The Apiary Issue 1

The Apiary

ISSUE 1, WINTER 2020

Editorial Team Editor in Chief Caitlin Young

Editor & Typesetting Ríbh Brownlee

Contributing Editor Andrew Hamilton

Contributing Editor Anna Royle

Contributing Editor Alexandra Ward

Contributing Editor Jasper Banerjee

The Apiary is a literary magazine organised, edited and produced by the Writers’ Society of Queen’s University Belfast.

All proceeds from sales of The Apiary go towards funding future issues.

Editor’s Letter

BY CAITLIN YOUNG

This summer was a difficult one to impose narrative onto. An unclear start and end date. No exam halls to rush out of, no falling asleep on the shoulder of a stranger on a flight somewhere. No clear stories emerged and many remaining memories are hazy and unclear. The inspiration for the theme of ‘Lost Summer’ was to grapple with our new nostalgia for the old normality, the absurdity of our day to day lives that emerged over the summer and our adjustment to a reality that grew and morphed over the first lockdown.

We as an editorial team toiled over everything we personally lost. We tried to find the shared vocabulary for the phases of lockdown to the back home brain fog, 5km walk clarity and the anti-climatic ending to the academic year. What we found in the writing in this issue, felt like snapshots of the emotional processes we all went through.

We’ve been editing this magazine over a period where the repercussions of things both months and years in the making have come to fruition. It’s been terrifying, exhausting but has had its moments of exaltation. If summer was the prelude, we are hopefully about to enter intermission.

I’m endlessly grateful to so many people who made this issue happen.

Firstly to our contributors who relived and took a horrific time in all our lives and made them into beautiful works of art. To Queen’s Student Union, who provided the funding for us to print the magazine. To Meg-Elizabeth Lynch of Trinity Publications for all her help and guidance. To those at the Seamus Heaney Centre for their enthusiasm. And finally to my fellow editors, who kept me sane, offered their insight and are the reason for the clarity and quality of this issue.

Contents

The Lost Summer Issue Sunshine State – Beth Garrett Cocktail Umbrellas – Anna Royle A Maritime Clear – Caolan Plumb le temps de l’amour – Catherine Isabelle Kerr Lost Things – Jamie Ryan Anderson Wading Through the Dunes – Aoife McGrath Deptford Rain – Jasper Banerjee The Year Of. – Emma Buckley Last Touch of Spring – Cait Phenix Gothic-19 – Faye N. Near Shaw’s Bridge – Cait Phenix Crabs – Dara McWade Losing August – Cait Phenix Sutton Suburbia – Aoife McGrath A Nettle Elegy – Andrew Hamilton The Green Window – Cait Phenix Unpicking – Bebhinn Tankard There Will Still Be Mondays – Alexandra Ward Someday – Hephzibah Wilson

Cover art by Arthur A. Cespon

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Sunshine State

BY BETH GARRETT

Losing summer is not like losing sleep, In that absolute sense.

The sun still shines, The bees float around my garden, The flowers still bloom, And yet sometimes I find myself gazing sadly out the window, My hair the longest it’s been since I was 16.

I miss you, But I have survived missing you.

And I’ll see you again, Smiling in your too hot car, With your broken AC and your warm laugh.

And the Florida heat waxing through the window, And the air building up to a storm.

I won’t lie and say, I can’t survive without you, I could, But then again, I just don’t want to.

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Cocktail Umbrellas

BY ANNA ROYLE

I was only six months old when my mother hung me on her hip, her hand scurrying about in her carry-on bag to find the necessities needed to keep me quiet for the two and a half hour trip. She said I must’ve been a fish in a past-life because from the very first day, when the heat still felt stuffy, I would float in the pool for hours like a rubber duck in a bath. I was plopped in a ring with a string attached, looped around my father’s finger as he lay in the shade, working on the crossword puzzles he’d saved up for weeks before the holiday. He cut them out of the paper each morning and slid them into a crumpled polly pocket that he kept in the drawer in the kitchen, below the TV. When the sun would lower, I was strapped snuggly into a pram that was pushed fifteen minutes across the sand-dusted pavements to a Chinese restaurant with looming golden dragons guarding the front. The waitress, through broken English, offered to take me into the back with my bottle and nurse me while my family ate. My mother laughs now at her irresponsibility.

