Tag: #amreading

What I Loved About Barmouth in the Summer of 1986 – Steve Campbell

It wasn’t being woken before the clinking of milk bottles and getting crammed in, five abreast, across the back seat of our car as the smell of manure wafting in through the open windows, or the crawl behind an endless caravan of caravans, counting sheep to pass the time, it wasn’t the plastic shopping bag my brother filled with vomit that sloshed about in the foot well or the monotonous games of ‘I Spy’ and ‘Spot the Yellow Car’ that caused us to bicker and sulk instead of entertaining us, it wasn’t the wind-ravaged tent that we wrestled to erect, handed down from relatives who’d upgraded to a deluxe eight-berth caravan or the continuous Welsh driving rain, that somehow felt colder than English rain and found every hole there was to find in that tent, it wasn’t the missing bulbs of the tired illuminations that lined the promenade, or the cackling seagulls that dive-bombed us whenever we ate in the open air, it wasn’t the siren-blaring fruit machines that devoured every last penny I’d scraped together doing chores over the previous Winter, or the five out of seven days where the weather forced us to stay in the tent and play card games over and over and over again, it wasn’t the cows grazing in the neighbouring field that kept us awake at night with drunken moos, or clumps of sand that got everywhere and made applying suncream, changing clothes, showering and eating, crunchy, it wasn’t the rough pebbles that we had to clamber over, making monkey noises to reach the only square metre of unoccupied beach, or the dog turds we discovered buried a few inches beneath the sand’s surface. What I loved about Barmouth in the Summer of 1986 was that one Saturday afternoon, before we packed up to leave, where the smell of freshly cooked doughnuts dragged us into a shop and we came out with our lips coated in sugar and clutching oil-soaked paper bags brimming with fried batter, it was the afternoon where the clouds were nothing more than a whisp and couldn’t prevent the sun from browning our shoulders and raising freckles across our noses and, enmasse, everyone on the beach squeezed into swimsuits or rolled up trouser legs to feel the sea against their skin, it was the afternoon where the water was as clear and bright as any exotic location Judith Charmers visited, so much better than Tenerife or Florida or Devon or wherever my classmates would be bragging about when we returned to school in September, it was the afternoon of skimming stones until my shoulder aches and making a dam to stop the sea from coming in with a group of children I’d never met before, and would never see again, but that didn’t matter, it was the afternoon where I swam a little way out and lay on my back, waves lapping around me, and all I could see was blue because the sky had melted into the sea and it was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began, it was the afternoon floating close enough to the beach so that I could hear the shushing of waves but also being a million miles away, giggling to myself because I didn’t have the words to articulate how I was feeling, it was the afternoon that was over all too soon but one that I knew I’d come back to, decades later, reclining in a deckchair with a book in hand, I’d steal a glimpse over the pages between chapters and see my children splashing in the same sea, a few yards from the shore and a million miles away too.

 

STEVE CAMPBELL has work published in places such as Spelk, Fictive Dream, MoonPark Review, Molotov Cocktail and Flashback Fiction. He’s Managing Editor of Ellipsis Zine and is trying to write a novel. You can follow him via twitter @standondog and his website, standondog.com

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A Girl’s Guide to Frog Gigging – Mary-Jane Holmes

Arielle dripped duckweed into the yard, a cowl of nutria round her neck strung up by their angry orange teeth. She’d pulled them from traps sunk along a stretch of marsh she had no right to be in keeping her body low in the water so old Larnaudie, spit-polishing ball bearings by the landings couldn’t get a whiff of her and set to. Every so often, a frog mistook her skirt ballooning across the bubbling algae, for a lily pad and she scooped it up, thudding its head against the alder roots that held the river bank and stuffing it into her knickers, for she knew that snaring water rat was one thing but there was no forgiveness for frog gigging these days.

‘Give me that twine’ her mother said, taking the marlin spike from her mouth, setting it down on the halved cognac barrel that her father had used as a makeshift work bench before he’d left ‘to make his fortune’. Arielle unhitched her brace of vermin, pulled the nylon cord out from under the limp bodies and handed it over. Her mother licked the ends and twisted the splice into the lengths of the skep she was working. It would be the fourth she’d made, the others swinging from the paltry coppice beside the pig huts and the bees yet to colonise any of them. Arielle flinched at the fervour of this fruitless industry when there was so much more to be done; how were they to pay next month’s rent? She was young but she sensed this was a type of craziness deeper veined than Thierry Begoux barking at the few automobiles that growled through the village, or Mathilde the seamstress sewing nightdresses for her kitty.

‘Your brother can practise on those’ her mother said to Arielle’s catch, re-arming her mouth with cow horn ready to de-pith and strop the bramble suckers for the binding. Arielle gathered the wet shag of pelt by the tails and crossed the yard for the house, kicking at the tufty mole-hills sprouting in the lean spring sun. The warmth was welcome, the winter had been raw and with her mother too dafty to oversee the planting, the brassicas and onion sets Arielle had sowed, had rooted shallow, only to curdle in the first hoarfrosts. They’d lived the latter end of the season on pickled cucumbers from the summer harvest, saving the softer conserves – the syrup blanched persimmons and duck fritons for Mother who had stopped eating but Arielle made her suck them through hollowed oat grass.

Her brother Felix was in the larder sharpening knives on the whetstone for his new job at the abattoir, his face churned pink with effort. When Arielle picked up the pretty pearled handle of a tripe knife, he snatched it from her and ran its serrated edge across the downy cut of her jaw. Arielle did not move. She knew that to do so would only flame her brother’s frustration that Mother’s old knives were past honing and that he had to work in the abattoir. She listened to the dull blade scissor at her skin, a sound like crepitating straw. Felix stopped when he saw the coypu and Arielle bolted to the attic stairs shouting back that Mother had said to flush them out good before hanging them.

In the attic, she lay on her mattress tracing the welts rising on her cheek. She closed her eyes and thought of her father who had never sent word, had never sent the money he promised and wished there was someone to help her, knowing she would have to coop the chickens and pull Mother from her canes and baskets before the dew fell. It was then something slipped warm against her abdomen. Reaching under her skirt she pulled out a frog. She held it up by its webby hands and it did not struggle, just hung there, its pale throat pumping. ‘What a wise thing you are’ she said and kissed it, and kissed it knowing for the first time that flush of hope madness brings, and the frog blinked, her eyes as glistery as shining armour.

 

MARY-JANE HOLMES has won amongst others: the 2018 Mslexia Flash Fiction Competition, 2017 Bridport Poetry Prize and the Dromineer Fiction Prize. She has been published in places such as Best Small Fictions 2016 and 2018, the Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Prole, and The Lonely Crowd. She is Chief Editor of Fish Publishing, Ireland.

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Heterochromia in Charlie’s Living Room – Michael Bloor

On his way to the airport for his early morning flight, Charlie felt shrivelled and cowed. The previous evening, a meeting at the university had been cancelled and so he’d arrived home early, only to find Huw Pryce-White at his ease in an armchair with a whisky glass in his hand. Charlie’s wife, Felicity, had explained (a little too quickly) that Huw had popped round to borrow a book, and she’d poured him a drink while she searched for it.

There had been a pause. Pryce-White, his famous, battered, leather jacket unbuttoned, had simply stretched out in the chair, smiled, raised his glass and winked. The wink was disconcerting, since Pryce-White had one green eye and one brown eye. Closing one eye wrought a complete change in his physiognomy. A number of past female students had allegedly found themselves fascinated by those piercing, dissimilar eyes, to be released only when they were hooded.

Charlie, initially nonplussed, then worked his way through an unpleasant train of thought, carriage by carriage. ‘What was the book?’

Pryce-White had remained silent, still smiling. Felicity supplied an answer: ‘Er, Louis MacNeice’s autobiography…’

Another pause. Charlie muttered, ‘It’s in the bookcase in the spare bedroom – I’ll get it.’

As he climbed the stairs, he recalled a poignant passage from the book. MacNeice, on first arriving at boarding school as a child, had not gone to the toilet for two days, because he was too embarrassed to ask for directions. Charlie knew how that child had felt. After Pryce-White left, Charlie had failed to ask Felicity for directions.

*      *      *

Boarding the Aberdeen-Heathrow shuttle, Charlie was shrivelled once more to find the adjoining seat already taken by a very large, bearded gentleman. But in the event, he proved an entertaining companion – Gunnar, a Norwegian oilman – who had just been dispatched by his drilling company to a place in Africa called ‘Libreville.’

‘What do you know about Libreville?’ Charlie had asked.

‘Don’t know a damned thing.’ Gunnar laughed and signalled for a tonic water and a complementary packet of peanuts. He topped up the tonic water with a whisky miniature from his side pocket.

‘If I were in your shoes, I don’t think I’d like not knowing. Unknown prospects.’

Gunnar shrugged: ‘I imagine there will be someone there to meet me – there usually is.’ He fanned some boarding passes: there would be two more flights to board after he arrived at Heathrow. ‘Maybe I’ll find out something by the time I arrive.’ He laughed again.

‘Does this kind of thing happen to you a lot?’

‘Every once in a while. Before I was in Aberdeen, I was in Azerbaijan. I’d never heard of that place either.’

‘What was Azerbaijan like?’

‘Don’t really know. I was in one of those places… er, “gated community.” Everybody there was in the oil business too. Fancy a whisky?’

‘It’s a bit early for me… but, why not?’

Gunnar produced another miniature from his side pocket, poured half into his tonic water and the other half into Charlie’s plastic teacup. Charlie had never tasted whisky in tea before. He reckoned it was a good combo.

Gunnar asked what Charlie would be doing in London. He was told about the dreary academic journal and its dreary editorial board meeting. There was a pause. ‘If I may say so, Charlie, you seem a little gloomy.’

Charlie stared into the now-empty teacup. ‘Gloomy?? Gunnar, I feel like a man on a beach watching the ebb tide and knowing it will never return.’

More whisky appeared, a half-bottle this time. And Gunnar listened to the story of Huw Pryce-White sitting in Charlie’s armchair. ‘Hmm. Hoo Priss-Vite, you say? A curious name: hyphenated, perhaps? Is he Scottish?’

‘He likes to pretend he’s Welsh, likes to play the hell-raising Celtic Bard, but he’s actually from a place called Blundellsands, outside Liverpool.’

‘Heh. You would like to do him harm, I think?’

‘Dead right, pal.’

‘Heh, heh. I was born in the Lofoten Islands, in the far north of Norway – a fishing community. You know how superstitious are fishermen. My grandfather, he knew many spells, many charms. Also, secret signs – staves – that can be drawn or carved to bring luck. Or bad luck.’ Gunnar paused to top up Charlie’s cup and murmured confidentially, ‘You simply hide the stave among a person’s belongings.’

It was a tough call. Charlie took another swig, thought about it, and then asked politely about Gunnar’s granny.

The moment passed (apparently, Lofoten Island women were bad luck anywhere near a fishing boat. No spells or staves, but she cooked a mean fish soup). The conversation moved onto the disappearance of the Scottish herring fleet. But a seed had been sown.

*      *      *

Two days later Charlie, through his open office door, watched Pryce-White wander along the corridor, into the staff toilets. Charlie snuck quickly into the vacant adjoining office and stole Pryce-White’s famous, battered, leather jacket. That night, he burned the fucker in his backyard.

 

MICHAEL BLOOR is a retired sociologist living in Dunblane, Scotland, who has discovered the exhilarations of short fiction, with more than thirty pieces published in The Cabinet of Heed, Everyday Fiction, The Copperfield Review, Litro Online, Firewords, The Drabble and elsewhere.

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Disasters – Jared Pearce

When the storm kills your cat,
or the cold kills your mother,
or the heat kills your father,
and we could go on to the end,
then it’s easy to see nature

coming alive. But most of the time
we scurry around each other,
leap from another’s shadow,
keep our ears twitched for any
crunch on the pine needles

because it’s people crashing
cars, burning tires, casting bullets,
razing sunflowers. We know
the real deal when we see it.

 

 

JARED PEARCE’s collection, The Annotated Murder of One, was released from Aubade last year (www.aubadepublishing.com/annotated-murder-of-one). His poems have recently been or will soon be shared in Xavier Review, Blue Mountain Review, THAT, Adelaide, and The Aurorean. Link and upcoming events are featured here: https://jaredpearcepoetry.weebly.com.

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Image via Pixabay

Tessa – Emily Livingstone

There she sits, a queen of death and life, on the chair next to Mom’s bed. Mom has been dead for two weeks, and I’m ready to touch Tessa. Tessa’s chestnut curls have called to me since I was five. Her face is still perfectly smooth, her eyes still shiny and piercing. I’m sweating, I realize, but I grab her anyway, feeling the stiff petticoats brush against me as I carry her.

