What is that one thing? The thing other people find dull or even yawn-worthy, but which unaccountably excites your passion? The one thing whose secrets you know, into whose depths you have plunged, which appears ordinary but which you can make extraordinary?

Or: tell us about the sweetness of rest, the torture of sleeplessness, or the desperation to get through the day without the unthinkable occurring.

If this does not inspire you, consider the delight of a baby’s yawn, or that of a tiny kitten just before it gives up on the rigors of a day spent chasing sunbeams. (We could all use something along those lines just about now.) Perhaps you have an old hound dog whose last yawn touched you in a way you must set down in words.

We love non-fiction, memoir, and creative non-fiction just as much as we love fiction and poetry (and hybrid), but we receive very few submissions in this category. Essayists, we’re waiting for you!

As usual, artists, we also want your photographs, drawings, and paintings that relate to this prompt! Or, if you have something you’d like to share that doesn’t have anything to do with this prompt, we’re still eager to see it.

The theme for issue #13 is YAWN. Submissions are open from April 1 to 30, 2026. Issue #13 will be published starting on June 1, 2026. Visit our submissions page for more details.

Read Issue Twelve online here.
Get the PDF version here.

The bus doors hissed shut right as Marcus turned the corner. He stood, taking in the sound – like the city exhaling disgust at him specifically.

His briefcase swung against his knee. The leather handle was already sticky with sweat even though fog was choking the street like wet gauze. The 38 Geary pulled away, its taillights two red eyes winking at his failure.

“Wait!”

His voice disappeared.

Marcus stood there. 8:47. Daniel from accounting would purse his lips into that small anus of disapproval he saved for people who couldn’t even catch a bus on time. Twelve minutes until the next one, standing here like an idiot in shoes that cost three hundred dollars and still squeaked when he walked.

Fuck it.

He started jogging. The briefcase banged his thigh. His girlfriend had bought him these shoes, saying they’d help. As if Italian leather could make white people see past his skin. The bus sat fat and smug at the next light.

Marcus ran.

Something weird happened. His breathing evened out and the briefcase stopped mattering. He was actually gaining on it. The bus lurched forward and so did Marcus, tie flying back like he was someone important, someone with somewhere to be. Someone who mattered.

He caught up to it at Fillmore.

Inside, the usual suspects slumped against windows: Purple Scarf Lady, Giants Cap Grandpa. All of them marinating in their own quiet desperation, scrolling past other people’s fake lives while their real one leaked away minute by minute. The bus was an aquarium. They were the fish.

Marcus laughed – an ugly bark that came from his stomach.

He looked at that bus and something snapped clean. The light changed green and the bus wheezed forward, but Marcus was already past thinking about catching it.

“Come on, you piece of shit!”

He careened down the sidewalk, dodging poles and benches. A mother yanked her stroller away from him at the last minute as he strode by at full speed. Yeah, lady. Black guy running and yelling. Call someone.

The bus fell back like it was standing still.

Marcus’s legs pumped harder. The neighborhood morphed around him. Victorian houses that used to pulse with life – musicians in the basement, somebody’s tía cooking on the stoop, kids doing homework on the porch – now they were hollow, Airbnbs and investment properties. Empty most of the year. Fresh battleship-gray paint over what used to be electric blue, canary yellow, deep purple. The owners probably lived in Atherton. Probably had never met their neighbors.

His corner store was gone. In its place was a shop selling candles that cost more than his monthly PG&E bill, waxy columns named “Meditation” and “Renewal.” As if the scent of burning eucalyptus could fill the hole where your soul used to be.

The mural on the laundromat – this gorgeous thing, all these Black and brown faces looking hopeful – painted over. Just flat beige now. The landlord probably thought it hurt property values.

He tore past the construction site, another glass phallus climbing toward heaven. The jackhammers sounded like the city screaming. The billboard promised luxury. This used to be Mrs. Chen’s garden. She grew actual food here. She fed people. Taught kids that tomatoes came from dirt, not Whole Foods. Before long, a developer decided the land was worth more empty.

Marcus’s lungs burned but the burn felt clean, like cauterizing a wound.

Downtown swallowed him. The financial district pressed in – all those buildings designed to look important, to make you feel small. Each one blocking more sky, like they wanted to own even the light. Marcus recalled coming here with his father. He was maybe eight. They got ice cream at the Ferry Building, watched ships and the men working near the water’s edge. Men who did real things with their hands. Before the algorithms made his father redundant.

His dad drank himself dead by 56.

Marcus ran faster.

The morning rush thickened. All these people in their costumes, clutching phones like they were afraid someone might ask them to look up, to actually see. Streaming into buildings where they’d spend the day moving money around, creating nothing, producing nothing, just shuffling numbers in a shell game where the house always wins. He dodged through them. His jacket flapped open. His briefcase swung wild. Some guy in a blue suit yelled “Watch it!” but Marcus was already gone.

There – his building. Fifty hours a week minimum. Analyzing market trends for people who already had more money than their great-grandchildren could spend. Writing reports no one read. Sitting in meetings about meetings. His life was measured in Excel cells and Outlook invites and the slow erosion of whatever he used to believe about himself.

The fountain in the plaza shot water in computer-programmed arcs. Even the water had to perform here. Had to fall exactly where it was told.

Marcus’s heart crashed against his ribs, over and over. His shirt clung to him, a wet membrane. His feet throbbed, hot and raw inside his expensive shoes. Other employees filtered through the revolving doors – those doors that keep spinning whether you go in or not, whether you exist or not. Security guards with their metal detectors and their dead eyes, and everyone sleepwalking through security theater toward their climate-controlled coffins.

He should stop, breathe, become presentable. Should walk through those doors and apologize and pretend today was like every other day, would be followed by another day exactly the same, a string of identical days leading to a retirement party where people would say nice things they didn’t mean before forgetting his name by Monday.

His legs kept pumping.

The fountain got close. He could smell the chlorine trying to mask the mineral rot underneath. His briefcase felt like it was full of stones. Like he was carrying his own death around. Like a casket, with his dissolved dreams inside he’d toted blindly for years.

Twenty feet. Ten.

The security guard looked up. Started to smile. He started to lift his hand in a wave, this small acknowledgment that Marcus was a person he recognized, a regular, someone who belonged here.

Marcus cut hard left.

He launched himself over the fountain’s wall. Hung suspended in the air for one impossible second – between the him that clocked in and the him that could still choose. The water waited below, moving the only way it remembered how before someone told it to stop.

He crashed through the surface.

The cold was a slap. Perfect. It filled his nose, his ears, his mouth. It soaked through everything – his suit, his shirt, his skin. His briefcase hit the bottom with a sound like a body falling. Above, muffled shouting. People gathering to watch the show. He stayed under, letting the water hold him. Letting it wash off whatever he’d been pretending to be.

When he surfaced, he was laughing and choking, and maybe crying. He couldn’t tell. It didn’t matter. He stood there in knee-deep fountain water, clothes plastered to him, and looked at the crowd. Karen from HR. His boss Tom. The security guard speaking urgently into his radio like Marcus was a bomb threat.

He reached down and grabbed his briefcase. Lifted it overhead like a trophy. Water geysered from every seam.

“I QUIT!” he screamed at all of them, at the buildings, at the manicured trees in their concrete prisons, at the whole neutered gutted sold-off corpse of the city. “I FUCKING QUIT!”

And standing there in the fountain – water everywhere, everyone staring, sirens probably coming – Marcus felt his pulse for the first time in years. He felt the ghost of the city that used to exist under all this glass and greed. His father’s hand in his. Mrs. Chen’s garden in full bloom. Every mural, every mom-and-pop shop, every person and place erased to make room for more money. But also, this: his own lungs taking in air. His own feet on the ground. His own life, whatever was left of it, finally his again.

Water streamed off him onto the concrete, finding its own way back. The way water does when you stop telling it what to be.

R.E. Harris is a writer, journalist and documentary filmmaker currently living in metro Atlanta. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, among other international publications. He is a past recipient of the George Polk Award, the Scripps Howard Award and the Grantham Prize for investigative journalism. He surrounds himself with pens, puzzles and inquiry.

       1. (home)

there is time left, i guess

i.

there is just too much politics growing 
as the family eats, the elder daughter
and the detoned father,

shard right-wingness against the girl
who kisses the blood ground and waves
		                 red flags at streetlights

baba will never know

gloomy humid summer, hair in spitballs,

maa                 cooks
                                 cooks
                                         cooks

maa doesn’t understand living beyond dinner tables,
What does maa even understand about living?
there is too much light and prayer staining the food,
father and I don’t see her,

steered, severed, crying mother, wake up, do something for yourself

ii. 

every face is a repetition,
kiss me with that face, kiss me
hidden behind the bush like you taint me,
taint me more than I am.
Kiss me like I hate you,
kiss me like you have never known softness
kiss me and I won’t recognise my body,
carry it around my neck for the rest of my life.
Dig your teeth in, mark landmines on my lips
as long as it is painful, it will be pleasurable.
Kiss me, I will become what you make of me.

maa I am not you, I will never be you
I know desire, I escaped, nothing can stop me
not even you
not even the city, will escape it too




iii. 

every time I take the metro, the city emerges behind me,
gulfed in endings, the people in stranded horizons
derive pleasure from the city fermented to their skin,
lick them,
Lick time, lick the rain
that falls impatiently upon these yellow streets
in death and doubts.
It’s January’s city now, 
Like the dog-bitten dustbin, everyone here is dispensable.


In a certain corner of the street, the cigarette stench has dried overnight, and a small boy grows roses to sell them to strangers
Every now and then I feel this indescribable urge to cry




2. (outside)r

I.

I grow up.

swiftly defy lungs, smoke propels, dog teeth in a strange foreign land
trees shimmering behind the window
the air smells like
                                       cure.

Even for a little while, there are too many stars here at night,
too many lips to touch, hoe eras and corona bottles under the bed,
darkness by 4, but glimpses of light
up my body, up my body
be lost, thoughts hang from the Big Ben, 
and if the electric buses run a little faster
the past may not even keep up.

Is this emancipation?
existing is magnetic 

maa do you see me gliding like the sky’s my own fucking lounge
I never want to go home

II. 
Every night you ask me for tea
I watch the kettle whistles.
As your delicate hands pour the red juice
Over two similar plastic cups, 

we talk and talk and talk and talk
and talk and talk and talk 

The formless night intrudes through the window
Like the tea, it tastes tender.

Maa I feel protected after a long time.

III.

maa i am 22 now, i am continents away, maa where is the potential you talked about, i am curled up in a lightless room, in a glamorous white country, trying to write something, nothing’s working out, where is the fucking potential? 

