From the Silence of the Stacks, New Voices Rise Vol. VI

From the Silence of the Stacks,

New Voices Rise

An

anthology of writing by The London Library

Emerging Writers Programme

2024–25 Cohort

Edited by Claire Berliner

Published 2025 by The London Library

The London Library

14 St James’s Square, London SW1Y 4LG

londonlibrary.co.uk

Charity No. 312175

Collection and introductions © The London Library 2025

Copyright of the individual works remains with the respective authors.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN (print) 978-1-0685123-1-5

ISBN (ebook) 978-1-0685123-2-2

Typeset by Will Dady, 2025

Printed in the UK by TJ Clays Ltd

Children’s & Young Adult Fiction

About The London Library

Founded in 1841, The London Library is one of the world’s great lending libraries. A unique literary oasis in the heart of London, it houses an extraordinary collection of around one million books and periodicals dating from 1700 to the present day, nearly all of which can be borrowed.

Members can browse seventeen miles of atmospheric bookstacks, read and write in hidden corners or in beautiful reading rooms, attend our vibrant events programme or work remotely using the extensive online resources.

From the outset, the Library has been a place of inspiration and support to writers, readers and thinkers of all kinds. From Charles Dickens to Sarah Waters, TS Eliot to Raymond Antrobus, Virginia Woolf to Kazuo Ishiguro, Angela Carter to Jessie Burton and to successive cohorts participating in our thriving Emerging Writers Programme, our building in St James’s Square has provided a home and a creative community for anyone who loves the written word.

The London Library Emerging Writers Programme

The London Library Emerging Writers Programme has been running since 2019 for up to 40 participants each year. It is a year-long programme designed to provide early-career writers with the support, resources and community that they need to establish themselves and hone their craft.

The Programme includes: a year’s free membership of the Library, with full access to all its resources; a structured programme of masterclasses with established writers and industry professionals; peer support meetings and a writing network; and support from the Library’s expert staff. Writers of any genre, age, level of writing experience and from anywhere in the country, are welcome to apply – for free – for a place on the Programme. The only criteria are that applicants have to have a project in mind to work on throughout the year, they have to commit to using the space and collection of the Library and they must not have previously had a full work published or produced. Applications are judged anonymously by a panel of judges drawn from across the literary world.

Previous participants on the Programme have gone on to find agents, publishers and multiple platforms for their work. Some have enjoyed international success and many have found critical acclaim. A number of the communities and networks created on the Programme have been sustained long after the year’s end and participants have gone on to contribute to future iterations of the Programme.

Introduction

The London Library has always been a space of discovery. It’s an infinite warren of information, as Bram Stoker encountered when he scoured the folklore and topography sections in his research for Dracula; as did Charles Dickens when Thomas Carlyle sent him a cartful of the Library’s books about the French Revolution and A Tale of Two Cities was born. It’s a treasure trove of stories, as Kazuo Ishiguro found when he plucked Harold Laski’s The Dangers of Being a Gentleman from the shelves and conceived The Remains of the Day; and as AS Byatt explored in Possession, a novel spun from the possibility of unearthing hidden literary gems in the Library’s stacks. It’s a place to find friends and community, as the Bloomsbury Group and the Arts and Crafts movers and shakers did; and even a place to find love, as HG Wells and Rebecca West, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland, Iris Murdoch and John Bayley could all have attested. It’s where writers have found their voices and built their careers, like Virginia Woolf and Tom Stoppard, who joined before they’d published a single thing and continued in membership throughout global success.

The Emerging Writers Programme was born from a desire to open that world of discovery up to generations of new writers and, in the six years it has been running, it has sparked new stories, fuelled more research, built more friendships and spawned new work across every genre and discipline. That work has found its way into the wider literary landscape, been read and enjoyed around the globe, received critical acclaim, won or been shortlisted for major prizes and inspired many more writers to find their own voices and make their own writing discoveries.

The number of applications we receive for places on the Programme rises each year and the sixth cohort, whose work is collected in this anthology, were selected from around 1700 applicants, another record. The group used their year as their Library member predecessors had: to make discoveries, to be inspired, to build relationships and

community and to find their voices. The pieces in this anthology offer a glimpse into the work they have produced as a result, across novel, short story, children’s & young adult fiction, graphic novel, non-fiction, poetry and writing for the stage and screen. The work is beautiful and funny, sexy and spooky, hard-hitting and profound, whimsical and wise. The projects take us around the world from Afghanistan to Bosnia to Brazil, the Dominican Republic to Italy, Sierra Leone to Turkey, Uganda to the USA, Zambia to Zimbabwe, alongside stories from around the UK, its cities, suburbs and rural landscapes. The stories explore art, colour, imprisonment and freedom, cannibalism, witchcraft and hauntings, class comedy, murder mystery, fantasy, history and present-day reality. These are fascinating projects from exciting new voices; this collection is another world of discovery. It has been a pleasure and a lot of fun to work with this talented and committed cohort of writers over the last year; to see them throw themselves into the Programme and the life of the Library and glean all they could to develop their ideas and take their writing to new heights. I can’t wait to see what their futures hold and to discover their books on the Library’s shelves.

Claire Berliner Head of Programmes, The London Library

September

2025

Novel

Vic Beswick

Extract from Videotape

halo-per-i-dol.

It skips around the mouth, doesn’t it? A halo, a pear-drop, a paper doll. I can’t remember the injection. Daniel said it was like the ones they use in French patisserie schools to fill up the doughnuts.

That first week was thick and dark. I became good friends with a wicker chair, stroked its cheap pine armrest for hours, fascinated by the quiet orange loop in the grain. One of the old boys, usually as quiet as a lamb, suddenly got up one morning and started screaming about the dirty magpies in his porridge. It would have been funny if I’d been able to laugh, but my mouth was rigid and slopped full of foam. My birthday came and went, remarked upon only by one sweet Welsh nurse as she flicked through my notes.

“Nineteen, today,” she said.

“Happy birthday, darling,” I replied, and she stared at me, greyhaired, confused.

They tinkered with the dose. Turned the lithium up, the haloperidol down.

And then I could think about things. Think with air around the sides. How lovely thoughts are. How did I never notice, until now?

“You’re going to get depressed, soon,” Doctor Greene says, discharging me. “That’s a guarantee.”

“Nah doc,” I say. “If anything, I still feel a bit fizzy.”

“That’s because you’re due a dose. You have to take it as soon as you get back home, or you’ll melt into a little puddle on the floor and be back here by tea time.”

I like Doctor Greene.

“Nobody will be at home. They’ve cut their losses,” I say, as I’m handed back my shoelaces. They flop in my hands, grubby and flecked with tiny

full-stops of my own blood from when I nicked that poster. “Why don’t I feel it?” I ask, suddenly. “Why don’t I feel anything right now?”

“You will,” she says. “And when you do, call us up, and tell me.”

She hands me an alert card to put in my wallet. It reads

TOSCA ANTHONY KISSIN BIPOLAR I DISORDER LITHIUM PATIENT

“Who do I give this to?” I ask.

“Nobody. You just hang on to it.”

I realise, slow and darkly amused, that it is a card that is made to be found.

I go home, eventually, greeted by a stack of bills and catalogues and Beano magazines squished through the letterbox. The carnage of my mania is still all over the house: blood on the microwave door, oil paint on the walls and some on the ceiling, too. Someone – some twat – has stubbed a cigarette right through a picture Allegra had drawn and stuck to the fridge – me and her and March sitting in a meadow, titled in pink magic marker, THE KISSINS.

March has taken her belongings from her bare white bedroom, her nicest coat, her tub of cold cream and she’s put a Virgin Mary figurine on my bedside table. Crude mouldings, chipped plastic at her temples. She is a cold blue chess piece in my palm. I want to squirrel her away and never look at her again, but I can’t, so I pour a panicked pint glass of extra-thick bleach and she sinks into it, bloated, coated in fine, golden, caustic bubbles.

I set her back on the battered beermat on my bedside table, with firm ideas of flaking her enamel off and giving her apple-red acrylic cheeks tomorrow – I can paint some life into the old bitch – and then I close my eyes as tightly as I can, clutching the mattress with my fingertips, and whisper imsorryMaryimsorryimsosorryim...

That night, I get into bed and try to process everything that’s happened.

I go to call Daniel but it’s far too late.

The dial on my 1970s travel clock ticks patiently. I notice that crack in my ceiling that I used to think looked like the side profile of Freddie Mercury, but now it is what it is.

A crack.

Daniel and I talk every day. He’s always exhausted from uni, but we hang onto the line anyway, even when we’re making dinner, brushing our teeth, reading our mail. We lament our lack of credit, run to the shop, re-dial. He answers the phone like a distracted hotelier even when he’s expecting me, with a “yes, yes, hello, hello?” and then I motormouth at him, about the history of punk rock, about how nice it would be to live in Ancient Greece and my favourite graffiti that I’ve seen in public lavatories. I tell him about the lives of famous comedians like Tony Hancock and I do the impression too, Hhhhhhhhancock’s Half Hour, with the trumpet blown through a tight circle I make with my hand. “23 Railway Cuttings, East Cheam,” I recite. “Barbiturates and alcohol. No friends or family. Hhhhhhancock’s Half Hour.”

He has stopped asking me how I feel because I always say I dunno, to be honest Dan.

At night, he tells me please, please. Go to sleep.

One night, late, he asks me, his voice all languid, fake-sleepy, almost bored,

“What’s it like, Tosca? To look like you?”

So, I tell him. About how hard it is to find shoes that fit, how heavy my hands feel sometimes. About desire – desire for myself, even – and how I have developed a taste for skinny boys with galaxy freckles, the exact opposite of me, smallness, Godliness, pinkness, bluntness, blondness.

I tell him about my circumcised penis, how easily I tan. I tell him about my big veins, a phlebotomist’s dream, my always awakeness, my tendency towards gooseflesh.

I tell him I’m ashamed of it, I tell him I like to do things that make me feel ashamed. I tell him I want someone to think I’m disgusting. Fully rotten through. Spit at me or make me spit at them, then leave.

I tell him that the body is glory.

And I say, steadily, with one hand in my boxers,

“Now, tell me, what it’s like to look like you?”

But there’s just the rustle of sheets and breathing.

“Oh,” he says, finally. “I can’t.”

Tick tock goes the travel clock.

“I framed the Space Odyssey poster,” he says, turning over in the bed linen, a puff of detergent exhaling down the line. “I hung it over my bed. It looks lovely there. Your blood all over it is such a conversation starter.”

And I didn’t say it, but I thought, conversations with who?

I suppress a belch that wants to be something else, something deeper. Mother Mary boils in her bleach.

How do I know how much feeling is good for me? How do I know?

There is a flood coming. Like a bird, I can feel it.

“Tosca? You there?”

“Yeah. I’m here,” I say. “Are you?”

“Of course I am. When am I not?”

I swallow, carefully. I think, I think, about hanging up.

If you just asked me to come over, Daniel. Night train to Oxford, I would love you so deeply, so completely, so uniquely, that all would be understood and obvious tomorrow.

In the sky outside, an ambulance wails, then dies into silence. The phone aches against my ear.

“Would you like to hear a story about Britt Ekland and Peter Sellers?” I ask. “It’s funny in a sad way. It starts in the Dorchester, in the 60s.”

I drag a cigarette from the packet with my teeth.

“You’ll like this one, Dan, I promise,”

The fag bobs between my lips; my hand, the zippo, shaking.

“Everybody does.”

Heather Cutforth

Extract from Great Big Phoney

When Neville finds his sister’s body, the violence of his voice makes the walls of the bedsit tighten at the edges.

“Gone!” he cries. “SHE’S GONE! TAKEN TO THE GRAAAAVE!”

His knees pang as he crumples against the floor and curls into a ball. Chocolates fall from his pockets. Two Clarnico Mint Creams escape under the bed, bumping to a halt against something hard – a secret thing.

“Dead…” Neville continues to whimper. “Dead… Dead…”

His wife and daughter stand in the draughty tenement stairwell, their skin painted a sick-yellow by the lamps. They’re not dressed for the weather. Neither of them wears a coat. September has cooled spitefully and the fog is damp that Sunday, fizzing at the skin.

When Neville heard his sister was back in London, he immediately marshalled the family onto a bus to Bethnal Green. Then he banged like a piston on Velma’s door, convinced she was there, that she was hiding. When Maude suggested they come back some other time, Neville rolled up his sleeves and told her it was nothing good old-fashioned MANPOWER couldn’t fix. He kicked the door once, twice, thrice… a number of times, actually, before it finally gave way and the scene was revealed.

Now Maude coughs. Her husband is unable to rise from the ground. “Oh,” he moans, rolling into the space fully. “Oh!”

Even with so much energy given to wailing, he can’t help but look at the room as well as the woman. It is his first time in Velma’s home, a space where the beautiful mixes with the ugly. Two of the windows are cracked yet framed by deep purple velvet curtains; they hang by peeling wallpaper, next to a bucket left out to collect drips from the ceiling. Drip. Drip. Drip. Inside the tin basin, a bottle of FRENCH

champagne chills. It sits in easy reach of the iron-wrought bed, the one dressed in greying, sweat marked sheets, above which there hangs the stuffed head of a boar. Its eyes are glassy, dead and eerily familiar. The beast presides like a Lord over a Kingdom of Paper. Stuck to the walls, crumpled into corners, Velma’s mind rustles around them, her handwriting more alive than the woman herself.

THERE IS A SPECTRE HAUNTING / No pasarán! / BREAD AND HONEY

Neville turns away and looks at the body again. Velma is spread across a solitary slither of wooden floor with books collapsed around her. Her skinny arms stretch above her pillow of hair, while her skirt is winched up to the ribs, exposing…

“Oh, I can’t!” he says, beckoning his wife into the room, who goes to the body. She tugs at the hem of Velma’s dress. Gently at first, then with some force, until it returns home, down by the ankles.

“Did you see anything?” Neville asks, voice pitched like a thing squeezed hard. “Are there any… wounds?”

“We should call a doctor.”

“A doctor!” he jumps in the air, as if electrified. “Yes, we need a doctor!”

Neville rushes past his daughter, who instinctively knows when to move out of her father’s manic path. He leans against the handrail and bellows down the stairwell: “HELP! MY SISTER IS DEAD AND NEEDS A DOCTOR!”

To which some hardened soul replies that it’s probably too late for all that. “They can’t bring ’em back to life!”

Neville clutches his heart. Oh, the world! It is always too much for him. His clothes make a hiss against the doorframe as he slides to the ground, once again more puddle than man.

Maude steps over him and says she’ll go fetch someone. “You stay and keep an eye on things.”

It’s unclear if this instruction is for Neville or the child. Bertie puts a reassuring hand against her father’s trembling shoulders. Neville is so inside himself, so caught in visions of his sister, that he looks up expecting

to see Velma there – not as she is, inside that terrible room – but as she was years ago. How titanic she used to loom. There is something of his sister in his daughter’s face, a childish softness she used to have.

“Jesus,” he exclaims and leaps back to his feet. “Where has Maude gone?”

He folds his body against the landing’s twisted railings, looks down at the faces below. Steam escapes up through the tenement’s throat, smelling all at once of boiled meats, stewed cabbage and custard. Neville can’t see a single man, just levels and levels of women with children at their skirts. A feeling of being pitched forward suddenly strikes him. He feels his body might topple down towards those anonymous females.

Someone in the dark calls out his sister’s name. “Velma! Velma, you hearing the news?”

He strains his ears for his sister’s reply, hoping a miraculous change in circumstance is about to happen, now that another person is involved. Fooled you, didn’t I, dear brother? He imagines her saying. Christ isn’t the only one who can make a mockery of death!

Neville feels he can never predict what other people will say to him, but her voice he can reach for at will. He has spent years without the woman, tussling with figment arguments, old threads of conversation, her voice undulating with age. High when he recalled her as a girl, low and feral when thinking of her as a woman. All the hushed stories they told one another, the dreams they confided, the fights they had, it is all inside of him. A toybox of little Velmas and little Nevilles, which he has been puppeteering inside his head.

“Velma,” someone calls from below again. “Velma! It’s happening! I told you it would!”

If his sister is dead, he will only ever have that toybox. Neville will never be able to speak to his sister again, never be able to explain himself…

“Velma!” the voice cries. He listens, willing for Velma to answer back, to magically rouse herself from the void.

“Dad,” his daughter calls.

“Shh!” he says, not turning.

“Dad, look!”

He starts to turn when a caterwaul of sirens goes off. Every door in the building pulls open and a stampede of feet takes to the stairs. Bertie is nearly flattened by a rolling boulder of a woman, who explodes from the flat next door, two babies under her arms. Neville, fatherly instinct kicking in, bounds to his daughter and presses them both against the wall. She is so small against him. Holding her releases another sob, one that’s less theatrical, but retching all the same. “Oh,” he whimpers.

“Dad…”

Little fingers push against his chest. He holds her tighter. Can she breathe? How breakable are children? He often wonders… They were only children when they left London and went to that place. Sometimes he forgets that. How small they must have been, standing on the train platform, their suitcases in one hand and the other’s palm in the other. Neville cried the whole way and Velma recited lines from the Bible. How did that one verse go? Love suffers long and is kind… is not provoked... does not rejoice in… something. What was that word? Velma knows. She always has an answer.

Neville lifts his head, still not ready to confirm her death but knowing it is surely inevitable. There is even more noise now. Not just the sirens, but people too. Hundreds and hundreds of people are fleeing into the streets, making for the shelters and behind them, dozens of echoing wirelesses, the restrained voice of the Prime Minister. A state of war will exist between us…

Everything is shaking. Everything feels alive. He looks to the body, bracing for the reveal. Paper has escaped from the pins in the walls. It flutters down like gigantic flakes of snow, the white sheets obscuring the room. He sees her upturned boots first, then the bloodied skirt, and finally the gun.

Velma, sweat beading against her forehead, holds herself upright on the floor and aims a Mauser bolt-action rifle at her brother’s heart.

Dallas Marie Koelling

Extract from Wife Guy

When Grace was baptized, I got an erection. Wait, that sounds terrible. Grace was not a child, she was twenty-one years old, and we baptized her in a blow-up pool in the middle of the church. She was wearing a white dress with nothing underneath. To be submerged in water in front of at least one hundred people. Is that not odd? It’s not like the urge to be baptized sprang up in her spontaneously as a part of some college revival, she wasn’t jumping into a campus fountain to be saved with hundreds of other awakening souls in a collective frenzy of spiritual renewal. The baptism had been on the church calendar for weeks. She had seen people go before her. She knew better.

Amanda and I pulled her out of the pool and she was reborn. The dripping white fabric clung to the perky evidence of the cold water. I felt an unwanted rush of blood. Unwelcome. Involuntary.

I shouldn’t blame Grace. She was naive, unaware of the effect her contours would have on the men present.

Then again, none of the other men present seemed affected. Everyone was applauding, laying innocent hands on one another, hugging, cheering, whistling. A soul was saved. But what of mine? So dramatic, John. No one else was rushing off to the sacristy to take deep breaths and pray for sanctification, purity. Only me. I put my vestment back on, even though my clothes underneath were still wet. I couldn’t let anyone see. I felt that I was in violation of my morality contract.

I grabbed a towel for Grace and reentered the nave. As I handed it to her, I felt like I was seeing her for the first time. There was a physical difference in her; whereas before she had been pale and gaunt, now she had a fresh face, full cheeks, a misty reverence in her eyes. She was crying and the tears seemed to glow, the wet glass of her eyes shining.

Every time I posted a video, I found myself refreshing the page over and over, watching the numbers tick up, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I was addicted to the dopamine rush of my phone buzzing with notifications. I liked that people were looking at me, hearing my words, having discussions about my message, even getting into arguments in the comments section. The idea that images of me and words I spoke could reach far corners of the world, made me feel bigger than I was.

We validate what validates us, I’d said in a sermon. When we allow something to make us feel valid, we give it power.

An anonymous user commented on one of my TikToks: I want this man to have premarital sex with me but he’s almost hotter for the fact that I know he wouldn’t.

I clicked on her profile. It was clearly a throwaway account, the username a series of inscrutable numbers and letters, no videos. Still, I felt validated.

I met Grace in late spring, when she showed up at the church one day. It was storming outside and we were expecting a small crowd for the Sunday evening informal Worship and Praise service.

Grace was dry, thanks to her Hello Kitty umbrella. She was also wearing a men’s trench coat, at least three sizes too large. It created the illusion that she was really two small children stacked on top of each other, pretending to be an adult.

She looked lost, confused.

“Are you here for the service?” Amanda asked.

Grace nodded shyly, her sunken cheeks blushing.

“Welcome,” I said. “What’s your name?”

“Grace.”

“Are you a student?” I asked.

“Um, kind of,” Grace said.

She seemed reluctant to meet my eye.

“Well, come on in,” Amanda said. “Here, come sit next to me.”

I thought I would be married, or at least engaged, by the time I finished college at Duke. Then I figured I would be married by the time I finished Divinity School at Yale. Then, I assumed, wished, hoped against all hope, that I would be married by the time I got ordained.

I was an Associate Pastor at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, I was 26 years old and I was still deeply single.

My problem was that I rejected every woman who came my way. Well, every woman since Maeve. Maeve was precious and beautiful and she said no when I proposed. I was down on one knee and everything. We were surrounded by mist and blooming flowers in the botanical garden at Duke, at daybreak. She cried, she was so sorry, she really wanted to marry me, but she wasn’t sure she believed in God anymore and she couldn’t dedicate her life to ministry, which is what marrying me would have meant.

Afterwards, I distrusted beautiful women. I also felt, immovably, that my future wife would have to be a beautiful woman. It put me in a difficult position.

But what about Amanda?

Yeah, John, what about Amanda? Why don’t you just marry Amanda?

The people in the comments sections of our podcast clips demanded to know: Are these two together? Why is there so much sexual tension between the hosts?

I clicked on the sexual tension comment: another blank profile and at least ten replies calling it inappropriate.

“For those who want to get married, I would ask them the question: Are you praying for a wife, or are you praying for your wife?” I posited this on one of our episodes of the Thirsty Thursdays with John and Amanda.

“Mm, so good,” Amanda responded.

“Because if you get married, the most important thing you will do in your marriage, in my opinion, is pray for your spouse. You will intercede for them in ways no one else can and if you truly believe God

has someone for you, who is out there in the world living their own life, why wouldn’t you say a prayer for them?”

“No, exactly,” Amanda said. “Because the Holy Spirit intercedes when we pray, no prayer is ever wasted.”

Amanda was so holy. She really, really loved God. Sadly, she was fat.

What was so refreshing about Grace was that she wasn’t interested in me at all.

I’d had four separate women over the past year tell me that they thought God had given them a special message: that I was their husband. There is nothing that turns me off more than shoddy interpretations of God’s messages. If God told you that, why didn’t He tell me? Why would the message come from a strange woman, cornering me in the parish hall, earnest and nervous, burnt tongue smelling of coffee? Would the woman God has for me make me so uncomfortable?

Grace barely looked at me. I tried to catch her attention during worship, but she always had her eyes closed, her hands in the air.

I watched Jesus change her. God filled in her face, brightened her eyes. She grew in confidence. She made friends. She became close with Amanda. She auditioned for the worship team.

I felt a growing sense of calling, of attraction. I didn’t know why I was so drawn to her. Was it her shiny hair, the colour of honey? Her cherry red lip gloss, the way she smelled like sugar and vanilla on the rare occasions she got close enough for me to take in her scent?

But, surely, it couldn’t be down to such superficial, material, olfactory things, when the attraction I felt came from so deep within me. It had to be from God.

Sharmaine Lim

Extract from See Hum

madeleine kneels in front of the television in the bedroom, her eyes fused to the screen. Smoke billows from a bus on Tavistock Square. Its roof lies in a crumpled heap nearby and huge panels have been ripped off its flank. Mangled steel poles rise from its battered head like the feelers of a monstrous cockroach.

She hears a knock on the door and Shola says, “Mads, Fin wants you – I think he’s done a poo in his nappy. And school called.”

“Julian rang. He’s on a bus,” says Madeleine. “Sho, what if there’s another bomb?” If she hadn’t made him late this morning with her stupid questions, he wouldn’t be caught up in this. Shola says something else, but her voice sounds like it’s coming from the bottom of a well. A cluster of seats – the blue of their fabric still vivid and clean – cling valiantly to the remains of the bus’s upper deck. Feeling a hand on her shoulder, Madeleine tears herself away from the image and turns to her friend. “Sorry, I’ve been so focused on Julian. Are your friends safe?”

“I think so. Did he say where he was?”

“No, but I managed to warn him that it was a terror attack before we were cut off. Wait, what did you say about school?” asks Madeleine.

“They’re closing early just in case. Look, Julian might ring again. You stay – I’ll collect Chloe.”

Once Shola has left, Madeleine changes Finley’s nappy and settles him in front of a Balamory DVD. She returns to the bedroom but can’t bring herself to switch on the news. Retrieving Julian’s pyjamas from the floor, she folds them neatly on top of his pillow. What if he never comes back? As she moves through the room, it feels more spacious, untrammelled. In the bathroom, his toiletries splay across the vanity top. Dribbles of shaving foam have dried at the edge of the sink. She screws the cap back on his toothpaste tube and begins tidying.

Julian pounds on the bus driver’s screen. “There’s been a bomb on a bus.”

“What?”

“It’s a terror attack. Open the fucking door.”

People around him scream as they clamber to escape. A woman rams her pushchair into him and its wheels roll over his shoes, setting his feet on fire. At last, the doors swing wide with a hiss, and they spill like skittles onto the pavement. Backing away from the bus, he sees that the pushchair is wedged in the door. He rushes forward to help, yanking it free while fending off the furious kicks of the howling baby.

He weaves through the throng onto a side street. Beyond the crumbling cupola of a church, the Gherkin spirals towards the sky. A helicopter whirrs overhead and he looks up to see an aeroplane soaring through the clouds. As he tilts his head back to follow its path, a tower looms up behind him and it looks as though the plane is heading straight for it. He stumbles onto the road. A screech of bicycle brakes, a hand on his arm. You alright? Julian nods, swallowing hard. He steps back onto the crammed pavement. Should he go to work? The skyscrapers in Canary Wharf are an easy target. But this sort of thing doesn’t happen, not in… fuck it, he’s going home. He pushes through the fray, looking for a way out of the narrow streets, away from buses and bombs and buildings built like bullets.

Water shoots at full blast into the sink. When it starts to steam, Madeleine holds her hands under the gush until it scalds her skin. She looks at herself in the mirror. What would life be like if she no longer had to rush around the house making everything perfect before he comes home? There is relief at the thought of not having to worry about saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, watch her tone, or track his moods and petty jealousies. Or stand frozen with helplessness while he picks their children to pieces over the smallest mistake, knowing her intervention will only invite worse. She stares harder at her reflection.

What does it say about her that she is contemplating life without him before he’s gone? Her eyes look back, red-rimmed and condemning. Her phone chimes in her pocket.

Im safe coming home r you kids ok Batterys nearly dead. nearly dead overshadows Im safe before the meaning of his words sink in. Her fingers are shaking.

Alk fine hre. Were waitg 4 u be carefuk.

She buries her face in a towel to regain control of herself and the smell of musk and bergamot washes over her. It is his aftershave, the essence of dark winter nights huddled under the covers listening to The Stone Roses, her cheek resting on his bare chest, the music breaking open their hearts. She drops the towel and types I love u.

He ducks into a deserted alleyway between two buildings. Humid, rank air blows at him from the ventilator shafts lining the wall and he grows dizzy, inhaling its stench. How will he navigate his way home without a map? He squats down to clear his head. If he finds the river, he could go west until Westminster, then through the parks for most of the way. Terrorists wouldn’t bother to target rivers or parks.

He beetles onwards, first in one direction, then another. This fucking maze. What’s that up ahead? Going closer, he sees that it is one of the cast-iron lamps that line the Thames. A pair of sturgeons hug its base, their ebony scales gleaming in the slippery light. He hurries towards it with renewed purpose. On the opposite side of the river, The Globe crouches like a grumpy monk with a head of tonsured hair. Everything feels so normal here. He tries to text Madeleine again, but his phone is dead. Have there been more attacks since her last message? He shakes his head and stares at the water. Low tide has pulled back the soggy brim of the river, revealing a rime of flotsam along the foreshore. Two men mudlark in the cratered landscape. They call out to each other about their finds, laughing with the easy joy of lives that are whole. Above them, screeching seagulls gyre in widening arcs.

