Issue 4May 2011

22

4CONFESSIONS

SASHKA DRAKOS

10THE SCHOOL RUN

PAIGE SINKLER

12THE MUSE

KATIE WITCOMBE

16IDOLATRY

JOHN MCCARROLL

24I KNOW WHAT HAPPENS

ALEX LOCKWOOD

26SWANSONG

DAVE DENTON

32NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE

MARTIN POND

36W.H. AUDEN VISITS THE CAFE NORTH POLE

KIRSTY LAW

37ELEGY FOR T. KENNEDY

SARAH FIRBY

38KITE

JESSICA MANNION

40THE GHOST OF CHRISTMASES YET TO COME

BEN SCHWARZ

41MANUEL

SHEREZADE GARCIA RANGEL

42DAY OUT

G.B. LINDSEY

43OF ODDITIES AND COMMODITIES

JAY RUSSELL

44WRITER’S RETREAT

G.B. LINDSEY

45THE OTHERWORLD

LUCY COULT

46FOAMY GUILT

JENNI REAY

47FOOTSTEPS

JESSICA MANNION

48TIS BETTERTOM DIBB

50>EMOTICONS<

MATTY GUY

Cover Art by Steve Reynolds

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Hiding in the Pattern by Robyn Nevison

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ConfessionsSashka Drakos

[1][The room is cold and dark. You know he’s here by the rustles of shadow. Against the other wall.To your right.Breathing on the back of your neck. You don’t know how long you’ve been here or if you’ll ever get out. You don’t even know how you got here. Fear whimpers in your chest, but you push it back. It wouldn’t be so bad if he’d just talk. If he’d just tell you what he wanted. You’d give it to him.]

It’ll be over soon. Don’t worry.

[Something clicks in the dark and your throat squeaks with the scream you barely manage to swallow. Sweat prickles on your skin and you feel him close to you. You don’t know how you feel it, but you do. Like all the energy in his body is pulling at all the energy in yours. Your heart pounds and your breathing slows. You are soon-to-be lovers hovering on the precipice.]

I’ll be gentle. So gentle. You’ll be my special one forever.

[You want to flinch away as it trails down your arm. Cold. Smooth. The lightest touch but it shocks your nerves with electric force. Tears come and you bite your lip. Any second you’ll wake up and find this isn’t real. Any second, the lights will come up and your friends will run in laughing. Any second.]

I’ll tell you a secret.

[His breath is hot and strangely sweet on your face. You think of cinnamon lattes and that coffee shop down the street from your apartment. The barista you still haven’t worked up the nerve to ask out. You wonder if she’ll even notice when you don’t show up for your usual early morning coffee. You wonder if she’ll even be a little disappointed.]

They say it’s the way you walk. It’s how you maintain eye contact. It’s how you project your voice. It’s the way you hold your head up.

[This time it’s his fingers running down your cheek. They’re warm and dry and a little rough. You resist the urge to lean in just to have someone hold you and take away the edge. It’s getting so hard to hold it together. It’s getting so hard to believe you’ll make it out.]

They say it’s your clothes. Your car.Your home.Your first impression.Your pheromones. They have all sorts of ideas about what attracts one person to another.

[He’s so close now you can feel the heat from his body soaking into yours. You can smell fresh soap and the dampness of his hair. Lavender and cotton. And you can feel it. Close. Not poised to strike, but ready. Almost casual.]

Do you want to know why I picked you?

[You close your eyes and nod. Tears run down your face. You hope he doesn’t notice in the dark. You hope he

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doesn’t notice in the dark. You hope he does and decides to let you go.]

Do you really want to know?

[Yes, you whisper. Breathe. Your lips feel numb and shaky around the word. You wish he would just get it over with. You wish he would change his mind. He presses his mouth to your ear.]

You are.So pretty.When you smile.

[It’s dark, but you force a smile anyway. Falter with a sob and steel yourself to try again. You smile better and bigger than ever in your life. You smile like your life depends on it.]

Large mocha macchiato and an Asiago bagel at 8:43 every morning. Large iced chai at 5:17 every evening. You pay with cash and take a sip before you leave the counter. And then you smile.

[It’s in your side, sharp and cold. Your head spins and your legs get weak. You smile through the tears and the cry that lingers in the air. You hope someone feeds your cat. You hope someone calls your mom. Grainy light comes from somewhere and you see him leaning over you. Hetakes your head in his hands. Sweaty.Nervous. His fingers run through your hair.]

It’s always been about a smile.

[You close your eyes and feel relief.]

[2]I’m glad you wore the blue dress, I think as you try to hide your nervousness behind laughter all through din-ner. Anyone else would think we’d only just met.

I play along. They say it’s important to keep a relationship exciting. A little fantasy never hurt anyone.

It makes me think of the first time we did meet. You were so sweet and wholesome. You’d bumped into me on the stairwell and dropped your papers. I bent over to help you and that was the first time I saw your smile.

You have such a beautiful smile.

It’s cute that you insist on paying, with a defiant tilt to your chin as you inform me that you don’t expect anyone to pay your way. I win, in the end, because you’re watching a street vendor when the waiter comes by. When you realise you’ve been duped, you flush and stick your tongue out like a child on the playground. I could kiss you right then, but I’ll keep up our little game for now.

I’m really glad we did this, you say as we walk along the river front.

The lights reflect in the water like the stars we can’t see, and I know we’re coming up on your favourite spot. It’s that little circle near the bend where you like to eat your lunch on nice days. Once or twice, you’ve brought a co-worker along, and I’ll admit, I was a little jealous you shared your favourite spot with them and not me. With you walking beside me and your head tucked against my shoulder, I realise how petty a thing that was.We stop at the bend and you slide your arms through mine, tilting your lips up to be kissed if I choose. I know I will, but I’ll make you wait first.

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It’s getting chilly out, you say, snuggling closer. We could go back to my apartment.

I think of your little studio on the other side of town with its clutter and debris and mismatched furniture and it makes my skin crawl. When I ask you to move in, we’ll burn every last piece.

Let’s go to mine instead, I tell you. So we don’t have to drive to south side. I have that wine you like.

Your step back creates a vacuum between us and your eyes look cold and mean. How do you know where my apartment is?

I find myself getting irritated and try not to be. It’s been such a lovely evening so far; I’d hate to ruin it. When I don’t answer, you step back again and cross your arms over your chest. You’re not pretty when you do that.

Answer me, you say, and I can see that hint of defiance in the restaurant was a sign of things to come: I didn’t tell you where I live.

Don’t be ridiculous, I say. The perfectly nice evening is ruined because you have to be stubborn. Of course I know where you live. Just like I know you hate liquorice, but love sour worms, and you listen to AniDiFranco when you’ve had a bad day, but the Scissor Sisters on good ones.

You step back again, but this time you don’t stop. Your eyes don’t look mean; they look scared. How do you know those things? you ask, and you’re looking around but we’re all alone and that seems to scare you even more.

What’s wrong, honey?

Don’t – call me. That.

You hold up your hand to keep me still, but I’m concerned so I keep coming.

You should not know those things, you say, making your hands into fists. We only just met.

Stop that, I yell, and then I apologise. I didn’t mean to sound so angry, but I’m tired of this game. We met a year ago in the library.

You’re shaking your head as you say, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I met you yesterday at the coffee shop when you asked me to have dinner with you.

You’re still holding your hand up to keep me away. I’ve stopped chasing you.

No, I tell you, forcing myself to be calm. I asked you to have dinner with me because it’s our anniversary. One year from the day we met. It’s our first, so it had to be extra special.

[3]The first note came on Tuesday.

Typed. Single-spaced. Blue index card. Taped to my door.

I did it again.

Coming off a double-shift and wanting nothing more than a cigarette and a few hours of mindless, violent television, I ripped it off and banished it to the realm of Not-My-Problem. Something to do with the

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neighbours, or a friend with a misguided sense of humour.Really. Not. My. Problem.

A week later, there was another one.

This time it was the afternoon, on a lavender card.

I can’t stop.

For a moment, we stared each other down, this card and I. With less certainty, I peeled it off the door, left it on the kitchen counter and grabbed a beer out of the fridge. It wasn’t my usual brand, but it was cold and smooth, and I didn’t care. Every so often I would come back to the card and re-read those three words like they just might say something different.

By the third Tuesday, my sister said I should take them to the police. I promised I would, but as I stepped out of the elevator on my floor, I felt the breathless anticipation of first dates and dream job interviews. Would there be another one? What would it say? Who was leaving these notes on my door?

It was yellow this time.

Can you forgive me?

We paced my apartment, the index card and I. Forgiveness for what? I ran down the mental list of people I knew who might need forgiveness, and came up empty-handed.

I was definitely intrigued.

Still perusing the card, I dug in the freezer for my favourite microwave dinner. I could have sworn there was one left. Definitely been working too much. I’d have to remember to stop by the store after work.

I was hoping the fourth would give me some answers, or at least a direction to pursue. Like most things that have built-up expectations, however, it was wholly unsatisfying.

Pink.

I promised myself I wouldn’t, but…

This one got flung onto the counter with its friends.

No one likes a tease.

The linen closet gave me pause. Call it a quirk, but I separate the white towels from the blue ones. But there, perched nicely on top of the blue towels, was a fluffy, white one. I didn’t even remember washing those tow-els, but it wouldn’t be the first time I missed a few details.

