No one thought too highly of the Ma’dān, and as Owens didn’t think too highly of himself either he chose to stay amongst them after the war. Physically, they weren’t all that different from an Englishman. They had darker skin, of course, and darker hair they kept hidden beneath a keffiyeh or headcloth, but otherwise […]
This sugar mill belonged to my family. That sentence kept ringing inside my head the entire day. I couldn’t stop thinking of the little white girl with little pale lips, pointing her finger, thin like chicken bones, to the other side of the street, the abandoned mansion in the large plot of land overtaken by […]
In the Church of Guinmarie’s Mercy, which sits upon a hill in the tiny town of Jago’s Rise overlooking the sea, there lies a bejewelled saint. She’s attended by nuns of various vintages; not a man will go near her for the last who did—none can say when, only that it did happen—dropped dead whilst […]
After the crash, she stumbled out into the dark. She had the thought, even then, that she shouldn’t be moving. Something about neck injuries after a crash. Something she had learned in school or seen in a movie or both or neither. But the car felt like it was crushing her. Suffocating her. Like it […]
“This is it,” Lily said. It was just a smear of green on a lonely hill, an old cemetery in the middle of nowhere Bulgaria. Gravestones leaned like bad teeth, the names and dates long eroded. It was our ninth graveyard in three months and I knew it wouldn’t be the last. Because the last […]
Aries: There is always an end to a ball of yarn, no matter how infinite the thread might seem. Don’t worry if the bindoffs look ugly. In sewing, the inside is always entrails. The daily horoscope has amber-colored stains where the newspaper met the humidity of dead skin. You stare at the blurry letters, thinking […]
The bombs had stopped falling. That was the first thing that struck Alice when the train pulled away, its smoke and roar fading into the distance, and she looked out across nothing but green for miles around. The silence crept into her, like long fingers snaking down her throat, and she felt she no longer […]
All that remained of Chana came back from Kraków in a little wooden box: a golden chain with a pendant, a palm facing out with a carved unblinking eye to protect from evil. Chana’s death lived on the mantle in the main room of the house, where it would gather dust if Rochel didn’t clean […]
The monitor only allowed one-way communication, so although Danni could listen to her child if she needed to, she could not respond, like a one-way mirror, she thought, in a police interrogation room, but then the baby couldn’t respond anyway, not yet, and her brother had given her the device. It was the first, she […]
You and Bromwick set the town afire. Crumbled dwellings backdropped to curtains of smoke. Because you were sick. Are sick. Because—you can’t remember why you did it. You remember The Fire, but dissociatively, like a nightmare. Like you and your brother weren’t really there. Out of bed, out in the road, after curfew. Dirt caked […]