By the time I was six years old I was able to slip into the holiday routine as naturally as I took to the water. I took part in a kind of pageant-style competition at the hotel that year. I felt like a seal in a waterpark, walking around the perimeter of the square dance floor, with the lights so bright that I couldn’t see the audience. When I started to cry the hotel manager got my mother to walk with me. My father told the pre-teen judges that he’d buy them a pizza from the kebab shop across the way if they chose me as the winner. I won a knock-off barbie with weirdly defined joints, and a paper sash that I wore over my swim-suit the next morning. I was waiting by the reception steps for my mother when a woman walked by and said She’s still wearing that bloody sash. My mother told me she was just jealous that her daughter didn’t win.

It was now tradition upon arrival that my mother would heave a shopping bag filled with presents to the pool area, a skinny Santa, handing out Irish 4

chocolates and key rings she’d bought at the airport to the adults that I now called Auntie and Uncle despite having no relation to. They gasped through mouthfuls of salt and vinegar crisps when I said I was eight and a half. I begged my father to teach me how to swim better. I’d tighten my goggles until they left red hoops around my eyes, before sticking my face straight into the pool. My father held my stomach with one hand, like a fancy waiter holding a tray, tricking me into thinking I was doing most of the work. I would doggy paddle my way to the edge just so I could climb out, grazing my knee on the edge but not caring, a flying squirrel, diving in again and again as my father complimented my stinging belly flops.

My mother slid her new digital camera into her black clutch bag before we headed out the door, my father’s goodbye echoing against the ceramic tiles. He suspected he had sunstroke so for the first time in eleven years, it was just my mother and I going for dinner. My mother ordered us cocktails, mine merely a mixture of fruit juice. When it arrived she made me wait behind the hot sparkler until her camera would focus. My cheeks ached and the sparkler was a black stump by the time the flash went off.

When I was fourteen years old I was sweating in my t-shirt and shorts in the shade. I felt awkward in front of Chris. His sun bed creaked as he pushed himself up. He swiped is sweaty hair away from his forehead. It’s bloody sweltering, innit? Anyone wanna come for a dip? I was watching him from under my sunglasses, pretending to be asleep. Maybe in a bit, love, responded my mother. I watched his pasty back as he made his way towards the water.

When the waves licked his feet, he yelped at the cold. I watched the sea swallow his pink pillow of a stomach and he shouted back at us, It’s cold at first, but it’s alright once you’re in!

My mother was pleased when I was finally old enough to get served at the bar. Get me a gin and tonic, make sure to say its for me so they use the good gin. When I went to hand over the ten euro she’d given me, the hotel manager waved her hand, saying our drinks were on the house. Even though Chris and my mother had broken up two years ago, we were rarely alone and I brought the drinks back to a table of over twenty friends. There was one tiny nightclub situated just outside the town. My mother told me to be careful before I linked arms with a girl I’d probably spent more time in total with than any 5

of my friends from home. I stumbled into the bedroom at around 5am, mumbling to my mother that I felt sick. She was too sleepy to respond, so I spent the remainder of the night hugging the toilet bowl. I awoke several hours later to find my mother looking over me, offering me a cup of coffee.

She laughed, saying that at least I’d learnt my lesson. ☼ ☼ ☼ This summer she stands at the window, stirring the pot of this week’s soup of choice (vegetable). There’s that car parked outside her house again. They definitely don’t live together. At twenty years old, I’m spending my first summer at home.

My days consist of putting-off finishing the A3 jigsaw that’s been balancing on the footstool for too long, while listening to my mother’s hourly news report on the neighbours. I’m straining to watch the day-time television as the sun bounces off the screen, the dust sparkling against the black mirror.

