***Page 1 – Elephant in the Living Room*** If the moon happens to be bright, it shines into the Godot family’s kitchen window, casting a bone-blue light across the kitchen table that’s got four placemats on it. Each placemat is made from a photo of Beckett, the family’s recently lost dog. (…)
***Page 1 – The Woman Who Brought Matisse Back from the Dead*** Paris, 1950 The studio on the Boulevard du Montparnasse was not far from the Boulevard Raspail crossing. The door to the concierge’s loge was ajar. The husband of the concierge was urinating into the sink when he noticed the(…)
*****Page 1 ***** A FAMILY. Twelve children and two adults – marital status unknown – crossed the Atlantic from Ireland. The adults couldn’t cope so they swaddled the children with every piece of clothing they could grab from a church rummage and took the ferry from South Ferry, Manhattan to St. George, Staten Island in(…)
*****Page 1 ***** Why leave Berlin for Paris? An unemployed man with no friends, Eli G., with a wife, Vera, and one child to feed, Karl, got fifty-one mark a month (1931) in relief. Vera budgeted: Per month = 51 mark rent, electricity, heat, outings = 32.50 mark feed family = 18.50 mark Per day (…)
Following, extracted from a BBC report: Barack Obama has become the first serving US president to visit Hiroshima since the World War Two nuclear attack. Mr Obama said the memory of 6 August 1945 must never fade, but did not apologise for the US attack – the world’s first nuclear bombing. Mr Obama spoke to two survivors and(…)
Least Likely To Meet four boys born in the City of L: The boy born in February was bathed in the kitchen sink. He was slight, pale, had pimples. His father drove a green bus. The boy born in June was called ‘a horrible piece of red meat’ by his father.(…)
Following, a glance into the draft of my new book (working title) Found and Lost – a quaisi-biographical epistolary collection meditating on six years and six deaths, future work in this crumpled world, life after the death of loved ones. A few lines from Part V – A Curtain Blows into a Room Saw a bin of basketballs at Gristides(…)
After two weeks in Dublin, five weeks on Hydra, my friend Dan bullied me into accompanying him to Bulgaria. I resisted the pressure for a week and finally (because he was also helping me edit a new piece of work*) he used his PhD in bullying to a good end. I blew off my return ticket to New(…)
Having calmed (I thought) my young, neglected novella along with my eleven other disturbed creations the other night, I entered a period of empty-headed wellbeing that, unfortunately, was rudely interrupted just now just as the sun was sinking into the Aegean Sea. I heard a disturbing sound that made the hair on my neck stand up straight. I could hardly believe my ears. Again,(…)
