Archives

920.03 - BOVINA (... Why struggle? The sea is wide, where would you swim to?  Better that you retire to your cabin in steerage ...)

613.04 - WEST UNION (... I lie in wait on the winding sheet as you go about your business. It’s a ritual that brooks no interruption ...)

365.87 - NIAGARA FALLS (... Some guy in slippers has pulled his car onto the shoulder to let his wolves take a shit ...)

239.25 NEW YORK (... Somebody's been shooting arrows at SoHo, now Broadway is strewn with feathers. Gone are the plywood boulevards ...)

092.20 BROOKLYN (... doesn’t the exercise begin to look like, at best, disingenuous absolution? Confessing our sins so we might be forgiven ...)

509.75 BOVINA (... two Harry Potters in succession are akin to being stabbed through the eyeballs with Voldemort’s whittled penis ...)

629.03 BOVINA (... a pendulous apron of risotto seethes over the waistband of these unchanging, everlasting underpants like malevolent blancmange ...)

845.09 BOVINA (...we blubber from room to room, bewildered amoebas, off-gassing, absorbing everything in our paths ...)

188.03 - RONDOUT (... Dusty, who never even considered getting out of the car. This is adult business. She can smell embarrassment and decay a mile off ...)

434.87 - RONDOUT (... the erstwhile swamp is silent except for the creak and groan of river ice, and the furtive rustle of fellatio ...)

528.03 - BOVINA (... between cell service, the fake morning, the fake restaurant, fake farm, fake smile: falls the shadow ....)

539.03 - WALDEN ( ... the ghost of Henry David Thoreau appeared behind the dwarf privet, reminding us that disobedience ...)

658.18 - BOVINA (... They'd dug down, buried themselves alive, a last-gasp effort to find heat. Now they were wood. I walked away ...)

288.06 KINGSTON (... sewage was routinely dumped out of windows, pigs ran unchecked through the streets. Not even the Dead were safe ...)

688.23 - DELANCEY (... here they just feel sad. A small-time Paradise Lost, where rooting under the cushions to find it again seems paltry and vaguely disgraceful ...)

626.94 ROXBURY (... she describes dangling from the 'oh shit' bar with one hand whilst deploying the other to keep her child inside her vagina ...)

552.32 - TANGIER (... They're back to where they’ll be all day; the plastic tables that surround the stillborn pool ...)

603.21 - BUDAPEST (... I wince, but plump for the carp, knowing the experience will be miserable ...)

231.01 - BALKANS (... There’s nothing left in Srebrenica. It is a town full of ghosts, just wants to be left alone to disappear ...)

651.02 - ANATOLIA (My cabin companion, a Russian wrestler making for Batumi, plies me with sweet bread and cold-brew ...

833.23 - CATANIA (... third night in a row eating horse at this bend in the road, pummeled by scooters ...)

852.04 _ TUNIS (... the ship is all Arabs; the last Europeans - nervous ladies traveling with pets - were deposited in Palermo this morning ...)

704.92 LONDON (... Forlorn, unloved and misbegotten, splayed nightly across his futon on the fag-end, flyblown carpet at Blythe Road ...)

439.75 RHIWDDOLION (... And, without fanfare, it is night again before it was ever day, the sun having merely poached the horizon ...)

337.05 HUDDERSFIELD (... what if you just vanished in all of this? What if the next time I called, you weren’t there? ..)

733.54 DONEGAL (... Rockwell Kent, who, roaming Western Donegal on foot in 1926, took a cow byre for a home from Dan and Rosie Ward ...)

041.93 NAPLES (... Chi chiagne fotte a chi ride. He who weeps fucks he who laughs. Don't be a cry baby, asshole. Naples is a city of conviction....)

329.04 - SANT'ERASMO (... a smear of edible tissue lurking within a cartilaginous carapace, like the plastic handle of a toddler's tricycle ...)

749.81 VENICE (... just as nobody fucks with a communion wafer or their sister, nobody fucks with the sauce ...)

455.84 - FLORENCE ( ... property is theft; and this was one of those crystalline amalgams of beauty, gravity and poise that can drive a man to burglary...)

762.11 - DOVER (... the people at the bus stop all have one leg longer than the other or are missing a head. There’s a fight in the pub ...)

109.29 - PARIS (... floral wallpaper, the Oxfam desk reborn in baby-blue, each single mattress a horse's stomach stuffed with cobbles ...)

833.12 - JERUSALEM (... a combed-over hermaphrodite edges to the front and falls to his knees, blubbering ‘We adore you O Christ and we praise you!’ ...)

832.04 - ABRAHAM & SARAH (From where he was crouched he could see a corner of the toilet bowl, her underwear discarded on the floor in front ...)

403.41 - SIAN KENNEDY (... He was happy there, out in the white light, white heat of it, constantly amazed by the weird shit it regurgitated ...)

803.11 - GREG CARTER (We were chatterers, me and Greg. It quickly became clear we drove everyone around us bonkers ...)

414.23 - TOM WILLIS (... By the time they reach puberty, two-thirds are gone. Then they start shooting out the rest, twelve a year, like one of those guns that fires ping-pong balls

009.74 - BETH (... Beth was sober, swathed in linens, conducting the motley orchestra with a well-honed baton ...)

768.09 - MARTHA (... The most wonderful thing he’d heard in his life, or at least since ten minutes ago, when she suggested getting back into the bath ...)

209.62 - MILLIE & SALLY (... He had just fathered the Lamb of God and nobody gave a fuck ...)

293.06 - AUGUSTINE (... When love dies it leaves stains on the floorboards. It wasn’t what he expected. As he ghosted round the old rooms ...)

954.02 REBEKAH ( ... the Oryx is draped across the hearth, making arch comments about the window treatments ...)

709.32 - WINIFRED (... you had a hole the size of a sixpence in your head, at the crown, as if trepanned in utero ...)

675.01 THE BERRY HORN ( ... they crossed the ocean in a gale, the Berry Horn and Raisin Snail, to a spit of sand and sea ...)

634.09 JACK THE CAT (... Jack's crying, like he's stumbled upon something important that really needs to be said ...)

010.37 FIGURE TOMBALE (... Huxley was right. ‘Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder' ...)

466.81 JOHN PRINE (... the plaintive camping trip, the flailing marriage, the sausages and shadows and dark lakes ...)

039.61 NICOLAS BLOOMFIELD (... constellations of a life always there, scarcely visible under daylight's lion gaze ...)

261.43 CLAIRE BOWKETT (... an elderly woman begins to dangle out; jet black hair, pink tracksuit, one arm clinging to the door, the other ...)

654.33 EVAN STRUSINSKI (... might seem at first to be an eager sea-lion that ate Jackie Gleason, he's actually a spinster maiden aunt...)

392.55- DAVID BARRY ( ... and barked like naughty stuffed toys come to life in some scurrilous, slightly pornographic rendition of Winnie the Pooh ...)

232.87 - PERQUINA LOVELY (... a dizzying array of projects woven on the many-bobbined loom of self-help, natural beauty, foraging and vaginal care ...)