The Red Line Issue 2

THE RED LINE With Stories From

Sophie Clarke Barrie McKinley Bear Weiter Judith Amanthis Wendy Thornton H. V. Chao

Welcome to the second edition of The Red Line, the theme for which is Excess.

This time around we have a group of Editors and writers judging the short-listed stories, and a cracking good shortlist it is too.

We have body dystopias (Rhinoplasty), nano-technology, drug-induced crime sprees (Rush), a confrontation between a group of drunkards and the vestiges of a crumbling empire (Dogs), a party on a derelict ship (the Scene), violence, suicide, and designer clothing (Trying it On), and excess of an erotic nature (Why are you here?). It’s a mixed and diverse bag of tall tales, some with interesting and pertinent underlying social themes, and we are happy to present them to you for your delectation and delight.

Normally things should be taken in moderation, but in this case we would prescribe reading these stories as many and as often as you would like. After that, if you still have room, we will provide the winner and the feeback at the end.

Until then.

Stephen & Toby The Red Line July 2013

Rhinoplasty

by Sophie Clarke

That’s where it started, hand in hand before the sparkling doors of New You Clinic.

Ruth and Grace. Grace and Ruth. But everyone said it Ruth and Grace, like that.

I’ve kept that mental snapshot of us, reflected in the glass. Despite everything, that’s how I’ll always remember us. Grace, soft round face and neat features, biting her lip. A big girl. Big-boned. I always suspected she’d be prettier than me if she lost some weight, and so I guess I was always secretly glad that she didn’t.

Then there’s me, squeezing her hand in encouragement. Or is it fear? My mouth twisted into a sortof grin, because even then I must have known I had it better. I’m clearly satisfied with the way my clothes

hang about me; the gap between my thighs even though I’m standing with my legs together. And I’m pretending that the sun’s in my eyes so I can shield my nose with my free hand.

I say that’s where it started, though of course it started before that. I could take you right back to the times we used to drag the piece of spare carpet onto the front lawn and play Barbies. How I sighed and said, “I wish I looked like a Barbie doll.” Grace picked blades of grass. She was big even then, but she said she didn’t care about looking like that. Not really.

There were more important things.

And I swallowed the impulse on more than one occasion to snap that she ought to care. Because

you know what it feels like. You’re best friends with

“Maybe,” I said, flicking through pictures of

someone, you care for them more than anything else celebs caught in unfortunate bikini snaps, and silentin the world, but there’s also this silent battle being

ly worrying about the way my stomach sticks out

waged between you. All the time you’re at war, and

after dinner, “but they still already look pretty good

you’re vaguely aware of it, but you don’t know why in the first place, they’re still pretty thin before all or how to stop it.

that.”

Her face reddened, but she recited fearlessly

The first thing to hit me was the smell. Fresh aloud. “Bikini season is just around the corner. Are and creamy, like the fancy bottle of hand cream my

you ready?” She snorted. “Well, last time I checked

mum kept just for show in the downstairs toilet. And I had a bikini and a body to put it on.” then, lingering just behind that, a faint whiff of disinfectant. Hospitals.

At the front desk, a Model gave us forms to fill in. Legalities. I imagine it said a lot of stuff about

I shuddered at the thought of her pale, wobbling flesh, rippling through the water. But at least I felt a little better about my stomach.

All that starving myself paid off anyway. I

risk and responsibility. I don’t know. The print was

was immediately promoted to Surgery. It’s weird at

too small and I couldn’t be bothered to spend hours

first, but you get used to it. That kind of surreal de-

on it. If you turned up at their door, chances are

tachment from your body, from the skin you’re

you’d thought it through, agonised enough, and not

wearing, as if it were just some garment you could

just for hours – for weeks, months, whole years of

throw off, swap for something better.

your life. We knew the risks, I said to Grace. We

I never felt like my nose belonged to me. The

were willing to take them. And that marked the day

Lea nose. Clutching at the roots of the family tree.

we signed our bodies away.

Mutating further with each generation. My mum had

Grace got sent to Diet Management. They

this joke, that you could make a ski jump out of it.

didn’t even bother weighing her. But she blushed

And for years, I’d run my fingers over the horren-

crimson when a Model told her, as if she hadn’t ex-

dous bump at the bridge and pray hard for a miracle;

pected to wind up there first.

one of those cute, inny noses like a button.

It took me back to our early teens, lying spread-eagled on my bed, smoothing pink polish

Until I came to New You, I thought it was chiefly my nose that needed fixing, but it turned out

over our nails. She’d go on and on. She had this con- there was more wrong with me than I ever realised. spiracy theory about photos being retouched.

The balding surgeon drew little lines over my breasts

with black pen, and spoke with exaggerated slowness, like I was a child.

“Breast and buttock augmentation,” he glanced down to jot in a notebook, then looked up critically, marking lines on my face. “Rhinoplasty, rhytidectomy, browplasty, cheek augmentation, filler injections, laser skin resurfacing.”

That’s how they said it all, you know. Proper names. This wasn’t some seedy, backstreet establishment. These were professionals who knew what they were talking about.

“I’ll pencil in your first Correction,” he said. They deem ‘Correction’ to be a better descriptor.

‘Operation’ was scaring too many patients, because it makes it sound like something invasive, something

life-threatening. But the fact of it is, they’ve really got it all controlled now. It’s very safe. Standard procedure.

There was a lot to prepare for. I don’t want to say that I completely forgot about Grace, but we weren’t in the same departments for starters. And then I was lying on the Correction table, a hoard of blue figures in white masks buzzing around me.

“You’ll feel a scratch,” came a voice close to my ear. “That’s the anaesthetic.”

For a second, Grace’s face drifted before me like a lily pad on water. Then all the dots of paint dispersed,

and there was nothing. * You have to suffer for beauty. My mum used to say that every night as she brushed the knots from my hair. That was another one of her little jokes. But sometimes she yanked at my scalp and it hurt so bad that I cried out.

When I woke in Recovery, I wasn’t prepared for such acute pain. Just shifting my weight on the pillows made me wince. I don’t know, you forget what’s happening, on a very basic level, is that you’re

being cut up and stitched back together again. You forget it’s as gruesome as all that. Your footsteps squeak along buffed floors, and at the end of the corridor there’s a water machine where you can choose between Room Temperature and Ice Cold. But you peer round what you thought was some vacant room, and there’s the human body pinned to the operating table, seen as it should never be seen. Open. A glaze of organs; pumping, glistening red. And then everything’s mopped up afterwards. And in the corner you can still get a cup ice cold of water, if you want.

When the pain subsided, I visited Grace in Diet Management. Mostly they let

Surgeries make visits so that we could parade our progress in front of them. To make them feel bad about

themselves. Work harder. The room was plastered in charts, which I realised on closer inspection measured

calorie intake and output in painstaking detail. Young women pounded their thighs up and down on cycling machines, sweat trickling into their eyes.

“Nice,” Grace indicated towards my top.

“Thanks,” I said. “You’re looking great, you know. I bet you’re not far off.”

“I’m not losing enough weight.”

“I’m sure you have,” I cocked my head.

“Well I haven’t because the scales say so.”

“Oh, I just thought...”

“Ruth,” she said, brushing aside the niceties like flies, “I need to talk to you.

Properly.” * “Karen Woods,” I said.

I hadn’t thought it would come to this, but there I was, stating the obvious.

Karen was a Crude. Opted out. She had dark, frizzy hair. That’s what I remember.

The way she tried to slick it down at the roots with wax, which just made it worse. The way we all giggled, “It looks as if she hasn’t washed her hair in weeks!” The annoying thing was, she didn’t care. And she was one of those exhausting people that had an opinion on everything. If you said bananas were yellow, you could be certain she’d argue they were blue.

I mean, at first, a lot of girls said that they weren’t sure, for shock value or whatever, but no one ever seriously put up a fight when it came down to it. Karen was the one girl in our year obstinate and stupid enough to say that she wouldn’t become a Model, and stuck to her word. The school guidance council-

lor even called her into his office. That’s the thing, it was a really big deal. If you didn’t Complete, you’d be hard pressed – no, thinking about it now, it’d be nigh on impossible – to get a job, to find a partner, to settle down and have a family. But it was more than that. It got to the point where people were hurling abuse at Crudes in the street.

Once or twice, I saw her and Grace exchange shy smiles along the corridor, but I made enough bitchy comments that Grace would never risk talking to her.

And now, just at the mention of that name – those two little words sufficed – Grace’s face fell. She

had one of those faces, I could read every expression that crossed it.

“Karen was braver than all of us,” she said, pulling herself up to sit on the counter.

Afraid of making a scene, that had seemed like the best place. It’s funny, I always thought the idea of going to the toilet seemed out of place at New You; it was too pristine for natural bodily functions. The taps and soap dispensers were all automatic. And the wall above the sink was entirely mirrored, so that our actions played out before us like we were watching a scene from a soap opera.

“Grace!” I burst. “You know it isn’t as simple as that. I mean, yeah, I could say ‘oh, you’re right, we’ll leave. Just walk straight out the door. Settle back into our old lives.

Everyone’s happy. Everything turned out nice.’ But that just isn’t the case, is it? Look, you’re thinking too much. But we’re both in this together, yeah?”

“The thing is,” she twisted her hands in her lap, “I may not fit the ideal, but you know what? I’m almost ashamed to admit it, but I’m happy the way I am. Sometimes it’s hard when everyone’s telling you that you’re worthless and disgusting. You start to believe it a little more every day. But being here has made me realise more than ever that this isn’t for me.”

“Then what are you doing here?” I shrieked. “Go home! Just fucking leave!”

“That’s what I want.”

“I just can’t understand it,” I said, “I’ve never said it, but for God’s sake, it’s all staring us in the face. You’re fat.”

I stopped.

She looked fragile, like the blue and white crockery in my parent’s dining room cabinet. Pale, almost ethereal. And I panicked because I’d always thought she was unbreakable, and maybe I was wrong.

