En Bloc Issue 1

en bloc

1

FICTION

POETRY

Ian Cowmeadow Dave Gerow Taneesha Datta Richard Risemberg Harry Kalvin Dora Valkanou

Matt Haw Michael Dreher Simona Nastac Matteo Scaburri Ned Green Charlie Boy

PHOTOGRAPHY

ART

Brandon Oleksy Clarissa Sofia Richard Battye Alexandra Perpick Ricardo Bouyett Christopher Lopez Taylor Strickland Emily Burnell Joseph Martinotti-Muncey

Matosan Nelson Caroline Boyer Ruby Cedar Issie Holmes Alexandra Zlatar Martina Scott Sasha Marshall Psychosurrealism

With special guests: Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize Winner Marylin Chin International Booker Prize Winner Lydia Davis and ‘King of Indie Animation’ Bill Plympton

2 Cover: @Psychosurrealism

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3 @permajet

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With special thanks to: Poppy Phelan Paul Mills Tyler Honey Rebecca Anforth Ra&Olly Ltd Greene & Heaton Ltd

En Bloc Issue 1 Digital Edition 2021 Published by En Bloc Publications Ltd Copyright © 2021 EN BLOC PUBLICATIONS LTD. All rights reserved.

Printed by Cambrian Printers, Aberystwyth.

No part of this magazine may be reproduced or distributed in any form nor by electronic or mechanical means, including information storage or retrieval systems, without permission of the copyright owner, excepting brief excerpts for use in review. www.enbloc.co.uk Bude, Cornwall.

ISSN: 2634-2308

5

A note from the editor It has become, in recent months, a matter of personal mania; that the entire constituent of the literary and artistic community, almost without exception and in no other facet of working life, have deigned seemingly unanimously to sign off their emails in exclusivity with a single, insular, torpid: ‘Best,’ It is arguably the worst.

Swine, I have filled thy trough.

Well, what a winter it was, yes luvvies? What rags! And hath the cold been any less the stranger how surely it would have done us in. How surely it nearly did! Well, luvvies, come; there is bosom enough for all in here.

It is a strange obligation – a letter from the editor. Mostly so in being one to which you aren’t especially obliged in the first place. Stranger yet the notion of being the editor at all. Even now some six months into wearing the badge I wonder on whose authority I do so. But there persists in spite of my selfappointment and self-appointed fraudulence a sense of gravitas beyond what gets written here; that what’s being written isn’t nearly so important as the fact it is. Contrived or otherwise: It’s baby’s first words. Valedictory address. Some declamation on the eve of battle. It is the thousands of writers, artists, poets and photographers that upon my declaring ‘We’re going to start a magazine’ shared in an idea greater than the sum of my dreaming. It is the pleasure we have had in the weeks upon weeks of submissions from every corner of a world you didn’t realise was quite so big and yet not so far away.

The letter de l’éditeur is at once something serious and something taking itself all too seriously. Or I am. But that a company limited by shares might be unlimited by so much more endures the act of pantomime.

And all this nauseating self-reference goes no way to exonerating me from the horse suit:

6

A note from the editor

This time last year my mother was fitting on the floor of the house of a man she had met buying alcohol at the petrol station near the last home she’d ever have. She was taken to hospital stroking out and died two months later bleeding from her insides. She was fifty-two years old.

My mother, and by extension, we - had never known money. In the years preceding her death she had been waiting on the settlement of her own parents estate, that her small portion might be enough to buy a van and drive away with her dog from men in petrol stations. The money went into her account on the morning of her death.

Whilst we had not known money, whilst my mother never would; we had for the most part lived in a way that precluded its necessity. We read yellowed books and jammed scratched Cat Stevens’ CDs into cheap plastic players. We watched Koyaanisqatsi a hundred times on VHS and painted hand-prints on splintered car-boot didgeridoos. And money was that weird thing that for some reason ordained how many times we would have stew in any given week.

When it came my way I didn’t know what to do with it. I gave what I could away to good causes. I gave what I couldn’t to bad ones.

In a conversation with the former; a charity set up following the loss of a friend*, it occurred for the first time that the long sequestered creative’s alternative to ‘Dude, we should open a bar’ had become a tangible reality, after years of idle fantasy.

We put a plaque in the ground and interred her ashes. We talked to the mud and swore at the sky. I didn’t think she was in either one.

But so far as she might be anywhere, so far as any of us might hope to be; perhaps between pages wouldn’t be so bad.

Samuel Leach Chief Editor

*thepearlexchange.org.uk

7

La robe de nuit d’Anne Caroline Boyer oil on canvas

8

á Agnafit

9

Taylor Strickland

Support System

Clarissa Sofia

10

Reading Lorca in Granada Let’s call this tavern La Casa Santiago or Los Molinos the actual escapes a tiled courtyard you’ve never graced where none I know have been where I don’t know the speech of these dark mouthed men who growl los pobres los pobres as scooter engines wail along to scuzzy radio flamenco the afternoon hangs like washing between tenement houses I pass another siesta sleepless reading of white clouds coasting over distant sierras as white clouds coast over distant sierras I wave flies from my vernacular wine they snarl filmy wings in foul congress try to drown themselves in the glass I watch the wind blow the olive & poplar & eucalyptus trees beyond reason rousing the bitten strays who come limping from their curbs & culverts to beg for scraps at the tables I think they might be you coming back from the afternoon of your sad peregrinations & I look to the door again.

Matt Haw

11

Teapots & Kettles

Emily Burnell

12

Baby Brownie Ian Cowmeadow

One day, when he is 61, Fin will have his eye caught by a tumble of things outside the house clearance shop. This is the way he has always been; Alice at the rabbit hole. And when presented with a pile of stuff, he will dive in and rummage about to see if anything curious turns up. The DVDs and the 1920s set of Walter Scott novels will be skimmed over, the small watercolour of Windermere will be examined and the Homer Simpson egg cup will make him smile enough to think he might buy it.

But all of these (and the cutlery, the postcards, the coffee pot and the costume jewellery) will be forgotten when he unearths the small camera case with its long strap. Dangling it, he will feel by its weight that the camera is still inside. Picking at the flakes of long-dried leatherette and catching the vague odour of mould, his memory will begin to stir. When he unpops the flap of the case, the aroma will rise like vapour and dissipate; the trace of something that will now have flown.

He will slide the camera out and hold it in his hand. A small box of black Bakelite with rounded edges. There is a shallow protrusion to the front where the porthole of the lens is set in a fluted band of plastic. Around the lens the words “Baby Brownie” have been embossed, and beneath this, a small zinc lever invites the index finger to fire the shutter. He will hesitate

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Ian Cowmeadow

before doing so. When he does, he will feel the engineered resistance before the click and the lever will return, ready to fire again. He will go to wind the knurled disc on top of the box as if to move the film on. But he will stop, tip the camera forward in his palm and look through the small red window where the frames are counted. There he will see the tip of a black arrow pointing to the number 6 in a circle. * Finlay and his sister Jody are trying to look as if they are swimming.

When the tide is receding on that part of the Norfolk coast, a nine-year old girl can walk nearly a mile towards Germany before the wavelets lap her knees. Little Finlay is sitting cross-legged in the shallows and Jody has to lie on her stomach and hold her face up. They appear head and shoulders above the water like two small busts, grinning in the sunshine.

Their father holds the little black box in his right hand, squints through the flip-up metal frame that is the viewfinder and slides the zinc lever with the index finger of his left hand. Of eternity, one-thirtieth of a second is taken and put in the box. * Fin will tell Jody something he remembers. They will be drinking gin and tonic at her kitchen table. Her huge, unkempt dog will be sprawled sideways, flaked-out on the slate flag floor. It will raise its head, more out of habit than expectation, every time one of them fumbles in the bowl of peanuts.

‘It was always there.’

‘Did Mum take it?’

‘Must’ve done. He’s in the back garden in that photo, isn’t he? It was tiny – I used to keep knocking it off when I did the dusting for her. You never did the dusting, did you?’

‘I painted the back room.’

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Baby Brownie

‘And we never heard the last.’

They will laugh at that. The dog will open one wet eye.

‘The frame never broke, though. Looked like it was made of matchsticks.

You know – chopped up and glued together like miniature parquet.’

‘Mum told me it was made by prisoners of war.’

‘Maybe. But it never broke.’

‘I once threw an egg off a cliff at Cromer.’

‘So?’ ‘It didn’t break. It bounced three times and it didn’t break.’

Jody will look at him as he prods the ice in his glass with his finger.

‘Liar.’ She will say. ‘Let me go and see if it’s in the shed with the stuff from Mum’s.’

Jody will scrape her chair as she rises. The dog will lift its bulk and amble after her. * Finlay is in the cab of his father’s lorry with the door open. It has been warmed like a greenhouse by the sunlight that has poured through the windscreen all morning. It is fumed with leather and petrol. He can’t reach the steering wheel.

‘Jody, give him a hand will you.’

She steps from the ground to the lattice footplate, from where she levers herself up to be level with her brother. He giggles as she places a hand in the small of his back and helps him to shuffle forward on the upholstery of the driver’s seat. Once his bottom reaches the front edge, he is able to lean forward and support himself by gripping the lower segment of the steering wheel with hands apart, as if driving.

‘That’s it.’

Jody climbs down to leave Finlay making engine noises. She stands by the front wheel, its arch framing her shoulders.

‘Look at me. And give us a smile, Jody.’

Their father holds the little black box in his right hand, squints through

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Ian Cowmeadow

the flip-up metal frame that is the viewfinder and slides the zinc lever with the index finger of his left hand. Of eternity, one-thirtieth of a second is taken and put in the box. * Jody will hand him a magnifying glass. They will have taken the little print out of the matchwood frame to see if there is anything written on the back. There won’t be. The dog will finish the food it has been given and drive its snout into the farthest recesses of its bowl, flicking out its tongue to make sure that nothing has been missed.

‘Is it the same?’

‘Looks like it. I knew I wasn’t imagining it. You must remember, Jo, it was in the cupboard under the stairs for ages in that flaky case with the strap.’

‘Don’t think I ever saw it. Mind you, I was never in and out of that cupboard the way you were.’

‘Spiders?’

‘And the smell of gas.’

‘There was all sorts in there.’

‘Mice?’

‘Probably. And a family doctor book with a section on married life.’

‘Maybe I should have gone in there.’

He will put the magnifying glass down and touch her lightly on the arm.

‘I’m sure it’s right. You can make out that fluting where the lens is. It’s certainly small enough.’

‘Well, I do remember – whenever we had to stay still for a photo – thinking he should get a bigger camera so he wouldn’t have to squint at us like that.

I just don’t remember seeing it in the house after he went.’

Fin will reach behind him to the back of the chair where he will have hung the camera in its case. He will lift the strap and lower the case onto the table. He will pop the flap and take out the little black box.

‘It’s a bit smelly.’

16

Baby Brownie

‘But it’s definitely the same sort, look. That’s definitely a Baby Brownie round his neck.’ * Finlay is in his sandals on a little mud patch that has formed from the crumbled bank of the river. It is like a miniature cove. The green water ripples near his feet and two drakes rise and fall waiting for more. Finlay throws a handful of crumbs with a clumsy, mistimed jerk of his arm. Most of the crumbs flutter on to the mud, but enough arc over the ducks’ heads to have them turning and scrabbling with their beaks.

‘Go down there and show him how, Jody. Gentle. Underarm, so they come up to you. He’s making them nervous.’

Jody steps onto the mud patch and takes her brother’s hand. She unfolds his fingers and pushes more crumbs into his palm before closing his soft fist up again. She tells him to watch as she swings her own arm, releasing a small cloud of crumbs at just the right moment. Other ducks appear from downriver, zoning in on the miniature cove. Finlay gets excited and copies his sister.

‘Give him some more bread, Jody. Get him to throw it on three. One, two…’

Their father holds the little black box in his right hand, squints through the flip-up metal frame that is the viewfinder and slides the zinc lever with the index finger of his left hand. Of eternity, one-thirtieth of a second is taken and put in the box. * The dog will look up at Fin as he puts his coat on and hoops the strap of the camera case over his head. Through deep eyes, it will plead with its very soul, tail swaying. Fin will reach out and run his hand over the knobbles of the animal’s skull.

‘We’ll walk, Fin. It’s only out by Marriott’s Lane.’

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Ian Cowmeadow

The dog will disengage its head from the man’s distracted scratching and trot into the hallway in search of its owner’s voice.

‘Do you think she’ll do it?’

‘Why not? Bridget loves this stuff.’

Fin will close the kitchen door behind him, squeeze past Jody bending over the dog in the hallway and step out into the air. Jody and the dog will follow.

As they walk, the camera giving a soft bump against his stomach with each step, Fin will stop himself from asking a question he used to ask all the time. He has not asked it for years and will not ask it now, because he knows the answer will never change. Those days. Did mum ever come with us? It would irritate Jody.

‘You know, Fin, even if it is the same one, Dad won’t be there. You do know that don’t you?’

