1. IN ABSENTIA
Paranormal activity at the polls as Jessica Johnson goes on the trail of missing voters
2. TALL STORIES
What’s the meaning of a monolith? Willy Ndatira sees hidden messages in the immovable meme
3. HORRIBLE BOSSES
A US president, an unspeakable mound of sublimating slime and a game of geopolitics collide in Dennis Kelly’s report from another dimension
1. Ghost Town
TEXT JESSICA JOHNSON
“People that have died ten years ago are still voting.” No one could deny Trump’s vote-rigging claims, of course, but what happens when the skeletons in the closet come out to haunt? Jessica Johnson, the Orwell Youth Prize winner who predicted her own A-level results would suffer because of a snobby algorithm, joins the ghost hunt
When Mum disappeared, I never really felt that she’d left. Elle and I have been trying to work out where she went for ages. We’re meeting up again this afternoon to look over a few more of the fi les, but we’ve never really gotten anywhere with it. Elle says she’s probably dead by now. Five years is a long time for someone who didn’t show any signs of wanting to leave.
There was a cold breeze as I walked to Elle’s place, the type that catches every feature of your face, like a faux-ghost bedsheet that wraps itself around you till you don’t really know what you’re pretending to be any more. I wonder if Mum had been pretending, and all this time she was only letting me see through two tiny holes that she’d cut out herself.
“Hey!” a distant voice caught in the breeze. “I thought I’d come meet you, it’s so quiet out at the minute.”
It was Elle. “Yeah, I know,” I called back, “it’s dead.”
“Literally,” she replied, as she walked up to me. “Anyways, I’ve been looking through some more of the stuff and I swear I’m on to something.”
“Listen, Elle, come on. It’s been what, fi ve years? We’re not gonna fi nd her.”
“But don’t you want to find out what happened?” she snapped. “There’s more to it, trust me.”
“Elle, I…” I wasn’t sure what to say. “Right, whatever. Let’s go.”
As we