When I was a girl, I longed to play with her, and Mom always said no. But I couldn’t resist—she would be the perfect tea party guest, the most obedient child in a game of house—I needed her. I took her once, when Mom was lying down, and brought her into the garden to smell the roses. Then, I just sat on the grass, and looked at her, holding my breath as I stroked the hem of her dress, rubbed those delicate fingers. And then, Tessa and I were yanked apart, and I spent two days in my room, listening to the click of Mom’s heels outside the door and the clomping footsteps of Sean, two years older and never in trouble. Mom took me out every few hours for the bathroom, but she didn’t speak to me. When I washed my hands in the sink, I met her eyes in the mirror. They were like dark glass, with no special recognition for me.

I am holding her in Mom’s garden now, and I hear my name. I go red from cheeks to core. I’m a grown woman, holding Tessa in the yard and looking at the neighbor woman.

“I’m Becca,” she says. She’s tanned and thin, holding a watering can and looking at me through the chain link. “I just wanted to say sorry about your Mom. Let me know if we can help with anything—my husband’s Pete.”

I nod, waving at her awkwardly while I hold the doll. Then, I flee.

Mom hated that family. There was the day it rained—one of Mom’s good days—and the kids were out playing in the mud. “Shame on their mother, letting them run around in the muck like that.”

I thought they looked like something out of a children’s book, running, shrieking, floating little boats in a puddle near the swing set. But I said, “Let’s close the curtains. Then we won’t have to see.”

I sit Tessa on the couch and start microwaving a Lean Cuisine, trying to get it all out of my head. Mom. Becca. I keep catching Tessa’s eye. Even now, even when I’m the only one left (Sean can’t be bothered to come back to deal with Mom’s death, just as he couldn’t be bothered to come back and care for her when she was alive), Tessa is distant. She looks through me and past me, past my own death to a time when she can rule over an empire of tidy solitude.

The microwave beeps and I flinch. Tessa looks smug. And then, I know what to do, and I go and take Tessa by the arm so that her body clunks against my leg, and I bring her up the driveway to the street and sit her on the trash bags I’ve put out for garbage collection.

My heart is beating wildly, and all evening, I think of her out there. I imagine tomorrow, when she is thrown in the back of the truck and coffee grounds smear her pale face, and egg yolk sticks to her dress. When she is compressed.

I fall asleep watching TV, and wake to the sound of the truck pulling away. A rush of nausea washes over me, and I go to the window, but the trash is gone. Tessa is gone.

I’m lonely. Lonelier than after the funeral. The only time I’ve felt like this was after Candy. Candy, my secret. Candy, who plucked me from the sidelines of a college party and taught my body to move. Candy, who held me in her arms for weeks and let me hold all her secrets. She left me so easily.

I sit on the couch as Mom used to do, and stare out the window at the neighbors’ yard. And then, there is the little girl. She is carrying a big blanket and a basket, and it’s so much for her, she almost looks like she could fall over. Then, she leaves again without unpacking her picnic, and returns with a teapot, which must hold real water, because she carries it against her chest, right under her chin, and walks very carefully. She unrolls the blanket, and there—green dress, black shoes, chestnut ringlets.

The girl bends Tessa into a sitting position and slowly pours two cups of water. The little girl solicitously holds a cup to Tessa’s little bow mouth, but all the while, Tessa’s eyes look over the girl’s shoulder, fixed on me.

I hold my own oily, stringy, dull hair and pull. My eyes are watering. I take a step toward the slider, then stop. I should never, never have thrown her away. She’s valuable, probably. She’s mine. The girl will ruin her.

I watch the girl speak to Tessa and lean in for her replies. When the tea is complete, the girl picks Tessa up and hugs her around the waist, bringing her inside with all the casual intimacy of a sister.

I pack more things in boxes, but then I have to unpack them in case I’ve made another mistake. It’s around two a.m. when an idea comes and hope coats my tired brain and lets me sleep.

*      *      *

The aisles are filled with cheap, plastic dolls wearing outfits in garish hues and looking blankly out into the fluorescent light with overdone expressions of wonder or joy. How can I possibly get the girl to want one of these? They are nothing like Tessa. They would be all wrong at a tea party. They would drool on the table cloth and spit up the tea. They would crawl away and get mud on their jumpers.

I settle, finally, on a doll whose name has already been chosen by some marketing team. “Mackenzie” has straight, shiny blonde hair and makeup painted over her eyes. She has a denim jacket over a tank top and a skirt that’s repulsively short. But at least she has eyes that open and close.

*      *      *

I knock on the door while I balance Mackenzie’s box on my hip. She’s wrapped in appropriately heinous paper depicting hundreds of balloons rising with snaking, curly-cue strings underneath them. There’s a pre-done, iridescent bow to top it all off.

The mother seems happy to see me, eyes flicking to the box. She invites me in. The happiness doesn’t last long when I explain the mistake—that Tessa belongs with me, that I’ve brought this other doll for her little girl.

The mother gets cold, her face losing its flexibility. “I know you must be going through a tough time,” she says, “but Lyddie’s really taken to the doll, and you did throw her away.” She takes Mackenzie and promises to try.

*      *      *

The girl goes outside later, holding Tessa. She sits on the ground hugging Tessa tight, stroking the perfect curls, and I open the slider slowly, go out there, drawn to them. She hears me, and stands—her face is red and blotchy with crying. She holds Tessa’s head under the chin and shouts, “You can’t have her! She loves me!”

The girl runs with Tessa behind an oak where I can’t see her. A moment later, the door to the house opens, and the mother makes a beeline for the girl. My breath catches. She’s going to get it now. The doll will be taken away. The little girl will be locked up.

The mother scoops up girl and doll and carries them into the house, smoothing the daughter’s hair and murmuring to her. She doesn’t look at me.

My knees feel wobbly. I go inside, to my room. I lie down on the old pink comforter, burying my nose in the mildewing cotton.

I used to lie just this way when I was bad—when Mom put me here. I would go in and out of sleep, and each time I woke up I would try the doorknob, sweaty in my hands, but it was always stuck. Sometimes, I shouted, but Mom never answered. Sometimes, when Sean was home, he would come to the keyhole and yell, “Shut up, Adah!”

Finally, Mom would open the door and say, “That’s all done now. Time to come out.” I’d be so hungry, and Mom would give me a bowl of white rice and a glass of milk. Always that meal. What did it mean?

I can leave my room whenever I like now. When I finally do, I see an envelope lying on the floor just inside the front door. I read the message and open the door.

There is Mackenzie, smiling up at me from her plastic box.

With scissors, I cut into the box, freeing Mackenzie. I hold the doll up and look into her face. Mackenzie looks friendly, open, maybe a little pathetic. Of course, the little girl had not wanted this doll. Of course, she had not been fooled. Her hair isn’t even right. Not even close to right.

My hands are trembling as I plug in the curling iron in the bathroom and use it on Mackenzie’s slick blonde hair. There’s an unpleasant smell, but I bite my lip.

“Beauty is pain,” I tell Mackenzie.

The doll is horizontal on the vanity and her eyes are closed against the heat of the iron. What else? Wipe off that makeup. There must be a way to get it off. Different clothes. I meet my own eyes in the mirror and I see my damp, red face, the wrinkles around my eyes and mouth, my wet eyes. I look back down at Mackenzie. The curling iron has melted part of her cheek and her hair is caught in the plastic wound.

“Come now,” I tell her. “Be a good girl.”

Really, her hair is better, and the curls almost hide the burn.

When I lie Mackenzie down on the welcome mat next door, I think she looks quite well.

*      *      *

The knock on the door is angry—like a movie where they will come to take people away to a secret prison. But I feel a kind of calm return to me. It will only be Tessa, coming home.

But no—it’s the father from next door, gripping Mackenzie tightly by the neck. Mackenzie’s wide-eyed, scarred face thrusts into mine, and I reach for her, only to have her yanked back again.

“You left this on our doorstep,” he says.

I’m afraid. I’ve never had a man mad at me who wasn’t my own brother, and Sean was bad enough. The father is tall and a little overweight. He’s still wearing work clothes, a suit and everything. He is like an old TV father gone wrong.

“You did this as what—a threat? Well, I’ll have you know that if this doesn’t stop—if you don’t cut this out, I will call the police. You leave my daughter alone—and my wife.”

Now, he shoves Mackenzie at my chest and my arms come up to close around her. I’m shaking and I have to pee. I don’t move until I hear the neighbors’ door slam shut.

“There now,” I say, and sit Mackenzie on the couch. I’m still shaking when I make it to the toilet and my bladder lets go.

My legs feel unsteady as I return to the living room. “Mackenzie, quiet down. You’re getting on my nerves.”

I pick her up.

“Why don’t you go and lie down,” I say. “I’ll let you know when it’s time to come out.”

I lie Mackenzie down on the faded pink bedspread, and her eyelids click closed.

I close the door and lock it.

I go over to the sofa and sit, holding my knees to my chest. I turn on the TV and let the programs play and play. Mackenzie wants to come out, but it isn’t time.

There’s a noise from next door, and I’m up, looking out the window. I hear running, stomping feet, then a boy’s low grunt, and a small sound I can’t identify. The brother is on the porch of their house. I go for the slider, and I can hear more happening—footsteps and angry yelling and a girl’s wail.

I fumble with the handle, then I’m outside, and four pairs of eyes are on me. There is the father, red-faced and frozen mid-yell. The mother, kneeling and hugging the little girl around her middle; the little girl, red-faced, too, and crying. There is the boy, staring at me and holding Tessa by one leg, her petticoats all overturned and her poor bare legs exposed, and her hair hanging down, but even worse, her face. Her face is in pieces on the porch—I can just see it from here, through the chain link that separates the yards. The boy glares at me. The mother ushers all of them into the house. Tessa goes, too. Only her face remains.

I moan, backing into the house. I crawl into bed with Mackenzie and clutch her tightly.

*      *      *

Mackenzie and I spend the next few days together. We don’t go out or answer the phone. When the real estate agent Sean arranged for comes, we are quiet and don’t move a muscle.

The night before trash pickup, I’m anxious. Mackenzie tries to comfort me, but she doesn’t understand.

We watch out the window. Finally, the father brings his trash in a black bag up to the curb and leaves it there. When it’s dark, I tell Mackenzie to wait, and open the front door and creep up to the road. I tear open the trash bag and reach through the coffee grounds and liquids and soggy tissues until I feel her.

I take her by the waist and hug her, carrying her home.

Tessa is quiet during the bath, which is a blessing, since the water could get inside her head if she makes too much of a fuss. Much of her face is gone now. The eyes, nose, and most of the mouth are broken away. All that remains is a bit of lower lip and jaw, delicate temples and a touch of forehead at the hairline. Mostly, there is a dark cavity where Tessa’s face was, showing the concave back of her little bisque cranium.

After the bath, when I bring Tessa out to the living room, Mackenzie offers a friendly smile. Tessa has only her bottom lip now, and it can’t smile.

It doesn’t matter.

We are together now.

We eat frozen meals I have stored in the basement freezer until the power gets turned off. We light candles and drink lukewarm tea slowly in the silence, with not even the hum of the refrigerator to disturb us. There is knocking sometimes, but the phone no longer rings.

We get notices in bright colors, slipped under the door. There is more knocking.

We know what to do. It’s simple. We just use the candles—the curtains, the old bedspreads, the couch, they all burn easily, and there is light again, one last time.

 

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Image via Pixabay

In Which a Tinker Courts Constable Arlene – Michael Grant Smith

Summertime in Last Chance conjures images of longer days, the constant threat of dehydration, and our annual Dust Festival. Last Chance’s citizens are hardworking humble heroes and we never miss an opportunity to celebrate the community’s leadership in powdered grime production. Similarly, throughout the rainy winter and spring seasons, our mud industry thrives.

The world outside Hubert’s mobile home was the color of old straw. July had wedged itself into the atmospheric layer between pavement and the stratosphere; air weighed nearly twice as much as usual. Frenzied preparations for the upcoming Dust Festival placed a chokehold on the bowels of local authorities.

Constable Arlene dumped beans & franks into a saucepan set to simmer. The can opener’s whine had triggered dozens of cats, whose chorus climbed from teakettle pitch to ultrasonic. Arlene waded shin-deep into the living room, where soft-footed predators also swarmed her uncle’s floor, sofa, and coffee table. Feline breath displaced the alkaline air.

“So, how are you, sir?”

“Me?” said Hubert. “I get by. Better than some, probably.” He sipped his fifth or sixth cup of the day’s black coffee. “Better than your daddy, I expect.”

