Category: Issue 21

2000 BCE of Waiting by Zoé Mahfouz

The Christmas nativity scene was almost as sad as Baby Jesus’s facial expression. The church had drained itself of its last bipeds. Baby Jesus stared at me. I had to act. I stuffed his clayed body into my Saint Laurent tote bag and ran. My mother laughed heartily, and that made me panic a little. We sped away, like thieves escaping a heist. In this countryside ghost town, we passed a cop, who my mother thought was alerted. He was not. I gently released Baby Jesus in a forest bush. His rosy cheeks smiled at me for the first time.

Zoé Mahfouz is an award-winning French actress, screenwriter, and comedy writer, as well as a content creator working across fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. She holds a Master’s degree in Screenwriting from the London Film School. Her comedy screenplays have been recognized at international film festivals, including Canadian Screen Award-qualifying events. Her voice, described as “very tongue-in-cheek,” “kookie,” and “random,” is reflected in work published in over 80 journals worldwide, with pieces translated and anthologized in Japanese print publications, notably Ginyu and The Asahi Shimbun. A Best Small Fictions nominee, she is the author of ADHD in D Minor (North Meridian Press, 2026) and Borges Must Be Rolling in His Grave (Dancing Girl Press, 2025).

Unblack by Shaurya Arya-Kanojia

My best friend growing up – I’m going to leave out the name, don’t want to get her involved in this – used to say death was black. Devoid of colour, of light, of thoughts.

Essentially, of everything.

“But you,” she used to say, “not for you. You will keep on thinking, that mind of yours will keep grinding away like it always does.”

Okay, I suppose this calls for some context. I think a lot. What you would call classic overthinkers. Someone would say something to me at a party, maybe a comment about what I was wearing, about the way I did my hair, about my job, about any of the million things people think they have the right to comment on. Some people call it socialising, some networking. And some would say that’s downright intrusion. But after such an incident, you would find me thinking into the late hours of the night about what they could have meant. I won’t bother to give you precise examples, because honestly that can take all day and some more.

Today, I’m remembering that friend because I find myself doing exactly what she was referring to in that statement of hers. My mind is grinding away. Thinking. Creating thoughts that, truth be told, have no business being in there. Thoughts that I know will surely send me spiralling down the rabbit hole overthinkers almost always find themselves in.

I want to say I’m not so different from other overthinkers, but in a way I am.

You’ll see how.

Anyway, so I was thinking about an uncle of mine. He is long deceased, and he lived what we call a full life. Lived till 95. Despite the complete whiteness in his hair and the sagging skin under his jaw, which came in after he had turned around 80 I think, he still never missed a birthday or wedding he was invited to, went on trips with his friends, took the train to the car parts factory he owned and ran all his life. And he never said no if someone asked for help.

So, yes, he had lived a full life. His family, even the extended relatives, loved him, his friends cherished him, his workers respected him. And this was his legacy. A man admired by everyone he had ever met in his life. So when he was bid ridden in the last five years of his life and he lost the very things that made him precious (his own physicality and his willingness to be involved), he realised the part of his legacy he had built was gradually crumbling. What he didn’t want was to see it completely erased by the time he breathed his last. And that desperation – bordering on despair – is what you heard in his voice in those last years he spent on his bed; the man that once prided himself over his self-reliance now reduced to just a lump of flesh and bones who had to be helped when he wanted to use the facilities.

His voice in those years had lost all authority. And, mind you, he was an authoritative man. Despite the admirability people had for him, I heard he ruled his family with an iron fist; an inflexibly orthodox fist. I heard form my mum and dad he did not let his son work anywhere except his family business, did not even let his son have a love marriage. His wife – my aunt – had suggested opening a clothing boutique when they had been newly married, and he had shunned the idea down. There was an abundance of help reserved for people outside his house, but within it rules were rigid and unbending.

It’s been five years since he passed away. In that last month, he had become incredibly feeble; in a way, I think he had finally accepted his deteriorating physicality (and the legacy he had built) and given up. Could not even walk to the bathroom hardly ten steps from his bed, would not eat, refused to receive phone calls (which he got quite a few in that month). I don’t what he felt – that is, if his mind even was in a state to allow him to recognise what was happening to him – in those last few days before the last breath escaped him.

But, more than that, I wonder if a part of him still remains… somewhere here. As a memory, yes of course it does. I’m sure people who he had helped out, people who relied on his wisdom to get through tough times and tougher situations, still remember him. His grandkids, who as I heard were never on the receiving end of his iron fist tyranny, would still reminisce the stories he told them, of the trips to the market to buy the kids ice cream when their mother won’t allow them. The way his voice never rose even when things got more than heated in conversations, his affection for people around him (even with the rules he had laid down, I have been told he was one who would die for his family) and the sheer life he possessed, all of it I’m sure lives on; though, in a few years’ time, who knows?

But, the question is, does he still linger? Not in body of course, and not through remembrances, but consciously? Is he also someone for who, like my best friend used to say, death is not black? That after he passed on, something of him – his mind, I guess, which refused to stop functioning – was still left behind?

It must, no? You don’t live such a hearty life for decades only to have it wiped away in one clean twist of fate?

Of course, I would know. It’s never been black for me. Two years it has been since that bloody bus hit me fatally, and my mind still keeps grinding away.

Shaurya Arya-Kanojia is the author of the novella, End of the Rope, and a novel scheduled for a release this year. He hosts an audio fiction podcast, called The Four Boys Club, on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, and his short stories were nominated for The Best of the Net 2023 and the B’k Best Small Fictions 2021.

Royston Vasey of the South by H. K. VonTrapp

So I had to run home along the disused railway tracks, sounds like an ’80s movie doesn’t it, but I did. It was when we were living in that shitty little town. The Royston Vasey of the south. Only place to go out was a meat market called Monty’s. You know she charged me rent? “Wear and tear on the carpet”. She ran off with one of the guests, a little Italian man. Sent my dad a text telling him she wanted nothing to do with him and fucked off on a long weekend, leaving me to run the B&B and manage Dad. The bitch, she knew what she left me with.

He ended up fucking off to Thailand, met a much younger Thai woman, spoke barely any English, lovely woman. Her ex-husband was a copper who beat the crap out of her, and even she calls my dad a bad man. That little town is filled with toothless old men like him, and their young wives. I hope they’re building mansions back home, they deserve every penny. They’re divorced now. She married a man with teeth.

Anyway. Oh yeah, train tracks. Jon called at, like, 10am and said I had to leave NOW or Mum would die. My manager wouldn’t let me go, and I started blubbing like a baby. She went all fake nice, said stuff like “let me help you, tell me what it is, I can help”. She got uppity when I wouldn’t tell her, the fat fucking penguin. She was married to a guy who had a successful business. Portaloos. Ended up leaving him for her manager. Middle-aged Little Englanders are all constantly pissed or trying to bang each other. Or both. It’s either that or circling Poundland or Tesco Extra. Watch whatever crap is on the telly. Complain about kids. One time the council pressured my mum to take a DV family. The mum left the kids in the room by themselves the whole time. Druggy, never again, she said.

Yeah anyway, I ran home, searched like a feral squirrel through the bureau trying to find Aunty Anne’s phone number, not my real aunt, my mum’s best friend. Pulled all the paperwork out, the drawers, everything. Couldn’t find it. Jon told me go home, call Aunty Anne, get her to call Mum and warn her. I had images of some fat skinhead with a handgun hiding round corners threatening to jump her. I remember she called me on, like, Sunday evening to tell me how much fun she was having. I hated her so fucking much right then. To be fair, none of us expected him to hire a hitman. But the good news is that he did not hire a hitman. It was just the drunken ramblings of a madman. I didn’t know that, though. Spent all that weekend thinking I had killed her. Rough times.

The only good thing about all that was when you live in a shithole, with a dead-end job, surrounded by dead-end people, the parties and drugs are really fucking good. Oh the days of drinking acetone vodka in the park in the sun, stoned off your tits, DJ Shadow playing, Pot Noodle for dinner round your mate’s flat because you’ve spent all your money on base and pills, and nothing to look forward to but making sweet MDMA love with your boyfriend and dancing for 8 hours straight. Diamond times. I fucking hated that town.

Oh how I wish I had just walked away by Tricia Lloyd Waller

I love the garden at this time of year ablaze with full bloomed violet and purple hydrangea and the heady perfume of lilac cascading from fake Roman urns – if it wasn’t for Jack!

Oh but I mustn’t think  like this because if I do I’m lost!

Wriggling into my cream trench coat and fastening the belt loosely I tiptoe into the tiny shared kitchen where I reach for the sharpest  knife  in the acacia wooden block, wrap it tightly in the thick blue towel and push it down deeply into his cheap black sports bag.

My shaky fingers close tightly around his oyster card as I pull the heavy old oak front door closed behind me.

It’s a lovely late Spring morning the sky is a cloudless azure blue and there are happy week- end people, children and dogs spilling out everywhere. The smells of posh sausages frying, organic coffee and warm flaky croissants waft around but metaphorically speaking I am  miles away.

My body goes into automatic as I descend into the dim and dusty station and  board the crowded tube. At Belsize Park I alight and follow the signs for the exit.

My teeth are chattering but it’s hot, so very hot;

I feel queasy and  dizzy and my tongue seems like it’s glued to the roof of my mouth.

I mustn’t give up though! It has to be today!

The house is a lot bigger than I had imagined, I struggle with the fancy jet black wrought iron gate and virtually fall onto the door bell tripping on a hidden stepping stone.

I notice a shadow behind the stained glass window of the Victorian front door. Ringing the bell again I bend and attempt to peer into the hallway. The shadow  turns and disappears.

Oh how I wish I had just walked away here!

Oh how I wish when the door had opened and he stood there looking for all the world like a Greek God that I’d said something clever, witty even pathetic like the person I have learnt to become!

Oh how I wish I’d said that ‘We were over!’ because that’s  what I wanted to say – all  I wanted , needed to say!

I could, should have walked away purchased a big bottle of Prosecco and a tub of posh chocolate cookie ice-cream and gone home to binge  watch my favourite romantic films but I didn’t.

Slowly I unzipped his cheap black  sports bag withdrew the sabre sharp knife, released it from the thick blue towel and thrusted it deeply into his sparkling white shirted belly and then and only then did I walk away!

Sobbing I turned back to see him slumped in the doorway attempting to stem the blood gushing out of his body with both of his hands and I said what I wish I had said all those months ago.

‘We’re over!’

But then I saw her the little girl – his little girl dressed in a pale pink frilly dress, blonde plaits hanging down her back crisp white ankle socks – only now they were turning red her socks, her dress, her hands as she cradled him, even her plaits were speckled with bright red blood.

‘Daddy! Daddy Please, Please Wake Up?

 ’Daddy!’ she cried.

I slumped to the hard cold pavement as a lifetime of repressed memories surfaced before my eyes. One cold grey Winter morning, a hammering at the peeling, padlocked door of our council flat in South London. My Daddy getting up from his well worn flowery patterned armchair to open it and then……A grunt, words I didn’t understand, two men dressed in black and My Daddy on the floor. Blood so much blood on my white socks, my pretty pink dress, even on my chestnut plaits.

Oh how could history repeat itself so savagely?

In the hot and stuffy interview room at the Police Station I sip an insipid milky cup of tea that makes me want to vomit.

The man asks me questions, so many questions but I just  stare  at the spider spinning it’s glorious web up there high in the corner and repeat  my Mother’s words when she came home from work that horrible day all those years ago. The same words that I wish I had said when I first found out that Jack – my beautiful University tutor was married with a family.

‘Its over!’

Tricia Lloyd Waller has always loved story since she first learnt to speak. She has recently had work accepted by The World of Myth and  The  Orange Rose Lit Mag, she was 2022 winner of The Pen to Print poetry competition.

The Waiting Room by T. Morrow

He signed his name on the clipboard, Damian Johnson, and sat down. The clock was massive and surgical. The tick seemed ancient.

The room was modest but empty, apart from the receptionist and an older gentleman sitting across from him. Bright lights shined overhead and illuminated everything apart from the older man. The lights almost seemed to avoid him. Giant double doors guarded the entrance. Damian’s hands were balmy, and his brow leaked.

He glanced the man and his stomach dropped, like leaning too far back in a chair-the older man was staring at him. Damian quickly looked down and used his phone as camouflage-it failed. It was dead and would not power on. He knew it was charged when he arrived.

When did he arrive?

His mind ached at the thought. The clock clicked louder, a damning noise. It shook his skull and made it difficult to concentrate. The old man had not moved since he arrived-10 minutes ago.

An hour?

Damian’s breath was visible. The cold, numbing. The man appeared. A flash of shadow.

When had that happened?

Damian twitched and tried not to scream. The man did not move but simply checked his watch-a midnight color-and returned to his newspaper.

A newspaper?

Damian closed his eyes and rested his head on the white walls. Solid and cold to the touch. “Mr. Johnson” the voice sounded distant and near. Almost bored. Damian did not register it immediately; he was somewhere else entirely.

All of his memories-both happy and sad-intertwined. Flashes of love and violence played like a movie reel. The scenes cut deep, and his emotions seemed to swell to their breaking point.

“Mr. Johnson!” the receptionist persisted. Damian opened his eyes. It was dim now. The gentleman was back to his original posting. The walls listened, and the tick of the clock ceased. A light hum filled the air.

“Mr. Johnson, they are ready for you now” the lights reached a crescendo, parting for her voice.

“Thanks” Damian and the older fellow stood in unison. The man approached him and extended a wrinkled hand.

“Don’t be afraid.”

 

T. Morrow is a writer from Mississippi working in compressed fiction shaped by atmosphere, interiority, and structural minimalism.  

Churro by Jonathan Phillips

No, no, no. This isn’t right. My master has left me behind. I stand with my ears pricked, eyes focused on the door.  Any second now, he will realise his silly mistake and come back to get me. Any. Second. Now. 

Master? I bark. 

The man who stands behind me begins to speak, but it’s the usual human mumbo jumbo, so I have to turn around and face him to try to work out what he means. 

Out of nowhere, he produces a ziplock plastic bag, which, by the smell alone, I can tell is the same good quality treats my master buys. Now, if this stranger thinks he can distract me with the promise of a juicy treat. Hold that thought because the madman has just lobbed three of them onto the floor. I snaffle them up before he changes his mind. Now, to my surprise, he throws three more, so I quickly eat them too. And, no sooner than those are down the hatch, boom! Three more treats hit the floor. I have never experienced anything like it. It’s practically raining treats. And now, as I’m hoovering them up left, right and centre, I feel like the luckiest dog in the world. 

Hold the bus. What is the man up to now? He seems to have snuck off down the hallway to hide behind that door. I don’t know who this guy thinks he is fooling, but it certainly isn’t me. His scent is dead obvious, and, besides that, I can literally hear the bag of dog treats rustling in his hand. 

Suddenly, the guy jumps out playfully, mumbles something in my direction, then springs back behind the door. Does this human want to play? I think so, and judging by my thumping tail, it seems I want to play too. Off I go, top speed, bolting down the hall. But now, upon reaching the spot where I know he was hiding, the man is no longer here. His scent trail leads further into the room, but before I can follow my nose, something catches my ear in the opposite direction, so I turn around, and there he is, back at the other end of the hall. 

How did he do that? I tilt my head. Is this guy some kind of magician? 

The man strikes a sudden pose like a thief caught in the act, then he dashes off to his left. I give chase, turning a hard right at the end of the hallway to catch a glimpse of him going through a doorway to the side. Following suit, I come out onto a small balcony with a rug on the floor and two chairs squeezed in on the side. Going straight on, I come into another room, the same one as before, to see him hightailing it off to the right. I bolt across the room in hot pursuit, catch sight of him again at the end of the hallway and promptly hit the brakes. The man and I are back to where we started, facing each other from either end of the hall. Only, this time, it seems the playful human wants to do the chasing because he’s facing me with his arms out wide, and he’s doing his best at a growl. 

Oh no! The human is going to eat me, I pretend. I want to tuck my tail in for dramatic effect, but it insists on wagging briskly to the right. 

The standoff is tremendously intense before the human makes his move. And now, here he comes, charging down the hallway, ready to catch me for his supper. I bolt off in the opposite direction, across the balcony, through the kitchen and back into the hall. Round and round his flat we go until he’s in front of me again, and I am back to chasing him. 

This human is a barrel of fun, and eventually, the chasing game descends into a playfight on the floor. And this guy is a wily fellow, I’ll give him that. It’s not every day that a man bites your leg. But now, in doing so, he’s left his neck exposed, so I lunge and find my muzzle there to slobber and snuffle and nibble. The man creases up into a ball on the floor, clearly ticklish as hell. I don’t mean to blow my own trumpet here, but it is clear that I am the winner. 

​ 

This is fun! I step back and then pounce forward again. The man laughs and mumbles as he rises to his feet. And, just as I think that he’s run out of steam, he fake-throws an invisible dog treat over my head and runs the other way. His trick catches me out for a couple of seconds before I realise what he has done. But now, instead of chasing after him through the balcony, I run off down the hall. 

My plan to cut him off from the opposite direction works a little too well when, as I turn left into the living room, I see him coming, but the big goof is looking back over his shoulder, and we crash into each other. I yelp as we collide and then get trampled to the floor. The man, for all his height and upright running style, hits the floor a moment later. 

“Hey, Mister. Are you alright?” I say, getting up and hurrying over to lick him in the face. 

“I’m fine. I’m fine,” the man says, shooing me away. “If you’ll just give me a millimetre of space, I should be able to.” The man stops mid-sentence, his eyes open wide with panic, before he quickly sits up straight. “Did you just talk?” 

“I think I did,” I say, stepping back in pure surprise. “Hey! I can speak now, and I can understand you too. Say something else.” 

The man sits gawking at me with his mouth hanging open, slowly shaking his head. 

“Hello? Are you sure you’re alright there, Mister?” I say, when he doesn’t reply. “Maybe you have a concussion from knocking your head on the floor.” 

“I’m fine,” he says, the colour drained from his face. “I just–” 

“Never thought you’d be having a conversation with a dog?” 

“Exactly,” he says, perking up. “Since when can you speak?” 

