ALLITERATI MAGAZINE
WANDERLUST
ISSUE 20
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Editor’s note Dear readers and writers, After a long process of marketing, submissions, editing and design we are delighted to introduce Alliterati Issue 20. This edition revolves around the theme of ‘Wanderlust’ or travel, intended as a platform for any adventures our contributors experienced over the summer months and as a riposte to the creeping autumn blues. You will find inside tales of mysterious Bolivian market stalls, failed quests to find oneself abroad and in many cases, a celebration of the esoteric and rewarding nature of world cultures. For this edition we received a stream of submissions from talented artists and writers that are new to the magazine. We wish to praise the work of newcomers Elizabeth Gibson, RL Price and Louise Adjoa Parker, among many others. At the same time, the A Team carousel has seen the arrival of Hannah Bullimore and Emily Owens for their first full experience of the manic Alliterati publication week. We are very happy to announce a high quality edition and thank them for their tireless efforts. We hope you enjoy reading this as much as we did ourselves. Best wishes, Adam (Chief Editor)
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The Team Art and Format Editors
Anna Skulczuk
Hazel Soper
Literature editors
Hannah Bullimore
Emily Owens
Adam Thompson 3
Table of Contents Iona Frances Brown: 32-34: Untitled
Louisa Adjoa Parker 6. She wants to dance at night 7. Land, real and imagined 8. Flying Home
Melissa Neal: 35. The Farsighted Man Callum Conway: 11. Nighttime Traveller
Jasmine Plumpton: 36. Backpacking for Bibliophiles Carol Hamilton: 14. Eastern Practices 15. Discoteca: El Toro 24. No Translation Needed
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R L Price: 16. Chingu
Molly Bythell: 10. Woman by the Oil and Salt 13. Woman Hiding 23. Woman Drying Under a Clothes Line Woman Sitting in a Tomato Bowl 28. Woman Standing on a Trolly Woman in a Garden 29. Woman Leaning on Potatoes
Kate Tattersfield: 12. Anew
Elizabeth Gibson: 37. Vacant 38. The solar eclipse of March 2015 through the eyes of an English Assistant 40. Yellow 41. An apple abroad Patricia Cunningham 26. The Witches’ Market 30. Lost in St Petersburg 5
Louisa Adjoa Parker She wants to dance at night as the sun goes down, a gold dress clinging to her rounded hips her skin blackened by the sun; she wants to dance to a different beat, dance till the sweat on her skin grows cold, dance till her limbs ache, dance to stories drummed out in beats, dance to the sounds of lovers this hot night, wrapped only in sheets, dance to the sound of crickets. She wants to dance under a different sky, bright beads round her throat, flowers in her hair, bare feet in the sand, until the sun comes up again.
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Land, real and imagined Yes, I am from here, really, but also from there. My feet connect me to this piece of earth which rolls away in green waves; this piece of earth inhabited by people who do not look like me. My skin tells the story of another place; an imagined country with dusty roads, hot nights, which I have yet to see. We are all leaning into the dark towards our ancestors, who lean towards us, with bent spines, trying to tell us where we are from, where we are going.
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Flying Home Did your mother sing softly in the night, her voice like a gentle forest breeze her breath like a feather stroking your cheek, did she sing you Igbo lullabies and pray Buckra wouldn’t hear? Did your mother tell you, child, that one day you’d sprout wings and fly back to the ancestors, over the sea like a migrating bird returning home? Did your mother sing softly in the night the heat from her tired body lulling you to sleep; did she sing of the ship sailing from the Bight of Bonny how she shivered and longed for cloth to cover her skin? Did she sing of the sickness, of the rattle of chains of the cold water that seeped into her bones of the people whose breath stopped in the night, or the ones who chose death over being a slave, whose bones were picked clean by the fishes, whose souls flew back home?
