En Bloc Issue 3

en bloc fiction | poetry | art | photography

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FICTION

POETRY

Gabriela Halas Israel A. Bonilla Hattie Atkins M. Steven Neal Lizzie Golds Caitlyn Ng Man Chuen

Miodrag Kojadinović William Doreski David Heidenstam Sohaila Baluch Steve Denehan Henry Woodland

PHOTOGRAPHY

ART

Angela Zheng Jonathon Miller Kelly Hadley Rob Woodcox

Dilianny Espinoza Micha Huigen Ioannis Lassithiotakis Noushin Delfani

With special guests: Turner Prize Winner Keith Tyson Hasselblad Ambassador Hengki Koentjoro T.S. Eliot Prize Winner John Burnside

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Cover: Dilianny Espinoza

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PLASTIC FREE.

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CRUELTY FREE.

PURE ESSENTIAL OILS.

BRINGING ABOUT A SOAP REVOLUTION. REPLACING YOUR BOTTLES WITH BARS. 6 www.littlesoapcompany.co.uk

With special thanks to: Koden Digital RJL Editorial Ra&Olly Ltd

En Bloc would like to acknowledge that the verse 1950: Low Farm from the poem on page 78 has been featured previously in Pennine Platform, to whom we extend our thanks.

En Bloc Issue 3 Digital Edition 2021 Published by En Bloc Publications Ltd Copyright © 2021 EN BLOC PUBLICATIONS LTD. All rights reserved.

Printed by Pensord, Wales.

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: 2634-2294

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Various Works Ioannis Lassithiotakis

Man and Wife On days like this, her sorrows seem elective: purest gesture like the fur trim on a stole the queen wears for her sister’s execution; while somewhere in the backrooms of the year, the Cathar in him dreams in honeydew of how things might have been had he been saved: an Afterwards implicit in the light, no shadow anywhere, besides his own.

John Burnside

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Verses for a Sampler Rain at the gates and the ghost of a mother is here.

Fur-lined with the blush of Michaelmas, and plainly fabled, she is older than the girl who raised us, less impersonal, though not above suspicion.

Nightly we lay her down in a bed of needles, patient as mice, enthralled by the thought of Forever; nightly we wait in vain for the Ecce Virgo, a local hajj, the house of alpenglow, a phantom horseman from some Medieval woodcut, Homo ludens, with a taste for calculus.

Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts: the first snow blowing in from street to street.

A final orchard.

Blossom in the ruins.

John Burnside

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12 Time Travel Rob Woodcox

13 Otherworld Rob Woodcox

14 Heart Strings Rob Woodcox

15 Tamul Rob Woodcox

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17 Pink Harmony Rob Woodcox

18 The Mountain Rob Woodcox

Oblivious Birds Gabriela Halas

1 Gunner tried hard to be himself. Trouble was he didn’t know which self. He felt cursed. Thick-limbed. Uncomfortable when he awoke and more so in his dreams. Drawn and quartered. Couldn’t recognize himself in the mirror most days, played with his loose flesh, crooked teeth, his softness. He had memories of expressions, but few were familiar. He still felt the pull of swamp water, the pressure against his chest waders, the threat he felt in their potential to overfill. Cattail heads engorged in the spongy boundaries of pond and land, then exploded, air-borne in thick clouds, and caught in the damp corners of his mouth. Rushes so high his groin ached. Stepping out from the suck of mud, more than once Gunner had lost his balance, tilted, sloped, than sank into the gloom of rotting duck shit. Trouble was he dreamed one night of a 12 gauge in his right hand and the soft inner thigh skin of his sister in his left, downy and warm. He awoke damp, the indent of his breastbone pooled with moisture. Bitter bile trembled at the back of his throat and he lay on his back, waited out his panic and half-erection. He felt his twenty-year-old scalp, already thin, irritated, and clutched hard at the shaved head he used to cover his shame.

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Gunner had spent last spring at a youth Church camp. They’d volunteered in some Ducks Unlimited choked-out wetland; an expansive marshland, old dykes and clogged creeks, a sluggish green-black pond grimy with weeds in twisted range. A section of higher ground merged a two-track behind a farmer’s field to a four-wheeler trail, and a berm that had been raised against a mild slope long before. A narrow passage made for a makeshift shooting range, even as scraggly willows and early cottonwoods staked new claim. Four weeks on the Flats, the mosquitoes had descended in clouds. Tent flies zipped so fast and laughter filled the air like strikes against skin. Loud, driven, the male and female calls tireless; Gunner lay awake with the consistent gentle prod of ground at his back. Youth camp had felt like a joke, to everyone but Gunner. In the Church basement back in March, as everyone had gathered to be assigned waders and tents and tin mugs, Gunner recalled a quiver of excitement. Fluttered his hands in directions all at once, hisvoice rose, startled and effusive. He had felt a brief flash of recognition, the possibility of being one animal in the flock, part of the herd. But cliques and groups formed behind his head; he turned and twisted his baldness only to realize in the time it took him to look again, the flocks and herds abruptly resolved. Gunner wasn’t surprised. He had seen what drakes on the water did as they jostled for power, for place. The panicked desperate flail in the loser’s last sad attempts.

Gunner also saw what the drakes did to the hens, vulgar, unremitting.

The Church kids smoked, buried butts in the water’s brackish edge. Gunner walked through their coughs; a bog of smoke waved away in mockery. The long sedge hid his body and he ran the sleek cool shafts through his palms, watched mallards as they cackled in the stagnant algae. Gunner’s father, everyone called him Spud, had signed Gunner up.

“You go to Church for your mother, son, you go work DU for me. You’re not doing jack shit anyway.”

The idea was to get the kids involved, to tent and work and shoot, and forget things like electronics. To rough it. But they all drove to the Piggly Wiggly every few days to fill up on spongy pale buns and bacon, and Gunner never got the point of camping in a strangle of tree line as it skirted wheat fields and converted ag. Barns and tractors in distant view. All the fathers and newly

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muscled boys shot guns near every day. At birds or not, Gunner couldn’t always tell. Jesus quotes on XXL t-shirts on XXL men. The girls from Church sat high on a nearby picnic table, knees wide, backs taut, and watched. Pink camo short shorts pulled tight. Every few days in the pre-dawn light, the men and the boys dressed like the dank earth would decoy nearby fields, and when one man hollered, shot exploded in the sky, brought a rain of loosenecked birds smashing to the ground. A spring opener on snow geese—birds, Gunner was told—that tore through early soy and the root of winter wheat.

Spud declared their numbers out of control, their shit cakes every free patch of God’s green earth.

Spud went to Church of course, but really felt the pull of the blind more than Jesus’ long flowing hair. Being away from the women. Chicks, the younger men said, and they laughed, their bellies jiggling in a strange synchronous rapture.

Gunner took the birds later, dumped near the blinds, and laid them on their backs. Unfolded their wings, pressed flat and long like a T, and tore the thin flesh along the keel. Felt the rise of acid in his throat as each body gave way under force. Breasted them; convinced himself of their use if stacked neatly in the camp cooler next to the burgers they ate nightly. Gunner’s pile grew. Until every few days, he heaved them in the dumpster on the trip to town. Guessed the crows were going to have a hey-day.

2

Come October, Gunner felt different. He stared at himself, tried on expressions; flexed once or twice. Watched his arms, those ghastly spindles, move under halfhearted duress. Gunner saw the resemblance to his mother’s arms, those goose-fleshed markers of age and domesticity. The morning after Gunner’s dream, the thigh’s alabaster skin, warm and thin like a puppy’s belly, Gunner couldn’t look his sister in the eye. As he walked into the kitchen, there were three eggs in firm statue, a cross of bacon, and biscuits yellowed with butter. Gunner flinched, could feel a surge of deep discomfort rail between

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his ribs. He covered the sounds of his retching with the shower steam hot.

When he returned, Gunner’s breakfast sat like a message: paled out, limp, cold. Gunner, you are late for everything and appreciate nothing, his mother had once said. Gunner recalled the sound of each letter. APp.Re.Ci.ATE. He had been a kid then, sounded out each syllable until he traced his finger down a row of words—comprehend, understand. Un.DER.St.And. He stood closer to his mother after that, until she sighed, pressed her hand on the back of his neck, go on, Gunner, go.

Candace, Gunner’s mother, pronounced him ashen, white as the good Ghost, as Gunner sat and wrapped a hand around a cool glass of milk she placed in front of him. Candace, slight, yet efficient in figure, reminded Gunner of the white-tails that lingered where the suburbs had mowed forest into field.

She moved like she was forever recoiling from a wind; idle hands Gunner, she would say, but never satisfied the end of her thought. Candace never sat around like Spud, who sank further into his double-wide recliner. Gunner chewed, swallowed tightly. He had once watched a beluga butchered on TV; some northern place Gunner could never have imagined existed. The thrust of the gaff hook, the entire village in celebration. Gunner couldn’t look away from the perfectly cut sections of blubber, squares like giant marshmallows, distributed to waiting hands. The white float of fat as piece by piece was laid in rows on a pebbled beach. Repulsed, captivated, Gunner saw Spud there, his white massive flesh exposed.

Spud came in a few minutes later, stood with his back to Gunner, leaned his belly over the sink, and peered into the yard.

“If the goddamned Davis’ would just put that maple out of its misery, lawns around here might finally look right.”

Spud was going shooting; the last bunches of snow geese were still picking at a few fields before heading wherever they went. Those last shots of the season, Spud had once began to say to Gunner, but he hadn’t finished, didn’t expect Gunner to get it.

Spud glanced at Gunner and told him to rake last night’s stormy leaf loss. When he left the kitchen, Gunner stood. Ran hot water over the plate, rinsed glass and fork. Watched until Spud’s truck pulled from the drive down the street.

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Gunner moved through each patch of suburban lot; rust and ochre fell around him, the slash of vermillion in the dead vein of each blade. He didn’t mind the work. Hours would pass before much would happen—his mind emptied. He watched the shadows of trees change in angle, stretch in length.

Backlit by the sun, he was fond of negative space; the darkness that hugged the edge of light revealed more than the image itself.

“Hey, Retard!”

Gunner heard the cry of his younger sister.

Behind him came a kick, as she smeared the raked debris he had piled at the center of the yard.

“Mom wants you in the house, pronto. What the hell are you doing?”

She rolled her eyes and beat back to the house; her fury left a trail that made Gunner tired. Gunner looked down, didn’t know what she had exclaimed about. He stood, stared at the twigs caught in the teeth of the rake. There were pink wrappers of some kind too, and an arrangement to the grass that he liked.

Gunner was sure he had memories before this. Before his sister had decided that Gunner was helplessly feeble, or worse, wrong. They had sat together in this same yard, pulled out things from inside the shed, built make-believe pathways that led to rooms with mahogany doorways, the colored breath of dragons. Rooms which housed stories only they could understand between each other. There was a time, he was sure, when his sister had been excited about small things. Meaninglessness. Before she could really venture out into the world, he would bring back to her the lost objects he found through his wanderings. The thrill in her face, her little-kid smiles half-wild and gorgeous.

A tiny plastic stegosaurus in faded fluorescent. Two stones plastered together in fresh concrete in the shape of a heart. An owl pellet she rolled in her palms like a talisman and gazed at Gunner as he told her of the open fields behind the school where the Great Horns called. But his sister had not lasted. And Gunner couldn’t ask why.

Gunner came into the house. His mother was in the kitchen with her back to him, talked quietly into the telephone. She turned to face him with an expression Gunner had never seen. Something he had no words for. How could he be from this woman’s body and know so little about her, Gunner

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thought. He looked down, didn’t want his mother to see him looking at her, her body.

“Gunner. There’s been an accident. Your father. Shot someone. Something about the light, the goddamn geese. It doesn’t look good. He’s at the station now. It was a young woman. I think you knew her. She was from Church camp, Sandra something?”

His mother spoke in tones. Hues of color. The kind that explode across a prairie sky as nearly soundless winds lift to obscure. Gunner imagined the metronome of her heart missing timing, skipping rhythm. Her sandy-colored hair and freckled arms spun around the kitchen, jagged with stops and starts.

Her hands commanded every surface. She looked up one last time.

“I’m going to see your father now. I’m going now. I need you to stay here and look after your sister. Don’t let her go anywhere. Don’t leave the house in case anyone finds you. Asks questions. I don’t want you talking to anyone. Do you understand? Do you? I need to know you are listening. Gunn?”