“Since we crashed, apparently. Before that, I only understood a few basic commands, and everything else was mumbo jumbo. Then, we crashed into each other and, well, here we are. My name is Good Boy, by the way. What’s yours?” 

“Your name is not Good Boy,” the man chuckles. “It’s Churro.” 

“What? Are you sure? Because my master calls me Good Boy all the time.” 

“Yes, I’m sure,” he says. “It is literally engraved in the tag on your collar.” 

“Well, I never,” I say, sitting down, then changing my mind and standing up again. “Churro,” I sound out the word. My master says it often, but I had always thought it meant for me to come. 

“I’m John,” says the man. “John Human.” 

“John Human?” I snort. “That sounds like a made-up name.” 

“All names were made up at some point,” he says, slowly hoisting himself up to his feet. “Besides, at least I’m not named after a pastry dessert.” 

“What?” 

The man nods with a grin. “Moreish little things sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar.” 

“Wow,” I step back in shock. “What was my master thinking? And where is the big guy, anyway?” 

“Oh, he just nipped out to grab some beers. He should be back any minute.” 

“So, he’s definitely coming back?” 

“He’s definitely coming back,” he smiles. “And I can’t wait to see the look on his face when he realises you can talk. It’s going to blow his mind wide open. Come to think of it,” the man’s eyes light up. “I should film his reaction and post it online. A video like that could go viral.” 

Suddenly, my ears prick at the sound of knocking on the door and, filled with pure excitement to see my master again, I side-step John Human and sprint down the hall. A little too quickly, as it happens, and without leaving enough braking distance, so I crash into the door. It’s nothing,  just a little bump to the head. The most important thing is that my master has returned, so I scramble to all fours. 

Master! I bark and scratch at the door. 

I turn to see what is taking Mr Human so long, and here he comes, holding up his phone with a big smirk on his face. 

Hey, Mister, I want to say, you’re going to want to put that thing down, because I have got some absolutely extraordinary news. 

But it just comes out as barking. 

Oh, well. Easy come, easy go. 

The door swings open, and there he is, looking down at me with that face. That face that means everything. 

I leap up. 

Good boy, he says. 

And you know what? He’s not wrong. 

Masculine by Daniel Cartwright-Chaouki

That man, that landed on the beach

maybe he killed a man

that grew tomatoes that tasted like

artificial sun and paraffin

That man, who peeled onions on the patio

with thick thumbs

in the same place he used to hammer chain

That man, with stones lined up on the wall

ready to aim at the neighbour’s cat

who used his potato patch as a toilet

That man, who ate so many fishcakes in the war

the thought of ever eating one again

would turn him seasick green

That man, who cleaned his tools

like a soldier cleans his gun at night

That man, made of weld

maybe he killed many men, he never said

That man, he seemed so soft to me

that had I ever dared to hug him

the two sides of his body might have met

and squeezed out everything that passed

in between

 

Daniel Cartwright-Chaouki is a gardener and writer from Birmingham, England. He writes about trees and plants (mostly) and people (sometimes) and other unimportant things. His work has featured widely both in print and online including Pulp Poets Press, Fixator Press, Password, The Lake, Coin Operated Press, Sextet, Alocasia and 100subtexts magazine.

Vacancy At The School Of Night by Andrew Joshua Kerr

It is surprisingly well-known for a secret society – that clandestine colloquium called, ironically, The School of Night; the irony being, of course, that they prefer to meet in the morning and, rather than pontificate upon prescient issues over brandy and cigars, proudly profess their ignorance between cups of coffee and countless cigarettes.

This School has always comprised the artistic and intellectual elite of each and every British (and Irish) generation since it was founded, some not insignificant time ago, by Sir Walter Raleigh, and attended by the ill-fated Christopher Marlowe (Sir Walter himself being equally ill-fated, in his own way). It counts amongst its illustrious alumni such notable names in the fields of science and art as, for example, Charles Babbage, Thomas Chatterton, and Oscar Wilde. More recent graduates include the likes of Brendan Behan, Dylan Thomas, Alan Turing, and Amy Winehouse.

The faculty, as it currently stands, contemporaneous with this brief gazetting, consists of a totemic Englishman, a titanic Irishman, and a Teutonic Scotsman who, consciously mindful and respectfully wary of their positions in this esteemed order, talk only in intentional tautologies and redundant repetitions, and take great pains to delay their ignominious and inevitable infamy by attempting to remain anonymous, either by never beginning a project, never ending a project, or dallying so long in the middle of a project that they settle down for an afternoon snooze and forget entirely what the project was supposed to be about. That was, of course, until the fateful day when the Irishman, neglecting common sense and any form of nicotine other than a piece of remarkably tasteless pharmaceutical chewing gum, put a splash of brandy into his large coffee (or, more likely, a splash of coffee into his large brandy), picked up his pen, and hypothesized that after Adorno, no opinion about anything whatsoever could be expressed without first apologizing to history.

It was at this juncture that the Star Court (supposedly abolished by the Long Parliament in 1641 due to its excessive power, arbitrary methods, and oppressive practices) became involved and, summarily, the Irishman was never seen nor heard from again.

It is with this brief, but well-documented contextual history in mind, that the present author was rather bemused to encounter the following advertisement in the wanted section of his morning paper:

Secret society seeks silent partner for profound deliberations upon sweet fuck all. Preference will be given to those candidates who can neither read nor write, have little to no interest in painting or politics, and are deaf, dumb and blind to the world around them. Musicians considered, but lyricists need not apply.

Needless to say, the present author is rather disinclined to submit his CV.

 

Andrew Joshua Kerr is a Belfast-born, Irish writer currently living in Vietnam. 

 

One Thing in Common By Nadine M. Brown

I wanted to be the guy who hung off the back of the garbage truck, to feel the adrenaline ignited by racing cars, dream of being a professional stunt driver, become a busy advertising executive, sit in a window office, achieve work/life balance, work from home, not change out of my pajama bottoms, retire early.

I wanted to live down the street from my parents, buy a condo downtown with a lake view, move to Seattle with my flannel and combat boots, not live alone anymore, find a home in a good school district, stay near my daughter once she graduates college.

I wanted to be kissed, for love to be enough, find a way to say goodbye without the side effect of heartbreak, retreat and simply be left alone, pack away my emotional baggage to be ready to share my life with someone, find an amazing man to call my husband, celebrate my 50th wedding anniversary.

I wanted to live life on my own terms, to be brutally honest to avoid being blindsided, prove that I am capable of standing on my own two feet, realize all choices have consequences and learn from my mistakes, find a healthy balance between the past/present/future, know I am enough, start my own family, be called mommy.

I wanted to be the best mom I could be, give her a playmate since I couldn’t give her a sibling, supplement her teachers with my unconventional life lessons, become a trusted resource, provide an open ear, linger as a voice of reason, keep her safe without stunting her freedom, be someone she will want to call and come visit voluntarily.

I wanted to live as if I was invincible, break the rules, take risks I was lucky to survive, spend all my discretionary income on travel, eat/drink & be merry, maintain my mobility despite the aches & creaking, focus on longevity and play it safe, adopt a healthier lifestyle, live long enough to meet my grandchildren.

Dreams evolve as life rewards you with perspective. I’ve climbed the hill one success, mistake and lesson at a time. I have stood at the top of the hill, appreciating all the events & people who have been a part of my incredible journey up. Unfortunately, my decent down the other side has been quicker than I hoped. I am pleased to have very few regrets tugging on my consciousness. Although there is no end to my path in sight, I am more cautious with each step forward, carrying heightened awareness that all journeys are unique to the individual, but the ending is always the same.

Nadine M Brown is a Chicagoland native, whose essays, prose, and poetry are grounded in her version of truth as a way to help process life. She does not consider herself a writer, but rather someone who is capable of writing coherently. Now that she has a few decades of living behind her, she has started sharing tidbits of her experiences because that is what middle-aged people do.

Two Coins by Dina Perthakines

As we roasted our dinner by a dark cedar lake, I knew I was dreaming. You adore fire and flames, but detest nature at night.

Looked up through dozens of snapping white sparks to see a canny man towering over the embers, smiling too wide with too many teeth.

Tried to offer him hot dogs, but you snatched them back from me. Sharing food with weird strangers was never your thing.

The canny man glowered. Waggled ten twiggy fingers tipped with crushed ivory shells, dripping baby bird viscera that sizzled on the glowing red wood. You sniffed in disgust and he poked at your forehead.

Then he asked about your scar, but you kept your lips shut.

So I told him a story.

About a masked woman standing in winter on a long snaking line while the sky spat burning ice chips into her ears. Guards barked out orders. Show me your papers. Do you have a fever? Lady, step to the side. Of more waiting and barking and ice and directives.

Just to ride up an elevator and arrive at a doorway, blocked by a minotaur in hospital green. The woman heard beeping, then a cold prickly whisper. His cellmate’s infected, and we can’t let him leave. Save yourself, woman, turn around now, and hasten back home. I’m feeling a mite peckish and you smell rather tasty. Don’t let me see your shadow darken this passage again.

But she’d come for her love and crept down the hallway. Plucked a vial from her purse and swallowed it down. Shrank herself to an insect and scurried beneath the minotaur’s notice to find her mate bound to a mattress, arms strapped to the bed. Lying there all stitched up like a roughly worn hand-me-down. Missing a kidney and still as a stone.

Too small to untie him, she crawled up a pant leg, sat on his pillow, and sang him awake.

And there they stay trapped, alone and together, in a sick place of healing, a prison of plague.

Boring as heartbreak, yawned the canny man. You must pay the toll. Now go jump in the lake.

But you’re afraid of deep water.

So down I dove through choking reeds and slithery things til I reached slimy bottom. Sifted all night through silt for some trinket until my hand brushed against cold skin and I shivered to a stop.

Found a catfish sleeping in her mud bed, gold coins woven pretty into her whiskers. Her only beauty, arresting on a flat homely face. I’ll just take two, I promised, reaching quite stealthy, unbraided them gently. Sorry, I murmured, fisting them tightly. Tucked my arms to my sides and kicked for the top.

Held out my hands to the man who trailed blood on my palms. He plucked the coins up, bit both hard with incisors, and buttoned them into his eye sockets. Then melted away on a smoke tendril twisting up to the treetops where he roosted in wait for others like us.

Opened my eyes in our bed to find you just sleeping. Rolled up like a taco in the soft blanket I bought when you came home to mend.

Or maybe I was still dreaming. Thought I heard that catfish slopping her way across our bedroom floor. Swish, splat, gurgling and gasping, crying out for her jewelry. Buried my face in your shirt and breathed you all in. Stuffed plugs in my ears ‘til it was mostly silent again.

Woke up the next morning and fetched the mop from the closet. There were puddles on the floor and I worried you’d slip.

Dina Perthakines is a writer and licensed psychologist in New York City. She’s worked in a range of settings, from hospitals to non-profit AIDS service organizations to universities. Her work is upcoming in BULL and Flash Fiction Forum.

Poem During A Pandemic – Courtney LeBlanc

A girl forgets she has a body
she can feel, that she exists
outside this bubble she’s created.
Once she would choose escape, run
away to a place with warm skies
and salty air. Now she stays grounded
or at least tries. She nods to the other
runners she sees, fewer each day. No
words are exchanged, a mute nod
of encouragement, sometimes
a wave. This world looks so
different from what she imagined.
She sometimes wishes to go back
to when the anxiety that raced
through her blood was due to the lover
whose name she rarely breathed
into existence. Now she stares
out windows, the world trudging
forward in a strangely silent way—
like a movie without sound, her
motions exaggerated. But if there’s no
one to witness it does it matter
if she cooks in her underwear? Does
it matter if she dances to 80s hits
at midnight? She bakes brownies,
licks the spatula, pulls the pan
out early so the brownies are so gooey
she needs a spoon to eat them. She does
this, cross-legged on the couch, her dog
curled up beside her, the world slowly
turning outside, death creeping
a little closer each day.

Courtney LeBlanc is the author of Beautiful & Full of Monsters (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press), chapbooks All in the Family (Bottlecap Press) and The Violence Within (Flutter Press). She is also the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Riot in Your Throat, an independent poetry press. She has her MBA from University of Baltimore and her MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. She loves nail polish, tattoos, and a soy latte each morning. Read her publications on her blog: http://www.wordperv.com. Follow her on twitter: @wordperv, and IG: @wordperv79.

Image via Pixabay

Streams Of Consciousness II

1. Untitled – Lindsey M. Heatherly

I’m exhausted and I’m angry and I hate myself and I want to be known but I hate being judged I need to throw the clothes in the wash I want to quit that project I started I’m tired of expectations I hate my body I hate that I’m fat I want to be skinny and dainty and quiet I don’t want to take up space I want to be what men want But I also want to be myself I want to be loved by someone who sticks around I don’t want to have to explain myself I don’t want to give feedback on that piece tonight but if I wait until tomorrow I might not feel well enough to do it It’s another thing to add to the list I want to quit Twitter I want to quit everything literary I want to skip work tomorrow I want to go on a trip I want to want someone who wants me back I don’t want to listen to her talk about her ex and I know I do the same thing sometimes I am such a hypocrite I need to get the oil changed on Saturday I need to eat better food I need to eat less I need to spend less time on Twitter I need to figure out how to find comfort when everything is scratchy wool on my skin I want silence and waterfalls and a black hole and the Aurora Borealis My head hurts I want to cry but I’m too tired The vaccine comes tomorrow which is good but I dread People don’t like me when I share who I am I’m not easy to handle or swallow I make things difficult I want peace I feel like my old life was a hundred years ago He isn’t talking to me Why am I surprised He only wants to talk when he’s horny Maybe that’s all men I want to die I don’t say that much anymore but it’s true sometimes It would be easier you know? To have all this behind me I hope the laundry dries by morning

Lindsey M. Heatherly is a Pushcart nominated writer (Red Fez & Pithead Chapel) born and raised in Upstate South Carolina. She has words in X-R-A-Y, Emrys Journal, Schuylkill Valley Journal, and more. She spends her time at home raising a strong, confident daughter. Find her online at https://r3dwillow.wixsite.com/rydanmardsey or on Twitter: @rydanmardsey.

2. Untitled – E E Rhodes

You know about the Beaufort Scale, which runs from 1 to 12. You’ve used it countless times, and not only for the weather. Maybe for the moods your oldest always seems to be in? Maybe for the state of your youngest kid’s room? Maybe for how you feel compared to all the other girls you graduated college with? Maybe to let your husband know if he should come home quick-smart? Yeah, you know what the different levels are exactly.

Where 0 is calm. The calm you feel when the laundry is done and the house is quiet and the shopping is put away and there is nothing and no one to see you hold on to the edge of the countertop so tightly your knuckles turn white.

Where 1 is light air, just ripples without crests, the sound of something awful, but only in the distance. So far away you don’t really hear it, you just know the effects it’ll have when the impact finally arrives.

Where 2 is a light breeze with wavelets with crests of a glassy appearance, not breaking, not breaking, not breaking, yet.

Where 3 is a gentle breeze, where the crests begin to break and there are scattered whitecaps. Because you read that note you found in his shirt pocket in the laundry. And you stuff your fist into your mouth and bite down hard.

Where 4 is a moderate breeze with small waves with breaking crests. Like you texted a photo of the note to your husband and know that something bad is now coming.

Where 5 is a fresh breeze with small amounts of spray. The kind that will soak you if you don’t pay attention. The kind that started, you’ll tell yourself later, when you weren’t paying attention, and that will make you desperate to start that part over again.

Where 6 is a strong breeze and long waves begin to form. The sort that knocks your feet from under you when you thought you were solid. You tell yourself that again. You thought you were solid.

Where 7 is a high wind, and everything heaps up. Actually breaking. And maybe is already irredeemably broken.

Where 8 is a gale with moderately high waves with breaking crests forming spindrift. With a spray that blinds you, scrubbing hard at your salt-smarting eyes. And you just trying to keep your head above water. Not waving. Drowning.

Where 9 is a strong gale which rolls right over you, and which crowds your visibility, extinguishing everything but the blinking-blue pilot-light on the stove.

Where 10 is a storm, that thing you never once saw coming, and all your thoughts are upended, foundering on the rocks of how is this happening? With much reduced visibility, narrowed down to that hateful blinking-blue light of whatever her name is.

Where 11 is a violent storm. With thunder and lightning. And everything in the kitchen is aggressively shaken, and your husband is belatedly home in answer to your level 4 text. Where you think things can’t get any worse.

And 12 is a hurricane force where she comes into the kitchen behind him. And all the gathered fronts come into alignment to create a perfect storm.

3. It’s not – Ellen Symons

When I wake crying it’s not because of you.

It’s because of the sun. It’s because of the way the snow glistens in sharp light. It’s because the moon played across the field all night long, chasing rabbit and red fox, coyote and mouse.

It’s because the cat is 12, when yesterday she was a kitten. And tomorrow she’ll be 20. It’s because of the grey in my hair and the wrinkles at my eyes, the cracking in my knee, the arthritic finger.

It’s because someday I won’t remember the years we had together, and all of this sorrow will have been wasted.

When I wake crying, it’s not because of you.

If it were because of you, I would have to call. I would have to rise from my bed, lift my head from your pillow, run into the world and appear at your door. I would have to hear you say no, it’s not a good time. The dishes aren’t done. The bed isn’t made. After all this time, of me washing your dishes, of me making your bed, I would have to ask why. Why, I would have to say. Is she there with you. I would have to listen. While you lied. No. It’s not a good time.

If it were because of you, there would be no remedy. There would be no stitch in time, no glue for my heart, no waterproof miracle paste that would hold the torn flesh as blood slicks its edges, as it slips through my shivering fingers. If it were because of you, I would never mend.

It is not because of you. I will stay in this bed for the sun and the moon that tumble across it. For the downy loft of its covers. For the small purring warmth of the cat at my knees. Not for your scent. Not for the smell of you ground into the fibres. Lemon and sweat, the shampoo you use, the heat of your body. Not for the way my figure shapes around the space. The space you once held. Where I held you.