Fin will feel annoyance and admiration for his sister. There will be the sense that she knows what he is thinking and that the question about mum was always really a question about Dad. ‘There might be a reflection. Something we could pick up with the magnifying glass. We could get Bridget to blow it up for us. That would be something.’

‘It’s not likely. Don’t get your hopes up.’

‘At the very least, it’ll be like looking through his eyes. Won’t it? I mean, it’ll be what he saw back then.’

‘Fin, even if it is the same one – and what are the chances of that? – it’s been knocking about under the stairs and finding its way, somehow, to the junk shop. God knows where it’s been. I really don’t think there’ll be anything on it.’

Fin will feel snookered by Jody’s logic.

He will see that she is right, but he will not let go.

‘It’s still in its case, though.’ *

18

Baby Brownie

Finlay and Jody are standing in front of an ice cream parlour window, an arc of fancy lettering behind them. Finlay holds a cone. Mr Whippy’s neat quiff has been licked into a shapeless stump and rivulets of melted ice cream trickle over Finlay’s fingers. Around his mouth is a glorious mess.

Jody has bitten the base off her cone and is sucking the remaining ice cream through. She asks their father for a tissue.

Once she has popped the last plug of soggy cone into her mouth, she wipes her fingers and her face. She goes to clean her brother up.

‘Hold on, Jody.’

Their father is laughing.

‘Here Finlay.’

He puts the tip of his finger into what’s left of his son’s cone and applies a dab of ice cream to the button of the boy’s nose. Finlay screws his face up.

‘Get in a bit closer, Jody’ Their father holds the little black box in his right hand, squints through the flip-up metal frame that is the viewfinder and slides the zinc lever with the index finger of his left hand. Of eternity, one-thirtieth of a second is taken and put in the box. * Fin will suggest they cut across Parson’s Meadow to get to Marriot’s Lane. Jody will say she doesn’t have the shoes for it. Fin will say it will give the dog a run. Jody will say it’s full of cow pats. Fin will say please, go on, I’m not round this way very often these days. Go on. For old times.

The dog will sense the meadows as soon as they start off in that direction.

It will tug its leash in jerky bursts of acceleration. As if it were late for an appointment.

On the meadow no cows will be grazing so they will set the dog free.

They will walk over to where a fallen tree has had its branches sawn away by the council, and sit on its torso surrounded by brittle twigs and sawdust.

‘Let’s have a look, then.’

Fin will hand Jody the camera case.

19

Ian Cowmeadow

‘How much do you remember, Jody?’

‘About this? Not much. It’s vaguely familiar, how tiny it is. Maybe that’s why Dad would keep using something like this. I mean, it’s no trouble, you could just about put it in a pocket and there’s nothing to adjust or anything.

Dad would have liked that, I think.’

‘Really?’

‘I suppose. I just feel he didn’t like complications. But I don’t know. I could be wrong.’

‘Where did he go, Jody?’

‘I don’t know, Fin. You know I’d tell you if I did.’

‘True enough.’

‘Mum didn’t know either. I asked her at the end there. I suppose you did too. I hope we didn’t badger her.’

‘She told me she didn’t know.’

‘She didn’t, Fin. Is this the thing to wind the film on?’

Fin will look to where Jody is feeling the knurled edge of the metal disc on top of the camera with her forefinger.

‘That’s it. It’s meant to be turned in the direction of the arrow there.’

‘Call the dog over, will you Fin.’ * Finlay takes another unsteady run at the orange ball. It is cheap and light and the wind across the park keeps rolling it a few inches this way and that.

As Finlay throws his whole leg at it, the ball moves again as if playing a game with him. He swipes the air and falls on his back, confused.

Jody runs over to her brother laughing loudly to head off his tears. She picks him up briskly, swings him around a couple of times until he has forgotten his humiliation and then asks him where the naughty ball has gone. He waddles over to it and picks it up to show her. She wags a finger at it.

‘Perhaps if he just puts his foot on it. It’s only going to keep blowing away.’

20

Baby Brownie

Jody persuades Finlay to put the ball on the floor and helps him to place his foot on it. His standing leg wobbles with the strain of keeping his balance, so she stands next to him with a hand on his back to stop him falling over again. Once he is steadied, Finlay folds his arms and their father bursts out laughing.

‘Jimmy Greaves!’

Their father holds the little black box in his right hand, squints through the flip-up metal frame that is the viewfinder and slides the zinc lever with the index finger of his left hand. Of eternity, one-thirtieth of a second is taken and put in the box. * The dog will nose at the camera in Jody’s hands, scenting it out to see if it is edible. Fin will get his fingers under its studded collar and give a firm tug to pull it away. The dog will reproach him with a sidelong glance.

‘Sit.’ The dog will sit.

‘Shall I?’ ‘I don’t know. It might break the film.’

‘Still wouldn’t lose it, though. It would be there in the camera. Bridget will be able to get it out for us.’

‘Yes, but.’

‘Do you want to do it?’

Jody will hand Fin the camera.

‘Me and the dog.’

‘I don’t know.’

Fin will turn the small black box over in his hands. He will start to turn the knurled disc while looking through the round window in the back. It will be initially loose, then stiff as it takes up the slack of the film roll inside. Jody will lean across and Fin will angle the box so that she can see the window.

‘Go on, then. Let’s get to number 7.’

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Ian Cowmeadow

Fin will pause.

‘He won’t mind, Fin. Honestly. It’s not like we’re carrying his ashes around or anything. Anyway, it more than likely isn’t the same one. Could be anyone’s pictures in there. Mr and Mrs Bloggs and their three children on holiday at Bognor.’

Fin will start to turn the disc.

‘And you don’t think they’d mind, would they, if we joined them?’

‘They’d be delighted.’ * The meadow is mobbed with wild flowers. Finlay and Jody are sitting at the base of one of the trees that line the edge. On the dry earth beside each of them is a small stash of picked daisies. Jody is going at it like a piece worker, piercing stems with her thumbnail and threading the flowers through so that a long chain is spooling into her lap. Finlay is watching her and getting frustrated. All of his daisies have been picked close to the head and when he does find one or two with a bit of stalk left, he can’t get the hang of making the holes. He is close to tears.

Jody takes her next flower and slowly shows her brother how she makes the slot in the stalk. She gives him a handful of daisies from her own stash.

‘Look, Finlay.’

Their father hunches down in front of them and hands his son a perfect buttercup.

‘Do you want to know a secret about Jody?’

Finlay takes the flower and looks intently at his sister as if she were suddenly unfamiliar. Jody smiles, thrusts her head toward Finlay and tilts it upwards. She takes her brother’s hand with the buttercup in it and, looking down her cheeks, guides it under her chin. The skin of her throat glows yellow.

‘Yellow,’ says Finlay.

Their father holds the little black box in his right hand, squints through the flip-up metal frame that is the viewfinder and slides the zinc lever with

22

Baby Brownie

the index finger of his left hand. Of eternity, one-thirtieth of a second is taken and put in the box. * Jody and the dog will be all set. Fin will flip the metal viewfinder up and check the window to see that the number 7 is in place. The dog will glop at a passing bee which will escape and have him pulling against Jody’s restraint in an effort to give chase.

‘Sit still, will you?’

The dog will sit still.

Fin will raise the little black box in his right hand. He will squint though the metal frame. With the index finger of his left hand, he will slide the zinc lever and feel its engineered resistance.

Jody will relax her face and look directly at the porthole of the lens.

Fin will cluck and the dog will look straight at him.

Of eternity, one-thirtieth of a second is taken and put in the box. * Jody’s friend Bridget will have a studio in a disused motor garage out by Marriot’s lane. She will appear in the double doors to greet them with a bowl for the thirsty dog in her hand. She will put the bowl on the ground and they will watch as it slaps its tongue against the water and soaks the dust around.

Bridget will walk them into the oversized shed where cars and small delivery vans were once operated on by local men in boiler suits. Fin will notice the long table covered in tins and staplers and old magazines and random crockery. Jody will stop to say how much she likes the print attached to an architect’s drawing table with masking tape. Bridget will open a door at the far end and usher them into the darkroom.

‘This is it, Bridget.’

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Ian Cowmeadow

She will take the case from Fin and unpop the flap.

‘Cute. Looks like a Baby Brownie.’

‘You think it’ll be OK?’ ‘You never know. They are quite tight these. You haven’t got into it at all, have you?’

‘Couldn’t work out how.’

‘Good. It’s this little bar underneath. Here, look. If we were to slide that, the whole lot would come apart in two sections. It’s such a nice little thing.’

Fin will be apprehensive. For a moment, he won’t know why. Then something will occur to him.

‘It’s like opening a Pharaoh’s tomb. I’m a bit nervous of it, Jody.’

‘Honestly, Fin. There’s no curse on it. Really, it’s fine.’

‘I don’t know. I’m not sure.’

‘Mrs Bloggs at Bognor, Fin. They won’t mind. Dad won’t mind.’

‘Just seems a bit disrespectful.’

Bridget will offer the camera back.

‘That’s OK. We can leave it. Do you want some tea?’

Fin will hesitate as Bridget holds the little black box out to him.

Jody will wait.

‘It’s up to you, Fin.’ He will know what she is thinking. That the real fear is that nothing will be there.

‘No. Go ahead, Bridget. And thanks.’ * He sat in the lee of a friable cliff, up beyond the tide line of crackle-dry weed and powdered shell. The light was bright and even, diffused from the sun through a filter of high, thin cloud. Between the sporadic squabbling of gulls, he could hear the children’s voices carrying across a broad stretch of sand.

He reached over to the raffia basket that contained the sandwiches, lotion and towels and lifted the camera case from on top of it. A rummage in the

24

Baby Brownie

basket produced a small oblong carton. Unpopping the sleek, faux-leather case, he pulled out a small black box camera and rested it in his lap while he opened one end of the carton and took out a roll of film.

On the base of the camera was a little bar which he slid forward, releasing the two moulded halves of the Bakelite casing from one another. The bottom half housed an empty metal spool which he jiggled from its slot so he could put it into the take-up side. Bending double to create an area of shade hard up against his stomach, he carefully took the sealing tape from the film roll and began to unravel it. When he had an inch or so free, he put the film in where the empty spool had been and slotted the loose end into the take-up, before sliding the two halves of the camera back together and locking them with the little bar.

He looked up and exhaled. It was an operation he had conducted in a state of tension. Always there was near panic that stray light would somehow get to the inner windings of the film and ruin it. A fear that he might collect memories not knowing they had already been erased.

With the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, he turned the knurled disc on top of the camera in the direction of the arrow. He felt slack turn to resistance and could feel the film moving from one spool to the other.

Tilting the small black box forward, he looked into the red window on the back and turned the disc until the number 1 appeared.

* In the pitch dark, Bridget will turn the knurled disc until she feels the tug of the film loosen as it comes free from the feeder spool. She will slide the little bar and separate the two halves of the Baby Brownie. She will shake the take-up spool loose and locate the end, where she will begin to separate the backing paper that carries the frame numbers from the film. She will select the spiral from a developing tank that she has already set to the right width. Carefully, she will use her blind fingers to guide the end of the film into the mouth of the spiral and, when she is sure it has taken, she will

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Ian Cowmeadow

ratchet the spiral so that the film curls into place, the backing paper falling away as it does so. The loaded spiral will be placed in its tank and the lid screwed back on.

Out in the studio, Jody will be sitting on a broken couch with the dog leaking slobber into her lap, while Fin will be picking up and examining bits of crockery from the long table. They will share the silence.

After seven minutes of agitation – rinsing – five minutes’ fix – further rinsing, Bridget will clack open the door to the darkroom. In one hand will be the wet spiral dripping onto the concrete floor. Jody will sit up, shifting the dog’s head. Fin will put a blue saucer back on the table and stare at Bridget.

Fin and Jody will follow Bridget to the open double doors of the studio.

The dog will flop from the couch, shake itself and jog after them.

At the doorway, Bridget will disengage the film from the spiral. It will flex out like a strip of wet kelp, and she will hold it up against the clear white light of the sky.

26

Freedom

27

Joseph Martinotti-Muncey

Sometimes memories never leave your bones

Alexandra Zlatar

28

Navi I’ve prepared a manifesto I expect an acknowledgement of the terms by Monday.

I can’t stop, sweet Navi; my car is blaring No doubt the town getting uppity discontent with its working boy, and his one cigarette too many.

This room you’ve taken to, I can’t abide.

It smells too much of grass stains, lily-pads and corduroy.

Show me again tomorrow when the window is foggy and the light stolen from a depth.

Shadows are unpleasant little creatures.

You could run your fingers through my hair Navi, and tell me I’m fickle and loose-lipped.

If I were to do as you ask, sweet boy, if I were to detail the contents of my Parisian ticks, I will have noticed too little, and you will have noticed too much.

And it shall be far too late to talk me over.

I am not a talker, my plum, and words are not my friend.

Unlike you Navi, I am a tinkerer and I am disappearing.

29

Charlie Boy

Buckets

Christopher Lopez

30

Mt Pleasant Ave.

