Escort Services
Amplified sounds from a short-circuiting buzzer echo through a quiet hallway, a salvo of bursts ringing out into the darkness. She’s on time, and his primal craving of love and want races headlong towards the door, wine and song. Now she talks about the Freemasons as if she’s on the board of directors, a silent
The Dead Letter
That summer morning was humid, bright, and busy. The girls were rushing around doing homework, digging out plimsolls, and searching for lunch boxes; raisins, cucumber, and tubs of yoghurt – packed lunches. It arrived in the morning post, bundled with bills, catalogues, and fast-food flyers. The postmark was antipodean, and the franking skew with surreal
Christmas Day
His nine-year-old loved her nursery, and she loved climbing trees, and reading her books about history, flowers, and trains. And she loved her father, and he thought of her as he buffed his black Oxford brogues from Loakes in London. And he thought of her again when he ironed his shirt, how she smiled when
Broken Homes
It’s not easy avoiding them, on a dark path, in the early morning. Try in vain, the lack of light, but it all ends in tears. Hidden shapes or curled up leaves? One cannot tell as you trudge to the garage, to get your bike for the early train to London, knowing that soon the
Spark and Flint
I don’t put faulty Zippo’s in the post for maintenance or repairs. Once damaged, they are kept in a small wooden box in my study. This reminds me of the trauma that each of them endured across the years; each bang and scrape and hurt. Like dropping them on isolated runways in Angola, or smashing them
Sticky Rice
A wonderful evening with my daughter, sticky rice and green tea; sweet and sour. We laugh and she tells me stories about new love and life. And I think about my mother, and my training of the sticks. It’s a long story, over three years, just like a degree. It started with Saul when I
Saturday Night
They wait on motorised chairs and plastic seats, with stalks of shiny steel that rise up above balding heads and greying hair, bags of saline, intravenous prick. In sombre states of lonely dementia, depression, and other severe ailments, they sit in rows – three deep, five across, care home attendants looking on. They wait for
Triptych
three sons of Uusimaa washed upon a foreign shore. the first shrugged and grunted and planted himself fast and there toiled to build a house rooted in worldly wickedness but the beetles came and stripped him of flesh as he slept and he was no more the second scorned his brothers earthly failings and contrived