Litro139 teaser

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Featuring David Rose Simon Holloway Matthew Di Paoli Kelly Creighton Dominic Stevenson Reece Choules Michelle Bracken Lucy Durneen Colin Barrett

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H C U

K C LU

Mystery Issue, March 2013 | 44

LITRO MAGAZINE Issue 139 | November 2014

David Rose AT COLONUS

Simon Holloway MOSQUITOES

Matthew Di Paoli THE CLEANING LADY

Kelly Creighton TEENAGE ICON

05 09 11 14

Dominic Stevenson 20 I WAS THERE

BONFIRE NIGHT BENEATH THE STARS

22

Reece Choules

24

Michelle Bracken

29

Lucy Durneen

33

Colin Barrett

38

SEEN AND NOT SEEN

NO ANGELS

WILD GESTURES

AUTHOR Q&A

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Litro Magazine

No Such Luck

EDITORIAL Dear Reader, We all know the whims of lady luck. Looking back on 2014, most of us will have had our fair share of lucky breaks—and plenty of bad luck too. Here at Litro, we’ve had lots to be grateful for in the last year: the launch of our American website LitroNY.com, our three events at the Latitude Festival in the summer, the publication of our ebook anthology Transatlantic in the US, and, of course, all the wonderful writing that has passed through our pages and our website. But none of these came without their share of misfortunes and problems to be overcome.

Nothing worthwhile ever does.

Litro #139—No Such Luck—explores stories of failure, loss, disappointment, and some very, very bad luck. Here we have tales of failed relationships, homelessness, death and despair. And yet, somehow, there are still a few bright sparks of hope among the hardship and ill fortune. After all, every writer knows that it takes more than a little bad luck to break the human spirit.

We’re excited to have David Rose opening this issue with At Colonus, a broadside aimed at Boris Johnson's recent campaign to eliminate rough sleeping. David’s Posthumous Stories is one of the best collections we’ve seen in recent years, and his contribution displays a masterful touch. What better way to follow it than with Simon Holloway’s Mosquitoes, a character study examining what it means to be left behind after your other half passes on.

Matthew Di Paoli offers a lighter interlude in The Cleaning Lady, a story of childhood obsession, stray dogs and oversized underwear. Then Kelly Creighton revisits an old lover—and a classic The Vaccines track—in Teenage Icon, unpicking the old adage that absence makes the heart grow fonder. Following

that, Dominic Stevenson remembers the fallen of World War One, and the victims of the current economic crisis, with his poems I Was There and Bonfire Night Beneath the Stars.

Reece Choules tackles parental grief in Seen and Not Seen, as his narrator withdraws from life following a personal tragedy. Then tragedy is faced full-on in No Angels by Michelle Bracken, as she attempts to answer the question that has haunted mankind for millennia: what happens after death?

In our last story, Lucy Durneen picks apart a failed affair in Wild Gestures, a piece that was highly commended in this year’s Manchester Fiction Prize. It’s easy to see why, as Lucy handles her tale of failed romance with grace, wit and imagination. Failure has never looked so colourful.

Finally, we talk to Colin Barrett, author of the critically acclaimed short story collection Young Skins. Colin has won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award—plus he’s recently been shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. We chat with him about his writing, his roots, and the importance of luck.

As 2015 looms large ahead, we have plenty to look forward to. We’ll be turning our gaze towards Mexico in the spring, while our Myths & Legends issue, due in March, will include the winner of this year’s IGGY & Litro Young Writers’ Prize.

Throw in some unmissable live events, as well as some exciting news on the publication of our anthology in the UK, and 2015 is already full of promise. Let’s hope our luck stays good.

Dan Coxon Editor November 2014

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The latest Litro BookClub read, is BARCELONA SHADOWS by Marc Pastor “As gruesome as it is gripping highly recommended.� Independent, CSI by day, writer by night, Marc Pastor author of Barcelona Shadows Children are going missing. A body is found, twisted and drained of blood. Is the Devil himself haunting the Shadows and spiriting away the innocent? the perfect Halloween Page turner Litro

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AT COLONUS Sleeping rough in modern London

by David Rose Expanse of grass to left and right, extending to a perimeter railing of corroding wrought iron. The view is limited by a series of trees: regularly-spaced urban plane; horse chestnut, leaves browning, crisping prematurely; a solitary beech.

In foreground, in contradiction of the grass worn bald by summer use, an expense of grass close-mown, striped in the mowing, watered daily and still dewed in the heat. In its shrubbed borders a rustle of wings.

