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Dear Sir,   I think about that smile you gave me in the sun and I wanted to explain why I had dirt on my face   The night before at 11 pm my husband, sitting on the sofa, had said there was a bird in the chimney and/but/and he wasn’t going to do anything about it   (When I say the chimney we live in a rented house and instead of a fireplace we have a thick piece of board which is painted over and stuck down with gloss paint)   I looked it up on my computer and it gave the two obvious choices: get the bird out or leave it to die The option of leaving it to die was gone into in some detail and how long it would take to decompose and the specifics of the smell I went to bed and immediately fell asleep   In the morning the children woke up and I took them down for breakfast (I should say the house is very small so breakfast is right by the boarded-up fireplace which contained this bird) By this point I could hear sounds like a person’s coat when they stop right outside your front door, before they knock   shwww shwww   Or if they’ve stopped there for another reason and aren’t going to knock   I put on the radio and got the children ready, and then we walked to school   On the way back I did think that if I saw you I might just confess the whole thing But what could I say to make it sound appealing? Watch me smash something then perhaps we could have a little walk   sir   When I got home the bird was moving in the still house, living in the wall, my husband having already left for work In the basement I found a broad flat tool like a metal version of an ice- scraper for a car windscreen and I used this and a hammer to slowly break in the edges of the board   While I was doing this I thought of a book I had read in which the writer remembered her mother rescuing
20 Metres

Prize Entry

May 2020

Olivia Smith

Professor Lock-up straightens behind his security screens as I push my detergent cart into the lobby The drop in temperature shocks me The lobby is like a refrigerator   ‘Good evening’ Professor Lock-up inclines his head ‘How is The Great Dr Clean-up today?’   ‘I am well, thank you’   We ask after each other’s wives and children and, throughout the exchange, his gaze roams beyond me and down over his screens   ‘God is good,’ I say ‘Regrettably, I must hurry tonight’   I cannot waste another minute here with him; I am no longer looking for a security man’s stories, ordinary tales such as:   Professor Li has flown home already The heat was too much for him His ankles swelled red and he shuffled about his lab in ordinary slippers The next week, he did not sign in at all His replacement will come on Tuesday   or:   You have probably heard, but Dr Huang is flying his parents out for this ‘New Year’ celebration they do Imagine   ‘We will talk soon’ I fish my pass from my bag ‘Another time’   Professor Lock-up squints at his screens His screens are divided into grids that show every empty corridor and laboratory in the Loop’s vast campus He straightens, looks back to the glass doors and rubs his thick neck   ‘I don’t know if you have – ’   ‘Oh, I have heard’   Truly, the thrill of Professor Lock-up’s ability to translate the scientists’ abrupt language has faded; more so now that I am learning to understand it for myself To hear one of their stories is to hear them all   I no longer collect tales of decorated professors, of technicians and student researchers returning to Beijing   I have wrung the last juice from rumours of small families and thin wives who wait indoors, afraid of how the sun might greet their skin   These stories are everywhere My children – even little Kofi, whose mouth is always open, who clings to his sisters’ legs to stand – are no longer satisfied by them My little ones have realised the scientists are, under their differences, like us No children want to hear tales about people like their parents   ‘I will clean Conference Suite Three

Prize Entry

May 2020

Maintenance

Sussie Anie

Prize Entry

May 2020

Professor Lock-up straightens behind his security screens as I push my detergent cart into the lobby. The drop in...

Prize Entry

May 2020

Rockets and Blue Lights

Gabriel Flynn

Prize Entry

May 2020

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This all happened in Barcelona, in the spring of 2017 I haven’t spoken to him ever since, we never got back in touch for some reason, and plus after I went back to Buenos Aires I met Agustín and soon we got together and I believe we were happy for a while, so I forgot about him and my brother and Barcelona and all of that And yet sometimes I still think about him, I don’t know why I remember I used to look at him, my head on the pillow, trying to make out his body moving through the semidarkness of the room, picking some clothes and then gradually coming into view at the foot of the bed, where he would sit and get dressed I remember I used to watch him walking out onto the balcony for the first cigarette of the day (stiza or stizza, that’s how he used to call it in Italian) and then stepping back in and leaving the windows and the white shutters ajar so that the sounds and the smells and the light of the city might pour into the room once the sun rose, once the city rose, because before that, as I quietly, almost secretly watched him getting ready for work, I would often find myself under the impression that he was the only human being alive in the whole of Barcelona, that I was spying on him, that I shouldn’t have been there, in his flat, in the flat of a man I barely knew, and in fact I never got used to that impression, to Cesare’s silent figure groping his way through the obscurity in the early minutes of the day, go on yes please don’t stop and this is the more surprising the more I consider that on the other hand I did get used, during those twelve days we spent together in Barcelona, in the spring of 2017, to the basic rhythms and patterns of his routine I

Prize Entry

May 2020

Mária

Lorenzo Mandelli

Prize Entry

May 2020

This all happened in Barcelona, in the spring of 2017. I haven’t spoken to him ever since, we never...

Fiction

Issue No. 18

At the Clinic

Sally Rooney

Fiction

Issue No. 18

This story featured in The White Review 18, published in 2016.       On the way to the...

Fiction

Issue No. 11

A Vicious Cycle

Evan Lavender-Smith

Fiction

Issue No. 11

I have seen the bumper stickers on the bumper of your Toyota Prius therefore I have induced that you believe...

frequently asked questions about your craniotomy

Fiction

January 2020

Mary South

Fiction

January 2020

If you’re reading this page, chances are you’ve recently heard that you need to have a craniotomy. Try not to worry. Although, yes, this is brain...

Fiction

December 2019

The Bad Brother

Rita Bullwinkel

Fiction

December 2019

We were a committee of three brothers, but one of us was bad. Bad in the sense that one...

Fiction

October 2019

Symmetry of Provocation

Vi Khi Nao

Fiction

October 2019

She saw her father at Smith’s. By accident. She was paying the heat bill. After paying the heat bill,...

Exquisite Mariposa

Fiction

July 2019

FIONA ALISON DUNCAN

Fiction

July 2019

I broke three contracts in 2016. The first was verbal, a monogamy clause. But he was fucking around too, and I knew, because everybody...

 

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