He looked up and met her eyes. Gu.NN. “Yes.” “Good.”

Gunner’s mother’s exit out of the house left a panic of upheaval that breached Gunner. A riot of energy swirled around the hallway where Candace had last spoken. Somewhere, past his body and her body, was Spud, head in his hands at the police station downtown. Or full posture, in argument, enraged; Gunner couldn’t be sure.

Gunner breathed. Felt his chest compress slightly. Then a little more. Then more still until his breath became staggered, unpredictable. He had never felt the muscle in between his lungs matter so much. He managed to sit down.

A deep chaos rose in him. Felt the stubble on his chin itch. Felt his soft dog body ache.

“Gunner. Gunner!” His sister erupted into the kitchen, slid across the linoleum on sock feet and halted at Gunner’s back.

“Where’s mom? I’m going out. Stef ’s going to the mall and I need to go.”

“No. You can’t go anywhere. Mom’s gone and told me to not let you out.

Wait until she comes back. Wait until she calls or comes back.”

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Gunner turned and stared at his sister. Her hair nearly the same as Sandra had had that spring at camp; Gunner thought of downy feathers, bundles of soft foxtail woven together. Peacocks plumes that hung lazily. The type of hair girls complained wouldn’t do anything, Gunner would overhear. But he enjoyed the movement, a ruffle in the slightest winds, a willowing. Gunner’s sister sighed loud and deep. Her voice shook.

“I hate you, Gunner. You are a fucking moron.”

Gunner leaned, let his head pull him down until he lay crouched, forehead on the cool autumn floor, arms loose at his sides. This is not really happening, he thought. Mo.Ron. You bet your life it is.

3

Sandra had been a good sight. When the other kids sat around, teared through venison jerky between their front teeth or snuck smokes between weed pulls, Sandra kept her eyes skyward. She followed the silhouettes of birds flying high overhead. Despite the manic flap of waterfowl, she identified them without pause—the shape and angle of carpals, their leaner or wider football-shaped bodies, the crown of heads as they shuttled through the air.

She called out a litany of names: Cans. Pins. Rings. Blue-bill.

Gunner had imagined her late at night, memorizing the colors, the changing seasonal plumages. Their constant predictable movements across continents.

Sandra. Sand.Ra.Saaandraaa. Gunner would mouth as he lay on his back that spring. She had arrived a week after everyone else had begun; placed her tent closest to the slough that pursed their waders to their thighs. A Christian daughter with hair the color of a gold river evening, her body like some tree held tight against the weather—sturdy, thicker in the middle, with arms Gunner watched with envy. They were beautifully hefty, stronger than his own, all porcelain skin and mid-western breeding. Gunner held some memories precious; Sandra was one. Like flooded-out childhood basements or the long highway lines of storage units, most of Gunner’s memories were

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subject to the dust and grime of time. Jagged, confused realities. Gunner understood he hadn’t known Sandra, not at all. But she had made him feel different, that was all he knew.

Sandra had worn two-piece terry-cloth track suits; like soft towels they draped around the soft, bulging curve of her belly. The pat-pat of pink flipflops flung dust on her ankles as she walked the high dry ground of the campsite. Her bluntly cut hair swayed across her back. Her turned-in wrists, Gunner imagined, soft and smooth like a river’s stones. And despite, or maybe because of the way Sandra’s softness indulged in Gunner new thoughts, he was reminded of geometry, the cool precision of measure and focus. Her face a lighthouse of expression, impassive, converged on a fixed point. Her shorts strained against her muscles, the small pockets of fat at her sides. There was the sucking sound as her thighs loosened from the damp spaces they inhabited.

As Gunner watched Sandra walk, he felt a pain somewhere: recognizable, foreign, a restlessness despite the stillness across the Flats.

Sandra had painted signs for the local DU chapter. Gunner couldn’t imagine anyone but the ducks ever visiting the dreary watering hole they volunteered in, but interpretive signs were part of that spring’s work. Something for adults to scan over and kids to never read. Child-like, pretty, with simple reflective facts titled in a humble extravagance: “America’s Wetlands and You - Protecting Our Treasures”, “Familiar Waterfowl and What You Can Do to Help”, “A Hunter’s Memento - Shooting to Preserve Our Ducks”. He admired Sandra’s work from afar, close up when everyone went to sleep. Northern Shoveler, American Widgeon, Lesser Scaup—two-word phrases that left Gunner filled with questions. One familiar word, another from some foreign tongue. How names seemed to free and constrain. Sand.Ra. Gunner read—some ducks flew to Alaska. Others to Mexico. Migration. Flyways. Breeding. He blushed.

He followed Sandra’s brushstrokes with his finger.

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4

Spud spoke to Gunner a week after he arrived home from the police station.

Cornered in the kitchen, caught unawares, Gunner remembered the coolness of his forehead on the tiles. How he had taken in ragged halting mouthfuls of air. Gunner, his body cued, had avoided Spud’s entries and exits in every room of the house that week, no space sacred. Spud’s voice, like the crack of a pump as it punched along a magazine, startled Gunner; his bowl clattered on the counter. A splatter of milk discharged in a circular rattle.

“Gunner, tomorrow after the funeral, you need to drive your sister back home, me and your mother are going over to Stan’s. Got it?”

Gunner reached for the blue sponge in the sink, smelled its earthy mildew, and brushed a milky-way pale streak across the counter. Gunner knew Candance scrubbed the grout between the tiles; he laid his fingers in the cold milk, pressed it softly between.

“And don’t even think about driving anywhere but straight home. Got my eye on that odometer.”

Gunner couldn’t help it. He looked up at Spud, his father. Spud squinted.

And there, Gunner saw, not a look of dislike, as he had often for years, nor one of disgust, as Spud contorted on occasion, but a look of confusion.

Bewilderment. As though Spud peered into the Grand Canyon and wondered how many buckets of sand it would take to fill something so gigantic. And once filled, how long until the wind would empty such a pit. A strange intangible fact—the same kind of alien-like nature of Gunner as he stood in Spud’s kitchen—despite the slope to Gunner’s nose as it mirrored Spud’s, or the deeply trenched lines that bound both their knuckles. Gunner held Spud’s reticent wonder for a moment longer.

“Sure.” He replied and left the room. Left the bowl, the cool linoleum floors, the contracted universe on the ceramic tiles.

Later, Gunner would go back to the stripped-out land, those dirty little ponds and the cackling ducks, just to see where Sandra had chosen to use one shade over another. It seemed to Gunner, while each species of duck was

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perfectly accurate, there was Sandra too, flying. Soft. Substantial. He traced where color escaped, where her brush had leaked over the threshold of the body. Impulsive. Im.Pulse.Ive. When Church men carried Sandra’s body, held in glossed deep cherry across the Church parking lot, Gunner caught the way the sun played on the wood grain. The lines of once-living tissue shone and flashed like iridescent feathers in the falling light of October. Gunner closed his eyes to remember. A body shoved Gunner’s shoulder, but he hardly noticed. Instead, his mouth twisted in a way he recognized from a distant memory. He saw the sun move behind the trees, creating silhouettes. He watched oblivious birds take flight.

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Bicycle Angela Zheng

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Aubade Sleep. I’ll stay down at your feet while you lie underneath, two sheets exposed where their ends meet, then part.

I’ll draw the curtains in the dark and forget that I spent last night the same as every day this week: anxious, distracted by my phone, predisposed to not knowing where things should go or where they end and then begin. Leaving is one night nearer now and so as well a growing dread of lying, being lead.

Outside the footpaths are all bare and closed windows withhold the glare of morning and I am afraid. Aubade: Wake up. Wrap your hands round my face and tell me this contingent place is home, if not precisely safe Henry Woodland

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Late In the end I was late. You must have known: You’re late. In the end it was two cancelled flights And fourteen nights in a hotel. You knew as well As I did the silence of that wait, your arms Deprived of analeptic chimes from golden Charms of malachite and ametrine and Amethyst and moss agate. I arrived As green and dim as periclase, just too Late to be embraced however meekly From your bed. They’d pulled a white sheet high above Your head, a pale maquette kept safe from dust.

I crept in late to hold your hand, so frigid And so limp. Pathetic after your vice grip On mine when we’d leave school as if, having Strolled through two pandemics and as many Wars, the project of a street of cars Against a boy was your most grave.

I was too late and like all elegies I’m speaking to myself. There was no greeting, No goodbye, between them nothing else.

Henry Woodland

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Loch Kishorn, 1977 Hattie Atkins

“Knock, knock.” He mimics the noise with his mouth, the bedroom door ajar. “Food’s ready.”

“Now, see this, Robert,” she says as he enters, ignoring the dinner plate in his hand. “I haven’t seen this one before, see?”

Robert potters to his mother’s bedside table, beside which the yellowed sheets of the bed are stripped and unmade, and sets down the plate. The room is high ceilinged, held up by salt-weathered beams. The door to the adjoining bathroom is closed; from within it comes the quiet insect hum of the extractor fan. Stooped in her director’s chair, his mother strains against its soft linen back, working pressure into its wooden arms. Her neck is turned towards the view, her hands poised at the canvas. Before, Georgina would rely entirely on this first-floor panorama for her landscapes, which often reanimated Kishorn precisely as it had been: the blue loch, stationary in breeze, a drop from the stout, beetling cliff face holding aloft the surrounding cottages, patient in their few. Since then, the landscape has changed immutably. Now, it is rock and dust, the colour of pale, decaying daffodils, and the waters are festooned with floating steel. As she paints, Georgina attempts to decipher the remnants of the Kishorn she once knew, to excavate its since-consumed history. Then, falsely, she consecrates it in swathes of cobalt blue.

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He is deliberately slow before joining his mother at the window.

“Come, now. This man in the red.” Georgina takes his forearm, viper-like.

Robert spots him, crimson boiler suit streaked with black, as he crosses the yellowing grass towards the quarry.

“I don’t know him. There’s so many of them working here now. You can’t expect to know them all.”

She turns on him. “I’m keeping them in the memory bank, you see.”

Behind her spectacles she is owl-like, quietly furious; a look he recognises and dismisses, not yet a warning tell.

“Aye, that’s fine, ma. Your food is ready.”

They have eaten meals in the attic bedroom for years now, since his mother’s respiratory system began to protest and the stairs became a challenge. Tonight, they eat on trays together, him on the bed, her in the director’s chair.

“We ought to get you a seat more comfortable,” he says after some quiet.

“I’m grand, thanks.”

“Can’t be good for your back, that.”

“I haven’t seen anyone in this red suit before. Do you think they’re doing a different job to the others?”

He prickles with irritation. “How should I know?”

Georgina picks at her meal. Outside, in dwindling light, the quarry is absent of all life. The loch’s surface, clear of material and boats for the first time in days, shimmers an antiquated pearlescent, a reflection of the just-mounting moon. She read in the newspaper last week that work on the Ninian Central Platform – a rig supposedly being used to siphon oil from the North Sea – would soon begin. She breathes in the sight of clear waters, thankful for their brief reinstation, and is, for a moment, defused. The man in red has disappeared.

She asks Robert, “Did you get down to the town today?”

“Aye, I did.”

“And?” “The Jobcentre had nothing again. Surprise, surprise.”

Georgina sniffs, a quick sound of disappointment. “Oh, well. If that’s your lot, that’s your lot.”

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Robert avoids her gaze, moving a boiled spud around in a rim of butter.

“I had – I did have another offer today. I was at the pub with some of the lads from the quarry.” He pauses, waiting for his mother’s response.

She looks closely at him. “And?” “There’s work going. The kind of work that would earn us a thousand pounds a week, in fact.”

“How interesting, Robert.”

His bones seem to loosen beneath his jumper, sulky like a child. “A thousand, ma,” he repeats.

In a quick fit of contempt, Georgina shoves her dinner, meal half-eaten, from its rest on her knees. Inches of pink salmon leave fat drops of yellow on the carpet. The tray lands with a plastic wobble and the plate, becoming separate, spins loose, cracking against the bedframe beside her son’s legs before rolling slowly to the ground where it clunks apart into two meticulous halves. Robert, in a contrasting moment of stasis, had not shifted to shield himself; only when the plate has slowed and stopped does he flinch, lashes moving jerkily against his cheeks. He surveys the scene. The peas have disbanded, their cone formation like a fleet of minute ships setting south and dispersing. Standing, Robert bends to retrieve the scattered bisections, then stops himself. Georgina watches her son, his disjointed movement, his lingering conflict, as if she is familiar with this pattern: an initial apathy, a lack of emotion, growing to quiet resentment as it ferments. She lets this resentment brew, her chest heaving up and down, a balloon taking in air and emitting it again.