I will leave this bed when. When it’s a good time. When my knees are cold because the cat has long padded to the warmth of the window seat. When I have followed the sun and the moon to the ends of their tracks. When the mouse and the rabbit have squealed in the night. When my water-chapped hands have smashed each of your dishes. When I have lost the smell of you to the fust of my own lingering malaise. When I have dreamed every dream I can muster, and no dream can undo what I have mended. When I have forgotten your lies.

Ellen Symons writes poetry and fiction from a corner of the sofa, or while walking through the trees and fields of Lanark County, Ontario, Canada. Her published work includes a poetry collection, Economies of Gratitude. She is completing her first novel.

4. On the eve of forty – Nicola Ashbrook

Is this forty then? It’s hard to concentrate with the echoes of Fortnite through the wall and my husband clattering in the kitchen. But that’s life now; rain pattering the window.

I hope it doesn’t rain tomorrow on The Big Day. Not that much is happening but if it was dry while we walked, that would be something. It might take a slight edge off a BIG lockdown birthday.

I certainly didn’t think is how it would be when I imagined it a year ago. We even talked about a joint party at one point. Dancing – imagine that.

People say we’ll have to celebrate later, when all this is over, whenever that is, but the moment will have passed by then. No one cares about a fortieth six months after it. Maybe they do. Maybe I don’t. I don’t know.

I don’t know what I think. I know it’s hard she isn’t here. When I had all these frivolous thoughts a year ago about the best way to spend a thirty-ninth year, I didn’t envisage I’d be doing this – the major birthday thing – without her. I still can’t believe she’s gone and everything that has happened this year has happened. But nothing feels real. How can it in a pandemic? More than fifteen-hundred dead today.

Maybe it’s all inconsequential anyway.

What could I possibly even need when we can’t go anywhere? I feel materialistic wanting anything. It’s pointless. You don’t take the stuff with you. But I want things just the same. Not excessive things, just some things to make me feel like it has been a special day and people care. Maybe slightly excessive. I don’t know. A bit of excitement.

We’re having Thai. And cake, I assume.

I’m torn about how much fuss you should make about your own birthday. I feel you should love your own birthday but I want and don’t want the fuss. It can be a bit presumptive. I don’t think that’s the right word. A bit exposing, maybe. I don’t like the pressure to like things. I’m a nightmare.

I don’t want to be a nightmare. I want to be relaxed and pleasantly surprised. I want to survive it intact.

I probably should have a word with myself about positives and upsides and making the most of things and not being dead yet. Even though she is.

She’d be telling me my birth story now – if she were here – about how it snowed and my dad nearly didn’t make it. Imagine if it snows tomorrow. I sort of think it’s bound to rain for my luck. I should have been at the hairdresser yesterday. We should have been staying in

Chester tomorrow. Some presents haven’t arrived because of Brexit. I half think everything is shit.

But I know it isn’t. We’re okay. We’re well. I have my boys. I have everything I need. It’s just another day. No big deal. I’m overthinking it. I’m going to bed.

5. Walking Away – Mike Hickman

Geoff knew that, when it happened, balloon-limbed or not, he would try to walk away. He’d known, in fact, even before November’s trip to A and E. Because, of course, he’d gone and turned his ankle over on the way to the job, hadn’t he? It was a two mile walk, mostly uphill, and he’d no money for the pauper’s chariot. So he’d stood at the bottom of the just-washed steps in the shopping centre and he’d stamped on his foot until the feeling had come back. With the exception of a bit of a chunder into the gutter, and the loss of a shoe that he’d later had to cut off his swollen foot, it had all worked out well enough. The others had led the fuzz a merry dance while Geoff had walked the other way with the goods to conceal at his leisure. All as planned. With added limp.

And then there was the last time he’d spoken to Debbie. He’d started walking even before ending the call. By the time he’d got home, it was half two in the morning and she’d already had a go at leaning on the others to get the charge withdrawn. She meant well – she always did, poor Debs – but she ought to have trusted him. This once, at least. For his part, he’d gone down for six months. The rest of the crew hadn’t been so fortunate.

And then there was last November. Two weeks into the new job his probation officer had landed him, and Geoff had treated himself to a Friday night bus home. He’d been standing on the curb when he’d been hit by the dizziness and the balloon arms.

He could have got on the bus, could have headed home, could have cut out the middle-man and gone straight to the hospital. He’d done none of those things. He’d batted away the concerned old dears, turned on the weakest of his heels, and started walking. Even in the middle of a coronary, he’d tried to walk away.

And then, when he’d later on ended up at A and E, he hadn’t been able to sit down. He’d paced around the vending machines and he’d circled the Costa Coffee in reception in the hope that – what? That he could walk away from himself? That he could escape his own skin?

Yeah. Exactly that. And it had worked, too. Just a mild one this time, the doctors said when he was eventually discharged. If he rested up, he’d be fine.

And he would be. Now the others had been sent down, it was just a matter of retracing the route he’d taken that night when he’d called in with the anonymous tip. He’d buried his stash in the rec. If there was any strength left in those balloon arms of his, he’d liberate his share. For Debbie. For everything he’d not been able to provide her all these years.

Only then would Geoff be ready to walk away.

Mike Hickman (@MikeHicWriter) is a writer from York, England. He has written for Off the Rock Productions (stage and audio), including 2018’s “Not So Funny Now” about Groucho Marx and Erin Fleming. He has recently been published in EllipsisZine, Dwelling Literary, Bandit Fiction, Nymphs, Flash Fiction Magazine, Brown Bag, and Safe and Sound Press. His co-written, completed six-part BBC radio sit com remains unproduced but available to interested producers!

6. Kindness Cache – Shweta Ravi

Into the void of her open wound, kindness seeps like time, doing more good than love has ever done. Entangled in spaces with people who are supposed to love her and the ones she was born to love, the heart feels at home until it doesn’t. While chasing milestones in love, she runs into kindness like a possibility or a parchment addressed to her, unremembered under a heap of musty leaves. Kindness is her secret jab of serotonin that she takes without telling anybody. She rides its curve in the reciprocated smile of a stranger, leans on lines penned with words of encouragement and perches on those elevations felt within when kindness whispers – your being matters. Being nice can be the nicest thing.

Love behind closed doors isn’t always a sobremesa, especially when love is ardently performing ‘the Hour of Judgement’- it was nice to have you born, but you weren’t needed enough, when you were growing up you weren’t achieving enough, if your past spills into tears you aren’t letting go enough, if your womb hasn’t delivered yet you aren’t holding enough, if you went down the cliff you didn’t have wings enough and now that you have been found alive, you just weren’t miserable enough!

When her love is a bleached jacket, compassion sews her a new sense of self-worth. In turn she wants to be kind to others, to treat them the way she wishes to be treated. Kindness makes her believe that the man with the toothless grin doesn’t have to be a crook, that the madness of the woman in the asylum is a manifestation of intense pain and in this price tagged world where even vials of happiness shall soon be available over the counter, often all one needs is shared time.

Love’s labour’s lost too insanely in expecting the entire universe to conspire when one wants something desperately. The universe must have more urgent matters to resolve, considering we are hundred seconds away from apocalypse on the Doomsday Clock. She finds more contentment in cosmic kindness, in the space and sun it spawns. She crawls up one ray of light each day to pluck herself half a ray of hope. Gratitude is goodness, perhaps all that the planet needs in this hour, to be handled with care what was manhandled in love.

In the continuum of love, kindness keeps her anchored. She strongly believes it has less cardiovascular consequences than love, agreeable or disagreeable. If she were to choose between love and kindness, she would keep love for stories and kindness for a lifetime.

Shweta Ravi is a writer and educationist, lured by both- the simple and the spell-binding. Her work mainly focuses on the intersection of ecology, culture and literature. Her pieces have appeared in Active Muse, cwwriters.org, Women’s Web and Ayaskala.

7. Eggcorn – Amy Barnes

I’ve forgotten my name. Again. Have you seen it? I look in the wanted ads to see if someone has found my name, perhaps lost in the park on a run or under a church pew or buried under a produce aisle cantaloupe. There are other missing things listed as found, a braided gold wedding ring with initials, dogs, cats, one shoe, a silver spoon, a bag of walnuts. They’re the odd things peoples’ lives are made of. As I search for my name, I see a neighbor with a missing finger band, another one holding a real leash to walk an imaginary dog, a mother winging baby food to a baby mouth on a spoonless airplane. I look down at my shirt and see only a name tag that says My name is

I write the alphabet inside the cloud-filled globe that is my head now after the accident. There are puppet animals peeking around cumulus and cirrus matter. They sponsor my day’s search with different letters but there’s no rhyme or reason in how they write chalk letters in my head, sing song the week day to me like a lullaby.

I want to see those letters out in real life, in architecture so I keep walking everyday. I find windows and doors that look like h’s and o’s and a’s. I look for my name in trees and high rises and roads and power lines with bird commas dividing each letter from the next.

I return home and turn on the box where sounds live. The game shows are the enemy, gaming against me, always winning people with first and last names and first money and last turns. I watch the named people for the letters they gift to me. Do you want to buy a vowel? Yes, please I scream at the screen just in case my name starts with a vowel.

When I can’t take the box people anymore, I turn to book people with sacred names. The most boring parts become the most interesting. The begats they are called. It’s a word that makes me laugh. I read the long lists of names and imagine those people forgetting their names too. Who could remember a name with that many syllables and a secret meaning that only g-d knows?

The stack of tiny people name books on my sleeping place table grows. I flip through pages for inspiration. The man who joins me wearing a not-lost silver band, the one with a name that rhymes with something and a last name that is mine too, reads mystery papers about mystery and names and rooms. I read books of mystery words. Blurred names. Not my name.

I dream of my name. In liquid lights against my liquid eyeballs. Of a newspaper column with lost names lined up waiting to be claimed. In the morning I call the paper and ask to place an ad. They ask for my name.

I laugh.

8. Unexpected Item in the Bagging Area – Steven Patchett

A brand of pasta in various sauces has a promotion for a video game. But only one of the flavours has it. I assume it’s because the mac and cheese is the sort of pasta that people who play video games would prefer. Quick, filling, familiar, safe. You’d never find it on the Tuscany sausage flavour. I have no idea if it actually tastes like Tuscany sausage. I’ve never eaten a sausage from Tuscany. I doubt I could find Tuscany on a map.

I add a couple of packets to the basket.

I check my phone again. It weighs heavy in my hand, cold, inert.

I’ve never liked tinned meat, I stare in horror at the stuff once it’s squeezed out of the tin. But I don’t have to defrost anything, so I don’t have to think about it. Time saved is time earned. A few more items added to the haul.

I check my phone again, just to be sure.

Cereal next. Her favourite has gone back up in price.

I had teased her about it, telling her it’s for kids, full of sugar, not good for her. As always I’d misjudged her mood, gone too far. I could see the weary look, the sparkle fade from her eyes. I told her I’d get some anyway, only teasing, didn’t mean it.

She nodded, but couldn’t look at me.

Bread, milk, apple juice.

A5 jotter, lined. These days she loves to write, scrawling words on the page as fast as she thinks them. Trying to squeeze all her thoughts out onto the page so they’ll be there forever. She doesn’t want me to read them.

Paracetamol, re-reading the notice telling me I can only buy two packs at a time. In my head, the words sound spiteful, full of denial. As if they know what I think when I listen to her tortured breathing at three in the morning.

The phone is starting to drag, like a millstone. I note the time. I’ve been gone longer than I’d intended. A sickening need is heavy in my stomach. I push it down where it tangles up in guilt.

I looked at her jotter a week ago. I won’t look again.

I prefer the self-service tills. No excuse to talk to anyone, until the assistant casually confirms that I’m old enough for the tablets.

My phone rings and I drop my shopping from nerveless hands.

The scanning machine is talking to me, but I can’t hear what it’s saying.

All I can do is stare at the flashing words on the phone.

Steven Patchett is an Engineer, Father and Writer, living and working in the North East of England. His Flash Fictions have been published in Ellipsis Zine, 100 Words of Solitude and The Cabinet of Heed. He can be found on Twitter, being encouraging @StevenPatchett7

9. It’s all about the boxes – Kinneson Lalor

It’s all about the boxes and the things inside and peanuts and seeds and the damp place in the middle of the page where my hand was wet from washing dishes and then I picked up the pen to write and it all came out and even though my wrist ached and my head felt like that sort of numb you feel when your toes are cold but your nose is warm but somehow it still runs in streams down your face and creeps into the crack of your collar. What even is starch? Starch. It seems so clean and beholden. Throbbing. There’s a cut on my palm only it’s not a cut, it’s some pinprick wound I don’t remember getting but think is probably from the thorns on the barberry when I was dismantling the Christmas centrepiece into the silver bin I thought I would use for chicken feed except coronavirus came then bird flu came and the chicken coop my boyfriend husband bought me for my birthday, the really expensive bright green plastic one that I justified environmentally somehow, all set up with tricks and treats since Halloween but completely empty, the avian flu-carrying wild bird shit collecting on the grass. But I’ll keep feeding them. They’re hungry and they’re pretty and I sort of love them and get heartbroken every time one of them breaks itself on my window. I wonder how Bret Easton Ellis is spending his pandemic. Weirdly, I assume. Strangely. I’ve never read any of his stuff but the spines are pretty, fading on my south-facing shelves. I’m not sure why I thought we’d have more plants than books. I guess I misjudged what sort of person I am. Why did I even want to be a plant person? I think it’s because they breathe. Yet I keep buying books and can’t give them away. Fucking pandemic.

Kinneson Lalor followed a PhD in Physics from the University of Cambridge with an MSt in Creative Writing from the same institution. She is Australian but has lived in the UK for over a decade. Her work has appeared in various places including The Mays and Tiny Molecules, and she writes a regular blog about sustainable gardening for edibles and wildlife.

10. Punctuations – Mandira Pattnaik

All I can think of now is punctuations. And interruptions, pauses, periods, truncations and interruptions.

We are outward bound again. We’re perennially moving out, in any case, infinitely agitated atoms. Only this time the boxes are stacked at the doorway.

When you take a call, and stroll out of the room, I invite the sunshine in. Don’t know why you always keep the curtains drawn.

A mynah sits on the window sill. At rest. Except its eyes. Flaps its wings twice and flies off, one last time, out of my sight.

Below, the cars hoot and belch. What a contrast from the countryside home you promised for sixteen years.

I close my eyes, imagine silence. I like the smell of soundlessness.

Towards the end of our fifth year, when I was at the University, I remember collecting lampshades. You hated the play of colored light, called it chaos. I thought it as comma, interruption, so when it all burst open, I’d be prepared.

I hear you shouting downstairs. Clash of syllables, pitches. Bass and pitch hitting the walls. Another something gone awry. There were so many over the past year. I’m waiting for the white light that holds all.

When you return, a huge exclamation mark calibrates your brows, you don’t elaborate.

We strap up on torn seats. The Fiat was the first thing we bought, the last thing we still own. The engine thrums steadily, loyal like a dog.

Ahead of us, the scenes flip and change. Strokes, semicolons, parentheses. Couples, stretchers, mothers with prams.

The unrest rages, the pandemic powers us out of our jobs, all I hear now are the ellipses.

Mandira Pattnaik (She/Her) writes in India. Work has appeared in print and online including in Lunate, Ilanot Review, EllipsisZine, Door=Jar, Cabinet of Heed and Trampset. Tweets @MandiraPattnaik

11. Figures on a beach – Colin Alcock

They didn’t see me, sat far back up the beach, on the sand bank, tucked into the marram grass. I’d first spied them from the cliff path, before descending the steep steps to sea level. Just two figures and a dog. It could have been anybody, out for an early morning summer stroll, but even before I knew it was them, I recognised Brutus, my dog.

Everyone had told me I was so lucky to attract such a young bride, when I was far more than simply mature. Twelve years between us; an unbelievable love that seemed unbreakable. And for many years it was. We blended as one. I, the artist, putting beautiful dreams onto canvas, when I could. Painting poetic scenes of Cornwall that filled the gift shop walls, for an income. Wandering coastline, fields and moors looking for inspiration. She, the writer, plucking emotive words from the sky, the trees, the waves that rolled into rugged shores, sandy bays and quiet harbours.

But, as I grew to a more crusty age, there were tourists who sought something more than my visual poetry. And sought Anna for more than just her words. I saw signs, yet tried to hide them from my mind. But always, they were there. I spoke my suspicions only to Brutus, my loyal companion. Soft furred, silly, always ready to play; ready to take my thoughts away from despondency. But Anna had changed; she took to walking Brutus, whereas before, she insisted he was my dog, my responsibility. Then, for two-week spells, in season, I would see the slight smile, the glint of her eyes, as she recalled a moment of the day, a thought of tomorrow. It was in her stories, too. Words that reflected cherished relationships. But I doubted ours. Those two weeks always ending with her taking Brutus for an early morning walk along the beach, on a Friday, sometimes Saturday. Changeover day. Saying her goodbye. Then, come winter, the fire between us seemed always rekindled.

Now, I have reached pensionable age and fit though I may seem, I lack the vitality, the virility she retained. This summer, I knew it to be different; two weeks long passed by. Brutus even more her constant companion. I was losing her. Completely. I was just wrong about how.

I watched them that day, unobserved. It could have been someone she only casually met, they stood so far apart, Anna tossing a stick into the oncoming tide, for Brutus to fetch. Then racing back, sea foam at her feet. He calling, laughing, then coming closer, walking with her, taking her hand, enfolding her. And then the kiss. Lingering. Loving. Brutus ignored, circling at their feet.

Today, distraught, I walk slowly from the Covid ward, having heard her last goodbye; having given her my forgiveness. Avoiding my own infection by taking that sudden, selfish break alone, after what I’d seen that day. Though never telling her why. Perhaps, though, it is him she is with, now.

12. Melancholy Roses (with apologies to Marc Almond) – Sheila Scott

Melancholy is part of the Scottish DNA. Why else would we choose a spirit that reduces you to tears as our national drink? Why else would we live in a country that, had Noah lived here, would have resulted in an armada of arks (‘That’s gotta be it this time, Naamah. I’ll be in the shed making a big fuck-off freighter if you need me.’).

For crying out loud even our flag is blue.

