Jan Carson's Blog, page 19

Postcard Stories 2015: Week Twenty Seven

July 2nd 2015 – Waterstones, Belfast

Josh and Holly Butler

Today is the hottest day of the summer so far, which is to say the city smells like the inside of a slow-roasted car, or the city feels like gym floor dust collecting under your fingernails. In the window of Waterstones they are making the most of the blue sky. They have arranged on a picnic rug, books on the theme of nature and the great outdoors, (also, to the right, some pocket-sized paperbacks, ideal for reading on the beach). A single ladybird is crawling across the cover of the foremost nature book. It is moving slowly, discovering with each thin step, the difference between photographed grass and the real thing. You stop to stare at the ladybird for a moment. It leaves the natural side of the window display, stumbles towards the Maeve Bincheys and Dan Browns. Is the ladybird product placement on Waterstones’ part, you wonder, or has it simply misread the line between inside and the green world beyond.

July 3rd 2015 – Albertbridge Road, Belfast

Kara Nelson

The Tall Ships arrived in Belfast yesterday. They are not as tall as we’d been lead to believe. We thought you might be able to see them from space, or at very least, Cave Hill. This is not the case. You have to be right under the masts, looking up to achieve the illusion of tallness. And, there are fewer of them than we’d been promised; something to do with the smallness of our harbour and also health and safety legislation.

“Still,” say the people who are captains, or whatever one call the drivers of ships these days, “this is a remarkably small country. Surely everything must seem big and tall and much, much more when you’re used to so very little.”

The old perspective argument.

We’ve heard this one before. The punchline is always, less is more in your case. It does not hold water. We know this for a facts. Belfast once harboured boats big as city blocks and these boats were considered equally grand from every foreign perspective, including the ocean floor.

July 4th 2015 – Reading

Louise McIvor

Eleanor changes trains at Reading. The platform is surprisingly crowded for a Saturday evening. The commuters are all well-dressed in suits and wedding hats. She presumes Reading to be a town of exceptionally stylish people and only later discovers that there has been a regatta –a famous one- just a few miles away with champagne and society papers.

Eleanor sits in the first empty seat she can find. The train is almost in Bath before she realizes that seats have been allocated and she is sitting in the wrong carriage.

No one has come to question her presence in First Class, not even the ticket collector, though she is odd woman out wearing jeans in a room full of heeled and skirted ladies.

Just outside Bristol a man pauses at Eleanor’s seat and presses a note into her hand. It is written on the back of a Marks and Spencers’ receipt. It reads, “meet me in the toilets in five minutes.” She is not sure if the note is intended for her or the actual ticket holder.

Eleanor does not go to the toilets. Afterwards, at her mother’s, she wishes she had.

July 5th 2015 – Burnham-on-Sea

Stephen Connolly

We can see the end of the world coming up the estuary, past the power plant and the lighthouse. The blackness is dropping down in lines. With binoculars it is possible to see the exact point at which it makes contact with the ocean. Presumably the fish are already dead.

We continue digging holes, building sandcastles, passing the Thermos from one side of the picnic rug to the other. It is still blue above our heads and so we tell ourselves that this is a false alarm.

We have been led to believe that the end of the world will happen all at once, even in different time zones. We have over-simplified everything.

When the end of the world reaches the tide’s edge we say, “uh oh, looks like it’s time we got going.”

We pack up our things. We even fold the picnic rug neatly. We make for the car and, only at the very last second, break into a run. We do not want to appear hysterical. We do not want the children to know.

July 6th 2015 – Bath

Anne Deighan

It is impossible not to imagine Jane Austen at ease in this city, walking and folding her hands in gloves. The squares are square and bordered on all four sides by privet hedges and black, spike iron work. The buildings are the bleached blonde colour of old sand and everywhere the ivy climbs neatly, never once taking its ascendancy for granted. Even the cobblestones are correctly angled. This is a place for moderation and discrete romance. Small intrigues might be permitted in their proper place but even these would be tight as a well-laid table or a slip of Sunday afternoon needlework. This is the kind of city which is always clean, which is inclined to resolve itself in the time necessary to drain a china tea cup and refill. In other words, Bath is two square miles of sense and sensibility; the kind of place which made those Brontes howl.

July 7th 2015 – Bath

Padraig Regan

The Victoria Art Gallery is situated at the rear of the Guild Hall, Bath. It is sandwiched between a covered market and a Café Nero. It contains one Lowry, several minor Belgians and the country’s largest collection of porcelain dogs. There are so many small, ornamental dogs that there is barely space to contain them and they have been shuffled together on glass shelves with complete disregard for breed or context. (A sixteenth century hunting dog sits nose to arse with an Art Deco poodle, and, do not even get me started on the Dalmatians). In the main gallery the space is dominated by a Kenneth Armitage bronze, two fine cobwebs spidering the gaps between the subject’s raised fingertips. The Victoria Art Gallery’s brochure would leave its visitors to believe in a Warhol Marilyn. No such print is forthcoming but the porcelain dogs are more than adequate compensation.

July 8th 2015 – Bristol Airport

Gillian Grattan

There is one unguarded plug socket in the whole airport. It is behind the seats in the arrivals lounge; a fair stretch past dust and balled up tissues and the soft, golden curls of abandoned, potato crisps. I have been in the airport alone and waiting for almost ten hours. I am down to my last bar of battery and the bar is red and I cannot reach the plug socket with my too short arms.

“Are you after that plug socket?” asks a young fella in a Hollister sweatshirt.

His voice is mashed potatoes with butter. This is common enough in the old people round here. In one so young it reeks of trustworthiness.

“Yes,” I reply, “for my phone charger.”

I assume he is going to reach the unreachable plug socket for me and this small act of kindness will go some way towards neutralizing the last ten evil hours.

He doesn’t. He shoves his own charger into the socket and thumb flicks his way on to Facebook. I make my case topple on to his foot. He is wearing flip flops. I do not even think about apologizing.

Postcard Stories 2015: Week 26

June 25th 2015 –Catalyst Arts, Belfast

Aislinn Clarke

The year we were married Peter and I rented a second floor apartment on the East Side. To the left of us lived a woman with lizards, to the right, two schoolteachers who only made noise at weekends. Directly above us was a young Mexican man in training for the regional heats of Mr. Universe. He wore shorts at all times, even in winter and spent his evenings lifting weights in the privacy of his own kitchen. We could picture the cut of him: legs spread, arms wide, heaving half his own body weight while the television mounted over the breakfast bar played Baywatch re-runs. The sound of his weights leaving the ground was inaudible. Their returns registered in the bedroom below like earthquakes and other signs of the end times.

