyone I have come to know is very suddenly dead.

I start my day by walking around the revolving corridors of my home to find that they are cold and grey in their beds. Their skin is pinched and their eyes are shrivelled, and their hands are placed beautifully above their duvets, sitting without weight on their hollow and decaying ribcages. I open each bedroom door quicker than the one before, with my hands shaking but never actually landing on anything. I can feel the sadness in my muscles as they ache with the fear of being completely alone. I throw open the endless doors in the wretched play-house to find person after person departed in their beds, each one more decayed and dusty than the last. I can feel the panic in my furious blood as if I am really there, and then I will wake up.

My body will become limp as I fall upwards past layer and layer of consciousness until I am awake and I am quickly pushing myself upright on my shivering bed. I will feel the pull of reality like gravity as I am hurled out of my inferno and will press my hand to my chest to somehow stop my heart from banging. My mind immediately hopes, but takes a while to realise, that it was all in my head. It was behind my eyes, and I will immediately begin to think of the next time they will shut.

Sometimes when I shut my eyes I am in a prison cell.

I cannot tell where I am in the timeline of humankind, for the walls seem to be timeless and unchanging. My neck will ache from the tenseness of my muscles. I will stand up slowly, not noticing that I can never quite reach anything that I attempt to touch, and move to the bars of my prison. My feet stand on nothing. My hands hold empty space. But the coldness of the jail is bitter, and I feel as if I am shaking whilst I slowly look around.

I look into the dark void the other side of my bars and very suddenly feel afraid. In the moment, I never know why I feel so scared to reach out. But it is always the same, and I always feel the familiar sickness of dread when I look into that eternal emptiness. Confusion subsides and the familiar clanging of panic starts lacerating through my ears. The moments seem to flatten. The air seems to rush silently past my face. And as I tentatively squint into the blackness, something horrifying lurches at me through the bars.

I do not have time to see what it is, but flashes of unbearable red and green split open before my eyes. The noise is everywhere and I suddenly cannot see. I can feel an agony that tunnels in circles under my skin. It rises and rises until my breathe becomes solid in my lungs and I cannot breathe. My eyes are so heavy that I try and try to open them but I cannot. My hands are stuck to the bars as something tears them apart with aching and heavy pain and the overwhelming thunder of my surroundings deafens my ears and each bone of my body seems crippled by the stretching pain and suddenly my legs kick and my brain awakens. I open my eyes in three firm blinks to see my glass of water on the table next to me sitting perfectly still. No relief floods me, for I have had this dream one thousand times before. I have no energy to even try and care.

And yet still I run my hands over both of my arms under the covers.

# data[].attributes.body
This Garden is small, but it keeps the young poet in mind. He is the philosopher enshrouded within the green, all leaves and life drenched over the fence; all thoughts and observations drenched over them the same. He is the watchful eye in July, his gaze hot and heavy; he sees only the Garden, but yet has a view of the world. All this from his chair, where he reclines, at the front of the Garden.

He remains there, limbs spilling out the chair; he watches the mad performance in front of him: the parade of the animals as they chase after wasps, the breeze’s gentle unnerving of the leaves, the rabbit clawing at the door of its cage. He frowns at it all:

This is a Garden not made by God. This is a Garden sculpted by Paradox herself, for how can we profess to be free where fences stand as monuments against such cause? We are subject to this looming presence, and it is how I know this is a Garden not made by God. No immortal hand, pressed against any holy lip, could have been bestowed upon this same ground on which my heels scrape along.

And on this ground that I tread, I do not touch. The pavement is but another barrier to our freedom; it conceals the grass that grew here before - now ripped out and paved over in all their screaming pleas. This long grass I would swim through, where I’d find all kinds of soily aphorism deep in the summery plunge of emerald, now accosted by the wanton slab and harder ground. But this solid ground isn’t solid ground. You can tread firm upon it, but all truths fall through; we can run, but only run so far until we must stop, displaced by this fence: firm and unblinking, reminding us that our free will is but liquid through our fingers. No, this is a Garden not made by God.

Perhaps we are like that grass, concealed away under the pavement? It’s so very dark under there, forever at the mercy of night skies pressed all above us, smoothed out in greyed conspiracy. But what of the animals over by the edge of the Garden? They run in circles, one chasing the other, and the other chasing a wasp. They all get stung by the end of the play, but do you see how the wasp just goes and flies free, over the fence? I watch it fly away, as do the animals. We all sit and admire Freedom and her flight, though it stings as she leaves us behind.

Perhaps we are like the animals, chasing each other in looped sequences of playful outrage? We run after one another, but we’ll never catch what we truly seek to find; promises of every nature flying away to places only the winged can reach. Down here, we observe failure upon failure and taste nothing but constraint; ever slowly do we become aware of our fate. All this truth is served on this paved stage, performed by animals, and I do find myself tearful as my head turns to the rabbit in its cage.

This rabbit knows nothing of freedom or its air; it is kept in secret, caved in the distant corner of this Garden I now know as Despair. I ask my mother to let it out: the rabbit in this paved purgatory that Time itself had forgotten about.
In both hands, she clutches the rabbit and moves past the fountain that could never spew out its burdened water, until she finally places the rabbit into another, larger cage.

And so I see myself also in the rabbit: that in this Garden not made by God, I have discovered the scrapings of our proposed freedom; that it is merely one cage removed from another.

# data[].attributes.body
Tuesday 6.23AM.  An alarm wakes Richie Bowers. Gripping the duvet with his left hand, Richie Bowers exposes his naked jiggly form to the world. He drags his feet over to the misted window whilst scratching his crusty balls holding up his hand close to his face, he then flicks the flaky, dead skin from under his yellow stained nails with his thumb. Hearing the gentle cooing of the baby pigeons hungry for their mother. He pulls across his late mother’s powder pink velvet curtains, and strains his eyes, struggling to gain focus through the smoked stained Blenheim, scalloped net curtain. Panicked, jolting his head over his left shoulder, followed by a whole-body sigh, it was only 6.26AM. Then there she was, walking past the bus stop, wrapped in a light jacket and into the motel. Richie rubbed down his coarse beard and shut the curtains.

Wednesday 5.40AM. Richie stirs to the squawking of the new-born pigeons. He lies warm and safe in his bed waiting for his alarm to get up. 6.25AM. She walks into the motel.

Friday 5.38PM. Richie steps out of the shower into the steamed bathroom, wiping his glasses with his pink towel. Walking into the bedroom, he finds his pin stripped shirt on the floor. Sniffs it. Grabs his Old Spice and gives it a quick spray. Pulling up his black trousers, he tightens his belt and the shirt forms a little ‘V’, exhibiting spidery hairs. 5.54PM. She works evenings on a Friday. 6.20PM. Richie enters the motel.
“Richie, haven’t seen you in a while.” Rodney says, pulling a pint of Fosters and sliding it across the bar.
Richie slides the pint back, “Fill it up, Rodney. Ain’t a wonder you ‘an’t seen me in a while’. Rodney saying nothing, picks the pint back up and fills the glass until it flows over. Richie, “Ey, don’t waste it!” and passes over a fiver.
Taking his first glug, the beer foam settles into his moustache. He looks at her wiping a table.

# data[].attributes.body
‘I’m sick of being seen as a brunette Elle fucking Woods. These men think they can waltz into my office and throw any request at me with a smile and a darlin’ as if I’m their secretary.’

‘Oh that’s shit’ said the voice down the phone.

‘Yeah I know. But complaining about them really isn’t going to help, kicking their arses in the boardroom sounds much more fun anyways. I’ll see you soon okay? … alright bye.’

She didn’t even listen for the response that crackled down the line, she had better things to be doing and her friends all knew that. Being a junior lawyer at a big-time law firm left little time for any calls of a social nature. With a slick turn in her chair she turned her back on the mesmerising strip of New York skyline visible from her tiny office window and carried on with her proposal. Hallie would never be the meek and mild girl that the old pinstripes in her department expected her to be. Her work effort, determination and resilience outdid many of her colleges but she was still considered to be young, inexperienced and emotional. Modern day sexism at its finest. Julia, the only other woman in her department with any substance was as male as the rest of them; bar anatomically speaking, as the idea of this being a man’s world was still ingrained in the system.

Not all of the men she worked with were completely inept though, Sebat least managed to maintain eye contact with her in discussion, unlike many of the others whose eyes seemed to drift frequently. He had also helped her get onto this case, in which a big corporation appeared to have funds frequently disappearing from their books, or, as her instincts told her, disappearing into some off-shore bank account and lining a few high up pockets. She just had to work out a way for them to admit it, or to find the evidence for herself. Either way it would be a career defining moment for Hallie. All of the everyday sacrifices would become worth it, as her skill would be undeniable, and even the most backwards of partners would not be able to ignore her success. That is, if she managed it. She was getting ahead of herself as it would not be as simple as that, it never was. Multi-millionaires know how to play the game and have too much at stake to hold their money covered hands up in surrender honourably. Not if they thought they had a way out.

Seb watched her from the door and finally cleared his throat.

‘Take a picture Seb, it’ll last longer’. Hallie finalised her document and looked up.

‘Well it’s good to see that someone around here does some work’ Seb said with a wink.

Hallie smirked. ‘But here you are, stopping me.

‘You done? Because it’s time we spoke to Mr. Donovan directly.

She didn’t even bother responding but walked past him, heels clicking on the marble floor. Soon he was beside her, paperwork in hand, ready to issue their subpoena.

# data[].attributes.body
The overbearing size of the crowd struck my eyes with a ferocious wallop. Subtle scents of various people entered my nostrils one after the other, some pleasant and fragrant, yet some body odour ridden. As I meandered through everyone attempting to reach my group at the far north west corner by the stage all huddled together next to the dwarfing speakers, I became a chicken in a battery farm, being squished and nudged by everyone and their mum. My arms became slippery slopes of skin thanks to the sheer amount of sweat rubbed off onto me by the over excited, over amicable fans, whose jaws had a rapidly diminishing life span. After passing these creatures in the middle of the sweatbox of a crowd, an overwhelming feeling of joy and relief sieged my body and mind, as I could finally see my group.

# data[].attributes.body
My sister is the kind of person who will call you up and tell you about six new developments in her life in two minutes, without breathing. I don't mind it though. And she’s happy to be center stage. Her incredible lung capacity is probably due to years of trumpet lessons, but eventually she got bored of trying to squeeze her need to communicate through through a brass mouthpiece and a series of valves, even a mute if the conductor was tired of whisper-screaming ‘pianissimo!’. In a last effort to resuscitate her enthusiasm for music my parents got her a clarinet. We don’t talk about the clarinet.

But I got the most recent bulletin in person. Recently, my sister has rehomed herself with a family who live in a mansion. She comes home occasionally to update us on the antics of these people, who have named their seven children after things such as a river in Australia or a diamond pattern traditionally found on the kilts of members of a certain clan in western Scotland. They seem to entertain her as much as she entertains them.

'I went on a shoot with the Roans. We got 120 pheasants and 40 ducks. The dogs killed a fox but we have pictures to show it didn’t happen on purpose.'

She holds up her phone and shows me the pictures.

A beautiful woman with brace of birds around her waist, like a feathery skirt.

Swipe

The ripped up carcass of a shaken fox.

Swipe

A selfie of my sister looking elated, holding a duck in the air by its neck.

]

(She looks at me. I know she wants a reaction, but I’m not giving her one. She changes her approach.

‘How was the protest?’)

# data[].attributes.body
An exasperating, high pitched bark fills every crevice of the 6 rooms that make up this home, followed by the distinct pitter patter of 20 tiny claws on the hard wood flooring. An invisible but reassuring odour wafts around the entire house, consisting of a medley of youthful perfumes and aftershaves, the sticky smells of a toddler and the unconditional love of a single mother. Each room has its own theme based on the personality of its occupant, but somehow each individually crafted safe haven pieces together like a unconventional jigsaw puzzle. This is the setting for the last 9 years of my life. Every story emanates or finishes right inside this familiar backdrop.

