The Inkwell IX

Hi there! We’re Edinburgh University’s creative writing magazine, showcasing the best student writing the Uni has to offer. What you have here is a very special edition of The Inkwell. We’ve tightened up a bit. Gone smaller. Cute, I might venture, but don’t be misled: there’s nothing “little” about the writing in here. We greatly enjoyed putting this collection together and would like to thank everyone who contributed to this final product. Now all that remains is for you to find a comfy spot and have a little flip through. Enjoy.

E D I TO R I A L EDITOR IN CHIEF

Joni Chiang

GENERAL EDITORS

Jenny Allan Nuzha Nuseibeh

POETRY EDITOR PROSE EDITOR DRAMA EDITOR COPY EDITOR HEAD OF DESIGN

Francis Shimell Lucie Norel-Wilson Niamh Keenan Ross Foley Julia Barbour

SOCIETY PRESIDENT VICE PRESIDENT EVENTS MANAGERS

Toby Sharpe Madeleine Laulund James Gao Alice Welton

SECRETARY TREASURER

Elisabeth Peterson Silje Graffer

• Contents • 3

And all this, my darling, I dreamed for you

5

Luxembourg, 1942

6

The Last Story

9

Decades

11

Circus Nights & The Actress

12

Watch-Face

14

Old Psychology

18

Sorry

19

Sat on a Seat at the Window

23

The Surface

26

The City is Thousands of Years Old

28

Fairy Wood

29

Laila

• And all this, my darling, I dreamed for you • It was the summer I ran away to California.

I never saw myself as one for romanticism, but a dream as monolithic as that is one you can fall into for a long way without having to come up for air: land of gold, land of sun, land of cars, cheap gas and endless, snaking highways.

It started because everyone else had fallen in love, friends moving continents like fourteen hours of flight was just a heartbeat. It’s an intoxicating idea, so I followed suit.

The boy out there was everything, or at least on the surface. He had a Californian smile, the row of white teeth that didn’t dazzle like they do in the adverts but when he showed them it was like he was letting you in on a secret. There was an intimacy there, in that smile, something that said he was complicit and that you were, too.

He spoke the way he wrote. Full stops after every turn of phrase. It gave him an idiosyncratic pace that made him quietly emphatic about everything, small flairs sparking in every gesture. A few days was enough to convince me to go back, to spend all my money running away from the offices in London, the train timetables and the grey river that can’t bring itself to sparkle, even in the summer.

He had a car: it wasn’t a romantic car, but it would do. Couldn’t make it look like much in photos, not like my Chicago friends who had a knack for filtered hedonism, but you could play music full blast, letting it swell and burn in the sunlight. It came from a murky town, that music, but it was set alight under that Pacific sun, all the colours of the notes aflame, giddy synths warmed like shells on a beach, pearlescent and glaring.

I felt like, on those highways, that I’d have done anything for him (there were others I’d have done anything for, too). It was that habit of trying them on for size like expensive jewellery, seeing how well it would suit you but knowing you’d never buy it because it could never be perfect and you’re too young to know what quality is and don’t really have any money anyway.

3

So I’d try him on, thinking of the nomadic, Californian lifestyle I’d read about and thought I’d be happy (but probably only because of the sun). I imagined crowns on our heads, vintage, burnished, matte, somewhere between bronze and gold, like some resuscitated Aztec royalty, daubing them on like metallic paint on grain photos.

I fell in love in dive bars, drinking the piss beer and eyeing up the dead duke box in the corner. I fell in love in motel rooms, rooms where we’d die in flames every night, and on beaches, beaches where we’d wake up phoenixed every morning, sitting on the rocks smoking up, the forest behind us and nothing but blue in front. I fell in love with him over and over and over again. I fell in love until it was sea sickness.

And it was sickness. I was sick. Sick enough to have to write the dreams out of me, to frame them in images that were never real. Sick enough that fighting against my own memories became a permanent task, that the phantoms of feeling became my permanent neighbours. All I wrote for months after was: I will write you out of me,

I will write you out of me I didn’t run away to California. It was the summer I wandered on bridle paths, the pale English sun failing to find its way through my skin, realising I was lost, dreaming everything up to soothe the ache of finding yourself alone and out at sea.

