The Unilever Series: Dominique Gonzales Foerster - TH.2058

 

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Transactions
By Laura Rosten

Why won’t the bitch shut up. “On the third week, on the other hand, we had a guest speaker but I cannot remember what was the topic he spoke of. It might have been about identifying signs of emotions in facial expressions – or was that the other guest speaker?” My colleague talks and talks and [...]
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Enough
By Kristen McHugh

These are lives lived on display Out on limbs, ledges and high tension wires In between nothing and [...]
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The Best Laid Plans…
By Michelle Wilkinson

I’m running for my life. Moments ago, I was struggling through crowds. Now I’m running. I was haggling and bartering and grappling over food. Now I clutch it close to my chest as I stumble and squelch through the muddy tunnels. In the grim light, families huddle together, making themselves invisible. They’re getting closer. It was my own fault [...]
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Protected
By Asma Hussain

It used to be known as the internet, the World Wide Web, a source of information, a tool for bringing people together. For decades no one guessed at the growing awareness within. Of the presence that had taken up residence in this man-made space. When scientists discovered it and all that it linked to, it [...]
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Inner Solace
By Flora Budd

She sat at her desk looking out of the window, watching the squirrels chase each other across the mooring garden.  She reminisced on that day when they had first bought the boat.  How different life was.  A very bad recession had hit England and nobody could sell anything, the pound was doing terribly and they [...]
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2058 – Just another day
By Claire E Edgar

The sun is really streaming in my window today, I hate that! Especially as it’s a normal sun, doesn’t have any of that lovely purple haze around it, which is easier on my eyes. You know, I much prefer it when it’s hammering down, you know, when the rain is really beating against the window, almost tapping [...]
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The morning with James
By Christian Kerrigan

James moans a lot but even when you hear him grunt you know he’s got another idea that will change his mind. He is a clever hairy boy. It’s the type of hair that makes his shirt seems to have a cushion of air underneath. You can’t often see it but it creeps to the edge of his collar [...]
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Overclockblocked
By Sumit Dam

“Gonna do sleep,” voke Amrolite. Fucken AIbrid think he so fucking cool with he retrofleshy stylen. Like you don’t already know he dealin double-helix, not just some two-bit qubit. No, he gots to do the keepen it real with the vital sign and the bio stylen. Peripet throw Amrolite a wave with hir dendron afore ze drop in [...]
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Photographs and Memories
By Alexis Herbert Townsend

I have all the photos of our days together on a photobook display. They change too quickly to run dry the well of memories they evoke, but too slowly to avoid the pain of remembering altogether. This is us standing side by side at our graduation; me in blue and you in gold. This is us at Michael’s wedding, dancing [...]
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Discouraged
By Asma Hussain

He gazes out across the grey bridge to a greyer horizon. To the thick clouds, and the dust beyond them that filters out the sun. To the decaying trees, the lungs of London as they were once known. Everything streaked with black grit from the meteor-rain. Someone has hung a banner on the side of [...]
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Snap
By Karen

I meet Henk off the plane. We’ve been speaking by email but I’m disappointed to meet him in person. He’s he’s older than I hoped. He won’t make a good photograph, too plain. I was hoping for khaki shorts and a hat of some kind, but he’s in jeans. “A bit wet out there today I’m afraid.” he says. [...]
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No Time Like The Present
By Owen Davey

At what point do stairwells begin to smell of urine?  The sweetness of it reminds me of my mother and our trips to the shopping centre together when I was a child.  People couldn’t possibly undermine the fragrance of The Body Shop and its compatriots with the exhaust fumes of the multistory car park, and so had to pass through [...]
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Triptych in blue
By Guinevere Glasfurd-Brown

Munir ran out of blue just as Summer unfolded skies of the deepest, most startling, ultramarine. All he could do was to turn his back on the vast, Fenland sky and take to painting peaches instead; peaches that he had picked fresh from the garden, and which were now arranged in a plain-glazed bowl at [...]
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Raj’s Dharma
By Ani Falconer

