“Follow the recipe exactly,” said Mother. “You’ll delight your stepfather.” So, I braised the beef, cut the carrots and diced the onions, as directed. But I substituted arsenic for the oregano and garnished with pomegranates instead of parsley. And that groping, bad-breathed Judas loved it to the end. **** Brooks C. Mendell Brooks C. Mendell
Night falls heavy behind drawn yellow curtains, as the silent face watches me grieve. My father used to keep a small transistor radio in the kitchen, a Zenith from sometime in the 1960’s with brushed silver dials and buttons. As a child it was already an antique, the sound it created hollow and tinny, like
After departing in a blaze of mediocrity, Graham Vasey returned to St. Joseph’s Junior School only twice in his life. The first time, it was being renamed the Graham Vasey Junior School, in dedication to his Booker Prize-winning success. He had sprung from such humble origins; he thanked his schooldays, in several interviews, as a
You’ve just walked in the door, stripped off your Lycra and turned on the shower when you see it: the toe. Not an ordinary toe; not a toe attached to a foot attached to a leg attached to a body. No. This is a severed toe. Freshly severed. It’s upright and propped against the wall.
He came into the room and he had no idea that he wouldn’t be leaving, at least, not the same way in which he had entered. It wasn’t that kind of room. The kind a person can just up and decide to retreat back the way they came. She was already there. Sitting. Believing. That’s
The blubber-oil lamp flickers against a wall of ice and snow. Illuminated figures loom large like shadow puppets; huge and misshapen. Their dance, dark and muted, whispering from the shadowlands. It reeks like the campfires of my youth, but here the smoke is heavily infused with brine and grease. They begin quietly and without fanfare.
Just now, while you’re walking through the park, if you look up at the right-hand corner of the third floor of the hospital, you’ll see her, Bryony. You know she’s seen you; she has keen eyes and a sense for the coming and going of things. Back in her early twenties, when she was studying
He arrived on Nathan’s tenth birthday. It wasn’t a shock; it was as if Nathan had been waiting for him to appear all along. It had been a nice day, a little chaotic, but nice all the same. After opening the presents and tucking into a mountain of sandwiches, at three o’clock they cut the
There is something quite comforting about knowing that this is the end of human existence. It doesn’t matter that we all die; that everything is pointless and that I’ve not achieved anything. I must be special if I’m one of the last people to walk the earth, before our self-inflicted extinction. It’s the same perverse
Surrounded by bamboo trees, Molly lounges in her stained oak rocking chair, observing her spotted male cat and wondering which Goddess showered the boy with the gift of true patience. But not the kind exhibited by humans, who simply fall into a momentary lapse of reason and stare with vacant eyes at their immediate surroundings.