He trudges along the Embankment, craning his neck to look for landmarks. When Big Ben’s steadfast spire and familiar clockface come into view, he breathes easier. He is footsore and his back aches, but his mind is still. There is a strange solidness to his body; neither the past nor the future seem to have their usual grip on him. Noticing a tourist booth by the pier, he goes over to buy some water.

“Did you hear about the bus bombing?” he asks, picking up a street map.

The vendor tells him that there were four bombs, three on the tube, one on a bus. Dozens dead. They look at each other in silence. When she says that one of them exploded between Liverpool Street and Aldgate Station on the Circle Line, he reaches out to steady himself. He was on the Circle Line at Liverpool Street. Those sparks in the tunnel that everyone said was due to a power surge must have been from the bombed train. The one he’d missed. He remembers rushing for it at Baker Street and blaming Madeleine as he watched it leave without him.

He breaks into a run, the water forgotten and the map fluttering in his hands like a homing pigeon as it guides him through hushed green expanses and under rustling trees. At Marble Arch, he allows himself to pause, the twin wings of his lungs heaving for air.

It is mid-afternoon when he limps into the mews. Never has the sight of its pastel walls and dusty box planters felt so welcome. He stops to fumble in his pocket for his key and the door flies open. His family is in his arms, a tangle of warm cheeks, wet kisses and eager, clinging hands.

Marcella Marx

Extract from The Past is Another Country

vasco rambled, looking for water to wash away the fresh blood on his hands. He had been camping at the front, close to the hill where the will-o’-the-wisp had flickered at night for more than a month. Unable to find any clean water, he stared at his palms.

Once, a long time ago, a lady at Miranda’s Gentlemen House in São Paulo had read the lines in his palm. Mapping them with her finger, she said he would have a long life. He scrubbed his palm against the fabric of his trousers as he would sometimes do to assure himself the lines were still there. This time, a layer of dried blood and dirt blurred them all. He flinched at the sound of wings flapping close to his ear, a dark smear of blood marked his cheek.

He hurried around the camp until he finally found a barrel. The water inside had an acid stench and hundreds of flies hovered above it, taking plunges into the filthy water. He took a piece of wood from the ground, dipped it in and scrubbed his hands hard to get rid of the blood. It spattered his arms and elbows. Another flap of wings close to his left ear; he waved it away, flicking water into his eye. It stung and he rubbed at it with his upper arm, clouding his vision. He dived one hand into the barrel and cupped out some water to clean his eyes, but the water was swimming with dying black flies. Another buzz, now close to his mouth. He shook the water away and sat on the floor, giving up on all cleaning. The doctor’s words were echoing in his head.

“What the hell did you bring me a leg for? What use does a loose leg have? Would you bring me a head without its body? You’ve got to bring the man, not the leg, for Christ’s sake! Somebody, please, explain to this corpsman what his job is. Go throw this thing somewhere, will you?”

Vasco dried his hands and face on his shirt, marching back towards the battleground. The day wasn’t over yet. He must find the man.

The commander’s order was to move north, despite the time. Vasco had hardly slept for more than a couple of hours after trying in vain to find the legless soldier. He wanted to believe the soldier had been rescued by someone else and was now safe in the infirmary, but there was no way he would ever know.

The night was swallowing the light. Each day of the new season, another chunk was gone. It was dark when Vasco’s health battalion arrived at a deserted farm. The Italians had fled after the bombings. He found a dry spot on the ground and covered it with his blanket. He was lucky he had a spare one to cover himself with. Autumn was bleeding into winter and he could already tell that this winter would have more in common with war than any other season. At sunset, the skin on his hands appeared to turn to bone. Looking up, he noticed the sky was white, so white it gave him the impression that if he stretched his arms, his hands could touch it. Was that a sign of something? Rain? He had always been able to read the weather. Before the rain came in Brazil, the air smelt different, birds stopped flying and started singing, as if broadcasting the news. In Italy, nature didn’t speak to him.

Chalky flakes reached his nose and slipped down his cheeks. He raised his hands to hold snow for the first time. He expected it to be thick and heavy, but it was weightless like pieces of cotton. Snow was too white and delicate for war. He imagined it would emit some noise, as the rain did, but snow fell silently, as if not wanting to disrupt the course of things. His heavy lids followed the movement of the flakes and fused with his eyes.

A beam of morning light on his face woke him up. A cluster of green grapes hung above him. He had slept in a vineyard. He lifted his head and pulled down a grape with his lip. The grapes tasted nothing like the ones people sold in Brazil. These were sweeter, proving that fruits and people had their ideal environment to thrive. Having his first breakfast in bed during the war put a guilty smile on his face.

He stretched his arms and legs, like he used to do in his own bed, then patted his head, feeling the cold morning dew on his scalp. He slid his hands down and felt his clothes and blanket were soaking

wet. He started shivering. While he rubbed his hands together, he tried to move his toes inside his boots, but they didn’t respond to his command. He sat down and took his boots off as fast as he could and kept rubbing his feet and toes, trying to brush the frost away, desperate to wake them up from their deadly sleep. His memory took him back to the infirmary where he was helping a doctor a couple of days past.

“Find a stick to put in his mouth and hold him,” the doctor told Vasco while cleaning the scalpel.

The soldier lying on the stretcher murmured words in English. Vasco didn’t understand them, but realised he was praying.

“What are you waiting for, Corpsman? Do as I say!” the doctor barked.

“But he’s praying, Sir.”

“Praying can cost him his whole foot rather than only his toes.”

Vasco held the soldier with both hands but soon needed to climb on top of the stretcher and use his whole body-weight to stop the soldier from moving. It would be easier to fight with a gun at the front than see this suffering, he thought.

The soldier’s scream mingled and faded away with the other yells and cries of the infirmary. The doctor didn’t seem to acknowledge them anymore, but they haunted Vasco all night long, like buzzing flies inhabiting his head.

The doctor handed Vasco a tray with the ten purple pieces.

“What should I do with them, Sir?”

The doctor shrugged, moving on to the next patient.

The movement of Vasco’s steps made the toes roll from one side to the other like loose grapes on a plate. He was the juggler, trying to keep the tiny pieces from falling off, without ever touching them. He passed by a waste bin and thought about tossing them out there, but couldn’t. Instead, he kept on walking until he saw an olive tree. He chose a spot under it and dug up ten small holes. After placing the first toe in its hole, he figured it was not right. He removed it, closed all the nine holes again and dug one further in depth and width. He buried the toes all together, guessing they would want to remain as they always were – in tandem.

Emma Mitchell

Extract

from An Odd Surprising

Cluster

We leave the tap room’s raucous explosion of liquor, lust and laughter, climbing the well-worn staircase with its narrow, panelled walls to the rooms above. The air is warm and redolent with tobacco, liquor and coupling. We step across uneven boards to a chorus of grunts and creaks. Our feet hurt in buckled and heeled shoes, our bodies itch and reek, but we are merry. Squat windows serve as looking glasses now that night has blackened them, the candles casting knowing light upon our persons as we see ourselves reflected there.

We are fashionably dressed in bright silks and cambrics. Our sleeves and handkerchiefs are edged with lace. Ribbons trim our elaborate hairstyles, coaxed into place with powder, pins and pomade scented with summer flowers. All of our cheeks are reddened, some with rouge and some with wine, most have patches too, covering scars and the shame of disease. Our smiling eyes meet and are distorted in the glass. We are young, so very young, we are jaded matrons too long upon the town, and we are every age in between. We are beautiful, we are handsome, but we are also plain, or even ugly. Our bubbies are small and hard and high, they are so large as to please even a Dutchman, or they droop disappointingly. Our legs are thick and slender, our fragrant breaths stink, our cunnys are so small as to fit every member like a glove, or they accommodate even the largest of swords with room to spare. We are tall, many of us are ‘medium-sized’ and some of us are very, very short, and men like to make a spectacle of our diminutive height. We are educated and we are ignorant. We can recite scripture, sing bawdy songs, play the fiddle and dance at the opera. Sometimes we stand naked on the tables at the Rose Tavern as a figurer.

A handful of us were baptised at St Paul’s on the other side of the market square but most of us journeyed to Covent Garden. We come from cities and shires, all the far corners of the kingdom, all

the nations now united under His Majesty George III, a king born in England but German just the same. We come from Flanders, from France, from Spain and from lands far beyond Europe. We fled sorrow and need and found solace in sorority. We are in good humour and we are free, for now.

The Shakespear’s Head tavern is less populous on the sabbath. The market is silent, the apprentices have returned to their masters, the merchants to their fine city houses and the gentlemen to their pious wives. The landlord, Tomkyns, lets us use an upstairs room without charge, a small concession for the money we make him every other night. A waiter walks ahead of us carrying a flask of claret. He opens the door and holds it as we rustle past, a sharp hawk of a man, whose eyes miss nothing and whose fine clothes belie a shabby heart; a pretender to disgraced head waiter, Harris’s crown. He places the flask upon the table and backs towards the door, his eyes feasting upon us as we call for more chairs, more coal, meat and wine. Some of us sit on the table, some on the floor by the fire and some plop down upon the dozen or so chairs scattered about.

In the candlelight, the room looks well appointed, with fine paintings on the walls and an elaborate plaster fireplace, above which hangs a large oval mirror in a gilt frame with two candles burning bright. The spills, stains and soot recede into the dark corners of the room, but we know them too well to forget they are there.

Once settled, we collect dues, each of us placing half a crown into a purse held by the boy, Ned, before the money is divided. Of each coin, a shilling goes to support our sisters in need, sixpence pays for liquor and so flows back to that reputable scoundrel, Tomkyns. Before he was sent to rot in Newgate Gaol, a shilling from each of us would be taken by Harris, payment for his negotiations on our behalf, on top of what was owed and paid to him before we gathered in this room for our weekly Whore’s Club meeting. Our debt to him could never be repaid. The twenty-pound bond, tire money for the fine clothes in which we preen and pose, and poundage of five shillings for each guinea we earned on our backs that week, would be paid each

Sunday, sure to make him rich and keep us poor and reliant upon his introductions, until he damned us to obscurity and buntering in the perilous alleys by Drury Lane – another man grown rich from women’s industry. But while Harris paces his cell, raging at those who put him there, his share of our dues now funds a more wholesome enterprise than the enrichment of England’s ‘Pimpmaster General’.

Once the purse is full, Ned repairs to a corner of the room to apportion it. Some of our sisters will come later in the evening and add to our funds, some will not come at all this week, being in keeping and unable to get away from the men whose affections they currently hold. Some will be sick and some will be dead, either by the hands of Fortune or brutish men. We discuss those of us with child and so far along they cannot work and Ned writes down their names in his pocketbook. We discuss those of us under the care of the apothecary or the Lock Hospital, taken ill with the clap, the pox, or the French disease. We discuss those dragged to the Fleet for debt, or to Newgate or the Bridewell for theft, disorder and worse. Ned adds their names to the list too and sits quietly calculating how much each will receive to ease their burden this week.

The coin for liquor is placed upon the table and at each return, the waiter eyes it in vain, for we are too worldly to be careless with money so laboriously earned. The rest of the monies remain in Ned’s purse. The boy is trusted. He has been with us for many years, a faithful houseboy who has followed us from brothel, to rooms paid for by our keepers, to the smart suites of rooms in Westminster or St James’s where callers are thoroughly entertained by Nancy, his mistress. There is gossip that Ned is her son, but she asserts it is not so and that she merely made provision for the orphaned child in sympathy when cast off by a keeper. Whatever his story, Ned’s loyalty and discretion is assured, for he has witnessed the truth of men from his earliest days.

With our business concluded, we close the meeting with our customary whore’s prayer, “Heavenly Lord, may our cullies be kind and quick to spend, their coins unclipped and pox-free their pricks”. We start upon the meat of our evening, nourishing our spirits with

gossip, carousing and tales of foolish men with purses looser than our own reputations. We begin with Derrick, the grubby little Irish poet, and the publication of his infamous List, in Harris’s name, in which we are defined and made desirable and damned. It is said a new edition is imminent. Some of us have petitioned, some of us have paid, and some of us have made promises to Derrick, so that he will include us and give a good account of our persons. He has grown boastful since the success of last year’s list, his first, and now claims he has the power to lift a pot scrubber from a chop house in Whitechapel to the noble ground beneath a heaving Lord. But he is not a kind man and those of us who have refused or rebuked him are concerned at his account of us, for even a whore has a reputation worth losing.

Fiona O’Brien

Extract from Lightfall

The ancient world had its own whisper of spirits: gods and goddesses, nymphs and daemons. These were tied to the land; they were the Earth and everything within it. They were the spirits of trees and rivers, of wadis and stars. They had known the beginning. Their existence was written in raindrops, in the dimples of rocks, in the light skimming through leaves. They controlled the seasons, the harvests, the tides. They were to be honoured, but they must also be feared, and repaid in ritual and sacrifice. They did not give something for nothing. Life lay in their hands.

As children, Parisa and Lucy could never agree on whether to admire or despise these celestial beings. Sitting cross-legged on Parisa’s bed with the Golden Compendium of Myths on her knees, Lucy decided she liked them, drawn by the order they gave to the world. It made sense to her that a god like Zeus, huge and regal and ruthless, should be the ultimate decider of fate, bossing deities and mortals around. But Parisa, sniffing unhappily under the covers at the other end of the bed, felt too keenly the injustice.

“But he’s so horrid!” she cried as Lucy read. “Why should she have to turn into a cow when he’s the one who did wrong?” Having no satisfactory reply, Lucy, with a precocious martyrdom, would snap the book shut and refuse to read on unless Parisa piped down – a request Parisa, fed up with being the youngest, seldom obliged.

Their mother’s God was less showy than Zeus and far more prescriptive. (And much less exciting, Parisa said.) While the ancients belonged to the Earth, this God belonged to the architects and, once a week, made them go to his church. There, in the austere light of the red-brick walls, their mother would swipe at their knees to stop them from talking, her hand skimming under the hymnal rack, her eyes never letting go of the priest as he paced cheerlessly to and fro. This God

did not share the ancients’ joy or mischief or camaraderie, insisting –despite his host of angels and Mary and his communion of saints – that he alone was the holy one, he alone was the lord. Threatening the fires of hell, he demanded undivided love and compliance. But he was more sensible too and more willing to barter. Gone were the thunderbolts; now if you sinned, you could go to confession, instead of being turned into a cow. It was an arrangement which Lucy, on balance, thought it wise to accept. While she did not like it exactly, she did as she was told. Of course, Parisa did not. Parisa, who by early adolescence was styling herself as a free spirit, did not see why she should be told to do anything at all. “Sure, heaven sounds great,” she wept to Lucy, after her mother forbade her to go on a date with a much older boy, “but what’s the point of living forever, if in real life you’re not allowed fun?”

Walking down Ame’s main road more than three decades later, carrying Parisa’s breakfast smoothie in the first blaze of the day, it occurred to Lucy that, here at The Haven, her sister had finally found her kind of belief. David’s spirits were neither punitive like the ancients nor unbending like their mother’s. The Beings of Light were not vengeful or jealous, not demanding or judgmental. As an adult, Parisa had flirted with so many faiths, and here she could find hints of them all – Buddhism, Hinduism, Gnosticism, Kabbalah, mysticism, Taoism, Sufism, neopaganism, perennialism, all sorts of isms so that The Haven was less like a creed and more like a gargantuan spiritual pick-and-mix, perfectly suited to Parisa’s fluid, unattached, self-centred way of living. Time moved on and the search for meaning moved with it. Now, you did not even need a god to find meaning, you could just look inside. Now, Lucy thought wryly as she carried the Emolo Energiser up the steps of the Miracle Hotel, Parisa could probably turn herself into a cow if she wanted to badly enough. All she had to do was be open, manifest and receive. All she had to do was believe in David.

They had planned to leave early to avoid the worst of the heat, but when Lucy got back to Room Eight, she found Parisa still on her bed and Doreen, backside in the air, rooting beneath it.

“It’s got to be there somewhere,” Parisa said fractiously, as Lucy came in.

“What?” asked Lucy. The room was stifling. She opened the window to air it.

“My Zeolite. I definitely packed it.”

Doreen extracted herself from under the bed, hauling a plastic bag so full it was almost translucent and upending it on the mattress. Out fell jars and tubs, cardboard boxes and pill sheets, vitamins, laxatives, homeopathic balms, anti-diarrhoeals, herbs, diuretics, minerals. Together they rifled through them, Parisa frantic, Lucy trying to hide her dismay. Her sister had always had a tendency to linger in the supplement aisle, but these days her consumption of pills was huge and erratic. Doreen triumphantly located the Zeolite.

“But what’s it for?” asked Lucy, as Parisa shook out two orange capsules. Lucy tried to give her the smoothie, but she said water would be better and swallowed them dry.

“It has a vibrational frequency that removes toxins,” she explained, as Doreen got her a glass. Continuing to sift through the pile, she chose a turmeric tablet, a Haven pill, and two vitamin Es, gulping them down.

“You should never drink water that’s been boiled in a kettle,” she said pointedly. “It’s full of oestrogen.”

“Doreen used bottled water,” said Lucy. “You don’t even have a kettle.”

“Gloria told me. She’s a macrobiotic.”

Lucy allowed herself a roll of the eyes.

“I still don’t see how you can walk to the lightfall,” she said, looking at her watch, “if you can barely get out of bed.”

Tears immediately shone in Parisa’s eyes. “Oh, am I holding you up?” she replied.

“It’s not about time,” said Lucy, in a tone that suggested it was.

“I’m sorry to be such an inconvenience.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I never said that.”

“So, I’m ridiculous too, am I?”

Lucy sighed.

“I was only thinking of you,” she said. “I thought you might need rest.”

“But I’m the one who needs the fall!”

Her need rang out like a gunshot. Lucy felt it in her stomach, so hard that she took a step back. When the echo had died, Doreen sat on the bed.

“How about a wheelchair, hon?” she said kindly. “We could push you.”

Parisa looked at her with Disney eyes. “Do you think we could?” she said.

Doreen looked to Lucy. Thin-lipped, Lucy nodded, annoyed she had not thought of a wheelchair herself.

“Why don’t I go get one,” said Doreen. “Leave you two to get ready.”

When she had gone, Parisa turned her great liquid eyes to Lucy. Now she had won, she would act wounded and helpless.

“Would you be willing to help me get dressed?” she asked, and of course Lucy would, taking instructions, weeding dutifully through the mess in the cupboard to find the right skirt, the right pants, the right blouse. For a while, she clung to her annoyance, but soon it rubbed off in the easing of clothes, in the reality of wasting flesh, sharp bone. The blouse hung loose; when she brushed Parisa’s hair, long grey strands came off on the brush, tired and wiry. Lucy said nothing as she helped, but when she was done, she planted a kiss on her sister’s head. Parisa smiled, contented. And the quarrel – as all of their quarrels – was gone, dissolved in the undertow of their lives.

Erin Peacock

Extract from Hoggyliche

Berri’s unexpected reunion with her father takes place on the A1176 heading eastbound towards Spalding, as the front of his Audi Sportback crashes into the rear of her Fiat Punto. The opening seconds of the impact are dense with confusion. There’s a meatiness to them, iron-rich, fat-thick, whilst the seconds that close are feathery and dry, buoyant with disbelief. The cold crunch of metal combines with hissing air, before the gasping finality of her spin to a standstill. Berri’s body adjusts to its change of pace, its sudden motionlessness, its not being where it should be, stirring the great roundabout ahead like a languid teaspoon.

As she stares at her dad through their smashed front windows, a pool of shattered glass in her lap, she isn’t struck by fear, or panic, or pain, but rather by the sheer improbability of the situation. Briefly, she wishes she’d died in the collision, if only to save herself the embarrassment of it. Any scale of absence can add an uncanny awkwardness to a conversation, but Berri would never have conceived that the first words she’d hear from him after twenty years would be: “Well, there goes my no-claims bonus.”

It’s approaching midday, but the sun has yet to nudge its way through the salt flat cloud. The scene is Spring and clumsy; a blunt pencil sketch with 4B smudges where tyres have screeched across the graphite asphalt. A scraggy hedgerow is pockmarked with shrivelled berries. Ploughed fields have spat out hunks of mud onto the road, which are flattened amongst rabbits, rats and fallen straw from lorries past. Berri thinks she might stay in the car forever, belted into its synthetic seat, stained with sweat from summer drives. It’s only when Matt reaches over from her passenger’s seat, trembling and frantic, to tell her she’s bleeding, that Berri remembers she has a boyfriend and indeed a life outside surviving a car crash. Matt sticks a finger to her

scalp, wipes, then shows her the resulting red as though offering a taste of freshly made jam. She thinks to lick it, then decides against this.

“That’s Larry,” she says, calm as the kite perched on a nearby fencepost preening itself, seemingly unmoved by the accident. “That’s my dad.”

Matt laughs. Even after eight years together and a complete lack of evidence, he remains convinced that Berri is a funny person. She waits patiently for him to process her sincerity.

“Well, I suppose this could get rather uncomfortable,” he replies, even though it already is. Jittery, pale and quite possibly in shock, Matt peels Berri from the exploded, cystic airbag where she has buried her face, nibbling on the nylon between her stained front teeth. She thinks he might tell her that he loves her, because this is what people do after near death experiences. Instead, he gets out the car.

Larry inspects his bonnet, piggish and crumpled into a 30mph sign. His hands are on his head in veritable anguish. Several witnesses have pulled over, their doors swung open in a rush to check for casualties. They huddle around Larry who swipes them away with impatience. When Berri alights from her vehicle, the sudden unease of the twitching onlookers makes clear she is assumed to be culpable for the crash.

One woman emerges from the front of a lumbering minivan with blacked out windows, her translucent leggings revealing thick, creamy varicose veins. She retrieves a foil blanket from her boot, unfurling it with a loud, lightning clap. The noise makes Berri wince and tenderness ripples from her temples. The woman says something about whiplash. When offered the blanket, Berri accepts, folding herself into it. I’m a turkey dinner, she thinks. She wonders whether her reactions are being perceived as normal, typical; whether this is what a car crash should feel like, or how it looks on television. She looks around for cameras, booms and a director’s chair. There is just steel, glass and the imprint of tyres torn through the grass verge, the delicate stems of giant daisies snapped, wheezing.

Matt attempts to dismiss the clingier spectators with a strained performance of authority. His voice shakes as he announces that no

one is hurt and everyone is fine. This statement feels premature. But the crowd disperses, leaving behind exotic fruit clouds puffed from disposable vapes. The woman with varicose veins heaves herself into the driver’s seat, shouting at a child in the back who has drawn greasy penises into a patch of breathy condensation. As they drive away, Berri feels relieved, for no clear reason, that the woman was uglier than her.

Berri’s approach towards her father is staggered. She worries that her wobbling stride might alarm Matt, so she makes an adept, swooping dodge of Larry’s attempt to hug her, hoping this will placate any concerns over the possibility of concussion.

“I’m so sorry,” Larry whines as Berri addresses the carnage of the scene. A leather chamois sprawls behind him, crusted like old, picked skin. ‘This was all my fault. Completely my fault.’

These words are more akin to what Berri has been hoping for upon their eventual meeting, though the reason behind them is different to what she has invented during restless nights as foxes shriek outside, or dramatic shower reconstructions that repeatedly end in his brutal demise.

“You were going way too fast,” Matt interjects, anger beginning to blister the initial shock. He jabs a finger towards the speed limit sign. “There’s no way you should be overtaking on a road like this. Imagine what could’ve happened.” By this, he means: imagine if we’d all died.

Berri’s voice is crunchy. “What are you doing here?”

“We’ve had a crash,” Larry soothes, as though she’s unaware, perhaps stupid.

“I mean, I thought you lived abroad now.”

“Ah, well,” he says, and this is all he says. His ironed shirt is flecked with snags. The top three buttons are pompously undone, as they might be on any man who has retired to Corfu and possesses such disregard for the highway code.

Larry checks his gold watch and, realising its face has smashed, the minute hand stuttering lamely, rips it from his wrist and throws it to the floor. Matt flinches from the verge where he has escaped to inform the police of their situation. He pulls his phone away from his

ear briefly, seeming to assess for impending violence. When his call is answered he starts, turns away, then apologises into the speaker.

“I suppose you’ll want my number.” Larry gestures for Berri’s phone. She is concerned by the orderly progression of this strange event, having expected the experience of a car accident to include more screaming, more fire, perhaps an explosion.

“Not especially.”

Behind them, drivers gawp, or pretend not to, as they filter past mechanically, slowing for the thrill of it, the thrill that something terrible is happening to someone who is not them.

“You know, you look just like your mother,” Larry says pensively, addressing her with a cocked head. The deep, fleshy wrinkles of his brow sparkle with sebum.

‘That’s an observation that has been made before, yes, and often by people who also pertain to know me much better than they actually do.” Berri returns to her car and searches the grimy floor for her phone. It’s still attached to the aux. When she pulls it free, a spark ignites. A single, barely perceptible crack has appeared down the centre of the screen. She presses it, hard, screams, then watches as a dystopian web appears. Upon her return, Larry watches Berri intently, her curdling yelp clearly rendering him alarmed by his daughter, not for the first time.

“You just crashed into my car. I won’t apologise for seeming perturbed,” she says, acknowledging his expression of uneasy bewilderment. “Here you go.”

She throws her phone at Larry hard in the direction of his groin. Without any time to prepare, deflect, or swerve, it meets its target. He doubles over. Matt rolls his eyes theatrically, then returns his focus to remembering Berri’s licence plate, which he reads out using a sandwich-based version of the phonetic alphabet. E for egg, C for cress, M for mayonnaise.

Holly Redshaw

Extract from Agnes of the Marshwaters

Ihope you’re not doing what I think you’re doing. That fish could be someone’s meal, you know.”

Agnes nearly jumped out of her skin at the sudden, sharp voice behind her. The eel twisted and writhed in shock, slipping out of her hands and back into the water below. Furious, Agnes raised her head in time to see a mid-sized seabird alight on the raised end of a half-submerged log, light reflecting off its green-black feathers like an oil spill. With a beat of its wings, the bird shuffled on webbed feet and then was perfectly still. It looked at Agnes with electric yellow eyes and Agnes stared right back. She hardly dared breathe.

“And what,” said Cormorant, in a voice like a straight razor, “are you doing all the way out here, Miss Marshall?”

Cormorant held his hooked beak slightly lifted as always; half noble, half supercilious. His snake-like neck curled and coiled upon itself, and the dark green sheen over his feathers gave him an unsettling serpentine air.

“Am I not allowed?” Agnes replied, trying not to let her voice waver. She could count on one hand the number of times Cormorant had spoken to her directly. Her initial impulse was to apologise and explain herself, but there was also that other part of herself; the part that bristled and tensed and wanted to bite people’s heads off.

“There are no official rules, as such,” said Cormorant. “But there are safe places for humans to venture and this is not one of them.”

“Unsafe because of the tides?” said Agnes, faux-dumbly.

Cormorant looked down at her wearily.

“Don’t be facetious. You’re a Marshall, so don’t try to play stupid with me. I’m not a crow and I don’t enjoy games. These eel traps have been here since the last century; no new ones have ever been built and for good reason. Other things were here once. This is

verging on hallowed ground.” Cormorant blinked once at Agnes, who remained silent.

“But then, perhaps,” he said, “that is exactly why you’re here. Unless you’re having a career change and mean to turn trapper yourself, which, personally, I find highly unlikely.”

Agnes resisted the urge to snap that he probably didn’t know what she did for a living anyway and remained mute. For some reason, interacting with Cormorant often made her feel like she wanted to cry.

“Well? Is it?” snapped Cormorant. “Is that why you’re out here? Magic hunting, looking for your ancestry?”

He sneered his last sentence in such a way that Agnes bristled instantly and felt her spine straighten out with the heat of it. She drew herself up as best she could from where she crouched on the bank.

“So what if I am?” she said shortly. “What business is it of yours what I’m looking for? I live on the marshes too. It’s not impossible that someone around here is finally interested in the things that live here, or the things that used to.”

Cormorant laughed.

“You can quite clearly see what’s happening here,” he said. “Surely even you can tell the cause of it is beyond any human. Only—” He stopped short. Agnes blinked at him.

“Only what?”

“Nothing.”

She smiled to herself.

“If it’s beyond a human, a normal person…” she mused, looking slyly up at Cormorant, “do you count witches as humans?”

Cormorant twisted his long neck threateningly and his yellow eyes took on a reptilian glaze.

