Litro Summer issue

SUMMER Juno Baker Rajeev Chakrabarti Jessica Mehta Innocent Ilo Richard Lee -Graham Ellie Broughton Frank Meola

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Cover | Seigar

EDITOR'S LETTER Editor- in-Chief & Art Director Eric Akoto: eric.akoto@litro.co.uk Assistant Editor Barney Walsh: barney@litro.co.uk Designer Elina Nikkinen Head of Development & Partnerships Maria Salvatierra Arts editor Daniel Janes: arts@litro.co.uk Online Editor James Cook: essays@litro.co.uk Catherine McNamara: flash@litro.co.uk Dur e Aziz Amna: tuesdaytales@litro.co.uk Story Sunday: barney@litro.co.uk Cover image

by Seigar General Enquiries +44 207 257 9478 Subscription enquiries subs@litro.co.uk or +44 0203 371 9971 USA: 646 519 2452 All other enquries info@litro.co.uk © Litro Magazine LTD July/August 2018

Eric Akoto

DEAR READER, For this summery issue of Litro Magazine our call for submissions wasn’t limited to a particular theme – we threw wide our doors for writers’ best work on any subject matter, to let them surprise us – and so the issue that emerges is a bit of a mix, even more so than usual, ranging from the serious to the playful, covering dark matters and silly games.

So we have stories of grief and loss and suffering: there are (literary) communications from beyond the grave in Richard Lee-Graham’s strange but touching (and playful) “…in acceptance.”; Nigerian writer Innocent Ilo’s “When You (Don’t) Want to Die” begins as a story about a little girl longing for death, but becomes something more magical; and in “The Crossing”, Rajeev Chakrabarti takes us through the journey of

a Syrian refugee’s desperate flight from war, seeking a new home.

But we have space for more relaxing stuff, too, for some on-the-surface not-soserious work. There’s a musical interlude: focusing particularly on the words of Paul McCartney and John Lennnon, Frank Meola’s essay “Reading Words, Hearing Music” is about song lyrics and poetry and the difference between the two. And then there’s time for a game or two: in Juno Baker’s “The Rules of the Game”, set in the 1980s, teenage schoolgirls vie for an appearance on a TV gameshow that one of them dreams might change her life; while in Ellie Broughton’s “The Touch Thief ” a man plays a creepier, lonelier private game on the London Underground.

Finally there’s poetry from Cherokee writer Jessica Mehta; and photography from artist Seigar, from a series entitled “My Plastic People”.

As usual, but even more so than usual, more work was submitted to us than we could possibly squeeze into a single issue of Litro, so look to Litro.co.uk’s online #TuesdayTales, #FridayFlash, #SaturdayEssay, and #StorySunday slots for even more great writing.

www.litro.co.uk @LitroMagazine @LitroMagazine

TABLE OF CONTENTS 05

Contributors

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FICTION

#171 Summer

07 The Rules of the Game by Juno Baker 14 The Crossing by Rajeev Chakrabarti 22 When You (Don’t) Want to Die by Innocent Ilo 30 …in acceptance. by Richard Lee-Graham 39 The Touch Thief by Ellie Broughton

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ESSAY

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Reading Words, Hearing Music by Frank Meola

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POETRY

18 Poetry Quintet by Jessica Mehta

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My Plastic People by Seigar

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CONTRIBUTORS

Juno Baker is a freelance writer, and Between receiving tonnes of rejections from editor of the University of Cambridge’s cat-adoption agencies, Innocent Ilo finds Leading Change website (leadingchangeuc. com). Over her reasonably long life, she has worked as a secretary, singing-dancing waitress, performance poet, children’s party entertainer, film extra, actor, cabaret compere, night summary writer and journalist.

She has written articles for the Guardian and Third Sector Magazine, book reviews for Litro, and once interviewed Dolly Parton.

