Dream, asks the billboard. Asks? This the 21st century. Dream! The billboard demands I dream. Without the billboard I have no dreams, without my dreams the billboard has no purpose. Bold and agitating, the billboard greets me at 3:30 pm each day when I leave Victoria station on the southbound train for Margate. Dream! What…
There’ll always be cakes in Miss Hawthorn’s shop window. Creamy round cakes topped with cherries and pink glazing that turns sweaty in the sun. Although the grime and the dust of the busy street, pounded by the crowd’s busy feet, dirties and stains the glass of Miss Hawthorn’s shop window, the cakes always look so…
misery confirmed Fren Burt is sitting across from me drinking a milk and vodka on the rocks. Too poor to afford coffee liqueur, too politically correct to order a ‘white’ Russian. There’s a wasp in my beer. Sunlight refracts through the glass onto its squirming body. Nobody saves a drowning wasp, do they? They will…
Alexei Stepanovich signed his name with a flourished S on the gilded, yellow note-pad. He was disgusted by his name and much preferred everyone to call him “Sue.” As such, every time he was forced to sign a notepad, an image of his own mild face or the bare breasts of a middle-aged woman, he always signed…
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…
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…
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,…
Seal Matches 