“How far down, missus?” The woman’s staring not at the hole in the wet ground, nor at the tall bearded man who’s asked her a question, but back at the house behind her. She’s half-turned, the top of her torso twisted almost impossibly, almost fluidly, in defiance of the strictures of the steel-stayed corset beneath […]
She was seven years old, and if only she hadn’t seen the sign then none of it would ever have happened. The grounds of the country house were vast, limitless-seeming. They had already been inside the house itself, had eaten lunch in the cafe, had explored both the lower and upper gardens, and had made […]
She’s not supposed to mix alcohol with her pills. Not supposed to drink at all, but how else can she fill the hollow? She misses cocaine and Valium, that chemical seesaw, the duo that blotted out the 90s and half the decade after. Those years after the show. After Tony stopped calling. She recalls 1983, […]
Excerpted from A Psychogeographer’s Guide to the British Isles, Vol. 1: London, by permission, &c. In the Church of St. Anselm & St. Cæcilia on Kingsway, near Holborn Station, there is a statue of St Peter with a golden foot. Place a pin in your maps: many statues have toes or noses or bronze balls […]
“I don’t understand,” she said, gazing discontentedly around the churchyard, “why we always want to hold on to everything, regardless. We don’t even let our dead go, for God’s sake.” I said nothing, I who had spent a long year trying to hold on to the living, and failing badly. I had an urn full […]
My mother could do it from the Rorschach of tea-leaves, or from the metropolitan map of your palm, or from knots tied on a piece of string. She’d do it from the tiny flecks of colour on the edges of your iris, clamping you between her work-roughened hands and craning her head back, narrowing her […]
Furioso, el mar brama desgarrando las velas del San Cristóbal. Reclama con rugidos de espuma, grita como una mujer parturienta, llora cual niño abandonado . . . Esas fueron las palabras que alcancé a reconocer entre los últimos balbuceos dementes de un mozuelo morisco quien, con los ojos desorbitados, se arrojó por la borda durante la tempestad que […]
(traducido por David Bowles) Cuando las paredes son delgadas, cada vecino es un criminal y un asesino. Las sirenas de policía aúllan todas las noches, entre las doce y las tres de la mañana. Esta cacofonía nocturna genera especulaciones. ¿A quién le irán a robar ahora? ¿A quién lo irán a matar? Cada noche, te […]
Qué dolor que el planeta entero acabe violentamente justo a las siete de la mañana cuando todo el mundo se ha despertado y sale a trabajar. Qué lástima que las noticias apenas logren hablar de la inquietud anunciada mundialmente por expertos y autoridades y casi nadie en la calle les haga caso y nadie entienda […]
(traducido por David Bowles) Enterramos a los primeros con formalidad y reverencia. Ahora suena tonto, pero ¿qué podíamos hacer? Después de todo aún eran nuestros hijos. Hasta vestí bonita a mi Sarah para la ocasión; le puse su mejor ropa dominguera, un vestido amarillo de algodón que brillaba contra el marrón oscuro de su piel, […]
