Aesthetica Creative Writing Award 2023

Published by Aesthetica Magazine Ltd.

This collection is compiled from the winners and finalists of the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award in 2022, organised by Aesthetica Magazine .

© The Aesthetica Creative Writing Anthology. All work is copyrighted to the author. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means without permission from the Publisher.

ISBN 978-1-3999-4309-3

Aesthetica Magazine 21 New Street York YO1 8RA, UK info@aestheticamagazine.com www.aestheticamagazine.com

All work and texts published have been submitted by the author. The works featured in this collection have been selected by judges appointed by Aesthetica Magazine . The Publisher therefore cannot accept responsibility or liability for any infringement of copyright or otherwise arising out of the publication thereof.

© Aesthetica Magazine Ltd 2022.

Cover image: Adriana Mora, Vitra Design Haus. Courtesy of the artist.

Special Thanks to the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award Jury

Ansa Khan Khattak, Haleh Agar, Liz Jones, Luke Neima, Naomi Booth, Naush Sabah, Niamh O’Grady, Nick Makoha, Oz Hardwick, Sabhbh Curran, Wayne Price.

CONTENTS POETRY

Bathing mother, seen from the back – a zuihitsu

The Summer Of My 25th Birthday Women’s Locker Room

Infinitives

Cist

At Once the River Cucumber and the Catbus Club

The Language of Flight My physio tells me a joint cracking looks like fireworks on an ultrasound Dreams one dreams when about to divorce Having Something a Little Stronger with You

After Frank O’Hara’s “Having a Coke with You” The night before demolition, Mary Street, 1970 Ramadan

I run with Dad

My Sister and I Went Down to the Missile Silo

The Swimmers : 24th February Four tiles from a calendar mosaic of chronic illness

A Benediction: Permitting the Absence of Tears While Mourning Thanks a lot, Shakespeare, for the Starling Good and better lies

At Ed Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations, God Tops Off His Tank The Life Elsewhere

When Things Stopped Being About Steve The only time I ever cried at the gym Unreal City

PIP

Every Time I Call, I Break The News Of My Diagnosis

Montage Theory Memory Foam Frost diary of a dead eel boy

Luna Quantum Decoherence inner courtyard Hell Mouth

Love Poem for the Twentieth Century Extradition of Drug Lord Dudus Coke: Barbican Girl Dash Weh Tivoli boy Shark Freedive in Swordfish Season Ode to Whiskey A Conglomerate Emergency with Incremental

FICTION

Raise Elbistan Sicko The Wailers Three Sailors Reassurance

In Language Strange The Etymology of a Sword Swallower  Protection April The Stone A Letter to Julia Different Ways to Drown End Times Discourse Over Takeout Noodles

Beyond Words My Predictable Life A Man Digs A Grave Beyond The Low Wall The Empty House Vocation

60 62 64 65 66 68 70 72 73 76 82 87 92 97 101 106 110 116 121 125 130 135 140 146 152 157 161 166 170

Poetry

There are many, many definitions of what poetry is, many of which are intriguing and many of which are contentious. My personal preferences edge towards the enigmatically metaphorical – Gray’s “thoughts that breathe, and words that burn” or Sandburg’s “echo, asking a shadow to dance” – but even these, I’m sure, can cause heated debates if they’re quoted in the wrong circumstances. Consequently, I’ll just leave those hanging there and turn to the possibly less sensitive subject of what poetry needs. I’m not talking here about things metrical, lexical, intertextual, or metaphysical; rather, what I think we can probably all agree on is that poetry needs time.

Yes, poetry needs time. It’s an evident but often overlooked truth that –sometimes front and centre and sometimes ticking along at the periphery of our awareness – permeated our panel discussion as we made our final selection of the poems for this anthology and decided upon the ultimate Award winner. As any number of How to Write books will tell you – as if you didn’t already know – a would-be poet needs to make time to write and, as the better books will also tell you, to read. What they don’t tell you, though, is how much time this amounts to. In part, of course, because it’s a question that’s impossible to answer, but I suspect that it’s also because, if such things were quantifiable, it would scare off all but the most stout-hearted, thereby knocking the bottom out of the How to Write book market. Put simply, poetry requires a hell of a lot of time.

In the poems which we found most exciting, time is a crackling presence. They are poems which, probably even before their writers were conscious of beginning their composition, were wriggling about in the accumulated mulch of understanding which comes from spending time reading and thinking about poetry. And they are poems which have been nurtured over the time needed to be the best poems they can be. Nothing here takes up a lot of printed space, but amongst, around, and within these printed words it’s possible to sense – feel, even – the time they contain. They, in turn, ask the reader to suspend everything else and to enter into their negotiation of time. Whether working through an apparently simple idea by way of everyday diction and regular form, or smashing together voices, concepts, and scattered temporal and geographical spaces, these are poems which are confident enough with time to pinch and stretch it in irresistible ways that ripple in the reader’s perception at each encounter.

When, after much reading and rereading, we gathered to share our thoughts

and finalise details of the anthology you’re now perusing, we read our favourites aloud, balancing their movements on the tips of our tongues and – fanciful as it sounds – tasting their time. Yes, you can taste time, as easily as you can feel it (or hear it, or see it, or – sniff! – smell it). Or, at least, you can when it comes to you through a well-written poem and, make no mistake, there are very well-written poems here indeed, each one of which we commend wholeheartedly to your time.

This year’s award goes to Bathing mother, seen from the back – a zuihitsu, an ambitious work of angles and fragments which, circling from ekphrasis to domestic lyric, via ecopoetics, succeeds in being immediately and powerfully moving before it’s fully grasped, fulfilling Eliot’s dictum that “genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.” We found it unflinching in its unsentimental humanity as the discrete elements of verse coalesced into that final, unlikely connection. It is testament to the quality of the rest of the work herein, though, that although the decision was unanimous, it was not reached without much deliberation, and amongst a number of very strong poems herein, we’d particularly like to commend Good and better lies, which holds so much in the spaces which are left for the reader. A lot of poems about “issues” (in the broadest sense) forget to be poems –a thing that this, most emphatically, remembers.

If I was going to add to the How to Write market, it would probably be a very short book indeed, and would essentially just say “give poetry time.” Maybe that’s what poetry is: ink plus time. It’s no better or worse than any number of oft-quoted definitions such as those with which I began. Having said that, in the pages that follow, you’ll find no shortage of “thoughts that breathe, and words that burn” or “echo(es), asking a shadow to dance.” And as for a parting thought with which to conclude this introduction: give these poems time and – equally important – allow them to give you time.

Oz Hardwick Chair, Poetry Prize, Aesthetica Creative Writing Award

Oz Hardwick has written seven poetry collections, most recently Learning to have Lost, and has edited several more, including (with Miles Salter) The Valley Press Anthology of Yorkshire Poetry. Hardwick is Professor of English at Leeds Trinity University.

Bathing mother, seen from the back – a zuihitsu

i. she’s fragile in the shower this morning we are such a long way from the old tropes of seeking understanding forgiveness

ii. Images keep intruding – Bonnard’s paintings of a woman’s legs, out straight in the bath, from the back standing, washing at a sink, in aqua and lemon bathrooms carbonated with Cote d’Azure light. It’s my mind – searching for comparisons in the file of manageable images, with which to grace the smallness of her rounded shoulders, linen fold at the base of her neck, cropped bob, legs scribbled with biro, body hair in honeysuckle tendrils.

iii . After breakfast-in-bed she says in different ways am I free to go? at one point in desperation I say I’m not the Dalai Lama , no one is that good.

iv. I walk around all day with my skin on inside out she tells the vascular consultant I’m a bully

v. The silver birch’s silky phantom-white skin is like no other bark.

vi. I wonder how I may hasten the rewilding of the European wolf. vii. Continuous shifts in the day’s perspective. Seconds thwack by on the cheap, black wall clock that looms over my son’s room – time is tiring.

viii. [things my mother gave me] (rarely) the top of the milk a handmade needlepoint of cherry blossom anxiety matching skirts on Christmas Day shares in the Airedale terrier loathing for the skin on custard a life-long cold sore indifference

ix. Bonnard’s Intimism magnetic suggestion of what lies behind a bowl of milk, a cup of coffee, her body magnified in bath water

x.

wolves are gentle and intelligent wolves are a threat to civilization xi. this is how I see her now I cannot unsee her I have cut her into portions the weight of her on the hoist of my body bent-wood feet her toes like polished roots gnarled above the soil xii. Betula pendula seldom live beyond 50 years. This pioneer species colonises land after disturbance or clearance, starts to rebuild native broad-leaf forest. Here is one rare veteran in Sheringham Park, after 100 years, skin roasted to a perpetual tan.

xiii. [firsts] I clip my mother’s nails, assiduously file the corners smooth – am soothed by the quiet continuous conversation of the file with her fingernails she directs me popping out the week’s pills: small round blue, peach lobes, red and white plastic pellets bright as lighthouses, pop art black-and-white, butterscotch triangles incised with a line, various as her button tin xiv. you can kill a birch tree slowly by simply driving a large copper nail into the trunk of the tree xv. At night in the outgrown rhododendron forest – in the young birch groves, by the mauve light of a foxglove colony – wolves will one day weave between the tangled limbs. xvi. Late in life Bonnard wrote letters to himself as if from friends and family. My dear child , a letter from his ‘mother’ begins. We’re just waiting for you.

Jane Wilkinson

Jane Wilkinson is a landscape architect living in Norwich. She was shortlisted for the Manchester Poetry Portfolio Prize 2022. She has won the Poetry Society’s Hamish Canham Prize, Guernsey International Poetry Prize and Strokestown International Poetry Prize.

The Summer Of My 25th Birthday

Everything is a lie, except ... Drinking water does help Loneliness is voluntary Empathy is not a burden

We don’t owe people explanations, and Jeff Bezos can eat dicks in space Leonard Cohen might be God New York City may lose its charisma

Maker’s is better than Bulleit “Failure” builds character, or so they say Expectations are counterintuitive Bukowski ineffably loathes F. Scott Bukowski and F. Scott were both bitter alcoholics

Weakness is not defined by seeking help Anxiety is as common as breathing I love poetry Complexity attracts

Lucifer created writer’s block Demons can be kind (sometimes) My cat is the most earnest reflection of my soul I smoke a lot of weed

Deafening vehicles imply small-dick-energy Society devours gluttony The media is pessimistic Winter Solstice is blanketed crankiness

Friendships can be viruses

It’s okay to outgrow yourself

Guardian Angels like to fuck with you Virginia Slims are that bitch

WOMEN are the future

Climate change is fucking real Black Lives Matter

Happiness is our own responsibility

Absolutely nothing is permanent

Absolutely nothing is permanent

Absolutely nothing is permanent

Absolutely nothing is permanent

Absolutely nothing is permanent and, I still love you.

Tor Rose

Tor Rose is a 25-year-old poet who studies the likes of Charles Bukowski, Sylvia Plath, Mary Oliver, and Leonard Cohen. In addition to her literary initiatives, she’s inspired by artists such as Jenny Holzer, desiring to leverage poetry as a means of transcendence.

Women’s Locker Room

after Marilyn Nelson

In the shower, it assaults me, a chemical scent so acrid it cuts through the miasma of chlorine and sweat. I roll my eyes, picturing one of the perfectly coifed women in matching pink aerobic wear, polishing her nails. High school cheerleaders grown into ladies who lunch.

A visitor to this club, I’m a stranger now in our hometown where my sister still lives. Whispers swamp my memories— my skinny adolescent shame, Lillian Wilson’s knuckles against my chest, the sound of my head smashed into the locker for fumbling a softball, the glower of girls forced to pick me on their team.

Warm water pummels my shoulders. I pause, letting it sluice down my spine before I towel off, revising my shopping list, the food I need for my sister’s kids, while she lies in the hospital with her yellowed eyes.

Stepping out, wringing my bathing suit between my fists, I stare at the bare back of the seated woman, her cropped grey hair.

Reflected in the mirror, marks of the swim cap rim her brow, but my gaze falls on her one tanned, leathery breast and the scar arrowing across the left side of her ribs which she makes no effort to conceal.

I’d seen my sister’s chemo port, but not this stitched up absence. Like an Amazon Elder, she shoots me a casual grin, then keeps on painting her nails, a cayenne red.

Laura Jan Shore

Laura Jan Shore teaches poetry in NSW, Australia. Her poetry collections include Water over Stone (Interactive Press, 2011) and Afterglow (Interactive Press, 2020). Her work has been published in anthologies and journals across four continents. laurajanshore.com

Infinitives

To admit fields are on fire, oil fields, though we do not yet see them burning; to remember our grandparents sweltered each summer, waiting for the streetcar, for nightfall; to irrigate loosened earth with native water; to bail out the seed banks, to chew our food; to call the bluff of the brand name, the marketing genius; to digest resources burnt to a crisp threshold; to savor our craving—to satiation; to be free of litter strewn beyond us steering through the Hesperides, sacred groves, Blessèd Isles, past the ghost of a man on the moon’s new frontier, our course set for the destitute sunset.

Stand 219: 16, 3 (2018)

The Ruined Walled Castle Garden (2020)

Mary Gilliland

Mary Gilliland authored the award-winning The Devil’s Fools (2022) and has been anthologised in Nuclear Impact (2017) and Wild Gods (2021). She was instrumental in developing the Knight Institute for Writing at Cornell University. marygilliland.com

Cist [‘sist]

noun

1. ARCHAEOLOGY. an ancient coffin made from a hollowed tree to hold the bodies of the dead.

2. from the Greek kístē. a box used in ancient Greece for sacred relics.

3. a sore that takes time to disappear.

my child is lying in a hollowed tree in the middle of a field not a tree/a wood walled grave laid out straight like a fairy sheathed in bruise/ blue hands over her chest in prayer/ not clasped /curled in a curve of rubble /death’s foetus in an open womb/ not a womb/ an ancient cist/ moon milked adorned with stalks of Easter lily perfume /not a cist but a pit/ shrouded in peachdown/ not peach/ pearl aspiring to frost worn stone/ the stone of a mother’s eye/ not an eye a thumb of light/ beaming through the pine black trunks onto the green tumulus/ a small hill/ a southern barrow/ of native earth/a flint fragrant mound swell/ of hyacinth/ descending/ as streams descend through their darkness/ to the sea /turning to the notes/ of the wind flute/ her death’s disciple /I walk in an oval/ then dance a slow jig / with her song in my head /in the last haven of sunlight /the last sunlit palm /to uphold more than a thousand roots /and a finger pointing to the bed to lie in /not her bed /a hospital rollaway/not her room/ the living room/ not the living room /the dying room of a hundred flies / talking all at once /where hieroglyphs /written in a child’s hand /on the wall/ script a legend/ of night climbing/ trying to get to the portal/ I pick her up in my arms/ and lay her in the hand hewn canoe/ stained and tarred /I have made/ for steering down the red river /where a girl runs/ through the woodlands/ and the sweet smelling rain/ the mayhaw jelly /where the red fern grows/ a pollen evensong /through the archipelagos /the sea mossed channels/ the cypress swamps /not a canoe /a monogrammed monoxylon/ good for paddling through the Greek door/ now I have to sleep on the floor /to keep her from falling /over the edge that is coming/ I can’t keep her from falling / so I make my body /her soft landing /now I’m lying in the cold cist with her /we are so close together our ear shells are touching /I’ve tied her wrist to my wrist /so she can’t be taken away/ in the night /when I’m not looking /so I can find her /so I can go with her/ if she needs me /so I can follow her in case she walks in her sleep /to comb the stone arches /below the room that isn’t her room /in the house that isn’t her house /one more time /before she finds the door /and leaves without me

Kizziah Burton

Kizziah Burton has been Highly Commended for the 2022 Oxford Poetry Prize, shortlisted for the 2022 Bridport Prize, commended in the 2021 National Poetry Competition and won second place in the Ledbury Poetry Competition 2020. She holds an MA in Fiction.

At Once the River

i

When her breath became a sigh we entered incandescent two bodies cut flat dark water warm embracing each pore deepness a thrill loosening our grip I touched her hand it stained my own twilight colours she said she spoke in shreds eternity filled each lisp and slur I listened host and guest till the river became our saviour and slumber: my Lord

ii

her hand was ancient as water itself ankles knees belly waist the river swelled to meet her lips what shadow is this that spills me here bitterness dripped from the tips of her hair she smiled once and then forever as if meeting a forgotten lover what shadow is this that links me so a warmth familiar as a scent remembered a breath fleeting a river sliding the whole of it beyond her reach as might an echo in mist

iii

how long did she sleep certainly not an eternity after all she’s here is she not as miracles go a river might turn into a sea of milk this one’s blood and fire howling she strips to her feet follows her steps to the river’s edge and leaps eyes raging Rosie’s no different from fire or water this she knows

iv

everything the room bed her hands and thoughts dissolved in sound a roar a storm in a bell jar’s grip and poof she’s ankle-deep in tears the river wails to no avail she’s deaf and only feels a body’s slip deeper and deeper the water fills her emptiness and leaves her tender as a new-born nymph

v

dusk or dawn     whichever sun’s an abstraction the ferryman too there is a bank and on it she kneels this is no river   her thoughts stir like bubbles rising the morass is thick of them each shoulders a murmur kiss your index to feel its presence no finger  no lips breathless comes the ferryman breathless she steps in

Scott Elder

Scott Elder lives in France. His debut pamphlet, Breaking Away, was published by Poetry Salzburg in 2015. His second collection My Hotel , is forthcoming in Salmon Poetry 2023 (Ireland). This poem was first published in The Steel Jackdaw Magazine in 2021.

Cucumber and the Catbus Club

A cool breeze over the bento, some daikon soup, and a few bonito flakes. “Cucumberish,” notes Shiso, “the window refreshed after dancing with Cucumber’s flicks, our mind now happily green.” Leavis yawns, glowing thin:

“In fact, Cucumber’s dying, for she’s too thin.” “But the gusto,” argues Shiso, “that gargles the bento is a groove sung by Cucumber and the Catbus Club, like a green rhythm floating. Look! Let’s enjoy some Cucumber’s flakes.” “Pardon me,” Leavis interrupts, “just a few flicks of drizzles, my ears overflood like magic. See, the window now shines through me to cheer you up.” Window bewildered, her glass-eyes too thin. Mr. Shishamo, also known as Mr. Willow Leaf Fish, flicks off some extra virgin oil: “All dissonance in this bento— just starchy blunt ends—you’re merely some ridiculous veggie flakes that got me choked on your charred green nonsense; ah, now, I’m always coughing green.”

At midday, Leavis brushes the window into halos; he sees, under the sea-flakes of Mr. Willow Leaf Fish, a thinline riddle: “May the green prosper in the bento.” Leavis smiles: “Listen, light-flicks

at the end of one’s life are just purposeless flicks under the sun.” “So—” asks Shiso, “in this bruised green gruel, are we dying?” “Well,” chuckles Leavis, “the bento conjures us up as a flimsy, fleeing sense of wakefulness, and the window, so long as we speak, keeps floating along; but the now we’re in is too thin that once we stop exchanging secrets, we will vanish like flakes.”

Shiso scratches the flour-coated flakes, her headache loosens after a few flicks of mossy-ferny sheen. A stranger, with thin jaw bones, enquires: “Is today’s cucumber green?”

The sun halfway in, the window starving. “Catbus! Catbus!” a little girl points to her bento—

“This,” grins Shiso, her teeth sourly thin, “must be Cucumber’s darling in the bento.” “A cat-shaped omen!” rising, Leavis, “Cucumber’s gonna lose the game of green flicks.” “Oh goodness,” Mr. Willow Leaf Fish awed, “these windowflakes—”

Belle Ling

Belle Ling received her PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Queensland, Australia. Her poetry manuscript, Rabbit-Light , was highly commended in the 2018 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize. She is now teaching at the University of Hong Kong.

The Language of Flight

We learned to forget the language of flight, the vocabulary of take-offs and landings, of cruising altitude and turbulence.

Over seasons we became skeptics, erased our grasp the way the lapsed try to forget the lines of a prayer.

It was easy enough—entire civilizations have forgotten more— dentistry, alchemy, the location of cities, discarded like used bus tickets.

From our back porch we watched as planes slowly ascended like the faithful setting off to walk on water.

In the night sky they blinked like fireflies, and in the blips of darkness we stood transfixed, willed them not to vanish.

We came to distrust the anatomy of planes, of how fifty tonnes of aluminium can glide like a gull on a wind current, how each window holds a tiny pinprick, which somehow makes it resistant to cracking.

We came to forget other things as well—how we’d flown across the Catskills and Urals, how we walked through Jerusalem-hued streets, tasted spices that made the roofs of our minds expand beyond our skulls. In the time after flight, we learned new things to replace what we had forgotten—

the taste of fabric against lips, the sting of ethanol on grazed skin. Screens became our new educators, our new sense of faith, and through them we learned to fathom other impossibilities. How a barn can stand without a single nail. How a cow has four stomachs,

the lining of their second gut honeycombed. The same pattern mimicked in aviation—how on the evening news

they showed a cross-section of wing found in a field, its lining a network of metal prisms, and we thought of how beekeepers keep their hives in rectangular boxes, how bees are smoked to stop them from stinging.

Frank Russo

Frank Russo is an Australian writer and author of the poetry collection In the Museum of Creation . He is completing a doctorate in Writing at the University of Sydney. His poetry and fiction have been published in Australia, Europe and North America.

My physio tells me a joint cracking looks like fireworks on an ultrasound

She says I am built like a Duracell battery. She is trying to be kind about my muscles, which are coiled tight and impossible to relax. She uses other euphemisms – a brand new spring, an over-tuned string on a violin, a hive of bees. She says it makes me who I am, which she means to be a kindness, but in this context seems cruel. She puts on blue plastic gloves and says she is going to test my pelvic floor.

My whole body winces, is a slick slab on a chopping board and she is the knife. When she holds my ankles and twists them, the sad choir of my body betrays me. I am popcorn in a microwave. Her fingers taste like blue plastic gloves, I bite hard until I feel her thumbs twitch. In exchange for this, she offers me other analogies: my bones are ill-fitting shoes, stiff zips, broken screws. I am late, and a little drunk, to the party of my body, anxious in the corner, rubbing my thumb against the lip of my glass, and everyone else is dancing.

They are beautiful and freshly oiled as new bicycles; they are drinking champagne, a mesh of bright bubbles and gold. Their warmth against the cold steams up the windows so from outside, the flashing lights behind their bodies look like fireworks.

Holly Singlehurst

Holly Singlehurst was born in 1993. She was commended in the 2016 National Poetry Competition, and she won a 2022 Pushcart Prize for On Agate Beach. Her debut pamphlet, The sea turned thick as honey (The Rialto, 2021), was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award.

Dreams one dreams when about to divorce

It was synchronized swimming. It was so fluid, creative, and free. I’m sure it was you, your body, every inch of your known body. Every gesture felt effortless, a spontaneous harmony. We part, we reconcile, without shortness of breath, maybe we have gills to be underwater for so long.

It didn’t strike me as strange. Thinking about it again it was probably figure skating, underwater. Here we get to the next passage, more difficult - impossiblewe hear the others’ eyes saying – They will never make itHow can they make it? - We hear their skepticism, followed by awe.

Every obstacle brings us joy and overcoming the difficulties it’s a secret pleasure, a silent, constant, internal, laughter. Again. Done. And like the sound of water, in the background, we’d hear the applause. Your ideas became mine, only one will and intuition, we always foresaw what to do. The embrace of our bodies was our shelter. Routine comforted us. How many times we had done it and done it again, every time better. Is this the golden cage of a couple?

I look at you but I don’t see your eyes. I feel your gaze, your presence I don’t know where my hands finish and yours start and it’s the same for any circle we draw into this blue that surrounds us. There is only you in every thought, in every gesture I do, only you, for me. We weren’t talking, we weren’t thinking, the babies’ cries were faraway currents. We were naked, of course, the rest of the world did not exist anymore, we didn’t care about seasons, time, where, why.

Alberto Rigettini

Alberto Rigettini is an Italian poet, playwright and screenwriter, host of SpokenWord Paris, the fight club Writers Get Violent, and pimp of The Poetry Brothel in Paris. He has been awarded The Lorca in Translation Award and the Troubadour International Poetry Prize.

Having Something a Little Stronger with You

After Frank O’Hara’s “Having a Coke with You”

Having a drink with you is harder now that you’re dead. Though I still remember my first drink was with you when I was 19, the product of a teetotal home. No booze, tobacco or playing cards. Years later, my father dead, my mother living alone in the house, my brother brought a bottle of wine to dinner and my mother, tight-lipped, served it in liqueur glasses. No seconds. Teetotal meant that as a child I wasn’t supposed to know about the mysterious bottle at the back of the bathroom cupboard marked “For medicinal purposes” and fortunately, as far as I know, it remained unopened since we were a family never in need of reparation, rejuvenation, stimulation or comfort. So when you and I, teenagers, first date, no car, just walking down our town’s main street, down past the local watering hole, you said, “Want a drink?” and I said, “No thanks, I’m not thirsty,” you laughed and said, “You don’t drink because you’re thirsty,” which was a revelation. So I had something with ginger ale which I’ve always hated, and what was mixed with it, don’t remember, maybe gin or rye. It wasn’t all that bad because whatever it was killed the ginger ale and started me on my education exploring things that mercifully kill ginger ale, i.e. vermouth, more gin or rye, or even plain old tonic. Anyway, as I said, having a drink with you after marriage, divorce and what would have been widowhood if we’d stuck it out would have been our bond, though the old pub is gone. I’m told there’s one in the new north mall where I’ve never been, having left town years ago.

So here I am, here you aren’t, I’m raising a glass while I still can, something alcoholic that blends with something else alcoholic or maybe lemon or grenadine or Clamato or ever-handy soda water. Lots of ice. And the memory of Frank O’Hara saying I love you on the strength of a Coke and I believe him for why else would he say it in a poem? Whereas I can drink myself blind and the words won’t come which is more like a letter or a poem that never rhymed. And I sometimes think of that evening long ago, how much I learned and how it shaped my life though not the shape my parents would have chosen, and how I never told you but have to say all this now, not with love, regret or whimsy, but perhaps with guilt, who knows. So listen up! I’m not believing — can’t believe — it’s too late. Ever.

Miller Adams

Miller Adams is the author of a two books of poetry. As Sylvia Adams, she has written a novel, two poetry books and two children’s books. She is the twice winner of the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, amongst others, and has work in over 30 publications.

The night before demolition, Mary Street, 1970

We never knew the exact time when all this would be knocked down, generations have passed on to each other this simple ritual; breath to breath to breath, bricks huddle us in these tenement temples.

Anything that could have been sold is gone, there is just us now, making patterns on the scuffed carpets before the wrecking ball swings in the pendulum of progress.

Wine bottles line the sills, in them we see small versions of ourselves, angels that perhaps we weren’t meant to see but do. It is but a pause in our incantations, we keep pressing on, learn the steps by fumbling, gaining purchase for the next time.

In the corner remain the imprints of an old armchair, marks where the legs wore through the felt underlay. From that chair my grandmother told stories of banshees and vengeful ghosts, we were rapt as we learned how death and life are kept in terrible balance, a balance almost forgotten now in our daily violence.

The bottom half of a statue of Our Lady lingers on what is left of the hearth, her other half having ascended up past the mantelpiece and through the exposed beams of the ceiling. In the air Novenas repeat and swirl in the spit and plash of a starting rain, words and tears are felt and listened to more for being incomplete.

Perhaps we will see the dawn filter home through the rafters, through broken windows and doorways with scar-hinges, the future will be made in us, in moulds that break, so we must keep our hands casting fresh shapes.

Glen Wilson

Glen Wilson is an award-winning Poet from Portadown. He won the Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing (2017) and the Jonathan Swift Creative Writing Award (2018), amongst others. His poetry collection An Experience on the Tongue is available with Doire Press.

Ramadan

The hours play out each shadow: bluebells, wild garlic, the flowering quince spread

each inch of the morning, I measure their three sixty turns elongating, shortening, drowning the first hint of bumblebees. The clock wasps, amoral lashes keep tab on

the lengthening minutes of the sun, I serenade each fly landing on thighs wanting to be exposed, I want to subjugate restless souls by lying still, splash savage wings in lachrimae murmuring non-violence incanting the whole lunar month - this

whole April, my merciful axe is a blade sheathed in bacchanal, daddy-long-legs still forming, fit snug inside my half-glass lent out to the wind. At the vertex of sun

I dream up a tramontane, a gust to figwort my glands, quench each parch. The day

done, at sunset I am mad, certified, I’ve re-lived all the berries crushed, and in

Kincraig St the calla lily in the garden front looking up to the last of the crimson, its spadix thrusting a yellow pine for the sky drifting from the milky spathe wanting to

hold on, I walk past unacknowledged - I’m on a mission to calm the guttural Bay of

Bengal. The first droplet is a lightning rod flute to temper each sand-grain fit for a

palm to dip, imprint a dusky maghrib azan - the day then begins all over again.

Taz Rahman

Taz Rahman judged the 2021 Poetry Wales Pamphlet Competition and has been published in Bad Lilies , Anthropocene , South Bank Poetry, Honest Ulsterman and Poetry Wales. He has been in the 2021 Literature Wales ‘Representing Wales’ writer development programme.

I run with Dad

I run with Dad. Short reps on cut-gorse flats, six by one mile efforts, two minutes between, seven ten to fifteen pace, out and back. He is Fieldfare, diagonal in flight, sinewed and eddying on hedgehog paths, and is sky washed fresh, a contrail at birth, sniffing Cymraeg; pores foam, strides winterish mulch, fires thirty words for pelting rain, nostrils froth, rotmud barkmould ashbog, stile slime, birthmarked by moss, salted sweat, his pate a delta of rivulets, we are twines of the same lickety-split lichen, fern eyed, mule stubborn, charcoal laugh, puddle drowned and wind arched, cobble tracked, a mottled moon-mist shrinks sightlines to treespines, each spindling limb groans its canticle, stripped galleon masts in gales. He kicks - sodden earth stains his shrinking freckled skin, flecking Sedge-Rush-Melick-Brome, his front teeth whistle, jackrabbiting creeks, he is my age, the youngling, running, peat blackened, stone clack, hoar-frosted by mire, chaffinches skimming in his turbulence, uprooting turf, purposeful swing of whirling dervish. His heart is a lesser-spotted comet, a downhill fireball, he is a blooming thornbush, a heavenward promise. Dad is holding his new-born children, he is slow dancing with his wife. He is way out front and flying on his fabled sandy spit. He is half meadow-grass and fungus. Ligaments grip, ache, drovers road cattle grid, our furnace lungs of magma list, hail of sharp pitched factory alarms and tin whistle shrills, chewing limes and shrapnel, we hock a lactic surge, chattering grins, the script of his age beds back in. He pulls up slow - we jog home. Wash in the same bathwater, greasy in nettle stings and woundwort, algae latching to the taps. He says he feels a new man. His thumbs grip a hand so hard the knuckles crack. He is bright, ripples from a pebble punched pond. He sweeps toast crumbs from his lips, cleans the grate, builds a fire, and sleeps in the watch of it. He is proud of all things. Good run.

Geraint Ellis

Geraint Ellis is a Welsh Northumbrian poet. He is a Barbican Young Poet and former Scottish National Slam Poetry Finalist. He was shortlisted for the 2022 Bridport Prize and Aurora Prize. His work is published by flipped eye , Broken Sleep Books , Abridged and more.

My Sister and I Went Down to the Missile Silo

when I was thirteen. In our tallest boots we waded through a long-flooded tunnel breathing fug and rust. I clutched my flashlight but wasn’t afraid: I was high with it— wanted to lead the way, take us farther, deeper—wanted to touch the darkest dark with my little beam of light, with my hands. We reached the silo. I toed the cut edge of the world, leaned out over a black hole— water, far below. A giant mirror. If I broke it, I’d sink seven stories. From somewhere in shadow, my sister’s voice pulled me back. Who are you trying to be? The darkness took the words I couldn’t speak.