“My dear child,” he said icily. “In these wonderful days of modern convenience, what on earth could prompt an interest in such a thing as witches?”

It was not a real question. Cormorant’s eyes slid slowly down to Agnes’s hands and she reflexively clenched them shut. They had that queer sensation again – cold at the fingertips, dry heat pricking at her palms.

Cormorant laughed softly under his breath.

“Surely you don’t think…”

Agnes felt herself go beetroot red and the seabird sighed.

“Oh, you silly girl,” he said with distaste, the words cutting across Agnes like a blade had been slid across her windpipe. She looked down at her feet, her throat tightening as she tried to swallow the stinging tears burning at her eyes.

“I’m a Marshall,” she said with as much dignity as she could, still not meeting Cormorant’s eye. “Like you said, that means something. You talk to my father and my mother. You talk to us, the family. Not much, but more than anyone else. So, what are we meant to do? Nothing?”

“It is a bold assumption that you might even be able to do something.”

“Not all witches were killed. Many just left. Is it so ridiculous to suppose one might come to help here? Or that… that there is one who could help?” Agnes flinched minutely at the use of the ‘W’ word while noting that, interestingly, so did Cormorant.

Cormorant scoffed. “What, like you?”

“No. Not necessarily.”

Cormorant’s eyes widened, pale yellow around the edges, where the whites of his eyes should have been.

“Gods, your parents really did let you read too many fairy books when you were little,” he said. “The Marshwitch isn’t real, you stupid girl. Magic might remain, no one’s denying that, but the witches are gone. Can’t you get that into your thick head?”

“There is no need,” Agnes replied stiffly, trying not to lose her temper completely, “to be quite so rude to me. You live on the marshes and I don’t see anyone else trying to do anything about all… this.”

“Because you couldn’t even explain what this is, to the rest of them,” hissed Cormorant. “Could you? Can you imagine going to that leadbrained lot in the town and trying to explain this to them? What would you say? The traps are empty, yes. But just as crops fail some years, so do animals. A multitude of things could affect breeding. So, then you’ll get the marshmen to act as your witnesses, will you? To vouch

for the other animals; the birds, the wildfowl that are either gone or found rotting where they lie. And you expect a load of townsfolk to take seriously the mutterings of crustaceans still backwards enough to be living out in shacks on floodplains? Even if they did take notice that the fauna is failing, the creatures disappearing, why would they care? They have roads to big towns and cities. More people buy motorcars each week. They have hot running water, warm houses, food arrives in tins on their doorsteps and the news comes daily. Why should they care? And then—” Cormorant barely paused for breath, “and then, the solution you offer them is to seek out a witch of old, the thing that terrifies them most; to offer up a Marshwitch as the solution to a problem that they don’t even care about?”

Cormorant’s feathered breast heaved with the exertion of his impassioned speech, spat out like poison on the ground in front of him. Agnes looked at him blankly.

“I never said anything about the Marshwitch,” she said eventually. She tilted her head at Cormorant. “So, she is real then, or was?”

The fire had gone from Cormorant’s now pastel-hued eyes.

“I am not discussing this with you any further,” he said with a grim finality. “You are a child grasping at adult things. I am not your steward or your tutor; leave this to those who know what they’re doing. Go home, Agnes.” As an afterthought, he added, “And give my regards to your parents.”

As he flew off haughtily into the greying sky, furious retorts dying on her tongue, Agnes thought about how many of the birds who could still talk spent their time telling her what they weren’t, whilst remaining maddeningly unclear about what they were.

Maxine Sibihwana

Extract from Overbite

here, in Benefit-Of-The-Doubt, where we live, where we start our story, there is so much to be thankful for. When I was a boy, this place was a speck of dust waiting to be swept away. God forgot our names when it was time for blessings. Even Satan kept us in afterthought. No one was coming to collect us. Nobody wanted to chew air. And I was the air waiting to be chewed.

The one whom I was supposed to call father, Drunk-AndDelinquent, was a devil who kept me in afterthought. A cocktail of confused speech and fermented saliva always bubbled at the corner of his crispy-lipped mouth. His right hand and his penis were in a committed relationship and paraded their love for each other around the village. Drunk-And-Delinquent met my mother, Too-Young-To-Be-This-Troubled, on a night when the moon was full and so was his liver.

Too-Young, only partially bloomed, was searching for precious stones washed up on the riverbed. Back then, Too-Young and her mother would sell stones from the riverside to travellers in search of mystical objects. And mystical they were indeed! The same stones that could give you babies could salt your earth. The same stones that were just washed-up carbon.

That night, as Too-Young searched the earth around her, she felt the scratch of crispy lips on her neck. A slithering tongue in her ear. The burn of entitlement between her legs. Two moons later, she felt the itch of pregnancy in her belly. Many moons later, I erupted.

As a boy, I watched The White Man turn my mother’s mystic treasures into rosary beads. Mysticism, apparently, was a problem for God. Even though you could use the rosary to pray to God for babies or sow your soil with salt. The rosary, made of washed-up carbon. As a boy, I watched White Man spin empty meanings into yarn.

Anyway, today, in Benefit-Of-The-Doubt, there is so much to be thankful for. See, God may be the biggest fish far away, wherever he rules, but here, he is just tilapia. I am the one that the people offer their carbon prayers to. People enjoy giving me everything precious to them and I am not shy about receiving precious things. I am not shy when I consume them.

My appetite is quite unique, and my people respect it. They encourage me to be the fullest, most abundant, big-bellied version of myself. We are a tight-knit community. My needs are always fulfilled. Benefit-Of-The-Doubt, the teat that I have suckled since birth, never tires of me. Even when it had nothing, I would suck and it would always find a way to provide.

And I will always return the favour. My name is Every-Man. I offer a service for the Troubled Parents of Troubled Girls, by taking them off their ill-equipped hands and placing them in the warmth of my stomach.

What makes a girl troubled? It is not for me to decide or care, truthfully. I learned from a childhood of watching my mother and grandmother sell stones with dubious meanings that the customer is always right. Allowing my customers to decide whether or not their girl was troubled gave my business the room to grow and develop on its own without me having to lurk in the shadows. I conduct my business in the light.

In Benefit-Of-The-Doubt, I am a respectable entrepreneur. And in this place, which God forgot, how great was my faithfulness for me to be rewarded so deliciously?

Do not confuse me with the one whom I am supposed to call father. I am nothing like him. To me, there is no honour in taking what does not belong to you, forcing seed into unsuspecting women and vanishing when they erupt, like planting a bomb and acting confused when it detonates?

My diet is unorthodox, sure, but its originality is applauded because I protect tradition. This is a family-friendly business, after all,

and how can a family-friendly business flourish without honouring core family values? Without honouring heritage? You see, I do not take these girls without warning, I speak to their parents. I serve them a full plate of Pleases and Thank Yous.

Of “Wasuze otya nno, Nyabo” and “Gyebale ko, Ssebo”.

And I do not take these young girls. I eat them.

Now I know what you’re thinking; Yii, nawe Every-Man! Eating young girls? How could you do such? Do not be angry with me for simply taking my place in society. Everyone has their role to play.

Nga, your role is cannibalism? What would God think! God’s not here.

*

Too-Young was very soft. A boneless and braindead soft. Too delicate to locate common sense. Too brittle to find joy in being my mother. I was a fat decaying corpse that she carried on her shoulders daily. Motherhood was the cross that she would carry to Calvary.

Each day for her began with soaking her face in tears. As if the fatty meat of her cheeks needed more softening. As if she wanted to dissolve. Why have you forsaken me! she wept at The White Man’s God, as if a parrot or a skipping record.

I never cared for my mother’s hysterics, but I do owe her gratitude for creating an environment that facilitated my entrepreneurial spirit. When I was a boy, she would go away for many days selling her beads and her body to the highest bidder. And in my newfound independence alone in our home, I was able to prepare my meals with ingredients that I had sourced by myself. I learned what it means to graft. Not many boys my age knew the meaning of a hard-earned meal. Too-Young was setting me up to be unique.

The neighbours’ bisasiro was a great source of food, full of fresh banana peels, discarded tree bark, old tea leaves and congealed milk. If I was lucky and someone had died or got married, I’d find old stew and

suck the marrow out of old chicken bones. A good source of protein was crucial for my growth. And if the Neighbour was asleep under his favourite tree, I would eat the decaying fruit and vegetables in his compost. It was filled with the nutritious rinds and scraped gourds that helped me keep an organic balanced diet. I learned how to value all kinds of food. It is impolite not to eat whatever is presented to you.

And as a man, I grew to understand the strain of unwanted children. I learned that water is God, so I wash the sinful flesh of each troubled girl I prepare to eat. Maybe if my mother washed me properly, I could have been like those soap-scented boys with polished shoes and fat stomachs. The soap-scented boys who went to school. Those who grow up in glory and go on to be priests or police or presidents.

But I found glory in my own way. I worked my way up and I work for myself. Even the President, his excellency himself, first needs to ask for permission through general elections before doing presidential things. I started my business with my own permission. I have my mother to thank for that.

I began by looking for girls who reminded me of her. With thigh meat that fell off the bone, with eyes deep-set in the skull, with a brain full of vacancy and a body soft as air to chew. As significant as a discarded plastic bag.

The way my mother floated from bed to bed, from tear to tear, I realised very quickly that not even I would miss her. The wind would blow, and she would blow away with it. I knew, from eating compost and bisasiro, that food tasted better when nobody would miss it, when no one would question me about where I found it or how I got it. And in Benefit-Of-The-Doubt, those who did not uphold the good wholesome standards of our community were easily forgotten.

Almost-But-Not-Yet-A-Woman reminded me of my mother. She was someone very soft to chew, but a lot more remarkable – she enjoyed running and she would run very very quickly! Legs that sliced through the wind. Feet so light, they started to fly. Unforgettable! She was my first love. She twisted the ligaments of my heart to feel love. She was truly interesting.

Audrey Slade

Extract from The Making of Lynn Bartowicz

Lynn Bartowicz had always wanted to be Jewish. Actually, what she really wanted was to be successful, but she came to see Jewishness – not Judaism itself, to be clear – as a shortcut to that state.

The idea began when she was a child, through the influence of her father, Paul Bartowicz – or Paweł Bartoszewicz, as he was christened. Paul was a money man at one of the film studios. Not a money man in the sense of financing films, but a money man in the sense of counting other people’s money as it made its way in and out of the studio’s books. In other words, he was an accountant or, more accurately, a bookkeeper. He told Lynn that he’d written several scripts and tried to pitch them to the studios, but none were taken up. Thus, he remained a money man, on the outside looking in.

What he also told her, over and over, was that so many of the studio heads, the producers, the directors were Jewish. Not only that, but the doctors, the lawyers, the bankers – Jewish, all of them. Lynn knew he was exaggerating, but nevertheless he had planted a seed. And so, when she extracted herself from the West Coast and installed herself on the East Coast, she took this idea with her.

Far exceeding the achievements of her parents, and living out their hopes for their only child, Lynn had attended one of the better California universities courtesy of a generous financial aid package. As soon as she graduated, English degree (with economics minor) in hand, she took herself off to New York. It was the last day of June, 1988.

She had enough money to see her through a week at a dismal hotel on the far West Side. Although embarrassed by the state of the place, in years to come she would talk about her stay in Hell’s Kitchen with obvious pride, embellishing the description so it sounded even worse

than it was. In fact, though, it truly was grim, from the surly front desk clerk behind the cloudy Plexiglas screen to the broken-down elevators to the urine smell that rose up with each step on the filthy corridor carpet. She would close her eyes when she leaned down into the brown-stained sink to brush her teeth. Whenever possible, she ‘did her business’ in the bathroom of a nearby coffee shop rather than use the shared facilities in the hotel.

Within two days of arrival she’d found work as a temp in a law firm. Looking around at the Singers, Weinsteins and Schwarzes on the name plates, she nodded inwardly, sensing her father just might have been right.

As Lynn walked the streets she stared at everyone, hoping to unlock the magic of what made them special. People seemed imbued with firmness, a sense of clarity and decisiveness, while she, in contrast, was tentative, unsure. The women, even those not conventionally pretty, were sharply defined. Lynn, by contrast, looked out of focus, her hair a middling brown, her eyes an indecisive hazel, her rounded face lacking any clear lines of demarcation.

Through an advertisement in the Village Voice, she found an apartment share with two other women in the West 90s, about 20 blocks south of Columbia University. The main tenant on the lease, Pamela Rubinstein, had the master bedroom. It was large and pretty and had its own bathroom. Lisa Carter had the second real bedroom. Lynn was allocated the tiny maid’s room.

Pamela seemed to be without money worries even though she worked in publishing, a notoriously unremunerative field. With her hair parted on the left and swooping over to the right in a series of luxuriant gentle waves finishing just below her chin, her jewel-coloured sweaters over black pencil skirts and black tights finishing in pointy black suede shoes, she seemed the embodiment of a certain type of Upper West Side Jewish New Yorker: comfortably to the north of the middle-class mark and confident of her place in that world.

Two months after Lynn’s arrival, Pamela and Lisa threw as big a party as one could in a not-quite-three-bedroom apartment. Pamela loaned Lynn a sapphire-coloured sweater and Lisa supplied a pair of chic boots. Lynn had to provide her own skirt – there was no thought that she would find one capacious enough in anyone else’s closet.

“Seemed like you struck up a conversation with Greg,” said Pamela the morning after the party. She and Lynn were having coffee while Lisa and someone she’d met the night before were murmuring away in the bedroom, possibly in a hurried round of intimacy or, more likely, in a shuffle toward an awkward goodbye.

“Yeah, he was great,” said Lynn. “And so smart. He works in finance at Oldman Sachs.”

“Goldman Sachs, you mean,” said Pamela as she refilled their cups.

“Right, sorry – Goldman. Glad you told me before I embarrassed myself.”

“Hmm.”

“Actually, I think he might have asked me out.”

“Really? What exactly did he say?”

“Something like, ‘it was nice meeting you. Maybe we’ll bump into each other again.’”

“Right,” was all Pamela said. She took a long sip from her giant coffee mug, which was big enough to hide her eyes as she drank.

When, a month later, the date still hadn’t materialised, Lynn persuaded Pamela to arrange a dinner party, where Greg would be one of the guests.

Sitting to Greg’s left at the table, Lynn looked for an opportunity to start a one-on-one conversation. She’d done research on Goldman and was ready with her questions.

“Did you always want to work in investment banking?”

“Not always. There was the inevitable family pressure – be a doctor, be a lawyer. I decided instead to become the third Jewish cliché, a banker.” Greg had grey eyes, curly brown hair and straight

white teeth. He was wearing a navy-blue sweater that was impossibly soft – Lynn knew this because she accidently-on-purpose brushed up against his arm when she leaned down to pick up her napkin, which had dropped to the floor. “What about you?” he asked.

“My father works in finance at Paramount Studios,” said Lynn, hoping his position would sound important. “To be completely honest, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do when I came to New York, but I’m actually thinking of getting into banking. I minored in economics.”

“Well, I’m not saying it just because I work there, but it really is true that Goldman is the top place. Or Lehman Brothers. All the big investment banks run training programmes and it doesn’t even matter what you studied – you could be an English major for all they care. As long as you have the aptitude, they can train you.”

Lynn asked how she could get into the training programme and Greg explained that most people come in straight from undergraduate, though occasionally they might find their way in through another route. “It doesn’t hurt to do something that makes you look interesting,” he said.

Lynn spent the next several months upgrading. She began volunteering with two non-profit organisations, one focused on introducing poor children to the arts and the other aimed at getting poor children into good colleges. She gradually improved her wardrobe by buying items on sale at Bloomingdale’s, even if they sometimes fit awkwardly.

The law firm where she was temping took her on permanently in a research role. The firm had a large practice in real estate and was involved in all the glittery deals in the city, following them up and down as they boomed and collapsed. Lynn spent as much time as she could in the firm’s library, learning about financing structures, and within six months she knew enough to be convincing in a job interview. Through an introduction from one of the law firm partners, she managed her way into an informational interview and eventually into an actual job in the real estate group at Goldman. Not as glamorous as mergers and acquisitions or some of the other fancier areas, but it was still Goldman: the Jewish investment bank.

Abby J Walker

Extract from To Set the House in Order

her father is sitting at the kitchen table, the rain lashing against the long window behind his head. The candles and lamps are unlit, the range cold. His hands are wrapped around the mug of tea Bonnie made for him before she left. His eyes, turned down into it, are elsewhere. There’s weight in his face; he hasn’t buried anything today.

His salt-and-pepper hair is damp but not wet. His hands are clean and white around the mug, inside which the tea will be cold by now. Either he is trying to convince her he has been here since she left or he simply hasn’t noticed how much time has passed.

“Would you like another tea?” she asks from the doorway.

He doesn’t react. She moves closer. His mouth is slightly open, the tip of his tongue working over his front teeth. He’s breathing badly again. The rain will clear the air for him, at least.

Bonnie goes to the range and empties the ash, arranging a pyre of kindling and coal in its place. She lights it and places the kettle over the burner.

As the water heats up, she puts away the groceries: the meat, the butter, the sugar, placing them beside the eggs she collected at dawn. It had been the first morning Bonnie noticed the darkness lingering. Summer over again, and so quickly.

Cough medicine in hand, she opens the cupboard above the sink and a small stream of flat brown somethings flutter down onto the countertop. Bonnie picks one up. Sycamore seeds. Then she notices others, scattered on the floor of the kitchen like dead moths. There is a small bundle of them under the table beside her father’s bad leg.

She puts the medicine away.

He’s been collecting, not burying, and not so long since the conkers. Bonnie woke to hundreds of them placed in a long line down the main staircase, snaking into rooms like the track from a child’s train set.

She keeps finding the empty skins under furniture when she cleans, soft with rot.

Bonnie glances over her shoulder at him. Still occupied. She opens the drawer beside the range and takes out a small mirror. As she expected, the rain has washed the smudges of blood from her face, leaving a smattering of pink semi-circles behind. The deepest sits in the cushion of skin beneath her left eye, made by Calloway’s index finger. She touches the cut, feels its edges.

You bring her home.

Bonnie draws in a breath – holds it – until the voice, and the memory of it, fades. But the breath sticks.

Two pale blue eyes have returned from elsewhere. They are watching her from the edge of the mirror. Bonnie places the mirror back into the drawer and turns to her father. His eyes flicker just a fraction from hers, taking stock of her face and then back.

She waits for him to ask who hurt her.

“Mrs Calloway,” she says, when he doesn’t. “Ada’s mother.”

He lifts a finger and taps once on the rim of his mug and Bonnie turns to the range to wait.

Her voice had sounded strange when she said Ada’s name, like it had to be forced around something in her throat. Perhaps the wet has gone to her chest already. She realises she doesn’t feel well: lightheaded and hollow-legged.

At the first notes of a whistle, Bonnie takes the kettle from the burner and pours the water into a fresh mug. Two sugars. She places it in front of him. His hands are slow to release the old cup, only surrendering it when Bonnie nudges the new one closer, drawn by the heat.

“Do you need anything else?” she asks.

He draws a finger around the rim of the cup.

“I’ll be upstairs,” Bonnie says. “If you do.”

“Wait.”

Eyes still on his tea, he reaches out his hand. She takes it. He runs his thumb over her knuckles, down the bones in the back of her hand. She knows her father’s hands more than she knows her own, would

know them without sight. They are the parts of him she recognises when she doesn’t recognise anything else. She can feel how they used to feel in her childhood hands. Bigger, the callouses shallower, but undeniably his.

He squeezes her hand once.

“Thank you,” he says.

“You’re welcome,” she says.

With a final squeeze, he drops her hand and returns his to the heat of the cup.

“I’m going upstairs now,” Bonnie says.

She lights three of the fires before she goes – kitchen, sitting room, dining room – then heads for the service staircase, where the steps are steep and the ceiling low. There is no light, the snapped necks of the old gas lamps hanging above her head. She can do without light. She likes the darkness and the narrowness of this staircase. The main corridors are too open, like long rooms in themselves.

Emerging onto the east corridor on the second floor, Bonnie follows the faded red carpet-runner to her room and crawls between the cold sheets of her bed. Her headache swells against the pillow, then calms.

The cold is her punishment, deserved, though her lateness wasn’t entirely her fault, as it is not the house’s fault that it is cold. Some things are simply beyond her control. Even if the doors had stayed locked and she had lit the fires before she left, the heat still wouldn’t have reached her room until morning. The house is too big and too stubborn and there is nothing to be done about it. She cannot blame it for its nature. It was not built for only two to rattle around inside.

Three, if counting the one in the basement, but Bonnie hasn’t heard Ada rattle in a while.

Bonnie sleeps badly and the morning – sharp and bright and cold – is a relief. She kneels in the wet dirt with her back to the south side of the house, picking raspberries from the garden. The autumn raspberries are better than the summer ones this year, each one the colour of honey.

They fall from their stalks with the gentlest brush of encouragement and drop into Bonnie’s palm. Most make it to the tub beside her. Some are too good not to sneak into her mouth. She chooses a particularly fat one and sweetness bursts between her teeth.

The deeper into the plant she reaches, the paler the raspberries become. They resist when she pulls, like baby teeth still fixed to the gum. She leaves those ones.

Then, on her hands and knees, she spots something at the very back, almost against the trellis. One golden raspberry, sitting in the shadow of the plant. Bonnie shifts the leaves. Its flesh has grown long and down, a gaunt cousin to the others, the biggest of the season by far.

She reaches for it, fingertips about to touch, when something grabs her ankle. She overbalances, her face scratching against thorns, ribs hitting the ground. She twists – a stalk snaps – and then the thing at her ankle is pulling, dragging. The leaves whip past, the sky uncovered, hands raised in front of her face.

Her father stands above her. Their eyes lock, hold there and she cannot blink, cannot look away, must stay absolutely still.

Her father’s face splinters into a smile. He points to the bucket.

“I caught you sneaking them,” he says.

Short Story

Liz Churchill

Extract from It’s Probably Fine

Nat nearly steps on it before he notices the tiny face peeking out –tiny, indistinct features, shadows of long hair hanging like riddles (it could be any colour) and all of her clouded in blue light. It’s not a good quality photograph but, involuntarily, he moves towards it. He’s always enjoyed the whole siren fantasy; a sexually irresistible woman –scent of danger on her breath, bounce of death in her breasts, killing men with lust. OK, stop the cartoonish wank-fodder, he thinks. He also thinks: what a great way to go. Then he thinks of his mum. Christ.

Crouching down, Nat picks up the open purse from the pavement, takes it in his palms and holds it like a holy book. There is nobody around. He can see no-one up and down the length of this residential road. He stares back and forth. Surely somebody will come? But all he sees are terraced houses staring back at him with defensive window and door faces. Nat chooses the closest one, steps forward and knocks.

“Yes mate, yes mate, yes mate.” The voice pumps of the man who opens the door. He sounds impressed. His body bobs up and down like it’s aboard a boat.

Nat feels nauseous; whether this is due to the man’s sea-sickly movement or a more generalised sense of dread, he’s not sure.

“Hi mate, yes.” Nat echoes. At times, Nat is very good at social mirroring. “I’ve just found a purse.”

“Yes mate!” the man congratulates. He shouts, in fact, as if there’s loud music playing and he’s trying to make himself heard.

“So, I’m trying to locate the owner.”

“Right,” the man nods.

“There’s a driving license.” Nat shows it to the man. “Do you recognise her?”

The man laughs. His eyes seem permanently narrowed with mirth, like just-split mussels. “Never seen her before in my life.”

“Ok, thanks. I guess I’ll put a post on the local Facebook group or something. I just feel a bit uncomfortable about holding on to it, you know… because it’s not my property.”

The man stops smiling. “Are you worried, mate?”

“If I’m honest, a little bit. Yes.” Nat feels vulnerable. He feels as if he might suddenly unburden himself of something to this unpredictable stranger.

“Video! I’ll do a video of you holding it! That will prove you didn’t steal it.” The man dives back into his house.

“Right,” says Nat, to the now empty doorway.

The man comes back a few seconds later with his phone and starts filming. Nobody speaks. The man walks reverently in a wide circle around Nat. His body seems suddenly more controlled and more defined, like a matador. The man points his phone all the time at the purse. He stands still and moves it towards the purse then away from it, lifting it high above his head, leaving it up there for a second or two. Then he brings it down with a flourish as if he’s just nailed a flamenco routine. “Decent bit of footage,” he says. Then he backs away and closes the door to his house without a word.

Nat stands still on the doorstep. He feels strange.

Once home, in the privacy of his kitchen, Nat takes the purse from his back pocket. It feels wrong to rifle through it, but it’s only now that he feels he can, and should, take a closer look at the driver’s licence. It sits in the transparent cardholder as though it’s a piece of ID regularly flashed. Her face is younger-looking than his – maybe late twenties? Then he remembers the date of birth is shown; she is twenty-eight. Just a few years younger than him and Lissa. She has a haunted look about her, very serious, like a lonely seventies housewife from a song sung by Karen Carpenter.

But then nobody ever looks that healthy in a driving licence photo do they? Except Lissa. Lissa’s told him on more than one occasion that she’s always been photogenic. Some people just are, Nat, and some – she likes to say as she ruffles his hair like a dog – aren’t. A photograph is like

capturing someone’s essence. If you don’t know what your essence is, then you’re always going to be trapped in headlights, waiting for someone to rescue you.

He stares at the licence. Her name is Mabel Matthews. Alliterative. Like a superhero. Or a cartoon character. Or an American talk-show host. Mabel. It’s not a name he associates with a woman in her twenties. It’s a name of his great-granny’s generation. A name that’s come back into fashion for baby girls. Mabel. So close to marble. Hard and beautiful. Nat tries to imagine Mabel’s face fully animated. How does she smile, frown, laugh, show surprise? Her skin is grey in the photograph like she’s dead. He wonders how soft it really is and what shapes her cheeks, nose and chin make when viewed in three dimensions. How does she speak? What’s her body like? What makes her happy? What makes her sad? Why did she lose this purse? Is she just careless? Did she drop it on purpose? Did she want someone to find it? Did she want Nat to find it? Does she want Nat to find her?

“I’m back.” It’s Lissa.

Nat quickly closes the purse and places it in his pocket, sits on it. “Hey,” he says.

“So, Jen’s got the tickets.” Lissa says, and gives Nat a business-like peck on the cheek.

“Oh, great!” Nat says. A split-second later, he realises he doesn’t know what these tickets are for. “Oh god, sorry. What are these tickets for again?”

“Oh god, sorry,” mimics Lissa, deepening her voice, laughing. “You sound like a rom-com character. Like some god-awful Hugh Grant creation.”

“Well,” says Nat, frowning against a familiar feeling of hurt. “You know, Lissa, I don’t actually remember you telling me about these tickets. And I’m not a mind-reader.”

“Why did you say, Oh great then, Nat, hmm?” Lissa strokes his cheek and speaks softly now. “Seems like you’re pretty excited about these mystery tickets. What are you hoping for? A candlelit dinner with me?” She gives him a fleeting peck on the cheek again and turns to start preparing some dinner.

“Oh, I can do dinner, don’t worry about all that.”

“Yes, Nat. You could do dinner.”

“No problem,” says Nat, pushing his chair back, beginning to stand.

“It’s just that I don’t want to eat at midnight. And we’ve got the tickets. We’ve got to leave by 7pm. So, I think it’s best, don’t you, if I just make us a stir-fry?”

She enjoys this. Withholding information. Springing events on him. Expecting him to know what’s happening. It amuses her, this little ritual.

Nat counts the beats of the second-hand marching round the wall clock. He wishes the silences between were real moments of peace and not marked by the sigh and clatter of Lissa. She chops through onions a split second after the tick and tock of the clock; it sounds like angry, syncopated jazz. Lissa sniffs as she works. She stands for a moment and stares into the wok. Her face is furious. She moves the handle back and forth to shake up the peppers. Nat imagines her thinking, “Come on you little fuckers, we haven’t got all day.”

Unbidden, Mabel wanders into his mind; she is naked. Nat takes a sharp intake of breath, flinches, as though a TV has just been turned from a nature show to porn. There she is. Waif-like and beautiful. Hair coming all the way down to her nipples. He imagines her wanting him, laying back, quietly desperate. He imagines her whispering “I love you” the split second before he cums. Like it’s an enchantment that unlocks the gush of sperm he lays into her after an almighty thrusting.