Her fiction has been placed in several competitions – including Winchester Writers Festival, Pin Drop, Short Fiction and Rubery – and appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, most recently, Mslexia 76 and Unthology 9.

Ellie Broughton is a content producer

and writer living in London. Work of hers has previously been published by The Independent, Positive News and Elsewhere Journal.

time to read, write, tweet, and nurse his fragile ego. His works have been published or are forthcoming in Fireside, Reckoning 2, A Beautiful Resistance, Brittle Paper, Strange Horizons, Short Story Day Africa’s Identity anthology, and elsewhere. He lives in Nigeria and is currently working on a novel(la).

Seigar is an English philologist, a high-

school teacher, and a curious photographer.

He is a fetishist for reflections, saturated colours, details and icons. He feels passion for pop culture that shows in his series. His aim as an artist is to tell tales with his camera.

Travelling is his inspiration. His most ambitious project so far is his “Plastic People", a study in anthropology and sociology that focuses on the humanization of the mannequins he finds in the shop windows all over the world. He has participated in several exhibitions, and his works have also been featured in international publications.

He writes for The Cultural Magazine (Spain) about photography and for Memoir Mixtapes (L.A.) about music. He also shot and wrote “Being young in Tenerife” for Vice Spain.

CONTRIBUTORS

Richard Lee-Graham is a London-

based writer who studied creative writing at Central Saint Martins and has attended workshops at City University of London. In 2017, his short story, “The Euth of Today”, was shortlisted and published in in Storgy’s Exit Earth anthology.

Common themes in Richard’s work are death, time, and life’s misfits. His greatest influences are the novels of Kurt Vonnegut, the journalism of The New Yorker, and the music of David Bowie. You can find more of his work on his blog; rlgwrites.com, or get in touch via Twitter; @RLGwrites.

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Frank M. Meola has published work in a variety of forms and places, including New England Review and the New York Times. He recently completed a novel, titled Clay, and is working on a new one. He has an MFA from Columbia University and teaches at NYU. He lives in Brooklyn, New York with his husband and their two cats.

Rajeev Chakrabarti is a writer from Jessica (Tyner) Mehta, born and raised

in Oregon and a member of the Cherokee Nation, is the author of thirteen books, including eight collections of poetry, four novels, and one nonfiction book. She’s received several writer-in-residency posts around the world, including the Hosking Houses Trust with an appointment at The Shakespeare Birthplace (Stratford-UponAvon, UK), Paris Lit Up (Paris, France), the Women’s International Study Center (WISC) Acequia Madre House post (Santa Fe, NM), the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts (Nebraska City, NE), and a Writer in the Schools (WITS) residency at Literary Arts (Portland, OR). www.jessicamehta.com

Kolkata, India. He graduated from Delhi University’s St Stephen’s College, and attended graduate school and worked in the USA before returning to India. His novel – about a prisoner in Afghanistan – is under submission to publishers in India; an extract is forthcoming in an anthology published by the Margo Collective in the UK. “The Crossing” is his first published short story.

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The Rules of the Game

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By Juno Baker In the 1980s, a teenager dreams of escape…

She pictures his feet thumping across the plush Persian carpet, and the swathes of peach silk that drape the windows of his hotel room. (No. Not room. Suite of rooms. She can see a fourposter bed through the open door behind him.) She watches him pace, turn, and march back clasping his hand to his head, clutching his hair. He’s ignoring the television for now, but it’s switched on, blurting out the same adverts that jangle along in the Sixth Form Common Room: Shake n’ Vac putting freshness back; a man stripping in a launderette to wash his jeans; a finger of fudge being just enough to give your kids a treat. She knows why he’s ignoring the adverts. She knows that he, Oliver Stone, is plagued by a crisis. He’s racking his brains trying to think who – who on earth – could play that role in his next film. And as the daydream plays out in her head, Em realises Abigail could do it. She really could.

