He bought a pack of Rizlas and kept you waiting while he counted the change.You stood perfectly still to hold the moment open and tried not to care about how he stared at your tits. This was one of those nights where the world had endedand you hoped it would begin again with an empty…
The Forward Prizes are among the most prestigious awards open to both established and emerging poets in the UK. They’ve been running since 1992, and in that time winners have included poets such as Seamus Heaney, Simon Armitage, Kate Tempest and hundreds of others…
One of the last things we did in 2018 was send off our nominations for the Best Small Fictions anthology – an annual collection of the best short and hybrid fiction collated by Braddock Avenue Books. In past years a number of stories which which first appeared in Neon have have gone on to grace the pages of a BSF anthology, including Lydia Armstrong’s “The November We Are Fifteen” and Claire Joanne Huxham’s “Correspondence”…
[ Download Digital Edition | Print Edition SOLD OUT ] There are hundreds of ways for worlds to end. In this apocalypse-themed issue of Neon we explore just a few of them, from the collapse of Stanley Kubrick’s elaborate city within a film set, to a plague of uncontrollable floating. We move from the small…
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…
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…
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…
[ Download Digital Edition | Print Edition SOLD OUT ] In this issue we meet monsters and their mothers. A teenage girl contemplates the burgeoning horror of her family genes, while a werewolf – desperately lonely – struggles to make it in the big city. We visit the beach at night and examine the aftermath…
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…
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…