These Pages Sing: Autumn 2024

THESE PAGES SING WELSH LITERARY MAGAZINE Sue Moules. Gareth Writer-Davies. Carolyn Thomas. George Sandifer-Smith. Sheila Jacob. Catrin Mari. Sue Regan. Angela Graham. Elizabeth Lockwood. Angela Arnold. Charly White. M.R.Smith. Barbara HughesMoore. Guinevere Clark. Catrin Lawrence. Rebecca Elizabeth Roberts. Rosy Adams. Jonah Jones.

AUTUMN 2024 | ISSUE 01

THESEPAGESSING.CO.UK

Table of Contents.

POETRY Sue Moules LOOKING DOWN AT THE SCUFFS ON THE TOES OF HER SHOES Gareth Writer-Davies IN THE RADNORSHIRE HILLS after an observation by Nicholas Whitehead Carolyn Thomas To Jen at the Autumn Equinox (After Robert Graves: To Juan at the Winter Solstice) We ran like townies

Catrin Mari Cymraeg. Caerdydd Gwen (Rapunzel)

George Sandifer-Smith Festivities/Ffestiniog Trefor Hill The Ice Tombs

Angela Graham CARDIFF DOCKS, 1931

Sheila Jacob Blodeuwedd Takes Flight The Open Road

Sue Regan Holm from Home

Elizabeth Lockwood Rebuilding Anemoia Angela Arnold these are the people all the colours of sea a skim of present Charly White The Busker M.R.Smith Yellow Belly Barbara Hughes-Moore you were a haunting nightmare Guinevere Clark Dear Blood Our Beach

SHORT FICTION

Perry Wyatt Editor

Catrin Lawrence TAGGED

Kornelia Urbaniak Cover Designer

Rebecca Elizabeth Roberts Unfortunate Sisters Rosy Adams Otherworld Jonah Jones Missus Lummas and the Devil’s Coach Horses

LOOKING DOWN AT THE SCUFFS ON THE TOES OF HER SHOES SUE MOULES She looks down to avoid the camera click, the flash cube hiss as light bounces off her round spectacles and her eyes close from the light.

The blue ribbon in her hair is slipping down the side of her face, it is to do with the electricity that lifts her hair like a curtain when her mother brushes it with the Mason-Pearson hair brush.

She looks at the scuffs on the shoes she wanted to keep pristine that now will need polish and elbow grease, newspaper on the table and the parade of brushes to regiment them back into perfect Start-rite shoes.

Sue Moules has been published in New Welsh Review, Planet, Poetry Wales, and Ambit. Her Poems were included in the International Women’s Day anthology (Welsh Women’s Coalition, 2010).

In 2024, her poem ‘Walking the Whippet’ was chosen for Brighton and Hove Poems on the Buses.

Her poems have appeared in By Ways Anthology (Arachne) 2024 and Words on Troubled Waters (Lutra Press) 2024. Her most recent collection is The Moth Box (Parthian).

1

IN THE RADNORSHIRE HILLS AFTER AN OBSERVATION BY NICHOLAS WHITEHEAD

GARETH WRITER-DAVIES it’s no surprise that geese are driven “shoo-lag” and pigs “gewee” words from the Bronze Age a hide and speak from dros y mynydd English the last Welsh dragon was killed in these empty hills and fairy rings still entice dancers a good place to hole up between contours of rain showers wild roses and violets gorse and bracken swamping blood spattered boundary stones Shelley stayed briefly in his worst depression now writers and rock stars walk the hollow lanes unmolested vowels unwinding their denial of fame tested by ghosts of the past, sheep-shit goblins of the present in the hills, farmed silence sanctuary, a thousand stormy years in the making out of the dark, the stars shine brightly we go our own way and do not count them

Gareth Writer-Davies is from Pencelli, Wales. His work has been recognized multiple times in various competitions, including being shortlisted for the Bridport Prize in 2014 and 2017. He was also commended in the Prole Laureate Competition in 2015 and 2021, and was named the Prole Laureate for 2017.

Gareth received commendations in the Welsh Poetry Competition in 2015 and was highly commended in 2017. In 2023, he won the Wirral Festival Poetry Competition and was the runner-up in the Spelt Poetry Competition. In 2024, he was the runner-up in the Mid Wales Poetry Prize. Gareth was a Hawthornden Fellow in 2019.

22

His published works include Bodies (2015) and Cry Baby (2017)

by Indigo Dreams. He has also published The Lover's Pinch (2018), The End (2019), and Wysg (2022) by Arenig Press.

To Jen at the Autumn Equinox (After Robert Graves: To Juan at the Winter Solstice)

CAROLYN THOMAS There is but one song that proves worth your singing, whether of the North Sea, Neptune’s daughter, bottles on a wall, icy Snow Queens.

Quiet moods, infused with passion: a fugue of pleasure; a lament of loss.

As you compose, sigils of light and darkness spin like Arianrhod’s silver wheel while Rhiannon’s white horse skips across the scales.

A fig washes ripe on your tongue, succulent, like your lyrics.

Pomegranates come into season: sweet scarlet jewels remind Persephone she must return to Hades’ arms.

Greens transform to reds, soft yellows, fiery orange, fall in a gentle glissando, sigh his longing.

Minor chords speak Demeter’s desolation, mother love, aching pain before the stinging blasts of winter’s anguish.

The song is everywhere. The honeysuckle’s wayward vine taps on your window pane, percussive, ghostly.

You know the music of the cwms, the rivers.

Squirrels dash from dray to tree, allegrissimo, harvesting sweet chestnut, acorn, filbert.

Above the lonely moor a skylark sings it.

Among the pines the wind soughs a dirge for the Green Man. Today marks Mabon’s time. Imprisoned, he languished.

Cai sought the wisdom of the oldest creatures, blackbird, stag, owl and eagle; rode the silvered shoulder of the salmon to rescue him.

A crescendo as Orion rises. Mabon, the huntsman, is free, free to aid Culhwch brave the boar’s tusks, kill the old giant and win Olwen. Sing it!

33

Nature, old stories, moment, piano, voice sing out the tale worth telling.

In the soft grey quiet of late September your own sounds unfold, rich as autumn colours, fluid as the surface of the sea, sparking like bonfires.

