Typeslash Review

The first time you lose a man, it feels like an earthquake measuring nine on the Richter scale. Seismic shock of such magnitude can permanently alter ground topography, says Wikipedia. That description is congruous with the flattened terrain of your heart. You feel 100% ruined. Every night you weep, irrigating your wounds afresh.  It takes…

They’d been driving for nearly two hours when David saw the sign for Diggerz and snorted and said “Diggerz, oh God.” Andrew said, “What is Diggers?” “Diggerz with a ‘z”. David paused for a moment, leaving Andrew to wonder how he heard the “s”. Andrew wondered if it was just something that David had gotten…

My hands take up too much space. Her body, she says it takes up too much space. In the shadowed places no one can see, in the depth of the grit that is not space: this is where I make my love to a woman for the first time. A place of faerie tales. Monsters…

I ask him to stay between me and other men and he laughs, his blond hair flashing in the sun. He blinks his blue eyes and another man touches me. * I walk along the beach, the bottom of my skirt drags on the sand and I know I’ll have to wash it in the…

In the pub, raucous, Friday night. In the corner, forgotten, unlit, where the Christmas tree lights flashing in sequence can’t be seen, where the log-fire’s heat and glow cannot reach: a stuffed fox in a glass case is facing a kingfisher fixed to the wall. Up at the bar customers sing a Christmas carol and…

in a way, isn’t death just another word for i love you to eternity? i’d like to gift you my death, die in your hands, drown in your eyes, so that you can bear my ashes on your skin like stardust. in another way, isn’t death an ode to a lover? i’ll cross the stars…

The lights were flickering off and on as we all huddled in Peter’s dorm room that night in April of 1977. The rain had been pouring harder and longer than we’d ever seen it, and in the coming days would result in the highest flood waters in over half a century in the Kentucky, Tennessee,…

We enjoy the fruit adorned with bitter thorns as the sweet juice passes our marble lips. We tear apart its flesh with our crimson-stained teeth, only realising afterwards that it is laced with poison. The forest floor is rotting with discarded apples, and we are shrouded in darkness as the shadows slink closer to us.…

When he strides into your chambers, you are already standing up to greet him.  “I have come to fetch you,” he says, doesn’t miss a beat the way you might expect him to, doesn’t do so much as blink – all ivory and fine-cut marble, piercing eyes, wine-dark hair. (Square jaw. Cleft chin. The echoes…

Yeah, he’d done a few things that might be considered bad, but he put food in his kids’ bellies, gave them clothes. He was supposed to be a tailor, but he was a terrible tailor, so when he got the opportunity to do a favor for some local hoods whose stars were rising, he couldn’t…