Thankfully, I’ve already seen this re-run of Loose Women, so I’m not missing out on much. I start setting up for the daily after-lunch scrabble game.

There’s a drawer in the kitchen, below the TV where we keep our pens.

It requires an extra tug to open, jammed with dry felt-tips and last-year’s birthday cards. But lying beneath all that is a used cocktail umbrella, a broken fridge-magnet, two sand-filled reptiles and a pile of photos that didn’t make the album, including one of my mother asleep on a sun bed, another of me sticking out my tongue at her photo request. My mother keeps saying that this is the perfect opportunity to sort that tat out. But she’s let them lie there, collecting dust for over ten years. And despite our complaints of boredom, I know we won’t find the time to clear it out.

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BY CAOLAN PLUMB

le temps de l’amour B Y C AT H E R I N E I S A B E L L E K E R R

This summer feels different.

Stripped of practice and ritual, bare and naked, clothing myself with distraction.

In a cherry red car, we drove to the temple that hangs on the edge of a cliff below our favourite celestial body and muse, with stars peppered around her.

Sometimes you can even see the Northern Lights here, night-time magic I can only imagine.

Too wild, as wild as Venus being born right on this very Irish shore. But this time her shell is shut.

On the drive home, an opal-eyed fox stands at the side of the road and I wonder would I trade lives with him? To kill a hare with a flowerbed as my plate.

To escape the neverending change that comes with growing up, to have a constant life of the same tasks and to seek solace in the mundane.

I get home and stare at the chimney outside my window, listening to ‘le temps de l’amour’

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Lost Things B Y J A M I E R YA N A N D E R S O N

Summer was taken from us the way most lost things are. Down the back of the sofa, crushed by the stained cushions your mam turned over to hide the yoghurt stain you left in the wake of your infancy – or perhaps, in most extreme cases, on an icy road on a pitch-black night, with shattered glass as petite diamonds scattered upon the road, and flashing lights which scream against the darkness as a mother left behind by her child. Gone forever.

Summer was meant to be the promise of freedom, of escape, of some sense of spiritual autonomy. Of driving down a carriageway at eleven o’clock at night, soaring at sixty miles an hour, feeling as though if you were to go any faster you, and the radio blaring to the tune of The Killers or Fleetwood Mac or even Girls Aloud, would ascend into some subsequent state of being. Ethereal.

Summer was meant to be laughing with your friends, laughing with Him, whose lips made you blush even after his headlights had cut around the corner and left you to your aching elation. Meant to be lying awake against the unsettled darkness of your room, waiting for the gentle buzz of your phone as though it’s a kiss sent just for you. Meant to be grinning as though a life apart from him – from this Summer – was an impossibility, rather than an inevitability. Meant to be.

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B Y AOI F E MC G R AT H

Deptford Rain

BY JASPER BANERJEE

If it were a movie, it would be a bad one.

Bad, boring, bland, critically panned. It would only be praised by French dudes with pencil moustaches and rolls of black and white filmstock.

You would hate it.

You would turn to me in the empty cinema screen and ask what it meant.

6 months of pain and that’s what came out of it? I‘d say some shit like it’s about loss, minute after month it’s about loss. I’d get weird eyes from the projectionist. And that would be that because I’m biting my tongue the same way I used to, used to.

As I leave the place it would be rainy, but it would be Deptford-rain. The rain that gets you cold but that you couldn’t capture with a camera. The world would be muted concrete grey and non-climb black paint. To your eye it would make the world look grainy, like old black and white filmstock.

On the way home from the cinema it would rain, and you would wish we’d have watched something else because that shit wasn’t worth it, and very much isn’t now worth this trek back home. We’d been the only ones there, no one but me, and you.

Then I’d sit under the DLR, concrete covered, I would tell myself the truth. How what’s worse is that he left by inches, he didn’t even have the decency to use some big distraction; so that’s why there’s no exciting inciting incident and there’s no clear character motivation. There’s a lacking but not one a 3 act structure could fix. There’s an arc but it bends downwards.