I was lying 
I was lying
I was lying

there is nothing here
sounds of the city stolen blue
parcel me a guidebook, will you?

maa i am not you
maa i want to be you, at least you are full.
maa is there any time left anymore
to be you?

Can you cook something for me?




3. (return)

One morning suddenly you walk up to the front door and light spills yellow all over the place
You remember
That you are back home,
Maa, Baba, they are still where you left them

As the city recoils ahead of you, you realise

That there are fallen leaves everywhere you go
There is no country like home, no war like living. 

Sayantika Sarkar is an Indian poet, fiction writer, and essayist with an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Surrey. Her work explores womanhood, cities, migration, intimacy, and quiet forms of resistance, examining power, displacement, and the emotional afterlives of borders. Her writing has appeared in Poems (India) and The Insurgence.

Joãowow Lucas is always looking for more wow! As a writer, artist, and immigrant in Lisbon, Joãowow captures photos as inspiration for poetry. Typed on half-sheets of old paper on an old typewriter, these short poems explore themes of belonging and alienation, home and the road, adversity and acceptance.

The Grotto’s serenity belied the rumours that swirled like noxious clouds, casting shadows on its role as a tranquil resting place for the school’s long-gone members. It hid its mystery like a secretive animal. Sana’s hand draped over a rock as if pulling a friend closer, about to mutter confidences. Sunlight filtered through the morning mist, watery and tepid. Water splashed down the fountain at the entry, collecting in a muddy pond in which a school of vermillion and white fish swam ceaselessly in contained circles, oblivious of the lakes, rivers, and seas brimming with life much like the inhabitants of the boarding school. The smooth, alabaster statue of Mary stared stonily ahead, presiding over the scene, pretending to an equanimity it did not feel. The trees surrounding the graves shivered and stood reticent, like witnesses holding back testimony.

Seven days earlier, when Sana first saw Amaya on the other side of the doorway, she hoped they would be friends. Sana stood at the entrance to the dining hall, diffident and unsure, like a sparrow who had fluttered in, lost amid the tables and chairs, searching for a way out.

There was a briskness to the morning. The nuns instructed, the girls spooned in their breakfast, all unquestioning in the roles assigned to them. Sana spotted a milk jug, surrounded by colourful plastic cups, emanating a strong, stale odour. She hesitated, then squaring her shoulders, poured the milk and brought it to her lips. The smell overpowered her. Grimacing, she left the dining room, her stomach in a churn.

“You should add Bournvita or Ovaltine, you know. It tastes a lot better,” said Amaya, hurrying after her. “I’m Amaya.”

“I’m Sana. I didn’t think of it. Packing was such a rush.”

“You can have mine.” Sana smiled at the unexpected kindness, her warm brown eyes pools of gratitude.

“Where are you from?” her new friend asked.

“The hills. I’m not used to the heat.”

The girls chattered and wandered around the grounds until the sombre chime of the clock announced their first lesson. They ran through deserted mango and tamarind groves, late for school. Breathless, they stumbled into the classroom. Mrs D’Souza looked up from the blackboard at the audacious interruption, her chalk poised mid-scrawl. “Come in,” she said, her voice tight with displeasure as she glanced at her watch, its leather strap fraying at the edges. A sea of friendless faces greeted them. They parted to take their seats.

“Who’s the new girl?” Jessie jabbed her neighbours in front. The girls shrugged politely, taking care not to offend her. Tall and burly, captain of the basketball team, Jessie was unassailable in her popularity.

“Get her to the meeting tonight.” The girls smiled in acquiescence. There was no point resisting.

The classroom was hot and still except for the tired sweep of the fan. Sana looked out of the window. It was yellow and dusty, a far cry from the dense green, damp home she had left behind in the hills. She remembered the house, looking at it one last time from the backseat of the car, ejected from it like a useless piece of scrap. It sat brooding atop a hill at the end of a cul-de-sac, its windows shuttered, the elevation affording it privacy. Its walls were always thick with moisture. The dank smell stayed with her. The heat of the plains dried up the damp in her clothes and her shoes, but there were dark corners within her it failed to reach. The screeching chalk across the blackboard brought her back to the classroom. The girls shifted and squirmed on hard, wooden seats as Mrs D’Souza droned on about the rivers and seas of the world. The lesson felt endless; a barrage of information rained on restless forms waiting for the freedom that came with the clang of the bell.

Amaya led her to the shaded path, lined with tall eucalyptus, the longer route to the dormitory that passed outside a grotto. “It’s cooler here.”

Sana followed, hugging herself closer, noticing the rocky exterior of the grotto dotted with shrubs. She felt as if she was back in the house, being watched. Each time she had entered it – despite its high ceilings and sprawling expanse – she felt she had stepped into a mousetrap. In the two years she lived there, Sana never rid herself of a deep unease, of being haunted by shadows.

Her family had never entirely claimed the space. Sana’s breath quickened as she thought of her little brother dying, her father leaving, her mother wasting away until relatives decided to put her in an institution. The house was locked up, surrendered to its shadowy inhabitants.

“This path looks deserted.”

“The girls don’t like coming this way, after the incident.” Amaya’s face took on a cold, sharp glint. Sana’s heart constricted as if someone had wrapped icy fingers around it. The wind picked up. Dark clouds rolled over the sun. The eucalyptus swayed, its slender leaves whispering secrets to the wind, its slim trunks ghostly white. It was a sea of unhappiness, each step pushing Sana further into a slush of misery. A sliver of clammy coldness touched the back of her neck. Then, all at once, the sun streamed through the clouds and chased the shadows away, as if someone had reluctantly released her back into the world.

“Are you ok?” asked Amaya.

“I’m fine,” she rasped, puzzled at Amaya’s expression of benign concern. “This place is creepy. Let’s hurry.”

As they neared the dormitories, a group of girls walked towards them. “We’re meeting in the hall tonight, after lights out. Why don’t you join us?”

“It’s another dare,” one of the girls muttered.

“Aren’t you afraid of getting caught?” Sana asked.

“Little danger of that happening. Once the matron is asleep, she rarely wakes up.”

Sana and Amaya took the narrow stairs to the dim hall lined with cupboards, leading to the dormitory. Two rows of single beds on either side flanked a dark, polished floor dully reflecting the moving forms of the girls, capturing them in a subterranean world. At the far end was the matron’s room, demarcated by a wooden partition with a door. Beyond that lay a dark corridor leading to the toilets. The girls went there in twos or threes.

Night fell. The girls waited under the covers with the equanimity of monks. Once the matron’s shoes clattered across the floor and the sharp click of her door signalled that she had retired for the night, they trickled out of their beds into the hallway, and arranged themselves in a circle. Jessie stood at the centre and raised a brow as Sana sat down.

‘“I see the new girl came. Well, we all know why we’re here. Let’s hear some ideas.”

“Go to the school building alone at midnight?” someone ventured.

“C’mon! That’s child’s play.”

“Walk to the sports field at the far end of the campus.”

“It’s a plain old walk, lit all the way with lamp posts.”

Jessie shot down suggestions as quickly as they rose. Then, she made one of her own. “We all know about the charming little grotto near the playground.” The girls looked at her in astonishment, but she dug in. “Whoever goes to the grotto at midnight and brings back its sweet water in this bottle will get the first pick of everyone’s tuck.” She held out a small glass flask.

Protests rose: “Too dangerous!”, “We’ll be caught…” and fell like dry leaves on a dying wind.

“Anyone brave enough to do it?” Jessie looked around. Her eyes settled on Sana. The girls shifted nervously on the floor.

Amaya whispered in her ear, “You can do it! It’s just a walk. I’ll come with you halfway.”

Where was the harm? Sana was no stranger to spooky places. And if she did it, she’d be in Jessie’s good books. The tuck would be the cherry on top.

“I’ll do it,” said Sana.

Jessie looked at her as if she had underestimated her. “What do you know? Looks like the new girl has gumption after all!”

The date was set. Days passed in a flurry of alarms, classes, homework, and conversations. As the girls came to speak with Sana, Amaya grew gloomier and resentful.

A week later, the night arrived like any other night. Darkness fell, brooding like a slighted friend, spreading its scowl across the sky, sullenly snuffing out orange, pink, and lavender hues released by the setting sun. It was time for supper. Sana had a big night ahead; she’d better get some food in, however unpalatable. She wondered if her mother was okay; she’d had no news.

The moon came out, bathing the landscape in cool silver, and Sana set forth with Amaya by her side. They soon reached the halfway point; the only obstacles being a rusty gate, which Sana opened so as to not wake the guard, and the hulking dog guarding the premises at night – pacified with the cookies she’d stuffed in her pocket. She turned to wave Amaya goodbye, but found herself alone, the only sound the wind rustling the leaves.

Sana felt a chill creep in, though the night was warm. The clouds rolled in and partially covered the moon. A short walk brought her to the grotto. She entered, feeling as if she had broken into a private home. The familiar sensation of being watched was with her again. She could make out the rocky cave where Mary’s statue stood, and the shapes of the gravestones in the faint light. She walked in deeper. It was easy enough to reach for the tap and collect the sweet liquid, but she was overcome by an unslakeable thirst. She drank in long, greedy gulps, and filled the water bottle. The water was sweet indeed. It ran through her veins, making her feel less of this world. The clouds parted and in the clear moonlight, Sana saw a cluster of smaller graves, a litany of buried dreams. The years indicated shorter lifespans; some of children as young as nine. She ran her wet fingers over the names on the graves and stopped at a familiar one: Amaya Wilson.

A shiver of recognition shot through her like lightning. The shrubs closed in and she couldn’t breathe; her feet were lead, an invisible force pinning them to the ground.

It had been a strange dream. All Sana wanted to do was drift off and get a few more minutes of sleep, but Sister Alice’s strident announcement that there would be no school today intruded. The girls were to proceed to the library, Sister Alice told them, wearing her stern, unsmiling face, and spend their morning constructively, wasting no time on idle gossip. A hush settled over the dormitory, like cold air on a sunless day. Jessie and the girls walked towards her and stood around her. Sana sat up, expecting a spate of congratulations and back thumping for completing the dare. Instead, the girls touched her sheet, her pillow, and mumbled.

It was an unspeakable tragedy. How terrible the whole thing was.

Only Amaya sat beside her smiling, stroking her hair. The smile left Sana cold.

She reached out to touch the girls, but failed to grasp their solid forms. She looked at Amaya and realised they were both nothing but air. The girls made their way to the library in a single file.

The day wore on. Jessie sat in the library under the softly whirring fan, her face shrouded with the pall of death.

“They’re saying she had a frail heart.”

“It’s just like what happened a few years back,” said another.

“When Amaya Wilson died?”

“Yes – she took up Jessie’s dare. They found her body in the toilet.”

