Claire was late to pick up her children from nursery. She worked on the tenth floor of a tall glass building in London Bridge and had watched the snow fall against the cold December sky, delicately at first, then thickly, flakes spinning, candyfloss white. ‘Nothing to worry about,’ she’d said to her team when […]
Fiction
Origami
Image: © Charles Eastwood Fold the paper in half vertically, unfold it, fold the paper in half horizontally, unfold again. You were sixteen and drunk off the cheapest corner-shop vodka. You let ugly boys kiss you if they were nice enough, or if they looked your way at back garden parties. He noticed […]
The Red Notebook
dImage: © Charles Eastwood One undistinguished weekday, she adds, on impulse, a spiral-bound red notebook to her online shopping delivery. Days later, amid the frugality of a set of ingredients for meals for one – a single aubergine, a small sachet of chow mein sauce, a shrink-wrapped half-cucumber – it arrives. She rests her […]
Tourism
Image: © Charles Eastwood For thirty American dollars you gain entrance to the art museum. You walk through a metal detector and fear it will beep. You imagine if it did beep, how everyone would look at you, with full attention, in tension, and how your skin would vibrate. You would reach into your […]
Luca
Image: © Charles Eastwood It had been a long time since anyone in Luca’s village had seen a star. When the companies had decided to take the night sky for themselves, there was little anyone could do to stop them – and when the darkness had spilled over the sky, like oil, concealing everything […]
…for all the days of her life
Image: © Charles Eastwood She hadn’t looked for it in a long time but there it is, just as she knew it would be. Underneath her winter coat that was too tattered now to keep her warm, atop her worn out boots, which likewise had lost their ability to keep her feet warm, was […]
The Eid Dinner
Image: © Charles Eastwood On 19 March 2003, US and British forces invaded Iraq; by May the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba had become a permanent facility housing over 680 prisoners. In Europe, a devastating heatwave caused over 30,000 deaths that summer. The year also saw the launch of Skype, Linked-in and the MySpace social network, […]