The Loss of Intimacy

She bustles in, weighed down with his clean underwear, pyjamas, barley water and boiled sweets, his reading glasses, now repaired, holding back wisps of her grey hair. She has to catch the bus at the same time every day and sit for hours, making repetitive small-talk with a man who doesn’t know her name, has forgotten, […]

Gifts

In German, Gift means poison, something he may not know. He brings her gold, perfume and clothes, sometimes a diamond, sometimes a rose, until she doesn’t even see them piling up in lonely high security, the toxic perfection of their mansion. So she searches on the internet for something that she cannot get from him […]

Guitar Sunsets

My passion as a teenager was playing the guitar, contorting fingers into chords and positions, resonating waltz and polka from the sound hole of a Yamaha, plucking delicate arrangements of Bach and Scarlatti. Now my fingers will not stretch across neck and frets, too stiff and sore to press on strings, too clumsy for harmonics […]