For the fifth, I decided to be proactive.

I chose a green index card from the multicoloured collection on my desk and rolled it into my thrift-store typewriter.

My note was short and to the point: Stop dicking me around.

Halfway through my shift, I was tempted to make my sister go check for a response. It would only be

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Walking down the hallway, I felt my heart sink as I saw only one green rectangle taped to my door. Perhaps changing the rules had scared off whoever felt compelled to unburden themselves via index cards on stran-gers’ doors. Perhaps something had happened.

That worried me. There could be some stranger out there hurt or dead, or God knew what else, and I would never know what happened to him. Or her.

As I got closer, I realised my single line of typing was no longer alone.

Beneath it, in the same uneven type, was simply:

The new shower curtain is lovely. I ate the leftover ham.

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The School RunPaige Sinkler

You see him most days, pushing a buggy and tugging his eldest along behind him with brief commands. You exchange smiles in the stream of chattering heads, and your kids ‘It’ each other playfully as you pass. He’s new in this part of the city. Tall, quick, wears shirts with buttons. He’s probably in his early forties, but he pushes his pram with the enthusiasm of an occasional uncle. He chews gum.

You’re nearly forty yourself and well bedded down in motherhood. You’ve long since capitulated to the routines, unidentifiable smells, irrational conversations and fragmented moments of your livelihood. By now you can plan the entire week’s menu whilst reading the bedtime story. When your daughter interrupts with a question, you look at her for a second before checking the book’s cover to see what you’re reading. You ab-sorb her surreal comments and random decisions during the day and then, at its end, empty your pockets of its currency—wilted buttercups, an impossibly small tyre, a flattened gift bow. Precious only a few hours ago, now abandoned in your care.

Now that she is lodged in school, you return daily to a houseful of time. You stand in the abandoned kitchen, dust swirling through sunshine. Scanning the row of cookbooks, you wonder what you were thinking. The apartment seems crowded, as if the unscheduled day is a new visitor who must be entertained. Your neigh-bour two flats down, three kids in school, has started wearing lipstick again. Lipstick sounds almost ludi-crous, at her age, in your line of work. For what? You barely remember the colour of your own hair, exiled in overstretched elastic bands. The mirror offers no clues.

You can’t deny he’s made an impression. Not by standing out, but by blending right in, tacking through the school run unintimidated by the pavement mafia. Unlike most cameo fathers, he doesn’t hang back at the roadside, clinging to business on his phone. Instead, he leans against the railings at the entrance of the school, chatting to you all, laughing at his kids with affectionate deprecation. He is so calm that when he jogs past you one morning muttering “I’ve lost my son,” it takes you a minute to realise that he has lost his son, in the sense of an emergency. By then he’s already strolling back, pulling the boy to heel like a frisky pup. He seems to be a man in the sense of ‘man’ that has somehow become irrelevant.

So you know him and you don’t know him, but you rarely pass each other without some acknowledgement as you circle the perimeter of your children’s world. Every now and then he stops short and says “Oh,” rooting around his person, “I have something for you,” finally pulling from his black jeans a kids’ party invitation or Big Toddle sponsorship form. Time enough to notice he freckle on the tip of his ear.

You fall into the habit of taking this token on behalf of your child, thanking him and then mocking disap-pointment upon its examination, saying something like “Oh, I thought you meant for me.” And he falls into the habit of chuckling, his head tilting with a smile, as if trying to think up some harmless but enjoy-able riposte before your tin ships shove off again. His failure leaves something in the air. Even at the busiest times—tending to an after-school meltdown or jamming your kids’ gloves into pigeonholes, you manage to nod just before passing out of sight, like a bookmark in the chaos.

Then one day there is an invitation for you. In the kids’ toilets of the soft play place, where the hollering of thirty-odd birthday guests glances everywhere off the furnishings. He’s bent over a Lilliputian basin washing his hands when he looks up in the mirror and smiles at your reflection behind him. His son rushes out into the party. “I have something for you,” he says quietly, removing his chewing gum.

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The door closes, then locks, and you move towards each other, awkward until you find purchase in the famili-arity of a larger body tending to a smaller one. He loosens up, and you respond to his murmurs and move-ments like to a language you once knew. It is all so unexpectedly soft, sharp. Warm.

But the light—the cheap fluorescent light—throws down an antiseptic glare. As it is meant to, illuminating the darkest corners of unpractised events. And the toilets, though scrubbed three times a day, stink with the urgency of dozens of children who cannot control themselves. Its insistence gets between you, sticking to the soles of your shoes, sending you stumbling over his nappy bag. He pulls at your hair with clammy hands, and the cold basin saws dully against your legs.

The screaming outside redlines like panic, and suddenly you are too close to him, saturating with a rich scent that is not of your kin. You are now so close you can’t help but see in his face the edgy little boy he walks each day, tight red curls and runny nose, shuffling along in unfocused masculinity, opaque routine. You can almost hear him outside the toilet door, bent in unspeakable discomfort, banging, banging on the door for relief.

You can’t fling it open fast enough.

Artwork by Jonathan Lim

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The MuseKatie Witcombe

She has almost expected it to end like this. Cold, tiled walls that gleamed with condensation as if in mimicry of the oily rain which coated the window, distorting her view of the slate-grey November sky that hung over London like a virulent smog. A nurse, whose face was as starched and impassive as her pinafore, occasionally swept into the room to administer some undisclosed medicine or take her pulse. The nurse’s ornately folded headdress reminded her of the origami swans that her brother Tommy used to make. She would wear them in her hair, her black curls riotously uncontrollable before she had succumbed to the harsh symmetry of the more fashionable bobbed haircut, and feel like an oriental princess amongst the gentle dilapidation of the family farm.

This recollection, as painfully bright in her mind as the bleached uniform of the nurse, made her chest throb painfully and she resisted the urge to acknowledge and expose more of the memories that suddenly besieged her as one would unravel the colourful string of a magician’s handkerchief. A magician. Yes, that was safer territory. She had once attended a party where a magician, employed no doubt to lend an air of supernatural mystique and sophistication to yet another evening of mindless debauchery amongst strangers, had produced a grey dove, as soft to the touch as the first light of morning, and handed it to her. At the time she had practi-cally purred with pleasure, and insisting on procuring a gilded cage for the bird. How sad, she now reflected, that the only exotic avian specimen she truly wished to receive was a crumpled and rather grubby origami swan made by her brother’s slender fingers.

Oh, but the parties! An endless maelstrom of sequinned gowns, laughing faces, ornate hotel suites, cham-pagne flutes so delicate that they seemed to be spun from sugar. The constancy of the gatherings, and the likeness of each one to the other, made it impossible to differentiate between them. Instead, the years she had spent as the ingénue of the social circuit, that dizzying carousal of new places and new faces, could be con-densed into a single sensory memory. Even now, just walking past a florists at the end of the day and catching the scent of roses in bloom could trigger the memory of those balmy summer evenings when she had flitted from man to man like a hothouse butterfly.

The smell of the flowers had been so heady in the twilight of those gaudy, glittering nights, that one could almost detect the first traces of the decay which would have shrivelled the petals by morning. Sometimes she had felt like a rose herself; outwardly incandescent, heavy with the sense of her own polished sensuality, and yet perpetually on the brink of decay. She had once discovered the rotting corpse of a jackdaw in the cobbled yard of the farm, and beneath the feathers, still as soft as gossamer and pearly in the light, she had detected the writhing of maggots in the dark depths. She felt the same murmur of putrescence beneath her own glossy feathers, and shivered in the night to think of the hollow place where her heart had shrunk and withered like petals in the sun.

In her feverish dreams, memories of her childhood on the farm flickered and faded in sepia tones like a reel of an old film projected onto the back of her mind. In her weakened state she could not fight the regression into her past, and nor did she want to. There was comfort to be found in the half-forgotten images of cow-sheds and silken fields of wheat. The sycamore tree in the back garden which she had climbed as a child, los-ing herself in a dappled world of whispering leaves. The sun breaking through the foliage would create deli-cate pinpricks of light, like the embroidered collar of a dress.She remembered her mother milking the cows in the barn, surrounded by the bovine warmth of the steaming, stamping creatures. The edges of the wheat field would dissolve into the dusk at twilight as if the darkness were gathering the crops for some unknown deity.

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Around the gaslight in the kitchen, moths would gather and collide like lost spirits.

And coffins in the rain. Not so much comfort to be found in that particular memory. Her family had been de-stroyed by the Influenza epidemic and, like some blessed child saint, she had survived without a blemish. She had watched as they lowered her mother and father, her brothers, into the clammy earth and she had known that her childhood had died with them. London awaited, and a bleak terraced house owned by a dour great-aunt. Not that she stayed there for long. The bright lights of the West End beckoned, and she followed them as blindly as the moths which had once haunted the gaslight in the farmhouse.

In the end, it had not been so difficult to throw away her past and begin anew. The transition from chorus girl to leading lady had been a remarkably swift one, aided no doubt by her formidable beauty and willingness to share it with the many men that she encountered in her lonely rise to notoriety.It wasn’t long before the seedy backstage existence of the theatre was replaced by an altogether more enticingprospect. As the mistress of the rich she could play with those bright young things in the decadent apartments of Mayfair and Chelsea where, like a house of mirrors, each room led to another of equal beauty. And if she had to get her hands dirty to join in with the fun, it seemed a small price to pay. Where else could she go now? Back to her childhood on the farm, with dirt beneath her fingernails and flowers in her hair?