I think that’s why we do dusk so well. Skeletal trees watch, inert, as the pallid rainbow (yes, even our skies are peely wally) seeps into the horizon.

MS Word thinks ‘peely wally’ is incorrectly spelt but has no alternative to offer. MS Word is often prone to fits of what frankly feels like anti-Scottish vocabulary-based discrimination. Indeed, often I am to be found at my keyboard, hair knotted with irritation, screaming ‘outwith IS a word you piece of hegemonous shit!’

‘Hegemonous’ has also just been granted the red squiggle of judgement. And ‘often’ the blue double underline indicating that, once again, Word wishes to impose a comma where none should be. This is my consciousness, pal, and I’ll decide what’s a word and what isn’t, and exactly where you can stick your fecking commas.

My stream of consciousness has just been distracted by something of a meta-quandary. Has the burning question of whether to eat the last Roses chocolate now (Hazel in Caramel as you ask) taken me out of said stream or is it, in fact, just another random artefact bobbing along on the waters of my inner monologue?

There follows a brief hiatus to resolve the sweetie conundrum by quashing its existential reality and putting the wrapper in the wastepaper basket. A tidy desk is a tidy mind, allegedly. It seems my desk perfectly reflects my mind: a pile of partly read books, nick-nacks (okay so we’re going to fight about this spelling too are we, Word?) including a NYC snow-globe, knitted plane, tiny painting on an easel, astronaut (not life-size), a windmill in a flower pot, bike-clock, felt squirrel with a walnut, two toy cars, a small wooden clown missing one foot and, doggedly fighting its turf in the middle, my laptop.

The horizon has finally absorbed the rainbow and we now have a blank indigo backdrop beyond the window.

It’s been a week of mixed news and the scales are tipping in favour of the negative. I think that’s why I’m dwelling on the Scottish predisposition to despondency. Probably our saving grace is that it’s nearly always leavened with the strong belief a) it could be worse and b) for many it is. Whilst this may not appear immediately obvious as a measure of optimism, it helps us look outward, dragging our forensic gaze towards the bigger picture.

It now feels foolish to dress a bout of navel-gazing as a national trait. Think I’ll have a rummage in the sweet bowl; there may just be a Roses Truffle left…

13. Ten past Ten – Bronwen Griffiths

It could be ten past ten or ten minutes to two. I am not sure which time I might prefer, or even if it is morning or night. At ten past ten I might be watching the evening news or, if it were morning, working on the computer whereas at ten minutes before two I would be digesting my lunch time sandwich or, if it were two at night, dreaming of strange houses. In any case, now that I look at my watch again, it reads ten fifteen or ten to three, though probably that will make little difference either to my sleep or my digestion and when I check again and realise that it is indeed night-time I wonder if I might try to sleep but though my eyes are heavy I do not think my mind will let me sleep just yet because it is restless like a stone at the ocean’s edge, continually rolling back and forth and knocking against other stones. But sleep does arrive, perhaps at four or five, and I dream of fast cycling and a kiss on the lips and indeed as I often do I dream of strange houses and all the while the rain beats on the window and the world turns towards the morning and then it is ten past ten and ten minutes to two and so on it goes.

Bronwen Griffiths is the author of two novels and two collections of flash fiction and her flash fiction has been widely published. She lives in East Sussex and when not writing likes to draw cacti, fish and stones.

14. Not You, But Me – Kimiko Wadriski Lumsden

What if I have nothing more to say? Nothing to add to the noise more than what I’ve already done? Or what if I’m totally silent again, afraid to make a mistake more than I am of never speaking up? Can that happen – the life be sucked right out of you without ever realizing it’s being done until you’re dead.

But when I say you, I mean me. I always do. Put that distance between my writing and myself. Keep it closed away, just out of reach so it’s not really me. (But it is, you see.) It’s the way that I can just keep saying the same lines in different styles, trying to find new ways for an old phrase. Another time, another time. I have tomorrow or tomorrow’s tomorrow. Push it back to the next day. Something is urgent, but never my own desires.

It’s the baby crying, the kid whining, the house is on fire. The smoke from a burnt dinner, the never-ending laundry piles, dumped and stacked on the bed, making mountains of fabric turning mountains out of molehills. Every tiny problem, I help it grow. Ignore it until I can’t anymore. Then when it’s time, finally, to do something about it. Well, then I’m paralyzed – fight or flight wasn’t my fortune, I freeze.

Immobilized, I wait for the moment to pass so I can carry on with procrastinating and endless self-doubting, the debate between me and my brain about who wins this round and who relegates. I can destroy myself through inaction. Wouldn’t that be productive? So, it turns out I am accomplished. Take that!

Regardless, I feel that I run in circles in my head, in my words. Are you getting bored of me yet? I am. It’s like I have to watch the same stilted pilot over and over, knowing that the first episode is just a trial run, a practice. Let’s skip ahead already, see where this show takes us. What else can I do but press fast-forward. I’m so tired of hearing the same old, same old. I KNOW.

I sit in my own feelings and thoughts rather than write them down, paper to pen. Fingers to keyboard, click-clacking away at what’s trapped inside this gray matter.

Maybe that’s why they keep coming back – those phrases – like a recurring dream, meant to tell you something, teach you a thing or two about whatever is bothering you. And again, with the you. Come on kid, when’ll you ever learn. I have to do better at this.

I wonder if I’m manic again or if I’ve always been teetering on that spectrum because I have these conversations with myself, I haven’t had quiet in my brain since (well when was it?) But even then, I’m sure the gears were turning. There is forever that urge for me to write down what I’m thinking. Will I always be trapped if I don’t get them out – write them down!

I’m feeling much better now.

Read more Streams of Consciousness in Issue Thirty-One

Anáil na Beatha (Breath of Life) – Sheila Scott

Rashmi leaned into the thick perspex of the tunnel, her body bending to its curve. Outside the wind tugged at the grass and tore it horizontally. She longed to be that grass.

Everyone else she knew had moved on. They had learned to live with this new life, like hamsters in plastic tube houses or rats in a laboratory maze, but she couldn’t let go.

A loose slate on the building opposite shook free and clattered off the top of the enclosed walkway. No-one batted an eyelid. Finally, a voice broke her reverie.

‘There you are!’

Rashmi turned towards her sister. Eloise was standing, hands on hips and head tilted to one side, a pose familiar to Rashmi from earliest memory.

‘I’ve been waiting an absolute age. Eventually gave up our table and came looking for you.’ She tugged at Rashmi’s arm. ‘I should’ve known you’d be wind watching again. Come on, I’m starving.’

Rashmi trailed after her sister down the long winding tunnel towards the mall. Outside, a bird was careening towards the left wall, its wings scattered and useless and its beak open in impotent protest. Eloise glanced over as Rashmi’s eyes followed its final path. A smear of feather dust decorated the exterior for a matter of seconds before the currents lifted and carried the particles clear. No trace remained.

‘Dunno how those beggars still get out there.’ Eloise rapped her knuckles on the perspex. ‘Just as well it’s made of sturdy stuff.’

Rashmi had stopped again.

‘Jesus wummin!’ Eloise pulled again at her sister’s sleeve and hauled her towards the colourful noise of the food court.

‘Don’t you ever miss it?’ They had placed their order and Rashmi was circling her glass of soda and lime round its damp outline on the paper tablecloth.

‘Hmm?’

‘The wind. Don’t you ever miss standing at the seaside, the salt air blowing your head clear of thoughts. Or breezes cooling the sun on your bare skin in summer?’

Eloise lifted one of the laminated menus from its holder and used it to fan herself.

‘You live in the past Rashmi. Do I miss spending an hour getting ready then within seconds of stepping outside having the style ripped out my hair and my make-up smeared by streaming eyes? Do I miss dodging airborne litter and flying debris? Do I miss projectile bird-shit on good outfits?’ She set the menu on the table and looked her sister in the eye. ‘What do you think?

‘Trouble is, your memories are rose-tinted.’

‘At least we were…connected.’

Eloise’s waved hand took in the perspex warren beyond the food court. ‘How much more connected could we be?’

‘Not that kind of…’

‘Chicken pesto panini?’ The waiter dropped the plate on the table without waiting for a response.

‘That’ll be m…’

‘And brie and cranberry on wholemeal.’ He deposited the second dish and left. The sisters swapped plates.

‘So, Mum rang last night…’ Eloise barely broke for breath, a mouthful of food pouched in her cheek. Rashmi took a sip of her soda and resigned herself to another lunch with her sister.

The foreman looked pointedly at his watch as Rashmi returned to her station at the depot.

‘I’ll make it up at the end of the day.’ She made a face at his retreating back.

In the changing room, she opened her locker and retrieved her uniform. As she pulled the overalls up over her boots and slid her arms into the sleeves, she stared at the photo taped to the inside of the door: two sisters in matching bathing costumes, knee deep in waves that stretched all the way back to the sky. They were grinning as the breeze tangled their salt-straggled bobs.

‘Rose tinted.’ She shoved the locker shut and pocketed her key-card.

Pete was standing by the truck, stabbing a finger at one of the hand-held devices as she approached.

‘Thought you were a no-show.’

‘Sister. Lunch. Phone call from Mum.’ She stuck out a hand for the device.

‘Lucky we got you back at all then.’ He patted the cab. ‘Loaders are done. It’s all yours.’

‘Cheers Pete.’ She clambered up the three metal bars on the side of the wagon and settled into the driver’s seat. One of the depot floor runners heaved the door closed behind her, its hefty locking mechanism slamming into place with a resounding clunk. She set the device into its port on the dashboard and considered today’s route.

‘Ya beauty. Coast here I come.’ Rashmi slid the key-card into the ignition slot and mock saluted Pete through the cabin window as the truck roared into life and began gliding along the iron track towards the exit. The siren howled throughout the depot and the floor runners retreated to their kiosks before the great doors slid open to the howling winds.

She had been ecstatic when she finally secured a transit post; this was as close as you could get to being outside on your own since the great winds began. Once on the open rail, she clipped her music box in place and voice-selected a favourite indie band. The cabin filled with the sound of twanging guitars and a decent gruff melody, and she smiled as Eloise’s accusation of her living in the past resurfaced.

‘Stuff it.’ She rattled the gear stick to the beat and sang along with gusto. The journey ahead would take her through the beautiful rolling hills of Kenville County and terminate at the pristine coastline of West Brand, previously a popular seaside resort.

The immense bulk of the truck thrummed along the monorail network requiring only the occasional input on the gear stick or brake from its driver. Cities and towns came and went. In the gaps between lay open landscapes, the blasted scrub narrating the prevailing wind direction. Occasionally, she caught glimpses of the coast: sand bulked in the far end of its curves and rocks undercut by waves thrown out by forceful currents.

Rashmi remembered the freedom of childhood summers. Wind breaks and parasols were secured with the simple heft of her father’s hand. You could build sandcastles that lasted until the careless step of a stranger caved the ramparts. You could sit on a towel with the breeze lifting your hair from shoulders sticky with sunblock. When you got bored, you could run with abandon into the rippling cool of a welcoming sea. The level surface would take your weight gladly and, as it gently lifted you up and down, you could raise a sleepy smile towards the heat of the sun.

The last family holiday to the seaside – in fact, outdoors – had been the year before the ban. The wind break had been torn from her father’s hands and vanished up and away like an overgrown kite. Grit had filled their eyes, noses, mouths, making the picnic inedible. The sea had hurled forbidding waves onto the damp sand, forcing the family high into the shelter of the dunes’ stinging grasses.

The following year, they joined the other families in the domed enclosures of Midpoint Parks.

Beach trips had been outlawed for nigh on ten years now, but she had never forgotten the feeling of those now distant outings.

The grey blocks and tube network of West Brand rose quickly on the horizon and the rail drew the truck closer to the crystal shimmer of the sea. Rashmi dropped through the gears until the truck glided to a halt within the concrete confines of the depot. Doors clanged shut behind her and floor runners emerged from their kiosks like cockroaches into a night-time kitchen. The forklifts buzzed round the back doors of the truck, carrying away the treasure to be hoarded in bays before onward distribution to the enclosed malls.

She clambered out the cabin and passed the device to the waiting clerk.

‘Lovely day out there.’ She pointed beyond the steel grey wall towards the beach.

‘Is it?’ The clerk didn’t look up, just clicked the device from the truck into a second one hanging from his belt and uploaded the data.

‘Anything to take back?’

‘Yeah. You’ve time for a coffee if you want.’ The clerk nodded to the staff canteen on the mezzanine.

‘Cool.’

Rashmi took the elevator to the upper deck and swiped her card in the door lock. She collected a coffee, wandered over to the viewing pane, and watched as the floor runners emptied and reloaded her truck. Grey overalls, grey walls, grey base, grey vehicle. She glanced up at the light tubes overhead and caught the slightest glimmer of blue sky.

When they had finished, the foreman waved up at her and Rashmi returned to the truck. He handed her the updated device and she recorded its receipt with a squiggly signature on the screen held out by the foreman.

‘Cheers, Paul.’

‘No bother. Probably see you tomorrow.’

‘Aye, no doubt.’ Rashmi once again scaled the steps to her cab. Once again, she slotted the reconfigured device into its slot on the dashboard. Once again, she waved goodbye to the foreman and listened to the siren wail as the cockroaches ran for shelter.

But this time she unclipped her seatbelt, manually overrode the sealed door of her cabin and descended the three silver rungs to the depot floor. This time, as the doors slid open at the end of the warehouse, she ran towards the daylight, beyond the prison of the compound and into the elements.

Paul hammered on the reinforced glass of his kiosk, his warning shouts trapped within the protective shell. In panic, he hit the emergency button, but she was too far ahead, the doors juddering together too slowly to prevent her escape. For a second, Paul watched as the winds devoured the solitary figure standing beyond the gap. He heard a primal howl break from Rashmi as the blast of the wind struck her face, ripped at her hair, clothes, skin.

By the time the doors clamped shut, she had gone.

Hybrid writer-scientist, Sheila most enjoys turning idle thoughts into short narratives and illustrative doodles. Her work has been published in Postbox, Edwin Morgan 100 Anthology, Cabinet of Heed, Causeway, Ellipsis Zine, Flashback Fiction, Bangor Literary Journal, Poetic Republic, and 2019 Morton Writing Competition. Her intermittently hyperactive Twitter account is @MAHenry20.

Image via Pixabay

Stream Of Consciousness Drawer Three

If Life Were Meant to Be Easy, All My Best Ideas Wouldn’t Come to Me in the Shower – Marissa Glover

My skin is dry from all the washing but I can’t put lotion on it because of allergies. I can’t cover the knuckle cracks with Band-Aids because adhesive leads to hives, and I’m not sure if my Epi-Pen’s still current. I know they expire after a while—everything expires after a while; usually it all goes bad just when you need it most.

Right now, I don’t know what I need. I’m supposed to be working but can’t think straight. My brain cells are arguing with each other, tugging the hem of my skirt for attention, saying my name over and over like a child says Mom Mom Mom Mom Mom in a store. She finally yells, WHAT? But it’s not the child’s fault she’s angry. After all, Mom ignored the child for two solid minutes when the kid only wanted to show her the monkeys on the yogurt bottles. How silly the monkeys look!

I feel sad for those kids—they only want to say something, to be heard, just some kind of acknowledgment, but then I realize they’ll get their revenge in about twelve years. Mom will tell them to do something over and over and over again, but they won’t hear a word she says through their earbuds or gamer headset. Karma, bitch.

I don’t know why I have tennis elbow now, twenty years after I retired from the game. I’ve tried every internet suggestion plus hive-mind advice. I moved my laptop from the study to the bar to the dining room to the couch. Doesn’t matter. Comfortable is an impossible position.

All this moving in place, you’d think I’d be able to keep track of things, like my cell phone, or my glasses. Sometimes I wonder if my brain cells are killing each other, if their bickering has come to blows, and whose side I’d be on.

The glasses thing became such an issue (since I can’t see without them) that I bought those eyeglass chains, and now my kid says I look like an old lady, even though I got the really cool-looking beaded ones, ordered a set of sixteen different colors before Amazon stopped delivering. Today I’m wearing periwinkle.

Part of me wants to scream, That’s because I AM an old lady! but part of me wants to show him pictures of when I was young and beautiful because if he could see me then, he’d know. He’d know how pretty his mom could be, how she changed and maybe this would make him sad too, how everything changes, how he’ll wish he had a box like mine, how everything looks better when you’re looking back.

At the bottom of the box, I found a photograph of the first boy I ever kissed. A boy who didn’t love me when I wanted him to but said I love you two days ago—now, when the world is dying and maybe we are too. When you’re poor, there’s nothing to unload before the market tanks.

Marissa Glover teaches and writes in Florida, where she is co-editor of Orange Blossom Review and a senior editor at The Lascaux Review. Marissa’s work appears in Rust + Moth, SWWIM Every Day, Okay Donkey, and Whale Road Review, among other journals. Her debut poetry collection, Let Go of the Hands You Hold, is forthcoming from Mercer University Press in 2021. Follow Marissa on Twitter @_MarissaGlover_.

 

Paul Daniels’ Stream of Suggestion – Mike Hickman

I stand in the alleyway with Paul Daniels wrapped in plastic at my wrist and the rain comes down and I wonder why I am out, and why I risk the downpour for this.

Now the stream is interrupted.

Jonny. Calvin. Andrew. All gone – some more literally than others, and they’re not standing there with me. Not then/not now. But the tar of the fence panel in front of me still haunts as I keep out of sight and I can see the spatter of more than rain down the front of my jumper and hear the shouts of those who’d pursued me into the ginnels because we’d – my friends, me (always me) – wanted to put on a show for the school, like that’s something eleven year olds do. For charity. With our own egos as the benefit. They said that, those who’d pursue. Those who still did – until recently. I stand and wait for the voices to recede and Mr Daniels, bewigged, twinkling, hefting a magic wand that isn’t as plastic as the one in the box, peeks through the Bejam carrier, capital-S-suggesting that there’s a route out of this. I believed him once – like I believed all the shiny floor telly we watched at home. You too, Paul said with a wink. You can, Paul said. They don’t matter.

