You still in there?

Yeh.

You still in there?

YEH!

You writing your will?

You want the loo?

Of course I want the loo, why you think I’m out here?

Won’t be long.

Hurry man.

Alright!

He flushed the toilet and washed his hands and in the mirror, as he washed, he still looked over his shoulder at the part of the bathroom wall where the toothpaste had spilt. He had not spilt it. And he wondered vaguely how toothpaste had made it all the way over to the wall opposite the sink, next to the door. The door on which James was now tapping with urgent regularity. He turned, unlocked the door and stepped aside to let James in, pulling the door closed behind and walking away; his head swirling with the visions.

Pareidolia seeing patterns in random data.

He looked that up and was not even sure how to pronounce it: Par e doo lia. Par a dole ia?

Doctor Doolittle, he skipped a groove. Para dole ia Doctor Doolittle: You hear words where there seem to be none, I see pictures where there should be none. I see inside the scruffed wallpaper, I can peer in amongst the scroll of vine-like ribbons, and especially that blob of blue toothpaste – on the opposite side of the bathroom – that looks like something.

Doctor; to look aside beside and inside form. To find another within.

Ah, yes, my boy. I understand now. Let me tell it to the birds straight away.

He stepped out into their big garden and walked all the way to the bottom. There was a small copse of weedy trees. They grew quickly but were not overly graceful. Nonetheless he liked their shelter. The trees huddled around, as if concerned for him, and when he sat down in amongst them no-one from the house could see him. It was his peaceful place; and now he felt he had to attempt to clear up what he had just seen.

The spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness of unrelated phenomena; abnormal meaning or significance in random experiences by psychotic people.

Psychotic?

And also, neurotic. These two terms kept cropping up. He turned off his phone screen for a moment and looked away. He listened to a robin squeezing forth a stream of sweet twirling syllable.

Well, he thought, it is definitely saying something.

Neurotic psychotic, seeing buddha in the toothpaste? Only the buddha was distinctly peaceful to behold. He wondered if he might discuss this with the household: Who else has visions while taking a crap? Sue will say she did not want to discuss this at the dinner table. James will make groaning straining noises, and Akki will begin sniggering, then Sue will glare at me as if to say; Now look what you started.

No, he did not feel he was yet able to share this. And anyhow, he did not yet know what he was seeing. He called the figure the buddha in the toothpaste, but was it? Maybe he was looking at a practising monk, a student, a beginner? Why should the enlightened one choose to reveal their presence in the obscure splashes of a bathroom? Then again, why should they not wish to reveal themselves?

He looked at the eyes looking at him. Each of the trees around him stacked up a row of eyes in the silvery flesh of their bark, and gently they all looked upon him. As if they were waiting for his decision. Okay, he settled himself, leaning against a rock, cross legged. He began to pull back to mind every aspect of these pictures he had been seeing.

Overfitting

Observations are overrun by an easy sense of the unique instead of matching the signal that pertains to the generalised population. Fitting the noise rather than the signal.

He opened his eyes and found he was furious. He was arguing with scraps of information. All the bitesize theories which countered his experience. Why the fuck shouldn’t an experience be unique? What was it about reality that demanded that it should be the same for everyone all the time? Wasn’t that neurotic?

Oh–no–you–cannot–see–me–like–this! I–am–reality–and–to–be–real–I–must–be-seen–the–same–always–forever!

Later that day Sue kept looking across at him. They were urchins and she was house mother. They had ankle bracelets which beeped and recorded where they went. Sue did not. This was her house. They were her guests. She looked again, over the meal table, and asked him if he was feeling alright.

Yeh. Nice this.

Just stew.

Nice stew.

Not got stomach pains?

Nah. I’m eating it all. Ain’t I?

Okay.

I’ll have more, said James.

I’ll have more, said Akki.

Sue looked at me. Yeh, he thought, no problem, sliding the bowl over in a gesture of begging, as if to say: See? No collywobbles, I can eat and eat.

He was not overly hungry for a second bowl of the slop, but Sue liked to see her boys eating well. She also liked regular habits and had no doubt noticed his increased journeying time between the toilet and his peaceful place. She may even have been able to monitor his stays from the signal emitted by his ankle bracelet.

Fucker, he thought. Fucker, fuck, fucker, fuck off out of my head. I will visit the garden whenever I want. Anyhow, she was the one yacking on about peaceful places and allowing time for reflection. She was the one who left leaflets in the hallway promoting mindfulness. Once she had invited the young men around her table to a yoga class. After a moment of stunned silence, the three of them pissed themselves laughing. It was one of the few times he had ever seen Sue even slightly flustered.

You could keep on your tracksuits.

Hey-hey, laughed Akki, I thought you had to wear stretchy for yoga!

Or be naked! James howled.

Urg!

Now you are being silly. Sue stood, reminding us of the washing up rota before leaving the room.

Gambler’s fallacy: Gamblers may imagine that they see patterns in the numbers that appear in lotteries, card games, or roulette wheels.

Hey-hey, grinned Akki. You got around them firewalls?

Akki was peering over his shoulder, trying to see what he was seeing on his phone.

Leave off. You know that’s not possible.

Anything… He paused and waved his hands before him as if hypnotising fireflies. Any-thing-is-possible.

Akki, man, you just want me to get you a porn site?

Sure thing.

Can’t do. I’m just interested in stuff, that’s all.

Akki shrugged and went back to his pile of comics, bored with the conversation, bored with everything. Their television rights were strictly controlled. They needed to tidy and vacuum the carpets and stick to the washing up rota if they were to keep even the small allowance they currently had. They could go out in the day. They were meant to be looking for jobs. Sue encouraged them to try and find a volunteer post.

It would be a way in, she said.

Into what, he wondered. Into the neurotic reality?

Akki stayed in his room mostly. At least they did not have to share rooms. He could not stay in his room for long. It was as small as his cell had been. No stinky, not stacked with a bunk, someone farting above his head all night. But it was small. James went out. James went out and according to his tag he sat in the library all day, but he usually came back smothering the stink of booze with mints. He asked him if he had managed to get the tag off. James would not say anything.

He sat amongst the trees and listened to the bird sing of tales he thought he might almost understand. He even sat out in the rain, because he had a good overcoat now, and the trees covered him up if it was not absolutely bucketing it down.

Fortune-telling and divination is based upon discerning patterns seen in what most people would consider to be meaningless chance events.

He was always surprised to see the blue figure mediating in amongst the jungly landscape. There was a rota to cover cleaning the shower, sink, and toilet. This bit of wall obviously escaped the required duties. Sue had her own bathroom, her own rooms locked away on the other side of the kitchen. He had taken in, he thought, every detail of the wallpaper and toothpaste. He knew it was exactly that, just wallpaper, messed up by time and usage, marked by a random splodge of paste. Yet even in his objectivity he had begun to step through the trailing vines, feeling the thick carpet of moist leaf litter beneath his feet, smelling the dark interior warmth of jungle, listening to the nasal laughter of a crowd of birds which rushed around above him, just before him, returning and then vanishing up into the canopy once more. He kept pushing the fronds aside and taking another step. A sense of expectancy was hurting in his chest. The heat was making him sweat. All his trousers were wet, and his tee shirt was beginning to build up a salty rime. The birds kept rushing back. Two or three at a time bouncing around on a branch just ahead of him. He picked up Dr Doolittle’s top hat from where it had fallen, brushing of a few grubs and a little birdlime. Now, if he doffed it politely in the direction of the birds, and asked them to speak a little bit more slowly…

HeHeHeHe!

Three grey creatures with sharp black eyes whizzed around the branches which were tangled together directly ahead. He paused and waited for them, and they appeared to wait for him.

HereHereHere, they said, Hereisourking.

They flicked out of sight and four similar looking birds could be seen hopping up and down the next tree along. He followed their excitable noises.

HeHeHelp, one said. Stopping to fluff its feathers and peer directly at him.

HelpHelp, others chorused: He’sourkingOurking.

And thus, with erratic dancing movements and their jabbering voices, these birds led him deep into the tropical forest. As the shadow increased, so did the temperature. The birds did not sit still for long and never got beyond repeating their same basic message. Doolittle’s hat kept getting twanged off his head by branches. Still he understood the babblers, hat or no hat. He followed, expecting to find a blue buddha mediating beneath some vast fig tree. Instead there was a little man, as grey as the birds only not as neat. He was distinctly shabby, this man, and crawling about in the dusty leaf mulch. He patted every surface and held his head up to listen and sniff at the air, wracked by a continual state of alarm, bewilderment, and obvious fear. When the two humans came close to each other, the one on the ground stopped crawling, panting like a dog. He mumbled something.

What?

I said I hear you! No need to shout.

You’re blind.

Yes.

The birds descended and began squawking, bouncing all around. The blind man swiped ineffectually at them.

But they want to help you, he said.

How, growled the blind man, pulling himself up to sit against a tree.

They say I must find four different types of guano and wipe each in turn over your eyes.

The blind laughed bitterly and swung his face around in hope of catching a little light. He shook his head, seeing nothing, and pulling himself into a tight bundle.

I’ll stay here then.

If you would. The birds say they will guide me.

A tiger may come and eat me.

Tiger? He looked around. Yes, I suppose. Might eat me as well.

Greedy tiger.

I’ll be quick.

Yes.

First there was the white guano. This fell from a songbird. He had to crawl into a clearing to find it, the delicate splats dotted along a series of emerald coloured leaves. He snapped off two leaves, one for each eye, and made his way back, guided by the burbling twirl.

The so-called king was where he had left him. Apart from turning his head slightly away, the man did not move, and he was allowed wipe one leaf on each eye, whitening the eyelids. He stood back to see what would happen. Nothing happened, apart from a few slow tears moistening the edges of the man’s eyes.

Does that hurt?

Not at all.

I’ve to find a hornbill next.

Ah – hear the coughing dog? Follow that.

He found great splatter of yellow. The dinosaur noise floated down from above. He found one big leaf and scooped the yellow mess onto it. When he returned to the crumpled form of the grey man he saw that his patient, if that is what they were, had been crying. White lime had run down his cheeks.

You sure this does not hurt?

The man did not say anything but lifted his head up to receive the next application. The yellow gunk was smeared all over the eyes and forehead and nose. The leaf was not agile enough to press just into the eye sockets.

He went away to look for the jungle fowl. Cock-a-doodle-doo it went, obligingly, although he could not tell what time of day it was. He came into a broad glade and the cock stood and faced him, a great sumo wrestler ready to hurl itself toward him. He laughed. The laughter was meant to allude to his unconcern, and yet the threating stance of the bird did not lessen. In the severity of its penetrating eye he began to be genuinely concerned about this encounter.

Cock-A-FUCKING-DOODLE-DO, it swaggered.

He edged his body into the space and sidled around, picking up scrambled piles of purple mess as he went. He needed to carry this excreta in his hand.

The man was pacing around the clearing, stretching himself, and stumbling every now and again. This was, he remembered, a king for his grey friends, the babblers.

Here!

He announced his approach and the king tripped.

The man said there was light, shifting light, but he still could not see.

If I may? He moved closer and spat over the man’s eyes. He daubed on the purple gunk. It formed a thick paste. You must let that set, he explained.

You know, the king sniffed. For a moment I had deluded myself into thinking I could see. But I cannot see. Show me where to sit.

Next he was to find the Amur Falcon. He was told to look out for its red boots. The usually bossy and bold grey birds suddenly fell back as he began to make his way up a rise. By the time he was amongst the large trees on the peak of this hill his babbling accompaniment had completely fallen away. He looked high into a tree and saw a clutch of resting falcons. Small birds, although twice the size of the babblers. He needed to climb the tree. Near the top third of the tree he found his limbs were becoming blackened by scratchy runs. The liquid was slippy and between his fingers it became tacky. The stickiness, once apparent, did not set or harden. He loaded up this goo on as many leaves as he could grab.

As he descended the tree he looked up at the falcons. They were all looking down at him. The gathering bore an air of cosmopolitan amusement. He retreated, his collection of blackened leaves hanging out of his mouth.

When he found the man he had need to hold him down and talk sternly to him:

No!

No, he explained, he was not trying to burn up his eyeballs; yes, he had said he was going to help and that was his intention. Quickly he smeared the black crud over the other man’s distressed face. There was silence for a while, and then the man peeled aside the tacky mask and said he could see him. The small clearing came alive with the racket of dozens of grey birds. The two men embraced, and then the grey king danced around the edge of the clearing and then a tiger sprang out and grasped the king’s head in his jaws, dragging him away to the sound of a distressed babbler chorus.

Sue was at the other end of the garden shouting for him to come inside immediately. It was dusk but not, he thought, beyond his designated curfew. When he reached Sue, he saw there was a copper standing behind her. The copper lifted something like a dead rat. When he got closer, and the artificial light from behind the pair fell on the object, he saw the police woman held aloft an ankle tag. He looked down. Yes, his was there. He looked up, confused yet working out a possibility and forcing his face to bear absolutely no trace of either understanding or foreknowledge.

James, said Sue.

Sir, said the copper with a very tired sounding droopiness; Sir, if you might, can you? Can you explain this?

It is an ankle tag. I have one. He lifted his trouser again to make sure that everyone could definitely see that he had remained tagged.

Yes, sir, we know that. Only this was found tied to a table leg in the library. The library had need to close early due to minimal staffing. As the last volunteer went around, they found this; it was strapped to a table leg beneath a logged-on computer.

And he had draped an overcoat over the seat, as if he were about to come back, said Sue. Only, and she was trembling with outrage, it was not his overcoat! Not at all.

Was it yours? He asked.

No, not at all.

Only, James is a thief.

He was a thief, Sue emphasised.

I’m not sure.

Do you know something, sir?

No, of course not. In our situation no one gives anything away.

Oh! Sue stamped her foot: You are meant to be sharing, supporting one another.

Yes, he said blandly.