She had carefully constructed an image of herself based primarily on the film starlets in the magazines that she and her flatmate Margot would devour in the dingy bedroom they had shared whilst dancing in the chorus. Gold-tipped cigarettes, a laugh like the wind in a crystal chandelier, a coltish elegance and an air of impenetrable mystery were the key components in the new identity that she unleashed upon the world. She had practiced talking in a cut-glass accent for hours on end, until the gentle burr of her rural patois disap-peared as surely as a bruise fades from the skin. Well, one must always keep one’s cards close to one’s chest after all. The act was so convincing she almost believed it herself, but then she always had been a consummate performer.

And now she was a model. No, more than a model. A muse. The word had such exotic connotations. It made her think of odalisques reclining on velvet divans, of the goddesses, swathed in Grecian robes, that she had once seen engraved on the side of an ancient vase. The reality, of course, was rather different. Hours were spent arranging her position on the window seat so that just the right degree of wistful nonchalance could be achieved. The rose that seemed to dangle with such delicacy from her slender fingers was artfully posi-tioned by her lover, the artist. When he painted her, time seemed to bend and warp, like old wood left out in the rain, so that sometimes an hour seemed to pass in the blink of an eye and sometimes a minute passed as slowly as a fly drowning in molasses. She felt as if she herself were drowning in the suffocating silence of his studio.

When posing, her muscles would be strung as tight and tense as the strings of a violin. Tongues of flame ran up her arched back. The cold which stole in from the street through the draughty window crept into her bones and froze her blood. It was as if he believed that she was carved out of marble, or some other precious stone. A living monument who responded to his demands without resistance or complaint.Even when he took her to his bed, he would examineher body with the same clinical detachment with which he studied her profile whilst sketching. Sometimes she felt like a butterfly mounted in a glass case. She was a specimen to him, something to be preserved and displayed. But not loved. No, never loved.

It struck her as deliciously ironic that, whilst her name would undoubtedly be forgotten by those who would live long after she was dead, her profile had become immortalised in the artist’s celebrated portrait of her. Girl at the Window was regarded by many as his finest work, his masterpiece.

When she felt her slim waist thicken and the first stirrings of life within her belly, it failed to surprise her when he responded to the news with mute passivity, and perhaps the smallest flicker of repulsion. After all, now she no longer belonged wholly to him. What surprised her more was the strange woman who

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Artwork by Anthony Morris

woman who appeared in the apartment that same afternoon bearing an odd apparatus of tubing and syringes. Everything had been arranged. She was told it wouldn’t hurt.

Now the taciturn nurse was taking her temperature, deliberately avoiding her gaze and touching her skin only when necessary, as if moral depravity were contagious. It was as if she had ceased to exist, which in her delirium struck her as a rather comforting thought.She drifted in and out of consciousness, and the words of the doctor reached her as if from a great distance away, like voices caught in the wind. She heard in snatches the diagnosis which would render her obsolete in the eyes of society, that she had suffered ‘permanent dam-age’ and that ‘children were animpossibility’.

So it was finally confirmed, by a medical professional no less,that she had a gaping emptiness inside her, that she was incomplete and damaged. As if she hadn’t known that all her life. The doctor, failing to understand her bitter smile, ordered the nurse to administer sedatives twice every three hours and swept out the room. She was left alone once more with her restless thoughts, which collided in her mind to form a mosaic of memories.

The dusty wind that blew over the fields in the summer, perfumed with the wild flowers that grew amongst the corn. A flock of starlings outlined against the pale October sky. A bed sheet on the washing line outside her window, snapping in the breeze like the sail of a ship. And a paper bird hidden in her hair.

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IdolatryJohn McCarroll

Part IOn top of the mountain, waiting for god, Moses the prophet sat, wrinkles like ancient scars carved into his worn face, a mask with withering and yellowed eyes. They were watering from dust, from sadness, from age, from 24 years of ceaseless wandering, they were leaking drop by drop his life into the hungry sands, which would never be satisfied, not even when they enveloped him fully, leaving him brown and brittle, grinning with death’s rictus for all eternity.

God was late. He shouldn’t be, but He was late. The prophet shifted his weight back onto his heels and mournfully chewed on a piece of bread. The searing heat of the day had dissipated, leaving the cool blue night, empty save for Moses and the mountain, both slowly growing colder.

Involuntarily, he thought of the Gods of his childhood. Strange half-remembered figures from ages ago, before the prophecy, before the plagues. Even now, the litanies remained inscribed upon his weary heart, growing dusty from disuse, but no less moving. There was a king, a rent apart king, held together with linen and frankincense and power, who would judge them all. There was the one who weighed your heart, the one with the bird’s face and the eyes of ice, callously calling out your sins. Beasts of terrible form danced through clouds of incense to staggering rhythms, languidly copulating with the shadows, spawning kings and demons with equal zeal. These were the Gods he saw with his eyes closed, these were the ones whose voices he shut out, whose deputy he had slain, who lay unburied at the bottom of the reed sea, noble eyes plucked out by the unclean scuttling beasts.

The new God, the God of his fathers, of Aaron, of the Israelites was late. No statues of this God, just a fire in a bush, a rain of toads, a swarm of locusts, all the terrible plagues and catastrophes of a two and a half decade ministry, as his people wearily limped towards the promised land, leaving a trail of their dead to rot or be consumed by the vultures that forever trailed them. Moses shuddered, thinking of the fate that awaited him. The cornerstone of the royal philosophy; you must be preserved to live forever. The new god never talked about forever.

With a jolt of white hot pain that lanced through his guts and set his body to trembling, the prophecy began to manifest itself upon Moses. The agony began low in his spine and quickly arced upwards from his tailbone to his skull, alternately tightening and loosening his aged muscles . From deep in his chest something heaved, and he was thrown onto his back, grinding down into the sand and staring at the empty sky.

Soaked in his own urine, frozen and sweating in the night, the prophet screamed wordlessly as his body flopped and writhed like a broken puppet. Upon his lips a giant bubble of blood, like a scarlet pomegranate, grew larger and larger, ripening on his soundless screams and wetly glistening. With a soft pop, it exploded, sending thousands of tiny seeds into the night sky, glittering rubies as a counterpoint to the winking dia-monds of the night.

As darkness radiated inwards from his peripheral vision and his consciousness flickered and died, the proph-et, Moses, began to forget exactly who it was that he was waiting for, as images of a burning bush melded with older, ancient portents of beasts, mountains, blood, thunder, and virility. He worshipped silently his God and Idols alike as his body convulsed in the sand, leaving imprints in the shifting ground like wrestling demons and or battling serpents.

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Aaron of the House of Levi, high priest and rumored prophet, sighed and leaned forward, plucking a piece of lint from the robe he wore, a moldering treasure stolen from a sacked kingdom, years ago, when there were still kingdoms nearby to sack. Here in the desert, the robe was a curse, heavy and sweltering, the bottom rag-ged from dragging over countless miles of stinging grey sands. He never took it off. Moses had the gift, but no way to express it; his voice a menacing inarticulate moan, tongue chewed off long ago in a divine fit. Moses the ascetic, soaked in blood, ranting about vengeance and milk and honey, hardly needed the robe.

Aaron used to have the gift. Now he had the robe. There had been a time when he had bested the gods of the oppressors. That had been years ago, and all he was left with was an empty voice, Moses’ tool. When you had nothing of your own to say, it paid to look like a king, even a slowly decaying one.

Now, Moses was on the mountain, hearing the voice of God, and he was in his tent, breathing shallowly in his looted silks, bound tightly around his throat with a golden clasp shaped like a seashell, hearing the com-plaints of his people.

“Your Eminence,” began the priest, wilting under his master’s withering indifference, “ we have a situa-tion with, the-” he rethought his wording, “our people.” He ran a hand over his shaved head nervously, “they want-”

Aaron cut him off with a sardonic snort, “-Food? Water? Gentile wives? Do they grow tired of the desert?” Moses was the voice of God, and he was a bureaucrat, another hebrew slave scribe. Even after almost three decades, it rankled.

“No, excellency,” the younger priest said, reaching into his robe and revealing a miniature bronze trinket, a voluptuous woman with lapis lazuli eyes, “they want a god.” He placed the trinket on the ground with an un-seemly amount of reverence, kissing the hand that had held it surreptitiously . Aaron noticed the gesture and wondered silently.

“A god?” Aaron’s voice sounded hollow and tired, even to himself, “What of the God of our fathers? Who delivered us from our bondage, who-” He stopped abruptly. The priest looked far too young to have any memories of bondage, of the plagues, or of anything but sand, dust, and manna, the swarms of sand lice that, in times of need, the Israelites would eat.

The younger priest was resolute. “The Gentiles have their gods, they have Baal, and Ishtar, and Hubol, and thousands more-” he paused and swallowed rapidly, “all of whom are nothing but a mote in our Lord’s eye.” He looked at Aaron, who slumped morosely in his chair, draped in faded silks embroidered with the names of another’s god. He looked tired beyond comprehension, faded and broken.

The priest rallied himself, muttering a prayer that he had heard from an Abyssinian raider they had killed in the desert. “Their Gods, High priest,” his voice settled into a rhythm of haranguing unconsciously adapted from a childhood of Aaron’s long sermons, “Their Gods can be known. They have idols, glittering colossi that inspire, while all we have is your brother, the mad prophet. They say we had Gods of stone and wood during our bondage. We now need a God of Gold, greater than all the other peoples of the world.”