June 26th 2015 –East Belfast

Wendy Bateman

Last night he went out drinking with the ones from work and now there is a scratch on his sunglasses and the scratch is roughly the shape and size of a one pound coin. The scratch on his sunglasses is not like other scratches he has experienced in the past. It does not impede his vision but rather, enhances it. Looking directly through the scratch in his sunglasses he can his own past trailing behind him. It is amazing how many important things from his past he has already forgotten: his now dead grandmother, the pulled tooth, the time they drove to Hungary in a transit van. The scratch is the best thing he has seen since the original Jurassic Park. He cannot stop looking into it. He begins to wear his sunglasses indoors and does not even care when the ones in work take the piss mercilessly.

June 27th 2015 – Outer Ring, Belfast

Nathaniel Joseph McAuley

Saturday afternoon in the Tescos near Forestside and a woman behind you on the escalator is saying, “guess what I dreamt about last night?”

You are intrigued, as you always are, by dreams.

“Dunno,” replies the man, possibly her husband, who is shopping with her today.

You cup your ears into their conversation. It is a long, slow-moving escalator and you have at least three minutes with the dream couple.

“I dreamt I was ill,” says the woman.

“What was wrong with you?” asks the man.

“I can’t remember,” she replies.

It is a long, slow-moving escalator and you are wedged between a shopping trolley and a woman who is not even interesting in her dreams.

June 28th 2015 – East Belfast

Nicky Kells

Until this afternoon in the library she had not known that the word pen was a derivation from the Latin word, penna, which was not, after all, a form of pasta but rather a means to say quill or feather. This mad solid sense to her in the library, with the book open on her lap like a table, spread. The pen should be linked to the feather of course for it was nothing if not an instrument of flight.

June 29th 2015 – Ulster Hall, Belfast

Tara McEvoy

Things to do with the cardboard box encasing an industrial-sized fridge:

Form an independent republic in the middle of the staff room.
Start an extremely short-lived bonfire.
Sail down the Lagan and far out to sea/sail down the Lagan and get no further than the Big Fish before your boat succumbs to damp and the fickle whims of gravity.
Recycle. Recycle.
Back a shit load of school text books in preparation for September.
Experiment with solitary confinement.
Open Belfast’s latest bijoux hotel experience. Charge an arm and an artificial leg for occupancy of its only room.
Cut into small, square inch fragments, bury in the back garden, beneath soil. Anticipate a forest.
Leave it where you found it. Hope it will eventually go away, as is the practice, locally.

June 30th 2015 – Ulster Hall, Belfast

Manuela Moser

At the next table over there is a heavily pregnant woman with a mug. She is all over thin except for the bump of her belly which she keeps tucked beneath her shirt like a honeydew melon.

“Ah,” she says, between sips of her iced coffee, “the baby’s going clean mental tonight. Here, feel.”

All three of her tablemates, (mother, sister, husband?) stretch their hands across the dead space to lay them on the place where the baby is kicking. For a moment there are all together connected and listening, (though an unborn child shifting in the womb makes no discernible sound). In other rooms or other times, this would be presumed a séance. They have no idea how they must look from a distance.

July 1st 2015 – QFT, Belfast

Nathan Morrow-Murtagh

Andrew had been single for as long as he could remember. The West was just as wild and lonesome as the movies suggested and he had yet to settle in. By day he roped cattle and trapped animals for eating, by night he whittled. (He was not much of a one for frequenting saloons). After his first year on the homestead Andrew could no longer stand the loneliness. He could not afford a wife by honest means so he made wanted posters of his own likeness and tacked them all over town, offering a fifty dollar reward for anyone prepared to pursue him. Since the words about the Wild West had gone global now, fifty dollars was no longer considered much of a reward and no one ever came after Andrew. Yet it made him feel like hot whiskey had pooled inside him every time he saw his own face and the word, wanted, printed like a sign of things to come, just above his head.

Postcard Stories 2015: Week 25

June 18th 2015 – Belfast International Airport

Paddy and Darlene Meskell

Every flight out of the International is delayed. They line up to make their sad, little excuses like children who have not completed last night’s homework. In Glasgow, essential maintenance. In Luton, bad weather and delayed incoming flights from Bristol, (the aeronautical version of it is all someone else’s fault). After an hour the children in buggies begin to fuss and are lifted loose already dressed for bed. A man in a Scottish football shirt takes one too many drinks at the bar and is escorted from the building face first, a security guard hanging off each arm. People complain. On the runway below three brown hares exploit the space usually dominated by passenger planes. They run loops of themselves across the tarmac, bucking and leaping like small gods. They are mocking the humans in their ticketed lines as they wait anxiously to leave this place. The hares knows this evening is perfect, right here in Aldergrove, and anyone’s for the taking.

June 19th 2015 – National Portrait Gallery, London

Alice Dawson

In the National Portrait Gallery three teenage girls in school uniforms sit cross-legged beneath a video installation of David Beckham, sleeping. David Beckham is naked from the waist up and looks like an actor pretending to sleep for the camera. The girls are “drawing” David Beckhams. They have yet to make a single mark on their A4 sketchpads for staring at him breathing in and elegantly out. Their teacher pauses behind them, leans over, says, “it’s not even proper art.”

David Beckham sleeping is not what should be considered art. Neither, in light of Snowden’s photograph of the young David Bowie, eyeballing the camera in profile, should it be considered properly pornographic. The school girls are too young and screen-sure to understand this.

June 20th 2015 – Royal Academy of Art, London

Scott Sloan

In 1966 the artist Tom Phillips bought a copy of the little-known Victorian novel, “A Human Document,” tore the text to pieces and using W.H. Mallock’s original text as a canvas of sorts, adapted one page per day with paint and ink and ingenious spaces. Though the words were Mallock’s own entirely. They now read like a stranger’s.

By the early 1970s there were hundreds of these translations, enough to publish a second “Human Document.” It is impossible to say whether this document is less or more than the original or whether Mallock might have set his Victorian sensibilities aside to find the vandalism flattering.

Approximately sixty pages in Philips has blocked and peeled to reveal the words, “children die of the imagination.” It is as if he has cut through the quick of one small novel to reveal the essence of all art ever, and also its appeal. This has been more than a matter of paint.

June 21st 2015 – Oxford Street, London

Apricot Irving

Yesterday it rained like the sky was broken and could not turn itself off in the usual fashion. On Oxford Street and Covent Garden the tourists slouched across the paving slabs in sandals and summer pumps. Underfoot the street muck pasted itself into a grey, black grease. There was every possibility of an accidental fall.