“You are ridiculous, ma.”

“How dare you even suggest it,” Georgina says, voice calm. “A job with them? After all they’ve taken from us?”

He ignores her. “If you think I’m clearing up the mess, you’re wrong.”

Stepping cleanly over it, he moves to the door, avoiding the spot in which his mother sits.

“Get a grip, Robert, it’s just a plate,” she breathes.

With a suggestion of finality, he shuts the bedroom door behind him, before opening it again and leaving it ajar.

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HATTIE ATKINS

That night, Georgina dreams of 1912. Her sisters, in distant, papery fragility, gather at the cliff edge, about to descend to the waterfront. She is in the kitchen downstairs, only just big enough to see over the basin of the sink and out to the cliff edge. Content in her solitude, she turns away from them.

On the table, the pink gingham of the tablecloth flashing drowsily like the illuminated dancefloors she would never come to intimately know, sits a glass jar containing three ladybirds and three wide leaves: one bed, one nutritious meal, one latrine for each; necessity meeting synchronicity. Even as the dream plays out at the ends of her fingers, she is not sure if it is memory or makebelieve. She is not sure if her history still resides in her body at all.

It is late when she wakes, subsumed by the bedroom’s empty, lolling darkness.

She nudges the hot water bottle pressed against her aside, heat itching in the creeping summer humidity. One leg then another, she shifts to perch on the edge of the mattress. From such an angle, the Kishorn that exists beyond her bedroom window is flattened, made two-dimensional, and Georgina pays it only subsidiary mind as she places her specs on her nose, allowing the dream to trickle off her like sweat and her swollen ankles to regain some human sensation. A blue light from shore brings Kishorn, pinprick, back to her attention; she refuses to close the curtains at night, she the watcher and her house the watchtower.

Agitated, Georgina moves to the window. Still, she finds the quarry bare of activity. To the east, across the grass, the sprawling caravan park is unlit. The strangers had all arrived this way in 1975, manifesting in their hundreds, swarms of them in motorhomes with headlights and grilles masking staring eyes and half-open mouths. Some of them materialised in long, flat cars topped by canoes. Georgina knew, then, the influx was invasion. The families that emerged – tall husbands and mushroom-haired wives and numerous bug-eyed children – were not families at all, but parasites, infiltrators of their idyll. Before them, Kishorn was a sleepy village of uninterrupted landscape, scarce population, low, wide skies and stretching crystalline waters. Now, Georgina thinks, it is a wasteland, a thing violated by a vague industrial subset of oil barons and businessmen and their labouring foot soldiers. “They’ll do

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anything for money, this folk,” she told her son in 1975. “They’ll rip our home apart brick by brick. Just you wait.”

Georgina scrambles to stand. There is no blue light now; somewhere, on a distant shore, it has been extinguished.

Disgruntled and distracted, she takes three steps before becoming unbalanced on something below her feet. Mid-motion, she fumbles. Then, she finds herself on the deck, heavy on her rear end. The dull ache is instantaneous, although she feels only numb pain below the coccyx. Georgina notes the broken plate she has slipped on, frustratedly scrutinising the blue shadow for a culprit and finding it there, upturned at her ankle.

Robert appears in the open slice of the door. His mother groans, not having heard him approach.

“Christ, ma,” he says, hastening to help.

“Stop it, you wee girly. I’m fine.”

His countenance is grave as he lifts her, a hand beneath each armpit. She grapples with the pinstripe pyjama shirt at his shoulder as he shifts her uneasily back onto the mattress and she finds a comfortable spot at its edge, feet dangling above the floor.

“You should have cleared up your mess when I told you to,” says Georgina.

Robert says nothing. He props himself up in the director’s chair. The distance between them, he suspects, is a verge.

“Was that whiskey on your breath?” She had smelt it as she neared his face: sour, alcoholic, warm.

“Aye, just a nightcap. I couldn’t sleep.”

“Same here.”

He holds his head in one hand. The easel faces him, and he glances over her most recent work: it is a troublingly familiar piece, a carbon copy of every scene she has painted from within the bedroom, with careful strokes of greenwhite cliff meeting the loch below, to its left. From here she can see the entire scope of the panoramic landscape. He can admire the scene aesthetically, but feels no recognition, possesses no feeling of grief, for the long-dead idyll it depicts. He wants to tell his mother this, that he wishes she would keep the corpse of it subsumed by the earth.

38

HATTIE ATKINS

“We could move you into the study downstairs,” he offers eventually, blindly.

“The study? It’s tiny. Why should I want to do that?”

“I worry about you up here. Slipping and falling, and so on.”

“Your suggestions tonight have been a load of shite, Robert.” A headache begins to bloom in her temples, and she sighs. “Well, get us a whiskey, then.”

In the kitchen, Robert takes a swig from the bottle before washing the bottom of his mug with it and pouring another for his mother. He glances over the letter he had been reading, creased with three sharp folds, dampened by plump shards of soapy sink water. He doesn’t read it; simply watches the words become lines and rounds the harder he stares. In a flash of panic, Robert puts the mugs aside and slides the letter into its envelope, before shelving it in the cupboard beneath the sink.

When he returns to her bedroom, stairs creaking like the swoon and rattle of an old fishing boat, Georgina is asleep where she sits. He sighs, a sound of relief, and tugs the curtains shut across the window.

Beadily, Georgina watches her son in the driveway. Amongst the long grass, he is dressed in brown trousers with a loose cotton button-up topping a plain t-shirt, an unfamiliar rucksack slung over one shoulder. She stops watching, lingering instead over a beige telephone wired into the wall. In her quiet hesitation, she notes that the external din – of mechanics, metal on metal, shuddering earth and masculine shouts – has not quite drowned out the harmony of the gull’s call. Georgina pulls a finger around the rotary dial and sticks the receiver under her chin.

“Hello?”

“Hello, dear.”

“Oh, there’s a surprise,” her sister responds. “Long time, George. Are you alright?”

“Aye, I’m fine, Dot. Well, Robert has betrayed me, of course, but that’s by the by.”

There is some pause. Eventually, she says, “How’s that, then?”

“He’s working for them now.”

“Is that a fact?”

39

LOCH KISHORN, 1977

“Aye, it’s a fact. He told me he was offered a job with them last night and this morning he left without a word. Rucksack and all.”

Dot sighs. Although younger than Georgina, she is still well into her seventies, and her voice quavers with age. “Would that really be so bad?”

“They are evil people. They have thieved from me and I will not allow it.”

“You could do with the money.”

“Don’t tell me what I could do with.”

“If you only called in to be rude, I don’t mind hanging up.”

In fact, Georgina hangs up first. She bristles into the still air, receiver slammed, hand remaining in place, unsure why she believed Dot would take her side at all. In their long history – the kind uprooted, excavated, by men and machinery and money – they have rarely been a team. She remembers vividly, like paint appearing unwilled onto canvas, the summer of 1912, and her young, adolescent body, feverish with tuberculosis, packed into the back of a snout-nosed ambulance. She remembers her sisters, Dot in the foreground, waving once, twice, before receding to the loch. In a year’s hospital stay they visited only a handful of times, and her life diminished to that of a creature in a jar, the tentative promise of Loch Kishorn to return to like a homing beacon.

Dusk has settled in a thin, spiderweb mist by the time Robert returns to the cottage. Unusually, he showers before coming up to see her. Still in her director’s chair, canvas untouched, Georgina hears the click of the front door, the thud of feet on beechwood floor, then the moving pipes as the shower – a fairly new addition to their old, solid home – turns to heat.

At her feet is today’s paper. The front cover sports an illustration of the Ninian Central Platform as it will look upon completion: it is a flat, circular thing, the length of a football pitch, perhaps, but grotesquely alien. A sort of extra-terrestrial metropolis, the platform is pockmarked with tunnelling holes, concrete walls within walls, labyrinthine, spiralling to its centre, parts of it suspended by wires that lead, seemingly, to nowhere. She wonders how she will paint the blue of the loch correctly once it has been eclipsed.

When Robert finally comes to the bedroom door, announcing himself with

40

HATTIE ATKINS

a “knock, knock”, Georgina doesn’t turn from the window.

“Everything alright, ma?”

She doesn’t respond. Outside, the day’s lights, cottage to cottage, are diluting.

“Ma?” “Where have you been?”

“Hm?” “Where have you been? You’ve been gone for hours.”

The springs of the bed wheeze where he sits.

“Doing odd jobs about the town. Getting some pennies in. Nothing suspicious.”

“Oh, aye. Nothing suspicious, then, you see.”

He shifts in his perch, defensive. The pinstripe pyjamas he has changed into are too big, and swell airily around his shoulders and armpits. “You don’t believe me?” When there is no response, he continues, “Even if I had been down at the quarry – which, I’ll say again, I haven’t – I’d be doing it for us.”

“Oh, give over.”

“You don’t understand the money they’re bringing in. It will make us all rich, ten years’ time.”

“I’ll be dead in ten years’ time.”

“Oh, now you give over,” he scoffs.

Georgina turns to him, deflated. She understands her lot in life; she shoulders and relinquishes, doesn’t ask for more. She takes her tea stewed and sugared, delivered outside her bedroom door. She sleeps in the same revolving series of bed socks, a hot water bottle pressed against her abdomen, its sharp comfort transcending the seasons. She loses her breath dusting the room, and so the surfaces grow grey and thick. She eats fish and potatoes at dinnertime, manifesting the role of the retired fishwife accepting the fruits of a life’s long labour. She understands how deterioration creates absence, especially within a social life, but counts herself lucky to still receive some visitors: Robert, from below; her sister, who visits twice a year; Doctor Aird, who assesses the efficacy of her lungs when he sees fit. She doesn’t ask for more, nor does she ask more of Robert than this.

“Look at what they’ll do to my home,” she says, motioning towards the

41

LOCH KISHORN, 1977

newspaper on the floor with a socked foot.

Apprehensive, Robert shifts to see better. He has seen the illustration already, of course, glances at it only perfunctorily. Outside, through the window, the skyline is littered again with the same machine progress. He wants to tell her it gives him only hope.

His mother continues, “What do I have if not my home?”

Robert gesticulates at the walls. “This is your home, ma. If I don’t make money, we won’t be able to afford repairs, or the bills, and we’ll lose it. Then we really will have nothing.”

“You think I’m daft, don’t you?” There is wildness, again, in the arch of her owlish eyebrows.

Keen to defuse the moment, he crouches before her, takes her time-oiled hand in his. “I know how you feel. That’s why I’m not working for them. I was washing windows on the high street. I promise.”

At blue dawn light breaking in, Georgina sits up and runs a hand through the hair at the nape of her neck. There is a scent in the air, crawling up the stairs, thick like stew cooking through on the stove. A blob of yellow stains the carpet: her spilt dinner’s final resting place. Having moved over to the director’s chair, she watches the caravan park across the way, labourers beginning to emerge like ants from their mounds, some of the wives lingering at their doors to wave them off. Robert, interrupting the scene’s familiarity, strides into view. He is wearing a red boiler suit, zipped up to his chin. He shuts the gate behind him, and greets another suited man as he goes. He casts no glance up to the window, although he knows his mother will be watching.

At first, Georgina does nothing. Then, over the arm of the director’s chair, near tipping herself to the ground, she throws her fist and forearm at the glass. The noise on connection is heavy and hollow, like a hare in frenzy that thumps at the ground with its hind leg.

“Robert,” she shouts. He cannot hear her, or he can; either way, he does not look. “Robert.”

Breath shallow, she pounds against the window until her son has receded into the landscape. The last knock of herself against the glass produces a thin,

42

HATTIE ATKINS

spiderweb crack in its surface; only then does she desist. She limps to the bedroom door, teeters down the geriatric stairs with swaying uncertainty.

Through the passageway, she hauls the front door open, emerges into fresh, blue breeze, and finds it tastes ashen, yellow, on her lips. She lingers, eyes the water visible beyond the rocky drop; the skeletal structure of the Ninian Central Platform eyes her back. After a minute of pause, waiting to go on, Georgina feels the heft and pull of acute defeat. She closes the door and heads back up the stairs.

