culture

A E Macleod 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...

Ellena Savage 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...

Carmel Bird 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...

Sheyla Smanioto 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...

Sinéad Stubbins It all started with a panther head. Woodrow and Wyatt both worked at small tattoo parlours old enough that they used to cater exclusively to youthful World War II soldiers, who got tattoos to help them cheat death or to tell the story about how they...

John Kinsella In front of Gabrielle d’Estrées et une de ses soeurs , an older woman is pinching a younger woman’s right nipple. Another woman is photographing them. The women are clothed. They are obviously imitating the painting but it is unclear if they’re...