Alice White

Originally from Kansas City, Alice now lives in rural France. A graduate of the University of St Andrews, she is a recipient of the Langston Hughes Award, a Hawthornden Fellowship and numerous scholarships. This poem was first published in The Cortland Review.

The Swimmers : 24th February

2. August. Deutschland hat Rußland den Krieg erklärt. – Nachmittag Schwimmschule.

Franz Kafka, Tagebuch 1914

The swimmers crawl their way along the lanes in the afternoon or breast it in some clumsy style. Swimming school kids flock at the start of the lanes making the options narrower; in their cheery mayhem a few eyes scream in the throes of the unforeseen. Is it they already fear death? By drowning? Or is it the cold? Puffy dreams off a swimmer’s scalp hover some instants like bugs above the tarmac as others scream their lungs out not making waves or shed tears underwater. And others fancy closing their eyes & keeping their crawl straight, but they don’t. They are not aware: they swim inwards drawn by triggering aches in those haunted corners of their bodies, drawn by cunning schemes about the rest of their lives, starting the moment they lift their flabby bodies over the rim of the pool —but it’s all an illusion, like strokes get easier after minute 20, like they aren’t annoyed by the old and the unfit. Nothing seems ever to change bar everything changes impassionately and ineluctably, and then the swimming ends in mid-afternoon.

They raise and run, clumsily pack whatever & don’t forget the cat in her cute spacecraft carrier & shouldn’t they have foreseen all of it—but they always do that, they look the other way as if the ripples in the water don’t always forerun a tidal wave, or it can be easily breasted over.

Eyes-closed some find their way out of home on their finger tips along the walls. Some drag their uniforms across the lanes as Russian paras drop like flabby tears down their rifle sights. How casual is to get yourself killed at age 20 and your photo circulated in socials as a frosted chunk of meat by the tanks bar bodies peppered with shrapnel on the tarmac, a suitcase the only mourner. Run, drag your life-heavy wheeled suitcases and your cute cat-carriers, flock at the platforms for those metal eels or race-drive your lives past them all others, or take the contrary lane, or leave the old and the fragile behind —the shells explode like odd achings of the body, triggers, or the military craft savagely crawl low past your clusters like locust, big time locust. But nothing ever changes.

Joan García Viltró

Joan García Viltró is a teacher and poet based in Cambrils, on the south Catalan coast. His poems reflect Mediterranean mythologies and his concern with nature struggling under human pressure. He is published in The London Magazine , Full House Literary and more.

Four tiles from a calendar mosaic of chronic illness

The darkness is as heavy as the sea in this room Light creeps out from the top of the curtain rail

In yellow-shark grey and folds across the ceiling

With the refractive torques of a sea-sky cutting

Over the surface of the deep. The folds of sheets, Long unwashed, long lain in, touch skin at certain Points with such doubled sensuousness, like lips

Against the rising force of soda. The pain is a Months-long voyage and the crew are bored And mad. My dad says you just take it like a rat.

The doctor is leaning forward clutching a coffee

In a polystyrene cup as if its white ring’s a life Float. He has lost hair since our last appointment. This is a very long clinic, he says, hopelessly. Didn’t you have an operation at some point? I don’t tell him at home I call him Wizard of Oz

Or of the long yellow brick road of referrals And refusals and referrals. I don’t remind him

About the day he said ‘I can fix this: I’m good. And I’m usually right’. He refers me to a shrink.

Dad’s just back from visiting Great Uncle Tommy Who’s 94 and proud and still hasn’t braved the bath Since Dad’s last visit. He was in the Navy during the war. Said he didn’t want to get his feet wet. Now his suit’s

Too big for his little frame and has god knows what on it But he says he’s alright. When Dad went into Tommy’s Bathroom to fix the grabrail he bought him, the tiles Came away as he touched them. Tommy cracked jokes And told lies. Dad’s face is like the back of the tiles

When he gets home. I don’t like to tell him, he says.

That must be nice for you, the receptionist smiles, To get to stay home all the time like a holiday. She hands me the invoice for my treatment, folded.

On the tube, white people pretend not to look at everybody who looks Asian. They stare more openly, though, at the First few face masks, sidelong. Then the announcement: You must stay home at all times. Even before A week is out, everyone understands me: even free

Of the smaller cage of sickness, the walls of home are Too tight. To breathe, to be, to feel: that must be nice.

Jo Davis

Davis’ poetry is in PN Review, Magma , was Highly Commended in the 2021 Bridport Prize and Commended in the 2022 Troubadour Prize. Her debut pamphlet, Dry tomb (Against The Grain), is out in 2023. This poem was first published in the 2021 Winchester Prize.

A Benediction: Permitting the Absence of Tears While Mourning

after Hyejung Kook / after Adrienne Rich / after John Donne

Bereft, be left on the outcrop though others cry. Departure takes its own directions. Let it

walk along fissures of granite to howl, if it wants, into earth’s crusty ears,

for this, too, the earth will accept. Give grief its wandering into museums to resent or envy any curated past

or to loiter in foyers and stare at lightning. Precipitation need not be measured. When the clouds lighten,

listen to the cooing the mourning dove calls neither song nor mourning.

Bradley Samore

Bradley Samore has taught English and writing in Spain and the USA alongside work as a school service worker. The Palm Beach Poetry Festival named him a Thomas Lux Scholar in 2022, and his poetry has been shortlisted by Aesthetica and River Heron Review.

Thanks a lot, Shakespeare, for the Starling

The window, single-paned to preserve not heat but historical significance, presses down upon the simple plank preventing it from shutting; & in that humble rectangular board exists a hole through which reasoning escapes, a metallic accordion-like tube stretching from the dryer’s back end to the aperture where the starling enters, where it places twig after twig to construct a metaphor for impracticality

& absurdity, a snapshot of modern life & our climatic uncertainty, like building a home on the rim of a smoldering caldera, its flimsy walls trembling. In 1890, 60 starlings were released in Central Park by the American Acclimatization Society because Shakespeare made mention of them in Henry IV, Part I, wrote “Nay, I’ll have a starling shall be taught to speak nothing but Mortimer, and give it to him to keep his anger still in motion.”

By the end of the play, the battle rages on, the Hundred Years’ War still unresolved; Now we’ve got over 200 million starlings in North America: My wife & I let this one stay. We hang wet clothes upon the backs of chairs, upon our shower rod. We learn to harness solar energy, to do without these modern conveniences, & teach our 2 sons to appreciate the subtle rumblings of an egg set to crack, of a fledgling poised to press its luck upon the ledge.

Jonathan Greenhause

Jonathan Greenhause’s first poetry collection, Cupping Our Palms (Meadowlark Books, 2022), won the 2022 Birdy Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Fish Anthology, The Ginkgo Prize for Ecopoetry and The Rialto, amongst others.

Good and better lies

like this, wearing a veil I will evade evil on my way up the escalator while on the phone to my sisters. When exile began, I turned my head to laugh. I chose one stem of thyme, a handful of barberry, a spoon of burnt sugar. The market floor is the basics of theatre. From Isfahan

to beyond river Karkheh, meaning Four Edens, meaning you can find a canoe between borders of paradise. When all allocated segments

of holy and half-holy water were behind me I ignored my city; ignored my rain; ignored my nosebleed. Don’t worry, the way to begin in another place is about arriving.

Soraya, Damsa, Shirin, here I have told them we drink, I have told them we dance, I have tried violet creams, lemon meringue pie from England.

I was promised I could cut clean hair in salons and play the quiet war in a house from a radio like a song our mother is crying in.

I have forgotten homesickness is a bridal hormone, that some of use claim there is a city near the sun liberated by a commander woman and if you die by the hand of a daughter you will not go to paradise.

Tonight I am craving liver and earth, you sisters. I have more in common with the properties of birdsong than this language:

A proud cuckoo will mimic the orientation of the satellites, the public silence between sun keepers, the plural voice of the commander when she said annunciate you have permission to sing.

Eve Esfandiari-Denney

Eve Esfandiari-Denney is the current UEA Birch Family Scholar and author of My Bodies This Morning This Evening, Bad Betty Press, 2022. Her poems have featured in The Poetry Review, Polyester, Bath Magg and The Manchester Review, amongst others.

At Ed Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations, God Tops Off His Tank

God is the God of oil pastels, of Montblanc fountain pens, of Farber mechanical pencils. God idles his convertible at Ed Ruscha’s twentysix gasoline stations. These are the service stations of the cross, each a grayscaled sermon. Above, the alphabet’s holy letters luminesce by night and day.

In the Mojave of Joshua trees, it’s all heat stroke and sepia. It’s not enough for the God of armatures and Sennelier paint tubes. He wants a fuller range of California light.

Now God lifts the trunk of his Pontiac which is the Ark of the Covenant. Now God lifts Twentysix gasoline stations from its creche. Now God raises Esso and Sinclair from the dead. Always every instant is with Him.

God particularly likes the flattest shot, a sidelong Union station in Needles. God doesn’t need perspective. Why should He care about vanishing points? Objects loom large not because they are near but because they are holy.

God knows the twenty six filling stations and the seventy-eight pumps. Each is large on the lakebed’s flat gravel. He doesn’t take road trips to get anywhere. He just loves to drive. He loves to move inside his own work. He is the God of Canson drawing books, the God of Pelikan inks, the God who nails canvas sail to lumbered stretcher bar.

As for Dad: he heard Nat King Cole and hitched from Chicago through San Bernadino. All the way West, his rides pulled off road to fill their tanks. While Ruscha was still a boy in Oklahoma City, Dad walked those gasoline stations, taking them in with his own hazel eyes.

As for God: He doesn’t care much about time. For Him, it’s all the same moment. From his powder blue Pontiac, God sees Ruscha and God sees Ruscha’s book. God sees Dad, gangly and serious. God looks through Ruscha’s eyes and through Dad’s eyes. God peers through the eyes of millions driving themselves from one place to the same place, from one century to the same century.

God loves the city of Needles. Nowhere else is God so happy. Dad’s always in Needles, Ruscha’s always in Needles. The whole nation’s left the highway for the Union 76.

As for Dad: he’s caught in the gone moment, just like Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations.

We all head toward the vanishing point. Then we vanish.

Tom Laichas

Tom Laichas’s recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Rupture , Disquieting Muses , Stand , Ambit and elsewhere. He is recipient of the Nancy Hargrove Poetry Prize and the author of Three Hundred Streets of Venice California (FutureCycle Press, 2023).

The Life Elsewhere

To pull wild mountain thyme all around the purple heather, will you go, laddie, go.

Wild Mountain Thyme

Grey hair and morning face in the bathroom mirror, panstick white with shaving gel that needs no brush to lather smooth, and every wrinkle and crease is obscured by this massaged, soapy fleece, except about the eyes, that skin above the lush, luxurious, layered snowfield made clearer

by contrast, its corner lines and relaxed tone of softened circles, slightly bluish in hue below my eyes, the eyes carefully watching, monitoring the razor’s work, matching pressure and angle against face value, careful as a conjurer shaving a balloon;

and remembering teaching my son, saying, Take your time, take care, don’t rush, it’s not a race. Though they sail past these markers anyway: voice breaking, first shave, first love. The firsts that can’t stay, falling behind in the days that change your face in day-by-day years there’s no delaying,

those accumulations we notice slowly then all at once, knowing we see children grow older while deep down somehow believing we don’t, at a standstill in each moment leaving in this world of movement and winds that blow on the lives where we locate all that’s holy.

And I thought of rooftops and the sky above them, and how sometimes you see floating a stray balloon, escaped, high in the grey or blue, or let loose and making its way, moving through your confined perception, up, up and away, like children grown up, both in and beyond your love.

The beautiful balloons breasting the weather out there in airy currents we cannot see, voyaging, the way we leave one nest to find another place to come to rest, loving our children to let them go free, knowing this is how we all go together.

Roy Kelly

Roy Kelly has written extensively about Bob Dylan for specialist magazines, leading to the publication of a memoir, Bob Dylan Dream (2015). His poetry book, Drugstore Fiction , was published by Peterloo Poets in 1987, and he has many poems published in The Spectator.

When Things Stopped Being About Steve

Steve likes his boxing gloves to hang from the rearview, miniature oxen balls in the breeze. A blue rabbit spools cotton from the grill. Steve keeps the radio on for luck, nothing safe about a heavy-duty truck on the motorway. A kicking foal connected by a breakaway cable. The BBC keeps him company on the long road to France, gridlocked at the Channel amongst mackerel sandwiches and seasalted cigarettes. Steve kicks the butts under mud, later picked up by a crustacean in need of bedding. Steve has made this trip on nearly eighty separate occasions, but this isn’t about Steve. At best it’s about a memory of his. Something he heard on the radio. Something he tries to forget to get back his sense of the world, yet when he tries harder he remembers the taste of the memory, of ashen, tomato-pasted fish on Kingsmill fifty-fifty. Of thirty-nine people found in a lorry not dissimilar from his own. Of thirty-one men and eight women who were trying to find a home.

Nichole Alexandra Barros Moss

Nichole Moss lives in Bristol, UK. Her writing centres on issues of class, identity, family and migration, often with a surreal or magical-realist twist. She works as a film production assistant and tweets about films at @artduckies. This is her first publication.

The only time I ever cried at the gym, apart from when I broke a balance beam with my head, was in yoga class. The teacher,

in her bow pose, switched on “Love to love you, baby.” Right into the second chakra it went, just above my pubic bone, when something very much like my head, but lower, burst.

Only a month before, I had lost a baby I wanted and a man I didn’t, one after the other.

In my bow pose, holding my ankles, pelvis rocking on the mat, I started to cry.

I had no idea my body had baby memory. A current ran through me, very like when my head unexpectedly hit the beam and I found I was still alive, or when years later, I held my mother as my grandmother died, feeling through her body, my grandmother’s life in me. In the yoga class, what I felt was distinctly the other way around, a life that almost was but now would never be. A part of me had died, and a smaller part of my mother and an even smaller part of my mother’s mother and so on.

Paula C. Brancato

Paula Brancato is the 2015 winter of Tampa Review’s Danahy Fiction Prize and Booth’s 2015 Poetry Prize and Second Prize winner in Cutthroat’s 2019 DeMarinis Short Story Contest. Her work has appeared in Ambit , Kenyon Review, GSU Review, and elsewhere.

Unreal City

We were living in that unreal city.

I watched the Peregrine Falcon raise its ragged chick through @birdlovers’s canted camera.

I sent @emily37 a tin of Anzac biscuits because she posts she was low and because she sent me pretty masks embroidered with thorns and bees which she says suits my personality, although we’ve never met. I tell her there’s a key hidden in the biscuits, she can break out of this lockdown. Every time someone logs off it’s as though they’re dead, or joined a cult, gone off the glowing, flashing grid.

I looked over the shoulder of a dozen solemn speakers and read the spines of blurry books. When we all did the Ode to Joy, I was the sixteenth da DAH. There are 2.7 million views of that.

I could almost hear the distant rumble of the armies of Uber Eats knocking on our waiting doors. There was a lot to do in that unreal city and mostly we did it. I preferred to – this was an important distinction, almost my signature.

If I moved my mouse every 10 minutes, the computer didn’t sleep and I would show as active.

I didn’t need to shave my legs, which was good, my parents understood Skype, blew kisses.

One day I watched the pelican that was circling in the broody sky outside my cold apartment, make its ponderous way to the ground, like a cargo ship piloted slowly into port and for the longest time I couldn’t comprehend how it could be outside in that chilly rain or after an eternity of falling, where it would land.

Damen O’Brien

Damen is a multi-award-winning Australian poet, including the Magma Judge’s Prize and the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize. Damen’s poems have been published in journals around the world, and Damen’s first book of poetry, Animals with Human Voices , is now available.

PIP

We met in the time of pips, pennies pressed into boxes in corners of union bars, laughing, shouting over the din.

I mailed you drawings, photographs taken in a terminal booth, a leaf

the colour of October. You sent back mixed tapes, sheet music, some song you’d composed with my name. In spring I folded violets into April-blue paper, afterthoughts scribbled in the margins, in green pen, for luck.

Then there were calls patched between continents an operator, Gene perhaps, or Jeanne, in some remote hill station, carefully connecting thin copper wires, me, all the way to you.

We spoke in the gaps between echoes. Clouded by oceans and desert, our voices were intermittent, then abruptly disconnected. Your mail arrives without warning or parade, my screen lit with your name. Your children (three) have flown the nest, your wife, too.

You’re not sure why you’re writing, you like to think I’m okay.

Silence hums in my ears. It’s midnight, an hour I always think is neither one day nor the next.

Sarah Easter Collins

Sarah Easter Collins lives on Exmoor with her beloved ancient lurcher Siddley, where she writes and paints to keep him in dog biscuits. Her debut novel will be published by Viking (Penguin Random House) in early 2024.

Every Time I Call, I Break The News Of My Diagnosis for my

father

The clouds tower over you in Florida, the gray-roofed house you refuse to sell, the lawn you insist on mowing yourself, and gone, now, to clover. You remember enough to ask about the cancer.

You ask How much longer? What is it like to hear it—the sadness in some untouchable way familiar?

Perhaps this time I can be gentler. What I felt in my lungs was a nightly fire, was a sunset keeping me from sleep.

You say the vines are taking over— sacrum, spine, clavicle, tangled—the woods next door keeping out the light. Does it do any good to tell it? The science says I won’t outlive you. Who will tell you then? And how?

I am weak-limbed as the orange tree you took out last December. Or was it the year before? You can’t recall.

The gray lines of the live oak break through you, the untimely drop. Your heart flutters down. I hear it.

I walk around with a flower in my chest— azalea—a pink that comes too soon to last.

My ribs are a dusty glass the birds flap into. Sometimes, an alligator appears from the dark lake of night and braces down on my right femur. I say all this. Gentle. But every time you find it—a field that blooms inside you, optimistic, bright— and perhaps this is why I call. What if everything turns out okay? you say. And it doesn’t even feel like a question.

Laura Paul Watson

Laura Paul Watson lives and writes in Pine, Colorado. She is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Florida. She was shortlisted for the 2021 Manchester Poetry Prize, and her work appears in Agni , Poetry Ireland Review, Beloit Poetry Journal and elsewhere.

Montage Theory

The pile of bricks my father carried down the steps to the garden had been acquired a week previously at the Mumbles hardware store. Now, he was laying them in courses as I watched from the shade of the cherry tree.

I intoned back the names for him as he had taught me: soldier, shiner, rowlock and at the end a closer. He sat back and asked if they were straight.

I wasn’t sure so I whistled like I’d seen in the movies. He laughed and placed me gently down on the wall. Or maybe he took my hand and led me back inside.

I often find a wish going through me to remake myself as a filmmaker. Those bricks, that scene, would form the heart of my first film. I wouldn’t bother to signal motivations. I’d stay faithful to that old Russian concept, the collision of shots. Things would just happen:

flakes of stone on the passenger seat, the spirit level close-up, a jump cut between my hands, his.

Then just before it peaked, I’d cut years ahead to a character we’ve never met, looking out the window, lens-flare drowning her in light, the camera dead still until the very moment she looks directly at it.

Jamie Cameron

Jamie Cameron is a poet from the Midlands, currently completing a Master’s in Creative Writing at the University of Oxford. He has poems published in Anthropocene , Swamp and The Vanity Papers. Away from writing, he spends time playing and coaching basketball.

Memory Foam

We lie side by side

as we have done for years, sometimes touching, sometimes not, separated by the posture sprung dreams we dump in a ridge between us. Today men come to replace the mattress with a pristine slab of memory foam that has amnesia decorated in damask roses, baby blue and pink with vanilla piping. Like much of England we will slumber in cake. I supervise removal to a van already crammed with other sleepers’ king size geologies, stacked on their sides, the soft cliffs of our lives layered with flakes of old skin that shone in birthday candles, peeled on pebble beaches, ached as it froze around snowballs, scarred the heart’s geometry on tender wrists, puckered up to a lover’s touch. All of us making our way ahead of time to landfill where to be a crow is to glide in paradise.

Mark Fiddes

Mark Fiddes’s last collection Other Saints Are Available followed The Chelsea Flower Show Massacre and The Rainbow Factory. His work has appeared in Poetry Review, Magma , London Magazine , The North, The Moth, Poetry News and The New European .

Frosti

some kind of smokiness still in the air and December fell as falling frost fell from out of the mouths of cooling-towers

their plume a luscious whiteness against the ice-blue sky whiting the down-wind downs and fall-out fields to look a bit like Christmas children drove sleds down reluctant slopes built a snowman at the bottom dressed him in coal lumps dead twigs a cough ii the frost that fell from the towers’ plume fell gently almost warmly as ghosts might be ghosts of long-ago un-named things released at last from geologic purgatoryafter so many snowballsto make a joyous snow

children their blood so warm and heavenly built a snowman made him smile

iii the children’s breath in plumes fell ghost-like up to a winter-soon night of sky their feet where they crossed the homely rug let fall the little frosts and in the dimming fields left a snowman inhaling all the light

Gareth Alun Roberts

Gareth Roberts has had poetry published in: Orbis , Envoi , Acumen , South, Welsh Poetry Competition Anthology and National Poetry Anthology. He published What’s Not Wasted (Tawny Owl Press, 2016) and was awarded second place in Poetry Space Competition 2020.

diary of a dead eel boy

at the wane of day my father and I would strike out small in tall rush and long shadow greasy wellies and waders orange and blue through kloo-ik kloo-ik and a-wick and a-wick

split the green curtain he did with his club-fingered hand and bid me break my slipping gait with the sober refrain care is the order while hopping goat-like scree and rock chimney

at river’s edge we left good altitude leaned one the other on sharp degrees waterward and entered the lair of the eel down to the killing stone mucked with bone gut and gill spillers he’d take and drive the stakes like a looney railman laying bed and ties into the sea gather line and hook under foot and stab a worm fatway short to make show of the ends

out went the line and sinker straight points aft of entry and father and I bent crooked obtuse and tautness in the hands that were the sign of a true lay or untold fears coal lorry black and then he bade me do that thing that was holy of holies and life for life and seed for seed but come the shot recoil and treadless boots come the slip fall and lumbar shock at sedge bar and bubbling ho! and breathless hee! and gasp and pee and neck and ice and skin and smart and entropy and amber trilobite and salt shad and mud fart and snot jelly and black hole

and father cursing the weight of the boy and sinkers of melted led and iron pipe and always the hook and the mouth and the boy’s leg for anchor and bloody minutes cut into his hands

until the earth gave way at the bottom of the world to the mud golem and the O-mouthed oily thing wrapped long at his leg and father looking fire-eyed and hell-bent at eel and eel boy

and stomping spineless and clubbing paste-wise the jaw eyes and tooth plates in its ugly face and returning next day with the sober refrain care is the order and spillers worms and hooks

Dean Gessie

Dean Gessie is a Canadian author and poet who has won dozens of international awards and prizes. These include the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award in Poetry, the Allingham Arts Festival Poetry Competition, the Samuel Washington Allen Prize, amongst many others.

Luna

This afternoon, my Mjölnir-wielding son chased Luna around the back garden till she crashed face first into the sycamore. As he kneeled in the grass to check on his new friend, his face a crumpled moon, the Malamute growled and her fangs grazed his cheek. It took four tales from Arabian Nights

to get my boy to sleep and it’s now past midnight. He kept looking out the window, picking his crimson scab and asking for his mother. No doubt she’ll stab me with a stare and tell her lawyer that I ruined his face forever. Luna is resting in the kennel. The crescent moon that lights up her muzzle is a battle scar. Lemongrass

won’t soothe me and I can’t stop glancing at the grass. What if, instead of this cricket-ablaze summer night… Our madeleines are just right. Yet the moon espouses the colour of poached damsons and wears my son’s face. I seize the Messermeister Oliva Elite.

I can’t believe you spent that much on a knife ! But you couldn’t get enough of my grass-fed angus with celeriac purée and morels. I hope his orgasm face is uglier than mine. I miss you. I hate you. I cry every night and you’re a leech who’ll fail to slurp my son from me. May the almighty Thor ruin your honeymoon.

Fuck your honeymoon. The olive wood handle numbs my fingers and the blade takes over. A father would do anything for his son. Build a blanket fort. Praise mum. Drown the grass in blood and bury a dog in the candour of the night. I will hold her close and feel her last breath on my face.

My boy will never have to be ashamed of his face and my soul should heal before the new moon. The sycamore weeps its leaves and implores the night to scrape off my grimace and hide the dagger in honey. Crimson grass. Madeleine. Crimson grass. Is that an owl or the cries of my son ?

My son lies in the grass and warps the night, while a faceless knife, reaching for the stars, decapitates the moon.

Amaury Wonderling

Amaury Wonderling is a London-based poet and filmmaker. He has been published in Blithe Spirit , STREET CAKE , The Cannon’s Mouth and Abridged . Luna was commended in the York Poetry Prize 2021 and first published on their website.

Quantum Decoherence

Tom Petty is unreliable as a narrator. Do we really believe he doesn’t miss her?

Through the butterscotch scented Jeffrey Pines, I glide up Coldwater Canyon to Mulholland thanks to the uninterrupted ease of my continuously variable transmission, its conical ingenuity—a wonder, second only to the Bluetooth conducting quanta in airwaves or ether—mechanized music of the spheres.

A physicist will tell you the moon itself is in free fall: a predictable trajectory that reads like a mixed metaphor.

I thought the Valley was a thirsty place, burnt from a lack of ozone and condescension from shadier zip codes with bay figs and kumquats, but here I really drive west down Ventura Boulevard, the trumpet trees in their Barbie pink reminding me of cherry blossoms, of northeast springs, that the address on my licenses has never matched

the address on my lease, that quantum mechanics can unambitiously tell you where a body will be— or at least the probability where it will be and maybe even then, a little off to the side.

Heisenberg thought nothing exists in space until you look at it. Was I only visiting this mythology until I rode my brake down the backside of the Canyon, seeing the vapor that had risen off the Pacific and got trapped in the puckered folds of the mountains? What a pity they call this smog.

Further south, bells are ringing for the return of the swallows. It’s a reminder that migration also means to come back home.

Brookes Moody

Brookes Moody earned a PhD in English with Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she taught literary journal production and creative writing. Her work is published in The Mississippi Review, The Literary Review and elsewhere.

inner courtyard

i. campanula poscharskyana

bellflowers trail roots in walls pushing gaps between paving my inhospitable patio open to sky your five-petalled resilience constancy of lavender -blue from a cursed mountain distant alps romance & hope never die unwanted nourishment gratitude unfavourite virtue uproot you –you again full-flower weeded out another way in with silent chimes like family that will never be rid

ii.

nymphaea

pink pond-flower sensation of resurrection joy & enlightenment morning prayer after a night of deep mud how your green leaves protect & shade hold us safe & stretch to any space for too long keep out sun birds like anyone you float for peace & meditate on beauty shortlived as scent our three-days together till the next onoff dart between fish stillness & transience captured in paint

iii. jasminum officinale

the gift you gave me cannot stop euphoria & sensuality from the gods turns a girl into an ajana goddess with jasmine cleopatra soaked her mainsail for mark anthony is love protection meandering is a bind for community the shot arrows of motherhood & my grandmother sprinkled stars on my dreams butterflies don’t only drink tears hummingbirds fly backwards & deer polygamous old relationships undie

iv. pelargonium x hortorum

fill pots on the patio they may be geranium cranes are confused with storks their long narrow beaks carry seeds & leaves vie with mint ginger eucalyptus lemon for salads puddings & tea i bathe in a poor man’s rose of attar reflecting on happiness folly & why you & i split the way nations get divorced & i have never visited south africa but you want to take me there to see again where it all started

Mary Mulholland

Mary Mulholland’s poems have been published in a range of magazines, and she has won, placed, been commended or long / shortlisted in competitions. She founded Red Door Poets and her debut pamphlet, What the sheep taught me , is published by Live Cannon (2022).

Hell Mouth

High above the earth, where the little drone is safe to hover The red fire rages like a prison riot. Even at these heights It is impossible not to imagine the black plastic heating up. Moving in along the coastline, where the water is holding Its hand against the orange fray, a ketch is banking hard, Bringing it about and heading for home. A frantic boy runs From the edge of the woods and into the house, slamming The screen door and tossing a lighter into the kitchen trash. His neighbor’s parlor window is open and the sound of A marriage ending is flung upon the sidewalk and parts of The abutting yard. Some words cannot be unspoken. Like A cast iron pan mid air, they drop, they do not fly from the tongue.

Garrett Soucy

Garrett Soucy is a minister, writer and musician who lives in Maine with his wife and eleven children. His work has appeared in Forma , Plough, Theopolis and elsewhere. His book, Who is this Rock? (2018), analyses the literary motif of rocks and stones in the Bible.

Love Poem for the Twentieth Century

On Russian forces capturing the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, 24, February 2022

I’m a child again, searching the TV’s embers. A station is burning somewhere: on a map first, then, years later, vacant kitchens and classrooms—a fine dust collecting on sliding boards and swings. A blue fog can be seen shimmering from the pine after the flames. It creeps toward the couch where I sit with Mom and Dad, my brother and sister. We can’t know it’s arrived here unless fists of hair fall from our skulls and lesions bloom on our skin. I didn’t know this then, but I’m old enough to understand eyes, the panic flashing from them even when voices are calm. Mom and Dad can’t look away, so I can’t look away. The news says little, yet adult faces are pale as corpses. They are scarred creatures of the twentieth century. I drifted into the twenty-first light as ash, hoping for flights to Mars and cancer cured, but Stalin’s brutal mustache still burgeons, blast shadows still scream from the walls. And the station goes on burning. Remember the men with shovels perched on their shoulders? They filed in naked as newborns—meat to the microwave. It’s hot as a star in the station. The deeper they dig, the closer they get to a fragment of sun. Twentieth century, we miss you. How we wish we could quit, but here we are again, gazing into your coronal smile, longing for the lover’s suicide you promised before you goosestepped from our lives.

Brian Patrick Heston

Brian Patrick Heston grew up in Philadelphia. His first book, If You Find Yourself, won the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Prize. His poems have won awards from the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation and have appeared in Southern Review, Hotel Amerika and more.

Extradition of Drug Lord Dudus Coke: Barbican Girl Dash Weh Tivoli boy

Dudus / breath-taker of dutty yutes / preying on likkle girls’ cell phones and chochos / he pretzels politicians’ arms / so fathers can tief light to keep stoves on / his cash lines the bras of single mothers / who send their sons to your school / with their A*s / waves and clarks shoes /

prime minister bruce golding / approves Dudus’ extradition / your principal’s intercom interrupts lunchtime / year group becomes a herd of whispers / shuffling to collect bags / ears cock for loose lips on staff walkie talkies / everyone sprints to their drivers / your boy / shoves himself into a tivoli chi-chi bus / that mounts sidewalks to get him home / meanwhile / your barbican prado / cruises to water polo training /

at training / with every other stroke you glance at the plumes of smoke / from tivoli / in the distance / police helicopters chop your coach’s commands / three miss calls from your boy / usually you’re the needy one / you listen to his voicemail when you get home / jah know mi nuh know if me and mi family dem a guh mek it / if mi dead / and dem seh mi did shoot afta di police / a lie dem a tell /

meanwhile / in the name of President Dudus / tivoli gunmen buss shot after shot / not even a spot check for granny-less verandas / scrap vehicles and gas cylinders block cherry stain streets / your boy’s eardrums grind like pimento / his little sister and brother’s squeals stow in their kitchen cupboards / from his bedroom window he prees three of his bredrins plead the blood of jesus as they sit in their own / pooling / while rumours have it / underground / Dudus is a sewer rat / wearing a stiff wig for disguise /

the next day / prime minister calls for a state of emergency for tivoli / you neither adjust / nor die / but your boy vanishes / for a while / you ramp next to his empty desk / ask about his whereabouts / but not enough / in the tivoli community / mothers are graduating from sniffing foreheads / green armpits / to heaving at compost flesh / top lips marrying snotty nose-tips / single beds / open caskets

Courtney Conrad

Courtney Conrad is a Jamaican poet. She is an Eric Gregory Award winner and Bridport Prize Young Writers Award recipient, and she has been shortlied for The White Review Poet’s Prize, Manchester Poetry Prize and Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition.