43

44 Stay Dilianny Espinoza

Let that shit go Dilianny Espinoza

45

Judging a Poetry Competition His tone was curt, bruised I let him talk waiting for him to get to the point it didn’t take long having read one of my books he had called me out of the blue a couple of months before asking me to judge a poetry competition I had agreed flattered as I was now, he mentioned a poem I acknowledged it I see that you didn’t shortlist it.

Okay.

Why not? there had been hundreds of poems good and bad I could remember some of them but not that one I went through the files found it barely remembered it second time around I have the poem here.

Right, right, right.

It is coherent but it says nothing.

Right, right, right.

I don’t know why the writer felt the need to write it.

46

Right, right, right.

Everybody knows that flowers are nice.

That meadows are nice.

Right, right, right.

When I finished reading it, I did not feel anything. a pause The thing is, and maybe you didn’t know this but she works for RTÉ and is married to a famous journalist.

I did not know, let it hang there for a while …Okay.

Did you not feel that it had any merit at all? he went on, asked me for my academic credentials my literary qualifications the conversation ended shortly after when I told him I had none Steve Denehan

47

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49

A Threefold Cord Israel A. Bonilla

As I help Fátima’s father carry the flowers, he complains about his back.

“A bunch of delicate things putting me to the test. Can you believe it?”

I’m close to laughing, but I do my best to keep it a smile when we near the entrance. Most of Fátima’s cousins are gathered round a coffee-filled table. The disposable cups seem untouched. You can still see the vapor rising from them; on the whole, you wouldn’t suspect they were theirs. Some of her cousins browse their phones, others whisper and signal a grin. Those who see us wave aloofly. We leave the flowers next to others’ arrangements.

Fátima’s mother approaches with heavy steps. Everyone’s apathetic mood gives way to a measure of solemnity. They lock their phones and hide them, hush, stand straight, smooth out their shirts. One by one, they hug her. They all seem unsure whether to speak. Perhaps they sense that by doing so, they’ll undermine her frail silence. Her eyes rarely fasten on theirs. She stares into the distance. The moment she leaves, they resume the manner in which they intend to spend the night.

I haven’t exchanged a word with Fátima. She’s concentrated on her mother.

Aside from helping with the flowers, I’m at a loss. Her father seems as disoriented as I am. We follow them into the main room. It is slightly empty.

There is a large, pristine table in the center, on which a spare plate of cookies

50

ISRAEL A. BONILLAS

rests. Only one of Fátima’s uncles, the youngest, is sitting here with his family.

He embraces his sister, who at last is in no hurry. She breaks down. He remains calm and greets us with a nod. Fátima is touched by this gesture and rushes toward one of the bathrooms.

I sit in a chair nearby. The door to the chapel is in front of me. I can distinguish the rest of the uncles and aunts. Unlike the youngest, they look overwhelmed.

As much as I would like to offer my condolences now, I somehow feel alien to the whole situation and thus fear they might suspect insincerity. I wait for Fátima’s lead. Her parents, meanwhile, enter without us. There is immediate commotion.

Fátima trudges to the chapel’s door. She pauses and glances in my direction, then lowers her head and goes inside. I catch up. The casket hasn’t been brought. I try not to prolong my interactions, expecting a laconic demeanor to compel everyone to forget me. Nevertheless, one of her uncles grips my hand with both of his. He does so almost desperately.

“It means very much to me that you’re here. Very much.”

I grab his shoulder and give a weary smile. Fátima, with swollen eyes, asks whether I would like some coffee. Before I answer, she hands me a cup. It is only now that I notice everyone here has one pressed against their chest. A gradual silence harmonizes the varying degrees of grief. Fátima and I head to the main room.

“They’re tired. They’re at that point in which you just can’t keep crying.”

“I know.”

The families are slow to arrive. Their dispersal is uniform: the young ones to the lobby, the middle-aged to the main room—the lone close relative to the chapel. The large, pristine table gluts with plates and used napkins. People begin talking after a respectable number of minutes. One would figure a single subject, but no: love, maturity, parenthood, genetics, family values, loans, crime rates, vagrancy, rehabilitation, God are all discussed. I believe a conjectural biographer could glean an authentic portrait from the variations upon these seemingly disparate themes; with no more than an ear to listen, of course.

Fátima props her head on one of her hands and makes an effort to stay

51

A THREEFOLD CORD

awake. In front of us, her youngest uncle plays with his daughter and answers his wife, who is sketching anecdotes to her sisters, whenever she needs to recall a detail.

“Have you spoken with Adrian?”

“No. We said hello. That’s it.”

“What about your uncle’s sons?”

“I gave my condolences.”

“They looked okay, don’t you think?”

“Yes.” In every remark I am torn between dismal comfort and genuine doubt.

Although I’m aware that in these moments it is best to quiet, I’m confronted again with the matter of perceived insincerity.

I go out for air. Adrian, Fátima’s most opinionated yet beloved cousin, breaks off his conversation to approach me.

“A cigarette would be nice, wouldn’t it?”

“Couldn’t agree more.”

“But, you know, it’s not an option. They still see us as kids.”

“Guess that wouldn’t apply to me.”

“Ha. They’ve already made their mind up about you. It wouldn’t mesh.”

“No cigarettes, then.”

“My uncle liked them. For a while he hid the habit, but… things didn’t work out with Aunt Flor, and that was that.”

“Can’t blame him.”

“He fucked up his life, though. I know Fátima hates to hear it, but it’s true.”

“It’s difficult to talk about it. That’s for sure. He is, in the end, her uncle.

Was.” “It’s fine. He is our uncle.”

“And he was good to her.”

“I’m not disagreeing with that. I’m talking about his life as a whole. There’s Aunt Flor, Leobardo, Elena…”

“I get it. But there’s also many other people. How would you even begin to calculate all of that?”

“Ask around one day.”

52

ISRAEL A. BONILLAS

“It will be a mix. It’s always a mix.”

He appears to meditate his answer; a hearse then parks close to us. I pat Adrian’s back and hurry inside. As the realization that the casket has arrived furthers, body after body tenses. Fátima is no longer in the main room.

I intend to look for her in the chapel, but I’m struck by the sight of her youngest uncle—he is sitting still, with both hands clasped near his face, almost as in prayer; the sonorous approach of the casket seems to increase the speed at which his left leg fidgets. His wife and her sisters are distracted by the murmurs and stand as soon as the casket enters. He remains concentrated elsewhere. The casket is slowly moved toward the chapel. There is a minor struggle to position it in proper relation to the door. In the midst of this, he reaches for one of the casket’s edges and taps it. He gets up, adjusts his belt, and follows the casket through the door. Coughs mingle with wails.

Eventually, the tension subsides. Now, however, the conversations steer along obscure routes. They are far more idiosyncratic—intimate, even. I distract myself by looking at the corporate-like minimalism of the funeral-home.

It is amusing to find how much it contributes to the general solemnity— with acoustics that propel the faintest step into shrieks, with barren colors that pummel any mirth, with apathetic employees who hint at a residue of sympathy. You must be reminded of the proper etiquette: affliction or shame.

I am handed over a half-full cup of coffee.

“Can I lie down and push my feet against you?”

“Sure, sure. Go ahead.”

She is done. I am done. Most are done.

I look forward to the burial, where the off-key guitar and humble snare drum will play old songs that’ll excuse the breach of manners.

53

Seed of Consciousness Keith Tyson 54

Geno Pheno II NYC 2004 Keith Tyson 55

Nine Oil Rigs Keith Tyson 56

Still Life with Vectors Keith Tyson 57

Unnatural Portrait Keith Tyson 58

Legacies of Violence Empire built pyres continues to build pyres that burn and burn bodies and histories and truths Sohaila Baluch

59

Lobsters Don’t Mate for Life Lizzie Golds

You’re soaked when you arrive. It’s July, the rain is warm and unpredictable.

‘Sorry,’ you say. ‘Northern line got stuck so I ran here from Camden.’

The air feels thicker with you standing there. You’ve got that summertime city smell about you – damp denim, petrol and sweat. It mingles with the scent of fried garlic coming from the kitchen, hot and pungent.

‘I messaged you about the delays on the Northern line,’ I say, trying to make space between us. The entrance is cramped and muggy. The glass panes on the door are steaming up, blurring the outside world.

‘I didn’t get it,’ you say.

‘The bus would have been faster.’

I wave at the front-of-house manager who has now asked me twice if I’d rather wait at the table instead of in the foyer. He looks at your sodden T-shirt and opens his mouth to comment. He decides against it when he sees my expression.

‘If you’d like to follow me, then,’ he says. I nod a silent ‘thank you’.

We stop at a table for two by the biggest window. He lights the candle in the centre.

‘Best seats in the house,’ he says. He smiles at me, but it doesn’t reach his eyes.

60

LIZZIE GOLDS

‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘Sorry about the delay.’

‘No problem. We’ll need it back by eight o’clock, if that’s alright?’

One hour. ‘Sure,’ I say.

Your shoes squelch as you pull out your chair and sit down. The man sitting behind you reaches for the jacket on the back of his seat, sees us, and frowns.

I’m not sure if it’s directed at your squelching, my lavender purple hair, or simply our combination.

We came here on our first date, but it wasn’t the first time we’d met. We’d been flirting with each other for months at work. It was me who finally asked you out, because we both hated our jobs, but I was the one spending my lunch breaks on the phone to recruiters. You got in my tube carriage at Tottenham Court Road and we travelled the last six stops here together, glancing up at each other every so often and grinning like we’d already been drinking. You could have sat next to me, but there was an unspoken agreement that we weren’t going to talk until we got to the restaurant. You were still chewing gum and I was still fussing with my hair and checking my lipstick. We understood each other then.

We shared bruschetta and you got basil stuck between your teeth. You thought it was embarrassing when I told you; I thought it was cute. We kept starting anecdotes and not finishing them, getting distracted by the nearness of each other, the euphoria of finally being here together. I ate spaghetti without considering that you’d see me with tomato sauce around my mouth.

You let me have the last few spoonfuls of your sticky toffee pudding because I panic-ordered cheesecake and didn’t like it. We drank too much whiskey and walked back to the tube arm-in-arm, something of a challenge since my boots made me five inches taller than you. I liked that you didn’t mind.

It was your idea to eat here on our three-year anniversary. It’s not because this is our favourite place. Things aren’t how they used to be between us. If any spark remains, this is the last remaining place we might find it.

You’re pretending to study the menu now, but I can feel you trying to read me. Your hair is already dry because you had it cropped so short that I can see your freckles through the fine blond strands. It doesn’t suit you.

‘Are you having a starter?’ you say.

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LOBSTERS DON’T MATE FOR LIFE

‘Maybe,’ I say. ‘Are you having one?’

‘I’ll have one if you have one.’

‘I think I’ll leave it.’

‘Okay, no starters, then.’

‘Have one if you want one.’

‘I’m alright.’

You’re lying. You’re nervous, and you get hungry when you’re nervous. We’re different in this respect. I scan the menu, my gaze automatically landing on a baked macaroni and cheese. I would normally devour this and have no problem finding room for dessert – but macaroni and cheese is not a food for tense situations. It’s a food for unwinding, for cradling on the sofa. It’s something I make on long Sunday afternoons, still in my pyjamas, eating most of it straight out of the pan. I can happily spend hours in the kitchen, gathering herbs and spices from the cupboards, adding a pinch of this and a splash of that to a big stew pot, flitting from sink to hob to chopping board and back again. I like making the kitchen my domain, taking up that space.

Unlike you, I also like the mess. You clean up as you go. You like recipes that are quick and formulaic, with no room for interpretation.

I flip the page to look at side dishes. Flip it back again. Consider a mushroom risotto, a spicy chickpea burger. Eventually settle on a superfood salad that doesn’t remind me of anything. Cold quinoa, butternut squash, sundried tomatoes. No dressing.

A waiter comes over, pours water into our glasses and sets down a bread basket. You take two slices and start eating straight away. You order lobster for your main and I try to hide my disapproval behind my menu.

‘Is that lobster for two?’ the waiter asks.

‘No,’ I say, without looking at you. ‘Superfood salad for me, please.’ I tell him to come back for our drinks order.

‘What is it?’ you say, because you know me.

I take a sip of water, tap my fingers against the glass. Try to leave it alone.