From within his small circle of trees he contemplated the jungle. A tiger, still bloodstained, sat behind the blue cross-legged figure on the edge of the jungle clearing. He dare not approach. He looked long and hard but could not move closer, despite the glorious birdsong, the croaks, cackles, hoots, and the melodious trills which wove around the green canopy and said; yes, yes, come in, come in now. The eyes on the trees, the woody eyes, glared at him.

James did not return. Akki refused to lift his flesh out of the sop of his boredom. Sue walked them both, daily, to the job centre. It grieved her that the library was so close to the job centre, practically next door. Sue would allow library visits yet would not allow them to remain alone in this dread place. Akki had found the graphic novel section. While Akki read comics, he looked at the local history section. He was drawn to this jumbled corner because it carried no computers and very few people ever visited. Occasionally a grey, bedraggled bird – not quite a sparrow – would flutter close to the window and, outside, set up an urgent tap-tap-tapping noise on the glass.

 

NICK NORTON’s recent prose can be found in The Happy Hypocrite, Shooter, Idle Ink, Adjacent Pineapple, Fictive Dream, The Honest Ulsterman, and elsewhere.
His book AKA: A Genealogy of the Saddle is described by Patrick Keiller: A joy to read…brings a headlong, associative sensibility to the literature of landscape. https://www.bookworks.org.uk/node/1894

 

Image: kai kalhh via pixabay

He’s on TV again. You’re perpetually stuck in the silence that punctuates conversation and he’s on TV again. The sound is off but everybody in the bar is staring up at him, the hometown boy done good. Everyone seems to love the fact he’s made it, as though it covers themselves in glory through osmosis but it just hammers home how little anything happens here.

You went to school with him, not that you would have noticed at the time but then no one did which is what makes this all so much worse. Apparently the school lauds him as a notable alumnus now whilst the music department claim him as a prime example of how well their extracurricular programs work despite the fact he never took part in any. You remember his sister a bit better, she was in your year and it seemed like everyone had a crush on her. She always wanted to be a singer too so perhaps this is more galling for her but you doubt it since you’ve heard she’s on tour with him.

You can’t hear what he’s saying but you can tell from the smug look on his face that it’s some disingenuous platitudes about being humble and having surprise at his success.

It’s nothing personal against the lad and you don’t begrudge him his accomplishments but it’s the mediocrity of his endeavours that irk you so much. Sure, you were never anything special at music but you could throw a handful of adjectives together and explain why love is so great yet, here you are drying pint glasses and he’s on television explaining how doing exactly the same thing made him a pop star. He just makes the sentiment vague enough so that it applies to anybody and everybody.

One of the bar flies catches you watching and nods back at the TV.

“His dad drinks in here you know?”

As if you wouldn’t know, as if you aren’t in here every night serving pints of piss to everybody that walks through the door and then cleaning up half of it come closing time.

You nod, “Yeah, I know.”

“His younger brother too.”

“Uh hunh.”

“You a fan of his?”

“Not really my cup of tea.”

“Still, it’s enough to make you feel proud.”

“Of what?”

“That he comes from here, that we can produce world class talent. Does it not make you proud of your town?”

You look around the bar at the same old faces, predominantly ageing, fat men who come here straight from work and drink their lives away until last orders. The drunk talking to you is in here every night himself, drinks six or seven pints of cider and then drives home. You slowly, deliberately turn back to him and hold his watery gaze.

“Yeah, real proud.”

You should be out there creating something beautiful, something useful but all your energy goes into this job, into living and surviving. You know you could write about looking up at the stars and the moon and jotting down the colours in your dreams if it weren’t for the sheer exhaustion of staying the fuck alive.

Some bright spark behind the bar decides to put on his music and you spin on your heel to stare them down but you meet eyes with the boss and quickly drop them to the floor but the damage is already done.

“You don’t like George then?”

“I have other preferences.”

“I thought he was supposed to be the voice of your generation?”

“He’s just a singer.”

“But does he not stir something within you, does he not speak to you on important issues?”

“Look, all music, any music, is just rhyming words over pleasant sounds. His songs aren’t elegant scriptures on the human condition it’s just words and sounds.”

“But those words are art, the way he paints pictures with them is a talent surely?”

“A child can paint a picture, it does not make them Picasso.”

“Yes, because a child can copy what they see but they can’t create something new from a sight seen a thousand times before, they can’t give a new viewpoint on an old vista, an artist can.”

“And you think that’s what he does?”

“Well, I don’t know about that but the imagery he conjures up is certainly evocative. The one where he sings about how the sunset makes him cry is rather touching.”

“Anyone can look at the sky and recount the colours they see.”

There is silence now, you think you’ve touched a nerve but you dismiss any worries and just carrying on drying glasses. You can sense the crushed notions of you as a person, something you’ve managed to pick up on over the years as you’ve found people project images of themselves onto you with your seeming reticence to talk an apparent invitation to create their own image of you with no basis behind it. George’s music continues to play and the old drunk taps out the rhythm on the bar as you flit up and down it trying to find things to do. You’re on an earlier shift tonight so you’ll miss the evening rush for once but you realise just how quiet the place is otherwise.

You’ve been doing this for two years and you’ve never quite warmed to it. Spilled beer and forced conversation were never your forte but it was supposed to be a stopgap sort of thing until bigger and better plans came your way but you didn’t realise how much your disdain for drunkards and lack of enthusiasm for socialising would seep through. It’s not a bad job and the people are alright but it’s just not for you and things haven’t quite worked out the way you had envisioned and you still get a palpable sense of relief when it’s your time to clock off.

You tidy up and say your goodbyes and nod to the regulars as you pass. It’s nice to get out early on occasion and this is the first time in a while that you’ve not started walking home in darkness. It’s not far off though and the sun is already setting covering the sky in peachy oranges and pinks whilst purple clouds skid across causing long, streaky gouges in the flesh coloured tones. You can’t deny it isn’t pretty, perhaps you’d go so far as to say beautiful and you try to pick out the words of how you would describe it. You can see the hues of orange highlighted by the dim yellows but they don’t make you feel anything, it looks good but it doesn’t make you feel a thing so you just shut up and look at the sky.

 

 

Image: pxhere

It’s not easy when you hardly speak the language of the place you’re living in. You embarrass yourself. I can’t help being aware I’m a complete outsider every single waking minute. I’ve got this plan though – to learn a few new English words every day. I’m going to focus on one letter at a time then choose some which start with that. But I’m not doing the alphabet in order. My approach will be more personal.

I is the letter I’m concentrating on first because I just love the fact it’s a word in itself. And it’s me – I am. A handy reminder of what would normally be a simple fact. Because I have to tell you that in the kind of life I’m living now it can sometimes be quite hard to remember you exist. I have no papers and it wouldn’t be safe to be on show. So I try to make myself as Inconspicuous as possible and I walk close to the gutter with my head held down because I live in constant fear of coming to the attention of the authorities and being deported and there’s a lot more of that happening these days. I have my debt to pay off to the organisation that got me over here. And at work each day in the leek field I look down too, keeping my eyes on my task. If I forgot to do that for just a couple of minutes or so my hand might slip and then it could be sliced into with my hacking knife or it could be cut right off. Well maybe I’m exaggerating there but that knife’s horribly sharp and it does bother me. I can’t bear to even think of any more trouble as I’m unable to handle what’s on my plate already. So I mustn’t take any more chances than I have to. As I’ve said, I’m trying to improve my English, but this takes time. I say my chosen words to myself silently sitting by the damp table in the wrecked bus where I’m living now. I repeat them over and over again until I know them thoroughly. And starting with I does seem to make the best sense as now and again, when I’m shuffling along I actually do find I’m starting to forget the true me and am becoming in my own mind how everybody else sees me. Well, when they see me at all I mean. And this is very scary. So, yes, I feel good about the I word and I believe that saying it helps me avoid that lost feeling you can easily develop in an alien world. Another nice thought is that at the end of one year I’ll have maybe a couple of thousand words belonging to me. I don’t think I will feel so desolate then.

Here I am in the leek field, my place of work. I’m leaning forward, ripping one out from the dense earth at this moment. Very often it feels hard being me and I ask myself if I’d like to be another person instead. I don’t know about that, and I suppose, if I think about it, the answer is no, not somebody else, I’d always wish to be me. But I do long and pray for other things to be different. Not me, the world; the world around me.

There’s something else about the letter I. I just love the fact I rhymes with ‘eye’ and for some reason this reminds me of my own Inner eye. You might say it’s just in my Imagination but I honestly feel there is an inner eye in me that sees what the ordinary eye does not. Well I hope this is true because there’s no one out there to keep a watch on things and make sure I’m safe. Secretly, I feel there are two of me, the one you can see which is fairly superficial and another, more significant one you can’t. It is of course, the hidden me that looks out from this other eye. Perhaps this is what loneliness can do – make you Invent a second self so there’ll be someone else to talk to. I is for Isolated. I’d rather not have it as one of my words but that would be denial. Because I have to say it’s what I’m feeling most of the time, both in the leek field and in the local town.

In fact, walking around the town this morning I felt so entirely cut off from all the other people there it very nearly made me cry. I made sure to keep my head lowered but at the same time I couldn’t stop this terrible craving to be looked at from suddenly welling up in me along with the tears. There was this terrible urge to come out into the open. I wanted it more than anything. Because, the truth is I can’t stand the fact that no one ever sees the real me, only the form of me shuffling along as close to the gutter as I can get. Imagine being protected by being simply unseen. But it is so because if anybody became aware of me that could be it. I am an Illegal. It hurts my mouth to even form that word but as I’m trying to say, I think it’s essential to keep on being aware of the truth of things. So this is to be one of the main words I will make myself memorise.

I never want to be under any Illusions about what I am and what I’m doing in this place. Illusions is also a useful word to concentrate on. Because I need to remember that it’s all too easy to fall into them if you don’t keep your wits about you. I think of Zara my tiny daughter and what I need to do to keep her alive and to help her find a life better than the one I’ve had so far. First off, I need to work and can’t afford to start fantasising about being here in any other way or what will become of her? I think of my aged parents looking after my little girl. They try their best as they’re not bad people and would always do what they could in any situation. But money is what it basically comes down to. And this is what I have to earn. For them. Having any other wish or ambition is an indulgence I can’t allow to happen. No, I have to stay focussed and not let myself get distracted by daydreaming.

A crazy saying comes into my head, ‘Another day another dollar.’ And that’s exactly what my own life boils down to. I earn, there is no other aspect to me which is meaningful. If I lose sight of this I’ve lost everything. I lift my right hand, grasp at yet another leek and tear it out of its dank earth spot. Then I hack off the tough outer layers with my knife and tip the leek into my bag.

People live nearby as the town is fairly close to here – just a mile or two away. They often drive past me in cars when I’m walking back from work in the fields. Children on the back seats like to wave. The first time I realised one of the children was waving at me I felt uneasy. Had they seen me and all there was to see? An Illegal migrant. But no, the more I thought about it the more certain I became that it was quite safe. I felt sure all they saw was a stranger passing along on the road and they’d forget as soon as I was out of sight. At first though, I was so scared about the children noticing me it started a bad pain stirring in my gut. An ache of fear. That’s when I realised how fear and the workings of the body are very fundamentally linked. But no, the kids don’t know anything about me. I’m just a person. Two arms, two legs. They wave. It’s Instinctual, a game of registering what you see. Except they never see the real me, only the shuffling one. Of course I’m relieved about this because I shouldn’t like word to get around. I don’t want to be deported, please not that.

I’m going over all of this when a car suddenly passes me as I trudge along the lane towards the derelict bus at the end of my day shift. Inside are a group of children. They wave as they overtake me, though from where they are looking – the slightly cloudy rear windows of the car they’re travelling in, I can be little more than a shadow. My step feels lighter for a minute registering this. Then the car vanishes into the evening. I as me had gone unseen. Which is reassuring, but knowing it makes me suffer. And I’ve already had too much of that to last a lifetime. So that now, by contrast, I want to talk about a strangely uplifting moment.

Once, in early Spring, I’d knelt down to look at a tall bright flower growing by the side of a lane. This narrow lane ran between two large flat fields and at first when I looked around me I didn’t see anything except weedy and dusty stretches. Then I’d become aware of this singular plant. I’d been traipsing along, head bent as usual when I noticed its stem coming out from surrounding twigs and leaves. At the summit, I saw the rich silky purple of its elongated petals with creases cutting inwards to a centre which nobody would be quite able to ever see try as they might. I pictured a crinkly half hidden face. Later I found out that the name for the flower was Iris and I’m definitely keeping that word in my growing vocabulary as when I looked at it I’d almost seen myself etched into the lines of its Imaginary features. It was a touching sight and I started getting a very strange feeling: As if I were it and it were me. This creased up fairly secret thing that was also full of beauty. Because I do feel I have that in me too. And I don’t exactly mean physical beauty, I’m just saying there’s this quiet inner part to me and when I glimpse it, as I do on rare occasions, that’s the way I see things. I feel good then, about who I am. All my harsh bits, my dissembling bits and my cynical bits, have been wiped clean away or left behind on the surface crust. This inner me is Iris purple in colour too and petal soft.

That’s why, when I looked down into the weedy roadside I really did get this sense of seeing myself there and I had this Intense urge to pick that flower and press it into my pocket for keeps. I reached over with my hand to do just that. But no, I stopped myself, for what would the point have been as the little delicate thing would have withered to nothing right away. So I resisted the temptation and just stood still in the lane for a minute or two gazing at the flowerhead. At last, with raised spirits, I carried on my way.

 

JAY MERILL has work in 3: AM Magazine, A-Minor, The Bohemyth, CHEAP POP Lit, Ellipsis Zine, Entropy, Hobart, Jellyfish Review, The Manchester Review, matchbook, The Literateur, Lunch Ticket, Spelk, SmokeLong Quarterly, Storgy, Unthology 10 and Wigleaf. She has 2 collections published by Salt: ‘God of the Pigeons’ and ‘Astral Bodies’.

 

Image: Lotta Gessner vis pixabay

Suzanne Thibodeau lay on the edge of death, or so they all thought. Her parents and her brother Albert were grey-faced and silent, going about their chores on the farm and minding the household by rote. Listless, but more optimistic than the others now that she was home from the hospital, Albert did his homework in his big sister’s room. He spread scribblers out on the flat quilted blanket like an added layer of armour against whatever sinister foe had pulled her down.