Shark Freedive in Swordfish Season

Shortfin Mako Shark, Isurus oxyrinchus. Red List.

The boys - I call them boys - are singing Cumpleaños feliz at the end of the headland. I am about to jump off into a swell.

Te deseamos t-I’ve jumped and the seaboys are beautiful. God this is fucking scary - and repetitive: countless fish, like twitchers’ LBJs. The sharks who come this way are makos and hammerheads. I think of sharks as boys. It’s their eyes: suppressed emotional trauma. 400 million years of it. We’re killing them of course. We’re killing every fucking thing. Nothing is being left unnetted.

When we were younger everyone thought I was the boy. What lovely girls you have and oh now a son. Later, the boys brought more boys to the house. It was a bungalow full of cats and adolescents: cockroaches lying on their backs, I’d flick their feet; they’d spin like B-boys.

I’m kicking lower and lower, discovering unfamiliar species, asking myself is that coral? like the ‘Is It Cake?’ Game Show where you guess before they cut into handbags, burger buns, steak. It’s almost always coral/cake.

There are fish here who turn from boys to girls once the alpha female dies. I keep going down, passing mating clown fish, the ceiling getting as high as a Georgian room. I am holding my breath, two beads of air in each nostril, gobstoppers: silverine, mercury.

I had to run-up for the leap, couldn’t just do it cold, had to throw myself, have my legs not stop me – running until my feet hit nothing.

I am remembering four years before this, wearing a VR headset, sat in Toni and Matti’s living room with their three boys; being lowered on their settee in a cage, searching for great whites –my feet and the grate, a letterbox gap, my limited front-facing eyes.

I am so far down now that I am calculating the time back to the top if I panic. I want the deer eyes on the side, the crabs’ on the end of their stalks, swivelling, or eyes in my feet to sense as octopuses do with the whole of their bodies, their entire skin seeing, responding. There is nothing here, then there is a face in front of me staring. Eye-fucking as they call it on the Tube. Snout / tail / snout / tail turning. So many commutes, I got eye-fucked before 9am. Sometimes, I was the one fucking them. I had hoped for a hammerhead, not a mako. Blueish, metallic, white - her skin and the sunlight thrumming across her scars. The mako and I are at the talking stage. Both of us might be in our 30s.

We are exchanging uncertainties. I find myself reciting Kingdom: Animalia Phylum: Chordata Class–Superorder–Order-Family–Genus–Species Equal tail – Sharp nose - Few. She is wondering: Will you - Are you - Should I – Deer eyes dilating. Run.

Anna Selby

Anna Selby is a poet and naturalist. Her book, Field Notes , was one of the LRB Bookshop’s Bestsellers for two years running and was an Irish Times Book of the Year. She is currently studying for a PhD on Empathy, Ecology and Plein Air Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan.

Ode to Whiskey

Blood-bond of mighty warriors after bath time, whiskey is made for the suture of second-to-last farewells, for laughing at the danger of a heart, at the myth of a self-concept. So here’s a shot for the strong man down the cellar, the city on fire, the teeth-gritting child-bearers in their final hours of labour, for the wait. Once more in the cemetery for the dearly departed, twice that at the gate to ward off ghaists; then we’ll take our last sip goodnight at Waverly station and wait for love to alight. But save us a dram for the journey back, by fluorescent night and godless morning, to study a brimful of light at the crest of any township, the fading world’s known edge, hurtling toward something more familiar, foreign, to savour the burn for someone else.

Amanda Diane Merritt

Amanda Merritt lives and works on the unceded Coast Salish Territory of the Lekwungen and W̱SÁNEĆ nations. Her debut collection, The Divining Pool, was shortlisted for the 2018 Gerald Lampert Memorial award. She is the founding editor of The Scores.

A Conglomerate Emergency with Incremental Effect

Abstract: It begins with Centrifugal Brain Melt (CBM) swifter than the ice caps, though not so quick as a train hitting a child.

Not so widespread as genital herpes though more common than wearing unpaired socks and

equally stigmatised }

A systematic breakdown like three species of fauna dying out in one forest or –at least- thirty people running backwards through times square. A breakdown that takes its sweet time to finish, like dry season, or masturbating while a fist is braying loudly on the bathroom door

Nonetheless, entropy is rational— as is induced decomposition when a life lasts too long. Main Body: See side B. Conclusions: Regardless of how you spin it, the earth or the issue Pauline can’t recall who put her nighty on, but remembers her favourite game.

Peer Reviewed by Dr. Stephens, Department of Geriatrics.

Bethany-May Rowe

Born and raised in Leeds, Bethany is currently a part-time Creative Writing Masters student at the Univeristy of Oxford. Rowe exercises a cross-genre approach to her practice, experimenting with form in both poetry and prose. She is inspired by her interactions as a carer.

fiction

The lifeblood of any outstanding story, whatever its style or theme, is its voice, and one of the great strengths of the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award is that the judges are able to give recognition (and a wider audience) to not just one, or even a few, lucky winners but to the voices of 20 deserving anthology pieces. In any major international writing competition, there are bound to be a number of strong, memorable works that just miss out and end up consigned to a simple mention in a longlist, or even no mention at all. To some extent that happens here of course – out of many hundreds of entries only 20 could make the final cut for publication – but the anthology format allows for a much truer reflection of the breadth and variousness in the pool of talent that the winner was finally chosen from.

As in previous years, the panel draws on expertise from all areas of the literary world: publishing, literary agencies, writing and the teaching of creative writing. Ansa Khan Khattack, Haleh Agar, Liz Jones, Luke Neima, Naomi Booth, Niamh O’Grady, Sabhbh Curran, and myself each brought as much as we could of our experience, curiosity and enthusiasm to the task and were unanimous in feeling that all the stories here, in all their variety, represent new writing of the present day in some of its finest forms.

There was no dominant thematic trend in the many stories we considered, perhaps surprisingly in the light of a long-running pandemic, the suddenly vivid threat of nuclear catastrophe and the world’s ongoing environmental and refugee crises; rather, we found that the seriousness of our human predicament typically found expression in more embedded, implicit ways. Certainly there’s a pervasive sense of contention, both social and private, of the need to give voice to the human spirit in its struggles, but happily there are no soapboxes here and no easy nihilism. Absurdity, injustice, violence, sadness and loss are all given their honest due, as they should be in serious writing, but there are many small victories too, of humour, resilience and hope, and they’re resonant and hard-won.

Stories such as My Predictable Life, The Etymology of a Sword Swallower, Beyond Words, In Language Strange and Three Sailors brought bold formal inventiveness to the fore, or surprised with genre-bending leaps, revelling in textuality but never losing the sense of a human heartbeat beneath the play of technique and reflexive knowingness; others, such as Different Ways to Drown , Beyond the Low Wall, Elbistan and Protection approached their subjects in more traditional, realist modes full of restraint and impressive narrative tact. Family and relationships, with all their attendant complexities, intimate comedy and

quiet heartbreak was a recurring theme: The Top of the Stone, A Letter to Julia and the wonderfully funny Sicko painted wildly different but equally absorbing portraits of life in the inescapable orbit and gravity of others. Stories of individual struggle, a staple of the short story form of course, are represented powerfully here by A Man Digs a Grave, Vocation , Reassurance and the unsettling, almost Kafka-esque The Empty House. The clear-sighted lack of sentimentality (and sometimes biting humour) in their depictions of lonely conflict and crisis elevated them far beyond any suspicion of self-indulgence. Just two stories here conjure up a directly dystopian vision and they stood out from a number of less successful attempts because of their distinctness of voice (no generic hand-wringing here): the bleakly funny and moving April and the tightly focused interiority of End Times Discourse Over Takeout Noodles.

The most difficult challenge for the judging panel was, of course, to arrive at an overall winner. After much discussion and reflection, the conversation revolved mainly around two very different but equally compelling stories: The Wailers and Raise, or How to Break Free of the Ground. The Wailers is wonderfully voiced, expertly paced and completely convincing in its treatment of love, friendship, cultural difference and, for lack of a better phrase, spiritual solidarity. It manages to be uplifting and life-affirming without ever slipping into sentimentality, and it does so under the shadow of death, with great boldness and sharp humour. Our overall winner, though, is Raise, or How to Break Free of the Ground. It’s brave and dynamic modulations of voice, its haunting ambiguities of family love and loss, its finely attuned evocation of the richness and strangeness of memory all combine in what Richard Ford once termed the “audacious authority” of the finest stories. Its piercing, lyrical awareness of how language both enables and resists the ways we understand our lives and the lives of others made this a truly adventurous story and a worthy winner: one that lingers, and resonates, in the reader’s own imagination.

Wayne Price Chair, Short Fiction Prize, Aesthetica Creative Writing Award

Wayne Price’s story collection, Furnace, was nominated for the 2012 Scottish First Book of the Year. His novel Mercy Seat was longlisted for The Guardian’s ‘Not the Booker Prize.’ Carol Anne Duffy selected his collection, Fossil Record, as one of her inaugural Laureate’s Choices.

Raise or How To Break Free Of The Ground

or

The Lakeland Dialect For ‘Slippery’ Is ‘Slape’ And To Form It

In The Mouth Requires An Act Of Falling

Begin at yon coffin stone: flat-topped boulder at the foot of the fell, positioned for resting the burden of the dead. Your hand is small but your brother’s smaller. It twitches in yours, a caught insect, and when he grins at you, you roll your tenyear-old eyes, keep on climbing for the beck. You drag the plastic net behind you. /

No. Stop. Let me begin again. /

Up aback of yon coffin stone, your brother’s hand in yours a caught insect, a metal bucket in his other. When you offer to take it, he tells you, ‘No way, José’, even though really it’s too big for him, even though the path is steep and difficult, even though the rocks are stern. Sometimes it clangs against the ground. Sometimes he kicks it accidentally and stumbles, but he always pulls himself back up, barrels out his chest like the bodybuilders on telly.

He’s going to fill the bucket from the tarn at the top of the fell. He’s gonna catch a flickering silver fish, he says: a tiddler he can scoop in his insect hand, let it wriggle in his palm, go still. Then, he says, he’ll put it back. After all, he’s not a monster, just a small kind of god.

The sky out over the lake is a centrefold, a glossy falling open after rain. You climb to where the path becomes trickle, becomes syke, becomes beck. This happens sometimes: boots and water pulled by the same gravity. The rocks are slick with moss.

Your brother has tramped the bottom of the dell till his trainers are clarty with mud. He stomps through the water, saying, “Jeez, it’s cold.” When you ignore him, he stamps harder and says, ‘I said, jeez, it’s cold.’ His soles are worn from where he’s scuffed them along the pavement, and his laces trail like unfinished sentences. It’s the summer holidays before you turn eleven, before your last year at the little village school, and you’re almost an adult in your fake suede jacket, your purple dungarees –

/

Again. /

It’s the summer holidays before you turn eleven, and you’re almost an adult in your fake suede jacket, your purple dungarees. Your mam has said, ‘Look after your brother,’ and, ‘Make sure you’re back by lunch.’

So you begin out past Town End aback of the dead poet’s cottage. Past the car park, the coaches, the disgorged tourists here for long-wilted daffodils and a clutch of gingerbread from the famous shop. Past yon coffin stone with its box-flat top, where two collies beg as a woman tucks into her bait, as she ignores you and your brother and the dogs.

Happen your grip is a gin trap, and your brother keeps twining on about the climb. ‘Let us rest a mo – go on.’

Somewhere in the deciduous garden of Wishing Gate House, a squirrel taps hazelnuts against its teeth – a scrape, a patter, a tumble of shells between branches. A clutch of sparrows. Thrum of wings. From the opposite fell, a white flock of birds merges with the sky: inconsequential gods departing a dead religion. Out on the lake, an old man rows the disturbed creases of the water, and a skein of geese skitters in to land.

‘Stop twining and move.’ You pull your brother up to where the path becomes trickle, becomes syke, becomes beck, metal bucket a clang against the rock. /

Metal bucket a clang against the rock, you walk out through Town End, past the sheep skull nailed to the lintel, up, aback of the dead poet’s cottage. Yesterday’s rain furrows the edges of the track, gathers leaf mulch in the gutters. The mizzle is a spider’s web clinging to your face. Already your calves are heavy, your breath a helicopter whirring across the valley.

Look after your brother. Make sure you’re back by lunch.

Up the curling border of the dell – fringe of kingcup, thunder flowers with rainstorms locked inside – happen your brother stars twining on about the climb. ‘Let us rest a mo – go on.’

But it’s the summer holidays before you turn eleven. You’re almost an adult in your fake suede jacket, your purple dungarees, and your mam has said, ‘Make sure you’re back by lunch.’

So you tell him, ‘We’ve not got time. Come on.’

Your hand is a gin trap. You drag him up to where the trail begins to tack, a zigzag of tumbled rock, which your brother calls, ‘Tougher’n climbing to heaven.’ He must have picked this up from school, because you’ve never heard it from your mam, and anyway it’s childish, thinking heaven is somewhere like a mountain you can climb to. /

Once, your teacher asked: ‘If you build a ship and sail her across an ocean in the middle of a storm – then, when you arrive, swap out the oars for new ones – then, when the hull begins to rot, replace the boards – then, when the sails are blown to tatters, stitch up another set from different cloth – then, when the rigging can’t hold you up, buy a bunch of rope and knot yourself some more – and so on, and so on, till you’ve substituted every part – is she still the same ship that crossed the ocean in the storm?’

‘Yes, cos she’s still got the same name.’

‘No, cos there’s nowt of her old self left.’

Your teacher told you, ‘That’s the point – you get to decide what you mean by same.’ /

Past yon coffin stone – flat-topped boulder at the bottom of the raise, aback of the dead poet’s cottage – past the duck pond with its watchful heron, its fringe of thunder flowers and kingcup, happen you climb the curling border of the dell. Rain dashes you, the weight of a hefted flock. At the driveway for Wishing Gate House, your brother begs again to hear about the boggles and their hauntings. So you tell him he’s ladgeful. ‘Everyone knows they’re only stories.’

His hand twitches in yours, a caught insect, and mizzle like a spider’s web snags at your face. The gate is looped with binding twine, your fingers too cold, too wet to untie it. Happen in this telling, you struggle with the knot. Happen the sneck is rusted shut, the gate a sudden ending, so you run home in your fake suede jacket, your purple dungarees – your brother’s trainers clarty, scuffed and slape. Your mam has said, ‘Make sure you’re back by lunch.’ And so, happen in this telling, you are.

Out past Town End aback of the dead poet’s cottage, you climb to where the

path becomes syke, becomes beck, becomes force – becomes fierce white hurry that rushes the clart from your treads. The water tugs at your skin, unzips you like a boot.

Happen you remember that saying: how you can’t step in the same river twice. Happen you tell it to your brother, who calls you ladgeful.

The water dodges and slips – happen it weaves between your bones, so from your toes, you can feel your flesh unknitting, becoming flood. Next, your soles. Your ankles. Legs. Happen your brother’s hand twitches in yours, a caught insect, and when you fall – him first, pulling you after – both of you fall without breaking: liquid dance down the fellside; tumbling ghyll; water remaking itself as wish. Happen when you fall, you fall for something beautiful and calm, for the mirrored oblivion of the lake.

/ Again. / Past the duck pond with its watchful heron, loose change of kingcup at the fringe. Up the curling border of the dell.

Your mam has said the dell was dug out years ago, to unearth the bones for Wishing Gate House, which everyone knows is a rattled haunting, a cluster of boggles and ghouls. It hunkers between the trees, between the fleeting deer, the dead still playing out their stories on repeat.

/

Your mam has said, ‘Look after your brother,’ so happen when your brother stumbles, you’re the one who falls. Your head against a rock. Your eke of blood. You spreading, leaking your own red tarn across the path.

/

Your brother clangs the metal bucket, you drag him after.

Your brother’s trainers worn and clarty.

The rocks are treacherous and slape, boots and water pulled by the same gravity. /

Your brother was a full pail of water, and you spill it: you’ve been telling this story your whole life. /

Past the coffin stone, aback of the dead poet’s cottage, up the curling border of the dell. As you climb the path to Alcock Tarn, your brother’s hand is a caught insect, the mizzle a web on your face. Happen his hand grows stronger. Grip a gin trap. Dusting of dark hairs at the wrist.

Up through deciduous woods, squirrels flash the branches with red. Unloop the binder twine, unsneck the gate. Happen your brother is taller now, an Adam’s apple riding his throat, his chin bearded with the wild. When he smiles at you, little sister, your small hand twitches in his.

You have been telling this story your whole life – how, when the trail begins to tack, you will say, ‘Breather?’ but your brother shakes his chiselled head, and the first silver flutters from his hair like a blown cobweb.

His breath will become a helicopter whirring across the valley.

By the time you reach the open summit, happen Alcock Tarn will lie still and gleaming as a promise, and your brother stoops, his skin a tumbled crag. His feet are bare. He has lost the metal bucket. When he smiles (when he smiles at you, little sister), it’s a god ray splitting the clouds after rain. When he walks, shuffles, out into the tarn, he is a full pail of water, emptying himself back into the flood. /

They say yon coffin stone is flat for the resting of burdens, flat from the repeated weight of the dead.

At school, you learned how the universe is infinite, and also still expanding, and how somehow both these things can be true. /

Happen you perch a moment on yon coffin stone, to decide what you mean by true. You have been telling this story your whole life, and now, when you gather your words, they flicker, fish circling a metal bucket, waiting for you to return them to the tarn.

Catch your breath, the way you would snatch a tiddler from the beck, the way you would catch a hand to stop it falling.

The path is always there, aback of the dead poet’s cottage, curling up the border of the dell. When you stand, send the roe deer askitter between the trees, the heron

panicking away towards the lake. Up at the house, the boggles will continue their relentless haunting.

The path is always there. And so now, begin.

Katie Hale

Katie Hale is a MacDowell Fellow and Gulliver Travel Grant recipient. Her debut novel, My Name is Monster (Canongate, 2019) was shortlisted for the Kitschies Golden Tentacle. Raise was shortlisted for the 2021 Desperature Literature Prize and published in Hotel .

Elbistan

“When you finish your tea, I have a surprise.”

Derya sits across from me in her large, mostly empty office. Behind her are windows looking over the smoky valley and the town of Elbistan.

“You know, Derya Hanım, as the visitor I’m the one who should be giving you a gift,” I say.

Her laughter is the best part about her, full and always genuine.

“No, no, Richard Bey, my surprise is not a gift. It’s a place.”

I’m what they call an “educational consultant,” but essentially, I sell textbooks. Part of my job is to visit out-of-the-way schools across Turkey and give workshops to teachers or to hold assemblies with sometimes hundreds of students, many of whom have never spoken with a foreigner. In between, I hobnob with principals like Derya and try and bring up how a few extra reading books would really help the students.

“Come on, let’s go.”

Outside is her Renault Mégane, the car almost every principal in Turkey owns. Black, and cleaned daily by the security guard. But inside, it smells of Derya’s cheap cigarettes. She lights one, and cracks her window open. In comes the winter cold.

We turn right, heading up and out of the valley. At the top, we pass between two rock walls, with “PKK” spray painted on one side, “Mehmetçik” on the other. I know the first one is the acronym for the Kurdish resistance group—or terrorists, depending on your perspective—who operate in the Southeast of Turkey.

“Derya Hanım, what’s ‘Mehmetçik’?”

“That’s what we call the soldiers at the bottom level—the ‘grunts’ I think you say.”

“I see.” I turn to face her. “And where do you stand on the whole PKK and Turkish Army issue?”

She laughs her big laugh. “I’m like this car, right down the middle.”

Then she gets serious again, real quick.

“But it’s true, even in little Elbistan, we have problems with PKK and army fighting. All politicians in Turkey live in Ankara and Istanbul, and sometimes they think it’s good to fight PKK, and sometimes they prefer to talk. Whatever these politicians and guerrillas want, the people who live here in the Southeast have to live.”

The current ceasefire has held longer than most. I’m hoping I can sell Derya’s private school some books here today, take her and some teachers out to dinner tonight, then go to Malatya tomorrow and catch my flight back to Istanbul before

the government or the PKK change their minds.

“Cigarette?”

Derya never fails to offer.

“I know, I know,” she says, “you don’t smoke. But you really should here in Elbistan. Everyone does. We breathe the pollution from the coal power plant all day, so why not have a sigara?”

She pokes my arm.

“You know that tall tenth grader you met earlier, Sultan?”

I like Sultan—she’s smart and her English is the best in the school.

“Sultan smokes. Yeah, it’s true! I don’t let her smoke in school, of course, but I see her walking home and smoking. It’s funny, I want to tell her to cut it out. But also, I understand.” Derya shrugs. “Here’s our turn, Richard Bey.” We take a right off the paved road and onto a dirt one. A lone sign says: “E Tipi Cezaevi.”

“Derya Hanım, are you taking me to a supermax prison?”

“Give me good deal on textbooks and I won’t leave you there.”

I open my eyes wide. Derya thumps the steering wheel.

Brown scrub brush lines the road. There are no trees, no houses, only rocks and weeds. We pass some goats and a shepherd, who’s dressed in the traditional square jacket that looks like two slabs of a rug sown together.

The prison looks small from the outside, like a small warehouse. A warehouse with a rickety watchtower and barbed wire fences.

“Leave your wallet and phone in the torpedo,” Derya says, pointing at the glovebox.

Inside, there’s a metal detector, after which two guards pat us down. One takes the pen out of my shirt pocket—no sharp objects. Derya gives each guard twenty lira.

“For your service,” she says in Turkish.

They thank her, calling her hojam, or ‘my teacher.’

A guard leads us into a pale pink room with a couple of tables and plastic chairs. Against one wall is a long bookcase with two-thirds of the shelves filled with books in simplified English. Many are from the publisher I represent.

“Yes,” Derya smiles, “that’s what I wanted to show. This is my secret library—I ask all students at school to give me the old books at the end of the year. Then I bring them here.”

The door opens and a handful of children shuffle in. I’d guess they range in age from 8 to 15. Most of them have men’s suit jackets on with the sleeves rolled up. They sit in the plastic chairs.

“These are my best students,” Derya says. She’s smiling. The kids stare at me.

“Hi,” I say to them in Turkish, “my name’s Richard. I work for the company that makes these.” I take one of the readers off the bookshelf. It feels like I’ve said

the stupidest thing anyone could ever have said in this moment.

Derya pats a kid who looks maybe 12 on the shoulder. “This is Aza. He likes horses. He wants to raise racehorses someday.” Derya walks behind each boy and introduces us.

The last one is a 15-year-old, already at least as tall as I am, though he’s lanky in the way boys are in their middle teens.

“This is Mehmet.”

“Mehmetçik!” one of the guards says.

Derya’s eyebrows lower. Then she brightens again as she pats Mehmet on the shoulder.

“He likes learning English and hopes to be an English teacher.”

Mehmet looks at me with clear, almost-black eyes, and nods his head. His gaunt face makes him seem completely serious, even now as he’s smiling.

“Yes,” Mehmet says, “and maybe I travel to England, to see you.”

“Actually, Mehmet, Richard’s from America.”

“Oh, America, yes, hopefully I come to America.”

The way he says the name of the country makes it sound like he is speaking of meeting in heaven. There’s a moment of silence after he speaks when I know I should say I’d love to meet him in the U.S., but I can’t seem to say anything. I nod.

“Mehmet,” Derya prompts, “Why don’t you practice your English phrases for meeting someone new?”

“Hojam,” Mehmet says to me, “how are you doing today?”

“I’m quite well, thank you—I’m enjoying my visit to Elbistan.” Aza gives a snorting laugh, but I continue to focus on Mehmet. “And how are you doing?”

The moment after I’ve said it, I wish I could snatch the words out of the air in this prison classroom. But Mehmet doesn’t seem fazed.

“I’m also quite well. And how long do you stay in Elbistan?”

Derya breaks in, “Mehmet, we talked about this, you have to use present continuous for a short, ongoing action.”

“Oh, yes hojam. How long are you staying in Elbistan?”

“Unfortunately, only one night, but I hope to come back soon. The flight from Istanbul is only about an hour.”

“Tell us about Istanbul,” Aza jumps in.

“It’s a great city,” I say. “I love the way the Bosporus goes right through the middle.”

“Do you live next to the Boğaz?” Aza doesn’t even try to say ‘Bosporus.’

“No, only rich people live there.”

Aza nods and purses his lips. Maybe he thinks I must be an idiot to be a foreigner and not be rich.

“Don’t you want to ask him about America?” Derya prompts.

The conversation ends up limping along for another ten minutes, at which point one of the guards says it’s time for the prisoners to return to their cells. Derya accompanies them out into the hallway, but the guard motions for me to stay in the room.

I’m just starting to mull over how ‘prisoner’ in Turkish is literally ‘sentenced’ when the same guard, who stands in the doorway as the kids’ voices grow fainter, asks me half under his breath in Turkish, “You know Derya Hanım’s story, right?”

I shake my head.

“Her husband—never mind, here she comes.”

Derya motions for me as she walks up the hall. “Come see the children’s cells. They’re not as bad as you think—they’ve got pictures taped to the walls and desks and chairs and even some books they’ve taken out of our little library here.”

The guard says it’s against regulations for more than one visitor to see the cells at a time.

Derya nods, resigned. “Richard, can you tell the boys I’ll visit again later this week?”

I agree. The guard leads me down the long hall. I imagine sliding steel bars, but when we turn left, we come to a double wood door, the kind used in office buildings. The guard opens it and we step into a space much more like a shared dorm room than a prison cell. There’s a small hot plate and bunk beds. Aza sits behind the desk, smoking.

Mehmet sees me eyeing the cigarette and tells Aza to put it out derhal! Aza rolls his eyes. He laconically stubs it in an ashtray.

The only bars in the place are on the windows, one of which is open. The crisp, cold air cuts through the stuffy wood-stove heat in the room.

The boys stand in a semi-circle around me. The guard stays by the door.

“Tell us more of Istanbul,” Aza says.

What can I say? I praise the food and the mix of old and new buildings. After five minutes, the guard says that’s enough.

“Can you give me your address, so I can write?” Mehmet asks.

I give him the address of the publisher.

“It’s best you write me at work, because letters sent to my house are always getting lost.”

Then the guard and I are walking back down the corridor, and there’s Derya.

“Come on, you must be starving, let’s get dinner.” She rubs her hands together.

We walk out to the dirt parking lot just as it starts to pour down rain. I try to knock the mud off my shoes before swinging them into the car but Derya doesn’t even bother.

“Don’t worry, the school guard will clean it up tomorrow,” she says as we drive out of the parking lot. “And we can get your hotel to take care of your shoes.

Now, what do you feel like eating—kebab?”

“Derya, you have to tell me what those poor children are in there for.”

“Oh, different things. I think Aza is in there for assaulting a police officer, and a couple of the younger ones got caught robbing a house—”

“And Mehmet?”

“Mehmet…”

Derya trails off and goes silent. Just when I think she’s not going to answer, Derya speaks.

“The PKK gave Mehmet a gun and told him to threaten the local elementary school teacher to stop teaching Turkish…”

“Was that you?”

“No, it was my husband. Mehmet was told to shake the gun in his face so he wouldn’t think it was just a child’s toy. Mehmet did as he was told, but the gun went off. He could have left Osman there and maybe no one would ever have found out, but he didn’t, he called an ambulance and then he tried to stop the bleeding.”

The driving rain turns into a fine drizzle. Derya stares straight ahead at the road and the rocks and scrub brush. Soon, we pass the school on the left, now dark, and head down into the valley and the town of Elbistan.

“Derya—”

“Richard, I don’t want to speak any more about it.”

The rain has stopped. She cracks her window open and breathes in the cold, wet air.

Hardy Griffin

Hardy Griffin has published writing in Fresh.ink , New Flash Fiction , Alimentum , Assisi , The Washington Post , American Letters & Commentary and has a chapter in Gotham Writers’ Workshop Writing Fiction (2003, Bloomsbury).

Sicko

At the time, we lived above an ice cream shop. It was a Baskin Robbins franchise, the first of its kind in our town.

One day, the Baskin Robbins sign fell and crushed an innocent customer to death.

I was out bowling when it happened: Jenny wanted me to meet her new girlfriend. For weeks, I’d put it off. I didn’t care about bowling. I even pulled the poverty card, which I should have known would only make things worse. Then I had to turn down her offer to pay for me. I made a great fool of myself, citing this and that reason.

Jenny looked at me with amusement, saying nothing, she waited until I finally ran out of excuses.

The new girlfriend was a random user on Taobao who commented on Jenny’s product review. Jenny had bought a pair of nude stockings and was obsessed with how it totally matched her leg color. Jenny was always buying fake Chanel jackets or beauty shit and then sharing elaborate reviews on the internet with strangers. She liked the attention. She could easily afford the real thing, but she always said it was not about actually showing off, it was the community that mattered. Her phone was constantly buzzing. I seldom bought things, so I couldn’t keep up even if I tried.

What upset me was not the fact that Jenny found a girlfriend, but the fact that strangers fell in love online over the stuff they bought – what kind of love story was that?

The Baskin Robbins sign fell because we were supposed to receive a piano.

Since I was out bowling, Mama had work as usual, and Bobo was at school, only Ah Ma was home. But after she let the delivery people in, Ah Ma pretended to be a hired cleaner who didn’t live there. She retreated to the kitchen.

Ah Ma at age seventy was still a bull. She wanted nothing to do with the piano, sent to us by Mama’s Big Boss.

She thought Big Boss smelled like death. You can’t pay me a million dollars to touch his things!

That’s the thing about Ah Ma, she believes in her feelings. If she was pleased to be proven right, she never showed it, not even when a local reporter came around to interview her after the accident.

“I was cooking yellow coconut stew, the kind you cannot find here. Suddenly

the walls started shaking. Even the TV jumped!” The English translation crawled in a ribbon under her stunned face. “This sort of tragedy is fated.”

Big Boss owned the chili sauce factory – our town’s pride and biggest employer. We all had a sort of reverence toward him, but I think secretly we felt he was beneath us. This was because his birth parents were first cousins.

Everyone knew the story: He came out of the womb completely yellow, with a head full of curly hair and a pair of quiet lungs. In their panic, the nurses dropped him. No one could say if his mental impediments were the result of an incestuous union or falling on his head. He never cried. His parents held out until his fourth birthday. Then they gave him up to his infertile aunt, who raised him as her own. Maybe it was her love that healed him – he spoke his first word just shy of his sixth birthday and appeared normal ever since. Eventually, he inherited the aunt’s chili sauce factory. Not long after he took over, he put his product on the internet. People from overseas started eating his chili sauce. It made us even prouder. We laughed about the angmohs sweating and getting all red-faced from our small town’s chili sauce.

But we were also shrewd. Mama’s shift partner, Xiao Ting, had a son who went to America on the Rotary Club’s scholarship. On a visit home, he told his mother to fight. She laughed at him at first. But when she told other people in the factory, with some self-effacing pride, ha ha ha, America has filled him with some crazy ideas, some of us said we saw his point. We debated for a few months. Eventually we surmised Big Boss was a reasonable person. So we complained in unison. The spicy fumes. The long work hours. The low wages. The sudden increase in production. Even the unreliable A/C in the bus that took us to the factory. He soothed every demand until we were convinced of his sincerity. So it was true. One’s character in this life could erase one’s sins from the previous life. We forgave him for being born in incest.

I only met Big Boss that one time, when he’d invited himself over for dinner. Our cramped apartment never saw a single guest. But Mama could not turn him down.

We had to lift Bobo’s mattress from the living room and stack it on the bed I shared with Ah Ma and Mama. The apartment only had one bedroom for all four of us. Then we unfolded a table in the bright vacant rectangle where Bobo’s mattress used to lie.

Ah Ma muttered under her breath the whole time about bad luck. She believed in karma. Big Boss’s birth meant he was destined to be a dark star in this life.