# data[].attributes.headline
Memory and Dust Lead Down to the Beach- descriptive exercise 

# data[].attributes.subject
Memory and Dust Lead Down to the Beach- descriptive exercise 

# data[].attributes.body
The place, which did seem in the eyes of all who lived there to have had an obscure yet undeniable right to hold the designation 'place'; had been folded and redoubled more times than any one existence could conceive. From every laine and twitten being excavated by steady hand and the unrelenting violence of machinery, this land was formed. Furrowed and riven and ploughed by simple labourers and proud farmers in their sea-way shacks before this. Out of the salty chalk the now calloused hand erected the city and all else to come. Time washed down the ruts and tracks and scrapes of their living, down to the sea that at this time still belonged to itself. The men and women along the shore felt the ebb and flow against the rocks, and knew that as the sun was being extinguished from a waning Autumn half-light, so would they be shaken from their lives of simple solitude and ebb and retract like the waves. The water did not forget. But within the simple sphere of the human the years unwound and dissolved the living memory the passing of mind and body had long been a precedent of. The sea had stood witness to every dead woman and child combing the beach, and every lover for whom the crashing tumult held no answers and yet provided comfort all the same. With this eye looking out, every colour and texture could be dissolved: deep navy blue, green, turqoise, duck's egg, azure, deep, deep darkened waters that shorten the gap getween the depths and the storming sky. No riddles and no answers could be found. Only the unmoved and ceaseless presence of the water and the clouded canvas above. And the placed changed yet and saw all manner of structures rise up along its front. The hotels, the shops, arcades, terraces and piers closing the gap between land and sea. Past the point at which no swimmer's stroke is felt, the lashing of the rain and the howling gale rushed through every street and corner and invaded the warmth of every home. For there is not one who can escape the enveloping mass of a storm within the darkness of winter.

# data[].attributes.body
The boy sitting across from me is adorable. Not necessarily in a sexy way either. He’s all rounded cheeks, big green eyes, and baby doll lips. He has freckles and that swoopy Justin Bieber cut everyone had in middle school. But he’s not in middle school. He’s studying law, which I find hilariously ironic considering the fact that he just had to appear in court for a domestic disturbance involving his mother. A real inside look at the system. I wonder if the cop had to choke back laughter, expecting to find yet another asshole beating on his girlfriend but stumbling upon a pretty boy having a nonphysical argument with his mom instead.

Steven, the flavor of the month. Or, at the rate I’ve be going lately, of the week. He’s talking, shoveling IHOP pancakes into his mouth between sentences but I’m not particularly listening. I’m studying his eyelashes. They’re long, and I’m jealous. Boys always have the longest eyelashes and they hardly deserve them. His are the same caramel-brown color of his hair, and feathery. They add to the overall elfish quality of his face.

I hear my name. Steven has just asked me a question. I blink at him.

“What?”

“Is it good?” He gestures to my stack of pancakes with his fork.

“Not considering how long we waited for it,” I grumble. I take a sip of water, level my eyes with his. He stares back, fascinated. I don’t think he’s ever been with a girl like me. It’s good news. It means I can be as sardonic and bitchy as I want and he’ll somehow think it’s sexy and exciting. He mentioned earlier that he usually goes for bubbly, well-endowed blondes under 5’5, so I must be a real departure from the ordinary for him. He must feel so adventurous.

# data[].attributes.body
Skin.

1

Nancy was taking a soak. The black evening felt like a tar she must scrub off in the yellowing water. Her granddaughter’s birthday was plaguing her, she felt like she hardly knew the girl. Her dark greying hair was matted, making her look straight out of some horror flick from her youth. Picking up the pale sponge, she circled her crepe paper skin, the age-grooves seemed to have appeared all at once, like a prophetic scripture. Nancy thought about the last time hands had touched that skin, she couldn’t quite recall.

Curling her worn down fingers around the glass that balanced on the edge of the tub, she sipped the bourbon and ice, it trickled down her throat, kissing the soft pink tunnel. Her granddaughter was turning twenty next week. Nancy tried to cast her mind back to her own twentieth birthday, she recalled a love letter, the lines blurred in her blueish memory. She shook her head, water spraying the tiles. Taking another sip she decided to call Grace tomorrow, in the hope she might answer and give her grandmother some indication of the kind of young woman she’d become. She felt the water turning cold and realised she had been soaking for about an hour. The bathroom light flickered rhythmically and sighing she realised she should call someone to sort it out. The days had become malleable recently, a veil of silence marking the transitions from day to night. It took her a while to leave the tub, her bones were becoming frailer and they seemed to creak in laughter at her. She’d felt pathetic for a long time.

It was at this moment, as she stood dripping and grey, the peculiar happened. Her heavy lidded eyes barely open, she reached for the towel on the hook. Her fingers gripped something softer, her eyes widened and she saw the skin. Horror seeped beneath her own translucent casing. The taste of whiskey brought the comfort of potential illusion. A mirage in the corner of the steamy mirror? A pressure pulsed on the nape of her neck, ice cold. Reaching around to touch the coolness, she found something metallic. She tugged, desperate to remove the alien object buried into her neck. As she tugged she realised- it was a zip. Exposing pink throbbing muscle, blue racing veins like string, she removed her skin.

Climbing into the new skin she felt at peace, as though every church bake-sale and clockwork, oscillating day had led to this. Feeling every nerve vibrate, she lifted her head with the pulse of a whale. Wiping the condensation off the mirror she saw her reflection.

2

The flowers in the centre of the table drooped as Nancy sat picking at a browning lettuce leaf. The summer air stuck her hair to her ears. A gaggle of petticoats sauntered past, howling. She looked up from the plate.

“London?” he frowned.

She immersed herself in the pause that followed. His eyes darted around the street, frantic and blue.

“I really can’t say no to this.”

As soon as the words left her lips she knew they were as pathetic as her meal. She could turn it down, she could succumb to him, and only him, as she had envisioned. She didn’t need academia, but then she just couldn’t end up like her mother; throwing everything at a man and ending up picking the grime off a cooker with children tugging at the hem of her dress. What if they didn’t last? He could leave, you know. He seemed like her soulmate but you never know with these things. God, soulmate sounded crude, she was a woman now. Two decades she’d been breathing, surely she could walk away from this?

“Well, I wish you the best.”

He placed the money for the food on the table, stood up, kissed her forehead, turned, and walked through the heavy street. She wanted to run after him, tell him university could wait, they could really make it, they loved each other so purely, but she knew better.

3

Placed into the new skin, into the new sockets, were a pair of blue eyes. Nancy’s were always brown. She rubbed at them but the azure would not shift. She scanned her figure, muscular and dark, she knew this body well. This body had not left her mind in thirty years.

# data[].attributes.body
I couldn't work out an ending that isn't boring or vague..

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“Listen, I just…I need you to know that this doesn’t change who I am. I’m still me. I’m still the same Iris that i’ve always been. It doesn’t change anything, but I need you to know, so that you can see all of the person i’ve always been. Not just the parts I let you see up until now. Dad, I…I’m gay.”

It hangs in the air for a moment. Saying it out loud still feels weird, like my mouth hasn’t quite caught up with my brain. I suppose i’ll grow into it though, the more I actually say it. Maybe it’ll go away when I finally say it to more that just the reflection sitting across from me. It’ll be real then. No going back.

God this is going to be a mess. No matter how long I sit here and rehearse it there’s no telling what i’ll actually end up saying. What he’ll end up saying. That’s the worse part though of course. It doesn’t bear thinking about.

But despite how it all feels I know that it needs to come out. No pun intended. And I owe it to him to do this properly.  I owe it to myself too. To look him in the eye and say the words.

No more dwelling on it, time to go.

I try my best to ignore the panic ballooning in my chest and get up from where I had been sitting cross legged on my bedroom floor. I stand there for a minute and take a few deep breaths. As if they’ll somehow deflate the balloon, steel my confidence. They don’t. “Have faith in him Iris. It’s going to be okay. You’re going to be okay”

Things here get a little hazy, I know I went through the motions of opening the door and walking downstairs, but I don’t actually remember doing it. The next thing I do remember is standing outside dad’s study with my hand raised, about to knock. I tell myself i’ll count to 10 and then i’ll do it, but I keep on counting past it. I’ll do it at 20. 30. 40. 50. If I don’t to it at 60 i’ll never do it. 61. I knock.

“Come in!” he half shouts through the door. And I open it, walk through, and close it behind me, anxiously hovering a few steps in front of it. Maybe it’s my fight or flight response that makes me do it. If I stand close to the door I can make a break for it when things start to go horribly wrong. If.

“Hey pumpkin, what can I do you for?” He’s only half paying attention to me. The other half concentrating on the work in front of him.

“Dad, can I uh, talk to you about something?”

“Sure sweetie, i’m all ears” he says putting his pen down and turning in his chair to face me, i’m acting way too strange for him to be anything but focused on me now. It makes my hands start to sweat.

“So I um….this is sort of hard to talk about, it might take me a minute to get out” he looks like he’s about to say something, express concern, but I keep talking before he has the chance to get anything out, I know if I have to stop now i’ll start crying and i’ll never say it.

“Please, just let me talk, it’s nothing bad, at least, I don’t think it is, just a little difficult.” He relaxes back into his chair a little, to show me that I have the floor.

“First I want you to know that this doesn’t change anything. I’m still the same Iris i’ve always been. I’m still your little girl. But this…is something that i’ve been trying to figure out for a little while now. But I am sure of it. Absolutely sure. It’s not a phase, it’s not a decision, it’s not a choice. It’s just a part of me that I haven’t shown you until now because…well because I was scared of it. To be honest I still kinda am. Scared about what it means. How to deal with it. But despite that I feel like I can’t keep it inside any longer. You deserve to know because you’re my dad and I love you. Dad, i’m gay”

He doesn’t say anything at first. It seems like an age before he does do anything, but when I finally feel his arms wrap around me I can’t even remember why I ever thought this would go any differently. And all at once it comes out, the balloon in my chest bursts and I can no longer stop myself from crying.

We stay like that until my tears reach a natural ebb and he pulls back from the hug, his hands still holding onto my arms. I can see he’s been crying too.

“Iris,” he begins, looking me straight in the eye. “I am so, so proud of you. I love you more than anything in this world, nothing could ever change that. We’re a team remember? Stuck together like glue.” He gives me his most dorky cheesy grin and I know that it’s all okay.

“You have no idea how much I needed to hear that” I say, and I pull him back into the hug.

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Where?

She repeated, endlessly, as if she were less than a broken record player (although, a great deal more expensive).

Where?

It was suspected this was the last word she had spoken.  We did not know what to tell her. I doubt she would've listened, anyway, or if she had even retained the capacity to comprehend any kind of answer. All we could do was record and observe.

Where?

Doubtless, it seemed that any kind of answer given to her wouldn't be satisfactory even if she could comprehend it. It was a difficult question to answer in any kind of way, given the circumstances. Record and observe. Record and observe.

Where?

Where was she, really? You could say she was right there, physically, heaped on the metal floor. However, she, in the sense that she knew herself and how everyone else knew her, was definitely not there anymore.  If she, the real she, had been there to see this, she would've no doubt had been vehemently denying that this thing was, in any way, her.

Where?

But if she wasn't her, than what was she? Was she even real, or some shadow, some endlessly looping black-box, some strange phantom trapped re-living it's final moments over and over and over again until the end of time? I had often wondered about the afterlife myself; a strange thing for a man of science to admit, but it was true. In this moment, I could not help but think that Hell had not existed prior to now, but that we had created it ourselves.

Hey, I need help -- I think my legs are broken. Is anybody there?

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Every night we all wore different faces and our finest clothing, it was always beautiful and disgusting. Tonight, I was Mrs Kitling. I had been reborn in layers of red and gold, and entombed within genuine furs, which would surely turn a few heads. As I presented myself to the dance, I saw the usual strangers dancing, gossiping and indulging, all failing to excel upon their previous attempts of magnificence.

A Mr Ducklee waddled to make my acquaintance, extending a stunted hand protruding from a suit of feathers. A usual disappointment to the ball, he saw creativity in his absurd appearance, yet while some fly to close to the sun, others fail to lift off the ground. The suit which held together his various bodily parts was entirely black and decorated with speckled feathers which had been poorly attached, for many had already begun to escape. His ever-thinning hair was now bright orange and slicked back causing visible discomfort to his tightened forehead. His wrinkles were visible under his heavily painted face, where his eye sockets had been painted white, extending from his pointed nose to his pinned back ears. The remainder of his face was heavily painted black, which already showed signs of cracking where layers of his disguise were to thick for comfort.

“Don’t think we’ve forgotten Ms Ivory over there” Mr Ducklee announced to me while pointing his clubbed finger in the direction of who used to be Ms Elegant. Mr Ducklee continued, “only last week she was grey rather than white, a remarkably poor attempt at wealth”, he boasted aloud.

“Don’t break the illusion Mr Ducklee, anyhow, beauty cannot exist without disgust, how else would people better themselves?” I barked back rather abruptly while gulping down my nectar.