He won’t give up. He’ll just keep it up ‘til I die. Poor Albert.

Suzanne lay unmoving. She spelled words from her reader in her head or recited the names of Provincial capitals and the populations and main exports of major Canadian port cities. She listed the ingredients in her mother’s best recipes. “Tart Pastry,” she spoke the words unannounced, in a firm voice. Albert stopped colouring. “Two cups flour. One teaspoon salt. One teaspoon baking powder – the red carton, not the yellow. One cup margarine. Half-cup icing sugar. Beat one egg and tablespoon of milk and add to mixture. Mix like pie dough.”

Whenever Albert came into the room she stirred, her eyes opening and a thin smile on her lips. Her gums were too red and her skin too white. Albert read her jokes from his Archie and Jughead Digest. Sometimes he brushed her hair, hiding his hands to pull clumps from the brush.

As the March sun gained strength, Albert spent time playing with the young goats in the barnyard. Suzanne watched him enviously through the window. She laughed when he did, imagining herself running and jumping in the puddles. He has enough energy for both of us, she thought – if only he could share.

The goat he called “Belle” was especially fond of him and bleated whenever he came into the barn. One warm day, Albert tied a bell to a dog collar he placed on her neck. He made a leash from some binder twine and led Belle to Suzanne`s room.

“Suzanne,” Albert said in an excited whisper. “You have a visitor!”

Belle’s hooves made a clop-clop sound on the floorboards in the hall. Suzanne craned her neck, lifting her head to see who was there. Albert let go of the leash and ran around to the far side of the bed. Seeing him disappear through the door, the doeling rushed into the room. It scrambled forward and reared up to put its forelegs on the quilt. Then Belle simpered, straining to climb across to Albert.

Belle stopped short when she saw Suzanne, the little girl’s eyes bright and shining in amazement. The baby goat lowered her head and sniffed.

“She’s licking her, she’s licking her!” Albert shouted.

Suzanne withdrew her hands from beneath the covers and held the slender downy neck, feeling the life so strong in the spring kid.

*       *       *

He remembered thinking as he fell from the rafters, I’ll be okay. He always had been. Cars rolling in the ditch, the chainsaw slipping and cutting a strip across his blue jeans but the skin untouched, drunken nail gun battles. That was real stupid, but I wasn’t the only one doin’ it.

I guess a broken back is not ‘okay’, he thought as the light changed and vehicles coursed through the intersection sending up a mist of dirty spray as they sped by.

He wheeled down the city sidewalk towards the Law Courts. Suzanne was going to meet him today. She had a trial at 2:00, but said it was just a short thing – in and out. He stopped for a hot dog at Chez Eddie. I better watch my weight, he thought, a bit guilty as he rolled up the ramp to get his daily ration. Besides, the guy here’s a jerk. Setting up his little food truck in the summer, spends the winter drinking cheap draft down at the Legion, or in the titty bars on Maginot. Bragging about being a vet when all he did was hang around in the motor pool in Winnipeg. If I wasn’t in this chair, I woulda settled his bullshit down a long time ago.

“Gonna need a heavier ramp, you keep it up,” said Bob, the owner of the food truck that parked daily on King Edward Street.

“I resent that remark,” Albert said. He held up one finger and blinked it twice, like a back-catcher.

“One dog, with hot peppers and onions,” said Bob, busying himself with a bag of buns.

“And hurry!” Albert Thibodeau said. “Gotta meet Sis today and hear about how great she’s doing.”

“Tell her I love her.”

“No chance. You are a smelly dog, selling smelly dogs to other smelly dogs. You are on the interdict list.” Fuckin’ loser. Bet he couldn’t even change a tire or fix a broken window, never mind put up a two-hundred-foot hog barn in the dead of winter. He always acts like he’s my equal. Jesus. He’s a hot dog salesman.

“I love you too, Thibodeau,” said Bob, smiling and handing him a foil-wrapped hot dog. “You know, people are gonna talk, you two both not married, and she’s such a looker an’ all. Maybe you should let me ask her out – just to keep appearances up, y’know?”

What? Suzanne? Albert sat with his head down. Then he looked up, his face dark. “First of all, I don’t ‘let’ anything for Suzanne. She decides things for herself. And second,” he reached back with the loaded hot dog and fired it past Bob’s head. It exploded against the back wall and showered the counter in peppers, onions, and mustard.

“Speaking of appearances, Bobby boy, you better clean your place up,” Albert said, looking up at him, defiant. Shoulda done that a long time ago. Check out that face! Serves him right, the prick.

Albert tooled down the ramp, skidded into a turn at the bottom in the springtime slush and then pumped the wheels hard to get up a low rise on the courthouse lawn.

“Get lost, you crazy bastard! Lousy half-breed,” Bob yelled over his shoulder. He held a wad of paper towel as a dam under a knot of fried onions that was slithering down the wall.

Loser. Pathetic fat ass – bet he whacks off to the Sears catalogue. “I know I do,” Albert said to a passing stranger, nodding as he did so. The man glanced down at Albert, then straightened his gaze and carried on down the wet sidewalk.

Albert Thibodeau sat looking out at the harbour in the distance. He could hear Bob nattering to a woman who leaned on her walker outside the food truck. Glowering at them from above, Albert had the strange sensation of standing. He looked down and there were his legs in the chair. Nope, he thought.

Suzanne walked up the hill towards Albert. She took long strides up the incline and her face was glowing; cheeks flushed. Her long hair, not quite red, fell about the shoulders of her navy peacoat, as if it had been painted that way.

“Suzanne! I thought you had court?” Albert said, turning to face her.

“Postponed,” she said, opening a leather portfolio to hand him an envelope.

“What is this… oh, wait!”

“Open it,” she said, starting to smile. Lip gloss, white teeth, pink gums. “A little something from the insurance company.”

*       *       *

Suzanne lay in a chaise shaded by a thatched roof. Several fallen coconuts sat in the sand around her. She gazed out past the reef — “beyond the swash,” as they said here — to where the water was a darker blue.

An easel stood near the lounge chair and a watercolour was underway.

Nearby, beside the sandy street that paralleled the beach, a woman used a steel bar to prod the driftwood she was burning. The wood was in the cupped steel of a half drum cut lengthwise. Orange flames jumped and danced out of the rusted barrel and the woman held her head and shoulders back from the heat they threw. Her forehead shone with sweat. In the evening, she would put on a pretty print dress and sell grilled fish and chicken to the tourists strolling by on the macadam roadway.

“Carolina blue, cerulean blue, cobalt blue,” Suzanne said from under the brow of a sun hat, fingering some small tubes of pigment.

“Labatt’s Blue,” said Albert, hoisting a bottle of Belikin beer as he drew up next to her on the wooden ramp. “Next best thing, anyhow. How’s the Queen of Caye Caulker today?”

“Screwed and tattooed. How’s my favourite wheeled frog?”

“About the same. Ready for your meds?” The fixings for a joint lay in his lap.

“My meds? Looks like our meds, Mr. Eyes-like-two-pee-holes-in-the-snow. Startin’ early, ain’t we?” What else is new? she thought, straining to keep her face impassive. Don’t show him you’re worried – he’ll freak.

“I have a surfing lesson to give soon, so, you know – gotta attend to business now.”

“Har,” she said. There he is.

“Seriously. Meds now or wait ‘til later?” Albert said, persisting.

“How about now and later?”

“Now yer talkin’.” He rolled a joint, lit it and passed it to her. She took a greedy drag and squinted at her brother through one eye.

“Jeez, if Mom and Dad could see me now…” she said after exhaling. She struggled up in her chair and dabbed at the painting.

“You’re getting’ good,” Albert said, admiring the watercolour.

“The trick is to know when to stop,” she said, watching Albert place the joint in an ashtray epoxied to his armrest.

“Not my strong point, eh? I don’t think I’d make a good painter.”

She smiled at him, her body in repose, reclining. “You just gotta listen to the painting, buddy. It tells you when to stop if you pay attention.”

His face clouded. He looked hard at her where she lay, her sundress crumpled and the veins on her white arms showing pale blue through the skin.

“Nice try,” Albert said. “We’ve talked about this, Suzanne,” he continued, his voice raised just enough to make her look over to him.

“Now listen up. I will get you through this. Me an’ Belle got you through the first spell, back when you were little. That’s where I took care of you. You got me set up with the insurance settlement – that’s one for you. Now we gotta get each other through old age – and guess what? I’ve already begun. I started my golden fucking years without you.”

He paused long enough to take a big hit off the joint. His eyes stayed locked on her the whole time. Suzanne thought of Belle, the tiny doeling goat licking the salt from her neck as she lay in her childhood sick bed, the tongue rough like a kitten’s. After a moment, Suzanne spoke. “I made Mom and Dad let me have Belle there in my room for weeks. She peed on the floor and you cleaned it up so Mom and Mémère wouldn’t go nuts, remember?”

“Oh, yeah. You don’t soon forget the smell of goat piss.”

“I remember you cursing as you mopped up the pee. Remember little Belle watching?” Suzanne said.

“She had those crazy horizontal pupils.” He said, then paused and swung his head side to side, his hand touching his neck. “Christ, Suzanne. You weighed, like, forty pounds when you came back from the hospital…” He coughed. Tasting blood in his throat, he turned his head aside and spat. It landed thick and black and did not seep into the dry sand at all.

He sipped on the beer to take away the metal taste in his mouth and then slid the bottle into the cup holder. “So remember, Sis, I’ll tell you when to stop. Okay?”

“Okay, Thibodeau, okay,” she said, smiling with tired eyes at the wiry little belligerent in the beret who now sat wagging his wheelchair at her, the front tires lifted off the ground in a wheelie.

*       *       *

She stood in the front row of pews. Her hair, not quite grey, was pinned up neatly and a 1930’s style face veil hid her eyes. The pillbox hat and form-fitting black skirt and jacket made her feel like Myrna Loy.

Suzanne had read that the veils women wore in the Western Provinces were originally taken from the unofficial dress code of “ladies of the evening”. Single females who veiled their faces at night were available – for a price. An unspoken tribal signal. Hollywood starlets who wanted to shed their wholesomeness and vie for juicy roles as the hardened or the wanton wore veils.

I’m no femme fatale. Just wore it ‘cause it’s pretty. Plus, the veil would hide her smeared makeup once the crying started — maybe that was the best reason for it.

All the uncles and aunts, the cousins and their families had come out. The farmers from La Broquerie, the family from Moncton, from the Marleau side, and all of Albert’s work buddies and the old hockey guys too. They were all here. Those who survived until now, anyway.

They didn’t hold up that well, she thought, thinking of them clustered around a board of pictures in the funeral home lobby. Albert in minor hockey, at a dance in Friedensfeld, playing ball in Vita. Now his cronies were bald, grey, fat. The ruddy skin on their bulging noses looked like lunar landscapes. Drooping ears sprouted thatches of mossy hair. They had been a race of lean, wild daredevils, racing snowmobiles and chugging beer. Now they were confined to lawn chairs and slippers, sipping double-doubles.

“Die young – leave a clean corpse,” Albert had bellowed, sailing by on a motorcycle back on the farm, standing on the seat on one madman leg. How come he could do that and not fall, she thought and closed her eyes behind the veil.

But he was a Goddamn mess inside. A Goddamn mess. And he knew it too. The whole time. He gave his best to me, always. Everyone else got what was left over. It’s not fair, but it’s what he chose.

She watched them load the casket into the hearse. Since when are hearses blue? His casket was full length even though Albert was barely five feet when he passed. His atrophied legs curled up under him like the feet on Mom’s ironing board – tucked up out of the way, pinned back for easy storage. That guy at the funeral home suggested an adolescent size casket – what a bizarre thing. I shouldn’t judge – who knows the crap he must deal with? I wouldn’t want his job. But still… “I’ll take the full sized one, the Brittany model, in oak with satin stainless-steel fittings,” she had said, uncrossing her legs and popping open the clasp on her bag. Fuck you, and your ‘adolescent model’, she had thought to herself – almost saying it out loud. Then she snapped her credit card on the polished desktop and looked away.

Almost two, time for meds, she reminded herself as she stood by the grave. She straightened her spine and pushed her shoulders back. In her purse she found Mémère’s handkerchief. Unfolding it with care, as everyone watched, she took out the dirt she had collected. Dark and rich, from the foot of Father’s plot and the sandy loam from next to Mother’s headstone. She scattered the mixture over Albert.

He would have gone to the Marlies that winter if he hadn’t fallen out of those rafters. Likely would have been an NHL hockey player. Wonder what my life would have looked like then? Or his?

Then she reached in her coat pocket and took out the little bell, tied with a ribbon. It was just like the one Albert had fastened around the doeling’s neck when he brought it to Suzanne’s room. Its delicate ringing had come to mean something irreplaceable to her. A sound effect singularly associated with the place that only she knew – the blurry, terrifying skein in which she had lain, in the thin divide between life and death.

Suzanne thought of the doeling, sleeping in a box of straw in her room for weeks. She remembered the animal’s thin head, ears forward as Albert left, shushing the goat kid and then he, winking at her, his big sister, before closing the door.

Suzanne held the bell in her closed hand and prepared to cast it in. She stood unmoving until the people began to turn away, arms wrapped around loved ones they walked slowly to their cars. Then she bent her knees slightly and let the bell fall into the grave, listening carefully to hear the faint tinkle.

 

MITCHELL TOEWS’ website: mitchellaneous.com

 

Image: Manfred Richter via pixabay

 

 

Nerida forgot to look at her father for the last time. Her mother hadn’t come. Before she could turn around, the heavy stone door was pushed closed, extinguishing the sunlight and all sound except for the clinking of trowels outside the door, cementing it shut. She tried to remember what her final, unceremonious glimpse of her father had been, but she couldn’t find the memory.