The story was never the film, – it was why it was made. Proof I exist. Proof that those months happened because we both, I, have no recollection of it. Whilst yes I am on screen for those weeks and hours it was not me.

The physical thing without you is not me.

I begin to walk home at least now I feel the rain on my face. That I feel 11

my face is everything, you don’t get these feelings from film. You get to watch. And so you watched. Watched me have the mindset of just getting through it, that things would be better when it was over, when I got back to reality, back to normal. But it hurt too much so I took a step back… then it hurt too much so I took another then another then, eventually, floating six feet above, filming myself. It was no longer Deptford-rain, – now it came down like a million crystal balls dropped vertically each shattered upon impact. You looked down the road marvelling at this cinematic quality. Everyone reacted as if they were part of some grand production, some huddled begrudgingly under their coats others comically under flimsy newspapers.

And so we strolled, distanced and six feet below, cold, – wet, ego bruised we made it home in the rain. But I could feel the rain, and we could feel shame… and that feeling was everything. To feel bad to me was more than I had felt in hundreds of days and a million seconds, we felt that anxiety together, as one. So I smiled to the camera, and you smiled back.

We can make a film next summer.

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The Year Of.

BY EMMA BUCKLEY

We called it the Year of Nothing. The Year of Blank. The Year of Question Mark.

It might have started with the first news report. I remember how we tried to ignore it, the two of us at the kitchen counter, slow dancing to The Ink Spots, forgetting those old love songs were written when they thought the world was ending. It might have started with that morning lecture, cancelled two hours beforehand. We didn’t talk about it, because I wouldn’t have gone anyway, not with the rain ravishing the windows and you dozing beside me.

It might have started with the cancelled gig at The Speakeasy. I hadn’t seen you very much lately. Or you. Or you, either. Fuck, where were you? The email came through telling us not to show up. I had just finished putting my lipstick on when I realised the entire world seemed to have packed up and gone home. So picture me, crying on the dorm room floor, hiding from the windows. Dressed up, on time, gorgeous. Alone.

So many missed calls. Summer wouldn’t answer the phone.

The stay-at-home order and the dinners at my desk, forgetting to speak aloud to anyone for a few days on end. The sunflowers turning to each other instead of the sun. Sleeping in until eleven. Twelve. One. The time we fought so bad over the phone that I thought it was over. Simmering in the homes of our respective mothers, too ravenous for touch to get a single word out of our mouths, to say anything that wasn’t a synonym for enough.

The flight cancelled. The gig postponed, again, then cancelled. I was banging my head against the wall to pass the time when puzzles and playlists stopped cutting it. The parade cancelled, then put online. The anxious vomiting, 13

sleeping through the mornings. The birthday party, illegalised. The three photos on my camera roll between saying goodbye and seeing you again encompass two and half months, because there was nothing I wanted to remember – except for my dog chasing the bumblebee, and a text you sent me, and a picture of the sea.

A shrine for what I wanted summer to be.

BY CAIT PHENIX

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Gothic-19 B Y FAY E N .

There’s a fog over your head. White wisps that curl into the wrinkles of your brain, nestling there like how a tick buries its head in dog flesh.

Run, screams the news. Hide.

Keep the doors shut and wait, wait for the monster to pass. Hope no one you care about got caught in its grasp. Hope you don’t see any bodies in the street.

Time isn’t allowed through the front door, but its whispers still leak through the keyhole. How long has it been? The hours are too short, and the minutes are too long. It’s been weeks, it’s been months. You wonder if it’ll be years.

Keep your hands busy, of course. Idle hands are the devil’s workshop, are they not? What could be more evil than the caged creature you are.

Don’t check the news, or you’d get your answer.

One becomes twenty becomes three hundred becomes four thousand.

Exponential increase – you learned that in school but never thought it meant anything.

