I fell pregnant three months after my sixteenth birthday. The fifth girl in my class, because with the coal running out and mines running down the town’s gone along with it, and there’s not much else to do round here but fuck, so we do. The results speak for themselves. […]
It’s been twenty-three days since she lost her daughter. For twenty-three days, Mariska searched, trawling ruin and wreckage, sifting through bone and ash, picking apart carcass and corpse in case her daughter’s atoms […]
The first thing they do when he starts working at the Office on Persons Yet To Be Missing is to give him the code name Nuu and to tell him to forget who he was before. They hand him a name tag with that single elongated syllable on it, ණූ, which Nuu thinks looks like a hornet on skates, or […]
We weren’t going to torture the spy. But we did threaten to. And now he’s dead. Cyanide capsule. We weren’t fast enough to stop him. All we have to go on are the papers we found in his apartment in the cinquième arrondissement. We know from the dead spy’s documents that […]
Democracy shades black-brown-yellow, is iridescent, buoyed up on reflective cells: guanophores and leucophores. Democracy is in warm shallow waters, and among the glass towers that poke the surface into the hostile dry-world. Democracy is a consensus told in chromatophores […]
The girl who carried plums was not a princess but dreamed of jewels against her throat. With stained fingers, she plucked the stones from the center of the fruit and peeled back the skins to lay dripping pieces on her mother’s tongue. Her mother stared past her— […]