Aaron raised an eyebrow and brushed some of the eternal dust out of his greying beard. The young priest, encouraged by the signs of interest, continued louder and with obvious zeal.

“Excellency, they say that you too were a prophet, chosen by God. Moses is gone. It has been four days, and we all know that he was unwell. Glory to him, who led us out of our bondage.” The priest, shaking with en-thusiasm, stepped closer to Aaron’s throne, “But what greater glory to you, excellency, for delivering us from our darkness. Give them a God-” he seemed to think for a moment, and then proudly continued; “Give us a God, excellency, and guide us from the desert in our hearts.”

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The speech over, the young priest stood, hands spread in supplication, while Aaron sat silently. He remem-bered the idols, Yahweh Elohim, carved out of sand-blasted caravan wheels, his divine form roughened and unrecognizable, an insignificant deity compared to the unblinking wadjet hanging from the necks of each slave master, or of the granite-carved faces of ancient kings, Gods since birth.

Aaron remembered his miracle, his staff of wonders, swallowing up the trickery of the Pharaoh’s wizards and sooth-sayers, while his brother drooled and moaned in the corner, limbs of a poisoned spider. It had been twenty five years since his miracle, twenty five years of being a voice without heart, of smoke without fire. Heedless of the younger priest, who gazed at him curiously, then impatiently, and who finally left, walk-ing backwards and bowing at the tent’s door, Aaron, High Priest of Yahweh and one-time prophet sat and thought.

For the next day, he moved like a dreamer, avoiding the other Israelites, Levites and commoners alike. He muttered to himself in Hebrew and Egyptian, quoting scriptures the others never knew existed, wrapped in his cloak of office slowly fading in the sun. The people began to whisper. If prophecy ran in the bloodline, might not madness?

That evening, as the ram’s horn was blown to declare the Sabbath and the fires were put out, Aaron led the chants, rituals from before the captivity, before his people became slaves. Wreathed in twilight with the rising moon illuminating him from behind, Aaron spoke to his people, his voice the voice of old, which had shout-ed at the wizards “Let my People Go,” which laughed and rejoiced as the king of the known world was swal-lowed by the brackish water. The voice, which was, to the eldest among them, the voice of God itself.

“By many signs has our God, the God of our fathers, made Himself known to us.” Aaron trumpeted, letting his cloak of office fall from his shoulders and standing straight and unbowed before the people, “ He has called down the plagues, he has delivered us from servility and cringing. He is the one who made our grand-fathers’ grandfathers out of dust and blood, who slew the races of the wicked in forty days of floods, and he will lead us to a land, overflowing with milk and honey.”

The people cheered, sensing the sharp edge of portents and destiny cutting the night with the wind, flaying and invigorating their flesh.

“Tomorrow evening, when the day of rest is finished, my priests will gather a measure of gold from each among you.” The prophet’s voice keened above the rising desert wind, the cry of a hawk seizing a hare, “the fires will be stoked, and our hard-wrought treasure will shape our God, a golden Calf, eternally young and flush with His power, endowed with great curving horns and fierce hooves of obsidian to crush and toss aside those who stand in our way.”

The wind lifted the heavy cloak from his feet and tossed it aside as the cheers of the chosen people resonated throughout the starlit dunes into the ceaseless night sky.

The calf was as he had said. Standing as high as a man’s shoulder, with horns half again as tall. Its eyes were of lapis lazuli, its hooves were of obsidian, and it was carved intricately with the holy glyphs copied from the treasures of a host of people, proudly crowned with the Ankh of eternal life. The people anointed it with oil, and celebrated its glory. They called it a miracle. They stayed for five months in the same valley, content with their God and their prophet, raiding the rich kingdoms to the south for their bread.

Dazzled by the heat radiating off the sand, eyes fixed on the wheeling hawk over the horizon, Ra, master of the winds, and blood dripping from his mouth, tongue again shredded by prophecy, Moses made his way down from the mountain. His feet were bare, his beard was grey and caked with filth, and his stomach was swollen and empty. He sought neither food nor drink, but gulped greedily at the dew-fattened locusts that flew unerringly into his mouth. In his arms he carried two rough-hewn stone tablets with words that he

19

couldn’t read or remember.

Over the thirst, over the weight, over the heat, he could hear the voices of the desert speak to him, unnamed and un-worshipped dune gods, dust gods, dry and dead gods, buried under a mile of sand. He thought of Hapi, from whose bosom flowed the mighty Nile, which had delivered him in a basket to the palace of the God-Kings. His king, his once brother, rotting like a blasphemer at the bottom of the sea. Moses shook with fear. When his time came, would any god claim him? Who would preserve him for his eternity?

He trembled and fell into the sand, thrashing like a mule with a broken leg, then righted himself and followed the hawk towards his people. Inch by agonizing inch, with each step his head lolling onto his chest, bowing to each and every deity on his path, Moses tried to remember what message he was going to give, and from Who it came.

When he finally stumbled into the camp, the fires were stoked into infernos throwing dancing and twisting lights upon the people, gathered in a circle around the glittering calf. On either side of the idol were cap-tive desert people, slowly bleeding to death and tied to tent poles, while directly in front of the idol, a young woman with a painted face and high bosom spread her legs invitingly, the fire failing to illuminate the sanc-tum of her thighs. A slender priest stepped forward and mounted her, and the crowd chanted in turn with his thrusts the forbidden name of God, gradually gaining in intensity until the entwined figures lay spent and panting at the foot of the watching idol.

Into the silence, Aaron strode, bare chested and covered in red paint, blood, and wine. His every movement was silken and graceful, flush with power and adulation. The crowd roared their approval as Aaron casually slit the throat of one of the bound bedouins, blood soaking quickly into the sand without a trace.

Aaron began the litany, while Moses, from the outside of the circle unnoticed by all, began to feel the fires of prophecy within himself, like a wasp larvae tearing through the skin of a beetle, to emerge glistening and free, leaving the host to leak green ichor and die twitching. The two tablets he had carried from the mountain dropped and shattered, and neither he nor the Gods paid any heed.

With a wordless bellow, he thrashed through the circle of worshippers, falling upon his knees in the shadow of the great calf, croaking a string of meaningless and mangled syllables. Eyes focused on the writings and arcane symbols on the idol, like whirlpools mixing the Gods of his childhood with the God of his fathers. Moses gave himself to the multitude of voices that raged in him, the powers that reigned over his princely heart .

Aaron recognized his brother with a sinking heart. He felt himself thrust aside. Something came over him, and he shuddered and began to speak in a deep voice, his brother’s voice. Bound and impotent, he intoned Moses’ words to the crowd. I have returned. The people watched, stricken with silence, as the two communed, Aaron’s will submitting to his crazed brother.

Glory to our Elohim! The people cheered.

Moses moaned, Aaron spoke: Mine eyes are glad to see such a spectacle, our lord Triumphant, and strong. Yet, let us not forget the due of, they paused, the whole world seemed to pause, as Moses the prophet listened to the voices on the wind, hearing all the arcane prayers, holy or profane that careened through the spirit-haunted sky. Osiris, lord of the Dead, Ra, who moves the Sun, Isis… they continued, naming the pantheon that had forever claimed part of the prophet’s soul, each name invoking greater and greater cheers from the god-starved Hebrews. From within the crowd, glittering idols, bone phalluses, animal-headed monsters, and sacred shapes passed forward, secret holies carried for 24 years on the sands. The idols were arranged by the Levite priests next to the calf, greatest among lords, Yahweh triumphant and generous.

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From on the ground, staring up at the blood-splattered calf, Moses barked out one last order, duly translated by his brother, Let us celebrate our Gods, who will deliver us in this world and the next! His maddened and bloodshot eyes stared at the golden Ankh perched between the calf ’s horns. He reached up for it, grasped at thin air and fell silent. Unconscious, he was carried by the priests to Aaron’s tent, as the celebration swirled and danced around the expressionless icons, sadly attended to by Aaron, one-time Prophet of Yahweh.

Part IILimbs akimbo in his brother’s bed, Moses dreamt with his eyes open and rolling. In his dream he saw him-self, dressed in his old Egyptian finery, in the middle of a desert valley, sinking to his waist in sand. From one of the hills around him came a voice, echoing and booming and washing over him.

-Idolater

Moses could say nothing, but raised his hands in supplication.

-You ignored our laws, and you have become abhorrent to us. You have made a pact with our rivals

Moses tried to pull himself out of the sand, only to have his hands sink in to his elbows. He heard the cry of a hawk and the whistle of a swift descent. With a soft thump, a charred raptor with stunning blue eyes hit the sand in front of his face, sending up a cloud of smoke and dust. Moses moaned, trying to form the word “who”, with his broken mouth.

-I am that I am. We are what I am. I will become who we were. The gods of your people. The God of your Fa-thers. You have failed me, you have broken our laws, the terms of your people’s freedom. You were warned : You shall have no gods above me

The valley boomed with the pronouncement, and Moses despaired of death and the inevitable oblivion.

-Maggot, your flesh is still mine, riddled with Idolatry as your soul may be. You must stamp out the blasphemers, the priests who lead the sinners. Cleanse them. By knife and fire, by cord and axe.

