Red Line Issue 1

THE RED LINE

With Stories From

Jane Hertenstein Sophie Monatte Jay Merill Graeme Lottering Nena Callaghan Geraldine Creed Steve Thompson

So here it is – the inaugural issue of The Red Line, a magazine of international fiction.

In calling for submissions from across the world, we were looking for work that contained the universal, that transcended the ordinary, and crossed borders.

So it seemed appropriate for the first issue's theme to be just that – borders.

As the submissions rolled in, we were consistently surprised by the variations on the theme – variations that not only highlighted the divisions between us but also the things that unite us.

In both Jane Hertenstein’s Vigeland Park and Graeme Lottering’s The Odyssey of Marius Kolgar, the borders are real tangible things to be crossed, for either exploration or escape. The characters find themselves in airports and train stations, stalling between transit, between choices.

Sophie Monatte’s Designated Staircase Number Two reminds us how the division of countries and races gives rise to prejudice and how everyday situations – such as picking your child up from school – can escalate into something desperate and frightening while in Steve Thompson's A ubergine, a chance at love between a worn-down doctor and a woman working for a landmine clearing agency is threatened in Kosovo.

The trials and tribulations of eeking out an existence in a place far from home also forms the core of both Jay Merill’s Gold Mountain and Geraldine Creed’s Fuel for the Fire. The younger women in these stories find their brutal working conditions eased by the simple friendship of an older woman. A sense of dislocation hangs over these stories, relieved by the homeliness found in companionship.

Home also looms large in Nena Callaghan’s First Memories, our single creative non-fiction piece. The sights, sounds, and smells of that defining place are carried across borders and through the years.

Our first issue reflects our desire to print fresh, evocative writing with a global perspective. We had no idea, starting out, whether we would succeed in this or not, but as our selected writers have shown, there are many fine stories in the world still waiting to be told.

Stephen & Toby The Red Line March 2013

The Odyssey of Marius Kølgar

By Graeme Lottering In the flow of the itinerant, we find Marius Kølgar anchored to a 20-foot copper statue of Chinese dragons supporting a globe in the middle of the enormous vaulted hall of the terminal. There is a din of indistinguishable conversation, a squealing of babies in the background, and the occasional departure call in Mandarin, English, and sometimes a third language of some exotic local.

He is clearly not native to the country, yet nor does he seem out of place. He is certainly confident in the inundation of languages and cultures. Marius, you see, is the perfect protean individual; like a liquid, he can conform to any container. He is very much at home in the liminal space of airports. Although he is a seasoned traveller, he is not a tourist. It has been years of wandering from site to site, and this, he has promised himself, will be his last journey.

It is Chinese New Year: The Year of the Rabbit.

We see him check his boarding pass and replace it, along with a Danish passport, into the inside breast pocket of his coat. He then tilts his head back to scan the large screen for the related information as a detail of security guards pass by beneath it.

Simply by looking at him, you would be unable to discern his place of origin. Born in Singapore and

“Thank you.”

raised in the Global Village, he holds three different passports. Marius is son of Lars Kølgar, a Norwe-

“Shé-shé.”

gian oil rig worker, a drill engineer, who’s spent as much time at sea as he has on land. His mother is a

Marius has been in China for two weeks now. You

Malaysian Buddhist, who is herself a mutt of mixed

see, he is an archaeologist, a master of Buddhist stat-

Dutch and Indonesian decent. You might pick up on uary. He is the specialist they call when artifacts the telltale traces of Viking in his physique: tall,

emerge through the dust of the past into the present

broad shoulders and wide jaw. His nondescript facial day. “These works of ancient masters,” he would features, however, are neither Asian nor European,

often marvel, “are the only permanent things in a

but could pass for either depending on the language

world of constant change.” And perhaps that is why

he spoke.

he loved his work. His own impermanence vanished when he examined a rock carving, or a bronze Bo-

Marius emerges from behind the bronze globe and

dhisattva.

walks a few steps to the Exchange Booth.

He stayed longer than he wanted, though, partially “Shin-shi Hua Le,” he announces in terrible Manda-

due to unforeseen complications at the dig site, par-

rin.

tially due to an affair with a hotel receptionist. The woman in question was a short Han Chinese—

“Happy New Year!” the young woman responds,

beautiful and smart. She was a temptation who came

staking off English as the common tongue. He slides to him when he requested a foot massage after a long his remaining Chinese bills under the gap in the win- day of working under the winter sun. dow and asks for Singapore Dollars.

Her English was awful, and so was his Mandarin, Despite being fluent in a number of languages, Mari- but she spoke in perfect Japanese. They became acus never had a knack for Chinese. Had he spoken in

quainted with each other as she rubbed oil onto his

English, however, you would hear a nebulous accent feet: personal details steeped in the anecdotes of past composed of the profound vowels of Scandinavia,

lives, stories of travel and secret affairs, and nostal-

the tropical rhythm of Malay, and the languid island gic recollections of home spoken in longing whisintonation of the Bahamas, where he was educated.

pers. He made her laugh, blush, and moisten deep

His dialect contains within it both British and Amer- inside her pantyhose. She made him feel alive, ican idioms, and rarely the slang of Singlish spoken

strong, and hard beneath his cotton robe. Her hands

in his birthplace.

followed the tension in his feet to his calves. He sighed and closed his eyes in delight. She wanted

Briefly, he absorbs his own reflection in the win-

more, and dared to become increasingly risky. Her

dow: clean shaven, deceitfully youthful, and cap-

hands caressed his thighs, gliding up his nightgown

tioned by the lettering of the word ‘CAMBIO.' The

to mysterious velvety regions she yearned to ex-

woman counts out a stack of $1,000 notes and slides plore. He moaned; she bit her bottom lip as she held

it under the glass.

him in her hands, feeling him engorge. Their heart-

beats quickened with knowledge of what was about to occur. He let her familiarize herself with his body; her greasy fingers polished his skin, lubricating his bottom half. Then, when he could resist no more, he lifted her head, kissed her passionately, and dexterously unbuttoned her hotel uniform, exposing her white breasts punctuated by pinkish fullstops.

She was a siren, a delicious Asian Calypso, soft and erotic, capturing him in her oiled hands. And he refused to leave the hotel for two days, hoping to stumble onto her in an empty hallway. He missed his plane, and extended his stay until they could meet once again and make love in the shower of his room, their sensuality exposed in the enormous mirror.

Afterwards, while fitting together pieces of her shed uniform—a silk skirt riding the gentle curve of her

lean legs—she said factually in Japanese: “I like your moustache,” and smiled a teasing smile.

This he remembers as he washes his hands in the airport toilet. They are not necessarily dirty; he is simply killing time. He is thinking, planning, devising some way out of himself.

Marius Kølgar is nervous. On his person, he conceals his real passport, the tiny booklet defining his true identity. The red Norwegian Passport, in which he sports a beard, is tucked into his left sock. It is the one thing that distills the truth.

Marius, maintaining eye contact with his new persona, gently adjusts the glasses with dark frames on the crook of his nose. His dark hair is parted and sleeked back. It is cut short in a business style. His normally lean form is potbellied. He now matches the picture of Marius Niemand, a Danish entrepreneur.

Mr. Niemand enters the security checkpoint with confidence, takes off his coat and places it into a tray along with his laptop. His carry-on bag is conveyed slowly through the X-ray machine. He makes sure to take off his belt, his watch, his ring (a deceptive clue to a non-existent marriage), and empties his pocket change. He is ensuring that the metal detector does not beep.

A bead of sweat appears on his forehead and rolls down his temple.

The moment of transition passes in slow-motion as he steps from the public part of the airport into the passenger section. Despite the tension, he smiles at the guard and steps through the mechanical gate.

It does not sound.

He breathes.

The truth hidden in his sock is not what worries him. It is the heavy burden which he carries under his shirt.

By the departure gates, he sits next to a French tour group. They are squabbling, arguing about the time zones between France and China.

“C’est sept heures entre le deux,” he volunteers. Then, he notices himself on the TV playing 24-hour Chinese government news.

He see himself, bearded with long hair, speaking in dubbed Mandarin. Next to him is a Sheik man in a red turban, whose grey moustache completely covers his lips. Behind them is the dig site. Marius remembers the interview. He is explaining the relevance of the find.

“It is the one of the oldest Buddhas in China,” the voice-over says in Chinese. “It is carved out of jade in a

style more reminiscent of Nepal.” The TV shows an image of workers excavating an archaic village.

“The Buddha was found in a cave, which must have served as a proto-temple,” the Chinese translator explains as the cameraman makes his way into the darkness. Inside the grotto, the scientists have set up bright halogen lights, which cast long, cyclopean shadows onto the carved interior. And the image on the television finally settles on a life-size Buddha, sitting on a green lotus; his hands are in the Abhaya Mudrā, five fingers loosely pointed up, signaling fearlessness. Where the Buddha’s face should be, there is a flat break. It looks as if the face was cut off.

“A weakness in the stone has separated the front of the head,” Marius says in his Chinese voice, “but we have been unable to discover its whereabouts.” Then the screen jumps to images of similar stone carvings, and a Chinese narrator takes over.

Marius looks away. He stares out the long window at the plane on the runway. There is a lot of commotion on the tarmac: people in yellow jackets running around, porters packing and unpacking, and in the foreground a security guard rides a bicycle.

Inside the terminal, there is a babyl of languages being spoken. Clean-shaven Marius Niemand goes unnoticed. He is below the radar.

An electronic voice makes a boarding call. People rouse from their semi-slumbers on uncomfortable plastic seats and form a line, starting with the wealthy and the crippled.

The TV in the background is still showing icons from early Chinese Buddhism. He thinks to himself how the West melted down all their antique bronze sculptures to make weapons. Once revered statues of Poseidon and Athena standing sentinel over legendary nations were turned into swords and ammunition.

“Jade,” he thinks to himself, “now that is immutable. It persists despite being beaten by waves and wind, preserved in deserts and underwater. It will remain our human legacy forever. The face of that jade Bud-

dha is the face of constancy.”

He is uncomfortable—hot and sweaty—yet he doesn’t remove his coat. He has made it so far. And once on the plane, he will return to some semblance of home. Or so he promises himself.

The queue has shrunk, ebbing its way into the aircraft. Marius joins the end of it. When the woman ahead of him enters the gate, he is alone with the staff in the waiting area. The TV in the background is broadcasting a warning against illegal trade in Chinese antiquities. Marius notices but ignores it, smiling his charming smile at the flight attendant as he hands her his boarding pass.

He is the last one on the plane. His has an aisle seat near the back.

After takeoff, somewhere over the South China Sea, he enters the lavatory. He locks the door and unbuttons his coat, peeling away layers of himself (cardigan sweater, cotton dress shirt, thermal tanktop, a white medical compress) to reveal a green smiling face of Siddhartha Gautama, the Jade Buddha.