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Did your mother sing softly in the night, did her songs seep like water into your dreams? Did you dream of a land where the river fans out into the Atlantic sea, did she sing of the mangrove swamps, did she tell you sometimes she woke in this hut with its beaten earth floor, its roof of leaves, and forgot she had been stolen away? Did she sing of this land, over the sea, did you dream of it, child, in your dreams were you free? Did your mother sing softly in the night, her voice like a gentle forest breeze her breath like a feather stroking your cheek, did she sing you Igbo lullabies and pray Buckra wouldn’t hear? Did your mother tell you, child, that one day you’d sprout wings and fly back to the ancestors, over the sea like a migrating bird returning home?
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Molly Bythell Woman by the Oil and Salt
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Callum Conway Nighttime Traveller I have been everywhere – the underbelly of Berlin: In darkrooms with men in leather Who dance around poles under violet light With sweat dripping from their faces As they snort and smoke and drink into the night. I have seen the Aurora Borealis through the windows Of a glass igloo in Kakslauttanen, it is beautiful. I look for other places, too: Jukkasjärvi, Reykjavík, I keep the images in my mind – And go elsewhere. It’s easy. I’m good with key terms, I know what to search for. I walk through blogs like they are city streets, I flow through the veins of them as I scroll. I close my eyes and imagine the smell of the air, The way my boots would sound on the ground. TripAdvisor makes it feel like it was me watching Lion chase gazelle on a safari in the Zambezi Valley. I was the lover in that honeymoon suite in Austin, It was me wrapped in those Egyptian cotton sheets And my finger that a ring was pushed onto. I have been everywhere – I have seen it all, I lift my fingers, but never my feet, they stay Hanging two centimetres above the floor Unless I alter the height of my office chair To pass the time on a long night.
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Kate Tattersfield Anew Nordic light
on painted canvas Pinballs released surging forward, frantic searing through membrane moving onwards, headlong
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Molly Bythell
Woman Hiding
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Carol Hamilton Eastern Practices
Everything is saved at the last minute in my world --Isaac, Jesus, Emily Dickinson. I keep busy drying rose petals in browning pages of old books, copying, storing, documenting, imagining a great-granddaughter coming upon a letter tucked away somewhere. I am not Buddhist, and I have learned to un-idealize the practice from travel in its lands, as I must my own in mine. But the acceptance of ephemera, the idea, shared with me by friends of the persuasion and from witnessing its rituals by tribal peoples closer by, I want to learn it. I am insured against flood, wind, ice, fire, even theft, yet I want to scatter the ashes, dance about in the midst of disaster, gaily toss treasures in a frenzy of acceptance. Yesterday my radio said here we must now buy earthquake insurance. Is it a temptation or a step to salvation if instead I spend my money on a bottle of fine wine, on a gift of moments for us to share?
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Discoteca:
El Toro
Small ticket box entry, guarded, also only exit, gateway to a Bosch scene of scream and writhe, looked down upon from rings of balconies lined with ancient horsehair sofas, tinderbox temptation to the myriad hands of the dancing or shouting, hands holding ash-wormed cigarettes that whirled through air with abandon. Intended to simulate a bull ring, the place’s verisimilitude lay in the crowd hysteria and the stink of impending death. I was relayed off duty at 1 A.M., made a 30-minute struggle to exit, shivered and raged like el toro in Sevilla except there was no space in this arena anywhere for a bull to be given half a chance with el torero. Disco club in San Miguel de Allende, the high school girls’ sponsor gone home for a funeral, and I a designated chaperone. The on-duty hours had passed, itchy with premonition, like wool against skin in a sudden heatwave. My escape was not the triumphant exit of a bull just heaving at a dash out of the dark tunnel, horns dipped in blood, a lucky one, who unlike me, gave no thought to his fellows still on the roster for their moments under the eye of heaven, looking down, estimating the odds. 15
R L Price Chingu
