Litro 163 Teaser

ISSUE 163

ALTERNATIVE FACTS Calder G. Lorenz Brent van Staalduinen Amy Gilvary Q. Lei Adjie Henderson Victoria Briggs Suchana Seth M. René Bradshaw Claire Polders

Cover art | Veronika Gilková

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Editor-in-Chief Eric Akoto | Online Editor online@litro.co.uk Arts Editor Daniel Janes, arts@litro.co.uk | Assistant Fiction Editor/Story Sunday Barney Walsh, fictioneditor@litro.co.uk Tu e s d a y Ta l e s H a y l ey C a m i s , t u e s d a y t a l e s @ l i t ro . c o . u k Flash Fiction Editor, Catherine McNamara, flash@litro.co.uk C o n t r i b u t i n g E d i t o r a t L a rg e S o p h i e L ew i s , R i o , B ra z i l Design Assis t ant Elina Nikkinen | Adver tising Manager +44(0) 203 371 9971 sales@litro.co.uk

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table of contents #163 Alternative Facts / 2017 June

05

Contributors

07

Editor's letter

essays

1o 40

Writing in the Realm of Alternative Facts - Calder G. Lorenz Con Artists - Claire Polders

non-fiction

21

The Inaugural Address - Adjie Henderson

fiction

12

Hard Sell - Brent van Staalduinen

23

The Last Brown Rat of Nagasaki - Victoria Briggs

27

The Operation - Q. Lei

33

The Storyteller - Suchana Seth

37

Tigre - M. RenĂŠ Bradshaw

art

19

Trump in B&W - Amy Gilvary

45

Again and Again - Sarah Kaizar

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5 CONTRIBUTORS

Calder G. Lorenz is the author of One A humanitarian at heart, Amy Gilvary’s inWay Down (Or Another), his debut novel from Civil Coping Mechanisms Press.

His shorter fiction has been published in sPARKLE & bLINK 2.4, Switchback, Curly Red Stories, FictionDaily, Two Dollar Radio’s Noise, Literary Orphans, Crack the Spine, Black Heart Magazine, Litro Online, The Forge Literary Magazine, The Birds We Piled Loosely, New Pop Lit, and gravel. He resides in San Francisco and works in the Tenderloin District at St Anthony’s Dining Room.

novative artistic vision coincides with her social inclination to spread love, kindness and acceptance through creativity. Her works are highly symbolic images of the power of words, particularly the contemporary artist’s role as cultural innovator and changemaker. In addition to creating VoicePix like Trump in B&W, daydreamer and nightthinker Amy Gilvary can be found playing piano and tending to her incurable love of canine kisses!

Claire Polders is a Dutch author of four Victoria Briggs is an award-winning and novels with a debut in English on the way. Her short prose appeared in TriQuarterly, Electric Literature (Okey-Panky), Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. She lives in Paris with her American husband, who is also a writer. Find more of her work at www.clairepolders.com.

Pushcart-nominated writer whose work can be found in various UK, US and European publications. She lives in London, where she’s writing a novel, and tweets @vicbriggs.

Suchana Seth is a physicist-turned-datascientist, compulsive reader, slow traveller, and

M. René Bradshaw is a Californian- photographer of empty chairs. Her day job is born writer, translator, and culture critic based in London. She is the UK Editor-at-large at Asymptote Journal, and a contributor for The London Magazine and The Times Literary Supplement.

to prevent data dystopias. At night, she writes speculative fiction and poetry. Her travel writing has appeared in The Coffeelicious. Follow her at https://medium.com/@suchana.

6 Ann “Adjie” Shirley-Henderson is Sarah Kaizar is an American artist, illusa scientist and former university dean. She has many publications in diverse scientific areas, ranging from molecular genetics, forensics, and anthropology to setting standards for environmental controls. Recently, her research has concentrated on a study of the lives and times of émigré scientists in the 1930s. She has made numerous public appearances and interviews related to science education. Her short stories have nothing to do with the credentials above.

trator, web and graphic designer living and working in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Her work addresses a spectrum of themes ranging from current environmental issues to topical social and political pieces. In 2016, Sarah launched her own company, Rally Caller, offering a line of eco-friendly art prints and stationery featuring her original illustrations of endangered American species. This work is available in stores across the United States and online at rallycaller.com. A portion of all sales from this body of work is donated to the Center for Biological Diversity to support their efforts in protecting the lands, water and climate that species need to survive.