A light of violence flickered in Arlene’s eyes but she said nothing. Hubert didn’t notice; his attention pinballed itself to remote dates and locales.

“Could be worse. What about the time I kicked dirt over my third ex-wife?” he said, tight-faced. “Nice casket, nice service. She didn’t appreciate it, though. Kept hollering, wouldn’t shut up. Almost ruined her own funeral. Maybe I jumped the gun?”

Hubert shook and coughed. It wasn’t a seizure; he was laughing. After a minute the oldster’s features settled the way custard folds into a par-baked pie crust. He rubbed his tears.

“Never killed no perps when I was on the job,” he said. “Forty-nine years as constable without being shot. Stabbed, though. Just once. The guy yelled at me after because I was still alive.”

“I know, sir.”

Lucidity dealt Hubert a glancing blow. He pointed a finger the shape and color of uncooked breakfast sausage left out overnight.

“You has to stop dating them jailbirds! Aim higher. Make yourself less available. Quit doing kindnesses.”

Arlene’s cheeks burned. In her mind, and unbidden, floated brain-pictures of Dolly Everett’s arched eyebrows and pianist’s hands.

“Just because Councilman Everett’s wife sleeps in the lockup now and then,” said Arlene, “it don’t make her a criminal. She needs to be away from home sometimes…”

“Away from her husband and babies, you mean! Why do you fall for the bad ones, and her all married to the hilt? Pretty little filly such as yourself — some of them gals at Charlotte’s, them what say things, they say your prospects ought to be sky-high.”

“If the staff at Charlotte’s Salon & Barber wants to gab about my so-called behaviors, maybe I need to drop by and verify their licenses are in good order and up-to-date!”

“That’s my girl!” shouted Hubert. He beat the arms of his chair as if they were bongo drums. The cats, boiled by the commotion, resumed their mewling. “Get on out of here, Arlene Candace Nelson, and abuse your office a little bit. It’ll perk you up! Go make your uncle proud — and your famous daddy as well, wherever he is!”

Constable Arlene evacuated herself from the old man’s trailer and fired up her motor-scooter. Gravel ricocheted off sheet metal and pinged the living room window as she twisted the throttle and sped off. Last Chance’s best and only law enforcement officer rode in a cloud of dust, exhaust, and a dark mood. She’d concede one point to her uncle: there was no better tonic than writing a few tickets.

She parked her scooter in the Farm & Fleet’s loading zone; the building also housed Last Chance’s municipal offices ever since the Grange Hall got a termite fumigation tent. Next door, Carl’s Chicken Shack displayed a hand-written sign in its order window:

welcome dusters

no public toilet

Bending to tie a bootlace, Arlene growled at the shimmer of cat hair wedded to her pressed uniform trousers. She licked her fingers and rubbed furiously at the stubborn fuzz until she heard an unfamiliar voice:

“I can make your problems disappear, officer!”

A stranger grinned. He appeared stocky but fit, fleshy yet firm; a bell pepper in human form. Without waiting for Arlene’s permission he ran a tiny paint roller device up and down the furred fabric once, twice, thrice, and the mess was gone, transferred to the sticky rotating cylinder. Meanwhile, Arlene gripped her hefty flashlight in one hand and a citation book in the other.

She drew a lung-snapping deep breath and said, “Sir, you invaded my pants’ personal space. I am fixing to ring your bell but professional guidelines dictate I warn you first.”

The man and his smile both froze right there in the street. His eyes — gentle, lovely ones they seemed to Arlene — grew as big as hubcaps.

“My deepest and most profound apologies!” he said. “I encountered a beautiful woman experiencing garment distress and I could not suppress my urge to assist. Please, can you forgive my presumption?”

“If forgiveness and arresting go together, so do spareribs and soap,” replied the constable, her voice as flat and brittle as a saltine cracker. “Who are you, sir, and what brings you to Last Chance?”

“My name is Durwood Ott. I am a purveyor of essentials, gimcracks, and baubles; a sharpener of dull edges, a singer of songs.” He waved a copy of The Last Chance Gazette & Intelligencer. “News of your Dust Festival has traveled and I came here to ply my trade, or so I believed.”

Durwood removed the battered, wide-brimmed hat from his bald noggin. He extended a hand, which Arlene caught with her own firm grip (contrary to departmental procedure and her own regular instincts). A spark sizzled but no one recoiled. Might have been an electrical jolt of the static persuasion, maybe it was something else.

“Well, now,” said Durwood. “Aren’t you intriguing!”

“A tinker,” whispered Constable Arlene. Her hand felt jazzy. “You had to be a tinker.”

He smiled, mistaking her meaning. “I prefer to say the profession chose me, not the inverse. Perhaps we could take a coffee together? I would be delighted to share with you my life’s story.”

“No, thank you, my official counteroffer is for you to vacate town at once or spend a few days in jail.”

“I did not intend to upset you! How selfish of me…we could talk about your story instead?”

“Mr. Ott, you stand in violation of Last Chance civil ordinance 326-A-2001 Sections 1 through 5, to wit: no hobo, grifter, drifter, transient, tinker, or any other classification of vagabond shall be permitted temporary or permanent residency within Last Chance’s jurisdiction. In smaller words, I am bound to escort you to yon outskirts or invite you to be locked up a spell.”

“May I ask you this: If I am to be incarcerated, will you be my jailer?”

“Yes, sir, it is my swore duty.”

Durwood laughed; not the way people do when a scooter’s front wheel drops into a damn pothole and pitches a constable over the handlebars, but more in the manner of expressing joy. Arlene’s fingers, all on their own, tucked some loose dark curls back up under her cap. The tinker held out his wrists in an unmistakable gesture of Coming Along Quietly.

“You locked up my heart from the moment I saw you brush cat hair from your leg. I surrender myself to your custody!”

Mr. Ott probably had a few regrets during the first few days of his incarceration, maybe missed his freedom or whatnot. As the years turned to decades, however, his affection for Constable Arlene grew stronger. Not once did he petition for release, or attempt an escape, even on weeks she left the lockup door open.

Similarly, Arlene’s fondness for her prisoner stuck like roofing cement. She spent long, pleasant hours in her office chair, adjacent to Last Chance’s fantastically aged and persistently dozing clerk “Frisky” Clinchett, and listened to her caged songbird. Durwood the tinker warbled about traipsing to distant places and having adventures and meeting improbable outcomes head-on. The shoosh of an unseen ocean hovered behind every one of his melodies.

Folks tend to settle in Last Chance and seldom depart, except under cover of darkness or frog-marched by the authorities. Constable Arlene had never left and was certain to remain. Latches of affection slip between gear cogs from low speed to high and in between, a fact known also to Dolly Everett.

Arlene Nelson struggled to visualize the size and shape of her fugitive daddy’s probable prison cell (as if any such structure of stone and metal could contain a legend). She wondered what song former-Mayor Lowell “Fuzzy” Nelson would sing to his only daughter, and whether chain gang sledgehammers could break asunder a big heart.

 

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Parallel Lines – Tina M Edwards

I was a child of the ‘70’s. Growing up amongst bell bottoms and foot long collars, brown and orange wallpaper. It was a time of political change, and one very hot summer. Fleetwood Mac was on the record player and Stevie Nicks was pinned on the inside door of the garden shed.

On the days that dad went to see a man about a dog, I was allowed inside the warm small space. ‘To keep an eye on things,’ Dad said. Make sure Mum didn’t ‘tidy’ the place. When he eventually returned, stumbling and slurring words, we sat in a haze of Woodbine that mingled with the smell of fresh creosote. We were happy then. Me, Dad and Stevie, until mum started banging on about how she always did everything around the house while we had a life of Riley. Whoever he was, he must have been one lucky bugger, because I thought it was us who were the lucky ones.

Then one day Mum decided to get a job, as a Tupperware lady, and almost overnight everything changed. The fridge was full of plastic containers stuffed with carrot sticks and there was no dinner on the table when Dad got home from work. That was when the rumours started, from number 28, that Mum was carrying on with another man. Someone high up in Tupperware. So when she upped and left, one Sunday evening, dragging an oversized brown suitcase down the back lane, I guessed it must have something to do with the Riley bloke.

By the time she came back, six months later, the fridge was full of Vesta curries and Dad had finally brought the dog home. A deaf black and white mongrel with a dodgy back leg who we named Debbie. The shed had been dismantled one night when the coal bunker was empty and Stevie Nicks had been stripped and used to pick up Debbies shit. Dad was growing side burns and ironing his own shirts, and on the record player was Blondie. And all dad said to mum when she walked through the front door was; Pamela, things are going to be different around here now.

The next morning I opened the fridge and found a lone Tupperware container on the top shelf next to the cheese. A piece of paper had been stuck to the lid and read; ‘This is a reminder to never leave things for too long or else they will go off.’

It stayed there for a while until I saw dad remove it after breakfast one morning and replace it with a Vesta curry. He winked at me and I nodded as if I knew. Knew what the hell was happening in the cold space that no one talked about. His secret was safe with me. I’d not let on I’d seen the woman down the road from number 28 shopping in the corner shop, her basket full to the brim with Vesta Curries.

 

TINA M EDWARDS poetry and fiction has been published in the U.K. and America. She has a penchant for ducks and Cornwall and has been told since childhood she has a vivid imagination. Which is just as well, considering she loves to write. In another life she was probably a Chirologist.   www.tinamedwardswriter.wordpress.com

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Banshee – Claire Loader

They say the banshee came the night my grandmother died, the night my mother was born. Through their screams and wails it was said another sound could be heard, a keening howl that tore about the hedgerows, raced upon the fields. The desperate cries of life and death dancing above the thatch as both bled into the floor beneath it.

I never really believed in all that shite. My Grandmother dying as she gave birth on the barren earth of a dingy cottage was horror enough without the need of a spectral element. I think Mam was always disappointed in me in that way, as if not believing in another piseog I was turning my back on her somehow. Just another disappointment to add to the pile.

“Could you make your bed this morning please, just once?”

“Yes, Ma.”

“And don’t go using the dryer so much. You know it eats up the electricity.”

“I’m sorry, Ma.”

“And you better not fail that maths test this morning. If I have to be called in to talk to Mrs Kennedy one more time…”

“I’ve been studying Mammy, don’t worry.”

If the banshee really did exist surely it was in the form of Mrs Kennedy, she heralded the death of all things. That pursed upper lip, those awful tanned stockings, the way she spoke Irish like she was squeezing it past a carrot squashed up the hole of her arse. Her classes were like one long drawn out scream in which we were all forced to remain silent, not knowing which one of us would drop next from shear boredom. And I was late, again.

“Ms Kavanagh, Dia dhuit.” The words slid out of her mouth like putrid yoghurt. “Delighted you could join us.”

I sat quickly in my seat, determined to ace this thing, to prove to Mam I was more than just a future burger flipper at Supermacs, pregnant at seventeen to the likes of Enda Costello. I looked up at him from my exam paper, broad shoulders hunched over his own, the bottom edges of his pants mucky with this morning’s dirt. Up early on his Dad’s farm most like, his large hands at work long before I managed to drag mine out of bed. His pen was dwarfed by them, and I could suddenly see myself in its place, albeit far less rigid…

“Ms Kavanagh! Eyes on your paper please!”

The banshee again, screaming at me from my future. I looked at my blank paper, then at the clock. I didn’t need the gift of foresight to know I was in deep shit.

When I arrived home Mam looked shook, as if she knew already of my imminent F.

“You alright, Ma?”

Her hands paused in the sink, “Yes. Yes, it’s nothing.”

My eyes narrowed, full sure she could somehow see into my mind, into all of its scraggly compartments, see clearly my morning equations that had nothing to do with numbers. I wavered like an unsure cat, not knowing if it was truly safe.

“Why don’t you go walk the dog or something?”

My brow creased in suspicion. “Sure, Ma.”

I grabbed the dog, hand sliding over the small box in my pocket as I headed out to the quiet of the back field. My parents hadn’t built far from the old cottage, its stony gable end the only thing visible now through the tangle of brambles. I turned from the kitchen window, lighting up a cigarette away from the ‘Great Eye of Mammy’ that was otherwise always watching, Molly rustling about the long grass as I drank in the quiet of the afternoon, certain at any moment Mrs Kennedy would appear with my fast food uniform at the ready, the stitched white shirt proclaiming my doom.

Molly started barking suddenly and I nearly tripped as, quickly turning, I saw her growling wasn’t at the house but the ruins, a dark movement catching my eye from between the bushes.

“Those little Halloran shits again.”