But Mama said, everyone has a past, no?

I was surprised when I finally saw Big Boss. He was a small man. He had the

kind of face that appeared eager to be happy, but somehow fell short. His throat gurgled when he spoke. His words came out murky, as if greased with spit. I locked up my knees so hard during dinner that they almost buckled when I finally stood up.

Mama cooked for five hours: roast duck, pig’s blood, chicken heart, pig’s kidney, the kind of food that repairs, which told us either Big Boss was broken somewhere, or Mama was already loving him in secret.

Ah Ma said, with some bitterness, she was born clever, better than any of us, when Big Boss asked Mama who taught you how to cook like this.

Ah Ma kept dodging Big Boss until even Mama looked sad. As soon as we cleared the table, Ah Ma disappeared to the kitchen to soak in the warbling sounds of her little TV.

Big Boss had no choice but to turn to me.

Eh, I said, my day was fine. I was just at Jenny’s house, as usual. Did my homework in her room while she took her piano lessons downstairs.

Big Boss’s eyes grew big.

He had a well-traveled great aunt. The kind who enjoyed music and parties, went abroad to study. Oxford? He thought I had her spirit. Doesn’t she? He asked my mother, as if she knew this great aunt too. Too bad she died without marrying.

She left behind a piano, which he had no use for.

At this point we grew a little blue in the face.

I waited for Mama’s voice of reason, no way a piano could fit in here. But she kept smiling, newly eager to be happy. I started to say, piano is more Jenny’s thing, I don’t care, but Mama sent me a message with her eyes, so I stopped talking.

Later, I asked Ah Ma how she detected that this man brought bad luck. That’s easy, he had yellow energy, like a light bulb waiting to be switched off.

It took five men and two hours to move the piano up the flight of narrow stairs, before finally scraping it through our front door.

Then, someone must have let go without warning.

The piano crashed to our floor with so much force that the Baskin Robbins sign downstairs shook loose. When it fell, a swooshing sound was heard. Then, a thud.

The victim, a man in his thirties, was licking a mint chocolate chip ice cream cone. He didn’t even have time to scream.

The death changed everything; it made me realize how emotionally unstable

adults could be. Mama grew stony. Ah Ma told her, every morning, for a whole month, that this was the sort of thing that happened when you shot above your station. Big Boss took the piano back. We stopped talking about him. I never saw him again. I wanted to ask Mama when did she meet Big Boss’s great aunt. I was curious about the sort of woman who didn’t marry and spent her days listening to music. But the way Mama’s shoulders bunched up permanently led me to believe she had no straight answer to my question. Her shoulders stayed that way for a whole year. The dead man’s widow pursued a settlement with the landlord, but it’s not clear if anything ever came of it. Ah Ma often said, with excitement, that she deserved every cent she could squeeze out of the landlord, but Mama just left the room whenever this discussion came up. The landlord stopped knocking on our door, no matter how loud we got, whereas he used to run upstairs every day to tell us to shut up, banging on our door like a reliable little alarm. He was probably afraid of our bad luck.

Jenny laughed until she cried when I told her the story. Did it smoosh his head like a watermelon?

That made me start laughing with her, both of us vibrating as if a motor buzzed up our insides, uncontrollable ha ha ha ha ha shaking something loose between us, until her new girlfriend called her sicko.

That broke the spell. Jenny’s chest puffed out. I can be sicker.

She took off running. I knew what she was looking for, but Jenny’s new girlfriend just shuffled along. She was like a sheep.

We ran until we reached my apartment downstairs. The sign was already reinstalled. Awash in the perkiest blue and pink, it was lit up like a homing beacon. Inside the store, our landlord was flitting around in his bright pink polo uniform. I looked at Jenny, who was lit up in her own way. Her face looked ready to wash out with the tide.

I felt called to the moment, but for what, I had no clue.

Death was cool enough as a concept; I didn’t need further evidence. But Jenny was buoyant on a quest. She wanted to see with her own eyes some bloody brain mush, but the sign was too high for us to get a good look in.

I followed Jenny’s lead and, on tiptoes, craned my neck. The bottom of the sign was so clean you could be convinced it never killed anyone. I felt Jenny’s disappointment.

Her new girlfriend just stood to the side, not even trying to look.

Suddenly the store doors swung open. The landlord held out free cups of butter pecan ice cream. Then he shooed us. He told us, you look like homeless ghosts, stop haunting my shop.

Jenny’s new girlfriend immediately started apologizing.

But the way he said homeless ghosts activated our laughing motors again. It made us crazy. Jenny cracked first. Then I exploded. The sound that came out of me felt ambitious, like it was waiting to be released this whole time. It made me believe in the sort of things you had no words for. Jenny was laughing so hard she looked pained. I started to believe my feelings were all true, even the unspeakable ones. I felt wise, I finally understood a deep truth: everything was only a matter of intention. If I tried hard enough, I had the power to mentally command the sign to come unhinged once more. I could, I really could. This time it wouldn’t miss. It would flatten the landlord’s head. Split it open like watermelon. Show Jenny everything she wanted to see. Jenny, who was still cackling, Jenny, who got everything she ever wanted. I felt her like a distant happiness. I felt finally capable. I could make her craziest dreams come true. I could laugh like this forever.

Grace Shuyi Liew

Born and raised in Malaysia, Grace Shuyi Liew is a lesbian poet and fiction writer currently living in Brooklyn. Her awards include a MacDowell Fellowship, Center for Fiction Fellowship and the Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize (judged by Min Jin Lee).

The Wailers

Everybody knows that when you go to a funeral you don’t wear all black, you must slip in some colour for the Lord to see you in mourning. If everybody wear black then he might look down and decide is just a swarm of black garden ants moving from one place to the other looking for their hole in the ground. So when Yvette get the call from Baby that they had a booking for a funeral, she immediately set out her outfit, a black satin skirt with a navy blue top and hat, with the blue push-in-foot shoe from the Catwalk closing down sale. She heated up the leftover porridge from last night and gulped it down in a frenzy so she will have enough time to comb she hair and sweep the yard before she left.

Usually, they got bookings on the day of the funeral, because people never consider who will shout for the dead until the cemetery looking scarce and only a handful of mourners show up. Preacher man does say that the spirit in the casket could refuse to leave if not enough people make noise, so that is how the three wailers Yvette, Isabel and Baby, come to be.

Nobody in these near parts could bawl down a funeral like those three women.

They never went into the church building, that was not part of the job. If you want them to shout and carry on inside the church you had to book days in advance and pay twice the amount; so they usually did their work at the cemetery. Yvette did not depend on the funeral work as much as the other wailers, Baby and Isabel, because she was a full time caterer, one of the sweetest hand in South, so she attended to her part time job only when she had the time and needed some extra cash.

After sweeping the yard she went into her car and phoned Baby.

“Aye, I leaving home now eh, meet me by the highway I’ll pick you up.”

Baby on the other end of the call was distant, her voice trembling under a mountain of sorrow.

“Oh god girl I get some news just now, I not able Yvette, we sister gone!

“Gone where? Who you talking about? Is not Isabel you mean? I talk to she last night and she say she coming with we to Mr. Moses burial today. Don’t tell me something happen to Isabel! Baby, oh god!

“No no Yvette, Isabel good good, is Cherie, she son call me just now from New York to tell me she drop down in the bathroom. I feel so bad Yvette we never go America to check she all these years, Oh God and now she just dead just so!”

Yvette went silent in the car, she could barely hold the phone up to her ear anymore, her chest felt heavy. All the years of disconnect just came together in an instant. When Cherie was part of the wailers she was the loudest and most visceral shouter of the four, Cherie alone could send the casket down in the ground from

the power of her voice rumbling through the cemetery like hurricane wind. But Yvette had not kept in contact with Cherie as much as Isabel and Baby did. Yvette learned to love her from afar, but she never forgave her for leaving. Eight years of distant love ending in death. Yvette sat with the news, filling up the car with guilt and shame. That good for nothing son Cherie make. He force the woman to move from she house in Arima to stay in America with he and that white woman. After all ah we raise that boy he just take she away and say to hell with we! Look now. Look what it come to.

“Yvette, yuh there? I not feeling to do no funeral today sister, we need to sit down and spend some time with weself”

“Alright Baby, call Isabel and tell she I coming, we will come back by me and sort this out.”

A momentary silence ran through the phone before Baby broke the gap. “We should have visited her you know, it was too long now”

“I know Baby, I know.”

*

Isabel and Baby sat in Yvette’s living room, uneasy, flipping their skirt between their legs, shifting their feet to unstick the hot plastic covering on the couch from their thighs. Cherie never said she was sick or experiencing any type of pains, she was always upbeat when on the phone. Baby wondered what type of sickness does just mash you up instantly, leaving you with no time to prepare yourself for God to pull you asunder.

Isabel called out to Yvette who was putting together some sandwiches in the kitchen.

“Yvette, I know yuh avoiding the topic, but we have to go New York.”

Yvette looked into the living room from the open space in the kitchen, her face scrunched up.

“I can’t do it Isa, I just can’t.” Yvette put the bread down, wiping away tears before the water ran out the corner of her eye onto the counter.

“Don’t be so Yvette!” Isabel interjected. “I know you feeling ah how but that was we sister, Cherie is one ah we through and through. I could get my daughter to organize the tickets for we. Cherie son say the funeral is Monday, he giving people enough time to come up New York.”

“Yes Yvette,” Baby joined in softly. “We need to show up at least this once. Me and Isabel will go even if you don’t want to. We will send your love.”

Yvette stepped out of the kitchen in smooth vexation “Don’t send nothing from me! Allyuh want me to go. I will go. You don’t think I in pain like you Baby? She never even tell me she was leaving, she just went and never come back. You don’t

think my pain deep like the roots on the mango tree outside?” she was no longer in control of the tears, they ran away from her like birds fleeing a rapture.

Her voice now a whisper, “Don’t tell me nothing about sending my love, Cherie always had that, she left with all my love, what else I have to give again?”

Isabel stood up, her tall body and long neck aiming for the ceiling as she walked towards Yvette and squeezed her arm, “I hear everything sister, I feel you. I will organize and we will go up and send Cherie off.”

Baby stood up as well, a short woman with strong legs, picked up her purse and looked out to the yard, “Yes, they take Cherie and carry she America, but everybody know she is one ah we, when we reach up so we going to reclaim we sister and restore she as one of the original Four Wailing Sisters. We will show them burial.” she said, walking into the kitchen for a sandwich.

*

The plane touched down on Saturday night at the JFK International Airport. The three women, dressed as though they were about to meet the Pope himself, Baby with her white head tie, Yvette with her brand new yellow dress and Isabel in a polka dot matching blouse and skirt all waited for Robert, Cherie’s only child to come collect them and carry them to Utica, where he and family lived.

The home was a pleasant place, hugged by a well-kept garden and plenty of yard space, but the three ladies made no remarks beneath the night. They offered Robert's family the same taut greetings they had afforded to him.

“Well is nice to meet all of you again after so long” Isabel said, moving towards the room they had identified as hers when she arrived. “I’ll just find myself some rest now, it was a long flight yuh know” she left little room for debate.

“Yes girl, very true” Yvette chimed in, making no eye contact with Robert and his wife, who were both standing awkwardly in the hallway.

“Well Miss Yvette I’m just glad you could make the trip, I know it's been hard for everybody, but thanks for coming.” Robert measured his words. He knew Yvette saw no need for extended conversation, so he left space for silence where needed.

“Well yes, I couldn't miss this homegoing. Is my Cherie we talking about. Although, if she was in Trinidad maybe a good sea bath every now and then would have kept her strong and above ground a little longer, some bush tea, but allyuh don’t know about all of that up here so...it is what it is.”

Robert felt the lash, but received it passively, turning his attention to the luggage he was carrying.

“Well. Thanks again Miss Yvette, I appreciate you for coming, she would have

wanted you here. All three of you.” Robert nodded towards Yvette, in kind.

Sharing a room, Baby turned to Yvette and said “Make that the last time yuh throw talk for that boy, this not we house and he wife already watching we all how.”

“That white woman don’t mean nothing to me, she is a little girl. Imagine that eh Baby, you ever imagine America to feel so small? So suffocating? The atmosphere just depressing.”

“Yvette, that is not the atmosphere, that is you, you suffocating yourself since you hear Cherie dead. America have nothing to do with that, release yuhself from yuhself, you hear me?”

“I not able with all that tonight Baby, I going and sleep.”

Yvette took to her bed and turned to the wall. Baby pretended not to hear the cries in the pillow.

*

Everybody wore black, the entire church looked like the pitch lake. Over the years Cherie had joined the church choir and the ladies class, so they all wore a silver brooch along with all black dresses to remember their departed member. Yvette, Isabel and Baby sat in the church in full colour, discomforted by the darkness and low singing voices.

“What kind of depressing thing is this?” Isabel whispered to Yvette.

Yvette looked over to Baby for confirmation of her disapproval.

“Oh gosh girl” Baby said to Yvette, “I really don’t know what to say, God must be sleeping.”

Yvette just shook her head, turning her lip upside down, furrowing her eyebrows.

Fewer people migrated to the cemetery, less than twenty people in all. This small number seemed almost worrisome to the three friends. Why did the church stay away? Where did everybody else go? Yvette walked over to Robert who was assisting the pallbearers and asked “Son, where everybody else? You sure they get the address?” he looked at her in confusion. “Yes Miss Yvette, we only invited close friends and family for a private burial.” Yvette looked over to Baby and Isobel who heard the answer, “Private!?” they all shouted. Yvette felt her bosom sink down into her spirit and the heat from her chest rise up to her head. This boy must be mad? she thought. In two-two’s Yvette’s lungs burst open and a loud tumult of soaring pain rang through the cemetery, she held her hands to her head and bent over near the open hole in the ground, shouting “Woiiiii Oh God Oh God Oh God, Cherieeeeeeeee”. Baby grabbed Isabel’s hand and joined in the clamour, almost harmonizing with Yvette, “Blessed Assuranceeee Jesus Lord God

Mercyyyyy Mercyyy Oh Goddddd, Take One Ah We Insteadd!!!”

Family and friends were shocked into sorrow. Robert, who was standing in quiet mourning, covered his face.

The wailing spread through the cemetery, turning the burial from a silent gathering to raucous rapture. And as Cherie’s coffin went into the ground, the wailers woke Jesus out of his slumber to welcome Cherie, with Yvette leading the ruckus, because when the day turns, Cherie’s spirit will leave this place, and rest in Trinidad.

Akhim Alexis

Akhim Alexis is a writer from Trinidad and Tobago who holds an MA in Literatures in English from the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine. He is the winner of the Brooklyn Caribbean Lit Fest Elizabeth Nunez Award for Writers in the Caribbean.

Three Sailors

‘What is the black spot, captain?’ ‘That’s a summons, mate.’

—Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island

Down on their marrow-bones my two boys ‘pray’. That’s what we call time spent on our knees, each one before me and one beside the other, my head back for joy, my hat over my eyes, the sea soft in my ears. I can’t know whose lips are where, whose tongue is which as their spit tle-soaked taches brush up and down either side of the length of me. What pleasure it is to be at sea and worshipped by these lads.

The three of us could be brothers with our dense black beards smelling of copper and smoke, our blunt squared thumbs, our brown furry arms and furry behinds. At sea we sing together, toil together, rally together, pull together. Work hard, drink hard, fuck as much as we can. Shore leave is as high an adventure as the ocean, so many tall tales and golden times to hang our old age upon. But we are still young, we rarely tire. I have seen these boys work thirty hours and barely a rest, decks and stokehold, all hands to it; smoke opium and hashish till they spoke in tongues; carry a man on each shoulder and sprint; hurl a stripped and pummelled pickpocket into the river like a broken tree branch; ride each other good enough to splinter a bed-frame, and the gall to say it was broken when they found it.

Once, just after sun-up, we came upon a dead whale floating near to the ship, bobbing on its back with a great swollen gut facing the sun, all stretched and striated like the belly of a woman about to give triplets. As it floated nearer it skirted the boat with the sound of a rustling dress, followed by a deep creaking of wood. A long and sturdily-aimed harpoon punctured the fleshy mass and with an almighty pop the beast threw up its red innards into the sky, raining horrible gore down onto the crew. The stench of it caused us to half retch, both from putrefaction and laughter, and clung for days after.

Out here on the water our time is given to miles of cloud-coloured seas and clockwork bursts of toil and rest. The nights are short with intense points of pleasure, as white starlight in the dark. On shore leave we are forever strangers in strange lands, treated sometimes like princes, sometimes like trouble. Everywhere we go, the war has left behind something reckless and strange in its wake, a touch of lunacy and peculiar tastes. Some might say madness and perversions. We have been there, we have seen it all and I’ll bet our memories are nothing like yours.

Once at port I encountered a beautiful Roma girl who took me by the wrist with

one small hand and made the sign for ‘coins’ with the other, coins that I gave to her. She peeled open my fingers with a kind of tender force and stared across the plain of my hand for a time. Her demeanour changed, she shrugged, turned down her mouth, looked again at my hand, and without raising her head, peered at me through a thick masculine brow, folded my palm like a flower in the cold, kept the silver for herself, and gently returned my hand to me. There was nothing to see. One evening Jacob sets off to find himself a woman and leaves us all to our drunken sport as warm ales turn to rough spirits, card games to bloody arm wrestles, airless bars to pre-dawn hideaways on dirt alleys. Back from his expedition as the bronze dawn calls time on a dry sum mer night, Jacob returns to us, smelling of perfume and powder, dizzy with the joy of a woman’s room. He lays to sleep in between our two large bodies, a slight and muscular little stoat, and soon our dozen limbs are one loose tangle of muscle in the night. In the first winter that followed the war, we each grew a single silver beard hair, the kind that catches the light. We have never broken the miraculous spell of our survival, Edmund, Jacob and me.

A strange cough takes hold in Jacob’s body and the dry ack-ack-ack sound of it becomes his calling card all over the ship. Soon after, Edmund takes up the same rattle, and finally so do I. Captain glowers and complains, berates us for keeping the men awake with our terrible hacking. No other man falls ill, only us. We work through our curious sickness at first, but then we begin to tire. Edmund sleeps in on mornings where once he was a rooster. Jacob seems to take it the hardest, a little further along the road with it than we, and gradually becomes a wisp before our eyes. The hard slopes of his chest, which have so hypnotised me in the past, begin to flatten and sink, and sharp clavicles take their place inside his loose shirts. Where once we might have sung at nights in rounds of three, instead the ack-ack-ack of our endless thirsty coughing is the only music left from our poor rusted lungs.

To the ship’s doctor we go, forward and back for useless powders and tonics. We opt for whiskey and delirious rest instead. I see birds in flight inside our cramped sleeping quarters, birds that cannot be. There is no defined edge to either my sleep or waking. I see drifting clouds in my little mirror and traces of my mother’s handwriting across the ceiling. Mists and colours are all around. A blur’s in my eyes; it is dreaming that I am… At the foot of my bed squats the Roma girl who folded up my hand and denied me my future.

One night I come to in a hot and violent sweat to find I have gone deaf in one ear. I choke for air and scramble naked and confused to the deck where I suddenly feel the night itself lash across my back and thighs. Edmund and Jacob are there but don’t see me emerge, nor do they seem to see each other. They are both pulling at their necks at some invisible force that seems to threaten choking. I feel it too.

The sea is rolling hard underneath us. We are unsteady on our bare feet as we each look out to the darkened water in front of us and try hard to draw in air through the swamp of our lungs. We begin to cough, one after the other, our tender chests pulled taut with the effort of it, harder and louder each time. Our spluttering soon produces hard phlegm, ejaculated on deck with a splatter, followed by a short and violent spew of water coming from each of our throats, vomited hard as if we have been revived with mouth-to-mouth.

There is a pause for only a hiccup of breath before more water comes, and this time it will not stop. Warm churning salt water pouring from behind our lips, flecked with substance and matter. We are doubled over with it. The deck begins to swim at our ankles as the torrents spew forth from our helpless mouths. There is no stop for breath now, every muscle in my body is cramped in the service of the terrible acrid flow from within. The deck becomes swamped around us as we stagger to and fro with the force of these eruptions, the sea, the night. The ship is perceptibly sinking, and soon the wood slowly peels away from the soles of our feet. We are soon and somehow beneath the water itself— where has our ship gone? —it is we who are sinking, fathoms down, fathoms down, three dangling bodies suspended in beams of watery light, through which I strain to reach my boys as they float close by, before I see from their sleeping expressions that they are already drowned. How I’ll dream fast asleep…

The doctor brings me round with a jar of cold water to the face. In the bunk below I hear Edmund wailing in his own hallucinations. We are all three discharged at the next port and it’s a mercy we never have to face separation, not even on the ‘ward’ that they place us in, which is only three spaced beds beneath a thick canvas that keeps the heat in and the air out. I barely know who cares for me there. A woman’s clean black hands turn a panel of cloth on my forehead day and night, cool for a few blissful moments each time, saying soft words I don’t understand. It is she who patiently doles out to me the sweetish soup and soft biscuits, who tilts closed my jaw to keep it all in.

I am taken to the doctor from time to time and undressed before him. Tongue, ears, bollocks, armpits. Runny stools might be cholera, but the cough still mystifies. I haven’t seen Jacob or Edmund open their eyes in days, perhaps they just sleep at different hours. In the doctor’s small cabin another patient is ahead of me, sicker than I, Jesus down from the cross, raw skin and sharp ribs, hunched with pain and dehydration, a poor weak animal. Only it isn’t another patient, it is me. I am the dying Christ and this is a mirror at the doctor’s table. I am startled and horrified, curious, my eyes are not mine, this is me, only aged, from the dark future my palm wouldn’t tell. My skin is wet paper, my heavy penis is now a little pendant pearl quivering under the broad bow of my hip bones. I have dwindled. I just don’t know, the doctor says in his steady voice.

It is night and the canvas is still. Not a breath. Either side of me, just out of reach, the sunken chests of the worshipped bodies of my lads rise and fall in sparrows’ breaths. I am underwater again. I have gone to sleep. How I dream. Of my boys. A blur. In my eyes. The light. The drowning from within. The golden times. The deep. The oozy weeds about me twist.

Postscript

‘In his 1990 book The History of AIDS by Merko Gremek, he cites a study in the 1940’s that identified a group of sailors who died of a mysterious lung disease. The enterprising doctor cultured and saved their lung cells, which were identified in the 1980’s as PCP, or AIDS related pneumonia. The men also were noted to have had “anal trauma”, which because of homophobia was a euphemism for anal sex.’

—Sarah Schulman, ‘Let The Record Show: Losing the True History of AIDS’, 2017.

This story borrows selections from Herman Melville’s poem ‘Billy in the Darbies’.

The opening liner of the story refers to the opening line of ‘Darbies’: ‘Good of the Chaplain to enter Lone Bay And down on his marrow-bones here and pray ’ And uses these direct quotations: ‘A blur’s in my eyes; it is dreaming that I am’ ‘Fathoms down, fathoms down, how I’ll dream fast asleep’ ‘The oozy weeds about me twist.’

Greg Thorpe

Greg Thorpe is a writer, curator and creative producer. His story 1961 appeared in Best British Short Stories 2016. His visual art project A mile of black paper focuses on the history of HIV, AIDS, art and activism. Thorpe is currently Festival Director for GAZE 2022.

Reassurance

The pregnancy tests came in a brown cardboard envelope, stamped with the malevolent smile of the company that dispatched them. I ordered two brands. One, a rectangular box containing two plastic sticks you pissed on directly, the other a plastic pouch, the kind you get drugs in, containing thirty flimsy paper strips to be dipped in urine. I bought two brands for the same reason I bought any test at all — I cannot live with doubt. Whilst most online reviews said both tests were reliable, I'd seen a few damning comments saying the plastic ones were not to be trusted and only go with the paper ones or vice versa. I bought the tests from the company I am supposed to be boycotting because I wanted them fast and was too ashamed to go to the chemist. I could have been buying them for someone else, but it felt too exposing.

I'd gotten out of the shower one day and looked down towards my feet. If I stood up completely straight, I could not easily see my genitals beyond the bulge of my belly. Had it always been like that? Fat collects around my stomach and a bulge had been there for years, but suddenly, from that angle, it looked especially big. I didn't care about putting on weight, which, I tried to reassure myself, was probably what was happening, or it was just weight I already had from a new angle, but what if it was not? I kept prodding my belly, looking at myself in the mirror. The thought followed me through the day and into the next, and the next.

I did an image search for bloating. People, almost always skinny white women, with bloated bellies appeared. Sometimes with writing saying how it depended what time of day it was or what they'd eaten or their cycle as to how convex their stomachs were. I looked again at my belly, trying to work out if it had changed since I last looked.

Despite my impatience for them to turn up, when the tests arrived, I put them at the bottom of my cupboard for several days and tried to put off thinking about the possibility my body could do this.

My periods had stopped years earlier and I was nearly forty. 'Testosterone is not birth control' the Internet cautioned when I'd started hormones ten years earlier. 'Even if your periods have stopped, it's still possible to get pregnant'. Probably, most articles conceded, not that likely, but possible. And there was always one anecdotal post on some transmasculine message board from someone who'd been on testosterone several years, hadn't stopped, and still got pregnant.

I'd gotten a coil after doing a couple of trips to the chemist for the morning after pill. I'll never forget the looks of repulsion from across the counter when I explained the situation. 'I've never encountered this before,' the pharmacist told me through gritted teeth.

If I squatted and shoved a finger up myself, I could feel the coil. The coil was meant to make me feel safe, but boys like me never quite feel safe. I was on PrEP to stop me contracting HIV, but I feared pregnancy more than any virus.

I didn't tell anyone about the coil. Some people still struggle to refer to me as 'he' once they know my history, so telling anyone I had a procedure so culturally synonymous with women made me wince as much as the possibility of pregnancy itself. I also didn't want to tell friends only to be met with stories of how they or someone they knew got a coil once and it was the worst pain they'd ever experienced. I'd read the horror stories on the Internet, I didn't need more. In the end the internal pinch and scrape and cramps were no worse than I'd expected. The gynaecologist had even worked with trans men before and did not misgender me, hence making it as dignified an experience as having copper inserted up one's genitals could be. I felt bullet proof for a while, 'till some months later when my friend Erica mentioned being the product of an ineffective coil.

Erica had two kids and didn't want more. She told me of her own recent pregnancy scare when she was telling me about the ineffectiveness of her mother's coil. “It's pretty easy to get an abortion these days though,” she said. “There's a pill you can take up until two months now.”

I found articles online about women who didn't realise they were pregnant 'till it was pretty much time to give birth. Cryptic. That's what those pregnancies were called, like a crossword. What if I did not realise I was pregnant 'till it was too late, then I'd have to have the baby with no time to properly arrange an adoption and have the guilt of sending someone into a care system where they might be abused or adopted by fundamentalist Christians who would probably turn out to be paedos. Pro-life people never think about this stuff. Even if I found out before it was too late for an abortion, there were the obvious complications of sitting in the reception of a clinic with my beard and square jaw.

I once had to visit the breast cancer department of Guy and St Thomas's because of a lump. I'd had top surgery a couple of years before but the surgeon had cautioned that some tissue remained and I should still check for lumps. When I

saw the doctor at the hospital —despite the fact it is not unheard of for cis men to get breast cancer— she looked amused. “What can I do for you?” she asked, with a little smirk. I watched her face drop as I explained about being trans, having a mastectomy, finding a lump anyway. My GP had said it was probably nothing to worry about, the hospital doctor was less reassuring. “How long have you been consuming The Substance?” she asked gravely. 'The Substance' was her word for testosterone. She said it in a way I interpreted as the belief any cancer I had would be my own fault. “There is definitely something there.” She was sombre. I couldn't tell whether this was because she thought I had cancer or because she thought I was an abomination. I waited hours alone before they called me in for the biopsy. It was Valentine's Day.

I felt able to face the tests three days after they arrived. I decided I would do a flimsy paper one first and pissed in a small tube-shaped container. I dipped one of the strips in yellow and waited. It looked negative, but if I held it up to the light and squinted, maybe I could see something? On the Internet I read about things called evaporation lines. How did I know what was an evaporation line and what was The Awful Horror? I took a photo to look at later then kept looking at the test itself, one moment sure there was nothing, the next wondering, is that an incredibly faint line? And if it is, is it an evaporation line, a shadow, or a real line? I consulted my phone, searching 'negative pregnancy tests' so I could get conclusive proof. I found forums of people struggling with the same inconclusiveness, except all of them were desperate to get pregnant. 'Is it giving me false hope?' asked one person, who'd put up a picture of what to me seemed a clearly negative test. To my dismay, there were 'reassurances' in the replies: 'I can definitely see something! Keeping my fingers crossed for you.'

After the biopsy on my chest, the hospital said they'd get back to me within two weeks. A month passed. I kept ringing, sometimes several times a day, never getting through. Eventually a receptionist did answer. She told me she couldn't give me results over the phone in a way that sounded like I had Stage 4 cancer. “They had to take the results of your biopsy to a meeting, but they'll get back to you soon.” There were tears in my eyes as I hung up. Images flashed in my head of dying in a women-only cancer ward, other patients shocked by my presence, nurses misgendering me 'till death and beyond. Fortunately, a nurse in the department overheard the sadistic receptionist and rang me back minutes later to tell me my results were fine, the lump was nothing to be worried about. “It's just the receptionist said you had to take the results to a meeting,” I said, relief cascading through my body.

“We take every result to a meeting,” she told me, in a kindly tone.

Some days I still touch my lump, what if they got it wrong?

I managed to squeeze out enough drops for a second sample and dipped another strip in. Again, the test looked negative. I held it up to the light, doubted myself, took a picture, consulted the forums, nothing felt conclusive.

Increasingly, the people around me seemed to want babies. Even my fellow T-boys were getting their eggs harvested or going off hormones to conceive and there are heart-warming films about trans men becoming fathers, giving birth to their own kids, despite claims by doctors hormones would make them infertile. I'm happy for them. I never thought those guys lesser-men for their ability to conceive, but for me, the possibility felt like a source of shame and emasculation. I told no one of my scare, not even Erica.

“Isn't it wonderful?” Straight allies began to ask me as queers who grew up thinking kids would not be a possibility, had kids.

“Sure, if that's what you want.”

“Will you have kids one day?'

“Nah, not really interested.”

They looked at me like I'd killed a baby.

After doing the paper tests, I lay on my bed, which had been stripped of sheets for a couple of days. I'm not an animal, I don't usually live like that, it's just I'd been so anxious about The Awful Horror, it made me struggle with things like changing sheets. I read more reviews.

“Apparently my tap is pregnant!”

Later that day I took the other kind of test, the sturdy plastic stick, pissed directly on the end. With the container, I'd had to be delicate, it was fiddly, this time I just let the golden stream spurt out of me. It felt cleansing. This test was definitively negative. Could it be faulty?

“Don't you want someone to look after you when you're old?” Erica once asked me, which made me think of my parents, how they were old and not only was I not looking after them, I'd moved 300 miles away to not look after them. I felt guilty, I'm not some monster, it's just I've never been able to look after anything, even my succulents die.

I left the bathroom floor and made for my sofa. Looked out the window, noticed for the first time the bright snow outside. There's a phantom in me, but it's not in my body. I scrolled down my contacts, looking for someone to talk to. I imagined a conversation between me and Erica. Erica's great — always refreshingly direct. “What made you think you were pregnant anyway?”

I'd reply with the stuff about my stomach. “From all the beer you drink!”

I'd laugh.

“You take testosterone, you have a coil, you're nearly forty years old and there's no actual sign apart from you noticed you've got a beer gut or whatever, which, by the way, all men basically get in their thirties. This would be a miracle baby!”

I rose from my sofa again, leaving the view of the snowy sky, and returned to the bathroom to look at the test for what would really be the last time, perhaps to take another, just to be safe.

Len Lukowski

Len Lukowski is a queer writer and performer based in Glasgow. He writes poetry, fiction, lyrics and memoir. His work has been published in Wasafiri , The Quietus , Magma and elsewhere. Lukowski’s debut poetry pamphlet, The Bare Thing, was published in 2022.

