Being 16 when his father died gave him an opportunity to become angry and sensitive, to give up his paper round, to fail at school. He didn’t need a reason, to be fair. Michael was quite clever – above average for the country but no more than so-so for the school he’d passed his 11Plus to get into.

He didn’t try. He was lazy. Later he said he was scared to fail and that that fear had taught him a valuable lesson. There was some truth in that but not a whole lot. Mainly he was lazy and not that clever. Even if he’d tried his best, he wouldn’t have done that well. If he didn’t try, he couldn’t fail. That was another thing he used to say later, looking back, giving advice and the benefit of his experience, but at the time he didn’t really rationalise it that way.

Class clown. His teachers called him that. Too busy trying to make the other boys laugh. He liked that.

His father’s death gave the lack of effort extra dimensions. It added poignancy. It let him be rude, and surly, and disruptive, even when he didn’t feel like it. He sometimes just went through the motions. Not an act, exactly, but…He always stood slightly to the side of his real self. He was always a little too aware of his actions and behaviour.

Michael wasn’t the calculating sort. He didn’t sit down and plot his response to his father’s death. But it didn’t come instinctively either. If he snapped at his mother, or answered a teacher back, or stormed out of the house or the classroom, there was always a moment, a fraction of a second, when he made the conscious decision to do so, when he could have decided not to. Messages would flash across his mind – I can get away with this because my Dad has just died. Or, This is how a boy whose father has just died acts. The latter more often, because it gave distance and made it impersonal, lessened the responsibility. He used it on girls too.

Yet though he was false, his falseness was true and honest. He always pretended with such heart and soul that he really meant it. He could – and it stayed this way into adulthood – convince himself most easily.

He remembered a different truth.

Sometimes, by accident, he remembered the wrong things. They never left his head.

Dry skin, psoriasis. Plaque psoriasis. Symmetrical. Get it on one elbow and you’ll get it on the other. On goes the ointment. Give up dairy. Become wheat intolerant. Take your coffee black, your tea with lemon. Another coat to his personality, another interesting quirk. A father who died when he was most vulnerable, a dying mother, a skin condition, a wheat intolerance. Could you call it glamour?

Michael McInerney worried very occasionally that he felt nothing, just what he was meant to feel, or thought it would make him look better to feel. And were his actions and responses and words and phrases genuine and pure? Or learned from films and songs and TV dramas and Latin phrases chanced upon and self-help books devoured?

Michael McInerney both worried about his health and ignored worries about his health. He kept both things to himself. To others, the front he presented was assured and confident, mature and accepting of the inevitable. Rational. Inside he pushed the inevitable away.

If he had an ailment, if something was bothering him, he would research it, find out the facts and opinions, and then tell others those facts and opinions. And he’d tell his friends and acquaintances to do the same.

“You can’t ignore it, mate,” he said. “Here, have a look at this website. Learn about it. Conquer that fear.”

He told the world that here was a man who acknowledged his own mortality, his own speck in the firmament, who harnessed his fears and overcame them with knowledge and understanding and assurance. He talked fluently and knowledgeably, handled technical language with flow and aplomb, and chided others who buried their heads in the sand.

“You can’t bury your head in the sand, mate,” he said. “It won’t go away if you ignore it. You’ve got to face it. I’ll help. I’ll go with you. I’ll talk to her, if you like. I’ll be there whenever you need me, whatever you need me for.”

(You can bury your head in the sand! Look at me!)

He told people of his intention to cut this out and eat more of that. He did neither. He proved conclusively that the doctors were wrong when they recommended this or that.

Late at night he ate heavily, takeaways big enough for two or three people, spooning the chicken fried rice and Singapore vermicelli into his mouth straight from the silver carton, starting to eat on his way from the kitchen to the lounge, fitting a spring roll into his fist and taking huge, devouring bites. He’d spread the cartons on the coffee table and hunch over them, the TV on with the sound down low so as not to wake Amanda, changing channels with greasy fingers.

His great fear was a stroke. He was haunted by a story Stella, his first wife, had told him. The husband of one of her colleagues had been away on business, Amsterdam or Brussels, somewhere like that. Anyway, one night he went to bed, same as normal, and during the night he had a stroke. God love him, the poor man. He was alone in bed, God love him, and it was hours before he was found, the poor man, God love him.

Stella didn’t know the woman well – she’d only just joined her work. Stella came home one night and told Michael the story while she was getting tea ready. This was going back a few years, the late 90s. Stella told Michael the story in a ghastly, shocking account, in a shivery, just goes to show you never know the moment, God love him kind of way. And then she carried on making the tea, singing to the radio, shouting the children to come down to the table, the story behind her, its effect deep but brief.

With Michael, though, the story stayed. He wanted to know more. (He wanted to know nothing, to erase it from his brain.) He wanted details, names, ages, places, times. Where was he? Brussels or Amsterdam or where? How old was he? What was his name? Was he my age? (If he was not Michael’s age, if he was younger, then maybe that meant Michael had escaped, that it couldn’t now happen to him, that Michael had won that round. But older? Just a year or two? Then that meant it could still be waiting for him.) What did he do for a living? Was he away on business alone?

(There was glamour here. Work took this man abroad. Maybe he normally would take a conference call but this trip was unavoidable because what was needed to be said had to be said face-to-face. Michael wanted such a trip. A hotel by the canal, some useful phrases in Dutch or Flemish or French, he wasn’t sure. Bicycles over the bridges, cars on the wrong side of the road, maybe he’d hire a car and take a trip, maybe to the battlefields of the First World War, just for a few hours after the meeting finished early. And the sirens on the ambulance, that continental bell ringing, that continental two-tone, thin, like a toy almost. Like in the films.)

One evening, he said to Stella, “How’s Rob?”

“Who?” said Stella.

“You know,” said Michael. “Rob. Gemma’s husband?”

“Gemma?” asked Stella. It didn’t click. Then it did click and Stella shrugged and said she didn’t know and why are you so interested.

“No reason,” Michael said. Certainly he wouldn’t have been able to say what the reason was, wouldn’t have been able to form the words even if he could have formed the thoughts. Stella had said his name was Robert, but he called him Rob, like he was a friend.

He created a narrative for him, a film Michael watched in his head over and over again, each time adding touches and flourishes. Rob and his colleagues in a hotel bar in Brussels. Not Amsterdam, although it had been Amsterdam to begin with. Brussels was more international, its buildings spare and universal, business-like, sharp. Their day of meetings was over, their meal finished. They’d thought of eating in the hotel, but one of them had heard of a restaurant around the corner that did fantastic moules frites and had a great range of beers, so they’d gone there.

Was their work in Brussels finished? No, tomorrow was the crucial day. So that changed the film. They ate in the hotel. The bar with the moules frites and range of beers, each requiring a different glass, would have to wait. Just one bottle of wine between the three of them. They discussed strategy, who would say what, how far they could go over costs, what they couldn’t compromise on.

An early night. There’d be time to celebrate if things went well tomorrow. Then they’d have a few of those famous Belgian beers, each requiring a different glass.

Good night then. See you here for breakfast, 7.15 sharp. The car’s here at 8.

In his room, Rob went over a few points one last time. Then he called Gemma and told her he loved her and asked how were the kids and no, he’d not forgotten those Tintin books she’d asked him to get, in French, good for the kids.

And then Robert, 37, went to bed and had a stroke. His body collapsed and froze, trapping him silent screaming inside a twisted, useless shell. Would he have woken first? Woken, and then known everything, all knowledge for a fraction of a second before his body and mind contorted and locked.

Locked in and locked out.

He pushed the story away. It never left him but it generally stayed hidden and forgotten. It tapped him on the shoulder at times, the dangerous times when he woke in the night, or the times when he and Stella, and later he and Amanda argued, and she went to stay at a friend’s, or with one of her grown-up children by her first marriage, or – as Michael sometimes wondered, even, sometimes, hoped – with her ex-husband.

At such times the details of the story, the embellishments that he’d added, would herd round him, would drive him, butting him towards a point where he could keep his eyes squeezed shut no longer. He had to look. And the images and words of the film he’d made swarmed round him and stampeded over him and crushed him.

He imagined his body as having an outer shell that melted like a doll left too near the fire. Mouth drooping and dribbling unfelt saliva from a downturned corner, one eyelid toppled uncontrolled to near-shut, his flesh-smeared face and useless, lifeless limbs. Unable to move, unable to speak, but his mind working and his voice shouting and screaming soundless, unheeded, unheard. And he heard everything going on around him, too, the voices talking about him, unaware and not caring that he could hear them.

Could his mother hear? Lying there in her hospital bed? Could she hear his voice when he spoke to her when he visited? He didn’t say much to her, in truth. Too busy making calls from the bedside. Too busy looking busy.

