I climb the stile and drop into the field, feet sending a dust cloud into the air. It films my eyes and I blink it away as best I can. The sheep are bloated yellow dots under the crumbling boundary wall, awake but still, conserving energy before their move to the next patch of shade.…
…slap at thrip and thunderbug, midge & mosquito come whining from the dark at neck and wrist, ancient blood knowledge voiced by this time & in this place long before the winking out of every point of light & too the ones unseeable, inaudible, stars so far that they are yet to be even seen here so young is the planet in relation, how it will go with the one to whom you are wed Mary well ask the biting bloodbugs, ask the twirling phantoms hereabouts & implore the leaves & the shine on them & if you must grieve at this point before death then
The party is in the morning. I arrive early at the venue, ensure it’s clean, the bathroom stocked with toilet paper. I arrange the tables, decorate the cake with a wicked witch flying on her broom, black cat as passenger. I blow up the balloons – helium is not allowed, not to disturb the fire…
The issue, I realised one morning in the supermarket, holding my little list of necessities, was that I couldn’t take my own life. I was wheeling the trolley about, dropping things into it from my brief list, when I came to a stop on the cold meats aisle. There, laid out in cuts and slices and sausages, was pig, every shape and flavour of it, in discs and dice, smoked and cured, all ultra-illuminated by the fluorescent light; like laminated bruising. And somewhere out of view there was a person, with a job and a smock dedicated to this.
We’re very excited to announce that we have a new online fiction editor: Matthew David Scott.