Brent van Staalduinen is an award-

winning short story writer and novelist from Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. He is the recipient of the Bristol Short Story Prize and the Fiddlehead Best Story Award, and the author of Saints, Unexpected, a novel of magical realism. Follow Brent at www.brentvans.com and Twitter (@brentvans)

Veronika Gilková is a Slovak photogra-

pher who originally studied psychology but started to concentrate on photography during her final years of college. Her photos are mainly portraits with a dreamy atmosphere and have been featured in several magazines about art and lifestyle.

Q. Lei is a Chinese-born writer and film-

maker currently living in Berlin, Germany.

She is the co-founder and editor of BLYNKT Magazine (www.blynkt.com). She is in the last year of her PhD studies in Modern Japanese Literature at Princeton University. Her work has been published in the Centum Press Anthologies, The Speaker, BLYNKT Magazine, among others. Her debut documentary, Berlin Transgression, is scheduled to come out in 2017.

7

Editor's letter Dear Reader, Lies, damned lies, alternative facts.

Oscar Wilde, in his essay “The Decay of Lying”, bemoaned the decline of mendacity as a fine art, complaining that even politicians “never rise beyond the level of misrepresentation, and actually condescend to prove, to discuss, to argue”. This isn’t the case any more, if it ever really was, but an aesthete like Wilde could hardly be pleased by the lie as wielded, which such blundering crassness, by today’s right-wing politicians.

Disinformation is for dictatorships, banana republics and failed states, right? Yet America is now governed by a president and a party that fundamentally don’t accept the idea that there are objective facts; instead, they want everyone to agree that reality is whatever they say it is. Shortly after Donald J. Trump was sworn in as the United States’ forty-fifth president, his press secretary, Sean Spicer, used his first appearance to throw what would become a series of curve balls, by putting forth debunked information that questioned the media’s reporting on the size of the president’s inaugural audience (it had in fact been a relatively small crowd for an absolutely tiny, tiny man). Kellyanne Conway would go on the US political TV show

Meet the Press to clumsily defend Spicer’s and Trump’s blatant untruths about the crowd’s size as simply “alternative facts” – the phrase joining “fake news” and “post-truth” as hallmarks of our times. All our political lives – and what’s not political? – are increasingly directed, if not determined, by the lie. Fake news misleads while the truth gets dismissed by fake news by those to whom the truth is inconvenient. That Toddler-in-Chief across the Atlantic is a continual, shameless liar; the Brexit referendum was won by lies (the mythical £350 million a week for the NHS, etc.); and Theresa May’s cynically opportunistic general election this month … well, she kept repeating the phrase “strong and stable government” until it became too obvious an untruth (she showed her weakness by refusing to debate Jeremy Corbyn, her government’s weakness in its social-care policy U-turns, etc.) – and she does seem given to moronic mantras, first “Brexit means Brexit”, then “strong and stable”. So at the time of writing it’s heartening to see her poll-lead narrow, and the likelihood diminish of her getting the landslide victory she hubristically reckoned was in the bank.

8 @LitroMagazine @LitroMagazine

But then again, Litro Magazine is in the business of using fiction and the story to explore the zeitgeist – though isn’t fiction all just lies? “oh, fuck all this LYING!” B.S. Johnson exclaims in Albert Angelo (the novel with a famous hole in its pages, which itself turns out to be kind of a lie), breaking the fourth wall to address the reader directly, as himself: “Im trying to say something not tell a story telling stories is telling lies and I want to tell the truth…” But Johnson was wrong – in his cynicism he was naïve – and good fiction isn’t lies; it’s not even truth-inlies. It’s metaphorical, doesn’t try to fool anyone, it’s a way of getting at deeper truths.

And it’s time to insist on the truth – maybe we are living in a post-truth era, steered by the lies of dishonest or unfeeling politicians, right-wing media and big corporations – but maybe also we can find a better way.