The Sixth Form Common Room stinks of fruity Body Shop products, teenage sweat and the salty smell of prescription spot cream. Upper sixth-formers oust the Lower Sixth from the best seats. Standing room only. Em leans against the wall. She should have gone home.

Abigail’s watching it at home. Her mum wanted them to watch it together. (Apparently.)

Everyone knows what happened at the audition. (Obviously.) For weeks, younger girls have been running up to Em screaming “willow” in her face. Now, she must watch Abigail Fawcett appear on telly in her place and she knows what will happen next. Abigail will get spotted –

by Oliver Stone or George Lucas, someone like that – and be catapulted into a career of fame and fortune.

The music begins. Drums skitter. Girls scream, “It’s starting! It’s starting!” Space letters fill the television screen, shimmer and change, whirl and explode.

“Everyone shut up!”

“It’s starting!” *** Strange that Em even heard about the audition, given how little she listens in Assembly. So strange in fact that, when she thought about it afterwards, it seemed that it was meant to be.

At first, that Assembly had been no different to any other. The sun had filled the school hall, highlighting the shine on Sister Assumpta’s pale stretched skin and warming up the gym mats, so that the place smelled of old rubber and old sweat. Assembly was always tedious (obviously), so it was impossible not to lose herself in fantasies about the life she was destined to lead. A life where she’d be interviewed on chat shows like Wogan.

Sister Assumpta’s voice had faded out as Terry Wogan’s warm Irish lilt faded in: So Em tell us how you were spotted? She imagined herself smiling a perfect smile. Was it George Lucas who saw you walking down the street?

Was it George Lucas? She couldn’t decide. It had been George Lucas yesterday, and the day before, but that morning Em decided she didn’t want a Princess Leia type of role. She thought she might be grittier than that. David Lynch?

She’d read in magazines about girls breezing round London and being spotted by

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The Crossing

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By Rajeev Chakrabarti Goodbye, Home. Goodbye Syria.

We’ve left everything behind, but we mustn’t look back, my mother whispered to us.

She pulled us into an embrace and kissed our cheeks. Her lips were soft petals that brushed my skin, and the scent of her perfume was in my breath. My brother Efra lay his head down upon her shoulder as his little body trembled. I looked past them to the window of our small room, where the sun’s glare hid what lay outside – like a future that was not ours to see.

It had been four years since the war began, three years since the shelling started and our country had come to a standstill; two years since planes flew overhead and dropped bombs over the cities, leaving black scars upon our streets, our souls; six weeks since we had fled our home and crossed the border, leaving everything behind. Now, we waited for what came next: a chance to start life anew, to live in hope and not in fear, to dream once more. *** My father was a soldier in the Army and after the war began, he was sent away to the front to join the fighting. Before he left, he kissed us goodbye and promised that he would return to us. We prayed to Allah to protect him and keep him safe. Days passed before we heard news of him. After we went to bed, my mother turned on the television, and I listened to it through the walls, to catch any news of the war. Sometimes, when I woke up at night, the TV was still on: my mother had fallen asleep on the sofa and I tiptoed across the living room and turned the television off. My father called us from the front: he spoke to us in his lighthearted way, as if he was not at war but somewhere else. Once while on the telephone with him I heard gunfire in the background and I was afraid, as if the war had suddenly become close. We asked him when he would come home. Soon, he promised. Then one evening he came home, on leave from the front, and he pressed his bear body against our soft skins and held us tight.

When he had slept and rested, he was like our father of old again, though his hearing was less sure and he spoke louder than he did before. One evening, Efra sat down next to him and said: tell us a story, a story about the war. But he did not tell us about the real war; instead, his stories were fantastical tales, full of adventure where the enemy – the rebels – were like mythical creatures. He told us how he would outwit and defeat them before he killed them off. Efra listened to him with his hand on his chin, his little body shivering with excitement till he grew tired and fell asleep on his lap. My father picked him up and carried him to bed. He returned and took me to bed, kissed me goodnight. I closed my eyes and listened to his heavy footsteps fade beyond the door and I knew he would be going away again. *** His leave ended and he returned to the front. The war intensified and spread to the north of the country. The rebels captured the first cities and then reached the outskirts of our city. On television, they spoke only of great victories, how the rebels would soon be defeated and the

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Poetry Quintet

By Jessica Mehta

How I Like My Women I like my women slight and frail, bones hollowly light, ribcages pressed like prison bars against the skin.

