Abigail Ottley

      BECAUSE When she is toddling small, she learns to hear real good because she cannot see. Faces, unless they come swimming up close. are a blur of piggy-pink and ice- cream. In the street, she doesn’t know, cannot be certain when to smile, when to...

Maggie Mackay

  Lesson   A cell, an upright piano. Sentence, one hour. I’ve never shown any interest in music, never tapped out thumps on the dining table, stamped out beats in my scrappy shoes or hummed silly tunes. The teacher is an old spindly man. Grim, out of a...

Natasha Gauthier

      Skins My mother had a handbag made from the skin of a female cobra her brother killed in the garden. No rrkk-tkking Kipling mongoose to protect her, just my fierce uncle, bantamweight in a stained banyan brandishing cricket bat and torch. Rain...

Romy Morreo

  Generational Divide She only speaks to me these days through groaning floorboards in the night and slammed doors. Through eye-rolls, half-eaten dinners, and empty packets of birth control pills. Her friends and their mothers are ghosts, glimpses of them...

Emma Simon

      Hauntings No-one has seen a ghost while breast-feeding despite the unearthly hours, the half-light mad sing-song routines of rocking a child back to sleep. A potent cocktail of hormones. Perfect conditions, you’d think, for a woman to slip through...

Kushal Poddar

      As the Festival Wanes I The furniture covered in once transparent now foggy sheets craft the room a morgue, and we identity the bodies, “This cupboard, my mother brought with her from her father’s place.” “This couch still...