I don’t know what I was doing heading towards the cottage, as if my cigarette was some kind of lightsaber against local vandals, but I stopped abruptly, the dog trembling at my feet, a hooded figure looming out from the stone.

“What the…”

A shriek broke the air and, not waiting to find out if it hadn’t come from my own mouth, I ran through the paddock, my fingers fumbling on the kitchen door, before slipping inside and slamming it safely behind me.

Mam spoke suddenly from the middle of the kitchen, as I leaned heavily against the door, my chest heaving. “You saw her too, didn’t you?”

“I, no, um… maybe?”

Mam stood ashen, her gaze suddenly fearful and I barely made out her whisper, “But she only comes to warn of another’s passing. But that means…”

Our eyes locked. Perhaps now was a good time to tell her about the test.

 

CLAIRE LOADER was born in New Zealand & spent several years in China before moving to County Galway. A photographer & writer, she was a recent winner in the Women Speak poetry competition and blogs at http://www.allthefallingstones.com

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The Layover (Bellies On The Breeze) – Stephen Mead

Some birds have heart attacks in mid-air,
the pulse suddenly fluttering at too rapid
a rate. We, as well, often travel that
accelerated. Our eyes, cameras, process
micro seconds, our limbs; long distance
runners, our energy; hormonal stimuli
thrown into overdrive…

Let up. Let up.
Tranquility spills into panic, sifts
like rain through tired joints, spreads,
steams invisibly.

Remember the bends?
They are resigned now, detached, clasping
stillness like wings that have flown
into the tower of a large glass marina…

As water things slide, fin-sprinting
here & there for the ebbing of concentric
ripples. The beauty of such motion,
observed & next, entered, is what holds us
to existence as we again dive, gut-gripped,
in flight.

 

A resident of NY, STEPHEN MEAD is an Outsider multi-media artist and writer. Since the 1990s he’s been grateful to many editors for publishing his work in print zines and eventually online. He is also grateful to have managed to keep various day jobs for the Health Insurance. In 2014 he began a webpage to gather various links to his published poetry in one place.

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Image via Pixabay

Flamenco Tat – Chloe Balcomb

Turning the corner into Vernon Street, Daisy tastes vermillion and her unease grows. It’s been a while since Rhoda had one of her turns but then she’s just finished a commission, always a trigger. Daisy sighs. She’s an Art student herself so it’s not that she minds having an unusual mum who’s a bit batty and dresses like someone from the 1920s, it’s just the unpredictability factor.

Daisy pauses at the front door and takes a deep breath. Beneath the grey blue paint, the grain shimmers. She admires its silky taffeta appearance, will one day replicate it on her own front door, ‘Not long now!’ she thinks giddily. Living with Rhoda is taking its toll.

‘Rhoda, I’m back! ’ Daisy calls from the hallway. She squeezes her jacket onto the overflowing hooks, pausing to rest her cheek against Rhoda’s favourite, a moss green maxi coat that looks incredible against her mother’s auburn hair. Daisy’s own hair is an ordinary brown, though thick and glossy, while Rhoda’s is beginning to thin.

She bends down to unlace her boots. They’re still pinching at the bridge, which is weird because surely ‘vintage’ Docs should be worn in by now? Her mother distrusts second hand shoes, says they bring a stranger’s energy into the house that’s hard to eradicate. Claims Daisy’s been ripped off anyway, says purple Doc Martens didn’t even exist back in the day.

Daisy hates it when Rhoda bursts her bubble but has learnt to keep quiet. The consequences of shaming her mother are worse than the initial pain. Take that time Rhoda killed Goldy in an ill thought out spell. To be fair, though Rhoda had found a substitute, Daisy had spotted the change. Tired of her daughter’s protest and growing impatient at her tears, Rhoda had turned herself into a hat.

A straw boater trimmed with green ribbon was completely useless to eleven year old Daisy, who for the rest of the week had to cook her own meals and walk the four miles to and from school because Rhoda hadn’t thought to leave bus fares. A week felt like forever in a quiet house and a hat wasn’t something she could easily chat to.

Daisy’s father Robert had left them by then. And little wonder, given her mother’s outbursts and eccentricities, though the suddenness of his departure and his continuing silence, still rankles.

Daisy’s tried hard to respect his choices but this Christmas, after one too many Snowballs, she found herself asking Rhoda whether she ever missed him? Annoyed, Rhoda declared that she certainly didn’t and nor should Daisy. She went on to list Robert’s faults, including his unimaginative dress sense, complete lack of skills and general neediness.

Despite her mother’s vehemence, Daisy detected a note of regret in this tirade but was deterred from further questioning by Rhoda’s final remark that Robert smelt strongly of seaweed. This last part was true at least and suddenly reminded of his metallic, salty scent, Daisy had mourned that too. So what if Robert had dressed conventionally, couldn’t’ summon smoke or turn cupcakes into mushrooms? As far as she knew, neither could anyone else’s father.

’Mum, I’m back!’ Daisy calls again but still there’s no reply. She wiggles her bruised feet and pads into in the front room.

Light splashes through the stained glass window, flooding the carpet with colour. As a little girl she’d loved bathing in the translucent strands and relished the way they’d clothed her skin. Purple was her favourite because it made her happy and she loved the underwater feeling of emerald green. The blue was deliciously calming and made her sleepy. Orange could be sickly if you got too much of it and red made her so itchy that she’d continued to avoid it.

‘Why are you standing there, Poppet?’ Robert would ask, but such things were hard to explain and though he ruffled her hair and nodded seriously, she could tell that he didn’t understand.

By contrast, Rhoda positively encouraged unusual behaviours and signs of exuberance. She understood that Monday, a red day, was spiky and uncomfortable. She knew instinctively which fabrics Daisy would enjoy and why her daughter rejected clothes that smelt wrong when loosely crumpled.

Early on in Secondary school there’d been an embarrassing Parents’ Evening when Miss Price had openly gawped at Daisy and Rhoda’s contrasting velour capes, before suggesting that Daisy might be on the Autistic Spectrum, what with her ‘heightened sensory reactions.’ Rhoda had responded by pinching Daisy’s cheek delightedly and laughing her wild laugh, before saying,

‘You might call it that but we know different, don’t we Daisy love?’

To all future events Daisy wore her school uniform. She became a model student and avoided further incident by saying that her single parent working mother, was unable to attend. Of course, things would have been simpler if Robert had still been around. Daisy fondly remembers her father’s ordinariness, the nubbly feel of his soft worn corduroys, his wooly cardigans.

Gradually, over time, Rhoda has become more stable and there are fewer surprises. Usually when Daisy returns from college, Rhoda’s absorbed in one of her spectacular paintings. Great splashes of colour on vast canvases, she works on them late into the night. Daisy herself can only glance briefly at them before she’s affected, but Rhoda’s London dealer has no such problem and they always sell well.

As a result, Daisy has rarely gone without, though it’s true to say that Rhoda, an ardent anti-consumerist, is increasingly a hoarder not a spender. Despite her love of textiles and original design, Rhoda’s wardrobes creak with faded garments that no longer fit her and are pocked with moth holes. Like elderly recalcitrant relatives, Rhoda declares that they have earned their space and must stay.

Standing in the sitting room Daisy takes stock of the overstuffed bookcase and ancient couch spewing its innards. The place is cluttered with useless objects, like these on the mantelpiece – a pile of irregular shaped green stones, a carved elephant with a broken trunk, the sooty stump of a candle and a creamy limpet shell that, if she’s not mistaken, has recently migrated here from Rhoda’s bedside table.

A delicate thing with a tinge of softest primrose yellow, it reminds Daisy of a summer dress she once had. She picks it up tenderly, blows dust from its slim flutes and feels an intense and immediate sorrow. A tear plops onto the shell. Rubbing it in gently she feels the hairs on the back of her neck rise to attention.

She turns round slowly. To all intents and purposes the room is empty but the air crackles with electricity and little puffs of wind ruffle the curtains,

‘Mum?’ she murmurs tentatively and then more impatiently, ‘Mum, I know you’re here somewhere, please make yourself known!’

There’s no response and Daisy finds herself sighing again. Rhoda’s timing stinks as usual. Either she’s forgotten that Daisy’s having friends over from college tonight or this is a deliberate ploy because she doesn’t want others in the house.

Daisy stalks into the kitchen and makes herself a cup of tea. She fills Smokey’s empty saucer with milk and calls him. He doesn’t appear either and her irritation rises. How many times has Rhoda promised she’ll stick to inanimate objects? And what can possibly be learnt by turning a cat into a notebook or place mat anyway? Smokey will be cranky and off his food for days, no doubt emphasising his annoyance by crapping in the bath.

Daisy fishes out her teabag and throws it in the compost bin before clocking the acrid smell of singed paint from near the pantry. She scans the area for alien objects and spots a black enamel tea tray, blowsy with roses and rimmed with gold, the style of which can only be described as Flamenco Tat.

The tray shimmers. She picks it up carefully. It’s faintly warm and sticky, the enamel not quite set. Anger rises in her body. Surely Rhoda could have given Daisy a chance to talk her round? Or at least chosen colours more thoughtfully? God knows how long she’ll be in this form, leaving Daisy as usual, to field awkward questions.

‘Jesus Mum!’ she exclaims, ‘You’re an Artist! Why not choose a Faith Ringgold or a Tracey Emin? At least I’d have something decent to look at!’

Daisy slaps the tray back down and stomps back into the front room. To her relief Smokey slides in beside her. She picks him up and strokes his soft grey fur but he struggles uneasily from her arms.

Alerted, she looks around. Something in here is different but what? She turns to the mantelpiece, her skin tingling. The air around and above it is shimmering softly, creating light and shadow, a sense of movement.

The tingling continues and she finds herself picking up the limpet shell and inhaling its briny odour. Its pleated creamy surface is emitting heat and appears to be pulsing. Daisy stands stock still, blood pulsing in her head. Surely Rhoda couldn’t’t have? Wouldn’t’ have?

‘Robert,’ she whispers incredulously and the shell gives the smallest of shivers,

‘Dad? Is that you?’

 

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Image via Pixabay

Magical Objects – Caroljean Gavin

The Aunts came one after the other in a procession of pantsuits and leather loafers. I purchased their services with the money I had left from my father. They marched up the concrete stairwell of our fifth floor walk-up, never-minding the shed snakeskins of used condoms, the daggers of broken brown bottles, the oily mystery puddles, the ground out cigarette butts, the walls smeared with ash and feces. They would give my daughter the gifts and blessings I could not, the gifts and blessings my parents didn’t give me. The Aunts ascended armed and perfumed with their lilac, their lavender. Tea rose. Sandalwood. Potato salad. Ziti casserole. Banana bread. French roast. Wrapping paper, tape, and ribbon. I watched them through the peephole.

They rapped on our door; seven soft knocks with their seven soft fists.

Petal swaddled in pink muslin and sleeping, was oblivious to the knocks of the world.

The Aunts shuffled in. Pant legs aflutter, they glided past the wiped and whitened walls.

Things would get better when I wasn’t birth sore, bleeding, sleepless, and so in love with my little princess and my prince charming, Rex, that I was a float-y, blissful, ache. And things would be better when Rex got it under control. He was working on getting it under control. He really, really, really was. I wouldn’t have stayed if he hadn’t promised. The Aunts were paid to give their gifts to our daughter; they wouldn’t judge. Still I polished every fucking thing till it shined, sparkled, and glittered like the Northern Lights on the coldest, darkest, Northern winter night.

The Aunts shed their coats and their packages, piling them on the table I had fancied up with a stiff, floral, dollar store tablecloth and a large yellowed doily my grandmother had crocheted once upon a time.

The Aunts gathered around Petal’s crib of thin white spindles.

“Live Nudes!!!” blinked in daylight neon through the window. A police car flashed its reds and blues, siren-ing down the street. Someone yelled, “Get off my tits motherfucker.”

“Look-it,” said one of the Aunts leaning down over Petal’s puckered bud of a face, “Look-it how peaceful.”

Petal, my five-day-old sleeping beauty, her eyes fastened tight, eyelashes intertwined, her soft little lips, almost quivering with breath rested, with her arms stretched past her head.

Rex was retching in the bathroom. Just puking out his guts, rattling the porcelain, kicking his feet backward into the door, banging the hell out of it. He had the faucet going as if the anemic trickle of low-pressure water could drown out his frantic racket.

The First Aunt, at the head of the crib, bent down over Petal, slipped an object out from the depths of her trench coat and pinned it to Petal’s swaddle, right above her bird-tiny chest. The gold of the rose brooch glittered, and the diamonds encrusting it sang out stars of light. “May you always be the most beautiful girl in the room. May you always glitter as brilliantly as a rare jewel on the sun. Even in the deepest caves of darkness, your beauty will shine.” She bent down and kissed Petal on her lips.