You know it; you write it; you play it; the only song worth singing: Stori o gariad, emerging from your mouth, your heart.

Carolyn Thomas is from Tonna, a village in the Neath Valley in South Wales, but has lived on Tyneside since her days as a student at Newcastle University. Now retired after a career of teaching in Further, Higher and Adult Education, she is now enjoying the freedom to write.

She has reviewed for Stand and published poetry in Dreich, Impossible Archetype, The Ekphrastic Review and elsewhere as well as stories in two anthologies published by Honno Press, Lipstick Eyebrows and Painting the Beauty Queens Orange, which contains her account of life as a gay woman in the 1970s. She lives with a misanthropic cat, still thinks of Wales as home and, stereotypically, sports a dragon tattoo.

44

We ran like townies CAROLYN THOMAS

Up on the mountain we ignored the Neolithic cairns, the Roman camps outsiders came to see.

Our playground was among the farms.

We knew the few sounds of the mountain traffic: Billy Dodds’ old Armstrong Siddeley loaded with churns for Neath’s Italian cafés; the backfiring jeep from Penrhiwangharad; Blondie’s clip clop and the wooden wheels of the trap from Dan y Lan. We knew the bird cries and the sounds of cattle shifting restlessly at night, the daytime whistles to the dogs.

We ignored the vixen’s cry, blood curdling, resonant of torture, scorning townies’ terror at the shriek.

Strolling home, lit by moonlight, suddenly we stopped, blood running cold, too brave to articulate fear.

The cough behind the high hedge, distinct, unmistakably human. But who?

This is Fairyland Road by night.

Sometimes lovers come up here, steamed-up cars speaking secret trysts.

Tonight there was no car.

There are stories, Romans, druids, ghosts, unsavoury old men. We ran like townies, terrified, spilling our tale back at the farm.

When Idwal heard us out he couldn’t speak for laughing. Our humiliation was complete: brave country girls frightened by a ewe’s cough.

55

Festivities/Ffestiniog GEORGE SANDIFER-SMITH From nowhere, we have the audacity to pull out an apocalyptic Boing. A heavy snow of white noise. Our guitars in the church hall spooling backwards, rusting. We read the milk, narrate our tea. One hot bastard. Radio offers us a Dirty Sanchez. Slap an unofficial book for Cheats on my thigh. Let’s report on our sex lives. Let’s improvise.

Let’s discover a love for beer that will damage my social skills for years to come. Hit a bongo with a fascinating lack of rhythm. Laugh at ourselves, never each other. Two for a packet of tea towels. Two for a packet of tea towels. A waterfall from my cock while we recite my fresh lyrics out of order. Laugh. Slowdown. Laugh, slower. Slower again.

Explode.

GONNA BE A DIR’Y PUNK

6

Trefor Hill GEORGE SANDIFER-SMITH

The Old College is in the jaws of a caping coast, green glass stained with Moon-white streaks.

The second to last drag fumigates a nightful of lungs. Our tree shadows me. You are a train journey away. I’m picturing the hat, clock, wedding ring. Cheers erupt from the single glazing at the road’s end. I bargain with the paving that’s pulled my muscles. I need you. The sea answers my promise with salt. Our tree speaks.

7

The Ice Tombs GEORGE SANDIFER-SMITH

In hills where suns burnt our tree we dug beneath frozen rocks. A doorful of voltage pierced silvers and I watched you. You missed the bedsit, thankfully, as giants tore through cellophane – wrapped up like Scotch eggs, a buffet of warriors who droned, droned: you will be like us. Resistance is useless. Loving you came easily, but will you love this underground, ice tombs, no resting place?

Will six years in silver match all the tumbling twenty first century? The sea says of course as you grip my cold hand in hail. Blood warms.

George Sandifer-Smith is a Welsh poet, originally from Pembrokeshire. He has published two books of poetry, Empty Trains (Broken Sleep Books, 2022) and Nights Travel at the Right Speed (Infinity Books UK, 2022). He is currently the Reviews Editor at Poetry Wales Magazine, a position he has held since 2022. He has previously edited the poetry anthology The Wait in aid of Cancer Research, and also was guest poetry editor for the inaugural issue of Abergavenny Small Press Journal. His poetry has appeared in Poetry Wales, Ink Sweat & Tears, The Stockholm Review, New Welsh Review, Atrium, and numerous anthologies including Poems from Pembrokeshire (Seren Books, 2019), Hit Points - an Anthology of Video Game Poetry (Broken Sleep Books, 2021), and Anne-thology: Poems Re-Presenting Anne Shakespeare (Broken Sleep Books, 2023).

In 2019, he was awarded a PhD in Creative Writing by Aberystwyth University. As well as writing poetry, he has also published fiction with Gwyllion Magazine and Inventive Podcast (Overtone Productions, 2021). His first children’s book, Cholloo’s Birthday, a collaboration with artist Julia Ashby Smyth, was published by Lily in 2014. He lives with his wife, and their rescue cat Deli.

8

Blodeuwedd Takes Flight SHEILA JACOB

9

The Open Road SHEILA JACOB

Dad blurred their cob-drawn bow top travelling-tracks, prized the sturdy soles of his polished boots, strode down tramlined streets to his daily factory job, whistled his way home to a tight-squeeze back-to-back with kitchen sink, tap water, dinner cooked on the stove, coal fire in the brick-built grate.

He never mentioned his gypsy blood, planned no slow reveal of onion fairs or bareback horse riding, taught me to hold the rail of a moving bus to the city centre – lean into the wheels’ half-skid, wait, then stair-climb to the upper deck, bag a seat at the front, enjoy a wide-windowed view.

Sheila Jacob lives in N.E.Wales with her husband. She has lived in Wales for fifty years but was born and raised in Birmingham and finds her Brummie heritage a rich source of inspiration. Her poems have appeared in various magazines and e-zines including The High Window, Atrium, Black Nore Review, and her debut pamphlet with Yaffle Press, Spotlit Under Street Lamps, has recently been published.

10

I love the streets on which my feet press imprints, a morse-code mapping tapping Castle, Duke, Dominion, passing the harsh metal flash of digits stamped into the rain-slick shine of stone.

Paving slabs mark borders, black, between time, I press forwards Past spilled light, bellowed orders reverberating out.

Brick chatter clashing red against the lead-grey sky.

