She sits by the smouldering tarp, kicking a rock with her dusty boot. Cinder and coals smolder perpetually. The sun is stingingly bright. You can taste the heat. She used to go down to the sea, to cool off, to bathe, to feel weightless. She’d go at night with her cousin, Zadi. When the sea
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Triangles and Other Geometries
After maybe thirty hours of phone conversations I finally asked him if he was gay. I don’t usually have to ask, either I know or it doesn’t concern me. But this was a man who staged his selfies in historical fashion: Milan in the 70’s, New Orleans in the 30’s, you get the picture. Are
Of Clay and Wattles Made
A great many years ago – or maybe not so long ago – I’ll leave it to you to determine – it was decided, quite against my will, that I would take the Number Fourteen bus to school. The bus was a great beast of a thing. It rattled deafeningly as it struggled over mud-covered
The Last Forest
Except for the light breeze everything is different from all she had ever known. The temperature, the humidity, that she cannot see the horizon, the colors and the way the light dances over the ground. She has never smelled anything like this before, but it is not unpleasant. It comes closest to a combination of heavy wet mud and the youngest grasses. Behind her she could still have seen the familiar blue sky, green water and yellow sand through the trees, in case she had looked back.
The Solar Elegy
The year is 1743. Daniella Caracosa smelled piss, rat shit, and some fine perfume throughout her quarters aboard the Mindful Miscreant. She swayed from side to side on the bed, contemplating how she emerged here, in this place, instead of in Cordoba. She was to be royalty! She imagined the regal weddings, the ballrooms, the dresses! It was all she could have wanted. But now, her husband-to-be has placed a bounty on her head-
The Ice
We were born in darkness and hunger, and that was all we ever knew. My brother said we were like axes lodged in stone, impotent objects frozen in unknown space. Silence overwhelms us. Wind is a silent phantom, ice a silent beast. Sometimes it crackles with anxiety, sometimes it groans with hunger. Sometimes it terrifies me.
I Sound Like It
Again, the phonograph replays the record. The very first motion of the driver’s ferrite, pointy reader-head clicked heavily on the periphery of the disk causing the first friction on the shellac surface and sounding like a glitchy fuzz, whose prosaic particles started moving, vibrating randomly in the space generating broken waves without any predictable order.