A figure seated in partial shade. Another hurrying toward it.

-What do you think you’re up to? Strictly no dogs, there’s a notice prominent at the gate.

-Dog? I have no dog.

-Then what’s that lead for?

-A keepsake, a memento mori, a comfort to the hand, a habit.

-Let me see your ticket.

-Ticket? I have no ticket.

-You need a ticket to enter this enclosure.

-This is not a public place, a park?

-This is the putting green. You need a ticket, obtainable at the office, along with putter and ball.

-I did wonder at the quality of the sward. I was enjoying its refreshment.

-It’s here for the enjoyment of golfers. If you’re not intending to play, I shall have to ask you to leave.

-Would that I could.

-Play or leave?

-Both. I was a mean opponent with the clubs in my day. But my ingress through the gate was of the nature of a hole in one, that is to say, a fluke.

My egress, I regret, will require assistance. Your arm?

-You’re blind?

-I was hoping for tact and a friendly touch.

-So this lead here? Guide dog?

-Another hole in one. Far more than man’s best friend. More like a daughter to me.

-What happened?

-Killed by an unskilled skateboarder. Below the Hayward Gallery.

Attempting some sort of pirouette, was his explanation. Broke her neck.

A clean break is all I hope.

No Such Luck, November 2014 | 05

MOSQUITOES

The lonely existence of those who are left behind

by Simon Holloway She takes a cup, just one, from the cupboard above the kettle. The routine has changed and she has had long enough to get used to it now. It has been a long day. It is twenty past one and it has already been a long day.

The kitchen is ordered. Drawers and cupboards are filled. Outside the window the grass is short and the flowers are pruned. A few cherries lie under the tree, the morello variety, too sour to eat. Sheila sees a blackbird dancing across the lawn, as if the sunlight has made the grass too hot to stand on. She drinks her tea. Relief? No, that is too strong a word, too denigrating to their love. But Charles has been dying for so long. The hospital staff know her too well. “I’ll write them a letter,” she thinks. “Not a thank you card but a letter. What is there to thank them for in such a glib way?”

The blackbird bounds under the fir tree and pulls out a fallen cone.

It flicks it around on the ground, shaking and spinning it, pauses to glance quickly for danger then repeats the lifting and dropping procedure to loosen any insects lodged inside. The action annoys Sheila. Signs of life. A fervent continuation. She takes her tea and tiredness to the lounge and stands by the window, hearing the clicks and ticks of cooling metal from their car in the driveway. Or rather from his car, his choice of practical hatchback. It’s a staleness she hasn’t noticed before, on the drives to and from his bedside. His death has been coming, has been known and accepted. The future has been hers to consider for weeks, months.

A different car, then? How would she go about it? She has blood underneath her fingernails from scratching at bites from mosquitoes and midges.

There are other letters she must write, to banks and savings providers, to the mortgage company, to the gas and electricity companies, insurers, all including a copy of the certificate. It doesn’t intimidate her. She has always been involved with such things. She is ready too for the logistics of death. At the lounge window, with its pelmet and tie-backs, its sill of model tractors, she realises she has been thinking of children: not an old longing but the thought that she could have handed over some of the mundane necessities.

It had been her choice. Charles said he wasn’t bothered, either way. “Those tractors can go,” she thinks. “Was he lying?”

Her clothes smell of the cleanliness of hospitals, as usual. It had become a ritual of bathing, a way to glide in the evenings with an untaxing book, a lack of attention. “Charles is dead,” she thinks. She washes her cup and leaves it on the drainer to dry by itself.

It is too early for a long bath, or too late. She turns on the shower and undresses, inspecting herself in the mirror for indicators of his absence.

What marks do sixteen years of marriage leave on a woman? Are there signs in the shapes and curves of her body, in the lines of her arms and shoulders, in her breasts, her stomach, her hips and thighs? Do her eyes and mouth show love, the intertwining of lives, or are they as they would be had she and Charles never met? There is dried blood on her ankles. The bites are ripped, exposed.

The steam makes her feel even more tired. She has been waiting, preparing. Sorrow, if that’s what it is, has passed her by. She finds some trousers from the third drawer down and a loose sweater, loose enough to shake the tiredness off in defiance. A call to action long delayed.

For three hours she storms their castle. First to be exposed is the drawer in the kitchen: his drawer, full of batteries and pens, old takeaway menus, No Such Luck, November 2014 | 09

THE CLEANING LADY

Echoes of a childhood infatuation

by Matthew Di Paoli For a short time growing up, we had a Polish cleaning lady to help around the house. She came on Tuesdays. I was only eight, but I remember sneaking behind the ribbed oak banister and watching her change out of her blue maid scrubs.