The scene laid out before her was a paradox: more riches than her family would see in a hundred lifetimes were spread across the room in piles of golden coins, exotic trinkets, priceless sculptures, paintings, and bloated, cushioned furniture. Even the cat perched atop a chair would have fetched a higher price at market than she could even imagine, some foreign breed she couldn’t pronounce from a conquered land she’d never see. And of course, the sarcophagus – the most spectacular, glitteringly bejeweled thing she’d ever seen. Its effect was nearly blinding. Inside, the king rotted.

The paradox lay in the room itself – not so much a room as the mouth of a cave, fashioned into an ornate tomb. Brutal stone walls radiated a deathly chill, a ghost of a breeze blew through a hole in a far corner and candles cast shadows on the walls, but soon they would burn out and there wouldn’t be any light ever again. The cat purred and began wandering around. Nerida wondered how long it would take her to die in here.

The king had been buried with a cache of bread, wine, and whatever else was stuffed in the numerous crates in the room with her. They were his feast to bring with him into the afterlife, and Nerida was to be the dancer on the threshold. She practiced the sacred dance, the one she’d spent her entire life learning, as all girls did in case they were chosen to convey a spirit into the beyond. There was no food among the king’s bounty she was allowed to eat, no drink, and perhaps not enough air, but that wasn’t the point. She only had to live long enough for the gods of death to arrive and see her dance.

She flitted between piles of riches, going through the motions she’d learned. She thought she’d feel worse, but when the stone door was shut behind her, it was as if the world outside had never been there at all – her father, her mother, the three-legged dog that had followed her home all those years ago, the glover’s boy who’d been giving her looks. A brief lifetime of connections and acquaintances were blown away and forgotten as easily as a spider’s web.

She spun, bowed, and waited.

*      *      *

There was no way of knowing what time of day it was. She’d been entombed in the morning with dew still on the grass and a damp mist clinging to the ground. Her body was telling her that the sun must be setting by now. The meal she’d eaten was digested long ago and now her stomach clawed and moaned at her. The candles, though expensive and long-lasting, were burning out one by one, gradually plunging the cave into darkness, from which there would be no returning. A couple of hours ago the cat had found a rat somewhere among the food stores and after a moment of yowling and screeching, eaten it.

Nerida reclined across a chair, her feet dangling over one arm and her head resting on the other. After the men outside had finished cementing the door, the whistling of air coming through the hole in the wall, rising from somewhere deep in the caves, seemed to grow – she noticed every dip, every gust. Then, she heard a voice.

It was subtle, nothing more than a rumbling undercurrent, but words, discrete words, intonation, expression – this much she could discern. She ran across the room to where the hole was, and stood upon a barrel to peer into it. It was about as big around as her face, and the air that fell from it like a sigh was cold as winter.

The voice was a low burble, as if she were hearing it from underwater. It grew louder, somewhat clearer. Higher frequencies presented themselves and the sound began to take shape – shape enough that she was able to hear a second, higher voice, responding to the first. The breeze howled, became a wind, whistling around subterranean corners and pouring into the cave, drowning out any sign of the voices and knocking Nerida to the ground.

From her view from the stone floor, the ceiling was becoming occluded by a series of wisps, as if the very wind had color and form. The wisps came together like the sinewy strands that compose the meat and muscle of animals, gliding on the air and pooling several meters away from her. She watched breathlessly as two forms emerged from the strands.

The first to take recognizable shape seemed to be a tall, thin man. The process by which he became a physical entity was imperceptible by her – it seemed to take place between the ticks of the clock in her mind, so that she was never sure that this was anything other than the way the figure had always been – but there he was, a man, or something to which a man was her closest point of comparison. His hands were scaly and taloned, like chicken feet, a beak took the place of his nose and mouth, and extravagant plumage jutted from his spine, feathers ruffling against each other as he surveyed the room.

Beside the man, wisps were working to create what seemed to be a dog-sized lizard. Nerida felt the blood seem to stop in her veins in the presence of the gods of death.

She tried in spite of her trembling to stand, and found her knees unable to support her. She pressed her palm on the surface of a table to hold her upright and cursed herself for failing now. As the green and red pattern on the scales of the giant lizard surfaced before her eyes, she began her dance.

She closed her eyes, raised a leg, raised her arms, spun, twisting her wrists and slicing her arms through the air as she’d been taught, bent low, threw her arms as if into the sky and let her body follow, tipping her hips in either direction as she shocked her arms into frozen contortions, dragging the tops of her outstretched fingers along the white flesh of her neck —

Needles seemed to puncture her ear drums. The sound of a thousand fortunes in gold coins clattering onto stone rang through the cavern. Nerida opened her eyes, nearly falling, her dance cut short. The gods were gone, or so it seemed until a blot on the opposite wall shifted and she saw the lizard now darting along it toward the source of the metallic crash. “Have your fill.” It was the low voice from beyond the wall, the voice of the man. She couldn’t see him past the stacks and aisles of treasure. She walked gingerly through it all toward the voice. A laugh rippled through the space.

She came out from the mass of treasure and arrived at the scene, near the sealed door of the cave. A large, ornate chest had been smashed and its contents, thousands of coins, were scattered on the floor. The lizard roved over it all, mouth hanging open, its tongue shooting at, sticking to, and reeling dozens of coins into its mouth at a time.

“Look, Ruk, our dancer finished her performance. Was it not magnificent?” the man said and turned away from them, wandering behind further mounds of valuables.

“Didn’t see it,” the lizard Ruk said between bites of gold. This was the higher voice she had heard.

“A shame. I didn’t either. Could we get an encore?” Something crashed from where the man had gone and the lizard disappeared in that direction, leaving hundreds of coins behind. Its body was rounder now and its movements somewhat slower. “Don’t break it!” it complained, unseen.

Nerida then stood alone in the coins, listening to the rummaging and laughter, both high and low. She looked at the royal sarcophagus. Only a few gems remained in a field of empty sockets. She no longer trembled, but instead was utterly numb. Using legs she no longer trusted the reality of, she followed the creatures.

Around a corner, the lizard’s mouth was distended wider than Nerida would have thought possible, rendering it more mouth than lizard. Its lips were wrapped around a sculpture that had been tipped to the ground, the marble man’s upper torso disappearing impossibly into the thing’s throat. The chicken man laughed. “Ruk is a fiend for sculpture.” His arms were crossed at his chest and he clicked a talon against his beak pensively, his eyes inscrutable on his alien face.

The lizard drooled on the sculpture as it sank deeper into its belly and streaks of the sliva ran down it onto the floor. Nerida’s eyes burned. She turned away from the creatures, turned the corner of a shelf of trinkets and leaned against it out of sight, and tried to cry as quietly as she could. She felt it was her neck, not the marble, that the lizard was slobbering on.

She felt the air beside her stir and opened her clouded eyes. The chicken man stood there. He rested his rough hand on her bare shoulder, the points of his talons sitting delicately on her flesh like needles standing upright on the surface of still water.

“Oh, we’ve been cruel. We have – positively monstrous.” He plucked a diadem from the shelf. His jewels flashed wildly in the dimming light for a moment before he perched it on her head. “To have a girl weeping amongst a kingdom’s splendor…”

The other creature appeared at her other side and began pulling objects off the lower shelves with its tongue and into its mouth – fine plates, golden figurines, exotic gadgets of unknown function. The statue had swollen its body past the point of belief – it was now little more than a sphere of seemingly infinite volume.

The chicken man tossed a ring crowned with an oversized sapphire into Ruk’s maw then wrapped an arm behind Nerida, pulling her toward him, his talons resting not painfully on her side. He took her hand in his other claw and waltzed with her to the tune of Ruk’s feast. His claws were gentle on her skin as they shifted among the debris of the painstakingly-arranged crypt, brushing priceless items aside with their feet. The chicken man hummed a tune familiar to her from beyond the giant stone door. Nerida pulled herself closer to the cold warmth of the chicken man, burying a hand in his soft feathers, and closed her eyes as he slowly danced her down the rows of emptied shelves. For a while it seemed as though it had all ceased to exist.

She became aware that the sound of Ruk’s consumption had slowed to a stop. The dance ended, she saw, reluctantly opening her eyes as if for the first time today, near the small hole from which the man and the creature had emerged. Ruk rolled out of a blot of shadow that was now becoming the entire room. The hulking sphere that had been the lizard was lit by only a few flickering candles.

Running a set of talons through Nerida’s hair, the chicken man asked Ruk if he’d gotten all he wanted. A dull groan seeped out of some hidden orifice on the thing’s surface. He held Nerida’s head in a set of talons and she saw tendrils of air rising from behind his face, Ruk’s shadowed form diminishing and disappearing back into the hole. She felt the claws fall from her face as the man dissolved before her.

The wind from the hole quieted. Somewhere among the ruins of the king’s crypt, the cat wailed.

 

 

Image: male96 via pixabay

 

 

The Abbey stood on a steep hill of jagged rocks and thorn bushes. On the western side, next to the refectory, was the novices’ dormitory, a candle-lit room filled with twenty boys sleeping in neat rows of beds. Near the door, where the room was coldest, a thin-limbed boy huddled under his coarse blanket and began to shake with a fear so strong that the legs of his bed rattled against the floor-boards.

Over and over again, he remembered the twisted bodies of the villagers lying amidst the smoke-blackened timbers of their cottages. As he did every night, he forced himself to picture his mother; the scar at the end of her chin; the fine lines where her eyes narrowed; the red hair that curled around her neck; and on the cottage wall behind her, the white buds of the rose bush she had planted on his first name day.

When the fear passed, he began to cry, softly so no one would hear him. He knew he would never see her again. That part of his life was gone. He felt as if he had been hollowed out and all that remained beneath his skin and bones were his fear and his memories.

A pale light began to seep through the dormitory’s shuttered windows. In the distance, the bells in the Minster, the Abbey’s church, rang the summons for prayers. The door banged open. The burly figure of the Novice Master stood framed against the light. “Get up,” he shouted. “The day’s wasting away.” He woke the novices every morning with the same words.

The boy wiped his eyes and stepped gingerly onto the cold floor. He pulled on the ragged tunic that was too big and the sandals that were too small and joined the end of the line of yawning, fidgeting novices. After the Novice Master, had inspected them, they followed him out of the dormitory, past the refectory and into the Abbey’s courtyard.

The great stone bulk of the Minster loomed ahead of them. As they drew closer, starlings flew up from the iron cross at the top of its tower. The Novice Master lifted the bolt from the doors and ushered them inside. The church was dark and gloomy despite the spears of light that shone through its narrow windows. The boy stood at his usual position near the door with his back pressed against a wooden beam.

When the rest of the monks had arrived, the boy watched as the Abbot, a tall man dressed in a white robe, walked down the nave with two black-cowled priests trailing after him. At the far end of the Minster, the Abbot genuflected before the wooden statue of the man bound to a cross, lifted the silver chalice from the white, marble altar, and began the service.

The boy knelt with the other monks. The stone floor bruised his knees and the acrid haze of incense smoke stung his eyes. He did his best to join in with the service but he didn’t understand Latin and the words were cold and harsh to his ears. While the others prayed, he scratched a small cross in the waxed surface of the beam behind him. He had made a mark for each of the mornings since the monks had offered him their sanctuary.

At the end of the service, the boy followed the novices to the classroom on the other side of the Minster. The daily lesson, when the boys practiced their reading and writing, was the worst part of his day. The Brother Teacher, a gaunt and humourless man, sat on a stool at the front of the room and tapped his walking stick on the floor as he watched the novices work.

The boy crouched behind his desk at the back and stared glumly at his manuscript. No one had ever bothered to teach him to read. He wondered what it would be like to know what the words meant. He imagined he would understand them in a single moment of clarity, as if he looked into a pool of water, one moment muddy, the next clear, and suddenly saw the small fish swimming back and forth between the reeds.

There was a sharp crack on his desk. Startled, he looked up. Brother Teacher stood over him, stick raised to strike again. “I’ll not have you day dreaming during my class. Let’s see what you’ve learned.” The Brother pointed at the manuscript. “Tell me what it says.”

The boy stared at the words until a nervous sweat formed on his brow. But no matter how hard he tried the letters were no more than crabbed marks. For all he knew, it was a recipe for venison pie. He stared at the floor, hoping the monk would leave him alone.

Brother Teacher rapped his stick on the ground. “You ignorant boy. You’ve never bothered to learn. All you’re good for is work in the garden. Now go and bother us no more.”

The room resounded with the novices’ jeers. The boy wanted to shout at them all to shut up; tell them how unfair it was; beg the Brother to be allowed to stay at the back where no one need notice him. But instead, he ran from the classroom.

He trudged back through the courtyard with the boys’ laughter echoing in his ears. Every morning on his way to the Minster, he walked past the garden. It was next to the refectory and surrounded by walls made of unevenly-sized stones piled one on top of another. The entrance was an iron gate about the height of a tall man. Moss grew between the cracks where the hinges on each side were bolted into the stone.

He pushed at the gate. It opened with a rusty creak and a dove flew up from the branches of a magnolia tree just inside. Ahead of him were a series of raised soil beds bordered by apple and pear trees. Three monks worked on their hands and knees in the nearest bed. One of them, a man with an unkempt grey beard, put down his trowel and walked over.

“What do you want me to do?” the boy muttered.

The monk pointed at his mouth and shook his head. He handed the boy a trowel and a small cloth bag. Do what you will, he seemed to say and went back to his work.

The bag was filled with pale, yellow mustard seeds. Shivering in the wind, the boy looked back at the gate, and thought of the warm classroom. But he couldn’t go back there. Shoulders slumped, he went to the soil bed furthest from the other monks. The wet earth dampened his knees as he knelt. He dug a small hole with his trowel and planted the first seed.

Through sun and wind, sleet and rain, from morning mist to dusk’s long shadows, the boy worked in the garden. His back stiffened until he walked with a stoop like the other garden monks. The lines on his palms darkened from the soil ground into them and the callouses on his fingers hardened into thick burrs.