There’s people walking past your window, their faces are covered and there’s gloves on their hands. Plague doctor chic revamped for the twenty-first century.

Your phone says it’s been three weeks, but your body’s still stuck on day five. You blink and an hour has passed.

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There’s a curse that flits about, may you live in interesting times. It didn’t sound very scary when you first read it, but then the year started with a country burning and a once-in-a-century plague. Massive floods in Indonesia, African locust outbreaks, a volcano erupted in the Philippines. There was almost a nuclear war, but did it register with the public like the helicopter crash? Like the black civilian being choked to death by a white policeman?

That happened in one month. These are interesting times, and now I know why it’s a threat.

BY CAIT PHENIX

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Crabs B Y D A R A M C WA D E

I woke up about... midday? I didn’t check the clock, so I’m not sure what time it was exactly. Sun was high and hot at that point, and I kept the blinds and windows closed. It didn’t take me long to figure out what the first thing I was going to do after getting out of bed would be. I sat at my desk, turned on the computer, headed to www.youtube.com, and watched the ten hour crab rave.

And I have stayed there. For ten hours. No toilet breaks, no breakfast, lunch, dinner. I stayed sitting there, on the little plastic chair at my tiny wooden desk in that dingy bedroom far from home and I watched the little orange crabs rave until the video was over.

And they rave so good.

I don’t know what the music is, but also, I know it now better than any other song I’ve ever heard. I know the rhythms of it, and how it matches the thousands of crabs that are there, spread along a rocky beach, trapped on this gorgeous green island. The trees are fidelitous with a detailed leaf pattern, animated by shadows as a sun shines and moves across the sky. The sea is still, but reflective, a shiny turquoise ocean that betrays its fake digital nature. I don’t care how fake it looks. And neither do they. The crabs make a life for themselves amongst their people, moving their spindly imprecise limbs on their lonely paradise. Working together for the good of the dance.

Something about that mixture of high and low detail on the models make it look serene and beautiful. I want to keep looking; more than look, I want to be there amongst the crabs, clicking my pincers precisely with the beat. I wanted to get up and dance, but I couldn’t. My body wouldn’t respond – my human body ceased to exist. I was a crab. I was moving, but it wasn’t the old body of flesh and hair and red blood and bone, but a new body, of shell and meat and spiked chelipeds and chitin.

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My favourite part is when one of the crabs, I call him Hips, starts thrusting himself backwards and forwards on his 6 little tibias. They put him on top of a rock – clearly, he’s the star crab of the group. This one may have no discernible identifying features – being that these thousands of crabs all share the same model – but they bring something special to the tribe.

Another crab spider-walks in a circle, bringing her pointed legs down so hard they burst the calm beach into sparkling disco, fragmented sand turned to fairy dust in the sunset. I’ve eaten crab legs before. These were not those legs; these legs were powerful, built to keep legions of enemies away.

The more I looked the more I saw they weren’t standing on the beach. The crabs float on the digital island, guests from another dimensions, observing the uncanny world through black tear drops stuck out from an armoured head.

I never used to spend my days inside. I was chased out, by a claustrophobia creeping along my skin, or by the calls of the family I lived with. We would walk together, see the outside world and it’s parks, it’s beaches, it’s trees.

Those calls don’t happen anymore.

But I’m still not spending my days inside. I’m there, on the island of crabs.

Another guest in digital paradise. Dancing with the crowd.

The colours change in the video, from a lush blue day to an amber that glows like a sandstorm. The crabs wind down, after the sun sets, and fall into a deep violet sleep. They return to their caves, happy with their day of dancing. Another beautiful day in the sun, focused and warm and together with their family. They all live there, and will continue living there forever.

Tomorrow, they have another 10-hour crab rave.

I return to bed now. It was a good day. I have been a crab. Maybe tomorrow I won’t go to that island; but I know that family are there for me, waiting. I don’t need to close the window or blinds before I sleep; they’ve been closed a long time now.

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Losing August

BY CAIT PHENIX

The lover’s lanes are empty, they’ve resigned to being roads.