In the reflection of the mirror, he lifts it up, life-size, to conceal his face. And with this ancient treasure of permanence, he knows he holds all reincarnations, all virtue in his hands: it is everything he lacks, every opposite of who he is. This is one last crime, one last deception, he thinks, and he knows that he can finally, after many years, go home.

Graeme Lottering was born in South Africa at the edge of the Kalahari Desert. Currently, he lives in Toronto, Canada. His work has been published in The New Quarterly, The Montreal Review, as well as Lost in Thought, Flaneur, and Specter Magazines. He has also contributed to CBC radio in the past. In January 2011, he self-published his debut novel, ’98% Grey’ on Amazon.com. He has since finished writing two other novels.

Aubergine

By Steve Thompson Gabe bought the eggplant on impulse. Plump, firm and smooth. Reminded him of cooking with Maddy.

Eggplant parmagiana, spinach salad, a nice Australian Shiraz. Something Maddy would like. Here at home he had the ingredients. In Prishtinë he'd been an improviser – not only when entertaining but in the operating theatre as well.

When he accompanied the first NATO contingent into Kosova in June 1999, he triaged and repaired war injuries from both sides as the Serbian forces withdrew. Then he continued to serve when he could using vacation time and leaves-of-absence from his hospital duties in Canada. The local surgeons de-

ferred to his superior skills in repairing injuries that should never happen to civilians. He was appalled people could still encounter abandoned unexploded bombs and landmines. The lucky ones lost only a leg or an arm and lived… he couldn't bring himself to say normal lives. Gabe winced. He'd decided in Prishtinë were he to trigger a landmine explosion he'd rather be killed outright, blown to smithereens, not struggle to survive partially intact. But he fought to save lives, reconstruct what was left and rescue some dignity.

Now he regarded the eggplant with loathing, its anatomy transformed, the thick round base a transhu-

meral amputation, smooth skin gathered back over the stump.

Gabe met Madelaine in Prishtinë at a medal ceremony. The contributions of Canadian personnel were being recognized so he'd felt obliged to attend. A bravery citation was being awarded to a member of the Canadian landmine team.

After the ceremony, Gabe grabbed a glass of wine and escaped from the reception room onto the third floor patio overlooking the city.

"It's surprisingly beautiful from here." A female voice came from the darkness. "Are you escaping the hordes of glad-handers?"

"Oh, hello. I didn't expect anyone out here." As his eyes adjusted he recognized the medal recipient.

"I'm Gabe Willett."

"Madelaine Ouellette."

Gabe inclined his head toward the reception room. "Congratulations."

"Thank you."

"A bravery citation is quite extraordinary."

"We do our jobs. All of us. Everybody in this work is courageous. Or foolhardy."

"I suppose but you were singled out. If I can slip back in unnoticed, could I get you a glass of wine?"

"That'd be great."

"White or red?" Gabe asked.

"I'll have what you're having."

Gabe returned carrying two glasses of red wine and a small platter of hors-d'oeuvres. "I thought I'd appropriate some snacks as well."

"You're with the medical group, Gabe?"

"Yeah. Trauma surgeon at the emergency hospital."

"You do that at home?"

"I'm at Sunnybrook in Toronto in my other life."

"Is this different?" Madelaine asked.

"Well, Madelaine…" Gabe paused then said, "I heard someone inside call you Maddy."

"Maddy's fine."

"Alright then… Maddy… here we have neither facilities nor equipment."

"Sounds gruesome," Madelaine said. "But I suppose you're used to it."

"Battlefield medicine's exciting at first, but I'll never get used to it. Back home, we seldom even see

gunshot wounds. It's car accidents, work injuries. And an amazing number of lawn mower encounters. We don't see people blown apart. I can't get used to that."

One of Madelaine's team members summoned her back inside.

"I've asked a few friends for dinner Saturday," Gabe said before she went. "Would you come? We could talk more."

"Sure, I'd like that."

Gabe pointed from the balcony toward PrishtinĂŤ Centrum using the UN headquarters building as a land-

mark. "You can't quite see it but the second street west of there, second building on the left, apartment nine."

Madelaine arrived early. Gabe greeted her with a smile and a handshake then offered some wine.

"I unearthed this Vranac red at the market. The best local reds are from Montenegro."

She agreed with a nod. "I've been thinking about our names – Ouellette, Willett. They're essentially the same. French, English. We could be related."

"Whoa! That's enough to derail a friendship."

"You think?"

"Nah. Just kidding. I don't remember many embarrassing skeletons in my family closet."

Madelaine looked at two large eggplants on Gabe's meagre kitchen counter space. "Are those for dinner?"

"Absolutely! I'm making eggplant rolls. Rouleaux d'aubergine."

"Smart-aleck! You just made that up!"

"We slice the eggplant length-wise into thin steaks."

Madelaine laughed. "Steaks, indeed. The vegetarian's lament. I'm good at slicing and dicing. I could carve l'aubergine." She held her hands out straight to Gabe. "Maybe not surgeon steady but see, no shakes."

"Go ahead."

"Comme ça?"

"C'est aussi bon que moi."

"You speak French?"

"Juste un peu." Gabe decanted more deep ruby wine. "I grew up in Toronto. We should learn something

about each other in case we really are cousins."

"Me, I'm from Thetford Mines. That was only a joke about being related." She explained she'd been an introverted kid, smart but uninspired and very provincial. Daughter of a mining engineer, she'd studied in Montreal fully expecting she'd return home to the asbestos mines. "I kinda gravitated to explosives. Dismantling failed charges, understanding why they didn't explode. So, after graduation, I joined the army."

Gabe watched her carve the eggplant in longitudinal slices. Suddenly the soft seed pattern became stitches, tens of them. Yesterday he'd sutured the boy's abdomen by hand. Such a slow procedure, more than two hundred stitches but he was sure they'd recovered all the shrapnel.

"Anything else I can do?"

"Sorry. I was… well, thinking of something else."

"Just wondered if I can do anything else."

"Sure, you're nimble with that knife. You could chop the spinach."

When the others arrived, Gabe and Madelaine continued to drink wine but Gabe also offered birrë e Pejë, a local beer. Later he served his dish just as he'd described to Maddy, aubergine rolls stuffed with ricotta on a bed of lightly steamed spinach, accompanied by brilliantly green asparagus and herb-flecked rice. He tried

his best to maintain his jovial demeanour, his mind preoccupied with stitches.

Madelaine excused herself earlier than Gabe's other guests but promised to meet him for coffee Sunday afternoon. Then there she was, walking toward Olympia Restaurant. Gabe suddenly realized he hadn't seen her in daylight. Now the bright sunlight insinuated radiance, distributed red highlights through her auburn hair. From the moment she noticed him watching her, she smiled broadly, held his eyes with hers as she continued toward him. Those hazel eyes articulated her vivacity, her energy. She reached out for both his hands, kissed him on both cheeks, stood back still holding his hands. Gabe steered her to a corner table.

They ordered macchiato at Maddy's suggestion, along with mineral water and a selection of biscotti. They chatted comfortably about Prishtinë and their lives at home. Later, Maddy suggested they order baklava. As they waited, Gabe asked where she'd gone to school.

"Mining engineering at École Polytechnique. It is offered only there." "École Polytechnique. You'd be too young to be there in 1989?"

"Moi, too young? Thank you for that. But no, the massacre happened my first year. I knew all fourteen who were killed."

"That must've been tough." Gabe really didn't know what to say but felt he should respond.

"I was… I don't know the English… morte de honte."

"Mortified."

"More than that, though. Almost ashamed I'd escaped so easily. After a while, we women talked amongst ourselves. We decided to stop… I think it's wallowing… in survivor's guilt and do something with our lives to honour our friends. The massacre compelled, no… catapulted me into feminism. But my law and order attitudes toughened. Funny, eh – a right-wing feminist?"

Gabe smiled agreement. "How'd you get into landmine detection?"

"How'd I become a sapper? Well, I was fascinated by explosives. After five years as ordinance officer,

peacekeeping in Croatia, I felt we shipped home prematurely. I needed to see success, I think. So I joined Canadian Landmine Clearing Agency. It's an NGO funded by government and private donations. So, Gabe… I'm headed home to fundraise. You know, the lecture circuit."

"When?"

"Day after tomorrow. I need to go. I can only live so long on adrenaline rushes."

Suddenly Gabe gauged something else in Madelaine's eyes – the same tired look he recognized in his own mirror. Worn down by the mission. Dealing with trauma.

She paused. "It's good to talk with you, Gabe."

"I like talking with you," he replied then he asked, "Are you finished with landmines?"

"Not at all. After my speaking commitments, I'll join Canine Mine Clearing. I've already met my dog, a Belgian Malinois named Blaze. He's beautiful, big but gentle, black muzzle, gold and black body."

"Will you be back in Kosova?"

"Yes, in charge of the mission. I really can't say more, Gabe. Classified information, you know. Funny eh? I can tell you we've cleared more than ninety percent of the mines. That's public record."

"But now you're fundraising."

"There's clear shock value in having a woman be the face of landmine clearing." Gabe thought he detected a hint of resentment in Maddy's voice. "But, you know, I've decided I'm okay with that."

Almost a year later, Gabe was seated at the bar on the Grand Hotel patio when Madelaine walked through the gate. She moved quickly toward him.

"Hey, doc. You're back."

"Hey, Maddy. Great to see you." He stood to greet her, offering a handshake but she wrapped her arms

around him and kissed him on the lips. Gabe tensed with surprise, then relaxed his guard.

She appraised him with her eyes. "It's so good to see you. I've only been back two weeks myself. Notice a difference?"

He gazed at her thinking how good she looked, tall, lanky, how the highlights in her hair sparkled, how she blended in with the beautiful Kosovar women until he realized she was asking about differences in Prishtinë. "For sure. Landscaping. Shrubs. Roses. Pride in appearance. Let's grab a table. Can I get you a beer?"

"Actually, Gabe, I'm meeting some of my UN buddies at the corner table." Madelaine gestured with her

head. "Friday night pub crawl."

"Makes things seem normal?"

"Not really. Nothing's normal. Nobody on assignment is normal. We should get together. Where are you staying?"

"Same old apartment."

"Soon as I saw you, I thought of our eggplant dinner. Strange, eh? Haven't seen you for a year and that's my first thought."

"How's tomorrow? I'll get some wine and we'll cook."

"That's a date. When do you return to the hospital?"

"Monday."

"A quick head's up. Five local kids stumbled onto an unexploded bomb. Two were killed outright, three survived. They're in the surgical hospital, severely injured."

The colour drained from his face. That's why I went home, he thought. Not sure I can face it.

Madelaine said quietly, "I'm sorry Gabe. I know this troubles you."

"It's okay, Maddy. No problem. Forewarned is forearmed, you know. Anyway thanks, see you tomorrow." But in his head – forearmed. Amputated forearms. Dammit.