You did not have an umbrella or, for that matter, socks, and were soon drenched and hiding out in Foyles where it was only polite to purchase books and hope they would not run on the long walk home.

Last night you dreamt of Piccadilly Circus from a great height. All those wet umbrellas circling Eros like black beetles, swarming. Just before you woke the umbrellas became Spanish skirts twirling on Spanish ladies and it was easier to believe London a European city, even in the rain.

June 22nd 2015 –Canary Wharf, London

Kelly Creighton

There are six little boys on the tube between Bow Church and Canary Wharf. Each is wearing a football shirt and a hearing aid clipped to the spot where their ears fold into their scalps like tiny television aerials. They are signing together as they lean against the end of the carriage, fingers flying like individual insects and you do not understand anything except their smiles.

A young lady is with them; a carer of sorts. She hands out Kit Kats, says, “eat them quick boys, before they melt in the heat.”

She uses the wrong kind of words with her mouth and they boys do not hear her. They eat their Kit Kats slowly, smearing their hands and faces; lick the chocolate from their fingers with kitten pink tongues. They are silent as they eat, speaking the universal language of small children and sugar and trains.

June 23rd 2015 –Ulster Hall, Belfast

Anthony Quinn

When I grow up I want to be a player in a paper orchestra. This will be similar to being a player in an ordinary orchestra but, as the instruments are not made of brass or wood or any kind of permanent material, they are extremely affordable. I will be able to become a violinist then, just a few weeks later, a trumpet player, a cellist or even a banger of over-sized drums. Furthermore, the noise made by a paper orchestra is nothing near the racket generated by an everyday orchestra, even in rehearsal. The sound of a paper orchestra is like the memory of a song heard once in passing, or rain behind glass, or the noise human breath will make catching on the inside of a woollen scarf. Paper orchestras are all the more precious because they are disposable; because they are also subject to the subtle shifts of wind and gentle wear.

June 24th 2015 –East Belfast

Danny McClelland

“Watch this,” said Steve.

He gunned the car’s engine, pumping the accelerator until the noise emerging from beneath the bonnet was a prehistoric rumble like dinosaurs or tectonic plates shifting. He raised his foot from the brake and the car shot forwards past the skeleton frame of Frankie’s rib shack and the old men fishing for crabs with string and the sign where it said, “eight years and older for the Helter Skelter.” We flew free of the pier’s edge and hung for a moment between one blue and the other like a skiff of early morning fog on the ocean’s surface. Then the car skipped once, twice, three times across the waves and we were, for a moment, a skimmed pebble tossed from the hand of some bigger god.

“I thought we’d skim if we went at it fast enough,” said Stevie.

And then the car sank, swallowing his next sentence. He had not previously considered what would happen when we stopped moving.

Postcard Stories 2015: Week 24

June 11th 2015 – Antrim Area Hospital

Cat and Levi Rogers

“Imagine if the hospital was left empty,” you say, “and we could sneak into the X-Ray Room and take pictures of the way we look inside.”

You think your toe was once broken. I have suspicions about my middle finger, related to that incident in Amsterdam with the lamppost.

“It would not point properly afterwards,” I explain, and lift my finger to you, by virtue of illustration.

There are other items I’d like to x-ray if the opportunity arose: water, candyfloss, helium-filled balloons; the closest I can come to photographing a ghost.

June 12th 2015 – Cathedral Quarter, Belfast

Ryan Kee

My legs on the car seat, stretching and retracting as they pump the brake pedal are also the legs of my grandmother who is no longer with us and did not drive this car but rather a similar car, tooth-filling gray with a pair of pink dice furring from the rearview mirror and, on the parcel shelf, like a cliché sweating behind the back windscreen, a picnic blanket folded over itself like a fat, blue bandage, and an always nodding dog. It smelt in there of polo mints and the talcum powder she kept in a puffered, cardboard tub on the edge of her bath, which was avocado green, as was her sink, her toilet and her carefully hung handtowels. The corner of the car’s passenger seat was chewed away to reveal custard-coloured foam, lumping below. I’d done this with my teeth when I was younger and too small, or perhaps insignificant, to ride upfront with the adults. I was not easy as a child and had, quite naturally, taken my frustrations out on the upholstery.

June 13th 2015 – Botanic Avenue, Belfast

Glori Gray

“What’s the difference?” she thought, and went to the Pound Shop, where the dishwasher tablets were cheaper. She kept her mother’s change and felt no guilt.

Though the brand was identical to the dishwasher tablets they normally used, the writing on the packet was in a foreign language –Polish or Romanian- the words recognisably Eastern. She stored the box under the sink with the other cleaning products and hoped her mother would not notice.

Her mother did not notice. The dishes were no more nor less clean than usual but there were tiny European fingerprints on the cutlery and a strange taste off the cups, like sadness in a foreign film, which persisted even after a second and third rinse. She could not shift her thirst with these cups no matter how much she drank.

June 14th 2015 – Dundonald

Lori Englert

It had been an impossibly damp Spring and the lawn was two parts daisy to every part ordinary grass. That evening they sat out on a picnic rug watching the barbecue embers cool and crumble until it was almost midnight. While they talked he kept his hands busy with a daisy chain, pressing his thumbnail into each stalk in turn until there were almost a hundred of the little flowers hooked together like a sad, chain gang.

When the night was almost over he fastened the necklace around her shoulders, reaching under her hair to bind the first and last flower together.

“They’re already wilting,” he said, by means of an apology.

By the time she was undressing for bed the flowers were quite dead and she dropped them in the bed without a second thought. The evening stayed longer with him, lingering as a lime, green bruise just beneath his thumbnail where the daisies had bled and stained.

June 15th 2015 – Ulster Hall, Belfast

Daryl Woods and John Lassiter

In 1950 the movie director John Houston transported Katherine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart and, (by default), Lauren Bacall, to the Belgian Congo in order to shoot the African Queen. Having overspent on A-list actors and exotic locations there was little money left for necessity. Hepburn acted and when she was not acting, turned seamstress and doubled as the costume department. Between takes she ate like the locals ate and consequently found herself pausing between lines to vomit in an off-screen bucket. Bogart was made of sterner stuff. He consumed nothing but harder liquor, sweated like a stuck pig in the African sun and was the only person on set not to fall ill. Later, much later, post-production Oscar nominations, Hepburn and Bogart would appear on the big screen, whiter than white people should; graying a little round the edges in glorious technicolour.