In this issue of Litro Magazine, Calder Lorenz’s “Writing in the Realm of Alternative Facts” tackles the fiction-writer’s problem of having to write “lies” while everything else is being corrupted by lies. Brent van Staalduinen, in “Hard Sell”, a hybrid of fiction and creative nonfiction, explores

five stories rotating around a landmark tragedy, a real one, occurring on a single fateful day; while Victoria Briggs, in “The Last Brown Rat of Nagasaki”, offers a beyond-improbable tale that’s no less about the truth of what it’s like to be human. War runs through both these stories, as it does, more obliquely, through Q. Lei’s transgressive “The Operation”. M. René Bradshaw’s “Tigre” takes us on a trip to Latin America; Suchana Seth, in “The Storyteller”, makes her own that ultimate teller-of-tales, Scheherazade of the 1001 Nights; while the truth is rawer in Claire Polder’s personal essay about abuse, “Con Artists”. And finally we have three pieces about that unavoidable monster of alternative fact: Adjie Henderson’s “The Inaugural Address”, and two artworks, Amy Gilvary’s “Trump in B&W” and Sarah Kaizar’s “Again and Again”. Our cover artist this month is Veronika Gilkováa Slovakian photographer. Her photos are mainly portraits with a dreamy atmosphere and have been featured in several magazines about art and lifestyle.

Eric Akoto

Editor-in-Chief

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10 10

Writing in the Realm of Alternative Facts

ESSAY

Calder G. Lorenz In a word, they tell the TRUTH. There are some fights that ain’t worth fighting even if you win.

There are other fights you have to fight even if you lose.

—Tavis Smiley

Fiction. That beautiful word.

I began my second novel with this quote from Tavis Smiley. I needed something to kick start what I was taking on. And it did. At least I hope. I’m not sure that when I found these words that I was totally aware of what was to come. What was marching towards us all. I suppose I couldn’t know that. In the same way that I can’t know if this new unpublished book will work. But that is the future. I am here now. Alive, working, and fighting during the rise of “alternative facts,” “fake news,” and a hatred for all things learned, experienced, fact-checked.

One might think this a renaissance period for the fiction writer. A time to rejoice. Our craft suddenly elevated to the highest levels of power and governance. Everyone seems to be throwing around a love for twisting the truth. One might rejoice.

In truth, it feels a bit like stepping into Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, sinking back to a time when our Masters were demanding to be appeased and entertained. Our artists told “to depict life not realistically but aspirationally.” The truth buried deep beneath the narrative skin so that one could survive to write again and again, to jab at one’s righteous ruler, to survive, if that was even possible.

These days who are we to resist the temptation to cash in on this sudden cultural foray back into the world of alternativism. After all, fiction is fact! It would seem a good time to be in the trade of trading truths. A good time to spin the wheel of spin. It would seem you could be useful to a certain class of thought.

There are fictional massacres. Scientists fighting for their fact-based lives. Parents tormented by the followers of alternative media cults. And entire fictional narratives dedicated to abolishing even the most basic foundations of what essential organisations provide our stumbling, crumbling country. The truth is that we are living in a post-truth world.

There is a market for sleight of hand. For the twisters of truths. For the speakers of fiction.

But there’s a problem with that. Always a rub. Most of the authors that I adore, admire, respect, root their storytelling in reality. Have employed research of some type. Birthed their characters and worlds in living breathing fact and a mirrored state of what it’s like to be human.

12

FICTION

Hard Sell

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Brent van Staalduinen

October 29, 2011. Somewhere along Kabul’s infamous Darulaman Road, a Taliban suicide bomber rams a vehicle packed with explosives into the side of an American military armoured bus. Seventeen people are killed, including a Canadian soldier working in an advisory role to the Afghan National Army. He is the 158th Canadian soldier to be killed in Afghanistan and the first to be killed in the army’s new, post-combat role.

Somebody could walk into this room and say that your life is on fire.

— Paul Simon Mcpl. Byron Greff Kabul, Afghanistan Riding the rhino. Again.

He shifts in his seat, sweaty against the vinyl despite the air-con unit blasting away on the ceiling. His rifle, unclipped from its combat sling rests muzzle down between his legs.

The molly pouches on his tac-vest and his body armour keep him from relaxing, forced to sit a few inches forward like a kid on a school bus refusing to take off his pack.

The driver, a sergeant, turns in his seat. He double checks his manifest by surname and rank. Cabrera, lieutenant colonel. Newman, staff sergeant. Darrough, sergeant. Greff, master corporal. He runs through the civilians by name only.

There’s the requisite safety briefing where the security officer fancies himself a comedian. Stay seated. If you’re getting shot at, stay inside the Rhino. If we hit an IED and the Rhino catches fire, get out. If the Rhino is on fire and we’re being shot at, stay inside the Rhino.

But if you do have to get out of the Rhino, remember that when the Rhino gets blown onto its side, the top escape hatch then becomes the side escape hatch. Remember that, people. Ha ha.