"What's wrong?" Madelaine asked the next day.

"I went to the hospital this morning…"

"I see."

"I couldn't do it. Couldn't go in. I walked to the campus. Stood in front of the surgical hospital. Felt

good. Then, I couldn't go in. Couldn't open the door." Gabe sniffed to choke back tears.

"Maybe it wasn't such a good idea for you to come back."

"It's just anxiety. About surgical problems. Don't worry. I'm not actually scheduled 'til Monday. It'll be fine. Weekend to rest. Get over the jet lag."

Maddy didn't reply.

"I just don't want to face kids' broken bodies. With no facilities to fix them properly. Not sure I can do it."

Maddy touched his arm. "I'm glad you're here."

"It's been almost almost a year. This is my first opportunity to come back because I was being treated

for post traumatic stress."

"PTSD?" "Yeah. Only I don't think the meds are working. Not supposed to drink. Maybe that's messing things up."

"Maybe it's not the meds."

"I thought I'd hop back on the horse that threw me. But I can't."

"If you think you should return home, I could arrange a priority flight. I've got pull

around here now. I know the stress you're under. I've been there."

"Not you. I don't believe that."

"The speaking tour was not my idea."

"Did getting out for a while help?"

"I think so." Then Maddy added, "I could fly with you if you didn't want to go alone."

"Thank you but your work's too important to up and leave."

That final weekend in Prishtinë Maddy came to his apartment, suggested they hike in Gërmia Park. "Let's take the dog," she said. "We can bring him back to his kennel later then go out for dinner."

Gabe smiled at Maddy in agreement, pleased to allow her strength to envelope him – to offer change in his life.

That sunny autumn Saturday, the park green space filled with families, relaxing, picnicking, sunbathing, kicking soccer balls, Gabe and Maddy talked as they walked the well worn hiking path, advancing uphill through a forest of mixed mature hardwoods and conifers.

"It's like an oasis, an escape from Prishtinë," Maddy said.

"The adults don't seem very relaxed. They're really watching their kids."

"This area was heavily landmined. The park itself is clear but there could be some still undetected."

"Then we'll keep to the path," Gabe teased. Maddy grabbed his hand.

So they were dumbfounded to see the young child playing alone, gleefully running, jumping, kicking up leaves between the trees off the pathway. Gabe looked for other kids or an adult. He heard someone calling but it was hard to distinguish above the playful shouts and shrieks from the park. Then, he heard the name.

Leka, an adult voice infused with panic rose above the din.

Blaze broke his training, his weekend off too. He adopted a family dog role, ambling slowly, his long

tail wagging gently, toward the boy who was beckoning and calling. Then he stopped abruptly. Sniffed the ground. Whined gently to attract Maddy's attention. He crept slowly forward toward the boy following the scent gradient to its highest concentration. Gabe moved quickly. He'd seen enough trauma. His duty was to keep this kid whole. "Leka," he called in Albanian. "Qofsh atje!" Don't move.

"No, Gabe, no!" Maddy responded to Blaze's guidance, leaping between the child and danger, pushing both Gabe and the toddler to the ground. A blast… Madelaine and Blaze bore the full impact.

Gabe knew he was in shock. He needed to help Maddy. So much blood. So much pain. He felt a hand on

his shoulder.

"We need to take you over there, sir."

"Yo, unë jam doktor," Gabe hoped his words made sense. "Unë s'mund ndihmoj." I can help.

"I'm sure you could, sir," a voice replied in English. "But we need to look after your arm. It's too late to help your friend."

Now in Toronto, Gabe's appetite was blunted by memory. He knew he shouldn't have bought that damned eggplant. He couldn't prepare it. He wasn't yet ready to slice the thing left-handed.

J. Stephen Thompson is the Canadian author of The Aftermath, a novel loosely based on his adventures in post-war Kosovo. His short story, Aubergine, also draws on these experiences. His career in microbiology provides a unique perspective to his writing. An avid hiker and outdoor enthusiast, he lives with his wife in a log home amongst the birds, raccoons, squirrels and bears of rural Kawartha Lakes, Ontario. Check out his writing projects at http:// jstephenthompson.ca/books

Fuel for the Fire

By Geraldine Creed Harburg is a small industrial town on the Southern shores of the River Elbe. Its only a short train ride from the city of Hamburg where every morning, at exactly fourteen minutes past five we’d board a train that would take us to this hinterland of German manufacturing. For twelve long weeks, that train was never early, never late, just bang on time. Steve and I would split up then, on the steps of Harburg station.

We’d both found summer jobs in the ‘Gummiwerks’ that overshadowed the town.

Each day we’d slave over conveyor belts of hot rubber that would later be used in the cooling systems of German cars.

I’d never had a desire to be in Germany, that was Steve’s idea. He’d sent off the application forms. It had suited me to let him do all the organizing, I was swotting Chomsky and F.R Lewis and big into access television and the great new global village. When the offers came back, Steve was excited and talked about us getting a flat together with the money we’d earn.

‘But what about my fees,’ I said. ‘I’ll need that money for college.’

‘There’ll be plenty over Katie, the overtime is massive.’ Steve assured me so I wasn’t thinking about the pure slog until I found myself there, slap bang in the middle of it all. Living in a flat, meant for two - but sleeping eight of us Irish – and waking at five in the morning to catch our train to work.

The women’s shift started fifteen minutes after the men’s’ – a small compensation for the extra bus ride we women had to take once we arrived at Harburg station. We worked in an annex about three miles out of town, in a real wasteland where the shadows of tall buildings blocked the sun even when it did shine. I was disgusted on my first day on the job when Ramu, the foreman told me that there was no overtime on offer at the annex.

‘Only the men get overtime.’ He said twiddling his long handlebar moustache.

‘Why couldn’t you have gotten us jobs on a tulip farm or picking gherkins or something?’ I balked at Steve as we journeyed back to Hamburg that first day.

‘You didn’t have to come Katie, nobody twisted your arm.’ He was pissed with me complaining, he closed his eyes and pretended to go to sleep. And much as I hated it, it was true, I’d just drifted along because it was convenient and besides, Steve was cool and I liked the way his jeans didn’t fit and the cute mark above his left eyebrow that turned red when he got mad.

There were twenty-four of us working on the fifteenth floor of the annex, twenty-three women and Ramu, the Turkish foreman with the big moustache. The women had little or no English. There were some Portuguese and Spanish, two or three Greeks, several Poles and the rest were Croatian. Most of the women lived in Harburg – it was cheaper than the city - so I’d meet them when I boarded the bus to the annex every morning. They’d ride that bus out of town with eyes closed and heads down, saving every ounce of energy for the long day that lay ahead. We changed quietly in the locker rooms too, transforming ourselves into an army of rubber clad yetis with white boots and gloves and aprons and masks across our faces. Once the hooter blasted and the machines cranked up it was full steam ahead – Clankety clank clank, clankety clank clank - the tubes came sailing down the conveyor belt and we’d sprinkle powder on them so they wouldn’t stick together and then pack them ten to a box. And when Ramu protested at someone he saw out of rhythm with the rest, (which was usually me), he would march up close and personal and roar, ‘Schnell, Schnell,’ I always thought I’d faint from the stink of his breath. He’d get so close that parts of his body would be pressed against mine and I’d see stale bits of food in his moustache.

Weekends were hard work for Steve and I: we drank in the nightclubs along the Reeperbahn and went straight to work from there, bombed out on pills and beer and loud music. On Saturdays like that, I’d always volunteer to work the manual machine, where I could at least rest my feet while I loaded and chopped. Rosa worked with me, powdering the tubes and stacking them into boxes. She was a small, squat Croatian with saucer brown eyes and a bun of jet-black hair. I took her to be in her forties and I think she took to me on account of my bandaged hands. I had developed a rash from the powder we used on the rubber and each morning before we’d start, Rosa would help me bandage my red raw hands with fresh lint before putting them into my oversized gloves. We had a fifteen-minute break in our eight-hour shift and as there was no canteen, we ate our soggy sandwiches at the barred windows where we could at least feel the breeze on our faces and observe the treeless road through the industrial estate that would take us home again at two. The women smuggled in korn schnapps on these Saturdays, to break the curse of our six-day week. I hated the stuff but drank it anyway as a ‘hair of the dog’.

Rosa and I conversed in Germenglish – a kind of cross-speak we’d developed while cutting and stacking the rubber tubes all day.

‘How many kinder?’ I asked and she held the fingers of one hand up.

‘My mother…..Mutti.’ I said as I held up eight fingers.

‘Me Mutti ……’ And she pointed to her chest and then held the fingers of both hands up.

‘Ten!’ I said, ‘ Now that’s arbeit.’

She’d tug my sleeve when she got excited, ‘Drie. ’ She held three fingers up and then said the word in English, ‘Tree …in tree years I go.’

‘Where?’ I asked.

‘Money gud here, I buy land in tree years.’

‘Great.’ I said. And her face beamed at the thought, like she was at home in that very moment, looking at her land. She pointed to her wedding ring, ‘Husband?’ I guessed and she nodded.

‘Husband make haus.’

‘Cool.’ I said and she repeated the word and laughed and then the whirr of the cutting machines drowned out our chat and she was pulling my sleeve again as we got up to go back to work, ‘Careful’. She said pointing to the manual cutter, ‘Nix gud.’ She put a hand out and made a motion across her splayed fingers.

‘Last voman…kaput’ She said shaking her head as Ramu, like a demented sheepdog, got in and around us and drove our quota up and up with his whip-like cries.

‘SCHNELL, SCHNELL.’ When the siren sang for the end of our shift, we women would peel off our protective gloves and boots and masks and hang our heavy aprons on pegs before stumbling into the showers. Jets of hot water stung my blistered hands as I listened to these big blue veined women shouting to each other, happy to be finished their shift, sharing their news of home and how their children were doing. Children they were sending money to so that they could go to school and learn to read and write and not have to work like mules all their lives . I could imagine these children rushing home from schools in Greece and Portugal, Spain and Croatia to watch flat screen TV’s bought for them by their absent mothers. I wondered if these children would see these mothers as strangers when they saw them again and if, for them, the grass would always be greener some place else.

It didn’t matter how hard we’d scrubbed, the smell of rubber remained under our nails and in our hair when we boarded the bus that would take us back to Harburg.

I usually hooked up with Steve at the station or later that evening in Hamburg if he was doing overtime.

Our last week in Germany was busy for Steve; he was getting double shifts and raking in the money. I was bored riding back to Hamburg on my own. One afternoon, as we left the annex, it began to rain and Rosa insisted I come back to her flat for tea. She lived in an attic room high above the market square in Harburg.