“Oh.” That little word sucked all the air out of the room.

“Gracie,” I reached out towards her, but she slid off the counter, backed away, “I didn’t mean it. I don’t really think that.”

“It’s fine.”

“Look, I don’t know,” and then I said the words that she’d been so desperate to hear.

“We’ll leave. Both of us. If that’s what you want. We’ll go.”

“Stop it,” she said.

“I mean it.”

“You said it yourself, there’s no other way. Please, just forget it.”

She rushed for the door. And as I stood there, I had no idea who had won and who had lost. * The surgeon explained he’d have to break my nose.

It’s funny, because I’d been waiting for that consultation for so long, but as his voice washed over me – complication, risk, blah, blah – all I could do was replay the school skirt incident.

At the time, clinics like New You were popping up all over the place, there were a lot of ads on TV, a lot of testimonials, you know? And you began to see girls walking around, once in a blue moon at first, then more of a steady stream – the ones that had achieved Model status. Then it was real, not just a retouched picture in a magazine, or a freak horror story about ruptured implants. Models were living, breathing girls strutting down our streets. And though Grace would take a hell of a lot of persuading (she was into all this phony ‘real women’ stuff), I was determined that I – we – would be one of them.

She couldn’t fit into the sixth form skirts. Seriously, we were squashed into the fitting room and she was tugging at the zip. The bespectacled assistant, all rushed apologies, scoured the school shop.

Eventually she pulled out the size guide and shook her head. They’d have to get it custom made.

So she had to wear her P.E. shorts for the first five weeks. They were tomato red.

Lycra. Girls sniggered together in corridors, by the water fountain, in the common room.

“If you’ve got something to say, say it!” I finally snapped in the middle of English.

Because Grace was my best friend, and it’s like with family, isn’t it? Y ou can say things, think things, because you’re so close. But no one else has earned that right. They should shut the hell up.

No one bothered her any more after that. And the morning she got her new skirt, the first thing she said was, “I’ll do it. I’ll do it with you.”

Because that’s how it had to be with everything. Ruth and Grace, the two of us.

And now, things were finally looking up. I tried not to think about the lengths she must have gone to in order to reach Surgery size, but she’d managed it somehow, and I beamed with pride.

“Well?”

My smile wavered. It took me a moment to remember exactly where I was.

“Tuesday,” the surgeon said. “Your nose reconstruction.”

“Oh, yes,” I made a mental note. The same day as Grace’s first Correction.

*

It’s hard to say this. To get to this part. But from what I could piece together afterwards – it was all such a blur, they wouldn’t disclose much – Grace went into the Correction without any complications. The surgeon started operating. But when they opened her up, her body just sort of... stopped. Like it gave up. Heart shut down. All the organs just shutting up shop. It was almost like she didn’t want to fight. Slipped away. Nothing they could do. They said maybe it was the stress of the dieting, and then the Correction on top of that. It’s not so unusual; each body is different.

Hers just couldn’t handle anymore.

* I was going to slam the door on my way in, but hesitated. My gaze lingered on the fanning leaves of a curiously manicured pot plant. I let go of the handle and the door swung back, then slowed and clicked closed – like everything here, this place wasn’t designed for confrontation.

“I’ve been expecting you,” the surgeon glanced up from his paperwork.

I didn’t know whether to nod or shake my head. The big entrance I’d planned – the accusations frothing on my lips – dampened and fizzled out under the bleach-white lights, which bathed the room in

an eerie quiet. It seemed out of place to stand, so I took a seat.

“You know why I’m here then, I suppose.” I found I was trying to keep my voice level, as if we were discussing nothing more trivial than the weather.

“It’s difficult to accept, isn’t it?” he gestured around. “That life goes on as if nothing’s happened.

World keeps spinning.”

“Yes,” my voice quivered. “It’s wrong.”

“Wrong? Girls make the decision to come here all by themselves."

“But it isn’t just about personal choice,” I paused. “There’s a lot of pressure.”

I wished then to channel some of Grace’s outrage. I knew what I wanted to say, I’d listened to her enough times, but even so, the words came out clumsily, lacked conviction.

“There are all these messages, you know, and they’re saying women have to look a certain way – when you’ve got a society like that, it isn’t that simple, is it?”

“So who are you trying to blame?” he looked at me with those small, watery eyes.

Measuring me up. And all of a sudden I felt like we were part of a chess game, where all along your op-

ponent is three moves ahead. “The people that make the adverts? The magazines? They only respond to

what sells. And it’s women buying them, keeping them in business. Where does the blame fall in a cyclical structure?”

“I’m not saying you can pinpoint it,” I said, “I’m saying that you’re part of a system – a hurtful system – whether an active or passive participant. Even in your small, individual way, you’re endorsing it.

And a system is like a machine – there are countless cogs that all play their part to make it work. And this system, it isn’t right!”

The black king, backed into a corner. Check.

He sat up straight in his chair and took off his spectacles, cleaned them with a small piece of cloth, and put them back on again.

“Listen...”

“Ruth,” I said.

“Yes, Ruth, sorry. Listen, I can see that you’re upset. You’re at that stage of grief where you’re looking for someone to blame. It’s easy to jump to – how should I say – conclusions, when things go wrong. To see me as some sort of villain in all this. But when I go home at five o’clock, I’m just an ordinary man. I have a wife and two children. I do understand all this, and not just on a professional level.

Surely you must know that there are far worse clinics than this. I’m helping women in a secure environment, keeping things as safe as they can be. And I’m turning so many lives around! There are complications. No one’s trying pretend that complications don’t happen. But this ‘system’ you’re so upset with, aren’t you going to reap the rewards with a new life? And when ninety-nine percent of girls leave like you, isn’t that really what it’s all about?”

It was like he’d swept a hand across the board, sent all the pieces flying.

“I do understand,” he laid a hand on my arm. “These are strange times. Everything’s so new, for all of us. But you mustn’t dwell on things, it doesn’t do a person any good.”

I don’t remember much after that; something about my upcoming Completion and going back home. Promises. A bright future.

I made sure to shut the door carefully on my way out. But of course, it made no difference to that same, soft click. * Just the fact I haven’t even thought about it for so long, I guess you think I’m callous.

Heartless bitch. And it is callous, isn’t it? Part of me wonders what I’d have actually done if

Grace had Completed. I’d always needed to feel prettier than her, to lord that over her, ever since we were

kids. What happened was devastating, I’d do anything to change it, but I’m just not sure the ending was ever going to be happy.

Funnily enough, the surgeon was right. I married a wonderful man and had two beautiful daughters. A fairytale life.

When you become a Model, you’ve got a good twenty years, up to thirty if you keep on top of it.

And I did, obsessively. The other week, I looked in the mirror, and that’s when I saw it. A thin crease in my forehead, like expensive tissue paper.

I tried Botox. I tried a double dose. I rubbed in anti-aging cream five times a day.

But they say that grief, that guilt, can do funny things to a person. Since that first line, it’s weird, but I’ve found it harder and harder to look at my reflection.

All these years later, after everything I went through. You probably think I’m mad, I know. It’s perfectly irrational. But a lot of the time I find myself running my fingers over my smooth, skinny nose, like a perfect concave slope in a geography diagram. And then I feel the Lea rising in me, I can feel it rising up my throat, and that’s when I burn for the old hump – the great,

stinking, ski slope conk of it.

Sophie Clarke studies at the University of Oxford. Her poems have been published widely in UK magazines, including Poetry Review, Popshot and Fuselit, and she has been selected to record work for the PoetCasting project. She guest-edited the Poetry Society's youth magazine and won first prize in the 2013 PBS Student Poetry Competition. Recently she has been writing speculative short fiction with a focus

DOGS

by Barry McKinley

London, 1979.

Three years ago, Nicky D’Arcy was in a seminary. There are different accounts as to why he never made it to holy orders, but the one I like the best is the one he dispenses himself: “I broke a blackboard over a priest’s back.”

“Why?” “Because I liked the sound it made”.

Everything about Nicky D’Arcy is two sizes too big. His hair is a wild mane; a rope unravelled and dipped in teak oil. The gold hoop earrings swinging from his lobes are heavier than stirrups. His shoulders are wider than doorways, and the doorknobs themselves get lost in his fist. Plus, he’s crazy. It’s like you took two madmen and rolled them into one. It shines in his eyes when he swaggers on the King’s Road or Oxford Street. It cuts a path through pedestrians. It stops traffic when he crosses, so he never has to break his stride.

Nicky travels with an associate known as The Madra, a low voltage hippy who soaks up porter like a man-sized sponge.

Nicky and The Madra commute regularly to Berlin, Paris and Amsterdam, but they never appear in public bearing luggage.

Their movements are secret. They sleep in the long grass or crash in a houseboat squat on the Amstel River. They are dealers of dangerous substances.

By arrangement, I meet them in a small pub in Fulham. Three middle-aged men, illuminated like Apollo controllers at Cape

Canaveral, sit at the bar and watch television. We take our drinks to the lounge area where a video game flicks a square dot against a wall of bricks; it’s like watching sperm attacking an ovum. We sit in an alcove, beneath a framed Union Jack inscribed “To Gerry the Landlord OC, from the boys of 1st Para.”

The Madra keeps looking at his watch “We have a midnight bus to catch,” Nicky asks me, probably in jest, whether I would like to join them on their travails, but I tell him I would prefer to sleep on a mattress stuffed with live rats, which, come to think of it, is probably what you would get in a Dutch riverboat.

A packet of Drum tobacco is produced and Nicky rolls a massive cigarette. He offers me the packet, but I decline; if I wanted to pick tobacco off my tongue, I’d eat it with a spoon. The conversation, mostly conducted by The Madra, is largely about people back home in Ireland, stragglers and misfits, pricks in the bramble bush of life.

“You remember Big Dermot?” asks The Madra, “He rode his bike into the river. He thought he could cycle on water. It was a Jesus thing.”

