Waiting: Dartmouth Park Hill, Spring 2009 [see more…]
Aug 302013
Jul 032013
by Sno Flo
Rugged men with frost-nibbled beards were hugging pints and staring at us as if we were quarry shipped in from the Far East to replace local female stock escaped to parts less chilly and depressing, like Kingston. I ordered two rum and cokes, and asked myself the question every speed dater sporting two X chromosomes must: why were we bothering to pay fifteen smackers to meet men when there were so many free ones lying about? [read more…]
Jun 262013
Let’s All Meet Up In The Year 2000 by Rachel Stevenson
He plays Smokey Robinson and The Shirelles and Dressy Bessy and I lie on the sofa bed in the living room and have paracetamol and chocolate biscuits for my breakfast, until he starts to indicate that he wants me to leave. I walk down on my own in the rain to Notting Hill, feeling ill and sorry for myself. The sky is the colour of a dirty duvet and the trees are broken umbrellas that don’t keep the drizzle off. [read more…]
Jun 242013
At Bow Church DLR, the bride boards, cream heels delicately minding the gap. Her right hand grips a posy, her left curls itself around a handrail, silver ring glittering.
May 242013
by Matt Haynes
Although obviously the stupid machine couldn’t actually see her. Probably a good thing too: right now, she must look every one of her eighteen-plus-forty-odd years. Such an awful day. All the financial stuff… she’d just never taken an interest. Never had to. And now here was this… this computer telling her she couldn’t buy a small bottle of red wine without “approval”. She hadn’t known they made them so small, not till she’d seen the display. [read more…]
May 012013
by Natasha Green
I saw Maggie slip a compact out of her bag and smooth her hair in the mirror, tucking a lock of it behind one ear. She smiled and waved at me. Gone was the curly-haired maelstrom, with eyes circled in crumbling kohl and hands tipped with chipped silver nail polish; the Maggie of early-morning telephone calls full of grotesque imitations of spurned lovers abandoned in the night, calls that left me laughing and gasping for air on the other end of the line. [read more…]
Apr 062013
Oblivious to lunchtime crowds, he strides towards Holborn Circus – sharp suit flashing in the Hatton Garden windows, mobile clenched tight – shouting: “You’re the one who told me you loved me…”
Apr 012013
by Jack Pandemian
School nights have no meaning until September so we roam, my friend and I, within the boundaries of our Zones 4-5 school bus passes. Brixton is too far, Zone 2. Camden is unimaginable. But out here there is a club above a pub where every Saturday the walls run with snakebite sweat, and where the carpet sucks lecherously at your boots as you lift one foot and then the other to the jangling sound of L7. [read more…]
Feb 142013
by Howard Colyer
Eleanore feared that she would be buried alive, she feared that she would be stuck in some chamber underground or under the sea; mines and submarines troubled her, though she had entered them only in her imagination: but she had a vivid imagination. I’m cursed with a vivid imagination, she would say, and look at the ground in despair. And she would imagine things, and almost all of them bad. [read more…]
Jan 272013
by Rachel Stevenson
I suppose one day Joanna will come to me and say: “We’re getting a place together,” and “we” will no longer mean she and me. And I’ll be living on my own with a cat. I wonder when a girl living on her own with a cat stops being fun and la la? When do you cease bringing boys home just to kick them out next day? Trying to get the man to stay on a Sunday to share the croissants because you’re sick of eating them all yourself? [read more…]