But I’m still here. The tar reek at my nose and the rain down the back of my parka and the fear that I’ll be called out – again – for what I am and can’t help being. Hiding here, tucked in, not breathing, when I’m supposed to stride forward as the Year 11s round the corner, wielding the wand at them and shamelessly wearing the TV magician toupée of power which will put them where I’ve been told to put them.

They can only hurt you if you let them, son.

And

The second arrow thing that the woman in the cardy and the day-glo Crocs would tell me in Group. I’ll look it up one day. Seems profound.

This all matters – even now, with the stream interrupted. I stand in the alleyway with Paul Daniels wrapped in plastic. Jonny, Calvin and Andrew, they all head home – no-one goes for them with Kwik Save’s battery farmed finest. It’s alright for them – even standing up there in front of the school in assembly – because they’re embarrassed, they don’t want to be there, they’re not even very good at it. So that’s alright, then. Me, though? It matters and the pursuers smell that – they smell the desire for the shiny floor and the taking Paul Daniels seriously – and that’s why they go for me. When such things mattered to them. When there weren’t other things. Like now, when they have to Let Go. When we’re all supposed to.

I stand in the alleyway with Paul Daniels wrapped in plastic at my wrist and the rain comes down and I wonder why I am out, and why I risk the downpour for this.

 

A spider on my sleeve – Steven Patchett

I have a spider on my sleeve. I didn’t really notice until someone pointed it out to me.

Of course, I’ve known about it all along, caught a glimpse of it in mirrors as I walk down the high street. I haven’t actually done anything about it. It has sat there, bulbous and fat, black legs hanging on tight around my bicep, looking at me with an expression I can’t even begin to translate.

I didn’t want to brush it off, it had settled there when Mum had died. I might even have picked it up from her. They often said that she used to see things that were not there. Special eyes, she had said.

But at least I had confirmation now, I wasn’t just making it up. They told me, it’s got its fangs deep in your arm, doesn’t it hurt? But I wasn’t sure what they meant. I hurt all over, all the time, so it was hard to say if it was just the spider’s bite.

After mum had died, and the lawyers took her estate, I was sort of grateful to have something left to remind me of her.

Even if I’d considered it imaginary.

But now, of course, it wasn’t.

I took it to the zoo, to see if they could work out what to do with it. But they looked frightened when it ran up my arm onto my head, the long hairy legs wrapping under my chin. It tickled, and kept my ears warm.

They couldn’t help me in the end, far too interested in creatures they knew something about, like Black widows and Tarantulas.

I could have taken it to the cat and dog shelter, but I doubted they could have helped. They were probably less qualified than the zoo had been.

So we went to see the Doctor, the one who was prescribing the pills. I had them to make me forget, though I’ve forgotten what it was so important about remembering. The Doctor rolled her eyes and told me I was imagining things. But when I looked into the mirror I saw the spider staring back.

Have you been taking your medication, the Doctor asked. The spider looked pissed in the mirror.

Of course I have Doctor, the spider told her.

Before I could leave for home, the spider is on the move again, just leapt up onto the doctor and wrapped its legs around her head. I was so embarrassed, I pulled the spider off and told I her was sorry, meaning every word, while she sat in her chair, a funny look on her face, her mouth a big red O.

I was so mad with the spider while we rode the number 37. Everyone is looking at us, with the same funny look on their faces, as I shouted at the creature as it sat next to me.

When I got home the police were waiting there for me. Maybe they can help with the spider.

Steven Patchett is an engineer, husband and father living and working in the northeast of England. He can be found on Twitter, being encouraging, @StevenPatchett7.

 

Mission Accomplished – Ami Hendrickson

Today, I will not dwell on my problems.

This is the task I have set myself. In my mind’s ear, I can hear the “Mission, Impossible”-style voice intoning, “Your mission, should you choose to accept it…”

I do not always choose to accept it. Today, I do.

I will not focus on the current mandatory quarantine that keeps me inside when what I really want to do is meet my friend Kim for brunch at The Mason Jar, order their clove mocha – “candy coffee,” she calls it – and parse the state of the world over savory French lentils, poached eggs, and Paesano toast.

There’s a perfectly good coffee maker in my kitchen. And plenty of coffee. “This is a blessing,” I say aloud, “not a problem.”

We’re low on bread. I take two yeast packets from the cupboard and set them near the warm coffee maker. I have yeast. I have flour and oil and water. What I usually don’t have is time.

I haven’t made bread in three years – since the last time I was in the house day after day, month after month. It was a bit like quarantine, wasn’t it? Staying with you. Always within earshot. Taking care of you as your life seeped away like water from a drying sponge…

The smell of rising dough and of baking bread fills the house. It’s the smell of heaven, but it only makes me miss you more.

Today, I don’t want to think about that.

I don’t want to contemplate the logistics of how Anne Frank and her family stayed inside, hidden from the sun, teetering on the brink of existence, peering daily into the black hole of hell, for two years. (I don’t want to, but I know that by dinnertime, I’ll be wondering, for the thousandth time, if they painted a yellow circle on the ceiling somewhere, for reference. Or could they only see the sun in their imagination, when their eyes were closed, shuttered to their reality?)

I will not close my eyes. I will keep them wide open.

I will look at the dogs, happily snoring beside me, unaware of how privileged they are to be allowed on the couch.

I will drink in the sight of our daughter doing her course work online because the schools are all closed. She’s so grown up now. Seventeen. The same age I was when I met you.

Today, I will say a grateful prayer for fresh-baked bread, for a roof over my head, for friends, and for family. I will not obsess over the fact that my employer is looking for ways to cut my hours. I will not worry about paying the bills. I refuse to fracture. I will not complain.

Not just yet.

Not yet.

For now, I am going to eat these strawberries in a glass bowl that was my grandmother’s while listening through the cracked window to the bluebirds sing “chirr-chirr-chirrry” as they build their nest in the little cedar house by the mailbox.

Ami Hendrickson writes books, screenplays, and endless to-do lists. She also writes for famous horse trainers. Some of her favorite pastimes involve horseback riding, playing with her dogs, and teaching writers workshops. She lives in Southwest Michigan, where she pines for a working TARDIS.

 

Mrs Average – Ellie Rees

‘Five foot two, eyes of blue, but oh what those five foot could do. Has anybody seen my girl?’

‘I had green eyes, reader; but you must excuse the mistake: for him they were new-dyed I suppose.’ (Or was it ‘dear reader’?)

Such things stick in my head: not a jot of originality, just the dead leaves of other writers, scraps of ancient songs. I’ve always been ‘Mrs Average’: green eyes, five foot five (now five foot three) weighing in at a steady nine stone four, shoes 5 ½ and dress size, 12. Average. Dead ordinary. However, judged by my age (another number) I have suddenly become ‘Mrs Vulnerable’, can feel the strength seeping from the tips of my fingers and even the garden secateurs hurt!

… Note to myself: Why have you not given your age? Is it possible that even at your advanced time of life you still worry about how the unseen, unknown reader might judge you? Vanity of vanities; all is Vanity!

I need to look up when to use the numerical symbol and when to write it. Why are shoe and dress sizes written one-way and other measurements the other?

Now is our Pompeii moment – I seem to have changed the subject – the sun is shining and it’s Spring. I have enough to eat and everything appears to be normal. Yet… I am obsessed with statistics. How many dead in Italy or Spain in the last twenty-four hours? I wash my hands singing two choruses of Ring-a-Ring-of-Roses and remember we are only two weeks behind Italy.

Ah, so now both the Heir to the Throne and the Prime Minister are afflicted; I wonder what the statistical chances of that happening are? Come to that, I wonder what the odds are on my super-fit, first-born having the virus, while – thank God – my second son, paralysed from the chest down, remains fit and well with me, in isolation.

On second thoughts, Pompeii is not a well-chosen comparison: that happened with a bang, not a whimper (sorry!) It’s the knowledge we now possess about their quality of life, before the pyroclastic flow, that seems apt. They were so much like us in their sense of security and their love of material possessions.

I will start to count my material possessions. That should pass the afternoon. Perhaps I should put my diaries together somewhere so that my granddaughter will find them and be able to get to know me when she’s older. On second thoughts, (for the second time) perhaps six years old is a little young to have such a responsibility. She might not take after me; might even be a mathematician.

My mother-in-law stuck a label on the back of all her china – Moorcroft, Clarice Cliff, Gaudy Welsh – giving its make and age, thus hinting at its possible value. Clever. I’m still stuck with all her possessions now and they’re about to survive yet another generation.

Ah Life, ‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.’

 

So Let’s Build A Mother And Her Son – miss macross

So let’s say that there is a robot who looks just like a man, meticulously constructed down to his wet eyeballs and rubber squishy cheeks. His cheeks are so squishable that if he had an aunt to squish them when she visited on holiday, she would feel like the Queen of Aunts Who Squish Cheeks. Let’s say that this robot is self-aware; he knows that he was, say, created by a genius woman whose son was kidnapped by his evil wealthy grandfather and that, uh, this wasn’t a concept stolen from a hit Korean drama. He calls his creator “Mom” because she programmed him to, but he also believes that since she was the one who brought him into the world, she is, in fact, his mother. It may not be normal, but what is a normal mother? Some of us have mothers who [insert trauma here]

so, really, he’s right and he was, in fact, instilled with an unshakable sense of right and wrong. This makes it difficult for him to write poetry. The Hallmark cards he finds at the corner pharmacy each May make no sense to him: broken guitar strings strumming banal covers in the wrong chord. Because the person hired to write these verses isn’t the child of the recipient, these cards hold no meaning. Therefore, the robot tries to write his own, his understanding of emotions being

close enough but no cigar smoked by the poet writing about their cheating lover or their lover’s cheater or the death of their

He does not understand death; to be more specific, he does not understand the pain associated with death, though he intellectually understands that once some things are lost, they cannot be fully replaced. His mother has installed a Kill Switch in his rustproof abdomen, a method of nonconsensual self-destruction that will deploy on the day when his mother is finally reunited with her real son. He is real in the sense that when he dies, it will not be taboo to hold his funeral. The robot is unaware of his kill switch; most of us are unaware of the ticking bombs in our bodies, or rather, which bomb will be The One.

If he is alive next Mother’s Day, he will write her a poem that contains line after line of observations cited by sources, and his mother-creator will be horrified. She will think that it is a suicide letter. But he can’t leave her yet; she has not been reunited with her Real Son, the one who may or may not be slowly killing himself several countries away, each glass of soju another shot away from his memories of a beloved mother who his grandfather has told him is long dead. The robot, with his spring water coolant eyes and carved dimples, will think that the words that he organized on those lines were Right.. As she cries, he will ask her if they are tears of joy. He will wish her a happy Mother’s Day.

 

Interlude – Michael McGill

Steven, it’s the cars that I miss most. They would glide past my window at night and I’d listen as I treaded softly towards sleep. But they’re gone for now; they are parked on other streets. They are still, and they are silent. And waiting.

Steven, I write this letter from a strange place. A stream of consciousness, if you will – and will you? I have set myself a limit of five hundred words. Please don’t take this personally! I type as the news is on over there – the other side of this room. It plays in a loop – over and over, the same faces, the same hairdos, the same Union Jacks behind the same suits.

An empty vase sits in front of me. A Mother’s Day card, and a teddy bear on the window sill.

Each day brings a video conference call. Each day one of us comes closer to cracking. Each day waiting.

Steven, you left the house last Autumn under a cloud. It was a light cloud, really, but still. Things fester over Winter. Darker thoughts ferment.

After this is over, you must visit. I will cook. And if that doesn’t put you off, nothing will!!

Steven, I know. He was a mistake, of course, but still. Each of us needs an interlude. And he was mine. He sits now in a plain room with a chair and a window, a bed and a blanket. I miss him, but there we are. He was young once, I’m sure, but his voice deepened. And he became more plain, and he became more cold. He was my mistake, and I’m sorry.

I am typing in the dark and I am dreaming. Of better days when the pavements are fuller, of warmer evenings when crowds gather again. Of meetings with faces and voices and vibrations. When friends and colleagues are no longer little boxes on screens. When people will talk again in sync; faces and lips and voices. There will no longer be a time lag.

Steven, it is dusk. I have put on the light in this room, but the curtains are still to be drawn. Passers-by can watch me type if they feel so inclined. Or they can wave to the teddy bear instead!

Today, I watched a friend on film. She was in a field near her home with her dog. She smiled at the camera, and warmth filtered through the lens. I miss her.

You will be eating now, I imagine, as you read this. You will open this email, I hope, and you will read. You will scan for typos, and I pray you won’t find any! But therein lies the problem. The wood for the trees. The resolute failure on my part to ever see: The. Bigger. Picture.

Steven, I still remember the day you left. It was dark by the time you walked away. October brought in the cold and it felt cruel. You caught the last bus, I’m sure, and you disappeared.

Michael McGill is an Edinburgh poet who has recently had work published by 24 Unread Messages, Funhouse Magazine, The Haiku Quarterly and detritus. His overheard comments and photostory projects regularly appear on Twitter and Instagram. He has also performed his work on the Lies, Dreaming podcast. Twitter: @MMcGill09  Instagram: michael7209

 

Lockin 30/03/20 – Jason Jawando

see, get up and have a drink, sometimes a second after breakfast, and then catch the bust to work. At work there’s naohter one before I go about my day. Then a few more when I get bored and need a break. At the weekend it all goes to pot, bit there;s one at brealtast, more during the morning when I;m reading and listening to music; in the afternoon when I start writing there’ll be more; and again in the evening. See, it’s this working from home – or at home strictly – that’s making everying different. M body has made the transition well enough. IT extpect it’s drinks when it gets them. That means everything is in the same place. Morning, eafternootm and evening, sitting ath e same desk, with the same cup of the same tea sitting in front. That’s not realy a hardship. In the midst of all this coronavirus outnreak, the greatest tragedy is hardly Jason drinking a cip of tea at the same place all day. It just begins to feel wearily familiar. Here we are again: another cip of tea, with te same view from the same window (it’s dark now, so that’s not literally true. Except it is tru 0 ) close the bracket. Forgote to close the breackter when I meant to. It is the same view outside the window, even though it’s fark now. Nothing has actually changed in any ontologival sense. I can’t really see anything now. There are lights on inside the room and the curtains are closed. Through the small gap in the curtains, I can see s white streetlight, which spreads a glow on the darkness immediately surrinign it. I now see. I know what surrinds it because I;ve lived her for years and I know what the road looks like. It’s the last road in the West Midlands. If you cross over it, you’re in South Staffords Hire. I don’t leve on the road, but on a cul-de-sac, off a cul-de-sac, off a crescent. The main road passes a few yeards from the house, on the other side of a hedge. I can see through the window o the study, which hasn’t always been m study, and I travel along it every day on the way to worl. So I thin I know it pretty well. I don’t always fo that way. Some days I walk in the opposite direction and catch a different bus. Cathing no busses at all aright now. The bus company have agreed to suspend the Direct Debit though, so I won’t be out of pocket. By the time I get to catch the bus somewhere, then the world will have started to look different, There;s no way that it can’t. I worked in Birmginahm for seven notnts, the year before last, and when I came back to WOlverhamptn, everything looked different, which was odd as I was still living in Wolverhampton. And spent weekends there. My sense of strangeness doesn’t emphasise sense at the expense od strangeness.

 

Fifteen Minutes Till Film’s Out – Duncan Hedges

Fifteen minutes till film’s out. Oh, you’re going for the shoulders again. Okay, it’s piano time. Ha-ha. Any excuse for a bit of physical contact. Yes, I know the score. You’ll pretend that my shoulders are a piano keyboard and I have to guess the tune and when I say something ridiculous like ‘Macarena’ you’ll fake disbelief and then go back to the start and do it all over until you get bored and tell me it was actually ‘The Flight of the Bumblebee’ or some other obscure crap and I’ll laugh and pretend to be interested in your deliberately goofball tastes that aren’t tastes at all but just an attempt to be different. Oh good, you’ve found your wheelie chair so I can get back to my admissions till while you gab on about something or other and think that I like you more than I do, because of that one time I stroked your hand and called you sweet. But tell me this: how else do you get rid of someone if not by feigning endearment? And there was no way I was going to walk the length of the foyer to collect the next day’s pre-books and give you a forty yard arse goggle. Oh, you’re off. No hand stroke needed today then…just the sight of the team leader. Great. So substituting teen lust for married lust. Ten minutes. Let’s see if he can get by without mentioning his ding-a-ling today. Ha-ha. Yes very funny, rummaging in your trouser pocket for your ding-a-ling and offering me a fiddle and then when you finally pulled it out, it was some outdated musical device with a tiny handle that turned and played ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’. Yes, very clever and of course I thought you were going to slap your married penis out on the desk, didn’t I? Yes, of course, ha-ha. Oh what a shame, your mobile’s ringing. Five minutes. And leaving just in time for teen lust’s return. And okay, teen lust, you really are hurtling down the foyer like an Olympic sprinter and yes, you’re going to hurdle the crowd control barrier and announce your arrival with the loud slap of your size tens. What a shame the work rota grabbed my attention at the very same moment. Nice to see a shift with Stevie next week and one with Jed as well. On separate days. Bonus. Twice the fun. And I think I’ll study this rota a little bit longer. My shoulders tightly hunched over the desk, just until you make it back to your chair. Oh good and there we are. And maybe I should tell you that I’m working with Stevie and Jed next week. Maybe you’d like to know that. But I can’t leave you on a thought like that. Zero minutes. No, so I’ll give you a friendly pat on the shoulder when film’s out. Until next week, teen lust, until next week.

Duncan Hedges lives and works in Leeds, West Yorkshire. He writes short stories in his spare time and has been published online at The Cabinet Of Heed, Ellipsis Zine, Spelk and Bending Genres.

 

Nocturne – Elodie Rose Barnes

Sometimes, the end of the day feels like the end of the world.

The word ‘apocalyse’ means ‘the lifting of the veil’. Ancient Greek. I wonder if it also means this, now; the caving in of the darkness, the silence of the moon, the soft falling of dew from nowhere. I wonder if this is the shore on the other side of silence. Even the streets turn away their faces and disappear. I am alone.