The tiny flat had views of Paris, London and New York on its walls, postcards from Rosa’s sisters and brothers who, like her, had all left Croatia. Out Germenglish had advanced at that stage, we were getting good at conversing, telling each other about our lives. Rosa told me she’d first worked in a cocktail bar down the Reeperbahn but when she realised she wasn’t employed to serve drinks she complained. The manager felt her tits and stuck his tongue in her ear and told her she was hired to be an LBFM and if she didn’t like it she could walk.

‘L B F M?’ I had never heard the word.

‘Little brown fucking machine’, Rosa said. She had been sixteen when she first came to Germany.

Rosa kept a biscuit tin under her bed; it was full of cakes from Zagreb. She made tea and we sat on the small windowsill of the attic room, looking down over the now empty market, eating diamond and heart shaped cakes that had - like fortune cookies – things inside; peas for under your mattress and little wooden figures in stripped shawls for under your pillow to ward off bad dreams. She kept her savings in the biscuit tin with the cakes, hidden under layers of tissue paper. She had photos of her kids in there too. She showed me them, one by one, listing the names and ages of all five children, ‘Big, they are all big now.’ I said.

‘Yes and when I go, it’s me, me to mind …their babies.’ Her laugh was bright after she said this; there was no hint of regret. Things were as they were and that was just a matter of fact for Rosa.

On our last weekend in Hamburg, Steve and I bought some acid. It was our going away celebration. We took it in the early hours of Sunday after an all night session and stepping over crashed-out bodies in our dark two-roomed flat we took off to see the sunrise. As we crossed Mockenstrasse I saw the brightness of the day reflected on the bonnets of cars gliding by. I imagined the rubber tubes that I had cut and stacked each day with my rotting hands were now living under the bonnets of those cars, cooling the expensive engines and I waved to each and every car as if they were my children.

We rode the escalator from the street down into the bowels of the station three times that morning. The

sound of the stairs became for me the clankety clank clank of the cutting machines. We had wanted to get a train to somewhere nice in the country but once we arrived into the bustle and noise it was hard to find our way out again.

All the faces we saw were blurry, walking by us or staring out at us from buffet bars, distanced by glass and mouthing words we couldn’t catch. We clapped our hands like two year olds whenever someone ran for a train, their bodies leaving a trail of colour behind them. We watched the ‘Polizei’ as they jerked the leads of Alsatian dogs and saw the glint of weapons when they brushed their free hands past their belts to show who was in command. We must have queued up ten times to use the photo booth. I didn’t want to have my picture taken but Steve insisted, he wanted to get rid of the change in his pocket, it was weighing him down, he said. Once, while waiting for our third set of photos, we recognized a group of men from the ‘gummiwerks’, they tipped their hats and smiled as we waved like there was no tomorrow. It felt nice and warm to recognize faces and be recognized in return.

Later, when we started to come down from our trip, we sat in a coffee bar watching these same men through the glass. They stood in three’s and four’s against a bar counter, smoking and chatting. Like us, they didn’t seem to be going anywhere in particular. I could tell they were Turkish by their tight moustaches and the gold in their mouths when they opened them to speak. Those on their own, stood with hands deep inside their pockets, watching the trains come and go. I wondered if they were watching like I was?

Secure in the knowledge that some day soon they would be leaving. Boarding a train from this station and never looking back.

‘My Gawd Katie, your so soppy.’ Steve said when I tried to explain what I was thinking.

‘They won’t take trains home. They’ll buy big station wagons and second hand Mercedes and drive home to Istanbul or wherever.’

‘Now you’re talking soppy,’ I accused.

‘No, I ‘m not. They bring home a bit of Vorsprung durch technik,’ he clicked his fingers at me then, I hated when Steve clicked his fingers at me, ‘And all of a sudden everyone in the village wants to go away and make their fortune. Its fuel for the fires of Capitalism, Katie and we’re all cogs in the great big Imperialist dream……’

The waitress moved towards us with her cloth and I noticed my cup was empty but I couldn’t move my lips. My tongue was dry as timber and my teeth grinding from the strychnine in the acid. I sat and thought of my four uncles – my mother’s brothers – who had left Ireland in the fifties to find work in Canada. The waitress scooped the cup from under me and rubbed the spot where it had been. Did my uncles know they were leaving for good the day they went? Would they have called themselves emigrants? I let my hands rest on the table and felt the warmth of the coffee that had been there. None of my uncles returned to Ireland.

Steve and I bumped into Rosa and some of the other women on the train to Harburg next morning. It was to be our last day of work and the women insisted we join them so we squeezed into the seats beside them as they sat on each other’s laps and told us how they’d spent the night in Hamburg, as a treat. A famous group from Croatia had played at the university and the women had ended their night with a fireworks celebration on the river. They showed us the images they had grabbed on their phones. I was happy to introduce Rosa to Steve. I even showed her the photos we had taken at the station. She seemed sad. I couldn’t see the sense in that. I put the photos away when the polizei came down the carriage to check our tickets. For once Steve and I had bought one.

I worked on the manual cutter with Rosa all that day. We worked at a comfortable pace, but I was wasted and every clackety clack clack of the machine drilled a hole through my brain. I spent our fifteen-minute break with my head stuck as far between the bars of the window as I could get it. Rosa fed me korn schnapps to keep me awake.

‘You be careful on machine okay.’

‘I’ll be fine.’ I said. ‘It’s my last day.’

‘That’s why I say,’ Rosa put a finger to her eyes like she had done the first time she explained the danger to me, ‘Be careful.’

‘You don’t smile today Rosa?’

‘Your photo make me sick for home.’

Rosa couldn’t stop talking on that last day. She told me she’d been in Germany for over twenty years. Her children had mostly been conceived on holidays home. When she first left her town she paid the equivalent of a years wages to get safely across the Austrian and German borders. Her father had told her what to do to ensure the guide who brought her did not lead her up a stray mountain path and cheat her of her hard earned savings. The villagers had devised a system, he said. Rosa had her photo taken in a booth like the one me and Steve had used. She cut the strip of photos in half, giving one half to the man who was taking her group across the borders and keeping the other. When Rosa reached Hamburg safely she sent her half back home to her family and it was only then that her guide got paid. The breeze from the barred window felt good on our faces as we stood together one last time. Below, I could make out the crossing gates and the curved line of the track to the main factory.

It was all I knew of the surrounding countryside in the whole twelve weeks I’d been there.

Steve and I left Germany five days later. We travelled by rail, down through Germany and France and then across to England. It was mid September and raining heavily as we stood on the dart platform in Dun Laoghaire last week. Now, I’m sitting in a café off Grafton Street writing to Rosa as I wait for Steve to show up. He’s been partying since we got back last week but we’re supposed to be going flat hunting today. I’m using a dictionary to write my message to Rosa. As I see Steve wave and come towards me, I hide the letter under my bag. Its only when he sits down that I notice the new leather jacket and spiv haircut. I wonder where that puts us with the flat hunting, him splashing out when we’re meant to be pooling our money, making it last. I’m not really listening as Steve’s tells me about the apartment he’s found. I want to get my own biscuit tin, leave it under my own bed ‘cos I know its my wedge of the our rubber money that’ll end up paying the rent on this pad he’s motoring on about. I tell Steve straight out, while he’s in mid sentence, I tell him I’ve changed my mind about moving in together.

I stay on in the café after he leaves, part of me sad, the other part relieved. I think of Rosa’s tear stained face that last day in the factory when I gave her one half of the photos of Steve and I. I am sending her the other half now, in an envelope with this silly card. A sheep sits in an armchair, drinking beer and watching a TV weather report. The dialogue bubble above the weatherman’s head says, ‘Apparently the grass is greener on the other side’. I don’t know if Rosa will get the joke but I’m sending her all my wishes, hoping she makes it home soon to buy her piece of land.

Geraldine says “I am a filmmaker and writer. My first feature film ‘THE SUN, MOON & STARS’ received Best Comedy award at the Florida Film Festival, USA in ’96. My second feature CHAOS/DEATHGAMES - a low budget sci fi set in 2020 - won the audience award at the Luxembourg Fantasy Fest 2001.

Since 2003, I have been writing screenplays and making documentaries. I have directed over fifty hours of prime time, long form documentaries for Irish Television. Subjects range from History, Culture, Art, Mental Health, Social and Environmental issues. My expertise is in showing an audience how extraordinary, ordinary lives can be.

In 2006/7 I attained an MA in Creative writing from UCD and my short stories have appeared in numerous publications since;

'Jesus on the Dash’ in new writing from UCD 2008 'Vis a Visa' in Boyne Berries 5, 2009, ‘Out of Sight’ runner up in the 2009 Francis McManus radio award and broadcast Nov ‘09.

'The Stenographers' long listed for the FISH publishing memoir competition in 2012.

'The Sheriff of Sunday' third place in the Trevor/ Bowen International Short Story competition 2012 'Swimmers', a first novel was long-listed for the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair competition 2013 www.creedoproductions.ie www.vimeo.com/gcreed/videos

Designated Staircase Number Two

By Sophie Monatte Wilma Taylor, born Arellano—pronounced ah-ray-YAH-no—is about to walk up the first step of the concrete staircase when a disparaging whistling sound makes her flinch, less a startle reflex than the expression of a dreadful anticipation. She stands still, a sigh of despair filling her throat as she listens to drawling footsteps approaching behind her. Even though she reads it every day—well, she even dreams of it—her eyes are still masochistically drawn to the dauntingly large sign right next to her at the bottom of the stairs, Designated staircase number one for regular People. Dogs and helpers, proceed to Designated staircase number two on the other side of the shopping plaza . Even dogs are entitled to their capital letter.

Wilma glances at her watch, four minutes before the end of class. Her daughter Marie is frantically frog hopping in the Kids in Motion classroom. As the second longer whistle blast becomes more determined in its shrillness, Wilma swivels around with resignation to face the security guard, a young man with eyes so narrow they look like clam shells, who’s waving his finger at her as if to say, Nice try, young lady!

He expertly spits his whistle in his right hand and tucks it inside his pants pocket.

“Ma’am? Ma’am?” Where did the d vanish? “Where are you going?” He has the revengeful air of a scapegoat who’s been waiting since kindergarten for his turn to lash out.

“Sunshine House. The preschool.” Wilma indicates the second floor of the building with a nod. “To pick up my daughter. Marie.” She adds in an exaggerated tone, “ Taylor .”

In the irritated mumble of someone whose job consists of repeating the same line over and over, the guard starts, “Please proceed to the other staircase,” his left arm extended in the direction of the plaza’s west wing. Five minutes walk. Five more to run up the stairs two by two and stride past the bakery selling the stale pineapple buns Marie devours in one bite, the local cha chaan teng restaurant, the foot massage place, then all the way through the suspicious-smelling Wellcome supermarket to finally access the school premises. There’s not enough time, yet Wilma can’t resolve to say it out loud. I am not a helper . She’s about to ask what’s wrong with this staircase but gets silenced by a sharp drilling sound coming from the back of the mall. Hopefully they are building a Designated staircase for Filipino-born women married to Western expatriates . Three minutes before the end of class. Marie collects her painting, a purple goofy-faced stegosaurus. She puts it carefully inside her schoolbag as if it were as precious as mommy’s diamond wedding ring.

