I bite my tongue as the psychiatrist interviews Mr Lemming in the psychiatric ED status post suicide attempt number one: the sole survivor of his cult’s alleged mass suicide. He notes Mr Lemming’s family history, asks about recurring feelings of sadness or emptiness, psychiatric medication. Whom he lives with. What he does for a living. How much he drinks….
Category: Magazine Content
Projectile Sounds
That year, I learned about the Doppler effect in physics class. What makes the noise of a speeding car seem a pitch lower after it’s sped by you. It was fall. My pimples were mostly gone but I was still fainting. I had not yet learned how to take the new refrigerator for granted–the choice…
Grief Triptych
In memory of Matt Kinnison Unnamed, unknown I am telling an unnamed, unknown someone, that I dreamt Ed was still alive. But I am telling the unnamed, unknown person this in a dream. Even as I sleep, I know that it’s complicated. I see Ed twisting in pain on the floor. Thin as a greyhound,…
Chairman Mao, in Retirement
To fill the day Chairman Mao goes on long walks. He buys a gold-tipped cane from a vendor stand, walks leaning heavily on it. He kicks at errant pieces of gravel, imagining the stones are the stars of the universe. He reads The Collected Works of Charles Dickens till he falls asleep in the study…
Maintenance
Rented one of those little one-bedroom apartments that make you wonder whether your luck will ever change. You know the type. Wake up the first morning and you’re lying in bed, running your fingernails across the wall. You do this every morning, thinking about what went wrong and whether your ex-boyfriend really loves you as…
Ike Takes a Holiday
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….
An Hour, Maybe Two
It’s coming, hurting things along the way. It throttled Mrs Lanford’s self-esteem,and left her lodger, Nigel, with tortured thoughts.Mr Kumar’s dreams suddenly turned sourand he closed his shop. Rumour is he’s torched it but I’m too afraid to look. My next door neighbour, Sharon, killed her cat;my own stays out of reach. They warned us,…
I Knew by the Shapes of the Trees
I knew by the shapes of the trees we were almost home. I wasn’t sleeping. We had reached the spot where the trees changed and I heard them say I was sleeping. Flying and falling were my only dreams then and they just repeated but in different ways. One day it would all make sense….
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…