In time, I trace familiar boundaries, places, the quick- step cadences of lost stories whispered: snatches caught up against the slick crashing rain splashing slate and coal black and earth.

I hear syllables sail on iced winds, outstretched wings screaming above the drip-dropping rain Here, remains caught conversations to which my feet tap their tentative return, echoing out.

Dwi’n caru’r strydoedd lle mae ‘nhraed yn camu yn mapio mewn côd, Tapio, Castell, Dug, Dominion, Pasio Fflach caled metal digidau wedi’u stampio mewn i sglein slic y cerrig yn y glaw.

Mae llechi’r palmant yn marcio ffiniau duon rhwng amser.

Dwi’n camu ‘mlaen heibio arllwysiad golau, yn bloeddio o ffenest tafarn. Mae clebran y brics yn gwrthdaro’n goch yn erbyn yr awyr lwyd.

Mewn amser, dilynaf ffiniau cyfarwydd, llefydd diweddeb cyflym-gam sibrwd straeon coll, wedi’u ddal yn erbyn taro slic y glaw sy'n tasgu: yn lwyd, glo-ddu a lliw pridd.

Clywaf sillafau’n hwylio ar gwynt rhewllyd, adenydd estynedig yn sgrechian uwchben glaw lech-lwyd yn disgyn Dyma olion sŵn sgyrsiau wedi dal, alaw cerddoriaeth fy nghamu fy nychweliad ansicr, yn adleisio mas a mas.

Translated by Catrin Mari

11

01

Gwen (Rapunzel) CATRIN MARI Welsh artist Gwen John had an affair with Auguste Rodin, later becoming a nun. During her lifetime, she was overshadowed by her fellow-artist brother, Augustus.

On the foot-sting shale, she would let down her salted hair to the wind, sketch the edges of beached gulls, strips of shells and fish scales.

Paper flails ragged, like a wobbling surfacing of grief.

She mooned over old masters, circling a viridian-sharp room, sat still and paper as prey.

Later, she learns that lipstick reds are louder than she is.

Yet she scrapes her way, hands clasping at her brush fingers as if they were salvation.

Meanwhile, Gwen waits, and waits, in a nun- quiet room, burning in fervent writing, waiting, craving aching for him.

12

Catrin Mari is an autistic social scientist with a background in the heritage sector, based in Cardiff. She uses poetry to break barriers to engaging with academic research. Her poetry deals with themes of sense of place, uncovering stories of under-appreciated historic figures, and shifting identities including as a Welsh and neurodivergent person. Her work is due to be published in an anthology of Welsh radical poetry, an online zine about the valleys, a collection raising money for mental health charity, Mind; and Disabled Tales, a literary magazine exploring disabled fairytale figures. She regularly performs her poetry in Cardiff and online.

HOLM FROM HOME SUE REGAN Most days, years even, I am Steep Holm.

Proud, upright. Unbothered by sea, storms, tourists.

An off-course winter tern May rest, safe in my salt-lashed cove.

The Severn Bore will rush at me hugely, savagely seeking to batter down this isle.

Hurling rocks, seaweed shreds, Lost stowage, boats in bits A tidal rage, the failed flotsam of watery Titans.

I rebuff it all. I stand Still.

But this year I am Flat Holm.

Worn down, unrested, low.

Sensitive to every wave, every wind Each visiting boat a damnable nuisance of noise, and needs – “Which way to the birds?”

Litter, toilets. Mine’s a large tea please.

I wish to send them down Down to drown in the un-dredged deep.

I would bargain with daemonic mer-creatures to drag these burdens from my shores.

I would trade my seabird eggs, sealskin fur, my saint’s story For a soothing, shanty balm.

Desperate for rest, longing for sleep I yearn to be Steep, and calm, again.

Sue Regan was born in South Wales, her childhood punctuated by the Flat Holm foghorn. She is still drawn to the sounds of the sea, and writes about longing and connections.

Recently, she has been encouraged to share her writing with others, and to read at local events. In 2024, she has had poetry published for the first time, at Diamond Twig and in Dreich.

13

CARDIFF DOCKS, 1931 ANGELA GRAHAM

I follow my teenage father as he steps ashore from the M.V. Pardo of the Fairwater Shipping Line.

He is a man now. He has voyaged for the first time ‘Out and Back’ to the River Plate Ports, The Argentine. He has walked in Buenos Aires and Rosario.

Here the ground beneath his feet is buckling. He sways as the Lascars and the Argies urge him to a drink in The Packet but, no, he’s for The Vulcan with the Newtown Irishmen.

He owes to them the start that Belfast grudged him − Clifford Graham, Papist with a Protestant name.

He is a camerlengo, a cabin boy. He serves the stewards who serve the officers. He cleans up piss, blood, vomit, spillages. He has learned to sew.

He shoulders his canvas kit bag, heads up Bute Street.

Throughout the Thirties this is all he’ll know of Wales: the Docks, the Pier Head Building, Tiger Bay. This will be home from home for him except that in the fug and jostle of the pub, his boots in the sawdust, it is the ship he thinks of, its self-sufficiency, the Master at the helm, a place for every man.

Angela Graham is from Northern Ireland. She has had an award-winning career as a film maker in Wales, is a Fellow of the Institute of Welsh Affairs and a Welshspeaker. Her collection of poetry, Sanctuary: There Must Be Somewhere 2022 and her collection of short stories, A City Burning 2020 (long-listed for the Edge Hill Prize) are published by Seren Books. She won the Poetry Prize in the inaugural Linen Hall Ulster-Scots Writing Competition, 2021. Her poetry collection Star: poems for the Christmas Season has just been published by Culture And Democracy Press.

14

Rebuilding

ELIZABETH LOCKWOOD Words are flying through the air Like the Red Arrows but less orderly More like a jumble sale Knitted gloves are being purchased Because little hands are freezing in autumn air Quickly abandoned to crunch leaves with bare fingers Frustration is swelling in our middles Radiating up and out Crumbling paper, throwing it angrily into the bin Words are being carved through wet sand Slower, but not quite snail pace Shells are being placed around the letters Little windmills are being perused Hands are turning their sails on a still day The sticks will be pushed into the soil and left Sadness is building behind our eyes Reaching the top of the waterfall Flowing out, tumbling down stream Words are spilling over cups and saucers Cake is being gobbled down Crumbs pushed onto side plates or raining like snow Hands are tapping on windowpanes Ready to leave, to grasp the chains of the swings Whoosh, feet first, thoughts second Joy is dwelling in the foundations Growing through the soil, evergreen Smiling with the light, beaming down on each face

Elizabeth Lockwood is a writer interested in the duality of life. Of how happiness and sadness coexist and how grief informs and changes our realities. She has written three collections of poetry, studied English Literature for seven years, is a mother of five, and lives by the sea in Carmarthenshire.

