3:AM Brasil: The Silent Lilly
So sick Daura had become, demanding me to keep in silence for all these years. She used to bite my body parts, my tongue and she always came to me with a different thing to open me up. Some days she put her fingers inside of me. Other days she came with some kind of sharpened object which I imagined it was a knife or a comb. She really cut me. Some days I bled like a soldier forgotten in the battle field. Some days I felt pleasure. Some days I felt hatred and mostly, I felt dead.
By LetÃcia Palmeira.
‘Even if the bad guy loses’
Rick Parker did anything and everything to get ahead. He lied, stole, cheated, threatened, attacked and swindled his way across America. He fixed fights and swindled his friends, fighters, the public and members of his own family. And when Tim Anderson finally killed him, Parker’s own sister, to the chagrin of their wider family, said that it had only been a matter of time before someone had done it, expressing surprise only in that had been nice guy Tim who had done it.
Pete Carvill on Jon Hotten‘s boxing true crime tale The Years of the Locust.
‘No ordinary man could be so stupid’
George Monbiot gave the best objection to contemporary conspiracy theories: they form a nonsensical distraction from actual harm carried out by governments and corporations. The ID card programme, nuclear weapons, Western complicity in torture – surely, there are enough real monsters to fight out there without inventing imaginary ones. Think about it: while you’re chasing UFOs, giant lizards and the Lindbergh baby, the real crime is still going on.
Max Dunbar on David Aaronovitch’s Voodoo Histories.
The Elect
There are some hundreds of us. One of us, we are mostly men, said: Surely we came in twos from our hometowns, from our home states, and there can’t be more than one hundred of us? But the rest of us talked over him, talked him down. Even the oldest and woolliest among us can see that there are more than a hundred of us. Although it is hard with all this furniture, these wires and this weather to come together and count up or count off. We only come together in a crisis. We can’t decide if this is a crisis. And some of us, who rarely turned up before, never turn up now.
By Gavin Grant.