Another wheatish-skinned woman dragging a wailing dog heavier than her on a leash walks towards the West wing, chatting animatedly on her cell phone in what sounds like an Indonesian dialect. The reddish-brown and white fur ball belongs more to Siberia than hot and humid Hong Kong judging by the distraught way its tongue is lolling out of its mouth.

The girl’s gaze is fixed on Wilma and the guard. It’s unclear if her head is outrageously

shaking at the injustice of the scene or at a colleague ’s arrogant presumption.

“Ma’am. Please. You have to use the other staircase. The one on the other side of the plaza.” After each sentence the guard emits a kind of snorty grunt, a taste for savory phlegm or a lingering cold, it’s hard to tell.

“What other staircase?” Wilma dares him to say it out loud. The one for maids. You look like a maid.

“The one on the other side of the plaza.” The man is an automated voice message system all by himself.

Wilma is only one floor below her daughter. Marie. Ends with a e, not a a. The guard reaches out, as if ready to grab her elbow and guide her in the right direction. Wilma doesn’t budge, a freedom fighter.

“What’s wrong with this staircase?” she reiterates. Two minutes. Marie puts her shoes on by herself for the first time, smiling proudly at her teacher. The whole school is cheering.

The security guard remains silent, swaying on his heels. When Wilma turns towards the stairs, he starts anxiously looking in his pants pocket for his whistle, lost among a soft pack of cigarettes, a mucus-soaked Kleenex, his latest Galaxy smartphone and an Octopus card with 4.60$ credit remaining, twenty cents short of his bus ride home.

“I have the right to use this staircase,” she insists.

“Ma’am, have you read the sign?” The guard points in an aggressive I’ve had enough movement.

“Every single day,” she barks. And then she settles down again. “Twice a day actually. Every morning when I drop off my girl, and every afternoon when I pick her up.”

“Oh, I see, so you confess to breaking the law twice a day.”

“I am not breaking any law.”

A yellow stray dog approaches sniffing around, its eyes roaming over the ground, unconcerned. It pauses at the infamous sign, one leg up, a few drops of urine spurting against the pole, and then starts lazily climbing up the steps. Halfway through the staircase, the mongrel sits for a second as if worn-out from the hike, then slowly retraces its way back down the stairs and walks away in the direction it came from. As if the security guard suspected the dog’s disruption was in fact a diversion attempt orchestrated by Wilma, he dramatically takes a walkie-talkie out of his shirt’s pocket and with the voice of someone who’s been watching his share of law enforcement television shows, he starts, “This is Staircase Number One. We have a situation here. A helper who refuses to proceed to the other wing.”

“I am not a helper,” she finally shouts in a quivering tone hovering between rage and shame.

“Can you prove it?” He enquires, his eyebrows teasingly wiggling at her.

“Is this a joke?” She raises her hands to her head, nervously shuffling along.

One minute. Marie is singing the Good-Bye Teachers song at the top of her lungs.

Proud mothers are taking turns to peep inside the classroom through a little hole designed for that purpose.

“What’s your nationality Ma’am?” he quizzes in a FBI kind of tone.

She can explain; it’s all right. “Well, I was born in the Philippines, but—” “Ha, see!” Upon hearing this self-incrimination, the guard almost starts victoriously jumping up and down.

“But it doesn’t mean that I’m a maid. Filipino maid is not a pleonasm.”

He frowns in confusion, mouthing a silent “What ?” but recovers right away. “Right,” he chuckles. “Do you have your employment contract with you?”

“My—No!” Her eyes bulge in exasperation.

He gives a brisk crack of his knuckles. “Are you working illegally in Hong Kong?”

“What—No, I don’t have to work. Listen, I’m not a maid. Not a worker. Just a housewife, born in the wrong country, now married to an American.” She fiddles with the idea of taking out her wallet, pathetically exhibiting the thousand-dollars bills she carries around with her.

“Oh really?” he warbles sarcastically. “Never heard this one before!”

“Look at me,” she pleads. “My clothes, my haircut, my necklace, my wedding ring.

It’s obvious I’m not in the domestic helper’s income group.”

“I wouldn’t know Ma’am. I’m not authorized to judge people from their appearance.”

“Right,” she explodes with an ironic guffaw. “Strictly from the oiliness of their skin and the thickness of their hair. I see.”

As she takes her phone out of her handbag and starts urgently looking for family pictures, she hears the sharp clicking sound high heels make on concrete stairs. A pretty redhead in her late thirties appears, holding hands with a sulky little boy. The guard greets them with an elaborate nod resembling something of a royal bow. Wilma’s grin as she recognizes her daughter’s classmate rapidly turns into a panicky wince when she realizes she’s late. Marie is waiting in the entrance hall, crammed between an oversized aquarium and a coat rack. Teachers shake their heads. The secretary searches through her files for Wilma’s cell phone number. A Peppa Pig sticker is solemnly brought over.

A hundred and twenty-six steps below, the mother is returning Wilma’s greeting, her eyes attentively widening, almost expecting to be asked for directions.

“This is ridiculous but could you please confirm that I am Marie’s mother?” Wilma chuckles at the absurdity of her own question, as if saying, I know, right? Some people!

The redhead darts a quick worried glance at Wilma and the man then without a word pulls her kid closer to her and quickly walks away like someone escaping from a beggar.

Exasperated, Wilma puts her hands up and yells, “Please! You know I’m not a helper.

We see each other every day at school. Twice a day!” She stomps her feet in rage. “Your son peed in his pants yesterday.” She lets out a loud frustrated grunt and without a final glance at the security guard, she starts sprinting towards designated staircase number two.

While running away she could be reflecting on the injustice of blood heritage or shedding tears for her own poor mother and her grand mother and entire generations of Filipino women who bravely yet vainly sacrificed their lives, their youths, their marriages, their self-esteem and any chance of happiness just to ensure that Wilma would never have to

suffer the same discriminations and humiliations. But no, what occurs to her at this exact moment is that the designer sunglasses hiding her sobs of anger cost twice her Indonesian helper’s monthly salary.

Sophie Monatte has lived and written in France, New York and Hong Kong. She’s earning her MFA in Fiction at City University of Hong Kong and writing her first short-story collection in English. She plays way too much backgammon. She's afraid of exclamation points.

Vigeland Park

By Jane Hertenstein

Often Plan A is in jeopardy of becoming Plan B or C depending upon the circumstances.

Everyone said go to Bergen, and we fully intended to, except it was May Day and a national holiday and train prices quadrupled.

While studying the train schedule, my shoulders breaking from the load I carried on my back, I got that sinking feeling, where I’m sucked into a whirlpool inside of myself, spiraling downward, deeper and deeper. Around me the frenetic comings and goings within the crowded station slowed and the loudspeaker announcing arrivals and departures became muffled.

You must go to Bergen, our friends all said. If you’re going to Norway, you must see Bergen.

Bergen is a World Heritage site, that old-world authentic fishing village vibe. The streets are cobbled and wind around the harbor, and the waterfront houses are made of timber and painted white or pale yellow like butter with blue accents that mirror the sea, and storks nest on the rooftops, and the people are welcoming and serve lappe pancakes with gooseberry jam and sour cream. If only we could get there.

The other thing friends told us was that Norway was expensive. The most expensive country on earth. But, what does this mean? That in comparison to the dollar things would cost more. Well then we would just have to watch what we bought. Or that the basics that we all take for granted such as coffee, pizza, and chocolate were exorbitant. Or did it mean that in our ignorance we’d pass getting tickets online when they were cheaper and instead opt to buy them at the station where we’d regret that decision, and have to come up with Plan B because we could no longer afford Plan A. The center of my stomach melted into my feet, making me weak.

My husband and I had embarked on a Ryan Air vacation of several countries right when the dollar was bottoming out against the pound, the Euro, the Norwegian kroner, and just about every other viable currency, but especially in Norway, where it felt like inflationary Germany after World War I, where the Weimar Germans paid for things by carting their marks to the market in a wheelbarrow. For a local bus ticket from the outskirts of Stavanger into the city center (a distance of 3.5 kilometer or a little over two miles) we paid seventy-five kroner. A thumbnail conversion for the mathematically impaired was five to 1—or about $10.

I yanked on the straps and lowered my pack to the ground. I considered collapsing down next to it.

Our Ryan Air tour was comprised of many short flights originally advertised at ONLY ONE PENCE—which sounded way doable on the other side of the ocean, but quickly added up. There was a credit card fee, a handling fee, a baggage surcharge, and because we were not members of the EU a fee to check in rather than being able to use the kiosks in the terminal. Also the pence must be a euphemism for $100 because that’s what it came to per person for each of those short connecting flights we planned between London; Haugesund, Norway; Dublin, Ireland; Trapani and Palermo, Italy. Four times two squared.

“Now what?” my husband asked me, the bus terminal around us buzzing with holiday travelers.

Sebastian and I are used to traveling like gypsies, or more specifically like Blanche duBois, relying upon the kindness of strangers. Through the years and several trips abroad, we’ve figured out many cost-cutting tricks such as: taking the night train in order to avoid paying for accommodations, eating out of grocery stores instead of ordering off a menu, and never, never sit down at a café where the coffee is three times more than if you stand at the bar and slug it back. We stay in hostels, couchsurf, or bargain with the proprietor of B & Bs telling them to skip the breakfast (which is usually awful anyway). We scour the Internet for discount coupons, promotional codes, and free airline “miles.” Before leaving the States we applied for a certain credit card that allowed us to withdraw money more cheaply than the average bank card (though I had my doubts in Norway).

As independent travelers, we scorn those cheesy package deals where everything is included. You don’t have to worry about anything. The tourist bus pulls up and you pile on with 30 – 40 other retirees and suddenly you are in sightseeing hell with a boorish seatmate who talks too loud and a chirpy guide who is forever narrating the obvious. You’re stuck having to go to the same restaurant with a pre-arranged menu. You have no choice but to flock together in the plaza, piazza, platz and allow yourself to be shepherded by a tour guide carrying a large colorful umbrella, oversize sunflower, a green frog pennant, or—you fill in the blanks.

On the other hand sometimes you wish someone would tell you what to do.

At the bus depot in Stavanger I stared upward. This was one of those modern stations, minimalistic-Scandanavian. I was hoping for a Sistine Chapel connection, for the finger of God to reach out and save us from our predicament.

“Why didn’t you get the tickets when you had the chance?” he asked.

“Let’s not go there.”