I couldn’t decide between a hedgehog or a hamster. The fish were boring, the beetles freaked me out and the lizard might be too high maintenance. I didn’t have a clue how to look after the turtles, and all the guidance books were in Korean. The rabbit would need too much space when I was only living in one room. So it was a choice between the unusual option – the hedgehog – or the easier alternative with the hamster. I pointed out the fluffiest of the tiny grey hamsters to the shop assistant. It took some broken English, some phone-translated Korean and a lot of pointing and smiling, but eventually I was on the ferry home with my new hamster friend asleep in a plastic cage. I hadn’t intended to get a pet. I’d gone for one of my weekend visits to the city on the mainland – a chance to top up on vital supplies like tampons and peanut butter. I’d sometimes treat myself to a decent coffee or a burger, maybe a long sauna session in a bathhouse. On this occasion, I’d gone to one of the bars that I’d heard was popular with other English teachers – I had a wild fantasy that some friendly Americans would see me and tell me to pull up a stool, grab a beer and introduce myself. Instead I drank tasteless lager alone at a booth, while the barman watched a gaming tournament on a little portable TV. I was sitting and drinking, thinking about how I must have gone nearly two days without saying a word to anyone, except for my few fixed phrases for shopping. There were no other foreigners on my island, except for a handful of Cambodian internet brides spread out across the more distant farms. People stared at me. No
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one spoke much English, not even the other English teachers. My daily conversation was dictated by the Elementary school textbook - ‘hellohowareyou’ ‘finethankyouandyou’, ‘doyoulikepizza’, ‘yesilikepizza’. Admittedly, my Korean was no better - I was mute and illiterate, barely able to spell my own name in wobbly Hangul script. I was lonely. I found myself scrolling through the city’s English language Facebook groups on my phone looking for places to meet people. The local buy-and-sell page was full of cats in need of a ‘forever home’, usually because their ‘human mommy’ couldn’t be bothered to fill in the paperwork to transport them back to their home country. Then I thought of the small pets section on the top floor of the Homeplus department store. That could fit my budget and into my tiny, single-roomed house. I wouldn’t have to feel guilty about leaving it alone while I was at work. It would probably die by the end of my contract, so I wouldn’t even have to worry about transporting it home. This hadn’t been what I’d pictured – buying rodents just to have a bit of company. I’d sent off my South Korean teaching application with visions of living in Seoul, downing shots of soju in all-night street food tents with huge groups of my new multi-national friends. Weekend breaks to Tokyo, bank holidays in Bali, a trip to Thailand over New Year. I did a week’s intensive training with a hundred other twenty-somethings on a University campus on the mainland. But once the contracts were all signed, I found myself being driven further and further out of the city by my new vice-principal until we reached the ferry port. The crossing took twenty minutes, and Ms Kim didn’t say a word the whole time. The boat landed at a rocky little island with only two or three streets winding away from 17
the harbour – run-down restaurants in people’s front rooms, out-of-season guest houses. Racks of flattened squid drying out in the wind. The buildings were grey concrete, the mountains were dull brown and the snow was only half-melted. I was driven out to the elementary school, and taken to a small, tin-roofed bungalow around the back of the sports hall. It was no bigger than my teenage bedroom. I could reach into the fridge from the end of my single bed. I tried to start with the basics. Hana, one. Dul, two. Sett, three. Nett, four. In the first few weeks, I didn’t feel too lonely. I was too tired. Every minor task of the day had become a challenge – anything from setting the thermostat to working the washing machine took some degree of puzzle-solving and guesswork. My brain power was drained, and I slept through most of my free hours. Dasot – five. Yosot – six. Ilgot – seven. After a month or two, I started to really feel the difference. I was lonely. I would plan my lessons in silence, only able to pick out occasional nouns from the fast-flying office banter around me. My students would whisper and laugh behind my back – sometimes telling me things to my face that I couldn’t understand. I’d eat my lunch with the other teachers and sometimes got invited to staff dinners in local restaurants, only able to occasionally chime in with well-rehearsed set phrases. Igo moyeyo - what’s this? Mashisoyo – it’s tasty. Once the school day finished, I never saw anyone. I used to go whole evenings, sometimes entire weekends, without uttering a single word. But when I got home that night with the hamster, having a little animal in the room seemed to ease some of 18
