Woman, Eating

I arrive at the Otter and the front door is closed and there is no one to let me in. This is what I always fear about arriving at new places. Being stuck outside. I stand as close to the wall as possible so I’m in shade.

My mum had gum disease when she was fully human and, gradually, over the last couple of centuries, her teeth have, one by one, fallen out. The last tooth, a sharp and pointed molar, came out while she slept one night, when I was around twenty, and was there on her pillow in the morning – the last semblance of her demon body, she said, that God had

‘So, where did you come from?’ Ben says as we walk down a dark corridor. I pause. I get this a lot too. ‘Well, I’m from England. But my dad was Japanese, and my mum is half Malaysian.’ He turns around. ‘Oh my god, shit, no, sorry – I mean where did you come from today? Like, are you living in London?’ ‘Oh, yeah,’ I lie. ‘I live just near here, in K

Crimson Orchard recommends that residents have as many of their belongings – photos, books, furniture even, any personal artefacts – arranged around their rooms as possible, because old things with memories already associated with them encourage the formation of new memories, apparently. But Mum still ended up having too much stuff. She essentially

I feel small, like I’ve been beaten down by the city. My outings have been fruitless. I have none of the things that connect me to my life lived in Margate or my mum – only my belly button, and the little scar on my neck – and I have no food. In the dark, my stomach rumbles loudly.

I think I realised quite a long time ago that the demon isn’t necessarily linked to God; it’s not the antithesis of human, or of the soul. It is just a different animal, which has a different diet to humans. I’ve heard of a crustacean that eats just the corneas of sharks, until the sharks are blinded, and butterflies in the Amazon that drink the te

‘Er, so … I can’t actually see the forms,’ he says. He laughs and looks up. ‘But I’ve marked crosses where you need to sign.’ He brings his head low over the table and squints. ‘Um,’ he says. ‘Here’s one.’ He slides a piece of paper and a pen across the table towards me, his thumb held firmly part way down the page where I need to sign. I can see t

‘You must have been influenced by him as an artist.’ Gideon says this as a statement, not a question. ‘It’d be interesting to see your work.’ ‘I suppose I have been, yes,’ I say, feeling guilty again that I haven’t made any work for such a long time. ‘Were you close?’ Gideon asks. ‘Actually, he died before I was born.’

My mum coached me on how to lose friends when I was a teenager. She taught me how to drift out of other people’s lives so that they eventually stopped contacting me and forgot I existed. She taught me how to appear boring to friends, depending on what they were interested in, or how to act clingier than I really was so that the other person would b