15

Anemoia

ELIZABETH LOCKWOOD

I’m nostalgic for places I’ve never been Those magnificent old world cities and ancient forests and rolling landscapes, trains that billow steam and carry me to a castle to learn more than sums, aromatic coffee shops calling me in, books in brown bags and the smell of the freshest air ungraspable in my hands, and the sands of shores falling between each finger as I watch the horizon in awe and the snow falls and gathers in all the right places For lives I’ve never lived A large inner city family cushioning me on my return home from the office, cutting chunks of butter to be smeared on freshly made bread in the farmhouse kitchen, jokes boisterous and tales dripping their way through the generations, universities with stirring architecture, where I walk with cap and gown, effortless and smiling, headed straight for the chance of a lifetime before I was even born For houses I’ve never seen Only online or in my imagination, with grey stone symmetry and a green view, where an open fire warms the cold deep down in my soul and the rain spatters the light bearing windows that frame the garden that seems to go on for miles, the old flat, compact and cosy with the city view that flows in through the living room windows and thousands and thousands of fairy lights cut through any darkness For people I don’t know The ones I swear could be my best friends if we only knew each other better, or ones I’ve never even met, that my mind has made up on a lonely hour, people that surround me with joy, where people seek me out, where family grew like the biggest tree and I’m nestled on a branch supported by the strongest foundations and inside jokes you could paper the walls with and people that show up with food prepared exactly when you need it And for feelings I’ve only felt in dreams Wholeness, completeness and peace, where I hold each child of mine close, where all their hearts beat and their chests rise and fall with ease, where happiness isn’t frightening, love is everything and sadness is only fleeting idea, fear is a momentary blip, where it feels ok to just be me and we are free, freer than birds and more comfortable than the best winter jumper could ever be

16

these are the people like apple pips surreptitiously dropped by unknown visitors like thunderclap seeds delivered by next-door's gale promptly sprung to attention invited or not – potential friends who sow themselves in the crevices of your tidy life startling crops of acquaintances that germinate unbidden and you run through the garden of your life with your laden trays like a self-self-employed waiter beneficiary – applicant – aide glad of this weight of impositions this wilderness of gifts

ANGELA ARNOLD

17

all the colours of sea ANGELA ARNOLD

world's close-kept misery rolled out flat end to end to end to end the mirrored hush of coooooooool like a giant's hand on fever the whole miraged land dragged far out from its wet mooring fruit and all its gaudy kin scattered in rippling streaks of bounty an artist's blob of envy mixed deep into the wash of tides at least a million borrowed jewels lost in shreds of ragged nets and this: the spilt blood of ages

18

a skim of present a thin crawling of first grass over ghostly minescape willing to hold orchids now while grandchildren scatter along barely paths and dogs flee deep into the past new shouts shooting up and down what once was chwarel and is now calling to other places: send seeds via air via birds messengers with little packets of future to germinate regenerate build up grow layers on layers topping rubble the massive scars now their own first landscaping – land about to repurpose itself with a fanfare of sun-sprung helianthemum in hungry sheets that can cling scrub willow that will elevate rock once bulldozed soon to host stranger gentians yet to bloom the lasting of it all in the hands of the next need/greed for whatever raw stuff next chwarel: quarry

ANGELA ARNOLD

Angela Arnold's poetry has been published widely in print magazines as well as online, in the UK and elsewhere.

Her poems have also been included in anthologies produced by Templar, Frogmore Press, Eyewear, Arachne Press and others, including the The Best of new British and Irish Poets 2019-2021. First collection In|Between , about 'inner landscapes' and relationships (Stairwell Books, 2023).

She is also an artist, a creative gardener and an environmental campaigner who lives in North Wales. She enjoys her synaesthesia and language/s and is currently learning Welsh.

19

The Busker CHARLY WHITE A gentle tap of a beige converse shoe a metronome that ticks out to take over the drum of our heart as we synchronise our soul with its lingering echo a magnet of life calling upon all those with any passion still left within their bones to bring the sounds of their living to this stage a simple request: a song, a laughter, a moment of life - a snippet of our time a gentle tap of a beige converse shoe splattered, now in all the colours of our lives

Charly White is a poet, author and musician from Wales. Her writing focuses on mindfulness, nature, and well-being. She released her first poetry book: A Collection of Wildflowers (Arkbound UK) in March 2024. Her poems are featured in the anthology Mental Health and Poetry for Mental Health (Robin Barratt), the online literary journal Poemstellium, and the literary magazine Coffee People Zine. You can follow her journey @the.poetrygarden on instagram.

20

YELLOW BELLY M.R.SMITH The moon mocks me Calling cowardice My yellow belly Too scared to return To her waters I am scared of rebirth Of living the life I am told I deserve Her silver glow Sinking into the water Beckoning me to come closer Give over She says Let me bathe you instead Wash away the self doubt The feelings of regret You've only lived A half life In the dim light Hiding away from the spotlight She whispers You should Swim in deeper waters Let me hold you in my arms instead

M.R.Smith is a poet and fiction writer from South Wales. Her work has been published in Zines' such as Myth & Lore Zine and themed Zines from Coin Operated Press. M.R.Smith loves writing about her relationship with nature and adores all things folklore. She hopes to publish her first chapbook of poetry this year.

21

you were a haunting a presence in absence more than you were with me i feel you round corners grasp you in glimpses the back of a neck a straight-spine stride the imprint of you everywhere you’ll never be haunted by the death of us but the ghost is me.

BARBARA HUGHES-MOORE

22

Barbara Hughes-Moore is a writer and law lecturer from Cardiff. Her research, teaching, and creative writing is concerned with the Gothic, haunted by ghosts and the specters of lives, and loves, unled. Her short stories have been published by Horror Scribes, Roath Writers and The Folks.

