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The Wheel at the Centre by Marcus O’Shea

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You can smell space, not direct like, you’d die doing that. But you can pick up bits of it from the things that went outside, wafts of recently used space suits or antennas brought in for repair. Away from planets it smells like a metal fire, the twisting girders of burning buildings or a penny … Read more

Fauna by Armaan Kapur

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“These men,” he says, “were idealists. They were convinced escape would find them, and their consequences would simply evaporate with the passage of time. They waited and wandered for days, until their fingers became wiry and their eyes couldn’t focus, until scents muddled together and hunger possessed them. They began to forget where the forest … Read more

The Fourth Date by Anna Geary-Meyer

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I had been dreaming of water, of cool, chlorinated rhythms, but I woke with a dry tongue and gaping mouth, body thirsty but still not conscious enough to act. I squinted into the in-between light of an almost sunrise, my hand tangled in E’s black hair, her heavy breathing filling the room. It wasn’t time … Read more

Bringing Back Bob by Charlotte Wuhrer

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We didn’t tell anybody we were going. We were going to pick up Bob from Denmark. We knew he was waiting. And we knew Peter wanted to get rid of him.

We hadn’t been spontaneous for at least a year. Before we left I had wondered what the point was, the world divided up into islands made of two. I didn’t want to belong to anyone. You didn’t want to belong to anyone. We yearned for spontaneity, and wondered if we were polyamorous. We mentioned it once to one another to test the water with our toes, then pulled them back. Too deep, too cold.

Bob was twenty five years old, which was already a little too old for what we had in mind.

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A Monkey On A Horse by James Carson

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James Carson reads from his fantastic story ‘A Monkey on a Horse’. James came all the way from Scotland to take part in the book launch of our Streets of Berlin anthology. He really read beautifully, you’re in for a treat. We’re sorry about the sound quality, but get 50 people in a cellar and … Read more

Mermaids by Jane Flett

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Jane Flett is a philosopher, cellist, and seamstress of most fetching stories. Her poetry is featured in Salt’s Best British Poetry 2012 and her fiction has been commissioned for BBC Radio, awarded the SBT New Writer Award, and performed at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. She also leads creative writing courses with The Reader.

Why Victoria Couldn’t Attend Summer 2015

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I cannot be here because I am lying in the middle of a tiny road in rural France. It is dusk. My bicycle lies beside me. I’ve a broken collarbone, cracked ribs, shock, a phone that can’t tell me where I am and a fine view of the Alps as the sun sinks and the … Read more

A Form of Chinese Whispers (of Sorts) by Ambika Thompson

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You tell someone something and then immediately regret it. You can’t take it back, so you try and pretend it never happened. They inevitably tell at least one other person. You don’t find this out for months until one day this other person drops it on you, and they tell you that someone else knows as well. You try and explain your way out of it, because you’re incredibly embarrassed by this whole story. It makes you feel exposed and vulnerable like you’ve been walking through a grocery store naked with multiple dildos strapped to your head.

It’s not until a couple of days later that you realize that this other person, who doesn’t know that you know that they know, has been acting really weird towards you for a certain amount of time that correlates exactly to the length of time that they’ve known the thing that they don’t know that you now know they know.

You start finding out that more and more people know from all this random information that starts coming at you from all sorts of arbitrary people. For example, like the post person who has taken to leaving your neighbours’ packages with you, even though the neighbours are at home, just so the post person can get a look at the person who said that thing even though you immediately regretted it right after you said it, and you’re only left to wonder how the hell they knew about that. Or like the bus driver who said to you, “You’re that kind of girl, eh?” Which makes you feel really creepy and weird, even more so when he follows it up with an attempt at making a sexy tongue flick. This then leaves you wondering how the bus driver knew as well, and who seriously thinks sexy tongue flicks are sexy anyways?

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From our Festival: GORGAST by Lee Holt

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Lee Holt, who we had never met before, arrived promptly at Fort Gorgast on the Friday afternoon. His first words to us are The Reader’s favourites when assembled in this particular order: ‘What can I do to help?’.  Help Lee did, for which we would like to thank him. I would also like to thank … Read more

From our Festival: THERE IS NO HOPE AND THE NIGHTS ARE COLD by Marcel Krueger

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The following terrifying tale is by Marcel Krueger, a good friend of The Reader Berlin. I first read THERE IS NO HOPE AND THE NIGHTS ARE COLD some time ago in one of my workshops and I thought its harrowing nature would suit our purposes well. Marcel not only joined us a mere week or so after his wedding (we hope his bride forgives us for borrowing him so soon), he also kindly contributed an introduction which gives a little background to our erstwhile weekend home.

To appreciate it fully, you may want to imagine yourself deep amongst Gorgast’s dark tunnels, at the foot of a lightless broken staircase. You turn to your left and there, in the gloom, you make out the shadowy silhouette of a figure smoking a pipe…

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