Most of the time, he was angry. Two decades - perhaps more if he dwelt on it for too long - he’d worked his way up to this. Research grant secured, carefully curated team on board. And now, he’d lost it all. Through no fault of his, either. perhaps it was his own biology laughing at him for trying to decipher it.
Read More“Write it.”
“I’m…trying…”
Your voice is hoarse and weak. You don’t remember when you last drank. Or ate. Or slept. But adrenaline propels your fingers against the keyboard. You suspect the sun has set, but you daren’t look up and check.
They will be waiting if you do.
“He isn’t going fast enough,” one of them whines, “I’m hungry!”
“We have waited too long. We must be released.”
“He will finish soon.” You feel her icy glare on the back of your neck, and suppress a shudder, “If he knows what is good for him.”
Read MoreIt awoke in the dark heavens between matter and non-existence. A fragile crust of ice on a pulsating metal sphere, hurtling through nothingness. It witnessed the death of light and the birth of galaxies, and felt indifferent to these acts.
I am alone.
Read MoreEven the sound of a microwave oven terrified him. This was why he had avoided microwave cooking for just over a week. All he had to eat in his house was a shoe cupboard full of boxed meals, all of which were, necessarily, microwaveable. How daunting the quantity in which they had accumulated, these microwaveable meals. He had to put one of them in the microwave, and eat it. His ribcage was showing. He was wan and thin, sickly in frame and stare.
Read MoreThey had been a happy family for many years. There was an uncle who lived in a dark cupboard: he didn’t wear clothes anymore and walked about on all fours. His eyes had turned inwards from not needing to see for so long, so when he looked at you there was no iris, only a lens of grey albumen. The only time he saw the sun was on his weekly walk to the playground, leashed: so he couldn’t attack the mothers.
Read MoreYou do not remember what life used to be like. Or rather, you remember it, but it is hazy now, as if you are seeing it through a curtain. Some mornings you wake up and think you can feel seafoam on your skin, waves pushing against your breast. Some mornings you wake up with a smile on your face, but it is not yours. It belongs to some past you, some other you. And you are not her.
Read MoreMessing with the machinations of mortals was fun, until it got you stuck with them in a stolen fishing boat in the middle of the Ionian Sea.
Read MoreHow many hyperactive, irresponsible boys did it take to mess up Rachel Garrett’s immaculate kitchen in five and a half hours? Jessica would say… two. The first being her eleven-year-old twin brother, and the second? Her forty-two year old uncle.
Read MoreHow peculiar your way of referring to death. As if death in itself was the unique boundary of life, the sole state in which life is life no longer. You could reference the quietude of a heart, the coldness of a body, the emptiness of a gaze, yet that only reminds me of the heaviness in my chest, the blackness of my dreams, the numbness of my mind. Aren’t these too manifestations of lifelessness? I lack a doctor’s expertise, but I feel confident when I say I have barely ever been alive.
Read More“Only the wounded truly understand the healing power of other people.” This is what I tell my daughter as I brush her hair back from her face. She had been crying in her sleep, hands clenched around the sheets in front of her chest as though she were scared her heart might be trying to leap from it.
Read MoreSometimes you look out the car window and see them – running alongside you.
You aren’t sure what they are exactly, these strange beings, but you only see them when you least expect it, when your guard is down and then they slip out from the shadows of the trees along the tarmac road and follow the car down the highway.
Read MoreIt was wet. Unformed. The oats swam apart in the milk, drowning piece by piece. They were small islands in a vast sea, bobbing up and down as they floated apart and then back together.
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