‘Every time I drink a glass of claret it goes straight to my face.’
Business was slack. The pubs closed early and the ferry came in for the night. The sky was pink above the school on Chapelhill and at eight o’clock the high tide arrived and the promenade was quiet except for a dog barking. From out in the bay you could see bright lights in all the windows of Roth…
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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.
‘The world comes down on your head if you don’t tell people what they already believe to be true.’
Andrew O’Hagan on truth, journalism and fiction.
‘Human nature is not improved by concealment, especially when it comes to the past.’
A short story by Andrew O’Hagan.
‘A lot of journalism was in danger of becoming ‘celebrity writing’, in the sense that the writer and his conscience could become the story.’
‘The men were quiet. They said nothing for a minute and the sea at my back was calm and almost imaginary, but you could hear the waves coming to wash the chalk cliffs from under us.’
Harley Hern’s ‘Screaming’ is the Pacific regional winner of the 2019 Commonwealth Short Story Prize.