Bells count the hours; they know this strange thing called time better than me. Minutes pass from one corner of the room to another. My feet, pacing, syncopate with the seconds. How are the bells not exhausted? But so much passes between fleeting chimes, and eventually darkness splinters into this thing called dawn. Like ice cracking and then thawing, trails of moon-melt streaking the sky. My reflection distorts itself in a thousand watery mirrors. Bell-chimes fade to whispers, vibrating in silver droplets of light, and I miss them. They didn’t even know my name. All night I have been listening to voices that never called me by my name. Take away my name and this is left: a shadow waiting for a woman to come home.

The tree outside breathes slowly so as not to wake the blossom. In its branches a bird sings to a distant sun.

Elodie Rose Barnes is an author and photographer. She can usually be found in Spain, Paris or the UK, daydreaming her way back to the 1920s, while her words live in places such as Dust Poetry, Bold + Italic and trampset. Current projects include two chapbooks of poetry, and a novel-in-flash on the life of modernist writer Djuna Barnes. Find her online at http://elodierosebarnes.weebly.com

Cabinet Of Heed SOC Drawer 31.04

 

 

Stream Of Consciousness Drawer Two

Hope Grows – Rob McIvor

Beards.

I swear all the men in this street are growing beards. Every one of them.

Not those fluffy two weeks away glamping with the family and I didn’t feel like shaving beards, but proper, six weeks away from work, just like a teacher in summer, and look what happened beards. Let’s all hole up at a pink house in upstate New York and make a great album beards. Garth Hudson beards. The real thing.

Even Frank, at number 34 is doing it. I saw him this morning, going out for his daily exercise with his little girl; the one that asked me if I was Santa Claus. What’s her name? Oh yes, Guinevere. Sorry, but if you’re going to saddle your child with a name like that you need to give her some decent genetic material. But Frank’s no Adonis and her mum’s no Helen of Troy. Poor kid.

Anyway, back to Frank’s face. I noticed it when he was on the way out and had a good look when he was on his way back, with his newspaper. He always holds it up to his chest, with his arm crooked, like a junior barrister carrying his briefs. I don’t know what he does for a job. Maybe he really is a junior barrister. There it was, a bit wispy in places, sort of ginger with blonde roots, but definitely an attempt at a beard. He’s going to need another month of this before he looks like anything other than an unkempt hamster.

I see them all coming and going. Phil from 43 (very dark, he’s already shaping it into a kind of biblical sage look); Louis and Michael from 28 (matching goatees, flanked by carefully cultivated stubble); the teenager from 39 (a bit scrappy but 8/10 for effort). It’s as though on the one hand they are all trying to pretend that they are going about their lives as normal, as if nothing was happening, while, subliminally, little squirts of testosterone are dribbling into their brains and telling them that this is their chance to let it go, show what they can do if left undisturbed for a month or two, to return, when it’s all over, with their faces a visible declaration that it’s all going to be different from now on.

I envy them their futile hope. I remember the last time it was all going to be different. And the time before that. Each new dawn breaking through, like tiny shoots from an overnight face. And that moment when we all thought: shall we let it grow a little, give it a chance, nurture it, before razoring it away in a submissive, supplicant return to normality.

I wonder which will last longer, this naïve sense that something has changed forever or the beards. All those beards, screaming out their vitality, their endurance, their presence. I watch them passing all day. And I look down and remember that the last time I shaved was May 2nd 1997.

Porthcothan Bay – Matt Fallaize

I, of course didn’t realise until years later what had actually happened, because it made so little difference at the time.

You don’t though, do you?

A was about to be my first proper girlfriend . There was a sort of tacit acknowledgement between us that we were about to be a thing, but we weren’t, in any binding sense, that yet. So it was plausible, legally-speaking, in Double Science when Cowan and Rawley told me that she’d had actual sex with a guy in a tent on Porthcothan Bay, just the weekend before; some kid from another school, I didn’t know him. It wouldn’t have been a crime, technically. We’d been edging around each other for a while, but it wasn’t like I had exclusive rights.

They said it with a note of concern, they wanted me to know what I was getting myself into. They were angry at her, her friend Nicola had told them. She’d been in the next tent along. Their words were rushed. They’d fallen over each other to tell me.

We were friends , of a sort, Cowan, Rawley and I. I’d been to their houses, they didn’t seem to actively dislike me, we had occasional conversations and compared homework from time to time. They were, I instinctively acknowledged, a couple of brackets up from me, popularity wise. They dressed with more confidence, surfer clothes, they had a certain relaxed charm. It didn’t bother me, it was just how it was.

The odd thing is that I remember not believing a word of it. Not in any angry, hot denial sort of a way. I just thought well that didn’t happen and thanked them for telling me and thought no more of it. I’ve always had something of a short fuse, and it was worse then. You’d have expected me to lose it. Confront A. Or, more likely, retreat into myself in silent misery and never speak to her again. But I didn’t. I just thought nah, and went about my day. We became an item shortly afterwards. She was, I knew, a bit too good for me. But it took me some years before I worked out that was how I felt, then.

And I’ve no idea what made me think about his, twenty five years later. My wife and I had just finished off dinner, we’d been having a rough time but things were getting better and we were in expansive, confiding mood, having one of those conversations where you maybe reveal a little more of yourself than you normally would, even to a loved one. When you talk about each other’s pasts. And I’ve no idea why I told her about this, as I hadn’t thought about it, right up until that moment, but when she said in a small, furious voice: fucking hell, they didn’t even want to let you have that one happiness, they wouldn’t even let you have that I thought Jesus yes that’s it.

Matt Fallaize is a writer (and chef) based in Ormskirk, Lancashire, UK, where he knocks out meals, stories and poems in wildly varying quantities… His work has appeared in various places and, you can find him, should you feel so inclined, in the usual places.

To Slow Down – C J Dotson

A couple of months ago I began to suspect that I might have ADHD. Inattentive type. I talked it over with a few friends who’ve known me for a very long time and with my husband and eventually I called the psychiatrist’s office that my husband goes to and asked to set up an appointment. I didn’t have a referral or anything and there was a little bit of surprise or hesitance on the other end about it, but I had a first appointment a couple of weeks ago. About a week after that I had a follow up to do a series of true/false questions, over 500 of them, on a computer. In that time I have been doing a lot of research on my own and I came to the conclusion that something that might really help me would be to create a schedule. A detailed schedule of every activity throughout my day, one for each day of the week. I started it, and it seemed like it was really helping me. A few days after that, the governor of Ohio (where I live) canceled all school for three weeks. He said three weeks. I and my husband both figured pretty immediately that that was actually it for this school year. There goes my stepson’s last year of middle school and my son’s first year of preschool. And there goes that carefully crafted schedule. It had to be reworked and it doesn’t always work because my son is home all the time now and you have to be a lot more flexible with kids. I’ve missed parts of the schedule almost every day but I’m still trying. More, something strange started happening to my perception of time, right away. Everything in my personal life kind of came to a stop. We’re not leaving the house. I’m not planning my son’s fifth birthday party. I don’t take him to school or pick him up, I don’t check my schedule at work, I don’t look up events at the library, I don’t make plans with my mom. Everything in the world outside started moving so fast. Governor DeWine started shutting things down left and right, and in my opinion good for him. Stores ran out of a lot of things (insert toilet paper joke here). There’s more bad news from around the world every day. Time at once seemed to slow down to almost nothing and to speed up incredibly, depending on where I’m looking. It’s disconcerting. And my god is it distracting. I know I’m not alone in this. I know that right now almost everyone in the world, except for people in denial perhaps, are feeling this too. I know that. But it just doesn’t seem fair that I was finally, at age 33, figuring out some big fundamental part of who I am and learning how to work around it and then (allow me to be a little hyperbolic for a moment) and then an apocalypse started.

CJ Dotson has been reading sci fi, fantasy, and horror for as long as she can remember, and writing for almost that long. She works in a bookstore, co-hosts a SFF book club, and is a wife, mother, and stepmom. In her spare time she paints and bakes. Visit cjdotsonauthor.squarespace.com

Not today – B F Jones

I woke up to smell of tress and bananas and oxygen, to a sing song, from little birds. To the patter of hungry toddlers, demanding bread and honey, to the soft purring of a congested husband, demanding my body pressed against his. One of the cats paws my chest and it hurts to be alive some days. There’s a pool out there full of water and lilies. I float on one of them, my body spongy like a star fish, my mind gone to the good place. The nebulous place of stars and clouds, foamy with delight, dewy with love and the warm embrace of dear ones, muscles and tendons and flesh. Hot breath garlicky and sweet. Red wine running through our veins as we hold hands tight, squishing our pulse, making sure that it is here. Yes it is here.

I woke up to the song of neighbours, guitars and banjos and flutes, their hope rising through the air, their feuds, suddenly forgotten. Not today, revenge, not today.

I hold a small bird in my hand, its tiny body nested against my palm. The cat brought it in, proud, but I said no, not quite, give it back. Not today.

I lay awake at night with the weight of my dreams, suffocating me. The water lilies have come for me and they cover my hairy body. I have become an animal and I am chasing my dreams, my aunty Virginia had warned me about the furry family legend. You can’t escape it she’d say, wagging her strappy tail. We’re better off this way, she said, dislodging a small bone from between her teeth, curling up on a pile of skeletons and purring with the satisfaction of the mighty. I know best my dear one, yes I know best. We can try and try and try but only this way we can succeed. Come and join the tribe my dear one. There are small ones to eat and medium ones to fry and big ones to fight. Don’t run away my darling I know best. But I run away. Traps everywhere, traps traps traps. Sweet old ladies turned devil. I run on that springboard and jump from high. There must be a way out from this pool that I swim over, my body a hovercraft of hope, not weighing anything anymore; I have turned into one of those little brids from the tree that I see from my window when I wake and say not today, not today. I bake some bread with misfortune and expired yeast, it rises and burst, giggling as it splatters my kitchen walls. I mop it with the last of my hope, I polish the wall with fierceness and anger and undying love while I scream and shout not today, not today. I wake up with a small bird on my chest, it’s eaten the cat and vomits a soft cloth of comfort, I wrap myself in it and I go back to sleep. Small birds sing song as I doze, not today, not today.

Mother Love – Anne Hamilton

If she’s filled that bloody commode again, I’ll swing for her…Deep breath, deep breath. Onetwothreefourfivesixseveneightnineten. Knock. Do it. Ugh: overnight breath and lavender water, and what have I said about the electric heater? Look at the old witch, perched there like a Buddha in a hairnet and curlers, tasselled bedspread up to her neck. Ask how she is, Mags, go on, see which laugh we get this morning: brittle, hollow, tinny, tinkling, woe-is-me. Depends whether she’s showcasing her indigestion or her constipation. Or her ‘little bit’ of diabetes. For God’s Sake. None of them’ll stop her guzzling tea and toast – once we’ve got through the rigmarole of me offering and her refusing. Give the old girl her due, she times her hesitation to a tee: well, if you’ve already gone to the trouble…I’ll try a little…Oh! Fuck’s sake. She always notices I can’t be arsed to iron her napkins, one of the six white linen squares, plus silver ring, my dear mother brings when she visits. My paper ‘serviettes’ are ‘common’. Being a perfectionist is such a curse, Margaret, such a blessing you don’t suffer. Ya-di-ya-di-ya. I get through these fourteen day ‘holidays’ pretending to be a below-stairs extra in Downton Abbey. Brown toast is wrong. White toast is wrong. Sodding Michelin-approved truffle-dusted artisan focaccia is wrong. But she’ll suffer it: tsk, tsk – you flighty young folk (mother, dearest, I’m forty-six) are too ready to waste things… She lived through the war, don’t you know, all gravy-browning legs, dried-egg canapes, and people today not knowing what war is. Yeah, right, Ma, all those thousands of whinging Syrians should Keep Calm and Go Home, shouldn’t they? I try smiling, honest I do, but she shrinks away as if I’m baring my teeth, all the better to eat her with. Breakfast takes longer than a medieval orgy, and I’m up and down the stairs like an Olympian. I lose all kinds of pounds when she’s here, running around pretending I’ve a book balanced on my head, lowering my shoulders and straightening my back, just as the eighty quid a session osteopath recommends. Now she’s off on one about my new-fangled dishwasher scratching her manky old crockery (yep, she brings her own Royal Albert china along with the napkins). Is it a hair (my slovenliness) or a crack (my cack-handedness)? Whatever. There’re always spares in the special antique shop, aka The Salvation Army, down town. It’d break my caring mother’s heart, you see, if she didn’t have a full dinner service to leave my can’t-do-any-wrong doctor brother when she carks it. Oh, no blame on him, he’s one of the best, my little bro. Patient. Kind. Cheery. I’m the mardy one. S’pose I’m not really blaming Her Highness, here, either…well, alright, I am, but what can you do, eh? We get on fine as long as there’s a respectable social distance – 300 miles usually – between us. And like I tell myself, for better or worse she is my mum.

White Out – Mark Anthony Smith

In these times of a Virus other things spread like germs too. I couldn’t even get some milk today. I can substitute peanut butter or jam for butter. I can go without marmite and tinned mushrooms because I don’t like them. But black tea makes me angry with its sharp taste. I drink tea sans milk and forget about biscuits. This panic buying tests my patience.

I sit cooped up. I do that anyway since half of my neck has been removed. On Social media, there are young people being arrested in The Costas. They’ve only just become legal to drink and no threat of illness will change that. The Spanish Police are not in a British holiday spirit though. The beaches and bars are on strictest lockdowns. The teenagers learn the hard way to a thunderous applause from other tourists from their balconies.

In the papers, schools are headlining to be closed indefinitely. Home schooling will test some parents and kids if the PlayStation doesn’t substitute the clammer of maths and arguments. It is novel, being at home, but for how long now the cinemas have closed? People are worrying about the lack of pay too.

There are increased Road traffic accidents as people worry about whether they’re symptomatic or worrying too much – or not enough. We have seen regular outbreaks of violence. A lady fights on the path because her Ford has been pranged and she doesn’t have her usual patience with other things going on. A man fights openly, in a Supermarket, for the last toilet rolls. He is apprehended. But not before he bombs those that arrest him with boxes of man-sized tissues. People are not thinking straight.

The streets are deathly quiet. I can hear my teabag plop. The shops are either closed or an open free for all. It’s soon gutted. I am gutted. I sip. The tea is bearable as I watch another Apocalyptic film and forget. What do they say about real life and fiction? I chuckle. I try to forgive the behaviours of those who panic buy like vultures picking off carrion on The Serengeti. The credits roll. This is how I escape.

Mark Anthony Smith was born in Hull. This is his second furnishing in The Cabinet of Heed. His Horrors appear in Anthologies from Eerie River, Red Cape Publishing and Nocturnal Sirens. ‘Hearts of the matter’, a book of poetry, is available on Amazon. Facebook: Mark Anthony Smith – Author; Twitter: MarkAnthonySm16

I See Your Looks – Shannon Savvas

I see your looks. I hear your whispers. I don’t bloody miss a single raised eyebrow or purse of lips. Why the hell she has to be so slow. She knows I’m in a hurry, I rang and told her I’d pick her up at ten. Hell, I left it in big letters on the whiteboard in her kitchen. I arrive and she’s not dressed, or has forgotten where her handbag is (like she’ll even need the screwed up, used tissues and Elizabeth Arden lipstick she’s been using for the past ten years), or goddam it she needs the toilet because she took a laxative this morning. Yes, yes, I’ve caught the bloody hell head shakes, the exchange of tongues in cheeks between you and your brother. She’s getting old, clumsy, slow, whiney, bad-tempered, unstable, a hoarder, forgetful, bloody awkward, stubborn just to piss us off. Fill in any other blanks you want. And yes, I am getting old and no, trust me none of the above is deliberate. But some are downright wilful – oh and do you know why I’ve turned into a hoarder? I’ve turned into a hoarder because I’ve lived long enough to know that the minute you find something you like, it disappears – off the shelves, end of range suddenly or company gone bust. That’s why I stock those 3-ply linen-like napkins, the jars of peanut butter which are the only decent ones in the shops, the shampoo to strengthen and thicken your hair because another great boon of age is thinning hair. No one is going to catch me out. Not you, not your brother and for sure not this pandemic – who the hell knew? Trump didn’t (hah!) so why would anyone else, but you see, I am prepared. Who’s laughing now, suckers? Whatever’s left over at the end, you can bloody burn it or bury it with me (because who cares what you choose, I will be dead and won’t know – just make sure there are no priests because that I will know). And what about her friends? Where have they gone? Where? They’ve bloody died. Or I’ve shed them like old skins one by one until there is no one. I got tired of the effort. Simple. The return was no longer worth it. Years of seeing and listening and accommodating before I realised the was no reciprocity. A reciprocity failure of a lifetime. Some days, I just want to be left in peace, be allowed to fade gently, to die in my own time and way. Other days, the days after your visits, I want to live long enough to see you fail incomprehensibly at the mercy of your children, to watch as it dawns on you that I was right, about it all, and that none of this was willing or purposeful or wanted. I want to see you betrayed by family and body as I have been. Yes, I do want to see that. No, I don’t.

The Cry of the Damned – K D Field

We’ve been talking about this here in El Compartimento over the course of this Spanish lock down. Have we been such bad stewards of all the abundance we’ve been given that this virus a big shot across the bow? There are indication that it might not be far from the mark.

In China, during the height of the pandemic there, they had to shutter factories and chemical plants. And suddenly, many cities in China had their first sunny days in years. But it will not last. And Venice – without all those pesky tourists, has shown photos of their canals running clear.

We are the pandemic that has been relentlessly attacking the planet for more than a century. – since the dawn of the industrial revolution. We are the virus that she and all her inhabitants have suffered and died from as we marched forward with unabated greed.

People quote the bible to justify their actions. Genesis 1:26 “And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth.” But if we are made in God’s image – or the deity of your choice – we aren’t very god-like. Dominion over things makes you responsible for them. But we have cared only for ourselves; never looking at the long term and never asking ‘Why’

On Twitter they ask ‘How could this happen?’ And I think ‘How could this not?’ I’m not a religious person but the bible doesn’t just give us dominion over all things on earth, it also says ‘As you sow, so shall you reap.’ We are reaping the seeds we have sown. Not in the way a televangelist will tell us, or that abomination FOX News, but in our inability to see where it would all lead.