There was talk about closing the grotto, and even the entire boarding school. The girls went on with their days, marking time for holidays.

Jessie sensed their withdrawal and saw the blame in their eyes. She kept to herself, but unaccountably, while brushing her teeth, bathing, having a meal, doing homework, the faces of Sana and Amaya flashed before her eyes, leaving her unsettled. She could not shake off the inexplicable feeling of being watched, stalked like prey by their shadows. She begged them for forgiveness. The feeling of guilt spread through her like ink on blotting paper.

If she was lucky, Jessie would go home for the holidays. But for now, their shadows held sway.

Shikha Bansal is a Hong Kong-based poet and writer of nonfiction. Her poems have been published in Proverse Publishing and Imprint, and her essays and articles have appeared in Imprint, Culture, and Playtime.

One hedgehog splits to two,
in the soft crack of bark;
then four in a fallen trunk,
damp wood sweating into yeast,
foam on the pale rings,
just off the path,
a moving knot.

I reach, then pull back.
Spines tick my wrist,
calm as nursing once;
warm fur, soil, musk.
I lift them to my mouth.
My tongue takes the first prick;
they slide down
and settle in my trunk,
under ribs, under shirt.

Years ago, they slept there,
gnawing my fingers for salt.
I pocketed them with crumbs,
crumb dust in the pocket seam,
walked home, rattling,
until the warmth went inward.

Late morning, I step from trees.
They rise in my gut;
sharp points press hip and shoulder.
Spines lift under my shirt like shoots.

Back in the log,
the foam dries.

Sean Wang is a Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions nominated poet and PhD candidate. His poems appear or are forthcoming in West Trade Review, ONE ART, wildscape, and literary journal, among others. He can be found on Instagram at @sean_wang1997.

The thing about writing prompts and themes is that they don’t always produce what you expect. In this case, it is our good fortune that few of the pieces in Issue #12 of The Apostrophe have an explicit connection to the conventional definitions of fortune – for example, nobody in this issue wins a fortune. (To our mild surprise, no piece includes a mention of the TV game show “Wheel of Fortune”, either.)

Instead, this issue features pieces that range from the introspective (“Hedgehogs In My Trunk”), the mysterious (“The Grotto”), and the cheeky (“Jerks in Relief”), to the poignant (“Tales of a Circle”) and the exultant (“Marcus Reclaimed”).

In the case of one piece, we’re not even sure what it’ supposed to be about – dare we take it literally? – but we love it.

We also have the good fortune to introduce several new artists and photographers in this issue, as well as welcoming a number of our favorite repeat contributors. Readers of the PDF version of The Apostrophe, which is published on the final day of each publication run, will be treated to bonus artwork that does not appear in the Substack version.

Above all, we wish all subscribers and readers an auspicious Year of the Fire Horse – full of good fortune!

To be able to express oneself through the medium of writing is a wonderful piece of good fortune.

Yet fortune is not always so kind to us. Where was Fortune when illness or war (or simply a financial setback) wrenched out our hearts out of our chests, when we received that terrible message, when we read that terrible news?

The most important characteristic of fortune is that it is fickle. Even when we have a hand in it - going on an adventure to seek our fortune, turning the great Wheel of Fortune, or perhaps being in possession of a good fortune and therefore in want of a wife - we cannot guarantee the outcome.

Tell us about your own fortunes: what brought you to where you are today? We love non-fiction as well as fiction and poetry (and hybrid). Send us a chapter of your unfinished novel, and let us wonder where fortune will take your character next. We’re relatively flexible on length so don’t worry too much about word count.

Write about your wishes, your hopes for a fortunate future, and do so in the medium of your choice. Most importantly, once you’ve written it, send it to us! We promise to read every word.

Remember, artists, we also want your photographs, drawings, and paintings that relate to this prompt! Or, if you have something you’d like to share that doesn’t have anything to do with this prompt, we’re eager to see it.

The theme for issue #12 is FORTUNE. Submissions are open from January 1 to 31, 2026. Issue #12 will be published starting on March 1, 2026. Visit our submissions page for more details.

Read Issue Eleven online here.
Get the PDF version here.

At one of his seven mansions [appraised at $77.5 million], the one closest to the hospital best known in the world for treating his particular ailment, he lay on the custom made invalid’s bed [$36,500] with IVs in each arm. Classical music was playing on low volume, on an old-school stereophile’s dream of an audio system [quad speakers: $182,400; CD player: $7,800; pre-amp: $12,000; 300W amp, $9,150; custom built turntable, $23,700, diamond needle, $4,250; hand-made cables, $8,400; custom built cabinet handmade from rare woods from Brazil, Sri Lanka, and Hungary, $62,000].

The attending nurse sat in a seventeenth-century French armchair [$45,000] quietly scrolling through her text messages. She felt a little sad that her patient was dying; she was making over three times what she would get anywhere else as a hospice nurse, and she couldn’t help wishing he would live a few months longer, long enough at least so she could get that car she’d been dreaming about. But the doctor had said he didn’t have long now, a few hours at most. She sighed and counted her blessings.

He’d fought the disease with all the money in the world—well, he would have spent all the billions he’d earned, if money could have done the trick—but money was powerless before the caprices of nature. He remembered a poem he once read, by some underpaid and forgotten poet [he had a secret weakness for poetry; the book was a first edition, priced at $1,225]. It was about Death smiling at the brave soldier on a deadly battlefield, shrugging at the preacher in his pulpit moments before an earthquake leveled his church, laughing uproariously at the rich man who thought Death could be bought off.

He’d thought that, as a rich man, he could bribe Death. If he could only see the right doctors—if only he spent enough money in the right hospitals. But it was all a waste. The pathologist, about thirty years old, had told him he had six months at most, no matter what he did. And it had been almost six months to the day.

I shouldn’t have yelled at the kid, he thought.

But he was not a man given to regrets. He didn’t waste time thinking about his six wives. He’d grown tired of them, one after another, every few years. In any case, each of them had accepted the prenup, never believing it would apply to her,

He looked at his own hand, clutching the buzzer [$368 from the latest medical supply catalogue]. He was not even 50! How could he be dying?

He wanted to shout it out the window [$2,500 including restored original sashes]. But the nearest neighbor was two miles away. His chauffeur, his four maids, his butler, gardener, and two cooks would hear, since he required all of them to live on the estate. But none of them would answer.

Most of them were wondering where their next job would come from, and if they’d be left anything in his will.

With a bitterness he hadn’t felt since childhood, he thought of his will: unwritten and unsigned. How many times had he had the same discussion with his lawyer [$775 per hour]? ‘Do it for those you love!’ the lawyer had urged him. In response, he would smile his tight little smile.

That little smile was on his lips as death entered his body. Afterwards, his servants, nurses, doctors, wondered why he was smiling at the end.

Nolo Segundo is the pen name of a retired teacher who became published in his 8^th decade in over 250 literary journals in 21 countries on 4 continents and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, thrice for Best of the Net. Cyberwit.net has published 3 poetry collections in softcover, the latest titled Soul Songs.

Sambhu Ramachandran is a bilingual poet, translator, short story writer, and academic from Kerala, India. He is currently working as Assistant Professor of English at N.S.S. College, Pandalam. His poems have been repeatedly anthologized in The Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English and have also appeared in journals like The Bombay Literary Magazine (TBLM), Wild Court, Madras Courier, The Alipore Post, Muse India, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Setu, Sextet, and The Chakkar, among others.

When I told them I was going away for a while, Mum couldn’t understand why her only son would leave just before his birthday. She’d made plans, she said. Thirty-five years old isn’t a significant age, but as an only child it’s my duty to spend my birthday with my parents.

This year, she said, jabbing at where my birthday is marked on the calendar, she’d planned my favourite: roast beef and a treacle tart for dessert. Dad scraped his chair back. ‘For Chrissakes, he’s a grown man,’ he muttered, and went to his study, leaving his dirty plate on the table.

Mum always makes too much of my birthday, and this time, I refused to play along. This year, he would have turned eighteen. I can’t be certain he’d have been a boy, but that’s what I like to imagine. His birthday isn’t marked on the calendar. I don’t know exactly when his birthday would have been.

So I’ve come across the water, exchanging the Lincolnshire fens for the flat lands of Jutland.

On the drive from Billund airport the winds buffet my hire car. The road stretches for miles, curving away over the earth’s surface. Low buildings hunker close to the ground. Navy, mustard, burnt red.

The rental house sits at the edge of the woods, trees thin and tall behind. Ahead is the North Sea, a strip of silver on the horizon. I go inside the house, where the low roof harbours shadows. Dragging a chair outside, I shelter under a blanket and wait for the sun to set. I eat herrings and black bread. A flock of starlings pulsates above. Black Sun. That’s what the Danish call it. The sweeping flock of starlings.

On the second day, I leave the rental and swim in the sea. I jump in waves that rise high around me. Saltwater fills my nose and mouth. When I come out, my hair is matted, and my skin is the colour of sand. Windburn stings my cheeks. I crouch down, like the low houses, the sun warm on my back. The long beach is empty, but I imagine a small boy digging in the sand. Building a sandcastle, scooping out a moat.

I was seventeen. ‘You have to come and pick me up,’ Mum said on the phone. She gave me the address, and I went to collect her. She didn’t have many friends, and it couldn’t be my dad, she said, so it had to be me. Only when I arrived at the clinic did the pieces start to fall into place. Posters for counselling services lined the walls, and there were leaflets detailing post-procedure aftercare. In the waiting room, no one noticed me, a teenage boy. Women who find themselves in those places have enough to think about without wondering about anomalies like me.

Mum was slumped in a chair, pale and unsteady. She leant on my shoulder, and I helped her into a taxi. Another time, we might have got the bus, but there was no way she could make it to the bus stop. But she insisted the taxi drop us off round the corner from the house so that Dad wouldn’t see. ‘Don’t tell him. Please,’ she said. I understood. Dad would never have allowed the clinic. Those last few steps up the garden path she was almost unconscious. I hustled her upstairs, sweating through my school shirt.

Over the next couple of days, she claimed an unspecified illness and stayed in bed. Her head was aching. She felt dizzy, she couldn’t eat. Dad left her alone, as he always did when she was like that. He was used to her mood swings. ‘Women’s troubles,’ he said. ‘Weak constitution.’

She’d been that way when I was born. I knew because I’d found calendars from past years where she’d marked blue for bad days, red for good. Entire months of blue. Blocks of it after my birth. Baby blues, they would have called it. Except, this time, there was no baby.

When I tried to open her curtains, she complained and made me close them again. When I brought her something to eat, she left it untouched.