Moses nodded, groaning. The sun wheeled in the sky and disappeared. He grew cold. The sand shifted and then he was in water, salty and foul, his arms and legs bound. He sunk fast towards the bottom of the sea, ra-diating a soft luminescence. His eyes fell upon the remains of a great army, drowned by divine anger. He set-tled on the gravel floor next to a skeleton in a golden chariot, rich silks floating over fleshless bones, cleaned to ivory by the vile sea beasts. Moses screamed and the water rushed in and he knew nothing.

With a wild roar, Moses jolted up in his brother’s sweat soaked bed. Gasping for air, he pushed off Aaron’s ministrations, and began to prophecy, fatigue and weakness shed like a cobra’s skin. In Aaron’s voice: Aaron, you have offended our God.

“Brother, what are you saying?”

You are as an insect in the eyes of the Lord.

Moses reached up with a clawlike hand and grabbed Aaron’s beard. With all his strength, Aaron tried to resist Moses’ words bubbling up inside of him, slapping and rending at his own flesh, but was overwhelmed. The calf is blasphemy. The idols are abhorrent. The rituals are perverse. Aaron fell to his knees, pleading at his brother’s feet, “I had no idea, Adonai, my God please -” His pleas were cut off by his own voice, proclaiming the divine wrath. You are but a worm. The lord cares not for your groveling, yet ye shall be spared. Call your trusted warriors, for your house must be purged. Weakly, from the floor, spattered by the blood from the

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the Prophet’s mouth, “It will be so.”

The sun poured through the tent flap, and dappled the Prophet and High Priest with its light, glittering off of their naked iron. They stood in the entrance of a tent of the Levite tribe, their kinsmen and priest of the cult of Yahweh. The priests were attending to the idol, leaving just the women and children in their communal home. Aaron stepped forward, ignoring the greetings of his family with tears running down his face, and translated Moses’ vile groans.

You have turned your back on your God. You have consorted with serpents, you have defiled the holy days, you have chanted the names of demons. You -

“I’m sorry,” he whispered in his own voice. Forcing it out like an arrowhead from a wound.

- are to be cleansed.

Aaron closed his eyes and lashed out with his blade, smiting an ancient woman. Chaos filled the tent as Moses screamed and frenzied, rending apart those nearest him. Those who escaped the tent poured into the hands of the warriors, hard-eyed and anointed, who dispatched them without mercy.

They moved from the tents of the women like a wildfire, consuming each and every member of the Levites, until they came to the golden calf and the other idols, surrounded by the priests, armed only with ritual dag-gers. Aaron looked towards Moses, who appeared to be in a fugue, covered in gore and filth. Apparently there was to be no decree from God for this massacre. He wearily signaled his warriors to murder the last of his kinsmen, who died almost without complaint, protecting the idol of his lord.

As the last priest fell stricken into the pink hued sand, Moses and Aaron strode towards the Golden Calf, careful not to tread on the icons that were arrayed in around the statue. The massacre was complete, and the last two levites, God’s voices on earth, surveyed their work.

“What of the idols, Moses?” Aaron asked, his powerful voice cracked and dry. “Shall we destroy them?” The prophet shook his head. There was a fine line between idolatry and common sense. Even now, bolstered by his God’s strength, he could hear the other ancient voices raging and promising untold torments. He tilted his head meaningfully.

“We move?” Aaron asked. The prophet nodded and screeched.

To the Promised Land! Aaron held his bloody sword aloft and strode towards his warriors and the crowd of onlookers, who scattered in fear towards their dwellings. We will leave this place of villainy tonight! Children of Israel, break camp for the land of milk and honey.

Alone among the dead, Moses reached towards the calf, caressing its golden flanks, and wordlessly reciting the prayers in many tongues that adorned its sides. With a rough chop of his blade, he separated the Ankh from the calf ’s head and tucked it into his robes, leaving without a backward glance at the dead littering the ground, already beginning to bloat in the desert heat, or the rows and rows of silent gods who would guard them as their bodies corrupted and beyond.

Sixteen years later, the Israelites marched towards the promised land like a trail of tiny black ants, while on a mountain, the Prophet and High Priest, last of the Levites, waited for God. The years weighed heavily on Aaron’s once proud and strong form, leaving him grey and broken, while upon Moses’ prematurely aged vis-age, there had been almost no change. For the first time in forty years, they looked like brothers, shrunken and maddened raisins.

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God was late. Aaron was glad, for this was their punishment, denied the honor of marching into Israel with their people. He had been the voice of God for a man’s lifetime, yet had never seen him, but had, once when he was a young man, felt His touch. After the blood of his kinsmen stained his hands, he retired from public life, save when Moses needed his voice. He had become tainted with dishonor and madness, the pariah-king, outcast emperor.

Moses appeared to be facing his death with equanimity, sitting silently like a lamb led to slaughter. A gradual tremor in his limbs announced the presence of the divine, quickly increasing to a fit of thrashing and scream-ing. Voices exploded from each stone around him, poured from the sky, and bubbled up from his flesh, a cacophony united in anger.

-False Prophet! screamed the sun, eye of Horus the great.- Betrayer! screamed his drowned brother, God on earth, denied his eternity.-Moses the forever damned- So he was named by the Ibis headed God, who opened the Prophets chest with a copper blade and removed his heart. It was held aloft red and glittering, and then with a birdlike cry of retri-bution, tossed into the pit.

Aaron stared in surprise as his brother trembled and shook, moaning and whining in his broken voice with nothing, just a patch of empty air and dust. Aaron’s voice translated as the prophet grew weaker and col-lapsed.

My God! Where are you? There was silence, just the wind over the mountain. My God! The prophet gnashed his teeth weakly. Osiris, my lord! Forgive me, Isis, mother, succor your servant, brother, God, Devil, Angel, have I not done your work? My masters, don’t let me- he screamed with terror and anger as his vision blackened, Don’t let me rot!

With his last strength, Moses, Prophet, Murderer, Idolater, and Liberator, clutched the Ankh of eternal life, displaying it to the heavens, pleading for the life beyond life he had spent his years dreaming of.

Silence reigned on the mountain as Aaron stared at his brother’s corpse, clutching a blasphemous icon. He recalled with numbness his brothers last desperate bargaining with thin air, invoking the thousands of voices that spoke to him in the wilderness. The God that called for murder, that called for forty years in the Desert, that had ridden and broken him like a mule- just one of the many voices of the great wasteland.

Aaron , for the first time, spoke to God in his own voice, “You are the burning bush, and we are the fuel. You have swallowed us up like the snakes of the magicians, eaten our entire forsaken lives. We are still slaves, we will always be slaves.” He laughed at the laws of God, laughed at his people laying waste to their kinsman at a word, and laughed at himself, nothing but a reed flute, discarded and crude. He laughed until his laughter turned to coughs, and the coughs into gasps, and until he too departed, choking on his own blood. Above the two corpses a flock of great vultures wheeled and banked, while above them was nothing but empty blue sky.

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24

Artw

ork

by M

erlin

Flo

wer

25

I Know What HappensAlex Lockwood

Their meeting is impromptu and they set out to visit a gallery on the quayside. It’s too windy to walk that way, really, but without talking how can they change their plans?

And then they do. To a gallery just round the corner. They take a route through the city library. They’ve not seen each other for six days. When they spoke last, she chastised him for not calling while he was away. He didn’t see it coming. He thought it was a nice break. He realises that’s his preference.

They stumble into an exhibition of the Diary of Anne Frank. He doesn’t know the story in detail—how long, for example, they managed to stay hidden in the secret annexe in the back of her father’s office. He follows the progress of the story through quotes from Anne’s diary. Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor. Kristellnacht. Hiding. Betrayal. Separation. Departure.

He is struck by the quote: ‘I want to go on living even after my death! And therefore I am grateful to G-d for this gift, this possibility of developing myself and of writing, of expressing all that is in me. I can shake off everything if I write; my sorrows disappear; my courage is reborn. But, and that is the great question, will I ever be able to write anything great, will I ever become a journalist or a writer?’

He feels the responsibility of asking: what happened to that ‘o’? If only I could l-ve, he thinks, just for a m-nth, and w-rry about n-thing. Fear grabs him. It shakes him and asks: but will it be en-ugh?

He bends down and puts his hands on his knees as he pushes his nose against the pictures of the British soldiers liberating Bergen-Belsen. What they found there ‘shocked’ them, but he doesn’t think he knows what that word means if it can be written so easily. Sh-cked.

He reaches the final stand, a stall with information about the Anne Frank Foundation. He thinks he should do something with them. Volunteer. Write.

She comes back from where she had gone off to browse the library. She looks up at him and sees his watery eyes. She makes a cooing sound. ‘It’s okay,’ she says. And then as they walk away, ‘that’s why I don’t read to the end. I know what happens.’

Later, he understands. He always leaves a crust on his plate. He never reads the last paragraph of the news. It took him a month to watch the final episode of Battlestar Galactica. Always some remnant. He thought it was a lack of concentration. But he thinks now it might be something more terrible than that.

26

SwansongDave Denton

The knocking woke Val from her familiar dreams of waves and lights. She blinked a few times, before the scene took shape. Queeny howled and jumped on the spot, hackles raised, her remaining teeth bared. She peered through gluey eyes at the clock on the far wall. Two in the morning. Who was knocking on her door at two in the bastard morning? Kate, Maybe? No. She and Kate had exchanged barely two words in over a year now. Police? No. Val knew a copper’s knock when she heard it. This knocking was quiet, restrained even, but with a quiet insistence that suggested that the visitor was prepared to rap at the wood until either it or their knuckles had been worn away.