23

GUINEVERE CLARK Dear Blood, I will only write to you once.

I know you know my body. So, tell me what works in a thump gasp. Bring my secrets, passions palpitating, muscly orgasms, the love-sick breath skips, all these rippling brooks of blood up. Free your electric matrix, that complex chest, heaving with being.

Loosen ruby flumes to light. Bring butterflies to the skin of my thighs, life from the long clot. Yes, loll on your webbed bed but give me the weight of you, an open lock.

Feed me the first pulse, that cherry drop of singular scent, every lick and sniff. Now. Chance it! I can hear your answers dart, ushered on lust, jagged wound, furl of bitten lip, taste serum’s rush, powder of the crust. Blood on your blood map, saddled in iron for this vampiric world, blue snakes in coddled napes, do not evade my eyes. I am running for you, with you, vermillion love, so do more than hide! Let’s drink in my tunnels, listen to the measure of centred emotion. Teach my soul’s stint your red lexicon, replicate the steady propel to reflection. My placenta meant something – black-flecked and liminal and more, more. I know I am both individuals. So, jet me in poetry rosy, find us an enclave to roll into. Stamp me with your death-defying DNA, centuries of love. I’ve tasted you and I wait for you, blood.

Yours, Guinevere Clark holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Swansea University, on the poetics of motherhood, sexuality, and place, exploring liminal spaces, gender inequality and the mother-child relationship. She teaches poetry at Swansea’s Taliesin Arts Centre. Recent award short listings are: The Wales Poetry Award, Poetry London, Hammond House, Cinnamon Press, and a longlisting in The Nature Chronicles Prize. She’s published widely: Poetry Wales, Atlanta Review, Magma, Minerva Rising and Demeter Press. She leads Poetry Into Light, an enterprise that celebrates and empowers community through poetry. Her first collection is Fresh Fruit & Screams (Bluechrome, 2006).

24

Our Beach

GUINEVERE CLARK

Shells are posted through doors, rumbling a new currency on the floor. cars free float, no bass boom only the rattle of mussels and quartz The neighbour, who never looked once, now holds my curves. Our eyes lock in the league of a wave, the glassy swell of union. We live in a new street, the patterns have changed. Occasionally we do a half-lit dance like jellyfish at dusk.

I’ve grown a sort of seal skin that seems to work, clashed with whale pods, tattered trawlers – followed them, lost.

At night, I clean my son in a rock clutch.

He is slowly forgetting our little blue house.

Sometimes, we go and watch it softly rot.

We live, partly on a petrified Mesolithic oak tree, wretched from winter’s sea, use electric eels for energy, to check our skin, light the dim. My face has a fish glint – silver and slightly cross.

Dragging our roots until they thin, evanescent as fins, through silt and memory. I teach him the Ice Age, polar bears decline, the complexity and simplicity of time, whisper on his pearled cheek about herstory, the cycle of shore flowers, belly eggs. Tell him, that once women wept for earth, laid down at peace camps, screaming against toxic seas.

He smooths fingers over the antler horns and bullets birthed up for Yule from a beach hole. We hang them on our tree, feel the trip of the planet’s heart.

Sinking footprints into fossils, fallen on sandy roads, someone else’s toes, he calls, splitting lip-brine to smile.

25

TAGGED CATRIN LAWRENCE 6th March Mum saw my makeup before school and made me wipe it off. It’s not allowed, she said, but I’ve worn it loads of times to school and no one else gives a shit.

Sometimes Mrs Dee does but that’s cause she’s old. No one understands that I NEED it. Mum should, she’s seen me plenty in the morning, I look like a bloody ghost without my makeup. Does she want me to look awful?

Luckily Kat lent me her foundation before class, but the bell rang before I finished putting it on. We ran like hell to form room but before we went in Kat said to put my arm around her. Weird, but I did, and we staggered in. All our form stared at us, but Mrs Dee glared.

“What time do you call this?” she snapped.

Kat started retching and I genuinely thought she’d puke all over me. But that’s what she told Mrs Dee! That she’d felt sick in the toilets – “I’m like, cramping really bad, Miss” – and I was helping her out. Everyone laughed and the lads made spewing noises, but Kat just flipped them off and winked at me. I couldn’t ask for a better friend.

We still got detention, cause that old cow Mrs Dee didn’t believe her. “I believe you were helping Elizabeth look like a slattern,” she said. I Googled it at break cause I didn’t know what it meant and I couldn’t ask Mrs Dee in case she started bitching about paying more attention in class. Turns out it’s an old word for slag. Twenty-first century, Mrs Dee, can’t a girl wear makeup? I had to wipe it off AGAIN. The lads kept making period jokes to me and Kat all day. Apart from Tom, cause he’s the only decent boy in our school. And the fittest. He even asked Kat if she was feeling alright! Hope he didn’t mean it in a flirty way though. I don’t want him coming between us.

Mum found out about the makeup cause she had to pick me up from detention. She told me off for HOURS but made it all about her. Said I’m representing this family, and everyone will think she’s a Bad Mum who needs A Man In Her Life to take charge. Calm down Mum, a bit of foundation doesn’t mean I’ve got daddy issues.

She made her horrible cottage pie for tea. We were going to get curry, but she MAGICALLY changed her mind. I never get anything I want. Like I asked Mum for that new eyeshadow palette for my fifteenth, and she bought me this stupid diary instead. It’s not even a new one. There’s pages torn out the front for God’s sake!

26

Mum thinks I need an ‘outlet for my feelings’, so I’m guessing she’s going to snoop in it later about dad.

Bet she didn’t count on this being my last entry before my tragic death by food poisoning. Please come to my funeral, Tom. 7th March God, this is weird. Not that I’m still alive (ok it’s a little weird – I did have Mum’s cottage pie last night), but what happened today.

I went downstairs this morning and saw Mum at the kitchen table, crying so hard she was practically flooding it. Snot pouring from her nose and everything.

When she saw me staring, she said, “I don’t know why, but for some reason I didn’t think you’d come down today.”

What was I meant to say? First, she was crying, which she never does even when dad left, then she was coming out with weird stuff like that. I couldn’t stand seeing her look so small and helpless, so I took a deep breath and asked what was wrong.