The dream was grand, but what I really wanted were the memories. I didn’t want you, I never really wanted you. I wanted everything you could give to me in illusions, in hallucinogenic phrases, emphatic full-stops, drugs to lift me out of the woods. Funny thing to want to collect, nostalgia, but I’m a magpie about that, mad about being sick for the past. Mad about burying fears in glossy catalogue fantasies, ploughing them into anyone who might be a mannequin dressed up as escape. Mad about wasting my youth wishing I’d started being young younger.

Rachel Wilson

4

• Luxembourg, 1942 • If he could tell you he would say that it feels nothing like falling asleep there is no well lit cinemascope flashback of your life he would say that he remembered, not everything not even necessarily the good things the first time he walked into the Prospect Park Zoo laughing as the elephant moms bathed their children with water collected in their trunks his grandmother eccentric as only Italian heritage can give you but maker of the most delicious cheesecake east of the Hudson and his brother, Steve, so burdened with life except that one night on Coney Island the sun painting across the sky in gold, white, scarlet, lilac, fuchsia, and the bluest sky he had ever seen, until Luxembourg, first tour, 1942, 9th Infantry, Private First Class 12123586 when a bullet took away his ability to walk and he was carried on a makeshift stretcher through a field of wheat, which he had always thought sounded like the waves but when the wind is in the right mood the moving stalks sound somewhere between stern and outright angry as if the very earth was running out of space to keep the blood Matt MacDonald 5

• The Last Story • As the years went by, Greg learned to levitate above daily existence. He mastered the art of drifting effortlessly through the squares on the calendar, hanging over the desk. Time passed, measured by one step in the air after another, always the same distance apart, making the same empty noise, like wind squeezing through the crack under a door. The rhythm coincided with the changing traffic lights on his way to the office; the very same rhythm that dictated the clicking of numbers in his head, the way his mouth chewed the food and the echo, left behind the heels, sneaking out of his flat, down the stairs and out in the deserted street, illuminated by the lights of two in the morning. He couldn’t even wait for the clicking sound to die off before he dozed off, with mind spotlessly blank.

Of course, there were some difficulties. There always are. Sometimes she returned. Greg never heard the rhythm of her steps along the hallway. Nor had the draft ever announced her arrival by smuggling her perfume through the key hole.

But still, there she was. She knocked on the door twice, then pressed the handle as if she was entering her own home.

“Morning,” she said, her voice still a bit scratchy.

The single word she uttered fell on the floor and crawled away into the far corner of the room. She stepped in, closed the door and drew a chair.

“You can’t smoke here,” Greg said without looking at her, nor sitting up. The newspaper was boring as ever, but he wanted to finish the paragraph.

As she lit a cigarette and exhaled a heavy cloud of smoke towards the ceiling, he reached under the sofa and pulled out an ashtray.

“I don’t need that,” she waved the hand holding the cigarette and a few flakes of ash fell on the floor.

“Then what do you need?” He unfolded the paper again.

“You know.”

“You know you won’t get that. Is there anything else?”

“Nope.”

6

“Well?”

She sat with legs crossed, her eyes examining the ceiling with extraordinary interest.

“You know, I’ve had to look at that ceiling so many times, but I’d never noticed it was black.”

“It relaxes me. Did you seriously come here to discuss my interior design?”

“Occupational hazards,” she shrugged, threw the stub on the floor and stood up.

Greg started up from the sofa, but before it went further, she left.

An hour ago, Tina was lying in bed face down, trying to force herself back to sleep. The pillow was suffocating her, so she shifted and turned, desperately trying to reach a consensus between breathing and comfort. It didn’t take long before she gave up and threw her feet to the floor, sliding them into a pair of ballerina slippers. As she stood up, she felt that she couldn’t bear their soft touch and kicked them off. She hurried to the old wardrobe, pulled out a pair of jeans and a loose sweater from its heart and got dressed. Keys, cigarettes, a pair of moccasins. She had to talk with him. Forget the coffee!

Soon enough she was standing in front of the door she knew better than her own. Without hesitation, she knocked lightly and opened it to find Greg lying on the sofa, immersed in a newspaper. He didn’t acknowledge her presence in any way. If not for his open eyes and barely rising chest, she’d have thought he was dead.

“Morning,” she said to fight the impending silence.

No response. Very well, she thought as she closed the door behind herself. She moved a chair closer to him and lit a cigarette. The timer was on.

“You can’t smoke here,” he finally said.