We like to play loose with our itinerary—thus the rationale for NOT buying our train tickets in advance. You never know when you’ll fall in love with a place and need an extra day, or decide you hate a city and cut out early, or meet another couple at a bar who recommend a beach resort you’d never heard of, or meet a bunch of people who invite you to come along— though that has never happened, we still like to keep all options open. But spur of the moment only works when things go according to plan. Often Plan A is in jeopardy of becoming Plan B or C depending upon the circumstances. Once a screw comes loose and the wheels start to come off then Sebastian and I fall into a predictable pattern of panic.

Sebastian keyed in any number of combinations at the self-ticketing kiosk trying to find cheap passage to Bergen until we determined that, yes, we could get there, but only if we blew our entire trip budget.

Our original plan was to bus to Bergen and then take the famous train over the mountains to Oslo. The one Rick Steves recommends. NOT that we are the biggest Rick Steves fans. Sebastian and I usually make fun of him and his public television series, where everything comes across as staged and phony—especially the impromptu folk dancing in native costume. But Rick Steves touted the overland train route where one can experience the highs and lows of Norway. The tallest of the mountains as well as the fjords and valleys and spectacular waterfalls that cascade down within feet of an alpine station. I loved the idea of hopping off the train to toss snowballs with Sebastian. When working on our itinerary I had no inkling about May Day, the first of May—for if I had I would have gotten the tickets when they were 119 kroner—the equivalent of about $20. Now they were available for 700 kroner each.

“If only—” I began.

“Don’t.” Sebastian interrupted.

His tone triggered self-defense. “You think this is my fault.”

He wouldn’t answer me.

“What fucking country celebrates May Day!?” I might have said this loud enough to draw attention.

“Shut up,” he said. A few polite Norwegians averted their eyes away from us.

These abrupt words bypassed my ears and went straight to that sleep-deprived, travel-traumatized portion of my brain that doesn’t operate on logic but rather reacts based upon emotions, untethered emotions cut loose from everyday moorings.

Next, I did what anyone would do in a strange country: I turned and pushed through the doors, leaving him at the station.

I walked down the sidewalk bordered by outdoor cafes where carefree Norwegians were beginning to enjoy their holiday.

Blonde, bronzed, and rich. They didn’t have to worry about running out of money. Why even the drug addicts get a stipend!

There had been a time when the human tide of Norway came our way that is to say to the States. There is only so much arable land. Farms were divided among the sons (not always enough land for one person to raise a family on) or else given outright to the oldest son, forcing the other sons to pursue non-agrarian occupations. Add to all this a few consecutive years of failed crops. There was little margin for error. The mid-1800s saw a huge migration of Scandinavians crossing the ocean and settling on the American midwestern frontier. Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the Dakotas. But in 1970 oil was discovered in the North Sea and for some reason Norway decided to nationalize their natural resources instead of leasing them to corporations.

Thus, every citizen gets a share of its nation’s wealth. Because of oil they get to drink coffee at sidewalk cafes.

I had no idea where I was going, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to go back to the station where Sebastian was. I sat down, had a coffee, paid for it with the few remaining kroner I had in my pocket, and then wandered back to the station where I found my husband reading a book. We didn’t speak to each other for a good five minutes.

“We’ll take a bus.”

“To Bergen?”

“No, to Oslo.”

“I want to go to Bergen.”

“We can’t. By the time the bus gets there we’ll only have to turn around and leave. Listen our plane leaves from Oslo in two days. We can go straight to Oslo and have an extra day before flying out.”

Now one of the other things friends told us was, Don’t go to Oslo. Oslo is ugly.

“I vote for Bergen.”

“This isn’t a vote.”

Maybe it was here I started to cry. I can’t remember. There was no way I could explain to him my dream of walking the streets of Bergen. I was convinced he didn’t care.

Buses left across the parking lot from the train station. It would only take about nine hours to get to Oslo via Kristansand.

I pretty much hated Sebastian. *** Night fell and we slept off and on, the bus gently swaying. We wouldn’t even get a chance to see Norway’s mountainous interior. It was as if we were riding in a subway. I stared out the window at passing headlights and a coal black sky.

Our fight in Stavanger wasn’t really that unusual. We typically have two or three breakdowns per trip, bends in the road

where we physically, mentally, and emotionally shatter, where we cannot go on and so turn on each other. Most of this can be attributed to the stress of travel: not knowing the language, getting over jetlag, uncomfortable beds, or, if able to sleep, waking up feeling strangely dislocated, aware that things are out of place, that, indeed, I am somewhere else.

Except our first fight occurred at home.

Before we’d even left we were already tense. My grandfather was suddenly hospitalized. Each time we planned a trip we told ourselves that we were going to splurge on travel insurance to mitigate any pre-trip jitters. But, no, when it came time to click through and place an order for tickets, after all the other surcharges and fees, I was just too cheap. I rationalized that the extra $100—50 euros?—would be better spent on gelato, bars of Lindt chocolate, dark beer, and so I forwent. Thus, there was no turning back or wiggle room for deaths in the family or sudden hospitalizations.

Granddad is eighty-four and has decided he doesn’t want to live. The doctors have diagnosed his problem as loneliness.

He had been married to my grandmother for over fifty years when she passed away last summer from complications accrued during a hip replacement surgery. It was no one’s fault really; we all told her it was risky at her age, so why not let it go. But she was in such intense pain that she underwent the operation and the subsequent infection and the weakness and then succumbed to pneumonia and slipped into a coma and died. Now Grandpa cannot imagine life without her.

In addition my father suffered a stroke—not recently, but still I’m getting used to the fact that he will be forever paralyzed on his left side. Thank God, my mother quipped, he’s right-handed. The stroke occurred after he’d retired and both he and my mother had moved to a retirement resort community where they could indulge in their passion for golf. Now he spends his days staring out the bay window in the kitchen watching golfers cross the links searching for lost balls in the rough by their back yard. He’s become a fan of Fox TV news and Mom bustles and fetches for him. My main concern of late has been my mother. She’s getting worn out. Their relationship has always been problematic and I think they were both looking forward to spending their last good years doing whatever they wanted—without the other—but now Mom is stuck and takes it out on Dad. I’m used to getting phone calls where they take turns complaining about each other. One good thing about our trip was that we weren’t taking our cells phones.

It was dawn when Sebastian and I disembarked at the Oslo transportation hub. We arrived underground and had to take a two-storey escalator to reach to street level where we stashed our backpacks at the station and wandered outside like moles adjusting to daylight. Right away we saw what our friends had warned us about. The city seemed tarnished. Maybe it was the pollution. The buildings, though painted pastel colors, were dingy as if we were viewing them through dark glasses. The painted stucco was streaked by run-off from the slate roofs. In addition the sky was overcast. The western side of the country had been warm and spring-like, but here it felt twenty degrees cooler (I’m not even going to try to think in terms of Celsius). In rubbish-filled corners where the sun never shone there were little piles of sooty slush.

Oslo is situated along a sheltered bay next to the water. One can imagine during the Hanseatic period the great merchants shipping and receiving goods down at the busy quay. Today the city is completely cut off from the harbor by a hectic highway. We passed over four lanes of traffic on a pedestrian bridge and headed toward the brightly lit Oslo Opera House meant to resemble an iceberg. It shimmered, reflecting car headlights and emitted an inner glow, a solstice-ish evanescence.

I’m awed but also still in a funk. Sebastian and I haven’t exchanged more than a word or two since leaving Stavanger, since he informed me that I didn’t have a vote.

A cool breeze blew in and tattered clouds spat rain droplets so we ducked inside for a quick coffee and to check our guidebook. The coffee cost more than eight Americanos. We bought one. At least it came in a china cup with a saucer. We were able to share our single latte like civilized human beings sitting at a café table covered with white linen, facing the sea— for awhile forgetting we were gypsies. I turned in our book to FREE events and exhibits. Yet even in this idyllic setting we were barraged by the sound of jack hammers and could feel through the soles of our shoes tremors from the piles being driven into the silty harbor floor. Our server informed us that the city was rerouting the highway. In the future automobile traffic would flow into Oslo through an underground tunnel, which explained the number of cranes and construction machinery the size of ocean liners I observed in the background as Sebastian and I snapped a few pictures from the tip of the opera iceberg.

We meandered the old part of the city—not really that fabulously old. A few of the buildings reminded me of Prague, a dim comparison. We hiked up to the Parliament building and Palace where the royal family lives. Guards wearing furry hats stood watch in tiny booths. Somehow I couldn’t imagine them thwarting terrorists. But this is Norway; there are no terrorists.

We saw a bus with a digital readout: Vigeland Park, one of the FREE places mentioned in our guidebook. Our timed bus ticket was still good so we chased after the bus and crowded aboard. We had to stand up, squished next to each other, which was uncomfortable—only from the perspective that I was still angry with him. We bumped along and into each other in silence.

My mind was elsewhere as we entered the park. At first I didn’t even notice the sculptures cropping up on both sides of the walkway. As freelance travelers we often miss out on the significance or history behind monuments. The frustrating part of being a tourist is that you’re unaware of what you should be looking for. It’s only later at home that you “get” what it was and by then it’s too late. Molded and carved figures rose up beside me.

A woman running and lifting a child, her hair flying behind her, an expression of utter joy upon her molten face. There was a dancing girl who reminded me of my sister who lives in New Mexico, her dreadlocks twirling like a pinwheel. Suddenly I was homesick for Kirsten. Standing before a man embracing a woman from behind, his hands resting upon each of her breasts, I felt a pang in my chest.

Sebastian and I strolled on.

I snapped a picture of a toddler stomping his foot in a tantrum. The green patina on his chubby legs was discolored as if

he had wet himself. I laughed. I recognized this child. He was everywhere: standing in the check out line at the grocery, in the hospital waiting room; he was the child told to go to bed, the child told no.

Sebastian stopped to take pictures of a group of kids (real, not sculptures) on the grass doing cartwheels and backflips.

“Life imitates art,” he said. I nodded. I still didn’t feel like talking.

We passed more sculptures. A woman, her head resting on her hand, exhausted, catching a cat nap before suddenly awaking and hurrying to start dinner, fetch the kids from soccer, return the DVDs to the drop box. A man and woman their limbs entwined around each other, tangled up together. It was hard to discern where the one began and the other left off. The sexual tension was palpable, complicated.

There was a granite middle aged couple, their eyes averted, gazing off in opposite directions. Perhaps they’d argued. She wanted one thing and he realized he could never love her as much as she needed.

“Where did you go?” I asked Sebastian.

“What are you talking about? You left me.”

“Only for a little while. I needed some space.”

“Yeah, me too. But I’m back, for now.” We were finally talking.

I pointed to a stone woman, past her prime, her breasts drooped and her abdomen sagged. For being made of rock, her flesh seemed gelatinous, soft, utterly believable. “She’s frightened.” She leaned toward her partner, an old man, visibly ill, a cancer eating away at him or Alzheimer’s robbing him of his personality, the person he used to be. Like my grandfather in diapers, wetting himself because he forgot what it was like to take care of his bodily functions, sitting in soiled pants until changed—never knowing the difference. I told Sebastian I needed to sit down. He ran to fill up my plastic bottle with water and returned with two hot pretzels slathered in mustard bought from a cart vendor.