“Quite right Mrs Kitling”, replied Mr Ducklee while inserting a white power up his beak, “I expect her next self to be an improvement, we have no space for the impoverished in society”.

The usual small talk continued between us, extending from expanding our own egos to belittling those we saw below us, all the while we indulged our usual vices.

Colours blended into each other as we all danced together in a circle. I saw bears, and snakes and pigs all dance hand in hand, while laughing, and screeching strange sounds. The dance digressed as the guests moved faster and faster, blurring into one continuous circle of debauchery. We became primal in the dimmed light, and any noise now made was no longer any understandable language.

Everything spun, and I needed to stop. Confused, I looked around, from face to face. The masks had slipped and beneath I saw the ugly truth. Stretched skin, balding heads, shrivelled lips and dirty teeth.

Turning in disgust, I decided, “Tomorrow, I will be a Hare”.

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1) The muddy oils on his face swirled in blues and greys, but none could see it. He’s the watchful guardian in the library, cloaked and time-stricken, but yet unseen. Why are we always blind to those that never sway; to those that stand, always? He was a part of the library, such fine architecture, all dressed up in smoky aphorism; a glint upon his glasses, and through the glass upon where he sits, we dare to ignore him. To ignore him with that crimson ribbon bestowed upon his neck is a crime: his very stance is one of importance, a hushed grandeur that is both pronounced yet hidden behind flushed cheeks that couldn’t possibly have been caused by any excitement, for how could he possibly procure such electric condition from inside a nameless frame?

2) The monster she operates as she scans her life through will not obey her. She is there, in the temple of books and solitude, trying to scan but a single piece of paper, occasionally battering it with her hand (always in threes) as if violence has ever proved to be the answer. No, the machine just roars back - it doesn’t take orders, never did, and she’s learning the hard way. How long do you think she’ll have to stand there, alone, frame in unrest, the final follicles of hope, blonde and silky, straying from her last finger? I’ll send prayers in her direction, I couldn’t imagine what it is like to be held up in a land so apparently free.

3) His eyes are fixed to the sky; it is how I know he definitely once believed in a God. Though, I get the impression he does no longer, for why else could there be tears in his eyes with a sky so blue? These tears are lilac purple, they screech down his face in wicked integrity; his faith has been so snapped at odd edges that nothing could bind it back together. He falls to his knees, his fingers slipping in and out of the cracks in the pavement, as though he begs to fall in between them himself: to give himself to the world’s cement would restore him, he feels. These fingers become distracted by a sudden thought; a sudden rummage through his bag that end with no reward. Such biblical drama, all trapped in his throat, every word leaking out but shattering upon the ground. His hymns cannot take flight in his phrasing that forgot meaning. For cellophane he cries out, and I question his use for cellophane. Do you think he means to plaster over his faithless outcry? Will someone just give him a slice of their peace?

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A very long bus home. I’m old enough to be these peoples grandfather. I’m exhausted but I’d rather not make this journey. Could move closer to the pub. Could find a pub closer to me. My shopping bags digging into my wrist, I don’t think I actually need what’s inside but I bought it anyway. Can’t be arsed to carry it up that hill. Is this my stop? Shit better stand up… oh its not better sit back down. I wish they would all stop looking at me it’s making me shiver. It’s cold enough as it is. How long have I owned these jeans? Can’t remember the last time I bought a new pair of jeans. Is that boy looking at me? Not he’s looking out the window. No he is looking at me! I can see it in the reflection of the window. Why is he staring? I suppose I must look a right state. ‘What’s a man as old as him doing out so late on a Monday?’ I suppose he’s thinking. He’s right to wonder, I’m wondering myself. I don’t want to stand up again but my stop is next. Shit I can’t be arsed with that hill. What time is it now? Half-one. I’ve had that watch for forever. Never needed a new one. Almost as old as me I suppose. Almost. This is my stop. That boy stands up as well. Shit I can’t stand up straight, the bus is throwing me off my feet, I must look like a newborn deer. Now for that hill.

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12,480 Minutes Wasted

“I think about it all the time” she whimpered. “It’s not something you just get over… I didn't mean for it to happen… I hadn't ever considered it before… It had never crossed my mind”

It was just the two of them in the room. The walls were pained a mint green, it was supposed to be soothing. The young girls eyes wandered everywhere but directly into the older woman’s, she’d only look at her when the older woman wasn't looking. They didn't really like each other, well, it was more so that the young girl didn't like the older, middle-aged, woman, I’m fairly certain the older woman liked the younger girl, but she saw her as a frail, easy to manipulate, inexperienced vessel that could be filled, and by filled, I don't mean positively, I mean filled with corruption. She could corrupt her. That’s really what everyone saw - especially the boy. These women had known each other two years, seeing each other for two hours a week for 104 weeks, 208 hours, 12,480 minutes. You’d think by now they’d be friends, but this relationship was by no means a friendship, it was more of a business transaction. The young girl’s face was tarred with blushes of red, it contrasted with her yellowish hair. They used to call her beetroot. Her face was plain, there was nothing striking about her physically. She wore make up, enough to feel like a mask, with everyone constantly watching her she wanted cover to conceal herself.

“Im tired of trying to please everyone” the younger one said in a monotone whilst pulling at the plethora of rubber bands she wore on her left wrist. “I can’t face the truth, and thats why I act this way”. She’d reached the conclusion herself, she didn't need anyone to tell her the answers. “I’m not clueless and you treat me as if I know nothing, secret conversations… I’m sick of it”. The older woman just sat there, perched on her wooden chair that was covered in a rough blue fabric, she had one eye on the clock in the left corner of the room. The room smelt, it wasn't unpleasant, it was a type of disinfectant, but she’d been in there so many times it choked you, probably something to do with the associations her brain made with that particular room. Finally, she looked at the older woman, she was younger than she realised, her hair still had its colour, it was lustrous, think blonde curls running past her waist. She wasn't tall either, in fact she was on the short spectrum. The more she looked at her the more she despised her. Her clothes were odd, she was strange, she wore thick pale blue tights underneath her suede looking brown skirt. She was boring. Nothing special. The older woman moved on her chair releasing a sigh from the floor boards, even they had given up on this encounter.

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Housemate:

She has always dressed in a way that baffles us. Today she wears long lightweight trousers and a small red top, covered by a glaringly bright orange jumper. She ties it loosely around her front and pushes one sleeve off her shoulder to show her pastel white skin. Worn on anyone else this would look ridiculous, but her detached and immovable sense of self moves her limbs for her, creating an unarguable air of nonchalance and confidence. Her mousy hair is mostly tied back in a low and half-hearted bun, with only her fringe remaining round her faint face. We are going out tonight, and she has stuck down a small gold star in the outer corner of her eye. It looks innocent and childish on her gentle make-up, and as she adjusts her fringe in the mirror small strands of it get wedged underneath its points. She smiles and it rises on the creases of her cheek.

Library:

Sat across the library with a book in front of him is a boy. He struggles with his position as if he cannot see properly, for he fails to choose between holding his work in his hands or placing it flatly on the table before him. His mottled blue jumper is rolled up on both arms and a black watch is locked around his wrist. It is sleek; a complete band of shiny matte black that from a distance looks as if it is part of his very skin. He seems totally unbothered by the group standing next to him, for though many people here choose to block out the rolling noise, he uses no headphones. And for this reason his concentration looks conscious. His eyes are pinned to the page and his movements match the movements of his environment. The group to his side starts to dissipate and he edges away from them. A girl walks behind him and his arms tense to hold the pages of his book. He is not sunken and submerged in his own vacuum like the open-mouthed girl to his left, but he is in tune with the lights and sounds of the world. And yet his eyes never seem to leave the book, and his hands only separate from the pages to itch his plain brown hair or to support his tanned face in his palm. His watch buzzes and he taps it quickly.

Train platform:

He strides towards the edge of the platform as if he does not care if he drops straight off the side. He wears all green; a horrible outfit consisting of pale almost-cream chinos and a sea-green jacket with a hood. He slings his bag over his shoulder and puts his hands in his pockets, realising how close he is to the platform edge and retreating. He looks down at the floor as if to study the yellow line that he has so confidently crossed. He is the embodiment of the average man, with nice but unremarkable features. His hair is short and paper-bag-brown and sits just above his eyebrows. He wears glasses with thick black frames and lenses that vanish his eyes when the sun hits them. A cloud moves and the light slides up his legs in seduction, changing his trousers to a more bearable colour.

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We waited and waited, finally after three buses and twenty-five long minutes later we were going home. The Autumn weather was settling in, the wait was long and our decision not to wear jumpers grew of increasing regret. It was only the first day of the week that was over and we were exhausted and hungry. The raspy sounding engine started back up and we were on our way home. A short while later we departed, an earlier stop than usual, due to the awkwardness of the number fifty bus. After an annoyingly long, but vital stop off for the evenings snacks we trudged up and down the windy, draining Brighton streets in the direction of home. Then, seemingly out of the blue, the sky became scattered in shades of pink and crimson cloud. A rainbow appeared at the end of the street, imbedded in the pinkish sky and we were distracted away from our thoughts of food and tiredness. It appeared as if only the tip of a painter’s brush could have constructed the image, at the end of a regular road in Brighton, at the end of a regular day. Despite the challenges this regular day had presented, the cold weather was forgotten and we wandered effortlessly and happily home.

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I was sitting in a posh two bedroom apartment on one of the city’s most expensive residential streets, holding a flute of £50 champagne in my hand and wondering how exactly I’d come to be there. I knew how it happened logistically: a Tinder match, boredom, the self-destructive tendencies and near-sociopathic tendencies my psychiatrist had warned me against falling back into whilst abroad but I’d just nodded and smiled and collected my Lexapro prescription as usual. My date for the evening was, at the very least, interesting.

Lucas was a self-described ex-drug kingpin. It seemed that drug money was the only thing that could have afforded the place I was sitting in, besides a well-paying career. In the dim light of the sitting room’s half-extinguished chandelier I could make out a circular indentation in the exact center of his chest where a 22-caliber bullet had bounced off his sternum. A dispute over drug territory gone wrong. I traced it with my finger, feeling the warmth of his skin and the soft waves of cauterized scar tissue. He had the phrase “Kill your mind” tattooed on his collarbone.

He had just turned 20. What struck me the most about him wasn’t his stories or his money or the criss-crossing, years-old self harm scars on his body, but the startlingly boyish openness of his face. He’d done so many bad things in his life, had so many bad things done to him, yet I’d never met anyone so disarmingly kind. Maybe it was just because he liked me. He came from old money, was a trust fund baby. I’d always assumed these things came with a certain kind of softness you couldn’t shake. Lucas had certainly tried hard, but he’d decided to calm down and stop dealing after a Xanax overdose had taken the life of a close friend.

He was looking at me, entranced. He couldn’t figure me out, he’d said, and he liked that. I should have told him that there wasn’t much to figure out, that I was depressed and attention-starved and trying to seem more twisty and dark and intriguing than I really was. But instead I sat smirking at him over my champagne glass, wearing my transfer-proof red lipstick and batting my eyes and milking my luck for all it was worth. I didn’t recognize myself, I felt like some kind of self-assured demonic presence with no sense of consequence had wrested control of my body and had no intention of giving it back until I was either dead or genuinely happy. Since neither of those were likely to happen any time soon, I decided to let the demon go where it may.

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·     She stood aloof, tall and slender, impatiently tapping her foot and sighing frequently enough to annoy all of those around her. A woman in a man’s world. Except she wasn’t accepting this, she was kicking the doors down, one stereotype at a time. Business would no longer be male, nor would the women in it need to become male in manner to survive. Her stance alone told you she wouldn’t need to survive, she would conquer. Perfect hair, shining teeth, freshly done nails; they would scoff at her, the middle-aged men in pinstripes, but soon their whiskey glasses would be smashing, their gentleman’s clubs burnt to dust.

·     Hunched over his notebook he sat silently absorbed in his task whilst the world bustled around him. The café was heaving as the storm drew in but even then, he didn’t spare a glace for those around him. His hands became increasingly covered in spots of ink as he scrawled away intently, jerking slightly every now and then to turn to the next untouched page. He worked away seamlessly, showing little sign of emotion bar an infrequent twitch of the mouth which I assume was created by some perfect prose or proclamation. His focus was calming, he looked so pensive, absentmindedly sipping from a coffee which, by now, must have been stone cold. His face became clouded and the book was shut with a snap. And then he left.

