I’ve run to the romantic city. The sinking city. Years before she’d asked me if we we could go, together, and now I’m here, alone. The waterways are green-blue and the yellow-fronted houses are crumbling. Henry James wrote of the empty palaces, I’m here to write of the emptiness of the whole adventure. On the…
At the end of the each month we round up the girls and slaughter them. They’re not really girls. You’ve got to be careful using such absolutist language. These are our jiggling jigglers. They jiggle for you, they jiggle for me, for us. People are easily offended, especially when we tell them that we…
I wrote a novella first, which was 20,000 words long. You can read the entire thing on my blog. It’s an idea that I want to expand one day. More importantly, it was the idea and the execution that lead me to believe that I was capable of writing something that was long and still…
There’s something in the hazy details of the buildings in Budapest that made me think I was walking into a film-set. Nothing looked quite real. Mostly because I’d never seen such consistently beautiful architecture, street after street.
Open up your gut, says the doctor. I peel it open with my bare hands, my fingers right through the skin. It’s like putty, really mushy. Open, open, my belly opens like a mouth, a toothless mouth. Did you ever make Plasticine animals when you were younger? I didn’t. I watched someone else. My stomach…
You’re just a blur, a smudge. Something that used to be. Faded wallpaper between cracked plaster. It’s green wallpaper and sometimes I see your face in it. I see your face in everything. When I dream, I dream about your shape, your figure. You are indiscernible. You are just a shape. There’s no definition, I…
Forgive the blue skies for giving you the impression that it was a warm day whilst I took pictures of Matthias Church in the Buda Castle district, because during my entire stay in Budapest the weather hung around the -1 or -2 mark in the evenings, with barmy highs of 4 degrees during the day.…
You could hear her crying, all through the night, if you passed over the bridge on the way out of the village, past the old chapel. Wailing she was. Like a ghoul. We tried to get through to her, but she was whispering to herself, talking to the walls, sat on a rotting pew, in…
I take the last steps two at a time and grab her in a bear hug. She feels so frail. So small. Delicate like the thin graphite of a pencil, or a budding corn stalk. “What’s wrong?” she asks. She asks so normally. I forget where we are. She smells very rich, like double cream,…
Inside the house the air is very still. The staircase has a worn carpet on the steps. It’s almost like I’ve stepped into a museum. I expect a group of school children to come round the corner, looking bored, and rightly so: the house is empty. The layout is like Grandma’s, but there are no…