“Coffee,” I said. “I should make coffee.”

The Aunts didn’t move their gaze from Petal for a breath, a blink, or a twitch while I ground their gourmet French Roast in my rumbling, screaming blender.

“Alright then,” said the Second Aunt, stationed the first on the right side of the crib. She was tall and stern, gray and brown, some kind of shore bird of the apocalypse, “My gift to you is intelligence, the capacity for wisdom and for wit.” She licked her finger and made a circle of slobber on Petal’s forehead. “Among the pile of packages, wrapped quite effectively, is a large, leather-bound book of tales, fables, stories, and myths, with which you can enhance your already increased capacity for understanding and navigating the world. Also there, you will find a second leather volume full of History. A third is devoted to Geography, and a fourth to Science and the Natural World.

You will have a flexible and fertile mind. You will be clever and cunning, and wise. You will know more than the most tenured professors…more than the most versed trivia masters.”

“Perhaps you should have saved the poor girl’s body the weight of all those pages and sprung for a laptop,” one of the Aunts on the other side of the crib teased though I was the one who had not sprung for the top tier package.

The next Aunt, the Third Aunt, had a dusty-rose tint to her clothes. She wore a pleated skirt, a cashmere sweater, and pantyhose two shades too dark. She only came up to the shoulders of the Second Aunt. When she moved, it seemed as if her bones were made of mercury or some kind of liquid that gravity didn’t apply to. Her voice, when she allowed her lips to part, was soft, fluid yet measured, somehow maintaining a sense of sternness with no hard edges. “My darling,” she spoke, “May you learn to flow over the rocks with nary a twist to your gait. May you grow to sway with the breeze and never tremble or tremor. May you know the excesses of your own demeanor and of the world, so you may be all the more steeled against them.” She opened her palm, and resting inside was a small, glass-worked koi on a thread. She tied it to the crib. It spun and spun between two of the perfectly white spindles.

“What a nice segue,” said the Fourth Aunt, the Aunt at the foot of the crib. “What a nice segue indeed.” The Fourth Aunt was exactly the tallest of all the Aunts, the most athletic, and the most lithe. Her clothes moved with her and she was moving all the time with an assortment of purposeful gestures and poses that seemed to be part communication. She did a plié, and then tossed her body up into a small, joyful leap. “Dance,” she shouted, and I imagined Petal throwing up her arms in startle, but she didn’t stir at all. “Dance!” The Fourth Aunt folded over into downward facing dog, her derriere pointed up to the ceiling. She unfastened her scuffed oxfords. She drew her feet out of her shoes, tied the laces together and hung them over Petal’s crib. “My child,” she said, taking my baby’s feet in her hands, “There will be no dance that can defeat you. Your body will be fluent in the language of music, of rhythm, nuance, expression. Your muscles, your very bones will speak in music, in dance, as natural as breath, as enchanting as magic.”

“Very well spoken, my dear,” said the Third Aunt. The Fourth Aunt nodded and dropped to a deep, show-off-y curtsy, then deepened to a low bow, gesturing to the Fifth Aunt on the left side of the crib.

“Beautiful,” she trilled. The Fifth Aunt had a labyrinth of tight braids running along her head, short sprigs of baby’s breath sprayed from them. Her skirt and her blouse were both ecru, long and loose. She reached behind her and pulled out a ukulele that she had set against the wall.

The First Aunt clapped her hands together, “How delightful.”

The Fifth Aunt smiled back at her, held the ukulele against her body, opened her mouth and…

“Help me!” Rex screamed from the bathroom. The Fifth Aunt put the ukulele down, and slipped her finger into Petal’s hand.

“Let me out of this mother fucking prison! I need medicine!” Aunts shifted in their shoes, tugged on their skirts or at the knees of their khakis. The Sixth Aunt turned over her wrist to check the time. I didn’t want to make them late for their next appointment.

“Excuse me,” I said.

The wooden chair wedged under the bathroom doorknob rattled, shook, and leapt in place. I took a deep breath. Rex just needed fresh air, and it wasn’t really fair of me to keep him from the Aunt’s blessings. He should be there.

I knocked the chair out from under the knob. The door burst open. Something hard caught me above the eye. Rex shoved the door and me behind it, thump-sprinted down the hallway bare-chested and barefooted and barreled out the front door.

The bathroom was a mess. The toilet was stopped up with toilet paper. Water burped off the lip of porcelain. Every thing, every bottle, jar, makeup palette, Q-Tip was on the floor. The medicine cabinet mirror was hanging on by a hinge.

“Lovely, lovely,” the Fifth Aunt said when I made it back to the living room. The coffee was half gone, and the banana bread had been nibbled on. Our chipped plates and mismatched mugs filled the sink.

The Fifth Aunt picked her ukulele off the wall and cradled it back in her arms, “I simply must get the recipe for that banana bread dear.”

“Just a secret family recipe,” The Second Aunt said looking at her hands, “No big deal. Of course I did adjust it to be gluten free, so it’s made with combination almond and coconut flour. I also substituted brown sugar for most of the white sugar, and of course I toasted the walnuts before including them, and then there’s the matter of browning the butter, which really should go without saying.”

“Oh yes, yes,” ad-libbed the First Aunt, “I think I came across that recipe on the Internet. AllRecipes? The pictures of it were awful. Not appetizing at all.”

The Fifth Aunt closed her eyes, dropped her jaw, held a chord with her left hand, lifted her fingers and slid them up and down the fret board while her right hand fingerpicked frantically, tickling and teasing the music out of the ukulele. “Baby mine” she sang, with her eyes closed, her tongue rolling out the syllables, savoring them, spinning them gently out of her mouth, and into our ears.

I wiped a tear with my sleeve.

When the Fifth Aunt was done, the Aunts clapped. The Fifth Aunt slipped the ukulele back in the case, and kissed each of her palms. One she pressed lightly against Petal’s lips, and the other she wrapped around Petal’s tiny hands. “And like that,” she said, “the music is yours.” Looking at me, she said, “And so is the ukulele. Hers. It is not worth much in money,” she warned me, “but to the girl it will be priceless.”

The Sixth Aunt folded her hands in front of her; they hung down with her skirts. “What a kind offering,” her voice cooed, highly pitched, but not too highly pitched, sweet, but not too sweet, softly, but perfectly audible. “Everyone, such kind offerings.”

The Sixth Aunt dipped her head down to study Petal, “And my precious soul, that is exactly what I have to offer you. Kindness. Goodness. A clear sense of what’s right and wrong. Humility. Compassion. Empathy. You will understand that you are superior to no one and that no one is superior to you, and you will treat people accordingly. You will take responsibility for your actions, and you will give people second chances. You will give gifts for no reason. Your generosity will be purely motivated and boundless. If you have any enemy in this life it will be Injustice.”

The Sixth Aunt drew an index finger over her lips, pulled back Petal’s swaddle, uncovering her chest and painted a heart over Petal’s in lipstick. “Never forget that above all, your heart is who you are.”

“Hear, Hear,” applauded the First Aunt.

“I say, that was a fine job,” said the Second Aunt.

“Thank you all, very much,” I said, “We really appreciate it.”

“Of course, my dear,” said the Third Aunt. Would I have to tip them? I hadn’t thought of that before. I had a little cash I’d been saving in a tampon box, but not enough for all of them.

“True, true,” agreed the Fourth Aunt, wiggling her toes into the carpet, “We do not get as much work as we used to. My legs need the stretch every once in awhile you know.”

“This darling has been particularly quiet,” said the Fifth Aunt.

“Not a peep from her,” the Sixth Aunt agreed, “Not a peep.”

“She’ll be hungry soon,” I said. My breasts were heavy and full, uncomfortable. “Anytime.” I said.

“Of course, of course,” said the Third Aunt. “Well it was brilliant to meet you, to come to your beautiful home.”

One of the Aunts coughed deep in her throat, I’m not sure which.

The Seventh Aunt, shuffled up to the crib from the back of the apartment, my room. She yawned and rubbed at her eyes with slim tan boxing gloves over her hands.

The Aunt of Strength. The Aunt who would teach my daughter how to kick ass and take names. The Aunt whose gift would inspire her to never relent to fear, to bullying, to other people and other things controlling her. I hadn’t noticed the Seventh Aunt slip away. There were so many Aunts; it was hard to keep track of them all.

“Did I miss anything?” the Seventh Aunt asked on her way to the coffee pot. “Just black,” she called to me.

“It’s gone a little bitter,” I warned.

“The bitterer the better,” she blurted, “This old tongue can take it.”

I poured her a cup. She fumbled at the mug with her boxing gloves, batting it around the counter like a cat. I grabbed a straw and popped it in her mug.

The other Aunts were gathering their coats and riffling themselves back together in a line.

“Hey, I haven’t gone yet,” the Seventh Aunt shouted, “Keep your wigs on and wait for me will you?”

“My dear, said the Second Aunt, “You were supposed to go first.”

“Hey,” the Seventh Aunt countered, “Don’t tell me how to live my life. She’ll get her gift. After my coffee. I’m not as young as I used to be.”

“None of us are,” said the Third Aunt, but she wasn’t agreeing.

“There is supposed to be an order to these things,” the Sixth Aunt reminded her.

“Order, schmorder,” The Seventh Aunt said, and then miraculously drew up the rest of the coffee through the straw, rubbed her boxing gloves together, and sauntered up to Petal’s crib like a bulldog. “Let’s do this thing.”

The rest of the Aunts shuffled back to their places around Petal’s crib.

“Come on, dear,” the Seventh Aunt shouted to me, “What are you doing all the way over in the kitchen?”

“Watching,” I said, “Staying out of everyone’s hair.”

“Being respectful, I would imagine,” piped in the Third Aunt.

“No, no no,” the Seventh Aunt admonished, “Be anything but that.”

“My, my,” the Sixth Aunt tutted as I make my way over, “Brashness does not become us.”

“It isn’t ladylike I know,” the Seventh Aunt scratched at her bottom with her boxing glove, “Being ladylike is not all it’s cracked up to be.”

“Surely…” started the First Aunt.

“Look, look,” the Seventh Aunt blustered. She was red faced and her hair seemed to be escaping its loose bun out of a yearning for adventure, “We can argue this all day. I used to be Obedience for Christ’s sake. I never would have survived this long if I hadn’t changed. Anyway,” she bent her head down and wiped her sweaty forehead off on her sleeve. “Back to the matter at hand.” She looked down at Petal and smiled. “Oh, how cute. Look at how hard she is. You can already tell, this one is going to be tough. This one is going to punch life in the nose and while it’s bleeding she’s going to tell it to screw itself with a chainsaw.”

“It will be bedtime soon,” warned the First Aunt.

“That it will be,” agreed the Seventh, “ So my darling, my gift to you is…”

“Holy fucking God,” Rex howled as he fell back into the apartment. “What the hell is wrong with you woman?”

“Keep your nasty ass boxers on and sit down.” The old woman behind Rex looked a little like the Aunts: gray hair and tiny bones, but she was dressed in black and gray instead of various shades of brown. She did not come in laden with packages or with a pleasant scent. She smelled a little bit like mold and carried with her only a small black purse that hung from her shoulder. Also she wore too much blue eye makeup and a terrible shade of orange lipstick. It took me too long to realize it was my actual aunt, Mildred. She looked ten years older than the last time I saw her, a year ago, my father’s funeral.

“While you’ve been having your nice little party,” she said to me, “I found this one in a frenzy in the hallways, knocking on people’s doors, causing chaos. I just took a wild guess that he belonged to you.”

Aunt Mildred had Rex by the wrist, her nails digging in. She threw him at the couch, and then sat down beside him, tucking her skirt under her knees. When he tried to pop back up, she hit him in the chest with her handbag.

The aunts shuffled in their shoes, and just looked at each other. The Second Aunt checked her watch.

“I thought we didn’t do the evil, curse-y one anymore,” The Fifth Aunt said. “People were asking for their money back.”

“This is Mildred,” I said, “My father’s sister.”

“So who are you all then?” Mildred asked, scowling directly at the Third Aunt, “Her mother’s sisters?”

“We are The Aunts, that’s all you need to know,” the Seventh Aunt said, bouncing her boxing gloves together and off each other, for some reason, like she was getting warmed up to use them.

“Well whoever the hell you are, congratulations. Congratulations on getting to celebrate this little hot mess.”

“That is no way to talk about a baby,” the Fourth Aunt scolded.

“Yeah, because that’s who I’m talking about,” Aunt Mildred said.

