Hope & Pray
Featuring stories by writers Carole Bugge, Richard Smyth, Polys Loizou, and Sam Carter; performed by actors Amber Bogdewiecz, E James Ford, Amanda Renee Baker, and Kate Chadwick. Hosted by Andrew Lloyd-Jones at KGB Bar on 4th December 2013.
The Doctor Of Ethology Presents His Findings
by Richard Smyth
The doctor of ethology fanned his notes on the lectern. ‘Thank you all for coming,’ he said, or something like it. The professors nodded, so as to say: proceed.
‘I will first deliver my key findings,’ he said.
‘Do,’ encouraged the professors.
‘They attach great worth,’ he said, ‘to conditions of dissociation and delusion.’
Winter in Brooklyn
by Sam Carter
Hugo Hart walks into the December dusk to commit today’s letters of application for employment to the mail. It’s a hopeless waste of paper and postage, but he’s honor-bound to try, for Sarah’s sake. Eighty-seven rejections in three months tell him he’s doing something wrong, but he cannot fathom what. Trudging down the rickety tenement stairs, he hears the Toniolis fighting like starved raccoons. The apartment walls here are so thin, that when Mrs. Tonioli sneezes, Sarah says “Bless you”.
And The Band Plays On
by Carole Bugge
Katherine stood on the second floor landing of the Boston town house, gazing down on the wedding guests below. She was attending her friend Molly's wedding, and the reception hive swarmed beneath her on the first floor of the splendid Victorian house, which belonged to Molly's brother-in-law. Katherine leaned against the circular railing, watching the guests orbit each other like planets, constellations of couples moving in the universe of the dance floor.
Devil in Me
by Polis Loizou
I thought you’d never come, beloved. Papasimeon tells me it’s a hopeless cause, my troubling the box of sand in his church with another lit candle. He says God is your nursemaid now, that he sent St Nikolas into the sea and pulled you out that night, carried you into the other world. No man returns from the dead, he says. But what does the young priest know from his studies that I haven’t learned from experience?