Warm Days Will Never Cease

Warm Days Will Never Cease

Photo: Vicky Jirayu / Shutterstock.com ‘Kate,’ you say, ‘summer is nearly over. There’s something you need to know.’ It’s August and we’re wearing summer dresses in the beer garden. Purple vines climb trellises and the evening air carries the murmurs of people who are...
The Straw Chair

The Straw Chair

Photo by Xauxa (Håkan Svensson), CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons At ten years of age, I stopped being innocent. The experience was not sexual in nature, but something darker. Funny enough, children are natural in the world of the invisible, but if the door of the...
I Kissed a Wall in Ibiza

I Kissed a Wall in Ibiza

I like to tell peopleI kissed a wall in Ibizakayaked the Mediterraneangot stung by a jellyfishgot super tanate paellavisited beacheswhere gorgeous womensunbathed toplessseemingly without fear. I like to tell themI wore tiny shortsand belly shirtsand bikinisthe whole...
An ecological disaster of parakeets

An ecological disaster of parakeets

He worries about his mother reciting a list of salad leaves at her apartment door, about the silvering of the hairs at his temple and on his chin, and about the 12,000 green parakeets that shouldn’t be here. ‘What if they ate all the other birds?’ my partner asks me,...
Love in the Time of Welly Vodka

Love in the Time of Welly Vodka

Photo by Charles Rispin / Welly Club, Beverley Rd, Hull / CC BY-SA 2.0 I want to tell the story about the two boys I saw at a Pigeon Detectives concert, stacked together like a totem pole, arms spread wide while the audience milled under them like clumsy, bumbling...
L’enfer, c’est les autres

L’enfer, c’est les autres

Photo by Petr Kovalenkov / Shutterstock.com Heads entwined, you read Duras’ The Lover while I peered over at the orange-eating, dowdy woman clutching her pearls across from us. Is she still looking at us?, you whispered out the side of your mouth. I nodded, gurning at...