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Tears tumble like vinegar down the deep trenches in her face, streaming over the crevices of her faded old skin and splashing onto the face of the dried old photograph. It was a haunting mirror, only half true now and stuck desperately in the past as she looked on at the handsome young couple smiling back at her in smudged black and white.
A tear for every year.
She sniffed back the flood and accepted a terrifying peace in feeling closer to him today than she had since he drowned in the trenches seventy years ago.

The wallpaper is of a style beyond an era I could name, and yet the condition is perfect; no tattered edges, no curled corners, no scuffs, scratches or scrapes. It doesn’t have the same old-person smell that so many of the others had either, nor even that taint air of alcohol gel and cleaning agents. It just seems fresh here at WestAcre Care Home.
A bronzed light falls through netted windows of a large west-facing room. It’s filled with chairs not strewn randomly around the room but placed intentionally and with care so as to nurture conversation. The faces are varied. Some wrinkled, staring wistfully over the grounds at the setting sun, other soft and smiling, engaged in quiet conversation over a cup of tea and a hand of hearts. Their conversation drifts through the air like music in a next-door room, audible but not invasive; I catch little bits here and there as we wait at the door, and I know this is the right place for him. His tales will go down well here, and I know he will receive theirs eagerly.

“It’s been a long time!” he exclaimed, his smile wide but his eyes muted.
“How have you been?” I asked, loosing my tie and setting my pint briefly on the corner of the table. Perhaps he could see through the feigned interest, but he played along.
“Very well indeed,” he went on, “I’ve been travelling. South Pacific mostly; New Zealand, Tonga, Samoa. I spent a long time moving around urban Australia – you know – Sydney, Brisbane, taking whatever work came my way, seeing whichever girls came my way!” His grin was very broad, but still his eyes betrayed him.
“Anyway, I only flew back in yesterday and I’m exhausted. I probably should get on my way.” As we shook hands I looked for the sun-stricken tan line beneath his watch; the freckled skin; the bleached tips of shaggy hair. I like to think of myself as pretty perceptive, but I found none. He was always like that at school.

Burning torches and red faces, but no hoods, no balaclavas. We have no shame in this, no secrets. We sweep the streets like a slow stampede – calculated and considered but no less catastrophic. We don’t scream, we don’t shout, but the sound of smashing windows is drowned beneath the beat of marching feet.
Storm strike the city streets; united swarm; swamp assassin.
Together we swell to fill the space, together we stand beneath city hall steps.
Together we rise.

She had something there, sitting casually between her teeth like a book on a shelf. I couldn’t tell if it was a permanent fixture, some kind of unfortunate dental work, or the by-product of a rushed falafel wrap […]

There can be no denying we have become more civilized as a race, as a people, as humanity.
Our medicine has improved dramatically over the last two centuries, almost even to the level of our impressive homicide […]

These Walls, cold and close; the only respite that tiny, flaky hatch. The solitude whips me into a frenzy until I freeze, again. These Walls, all 99.

Little more than dust, to begin with. Just dust and bones and hair and dead cells; lifeless and abandoned.
Just dust and bones and hair and dead cells, and then one breath; inspired and inspiring.