“Even Jesus didn’t try it on a bicycle,” I reply.

The Madra drones on for a while, and then falls obstinately silent. He goes to the jukebox and lights it up with a ten-penny piece; The House of the Rising Sun bawls out from the big speaker behind the metal grille.

“I love this song,” he says.

The whine of the Vox Continental and Eric Burdon’s immensely annoying squeal combine and fill the bar with an echo of falsetto regret. The Madra plays imaginary piano keys on the beer-wet table and the three men on their stools swivel as one to show disapproval. Halfway through the first wailing chorus, Gerry the Landlord comes out from behind the counter, reaches to the back of the machine and turns down the volume. Way down.

“I was listening to that,” says The Madra.

“There are men here at the counter,” says Gerry the Landlord, returning to his spot behind the taps. “Men!” I look to the three men at the bar and realise something I should have caught before; they are all ex-soldiers, as is Gerry the Landlord.

Nicky throws a massive, evil smile in Gerry the Landlords direction, and then produces a brown pill bottle from the flapped pocket of his Wrangler jacket.

“Take a free sample,” he says, “and pass it back.”

The bottle is old and discoloured; the name of the original patient and pharmacy scratched away. Benzedrine from the 1950’s, antique narcotics, I take two pills and swallow.

The Madra talks about a cat he owned called Fur Suit, an animal the size of a small stuffed sofa, with eyes as big as saucers.

“The women cuddled him first, and then they cuddled me. I was nothing without that cat. He got me into bed with ladies who wouldn’t have normally touched me.”

“A pussy-magnet,” I suggest.

The Madra laughs. “You’re a dry bastard,” he says, slapping me on the knee.

The Queen appears on the TV screen, reading a prepared speech, her lips tremble but we pay her no attention. Then The Madra barks: “Raaaaaawruff!”

I’ve heard he does this sometimes. I’ve heard he just can’t help himself.

Gerry the Landlord bangs a glass ashtray on the counter.

“Raaaaaawruff!” goes The Madra.

Gerry the Landlord looks to his television Queen and promises loyal protection. The three ex-soldiers turn on their stools and sizzle like revolving chunks of kebab meat, but they are no longer young, no longer the regimented boys from Aden and Suez; they have become nothing more than mechanisms for sucking the cancer out of untipped cigarettes. Only in their dreams will they ever fight again.

The TV cuts to wreckage on an Irish beach. A plum chap from the BBC talks about a bomb in Sligo and I hear the name Mountbatten mentioned. Cut to the Queen, a tear in her eye for the loss of her cousin.

“Raaaaaawruff!” shouts The Madra, and he almost seems embarrassed by the fact he can’t stop.

Gerry the Landlord approach-

es, enraged.

“You three…Time to leave”.

“It isn’t closing time,” says The Madra.

“For you, it is.”

Ice forms around Nicky’s eyes; he looks at Gerry the Landlord and says, “We’re not going anywhere.”

“You’re leaving here, now.”

Nicky’s eyes glitter in amusement. The three old soldiers inflate themselves inside their Oxfam jackets, but all they really want is peace in our time.

“I’m going to count to three.”

“Don’t do that,” Nicky says, “you’ll just look foolish when we’re still here.”

“Think you’re funny, do you mate?”

Back in Ireland, I once saw Nicky D’Arcy fight and it was like watching a ballet where people got hurt. The pub was a long, windowless cavern, painted black and lit with ultra violet lights; the punters huddled around low tables, looking like ghosts with tuberculosis. Voices were raised, stools overturned and large brown bottles swept from a table. A rugby scrum rumbled on the floor, gobbling recruits and spitting out the wounded. For a moment, it hovered, then lurched and collapsed. Only Nicky D’Arcy emerged unscathed from the ruck. He rose triumphantly, shaking off the twisted confusion of damaged humanity. He waved

a fist in the air and roared, “I’m going to kill…”

And every man around him paused in fear, expecting to hear his name called, but Nicky D’Arcy was neither selective nor specific. He finished his sentence with the word “somebody!” With that, he dived into the trembling mass of bodies and smacked at everything that moved.

“Right,” says Gerry the Landlord. “Get out of here, bloody NOW!” The Madra looks nervous, but Nicky puts his hands behind his head, like a man preparing for slumber. To reinforce the image, he leans back and closes his eyes.

Give him a blanket; we might be here for the night.

“Right,” says Gerry the Landlord, “You wouldn’t do it the easy way…”

He goes to a door on the closed-in staircase, bangs it with his fist and in the upstairs distance something stirs: Not human, something claw footed and heavy boned. It moves quickly over linoleum flooring and, when it reaches the stairs, comes tumbling down like a careless delivery of lumber. It hurls itself against the door, scratching and yelping. Gerry the Landlord turns to us; a lusty beam of victory lights up his face.

“You want a dog? I'll give you a dog.”

The claws rip at the woodwork, pulling nails and knots from the planking.

The Queen puts down her prepared speech, crumples it into a ball and tosses it over her shoulder. This may be another one of those dire moments, when British firepower triumphs over the pure guts of a lesser nation. This might be the battles of Crécy, Blenheim and Waterloo, rolled into one.

Nicky opens his eyes and something dangerous awakens, something deadly, instantly recognized by the old soldiers. The dog barking intensifies. Gerry the Landlord puts his hand on the old brass knob and starts to twist. The howling grows louder.

“Will you leave, or must we let out the dog?” purrs the Queen.

Nicky stands, slowly, and Gerry the Landlord is surprised by the height, width and sheer muscle of this Pat, this Psycho-Pat. His hand trembles on the knob as he turns it another few degrees.

Nicky reaches down, plucks the three-legged stool from

the floor and holds it up by one leg. He looks straight through Gerry and into the Queen’s watery eyes and says, “Let out the fucking dog.”

“LET-OUT-THE-FUCKING-DOG!” Suddenly, I love this giant of a man. Suddenly, eight hundred years of calamitous and humiliating defeats are wiped from the slate of history. It does not matter what happened under Cromwell’s whip or Cornwallis’s hoof, this is a victory of historic proportion.

In Selma, Alabama, it was “We shall overcome.” For the French it was “liberté, egalité, fraternité”; the Cubans, “La lucha continua” and the Israelis, “Kadima!” Finally, the Irish have their own battle cry, an instantly recognizable call to arms.

“Let out the fucking dog.”

Gerry the Landlord drops his hand from the doorknob in abject defeat, and the three old military kit bags turn away, back towards the carnage on the television. The Queen looks vanquished; not even God can save her. We hold our ground. Nicky passes around the pack of Drum tobacco and we all roll up and luxuriate in the thick smoke of the battlefield. We relax and let the clock tick away until closing time. Then, on the stroke of eleven, we stand. We march towards the exit with heads held high. We pause once, at the Bal-Ami Jukebox, and The Madra inserts another ten-penny piece. He reaches behind the machine and turns up the volume. Way up.

We leave. The air outside is warm and muggy. I pocket the pill bottle and slip a ten- pound note into Nicky’s massive hand.

The darkness separates us. A bus is waiting somewhere to take them through listless hours and heaving sea, into the heart of a foreign land. I should go with them, I should, but something keeps me rooted here, in this moment, in this city, in this England. I feel my lips moving and I realise I am singing along to the music coming from inside the pub.

…It’s been the ruin of many a poor boy And God, I know I’m one.

Barry McKinley was nominated in 2010 for Best New Play, Irish Theatre Awards (for Elysium Nevada). He has written plays for BBC Radio 4 and RTE. He was short-listed twice for the Hennessy Literary Award. His plays,THE LA ST CRUSA DER and SMALL BOX PSYCHOSIS will be staged in Dublin during April.

Rush

by Bear Weiter

The shit’s called G.Rush, and it’s the bomb—a rush of euphoria that slowly slips into a mellow transcendence. The period’s silent I guess, but everyone knows it’s there. Like gee, watch my life rush away from me. It’s a drug, a glittering dust you inhale, and the more often you do it, the longer the rush lasts. They say eventually you don’t have to do it at all, it just takes over, and we all rush to get there as soon as we can.

Except, it’s not a drug at all. It’s a neurostim nanotech cerebral cortex hugger. Something like that. Just starting to show up in the clubs.

Not that I knew any of that when I first sought it out. Had I known, I would have said no fucking way.

I’m a guy that’s done too much and been busted too often. When the cops offered to make the worst disappear if I’d go undercover—sniff it out so to speak, find the guys behind the petty dealers, see what they’re up to, that kind of thing—I said sure.

I was working on that, and then I was just working on having fun, and now all I want is more G.Rush.

See, you forget yourself, and everything else, when you’re on it.

He called himself Jones, though no one knew if it was a first or last name—probably neither. He wore a black and white plaid vest over some colored shirt; the shirt color would change, but never the vest, nor the fedora with the same plaid band around it. Besides the loud clothes the guy looked a little run down—hollow eyes, scruffy face, some scabs on his knuckles. But he was the man at the club, and you had to seek him out.

I did just that.

He put the pill in the palm of my hand, gentle like it could break easily. It was a small thing, slightly transparent, a capsule that you could pull apart. One half of the pill was blue, the other red.

“What’s this,” I asked, “a Matrix joke?” I had to shout over the thumping bass of the club music.

He ignored that. “Open it, and quickly inhale what comes out. But not here, someplace by yourself.”

“Where’s it come from?” I left it vague, just to see where it might lead.

He gave me a dull look, then shrugged.

Drugs and I have a history, but I never cared for the ones that left me out of control. Happy, yeah. Running a thousand miles an hour, you bet. But I got wiggy when it came to control. I didn’t like falling-down drunk. I had to be in charge, free, which was probably why I was here—jail time would have definitely made me wiggy.

“So,” I said, bouncing the thing in my palm, “how much?”

He grabbed my hand, stopping the bouncing. “Nothing.”

