Latest Features
Hell
In the morning, sore and coffeeless, the light pale and cold, Theresa got us lost on the way back to her car and we found ourselves in an area that didn’t seem park-like at all, but rather hostile, alien, the landscape erupting in sharp, slate outcroppings like the scales of some enormous buried dragon.
We got so turned around, do you remember?
It was like it always is when you’re lost, a bit funny at first—the camaraderie of it all—and then not so funny.
By Nicholas Rombes.
Hypnotic Control
As a theatrical hypnotist, John-Ivan Palmer will make you crow like a rooster and chug like a wash machine. He will suspend a lady by her nape and Achilles tendons between two folding chairs and sledge-hammer a cinder brick on her tummy until her navel fills with grit. Simultaneously, with the other hand, he memorizes a complete issue of TIME Magazine at a glance, and is quizzed on specific pages by awestruck folks in the audience.
By Tom Bradley.
47 Sanford Road
I chose Sandford because of a photograph I once had. In it, I’m standing outside number 47 with a bottle of beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other; my attention has been taken by something out-of-shot and I’m looking to one side, at a cabbage white butterfly perhaps or neighbour sitting on her doorstep. I’m impossibly young, louche, invincible; I have the look of someone who has just struck an exclusive deal with the world that has left them impervious to the buffeting vicissitudes of life. I hadn’t seen the photo in years but that wasn’t the point: I’ll always remember it, just as I’ll always remember tying my partner to the futon in the red-bulbed attic at the top of 47’s narrow stairs or freewheeling past the mosque as we rode to feed the geese by the goose-shitty bandstand in the park; just as I’ll always remember buying handfuls of fruit and veg from the market on a Saturday morning – once we mashed a bowl of blackening avocados and had it on buttered toast – or visiting friends on afternoons that stretched round the earth like sun-warmed light or love.
By Charlie Hill.
another loss against the horns
and what is a queue for the pumps—flashy, pattern motos with missing handle-grips, side-panels scratched, in colors that don’t match, loose exhausts bobbing and ticking in the heat—clogs the gas station and spills out down the road—more pothole than road—of plastic bottles crushed into black mud, hard-packed under more plastic, more mud, more plastic, more mud, more plastic—autumn leaves on a forest floor, only autumn never comes down this far: it’s every rainfall, every flash flood—the fresh forest soil long ago swept away, this is the pungency of stagnant sewage-infused black mud on which women sell coal, closed bananas, breadfruit, kowosol, watermelon and lettuce leaves…
A short story by Roy Duffield.
Déraciné
At the Holiday Inn café, having not had breakfast, he ordered steak and fries for a late lunch. It was difficult to cut the meat into bite-sized pieces with a knife, and even with the addition of salt and pepper it was flavourless and could not be fully chewed up. He poured it down his throat with the wine. It was like eating the sole of a leather shoe. Indeed, the leather soles of his wingtip shoes had been damaged by moisture. The rain never stopped falling. He was trapped by fickle weather. The droplets trickled down outside the window. The last sip of wine flowed into his stomach. The only meal of the day he had during his hotel stay. Monotonous routine like the very pulp fiction he was tired of reading.
A short story by hiromi suzuki.
Wellness
Here in Norwich the Plague has passed yet Grace says many are still unwell. This may be due to their children. They name them William and Richard and Alice and Agnes. Grace tells me the parents say to each child every night sleep well and the children sleep well but the parents are not well as far as she can tell. And me?
When I was but a girl the Plague caught me and would not let go.
My parents bless them fed me broth. They tried watermelon and kale and activated charcoal as well but alas the Plague bubbled and boiled in me and would not let go. Then my parents bless them lost all hope and laid my broken body on the wagon that takes away the unwell to rest forever in a dark distant crypt. Farewell they cried farewell.
A short story by D.J. Huppatz.
I am my father’s daughter
I was one with the cold / Moscow imparted, an import
from the old Soviet days / A mixture of mud & snow
on my western-brand boots, / as deep as my animus
after all these human years / loneliness inexpressible
since we left without him…
A short story by Stella Fridman Hayes.
I Would Like a Moustache
I would like a moustache, so I decided to perform a citizen’s arrest on the newly-appointed Secretary of State for Business and Trade. Like me, the newly-appointed Secretary of State for Business and Trade did not sleep altogether soundly. Sleeping was not one of his core skills, meaning he often went for long ruminative walks along the river at night, streets all slippery and bare, reduced threat of assassination/name-calling. I read about this on the Global Network of Interconnected Computers, Servers and Smart Appliances (also known as the Internet), the Secretary of State for Business and Trade’s sub-prime sleeping habits.
A short story by Niall Kaye.
Eggs
About a month ago, my father’s aunt Sylvia told me about our way-back-when ancestor who was supposedly displaced Russian royalty. Old Vlad was shy around cattle and preachers and liked to drunkenly poeticize about the Fatherland. I couldn’t remember a time when Sylvia didn’t have a rattling glass of vodka in her hand, and when she told me that story she leaned in close, her breath reeking, and said, “That’s why I am the way I am. You can’t stop blood, can you, Muriel?”
A short story by Alicia Bones.
A Surrealism of Pure Endurance
Carrington’s animals shift, transmute, and exit human epistemologies. Vik Shirley’s deer cannot. Instead, they persist—not because they expect to change anything, but because stopping would mean total submission. This is surrealism after rupture—after escape has been foreclosed, where the only remaining act is to endure. How we bring our despair through itself into an energy that acknowledges and transforms without self-deception—this is what Shirley’s deer gesture toward; however futile their efforts may seem.
Stephen Sunderland reviews Some Deer by Vik Shirley.
Killing the Universal Man: An Interview with Thomas Kendall
It’s like mixing a record. What are you going to foreground, what is going to sit so low in the mix that it acts subliminally? What I’m looking for in writing is language that’s concerned with what is inexpressible, which is a language moulded by pressing itself against the ineffable… I have a dream about writing a very quiet novel, one that mixes Blanchot with Marilyn Robinson or something. Maybe that will be my ‘domestic’ novel.
Thomas Kendall interviewed by Chris Kelso.
Who’s To Say?: Life and Form in Life of M
What Do We Really Know of Birds and Men?
