MIR Editor

My dearest Theo It has been several weeks now; how are you settled into your lodgings? I have been in correspondence with the van Stockum-Haanebeeks. They pass on their kind regards. It makes me glad to know they are thinking of me, but you are my preferred confidante. I have much to relate. Dark nights…

Coney Island, Brooklyn, New York. 1902. “I ain’t got rickets sir, no. Nor the pox.” “Yet,” he said, taking hold of my jaw in a hand that was cleaner than any I had yet seen in America, “show me your teeth.”

She smokes a rollie whilst blasting hot air up her jumper with a hairdryer. The smell of fresh paint lingers through the smoke. The pangs of pre-menstruation tighten.

I arrived in Quito in October 1968. Rolling Stone sent me to write an article on a growing counterculture of freaks and hippies travelling to South America to experience ayahuasca.

“Genghis Khan? Never heard of her.” – Diana Ross I When Genghis Khan died, they buried him in lowland shrub beside a river and then re-directed the river over his remains as per his wishes, so that he may lay undisturbed in the afterlife, if there was an afterlife; which he didn’t think there was.

Church is, I’m sorry to say, a mixed blessing.  I wish I could testify that it’s been all fellowship and edification, but in truth God’s people come with a steady stream of frustrated tears and angry words as well. 

Lauren thinks about this picture a lot. It’s hard not to; she sees it almost every Sunday. It’s framed on the wall in the Queens Head where her mum tends the bar, above a long-since-faded police appeal for information.

Your voice carries through walls, travels along pipes, pierces wallpaper, drips from taps. Your smell is a film that rubs off every surface I touch, no matter how much I scrub and clean.