“Nothing as in ‘you’re cool, no charge’ or more like ‘the first taste is free, but then it costs you?’” I asked.

He shrugged again—meaning, the latter.

I nodded and patted him on the arm. I had been given some cash just in case, and I now considered that money mine. Get high and be paid for it? Who’s going to say no to that?

My friend lingered near the bathroom across the hall—we called him Sonic, because of the hair. He had hooked me up with Jones, whom he had dealt with before, but kept his distance now. Everyone has to ask for themselves, Sonic had said. He had done just that before me, and I could see his impatience.

He twitched his head toward the bathroom as I neared—in here the gesture said. Back here in the john, the music melted down to the bass beat, a regular thump thump thump that you could talk over. We entered the bathroom; it was still early, so only a small menagerie of guys, gals, and others lingered or groped each other. I almost followed Sonic into a stall before he stuck his hand out. “Grab your own.”

I took the one next to his. Sonic gave directions over the thin metal wall. “Cup your hands together, and carefully pull it part. Spill the contents into your cupped hands and get that up to your face quick. You want to inhale it all.”

The pill had remained cool and smooth in my hand, not tacky at all even though my palm was damp with sweat. This was no gelatin capsule—plastic. I heard a deep breath next to me, like inhaling before getting to a graveyard, a long pause, then a slow deflating sigh. I think he said yeah while breathing out. I didn’t have to take it, my narc contact had said so—just get in good with the dealer, try to find the next guy up on the chain. But I did have it here, and I didn’t have to do any more if I didn’t like it. There was no cost to me…

I pulled it apart like Sonic had instructed. I expected powder, or fine pellets, but only a fine fog emerged—almost color-

less, with glints of bronze winking in and out of existence. Covering my nose and mouth, I sucked deeply.

As it rolled through my nose it danced along each hair, vibrating from the tip down into the follicle like tiny swarms of butterflies. It caressed my sinuses, the back of my throat, and continued spreading from there. It smelled floral, tasted sweet, and left just the faintest metallic tinge on my tongue. Even before I had finishing breathing in, swirling happiness coursed over me. I kept inhaling, deeper, deeper, seeking out every last bit clinging to my palms. When I could take no more I held it, squeezing my face tight to keep it in. I don’t know if it mattered, if it was like a bong hit or something, but I followed Sonic’s lead. Besides, it tasted too good to let out any sooner than needed.

Finally my breath leaked out in wheezy gasps. There was no fog, no glints, not even a hint of taste. I had taken it all in, and it was mine.

Sonic spoke from outside the stall door. “You do it yet?” His words piped directly into my brain. He knocked on the door—thump thump thump—beating in time with the music, interlacing into the beating of my heart.

“Yeah,” I said, though maybe it was more like his yeah, sighed out, agreeing to whatever was asked. Because it was good, is good, everything shines, and everything is worth doing.

We’re on the dance floor, though I don’t remember going there, nor ever really dancing. But we are here, bouncing and writhing with the best music I’ve ever heard, like my brain’s part of the synthesizers, turning my own thoughts to music. Everything glitters, shines with an inner life. The girls are plentiful, with weightless boobs, skirts flying high, and they laugh at anything I say. Not that they can hear me, nor I them. But it doesn’t matter, because we dance, then we don’t, now walking one of the girls along a street, our skin sending signals through our clenched hands, now stripping her out of the clothes in a bedroom that’s not mine, now fucking to a thump thump thump of music that I’m not sure I actually hear, but it doesn’t matter because it’s all good, perfect, and everything shines.

I woke early, with the nameless girl sprawled out naked next to me. Morning is never flattering, but this girl is far different than I remember. Before I sound like a dick, let’s just say the details don’t matter—and it’s not the first time anyway.

Hindsight can be a picky bastard, and without further tainting my memory of a great night I got the hell out of there.

We repeated this nightly—the club, the dancing, the girls—always with G.Rush, always getting one capsule at a time.

Jones wouldn’t give any more out, even when I offered money. I didn’t tell my narc it was free, and got another wad of cash for more. I offered the whole chunk of bills, but Jones just shook his head—one dose at a time, only after asking. And I saw plenty of others being turned away, so I wasn’t going to complain.

Time between the nights and days fragment—the nights are all about the moment, while the days become efforts at looking back. There’s gaps, both between these two time periods as well as during each. I sleep longer, I wake more often—even when I was not sleeping—but it’s all magical and sparkling, and even if the girls don’t look the same in the morning they’re abundant and willing and all I want is more.

Sonic is right there with me, floating on G.Rush, dancing into the night, disappearing with a girl. I catch glimpses of his own black outs, moments when his eyes glaze over, and I wonder if this is what my gaps look like.

I don’t really care, or maybe I’m unable to.

I drift awake, my mouth is already moving, saying “no no, it’s cool man.” I’m sitting at my kitchen table, with a bunch of trash and food waste before me. Standing on the other side of the table is Officer Capeletti, the narc cop I report to, with his partner looking through my stuff in the other room. “I...uh...” What was I saying?

“Go on,” Capeletti says, like I had been making sense.

“What were we talking about?” I ask.

He grabs the back of the chair nearest him and gets down in my face. “Are you fucking high right now?” He’s a big guy, but soft, and I’m bigger. I could take him, except fighting’s not my thing, and I know there’s nothing to win against a cop. I stay in my seat.

“No, I’m good,” I say. I’ve been fucking good for weeks, I think, but I keep that to myself.

His partner pulls out the roll of cash from the box I keep by the TV. He shines a black light on the bills as he flips through them, then looks at both of us. “It’s ours,” he says.

Capeletti sighs, lets the chair fall to the ground. “If you don’t pay, we can’t trace it.” He looks back at his partner. “Take it all, he doesn’t need it.”

I don’t remember buying anything recently, and I’m still getting my shit for free so what do I care.

“Here,” Capeletti says, putting a small black disc on the table—a tracker, a snitch. “One side’s sticky, just peel the backing off. Get it on your dealer, his car, in a pocket, something. Do that and you can remain free for a while longer.”

I might have agreed, but I’m back in the club, hours—or days—later. Sonic’s talking out of the side of his mouth, as if the other side of him has fully succumbed. I don’t hear him, I don’t hear anything at all besides the pounding bass, but I nod just the same.

We all nod, agreeing to whatever might have been said. It never matters anyway, does it?

Sonic disappears, but I barely notice. My moments of awareness are few now, like bronze glints winking in and out of existence, random experiences flashing on my personal big screen. Dancing, walking, fucking, eating, and always more G.Rush.

Jones can’t be found, and this I do notice. Later, I find Sonic in the back halls, wearing the plaid vest and fedora.

“Sonic, you’re dealing now?” I ask.

“Jones,” he says, like I’m meeting him for the first time.

“Okay,” I say, and ask for one. He drops it in my hand, and I lean in closer. “Any more for a buddy?” I ask.

No smile, no nodding. He gives me the same dull look as the previous Jones.

Whatever. Like everything else, I don’t care. I got my G.Rush. I pat him on the back and head for the bathroom.

In front of the mirror, I see myself for the first time in…I don’t know. I look gaunt for one, but not bad—leaner in certain ways. In others, I’ve definitely filled out. Like I said, I’m a big guy, and I’ve never been fat but now I’m toned. Muscles have defined themselves in places I can see—my neck, forearms—as if I’ve been hitting the gym with intensity. I have no memory of this, but that means little now. My eyes are clear, no redness anywhere. If I’m a junkie, I wear it well.

But am I a junkie? I’m not taking more, and maybe even less than I had. If, you know, I could remember much. And what do I care about my memory anyway? If things were so great before I wouldn’t be doing this for the cops. As far as I can tell, things are better now—I hear the music of the club nonstop, and I’ve never been happier. Yeah, okay, maybe I’m a bit out of control, but there isn’t that wiggy feeling I’d get if it was bad. At least I’m not sticking up the corner store for one more hit, nor am I sucking dick…

Except…

I wake, behind a girl, pounding like there’s no tomorrow. She’s hyper blonde, with a spiked collar around her neck and black leather cuffs around her wrists, chained to the bed posts. She’s moaning like a porn star. Someone behind me says “I told you he was good,” but it all goes away before I can turn around.

I wake just as my fist slams into someone’s face. I feel nothing. The guy—I don’t know who he is—puts his hands up, pleading through gurgles of blood. I hesitate, with a small part of me hoping this is just a dream. But mostly I hear the thump thump thump of the club music, or maybe it’s my blood pulsing in my ear drum, and before I know how it ends it all fades to black.

All you remember are the moments of waking, and the surprises: hands covered in sticky red, or burnt hair, or no clothes.

There’s also the locations: under a bridge, in a bathtub, or the trunk of a car. But in truth nothing’s really a surprise because you don’t have the capacity for it—it’s just a thing that somehow has to do with you, if you only cared to figure it out, or really cared at all.

I wake, standing, a gun in my outstretched hands. Booming words yell things like “stay down” and “faster with the money” and “shut the fuck up!” although the only voice I hear is my own. All the while, the bass kick thumps in my ears, and I fall back into the groove.

The next time I wake, my cock’s in one hand and someone else’s is in my other. A few more naked people squirm nearby, making squelchy or slurpy sounds. Several others stand around us, either holding a camera or a mic. Someone says “why’s he stopping?” but all I can think of is my hair—it feels clumpy, matted, lopsided, and I wonder when I last washed it.

And these brief flirts with lucidity become shorter each time.

My waking moments have become flashes of nightmare, short insane scenes with no beginning or ending. They’re quickly forgotten, but…

Sonic’s sitting against a car tire, unlocking the shiny cuffs around his wrists. The plaid vest is twisted awkwardly, and his hat is no where to be seen. Officer Capeletti and his partner sprawl on either side of him, red stains blooming on their clothing. Smoke traces out of the matte black pistol in my hand, like the vapor of a freshly opened capsule. The slide is locked

open and the magazine is empty. Sonic pulls a black disc from his vest pocket—the same tracker the cops had given me and, apparently, I had planted on Sonic.

