Fiction

That night I snuck out of the house and walked for half an hour to Ramlet AlBayda. It was the only public sandy shore left in Beirut, courtesy of the warlords who ran the country after the end of the civil war.

If you want to know how poor somebody was growing up, ask them how many windows they had. Don’t ask what was in their fridge or in their closet. The number of windows says it all. It says everything. If they had none, or maybe one or two, that’s all you need to know.

Anasuya lies between the crumpled bedding. Even the slightest touch of the chenille blanket irks her. The cooler spews warm air into the bedroom of their top floor apartment in Bangalore. The walls seem to glow with heat like a tandoor. She kicks the blanket into a ball, pushing it into a corner.

Hina-chan has such beautiful skin, I think as I wash her. Using a linen washcloth I’ve specially ordered to avoid irritating her delicate skin cells, I start from her toes, working slowly up the length of her body stretched out supine in the water.

When you are interviewed for BBC documentaries in your palace, they will want to know how you met. Cast your eyes downward and tell them how you were a shy and hardworking secretary in the State House typing pool. Omit to mention that you were married. Lie that you were divorced and not looking.

I woke up at 4:12am on 27 December and it was gone. It stayed for Christmas and Boxing Day and then just disappeared. It’s not that I don’t know where to find my table, it’s that I don’t know how to find it, and I’ve got to find it because … I can’t quite touch the future without it.

Isabel Waidner is a writer and critical theorist. Their novel We Are Made Of Diamond Stuff (2019) was shortlisted for the 2019 Goldsmiths Prize and is currently shortlisted for this year's Republic of Consciousness Prize.

James Young is a Northern Irish writer, translator and journalist. His short fiction has appeared in a number of literary journals, and as a journalist he has written for several leading newspapers and websites.

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Image credit: Douglas Perkins … The ramen reminded Tabeko of the cove in which she grew up. She held the sides of the  earthenware bowl and imagined they were the sheer mountains that encircled the bay her family home overlooked, a thousand kilometres away from her apartment in Tokyo.

Shortlisted for the Wasafiri New Writing Prize 2018 … I’m having a drink on my balcony. The lights from Zürich and surrounding villages coruscate a prism of dreamy colors on the lake. The air is still and there’s no wind.

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Image by Khanya, The Designer … Winner of the Wasafiri New Writing Prize 2018 Fiction Category … It’s warm in the shop, the window so wide the whole of the street is beside me. But it could be warmer.

Lydia’s new therapist is all corduroy trousers and flat-heeled sandals. Hair pulled back in a ponytail as if it has been slicked with starch. Brown-rimmed glasses that melt into her face. Mousey, as if she doesn’t want to be a distraction to the Healing Process.

From the harbour she looked like a tiny black beetle scurrying up the hill towards the oblivion of the horizon. The sinews in her thighs burned and her fingers were numb from the bags she carried filled with potatoes, yams, breadfruits and acres of cotton muslin.

‘I need to speak with you, meet me at Al Nuaimi Café in 15 minutes’. Helin wiped the sweat from her forehead using the knuckles of her left hand and checked the time on the phone she held in the other.

Parallel to the Learning Centre there was a playing field, lined and oblong and chopped and trimmed with regularity, bordered with hedges and visible through the classroom windows: apart from a patch at the far corner that had a cluster of cottonwood trees.

Nineteen days of rain – unprecedented, they said – and I could hardly tell it was morning. E, my youngest, was screaming and had me up for four hours the previous night, so I switched her off, laid her on the bed and gently closed the door. The silence a soft blanket around me.

The Heavens Also Weep … I call it the day the heavens wept. I’d arrived home unexpectedly and there was my father battering my mother on the kitchen floor. Beyond a sensation of heaviness in the pit of my stomach, three things will ever remain clear about that afternoon.

Sunday afternoon sweltered hot and rainless.  On the cul-de-sac next to the alligator canal, the humidity shimmered off the black tarmac, giving the neatly-trimmed hedges, palms, and ficus trees a fluid, iridescent sheen.  In his computer room in the white three-bedroomed ranch house…

‘I bought you something,’ Duncan said, ‘but you can’t love it.’ … ‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘That’s the rule,’ he said, and he lifted a blanket off his surprise for me, a little mechanical dog. Its tail and ears were furry but the legs were metallic and its torso was smooth white plastic.

Fritz told me once,  ‘ Be the sea so that you may receive their polluted streams but not become impure.’ … At Elysians, a secure psychiatric unit for adolescents, our days began by lining up for a tiny paper cup.

Look to the rudder. It explains every damn thing. Every damn thing. What will steer the world on an even keel is not the stern, the bow, or the hull. Wake up, boy. Stop dreaming a big fix. Look to the fucking rudder.