Anger cloaked him. Draped in folds. You could see it. Smell it. Hear air quivering. Like hornets. Like cymbals. Terrifying. Sensual. On the day the world ended Ike Steel scoffed from his penthouse. Glaring down. Like God. As chaos consumed streets. He was still. But for the ever-trembling rage. Scotch in hand. Despising it all….
Category: Fiction
Spume Law
Whole street’s screaming drunk for the duration of the weekend. Taking it in turns to vomit outside the pub. Kids smash empties on the road. There is an air of abandon here. Across the tracks the trash spills like lava down the embankment. The train rumbles by and hardly anyone glances out the carriage. They…
Baby Talk
They look up and gurgle and coo. They are plump and wide-eyed and smiley. They stare at the bubbles that float by. They are hypnotised by the mobile that plays the Brahms Lullaby. They sleep deeply, dreaming of . . . what? The struggle to get here? The months trapped in the warm liquid? The…
Steel Lattice in a High Voltage Place
There’s a place I stand in the woods with tree-lined eyes. I stand there sometimes below several high steel bodies. Electrical towers humming–six arms and long cords attaching like long thin sperm poised to eat each other’s ends. The towers need these bonds. It’s their kissing and talking. When humans want to communicate they just…
Sweeten
Almost sternly, disapprovingly he was saying it’s so important to vote, you really owe it to all the women who struggled so that you could, you owe it to yourself. And although she didn’t want to shatter this little world they’d created, this fort with walls of misspelled menus, this moat of black coffee, there…
Five Imaginary Babes
In time I’ve had five babies. The first one was boneless and meatless; it was a puggish fold of skin, and I would throw it on the ground in disgust where it would puddle up and gurgle little flatulent gusps that were almost cute but stank like dank pot. Within a few days, having accidently…
From Ribs Come Tales
A story begins at the point where two characters meet. If I put Adam in a garden by himself we don’t have a tale. Adam stares into space drumming his fingers. He doesn’t even think about anything because he has nothing interesting to think about. Now if I put Adam into a garden with Eve…
Diagram of a Life
There’s something about a man led around by his dick. The arrested, slop-licking gaze, the ever-attentiveness, dick forward–my father is such a man. Maybe that’s why I can spot them, men and women leashed to some kind of compulsion, drinking, say, or eating, or even health. Give me five minutes and I’ll give you your…
The Axeman
At night, the Axeman comes. He enters her apartment silently, and stands over her bed, watching her sleep. He listens to her snores, her whimpers and her sighs. When she gets up in the middle of the night to pee, he follows behind her and from the darkened hallway watches as she pulls her lacy…
The Derelict
From under the bridge she watched the patrol boat scud upstream, leaving on the river a long scar. She loathed these boats, sly in the water and always talking, loud-speakers squawking. She gathered spit and slugged it into the mud. It sat on top of the scummy layer of ice, glistening. Winter was a fist…