I love the women with stomachs caved in, divots carved like ice cream scoops below breasts begging to melt. It’s the women with the lips like readied blisters, skin sautéed in good genes and creams that remind me how exquisite we are and of all I’ll never be. *** The Lecture You think I want to be here?

Listen, I was young like you once, too. I thought of traveling the world and I did a little and let me tell you there’s nothing romantic about drunken Korean men vomiting on your shoes in the subway or Ticos on the beaches holding your hand and sucking down iced sodas poured in plastic bags while they give thirteen-year-old local girls the up down.

Just listen to me: I wanted to go to Iowa. I stood on the murderous barstools at the Yamhill Pub on open mic night and told roomfuls of belligerent strangers about my one-night stands.

I read The Bell Jar and fancied myself Esther or thought, you know, if I’d just been born in the right decade they’d have called me more handsome than Marlon Brando and I could’ve been high every night or crafted the perfect suicide letter. Listen, I’ve done all that and let me tell you something you already know,

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When You (Don’t) Want to Die

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By Innocent Ilo A child’s longing for death … and an unexpected new life.

On a cold Saturday morning, many years ago, I woke up and really wanted to die.

Before the thought came to me, I was like every other seven-year-old girl who found delight in wearing patchwork skirts, got scared of turkeys with dangling red wattles, begged storks for white fingernails, thought shooting stars could make wishes come true, and measured her shadow at noon to know how long she would be alive. But those every other days withered and ushered in days of sitting alone, cooking up death-plans, and nights of sleep wiggling around my eyes and scurrying off when I reach out for it.

I first heard of death from Ma Joy. She talked about it with the other matrons after lunch, last Easter Sunday. They clustered around in the basement after sending us outside to play. I stayed back, eavesdropping behind the door. Ma Joy began with reeling out names of people death had taken: Urema, who used to deliver the moi-moi; Uncle Folarin, who used to come fix the pipes; and Aunty Ursula, who used to steal strands of hair from the newborns at Fent Hospital. It was easy to pick up Ma Joy’s high-pitched voice as she described death’s frigid and spidery fingers.

“He curls up on the brick wall of Cathedral and bides his time on a soul,” Ma Joy had said and the other women – NK, Adaku and Ifenne – made whooshing sounds with their lips.

“Aye!” That was Adaku, I could tell from the voice’s feathery brush. “My mother used to say that you could see death catwalking in Cathedral’s garden on the night of the Summer Solstice.”

“Catwalk?” I was lost at whose voice it was, NK’s or Ifenne’s.

“Yes.” Adaku was affirmative.

“Isn’t death a man?” This was certainly Ifenne, the brash tingle of the voice against my ear gave it away.

“No, death is a woman. A fine woman with heavy breasts and tomato-coloured lips,” Adaku said.

The Summer Solstice was two months away from Easter so I blew hot air into the cup of my palms and rubbed the moist warmth all over my face to make time go faster. April’s days fizzled out, leaving behind bouts of flu from the early, dusty rains. May swooped down on us and filled the air with the sanguine voices of children who played Ododo-Miri, a game where children tried running through the rain without being hit by raindrops. Only wingedfeet children could play Ododo-Miri and I have to watch them from my window, with envy in my eyes. When I was sure they were not looking, I would fling banana peels at them and wait for the delightful crack of breaking bones as they slip on the peels.

June finally came with the rustling of brown leaves. Each day crawled away, slowly,

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...in acceptance.