The enormity of her breasts, hidden neatly behind her thick white bra, gave me purpose. It was a strange voyeurism because it always felt invited—to change right out in the living room where she knew I could watch.

I could only guess at their texture and weight, similar perhaps to holding balled-up cats—they might squirm out of my hands at the slightest touch.

In a way, I wasn’t that far off.

After viewing her, I’d sneak into the upstairs bathroom and take three small papaya pills from my mother’s medicine cabinet. They tasted good and she’d said to chew them when my stomach felt funny. I couldn’t remember the maid’s name or her face now, which I was sure wouldn’t have been up to my present day standards. But in memory she remained immaculate.

There was a certain fanaticism that stayed with me from that period, the hope that at any time, I could stumble upon a depraved miracle.

I thought about the cleaning lady as I sat on the M79 bus riding crosstown to see a girl. She was a dancer and I hadn’t seen her in two weeks because she’d booked a gig right after our first date. I wasn’t sure if it was true or not. I assumed it wasn’t, but then she called me so maybe it was.

The first time around we kissed, and she straddled me. Her breasts weren’t like the maid’s, but dancer’s breasts rarely are. She had underwear that I felt but didn’t see, and for two weeks I was wondering why it was even worth wearing something so insignificant. It made me hope she’d be wearing the same pair.

On Park, a dog got on. He was brown. I stood up front, and he parked himself next to me. I looked around to see if he belonged to anyone, but he didn’t. He was just a dog on a bus.

I leaned in to the bus driver. “Is this dog by himself?”

He took a wide right, checking me in the mirror. “It comes on the bus every day. It’s quiet, so I don’t ask questions.”

“Where does he go?”

“It gets off at York,” said the driver.

“And you don’t know where he goes after that?”

The driver pulled over and lowered the bus. It hissed down and a few elderly women gingerly boarded. “You’re asking me if I know the ultimate destination of a dog who rides my bus every day?”

I looked down at the dog. He seemed to be listening to the conversation, perhaps aware that it pertained to him. “When you say it like that it makes the question sound stupid.”

“Does it?”

No Such Luck, November 2014 | 11

TEENAGE ICON

Revisiting a past lover

by Kelly Creighton Jeremy stoops down into the blue Jaguar X Type. The car makes him feel twice his age. His first car—the run-around scrap metal on wheels—sits abandoned in the driveway; it has done since the garage refused to take the Jag back. Even in death his mother’s contract has remained.

Jeremy’s father had handed him the keys, his expression pissy. “You might as well,” he said.

Jeremy reverses over the two tone flagstones; he swings the vehicle swiftly in the loop of the cul-de-sac packed with identikit detached homes. Tyres yelp on wet tarmac, goading his father who glares through the window of his study, which was Claudia’s old bedroom and has now become his office space since she left too. She has been accepted on a PGCE course and doesn’t want their mother’s car, not with congestion charges and the unfamiliarity of London’s roads.

Jeremy sets off for his last day in his job. His three week old old job. On Monday he starts casual bar work in the nightclub, another stopgap to pay mobile phone bills and vodka quotas while he dreams up a career. Despite his father’s quiet anger, top-heavy with grief, Jeremy feels no pressure to become responsible just yet. He will rely on his inheritance for now, sure that his mother would have wanted him to find the right job, not the right-now job. The right now makes Jeremy feel sick.

As he drives from the monotony of Irish suburbia he thinks about Claudia, the lucky bitch has always known what she’s wanted since they were kids.

He wonders about paying her a visit; maybe he could sleep on the floor of her room while he samples the club scene. Jeremy wonders what the men are like in London and if one could take his mind off Louis.

He envisages Louis, pictures the white origami creases of his shirt sleeves the morning they had sat at his dining table.

Louis had repeatedly run his little finger over the smooth red handle of his cup. The cup had narked Jeremy, one of the ones that began with, ‘Calm Down and…’ Jeremy couldn’t recall what the rest of it had said.

It had been insignificant yet Louis’s finger kept bringing his attention to it, as if to send him subliminal messages. It had only added to the noise in Jeremy’s head.

The new Vaccines song had played on the breakfast show, a punkie upbeat little number. Every time Jeremy has heard it since it has reminded him of then; reminded him of Louis. Now the song still makes Jeremy miss him.