June 16th 2015 – Linenhall Library, Belfast

Kat and Phil Mawhinney-Kam

The train was an old-fashioned affair with compartments which could be sealed off simply by sliding the door into its socket. Michael found an empty compartment, entered and was already settling himself by the window when he noticed the man slumped across the opposite seat. Sleeping, Michael presumed, then noting the grayish hue of the man’s face, understood him dead. There was no obvious signs of foul play so Michael sat on considering his options for two full stops.

The dead man was wearing a very fine jacket and Michael, who was not given to sentimentality, decided to take this jacket, for what use had a dead man with such an item. He started in on the buttons. They were a bloody nightmare and the arms, having already stiffened, equally problematic. The dead man slipped from his seat to the carriage floor and, fully committed now, Michael squatted over him, tugging at the jacket until at last it came free and he held it against his own chest and saw it was too small by far.

He wondered if the man’s shoes might be a better fit and how he might explain all this, and the blood, to the ticket collector.

June 17th 2015 – Cathedral Quarter, Belfast

Ian Wylie

Which reminds you of an old women you once knew in a cottage with horses, somewhere in sight of the anxious sea. Perhaps this woman’s husband was a fisherman or a regular farmer of turnips and spuds. A man with mucky hands and a presence at the kitchen table who died of illness or accident and was buried no more than half a mile from the old woman’s front door. This was done without cross or stone on account of debts.

The old woman, feeling the lack of his heat in bed, let the sheepdog in with her and caught the mange off it so her skin came loose in flakes like boiled potato peel. And, when she died, they said it was of heartbreak and the mange and going to bed with a half-breed collie which, you are quick to point out, is a better story that the psoriasis and grief-related stress she’d be lumbered with today. No comfort for the old woman though, who is dead, despite all your poems.

Postcard Stories 2015: Week Twenty Three

June 4th 2015 – Ulster Hall, Belfast

Wells and Tracy Kane

When he donkey was a very small donkey and had no idea what its ears or clipping hooves were for, it overheard two birds talking on a branch.

“Look at that little donkey,” one bird said to the other.

And the donkey, because it was only young and had not yet grown into its ears, heard the word monkey where the bird had said donkey. He fancied himself capable of walking almost upright now, of climbing trees and grasping fruit between his forelegs like a human child, eating. The donkey did his best to live as a monkey.

He was always disappointed and ashamed of his unnatural cravings for hay. The other donkeys avoided him in social settings. He did not care. They were not monkeys like him.

They said, “that donkey had airs and graces above his standing.”

Secretly they were jealous of the young donkey. He had not yet managed to climb a whole tree but had certainly been higher than any other donkey in the field.

June 5th 2015 – Belfast

Amy Roper

In the corner of the pub a group of girls are using their mobile phones to video the approach of each of their friends in turn. There are around twelve of them in total, hooting like unhinged things. They are dressed for June in a much warmer city. Later tonight they will raise their mobile phones high above the glass-empty remains of the evening and video each girl’s exit: backwards, past the parasol and the boys smoking by the outdoor heater. When they are old and probably married, they will come across these videos of their taught-bellied, former selves, coming and going in summer tops, and they will remember how little there was to fill their days, and how full they always were.

June 6th 2015 – Botanic Avenue, Belfast

Diana Decaris Champa

In English we did not work so we tried translation. I was particularly keen on French but soon realized that a harsh truth is just as heavy when delivered with romantic intonation. Architecture was your best attempt at translation yet you could not decide if we were detatched or semi-detatched or stubbornly terraced. Soon the very foundations were not strong enough to support us. Sign language was equally disappointing.

“I feel like we’re just playing rock, scissors, paper here,” I said, with my hands and all you saw was a fist, falling in the most violent fashion.

In the end we were reduced to quadratic equations; less than or equal to everything we had previously been.

June 7th 2015 – Waterfront Hall, Belfast

Rachel McKendry

As usual there is an argument over who will go first.

Peppa Pig point blank refuses, the incident at the children’s festival, still fresh in her mind. Fireman Sam and Buzz Lightyear are, despite all obvious assumptions, demure types, given to hanging back with the balloon modelers. Snow White would make most sense for she is a reasonably ordinary looking girl in a dress; the only character in the group not required to wear a headpiece.

“I’m having a bad hair day,” she says, in lieu of retreat, and pushes Olaf the Snowman out the door first.

The others troop after, each grasping the padded hem of the character in front. Their costumes narrow at the ankle, constricting movement. They shuffle forwards into the throng of sugared children, lurching and stopping like blind men leading other blind men.

Olaf the Snowman cannot see shit through his eye slots and his carrot nose collides with the popcorn machine. He draws back suddenly, upsets Peppa Pig, begins a process which is like dominos falling, or books.

This is how the trouble started.

June 8th 2015 – Ulster Hall, Belfast

Ellen Wilmont

In the storms over the weekend a further two letters have fallen off the Ulster Hall sign. A man approaches the box office counter holding the letter L.

“Is this yours?” he asks. “I found it lying in the street.”

The sign now reads “LSTR HAL.” The sound of this when said quickly is a throat disorder or a Swedish holiday resort.

The first four letters have also fallen off the Central Station signs. The remaining letters glow in the dark like Scrabble tiles trying their best to say something. Perhaps, you think, the city is shuffling around itself, attempting to leave messages for anyone keen enough to read.

Take a consonant from this place, a vowel from another, rearrange them to make a shop front sentence:

“Things fall apart.”

“Somebody save me from myself.”

Belfast is coming apart at the seams.

June 9th 2015 – Ulster Hall, Belfast

Caroline Puntis

On Tuesday a bad thing happened. Unlike other bad things which had happened to her in the past, this bad thing was neither smooth, nor circular in shape. It was a kind of oblong and rough to the touch, like the gritted texture of a crab’s shell. She placed it in her handbag, making room for the bad thing amongst the paperback novels and red lipsticks, (four, in a variety of whore red shades). All day, her handbag felt heavier than usual. It dug into her shoulder leaving a groove, three inches in diameter, the colour of mouths, inside. That night, when she emptied her handbag before bed, the bad ting was still there but there were many other things attached to it: tissues, hairbrushes, kind words from old friends, a cup of coffee she had not asked for, but desperately needed. The bad thing was not diminished, but no longer quite as sharp around the edges.