“Penny for them,” Lissa says. “Not like you to be away with the fairies.” She laughs at him and Nat joins in; it seems appropriate. And he sighs quiet pulses of relief that, as hard as he finds it to believe, Lissa cannot, in fact, read his mind.

Fionnuala Deasy

Extract from Animal Care

We house the cats according to aggression, she says. The hardto-homes are in here – she gestures down the row of stacked metal cages – and outside are ferals, then upstairs we have mums and kittens.

From behind the metal bars, all the animals look docile. Near my left shoulder, a small black cat rubs its skull against the bars, revealing the pale grey skin beneath its dark fur. Dee points at a white cat with brown ears and a pink nose and says, that one looks guilty because he impregnated his mother. She tells me that the pair were brought in by a disgusted owner who hadn’t bothered to neuter them. The vet had performed an abortion on the mother.

We’re calling him Oedipus, she says.

Recently, I’d been spending weekends alone in my bedroom, drinking whiskey from a tea-stained mug, looking at the internet and occasionally masturbating. I couldn’t afford a therapist, but I imagined a therapist would be telling me to get out and meet people, get involved in my community. So, a few weeks ago, I signed up to volunteer at this cat shelter. The smell of cat piss is hard to stomach at first, but you get used to it.

In the week, I work for an activewear brand, producing small units of web copy and rotating synonyms for ‘elasticated’. To save money, the company recently switched to solely homeworking, stopped renting the glassy office in town and installed monitoring software on our laptops. Every morning, I wake up with the swirling pattern on my bedroom curtains vibrating in my peripheral, reach for my laptop and begin the series of small and tedious tasks that make up my day. In our ‘catch up’ video calls, my manager will click onto the monitoring software’s dashboard and tell me how my performance negatively compares to

my colleagues before questioning the cumulative length of my lunch breaks. Behind her, a Picasso print popularised on Instagram reflects her clean white living room. Between self-service checkouts and living alone, these half-hour meetings are sometimes the only time I speak all week. My colleagues are all glamorous and blonde; when we worked in the office together, they would talk constantly about the gym and their boyfriends and weigh up which minor plastic surgery procedures they should pay for next. I didn’t get invited to work drinks on Thursdays. Now, I watch their stories of boomeranging cocktails from bed.

As we walk around and meet the cats through the cage bars, Dee tells me their stories. There is Arnold, a smoke-grey cat who cowers in the corner watching us, eyes round as pennies. His owner admitted to punching and kicking Arnold on a daily basis before eventually surrendering him. There is Mog, who was dumped in a binbag on the side of a motorway with her four kittens, all of whom died still attached to her. There is Felix, who was living in a locked pitch-black cupboard in a house with 40 feral cats. There is Penny, who was found locked in a flat with her owner who had been dead for three weeks; when Penny arrived here, she was covered in human blood. There is Jammy, an enormous tabby with an oddly spherical head, whose owner was recently made homeless. The cats stay very still as we look at them inside their small metal boxes and watch us closely as we move. The idea of becoming homeless and being forced to give up a beloved pet is not so distant. I regularly think about the perfectly possible sequence of events that could lead to me losing my overpriced flat. The role I perform could easily be done by an artificial intelligence. From the tone of our daily internal communications emails, I think I will soon either be fired or my role reconfigured to that of a ‘human eye’, checking over an AI’s work and making small adjustments. I probably made a mistake taking this job in the first place. In the interview, they asked me about the change from science to marketing; I said something about a fresh start. It was a fair question; my last job had been in a lab. After I finished a biochemistry degree, I worked as an assistant on a

human disease drug-discovery programme. In the basement of a large modern building, eighteen people in PPE moved around each other handling chemicals. The lab was considered cutting edge because it had a transgenic mouse colony on which it was experimenting to make discoveries about Alzheimer’s. I was told I was extremely lucky to be there. As the youngest member of the team and the only one without significant letters after my name, animal care mostly fell to me. The mice were kept in an enormous vivarium that spanned the lab wall, inside of which pairs or small groups of mice were kept in clear plastic boxes, about the size of a shoebox. There was a plastic sheet separating the mice from the lab, and at intervals there were long cream-coloured arm-length gloves, through which we would insert our arms and manoeuvre the various containers of mice. The animals were kept in completely aseptic conditions, so we never came into physical contact with them. If retrieving an individual mouse for testing, I would hold the tiny squirming body through the thick plastic of the gloves.

There were so many bureaucratic processes surrounding the colony that it was easy to objectify them. Before a procedure, there were vast amounts of paperwork to fill out. The Home Office oversaw all animal testing and required constant monitoring and transparency. Sometimes, my job was just to watch experiments and record the severity of pain inflicted on the animal, noting down the chance of ‘non-recovery’ (death). I would observe an experiment on a mouse and watch its small blank face, its shining round black eyes, its twitching, delicate nose, for any visible signs of pain.

Our transgenic mice were clones who were given Alzheimer’s at birth, the relevant gene inserted into a fertilised mouse egg through a very long, thin needle. Our mice were lethargic and didn’t really behave like mice; they did not burrow or act curious, but moved around their containers with little interest. Throughout the animal’s life, we administered differing cocktails of drugs and performed cognitive tests on them. There was one PhD student who was using the mice to see the effects of certain lifestyle factors, like smoking and alcohol, on the development and severity of symptoms.

These experiments were hard to watch. Many notable papers were produced by scientists in the lab and minor breakthroughs in Alzheimer’s treatments were ascribed to data we produced. The professor who ran the lab was an eccentric Lithuanian woman called Ugnė who had a halo of ringleted golden hair and shouted a lot. On top of her computer monitor there was a large white stuffed mouse toy, evidently purchased at a children’s toy shop. Its cheerful stitched smile and plastic eyes seemed cruel. In the unlikely event that the lab lost its funding, all of the real mice would be destroyed.

Gift Nyoni

Extract from Churchill

David’s not going to go to boarding school and that’s the end of it. He stands twenty paces from his father’s Nissan Blue Bird, legs apart like a cowboy in a gunfight. He’s dressed, against his will, in grey shorts and a blue shirt, striped tie, knee length socks and polished black shoes. No spurs. His father’s car sits confidently on four wheels, brakes engaged, the military licence plate jarring against its dark olivegreen paint, its headlights grey and dispassionate. It’s a battle of wills.

Ever since David’s father returned from the war, he’s been trying to get David out of the house. The car is his father’s latest recruit in his evil attempt to oust him. David is tempted to transform into Cyclops, one of his favourite superheroes, and emit an optic blast of fire from his eyes that’ll cut the car in half and foil his father’s plan in seconds, but his mother passes him in a hurry, fumbling with the keys as she nears the car door. She slumps into the driver’s seat, reaches across to open the passenger door and says, “Come on, we’re late.”

In the backseat is David’s school trunk, a black metal box with his name painted across the top in white lettering, followed by his mother’s surname. Since his father doesn’t want him, it should please David that his father’s surname isn’t on the trunk, but somehow it doesn’t. It feels as though his mother’s taken his father’s side and he’s been cast away.

“Don’t make me call you again,” his mother says.

David tries to make one last stand. “I don’t want to go…”

“David, if I get out of this car…”

She doesn’t have to tell him what will happen. David gets into the car.

One after the other, the streetlights scramble into line and stand at attention as the car passes them. Hanging from their necks are posters of the new President’s face, glaring down at David through his large square spectacles. David looks away and studies his mother’s feet. It’s

strange to see them manoeuvring between the pedals. It’s strange to see how she’s shaved off all the hair on her legs and how all the landmarks with which he was so familiar – the callouses on her knees and the little scars on her thighs – are now obscured by the sheen of pantyhose. He doesn’t recognise his mother anymore and he doesn’t recognise the places they’re driving past. He’s castaway and lost and he doesn’t know how to feel about it.

On Main Street, a Datsun 120Y stops beside them at a set of red traffic lights, its tyres weighted down by suitcases tied to the roof and more suitcases jutting from its boot. In the backseat, bags and suitcases press a little white girl against the window. David is used to seeing white people on television but he’s never been this close to one before, even if the girl does look a bit like she’s behind a screen. He raises his hand hesitantly and waves. The girl frowns and looks away. In the front, the girl’s parents look ahead.

“Where are they going?” David asks his mother. He had wondered what would happen to the old country, Rhodesia, when the Rhodesians lost the war and the country became Zimbabwe. Would it pack up and leave, like a lonely old man with a suitcase disappearing down an empty street? Would it take with it its streets, roads, streetlights and buildings?

“South Africa, most likely,” his mother replies.

“Is it far?”

“Not far enough,” his mother says.

They encroach upon the city, and as they turn into Borrow Street, the school appears, the boarders’ hostel sitting on a hill a short drive away from the school gate, tall trees with whitewashed trunks lining either side of the driveway, casting long shadows.

The first thing David learns about white people is they’re bigger in real life than he imagined. Looking out of his window, he sees one of Churchill Junior’s four sports fields and on it, a pack of white Rhodesian boys the size of the giants in Gulliver’s Travels, chasing after an Asian boy who’s no bigger than Danger Mouse and who’s fleeing from them as fast as he can with his ball tucked beneath his armpit.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” his mother says, peering up at the trees.

David swallows. “It’s big.”

“The world is a big place, David,” she says, glancing outside to see what’s grabbed David’s attention. “It’s just you never had the chance to see it before, but this is your world now as much as it is those boys outside. You have to discover it and master it. Do you hear me?”

But David’s concerned about the fate of the fleeing Asian boy. There were no Asians in the townships. They lived in the space between the townships and the white suburbs, and the only time David spoke with them was when he went to their shops with his mother, but when he sees one of the white boys leap into the air, dive and then lunge at the Asian boy’s feet, tripping him up and bringing him down, he recoils in horror.

“Of course, you don’t understand,” his mother says, “just remember that this world is full of new things and you must be open to them. For example, you’re going to have new friends,” she says, unable to hide her excitement, “white friends.”

“But I thought you said white Rhodesians are evil.”

“Not all of them.”

This is the second thing David learns about white people and it confuses him. “How will I be able to tell them apart?” he says.

“It’s a new world for me too,” his mother says. “I no longer have all the answers.”

Looking out through his window, David sees the pack of white boys pile on top of the fleeing Asian. He can’t see any sign of the boy’s ball, the boy himself buried beneath the gigantic pyramid of flailing arms and legs. He tries to imagine himself amongst the white boys, to imagine them as friends, but he’s never seen it in his comics and he can’t see it now. As if reading his thoughts, David’s mother squeezes his thigh reassuringly. “It’ll be fine,” she says.

They arrive at an imposing whitewashed building with the words ‘Pioneer House’ etched into the brickwork above the veranda. Three white boys are standing beneath three arches, each leaning against a pillar. The car slows down, lurches forward and then comes to a sudden

stop, launching David and his mother forward, to the amusement of the boys.

“Let’s go,” David’s mother says, reaching for her handbag.

But David’s embarrassed and he shrinks back into his seat.

“Come!” she says and then whispers, “remember, this is your world now.”

She leans forward, toward the steering wheel and reaches blindly amongst the pedals for her stilettos. When she opens the door, one of the boys holds out his hand. “You’re a long way from the townships,” he says.

The other two boys start cackling.

David’s mother ignores them. “I’m here to see Mr Kent,” she says, straightening her clothes and adjusting her handbag.

“Cleaner’s entrance is round the back,” another boy says, to more laughter.

“Is that how you were brought up to speak to your elders?” David’s mother says.

“That’s how I was brought up to speak to – ”

“That’s enough,” says a man who’s appeared at the entrance to Pioneer House. Upon seeing him, the boys stand still as lampposts. “Dismissed,” he says, coming down the steps, his head of hair a fiction, his stomach so big it wobbles with each step and would spill over in front of him were his shirt not tucked into his shorts. The boys scatter in different directions. When the man reaches David’s mother he says, “I am sorry about that. When wars end, the world focuses on whether adults can get used to new ways of doing things but it’s the children, hidden from view, who suffer the most.” He extends his hand. “Mr Kent. House Master. Welcome to Churchill Junior.”

DC Restaino

Beneath the Waves, Our Light is Still Blue

During an adolescent summer close to rotting, our family drove into the gullet of the mountains near our house. It was a ritual event, how we used to close out the last weekend before school. It was the final summer before drought strangled the river, its muddy bank oxidising into a wound, ending our pilgrimage. That year, though, there was still the placid clouds, the tang of sunscreen, the deep gossip of frogs, the slosh of water slicing down the curved cheek of the rock face.

The mountain road serpentined, blocking our journey from sight, until we rounded a bend and the shoulder widened enough to allow parking. Our father pulled in behind a link of cars where other families milled about, shepherding kids away from the risk of the road and toward the water.

Our mother shouted after us as we tore out of the backseat and down to the pebbled shore, kicking off our shoes and shedding shirts. I bet you I could beat you to the shore, but you won. First out of the womb, I was always chasing your back. We splashed in the river. Our father laughed even as he chided us, shouted for us to help unload the trunk. We dripped back and lugged towels and coolers and our mother’s lounger, dodging groups of teens passing booze poorly masqueraded in clear water bottles, an older couple bent near their hiking poles, a little girl chasing her older brother, determined to keep up and eat the distance between them. We selected an empty space in the sun near the bank.

Our parents joined us in their own time, nodded with approval of our spot and we went about setting up camp for the day. After, our mother rubbed sunscreen into our faces and she sheathed her arms in tanning oil. I asked if I could use some too, but she refused. “You’ll burn; you don’t pay enough attention,” she said. I got my obstinance

from her and though I wield it deftly now, back when I was a child, it made my skin sting with rage.

Our mother laid out sandwiches cut in triangles and fruit, told us to eat first before playing in the river and you diverted my attention by stealing grapes from me in increasingly elaborate ways until I was fully distracted by your antics. We giggled beneath the sun until our mother said we were safe to swim.

Before us, the river curled into an inlet, offering stillness, briefly, in the torrent. We stepped in, rippled the flat water until our limbs ached and then found refuge on the spine of rocks that demarcated the space between our pool and the white-capped rapids. We sat perched on them, the hot stone steaming our skin.

From shore, our mother kept watch over us. She let us languish on the rocks as long as we stayed facing the still side, left some part of us submerged. She never stopped her surveillance; it seemed to linger on me, despite always following her directions. Maybe she didn’t trust me. Even then. Even with you.

Other kids clamoured on the rocks nearby. A group of older boys leapt from them into the water, competing to see who was bigger, who could make a better splash. The little girl from before called out to her brother as he jumped, cheered when he created a small tidal wave on entry, paddled closer to the rocks for her turn.

You re-entered the water, stiffened your foot and hooked it to mine so you didn’t drift away as you floated on your back. Your belly and arms were partially exposed, an archipelago dappled in scales of light. I laid down to be a counterbalance, help you stay buoyed. Above, the sky yanked a sterile blue straight from the horizon. The mountains yawned overhead, their peaks dulled canines, like some old, patient predator. We remained suspended in that moment, pulled together, you and me.

The splash came first. Not the sound of entering, but the cascading fragments of the rupture. It came from behind; it came from the wrong side. Then, the scream. You flailed, and I twisted my feet together to try and keep you snared in place even as you continued to

fight me. The more you surged, the tighter I held you, the rock cutting into the thin flesh of my back. You wrenched me into the water and when I surfaced, you were already dragging me back to shore where our parents were shouting for us.

Our mother and father stood sentry with the other witnesses over the remains of the fractured family until the police, the park rangers, the ambulance arrived. Our parents gave their statements as our mother’s fingers clawed into our shoulders. When they were done, when they had nothing more to offer, they cocooned us into the backseat of the car.

On the drive home, they took turns glancing at us in the rearview as though we’d evaporate if we weren’t monitored and whispered about the little girl. How she mimicked her brother as she crawled up the rock. How she hopped and waved at her parents on the shore. How she slipped as she smiled, falling so fast she didn’t have time to shift her face before she went under. How her dad yelled for her. How her mom slapped through the water for her. How her brother remained stiff, anchored in place forever.

I saw none of this. I was focused on you. I only turned back once we were on shore again, after she had already been gripped by the river, her blonde hair flashing quicksilver between the waves like a fish as she was carried further and further away.

Now, when I think of you, I picture you in her place among the rapids. I am confined in the rocks. The sharp planes bite into my feet and I want to chase after you but there is no way for me to move forward so I wait for when you might surface again; I force myself to watch you depart.

Annabel White

Extract from Look How It All Worked Out

Janey wakes early and walks in her PJs down to the pond. It’s the first warm day in spring. She stands at the edge of the sand, the water touching the tips of her toes. There’s a bird on the rock. It’s small and speckled with a long thin beak that opens and closes, like it’s yawning. The bird looks at Janey, stretches out its wings and flies across the pond. This is when she remembers. It is roughly a quarter after six, which means Janey has made it a whole fifteen minutes through the day without remembering her mother is dead.

In the first few months she could make it twenty seconds. She could walk from one classroom to another, she could climb onto the school bus and take a seat, she could butter a slice of bread. But then she’d hear her mother’s voice, smell her shampoo, see her scarf hanging on the back of the kitchen door. Fifteen minutes is a record.

Last week Janey asked her sister Eleanor if she played the game too. Eleanor is fifteen, three years older than Janey.

“What game?” Eleanor asked and when Janey explained the rules, Eleanor looked disgusted.

“That’s fucked, Janey,” she said. “That’s really fucking fucked.”

Their mother got sick in the summer and died in the fall. At the funeral Janey sat in the front pew, her father on one side, Eleanor on the other. Behind her was every person she’d ever known. Janey read a poem during the service and afterwards her Aunt Delia, who wasn’t really her aunt but a friend of her mother’s, told Janey her mother would be proud. Aunt Delia was wearing a new dress and a lot of make-up. Janey hated her for that.

Janey walks up to the house and wipes the sand off her feet at the back door. In the kitchen, the radio is on and her dad stands at the grill, flipping pancakes.

“Why are we having pancakes?” she asks.

“It’s Tuesday,” he smiles. “Why wouldn’t we have pancakes?”

Janey was worried in the months after her mother died that her dad might one day start dating. Her father is handsome in that backwards-cap, flannel-shirt sort of way and the divorcées of the Cape descended on him like vultures. They flew in with their sad eyes and big bottom lips, holding apple pies and sausage-meat lasagnes. “Oh Bill,” they said as they scooched up next to him at the counter, placing a palm on his bicep. “You call me. You call me whenever you need.”

But Bill Spink never called. He didn’t get back to Marjorie from the Ladies’ Library about the fundraiser she suggested, nor did he take Petrina up on her offer of dinner at the Fish House. When Suzanne dropped by to see if he’d play pickleball with her in two Saturdays’ time, he laughed right in her face. He couldn’t play pickleball, he told her. He had to look after his girls.

At seven forty-five each morning, Eleanor and Janey walk up the tree-lined track from their house to the bus stop. At seven forty-three on this particular morning, while Eleanor puts on her shoes, Janey goes to the bathroom. As she pees, she stares at the hand towel by the sink. It’s an old towel, patterned with pale pink roses.

Janey will one day grow up and move away and her father will get married again to a woman Janey will approve of who will remodel the kitchen, then the living room, then this very bathroom. So much time will eventually pass that Janey won’t remember what this bathroom, the one she’s peed in every morning for the first twelve years of her life, even looks like. But she’ll remember the pattern of the towel. The two will interlink in her memory: the dark stain in her underwear, those tiny pink petals.

Out in the hallway Eleanor is stomping her feet.

“Come on, Janey. We’re going to be late.”

There’s a moment right after she sees the blood when Janey feels panic rush through her. Oh my god, she thinks. I’m dying. But then she remembers the pamphlets passed around in health class, those discreet little pouches some of the girls in her grade take into the bathroom, the notes they give to get out of swimming. She understands then. It’s her time.

Janey wedges toilet paper into her panties and, on the bus, she sits, legs clenched, as they trundle along Main Street, picturing the blood soaking up the paper, staining her skirt and the scratchy seat she sits on.

They drive past the crab shack and the sculpture gallery and the peeling painted sign for The Lighthouse Mini Golf. Somewhere behind her she hears Penny Cavanagh mumble, “It’s a wonder they don’t take that thing down.”

The mini golf closed three years earlier. The owners, Mitch and Pauline Stuart, had lived on the Cape with their son Linas all their lives, that is until three years ago when Mitch was sentenced to nine years in prison for the statutory rape of a fifteen-year-old girl.

Kacey Lucas was a cheerleader. She worked weekends at The Lighthouse and for some reason believed herself to be totally in love with Mitch. The rumour was he got her pregnant up against the windmill, but Janey doesn’t like to believe that. The windmill was her favourite part of the course.

It was Kacey’s mother who called the cops, then drove Kacey to the clinic in Boston. Nobody could believe it. Mitch ran coastal cleanups, made his own marmalade and sold it at the farmer’s market. Janey remembers Saturdays with her family on Breakwater Beach. Mitch in his swim shorts and a Red Sox t-shirt, throwing a frisbee to whichever kid could catch it. No. Nobody could believe it at all.

Pauline and Linas moved away, then they moved back. Pauline’s parents live out by Pine Pond, they’re getting older and she wanted to take care of them. Linas is in his early twenties and he works on the check out at the Stop & Shop. The big one, just outside of town.

“He’s probably got it too,” Eleanor said to Janey after he served them one time. “You know, the pedo gene.”

Even before everything happened with his dad and the cheerleader, nobody liked Linas Stuart. He was a sad, sweaty kid and in his freshman year the rumour was if you touched him you’d catch The Disease. Back then, the epidemic spread through the high school, the middle school,

all the way down to nine-year-old Eleanor in elementary. She sat at the kitchen table one day after school, her red face pinched, her tiny shoulders shaking.

Janey and Eleanor’s mother was, as far as Janey can remember, a good person. Sally Spink disliked gossip. She didn’t pry into people’s personal lives, never stayed behind after church to chit chat with the other wives. She had heard, through a friend who ran the high school chess club, that every day the Stuart boy ate his lunch alone. This wasn’t information she sought out. Nor was the fact that the other kids liked to fill his backpack with garbage and call him by the nickname Fatbag. Janey overheard her parents talking about it. The whole thing made her mother sad.

There was a moment, not too long after, when Mitch was on the corner of Main Street and Sally stopped to say hi. Janey was seven, mute at her mother’s side, trying not to inhale the smoke from Mitch’s cigarette. Above her Sally was saying, “There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you. Something I think you should know.”

When Sally told Mitch about The Disease, he shrugged it off, said something about fourteen-year-old boys, how this is what they do. “You should have seen the shit my buddies pulled on each other back in high school.”

“I just don’t think they’re his buddies, Mitch.”

Janey still remembers the way Mitch’s voice turned cold and hard. “I don’t know what you’re trying to imply,” he said. “But I’d appreciate it if you stopped worrying about my son.”

Sally Spink didn’t need to be told twice. She dropped it after that.

Children’s and Young Adult Fiction

Avantika Taneja

Extract from Pepper and the Poison Sniffer

Burcu sniffed a four o’clock afternoon rain coming. The scent was black and stormy, making its way to the Anatolian side of the city. It punctured through the buttery scent of freshly baked pide ekmek in the bakery.

It was still early morning. The sky was as blue as the Bosphorus and betrayed nothing about a later storm. Burcu’s nose twitched. It often did when it forecast a storm before the sky did.

“I’ll have three of those, please.” She pointed to the pillowy flatbreads.

A cat, lately a staple around the bakery, made figure-of-eights around her legs, depositing its scent. A scent that was distinctively peppery, just like its colouring. It was inky black all over, except for white socks and a white patch on its nose.

The baker came out from behind the counter and handed over the loaves. She dusted down her apron and clouds of flour dust rained onto the cat.

“Choo!” it sneezed.

“Aw, how adorable.” Burcu cradled her loaves like triplets, peering down at the cute cat. She quickly added “live long” (the polite response to a sneeze). The cat, now fully speckled with flour, stared at her blankly.

“She even looks all salt ’n’ pepper now,” Burcu remarked.

“He,” corrected the baker. “He is always hanging about for spare crusts.” It sounded like a complaint, but the baker’s eyes smiled. Burcu glanced out at the sky and made swiftly for the door. “Thank you, abla.”

“What’s all the rush? Stay for a cup of çay?”

“My sister is engaged. Her future in-laws are coming over.”

“Oh, lovely. She’s a beauty, that one. Who’s the lucky one that snapped her up?”

Burcu rolled her eyes. The last thing she wanted was to discuss her sister’s suitors yet again. “I’ve got to go, abla. There’s a storm coming.”

“Nonsense. Not a cloud in the sky. You have such a wild imagination.” The baker didn’t seem to mean this as a compliment.

Burcu hurried out, stumbling over the flour-dusted cat, who was terribly interested in her ankles. He followed her first out the door, then onto the wide high street, then onto narrow cobbled lanes as she neared home. He padded his little white socks in lockstep beside her, sending out mini clouds of flour dust.

Even though Mama would object, Burcu broke off some crust and made an offering. The cat jumped up to retrieve it, but missed. She smiled. He had a hunter’s appetite but lacked a hunter’s instinct. He was barely more than a kitten, though. She bent down, offering the crust in her palm and he nibbled appreciatively.

She patted him on the head. “Let’s call you Pepper.” Pepper. Because you are more peppery than salty. He paused, stared blankly, then purred and rubbed his peppery scent on her again.

Pepper wasn’t the first cat she had fed, but he was the first she had named. Just like many Istanbulites, Burcu often shared a scrap or two (or ten) with a stray cat or two (or ten). They were the collective pets of the city. But wouldn’t it be nice to have one to call her own? She wondered how each one had come to settle on their particular patch of the sprawling metropolis. Perhaps, like her, they were just born into their pocket of the city. Perhaps, like her, their own patch had seeped into them and they had mapped the scents of every single corner.

Pepper was born an alley cat. It was an oven fresh trail that led him to this particular corner of the city. Humans thought the whereabouts of their four-legged counterparts was an accident of birth. It wasn’t. In the feline world, you had to find your patch. And then you had to claim it.

Pepper was a catten now, somewhere between kittenhood and full cathood. Not long into his pilgrimage, leaving his birthspot to find his own patch, his nose filled with heavenly baked scents. Luck shone down on him; he’d found the neighbourhood bakery.

He imagined a steady parade of baked goods in his future, warm and soft out of the oven, and resolved to make this his spot. But soon it became clear that while the bakery was the place for him, the baker was not his person. She only ever offered him leftover, hardened crusts; never the meaty or cheesy fare that tickled his nostrils every morning.

He was learning fast that in choosing your patch, you had to find a human you could tolerate as your own. A keeper, of sorts (but most definitely not an owner). Someone who loosely tracked your whereabouts. Someone who provided, if not all your meals, some assurances your belly would be full.

So, when a girl, barely more than a kitten herself, walked into the bakery smelling of lamb stew and stuffed peppers and grilled fish, his tail stood up to attention. He sniffed around her ankles. She had just come from a kitchen where some sort of feast was being prepared. But at that precise moment, he got caught in a cloud of baker’s flour dust and sneezed. Awkward.

“Aw, how adorable,” the girl had crooned, her voice as bouncy as her pigtails.

He held back a hiss. Despite the undignified position of being doused in flour, no self-respecting catten likes to be called adorable.

He had a choice at that moment: should he resign himself to irritation or should he walk away from the heady aromas surrounding the girl? His horizons had broadened and now he imagined a steady parade of juicy bones, minced meat, fishtails and more smells and tastes than the bakery could ever deliver.

He made his choice: Fine, he thought. I can do adorable. With his tail and head held high, he followed the girl out of the bakery.

Burcu could smell the feast underway at home from a few houses away. Grandma’s lamb and bean stew simmering since morning. Mama’s bulgur and spiced mince served in colourful bowls made of red and green peppers. Baba’s fish grilled on an open fire. Between all the cooks, the guests were set to be as overstuffed as the peppers.

She paused outside home to part ways with her new feline friend. But Pepper seemed to have other plans. He invited himself to the feast by following her inside. Burcu didn’t protest.

The family kitchen was thrumming with excitement, stress, anticipation. No one noticed her new companion. Mama and Grandma were elbowing for a prime location near the stove. Baba was barely visible behind the mound of pistachio pastries brought from the Spice Bazaar where he was a merchant.

“Ah, good, Burcucik, you’re here,” Mama interrupted, grabbing the bread babies from her arms. “There’s so much left to do.”

Burcu wove through stressed family members and over to the stove. She fancied herself the taste tester of the household. She was –if she did say so herself – like the fabled Mezze. Mezze the Ottoman Sultan’s personal poison taster. Burcu had read about her in her historical recipe book; how she had experimented with smells and tastes and poisons to keep the Sultan safe from assassination attempts. She was even rumoured to have had a laboratory beneath the palace.