The civilians in the back, spindly things in just their Kevlar vests, tend to laugh nervously and look at each other. The troops and private security contractors in full battle rattle don’t. They’ve heard variations on the same theme dozens of times. They always take the front seats, unless ordered back for an officer or VIP. Closest to the door. Fight or flight positions.

The Rhino’s been idling in the marshalling yard for a while, waiting for its escort.

No one gives the driver a hard time about it. Even the troops feel safer when they can’t predict the timing of the runs from Camp Julien back to Camp Phoenix. Eventually a few MRAP vehicles rumble into position, and the convoy departs to a crackling soundtrack

the

PN Review Prize 2017

For over forty years PN Review has been a place to discover new poems in English and in translation from around the world. In 2017, the first annual PN Review Prize will reward the best new poem and best new translation, written anywhere in the world, with cash prizes and publication.

best poem

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£6 entry fee; free to PN Review subscribers

must be written in English, previously unpublished, and the sole work of the entrant

translation must be in English, unpublished, the sole work of the entrant, and with copyright cleared

winner receives £600 and publication in PNR.

winning translator receives £600 and publication in PNR.

Both competitions open on 1 July and close 12 midnight gmt on 1 September 2017.

The competitions are open to all. Entrants may submit to both categories but the same entrant cannot win both prizes. Submissions to prize@pnreview.co.uk as attached pdf.

You will receive a reply within one week with a link to make payment. Submissions are read blind: do not include your name on the same page as your poem. Include your full name, contact details, subscription status, and poem title on a separate page before the poem. The entry fee is non-refundable and unpaid-for entries by nonsubscribers will be disqualified. The decision of the judges (the PN Review editors) is final and no correspondence will be entered into. Winners will be notified by email on 1 November 2017 and invited to a prize-giving event in Manchester.

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19

ART

Trump in B&W Amy Gilvary

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A humanitarian at heart, native New Yorker, Amy Gilvary’s innovative artistic vision coincides with her social inclination to spread love, kindness and acceptance through creativity. Her works are highly symbolic images of the power of words, particularly the contemporary artist’s role as cultural innovator and change-maker. To commemorate his 100th day in ofice, her recent VoicePix: Trump in Black and White is a collection of 100 of the many, many statements he made pre and post election (presented here in a #SmallFontForASmallMan). This is the POTUS’s actual voice taken from speeches, debates, interviews, rallies and press conferences.

So in a sense he created this art and would tell you it’s the very, very best piece here.

1) Nobody has more respect for women than I do. Nobody. 2) I tend to like beautiful women more than unattractive women. 3) There has to be some form of punishment [for a woman who gets an abortion]. 4) And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the [bleeped out]. 5) ’Cause I like kids. I mean I won’t do anything to take care of them. 6) I don’t wanna sound too much like a chauvinist but when I come home and dinner’s not ready, I go through the roof! 7) I was the one that really broke the glass ceiling on behalf of women. 8) I never went bankrupt. 9) Well, you know what? I’m worth five billion dollars, plus, by a lot. 10) Nobody’s stronger than me. 11) I’m gonna get the bathing suits to be smaller and the heels to be higher. 12) There’s nobody bigger or better at the Military than I am. 13) I think you better hold onto your girlfriend, Rosie, because if you lose her, you’ll never be able to get another one. 14) There’s nobody that will take care of women’s health issues better than I will. 15) I know words. I have the best words. 16) There’s nobody bigger or better at the military than I am. 17) My primary consultant is Myself. 18) I don’t know anything about what you’re even talking about with uh … white supremacy. 19) Nobody loves the Bible more than I do. 20) Putting a wife to work is a very dangerous thing. 21) With the terrorists, you have to take out their families.

22) It’s all fake news. It didn’t happen. 23) Nobody builds walls better than me. 24) I’ve received many environmental awards. Many, many environmental awards for the work I do. 25) I get the biggest crowds. I get the biggest standing ovations. 26) I think it’s [Climate Change] is a big scam. 27) I love The First Amendment. Nobody loves it better than me. Nobody. 28) Nobody’s better to people with disabilities than me. 29) I’m worth many, many billions of dollars. 30) The reporters because they’re a very dishonest lot. 31) I could be the most presidential person ever.

