Gareth Durasow grew up in Castleford, West Yorkshire. He has been a teacher, a tailor, a soldier, and a spy. As well as Neon, his short stories and poetry have been published by The Fiction Desk, Dead Ink, The Rialto, Shearsman, STORGY and Ad Hoc Fiction. His poetry collection Endless Running Games is available from…
Category: Magazine Content
The Audience May Want to Look Away
Ground floor flats mean easy access to the street. There is no lugging your shopping up flights of stairs, no lugging your bins down them. Large windows on ground floor flats let in a lot of light. You really feel in the middle of the action. Selling points. He didn’t mention that ground floor flats…
An Image Poem
Alan Bern, a retired Children’s Librarian, is a poet, storywriter, and photographer with three books of poetry: No no the saddest and Waterwalking in Berkeley from Fithian Press; greater distance published by his own press, Lines & Faces, a fine press specializing in illustrated poetry broadsides, collaborating with the artist Robert Woods, (linesandfaces.com). Alan has won prizes for his poems, stories, and photos…
Petrichor
That summer they added fluoride to the water. Our parents did not question that the commies who ran New York City wanted us to glow green in the dark. A decade earlier, our fathers had stopped the stain of evil spreading over the Pacific and Europe. They had no patience for the distinction between fluoride…
Huge Rat Comforts Himself With Lies
The rat engineered to grow to the size of a humanhas only two hours left to live. The laboratory has burnedto the ground. The rat suffered burn wounds, but theseburns will not be what kill him; it’s just that his physiologyis unsustainable when detached from specialized machinery.So he has stepped out of the burning building,…
Pretty Little Chestburster
face-hugged from the black then ditched like a flesh vessel, the worst of it now is wondering where you are. who you’re with. glowing on every grimy corner, I wear you so heavy it feels impossible you could be anywhere but curled beneath my ribs, preparing to pop. Stephen Ground is a multi-faceted writer and…
Social Science
“Social Science” was first published in Tuesday Magazine It is the early morning. A man, dressed in a suit, walks alone to the bus. He feels a pleasant and uplifting sense of solitude, but slowly becomes aware of a matched sense of desolation. He sighs, his feet feeling heavier than before. A researcher, hidden in…
Steam Dragons
They breed them in factories now, of course, hatch them in incubators in the rolling mills, and our young people would be shocked to ever come across one that could use its wings, or that was any bigger than, say, the house of a foundry manager or civil engineer along one of the tree-lined streets…
After the Wedding
On our first visit to the beach we could see something going on in the water, beyond the cliffs, buggering the view. Local divers and boaters had set up a kind of makeshift no-go zone. Ropes drooped from buoy to buoy in a wobbly oval, and there were small boats with winches and ropes and…
Thicket
You didn’t go in the thicket. We all knew that. – Dan Layton was the eldest of us, and when he turned 13 he, of course, knew better. We’d heard the stories and we’d seen our mothers out at midsummer, tying ribbons to the spiked branches. We’d looked out of high windows at midwinter when…