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They say it’s impossible to judge a person’s character based on a single picture. That may be the reason why so many people on dating apps turned out to be murderers. Leon seems to only add up to the infinite sea of Tinder’s mysterious fish. What kind of human would choose to represent themselves with a naked picture consisting only of their sweaty back and butt cheeks spread wide? Self conscious person, ashamed of their face? Maybe a kind soul crippled by hurt over loss of his hair.  Former electrician, who suffered horrible burns on the front side of his body? Is he a typical lad, or more of a macho? Egoistic manchild, the epitome of the word „patriarchy“, or just a child that has never been loved by his mummy? Or has he been loved to an extent that he considers this sort of behavior acceptable? One thing is clear though, he is looking for casual sex. But based on his picture, isn’t he fishing in the wrong waters? We cannot say. We can only be thankful that he hasn’t provided us with the view from the other side.

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The power of first impression wasn’t too kind to him. He had a scruffy lumberjack face, complete with an unruly beard. His eyes, partly covered by a hat the colour of a rainy forest, looked alive, his mouth always smiling, always polite. The coat he was dressed in was well worn, his shoes looked warm and comfortable. Like a clockwork, he came in every day and asked for a regular black tea, clutching two fifty pence coins. After he put two milks in his tea, he used the paper cup to warm up his already glove clad fingers, whether it was sunshine or rain. One may come to the conclusion, that he spent nights sleeping under the blanket of stars. How surprising was the company key chain, holding an access card, hanging on his neck. What a wonderful error of judgement.

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The intensity of his stare could only be matched by the sun. In fact, he might have been the sun himself, bathing her in the rays of his affection. Nothing short of the moon, her pale round face embellished with dark, almond shaped eyes and mauve painted lips, hid underneath a long veil of shiny black hair. Her slender body clad in black, she was a mystery he was determined to solve by the sheer power of his fixed glare. Not once smiling, she reflected his advances with a gaze of her own. They stared at each other for hours, only ordering one milkshake. How freaking annoying.

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My reflection stared back at me. I looked the same. My hair was still dark brown, my eyes still light blue, my nose slightly crooked and the bags under my eyes were still as prominent as ever. Even though I still looked like same old me, something felt different. It is hard to describe and it might not even have been visible. A feeling had come over me, something that I had never felt before. Something about my reflection had changed. I had dreamt about becoming something different, even as a kid when I could make a wish; I wanted to be prettier, taller, smarter. But whatever had changed wasn’t visible in the mirror. However when I looked at my reflection once again, I realized that I couldn’t really be bothered by my slightly crooked nose or even the bags under my eyes. I smiled at the mirror and my reflection smiled back at me, not a perfect smile, but a confident, real one. I opened the bathroom window and the heat of the sun warmed my whole body. I took one last look in the mirror and my reflection told me that today was going to be a good day. Something had changed.

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Dreary rides on the train infect the day, which I’ve been living on a rainy loop for the past decade. It’s all silent insanity when you’re getting ready everyday and going to work, coming back home again with absolutely no sense of progress or achievement. “At least I got through today,” you tell yourself. But then you tell yourself that everyday, don’t you? What are you waiting for? These thoughts you try to dredge out of wet eyes at half seven in the morning when you realise that you have to face the same day yet again. You can practically feel the clogs in your brain, all rusty and cracked; the unravelling of the knot inside your stomach that you always felt until you got into work and were distracted for eight hours. It always works out this way. Then you go home and, “At least I got through today”.

And then, you get up again. This day, as you’ve guessed, will be absolutely no different to any other, and so this story itself will be no different to any other. Your performative mundanity has been acted out hundreds of times before, just as this story has been written a hundred times before. Nothing here is special. We don’t live special lives, not here. Too often are these words written down, swimming across the page, always within the margins, never outside the lines. Sometimes those pesky big words that come out to play get too close, they have to be tamed. They do not belong to these Monday mornings. I could swear, however, when I leave my notebook cast carelessly on the bed to begin my day, thousands of tiny hands reach out from the page, begging for a release; I feel sorry for these words, each word that was designed with hopeful intention, but are instead used to dramatise absolutely nothing. And what about the cursive in which I write? Tired and confused, each word bent at the edges that make everything seem assured. But do not confuse elegant curls with the curls of a frown. These words, all spliced unwillingly together, do not possess the beauty you may think.

But that’s the thing, isn’t it: nothing is as you first think. You get on that train you always just miss (you’d think you’d learn to get up a bit earlier by now!), pulling away in all its tragedian jest, then you get on the next, much busier train, sliding yourself through a jungle of arms and hands protruding from poles as though our hands were meant for holding on for dear life, and you’re forced to hang from the neck of a complete stranger. We all stand there like trees, though our sways are not blissful, but full of bent knees and staggered jolts. That yellow light of the train you only see in the tunnels (that seemingly never end), you imagine, to be the light of the hypnosis in which everyone is under; we are living each other’s day over and over again. We are all the same, there is no difference. What is a multitude? Whatever they are, you won’t find them on this train. It is then you realise that the train no longer becomes busy - we are all but a single body. It’s just you here, musing about nothing - oh yes, nothing: the return of that magical ravine that we love to make something out of.

I love to muse about nothing. I believe that it’s such an art form to take nothing in your hands, and fold the edges, an origami of nothingness. But except now it’s something. This is all ritualistic decoration to make something out of the nothingness that it is my day. Though, now it is all ruined because I’ve discovered the meaning of it all. All of this escape, even the writing, is all ritual: performative and grey, sunken, yet shallow. These are not magical rituals (that would be ridiculous: there is no magic in this part of town), but actual, soulless ritual. Like the ones you perform when you run for the train and then miss it; the ones you perform in your office cubicle. Those rituals. Rituals everywhere, at all hours. But for what? Who is your god? Just think, after I finish writing this, and as you finish reading this, endless rituals await.

Perhaps that is where beauty is to be found? In our joint performance? Each of us are valued cast members in this play, each a starring part. The play is one everyone has seen and played in, but it never gets old.

Well, that is until we realise that it’s another ritual.

# data[].attributes.body
I’d hoped he’d be hotter, to be honest. It took me a moment – he wasn’t at all how I’d imagined. Then the name, like a fist, came swinging from the dark corners: Lucas. I whispered it at first, scared I’d crush my name if I was too zealous.

The nipples were the first shock. I’d done the research, obviously. I’d read about how they’d be smaller, how the surgeons would trim my areola. But this seemed ridiculous – they were nothing, pathetically sized brown buttons on my chest. My chest was still clearly mine. The dark pink patch where I’d had a rash at the age of ten still sat below my left collarbone, a faint but stubborn ghost of anger.

The other relic I’d carried through, the scar above my right temple, was from not much later. From the age of four onwards, the hairdresser was the site of mine and my mother’s most toxic battles. Last month, we reached the compromise of a pixie cut. Mum said it was still “dainty tomboy” and I let her have that, knowing myself it was dainty gay boy. But for about a decade prior to this, it was nothing but a catastrophe every time. Not long after the rash, I’d insisted on a buzz-cut. I got a bob. So I stole Tom’s clippers and took them to my temple, getting a few strands in before somehow managing to gouge out a small clump of scalp. Mum screamed “Stupid girl” until the blood stopped coming and I screamed “boy, boy, boy” until my voice gave out.

The rest was new, impossibly different. My jawline was blunted, more brick than glass and my eyebrows were similarly dulled, now a thick black mass. My eyes had caught – they were brighter, little embers rolling around.

It was my torso that shocked me most. So brutal, freefalling lines down my body without the interruption of undulations or clumps of fat. I took two minutes to caress hips and thighs that didn’t bulge or contort against my will, train tracks running straight where I wanted.

When I’d stopped wondering at my legs, I looked between them. I’d seen them before, of course; stolen glances at the football pitch and boys and their skin bancing around in shorts, the anatomy pages of the biology textbooks. And porn, obviously. I’d wanted to see them in action. It was much uglier up close, a little flap of pink dangling. It seemed in the way. I couldn’t get over the fragility of it, like it would almost come away if I tugged too –

“Hurry the fuck up.”

“Just a minute,” I turned and snapped. When I came back to the mirror, it was the nipples that got me again. Bigger. Back on the end of two lumps dangling below my rash scar. The mark on my temple was tucked back underneath the pixie cut. My hips had rolled back into their hill shape. The fist had swung back into its corner.

# data[].attributes.body
You look in the mirror and you see you. The you that you have always been, or at least you think you have. You wave your hand from one side to the other, and so does your reflection. You don’t dare look at it without the glass separating you from reality. You try to remember what has changed. Your skin, Yours, still hangs motionless on the back of your door. But then whose is this? Surely You’re still You. Turning back to the mirror you touch your face, your hair, falling down in waves, as it always had. Doubt fills your mind. How can you be sure it always had? You don’t know anything except for the fact that it always had. Sure you used to cut it shorter when you were a child but this hairstyle has become inexplicably you. You try to remember what has changed. But how can you possibly remember Your memories, the You that you were before? How can you be sure there was a You before the you you are now? A panicked feeling takes over. Your breathing gets heavier and you feel your hands gripping the sink. Are they even Yours? A sudden slam opens the door, the back of it bouncing against the wall behind it. She rushes in. You know who she is, and you know that you love her. She knows you love her. You know that she knows you love her. She reaches for your hand, yours. ‘Are you okay?’ You nod shakily, trying not to make her too worried. She always gets so worried. ‘Are you sure?’ You are, and you tell her that. She lets go of your hand but you can still feel its warmth. She leaves you with a soft smile and closes the door behind her, its empty back staring you in your face. You look in the mirror and you see you.

# data[].attributes.body
Based on the "Skin" exercise

# data[].attributes.body
One for sorrow

Two for joy

Three for a girl

Four for a boy

Five for silver

Six for gold

Seven for a secret never to be told

Eight for a wish

Nine for a kiss

Ten a surprise you should be careful not to miss

Eleven for health

Twelve for wealth

Thirteen beware it’s the devil himself.

Those damned crows should have clued her into what was happening long before all this shit happened. She knew the rhyme, she knew the implications, yet she didn’t think to look up at the sky and count when it fell from the sky, not a hundred meters from where she was standing. She heard the cacophony the birds were making as she crept towards the steaming thing that had just landed in front of her, yet she couldn’t quell her rising curiosity enough to think, enough to realise the true danger she was in.

The darkness seemed to flow out from the small crater the impact created, seeming almost like the water one sees just before an oncoming storm. Agitated and nearly black with raging potential, the darkness seeped out of the hole, becoming larger and larger until it began to lap and climb the trees surrounding the small clearing she stood in.

The crows sang louder, finally achieving at tearing her attention away from the darkness and towards the dull, overcast sky. She began to count the crows filling the treeline, knowing now the truth behind their words. It wasn’t just an old wives tale, it spoke of something much older and sinister than anyone could have ever imagined. As she counted the last crow, they all flew away, away from the darkness that had now reached the edges of her hiking boots. She quickly stepped away from the seeping darkness, never turning her back on the mass as it began to rise and form into something horrifying yet highly recognizable.

All she could think of as she watched the mass grow was why had she never thought to question what came after thirteen?

# data[].attributes.body
Please introduce yourself.

I’m Jules. At the moment, I’m working in a cafeteria. Some people say I’ve got a difficult job, but in a way, I think I was made for it. Okay what else? Well, I got installed a couple of years ago. You’d think there’d be some training or something, but nope, nothing. One minute I’m sitting in a box with the other candidates and the next I’m being mounted to the ceiling between these two fluorescent lights.

What’s it like living next to them? Are you guys friends?

I mean, they’re not terrible neighbours, but they make me super anxious, you know. It’s pretty weird because they’re potential fire hazards. One even told me they were installed together in the eighties! I know this is going to come off as rude, but I’m pretty sure they’re long overdue to be replaced. Incandescent bulbs? Mercury vapour? Isn’t there rule about that? Our relationship can be a bit rocky at times, because I’m supposed to call them out if they fuck up. Am I allowed to swear in this?

Sure but we might have to bleep it out later depending on when this is aired. Talk me through the hardest thing about your job.

Okay well there’s this thing that’s constantly on my mind. In my job, we’re always meant to be vigilant. I’m hypersensitive to danger. The moment there’s a hint of smoke, that’s it, you know. It’s on. I let everybody know what’s happening. But it’s never happened for real. I’ve had lots of practices and drills. I get tested every Tuesday. But it’s not the same. It doesn’t feel, what's the word? It begins with 'A'...