‘Teenage Icon’ played in the café when he had been on his blind date with Padraig, set up by Lexi. The intro immediately brought him back to Louis, and he remained on his mind during the rest of the date, even during the stifled sex in Padraig’s bedroom of his family home. It had all seemed amateur compared to the self-assured encounters with Louis in his stylish studio apartment. He had pictured Louis when Padraig touched him; his five o’clock shadow over the hollows of his cheeks and their abrasive kisses, sometimes gentle, sometimes urgent. No man he had seen since had been a patch on Louis.

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I WAS THERE

Remembering the fallen

by Dominic Stevenson I was there.

Cutting a worn figure with a Players hanging from my slack charred lips waiting for my helmet to be penetrated by a single, infinite, bolt of lightning.

I was there.

Holding onto my best friend, three foot long and constantly jamming as I caressed it furiously, anxious that our next touch wouldn’t be our last.

I should have ditched her, but I couldn’t, there was just nothing else.

I was there.

Wiping tears from a shattered face, its mud casing smeared by the flowing river of regret that ran from my eyes as I recalled my eagerness for King and Country, when all that was obliged was to stay in school.

I was there.

Grabbing at a mask and forcing it onto the man next to me.

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It doesn’t do to make friends because as the toxic air around fills gasping lungs you’ll eventually see their lungs bellow, in your hands, or they yours.

I was there.

Looking at her picture, knowing that she would be true because every wretch who could sweet talk her to a lie was next to me.

My brothers in bayonet depriving her of her satisfaction through self-incarceration in a field as far away from a morning kiss as can be known.

I was there.

In the black and white footage, of those men, all dead now and only known to you as mathematics.

But we do hope you remember that we were there.

Remember by Sara G. Dominic Stevenson is an English-born writer with his roots in the post-industrial north of England. His aim is to take part in the global discussions surrounding societal, gender, sexual and educational equality. His poetry and short stories have been published in a range of print and online publications including Poetry and Paint, Forward Poetry, The Cadaverine and Spontaneity Arts Journal. His first collection, The Northern Line, is due out in April 2015.

No Such Luck, November 2014 | 21

BONFIRE NIGHT BENEATH THE STARS A meditation on inequality

by Dominic Stevenson Penny for the guy, and the girl, in the sleeping bag on the doorstep of a shop that made ÂŁ67.4 million pounds profit, after avoiding tax, in the financial year 2012-13, ensuring the closure of libraries, hostels and A&E units, in the financial year 2013-14.

Hold the shivering to account, as fireworks illuminate their faces distressed, torn, worn with memories of misfortune, self-made in your eyes.

Approach your temple, walk on proud, and make sure you don’t remember their face, as you step over them, to offer praise and thanks for your blessings.

Forget that times have fallen harder on them, than the discomfort you feel, walking past to preach and pray and hear from God’s messenger peace and justice for all.

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SEEN AND NOT SEEN

Enduring the pain of loss

by Reece Choules Naked on the sheetless mattress, legs apart, arms stretched wide, he watched the clouds move outside his window. There was a knock at the door. Loud. Knuckles on wood, once, twice, three times. He didn’t move.

He didn’t speak. A woman’s voice broke in.

“Can I…” “No.” “I’ve made sandwiches.”

“Did I ask for them?”

Silence. She thought about this. She thought about the next part of their routine.

“You’ve got to eat.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“But Mr. Henry…”

“I said I’m not hungry.”

Silence returned. A breeze came through the window caressing the limp cock hung sadly between his thighs. He turned on his side. She knocked at the door again.

“Mr Henry.”

On the embossed wallpaper of the half-decorated room he made out tortured sex acts in the obscure twisted lines and bubbles. He made out faces scarred with horror, grotesque in the shadows of a large floor lamp. Poorly put together. Rarely switched on. He reached with trembling hands towards the face he once thought of as his own.

“Mr. Henry.”

“Go away.”

“I’ll leave the sandwiches outside your door Mr Henry.”

He watched a spider crawl along the wall above the skirting board yet to be painted. He had never liked this room. Its angles too harsh and sudden. Ceiling low. It would forever remain unfinished. Forgotten. Lost to the past. He heard the phone ring.

“Tell them I’m asleep. Marta, do you hear me? Tell them I’m asleep. Marta.”

He coughed. Lungs flooded with air. He could hear the high and low points of exclamation in her tone, but try as he might he was unable to make out words. If he had been in his own room then, well, life would be different, life would be as it was meant to have been.

Floorboards creaked under the disturbance of footsteps. He could feel her pressed up against the door.

“Mr. Henry.”