“Why did you come?” I asked her. There was a smudge of something on a wall behind the crib, something I must have neglected to clean off, something that escaped my attention. The smudge moved, scampering quickly to a crack in the ceiling.

“I guess I heard the news. Didn’t I?” Aunt Mildred said.

“Mom?”

“Ding, ding, sweetheart. She’s a delight. Wanted me to check on you.”

“Don’t tell her where I am,” I said, “Please.”

“Well,” the First Aunt said, “We just need to finish up with the final blessing and then we can be on our way and let you catch up with your loved one.”

“That’s right. That’s right,” the Sixth Aunt agreed. She patted the Seventh Aunt on the shoulder, “Go ahead dear.”

Aunt Mildred said, “Your daughter doesn’t deserve to grow up like this.”

“There’s love here,” I shouted.

“Your daughter doesn’t deserve to grow up like this,” Aunt Mildred repeated.

I stared at my ragged ass, stupid, stupid fingers. “What about me?” I muttered to those asshole hands of mine, “Did I deserve to grow up like that?”

Aunt Mildred’s orange lips tightened. “I did what I could at the time.”

“Trips to the zoo? Pizza parlor dinners?” I cried, “You took me out, but you always brought me back.”

“With books,” she said like it was a defense. “Clearly they gave you hope. Clearly they still give you hope.”

The Seventh Aunt approached Aunt Mildred, “You want me to punch her lights out?”

“No.” I said. I sank to the ground. The carpet smelled like actual shit.

Rex crawled over the arm of the couch and ducked and dodged Aunt Mildred’s graspy fingers, running back out the door and down the stairs, thumping, thumping, thumping.

“He’ll be back soon enough,” Aunt Mildred said.

“I know.”

“Maybe you’ve avoided it,” she said. “But one day your daughter is going to find that damned needle, just like her father, just like your father, and when she pricks herself, she’s not going to be gone for a 100 years until someone saves her. She’ll be gone forever. Forever. There will be no saving. No miracles kisses. That’s not how it works. Just fucking memories and funeral lilies. Who cares if she knows how to sing and dance?”

The Seventh Aunt crouched down beside me, put a boxing glove on my shoulder. “Hey,” she said, “Look in my pocket.”

“You’re not a real fairy godmother,” I answered, “You get paid by the hour.”

She said, “So what? We need to eat like everyone. Doesn’t mean we don’t have magic. ”

She pushed her hip out to me and there was something paper sticking out of her pocket. I slipped it out and stared at the photo, the Polaroid of me as a little girl that I hadn’t seen in years. Maybe Strength found it in my closet, maybe she found it in some hidden time capsule. In the photo, I am snarling with a smile tucked under my irises, too young for the teeth I am missing. I am holding a huge water gun, pointing it at the photographer. It was empty, Dad thought it was funny. I was trying to protect him. Thought he was dead when I came down the stairs, the way he was laid out on the floor. I was so confused after he took that picture, I cried, and my mom yanked the water gun out of my grip and gave me something to cry about, and the bruises left over had me crying for days, had me learning how not to cry, how to absorb pain, hold it, not show it, never show it to the person who caused it.

“I look…plucky,” I said and handed the picture back to the Seventh Aunt, “but you don’t know that photo like I do.”

“You are still alive,” she said. “Your mom, your dad, they were doing the best they could.”

“Their best was pretty shitty.”

“Yes, it was pretty shitty,” the Seventh Aunt said, “but…”

“The family curse,” Aunt Mildred said, as she began scooping things out of her handbag and then dropping the same things back in. She handed me a check and a handful of strawberry hard candies.

“Needles and fairy tales,” I muttered. Prince Charming, you wait for him to save you and he’s a trash can, and his kingdom is a landfill, and he puts you to the same damn work you were at before, and one day you wake up as your own stepmother, and one day you wake up, and you’ve been asleep for your whole life, and you are covered in bruises and ashes and pumpkins, globby seeds threaded in your hair, rotting, and fairy godmothers surround you with your one beautiful uncomfortable shoe held so tightly around your foot. As they chitter, chatter, trill and coo, you feel breeze refreshing your leaves, you feel grass growing beneath you.

Petal began to cry. My nipples started purging milk, the wet spot on my top spread fast, like from a wound in my heart. The Aunts parted as I approached the crib and lifted Petal into my arms. Petal was not a glass shoe. Her skin was warm, soft, pink, and her own. She snuffled for my breast, brought her mouth to me, feeding herself. Petal was not a wishing well. She was not a golden key or a poisoned apple. She was not a talking frog. Not a secret name. I held her in a one-arm cradle, my other hand grasping a thin white spindle. Not a blessing. Not a curse. Not a promise. Not a threat. Not even a miracle. Just a daughter. Just like me.

 

CAROLJEAN GAVIN’s work has appeared in places such as Bending Genres, Barrelhouse, Flash Flood, The Ampersand Review and is forthcoming from The Conium Review. Currently she is raising two rambunctious boys, a novel and a story collection.

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The Trouble With Larry – Mark Czanik

Dora and Dorcas were on the 476 to Ledbury, sitting in the seats reserved for the elderly. Dora’s friend Irene had told her there were gammon steaks on offer in Tescos, and since they were sold out in her local store by the time she got there, she had decided to catch the bus to Ledbury and try the Tescos there. Dorcas was just along for the ride.

‘I had to laugh yesterday,’ said Dora. ‘This Polish man sitting opposite me on the bus kept asking me if I had a shoe. “Have you got a shoe?” he asked me. I said, “A shoe?” “No, a shoe,” he says. “No, I ant got a shoe.” Only the ones I had on anyway, and he wun having those. “A shoe!” he kept saying. And then eventually I realised what he was trying to say. “Oh, a tissue!” I said.

The two women laughed.

‘I couldn’t understand a word he was saying,’ Dora went on. ‘Not only was he foreign, but he had this bad cold too. Breathing his germs all over me.’

The bus gears gave a violent scrunch, as if the vehicle were clearing its throat, and began its slow struggle up Prospect Hill.

‘That reminds me of this cat I took in last summer,’ Dorcas said. ‘This beautiful grey cat. It just sort of made itself at home for three weeks on my sofa. I mean, I put him out in the morning, but he kept coming back and settling onto my sofa. It seemed quite content. So I started bringing it tins of cat food home and feeding it. And I called him Larry. I even bought him a litter tray in case of accidents, which he was quite obliging about.’

‘They’ve closed more public toilets in town now,’ Dora said.

‘I know, terrible, ennit. I mean, we can’t all squat down in the street like Basil whenever we please.’

Basil looked up from where he lay in the aisle at this affront to his dignity, and then returned his head stoically to his recently washed paws, which smelt strongly of disinfectant.

‘Pam was in Cornwall last summer and she said there are lots of conveniences still open down there.’

‘You can judge a town by its toilets.’

‘You can.’

‘Dan and Denise have got five ensuites in their house now,’ Dora said.

‘Where do they go for the other two days?’ Dorcas replied.

The two women laughed again.

‘No, I enjoyed his company,’ Dorcas said, picking up her story. ‘Basil enjoyed his company too, funnily enough. I mean, he likes terrorising cats like the best of them, and he’s normally quite possessive of me, but somehow he made allowances for this cat. And Larry seemed quite at ease with Basil. Not put out at all. He looked content on my grey sofa. Blended in very nicely. I was even thinking about getting a cat flap put in so he could come and go as he pleased.

‘Oh, there’s Arthur, look,’ she interrupted herself, gesturing to an old man with a walking stick as they passed the Cock of Tupsley. ‘You know, I never see him out with his wife. I don’t think they’re that enamoured. I might be wrong.’

The two women watched the old man making his solitary way along Hampton Dene Road.

‘Anyway,’ Dorcas continued, ‘one day this builder from over the street came in to give me an estimate on some work I wanted doing. I had plans for a new kitchen, and he made such a nice job of Irene’s downstairs toilet after Derek’s stroke. And this builder kept looking at this cat lying on the sofa. ‘“That looks a bit like our cat,” he said. So he went out and came back with his wife for a second opinion. And it turned out it was. And she got quite angry with me for taking her cat. She said they’d been looking for him everywhere. Didn’t I notice the identity chip on the back of his neck? Apparently, there were all these posters up in the area as well – on lampposts and in shop windows, and all down Watery Lane. But I hadn’t seen them, or the identity chip. So she bundled him up in this blanket and took him away.’

‘Well, that’s a mistake anyone could make,’ Dora said.

‘That’s what I said, but they didn’t seem to think so. And that wasn’t the end of it. The cat came back the following day, and they came knocking on my door. More strong words were spoken. They started swearing and calling me a cat thief and all sorts of terrible things. Anyone would have thought I’d done it deliberately. And you could see Larry was getting upset about it. I had to ask them to leave in the end. I threatened to call the police and take out a restraining order.’

The two women fell into a habitual silence while the bus negotiated the old stone packhorse bridge over the river Lugg, where so many travellers had come to grief. ‘Must have been a very special cat,’ Dora said, once the danger had passed.

‘Probably a pedigree. I expect it cost a lot. Basil didn’t cost me a penny. I was lucky to find him in the rescue home. But then you were the one who rescued me really weren’t you after I lost my Bernie,’ she said, reaching down to give her dog a stroke.

Basil, finding his coat being ruffled, looked up with his eyes only, like one well acquainted with the transitory nature of compliments. Still, his tail gave a little involuntary thump.

‘Anyway, Larry still visits me every day and sleeps on my sofa. I think he prefers it with me. This family, they’ve got a lot of children about, and cats don’t like being moithered do they. And this builder’s always making a lot of noise in his garage where he has his workshop. I can hear him banging away all day sometimes.’

‘I bet you’ve never complained about him.’

‘Well, not to his face. No wonder Larry needed a bit of peace and quiet.’

The bus was passing the new golf course now on the other side of the new redbrick estate at Bartestree.

‘This used to be all hop fields once,’ Dora said.

‘It did,’ said Dorcas.

‘So where’s this cat now?’

‘On my sofa. But I make sure to put him out every evening so he can go home, and at least put in an appearance. I don’t want them to catch him in my living room and get told off again. What was I saying all that for? Oh, yes, that Polish man asking you for a tissue. Well, I called this cat Larry because he was as happy as Larry. And his real name turned out to be Harry.’

 

MARK CZANIK’s stories have appeared in The Interpreter’s House, Southword, Wasafiri, Cyphers, and elsewhere. He used to write poetry too, and plans to go back to it one day, along with drawing and learning Hungarian. He was born in Hereford, and currently lives in exile in Bath.

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A Cello Story – Heather Sager

Of course, the children still returned to have my mother’s cookies, to be petted about the head, but they never again came to hear her play the cello. To play with me—and my brother—in the open in our comfortable home, that Mother did not do either. Not since the incident. Sadly, the neighbors admired my mother’s technical skills—on that one occasion—then declined her future invitations. What had happened that night, shades drawn to our Ohio street as Mother played celestial music, my brother and I in our rooms? Though I couldn’t say it at the time—I didn’t know what to say when Mother cried in the kitchen—the neighbors were philistines. They did not know their Shostakovich from Oum Kalthoum, as Mother did.

Father was a digital parts salesman. He never once heard Mother play. He wasn’t the type to appreciate Music, he said. Music was always spoken of in a revered whisper in our house—because of Mother. Soon, Mother practiced only behind closed doors, sending out warm, arachnoid tones from her barricaded office. I imagined my brooding, faceless Mother as the oracle in the de Chirico painting.

Friends stopped coming. Breakfast dishes piled in the sink. A limousine came to take Father and he never returned after that.

Mother’s hair grew wild and she became strange—recklessly beautiful. I never sought advice from Mother—I, her daughter, her young pea. It seemed dangerous to do so. And so it was that one Sunday, when I returned from the mall, job application in hand, I found with utter astonishment that the house was abandoned. A screech of notes—violent, Schoenberg—came from Mother’s cello and the ventilation system. But I looked and Mother—she was gone.

Over the years I got such wonderful postcards.

 

HEATHER SAGER is a fiction writer and poet. Her work appears in New World Writing, Mantis, Sweet Tree Review, Little Patuxent Review, and other journals. Heather grew up in rural Minnesota and lives in northern Illinois.

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Ballade For Single Women – Irene Cunningham

Cavaliers on the weekend tour
we keep our eyes peeled for well-heeled
men with wallets, and hair just groomed.
My hot lips squint from lurching cheers
in clouded rooms, guessing careers
comparing body parts to heights
though any one might test the means
come the end of the long long, night.

