Author S. K. Nicholas

There’s graffiti on the walls in the toilets. Would’ve taken a cubicle, but they’re overflowing with shit. At the urinal, I look up to the ceiling clenching my teeth and notice the window above my head is cracked and fractured like the web of a spider. I think of Charlotte’s Web, then of Roald Dahl, Read more

In these mailable hours where the town is a hive of twinkling, ghostly lights, you can’t help but feel on the cusp of something more. The streets are cold yet strangely alive with the smell of fried chicken, not to mention the exotic kiss of cigarettes perched upon the lips of lovers trawling through windswept Read more

The veins in her chest reach out like the branches of a tree. She has a fever, not to mention a sore throat and a bottle of Benylin in her bag filled with brandy. It makes her burp, like a tiny fish. There’s a comet somewhere. As it passes, it shakes the building housing the Read more

The darkness of morning, interrupted by a sudden wave of white. It didn’t last long. The snowfall was heavy, though. Not heavy enough to settle, but enough to block out the world and make the morning seem somewhat beautiful, and not the maze of grey that it so often is. Some of my favourite memories Read more

On a balcony overlooking town, the steam from our cups of coffee obscures the faces of those walking below. It’s freezing. Our bones knock and jive. The alleys are swimming with trash. Amid the trash are bumbling heads staring at the ground on their way to the entrances of a hive of thrift stores—the kind Read more

The outlines of these moments run like mascara. The mascara she bought from Boots on her lunch break, along with a pack of tampons and a sugar-free Red Bull. The flesh of strangers smears the exposed skin of her skinny wrists. Wrists attached to fists that shake at the sky for no particular reason. The Read more

Drunken footsteps echo through stairwells in the early hours of the morning. Stairwells that have witnessed a thousand casual histories as if it were no big deal. Which it isn’t. And which it is, because every footstep tells a story, and in the end, our stories are all we will ever be. The world ends Read more

Civil servants. Slaves. Tiny bits of dust clinging to imaginary dignity. Wine in bellies trudging down streets that best belong in memory but stick around regardless. Like a dead cigarette on the bottom of your shoe or a piece of gum stuck to your wobbly arse. She bleeds. She is a woman. It’s a full Read more

It’s a slow day. The kinda day for a slow suicide. The kinda day that has a sky ready to piss all over your hungover head. Grey this. Grey that. The corpse of a fox haunts, as does the image of a bruised baby with broken limbs on page fourteen of some paper or other. Read more