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Ancestor Worship

Sophie Curzon-Siggers

The ocean’s benevolence raised me; not fishes hauled and eaten in abundance, but its great iconoclast, the whale. This custody was devised by two parents finally decisive about their irrevocable differences, that the Southern Ocean and the Victorian plains do not cohabit. My mother would never declare ‘I am a whale’ as I declared ‘I am a seal’. Her name’s meaning, ‘dark stranger’, is an internalised marker. A name in vogue in the late 1950s, but maybe even at one day old, they perceived her as foreign. If we tend towards the souls of things, then the bookshelf of hardback […]

To Miscarry

Miranda Tetlow

I was sitting on the toilet. Plucked from the underpants around my knees, cradled in the palm of my hand, was a blood clot almost the size of my thumb. It was a luminescent red, verging on glittery, the colour of a nail polish bottle I might have picked out at the chemist. What I could never have imagined was that, for a moment, I would think very hard about swallowing that clot. I’m sorry, did you screw up your nose? I don’t blame you. After all, the first rule of miscarriage club is this: you do not talk about […]

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