X Marks the Spot

I once tried, as a teenager, to fellate myself (I was centimetres away, just as I am always a few lexemes away from what I want to say). No other male has told me they did this but I suspect many adolescents try (in the spirit of adventure) and fail (a downside of being upright).……

Whodunit

There are ten basic cloud types (genera) that derive from five fundamental forms (sheets, wisps, rolls, etc.). They are divided into three levels – cloud low (CL), cloud medium (CM) and cloud high (CH) – according to where they are found in the troposphere. Genera are divided into species, which are subdivided into varieties, leading……

Vilnius city tour

An open-top bus with the words VILNIUS CITY TOUR splashed on the sides in bubbly letters regularly passes through my beloved neighbourhood of Žvėrynas. It makes its way from the KGB museum, across Žvėrynas Bridge, past Our Lady of the Sign (a showy neo-Byzantine Russian Orthodox church), to a Radisson Blu hotel by the river.……

Under duress

Many moons ago, I was in a bar that I loved, in a time that I loved, enjoying a quiet drink with H. His ex-girlfriend called; she was translating a text and wasn’t sure about the meaning of the word ‘duress’. H knows words but, feeling under pressure to impress her, on top of being……

Thud

According to a study by linguists at the University of York, the ‘th’ sound (voiced dental non-sibilant fricative), that vexing English lisp, will have disappeared in London by 2066 as a result of the spread of Multicultural London English. Thugs will be fugs. Thought will be fought, The thickset thug thwacked the throaty theologian’s thorax……

Streaming

Plastic is sad to the touch. It feels wrongly smooth, like a glib remark. It conveys nothing but a dull sense of its functionality. It is luridly durable, inexorably cheerful. A sensitive child, plastic toys made me sad. When I got a plastic toy for Christmas or my birthday (such as a lightsaber) my initial……

Rock-paper-scissors

It came to me as I walked by the river: a thrilling idea, my thoughts excitedly scattered in every direction, sneaking a lightning peek at what it might look like (it would be a short story, possibly a novel). A hundred metres later I had rejected the idea for being too controversial. It would attract……

Quorum of one

Kiril is laconic. He doesn’t elaborate, digress or embellish. Words hang awkwardly in the air, suspended in silence, mingling with other particulates, before he finally responds to them. He is not unfriendly or socially inept; he is just startlingly uncommunicative. Words are either tools to get a job done (pass the wrench) or units of……

Princess Spurga

Princess Spurga was famed throughout the land for her charm, goodness and beauty. From remote hamlets to fishermen’s villages to bustling town markets, everyone spoke of her with affection and admiration. Once, while riding through Vilnius in a carriage to attend the marriage of her cousin, she saw a beggar drop to the ground and……