She levered herself off the sofa, manoeuvred around empty gin bottles and peered up the hallway. Through the glass in the front door she could see a black shape mosaicked against the street lights. Instinctively, she looked over to Daniel’s armchair for reassurance, but there was only Queeny, gummy and half-blind. She shuffled up the hallway, fastened the safety chain and opened the door.

A man shivered outside. He hunched against the drizzle, one arm crossed over his stomach. The rain plas-tered his shirt to his body, cruelly exposing his thinness. The glow of the street lamps hollowed out his eyes and gave an odd, diseased tone to his skin.

‘Can I help you?’ she asked from behind the door, leaning down to shush Queeny.

‘You Missus Stutterman?’ The man’s voice was thick and phlegmy.

‘Miss Stutterman, and who wants to know?’

‘Can I come in?’

Val’s mouth moved silently, until she found her voice.

‘I don’t bloody think so. Don’t know you from Adam. What you after?’

‘Please,’ said the man. He leant heavily against the door frame. His hand, covered in blood, reached up. ‘Let me in.’

She screamed and slammed the door in his face. Pressing her weight against the wood she struggled to con-trol her breathing. The knocking started again.

‘Miss Stutterman? You there?’

Her conscience hissed at her; she had shut a man, wounded and in need of help, out of her house. Heart in mouth, she removed the safety chain and opened the door. The man’s legs had given way and he knelt on the ground in front of her.

‘I’m sorry pet, I’m so sorry,’ said Val. ‘I saw the blood and got scared. I didn’t know. I am so sorry. Get in-side. I’ll call ambulance.’

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She helped him to his feet and offered him her shoulder. He was light. Under the weak bulb she could see him more clearly. He was young; about the same age as Daniel. His eyes were the colour of rainwater and small blue veins ran like cracks through his white skin. She tried to stop her eyes wandering down to the red mess beneath his ribcage. She led him through to the kitchen and sat him down, handing him a towel to press to his wound.

‘What in the hell happened to you?’ she asked as she dialled emergency services.

‘I fell,’ said the man, resting his head against the table, the white towel now crimson. ‘I think I landed on… I dunno… a fence post or something.’

‘Bugger me, but it don’t half look nasty.’

‘Aye,’ said the man. ‘It killed me.’

Val didn’t move. She became very aware of the faint draught from the back door and the weight of her tongue in her mouth. The clock ticked and tocked; helpfully dividing the endless silence into units of time. The phone pressed to her ear rang and rang. Nobody picked up. All that was left of the world was Val, her half blind dog and the dead man. She forced herself to laugh and the world lurched back into life.

‘Don’t be such a drama queen. You’ll be fine,’ she said. She couldn’t manage the smile to back this up and so turned away from him. ‘Eee, what’s wrong with these lot? Emergency services my arse. If they don’t pick up soon, you really will be dead.’

Queeny padded over and lapped at the blood puddling on the floor. Val pushed her away with a foot.

‘Nobody’ll come, Miss Stutterman,’ said the man. ‘They didn’t before.’

‘How exactly do you know my name?’ asked Val. She wanted to turn round and confront him, but her body was too heavy. The phone continued to ring.

‘Daniel told me about you.’

‘My Daniel is dead.’

‘Aye, he told us,’ the man scratched behind Queeny’s ears. ‘Told us about you an’ all. Said you were a good sort. Bit arsey, but a good sort. Said that anyone willing to put up with his singing must have the patience of a saint.’

She span round and hurled the phone handset at him. It hit his shoulder and fell to the floor. The ringing continued, further away than ever. He looked slowly from her, to it and back again.

‘Get out,’ she said. ‘Get the fuck out of my house.’

‘Y-you kicking me out?’

‘Too bloody right. I don’t know what the hell you think you’re playing at, but I’m not having it. This your idea of a joke? You think it’s funny?’

‘Sorry,’ said the man. ‘I didn’t… I didn’t mean no offence.’

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‘You’re sorry?’ she said. ‘I’m bloody sorry for letting you in here in the first place. Sling your hook, before I call the police.’

She picked up the still ringing phone.

‘You can’t throw me out,’ said the man.

‘Just you watch me, mate.’

‘But I’m dying.’

‘Shove it. You’re no more dying than I am. You’ve got one of your arsehole mates to dress you up or some-thing. Thought you’d have a right laugh, didn’t you? Well I’m not having it. Fuck off.’

She grabbed the man by his collar and tried to lift him to his feet. He slid downwards, crumpling on the ground. She tried to haul him up by his waist. Her hands slipped on the blood and plunged into the wound.

He screamed.

Val stumbled backwards in shock and fell on the floor. Her stained fingers rose to her face. They had been inside him. She had felt the heat, felt things move. She looked back to the man writhing on the floor, tears streaming down his face.

‘Oh, God,’ she stammered, scrambling to her feet. ‘Oh, Jesus wept. Please… please don’t die. I’m sorry. Don’t die. Hold on. Wait right there. I’ll knock up the neighbours. Their phone’s got to be working.’

‘Wait,’ said the young man, through clenched teeth. ‘Please, wait.’

‘I’m so sorry, love, but my phones knackered. I’ll be gone a moment, I swear.’

‘They won’t hear you,’ said the young man, curling into a quarter-circle.

Val went to his side. His brow was shiny with sweat and his eyes were rolled back so that only the whites were visible. His lips moved noiselessly and his hands pawed the empty air. She stroked the side of his head, shocked by the coldness.

‘I know you don’t want to be left alone,’ she said. ‘But I’ve got to get help. Next door will be able to ring for an ambulance. You’ll be alright pet, you’ll see.’

His hand gripped her wrist, hot blood contrasting with cold flesh.

‘You can call them, but they won’t come,’ he said. ‘You can shout and shout until your lungs burst, but nobody’ll answer. It’s just like the first time.’

‘The first time?’

‘The first time I died,’ he said. A fresh burst of pain spasmed through his body, curling him tighter. The hand that gripped Val’s wrist let go. She paused, rubbed where his nails had broken her skin, then leant forward to embrace him. She cradled his head in her arms, stroking his wet hair and whispering empty reassurances until the pain began to ebb.

‘What happened to you?’ she asked.

29

‘I was so angry with her,’ said the young man. ‘Me girlfriend, that is. Not that she cared. She’d have already been on the plane by that time with… with…’ He paused and looked at her. ‘Funny. I can remember hating him… but can’t for the life of me remember his name. I left the house. Told meself that I was going to keep walking until I passed out and woke up some place new. I went right through through town, up to the old quarry. You know it?’

Val nodded.

‘Yeah well, it was dark,’ said the young man, ‘and I’d had a bit to drink and I fell. At least I think I did. One minute I was walking along thinking, the next I’m staring at the stars. I tried to get up, but there was some-thing pinning me to the ground. I looked down and there was this huge piece of wood sticking out of my stomach. I touched it. It was weird, kinda like I expected to feel my fingers pressing against it. It was grow-ing out of me, parts of me were all over it, but it wasn’t me. You get me?’

He coughed with such ferocity that Val thought his lungs might come out of his mouth. When he looked back at her, his lips were black.

‘You poor thing,’ she said. The words small and unconvincing, but all she could think of.

‘It didn’t hurt,’ said the man eventually. ‘At first anyway. I kept trying to stand. But then it grew. It was like there was something inside me, underneath me skin, trying to force its way through me ribs. And it was noisy. I don’t know if I can explain, but there was so much noise, just this… it wasn’t even a scream. A scream would be something, but this was nothing and it was so bloody loud.’

‘How long were you there?’ Val asked stroking his head.

‘Dunno,’ said the man. ‘It felt like forever. I was yelling as loud as I could, to make myself heard over the noise. But nobody came. Sometimes I lost the words, just started howling. I yelled for hours or days or weeks, but there was no one there to hear me.’

Val said nothing. She imagined him lying there, pinned in place by the stake through his stomach. Ani-mals watched from the undergrowth, waiting . He screamed for help, but nobody heard him. They couldn’t, because the wind picked up and threw his voice away from the shore that seemed to be getting further away every second. His legs kicked weakly and sea water fell down his gullet. On the horizon, torches and search-lights twinkled like far off stars. She thought she could hear voices, but that could have been the wind or the waves or the thunderous silence that grew somewhere in the darkness behind his eyes.

The young man’s nails dug into her wrist and she snapped back to reality. His head had slumped in an awk-ward angle and she could see his lips moving. She moved his head into the crook of her arms and realised that he was singing. The words slipped out of his mouth, half-formed and barely audible, but the skeleton of a song was there. She pushed his hair back and his eyes flickered open, taking a few moments to focus on her.

‘What were you singing?’

‘It was a song me mam used to sing for me when I were little,’ said the man. ‘But I can’t…. I don’t remember the words. Could you sing it for me?’

‘I don’t know the words either.’

‘It doesn’t matter. I just want to hear a voice.’

30

Val closed her eyes and tried to think of a song. Nothing came to her, but, feeling she had to do something, she opened her mouth and a tuneless dirge fell out. She paused briefly, embarrassed by the sound of her own voice, but the man squeezed her arm and she continued. Slowly the song took form, the aimless notes merg-ing into a half-remembered melody. Words began to appear; silly, stupid ones about kissing in a bus stop in the rain. When she had finished, she wiped her cheek, surprised by the tears.