Can’t. ‘You know lobsters get boiled alive.’

‘Do you not want me to order lobster?’

‘No. I mean, no, have what you want.’

62

LIZZIE GOLDS

‘You should have said if you didn’t want me to order lobster.’

‘I didn’t say that.’

I look out of the window at the street below. The rain has eased; the clouds are parting. A group of women a few years younger than me walk past, heels clacking on the pavement.

‘Don’t they mate for life?’ you say.

‘What?’

‘Lobsters. I’m sure I heard it somewhere.’

‘No. Hardly any animals do.’ I pick up my napkin, shake it vigorously and arrange it on my lap.

‘Swans and penguins.’

‘Why are we talking about this?’

‘You were the one that started…’ You close your eyes and press your fingers against your temples, realising how ridiculous it would look if two adults got into a ‘you started it; no, you did’ argument in public.

‘I don’t know,’ you sigh. ‘I was just thinking about it. It’s nice.’

‘Yeah, if you’re a swan or a penguin.’

‘Not if you’re a person?’

‘That’s not what I said.’

That question is there again, hanging in the air, unsaid but very much heard.

We’ve been to three weddings this year alone. You cried during two of the ceremonies, even though one of them was for my old school friend. You hardly knew him.

You push your chair out and lean back, looking around the restaurant as if searching for a topic of conversation that won’t make us prickle. Deciding you’re out of options, you say, ‘My parents want to come down next week.’

I take a piece of bread that I don’t want. ‘I can stay at Mum’s for a few days, give you more space in the flat.’

‘No, they’ll want to see you.’

‘It’s cramped.’

‘It’s our flat, though. It’ll be weird if you’re not there.’

Your parents don’t like me. They think I eat too much. Six months into our relationship, I brought a dish of vegetarian pesto lasagne to one of your family

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LOBSTERS DON’T MATE FOR LIFE

gatherings because I thought it was a potluck situation and you didn’t tell me otherwise. I put it down on the kitchen table next to shop-bought pots of coleslaw, cocktail sausages and red pepper couscous. Your mother peered under the foil covering as if inspecting a wound and said, ‘What’s this, then?’

She told me that I was a silly girl for doing all that cooking and that I really shouldn’t have. Your father saw it and said, ‘Crikey, did you not think we’d have enough food for you, girl?’ and clapped me firmly on the back, as if suggesting that I was sturdy enough already without any lasagne.

Now whenever we see them, they ask if I’ve got any spare cannelloni in my handbag just in case. You always laugh along with them, but I don’t think it’s funny. Nobody ever ate my lasagne and I still haven’t got my dish back.

The thought of it sitting at the back of one of their cupboards gathering dust makes me feel inexplicably sad.

The waiter approaches our table again. You order us whiskey and coke without hesitation. You’re trying to remind me what we’re doing here, harking back to that first date when everything was new and uncomplicated, when people still looked at us and smiled with their eyes.

Since then, I’ve changed my hair colour five times. I got a new job four months after we started dating, and I’ve been promoted twice. You have the same job and still hate it, but you keep finding vague, unimportant reasons not to do anything about it. I don’t ask questions anymore. We bought a corner sofa and a mattress because we rented unfurnished. I know your sister’s Netflix password. You’ve got my smoothie maker at work. I swap recipes with your best friend’s husband; he’s borrowed my favourite cookbook. Ending things isn’t as simple as it might have been if we were younger, or perhaps a few decades older. Our clothes smell the same.

The waiter returns with our food and drinks. He sets down your chips and side salad, both in separate bowls, as well as individually wrapped wipes for your hands. You move the dishes around on the small table like puzzle pieces, trying and failing to find an arrangement that doesn’t feel crowded.

I season my salad and mix the ingredients around. A sundried tomato falls out of my bowl and lands in your chips.

‘Sorry,’ I say, fishing it out with my fork. You hate sundried tomatoes.

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LIZZIE GOLDS

Wrinkly, slimy, salty things, you call them.

‘It’s okay,’ you say.

You pick at your lobster with your fingers, spattering butter sauce across the table. You try to get at it with your knife and fork, and one of its claws flies off your plate and hits the side of my bowl. You sigh and sit back in your chair, wiping your hands. You look out of the window, your eyes darting from passer-by, to lamppost, to car. ‘This isn’t going well,’ you say.

I stab a cube of butternut squash with my fork. ‘No.’ ‘How’s yours?’

‘It’s fine.’

‘Do you want some chips?’

There is a part of me that does, but now it feels inappropriate to share. We last shared chips on a freezing November day on Brighton Pier. We’d already had dinner, but the portions were small, and I was still hungry. You were full, but you wanted to share the chips because you said it would be romantic. A seagull crapped on my coat and you insisted on giving me yours, even though it was only on the sleeve and I thought it was funny. I said I was just happy it hadn’t gone in the chips; you said you weren’t going to let a seagull’s bowel motions get in the way of a lovely stroll along the pier. We laughed (and you shivered) all the way back to the hotel.

‘No, thanks,’ I say now. ‘I’m not that hungry.’

You frown. ‘You’re always hungry.’

‘What?’ I say, bristling, even though I know you meant this out of genuine concern.

‘No,’ you say. You screw your eyes shut and shake your head. ‘I meant – that’s not what I – I’m sorry.’

‘Yeah. I know.’

I chop up my salad just for something to do. I eat a few bites but don’t taste anything. You try to pick apart your lobster without sending any more of it flying.

‘Sorry,’ you say, when another piece of shell shoots towards me. ‘I’m just making a mess. I think I’m done.’

‘Yeah, me too.’ I set down my cutlery.

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LOBSTERS DON’T MATE FOR LIFE

‘Do you want anything else?’

‘No,’ I say. ‘They need the table back at eight, anyway.’

You check your phone. 19:50. ‘Oh, right. We’ve not got long, then.’

‘I’ll ask for the bill.’

The waiter brings it, along with a plate of chocolate truffles.

‘Have you got the joint card?’ you say, looking in your wallet. ‘I can’t find mine.’

‘I didn’t bring it out with me.’

‘I guess we’ll split it, then.’ You hand the waiter your card. ‘Half on each, please.’

I pay my half and ask the waiter to box up the truffles.

You give me a look. You never ask for doggy bags and you hate it when I do it. I hate the thought of wasted food more.

I gather up my bag and umbrella. The waiter returns with the box of chocolates and hands them to you, seeing that my hands are full.

Outside, the rain has stopped. The pavement is still wet but it’s sunny and warm, a perfect July evening. A group of teenagers walk past with a frisbee and a plastic bag full of cans, on their way to Primrose Hill.

‘Are we going back to the flat?’ you say. It’s always been “the flat”, never “home”. You’re looking directly at me now. The sun is making your blue eyes seem pale, almost translucent.

I look down at my feet, then up to the sky. ‘No.’ I say. My voice cracks. ‘I’m not going back.’

‘Not coming back,’ you say.

‘No. I’m–’ ‘I know.’

‘–going to Mum’s.’

‘Yeah. Okay.’

‘So, I guess–’ ‘Do you want the chocolates?’ You hold them out to me, your hand shaking.

‘Oh, yeah. Thank you,’ I say, taking them.

‘It’s okay.’

‘So, I’ll be back for my…’

66

LIZZIE GOLDS

‘Yeah.’

‘I’ll text you, or you can...’

‘Okay.’

Another couple leaves the restaurant, chatting happily. They walk between us, oblivious and beautiful. You stare after them as they walk away.

‘I’m going to go now,’ I say.

You look at me and nod once, your lips pressed firmly together. I wait for a moment, then turn and start walking. My feet lead me to the top of Primrose Hill where I stay for some time, looking down at the city. Later, I walk to the boating lake in Regent’s Park. I watch the swans gliding across the water and eat my truffles, the last things you gave me. The sun is still up; the air is fresh after the rain.

67

68 © Hengki Koentjoro

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© Hengki Koentjoro

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73 © Hengki Koentjoro

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77 © Hengki Koentjoro

Generation 1900: Home Farm Knowing he was dying, he took his leave Of each living thing; became more courteous To stupidity; and ceased (Again) to beat his wife. The Furies, mortified, replied, With eight more years of hideous life.

1925: High Crag We worked the quarry for many years, And I alone after my father died, And never did it yield much profit or much love; But man's needs bit deep into the soil, Exposing clean grey faces beneath the land.

Water filled the finished pits, and Sometimes a child would drown in there.

They would drag him up with nets, Making the water troubled, green and dull; Or a girl with her arms around her.

Then we would be silent for a morning, And wait for one of us to speak again.

1950: Low Farm There was a boy my own age on the cart The slaughterer's wagon, as it turned the yard.

Two men, a cart, an old horse, and a boy, And our bull lying sweating in the mud.

The knacker saw. 'Whoa, Fletcher, whoa.

That’s anthrax, that is, don’t you go near that.'

Looked at my father, who looked away,

78

Then reached back, found his gun, and shot.

The body jerked, swelled, shrank, and stilled.

The gun went back, the cart about.

'You want it dead, I do it, that’s the law, But burn it or bury it, we’re not touching that.'

Then just wet ruts, hoofprints between.

My father went to get the paraffin.

1975: Shortacre House An old man sits, unmoving, in my room; Who was my father once; who sweated for my birth.

The hands I feared lie flaccid in his lap.

The bones that bind them to the body shake.

This was the animal that worked for me.

This was a man who hoped for happiness.

It was his mate my infant brain desired.

It is his death the living heart still needs.

2000: Christmas Close The crow's caw breaks The frosty day.

Children play ball.

The weak sun fades.

Walk up the old lane Through the tracked mud.

Silent footings line the field.

Beyond a littered hedge Three strayed sheep graze.

What? Wait in bed Until death comes To light us out? Better Swing In a stairwell.

David Heidenstam

79

80 My Small Epicurean Woman Nr. 10 Noushin Delfani

81 My Small Epicurean Woman Nr. 6 Noushin Delfani

IGNITE IMAGINATIONS. JOIN CREATE Create runs arts workshops for people facing challenges in their lives. We give them a chance to express themselves, escape their everyday lives – and dream.

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My Job Was Basic M. Steven Neal

Engrams is what you called it. Memory traces you said. Said it’s the brain’s way of tending traumas. Pairing them off like that. You said talking helps. Said writing does too. It doesn’t bother me to talk about them. If I’ll ever unhitch the two memories is beyond me but I’m inclined to keep at it. I reckon I’d like him and I laying eyes on each other for the first time to set sacred. Reckon too I best get on about it lest I never put the story to paper. Talking and writing they’re something altogether different. So here is this story.

The day I met Anton I lay awake in bed and my figure was unmoving for a long while even before the sun rose and then continued on that way yet the whole while was afire as if it were of a siege done unto itself. The spoils, the lifeblood, the selfsame. It was 10 a.m. The time was early and peculiar to me. I was unpracticed in waking early. I usually worked the night shift at Homero’s but I’d been scheduled for lunch and happy hour. I don’t remember why.

My dog Scout, a female beagle colored brown and white or liver officially per the American Kennel Club, was firmly curled up under the coverlet. The more common coat for beagles is tricolor made up of black brown and white.

But I’ll come back to the coat patterns in a sec. The name Scout I’d eagerly preserved since adolescence to confer upon my inaugural pet as it was the namesake of my favorite fictional heroine and I’d made a promise to God

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M. STEVEN NEAL

that her, the heroine’s moral strength I would endeavor to echo. Still despite my word being ironclad under the most of circumstances it was so I would on occasion concede hard fought principle in tender of an acrid yet modestly less painful respite. In fact by and by I began to withal find my quest for probity challenging and profound and utterly contradictory to how someone who was just trying to be a good person should feel. Which brings me to the patterns. Which brings me to the memory I was reliving lying there next to her. The glum memory of separating her from her tricolor sister. Why glum?

Well not just owing to the separating part. See the way it went at the breeder was as the canine pair, them the last unclaimed of the litter, whined in a cardboard box I faced my petty horror: I preferred the brown beagle not the tricolor one simply because she was brown. I did I’ll say think of bearing both darlings but only for a moment. A moment in which I beheld my anticipated intimacies. Nurturer of hounds. Wife. Mother. Grandmother. Yet in each role I envisioned myself vexingly alone. I later wished I’d lingered a bit longer and engaged my uncertainty and probed the content of my unpleasant imaginings as they say one should do. But true to form I right off left the sibling, nearly puked carrying Scout away too. Turned out I was still down about it. Also turned out like myself the pup had a leaning toward sleeping in and what’s more on the day I lay indisposed at such a godly hour a frost had come into Austin giving the both of us yet another cause to stay unstirred.