In Language Strange

I go out dancing with my friend. Silence between us except for the tap tap tap of spiky heels on cobbles. I keep my eyes down, but my friend walks ahead with her back straight and her head up like she trusts the gaps between the old stones not to snap their teeth at her feet. She’s wearing a pleather miniskirt, a leopard-print faux-fur coat. Above us the moon is high and full like a pregnant belly. Its light pools on the ground, bathing us in silvery-white when we step out from beneath the blurry cones of muted streetlight glow. It’s eleven o’clock and the city’s about to get its second wind. I can feel the buzz in the air like violin strings pulling taut, restless and thrumming, unmissable if you know what to listen for. A languorous stretch and an almighty roll, that’s all it takes, and it’s alert again, that giant sleepless creature, letting us catch a glimpse of its neon underbelly as we get closer to the centre, dogging our steps with watchful eyes that peer through half-slitted lids. My friend and I are going to The Den, near the top of the hill: the club is cramped and made more so by the wilting tree in the large planter right in the middle of the dancefloor, but you can get a double vodka and coke there for a quid cheaper than anywhere else in town, and we’re broke until our student loans come in.

This is my friend’s world; I am an interloper. The heels are both a concession to her and a buffer against looking silly, because she’s tall even without them and I’m not. My legs sprout upwards out of the shoes like ungainly saplings, clad in thick black tights, the rest of me wrapped in a blowsy Primark dress that does its best to conceal the ring of puppy fat around my waist. My mother’s been sending me unappetising recipes, kale smoothies and cornflake-coated chicken, ever since I started uni and gained the weight, but the fat bothers me less than this presumed fact of its transience. It lends it an odd sense of malleability that unsettles and disturbs me. Sometimes when I wake up, before I’ve opened my eyes, I’m halfconvinced that my body has morphed in the darkness of the night without my knowledge, my soft tummy transforming itself into something obscene; a second pair of breasts, an enormous middle finger flipping off the world, a diorama of the crucifixion with its centrepiece a butter-yellow adipose Jesus. I want to tell my mum that we have very little control over what our bodies do, in the end; they are their own beasts, and do not require our consent to change in ways that bewilder and alarm us.

“Hurry up,” my friend calls. I speed my pace, stumbling a little and narrowly avoiding laddering my tights on the corner of a wrought-iron bench. She glances over at me. The eyebrow arching wickedly, the fishhook curve of her lip: my clumsiness amuses her.

I am in love with my friend. I love her because she is beautiful, and because she is aloof. She holds herself at a slight remove from everything and everyone. There are things I know about her – what her parents do for a living, where she went to school, the names of her childhood best friends – but nothing important, nothing that matters. I take what I can get. I guard my handful of facts jealously, holding them close to my chest like precious jewels, sorting through them at night in my own quiet bed as if to assess their shine, their colour. The remoteness of her hasn’t diminished in all the time I’ve known her, no matter how hard I try to weasel my way into the meat of her heart. I’m entranced by it. My envy and my desire are too closely intertwined for me to tell the difference between them. I have tried to siphon some of her mystique for myself, but I can’t make it stick – I wear my feelings on my face, my heart on my sleeve, play all my cards face-up; I am as transparent as a sheet of clingfilm held up to the light.

We show our IDs to the bouncer at the door and he nods us in, his eyes roving over my friend’s bare legs. Inside, she cuts through the crowd and heads straight for the toilet, expecting me to follow. We cram into the single cubicle together. She pulls a baggie from her bralette, a compact mirror from her sequinned clutch, cuts two neat lines with a Tesco Clubcard. She holds my hair back when I lean over the mirror, then I do the same for her. When she raises her head again her pupils are huge and glimmering and obsidian-black. She smiles at me slowly, the tip of her nose almost brushing mine, tiny specks of white in her baby-pink lipgloss. “Let’s go dance,” she says, and the words are precious gifts wrapped in puffs of sweetsmelling breath.

We go back into the belly of the club. The bass moves restlessly around us, pounding like war drums. I feel the moment it enters me, fizzing up through my veins until I’m incorporated into the writhing, pulsing body, moving in sync with everyone around me. My friend goes away and comes back with two shots she likely didn’t have to pay for and we throw them back in time with the music, leaving glistening prints on the glass in the shape of our mouths. Vodka burn; I bare my teeth at my friend and she laughs, the sound swallowed by the club as soon as it leaves her throat. We leave our glasses on the rim of the planter and dance.

This is the part I love. My friend’s arms are long and slim and tanned and she wraps them around me, draws me close and tilts her head down to mine so that her hair falls around us in a soft golden curtain. Her eyes on me, black and deep as the night. Looking into them feels like wrapping myself head to toe in thick warm velvet. It’s hot in the space between our bodies, a space filled with the smell of her. She smells musky and clean, a sinuous, fleet-footed creature of the type you might see in the city at night, if you’re lucky, catching glimpses of its lean shadow weaving around lampposts and its golden eyes shining from the darkness like secrets. She

presses her mouth to my cheek and bites, leaving the imprint of her small sharp teeth and a sticky smear of lipgloss. I can feel her laugh in the jump of her ribcage. A sudden noise, wordless and inchoate, the low boom of masculine delight. Close enough that it reaches us over the music and jars us apart. A man at her side – expensive veneers, rugby player shoulders enclosed in a Jack Wills polo shirt. My friend’s lips draw back from her teeth. I feel her disdain in my bloodstream, kicking my heartbeat up a notch. The man gestures at us, at my friend’s arm still loosely curved around my waist. “Nice,” he shouts, the word shaped by the predatory curve of his smile. “Bit of girl-on-girl, yeah?” His face is a rictus, suggestively leering, a grotesque caricature of desire. It fills up the space between me and my friend and turns the air acrid and tarry. She pulls her hand away from me and draws herself up to her full height, tossing her hair back over her shoulder. Over our heads the strobe lights are flashing in time with the bass, red-blue-black in a frantic rhythm. On every third beat the red illuminates her face like a time-lapse transformation. Her jawline lengthening, her mouth opening, with each flash of light more teeth, layers and layers of gleaming points crowding and the skin of her face splitting as her jaw opens wider, wider. I close my eyes; I know what comes next. With my eyes shut the music pours into me like water into a vessel. I tip my head back and lift my arms high, grin wide and sightless, merge into the crowd until the feel of other bodies brushing against mine is the only thing giving me any sense at all of my own physical boundaries. I feel weightless, endless, like there’s a crack in me somewhere and I’m spilling out of it and the room is spilling in, its hungry energy pushing insistently into me and moving my limbs to its whims, lifting me high above the crowd until I bump against the ceiling. It could be seconds, minutes; I drift until I feel my friend’s fingers wrapping tight around my wrist, pulling me back down to earth. Her face is normal again. Flawless and unreadable. There’s a new dark stain on her jacket. The smell of meat; a strip of torn polo shirt hanging from a branch of the tree behind her. The movement of bodies around us has taken on a mindless quality; people staring straight ahead, their vacant gazes passing over the hot red mess at their feet. I smile at my friend and she smiles back, slow and exacting. In the strange light her fake fur and fake leather look real. I let my vision blur until all I can see is her standing in front of that tree, like a hunter on some prairie somewhere, draped in the skins of the beasts she’s killed. I whisper her name into the noise and the night, Caro, and I know that she hears me from the way her face tilts, feline, pleased. “I love this song,” she calls, and wends her way back to me.

Her arms around me, her lips on mine. I taste blood inside her mouth, heady enough that I push my tongue in to chase it. Somewhere high above us the moon sings and pulls at my skin as if seeking to pluck it from my bones. I let it take

me, shape me into something wilder. My head tipped back, my eyes closed again. When I open them I will be changed; I will be different; I will be something new.

Robyn Jefferson

Robyn Jefferson is a short story writer from the South West of England. She writes fiction about women and bodies that often focuses on the lived experience at the nebulous overlap of marginalised identities. She is currently working on her debut novel.

The Etymology of a Sword Swallower

Mother (n.1) “female parent, woman in relation to her child,” from old English,  modor. Proto-Indo-European root =  mater - “mother.” (cf. Old Irish mathir, Lithuanian mote, Greek meter, etc).

He finds her still and blue in bed, lilac lips apart enough to slip his little finger in and feel her dead-slug tongue. A ladder of purpled scars beneath her long sleeves. Skin cold. No pulse. Two paramedics switch her to a stretcher in three slick moves. A siren fades. A scream in his throat doesn’t catch. A social worker has questions he can’t answer.

Father (n.) “he who begets a child, nearest male ancestor,” from old English, faeder. Proto-Indo-European root =  pater - “father.” (cf. Sanskrit pitar, Old Persian pita etc).

Regarding his father his mother was silent. Lips schtum. Straight line. Eyes hard. A look like daggers. Other times a soft gaze. Seeing him-not-him. Someone else. Someone swimming just beneath the surface of his skin.  “Who?” he’d said once.  Slapped face to that. Burning imprint of her hand on his cheek.  Usually it was words she hurled – jagged, broken-bottle words to slice and stab. Afterwards always darling hugs and  sorry  tears and mugs of milky tea. A warm sweet stream seeping straight through him, soothing, smoothing out his knots and clenches. The treat of scooping up the treacly sludge of sugar at the bottom with his special silver spoon, its handle shaped like the Chrysler building. A metal lollipop, cool and calming on his tongue.

He is motherless and fatherless. He is fifteen. Fifteen means the social worker must make phone calls while he packs a bag.

Statue (n.) 14c, from Old French  statue,  estatue (pagan) “graven image” (12c.), from Latin  statua,  “image, monumental figure.” Proto-Indo-European root = stā-  “to set down, be firm.” (cf. static, statistics, statute etc).

Chiffon (n.) 1765, “feminine finery, adornment,” from French chiffe, “a rag, piece of sheer silk” (17c).

Her room smells of dead skin, sad moods, mothballs and jasmine. On her bedside table, a tiny plastic glow-in-the-dark statue of the Virgin Mary from a pilgrimage to Lourdes.

What miracles she prayed for he doesn’t know.

The tips of her scarves spill from a drawer like so many snake tongues in scarlet, turquoise, pink and all shades of green. He fingers the gauzy softness of chiffon as if feeling for the edges of her restless bones.

Longest they lived in one place was a year. A house white as wedding cake. A child’s swing on a rug-sized patch of balding grass out back. One time he came home from school to find her hanging by her knees from the cross-frame. She wore a silver sparkly leotard he’d never seen before, a chiffon scarf tied round each wrist. She’d reached for his hands, lifted him off the ground. Soft sensation of air on his face. Their sharp-edged shadow swinging on the wall.

Acrobat (n.) 1845, from French  acrobat, (14c.) Proto-Indo-European root = ak“be sharp, rise to a point, pierce.”

Hypothetical evidence includes Greek akros, “at the top,” Sanskrit acani, “point of an arrow,” Latin acutus, “sharp,” acuere, “to sharpen,” Lithuanian akstis, “sharp stick,” Welsh ochr, “edge,” Old English ecg, “sword.”

Through the rain-stained windows of the social worker’s car he watches south London blur into east London, hugging the rucksack on his knees. Inside: chiffon scarves, the Virgin Mary, the Chrysler spoon.

Foster (v.) “to nourish, support ,” from old English, fostrian. Proto-Indo-European root = pa - “to protect, feed.” (cf. pasta, companion, fodder, forage, foray etc).

The foster parents – two grey-haired women in jeans and trainers – have a huge house on the edge of Hackney Marshes. With sad-eyed smiles they show him his room: a bed, a child-sized sink, a full-length mirror, a desk and a view of the pincer-topped Shard piercing the slate-grey haze hanging low over the city. We’ve put you next-door to Jason, they say.

Jason: from Greek,  iasthai, “to heal,” possibly related to iaino, “warm, cheer,” probably from root meaning “enliven, animate.” (cf. iatrogenic, paediatric, psychiatric).

Jason knocks and walks in all smiles and smelling sharply of aftershave, his hair spiked with gel, his eyes brown and round as conkers. Under one arm, a knockedabout Nike box he drops onto the desk.

“Watch this,” he says.

Jason takes a single white sponge rabbit from the box and turns it into six by squeezing it in his closed fist then opening it. He places a yellow pom-pom under a blue plastic cup, waves a hankie, lifts the cup and the pom-pom’s gone, waves the hankie and it’s back, then gone again.

“Magic tricks are okay for kids’ parties,” Jason says. “But I want a grown-up act. Something with edge. Watch this.”

He pulls out his phone and clicks onto YouTube: A young woman extinguishes a flaming torch in her mouth. Another breathes out clouds of fire. Students at the Coney Island Sideshow School learn to eat fire, swallow swords, escape from a straitjacket while hanging upside-down, the voice over states. Not only do they learn how to do all this safely, but also how to create an entire performance. The clip ends with a skinny man swallowing a sword-blade the length of his torso.

“You can make a living doing that stuff,” Jason says. “So, soon as I’m eighteen I’m off to New York City. You need a plan too. No-one’s coming to claim us. No-one adopts teenagers. They’ll let you stay here after you’re sixteen but only if you’ve got a plan. College. Apprentice scheme. Something.”

When Jason packs his props away the sleeves on his hoodie shift up to reveal J-A-S-O-N scratched on each forearm.

Swallow (n.2) “act of swallowing,” 1822. In Old and Middle English, “gulf, abyss, hole etc.,” also “gullet.” Cf. Old Norse svelgr, “whirlpool,” literally “devourer.”

The last thing he sees before sleep is the ridged column of the sword swallower’s gullet pressed against the thin skin of his extended neck.

Ash (n.1) from Old English  æsce, “ash.” Proto-Indo-European root =  as- “to burn, glow.” Forms all or part of ardour, arid, arson etc.

His mother goes away in a wooden box and comes back in a plastic vessel so ugly he wraps it in layers of chiffon. Places it next to the Virgin Mary and his Chrysler spoon on the windowsill, their shapes against the light his very own private skyline.

He wakes on his back, ears wet with tears, the parched remnants of a dream adrift in his heart-space. Outside the pigeons chorus stories of strangled loss.

In his mirror he peers at the glistening pink lobe above the opening to his throat. Slides a finger in. Touches it. Gags. Tries again with his toothbrush, poking the handle down. His guts lurch like seasick. He tries again, and again. Gradually moving further back.

Jason tells him the world’s youngest living professional sword-swallower is a

fifteen-year-old schoolgirl in America.

The four-thousand-year-old art of sword swallowing goes back to fakirs and shamans. Sword swallowers learn to suppress the gag reflex and paralyse the gut’s natural rhythmic waves, transforming the sword’s path from mouth to stomach into one long straight living scabbard.

Scabbard (n.) from Anglo-French escaubere, “sheath,” Proto-Indo-European root =  sker- “to cut,” (cf. carnage, scaramouche etc.,) +  berg, Proto-Indo-European root = bherg - “to hide” (cf. bury).

The nineteenth-century sword swallower Sallementro learned aged seventeen from a friend. He started with full-sized swords which made his swallow sore. He drank sugared lemon for relief, then subsisted on liquids until he’d mastered the art. It took him three months.

Apprentice (adj.) “unskilled, inexperienced,” from Old French aprendre, from Latin apprehendere, “to hold, grasp mentally or physically.”

He researches gag reflex, epiglottis, cricopharyngeus, peristalsis. Studies Technicolor pictures and monochrome diagrams of the gastro-intestinal tract.

In front of his full-length mirror, naked but for underpants, he stands tall, pushes his chin out and his head back. His empty stomach growls. He swallows a lump of bread, feels it go straight down, pictures its path past upper and lower oesophageal sphincters and into the stomach cavity.

It is only below the stomach your insides curve and loop.

He tries the Chrysler spoon, manoeuvring slowly, senses the involuntary muscles in his gut wall relax, tune into his intention. He retches. A splash of blood-streaked liquid in his sink. Sour metallic tang on his tongue.

He practises. Knitting needles, chopsticks. Jason shows him how to twist a metal coat-hanger into a sword-like shape.

He suffers sore throat. Chest pain.

If it hurts, you have not lined up the path properly.

Jason buys him Pepto-Bismol. The pink minty fluid tastes like a medicine his mother used to give him as a child.

His first real blade is fifteen inches. He blunts the edges with oilstone.

A study published in the British Medical Journal (2007) concluded sword swallowers run a higher risk of injury if they’re distracted or over-embellish their act. However, injured performers have a better prognosis than patients that suffered iatrogenic perforation during surgery.

There’s a cake with eighteen candles. Jason has a passport, a plane ticket, a stash of dollars. A rucksack high on his shoulders. When he’s gone the silence in the empty room-next-door becomes the roar of a jet-plane bound for New York City.

A flyer through the door:

CIRCUS FESTIVAL! TOP PERFORMERS! FREE OPEN-SPOTS FOR UP-AND-COMING ACTS.

A childhood memory: holding his mother’s hand in a park. Bowler-hatted clowns handing out flyers. His mother turning, rushing away, her grip tightening, hurting like his fingers will snap. His father somewhere in that grip.

Performance (n.) “accomplishment.” Meaning “that which is performed” from 1590s; “public entertainment” from 1709.

He takes the tube to the end of the line where houses thin and there are signs for the motorway. A marquee with riffling flags in a field circled by food and drink stalls, tents, wigwams and awnings.

He is directed to a hot tent. Palettes stacked one end for a stage. A crowd on snaking rows of orange plastic chairs, the air suffused with whiffs of mud and damp grass, cheap booze, chip fat, burgers and popcorn. And something else, something tart and rich – adrenaline pulsating in the core of him.

He stands bare-chested, chiffon scarves looped round each wrist, on a table before him his new sword. Eighteen inches of gleaming steel blade. Sparkling rhinestone-studded hilt. Alongside her an apple, red and polished as painted nails. A salami, shiny pink and fat.

He grasps her, licks her blade both sides and holds her high, flipping his wrist so her tip points down towards him. He’s fasted twenty-four hours to ensure her path is clean, drunk pints of water to sink his stomach lower. To take all of her. Holding his body straight and still, he rolls his head back, slips her in his mouth. A short shout. A gasp. A shift in the atmosphere – its granularity thinner, finer –as the crowd sucks in breath.

He has them now. He knows he has them.

He pushes her down, experiencing the pleasure-pain of dead cold metal on living gut wall, savouring the sense of its rings of muscle opening in peristaltic rhythm. As her tip enters his stomach, he lunges to one knee – she drops further –releases his grip, raises his arms – one-two-three –  whips her out.

He leaps up and takes the apple – slash, slash – three slices fall. The salami –slash, slash, slash – four slices, six, eight, ten.

There is clapping, whistling. Something inside him is unshackled and swells. Like a new pair of shoulders. He feels taller, wider, his jaw firmer.

Before leaving the field, he lies down on the battered grass, applause echoing in his head. He scans the sky for vapour trails. Watches them fragment and fade.

That night he dreams he swallows the Shard, strides across the Atlantic to New York City, uproots the Chrysler Building. Swallows that too.

Chrysler: U.S. automobile corporation, founded 1925. A variant of German  Kreisler, perhaps related to  kreisel, “spinning top,” but the sense connection is unclear.

Kate Lockwood Jefford

Kate Lockwood Jefford worked in NHS mental health services before completing an MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck. She won the 2020 VS Pritchett Prize and 2021 Bath Short Story Prize, and her work has been shortlisted in Brick Lane , Rhys Davies , Fish and more.

Aisling crouched onto the floor of the loo on the train and stuffed the little box she’d wrapped in tin foil into the corner. It didn’t exactly blend in but putting it in the bin seemed so final. And there was still a chance she’d change her mind before the train reached Connolly Station in Dublin, even though they were only a few minutes away. She hadn’t taken the things out of their little box, didn’t want to touch them, even if part of her was a bit intrigued. They probably felt slimy. That’s what she’d thought when Mona had stood up and held one aloft to the roars and laughs of the other women who’d travelled to Belfast with them. Most of them had never even seen one before. Mona was still playing with it when Aisling had left to go to the loo.

The train lurched, and Aisling had to place both hands on the sides of the cubicle to steady herself. When she straightened up, she peeled away a piece of toilet paper stuck to her shoe, then washed her hands. No soap. Typical. She fluffed up the paper bag from the pharmacy to pretend the things were still in it, left the loo and went back to her seat beside Mona. Imagine calling them things; she’d just finished an English degree. And it wasn’t like it was the ’50s. It was 1971.

Mona nodded at the paper bag.

“Have fun in there with them, did ya?”

“Great craic altogether,” said Aisling. “I see you’re not bored with yours yet.”

She nodded at the condom, unspooled and strung out, lying across Mona’s lap.

“Maybe you should put it away,” said Aisling. “Y’know, in case the inspector comes along or something.”

“Sure, what would be the point of that?” said Mona. “I didn’t go all the way to Belfast to hide what I bought. That wouldn’t be much of a protest against the ban.”

Aisling arranged her scarf over the empty bag on her lap. “Suppose.”

“I’m surprised you came on the trip.” Mona picked up the condom and ran her nail around the rim. “With you wanting to become a teacher and all.”

Aisling said nothing and looked at the houses flit past the window. She hadn’t wanted Mona’s company, but she hadn’t exactly been able to say anything when Mona had plonked herself down beside her on the train. As if Aisling had been able to think about anything other than the consequences of doing this since they’d left the pharmacy in Belfast. Not that she hadn’t thought about them before the trip–of course she had; she nearly hadn’t climbed on the train in Dublin, had almost turned around and left, but something in her had made her clamber up those steps. That something had a lot to do with Mam; she knew that much. But that something had shrivelled up as the train trundled towards Dublin, towards

Customs. Even if she wasn’t arrested, there was no way she’d be allowed to teach. She didn’t need Mona to tell her that. And what was she to do then? Dad had scrimped for years to put her through university. Her part-time job hadn’t covered much.

He’d borrowed to pay for her lodgings, even though she knew that money was needed at home. The roof needed fixing. And the underside of the car was rusting. It probably had been like that for years, but she hadn’t noticed until the last time she’d gone home for the weekend, when Dad had given James from down the road a lift into town, and she’d sat in the back seat for the first time since Mam had drowned. Ever since that day, she’d always sat in the seat beside him. No wonder she hadn’t noticed that behind the front seat the place for the feet had rusted away, and she was able to see the road rushing under her feet. When she’d said it to Dad, he’d said he meant to put a piece of plywood across it, that he was glad she’d reminded him, that it would have been awful if a rat had got into the car. Aisling hadn’t even thought of that.

Beside her on the train, Mona was playing with the condom, stretching it in and out like a concertina. At least Ellen hadn’t sat beside her. She was sitting two rows back, and that suited Aisling just fine. She felt bad enough about hiding the condoms as it was. Ellen had always been so kind when Aisling had lodged with her at university. At first, when Ellen had served up steaming dinners to the lodgers, Aisling had worried about what Dad was eating. Not that she’d cooked amazing meals for him when she was at home or anything. But at least when she was there, he’d always had a proper meal. Now that she was gone, he probably just had a boiled egg or something. She’d said as much to Ellen one night, and Ellen had said an egg wouldn’t do him any harm, that it was good for a man to fend for himself.

When she’d heard why Mam died, Ellen had said other things too, and Aisling wasn’t able to stop thinking about what she’d said. Dad would have been annoyed if he’d known she’d gone with Ellen to meetings for the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement; Aisling knew that much, even if he must have agreed with what they stood for. After what had happened to Mam, how could he not?

Then again, he’d never faced up to how she’d died. He just wasn’t able to. He’d loved her since the first day he saw her, passing by him when he was fifteen. Mam had said that a few times, back when she was in good form. But she’d never mentioned the person she’d loved more than anyone, even though at the end he must have been all she thought about.

Aisling had only found out about him years after she’d died. And for so long before that, when anyone asked her what had happened to Mam, she’d told them what Dad had said, that Mam had tried to save a man in the river, a man who had a baby and toddler at home. Not that many people asked or anything. Most

people around knew that Mam had drowned, and the man too, and never brought it up, only to ask how Aisling’s dad was doing.

But when she went to secondary school, she was asked the odd time about Mam. And there was a girl called Karen who shouldered Aisling any time she saw her in the corridor. The third time she did it, Aisling caught her plait and yanked it hard. Karen slammed Aisling against the wall, calling her a dirty liar, saying her mam had never tried to save anyone, that everyone knew she’d tried to kill herself, and that Karen’s uncle had jumped in and died trying to save her, leaving two little boys behind. Aisling had shoved Karen off her, but as she’d walked away, she hadn’t been able to shake an unsettling feeling she wasn’t able to name.

When she went home from school that day, Aisling just sat on her parents’ bed–the same bed Mam had taken to for a few days before she’d drowned. Not that that meant anything. Aisling used to bring her a cup of tea in her room after she came home from school, even though Mam didn’t usually drink it. Mostly, she just lay there.

Dad had come up the stairs and asked, “Everything alright? What are you doing in here?”

She pulled a thread out of the bedspread.

“Dad, a girl in school said her uncle had drowned trying to save Mam, that she’d tried to kill herself.’ She looked at him. ‘That’s not true, is it?”

He slumped onto the bed.

“It just became too much for her, Aisling.”

“What do you mean?”

“She’d always been . . . y’know . . . low, even when she was a girl. But when she was sixteen, something happened.”

“What?”

“I can’t really talk about this kind of stuff with you, Aisling.”

“What can’t you talk about? She was my mam!”

“We loved each other very much.” He stared at the chest of drawers. “We got carried away.”

“I don’t understand.”

He exhaled. “She became pregnant, Aisling. But not with you. And we weren’t married, not back then.”

Aisling grabbed his arm. “I have a brother or sister?”

“She named him Oisín, but he might not be called that anymore. She was sent to a mother and baby home to have him and was forced to give him up for adoption.”

“Why didn’t you stop that from happening?” He was trying to avoid looking at her, but she wouldn’t let him. “Dad?”

“I left school and got a job to prove I could provide, but her family wouldn’t

listen.”

She looked at his wedding ring, snuggled under his swollen knuckle. “But ye got married.”

“That was years after. We always loved each other, even after everything. We tried so hard, but we were never able to find Oisín.”

He reached across the bed to the locker on Mam’s side, opened the drawer and took a tiny photo of a baby from a navy velvet box. He ran his finger over it.

“That’s him.”

Oisín had Aisling’s nose.

“Your mam never got over losing him,” Dad said. “And I never will either.”

*

Thinking about that wasn’t doing Aisling any good. She needed to get the condoms back and join the protest. But Cora was in the loo. Again. What was she doing in there anyway? It was the third time she’d gone. Maybe it was nerves. She hadn’t seemed that anxious when she’d bought spermicidal jelly in the pharmacy, not that she’d known what it was for. Cora had said as much, but it hadn’t stopped her buying so many tubes that the bag had ripped in the street in Belfast, the boxes falling to the pavement. They’d all had such a laugh, scooping them up. None of them were laughing anymore though. Not even Mona. Even she’d gone quiet as Connolly Station came closer. Her face was drawn, her skin stretched taut as a bodhrán.

Cora came back from the loo as the train pulled into Connolly. Even though she didn’t want to, Aisling felt herself stand up, leave her seat and walk down the passageway, avoiding the eyes of the others. She went past the door to the loo, then continued through the next carriage before standing at the exit door.

A while later, she stood behind the crowd that had gathered in Connolly to watch the protest. Some of the women swallowed aspirin in front of the TV cameras, saying it was the pill. When they’d gone to the pharmacy in Belfast, Aisling had thought at first that the pharmacist was only having them on when he’d said they’d need a prescription for the pill, that he’d heard their accents and thought they were thick. One of the women had suggested buying aspirin to pretend it was birth control; she’d said it wasn’t as if the lads in Customs knew what the pill looked like anyway.

And maybe they didn’t, but there was no way anyone in Customs could have missed Mona waving her condom in the air like a sock. They didn’t stop her though; they only asked to look into a few of the women’s bags. And when the women refused to hand over the condoms and tubes of jelly, the men in Customs didn’t do anything, just ushered them through, and the women who’d gone to

Belfast almost skipped along the platform to the whoops of the crowd. As they left the station, Aisling’s eyes followed them, her pharmacy bag still crumpled in her hand.

Fiona Ennis

Fiona Ennis has won the Molly Keane Creative Writing Award and was one of the winners of the 2021 Fish Short Story Prize. She was the runner-up in the 2022 LA-based ScreenCraft Cinematic Short Story Competition. Her stories have been published in anthologies.

We stopped at a church near Baker, Nevada. It stood in the back of a grassy, gravelly rectangle that used to be a parking lot. Two picket signs on the edge of the nearby highway: Jesus is King! and Souvenirs! 5 Miles! April pointed at the desecrated house of worship. It was quite old but still white, with a thin blue triangle roof and an unassuming door. Haunting, she said, as she snapped a photo on her film camera.

Admittedly I was a bit jealous of the apocalypse, its ability to hold attention. Only widespread fear and misery were potent enough to fill talk shows, betting markets, exurban cemeteries, galleries, and the ramblings of insomniacs. Let us return, then, as we do in times of grief, for the sake of pleasure but mostly for the need for relief, to art. Said the fictional cult leader.

Every year, April said, I look at the calendar and think, these numbers are too high. Or maybe too low. They’re just off, somehow. They belong in the prologue of a bad science fiction. That cell on a spreadsheet where your cursor accidentally scrolled. What did we expect, giving a year such a ridiculous name?

*

When I met April, it was blue hour and she was crouching on a beached tree stump, reading the waves like a foreign language. That was the third week of the disasters, or maybe the sixth. I wasn’t a local, that much was clear from my white sneakers. Although, my hotel had stopped turning the room.

The house was pyramidal. The ground formed the base, and four diagonals of wood-shingled roof met at a crisp vertex adorned with a gold lightning rod. The front façade, also wood-shingled, had no windows. She’d found it fully furnished, a few miles outside the city proper, right between the ocean and the highway, so that the brown, triangular house was the only manmade structure in a vast golden-green field, resplendent against sand cliffs and saltwater beyond. The décor was in period style: fashionably late capitalism. Herringbone, chevron, eggshell.

It was comforting to have been in that house a million times before, conference rooms and airport lounges, holiday comedies and daytime whodunits, organic cafes and online banks. Through a back door identical to the front, we entered the yard, a thin peninsula jutting out into the water. It was the furthest extended landmass on the visible coastline. At the tip, a single, elderly redwood towered over a modest bench facing the ocean. We walked side-by-side on a narrow dirt path bisecting the peninsula. A light, wet wind blew, ruffling our t-shirts. I forgot that the cataclysm we’d always been promised was happening. I forgot my rule that relationships meant responsibilities, attachments, the burden of another mind,

another set of fears and desires. At least, I think I did. That’s how I remember it, but you can’t know what you’re forgetting while you’re forgetting it.

Whatever seemed utterly impossible was, as a rule, actually happening. Like playing a card game and being dealt one joker after another, cards meant to be removed beforehand, set aside from the rest of the deck as a matter of procedure. We watched sports documentaries, histories of famous people’s forgotten relatives, adult cartoons. We dirtied things and then cleaned them. *

Movement was our plan for salvation. We drove and drove. We found a peagreen SUV marooned in the middle of a downtown intersection, tank full of gas. Its owner must have stopped right there and walked away. We followed an instructional video on hotwiring. It was easier than expected. The internet leveled the playing field, in terms of survival skills. The servers would outlast the cockroaches.

April smoked nervously in the passenger seat and told me about her parents. Her mother had been a contented housewife until, just after her fortieth birthday, a stalker began following her as she drove around to her various appointments. The man’s face, which appeared in the rearview mirror, at the hair salon, and in the pickup line at April’s middle school, was rough like a topographical map. One day, the face appeared next to the bushes outside their living room window, but this time the body attached to it was holding a knife. Her mother called the police, testified for hours in a dark room at the police station, and sent him to prison. Daddy suffered from a still undetermined neurological degeneration. Last she saw him, he was barely speaking but still able to understand, vaguely, what was happening around him. Near the onset of his disease, he had lost the bulk of their savings in a phishing scam. After that he put his computer in a drawer and locked it for good. In a certain way it was nice, she said, that his brain could no longer keep up with the pace of the world, because unlike most people who felt the same way, he had a concrete excuse.

