I’m out on the far edges when the Gelic pounces out of nowhere like they always do. She snatches my lapels with ivory clean hands, pulls her smiling face close, breath clean as death, asking me throaty-voiced did I know my very own personal saviour.
Continue reading “Under Threat of Salvation by Marco Etheridge”
‘This is Britain! My fuckin’ Britain!’ shouted Gleeman as he slammed his ham-sized fist into his wife’s stomach. ‘Things are different now! There’ll be no more of your lip and no more of your equality. We don’t do that shit in my country no more!’ He stuck out his oily hand. ‘Gi’s it!’
The home-med stopped giving Alice her usual meds on Tuesday, and by Friday she was feeling unlike the person she’d been, unlike anyone she’d ever met or even heard about. The feelings were waves pushing a new tide ashore, erasing and redrawing the beach of her mind with each of a thousand pulses from an ocean she’d been unaware of until sometime on Thursday. She’d lain in bed Thursday night, drifting in a sweaty tangle of cotton, dangerous and terrifying thoughts banging noisily around inside her skull; Alice couldn’t decide if she was more scared that the new thoughts and feelings would continue or that they’d stop.
When I was seven the world blew up.
I was in the depths of a nightmare when my mother, tears streaming down her face and her voice raspy like torn cardboard, shook me awake and dragged me from bed. I was in the air before I knew what was happening, my favorite friend Fitzy hanging from my frightened grip as we bounded down the stairs and headed out the back door.
Victor sat on his bed. He looked out of his first-floor pod-flat bedroom window at the dual carriageway that was no longer a dual carriageway – not strictly speaking.
Electro-ped-cycles zipped. Freight trams glided. Electro-buses moved little by little, final phase commercial time drawing to a close – a fizz, a drone and a hum of noise.
I’ve sat here too long, Victor said to himself; just watching it move. I ought to get up.
It’s raining again. I haven’t been out for weeks, but it seems every time it’s my turn in Cell 421, it’s raining. Chuck wanted to trade. He said he’d give me his lunch for three days if he could stay in Cell 421, the only one with a window. Although I do want to eat more, I simply couldn’t take away his food. Not for this. Not for staring out of a window. It’s always the same thing; rain. It’s rain and with these long, almost endless lines of people.
literally stories 