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By Richard Lee-Graham A literary haunting, of sorts…

There were three things I had in common with my father: whisky, writing, and sleepwalking.

According to him, I was an uncultured whisky drinker and untalented fiction writer. “But, my God, you might just be the greatest sleepwalker there ever was,” he’d said one morning after he’d seen me juggling semiconscious in my flannel pyjamas. To this day, I’ve never been able to juggle whilst awake.

He hadn’t left me much: a few unpublished manuscripts, a signed first edition of his debut novel, and his Remington Portable typewriter, which he was found slumped over, with an empty bottle of whisky in his lap and the final words he ever wrote stamped into the furled paper – I'm tired.

The Remington Portable was a beautiful thing. When you held it in your hands it was heavy and cold, like a chiselled lump of iron ore. But when you placed it on a desk, it became an intricate, miraculous object, with hundreds of delicate cogs and levers working to your bidding. I’d always loved it. My father was repulsed by the idea of using a computer or word processor. “What’s good enough for Orwell is good enough for the rest of us,” he’d said once, grinding his teeth as he wound the fiddly ink ribbon into the Remington. Orwell had used the same model, but my father had been duped into thinking he’d bought Orwell’s actual typewriter. As such, he treated the thing like a literary totem, with powers beyond mere mechanical virtue. When I heard that he’d stipulated in his will that I should have it, it was the only time after his death that I came close to crying. I just didn’t expect it – he wasn’t a sentimental man.

My father was right about two things: I never savoured whisky for its flavour, and I couldn’t write to save my life. I was a drunken failure until the day I stopped trying to impress him – which was the day he died. My stories were awful. They were about ray-guns and green Martians and stereotypical characters like alcoholic writers. My prose was a mess and my father had told me so. That’s when I’d started trying to impress him with drinking – but I was even worse at that. I retched at the taste of his finest single malts, but gulped them down all the same. My slight frame couldn’t handle the stuff. By the time my father was swilling his third glass, I was urinating in the corner of my room, singing “Wonderwall” so loudly I could hear the urban foxes shrieking in reply.

I can’t tell you for sure whether I was a great sleepwalker, as my father had claimed.

For one thing, I couldn’t see myself sleepwalk – I was completely oblivious of it. But I did wake up in some unusual situations. During one episode, I’d got fully dressed and taken myself to a casino. I became conscious at a blackjack table, walled-in by a metropolis of chips.

Soon after waking, I was escorted out by some large men, along with my winnings, which I handed over to my father (I don’t recall the exact amount, but it was enough to stem the post

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The Touch Thief

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By Ellie Broughton A solitary game on the Tube…

The game started with a stranger nudging the man’s left arm from the armrest. Another day he might have fought for the spot. But he had been ruminating, and the sensation came from nowhere. He felt his neighbour’s right arm snuggle its elbow against his left arm. When the Tube jolted, a hand hopped into the spot where his own had been. A warm form lay against his arm, which now hovered beside the armrest, floating in mid-air. There had been no struggle, no contest; only sensation.

The moment reminded the man of a Bible story from a middle-school assembly.

Jesus was walking through a crowd when he felt someone touch the hem of his clothes. But it wasn’t because Jesus saw them that he knew he’d been touched. The Bible said the prophet felt his “power had gone out from him”.

Back on the Underground, the man has no time for qi or reiki or chakras or “power”.

But when the stranger’s coat sleeve had touched his own, he too had felt energy flow away from him like an out-breath. All day he was heady and light: he couldn’t stop thinking about the feeling of the stranger’s arm on his. It was not long after this that the man began to play.

These were the rules of touch thievery. First of all, a game must only occur between the hours of 6.30am and 9.30pm on the London Underground. Buses are an unsuitable ground for play (too great a risk of injury), likewise trains (pitch too large) and the Overground (implausibility of playing by daylight).