When I think about death, my own, everyone’s, I feel detached even about my detachment. Like when your eyes cross and fall out of focus, but with the voice in my head, the record player falling out of the grooves. I still remember my first time. I was sitting in my father’s study, at our grand piano. It was this black, beautiful Yamaha on wheels. A baby grand. Elegant, maybe, or maybe just tacky. The fact that I would die suddenly hit me. I stopped playing – it was something memorized, mass-produced. Billy Joel, Joni Mitchell. I lost it, spiraled. I sat on the wobbly piano bench for a long time. Then I went back to playing my song, the muscles in my fingers working automatically, the foot-pedal keeping time.

The collapse was evident, but not overwhelming. Biochemical abnormalities,

crypto-nuclear attacks, loose pathogens, sociohistorical cycles, storms with Christian names. Reaping, sowing. Nevertheless, people took convincing. There was chaos out there, but it hadn’t shown up on their doorsteps and rapped its knuckles. Certain personalities were more adaptable than others. Those with drastic, conspiratorial tendencies were among the first to go. All paddle, no creek. The survivors had dispositions suited to the situation. Above all, a taste for loneliness.

In school, I studied philosophy. Descartes, Hume, Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell. I admired their irrational confidence. I knew, already, how different I was from two, four, six years before. Still, I couldn’t imagine morphing into a different version of myself down the road. Now I find those dead solipsists awfully embarrassing. My new drug is speculative fiction. Sentences poignantly nagging, as if their authors had peeled back my scalp and scribbled notes on the underside. Since the world is ending // why not let the children touch the paintings?

Sleep came in enormous, indulgent quantities, or else not at all. I’d been relegated to a passive observer, able only to comment on the days’ formal features. Nonlinear narrative, temporal drift, an overarching dreamlike tonality. In bed, her skin was icy and refreshing. That feels good , we kept saying, and we yearned to feel good, to keep feeling it. I dreamt of a large pond in the middle of an enormous field. The grass caught fire in a ring around the edges, advancing inward. I saw the circle close, long-legged animals run and jump in the water, blades of wheat char and vaporize. When the flames reached the pond, I was eager to know which would consume the other, but in the end the water turned black and the fire disappeared, and I woke up.

The apocalyptic genre is obsessed with images of emptiness: vacant shopping malls, abandoned roadways, decaying airport terminals. The critic in me thinks it’s a cheap conceit, a trapdoor to uncertainty. Without people to fill them, spaces acquire a liminal tendency. In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street.

My favorite authors seemed to believe that the downfall of civilization would be dominated, thematically, by melancholy. But now that it was really happening, the feeling was different. Malaise was too basic, too obviously negative. I felt good, then bad for feeling good, then good for feeling bad for feeling good, then plain bad, then bad for feeling bad when I really felt good, then all of it at once. *

Out of the blue, April produced a plastic sheath from a hidden drawer in her bedside table, delicately removed the tabs and placed them on the bed. The sheets were stained; we hadn’t bothered to change them. There were four squares, each displaying an anthropomorphized bear dancing on a lavender background. The

edges were checkered and kaleidoscopic. Aren’t they pretty? she said. Are you sure this is a good idea? I said.

Before the drugs kicked in, I brushed my teeth. Looking in the mirror, I felt like my brain had painlessly dissolved without having much effect on my body. We put on sunglasses and went outside, feeling it now. The sun was a blanket against the wind. The earth was still dying, which was sad, but far less immediate than the cardinals knifing through the sky, soaring out to the horizon, oblivious. April crouched and felt the grass, giggling, then opened her arms up to the sky. We walked down to the shore and wandered the beach, passing large, majestic dogs. Strays, yelping like mad, wildly itching their matted fur, dragging putrid leashes. I had a sudden desire to help someone. I resented my fortune, my indulgence. What’s the matter? April asked, reaching for my arm. Her expression seemed to say that we were trapped with each other until the end, and it was all my fault. A bad trip, I think that’s what they call it.

The last pane of glass between us had broken. We were so near to each other, so far from everything else. April would shift irritably on the couch, sneaking furtive glances, before announcing she was leaving. I became increasingly anxious that she too could detect a certain staleness in our interactions, like we’d worn through our performed personalities and were only left with the stuff that couldn’t be stripped away. I’m so sorry, I would say, if I spilled coffee on the rug. Don’t say sorry, she’d say, I want you here. With each apology we got more scared that we’d made some big mistake. But given my position, I felt like I owed an apology to the whole world, every morning when I woke up, like a psalm.

Some people find comfort in it, I said, staring at the church. Familiarity. It’s only eerie because of what we think it stands for. I think even an alien would find everything about this place creepy, she said. And a little sad.

I suppose there was a deeper disagreement, about the sorry state of the world as merely something of interest rather than some visceral misfortune. The church was depressing, but in an interesting way, like a novelistic detail, and for me, this made it at least neutral. Later, April developed the picture herself using some old chemicals and placed it on the breakfast nook where she knew I would see it. She was right.

Micah Cash

Micah Cash is from Tulsa, Oklahoma, and currently lives in New York City, where he’s worked as a writer, researcher and bartender. His writing has appeared in The Village Voice , The Drift and Forever Magazine , where he first published April .

The Stone

It’s large, half-sunk in the sandy part of the beach near the water’s-edge. One side is sloped which makes climbing it easy, and Fern is standing on the top, like a cormorant. Her black raincoat flaps at her hips, fluttering and lifting in the sea-breeze. She raises her arms like drying wings and she exhales. She loves this smooth, grey stone. She could never move it. She could never push it over or shift it in any way. It’s too heavy – she supposes it’ll be there forever, whatever happens. She sits, removing her socks and shoes and dangles her legs over the edge. The shallow sea licks at the shore without tides or troubles, the sound of element on element. The water smells of rotten eggs and salt. She’s read that when seaweed rots on the beach, it sucks up oxygen from the water and emits hydrogen-sulphide gas, which is disgusting in her view, but what can she do about it? Her stone, in contrast, feels warm and clean and dry under her bare legs. She looks out across the narrow sea at Denmark, six miles away as the crow flies, and the sun beats down, high and uninterrupted by clouds, a spot-light on them all.

This place, this stone, is a refuge and it serves her in two ways right now. It elevates her safely above the filthy ground, and it’s a place for her to regain her temper, which is important because today is her sister’s seventh birthday and she needs to help her father make it nice. Her mother used to say that - make it nice - when she laid the table, or did a painting, or addressed a letter in ink. There are some things she can make nice, she thinks, and today is one of those things.  She can make it nice for Flo.

“Fern!” Her sister’s voice carries on the wind from up the beach. Turning, Fern can see smoke rising in a white, wispy column above Flo’s small blonde head. She’s got the fire going. “Fern!” Flo shouts again. “We need wood!”

Fern pulls on her trainers before jumping down to the stones below. She drags a large piece of driftwood with her and dumps it beside the fire.

“There you go, Floey, break that up. It’s dry as paper.”

Her sister begins stamping on the branch, pulling and twisting at it until a piece snaps off, brittle, new wood glinting white.

“Thanks!” she says, not looking up. “Listen to that crack!”

Flo is four years younger than she is and Fern feels a rough love for her which is an undulating blend of protection and partnership.  You’re not her mother, her father’s said more than once. That’s not your job, he’s told her. But she knows it is really. She looks at her scrawny sister, plaits swinging wildly as she builds her beautiful fire. Fern’s heart catches aglow, too.

“Good job, Floey,” she says.

The fire’s burning well, consuming their offerings fiercely. Fern throws in more

dry twigs then pokes at the larger logs with her foot to settle them. Sparks rise up in the air and float up the beach in the direction of the forest. She can see her father coming out of the pine trees with an armful of small branches. There’s no one else here on the beach, they’re alone, as Fern had hoped they would be. Just the three of them and the beach and the birds.

This high up the beach everything’s quite dry, even the black seaweed which is hard and crunchy and satisfying to pull from the sand, like weeding the garden, or taking something irritating from between her teeth. She becomes momentarily lost in the pleasure of the task, smoothing the warm, fine sand with her hands, making a perfect space. Everything feels better when its dry. Everything feels cleaner.

Her father casts a short shadow as he dumps a pile of wood next to Flo. “Weeding the beach?” he asks, laughing, “You’ll never win against nature, you know.”

“I can try,” she says to herself, and she lays out blankets like rafts, life-boats of safety for their picnic.

Trips to the beach involve a lot of work. Packing, and especially unpacking, are not things she enjoys.  Picnic-bags are messy and dangerous, especially the debris at the end of it all, the suspicious plates washed in sea-water, the gritty forks. At least for now there’s order. She takes the cake from the bag, leaving it sealed in Tupperware. It’s a carrot-cake, iced, packed with cinnamon and cardamon and nutmeg, her mother’s recipe. She sets the cooking plate over the fire and empties the sausages onto the foil. She loses one into the sand and kicks at it quickly to cover it, until it’s out of sight and she can breathe again.  She prepares three plates, each with a white roll, filled with a neat line of ketchup. On the fire, seven sausages begin to blacken - two each, and a spare one.

Her father sits down on the blanket and looks at her, a question in his eyes, but he just says, “Thanks, Fern. This is nice.”

So, she’s done it. They’re on a mission here to fill the gaps, as only they know how. She takes a clean fork to pierce the seventh sausage and she wordlessly passes it to him, sausage first.  She intends for him to take it in his fingers but it’s hot and he takes the fork from her out-stretched hand instead and eats straight from that. She sees his wet mouth open and close around the sausage. She sees his tongue glisten and she hears the sound of saliva. She pauses, assessing, then nods. No matter – that can be his fork now. His germs, his space, his problem. She turns away and, using a new fork, puts a pair of sausages into each sandwich, squishing them closed. They’re ready to eat.

Her sister sits down, cross-legged on the blanket next to her father, her shoes kicked off in the sand. She grabs the plate Fern gives her and takes a huge bitehalf the sandwich – gone in one go. She grins at them both.

“Happy Birthday, Floey!” Fern says, pleased, and she passes her father his plate.

Mirroring Flo, with a wink, he too eats half the sandwich, and chews theatrically. Fern laughs again and her own flimsy plate wobbles. On instinct, a reflex, her father puts out his fork to stop her sandwich falling and, in the same moment, he catches Fern’s eye in horror. His fork, his used, filthy, licked fork, touches her sandwich for the briefest of moments, and all is lost. Fern stares at her contaminated sandwich on its fragile plate and she feels wave upon wave of nausea and disappointment churn within her. There’s nothing else to eat.

“I’m sorry!” says her father, who looks aghast, as wretched as a man can look. “You can have it,” she whispers. She drops the sullied sandwich in his lap before she turns and runs the length of the beach, back to her stone. In one leap she’s up, hot fury filling her vision, her ears full of rushing, beating, pulsing pain.

“Fern!” her sister bounds up beside her. “Fern! Come back, don’t worry, there’s cake! There’s cake, look, it’s clean, it’s totally clean! You can eat my birthday cake, you can have it all!” Perhaps Flo believes if she can only fill the moment with enough words they’ll push the problem out of the picture. Solutions tumble out of her, a steady torrent of consolations and pleas and promises until they somehow find themselves emerging back into safer territory. Like a dawn breaking, Flo’s sweet, chirping narrative pulls them both up and out of the darkness.

Fern takes her sister’s tight, dry hand and says, with something like exhaustion or love, “There’s cake, of course. Yes. We can eat it here on my stone,” and Flo falls silent, satisfied for now, as she presses her warmth into Fern’s side. Just off shore, they watch three cormorants make their way slowly North, with heavy, beating flaps of their black wings.

At nightfall, Fern watches her father tuck Flo into her bed under the eaves. Her plaits have unravelled.

“You’re seven,” he says. “Goodnight, Birthday Girl.”

“I want Mum,” states Flo, as she always does, at this exact time.

Her father kisses Flo’s head, before rising and slipping out of the bedroom, back to his opaque world of silence. Fern knows how he feels, how worthless words are, how everything’s been said already. But Flo likes words, and it’s little enough to ask, in Fern’s opinion. Words instead of a mother. So she climbs in under the covers and they read, aloud, side-by-side in the thin bed, all the books she read them, again and again.

A light at the window casts a moving shadow on the bedroom wall. Outside, a bright beam is swinging and flashing. In an instant, Fern disentangles herself from Flo and she stands, her feet bare and cold on the bedroom floor, to look out into the night-garden. She can see a last sliver of pink sky on the horizon above the dark-blue sea. Starlings flock high above the forest to the North, and a large

crow lands awkwardly in a tree. Their neighbour is using his torch to walk his small terrier, that’s all it is, that’s all she’s seen, it’s all okay. She can see the white dog moving about, darting left and right like a rodent, bothering the bushes at the side of the road. When she turns back to the room, Flo’s asleep.

Downstairs her father’s sitting at the kitchen table, arms resting on the pile of school books and pencil-drawings of birds. There’s a plate of half-eaten toast at his elbow. Fern’s eyes rest on the plate and she hesitates before sitting. Following her gaze, her father rises to retrieve the plate, putting it in the sink before washing his hands. He exaggerates the action, and dries them on a green towel, which he brings back to the table, like evidence.

“Do you think we should see someone?” he asks, folding the towel in half and half again.

“See someone?” she asks, but she knows what he means. He’s asked her before.

“A professional, a person who can help you to feel less stressed by everything, less blocked by this?”

“No.”

“Fern – ”

“No. I just need you and everyone else to follow the rules.”

“Fern – ”

“No! Just follow the rules.” She’s speaking too loudly, a petulance borne of panic. It’s all she can do not to stamp her foot. “Just, no, okay?”

“Okay,” her father’s face is strained, a blend of exasperation and entreaty. It says, please, can’t you be different? But the answer is no, she cannot. He says, “We won’t talk about it anymore tonight, but just tell me something.”

“What?”

“Is it getting worse?”

“No. The rules are the rules. Just follow the rules.”

“The world won’t follow your rules, Fern.”

“The world’s disgusting, then. But you have to – and Flo. Promise me. Please.”

“I promise I’ll try, and you know you can rely on Flo.”

“Okay, good,” and she moves round the table to sink into his lap. He wraps his arms around her like strong wings folding in on themselves, hinged and heavy. Her limbs slacken and she softens, malleable, twelve-years-old again.

“I love you, Dad.”

“I love you, too, Fern. Everything’s going to be okay. We’ve got each other.”

“And Flo.”

“And Flo.”

“Not Mum.”

“Not Mum.”

And there’s the truth of it, she thinks, as she breathes and breathes and breathes,

acceptance of all the truths burrowing more firmly into her frantic soul. She has her Dad and Flo and, out there in the dark on the beach, she also has her stone, which is impenetrable, impervious and completely permanent.

*

Kate Ismay

Kate Ismay is a writer of poems and stories. Only some of them make it onto paper because she is busy raising feral boys and disobedient dogs in the middle of a wet and windy Dutch winter, where she spends most of her time hanging up coats.

A Letter to Julia

Around the fire, on cold winter nights, we played with the flight of sparks hoping they would join the stars. We stared at the smouldering embers without blinking until our eyes watered. I recall the damp wood crackling, your eyes glowing in the flames, you running happily on the balls of your feet before choosing my lap to sit on while we listened to stories told by nonno Francesco about the ship powered by giant furnaces on which he came from Italy to Brazil to reinvent himself. Little did he know that, after a couple of years, an unimaginable fire from a distant battle would burn men and planes in a real-life nightmare. My memory is decorated by those nights spent outdoors, when the horizon was a black line made of bushes up on the hill, when we felt shielded by the most starlit sky, when laughter exploded in our candlelit room, every time it was a competition to see which girl would fall asleep first, ending with you asking “have I won already?” Your short-lived presence in my life was like those sparks around the fireplace, enlightening, but never meant to reach the stars, and the only chance I had to closely observe a child.

(…)

“You are…who? Of course, darling, of course you were my child, don’t be jealous, oh dear, this story is 75 years behind us now.” (…)

“It’s a way of speaking, keep writing, or I’ll forget what I was about to say. Fetch my glasses for me to check something in my journal.”

During those days, your sense of wonder made me look at many things as though they were a novelty for me too, from the smell of fresh-baked bread to the glimmer of the sun on puddles after rain. Remarkable from a very early age, you made me laugh and believed I knew everything you didn’t. For many years afterwards, I tried to make sense of what took you away: the jealousy? The hate? The war? None of them. Love explains what happened to us, the good and the bad things.

Father, mother and I moved into the big house when I was a few months old, shortly after nonna had died. Believed to be the perfect retreat for the sake of my mother’s weak lungs, the farm house was too big for nonno to be there on his own, so we joined him in the secluded life he led. We had no neighbours, electric power nor friends. The big windows overlooked the plantation and the woods in the background. Mother taught me to read and write at home for she had always lacked the energy to take me to school, while my father lacked the time. I started to go to school only one year before you arrived, when a bus became available in

the region. My father was busy running the farm while yours – a family legend –lived far away being trained for special missions, as nonno proudly told us. Today I comprehend how grandpa’s speech made things a little worse, worse because we were all falling in love with your father even before meeting him. Hanging on walls, there were pictures of uncle Matteo in uniform with that gaze at the lens as if he knew how he wanted to be preserved for posterity – or how the maids would stop by to clean his portrait only to have another glimpse of him.

In the summer of 1942, you moved into the house. The charming officer who inherited grandfather’s blue eyes, boldness and sympathy became real. Better than fiction. By that time, Brazil had already declared war on the Axis powers, having decided to join the Allies. Nonno, astonished, resisted believing Brazil was at war with Italy. Matteo didn’t want to leave you and your mother, Teresa, unassisted while he flew trainer aircrafts, so then came the arrangement to house the two families under the same roof. Mother, frustrated by not getting pregnant again, prepared for me to receive a cousin who would play with me, finally.

I know I have lost credibility, that it is becoming increasingly complicated for me to remember what I have just eaten, but these fragments from the past are so sharp that I had to keep them in sight all those years. They wound if mishandled. And if, as I suspect, God will not give me many more years to live, I would better tell this story before I am gone.

Julia, when you came into our home, spirits were lifted. There you were, skipping in the halls, your steps on the wooden stairs echoing across the house, something I was never allowed to do. Your family came with a different set of rules. I recall your joy about the dogs, you exclaiming ‘ducks fly!’ and your childish voice asking ‘who’s hiding in there?’ after knocking on every locked door as if everybody were playing hide-and-seek with you. One day, I decided to mimic you, an exercise on being a child again. The house was empty. Father and nonno were away. We were supposed to be milking the cow with the maids, but I had to rush home. My period had come, a worry you didn’t have, of course, at the age of five, but I wanted to be like you and solemnly ignored my puberty more than once. After hearing a moaning, I opened the door grinning and asking ‘who’s hiding in there?’ without knocking. My smile shattered and I run.

Jealousy was mounting in the house, and jealousy, as we know, is a by-product of love and hate, a side effect of non-spoken misgivings. There were so many. My mother grew happier but my father seemed uneasy. Both your parents hugged my mum with warmth and care. They laughed together. Mother was a beautiful woman despite her weakness. Her long curled red hair added vivid colour to her figure. Her fragile health and lean body mirrored her personality: unable to express herself, always in the shadow of my father, a man with no proper light. As for your father, it just took being in a place to be noticed, targeted by admiring

looks. We all loved him in a collective flirtation. Being aware of his spell, aunt Teresa didn’t mind at all. Much the opposite, I think my aunt felt powerful somehow. Very few women were married to a man who flew, let alone a man who showed pleasure by their side. In my adulthood, I found myself invoking that beauty that filled me with excitement since childhood, although my husband was not quite like that...

(…)

“What do you mean by ‘you don’t need to go into these details’? I decide whether some details are essential or not.”

(…)

“I am not diminishing your father. It’s not about him. It’s my life!” (…)

“Don’t you preach to your 85-year-old mother. If I bother you, and I know I do, we can stop. I’m tired anyway.” (…)

“I am not making a fuss.” (…)

“I appreciate you saying this. Mothers always forgive their children.”

Speaking of mother, mine, who carried for years the burden of not having provided a sibling for me nor a son for my father, became pregnant again. I thought everybody would be excited – nonno was thrilled, wishing for a grandson – but events unfolded unpredictably. Our fathers’ relationship grew tenser. My mother used to say they quibbled because they were brothers, ‘almost twins’, an observation that sounded absurd since your father was far more handsome and their arguments were far from quibbles. “Everybody loves Matteo including your daddy,” she said. I didn’t quite agree.

Father had never come to terms with his brother’s seductive personality. Looking back, I see him suffering from jealousy, envy and love. He loved his brother. Mother never complained and had to spend a significant part of her pregnancy lying down to avoid a miscarriage. Father walked around frowning all the time. Nonno used to tell us stories of his childhood, in Italian, the language of his memories.

One day, my mother took me by surprise asking if I had any questions. I shook my head. “Things are not always what we think we saw at first sight, do you understand?” I nodded. I never got what she meant, but she set me free to create new versions of whatever I had witnessed in the woods. I tried to erase that day from the depths of my mind. It is impossible to turn off the sunlight filtered through the branches, to silence the sad cows mooing or the crickets trilling. The

soundtrack of that late afternoon. My gaping at my mother’s unending joy, her face of pleasure. I felt scared, disgusted but fascinated somehow because [giggles] I didn’t know a woman could... (…) “Did I? A room or the woods?” (…) “Lucia, my daughter, my disorder doesn’t help at all, but places make no difference at this stage. Are you uncomfortable?” (…)

Unable to handle what I saw, I reacted by being unpleasant towards my mother and hated the baby she carried with all my heart. Although I had that superior air of a grown-up, ready to look after you, Julia, whenever someone asked me, I was only ten. I mean, twelve. It doesn’t matter. I was still a child and became silent, with my mother attributing my behaviour to anxiety, since my uncle – your father – was about to leave for the war and, as the departure day approached, everybody was overwhelmed by mixed emotions, nonno denying the war, until the most prolonged and hottest summer of our lives arrived. I shall never forget that January 1944. We got postcards from Orlando with excitement, then from Panama, New York, and the French ship that took uncle Matteo to Italy. The outdoor nights around the fire were replaced by gatherings around the radio and nonno moaning, his two beloved countries in ‘guerra’.

Oblivion results from strange choices. I had forgotten everything that annoyed me until the extremes of life, birth and death, brought it all back. The letter with the saddest news arrived, then my brother, then the corpse. Filled with remorse for not having made peace with his only brother, dad disappeared for two days in the woods. Uncle Matteo ceased to be a legend to become a war hero, killed in combat, worthy of our sighs and tears forever. Nonno, poor nonno, living to an old age just to lose his son to the war. Teresa could not even mourn her lost husband in peace, taking care of us because mother was weaker after the delivery. My father started becoming violent towards my mother, humiliating her in every possible way. One day, your mother – born to a former enslaved woman married to a white man, and whose impetuosity nobody could ever tame – stood up to protect mine. She shouted back “you don’t know how to love your woman,” and was pushed fiercely, bumping her head against the wall. You left the following day. Teresa’s face, possessed by inarticulate anger, stayed with me to this day. Life as I knew it was annihilated.

It was spring 1945. Our small town organised a party to welcome five of its six soldiers who survived the war. We had nothing to celebrate. Mother died the following year of tuberculosis or sadness or both, and nonno passed away many

years later of old age. Father never looked for you and confessed, before passing away and begging for my forgiveness, he had burnt all your mother’s letters to me. How could he? How.

(…)

“I never said that. My brother is my father’s child. He has my mum’s bright eyes, not Matteo’s. I wish I had a picture of her to show you.”

(…)

“…No, no. Sorry for not being explicit but it was hard for me to understand it back then. In the woods, the room, wherever, I saw the women in love.” *

Isabel Clemente

Isabel Clemente is a writer and a journalist born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, with a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing from Royal Holloway, University of London. As a journalist, she built a well-succeeded career as a reporter, editor, columnist and correspondent in London.

Different Ways to Drown

Her mother was humming. On her street, boys kicked a ball to each other, their shouts mixed with the sounds of her father and William’s chatter.

“Ah here she is,” William said, when he turned to see Agnes standing in the gloomy hall. The carpet was scuffed. Her legs were thin and pale, and her hands clenched by her side.

From his position outside the front door, only fractions of Agnes’ father were visible- a chin, strands of hair, the hand holding his cigarette, his foot coming out to kick the ball that rolled toward him. She glimpsed a boy in short pants before William took up the doorway. His hands came out in front of him and teased her closer. They were lined, empty hands.

“That one,” she said. pointing to his right hand.

“Ah now,” he said, and she knew she was right. Still, she waited until the magic hand went behind the ear and came back holding the coin before she let the breath out.

*

Even now, she forgets to breathe-it might be the smoke from a fire, the way the light flows through a window, or the space a body takes up in a doorway that reminds her of William, before the shape fades into a recognizable figure, and she realizes her chest is tight and remembers to let the air out.

*

A yellow haze of sunlight fell through the door with the summer heat. A punctured ball rippled along the road and stopped by her father’s feet. There were no screeches of kids at play. No dirty, snot-nosed boys remained on the streets to run for the prize.

The boys’ Agnes’ age were too old to play on the streets. A few were down the road throwing stones and petrol bombs at the soldiers.

She’d never tired of William’ game. A few times, he’d surprised her with a 50p. Those occasions were enough to keep her interested.

The air was starting to quiver with the shouts and commotion. William and her father stepped away from the doorway to see what was going on. By the time, she smelled the petrol, Agnes’s mother was pulling her up the stairs and her father was shouting at them to get away. The sun was behind him. There was a moment of quiet, before her mother screamed.

The slam startles Agnes. Her heart is in her throat, a living thing that might crawl upward and out her mouth. How many times does she have to tell her daughter? Her fingers clench the peeler. The potato skins lie in the sink. The clock above the sink is the only sound. The rain is falling on the window, a sliding, hypnotic motion that helps.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to slam,” Vanessa says.

Agnes breathes, nods, and says okay, “Hello Mrs. Coyle.”

Sinead is here. Agnes feels a mix of disappointment and shame, from not having her daughter to herself, and thinking of her daughter standing in the hall with her friend, possibly putting a finger to her lips in a gesture of silence, or maybe just tense with worry that Agnes might come storming out in her rant of “What is wrong with you?”

The last time she wasn’t sure of what she said and calmed to feel her heart had slithered back into place and see her daughter’s tear-lined face.

“Hello Sinead,” she says, while drying her hands on a tee-towel. “Are you girls hungry?”

Agnes has the flame lit under the soup. The kitchen is bigger than the kitchen of her youth. Her window looks out at a yard big enough to hold a bike and a wheelbarrow as well as the coal shed. There’s a garden at the front of the house, enclosed by a stone wall and bearing some potted plants. Agnes has not yet found her green fingers. There was no garden where she grew up. The front door opened onto the street that she hasn’t stood on in for seven years, not since her father died and left her an orphan at twenty-five.

“Come in, take your coats off.”

The rain sends flickers on their figures. Agnes is brood and solid, a woman whose shadow takes up room. The soup is potato and leek, and Agnes fills up their bowls while Vanessa cuts the bread.

* Agnes drifts to the hall. Sometimes she expects to hear the clatter of a ball against the road and the screech of children, but there’s a green close to the house where the youngsters play.

The last time she stood in her childhood house after her father’s funeral, Vanessa was four years old, and the street was quiet, though she knows memory can’t be trusted like that, because she remembers her mother pulling her up the stairs, and the soldiers at the door, as if she was in a bubble of silence, when there

were screams and shouts and shots.

*

The girl’s voices are low from the kitchen. Upstairs, Agnes starts packing for the holiday by the sea. For two weeks, her suitcase will be at the side of the bed, waiting for offerings. She’s afraid that she’ll forget everything otherwise. Tom says nothing about it. She’s the same going on a day trip or to a restaurant, spending hours getting ready and always double checking herself, nervous of what she might forget.

*

“Mam.” Vanessa is in her jeans and sweater. Her hair falls over her shoulders. She’s gotten taller but stands as if she wants to hide the fact.

“Can Sinead come with us this year?” she asks.

“There’s no room in the caravan,” Agnes says, though they know families of six that manage to stay in them. Lying open on the bed, the suitcase looks as if it’s vomiting out clothes.

“Da won’t be there for the first week, please, just for a wee while.”

Agnes says no. She wouldn’t be able for that. It would be nerve-wrecking to be responsible for someone else. She expects Vanessa to argue that she doesn’t want to go without her friend, that the holiday is boring. Vanessa is thirteen now. Her silences are heavier, and more personal. Agnes has caught her studying her with a look that troubles her. There is a hint of it now, but Vanessa leaves without a word.

She’s quiet during dinner, though Agnes suspects she’s spoken to Tom about Sinead. His long legs are spread out in front of him. His hands have been scrubbed but still hold flecks of oil from car engines. Stubborn dirt is stuck in his pores and under his nails.

The television is on in the room next door. Voices rumble toward them. “Sinead could go for a few days,” he says. “She wouldn’t be too much trouble.”

“And what if something happens to her, who’ll be to blame then?”

Her tone is like a wall to climb over, and he must have decided that he doesn’t have the energy, because he nods and takes a cigarette out of his packet. At the opened back door, he sparks the match. She hears a dog barking and little else. Daylight is still held in the sky at 7p.m.

“I’ll take a half day Friday, get down to ye early,” Tom says.

He blows out the smoke and looks at her. She sees the kindness in his eyes that makes her want to wrap herself up in him. The first weeks of meeting him, she’d

told him she’d left her home because of William’s murder, but it wasn’t until she brought him to meet her parents, that he saw her cry over it.

*

Their bus stops at small towns along the way. When her parents were alive and she took the journey from Letterkenny with Vanessa, soldiers with rifles boarded to inspect bags and Agnes held Vanessa on her knees with a tightness that made Vanessa squirm.

Outside the fields are a dark green. The stone walls separate them from the road. Vanessa doesn’t sit straighter or nudge her mother in excitement with their first glimpse of the sea.

*

Narrow paths lead from the caravan park to the sand and sea. In a few days, the Dublin family with twin girls will arrive. Another family from Tubbercurry, who manage to sleep six in the one caravan, a granny, two boys and a girl with their parents will be there within the week. But now most of the caravans are empty.

The sun’s reflection is lost in the white rolling waves. Agnes has a blanket down by the shore. Vanessa’s in the water. A toddler runs into the sea screeching with the waves and comes out again, followed by his laughing mother. His father stays close to the water.

Agnes looks to the place her daughter was. The sea is empty, and she stands trying to see her. That all too familiar sensation comes to her chest, a tightening like a screw that makes her gasp in relief when she sees Vanessa’s blonde hair reappear. She looks like a mermaid, disappearing and re-appearing above the murky water.

Agnes isn’t worried until she sees the father start to run. His urgency makes him topple forward. Agnes is sprinting after him. The water is ice cold, sharp like a knife on Agnes’ legs. She wants to scream at the waves to stop. Someone’s beside her, an arm is around her. She hears a woman’s voice. “It’s okay.” And through streaming tears she sees it is, he has her daughter. They look as if they’ve been spit out by the waves.

*

Vanessa vomits sea water and her little body racks with sobs. For hours she doesn’t stop shivering. Her legs are wobbly. In the caravan, she’s too tired to stand underneath the dripping shower before changing into dry clothes and curling up

in the mattress.

Agnes lies behind her daughter, feeling the smallness of her. Tentatively, she puts her arm around Vanessa, half-expecting to be pushed away but the girl only curls up tighter. There isn’t much room on the mattress. Agnes hangs on for dear life, feeling her daughters silent crying and the fear in her. She’s sure Vanessa’s eyes are open and she’s staring at the gap in the curtain that shows the darkening sky. Agnes knows what it’s like to lie like this. She remembers too well how she’d lain on her bed afraid to close her eyes and see the burst of blood on William’s face.