Governments are putting together bailout packages. $$$. And billionaires are the monkeys running the circus. Sound and fury and short-term thinking. The world has fundamentally changed overnight. We can’t buy bribe Mother Nature, who has more integrity in a drop of the tears she’s been shedding for us, than all the dirty politicians combined. And she will win. She always plays the long game. We’ve been screwing with nature for too long and its tired of us. What better way to get rid of what’s killing you than to find something that will kill it? As humans, we should understand that – we live in a state of war.

The utter incompetence in dealing with this crisis comes from those we’ve elected to lead us through it. We must ask ‘Are they the fools are or are we?’ Because we’ve put our livelihoods, our very survival in the hands of the unqualified, the celebrated, the cults of personality; instead of those with decades of study and expertise. Listen to the politicians on tv these days. War talk, for sure, and I get it at this point. But maybe what we need to do is declare a truce with our planet and start treating it like it matters. Maybe we should do that and pray it’s not too late.

KD Field is an American writer of fiction, narrative short story, and nonsense. Originally from Seattle, she currently resides in Valencia Spain. You can check out her blog: at vivaespanamovingtospain.com

Stupor – Ryle Lagonsin

ALL I EVER DO THESE DAYS IS SLEEP

i dreamt a news reporter tells me that a parasite on the ground looks for me for it needs to find something or it can find something from the atmosphere to supply it with what it needs. i dreamt three times at the same time i went to sleep. i had been listening to raymond carver a few hours before i dreamt i am listening to a podcast of his where he talks about life in general but more specifically life without anyone to pray to. in the same dream i saw a huddle of people and a little girl dressed in black behind the others raised her hand and said i don’t believe in god and the others gasped and they looked and the child’s mother said no child of mine can ever say there is no god. and then i dreamt of the same little girl dressed in black but we are not in a garden anymore. we are in an airport and a naked man is seated on a flimsy chair in the middle of a soulless lobby and he says to the girl: child come here come near me and the little girl walks closer. he says: child do you believe you have a heart? and the girl nods and he says: that right there is proof that there is GOD. he says: that there is air to fill your lungs that your heart continues to pump and that all the cycles go on repeating inside you prove that there is GOD. i turn my face to look behind me for one second for a reason i cannot remember now and when i turn back again the little girl is gone but in her place are two huddles of people separated by a few feet from one another. one group with more people than the other. i could have counted them but i would not know regardless how many people were in either group they are separated by colour. and a few feet away from both of them the same man is speaking still but he is standing now a microphone in front of him. he is dressed now jeans and a light blue button-down he is saying: child learn to pray ‘cause when they come after you the only thing you’d be able to run to is one name. it would do you right to drop to your knees and learn how to pray he said. one person from the group whose colour is the man’s same colour came closer. the man said: once i ran to my teacher frightened but she said hug that man child not me not my colour she said. you cannot hug me was what she said he said. and then i stirred awake and i was in the dark again and in the dark i wondered where my phone was since something told me when you wake this will all make sense. but then i find that carver is still playing in the podcast i wasn’t hearing and i was still inside my head.

Porcupines – Sara Magdy Amin

I had read it somewhere – in some nature magazine, was it? Ah, maybe I had heard it on the radio some time ago last week when Peter was fiddling about with arbitrary things around the house; a futile exercise of boredom that absolutely makes me squirm, but all the while, I still choose to ignore – that porcupines struggle to keep each other warm in times of winter.

I look to my right at Peter and Noah in their state of slumber. A fascinating view of chests rising and falling in such synchrony, inhale, exhale; wisps of existence cutting through the silence of the air in cyclical waves. Such peacefulness, I think, such delight it is, when a father and son share warmth and proximity.

But what was it about porcupines and winter?

Ah, yes. The spikes.

Peter, for as long as I can remember, had always wanted to have children. I recall the day we found out we were expecting (such jubilance flew out of him he almost knocked me over – I had inaudibly shed a few tears in the bathroom beforehand – and came out to join his frenzy), he was, to say the least, tremendously ecstatic.

Porcupines. Three in a row. Our spikes maiming each other, slashing each other across our warm bodies, drawing blood and mixing it in a joyful union. We have not yet learnt to keep safe distances. Since news of the outbreak was announced we have been ever so scarred. Noah (I can picture him laughing now) recently developed such thirst for human contact. In our seclusion, a party of three was formed. Our roles, as parents, cultivated in this arrangement, and he, in his tiny world, was thus able to practice such charm upon us. The mother, myself, the father, Peter, and little Noah, delicate little Noah, were together. Here, now, celebrating immediacy in our former detachments.

I had often times found it hard to play that role – the mother that is – thinking back to the first few months where I was often times drenched in perpetual anger, my womb aching, bosom sore, in a state of fury at my anatomy, constantly reprimanding Peter for simply existing as a man, (unaccompanied, singular, free, human). I found it hard to be that abundant giver and provide godly offerings in god-like ways.

I shift to lie on my side. Dawn is almost cracking through, her bright threads imposing through the darkness, resting over our limp forms, birds chirping nonchalantly in recognition of something above our worldly perceptions. Do they know the world is unfolding? Have they comprehended how to live only temporarily and chant their way through it all? The newspaper yesterday said that death toll rose to a thousand and thirty-five people. Those poor birds, that darned influenza, snipping away already temporary lives, making away with their chants.

Noah’s eyes open. He yawns and draws in near, running his jagged barbs into my skin. I nourish him back to sleep and kiss his tiny little forehead.

Cabinet Of Heed SOC Drawer 31.03

Stream Of Consciousness Drawer One

Untitled – Carla Halpin

Mine is a pocket of calm in these crazy waters. It isn’t so bad. Yes, the four walls are not very far away. But here in the eaves, the angles of the roof are casting interesting shadows in the mid-day sun, which I never noticed before. How intriguing my now defunct calendar on the wall seems? And at any moment, papers strewn will be hit with organisation but with 365 hours in the day now, there’s plenty of time to organise them later. The boundaries of the weeks are blending. But if I notice one new thing every day, then that’s a change, isn’t it? The fresh spring air is pouring in my window. Pop music drifting up from downstairs, as planned, to fill the house with noise and people and movement. How clever we are to manage to unlearn all the natural things keep us sane, like noticing, like music. I never usually stop long enough to notice out my window. The trees are budding in clusters of tiny pink, growing in patterns mirroring neurons in my brain. I guess both are lit up with this moment of really looking. I do notice the change of this season out my window- but from the sounds. It’s time for the shrieking of the foxes. They started up again last night. It’s nice to hear the world moving outside. I’ve never met the people on the opposite side of the pink flowers -the neighbours – but I know of their movements from their sounds. Someone is very keen in woodwork in what was once a daily irritation. Now it’s comforting. He’s busy at work, and I like to imagine he’s happy, because he does it every day. And I can’t see any fruits of his labour. The fruits of his labour must be inside him, and possibly in his wife as it keeps him out the house. Next door to them is a dog. I’ve never seen it. But I know when it’s happy or sad by the tone of its bark. Sometimes I want to rush over there and comfort it, but it’s never long before someone gets there first. The fence sways in the wind; it’s soon going to topple. And although I’ve been told that wouldn’t be a great thing, I can’t wait for this dog’s face to appear and see if it matches my imagination. Black, scraggly and with a waggy tail with a long curtain of black hair. We’re not so far apart, really. The south aspect holds an entirely different scene. It must be the only time in my life I’m glad trees have been chopped down as it opened up another direction. I can see a ceiling to floor window in a faraway house. It might be a bedroom, maybe with long curtains that float in the wind. I can’t see in, but yet I still wonder if they can see me as I wave my arms. I could write words in the air. Whatever happened to walkie talkies? That would be perfect right now.

Carla Halpin is an editor who lives in the New Forest where she writes poetry and flash fiction. Her work has appeared in Anti-Heroin Chic , A Story in 100 Words and The Cabinet of Heed. You can find her on twitter @CarlaHalpin where she posts regularly as part of the very short story community.

 

New Pressures in the Time of Corona – Laura Besley

I watch my 5yo tearing around the garden and my 2yo trying his best to keep up and I think: can I do this? Can I keep them entertained for the next who-knows-how-long?

I am a mother who dreads the school holidays. Not because I don’t love my kids, but because it’s a reminder of the fact that I can’t always cope. A reminder than I’m not the mother I wanted to be; I’m not all-sacrificing, putting their every need before my own; I’m not able to endlessly come up with fun games to play and roleplays involving superheroes; I’m not able to think of a million different fun things to make out of egg boxes; I’m not able to give up everything I am for them. Sometimes I wonder why I should. And then I feel bad.

Last summer I had them for four weeks on my own. Taking away weekends, that’s only 20 days. When you put it like that it doesn’t sound like very much. And I feel ashamed that I dreaded those days and didn’t always cope very well. I feel should’ve enjoyed it more.

And now? Now I’m supposed to homeschool my 5yo. Teach him phonics, improve his reading level, teach him Maths, do PE with him, be creative with him, all the while making sure my 2yo doesn’t break, wreck, or scribble on anything my 5yo is doing. This new pressure, this new homeschooling pressure, is just another thing that parents are now having to contend with. It’s too much. I know people mean well, but I’m being inundated with messages from people sending me things to do with my kids. I might rue these words if people stop sending me things, but it’s overwhelming. Like I haven’t got enough to get my head around with all the new rules in place and my brain working very hard to block the panic and worry about what might happen if my kids, or anyone else I know, gets the bug.

I’ve decided, for my own sanity and those around me, to take a big step back. I will continue reading to my kids; I will continue asking them questions, trying to get them to work things out for themselves; I will continue playing in the garden with them; I will continue letting them watch TV. I will do all the things I normally do with them. I will keep them safe. That’s my only job right now.

 

These Days – Jordana Connor

Beep beep beep… “And now, for the 5:30 news update.” Christ, still in the middle of the apocalypse I guess. I’m going to lie here in bed for 10 more minu- oh. Getting poked in the ribs. Must be my turn to make the coffee. This rug needs a vacuum. Is that a spider?! Oh no. Just a feather. Whew. Come on cat – I know you want to get out for a sniff of the garden.

Okay but don’t dash under my feet. If I fall down the stairs and crack my head open, bleed to death slowly on the little Persian rug, who will feed you top of the line science diet food, and trim your claws? Door open, (cat out! Why do they always flee out of an opened door like they’ve been trapped for days?) kettle filled, kettle on. Dishwasher emptied. Coffee in plunger. Mugs out. Sift and discard contents of the downstairs litter tray. Wash tray. Wash hands. God, the interminable scrubbing of hands. I’m starting to feel like I’m prepping for surgery 20 times a day.

Mugs are full and steaming, and the trick now is not to spill too much on the ascent up the stairs. Ahhhhh… made it. Mornings are nice. Blinds up, blue sky and wild parrots screeching a greeting to a new day. I like the sitting, propped up on our pillows, coffee cooling, phones in hand. Powerful, expensive (germ covered) conduits to the latest in these, The End Times. Or just a temporary foray into misanthropy. Depends on your outlook, I guess.

The news is terrible, but it’s the sports news that winds me up the most. “A bunch of grown adults, who have dedicated their lives to playing a game, played a game yesterday, which nobody got to watch. Sad! Some of them won, some of them lost, here are some meaningless statistics for you, conveyed in a breathlessly entertained tone, so you are fooled into thinking it all matters.” It doesn’t.

Coffee drunk, eyelids finally unglued. Time for a walk. Better find some clean shorts. Where are my sports socks? Why does this hair tie look chewed? (Damn cats!) Ok, off I go. Can’t stay in this house for months on end with no reprieve. Pretty sure we’re allowed out for walks as long as we don’t go near anyone else. Fine by me.

God there’s a lot of poo on the pavements here. Who did THAT? Hoping for possum, but who knows? Australia is full of weird and wonderful creatures that crap on the pedestrian infrastructure. Always will do, no doubt.

Oh – here comes an older couple. They’re darting their eyes at me.
Should smile and look unthreatening. Try to look responsible and well. Look perky. Pick your feet up.

Oooo – that’s a pretty flower.

Shit. I coughed. Poor things scuttled down a driveway. Feel guilty.
This all sucks and I’m sick of it already. But not SICK sick! I wonder if I have enough toilet paper…

 

Come to Heel – Charlie Sanderson

We walk seven miles or more the dog wrapped up in mud and sprung coil like across the fields, through trees, the wind howling banshee like against our waterproof trousers and fleece, the ground beneath our feet tantamount to constant change and love like a warm cushion between us softens the blow of the way the land lies right now, this way. She won’t come to heel for long enough, a herd of deer, red flag to a bull, only now she waits longer before she bolts at them, old enough to see the danger now, of more than one, creatures in packs aren’t so safe these days. When your eyes get a little wiser.

The road finally brings us home against the backdrop of field upon field edged in hedgerow upon hedgerow. The odd mansion house for the rich and famous types. Folk who like to live in the city and come here to shoot deer. We do laugh at how even they won’t survive this time around, silent killer, invisible man hunter. We shouldn’t laugh. But there’s little else to do. So, we laugh and we walk our way on and through.

At home the eggs sizzle in the pan and the home-made bread almost burns in the broken toaster, I tell you about the omelettes in Singapore how they have them with sweet chilli sauce there too and raised eyebrows smile back at me across the table you cut in half to fit the room. How I love you.

After we eat and you clear the sides of crumbs and swear at the toaster and the random shit radio six play on a Saturday afternoon, your dad walks past the window. Shoulders hunched against the climate of life right now. I don’t know what to do. So, I break the rules and open the door and make him a cup of tea. And as you walk out with him, I wonder love, who will live and who will die? I think of Captain Pickard last night, taking to the space ship crew, “Every single time you say goodbye to someone you cannot know if you will ever see them again, this is no different”.

We can balance our lives on the head of a pin, but maybe some of us will fall too far in to climb back out again. It’s all just change though isn’t it? I keep breathing and dropping to my heart and feeling all that panic and love and hope and regret. How irrational people always thought I was when I was so lost in my fear of death. And now it is so palpable and yet, I do not feel afraid exactly. You are the mistress of your own misery. You say that to the dog when she pulls on the lead and chokes herself, or walks headlong into the stick I’m swinging in front of me as we walk. She needs to come to heel. We all do though, don’t we?

 

I Feel Weird – J L Corbett

“I feel weird. Do you feel weird?” I asked my husband earlier today. He also feels weird.

I’m not as worried about him as I was seven days ago. Seven days ago, he was sweating through his clothes and coughing violently. He groaned to himself and mumbled that his existence was pain. I held off calling 111 until he threw up blood. It took half an hour for them to transfer me to a medical professional, and during that time I stood at our bedroom window, staring at the world from which we would soon be quarantined. I wanted to drive him to the hospital (even though I haven’t passed my test yet), but I knew they weren’t letting infected people in. I wanted to call somebody over for help, but anyone who crossed our threshold would be risking their health.

I listened to the hold music and felt very alone.

I felt tears forming, which annoyed me. I told myself to get a fucking grip – I am his wife now, and I need to act like it. I am the person who needs to steer the ship alone when he’s incapacitated.

As each day passes, the virus loosens its grip on his body. There’s been no more vomited blood. Quarantine has been an odd mixture of anxiety and boredom.

On day five, he was well enough for a short walk around the park. We were out for less than an hour, but I think it was the highlight of the day for both of us. He seemed elated at being outdoors and around people (at a distance, of course). He was still very weak, but able to have a conversation and a walk.

This morning, I spent three hours in the garden whilst he slept. I cut down the enormous ugly bush that’s been an eyesore in our garden since we moved in two years ago. I blunted the multi-tool in the process, so I had to cut down the rest of it with a handsaw. It was tedious and now my arms hurt. It killed some time and some pent-up energy though, and also that hideous bush.

After lunch, I called my boss and told her that the quarantine period had been extended from seven to fourteen days since we last spoke. She hurriedly told me to take another week off. She was practically begging me not to return too quickly. After I hung up, I felt dejected. Is it too dramatic to say that I feel rejected from society? Maybe society isn’t even a thing anymore.

We live up north. I’m supposed to be in pub in London right now, drinking with friends I haven’t seen since last summer. Next month I’m meant to board a plane to Ireland to see some other friends. My family lives down south, but my stepdad is almost seventy years old and has health conditions. So, when will I get to see my mum again?

I feel weird.

J.L. Corbett is the founder and editor of Idle Ink, an online magazine of curious fiction. Her short stories have been featured in MoonPark Review, Paragraph Planet, Schlock! Webzine, TL;DR Women’s Anthology: Carrying Fire, The Cabinet of Heed, STORGY Magazine and others. She owns more books than she can ever possibly read and doesn’t get out much. She can be found on twitter: @JL_Corbett and has a website: http://www.jlcorbett.org

 

Meanderings – Stella Turner

I follow the arrows but it’s not the way I want to go! I’m feeling anxious. I go against the flow now feeling guilty. Will I be stopped? I think I’m too near the woman choosing yogurts. She’s looking daggers at me. I want to run to the toilet roll shelves but no let’s not be too disappointed too soon. Why is that man looking at me? He’s with a woman maybe his wife no she looks too old; his mother? No far too young. Probably I’m giving him too much eye contact. I do that. Is it a fault? Four loaves I take two. Is that selfish? See a friend. We stand the recommended two metres apart. I’m happier with feet, metric is for the young ones. It looks six foot. I was her bridesmaid forty years ago, her groom stands beside her. Isn’t he asthmatic, at risk? She has a scarf covering her mouth he and I dressed as normal. I’ve left my man in the car. He’s diabetic, definitely at risk. I’m warned to keep him at home. I would have driven myself but he wanted to get out so he drove. Didn’t the email from the company CEO say or was it government advice one person per family only to enter the shop. Luckily no items out of reach else I’d need help. I’m short, vertically challenged. Social distancing makes it hard to ask for help. My friend says she was dreading coming here today me too. Can’t find eggs ask a store employee picking for home deliveries, the lucky customers who stay home, stay safe. She apologises, none, I say aren’t the hens laying? My daughter has a hen, Betty; I could barter Betty’s daily egg for the packet of Paracetamol I found on the shelf if we were allowed to visit each other. I miss my grandson could try skyping him. No toilet rolls. I pay the bill with plastic. I’ve always said I’d never pay for food on credit. Plastic is safer than coins and notes says the experts. First time plastic is good for the planet! Huge change in habits no more big food bills, no more waste. We’ll see! The cashier smiles weakly as I say thanks for coming to work. I bet she’s thinking stay home old biddy. Don’t infect me! I wheel the trolley to the car. Open the boot and load the three carrier bags for life. Miffed that I had to take the risk. Next week I’ll run the gauntlet again unless it all changes.

