At the entrance of the restaurant, she hesitated a little. Out of cautious habit she looked with feigned disinterest first to the left and then, to the right—to appear lost, ...
A young man survives a crash that kills his friend, but memory has gone missing where grief should be. “Remembering the Dead” follows him through shock, guilt and the strange ...
Manda is holding together work, motherhood, class inheritance and a mind close to cracking. In “Filia,” care becomes ritual: for children, for guinea pigs, for memory, and for the self ...
Attunement
The house came with instructions that she did not read. She assumed they were the usual conditions, the kind dutifully handed out to every new occupant, outlining features she ...
A city night, a moving car, and a voice trying to make sense of what can’t be fixed. In “The Prayer,” MB Munroe writes grief as ritual — the kind ...
Four standout reads: Month of the Lilies, I’m Not Here, The Kingdom, and Guns, Ink and Smiles.
Story Sunday
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I met Tom Stoppard once, in the quiet stacks of the London Library. He didn’t give me advice or aphorisms — he gave me something rarer: his time.
“It was eight o’clock and I was still drunk.” Today’s #StorySunday is “Lost and Found” by Charles Adey.
“If you could save just one piece of music, what would it be?” Today’s #StorySunday is “Ostinato”, by James Borley.
Picture credit: Anders Nord
An hour and a half in, and so far, Monday night pints with his brother were going better than Tony Phelan had expected. It was Ian who ...
“Like weather passing over. It will, if you can just wait it out.” Today’s #StorySunday is the “These Quiet Rooms” by Jennifer Albon Burns.
“Everything… is slow and quiet… familiar yet unfamiliar to Fai and Cheong.” Today’s #StorySunday is “Where Are You From?” by by Flo Au.
Photo by Clay Leconey
There was something incongruous about the man’s back. My eyes followed him around the bookshop. He was slim, of medium height, dressed in beige, classic-cut mackintosh, and ...
She keeps looking, searching for something that isn’t there anymore, but smiles at the same time, keeping a polite pace to the conversation.
It was a cruel, cruel, thing to find. Her eyes in the mirror were cruelly the same as the eyes in the photograph; almond-shaped, fine and bright. Everything else had ...
Alistair couldn’t have known exactly what was wrong with our school’s secretary when he went in there. Mrs. Tinsley had just put the phone down and begun blubbering at her ...
Grain in the silo, hay stacked in the barn,
cows waiting to be milked – assurances that someone held fast to the rituals of earth that kept us all fed. ...
I’m in the shower when I see it: a black dot, just above my elbow, static under the suds slithering down my arm. I assume it’s biro and carry on ...