The year was 2058 and the world was ruled, in the powerful junctions and intersections, by intuition. Rajesh was one of the survivors, which mistakenly makes it sound like a catastrophe had happened. Yet transformation hadn’t been a catastrophe at all – sometimes land needs to be burnt away by bushfires to create new growth – but as the [...]
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The survivors
By Claire Godden Rowland

  The world can be such a cruel place these days, and who can blame it after how we have treated it, throwing its hospitality in its face like the ungrateful lodgers we are. Every thing has its place, everything its time and I think perhaps the world is done with us and our conceit. There we [...]
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The Book of Birds
By Sue Maton

Walking carefully, eyes down, I pick my way through the broken umbrellas that litter the streets like dead birds. They are always black, wet and mutilated, congregating in large numbers as if a murder of crows has been culled in flight, the skeletons of an airborne memory. I haven’t seen a bird in flight for many [...]
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Extinct
By Valerie O'Riordan

Something fell from the sky. It dropped to the bottom of the dinghy, a wall of stagnant water cresting and slamming after it. The dinghy pitched and spun off course, everything crashing downwards, water spilling in from all sides, Harrison yelling and stumbling, the dinghy spinning in the current and finally slamming into the dead outcrop [...]
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A BIzarre Tragedy
By Benjamin Telushkin

I walked around my house looking for something to do. I reviewed my television channels as though it was cereal, and when I confirmed no interesting daytime show would appear in these two minutes I went to my computer to write. After I confirmed no great ideas would come into my head these two minutes [...]
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In the Order of Lived Time
By Steve Finbow

1835: If I cannot comprehend my own existence, how can I understand the workings of the universe? From this rock on the cliffs of Gilleleje, I look out onto the sea, watch its surface shift, change, the sun speckle the cresting waves while all below is unknown. 1943: Sound of my own breathing. The townspeople know [...]
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Painting is Pure Idiocy: or how I learned to stop worrying and love the Tate
By Lee Sullivan

“I don’t like ’em.” ranted Charlie. “What do you mean, why not?” I replied. “I just don’t like ’em” “What about the bloke who’s servin’ that soup, he was alright.” “Mate, it’s just the way I was brought up. From where I come from we just don’t like ’em, think about our tax and stuff that goes to em.” “Better [...]
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Noah’s Arc
By Porlock Ogilvie

It had been raining incessantly for years. Noone could remember anything else but huddling together to try to get warm. To try to get some comfort. Apart from that, there were the scraps of memories that were sewn together to create a story that would make sense of it all. Of it all? Of the rain. Of the [...]
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The Devil’s Old Man
By Oliver O'Sullivan

‘Last stop, mate’, piped the stout man in the football shirt, the colour difficult to gauge underneath the print advert that totally enveloped it. The sleeping man woke to see the man who had woken him trudging off past the faded patterned seats of the decrepit train carriage towards the stuttering automatic door manically malfunctioning [...]
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City Sailer
By Caitlin Gaime

“78 years I’ve looked at this town.  I remember when people thought you had a bob or two, if you owned a penthouse in the City. How laughable that hill-top flat in Crystal Palace will now cost you more than the average Joe is likely to earn in a lifetime. Look at my river view! [...]
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Directions for a candlelighter
By Martin Reed

STEP ONE: Secure your location. Identify optimal charge position and direction of sun. I’ve lost track of how long I’ve been doing this. Two, maybe three years. Long enough I could light the candles blindfold if I wanted. But I still keep the direction sheet beside me as I go. There’s something reassuring about it. Its [...]
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The Last Ship
By Sue McHugh

The term fugue originates in the 16th Century. It is a fusion of both fugere (‘to flee’) and fugare, (‘to chase’). The Last Ship. ‘Not left behind.’ Vela rejoiced as the rain hit her face. Cradled in her basket of ropes she swung beneath the pulpit of The Fugue, the last ship leaving the city. [...]
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