‘That was nice,’ he said. ‘What was it?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Val, staring out her kitchen window. ‘Danny used to sing it when he was getting ready to go out. His dad taught him it, I think. Drove me up the bastard wall. Always the same bloody song, night after night.’

‘No, it wasn’t,’ said the man.

‘Oh yes it was,’ she sniffed. ‘Trust me mate, you have no idea. I had it every night for eight years.’

‘No, it wasn’t,’ insisted the man. He coughed again, more blood. ‘Every time he sang it, it was different… he was different… you were different. That’s what I miss, I reckon. There’s no new voices, you see… out there. Once the noise stops, all you get is what you’ve already heard, again and again and again. There’s no new ways of singing.’

Val sat silently, the ticking of the clock and the dripping of blood a metronome for her thoughts.

‘He misses you,’ said the man after a long minute. Val continued stroking his hair. The room in front of her blurred and she wept.

‘Then why isn’t he here instead of you?’ she managed at last. ‘I don’t know you, I don’t need you. I need him; I need to say goodbye.’

‘But you’ve said goodbye,’ said the man. ‘You’ve done nothing but say goodbye for the past two years. And he’s heard it. He heard it while you were still stood on the shore, he’s heard it every day since he left and if he were here now he’d just hear it again. He’s dead. All he’ll ever have is what he had. You’re not. You should be singing songs you don’t know.’

Val sniffed and stared out of the window.

‘What about you?’ she asked after a while.

‘I never got a goodbye.’ He attempted a shrug.

Val nodded. On the floor beside her the phone continued to ring.

‘What’s your name?’ she asked.

‘Anthony. They used to called us Anthony.’

‘Goodbye, Anthony.’

* * *Hours passed. The birds sang and the sky turned bruised yellow. Anthony’s breath rattled in his throat and he died for the second time. Val closed his eyes, brushed the hair out of his face and laid him on the floor. She lay down beside him, her forehead touching his, and slept.

31

* * *‘Hello, 999. Could you please state the nature of the emergency?’

Val’s eyes flickered open. Slowly the kitchen came into focus. Queeny scratched at the door, asking to be let out, the clock ticked and tocked on the far wall and a disembodied voice crackled from the phone handset. Blurrily, she picked it up.

‘Y’ello?’

‘Hello, madam. This is the emergency services. Could you please state the nature of your emergency?’

Val lowered the phone and surveyed the kitchen: It was a mess. The dishes needed doing, the floor needed mopped and she’d been using eggcups as ashtrays. There was no body. She looked down at her clothes. They were unflattering, crumpled and dirty from having been slept in. There was no blood. She inspected her hands. They were clean. The crackling voice from the handset interrupted her thoughts; she blinked at it a few times and hung up.

She got up, wandered from room to room for a few minutes, slumped in her armchair. There was something different, a change in the atmosphere of the house: the air was cleaner and her lungs breathed easier. Maybe she should go to bed. No, there was no time. The house was a state, Queeny needed walking and she really should ring Kate and catch up on the crack. Plenty of time to sleep when you’re dead. She got up, grabbed a pencil and paper and started making a list of all the things she had to do. She sang quietly to herself as she went.

32

Artwork by Russell Montford

33

Near-Death ExperienceMartin Pond

He watches the girl as she runs across the park.

She must be about eight or nine, he thinks – any older and she would not be towing the helium balloon along behind her in quite such a carefree manner. She’s still at that age when she is not self-conscious about being a child, or the trappings of childhood. In a year or two she would cringe if her school friends saw her running around in the park with a party balloon, but for now she is still a child.

Her hair is a black scrawl that suggests she doesn’t like having it brushed – that would change in a couple of years too. Her coat is a candy-pink confection with a fur-trimmed hood that bobs lightly as she runs. Her leggings are a little on the short side – she has nearly outgrown them. There are red LEDs on her trainers that flash with each footfall.

It doesn’t take long for him to locate the girl’s mother. She is walking some way behind, talking animatedly into the mobile phone that is clamped to her ear. Her other hand is thrust deep into the pocket of her heavy wool overcoat. Her hair is the same colour as her daughter’s, he notes, but unlike the girl’s it is immaculately groomed. The mother is walking slowly – sauntering, even – and is falling further behind the girl with every pace. Some maternal instinct surfaces enough to recognise this, and he watches as she pulls the mobile’s mouthpiece away enough to call after her daughter. He can’t hear what she says, but can guess. “Don’t go too far, darling,” perhaps. Or, “Wait when you get to the gate.” He doubts that the girl can hear her either.

He checks the clock – it’s almost time.

The mother’s phone conversation must have become more serious, he thinks, because she has stopped walk-ing altogether now, her head dipped in thought. Then she begins to turn slowly on the spot, as if this will help her focus on the phone call in some way. He wonders if she will regret this later. Meanwhile, the little girl runs on, in loops and spirals, each stride she takes causing the balloon to lurch after her in a series of halt-ing leaps; each stride she takes bringing her closer to the gate where she is supposed to wait, and closer to the road beyond it.

He pauses long enough to consider the chain of events that has brought the girl to this point, and to wonder – not for the first time – whether they might be random or somehow pre-ordained. Is there such a thing as fate, he thinks? Is the girl destined to slip on the muddy grass near the park gate, causing her to put out her hands as she falls forwards? Is it karma that she should let go of her balloon so near to a busy road? And is it some higher being’s divine will that causes all this to happen to the girl at an age when she stills care enough to chase after a stupid, silver balloon with Disney’s Little Mermaid on one side?

Or is it just bad luck?

He watches as the girl jumps up, unhurt, and, after giving her muddy hands a surprised look that is almost comic, looks up to see where her balloon is. It has been caught by the lightest of breezes and is drifting lazily away. Inevitably, it starts to gain height, but only slowly – its vaguely crumpled look suggests that the balloon has already lost a little helium. After a second’s consideration, the girl seems to decide that she can catch the balloon if she runs fast enough, jumps high enough. And so she sets off, her eyes fixed on the length of rib-bon that dangles temptingly just out of her reach.

34

He looks back across the park, seeking out the mother. She is still deep in conversation; the previously pock-eted hand is now out and making expressive gestures, despite the fact that the person on the other end of the mobile cannot see them. She is wearing black gloves with a fur trim around the cuff. Her long black boots say that she is a serious businesswoman, a hard-arsed, tough-nosed businesswoman that you just don’t mess with. He imagines the clip-clop that these boots would make, savours the thought, as he watches her pivot one foot on a pin-heel. He watches as she throws her head back in apparent exasperation.

But back to the main action. The girl is running, arms out-stretched, eyes aloft, straight towards the gate. Her mother’s warning, even if she had heard it, is forgotten now. In a freeze-frame moment, he can see that she is smiling – laughing, probably – and that she looks optimistic; even as the balloon continues to rise, she some-how thinks that she can get it, if she can only run fast enough, jump high enough.

The car is a small, blue Ford. The registration plate suggests that it is a good deal older than the girl, and the flowers of rust that are blooming around its wheel-arches confirm this. The driver is young though, surely only in his late teens. He is wearing a baseball hat that proclaims his support of Manchester United, and sun-glasses, even though it is not sunny. His window is wound down, presumably for the sole purpose of broad-casting the unfeasibly loud hip-hop he is listening to as he drives. He is speeding too, the tiny Ford’s engine revving enthusiastically. That and the hip-hop might have drowned out any shouts of warning, but there are none.

He watches the girl as she runs into the road.

There is a single precious moment of calm, between her sudden appearance in the road and the car’s impact. In that moment, the girl realises what she has done, perhaps hears the engine. In that instant, she turns her face sharply away from the balloon and just has time to look directly at the car. Adrenalin, speed and the vi-tality of her youth give her time to fling open her eyes impossibly wide, to open her mouth in a perfect O. But there is no time for her to scream.

The Ford hits her before the driver has even had time to brake. In slow-motion, the bonnet (barely crum-pling) seems to sweep her off her feet, and then she is spinning, a pink and black cartwheel, up and over. Her head thumps into the windscreen, creating a perfect splintered bullseye in the glass where, later, strands of the girl’s bloodied hair will be found. As she tumbles over the roof of the car, she flattens its aerial. He watches it spring back up again as the Ford, fishtailing slightly as it screeches to a halt, deposits her in an unnatural heap.

At first glance, she doesn’t look hurt, her coat perhaps disguising the extent of her injuries. There is some-thing unnatural about the angle of her right arm, the way it is bending like that, like someone has moved the elbow, and looking closely, he can see blood creeping around the girl’s hairline. Her mouth still forms an O but her eyes are half closed and without focus. She has lost one of her trainers – he sees it lying in the gutter further up the road, its red LEDs still flashing, and wonders what it must be like to be hit so hard it knocks you out of your shoes.

It is the screech of brakes that attracts the mother. He watches as she turns to locate the noise and then, finally taking the mobile away from her ear, she is running as fast as she can in those boots, shouting something that might be the girl’s name but is hard to make out because it is becoming a scream.

The driver of the Ford is ashen-faced, staring blankly at the steering wheel, trying to comprehend what has just happened. Something – perhaps the mother’s scream – gets him going again and, after a moment in which he perhaps contemplates driving away, the Manchester United fan instead removes one shaking hand from the steering wheel and turns the ignition key back, silencing the engine.