He saw a programme on TV once about patients who had woken during their operations. The anaesthetic hadn’t worked properly, so they were aware of what was happening to them, aware of the pain, but unable to speak or let anyone know of their situation.

Michael McInerney hated aloneness. Not loneliness. He could just about stand that, so long as there were others around him.

DOMINIC KEARNEY was born in Liverpool and now lives in Derry. He is the author of “Cast-Iron Men” and of “Ireland’s Beautiful North”, published by The O’Brien Press. He does freelance work for the Irish News, Culture Northern Ireland, BBC Radio Foyle, and BBC Radio Ulster.

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Image: Pexels

tronco e smorzando

“Merda!” said my daughter’s violin teacher, his voice uncharacteristically sharp as the doorbell interrupted us. De-entwining our limbs, he ran his hands through his dishevelled curls and lunged for his jeans.

A hirsute, bespectacled young man, his proclivity for wild gesticulation amused me no end. I smiled, remembering the first time I’d been the cause of his signature gesture: glissando’d into his DMs, he’d called it, throwing up his hands in that peculiar fashion of his. Despite the age gap, we were good together, but I had to end it – and soon. He was getting too involved. I recognised the signs. I’d been here before.

“Merda!” he said again, meeting my tickled gaze. “Aren’t you even un po ‘preoccupato?”

I traced a lazy finger across his non-damask cheek. His puppy-like espresso eyes were, as ever, eager to please; a novelty dog in the back of a car. Funny how a beard and horn-rimmed glasses could belie such youth. He really was extraordinarily good-looking – beautiful, even, but so young. So naive.

“No,” I said, holding the single syllable like a semi-breve and scribbling myself a mental note to book a manicure, “but that’s why you love me. Hide in the bathroom if you’re worried.” I kissed him before he could light another cigarette. Scowling, I fastened my robe and headed for the stairs.

The doorbell rang again. Ignoring its urgency, I lingered outside my daughter’s room, observing my seventeen year-old’s cacophonic mess. Somewhere, obscured by the noisy medley of clothes, make-up, and magazines, were the floor, bed and chair. Neatly propped in one corner, a violin and music stand were odd, jarring notes in the chaos. Grace Chatto, the uber-cool blonde cellist from Clean Bandit, pouted at me from a poster above the dresser. I smiled back, pausing to asses myself in the dresser mirror: I was in good shape for my age. The first, tell-tale lines of autumn just visible as faint, papery creases in my skin; delicate as venation on a leaf. It was time. Time to tell The Violin Teacher, but first I had to deal with the door.

divisi

On the doorstep of our Bexley semi, was my daughter, Olivia and, behind her, my husband of twenty-four years, Sam.

“Did you both lose your keys?” My voice sounded alright. At least I think it did; it was hard to tell over the sudden snare drum of my heart.

“I forgot mine. Olivia’s lost hers. Or rather, she threw them away.”

“Yeah, because I’m outta here! I’ve had it with you ruining my life! I’m going, and nothing you can say or do can stop me!” She threw her father a foul, withered look, before flouncing up the stairs. Sam sprinted after her, leaving me to assess my capacity for concern. Time to face the music, I concluded, following them like a mourner at a New Orleans funeral parade.

“You can’t leave!” Arms folded across his chest, Sam barred the doorway to Olivia’s room. “You’re not old enough! Where will you go? How will you support yourself?”

“I’ll get a job – and…I-I’ve met someone. He has his own business. We’ll be fine.”

“Wh-what do you mean, you’ve met someone?” Sam turned to me with a look that typically said, ‘Do something!’”

“Olivia, hon. Dad’s right. Let’s talk about it. Sensibly.”

Olivia threw her hands in the air, in an unsettling refrain of The Violin Teacher and for a brief moment, I hesitated, stymied.

“Do what you want Mum, but I’m out of here. You say we’ll talk about it, but you never let me make any decisions. It’s always what you want. What you decide. He loves me. Why can’t you be happy for us?” Olivia shoved her father aside, elbows pumping like a majorette as she marched to the bathroom. My heart clawed at my throat, but I knew I wouldn’t, I couldn’t, stop her.

There was a strangled little scream, and then:

“You’re here? Oh, thank god, you’re here. I’ve missed you so much!”

“You?” My jaw dropped as they emerged holding hands. “You and Olivia? She’s seventeen!”

“Mum! He’s only six years older than me. I’m not a child.”

I couldn’t look at Olivia. I was willing The Violin Teacher to make eye contact, to confess to everything between us since that first night. What were we up to now? The eleventh? Twelfth? I’d lost count, but suddenly, it mattered. My daughter folded his hand in hers and stretched to kiss his beautiful face, and a scream of denial died on my tacet lips. Then Olivia snatched up her case and started plucking her way down the stairs. About halfway down, she stopped. Stung.

pausa

“But – wh-why are you here? You said you had a concert. In Slovenia, right?” Her face was a sinkhole of gaping eyes and mouth. The Violin Teacher dropped Olivia’s hand without ceremony, and I was sure now of how deftly he’d played her.

“Olivia. Mi spiace – I am sorry.”

Gone was the puppy dog. This Violin Teacher was all man, and boy, was his virtuoso performance attractive! I spared a glance for Sam, whose Easter Island silence had caused me to forget his presence altogether. The Violin Teacher left my daughter’s side, and re-ascended the stairs to where I waited above. Sam was behind me at the top, and I flashed on the four of us as crochets and quavers on a staff and almost giggled at the absurdity of it all. With each step, my heartbeat echoed in staccato. Did I really want this?

crescendo

I extended my hand, surprised by the vibrato in it, and then recoiled, as The Violin Teacher reached past me

– to Sam???

“Arsenio,” Sam said sotte-vocce, embracing the younger man with unreserved and familiar passion. Cymbals crashed in my ears, and I glanced at Olivia as a foolish sob bubbled from her open mouth. Then Arsenio and Sam left together, without another word, in unmistakable and perfect harmony.

fine

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Image: Maura Barbulescu

The storm has passed. The lightning did not strike. The smell of iron is still in the air. This is the day of triumph, of achievement, of realisation. She will complete her quest by herself.

The last item of furniture to be removed from her cell is the bed. The wood is rough against her hands but light. It takes no effort in transit. The last item of importance is the sulphur globe. She scavenged sulphur from the apothecary and the metal rod came from a fireplace. It is the only thing that belongs to her.

She places it by the flowering cherry tree she sees every day through her barred window. She walks past to her tools. She spends time cleaning the trowel, the hoe, the rake until they gleam. They are elements of creation. They should be immaculate for the next person. The first bell rings out and dies away.

She hastens to the lake. The light races across the turquoise water. The three boys are waiting. The tallest with the limp. The middle one, the oldest, with the brown hair and the crooked ear. The shortest, with the strongest hands. She has traded apples, carrots and sweet perfumed strawberries from the garden for their patience and co-operation. The middle one shows curiosity and returns often without expecting trade. He has already placed the frame with its silken ties. They all raise their hands to be the conductor. She chooses the one with the chestnut hair, like hers.

The boy is fixed securely around the chest, with his arms free and his feet entirely off the ground. They have practised sufficiently. They are waiting for the audience.

Michael the treasurer walks past on his usual brisk walk to the kitchen. She waits for the look of disapproval and holds the spinning globe against the feet of the suspended boy. His feet begin to glow. It smells of fireside and approaching storm. The virtue is transferred. Michael falters, a never before witnessed occurrence. He stiffens, turns and walks in the other direction. As expected. She waits now for the confirmation. The second bell rings out and dies away. The echo is louder by the pond.

When Michael returns with Thomas the apothecary, the acknowledged man of science, the shortest boy is holding an open book balanced in his strong, sure hands. As the suspended boy reaches out the pages of the book begin to turn. The boy is laughing, waving continuously, the pages surrendering under each pass. The watching men turn and walk towards the largest building. They will return. This is the day of triumph.

They wait now for the testimony: she, the suspended boy, her fellows in experimentation. They are elements of creation. They will be the things she will regret once she has succeeded. Once she has achieved.

Matthew the leader approaches, bringing men with tools in work-roughened hands. These tools are not for creation. She holds the sulphur globe against the feet of the suspended boy. The feet glow. The tallest boy moves forward to stand on the mat of twigs. Perhaps the lightning remains in its surroundings.

The suspended boy reaches out to the tallest boy and the spark leaps between them. It leaps between them and then to the silken ties. The boy with the chestnut hair and the crooked ear is still laughing as he floats away, feet first towards the incipient lightning.

She walks back to her room. The third bell rings out as she is trapped in the passage between the garden and her destination. The echoes swell in her ear.

She lies down on the stone floor, positioned to observe the cherry tree in the garden. She will leave the sulphur globe for the boy with the chestnut hair and the crooked ear. They will come for her now. This is the day of triumph.