Other than possibly the Great Abe Lincoln, alright? 32) Donald Trump has always been very, very successful. 33) I’m the tough guy! 34) There’s nobody that’s done so much for equality as I have. 35) Number one, I’m not stupid, okay? I can tell you that. Right now. Just the opposite. 36) I went to The Warton School of Finance. It’s like one of the hardest schools in the world to get into. 37) There’s nobody more pro-Israel than I am. 38) Of course it’s very hard for them to attack me on looks because I’m so good looking. 39) I would’ve won the popular vote if I was campaigning for the popular vote. 40) My big win in NY – it was a landslide! It’s been like, unprecedented. 41) Some people won’t vote for me because I’m wealthy. 42) I’d like to punch him in the face I tell ya. 43) I have a great temperament. My temperament is very good, very calm. 44) I’m gonna bomb the shit out of ’em. 45) There’s nobody more conservative than me. 46) There’s nobody that understands the horror of Nuclear better than me! 47) Look, I have to do what I have to do. I’m not going to be politically correct. 48) Andrew Jackson- who a lot of people compare the campaign of Trump with. 49) I’m going to take care of everybody. 50) I’m talking with myself number one because I have a very good brain. 51) At least he’s [Putin] a good leader. You know, unlike what we have in this country. 52) He [Obama] likes me. Because I can feel it. You know, that’s what I do in life – it’s called like “I understand.” 53) Putin of Russia – he said “Trump is a genius. He’ll be the next leader.” 54) The wall just got ten feet taller. Believe me. 55) Nobody knows more about trade than me. 56) Let me be unpresidential just for a little while longer. 57) I’m afraid the election’s going to be rigged. I have to be honest. 58) The only thing she’s [Hillary’s] got going, is the Women’s card. 59) I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election – if I win. 60) I’d think my side was rigged. 61) I’m very Pro-life. 62) I’m very Pro-Choice. 63) Well I am not a hypocrite and I haven’t been treated properly. 64) Nobody knows the game better than I do. 65) You [CNN] are Fake News. 66) Written by a nice reporter. Now the poor guy— You gotta see this guy. [mocking disability] “Ah! I don’t remember.”

67) Nobody knows politicians better than I do. 68) I have to give like, my credentials all the time. 69) We won with the poorly educated. I love the poorly educated. 70) I have a great grasp of numbers. 71) There are millions of [illegal] votes in my opinion. 72) I’m best on terrorism; best on the economy; best on trade. 73) Nobody knows more about taxes than I do. 74) Well we were very close. We were just probably anywhere from 10–15 votes short. Could’ve even been closer than that. 75) I know more about ISIS than the generals do. Believe me. 76) I have five million people between Facebook and Twitter! 77) He [McCain] is a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured, okay?

78) Nobody knows more about debt than I do. 79) I’m a unifier. I’m very much a unifier. 80) There’s no rally like a Trump rally! 81) It could be 30 [million people] and it could be five. Nobody knows what the number is. 82) Nobody’s ever had crowds like Trump has had. 83) Jeb Bush has to like the Mexican illegals because of his wife. 84) I don’t have a racist bone in my body. 85) I love the Mexican people. They’re fantastic. 86) I have great relationships with Mexico. 87) I will build a better wall and I’ll build it for cheaper and Mexico will pay! 88) They [Mexico] are not our friend. 89) Nobody in the history of this country has ever known so much about infrastructure than Donald Trump. 90) That wall will cost us nothing. 91) Nobody knows the system better than me. 92) An impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful, beautiful southern border wall. 93) I will have Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words. 94) What I’m doing is good for the U.S. It’s also going to be good for Mexico. 95) There’s no ladder going over that! [the wall] There’s no way to get down. Maybe a rope. 96) I never said “repeal it [Obamacare] and replace it within 64 days”. 97) It seems that both sides like Trump and that’s good. 98) Look, I did some things in fun. I’ve said it as an entertainer. 99) And if I see I’m not doing well, then I’ll say “Bye-bye” and I’ll go back to building buildings. I’m not a masochist. 100) Sadly, the American dream is DEAD.

21

NON-FICTION

The Inaugural Address Adjie Henderson

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A rough translation of portions of Hitler’s speeches (1933 to 1938) as they relate to Trump’s inaugural (and other) speeches.

To the people of our great nation…

Our foremost duty is to revive a spirit of unity and cooperation in our great nation.

Our government will be better in the future than it has ever been in the past. Together, we will take on the task of reorganisation of the administrative and fiscal systems of our country.

We will decrease taxes and clean the swamp in the administration. We will get the job done!

