Buzzwords

I Run By Kate Armstrong.   In these days I do not go to bed. I do not expect to rest. Instead when night comes I roll myself up in a blanket on the sofa, still in day-clothes, and I count the ambulance sirens in and out of the hospital which has always been at the end of the road and which now feels particularly close. Like so much in this new world my sleep is a makeshift activity. I merely doss down for a while, quiet but still alert, ready to move into action if there’s a need. I

Parisians Are So French By Gerard Feehily.   In the first days of the confinement of Paris, there was paper everywhere. Torn documents, flyers, scraps of catalogues and magazines scuttled along the footpaths in the mid March winds. And then there were crows. Oily black, with that bouncing confident lope to them. I saw them on rooftops, they were perched on bins. They hopped onto car bonnets, stood at the doors of caf és. Delighted with themselves, black triumph.  They’re usually rare in Paris, but overnight they had invested the city, running the pigeons and sparrows off their patches. They’d

Dream in Daggers By Sylvia Warren. I had been expecting it. I had been half-pinned to the news during the day, fluttering between horror and practical worries; at night in my worse dreams I imagined having to place the ”  in front of my authors’ names to indicate that they had died, until the preliminary pages looked like a graveyard. My authors are doctors and nurses. If a second author on a chapter dies do you put a diesis? And the morning after the lockdown order came the boiler broke. It started with a drip that wouldn’t stop, off-time with

Temporary Filling By Katy Mahood. Day six of isolation. Today, I replaced my husband’s filling. Lucky for us, my dad had some old packs of dental filler from before his retirement. He offered to guide proceedings via video call, but by the time we’d hustled the kids upstairs it was gone nine o’clock, so Matt and I threw caution to the wind and went all out on the kitchen table. In that exciting new domain of marital intimacy I peered at the black-edged decay in his mouth. ‘Don’t worry,’ I told him as I pushed a ball of mint-flavoured putty

The Man Who Shook Hands with Everyone; A Myth From the Future By Ed Luker. The year is 2183. A child sits reading from their pad, breathing through an oxygen mask. Through the window is a barren planet. The child raises its eyes from the pad and turns to its carer: ‘What’s handshaking mum?’ The mother responds, irritably: ‘It’s an old human custom where people said hello by holding each other’s hands and shaking them.’ ‘Why don’t people do that anymore?’ the child inquires. ‘Well, once upon a time there was a man. He was the most powerful man in

The Magic of Closeness By Will Ashon. I’m not entirely sure what I’m supposed to be doing here, or saying, or why, but I’m pretty certain it’s not meant to be a begging letter. That’s how these things work, isn’t it? That I give you something, even if it’s only yet another report of the trials and tribulations of lockdown, which you search through as if looking for a fortune in tea leaves, in the hope that something connects or means something: a flash of recognition, some emphatic nodding, a stifled snort of laughter, that sort of thing. I’m not

An Apocalypse of Hugs By David Nutt. Now, an alarming amount of hugging happens in our house. Wife hugs dog. Husband hugs dog. Wife hugs husband. Husband hugs wife, etc. The two cats watch this cuddlement warily and scrabble for the nearest exit. I — the husband — adore my wife and our cozy menagerie, soft-furred and eminently huggable, clawing deep trenches into the hardwood. I’m just not sure we need our guts squeezed halfway up our esophagus every time somebody decides to shift position on the couch. Some nights, I wake to find my wife half-rolled off the bed,

You Were Always Waiting By Linda Mannheim. One You were always waiting for the bomb to drop, the floor to fall, the world to stop. You know that now: you were always waiting. You were always immersed in accounts of past collapses: weapons in the air, uniforms on the street, borders shut. And that meant you were always waiting. You were always travelling to places where the infrastructure was gone, the roads too rutted to ride down, the wild growth enveloping shattered skeletons of office buildings. So you were always waiting. You expected unpopulated streets, traffic lights without a purpose,

How to Explain ‘Psychokiller’ to a Dog By Nicholas Blincoe (and Fredo). Nicholas Blincoe lockdown-dances every day here! @NicholasBlincoe

Someone Great By James Cook.     Every morning as I take my twenty-minute, state-sanctioned exercise in the recreation ground opposite my south west London flat, I find myself repeating an ominous phrase: the worst is all the lovely weather. It’s the first line of LCD Soundsystem’s 2007 single, ‘Someone Great’. The ‘someone’ in the song has ‘gone’; we’re not sure where, or if the situation being described is a break-up or a bereavement, but as the tune unfolds, through hints in the lyrics, we become uncomfortably aware it might be the latter. Of course, it could be a temporary

Disinfecting the Disinfectant. By Ashton Politanoff. Day For breakfast, I pour the remainder of almond cluster cereal into a bowl. I use a soup spoon and measure out from the near empty yogurt pint. I slice the unrotted half of a banana, mix it all together. For lunch, I pan fry a piece of salami in vegan butter. I pull a frozen loaf of bread out of the freezer and toast a slice while I cook an egg. With two spatulas I flip over the egg and add a square of sharp cheddar on the cooked side. When the cheese

What a Way to Run a Railroad By Stewart Home.   Although lockdown in the UK officially began at 10pm on 23 March 2020, for me it started a month before. I was supposed to be giving some lectures in Hong Kong but they were postponed until 2021 due to the coronavirus outbreak in China. So although my ticket was booked, in the end I didn’t fly to Chek Lap Kok International Airport on 23 February or return from there to Heathrow in the middle of March. Moving on, I first fully experienced the hyperreal strangeness of our world turned