 

 

ANITA GOVEAS is British-Asian, based in London, and fueled by strong coffee and paneer jalfrezi. Her stories are published and forthcoming in the 2016 London Short Story Prize anthology, the Word Factory website, Dodging the Rain, Rigorous, Pocket Change lit, Haverthorn, and Riggwelter.

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Image: Public Domain

Newbon Manor occupies a lonely vantage point on north Yorkshire moorland, overlooking the hamlet of Little Sarling. The building is orientated peculiarly; it stands half turned away from the settlement, wilfully aloof amidst matted continents of dismal, aubergine-coloured heather that soak up the shadows of the passing clouds. The desolation of the surroundings is mirrored in the stark appearance of the hall itself; the sheer stone walls, blackened by centuries of windblown peat, and the austere, vacant windows, which reflect portions of the leaden skies and confer upon the property the forsaken air of a derelict.

The architect, Anthony Tyte, is a distant ancestor of mine. When I was a child, his portrait, evidently painted when he was long past his prime, was a disquieting presence in the residual gloom of the wood-panelled hallway. After dark I did my utmost to avoid moving unaccompanied within sight of its sunken, hollowed-out gaze. Under daylight, flared markings, resembling the beginnings and endings of engraved lettering, were visible upon his bare arms, which he had posed crossed over against his chest. It was my grandfather’s assumption that these vestige characters had once formed part of a family motto, perhaps applied to the painting after it was finished, and long since flaked off.

While studying divinity at Findlay College, in Oxford, I was surprised to encounter Tyte’s name recorded in a bound registry, held in the library collection at Christ Church Cathedral. Here he is listed as a founding member of a defunct order of stone masons and church builders known as The Cult of Weight, whose activities are briefly summarised in an accompanying footnote. Further illumination on the order has been provided to me by my mentor, Professor Victor Weston, to whom I wish to extend my deepest gratitude.

The sect first appears in records dating from the late 1600s. Most likely it was formed between 1672 and 1675, apparently in response to the discovery of a substantial stone relic that was uncovered following a landslip, outside the village of Woolweir, in the county of Devon. The find was described by an early eye-witness, Father Martin Ward, as a hollowed-out cone of calloused, coarse-grained marble, eleven yards long, the outer surface bearing a mottled pattern of worn-down bumps that were uniform enough in distribution to have been the work of a craftsman. A subsequent report, again originating from Ward, observed what appeared to be a garland of overlapping angel wings, carved close to the base of the object where it emerged from the mud. This had only been revealed after a heavy shower of rain. News of the discovery reached the ears of the church who thought it of enough note to warrant a visitation by a delegation of senior clergy, headed by an envoy of the Bishop of London. Among the party was my ancestor, Anthony Tyte; a man of puritanical zeal who claimed that, on multiple occasions, he had been taken from his bed by an angel and carried up to heaven. He had made attempts to replicate elements of the celestial architecture he had laid eyes upon, in the designs of a trinity of churches constructed in the capital, on the south bank of the river Thames. Sadly none of these buildings have survived into into modernity.

The landslip had covered a seldom-used cart track that ran along the foot of a steep natural embankment, and connected a pair of outlying farms with the village. From the top of the mound of disturbed earth and uprooted trees, the stone object projected like a spire on an upright slant. William Docking, who was steward to the Bishop of London, wrote in a letter to his master:

‘The farmer who showed us the way was keen that we should help him to free his wagon, which was trapped beneath the deluge of loose soil. Alas, when we uncovered it, the conveyance was crushed beyond repair under the weight of all that had come to rest on top of it. Laying eyes upon the wreckage, the man begged that alms be provided by the church as charitable restitution for the act of god that had deprived him of one of the tools of his livelihood. Some form of recompense was agreed upon, under condition that he would assist in the removal of the object when the time came.”

Following a careful inspection of the carvings on the stone, Tyte declared it to be a fragment of the celestial masonry that had tumbled from heaven to earth during the great battle between good and evil, that climaxed in Lucifer being cast down into hell. He ignored the locals who insisted that you could find stones of similar size and shape, and with similar markings, strewn throughout the region.

At this time, the foundations for Barnstaple Cathedral had just been put to ground. Tyte was friends with the principle architect, John Brightwell, and convinced him to incorporate his new-found holy relic into the bell tower as a steeple.

He remained on the site of the cathedral throughout the summer of 1672, and possibly all the way through to 1675. During this time the cult assembled around him, Brightwell, and another man named Neville Drewer, drawing its ranks from the masons and carpenters who were working on the building. Their stated intent, documented in a damaged copy of their charter, was to restore stone and metal objects, thought to be of divine provenance, to their rightful positions in the heavens, by incorporating them within the upper echelons of places of Christian worship.

The cult grew quickly, spreading rapidly across England, its members distinguishing themselves from the disparates ranks of artisans who converge upon any large-scale architectural project. Acolytes of the order were well-versed in the practicalities of structural engineering. They were renowned crane builders, meticulously crafting winches carved into the detailed likenesses of angels, upon which every filament of each feather was individually etched into solid oak. During a construction, these cranes ascended along with the rising walls; the pathways of their upward journeys having been pre-determined by the architects in their plans. At a point where an angel had scaled to the zenith of its usefulness, it would be incorporated into the walls of the cathedral, with the winches facing either internally or externally, according to the design. Henceforth, they might occasionally be deployed in the transportation of heavy loads into the upper reaches of the building.

As engravers, the cultists worked at such a frenetic pace that the ends of their chisels would glow red hot from the friction. Every so often a tool would ricochet from the stone and burn through clothing to brand the skin of an arm or a leg. This is the likely cause of the markings in Tyte’s portrait, his body having been permanently scored with the off-cuts of the sentences he had engraved into the walls of churches and cathedrals.

In exchange for their materials and services, the masons requested that burial chambers be built within the eaves and spires, where members of the sect could be interred upon death. When Anthony Tyte passed from this world in 1733, his earthly remains were lain to rest in a lofty crypt of his own design, sequestered within the steeple of Barnstaple Cathedral; the holy relic that was the foundation stone of The Cult of Weight.

Two decades prior to his demise he oversaw the construction of my childhood home on the site of Barnley Manor, which had been destroyed by fire. Its successor was deliberately rotated upon the old foundation, a few degrees towards the west, banishing almost from sight the nearby village of Little Sarling, which Tyte believed to be over-run by impious souls. In 1757, the population was almost entirely wiped out by an outbreak of pneumonic plague and the settlement permanently reduced to no more than a quarter of its former size, comprising no more than five cottage dwellings.

The Cult of Weight, latterly known as The Worshipful Company of Weight, disbanded abruptly in 1849. A brief disclosure announcing the winding-up of its affairs was posted in the business pages of The London Fairlead, but no further explanation was given.

In the same year, a journal article by John Hammerton, who was Anglican Bishop of Masham, observed that cathedrals which had assimilated pieces of divine masonry supplied by the cult, appeared more prone to drawing down unfavourable weather and suffering from structural damage. Hammerton was a rational man and attributed the phenomenon to quirks in the architecture influencing weather patterns “perhaps by the shaping of the winds that continually buffet the upper extremities of these prominent buildings.”

In October, 1987, a hurricane rampaged across Great Britain. The gusts caused catastrophic damage to Barnstaple Cathedral. Eye witnesses claim to have seen the stone spire wrenched clean away from the bell tower and lifted high into the air where it was swallowed up by the roiling clouds. In the aftermath, no trace of it could be found.

I visited the cathedral in 1993, while on holiday in Dartmoor. It was not long after the unveiling of the new bell tower and steeple. While I was there, I spoke with one of the volunteer guides and asked him his opinion on the fate of the missing original.

He replied that it had most-likely been torn apart in the storm and the pieces scattered by the winds along the bed of the River Taw.

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Image: Bernhard Stärck

 

 

As the factory was built, the town hummed with expectation. This was big news. Employment was scarce here. Many families were living cap in hand, and they were thought to be the lucky ones. Some couldn’t even afford a cap in the first place.

Shortly after the final bricks were placed, a finely-dressed gentleman appeared in front of the factory gates, clutching a loudhailer. ‘Attention townspeople!’ he hollered. ‘Your prayers have been answered. There is plenty of work available here!’

‘Hurrah!’ roared the townspeople.

‘This,’ he told them, ‘is a vegetable oil factory. In return for working here, all I ask is that you grow produce in your gardens and bring them to me. We will turn that into oil and sell it around the globe. And you will all be paid well!’

‘Hurrah!’ roared the crowd again, although some were unsure about having to hand over their carrots and potatoes, and others were confused because they didn’t think these were the sorts of vegetables that actually went into vegetable oil.