(APPLAUSE) And while we celebrate in our nation’s capital, there is little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land. All changes start right here and right now because this moment is your moment, it belongs to you. This is your celebration. And this is your country.

(APPLAUSE) What truly matters is not which party controls our government, but whether our government is controlled by the people. The welfare of our communities must be protected.

The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. You have come by the millions to become part of a historic movement, the likes of which the world has never seen.

(APPLAUSE) A nation exists to serve its citizens. We want great schools for their children, safe neighbourhoods for their families, and good jobs for all. These are just and reasonable demands of righteous people. It can be solved only in implementing sound natural economic principles and all measures necessary, even if, at the time, they cannot expect to enjoy any degree of popularity. We must also secure our borders against those who would harm us.

(APPLAUSE) We must use this nation of equal rights as an instrument for the securing and maintenance of peace that the world requires today more than ever before. As regards foreign policy, the national government considers its highest mission to be the securing of the right to live and the restoration of freedom to our nation and its determination to bring to an end to what is a chaotic state of affairs.

(APPLAUSE) We will not be victims of the press. The press does not inspire its readers, but on the contrary, it panders to their lowest instincts. The press has adapted to the level of the most ignorant readers. It is this press above all that carries on a fanatical campaign of slander and

23

FICTION

The Last Brown Rat of Nagasaki Victoria Briggs

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An unusual perspective on historic events…

Asleep in the city’s sewer, the last brown rat of Nagasaki was awoken by a sudden flash of blinding light. The light had entered through the drainage pipe, smelling of sulphur, turning water to steam, and bleaching Brown Rat’s vision so that he had to wait for his eyes to adjust before climbing through the concrete cracks that had opened in the pavement.

Up all night in search of food scraps, Brown Rat had retired to the sewer at dawn to escape the rush-hour traffic and the prickling summer heat. Even with his eyes still closed, Brown Rat had known that the light in the sewer had not been caused by any sun. He had been sleeping in this same spot for years. Its darkness was total; no daylight ever touched this place.

Although the duration of the light had been brief, its illumination was of an intensity that made Brown Rat suspect he had been witness to a miracle. A visitation, perhaps, or the transcendental glow of preternatural grace.

Emerging from the sewer, Brown Rat found the city had been transformed into a fiery volcanic crater. The school and houses all reduced to rubble and the roadside blackened with shadows that were scorched into the earth. He stood on his back legs so as to sniff out the new landscape. The air was thick with smoke and embers; the mountains hidden by a swirling tower of soft, grey dust.

Brown Rat headed for the marketplace. The floor around its wooden stalls were a reliable source of food whatever the time of day or season, but other than a soupy puddle in the centre where the stalls had been, he found nothing there. He scurried over to the harbour instead where the deckhands often threw him grains of rice and fish tails. But the waterfront was desolate, the boats and sailors gone. So too the factory and the temple, the town hall and the tattoo parlour. Next he went to the park to seek out the dogs and the dog-walkers, but the story was the same: both flesh and fur alike were absent.

Turning his back on the ruin, Brown Rat headed for the outskirts of the city. The further he travelled from the centre, the more buildings he found that remained standing.

There were cars and buses abandoned in the street. People were there too, dazed and dirty, sitting on street corners, their arms and legs covered in livid, crimson welts.

A week passed and then another. One day, Brown Rat decided to follow a trail of broken people north along the highway, to a hospital tucked back off the main drag with a stack of rubbish bins on the far side of its car park. Brown Rat recognised the metal drums immediately and even from a distance he could smell their sweet decay. His mouth watered – everything he’d eaten since the sewer light had tasted bitter and metallic. He was longing for

27

FICTION

The Operation Q. Lei

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She wants to fold back upon herself too, like petals…

I She wakes up in a white darkened room and realises an operation has been performed on her – her legs are amputated. She looks around for things that belong to this room, all of which she hardly knows: a monitor apparatus that is recording critical data of her existence, an empty glass and a filled jug, a capless pen, a dim florescent light, and herself. The light scathes her, as it scathes everything it touches, leaving them with wounds-marked bodies. It scathes the part of her body below her knees most ferociously, creating an abyss of shadow. In the abyss nothing exists but a spread of paleness that is faithfully reflecting the scathing beam of the florescent light. Where the florescent light reaches not is some abstract darkness. She cannot make sense of the concreteness of space any more. Spaces have folded back upon themselves like petals of roses fold in the lightless hours. She wants to fold back upon herself too, like petals, but her missing limbs only let her go halfway, so her body creates this embarrassing arc across the space above the bed.

