All posts by Michael Conley

The guys in the office laughed when you were assigned this one. You’ll know them by their scabbed knuckles, they said, by their clawed right hands cradled always at chest level like twitching beach-rescued starfish.

We know they must smell like the dustbins behind a seafood restaurant, although we can’t smell them from here. They look as cold and alien to the touch as the part of your leg that finds its way out from under the bedclothes in winter.

He likes this new work: granting, recurrently, the single recurring prayer of the drunk; the way the sallow light drags ruby through the bottom of a pint of stout.

Day 1. Using a series of hops, clicks, and honks, the penguins have communicated their desire to be free.

It starts in a mid-sized former mining town in Yorkshire. No explanation for it. No marks on the bodies. No history of such things.

One night, Alphabet fell from the sky. It began with uppercase Y’s spinning earthwards past our bedroom windows like giant maple seeds.

He wakes to an echoing quack. In the bathroom mirror, behind his shoulder, a duck roosts on the shower rail. When he turns around, it’s not there.