But they stopped questioning the man when what he said came true – the factory’s oil was sold all around the world and the workers were paid well. If the cost of being able to afford warm clothes and a few luxuries was giving up a few spuds each month, then that was okay with them.

Then another factory was built.

The finely-dressed gentleman appeared at its gates with his loudhailer. ‘Attention townspeople!’ he hollered. ‘Those of you who were unable to gain work at the vegetable oil factory, listen to me. More work will soon be available here!’

‘Hurrah!’ roared the townspeople.

‘And this time, we will be making sunflower oil! To work here, all I ask is that you grow sunflowers in your gardens and bring them to me. We will turn them into oil and sell this around the globe too! And you, like your colleagues at the vegetable oil factory, will all be paid well!’

‘Hurrah!’ roared the crowd yet again. Some of them had to borrow money from their neighbours who worked at the other factory so they could actually buy sunflower seeds, and others were confused as to why they actually had to grow them when it was only their seeds that go into sunflower oil in the first place, and weren’t vegetable oil and sunflower oil basically the same thing, anyway? But they stopped questioning the man when what he said came true – the factory’s oil was sold all around the world and all the workers were paid well. If the cost of being able to afford warm clothes and a few luxuries was looking after some sunflowers in their gardens, then that was okay with them.

But still some townspeople were without work, so when a third new factory was built they became very excited. Shortly after the final bricks were placed, the finely-dressed gentleman appeared in front its gates, again with his loudhailer. ‘Attention townspeople!’ he hollered once more. ‘Those of you who were unable to gain work at the vegetable oil factory or the sunflower oil factory, listen to me. More work will soon be available here, but this is the final factory I will build! As ever, I will require you to bring me the raw materials, and with them we will make and sell the finest of oils.’’

‘Hurrah!’ roared the townspeople yet again, and eagerly awaited the news about what sort of manufacturer this would be.

‘This,’ shouted the finely-dressed gentleman,’will be a baby oil factory!’

DAVID COOK’s stories have been published in a number of places online and in print, and he was once nominated for the Pushcart Prize, which was nice. You can find more of his work at http://www.davewritesfiction.wordpress.com and say hi on Twitter @davidcook100. He lives in Bridgend, Wales, with his wife and daughter.

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Image: Silke

Swimming so far from the crowd to strong waves
that guide me back to the shore,
I confess all my sins to a theatre without any faces
where the only ears listening are the cracks in bathroom mirrors,

Autumn leaves fall like lotus eaters retrieving the dead
I had found my Eden and never tasted its fruits,
the golden buds lay in sticky puddles of rust
among the remains of poached angel feathers,

a stranger wearing the pierced armour of paradise
Where all the delights had long ago expired and decayed,
I had found my Eden and never tasted its fruits
In a man-made paradise now unhinged.

 

MATTHEW DUGGAN’s poems have appeared in several poetry journals such as Ghost City Review, Harbinger Asylum, Prole, The Journal, Ink, Sweat, and Tears, Osiris. In 2015 Matt won the Erbacce Prize for Poetry with his first full collection Dystopia 38.10 (erbacce-press) and in 2016 won the Into the Void Poetry Prize. Matt has a new collection out called One Million Tiny Cuts published by New York Publishing House. http://www.claresongbirdspub.com

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Image: MWDesignCologne

 

 

The Woods place burned to the ground in April, owing a mattress too close a stove pipe. Twilight ruptured with screams, with geyser-yells spouting, with shouts flapping wild like bats in the eaves. I crawled to the window, my legs not yet fastened, still propped in the corner like umbrellas, like canes. My nightgown a snakeskin shed across the floor, a molted chrysalis, translucent, trailing. Like a house-trapped bird, I threw myself at the glass. The moon was out as the sun came up. It was two states at once, a time between times. I clung to the sill. Watched.

With buckets Mr. Woods raced down to the pond, his buckets like thimbles against the flame’s scale. In desperate arcs he chucked water, which landed to no effect, hopeless as pennies wished into a well. Mrs. Woods off aways keened under a quilt, entire generations upon her back. Old aprons, dresses, bunting, blankets, stitched into a history, a motley patchwork. All the women in her life were there that day, each a soft square, bearing witness.

For three days it smoldered, some hot dying thing, its immolated frame collapsing to pitch. To nothing: A blank on a field, a singular blot; a negative space, present in absence. On the scrim of drawn lids could I still see it, its original form, solid and there. When the smoke cleared, there materialized a truth: Cruelties are born no love can redeem.

The Woods place—was gone.

With an ice hook, by moonlight, I fished through the despond. Salvaged a door-knocker, brass and leonine. A roaring king with a ring through its maw, royalty to welcome a pauper home. I swathed it in a fold of skirt; it was still warm; still good. I found Mr. Woods, next day, in the barn. They were living there, the Woods, until their place was rebuilt. Pa wouldn’t permit them stay in the manse. Cobwebs more welcome to sleep in our guestrooms. Dust more invited to dinner than the hands. And Pa’s precious Jerseys, would I not be surprised, if he asked one to tea, Mrs. Woods set aside. Like a jug on a shelf, a broom or a pan, there for its job; alone.

Udders hung squeezed. Milk shot in streams. White pelted tin. Tap tap tap. A tail was tied back onto itself; it did not hurt the animal, Mr. Woods said, it just helped her stay out of her own way. On a stool Mr. Woods, redolent of the past, smoke was his hair, his clothes. Him. We become what we lose; we are loss. No scrubbing, no soap, no surface so clean, as the skin we are born in, and not even then. Birth, by its nature, a violent corruption.

I presented the knocker. My throat a fat knot. Wet beads hit my almond toes.

It’s alright, Caroline. You hold on to that.

And I did until December, long as it took, observed Mr. Woods as he rebuilt. Studied how he did it, what tools he used. In my Wanamaker diary, pencilled a list: hammer saw shovel trowel. Lead unto paper soothed as a salve, muted the pangs of my phantom pain. Provided a distraction, a preoccupation; my mind, my hands, something to do. From the forest I gathered stones, left them in little piles; when Mr. Woods found them, he knew what for. In the new fireplace were my thumbprints sealed.

A door sighed anew, and dread winged off.

*   *   *

The herd was Pa’s investment, a sliver of his pie, a bit of milkfat wealth to butter his bread. Pa bought the farm to escape the city rush, had the mansion built, a house on a hill. While the farmhouse, he decided, would be part of their contract: free housing provided to Mr. and Mrs. Woods. Free in the sense that they signed away their lives.

Free in the sense that, like me, they weren’t.

On the breed, Mr. Woods was an expert, and also on prosthetics, which he soon found out. Mr. Woods carved my legs, despite my father’s protests, and years later, taught me how to drive. From the start, Pa preferred I surrender: to a chaise, to a bed, immobile feminine. Were it not for the cows, for the money he brought in, Mr. Woods, fired, would have been the case.

Mr. Woods knew this. Mr. Woods was not dumb.

Mrs. Woods was the woman whose hands delivered me, deformed girl child, birthed me to life. It was Mrs. Woods and no one beside my dying mother, a newborn and blood loss, my father in New York. There is a portrait in the parlor of my mother as an infant. It is the only image of her that survives—in my father’s grief, the others he destroyed. So when I think of my mother, I think of her as a baby.

It is weird to have a baby as a mother.

“Well, hello, Caroline, please come in.”

It’s Mrs. Woods at the stove, the same one as before.

I give a little wave, shift the air.

My woodens clatter across the fresh boards.

In the Woods kitchen, Shep snouts me hello. I reach down and stroke his tail; its silky strands like fringes on an Oriental shawl. I run his fur through my fingers, over and over, sand through an hourglass, flip it, repeat. There’s a chair in the corner. That one’s mine. It misses two spindles. It misses me.

“How are you today, my dear?” Mrs. Woods to the range, shiny with grease, licking flames. Chicken and rosemary, butter and thyme. Mrs. Woods is as tall and as straight as a spruce. Her skirt is nankeen. It grazes the floor.

I say nothing (as if to say): Things are as bad as they still are.

I say nothing (as if to say): And maybe, even, worse.

She registers my mood like crickets vibrations, like horses storms. Intuits. Seems women have antennae, peaked ears, hidden eyes—extrasensory in their natural perceptions. Her concern a quick mask, a passing shade, an eclipse on her countenance. Dark. Between us transmits a secreted language, as silent and effective as an arachnid’s web. Catches lightly our weight, our heaviest thoughts, binds them together in candyfloss threads.

There are no words needed because it is us.

A sound. An approach. Shep reports to the stairs. The screen door snaps, open/shut, like a trap. It’s Mr. Woods run in—or maybe run out. In a liminal frame, waylaid, assailed.

His arms are sheathed in blood. His chest is soaked crimson. He is a heaving burst force. An emergency of flesh. Mrs. Woods says what, what is it Joseph. He says it’s the calf, the calf just born.