It went on like that for days, maybe weeks, the bedroom always in darkness. Dad slept in the spare room. I tried to encourage her to eat a little. Toast. Endless cups of undrunk tea. I was supposed to be studying for my A Levels.

I wasn’t allowed to ask her about it. I was to stop interrogating her. My mother’s plaintive tone when she said that made my stomach roil. I felt guilty, although I couldn’t work out what for.

One day she got up, as if the past month hadn’t happened. She tidied the house from top to bottom. ‘Told you she’d snap out of it,’ Dad said. I was able to commit more time to my schoolwork. I had six months before my exams.

Mum was back to her usual self, or so it seemed. I grew sullen. I walked the streets until late. When it got cold, I’d sit in the corner of a pub if I could get away with it, pretending to drink the dregs of someone else’s beer.

Once, we nearly spoke about it. Dad was out and I came across Mum looking through a box of my old baby clothes. She was under the eaves, searching for a suitcase. They had a holiday planned. Brittany, I think. There she was, in the attic, on her knees, holding up a tiny green jumper. I pulled myself from the ladder into the small space and crouched down so as not to bang my head. I looked into the box and pulled out a pair of shoes. I could fit them into the palm of one hand. It wouldn’t have taken much to bring the brown leather to a shine. I imagined white socks pulled halfway up little-boy calves. A pair of dungarees, a short-sleeved shirt.

‘These look barely worn,’ I said.

‘You grew out of them so quickly,’ she said, giving me a brief smile.

‘Mum….’ I hesitated. What did I want to ask her?

We heard Dad at the door. She began to pack the box up.

Within a few months, I’d left for university.

Morning in the Jutland rental: I lie in the low wooden bed, squinting at the ceiling. Last night I didn’t bother to draw the blinds, so the early light is dazzling. Overnight, the sun barely set. Instead, it swung low like a pendulum around the wide sky.

It’s peaceful in this place. I’ve been here a while, swimming in the sea that gets warmer by the day, but it doesn’t seem to be doing me much good. All this space and time. For what? To think? I’ve spent the last eighteen years thinking. Thinking, but saying nothing. Several times over the years, I’ve tried to broach the subject with Mum. She looks at me as if she has no idea what I’m talking about. Sometimes, I think I’ve imagined it all.

Eventually, I leave the low bed and go outside to walk through the shelter of the woods. A red squirrel jumps between branches before scarpering off through the trees. Overhead, I catch sight of a black-tailed buzzard. I meet no one.

After some time, I find myself at the edge of a lake. Or perhaps it’s an inlet. The water stretches for miles. Out there, away from the trees, everything is exposed to the wind. It flings the birds around and worries low-lying heathers in the fields. A marsh harrier fights against it, diving in and out of long, whipping grasses.

Later, in the evening, I sit outside on my chair. The sun is unwilling to leave. It lingers high in the sky long after I’m ready to go to bed. Deep in my blanket, I’m nearly asleep when I notice a flicker of something in the distance, the tips of flames. They’re coming from the direction of the beach.

I find myself wide awake and drawn to this wavering sign of life, and walk towards the horizon. As I draw closer, the vibrating hum of voices grows louder and I realise the whole village must be here, on the beach, gathered around the biggest bonfire I’ve ever seen. Even standing at the back of the crowd, the heat of the flames is intense. The noise of the people seems strange. For days, I’ve lived with only the sound of the wind in my head. The thrum and pound of the crowd is fierce in comparison. But they’re joyous, invigorated by the energy of the fire.

Someone nearby pours shots of a clear liquid and passes the glasses around. A man younger than me and wearing a grey scarf thrusts a shot glass into my hand. He shouts ‘skaal,’ and tips the liquid down his throat. I do the same. The liquorice flavour burns my insides. He takes the bottle and pours another generous measure into my glass. There are hot dogs sprinkled with fried, salted onion scraps. There’s cold beer, and lots more of the liquorice schnapps. There’s chanting and whooping and dancing that becomes more outlandish as the night stretches on.

Later, voices come together to sing what must be the national anthem. Afterwards, the crowd settles. People break off into smaller groups. Couples with their arms around each other. Small children asleep on shoulders.

Finally, the sun relents until the light from the flames is brighter than the light in the sky. We huddle closer to the bonfire and watch it die.

When I next look around, the crowd has thinned and only a few lolling heads in fold-out chairs remain. The man with the grey scarf has gone. The summer solstice has passed.

The next afternoon, I board a plane home. On the ascent, I catch sight of the beach and the charred remains of the bonfire from the night before. As we fly out over the North Sea, I lean back and doze, and in my dream the hum of the plane becomes the sound of the wind.

A published author of short fiction, poetry and writer of female-led novels, Holly won the Page Turner Award for Best Contemporary Fiction 2024 with her first manuscript Wooden Dolls. Previously, it won the Portfolio Prize 2023 (MA, University of Lancaster). Alongside working on her second novel, Holly also publishes Beyond the Book Cover on Substack. Originally from the UK, she has lived in Hong Kong for four years.

Beyond the Book Cover

Beyond the Book Cover: join me as I share brief personal reflections on book covers that hold special meaning.

By Holly Sykes

you need not seek love, 
for it already surrounds you.

it is hidden within those trinkets you find 
cleaning your house on a spring day,
pins and charms given by those
who may seem insignificant;
but care enough to wish you well.

it is hidden in the completely stocked fridge,
the multiple cartons of your favourite drink;
they never seem to go missing, 
and you can always rely on that sweetness
to carry you through a rough day.

it is hidden in the bitter aftertaste
of slightly burnt cookies with 
accompanying videos of subpar skills;
though they’re imperfect,
they’re so very human and that’s enough.

it is hidden in the typed messages,
words flowing through the ink of a pen,
writing of you about you directly or not;
even if it’s no literary masterpiece,
it drips, converges, fills your heart to the brim.

it is hidden in the jokes and banter
ringing through an otherwise quiet night,
the filter has fallen unnoticed
amid the shuffling of cards and loud music,
yet every word is crisp and clearly listened to.

it is hidden in the fleeting embraces,
pats on your back of comfort or concern
the perfectly peeled oranges sitting in
that same ceramic bowl that’s only gotten bigger
with each passing week, month, year.

so, i tell you this.
you need not seek love,
for it already surrounds you.
and this, you mustn’t forget.

Vanessa Ho K.S. is an avid reader, poet and writer from Hong Kong, whose work revolves around human emotions and experiences. When not typing away on her trusty laptop, you’ll find her crocheting, training for her next kumite competition, or immersing herself in other fantastical worlds.

We’ve all heard this story from our grandmas, but it bears repeating, because it’s true. Every word of it.

Once upon a time, before even your grandma was born, man-eating tigers roamed the countryside, and the sea was filled with pirates. Middle-class people could afford to buy their own homes, and animals could talk, although they were beginning to lose interest in doing so, because people never listened.

A young bride was on her way to her new husband’s village, way out in what is now called the New Territories, but was ancient and ghost-filled even then. She was dressed in the Guangdong style, in a red silk qun kwa, embroidered with phoenixes and dragons. On her feet she wore red silk slippers. A red silk veil, trimmed with yellow tassels, hid the tears streaming down her cheeks. Four sturdy bearers carried the bridal sedan chair, a red wooden box, with just enough room inside for the bride to sit upright and peep through the carved panels as she passed through the gates of her ancestral village, never to return. The sedan chair was antique and heavy, but the bearers were stout country boys, and the bride was beautiful and slender and weighed no more than a melon seed, so their progress through the fields and into the forested hills was swift.

Monsoon winds blew from the east, and the sky filled with dark storm clouds. More dark clouds filled the heart of one of the bearers, a handsome lad, apprenticed to a blacksmith. He loved the girl, and each loping stride they made towards her new home stung him like vinegar on an open wound.

The winding path to the groom’s hamlet led along the rocky shoreline, over a steep mountain, and down a deep, gloomy valley. It was a rough track, paved with granite flagstones, and the sedan chair bounced around like a sampan in a storm.

Along the rocky shoreline they went, and up the steep mountain. All the while the clouds thickened, and the wind rose. By the time they entered the gloomy valley, the rain was coming down like lashes from a whip. It drummed on the roof of the palanquin and turned the flagstones as slippery as tofu in a tub of water.

The bearers could hardly see the path in front of them as the rain beat down. They passed through a thick grove of bamboo and skirted a deep pool at the head of a waterfall. Usually placid and calm, the pool had become a seething cauldron. The swollen waterfall crashed like thunder upon the rocks below.

‘Careful!’ cried the lead bearer as a paving stone moved under his foot. Alas, his voice was drowned out by the rain and the surging water. The lovelorn apprentice stood upon the loose rock and staggered. His corner of the sedan chair bumped to the ground and the wet poles slipped from the hands of his companions. The tall red box tottered and then fell into the pool with a great splash.

The brave boys jumped into the foaming pool, and with much strain and swearing, returned the sedan chair to the bank. Hearing no sound from within, they slid back the panel to find nothing but a single silk slipper. Squinting through the rain, they saw a slender figure, dressed all in red, sliding over the lip of the waterfall, down to the jagged rocks below.

Mad with grief, the blacksmith’s apprentice threw himself over the falls. When the storm had passed, no trace of them could be found. The place became known, ever after, as the Bride’s Pool.

Any grandma will tell you as much, and if she is worth her salt, she will tell you not to go anywhere near there. For when the Bride’s Pool is perfectly still, on quiet days when the red-eyed koels whistle to each other across the valley, the bride appears below the surface of the water. Still dressed in her wedding finery, she beckons to lonely travellers, reaching out her pale, slender hand. Beware, a decent, god-fearing grandma will tell you, because the spirit of a person who has drowned is trapped beneath the water until it can pull another victim below to take its place.

But if your grandma is particularly smart, she knows that this is not the whole of the story. No, not even half of it.

A hundred years passed after the Bride’s Pool got its name, and then another fifty slipped by unnoticed. The tigers were all shot, and the pirates tired of life at sea and got into real estate development. Huge cities sprang up to the north and the south. The sturdy villagers moved away to the cities, leaving their fields and rice terraces to be reclaimed by the forest, but the hills around the pool remained much as they always had, which is to say lonely and full of ghosts.

Each weekend, people from the city followed the winding path along the rocky shoreline, over the steep mountain, and down the deep, gloomy valley. They tramped over the ancient flagstones and breathed the damp, spoor-laden air, fancying it to be good for them in some way.

One such city-dweller, who we will call the Rambler, was walking away from the deep, still water of the Bride’s Pool. Red-eyed koels were whistling in the trees, and a sense of calm hung over the place. Unfortunately, he didn’t have time to linger. His wife had given him strict instructions to be home by one p.m. They had guests coming for lunch, and she would be serving them hairy crabs, which had just come into season. The Rambler disliked his wife’s friends. Sunny and Mabel were loud and greedy, but the Rambler liked hairy crabs, so he lengthened his stride.