She said nothing while she cleaned her face. She took so long the silence started to hurt. I was ready to throw my makeup in the bin to make her feel better when she said…

“I don’t think you have daddy issues, darling.”

What. The actual. Fuck?

Ok Mum, I said, I’ll bite, what makes you think I think that?

“I just got a feeling last night that…” She blew her nose. “That you didn’t think I cared. That I made your behaviour all about me.”

I’ve heard that somewhere, but I couldn’t remember where at the time and I cared more about Mum crying. She pulled me into a hug, and it set me off sobbing too.

We had a long talk about dad leaving and how I don’t need to wear makeup to look good. Turns out she’s saving up to buy me the palette for after exams (somehow, she knew about that as well). She even said I didn’t have to write in here anymore if it wasn’t helping me, but I got a gut punch feeling when she said that, so I told her it was fine.

Maybe venting in here isn’t so bad after all.

Then Mum realised the time and sent me off to school. Before I left, she promised to learn some new recipes. No more horrible cottage pie.

27

Don’t get me wrong, I hate the pie. But I’ve never let on to Mum. I got another hug from Kat on the bus. She couldn’t ask for a better friend either.

Tom kept staring at me today in English. I’d look up from work and he’d take a moment to catch on to me staring back. He’d blink in a cute way, like those videos of babies seeing their reflections for the first time, then quickly look away.

Kat whispered, “See? He’d never flirt with me.”

Before I got any sense from what Kat said, Mrs Dee started screeching at us and I was in detention AGAIN. Just as I’d made things up with Mum too. Mrs Dee doesn’t usually hand out detentions for talking. She just makes a snippy little comment about Ruining Your Own Future or crap like that.

It got weirder in detention when she made me write out ‘Mrs Dee is young and un-bovine’ a hundred times. This time I KNEW she was making up words to make me look stupid. I asked her what ‘un-bovine’ meant and she told me I knew perfectly well what it meant – now silence.

I did my stupid lines till Mum came to pick me up. I showed them to her, and she asked me why I’d called Mrs Dee an old cow. Oh, I thought, that’s what it meant.

But here’s the thing – I’ve never called Mrs Dee a cow or a bovine or anything like that. I’d been on my best behaviour today cause I didn’t want Mum upset again (ok, apart from talking in class but that’s normal). Mum must have thought the same thing cause she asked Mrs Dee when I’d called her a cow.

Mrs Dee choked on her words. It would have been funny if what she’d said next wasn’t so creepy.

“I’m not sure. But I know she did! I remember her saying it yesterday.

Sometime.”

But the only time I’ve ever called Mrs Dee a cow is when I wrote it in – Wait. I’m trying something.

Hope Mum never finds out about those dirty hot chocolate mugs I haven’t brought down yet. No way she’ll find them under my bed, though.

Ok, so that worked. Mum was more annoyed about two mugs than I thought she’d be. The second I wrote about them I heard her thumping up the stairs.

28

When I tried asking her how she knew about the cups, she went all quiet. Standing at my door, all her anger wiped away but her forehead still wrinkling as she thought it over.

“I…don’t know, sweetheart,” she said. “I just knew.”

That’s all she can say. Cause the truth’s too weird to believe.

I’m trying to keep calm but my heart’s beating so fast it’s banging against my tits. Everything me and Mum talked about this morning, that hug from Kat, Tom (oh God) staring at me. They all know what I wrote about them in my diary.

It’s like a film me and Kat watched a couple of weeks back. Some American girl goes digging in a haunted basement and finds a book obviously made from human skin. As she flipped through the pages and their creepy pictures, me and Kat were bouncing on the sofa screaming “NOOOOO put the book back you daft bitch!”

But my diary was a fiver from the charity shop. And it doesn’t do anything dangerous. All it does is tag people, like you’d do online. Let’s them know you’re thinking about them. It helped me and Mum this morning, didn’t it? I’d never talk to her about dad otherwise.

How else can I do what I’m thinking of?

8th March Tom I lo Tom I really like Tom, if you’ve gotten a feeling that I like you (like over the last two days), it’s all true. You’re easily the best guy in our year, in the whole school. The fittest, the smartest, the lot. I know there’s tons of girls you could go out with, but you must’ve seen how I look at you. Christ, it’s hard enough writing this down never mind saying it. Just know that if you asked me to go out with you tomorrow, I’d say yes.

9th March I need to write this quick while Tom gets our lunch.

It worked!!! Tom came up to me this morning and said he’d been hearing that I fancied him, though he couldn’t say from who or where. His cheeks went pink when he admitted he couldn’t stop thinking about me yesterday.

“So how about it?” he said.

29

I literally jumped into his arms. His friends started yelling and whistling. One of them asked if we were gonna shag and Tom told him to fuck off. He carried on hugging me and whispered in my ear, “I’d go to your funeral.”

I laughed it off, cause I can’t think it’s weird if I wrote it in the first place, then we walked to form room together. Holding hands! Kat saw and winked as I sat down.

“So, when did this happen?” she asked.

Can I tell her about the diary? She’s my best friend but she’d think I was a nutter. Then again, I might as well have told her, writing it in here. But it’s the kind of thought Kat would brush off as too strange to be true.

I played it safe and told her Tom asked me out before school. It’s the truth, kind of, but my stomach felt like the mince worms in Mum’s cottage pie, wriggling.

Mrs Dee didn’t mark me late today or tell me off for whispering with Kat. She’s talking to Mr Peters by the lunch hall door. She’s shaking. I’m leaning back in my chair to hear what’s going on.

“I was so certain,” she’s saying. “Of course, I couldn’t remember when she called me an old cow, but I could hear her saying it in my head…Maybe I’m just getting old.”

“We all forget things.” Mr Peters pats her back.

“My mother had Alzheimer’s. I don’t like assuming the worst, but…”

Nan had that. She couldn’t remember me or Mum by the end. She was terrified of us, asking what we were doing in her room at the old people’s home, thinking we were going to rob her. I don’t want Mrs Dee to – Tom came back with lunch. He smiled at me, and it was so beautiful I can’t let him go. Without this diary, he never would’ve even looked at me.

Sorry, Mrs Dee. You’ve got to forget a bit longer.