that loneliness. It filled up the silence. It was nice to hear another living thing, running on his wheel or ripping up his paper bedding. Chingu – friend. The next day at work, I taught a lesson on pets to my fourth graders. ‘Do you have a pet?’ ‘Yes. I have a hamster. I like hamsters. Do you like hamsters? I came home from work and let him nibble on chunks of cucumber out of my hand. It felt better to talk to the hamster rather than just talking to myself all the time – ‘I’m thinking of making a stir-fry tonight, Chingu, what do you think? You can have some of the beansprouts and the carrot, but I don’t think you’d like the sauce much. Oh, and remind me, I need to buy more washing-up liquid after work tomorrow’. I bought him a plastic ball, and would let him roll around on the empty school grounds after hours. Some of the boys who would sneak into the playground to play football in the evenings laughed at us. I think it became a bit of gossip in the village – the foreign English teacher living in a shed with her pet rat. I’d sometimes meet people on my trips to the mainland, but it was never easy. Two Mormon guys approached me at a bus stop in the city once. I was chatting away to them, saying we should meet up for a coffee or go hiking some weekend. They politely told me that Mormons don’t drink coffee, and maybe they needed to be on a different bus. Another time, I signed up to paint a public mural after a friendly Korean woman approached me in a department store. She said she was from a group that promoted Korean-foreigner friendship, and they also offered free weekly language 19
classes and Tae Kwon Do lessons. When I got home and googled it, I found out it was a cult of some kind. The leader was wanted on rape charges in half the countries in Asia. I blocked the woman’s number and decided not to go. ‘Human interaction is too complicated’, I found myself saying to Chingu that night, as I cut him a slice of the apple I was eating – ‘I’m glad you’re not trying to sign me up for some freak religion’. The year went on. I bought a bike once the snow melted and started exploring the island. The mountains went from brown to vibrant green. I played games with the students, helped with the school vegetable patch, won gold in the Teacher’s race on Sports day. I could hold a few very simple conversations with my colleagues, and tried to make a good impression by bringing in banana bread I’d made in my rice cooker. The school holidays ushered in the tourist season and the beaches filled up – I went on organised tours around the mainland, leaving Chingu with a full water bottle and food dish for a few nights. It was nice to meet a few other English speakers, but after two or three nights it was a relief to come back home and enjoy our companionable quiet. I’d tell Chingu about the trip, feeding him segments of Jeju orange or East Coast squid through the bars of the cage. ‘You remind me of the Udo duck guy’ some Canadian girl told me while we were on a bus tour around the Demilitarised Zone. ‘Who’s the Udo Duck Guy?’ I asked. ‘He’s a bit of an urban myth now, but my friend met him in Seoul once. He got placed on this like tiny, tourist-day-trip rock way out to sea, and there were like no other English teachers there. So he buys a duck from the market, like an actual living 20
duck. He kept it in his yard, fed it meals, took for little walks, talked to it, it was like his best friend. Then, when his teaching contract finished, he killed the duck and ate it’. ‘That’s so…harsh’ ‘Well, any farmer he sold the duck to would have just eaten it anyway, you know? It was like a final act of respect to his little ducky friend’ I added her on Facebook when I got home, and suggested we should meet up again for the Harvest festival break. She read the message but didn’t respond. I started to wonder what I was going to do with Chingu when the year ended. The latest round of funding cuts meant my position wouldn’t be replaced at the end of the year, so I wouldn’t be able to pass him over to the next teacher. I thought about letting him run free into the woods, giving him his freedom after his year of service - but then I thought about the snakes and foxes. The first snowy days of the winter had started to come in too. I couldn’t believe myself when I started to research the transfer and quarantine process for small rodents. Pricing up how much it would cost to get a pet passport. I was half-aware this was a stupid length to go for a hamster – just a hamster, a hamster that cost less than a medium-size coffee. But I couldn’t help it. I didn’t want to say goodbye. One afternoon, I came home from work to find Chingu lying belly up in his own food bowl, barely breathing. I stayed up until three in the morning, watching over him and
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trying to force the spout of his water bottle into his tiny mouth. Finally the breathing stopped. What kind of funeral can you have for a hamster? They’re little temporary pets, only bones and fur. Did I really want to go out to the school vegetable patch at 3AM and dig a teeny-tiny teacup-sized grave? Was I supposed to light incense and scented candles, staying up for some kind of vigil when I had work in the morning? That said, he’d been my closest companion ever since I waved goodbye to my parents at Heathrow a year ago. Didn’t he deserve some kind of send-off? I scooped his body into an empty instant noodle cup and binned it. But as the lid came down, I said one final word: anyegaseyo. It means ‘goodbye’ - although the more literal translation is ‘go in peace’.