Burcu wanted her own kitchen when she grew up. A fizzing, bubbling, roiling, boiling laboratory of sumptuous smells. She would invent dishes no one had tried before. Instead of a regular menu, guests would have a smell-tasting menu, getting a whiff of the real thing before deciding what to order. Burcu’s Bouquet, she would call it. She pictured it etched on a big sign like the one above Baba’s market stall at the Spice Bazaar.

Mama came over, smelling of jasmine perfume and tried in vain to tame the fly-aways from Burcu’s two thick plaits.

“We better get you spruced up before the guests arrive.”

Burcu groaned inwardly.

“Such a sweet face.” Grandma came over and cupped Burcu’s chin. “Sweet as kaymak and honey. If only it wasn’t for that…” Grandma didn’t finish, she just sighed and walked away.

But everyone knew what she was thinking. It was a sentiment Burcu had heard her whole life from the elders. Almost a beauty. Almost the perfect face. If only, if only…

If only it weren’t for that…nose.

Nathanael Wheatcroft-Brown

Extract from You Look Better in the Sun

Ibite into the last piece of Yorkshire pudding on my plate, soaking up all the gravy that’s left.

“Would yer look at that,” Gran tuts, “A don’t know ’ow they get away with it these days, seen a bloody roundabout straighter than that.”

I turn my head from the TV. I don’t want Gran to see the way I was looking on at that lad.

“Nah, grim,” I say.

My heart starts beating fast, like it’s tryna shout up at my head, tryna tell me, Eh? What you chattin’ shit for?

I look back at the TV.

Exactly: The lad’s well fit.

“Am off to Agnes’s ’ouse for a few hours tonight,” Gran announces, swear she never shuts up about anything, “D’ya wanna come?”

I pretend to think about it for a second, even though she’s just asking for the sake of it. Agnes is nice, she’s been Gran’s mate for a few years, maybe Gran’s only mate. But Gran will be drinking at Agnes’ house. I hate it when she’s drunk. She comes out with stuff about our family I don’t wanna hear.

“No, am alright,” I say.

“So, what you doin’ tonight?”

“A dunno.”

“…Not spendin’ too much time with Darren, are ya?”

I freeze. It’s not his name that stuns me… it’s the way Gran asked the question.

“Nah, w-what ya mean?”

Stutter some more Ed, why don’t ya?

“Been some stuff said when I saw ’is mum yesterday.”

I’m dizzy, like for some reason I know it’s bad. The living room’s fading. I grasp the thread of sense left in me, and ask, “What stuff?”

“Well, watch out is all am sayin’. She said she saw some explicit pictures on ’is phone. Ha! She thinks he might swing the wrong way.”

The room drops underneath me. All the blood leaves my body and I’m just left with this dreadful and familiar feeling.

I wonder if other lads feel this way. The lads I see on my socials, performing funny skits and dances and having adventures together. Do they ever feel judged… trapped?

“She gave ’im a right tellin’ off yesterday when she found out,” Gran says.

I’m lost in this house, down this street, in this town. I feel paranoid, even though no one knows about me. But the worst thing: I feel danger.

All my life I’ve felt it. Sometimes, when I’m alone, it’ll creep up on me like a cloud of darkness behind my back. My chest will go all tight and I’ll start sweating and panicking and breathing so fast and shallow like I’m gonna nearly die. Just feel like a madman because there’s no reason for it.

“I said good for her!” I realise Gran’s still carrying on.

I’m here in the living room again. I finally clock what she’s been saying.

Darren’s mum had a go at him yesterday?

The pieces click together in my head. Was that before I went round to his? Was that why he was acting so different?

The memory I’ve been avoiding all day strikes me. I wince as the scene plays on repeat: Darren pushing down that innocent lad. I imagine the lad’s pain… I start to feel it. Suddenly the living room walls are shaking.

Someone’s knocking on the front door.

I almost lurch out my seat. Gran does, too. It’s random as fuck because no one should be knocking at this time.

Gran looks proper paranoid as she asks me, “You expectin’ anyone?”

I shake my head. We’re both frozen for a couple seconds before she shakes out of it and exits the living room.

Dead quiet everywhere now.

Until the front door unlocks and Gran calls, “Eddie, it’s for you! Reckon ’is ears must be burning!”

I jump to my feet and enter the hallway. Darren’s standing on the other side of the open door.

“Come in, then,” Gran tells him before I can stop her.

“Ha’way, what ya doin’?” I ask him.

“Just wonnid to see if you were in,” Darren mumbles. His eyes are glazed over. He’s only half there.

“We were just talkin’ ’bout you, weren’t we, Ed?” Gran looks both amused and disgusted. I hate her for it, even though I’m also disgusted by Darren but for a completely different reason.

“Am just about to get ready to go to Agnes’s,” Gran tells him, “Am back tonight, but if you end up stayin’ over…” She turns to me. “You watch yaself, Ed.”

The mortification on Darren’s face burns through me.

Gran laughs cruelly. “Bloody bugger,” she says and strides into the kitchen.

I’m not sure if it’s because I can’t stand seeing the pain on his face, or if I just wanna get out of Gran’s radius as fast as possible, but I tell him, “Come up.”

We enter my room. I stare him down as he sits on the edge of my bed. The dusty light in my room unmasks streaks of brown in his black hair and highlights the few strays peppered round his jaw.

“What did you do, Daz?” I’m tryna stop my voice from shaking. I’m tryna not be scared.

I stare dead at him and say, “You pushed ’im down, Daz.”

If Darren did that to him because he was… yeah… then what’s he gonna end up doing to me?

To himself?

Darren looks down, so I can’t read his eyes. He shrugs.

I hear a creak outside my bedroom door. I dive for my controller and resume the video game on pause. Bullets fire into a blue lake and stir the water as I hold down the trigger button.

“What you doin’?” Darren looks at me like I’m batshit.

I look back at the door.

As if on cue, Gran barges into the room.

“Do ya ever knock?”

“Oh shurrup, will ya.” She looks at the controller in my hands and tuts. “This all you lads do nowadays, shootin’ people on that bloody game?”

“Most of us.” I fake a smirk, tryna turn this whole insane situation one-eighty. “But Darren’s shit at it.”

“Dick ’ed,” Darren calls out.

“Ay!” Gran points a bony finger at us. “Watch ya language. Don’t youse be geh’in in the ’abit of swearin’, Eddie, ya sound rotten.”

“Whatever.”

“Whatever me again and you’ll see two halves a broken disc in no time, Ed. Watch me.” Fuck’s sake. Why is she always so damn vicious?

“So you plannin’ on stayin’ ova tonight, or what?” Gran asks Darren, “Don’t mind if ya do. It’s up to ’im.”

Darren checks back at me.

It must be his eyes, man. The pain in them. The need in them. All I can remember is what him and I had before last night. And I want it again. I wanna forget everything in between last night and now. I wanna feel warm.

I nod and say, “Yeah, whatever, you can crash.”

“Right then.” Gran eyes us sternly. “Top right shelf in kitchen, there a box of chocolates I ain’t eaten yet. Youse are lucky am tryna lose weight coz ya can have ’em.”

Darren’s eyes don’t meet Gran’s. I still spy the red on his cheeks from her comment downstairs. I feel the shame and paranoia start to wriggle into me, too. What if Gran’s suss that I said he can crash? After what she told me about him, what if she’s testing me? What if I’m supposed to tell him, The fuck you gonna crash at mine, Daz? Get fuckin’ gone, bender.

I cringe at the poison word in my head. I know it’s wrong. The poison’s been dripped into me for so long from everyone round here – conversations overhead, comments passed, feelings expressed –it’s become like a sticky glue in my brain. It’s not a real, independent thought. Nah, sometimes your environment has too much holding power. You start getting caught in the regurgitation. I’m fucking tired of it. Tired of feeling stuck in the web of other people’s thoughts. Tired of feeling held down. Tired of betraying myself. I don’t wanna think a poison word against myself or anyone.

Can’t a thought be realer, be gentler… for fucking once?

Emma Zipfel

Extract from Leave No Trace

You throw your head back, draining dregs from the Coke bottle, which is more rum than mixer. Your arm is draped over Sachi’s shoulder, steadying yourself as your laughter drowns out the sharp click of heels on pavement.

You hear the party before you see it. A bassline thumps through the street, voices spilling into the twilight. You can’t remember what was so funny, but you’re laughing so much it’s hard to breathe. You lean into each other. She is holding you up, and you’re holding her. There is a lull in the music as the DJ wheels up the tune. You turn to each other at exactly the same time, just as the beat drops; this is your jam.

A few escaped balloons are drifting over the neat rose bushes that fill the front garden. You trip through a cloud of candy-floss-scented vapers and push aside the streamers fluttering over the front door.

Inside, you’re swept up in the pull of the dancefloor. Sachi grips your hand. You scan the room, trying to spot the others. You recognise some faces from school, and Tembi waves from the decks. You wave back before losing your balance and falling onto Sachi in a fit of giggles.

You’re all moving together. Sachi tries to tell you something. You shout that you can’t hear her. She shouts something back, but the next tune drops. Whatever she wants to say is forgotten as everyone catches the beat, sweaty bodies moving together. Someone presses a flimsy plastic cup into your hand. You cheers. Realising how dry your throat is, you gulp at the drink, wincing at the burn of vodka.

Sachi shouts again, pointing to the kitchen and fanning herself with her hand. Her shoulders gleam with sweat; you can feel the stickiness on your own skin. She wants some air. But you’re caught up in the music and don’t want to stop dancing. You shake your head, raising a finger and mouthing, “One more song!”. You watch her carve

out a path that disappears as soon as she has passed through. You turn back and feel the crowd envelop you. The pressure of the last year seeping out of your pores. Exams done. Freedom, finally.

Eventually you need air too. Where is Sachi? You fumble with the handle, pushing the back door open. Forgetting the garden step, you trip and curse as you stumble onto the lawn. You look around quickly but there is no one else here to laugh at you. Slumping onto a plastic garden chair, you’re too drunk to care about the gross way it’s sticking to your thighs. You can still hear the frantic baseline coming from the living room. Everything hums with the vibrations.

Your high-heels try to cling to your skin as you kick them off. Your pinched toes now spreading gratefully into the cool grass. You look down at the peeling purple nail polish that no one was supposed to see; the splodges on your toes look like bruises. Whoever decided heels and parties were a good combination had obviously never danced in six-inch stilettos before.

You tip your head back and the sky above you spins, pinpricks of stars, muted by the city’s lights, circling the sliver of a crescent moon. Looking is making your head hurt. You close your eyes and feel the warmth of the night. The breeze that ruffles the angel-wing sleeves of your mini-dress promises summer is just around the corner. It is soft like a breath against your clammy skin.

The kitchen door swings open and a handful of people-like shapes spill out. They huddle together just outside and one sparks a lighter. They don’t notice you. The thick, earthy smoke drifts on the night air. You breathe deeper and let your eyelids sink again.

The shadow-people laugh loudly, but their words run over one another. You don’t know what’s funny. You don’t care either. You blink your eyes open, pulling your braids into a knot on top of your head, savouring the feel of the night on your bare neck. Something drags your eyes towards the shadow-boys. Huddled together, the smoke that rises in between them like a fog blurs their faces, already half-hidden by caps and hoods.

You squint, trying to focus. He takes a pull, and the embers crackle orange and black. The glow lights his face. He is staring at you. His eyes are bright beneath his hooded lids, but the look he gives you is cold as stone. He passes the spliff and his face disappears back into shadow.

The music is suddenly louder. The door open again. The party’s still popping. You’re done for tonight. But trying to stand up right now feels impossible.

The shadow-boys melt back inside. The door is a portal, transporting them from the shadows into the warm glow of the party, lighting up smiles and dimples and fresh shape-ups as hoods are pushed off and their bodies pick up the beat, moving like they’re made of liquid.

The door clicks shut, and the garden falls quiet again. The chirp of a phone notification makes your eyes spring open. Yours? No... The blue gleam of a screen lights up a figure near the back door. One of the shadow-boys didn’t go back inside. His hooded eyes look back at you. He comes closer. His eyes are fixed on yours. No smiles. He just keeps coming closer.

Too close.

It feels like everything is on fast-forward. Heavy hands claim your body. Rake at your dress. You struggle, stumbling over your heels. You yelp as a sharp point jabs into the already-aching arch of your foot.

The chair clatters down as you try to back away.

He presses against you. The damp garden wall is cold on your back, and you focus on that. He muffles your slurred protests with rough kisses. You’re breathless. Suffocating. The stale, smoky taste of him fills you. His body pins you as he scrapes your dress over your thighs. Your eyes squeeze shut. This is a dream. But when your eyes open, he’s still there. His fingers tear at your clothes. Tear at you. The sharp points of the moon glint above his head. He doesn’t look at you. You can’t look at him either. So you stare at the sky and watch it spiral.

You’re curled up on the grass like an animal playing dead. With trembling fingers, you stretch your dress to cover as much as you can. It isn’t enough. The cool grass against your scratched skin is no comfort. You’re not hot. Not cold. Just numb. But you’re shivering so much you can’t even stand. Your breath catches every time the shadows shift like there’s someone else out here. But there isn’t. You’re alone.

Your bare feet trip on the step, shoes dangling from fingers, as you push the back door open and are sucked into the crush of the dancefloor. You flinch as writhing bodies press against you. The music is even louder now. Filling the air is the smell of too-sweaty bodies, too-sweet perfume, too-strong drinks. Dipping your head, you push harder against the press of the crowd. Your breaths are fast and shallow; there is no air in here. You need to get out. Now.

You’re fighting against the tidal wave of dancers that keeps pressing you back, but you can just about see the front door ahead. It is open a crack, the streamers still fluttering like the tentacles of a jellyfish. This night is full of poison.

On the other side of the door, you lean against the frame to catch your breath. Forcing your feet back into your shoes, you swallow down your tears. No one can see you like this. No one can know.

As you walk down the front path, a burst pink balloon sticks to the bottom of your heel, and you almost slip on the shiny banner that has fallen from above the door. Its message, in swirly gold letters, glinting in the cold light of the streetlamps: Congratulations!

Graphic Novel

Kelly Vassie

Extract from From the Bones of Old Horses

Non-fiction

CE Cathcart

The Soft Swell of Buds

January crept towards its end. The park lay stark in the ever-shifting light, one morning a bright pale blue like a whinchat’s egg, the next clouded over and grey and the tree trunks black with rain. I found myself bringing little pieces of the trees back to the house, like a bower bird hoarding treasure – bunches of last year’s ash keys, a cluster of silver maple buds, tassels of golden alder catkins. As the light stretched further into the afternoons, I witnessed a stirring to life in the seeming stillness: the soft swell of buds. Taken at a glance, they appeared resolutely still. Only with devotion to a slower way of looking did the delicate unfolding reveal itself. Far from dormant, they seemed imbued with a startling presence, a sense of anticipation, as though each were a song waiting to be sung. I couldn’t help but think of Mary Oliver: ‘Such hints of gladness.’

On Imbolc, the Celtic festival that marks the beginning of spring, I was reminded of the metaphor used to describe this time of quiet burgeoning between solstice and equinox: ‘Winter pregnant with summer.’ I thought instantly of the buds, womblike and swelling with the promise of last summer’s sunshine.

One February morning, I noticed a shock of red in the park’s brumal landscape. The silver maple trees that flanked the hill on Montague Avenue had burst into blossom. Tight clusters of small crimson flowers clung to the bare branches. Petal-less, they consisted of a collection of protruding pistils in the female flowers, or feathery sprays of pollen-tipped anthers in the male flowers, both appearing on the same tree. In botany this is known as monoecious, meaning ‘one house’. Far from unusual, this multiplicity, as I would come to see, was a commonality among the trees, for whom queerness seemed the most natural way of being.

Although a bud seems like a dream that always comes true, for many years, I saw myself as a bud that had failed to blossom. I used to carry around an Anaïs Nin quote in my pocket: ‘And the time came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.’

I was drawn to the queerness of the metaphor, how it celebrated the freedom of transformation, while opposing shame, secrecy, stasis. After I came out, I kept it with me as a token of my quiet triumph over oppression. I clung to the word ‘blossom’, its irrepressibility. But what does it mean to blossom into a persecuted minority? Is it even possible when you’ve internalised so much shame? The work of a binary is to permit the flourishing of only half of those governed by it. In the dualism of straight and not straight, I could only be defined by my lack, my deviation from the ‘norm’. Of course, coming out can be a liberation, and often it is, but what it can never not be, is an admission of difference, of otherness. Now, when I read this quote, I linger on the word ‘painful’. I see what I failed to see then, how neither choice absolved me of pain, how, in fact, the measure of the choice was pain.

It’s no wonder my life had unfolded at a stilted pace, a ‘late bloomer’, they say – an expression shrouded in shame, weighted by its implications of deficiency and failure to thrive, to be normal.

But the buds taught me that everything comes into being in its own time. When it has gotten enough of what it needs to fulfil itself, when the environment into which it is blossoming is hospitable to healthy growth.

I came to see the buds as emblems of queerness. As an everunfolding form, their entire being seemed based upon the rejection of rigidity. Their life was one of continual emergence, continual possibility, but one lived in the margins, often overlooked or unseen altogether. I wonder, is it the interiority of a bud, its inherent opacity, that makes us disregard its importance? With its treasure concealed, its value is incalculable and therefore all too easily dismissed. But, in ignoring it we fail to observe the long gestation, the slow, incremental growth, the constant becoming that is the begetter of anything that is

worthwhile and important. In perceiving closely what was overlooked, I had truly seen the buds and, in return, felt truly seen myself. Within this reciprocal care there exists a feeling of deep togetherness, a sense of being ‘held’, as Mark Doty has it, ‘within an intimacy with the things of the world.’

On the spring equinox, I was struck by a haze of yellow on the horizon of the hill. A Norway maple, the only one in the whole park, had burst into blossom overnight. Clusters of small yellow flowers hung from the branch-tips, smelling faintly sweet. The only remnant of the bud I had come to know was the red case torn open, and in its end, a beginning.

Another monecious species, the Norway maple has panicles of hermaphrodite flowers, also known as ‘perfect’ flowers, consisting of both male and female parts.

Perfectly queer.

Stood beneath the froth of yellow blossom, I felt myself restored in some quiet, cumulative way, which felt a lot like being loved.

Vashti Katz

Extract from The Curse

Ihad been bleeding for twelve days when I chanced upon my old friend, the Ally Pally Witch. This time she revealed herself in an audio clip from the Open University’s Digital Archives.1 Robert Rowland, a former head of production at the OU’s first home in Alexandra Palace, was alluding to the witch’s legendary Curse, the one responsible for the fires: first in 1873, when the palace burned down just days after opening and then again in 1980. Some say the curse evoked three fires; the third and final still to come. Some say the intention was more generic, that nothing manmade would ever prosper in this place.

The curse is wheeled out from time to time to explain financial malaise or bad luck at the darts or any number of incidents or accidents that trip or strike, erupt or gush or throttle or collide around the palace and its grounds. In Rowland’s account, the witch is just a hazy sketch: an old woman living alone on a hill. But sometimes she is the keeper of a desecrated sacred well, sometimes a gypsy queen, evicted to make way for the new Pleasure Park. In one Victorian version, she is the self-appointed champion of two exploited noble orphans, intent on avenging the trespass to restore the inheritance system to its rightful glory.2 Sometimes she’s just a cantankerous old hag.

The blood is sort of like a period and sort of not. Stringy clots rappel towards the toilet bowl, a smell I recall from my post-partum pads, not foul or fishy or even metallic like menstrual blood can be, but earthy with a meaty edge. It turns the bath the colour of a wishing well. There is no rhythm to it and no dissipation. I hate my periods, but my cycle has at least been regular; heavier since the pregnancy but steady and predictable. Perhaps this new bleeding is perimenopause. Perhaps it’s just stress. I’m at that stage where pressures coalesce, heaped like in that plastic bucking donkey

game, when any sudden movement or unexpected load (a hamster, for example) might trigger the spring.

My mother said her periods just stopped one day with no dramatics, like a curtain drop. My mother-in-law said her periods never stopped. Even in her 70s she still needed pads for that time of the month. She said this like a humble brag, her head slightly cocked, the trace of a smile suppressed in the furrows of her ice-pink lips.

I lie in the copper-tinted bath, inspecting the swell which seems to mark the source of the bleeding. I haven’t been this menstrually aware since the pandemic. Through waves and peaks, infection rates and deaths, time slid into a sluggish sort of jet-lag; work, school, holidays oozing together. My cycle became for once a steadfast ally and not a duplicitous traitor: periods as punctuation, rather than flow. I measured time through my dwindling stock of tampons and pads, dreading the day I’d have to use the Mooncup gifted years before by my sister and now gathering dust and no doubt toxic-shock-syndrome at the back of my pants drawer. Our world puddled into our four-person household in our two-point-five-bedroom flat, occasionally spilling into Ally Pally park and whoever’s homes were on the other end of Zoom. With distances beyond our bubble levelled, my in-laws in Canada suddenly seemed closer. The children followed the progress of their grandfather’s tomatoes and their grandmother’s clandestine quests for hairdressers to stem the creep of her natural roots.

When lockdown eased, we drove up to Scotland and, on the way back, detoured through Knaresborough to visit England’s first ever tourist attraction: Old Mother Shipton’s Cave and Petrifying Well. There’s a photo of the children looking underwhelmed beside the well; calcified toys, utensils and umbrellas strung along the mossy rock. Out of shot was a rotten log with coins hammered in it to bring you luck and round the back, a cave where the witch once lived, telling fortunes and forecasting the end of days. The gift shop stocked potions and tacky charms alongside rows and rows of calcified teddies. Displayed behind the counter was a creepy sort of rabbit doll. “A genuine Hennow Hare,”

the shopkeeper told us. “Hand-carved by Wise Women from Cedar of Lebanon, the ceremonial wood of the Babylonians, to restore order in Troubled Times.”

Everything those days was about restoring order, resuming the flow. We seemed to have forgotten the volatility of the ‘Old Normal’. One day, in the future, we’d look back at lockdown, our family bubble, like a magic circle in a glade in the woods.

My father-in-law died unexpectedly, not during lockdown, but in that first New Normal. It wasn’t COVID, but, because of COVID, my husband was unable to get to Canada for several months to hug his mother. She had her daughter, his sister, who did what she could. But for long stretches she lived alone, an elderly lady in a house on a hill.

The thing about witches, is their ugliness, sometimes disguised by necromantic beauty. The thing about witches is their decrepitude, their vitriolic envy of the young. The thing about witches is their affirmation of us non-witches. ‘Real’ mothers become more virtuous when set against the evilness of stepmothers or mothers-in-law. In The Feminine in Fairy Tales, 3 Marie-Louise von Franz traces the original villain of stories like Snow White to the biological mother, but shows how these tales evolved over time to shift the wickedness on to a proxy figure. Her Jungian interpretation links this literary split to a psychological split in children: they cannot bear to see their mother as loving and punishing all at once.

My own mother, a psychoanalyst, leant into the figure of the witch, embracing her flashes of rage as part of Winnicott’s ‘good enough’ parenting. But there were other, more authentic witches in my childhood, like ancient Mrs Munroe who monitored our communal gardens from her top-floor flat, screeching down at us about the noise or damaged grass. Then there was the Nine-Mile-Burn-Pub-Witch. Tall and slender, long black hair, eyes heavy with kohl. She was always there, beside the fire, a sultry smile or maybe a sneer. I stared and stared. My dad called her a hippy. Even at my tender age, I knew she

carried some sexual potency, so different from my own mother whose curves and large breasts felt dowdy and safe.

My mother-in-law was slim and flat-chested. She worked in a ladies clothing store, went daily to the gym, performed elaborate dietary rituals and spoke of The Old like she was clearing her throat. My mother called her glamorous. She took it as a compliment, but I knew it was code for lacking in intellect. When my daughter was a baby, my mother-in-law referred to me as ‘old milk bags’, until my husband told her to stop. She’s just acting out the feeling of maternal displacement, I told myself in my mother’s voice. But it was more than that, a sort of repulsion, fear even. Ten years later, on the cusp of puberty, my daughter regarded my body in a similar way. Her own breasts were budding and she was, for a while, engulfed in a violent self-loathing, the horror of the ‘fat’ deforming her chest.

In her controversial book Hags, 4 Victoria Smith observes that while the female body, like any truly progressive politics, must embrace change, the social construction of femininity pushes women to resist change. I tried to respond to my daughter’s panic by modelling acceptance of my own aging body. I let my hair grey and my saggy breasts hang free. And yet, in the privacy of my mind, harboured shameful fantasies about a non-aggressive cancer that might result in legitimate mammoplasty.

1 https://www.open.ac.uk/library/digital-archive/clip/clip:ap_aclip4

2 ‘Muswell Hill Accursed’, The Evening News & Post, 22.08.1889.

3 Originally published: Problems of the Feminine in Fairytales. New York: Spring Publications, 1972.

4 Victoria Smith, Hags: The demonisation of middle-aged women. London: Fleet, 2023

Hadiru Mahdi

Extract from In Larache, We Made Many Friends

We arrived late morning. I saw everything in Technicolor. The scene opens on a road, fluid in the rising heat, light cutting our eyes into a squint, the camera craning down and turning to frame us at the crossroads.

The breath of the ocean tugged at our collars, pulling us through back streets promising the horizon at their end. Breaking out onto a main road, we crossed and stopped at a small concrete square, dropped our rucksacks and made seats from them. Resting for a moment, the sea in view.

Ca Va? Hello.

None of us saw him coming, yet here he was. Oui, ca va, et tu?

English, French, Spanish? Ah English, welcome.

In Larache we made many friends. A town of few strangers and people well-versed in the ways of the outsider.

Fareed, Judge Penitent / Hassan, The King

In Larache we made the friends outsiders make, outsiders too. The first was Fareed. He circled us with a slight stoop in his step, before sitting cross-legged on the ground in front of us. He asked for some tobacco and rolled a cigarette, quick, loose and wet. The edges of his lips lifted after the first drag, softening more his sun-touched face, his eyes were shaded by a faded black baseball cap. He looked to be in his mid-30s, said he had come over to tell us something, then turned to wave away a man floating nearby who, he muttered, suddenly irritated, was not a bridge to anyone.

Fareed insisted on meaningful questions. Why were we travelling? Where or why do we seek happiness? Who or what did we follow? Big questions. Everything about life and death and existence. Still weary

from our morning in Tangiers I sensed his dissatisfaction at our lack of urgency in wanting to know the truth in it all. Truth is, I had long lost interest in duelling with the words of man, pitting dogma against dogma as if all would be saved if we bow to the victor. As we grew quiet, he filled the spaces.

Fareed told us yes, he too had travelled, had lived in France, had spent time with a sister in Spain and studied French literature in Madrid. He praised Satre and Camus, choosing for himself the role of Judge Penitent, deprecating and dejected. Opening his arms like a conductor readying the world for the opening passage he declared all around us it is tragically beautiful and utterly hopeless. English was the weakest of his four languages so when his words became too fast for his tongue, he held his thoughts together with patches of French, Spanish and Arabic. His extended take on the absurd and bizarre was delivered from this spinning carousel of grammar.

OK so you know a little about the existentialists, but have you read any Arabs? Do you know Ibn Khaldun? Oh my god what? He was the first social historian sin par he started it all. Read the Muqaddimah. Ibin al Nafis? Ya Allah! He knew how the heart worked and Ibn al-Haytham, the eyes. OK, who else? Al-Mutanabbi? The best poet! Read everything. Je n’y crois pas! And then there’s Ibn Rushd another great but it’s his philosophy, you know, and his thinking on how we think.

Panting and exasperated at the lack of recognition in our eyes, his face fell into a Melpomene mask. We must rectify this now! He began scribbling hastily on a scrap of paper he pulled from his shirt pocket, mumbling as he went. These are the greatest minds the world has known, they shaped the knowledge of our time and you know none!? It is true Fareed, the dominance of the English language is our privilege and poverty.

We parted on uncertain terms but met again soon after on a road heading south along the seafront. Joining us in step, Fareed pointed to the guitar we were carrying – man, my friend is the best guitar player in Larache! Do you want to meet him?

