fiction

fiction   November 25, 2023

Rabbit

A plush rabbit I got for the children moves by itself. I bought it for my eldest on his fourth birthday. It wasn’t his favourite toy but he didn’t hate it. He cuddled it for a few days and then it was put into a storage bucket under his bed. After...

fiction   November 18, 2023

Consequences

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

Altar

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

Red Mercedes

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

Pathway

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

Death doula

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

The King’s White Hound

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

Black dad

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...

fiction   September 23, 2023

The Lake

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...

fiction   September 16, 2023

Nipples

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...