31

Christopher Lopez

No turn on red

Christopher Lopez

32

Red Window

33

Christopher Lopez

Plympton’s Dogma En Bloc sits down with two-time Academy Award nominee and revered animator Bill Plympton The phone rings for the fourth time. Oh, no, Zoom is a computer program, I say. The voice on the other end chuckles between apologies and the line goes dead again. I am met at the screen of my laptop some moments later

by Bill and his assistant, who is fiddling with the mouse on his behalf, and wearing a smile that betrays that this is probably not the first such instance.

The experience is a human one, and, having served the day’s entirety beforehand pacing nervously about my living room, one to which I am grateful. I am here in my capacity as interviewer, but this is Bill Plympton. He’s done his time. What the hell does he need to know what a ‘Zoom’ is for?

What it really affirms is something sacred about what Bill does; he’s an analogue man, maybe one of the last of them, in a world made up of ones and zeros: The relic of a golden age that got stripped out for pixels and sold off for CGI. Bill’s

conviction to his craft - his own brand of Python-esque humour cum Lynchian surrealism, is not one from which he has made his millions (as he will no doubt let you know). What he has made is a body of work of his own volition, out of his love for the art and independent from the constraint of committee or a budget that isn’t his own. Matt Groening went so far as to call him God. In speaking to the man himself you realise with some degree of immediacy that he might be the only one in disagreement.

There’s a sincerity to your work and an exploration of ideas that aren’t typical of animation. Was this deliberate or something that came about organically?

Oh, I don’t know about that.

Sincerity gives off the impression of being someone much more high class. It started back in Oregon as a child; my father was a banker, and so you’d expect he’d be stuffy or something, but he

35

was a very funny man. We’d have parties and gatherings and he’d always have a crowd around him listening to his jokes. And I said, God, that’s what I want to do. I want to make people laugh.

Verbally I can’t do that. I’m not a comedian and I’m not much good with jokes. But I could draw. So I started very early on drawing comics and that sort of thing. I got into animation on the old Warner Brother’s stuff. MGM. It felt like the perfect venue for my humour. Except mine’s definitely not for kids.

Some of it’s outrageous. It’s a very dark humour. Sometimes it’s insulting. I call it off-colour.

Maybe that’s the reason it doesn’t get more mainstream attention.

You know, I’ve had offers to do children’s films and children’s TV shows and things like that, but that’s not what I want to do with my life. You know? Life is very precious. I really want to make the most of my life. And so I want to do work that gives me satisfaction.

Your works seem to lend themselves to the absurd they aren’t only a play on the macabre and unexpected but in the same breath an embrace of them. Do you feel yourself compelled by any particular philosophy?

I’ll do something different. Like Shuteye Hotel, where this pillow kills everyone, gags them in their sleep, you know? Everybody dies.

But that’s a horror, so you expect that sort of thing. It’s pretty rare I’ll do a really sad, tragic one.

Oh, and I’m very ignorant with computers as you just found out.

I prefer just pencil and paper, really simple, basic elements of drawing. To me there’s nothing more fun than to sit on my couch at home. I’ll put on an old movie on TV and I just start drawing and draw whatever I want.

And there is that freedom. The freedom to explore new ideas and humour and visuals, new drawing styles, new techniques.

That’s what really gets me excited about my films, in lieu of getting a lot of money. That’s what I prefer.

You know, I make a living. I have enough for a nice apartment in New York and a studio and that’s all I need to get me happy. So, other people, who want to get really big and rich and famous, more power to them. Good luck.

You’ve spoken before of maintaining the human touch, incorporating the imperfections. A lot of artists wrestle with the sacrifice of an idea as it exists in the mind that seems an inevitability of turning it into something real. Did you have to reconcile that before it became an aspect of your work?

Do you think your choice of I like my films to be uplifting in subject matter has helped or some way. At least to end that way. hindered your career?

I like a happy ending. Which you might not think watching some Doing something new each time of it, but I think it’s important is what excites me about it. I don’t for the funny stuff. Except for think people are closed off to it maybe one or two where the gag either; I see Tim Burton and he relies on it - Footsteps is a good handles the macabre in his own example - they all mostly finish way and that does pretty well.

You just need that output. Get up alright. The guy gets the girl, Though I could never do, say, it out. Whatever form it takes. people fall in love, good prevails. a Pixar film. It’s not me. I can’t I started out professionally as a Everybody’s happy. Occasionally compete financially for one. political cartoonist. So naturally

36

my films came to have the same pen-and-ink sort of style.

By the time I was doing my own animations it just felt natural. I can do a frame that way in twenty seconds. It’s fast. It looks good on the screen. It has that handmade quality to it. The imperfections that’s what separates it as art.

I have no straight lines in my films. Right? I don’t want straight lines in my films. If I see a straight line, I try to get rid of it. I don’t want perfect circles. I like to see something that has that human feel. And like you say, it includes mistakes. Oftentimes I will leave the mistakes in there because it feels like it’s a piece of art you see in a museum.

What do you feel like creating is to you on a fundamental level?

is. It’s just when you’re creating something that gives you that satisfaction, when you look at it and say, wow, that’s nice. That’s a nice hand. I drew that. That’s an interesting face I created. And when you have that it’s not work.

It just feels like playtime. So I feel like I’ve been playing all day long and that’s something I never want to lose.

Is critical success a compromise of commercial success?

Ideally you hope they’re going to be one and the same. The dream would be to make a film that’s new, that really has something different to say, and see something like that do well as a movie or

You know, that’s a really great question. Most days I get up at five in the morning, and sometimes I work until nine at night, and you’d think, wow, you must really be tired. You’re drawing all day long, your hand is always moving, your brain is getting fried. But you know, I feel... I don’t know what the word is. A real sense of accomplishment; especially if the drawings are right.

I feel elated. I feel refreshed. I feel like I can go another five hours and I don’t know why that

37

on the television. Populist is a bad word here in America but I really think I am one. Look at Frank Capra or even Tarantino.

They appeal to popular tastes, but it was something very original.

They had success with something original.

I have a hard time in England.

France, Spain, Germany all do great. England seems a hard one to break into, which I think is strange because Terry Gilliam is a good buddy of mine, we have the same sense of humour. Maybe it’s a matter of exposure. But the distributors over there don’t seem to want to touch it.

We’re supposed to be a literary magazine, so I’ve got to ask it.

What are your favourite books?

How have they influenced your work?

I read a lot. I’m usually reading two or three different books.

One of my favourites is ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’.

That’s pretty wild. I might have read that 4 or 5 times. That one influenced me. In fact, I did a graphic novel kinda similar to it that we’re negotiating a book deal for at the moment.

But I should tell you: My vocabulary is about twenty words. You’ll see in my films that dialogue is a rare thing. The humour gets lost in translation, so I usually try to keep it universal.

I’m not great with dialogue. I try to convey it all visually.

Last of all, having spent a lifetime creating and exploring and experimenting; what would you impart above all else to someone wanting to do the same?

I’m really glad you asked that.

I wanted to add that. I’ve got something called ‘Plympton’s Dogma’. They’re my three rules for success. As if I should be talking, right? I’m not such a big success, but these are my rules:

Number one is keep your film short. If it’s a short film keep it like five minutes long. Otherwise people are going to fall asleep, people aren’t prepared for it. If it’s a feature-length film don’t make it some three hour extravaganza.

It’ll take years to make and gets incredibly expensive. Keep it about an hour, an hour and a half. You can tell a story in thirty seconds - some of the best ones are. If you stick to the principles of story telling and know what you want to create you can do it in no time at all and make something really fantastic.

The next one is do it cheap.

Don’t use big name voices or music from the Beatles, for example. Otherwise anything you make will be recouping that unnecessary spending. I do alright not using computers as well. Those are very expensive.

And the third is keep it funny.

Especially if you’re animating.

I don’t know why that is but even if you’re doing something serious people watch animation expecting to laugh at some point.

There are loads of really great animations that aren’t funny, but if you’re trying to sell it, get seen all over the world, that’s what tends to do it.

So I’ve been able to survive the last 30 years or 40 years, something like that, making my

38

films. And over my career, I’ve done eight animated features, all hand drawn by me. Every drawing, no one ever added any animation. I’ve done about 60 or 70 short films and I’ve won plenty of awards. I just consider myself lucky that when I was a kid I saw bugs bunny on TV, and said, that’s what I want to do here. To have made a living doing what I always wanted to do as a kid.

Necessary watching 1. Your Face 2. Footprints 3. Idiots and Angels

(1987) (2014)

(2008) 4. 25 Ways to Quit Smoking (1989) 5. Guard Dog (2004) 6. The Tune (1992) 7. Santa: The Fascist Years (2009) 8. Summer Bummer (2011) www.plymptoons.com

Eleanor’s Party Dave Gerow

The needle grazes the record, the opening lyric fills the room like a cloud of perfume – This love wants to travel to your heart – and you try to believe that your pulse is quickening at the richness of Sam Cooke’s voice rather than the fact that Richie Evans is in your bedroom for the first time since grade school, his backpack casually resting at the foot of your full-length mirror, his white khakis in communion with the Eiffel Tower pillowcase where you’ll lay your head tonight and try not to think of him until you inevitably surrender and think only of him – Over mountains, over valleys, over streams love will climb – despite having spent the entire schoolday telling yourself you only invited him (and, by extension, Jean) so he could hear your portable RCA Victor, a machine that’s played practically every song by Smokey Robinson, the Shirelles, the Isley Brothers, Mary Wells and of course the incomparable Sam Cooke (all banned in Richie’s house), and which you wish could form the basis of your whole public identity, cancelling out the horror-show features that are on mocking display in the mirror – your zits, your wet-spaghetti hair, the belly that not even the most carefully selected Bobby Brooks sweater can disguise – all of which have conspired to define you since the day you entered high school and a poisonous haze of one-size-fits-all hipness descended on everyone you grew up with, not least Richie, the tall young man with the soft

39

Dave Gerow

white hand that’s being absent-mindedly caressed by Jean, whose clinging blouse doesn’t betray a single tummy fold as she sits on your bed, and whose Jackie-O bob and Seventeen breeziness make her such a perfect match for Richie that even your Latin teacher congratulated them yesterday on their three-month anniversary, a remarkable endorsement for any teenage couple, whose relationships are typically dismissed by adults as puppy love, the kind that’s only celebrated in sentimental songs like the one your RCA Victor is piping out – If there are two people love wants to combine, nothing can keep them apart – the new Sam Cooke B-side, which won’t be released until midnight but is receiving an afterschool mini-premiere right here in your bedroom, a most unWyoming event made possible because your dad works for KGTL and brought the ’45 home from the studio this morning, meaning you could extend your well-rehearsed super-casual invitation to Richie (and Jean) during homeroom knowing full well his father forbids colored music in his house (which is very Wyoming), leaving him unlikely to refuse any invitation – especially an emphatically platonic one from a non-threatening childhood playmate – to hear the new Sam Cooke single, “Another Saturday Night”, which you’ve all agreed to build up to by first playing the B-side, a sweet but, in Richie/Jean’s infallibly unanimous opinion, underwhelming song that you silently wish had affected him like it affected you as you flip the record, making sure you “place the needle gently”, as your dad requested this morning with all the nonchalance he could muster, irritating you since you recognized his softness as tacit acknowledgement that it’s a special day because you’re inviting people over, which also prompted Mom to remind you twice over breakfast that “there’s lemonade in the fridge to offer your friends” (your throat swelled at the forced indifference with which she pronounced that final word), a treat Richie and Jean refused outright when you all stepped into the empty house, underscoring their intention to stay only for the length of two songs, which is a disappointment of course, but one that melts away, along with all the anxiety that’s led up to this event, when the needle touches down on the A-side and the neatest drumbeat you’ve ever heard bursts from the orange speaker, then Sam Cooke’s miraculous voice takes center stage – Another Saturday night and I ain’t got nobody – oozing cool and

40

Eleanor’s Party

sophistication, working an irresistible catharsis on you as Richie breaks into an unselfconscious grin and even gorgeous-but-vacant Jean starts snapping her fingers, the red gloss on her nails flashing in the light of your Cinderella lamp, her slender legs automatically uncrossing so she can tap out the beat on your carpet, and there’s no denying that everyone’s having a terrific time right here on your bed, maybe the first of many – If I could meet ’em I could get ’em, but as yet I haven’t met ’em – since your dad has access to all the new singles Richie could want, although it’s hard to imagine anything as gloriously freeing as this song, which has you fighting the urge to get up and dance like you do when you’re alone with a sheet thrown over the long mirror, the way you surely will tonight when you’re reliving the moment Richie Evans had a transportive experience in your room, the room of a girl he’s known since kindergarten but might finally see for what she is, a hip chick with great taste – Another fella told me he had a sister who looked just fine – and an RCA Victor that really rips – Instead of being my deliverance – and a kind heart – she had a strange resemblance to a cat named Frankenstein – but then a not-quite-furtive look passes between Richie and Jean, and he falls sideways and buries his face in your Eiffel Tower, convulsing and snorting, while Jean shifts uncomfortably and half-smiles at you, her dumb Audrey Hepburn eyes full of apologetic warmth, and as you dodge her gaze, you chance upon your reflection in the mirror and recognize, for the first time, the precise shape of your head: a rectangle, just like Frankenstein’s, a similarity that’s obviously not been lost on Richie and Jean and who knows how many other kids – I’m gonna have to blow this town – who’ll never regard you as the girl with the portable stereo and the new ’45s and the available lemonade, but as that rectangle-headed chick who bears a strange resemblance to a cat named Frankenstein, but now isn’t the moment to examine the wound, so as the indifferent needle glides home to rest and Richie sits back up and regains himself, you feign an oblivious smile, which the mirror reveals to be utterly gruesome, and say, “One more time?”