Drained swimming pools fill with fallen leaves, drive-in-movies become vacant lots, tarmac fields of parking spots, tattered paperbacks return to quiet shelves, empty sunscreen bottles fold in on themselves.

Summer shakes off briskly: a wet dog shudders out of a river.

Enticed by the day’s good looks, betrayed by its sudden iciness, he whimpers on the bank, freezing wet and wondering when did the water get so deep, when did the current change?

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B Y AOI F E MC G R AT H

A Nettle Elegy B Y A N DR EW HA M I LTON

She wove with parsley in the kitchen glow while, siblings in a pod, we sat at ease our skin a supple bark. Each one would know our mission’s gravity; slaying nettle thieves who darted hydra heads from orchard mulch and tore down honeysuckle, which we loved.

But winter won that war, not us, for ice had caught in snowmelt jaws the nettle root.

Watching, we mourned its failing with surprise then raised our willow swords in grave salute.

For honeysuckle tongues can whisper sweet but nettle stings shout louder yet.

Yet war, we found, comes waxing yearly as tender green-growth strengthens, stretching tall until my siblings left me, left the battle early with the first flushing of autumnal fall.

No willow wand is obdurate alone; I sheathed my sword and followed.

Now I live unharmed. Except sometimes when hiking crooked trails where hoary lichen kisses rocks grey-green between the nettles.

Then I pause, stung and staring, hopeful of smelling parsley from the kitchen or hearing laughter in the orchard.

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BY CAIT PHENIX

Unpicking B Y B E B H I N N TA N K A R D

The haberdashery-and-repairs shop where I got my first job closed this summer.

It was always on the way out, even when I worked there. Back then, they were only paying their Saturday girls the grand sum of three pound thirtythree an hour, so the summer holidays were the real chance to get your pocket money. I’d end a day with £25 in my pocket and swagger into town sumptuous in my wealth, scattering cash on chocolate and books and, later, ill-advised bottles of wine-based drink which would make us sick in the park bushes.

Time rushes by in a river these days, and it’s strange to think that’s how I spent my weekends years ago, leaning my full weight on the shop counter, waiting for my life to start. The sun shone on the windowpanes, glittering and glancing, bleaching the cobbled street outside, but we papered it out with the children’s knitting patterns we couldn’t sell. Babies fronted these instructions in brown paisley jumpers, their smiles a little faded by the years and sunstroke, peeling away a little at the corners. Minutes meandered in that bubble, my Geography textbook tucked in a nook under the till as I unpicked stitches with my left hand and highlighted passages with my right.

Groynes, natural and unnatural – “That’ll be £10.75, Mrs. Johnson,” – a turn of the page – cave, arch, stack, stump – “And how many metres of cord today, Ms. Cutter?”

We had our regulars, some warm and chatty, others tight-lipped and unfriendly, some inordinately rich and others so mean they’d dispute over pennies until you’d snap the measuring tape back and suggest they just bought something new instead. There was the elderly gentleman who only called the shop to talk about his late wife, just to find someone to cry with, even if that someone was fifteen and boxed in between clothes rails and an ironing board and a too-short-lunchbreak. The jobseekers with their open, hopeful faces, who would get their suits fixed for free. The slow ones who’d 23

dither in at five to five, ignoring the itching desperation of the Saturday girl who’d reached the end of Chapter Four: Coastal Features and wanted to treat herself to a well-earned recreation ground sesh.

Then the irregulars: a very small child who bought £200 worth of wool, and left us all speechless. Crocheters, knitters, darners and stitchers. First timers, old timers, tourists and the lost. Punks after leather jacket patches.

Mothers after reams on reams of name labels. One woman who deposited a skunk on the counter, asking us to make it a harness. I spent half an hour disinfecting the counter after she disappeared into the afternoon’s warmth, skunk trotting along loyally behind her.