As he toiled, the garden bloomed around him. Buds appeared on the tree branches and grew into twigs and leaves. Carrot tops and beetroot stalks emerged from the soil. Clay pots overflowed with sage and rosemary, tarragon and parsley. When the yellow petals of the mustard plants opened, he slept through the night without waking. As his fear left him, his memories of home began to fade away.

Spring passed into summer. One baking hot afternoon, a storm blew in from the east and torrents of rain lashed the garden. The boy dashed back and forth with the other monks, staking the younger trees against the howling wind and wrapping sackcloth around the vines. A bolt of lighting crashed down in front of him. Stunned, he fell to the ground.

In an instant, the storm’s roar ceased. He was no longer in the garden. Instead, he stood in front of the Minster. For a moment, all was quiet, and then the earth shook with a low rumble. Cracks appeared in the ground around the church and widened into jagged fissures with the ear-shattering sound of stone splitting. Where the chasms met, the ground collapsed into gaping voids. Leafy fronds rose up from the depths. Creepers swelled to snake through the Minster’s windows and wrap around its tower. Tangled knots of twigs and gnarled branches flourished and trunks thickened, until the church was hidden by a forest of oak trees.

He woke to find himself lying in the garden with his cheek pressed against the wet soil. The storm had passed and the sun shone. Starlings swirled overhead. A hound bayed in the distance. I have work to do, he thought, and his heart filled with purpose.

The following morning, he tended to the mustard plants and the lilies that grew beneath the magnolia tree. While the other garden monks were busy at their work, he plucked the yellow and white petals from the flowers and put them in his pouch. The next day, at the end of morning prayers, he let a few of the petals slip between his fingers and fall onto the Minster’s stone floor. When he returned the next morning, only a few of the petals remained, swept away into the corners, so he left more.

The magnolia tree blossomed with pink flowers. He clipped the ends of the longest branches and hid them under his tunic. In the middle of the night, he crept bare-foot from the dormitory. When he arrived at the Minster, he lit a candle, and walked to the altar. In the flickering light, he placed the branches against the sides of the chalice until the blossoms covered the silver and then he filled the bowl with yellow petals.

On the south wall of the garden, jasmine creepers had grown across the stone. Where the white flowers were thickest, he cut several lengths and tied them into bundles with twine. That night, he went back to the Minster and walked past the altar to the statue of the man bound to the wooden cross. He wrapped the creepers around the ropes that tied the man’s wrists and ankles. He wound the longest around the circle of thorns on the man’s head so the white flowers covered the sharp points. Before he left, he pressed the rest of the petals into the hole in the man’s side.

At prayers the next day, the Abbot railed at the monks. “Some wicked man,” he shouted, his voice shaking with anger, “has dared to desecrate the church. There is a snake in our midst and he must be punished.”

The Novice Master barged into the dormitory in the middle of the night. He overturned the novices’ beds and rummaged through their belongings. When he found the boy’s pouch hidden under a blanket, he turned it upside down. Petals, dried flowers, and lengths of vine fell to the floor. The Brother cuffed the boy so hard that his eyebrow split and blood ran down his face. As the novices looked on in shocked silence, the Brother knocked the boy to the ground and dragged him through the door.

A crowd of monks waited outside. The boy lay on the ground surrounded by their angry faces. He tried to crawl away but the Novice Master took a stick from his belt and struck him in the ribs. He yelped and curled into a ball. A boot kicked the base of his spine and he cried out. A fist hammered into the back of his head. Someone spat on him.

He thought they would kill him but instead the Novice Master took him to the refectory and led him down the stairs to a windowless cell. It was cold and dank and half again as long as his body. There was no light so he couldn’t tell if it was day or night. Occasionally, the door opened and a hand shoved inside a cup of water and a piece of stale bread.

In the pitch-black, the boy’s fear returned. As his body shook, he tried to remember his mother but his memories had faded. He couldn’t recall the shape of the scar on her chin or even the colour of her eyes. Now I have nothing left, he thought, and so he resolved to die. He stopped drinking the water. The bread piled uneaten by the door. When he no longer had the strength to sit, he lay curled up on the floor.

He lost touch with the passage of time. All he knew was the murmur of his breath and the weak fluttering of his heart. As he began to drift away, images poured into his mind: the yellow of the mustard petals; the green leaves on the trees; the garden monks working in the soil. And finally, he saw the great forest that would surround the Minster. I have work to do, he thought, and he crawled to the door and ate the bread and drank the water.

He spent so long in the cell that his nails grew into long spirals and his skin hung loose from his bones. One day or night, he couldn’t tell which, he woke to find the Novice Master standing over him. At first he thought he was still asleep and turned back to his dream of the forest but the Brother pulled him to his feet and led him from the cell and out of the refectory.

The sun dazzled the boy’s eyes. His legs were so weak he could barely stand. The Novice Master propped him up against a wall. “You’re not to do it again,” the Brother said. “Or we’ll cast you out.”

The monk let him go and left without a backward glance. The boy sat in the sun until his strength returned and then he limped to the garden. When he stumbled through the gate, the garden monks rushed to greet him. The bearded monk poured him a cup of water. The next gave him his trowel. The third handed him a bag of seeds.

The bearded monk put his lips close to the boy’s ear. At first, only a hoarse and croaking sound came from his mouth. Then his neck muscles clenched and he whispered, “John.”

The boy would have fallen if the monk hadn’t held him up. He didn’t think that anyone remembered his name. Even he had almost forgotten it. The monk pointed at a barren patch of soil in the west corner of the garden. You’ve work to do, he seemed to say.

John walked past the soil beds filled with vegetables ready to harvest, and beneath the trees branches heavy with apples and late-ripening pears. When he arrived at the corner, he ran his hands through the dry and stoney earth. The walls on either side were bare of moss and crisscrossed with silvery snail tracks. He tipped the seeds into his hand and examined them carefully. One of them, bigger than the others, had a small, green shoot. He planted the seeds in the soil, taking care to bury the largest close to the shelter of the wall.

When he had finished, he sat for a few moments, thinking of his mother. She had always made an offering after she planted so he poured a little water on the earth. Then he sang one of her old songs and the words sounded like drops of rain falling on the sea and the wind rustling between the trees.

That evening, John returned to the dormitory and it was as if nothing had happened. The other novices ignored him as usual. He slept in his pallet by the door. The next morning, the Novice Master woke them with the same words he always used. John went with the other boys to the Minster and stood at the back. The church was as dark and gloomy as ever.

At the end of the service, he walked to the garden. The bearded monk was standing just outside the gate. When the man saw him, he put his finger to his lips, looked left and right, and waited for two other monks to walk by. When they were out of sight, he gestured at John to follow him. The monk led him across the garden to the barren corner where John had planted the seeds. The other garden monks were waiting for them. One prayed with his trembling hands clasped together. The other’s tear-filled eyes looked up at the sky.

The bearded monk pointed at the wall. Look at what you’ve done, he seemed to say. A green branch had risen up from the earth to curl back and forth across the stones. At its tip, swaying gently in the breeze, was a perfect, white rose. And everywhere, the scent of flowers.

 

DAVID HAYWARD is an aspiring first time novelist who lives in Paris.

 

Image: SofieLayla Thal via pixabay

 

1

I pick the wild blackberries that grow among the untended late-summer overgrowth. Continuing down the path beside the canal, stopping only to collect more berries, I come to an opening. There I sit in the long, straggly grass, eating what’s left of the foraged fruit. The stagnant murky waters smell like a duck pond. A dull evening, shades of purple in the sky. A raggedy dog sniffs me. I think it’s a stray until its owner calls.

I take my journal from my bag and make an entry: I always knew it would come to this. Just not so soon. Purple twilight. Soft purple mournful sadness. Dog sniffs my sour clothes. I am the weeds sprouting from the cracks in the concrete path under this dimly glowing purple sky, slowly fading purple grey, a glowing purple grey, long-lasting twilight. These long, extended days don’t let night come this time of year. The sun can’t sink. Not completely. Not yet. I left everything I knew in New Zealand to be here, doing this. Spent everything I had. But I’ve achieved nothing, and I have nothing left.

2

The next day I walk into town along the canal. It’s a gentle day. This is the only canal here. It was built almost two hundred years ago to connect Edinburgh and Glasgow. Initially a commercial success, it lost its worth when rail became the more viable option. It once ran all the way down to the port; now truncated, it stops at the entrance to the city centre.

That’s where I am.

I find the Job Seekers’ office. I’m scrolling through the job opportunities. There. Immediate start. Bricklayer’s labourer. Weekly pay. I take the reference number to the counter.

“Do you have steel-cap boots?”

“No.”

“Well you need them for this job. You can get a pair for ₤20 from Industrial Supplies – just around the corner.”

That ₤20 is meant for my food.

I turn up on site. It’s loud and dusty. Burly men at work. I’m given a hard hat, a high-vis vest, a pair of leather gloves.

“See these bricks?”

Big heavy-looking grey things. “Yeah.”

“See that wall?”

“Uh huh.”

“You take the bricks from here to there. Stack ‘em so them bricklayers can easily get ‘em.”

I take the first brick. Hold out my left arm and let it rest there while I get another and stack it on top. I walk it over and place them behind the bricklayers. I do this again and again.

My novel. It’s unfinished, but worse, it’s no good. All this time. Nothing to show.

“Come on, son, you can work faster than that!”

It’s the foreman.

I don’t answer and I try to work faster. Uncomfortable scratches appear where the bricks rub the underside of my forearm. The foreman climbs the stairs back into the temporary office. I see him watching me from his window. His watchtower.

Do I abandon it? I’ve worked so hard. But who will read it?

The foreman opens the window and calls out: “That whole pallet of bricks needs to be moved by tomorrow – new ones delivered Monday.”

I look at how many bricks I’ve moved – I’ve hardly made a dent. The pile of ominous bricks. Sitting there. Looking at me. He’s looking at me, too. It feels like I’m in the Panopticon.

3

I take the stairs to my third-floor flat. I live in a housing estate. It’s grey and bleak. There are many buildings in this area just as grey, just as bleak. I have a bed, a desk, a laptop, a kitchen, a toilet, a shower. I flick the light switch. Nothing. I try a different switch and check the prepaid power meter in the cupboard: negative ₤10.

I lie down. I’m so tired I drift off to sleep without eating.

4

After getting a taste for lifting bricks, most people from Job Seekers don’t come back. I return and start on the bricks for the second day.

The bricks seem heavier. My sleeves have started to fray and tatter. The sharp corners scratch my skin. An early advantage is marked. Blood has been spilt.

I wonder how long I can keep up this battle. I could leave, sure. But instead I continue to move bricks.

5

It’s the weekend. My body aches as I walk across the field to the canal. There’s a wind from the north. The water ripples and gently laps against the concrete.

I pass an old bridge that opens up into a park with bench seats and trees overhanging the water. On the opposite side, a boathouse where canal boats moor. One of them has been converted into a restaurant. Beyond that, a line of pretty brick cottages.

A girl with long dark hair is sitting on one of the benches. She’s writing. Not once does she lift her head. There’s something unusual about her. She is so focused. So lost in her world. When I write, I’m frantic. I flutter like a sparrow, looking around the room for words as if they’re crumbs. What I’d give to have her composure.

I detour from the canal to the supermarket, where I buy a loaf of bread, an apple and banana. I have 38p left until I get paid on Tuesday.

I walk back. The girl is gone.

6

Back in my flat I eat some bread, have a glass of water and turn on my laptop. Its battery is running low. I open my work and read.

A woman came down the ramp of the boat. She and many anonymous figures, silhouettes in the Croatian dusk. Looking around the industrial port, she smelled the fish and oil and the salty Adriatic Sea. She took her camera from her handbag, taking a few shots of the setting. She had promised to document her travels.

As I read I want to scrunch up the pages. Since I can’t, I think about throwing the laptop through my bedroom window. It would smash the glass and fall the three storeys and break on the concrete below.

7

I’m back to moving bricks. I can’t get the image of the girl writing on the bench out of my head. I went back to the same spot on Sunday, but she wasn’t there.

On Tuesday morning I go to the cash machine to check my account. I’ve been paid! It’s the first money I’ve had in months. I take out ₤20 and buy a recharge card for electricity at my flat and some food to celebrate before returning to the bricks.

The work is exhausting. My arms and legs are sore. The bricks seem heavier. The day is a struggle.

8

I come home from work and open my laptop. I’m so tired I can hardly concentrate enough to read. My body aches, but I feel indifferent to my physical sufferings.

A tourist town in the off-season. All the colours seemed so desolate and sad in this abandonment. An empty swing sways in the sea breeze. She thought she should write an email to someone – that’s what people do on their travels. Yet something inside of her felt dreary. What she would write would not be full of admiration, inspiration, excitement. It would only be about herself. For that’s all she could see.

I don’t read any further. I right click on the file and scroll down to “Delete”.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” the computer asks.

I ponder before clicking “No” and shutting it down.

9

I walk the canal every weekend to the same spot, and she’s never there. I’ve almost given up hope. But this Sunday afternoon I go again. There she is. She has her book and she’s writing. Without thinking, I approach her.

“Hey.”

She looks up. It’s the first time I’ve seen her eyes lift from the page.

“Do I know you?” she asks in a Slavic accent.

“No.” She just looks at me blankly, so I start to speak again. “I’ve seen you here before. I wondered what you were writing.”

She looks as though she doesn’t want to answer. “Sometimes I come here to write letters. Today I’m writing poetry.”

“Letters? Do people still write letters?”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh … nothing.”

I look at her book. I’ve never seen a book like it before: its cover is stitched and sewn. Sun faded blue with green borders. The pages are dog-eared and coffee stained. On the open page are foreign characters: Es and As with tails. Cs and Ss with hats. All these Zs. Swivels and loops. Her handwriting is beautiful.

“Why do you come here? Do you like this canal?”

“I don’t think I like it. But it has a certain sadness that I like. It has the beauty of a neglected child. It has a history. Do you know what I mean?”

“I think I do.”

“I talk to the canal. I sometimes want to scream at it! It’s like God – it just absorbs everything.”