41

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So Cracked A Crinkled Dilly When reem’d I over hillock ‘long a gusting stream So cracked a crinkled dilly ‘neath a seep of sheet As the tingle pound of bells from dainty village far Did ripple through the folds of fern and celandine, The lazy bulge lethargic of shine sun would teem With gilded sparks as fays, the chuckle woollen bleat Of lambs and calves on spindles and the trundle car That on forgotten stream road glides, the augustine Old Steeple steep would seem to drip as honeyed gaze As sharp as crabs to signify the sleeping days Beneath the aching bower of the torpid pine Where ‘swathed of love was I when yours and you were mine.

When bold toes prodded clasps of stone beside the brine So cracked a crinkled dilly ‘neath a seep of sheet And silver twigs of sea as cold as malice would Pour writhes of fishes glinting over these two feet, The grand old seaside houses boarded ghosts benign Where swarm warm shades to revel, frolic, and to eat Their fleshy mem’ries wash’d down with sour wormwood, Ne’er seeing through the smog spray lace veil that their mete ‘Twixt living seas and dying oakboards is the line Of cobalt haddock, kelp drying as greying vine Now, as I lie here (spake the greying vine of man) I see that I will soon be of them, if I can.

When garish promiscuous lights shatter’d the black So cracked a crinkled dilly ‘neath a seep of sheet And prattled of the joyous terrors to be found In limbs lithe, oozes of thighs wrapp’d in sleek leather, There would I as a cock’rel strut my lakelike tack And twist and coil as cauldron smog to beat the beat Of jouncing joisted joyous jazz, the scented pound;

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And, pursed as puckers, find I sparkling dew pleasure In stains as swirls upon a river skipp’d by glum Mosquito, forge myself a drunken hop’o’my’thumb To whiskey thrash and dash of rum and plunge of gin Now, as to purple death I sink, yet I begin.

When of the lapping Lethe I supped as turpentine So cracked a crinkled dilly ‘neath a seep of sheet To guzzle of her sleepy whorls against the tide, I cracked a shunt of minnow ‘twixt these sharpen’d teeth And lapped its brindled scales and sucked it’s oil like wine; When then nepenthe icen crashed as solid sleet I found my eyes and fingers as rock ossified: I claw’d the amps of dirt that lay I underneath To find, in my resolve to sleep within the manse Of blacken’d parlours lost to time, I danc’d the dance Of devils dew-draped, crack’d for marrow smear’d of grease That sooty bulg’d to signify bitter decease.

So now lie I here cold, alone, ‘neath stretching yew So cracked a crinkled dilly ‘neath a seep of sheet With rooks my pastor, crows my priest, my final rite A wither worm that tangles from a dither beak, My soles by blisters pocked as though the Wand’ring Jew Were I, a traipser of the mire, the brush, the peat, Condemn’d to drift will’o’the’wisp a shimmer sprite Who as Sisyphus ne’er will conquer aching peak.

Yet, now you take my clammy hand and bid me sleep: So shall I drift upon wide oceans ‘neath this seep Of sheet that barely bears my weight on laps of wave: So hold my hand and swear I will be brave.

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Michael Dreher

Biking in Copenhagen is not for the feint hearted

Alexandra Perpick

46

Nyhavn

47

Alexandra Perpick

Højt over byen

Alexandra Perpick

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Små kasser

Alexandra Perpick

49

Waiting Taneesha Datta dress /drɛs/ n. Divya stands in front of the mirror. The dress is tailored in triangular arcs at her shoulders, cornflower crepe cut to frame pale flesh and collarbone. For seven months it sat in her cupboard, untouched. Guilt has persuaded her to pull it out and try it on. Puffed sleeves and slitted skirt and flowery print. Too fancy for lectures, too casual for formals. The kind of thing, Divya muses, that you only have occasion to wear once or twice a year, by which time it’s lain abandoned for so long that you’ve forgotten that you own it at all. schedule /ˈskɛdjuːl/ v. Finals are coming. Divya’s flatmates have been flitting anxiously from library to library to kitchen to bedroom to library to class.

Divya makes and then remakes study schedules. Practical Criticism and Critical Practice, Tragedy, Postcolonial and Related Literatures, Material Renaissance.

She’s not studying as much as her neighbours. Then again, one never does. It’s a comfort to schedule, at least. shopping /ˈʃɒpɪŋ/ n. She bought the dress with her sister, Steph. Steph bought a dress, too. It was a large, airy retail outlet, the kind with six racks and creamy sofas and white floors and unfinished ceilings. The kind of shop where dresses are named after girls (Loraine, Charlotte, Betty), or after characters out of Shakespeare (Othello, Hamlet, Romeo), or both (Juliet, Jessica, Adriana). Steph picked out the kind of thing only she’d have the courage to wear — a short, slim-fitting black dress with a plunging neckline. A neckline that converged into

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Waiting

three flimsy ties at the waist. Ruffle-edged sleeves and slightly puffed shoulders and a sheer back bodice. Georgette fabric dotted with white and red and yellow flowers. It was beautiful. study /ˈstʌd.i/ v. Deconstruction is a suprahistorical criticism that pretends to speak from a position free of ideology – that is, from an absolute point of view. Deconstruction is a suprahistorical criti-cism that pretends to speak from a position free of ideology. Deconstruction is a suprahistorical cri-ticism that pretends. Divya has been in the library for six hours. question /ˈkwɛstʃ(ə)n/ n. Divya goes to her last lecture, a revision lecture scheduled to cover old material. As she listens to the professor, who is gifted with tufts of greying hair and an opulent moustache, she is struck by a sneaking suspicion that she doesn’t understand Chaucer’s intent quite so well as everybody else does. She wonders, privately, whether she has chosen to study the wrong degree. The professor completes his lecture. If you have any questions, he says, now is the time to ask them. Divya has questions. Scores of them. Not the kind of questions she can ask in a full auditorium, though.

And anyhow, she doesn’t like the way her voice sounds, so weak and reedy, when it breaks through a surrounding silence. money /ˈmʌni/ n. Even in the shop, Divya had her doubts over the dress.

Perhaps she wouldn’t have bought it had Stephanie not been there, or had it not been on sale. Forty percent off. It was still dreadfully expensive. She wouldn’t have been able to afford it had it not been Christmastime, with cash-filled envelopes trickling in from her kinder relatives. Over a hundred and twenty pounds. It’s okay, Divya tries to tell herself. There’s still time to wear it. Over one hundred and twenty pounds, the price of an outing with Steph, the price of Steph smiling and saying, you look lovely, you look great, you look perfect. One hundred and twenty pounds, the price of a parting. tourist /ˈtʊərɪst/ n. Divya walks back towards her room, and passes the famous college willow, where knots of German and American and Chinese tourists are listening to tour guides with heads cocked to the side, gazing, chattering, posing, holding up their cameras, capturing untranslatable shade

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of green in pixels. To Divya, after three years of daily commutes, the tree has lost its allure. banana /bəˈnɑːnə/ n. Divya has developed a Pavlovian response to the sound of her email notifications. The outcome of her fellowship application arrives between Richards and Baudelaire. Dear Divya, After a thorough review of your application, I am sorry to inform you that we are unable — Divya deletes the email without reading the rest. Betraying no sign of disappointment, she heads off to the kitchen she shares with her flatmates. The glazed fruit bowl is filled to its brim; faded apples streaked with yellow sit atop a forlorn bundle of bananas. The bananas bend inwards. Divya can tell, as she eyes them, that their insides are beginning to rot. She takes one and bites into it. Waste not, want not, as her mother would say. probability /prɒbəˈbɪlɪti/ n. Divya is ninety-nine percent sure that Steph wore her dress at least once. She had one month and eleven days between the outing and the diagnosis. And then just under another three months after the diagnosis. Yes, Steph must have worn it. Perhaps the very next day. messy /ˈmɛsi/ adj. Divya comes back to her room from her lecture and leaves her coat slung across her chair. The desk is alright, because there is some semblance of order to its brand of messiness. The chair, however, is home to a towel, jeans, a dining-hall card, a pair of birthday cards, crumpled wrapping paper, a stack of books, a pale bottle of nail polish, an empty pencil-case, a grimy laptop skin. And now the coat. She doesn’t bother to clear up, because she can always study on the bed. She will wait until the pile overflows and spills onto the floor. And then she will wait some more. examination /ɛɡˌzamɪˈneɪʃ(ə)n/ n. Write about the materiality of the body and/or the soul. How are material things used to think about the relation between transience and permanence? What does postcolonial writing tell us about death? Divya does not want to think about any of these things. The questions, she feels, are insensitive. And irrelevant. What does real life tell us about death?

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party /ˈpɑːti/ n. Celebratory end-of-exams almost-end-of-term nightbefore-graduation party across the hall. Divya talks to a boy she knows from Tragedy lectures. Slightly intoxicated, he tells her that she’s different. That he likes the way she thinks. Divya sort of likes the way she thinks, too, but she doesn’t say that aloud. The boy seems somewhat annoyed when he doesn’t receive a compliment in return. Soon he leaves to go speak to somebody else. escape /ɪˈskeɪp/ v. Steph’s boyfriend — ex-boyfriend — has moved out of their old flat. The news comes as a shock to Divya. It feels as though another aspect of Steph’s existence has been expunged. The rooms she decorated with such care are, for all intents and purposes, gone, every trace of her presence extirpated. Divya wonders whether the ex-boyfriend has filled in the hole that Steph drilled into the guest-room wall, the hole that held up a screw that held up a painting of some non-descript forest. She tries to imagine the kitchen without its stools and brass utensils and crockery lying haphazardly across the counter, but she can’t. She still hasn’t worn the dress. She feels guilty, but whether it’s because of the dress or the move or the exams or something else entirely, she cannot say. friendship /ˈfrɛn(d)ʃɪp/ n. Jen, one of Divya’s friends from school, calls to see how she’s doing, to ask how her exams went, to congratulate her on graduating, even though she’s graduating in a few days herself. Jen’s boyfriend has broken up with her, but oh well, she says through the receiver, that’s life. Jen starts talking about school, about their old friends and old classes and old habits and old conversations. Do you remember, she asks, do you remember. Divya doesn’t remember, but she says she does, she does, she does. She doesn’t feel old enough to reminisce. Then again, it seems as though she spends all her time reminiscing. Either reminiscing or trying to avoid reminiscing. sunset /ˈsʌnsɛt/ n. Divya is waiting at the train station, waiting, waiting, waiting. She examines the last traces of sunset. Hazy brushes of lavender light blend with sterile contours of train station. Steph would’ve rolled her eyes.

If you keep staring at the sky, she would’ve said, you’ll miss the train. Divya berates herself. What a grindingly unsubtle metaphor. No, Steph would’ve sat on her suitcase and complained about the cold.

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Matosan Nelson

54 Forest

Shadowless Shadow The Great Matriarch says: There is a dog who barks at his own shadow, which is not there, for in mid-day sun, there is no shadow.

Notice that if I give him a dumpling or a chew-toy, he stops barking, but he does not stop when he sees his shadowless shadow. He barks with warning, with alarm.

He barks louder and louder, snapping his jaws, swallowing his own sputum, on his haunches, ready to pounce.

He is afraid of that which is not there. Like you, Mei Ling, when you wake up, gasping for breath, thinking you might die, that ICE agents will come with a choke-chain.

Poor dear, he wants to protect us from the unseen, the unexpected, the unknowable. This is very bad luck in the neighborhood, to constantly hear the harbinger of doom.

Should we, then, euthanize him, put him out of his misery? To prophesize destruction is to invite bad omens, to stare into the abyss.

Or should we calm him, caress him, give him shelter?

Let’s call him by his birth name and take away his power. Let’s shout, “Hashtag, No Collusion, Gunboat, Death Star, Apocalypse, Mara, Diabolus, Beelzebub!”

Let’s call him, “The one who understands vacuity.”

Let’s not fear him, but love him, offer him the pink leash, for he is your dog and he is mine.

Marylin Chin

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Towering Trio

Brandon Oleksy

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Brandon Oleksy

Flowers a week after mother’s day

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Untitled

Ruby Cedar

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Ta-Dah!

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Ruby Cedar

A Grammar of Dreams Dora Valkanou

I blame it all on Wittgenstein.