Authentic?

Yeah that's it. This is going to sound really bad, but I can’t wait for a real fire to happen. Career-wise, it would be a huge step up.

What’s the closest you’ve ever got to a real fire?

Um okay, I guess it’s when the kids are sitting around. Some are eating from those little boxes, others have got a tray of hot food. Sometimes, one will put their tray on the table below me. The steam floats up in these big plumes. I heard once that steam looks a bit like smoke, so I pretend in my head that the tray is on fire and that the steam is smoke and the kids are in danger. Sometimes it gets a bit too real, you know. I’ve never made a false alarm, but I’ve heard about others who have. Apparently it’s bad news if you do, and you’re pretty likely to be replaced.

Okay. What about a fire drill? Doesn't that feel like a real fire?

Imagine this. Someone triggers the alarm system. I know what I’ve got to do. But in the back of my head, I’m thinking what’s the point? The fire isn’t real. I know rationally it’s important. Fire drills are no joke. But it’s hard to put your heart and soul into something which you know is just an imitation of the real deal. The kids don’t take it seriously either. They’ve had too many of these by now to really care. They all kind of groan, then slowly get up and leave. I get it, it’s boring for me too. There’s always one kid who says ‘I wish the fire was real’. Not gonna lie, I agree.

# data[].attributes.body
He sits, sunken and grumbling, and clasps the television remote with white-knuckled fingers, claw-like and brittle as bark. He appears to be chewing something, and although he has not eaten, it appears like an involuntary action. Maybe he’s checking to see if his tongue still works. He flicks through the channels.

His face is marked, etched with years of sneering. He sits hunched over like some kind of creature, though you can hear the joints cracking in his back. The longer he sits, the more he will groan when he eventually attempts to get up. No, he’s going to be in this chair for a long while yet.

“That little weathergirl there, she’s got a lovely chest, hasn’t she?” Was he expecting a response from me? I’m not sure he even knows I’m in the room. He leans in closer, smacking his lips together like a lizard eyeing his prey, drool forming at the corners of his mouth. A leering smile begins to form on his face as he stares at his prize. One shudders to think of this man when he was ever able to act on his desire. He remains confined to his chair now, safely removed and free to ogle to his heart’s content.

His furrowed brow furrows even more as the weather report ends. He takes it as a personal slight. “Oh, for fuck’s sake!” he spits through his yellowed teeth. Only a skin so thin as his. Finally, he turns to me. “Fetch me a cup of tea, would you?”.

# data[].attributes.body
Brain. The transmitter of colour, sound, and image. The cage to the hallucinations of reality. I love you, you help me think.

Thumb and index finger. The transcribers, bringing it to life. I love you; without you there is nothing tangible. Nothing but b l a n k. An untold world. A landscape waiting to be painted.

Heart and soul. The givers of emotion. I love you - you wake me up at night searching frantically for pen and paper, making the air flex with my bodily movements. You fuel a fluorescent light that seems to pour out and stain the paper before me. You also keep me from waking up fully, drifting in and out of the dream world as I formulate words that end up in a hazy heap at the end of the bed, greeting me when I come back to reality.

Breath. I love you. I feel the pressure in the chest area when you’ve stopped, when I’m holding you as I finish that one particular sentence, when the words keep flowing out of me like my body is a leaky roof. I hold you because I can no longer extend you into the external world. I hold you inwards, pumping life into my cloudy conscience.
ZT

# data[].attributes.body
The 15:58 from Brighton to Bedford.

The woman sitting directly in front of me looked like the sort of sour faced middle aged, middle class person you try not to sit next to on the train. She had a long pointed nose reminiscent of a cartoon witch and a generally drooping, wrinkled face that betrayed her age.  Her platinum blonde hair was cut into a bob and her makeup was just enough to announce to the world that she had made an effort, but not enough that it might have been misconstrued as ‘trying too hard’. All of these thing combined gave off a general aura that would have made just about anyone dart their eyes quickly away any time she looked in your direction.

The gentleman sat to my left was quite a sight to see. Extremely tall and completely bald, with a stately face that made one expect that he’d speak like Prince Charles. Stranger than this still were the guitar case that sat on the floor beside him and the Hawaiian shirt he wore under a yellow body warmer and a smart beige jacket. The last time I looked over he was slumped forwards in his seat, asleep. It was quite difficult to place him into any of the categories of people you typically encounter on public transport, he deserved a category of his own; eccentric and stately older gentleman.

The girl sitting on my right was much closer to me in terms of age. She looked as if she was a student like me. The sort of person who might not say anything if you sat next to her  but would politely smile all the same. The first thing you noticed about her was her trainers. A base of white with accents of pastel pink and green. They made quite the statement compared to the relatively muted dark greens and greys of the rest of her outfit and her long black hair. On her lap she cradled what appeared to be a camera bag, no doubt transporting some very precious cargo onward to her final destination.

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Sitting in my favourite spot by the window

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Sitting in my favourite spot by the window

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(An overlay of blues and greens in the margin between stillness and silk)

Inside //

The blues of the room

a milky aftercrush of bluebells

An unravelling towel threaded with droplets of warm shower thinking

A flannel that’s the blue of bubblegum ice cream by the sea, a shade away from top-of-the-water blue

// Outside

The greens of an inbetween space

Autumn is the green to gold relapsing of leaves below sky

A field of deep green and thick soil, light tracing half-moon shadows, moving and unpeopled

# data[].attributes.body
Night. 1:33 am. Tine Castle. Truth is there. Stay hidden.

-R

That’s what the note had said. Vague and to the point, as my correspondence with the evasive R had been. As I have these past months, I followed the instructions verbatim. I needed answers. Tine castle, on the outskirts of the city, nestled in my car, heater cranked to the nines. Full moon. The autumn wind howled like a pack of wolves, buffeting the car, even hidden in a small gathering of trees in spitting distance to the main driveway. Flashes of brown and orange scratched at the windows and gargoyles grinned at me from the cast iron gate up ahead, tongues lolling out of their savage jaws. They seemed to stare. The night made monsters from kitschy statues as much as it made a curious man dead. The outskirts were no place for anyone after dark. The stories told by the mothers in the city and the villages weren’t just for entertainments sake. Child-thieving things lived in the wood speckled moors. The reports go back years. We only noticed when the incidents started reoccurring and the answers became harder to reach

R promised the truth. The letters were only ever addressed to me and kept the sender’s identity concealed each time.  The time now is 1:32. I watched the courtyard, squinting through the thin-trunk trees that concealed me. The gates were closed but were now redundant since the elements had weathered a gaping hole in the left side of the boundary walls, exposing the crumbling fountain and vast porch for those with a sharp eye. The castle itself was built in the fourteen hundreds, standing proud with spires, clustered columns and flying buttresses. Once maybe it had been imposing, a symbol of the Tine families long successful lineage. Now it was just fucking creepy. The spires were cracked and crooked, the columns broken and walls worn, the moon’s backlight gave it a haunting glare.

1:33.

Silence.

# data[].attributes.body
It would be inherently wrong to say, that it’s a place unlike any other. On the contrary, when you find yourself here, you are immediately transported into one of the clones, twins perhaps, or siblings, a parallel universe, not unlike airports, where you can be nowhere, but everywhere at the same time.

The first thing that draws you in, is the smell. Sickeningly sweet, somehow warming, smell that sticks to your clothes, sticks to your hair, burns into your nose, makes sure you remember it. And boy do you remember it. You will never walk down a street without smelling it again, wordlessly pondering whether it’s a brilliant marketing strategy, or just a very lucky coincidence.

You don’t come here because you enjoy it, no. You stand there, where so many stood before you, out of necessity. It doesn‘t take much time for you to figure out, that the humble reward comes with a great price. The repetitiveness, in movement, in speech, in actions and thought, dumbs you down with every sentence, makes you into a mindless robot. No opinions, no talent, no life, nothing is left of you in the moment, as you are merely a vessel, transporting the wealth to the rich, just like crusade ships brought colonial treasures to their masters in the olden times.

You may love forests, your first kiss may have been in a field, but none of that comes to your mind, when you look at the overwhelming flood of green and beige, which, combined with an unflattering sort of wood makes up most of the surrounding equipment. It appears to serve no aesthetic function at all, solely existing for it’s function.

Behind you proudly sits the metal heart of the place, you can hear it beating, demanding attention, warningly shouting „Notice me, or else!“ You have a complicated relationship with it, though, as you often use it to steal a moment for yourself, leaning your head against it, warming your nose and desperately trying to combat the frosty November wind attacking you through the gaping hole of perpetually open doors. Before you, empty containers laugh in between their partly full comrades with a mocking quality of a seven year old child. As you bend to pick them up, you catch a glimpse of your reflection in the glass. Purple is not your colour.

You are alone, mostly, baring the weight of this small universe on your undeserving shoulders and the stress that comes with it, in your cap clad head. You look to your left and see that it’s gone dark. Sometimes it feels like even if the world was about to  end, you would still be stuck serving sandwiches in Subway.

# data[].attributes.body
‘What wonders exist beyond the limited scope of physical experience?’ When confined to the iron living quarters of an Icelandic whaling ship questions of this nature elevate the mind from its limited physical environment. Despite possessing an educated background, Henry Davidson was never one for the philosophical mysteries of human existence. However, his self-imprisonment aboard the vessel causes the mind to wonder beyond its usual habitual processes. Being not accustomed with the ocean, Henry was inexperienced and therefore useless among the ship’s crew members. It seemed to him that below deck was the suitable place for cargo, for that was all he was.

Initially Henry focuses on his physical environment. He studied the intricate discoloured walls like the continents on a map. He polished the rusted rivets as one does to a valued coin. He delicately tugged at the threads of his pillow, as though he were assembling the ship inside a glass bottle.

Henry looked closer, seeing more than anyone had seen before. Shadows begun to stretch, and space multiplied around him. He created a whole world inside his room, a structure of possibility floating through a chaotic expanse. His room was one of finite limitations, but he created something more than the four walls which enclosed him. Transcending above this little ship, he saw beyond that of Heaven and Earth, and deep into the cosmos.

He closed his notebook and stood up, ‘What’s Icelandic for ‘Do you have a spare pen?’’.

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I took my place in the aisle of the bus as the lights went down and we started to chug along the motorway. Out of the window, the bushes and concrete and cars blurred into a dull smudge, like someone had pressed their thumb onto a fresh watercolour painting. People around me chattered with each other, or looked out of the window, like me, desperate to avoid making eye contact with a stranger. The colours kept blurring until we stopped at a red light, silently authoritarian and commanding the bus to be still. Underneath a bridge someone has painted ‘I choose how I feel’ and I’m not sure that’s how feelings work.

# data[].attributes.body
It was mostly a moment more than a place per se… this beach felt different than other ones I’ve meet before. The pebbles in place, the contrast of colours allowed by the blue sky, the wind and the blue waves from the ocean. It seemed to be just a peek of an infinite amount of water, of an infinite amount of blue just ahead of me. People around seemed to blur as time passed by, the sun was shining more than ever and to look up to the sky was a nonsense because as you headed your face you had to close your eyes. It was not warm enough to say it was a hot weather, but among all the possibilities it was a comfortable. The pebbles were brown, sandy, orange and some other were black; their size changed as you walked… the water was blue and transparent, it seemed that the sky’s reflection hit the waves strongly enough to make them look from a cartoon, but there moments that they seemed more transparent than ever. They clashed with the rocks and foam appeared in the surface. It could have been calmer, it could have been more intense, but it was as it wanted to be after all.

Close up:

The colour contrast is what takes places over everything. Shades of blue and hues of sandy brown next to each other, they are together in the viewer’s eye but detached by material means. Both colours touch as the water moves. The sun shines through the whole scene and allows some shining reflections in the chromatic possibilities. Movement in the calm.

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A constant coo of awkward awe, as customers negotiate themselves around an old pub table salvaged from the beach. There’s a bumbling busy-ness only likened to distant family dinners at Christmas. A faux friendly space that provides no clear line of focus. It’s an onslaught of colour in dresses, shoes, bags and jewellery. An excess display of 80s grandeur and an unknowingness of what it wants to be. The shop assaults with decadence, jabbing every sense, a perfumed room diffuser, Spandau Ballet’s ‘Gold’, twenty spotlights shining every corner and loud, tap dancing floors.
To the right there is a black velvet chaise-longue, that when sat on demands your legs to be outstretched due to it’s lowered level. There also sits a tacky, aged, red velvet heart-shaped pillow only really suitable for a seedy sex den.

