Tom Lee

‘I wondered what an onlooker might make of this man, this scene.’

Chelsey Minnis

‘I’m going to smash the geraniums. / Do you mind, darling?’

Terese Marie Mailhot

‘We started the affair in a small booth at Village Inn. I didn’t sleep the night before. You were my teacher, and we discussed my fiction.’

Blake Morrison

‘One by one they’re led into the box. They swear their oath. They confirm their name, their employment, why they were where they say they were, what it was they saw.’

Samsun Knight

‘What’s wrong is that she cannot breathe.’ Samsun Knight’s ‘The Dive’ is the winner of the 2018 Disquiet Literary Prize

Nuala O’Connor

Nuala O’Connor’s short story about Nora Barnacle, and her first meetings with James Joyce.

Andrew McMillan

‘I hadn’t / realised it possible / that I might grow into kinder / ownership of my own looks’

Benjamin Markovits

‘For a while it wasn’t clear how good he would become, and then it was. He went up the rankings, stopped, and started going down.’

Issue 143

Nathaniel Mackey

Chelsey Minnis

‘It’s dangerous like a very powerful doorbell. / Or a portrait covered with a blanket.’

Alicia Kopf

‘My brother is a man trapped in ice. He looks at us through it; he is there and he is not there.’

Pedro Rosa Mendes

‘We hope that the copilot knows the terrain well. That his mask of youth conceals the face of a seasoned veteran of war. That he knows the minefields because he helped plant them.’

Amy Key

‘She is luscious / and plump like marshmallow; part edible baby, / part nosy neighbour.’

Joanna Kavenna

‘They slept curled together in a hammock, little scraps of fur, hearts beating madly.’ Joanna Kavenna on her pet rats, Kat Bjelland and Courtney Love.