Fiction

It all started yesterday, with the burning.  Smoke rose in great plumes overhead as the men took to the fields with torches. They tied handkerchiefs over noses and lips; sweat rained down from their foreheads. Afterwards, they washed ash from their eyelashes and inside their ears. Sweetness and smoke filled their nostrils.  This, the great…

09:37. A late start. Water on his face, quick brush of his teeth, and he’s escaped the room. Walking down Old Compton Street to Charing Cross Road, through the entrance of Foyles. 

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.