I am not too hot on philosophy, but I was given this book by the man I love who does not love me back and I leafed through it, mostly out of curiosity.

Plus I had nothing better to do. This is probably what triggered the dream: Death is not an event in life.

A self-evident truth, if ever you saw one.

I also blame it on my brother, who has the sensitivity of a double-horned rhinoceros. We were all sitting around the Christmas table and, instead of the usual small talk, he said he had just gone and had our mother exhumed. In this godforsaken country we are all entitled to our own piece of dirt for up to five years. After that we must make room for the new dead. There are so many dead we don’t know what to do with them. Most people take the bones of their loved ones and place them in what is called the ossuary, together with all the other bones that have nowhere else to go. As it happens, we own a family grave in this village at the end of the world where no one ever goes, so Mum would avoid the indignity of disintegrating in the company of strangers. The little man in charge of unearthing the dead dug up Mum’s bones, wrapped them in an old sheet and placed them near the toilet in the shed allocated for that purpose. Another man, this one responsible for disinfecting the bones,

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was on his annual leave and would not return to work until after the holidays.

Mum would have to spend her Christmas by the toilet, wrapped in an old sheet. My brother said he would sue their arse off, but that is just talk. He was Mum’s favourite, you see, and misses her awfully.

I sleep like a baby at nights and have lots of dreams, probably because of the pills, but they are damn good dreams. I write them all down and send them to the man I love who does not love me back and I keep a diary with all the dreams for future reference, in case I need to see a shrink again. I go to bed every night trembling with joy and I can’t stop my feet from doing a little dance under the covers before I fall asleep. Dreaming is a second life to me, much better than the first one. A postscript by an affectionate God who realized he did not give me enough the first time and came back to complete the task in regular nightly instalments. I know I am nothing spectacular in reality but I don’t care. In my dreams I am this amazing person. Others have nightmares. I don’t. In my dreams I am usually a trapeze artiste walking the tight rope at an incredible height. At the end of the rope I take a bow and a bunch of little children with rosy cheeks cheer me to high heaven. Can it get better than that, I wonder.

In the Wittgenstein dream I was an English teacher, like in the old days.

The lesson was taking place in the living room of the family home, which was preserved in all its past splendour and glory. I was tutoring a group of about five or six students and I was very pleased about it because I would make some good money. I am ashamed of needing money but at least I always try to give high quality lessons. I learned this from good old professor Cernic, who used to teach a course in existentialism, when I was in College back in the States. He was completely bald with pointy ears and had this vibrant teaching style, running up and down the aisle between the students, screaming: life is a doughnut and all we get is the hole in the middle. That was existentialism, you see.

In the dream, I was supposed to be teaching indirect speech. That is not the easiest thing in the world, but I know it well and have taught it a million times. I started with an exercise from the book but the students were unable to do it.

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‘Guys, just give me a minute,’ I said. ‘I will find the right exercise for you in no time.’ I was calm and relaxed, because I knew this was a dream. If I did not find an exercise in the grammar book, I would make one up on the spot. In real life, I would have collapsed under the stress, which is why I usually prop myself up with hundreds of bottles of wine.

Just then, a new student arrived, one of those stern, unrelenting women who terrorize the dreams of teachers. My brother is certainly to blame for the appearance of the woman too, because at the Christmas table, after revealing the horrors of the cemetery, he talked to some extent about a woman who had showed up at the meeting of the Board of Directors at an obscure little charity where he is presiding officer - the Macedonian Affiliation of Educators of Northern Greece or something equally trivial. The woman was under the assumption the charity was a big thing and she was very demanding.

‘I shall require you to fax me the minutes of the meeting as soon as possible,’ she said to my brother acidly.

My brother is a man with no time to waste on bullshit. I would have sent the goddamn minutes, rather than go into a confrontation. The man I love who does not love me back has tried many times to tell me that I am strong enough to deal with the events of life as they come. They are mere events, he says to me, and he strokes my face where I don’t like it, the beginning of my jaw bone under my ear. He does not stroke me exactly, mostly he presses with his finger in a circular sort of motion until it begins to hurt. Then I complain and he stops. It’s funny but I think that this sums up our relationship, more or less.

My brother is two years younger than me. When we were kids, he looked up to me. Now everything is changed. We all rely on him, he is a rock. I love him more than our mother did. She loved him in a most selfish way, as if he belonged to her, as if he were an achievement, her crowning glory. Sometimes I think that my brother continues to participate in obscure charities only to live up to the image our mother had of him.

‘The minutes,’ the woman insisted, as if it were a matter of life and death.

‘The fax is broken down, Ma’am,’ my brother said to her.

‘Don’t you have a scanner?’ she insisted.

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‘The scanner is broken down too, Ma’am,’ my brother said and it will be a true waste if he does not go into politics.

This same woman, as I had imagined her, with red hair, horn-rimmed glasses and a mouth full of great big teeth (possibly false), came into my dream and sat among my students. She looked around at the baroque furniture and the heavy curtains and I could tell she was not impressed.

Now I cannot afford to lose any students and I did not want to lose the old hen either. How many losses can we sustain in a lifetime, I wondered. Is there a limit or does it just go on and on for ever? The woman remained oblivious to my inner trepidations and eyed me with cold contempt, suspecting I was this bumbling ineffectual has-been who finds solace in dreams.

‘We are doing indirect speech,’ I said. ‘Indirect speech in grammar is the act of reporting what another person has said. When that happens all the verbs have to take one step back into the past. I don’t know why that happens, nobody does. For the time being the dream is hiding the right exercise from me, but I will find it.’

‘When?’ the old hen said coldly. She was getting ready to strike with her beak and I was the worm.

‘Soon,’ I said.

‘You are a waste of time,’ she said. ‘I want my money back.’

She said that I was a waste of time and that she wanted her money back. I had it! I finally had it!

Just then my brother walked in and who would be at his side but Mum! He had at last rescued her from the old sheet by the toilet. Mum was wearing her favourite two-piece suit woven in golden thread, the one we had buried her in. Her hair was immaculate, styled at the hairdresser’s. She liked her hair wavy and piled tall on her head, to add more height to her figure. In the sixties she had worn it in a beehive that was truly awful. Over the years, succumbing to the demands of modern times, she had toned it down a bit and had even added blond highlights on one occasion. She was not a pretty woman in reality, but to me she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen in my entire life.

‘Guys,’ I said and my feet danced under the covers, ‘this is my mother!’

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Mum stood in the middle of the living room, with an aloof expression on her face. She seemed a bit withdrawn, as she had been the last months of her life. When the cancer spread to her brain, she lost her ability to understand speech. I found it very fitting that she should appear in the indirect speech dream. Maybe she had something to tell me.

The students looked at my mother in disbelief. The old hen sat down again, defeated by my mother’s regal countenance.

‘Mum, where have you been all this time?’ I said, screeching a little. I always screech when I talk to her. ‘I thought you were…’ I thought you were dead, I wanted to say, but I did not say it, because I did not want to upset her.

‘Foolish girl,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you ever come to see me?’ That was a thing she often used on me.

The truth was I had not visited her grave a single time in those past five years.

I don’t think it makes a difference, you see. The living belong with the living and the dead with the dead. Death is not an event in life, that is what I wanted to say, but I said nothing. Mum was staring at me, looking disappointed as usual. She had perfected that look just for me.

‘Come, have a seat here, Mum,’ I said in the end. ‘You look tired.’ And I took her by the hand and placed her in the red velvet armchair, part of the fabulous furniture Mum loved so much, when she could still play being the lady of the manor.

And there she sat, in the red velvet armchair in the middle of our baroque living room, queen-like, with a half-frozen expression on her face, mildly irritated by everything that had happened to her, before and after she died.

And there is no more to be said after that, because whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent, as good old Witt says.

Plus, I woke up.

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VERBS OF PROBABILITY

A few nights ago, I dreamt about the big earthquake of ’78. I wrote it all down on the notebook I keep next to my bed and sent it to the man I love who does not love me back. He was not very keen. He told me to stop sending him my dreams and to just read the goddamn book. I have no idea why he gave me the book. All I wanted was for him to love me. But I did as he said and kept on reading, until I found something that seemed kind of relevant.

Like everything metaphysical, the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.

The events of the night of the earthquake came clearly to my mind. There was a sea of cars flooding the streets of the city, as people attempted a quick getaway. There was talk of a building that had collapsed, trapping everyone inside. I was thirteen. That year I had experimented in losing my virginity – a disastrous affair. The young man, a mere four years older than me, had concluded the penetration hastily, though effectively. My lack of second thoughts before the event or remorse after it, led him to believe that I had lied about my virginity. Only when I pointed at his fingernails, dirty with my blood, was he finally convinced. Back then I could not suspect that I was destined to be surrounded by insensitive morons throughout my entire life. I thought he was a one off and the next one would be better. But no such luck.

That was the year I decided I was going to have an adventurous life. And I did, much to Mum’s dismay, as she disapproved greatly of adventure. The man I love who does not love me back says I did it because of the dead baby. My mother, before having me, had a baby girl who was born dead. She and Dad were devastated. When she became pregnant with me, she had a dream about Jesus ascending to heaven. In her mind, the dead baby would be resurrected.

I grew up under the burden of being God’s gift – my goddamn name means God’s gift in Greek. When puberty came along and I came down from my pedestal for a roll in the mud with the moron with the bloody fingernails, it was the end of the little miracle that had been my life. And because people rarely die when their dreams die, I exchanged the dream with another one. A life of adventure it was, a walk on the wild side.

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If not the events and decisions of that year, that earthquake definitely warranted a dream. It lasted for thirty seconds, which as earthquakes go is a mighty long time. Mum screamed non-stop. That was really something. I think she mostly screamed because a bottle of olive oil fell out of the cupboard and spilled all over the floor. There was really no reason for all that screaming, Mum had a maid who did all the cleaning up for her. Dad came soon after with my brother and we abandoned the crumbling apartment. Sometimes I think back to that night and I remember how the walls cracked and the plaster from the ceiling fell on our heads like cosmic dust. My life resembles that crumbling place, an easy, well-appointed life that is coming apart at the seams. I don’t scream though, cool as a cucumber. We spent the night in the car, the streets being utterly blocked. In the morning we managed to leave the city and made it to the country house by the sea, where we remained the entire summer. Eventually, we forgot.

But in dreams nothing is ever forgotten. So there I was, standing in the street, looking at all those cars that were going nowhere. Every now and then the cars inched forward at a maddeningly slow pace. Then a car drove up next to me and - what do you know - it was my Dad’s old black Citroen. I don’t think Dad had ever loved anything more than that car. It was a symbol, you see. He had beaten poverty, had escaped death during the civil war, survived the years of torture in the hands of the communists in a labour camp in Albania. What a life Dad had, and here I am, complaining over nothing. Dad had been born in a small mountain village of Greece. His father was a teacher. There were no more than ten students at a time, so they were all grouped together, in one class, and the older ones helped the younger. The village women nursed their children until they were four years old. Where would they find cow milk?

It would have been impossible to survive otherwise. During the civil war, Dad was a lieutenant in the Greek army. On the last day of the war, he was captured by guerrillas, who delivered him and his comrades to the communist regime in Albania. They walked the whole night and crossed behind the Iron Curtain. Dad wrote a book about it. Seven years of being tortured by fanatical bastards would be enough to drive anyone into a dream world for good.

But Dad had a good grip on reality. He returned, safe and sound, the only

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thing troubling him for the rest of his life being the terrible headaches, from having been kicked on the head too often by men in boots. And then, instead of becoming a whimpering idiot like me, what did the man do? He set out to win mother’s heart of steel – and won it! What a crowning achievement!

That was precisely what the Citroen meant: victory. I have been victorious, Dad said, every time he sat behind the wheel. He was not much of a driver either. After Dad died, we did not know what to do with the old car so we parked it somewhere in the street and tried not to think about it, until a lorry crashed into it and smashed it to bits. We threw it away in a car dump and that was the end of that.

In the dream, the old Citroen looked shiny and new. It was packed, of course, with all the dead in the family. Uncle George, who died first, was sitting in the back. He was a tall, handsome man, a doctor. The people in the village locked their girls in when they saw him walking down the street. He broke so many hearts, until his own heart betrayed him. Next to him was Aunt Eleni who died of bone cancer. Such was the destiny of a woman who had not touched anything or anybody for half a century. She always used a piece of tissue to turn door handles. Once, when I was a kid, I went to shake her hand to wish her happy Easter and she gave me a little stick and I shook the stick.

My mother had told me the story of Aunt Eleni. When she was young, she fell in love with a man, who was deemed by the family to be socially beneath them. They forbid her to marry him. She went crazy, lacking a layer of skin, as some of the women in our family do. She started dressing in rags and wearing men’s shoes and screaming in the cobbled alleys of the village. She was given a series of electric shocks, which was the usual treatment in those days and had amazingly partially cured her, save for a persistent case of germaphobia.

