3:AM Magazine

So different from the ugly squawking and unimaginably bright colours of the birds back in Africa, I feed them with scraps, seeds and stale chunks of bread like an infamous Sunday Mail rodent lady. Once the pigeons and scavenging seagulls have fought and shrieked and taken their pickings the smaller birds arrive onto my windowsill, poised and pretty, still-framed on the edge of time. I watch and wait for one more Spring when the first migrating swallow with its long tail feathers will arrive from the East and dart across the sky like a small boy’s perfect paper plane gliding on a gust of wind.

By Alan McCormick.

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Bronson knew the answer, had known it since he first received his instructions: he was being sent to the wall not to repair it, but to destroy it. The age of symbols was over. They weren’t real enough, and what wasn’t real no longer existed. Representation itself, of what use was it other than to obscure the real? The wall, at one time, had been a symbol of something, but what? This ambiguity was precisely what had saved the wall from destruction. As long as its meaning was unclear, the Empire could care less whether it existed or not. But once the wall again began to assume the shape of meaning and assert itself as something, it posed a threat. Reattached to a referent, the “wall” spiraled out of the tight, pressure-locked linguistic controls of the Empire. Meaning begat meaning.

The fourth instalment of a six part story by Nicholas Rombes.

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In the sky it seemed that modern jazz riffed the location of American style jeans to youth wanting to be cool. Mr Angel was not permitted to hear the piano, wind instruments or hissing drums. He had bought the jeans because during the school half term his son had come with him to the wholesaler’s cigar smoke-filled cave under the arches of Liverpool Street station. The same reflective London sky had shone on the substantial aesthetic of pigeon-hued masonry and the new insubstantial aesthetic which used the elliptical parabola of a flying saucer and the structure of an atom. The boy was undistinguished except that the irises of his eyes resembled cut and polished stones of turquoise.

By Laura Del-Rivo.

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The lack of objects on the horizon intrigued and then spooked Bronson, who recalled the plane of immanence from his useless theory-training, the horizontal moment of thought and all that. He understood that in order to repair the wall he would have to destroy it, tear it down to the foundation. That was prerequisite for the emergence of any new System. He would need to get to the root of the infection. In this phase of the Empire’s long collapse, to be an engineer, as he was, meant to be a destroyer, not a designer, of objects.

The third instalment of a six part story by Nicholas Rombes.

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The summer she is fifteen, Laure smokes her first joint with Johnny, who is on the swim team with her. Nothing happens except that she doesn’t get high and tries to pretend that she did while secretly wishing they weren’t sitting in scratchy brown grass that is giving her red welts all over her legs. She plays it cool while Johnny puts his tongue in her mouth and his hand inside her shirt, trying to enjoy the importance of her first kiss — but when she gets home she is shivering, brushes her teeth three times and runs a hot bath, staying in until the water runs cold and her mother sticks her head in the bathroom door, saying, “I thought maybe you’d drowned!”

By Anna McCormally.

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This is not a post-apocalyptic tale, a tale of what happens after the end of the world. The theorist in Bronson understood this, about the story he was in, understood that the end of the world was really a reactionary fantasy, the dream of thin-blooded tyrants, spun into popular narrative by writers and artists and movie makers. The landscape around him—the broken roads and disfigured buildings and polluted rivers—was not some dystopian fantasy of the slate-wiped-clean, but something far more dangerous: things as they are.

The second instalment of a six part story by Nicholas Rombes.

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Give her the look, he thinks: the look. Women like the look, initially, because it is an attempt at illustrating power, whereas it admits of no power, or, rather, another power, one of gentle subtlety and of beauty: their own.

He first constructs this sentence in his mind, using words he has learned over the duration of his short life to give some logic to his experience. Satisfied, he then lifts up his pencil and then he opens his notebook, and he writes the sentence down. He takes his time while writing, careful to replicate the thought exactly as he first thought it. He is aware of some necessity for it to be remembered exactly as it was first constructed in his mind.

Then, finished, he puts his pen down, and he looks up and he looks at her.

By Alan Cunningham.

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Bronson had been assigned to repair a remote part of the wall, in an obscure area of the Empire. The notice had come, like it always did, in the curiously old-fashioned form of a note in a sealed envelope beneath his door. It was there in the morning, a simple folded slip of paper in the envelope with the coordinates, a time-line, an all-zones passport, a contact number, the familiar list of instructions, and a credit card. If this sounds mysterious and romantic, the stuff of spy novels, then consider that Bronson was a mere field engineer, a repairer of structures, part laborer, part designer, part theorist.

The first instalment of a six part story by Nicholas Rombes.

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Three weeks later when the cops burst through my door, yeah, I admit, I had my regrets. But during the riots I didn’t think about being pulled, and I didn’t care either. You’re living for the moment, not giving a fuck. I still can’t believe it kicked off like that. It was like a chemical reaction, all these ingredients got together then boom, we were running the show. All along Tottenham High Road, cars, buses, buildings on fire, the feds cowering behind their shields. Down the backstreets things were just as lethal. Smaller groupings roaming in the shadows, ambush tactics, guerrilla warfare. I saw this TV crew get beaten to shit, all their gear nicked, every last piece of it.

By Michael Keenaghan.

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She is sitting down on the wet street, leaning her head back against the north building wall that makes up the narrow alleyway while her hand remains stuffed in the leather purse that displays a large bullet hole out its side, widowing the bags contents and allowing the dim alley light to illuminate her dead hand still clenched around a nickel-plated revolver. Blood pours from the multiple stab wounds and a massive slash across her throat, giving the woman’s blouse no proof that it was ever white. The man’s face contorts as the fatal gunshot leaks his life’s flow, rivering between his fingers and onto the concrete. He leans his head against the rusty dumpster that was supposed to camouflage his deed, yet now serves as the steel pillow that will deliver him away.

By Wendy Ashlee Coleman.

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