The Early Crown Benidorm / The Netherlands, 1990/91 I was walking through the garden of Arte when a waiter came to tell me there were girls asking for me. In the main hall stood Anja and Chantal, sunburned and peeling, backlit by the entrance. Arte sits past the discothèques, outside Benidorm proper — not the…
Tag: The Holographer’s Atlas
The Holographer’s Atlas
Henk en Cees — Benidorm, winter ’89 By the time Henk and Cees arrived at the Sunset, I already had a name in town. La chica de los sombreros — the girl with the hats. It had started in Ibiza, with a purple one, and grown its own legend the way nicknames do when nobody…
The Holographer’s Atlas
Maurice ’85/’91 In 1985 my mother left with Kahlil Gibran, her piano, and the ice-cold brain food she had served on a daily basis. What remained was my elderly father, a smaller house in the village, and suddenly — space. I stopped cycling thirty kilometres to school. I was tired of doing what was good…
The Holographer’s Atlas
The Constant There are men who loved you and failed you in the exact way that you have others, and you file them under known coordinates and navigate accordingly. Decades pass. Children grow, postcodes change, land numbers too, bad decisions, good ones, everything in between. Coasts remain. You teach yourself to call it nostalgia whenever…
The Holographer’s Atlas
Three new portraits go live this weekend, one each morning at 11am. The Holographer’s Atlas is part of The Memory Cartographer — a series written in the author’s own voice, not Elena’s. No fiction here. Only memory. Real people, real places, real prices paid. Each piece is named after the person it maps. Friday —…
The Holographer’s Atlas – Andrea
Two eyes, just above the water. That was all. The rest of him was under, still. I noticed them because they were staring at me. Returning the gaze, I remember thinking: what a pretty girl. The eyes, the dark curls floating around them, the suggestion of a face just below the line. Then he stood…
The Holgrapher’s Atlas – Allanu
The evening the two managers finally cornered me to say so, they were interrupted. I was being called to the office of the gerente.I climbed the stairs. The big man himself was holding a landline telephone against his chest, the way you hold something you’ve briefly set aside. He looked at me — one quick…
The Holographer’s Atlas – Rafael
This time the reasons I weren’t were simple: get away from the one I was trying to leave, get back the one I had left for him. Benidorm was where he would be, which wasn’t coincidence — it was the only reason that mattered. Rafael I had met the summer before. Dark, androgynous, the kind…
The C.O.M.C. Files 