In this Issue:
Indictment LB01T08645/2004
Disappearance of Arno Brittkower from the Harris Building, 17 Oruros St.
Exhibit 15: Adhesive or Post-It notes found on the top two floors (20th and 21st) of the building.
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Four flights. One up, one in, one down, one left. They all feel like up, a perpetual ascendance of narrow eclipsing corridors. Platinum monochrome scatterburst flickers persistently across my field of vision as I frantically continue my search for Suite 206, though I'm 16 minutes early and will most likely be on time. 206. 206206, 206. 206206, 602? No, 206. I repeat the number over and over in my head like a motivational chant. Breathless, I reach the middle of the last flight and spot an isolated door. This is it. Read more...
We stood in the middle of the old stone bridge. All our sketches and notes were neatly arranged in piles along its entire length, completely covering the astro-turfed walkway. Professor Thomas picked up a few sheets of A4 at random and waved them in our faces. Read more...
I had rented a room in a house at the edge of the town. A town lost in the Carpathians, near the border between Hungary and Slovakia: the most isolated place, so I'd be able to write in peace. The family who live here—father, mother, grandmother and two adolescent daughters—is quiet: they work a lot, talk little and never listen to music. There's no television. However, they hear strange things, sometimes. At night. Read more...
My head is spinning, I feel faint. What's come over me? Not as much as over these thumbnail chapters that want me to accept their reality, when in fact I've read tabloids more real than these sketches concocted for the benefit of readers with little time on their hands, in need of a quick fix of prose on their e-readers, something that lets them ride for a moment on a cascade of words, a river of syntax for a page or two, to be put aside whenever they want without loss of coherence to the overall design, which anyway hangs by a hope and a thread the plane won't crash (or land?). Read more...
I am sitting in my car by Hiverblue Lake, staring at a sky the colour of granite. The birds sing glumly, smearing the sky with minor chords.
An elderly man knocks on the car window and I wind it down further. "Yes?" I say.
He contemplates my face. "Try not to plait the braids of gloom for too long."
"Blue!" I exclaim. "Miles of blue."
" Read more...
And now we vote on who lives and who drowns! says the facilitator. You are on a tiny, over-crowded life raft—half of you must climb out so the raft stays afloat!
There are quiet chuckles among the workshop participants, who are sitting in a circle of metal folding chairs. Outside the circle, the facilitator is wearing a lifejacket, a red one with a plastic whistle.(Throughout this three day Self-Discovery Workshop, the facilitator, a kindly man with a well-pruned white beard, has shown a penchant for theater.) The church basement is lit by a few fluorescent panels and a lamp by the door. On a table against the far wall, a coffee maker hisses and gurgles. A box fan whirs in the corner.
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About Our Coffee and Other Fare
Please Note: All of the coffee served at The Irreal Cafe is fair trade, organic, shade-grown and not real. All of the food served at The Irreal Cafe is organic, vegan, locally sourced and not real. See "At Our Cafe" for more about what we would serve at The Irreal Cafe and how we would serve it if there were an Irreal Cafe.