13th March Jenny from Maths had better stop flirting with Tom or she’s gonna get it, I swear. Kat said he was just getting her help with his homework, but I know better.

Hands off, Jenny. Slag.

30

15th March Mrs Dee, I’ve already given you my homework for this week. You must have forgotten about it.

16th March Everyone in our year NEEDS to know that Jenny from Maths collects bags from the dog poo bin and hides them under her bed. What a weirdo.

20th March I hope Mrs Dee remembers to mark me and Kat off sick today. We both caught flu over the weekend. Sad. 22nd March Kat come on you know Jenny wasn’t really crying. She’s just trying to make everyone feel sorry for her. Not that they will after the rumours.

Do you want me to get us off school again? Will that make you feel better?

24th March Tommm text me backkkk. You can’t be busy with the lads all the time.

I love you.

28th March Mr Bairn is such a pri. Whoops, better not get his attention again. He’s almost caught me writing in here twice now. People notice they’re tagged so fast, and I don’t want him snatching my diary.

I’m meant to be writing down formulas for acids or whatever, but I don’t need Chemistry. I don’t need English, or Maths, or nothing. I can just write in here and people will follow their gut, whichever way I tell them to. Maybe I could tell a modelling agency I’m the hottest model they’ll ever find.

31

Or I could win the X Factor with a few words on a page. Maybe I’ll go to Downing Street, just to keep Mum happy.

She once said I’d have less options if I don’t work hard and pass my exams.

Now I’ve got every chance in the world.

29th March Liz hates Tom with everything she’s got and wants to dump him.

Liz I’m sorry you can’t keep doing this. Jenny’s inches away from pulling out of school. Mrs Dee thinks she’s going mental. I’m going to if you keep popping up in my brain, nagging me, making plans.

I couldn’t believe it when it came into my head, about the diary. Sounded like that scary film we saw last month. But then you left it in Chemistry, and I know I shouldn’t have read it but I’m glad I did.

You’re right, Liz. You’re a nutter cause of this stupid book. Get rid of it and stay out of our heads.

3rd April Kat. What the hell have you done?

Stop waving at me like an idiot. The sub will see you and I’m not pretending to cramp to save you from detention. You did it to impress Tom, didn’t you? You don’t care about me or Jenny or Mrs Dee, just sticking your tongue down his throat.

Tom please I love you I love you I love you take me backkkk.

4th April Tom please Kat is a lying cow why can’t you see that?

Why don’t you believe me?

Why are you telling everyone Jenny’s special hobby isn’t true?

Why are your loser friends calling me your crazy ex?

5th April You’ve ruined my life, Kat. I hate you I hate you I hate you I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I

32

6th April I’m worried about Kat. I want to tell her parents and Mr Peters that she’s been talking about hurting Tom for dumping me. Maybe I should go to the police, but I don’t think she means it. She just said she wants to make Tom as sick as she feels.

I couldn’t ask for a better friend.

7th April There’s a reason I don’t like cottage pie, Katie. Look what it did to Tom. That was proper sick, not your pathetic acting back in March. I wouldn’t be surprised if all cottage pies had acid in them. You really hated Tom for what he did – the bottle the police found in your bag was empty. I’ve got no clue how you managed to get that massive bottle out of the chemistry lab. Maybe thieving just comes naturally to you.

You can’t prove what happened, Katie. You’ll go mad like Mrs Dee. How long are you in that cell for? It’ll be a while – you did put Tom in the hospital, after all. Maybe you’ll have a few hours before the police interview you.

Alone, hearing nothing but me.

Do you want to know what I really think of you?

THE END

Catrin Lawrence is a writer of the strange, fantastical, and morbid. Her short fiction has been published by Gwyllion Magazine, and appeared in anthologies

by Black Hare Press and Parthian Books.

33

Unfortunate Sisters

REBECCA ELIZABETH ROBERTS

The strangeness began with a smell. Woodsmoke. A faint scent that seemed to appear from nowhere at least once a day even when the windows were closed, despite never being visible as rising grey pillars or as soupy woollen air. A smell that made its presence felt so often that Emily began to sniff suspiciously at the cuffs and collars of her clothes in case a neighbour’s bonfire had imbued them with the perfume of fire. Except that there were no neighbours, and there had been no bonfire.

Over time the smell of woodsmoke grew noticeably stronger, and sometimes brought with it the faintest whiff of roasting flesh that made her mouth water involuntarily and conjured visions of a low-ceilinged cottage with meat roasting on an inviting open hearth.

Yet the woodsmoke was perceptible only to Emily, perplexing her to an extent that during one of her daughter’s hospital appointments she was seriously tempted to ask the consultant whether there was such thing as olfactory phantoms, much as some women experienced phantom pregnancies?

The voices followed some weeks later, just as she was growing used to the frequent tang of burning wood in her nostrils. The first time she heard them was on their daily lunchtime stroll: past the farmhouse, some days turning left and heading into the village to the shop or post office; otherwise, right past the row of cottages and making a slow lap around the churchyard before heading home. None of her relatives were buried there – the last burial took place in the grounds of the ancient church before her ancestors had even set foot on the continent. Nonetheless, the walk around the graveyard had become something like a ritual visiting of old friends.

There was a stillness in the churchyard that allowed nature to flourish: robins and blackbirds, thrushes and sparrows, lightning-fast bats at dusk, rabbits burrowing among the graves, squirrels scurrying from yew to ash as though permanently startled by her presence, and once even a strange shrew-like creature that walked boldly alongside the pram for a few feet before vanishing into the long grass.

It was a churchyard purposely left to run wild, reclaimed by nature with only a thin strip of concrete left to humans. Most of the gravestones had been swallowed by history and ivy. Here and there a handful of newer stones stood sentinel, carvings proclaiming the names of the bodies over which they watched:

34

Anne, dau. of Thomas and his wife, died in her sixth year.

Eleanor sleeps in the arms of the Lord.

Robert Pugh of this parish died aged seventy-two. God rest his soul.

Two stones, cut from the same honey-coloured sandstone stood cheek by jowl. The first named three children, the second carried the names of another two. Five children, none of them over the age of ten, all taken from the same family within two months of each other. The youngest died first, the eldest survived longest. Emily guessed at a pandemic or epidemic of some sort, and a search of the village library’s reference section confirmed that cholera had swept through the village the same year as their burials.