As it was on days as well scripted by chance as ours, this friend was not far behind. Hassan, The King, The President, as Fareed had

declared him. His best friend, his confidant and his conscience. He was lore before we saw him and so unmistakable as he approached the street corner we were perched on. In faded jeans and a black leather jacket, tall and wiry with a confident strut, he looked like Jean-Paul Charles Belmondo in Breathless dressed by Lou Reed. On his head was a military flat cap, back to front, with a black and white Che Guevara print at its centre. A hard face on a gentle man, short stubble serrating his sharp jaw, large lips and a voice that was incredibly tender. Within his aura of equanimity, we were all utterly at ease, disarmed in his slow and patient presence in contrast to Fareed and the jittery companions who followed behind. Disciples of a reluctant sage. Hassan greeted us warmly but was sad, so sad, for five months ago, his mother had died.

One friend begets another and a few form a crew. We would be together for the foreseeable. As we followed this band of outsiders towards the cliff path, passers-by would call out Hassan’s name or stop to greet and shake his hand. By the time we reached their spot, we were more. All of them were alcoholics, passing between themselves a weathered one litre plastic bottle and drinking from it a dangerously strong spirit diluted with water.

Jean Genet loved Larache and is buried in the Spanish cemetery, looking out over the sea – so Hassan told me, as we sat on a stone bench against its whitewashed outer wall. We passed the afternoon here at their hearth, a makeshift Saloen Maghribi between graveside and raised grass verge. They told us about their town. Heady days when rock royalty and bohemians, decadent and quite separate to the rhythms of the farmers and fishermen, descended on the coast and lived in a mist of sea spray and hashish.

That is all history. Today there is little to hold them here, so they drift, starved and searching. They regard the same faces, peel paint off doorways, pick at locks dreaming an Elysium on the other side. Exhausted and bitter, they meet daily at the edge, considering the ocean. This view. An infinite mirror and nowhere to hide. The bottle a vessel to elsewhere, they drink until their bodies are afloat, gait in sway with the waters.

At last, Hassan asked for the guitar and sang us songs by JJ Cale and the Beatles. The music laid a bridge between his heart and tongue. The friends smiled with all their teeth, abandoning their bodies to the sound. They danced and were each within themselves. Fareed craned his neck, holding me with bright eyes that said see, I told you!

We walked south a little to watch the sunset from a cliff edge vista. On the headland, waves crashed against the rocks below the Castles of Laqbibat and Lalqáliq, the Portuguese castle they called it. Hassan’s older brother, the Rolling Stone, lived in their shadow. Famous for his European friends, his home was left to him by one such acquaintance.

I admit it, as their drink ran low and the meaning unravelled, I grew impatient. Then the breeze picked up, air cooled, and a scourge of mosquitoes made it all unbeatable. Outside the prison, where Hassan had spent a few solitary months for violating some law they didn’t respect enough to mention, we parted ways with warm embraces.

We blessed all our journeys, thanked each other for the company, made no promises. Fareed, calling back across the distance, insisted we remember the reading list.

Sabrina Mahtani

Extract from Women Beyond Walls: Exposing the Global Injustice of Women in Prison

When I was seventeen years old, my father was arrested. It was a summer evening in London and my sister and I were sprawled across our L-shaped sofa, watching one of those sitcoms from the late nineties, taking a break from our exam revision. I was counting down the days until the summer holidays when we would travel back to Zambia and be reunited with our father. I imagined swimming laps together in our pool, framed by fruit trees and pink bougainvillea covered walls. Or listening to the BBC World Service in the morning, sipping cardamom tea, while my father read The Post – the main independent newspaper at the time. I was looking forward to our habitual drives on Sundays after church to eat icecream. We would drive through the streets of our small mining town, Ndola, past jacaranda trees that would soon burst into purple or red, the sounds of soukous blaring due to our proximity to the Democratic Republic of Congo. The streets my grandfather once cycled, selling oranges out of a sack. The streets I walked down as a child, searching for sugarcane or roasted maize, a serial snacker.

I will never forget the phone call that evening. My mother dropped the receiver and her small body shook with sobs. My sister and I leapt to her, cradled her, too scared to ask questions. Her face was twisted by tears and fear but she managed to gasp, “They’ve arrested him.”

In the coming weeks, I picked up pieces of information from spying on my mother’s calls. I wrote down what information I could steal, trying to build my case against the country I used to call home.

I learned there had been an attempted coup, but it was poorly organised and put down in a few hours. A State of Emergency had been declared and a number of people had been arrested, including the former President, opposition leaders, soldiers and others perceived as opponents of the government. When the police arrested my father

from our house, his lawyer drove behind the police car for four hours until they reached the capital, Lusaka, to make sure he would not be killed. He was later charged with treason, an offence that mandated a legal death sentence.

Words that were waiting for me in textbooks at law school became my daily parlance: pre-trial detention, non-bailable offence, capital crime. I promised to become a lawyer, bargained my future with God as I clung to childhood prayers and beliefs. I put away my dreams of writing, shoving my poems, half-finished novels and plays into boxes at the back of my cupboard. “Don’t tell anyone,” my mother pressed upon us, trapped by fear of what people would think and the stigma and shame associated with prison. I couldn’t explain to my friends why I went home straight from school. Why I didn’t go to celebrate the end of exams. Why we felt guilty when we laughed, when we ate our favourite foods, when we lost ourselves – even for a moment – in our favourite TV shows, knowing that our father had access to none of these things.

Several weeks later, we flew back to Zambia – a country shaped like a butterfly, migration and metamorphosis engrained in the map. Butterflies are symbols of freedom, fitting for a country that has hosted and supported many liberation struggles. It was night, with a small sliver of moon in the sky when I descended from the plane. The air greeted me – warm and grassy – a smell of home. But I felt like a stranger. The last time I saw my father, I had been on a plane, waving at him from the window until he became a tiny spot, a small star. Now, I searched for my father’s face but could not see him. Feelings of panic rushed through my body, the gift of anxiety that has stayed with me. Maybe he was not released, all charges dropped.

When I finally spotted him, I felt like I was seeing his shadow. His belly had shrunk. I used to lie on it as a pillow when we watched TV. We ran to him, threw our arms around him. But it didn’t feel like him.

At night, my sister and I would sit by his bed waiting for him to fall asleep. Only then did we go to our bedrooms. Museums of our early childhood. The toys we had outgrown, the fairy tales we no longer

believed in. Our role was now reversed. We waited to ward off the bad dreams, to make sure our father was breathing, to make sure no one would take him away.

A few weeks later, my father took us to Chimbokaila, the popular name for Lusaka Central Prison. It means ‘the place to throw away’ –how prisons are commonly viewed. I stared up at the high metal gate, topped by barbed wire. A stern, uniformed officer opened a door in the gate. We were marshalled through to a small dark room with a few chairs around a table. My eyes tried to adjust to the dark space, the restricted natural light a feature of the purpose of this colonial structure – punishment. There was a sour smell in the room, stale air mixed with sweat and sadness. It is a smell I will come to recognise in many prisons I will enter in a future I have not yet imagined. A smell that will always take me back to this room.

The door opened and a man was escorted in. He seemed familiar but I couldn’t recognise him. He was thin and walked gingerly. He acknowledged my father and they shook hands. I shook his hand and bent my legs slightly, almost in a curtsy, in the way I had been taught to greet elders. I wondered where my father was detained. In which cell? With how many people? If he came into this room and saw visitors? What his life was like? I had many questions, but my father did not speak to us about what happened and we did not want to to pick at a wound still trying to heal.

I shyly offered the warm pizza box I had been carrying to this man and he smiled at me. It was not one of those mechanical smiles or strained or false, but a smile so large it made the sides of my mouth twitch and urge to return it. My father had also brought a carton of cigarettes. A prize for the football tournament they had started. I can’t remember much about our conversation. My mind was swimming with too many thoughts and I was trying not to drown. I remember feeling a tear trace my cheek. Brushing it away quickly. The man softly said, “Your daughter is disturbed by this meeting.” I was angry with myself. How dare I bring tears to a man whose arms were laden with sorrow. Looking back, I now understand that this was my father’s way

of showing us a glimpse of his world. A world few people see. A world most can ignore. A whisper instead of a scream.

A few months later, I was back in London, packing up my room as I prepared to go to university. I included a photo in my box of things. In it, I am about a year old and sitting on my father’s knee. He is wearing one of his colourful batik shirts, blending the traditions of Africa and Asia, a spirit of global citizenship. I opened an envelope from the pile on my desk. In the corner was a symbol of a candle wrapped in barbed wire; the iconic image of Amnesty International. The newsletter was about a Zambian opposition leader, Dean Mungomba, who had been arrested and charged with treason. There were concerns he and others arrested had been tortured and held in overcrowded and unsanitary facilities.1 The letter urged readers to write to the president, calling for their release. My tears spilled, a libation.

Though Dean Mungomba was released soon after, he died a few years later, his body and spirit broken behind those prison walls.

I honoured my childhood promise and became a lawyer. I was motivated by key principles: to ensure that access to justice was a right available to all, not a privilege; to bear witness to human rights abuses; to bring about prison reform, with better conditions; and to strengthen the rule of law to prevent wrongful convictions.

1 Amnesty International, Zambia, 1999. Available at https://www.refworld.org/ docid/3ae6aa0980.html

Alissa Mears

Extract from Expiration of the Fittest

riding shotgun, she insisted he stop, jumped from the carriage and, from a pile of earth recently quarried, she pulled out the first land-dwelling dinosaur teeth.

That’s one story of how the iguanodon was discovered. There are many. It is, after all, Gideon Mantell’s origin story: here was one of the world’s most important discoveries and thus his door into the Geological Society of London. In his first telling, it was his wife, Mary Ann, who spotted the teeth on a drive through Sussex. But in later tellings, he’d become the discovering protagonist, the story featuring him under spotlight, pin lights, an entire laser light show. Even as he was charting ancient history and no doubt seeing the smallness of a human life, Mantell remained obsessed with his own legacy. His family had fallen from noble grace and Mantell’s father, a mere shoemaker, was someone to be escaped. Mantell himself became a country doctor, an obstetrician, but his side hustle was geology, a relatively new study and his ticket to notoriety.

Mantell struck a deal with a local quarryman to inform him of any odd bits that showed up in digging the quarry. From the quarry’s refuse and in between delivering babies, the aspiring palaeontologist started to amass fossils of land-based prehistoric species. And, through connecting the teeth’s likeness to iguana’s teeth, extinct reptiles were acknowledged for the first time.

This weekend, we found iguanodon footprints, those of a mother and her babies. At least, iguanodon footprints were pointed out to us by our fossil guide and local palaeontologist, Megan. The Isle of Wight is Europe’s treasure trove of fossils. We hunted on the southwestern coast, where the cliffs are a rainbow of prehistoric promise. The Wealden layer, a deposit of sandstones and mudstones, preserves dinosaur remains of the early Cretaceous period, ranging from 130 to

65 million years old. And when it rains, the fossils reveal themselves, breaking from the cliffsides.

“The seas rose 145 metres above where they stand now, wiping species out that couldn’t adapt to salt water,” Megan tells us, as one of my children cries about his wet shoe. Before the seas rose, the spot we are standing on was a freshwater river into France, then it became a series of lakes and then the ocean floor. The island reached its current form a tender 9000 years ago.

We are a blip and filled with self-importance; as we fossil hunt, each of my four children – ages three through eleven – has a temper tantrum. A scraped shin, a lost pebble, a wet shoe, a missing shoe, the wrong shorts, the equal division of banana bread is not equal enough. All take precedence over ancient history.

It’s not just my children providing distraction from unearthing history. My husband is obsessing about what car to buy, worrying our options like a hangnail, seeing the right and the wrong van everywhere on the shore road above us.

I am looking at the fossilized dinosaur dung in my hand and considering the pile of essays awaiting my feedback, the piles of laundry we will have once home tomorrow. And then, ooo! A Venus in neoprene emerging from the sea, surfboard underarm, it’s Benedict Cumberbatch!

It is not easy to focus on the ancient.

On our walk, I keep picking up sandstone. I can’t tell the difference between ordinary rocks and ancient history frozen. So much of life is a race to discovery, before our cells make themselves over into another layer of the earth. We all want to discover something exceptional and we bring Megan our rocks again and again, cradling in our palms what we hope is ancient.

And indeed, our hope is ancient. What a gift we are as a species: the only one on earth to chronicle ancient history, of which we account for less than a cut toenail. And still, we participate so readily in the quotidian of now. There’s a comfort, as our seas rise, as the promise of our species is looking undone, in knowing the sea has risen before and

will rise again and while we may not witness it, we are the species that charted it before, told stories about it until it made sense, predicted it coming again. Saw and didn’t see our own participation in it. Saw that we too would be pulled under eventually, as individuals and collectively.

And yet, we took pleasure in the mug of tea, the hand held, felt the slights and slings of criticisms and heartaches, waffled over cars and shirts and ice cream flavours, even as we knew, in the proof of the earth around us, of our certain extinction. To look at cliffs that are a confrontation of our insignificance and still think with some feeling about laundry is astounding.

At the end of Orlando’s 400-year life, Virginia Woolf’s eponymous protagonist realises the present moment is the most ‘terrifying revelation there can be.’ In fact, the only way ‘we survive the shock at all is […] because the past shelters us on one side and the future on another.’ And on this beach, I realise the present saves us too, from the magnitude of the past, the eradication of the future. Our daily bread, our miracle. We lose ourselves in our details and so we live.

cf prior

Two Letters

I.

With the medieval English round “Sumer is icumen in.”

Dear Peter,

Sumer is icumen in. Have you noticed? You sit with your back to the window but I get full view of the tree, whose buds are pink and growing like bottom growth. Can someone else have castration anxiety for someone else? She dreamt mine was long and smooth in those striped boxers. I usually bring my own dreams, but I’ve considered bringing this one. Cuckoo! I can loudly say anything to you, here. The seed is growing, everything’s so prolific, so promiscuous. Are you? I think I know what you’re going to say. Often, I’m wrong but it doesn’t stop me from thinking it, giving my thought or dream to you, like a cat dropping a mouse at your feet. Lizzie and I were talking about this: the cat’s mouse is a love gift that no one wants. It’s always dead or dying on the rug – small writhing thing. I’ve never seen you wear any other boots and you’ve seen at least three pairs of my shoes. Is that fair? Some people – and some of these people are people I know! – they get this new lease of life, this new lift in September. I think ‘what’s wrong with you?’ Now’s the time for dying on the rug and off it. ‘It reminds me of returning to school, well, tell me something without telling me something, etc. No! For me, it’s the meadow is blooming and the wood that is coming into leaf now that really gets me going. I need sweat. Sometimes it drips down the spine and into the gap between the waistband and the back. Give me those men in the park lifting a former tree up with their vascular forearms and hands and dropping it down again like it means something. Like everything else, it does. Sing, cuckoo! The crocuses are pushing their way up through the earth, little pink and mauve fingers. It’s obscene. It makes you get why Proust was so horny

for asparagus. I told Klaus about rhubarb growing in candlelight and her face, it lit up, rearranging her freckles. The ewe is bleating after her lamb, Peter, for God’s sake! I always want to say. When Katie asks, I tell her you’re so irritating and she gets it – I don’t always want your insight but then, of course, I do, else why do I keep coming to look at you and your same shoes? The cow is lowing after her calf and some of the people I see at work, I can’t unclench the fist of time for them, they want to give me something, they want to give me something better than a mouse or a bird dying or dead on a rug, there’s something they want to show me the bullock is prancing, the stag cavorting to show that something’s happening between us or that it has happened. That together we’ve made something new or made something move. I get it. I do this too, I do, to you, the subject of every dream now, it seems. Sing merrily, cuckoo! I dream we are in a restaurant. I dream we are in a house. I dream you are hiding from me in a house. I dream we are in another house. Between sex and the cinema, you think what we do is more sex, don’t you? I wonder how you feel when you say it. Sometimes I think you think you’ve placed a grenade in the room between us, but sometimes it’s a football, sometimes it’s just something to play with, kick back and forth, a mouse and we’re both cats, two cats. Cuckoo, cuckoo, I never sing, so often the engine of my speech cuts out, so often I don’t speak, so often when I do I want to pull the words back into my mouth like a glob of mucus, swallow them. Are you supposed to do that? When I say you, I mean me. Writing you a letter there’s no problem of the threshold. You’d hate this – it’s a confessional. Closed up, enveloped/enveloped. The person confessing their sins to their confessor is not addressing the confessor, are they? If whatever this is we’re doing teaches me anything – and it does, often something I don’t care to learn – it’s that every addressee is me. Call it projection, call it projective identification, some call it love. At first I wrote to her when I should have been writing to you. You sing well, cuckoo, never stop now.

Cornelius

Dear Peter,

The weather’s turned again, regressed. She’s just like me. Ha! Looking backwards and pretending it’s forwards. Before I got to you Tuesday I, washing my hair in what I thought might be a new and more exciting style standing on the stool instead of assuming the usual kneeling position, my knees or navel pressed against the cool edge of the bath, misjudged things badly and sent water spilling down my back and into my jeans. On my way up, I left not enough minutes to get to you and stepped on a paving stone loosed from all the other paving stones and concealing beneath it a pool of water which went up the leg of my jeans and down into my boots. All week it’s been like this. An autumn day falling on the wrong side of winter on the wrong side of summer. Water spilling out, lifting slick trails of oil from the asphalt, sending them in rivulets sideways. It’s a profusion.

I was obsessed at sixteen with a photographic series depicting cracks in road and pavement surfaces, taken by a friend of my mother’s. Shot from perfectly above, they, like all aerial photography, did something weird and fundamental to scale. Looking, it was as if these photographs of pavements held in them the power to change the way I saw my world. Like whatever it is we’re doing here. It could have been a town or a desert valley – like the photographer and, by dint, the viewer was in a hot air balloon, standing precipitously on the edge of a tall building, or in a war plane – or something from Hooke’s Micrographia. In the union meeting Ed said, imagine we’re looking at this problem from either end of a telescope. I’m thinking of how binocular Bion is (I produced this thought especially for you). I’m thinking of Man Ray taking a photo of Duchamp’s Large Glass covered in dust in Duchamp’s studio sometime in 1920 and naming it ‘Vue prise en aeroplane’ – and all that entails. Proximity, distance, reconnaissance, war. That’s estrangement, baby.

Wet. This is how I arrived to tell you what I’d done, as if it were a crime and offered it to you – this time not as a cat would, but as a child offering you a toy they shouldn’t have but have had in their mouth. You intimate that I do what I’ve done to prevent an ending and I intimate that I don’t want to hear it, which of course I don’t and do – isn’t this all we do? Sometimes I don’t know what to do with all this profusion of meaning. Maybe I’m flat, grey and waiting for someone to step on me. Could it be you? My grandmother got married in June and it snowed. There’s so much you don’t know about me.

Cornelius

Barry Sadid

Extract from I Have No Desire to Be Freed

Najiba stopped outside the prison gates, suddenly nervous. Peering in, she could see the large, shadowy men and women waiting to search the visitors, soldiers for the boys and female prisoners for the girls. She looked down at the letter for her uncle, which her mother had folded and slid in tightly between the back of her shoe and her heel. These clandestine missives, whether etched onto fabrics and stitched into jackets, written in invisible inks or simply secreted in shoes, were the only means Zahra had of contacting her brother, then three years in Kabul State Prison and only allowed to see the family’s young children. The children didn’t mind – Fridays were for their uncle giving them pens and lessons, encouraging them to write, cooking for them (Sarwar Joya’s specialty was shir-roghan, milk cooked with oil and sugar, which the children would break pieces of bread into and eat with deep pleasure). Occasionally he’d badmouth the government to them and sew secret letters into the children’s jackets to pass on to the adults in his family. Joya was too popular for his own sake and pleaded with his family to keep the numbers of his hungry guests manageable; and so the children were split into two groups and took turns for their Friday visits.

This week it was Najiba’s turn, but on this particular summer Friday, all of her siblings and cousins had already rushed ahead, leaving her behind with her mother, who gave her a basket of Joya’s freshly washed and ironed laundry and the secret letter pressed between her shoe and foot. After a brief ride on the bus, she found herself by the deep gutter that separated the street from the prison entrance, glancing between the barely concealed letter in her shoe and the ominous women prisoners waiting inside. Where else could she hide it? Shaking a little, Najiba stood to one side, took the letter out and, shielding her mouth with her hand, she folded it again and

slid it into her cheek, keeping her hand hovering protectively over her swollen cheek. She was six, maybe seven, and walked into Kabul State Prison with one arm gripping a basket of laundry and the other held up to her face.

“Move your hand,” said the prisoner, patting Najiba down through her thin dress, and shaking out the neatly folded clothes she had brought with her.

“I can’t, my tooth hurts and my mouth is swollen,” mumbled Najiba. She kept the hand there as, dizzy with happiness and relief, she followed a soldier to her uncle’s cell. He was waiting for her, tall and strong, broad-shouldered, always fresh and smiling in last Friday’s loose piran-tomban, happy to see his little niece. She couldn’t wait and slipped the glistening letter out of her cheek to give to him. That was her mistake.

“I should have waited a few more minutes for the soldier to properly leave,” Najiba said, reminiscing around the dinner table of her Munich apartment almost seven decades later. It didn’t matter to Joya, who called in all his comrades to admire his brave little niece and her ingenious smuggling of the letter. Najiba Azad is now one of the very few people left in the world to have any living memory left of Sarwar Joya and one of the last of his family to see him alive.

Afghan prisons, for troublesome political prisoners like Sarwar Joya, were means of organised forgetting. Joya was 54 when Najiba saw him and he had already spent eighteen years of his life in and out of prison. As he told his disappointed comrades, the letter he received that day had little to nothing political in it, no news of the outside world, just a few personal things from his family that they couldn’t tell him in person. Having been barred from seeing adults, including his close family, soon he wouldn’t be able to see his family’s children either. Whether it was over the secret letters, the children carelessly repeating his insults of the monarchy to the wrong people, simple malice, or all of the above, the government would go on to cut him off from the world entirely. They moved him to the total isolation of Dehmazang Prison, notorious among Afghans for its uniquely modern brand of cruelty.

Here, the reminiscences, the stories, the fragments of prison writing, all stop, and darkness overwhelms memory. Almost. The prisoners, used to isolation from one another, would scratch messages, slogans, bits of poetry, for one another in the bathroom walls, an innovation from more revolutionary days decades before, when the first king to imprison Joya was assassinated. Then, Joya and his comrades had been sat in Sarai Muti Prison, awaiting their execution on the king’s orders when the news filtered in unevenly. Whoever was whispered to by a prison guard first hurried to the latrine and etched the news in Arabic, a language they knew the other guards wouldn’t understand, but the prisoners might. Another prisoner, seeing and understanding the message, etched out a translation below in French, and another in English and another in Russian and so on. The news bulletin in many languages read simply: the king is dead, the king is dead – and that meant their salvation.

Decades later, Joya would scratch out another message, but one which carried no news, no salvation or expectation of it. Joya had long since embraced the horrors inflicted on him with a hardened equanimity, much to the frustration of his family, collectively immiserated for his sins. To truly love your country, he once wrote, means taking whatever love you have for your wife and your children out of your heart. A prisoner who survived Dehmazang recalled seeing two lines of poetry on that latrine wall in Joya’s handwriting, a couplet he remembered by Saadi:

Attachment to the world is a veil, fruitless Once you break your bond, you are joined with the divine

One winter, Najiba returned to the prison gate with a bucket of coal for her uncle and a letter hidden inside. She, along with the rest of the children, had long since been banned from seeing him and this, waiting

in shivers outside for a prison guard to take the coal, was as close as she would get to her Mama Jan. Joya saw her from his cell window and gestured wildly, trying to catch his niece’s attention. I could see little Najiba standing in the cold, he said later, but whatever I did, she couldn’t see me. He was so moved, he smuggled her a red jumper he had knitted, embroidered with soft green flowers. It was so beautiful every girl in the family had to have one.

Poetry

José Buera

El Corte – Kout Kouto-a

“El General has found his word: perejil./ Who says it, lives.” – Rita Dove, Parsley

Scene

Ti Koko, set of ruins near Dajabón on the Haitian-Dominican border.

Cast

Ti Gason: Five-year-old boy, Dominican of Haitian descent.

Manman: Haitian mother and Vodou manbo dressed in the colours of Èzili Dantò.

Soldado: Drunk trigueño soldier from La Vega. A sprig of parsley in his lapel.

Ti Gason : Pési

Manman becomes chwal, lets Èzili Dantò ride her, sprinkle the floor with agua florida to sprout touch-me-nots, a green prophecy of a storm to imbrue us all

in blood. The manbo said my spirit is a gran granpapa from Ginen, but I am young, I still fear potoos mourning the dusk. A knock opens the night to the echo of a soldier shouting for men. At the door manman says nothing ¡Diga perejil! shouts the soldier, but her tongue is a gecko. ¡Coño! he spits in a mist of kleren as his

Soldado : Perejil

I wear my white uniform despite its brown stains from three days of weeding the border from the rayanos El Jefe said invaded our lands, cursed Quisqueya with devils they call gods –lwas in their animal tongue. The radio crackles Tierra is a gift to us indios – Taíno with Spaniard the only possibility under the Trinity. Dios habla e’pañol ¡Carajo! Kleren burns clarity in my throat ¡Diga pe-re-jil! This woman still says

face closes in. ¡PEREJIL!

!PE - RE - JIL! Manman opens her mouth, I hear nothing, my eyes behind a hand of green plantains, fresh as parsley.

Cast

nothing. Let me give you a small kiss, mujer. Let me baptize you, a steely smile from my machete liberates the jaw of this mute Haitian.

The Potoo: Nocturnal bird with cryptic plumage. Ti Koko: Ghost town near Dajabón.

The Potoo : Pegsil

A bohio melts to the browns of a bird, feathered bark identical to the burnt bough the bruja rests on. Hushed

it waits for dusk to open its wings and yowl nothing. Its eyes ripening cocoa, reflections of houses burning speckle

the night to mark a border with the smell of a hundred year curse masked by the cigarette a soldier smokes as he counts ears – once, doce, trece –wondering if they would accept the small ones at a whole peso rather than the quarter paid for kids’.

Ti Koko : Pe-wah-heel

A woman bleeds water, black hole on the side of her head. The water cleans the red earth

green into a trail that grows wider as it crosses the day over the remains of a bohio,

its charred royal palm beams a makeshift tombstone of a people who said nothing. Waterlogged

eyes swell red, carving a river as the night dirges last breaths to draw a new border in blood.

Govi: Clay urn housing a gros bon ange (a soul). Abandoned near Ti Koko.

Èzili Dantò: Vodou lwa who birthed the revolution. Vengeful protector of children.

Govi : Pegsil

A vessel made of red clay, warm as blood, its gros bon ange restless under a bottled sun,

counting crashed waves on the ripped tongue of a woman

Èzili : Pietruszka

Set kout kouto to paint

a black sow and bathe

in blood to avenge a border

who said nothing, waiting for a fracture to release her storm.

people who have nowhere.

Godelieve de Bree

Study from the Human Body, 1949

After Francis Bacon

He was having a fag, the curtains snoring across linoleum. The map of Dublin we’d tacked to the wall flapping. Small slaps of summer rain. We lived beside a football stadium, passed the restless hours in its lacteal glow. Who taught him vigilance?

How? Oh man, it’s hard to come back here. Safety pin lodged in curtain. I’d given him the power to make me lonely. Which he did, stood like this.

First published in Propel Magazine, Issue Thirteen

Assault on the Solar Plexus, 1961

After Lee Krasner moved into the barn where her husband worked after his death given space Lee tacked canvas to the wall & painted bigger than ever allowed before love is in one way knowing or learning what not to say I am preoccupied with trying to know myself in order to communicate with others all of which is an assault on the solar plexus feather wet brush flung swing whiskied under artificial light dimensional darkness earth splintered umber song spread thin mud slung by primordial instinct

Mahoning, 1956

After Franz Kline not hanging over head like an anvil on a rope not scent or slow wrinkly process or pulling a sweater out to a long crimped thread not diminutive via sex not intrusive thought yellow threshold of platform or bridge not slack bin bag not in film or a packet of pills not fly on a flower not memento mori terrible accident sleep nor peace

First published by Anthropocene

Western Dream, 1957

After Helen Frankenthaler

you’ll be a lake and i, a fish i’ve known you before this: perhaps we galloped together in the dry plains, our hooves kicking up dust or you were a channel that i –a creek – passed through or, briefer even, the wind that tickled the top of your shaggy grasses. perhaps, we were two peaches remembered only later by a traveller & her partner an hour after leaving home, our bodies rotting together over the course of a hot weekend

Olive Franklin

American Poem

after Zoe Leonard

down seventh between the long trees i am yelled at by two men want to cut me open make me sing a sweet song their tune dyke dyke dyke

i quit walking what’s a street for on tv men line up to be president

Previously published in Dyke Affair, Issue 1

My cunt is a sonnet etc. etc. after Diane Seuss

What are we really trying to get at here with all these poems. Especially the ones about teen girls shoving girthy household objects up their wazoo. See all the kids are doing it these days – three on the steps out front my building blazing up a fresh crock of poems, infecting their insta stories with iambic pentameter. You know what kids are like, well, some of them, anyway. Wasting their time on an MA /MFA/oral fixation on onomatopoeia. Any man in the bar who tells you he jumpstarted my career is lying. Career is such a dead word. Just another distraction in a stack of stiff, dirty distractions from what we were supposed to be doing all along dying and pretending we didn’t know that we were dying.

