Waiting Like this life, the afterlife is unfair. A woman dies at twenty-nine and leaves her infant daughter behind. Eight years later she is still trapped on the other side. When I’m in my happiest frame of mind, I imagine Veronica searching for my darkroom each time I turn on the blood-red light. In my […]
Water—there’s water everywhere, water covering my feet, my knees, my hips. Water, foam, salt, sand in my mouth, waves crashing against this iron cage, pulling both it and me towards the depths. Once, I looked at the sea for comfort, to shelter my loneliness from your anger, but you took that away from me, like […]
“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 […]