Before long he encountered a young couple coming in the opposite direction. ‘Good morning,’ said the Rambler cheerfully.

‘Good afternoon,’ said the young man, as though he was correcting him. How strange, thought the Rambler. He knew it was no later than eleven thirty. He walked this trail regularly, and he’d timed his departure to get back for Sunny, Mabel and the hairy crabs. He couldn’t be bothered to get his phone out and check the time, but he lengthened his stride.

Half an hour later, the Rambler was back at the carpark. He threw his bag onto the passenger seat and pressed the ignition. The car purred into life, which was a relief, because it had been unreliable lately. But there was obviously something wrong with the electronics, because the display showed the time as twelve fifty-five. Like the young hikers, it was an hour ahead of itself.

The Rambler pulled onto the road and turned on the radio. They were playing an Anita Mui song. He sang along. Anita Mui was his favourite. Then the DJ announced the one o’clock news, and his heart quavered. One o’clock? Without pulling over, he scrabbled in his bag for his phone. Sure enough, the time was one p.m. He should have been at home, but he was almost an hour’s drive away. What had happened? Where had the time gone? His wife would kill him.

Looking dumbly at this phone, he failed to notice two cyclists in his path. Almost too late, he swung the car into the opposite lane, before slamming it back to the left to avoid a double-decker bus coming in the other direction. He was lucky to be alive.

He passed through a series of traffic lights, all of which were green. This was fortunate, but he would still be terribly late.

Out on the highway, he threw caution to the wind, weaving in and out of the traffic, well over the speed limit. Before long, he saw flashing blue lights in his mirror, and an angry-looking policeman signalling him to pull over. I’m really in trouble now, thought the Rambler.

But before he had pulled to a stop, there was an almighty collision on the opposite carriageway. A bus full of nuns had ploughed into a truck full of chickens. Feathers and wimples were strewn over the asphalt, and the police sped off to deal with the aftermath. Hardly believing his luck, the Rambler carried on his way.

Despite his miraculous journey, the rambler arrived home over half an hour late. Waiting for the lift to take him upstairs, he checked his phone. There was an unopened message from his wife. He read it with a sense of dread.

It had been sent earlier that morning. ‘Sunny and Mabel cancelled. Sunny in hospital with chest pain. Gone to be with Mabel. Take as long as you like. Love P. xx.’

The Rambler had got away with it! He thanked his lucky stars.

When his wife got home that evening, he told her nothing about his adventures. She cooked the hairy crabs, and the Rambler enjoyed a double helping. Sunny’s loss was his gain. It had been a thoroughly satisfactory day. At bedtime, before he turned off his bedside light, he decided to push his luck a little further, but his wife said she was very tired and rolled over on her side. His winning streak had come to an end.

The next weekend, he was excited to repeat his excellent day. He drove out to the countryside and followed the winding path along the rocky shoreline, over the steep mountain, and down the deep, gloomy valley.

When he paused at the Bride’s Pool and looked into the dark still water, he was surprised to see a beautiful face looking up at him. He was even more surprised when the face spoke to him.

‘Hello,’ said the Bride.

‘Hello,’ said the Rambler. ‘My Grandma told me about you. You’re the Bride, aren’t you? Are you going to pull me under the water?’

‘Everybody asks me that,’ said the Bride, with a sad smile. ‘But I’m not that kind of girl. I prefer to make a fair deal. I want to go and visit the grave of a blacksmith’s apprentice I once knew. So, if you will take my place in the pool for an hour, I promise to come straight back and let you out. And to make it worth your while, I will grant you an hour of unbelievably good fortune when you get out.’

‘That sounds like a good deal,’ said the Rambler. ‘But how do I know you won’t just leave me in the pool forever?’

‘Well, I didn’t last week, did I?’ said the Bride. The Rambler asked her what she meant.

‘Well, you were here last week, and we made the same deal. I came back to release you, and I imagine you had a pretty wonderful hour afterwards.’

‘You’re right,’ said the Rambler. ‘I had a run of amazingly good luck. But I really don’t remember meeting you.’

‘That’s the way the magic works,’ said the Bride. ‘It makes you completely forget me afterwards. You just enjoy the good luck without knowing how you got it.’

‘Why is that?’ asked the Rambler.

‘I don’t know,’ said the Bride, who was very beautiful when she pouted. ‘If I made the rules, do you think I’d still be stuck in this pond? Anyway, are you in or out?’

The Rambler thought of double helpings of hairy crabs, green traffic lights, and escaping from the police. ‘An hour of good luck isn’t enough,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you an hour if you give me good luck all the way though until midnight.’

The Bride pursed her lips but agreed. The Rambler reached his hand into the water to shake on the deal.

As the Bride foretold, the Rambler forgot about their deal as soon as he climbed out of the pool, but his good luck began immediately. He found a thousand-dollar bill on the trail. He bumped into a group of young women in very small shorts, who gave him brownies and pretended he was handsome. The car started. The traffic was good. There was an Anita Mui marathon on the radio.

The Rambler didn’t ask himself why he was so lucky. He chose to believe that he deserved it. He was, he told himself, a good-looking man. He was charming and intelligent – just the sort of guy to whom good things happened. On pure instinct, he stopped off on the way home and put the thousand dollars on a horse. I’m a genius, he told himself as he collected his winnings.

Since he was very late getting home, he picked up a bottle of champagne to appease his wife. Getting into the lift at the bottom of his apartment block, he bumped into a neighbour who lived on the ninth floor. This being a folk tale – albeit an entirely true one – it behoves us to describe the neighbour as a comely young widow with a twinkle in her eye.

‘Celebrating something?’ she asked, looking at the champagne. ‘You should drop by and celebrate with me some time.’

When the Rambler got home, he was annoyed to discover that his wife had tired of waiting for him and had gone to see her friend Mabel. She doesn’t appreciate me, he thought. She never has. A man with my talent could do a lot better for himself. The Rambler picked up the bottle of champagne and went downstairs to see the comely young widow in 9D. She was delighted to see him, but threw him out like yesterday’s papers on the stroke of midnight.

The following week was miserable for the Rambler. Nothing seemed to go his way. His colleagues didn’t seem to appreciate how special he was, and his boss was quite rude about the effort he put into his work. To make matters worse, he lost his shirt making large bets at the Wednesday race meeting. It just wasn’t fair. A man like him deserved better.

As the weekend approached, the Rambler felt an irresistible urge to go for his usual hike. Ignoring his wife’s reminder that they had made lunch plans, he set out to the Bride’s Pool, striding along the rocky shoreline, over the steep mountain, and down the deep, gloomy valley.

Once again, he was surprised to see the Bride, and once again he accepted her unexpected offer. But this time he insisted that his good luck should last until Wednesday at midnight. That way he would be able to make a killing at the mid-week races, and his wife wouldn’t find out about last week’s losses.

‘Have you been using your good luck wisely?’ asked the Bride.

‘Of course,’ said the Rambler.

‘Because there’s only so much luck to go around,’ she said. ‘If you use it all for yourself, you will be depriving others of their own good fortune. Nothing good can come of that.’

He thought she sounded like his grandma, and the Rambler was not in the habit of taking advice from old women.

More fool him, because we all know what happens to people who ignore their grandmas.

The Rambler didn’t go home that evening. He went straight to the twinkly-eyed widow’s flat and took her out on the town. He drank a bottle of brandy, won a bar fight against five ruffians, and still got home in one piece. The next morning his head barely ached, and his wife didn’t give him any grief. In his complacency, the Rambler mistook her silence for acceptance.

The following week he slacked off at work, playing the stock market on his computer and making himself a fortune. He refused to take his colleagues to lunch, though, and sent cheeky responses to his boss’ emails. On Wednesday night he won another fortune at the races and carried it off in a suitcase. He was still drinking champagne cocktails when the clock struck midnight and the gangsters he had encountered on Saturday walked into the bar.

The Rambler came to in an alley, missing the suitcase of money and a couple of front teeth. When he finally made it home, there was a note from his wife saying that she had moved back to her parents’ house. A second note, from his boss, told him not to bother coming to work anymore.

From then on, the Rambler’s life lurched between peaks of happiness and troughs of the darkest misery. Again and again, he went back to the Bride’s Pool, pulled by an invisible force, but unable to understand the reason for his outrageous swings of fortune.

Soon it began to seem that the peaks were getting a little less high, while the troughs were darker and deeper each time. Even as he raked in his winnings, he wondered whether he was, in fact, clever and charming, or whether he was just lucky. And when his lucky streaks came to an end, he knew full well that he was none of those things.

When he bought shares in an arms manufacturer, a war would instantly break out. When he bought medical stock, a new disease would sweep the world, killing thousands. The police started investigating his share trading, suspecting he was using insider information. The Jockey Club looked into his unexplained ability to pick a winner. There was no evidence against him, and he lost more than he won, but the stress was beginning to tell.

His old friends had been replaced by a motley gang of ne’er-do-wells, who were always on hand to help him drink his winnings, but never there when he needed them. A succession of attractive young women would hang on his every word and then disappear, with an unerring sense of when his luck was about to fail. Dread and self-disgust began to stalk him.

The Rambler’s appearance began to deteriorate. Good health is only partly down to luck, and the Rambler was starting to have the body his debauched lifestyle deserved. If he stayed away from the Bride’s Pool too long, he would shake and grind his teeth, so he tramped there in all weathers with less and less enthusiasm, never understanding where the urge was coming from.

And so it was that the Rambler set off for the Bride’s Pool one August morning, when the monsoon winds were blowing from the east, and the sky was full of dark storm clouds. He knew the car wouldn’t start for him, and he was in no state to drive anyway, so he collected all the loose change he could find in the flat and flagged down a taxi.

‘This is no weather for a hike,’ said the driver, looking at his dishevelled passenger in the rearview mirror. ‘A typhoon’s coming.’ The Rambler ignored him and picked at his fingernails.

He followed the winding path along the rocky shoreline, over the steep mountain, and down the deep, gloomy valley. All the while the clouds thickened, and the wind rose. By the time he entered the gloomy valley, the rain was falling like lashes from a whip.

His dirty clothes were soon pasted to his skin by the rain. His feet slipped on the wet path. His shoes, a ridiculous pair of Italian loafers that he had bought on one of his benders, filled with water and then disintegrated.

The Rambler thought of all that he had squandered: the love of his wife, the meals of hairy crab with Sunny and Mabel, the pleasure of rambling for rambling’s sake, without being dragged along by some irresistible force. He thought of all the harm he had done with his lust and greed: the nuns and the chickens tangled in the wreckage, the wars and pandemics he had triggered, the stock market crashes that inevitably followed. All of this, he thought, because I confused luck with virtue.