# data[].attributes.body
The sun pours in through the window, illuminating the finger prints that cover my water glass. Nothing here feels completely clean, from the table tops, to the cups, to the bottles of sauce which have what feels like a double coating of grease that no amount of wiping would manage to shift. The state of the windows gives the lighting a warm, nostalgic feel, as if the décor hasn’t been touched since its opening by either the need to modernise or by a dust-cloth. Finery is evidently not the café’s concern, providing a cheap and cheery service is a much more their style. The inviting atmosphere is comforting enough though, to allow you to ignore the film of grime that covers everything until you are finished eating.

The cliental is an odd mix of hungover uni students, fry-up loving lorry drivers and businessmen grabbing a quick, no-nonsense coffee before their commute. Trackies, overalls and cheap suits appear almost as a uniform amongst those seated and stood in the sunshine. All are happy fulfilling their stereotype however, and accept each other’s without judgment as they all share a love of the joys that can be discovered in this little business that so easily goes unnoticed on such a busy road.  Over the whir of the coffee machine it is just possible to catch snippets of the student’s general gossip and antics of the previous night, including one testament that after being mixed with vodka and jaeger, donuts will never be appealing again.

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Antiques are waiting to be sold. Trying to avoid the dust that slowly settles, inevitably. From time to time someone will come in, looking for something. Most of the time, they don’t. The chapel-turned-shop is as timeless as everything in it and there is no telling how long it has served its purpose. Video games are stuffed in-between old books and pottery. The many high windows along the wall bring in an abundance of light, but never enough. Creaking footsteps from an upstairs you didn’t know existed are slowly walking away. It’s chilly. It smells exactly how you imagine it does. A bee flying around aimlessly breaks the perfect stillness. It stays close to one particular window, one that doesn’t allow light to shine through. Pictures of smiling children line the windowsill. You wonder whose they were. You wonder who would buy them. Dust has already settled.

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“The three of you are standing alone in a small rectangular chamber. In the far righthand corner of the room you see a dark wooden desk covered with sheets of parchment and piles of haphazardly stacked books.

On the desk also is a half empty bottle of red wine and a recently extinguished candle, with a thin trail of smoke still visible in the air above it.

Along the lefthand wall is a heavily stained workbench full of various pieces of glassware. Vials and beakers containing liquids of deep red, brilliant silver and violent green. A complicated set up of glass tubes and containers that appears to be designed to distill liquid, although it is currently empty. A set of brass weighing scales, on one side of which sits a small weight, and on the other a lump of gold of about equal size. The scales tip in favour of the gold.

The worn grey flagstones of the floor are covered in the centre of the room by a large ornate rug, woven with patterns so small and intricate it seems almost impossible.

The whole room is lit only by the flickering glow of several torches set into sconces at a number of points around the room, since there are no windows to let in natural light.

What do you do?”

# data[].attributes.body
Time passes slowly as I’m watching the digital numbers on the clock change. Even though I’m wearing my earbuds I can still hear the clicking sound of women’s heels on the floor and the chattering of people talking on the phone, even if I can’t hear what they’re saying. The woman standing next to me is frantically looking at her watch. I wonder why she seems to be in such a hurry. Perhaps she is running late for work or a job interview, or she could just be very impatient. The boy sitting at the crammed bench is staring down at his phone not realizing that there is an elderly woman standing next to him. I wonder what’s on his phone that is so important to make him forget everything around him. It might be his mother texting him not to be home late or his friends asking him what’s taking him so long. The young girl at the other side of the tracks looks like she has been crying, making me think whether her boyfriend has broke up with her or if she’s just had a bad day and wants to go home. So much is happening around me yet time seems to stand still. The loud rhythmic sound of the approaching train wakes me from my thoughts. I look up at the people I have been observing and I wonder if time has passed as slowly for them as it has for me.

# data[].attributes.body
As I sat down the person next to me turned. He had just picked up his glass of beer. The liquid inside swirled round. The individual bubbles on top were sliding back down again. The man’s face was unshaven, old and sunken. His eyes grey and blue like the mountains in the morning of upcoming winter. Past their cloud dew rolled hills down to the first grains of black. The entire coastline covered in black sand made the waves appear pitiful, attempting to pull it all back into the depths. There among the sad roaring of the sea knelt a girl. A few turtle eggs were lying in her lap. One she held next to her cheek. Then she parted her lips, blew her warm breath onto it. Then she bit into it and tore the shell out of the body with her teeth. I saw the man turn away and smile at the golden liquid still going round in his glass.

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Walking up a long hill in too-tight jeans, doc martins that don't fit (I'm not cool enough to rock them anyway) and a coat, even though it's pretty fucking hot. It's what, 11am? I feel underwhelmed, as I said to him last night in bed, and I can't stop thinking about the fact that I should have broken up with him there and then. This stretch of road is so atmospheric - at night, in the golden hour and now, on an empty late-morning. The houses are quiet and watchful, enclosing the bodies of half-asleep humans, and the cars sit bored on the smokey gravel and everything is just...still. I feel as if I blend in as I move slowly through the silent nonentity of the street. I want to dissolve into the brick wall that runs alongside it, melt into the soft looking gravel underneath the blue car I am passing now. Anxieties and 'should-have-dones' are plaguing me like a recrudescent dream.

# data[].attributes.headline
Welcome to the Art of Short Fiction 2018/2019. Below are the previous year's experiments, drafts and some peer feedback. You are welcome to post drafts of work here, or upload documents of the same, to this space. 

# data[].attributes.subject
Welcome to the Art of Short Fiction 2018/2019. Below are the previous year's experiments, drafts and some peer feedback. You are welcome to post drafts of work here, or upload documents of the same, to this space. 

# data[].attributes.body
The sun is setting over the rooftops, painting the city rose gold. The clouds blush softly. She sits on the windowsill, and looks out towards the rolling waves. It's cold, and the wind whips her hair into her eyes.

Across the chimney pots of the old houses, an undulating mass of black spots creeps towards her. Like excited particles, they jostle together, coming close to each other but never touching. They swell together, split apart and heave back to one swollen mass, blocking the setting sun.

She takes a drag on her joint and feels the wet of her tears on her cold cheek. When she closes her eyes to blink them away, a bright sunspot mars the darkness where she has stared for so long at the burning star.

All this, she must leave behind.

The evening comes, as the pink wash turns to blocks of dark purples and burnt oranges. Bright beacons burn in the windows of the buildings, one by one like a call, yet one does not burn in hers.

She removes her clothes and unzips her body. The rubbery skin flops over on itself, unnaturally flaccid, and tumbles from the sill to the carpet.

A black feather slowly drifts and settles on top the empty exterior shell. The flock has one more in the roost this evening.

# data[].attributes.body
Orientating through cobbles.

Out of pure space you were there backpacked and eyebrows raised

As though I looked right through you and couldn’t see.

There.

Photographic, mop haired,

Face of a lithe feline in that second.

You would soften at times, through the months, eyes would be droplet almonds, curved into warm flesh.

Orientating through cobbles.

We went where I suggested, you followed.

A spaniel with a cigarette,

hidden clumsily behind unkempt folds of blonde.

Over a calendar year of trying to understand you- with blind man’s fumbling success- sprawled prior to us. What I thought I understood unravelled and rewound tightly with ease of ball of string.

So much time was killed, without any memory

We walked, and spoke and I know

Without fine detail that you, with unspectacular execution, interested me.

Vacancy was your chosen demeanour, with a surplus of pursuit.

You wanted to know me and you wanted, yet, to stay unearthed.

Disorientated, I struggled to find my space between what you projected and whatever it was that you might need.

The bus ticket, you found it in my pocket-

‘love you’ were words you wrote upon it.

With a displaced insincerity as though you really meant nothing.

I knew, then, so far before the words ever past your lips

With their complicated  significance,

If not then, inevitably you would.

# data[].attributes.body
Is that him?

No it can’t be, he doesn’t even smoke. Yet that tall and slim figure, with that navy beanie

trapping his brunette strands of hair into a tiny make-shift jail on his head, resembles

something so similar to which I haven’t seen in weeks, months, but on replay in my mind ever since.

I dodged through the crowds of people all heading in different directions on a Thursday night, keeping my eyes on the familiar figure, and headed straight for him. He was standing outside the Wetherspoons where all my, and his, friends were inside, having a drink and catching up with each other. I was so excited to see them all again since I’d been at university. Yet, my stomach churned
and a lump arose in my throat as I watched him. I pulled my phone out of my pocket, checking for any notifications to make myself appear busy as I headed towards the pub’s doors.

He hadn’t noticed me at first, but as he began to relight his cigarette, he looked up and spotted me walking towards him. He froze, cigarette half-dangling from his mouth, staring straight into my eyes as I began to slow my pace.

And there it was again, the connection. The unfathomable connection, that felt so unreachable in the past few months yet so familiar to me. Our eyes did not drop from each others, and with the connection came the familiar feelings of love, trust, and safety, and all the happy memories we shared. I missed that feeling. A feeling I’ve longed for; a feeling of warmth in the brisk November air, like a lit fireplace; a feeling of home, surrounded by your loved ones on Christmas Day.

The answer to my question? Yes, it is him.

He, who I craved for at 2pm on calm Sunday afternoons, not 2am on lusty, lonely and

drunken Friday nights, but on the 4am late night drives in mid-summer, telling each other our issues, anxieties, and aspirations. Can we go back to those days, where all we listened to was the sound of the car radio and our shared loneliness as we drove aimlessly down motorways and country lanes?

We are still staring at each other as I stopped right in front of him. Our lips are parted, eyes wide, minds racing.

I see you again, and you see through me, but I’m ready again, and I know I can handle it this time.

# data[].attributes.body
'Here's the thing,' Enjolras says, over his fifth coffee. 'I don't even like him. So it doesn’t make any sense.'

‘You spent half an hour wondering if it was creepy to ask if he was wearing a new jumper,’ Courfeyrac says, stirring his unicorn frappuccino with a straw. He’s only drunk half of it in the time it’s taken Enjolras to go through four espressos.

‘So? That just means I notice things.’

It’s a hopeless case. Courfeyrac stares into the multicoloured swirls of his drink. They’re going to be here for hours.

‘I think it’s the judgement,’ Enjolras says.

‘What?’

‘When I’m getting more,’ he nods at the miniature espresso mug, ‘he like, laughs, but doesn’t actually tell me off.’

‘He’s a barista,’ Courfeyrac reminds him. ‘His job is to sell coffee. You buying coffee equals money for him.’

‘Yeah, but everywhere else I get this Look. I know they’re judging me.’

‘So your obsession isn’t because of the tattoos, it’s the fact that he doesn’t care that there’s more coffee than blood in your veins?’ Courfeyrac shakes his head.

‘Dude. Come on. Do you even know his name?’

‘They all wear name tags, it’s not difficult.’

‘Yeah, but when during your coffee order do you stop and stare at your barista’s chest? Unless you’re a creep, or have suddenly noticed the shape of muscles through his shirt - ‘

‘Shut up.’

‘So, what’s his name?’

Enjolras stares at the table. ‘Grantaire.'

# data[].attributes.body
All the things I wish I’d said,

Or alternatively, all the things I wish I hadn’t;

Is it better to be honest? Or to save someone’s feelings?

They are lesser than the things said;

I say them before I go to sleep:

I wish I had said I love you more often;

Relaying arguments to myself in the shower

You’re boring anyway

You’re too judgemental; and I think that makes you a bad person

Sorry I was so angry

But I deserved better than you

Rather than accepting everything you threw at me

All your ‘please’ and ‘thank you’s’

I wish we would have had more time

But maybe nothing would have been best

All the things I wish I’d said,

Or alternatively, all the things I wish I hadn’t said;

Is it better to be honest? Or to save someone’s feelings?

They are lesser than the things I said

I say them before I go to sleep:

I wish I had said I love you more often;

Relaying arguments to myself in the shower

You’re boring anyway

You’re too judgemental; and I think that makes you a bad person

Sorry I was so angry

But rather than accepting everything you threw at me

I deserved better than you

Rather than accepting everything you threw at me

‘please’ and ‘thank you’

I wish we would have had more time

But maybe nothing would have been best

# data[].attributes.headline
Focusing on Character - she was no more than five foot three

# data[].attributes.subject
Focusing on Character - she was no more than five foot three

# data[].attributes.body
She was no more than five foot three, yet the tattoos and piercings on her face made her personality seem bigger than her actual height. Despite the tattoos having no colour, the patterns swirled delicately around her eyes, across her cheeks, and over her nose, giving her a distinct air of strength and individuality. The bull-ring between her nostrils and short, dark pixie hair style would make her stand out from a whole crowd of mundane, ordinary people. It was intimidating.

