Aug 11 Fucking Hippies
Read by Will Goodhand
Terry had walked down a mountain for three hours, crossed a raging river in a boat with a cow, and hitched a ride to Rishikesh in a lorry driven by a very chatty man who believed in reincarnation and eye-contact, neither of which made for good road sense.
Now he wanted cake.
Continue reading "Fucking Hippies by Samuel Wright" »
Aug 11 Ten Steps from Nangarhar
Read by Ben Crystal
Yek.
The truck stops in the blackness. Saïd doesn't need light to see the driver jump from his cab, to hear hands brush against each other then rub against his thighs. A lighter flicks, the front door of the lorry closes and Saïd is left to count.
Do.
It started differently. In a truck, still, but with hope and clean clothes. Soraya was still glowing and ensconced in her new motherhood. She clutched Saiod to her breast and kept him tucked in to her jacket as the tyres hit bumps in the road. Saba and Sadaf looked from mother to father and back to each other, hidden in those private games that only twins can have with each other. A family of S-words, sad and scared and saturated with dreams of a better life. The five tickets to Turkey cost forty thousand pounds, money that Grandfather Sook had saved since before the Russians came. Saïd keeps his back straight, jaw set, and counts the countries, watches the borders as they fly past.
Continue reading "Ten Steps to Nangarhar by Helen Dring" »
Speaking in Tongues - SM-S
Read by Sophie Morris-Sheppard.
I.
The first impression was unforgettable. Unforgettable, how his turquoise eyes melted in hers before he even knew her name. Unforgettable his height, the softness of his hands, the radiance of his amber skin. Until that moment, Anna had regarded love at first sight as a cheap trick from romance novels she scorned. After seeing him, the cliché commanded her faith. His physical beauty – and beauty was the word because Persian did not distinguish between a man's beauty and a woman's – wasn't the kind she associated with the men she'd known. She was electrified by his breath drifting over her shoulders. These thoughts sifted through her mind before they'd exchanged more than a few syllables. They sat together on the bus, headed to a book-fair outside Damascus, near the airport, conversing in an Anglo-Persian no-one could have deciphered except themselves. Perhaps certain emotions could only fully be realized in this pidgin tongue?
Continue reading "Speaking in Tongues by Rebecca Gould" »
Aug 11 Let There Be Light
Read by David Mildon
The world stopped turning a long time ago, and no-one knows why. Whatever force, or impetus, that drives us suddenly disappeared. Whatever cosmic hand that spins the planet withdrew. It’s difficult to understand. There’s plenty about it in the ancient books, of course, but nobody reads those any more. Nobody reads much of anything any more. We barely have enough fuel to light the hospitals and the council chambers – there’s not enough to go around. We have one lamp in the house, and we only light it for one hour a day, at dinner time. There’s no light for reading. There’s no light for anything.
Continue reading "Let There Be Light by James Smyth" »
Aug 11 In the Shadow of the High Gable
Read by Katy Darby
Like a satellite dish or a well-positioned coriander plant, I face south. The plants in the garden, which I can see below me, beyond the window-pane, flourish, as a consequence of all the sunshine they receive. On sunny days in summer it is as though I can hear the photons falling in a tumult, in a great rain, on the supplicatory leaves. To my mind’s ear the plants’ furious manufacture of energy from the raw sunlight rattles like a factory full of looms.
I am a gecko. I have a feeling, however, that I was not always a gecko.
Continue reading "In the Shadow of the High Gable by Richard Smyth" »