Old stubs, remnants from countless nights passed in empty talks and wishful thoughts, rolled aimlessly all over the floor. When he saw she knew better, Greg moved, obviously irritated, and offered her an ashtray, full to the brim. It didn’t make any difference whether she used it or not.

“I don’t need that.”

7

“Then what do you need?”

The palpable impatience in his voice crushed her.

He knew what she needed. Yet he wouldn’t give it to her: it was too much to give, too much to ask for. Her hand bent back at the wrist under the weight of the cigarette half of which had melted by now. One last attempt to ask politely for his attention: change the topic, be witty for one last time, leave.

He had told her a story. Every woman deserved a different one, but they didn’t listen to him. They threw their heads back and laughed, their gorgeous perfumed manes dancing in perfect unison with the rhythm of the pleasant spasms. Then all of them, without an exception, would dive in with their plush lips veiled with lipstick.

Tina too had thrown her head back and laughed. Afterwards, she had dived in and glued her lips to his. But in the morning, as she woke up and saw his back turned towards her, she instantly regretted it. A red wave of shame climbed up her naked spine and at once she was fully awake. Restraining herself to grab his shoulder and shake him out of his sleep, she gently tapped on it, but to no avail.

She tried again, this time pressing a bit harder on his skin.

“There’s coffee in the kitchen,” he mumbled.

“Please, tell me another story!”

He snored in response. Terrified, Tina realized she had even forgotten the beginning of last night’s story.

A month passed before they met again, thirty indifferent days and peaceful nights. Greg was irritated with the silence in between the rings of the phone. At least when she called after each intense pause, he could ignore it. It was impossible to ignore silence.

The truth was that Greg had no more stories to tell her. Her eyes no longer inspired his imagination: the wings he had built out of her dreamy eyelashes and glued together with her heavy black mascara, fell apart as soon as the first rays of sunlight pierced his back. This time he thought he was closer. The moonlit path running down her bare shoulders as they walked in the night glowed brighter than ever. But then he looked up at the sky and concluded that it was a night like any other, and even the clouds were in the right places, drifting with the right speed across the squares of the calendar.

8

Mila Daskalova

• Decades • It began a fever.

There was a hot blush of fuchsia before I opened my eyes and he was a sunflower on the other side of the room; his stem ceiling high, his petals drowsy.

We found our sight at the sound of a lighter catching on the third flick. The end of a cigarette glowed in the darkness.

I was a woman now and we were hitting it twice then running down the Mile, because we could, because we were part of the air that was rushing us forward, with less indifference than leaves in the wind. A whole street symphony composed by our feet slapping on the cobbles. The streetlamps nodded downwards in easy agreement, watching us fly. Taxis were slick ships on course to the harbor.

“It’s all here,” I said. I was looking right at it.

We were hammering out new philosophies in hours. Contemplating covariance. Nepotism. Scooby-doo. “Someone should write this shit down,” he said, transfixed by the kid dancing like Ian Curtis in the corner of the room.

The nights never ended. They only paused for us to lie on the sofa, our limbs askew. Old bottles of water lay abandoned at our feet, side split and empty.

Ashtrays wept onto the threadbare rug. We only slept to be woken by the hit of the letters on the doormat, or a rattle of pans in the kitchen.

Sometime later I was leaning out a window to gather the breeze, waiting to go again and remembering our last movements: those wild hands telling odysseys against golden lamp light, brighter than a universe.

“Let’s go again,” I said. But we never did.

He lay face down on the carpet.

Teya-Jean Bawden

9

illustration Š Peony Gent 10

• Circus Nights • Overnight the tents sprung up like crocuses, bright colours defying the grey skies and stuffy businessmen who frown at unnaturally pink food. And yet despite the shining tents it is silent. From outside you cannot see the mysteries, the wonders that await you when, finally after counting the hours and waving goodbye to the mundane city scene, the curtain is drawn aside.

Inside is busy, another world of silk and sequins. Every name is false and every dream comes true. Numerous performers delight you, only to disappear behind a whisper of satin. A flash, a bang, the sparkle of glitter and the taste of smoke.

It is over.

Tomorrow when you stare at the marred, empty fields you may wonder if it was an illusion, a dream. How could you have marvelled at cheap tricks and flashing lights? Why would you enjoy a meal spun from sugar? You can’t have believed it, you knew it couldn’t last. You stare at the dirty crumpled fliers and paper cups rolling across the grass and turn away disgusted.

But, even so, for a moment it was here, and for a moment it was beautiful.