Standing outside her apartment door and fumbling around in her old backpack, she swore under her breath with a frustration crossing her small, pig-nosed face.

“Where are these fucking keys?”

A few seconds passed and a familiar jangle came from the bag, and then a loud clang as they fell to the floor.

“Oh for fuck’s sake.” She nearly shouted whilst picking them up again and roughly opening the door. She threw the bag down onto the rug, and made a beeline for the sofa, an old blue velvet find in the second-hand shop of Lewes Road, covered with mismatched cushions and blankets. To her, however, it was a dream. She slumped down and closed her eyes as she made herself comfortable, dragging the blankets over her head, body shivering from the cold October weather; she was too stubborn to turn the heating on just yet. Just as she was about to switch off the world for the night, her phone began to ring. A few seconds passed as she hesitated whether or not to let it ring, but remembered it was Thursday. Mum calls on Thursday’s. Sighing, she pulled the phone from her pocket and answered.

“Hi Mum, how are you doing?

“Well hello Soph! I’m good, I’m good. How are you, my darling?”

“Not bad. Work’s been quite tough today, plus I’ve got that essay due in on Monday so it’s all been hectic down here recently. My manager ma-”

“Sounds lovely. You’ll never guess what? Paul and I finally got that car today! You know, that new one, the electric one? What’s it called? Paul!” Her voice faded as she shouted to her husband, “What’s the new car called again?”

“Tesla,” Paul’s voice could distinctly be heard shouting back, along with the background noise of the TV blaring out the drones of hollering football crowds.

“It’s brand new this month, isn’t it? The limited edition white one, with black leather interior.” Sophie’s mum asked Paul.

“Yeah.” Paul was clearly more interested in the football.

“It’s a Tesla, Sophie! The limited ed-”

“Yeah I heard, Mum. Sounds great.” Sophie purposefully made herself sound irritated. She dreaded this phone call every Thursday, it was like a stuck record; Sophie being miserable, and her mum all excitable and happy with her new husband, Paul. Paul, Paul, fucking Paul. It’s all she ever talked about. Sophie was happy for her, she really was, especially after her last flop of a relationship. Yet she felt like she was losing her mum to the blindness of men, marriage and all that lovey-dovey stuff that comes with it.

“Well, anyway. Have you heard from that boy recently? Tom? Has he tried contacting you again?

“No he hasn’t, and I’d like to keep it like that.”

“He was such a nice boy when we came down to visit. Very gentlemanly. I could tell he was completely besotted with you.”

“Well not anymore, Mum. I want some time on my own for a while. Some me-time. I’ve got so much to do at the moment, I don’t think I can handle any more drama right now. I’ll explode. He wasn’t good for me anyway.” But that’s not what Sophie thought at all. She didn’t think she could love anyone more than she loved Tom. Maybe it was one of those cases of “right person, wrong time”, she kept telling herself, but she just could not stop thinking about him. She wouldn’t tell her mum that though, she didn’t want to seem weak.

“Well I guess that’s a good thing then.” Sophie’s mum did not know the art of “me-time” at all. It was a constant revolving door of men ever since Sophie’s dad left when she was 8.

There was a few seconds of awkward silence, where Sophie was frustrated at her mum’s obliviousness, whilst her mum wondered how Sophie could not want a man in her life.

“Well Sophie, I better be going now. Paul and I are going to the cinema later so I need to make us some dinner before we leave. Lovely to hear from you! Speak next Thursday, my darling.” Her mum made a kissing sound down the phone.

“Okay mum, have fun.”

“What do you want for dinner, Paul? We’ve got spag-” Her mum’s voice drowned out into the distance before she hung up.

“Yeah, bye mum, love you too.” Sophie threw the phone to other end of the sofa, and pulled the blanket over her head again. Her eyebrows creased together as she slumped further into the sofa, thinking of the conversation with her mum and suddenly feeling very alone. She longed for human affection, a hug, anything. From her mum, from Tom, from anyone who would show her the slightest bit of attention. But instead, she cradled the scratchy black cushion into her chest and curled into a small ball, waiting for sleep to take her away.

# data[].attributes.body
7/18/78

There I was, on the sidewalk, lacing my new boots up outside the club. Every time Jimmy decided to open the door (and he was feeling awfully generous tonight) I could feel the heat of hundreds of bodies jiving— but there was only one body in there that I gave a damn about. If I hadn’t bought the thigh-highs I might’ve reached her in time. But there I was, lacing up while she was

Shit, I gotta stop thinking like that. Anyway. I got my boots on, I checked my mug, which, if I’m being honest, had seen better days. My hair was definitely flat as hell but I didn’t go all this way for nothing. I guess I was hoping the boots would make up for the rest of me.

Gina’s the one who picked them out, I just didn’t have the funds at the time so I played it cool. Went back for them today thinking I might surprise her... thinking she might forgive me. Too little too late I guess.

But I shoved my ratty sandals into my bag and skipped the line. Jimmy let me in no problem. He’s nice like that. Like always the place was jumping, particularly hard for a Tuesday night though. Something by Donna Summer was on— and no, not I Feel Love, something earlier than that. Much earlier than that. But it was definitely Donna, I’d know that voice anywhere.

Anyone can play the game there are no rules

And you never know just what you lost until you lose

Couldn’t tell you what the chorus was but I sure as hell remember that line. Felt a little too familiar. Been playing in my head all night. Over and over and over.

So I’m pushing through the crowd, Donna’s wailing over the dance floor and some folks are really gettin down tonight. I would be too if not for the circumstances. I’m looking for Gina but the lights are flying, doing their best to blind me.

Then, all I once, and I swear I’m not being dramatic, the crowd parts, the lights stop bouncing and there she is. She’s feeling it like everyone else on the floor tonight but she knows she looks good. Shit, she always looks good.

I start making my beeline to her, I reach into my purse past the sandals and grab the page I ripped out of the book earlier today. Still don’t feel good about that one but I was desperate. No one’s bought anything from that dusty old bookshop in years anyway… Well, no one except Gina.

I’m yelling her name but she can’t hear me over the Queen of Disco. I’m almost to her, she’s about to see me, and then, he’s there. Rod’s had his eyes on Gina for months so I guess he was just waiting til she was most vulnerable to swoop in. And I mean that literally. Danced right between us and onto her lips.

She was drunk. That’s what I keep telling myself. I did manage to slip the sweaty page into her hand. She probably didn’t even realize it happened with Rod all over her like that.

Jesus. Now I’m sitting at our spot, knowing damn well she’s still out there. Or worse, maybe she’s already settled in for the night, with that rat. Fuck. Sometimes that’s all you can say.

-VC

______________________________________________________________________

Song

We never know the sweets o’ joy

Untill it goes away

The sweetest flower no notice wakes

Untill it meets decay

The bright sun shines out heads above

Like rich unnoticed dreams

And when the day is lost in clouds

We value the sunbeams

The spring is nothing when it comes

That seemed so bright before

The merry bee neglected hums

Flowers weeds, and nothing more

I know a place, it is a place

In spring where nettles come

There milk-white violets show their face.

And blue ones earlier bloom . . .

that place is where we met— tonight at 2

-Val

# data[].attributes.body
This skin feels tighter than it did before. I thought that it would stay in the dark where I left it, when I decided that I deserved the windows to be left open. It itches around my waist and doesn’t fit my throat right; it seems to chafe on my words before I utter them; my skin is paler. I can’t tell if this epidermis of mine is just that: mine. It’s an old friend of my mirror and it fits my clothes just as it did before. Yet there is some part within my stomach that is rejecting it like an incompatible organ transplant; I can feel my capillaries running dry as my fleshy hue turns more to a corpse than a living man.

-

The ground beneath me is impregnated with my walk as I mark my foot in its beating blood. The earth accepts my form and so I am reminded that I am whole and not unnatural. I am as I was, and as I will be. I close my eyes and I no longer feel the membrane of my skin between me and the trees. I close my eyes and I no longer bare the disconnect of the human being who, in infancy, learns that he is one, and the world another. Life lives within and without, and right now the timber within me propagates back with the dirt, and all that was fractured recreates. I am as I was and will continue to be – complete.

-

When our eyes fade and cataract, I will see you still as fresh as you are before me now. You will forget my name, but know me still – in the fingerprints we left behind on key holes and book spines. You permeate - as do I - onto the things we use and leave to die. You will touch my skin with an unfamiliar gentility, and wish that you could replay all I do; the poems you wrote about my hair, and the roots you dugout so I could bloom. But still will stand, after our mortal decay, the evergreen of our creation.

# data[].attributes.body
I sit down and try to remain calm. It was like someone else took over and decided for me. My skin… I see it hanging… I look at my own skin. A weird sensation goes through me. It feels like my blood is flowing too fast through my veins. Breath in breath out I tell myself. Whose skin is this? What kind of person is this? What have been her decisions throughout her life? I touch my arms, I caress my arms. These are my arms, the skin is not mine and I am completely aware of it. This skin has been through things, it has been through a lot. I feel it when I touch skin’s arms. I hold my hands, I hold my arms. I touch my legs, my knees, my back. I crouch down to touch my feet. Every part I touch tells me something. I can’t translate it, though. Skin is trying to talk to me.

I decide to take a walk. It is late, it is dark, I won’t see anyone I know probably. I put some clothes on and leave the house. Literally walking in someone else’s shoes. Sort of? Talk to me I say to skin. Tell me so I can help you. Tell me so I can make you feel better. I feel a darkness through my veins, that is what makes my blood go faster I think. I feels like the skin around my throat is tightening.

I come home again. Skin makes me feel very tired so I lie down on my bed and close my eyes. Not even my eyelids are my own. What eyes did they cover? What images did those eyes see? I want to make skin feel better.

I wake up and decide to inspect every inch of skin. In front of my mirror in the bathroom I stand and look at my (not really) body. A small scar on the right knee. Two bruises on the right arm. A burn on the left feet. It looks like my body when I was a child, never careful and always hurting myself. Did skin hurt itself or did someone else hurt skin? I feel anger coming up inside of me, this is my skin now I decide and nobody will hurt it again! I take a deep breath and hold it for a few seconds. “I will take good care of you. You are me now.” I whisper to skin. My blood finally starts to slow down a bit.

I come up with so many complications. Nobody will recognize me and nobody will believe me. I walk to my own skin and look at it. Did my skin make me happy? Your skin shouldn’t make you feel unhappy – but so many are. Was I comfortable? Was I pleased?

I am doubting my who life at the moment. Skin causes this. Skins fault. Who hung it there, who changed my body. Who decided for me to put it on?

I know I did. I wanted this.

# data[].attributes.body
You know that bit in the 1987 film Predator when Arnold Schwarzenegger’s trying to lure the predator into a trap by using himself as bait? You know, when he’s lying against a tree and says, ‘Do it! Do it! Come on, kill me! I’m here! Come on! DO IT NOOOW! KILL ME!’ That’s kind of how I feel right now.

Because I know what you’re about to say. I’ve imagined all the variations – all the tones of voice, all the accompanying expressions. And that’s all it would take, after all: one look, and one apologetic sigh – as painful as any predator’s plasma gun.

So do it. Kill me. It’s my fault, after all. I went skipping into the jungle, knowing since the beginning that it would come to this moment. I may have brewed delusions that this predator might take my hand and not my skull, but such delusions won’t save my life.

There you stand, and here I wait. But unlike Arnold, I’ve set no traps for you; I’m at your mercy. Come on, kill me, please. Set me free from this jungle, because I’ve got others to run into, other predators to meet, other deaths to be collected. But before I do that, you have to claim your prey.

Do it. Come on, kill me. I’m here. Come on. Do it now. Kill me.

It’s not your fault. Just … kill me quickly, please. And you know what? I’ll kill someone else. Someday. Somehow.

# data[].attributes.headline
Uncovered by Silence (First Draft) by Steven Shinder

# data[].attributes.subject
Uncovered by Silence (First Draft) by Steven Shinder

# data[].attributes.body
When Krystal heard the doorbell, she knew that Eccentricity arrived. Opening the door, she saw her old friend from college for the first time in three years. For a moment, she thought that he was holding a bouquet of flowers, but it was actually his purple umbrella with pink flower patterns, which he was in the process of folding up. Wet clothes notwithstanding, he was just as she remembered him: smiling with teeth on display, wearing a bowler hat with green and blue artificial peacock feathers, mismatched cozy socks (they were red and blue), and black clothes to fill out the rest of the ensemble. He had his luggage with him as well. The plan was to have him stay for three days.