His throat hitches, dry as tinder.

Boil water, Agnes, bring it the barn.

Mrs. Woods swings a cauldron over the hearth, filled with water, earlier drawn. She prods the ashwood with a cross-handled poker. Her hand a late autumn leaf, quivering on the branch.

Mr. Woods, in his despair, errs to perceive me, does not turn at my footfall as I follow him out. The sky is grey. Racks rush to cover. The horizon is panic. Indeterminate.

In the stall, the miasma hangs heavy. The boots have gathered. It reeks like the end. I weave through the throng like a reed on a loom, secure a clear view of the just-born. The mutant trembles in the birth-wet hay. Three horns crest dead center its skull. Three horns like daggers,

like daggers a lady’s, petite and unsheathed. Diminutive threats. Its skinny neck strains; its twig legs buckle; its knees are gnarly knobs. It is no boy.

Among the boots, murmurs: Praise-be’s and Lord-a-mercy’s.

Among the boots, a refrain: Should it be saved.

Like a vulture to carrion, the old curse circles, circles the rafters, dives to pick. The ancient accusation of my birth a hex, a scourge on the estate. My mother’s death. Resurfacing like mud beneath a spring melt, a relentless sun beating, unreason recast. The boots speak of me, speak through me, as if I am not there. I am no ghost.

I am right there.

In the corner, the dam on her side, her horn-maimed body in a brown heap. Mr. Woods elbows bent, hip-fisted, brow creased; lines in his face like readable thought: This dam is worth thousands—what will the old man say? And what of the tri-horn—what? Aside him is Carl, Mr. Woods’ right hand, advising him, softly, in a low tone. To my insect ears do his words amplify, do they cut through the din, pierce clear and sharp:

Besides the horns, ain’t nothing wrong with it, Joe. She’ll grow into the defect. It’s up to you.

Mrs. Woods arrives with the cauldron of water. The boots part to let her through. She steadies it—steady now!—lowers it to the floor. Coils of serpentine vapors, ribbons of hot fog. Mr. Woods dips a rag. Rings it out. Applies it to the encroachment, to the cold, of death’s grip. A last rites, a cleansing. Warmth on the mother. For her, he says, there is nothing we can do.

Overhead, rain startles the roof. Sluices in rivulets. Little rivers.

What of the calf? Mrs. Woods says. She approaches it as if it were normal. Extends her hand to its chocolate nose. It leans its mass into her palm. Its eyelashes are black, thick as fuzzy woolies. Caterpillars with fur. It moos.

Something lightens, brightens, a curtain pulled back.

It is me, laughing.

The boots turn in alarm.

Mr. Woods wipes his hands. Meets his wife’s eyes. Shakes his head in the way men do: slow and sure, slow and sure. Rubs the back of his neck, finds a decision there.

When Pa finds out, there is no end.

*   *   *

CAROLINE!

The baize does nothing.

The baize does nothing to suffocate his howls; his fits clap against the manse like hooves on cobblestone. The baize panels on the walls, that my father had installed, their original purpose was to mute life’s sounds. Shut out disturbances like wooden legs walking, a lost girl enabled, navigating a labyrinth. Now all they do is shut Pa in. Leave him to rot with his termite thoughts, gnawing in tiny bites, masticating his sanity. In his musty study, Pa thrashes in his chair, like a hook-mad trout flipping on the line. He is bones in a suit. Wool tweed flesh death. Yells twice as loud, my name like a swear. The walls into tissue. Air.

CAROLINE!

I don’t know who told him.

Pa’s state is such that he never leaves his study. Pa’s state is such that Dr. Morton advises: hush ill news; don’t tell your father. The doctor’s black bag is a portable peace; its assortment of needles like pencils in a case. For when Pa peaks, when his episodes erupt, like solar flares off an angry sun. When his throat wails louder than any Nor’easter, I let the doctor in—and flee to the Woods; stumble trip fall through the crown-high corn. My knees are more bruise, more scab, than knee. I am a running collection.

It wasn’t me.

For something so tangled, so jumbled and twisted, there is a taut thread in Pa’s ball-of-yarn conscience: paranoia tugs in a tight straight line. Pa pays off spies, shadow members of the boots, to deliver him the dirt circulating the estate. Into the daily mail is their scuttlebutt slipped: unsigned notes tobacco stenched, glued with spit, rumor on pulp. A rosewood letter opener is my father’s close weapon. A stab in the dark; a slice; a read.

My father puts his faith in strangers.

Strange men before his daughter, his daughter—me.

CAROLINE!

I cross into the study and Pa points. Points a turnip finger at the contraption on the wall: his Western Electric artery to the outside world. Its two circular bells, like a pair of owl eyes, watch me as I make his call. Its mouthpiece is a sable horn. Its oak box is a baby’s coffin.

Get me the Reverend. Tell him it is urgent.

I pick up the receiver. I turn my back.

If I were magic, I’d dive into this box.

The operator and me—could we be friends?

*   *   *

Show me to your father.

The Reverend is an oil drip. He is a walrus face and tea-stained teeth. Balding pate, scalp spread like a spill, a low ring of hair like a sunken halo.

Everywhere I look is a fallen angel. Possess me a soul whose wings aren’t broken.

Yes Reverend.

The mansion is modelled after a cathedral. Its design is Gothic; it is shaped like a cross. Pa’s study, first floor, sits at the head: where would be the altar, incense and unction; that is where we find him; that is where he—

The Reverend behind me, I knock on the door; there is a splinter of light; a suspended breath. There is no voice more urgent than no voice at all. The Reverend pushes past me, pushes to the past. Under his arm, a tuck of red leather. My father’s favorite book. Expired medicine.

The Reverend finds the note in Pa’s hand. The news of the tri-horn, the cause of Pa’s death. An attack on a heart I didn’t think he had. The Reverend says this is the curse, what should have been exorcised long long ago. There is fire in his eyes when he says these words. He tips my chin up so that I can see it. So that I am forced to see it. The fire again. He says show me where, where is the calf.

There is no forgiveness when it comes down to it.

Except I get to it first. My body remembers.

*   *   *

Imagine a bell tower—that is my bedroom. The windows are dormers, the roof a hard slant. It is a room meant to keep me small.

Well these are the facts that I have outgrown, faster than mushrooms in the space of one sleep.

JESSICA BONDER is an American fiction writer. She has published short stories and prose poetry in The Stockholm Review, The Lonely Crowd, The Honest Ulsterman, STORGY Magazine, Split Lip Magazine, Black Heart Magazine, The Bohemyth, Vending Machine Press, The Fiction Pool, and Unbroken Journal. Honors include: Longlisted for the 2017 Berlin Writing Prize; Honorable Mention in Glimmer Train’s Fiction Open (March/April 2017); Longlisted for STORGY Magazine’s 2017 EXIT EARTH Short Story Competition; Finalist in Split Lip Magazine’s 2017 Summer Mix Tape Flash Fiction Contest; Shortlisted for Short Fiction Journal’s 2017 Short Fiction Prize; First Place in STORGY’s 2015 Short Story Contest.

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Image: Bairyna

I’d not seen my mother cry before. The sight of it pinned my feet to the cracked lino, my sister’s breath loud in my ear.

The open kitchen door framed the rockery where snow in summer scrambled towards the concrete patio. If I could pass beyond this new version of my mother blocking the way, I would brush against the white-furred leaves as I climbed the steps to the lawn. The grass my father mowed the day before would have lost its pungency and dried stalks of it would stick between my toes. Screened by the giant blue hydrangea, I would squeeze the pure yellow pompoms of dahlias and watch them spring back, marked with new lines like the creases in my palm.

In the moist papery skin under my mother’s eyes, in the wet streak at the side of her nose, time stretched like my French skipping rope, the elastic tugging at my ankles.

The smell of wet sheets and laundry powder mingled with briny steam from the boiling ham. A black line edged the letter in my mother’s hand. Her pale green summer dress swung in ironed folds behind bronze freckles so dense along her arm it was hard to see her true colour. She pulled her red pinny to her face, the seam along the waistband splitting under the strain.

My trike sat parked on the patio where I’d left it. Inside the dome of its tightly closed boot my special stone slept safe in the dark, a million magic spells in its quartz frosting, the lucky hole filled with daisies rescued from the mower’s blade. I held the thought of it in my head, while my mother pushed past us into the hallway, while I skirted the unguarded space she left behind, while I dragged my weeping sister into the garden where rust bloomed across the sky-blue paint on my trike, and the metal handle of the boot scraped and squeaked as I struggled to turn it.

 

ALI McGRANE is an emerging writer of short fiction and poetry, living between the sea and the moor. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Fictive Dream, The Lost Balloon, Ellipsis Zine, Ink Sweat & Tears, Train Lit Mag and the 2017 Flash Fiction Festival:One anthology. Find her @Ali_McGrane_UK

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Image: PublicDomainPictures

When Greta vanished that night, she did so inside a glass of red wine.