June 10th 2015 – Botanic Avenue, Belfast

Scott Jamison

In my head I am inventing a dating agency aimed at impoverished writers. Impoverished writers drawn from a wide range of genders, sexual orientations and postal codes will be paired with independently wealthy individuals who lack personality; the sort of people you introduce yourself to a second and third time, having found them, in the first instance, remarkably forgettable. Impoverished writers will help these poor souls to appear mysterious at dinner parties and weddings, will write stories where the characters are named after their dullish other halves, will act, at all times, like spotlights, ensuring even the most non-descript pen pusher appears illuminated in their presence. In return the impoverished writers will receive three square meals a day, lodging and the occasional moleskin notebook.

Postcard Stories 2015: Week Twenty Two

May 28th 2015 – Donegal Square, Belfast

Sam and Emily Moore

There is some confusion in the line for the 28A. An elderly lady in a coral anorak has stuck her head, turtle-like, from beneath her umbrella’s brim to announce that, “Margaret’s not doing well at all.” She asks the next elderly lady down if there’s been any change in Margaret’s condition.

This one’s wearing a pink anorak and says, “they’re just waiting on Margaret now.”

Which causes a third anorak, (navy blue, nautical-themed), to chip in with news from the frontline, “Margaret’s just passed.”

“No,” argues the original anorak, “that can’t be right for I was only after talking to Margaret’s John.” She sets her bag-for-life down on the pavement as if to prove she’s here for the duration.

The dots are duly joined and it transpires that there is more than one Margaret dying in East Belfast today. All three anoraks shuffle on to the 28A and keep their hoods up all the way down the Newtownards Road. It is unclear whether they are in mourning, or just worried about their hair.

May 29th 2015 – Waterstones, Belfast

Chloe Kee

“Something is about to make sense

if we just keep going in the opposite direction.”

-Frances Leviston

I did not love nor even like the book which you said I would certainly adore. This is the third time this has happened in a month with other books, and of course, different friends. Does the fault like with the books or the friends? Perhaps, the fault lies with me and I have become loose in my reading habits, or snobbish, or inclined to give these books only the thinnest slice of my attention, reading with a wet sandwich in hand or before the previews at the cinema, so there are always stains blooming between the lines. In the future I will be a better reader and a better friend. I will try harder to love the books you love because this is a form of loving you. I will make myself read like a novice smoker, persevering ‘til I get a taste for it.

May 30th 2015 – East Belfast

Pete McAuley

On an overnight ferry to France the television screens are playing BBC1, siding with the place just left rather than the point of arrival. It is Saturday evening, just gone nine and the Lottery is over. Casualty has just begun and at certain point, almost half way between France and England, television signal is lost. The sad, distorted face of Charlie Fairhead, squared and rectangle like a Klimt masterpiece is caught onscreen for hours. He is staring, staring, staring as if this image should be the last thing we wish to offer Europe; an aging NHS employee, with a well-learnt frown.

May 31st 2015 – Loughbrickland

Holly and Andy Eaton

When I was a child of around ten or eleven some friends in a neighbouring house were allowed to erect the family tent in their bedroom and sleep there for the night. I imagine this was during the summer holidays, when all things were permissible.

This was a holy idea to me and I began to imagine myself living in my own tent, camping out inside the walls of my bedroom. (I was also willing to consider shed or greenhouses if a tent was not available). Inside this second space would be a bed, a table, a tiny lamp and myself, sleeping, like the mirror image of my real room, in miniature.

The thought of one space inhabited by another made sense to me then, like Russian dolls or the way I’d been brought up to believe there was a home inside my heart and if Jesus didn’t live there, then someone else would.

June 1st 2015 – Portrush

Ciara Hickey

There are storm warnings on the North Coast this afternoon. From behind the glass, with coffee, the beach is just as you’d ask it to be.

The sea is not blue nor grey exactly, but rather the moderate colour of Fox’s Glaciar Mints or glass caught beneath a layer of ice. The waves are not yet enormous, but further out to sea the idea of enormous waves is already beginning to occur. The sand wrinkles from one side of the bay to the other. The sand is like the mist which gathers around Sherlock Holmes’s feet in the old movies, but less sinister. It is like water, spilled.

A man is walking his Jack Russell across the beach. The dog is attached to him by a lead which gives the impression that it could also be a kite, could, at any second, lift off, if the wind so willed it.

June 2nd 2015 – East Belfast

Oonagh Murphy

Meanwhile in Paris, the Council have voted to remove almost one million padlocks from the bridges bridging the River Seine. They go at these padlocks with clippers. The padlocks are surprisingly resilient. Later, they will be melted down to make fences and gates and other strong but unremarkable items.

Meanwhile in Paris, most people are irate. Each individual padlock represented a couple who were once in love. Now, without a solid, metal thing to keep the idea of themselves together these couples are no longer sure about anything: love, trust, passion, the romantic appeal of large European cities such as Paris and Rome.

Meanwhile in Paris, the riverbed rusts with one million padlock keys suddenly reduced to common junk.

June 3rd 2015 – Cathedral Quarter, Belfast

Pauline Burgess

Everyone is looking at a black and white photograph of Elvis Presley. He is sitting on a high, swivel stool at a diner counter. There is a girl next to him and a man serving them from behind the counter. The counter itself is brushed aluminium, indistinguishable from the counters which featured in lunch counter sit-ins of the Civil Rights campaign. (You saw one once, in the Smithsonian, and could not be sure if it was a replica, or the real, mean thing).

Elvis has his back to the camera. Only the very slimmest section of his face is Elvis. The rest is just an ordinary, young man on a high, swivel stool, smiling. You like him better like this, without the rhinestones or the hips. You like that the girl seems ordinary too.

“Look guys, it’s Elvis Presley,” you say, because they haven’t yet noticed it’s him.

And they say, “well-spotted.”

And you do not tell them that you have already read the caption below the photograph.

Postcard Stories 2015: Week Twenty One

May 21st 2015 – Drogheda

Lizzy Donaghy

Seven things which could be effectively substituted for the hold music commonly piped down telephones whilst customers wait to speak with a customer services representative:

Babies smiling or thinking about smiling.
All two hundred and two episodes of the X Files in brief, synoptic format.
The voice of God, (New Testament version).
Wine, (any version).
“The Sound of Silence,” a popular song by the musical outfit, Simon and Garfunkel.
The sound of silence.
Alan Rickman expressing the sentiment that everything will ultimately be alright, using his own words and his own, peculiar speaking voice.

May 22nd 2015 – Sea Park, Belfast

KT Stevenson

It was not blue and then all of a sudden it was. On the far side of the Lough, the power station chimneys were like old-fashioned sweets striping against the sky. It was a day for breathing in and out; our lungs clutching the spring wind, as, after the winter, carpets will come out to air themselves on the line.

“Look at the boat,” you said, “off to Scotland or the Isle of Man.”