I don’t know how she can compare this dirty canal to God. But she sure seems interesting. I hesitate to ask. “Could you read me one of your poems?”

“They’re in Polish. You don’t understand.”

“Can you translate?”

“You can’t translate poetry.”

“Can you try?”

She pauses before she starts. “I’m looking at her / Who is she?”

Pointing at the line she’s on and translating in her head before she says it out loud. “I want to guess / I will ask / What she believes in / Who she believes in today.”

She takes a longer pause between lines. “So strange … I don’t know if strange is the right word? The Polish word ob-tsy means foreign or strange.”

I look at her paper and the word is spelt o-b-c-y and I notice that it’s not coffee stains but pressed brown leaves. I can’t tell if they’re real or printed.

“I think strange is better.”

She continues, “How do you say it when you used to know someone – you were close to someone, but now you’re not? You used to know them, now you don’t?”

“Do you mean distant, or unfamiliar, maybe?”

“Yes. Unfamiliar. So unfamiliar / With her own helplessness / She becomes friends / She cries / And you would like to cry over her / But she is so unfamiliar / I’m looking at her since a long time.”

“For a long time,” I interrupt.

“No. Since a long time. I’m looking at her since a long time / And it is a long time / That I stand next to myself.” She pauses and looks at the page. “It doesn’t sound good in English. You have to read it in Polish. You have to learn Polish.” She laughs.

“What’s it called?”

“It’s got no title … I can give it a title … what should I call it?” She doesn’t give me time to respond. “Call it ‘Ona’. ‘She’. No. Not she. Call it ‘Her’.”

“Thanks for sharing.”

“I never let people read my poems. Maybe because if I say it in English it means less to me.” There’s silence before she closes her book and ties it shut with a piece of string. “I have go now. My shift starts.”

“OK. Where do you work?”

“I look after a disabled man. He can’t talk.”

“Oh … Do you like your job?”

“No. Not really. It’s very lonely. But I can write.” She holds up her book.

“See you round?”

“Yes. Maybe.”

10

The days grow colder. Mornings are especially frosty. Streams of early sun cause steam to rise from the pile of bricks. My fingers are so cold it feels as if they are going to snap off. I rub my hands vigorously – it takes some time for them to thaw out. Once I’m warmed up, I get back to moving bricks. It’s much easier now: my body is used to the physical labour.

I’ve actually started admiring the bricks. I see they are a team, a community, and they just get on with life. Nothing to complicate it. They are laid on mortar – one brick to the next, side by side, one on top of the other; they are cemented, and clearly contented, in their place. When a brick needs to be cut to finish off a line, they accept that too – an individual sacrifice for the greater good.

I’m up to date on my rent and no longer hungry. I’ve even bought myself proper, heavy-duty clothes for the job. I’m starting to feel fit and healthy. I no longer think about my novel, my writing. I’ve given up and I’m better for it.

But I still think about that girl. I walk down the canal every weekend hoping to see her again – I never do. I didn’t even ask her name but I asked her to read me a poem. How absurd. It feels like she’s a figment of my imagination.

I turn to pick up another armful of bricks when I hear a terrific thud – then rumbling. I spin around. The wall the bricklayers are working on has collapsed. It’s fallen away onto empty ground. Bricks and mortar are scattered. Everywhere.

“What the hell! How did this happen? You imbeciles! Quick. Clean it up. Quick.” The foreman yells before addressing me. “Stop what you’re doing and tidy this mess up before someone sees it. Quick!”

11

After clearing the mess, the site is abnormally quiet. It’s like someone died.

I come home on the bus unsettled. I get off, but instead of going to my flat, I walk across the field to the canal. I take off my steel-capped boots and look around to check no one’s watching before hurling them into the water.

Plunge.

I watch them sink. They fade until they’re out of sight. The canal is only about a metre and a half deep, yet I can’t see the bottom. I can’t see my boots. Only a few bubbles surface as if to say goodbye.

Epilogue

Years have passed. I’m back in my home country. I sit at my desk and think of the canal. The water that doesn’t move. I picture the reeds. The path. The weeds sprouting from the cracks. The straggly grass. The green overgrowth.

I imagine what’s inside. A rusting tricycle. An engagement ring. A supermarket trolley. I picture my boots. My steel-capped boots on the canal floor. I instinctively know, as if it’s a fact, that they’re still there.

I remember the bricks with an unusual fondness.

I think of that girl. The nameless writing girl. Writing her letters, her sad poems. Sitting on the bench beside her canal, comforted by its obscure, forlorn beauty – like that of a neglected child. Her canal, absorbing all of her woes. Absorbing everything that gets thrown at it. Going nowhere, simply absorbing.

 

Nick Fairclough lives in Masterton, New Zealand. He has had work published in Flash Frontier, Blue Fifth Review, Rangitawa Collection and Takahe. One of his stories has been nominated for a 2018 Pushcart Prize and another for the 2018 Best Small Fictions. Learn more at https://nickfairclough.wordpress.com/

 

Image: pixel2013 via pixabay

 

Kis pulls the shiniest bauble from the Christmas tree and cups it in her hands. It looks like a see-through planet plucked from her porthole, and, valued at 1000 e-bits, it’s the most expensive decoration on the fake fir. Even before Kis had it priced, she knew this instinctively – this crystal sphere is the only thing she’s ever seen that is filled with clear water.

Kis switches her gaze from the bauble to the pale honey-colored liquid that she’s been sipping. The glass on her desk is simultaneously half-full and half-empty, even in artificial gravity. She tries to imagine again what Earth water would taste like, how rain would feel on her skin. But Earth is millions of miles away, smaller in her telescope than the decorations on the tree. So small that, if Kis could pick the Earth out of the sky, it would make a perfect necklace bead.

When she was younger and healthier, Kis’ great-great-great-grandma used to joke that, from this distance, her home planet was the size of an Earth cherry. Then Granchy would describe this cherry in luscious detail – sweeter than Saturn honey, redder than Mars, the color of pure, fully oxygenated blood, the last rare forbidden fruit. Kis’ mouth waters at the thought of this wonderful thing that she’ll never get to taste. Only one such tree left in the solar system, its precise location lost.

Still, at least Kis has this aluminum tinsel tree. If Granchy could see her now, she’d joke that Kis was eyeing up the decorations as Earth women used to drool over displays in jewelers’ windows, picking out the rings with the biggest sparkling rocks.

Kis finds it hard to imagine getting excited about hard stone. Metal and mineral are everywhere. Her fascinations are different. Yes, almost everything about the baubles is artificial, but not quite. She’s had them tested. Her oldest pieces carry traces of Earth elements, of land dust, even water and once-living matter. Their light and shine too is crafted by hand and imagination in memory of the old ways, in honor of life.

Kis’ favorite decorations are the transparent spheres dating from just before the exodus, with scenes depicted inside like mythic hanging snow globes or old-fashioned crystal balls into the future. Granchy used to stare at them for hours before finally pronouncing her predictions.

Granchy’s last insight though had been little more than a babbling of random words: “Honey-river-stone-hail-red-petals-glaze-falling.”

“Falling.” Granchy had repeated the word again before falling back against her pillow in the spaceship sick bay.

Every time Kis visited, she’d look round the small dorm with sinking despair. It was full of patients like Granchy – after centuries of anemic life, their hearts petal-thin and their minds finally running out of space for more memories.

No point dwelling on this, Kis drags her thoughts back to the fir. She can feel Granchy with her, like the Ghost of Christmas Past, plucking another glass ball from the green branches, then telling Kis to look inside if she wants to divine the future.

But the sphere in Kis’ hands is black as a starless night. There are beautiful chiming bells inside but they only sound when shaken. Kis pushes the swinging bauble harder and harder until…the black ribbon snaps and it falls from the tree.

Perhaps Granchy isn’t with her after all. Granchy would never choose such a dark future. Kis’ hand hovers above a globe with a frozen lake. Brightly scarved skaters dance across the surface to a swirl of beautiful soft yet joyful choral music, its song composed entirely from snatches of different people’s laughter. She longs to cradle it in her hands, but she fears this choice. It’s as if the Ghost of Other People’s Promises is beguiling her with sham dreams.

She touches the next sphere gently – it’s entirely filled with flurries of plastic snow – a gift of Christmas Present. The white flakes will not settle long enough for there to be anything but blizzard. Like the cosmic debris constantly pelting the spaceship.

Kis picks up the original bauble again. Granchy called this ‘The Rain Globe’, saying it reminded her of her last days on Earth. As Kis’ other plans seem to have failed, she wonders if she should get Granchy’s poem about it framed for Christmas. She flicks through Granchy’s e-note until she finds the words.

 

The Rain Globe

Imagine the Earth sealed in curved glass,
our world as a rain dome. The wet

more frightening than drops of light
glistening towards dice houses.

Hold this sphere in your palm,
turn it upside down and it’s the sky

that drowns. Foundations cling
to the thin land above.

Imagine we’re tiny people,
speaking through bubbles,

all of us now divers
thrown in water flight,

lives tilted
towards spillage.

 

But suppose this Christmas is Granchy’s last? It isn’t the most cheerful gift to give her, even if Granchy’s mind has gone too far to understand the sadness.

Ting! Kis’ electroscreen flashes with a new message.

“Your merchandise has been located. Your order is in g-flight!”

Kis senses her heart pumping redder and faster as she reads. She’d not really expected her search to work. But now this message from Galaxis. What if this is it? Finally.

Of course, Kis tries to slow her breathing, it could be a fake – black-world sellers are notoriously unreliable. But as past-dealers go, Galaxis’ reputation is legendary on the contraband scene. If it really is a cherry from that last tree? If the rumors are correct, one sniff may be all it takes to save Granchy.

And the price? Kis wills herself not to think about that, as she packages up The Rain Globe in stellarwrap. So long as this works, it will be worth it. It’s not the first heirloom they’ve had to sacrifice, and she still has Granchy’s poems.

Kis hears her own nails tapping the desk in time with her heartbeat, as she waits for her exchange to process. The noise reminds her of Granchy’s recordings of an old analogue clock ticking, only faster, more arrhythmic, hollower.

To occupy her fingers and thoughts, Kis turns to one of the brighter entries from Granchy’s journal and forces herself to concentrate on the lines.

Underwater: Surviving

In our new place / the fish
              that pour from the common tap
                          rise a little faster \ bubble bigger

                          Away from town streets / the water
              tastes clearer / easier to swallow
unthickened by twists of pipe

through terraces submerged
              in the flood \ of their own debris
At sea in this new world

              we are strangers to ourselves
                          Oceans teach us to dive deeper
              to find strength we never knew

If…when dry land returns
              we will welcome free-walking
but guard tails and fins in case

              We made this house of gills
                          layered with synthetic scales
              now \ we swim with it

Although, it’s the hundredth time Kis has read the poem, this still seems worlds away from her own life. No water, no individual homes on the Interstar, only an infinity of space outside and the increasingly more cramped crampedness of near-communal living inside. But the title and Granchy’s determination…survival Kis gets. Survival is the one essential that they’ve all been fed and watered on. Survival and hope.

Ting! “Your g-pod has landed!” The electromassage flashes a brighter blue neon than the lights on the Christmas tree, its chime louder than any bells Kis would ever wish for her frozen-lake skaters.

Although Kis is trying to stay realistic, she can’t help feeling expectation rise inside her as the small pod arrives in her cubicle-chute.

She prizes the pod apart and takes out a tiny box.

It looks the right size. She imagines the weight is right. But she’s scared now to open it. She’s never seen a real cherry, so how can she even tell if it’s genuine? There’s only one person Kis knows who will know for sure. The same person that Kis needs it for.

Shoving the box in her pocket, Kis grabs the next zip-express and hurries though the shafts towards the sick bay.

It’s hard to distinguish Granchy’s dark curls from the shadows on her pillow. Except the shadows are dancing and Granchy’s hair and head are still. Granchy’s breathing is slower and shallower even since Kis’ last visit.

“Granchy,” Kis whispers. “It’s me.”

Kis sees Granchy’s eyelids flutter and bends over to kiss her great-great-great-grandma’s moon-pale cheek.

“Look, I’ve brought you something.”

Opening the box, Kis lifts out the waxy fruit by its stalk. This thin wiriness bends with the weight of the shiny soft bead that she’s been promised is real cherry. It looks real, feels it too. She wishes Granchy’s eyes would open, and stay open long enough to look, check and reassure Kis.

Steadying the fruit with her gloved palm, Kis uses a scalpel to nick its surface, then slides a tiny sliver of reddish flesh into her specimen dish. If this is what it should be – and if it does what it should do – there’s enough cells for her to sample and re-synthesize.

Then, clasping the rest of the small bead gently between two fingers, Kis holds what she believes is the last red cherry to Granchy’s lips…and hopes.

S.A. LEAVESLEY is an award-winning journalist, fiction writer and poet. Author of two novellas, her short fiction publications include Jellyfish Review, The Nottingham Review, Ellipsis Zine, Oxford Today and Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine. Nominated for Best Small Fictions, she also runs V. Press poetry and flash imprint.

Image: Gerd Altmann via Pixabay

 

 

Sergey Vasiliev stares out the window, eyes wide. No matter how many times he sees it, it makes his spirit soar.

“Really Sergey? It’s not like you haven’t seen a sunrise before. In fact, you see it every ninety-two minutes. That’s like a bajillion since you’ve been on this mission.”

Sergey smiles and shrugs his shoulders. He looks back at Kiyoko Watanabe as she pulls the daily calendar page, wads it into a ball, and releases it, watching it float away.

“Seven days and a wake-up,” she says, a smile spreading across her face. “Going to make it home for Aimi’s fifth birthday!” She moves her hand to her lips, then to the picture above the daily calendar. “Goodbye International Space Station—hello baby girl!”

A glint of light pulls him back to the window and he watches the sun become visible above the curvature of the earth. Glorious. A new day, and all the hope and promise that comes with it.

“Good morning ISS crew.”

“Mornin’ Houston,” Mission Commander Jules Rousseau says in his best Texas drawl.

‘There you go, Commander,” the mission controller cheers him.