• The Actress • Breathing deeply, she hovers at the edge of it all. Blinded by the bright lights and uncomfortable in ill fitting clothes; face stiff, she stands almost frozen listening for her moment. When she walks in it is the walk of someone else, someone expected and yet unknown. Underneath the powder and gloss her face contorts into new expressions, unusual for her maybe, but not for this face. It is only one in her collection of masks. A strange laugh, an odd gesture, almost appears natural as she forgets herself. Submitting to the people and to the stage.

Rebecca Shaw 11

• Watch-Face • Funny how the back of my watch face still smells of that boy I don’t care to know anymore.

Joop Man tunnels me straight back into his seventeen arms, and still pulls up my stomach like sixteen.

And the metal face becomes woollen jumper and back of neck.

Nineteen nose knows differently.

Yet inhales to remember how we used to watch shit telly back in the sixth-form common-room.

Alison MacDonald

12

13

illustration Š Julia Barbour

• Old Psychology • The prognosis hits him like a newspaper thrown with practiced delivery, landing hard against his rough exterior. It comes suddenly: we might buy some time; probably not too late. He’d been kept an extra twenty minutes in the waiting room and had to throw another pound in the meter. He’d already bought more time. A fly throws itself frantically at the window, its knock and buzz drowning out the words washing over him until he is saturated by syllables and potential courses of treatment. Knock, knock, buzz—if the fly wants in so badly he’ll gladly trade places with him, if he can find the door.

Sensus Communis He brings the familiar pack from his pocket and weighs it on his palm. His stained fingers are a grimy reflection of its gold label. He flicks the pack open and withdraws a clean, bright white cigarette, pinching its end between his finger and thumb. He taps it twice habitually against his knuckle and directs it to his lips, closing his mouth gently over the filter—the smoker’s kiss. Lighter, flick, flint, strike, spark, the flame dances at the end of his nose, warming his face with a growing ember that fizzes and crackles. He draws with a faint wheeze and a rattled pull into his old lungs. The comfort floats on his senses, tasting and smelling of leather and dust and of warm pleasure. The sweet superfluity wafts through his head, leaving its quintessence in his brain while the excess escapes in a cloud above his head.

Imaginatio He’s not sure what age he started. He’s carried ashes on his chest since before his habit learned to tell time. His mouth tastes it, hands feel it, chest breathes it, brain thinks it. He’s not particularly fond of it, but it’s his greatest desire. He’s lived without money, without love, without joy, never without this. How many times has he sucked one of these into himself ? How many times will he put this one to his lips? He doesn’t think to count. It’s second nature, his other half.

14

Aestimativa The first—a spark of excitement, an element of danger, a hidden corner of the football field, an older girl, a dare. He took it with false confidence, impressed that his hands didn’t betray the tremor in his gut. He awkwardly held the rough puff in the back of his throat, but he didn’t sputter like the other kids.

He earned an approving smile from the older girl. That was the only time she spoke to him. He forgot to look for her in the corner of the field when the next day he brought a stolen pack from the back of his parents’ pantry.

And then he was captured by the carnality of it. The social statement and the taboo, the acceptance among peers with nothing much in common and the disdain from others whom he was relieved to find he had even less in common.

There was the smell of it on a cold morning, the feel of it on a full stomach, the concern of it after the appearance of a lump on the back of his tongue, then the relief and celebration when the lump went away and the habit could remain.

Eventually he came to know it less as a habit and more as a hobby. He couldn’t quit if he wanted to, but why would he want to? Life was too short; it was about simple little pleasures; only the good die young.

Memorativa He celebrated with one in his first car. Stared through the smoke into space on the back step of a funeral parlour the day they buried his gran. Cradled one between his fingers as his other hand tangled in his love’s hair. Wept upon it while that love walked out the door. He’d rescued it from spilled drinks, curious dogs, sneaky teenagers, and washing machines. He’d lost a whole pack once on a fishing trip when the boat tipped. He’d spared the rod, spoiled the tobacco. And all of it an offering from a grim reaper, in which he plucked long white cylinders like finger bones from caskets of danger dipped in gold. A lifetime of occasions marked with a ceremony of fire and smoke and breathing, of craving and taking a moment to be still and consume. Now all those moments he’d taken were consuming him.

