For mckenzee webcomic artist, poet, and generally talented top geezer, who gave me the idea for this with one of his recent experiments with imaging software.


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I'm making a salad because of the vegetarians - no, I'll start again.

I don't know what happened to everything else. Before, there was a house in New Malden and all the possessions of three people. This man, his wife, their daughter. Beds, books, carpets, the walls and pictures that hung on them. Someone in his position, you don't ask where it all ( Read more... )

Eighteen years ago, on the day her father was arrested, Aine's mother bought her some Plasticine. That evening there were many adults downstairs in the front room when Aine opened the packet, peeled the multi-coloured corrugated bars from the plastic and each other, and tried to make shapes.

But the shapes wouldn't come. Within an hour she had ( Read more... )

At the beginning his designs were dense, baroque. The first few years were warped by wrangles with manufacturers, or rather with the raw materials that could not do simultaneously all the things that were expected of them. A little of the detail then left his drawings, intricacies dispensed with between centre and edge. Shading became banded ( Read more... )

He bought the books without checking the prices on the back. It made him feel free. Better yet, they were cheaper than he had expected. That was a good day.

Then the next day he read the first chapter of one of the books. He had chosen well, he liked this one. The volume itself had an unusual flexibility, and a matt sheen to its cover. He put it ( Read more... )

Remembering Angelo and His Nurse.

You will need to be patient, especially patient this time. Details have come to me, rather a lot of them, some quite vivid. I must tell them.

Angelo wore a bow tie, a white beard, and an expression of constant wonder. His voice was fine and querulous, he was confined to a wheelchair, his hands quivered as crumpled ( Read more... )

Bella refers to Marthe as their nanny, their au pair, their assistant. Isaac can feel the tremors of guilt, the faultlines of Bella's inconsistency. It is a pattern he has learnt to detect, though little good it does him ( Read more... )

Anton sits in the chair in the corridor, the chair that once served the telephone, when that instrument had been fixed. He is reading a volume of Hulssman, in the original. Anton has been told that he should only read Hulssman in translation since, for the text to make any sense, the translators must impose an order and coherence upon Hulssman's ( Read more... )