“Here I am!” said Eccentricity.

“Just in time,” said Krystal, wrapping her arms around Eccentricity, not caring about his wet clothes. “Supper's ready.”

As Krystal led her friend into the dining room, her husband Gerald turned from the stove to greet Eccentricity with a handshake.

“Nice to finally meet you,” said Gerald.

“Likewise! And congrats! I saw your post online. When are you expecting the baby?”

“It's gonna be a May baby, like we planned.”

“May is almost halfway through the year,” explained Krystal. “So our child would have nearly equal waiting time for birthday and Christmas presents.”

“Ah, I see,” said Eccentricity. “And in May he or she would be able to have friends at school say happy birthday.”

“Exactly!”

The three of them sat down for supper, which consisted of smoked salmon, Yorkshire pudding, and lemon tarts. Eccentricity did not remove his hat, but neither Krystal nor Gerald were bothered by this. He politely complimented the couple on the meal that they had prepared together, thus flattering them.

“Krystal tells me that you're meeting with old friends all over,” said Gerald. “May I ask what brought this about? I mean, I think it's great, like a little tour, but, you know.”

“I just felt like seeing old faces again. It's been a long time and a long road.”

“How long you traveling for?”

“About a month.”

“Wow.”

“And you've planned who you're visiting when?”

“Yeah. My stay here would've been shorter, but...well, a couple of friends said they wouldn't be free. And a couple didn't respond...”

There was an awkward silence. Nobody seemed to know where to look. After a good ten seconds, Krystal spoke.

“Well, Gerald and I have an appointment in the morning. You're free to make yourself at home. When we're back, we can show you the sights.”

Though Eccentricity's facial muscles communicated sorrow, the smile returned to his eyes.

“Thank you. And it's not too bad. Just means I have more time to go to Solsbury Hill.”

“What's significant about Solsbury Hill?” asked Gerald.

“You've never heard the Peter Gabriel song? It sounds like a spiritual experience. I hope it lives up to my expectations... I'm actually going there after my stay here.”

“Straight from here?” asked Krystal. “Isn't it a bit out of the way?”

“Yeah. Four hours, but I don't mind trains. Sometimes you overhear children saying the cutest and darndest things to their parents.” Another pause, a look of reflection, and then a smile. “You two are gonna love your child.”

Eccentricity awoke the next morning. The silence of the house was instantly noticeable, and it made him feel vulnerable. He took out his phone, put on his headphones, and listened to instrumental new age music. This made him feel at peace as he made toast for himself. When the meal was done, he grabbed his umbrella and walked out to the backyard, where the rain poured. He did not mind it, though. The droplets were like friends, passing by and crossing his path for a brief while before disappearing. On his phone, he played “Life in Technicolor” by Coldplay. It was only audible to him, and he did not mind whether or not any neighbors would see him dance to the melodic magic, mouthing the words in silent discovery of an ethereal state of being. The wind blew the stretcher of his umbrella upward. But he did not care. He held the umbrella outward as he spun in a circle. He swung his hips every now and then, wiped the invisible windows of the air, jumped side to side with his shoes landing in mud puddles.

When the song ended, he walked back inside the house. He had a smile on his face, but it faded when he saw that Krystal was lying on the living room floor, arms stretched out in hopelessness. Gerald stood still, tears in his eyes. Neither of them seemed to notice Eccentricity. Gerald crouched down to lie beside Krystal and wrapped an arm around her. She lowered one of her arms to her belly, and then burst into tears.

Eccentricity felt destroyed seeing that his friends had lost something. He did not know where to hide, so he walked up to them.

“Oh,” said Krystal. “We...”

“I'm sorry,” said Eccentricity. “I can leave.”

They both got up.

“Look...” said Gerald.

“I'll be fine,” said Eccentricity. “And so will you two. It hurts now. And I might be speaking too soon, but you might have another chance.”

I know I won't, thought Eccentricity.

Without another word, he grabbed his luggage and awkwardly exited through the front door, off to his next destination. He did not want to burden his old friend with more troubling news. Nor would he try to trouble any of the others with it.

Though the illness was spreading through him, he was determined to make the most of his final month.

# data[].attributes.body
‘I’ll show myself out, you said,’

The whole thing is a haze, me and you,

and somehow I’m here without you

Falling into a circle of doubt

with no way out but acceptance.

But I will never break free,

because what I have to accept is that its me.

But then you don’t reply to my text,

And I’m alone, again,

Crying tears that I can’t even hear anymore.

And I’m thinking about you, again.

Thinking about the way your eyes traced my skin, but didn’t touch,

and your lips which touched mine but felt like someone elses

I try and remember, again and again but

The times that you hurt me, turn into grey

because your sorries are so soft.

I know this isn’t right, I know this isn’t good

But it’s the coldness in me

and the hotness in you,

That keeps this alive.

Standing in my living room, he says, ‘I don’t understand you,’

‘You’re too stubborn,

You'

You never let me know how you feel,’

and then im doubting, doubting myself…

Maybe, I’m the cold one,

because I can’t deal with your stuff.

Maybe I’m crazy,

because I can’t help but be with you.

But I can’t stay like this,

not when your doing this to me.

Breaking me down piece by piece,

Until I don’t know myself anymore and,

All I see is what you want me to see;

But even that feels normal now.

And then I realise, its not me, its you

I’m heated and disjointed,

but all I want is someone to love.

I’m intense and calculated

but all I want is someone to feel.

I say what I want but not what I need

and double track and stumble on

things you said and id cried and screamed at you for.

I don’t read you well and I take everything you say literally,

until your words become reality and your actions a public stunt

and everyone is laughing and saying how much they love you

and I’m left in our bed,

crying that Im that woman drinking wine alone.

But I drink the bottle because it reminds me of you

And then im gagging for what I think was us

what I think was you.

The bottle is empty, it’s a new day,

You embrace me like you love me but talk to me so briefly,

You make me feel like I can never  be sure of the ground im standing on,

That I’m never going to be the only one.

One of us isn’t being honest,

One of us is running away from what this I s ,

But this doesn’t give me anything anymore,

It doesn’t make me feel like it used to/

And then I feel myself shutting down again.

Shutting down each part of myself, until I feel my face freeze over

and my body becomes rigid in your arms,

And then my legs are walking me across the road ,walking away from you,

whilst you smoke and listen to you crap music by the corner stpre.

Your back arched as you lean against the wall, smiling down at your shoes.

We’ve left it again, with nothing made clear,

But false impressions and unspoken glances.

And this feeling, oh this feeling, that sits in my stomach

and swims in my eyes, won’t subside

until your by my side.

A text appears on my phone, ‘I’m seeing someone else b ‘

You’re seeing someone else.

Seeing someone else

Seeing someone else.

The words swim over and over in my drunk mind.

They get stuck in my throat, clustering into a small compact ball of knives,

which scrape and scratch as they climb their way out

and form only mumurs of pained and gutting sounds .

Bitter twisted tears fall and I’m so angry at you, I feel as if I could die.

But then I remember, just briefly, through the mess of the hysterics,

that I never loved you and you never loved me….

perhaps that’s why im crying.

# data[].attributes.body
Through the glass the wandering eyes of my daydreaming mind found a man to fuel its entertainment. The lives of strangers and boredom go beautifully hand in hand, like a mother does to a child crossing the road when they haven’t learned to do it alone. He crossed the road alone, as men do. His shirt tucked in rested like a deflated balloon, lifeless but still there. The left breast-pocket was full, tense at the seams from the weight of all the miscellaneous objects it bore, seemingly having to give birth need he ever extract something. The right pocket was empty, as if no one had ever told him the other existed, but the material looked far more beautiful; the denim had a depth to its blue that could make you want to go ocean swimming or sky diving, or anything else in between our home’s ceiling and floor.

Not that he would do any of these things. His brow was so densely furrowed it seemed to present a shelf on which to place every one of his emotions, all of which came in seven different shades of beige, just like his trousers somehow inhabited all seven at once through an illustriously curated gallery of patchwork and maintenance embroidery. He pulled them up almost routinely as he stepped in the puddle before the main door, something which seemed hardly worth the effort given their state. As his boots made their first voyage in this building’s carpet, they completed the trilogy in their weight and state, resewn within an inch of their life.

But this patchwork man arrived at our destination in common and looked up at me, revealing his face from under the shadow it lived in. His beard consisted of a grey I had somehow never seen before in how it seemed to echo the blue on his shirt. His perfectly rounded fedora hid his eyes from me until then, but they made their way to mine, somewhat reluctantly through his deceptively small circular spectacles. I have always thought that people’s eyes accumulate the stories of their lives within them, held down right beneath the cornea - sometimes in an embrace and others in a straightjacket - or that eyes have their own concept time, and age with every tear. His eyes were blue, but a diluted, dirty palate of blue, like he had somehow left them in the black wash after a long day to see them emerge discoloured and sadly shrunken. His eyes were weary. In that one look I felt like I’d never feel pain like I used to again. Not in the most tragic sense, but his eyes told me the ache of his years and his still-lingering youthful fears like they were my own. For that brief eternity, I almost became him. Just for a second. I saw his past and my own future like they were two ends of the same candle, one burning the other waiting to be burned. I scanned his ticket and showed him “just up the stairs and screen 4 is on the right”. He walked on. I watched his hand re-enter his pocket like a bat to a cave, and clench like his shoulders did. My head felt a frenzy of memories that weren’t even mine, and feelings that had made their way into my mind in a single look: some a glossy transference, others an iron brand. I knew nothing about this man and yet I felt like I knew everything. I knew nothing about my future and yet now I felt I could see it. I still don’t know who this man is but I know now that I am not alone on this urban plane, a digital desert. Back then, in my transfixion, I had entirely forgotten to say the rest of the words that comprise my role in this working world. So I turned back to my post and smiled to myself, muttering my little incantation of pleasure and professional obligation. “Enjoy the film”.

The ache of his years, and

His youthful fears.

They honoured him.

Amen.

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pathetic fallacy is a bitch - mabel mundy

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pathetic fallacy is a bitch - mabel mundy

# data[].attributes.body
I was hoping that the storm might break today, but the sky stayed warm and grey and did nothing to reduce my desire to punch something.

Well, not something. Someone, specifically.

‘I told you that this was a bad idea,’ Jake said. He was sitting on one of the crates, his legs swinging.

I ignored him. If I looked in his direction too long –

There wasn’t a lot else to look at. The inside of the barn was almost empty, save the crates, a rotting bale of straw and some rusty equipment. I couldn’t punch any of that.

‘What are we gonna do now, huh?’ He was still going. ‘They aren’t gonna come back, we’re stuck here – ’

Breathe in and out. It was like when my brother started whining, I just had to tune it out. Jake was just frustrated. It had been a long day and nobody had ever taught him to keep his mouth shut when he didn’t have anything useful to say.

‘It’s fucking Lena,’ he said. I could see him out of the corner of my eye. His legs were still swinging. ‘If she hadn’t – ’

‘What?’ I snapped, my resolve splintering. ‘If she hadn’t what, Jake?’

He quieted down. ‘I didn’t mean – ’

‘I think you did mean.’ I was so sick of him and his need to be right. It was like talking to a fucking child.

‘All I’m saying is – ’

The storm hadn’t broken, but I didn’t need to wait for it in order to start a fight.

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Feedback for Wild Horses (christmas piece) 

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Feedback for Wild Horses (christmas piece) 

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I like the peaceful atmosphere you convey throughout compared to the sudden break at the end, and the wonder of the children. To me the narrator was the eldest, so I was wondering where William fits in? It would also have been nice to hear from the other, silent child, otherwise I'm not sure if they need to be there.

The dragon comparison works well to signify the horses' size in relation to the children. Perhaps think about how useful the second, kettle simile is? It depends whether you want multiple images to help readers imagine the horses, or one consistent one.

I love William's innocent question - for me that's a great example of show and not tell. You've managed to suggest his age and the unfamiliarity of the horses. There are a few instances where you tell, then show the reader details (for example, the narrator telling us they spoke confidently, then show it using the bee simile for their words.) As you edit, consider whether every line is necessary.

Overall I really enjoyed your snapshot of a Christmassy scene! The children's' equal wonder and fear is captured perfectly.