Brecken Hancock | Tolka Issue Two, August 2024 I take my phone to bed – my husband on one side, my cell on the other. I face my cell. * It starts with a skim of scalp. The cadaver of a Texan murderer who died of lethal injection was encased and frozen in gelatine, then ground down on the axial plane, one millimetre at a time. Photographs of his 1,871 cryosections compile like leaves of a book; a stack of rectos; a secret turf of nerves (stubs of axons and dendritic miles); atrial chambers; a bog of colon; fat; furls of brain; and tendons, imprecisely milled, smeared across the surfaces. * He wasn’t sliced. In a university lab in Denver, a motorised, rotating disk of sandpaper scoured him away, turning him to frozen, cadaveric dust. * Each milling of his corpse revealed an aerial view of viscera – a slab...

Kimberly Campanello | Tolka Issue Five, August 2024 K. arrives at the cottage first. It is still covered in red, white and blue bunting a month after the jubilee, as are the rows of cottages and the detached houses in the village, the community centre with the yoga class, the café with decent coffee, the shop selling basics including newspapers and artisan local products, and the three pubs triangulating the square – one standard fare, one gastro, one wood-fired pizza. These amenities had been advertised in the house’s listing, which pinpointed their distance from the doorstep in fractions of a mile. The local walks in the famous landscape were also listed, including one that takes you up to a twelfth-century shrine to the Virgin Mary that had been restored and reopened to pilgrims in 1961 after centuries of ruin. This and other walks are circular or could be made that...

Liam Harrison | Tolka, Web Only, November 2024 In September I spoke to Colin Barrett about his latest book, the novel Wild Houses (2024), which was longlisted for the Booker Prize. Colin is also the author of the short-story collections Young Skins (2013) and Homesickness (2022). A short story from Young Skins, ‘Calm with Horses’, was adapted by Nick Rowland into a film in 2019, starring Cosmo Jarvis, Niamh Algar and Barry Keoghan. Years ago, I was working in book distribution when a friend first recommended that I read Young Skins. I responded petulantly to the recommendation, thinking that smalltown Irish malaise was overdone, and that I’d already read enough fiction about it. In our conversation below, Colin touches on the sweeping naivety of youth – how being dismissive, and growing out of it, is a necessary part of being a writer and, in this instance, a reader. Thankfully, I...

Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe | Tolka, Issue Two, June 2022 In 2008, Marcella Beccaria, curator of the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, commissioned a solo exhibition by celebrated artist Roberto Cuoghi. Šuillakku – as the show was to be titled – would represent lamentations for the fall of the ancient Assyrian city Nineveh. The pièce de résistance was a sculpture of Pazuzu, a fiendish demon of evil spirits and keeper of frigid winds which were thought to bring blight, famine and pestilence. The Met Museum’s description of Pazuzu offers: ‘He stands on two legs and has human arms ending in claws with two pairs of wings, a scorpion’s tail, a snake-headed erect penis and a horned, bearded head with bulging eyes and snarling canine mouth.’ Cuoghi’s nineteen-foot-tall Pazuzu dominated the third floor above the entrance to the castle in Turin, a towering threat keeping watch over the unwitting visitors. Cuoghi...