I ate and felt a lot better. “Remember that time we hitchhiked up north when we were in college.”

“Yeah,” he said, “and I left my favorite hat on a seat in a diner. I loved that hat.”

“But we got to see the northern lights. We thought it was the end of the world and were freaked out.”

“The whole sky was like a lava lamp.”

“Whenever I see hats,” I said, “I look for one to replace the one you lost.”

We kissed each other on our coarse salt-crumbed lips. It stung a little, but felt good.

Jane Hertenstein’s current focus is flash. A decade ago the average short story was 16 – 20 pages double spaced, today flash is all the rage, for the digital age, formatted for the hand-held device. Jane is the author of over 22 published short pieces, a combination of fiction and creative non-fiction and blurred genre. In addition she has published a novel, Beyond Paradise and a non-fiction project, Orphan Girl: The Memoir of a Chicago Bag Lady, which garnered national reviews. Jane is the recipient of a grant from the Illinois Arts Council. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in: Hunger Mountain, Rosebud, Word Riot, Flashquake, Fiction Fix, Frostwriting, Tonopah Review, and several themed anthologies.

The Gold Mountain

By Jay Merill There can be freedom in stillness and I’m appreciating this now. I’ve spent so much time running; away from things; towards others; running almost for the sake of movement. My life in the centre of the city has been a frenzy. But now here on its far border, I have learnt to be still.

Inside the shack of señora Guilliana Pėrez it is quiet at all times with only the occasional whirr of dust -carts as they pass along the road. Guilliana is a gentle person, not given to speech. I was sleeping rough but she has taken me in to her home which lies on the fringe of a rubbish dump. The señora is a compassionate lady and she is also glad of my company. She says there’s good work for me here. Tomorrow we are to go and speak to the owner of the waste-site. I look out from the window of the shack; see through a sparse hedge the mounds of trash in furrows.

Guilliana likes to sit in the one fixed position by the television. Although it is not turned on she stares at it as though she can see moving shapes. Often she will be frowning but this does not mean she is displeased. She has a look of concentration as though she is trying to take in what is going on in the tv programme. At other times she will be gnawing on a biscuit. There is a mouse-like way about her when she nibbles and twitches and stares out sideways from her eyes as though expecting the pounce of a cat. I see she thinks of each one of her children, that when she pictures her eldest daughter she breaks out into a smile, when she comes to her youngest son, a shadow grows. They always appear in her mind in the same order, beginning with the eldest. Señora Pėrez is old, her eldest children are married, her youngest have gone to the centre of Lima to go to school. Her cousin has them at her house but they come to their mother for the holiday. I have not yet met them. Her best moments are when she is very comfortable, after dinner usually. She will rock back and forth, even though she is not sitting in a rocking chair.

Now I work each day at the waste-lot. Juan Carlos the owner has asked me to sort out the different items at the dump. It is dusty work. I must take out the things to be re-cycled from the mound of waste.

Sometimes glass, or fabrics, sometimes plastic. There is a smell here. It gets in your nose especially at mid-day when the sun is at its hottest. And flies come in great clouds and buzz around the garbage. The

flies are industrious and wheel round in low circles, landing frequently where they like the look of the trash. It is best here early in the mornings and last thing in the evening. Calmest then, quieter, and smelling less. The work at the dump is not difficult. I do not mind it. In the mornings I think about friends left behind. I like to sit on one of the garbage mounds and remember former times. I ask myself if I will see my friends ever again and no answer comes to me. This is a strange place that I now find myself in. Like a little shut-off world. Every day is the same here. There isn’t much in the way of excitement. How different life is now from what I have seen.

Now I have been with Guilliana for one month and have helped her with the laundry, and particularly with the washing of the robes for Santa Maria Magdalena. Each week Guilliana changes the clothing on the wooden statuette in the Church at Pueblo Libre. Since I arrived here I have not left the environs of the waste site except to go to the church with the señora to bring the washed and ironed outfits for Our Lady.

We take off the clothes that have been on the wooden statue for one week and fit the fresh ones onto it, pushing the arms through as you would do for a baby. Our Lady stares at us as we carry out these duties, through her painted eyes. Guilliana seems trance-like when we are at the church. Sometimes I look at her and see her eyes are squeezed tight shut. At other times her eyes are opened very wide, and she can on occasions move between the tight shut to the very wide open amazingly quickly. It is not easy for me to imagine what she is thinking. She makes very few expressions; her body is almost rigid. When we have come away again, home to the garbage dump, she becomes lighter, softer, still saying little, but now furry mouse-like instead of stony. I know she feels it a sacred duty to perform the tasks with the clothes for Our Lady, and I am sure she has been doing this for years. She’s pleased that I am assisting her with this now and it makes her look upon me favourably.

It’s many weeks since I came here. Now in fact the weeks slip into months. I often think of my family, especially my two younger brothers and I try to picture them at home in Cajamarca and wonder what they are up to. I was sorry to miss Carnival this year as we always used to go and the three of us did dancing in the Plaza after the processions had passed. Guilliana hears me sigh and asks me if I am happy in my work here. She is genuine, she’s a good person. I think about her question.

‘Yes’, I reply. For it’s true. I am happy sorting and picking in the rubbish dump each day, for several reasons. It is easy work, though kneeling down so long makes my legs ache. But I don’t have to think too hard about what I am doing, so it is relaxing. Also I just do what I need to do and don’t have to try and please others on top of that. When I worked as a house-maid and also when selling on the streets, it was more stressful because I kept on having to say and do the right things or I’d be in trouble. Last year I lived for a time with a street gang helping some of the older kids by taking from their hand what they had recently stolen and passing it on again, so none of us would be caught. They were especially on the lookout for gold. Coins and trinkets, watches, anything. I learned to do pick-pocketing. It was easier than the work I‘d done before and the money was much better. Now I earn very little. But money is not everything.

I do not want to have a life of crime and I don’t want to be always running, running. Running to get away and running to a better life. I am glad all of that is now ended even though I have much less. Here I do honest work for my money and that is better and I am preparing myself for asking for forgiveness from Our Lady for all my past dishonesty.

But I know in my heart that though I experience this sense of freedom here, I am not in the right place for me. It’s a short term happiness only. I think more and more of returning to the world I know and I pat the hand of Guilliana because she is watching me with a troubled look and I know she fears I will leave here and she will be alone again. How can I tell her that her fears are true?

It’s lunchtime. I have come in from the dump and we eat together the bean soup that Doña Guilliana has made. The soup is peppery and also spiced with chili. I do not know anyone who makes this soup as

nicely as Guilliana. Though the heat of it takes your breath away it’s still delicious. I pause in eating and wipe my mouth with my sleeve; look around me. The laundered set of clothes for the wooden Madonna stir on their little line in the draught from the door. Later we will take in the change of clothes so that Our Lady can rest clean and comfortable. Through the window I see the sun in a bright yellow pattern through the gaps in the sparse hedge which separates the small line of shacks from the dump. I lower my head and eat. There is the clink of our spoons against the soup bowls. The eyes of Guilliana look far off. This is often the way with her. I try to picture what she may be thinking of.

In the morning early, I start my work, walking out in the rows of garbage. Fresh mounds have been dumped here by the dustcarts during the night. I saw the lights from the trucks reflected through the window of the shack as they brought in their loads and I heard the distant voices of the drivers. Today I must collect plastics for re-cycling and put each item in a special container. It is mostly plastic packaging and bottles and if there are paper labels stuck anywhere I have to scrape them off first. It is quite fun raking through the tips and seeing the glint of a plastic bottle or a sheet of bubble-wrap. Like a game of ‘find the treasure’ I used to play with my brothers when we were much younger. Now I am on my own though.

There are one or two other kids here working at different parts of the dump, sometimes with an adult. But nobody seems to speak that much. I discover that I do not mind this as I have got used to the quiet of the place. We smile at one another if we pass close by and they all seem friendly enough so I am comfortable.

It’s not quite dawn. Hardly any light in the sky. I walk the track between two huge mounds of newly arrived waste my feet scrunching on the gravely bits. The sound frightens away a couple of animals and large birds who have been picking through the debris. Foxes? Macaws? They are too fast for me to really see in this light. I’m holding my small container which I’ll fill with the recyclable plastic before carrying it to the large bin by the wall of Juan Carlos’ house on the far side of the dump. I enjoy these early walks through the towers of garbage, this strange unearthly landscape. Sometimes I imagine the huge piles I pass between as a powerful mountain range, the Andes in miniature. Today I’m particularly early. None of the other kids who work on the site are here yet, which is why everything is so still and so empty. Juan Carlos himself isn’t here either, and usually he is the first to arrive. There is some impatience in me that made me wake and want to start moving. It is because I am thinking of home; how I will soon leave this quiet life on the edge, and return to the fast paced centre of the city. it will be necessary to tell this to Guilliana. Her children are coming for the holiday in one week and this is the time I have chosen to go, so it will not be so bad for her.

I tip my collection of plastic items into the large box and turn, savouring this quiet freedom while I still have it, valuing it all the more perhaps because I know it won’t last forever. Before me the sun flares out pink and orange now. Its rays are moving across the top of a vast garbage mountain and catching at all the glass up there. I hold my breath, watch as each shard turns to gold; feel the magic of this silent moment.

Jay Merill is published by SALT who brought out her first collection of short stories, A stral Bodies in 2007. SALT also published her second collection, God of the Pigeon in 2010. Jay was nominated for the Frank O’Connor Award and Edge Hill Prize and has been Writer in Residence at Women in Publishing since 2011. She is currently working on a novel assisted by an Award from Arts Council England.

First Memories: Coffee, Tobacco and Rum

By Nena Callaghan A long time ago, on a dark and warm tropical night, I heard dogs barking in the woods behind my childhood home. That is my first memory. I wonder how many people ever try to remember their first

memory, that piece of self-history, the first inkling of awareness that one is a living, breathing thing that hungers, loves, hates and feels pain. I was about two years old and my mom sat next to my bed, nursing me as I burned from a fever induced by a spider bite that left a permanent hole on my left leg. Back then, we lived in a small hamlet in the Dominican Republic. Everyone knew their neighbors for several miles around and visited each other's homes without so much as an "I'm coming over tomorrow." Heck, you didn't even have to open the door for visitors because the only time the door resembled being closed was during night time.