15

Fantasia The buzzing grows and the fly bangs into the back of his head. It burrows into his thoughts until he begins to imagine a life searching desperately, persistently for stench and decay. To pound hopelessly against a barrier so thin and transparent that, although he can see the other side, he can never bring himself to comprehend getting there. To see the world through a mosaic of thousands of tiny copies of the same desire. To be drawn to the smell of revulsion and to bury deep inside it and make a home there. And yet also, to fly and move through life in an ever-changing pattern, avoiding the swats of circumstances.

To outmaneuver and seemingly outwit a predator bigger and more powerful.

To rebel against the clean and the cute and the well kept. To live to light up another day.

The fly lands nearby on a sticky mound on the concrete. A newspaper is stuffed into the postbox by the door. He quietly stretches out his hand like a wisp of smoke and eases the paper out, keeping it bound in a tight roll. The fly gorges itself on the muck on the pavement, intoxicated by the craving fulfilled.

A shadow emerges overhead as the newspaper comes down with a hard smack, mingling muck and fly and ink into yesterday’s news. The time runs out on the meter, and he flicks his cigarette, burnt down to the filter.

Jessica Legacy

16

illustration Š Eleanor McCullough 17

• Sorry • I’m very sorry, there’s nothing I can do.

Thas aw the ductir wuid say.

Ah suppose hes richt, It jist wasnae mentaebe.

We cun try again, Mibee.

Whun the floowrs huv groon ower the wee moond, An it dusnae hert taemuch tae see the wee bed Lyin empti.

Aw Ah cuid say wuz, Aye Ductir, Ahm awfi sorry tae.

K. F. Shenton

18

• Sat on a Seat at the Window • I don’t remember what time I left the house, but I remember thinking that I was late. I squirmed through a throng of ties, coats and briefcases, the train doors lay open and waiting ahead. My fingertips touched the cold inside of the steel door as I stepped shakily from the stone platform and into the harsh light of the carriage.

My eyes felt wide as they darted here and there; they betrayed me and I hated it. They darted towards a middle-aged woman sat to one side, her tired eyes fixed upon a laptop screen. An older man slept, openmouthed, towards the back. His newspaper had slipped onto the floor and scattered across the aisle.

One foot forward, one at a time: I stepped shakily along the carriage, and sat on a seat at the window.

As the train shuddered forward, the station fell away. My chest felt as though it was made of shoddy metal. An intractable magnetic force was prizing it open, ready to lay my racing heart bare; spilling my private cowardice all over the carriage.

It is silly to feel this way, I thought.

I closed my eyes and felt calmer. When I opened them again, the countryside was sweeping past. The stones at the side of track passed by, each little stone merging with the other in streams of brown as the train hurtled along. Fields rolled by and sheep grazed, stupid and still. Dark mountains stood sentinel on the hazy horizon.

Coughing erupted behind me, and fingers of panic traced their odious lines up my back.

19

The moment became heavy. My heart stopped in my chest, as if someone had wrapped their slender fingers around a tiny bird. I was frozen in this moment, staring helplessly into the eyes of some ancient terror with its hands clasped around my neck.

Nobody knew but me as I sat on my seat.

A large man shuffled past, breathless and ruddy-cheeked. He lifted his briefcase onto the luggage rack and sat down heavily opposite me.

I was wringing my hands in my lap, fixated on the swirling stones upon the track outside.

A private storm brewed deep within my chest. Suddenly, my heart thundered, ready to erupt through the surface of my tingling skin, beaded with fresh sweat. He cleared his throat loudly and I jumped, ready to run.

But, at last, it began to pass.

The man opposite would never know what crisis he had just wrought so casually upon me as I sat on my seat. I felt the storm subside, and cool breath flooded my chest. I swept a shaky hand over my forehead, grimacing at the dampness that came away with it. The carriage took form once more. Luggage racks, threadbare seats and sticky floors.

It all fell back into place, and I sat in my seat as though it had always been that way.

I watched the stones take shape on the ground below. I could see them now. Little ones, big ones, smooth ones, sharp ones. They blackened as we got crept towards the next station.

The train stopped at the platform.

An infinite sea of oblivious moon faces. Faces that watched, blank 20

and terrible in their ignorance. Soon the doors would open and they could devastate the carriage with their endless backpacks, polished shoes, hats and trainers. Their high-heels, laptop bags, umbrellas and bicycles. Their coffee-cups, smart-phones and plastic-encased sandwiches.

