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fiction
fiction December 2, 2023
Pour the contents of any cleaning product down the sink and you’ll realise it’s all the same. Hardwood floor and surface cleaner. Streak-free glass and window wipe. Lemon-scented multipurpose spray. They’re all just clear liquid that a round table...
fiction November 18, 2023
I was walking through the brightly lit foyer of the supermarket when I spotted him. I was scanning the room as I always did – the self-checkouts, the fruit and vegetable section beyond – and there he was, a few rows deep, his broad shoulders and...
fiction November 11, 2023
Outside is a collapsing quarter of shuttered banks, checkpoints, brothels, beaches, ruins, sites of worship. Inside was once a sanatorium to treat respiratory and skin conditions by the sea. The building is now a camp, a ward, a shelter, a pill...
fiction November 4, 2023
He comes up to me and asks do I want to make 50 bucks and I turn away like I’m not interested. I’ve seen this guy before. In more salubrious places, the kind I rarely frequent, unless I’ve won something on the ponies or had a few days’ work on the...
fiction October 28, 2023
I awoke early this morning from a dream. I had been lying on a beach with a great purple teddy bear on top of me. At first I thought, We are the same size, we are very similar , and then I thought, The bear is twice the size I am . Small lapping...
fiction October 21, 2023
Not the next day, not a month later
The red bike sat on the median strip with a placard tacked to it. Police aware , it read. The bike was a Kawasaki and Astor had owned one just like it years ago. The night he crashed it, Astor was on his way to a friend’s, a girl he’d known for...
fiction October 14, 2023
She toed the company line and told people it was an “honour” to counsel the dying. No one had instructed Andrea to say this, but it’s what people wanted to hear. She considered that it was part of her job to counsel the living against their fear of...
fiction October 7, 2023
Listen. I work like a dog. Trust me. I am not just any old dog. I know stuff. When the Duchess was dying in agony, they brought me in to test her chicory water. I knew perfectly well the “remedy” had been poisoned with wolfsbane. So although they...
fiction September 30, 2023
For him My dad is Black. When I was 11, we went to live in his adolescence, over by the dirt pitch in Morro Dunga, Jardim Miriam. When he left he still had a big afro, but when I turned 11 he was already balding, he’d say I was to blame and I’d...
