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ELLEN WILES was born in 1981 and grew up in Reading. After doing a music degree at Oxford, she did a Master’s in Human Rights Law, and then became a barrister at a London chambers, disappearing off periodically to work, including on The Bushmen Project in Botswana and with Karenni refugees in a camp in Thailand. After scribbling fiction on the side for a while, she did a Master’s in Creative Writing, and eventually quit the law. She is the author of Saffron Shadows and Salvaged Scripts: Literary Life in Myanmar Under Censorship and in Transition (Columbia University Press, 2015), which includes interviews with Burmese writers and new literary translations. She is currently doing a PhD in Literary Anthropology, researching live literature, and directs an experimental live literature project. She lives in London with her husband and two small children.
Someone has flung rainbow pepper on the air.
The hummingbirds are migrating, each alone:
Blossomcrown, Coppery Thorntail and Flame-Rumped Sapphire.
RUTH PADEL, THE MARA CROSSING
All across the country, people said that
it wasn’t that they didn’t like immigrants.
ALI SMITH, AUTUMN
Contents
We’re clinging to each other, fistfuls of flesh and bone, and battering rams are smashing over our heads leaving us stingy-eyed, breathless, a woman and her child are clinging to one of my legs each, everyone is clinging to someone or something, and I almost envy the two tiny babies slung tight to their mothers who don’t have a clue what this chaos is about, who don’t understand the enormity of this terror, because there are way too many of us piled in here, we’ve created a death trap for each other, we know this, but we need each other too, we’re all we’ve got left, and this might be the last group of faces I’ll ever see, and I’ve never seen a group of faces so petrified, and I’ve seen a lot of petrified faces, and there’s another one approaching, oh God, it’s coming, it’s coming, and we’re rising, rising up – up and up and up – and this wave is taller than the tallest cliff and my stomach clenches and our boat is vertical now and I’m clinging on with all my strength and we’re going to flip backwards and this is the end… but then we dip forward, just a little… and then we’re nearly horizontal again – we’re floating on nothingness, we’re flying – and then we SLAP down on the water, and my brain explodes through my skull and the water is roaring and children are shrieking and women are wailing and men are sobbing, and I look beyond the boat and there’s still nothing but this vast purple-grey sky bleeding into a desert of wetness you can’t drink,