We all looked at the boat. We were still staring when the rush of its wake made good with the tide and all that frothy water came galloping up the Lough to swallow the beach in one foamy gulp. I grabbed the smallest child and you, the second smallest and, in a trenched panic, we ran, thinking only of our dry ankles and the lawn grass beyond. Afterwards we laughed. Our lungs were large caves and this was the first deep breath of the spring.

May 23rd 2015 – East Belfast

Kate Moore

There were twenty odd people in the living room eating cheese and things that tasted of cheese. All but two had come in fancy dress, picking the Eurovision country they wished to support and adjusting their outfits accordingly. Of the two demurely dressed individuals, the first had misread the invitation and was mortified in her blue jeans and going-out top. She sat all night with a cushion cradled in front of her middle as if pregnant and trying to disguise the fact. The second could not have given less of damn. He was there for the drink and the nibbling things on sticks. “I’m for Australia,” he said, which went some ways to excusing his shorts and the beer cans, balanced like weights in either hand, and would not have worked as an excuse on any other Eurovision year.

May 24th 2015 – Bangor

Shelley Hutchinson

There are twenty three swan-shaped pedaloes moored against the edge of the boating lake at Pickie Pool. Twenty two are white and one is yellow which must surely cause self-esteem issues each time this swan catches sight of itself in the pure, blue water. After all, even swan-shaped pedaloes are aware of the ugly duckling from an early age and know the difference between beauty and the edge.

In Bangor, which is rarely mistaken for a ballet, or even a fairy tale, the ugly duckling does not always blossom into a swan; occasionally carries its black feathers into adulthood; sometimes finds itself working the tills at Lidl, longterm. The twenty third swan-shaped pedalo knows all about this. She stays last in line for customers and children, hoping this will help to hold their rejection at a safe distance.

May 25th 2015 – Ballymena

Cailin Lynn

By the end of the working week it is often hard to muster up the emotional wherewithal necessary to navigate one’s way through the weekend. I find it easier to freeze my emotions in advance of the week, ideally on a Sunday afternoon or evening. I pop each of my most frequently visited emotions -enthusiasm, disbelief, love and lust, to name but a few- into a separate compartment of an ice cube tray and store them, for ease of access, in the freezer section of my kitchen fridge. Then, when an old lover appears unannounced at dinner, or the cat dies, or ludicrous things are said over Friday night cocktails, I can simply slip a pre-frozen emotion into my drink, swirl it round the glass and wait for it to dissolve. Often I down the whole marvelous concoction in one, like a paracetamol tablet or a soluble aspirin. In this way I can appear normal without expending any particular effort.

May 26th 2015 – Drain’s Bay

Gerard Brennan

There are shells on the beach at Drain’s Bay no bigger than the head of a pin. They are pale, opalescent cream and peach and ice cream pink and coil into themselves like the inner workings of a child’s ear. There are also slightly larger seashells and these can be crushed between finger and thumb to make spools and coral twists which are shinier on the inside than the outside.

“Tiny staircases for sea creatures,” you tell her, arranging the smaller shells on the upturned lid of a Flora margarine tub in ascending order; smallest to largest.

“An American artist does this with leaves,” you tell her but she is four years old and too young to understand the deep breath calm which comes with placing things in their proper order.

May 27th 2015 – East Belfast

Eleanor Kyle

The Wilsons could not afford more than one baby. Neither did they believe in only children.

“It’s cruel,” said Mrs. Wilson, “bringing a child up without another child for company.”

When their baby was old enough to sit up they placed him in a small room, mirrored on all four sides.

“Look at all the mirror babies,” they said, “so many friends to play with.”

They took great comfort in the way their baby talked to his reflection as if the children in the mirror were real. Later, when he was sixteen or seventeen, and the mirror room had been demolished to make way for a home office, the boy had vague memories of siblings. He presumed them, all but himself, dead and did not ask but there was a sadness inside him like a two-sided mirror.

Postcard Stories 2015: Week Twenty

May 14th 2015 – Ulster Hall, Belfast

Mike Pacchione

Five days after Sir Arthur Conan Doyle passed thousands of his fans and followers sat vigil at the Royal Albert. They were not anticipating a resurrection, only a sleight shuffle in the atmosphere, a nod, or perhaps a whispered message from the next world over. The medium caught the hem of it hovering over an empty chair and, in the front row, Mrs. Arthur Conan Doyle –as might have been expected- also felt her husband’s presence pass amongst them and move on.

Everyone else was distracted by a particularly enthusiastic organ solo.

Sir Arthur’s thirty seven million pound investment in fairies and ectoplasm and holy mumblings from beyond the grave had not bought him so much as a closing remark; the chance to say, “elementary etc. etc.” one last time or admit there was nothing in this Spiritualist lark after all.

May 15th 2015 – Dundonald

Bekah and Stefan Wolf

On the eve of the season’s first barbecue, we pause to remember monumental barbecues of our past: the afternoon in Colorado when the man came rushing down the river with a shotgun and you lifted the barbecue, still smoking, into the bed of your pick up and drove the Hell away; the time on Portstewart Strand when the coals would not light and you made a flamethrower from a deodorant can so all our sausages tasted of Lynx and coal dust; and finally, that evening on Cannon Beach, when the barbecue played ball, but your forgot the corkscrew and you smashed the bottle’s neck with a stone to get at the wine and the wine was ruined for there were small shards of glass drowning in it and they were too small to pick out with our finger. Because of this the night was ruined.

Each you is a different man, standing behind a barbecue. I can only remember one name, but two faces stick with me like the morning after stench of barbecue smoke on the pillow.

May 16th 2015 – Dunadry

Mary Dixon

The bride is small at the top and wider at the bottom like a pyramid or a toilet paper lady. Coming in or out of a room she must turn sideways to accommodate her train. The bride is named Catherine but looking at her it is hard not to assume she has been called Cathy in youth and Cat since the age of seventeen. She is at least thirty seven now, but her dress is ten years younger.

There is a stain like the red hand of Ulster simmering across the backside of this dress as if the bride has sat herself down in something bloody, as if she has thrown red wine over her shoulder in some strange parody of that lucky salt ritual, as if someone with no sense, (her father perhaps), has placed his hand on her and given her a good hefty push into the next chapter.

May 17th 2015 – East Belfast

Wendy Young

Recalling the summer you packed late and went to Colorado with three left shoes and no rights, you have decided to begin packing at least three hours before the taxi had been ordered. You are drinking tea rather than wine. You are feeling like a person who is old enough to own a mortgage and listen to jazz for the way it makes you sound at dinner parties with strangers.