No, Jones—his name is Jones.

I wake.

The shit’s before me, the small blue-and-red capsule to break open and sniff up.

“Come on, Jonesy, this should be your last hit.”

I don’t see the speaker, but I know they’re talking to me. All I see are my hands, dirty and bruised, and in the middle of one palm the small touch of red and blue, the colors pulsing in time with the heart beat in my ears. Such a little thing, this capsule, this G.Rush, and he says I only need to take it once more. One more hit, no more wakey wakey—all party, all the time.

And then they own you for good.

If only I cared at all.

Bear Weiter is an illustrator, animator, artist, and writer. His fiction appears in a number of magazines and anthologies including Black Static, Rigor Amortis, and Slices of Flesh. Many previous works were under the pen names Jacob Ruby and Virginia Ray, but he has finally decided to brand everything under one identity—his own. You can follow him on Twitter @bearthw or his personal site: http:// www.bearweiter.com.

The Scene

by H.V. Chao

You always see the same types at the scene. For months, it’s been somewhere in the shipbreaking yards—the farangi riviera— most recently, a box boat with its gaping hold where moonlight sinks in shafts through blowtorch holes to catch raised arms, glow bracelets garish in the dark. By ten on Friday night, Connell’s sent his ESL cram course of addled kids back to their nagging parents fresh off call-center shifts. He’s grabbed dinner in the basement food court of the high-rise where he teaches and, in his souped-up polaamboo, a seven-seater sharecab all his own, is on the coast road, Ahmedabad miles behind. His second year here, he and three roommates threw in for these wheels, and now that he’s the only one in country, it’s all his. The sea breeze brings the fuel reek of the breaking yards past the straw huts and the paddies. On the shoulder a pristine fridge waits for two men sharing a beer beneath a palm to resume their bearer’s duties. The dark fronds stir above with sovereign indifference.

Then, to either roadside, the salvage bazaar starts: a five mile corridor of sheds still busy, at this hour, with glare and shouts.

It’s like a tent settlement outside a shelled city, except the refugees are things: doors, dishwashers, pillows, bathtubs, fans, fire extinguishers, styrofoam, row on row of mauve chairs from a hundred staterooms. Give us your huddled, your poor, Connell thinks, and then, this is what it will be like after the bomb. These eager vendors, these men whom no clothes seem to fit. Their

wifebeaters droop from bowed brown shoulders; their sweats balloon below the waist. A dented truck picks up a fleet of brand new used dishwashers. A rickshaw wallah pedals past a line of exercise bikes. Connell’s a connoisseur of these exquisite incongruities, which the third world tosses up with such fecundity. Just beyond the bare bulbs, boys in men’s shirts and house slippers sprawl asleep on rubber cables in piles broad as toppled baobabs, ends snaking off rootlike into the dark. In the distance looms the graveyard of discarded ships. By chain link fences and at wooden booths, palms are greased and smiles flashed, gates opened for Connell’s vehicle. In back, the padded cases of his speakers, mixer, CDJ clack as he jostles down the cinder drive.

As usual, Julio is early, with his van of handpicked beauties. Destination ¡Fiesta!, reads the bumper sticker on his windshield; out tumble, too, the on-again off-again Sarah and Becker, and that grizzled fixture of the scene, Hicks. Hicks, junkie mascot, ersatz Kurtz of the expatriates, with his long hair and German army jacket. No one knows his story, or how long he’s been in country. Becker says that on Hicks’ torso those are fishhook scars, man; that back home he headlined in a circus of pain whose website has disappeared; that he came to India to learn how to pull a Volkswagen with a rope tied to his dick. Julio’s heard nine different figures for how many girls he’s laid by pretending to be Iggy Pop. Sarah’s heard Becker whisper how one time, ransacking a hostel and jonesing for a fix, Hicks got his ass handed to him by a pair of Danish backpackers, one of whom was a five foot blonde. “Ladies,” Julio says, “ladies.” In lucite pumps and lamé miniskirts, this week’s girls are milling on the greasy sand, between the massive tomb of the container ship and the crumbled headstone of the bow. He herds them up a stretch of gangplank that rises past the ballast tanks into the cavernous hold, Becker following with a generator, Sara bringing up the rear with strobes. Hicks breaks into a wild sprint inside, hurling LED throwies at the walls. Every night, another piece is missing from the rotting hulk—scar tissue from torch cutting along all the edges—and the scene pulls further back into the unlit depths. It won’t be long before they have to move on down the shore and find another boat. Connell’s setting up shop against the far bulkhead when a new girl wanders in: torn jeans, jutting chin, tomboy ponytail pulled through a baseball cap. Connell’s seen her kind before. She’s waiting on her LSAT scores, or is it MCAT? The year her parents ordered her to spend here, getting to know her own roots, is—already? not even?—half over, and she’s afraid she’s getting too used to her surroundings, losing her ironic delectation for Engrish, for outrageous Bollywoodiana, but worse yet, losing touch with the wonder of first contact. Where’s that thrilling alien feeling, that xenosensation, the assault and fascination of walking down a crowded street bewildered, without a filter for the noise, the smells, the color? She’s gone looking for that feeling everywhere… Now he watches as she glances around. The hold’s still empty. She bites her lip, like maybe she’s too early. “Doesn’t it remind you of—” Connell searches for some sculptor’s name another girl once dropped, “Richard Serra?” She says, “I’m Anjali.” He nods, and starts the music. He’s never gotten over the spooky acoustics.

Davie and Donnie show up, slap hands all around, shout out, “Hicks, you’re still kicking!”—the customary greeting.

“Where’s Gunther?” they are asked. The lovers shrug, identical in white sportcoats and gold chains. He said he was getting a ride with Maria and Cunha, but when the Brazilians roll in, they say they waited for him half an hour at the place with the best jalebi—you know the one. They picture him, gangly in camos, plucking at his lip ring and checking his watch. Everyone laughs. From the edge of the hold, Anjali eyes a man wheeling his moped past the spotted barrels, the frayed ends of snapped steel cable. He’s caught a flat. “O homem do terno,” Maria observes. Another regular, always in a suit. Sometimes a woman will be perched behind him, sometimes not. He always wears a pale green shirt and never speaks. Over the beach shingled in scrap steel plate, crisscrossed by rivulets of leaked fuel, they come: Euro students, Ozzie expats, Japan teens with plaid skirts and day-glo fright wigs, pothead Canadian career English teachers like Connell himself. Headphones on, Connell scans the faces in the crowd. His first roommate’s ex-girlfriend, other wage slaves from the ESL academies, the Lithuanian au pair he met last month at karaoke, the bodybuilder, the liquor-pushing hostesses from the hookah dive, off-shift but still in company miniskirts and tight tees that say Jack Daniels, Johnnie Walker. The flooring booms and flexes to the bass, the thump and shuffle of a hundred feet at midnight. They come to breathe disease, to inhale ruin: paint flakes, heavy metals, liberated insulation. They come because they’ll scrape themselves on frayed hull walls and curled steel shavings.

They come because they know someday that science in a white gown will whisper in their ear that gentlest of annunciations, you have a tumor. They come because that day is too far off; they come because that day was yesterday. They come because cigarettes won’t kill you fast enough; they come because just living will. They come to have some mute postfatalist longing consumed by bass pounding in the bulkheads and their bones. They come to dance.

Outside, Gujarati pushers slouch in twos and threes, lighting pipes for NGO interns, the wall behind a mural of rust and barnacle to the waterline above. Surfers paddle up in wetsuits, shake droplets from their frosted hair. Pushcart vendors from the breaking yards are selling beer from homemade coolers. By flashlight and by kerosene lamp, skewered meats glisten on a dented grill, turned over now and then with brand-new tongs from a galley. Men with bandaged heads, men missing hands, men with one leg cut off at the knee, beg for change. “It’s a freakin’ sexual Disneyland,” Hicks is saying to Cunha. Hicks was in Gulf One, Hicks was in the Peace Corps but went AWOL, the Red Cross flew him in for some disaster and he ripped them off: two thousand dollars of laptops and sedatives. An old lifeboat bobs in the high tide shallows, lights blinking, full of Filipinos in factory second cowboy shirts. The night is young and someone’s already heaving off the side. “To America.” Hicks raises his beer. “Fuck that,” Cunha replies. A couch lands in the shallows of high tide with a magnificent splash. People look up. Davey and Donnie, tiny figures in white, wave from on deck way overhead.

In the hold, it smells of sweat. It smells like rapture. It smells like the last night of the world. Bits of glass wink from the floor, where a mirrorball gets kicked around. The man in the suit has, as usual, jacked his laptop to his projector. Ghost-

ly men in clunky robot costumes trade blows on the numbered bulkheads. The Japanese teenagers bounce in sneakers with six -inch soles. Anjali sways alone, eyes closed, biding time. Connell beckons to her. “C’mon,” he says, headphones round his shoulders, “I want to show you something cool.”

It’s almost silent in the sterncastle. The scene is only a distant throbbing in the ship’s depths. “So what are you looking for?” asks Connell. He checks over his shoulder, shines his flashlight back, catches Anjali running her fingertips along the cool wall. “I’m looking… for the last word on youth,” she says. They’re in the museum of leftovers from suddenly deserted lives, farther than the salvagers have penetrated. In room after room, his flashlight plays across stopped clocks, unmade beds, chairs drawn out from desks. Old Playboys and, in refrigerators, unopened sodas. Connell corners her under a stairwell and leans in for a kiss. She hooks her fingers in the safety treads above her head and swings back, away from him. When she runs up the stairs into the dark, he’s still standing there; her footfalls shower his hair with grit and dust through the perforated metal. The bridge is so old school, its lights and buttons like a 60s TV spaceship’s, or a missile silo console, Connell thinks. “…

40,000 tons,” Anjali is saying. The ship’s weight is pure abstraction, means nothing to him. They start heading back downstairs.