I really lived for the prom gowns, confirmation outfits, wedding dresses; every person stepping out from our little makeshift curtain drowning in their own clothing. I’d grab the cushion, the pot of pins, and the seamstresses would get to work. I’d pop up and down, watching out for other customers and handing out pins and tape measures like a nurse offering bandages and scalpels. Those busy times of year, it was always a three-week turnaround, crossing day by day off in the diary, shaking my head with sad authority when the inevitable plea of “can’t you just squeeze me in?” arose.

When things were fitted and fixed finally, we’d gasp and applaud and customers would spin, shyly at first, the thread- strewn lino a wooded ballroom for a moment.

I lost two summers to that dim little shop: stock taking, stock pricing, counting out candy coloured buttons, tossing balls of wool one-two-three onto the high shelves, waving at people in the café over the road. Armed with a sweeping brush, holstering a pricing gun at my hip, cutting swathes upon swathes of ribbon and tape and material and sheets of felt. But it was a shop where you heard some stories. Stories about people’s projects, of course, that they’d been working on for years and never finished, or started again knowing that this time, this time, they would complete it. Stories about mothers who loved to sew, mothers who never passed the skill down, grandchildren who yearned to learn. Stuffed toys that were loved to pieces, and pieced together. It was a time of fixing things we’d broken, repairing what was torn apart, not giving up or building-back-better but taking what 24

we have, breathing in, starting again. No new Jerusalem, no new jeans, that zip can be put in for just £12.75 if you have a bit of patience. There, you rejected fast fashion, the cut and the change. You held on.

And other tales were passed on more quietly, on rainy days, of affairs, and betrayals, the plots of soaps and films and real life and gossip and a cup-full of Dylon sensationalism thrown into the mix, colouring everything. People were vulnerable when they had to admit they didn’t know how to put on a button, that their interview was in half an hour, that the funeral was tomorrow morning, that they had to make this school blazer last just one more year. You’d learn them by their clothes, as intimate as notes left in pockets, pen inked on labels, even skin in trouser cuffs and fleas in jodphurs. An unpicker could snap your thread-like privacy faster than you could read about the flowing of the tides, erode the toughest customer’s edges.

At last, I’d turn to see the women at the sewing machines. I was in awe of their talent, the way they could make all broken things good with quick-moving hands, the magic of creation. And I knew they’d remember me when I went away, that they’d still turn off for a cup of tea and a chat whenever I came to visit, to update them on my life outside the dim, slow world, out where things were brighter and faster and faster and brighter day by day. I probably won’t see them ever again. When I next get home – if I do – it’ll be Christmas, and they’ll be long closed for good, the café opposite another casualty, each business shuttered. I’ll walk the frozen cobbles up a skeleton street, dancing on the bare ribs. The machines will be gone, but maybe they’ll leave the patterns up anyway, old-eyed children staring out at the sky, giggling at nothing.

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There Will Still be Mondays B Y A L E X A N D R A WA R D

I can hear the quiet nights More clearly than the loud at times.

It’s easy to ignore the shouts And bangs from in the streets; Less so to stay content When the only sound is your own heartbeat.

I’m glad to hear the knocks and thuds Of the boys who live below.

It gives the quiet house a life, Makes it feel more like a home.

When you cannot leave You learn to love the strangest things – The flute that plays at midnight, Dog-spotting through the window – Yet more than that, My lifeline seems to be The moving pictures on the screen, And housemates humming in the kitchen As they finally make dinner at three am.

I think I could recreate the world map above my bed From memory now.

When all the days melt into one, It’s hard to remember that There will still be Mondays.

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Someday

BY HEPHZIBAH WILSON

Leaves fall outside, it’s raining.

A car passes by.

You brought me tea in my special mug.

I haven’t had any yet.

I’m clutching it in my hands, keeping them warm.

You sit beside me watching the leaves.

The rain falls.

I’m watching you as you smile to yourself, Clutching your tea like me.

I meant to do so much this summer.

You glance at me.

You smile.

We sip our tea as the leaves fall.

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