Kellyanne crawled into my bedroom through the car door. Her face was puffy and pale and fuzzed-over. She just came in and said: ‘Ashmol! Pobby and Dingan are maybe-dead.’ That’s how she said it.
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“I’m looking for my daughter’s imaginary friends and you’d better bloody well believe it, mate!”
Kellyanne crawled into my bedroom through the car door. Her face was puffy and pale and fuzzed-over. She just came in and said: ‘Ashmol! Pobby and Dingan are maybe-dead.’ That’s how she said it.
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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.
Ben Rice is the author of a Pobby and Dingan and Etiquette. He won the Somerset Maugham Award in 2001 and was named one of the Best of Young British Novelists by Granta in 2003.
More about the author →‘When I came back from Gwen's I had expected to find him in the throes of his midlife koisis—you know—trimming an anal fin in the bath, or nursing a slime coat at the very least.’
‘I left Australia at the age of twenty, carrying with me everything I thought I would need.’
‘By the end of our journey together we had signally failed to understand each other, yet an unlikely, even unprecedented connection had formed.’
‘I lost my own father at 12 yrs. of age and know what it is to be raised on lies and silences’.
‘You can drink in a bar and sober up in the basement of a church, but everyone sleeps (or lies awake) in solitude.’
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