Lipstick Eyebrows Summer Launch

‘The  projector clicked again. On the wall was a photo of Mair holding a  placard defiantly, her shoulders squared to the police officer who  attempted to wrench it out of her hands. In careful writing she’d  printed the words: ‘Coal Not Dole’.’ From Scab by Ellen Davies

‘As  one group stands by their convoy with flags of solidarity and chants of  praise, the others are mostly in black, somnolent, waiting for their  dead. Among them is a young woman who sits by herself, crying quietly.  She is pregnant, you can see. Perhaps, it is her husband who is being  returned home in a non-descript box. The others, with posters of the  dead, give voice to their grief.

‘Paulinus!’

‘Chai! Paulo!’

‘Why do you have to die in a foreign land?’

The men among the group snap their fingers and shrug off their grief.'