The funny thing is that she got her revenge in the end. She convinced the family, after they moved to the city, that their house in the village had to be destroyed, as it was haunted by the ghosts of the past. They demolished the lovely old house, probably out of guilt for having destroyed Aunt Eleni’s life, so now we have nothing in the village, just a family grave. Aunt Eleni remained single and a virgin – at least one of us managed it – and went on with her life barricading herself behind tons of tissue paper, which she used

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for turning door handles. She would also buy huge rolls of bubble wrap to wear inside her clothes, which is why she crinkled when she walked.

But she could not protect herself; no one can. The enemy got her from within. She was looking straight ahead now, avoiding my eyes. What could she say? I fucked up? Most of us do anyway. Mum was there too, in the passenger seat, holding the dead baby. Her hair was immaculate, as usual.

Dad was driving the car, of course.

‘Hey, Dad,’ I said. ‘Where are you going? Take me with you!’

Dad turned and looked at me and his face was sad and yellow. That is the last image I have of my father, his sad yellow face, when they brought him home for the funeral. What a day that was! I remember a very tall, thin man like a scarecrow, all dressed in black, who came up and sprayed something on Dad’s lips. ‘There,’ he said to me, ‘now his mouth will stay shut for good,’ and my Dad’s mouth is now shut for ever. So it was my mother who turned and spoke to me, though she spoke in my father’s voice, because in dreams this shit happens and nobody bats an eyelid.

‘There is no room in the car. You are supposed to stay here. Try not to make such a fuss, girl. You should be fine.’

Mum would always come up with those phrases, containing modal verbs.

You should, you could, you might, you can’t…She knew better than anyone what was possible and what impossible, what probable and what improbable.

What were the probabilities that I would be fine, I wondered.

They drove off and left me standing there. I could not single out our car anymore because they all looked the same. They were going nowhere anyway. Big deal.

I am so tired I wish I could give up. That is what I wanted to say to the man I love who does not love me back. But we went to bed instead. He had finished reading the diary of dreams and was slightly annoyed at my general lack of direction and self-confidence.

‘I want to treat you badly,’ he said and that thrilled me. He stroked my tongue with his finger until saliva started dribbling on my chin. He said he liked it when I looked vulnerable. Then he proceeded to hurt me methodically.

In a life riddled with pain, this was the least of my worries.

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THE PAST I have given up teaching. I am working in an office now, pushing paper in a mental institution and turning out documents that are grammatically perfect. Nobody cares about grammar these days. Most people I meet are simply trying to hold onto their sanity. I am still trying to deal with the ghosts from the past. The man I love who does not love me back left me soon after my mother’s death. I tried many times to contact him, but he wants nothing to do with me. I cannot perceive of a life without him, so I keep returning to the book he has given me.

We are asleep. Our life is a Dream. But we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming.

I have no idea whether I dreamt of this life or it was real. Does it really matter? I continue to keep a diary of dreams, in case the man I love who does not love me back ever returns. I do not think that he will, but there you have it.

Election day came and nobody wanted to take Mum to vote. My brother was out of town and my son knew that Granny would vote for the wrong party.

My daughters refused. Throw Granny into the sea, was the secret thought in everybody’s mind, even in my own.

Mum put on a pink shirt with long sleeves, completely inappropriate for that time of year. She could not put the shirt tail into the back of her skirt and I helped her, but I did not do it very well because she does not understand anyway how much it bulges. I felt embarrassed over that, but I was really tired.

I had washed her hair in the morning (past perfect, for actions completed in the past before other actions) and styled it and she looked great. There used to be a severity about her, she had been so unforgiving. Now, as she was approaching the end of her life, she had turned soft. It suited her.

At lunch, she refused to have any of the chicken soup (simple past, for actions that happened at a specific time in the past). She said she would have some cherries instead. I had bought a whole load because I knew how much she liked them.

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‘I will not take you to vote unless you have some soup first,’ I said and she looked at me, perplexed at this unexpected reversal of roles.

A little later she came into my room and said she had eaten. I checked in the kitchen and found a small bowl with remnants of soup, but maybe she had only had a spoonful, how should I know. I took her to vote anyway.

It took us ten minutes to walk to the taxi depot, she walks so slowly. She was wearing a black woollen cardigan over the shirt. It must have been about a hundred degrees out there. Perhaps she does not feel the heat, I thought. I keep telling her to dress more lightly for this time of year. When we sit outside in the veranda, instead of wearing the satin dressing gown I got her for her birthday, she wraps a towel round her neck. I find it silly and I tell her and then she goes and puts on the dressing gown.

We arrived at the voting centre and I helped Mum up the entrance stairs.

We took the lift to the second floor. The poll clerk looked at Mum and asked if she needed any help.

‘Certainly not,’ Mum said. She is always afraid that people will trick her and steal her vote.

They gave her the ballot papers and the envelope. I asked her if she wanted me to find the paper with the party of her choice, the right-wing morons that she votes for, but she did not answer. She does this all the time, she does not answer. She might answer me one day. Tell me something useful Mum. Tell me something I don’t know. Fat chance.

She went behind the blue curtain. I could see her silhouette in the sunlight. I waited for about fifteen minutes, until she found the ballot paper she wanted.

Her hands tremble so much, you see. She put it in the envelope at last and came out.

‘Do I put this here?’ she said holding the sealed envelope and pointing to the waste basket.

‘In all truth you should,’ I said.

The poll clerk was looking at us. Into the sea, the children had said. But it was her right to cast her vote and I was certain this was going to be her last one so I would not deprive her of it.

Downstairs we went, first the lift, then the stairs. She was holding on to me

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tight (past continuous, for actions that went on for a while in the past). Out in the street she said: ‘Should I take off the cardigan now? It is rather hot.’

I helped her take it off. Then a taxi came along and we took it.

Back at our street, I helped Mum out of the taxi. She was walking very slowly now. She belched loudly a couple of times and I looked the other way. In front of our apartment building, she suddenly felt sick. She let go of me and staggered to the street curb to throw up. A bucket of blood came out of her mouth. She is dying, I thought. Mum is dying. My Mum. Then I realized she was throwing up cherries. She had eaten the goddamn cherries. Probably all of them, if I know my Mum. She lasted until the end of the summer. Her party lost the election.

I had this dream once that Mum was sitting in the kitchen eating cherries.

Then she was no more.

When I feel lonely, I burrow back into the grammar of my dreams, like a blind mole in the dark. I have come to realise that one can easily master the past, even imagine a possible future. It’s not hard, not hard at all.

The present can be a little harder.

71

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Life in a glass partition If, like some glass partitions, I was a building, my plumbing would be externally displayed, the meals I’d serve on floors one to five, would come, no questions asked, with recipe sheets.

If I’d been beamed into an unsigned-for package, I’d explode into foam at the depot, and I’m sorry but one of the casualty’s autopsies, (if I was in charge) would still be ongoing.

I’d like to see every novel reprinted with a bulky, illuminatory foreword by the author; a footnote a word seems a stretch, I know, especially when each footnote reads: inert.

Pretend to be good always, and even God will be fooled, but show me some authentic type, and I will show you life in a glass partition.

74

Ned Green

@psychosurrealism

She brings the night

75

True Fact When I was young, I once went to the Chelsea Flower Show in London with my mother’s second husband’s third wife.

This is a true fact.

Lydia Davis

76

Betrayal (2) Sometimes, in fact, what I want most is to be left alone. Is this because I am so extremely tired? Then, my fantasy of a relationship with another man simply involves being left alone. My lover, who is sometimes faceless, if I haven’t yet decided who he is, comes to my door and I tell him to leave—Go away. I do not even have to be polite. Leave. Then I am alone. I can rest. But of course it is an important part of the fantasy for him to want to be with me and come looking for me.

I would ask myself, after all, How can I dream of anything more active if I’m so very tired? When I am so tired, I can’t even manage a fantasy about having any company at all, even sitting side by side on a sofa. So I say: Sometimes, in fact, my dearest wish is to be left entirely alone. A lover will come to the door, and I will turn him away. Go. I do not even have to be polite.

But because my intention still seems wrong—to have, in my fantasy, a relationship with another man that is concealed from my husband, even if the fantasy is about telling the lover to go away—the fantasy itself still seems like a betrayal.

Lydia Davis

77

Emergency Preparations We filled the bathtub with a few inches of cold water, in case the pump stopped working. We were afraid to fill it more than that, for fear one of the cats might fall in and drown. The cats did not fall in.

What drowned was a daddy-long-legs.

No one missed him, we thought. But with insects it’s hard to tell.

Lydia Davis

78

Issie Holmes

79

The feet of people walking home look here, crocuses and nettles will soon be blooming PVC tablecloth will be cut by the metre milk will turn fruity you are two two is beautiful is spring the earth thaws we can bury the dead

Simona Nastac

80

No Smiles Today

81

Martina Scott

From ‘Project’

Richard Battye

82

From ‘Project’

83

Richard Battye

From ‘Project’

Richard Battye

84

From ‘Project’

85

Richard Battye

From ‘Project’

Richard Battye

86

From ‘Project’

87

Richard Battye

What’s inside a blue and white house Harry Kalvin

I’ve done seven deliveries, and I’m on my way to drop off my eighth. Erin hasn’t text me since I left the apartment, which isn’t surprising. I’ll be going home with some cash, maybe enough to buy her dinner, or a drink, if she’s forgotten whatever it was I did last night.

This order’s from Gelson’s. One carton of eggs, juice, vegetables, and some milk. The customer’s name is Rachel Shayan. The directions on the app take me to a nice part of the city, where there are new townhouses painted with a fresh coat of blue and white. They’re plain, but not ugly, and the people inside are probably happy to be in them. I ease in front of her house, get out, and leave the engine running. I ring the doorbell. A couple moments later the door opens and a small woman, brown-skinned, her hair tied up, leans out.

She wears a maroon-colored shirt, grey sweats, and no shoes.

“Hey. Gelson’s order, for Rachel?” Her eyes dart between the bags in my hand and my face.

“Oh, yes, gosh, I’m sorry. You’re Dan, right? It’s just been such a terrible night.” She pats her eye with a balled tissue.

“Yea that’s me. And I’m sorry, I hope it’s nothing too bad.”

“Thank you. It’s nothing. Nothing I haven’t dealt with before.” A loose chuckle escapes her.

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What’s inside a blue and white house

“That’s good.”

I extend the bags out. She opens the door wider. Next to her kitchen is a clear glass table. On it sits a half-full bottle of tequila and an empty glass. I can see myself sitting there.

“Dan, would you mind putting all that in the kitchen for me?” She smiles and steps aside.

I shrug and walk in. Jeopardy’s playing on a large TV in the middle of the living room. I set items down on the kitchen countertop. On her fridge there’s a picture of her standing next to a tall, grey-haired man with a genuine smile.

They’re wearing heavy jackets and thick goggles sit on their heads. Behind them are mountains draped in snow.

I walk out the kitchen. Rachel is kneeling in front of the bright TV. I used to do the same thing when I was a kid. It forced me to wear glasses, but now I wear contacts. No one can tell anything’s wrong. The crowd is cheering loudly, and she is clapping along, and for a moment she doesn’t appear alone here. Until the cheering stops. Rachel sips a coffee mug.

“Well, it’s all in there,” I say, almost yelling.

“My husband finds this childish. But I like watching people try to answer these questions, and I’ll guess along. Even if I’m wrong, there’s someone else usually wrong with me. Isn’t that a nice thing to know?” She turns and smiles.

It’s the same smile she gave me before at the door. Maybe she’s in her late thirties. She looks sad, but she’s still good. I hear a loud vibration. Her phone is ringing. She keeps smiling at me.

“My mom likes this stuff.” I agree with her husband. This shit is dumb. I don’t know what else to say besides the inevitable. “Anyways, I hope you have a good night.” She’s staring listlessly at the TV screen. I start toward the door.

“Dan?” “Uh, yea?”

“I’ve been inside the whole day. I need to sit outside.” She looks at her balcony. “I’ve never sat outside with anybody yet. We just moved in. My husband hasn’t done that with me yet. Isn’t he a meanie?”

“Oh yeah, it’s a beautiful place. I would’ve definitely sat out there with my girl.”

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Harry Kalvin

“You have a girlfriend Dan?” “Yep.” “Oh, well excuse me, mister,” she says with a laugh. “Well, do you have any other deliveries to handle?”

“Not right now.”

“So, if I leave you a nice tip, could you sit outside with me for a little and keep me company? You can have a drink and leave right after.”

I immediately imagine us fucking outside, but I force the idea dead. A drink doesn’t sound bad. Nor the tip.

“Alright. Sure.”

“Great! Go turn your car off sweetie. I have a great view, ya know. Just give me a couple minutes, I want to change.” She rushes into a room and shuts the door. I look at the blank TV screen and I see myself in its reflection, standing comfortably in a stranger’s home. I watch a commercial where a guy whose car has been fucked up by a fallen branch asks a lizard for help. There’s some rapid talking and a logo shoots across the screen and then it ends. Jeopardy screams back on. I walk out. It’s a Wednesday night and I’m going to drink with a random woman. This feels pretty good. This sort of thing usually doesn’t happen. I’ll have a drink or two, then go home maybe. Erin will be waiting. I find an empty visitors parking spot and head back.