It’d come to pass another hour until I got myself out from under the coverlet and swung my feet to the ground and stood all in one motion. I’d done it that way for years. I was twentytwo. Fore I told at Jim’s I was but ten and since had grown tall and lank and my hair longer and turned from blonde to brown. My eyes had turned too. They were yellow. They’d be pasty when I woke. More than most people’s I would bet. I’d wipe them the undersides then the corners to rout what had overnight accumulated and I’d set the kleenex I’d wipe them with to pile on my nightstand. I wiped them that morning the same. I’d done it and then tossed the kleenex in the wastebasket. Two points. I hadn’t shot the wastebasket not once since I was a girl and I suppose in that moment something had just rose up. Sometimes it rose up. Became the dark into light that way. I yet went then to thinking on other things. Physical things.

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Mostly puberty hadn’t been kind to me and my jawline had become strong and tapered hard anteriorly, hyper-projecting or rendering me a protruding chin. What I often judged looked like a witch’s chin. And my eyebrows had thinned. I was thinking on that too. Oh how I’d wish them thicker. I began each day resuming in the disquietude I carried during waking hours and in the prayer the night was eternal. Yup that’s how my mind would operate.

And until I finally stopped thinking about all them things and shuffled into the bathroom I’d been standing there for some time and save the wiping and the wastebasket I’d been still and gazing out into nothingness as if I was contemplating the edge of the world. As if I might just go ahead and step off it.

By now I had leaned in toward the sink mirror to scrutinize my face, and I got right into it. Despairing over my blackheads. As I would standardly in that there mirror and this time around they looked no different I just remember despairing. Blackheads run in my family. Daddy has them and so did brother.

Daddy’s momma had them worst and so I figured they got that way with age and I must in the end yield deeper grittier pores. I scrubbed my face for a few minutes. Then I paused. Then I squinted at the small antebellum pocket watch set in mother-of-pearl case, what granddaddy bequeathed me and what I kept open and lying on the sill of my bathroom window, and I could see time was outpacing me. I was going to be late for work. When I’d took up I was to clean myself daily I’d meant it and yet I wished to make good the hour was limiting me to a shower instead of a long-needed soak in the clawfoot tub my bungalow bestowed and had boasted as incentive on Craigslist where I’d located the housing rental ad: $400 A MONTH / WEST AUSTIN / SMALL / CLEAN / QUAINT / TUB YOU CAN SPEND A NIGHT IN. I found the whole thing difficult however. Showering. I mean the general effort it took.

Being upright and all behind there what I had a Chagall Lovers and Daisies vinyl shower curtain and beneath my rainfall shower head. For behind my multicolored Expressionist screen in right veiled seclusion I’d reverberate with thought and reflect and be assaulted by memory and be made vulnerable. As I’d be made vulnerable equally and reliably in another kindred overly private hideaway the public bathroom stall, for you to know. And it’d happen then

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standing, accessible, penetrable and teetering and head descended and bowing below the shower’s arriving cleanse under the deluge warm and bearing down against my soft and weary flesh my entrenched truths would be leached readily from my body and left pooling on my skin them refusing unlike sin to be washed away by water. I skipped my ablution this day. I moved back to my bedroom. I took my robe off reluctantly. I liked being in my robe. I got into my work clothes. A white shirt and short plaid skirt. I had long legs. Knew I could make more money working at Homero’s wearing the skirt than at some office. Besides Jake used to bartend there and got me the job. I’d come to remember my brother there behind the bar. Smiling. He’d always be smiling.

He’d die in an automobile accident a few years after I was married. I don’t know what to say about that. I really don’t.

Finally I’d finished dressing and I let Scout in the yard and took an orange juice juicebox from the fridge and slowly went outside toward my car. I as a rule moved slowly. I liked feeling my feet pressing the ground in tempo with the pace I perceived the world and if I went any faster believe you me I would fall. Or at the least stumble. Taking it that pace suited me just right. I had seen him when I come out. My neighbor Vince. He was mowing. Mowed every week frost or not. By the time I got to the curb he had shut the machine and I could tell he was watching me and then he said Could you park a bit less in front of my house next time? Now I readied my reply of it. Took a quick minute too. Thing is I’d kept a whole lot of replies ready so to issue out for when the right time would come. When they ask you things and one set of words might could get you in sorts of trouble and if only you had the other set they’d come to expect, well. Can’t say I wasn’t a civil girl about it. Made so I could get through the day proper is what I found. I’d fixed the replies by the years but I never did have any notion of how long it would take to do the fixing. No notion the toll it’d take neither. Fixed them by a drawn-out process of trial and error it turned out. I had a sharp sense of one’s disinclination is how I’d put it. Precisely in moments I’d falter in conversation that is. A sharp sense of one’s subtle even subliminal distaste for my inadvertently ill-chosen words. Like some kind of bug-feelers I suppose. It’d be painfully evident to me. Shifting eyes. A half-swallow. A hitch in speech. A change in their

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cadence about the breach in momentum, in discourse. And it was any or all of these traces what would emerge upon them hearing and then re-hearing me violate both new and primordial wounds. Was any or all what would rouse their overwhelming feelings of discomfort and fear and fury. I’d have the sense of it all. I wanted to say the right thing. Better my verbal volley.

Please my listener, and myself. Though I often even when extra careful ended up erring and then after all peering at their inevitable muscular and emotional unrest as their composure and psyche was tested. And what was most grim for me in the offendees’ metamorphosis? You’d asked me that once. Twice maybe. Most grim by a far ways I can tell you right now was their sorting out just before they settled on whether to carry on or exit the dialogue or lash out at me in defense. The reckoning I reckon. I never could witness it any other way. Never quit trying not to either. What’s more for you to know: In myself the same traces any or all plus added corollaries I’d yet to observe in others including shallow breathing and inability to shout or compete with background noise and urgency for self-harm and high-pitched ringing in both ears emerged exactly when and every time I received ill-chosen words.

And here I might thank them for it. Might thank Him too for that matter.

Because I’d become—I was lexically equipped to respond equally, like I was saying. Even more handily than most. Even more markedly. Not to sound off about it too much but I was. And would if need be respond with defined intention so as to resist and avoid, primarily avoid being wholly provoked and cornered. And under equal impetus so as to protect a friend. Or Jake. Or momma or daddy. Or my lover. Or Scout. Or really anyone I deemed begged safeguard in the form of a verbal offensive. And when I spoke my words wittingly and squarely to the perpetrator under the combustive and generally all circumstances regarding conversation I was racked with terror but never blinked. I chose then: Good morning Vince that’ll be fine. My answer was safe. For his neighborly iniquity I had weighed impugning him but refrained.

And I even spoke his name which I detected people liked. The sound of one’s name. Especially when uttered earnestly during conversation.

I arrived at work in the maroon Ford Bronco daddy gave me. He got a new truck so he gave me his old one. He’d take care of me that way when he could.

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M. STEVEN NEAL

Always had. Momma thought him a kind man when they married, thought he’d make a fine begetter. Thought him troubled all the same. No more was he than any other man who ever lived I suppose. No less either. The other week I had a dream about him and in it I was there in my bungalow back in Austin except for I was a little girl. Was the same age as in an old photo I used to keep there of daddy and I, and in the dream I was looking up at the photo and therein the image what sat frameless and propped on a shelf in my bedroom I maybe five or six-years-old was standing near daddy on a dirt road before a dust storm backdrop and Reconstruction era stone courthouse his daddy had occupied as county judge. I was wearing a yellow summer dress and long braids which were both windblown. I was leaning slightly in daddy’s direction into the wind as if to keep my footing. I was glancing up toward him. His face was rugged and hair fiery orange. He was standing with his knees slightly bent and was also leaning into the wind, digging firmly in the dirt with his boots. He was gazing directly forward. He was the idol in my life.

My hero. I thought it so in the dream and then I turned very old and then I woke up. Have the photo right here. The same as I had seen it. The same as it was. Would think him a hero when I was a girl. Still as he would long for the bygone cowboy era of his youth, when he’d worked herding and tending cattle, when he’d felt realer and freer then he did, he was intermittently absent from my life. Told me once was the way it was. What he couldn’t help hisself.

Toiling to reclaim the capstone of his past. Wept before me on all he’d said. I was ten years old and that was a very hard thing to see. Very hard. Forgave him right there. I always knew his genial aspect belied dread. And I could relate.

Sometimes in the years what followed when studying the photo I’d imagine our bodies dematerialize and join the hovering dust and disappear together, blown away by the wind. I’d come to display momma’s looks but was a true picture of daddy, to carrying an unsteady gait and misunderstood eyes and even rioting—mostly—in unflappable silence. Even was finical like him. That there maroon Bronco I began telling about being homage to his letterman for instance. Devotion I reckon. Or Shibboleth. Years ago when he bought it a wreck he had it painted over factory Ford Maroon with a high gloss finish— the kind of finish where the flecks of color pop in the sunlight—and had it

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fashioned with maroon vinyl seats and maroon vinyl dash and maroon vinyl racing-grip steering wheel. Daddy and his maroon. I appreciated his gesture.

I just felt burdened hitched to his particulars. I’d a firm sentiment of beauty.

I labored to adorn my life according to my persuasion hoping an authentic esthetic would shepherd me toward tranquility. I stood there looking at that truck for a good minute fore I headed up from the lot.

The restaurant was large with a seating capacity of 500 spread over fifteen server sections, ten inside and five patio. Today I worked patio. Shifts began and ended around traditional lunch and dinner meal times and also included a daily happy hour from 3 to 5 p.m. featuring half-priced menu items: L. Armstrong, LBJ, and Ladybird—or queso with ground beef, surf ‘n’ turf enchilada, and pink margarita on the rocks with salted rim, respectively. As far as Texas goes Homero’s portions were particularly mammoth. Weighed 2 times the state average. I can tell you too 6 times U.S. government recommended.

Told it to us the first day, both sets of facts. Said it was bragging rights. And patrons consumed shocking amounts of alcohol. Brimming drink sales during all three shifts and top liquor revenue in zip code—ten years running—made the establishment a civic tax treasure, also was bragging rights they said. I must’ve told you about Homero’s. Must have, right? The inside dining floor was terra cotta. The tiles were reddish and separated by wide white grout.

The servers would sweep and then mop the tiles between shifts stirring up spilled beverages alcoholic and also dry local favorites including sweetened iced tea and Coca-Cola—regular and diet—and a variety of Jarritos soda flavors such as apple, fruit punch, watermelon, and guava. Additional collateral floor waste included chunks of pico de gallo, gobs of guacamole, broken tortilla chips, pieces of chicken and steak and pork and shrimp, and a variety of splattered, prototypical Tex-Mex restaurant sauces including salsa, tomatillo, deluxe-tomatillo (with sour cream), and traditional ranchero red.

And also regrettably often we’d find retch or puke or vomit or upchuck, the specific locution depending on the server voicing the ongoing and unheeded complaint to management that cleaning customer overconsumption just plain sucks. At the time I walked in I smelled charred meat and tequila. I also smelled floor cleaner. When I’d come upon here for the first time I’d

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thought deeply in the same entryway about one’s standing in the world and the unlived lives of those before me and those after and still yet to come and I’d thought about those things like I said deeply and then abstractly to where the faces I’d seen became translucent and then had gone into waves and then I’d pulled up my knee-highs and set to work. I don’t guess I ever did tell you about those things I was thinking then at Homero’s. About unlived lives and all. I guess we ought to talk about it.

Now I was smelling the floor cleaner. And I wasn’t thinking much at all except for about it. I can tell you not a thing deep or abstract. I was watching a waiter ridding the floor of a neglected mystery amalgam must’ve stayed over from last night’s last call. The space smelled like absolute death. Suddenly I turned cold. My arms and legs grew goosepimples. They felt heavy. I was overcome by torpor. Took to regret. And rage. I was struggling to stay present.

I headed to the kitchen whereupon entering after negotiating two recurrently swinging saloon-type doors managed to gracefully nod, gesturing hello to the busboys, before pouring and then swilling a large coffee with extra cream.

That being something I’d do, take extra cream with my coffee and also I’d sip orange juice both for the calories on account of I’d find it difficult to eat.

