Fiction

Steven perched on a bench outside the small Tesco picking at his meal deal. He’d perfected his lunch. He knew how to get 76g of protein in one meal deal, but he resented Tesco. Did they think he was an ignorant fool? Of course he noticed the 15p price hike. The bench was in a plaza surrounded by flats and offices built in the new London vernacular, with an ersatz country pub, “Punk Pizza”, and an estate agent’s. Steven watched a pigeon hobble about on gnarled stubs but it didn’t care. It seemed to take whatever chance it got to get food, and on a whim it could fly up on top of anything it liked. ...

Life In what was formerly the drawing room of a grand Victorian tenement in the fashionable west end of Glasgow, utilitarian bookcases of the sort you’d find in a library with midcentury aspirations lined the walls. The shelves were packed with curious and cryptic tomes filled with mathematics that has largely been forgotten by most people since it was discovered in the late 17th century, and accompanying these were Cordelia Graham’s self-penned treatises on cosmology. The collection had long outgrown the shelves which Cordelia had bought forty years ago, and much of the floor was now underneath a Himalayan topography of books and papers. ...

The Astonishing Life’s Work of John Buchanan. My dear friend and mentor, the late John Buchanan, devoted his life to discovering and translating the lost languages and dialects of the mediæval inhabitants of this island. He held the esteemed position of Professor Emeritus and Chair of Philological Studies at the University of Edinburgh, and he had an unparalleled understanding of how to interpret arcane, ancient, and archaic texts. In the last three years of his life, unburdened by political or monetary motivations, he could devote himself to a project that he had begun in 1959 while completing his PhD. ...

February “I’m interested in Marxist Impressionism, mostly.” “What do you mean, Marxist Impressionism?” It was becoming clear to the rest of gathering that Drummond had no idea what he was on about, but he’d got swept up trying to impress the gathering that he was inventing his opinions on the spot. Drummond was self-proclaimed radical and polymath, not realising that polymath isn’t someone with a good enough grasp the on contents of Stroud’s Calculus for Engineers to pass their degree nor someone who watches a few Youtube videos a week with titles like “Visualising the Fourier Transform”. Drummond’s radicalness was exemplified by his authoring of an impressive number of communist memes on Reddit. By doing this, he had become familiar with a decent amount of left-wing jargon. Drummond believed that because he understood how serious things, like concrete, worked, he should be able to do a good enough job at bullshitting his way through a conversation about a style of art he’d just made up mere moments ago. ...