Through the closed door comes her muffled voice. “Go ahead and grab a beer from the fridge or pour some tequila. I’ll be right out.” The grey-haired man smiles at me on the fridge. I smile back.

It’s not much of a view outside. All the townhouses balconies and backyards look the same in the dim light. I drink beer and inspect the tequila. Don Juan. I sip a little, let it hug me. I shouldn’t be here, but I’m helping this lady.

I could put it like that to Erin later. Through the glass sliding door I watch Rachel grab a clean coffee mug. She’s changed into a light blue robe. Her brown hair falls to her shoulders, with small specks of blonde at the bottom tips. I like watching her move around the kitchen. I see different ways this night could turn out. Finally, she’s sitting next to me. Her beer is already halfway done. I like that.

“I hope you don’t mind being here Dan. I just want to talk.”

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What’s inside a blue and white house

“It’s okay. I don’t mind.”

She squeezes my arm. I try to act like it doesn’t mean anything. She pours more tequila, sips, then hands me the mug. I do the rest. The walls are cracking.

“Where do you live Dan? “We live on the Northside.”

“Oh, that’s cute. My ex and I used to live in a little apartment.”

“Cool. Where?”

“Somewhere that I don’t want to go back to.” She hits her beer. “This house is much nicer. Do you like it?”

“Yeah, it’s really nice. I’d like to live in a spot like this.”

“Then you will” She looks around her balcony and across the tops of dark rooftops. “They’re new houses!” She raises her hands in celebration, like she’s a cheerleader for the townhouses.

“Haha.”

“I’m happy to be with company. Fun company.” She places a finger on her lip and thinks. “Funpany!” She bursts out laughing. I force a chuckle.

“I’m just happy Dan. My husband, Jacob, he’s left for the night. So that means I can finally relax.”

Those images are back. “Really? What’s he doing?”

“He’s speaking at an AA meeting.”

“Really?”

“Uh huh. I didn’t want to go. I wanted to stay home and watch Jeopardy. Oh yes, He got mad, but you see I’m not an alcoholic…. Jacob and AA turned me into one. That’s what that fucking place does to you.”

“Oh. Shit.” She doesn’t seem like someone who needs AA. “I think my mom went for a little after rehab. She’s talked about going back.”

“If he doesn’t know then he can’t get mad about it.” She raises her glass, so I raise mine.

“Yeah. I guess you’re right.” We clink. “Sometimes it’s nice to leave this for a little,” she says and taps her forehead and widens her eyes, like a mime.

“Yea. I know what you mean.” Rachel strokes her hair, her legs are crossed, and a little bit of cleavage shows behind the blue robe. She’s beautiful. But I don’t know how to tell her. So I drink more.

91

Harry Kalvin

“It’s a nice night, right?” She laughs and bites her fingernails.

“Yeah. It’s a nice night.” I scan the blue and white houses. Small lightbulbs burn over front doors, indicating people are home. But for the most part the windows are dark, the curtains drawn. Everybody’s safe inside. Or maybe they’re not home at all.

“Sometimes I wonder Danny.”

I hate when people call me Danny. “Uh huh?”

“All these people in these little new houses…would they trade places with me for a day?”

She’s drunker than I thought. “That’s interesting.”

“Sometimes I miss that little old apartment…” She perks up a little now.

“You’d turn on one light, and boom! You see the whole place in one blink.”

She slouches back down, eyelids droopy.

“Our place gets hot. It’s small.”

“There are too many dark corners in this house….” She quietly cries into her hands.

“I’m sorry.” I think about rubbing her back, but don’t. Does she cry in front of Jacob? Suddenly there’s a bright light falling onto her from above. She stops crying and starts laughing. She shields her eyes. It passes onto me. I look up then turn away immediately. I scratch my eyes vigorously, white spots flashing and fading in my vision. I look back at the sky and there’s nothing but dark clouds. The sound of the chopper’s wings slicing through the air fades away.

“I wonder who they’re looking for,” she says.

“That light got right into my fucking eye.”

“You shouldn’t have looked straight at it.”

I grab my beer. It’s done. Hers is too.

“Let’s go inside. It’s chilly,” she says. Rachel takes the tequila bottle in one hand and my hand in the other and like a magnet on a fridge our hands interlock. I open the door and grab her waist as she attempts to walk by me.

I pull her into me, and I look at her grin and see the alcohol in her eyes and imagine kissing her. So I do kiss her, because I’m here. The amount of tongue

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What’s inside a blue and white house

she uses is uncomfortable, but my hands explore her backside and waist and it’s worth the trouble. I could’ve missed this moment. She pulls away.

“We’re not even inside yet,” she says. Her fingertips graze through my short hair. “Let’s watch something.”

The lights and television amplify the beaming in my head. I know I’m drunk, and I head toward the fridge and its soothing hum. I grab two more beers, then close it with a seal. I stare at Jacob’s smile, which looks fake now. Her smile is sad. Or Maybe they were always like that. I cheers Jacob, I cheers the fridge, I cheers Rachel. I plop down on the sofa, giving her a beer. She flips through channels. I notice some wrinkles on her neck and face. Maybe she’s past the age of having kids.

“Let’s see what we can find.” She slouches deeper into the sofa, shooting me a glance and smirk. She takes a healthy gulp of the beer and sets it down with the remote on the carpet and lays back, swinging her legs onto my lap. I feel her thighs. Her head is turned toward the TV and her body is angled toward mine, like an old renaissance painting. There is the feeling of something necessary., to feel safe with a familiar-like stranger. I move closer to her and begin to go in on her neck. with my mouth, I feel her up., wanting to see her breasts. She grabs my ass, lets it go, grabs again. I don’t particularly like it, but I ignore it. I ease off, her neck, beginning to undo her robe, taking her in. Her eyes are closed while she feels my body, her neck strained back.

“You’re beautiful, Rachel.”

She grabs my hands. “Can you turn off the lights honey? They’re right over there.” She’s pointing toward a wall.

“Yea, Sure.” I get off the couch and take a couple steps backward. I stumble and feel my foot knock the bottle over. I look down. It’s spilled all over the remote. She leans forward and looks at the mess.

“Oh, fuck” She bolts up and rushes into the kitchen and comes back with an excessive amount of paper towels. She stamps the wet part of the carpet. The liquid seeps through the towels. She wipes the remote, examining it closely.

“He’ll know there was a spill. He’ll notice the remote. He’ll probably be able to smell it.” She points the remote at the TV and presses buttons at random.

The channels change rapidly, then the volume soars and sinks.

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Harry Kalvin

“It’s working fine,” I say.

She’s pacing while biting her nails. The towels move around like little ghosts with the fast air created by her feet.

“I think it’ll be okay.”

“No, no, no I won’t be okay. He’ll know. He notices all that little shit…”.

She stops moving and looks at me with wide eyes. “We didn’t do anything, right?”

“What?”

“How long have you been here? Just a couple minutes, right?” The alcohol is out of her eyes, replaced by a child-like fear. I imagine myself as the trenchcoat and fedora wearing guy that’s crossed out on neighborhood watch signs.

“We’ve just been talking,” I say more to myself then her. She walks to a wall and cuts the lights off. We both sit on the couch. The TV’s images flash at us with no sound.

“It’s better in the dark,” she whispers.

Rachel grabs my hand and again they interlock. But We don’t do anything else beyond that. There’s nothing else to be done.

Once Rachel falls asleep I leave. It feels like I’m in my car very quickly, like I just blinked and there I am. I check my phone. Erin texted me once, simply: “Hey”. I call her. While it rings, I think of everything, but mostly her.

“Hello?” she says.

“Hey. What’s going on?” “What?”

“What are you doing?” I start my car. She pauses. “Are you ok?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. What’s up?” I back out. My foot slips on the brake but it recovers. I pass by blue and white houses. It frightens me that they all look the same. They could all hold a Rachel, or a Jacob, or an Erin, or someone like or a me. But you would never know it. Not unless they open the front door and let you inside.

“You never call me. And you sound weird. Anyways, I’m still here. Are you coming back soon?”

“Yeah, well I just wanted to call instead of text. I’m driving. I’ll be home in

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What’s inside a blue and white house

like ten minutes. I’m pretty hungry.” I stop at a red light.

“You always text and drive.”

“Yeah. Well, I got a big tip.” A cop car rolls past in the opposite direction.

I put the phone down. She says something I don’t catch. The cop disappears into the night. “What was that babe?”

“I said cool,” she says, pained.

The light turns green. I’m gaining speed a little too quickly, so I slow down.

“Yea, I’m So cool, I froze to death.” I don’t remember where I stole that from.

“What the fuck does that even mean?”

“Nothing. I can come get you, we’ll get some food if you’re down.” There’s a lot of cars out. I need to get off the main road.

“Let me guess, you want Chinese food?”

“I mean, it’s cheap.” I slow down as I approach a busy intersection. I see Roundin’ Third. Erin likes the fries and beer there. We used to go there a lot.

I make a quick right, cutting across two lanes and several honks. I manage to get in the furthest right lane.

“What was that?” Erin asks.

“Some cop driving crazy. So, do you want food or what? I could just pick something up I guess.”

“Yeah, sure. I don’t care. I’m fucking freezing in here.

Don’t leave the window open all day. Please.”

“It was really hot today while you were at work. Sorry.”

“Okay Dan.” “I’ll be back soon. Bye.” I hang up. In front of me an old lady pushes a shopping cart filled with garbage bags. The light has turned green but she’s still in the crosswalk, blocking me. I roll the window down and wait and try to hear everything I could possibly hear from the city.

I’ve just parked. I dig around my front seats for some gum, something to hide my breath. I find crumpled receipts and a couple water bottles with small puddles left at the bottom of them., which I down. I get out, holding a bag of fries and burgers. Within a couple steps, Erin walks out the apartment. She’s wearing grey sweats and a white long sleeve shirt, her hair down. She looks amazing. I don’t get close or she’ll smell my breath.

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Harry Kalvin

“Hey babe. I got you some fries from Roundin’ Third.” I hold the bag out.

She doesn’t take the food. She looks over my shoulder.

“Dan, your front headlights are on.”

“What?” I turn around. God dammit. I turn back around with a smile.

“Oh, thanks babe.” She hesitantly takes the food. I walk to my car. She stays cemented in her place.

“You did that last night too,” she says. I remember fragments of last night.

Parking, quietly walking into our room. Turning away from her in bed so she wouldn’t smell me.

“They weren’t on when I walked out here to start work.” I turn off the headlights. I start gathering all the empty water bottles. I’ll recycle. That looks good.

“Because I turned them off, Dan. Before I went to work this morning, I went back inside my room and took the keys from your pants and turned off your headlights. And I also found a six- pack in the backseat.” She turns around, heads inside.

“Can you help me with these?” I cradle the water bottles like a newborn.

She slams the door. I take a few steps then figure what the fuck. They bounce against the concrete then lay still. I can’t go inside yet. There’s nothing I want in there. I jump in my car, not starting it. I sit in the dark. It’s better in the dark. I reach behind my seat and feel the warm six-pack. They will taste like shit, but I can ignore it. I am good at ignoring. I am good at loving strangers. but not good at loving anyone who loves me. I close my eyes and see freshly painted blue and white houses. Maybe Rachel is awake now. Maybe she’s sitting in front of her TV, thinking scrambled thoughts. Maybe she misses me. Do I want her to remember tonight? Do I want her to remember me?

My phone vibrates. A text from Erin. “So, are you coming in or what?” My car is the only thing I own. I think I’ll stay in here tonight. I can do whatever I want in here. I reach back, grab a beer, open it, and take a big gulp. There are no lights on inside our apartment. It’s a warm night with a warm beer. I close my eyes and think of Rachel opening her front door with a smile.

96

-

What’s inside a blue and white house

I wake soon after to tapping on my window. Empty beer in my hand.

Through dirty streaks I see an old man. He walks around the neighborhood a lot, asking people if they want their car window’s washed. I usually don’t have anything to give him. I roll the window down halfway.

“You okay son? What you doing here?”

“Just resting man. What’s up?”

“Don’t you live right there?” He points a crooked finger at our apartment.

“Yea I do. Just chilling in here for now.”

He grins sheepishly.

“Okay okay. Wash ya windows for ya son?”

“Nah man, I’m good.”

He steps back and inspects my car. He has a dirty rag in one hand, and a clear spray bottle with blue liquid in it in the other. He usually has a bike, but I don’t see it around.

“I don’t think you’re so good. I can barely see inside this here.” He runs his index finger along the window, then shows me his darkened finger. “You got dirty windows son. But I can clean ‘em, you know me.”

I scratch my eyes, look around my car. There are three empty bottles on the floor of the passenger seat side. In the backseat there are three empty slots in the pack but two unopened bottles, the streetlight shimmering off their physiques. I turn to the old man and remember the dollars in my pocket.