Previously published in The London Magazine, July/August 2025

Shane

Shane bolts at me like a horse –horse, that’s how I called her, can’t stop talking about Shane these days: muscular, sleek, all my women are sick of it. Tell me they don’t care to hear how Shane can rush you to your knees like a childhood sports team and I’m only fucking with Shane these days, our backs whipping down the wall. Shane speckled up my spine after she left. All my women tell me Shane won’t love you back as I’m pissing my last pint into Shane’s cup, whitening my teeth for Shane’s twenty year anniversary at the club. Shane’s a marathon runner. Shane won’t walk you home just to the door.

A dyke outside a bar says, I don’t fuck with Shane no more, pummelling half a pack from mouth to tarmac. She doesn’t know my Shane: how sweet she can be for me, how she keeps me moving faster, harder, my taskmaster, my leader, my four-storey high electric heater. Keep sweating. I tell my women. Keep betting. We all know Shane will win me the race.

Previously published in Propel Magazine, Issue Sixteen, edited by Richard Scott

Lucie Richter-Mahr

Codex Dream

You’re asleep in a forest of blue trees

You’re lying down inside a clearing I’m there, in the circle, watching you sleep but I’m also somewhere colder I’m closing and opening my eyes inside a cloud

I’m on top of a mountain trying to tell you some urgent piece of news – that death has no terrors but it does have, for instance, a lion walking slowly through the forest of blue trees

Now I’m in a petrol station where you buy me a packet of Polos

It’s been years since my last Polo!

Your palm is a bright spark beneath the LED and further out the horizon rumbles Headlights fill up the lower fractus clouds

No essence can exist without its concrete being, so, yes –I’m on the asphalt But I’m also walking

backwards into a cool ring of stars

Behind the building

Over the road

Into a field of cornflowers

Yes, I’m watching from behind the blue trees while a lion without features comes slowly, softly, to eat a shining Polo from your hand

Shortlisted for the 2024 Aesthetica Creative Writing Award. Previously published in Propel Magazine, Aesthetica Creative Writing Anthology 2024 (2023) and Propel Anthology: 2022–24 (2024).

Drone

First indication The bees cut sideways

Three heads look up at the sound of flight

Second indication Smoke unfurls

An observation model on a half-circular track

Third indication An echo leaves its bed

Fourth indication We would like to report

Four snapshots in coniferous terrain:

A sharp, thin knife

Several flight holes

Baskets hanging in the trees A hopeful habit?

Fifth indication The shutter blinks

Nearly like sugar

Nearly as fast

Rope attached to a sheet of plastic glass

The hunters turn around at the northwest border

Leaving only baskets filled with camomile

The Hunter

The hunter lays a trap

In the long grass of a low field

The hunter is laying a trap

Like this: mud drying on a too-long root

Pale ridge Drifts of pine

The hunter is deadliest when still

The hunter is never hysterical

Bees appear On the border

In the static Where the hunter cuts sideways

Bright and curious Deer’s neck trained for the next thin pulse of lightning

As if pulling on one rope untangles another

It was a good storm

Previously published in Anelog.

Stage & Screen

Robin Cantwell

Extract from Mortar

Scene One

Florence, 1418. Brunelleschi’s modest study. Day. ANDREA is sat at a table with stylus and paper. He looks out the window with a sigh. Draws what he sees. His focus is hampered by BRUNELLESCHI, who hovers awkwardly, inspecting his son’s work.

Andrea: Father, please! Must you stand directly over me?

Brunelleschi: Don’t sulk, Andrea. It’s beneath you.

Brunelleschi snatches the paper, examines it.

And the laws of perspective woefully beyond you. Tell me, Andrea, have you ever seen a building before?

Andrea: Yes, but I have not studied their dimensions as you have—

Brunelleschi: And that building there. (Nodding out the window) The cathedral. You are familiar with the Santa Maria?

Andrea: Yes, Father.

Brunelleschi: You have walked in her shadow? Gazed at her grandeur? Breathed in her ancient air?

Andrea: (Teeth clenched) Yes. Father.

Brunelleschi: Then why are you so incapable of transferring her to the page!

Andrea: What exactly is wrong with what I’ve drawn?

Brunelleschi: So far, exactly everything. Your proportions are all off.

Andrea: The light keeps shifting.

Brunelleschi: Shift with it! Better yet, dance with it! Like a saltarello!

Andrea: People keep walking past the window. (Embarrassed.) People I know…

Brunelleschi: What better way to learn than with moving objects in the way! You should be able to see the cathedral with your back turned! Measure her in your mind’s eye! Feel the grit of the sandstone with the tip of your stylus.

Brunelleschi slams the paper down on the table, flips it over.

Brunelleschi: Again! If you can’t grasp it with natural talent, alas the skill will be acquired by tedious repetition.

Andrea: Need we do this now? It’s pageant day!

Brunelleschi: Oh, for goodness’ sake, Andrea, every day is pageant day! If it’s not pageant, it’s carnival, if not carnival, a feast. Little wonder nothing gets built in this blasted city.

Andrea: How would you know? You’re never here.

Brunelleschi: Which is why I have returned to Florence! To spend time with my son.

Andrea: Not for the competition, then?

Brunelleschi: Now, what would the competition have to do with me, eh?

Andrea: Do you not intend to enter? It’s all anyone is talking about.

Brunelleschi: (Furtive) I have yet to make up my mind.

Andrea: Madre says they favour Ghiberti for it.

Brunelleschi: (Hurt) Madre says a lot of things.

Andrea regards the cathedral through the window.

Andrea: Why is it so difficult to build the dome?

Brunelleschi: Who says it is?

Andrea: They’ve been trying for over a hundred years, have they not? I don’t see what difference this competition will—

Brunelleschi drags Andrea’s chair into the middle of the room.

Andrea: Have you gone mad, Father!?

Brunelleschi frantically grabs some chalk, and on the floor draws a giant octagon around Andrea.

Brunelleschi: Congratulations – you are now the dome of Santa Maria. Your foundations are octagonal. Why?

Andrea: Eight is a holy number. The day Christ resurrected. When the glory of God was made manifest to the people.

Brunelleschi: Correct. But what our cack-brained ancestors didn’t understand is that an octagonal dome is far more challenging to build than one with a circular drum. Unless the cathedral is built with unerring precision. Down to the braccia. Then along came Cambio – he they call the wisest architect who ever lived, Cambio the visionary, Cambio the Great…

He draws lines from the corners of the octagon, towards Andrea.

Brunelleschi: …And fluffed it. You see? They don’t align. The lengths refuse to correlate. An irregular shape means no fixed centre. And no fixed centre means?

Andrea: No dome.

Brunelleschi: Bravo! (Ruffling Andrea’s hair) Even the slightest of disparities – less than a single degree – makes it all the more complex. Some say impossible.

Andrea: And what do you say?

Brunelleschi: (Inspired) I say… possible.

Andrea: (Re: the chalk) Madre is going to kill you.

Brunelleschi: It comes off. (Suddenly worried) I think.

Andrea: So how do we know there’s no fixed centre? How can you tell Cambio ‘fluffed it’?

Brunelleschi: Through an understanding of three-dimensional points across horizontal and vertical plains. Something we call…?

Andrea: (Sighing) Perspective.

Brunelleschi: And so did the scales fall from his eyes!

Brunelleschi drags the chair, along with Andrea, back to the window.

Andrea: My tutor says perspective is a sin. Too close to the holy vision.

Brunelleschi: Your tutor is a nincompoop. Who no doubt comes from a long line of nincompoops. The kind who predict their fates from chicken bones and starry skies,

with no heed of evidence nor mathematical proof. Speaking of proof – and nincompoops – do you have any friends at school? You never bring anyone home.

Andrea: I am not a child anymore, Father. We don’t play at each other’s houses.

Brunelleschi: Then what do you do?

Andrea: Stroll the streets. Head into town. Slide into a tavern or two.

Brunelleschi: My. Such lofty ambitions you all have. One day I shall take you to London, where the really great taverns are. Two rounds down with the East End skinners and you’ll be shuffling sideways like a Genoese crab.

Andrea: When were you in London?

Brunelleschi: When I was studying their abbey.

Andrea: I’ve heard it is a thing of beauty.

Brunelleschi: Pfft! As with most things, Andrea, you have been grossly misinformed. It is regurgitated gothic vomit. Typical English – no originality of their own, so copy the Germans and, failing that, the French. (Struck by a thought) Do not get too close to your friends at school.

Andrea: You want me to have friends, now you are telling me to avoid them!

Brunelleschi: They will never amount to anything. Your success will build up a resentment within them and one day they will become your enemies. But they will still call themselves your friends. It’s confusing, I know.

Andrea: Is that what happened with Ghiberti?

Brunelleschi: (Nerve struck) That was different.

Andrea: How so?

Brunelleschi: He and I were never friends.

Andrea: Help me with this, please, so I can leave.

Brunelleschi: (Energised) Fix your line of sight upon the cathedral. Don’t look at it, look through it! Your intention is to create a perfect replica of what you see with the naked eye – a geometric facsimile of size and space that brings us closer to the truth than ever before. Here is your picture plane. The vanishing point is set. And begin!

Andrea draws intently. Brunelleschi watches.

Brunelleschi: (Deflated) I’m starting to think you’re doing this on purpose.

Andrea slumps – drops his forehead to the table. His mother FRANCESCA enters, fresh from the festivities. She wears bright colours and face paint.

Francesca: Getting along, are we?

Brunelleschi: Like grapes on / the vine.

Andrea: /Rescue me, please.

Francesca: Dai, Filippo – it’s pageant! The sun is shining. There’s street food in the Mercato Vecchio. Jousting in the piazza. Must you keep him in all day?

Brunelleschi: Forgive me, Francesca, but it is not I who keeps Andrea in – it is your son’s incompetence that prevents him from going—

Andrea: Why must I learn perspective? I trained as a goldsmith, as you wished. I am doing well at the guild.

Brunelleschi: Because, Andrea – and I do not wish to blow my own trumpet here – I bloody invented it.

Melina Namdar

Extract from Fermata

Jasmine: Trying to buy rope from B&Q is one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. Like, why are there so many types of rope? Synthetic, Cotton, Jute, Leaded Polysteel, Manila, Natural Hemp. I just need good old-fashioned rope. I’m not looking for anything special; just something durable enough to hold my fucking neck as I deck myself. I know that sounds a bit dark. I know. But there is a plan in place and there is good reason as to why I’m doing it, so before you sit there feeling sorry for me, just be patient and keep your sympathy to yourself.

I have no clue what to do with my life. I never have. Some people are blessed enough to know what they want to be when they grow up. Sometimes you can just look at a kid and you know. A plumber or an electrician or a chef or, I don’t know, something. But for people like me, we struggle, because A) we feel envious of the fact that people know what they wanna do with their life and B) it just feels fucking sad.

I’ve tried my hand at everything. As any typical Iranian would, I went and studied engineering. I have a full-on bachelor’s degree. But I realised engineering was boring and I didn’t enjoy it because I didn’t pick it for myself. So, then, I had the smart idea of trying to do something different. Went from engineering to sales to teaching assistant to tutoring. Like, none of it stuck. None of it felt… me. And now? I’m left with

one thing: I’m a quitter. If there was an award for almost making it, that would be mine. A consolation prize, please.

It makes it even worse when your friends are doing really well and like, you’re the only one who has nothing to report back and then, when you tell them about your endeavours, they kinda look at you and say “Babe you’ll figure it out.” What if I don’t figure it out Samantha, what then? I can feel myself going into a lull. I eat my cereal in silence, looking out the window at the terrible weather of this country and think why am I here? I wish I was born into more money; maybe then I could just do things and I’d be happy with the fact that I have money, but instead these are the cards I’ve been dealt. And it’s a shitty hand.

I got this bright idea that maybe life would be better if I weren’t here. My mum complains I don’t do enough, that I’m a disappointment, that her best mate’s daughter is a doctor and working for Doctors Without Borders and I’m sat on the sofa watching Adventure Time in my dirty pyjamas.

I don’t need the comparison and I don’t like the expectation, so, on a whim, I started looking at ways to die. Oh my god it’s gruesome. Why isn’t there an easy way to go, like a miracle pill. Do you remember ethics and having to do the stupid debate about whether or not euthanasia should be legal? Bruv, if I knew then what I know now…

Trying to overdose on paracetamol and ibuprofen does not work. The girl in your class chatting wass about how she nearly died is a pagan, yeah. You just vomit your whole existence for days on end, then lay

in your bed feeling sorry for yourself, wondering why you thought it was a good idea in the first place. Slitting wrists is too violent. Like life has tortured me enough, I’m good.

I tried to drown myself at my local pool. It doesn’t help that I can swim. What’s even more depressing is the kids start looking at you like you’re some sort of fucking idiot. Like your cognitive brain ain’t dropped. Allow me the judgment, you little prick.

I don’t have a car, so I can’t do the pipe in the exhaust through the window. Another reason I’m a disappointment, but there’s no need to drive in London. It doesn’t make sense; it just costs more. Like living is actually so expensive, like deep it for a second. I have to take the underground to Hanger Lane. Wait for the 95 that never comes on time when you actually need it and try to cross without getting killed by some idiot biker making TikTok’s as he runs a red light. Death by motorcyclist is not the vibe, ’cause then I’m pissing people off by blocking the A40. All to get to aisle seven, and not know what type of overpriced rope to hang myself with.

Excuse me, can I ask a quick question?

Customer Advisor (CA): You just did.

Jasmine: He’s one of them ones.

CA: Go ahead shoot.

Jasmine: Who says shoot anymore? Are we in an American sitcom?

CA: How can I help you ma’am.

Jasmine: Ma’am? Mate I’m 30. Wait! I’m looking for some rope.

CA: You’re in the right section. What kind of rope are you looking for?

Jasmine: I can’t tell this shaggy haired man, who clearly is dead inside, what I actually need it for.

Oh, you know, like rope, normal rope type of rope, you know you’d... ummm... use to hold heavy things!

CA: Then you’re looking for nylon rope – “When strength’s your priority, trust the rope with durability.”

Jasmine looks baffled.

Jasmine: Ummm, sick. Would it like hold the equivalent of, I don’t know, let’s say a human body.

Shouldn’t have said that, he’s now looking at me like I’m some sort of serial killer.

I mean, I’m looking for it to hold a very heavy item, not a human body or anything, that would be mad innit. I’m doing construction shit.

CA: Umm, go for the nylon.

Jasmine: Thanks.

Clearly, this guy has now told the other members of staff, because, when I get to the cashier, the woman is looking at me like I’m some sort of crazy axe murderer with my rope and cable ties, ready to tap that button underneath her desk at the slightest move.

I smile. Try to defuse this tension but it comes out so fucking creepy. “How’s your day going by the way?”

Cashier: Yeah good. Finish my shift soon, got my boyfriend picking me up.

Jasmine: Not the made-up boyfriend to save her skin. Quick, change the convo.

I like your tattoo.

Cashier: Yeah, I got one ever since I watched that Jeffrey Dahmer show. Cannibals don’t like the taste of tattoos.

Jasmine: I give up, I actually give up.

Cashier: Do you want your receipt?

Jasmine: Of course, I wanna fucking receipt.

Kate Roche

Extract from The Ladies’ Gallery

The Ladies’ Gallery in an old East London synagogue on Yom Kippur. We faintly hear the service taking place below. Mrs Zalman sits ramrod straight in the front row. Mrs Pinto is next to her, immersed in her knitting. Mrs Levin sits behind, a huge handbag on her lap. Mrs Quinn enters in sunglasses and sits next to Mrs Levin.

Mrs Levin: Gut Yontif.

Mrs Quinn: Gut Yontif, Hannah.

Mrs Zalman: You’re late. Service started four hours ago.

Mrs Quinn: Yeah? How long until Yizkor?

Mrs Levin: Soon.

Mrs Zalman: When God wills it.

Mrs Pinto: Two hours from now.

Mrs Quinn: I knew it.

Mrs Levin: It won’t be that long.

Mrs Quinn: Haven’t even done the Torah reading, have they? They’re late.

Mrs Pinto: Not as late as last year.

Mrs Zalman: God forbid you should spend time in shul on Yom Kippur.

Mrs Pinto: Wish I spent less time here.

Mrs Zalman: Mummy, you don’t mean that.

Mrs Pinto: I shouldn’t be here.

Mrs Zalman: Don’t be silly.

Mrs Pinto: They know we’re out. She’ll be breaking into the house as we speak.

Mrs Levin: Who’s breaking into the house?

Mrs Zalman: No one is breaking into the house.

Mrs Pinto: Her next door. She’s been waiting for me to leave.

Mrs Zalman: Mrs Rosenberg wouldn’t rob you. She’s a member of this congregation. You’ve known her for sixty years.

Mrs Pinto: Why isn’t she here, then?

Mrs Zalman: She’s in a coma, mum.

Mrs Pinto: Oh, so you take her side.

Mrs Levin: (Distressed) A coma…

Mrs Levin rummages through her bag, pulling out a notebook and pen.

Mrs Levin: I had thought that Mrs Rosenberg and Mr Samuels might make a nice little pair. It is a proper coma she’s in, I suppose Mrs Zalman?

Mrs Zalman: As opposed to?

Mrs Levin: An indulgent sort-of nap?

Mrs Zalman: The full megillah.

Mrs Levin: Ah, now that’s a shame. (She crosses out a line in her notebook.)

Mrs Quinn: Mrs Rosenberg and Mr Samuels. You can’t be serious, Hannah.

Mrs Levin: They would have been lovely together.

Mrs Quinn: Look at the state of him.

Mrs Quinn gestures over the balcony. The ladies peer down at the unfortunate Mr Samuels.

The Ladies: (In collective agreement) Hmmmmmm.

Mrs Pinto: His grandfather was the same. Very wet eyes.

Mrs Levin: He’s a very nice sort-of man, Mr Samuels. Perhaps Sarah, you might—

Mrs Quinn: Don’t even think about it.

Mrs Zalman: Given your track record, Mrs Levin.

Mrs Levin: I think you’ll find, Mrs Zalman, that I’ve matchmade thirteen couples in my time. With only fifteen divorces.

Mrs Quinn: And God forbid any of us should add to your accomplishments.

Rabbi: (Offstage) Ladies. Ladies, please.

Silence as all the women ostensibly observe the service.

Mrs Levin: We need to do Yizkor for Mrs Porter this year.

Mrs Zalman: It’s her family’s duty to do Yizkor, not ours.

Mrs Quinn: Well, they ain’t here.

Mrs Pinto: I was sorry to hear of Mrs Porter’s passing. Nice woman, terrible salmon.

Mrs Zalman: Terrible salmon. Very dry.

Mrs Quinn: Even at the funeral, they had that salmon.

Mrs Levin: The family told me they followed Mrs Porter’s recipe to the letter.

Mrs Zalman: They certainly did.

Mrs Pinto: That was her salmon, exactly.

Mrs Levin: It’s what she would have wanted.

Mrs Quinn: Foisting it upon us one last time.

Mrs Zalman: We ate beforehand.

Mrs Levin: Very sensible.

The Ladies fall silent as they remember Mrs Porter.

Mrs Quinn: Every year, there’s a new name for Yizkor.

Mrs Levin clasps Mrs Quinn’s hand.

Mrs Levin: Where’s Cynthia? She’s usually here by now.

Mrs Zalman: She’s not coming.

Mrs Quinn: Not coming? Where else should she be?

Mrs Levin: Golders Green.

Mrs Quinn: What?

Mrs Levin: She’s going with her daughter. They’re members of a new shul up there.

Mrs Pinto: She should make them come here.

Mrs Quinn: Exactly.

Mrs Pinto: Ninety years I’ve lived here, and I’ve successfully never travelled further than the Bethnal Green

Museum of Childhood. Cynthia should be careful, gallivanting off to North London at her age.

Mrs Quinn: She should be here with us.

Mrs Levin: It’s more convenient with all the family being up there now.

Mrs Cohen strolls into the Ladies Galley, standing over the other ladies.

Mrs Cohen: Ladies please. My husband is in the middle of his sermon.

Mrs Zalman: He’s doing very well, Mrs Cohen.

Mrs Cohen: Thank you, Mrs Zalman.

Mrs Quinn: He told the same joke last year. The one about the parrot on the cruise ship.

Mrs Cohen: He’s a busy man, Mrs Quinn. God forbid he should focus more on the sermon than the jokes.

Mrs Zalman: This is a day of atonement after all.

Mrs Pinto: Personally, I can’t hear a word he’s saying.

Mrs Zalman: Mummy’s hearing isn’t what it was.

Mrs Pinto: If you could ask him to speak up.

Mrs Quinn: Do they not teach Rabbis to project anymore, Mrs Cohen? I’m sure your husband wouldn’t want to forget the Ladies’ Gallery.

Mrs Cohen: No Rabbi has ever been able to forget the Ladies’ Gallery, Mrs Quinn.

A/B:

Nusrath Tapadar

Try Not to Think About It

This script should be performed by at least two female/non-binary actors (A and B). How lines are divided, or whether the whole script is read by both actors at all times, is open to interpretation.

Am I kissing right? In the movies they make noises— I mean, in porn they make noises…

Should I be making noises?

No. That would be inauthentic. Her hand slides around my waist, gently caressing the arch of my back.

I stiffen, not intentionally – the sensation – it’s just, new—

I feel her stiffen her back. No! Don’t fuck this up! Think! Quick!

I dive back in, a little forcefully, I realise on impact. But she responds well to the intensity. Okay. Okay. I need to get fucking serious about this. Let’s start showing some enthusiastic consent. Her hand is back on my waist and I think about doing the same.

But my arm is kind of trapped under hers and it’d be a whole faff to get it out.

I could stroke her thigh?

No, that’s stupid. That would be going from zero to one hundred.

What about what about what about what about what about—

OH! Tongues!

I could get my tongue out! Or in? Involved?

What are we trying to achieve with the tongue?

Is it like a sort of – lick? Of the lip? Or both lips?

Or are you trying to get to their tongue?

And then what do you do? Do you just, joust at it?

How much tongue is enough? How much tongue is too much tongue?

I’m stiffening again—

Release, bitch, release!

She’s pulling me towards her bed. All I can think is—

Are we both going to fit on that?

She doesn’t seem concerned.

She sits down, drawing me close, until I’m standing between her open legs.

And she kisses me, pulls me down onto her bed, cradling my head until it meets the pillow.

She slides her fingers through my hair.

OMG, no it’s so greasy! But she doesn’t seem to care.

She’s on top of me now, kissing my neck.

I still can’t breathe— Is this really happening?

She sits up and takes off her top, then her bra, Ohmygood—

BOOBS!

Wow… Boobs are amazing…

I want to just reach out and—

Wait, can I actually do that?

Fuck, I think I might be allowed to do that—

I don’t know if I can handle that kind of power

Whoaaaaaa… So soft and squishy…

Yep, you’re gay.

There’s no two ways about it—

Although you weren’t sure for a while, were you?

Does having crushes on men, or boys really, make you not gay?

Am I making it all up? No, that can’t be true

I’m loving this! Or am I?

Have I taught myself to want this? Through years of pining?

Because boys always smell like Lynx Africa and women smell like Jo Malone?

I’ve had loads of crushes on boys, and crush really is the word—

Like my ribs were caving in on themselves and like my stomach would explode—

And if they didn’t notice me at school that day I might as well just crawl in a hole and die.

God that’s a bit intense, isn’t it?

In retrospect that sounds stressful. Is that just what desire feels like?

I haven’t ever felt like that for a girl… Have I?

I’ve wanted to sleep with girls, that’s for sure, I wanted to sleep with Vanessa fuck me…

Did I want to sleep with her, but has a girl ever made me feel like—

My eyeballs were going to be squeezed out through my arsehole?

Hmm… No.

Now that I say that out loud it sounds healthier that I haven’t—

Wait stop – I’m having sex – my dreams are coming true and I’m still thinking!

But it’s important to think a little bit, no? To know you’re sure you want something?

I need to get into my body. What’s my body saying?

Uhm… It’s vibrating down in the old You Know What, that’s for sure.

Am I wet? Is that a good measure of – you know?

But they do say that being wet, even having an orgasm—

It doesn’t mean that you’re enjoying things.

It’s just your body’s way of processing what’s happening—

Getting it over with in case you don’t want it to be happening.

But I do want it to be happening! Right?

I would be devastated if this stopped.

Oh! That’s my boob! She wants to see my boobs!

Wowwww… Fuck it, okay!

Let’s get them out!

Wait, but then she’ll have to see my belly— hmmm…

Less sure about that…

OOOOOH SHE’S MADE THE DECISION FOR ME, WE’RE GOING FOR IT, ARMS UP, TOP OFF…

Wow… No adult person has seen your belly. What does she think? Is she disgusted? No, she likes it.

Freak.

No! Mean! To both of you!

This beautiful lady with beautiful boobs likes you and your belly and your boobs.

She’s stroking your booooooobs, she’s squeezing your boooooobs.

Fuck you Mum, if you could see me now!

EW NO! DON’T THINK OF YOUR MUM WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?

You can celebrate reclaiming your sexuality— And coming into your identity as partial to a ‘boob squared’ situation—

Without thinking about your—

Oh great, well she’s here now.

Hi Mum.

The most beautiful girl in the world wants to get me naked and all I’m thinking about is my mum calling me ridiculous because I’m not sure if I want to live the rest of my life with a man. Because ‘I’ve always had crushes on boys’, like when I was in year three and I decided that the ginger boy with the weird older brother was my husband, or in year nine when she caught me trying to dye my hair blue because I heard it was George Kim’s favourite colour. But the thing is Mum, I also wanted to be an astronaut princess when I was in year three. And the week before dying my hair blue I tried to spend all my Eid money on a life-size cut out of a Dalek, so I just don’t know that I can be held to choices I made between the ages of seven and thirteen. And maybe I would have told you I was watching Countdown for Carol Vorderman, not for the mental maths, if I hadn’t felt so scared of the repercussions! Fuck, if I even knew that fancying Carol was an option! How can you blame me for being confused when all you’ve ever told me is that what I’m feeling isn’t real? Maybe I only question myself because you make me. Brilliant. Now I’ve spent the best night of my life arguing with my mum and she’s not even fucking here! Oh—

That’s my pants— Hang on, when did I take my trousers off?

Ohmygod I’m naked. She’s kissing my belly

My thighs, my— oh god okay— Her face is in my—

Right, well, I’m definitely not thinking about my mum now, am I?

Shona Graham

Extract from Anna of F***ing Cleves

INT. ENGLISH COURT – HENRY’S THRONE ROOM – DAY

We hear the door close, and sweep round the COUNCILLORS, who are creating a drum-roll with their hands and feet.

It crescendos as we reach the fireplace, where THOMAS CROMWELL pulls the cover off of six portraits. ANNA and AMALIA’s are furthest to the right.

The crowd cheers.

HENRY sits directly opposite the fireplace, smiling.

THOMAS

Shall we meet the ladies?

A roar of approval from the gathered men.

THOMAS (cont’d)

May I introduce to you, the crown jewel of the Guise family, Mary!

He gestures to the first portrait: this is MARIE, who we saw earlier with her sisters.

THOMAS (cont’d)

Reports say she’s gorgeous, of course a fantastic thoroughbred, and, the piece de resistance, as it were: two sons.

This is met with ‘ooohs’.

ARCHBISHOP

A very promising candidate, my liege.

HENRY

Are there downsides to this creature?

The advisors laugh.