Malignant nausea bubbled stealthily up my throat once more as I sat on my seat.

It began. They filled me with their noise. Their smells choked my nostrils. Their mindless eyes bored into my head. There were so many of them now, their shoulders and elbows touching, buried in newspapers, books, phones and tablets. I watched them, my shoulders stiff and my arms turned to stone.

Waves of panic engulfed me as I sat on my seat. I was captive now. Inside the carriage, inside myself.

Freefalling, I had been dropped into the centre of a maelstrom. The tide of faces would wreck my seat and I would drown here, I thought, as I sat on my seat.

They insisted that I breathe them in. Insisted that I smell and taste their presence. Every part of them. And yet there was no pretence, no trick and no coercion.

There was only me, stupid and static, as I sat on my seat.

Conor Penn

21

22

illustration © Zoë Griffin

illustration Š Ailie Ormston 23

• The city is Thousands of years old • There is only geometry outside dripping with rain In Escher like advances it continues Above and below me The city built on top of itself Expanding up and down they tunneled built magnificent bridges and the wet and damp has covered them moss grows from ornate structures minerals hang on the ceilings growing ever slowly with the rain hiding the intricate versions of yesterday Jonathan Bay

24

• The Surface • “Hey”, somebody grabs your arm and shakes you out of your reprieve.

“You okay?” they ask you with eyebrows slightly furrowed together. “Yeah, sorry” you say, “I’m fine”. The person nods, smiles, and walks away.

From your spot on the floor, you watch the walls. The walls are solidifying and crystallising. Turning and turning. You take little notice, now.

Voices murmur and make strange sounds but you do not feel threatened by them. You cannot remember what you were not to forget. Instead, you keep staring up at something in the distance. They tell you to wait for the shift, but everything is turning and turning. The only reality is the pit. You know the shift is coming.

As suddenly as you found yourself in the pit, you find yourself in the reflective glass cage. Tearing your gaze away from the distance, you see that things are moving outside. They are making gestures and muffled sounds and you realise that they are people. Your pleading cries for help go unnoticed as they dance around you. Round and round. Turning and turning.

Mesmerised, you watch as they play in the sunlight. The sunlight! You are so close. Closer than you have been in a long time. It is still so impossibly far away. Mimicking the people, you prepare for the sunlight. You wait and mimic and watch and wait. If only you could see their faces! No sunlight can penetrate the reflective glass cage. You see the walls darken around you.

It takes a while to get up from where you fell. Slowly, oh so slowly, you finally roll over so you can once again see the sunlight. It is impossibly far away, even further than before. Your eyes hurt and you hear the broken tiles clink underneath you as you shift and you despair. You have been at this level before, but only once before. Driven by an intense frenzied desperation to get out you run up to the wall and smash against it. A shriek echoes around the room bouncing against the smooth tiles.

Once, you lived in the sunshine. You bathed in it. You know how good it is to be in the sun, the joy of it! The vitality! One day, you will be back 25

in the sun, with the bugs and the frogs and the cats and the dogs and the birds and the people! You have to remember! Now, all you can recognise are the encircling walls turning and turning around you. You ask yourself if this is the shift. The warm, lucid sun is just beyond your reach. If only you could get out of this pit!

Hope is all that keeps you going. Briefly, you wonder what you now look like on the outside. The sun is so close.

You have to get out. You have to get out. You need to get out. You must get out! Warm red splotches start to appear on the walls and you soon realise that you are covered with them too. You try to get them off, but it only makes them worse. You continue to claw and scratch and swipe and bite at them. Iron clamps constrict around your chest as an impossible heaviness settles over you. The floor sweeps up to meet you and you welcome it.

Looking up, your eyes perceive the light of day but it is preciously out of your reach. You know that if you can just climb up, and get into the sunlight, and you feel the warm rays of the sun caressing your skin, that you will be free. The room has turned and the dirt wall crumbles beneath your fingers. It gets caught underneath your nails. Feeling the wall, you step up on your makeshift bed and start to haul yourself up. Laboriously scaling the wall you discover that it’s easy at the bottom, once you get past the initial stage. You can grasp at roots now, but they soon disappear. The wall crumples beneath your feet and you have to rush to get to the top.

The muscles in your arm shake and scream at you to stop. But you can tell that it is only a little bit further to the top. You can almost hear the birds sing. You are so close. Suddenly there are no more roots for you to hold on to. Digging nails into the wall, it traitorously gives away beneath you again.