Molly Bythell Woman Drying Under a Clothes Line Woman Sitting in a Tomato Bowl 22
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Carol Hamilton No Translation Needed
"Rashn...libehn...hodehn"... My head...my heart...my stomach..." from CUTTING FOR STONE, Abraham Verghese He writes of Ethiopia, and I also was high in mountains, Peru at 13,000 ft. There the same hand gestures became laughable day after day after day. "My head, my back, my stomach." My Quechua translator Paulino taught me a little of his tongue, but his beautiful, dark face only smiled, for I knew the drill, could inform our Icelandic doctor the symptoms without intermediary Spanish. She, too, knew the familiar story, and she had a tally in her head, how many patients we could fly through in a long day, and though she spurned palliative care, there usually was little to be done but push our donated pain pills. She was impatient of my unneeded English explication. The hands danced in familiar patterns while the enormous loads toted on petite shoulders for eons, the parasites were there to stay. Occasional falls from rooftops or gorings by free-roaming bulls were the only pertinent changes in the stories. The fluttering hands, the creviced skin of faces pleated
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in pantomimed misery are archetypal. We, in our Westernized distresses, fine tune our tales of woe. There the caregiver, all too often, must only offer pills, and perhaps, despite the lack of remedy, learns to mutter, "I understand."
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Patricia Cunningham The Witches’ Market
I was shopping for foetuses and knew I had to be discerning. You could say I was ‘in the market’ for one but this wasn’t your average market stocked full of homemade jams;; this was the Witches Market and I was standing at 11,900 ft. (ASL) in La Paz, Bolivia’s largest city. Rows upon rows of wooden stalls laden with exotic and unidentifiable goods met my eyes. Amid the talismans, alpaca clothes, dried rats, frogs and insects, trays of herbs, owl feathers, amulets and ceramic figurines hung the dried llama foetuses. Like a gothic Diagon Alley, the cobbled streets of La Paz are awash with sorcerers and witch doctors. Fortune tellers jostle for space and currency amid the relentless bustle of traffic. Around La Paz’s infamous San Pedro prison shamans ply their trade at open fires, divining the future through melting tin, reading tarot cards and casting coca leaves. Want to cure a broken heart, cast a curse or attract a lover? At the Witches Market there is a tincture, potion or mystical practitioner who can help – for the right fee of course. La Paz, a fusion of old and new, is cloaked in gritty realism and reminiscent of some surrealist folly. It emerges gash-like from the earth, an immense bowl shaped valley into which a dusty sprawling city has been poured. A well-established hierarchy has evolved there where the lower neighbourhoods are populated by the affluent while the poor are forced up into the hilled shantytowns. Migrating continually upwards and excluded from the milder climate, they construct makeshift homes out ofof anything salvageable. Clinging precipitously to the elevated city limits these unregulated buildings periodically collapse, often killing or maiming their occupants, and yet they build, aspiring to live like those below. In this, as with all else in La Paz, there is a feeling of inversion, of something imperceptible being out of place. 26
Stopping to look at one of the stalls I noticed a woman surveying me closely, she was dressed in a black ankle length pleated skirt, thick woollen cloak and bowler hat which covered her long braided hair. Beneath her cloak I glimpsed a multi-coloured sling where she swaddled a baby from the biting cold. ‘Good Fortune’ she said pointing at the Llama foetus. An indigenous Aymearic custom, dried llama foetuses are buried beneath house foundations as an offering to the earth mother Pachamama, imbuing good fortune on its occupants. These traditions have, over time, melded with those of Bolivia’s colonialists and invaders resulting in the fascinating fusion of Catholicism and Mystic Aymarism apparent in the city’s streets today. Deciding against the purchase of a llama foetus as a ‘good fortune’ gift my friends might not appreciate I left the market empty handed, but the city remained long in my memory. Beguiling and disorientating to the senses, it burrows down deep inside you making it almost impossible to forget, willing you to return, but then maybe I too had been bewitched by La Paz and its mysterious inhabitants.