While I was reacclimatizing myself, I stood leaned against the metal cooler door and I retrieved from my back pocket the notebook and I took to reading what I had wrote the evening before. Had wrote that when entering/exiting the kitchen per the Be Safe section of the employee handbook staff was required to shout incoming/outgoing hot tamale. Wrote that the incorporation of hot tamale as motif in Homero’s corporate culture was instigated partly by a Dang Pro televised competitive-eating event that showcased eight of the country’s top professional eaters urgently consuming the restaurant’s fiery twist on your basic tamale: the addition of altitudinal, limit-pushing Scoville measuring peppers to beef wrapped in cornmeal, cooked and served in steamed corn husk.

Had wrote still more: Filming of the event occurred on location, in Homero’s southernmost patio section. Pro-eaters were tucked along a plastic cafeteriastyle table set in direct summer sun and wore headbands and wristbands, each for manufacturer, anti-sweat intention. But wristbands were also employed as a sort of appendage-like, makeshift napkin most commonly utilized in back-

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of-the-wrist swiping across mouth or nose but never eyes, for obvious reason.

Headbands and wristbands additionally served as promotion, each black and emblazoned Homero’s in red, five-inch lettering abut a sunglass-wearing fireball as logo. Donning the logo at Homero’s fulfilled step 1 in 7 STEPS FOR BOOSTING EMPLOYEE CAMARADERIE AND COHESION, an addendum to the employee handbook written and distributed by one recently ascended shift manager whose career aspirations were corporate.

The event’s main celebrity draw was the infamous 450 pounder from Ohio, Jimmy “Jelly” Bean whose monstrous calves were legendary and turgid and overrun by blue-ish veins that looked like small snakes. Jelly wore a t-shirt that read Eat or be Eaten. Jelly’s signature moves per the event sponsor bio data blurb on DP PR flyer totaled 1. Dunk headlining food in cocktail sauce [qua lubricant] for swallowing / 2. Choke down eight-scoop banana-split [re disport] as victory jig. Jelly clinched the blue ribbon after a gaining Yuran Wang the underdog from Brownsville, TX was disqualified for regurgitation.

Lastly about it I’d wrote that the restaurant’s hot tamale motif also saluted the chewy cinnamon candy that was the childhood favorite of founder Homero Villarreal FL. 1947-2005 COD SUDDEN CARDIAC ARREST. The one and the same confection made popular by U.S. movie theatre chains in the 1950’s and whose trademark red box with flames and urbane fireball remains recognizable and stocked in cinema concession cases and convenience store check-out zones to this day.

I put the notebook away and stayed on in the kitchen. The busboys they went in and out continually. They fancied me. I was kindly with them. I also spoke Spanish with them. I liked speaking with the busboys being I felt safer with them than most people, being they didn’t expect much from me.

And I felt honest exercising my Spanish with them being they didn’t speak English. I found no revelry in refining myself at another’s expense. I cringed when customers tooled their Spanish on bilingual, English Spanish speaking Latin servers. For example, and overheard by me earlier this week: Excuse me, Senorita . . . Could I get some agua, por favor? and Hey partner, where’s the bano? and We need another round of cervezas, pronto. Did I ever tell you I was fluent? Nearly fluent. I’m finding that I might’ve left some things out.

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It came by way of my finding the language come easy and as well owing to my very first boyfriend, my first heartbreak. I was thirteen. He was born and lived in Mexico, Nuevo Laredo, about two hours from my front door. He would cross the border often for work and to see me. And one day he stopped coming. He told me that it might happen. That he might be removed. He shared his resilience with me, his belief we’d each emerge stronger, better in light of it. De caràcter superior he would say. He introduced me to Fuentes, and Llosa, and Márquez’s magical story of Macondo and its mighty first sentence: Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. I sure was in love with Armando, his words and his authors’.

He is long gone and I’d been wondering these past few years about whether we might ever come upon one another again. Wondering what he was up to.

Wondering what I might say. I found that it was too much to consider. Then I started asking myself whether it was something I did ran him off. I can’t stop asking it, Jane. Can’t stop. Which is not something to be doing when you’re a married woman.

Well. My job was basic. I took mostly orders for tacos and booze. I existed as a liminal visual stimulus barely perceptible as more than passing object in skirt. But I was functional as server and self-preserver, knowing what words to utter to sate the patrons and allow myself to Ruminate unnoticed. Uh-huh … sure thing … be right back ordinarily spared me from captive chit-chat, and so let me get on with it. I could in relief continue quietly Ruminating, meaning rehashing my familiar and unsolved dreads what without fail awaited in frenzy though I’d hope might flee forever upon closing my eyes to sleep. For the most part I presumed rehashing worthwhile, more so than praying along with fantasizing along with pleading, which I did as well, all three without exception and in unison for good measure, experiencing the particular trinity as distasteful and particularly reminiscent of my childhood efforts, but as efforts still and as better than no efforts, better than hopeless, darkness, lying down to die. Yes, much better to pray along with fantasize along with plead.

But to my prior point I presumed rehashing more so worthwhile, so I’d been giving it a go. More so worthwhile even considering my mental exhaustion

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due rehashing since rehashing stretched from the first to the last waking hour, minute, second of my day. So why more so worthwhile? Why giving it a go? Certainly in part for character building. De carácter superior he’d say remember. And I’d been of late reliving his words and so I’d been feeling up for redoubling my efforts, feeling that my familiar and unsolved dreads could be up for becoming, instead, non-familiar and solved and that really the good riddance of my dreads could be within my control, owed to my hand, my might, my next turning over of just one more woeful recollection. Not that I really had much choice in rehashing or not rehashing, as it happens.

Ruminating is invariably a pitiless going-over that emerges, that creeps up on the Ruminator and lets the Ruminator Ruminate that they can Ruminate themselves out of Ruminating. A real round and round going-over, unceasing, unyielding, a firm will-not-stop-ever-until-you-are-dead, or sedated, or intreatment going over. I suspected its pitiless nature and even suspecting I presumed Ruminating, i.e., rehashing more so worthwhile. For I—and here is the other part—saw myself in my core as existentially humbled and running out of options. So maybe rehashing was the way to flee forever my dreads and the way I could leave the praying/fantasizing/pleading once and for all behind. Turns out about my dreads however there’d been as yet no signal of their departure, no diminishing, no tiring of them. Indeed then I’d come to expect, even when rehashing, even when praying/fantasizing/pleading, even more so as time went by, that my dreads they’d endure sedate in my dreams, they’d stir upon opening my eyes to wake, they’d build while shuffling my body to the bathroom, they’d when settling myself on the toilet be fully returned. I couldn’t shake them. They demanded my utmost attention, my complete regard, like wailing children I was obliged to them. They’re my duty.

I reckon it goes without too much further telling then I hated being a waitress.

Even went so far as praying on the bug-eyed drunks who stuffed their faces and pawed at me a justice’d come. I can see now where I was wrong about that. For the divinity in the hearts of men over eons passed down, therein the justice passed down the same. I wrote that. I think it’s fitting. I’d been reared via faith in God’s word and over time came to perceive that storytelling constructed upon rescue from this world could mightily rule one’s day-to-

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day. For a long time I’d held that a period of future bliss awaited me, that my meager present was plainly a moment to be tolerated as I bided my time. I still believe in God but I’d split with my church because for one thing, after Jake had slept with our pastor’s daughter the council then armed with cause did what they’d wanted from the start—removed the Fitzhugh trailer trash. And for another thing, so as to cut loose my deference for the Coming. I believed the lure of an alternate and ethereal actuality moved one not to live but avoid life, to skim earthly meaning, to be reckless. I still soothed myself with the help of stories but they were more improved, more nourishing for my psyche, such as perhaps most grad students drudged as servers below living wage in this pitiful economy.

When at last I’d gone from the kitchen I went to the patio and began to clean a four-top in my section. I was wiping the table surface with a rag, in circular motions. With my free hand I began pinching the back of my thigh with intent to harm and even slapped myself once across the face, undetected, I believed.

I’d used slang with the busboys and that’s what I was set off about. I’d used Qué onda? which meant What’s up? and I was presently considering that my choice of words had been overtly informal and that maybe the busboys found me now foolish, or coarse, or worse, phony. Of my earliest memories there’d been in my young mind a sense of self-reproach and -disgust and -hatred the same I was braving this here moment flailing like some demongirl at Homero’s.

I can’t forget slapping myself even all this time gone. It was the first time I’d done it public. The last time too. She’d made me that way deliberate is what I thought back then. Still sometimes think it. Considering momma and daddy were evangelical Christian and committed to their faith and they’d divorced when I was two years old and momma grew more religious trying to raise me alone. And seeing what I’d grown up attending sermons under John Harry, the powerful Pastor of the bursting-at-the-seams mega-church, Roundstone, in San Antonio, his role and method in conjuring up evil and the most dire of threats being legendary amongst us awaiting the imminent Second Coming. To lay it out, Evangelical Christianity in Texas is culturally centered around divine authority and inerrancy of Holy Scripture and surrendering to salvation is a desideratum for devotees espousing the apocalypse. In the

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New Testament, the Book of Revelation details the Second Coming of Christ, an impending paradise on Earth and a variant of it Millennialism practiced in my church prescribes that once very specific predicated events transpire as the Ronald Reagan assassination attempt in 1981, or the assassination of Israel’s fifth prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, or the occurrence of three blood moons the Rapture will commence sending believers rising to the heavens safely removed. The Tribulation period will follow as the Antichrist arrives to punish those left behind whereupon completion of horrific reprisals including war and famine and utter darkness, Jesus returns for a millennial one-thousand-year reign of prosperity granting the “saved” immortality. The impression of being “left behind” was firmly established in my parish and since enshrined in modern pop culture following Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins’s best-selling series of sixteen novels aptly titled Left Behind’s bigscreen adaptation starring blockbuster juggernaut Nicholas Cage. Point of it all being, momma especially uneasy as a single-parent was bent on befriending Jesus and carried a well-worn bible on her person to the supermarket, bank, my primary-school ballet recital, etc. To escape her proselytizing and growing rigidity I would seek comfort in Jake, who was older than me by three years.

He was sweet with me but burdened with waking me and getting me ready for school and watching me after school while she worked. Lina’s in God’s hands! momma sounded aloud one day at church after Jake finally went to go live with daddy. As it went shouting or crying out and other types of verbal eruptions was regular at Roundstone, by clergy and congregants who when overjoyed or troubled or simply agreeable with the Lord’s way acted fully upon their preferred mode of audible inclination. In the end I became a latch-key kid. The small stretch of mornings I did spend with momma was mostly awful, for both of us. She believed I was imperfect and unfinished. I was sad most of the time and was usually sick with a cold. Here are some healing drops of joy she’d say on our car ride to school as she’d hold a pretend watering can over my head. I knew she sought in me a child of God, content and confident and happy bearing a divine glow. But her intentions were less than pious. She molded and kept me for her self-regard, in her image and to carry her name, Carolina. I was unseen. And in this case unseen connotes that the nature of the

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subject is what is being conveyed. In other words unseen is the embodiment of the phenomenon. Unaccepted, undesirable, undermined, unvalued and also denied, refused, rejected, repudiated, vetoed, and invalidated. As such I subsisted. And because being unseen was I sensed the beginning of the end of my ideals and courage and standing firm resolute with my chin up and potency and lexical prowess and really stamina to go on, and because I was all told terribly frightened, I longed to be seen. Given the stamp of approval, the go-ahead, the green light, the nod, legitimized, ratified, substantiated, and appreciated. More so I did long amidst my unseen embodying than amidst my waking, feet on carpet, dressing, feet on linoleum, toilet-flush, feet on carpet, feet on linoleum, cereal, feet on carpet, feet on linoleum, shoes on, turning the lock clockwise … turning the lock counterclockwise, shoes off, feet on linoleum, feet on carpet, feet on linoleum, cheese sandwich, feet on carpet, feet on linoleum, toilet-flush, feet on carpet, reading, silence, waiting, being regular, run-of-the-mill unseen. Yes, more so, though really by a hair’s breadth, even amidst my so many un-mothered, lonesome days.

Withal I quietly yet broadly shouldered momma’s anxiety and breakdowns from her parental failures and relationship failures and religious shortcomings and all-out marginal existence, and during one of her notably terrifying nervous prostrations, I, desperate to help her, shared with her my private, self-soothing mantra: Every setback leads to a bit more character building.