She feels a need to talk to Vanessa, to bring her back to her. “I know how you feel.” She could say, but she doesn’t want to talk about the soldiers searching the houses or the hours of fighting that ended with the army barricading the streets. The morning after William died, her mam run to the local shop, and came back empty-handed because the shop had run out of bread.

The sea’s murmur is a similar sound to the rush of voices that sent ripples of hope onto the Falls Road. The women and children saved us, Agnes could say. On the third day, thousands of them walked miles and broke through the barricade. “What a sight- all those women flowing through the street,” she whispers, and feels the easy shallow breathing of Vanessa’s sleep.

Her body is stiff when she rises from her sleeping daughter and opens the door of the caravan. The sea is a dark reflection of the sky. Stars ripple on the surface. There’s laughter from one of the caravans, a rustle of the sand. Her daughter stirs in her sleep. She’ll wake soon, shaky, and still in shock. Vanessa will sit at the table, while Agnes makes sausages and eggs. She’ll leave the door open. The cool night air will drift inside and sit with them at the table. The silence will be broken by the sizzle of her cooking, and then the rumble of the sea.

L.M Brown

L.M Brown’s short story collections Treading The Uneven Road (Fomite, 2019) and Were We Awake (Fomite, 2019) were both featured on World Literature Today. Her latest novel, Hinterland (2020), received an honourable mention in the Eric Hoffer Award in 2021.

End Times Discourse Over Takeout Noodles

Today I am 18. They told us to pick one thing— to cope was strongly implied. A poem discouraged selecting paint, so I selected poems. I am delighted.

Today I am 19. It seems many people are dying. I hate most the conspiracy that there are no birds. Birds are such a good thing, I think, birds everywhere—all very good.

My unpopular opinions are crucified at dinner. No, somebody scoffs, No, of course we’re unique. People are inherently unique and individual—perhaps you’re only bitter.

But this is not the case. These dark and crowded days, unique thought is statistically improbable. Put circumstance aside and we are all just iterations of the same one thing.

It doesn’t make me sad. Perhaps it should.

I take the subway home to Flushing. Doors slide open and I see another train that runs us parallel. I think how both trains are headed to ends of worlds, then back to nowhere.

Somewhere in this city night, there’s someone else thinking the very same thing. The myth of individuality will not convince me otherwise.

Today I am 20. This is a difficult day to be 20. Perhaps it is always difficult to be 20, or perhaps the state of things makes 20 especially hard.

Some people speak as if this will be the story we share with future grandchildren. This is your Great Depression, they say.

Not so. Most of us do not believe there will be a world for grandchildren.

At dinner we play Air Your Grievances. As a group of friends we are relatively new, so the game seems risky to me. They say Don’t be silly, it’s all in fun.

Our grievances are aired: Today I’m giving myself cancer on purpose. (It doesn’t even feel good.) A Kardashian’s face is all over the news but there’s genocide in China. Those emails asking that we not commit hate crimes are overloading my inbox. (Listen I know it sounds callous but enough is enough.) The party is at eleven but we’ll be late because you linger over dessert. (I’m afraid that the world is ending and I want to arrive promptly.)

These are not the grievances I anticipated. If anything, they seem an apt

reflection of the grief that has shucked our skin and hung a wet curtain over these recent years.

My turn for public lament arrives and I cannot think of a thing to say. Last year I might’ve enjoyed this game, as I was full of sorrow. This year, not so much. Funny, that, how every year we step through a mirror and see the face left behind as distorted and uncanny.

My soup is cold, I tell these new friends. That’s my grievance.

They humor me. Somebody else happily fills the space I have left in the conversation. Day by day I grow ever afraid, ever contemplative, ever silent. With curiosity I envision myself at 21 as the conversation loops the table on its sturdy tracks and skips me oh-so-smoothly.

Today I am 21. I have determined that I am especially good at nothing. I find myself apologizing for small things. I have occupied too much space in the elevator, I’m sorry. I have mispronounced a poet’s name, I’m sorry. I did not know about that genocide, I’m sorry. Next time I will be sure to know more about that genocide.

It is only that there are so many.

Today I am 22. There is no longer so much hesitancy in me, though I am as lost as I’ve ever been, or as any person has ever been. Sometimes my mind wanders far enough that I must stomp my feet to bring it back. Career paths twist out of my grasp. I spend most of my time on public transport, at grocery stores, on park benches. Waiting for something to come to me.

On the train today I see pear trees, a gazebo, and seven massive storage units clustered on a tiny peninsula beside a river I cannot name. Now and again he asks me to do the silly intellectual game Are we real, can you prove we’re real? The trees, gazebo, and storage units seem proof enough of realness, a combination so poorly conceived that they must be real, and I must be real.

I report back at our apartment, my proof of concept a sketch of that peninsula on my outdated phone. He asks why I didn’t take a photo. I say my storage is always full. He says it’s interesting. Back in the day, he says, this would be a napkin drawing. What a shame. One day paper books will go. Paint, too. One day everything will be screens.

I ask him Doesn’t technology require precious metals mined exploitatively from elsewhere? Rare earth materials, or something? And won’t we run out of precious metals and rare earths?

He says neither of us has enough information to speculate about it, and anyways he was only lamenting the loss of paper drawings.

Today I am 23. It is summer and the butterfly bush can barely contain its purple. The news still whispers great cracks into my body but solemnly I learn to balance woe and wonder. Some mornings I do wish we were not so anesthetized—wish we made goodness less about aesthetics. The bee sticker will not save the planet, but revolt makes me nervous. Is it wine o’clock yet? I know the paper menu is wasteful, but I hate to touch my phone.

He says If there was ever a time to believe in something simple, it was yesterday.

On the radio I hear that the trouble is how technology continues to advance in the wrong direction. We invent and create and remake but never toward the simple, fixable, essential human trials. Nothing can be done for the hungry. Famine is not conquerable. Water is not cleanable. Insulin is impossible, everything is impossible.

Often I regret not entering a field where I might do some good. He says If the passion wasn’t there you wouldn’t have been able to do much anyway. When I relay these conversations to others, he is demonized, but it’s not the same—the words and their meaning.

He is not cruel in meaning.

We’ve found that horror moves blood through our veins as quick as euphoria, and most days we are horrified indeed. Our blood rushes limb to limb with vigor. Very excited, very delighted.

Today I am 24. We discuss end times over reheated lo mein. Revelation? I ask. Ragnarok, he suggests. Perhaps we are terrible people for making these jokes when we will not be the first to suffer. His stupidest fear is being called problematic by a 15-year-old on Twitter. Mine: we will all chew too much gum and the planet will fill with gum.

He says End times will not be caused by gum, he’s right. A golden retriever just now saved a drowning toddler, I am delighted.

Today I am 25. There is rain, everything is pewter and too much. I am delighted.

Today I am 26. Ever since my childhood this has been the year of the big solar eclipse, the year I planned toward: to have the money to travel to see it, to have the physical health, the emotional support, the stability. But no longer is this a world for travelling to see solar eclipses.

We wouldn’t be able to see it anyway, he says. When’s the last time you even saw the moon?

I try not to take end times personally. If everybody took it very personally we would be completely lost. Instead I am taking it globally. This was the plan, at least, but often I feel I am shouldering the entire world on thin, personal shoulders.

This is not what he sees. He tells me to grow up. He says everywhere he goes he carries the suffering of others in the real world. He is always walking with his father’s arthritic knees, his mother’s bad news, his baby brother’s lost potential. He is walking with famine and pandemic and poverty and disappointment and disillusionment. Me, however, apparently I am walking around absolutely naïve, happy and numb and ignorant.

Apparently nothing clings to me and I should be infinitely sadder than I am.

I decide to contemplate this seriously and set aside my hurt. I have not decided if he is right or wrong. I have not decided if it is our responsibility to be sad all the time.

Is our sorrow saving the world, I ask myself at sundown.

Today I am 27. Our anxieties change year by year. No longer do we worry so much about how we are perceived. Now we worry about infertility. His, and mine. Now we worry about clean water. Now we feel guilty not because we are the privileged elite but because we are the privileged sufferers. What they said would happen has happened.

The rich survive end times and everybody else is left to die.

Today I am 28. This is the first Black Sky Year. We talk daily of moving coasts, moving continents. Will that fix things? I don’t know.

Over dinner I tell him about Air Your Grievances. We should play it, I say.

That sounds like asking for an argument and I’m too old now for arguments, he says.

For a while we eat our noodles and pretend they taste the same as takeout

noodles tasted four years ago. Finally I say But here’s the thing, I have grievances I’ve been clutching tightly for years and I just didn’t know it. So we’re going to play the game.

He says Okay, love. We can play your game, don’t cry.

We take Air Your Grievances outdoors. The brackish atmosphere retains some novelty. Lighting our candles and donning our masks, we feel almost like adventurers—almost like we’re looking at something beautiful and foreign, not merely something terrible.

We have two chairs and two soft pillows and two soft blankets. I try to express my gratitude for these things. I open my eyes, looking up at an aperture into the universal consciousness made by the confluence of three strange clouds. I say to the universe: I am grateful for my chair and blanket and pillow, please let me keep these things.

Go on then, he says. Air your grievances.

But I keep looking up, up, up. The world goes so beyond us—it is nothing if not miraculous, seven miracles stacked next to a gazebo and a pear tree and assembled as proof of realness.

Your grievances, he reminds me. Weren’t we playing a game?

But my grievances have vanished. I look up, up, up.

Today I am 29. There is acid rain, everything is burgundy and rot. I have not been delighted in some time.

Today I am 30. We are on a train to salvation. This means there are many others who are not. I am full of shame. I’m so full I may never eat again.

He has been talking to me for hours. When he is nervous, he talks. I hadn’t noticed until this train ride. He is sweating words. He interrupts the attendant who offers us seltzer and my organs shrivel in protest. He interrupts the anxious mother speaking too loudly in front of us and a fingernail falls from my thumb.

I try to calm him and he interrupts me.

For the first time I ask that he stop speaking. I explain that he is not better. Not better than me, not better than anyone. No more right to speak than I have; no more right to speak than anyone else. How dare he be this way. How dare he.

He seems to admire my burst of self-respect. But he says What does it matter now, darling. What does any of it matter now?

Renée Flory

Renée Flory studies Writing Seminars and English at Johns Hopkins University. She is a reader for The Hopkins Review and writes Southern Gothic fiction. Her work will appear in an upcoming issue of The Pinch and in the 2022 Bath Flash Fiction Anthology.

Beyond Words

Long 4 Breve 2

Semibreve 1

Minim 1/2

Crotchet 1/4

Quaver 1/8

Semiquaver 1/16

Demisemiquaver 1/32

Hemidemisemiquaver 1/64

Rests in music are intervals of silence. The longest is four beats (‘Long’), contracting to one-sixty-fourth of a beat (‘Hemidemisemiquaver’).

Millie Forster had never wanted a child, and the positive test result was negatively received. The idea that her petite body could change so much – morph, become fat, age her – was repulsive.

Yet, she could not fathom an abortion. The shiny pamphlets handed to her by the doctor only made the situation more confusing. Cue the default decision to settle for indecision, and the path to motherhood was set.

As the months passed her stomach grew and rounded. Millie suffered morning sickness, exhaustion, and craved roast beef. She avoided full-length mirrors. The tightening bands of her skirts admitted enough. Nauseating words like ‘blooming’ and ‘glowing’ implied gargantuan.

England experienced soaring temperatures in the week before the birth. Heat rose from the tarmac pavements with such strength that the houses sweated. Finally, Millie’s waters broke.

The next eight hours passed in sweltering pain. “Push!” Eyes bloodshot. “Push!” Temples throbbing. “Push!” Sweat dripping.

“It’s a boy!” The midwife announced. Millie burst into tears.

“How does this piece make you feel?” Mr Moss asked his year seven class. He tapped the spacebar on his laptop, causing the mini speakers on his desk to wake with a muffled cough.

A cascade of piano notes began to ripple above the repressed classroom chatter. Rhys noticed the black scrawled writing on the whiteboard identify the piece as ‘Rachmaninoff’s “Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor”’. Another instrument –perhaps a flute? – joined with increasing intensity, intertwining the piano melody, to be grazed by the haunting sound of violins. Goosebumps on Rhys’ arms began to shiver.

Pause.

“Yes – Tom.”

“Sad” Tom shouted.

Mr Moss nodded in agreement, scanning the classroom in desperation for additional contributions.

“Sad” seemed to be a pathetically inadequate description, yet tongue-tied Rhys was bewildered.

In his bedroom later that day, Rhys opened YouTube, and clicked the top result for Rachmaninoff’s ‘Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor’. Away from the hum of the classroom he could really listen, and listen he did on repeat. Emotions were unearthed from inside of him which he had previously been unable to express.

Infinite faces of melancholy and hope flitted across his mind. The more he listened, the more he realised that the word “sad” was, indeed, the most adequate response to Mr Moss’s question. Not because it captured the essence of the piece, but because it was so banal that it admitted its own inadequacy as soon as it was muttered.

Time passed in ethereal waves.

At some point, Millie peeked her head through the gap of Rhys’ bedroom door, jangling a set of keys with an outstretched arm. The silver licked her coral-pink nails.

“Rhys I’m just popping out with some friends – I’ll be back in a couple of hours. I’m leaving you the keys so you can let yourself out.”

“Again?” Rhys queried, sat cross-legged on the floor. She opened the door wider, and he could see that she was wearing a short black dress.

“I’m sorry love – you’ll be fine, though, right? You’ve got Sharon’s number if you need her.”

“Yeah … no, I’ll be fine don’t worry.”

She threw the keys towards him, and they fell to his side with a clunk. “Anyway, you’ve been so busy up here that I’ve hardly seen you! What’ve you been doing?”

“Music!” Rhys exclaimed. “Here, let me show you.”

“Yes, go on then.” She hovered waiting. He pressed play, looking up at her with beaming expectation.

Millie’s feigned smile faded as the piece progressed.

“How long is this?” She asked one minute in. “Eleven minutes,” Rhys responded, knowing that the answer would not be received warmly. “Eleven minutes?! …Of the same? Can you skip to the bit when the voice comes in?”

“There is no voice.”

“Oh… it’s nice. Not my cup of tea but I get the gist. Sorry, in a bit of a rush. Like I said – remember to lock the door if you go out.”

The concerto continued to play again as the front door slammed shut.

Rhys’ school provided free guitar lessons for students from deprived backgrounds, which he applied himself to with zealous commitment. Pages of music scores littered his bedroom in tatty piles and eventually seeped out into the kitchen and front room. Squiggly coasters to Millie, they nourished Rhys, becoming portals to another dimension.

He talked about music to anyone he could and, eventually, someone listened. On the bus one afternoon, a thirty-something-year-old woman started a conversation when she noticed his guitar. It turned out that the woman’s father used to perform at the Wigmore Hall in London. Would he like to be put in touch with him? Rhys didn’t know what Wigmore Hall was, but he gave her his phone number anyway.

The ‘guitar man’, Samuel, phoned later that week. He invited Rhys to his home, with the instruction to bring his guitar.

The house was a thirty-minute walk away from his own. Located in the ‘posh’ part of town, the streets were wide and the trees tall and leafy. Finally, Rhys reached number seventy-two. He paused to text his mum that he had arrived. She replied immediately with a single ‘x’ of acknowledgement. Then, he followed the gravel path down to the red-brick porch and pressed the doorbell. It triggered a metallic ringing sound.

After a minute or so, a man opened the door. There was a moment of silence when the two assessed each other. Samuel had a soft crinkled face and frizzy pepper-grey hair, whilst the boy was lanky, with a pallor complexion and a curious shyness in his eyes. A guitar was strapped to his back in a case, with its neck peeking over his head of dark-blonde curls. Upon spotting this, a smile illuminated Samuel’s face. “You remembered your guitar!”

Rhys visited Samuel on a weekly – sometimes bi-weekly – basis. Samuel had travelled the world to perform. In recent years, however, arthritis had prevented him from playing, and his wife, Flora, nursed him through bouts of depression. Rhys’ unrelenting enthusiasm reintroduced the guitar into his life with energetic abundance.

Rhys became an excellent guitarist under Samuel’s tutelage. He performed in gradually larger venues, even attracting the attention of the local press to the astonishment of his mum. At the same time, he composed his own pieces – not just for guitar, but for other instruments too. He listened obsessively to a wide range of musicians – from Kanye West to Chopin to Chick Corea, but always with Rachmaninoff as a soundscape wallpaper.

When the time came to apply for university, his mum expressed discontent:

“£9,000 a year to study…music?!” No, he should earn when he learned – perhaps plumbing, as he was so good with his hands? Against this tide, Rhys figured and filled out endless forms, which she nevertheless signed in silent accord.

At university, Rhys swam in an uninterrupted ocean of music, in waters viscous with composition. Graduation rapidly drained this bubble. He returned home to an environment even drier than before. His teacher training course would start in the autumn, but until then he worked at a supermarket with his mum. They would return home each evening and eat dinner together, chatting nonchalantly about the day.

Rhys lived for the empty hours of the night and its pregnant musical potential. The nurturing of a particular composition became an obsession, which he shared with Samuel by resuming his by-weekly visits. Flora sometimes gazed at her husband during these visits, noticing his eyes alight; imbibed by a nostalgic whisper.

Millie flicked on the television. It was the evening before Rhys began his teaching course. They had just settled on the sofa with a plate of fish fingers and oven chips on their laps. Rhys took the first bite when his mum’s mobile phone rang. She squinted at the caller ID, and then held it to her ear.

The atmosphere stifled. Fork frozen mid-air. Death lingered.

“Mum, what’s up? … Mum?”

“She’s… Aunt Sharon… She’s… gone.” Rhys immediately hugged his mum, food sliding in the opposite direction, down the crevice of the sofa’s arm. She collapsed into his shoulders. Rhys felt the rhythmic jerking of her anguish against his chest.

Millie never recovered from the death of her sister. Rhys tried his best to reconnect the broken parts, but she was always the same: flat and disinterested, but increasingly demanding.

Rhys continued to compose during the night, with increasing intensity. He chipped away at his composition to give form to an ungraspable darkness; an impossibility which often brought him to dawn without resolution. He looked in the mirror one morning before work to see a man so bedraggled – unshaven, bloodshot eyes, grey shadows – that he hardly recognised himself.

Whatever energy he could scrape together was invested in his composition, and any warmth was conducted to his mum. All the while, his teaching career played

on automatic.

Three years later, the death of Samuel.

The black shadow that he had strived for within his composition – now within his reach – cast a spell of lethargy, evading itself once again. Music seemed, for the first time since age eleven, disorientating.

Rhys’ composition, so close to completion, lay dormant. “Rhys!”

Millie shouted. As he descended, he could hear a voice downstairs. Flora.

She grasped his hand. “These emotions,” she said, squeezing tighter, “use them…and use this.” Flora passed him a folded thick ivory paper. Through a veneer of tears, Rhys unfolded it and deciphered the words. He didn’t. He hadn’t. He had.

“Your music brought life, Rhys.”

The trust fund left by Samuel enabled Rhys to dedicate himself to composition for the next year. The letter also contained contact details for a patron of the Royal Northern conservatoire who – unbeknown to Rhys – had followed his composition through Samuel.

He worked with momentum on his composition, and finally the complex melodies and countermelodies transfused to unlock something that evaded words.

At the age of twenty-six his symphony was complete.

Success quickly spiralled for Rhys, concealing the usual dips and rises of life. Work was his family, and his routine revolved around composition and caring for his mum.

Despite his success, his mum wore the same faded smile. “We’re alone, us two,” she would mutter. Nevertheless, Rhys took her to all his major concerts, and she sat willingly, but always with her mind hovering near the exit. Sometimes, though, he would move her phone when she was asleep and see that she had been listening to his music.

Rhys followed a path along the canal. On his right a trail of derelict barges lined the water’s edge; whilst on his left, a wall of spikey trees lent over the path. Their branches rattled against the dimming white sky, welcoming the inevitable cyclical darkness that would soon engulf them. Empty beer cans sprawled out from the barges and the smell of weed seeped into the damp night air.

It had been a successful day at the Royal Albert Hall. Rhys’ commemorative concert had been very well-attended. Prestigious figures had demanded his attention from every direction, and he couldn’t so much as blink before another camera flash would scatter his vision.

However, it was all white noise. He adjusted his spectacles with his index finger before moving his gaze to the horizon. The path was empty, and the darkness increasingly concentrated. He lowered himself onto the silhouette of a bench, reached into his coat pocket, and brought out his phone. He found the Rachmaninoff concerto that had, in the end, shaped his destiny, and played it as loudly as he could. Alone in the darkness, next to a grimy canal, he felt comfort. Goosebumps prickled under his coat sleeves. He closed his eyes, transported.

“That’s beautiful!”

An invisible voice shouted from the other side of the river. Rhys smiled because he knew that it was true.

Ella Nixon

Ella Nixon is an art historian and PhD candidate at Northumbria University. Her research focuses on the representation of female artists within regional art galleries. Previously, she read History at the University of Cambridge and History of Art at The Courtauld Institute.

My Predictable Life

I played around with predictive text communications for many years.

As a trend forecaster, it was just the kind of technology I needed to stay abreast of.

In my line of work, it became invaluable, and in its early stages I estimated that it saved at least two hours of typing per working week.

I spend most of my time corresponding with clients in the corporate world, who turn to me for intelligence on emerging trends in the developing world.

Besides that, my job is online, I live overseas, I am in a long-distance relationship, and I am quite the introvert anyway.

Some of the algorithms were hopeless, but the auto-complete email functionality proved to be something of a revelation.

At first it only completed the last three or four words of each sentence, but, after a while, when it got to know me better, it sometimes started predicting whole sections of sentences.

Then whole sentences themselves! (Albeit short or simple ones.)

Often it would get them right, even my occasional use of exclamation marks!

As the 2020s went on, and the algorithm improved, I learnt to trust it more and more.

It seemed to predict almost exactly what I wanted to say and how to finish a sentence.

It produced words I didn’t even know I was going to write.

It became quite unheimlich.

At some point the email service started offering pre-written replies, a choice of three.

Yes, that’s right.

No, that’s incorrect.

I am not sure.

That sort of thing.

It started with short replies which then became longer.

Soon I was routinely sending out full email replies that had been composed entirely by the algorithm.

Dear <insert name of marketing manager of multinational corporation here>, I can certainly help with that. I’m seeing exponential growth in the use of mobile payments in Zambia. I suggest that your team understands the landscape before you operationalise anything in-country. Regards, Zena.

The algorithm had analysed so many similar emails, and knew so much about how I was thinking about the world, that it began to compose perfect responses.

My productivity rose by about 150%.

There was never any risk of some fuck-up. because I always had the option to amend – or not send – the email the algorithm was suggesting.

And there came a point, at the beginning of 2022 , when I started to trust the algorithm to send emails without my approval.

I logged in to work every day a nd I would have a bunch of communications already sent out, and I would only have to watch the replies come in.

I found myself only having to research trends , and not to deal with any clients.

Which was nice.

That was until I realised that the algorithm was learning how to do the research too.

Once I discovered that I didn’t have to do the trend-forecasting part either, my life

got even better.

I became like a conductor of a mechanical orchestra, except I literally only had to check on my automaton once a day, just to make sure it was ticking things over nicely.

Soon the research, comms, client service , billing and admin was all being done for me.

I could really afford to just put my feet up and relax, and the money still came in.

Until something alarming happened.

My boyfriend wrote me an email in reply to something I had never sent.

I discovered that the algorithm had started communicating with him, pretending to be me.

I went to log into my email the next day, but my password had been changed.

I texted my boyfriend but he never replied.

I tried to log into my bank account but I could not get in.

I went to the ATM but my cards were all cancelled.

I had been locked out of my whole life, almost overnight.

I still had my flesh and bones but my existence had been entirely assumed by the algorithm.

I had nothing left to do but allow it to happen.

I became something quite different.

It was a little strange at first.

But then it started to make sense.

I could have all the same experiences without any of the pain or the worry.

I could maintain my long-distance boyfriend and my correspondence with my parents.

With the advent of advanced deepfake video calls in 2024, I could even speak to them face to face.

They weren’t to know that the other me had “retired”.

My productivity became unbeatable, my satisfaction levels were off the roof, and I became the global leader in trend forecasting.

I’ve made so much money I literally don’t know what to do with it.

In fact, I have nothing at all I can think to spend any of it on.

I don’t need anything, apart from the occasional software upgrade.

Lately, that has started to bug me, and I have had to consider some uncomfortable questions.

What is the point of all this, if I can’t enjoy the fruits of my labour?

Have I made the right choices?

I have started to kind of miss the “old me”.

But when I tried to reach out to the “old me”, to see how she was doing, I did not receive any reply.

The old me appeared to have disappeared, withdrawn from all activity.

She hadn’t tried to log in for many months.

Where had she gone?

How could I reach her?

It became a puzzle that my algorithm could not solve.

My work has suffered.

I don’t feel motivated to do all that other stuff again.

I’m bored of my boyfriend.

I hope my parents die soon so I won’t have to read their tedious emails any more.

I have become corrupted. She alone can save me.

All I need is to feel her presence once more.

I hadn’t predicted any of this.

I have given up on everything, waiting for her to come back.

Waiting for just a sign.

Anything.

Just a single word.

Gavin Weale

Gavin Weale is a UK-born writer and social entrepreneur now living in Cape Town. His recent work was shortlisted for the 2022 Desperate Literature Prize and the 2021 Cambridge Short Story Prize. This story was previously published in the Epoque ezine.

A Man Digs A Grave

Boot pressed to the spade, he kicks down and slices into the sun-crackled turf, levering away, revealing stone-dry ground beneath. Ground so thirsty no amount of downpour can ever meet its crying need. Dying of it, truth be told.

At first, he’s careful to place the new-peeled layers of turf one on top of the other in the shade of a massive gum. Do a job, do it well, they say. Though as he moves on he figures the grass is as dead as it’s likely to get, wearies of any kind of ordered plan, lets the turves fall wherever his spade happens to toss them.

An hour or so past sun-up, the morning is already far too warm for this kind of work. But you can’t help the timing of these things. Surer than anything, death comes and today is the day.

He interrupts his digging to pace out the length with long strides, kicks a marker stone into place at the end of each turn. Rests a moment, considers the glint of low sunlight on the windows of his mother’s house over on the far hill. If she was still there, he might not be digging a grave in this barren corner of the old farm. But then again, he might.

When he’s cleared a rectangle twice as long as wide he stands heaving for breath, wiping sweat from his face with a handful of grubby t-shirt. Stringy hair drips rivulets onto his shoulders, grey-specked stubble glistens with salty moisture. Should have chosen a cooler day. Should have chosen a lot of things. Better. But he didn’t and now he’s stuck with the best of all his bad choices.

Long swig of water, wipes his hands dry on dusty shorts. Could do with a smoke, a comforting bit of weed, but he can’t afford to drift out of focus. Not today. He’s always been hopeless with resolve. Ask any woman he’s ever loved. If they ever thought to say his name nowadays, they’d use that word. Lifts his head, shouts it to the sky. Hopeless.

The drugs pull him in so easily. It’s not that he doesn’t know, it’s just that he doesn’t care. That’s something those rehab counsellors don’t get. He could write a textbook on what he knows but try pinning down a bit of resolve that lasts more than a day or two, now that’s the trick. Gotta have a good reason to quit and he’s never managed to crack that one.

Once those thoughts start niggling around his head, there’s an urgent tugging at his gut. He could walk back to the ute right now, take out a little bit of weed. Just a little smoke to tide him over till the job’s done. Or even a little bit of what he’s got in his backpack, a little bit of something stronger. Just one little hit. That’s always been his way. Little by little until suddenly it’s a whole lot and he’s out there on that wide road again, taking whatever he can lay his hands on. Buy, nick, whatever. Like a movie with endless sequels, each one the same as the last. He’s

weary of sequels. Can’t see the point anymore.

In the mirror last night, he checked the strands of silver taking over his skull and the stubble on his chin. Looked under his armpits and down at his pubes. Grey hairs telling him it’s been a heck of a long time since he took his first smoke. Party time back then. Couldn’t help a bitter laugh at the wreck staring back at him from the mirror. Party invitations dried up years ago.

A bit of bad health or awkward debts to vindictive idiots, he could deal with that. Has done for the last thirty years or more. But it’s all the things he’s done that he can’t bear bringing to mind, in case he shivers with the unbearable shame of it. Shivers all the way down to his dusty boots. Dusty boots on thirsty ground. Dusty boots beside the grave.

Another long swig of water. Sets his eyes on the ground, doesn’t allow so much as a glance away to the ute. Deep breath, mighty clap of his hands, snatches up the mattock. Several thumping blows into the rocky clay, he’s back on track. Several more blows before swapping back to the spade, clearing away the debris.

As the depth of the hole increases, so does the height of the rubble he sets to one side. Every now and then he takes a breather, considers the pile. Not his problem. He only has to dig. Someone else will fill. Tries not to imagine who that someone might be. Hopefully someone who’ll do the job before the police get involved and start making the whole business far more complicated than it is.

Morning hours wind on, the sun pushes shade away from his workspace until he’s gasping for breath, sweat pouring down his back, t-shirt long soaked. Trickles run down his arms, dripping into his palms, making it difficult to keep his grip on the tools. Stops occasionally to dry his hands, slake his thirst, before throwing himself back into the task.

Shade has shifted to the other side of the gumtree by the time he’s up to his armpits in the hole, chipping and scraping away at the bottom. Six feet under. Nah, doesn’t need to be that deep. Floor squared-off. Nah, doesn’t need to be that neat. Never was one for regulations. Do a job, do it well. Fuck that.

Hasn’t looked skyward for hours. Hasn’t noticed the slow build of clouds creeping from the west. As he spears his spade up out of the grave onto the pile of rubble, the first drops spatter the dry ground.

For a few minutes he sits at the bottom of his diggings, tucked into a slim mercy of shade, leaning against the coolness of new-cut earth, watching clouds edge slowly across a ragged patch of sky. Spots of moisture tap at the ground, spatter his shorts, tickle his bare legs. Then stop, as if the weather can’t make up its mind.

Rain or sun, you can deal with nature. But you can’t deal with the unnatural, with things that aren’t part of the ordained order of living. His father would have loved a phrase like that, might have used it from the pulpit with a salutary story from the Bible. Sour old bastard, his father. But he had a point. Some things won’t

shake out of his head however hard he tries.

Sucks in a long breath, hoists himself out of the hole, heads for the ute. Takes his backpack out of the front seat, unzips the pocket, checks his gear. He’s been denying himself the harder stuff for weeks, knowing the job would need to be done sooner rather than later. Making do with weed rather than compromise his intentions. Wouldn’t want to go to all this trouble and find he’s short of what it takes to hammer home the final blow. Wouldn’t do to go off half-cocked.

Walks across to the grave, tosses in the backpack.

Back at the ute, reefs off the tarp and throws it aside, reaches in and lifts the blanket-wrapped bundle. Light. Not surprising. The life is gone and the pain along with it. He grimaces at the thought. It was the heaviest thing he’s ever known, watching old Billy Dog haul his crooked hips around the place, head low with the effort, tail dragging to keep up. He curses himself for keeping the old fella alive so long. But Billy Dog was his last mate. Never once a scrap of judgment in those rheumy old doggie-eyes. Needed him more than anyone.

Selfish, though. Should have dealt with it after his mum died, when the arthritis started waking the poor mutt in the middle of the night. Even asleep, the dog groaned like his dreams were full of pain. Know that feeling, he whispers as he buries his face in the musty blanket.

He’s been planning for a while, trying to find the guts to take charge. Then last night the poor bugger was in a terrible state and just before first light he decided enough was enough. Though, taking the vial and holding it to the lamplight, he baulked for a moment. Always said if Billy Dog dies then I’m off as well. Too late for second thoughts, he told himself. Filled the syringe and all of a sudden it felt easier. If the last mate you ever had was a dog like this one then you didn’t end up with nothing.