When he reached the Bride’s Pool it was in tumult. The muddy water boiled like broth in a cauldron. The swollen waterfall crashed like thunder upon the rocks below. A paving stone shifted a little under his foot and he knew, somehow, that he had found the place where it all began, and where it must end. The Rambler tipped his head back to let the rain drive against his face, his body racked with sobs.

‘Why?’ he wailed, but no answer came from the roiling sky.

He looked down into the pool, but there was nothing to see except foam and stirred-up mud. He got on his knees, and reached into the water, not knowing what he was searching for, but knowing what he must do. Before long, he felt the pressure of a small hand gripping his own. It gave a gentle tug, as though inviting him to follow. He tightened his own grip, and the hand pulled him gently below the surface.

The Rambler’s body circled the pool three times before sliding over the lip of the waterfall, and down to the jagged rocks below.

Maybe your grandma has a different version, but that’s how my nanna tells it. And sometimes, if she’s had a drink with her mah-jong friends, she will sing a little song.

Oh my sons, and oh my daughters
Keep your hands out of deep waters
No good can come from water sports
With brides in red, or men in shorts.
So, stay away from gloomy valleys
And betting shops and Wan Chai alleys.
Heed your Gran, for she knows best –
Don’t put your blessings to the test.
Be not a rake, nor fortune’s debtor
For luck is fine, but virtue’s better.

And oh, you great titans of commerce
Chairpeople of the universe,
Tech gurus with your rocket fleet
With all the world ranged at your feet.
Remember that from dust you came
And dust you are, and shall remain.
You’re not that handsome, smart or plucky –
You’re filthy rich, because you’re lucky.
So use it for what’s good and true
For luck won’t last, and nor will you.

Julian Lyden is a Hong Kong-based writer with an interest in folklore, crime and the unseen forces which shape our lives. He enjoys hiking around Bride’s Pool, but he has never had much luck at the races, or knowingly instigated a pandemic. He loved his Grandmas, to whom this story is dedicated.

An extraordinary feature of creative writing is that it can start anywhere – and it can go anywhere.

Starting from a one-word prompt, “FLEX”, the authors in this issue take us from the modern day to the time of legends, from the deeply personal to the cosmic.

Julian Lyden’s “The Bride” combines a classic folk tale of Hong Kong about Bride’s Pool with a modern morality tale and (could it be?) biting social commentary. But like all classic folk stories, it ends with a song. In Vanessa Ho K. S.’s introspective poetry, the idea of a protagonist-antagonist conflict is turned inside out, for the two are the same.

Holly Sykes, with her story “Black Sun”, also challenges traditional forms by choosing an unconventional vacation setting and placing the main action internally. But readers are rewarded for their attention with a transcendent conclusion.

In “Babel”, Sambhu Ramachandran offers a moving example of concrete poetry, whose form is to be admired but which can just as readily be felt and pondered without its creative typesetting. On the other side, the final piece in this issue, “The Last Hour of a Billionaire” by Nolo Segundo, is unsubtle – but all the more powerful for its simplicity.

The artwork in this issue also displays the thoughtful interpretations that a theme can bring – from the physical arts to impressionist paintings and the gleam of sunset in a cocktail.

Sometimes, in writing or in art, the biggest flex is to stride forth and say what you want to say.

Issue 11 of The Apostrophe will be published starting on December 1, 2025 - one piece per day, with the full PDF version published on the final day.

On the last day of 2017, an internet neologist created a new phrase: “weird flex but OK.” Of course, you would be perfectly within your rights were you to choose to interpret the theme for Issue #11 of The Apostrophe in this sense. Would you like to reveal the true history of how you, a writer languishing in obscurity, are the true, onlie begetter of that phrase? We also accept essays, memoirs, and creative non-fiction, after all.

But perhaps you are a literalist-metaphorist. You yearn to riff on the classic tale The Pugilist at Rest, and write about actual muscles flexing but with a dozen layers of deeper meaning. Have you ever known a bodybuilder or an acrobat and wondered about their avocation, or are you perhaps one yourself? If so, it’s time to flex not only your pecs but also your specs: put them on and get to writing. (Speaking of gratuitous rhymes: we receive too little poetry and we’d love to receive more.)

On the other hand, you may wish to take a different, metaphorical view of our theme. Did reality shift one day for your protagonist, leaving them baffled and disoriented? We publish genre fiction, too (sci fi, fantasy, horror, etc.) and it would be fun to read a piece about a sudden flex in the spacetime continuum. And remember: it doesn’t have to be something out of this world; such a reality flex could happen just as easily in the grittiest true-to-life tale or in a soft-focus romance.

A genre we’ve been hearing more about lately is corporate fiction. Could a story about flexible working hours be the basis for an interesting tale? If you think so, then write it, and, most importantly, submit it!

Remember, the themes for our issues should be considered more of a writing prompt than a restriction. If you have a piece on a totally different subject that you’ve been yearning to share – in any genre, whether it’s a chapter of an unpublished novel, a haiku, a limerick, a hybrid piece, a dense prose poem, an almost-novella, a historical fiction story, a detective noir, or whatever – send it along! If it’s a great piece of work, the editors will be happy to work with you to sneak in some little reference to the theme.

The theme for issue #11 is FLEX. Submissions are open from October 1 to 31, 2025. Issue #11 will be published starting on December 1, 2025. Visit our submissions page for more details.

P.S. We are also looking for excellent art and photography! It doesn’t have to be related to the theme, because we pair artwork with each piece depending on the specific topic of that piece. Get in touch at hkwcmagazine [at] gmail [dot] com if you have art to share.

Read Issue Ten online here.
Get the PDF version here.

It was Lanson Place. He sent the confirmation on WhatsApp together with a grinning, horned emoji. She replied with a smiling face, even though she was unhappy; and her disappointment only grew when they showed her the room.

It wasn’t even one of the nice suites she had seen on the hotel’s website. No, it was a so-called “Deluxe Room”, which meant that it was small and had no view; the only window opened over a messy cluster of high-rises.

In the past, they’d gone to the Landmark Mandarin Oriental, the Mira and the Rosewood. Once they had even been to Upper House. And now this.

She dropped the two bags — the blue overnight bag and the small pink leather handbag — on the chair. She unpacked the dress for work the next day, the make-up set, the toothbrush. Hotels provided toothbrushes, but she preferred to bring her own. She hung the dress in the wardrobe and brushed it with her hand to smooth out the wrinkles. After she’d done this for longer than necessary, she sat on the bed, took off her dress and slipped out of her shoes. She always wore high heels when she met him, and although she had picked a comfortable pair, her feet were sore.

Besides, he was late.

She’d rushed over from work in an Uber, worried she might make him wait. They were meant to meet at 7, and she’d arrived at 6:55. Now it was 7:15.

He was always late.

She’d texted him at 5: “See you at 7? Can’t wait xx”. He hadn’t answered, even though the two blue ticks next to her message proved that he’d seen it.

Why did he keep doing this? Wasn’t he aware how rude, how insensitive it was? It had clearly been a question; she had included the question mark on purpose, after much reflection. Still, he hadn’t replied.

It wasn’t as if he was bad at messaging, not when he wanted something from her. When he asked her to bring something to one of their dates, that something being invariably a bottle of spirits, he was a persistent and quick texter. No problem there. Not the Glenfiddich. I prefer MacAllan. How many years?

Oh, he was clear then, wasn’t he?

She sat cross-legged on the bed and picked at her nails. They were painted Smoky Topaz. At least that’s what the girl in the salon had called the colour.

It was 7:20. It was always the same. She was already upset when she sent the message, but she’d still tried to hit the right tone. That question mark — she’d agonised before eventually including it.

Was it too much to ask for, this minimal amount of effort? Not even effort, just politeness. Treating your lover like this, the lover you’ve been sleeping with for ten months, who never causes any drama, who squeezes toothpaste onto your toothbrush while you’re still snoring loudly in the Mandarin Oriental or the Island Shangri-la, or presumably even here in Lanson Place, shitty though it is — should you not have a modicum of decency and at least not make the contempt in which you hold said lover that clear?

It’s not like she didn’t accept that sometimes he was late because of his profession, as he always called it. She didn’t mind. But several times when he’d claimed that he’d been stuck in meetings she’d smelled booze on his breath and once, after he’d complained that “the bitches in Beijing” had kept him on a conference call that overran for two hours, his voice had slurred.

She looked at the overnight bag. She hadn’t yet unpacked the lingerie and the small leather sleeve. She ought to put on the lingerie — she’d bought it, after all, so she might as well wear it.

Her eyes fell on the reflection of her naked body in the dark full-size mirror on the far wall. She looked wan, even sickly. Her hair was flat, and there were bags under her eyes.

There were, in her opinion, different types of mirrors in the world — friendly and unfriendly ones. The mirrors in her home were friendly. She’d chosen them carefully, but this one — it was hostile.

Still, gaunt and drawn was preferable to fat like the Walrus, wasn’t it?

It was. Yet the shock of an earlier experience with a mirror lingered in her mind. That had been about a month ago, when they’d spent a night in the Mira in Tsim Sha Tsui. He’d been asleep already, snoring like he always did. When she’d looked at the mirror opposite the bed and seen her reflection in the streetlights that flooded in through the window, she’d seen folds of flesh that she would have sworn had never been there before. She looked away in horror.

Yes, fat was worse than old. That’s what he always said too. And she’d known even that night in the Mira that she wasn’t fat. But her flesh had changed. It sagged, as if she were made of wax and a cruel hand had held her too close to a flame.

She got off the bed and walked to the overnight bag. She wanted to get away from that cruel mirror. But how could she wear the lingerie now that she had thought of her melting flesh? She should do more exercise. He’d said that he “encouraged” her to go to the gym. Not because of her appearance, he’d said, he loved her appearance, no, for her health. But it was not a problem of exercise. It was a problem of hostile mirrors.

Why was that mirror there anyway? So the guests could watch themselves fuck? Was that what Lanson Place was — a more expensive love hotel, like those terrible, tawdry places in Kowloon Tong and Mong Kok?

What did that make her? A social escort? A cheap hook-up that was no longer good enough for the suite in the Conrad, where he’d taken her for their first night? They had lain in bed and looked at the beautiful harbour view together.

What was this anyway, this thing with always staying in hotels? Yes, she had accepted it as, in its way, inevitable. She still lived with her mother — her brother and sister had long ago married and moved out. And of course there was the situation, as he politely called it. Still, how lovely it would be if they had a flat of their own! A small love nest — was that too much to ask? She’d suggested it to him, not directly of course, but if he’d got the hint he’d shown no sign. She was so sick of hotels! She’d never liked them. It had been okay with them only because they’d been nice hotels. And now this — Lanson Place.