35

He watches the girl as she dies in her mother’s arms.

Then he presses stop and ejects the tape. The hand-written label on its spine reads ‘RTC – CHILD’. He puts the tape carefully back into its slipcase, then files it neatly away on the shelf above his desk, where it sits in a long line of matching hand-written labels, between ‘LEVEL CROSSING CRASH’ and ‘AIR SHOW DISASTER’. When his hands have stopped shaking, he fishes the last Marlboro Light from the packet by the television, and sits back in his chair to smoke.

36

W.H. Auden Visits the Café North PoleKirsty Law

Smoked salmon in my opinionis an overrated dishbut please feel free to tryparticularly picked fish.

in their absencevegetables are conspicuous.

Half rotten shark and tail of whaleshould certainly be tried althoughowing to the smellshould be consumed outside.

Beware the browned potatoes,a Danish barbarism.

Most unspeakable lemonadeand very unfortunate soupsthat taste of scented hair oilhard macaroni and sweet milk.

Pickled sheep’s udders aresurprisingly, very nice.

About The PoemThe poem is made up from fragments of an excerpt from Auden and MacNeice’s ’Letters From Iceland’. Auden’s reaction to Icelanic food and culture made me chuckle.

37

Elegy For T. KennedySarah Firby

My thoughts of wolves are troubled, now.They are aging academics,paperback in one handRohypnol in the other.Home-wreckers, vandals.Lurking, aimless and pathetic,Leering.

But once upon a time wolves were simply,as you put it:The best.The cleverest.The strongest.Most cunning animalthat ever graced a woodland path.

In conversing with birds,they were peerless.Their eloquence inimitable.Their foresight incredible.Their teeth irrelevant.

And older, looking for proof;Looking for these storiesto defend the wolvesagainst slander,accusations of deviancyor, worse still,of inferiority to foxes…I found nothing.Turns out you made them.And so they are gone.I did find one faithful account(in the usual place)Wolves: teaching, wisdom.Chance for escape.

Artwork by Steve Reynolds

38

KiteJessica Mannion

spun spindle full of filamentstretched out and shining—stretched—so farin sky so brimful blue italmost makes you cry—the end of it—that string-parttwined around the spool—how stupid—wasn’t tied—!how stupid—careless—children are—it’s lostthe kitethe bad-blue ate it up—and happy past-time’sflown away to sad—the boy who held ittrailed along behindeyes just that shade of blue as skyto search it out—so sad—the kite—the string—so long—ate up by thunderousnothing-cloudsand yet he watched the sky ‘til he forgotwhat bright sharp shape it held

will you remember then, the boy?ate up by nothing thundering to lifeto rend the flesh it fed uponto silence—rendered itself as seen in onlytoo-late cat-scans, MRIs, and tests—rendered as x-ray clouds that glowwhen held to artificial light.but he would never choose that, no,that hopeless clutch to make-believenor fuss about the details:“take me home,” he said,and so we watchedthe string furl outwe knew it wasn’t tiedthat there was not a knotto stop his soul from flyingwhen the string—ranout.

39

About The Poem

Kite was written for my brother Glen, who died of cancer on October 10, 2005. The story about the kite is real: it happened to my sister Eileen and Glen when they were kids. She remembered the incident and told me about it, and the poem just kind of wrote itself. We all still miss him every day; he was a gentle, funny soul.

Artwork by Mayling Tam

40

The Ghost of Christmases Yet to ComeBen Schwarz

The moon is ill.

A black tire swings from theBroken arm of a treeRobbed of its sling.A bike hangs twisted through the hole likeHalf-chewed spaghetti.

We woke up one morningTo find the curtains hiding no window.The church bells are ringing lopsidedIn an empty wind,And no-one has seen a birdIn days.

The TV is broken,But we sit in the empty roomAnd stare at the empty screenWondering who is digesting whomAs nobody talks to nothing.The smell of ozoneReminds us of the Queen,And when we used to scream trivialitiesInto each others’ ears.

We hold handsAs a single black flakeFalls from the sky and smudgesOn your forehead.

Three children,With nails longer than teeth,Scrabble into the alleysTo snort the ashesOf a Christmas tree.

Artwork by Rebecca Yeh

41

Manuel Sherezade García Rangel

As dawn opens the nightThe blankets weigh on him more than before.In the day, his time is kidnapped.In the night, no one expects him to get up.

The old house, this big room, in the closet an altar;belong to someone that’s gone.He knows he’s not supposed to,but he wonders when it will be his turn.

The tree by the window wilts,On the radio, they are not playing his song.At times he thinks the fight is useless;At times he feels it should be won.

There’s a picture on the dresser,Yellow corners and a plastic frame.In it, he holds me and I laugh;In it, we didn’t know.

Artw

ork

by H

arrie

t Rol

litt

42

Day OutG.B. Lindsey

The road winds like a top.They want to pass,red hot candy on a slow curve.My knuckles white around the wheel;You glance back—ApologyThe muck from stables clings to your bootsbut the stomach says no shower,only lemon chicken in glossy bowl.Chinese jumble wavers intoKanji shapes,yellow sauce licked from fingertips.My fortune is generic,yours soaked in soy.Rain-tapped glass andI have no umbrella.My bedside is piled:Mary Barton Udolpho Eyre…Vague business says you cannot staywith me.Quiz time:Fingers fly over keys,de gozaro yo!Down in the quarry,I can hear you laughamidst the trees of Stevenson college.

43

Of Oddities and CommoditiesJay Russell

We’ll take all the rule books and each page we will rend,Loose perceptions of reality seem to buckle and bend.

Men without eyes lead you to seats,The idea of normal seems to retreat.

Oak trees and pines hang from the ceiling,Organic walls numbed without feeling.

An eternal circus replete with odd sounds,Nothing off-limits we are free without bounds.

Intentions are viewed through specterialiscopes,No need to abandon or lose all your hopes.

Farm animals teaching and reading aloud,And their multi-limbed farmers appear very proud.

Precipitation leads to fluorescent rain,Strange things of beauty and a world without pain.

Checkerboard suns illuminate all,This world awaits just answer the call.

44

Writer’s RetreatG.B. Lindsey

Rain patters wind smatter.Words scatteredgetting later.Two pence on the hot platedtable. Weightedunderstated.Opinionated.Opinion hated.Commiserater, writea pattern.Doesn’t matter:Ego shatterson the shutterswith the rain.

Artwork by Assel Kadyrkhanova

45

The OtherworldLucy Coult

Love songs smother, an abundance of promise in 3 minutes. Reality suspended

An illness, addiction

She won’t recover.

21, still young, little girl

Songs are promises, promises- her escape into hope.

It’s always best on the metro home.

Silent lumps sit stiffly around her. The day’s grime and rain soaks through their socks.

She changes the song.

The steam on the window warps her view on the world (all for the better)

An assortment of somebody’s half empty plastic bags shiver cold drips off onto the train floor and someone coughs

but she doesn’t hear it, she feels warm with the music in her ears.

The track ends.

Her stop. All change. The crowds as one body trudge up the stairs.

At the exit, the mass of migrating raincoats and squeaking shoes disperse away from the jaundiced light of the metro station, and into the late autumn gloom.

She walks behind them. The crowd become mere silhouettes, their outlines lit up by the glare of awaiting taxi cabs.

The taxi doors slam. Shivering, she chooses to walk.

The sky is black; softened only by a solitary star.

She stands on the empty street and turns her head up towards the abyss.

Then glancing back down, smiling,

She chooses another love song

And dances home in the dark.

46

Foamy GuiltJenni Reay

A Starbucks cup mind fuckHalf-caf-skinny-cap-coffee-flavoured syrupWith a cloud on topWhipped cream, sex tasteFour hundred per cent mark upOn a load of old beansSeattle grunge sounds swirl and echo in the murkFair Trade, Min-wage, Have a nice day mermaid.Clicking fingers, pot smoke and bongo poetry,Lost at the bottom of a disposable plasticReceptacle.

Photo by Diana Afanador.

47

FootstepsJessica Mannion

Foul beasts! Iamb scaredSpondee; sly Pyrricdoth pounce! And balefulBacchic bites toothsomeDactyl, just for fun.Amphibrach–she waitsfor long, dark minutes,‘til out pokes Trochee …SNAP! goes head … all quiet.Anapest stops, then stirs,then circles, then curls.Hearts beat. Poems asleep.

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Artwork by Assel Kadyrkhanova

49

Tis BetterTom Dibb

The Tunnock’s teacake wrapperI hunched over after lunchAnd flattened against the tabletopTore slightly at my clumsy ministrations.I cursed my lumbering, too-rough thumbsAnd returned with the gentlest strokes,Until I held a fragile silver leafIn this coarse, unwieldy palm.

I gazed a moment atThat perfect imperfect sheetWith its folds that refused smoothing(By my hand at any rate)And I wondered at such a small beauty,Which was only really for me.But still, I stood and paid and left it thereFor anyone else who cared to see.

50

>Emoticons<Matty Guy

A colon:Dangerous in the hands ofParentheses (use of brackets).A closed bracket opens a heart,An open bracket breaks it.A capital ‘P’ is playful, andSemi-colons make things cheeky;But all we want is upper-case ‘D’Or something more – less than 3.

Artwork by Diana Afanador

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