The Shoe Bag
Abdelaziz watched. From the lorry men were delivering the hotel’s supplies. Giant olive oil bottles for the kitchen. Pallets of cleaning products and insect killers to the stores.
     The noise of the planes and the heat stored up on the runway. He only came to watch one thing. The delivery of the hotel shoes. Huge transparent bags, a hundred pairs in each slung over the shoulders of the delivery men.
     So many feet. Where would they go?
     There was nothing as strange as the shape of a human foot. A walking hinge. The migrant’s essential.
     The black holes like doorways to the shoes’ interior drew his eye as much as the leather. Black circles of darkness into which feet would be placed each day. The sight comforted him. There was a destiny in it. All feet had a resting place allotted to them, inside a shoe. Even his own.

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Credits

fiction by
Jeremy Hinchliff
@HinchJeremy

image by
kerry rawlinson
kerryrawlinson.tumblr

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creators

Grip
The last time he saw her, she was sitting on the corner of the grubby white wire chair on the porch, the black vintage clutch gripped tightly in her hands. By then, her hands and pale skin were covered with creases and blue veins had sprouted up her arms. She would regularly pluck at her blouse and try to cover the blemishes. Her body was propped up in the chair, a pillow in the hollow of her back.
 
Each Sunday morning, for the past seventeen years, he would work on the flowers by the driveway, occasionally glancing in her direction. Her husband had passed away three years ago, so he was waiting. Perhaps another year, perhaps more.
 
The church bells were faint, irregular, mimicking her breathing. As the bells grew tired, her body sunk into the chair.

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Credits

fiction by
Carien Smith
facebook.com/carien.smith.9

image by
kerry rawlinson
kerryrawlinson.tumblr

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creators

Days Like These
The cloth of my life is purple. Each morning when I wake it waits for me. On good days I wear it lightly; a cape woven from the finest Merino wool patterned with innocuous swirls and swoops. If I am lucky, the cloth will remain soft but those days are rare. Each fold traps the day's stresses within and the pattern becomes an angry jangling mosaic of migraine and despair. On bad days the cloth swells into a huge greatcoat, sopping with troubles that hold me tight and I breathe shallowly, desperately, longing for the day to end.
 
I dream of leaving this loathsome purple cloth behind. I will no longer carry the weight of daughter, sister, wife, mother: the tags that define my life. One day, just for a while, I will wear peach: cobweb light and butterfly free. One day, I will return to me.

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Credits

fiction by
Jane Lomas
@completelyjane

image by
kerry rawlinson
kerryrawlinson.tumblr

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creators

He could hear her at the door and as usual, he shut his eyes, not to feign sleep but to exclude, to not witness. He let himself drift. The yellow lights of the tram in smog, the scratch-mark down his cheek on his first day at school. Twenty years later he’d marry her and ten years after that she’d leave him. His daughter would never recover and he would bury her at the bottom of her heroin descent. Thereafter his own life would snake down the board, through weekend binges, job loss and social isolation to house-bound decrepitude.

Time to engage. He opened his eyes. She was there, the bastard daughter of his bastard of a son. She would have had time to sneak a fiver from his wallet.

‘A wee trip down Memory Lane, Grandad?’
‘Trip of a lifetime,’ he said. Platitudes were so convenient sometimes.

Zeus Falls to Earth
The roof still smells of gunpowder.
 
The rain has left the slates a purple black, slick like fish scales.
Zeus sits with his legs apart, on the saddle of the ridge as if he has fallen from the sky. He studies the damage, where lightning has punched a hole through the roof, the size of a man. It reveals the relics of a child’s bedroom, once safe in the belly of the house.
 
The foreman screams up at him to stop dreaming. That he can find a hundred migrants off the beaches to fill his job for half the money. Zeus clenches his fist to summon the lightning bolt, but finds a hammer. Inside, he curses the impertinence of mortals, vows wrath and vengeance. But on the roof, as the rain passes and sweeps on towards Athens, Zeus bows his head to measure the battens and count the slates.

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Credits

fiction by
Henry Peplow

image by
kerry rawlinson
kerryrawlinson.tumblr

©
creators

Blue
Blue is the only colour. They all look at me as if I am crazy. I'm not crazy. The sky is blue. The sea is blue. I have blue swimming trunks, a blue bucket, a blue spade, a blue towel and a blue lunchbox. With a wave of her hand, Mum makes them stop sneering and laughing. I love Mum. She wears a blue slide in her hair, for me. I spot a small lump in the sand. "Look Mum, it's a red stone." I put it in my bucket. Mum's hand flies to her mouth. A tear appears in the corner of her eye. She smiles triumphantly.  Nobody is watching her. Nobody else sees her tear and her smile. I'm not crazy. I'm special. So is my red stone. Blue is not the only colour. There's red. Mum knows. Now she can wear a red slide in her hair.

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Credits

fiction by
Alva Holland
@Alva1206

image by
kerry rawlinson
kerryrawlinson.tumblr

©
creators