“Tell me the truth,” he says, “after all those the-day-after movies from grade school, all that prep and paranoia, aren’t you kind of disappointed the world didn’t end?” Anjali says, “I was two when the wall came down. When were you born?” In the dank gym, among the broken mirrors, she finally kisses him back.

They’re surrounded by white armatures, black padding, stacks of numbered weights on pulleys: strange, purposeful evidence of a civilization quite suddenly consigned to exquisite irrelevance. “I’ll tell you a secret you already know,” he says, drawing her down onto a bench. “It doesn’t matter what you do here. It never matters. Nothing you do here ever matters.” It takes his breath away, the otherworldly beauty of these creatures beyond consequence, armored by their promised future, by that ordered progress mapped out by parents and admissions. As they fuck his mind expands; he wonders if, in some tiny eatery, he’s ever checked himself out in a mirror originally from a ship’s berth; he wonders if the rebar skeleton of his ratty apartment building is rolled from melted freighters. Outside, Hicks has torn his shirt off. He’s howling at the stars. The man in the suit, pants rolled up around his shins, is wading with his laptop case in hand, entranced by the propeller: four times his height and, even with one blade mired in the sand, suave as calculus. Julio and the Brazilians are sitting on the waterlogged sofa like stranded conquistadors, like scions of the governors of Goa, passing around a massive blunt. “The best minds of my generation,” Hicks begins, “traveled to these fragrant shores where they could misunderstand, and be misunderstood, but America is wherever you are having a good time.” He pitches face first into the sand. “Fucking Gunther,” Maria says. “He never showed up.” #

First light finds Connell staring his slashed tires. Fucking Filipinos, he thinks. He remembers when he could sleep anywhere and wake up unaching, kinks shaken out or shrugged off, with no memory the night before and ready to do it all again.

He turns around, looking out to sea. Hicks is snoring almost gently in the shallows. A shipbreaker in a hard hat and plaid shirt prods him with a gumboot, and he groans, rolls over. The man in the suit flips up his kickstand and guns his moped. Connell starts running, leaving his black cases in the sand. “Wait!” he shouts. “Wait!”

In the gray damp, the barest stirring of the palm fronds. The man in the suit weaves his moped stop-and-start through the morning bazaar, behind backfiring trucks and ox-drawn carts. Despite the oil slick, the black sand, the smell of fuel and first smoke rising from the steel rerolling mill, there’s a cleanliness to dawn over the marsh that makes Connell feel an invalid. A stork takes flight over the silver water. In a few months he’ll be going home to Vancouver. He’ll see his high school friends and live in his parents’ basement for his annual two months’ vacation.

The traffic comes to a halt. The moped idles by the stall with rows of mauve chairs. They remind Connell of work, of the class he has to teach at noon, the chattering, expectant faces. He looks away. Down the beach, a ship has come in. It must have been there last night. It must be a few days old already. Connell squints as, high up on deck, two men hoist a goat bound by the legs. Another man bends over it. His arm moves, three quick flashes, and blood spurts from its throat.

Connell blinks. It takes a moment for the pieces to click, for Connell to recall a story Hicks once told. Tradition, Hicks had said, windmilling his arms, then they butcher it and give the meat to the first wave of men in, the cutters. On deck, the men are showering the blood about to bless every part of the ship. Connell looks away. His eyes meet those of a boy sitting in the front row of chairs, watching. The boy wears a white shirt that reaches to his knees. His dark eyes are unkind to Connell; they say, tourist.

H.V. Chao's fiction has appeared in Epiphany, The Kenyon Review Online, West Branch Wired, Diet Soap, The Coachella Review, and TheNashwaak Review, and is forthcoming in Birkensnake 6, Pseudopod, and Strange Tales IV from Tartarus Press.

His work has also been translated in LeVisage Vert and Brèves. Currently located in California—information that prevents you from ascertaining his momentum—he is at work on his first collection of stories, Guises.

Trying It On

by Judith Amanthis

If the pink curtains over the window stopped Seven Sisters Road seeping in, would I remember his name?

At least the room has a lock, clean walls, a bed steady on its legs. I shouted at the housing for two hours to get it. I thought I could undress inside it and paint the walls red.

He said back then, it’s what girls do, bleed. He giggled. It’s a sin, isn’t it, he said.

I can’t remember his name.

Yesterday morning my sweet friend texted. Yoga 2moro 7pm Putney.

She’s from Albania. Perhaps in Albania they’re all sweet, but she says they’re all mafia. I texted back, Free? She replied, Free 4 refugees. He he he, I texted, free 4 terrorists. Her English is excellent considering.

Mine was considered perfect, but not when I got to London, so I have to take a test to get anywhere with my profession.

I leave the crotches of my knickers browny yellow. My reasoning is as follows: I have only blood left and it keeps coming out, so I have only sin left.

You see, our Lord who washes away our sins never went to the launderette on Seven Sisters Road.

At home I wore the crisp white coats of my profession. The house help washed them. She beat the hell out of them. He was pouring coke from a bottle into a glass when he said, she thinks she’s slapping them with a stone. I shouldn’t have laughed. She comes from our grandmother’s village. I should have told him to be quiet.

My mobile’s switched off and the curtains don’t prevent Seven Sisters Road leaking in. Sometimes I think they’re a waterfall like the one near our grandmother’s village, where

the house help ground the dirt out of her children’s clothes, her right fist riding the stone. She must have

ground her left hand to blood and bone, making the water pink, because I can’t remember the name of the joints in her hand. Anatomy has left my head, for which I scored ninety two per cent in my finals, as nearly perfect as my English.

By good fortune, by nothing else, I’m not hungry. I have the left side of the middle shelf of the fridge downstairs. Why would I eat? Red wine’s better. When I took my first communion, how old was he? Four. When he took his own first communion, he giggled. I saw his shoulders shake. I was sitting with mama and baba in the third pew, watching him kneel, and I was in the second year of my studies

with anatomy in my brain.

I met my friend here in London at the English class. She wore such a pretty red dress and from it my two other friendships flowered. It would be a shame to cut them all down. Down they would fall, my sweet friends. She hasn’t forgotten her story. Not that they believe her. She said that just doing the yoga postures would be good for me. You already tie yourself in knots, she said when we were in the Madeira Star where a cup of tea is cheaper than chewing gum. She taught me about chewing gum when I’m thirsty and nowhere near a free tap.

I can remember when the house help first came to work in our house, but his, his name, I can’t remember it. When the house help turned the kitchen tap on, she clapped her hand over her mouth but the laugh came out anyway. He was watching. He said, you see? City water runs faster than village water.

Cheeky boy.

I can’t stay in this room. There’s nowhere else to go. The paracetamol bottle rattles after you take the cotton wool out. I could eat them with red wine. Our Lord had one last meal with his friends.

According to my second friend, my accent sounds Chinese. She ran away from Mugabe and has-

n’t got her stay. Last week we sat on the grass in Finsbury Park and the sun was so hot we lay in the shade of a dark green tree with long shiny leaves and my bone marrow warmed up. She says she can tell which country any African comes from the minute they open their mouth, and even which language, but she didn’t guess mine. Her breasts are like a shelf she hangs on straps from her shoulders. I couldn’t eat the biscuits. I drank the coke. She said would I like to come with her to a group who don’t believe all refugees are trying it on? She caught pieces of biscuit in her mouth after throwing them in the air. She said she was good at netball at school. I said did they throw the ball into a net or into a mouth. When I said

that, I suddenly felt sick so it was fortunate I hadn’t eaten anything.

Well, time’s getting on, and outside on Seven Sister’s Road the children will be out of school for

lunch. If I walk through the waterfall curtains, I’ll see the children crowding round the kebab shops and the sweet shops. If the UK government is capable of poisoning the children in this country, it’s capable of giving the government back home money. I have everything ready, including sanitary towels for the final spurt, although I can see I’d be forestalling my memory before I knew who’d miss me. I used to be a house officer in Gulu Regional Referral mainly, before I forgot my little brother’s name. Also in Gulu Independent.

My mobile’s switched off. So why is my third friend talking to me? She’s saying, you mustn’t

leave your door open. You never know who. You’re a bad girl you know. She laughs. No, I say, I’m not bad, I’m the worst. She says, sitting on the bed next to me, tell me. I look at her nose, large and straight, straighter now the curtains’re waving. Close the door, I say, I can’t stand the curtains. She closes the door. I say nothing. I have nothing to say.

We sit side by side for a while. Then she says, let’s go out. I say, I have to be back by six. Ok, she says, that’s fine. I’m going to take you shopping.

For a second I think she’s going to buy me a red dress and I want to put my hand in my knickers

so I can touch the blood. Oxford Street, she says. I have to hang onto my hand. Joking, she says, the only place to shop is Chelsea.

This is what life looks like. Waiting for the bus with the pavement ground to the bone by the thousand feet that are never the same from one day to the next. My friend and I lift our feet onto the seething rubber step of the bus. The driver looks only at the travel card, but that’s no different from home where the driver looks only at the money. My friend’s German. She says, Traid Fair Boutique, off Kings Road. Chelsea peoples throw out their latest designer clothes after one year, you know.

The sky here is indistinct, not the same blue as home. Last winter the clouds tore because they clung so clumsily to the roofs.

My boss at Gulu Independent took off the woman’s right breast and everything out of her armpit even though the carcinoma was confined to a single locus and the histology revealed no disease infecting the lymph nodes. I should have questioned his decision before I forgot.