Sliding from cocktail to bar, whore
they call us; our skirts laugh at sneers.
We slant eyes across pints of Coors
nudge each other Had him last year
condommed to the armpits, no fear
and necks stretched against boisterous bites
walled up dark lanes with trembling knees
come the end of the long, long night.

Now bare-back riders buck no more
no sucking and jumping bones, dears –
safe sex penetrates. No encore.
My fingers don’t feel the same here…
turns the man into a gloved peen.
In these diseased years thighs are tight,
the months are passing, now eighteen
come the end of the long, long night.

So cancel my ticket to ride
blow sweet kisses, goodnight good knights,
sing softly of white wine and beer
come the end of the long, long night.

 

http://ireneintheworld.wixsite.com/writer
https://wolfatthewindowblog.wordpress.com

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The End of the Night – Scott Laudati

I remember some good years.
The old pilings of
the Baltimore pier
that swayed under the crowd while
we watched our favorite band.
And when I told her
I didn’t love her
for the third time
she threw their record at me
and it hurt
but we laughed
until
I decided to break her heart again.

There was the year
I ate sixty oysters
at the Aqua Grill.
She’d paid attention
when I said
I only wanted to eat oysters
from states I hadn’t been to
so she had the maître d’
bring out a special menu
and I tried them all
and the Damariscottas
and Hog Islands were the best.

I woke up in the parking lot
of a Long Island casino
one time
and when I put
two chips
on red
I won $800.
I paid for everything
that weekend
and the four of us walked home
arm in arm
puking in the snow and laughing
like it was our last night
on earth.
We don’t call every year but
I still smile when I think about
that birthday
and the best friends
I never see.

Some years
I feel like I’m losing.
And there are others where the score
seems to be even.
I’ve lost cousins
and girlfriends
and a brown dog
with a white cross on her chest.
But there were the other years.
There were friends who
didn’t leave me in their wake.
Girls who left me believing I wouldn’t
always be let down.
And my mother,
using expensive ingredients
to cook me a birthday dinner
that fit with my new diet,
always making sure something was safe
in a world that started licking its teeth
as soon as you
walked out the door.

Tomorrow doesn’t always come with a nightmare.
Seeds grow.
Leaves fall.
I tell my friends to hold up their bottles
and look around.
“Remember our tribe,” I say.
“Nothing will ever be better than this.”
And I know I’m right
because I still haven’t found a place safer
than a backyard
in New Jersey.
And no matter how long I’ve been gone
there’s always a family waiting for me
when I come home.

 

SCOTT LAUDATI lives in Bushwick with his shnoodle, Dolly. His work has recently appeared in The Bitter Oleander and The Columbia Journal, among others. Visit him on instagram @scottlaudati

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Round And Round The Garden – Helen Laycock

No one ever passed Ettie Budu’s house without crossing the street first. It was an unwritten rule, a fact of our childhood. And you didn’t just pass it, you ran.

Ettie Budu’s house was a place to be feared, where malevolence resided, as heavy as a sack of ditchwater. It hung in the air and clung to the building like a ball of flies.

Get too close and who knew what would become of you? It was well known that she was a witch and that, behind that rotten brown door and those filthy windows, she concocted spells.

The house had become the personification of evil long before our lives had begun.

Everyone knew of it; there was no need to point it out. Find the worst house on the street and you had found Ettie Budu’s dwelling-place. Her hovel.

Unlike the other semis, Ettie’s had no front wall at the end of the garden. The grass grew high – an enchanted forest – and would, no doubt, shackle any child that dared to wade through. The windows, thick with grime, were as still as the eyes of the dead, but we knew we were being watched. It was impossible to see in from across the road – and no one was ever brave enough to peer in at close range. It seemed that dirty nets had been draped at the edges, but they may well have been cobwebs.

Day after day, at the end of school, groups of children would take a deliberate diversion in order to pass the house. None of us ever had permission to walk home that back way; it was a ‘lonely’ place where bad men hung out, but no one was willing to lose face and refuse the route. We’d climb a gate which took us to a narrow, grassy pathway along a little river, a ‘reen’. Gardens backed on to the side where we walked, and there was wasteland on the other. The gate we had to climb at the other end was just opposite Ettie’s.

Our status moved up a notch if we stopped and stared at it for a moment or two. It was a way of asserting bravery.

Sometimes a chant would begin: ‘Ett-ie, Ett-ie, Ett-ie.’

We’d adopt a stance: feet splayed, knees bent, hands on thighs. Quick glances would be exchanged, but we had to watch the door. Always.

It never lasted long. No one had the guts to see what would happen if she came out.

In the winter months, when grey afternoons sheathed the village in darkness, we would linger – not for long – on the opposite side of the street and watch the upstairs window as it flickered with candlelight. It was a scene far removed from our experiences of modern living; it had the intrigue and bygone age-ness of a grotesque fairytale. We knew she’d be stirring a cauldron in that upstairs room. An imagined face at the glass, hollowed by the light, would send us squealing and running.

Then, one day, I felt big and brave. Omnipotent. Adrenaline coursed through my veins, like fire bowling through a tunnel.

In an instant, I took off from the safety of the opposite pavement, leaping onto the road from the kerb and hurtling towards the unkempt lawn, seeing the house closer than I had ever seen it before – the parched windowsills, the gouged brickwork and the cracked glass of a dying building.

The ground was unexpectedly uneven beneath my feet as I ran in difficult circles through the long grass, lifting my feet high and holding my arms up for safety. I felt glorious and daring, and looked for approval as I curved around for the second time to face my awestruck onlookers.

I was a hero. I, the unnoticed one, was suddenly visible – the eye of the storm.

Then, chop. Everything changed.

Like the jerk of a reversing second hand, their gaze shifted from me one notch to their left.

As one, their smiles fell.

Their jaws dropped.

Their bodies flinched.

I heard a sound behind me.

I saw my friends run.

Should I look? Or run?

I recall the instant as if it all happened in slow-motion. As my chin passed my right shoulder, I saw a wiry, old man who had stepped out of the front door and was now feet away from me. His face was scrunched up in anger. His left arm was raised, and when I looked up at it, I saw that he was holding a cleaver. In a beat, he ran at me and I stumbled out of his garden, my legs taking great unwieldy strides.

I didn’t look back. I sprinted right to the end of the long, long road where the other children were hiding around the bend, fizzing with excitement and terror.

‘That was Ettie’s brother. The madman,’ I heard someone say. My heart was beating like a caught bird, and my chest prickled and burned as I panted.

‘A brother?’

This was news to everyone. There were two of them living there?

Double evil.

Our whispers filled the evening air like frenzied bats before we dispersed to the light and safety of our own homes, each a little more afraid than we had been up until that day.

The challenge had taken on a whole new dimension. The danger was real. We had been right to fear the sinister embodiments of depravity which dwelled inside that house.

I avoided any route that would take me past Ettie Budu’s after that. Maybe she didn’t exist at all, and it was just a vicious old man who lived there.

I wasn’t convinced.

At the age of fourteen, I took a Saturday job at the local supermarket, weighing out the fruit and veg for customers and pricing the brown paper bags. I was positioned right at the entrance.

Even though the incident had been years before, my breath caught like a wedged pebble when a hunched figure shuffled in just as we were closing, late afternoon, one dark November.

It was Ettie.

I experienced a cold thrill. I wanted my friends to see how close she was.

The stench was putrid. She was wearing a headscarf and a huge overcoat, and was dragging a battered trolley. She bypassed me and went straight to the tins just next to my fresh produce.

I could see her filthy face, whiskered and warty, the very image we’d concocted when we were ten. Her mouth hung open as she rasped and wheezed; I imagined beetles and spiders being exhaled with each whispering breath. She had only a few black teeth.

I shuddered. Even now I was a teenager, she still had the power to unnerve me. I dreaded a direct look from her; her eyes would turn red and she would throw a curse upon me as though netting a fish.

She really did have witches’ hands, too. Her nails were long, thick and brown and when her sleeve rose, I could see that the skin on her arm was impregnated with dirt.

I watched her steal a few tins of peaches.

As soon as the manager had locked the main door and was switching off the lights, I grabbed my coat and left by the back entrance. It would take her a while to get home. I could catch her up.

I had no idea why I wanted to be in proximity to someone who could strike me down with black magic. Perhaps I had been charmed.

I could see her shape, rounded, no head, shuffling along ahead of me. She looked like a dark toad under the streetlights. Because of the peaches, or the brother, or the state of her house, I felt immense anger towards her. She moved steadily through the night.

I stopped trailing her within a safe distance of her house.

She still scared me.

All through the winter she came for peaches.

She never paid. I never said.

She was always dirty. She always wore a man’s coat. I began to wonder if she might have been thin underneath. What else did they eat, she and her brother? Though I must have stared, she never looked at me. Her gaze seemed fixed on her dirty boots. She was bent like a bridge.

On the last Saturday of February, Ettie didn’t come. I had moved the last few tins of peaches to the front of the shelf for her. I left through the back door as the manager flicked off all the strip lights. There was a frost on the bins and the air was sharp. I wrapped my scarf around my mouth and headed for The Hovel.

Apart from a stutter of candlelight in one upstairs window, the house was in darkness. I imagined how cold they must be without electricity. Ettie – was that even her real name? – probably kept on her coat indoors. Her brother’s cast off maybe. Or did she ever have a husband?

Over the next few evenings, I walked by again. The house seemed to have fallen into a deep sleep, every window full of night. I no longer felt watched.

Sunday morning was crisp and cold. The sky was a dirty white, and as I made my way to Ettie Budu’s, it began to snow. Frozen flakes melted on my cheeks and caught in my eyelashes, and by the time I had got there, the blades of grass were tipped with white. It was almost pretty.

I crunched across the garden, older and braver than I had been the first time. Years of neglect had made the windows opaque, so I crouched down and pushed in the letterbox.

The humming seemed to come from everywhere: an incessant drone from an orchestra where violinists bowed the same monotonous note. Every inch of space was inhabited by moving black specks.

Funeral confetti.

I was reminded of shaking a snow globe, but in negative.

Layer by layer, my senses became drunk with excess, and I covered my nose and mouth with my free hand as the putrefaction seeped out of the letterbox and into my air space. The blood smell at the supermarket meat counter always made me gag, but the intensity of rotting flesh that was now spewing out of the rectangular aperture made me reel. Desperately, I scanned the hallway, but only had a sense of dark brown through the cloud of flies, nothing more.

Catching sight of movement in my periphery, I let the letterbox go with a snap. Three maggots were pulsating across my left glove. I shook them off on to the ground and ran.

The day they took the bodies away, there was a small crowd outside.

‘The mad brother chopped off Ettie Budu’s head with his axe,’ I heard a boy report as he swung an imaginary weapon towards his friend, ‘and he survived by eating bits of her until she was all gone.’

Maybe.

But I think that their ending was far from dramatic. We had made it that way. In truth, they lived together in the only way they knew how, an older sister caring for her brother, and surviving by whatever means were at their disposal. They were poor, cold and hungry, and society had shunned them.

We were to blame.

When Ettie had gone, the peaches had stopped coming. And, without peaches, her brother had dwindled, along with the melting candles.

The house had been dying all along.

 

HELEN LAYCOCK, previously a lead writer at Visual Verse, features in several editions of The Best of CafeLit. Recently longlisted by Mslexia, pieces are showcased in Popshot, Poems for Grenfell, Full Moon and Foxglove, The Caterpillar, Cabinet of Heed, Reflex Fiction and Lucent Dreaming, whose inaugural flash competition she won.

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Sunflowers – Amanda Saint

The woman behind the counter in a snake skin patterned sari doesn’t look at Daisy as she says, ‘Thirty rupee, madam, please.’

Daisy smiles anyway as she hands the money over in exchange for a fresh coconut with a straw stuck in the top. Nothing can stop her feeling good today.

On the shop’s rickety veranda she sits and watches bony cows and mangy dogs mill about. Down the street a harassed-looking woman bundles children into a tuk-tuk. Horns beep and the air is thick with dust and exhaust fumes from the constant stream of traffic going past.

Goodness still trickles through Daisy’s veins from the cold, sweet coconut water though. She can feel it. When she’d arrived at the retreat, only days after getting out of the hospital, her skin had been a dull and dirty yellow, showing the world what she was. A coward. Running and hiding in bottles of vodka until her liver nearly died.

When she’d woken up in the hospital the first thing she’d seen was a bunch of wilting sunflowers in a chipped jug on her bedside table. She’d blinked unsure of where, and when, she was. Then he appeared, sitting on a hard, plastic chair wearing his retro 80s t-shirt with the smiley acid house face, and faded jeans. What he’d been wearing that day.

‘Hey,’ he said.

‘Hey yourself.’