I was with her at the time, alongside many of Greta’s other friends. Greta often held small gatherings and parties at her house, and that Friday night we had all congregated at Greta’s house as the sun went down.

There was Samantha, who only ate food with her pinky finger raised towards the sky. And then there was Zara, who didn’t ever eat much at all and yet no one seemed invested enough in her friendship to ever say anything to her about it. Whether she was wanting people to notice or not, I’m still not sure. 

There were a few others who I didn’t know, and from the little attention that Greta gave them, I gathered that there probably wasn’t much to know about them.

None of us were surprised that night when Greta glanced down into her glass — filled almost to the brim with expensive red wine — and was swallowed right up inside of the liquid. She was delightfully odd like that. The girl was a collection of limbs that wove in and out of our lives. One minute, she’d be dancing beside you to no music. And then she’d be gone. Poof. Out the door and across the road and into someone else’s evening of mischief. Sometimes she’d say to me I’m going to love you and leave you before rushing off. Sometimes she’d say nothing at all. 

Greta was seated at the time, with her glass resting atop a chipped wooden table. I shudder to think what would’ve occurred if Greta happened to be standing when she vanished. That glass of red wine would’ve dropped to the ground and poor Greta would have soaked herself right into her mother’s carpet. 

The glass shook a little bit on the table, but otherwise the entire spectacle went rather smoothly. And if I hadn’t seen it happen, we’d probably all still be wondering where on earth Greta got to. She was fluid like that — no pun intended.

There were only a handful of us left at the party at this point, and since I’d known Greta the longest, it was decided unanimously by the others that I would be the one to hold on to her. Just until we could figure out what to do. 

“No drinking allowed,” Shannon said, and then she trotted back through the house and left me sitting there. 

For the briefest of moments, I thought about resting my lips on the edge of the glass and tipping it up ever so slightly. Would that mean Greta and I were kissing? What part of her would I be touching? I wasn’t even sure she was still alive in there, but nevertheless, I clutched her to my chest and carried her home with me. I clung to her like a child does to a teddy bear — scared of dropping it and terrified someone might take it away. 

Greta and I lived next door to each other. We always have. There was a big old oak tree in her backyard and the plump branches had grown so tall and so wide that they were now hanging out over the top of the fence and into our yard. You could see Greta’s house from our kitchen, and there has been many a night when I’ve plonked myself down on one of our kitchen stools and glanced across the black night and into that place. But she was never there. Not when you wanted her to be, anyway. She comes and goes, our Greta.

When I got home and walked through the side door, my brother Ben was stumbling around in the kitchen muttering something incoherent. 

“Hey,” I said.

He turned around at the sound of my voice. “Oh hey. I’m putting a pizza in the oven. Want some?”

I shrugged. “Sure.”

I rested Greta on the kitchen table and sat down. It felt weird to have her here with me and know that she wasn’t able to up and leave me at any moment. Because of her transformation, she was now stuck with me. She would go wherever I would go. I sensed some sort of weird power in me. Happiness. 

“You still drinking?” Ben said.

“No. That’s just a friend.”

He ignored my comment, and then took some juice from the fridge and drank the rest of it straight from the carton. “How was the party?” he said.

“It was okay.”

“Who went?” he said.

“The usual. Shannon, Zara, Greta. A new group of randoms.”

“How was Greta tonight?” he said, eyebrows raising. He swivelled around and peered out the window into the darkness.

“She’s fine. Her usual self,” I said.

“I can’t see her,” he said.

“She must’ve slipped into her bedroom when you weren’t paying attention,” I replied.

In fourth grade, Greta grasped my hand and led me to that big old oak tree in her backyard. She told me that she wanted her first kiss to be with a friend. With me. And before I’d known what was happening, she had pecked me on the lips and then gone twirling around in the long grass, cackling and cackling like her throat was broken. Finally, she had laid down on the grass and spread out her arms and legs like a starfish.

“We dated you know,” Ben said.

I rolled my eyes. I did know. He mentioned it a lot. It was his pride and glory, dating Greta. The wonderful Greta, he often called her. Their fling wasn’t long, just the first few months of high school. And neither of them really ended it. Greta just stopped talking to him and then Ben was too infatuated with her to try and convince her to stay with him. 

“I know,” I said. Silence ensued for a few moments, and I was sure that we were both thinking about the same thing. Wonderful Greta. 

A long while ago, I got embarrassed that I was looking over at Greta’s house all the time. I could never even see her — she was never home. And sometimes I would glance across and catch her family members in a moment that was not mine to see. Her brother often entertained girls in his room with his blinds open and the lights on. Her parents liked to argue in the living room, with one of them always reaching for the television remote and turning up the volume to cover their screams. I could never hear what they were saying, but their baring teeth and reddened faces gave their anger away.

It was never her family members who I was looking for in that house, and I did try to stop. But I found it hard. It was like they were my family too. It was like I was the daughter they didn’t really have. I was always home. Greta wasn’t. I could’ve slotted in perfectly in that house.

“Do you reckon you’ll stay friends?” Ben asked. “You know, after school ends this year?”

“Of course,” I said, without the slightest hint of doubt.

JESSICA SEABORN lives in Sydney and works in book publishing. She is the co-creator of The Regal Fox, a website showcasing fiction and non-fiction from writers all over the world. She has been published in Daily Life, Feminartsy and Milk Magazine. You can find her on Twitter @Jessica_Seaborn

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Image: Aline Ponce

 

 

 

I grab my secret stash, head into the yard when the kids are sleeping and light up. I don’t do it for the nicotine. I do it to remember.

Those moments when we’d sneak outside at parties and have a sly one together. Your ice blue eyes would pierce my own, they’d penetrate my flesh, my thoughts, my soul. I couldn’t hold it for long. It burned.

We couldn’t touch, it wasn’t allowed. But we were desperate to. We both knew it. Back inside we’d lock eyes across a crowded room. A moment, a flash, but we knew what it meant. A glimpse through a gap in gyrating bodies and we’d ravish each other for an eternity. Look away.

Sometimes our skin would touch. Thrown together for a group photo. The air crackles. Nobody noticed the unexploded bomb. Fake smiles. We are expert deceivers.

There are no more parties, no more stolen moments. Just me and the secret stash grasping at a feeling. If only we’d met in another life, another time.

I crush the cigarette out. A foul smell clings to my fingers, coats my tongue. A sickly swell churns my stomach. My lungs rot.

The aftermath. The regret. The self disgust. That’s how it would’ve been.

If they’d discovered us.

J. E. KENNEDY is an aspiring writer from Liverpool, England. Examples of her work can be found on her fantastical fiction website http://www.jekennedy.co.uk. Or follow her on Instagram @jekennedywriter. She is currently working on her debut novel.

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Image: Ralf Kunze

 

Llinos stands on the back doorstep, hands wrapped round a mug of tea. Up on the hillside, getting smaller as she watches, is her brother, Tomos.

“I saw you,” she says. They are sitting at the kitchen table. Their mother has her back turned to them. There’s a hiss as she breaks an egg into the frying pan.

“How long will it be Mam? I need to get out.”

“As long as it takes. Stop whining or I’ll give your egg to Llin.”

“Nah, Mam,” Tomos whines.

“I saw you,” Llinos says again, softly.

Tomos looks at her.

“Where? You couldn’t have.”

“I did.”

Their mother pushes plates of egg and bacon in front of them. They eat in silence, heads down. Anyone watching would think they haven’t eaten for weeks.

The truth is, they haven’t. Or at least, they haven’t eaten enough. Though their mother doesn’t know that. She has been cooking up breakfast – and lunch and supper – for her two children every day. For all the weeks and months they’ve been at the cottage.

“I wear my fingers to the bone for those two,” she says to her counsellor later that morning.

“That’s a cliché,” says the counsellor. “Try and put it into your own words.”

The mother – her name is Bronwen but the counsellor calls her mother too and she doesn’t like to contradict – tells the counsellor that these are her own words.

“For goodness sake! You’re supposed to be helping me.” She says.

“Good,” says the counsellor. “You’re getting angry, mother. About time too.”

Mother works from 8am to 8pm, every day. That’s what she tells the counsellor. And the work is never done. She is exhausted, doing this on her own. The children have been getting so unruly.

“Unruly?” The counsellor is looking for another word. Again.

“Unruly,” says Bronwen.

