Exclusive story: The Friend You're Never Sure Of; Kid Paradise's Spring Time Beach Bar is OPEN 48/14; Poem: Tin of Sardines; Tales From The UniversE 58 - newsletter from Madrid
An arcadia of imagination
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1. Kid Paradise’s Spring Beach Bar is Wild and Wild. And Wild. And, wait a minute: WILD-EST. And is hitting mid-April like Kid Paradise is born a million times each second while exulting in a perma-mid-life non-crisis
April is HERE and
what else
better can you do
than listen
LOUD
to Kid P’s tuuuuunnnnnnnneS
‘get your poems out and let us see who lasts til dawn’
Kid Paradise In The Mix knows how to TREAT ya!!!
2. It is all art, baby
Santiago Bernabeu, Real Madrid v Manchester City 9 April 2024
3. Poem: Tin Of Sardines
bust
open
a
tin
of sardines
on
a
Madrid
night
11.07pm
in
Spring
and drink these fishes all down oil and juice and the tales of their forebears out in the Pacific Atlantic oceans of our worlds and all the stars above
4. Short Story
The Friend You're Never Sure Of
She held the Luger pistol to her best friend’s cheek and made sure her best friend whose name was Madriga Hall saw how she eyed her straight in the eyes as she squatted across Madriga’s back in the field in the country of Higher Poynton above the village of Poynton.
Sheep were in the next field and the girl whose name was Rosa heard the birds in the oaks and silver birches and chestnuts chirrup their notes one after the other as if to take turns to ensure the one previous had their turn and Rosa smelt again the aroma of that morning’s coffee as it brewed in the French press and she saw beyond her best friend’s cheek in the glint of the silverlit reflection of the Luger pistol that got passed down generational from a great grandmother the gray horse and its foal a few yards away as they watched the scene.
And she said, ‘When I shoot this it will hurt.’
‘Why?’
‘You know why.’
‘Why are you doing this?’
They’d walked up here through the late April sun like they did every Tuesday morning, through the lanes and backlanes and meadowlands and the half forgotten tracks to where the sheep and their lambs ganged about and they lay in the gorsed heather and the longgrass and the buttercupped surrounds and Rosa had pulled the Luger from her dresspocket and jumped on Madriga and twisted her around and squatted on her back and pressed the pistol to her cheek to reach the juncture which they were at in this moment.
Madriga held her eyes in Rosa’s and Rosa laughed and fell off her best friend’s back and moved away from her and Madriga started laughing and from her jeanspocket pulled a snubnosed Colt revolver and told Rosa to drop the Luger.
Which she did.
And Madriga waited a split of a second and all the morning stopped and the hush she heard she heard go around the world and the galaxies where their interstellar oceans ebbed and the universe, too, where the gods of the gods watched on.
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