Sergey can hear the laughter in the background. With the sun fully visible, he abandons his window on the world and starts for the breakfast area.

“Who’s picking the music this morning, Commander?”

“My turn, Jules!” Kiyoko says in a sing-song voice.

“Please let it be, ‘Boot Scootin’ Boogie,” Jules mock pleads.

“In your dreams, my French Cowboy. This morning I want a little ‘Pepper’ with my breakfast,” Kiyoko declares.

“Nooo,” Jules wailes. “Sergey requested them yesterday, remember? ‘Back in the USSR?’

“Jeez, Jules. Not the Beatles ‘Sergeant Pepper,’ Just ‘Pepper.’ You know… the Butthole Surfers.”

“Butthole Surfers? Why would anyone request music by a band called the Butthole Surfers?”

“In honor of you,” Kiyoko informs him, “You know…because you’re an asshole.”

Sergey laughs hard at the unexpected retort.

“Is that Sergey laughing?” the mission controller asks, his voice incredulous.

“Don’t know, Control. Never heard him laugh. Not sure I’ve even heard him speak,” Jules teases.

*      *       *

Breakfast was always Sergey’s favorite meal. He recalls his childhood, sitting with his parents at the breakfast table enjoying butterbrots and kasha, his parents chirping about his mother’s writing or papa’s work in the lab at the university, then shifting their attention to him, enraptured by his accounts of school. The optimism of his parents at the start of each day sustained him, regardless of what the day might later bring.

On the ISS, the crew typically gathered for meals, and over the mission, Sergey had grown quite fond of his crewmates, especially Jules and Kiyoko. Though each was involved in serious work weighted by immense responsibility, their macaronic banter was eurhythmic, always bringing a joy to the table that attenuated the pressure of their mission. It was reminiscent of his childhood, the optimism sustaining him through the loneliness of months in space. He adored listening to Kiyoko’s stories of Aimi—how her face lit up when she spoke of her daughter, who at the age of four, was already using computers as well as children twice her age. “She’ll be twice the computer scientist that I am,” Kiyoko predicted.

Jules’ stories often involved his family’s vineyard and how much he loved giving tours, especially to schoolchildren. “They’re our future, Sergey,” he would insist, and Sergey was thrilled when Jules had asked him to assist him in presenting a biology lesson that would be transmitted to the schoolchildren in his hometown in a few short hours.

The time in space had given Sergey time to think about his own future. His status as ISS astronaut elevated his already impressive engineering resume, and he was certain that when this mission was over he would have a choice of opportunities that would assure him of a comfortable, if not lucrative lifestyle. Maybe then, Larissa would take his marriage proposal seriously. He imagined their marriage, followed by a honeymoon in Hawaii, and then a life together with three, maybe four children—

The alarm startles them, temporarily gorgonizing each before spurring them to action. Sergey allows the others to depart the compartment first, before propelling himself to his assigned station at the controls of the robotic arm.

“Commander, do you have a visual?”

“Where am I looking?” Jules asks.

“Port, eleven o’clock,” mission control tells him.

Sergey looks out the window. In the distance he can see it and he readies himself at the controls of the robotic arm. With an estimated half-million objects in space and less than forty-three thousand tracked, close approaches occasionally occur and a collision course is a constant concern.

“See, it,” Jules says.

“Can you calculate its trajectory?” Mission control asks.

“On it,” Kiyoto tells them.

Sergey can feel the tension through the silence. “What are we tracking?” he asks.

“Mobile Satellite,” the mission controller says, brusquely.

“J2000 projects it to be on course for intersect with 2015-158A. ETI three minutes. Approximate distance from ISS, one kilometer.”

“What satellite is mobile?” Sergey asks.

“2016-0027,” comes the terse reply from mission control.

“Malfunction?” Jules asks.

“Unknown.”

Sergey looks out the window, but can no longer see the satellite. “Are we a safe distance?”

“We’re safe,” Jules assures him. “Resume normal activities.”

“Negative on resuming normal activities, ISS. Prepare for maneuver,” Mission Control instructs.

“What’s going on?” Sergey asks, but his question goes unanswered.

On the closed channel, Jules tells them, “Meet me in Unity Node.”

Sergey is the first to arrive, his distance from the robotic arm only a few meters from Unity Node.

Kiyoko is next, and they hear Jules moving toward them. Sergey doesn’t like the way she is frowning and avoiding his eyes.

“What’s going on, Jules?” Sergey demands.

“This could be bad. A maneuver is precautionary, in case we are targeted.”

“Targeted? Who would be targeting us? Why?”

“You know the scenarios, Sergey.”

“Guys, I don’t think it’s us. The target, I mean.” Kiyoko looks at each of the men. “2016-0027, that’s the North Korean satellite, and it’s either malfunctioned or is deliberately being maneuvered on an intercept course with U.S. early warning.”

“What does this mean?” Sergey asks, looking from Jules to Kiyoko.

“We’re not sure, Sergey. Maybe nothing. Maybe the children are playing games, you know, trying to frighten each other again,” Kiyoko says with a shrug, though her tone makes the reassurance feel disingenuous.

“Well they need to stop with the games,” Sergey says, “it’s dangerous and irresponsible.”

Jules puts a hand on his shoulder. “Look, Sergey, we don’t know what it means, so there is no point getting worked up about it. We just need to focus on our training and hope for the best.”

“ISS, maneuver commencement in one minute. Recommend crew move to Quest,” mission control announces.

Kiyoko puts her hand on Sergey’s back and gives a gentle pat before following Jules to the conjoined Quest airlock. Sergey follows and within seconds, they are in.

“Mission control, we are prepared for maneuver,” Jules announces.

“Copy, initiating thrusters.”

During past maneuvers, the movement of the ISS to maintain altitude or avoid debris had been so slight that Sergey could offset the effect by placing a pinkie finger against a fixed object. This time, Sergey feels his body shift as the station moves.

“Do you feel that?” Kiyoko asks.

Jules gives a slow nod.

“They’re trying to move us in a hurry, Sergey says as he checks his watch. For the next three minutes, no one speaks.

“Mission control to ISS Crew, we request one of you go to the cupola for visual confirmation.”

“Roger, control. Confirmation of what?” Jules asks.

“US Space Command has lost data from 2015-158A.”

“Shit,” Kiyko moans.

“Exactly,” mission control answers.

“I’ll go,” Jules volunteers.

“Me too,” Sergey says, giving an apologetic shrug to Kiyoko.

They move through Unity to Tranquility and then to the Cupola, the entire trip taking less than two minutes. Sergey follows Jules in, head first, their legs protruding into the Tranquility node.

“Kiyoko, can you give us those coordinates again?” Jules requests.

Sergey cranes his neck, turning to see anything that appears out of the ordinary, when in his periphery, he catches an intense flash.

“What was that?” Sergey yells.

“Mission control to ISS, US Space Command is reporting launch of ICBM.”

“Sacre bleu,” Jules exclaims, covering his face with his hands.

“No, no, this can’t be—,” Kiyoko says, her voice breaking.

Sergey looks through the cupola glass at the earth and sees intense flashes up and down the Korean peninsula and in nearby Japan and China.

“Stop, please stop,” Sergey moans.

“What, Sergey? What’s going on?” Kiyoko asks, alarm rising in her voice.

Sergey feels a hand on his forearm. Jules is shaking his head.

“Kiyoto, what is our current altitude?” Jules asks.

His question goes unanswered as they continue their eastwardly orbit over the Pacific. They watch in horror as a missile streaks past them in its downward trajectory. From the waters off the Hawaiian Islands, sagittate projectiles rise on an intercept course.

“Yes,” Sergey says, for the first time feeling something akin to hope.

“Wha—?” Jules yelps as his body jerks downward.

“Move,” Kiyoko says as she projects herself past him into the cupola.

She twists, and Sergey knows she is trying to locate Japan, but he can’t take his eyes off the missiles shooting towards each other. Suddenly, where there had been one downward missile, there are many.

“Where is it?” Kiyoko cries. “Where is Japan?”

“It’s out of visual range,” Jules calls up.

“Mission control, MIRV’s deployed over Hawaii,” Sergey reports.

“What the fuck is a MIRV?” Kiyoko says, still searching for Japan.

“Multiple Independently Targetable Reentry Vehicle,” Jules says, his voice deflating.

Kiyoko glances down at him before twisting her head side to side while Sergey continues looking toward Hawaii. Her sharp intake of breath causes him to turn. “What?”

He can see they are just off the California coastline and Kiyoko stares, mouth open in horror, at the streaks emanating from the ground.

Sergey follows her gaze, sees the myriad of lines streaking into the sky in long arcs from California and the Washington coastline. The intense flash from the west causes them both to cry out and cover their eyes.

Sergey feels Kiyoko brush against him as she departs the cupola.

“Let me see,” Jules says, and Sergey imagines him pulling Kiyoto’s hands from her face so he can inspect her eyes.

Sergey hears her crying, but the sound is interrupted by audio warnings. He rubs his burning eyes, trying to restore his vision while simultaneously attempting to discern how many warnings and what they mean. For certain, the close proximity warning is alarming as well as an equipment failure warning. Is it the solar panels? He blinks a few times to clear his eyes. Is that a fire alarm?

“What’s happening Jules?”

“She’s okay,” Jules answers, elevating his voice above the alarms. “And you?”

“Okay. What about the alarms? What’s happening to the station?”

“Mission control, what’s the status of ISS?” Jules asks on the open channel.

For a few seconds there is silence, and then static.

“Mission control, come in.” Jules repeats.

More static, followed by a popping noise.

“Mission control, what’s happening?” Sergey yells.

“Mission control, come in now,” Kiyoko demands.

“Sergey,” Jules says looking into the cupola and pointing.

Sergey looks through the glass and gasps. To the west, a mushroom cloud rising far higher than the ISS, appears over Hawaii. “EMP,” he mumbles, knowing that no amount of yelling or insistence would restore communication with mission con

“We have to check the status of the station,” Jules insists.

“I…”

“Stay,” Kiyoko sniffles, “I’ll go with Jules.”

Jules and Kiyoko disappear into Tranquility node and Sergey returns his attention to the cupola, where the view is disorienting. Satellites appear outside their normal orbits, and nothing seems to be in its normal place. He watches a weather satellite lose altitude, falling into the path of orbiting space junk where it is pummeled by debris, before breaking apart and assimilating into the mass. He witnesses several near misses and one spectacular collision which, thankfully, is far enough away to not impact ISS.

They are over Texas when he sees the first streaks rising above the north pole. The counter-launches from Kansas and Missouri are immediate, as is his nausea. Sergey leaves the cupola, struggling with dizziness and what feels like the start of a massive headache. He propels himself toward Quest, his heart racing as he pulls forward. Inside, he searches for the transdermal dimenhydrinate patch he hopes will bring him physical relief. Sergey finds it in the space suit and applies it to his arm. He closes his eyes and tries to will his heart to slow, his stomach to settle and his heart to stop breaking. He counts backwards from one hundred, reaching twenty-seven when the fire alarm goes silent. The other alarms have also abated and now, the only sounds are the proximity alarms.

He wants to believe this is good news, that Jules and Kiyoko are putting the station back in order. When his count reaches fifteen, he is interrupted.

“Sergey, can you hear me?”

“Yes, Jules, I hear you. Is everything back to normal?”

There is a slight hesitation and then, “Please meet us at Rassvet.”

Sergey bristles. Rassvet is the port where the Soyuz craft is docked. Were they considering leaving ISS?

“On my way, Jules.”

When Sergey reaches Rassvet, Jules is outside the Soyuz capsule, his face pale and grave. Looking past him, Sergey sees Kiyoko sitting inside, clutching the photo of Aimi to her chest.

Jules steps forward, taking Sergey’s forearm and directing him back towards Zarya module. “She’s insisting we return,” Jules says.

“Why, is life support failing?”

Jules shakes his head.

“Structural issues?”

Jules shrugs. “The station’s still functional, though the navigational system is fried. We may be losing altitude, but that’s not what concerns her. She’s insisting we return so she can find her daughter. She said she’s leaving with or without us.”

Sergey looks from Jules to Kiyoko and back. “What do you think, Jules?”

Jules sighs. “For us, there are no good options.” He looks back at Kiyoko. “If I had a daughter, I would go back.”

*      *      *

From the Cupola, Sergey watches Kiyoko and Jules depart the ISS. He lifts his hand, though he doubts they can see him and immediately feels the intensity of loneliness. The pull starts in his stomach and radiates outward until he feels as if he’s been sucked into a blackhole. He’s over the Mid-Atlantic Ridge when he loses sight of them.

In his fantasy, Kiyoko and Jules splash safely off the coast of Japan, are picked up by a science vessel and taken to Tokyo where government leaders assist in reuniting her with Aimi. “It’s okay, mama,” Aimi will assure her, “the missiles didn’t work. Can we go to the festival and get Choco Bananas?”

The fantasy provides some relief and his spirit is bolstered again when Africa comes into view, the twilight revealing a continent unscathed. Perhaps the concatenation isn’t as catastrophic as he feared. He rubs his burning eyes. The emotion of the past hour has been exhausting. With eyes closed, he thinks of Larissa, wonders what she is doing, whether she is afraid and who is with her to provide comfort. He vows he will never leave her again…and his mind slips into unconsciousness.

*      *      *

His eyes pop open at the sound of the alarm. Through the cupola the earth is dark. How long has he been asleep? He checks his watch. He should be seeing the sunrise, but instead… He puts his hand to the glass and feels tiny vibrations. His head spins with the realization that he is in the midst of a pyrocumulonimbus cloud. Soon the entire station is vibrating, alarms blaring.

He recognizes the alarm for abandon station, and realizes that the ISS is in catastrophic danger. His eyes brimming with tears, he tries to imagine Kiyoko and Jules safely in Japan, reunited with Aimi. From his window on the world he begins humming a song, then singing, “Here comes the sun. Here comes the sun. And I say, it’s alright…”

 

 

Image: Free-Photos via Pixabay

 

 

Dear reader, I fear my sanity is escaping.

