‘My name is Marcos. I’ve always wanted to be Cristóbal.’
‘I don’t mean to be called Cristóbal. Cristóbal is my friend; I was going to say my best friend, but I’ll say he’s my only one. Gabriela is my wife. She loves me a lot and sleeps with Cristóbal.’
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‘The anglophone world, we have to infer, has run out of words for its own feelings.’
Daisy Hildyard on the wisdom of scarecrows.
‘What is the read receipt for?’
Lillian Fishman on texting, power and the ethics of leaving a friend on read.
‘Like pretty much everyone who uses the internet, I have seen many terrible things that I did not search for and that I cannot unsee.’
Rosanna McLaughlin on what the internet thinks she wants.
‘I have a pathological addiction to the internet, which I indulge with the excuse of making art. It rarely translates to anything good and mostly leaves me overstimulated and afraid.’
Paul Dalla Rosa on excess and the internet.
‘rumors of bees on speedwell, / no oxidative stress just / effortless pollination’
Two poems by Sylvia Legris.
‘Sometimes, in the midst of one of our arguments, he would say to me sadly, I understand you more if I understand less.’
‘And questions, more than heroes, are the material from which good stories are made.’
‘During the four hours they spent alone three times a week, Hans and Sophie alternated between books and bed, bed and books, exploring one another in words and reading one another’s bodies.’
‘1.In the waiting area of the Málaga airport for departing flights, a flock of birds nests on the beams. They fly back and forth across the high ceiling.’
‘Like him, the bathroom mirror had lost brightness over the years.’
‘Are you talking as Laleh now, or as the Islamic Republic of Iran? I don’t say anything.’
Fiction by Shida Bazyar, translated by Ruth Martin.