Back in the cottage at the end of the long drive through the woods where no doubt the Tylwyth Teg play at night, Llinos and Tomos are waiting. Or at least, two children who mother knows as Llinos and Tomos are waiting. They have been playing hide and seek. They have pulled the sheets from all the beds for their game. They have run outside, outside to play on the soggy grass – no-one could call it a lawn, it’s full of weeds and there are brambles too which have ripped the sheets. When Bronwen gets back she finds the mess of children and sheets. She knows that the children need food. That it will calm them down. She cuts slabs of bread to make sandwiches. With meat. Thick slices of ham, cooked on the bone. Bronwen is a vegetarian. She would like her children to be vegetarian too but they love meat.

“They eat too much,” she’d said to the counsellor. “You know I’m a mother,” she says when the counsellor does not respond. “How can a mother deny her children?”

The counsellor had nodded. Then she’d looked at her watch and said the hour was at an end.

The food calms the children. Bronwen tells them to go and play after lunch. She doesn’t see where they go. She makes herself a cup of tea and sits down to listen to a play on the radio. It’s warm in the room and the voices are low. She dozes.

As the sun is setting a girl, let’s call her Llinos, stands in the kitchen doorway and looks up to the hillside, where a boy, let’s call him Tomos, is getting smaller as he climbs. The girl follows him. Soon, if Bronwen were looking, she would see the two children silhouetted on the skyline, before they disappear over to the other side. But she is not looking. She is in the kitchen, preparing more food. And when she calls Llinos and Tomos for tea, the two children will be there. Eating again, as if they hadn’t seen food for weeks.

Bronwen feels so tired, but as she’d told the counsellor, how can a mother do other than feed her children?

CATH BARTON is an English writer who lives in Wales. Winner, New Welsh Writing Awards AmeriCymru Prize for the Novella 2017 and 2nd place in the Dorset Fiction Award, October 2017. Stories in The Lonely Crowd, Fictive Dream, Spelk and more. Regular contributor to Wales Arts Review. https://cathbarton.com/ Tweets @CathBarton1

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Image: tookapic

 

Cassandra in a blue bottle yells at Nasnas, and as he feels the sharp shooting aches yet again in his perforated eardrums, she swears twice over that the bloody beauty is the damned beast. In a Uniprose where the polished skeletal remains of the Homosapiens is the favorite museum piece, and wherein the tender tattered Grace cryo-sleeps inside a grey bottle, Kalan groans grut-a-tat-tut at the handpicked paradigm-shifting events strewn in an isolated enVirtualsphere. His skin leaks under his metal jackets, shells fly off his mouth, ears let out gun smoke. Dr. Andro pinches his titanolastic fingers and Kalan shuts his mouth up.

‘Damn if I don’t see all the grey heads coming together,’ the doc remarks, looking half-amused.

‘Like the purples at the back don’t mean countless corpses,’ says Kalan, bemused, then barfs semi-solid whites.

‘You, coin-operated Nataraja, see straight but—boo—those are blues.’

Kalan grinds his teeth, drops his hot metal-belly down. ‘Let me nap a bit, you piece of toxic Plastic’ he snaps, almost no-bodied.

The frozen events in the atmosphere disintegrate as Kalan, shrunk in a crimson bottle, dreams and feels:

Lights go out. Crickets chirrup. Fans propel ever so slowly to a halt. Those wide awake widen their eyes. Chirrup magnifies. Ones asleep wake up. Chirrup magnifies. Crickets burst, crickets burst to birth multitudes. Chirrup magnifies and magnifies. Ones alive press their ears. Chirrup magnifies and magnifies. Ones who breathe wail, press their ears and wail; deaf ones clap, chirrup magnifies. Crickets burst, birth multitudes. Chirrup magnifies and chirrup magnifies and magnifies. Ones who breathe wail, press their ears and wail away, deaf ones clap and clap away. Chirrup stops. Chirrup fades away before chirrup soothes again.

Until, and only until, Kalan groans again grut-a-tat-tut and shoots away yet again at yet another handpicked paradigm-shifting events.

AHIMAZ RAJESSH has been published in The Airgonaut, Occulum, Surreal Poetics, Cuento, 7×20, Jersey Devil Press, Nanoism, Strange Horizons, Pidgeonholes, 200 CCs, Flapperhouse, Malaigal, Padhaakai, Thalam, Manal Veedu, Unnatham and Liminality. His writing is forthcoming in Milkfist, formercactus, Jellyfish Review and Big Echo: Critical SF.

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Image: Stux

A long time ago, in the multiverse far far away, a Junior Intelligent Designer created a universe. The Mentor wasn’t pleased; there is a career path to be followed, and creating universes is a long way from the simple creation of moons. He knew the Boss wasn’t going to be happy either.

It wasn’t in dispute that Junior knew her moons, but she had gone too far. Universes can be created easily – that’s why there are so many in the multiverse – but getting all the pieces to work together successfully is tricky. Junior had assembled some ideas into a draft architecture and then, without telling her Mentor, had executed the build. The Big Bang was the first he knew of her universe’s birth.

There was no going back. Once the build had been started, it had to be made to work. After the Big Bang, the moons, planets, and stars were taking shape. Junior did know her moons. But the galaxies were a problem. They weren’t orbiting evenly. The Mentor added dark matter. He knew it was a kludge.

And then Junior insisted her universe was to expand forever, speeding up. If this one didn’t, she threatened to build another. Reluctantly the Mentor added dark energy. He checked his figures; 4.9% ordinary matter, 26.8% dark matter and 68.3% dark energy. He’d had to do some serious fixing! This mustn’t happen again; who would expect a builder of moons to birth a universe?

Junior studied her newborn universe. “Let there be light,” she instructed.

The Mentor sought an explanation. “Light?” he asked nervously.

“It’s so you can see,” explained Junior. “It’s an electromagnetic wave, and it behaves like both a particle and a wave at the same time. It always goes at the same relative speed, even if you’re moving. Nothing goes faster than light. Super cool.”

The Mentor’s curiosity got the better of him. “How can it go at the same relative speed all the time?” he asked.

“Time changes,” she answered.

He blanched. How had it come to this? What did Junior think she was doing? This universe was a nightmare! Who would ever understand it?

“Oh, and light is bent by gravity,” she added proudly. “Well – strictly – gravity distorts space-time, and light is travelling along a geodesic.”

There were tears in the Mentor’s eyes. “How are we going to explain this to the Boss?” he asked. “How did you come up with these ideas?”

“Well, I had so many and I had to choose just a few. I rolled dice,” she replied.

“We can’t tell him that,” exclaimed the Mentor, starting to panic.

“Okay,” said Junior. “Tell him I work in mysterious ways.”

 

 

Bio: Having spent his working life writing computer programs and technical documents, Gordon has settled into retirement in Kerry, Ireland, writing short fiction pieces to entertain himself and – hopefully – others.

 

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Image: Trandoshan

The girl steps into the water, careful precise movements until the waves lick at her hipbones. With a deft motion of her arms, she dives in. She has an neat overarm crawl, propelling herself toward the fiery line of the horizon.

The beach she leaves behind is clotted with people. They gossip and chat, eat ice lollies, apply sun cream, flick sand, build sandcastles, bicker and laugh and fight and play; they pay her no attention.

When she is a mile or so out, another two girls get into the water; they have the same efficient way of swimming, the water falls cleanly away from their bodies like hot knives through butter. Metre by metre, inch by inch, the new swimmers narrow the gap of gunmetal grey between them.

Like the shadow of a cloud passing over fields, the people on the beach fall silent. As they watch, the swimmers eat up the final shreds of ocean and come upon the girl in the blink of an eye. They push down on her, holding her in an unloving embrace.

They dip and bob, slip sliding under the water. The girl thrashes her legs but the fathoms below her give her no purchase and she loses precious sips of oxygen. There are three sleek blonde heads visible, but the swimmers are inorexable in their end goal and now just two heads bob up and down on the waves.

Briefly there are three again. Then two – the stillness stretches, folds in on itself with the weight of the watching gaze, but only still two remain. On the shore, the watchers take a sledgehammer to the silence as the sound of hundreds of voices cheer in victory.

 

 

Bio: Rebecca Williams has always wanted to be a writer. She completed the first draft of her novel – about bored housewives on a vigilante crime spree – in August 2017. She is killing time before second draft edits by dabbling in flash and shorter fiction. You can find her on Twitter @stupidgirl45

 

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Image: Li Yang

Tom’s house was full of drawers. He had the usual kind for keeping woollen socks, pieces of string and worn forks, but as the belongings strewn on chair-backs and table-tops might suggest, they were often overlooked. Tom’s life was dominated by the other drawers, the ones he had designed himself. The ones he didn’t have a licence for.

Tom had been sitting in silence for some time when a scratching noise caught his wandering attention, and since the drawers were motionless he looked at the window. A trailing branch waved in the breeze but not close enough to have skittered against the glass. Uncomfortable from sitting for so long in a state of nervous anticipation, Tom got up and looked out. A girl he didn’t recognise was striding across his garden with a spring in her step, and her hands in her cardigan pockets.