The second law of touch thievery is: thieves must pick on someone similar in size to themselves, or larger. Thieves cannot subvert their play into exercises in intimidation or harassment: pensioners, children, wheelchair users and pregnant women are out of bounds; anyone who might hesitate to complain or retaliate. For the man – at a respectable 5' 10" – the second rule relegates swathes of the general populace. Chivalric code sets the tone.

There’s no question of the game hurting anyone: nine times out of ten, the subject doesn’t even notice he or she is a goal. For every subject who recoils from his touch (as if his hand is a wet umbrella or a dog’s tongue), another welcomes him with a smile. Perhaps they too are playing his game.

Thievery was down to a mixture of skill and luck. At first, it was a game without rules. He learned his hunting ground over a number of years, and knew the best places to play, rest, look and hide, where the yellow line at the edge of the platform was scuffed faint, and how to perfect his camouflage.

After a while, the game became more sophisticated. Like a Go player he looked for sequences, not moves – heading to a quiet section of the train, knowing body language there would be more relaxed because the carriage was less crowded. In packed carriages, you could start a fight by brushing against someone’s backpack. But in adequately-filled carriages, a thief could run one hand along a stranger’s entire thigh without so much as an apologetic glance.

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Reading Words, Hearing Music

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By Frank Meola On poetry and song lyrics.

Recently I was browsing through Paul McCartney’s book of poetry and lyrics, Blackbird Singing, which I’d bought a few years before but hadn’t fully read. This time I paid closer attention to the verse, and I began to notice that I was reading the poems very differently from the lyrics. And for an obvious reason: the lyrics register in a way that seems less cerebral and more visceral than the lines written as “poetry,” meant to communicate solely as words on a page. I cannot separate the words of, say, “Eleanor Rigby” from the doleful melody and slashing strings that vivify and embellish them on the recording I’ve listened to hundreds of times since childhood. The words are already inside me, attached to musical notes, and refuse my attempts to give them a purely verbal life through the eyes’ silent, inner-voice perusal.

The emotions the song brings out are in fact older than my comprehension of the lyrics. As kids we learn songs by repeatedly hearing them and singing them, even if the lyrics are far beyond our understanding. This odd disparity between cognitive and emotional response is sharpest, I think, in songs. I can enjoy poetry whose meaning evades me (some of Stevens or Hart Crane, for instance), but that enjoyment is largely an aesthetic effect of the words, not an emotion created by music that infuses, as it were, the words at some preverbal level.

Songs become part of us by reiteration, working deep into our minds and residing there, dormant, until we hear them again or they are revived by a random association or a deliberate summons. And it is the melodies, the notes, the wordless instruments that create this lasting power. The song that provides McCartney’s book title begins “Blackbird singing in the dead of night/ Take these broken wings and learn to fly.” Perfectly nice phrasing, but here as I write them and when I read them in a printed book, the words don’t, as it were, take flight. Only when I liberate them by allowing the buoyant, folk-like tune and McCartney’s voice to assume their natural place beneath and within the words (by no longer trying to suppress the remembered music) do they assert their full force, aesthetically and emotionally.

The words have some of the music of poetry, but mostly they rely on – have their fulfilment in – the music of music.

Another way to look at this might be to compare the use of language in “Blackbird” with a similar use by a non-songwriting poet, not of course to disparage “Blackbird” as a poem (it isn’t one) but to suggest some differences in the way poetry and songs work.

Repetition provides a good example: in “Blackbird” the line “You were only waiting for this moment to arise” is immediately repeated. When read on the page, it is merely a repetition, meaning pretty much the same thing the second time. But when sung (at least in McCartney’s own interpretation), the lines are different because the notes are different, as are the singer’s inflections. We aren’t so much attentive to the echoing as to the variation in melody and emphasis, reinforcing the line’s meaning but also changing it. The waiting and the moment are given poignant urgency, and “arise” lifts hopefully.

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My Plastic People

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