The turquoise and Pepto-Bismol painted houses, arranged in two rows, faced each other. A dusty, winding road snaked through the middle for about a mile. Small clusters of houses sprung through the years and little neighborhoods formed along its path as new roads were forged. I reached four years of age living in the little hamlet and had made it a habit of visiting my neighbor, Cana. Cana was a kind lady who lived three houses down from ours. I remember walking down to Cana's house barefoot, sometimes wearing only underwear, and carrying a little white tin cup to get my morning coffee because my mother did not make coffee. It might seem a bit strange, but my dad and other neighbors usually gathered

at her house for coffee and to catch up on the news. They treated me like a celebrity, so I went over even

when my dad didn't.

One morning, I went to get my coffee as usual. I walked up to the bohio that formed the kitchen: a four posts structure, covered with the poor man's building material--palm fronds. The fire pit was a cement cooking hearth fueled by logs, mounted on four short posts with a cement base. The coffee smelled so delicious from the road that I could barely wait to taste the sweet elixir.

As I got closer, I noticed the back of a tall dark woman wearing a black dress, leaning against a corner post. She was talking to Cana. I walked up to the kitchen just as she turned around to look at me. She was smoking a pipe and smoke was shooting right out of a hole on her face where her nose used to be. Ter-

rified, I screamed and bolted home. I was crying by the time I made it home, and when I told my mom what I had seen she said, "Oh, that is Maria hoyo," which means, "Maria with the hole." Maria had gotten cancer of the nose from smoking and her nose rotted until there was nothing the doctors could do about it, but cut off the rotting flesh and keep it from spreading. Once explained to me, that experience did not keep me from drinking coffee at Cana's. The next morning, there I was, ready for my fix.

What does coffee have to do with anything, you might ask? Well, coffee, or the coffee plantation where my three sisters and I later lived with my aunt and uncle, became an integral part of who I am to-

day. I grew up in a place where ghosts, shape-shifters and witches ruled the night. A land where coffee, sugar cane and tobacco were the main crops, equaled only by the production of rice and beans. A land where its people are tied to the soil, its myths and traditions.

Harvesting coffee during harvest season was a great opportunity for me to tag along with my aunt and her children. They share-picked the coffee for my uncle. As we picked the coffee during the day, we told stories and sang songs which made the work lighter and time move faster. My uncle then sold the coffee to buyers who came from miles around. We kept a bushel or so for us of course and those coffee beans

were spread on a large cement slab next to the house, and left to cure in the hot sun. Within a few days the coffee beans' husks rotted, the other kids and I would take great pleasure stomping the husks off the beans.

Then it was time for roasting the beans in large pots, adding sugar to caramelize the beans as they darkened. The roasting, left a lingering aroma of roasted coffee that lasted for hours. It was us kids' job to grind the roasted coffee in the pil贸n--a mortar and pestle proto-type made out of a hollowed-out tree trunk. My aunt, Ina, brewed the first strong batch of coffee for the adults, by pouring boiled water in a colador- a pouch made of white cotton fabric. She'd say it was to taste the quality of the first year's crop. Then, she

did a second brewing for us kids--Now, that was coffee.

Just like she did with coffee, my aunt Ina did with the tobacco, grown on a smaller scale for personal

consumption. Both my aunt and uncle were avid smokers. Not an everyday, two-packs a day modern smoker, they were more like a homemade-cigar, half-a-cigar a day type. I was about nine-years-old when my aunt thought it was time I learned to roll and smoke cigars. One evening, while my uncle and his compadre Agustin drank rum in the living room and played dominoes-- the Dominicans' favorite past time next to baseball--my aunt decided to show me how to make cigars. After getting dried and cured tobacco leaves from the kitchen, my aunt called me to the bedroom. Stretching out the tobacco leaves and smoothing them out, she showed me how to roll cigars, cut the tips off both ends and after lighting it, how to take a

drag. Though it was not the best experience in the world, I did not want to disappoint her. After all, she considered me adult enough to smoke. We only did that a couple of times. She did not want me to get hooked on tobacco, and I was very grateful. Coughing and choking was not my idea of fun, though it was our little secret and that made it cool at the time.

So went the years I spent living in the coffee plantation with my aunt and uncle while my parents lived in the United States, trying to make a better life for us. By day, I chased after my cousins, with the pretext of helping them to pick coffee or reap rice, knowing full well that I just wanted to be with them, and

search for birds' nests or fish for crayfish in the nearby canal. At night, I would cover myself from head to toe with my thin blanket, afraid; after I had listened to stories about ghostly apparitions, which were doomed to walk the earth, either because they committed suicide or because they were trying to give away a buried treasure or botija that kept them from entering into heaven.

On some occasions, I was positive I heard witches laugh uproariously in the middle of the night. The witches often gorged themselves on fruit from our fruit trees while they rested from their nightly flights.

Afterward, they continued their journey to their gatherings, where they would partake in a black mass and

meet with Satan himself, or so my aunt and uncle would say, after hearing what sounded like laughter not far from the house. I'd verified it myself the next morning by looking under the trees where the laughter had come from the night before. Seeds covered the ground; sometimes they wouldn't leave a single fruit on the tree. Looking back to those days of fun, mystery and adventure, it is no wonder that when I got to New York City, and lived like a pigeon, up on the tenth floor, I would often sit and look out the window past the rooftops with their tall trails of black smoke coming from their chimneys, my eye resting atop Central Park; then, I'd wish I could turn into a bird and fly away all the way back home.

And the feedback from the judges for each storry along with their rankings (in reverse order), is below:

7. Aubergine We all really liked the pacing, tension and scope of this story. It’s very ambitious for a short story to tackle war, mutilation, politics and love but somehow A ubergine manages to confidently weave them all together. We really liked the contrast of images in the story; the obvious appreciation of food with the harsh realities of a surgeon stitching children back together. This is summed up well in the comparison between the titular vegetable and the stump of a missing limb. The bookclub agreed however, that the ending was somewhat heavy-handed and felt a little forced, where a tragic ending insisted on taking over what was up to that point a very intimate story.

Overall we felt we were being exposed to something so easily overlooked in the news; the real danger faced by ordinary people in former conflict countries and the risks others take to protect them.

6. The Odyssey of Marius Kolgar In a similar way to A ubergine this story impressed with its ability to do so much in such a short format.

It’s the most common idea of borders that we can all relate to; the airport security checkpoint with your passport in hand and, depending on where you are, not knowing if you’ll get through or not and what this story does is fill that moment with mystery and intrigue. We enjoyed the slow construction of Marius’ character and atmosphere of these homeless travellers where languages and cultures from all over the world mingle together. Most of all we loved the twist and the subsequent imagery of the man hiding behind a mask, a few members thought the symbolism was very effective. Others felt the story and language a little convoluted but this still rated highly on some member’s lists.

5. Vigeland Park Another story which rated highly on some member’s lists V igeland Park struck us all as refreshingly honest and real. While someone will always tell you the highs and lows of their adventures around the world it’s a rare traveller who will relay those moments in between; the near undetectable shifts in mood, the constant waiting and sometimes just the sheer tiredness. We could relate to that moment, having a missed a train or flight, where all your animosity is directed on your innocent travelling partner. That said some members found the story a little too fixated on the mundane, what was charming to some was banal to others. All of us however, could appreciate the ending; when you reach your destination (your intended one or not) the strain of travel dissipating , where you take in your surroundings and it all seems worth the effort.

4. First Memories: Coffee, Tobacco and Rum We were unanimous in loving the evocative language in First Memories; the smells tastes and experiences of the author’s childhood appeal to all the senses. She also manages to capture that feeling of being a child really well; it feels as if you are seeing everything through her eyes; the adults are tall and foreboding, the world full of strange and wondrous things. We particularly liked her horror at the woman, afflicted by cancer, whose nose has rotted away and her gradual acceptance of this. The story is very effective at transporting you to another world, appreciating the craft of all those sundries we take for granted. We enjoyed the it so much we wanted more and felt the ending was a little abrupt. It made us go back immediately and read it again to soak up more of the atmosphere.

3. Gold Mountain The most divisive submission of the bunch, Gold Mountain caused a rift in the group. Two members named it their favourite while the others were no so enthusiastic. Those in favour maintained it was the some of the best writing of the submissions, subtly guiding the reader through its ideas; simple but effective language evoking the state of a character outside of the world around them with strong imagery throughout. The story’s detractors argued the character was too wise for their years; a kid appreciating a horrible job like sorting rubbish as an escape from reality just didn’t seem believable. One thing we could all agree on was the character of señora Perez, a touching portrait of a middle-aged woman, her children long since gone, taking on the role of surrogate mother to the lost protagonist. Her mannerisms, routines and quirks are some of the highlights of what is a affecting a intimate story.

2. Designated Staircase Number Two It’s not surprising this story generated the most debate in the group dealing as it does with prejudice and racial exclusion. Although we were confused initially by what exactly was going on; where and when it was set, this fact actually set the story apart. None of us had ever really been exposed to this kind of treatment of foreign born maids and nannies in Hong Kong so it was quite a shock, and even more so that any Filipino would be presumed to be a maid and therefore not be able to use the same staircase as everyone else. While we felt in general that it may not be as well written as some of the other stories we thought the character of the sinned-against Filipino woman was well drawn and her reversal from sinned-against to sinner-also is a great twist which took everyone by surprise and raised the story above its competitors.

And the winner is:

1. Fuel for the Fire On taking an initial tally of who liked what it was clear that this story was going to be in contention to win, drawing as it did universal praise from all members. Instantly there were a few noticeable aspects: the character of Rosa, in many ways reminiscent of the much loved middle-aged señora of Gold Mountain, tugged at all of our heartstrings. Similarly, the protagonist’s act of sending half a strip of photographs to Rosa, in the same way she herself would have done when emigrating to Germany initially, was a standout moment from all the submissions. We also enjoyed the fairly laid back approach the story took, it has the feel of someone chatting to you over coffee.

Having said that we also loved some of the story’s intricacies. There is a surprising amount of tension, not just between main character and her partner but also the danger at work and all of us read the story wincing; afraid that some industrial accident was going to maim our poor lead (those who read A ubergine beforehand were particularly convinced of this). Though she remains unscathed it’s a surprisingly effective shadow that hangs over the story; afraid that tragedy could strike at any minute, a bit like real life maybe?

Some in the group thought this was the most mature writing, warm but not sentimental with a good eye for detail and little moments. There was a little disagreement about the story’s treatment of Rosa, one member worried about the story taking a moralizing tone (she sends all her money home so her kids can watch flat screen tvs) while the others could only read sympathy for a middle-aged woman separated from her kids.

But we all agreed that we enjoyed the protagonist’s journey; seemingly in the guile of her charming partner only to realise herself after 3 months hard slog. We all agreed that Fuel for the Fire is an engrossing human drama which anyone can relate to and it’s hard not to feel like you’ve been through something yourself after reading it.

So there it is, or was, the first edition of the Red Line. Thanks for the Djmoma reading group in Duclin for providing the feedback, and to our writers, including those that did not make the shortlist, for taking part. We hope is was a fun and worthwhile exercise for everyone involved.

Toby and Stephen