Yu-Han Chao, Joe Dunthorne, Paul Ewen, Steve Finbow, Amy Guth, Stewart Home, Travis Jeppesen, Paul Kavanagh, Haidee Kruger, Toby Litt, Melissa Mann, Martin Millar, Ben Myers, Kevin O’Cuinn, Joseph Ridgwell, Adelle Stripe.
~~~
“Oh that’s hard, I tend to finish things, even if I don’t put them in public… “
Unfortunately, it was England, it had rained for ten days, the village streets, dusty and potted at the best of times, now swirled with mud, there were four of us, Me, Demo, L-boy and the epic fuckers all know how to noun: the first sign that something peculiar was going on in the lifestyles of the rich and famous came… well, it all happened, just as I was finishing a cup of coff… and you grow up thinking – well, I did – that parenthood is off somewhere in the hazy distance, an ominous neverland, located west of foreign travel, exotic love affairs, and home-ownership, not when Cameron Diaz shot up a Banana Republic store, but arose from the dead and walked on in the jungle sunshine, dripping wet iridescent raindrops falling drip splosh, on those green shady palm fronds…. Pete looked at the wedding cake, a life-size replica of his soon-to-be wife and felt his balls shrivel, it was back in the days when I was a drifter without realizing it, killing one and injuring three others, or when Tony Blair confessed a liking for ‘tea bagging’ during a live expletive-addled political debate, ten miles outside of Tobaccoville and the asphalt is humming Elvis Presley, I was twenty-four and life was heading nowhere, there goes the world again, testing my resolve, it was normal for the Gods to leave Mount Olympus and visit the city of Athens at the time of the Dionysia, the air and the winds are the sea-goddess’s dreams, the girl walks away laughing, laughter that echoes up into nothingness and the black void of the lonely night, I met her in the Hawaiian room of the Lexington hotel, New York, 1937, her skin is at war with this place, she has very confusing heritage, or when Francis Rossi from Status Quo was arrested as part of a widespread bestiality ring, stack, stack, stack, when fires erupt in wires safe for years, when fire explodes and shoots into the night air, when a cigarette butt refuses to die and pulls down a forest; the fire simply ached for too long to be free and broke out of its nothingness, the hotel crawled with life, and teamed from the crevices with orange fire dragonflies and polished cockroaches, as gossiping finches wrestled on the slate pagodas; this was a city of birds, the last stop off before the winter migration, here it may well rain chandeliers and rhododendrons in hotel rooms, but never outside, where the climate is more temperate and Americans will remember Somalia and their botched attempt to take Mogadishu during the first Clinton administration, in the sky, somewhere over the North Atlantic great clouds gather and form cathedrals, mosques, and temples in the blue expanse but when Val Kilmer keeled over in the toilets of a central London pub – from the outside, the Windsor Castle looks like a second-hand shop, or a pawnshop, due to all the old porcelain bits and bobs in the window – and today I put your pencil in my mouth – it tasted of another woman’s words, Huggy played the triangle in the orchestra a small bubble of blood on his sculpted lips the first sign that something quite dreadful was afoot.
Parasitic 