THOMAS

Well, as you may be aware the King of Scotland had also expressed some interest in Mary, and the two are now... (Barely audible.) Married.

An uproar.

THOMAS (cont’d)

BUT, but, she has not yet been crowned Queen of Scotland! And we all know how, ah, fickle marriages can be.

Henry is glowering.

THOMAS (cont’d) Let’s move on for now.

He moves to the second portrait, this one of...

THOMAS (cont’d)

Her sister Renée, Abbess of St. Pierre. Enjoys playing the lute and harpsichord, an avid reader of poetry and can, apparently, name every flower grown in the gardens of Versailles.

ARCHBISHOP

A cultivator! Perhaps good to grow strong Tudor roses! And... sons!

THOMAS

Stick a lid on it Your Grace, it’s getting one-note.

CULPEPER

She’s beautiful – so slender.

THOMAS

Well observed. Like her older sister, she is lofty in feature and stature.

Henry narrows his eyes.

HENRY

How ‘lofty’?

THOMAS (Very quietly)

Six… foot… two.

Gasps. Thomas senses the change in mood and moves swiftly on.

THOMAS (cont’d)

Antoinette of Guise, Abbess of Faremoutier.

HENRY

Another Guise?

THOMAS

Another sister, yes. This one far shorter and unmarried, so we’re off to a good start.

DUKE OF NORFOLK

A little horse-faced, isn’t she?

THOMAS

Uh, is she? I would say striking in feature, perhaps.

DUKE OF NORFOLK

You know what she looks like? The King’s prize stallion, Canicida!

Sounds of recognition and some laughter.

HENRY

Would you have me wed my horse, Thomas?

THOMAS

No! No, of course not, sire. Now this, this lady is sure to whet your appetite.

He moves to the fourth painting: CHRISTINA, from the banquet.

THOMAS (cont’d)

The breathtaking, and highly sought, Christina of Milan.

One advisor pretends to swoon. She’s clearly a fan favourite.

THOMAS (cont’d)

Though she hardly needs introducing, this Danish beauty speaks five languages, and could give even our beloved monarch a run for his money on a hunt.

He winks at Henry, who scoffs but is clearly enjoying himself again.

THOMAS (cont’d)

Some may be put off by her mourning dress in this portrait, but I’m assured it merely indicates her devotion to the sanctity of marriage rather than to her previous husband. Look, she’s even had a message inscribed on the frame here! What does this say?

(Reads) ‘I am the great-niece of Catherine of Aragon.’

Silence. Henry is fuming.

Thomas stands between the portraits of Anna and Amalia, visibly sweating now.

THOMAS (cont’d)

The Julich-Cleves sisters! Unmarried, average build, unrelated to your ex-wives, and their brother, the Duke of Cleves, is literally called William the Rich. Their duchy is Lutheran, which would create a

great alliance for the stability of the English church, but they were both raised Catholic, so no outlandish religious ideas.

HENRY

Which one is the heir?

THOMAS

(Indicating)

Anne, sire, the eldest.

HENRY

Good. The other one looks too much like Wife Two. I don’t trust her.

Thomas sags in relief.

THOMAS

Excellent, sire! Anne of Cleves it is. A fantastic choice.

The advisors go to raise their glasses in a toast.

HENRY Wait.

Everyone freezes with their glasses half-raised. Henry turns to HANS, who is sat in the far corner.

HENRY (cont’d)

Hans. You’ve painted all these women. You’ve sat with them. Will this Anne of Cleves make a good wife?

Pause.

HANS

She is nothing like your previous wives, I can say that much with certainty.

Henry gestures for him to elaborate.

HANS (cont’d)

She is... good-hearted. Of strong character. Clever. Capable. I imagine she’ll make quite the match for you.

Henry nods. The men cheers and drink.

INT. ENGLISH COURT – HENRY’S THRONE ROOM – LATER

It’s evening and the room is empty, the portraits abandoned.

Henry walks in and finds Anna’s.

He stares at her. Touches her painted face.

HENRY Wife.

The word seems to whisper in the wind to the Low Countries.

INT. ANNA’S SUITE – SCHLOSS BURG – NIGHT

The sound of an axe falling and screams.

Anna’s eyes flash open as she wakes in a cold sweat.

She looks to Amalia who sleeps on peacefully beside her.

Anna settles back down, uneasy.

Will Jarvis

Aortic

INT. BROOM CUPBOARD – NIGHT

JACK sits on the floor of a broom cupboard in darkness. He’s breathing heavily. The sound of a TICK overwhelms him.

Tick tick tick tick tick.

TITLE CARD: AORTIC

Jack continues to panic. Tick tick tick.

Jack opens his phone, the white light of the screen illuminates his face. He scrolls down his messages to find one particular contact. He stares at his phone for some time.

Finally, he calms his body down and takes one last deep breath. The tick quiets as Jack voicenotes the contact.

JACK

You will never guess where I am right now. A small room, lots of buckets and brooms, kinda damp. (Laughs)

Last time I was stuffed in one of these, we were staying at your Nan’s. Still have no idea how you persuaded me to sleep next to a washing machine.

The tick continues, faint. Jack stands up, distracting himself as his frustration quietly grows.

JACK (cont’d)

Anyway... Hello. How’s it going? You’re probably asleep right now. Its early.

Tick.

JACK (cont’d)

What is that noise!

Jack searches around the room.

Jack flicks on a light switch on the wall. A bulb hums on, lighting up the cupboard warm orange. The light calms Jack down as he soaks it in.

JACK (cont’d)

You woke me up early that morning, do you remember? Next to the washing machine. Made me creep out your Nan’s to go and watch the sunrise.

EXT. PEAK DISTRICT – DAWN

Jack stands on top of a hill in Derbyshire. The warm orange light has transformed into a beautiful golden sunrise. The ticking has gone.

JACK

It was quiet. As if some massive national event was taking place just over the horizon and we hadn’t been invited. And I remember my chest absolutely killed! But that didn’t matter, because when we got to the top you could see all the little people on all the other hills. It felt lonely, but a good lonely. They were over there and we were over here, our little kingdom in that golden sunrise.

Jack enjoys the sunrise. But it soon starts to blind him.

The ticking starts again. Jack turns away from the sunrise and grasps his heart, clearly uncomfortable.

JACK (cont’d)

I’m in the hospital by the way. I had that surgery I was scared of. The aortic valve. They put this metal flap in me to help my heart pump. (Rubs his heart)

Tick

JACK (cont’d)

But I feel worse. Think its pumping too hard. Too much blood, too much oxygen. It’s giving me a headache.

Jack turns back to the sunrise. The tick stops.

JACK (cont’d) (Smiling)

I could’ve stayed up that hill all day. But we had to go.

Turns away from the sun.

JACK (cont’d)

You couldn’t really see the sun from down there.

The ticking comes back.

JACK (cont’d)

Anyway, I just wanted to let you know the surgery went okay. They kept me in overnight. Glad I finally summed up the courage!

Jack rubs his heart.

JACK (cont’d)

It does hurt though, my chest feels tighter. Everything feels tighter.

The ticking becomes a beat: Tick tick. Tick tick.

JACK (cont’d)

And that ticking is getting fucking closer and closer!

Jack lets go of his heart as he searches for where its coming from. Tick tick.

He then feels his heart again. A louder tick.

INT. BROOM CUPBOARD – NIGHT

Jack drops his phone as he stands in the broom cupboard. He’s realised where the ticking is coming from: his heart.

Overwhelmed, Jack tries to control his breath. He turns out the light and paces in the darkness, closing his eyes to focus, but the ticking heartbeat grows. His breathing speeds.

Jack storms out of the cupboard.

The voicenote continues, recording silence as it illuminates the room sickly white.

EXT. CAR PARK – NIGHT

Jack sits on the curb of the car park in darkness. Tick tick. Tick tick. Tick tick.

Jack tries to control his breathing. He times every breath to the tick of his heart.

As he sits in the darkness, his breath stabilises.

Eventually, the sun rises over the car park. Jack’s face is painted gold.

INT. BROOM CUPBOARD – NIGHT

The phone continues to record silence.

EXT. PEAK DISTRICT – NIGHT

The hilltop landscape has descended into darkness, the sunrise completely vanishing. Silence.

EXT. CAR PARK – DAWN

Jack stands up, watching the sun rise over him. The ticking has become a heartbeat. Beat beat.

Jack smiles.

Joe Kelly

Extract from Strawman

EXT. BLACK SCREEN – DAY

A bitter wind HOWLS like a chorus of banshees. A deep, earthy thunder rumbles in the distance, then CRASHES nearby.

EXT. UNTAMED MOORLAND – DAY – CONTINUOUS

A black deflated FOOTBALL with three deep slits forming a crumpled demonic grin.

We drift out REVEALING... large tufts of STRAW nestling the ball, a maroon BEANIE HAT, the tip of a tall WOODEN POST. The football forms the face of a SCARECROW dressed in a MUSTARD HOODIE, KHAKI TROUSERS and muddy TRAINERS.

Scarecrow looms down on us, standing firm against the backdrop of a charcoal sky. The storm crescendos, then suddenly... silence.

A disembodied voice hisses rapidly – “Kss-Kss”.

TITLE CARD: STRAWMAN

SLAM TO BLACK.

BARK. BARK. BARK – A shepherd dog expels heavy yaps, scratching against the other side of an old wooden door.

INT. COTTAGE BATHROOM – NIGHT – CONTINUOUS

BANG. The door rattles. BARK, BARK...

The space is snug, harshly lit, plastered with chipped vintage wallpaper. An empty Scotch WHISKY bottle lies at the foot of an avocado green BATHTUB. A large foot slumps out over the tub’s edge. Its owner jolts up:

GREER (60s, thick Highland accent) has a wrestler’s build, puffy cheeks and sunken eyes. Her throbbing headache makes it painful to move.

She spots a browning blood stain on the edge of the tub, rubs it and traces it back to a large cut on her forehead. An open window lets in harsh PATTERS of rainfall. A faint howling echoes in the distance.

With a bear-like grunt, Greer grabs both sides of the tub and heaves herself up.

SECONDS LATER:

As Greer unlatches the door, SOPHIE (the humungous king shepherd dog, twelve) barges through. Greer embraces Sophie, crouching to her level. BARK. BARK. BARK

GREER

(comforting, then irate)

Ssssh – SSSHHH. SHUSH!

Sophie obeys. Greer ruffles her fur with bristly affection.

GREER

What is it? Ey? What now?

Again, distant howling drifts through the open window. Greer turns slowly in its direction.

EXT. MOORLAND FARMYARD – NIGHT – MOMENTS LATER

Greer bursts out from the front door of her cottage yielding a HAMMER.

Sophie follows closely. Beyond several yards of moorland, the surroundings are a sea of mist and blackness. Greer stands very still, listening out for the sound.

There it is again – a little louder but still obscured by rainfall. Is it an animal? Greer listens.

Her face twitches – it could be someone screaming.

INT. COTTAGE KITCHEN – NIGHT

Greer rummages through cupboards and drawers, stuffing objects into a tattered HIKING BACKPACK – a FLASHLIGHT TORCH, an EMERGENCY WHISTLE, a FIRST AID KIT

SECONDS LATER:

Greer PUKES into the kitchen sink over unwashed dishes.

SECONDS LATER:

Greer reaches for a FLASK but knocks an empty GLASS BOTTLE to the ground. It SHATTERS. With a groan, Greer boots the bottle head across the room.

EXT. MOORLAND FARMYARD – NIGHT

Greer BLASTS the whistle, then listens for a response.

Another scream. She bolts in its direction.

EXT. WILD MOORLAND – NIGHT

Greer and Sophie traipse breathlessly through long grass and squelching bog land, closer to the sound’s source.

Another scream – this time shriller and prolonged. Greer squints through the darkness. She BLASTS the whistle.

EXT. FOOTHILL – NIGHT

Greer struggles up sharp, rocky terrain. She grimaces, pausing to clutch her bloated stomach of whisky.

A twig SNAPS nearby. Greer flashes the torch in its direction and fishes the hammer from her trousers. She sees nothing. An uneasy silence...

Suddenly, a tormented androgynous SCREECH pierces through the darkness from several dozen feet above. It has a strange cacophonous quality – like two voices blended into one.

Greer shines her torch up through the mist, illuminating the slopes of a giant mountain, shrouded in thick woodland.

EXT. MOUNTAIN SLOPE – MOMENTS LATER

Greer scrambles up the rocky landscape, spluttering phlegm.

BARK. Sophie shoots off.

Greer follows, just managing to keep Sophie in range of her torch. After several dozen yards, Sophie reaches a BODY. Greer rushes over to it, takes its head in her hand, shines a light on its facing revealing: A YOUNG MAN (22, baby face, soft cockney accent).

His eyes are shut but he’s breathing, shivering in the bitter Autumn night. He lies on his back, beneath a small cliff face littered with jagged rocks.

Greer removes her hands and shuffles back, composing herself. She runs the light over him. His trouser leg is rolled up exposing a fractured foot and large open wound on his shin.

GREER

What’s your name?

She pans the light along his torn, filth-ridden hiking clothes, up to his unkempt face. He’s drowsy, almost serene. A giant RUCKSACK cushions his head.

GREER

What’s your name lad?

He murmurs, barely responding when Sophie licks his face.

Greer pans the light across his outstretched hands, eventually landing on an empty JAR OF SLEEPING PILLS.

Greer BLASTS the whistle into the young man’s face. He groans, trying limply to bat her away.

Greer tears off her backpack and lays it beside his legs. She YANKS him on to his front so her bag cushions the wound. He moans with drowsy anguish.

Greer forces the man’s own fingers down his throat but they’re limp. He shakes his head.

Over this:

YOUNG MAN

No. No. No...

Greer clutches his jaw and shoves her own fingers down his throat. He resists but she overpowers him. He vomits. She shoves them in again, whacking his back hard. He vomits. Greer shines the light on his vomit and spots remnants of the pills. He tries to crawl away. She drags him back.

YOUNG MAN

Please...

Greer clamps open his jaw once more.

Olja Mladjenovic

Extract from Sublime

EXT. DRINA RIVER. BOSNIA. 1993. NIGHT

YOUNG ANJA, no more than five, holds her MOTHER’s hand. The Drina river surges powerfully, pulling debris and shadows downstream. Her mother’s hands are covered in intricate Sicanje tattoos, traditional Bosnian markings.

Shelling and gunfire in the background. The sound of the water builds into a deafening roar muting the gunfire.

MOTHER

We have to cross, Anja. The water is strong.

Anja nods, but her eyes are drawn to the river, the dark bodies drifting just beneath the surface. She looks up at her mother, her small hand trembling.

MOTHER (cont’d)

Keep your eyes on me!

Her mother steps into the water, pulling Anja along. The current tugs at them, trying to pull them downstream. Anja gasps, struggling to keep her footing, the water rising to her chest.

YOUNG

ANJA

(Whimpering, breathless) Mama!

The sound of the water roars around them, drowning out her mother’s response.

MOTHER Anja, look at me!

Anja looks up, her mother’s face a mask of determination and fear.

Suddenly they’re both swept away by the surging water. Anja’s mother thrashes, fighting the current.

Anja slams against a rock and grabs hold. The river pulls at her tiny body as her mother disappears into the torrent.

Her small hands grip tighter, fighting to hold on.

The sound of rushing water is deafening, turning into a static roar, a screech.

The screeching grows louder, Anja screams with it – the noise unbearable.

The whites of young Anja’s eyes go black.

The crescendo builds, Anja lets go.

BLACKOUT.

INT. MAYFAIR HOUSE. KITCHEN. LONDON. 2012 – DAY

A luxurious London apartment. ANJA (25) Eastern European, fair, irons at a makeshift station by the kitchen. Steam rises around her face.

She lifts a silk blouse. Examines it. Smooths it across the board. The iron glides in precise strokes – collar first, then sleeves. Steam hisses with each press.

Another piece. Check the label. Adjust temperature. The ritual continues.

Press, steam, hang. Press, steam, hang.

ROBERT (50s) brooding and richer than he should be, weaves around collecting his things.

He brushes past Anja. She steadies the iron.

ROBERT

This weekend we’re flying to Sebastian’s. I need the shirts done. Get something for Lila.

The iron’s steam mingles with her breath.

No answer.

Still no answer.

ANJA

Did you have anything specific in mind—

ANJA (cont’d)

Same as last time?

ANJA (cont’d)

I’ll have it ready by Thursday.

Robert pulls out his wallet, counts out bills, and places them on the kitchen counter.

Steely, he walks away, her gaze lingers on him.

LILA (20s) young and a permanent scowl on her face emerges from the bedroom in a silk robe. She carries a dress.

LILA

(Not looking up) It still smells like cigarettes.

Lila drops the dress, her elbow catching the portable rack. Several freshly ironed garments tumble to the floor.

Anja immediately drops to her knees, quickly scooping up the clothes, checking them for wrinkles.

INT. MAYFAIR HOUSE. MASTER BEDROOM – LATER

Anja enters with folded clothes. She admires the designer handbags lining the shelves, her fingers lingering on a silk dress.

She turns to see the chaos – clothes strewn across unmade sheets, wine bottles on the sideboard, makeup scattered, wet towels on the floor.

She sighs and gets to work cleaning.

EXT. MAYFAIR HOUSE. SERVICE ENTRANCE – DAY

Anja emerges with black binbags, she separates the recycling and breaks down cardboard. In the background PAUL (50s), the driver, leans against a new black Mercedes streaked with London grime. He smokes with chatty SANDRA (40s) the nanny.

SANDRA

(To Anja)

She left a right mess for ya.

Anja pulls glass bottles from a bag, places them carefully in the recycling bin.

SANDRA (cont’d)

How long d’you reckon this one’ll last then?

PAUL

Lila? Six months, maybe.

SANDRA

That’s generous. I give it three.

PAUL

Let’s hope for less than that.

They snicker.

SANDRA

Did you see the size of the venue for the girls’ party? We’re in for one.

Anja drops the last binbag, slamming the bin shut.

Paul stretches out his hand, offering Anja the cigarette. She takes it gratefully, inhaling deeply.

ANJA (To Sandra)

You’re back early.

SANDRA

The girls are at their mum’s for the night. Oh, I’ve added bits to the shopping list!

ANJA

I saw. The girls requesting fancy soaps are they?

Paul and Sandra exchange glances.

SANDRA

They have very fine taste, ease up, get something for yourself.

Anja hands back the cigarette, exhaling slowly.

ANJA

You need to clean the car, he’s going to lose his mind.

PAUL

That’s what I’m hoping for.

ANJA Nine AM, mine?

Paul nods. Anja heads back inside, shoulders a little less tense.

Author Biographies

Vic Beswick writes about madness and queerness, spiked with jetblack comedy. Their novel Videotape is a story of love, bipolar disorder and the search for grace when all seems lost.

José Buera is a Caribbean/Latinx writer. His poetry has been anthologised and appears in Anthropocene, Magma, Propel, Wasafiri and elsewhere. José is the founder of Empanada Poetry Salon, a gathering of diaspora poets amidst their foods.

Robin Cantwell is an award-winning dramatist, currently under commission at Marylebone Theatre. He is a graduate of Oxford University, Cambridge University, the Yale Writers’ Workshop, Mercury Playwrights and Criterion New Writing.

CE Cathcart is a queer Irish writer and gardener and a previous recipient of Spread the Word’s Early Career Bursary. Her essays explore our relationship to nature, queerness and belonging.

Liz Churchill is working on a short story collection. She has previously won the Scratch Books A4 Competition and she was longlisted for the 2025 Galley Beggar Short Story Prize.

Heather Cutforth is an alum of Curtis Brown Creative and the Soho Theatre Comedy Lab. She is working on a historical novel set during the Phoney War.

Godelieve de Bree is a poet and critic based in London, with poems in Propel, Tate and fourteen poems. Her critical work has featured in Poetry London, The London Magazine and LARB.

Fionnuala Deasy lives in London and works in museums. She is working on her first novel.

Olive Franklin’s work appears in POETRY, The Poetry Review and The London Magazine.

Shona Graham is an award-winning actor/writer, and winner of the 2025 Bill Cashmore Award. She’s trained with the Old Vic and Criterion and writes for stage, screen and audio.

Will Jarvis is a London-based writer, producer and director exploring human connection, neurodivergence and grounded sci-fi in film, TV and theatre. His work often plays with genre, structure and perspective.

Vashti Katz is a community historian and writes personal essays on the politics of aspiration, aging and inheritance. She lives in London and is represented by James Spackman, BKS agency.

Joe Kelly writes dark, strange and propulsive character studies for screen. He graduated from RCSD with an MA in Writing for Stage and Broadcast Media and now works for The National Archives.

Dallas Marie Koelling is a novelist, screenwriter and comedian. Her forthcoming debut, Wife Guy, blends satire and romantic drama.

Marcella Marx’s fiction explores memory, migration, and identity. Shortlisted for the Guardian 4th Estate Prize and winner of a 2025 New Voices Award, her short stories are forthcoming in The Georgia Review and other anthologies.

Sharmaine Lim is writing a novel about a troubled family navigating between worlds. Her stories have been shortlisted for several prizes and published in Brick Lane Bookshop New Short Stories 2024.

Hadiru Mahdi is an artist of Sierra Leonean descent. Themes in his work include objects as vessels; the power in space and place, language, map-making, memory and movement.

Sabrina Mahtani is a human rights lawyer. She is the founder of Women Beyond Walls, a global collaborative that challenges the mass incarceration of women.

Alissa Mears is originally from Virginia. A London-based writer and teacher, she’s finished a collection of essays and is in the midst of a memoir about friendship, Forster and displacement.

Emma Mitchell is a writer, performer and academic whose work employs experimental writing practices and forms to reclaim the voices of marginalised women from history, particularly the eighteenth century.

Olja Mladjenovic is a Bosnian-born, award-winning writer, actor and artist. Her work explores identity, place and the emotional landscapes of migration.

Melina Namdar is a British-Iranian writer and director for stage and screen. She received the National Theatre Peter Shaffer Commission and was longlisted for BBC Script Room and the Women’s Prize for Playwriting.

Gift Nyoni lives in London. Longlisted for the BPA First Novel Award and Bath Novel Award, he won the 2021 Guardian 4th Estate 4thWrite Prize and 2025 Afritondo Short Story Prize.

Fiona O’Brien is a writer and journalist whose work was shortlisted for the Wasafiri New Writing Prize. Her novel Lightfall, set in a cult, explores sisterhood and abuses of power.

Erin Peacock writes offbeat, closely observed comedy. Her novel interrogates class and aesthetics, following a dysfunctional family’s illfated pursuit of relevance, wealth and revenge.

cf prior is a writer, artist and PhD candidate. They’re working on a book about the end of life, are one fifth of the collective We Don’t Write Alone and are part of Queer Circle’s Catalyst programme.

Holly Redshaw is a freelance musician and bassoonist, working as a performer, teacher and SEND music leader. She is currently working on her first novel inspired by folklore and fantasy.

DC Restaino is a writer and editor living in London. His writing has appeared online and in print. He is a PhD candidate with funding from LAHP at KCL.

Lucie Richter-Mahr is a poet and researcher. Her writing has appeared in Magma, Propel Magazine and elsewhere. She is currently working on her first poetry pamphlet.

Kate Roche is a playwright and won Second Place in the Alpine Fellowship Theatre Prize 2023. She has had plays staged at the Tower Theatre, the Bread and Roses Theatre and Riverside Studios.

Barry Sadid is a writer from South London, working on memory and oral history in an Afghan context.

Maxine Sibihwana is a London-based poet and writer from Uganda. Her writing has been published in Notebook by MUBI, 10 Men Magazine, Die Quieter Please, AFREADA, Lolwe and the James Currey Anthology of African Literature.

Audrey Slade is a British-American writer. She has recently completed a novel, set in 1990s New York and Poland, about a woman who misrepresents her identity and must bear the consequences.

Avantika Taneja is a media literacy and careers education facilitator. She has children’s short stories published in Aquila magazine, a school programme and BBC school radio. Her writing, like her spirit, spans many places.

Nusrath Tapadar is a Queer, Muslim Bengali actor and writer. She’s developing her original sitcom with Clapperboard Studios. Her plays include Flowers, Stars and Conquerors and Made in Bangladesh.

Kelly Vassie is a Brighton-based artist with a background in theatre and philosophy of science. Her graphic novel From the Bones of Old Horses is a fictional memoir told from the perspective of the colour Prussian blue.

Abby J Walker is a Northern writer of literary horror novels, short fiction, and scripts. She won a 2024 Northern Writers Award and is a 2025 Alfred Bradley Bursary Award finalist.

Nathanael Wheatcroft-Brown completed his MA in Creative Writing, Publishing and Editing in 2023. You Look Better in the Sun is his comingof-age YA novel about a gay, working-class seventeen-year-old living in the North of England.

Annabel White is a short story writer based in London. Her work has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and the Letter Review Prize and published in Mslexia, Popshot and Litro.

Emma Zipfel is from London and writes contemporary fiction for teenagers. She creates stories that blur the boundaries between heroes and villains and explore the power of liminal spaces.

Acknowledgements

The London Library Emerging Writers Programme would not have been possible without a huge amount of support.

We would like to thank all the individuals and organisations who granted us the funds to carry out this Programme: Bloomsbury Publishing, The Garrick Charitable Trust, John & Kiendl Gordon, Sir Max Hastings, Hawthornden Foundation, The Jerzy Peterkiewicz Educational Foundation, Gretchen and James Johnson, The Julio and Maria Marta Núñez Memorial Fund, Simon Lorne, Robert Macleod, OJ Colman Charity Trust, Deborah Goodrich Royce, Sarah and Hank Slack, The International Friends of The London Library, Virago Books and a number of donors who wish to remain anonymous.

A huge thank you to the judges – Sophie Hannah, Sabrina Mahfouz, Amber Medland, Nii Ayikwei Parkes, Chris Power and Lutyens and Rubinstein literary agents Jenny Hewson and Jane Finigan – who brought care, deep thought, openness and a great sense of fun to the epic process of whittling many, many applications down to the 40 who made it onto the Programme. Thank you also to the brilliant readers who enabled that epic process and, between them, made their way through a record number (over 1700) of applications.

Thank you to all the writers and industry folk who generously shared their expertise with the cohort in the writing development masterclasses and workshops, which took place over the course of the year: Moira Buffini, Lianne Dillsworth, Edward Docx, Travis Elborough, Jane Feaver, Sara Langham, John O’Farrell, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Scott Pack, Nii Ayikwei Parkes, Sarah Savitt, Alexis Zegerman and, from The London Library, Amanda Stebbings.

Thank you to all the staff of The London Library who worked so hard to make this Programme a success, in particular: the Development Team, who have worked tirelessly to raise the money to keep the Programme going year after year and from strength to

strength; the Member Services Team, who make everyone feel so at home in the Library; the Membership Team, for endless admin and logistics; the Communications Team who helped spread the word far and wide; the Building and Facilities Management Team who enabled the cohort to come together in the Library; Maia Berliner and Jacqueline Nicholls for administrative brilliance and Samia Djilli, Learning and Participation Manager, for supporting the entire running of the Programme. Thank you, also, to the Director of The London Library, Philip Marshall.

Thank you to Tom Conaghan and the team at Scratch Books for their publishing prowess, to Will Dady for typesetting excellence and endless patience and to Matt Bourne for all things design.

And, finally, thank you to the incredibly talented writers who made the sixth year of the Programme such a pleasure to facilitate, the 2024/2025 London Library Emerging Writers cohort: Vic Beswick, José Buera, Robin Cantwell, CE Cathcart, Liz Churchill, Heather Cutforth, Godelieve de Bree, Fionnuala Deasy, Olive Franklin, Shona Graham, Will Jarvis, Vashti Katz, Joe Kelly, Dallas Marie Koelling, Marcella Marx, Sharmaine Lim, Hadiru Mahdi, Sabrina Mahtani, Alissa Mears, Emma Mitchell, Olja Mladjenovic, Melina Namdar, Gift Nyoni, Fiona O’Brien, Erin Peacock, cf prior, Holly Redshaw, DC Restaino, Lucie Richter-Mahr, Kate Roche, Barry Sadid, Maxine Sibihwana, Audrey Slade, Avantika Tanaja, Nusrath Tapadar, Kelly Vassie, Abby J Walker, Nathanael Wheatcroft-Brown, Annabel White and Emma Zipfel.

Claire Berliner is Head of Programmes at The London Library and oversees the Emerging Writers Programme. She is also a writer and editor.