Ian Johnson

I make the gig on a promise from the exquisite flyer, curated with a heart-sized fist in boot black serifs by a thick-set redhead. I’d only been in their venue (a church!) when my buddy Gary died – longer ago than my kids have been alive – splayed cold on the track for the last train home.

Inside, a handsome leper picks at the acoustics, bouncing a tuh-tuh tuh-tuh from the slabbed arches, as sturdy as rails, dripping on the souls he’d swayed and sent flying.

So cometh the thick-set redhead’s grrl band, chin first, biting down at sleeper pews with chipped teeth, chest-deep in strobing strangers – those siren eyes assuring, when a string breaks, the ‘we’ that remain can sit there and stew in this holiest hollow.

And Oh Christ I hope they make it. 

Every single one.

But not more than I wished raw, at the back of his mother’s quaking heads, that I’d left the nightclub with Gary instead, before his echo outstayed him.

Ian Johnson is a writer from North East England. His work appears in such publications as Trash Cat Lit, Underbelly, Scaffold, Literary Garage, and Free Flash Fiction. He is a 2026 Best of the Net nominee.

Read more from Ian:

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Here on Trash Cat Lit – ‘In the Fullness of Time‘ and ‘Frisson Interruptus‘