It wasn’t even that she couldn’t afford her own flat, although it wouldn’t be as nice as the one he had in Kennedy Town — she’d never been there, of course, what with the situation, but he’d shown her pictures of a gleaming marble bathroom and a full-sized kitchen with an oven. Her flat would be small and squalid, and not on the Island. It would be in Sheung Shui or Sham Shui Po or somewhere like that. She still felt, in some inchoate way, like a stranger on the Island, as if he were the local and she a tourist.

She took off her underwear, taking care not to look into the mirror. She picked up the leather sheath, felt the weight of the object inside, and put it down again.

She knew that her thoughts about the Island made no sense. She was the local and he the expat, not the other way around. It was clichéd – such a stereotypical match. A British man with an expensive watch and thinning reddish hair, huffing and puffing over a supine Asian body. A married man. She was a walking stereotype, the demure Oriental woman playing the — what? The social escort! Pleasing him, the Western coloniser, for lack of a better word. It was nauseating. It was a humiliation.

It hadn’t felt like that when she lived in the UK for her studies. What she remembered most from back then was how free she’d felt. At last she’d been away from her mother who, when she didn’t nag her, spent long afternoons locked in her bedroom with soft sobbing coming from the other side of the door. She loved her mother, but how wonderful it had been to be away! True, it hadn’t been one of the red-brick colleges in London that she’d originally targeted. It was crappy little High Wycombe, but at least she’d been close to London, really just outside, and in her last year she’d even lived in Brentford.

How wonderful that last year in Brentford had been! She’d had a boyfriend then, a fair-haired English boy who had been good to her, who had always appeared somewhat puzzled that she had chosen him. She was a good-looking woman who knew how to present herself to men, and Asian women had been popular over there, in that country full of walruses. Men had spoken to her on campus, the streets, even the Tube. But after a little bit of fun and exploration she’d picked the fair-haired boy, and it had been good. She’d liked him, perhaps even — she thought of this with a mixture of reluctance and longing — loved him. And he had loved her, this puzzled, fair-haired boy from Peckham.

She’d never told him that she loved him, and he’d never said it to her, but she’d seen it in his eyes more than once. He was one of those English boys who were raised in what he called the upper lower middle class, whatever that was, to be awfully polite in such matters and never to inconvenience his girlfriend with declarations of love.

She walked back to the bed and put down the lingerie. He’d told her to buy it — well, not told her exactly, but he had shown it to her on his phone and said, “that one I really like”.

The fair-haired boy would never have done something so crude.

She inspected it. The bra didn’t cover the nipples and the panties were crotchless. It was so tacky. No La Perla or Aubade for him — no, he was an Ann Summers man through and through. Actually, not even Ann Summers, but cheap Chinese-made lingerie made from low-quality synthetic fibre. Many of these English men liked things plasticky and fake, like in the glossy magazines UK newsagents hid on top shelves, the ones teenage boys bought in secret. It was as if these men got stuck when they were 15 and never grew up.

It struck her then that she loathed him. She hadn’t been fully aware of this until she thought about the fair-haired boy. He would never have expected her to prance about in gaudy, cheap lingerie.

Oh, how she hated him, with his ill-fitting suits and his croaking voice with its stupid Wolverhampton accent! She hated how smug he was, how he spoke softly yet managed to boast at the same time about his job as an in-house lawyer at some bank or fund or whatever. She hated the way he booked these hotel rooms without checking if she was okay with them.

His meaty butcher’s hands, with their red, dry skin. The wrinkles and folds on his neck that made him look prematurely old. The look in his eyes, that said I can find another one at any time. His mouth didn’t say it, but his eyes did. And his sneer.

The way he spoke to her. Oh, High Wycombe, that’s the place I always passed through. On his way to Oxford, to Keble College, where he read (people at Oxford didn’t study, they read, studying was beneath them) his bigshot history degree. Today we learn how Britain conquered the world. Tomorrow we learn why Britain deserved its colonies. He passed through High Wycombe once more on his way to London to become a solicitor, and now he was undoubtedly passing through Hong Kong, and passing through her too.

The way he walked, broad-legged like an ape, each step a mighty declaration, a conquest of territory, a colonisation. Thwomp. Thwomp. Down came the leather shoes, handmade on Bond Street. Thwomp.

He was so full of himself he couldn’t even see her. As if the universe were filled only with him. He was the Big Bang: all things emanated from him and revolved only about him.

Without even being conscious of her actions, she had slipped into the lingerie. By accident she caught a glance of herself in the mirror, a dull sheen on the red fabric in the halogen light. The underwear flattered her; yet there were the sagging folds that had not been there a year ago and had begun an apparently inexorable conquest of her body.

How had she ended up like this, dressed in tacky underwear from Taobao? The fair-haired boy had been bowled over by the fact that she was in his life at all; her mere existence had astonished him.

It had been her mother, or rather her father. A sudden heart attack while bobbing in the flat waters of Clearwater Bay. Her mother had been on the phone crying, and she had cried too. How could she stay in Brentford, how could she not come back and take care of her mother in her grief? How could she have known that that grief would mutate into a dreadful, crushing depression that would never again release her mother from its clutches?

The fair-haired boy had briefly stopped being puzzled and had cried too, first because of her father, and then because she broke up with him.

Yes, it had been because of the long distance. No, that had not been the only, or even the major reason. To be with a puzzled boy who cried easily, who was a bit soft, a bit wet — was that really what she needed and most of all, what she deserved? She knew her effect on men, after all. She’d been popular in the UK, popular enough to have a boyfriend and still a bit of fun when the boyfriend had already been in the picture (but not much! she assured herself, forgiving herself immediately).

She could do better, couldn’t she? Better than the fair-haired boy. After all, when she’d told him about her father’s death, instead of being strong, instead of being her rock, instead of being there for her, what had he done? Cry, that’s what. She knew that these days men shouldn’t have to follow gender stereotypes (she’d taken a gender studies class once, and it had been full of talk on such matters), but she could not help but feel put off, even disgusted if she was honest. She was the one who was supposed to be allowed to cry, not him.

Yet once back in Hong Kong, she had found that things were different, that they were tougher. There were lots of attractive girls. Many of them — she did not like to admit this to herself but knew it in some primal part of her mind — were as hot as or even hotter than her. There were fewer men, too, or rather fewer eligible men for all these girls, and the men who were there — the ones with good jobs and cocky looks in their eyes — those men were not looking for anything serious right now, or not over the break-up, or, in one case, ethically non-monogamous, which had sounded to her like no more than a fancy term for fucking around.

It was a trick of the light, a bad mirror. But then — it was true. She was getting older! Not that he could tell. 29, she’d told him. Just shy of the big birthday. How she hoped he’d never find out the truth — 35! What a dreadful number. The end of youth. Middle-aged now. A middle-aged office lady, an HR professional.

She wasn’t guilty — he’d lied too! She’d rifled through his wallet that night in the Mira. He’d lain in bed spread-eagled, mouth open, making sounds like a defective steam-engine and she’d pulled his Hong Kong ID card out of his wallet. 48, not 39. An even bigger lie than her. But unlike him, she’d never believed it. He had too many wrinkles, his skin was too flabby, his sparse chest hair too grey.

Yet she’d looked at the frog-faced picture on the ID, and when she’d seen him snoring on the bed it had felt like the first time she’d seen him without a façade. Without the expensive suit, casually slung over the back of the sofa, without the watch, coiled like a snake on the bedside table, without the Bond Street shoes that had been flung in a fit of exuberance into a corner of the room — how pathetic he looked! How old, just a few years away from those Western sex tourists who sipped on pints of Stella in the bars of Wan Chai — Victoria’s, Churchill’s, The Old China Hand Pub — ogling and groping Filipina maids moonlighting as — what? Social escorts? All of them named Jholynn or Maribel or Marylou, all of them offering themselves for the price of a meal at Caprice, no, not even Caprice, more like Ruth’s Chris Steak House.

Not her. She wasn’t like them. Unlike them she had class, she had style, she had a degree in HR Management from Buckinghamshire New University.

No! She wasn’t desperate. She was the one who had broken things off with the fair-haired boy — not only that, she’d cheated on him. He’d cried like an idiot but he’d never found out what she’d really done.

It was him, it was all him! With his wide-arsed English wife who was 35 — her age! — but looked 50, her body fat and flabby since the birth of the twins. On the photos he’d shown her, the wife had sagging bulldog jowls on the sides of a downward-pointing mouth, and a flab of fatty skin that dangled from her chin and that — he’d said in a malicious voice — his Austrian friend called a "Goder", which apparently was a word in Austrian for the type of flab that hangs from your chin and wobbles back and forth.

Yet it was not the Goder that constituted what they both called the situation. Or at least not just the Goder. No, the situation was the flabby wife lying in bed all day crying (like her mother? No, she assured herself, definitely not like her mother) but not taking care of anything, not even the children, although they had a helper and a nanny and the wife didn’t work. It was all him, as he always told her, he had to do everything and pay for everything and she wouldn’t even shag him in return, not that he’d want to, with her looking like a walrus, and the Goder and all that.

So that was the situation. That was why he’d always been so clear that he wanted to leave her, the walrus lying in bed crying and stuffing herself with Lay’s crisps and the Goder swinging back and forth. At first, she’d believed him: it was only a matter of time. He’d kick the Walrus out and she would be the one he chose. Oh, of course she’d never said this. She’d played it cool, had said that she was not looking for anything serious, that she wanted to have fun and that she had no expectations. She’d said it so many times she’d almost come to believe it.

But then they’d been in the Island Shangri-la the week after their terrible stay in the Mira, and there had been a plastic bag with a large black box inside. A present for the Walrus, he’d explained, a set of ten beautiful ceramic knives with black handles and pearly-white blades. He’d opened the box and shown them to her. She couldn’t tell the difference between them. She could barely cook, despite her time in the UK. In Hong Kong she either ate out or, more frequently, although she never told him, her mother cooked for her.

He said that the Walrus had wanted the knives for cooking, that she was concerned the twins didn’t eat enough healthy, balanced meals (how did this square with his venomous claims that she cared about nothing and only lay in bed snacking on Wotsits? She ignored this question); so he’d bought them for her birthday.

It was not that she compared the price of the knives with the presents he had given to her. No. But she’d gone to Sogo the next day and found the same set, and the number on the sticker had been surprisingly large. They were fancy knives, handmade by an Italian ceramics master. The price flitted through her mind, over and over.

