On the last day of summer Jane remembers how to breathe. Breathe, her uncle had instructed. Remember to breathe, Jane. When Jane’s arms claw forward they don’t break water. Her fingers come back with red dirt clayed up under her nails. She rakes her way up out of her burial site and she takes a midnight […]
They hadn’t been naming the barn cats, now that Ainsley and Devon were old enough to know the difference between taking care of and caring for something. In the afternoons, when the school bus doors opened to release them, the children hurried through all the feeding and mucking and cracking and cutting, then closed up […]
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 […]