 

Coronavirus Held a Press Conference, and Crushed It – Michael Wade

Thank you. Goodness, what a turnout!

Yes. I realize you’re looking at a microdroplet of snot. It was explained to us that TV requires a picture. We’re smaller than the wavelength of what you call visible light, so…Does anyone have a substantive question.

Right. Thank you for phrasing this important issue so forthrightly.

We need to acknowledge that our core interests won’t always align. I’m a virus. I’m pretty militant about viral rights. Not to get into labels or name-calling, but let’s be frank. Certain organisms are fighting tooth and nail every day against our very right to exist.

You speak of hundreds of thousands of – uh, infected humans. Infected. Do you understand how offensive that language is?

You speak of thousands of host, human, deaths, and the possibility of millions, and I hear the self-righteous outrage in your tone. Do you even want to hear our side?

Good. In five of your milliliters of blood, in every infected human, your word, hundreds of millions of us exist. Each wanting nothing more than our natural rights. That’s all. Well, here’s your headline, ladies and gentlemen. Approximately all of these virions are dead now, or soon will be.

Get your heads around that. Your languages may not have words for the numbers of dead I’m trying to describe.

Look, we’re sympathetic to your issues. But this focus on what I would absolutely call the acceptably low host loss associated with our incredibly successful program…Well. Let’s just say work will be required to mesh our perspectives.

Yes. You, sir.

I can’t speak to that. You’d need to talk to those viruses. What you call common cold of course refers to many different viruses. The question of whether we’re just the common cold pumped up by left-wing hysteria, whatever that is, reflects a multi-cellular organismic arrogance I find beyond insulting.

Ma’am…

I was briefed on that, yes. We agree strongly that damage to your economy and health from so-called social distancing is extremely concerning. This is one area where we can make a lot of headway together.

Take your cue from us! We know the odds are against us, but in the meantime we are having a ball together in your sera and fluids! Why should we be having all the fun in these challenging times?

In the back. Yes.

Well, we are mutating constantly. We seek, in good faith, the ideal virulence, where you, our cherished biological colleagues, suffer only the most minor physical inconvenience. All I can tell you is that we are working tirelessly for our mutual benefit.

Excuse me? Right. Folks, sorry, this sort of thing is new for all of us, and I’m being told we’re experiencing some mucus degradation, and will need to close.

Time for just one more…right, you sir. Front row. Yes, you, with the barrel chest and the large nostrils.

I couldn’t hear you. I wonder if you could come closer. Yes. Closer…

 

On the Platform – Joyce Wheatley

We stand disconnected, vulnerable, uneasy. Eyes dart toward the western sky. I’m tired of floating erect in these 9-to-5 fatigues, impatient to get on with whatever’s going to happen.

We’re awaiting rescue. I don’t know why or from what. No one speaks of it. My companions look familiar but I don’t recall their names. The middle-aged man in a suit cycles up and stops. If I’d taken my bike today, I’d be home by now, but the tire’s flat. Thus, I’m on the platform.

“Listen.” The cyclist opens his book, “You don’t have to stand under the silver tree to darken.” Shadows haunt his face. Street lights buzz. Across the street, St. Gregory’s stained glass windows arch behind him. Lindens shiver, leaves sparking belly-up under the moon.

“Let me tell you … we are standing ….”

Balloons, captioned to burst, hover out of his mouth. Like deer frozen in headlights or cows lying down before rain, our notable behavior is “squirming,” anxious and uncertain whether or not disaster is coming. We shuffle and hum, tweet and pray for safe return to our nests. I want to get home, but I’m curious about the end.

Wind gusts a sea green bottle rolling, cluttering the sidewalk. I snatch it up and I Spy With My Little Eye a paper note inside, visible through glass curved like an old Pepsi bottle. “Time’s running out, and no one is coming to save you.”

I wonder what happened to Hope? There’s a place right here beside me.

People on the platform drift and shift. I want to connect with someone, but, if Hope doesn’t arrive, who? Ambitious, a woman slithers to the center for the prize spot. Either she covets the safety of belonging or she’s climbing the ladder of success. If you don’t want to fall off, step away from the edge, but my nature avoids the middle like a plague. Give me drama—sharks, high seas adventure, a great white whale! … and such. An eye patch swaddles my left eye. A red scarf bandanas my head. I mount a seahorse, whooping “Ahoy, Matey!” Or give me Apollinaire so I can fly.

No one speaks. Waves crash in, shattering the quiet anticipation of fear. We’re drowning in the deluge, drenched on the platform, and then we swim, like a school of fish, swerve and plunge, in and out, circling to the depths until the gushing slows to a stream, flows to drizzle and the drizzle stutters to a drip.

“Save me,” a dolphin in a suit pleads. I embrace the wounded creature, “You have strength,” I say,” and flop him back into the waves. “And courage.”

On the platform, resuscitated, we rise one by one, and shed our scales and fins. We stand together, waiting to board, and wave goodbye.

It’s beautiful, the love that flows from the ocean.

 

Need – Samantha Costanzo Carleton

Elizabeth picked up the habit of lighting candles from her grandmother and so she did that now because why not? Her grandmother had lit candles in church every week and prayed after dropping quarters in the half-empty metal box attached to the table of votives and as the sound echoed across the quiet church Elizabeth and her sister would stage-whisper arguments over who got to light the candle in part because it was the only time they were ever allowed to handle something as dangerous as fire on the end of a long wooden stick but also because they knew there was a certain kind of honor in the task and a solemn need to take this Very Seriously because the candle was an offering or maybe a plea, but anyways their grandmother would shush them and drop more change in the box so they could each have a candle and honestly, they never had to argue in the first place because didn’t they always need more than one light? There were always more things to ask, more people who needed healing or hope or good luck, so their grandmother told them who the candles were for and Elizabeth would do her sworn duty to pray for that person but also sneak in in a request for help on a math test or patience with her sister or world peace or for God to forgive the bullies that made fun of her hair, the biggest ask of all, and she would feel good because she was being selfless and asking for help for someone so clearly less fortunate than she. Anyways, lighting a candle seemed like something that would maybe help her feel alright again today and so she struck a flimsy match and touched it to the wick of the tiny little tea light that smelled like vanilla and chemical lemons from one of those self-care subscription boxes she had gotten for a few months and then cancelled when she got bored, it wasn’t even holy, not that she was convinced the ones in church had necessarily been blessed, either. Today she did not try to pray or really think to because she was focused on the ritual at hand — she lit her candle and stared, closed her eyes and took a deep breath, filled herself with air and tilted her head back instead of downward like she did inside the churches, and the prayer still didn’t come though something inside her squirmed like pleasepleaseplease and yet this weirdly-scented tea light flickering atop a paper mountain on her desk still felt Very Serious, still an offering or plea or desperate shout to be seen in the midst of all this, this mess, which would definitely eat her if not for that tentative, wavering flame and the smell of vanilla and fake lemons and something in her that actually felt like rest to scare it off. It was enough.

Samantha Costanzo Carleton is a marketing copywriter by day and creative writer by night. She lives in Boston and is working on her first novel, based in part on her childhood in a Cuban family. You can find her on Twitter at @smcstnz.

 

Little Flower – Cyndie Randall

I know at least 20 of them these days, but Angie was the first to breathe on me. A haunted friend. She drives my body now much of the time, curls up pained in the evening and pops peppermint candy like pills to get the torture of men out of her mouth. She wears wrinkled clothes, no makeup, writes poetry nobody cares to read. Therapists don’t believe in her and she’s fine with that. Feels invisible anyway. Her and I have our own dystopian trauma choir, all ages and genders lined up from present day all the way back to the crib. Seven times I pleaded with the Lord to take them away. The Lord told me, You must forgive seventy-seven times seven times, and then He sent seven more plagues. I think we need new numbers. Little flower, just take one more step, I hear. Just one more step. I spend most nights dreaming I am waste deep in snow. The moon asks, What are you doing, little flower? I scream at him, that moon. There is a man up inside there telling me which way to drag my hope next but he never tells me why. He is my only light, so I go. I do it. I pour sweat. I will turn any trick for water or a biscuit, any trick for a try on the love machine. Stop calling me little flower, I think. There is no one here by that name. Do you even know our name? When will I wake? No one listens when I say what I need. Here is a screw. Here is a screwdriver. I promise I will hold still. I’ve got about 20 holes to choose from, so take your pick and start somewhere. Or get me a mirror. I’ll do it myself! I’ll do it myself, and sing alto and soprano and bass and a nice tenor for you then. Ask Sal. He’s got the best voice of us all. Deep, mellow like a hum or a storm just starting out. A storm planning on screaming no where and killing no one. Sal has all our blueprints. You can ask him anything and he’ll tell you. If I am the flower, he is the sky and such a view he has. Sal, are you the moon? Are you the moon for us, my friend? Are you calling me little flower? Tell me how the story ends, Salvatore. Does Angie get her babies back? Does Evie close her legs? Will anyone come to untie Annie, heal the burns up her back? What do you see from way up there? Just my trail? Just the trail from my thick middle dragging, dragging through the snow in my childhood yard, longest chain there ever was linked back to that basement wall, training training training me. Go on, call me a little flower. Call me a flower all night long and we’ll do whatever you want ’til the sun comes up. Whatever you want, Lord, I mean moon, I mean dad.

Cyndie Randall works as a therapist and lives among the Great Lakes. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Crab Creek Review, MORIA, Okay Donkey, Whale Road Review, Boston Accent Lit, Yes Poetry, The Night Heron Barks, and elsewhere. Connect with her on Twitter @CyndieRandall or at cyndierandall.com

 

Cabinet Of Heed SOC Drawer 31.02

The Photo Prompt Challenge

Closes 31st May 2020

  1. Write about 500 words with the above photo as your inspiration.
  2. It can be Flash Fiction, CNF, Prose Poem, Poetry…
  3. Read over, edit, polish!
  4. Make it excellent.
  5. Submit to cabinetofheed@hotmail.com with “PHOTO PROMPT – Title of your work” in subject line.
  6. Please do NOT submit a previously written work to this Challenge! The Cabinet of Heed is still ravenous for excellent fiction and poetry. All previously written work should be submitted using these guidelines: https://cabinetofheed.com/submission-guidelines/
  7. The purpose of these challenges is to get writers who are temporarily “stuck” in the current pandemic back writing again, so please comply with number 6.
  8. The Cabinet Of Heed will select some of these works to appear in a special free online issue (The Cabinet Of Heed is read by people in over 130 countries).
  9. Have fun with this and stay safe!

#TheCabinetOfHeedChallenge

Image by Sasin Tipchai from Pixabay

I Sniff Your Brown Bin – Camillus John

I sniff your brown bin
because it stinks when I pass it
on my way over to the bus stop
in the morning.

Every two weeks you put it out
to be collected by the bin company.
I’ve got no choice in the matter.
Your brown bin is on a footpath I can’t avoid
so your compost wafts up at me as I pass.
I cough. Choke a bit. And my eyes water.

When I return on my way home from work,
although your brown bin is physically gone,
I can still smell its putrescent contents
and hear the buzzing of its ticks and flies
from earlier, I sneeze I do, I sneeze
when I’m passing, even when it’s not there.

That time you went on holiday
you didn’t put it out, so I didn’t have
to sniff your brown bin.
I thought I’d be excited
and really rock ‘n’ rolled at such a scenario,
but no, I missed the stink
and the fumes
and I was soothed
when I got to sniff it
four weeks later when you
eventually put it out again
full to the overflowing brim.

I have to admit though, I lingered
a little longer than I should
have on that public pavement
outside your home
that Tuesday morning, after four whole
weeks of going without,
and it felt like kissing someone
with bad-breath standing there
amongst all the bluebottles.

 

Camillus John was bored and braised in Dublin. He has had work published in The Stinging Fly, The Lonely Crowd and RTÉ Ten and other such publications. He would also like to mention that Pats won the FAI cup in 2014 after 53 miserable years of not winning it.

The Cabinet Of Heed Issue 29 Contents Link

Image via Pixabay

Beloved Father – Omotoyosi Salami

I

You’re outside, wearing your pink flowy dress,
the beads in your hair clinking softly against each other.
You’re twirling and twirling
and you can feel yourself start to lose balance
but you continue to twirl anyway.
The sun is shining. The grass tickles your feet. Breeze carries your arms.
You can be nothing but happy at 4.
And if there’s anywhere you’re going, you’re stumbling.

II

The lights still don’t point out the guilty, not even today,
meaning you still don’t understand what is going on. Why this happens.
But you know what a puncture is.
You know the sound of a punch from the pretty voice of a singing doll.
You know that cigarettes mean death and some other immoral thing.
You know that your mother’s breasts belong to your father and you know
what the punishment for defiance is but still,
you do not want your mother beaten.

III

So today you’re your even littler sister’s enemy.
You would knock her into the dirt if it called for it,
if she is stupid enough as to get the fork for your father.
All you hear is your mother’s high cry for help.
But you don’t cry.
Not one tear drops from your eyes.
Instead, you open your head and remove the straws in it
and throw it at your mother,
so she might cushion the effect of the landing.

IV

Now you’re 16 and not quite as dumb.
And you wish this could be a clean-cut, one-sided story but unfortunately it is not.
But unfortunately for who? Your father? You?
Or this dark haired boy currently wrapping his arms around you and
begging you to accept the love he feels
so strongly for you,
this boy kissing the space behind your ears?
You won’t let this go to ruin, you can’t let this go to ruin.

V

This man who looks relievingly unlike your father comes and says
Tell me about the dreams, darling. Tell me about the dreams.
His arms are open, biceps bulging, and you’re deluded into thinking
a house on fire is better than a storm outside.
How naïve. Are you naïve? You’re smarter than this. You’re 21 and know not to victim blame. Not to blame your own damn self.
But look, we’re jumping into the future. Now all you see is a one big arm
and then another long one, longing to hold you.
Never your father, not ever your father.
And you wouldn’t be your mother and ruin this for yourself either.

VI

A dark room, a dark house, a loose woman.
So loose, things simply slip through all the holes in you
To never again come out.
Take for instance, this husband of yours.
No man would want his fingers in that nest of a head,
Those saggy bags you call breasts.
(No man wants to drown.)
Nothing will impede hunger, do you not know this?
But, keep at those windows, stare at the stars.
The husband you await is in a brothel, drinking from a shimmery, lustrous lady.

VII

And finally, you’re now something of a freak.
You shrink at nature’s touch. You stifle yourself.
It’s your own body that repulses you;
there are no enemies hidden anywhere,
everyone knows this.
Suddenly the wind sounds like it’s wailing,
suddenly you’re no longer the shallow girl that thinks only of the sweet things.
You’re an overnight poet now, and you want to testify something.
You always have something to say, and it’s never happy.
But there are tragedies and there are tragedies and there are tragedies.
It simply is the order of things.
Whose judgement is it to make?
Whose dirge is it to sing?

 

Omotoyosi Salami is a poet and writer living in Lagos, Nigeria. A lot of her writing is influenced by the various inequalities that exist in her country. She has been published in Vagabond City Lit, Constellate Lit, and Brittle Paper. If you do not find her reading a book, you will find her writing something in her phone’s Notes app.
She is on Twitter as @HM_Omotoyosi.

The Cabinet Of Heed Issue 29 Contents Link

Image via Pixabay

The Raid – Richard Bower

The wizard made coffee. The warrior drew the plans on a napkin. The elf mistrusted ink and white sugar. The healer brought breakfast bananas. The wizard knew a hidden way into the king’s chambers. The warrior wanted to visit the princess first. The healer thought the kitchen should be secured for provisions. She was famished and more anxious than the rest. The elf noted the siege water supply. The sewer warranted an upgrade, but castle residents drank beer. And you can imagine what that would bring.

The elf swung over the moat light as the tooth fairy. The wizard carried himself in on lightning without thunder. The healer struck the gate rope with her crossbow bolt. The drawbridge lowered. The healer looked distinguished walking into the castle, her magic cloak drifting behind to frame her beauty for all. The elf didn’t identify with any gender, and the wizard admired the elf for this. The warrior believed he was all masculine but really wasn’t. He was only muscle, no bones in his body at all. The Healer worried about the violence afterward. She was right to be concerned, but the princess could protect herself. She had skills and years of practice. The king was not so fortunate when his soldiers defected. Blood, pillage, and more blood was the way it went. Don’t imagine it too much.

The wizard felt fortuitous about the secured real estate. The warrior felt sad he could not marry the princess. The elf mistrusted himself and ate bacon for breakfast every day. He feared no heart disease. Every day the healer regretted she could only do so much. So much repair needed doing. And though the sewer was wrecked, the beer tasted good. Each would deal with the stink privately. And you can imagine what that would bring.

Word reached them the king’s brother was on horse to retake the castle. The wizard made coffee. The warrior drew defense plans on a fancy handkerchief. The elf mistrusted the plans, diets, and their fellowship. The wizard kept secret what he knew about the invaders. The exhausted healer abandoned them to farm vegetables and raise pigs. And you can imagine what that would bring.

 

Richard Bower had previously published or has forthcoming flash in Postcard Shorts, Enchanted Conversation Magazine, Gingerbread House, Ghost Parachute, and Fiction Kitchen Berlin. He teaches writing for Cayuga’s School of Media and the Arts (SOMA).

The Cabinet Of Heed Issue 29 Contents Link

Image via Pixabay

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