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Molly Bythell Woman Standing on a Trolly Woman in a Garden
Woman Leaning on Potatoes
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Patricia Cunningham Lost in St Petersburg
The snow was falling heavily and the cold was seeping through my bones. My hiking boots had sprung a leak and each step made a rhythmic squelching sound. The romance of getting lost had begun to wain when I began to lose all feeling in my toes. I had wandered St Petersburg’s snow-carpeted streets for what seemed an eternity hoping to see a familiar landmark. Taking out a street map seemed hazardous given the sub-zero temperatures and I was reluctant to add frostbitten fingers to my list of discomforts. There was nothing for it but to surrender myself to wandering the city’s winding streets, its glowing lamp lights reflected in the frozen River Neva, its white-powdered rooftops silhouetted against the bruised, blue-black skyline. St. Petersburg is a city of ghosts; time and space mingle in its half lit streets. Beneath the cobble stones lie the bones of thousands who fell where they toiled, constructing a shimmering mirage from desolate swamps. In St Petersburg the past rushes to meet you, it lies in the damp earth, beneath the crumbling bridges, it illuminates the gilded windows and golden turrets of the churches and courses through the veins of its mysterious occupants. Exquisitely entwined in the city’s fabric sit the fabulist constructions of the Church of the Spilled Blood, the Hermitage and the Peter and Paul Fortress, like ornate, gilded Faberge eggs wrapped in the sorrows and joys of its past. Losing all hope of finding my way, I navigated towards the warm lights that spilled out of a church with a golden, bulb shaped roof. The weak hue of a sickly mid-winter moon cast a grey pallor on a desolate graveyard. The flakes fell faster. I had walked too far to go back. Entering the gates I saw a small wooden booth. As I passed something within it moved. Peering closer I saw that it was swathed in furs. 30
‘Billet’ it said. ‘Sorry’ I said, taken aback. ‘Ticket, Tikhvin Cemetery’ it said. I moved closer just as a lamp light above my head spurted into life. The light cast a glow on a silver haired lady sitting bolt upright, immaculately dressed as if she might slip off to the Marinsky Theatre at any moment, a pearl necklace elegantly draped around her neck. ‘Of course, how much?’ The lady seemed to consider this, regarding me closely. In the inherent authority of her gaze I moved closer for inspection, drawing myself up to my full height. One shoe squelch placed me in front of her gaze. Raising her elegantly gloved hand she gestured for me to go through. I shuffled inside the gates and there, alone, beneath a full moon, I found the graves of Tchaikovsky and Dostoevsky and countless others. With only the softly falling snow around me and the stars overhead I paid my respects to those who lay there and was grateful for my good fortune, of becoming lost in St. Petersburg.
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Iona Frances Brown
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Melissa Neall The Farsighted Man In his pocket he found a match, which he lit swiftly against his grizzled chin. The man watched as the land stretched beyond the flame. He was surprised by the vastness; he had come far, yet his four senses imagined themselves in the heart of a dense woodland.
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Jasmine Plumpton
Backpacking for Bibliophiles I’ve always wanted to travel. But all I do instead is tread this black ink through landscapes of letters and try not to sink; clamber up lithic cliffs where jagged lines end, leaving lopsided ‘y’s like they’re mine to ascend. Snow-capped mountains are mild in quaint coffee shops, and south-facing front rooms, and busy bus stops. Admiring the adjectives I traverse the terrain, and scour the insides of a fellow fantasist’s brain, and head over handlebars with desire to stay, am transported to stars in the middle of day.
