He found it easy to switch off. He never put credit on his phone, rarely answered it, couldn’t text back. When she called he would remain vague in his plans, did not commit to places and times, did not commit to her. Their meetings happened when it suited him – he found, after long gaps he wanted them more and after a night, perhaps two in succession, he was bored. She didn’t switch on and off so easily: when he pulled her string she turned her full beam upon him. He lit her up like a forgotten… Continue

There was something about the whole thing that still made her BigKidExcited, she was giddy with the bright lights and the noise and the bonfires. Standing there, outside, the air so cold it felt like your skin was bruising in it. As if your purpled face could just peel back and reveal a brand new you, some strange and exotic… Continue

It had become easier to have nothing. To fill a
world with work. To avoid the emotional, the personal. To compartmentalise a
life and then trash the untended, unwanted aspects. File them away in deleted.
Clean up her discs.

Until they’d got too old for that sort of thing in the same way they’d got too old for drugs, drum’n’bass and four-day weekends. For hangovers. For not having children. For not settling down. For not settling. So they had, like beer, like dust.

They arrived in dribs and drabs, burnt out, wires trailing. Tripped minds and short-circuited eyes. Staring. Murmuring a gibberish mixture of Old School Mozilla, 140 character status updates, and… Continue

This year’s death toll was twenty seven. There was no memorial, just an A4 sign stuffed in a poly pocket and strapped to the pond’s railings, flapping in the wind. ‘Please Don’t Feed the Ducks... Bread’ it requests before spitting more words, like feathers, ‘it encourages the gulls.’ Even the ink bleeds. Twenty seven new ducklings died this year, because of bread. Because of myself and small children, all accomplices to murder in a city park.