“What is it Marta?”

Photo: Philip Asbury 24 | Litro Magazine

NO ANGELS

What happens after death?

by Michelle Bracken Death is a funny thing. My friends and me, we’ve seen a lot of people die.

Mostly men. Young guys. We’d wake in the morning to find a body in the street. Sometimes, it’d be there for hours.

We hardly ever talked about death, or what happens after you die.

It was like that in San Bernardino.

“What about Heaven?” Isis asked one morning, on our way to school. Her braids were thin and tight, and the pink and yellow barrettes kept smacking as we walked.

“What about it?” I said, shielding the sun from my eyes. “What would you do there, anyway? Do dogs go there, too?” We saw a lot of dead dogs.

And cats.

“Come on, JoJo. It’s not like the movies,” she said. And I remember that Isis laughed a little. But it was a strange laugh, like she wasn’t so sure about it. Perhaps she thought it was like the movies, but she didn’t want anyone to know.

We agreed that if Heaven did exist, we’d only want to go if we were both there, could wear sneakers, blast Beyonce as loud as we wanted, and eat as many Takis as our heavenly stomachs could handle.

I can’t say that I made it to Heaven.

I died, but I’m still around.

I see Isis all the time. She can’t see me, though. For some reason, death doesn’t work that way for me.

Like the movies.

A few nights after I died, I was sitting in Isis’s room, and she was looking at me, or she was looking through me, and I didn’t see myself in the mirror on her closet door.

I was a bunch of lights. I am a bunch of lights.

Red and orange balls of fire. A group of them. Like four to five.

Sometimes more, I think. There are times when I pulse, like the sun on the hottest of days, or like one of those science films. You know, one of those shots where we’re looking at the sun from outer space, from above the earth. So bright, and so hot. And, sometimes, you can see the sun sending out little fireworks. Where they go, I have no idea. *** It was Labor Day weekend. The three days off were long, and boring, and all I did was hang with Isis on her front stoop. We talked about Rina, and watched her down the street. She was always off with a group of girls, or a group of guys, or just one. The one guy.

My mother spent her nights at Party Doll, with her new guy Maurice.

They’d only been dating for a few months, ever since my father moved out.

No Such Luck, November 2014 | 29

WILD GESTURES

Deconstructing the affair

by Lucy Durneen THE DEATH AND LIFE OF ROMANCE. You fall in love with a voice, with a book, a beard, or lack of. You, who feel nothing, who is a wasteland in a woman’s body. You can’t let any of this show on your face, even when he gets into your dreams and sets them on fire, but yes, one day you make a left turn instead of a right, you buy lunch at one café instead of another and you fall like a cliché, a stone into water.

You have so much in common! You are academics. You teach classes that connect people with their inner poet. You have a mutual affinity for the second person and patisserie. Let’s split the cake, you say, which roughly translates as: you have my heart forever. He won’t, of course—no-one has anyone’s heart that long. But from this point on you move around the city like an echo. It seems bizarre that natural selection has not stopped humanity loving this way, fatally, inconveniently, but this is how it goes.

You are a romantic who has officially renounced romance but keeps looking for it in hopeless places, the way you’d always have half an eye out for a cat that went missing years ago. It has always stood to reason that one day it was going to saunter in, bristle at your leg, lap milk like it owned the place. This much is probability. Still, you have a home to go to, and an apartment to clean, papers to grade. That much is fact.

ONE OF YOU IS MARRIED. The winter city at dusk, the hour of sinning lovers. But you are not lovers. You are nounless. Your togetherness indulges no dangerous, expletive verbs, although you use them casually in conversation, sometimes, if not in reference to yourselves. You walk through evening shadows to the U-Bahn, moving from pool of light to lavender pool of light, and there is always a perfect four-inch gap between your hands, your shoulders; your heavy coats do not brush together and so the powder-snow remains untouched on woollen fibres, trembling with your footsteps like jasmine over water.

On one street, synthpop. Bach along another. You pass peeled-paint doors and posters for old operas. Your mind snapshots the shadows of dogs, a diamond necklace behind glass, the warm, grassy scent of horseshit on cobblestone. You catalogue it all with caution; you know what these kind of symbols can do. Yours is a profession that examines the fictional lives of fictional people; their hearts might not actually bleed or melt or commit any of the other atrocities that real ones claim to, but you know the odds aren’t good. You’ve written essays on the subject of manifest yearning. When you teach A Farewell to Arms you have a kind of wild look about you, choreographing all that unquantifiable tragedy into a dance performed with your hands.