He leaned forward, dropping the softest, gentlest kiss on her parched lips. ‘You’ve got to stop this now. It wasn’t your fault. Just an accident.’

Daisy sank back into sleep again. When she awoke he was gone, of course, as were the flowers. They were the ones he’d given her on their first date. The chipped blue jug the only thing she’d had to put them in. Wild young things didn’t own vases.

When she’d been released from the hospital, she booked the retreat and a flight leaving the very next day. Then she went to a florist and bought every sunflower they had and took them to his grave. She knelt in front of it, sprinkled the flowers all around. A splash of happy sunshine on a grey and gloomy day.

She ran her fingers over the inscription:

Robert James
12th August 1972 – 2nd October 2016
Beloved husband of Daisy.
Taken too soon. We were all we had.

Daisy sobbed while she smiled then kissed her fingertips, pressing them against his name. ‘Hey you. I’m going to be okay now. Thank you.’

The last slurp of the coconut water through the straw pulls Daisy back from that dank English graveyard. She takes the empty coconut back into the shop and places it on the counter.

The woman ignores her again and doesn’t look up from her phone. Daisy shrugs and carries on her way. Maybe she’ll stay here. Nothing to go back for, after all, and the insurance money would go a lot further. A nice little place by the beach where she can live a quiet, healthy life. Yoga, walking, reading, painting. No booze and lots of delicious vegetarian food. It’s what Robbie would want for her.

Daisy kicks her flip-flops off and stuffs them in her bag when she reaches the track to the beach. The warm sand caresses her feet as she climbs up and over the small dune. Later it will be too hot to walk on. At the top the beach opens out before her. Just a handful of fishermen fixing their nets. The milky sea glinting softly in the sun.

Daisy walks right to the end of the row of sunbeds. Takes the one in the front row so that no matter how busy it might get later, she can feel like it’s just her, white-hot sky, ocean, and burning yellow sun.

She lies back and stares up into the dried palm fronds of the parasol, a smile on her face. She’s turned a corner. She closes her eyes, lets the shushing sound of the tiny waves fill her mind.

She doesn’t see the snake until it’s curling around her leg.

With a breathless little scream, Daisy kicks out. The snake rears back, then strikes at her leg one, two, three times. Before slinking away into the shade it had been seeking.

Daisy’s leg swells and reddens instantly.

‘Help,’ she calls.

But the snake has stolen her newfound strength.

Nobody hears.

She grabs for her bag, her phone. But her fingers won’t work.

Then she’s still. Her breath coming in shallow gasps as the sun beats down, slowly turning her body golden again.

 

AMANDA SAINT is the author of two novels, As If I Were A River and Remember Tomorrow. Her short fiction collection, Flashes Of Colour, is coming in 2020. Amanda founded Retreat West, providing writing competitions, courses and retreats, and Retreat West Books indie press publishes short fiction, novels and memoirs.

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Growls of Fate – Katie Nickas

Sometimes when I’m alone in my apartment, the maker speaks to me. It talks about my husband.

We had a blowup last summer. I got mad and moved out. Our cat listened to it happen from the ledge, because cats hate shouting. Now, she stays with him. She’s sweet and adorable, with a face like an owl that peers from the ends of hallways and claws that dig into flesh to show affection. He has her and a good job and a nice place to live. He should be happy, but he’s not. I know this, but the maker tells me, anyway. It whispers like a surrogate conscience all the things he does to try not to be alone.

Books.

Grr.

Music.

Grrr.

Guitar.

Grrrowl.

In the daytime, I go for long walks through the blue-green hills that resemble bunches of broccoli. I look at the bluebirds and marshmallow clouds and walk to the store to buy groceries. When I get home, the rooster on the weathervane is stuck pointing south, its figure suturing the fog. I carry in the groceries that I’m addicted to buying and pour water and grounds into the maker, switching it on and listening to it brew. The whispers begin almost immediately. They’re palpable in the silence.

“He wants to be alone,” I say, unloading heads of garlic, carrots, celery, cheese, crackers, thinking I’ve been transported to some other dimension.

Grr.

“He pushes people away and then asks them to come back.”

Grrr.

“He’s bad.”

Silence.

“He can’t stop.”

Grrrowl.

Though soft at first, the sounds become more plangent as the cycle runs its course. I pour a cup, lean back in the chair, and close my eyes. Images of family and friends appear. Their features are nondescript, like tiny grains of sand swept in and out of form. I imagine my neighbors sitting down to dinner all throughout the neighborhood. It’s twilight. I know what happens at twilight. Shadows rise and mists settle, holding everything in their vaporous breaths until morning.

Sometimes, the maker splutters at these times. That’s when the heaviest truths are divulged—when it’s running on steam and wants to be fed more water so it can continue talking.

I sip and think I must have really good hearing.

They’re all gone now, those closest to me. Not gone—distant. It’s only the maker and I in this thick, cloistered silence.

Suddenly, I hear the flawed person inside and panic. Its voice fills my head—the voice of someone who’s been abandoned and who’s doomed to ask questions with no answers. I’m angry—angry that my husband treats people like puppets, bending them to his whims.

“Why did he do this?”

The thought sends shudders through my collarbone and pushes up beneath my skin, wanting to be let out. A plaintive growl spreads out across the room. Except instead of making a sound, it forms a word. There’d often seemed to be an echo in here, and while the maker’s percolations have been well timed to coincide with my questions, they’ve never implied they belong to an actual being or presence—a mind. I’d fed it water, electricity, and grounds. From those ingredients, it pressed out something like a piquant juice—sometimes smoky, others intense—but always juice and no more.

Yet the word was unmistakable. I straightened in the chair, my back turned rigid.

Suicide.

“Suicide?”

Yes.

More than a growl—an affirmation, with the maker reaching into its grizzled depths to lay a finger on its pulse and measure the beats of its efficient, little heart.

“He is, or intends to?”

No answer.

“Why?”

My imagination spirals back to all the possible causes: Childhood abuse, neglect, the old tunnel with no light at the end, his loss, our loss, the growing apart, the splitting after so many years together.

“Will it be fast or slow?”

No sound.

“Fast?”

Nothing.

“Slow?”

Grrrowl.

Yes, I might have guessed that. He’d already been killing himself slowly. One moment later, another question arises.

“What can I do?”

Silence.

“Buy him a book?”

Silence.

“Dinner?”

Silence.

“Cakes? Treats? Records? Phone calls?”

My brain kicks itself. You’ve already tried all that. For god’s sake, think of something more original.

Finally, it comes.

“Maybe, somehow, I could help him live?”

I hear the longest growl of all. Not only a growl, it’s something chthonic that seems to rise from the earth and shift through night’s inchoate shroud—something that speaks for others.

Clutching the sides of my chair, neck laced in sweat, I realize it’s not the maker at all. It’s he. He’s somehow found his way inside and is channeling himself through it.

The notion seems to lift some of the fog. To hear from another source that his life is truly out of control offers closure. But I’m just as unnerved as before, wondering what can be done to help someone live a life whose intent is on ending it, however gradually.

Rising from the chair, I walk to the kitchen and look at the maker sitting on the counter, its contents settled in the bottom. I could give it more water to listen to it talk some more. I could do that.

Instead, I pick up the phone and call him.

 

KATIE NICKAS writes off-kilter fiction. Her work is published or forthcoming in journals including Anti-Heroin Chic, Asymmetry, The Furious Gazelle, formercactus, FRiGG Magazine, The Oddville Press, Sidereal Magazine, Soft Cartel, and STORGY. Find her on Twitter @katienickas.

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Tornado Preparedness Drill – Ace Boggess

If the power’s still on, make coffee.
If you prefer whiskey, sleep
on a futon by the nearest phone.

I have better ways to spend my time:
complaining about loud noises &
worrying over this coming storm

which brings with it fish &
frogs that fall from the sky.
In the past hundred years:

one tornado in this county,
that so small the horror-movie
flying cows ho-hummed.

Nobody asked for my opinion,
but I give it while the city sirens
hit their spine-chilling notes &

radio stations sing,
“Get down, get down,”
as if a disco boogie jam.

 

ACE BOGGESS is author of four books of poetry, most recently I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So (Unsolicited Press, 2018) and Ultra Deep Field (Brick Road, 2017). His writing appears in Notre Dame Review, Rhino, North Dakota Quarterly, Rattle, and many other journals. He received a fellowship from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts and spent five years in a West Virginia prison. He lives in Charleston, West Virginia.

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Last Will and Testament of Gaia – Sheila Scott

I, Gaia, third planet of the Local Interstellar Cloud, Orion-Cygnus arm, Milky Way, declare this to be my Last Will and Testament, hereby revoking any and all Wills and codicils previously made.

At four point five six eight billion years of age I am of legal age to declare this Will and, despite the best efforts of some of my lodgers these last fifty thousand years, I am still of sound mind. My wishes contained herein do not result from undue influence.

Having experienced no major collisions, I have remained single and without children excepting one satellite. However, this sole relation has remained distant throughout and I leave them nothing.

Whilst I realise, but do not care, that this may cause some consternation, I hereby nominate, constitute and appoint God and Richard Dawkins as my Joint Executors to act in my interest regarding my estate and other items. In the event that these Executors be unable or unwilling to serve jointly, I appoint Rihanna as sole Executor. This Will authorises these Executors to act in my interest regarding my estate, debts, funeral expenses (see accompanying document ‘Par-tay’) and other items.

The assets I am legally entitled, by which I mean, I have decided to bequeath are as follows:

1) The Atmosphere I give to the Penguins. This one is too important to everyone and honestly who doesn’t trust these little dudes. Plus the flightless element has always tickled me.

2) Whales and Cetaceans, you get the Oceans. You know your ass is too big for firths and rivers so just stay the hell out of them – you’ve got plenty of ocean to swim around in now.

3) The Freshwater Lakes I give to the Crocodiles. You always acted like you owned them: now you do.

4) Fish, you can have the Rivers. I know how much you love those currents whether you’re surfing to the sea or battling upstream (physics kinda passed you by, didn’t it?) so enjoy, they’re yours whichever direction you’re travelling.

5) The Hills I bequeath to the Horses. Hell, you just look so damn good galloping over their rolling horizons. Off you go and make me proud.

6) Mountains I am giving to the Goats. You’ve not done a damn thing to earn them, but it takes a bit of nous to understand gravity and frankly you guys are the only ones just too dumb to fall off.

7) The complete collection of Soils is to be the domain of the Invertebrates. We all know you have your job to do but, let’s be honest, you’re no fun to look at. So, do everyone a favour and stay indoors.

8) Plants, you are entrusted with the Valleys. Some of you like sunshine, some don’t. I have faith you can sort who gets which face between you. But no secession: there’s room for everyone.

9) The Volcanoes are made for Dragons, if only to prove you exist beyond Welsh kids’ cartoons. Be careful making s’mores, though – those things are sticky little fuckers and can totally ruin a good rug.

10) Cats, you get the Tectonic Plates. Plan is that way most of the time they’ll just sit at peace. But when you’re not sleeping, no batting them back and forth just for fun.

11) The Tundra I was going to leave to the Reindeer, but the melt’s made it a challenge for you big boys getting about now. Therefore, given the more favourable feet-width to body-weight ratio, Geese, it’s your ball now. Reindeer, you know who to take it up with.

12) Bit of a no-brainer now – Camels, you get the Deserts. It may not be the most exciting asset, but it’s far and away the fastest growing – you’re on course to be Kings of the World. But play nice and enough with the spitting.

13) Wide open Plains are for the Skunks. The others have been pestering me for years over this, so use your space thoughtfully.

14) Regarding the Polar Ice Caps, Penguins you got the atmosphere so the Southern one is going to the Polar Bears. Big guys, you would’ve got the Northern one too, but you do like you ice-Lilos and it’s just sea up there now.

15) Finally, all my Glittery Rocks I leave to the Humans. You’ve always been obsessed with these at the expense of everything of value, so good luck eating, drinking, and breathing your bling.

Despite claims that will undoubtedly be made to the contrary (by I think we all know who), there are no prior legal contracts into which I have entered in relation to these assets. Anything that suggests otherwise is a crock of shit.

 

Signature: Gaia

Name: ____Gaia_______

Date: 21st October 2018

 

Hybrid writer-scientist, SHEILA SCOTT most enjoys sitting with pen and paper turning idle thoughts into short narratives and illustrative doodles. Published in Causeway, Cabinet of Heed, Ellipsis Zine, Flashback Fiction, Bangor Literary Journal and Poetic Republic, she also helps lead New Writing Showcase Glasgow. Her intermittently hyperactive Twitter account is @MAHenry20

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