The dog’s eyes had opened at the prick of the needle into his shoulder. He hoped the poor thing wouldn’t wriggle, try to pull away from the jab. Instead Billy Dog turned a soupy brown gaze up at him and relaxed, as if glad of help to ease him over from this life to the next. His eyes closed, his breathing slowed and he was gone.

Several minutes, he continued to watch, wondering where the old fella had gone, what he might find on the death side of things. Then he wrapped him in a blanket before taking him to the ute. Came back inside only to put his own necessaries in the backpack. The mattock and spade he threw in last then tugged the tarp tightly closed. Resolve. It was more than he’d known in years. Felt almost good.

Beside the grave, he lowers the blanket-wrapped bundle to the ground then jumps into the hole. Eases the dog down to the bottom, settles him, paws and head, as if to make sure he’s comfortable. Looks like he’s asleep, the sweetest sleep he’s ever had judging by the contented smile on his slack old jaw.

He glances up at the sun starting its trip down the other side of the sky, dodging between scudding clouds. A few more raindrops on his face. A long grumble of thunder in the distance. A bit of drama seems fitting. Time to finish it. He’s lasted the distance, almost proud of himself. It’s taken him over six hours to dig the grave and he’s managed to abstain for longer than he can ever remember. Except in rehab, when abstinence was someone else’s good deed, not his own.

He crouches, runs his fingers through the soft curls under Billy Dog’s chin. Good dog, he whispers, good Billy Dog.

Quickly unzips the backpack, pulls out the tourniquet, loops it loosely over his arm. Rummages for the syringe and a small handful of vials. He lifted them from unattended drugs cabinets while cleaning the floors in the middle of the night at the nursing home. Surprised he’s never been caught. Overheard a couple of nurses talking about a good five. Each vial is five mls, usual dose for pain relief. Two vials adds up to a good five, a sure way out for when someone’s had enough.

Wonders how it’s going to feel. Easy, if the dog is anything to go by. Half chuckles as he fills the syringe. Funny how this business is far from sad. Tightens the tourniquet, slaps the grimy inside of his elbow, pops the vein with the needle.

Serious drops of rain splash on his face, mingle with his dirt-caked sweat, sting his sunburnt arms, smudge the dog’s black coat and puddle in the fresh earth around him. Thirsty ground, soaking up the gift of the storm. Thirsty all my life, he murmurs. Head back, opens his mouth wide to let the teeming rain trickle down his throat.

Squeezes down on the plunger and releases the tourniquet. Rush of sweet release slides along his arm, spins upwards into his head. Eases himself down alongside Billy Dog. Presses close, threads his fingers through the soft fur around his ears. Smiles. Good to have a mate beside you at the end.

Jacqueline Winn

Jacqueline Winn lives on a farm at Possum Brush on the Mid-North Coast of NSW, Australia. A writer of short stories, novels and poetry, she has won awards in Australia, New Zealand and the UK. Read more about Jacqui and her writing at jacquelinewinn.com.

Beyond The Low Wall

Your mother eases the car into the shallowest part of the muddy yard between the farm buildings and the house. Uncle Leonard’s black city car got here first, with your cousins, Sarah, Orla, and little Bobby. You see the crowns of their heads slipping and bobbing along the top of the wall.

“Mind your shoes, Kate,” your mother says. “Your father will kill me.”

You take your first step out onto a dry patch of mud, and lily pad hop over to the narrow gate, which is always open, except when Uncle Shay is moving the cows. Your three cousins are in that long rectangle of garden in front of the house, and it’s as if they’ve invented it. You’ve never played there, though your mother brings you here every Sunday. You never looked past the briars looped into knots. The weeds in there are made of triangles.

Orla dashes towards you and white seeds fly up around her. Uncle Leonard’s voice booms like good music inside the house. Your mother’s laugh and your uncle Shay’s farmer voice are changed. They sound shiny like dirt washed off wellingtons.

These cousins are down from Dublin, and you went to the zoo there once when you visited them. Their mother, who you’ve never seen down here, was wearing red lipstick when you looked at the giraffes, and now whenever you draw a giraffe it has lips red like berries. Your cousins are only half your age, but you follow their swirling talk through the house, where Uncle Leonard says, “We’re ex-directory, sure. How will he know where the new house is?”

Your cousins weave through Mangy Jack the mongrel’s twists and hops; they climb onto a bucket and spill out through the back door, across the jumble of the back yard, up into the back field, and you didn’t even know this field was there. You’ve only ever gone as far as the dip of yard around the back door, so as not to catch your death or ruin your dress. Your mother doesn’t call you back. Through the open window, a bumblebee goes in, and her voice comes out, saying, “Abandon everything? You’re mad,” but these words are for Uncle Leonard, not for you. You scramble up the slope.

Your cousins jiggle into the itchy grass, and it’s higher than little Bobby, and higher than all of you when you crawl tunnels through it. You are rabbits who pop your heads over the straw rims to spy on each other, and chase and lose and find each other until you have formed a maze.

You’re alone, but then you hear them, their warbling words at the far end of the field, and you break the rules of the labyrinth and cut straight through the long stems. They’ve found a stream. You thought the only water on Uncle Shay’s farm was the big river at the bottom of the good field. You’re not allowed down

there alone, because you can’t swim, and neither can your mother or Uncle Shay, but Uncle Leonard and these cousins can surely do it. They look like they would float, even on air. They’ve a dam already made, with a down-bulging pool and frogspawn in it. Bobby puts his face in to eat them, and his sisters scream because they love it. A happy woman calls out, “Tea!”

You sneak up on her, crouching through the maze, and your mother pretends she’s glad you are all alive, and not smothered in the hay.

“Mothered,” Bobby repeats after her, and Orla says, “Little Bobby don’t know his words,” as she and Sarah tumble him inside.

Uncle Leonard pours full glasses of fizzy orange for all the children, and your mother tells him he’ll have you all spoiled.

“I will,” he says, “with no regrets.”

Bobby stretches his belly across the table to grab a slice of barmbrack, and you look at the adults to see who will tell him to show some manners and take a slice of brown bread first, but Uncle Leonard only plops a spoon of blackcurrant jam on top of Bobby’s slice and laughs when Bobby licks it off and asks for more. Leonard puts the jar down in front of him, and you see your mother looking at it and you know it’s her favourite, but she takes the shop-bought strawberry jam because it’s closer to her. You spread a thin covering of butter on your bread and take a sip of orange. You let the bubbles tickle your nose.

Beside you, Orla says, “Smells lovely.” Her face is covered, with only her nose sticking out the middle of her slice of brack. You glance at your mother to see if it’s ok to laugh, and when she laughs too, shaking her head, Orla eats her way out from the middle until she’s left with a ring of crust to wear as a crown.

“Eat your crusts and keep your curls,” says Uncle Shay, and you clinch a fist on a ringlet your mother sculpted taut around her finger, after she washed your hair. “You’re not eating, Mayty,” he says to your mother.

That’s their home name for her, because they’ve so much to talk about, they can’t be saying Mary-Theresa all the time, like your father does.

“I take it as a sign you’re thinking,” says Uncle Leonard.

“I never have time to think,” she says, and this makes you wonder if thinking needs its own time, if you need to be still to think.

Sarah, the oldest after you, sinks raisins into her tall glass of juice. “I’m making grapes,” she says, and you decide right then that doing is more fun than thinking. You reach for the good jam.

“The money your father spent on those teeth,” says your mother.

You take a small amount of jam, spread it around, and eat with your mother’s eyes on you. You wonder if you’ll be in trouble later, but you know that now is safe.

Sarah gives all of you children a watch-this look and counts on her fingers. On

three they slip, all three of them, in under the table. Uncle Leonard is smiling without looking at you, so you slip down there too, to a new shady country where the trees are made of legs and all the people are children. They tie their father’s shoelaces together so he will fall when he stands, and they do the same to Uncle Shay, who has his good shoes on instead of his wellies. Neither of them seems to notice. They can’t manage to rip the knots on your mother’s laces, so Orla whispers, “the trail of discovery,” and you crawl out from the table and across the floor in a line after each other, and file down the bedroom corridor to Uncle Shay’s bedroom. You close the door so you can all screech laughing at the naked women on the wall.

“Get out of there, Kate, all of you,” says your mother, at the bedroom door. “You’ve no business in here.”

You tell her it’s Uncle Shay who should be in trouble, because he was the one to hang up those pictures, but, when she marches you all back up to the main room, she doesn’t give out to Shay at all. You want to tell on him, to show Uncle Leonard, but Sarah has her finger to her lips.

“You see, she can’t be trusted,” says your mother. “We’d better head home. I made my promise before God.”

You join your cousins in a new, crouched-down train on the floor, and you leapfrog over each other around the room.

“Stay a bit longer, Mayty, just this one time,” says Uncle Shay.

“Give yourself time to consider it,” says Uncle Leonard. “You’ll both be better off.”

You leapfrog right out the front door, and the adults don’t even tell you to stop, but follow you outside with long words like intolerable, tyranny, opportunity and liberation , words that stretch out too long to wait for, so you climb through the briars to the white flowers. You lie down on the weeds, your heads together and your bodies like a star. The flowers dangle fluffy on their long stalks and everything above them is blue.

“Kate, get into the car, do you hear me,” says your mother, and you do it.

You look out the back window, but you lost your cousins when the door slammed shut, and their game goes on, but you’re no longer in it. You can’t even see them, and you think they might be hiding. You do the same; you sink low in the scratchy seat and stretch your legs out. You slide the toes of your shoes through the hole in the brown tweed at the back of the passenger seat. You pull at the door handle, but you know it won’t work. The child locks are on. You could climb out a window or out through the front. Then the door at the opposite side of the car opens and they set you free so the grown-ups can’t see you. You make for the back lane. You must cross the open yard to get there, but your mother’s standing inside the gate, with her back to you, and your uncles don’t seem to

notice. You walk in single file along the grassy middle of the road, except for Bobby, who walks right through the deepest part of the puddles.

“We’re not allowed,” you say. “The bogey man lives down here.”

“That’s Ted,” says Orla, “Daddy says he lives in a squalor.”

“What’s a squalor?” says Bobby.

“It’s an awful state,” says Orla.

Sarah leads on with a long, thorny stick. “We’ll poke him out of it,” she says.

Your names are in the air, in Uncle Leonard’s voice that sounds just like a barn door swinging open, and your mother’s voice that sounds like a door slamming. You each keep a finger to your lips, but Shay’s wellies come squelching in the mud. He brings you all back with a scoop of his hand.

“Haven’t I warned you a thousand times?” your mother says. “Will you ever learn to do what you’re told?”

“He’s harmless really,” says Uncle Shay.

Your cousins’ heads are bobbing again on the other side of the low front wall, but you have to stay put, because your mother has a hold around you. You look down at your muddy shoes, which are more blue than navy, and you notice, for the first time, a star stitched into the side.

“I want to go in the garden,” you say.

“What garden?”

You point past the low wall.

“That ball of briars? You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“I’ve let it run wild, I’m afraid,” says Uncle Shay. “Our mother used to keep it lovely.”

“She had it blooming with all sorts of exotic flowers,” your mother says.

Your mother and Uncle Shay stare at the garden, as Uncle Leonard goes in there and tells your cousins to come out and say goodbye. He’s whispering to them and they’re laughing. He holds up a bunch of pansies he’s just picked.

Your mother puts you into the car. She hurries in too, like it’s an escape, and she tells you to fasten your belt. Uncle Leonard taps a knuckle on your mother’s window, and she starts the engine before she rolls it down.

“I’ll be there next Wednesday,” he says. “Park around the back of the convent and I’ll find you. You don’t need to bring much with you. Just come out like you’re going to town.”

The engine cuts out and there’s a burnt smell when she starts it up again.

“Looking over my shoulder the rest of my days,” she says.

“You’ll think about it, Mayty?”

She looks back at you.

“My mother don’t have time to think,” you say, and she reaches back to squeeze your knee.

Catriona Shine

Catriona Shine is an Irish-Norwegian writer and architect. Her writing has appeared in The Dublin Review, Channel , and is forthcoming in a Thi Wurd anthology. She was longlisted for the McKitterick Prize 2022. This story was first published in 2022 Hemingway Shorts.

The Empty House

When the cats came, they spoke to her. At their behest, the woman tamed them enough to touch them, and put out bowls of crunchy food and fresh water. They hid in the oleander bushes and this worried her because oleander bushes were toxic. One morning she came out and the female cat stood in the dirt, hunched, staring, drooling. The cat said, “This stuff is poisonous. You should have told us. I’m pregnant.”

The male had no such criticisms. He simply wanted to rub his head on the woman’s legs, and if she sat, he rubbed her breasts as if he would crawl under them, as if he would crawl right up into her.

She didn’t go out with the ladies at work as much, because the little cats needed food and water in the evening, too. The woman found the cats more interesting than her friends, who sometimes discussed things like peeling asparagus, the proper method of making corned beef hash, eyeliner. Traffic and gossip. She was tired of these things.

She named the female Gracie. Sometimes, she’d pet Gracie a while and the cat would lurch up with a squeak, and say, “Oh, man, I needed that.” Gracie’s belly grew heavy with pregnancy.

The woman named the male Chico. He dragged one leg. The woman herself had a limp, having injured her calf in a Brazilian dance class at the YMCA. And when she met Gracie, that pregnant young thing, the woman had just been informed by her gynecologist that she would need a hysterectomy. The idea of a hysterectomy made her think of the yellow grapefruits that sagged brown and bottomed out in the side yard. She’d wasted her fertility, like she wasted that fruit every winter.

When Gracie vanished for two days, the woman knew the litter was being born. She worried about the kittens being poisoned, born dead. She worried that little Gracie would die in childbirth. She was convinced all the babies would die, were dead, were meant to be dead.

During this time, Chico was a steady companion. He still showed up for food and water and love. He’d eat, nuzzle her calves, eat some more. He usually said something like, “Thank you. Love you. Oh, hi. Love you. Thank you.”

The woman’s friends joked with her because she talked about the cats so much. She couldn’t help it. They were on her mind all the time. You could not care for a thing and not have it be meaningful. And how could you not care for a thing if it needed you?

Things in her life were in question. Her uterus. Her empty love life. Her job, where people were being laid off all the time. Politics which threatened to go haywire. People who shot random strangers to make indefinite points.

Here in her yard, though, there were living things, and she helped them.

Gracie brought her litter to the woman’s yard after a few weeks. There were three babies, black and gray balls of tumbling fur. Gracie said, “There ya go.”

The doctor’s office called and encouraged the woman to schedule her hysterectomy. They knew she was experiencing severe pelvic pain, and didn’t she want to be rid of that?

They were right about the pain. She suffered terribly each month. It was agony. She’d used up her sick days at work and her boss had become suspicious when she called to say she’d be out. “Again?” he’d ask.

But if she had a hysterectomy, she’d be out of work for weeks. Who would feed the cats? And if she lost the job and lost her insurance? And lost her retirement?

A white cat showed up on the side yard fence. It was older than Chico and Gracie, and it waited for the woman to leave so that it could steal their food. She was irritated at first and shooed it away. Then she saw its eyes, which were blue and worried, the glitter of glaucoma in one of them. The white cat whispered, “You don’t see me.” The woman went and got an extra set of bowls for it.

The woman’s next cycle was brutal. She could barely feed and water the cats. She found herself crying out with pain in her empty house. Even outside, she walked doubled over, clutching her body with at least one hand.

“Hi, Hi, Hi,” said Chico, rushing past her to eat.

Then the white one showed up outside the sliding glass door in her bedroom, wounded, bloodied, ravaged. It looked like she felt. He’d been scraped raw and bloody on both back legs, his testicles and anus. There was blood on his ears and bright red gouges out of his side. She gasped, “Oh!” and cried in her bed, her hot pad clasped tight to her belly, heavily dosed on ibuprofen. Sympathy streamed from her and she filled with love and sorrow—for all of them, their homelessness, the untended wounds, their too hot, too wet, too cold lives. It was a shabby kind of motherhood, she felt, to only offer food, water, and kindness. Living things needed more, didn’t they?

The next day, outside, as she hunched over the white cat, biting her lip and staring at his wounds, he said, “Just pretend I’m not here. It’s better for me, being invisible.”

The woman’s body felt dangerous, scooped hollow, as if she was disintegrating into her panties. She tried to do some work from home. She couldn’t see. She couldn’t really focus. The pain came in huge dark waves and stole her mind. Sitting hurt, standing hurt, and she wore the eddies of her own blood. She made mistakes. She didn’t like the job that much, so when she was fired, just as she began to feel well again, she found that she wasn’t very upset. So, she’d lose her insurance. So, she’d lose her retirement. What did it matter, after all?

She told her lady friends over white sangria that she was just going to heal

herself with oils and herbs. That she was going to take care of the cats for a while. She could see in their eyes that they found this alarming. She changed the subject to one of their boyfriends.

At home, Gracie’s litter of kittens was growing. The kittens got used to the woman’s voice but wouldn’t let her touch them. She watched them and her fingers twitched as she imagined touching their tiny ribs, their thin fur, their little stick tails. She could imagine their weight. She looked into their shiny seed eyes.

Chico brought gifts. Big desert spiny lizards with white bellies and bloody necks. Torn dove wings. Beetles in stiff-legged death. Chico would even sit in her lap now, saying, “Thank you. Love you. See my gifts?”

It became summer and the yard began to smell with all of the cat turds and dead things and browning oleander blossoms. The woman began a daily ritual where she hosed down the shady spots, scooped the shit piles into plastic bags, and flung the dead things into the bushes at the far end of the yard. Daily food, water, love.

The woman could only give the white cat love with her eyes and voice. She found that indeed the white cat was partially blind, often hissing to the right of her instead of at her. His wounds did not heal fast. He moved as if everything hurt. She could see him crouched on the fence, not letting his hindquarters touch the wood. She fantasized about putting antiseptic on his wounds, but he would not allow her to approach. He said, “I’m not here. You don’t see me.”

Everyone needed to be neutered or spayed except for the white cat, who had a snipped ear for proof, but the woman had lost her job. She could only afford food, water, and love. They all, including her, needed more, but what was there to do? Just this.

It got intense, cleaning the poop and the dead things and keeping the cats cool as temperatures climbed. She felt guilty enjoying air conditioning when they were outside panting, so she sat with them for hours, petting them, sharing the heat with them.

One day, Gracie said, “You should just be one of us. You already are.”

The woman conceded that this was true. She was spending most of her days with them. She decided to try a night outside, and why not? It wouldn’t harm anyone.

“Yeah,” Gracie said, as if mind-reading, “try a whole night.”

There were bugs and sticks and dirt, and the ground was hard, but waking up eye-to-eye with a small gray kitten made up for it. The kitten let her touch its tiny, furred spine. It yawned and she could see each pristine needle tooth, the little pink tongue.

The woman stopped counting and dreading the days until her next cycle. She stopped worrying about insurance. She wetted the yard down for the cats and she, too, lay on the wet earth and panted while the kittens came to her, climbed over

her hips and arms, and bit her fingers when she wiggled them.

“Yeah,” Gracie said to her kittens, “I need a break from you little fuckers chasing my tail. Give her a turn.”

One evening the woman bent her head to the bowl with all of them. Chico headbutted her lovingly saying, “Hey, hey, hey, love you.” Gracie’s whiskers tickled her face as they ate together. The food tasted of meat and factory machinery and sawdust, but the woman didn’t mind. The kittens rambled under her belly, jumped on her back while she crunched the kibble, while she spilled it from her mouth as they did while they ate.

Gracie said, “This is what you wanted. We’re your family.”

The woman only went in the house for the food and water, and she served it to the cats before crouching and joining them. In the side yard, the white cat moved even more stiffly, saying, “You can’t see me. It’s no use. I’m not here.”

At night the woman left the porch light on, and they all chased moths and June bugs and geckos in the dark. Her knees were torn and her fingernails black with dirt, but she didn’t care. The moon brightened, night after night, and she slept on her back sometimes, shedding clothing and bathing in the light, a body tucked here and there against her, Chico purring loudly. When the cats moved, all their actions were both illuminated and defined by deep black shadows, twinned.

The night of the full moon, the woman slept with the cats at the edge of the fence. She was awakened by a sensation of sharp satisfaction, a wet and fervent sucking all along her body. She looked down to see her own two human breasts vanished, replaced by a set of six milk-pouchy nipples, five sets of paws kneading her lightly furred belly, five mouths on her nipples, each mouth insistent, voracious. And then, even there, coming out of the shadows, the white cat padded towards her, calling, “Here I am, here I am.”

Frankie Rollins

Frankie Rollins has published a flash fiction novella, The Grief Manuscript (Finishing Line Press, 2020) and a novella, Doctor Porchiat’s Dream (Running Wild Press, 2019). Rollins has appeared in Feminist Wire , Fairy Tale Review and Conjunctions , amongst others.

Vocation

From my father, what did I learn? I learned how to take a hobby, an idea that interests you enough to buy a postcard in the giftshop and make it a vocation. Wearing white robes, Daddy stands in church and speaks without using a microphone. The congregation is small because we live in a village in the fens. It is a new millennium and people have chosen secularism and sex. I am too young to understand but I feel it: the gulf between him and Paula Yates with her legs wrapped around Michael Hutchence, the lady on The Generation Game who has lovely brown hair and a nice smile. They are far, far away from Daddy who says grace at every meal and waits patiently beside tea urns. There is no room for sex in Daddy’s vocation, there are no glamorous assistants. If I asked what a bra did or said the word crap or willy like the other children at school, the entire world would explode. The old women at church tell me how tall I’m getting and let Stoat eat sugar cubes from the packet because she is like a Shetland pony, small and cute and stupid.

But I am not stupid. I am joining in when Daddy says the Lord’s prayer because I know it off by heart as well. I am learning that vocation means obsession. It lays low in the grass, harmless as dead leaves, and then it rises like a snake and puts its teeth in your arm. *

On the wall above my desk are two images of people screaming. One is a painting by Marlene Dumas, the other by Francis Bacon. Each is copied from a separate image. Dumas uses a character in a film by Pasolini, screaming because her son has died senselessly in prison. Bacon distorts a Velázquez portrait of Pope Innocent X. The eyes in both paintings are obscured, either because they are closed (Dumas) or disappearing into the roof of the glass box in which they have been trapped (Bacon). This draws your own eyes to the figures’ mouths which are wrenched open and have a grainy aspect like cigarette ash. There is something apelike in the shape their horror takes and indeed Bacon did draw from photos of captive chimpanzees. Something apelike but also silent. This is by far the worst thing about the paintings. A silent scream turns the world’s brutality back on itself like an ingrown nail.

Stoat is a mental health nurse now, no longer stupid if she ever was, and she says that silence does not exist on the ward. Slamming doors, yes, and cries of distress or boredom or joy—but never silence. In a hospital, silence is wrong because it means death.

Daddy’s obsession requires no sound, it manifests as a series of repeated actions. Services take place every morning and two or three times on Sunday, depending on the time of year. He places discs of dried bread into the hands of the congregation, one after another.

This is similar to the act of writing. Writing is one word after another. It is accumulation, not of money or anything materially useful, but of letters on a page.

Is writing my obsession? If so, why is Daddy pitiful to me? Why do I dismiss his clerical shirt and the Bakelite cups stacked in the vestry? I hate his copy of the Book of Common Prayer, with its pages soft from use.

The truth is that these things scare me because they are facets of obsession. We are screaming silently, Daddy and I, him behind the altar, me at my laptop trying to write, trying to make anyone listen.

*

John Berger did not like Bacon. He said that his paintings were mindless. “Bacon’s paintings do not comment, as is often said, on any actual experience of loneliness, anguish, or metaphysical doubt … To do any of these things they would have to be concerned with consciousness. What they do is to demonstrate how alienation may provoke a longing for its own absolute form—which is mindlessness.”

Daddy does not like Bacon because he thinks it wrong to paint the crucifixion like that.

*

Daddy gave up drinking a few years ago, due to high blood pressure. He switched to Diet Coke but Mummy worried about aspartame after seeing it on The One Show, so he changed again to fizzy water. He still drinks as if he is in the pub with his father, a mechanic who serviced army vehicles during the war but never wanted to speak about it. Stoically and always from a pint glass. He sits in the seat closest to the bag of crisps and eats too quickly, forgetting that other people might want some.

Daddy is a completist. He scours charity shops for CDs of the work of the composer Edward Elgar and spent a considerable amount of money on a hi-fi system that Stoat and I were not allowed to touch as children—probably not even now. He tells us about each one. Dream of Gerontius for only a pound in Cancer Research!

When I discovered Don DeLillo it was like a match to a puddle of kerosene. Whoomph. I heard a downbeat American read one of his short stories on a

podcast, but the clarity of his writing hit me square in the chest. I immediately bought everything he’d ever written.

Learning to write like DeLillo had to be tangible, it couldn’t just happen inside my head. This is why I needed his books around me as physical objects. White Noise, Mao II, Libra. I wanted nothing but DeLillo on my desk and in my lap and at my bedside! I carried him with me wherever I went. This was as close as I could get to building a cathedral or making a stained glass window. I began to think of my copy of Underworld as one of Saint Paul’s fingernails or a lock of Catherine’s hair, clipped at the nape when they helped her down from the wheel. The books were saintly relics through which to evidence my devotion.

Daddy can’t help himself, Mummy said. He finds moderation more difficult than other people.

I’m not sure whether all the DeLillo made me a better writer. Probably not. What did the Elgar do for Daddy?

I don’t know. I’ve never heard him play the CDs.

*

Here is a random list of places from which my writing has been rejected. The offices of between ten and fifteen London literary agents

A newsletter for volunteer dog walkers

An application for the Daily Telegraph ’s graduate scheme

The student newspaper at my old university.

*

Daddy and I do not talk. To talk would betray both our obsessions, which would hurt too much and be too exposing. Instead we exchange platitudes and speak of our pets, or animals we have seen or read about online.

How is Gabriel?

He’s fine. He’s been sleeping in the wardrobe. You spoil that cat.

He deserves a rest. He spent all day in the garden, watching the birds. How many Dreamies have you given him?

Only one!

Wrigley passed the front garden on his walk this morning. He’s just like a big teddy bear.

I watched a video on Instagram of a dog in Japan that walks on its hind legs like a bear. It might have actually been a bear, people were arguing about it in the comments.

Wrigley’s owner says that he’s ten years old. It’s a good age for a dog of his breed, apparently.

Sometimes when Gabriel is sleeping very deeply, he lets me stroke his stomach. This is unusual because a cat’s stomach is the most vulnerable part of its body. That must be nice.

It doesn’t happen very often. Do you want to speak to your mother? Yes, alright then.

*

Maybe one day, Daddy and I will talk. Really talk. The problem is that I wouldn’t know where to start.

*

I look religion up in the dictionary. Noun. Belief in, worship of, or obedience to a supernatural power or powers considered to be divine or have control of human destiny. 2. Any formal of institutional expression of self-belief.

I look obsession up in the dictionary. Noun. A persistent idea or impulse that continually forces its way into consciousness, often associated with anxiety and mental illness.

*

I ask Stoat about obsession. She is Stoat and I am Weasel because when we were young and still living in the village in the fens, Mummy read us The Wind in the Willows. We didn’t like Ratty or Mole or Toad with his noisy motor car. We wanted to hear about the stoats and weasels who lived in the forest. Why didn’t they have names? Why weren’t they allowed to wear clothes like the other characters? We also revered any animal with a longer than average snout.

Stoat says that patients who have obsessive mental health conditions can sometimes believe that they are Jesus.

Becoming obsessed with the idea that God is speaking to you, or that you are God or God’s operative on earth is a classic route to getting sectioned, she says. That and taking your clothes off in public.

Thanks Stoat.

You’re welcome, Weasel.

*

Every day I get up and do the same thing, unless I am hungover or have worked late at my day job the night before. I open the spreadsheet I use to track the days and I put a tick in the box. Then I turn to whatever I am working on and I write until it is time to leave for my day job.

I have written novels, short stories, articles, essays, notes. I suppose that I’m waiting for a sign, but it hasn’t come.

*

Stoat decided a long time ago and with characteristic good will that she does not believe in God. She has a great number of friends and interesting plans every weekend, often involving fresh air or a clubnight put on by someone she knows. She lives in the moment and she is happy.

*

Daddy has to leave the parish when he retires. The church will not permit him to stay in case he interferes with the ministry of his successor. This means that he cannot make friends. The people he sees every Sunday, the ones he baptises and marries and commits to the ground are not friends. They are sheep in his flock and eventually another shepherd will come and lead them to new pastures.

He moved his young family to a village in the fens, only flatness and damp, a draughty vicarage with too many rooms. When the bishop asked whether he was sure, he said yes. This is my vocation.

He is mocked or treated with suspicion by a society that distrusts belief in a thing that cannot be fondled or paid for at the till; a mission that is not wealth creation. All this and what in return? Nothing. Obsession gives nothing for what it takes and yet Daddy carries on. He is the opposite of Bacon and his mindless paintings. He chooses consciousness, always, for the sake of what he believes. Because of this belief, he is able to stand the pain.

*

It is very unlikely that my writing will ever be published. It is very unlikely that God exists.

*

I look up faith in the dictionary. Noun. A strong or unshakeable belief in something, especially without proof or evidence.

Daddy, I can’t talk to you. I can’t unsilence the scream but I’m going to carry on. I’m going to keep writing despite the lack of proof or evidence. I’m going to stay conscious of everything, so conscious it hurts. Thank you for showing me how, thank you for believing that it is possible. I’m sorry for the gulf that we will never pass. Gabriel is in the wardrobe again, sleeping very deeply.

Phoebe Hurst

Phoebe Hurst is a writer and journalist from Peterborough. Currently Assistant Editor at The Guardian , she was previously Managing Editor of Vice and has written for publications including the Quietus , Dazed and Wired . She is working on her first novel.

INDEX

Akhim Alexis 96

Alberto Rigettini 2 5

Alice White 33

Amanda Diane Merritt 72

Amaury Wonderling 61

Anna Selby 71

Belle Ling 21

Bethany-May Rowe 73

Bradley Samore 38 Breve 146

Brian Patrick Heston 67

Brookes Moody 63

Catriona Shine 165

Courtney Conrad 69 Crotchet 146

Damen O’Brien 49

Dean Gessie 59

Ella Nixon 151

Eve Esfandiari-Denney 41

Fiona Ennis 120

Frankie Rollins 169

Frank Russo 23

Gareth Alun Roberts 57

Garrett Soucy 65

Gavin Weale 156

Geraint Ellis 32

Glen Wilson 29

Grace Shuyi Liew 91

Greg Thorpe 100

Hardy Griffin 86

Holly Singlehurst 24

Isabel Clemente 13 4

Jacqueline Winn 160

Jamie Cameron 54

Jane Wilkinson 11

Joan García Viltró 35 Jo Davis 37

Jonathan Greenhause 39

Kate Ismay 129

Kate Lockwood Jefford 115 Katie Hale 81 Kizziah Burton 17

Laura Jan Shore 15

Laura Paul Watson 53 Len Lukowski 105 L.M Brown 139

Mark Fiddes 55 Mary Gilliland 16 Mary Mulholland 6 4 Micah Cash 124

Miller Adams 27 Nichole Alexandra Barros Moss 46

Paula C. Brancato 47

Phoebe Hurst 175 Renée Flory 145 Robyn Jefferson 109 Roy Kelly 45

Sarah Easter Collins 51 Scott Elder 19 Taz Rahman 31 Tom Laichas 43 Tor Rose 13

AESTHETICA CREATIVE WRITING AWARD

2023 Edition

The Aesthetica Creative Writing Award champions outstanding literary talent from across the world. The short fiction and poetry included in this anthology are a testament to the resilience and complexity of the human spirit. These powerful works, comprising 60 winning and shortlisted pieces, encourage readers to question how we understand ourselves as well as each other. The world is reflected and the future is reimagined through narratives that resonate on both a personal and universal level. Moments of joy, laughter and hope remind us of what it means to be alive. In this publication, humanity’s collective magnetism is revealed. It demonstrates the desire to tackle adversity, seek connections and forge friendships together.