‘She did the work during the daytime: dressing him, washing his hair, and giving him his medicine. Most of that time Adrian can’t collate and discern any linearity, nor can he describe with any material details its happenings.’
New fiction by Eamon Doggett.
‘People on the street in the daytime come with blurred edges, their faces are grey scribbles in the air.’
New fiction by Cheryl Follon.
‘He wondered if it became, at some point, too late to reclaim who you want to be. Maybe some people are just Frankenstein’s personalities, stitched together through the limbs of borrowed traits.’
New fiction by Patrick Cash.
‘She was so very, very fortunate, yes, she was.’
New fiction by Jane Messer.
‘For several long minutes, nothing changed. We seemed to be opposite and equal forces.’
New fiction by Laura Shaine Cunningham.
‘Then I told him he looked like a lop-sided Trent Reznor and didn’t he want to kiss me? This is a kind of flirting. This has never not worked.’
Fiction by Sarah Fletcher.
‘“It’s your birthday tomorrow,” said my mother. “Did you know the Jesuits say ‘Give me a child before the age of seven and he’ll be mine forever?’” “Who are the Jesuits?” “Priests.” “Oh.” She tousled my hair. “Thank god you’ve met none.”’
New fiction by Jago Rackham.
‘I mean something closer to: am I a good person? Am I sincere and devout to those things in my life that I ought to be?’
New fiction by Benjamin George Coles.
‘The few days turned to weeks and years and it was a decade before we spoke about the future, a conversation focused on the past.’
New fiction by Gary Finnegan.
‘You grow up in poverty. You are told you are lucky, and that luck is why you are the only child in the family who gets an education. You have a natural sense for numbers, and feel that luck is a question of numbers. It is a question of the number of years separating you and your siblings from the source of luck.’
New fiction by Lilia Salammbô Fetini.
‘I’d heard about the surgery even before Cathy reminded me of it. They’d discussed it on the radio one morning, and I’d half listened as I was making coffee, but it seemed experimental – outlandish, even – and I assumed the idea would flicker, smoke, and then go out, like the time they talked about finding volunteers to go to space forever.’
New fiction by Sarah Turner.