You are not really this person.

You realize this when packing quickly takes a backseat to making sculptures from your holiday clothes and hanging these installations around your bedroom with jewelry, and shoes where your feet will later go. Talking to these clothy ghosts as if they are people with invisible heads and limbs you are already on holidays. You take a strange, continental pleasure in the way they smile back at you.

May 18th 2015 – Titanic Belfast

Niamh, Katie and Trevor Wilson

There were things we already knew about the Titanic. These included: the fake funnel, the third anchor and those extra fingers on the staircase angels. What we did not know was the half mile of ocean bed separating stern from bow. Half a mile; enough distance to berth another liner or house an entire High Street. After the iceberg this end went one way and the end, the other. Part buried now they are like a pair of huffing children, backs set and swimming against a reconciliation. Between them lie two lady’s shoes, mismatched and dancing round each other. Both are black, one is buckled. They nose each other gently like UN ambassadors lost in no man’s land.

May 19th 2015 – Ulster Hall, Belfast

Laura and Austin Orr

It is not ok to dress older people up as things they do not want to be dressed up as. For example: Elvis or Princess Leia from Star Wars. When it comes to costumes older people should be consulted just like everyone else.

You should say to the older person, “is there something or someone you’d like to dress up as today?”

And, when they reply, “well, now you come to mention it, I’ve always had a hankering to be Tom Jones or Napoleon or the angry one from Dad’s Army,” you should not snigger.

Older people are allowed to pretend they are someone else at weekends too. It is not ok to dress them up as older people, with slippers or reclining armchairs, if this is something they are opposed to. Neither should you insist upon spectacles.

Children and dogs are a different matter entirely. They cannot be trusted to make the right decisions for themselves. Consequently it is ok to dress children and dogs up anyway you see fit.

May 20th 2015 – The Quays, Dublin

Charlie Small

The room is redder than might be considered appropriate. Inside, with the doors closed, it is hard to believe in daylight. Several people have already begun to think about vampires. They have no idea why they are thinking about vampires but it must have something to do with the red walls and the red wine and the old man who is sleeping and has fallen across the table in the shape of a corpse.

Poets have recently been here and the smell of them is just settling into the curtains.

There is also a band playing on stage. That is to say, there is a boy with a guitar and space enough for others to join him with instruments.

A man who is possibly Paul Muldoon is sitting behind the door. In the deep red dark you mistake him for Bob Dylan. This is entirely understandable. You mistake him for the man who takes the money, give him five euro for his trouble, sit down. Later you mistake him for Paul Muldoon who has already left.

Postcard Stories 2015: Week Nineteen

May 7th 2015 – Queen’s Film Theatre, Belfast

Amy Boles

William goes to the pictures once a week on Thursday. He is not fussy about which movie he sees though quieter films, or those with subtitles, are usually more effective. He arrives late and sits beside someone, usually a single someone, who looks as if they have been waiting to see this movie all week. During the credits and previews William does a credible impression of an ordinary cinema-goer. However, once the film begins in earnest he really cuts loose. He coughs. He checks the time on his watch, then his mobile phone. He eats noisily. He coughs some more, plays with the zipper on his anorak so it makes the sound of ripped paper. He sighs. (William finds that sighing is the best way to drive his fellow audience members bat crazy). He could not care one jot for the action onscreen. It is the angry, angry people on either side who amuse William; who justify the ticket price.

May 8th 2015 – Limavady

Lucia Folk

You were born in Northern Ireland in 1980. You are well used to waiting behind parades, idling the engine while line after line of uniformed pipers goosestep past like lost soldier. Tonight a new experience, reading Cormac McCarthy and Raymond Carver and selected excerpts from your own writing whilst outside the Arts Centre window dozens and dozens of drums are keeping their own sweet time and the Lambeg beaters are waddling from one end of the High Street to the other, their drums strapped across their bellies like heavily pregnant women. You must raise your voice to be heard. They haven’t given you a microphone. You choke on the irony of being trapped inside a building where you are giving a lecture entitled, ‘the open road.’

May 9th 2015 – Cathedral Quarter, Belfast

Caitlin Newby

“It is possible to buy guns in Walmart,” she says, “both handguns and different kinds of rifles. You can put them straight into our shopping cart , no questions asked.”

This is Belfast. Everyone has an anecdote on the subject of guns; some are horrendous. He doesn’t join in or pay particular attention. He’s thinking about the other things you can purchase in Walmart, besides guns: toilet bowls and Grandfather clocks and grand pianos. He takes the top of his pint in one dry sip.

“What sort of degenerate buys a grand piano in Walmart?” he thinks. This might be worse than a gun.

May 10th 2015 – East Belfast

Jesse Shoman

The sofa came in a box exactly the same size as the sofa squared. It was made of cardboard. It was too big to fit in the wheelie bin and so they kept it in the living room, fully intending to take it to the dump at the weekend. With the sofa and the box, the room felt companionably full for the first time since Laura had left. For this reason they did not wish to dispose of the box.

They began to leave things on it: letters, paperback novels, the incidental ephemera of their working week. They didn’t keep a designated drawer for these kind of things. Later, they started to store things inside the box: records, vintage crockery, a coffee table they’d found in a car boot sale and couldn’t place properly in any room.

By Christmas the box was too heavy to lift so they kept it. It occupied a good third of their living room. When, in the New Year, Laura returned from Spain and asked about moving back in, there was no space for her.

May 11th 2015 – East Belfast

Tabitha Gentry

Something is crying in the third floor bathroom. There are two stalls in this bathroom and the crying thing is in the stall to the left with the door closed. It is crying every Monday just before lunch.

You glance under the stall door. The crying thing does not have feet. It could be standing on the rim of the toilet bowl but this is quite unlikely. (You did this once and slipped in).

You pass chocolate under the stall door. (There is no point offering tissues with so much toilet paper to hand). You think about saying something comforting or even praying. You don’t. The crying thing accepts the chocolate and ceases to be a crying thing.

The part of you which still believes in Christmas tells yourself it was only just hungry. Next Monday something will be crying in the bathroom again. It will come to cost you a fortune in chocolate bars.

May 12th 2015 – Ulster Hall, Belfast

Tabitha Gentry

Times were tight because of austerity and the recession and the way there was no money for anything except shops. The orchestra took advice from their experts and, after considering all available options, decided to become a paper orchestra.

There were advantages to this: money was saved on shipping for the paper Steinway weighed a mere fraction of its wooden counterpart; everything, even the bass could be recycled, (which pleased the environmentalists no end); and books could be folded into violins and piccolos so, if you listened carefully, it was possible to hear individual stories singing between the notes.