In several years from today at my wedding she gave a speech divulging the story of my magnanimous mantra share. She thanked me for my insight and helping her during a tough time. My husband was piqued. He knew little of my upbringing and later during the wedding while he was dancing with her, he asked her when and how I arrived at my mantra. She poised in chichi dress and with cheerfulness that only if carefully audited would reveal her as inescapably used and bullied and long ago cracked replied, darlin, Lina’s been saying that since she’s a teenager, it’s just something she must’ve picked up somewhere.

Stood there on the patio I wasn’t thinking about Pastor Harry or the Coming or momma, save the busboys I wasn’t thinking else. I’m at best as I said prior trying to unhitch this day. Trying on Freud’s gambit. For I’m thinking it, I

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ought to be telling it. That’s the effort I got in me right now yet when he came up to me I had much less. I reckon he’d seen what I did. He came up still.

Excuse me, he said. Are you working this other section too? I stopped wiping the table. I looked up. I crumpled the rag in my fist. No, I said. My eyes were big. When I’d look at you it was hard to tell if I was angry or injured. My name is Anton, he said.

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Geometricism Jonathon Miller

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100 Geometricism Jonathon Miller

Harvard Road When your neighbor’s kitchen ignites, you poke your camera from the window and catch a puff of smoke. That isn’t the smoke of the fire but the spirit of despair that accompanies all disasters. If you watch carefully, you’ll see it sprout a couple of heads and wave various limbs before dissipating with a cough of polite regret. Luckily the firefighters knock down the flames before the house is seriously discomfited. Still, the kitchen will need rehab, the back porch is scorched, and a smoke mark like a raised eyebrow extends almost to the attic window. You admire your photograph: a couple of human figures placed exactly where one would place them, and the smoke looking ghostly enough. Fire engines line the street. A couple of police cars nose into snowdrifts. Lights of various colors wink, some of them for Christmas, some for emergencies that recur with dreary fatalism. You close the window and watch the excitement settle to a comfortable level. No one rendered homeless, but your neighbors will be eating out for a while, or at least ordering takeout. The stink in the kitchen, the peeled vinyl siding, and the general air of disgust sicken but don’t kill.

Why don’t you close the window now, before the smell makes us sick?

William Doreski

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Where the Sun Sleeps Caitlyn Ng Man Chuen

The first and only time we watch the sunset together is the day I realize we will never be anything other than what we are right now. It’s something that I’ll never be able to name – something between nothing and everything depending on the moment or more importantly, depending on her mood that day. Tomorrow, we will be close to nothing once again. But for now, we are everything.

We have tried to watch countless sunsets together at observatories where the spectre of Mount Fuji is tucked behind the indiscriminate Tokyo skyline, in Gyeongju with our backs to the massive hilly tombs of distant kings whose names I never learn, and of course, on half a dozen beaches scattered across this side of the Pacific. But something always comes in the way of the sunset – sometimes clouds and sometimes that dripping yellow haze that coats cities and obscures skies when clarity matters most.

Usually, there is nothing to blame but ourselves. We drop by a convenience store to pick up another bottle of something that we hope will make us feel good. She is hungry so we have a bowl of cheap noodles somewhere. A dog appears on our path and we stop to pet it. Wet snow piles onto the train tracks and delays our route for hours. Our bus takes a detour – or maybe we were never on the right bus to begin with. We are victims to our

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own misaligned timing. We stop and the world carries on.

But there is a shared determination between us this time – on our very last afternoon in Taipei before we fly back to our apartments where we live out of half-unpacked suitcases and on dehydrated vegetables and instant meals.

There is a sense of necessity rather than desire. I feel it in her bones and in my own – the exigence that thrums between us keeps us synchronized like mirror time bombs. We need to catch the sunset. Perhaps we already know that we will never have another chance to. It is that feeling – one of premature loss – that fuels our pursuit.

We have spent the past four days watching locals speed through the city on their scooters past buildings crawling with vines like the earth is forcing itself back into the spaces it once owned. Tamsui District by the sea is no exception to the wheeled swarms and we watch them pass as we walk around the boardwalk. Her hand is warmer here in my own and I feel no hint of nerves lingering in her blood – not today. We are alone in a city of over seven million people and today, our isolation grants us indifference.

Another scooter zooms past us, its wind flicking at the ends of our long hair, yet neither of us flinches. As it maneuvers by us, I think that I could probably drive one of them. When I say so, she laughs.

I spent the summers of my adolescence at a cottage that sat on the mouth of a lake. It had a water scooter that I would take out every so often. The lake was always tranquil so I would zip across the water and make my own waves.

It doesn’t seem much different, I tell her. If anything, these scooters would be easier. Water is fluid. Unpredictable. Road is much more consistent.

She rolls her eyes, but we rent a scooter anyways – a modest electric one that doesn’t go nearly as fast as those operated by gas. The shop worker tells us to have it back by dark so they can close early to celebrate the new year.

Dusk is in an hour or maybe two. We don’t have much time, but we never did anyways.

I’ll drive, I tell her when we wheel the scooter onto a cobbled alley, just hold on to me. Her hands clamp around my stomach and her head tucks into the back of my shoulder as we race through the city. Road nothing like water.

But it’s not consistent like I thought it’d be – maybe nothing is. There are

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too many cars and too many people to do anything but go along with their currents, and the scrape of the pavement under the wheels makes my body rumble like the aftershocks of an earthquake, but I’m not afraid. I can’t be.

Her fingers twitch uneasily every time we slow down, every time a car passes too closely, every time we make a turn. She is nervous but her trust in me shakes away any nerves that I might have. We turn a corner and she grips tighter. I feel warm – the mild Taipei winter bends to our endless, burning summer.

“Look.”

Yesterday. Beitou District. A pavilion atop a hill.

I’m lying on one bench and she sits upright on another, looking toward the hot spring resorts that we can’t afford below us. A layer of steam rises from the springs, but it melts into the dry air and makes it stink of sulphur. Neither of us minds – we only bask in the warmth it leaves behind. I look at the paintings on the ceiling of the pavilion – leaping tigers and flaming dragons and phoenixes in flight – then break my gaze to follow her line of sight.

On the grass below us, there is an old woman pacing her limbs through the motions of a tai chi form slowly – like she is moving through water.

“Have you seen the old people doing tai chi outside the Chinese mall back home?”

Home. Not our apartments a short flight across the sea, but a place where we have never consciously co-existed. Our shared hometown – the only thing that we share on that side of the world. Where our families are, where we are – the real us, not the us we are now. A place where we are who we are rather than who we want to be.

“On the grass, right? I always wanted to join them whenever I’d drive by.”

“I could see them from my house. I always thought about joining them too.”

“It seems nice. Like meditation. Or breathing.”

She hums and continues watching the woman. I do the same and think of the two of us mirrored, watching the same scene with the same desires but separated by something greater than us. Our parallel lives. Then, she turns to me with an unusual abruptness.

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“We should sign up for a class together. When we’re home.”

This is the first time that we’ve talked about home in the sense of the future.

Sometimes, we’ll mention the past, considering places where our paths might have crossed growing up. The narrow aisles of grocery stores or derelict mall food courts. The sushi restaurant where she worked during university or the amusement park that I could see from my bedroom window. There are a hundred what-ifs between us and today is only one more – not any more likely to be a reality than the rest of them.

“That would be nice,” I say in a breath. The words feel false in my mouth. I don’t want them to be, but I am a realist. She nods but seems distracted. She is a realist too, I think.

She looks at me then and her eyes seem to be searching for something in mine. I don’t think she finds it, but I look away in case she’s close.

We arrive at the beach and leave the scooter behind, stripping our shoes and running onto the sand. She shouts my name and points at the horizon.

Slowly, the sun is sinking into the sea. She laughs and so do I and as I look at the sun, I feel like I can die.

Another beach somewhere. A few months ago – in the fall.

The moon hangs above us, large and incredibly clear. It makes me think of something I had read once, though I can’t remember where or if it’s true.

Anyway, it’s a nice story and maybe that’s more important than the truth.

A Japanese novelist was working as a language teacher. His student translated the English phrase, ‘I love you,’ directly to Japanese. Subject, I. Object, you.

Verb, love. The novelist pointed out that it wouldn’t be appropriate to express those kinds of feelings so directly. Instead, he gave his student a more apt replacement. The moon is beautiful, isn’t it?

“I think I might cry,” she says. I hadn’t realized that I was speaking out loud, but her voice is swollen with sentiment so I know that I must have been. “I don’t know how to describe it. It’s so beautiful. I want to cry but I also feel like I could die now. Do you know what I mean? Have you ever felt that way?”

Not sadness or suicide – something else.

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Years later, I will come across this phrase while studying Japanese. I’ll learn about how the Japanese word for ‘moon’ sounds much like the word used to express love, then suddenly, I’ll be back on that evening under the moon pale and yellow, hanging low against a sky the colour of a morning sea.

But there are other things that I will not learn for some time. Like that the Japanese word for ‘love’ - the one that sounds like moon - is one used as a confession for simple feelings. That there are other words to describe love. A word for longing, passion, romance – a wanting love. And a word for real, unselfish, pure love – a giving love not seen but felt. A word that combines the two. This moon-love is barely love. Sometimes, it’s not translated to love at all - only to ‘like.’

But it doesn’t make a difference to me - not yet and maybe not ever.

“Maybe,” I say to her, the moon still between us.

She’s laughing again and so am I. We play on the beach for a while – chasing each other, throwing fistfuls of sand back and forth, trying to push each other into the cool winter sea. It feels like we are children, I think as she laughs a little harder, and maybe we are. The sun disappears, slipping into the water for its nightly slumber.

I think about this beach – which I could follow along the Taiwan Strait, up the East China Sea and through the Western Channel of the Korean Sea to the beach where we first met – and wonder where one body of water ends and another begins. Haphazard names marking water from water as if there is a difference. Territory lines are drawn on maps first then on globes then painted onto the earth with wire and fences. But you can’t write anything on the ocean. Here, at the edge of the beach, and there, in the sea where the sun sleeps, everything is one. It is unending. The beach lasts not for an eternity but until you leave.

Sometimes, I think about the two of us missing all those sunsets for other things but mostly for each other. I tell myself they don’t matter because even when we were out of time, we were happy. Mostly, I think of her. I don’t know what she thinks of and never do. Sometimes, I hope that she thinks of me.

She takes a video of me walking by the water and I take a handful of

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photographs that, one day soon, I’ll tuck away in a box and mail to a friend somewhere. I will not be able to look at them without thinking of her, but I will want them somewhere safe. I will need to know that they exist somewhere even if nothing else does. A promise of existence – like knowing that the sun is only just sleeping, below where sea meets sky, never quite gone and doomed to return to some different shore.

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108 Esso Kelly Hadley

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Lowlanders, i.e. People Who Climb on Pumpkins

People who dwell in plains diphthongise vowels, particularly o. Their vocal scale is more on the side of a quadrature of the circle, a dual option: e floats between an emphatic i and an apathetic a. They are tolerant, often bilingual.

For transportation they use bikes, troikas and (sometimes) yawls.

As a rule their population growth is not high.

They are individualists, but have a social conscience.

There is a suicidal tendency.

Until they kill themselves, they engage in trade: diamonds, silk, hogs, antiques.

Strangely, they indulge in booze more often than the highlanders.

When drunk, they sing: in a choir, or seldom solo.

They go to their temple regularly, but are sceptical and pragmatic.

Haunted castles, lake nymphs and multi-headed dragons are ridiculous and distant to them.

Only the ghost of a drowned man disturbs them occasionally.

The taboo of incest is stronger here than on the hills; — since they do not resolve it, they are burdened for life.

Not until the sixth generation do they degenerate.

Their inner preference is for warm colours, but they are ashamed to admit that.

They live in houses on the walls of which the water level is easy to read.

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When necessary, they stick their fingers in dikes.

Grow grains, tulips and vegetables, motley cows & silkworms. Build windmills.

In winter they skate on frozen canals, possibly rivers and bays.

To them a sinusoid is no horizon line but a graphic symbol of some cycle, business trend, for instance.

They strongly try to preserve their kitsch culture of happiness against those who descend to their midst in gusts.

In vain.

Miodrag Kojadinović

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Photography and videography can change us.

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Our understanding.

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