Ralf Webb | Tolka Issue Eight, July 2025 People lose their minds on the first hot day of the year. This is a truth unique to these islands. Men strip off and light up in petrol station forecourts. Office workers on lunch break collapse face down in the grass. It’s a kind of domestic apostasy. Sun madness. Chlorophyllous delirium. One spends half the year holed up in damp-ridden, poorly insulated lodgings that the sudden promise of warmth, a super hit of vitamin D, engenders a state of temporary insanity so acute that it might merit as a legal defence. Things, in essence, get weird. Something like this seems to be happening in Wiltshire’s Bradford-on-Avon, where, on an unexpectedly sweltering mid-May afternoon, in the region of four hundred Morris dancers have descended, carrying percussion sticks, dulled swords and polka-dotted handkerchiefs to help celebrate the community’s seventh annual Green Man Festival. Bradford-on-Avon...

Not finding a four-leaf clover in the playground. Taking two leaves off one clover and holding the stalk up to a full one, then going around boasting about my fake four-leaf clover, knowing in my heart it could only bring bad luck. My mother in a Dolce & Gabbana swimsuit at the hot sulphur pools in Fontpédrouse, and the snow on the mountains behind her. The colour and shape of the fallen maple leaves in Phoenix Park, walking around on my own after taking oxycodone. Ice-creams in the corner shop like little pink feet. The girl from the school next door who used to hang out in the bushes where we went to smoke. She had cigarette burns all down her cleavage. She said she let her boyfriends do it and seemed to find it funny. Watching a video of a bullfighter being gored to death and the camera panning...

Eerie calm. A standing wave, a never-ending breaker on a rock cliff, a bass vibration that trembles through every cell like the mountain itself is humming, rain washes the windows like poison— Someone screaming, Fuck! Fuck! * What happens to your Feed after you die? There’s no way to survive that. No way. No, I don’t know know; I didn’t watch it with my own two eyeballs, but I know. Stop, just shut up for one second, I know. And so there’s this thing attached to me, this awful piece of knowledge like a – like a dead dog. A dead-dog piece of the story. What happens to the Feed after you die? When you die it rules out posting something like: hey I’m dead. The word sloshes around like a dog dish full of water. You might die, but your Feed lives on in a kind of afterlife. Friends...

Doreen Cunningham | Tolka, Web Only, October 2023 Noreen Masud’s memoir, A Flat Place, explores the flatlands of Britain, as well as reflecting on her upbringing in Pakistan and Scotland, through a mixture of literary criticism and anti-romantic nature writing. A Flat Place contains stories of brutality, the patriarchy, colonial violence and the erasure of histories of people of colour. Noreen’s experience of living with what she hesitantly defines as complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (c-PTSD) is a many-layered account of childhood trauma with no single cause or event. Noreen describes how, along with her siblings and mother, she was confined by her father inside their house, and how she found solace in glimpses of her first flat place, open fields near where she lived in Lahore as a child: I waited, every morning, as the dawn mists rose over Lahore, for the car to round the corner and open...