The paper orchestra might well have caught on, might even have gone down like a paper house on fire if it wasn’t for the wind section and the brass, who could not hold their spit in, who found themselves disintegrating long before the interval.

May 13th 2015 – Ulster Hall, Belfast

Bethany Dawson

Observations upon attending the marathon prize giving in a paid capacity:-

The babies of runners are the size and shape of normal babies. (You had expected them to be stretched like the way toffee goes when it is pulled).
Everyone is a runner until they are standing still by the buffet table with one of those little vampire sticks in hand, spearing cocktail sausages and chicken nuggets. Then, they are just ordinary people, but thinner.
The women wear their heels as if their feet are always thinking about trainers.
There are an above average number of black-haired people present.
The men were shirts from Next and Burton. They are finely checked and seem to distrust colour.
No one is running. No one is moving faster than should be expected of an indoors crowd. This disappoints you dreadfully. Especially the three people who are offered the lift and choose to take the stairs instead.

Postcard Stories 2015: Week Eighteen

April 30th 2015 ��� Ulster Hall, Belfast

Paul Barger

When the lights go out you are half way through a guided tour of the North Corridor. You do not have a torch and the luminous glow from your mobile screen isn���t loud enough to cut your path from one end of the gallery to the other.

���Apologies,��� you say, as you edge the tourists slowly along the corridor,��� if the lights were on you���d be able to see Picassos to your right and Rembrandts to your left, a check-marked Mondrian, hanging just above the fire exit.���

This is entirely untrue. The walls are made of very ordinary paintings painted by very ordinary, local artists.

The tourists shuffle slowly forwards. They are a very hungry caterpillar in transit. Their fingertips stretch outwards as if wishing to brace themselves against the artwork, as if they might read the artwork like framed Braille and find the artwork says, ���this is how it is to be blind, always trusting the guide���s word.���

You cannot see if the tourists are smiling in the dark, but you suspect they are.

May 1st 2015 ��� East Belfast

Michelle Jankovic

In the late 1980s the BBC were briefly inundated by phone calls from viewers claiming to see the image of the Virgin Mary, (lying sideways), in the London street map which formed the opening title sequence of the popular soap opera, Eastenders. In recent years no one has claimed to see holy images hidden between the frames of BBC television dramas. Though, if you squint, the River Thames snaking behind the Eastenders��� credits could be taken for a python or a length of unraveled intestine, each of which is holy and sinister in its own way. Also, a lady in Wolverhampton repeatedly calls in to Points of View, complaining that God is singing between the predictions on the Shipping Forecast and his honey milk voice is making her fall asleep behind the wheel. She wishes for the voice of God to be silenced or the programme to be rescheduled at a more convenient time.

May 2nd 2015 ��� York Street, Belfast

Jamie Beebe

The dance floor was made from Canadian Maple and sprung so it breathed in time with the dancers; up and down as the beat demanded. In the Thirties it was more than willing to accommodate waltz and stiff-backed ballroom, barely breaking a sweat ���til the GIs descended upon its boards with their big boots and their clattering lust for Jive and Lindy Hop. For almost forty years the dance floor did not discriminate between one foot and the other. It rose and fell with well-polished enthusiasm and, in a city better known for walls than floors, was a remarkable kind of thing to stand on.

May 3rd 2015 ��� The Hudson Bar, Belfast

Zosia Kuczynska

The functional poet begins every conversation with a question such as, ���how���ve you been?��� or, ���what is it you do again?��� The functional poet owns a blazer but does not always wear a blazer and sometimes watches box sets of the West Wing without searching for allusions to Greek mythology. The functional poet speaks with the voice of a person who has also shopped at Tesco and once holidayed in Lanzarote, (no irony intended). The functional poet keeps between the lines, knows when to go out and when to refrain from mentioning MacNeice, once read a novel from cover to cover and thinks this could well be a habit, has a girlfriend who works in an office or with children or perhaps in an office with children. The functional poet can picture a day when he, or she, will own a car of their own. The functional poet once won a competition in an online journal but hasn���t a hope of making print.

May 4th 2015 ��� Ballymena

Mel Brown

An elderly lady is gathering flowers on the roundabout at the bottom of the Ballymoney Road. You circle the roundabout three times. This does not take long as the roundabout is not much bigger than a paddling pool. Your second instinct is concern. Your first will always be attention to detail. This is the writer in you, also your grandmother.

The lady is wearing trainers and a housecoat of the kind still worn in the more provincial parts of Northern Ireland. She is picking tulips and daffodils and primroses. Due to their endangered status the picking of primroses is considered illegal within the UK.

Someone, you think, might call the police on the elderly lady. This would be no bad thing for it���s rush hour in Ballymena and you���re not sure how she���ll get off the roundabout and home with her arms full of stolen flowers.

May 5th 2015 ��� Ulster Hall, Belfast

Cat Anderson

Today we���re searching for clues in Alexander Hogg���s black and white photographs of 1912 Belfast. We are using magnifying glasses and felt tip pens, post-it notes and our imaginations, which are still dozy from yesterday���s Bank holiday. We are trying to provoke the social conscience in ten year olds.

���Look,��� we say, ���shoeless children in April, and it the cruelest month. Note the houses like boxes without windows, the pollution, (again the pollution), and each child strong enough, carrying another, as Sinead Morrissey so deftly puts it.���

It���s not like the ten year olds can���t see what we see. It���s just that they are distracted by the novelty of wielding a magnifying glass and the sign for Cadbury���s chocolate enlarging itself behind the lens like a loudspeaker yelling, ���look, see, we weren���t so different, even then.���

May 6th 2015 ��� East Belfast

Karen Vaughan

The photo-shopped novelist has teeth like a toothpaste commercial, skin like the exposed torso of an 1980s Barbie doll. The photo-shopped novelist prefers leaning against exposed brick walls, holds her chin as if it was an overfull teacup, thinks about important things happening just out of shot. The photo-shopped novelist heard on Women���s Hour that you shouldn���t wear dangly earrings, (too distracting, too much of a clich��), and consequently doesn���t. She wears black on all occasions even on holidays and is warmer in her armpits than she���d ever admit. The photo-shopped novelist dreams in black and oh-so-forgiving white, practices holding notebooks with intent and reads Bukowski on the bus for this is easier than telling men to ���piss off.��� The photo-shopped novelist once saw herself reflected in the window of Top Shop. It was a sunny day. She could not hold her tears in.

��

��

��

��