You fall, and fall, and fall. You fall and the landing is hard.

“Hey”, a person grabs your arm and shakes you out of your reprieve.

“You okay?”. You wish you could find your way out. “Yeah, sorry,” you say, “I’m fine”.

Michelle Mackie

26

27

illustration Š Peony Gent

• Fairy Wood • I’ll warn you, stone stepper light treader, it’s true; That that fairy wood is no good for you; while the paths may take you to places unseen, undullened by lamplight, shot through by sunbeams; where branches will bend under treasures untold, and their knarled knuckled hands offer all that they hold; there you may hear them, as the sky falls to eve, in the creaking of boughs and the whisper of leaves; And, if you’re clever, you may start to run, back through the shadows of the last-snatching sun; And you’ll think you have made it, but I’ll think you mistaken; I think you will stumble and crack, then be taken; And the sunbeams will drift into nothing but dust, the treasures will dull, snap and shatter with rust; in you will drink the soft golden shrapnel, swallow it down with the thick twilight musk; and there you will drown, soaked and choking on dusk Alexander Briggs

28

• Laila • I weep over cold tea in a small café. Across the sullied plastic table, Yahia’s dark brows knit over his horn-rimmed glasses. The fluorescent lights hum out of harmony with the rain outside.

“If you don’t mind my asking...” I don’t. His carefully-conjugated English chips the edges of the mugs with unintended laser precision: “Where was your father?”

She was the youngest—the last grape of the bunch, it is said in Arabic.

She was the sweetest orb, the one saved for last, the one anticipated with watering mouth: the sensation of its thin skin splitting between teeth and cool juice spouting over tongue and gums. Laila was wilder than the fruits of Bekaa Valley vines, but her skin was just as thin: the slightest application of pressure and her juices would spill across the kitchen floor, dyeing the floorboards dark wine.

I remember her silky mane pouring into the kitchen sink like water, her bent body shuddering with each fevered sob, howling like a storm as our father bent over her. He was screaming for her to stop, his voice growing hoarse as he struggled to be heard over her tempest. I rushed to her side and lifted her skull out of the sink. Her face was red and tear-stained; I hushed her, wiping the dried salt from her cheeks with my thumbs, begging her with half-finished sentences to stop crying.

Our father ordered me to my room. I looked up at him. Deaf to his words, I was unable to tear my eyes away from the pulsing twitch of a muscle on his right jawbone; the spell remained unbroken until my body made contact with the door behind me. My neck collapsed backwards from the force of the blow, and like a slingshot the back of my skull snapped against the door frame with a sound like the pop of bubble gum.

I left for Beirut not long after that.

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I dreamed the same dream about her every night for three and a half months. Her face appears before me, eyes half-lidded, an oil slick of tears across pale cheeks. She dissolves, and when the dream refocuses, she is walking down to the beach, wine-dark mane billowing behind her in the November breeze. She draws farther and farther away from me, a phantom, a mirage, a trick of the dusk. I am not home, I am not even in the country. Sirens, then silence, the cursor blinking at the end of an unfinished thought. I am not home, I am not even in the country. Our mother called me from the hospital; clinical beeping. I am not home.

I wake, and I am in Beirut, bathed in clammy sweat.

Aida Flores

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For 2014-15, the Department of English Literature is offering three exciting opportunities for writers who wish to explore their talents, foster their craft, and learn about publication. All programmes are taught by experienced teachers who are also well published writers.

MSc in Creative Writing

This one-year, full-time taught MSc offers students the opportunity to focus in depth on their own practice - of poetry or fiction - and develop both creative and critical skills through a combination of weekly workshops and seminars.

MSc in Creative Writing by Distance Learning

This three year, part-time course enables students to focus in depth on their own practice from home. It offers tutor and peer support and provides a clear framework with which to monitor development. It aims to develop awareness of process, to further craft and to raise writing and editing skills to the highest possible level.

MSc in Playwriting

This is a unique practical playwriting course and will appeal to aspiring playwrights, performance artists, directors, dramaturges and critics alike. Taught through seminars, writers’ workshops and practical workshops with actors, directors and other theatre professionals, it will focus not only on the craft of writing for performance but also on how a script plays out in real space and time, and in front of an audience.

For more information about these and other MSc programmes in English Literature visit: www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/literatures-languages-cultures/english-literature/ postgraduate/taught-masters