She has to accept the fact that from now on she becomes involuntarily open to external entities, each, unlike her, having claim to its own integrity. Her present state reminds her of an unclosable closet: all that is within is discernible to the outside; all that is without does not enter. Does anyone desire entry into her anymore? The entry is most likely undesirable. In fact, any sign of life that manages to escape from behind the half-closed doors of the closet is indiscernible. Undesirable. Unwanted to the observer of her condition. Only objects of certain physical form can be made beautiful. How come she never came across this simple thought before? She swerves her eyes to the water glass on the bed stand, and starts imagining it to have grown legs. How inappropriate those fleshy legs would appear along with the unalloyed material of the glass! Her eyes try to find other objects in the room to fasten on. Everywhere they rest, they are confirmed by the obscenity of placement of the legs being anywhere else but the empty space below her knees, which is exactly where they are missing.

Nurses are peeping at their patient as they pass by the large window, through which the room is connected to the structure of the hospital. No words are exchanged among the nurses, only silent looks into the room, and then a glance stolen with the closest one also passing by between errands. She realises that she is under observation by everyone behind that enormous glass window, but no one wants to come inside to take part in her metamorphosis.

They must be ashamed of the transformation mirrored on her body of the incompetence of their own humanity. The secret community outside does not so much bother her as the community’s inability to keep itself secret, so it appears to her as parading her banishment.

As revenge, she sweeps her hand carelessly over the bed stand, and before a second passes, two nurses, who were most likely observing their patient from behind the large window, rush into the room, adjust the florescent light, and clean up the aftermath of their patient’s inadvertent movements. Between the two pairs of eyes she notices flickering expressions of exasperation and sympathy. She decides that she enjoys these visits, so she commits the act five times in

33

FICTION

The Storyteller Suchana Seth

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A world where we are not truly free to make our own stories, but must tell the stories we were taught to tell…

I am Serim – Storyteller to our beloved Queen.

I walk alone these days, lost in the effort to tell my own story – my first, and perhaps my last.

It is of my Scheherazade I wish to speak. Of my princess – if I but knew how. But my powers are failing me and my story falters, like my steps.

I watch the moon rise tonight from my seat in the Tower of Contemplation, as I have done now for many nights. I sit here in the star-bright silence and struggle to remember the sound of my Scheherazade’s voice. But it is my Queen I remember. It is my Queen who rules my thoughts in spite of me.

My Queen – whose side I have never left in the long years of our life. I have sat beside her bed in the last watches of the night when she was but a child craving new stories. I have told her tales of mighty beasts that roamed the woods of our old world, and tales of the mighty heroes who hunted evil across oceans and beyond mountains. I have spoken of the ways of our people, and I have seen in my young Queen’s eyes the growing love for her people.

Together we have watched the swift summer race across the bounteous land. Together we have counted out the days of the slow winter as we walked the jewelled corridors of the palace. We are held to be old, even among our friends in the palace. And yet my Queen feels not the pangs of age, its slow decay. She is as lovely as the dawn on which I first gazed upon her. Strange that of all my fading memories, this one should be so clear – the vision of majesty my Queen was when she stood upon the ramparts leading her people in the Song of Gratitude we sing for the Ancients.

I have watched in sorrow as the enemy came in their great ships out of the far stars and plundered so much that was precious to us. I have watched my Queen stand still as a rock amidst the turbulence of those wars, a smile playing on her lips, her eyes alight with a sacred vision.

“The light of the Ancient Days will shine the brighter now – the enemy cannot plunder the treasure in my heart. The enemy knows not the purpose of our being,” I have heard my Queen say. Were these the words that nourished my doubt? Were these the words that shaped the circle my thoughts trace each day? What luminous vision can bring succour for our loss? What secret does my Queen keep, that keeps her safe even from the ravages of time?

I feel my powers ebbing – the stories are not as easy to remember as they were so

37

FICTION

Tigre

/

Amid mosquitoes and a cold forest flushed with moisture, deeper still we plunged…

We went to Tigre because we were told that it was a beautiful canal city floating on the delta of the Río de la Plata, named for the jaguars – known locally as tigres – which were hunted there until the end of the nineteenth century. S. didn’t dare to sit down when we caught the coastal train, because women in Buenos Aires become puckering, yawping dogs if one of their own is pregnant and an occupied seat is not immediately proffered. (It is a Catholic country, and like a slow bloodletting, elected democracy had just begun to suck out the chill of the last century’s dictatorship and recession: at least a quarter of Argentine women were pregnant.)