My friend throws open the boutique door. Try on everything, buy nothing, that’s my philosophy, she says. Her orange hair bubbling across her forehead strikes gold. Each railing in the shop, which re-

cedes further back than the eye can see until I imagine a mirage, has in it some gold. On the railing just

inside the door hang more colours than London’s given me in nine months: saris, tunics, loose trousers,

jalabas, scarves, African dresses. Gold trim is threaded through a lime green and scarlet one. The scalloped neckline and padded shoulders once carried the neck of the president’s mistress, his wife, his daughter, one of his diplomatic corps. I can’t look, but I must. Surely other women have worn this dress. Kind women. My grandmother’s kind. She told my baby brother off. She said, Phillip, you must never show impatience for someone else’s work. If you make a habit of it, the spit will jump right back into your eye. She cackled. Next minute she was chatting to the house help. She said Phillip.

Next to the railing is a curtain, pale green and white, quite thick. It hangs on large rings above a

cubicle for trying them on, all these second hand clothes infected with gold and memory.

Phillip. The UPDF men, the white soldier laughing. Phillip who never lifted a finger to feed himself but left it all to granny, me, mummy, Phillip who’d laughed at the house help. He was kneeling on the ground, a boot shoving his left knee down. The captain, the one with the belly, saying, “Acholi?

LRA terrorist shit.” My fists were clamped onto my buttocks. My dress tore and my white coat button tore my stomach. The ground smelled of maize flour and urine. I had no voice. Two UPDF ones stood on my wrists. I could do nothing to help Phillip. I looked up at the sky, the colour of love, my Lord’s

true home. The captain said to Phillip, eat her.

The white soldier bent down slowly. He hit my left cheek. The whine in my ear travelled to my temple and coiled round my forehead, tightening.

Philip bit and ate me like a dog. I urinated. I screamed to the Lord for menstruation. The SMG at my baby brother’s spine would explode into his fourth lumber vertebra unless he drew blood. When his mouth rose red in front of me, his eyes were dead.

Lord of the launderette and the waterfall, Phillip’s sitting in a sewage gutter in Kampala. He’s

lost his mind. Thank you for bringing me to the Traid Fair Boutique. I’ll take death back to my room and see if it fits.

Judith Amanthis worked on Kilombo, the London-based Pan-African magazine, until 2009. She has now finished her novel Dirt Clean, about West African office cleaners in London, and is writing a short fiction series called February Stories.

Why Are You Here?

by Wendy Thornton

I. The Hunter The vegetation around Michelle is intense, the sun blazing and dappled as it oozes through oaks and pines. Her broad-brimmed hat covers her face, large sunglasses protect her eyes. She paces the trail quickly, mouthing the names of each plant she passes, maidenhair, cinnamon fern, rain lily. She walks the trail when she needs to calm down.

She will walk, faster and faster, until she is too tired to care, until she can return from the late afternoon stroll and finish her day with benevolence. She walks further and further into the forest on the

trail, admiring a hawk, a brackish pond with a sleeping alligator, a cardinal who wings past her cheek.

She doesn’t know this trail well. A friend recommended it.

The doctors want to see her in person. If the tests were okay, they’d tell her on the phone. The first time she made them promise, never again. They humor her. Okay, just find out what’s going on.

Don’t you want to know where you stand? No. She hears a thud and looks down into the ravine. A horse stands in the brush, stomping and blowing. As she watches, a colt comes up alongside and the horse stares at her, defiantly, daring her to come

closer, to disturb her baby. She can’t believe she’s so near these wild creatures, close enough to touch

them. Wild horses are not indigenous to this area. Someone has put them here, perhaps some ranger who thought to restore the original ambiance. There are buffalo in the park, too, though she has never seen one.

The horse and colt disappear into the underbrush and without thinking, she follows them. Off the trail, the land is a fairy-tale, deeper shadows and sun like an impressionistic painting. She follows the huge animals mindlessly, her sandaled feet clumsy in the heavy growth, her bare legs torn by brambles and briars. The horses don’t seem to be trying to get away from her. They shamble through the underbrush creating a temporary path with their hooves that she follows. She listens to the snorting breath of the mother, who leads her colt via soft whispers. As they come around the corner of the bowl-shaped depression, she hears a slight rustling and looks up.

There is a figure kneeling on the edge of the ravine, a man in khakis and a pale green shirt. She hesitates. No one is ever on the trail in the heat of the day. As the horses clamber up the ridge, he studies them, his expression empty, his eyes inscrutable behind dark glasses.

Watching him watch them, Michele trips on a root and falls forward on her hands and knees, gasping as she goes down. Spinning towards her, he pulls a pistol so fast the motion appears mechanical. She stares up, eyes wide, and he puts the pistol away. Rising, he walks off silently down the path.

II. Visiting Hours “What are you doing here?” he asks, cracking the door slightly, looking out.

“I don’t know,” Michelle answers. Truth is, she’s quite drunk. Truth is, she doesn’t want to be here. She loves her husband with an-all consuming passion. She’s so confused by this silly crush on this silly man who is so diametrically opposed to everything she knows. She’s an environmentalist, he’s a hunter. She’s a song-writer, he’s a journalist. She’s a believer in God, he’s an atheist. They met at a friend’s house many months before. He doesn’t recognize her as the woman on the ridge in the forest.

They e-mail each other, philosophical conversations that frequently degenerate into arguments. Hunters are just cold-blooded killers. No, they level the playing field, weed out the weak. People who believe in God are needy. People who don’t are short-sighted.

They see each other at various events around town, and each time, she finds herself watching him covertly. She would like to think this is a purely physical infatuation. He has brown skin and a soft

smile and he is thin and lithe. She’s angry at herself for not being able to turn away from his cool blue eyes.

Strangely enough, sex with her husband has never been better. They are like lovers who have been separated by fate for a long period of time. Restored, they come together like molten lava, and she is so over-heated, she can barely stand to have him touch her. When he does, she wants to kiss his neck and his hands and his eyelids and this won’t do, not in public, not at their age.

She can’t even imagine having sex with the hunter. She believes she will ignite if he touches her.

She will burn in hell and if there is no hell, then she will just burn. Once at a fund-raiser for a local park, he bent to kiss her hello and she turned away abruptly, trying to ignore the hurt look in his eyes.

So yes, there is the physical. But there is something else going on, too. She likes that he intellectualizes death. He has awakened in her a primal need for battle. She wants to lord it over him with her intelligence. She wants him to beat her down intellectually. She wants to fight with him and win. She wants to fight with him and lose. She wants him to use his gun if she needs it, loan it to her if he can’t.

“Can you let me in?” she asks. He opens the door all the way. His house is old and sprawling, recently updated. She wonders how he can afford this beautiful home, the acres of land. She Googled him –well published but not enough for this kind of luxury. The house screams old money. She wonders about his parents, but he has only mentioned that he didn’t get along with his father.

Seems he doesn’t

get along with many people.

She tells her husband she wants to introduce the hunter to some of her friends. She is an inveterate match-maker so her husband is not surprised. She wants the hunter to be with someone else so she doesn’t have to think of him in that way anymore. So they can be friends. He has said he’s not interested in dating anyone right now, but she knows he’s lying. There is a locus of pain in his eyes that draws her, though logically she knows it’s probably self-inflicted. When her son was a child, he went through a stage where he got into fights with all his friends. Finally she said to him, “Did you ever think – since you fight with everyone you know – maybe it’s not them?”

Still, she can tell from comments the hunter has made that he’s been hurt, devastated even, by events in his life. And he’s been angry, too, angry enough at some woman to want to kill her, he says.

No one in her life is subject to that kind of anger. The men she knows – her father, her brothers, her husband, her friends – are unfailingly polite and easy-going. There is something scary and dark about the

hunter that she is drawn to. She’s not afraid of anything anymore. The advantage to knowing how you will die.

She steps across the threshold into his home and walks into the living room as if she’s been invited.

She sits on the couch, primly, hands on her knees. He stands in front of her, puzzled. “You didn’t say what you wanted.”

“I did. I said, ‘I don’t know.’”

Host hat on, he asks, “Can I get you something? A glass of wine or a beer?” He hesitates a moment, then adds, “Cup of coffee?”

She laughs. “I’m fine. I just want to explain something to you.”

“Explain away.”

“I think you should start dating again.”

He sits down beside her on the couch. “Really, why would that be?”

“You shouldn’t be so close-minded.” This isn’t going well. She can feel the heat off his skin. She can’t say what she wants to say – I want to see you with another woman so I can’t see you with me anymore. “You’re missing out.” She moves over to the farthest edge of the couch.

He glares at her. “You know, that is really annoying.”

Confused, she looks into those blue pools, a deep pond on a summer’s day. Angry at herself, jeesh, like an infatuated kid, she turns away to examine a painting on the wall, a bucolic scene with deer bounding out of pine-covered hills. “What is?” she asks.

“The way you constantly avoid me. I don’t have a communicable disease, you know. You say you’re my friend, but you won’t touch me.”

“Oh, for a bright guy – ” she mutters, and then, “You can’t figure that out?” Immediately, she knows she shouldn’t have said it. She stands up. “I’ve got to go.” She heads for the hallway. Stupid, what was she thinking?

He is beside her so suddenly she is astonished. “Wait,” he says, grabbing her arm.

“Oh, no,” she whispers, pulling away. She has never been unfaithful, never strayed. She has never felt this way before, as if, should she ignore this moment, something inside will be lost. Like everything the last few years – if she misses a chance opportunities dissolve. She kisses him and it’s his turn to draw away, but then he recovers. He cups her face in his hands and kisses her back, wraps his arms around

her. Their tongues tease, their hands wander. He strips off her shirt, unhooks the bra – with expertise, she

acknowledges, not surprised.

He pushes her gently backward towards the couch and as she goes down, he thrusts the skirt aside, strips off her panties, unzips his own pants. He moves towards the skirt, but she pulls his face to hers.

He laughs. “Okay, no foreplay.” She reaches for him, guides him into her. What is left of her body after the surgeons finished is hyper-sensitive. He pulls back, presses her knees out with his hands, watches her face. She hates to be watched.

