Our trailer in the woods was held up by trailing ivy that fed on the rust. It had a flat roof and slatted panes that trapped droplets of water between them when it got warm. Orange and brown chintz curtains swayed at the windows. The door was always open in the spring so that the…
Category: Magazine Content
The History of New Venice
1. Stanley Kubrick, old and mottled, wakes late at night, alone. He envisions a film about Venice, its beginning, its middle, its end. Compelled, he begins. * 2. The year is 2093 and the real Venice is gone. It is the Atlantis of that time. In April, Kubrick starts scripting. He plasters his study with…
Raw Vegetables on the Go
Previously published in The Golden Key We’d been in the kitchen a long time and the food was all gone. Burckhardt found me in the corner where I’d appropriated a chair and was defending it with my life. His lips were raw steak below blueberry eyes. “You always do this,” he told me. “Pretend you’re…
The Girls
There are three of them today, the blonde, the brunette and the new one – striped pink. Not that their hair has anything to do with the quickening of Gina’s pulse. So she tells herself, as she turns the corner from the bus stop and sees the girls loitering on her street. Gina doesn’t think…
Commerce
I was caught in the loops of a dream, walking through streets where paint flaked off the walls and buildings crumbledwith the memory of long monsoons. I entered a crowded bazaar. In my hands I held a shapeless parcel, battered,wrapped in dirty cloth. I could readLOVE on it in many languages. Each time carefully crossed…
This Blasted Horse
Shhyes, all of younosey parkerslurking behind trembling lacepottering in perms and dowdy dressesbutt outdon’t say itI don’t want to hear a word not a peepthing is, this blasted horse he doesn’t sleep and I’m not sure what he does when I sleepif I…maybe he squeezes into the lift, goes for a canter round the streets,…
Dead Drop
the phonebox stood at the edge of an abandoned trading estateand was easy to missI fumbled for coins in the darknessthe call was brief he spoke without accent he sounded tired contents fragilehandle with care it was a couple of hours before the message went out I watched from a café across the streetmy pager…
Daytime Television
First Program Spiders The talk show host invites the Naturalist onto his stage. The Naturalist looks as all Naturalists do: he is dressed in khaki shorts, a button-up white shirt, a pith helmet, brown leather boots. The exposed bits of his arms and legs are coated in a thick layer of hair, a little too…
Dream #14: The Egg
Previously published in Lungs. In my dream I boiled an eggto relive a childhood pleasure, to dip in – but there were so many otherchores to do in that moment. Packing my bags, dusting awaya matrix of web, and my kitchenhad stretched to a banquet hall – candle litand murky with my father’s antediluvian wares.So…
Five Stories in Which the Devil Appears
I A woman is walking to her car with a bag of groceries. Her young daughter is waiting inside the car. The woman has instilled in her daughter a powerful fear of strangers. The daughter thinks a strange man will try to kidnap her if he sees her sitting in the car alone, so she…