The following account is written with intentions of importance, none of which include the provision of entertainment. I urge you, the reader, to heed the foolish actions detailed in these pages, for it seems increasingly likely that you too may one day find yourself in a situation as sinister as mine.

It began with an interruption. The day thus far had been spent mostly in frustration as I had attempted to untangle several theories of human cognition; I was at the precipice of a breakthrough when the door to my office swung open without the customary preceding knock and my thread of thought was snapped. Professor Hadleigh strolled into the room with a level of joviality that suggested a complete disregard for his mid-afternoon trespass.

“…as you can see, it’s quite spacious. It’s just Doctor Pendleton in here presently, but I’m sure he would be happy to- oh, Pendleton! Dear fellow, my apologies, I didn’t expect you’d be here!”

“Well it is my office, professor. Who else would you expect to find?”

“Don’t you usually have an undergraduate seminar around this time?”

“I cancelled it. The children never listen to a word I say, they can teach themselves for all I care!”

“You cancelled… why on earth would you- no, not today.” Hadleigh made a big show of biting his tongue. He’s quite insufferable as a head of department. He subscribes to a hierarchy determined by job title rather than intelligence or academic brilliance, because this is the only hierarchy of which he can be certain he sits atop. I despise him.

“I’ve just been giving a little tour of the university to Doctor tuh-woah-mist-oh, who’s on loan to us from karr-killer university in Finland,” Hadleigh spoke the foreign words with an irritating slowness and still managed to horrendously mispronounce them. “His work on cognitive empiricism has caused quite a furore in academic circles in Finland, and he’s chosen our humble institution as the location for a year-long sabbatical. I expect you’ll be eager to pick his brain, given your shared field of study.”

I noticed for the first time the figure standing beside him, a stocky young fellow with a rather vacant facial expression. The heavy little man’s bored demeanour persisted as he complimented Hadleigh’s pronunciation, who grinned proudly like a dog who’d received a treat.

“I was not aware that Karkkila had a university,” I said as I shook his cold hand. His grip was strong, which I supposed was unsurprising given his Viking heritage. In the moment before he made his reply I could hear a faint whirring sound, similar to that of a gramophone record spinning on the centre spindle before being touched by the needle. At the time I dismissed the sound as of no significance.

“Karkkila Yliopisto was founded in 1847 and is one of the finest academic institutions in Finland,” he stated, and the whirring stopped. The cadence of his speech was eerie. Listening to the words, one got the impression that they were merely sounds which had to be made in a specific order rather than words with meanings attached. I reasoned that I was simply unaccustomed to the lilt of the Finnish accent.

I informed Hadleigh that I really did have quite a lot of work to be getting on with, and I turned back to my desk.

“I’ve decided to put Doctor Tuomisto in with you, Pendleton.”

“Put him in with me?”

“Well, this office is intended for two. I know you’ve had it to yourself since Doctor Clemens left last year-”

“Doctor Clemens’ leaving was nothing to with me, as I have told you before! His work was abysmal, and if it were not me it would have been one of my colleagues!”

“Enough, Pendleton! Everyone in this department is required to share an office, including you. Your thoughts on the matter are irrelevant!”

So, it was done. The empty desk which sat opposite my own was dusted off and half my office was surrendered to a man hailed as an expert on human cognition, but who had clearly yet to master human interaction. The Finn’s saving grace was that he did not say much. All the things he did decide to verbalise, however, were decidedly odd.

“Pendleton, tell me the details of your current thesis.”

“Pendleton, delineate, if you can, the unifying themes of your numerous research papers on the subject of empiricism versus nativism within the study of cognition.”

“Pendleton, share with me your thoughts on Descartes’ mind-body dualism and your reasons for these thoughts.”

I did not take to the Finn at all. His skin had an unnatural, metallic hue and his dull eyes were unshakable. His joints moved slowly, and his centre of gravity appeared to shift with each footstep, as if his body was fighting against its poor design. If Finland is filled with people like him, it must be a very queer place indeed. I decided that I should very much hate to visit a place like that.

For a couple of weeks, I hated him quietly. Each time his joints wheezed as he moved about my office in his strange, stiff way, I tutted loudly. Whenever I looked up from my work to find him staring at me as though his eyes were recording my every move, I made a rude gesture (which appeared to perplex him). Each time he probed me about my research, I suggested he return to Finland, where he was clearly much better liked.

The event which tipped my annoyance into fear transpired on a Tuesday afternoon, when I was enjoying a rare moment of solitude in my office. I glanced out of the window at the gaggle of students who were sitting in the grass, enjoying the unexpected April sunshine, and then I spotted the Finn awkwardly traversing the path leading from the library to the Micklethwaite building. I groaned inwardly at yet another intrusion by the irritating foreigner into a quiet moment, when I saw him stop quite abruptly as his right eye popped out of its socket and rolled about on the path like a large marble.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing! None of the students lounging on the grass and loitering outside the campus buildings even noticed – they were much too immersed in their own idiotic conversations to notice that mere feet away from them a suspicious foreigner had spontaneously expelled one of their body parts!

The Finn looked around himself quite slowly, eased himself into a kneeling position, retrieved his runaway eyeball and carefully slotted it back into its socket. He carried on towards the Micklethwaite building in a manner suggesting nothing strange had happened at all.

That evening I returned home to find Hirsch, with whom I shared a small house at the time, sprawled on the chesterfield in the drawing room with his eyes half closed and a glass of red wine dangling in his limp grip, dripping onto the pages of the book lying open in his lap. I snatched the glass and he awoke with a start.

“Wha..? Pendy, what the…?” he sat upright and ran his fingers through his dark curly hair, as he often did upon awakening. I knocked back the remains of the wine and poured myself another from the bottle he’d left on the coffee table.

“The filthy European is a damned machine!”

“I feel this is a story which could have waited until I woke up more comfortably,” Hirsch groaned. He set the sodden book on the coffee table and lit a cigarette. “I’m getting a little tired of hearing about this chap, you know.”

“He’s not a chap! He’s a thing, he’s an it!” I told Hirsch of what I had witnessed and when I had finished he seemed irritatingly amused.

“So, what you’re telling me is that Doctor Tuomisto is an incredibly sophisticated automaton posing as a human, hellbent on stealing your research and thus ruining your career?” he chuckled.

“Yes! Why else would he appear in my life, watching my every move, asking all these questions about my work?”

“Ah yes, because your work is of great significance.”

“Oh, be quiet. I should’ve known you’d be like this, you always are after this muck!” I slammed the glass of wine back on the coffee table and stormed upstairs to the spare bedroom. Just before the door slammed behind me, I heard his taunting words chase me up the stairs.

“…yes, of course you’re right, Pendy, you always are! He’s a machine which has travelled across the North Sea specially to steal your fascinating research, because nobody else in all of Europe is half as smart or as brilliant as you are…”

Bastard.

I was certain of the Finn’s true nature, but as a loyal subscriber to the scientific method, I decided to gather more data before making any irreversible decisions.

The next day, the Finn wandered into the office and made a low hissing sound as it slowly lowered itself to a seated position at its desk. I had come to believe it to be some sort of mechanical necessity – clearly the spies at Karkkila University had not invested as much money has they should have into their pet automaton.

“Doctor Tuomisto! Just the man I had hoped to see, could you weigh in on something, please?” I was sickeningly cheerful. The Finn turned its head ninety degrees to meet my gaze.

“Yes, Doctor Pendleton. I am always happy to help.”

“Excellent. So, tell me – what are your thoughts on alumantheses?”

Its dark eyes bored into mine as it attempted to compute the nonsense word. “Alu… man… theses.” It tested the syllables.

“Yes, alumantheses. Thoughts?”

The Finn repeated the word once more. “I believe the subject of alumantheses to be of considerable intrigue and the area as a whole is deserving of further scrutiny. Don’t you agree, Doctor Pendleton?”

“Interesting, Doctor Tuomisto, very interesting indeed. Whilst we’re on the subject, what are your thoughts on diptherescence?”

Again, the Finn made a show of repeating the word slowly and pausing in mock consideration.

“I believe the subject of diptherescence to be of considerable intrigue and the area as a whole is deserving of further scrutiny. What are your thoughts on the matter, Doctor Pendleton?”

It had been programmed with a sentence template for use in response to unfamiliar terms. There was no doubt – it was a machine!

For several hours I seethed, infuriated at the insolence and utter weasly nature of the dirty worms at Karkkila University for being so threatened by my research that they would attempt to steal it, and at Hirsch’s disbelief that my research would be worth stealing.

I was sick of science being wielded as a weapon. I had devoted my life to the study of the human mind, and where had it gotten me? Out of ideas and barely middle-aged, sharing an office with a dirty foreigner for weeks before finally stumbling upon the discovery that it wasn’t even a real man.

Reader, it was this moment of utter mortification at my lacking intellect that drove me towards my downfall. I was sick of looking at the Finn. I decided to bash its stupid metal face in.

*      *      *

“So, Doctor Tuomisto, how are you enjoying our humble university?”

The Finn’s neck wheezed as it turned its head ninety degrees to look at me. “I am adjusting to your institution most pleasantly, thank you for asking.”

“Is it much different to your university in Karkkila? It is Karkkila, isn’t it?”

“Yes. My home university is Karkkila Yliopisto, with a student population of 8152, home of the Karkkila Bears, who have won a total of three pesäpallo games against competing universities. Pesäpallo is a Finnish sport in which…”

There was, as always, an abundance of words but a dearth of intelligent information. A further twenty-five minutes passed without incident or conversation. I pretended to write fervent notes for much of this time, all the while carefully listening to the sounds of my colleagues locking their offices for the evening and saying goodbye to one another.

By half past seven, there were no sounds at all from the corridor outside.

“Doctor Pendleton, you have been working for several hours. I am interested in your work. Describe it in detail, please.”

“Perhaps later,” I paused, as if a thought had just occurred to me. “Damn. I think I left some of my notes in the library. I’ll be back in a few minutes, Doctor Tuomisto.”

The Finn stood up so abruptly that its chair clattered to the floor. “I will retrieve your notes. I will return promptly.” The stupid machine clomped down the corridor, determined to complete the wild goose chase.

As its heavy footsteps died with distance, I darted out of the office and strode quickly up and down the corridor, peering into each office window. All of them were empty, with the lights switched off. There entire building was most likely deserted.

I darted back into my office and rifled through my desk drawer, my hand finding the paperweight, one of two objects I had ensured were inside earlier that day. The glass cube felt heavy and important in my hand, and I found myself trembling.

Behind the open door was the best place to hide, and I stood with the paperweight raised over my head, my left foot positioned slightly forward. I was ready to pounce. Several minutes passed and I wondered where the infernal thing had gotten to. Just as my arm was beginning to ache I heard a noise outside and my whole body jerked, flinging the paperweight into the door, where it bounced back and hit me square in the jaw.

Pain erupted in my face and I whimpered involuntarily. I set the paperweight down on my desk, retrieved the second object from my desk drawer and took a quick swig. The liquid pleasantly burnt my lips and eased the pain in my jaw. I had hoped it would steady my nerves, but it did not.

“Hello, Doctor Pendleton. I was unable to retrieve your notes from the library.”

I whipped around, then froze. The Finn was in closer proximity than I had anticipated and we almost collided. This was the first time I had been close enough to examine its dark, inscrutable eyes, and I wondered if perhaps the whole damned thing had been a product of my imagination. Were those eyes truly as lifeless as I had assumed?

Suddenly, the metal man looked quite human.

“Perhaps you would like to recite your notes, I would be happy to-”

The paperweight cracked heavily against the surprisingly thin metal which had been painted to resemble skin, and it was only when my hand drew back that mind caught up to body. The Finn staggered backwards. There was a large dent in its left temple and the whirring noise was louder than it had ever been previously.

There was no scenario in which I could leave this miserable job half done and escape unimplicated. I approached the spasming machine, raised the paperweight above my head and, god help me, I did not stop until the whole ghastly thing was finished.

Towards the end, it became difficult. Sparks flew from the Finn’s joints; its eyes were pinwheels and its entire body seized and shook. Suddenly the limbs flew away from the torso, shot past me and smashed against the four walls of my office, leaving the abandoned torso to clatter against the floorboards.

I was a murderer.

No. It was just a machine. Machines can’t be killed.

It was an interesting conundrum. What makes a killer? Does the victim require a certain level of sentience, or is the sensation of killing sufficient to change a person irrevocably from man to murderer?

As I knelt by the remains of the Finn and peered down at the mess, the torso swung upon on a hinge and I was sprayed with a thick black liquid. It stung terribly as it appeared to bond to my skin; I gagged on the smell and began to hyperventilate. I would later scrub my skin red raw in the shower, and it would be futile.

The black liquid has long since faded, after staining my skin for several days. The infection, however, has yet to fade. With each passing day I find it increasingly difficult to write as the muscles in my hands continue to inexplicably atrophy and my eyes lose their ability to focus. I have thrown blankets over every mirror in the house so that I do not have to risk catching sight of myself – once a man, then a murderer, now a spectre.

My body cries for rest but rarely finds it. My nights are fitful spats of broken sleep, wherein I am taunted by nightmares in which Finnish academics have tracked me down and threaten my life for destroying their spying machine. I am tired. Hirsch has left.

As far as I know, the remains of the Finn are still where I left them: locked in my office’s equipment cupboard, the only key to which is in my possession. In the days following the killing my telephone was ringing a lot, presumably Hadleigh wondering where on Earth I’d gotten to. It rings less frequently now.

I wonder each day about the true purpose of the Finn. Was it ever really trying to steal my work, or was it simply pushing me into a scenario in which it could douse me with poison? And if so, why? More importantly, who would build such a machine and send it to my door?

Such questions hardly seem relevant now.

I fear the Finns will come for me.

 

 

J.L. CORBETT is the editor of Idle Ink, an online publisher of curious fiction. Her short stories have been featured in Storgy Magazine and Preoccupied With The History Department. She owns more books than she can ever possibly read, and she doesn’t get out much.

 

Image: Gerd Altmann via Pixabay