“Hey!” Tom called, but the window had only opened a crack because of the vine growing across it, and the girl didn’t look round. “Bugger,” he muttered, not having spoken to anyone all week. He knew there were more important matters in hand though, and he sat back down by his stack of paper to wait for a story to appear.

Tom had a creative streak. No harm in that, but Tom had let it go too far. Not content with embellishing legends or creating new ones from recent events, he wanted to make up stories of his own. There’s a word for that, his Nan had said. Do you want everyone to know you as a liar? He’d tried to explain, but the distinction between telling an untruth for entertainment and telling one to get yourself out of trouble had proved too subtle for her. Now he was weeks away from the golden age of twenty-seven, and not only not engaged but with no apparent interest in it.

Tom knew marriage didn’t have to involve love, though that made for a romantic tale to pass down the generations. Marriage was all about planning. Most people in the valley were engaged by twenty-six, so that when they came of age they knew – even if the wedding didn’t happen immediately – what life had in store for them. Tom’s plans didn’t involve his neighbours, the valley, or fitting in. Besides, it was hard to come to an understanding of that nature with anyone when you couldn’t let them linger in your house in case they started asking questions.

The fermenting-drawer rumbled. Plates rattled on the dresser above and Tom fingered his collar, watching for movement. Shuddering on warped runners the drawer inched out until Tom could see the closely-written sheets within. They taunted him with their proximity but he knew it didn’t do to be too hasty; three fingers ached with the memory of being broken last Spring. He held his breath till he could hold it no more, then leaned forward and grabbed his story before the drawer slammed shut and a serving platter pitched off the upper rack to shatter on the flags.

He skim-read the opening paragraph, then read it again more carefully. This time the words had melted and merged to form something better than he’d started out with. No redundant nonsense, no extraneous words scattered through otherwise acceptable sentences. This time the drawer had done its job and – His smile faded, his gaze froze on the last line: And they all lived happily ever after, except the guy I forgot to mention earlier who the story really should have been about, well he drowned in his own existential angst because his aunt was really his mother posing as his landlady while his girlfriend who was really his cousin …

The trouble was, Tom had no-one to turn to for help. There was a reason why the drawer-systems cost so much – actually there were two reasons, and one of them was that they were tricksy bits of kit. The other was that it didn’t do for literature to fall into the hands of people like Tom. He’d once heard it said that there were two types of stories: literature, for the well-to-do, and yarns for the simple folk. Both kept to the familiar, the old stories or something the audience knew the bones of; the difference was in the telling. Drawer-systems were sophisticated devices for the well-heeled, the licence alone cost more than Tom could hope to make in a lifetime. If he stayed in the valley, that was. In the meantime, his hopes for getting out were pinned on the original story he’d been writing, tucking away the precious finished sheets in his bottom drawer as assiduously as any betrothee ever stashed their household linen.

In theory, it was possible to harness and tune the airborne flotsam using natural materials, and concentrate them in enclosed spaces to affect the tales. Boxes would work, but drawers were more convenient and took up less space, if they were built right. So, a lover’s laugh drifting in on a summer breeze, the sigh of a neglected mother mingling with the frosty morning air, the warmth of Spring sunshine, could all be woven into the bones of the story to add seasoning. The yarn-spinners of the valley used the crude spindles of their forefathers, gathering threads of memory and song, and creating something fine but short-lived, passed around by voice or occasionally as dog-eared pamphlets.

A knock at the door startled Tom and he realised he was still standing with the useless paper limp in his hands. He stuffed it under a hat on a chair and went to the door.

“Hello,” was all he could think of, faced with the smile of the girl he’d seen earlier. She was quite pretty, close up, and she had an ink stain on her left hand. Without quite meaning to, Tom stepped back to let her in. The strong reach of her mind made Tom’s neck prickle.

“You should sweep that up, you’ll hurt yourself,” she said, and when she looked into Tom’s eyes he knew that in one glance at his haphazard furniture and the shards of a broken plate, she’d penetrated his secret.

He felt his face warming and started to stammer out some justification for his tinkering with advanced literary devices, but stopped himself. She could be from the government.

“Who are you?” he asked. His Nan would not have approved of such rudeness.

Tom’s visitor smiled again. “A new neighbour,” she said. “Come a-calling, with fetch-up gifts.” She held out a fine spindle: “They told me you’re a yarn-spinner.”

Tom reached out, but she snatched it back and secreted it in a pocket.

“I was told wrong though,” she said. “No yarn-spinner here. Can’t see no equipment.”

She grinned and Tom’s eyes darted round the room; he thought his old spindle might be beneath his bed.

“Did you make that spindle?” he asked.

She swept a pile of clothes and papers off a chair and sat down.

“That’s what I do, make stuff.”

*

Tom was actually whistling as he strode back up the lane from the post office. Mirie, for that was the girl’s name, was twenty-six, unbetrothed, and a machine-witch. She’d seemed to skirt every side of the how and why she’d ended up in the valley with no relatives, but Tom couldn’t deny she was good at her calling. She proved quite knowledgeable about the inner workings of drawer-systems. The optimum temperature for setting-drawers, where the ink stabilised in its new configuration. The proper dimensions for the inner partition of the fermenting-drawer, to allow just the right amount of word-shuffle. The summoning charms for airborne matter, to filter out the sentimental or macabre as required. She’d been a bit cagey about where she picked all that up, as well.

Still, Mirie had set Tom on the right path and he’d ordered new ink from the city, with a slower coagulation rate to improve his chances of hitting on the right combination before the letters became sluggish and had to be re-cast. With this new ink, and some modifications to his drawer-stack, Tom could be on his way out of the valley in next to no time. He would revolutionise the world of literature, proving it could be done by a country boy with no connections. Of course, he’d probably have to claim it could be done without a drawer-system too, at least until he was absolutely sure about retrospective application of laws.

He stopped suddenly on the path to his front door and the last of his tune died away as a soft puff of breath. His door was open a crack and he could hear clattering. Now he looked, he could see windows open, vines and climbers shoved roughly back from the frames. He advanced slowly, breathing soft and shallow so he could listen. A familiar hum came to him over the shush of a broom on flags.

“Nan?” He pushed the door open and stepped over the threshold.

“You weren’t brought up to live in a state like this.”

“Nice to see you too.”

“It’s a good job I came when I did,” his Nan continued. “I -”

“My drawers,” Tom blurted, launching himself into the room to lean over the large table. “Tell me you haven’t touched the drawers.”

“Well of course I touched the drawers.” Tom’s Nan looked at him as though she hoped there’d been some mistake of parentage. “Didn’t look like you’d touched them in a long time, and that’s the trouble. If you’d -”

“What did you do with the bottom drawer?”

Her nostrils flared but Tom ignored the warning signs and asked her again: “Where’s the stuff from the bottom drawer?”

“All those sheets of paper?” she asked, and Tom nodded eagerly. “I read a bit to see if they were important.”

“And?” Tom was bouncing on the balls of his feet, willing her to say she’d put them elsewhere for safekeeping.

“They were like no tales I’ve ever heard,” she said, stoking Tom’s ego even in his moment of fear. “So I shredded them for mulch.”

“You did what?” Tom might have taken a glimmer of satisfaction from the way his Nan flinched if he hadn’t have been watching his future recede into a hazy distance.

“Load of rubbish,” she insisted, though not as confidently as before. “I had to shift them so you could use your bottom drawer the way a twenty-six-year-old should: for your wedding gatherings.”

“What wedding gatherings?”

“Exactly.” Tom’s Nan rallied, on surer ground. “And if we ever want you to have any, we need to get you sorted out.”

Tom sighed. With Mirie’s assistance and a re-tuned system, he might make faster progress this time, but the thought of starting again from scratch made him feel sick and like he wanted to cry. Now that his Nan had started, he wouldn’t have a moment’s peace until the betrothal punchbowl had been drained and the bunting hung from his roof.

“You never take an interest in anyone,” she was saying, scooping socks from a shelf with one hand and brandishing a duster with the other. “I hear there’s a girl about your age new-arrived. No family, but then you can’t tell till you’ve taken tea with a person.”

“I have done,” said Tom, his mouth twitching with the birth of a smile that would broaden over the next few moments until it exploded as a laugh.

“Have done what?”

“Taken tea with the new girl. Mirie. She’s …”

He couldn’t think of anything that approximated the truth and would also meet with his Nan’s approval, but she misread his features in a useful way and smiled.

“I knew you wouldn’t let me down,” she said, indicating to Tom that she’d thought the exact opposite, but he didn’t care. He could see the glimmerings of a future again.

 

 

Bio: J.Y. Saville has had work published by Visual Verse, The Fiction Pool and The RS 500.

 

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Image: Michał Grosicki