When he talks about Maupassant you note, appreciatively, that he too is fluent in the language of wild-gesture, his crazy-dramatic movements rivalling your own. If the universe is providing signs, here is a sign. His hands move the air around like he is operating an engine. It is imperative that an ocean of space rises and falls between you, always, but something in these wild-gestures—

No Such Luck, November 2014 | 33

AUTHOR Q&A In discussion with the award-winning author of Young Skins

with Colin Barrett Litro: You’ve been hugely successful for a debut short story writer, winning both the Frank O’Connor prize and the Rooney Prize. Do you think the market is improving for short stories?

Colin: I don’t know. The Internet gives an impression of greater visibility and interest in the form, but the Internet does that for most things.

In actuality, it’s still probably the same relatively tiny band of doggedly impassioned adherents who help keep the short story alive. Alive, dead, declining, reviving: in any case such anthropomorphic metaphors have their limits. It doesn’t, shouldn’t, affect the work. I used to worry about things like the ‘relevancy’ of the form, and indeed worry about things like if serious writing etc. was on the way out. Well, it probably is, but it always has been. There are people, alive, now, coterminous with my own contingent existence, that care deeply about the short story. Today, that is enough for me. I don’t worry if there can be ‘enough’ of them, of us.

Litro: What attracted you to short fiction? Will we see any longer fiction from you?

Colin: Short stories, like poetry, are profoundly at odds with the literalness of language and the given-ness of the world. In short stories you are working with distillates. You are concentrating the world, and language.

There are intensities achievable in the short story form by definition much more difficult to replicate in longer narratives.

The novel does other, different things, but for the last few years I was fascinated by what the short story does. I used to read and write a lot of poetry.

I still read a bit, though less than I used to, and don’t write it as such. My interest in the short story progressed from that original interest in poetry.

But yes, you will see longer fiction from me.

Litro: Many of your characters in Young Skins are down on their luck, or generally in a bad place. Was this done as a dramatic device, to increase the tension in the stories, or did it go deeper than that? Do you see a lot of bad luck around you?

Colin: I did not think of very many of the characters as down on their luck. As I was writing the book, I didn’t think of them as anything, if I could, by which I mean there were no devices or preconceptions in play—not consciously, anyway. I just found a gesture or phrase and built from there. You write to find out what you are writing about. Luck isn’t a concept I spend much time considering. I think maybe most my characters would consider themselves lucky; at least, most have established some sort of working accommodation with their own limitations or inhibitions or parlous circumstances, and most are not alone in their lives.

Litro: The stories also feel very deeply rooted in Ireland. It’s hard to imagine them taking place anywhere else. Do you consider yourself to be a specifically Irish writer?

Colin: The great, or vexatious, thing about being an Irish writer is that you don’t have to worry about considering yourself an Irish writer, because even if you don’t consider yourself so, you are! I’m going to repeat myself 38 | Litro Magazine

Publisher & Editor-in-Chief: Eric Akoto Magazine Editor: Dan Coxon dan.coxon@litro.co.uk General Online Editor : Eric Akoto Online Short Fiction Editor: Katy Darby katy.darby@litro.co.uk Online Fiction Editor: Lia Martin onlinefiction@litro.co.uk Online Flash Fiction Editor: Jennifer Harvey flashfiction@litro.co.uk Book Reviews Editor: Inder Sidhu inder.sidhu@litro.co.uk Arts Editor: Daniel Janes arts@litro.co.uk Film & Arts Editor: Robin McConnell filmreviews@litro.co.uk Contributing Editors at large: Sophie Lewis, Rio, Brazil Lead Designer: Laura Hannum Marketing & Sales: info@litro.co.uk

Litro Magazine is published by Ocean Media Books Ltd. General inquiries: contact info@litro.co.uk or call 020 3371 9971.

Litro Magazine believes literary magazines should not just be targeted at writers themselves, or even those with a particular interest in literature, instead Litro believes in reaching the general reader whether they be a commuter, someone browsing in bookshop or in a bar or cafĂŠ to meet a friend.

NO SUCH LUCK LITRO | 139 You imagine catching snowflakes on your tongue, or burning inside a giant effigy. You wonder how it is possible that human existence can be so weird, so beautiful, arbitrary, animal, perfect and terrible, so pointless and yet something you would hang on to at all costs, through all suffering, for as long as it takes From Wild Gestures

by Lucy Durneen Cover art Photo by Laura Hannum www.litro.co.uk

ISBN 978-0-9554245-5-7

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