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Elizabeth Gibson Vacant The sea offers me a red shell: rich, organic, like lava. Is this enough for you? Enough to persuade you to give me another chance? Or two maroon shell halves still joined, the ghost of their creature still there, echoing in the cavern through which you could see the clouds and cliffs if I held it up to your eye? These are omens, I say, of good, of something being there, something vibrant, when it looks to all appearances like there is nothing. You say, but there is nothing. These are signs of what has been, what is lost. If the sea is telling us something, you say, it is that it will happen again and again. That I will never get it right. I should give up, and you should give up on me, and you should be the one to do it, to be a vessel, a ship, a shell, that fills and blooms red, heavy with life. Again I mention hermit crabs, critters that are happy in shells that are not theirs. Why can’t we catch a new little body, pull it out of the sea, nestle it between us? Again you sigh. I walk to the sea, wet with promise and pain, those equals. The breeze dances around me, whips my skirt. I am easy prey for the elements. I am light. I am empty. I look after you, already distant. I raise my hand of shells, arch it back – but I cannot throw.
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They say it will be something spectacular. Now the sky is the same grey it always is in Perpignan as I make the dawn walk through the maze of streets, while pigeons coo. Sometimes my students sweep past me in buses, faces full of laughter. What happens between then and when I teach them, how do they turn so lethargic? If I see them walking they are in a group, rarely speaking but still a little unit. I walk alone. There is only one of me. Do they ever ponder what my life is like? Maybe at fifteen or sixteen they still believe adults have their lives sorted, that there is a magical moment when you get it right. In class they talk of the eclipse. They never know about world events so this is good. They ask the teacher if they can look. She says
The solar eclipse of March 2015 through the eyes of an English Assistant
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And they look sad, but French kids don’t argue. They sit back down and get on with their work, and I get back on with checking their work and that is it, our moment of wanting the same thing is over. When we do get outside the sky is still grey, and they tell us it was only cloudy anyway, nothing to see. But I can tell by now they’ve lost interest and have moved on to the next great thing, the next thrilling project that at fifteen and sixteen is so very possible, and I am left to wander back home through the silent streets, in which nothing has changed. I am still twenty-one and have run out of projects, except for tomorrow’s lesson plans and my next trip into town to drink hot chocolate under grey skies.
no.
Yellow Break my life like eggshell. Watch me run dry. Wipe your flavescent hands on the white dress you donned to stroll around the market, where I came to escape you. My fragments glitter on the ground; tourists lament how painful it is to walk while the rest of the scene is so pretty. The stalls perch on a plaza round like a moon, which will henceforth be covered in tiny crater-like scars which show only in the balmy night, with the village silent and beautiful. I do love this place. In my clumps of runny yellowish nothingness I can gaze up at the Christmas lights, tiny neat baubles, and pretend that I am still whole, still have feathers tucked inside.
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An apple abroad Mandy asked me one night what questions you were asked at an Oxbridge interview, and I told her a question I'd heard tell of because I couldn't remember any of mine. It was: "Are you an apple or a banana?" I told her I was both, because apples hang on the tree in my garden but bananas get to travel the world. But that wasn’t true. I am no globe-trotting banana. I did grow wings for a brief span, went to Paris, the Lakes, Oxford and China. I cried in China, but settled. Then I just suddenly needed to be as my in
at home, be here. I realised this spring, I was particularly sad, that I could spend life quite happily dangling from a tree my garden. My family could watch me
grow and I could watch them, sitting and eating and laughing under me, picking me and making me into a pie or crumble, and seeing a new version of me grow again
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and again, and I would never have to leave them. I am an apple, and I will never be a banana. Bananas don't produce juice when you cut into them. Apples do. They weep. Now it is summer. I have three months here before starting my job in the very south of France. A beautiful, beautiful place. I simply have to go. And I remember the question was not, in fact, "Are you an apple or a banana?" It was: "Would you rather be an apple or a banana?" You can choose. I will enjoy three months as an apple, and then I will fly and land in the sunset fields while the snowy Pyrenees shine around me and there is music and colour, where peaches and tomatoes and olives and lavender and maybe apples grow.
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THE END
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