“How much do you want?”

“I’ll clean ‘em first; you pay me what you feel after okay?”

I sigh deeply and scratch my eyes, then really look at him. “Alright. Fuck it.”

I grab the beers and hop out. I take a seat on the curb across the street. He goes to work. I crack a beer. He doesn’t just spray and wipe; he sprays, wipes, sprays again, wipes again. He attacks the same window from different angles.

His work is humbling. He’s even going in on the tires. The streetlamp shines on him. He was meant to be here.

“What happened to your bike?”

“Ain’t nothin’. Had to give it back is all.”

“You were borrowing it?”

“Someone needed it, so they took it while I was doin’ my bidness in the

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Harry Kalvin

bathroom over there at Ralph’s.”

The lights have turned back on in the apartment. Maybe she’s watching.

“So they stole it from you?”

“Nah. I just gave it back. Like when my wife died. The almighty took her back. Ain’t nothin’ ours in the first place.”

“Hm.” He doesn’t look at me while he works. You could see through the windows for the first time in forever. He lifts the windshield wipers, runs the rag up and down them. He looks at the rag, shaking his head.

“No wonder you out here by yo’self.”

“I don’t mind it.” I almost throw up my swig.

“Mhm.” The old man wipes his forehead with his shirt sleeve and leaves the only things he owns on the ground.

“Car’s cleaner than it’ll ever be,” he says.

“You’re right. I haven’t cleaned that shit in months.”

“Man don’t you got a lady? I’ve seen her round here. She gotta hate that dirty car.”

“She doesn’t mind the car. She minds me though.” I reach in my pocket, feel a bill, pull it out. A twenty. I don’t remember getting it. I look at the old man. He’s just as surprised.

“Here you go man. Thanks.”

He doesn’t take it.

“She mad at you?”

“Yeah.”

“Take her out with that,” he nods at the bill.

“It’s not enough.”

He looks at the twenty, then to me. He chuckles, grabs my keys from off the ground, then swipes the last beer.

“I tell you one thing.”

He opens the beer.

“Whatever you do, clean that car first. Then..”

He takes a swig, grimaces, shrugs, tosses me my keys, and walks toward his

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What’s inside a blue and white house

rag and spray bottle. He picks them up in one smooth motion and continues down the dark street. When he’s out of the streetlights reach, I can still make out his wiry body, strolling along empty concrete.

I get a text from Erin. “Lock the door whenever you come in. Thanks.”

I take in my car. It’s never looked cleaner. My car will probably never look this clean again, no matter how many times I wash it.

99

Hammerhead

Sasha Marshall

100

America Sat on a wall with grey suit and lucky strike cigarette is my nephew Harry.

‘Harry you sleaze what are you doing up there?’

‘Ain’t it time to make some money on Wall Street?’

Harry looked at me with tired eyes and didn’t get down.

I went to work and made some money on the phones.

I drove home and didn’t see Harry on the wall; he was in my room screwing my wife.

He looked at me with tired eyes and didn’t stop screwing my wife.

Matteo Scaburri

101

From ‘Sugarcane’

Ricardo Bouyett

102

From ‘Sugarcane’

103

Ricardo Bouyett

Stucco Box Richard Risemberg

The building loomed in front of him: a shoebox two stories tall and three lots wide. Cheap aluminum-framed windows interrupting the beige expanse.

Fine cracks in the stucco leading from the corners of the window frames.

He couldn’t help noticing details, even boring minor flaws. It was part of his nature. And this was where he was to live for a little while. Just not too long, he hoped. He’d lost a wife and a job; he’d replaced the job, though with one that paid less money. He hadn’t replaced the wife, and wasn’t trying to. He just needed someplace to stay. The stucco box was what he could afford.

He knew what he would find when he went inside before even approaching the door: straight hallways painted that sort of eggnog color that looked dingy the moment it left the brush, all washed with the frigid official light of fluorescents. Brown doors with brass numbers on them and a doorbell set in the wall beside. Maybe a table by the bulge in the hallway where the stairs were. With some luck, perhaps a plant on the table, a real one that someone watered every week. More likely a plastic plant, or nothing. A mirror by the front door, maybe a whole mirrored wall. Of course he could be wrong: he had taken the apartment sight unseen, on the recommendation of a friend who was a rental agent and assured him that the building was clean and his future fellow tenants quiet. He didn’t need bugs or screaming matches in his

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Stucco Box

life right now. Not later, either, but especially not right now.

He studied the front of the building: behind the neat strip of grass that fronted the sidewalk was a row of dusty bird-of-paradise plants, with tiny weeds growing in the hard dirt around them. Not too bad, though it bothered him to see the weeds. A gray-striped cat stepped out from behind one of the plants and inspected him briefly, before walking calmly to the end of the building and disappearing towards the back. Maybe the cat belonged to one of his future neighbors. He hoped so. His wife had kept their cat. His ex-wifeto-be, and his ex-cat.

He walked up to the double glass door and coded the number for the manager into the keypad. A hurried-looking bald man in his fifties bustled out of a door by the elevator and came to let him in. He was surprised to see an elevator, given that it was only a two-story building. Though there was a parking garage in the basement. Supposedly a small gym as well. But, he thought; if you used the stairs you might not need the gym.

The manager was not quite fat but erring towards it. They shook hands and introduced themselves. The manager was named Phil, which struck him as vaguely old fashioned. Though his own name was Clarence, which was none the more contemporary. He preferred to be called Larry. “You haven’t actually seen the place yet, am I right?” Phil said.

“Correct.”

“Let’s do the rounds,” Phil said. “The courtyard’s pretty nice.”

He jogged Larry along the hallway to a door that led to the interior court, previously unmentioned.

“Nice enough,” Larry said. It was a smallish rectangle with circular planters, faced in rough stone, scattered here and there. In the center was a larger planter with three palm trees arranged in an attempt at something isosceles.

The palm trees weren’t all that grand, but they were enough to suffice the building’s name, “The Three Palms,” denoted in cursive wooden lettering over the front door. Iceplant filled in the rest of that planter; most of the others held more of the inevitable birds-of-paradise. The beds were well-weeded in here and the plants recently trimmed. That was a good sign. So was the graystriped cat he had seen out front, which wandered across his path now, and

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Richard Risemberg

the little metal tables and chairs set in odd nooks across the courtyard. It wasn’t the French Riviera, but it would do. Phil gestured ambiguously across the courtyard. “The tenants actually come out here all the time. There’s no view, but it’s quiet, and the plants…. Come on.”

He followed Phil down to the parking garage. There was indeed a small gym by the elevator, with a treadmill, a rack of weights, a weight bench, and a couple of machines. One mirrored wall. The mirror was clean at least.

Someone took care of things. The rest of the garage was the usual tenebrous concrete; cars nosed against the walls, oil stains against the smooth floor. A bike rack in it’s darkest corner with two tired-looking bicycles slumped in it.

“Nothing special here,” Phil said. “I have a key to give you, for the gate. No assigned spots; park where you can. Not everyone here has a car, so there’s always room.” The elevator took them up to the roof, where there was a small terrace with a glass wall around it. More metal tables and chairs, a couple of folded up café umbrellas.

“And here you get the view but no plants,” Phil said.

“Nice enough view,” Larry said, though it was nothing special. Roofs and treetops nearby, and the backs of the taller commercial buildings on the boulevard a bit farther off. In the distance, a pair of crows strutted about at the edge of the roof. “If you use the umbrellas, close them when you leave.

The wind gets a little heavy up here sometimes. There’s no way of knowing when… Let’s go see your place now.”

The plain brown door, with a number on it and a peephole set a bit too low.

Phil jangled his keys into the lock and opened the door. He let Larry go in first. Empty off-white rooms, a sliding door facing the courtyard, low gray carpeting. A bedroom and bathroom to one side, the kitchen opposite. Each room had a view of the courtyard. A forgotten power strip lay on the carpet, with its cord plugged into a wall socket. The only sign of life. “I guess the painters left that,” Phil said. “They had to do a little sanding or something.

You can have it if you want. I suppose you have a computer or two. Like everybody else.”

Larry nodded. He did have a computer or two. He was in fact like anybody else.

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“You’ve got a little balcony with enough room for a table and a couple of chairs.” Phil motioned towards the sliding door. “The drapes are almost new, and everything should be working. Stove and fridge included. Laundry room down the hall. Any problems, you can call me and I’ll get it taken care of.”

Phil sighed heavily. “Really, the tenant mix right now is pretty nice. You’ll like the place. Hang out here a bit, I’ll go get your key set. Be right back.” Phil went out, leaving the door open behind him.

Larry stood in the middle of the living room, staring out the sliding door.

The place seemed mildly desolate, like most empty rooms. His share of the furniture from the marriage wouldn’t make it much less so. An armchair, a bookcase, a desk, a few pictures. Well, you had to start somewhere. Start over somewhere. He’d ordered a bed which would arrive tomorrow, and that meant one more night sleeping on the sofa in his old apartment. He looked up at the ceiling. The shade on the ceiling lamp hung just a little crooked, and there was a tiny bead of white paint on it. He found the imperfection encouraging.

The rooms wouldn’t object to an imperfect tenant then. He laughed out loud at himself, then sank. It was the kind of joke he used to bother his wife with.

He opened the sliding door and stepped out onto the balcony. It was nice to be on the second floor, with a bit more of the sky over the courtyard.

The balcony had been swept, he could see the marks of the broom, and the handrail was freshly painted. All of it looked better from above. He could see an old man reading in a chair over on it’s shady side. One of his neighbors now, maybe a friend some day. You could never tell how people would turn out.

He heard trudging footsteps, and Phil came back in with the keys. He insisted on leading Larry through the various rooms. They were all of course empty. A few coat hangers in the bedroom closet. A carton of baking soda open in the fridge, to soak up odors. The inside of the fridge had been wiped and looked good. The fridge lamp glared in the white plastic emptiness. He closed the fridge and looked around the kitchen. It was enough. He sat down in the breakfast nook, which had built-in table and benches, like a booth in a diner. You could just fit four people in it, if they were all slim. There was a plug in the wall under the window, he supposed for a toaster. The windowsill

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was wide, and he could put potted plants there. He would have to buy some.

Phil said, “So, it’s all yours. The owners told me you’re moving in tomorrow, right?” Larry nodded. “Well, call me if you need anything. And welcome home.” Phil smiled, a tired sort of smile, and left him in the apartment.

Larry went back to the bedroom. It too featured a sliding door to the balcony.

He slid it open and then closed it again, listening to the rasp of the slide. Then he closed the drapes, listening to the mechanism rattle. The room filled with a clear brownish shadow. It wasn’t a very big bedroom, but it would do. For his new life it was plenty big enough.

He went out into the hallway and locked his door for the first time. He had to admit that he didn’t like the hallway, had never liked the hallways in this sort of building. Some of his friends lived in similar places; such buildings were everywhere. He took himself down the stairs and out to the courtyard again. More of it was in shadow now. He found a chair and sat in it and closed his eyes. He could the hear the slight rustling of the tops of the palm trees moving in a breeze. Then the sound of a radio or television, very faint, voices and music. The metal of the chair felt cold through his clothes, but he knew it would warm up soon enough and he felt comfortable. Likewise he knew that his empty rooms would come to seem like home within a couple of weeks.

Something brushed against his shin, and he opened his eyes: it was the gray-striped cat once more, greeting him this time. He reached down and scratched behind its ears. The cat wound around his legs a few more times then wandered off. He followed it with his eyes and noticed that the old man he had seen earlier was standing a respectful distance in front of him, holding his book under his arm. The old man smiled and said, “You new here?”

Larry nodded. “Moving in tomorrow. Just getting the feel of the place. Nice courtyard.”

“I spend a lot of time out here myself, if it’s not too cold or rainy. Mind if I sit down?”

Larry gestured towards the other chair nearby, and the old man settled into it. “I see you’ve already met Robin. That’s the cat. Sometimes I think he’s really the one in charge around here.”

“He your cat?”

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“He’s everybody’s cat. Phil feeds him, but he lives out here. He’s the law and order around this place.”

“Seems mellow enough.”

“If you’re not a rodent.”

“Well, if my ex-wife is right, I might be in trouble then,” Larry said.

The old man laughed. “Looks like you already passed muster with Robin, so I guess she’s misjudged you. Now if you don’t mind some silent company, I’m going to dive back into my book. By the way, my name’s Hal.” “Clarence. But I’d rather be called Larry.”

“Larry it is, then. You can be who you want around here.” The old man opened his book. Larry glanced at his profile, and then looked around the courtyard again. It was nothing special, just a rectangle with some plants and chairs, really. Still, for a moment he felt optimistic. Hal, the old man, and Robin, the cat, both ignored him though they sat nearby. Somehow that helped him feel at home, though he didn’t even live there yet. Maybe it would become a home of sorts for him after all, despite the boring architecture. You never knew. You never could tell how people would turn out. Yourself least of all, sometimes.

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