She keeps her eyes tightly closed as he pushes into her, then pulls away, waiting. She reaches for

his buttocks, insistent, and he laughs again. He keeps pulling back and she tries to get him to go deeper, embarrassed by her need. “You really want this, don’t you?” he says, and she stops reaching for him. She whispers his name and he sarcastically whispers hers back. She opens her eyes, stares at him, puts one finger to her lips and says, “Shush!”

His smile is sardonic. “Okay, then, no foreplay, no talking.” Annoyed, she closes her eyes, tightens up the muscles around him and arches against him. She hears the soft intake of breath and then he is propelling himself deep into her and she loses the conscious ability to react but hears him say, “Hey, come

on, you don’t have to pretend with me.” It seems like forever before she can force her eyes open and she knows what he will see. She tries to push him away, but now he sees his mistake and stretches atop her whispering, “I didn’t mean that,” and then he’s the one who can’t control what’s happening and she pulls him closer and feels his cry more than hears it.

For a long moment, they lay together, breathing heavily. Her fingers linger against his skin, her breath whispers on his neck. Then, as if someone had called her name, she shoves him off, sits up smoothing her skirt. “I have to go,” she says, rising, grabbing her clothes from the floor. She doesn’t remember

kicking off her flip-flops – can’t find one of them. She looks under the couch, under a chair, and as she stands he hands it to her. She slips it on and walks towards the hallway.

“Could you just stay and talk a few minutes?” he asks.

“No,” she answers, and walks out the front door.

III. The Game They see each other around town. She waves shyly, but never goes near him. Whenever he tries to

talk to her, she turns away, lets her husband answer for her. She likes that the two men are friends. She

likes that they have so much in common. They have both awakened feelings in her she once thought were

dead. She imagines that someday they can commiserate, share a beer, maybe go out on the town together.

One night, the hunter sits next to them at a cocktail party and chats with the husband. They talk football, taxes, the high price of gas. The hunter invites her husband to go hunting sometime. “He doesn’t hunt,” she says.

“It would be good for him,” the hunter says. “He could get in touch with his griffe eh dent. That means – ” “I know what it means,” she snaps, and they both stare at her curiously.

The next night, she is at his door again. He opens the door with a sigh. “You’re back,” he says, trying to sound irritated, but she has seen the glint of a smile when he first saw who it was.

“Why didn’t you ask me to hunt?” she says, standing in the hallway.

“Hey, tree hugger, I didn’t think you of all people would be interested.”

“You don’t know me.” She likes that he doesn’t know her, doesn’t know her history.

“I know you keep showing up at my door drunk.”

Stiffly, in a formal voice, she says, “I’ll leave then, if you prefer.” She opens the front door, but he

pushes it closed.

“No,” he says, “Stay.” He takes her hand and leads her into the living room and she is happy. The happy drunks feel when they don’t really feel anything but think their plans are going according to plan.

She plants herself in front of him, puts her arms around him, leans up on tiptoe to kiss him. He holds her at arm’s length, stares into her half-closed eyes. “So,” he says, “You come to my door loaded again.

Looking for a fuck-buddy, is that it?”

She steps back, stunned. “No,” she says, “That’s not what – ”

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m game.” He grabs her shirt and pulls it over her head. He rips the camisole off her chest, than pulls up her skirt. This time he doesn’t even bother removing the panties. He just shoves them aside, bends her forward over the arm of the couch, and unbuckles his jeans. He enters her quickly and it hurts. No one has ever done this to her. She tries to push him away, but there’s nothing to hold onto, and she is disoriented, her face in the cushions of the couch, below her shoulders. The alcohol rolls in her stomach.

“Hey,” he says suddenly, “I don’t want to be selfish.” He puts his hands on her and though she

tries to move away from them, he begins massaging her until she gasps, but she can’t relax, won’t. When

he breathes out a great sigh, and falls against her, she stays still, waiting for the strength to ebb out of

him, then slips from beneath him and creeps to the couch, grabbing her skirt as she glides by it on the floor. She lies on her side on the couch, her back to the room, her knees to her chest. She spreads the skirt out over her like a blanket. She is so angry about the tears, she wants to rip out her eyes. She feels him watching her. She wants to throw something at him, a lamp, the glass-framed picture of the clueless deer, a drink, something. But paralyzed by her own stupidity, she can’t move.

He bends down, puts a hand on her shoulder. She shakes it off. He slides his warm body against hers, kissing the back of her neck, but she stiffens and pulls away. “I’m sorry,” he whispers. “Don’t

know what got into me.” She wants to dissolve in his arms, to turn into a pool of liquid. But not yet.

Not yet.

She straightens her legs, twists around suddenly, shoving him so he should fall to the floor, but he recovers, rolling like a cat. He kneels beside her as she sits up, pulls the skirt on, rises. She picks up her camisole, her shirt, her shoes. He hovers expectantly, trying to think of something to say. Finally, he stands before her, blocking the door. She whispers, “You didn’t capture me with this,” and reaches a hand towards his crotch. He draws away, startled. “You captured me with this.” She touches one finger

delicately to his forehead. Then she walks out, closing the door softly.

She knows he will follow. She knows he will do whatever she wants. He will be the effervescent ending to her perfect life, the one who will free her from pain and debt and despair. He understands the natural order, just as she does.

Wendy Thornton is a freelance writer and editor who has been published in Riverteeth, Epiphany, MacGuffin and many other literary journals and books. Most recently, she won second prize in New York’s Literal Latte essay contest, and her essay on the rock group, Sister Hazel, just came out in New Plains Review: A Journal of Social Commentary. She was president and founder of the Writers Alliance of Gainesville, www.writersalliance.org. She has a BA in English, MA coursework in English and Cultural Studies from University of Florida, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and has been Editor’s Pick on Salon.com multiple times. Her work is published in England, Scotland, Australia and India.

Feedback Dogs (Winner): Dogs is an example of how style and tone in fiction can personify a moment in time, particularly one of historical importance. The characters, though rich in dialogue and action, take a back seat to the "pricks in the bramble bush of life," the language of anger, uprising, and simmering frustration. While the metaphor of the barking dog signifies the fantasy of southern Ireland - "eight hundred years of calamitous and humiliating defeats...wiped from the slate of history" – the true dogs are all the men that fill the bar and this story, barking and clawing and gnashing for their claim to virtue and identity. Dogs and its language crackle with the very violent and time-worn spirit of the rebellion itself.

Trying it on: Considerably experimental in its form and structure, this piece takes risks that succeed in many ways. The prose is highly poetic and lyrical, laden with haunting imagery. The structure seems to replicate and reproduce the fractured nature of memory, especially in relation to trauma. The overall effect is eerily surreal as the story walks a line that teeters between the details of quotidian existence, occasionally plunging readers into horror-filled scenes, slowly revealing painful underlying narratives. The language was distinctly beautiful, but at times the story might have benefitted from offering some additional support and/or structure to the reader. Though the lack of “clarity” surrounding what precisely happened is crucial to the story, it’s a tricky line to walk, and can result in some readers feeling lost or confused.

The Scene: The title of this piece suits this story immensely. In fact, the rendering of scene in this story is likely its biggest strength. At times the prose is almost cinematic, and the characters that populate this familiar yet completely unique environment live and breathe on the page as in readers’ minds. The clear and consistent voice of the narrator gives readers an interesting perspective on a small pocket of ex-pat counter culture, managing to simultaneously reveal emotional and psychological states of estrangement and dislocation in the narrator. There were moments that the prose seemed self aware, even bordering on self-conscious, which can draw readers away from the movement of the story.

Why Are You Here?: This submission was a great pleasure to read. The characters were complex, allowing you to explore deep issues about humanity and nature through their interactions. As is, the narration might do better with less exposition— sometimes the characters’ personalities could be revealed in a more subtle way, through specific actions. Here is a moment where you did it perfectly: “Once at a fund-raiser for a local park, he bent to kiss her hello and she turned away abruptly, trying to ignore the hurt look in his eyes.” (3) More scenes like that would improve the story even more. Furthermore, we feel the dialogue could stand to have a more natural feel to it. We sincerely wish you all the best and congratulate you on being a runner-up!

Rush: "Rush" is a fast-paced story with plenty of excess. The excess comes mostly in the forms of sex, drugs, and violence, and all of it is traced back to a tiny pill. The story is not unfamiliar, and gives pop-culture nods to The Matrix, Trainspotting, and perhaps even Alice and Wonderland. There is most certainly a deep, dark rabbit hole and the protagonist falls head-first into it. There are many great moments that whir by a little bit too quickly. I wanted to rest a little longer in this dystopia. How did our hero magically get girls, who was after him, and why was he powerless? The narrative begins to break down as the pill abuse becomes more regular. I couldn’t help but wonder whether this was intentional on the author’s part. Was it all just a

dream?

Rhinoplasty: This piece takes place in a cold, superficial future which the author renders in wonderfully precise, spare prose. The narrator’s admittedly callous viewpoint of her overweight best friend/sister is honest and engaging, and the excessive surgical procedures she undergoes to achieve the looks of a “Model” are brutal enough to make the reader squirm. All in all, this piece has a great voice and setting, and succeeds in examining the theme of “excess” in relation to societal standards of beauty and self-worth. Ruth’s honesty and slight coldness take her far initially, but at some point the reader will need a glimpse into her vulnerable side in order for the story to have more emotional resonance. Grace’s resistance to surgery in the bathroom is one such moment that is ripe with potential for emotional conflict, and can be developed further by revealing more of the narrator’s interior thought.

Afterword And there it is, the conclusion of the second edition of The Red Line. What a rollercoaster! And what a collection of interesting, diverse, and entertaining stories.

We do not have much to add, except thanks to our judges from Fourteen Hills magazine, and commiserations to those that did not win this time around. As we are an English/Irish duo I can tell you there were mixed feelings about the eventual winner.

Thanks for reading and taking part, and we hope you’ll join us for the next, and future issues of The Red Line, Toby and Stephen June 2013