Even before we went to Tigre, I discerned that S. wasn’t grown from hardy stock.

He studied at a third-tier university in London and would become a dentist only a few years later, specialising in new techniques for root canals. The evening before our trip, he met three fellow dentists-to-be in the hostel bar, plying the pretty young women with cups of the local watery beer, which they all repeatedly exclaimed was outrageously cheap. As we passed each other in the hallway to the toilets, S. tugged the bottom hem of my sweater and held me with a searching look. “When I first saw you, I thought you were unattainable,” he said. S. then pivoted squarely into the nearest toilet and slid the door closed. I immediately heard water slapping water. That night, we slept as we had for the past week – the bunk beds making us siblings, my face levitated three feet directly above his, gently buoyed into slumber by mite-bitten planks and damp wools.

A man, neither middle-aged nor in his first youth, boarded the train at the station where the city’s outskirts meet the sea. He spent the entire journey squatting to one side, muttering at a long sliver of glass that he nestled in the crook of his arm. The glint of the bright morning reflected and flashed in his eyes.

In Partie de campagne, the women of a silly Parisian family find sexual happiness and precarious truce in the river skiffs and willow-shadowed coves of a country village on the Seine. I didn’t know if S. had seen Renoir’s film, but after we disembarked at the station in Tigre, he raced to a kiosk and returned to me with two tickets which included a round-trip cruise as well as coffee and tea. When our canal boat arrived at the main island’s first dock, the captain, a Bolivian whose once-broken nose had crimped into a hawk-like hook, roughly motioned us off. Before guiding his charge back into the olive-ashen light gliding above the sluggish tributary, he aimed his deformed centrepiece in the direction of an opening in the brush. There was, as they say, no soul in sight.

“The bloody Venice of bloody Latin fucking America,” S. snorted. He barrelled forward with the same blind assurance that would later guide him into countless apertures of astonishing dentition. I dutifully followed him like a pet. During the short voyage, we had passed baroque mansions shrouded in ceiba trees, their branches heavy with empty birdcages and brown wrinkled fruits. Large estate gardens stretched out onto private piers offer-

Con Artists

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40 40

ESSAY

Claire Polders

A personal essay.

He stood on the roof of his red Volkswagen and yelled at the neighbour. He chopped the air with the French kitchen knife a friend of mine had given me as a housewarming gift.

I don’t remember what got him on the roof of his car, but I’ve kept the knife. After so many years it still lives in my kitchen drawer, unused.

Did he ever...?

Of course not. That would have made it far too easy.

I remember thinking: I can fix this. *** He vacuumed the house in the grey light of dawn, making as much noise as possible. Not to annoy the neighbour or get rid of the dust. He vacuumed to rob me of sleep. The previous night, I had refused to stay home and watch soccer with him, so I must have been whoring about. His revenge was typical. He knew I had an important exam on Derrida coming up and he wanted me to fail. Failure would ruin my self-confidence and the more my own story faltered, the more my belief in “us” would grow. *** I am not strong.

I am not smart.

I am not brave.

I am not detached. *** Left in my mind are scenes and anxieties and insufficient understanding. What did we say to each other over breakfast when things were temporarily pseudo-okay? How could I have slept with a man who locked me out of the house and made me stand without a coat on the walled patio in the snow? *** I was in college at the time, a philosopher in the making. Whenever I read a text, I applied my cognitive tools to distinguish baloney from logic, fact from fiction. I would look at the statements, debate them with others, question the author’s authority, and try to determine how a hidden hypothesis could be falsified.

At home I was stubborn and irrational, rejecting all the evidence that would contradict the one belief in which I had invested myself.

I believed we loved each other. ***

45

ART

Again and Again Sarah Kaizar

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This work seeks truth through the methodical manipulation of a set number of variables and explores the anxieties created by subtle shifts in presentations of the same pieces of information. This process yields a deliberate but limited context for understanding, rendered in a dense collection of multi-layered cells. The accompanying video component (https://vimeo.com/214831225) puts these cells into motion, further blurring understanding while simultaneously putting another element into “real time.” The video is intended to be played on a loop as a nod to internet meme format. The installation is currently on display at art museum The Delaware Contemporary as part of their annual juried exhibition, running 2 June to 8 August. See more at http://sarahkaizar.com/work/installation.html.

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