It was in moments like these that she felt he was showing off his big expat job with its big expat salary. How clear he made it that he was better than her. She’d told him that she’d come back to Hong Kong for her career, that she’d received an amazing offer covering the Greater China region for a big corporation. In reality, she’d been unemployed for nearly a year after her return.

She tottered back to the overnight bag in her high heels and tacky red lingerie, and took out the leather sheath.

She pulled the knife out. Its blade was also pearly-white. It was from the same brand; unlike the Walrus, she’d bought it with her own money. It was very sharp. She’d tried to cook with it, just once, and the flesh had dropped off the chicken drumsticks like ice cream melting off a cone. Ceramic knives were fragile, but cut sharper than steel.

When had she decided? She didn’t know, but now the idea was here, had perhaps been present ever since he’d shown her the knife box — no, even earlier, since that dreadful night in the Mira. How old they’d both been revealed to be, how far down the road. There was much less awaiting them in the future than they had already had. When she’d seen the brazen truth on his ID, something inside her had been set into subterranean motion.

The next day, after years of silence, she’d written to the fair-haired boy, unsure even to herself what she was expecting. He had replied with a picture of his two children, young and sweet, and also twins.

It didn’t matter. She knew what she had to do.

While he was sleeping, frog mouth open, making his gross choking sounds. A decisive stab into that noisy throat, the brilliantly sharp edge of the blade sinking into skin, gristle and bone all the way to the spinal cord (was that where the spinal cord was? She’d seen it in a crime show once but wasn’t sure). Would he scream? Could he scream with a ceramic knife buried inside his throat?

Or maybe the chest. To ram it into his smug, puffed-up ribcage. The way he always pushed it out! The I can find a new one chest. The blade was sharp, and if it found his heart it would cleave it in two.

But there was bone there, wasn’t there? There were ribs that would impede the passage of the blade, that maybe would — if her aim was poor, if the angle was wrong — even shatter the fragile pearly-white blade. What if the knife broke like a vase and she felt his red butcher’s hands close around her neck? The way he looked at her sometimes, especially when she compared the way he treated her to the Walrus — surely he’d thought about it.

No, better the throat! It was easier and she needed it to be easy so she wouldn’t lose heart. In important moments she always lacked courage — when she came back to the UK, when she didn’t tell him he had to leave the Walrus or it would be finished — so it had to be easy. She held up the knife so the yellow glow of the bedside lamp cast a matte sheen on the white blade.

He’d attacked her! That’s what she’d say. She was a petite local girl and he a beefy, blundering expat. The bored, suspicious cops wouldn’t care, she was sure of it! Who would care about a gweilo who had attacked her, a local? She’d say that he’d placed his butcher’s hands around her long neck and squeezed the pearly white, unblemished skin on her 29-year-old looking body.

The rage inside her grew as she turned the knife over in her hand. It was hot, explosive like a volcano. She could never sustain it for long, was incapable of the cold, methodical acts of vengeance that spurned wives and enraged mistresses plotted in the Korean soap operas she was fond of watching. No, her rage was like lava. Normally it simmered and roiled inside her, but then —

8 p.m.! Still he was missing, still probably in the Salted Pig with that disgusting, wayward Austrian friend of his, the one who came up with words like Goder.

It was his fault — all of it was his fault. His fault she was in this hotel in porn actress lingerie, face painted like a clown, waiting by herself until he deigned to spend a little time with her. His fault she was single — because in reality that’s what she was, wasn’t it? His fault he was trashing his family by having an affair, his fault for making her complicit. His fault she couldn’t find anyone else, because she was attached to him, his fault the fair-haired boy was gone from her life and someone else now lived in the flat in Brentford while she was back in smelly, overcrowded Hong Kong playing nurse to her ailing mother. If only he gave her what she wanted — love, comfort, security. Why did he refuse? Why did he stay with the Walrus?

It’s not like she didn’t know by now that he wouldn’t leave the Walrus. But he told her he couldn’t even get it up with the Walrus anymore. With her, he could perform no problem, and she always reassured him how awesome the sex was, how much she loved it, that she was in fact a sex kitten. In reality she faked almost all her orgasms, and most of the time didn’t feel like having sex at all. It was a chore, always had been, even with the fair-haired boy (there had been exceptions, back in London. They had been surreptitious and messy and dark and wild, and she preferred to keep them out of her mind).

It was in her mind, constantly — every time she replied with a heart emoji to his goodnight messages, every time she sent him a happy face when he made a booking — each time in a slightly cheaper, slightly less upmarket hotel than before (yes, she’d told him she didn’t care which hotel as long as they were together, she didn’t mind — but he should know, he should book something nice despite her words, to show that he treasured her). Even when he did take care of her, when she was able to let go and drift on her feelings like a cloud — even then it was still there.

The Walrus. The mistress. The cheap hotels.

The box with the ceramic knives.

Tonight was the night. Tonight, it had to happen! He’d been drunk more often, drunk and coarse, and not too long ago he’d slapped her. She’d been crazy, complaining about the Walrus and the restaurant he’d taken her to, and he’d had too much MacAllan and slapped her. It hadn’t been very hard, and he’d apologised, shocked and wide-eyed, and then they’d had the best sex they’d had in ages and for once she hadn’t even had to fake her orgasm.

She was still holding the blade in her hand when the soft chime of the doorbell sounded. Quickly she slid the knife into its sheath and placed it in the overnight bag. She hurried to the door in the nipple-free bra and red crotchless panties, almost tipping over in the Louboutin heels he had bought her when they had first started dating.

It was 8:13 p.m. when she opened the door, her Sultry Violet painted lips stretched in a welcoming smile.

#

At first they didn’t hear the beep beep beep of the alarm clock. They’d been drinking a lot. The girl always told him he drank too much, but she was the one who always ended up paralytic. It didn’t bother him; in fact, he liked it. She was sweet then, and looked at him with flushed cheeks and wide, dazed eyes.

He got up, took a shower and packed his travel bag. He’d told Claire that he’d had to go to Guangzhou, and he’d been careful with his packing. Once he’d forgotten his passport on the bedside drawer. She hadn’t seen it (hadn’t wanted to see it?), but he had been horrified how close he had come to the edge of an enormous abyss. Since that day he’d been careful, even leaving print-outs of hotel bookings lying about the flat for Claire to find. He was confident that she’d never even heard of Lanson Place, but he never stayed in the same hotel twice, just to make sure.

Still, this morning he was cheerful. He loved Claire. It’s not that he didn’t. And he liked the girl too. At times it had occurred to him that perhaps he could love her as well, but he had quickly dismissed the idea. Loving two people at the same time — such a thing was impossible, or at the very least too much trouble.

By the time he stepped out of the shower she had already changed out of the lingerie. Her long hair was still damp.

She smiled at him. "Good morning, darling," she cooed.

She flattered him. A 29-year-old, almost 20 years younger than him, who had no expectations, who wanted to enjoy life, and enjoy it with him. His whole life he’d only known people wanting things from him, had never felt that he could just — be. Not for any benefit he provided, but just for who he was, for the sheer pleasure of existence. How refreshing was this type of relationship, based on romance and sex and not some greater expectation. She was such a sweet girl; she’d once again got up before him and squeezed toothpaste onto his brush. And the sex was great. Claire had always been so reserved.

Yes, the girl was attached to him, he knew it, and yes, she was not entirely happy that she wasn’t his main partner. He did not blame her, although she did get annoying and emotional when she was drunk, and a few times he had come close — very close — to losing his temper. And yes, she looked a little older these days. Yes, he was back on dating apps, his face carefully obscured, but he was happy, happy to enjoy this carefree romance and, when it had run its course, to let it go, to kiss it as it left him, like watching a beautiful bird take flight from his hand.

He was ready to leave before her. He told her he needed to dash. She smiled, and at the door she stood on tiptoe to give him a little kiss and said see you soon.

The humid air engulfed him as he emerged into the morning heat and bustle of Causeway Bay. He took a deep breath. There was time for a quick coffee before work. Then, refreshed by a successful night, he would be ready to start a new day.

After many turbulent years in seven countries spread over three continents, Gregor Windstill has settled down in Hong Kong. He has had many lives, including a flirtation with academia and a brutish one night stand with journalism, and is now marinating in the unctuous goo of corporate life. His day job requires him to pretend to be a mature adult; his true self, and with it his deepest love, are reserved for storytelling.

You can find him on Substack at the following link:

Gregor Windstill

Still waters run deep

.

The sea is enclosed 
In the four walls of your square room. 
Fish prance and watermoss billow 
In waves of amber light, refracted 
Through the blue, translucent jar of your sea-
scented candle, souvenir from Scandinavia: 
“Øy” – translated with a flourish, as “island solitude”. 

Every time I step into your room I wince and 
Laugh: It smells like a fish market in here. 
With a sheepish grin, you say: let it burn 
Overnight, and be rid of it. 
Then your eyelids droop like heavy feathered wings
Limbs slump around my body like on a log upon water  
And sink, afloat, into deep slumber
Leaving my wide eyes and the candle’s beating heart
In the dark of the room. 
Outside, the rain patters – 

And down come the thrashing waves of Phuket’s seas
Where we, my arms around your waist this time, 
Bounced violently in the raging jet-ski and 
I, against the roaring engine and heckling waves, cried out 
The three words into your ears 
                                                                – echoed by you 
And splintered into a thousand golden giggles and yelps 
Received with eager gushes by the blue of the sea. 
In the middle of another sea, in Hong Kong, 
Our paddleboards made little progress on
Illusory waves, cradled in sweltering heat. 
We lay on our boards, shielded our faces with sunhats, 
Locked hands on the water between us 
(silky coolness tracing our fingers) 
And rocked to sleep under the cloudless sky – 
			Waking up with no sense of time 
To find our boards butting the edge 
Of a nameless island, mute with trees.

Now in your room full of sea 
It feels like the bed is carried on waves 
And your head rests weightless on my chest. 
We are far from the real seafaring type 
Yet bound to the sea by our best memories. 
On wayward tides we washed upon each other’s shores 
And two desolate mounds became one island. 
Shunned by some birds, withdrawn for fear of predators, 
The island relishes in its own flora, 
Dances in its own sweet meadows 
And rises to its own daunting hills – singing 
Praise to the briny sea.  

The salt-laden air purls gently 
Against the four walls of your square room. 
Shadows play on the dim ceiling 
For the sole enjoyment of its small audience. 
You are asleep; the candlelight tires not 
In lulling me to join you in dreams. 
Before I do I shall shift carefully to reach 
The nightstand; and put the candle lid on 
To let darkness engulf and preserve whole 
The sea-scent of island solitude. 

Vanessa Ho is a writer based in Hong Kong. She holds an MA from UChicago and a BA&LLB from HKU. Her interests are literature, culture, queer lives, and the humble yet powerful things in the world.