The Lion
The first night my father was gone wasn’t the worst of it but it was bad: the three of us in the big bed, wide awake until dawn. I still remember each long hour. February, and the restless dreamless night stretched on forever, my mother rubbing her freezing feet on us, my brother crawling deep [&h
As Good As It Gets
Prison, according to Roger Hallam, co-founder of environmentalist movement Extinction Rebellion (XR), is ‘as good as it gets.’ After serving a six-week jail term in Wormwood Scrubs, Hallam summarised the prison experience in a Facebook post as consisting of ‘sitting on a bed all day reading bi
Les Uzetiens
Marie Moreau, wife of the fishmonger, was fifty-four years old, childless, stout, and unimaginative, and had lived at number 31, Rue Jean Jaurès, for each of those fifty-four years. For her, the sweetest moment of the day was her cigarette on the balcony of her late mother’s house, forbidden when
the chatter of men and women
and fish in the room calling out her name over and over again was unbearable a courthouse of carp all slippery down the chamber sliding against the defendant as he spoke we could hear ever more loudly the noise of a gavel gulping for air or maybe someone in her statement softly crying? he asked [&he
he and i, we followed a cat in Shanghai
∎ Words by Yasmin Linh Nguyen. Art by Jules Desai.
Fisherman
My little eyes are whittled wide. They slip through clouded water, sleekly oiled, starved of tide, to find the feinting fish. My whetted nets will drip with jewels that dart and dive at every angle. I need to strip them of their silver-plated scales, roam like a fishing hook to every fissure, nook,
A Poem
The open window invites in flies, who do not yet know they will scatter dead in droves across my bedsheets. (How softly their grey little bodies drift towards the floor!) In these months I too feel death upon me. I sleep with my eyes open.∎ Words by Lindsay Igoe. Photography by Paweł Czer
Two Years in Service
1. I met Zhipeng the first day I got to my battalion. We were bound together, both set to finish at the same time in April next year. Everybody else in the company would finish in March. Zhipeng spoke broken Mandarin and broken English. He spoke Chinese to me for a whole day before realising [&helli