Although she tried to turn her mind to cheerful things, without fail Emily would pause at this grave and shudder. Imagining the parental anguish at watching not one but five bright young lives being snuffed out as quickly as candles made her throat constrict and her eyes sting, as though she was inhaling the smoke that seemed to follow her everywhere. It hung about her more often than not; in fact it seemed that the only time she was guaranteed to be free of it was while walking around the graveyard.

Her husband gently teased her about visiting the graves with Baby Girl (‘Skulking around the kirk and you an atheist!’), saying she must have a melancholic streak. Emily feigned a laugh and agreed with him, but didn’t stop going on her walks.

Baby Girl was eight months old when the voices first made themselves apparent. They were on the way back from the graveyard, and Emily had just paused to close the creaking iron gate separating wilderness from pavement. She heard them so clearly that it caused her to whip around and glare at the teenage dog walker behind her, who met her eyes and smiled with a nervous but sincere warmth. His bemusement when she scowled at him proved that it wasn’t he who had called her the name, nor had he in fact heard anyone else speaking. He was wearing earphones, and Emily briefly wondered whether she’d heard a snatch of a song escaped from his ear buds. Then she heard the voice a second time, closer this time, almost in her ear.

35

The first time the cry had been a clear, almost triumphant j’accuse! The second and all subsequent times it was never louder than a whisper carried on the wind, a collective sibilance, a persistent but accusatory hiss of a single, repeated word.

Emily hurried home. The sound followed her. Tinnitus, she told herself. Temporary.

It would pass. And it did, as soon as she closed the front door behind them.

A scientist even while she was on maternity leave, Emily began to record these phantom sounds and smells in a notebook she carried in her back pocket. She could be woken in the night by an insistent hissing or hear nothing for several days at a time, and the smell seldom coincided with the sound. The only pattern she observed was that they both occurred only when she was completely alone with her daughter, but never when they were in the graveyard.

Emily told nobody else about her ‘illusions’ (after all, they had enough to worry about). When alone she researched possible causes (scientific, of course) and read about pre-pubescent girls causing poltergeist-like activity; frustrated and unhappy women (it was always the women) summoning apparitions and causing strange, unexplained occurrences. Stress, she told herself. Manifestations of repressed anxiety at the thought of Baby Girl’s surgery.

Although she tried her best not to worry over something beyond her control, she found herself lying sleepless in bed, remembering her granny’s stories of the home that was so much part of her childhood even though she had no memory of it and only knew of it through others’ words. She remembered stories told tearfully, regretfully, of what happened to women like her, and worse, to their helpless children. Thankful that neither she nor her parents had been born in the old country, she lulled herself to sleep by repeating the mantra that they lived in an age of science, not superstition. Her daughter would have the surgery, and providing all went well, the weight would be lifted and these strange phenomena would cease.

A self-assured modern young woman, it never occurred to Emily to question whether she was the cause, a conduit, or merely an eavesdropper. * Baby Girl’s surgery was scheduled for 10am. Emily rose in the darkest hours of the morning to give her a final bottle before the nil-by-mouth period began. As she shuffled in slippered feet up the dark stairs and towards her daughter’s bedroom, warmed bottle in hand, she felt a sudden chill run through her body.

36

The air around her felt very cold, but as she slid her hand along the banister it entered a sudden pocket of warmth which seemed to emanate from her daughter’s bedroom, along with the glow of the night light. Emily stepped into the warmth, stopping dead on the threshold of the nursery. She was immediately struck by the all-too familiar smell of burning wood; and for the first time she was in the presence of its source. Of this she had no doubt. Standing over her daughter’s cot, illuminated by the nightlight’s yellow glow, was a stooped female figure. Scrawny, yet clad in voluminous skirts and shawls, one hand was reaching into the cot, a gnarled finger bone white against the warm brown of her daughter’s cheek.

The memory of her practical mother telling her ‘only the living do you harm’ prevented Emily from screaming in shock, although her fear was so great that she could neither inhale nor exhale. The milk bottle dropped from her hand and rolled across the polished wooden floor.

The woman withdrew her hand and turned slowly to look at her. She was standing at the head of the cot, and when her feet made no noise on the creaking floorboard Emily knew for certain that this creature was not human – or to be precise, it was no longer human. Looking into the apparition’s eyes, despite the cries of ‘witch, witch, witch’ thundering as loudly in her ears as the pulsing of her own heartbeat, Emily found herself able to breathe once more. The face was haggard but open; eyes blameless but heavy with punishment. This woman was more mother than monster. She had not come to hurt them.

There was a fleeting, wordless connection between them, and then Emily blinked and the woman had gone. The room before her was startlingly empty and suddenly colder. Baby Girl whimpered in her sleep. Before Emily could scoop her up and cradle her protectively against her chest, her husband appeared and picked up the bottle she’d dropped.

‘You look exhausted,’ he muttered, taking their daughter into his arms. ‘Go back to bed, try to get some sleep. I’ll feed her.’

37

Emily went back to bed, hoping to sink into sleep’s embrace and escape this living, bewildering nightmare. A bad dream, she told herself firmly. Her anxious brain allowing her eyes to play tricks. Right now, she had to rest and remain calm so that she was able to face the new day with composure and strength – and that was why she would tell herself these lies until she believed them.

Dawn was a long time coming. Emily ached for daylight and simultaneously feared the morning. She slept only briefly and fitfully, and when she awoke she did so with a name on her lips and a feeling that someone was standing over her, watching. Opening her eyes, she saw no figure against the dawn-lit backdrop of their curtains, and on the other side of the bed husband and daughter slept, limbs crookedly intertwined. The name faded from her mind as the day ahead loomed large. * Eight hours later she kissed her most precious darling tenderly, choking back the fearful tears and laid her in her husband’s arms and then watched helplessly as he carried her carefully through the doors marked THEATRES where she would be under the care of the anaesthetist.

Emily closed her eyes and reminded herself that the risks to her daughter had been minimized. The surgical team would do their very best for her. They’d promised. She tried her best not to picture the cholera graves. Instead, she remembered a happy day when they’d stood at the nearby crossroads, Baby Girl snuggled warm and safe between her breasts in a sling. The spring breeze had been fresh on her face, and she remembered how her curls had whipped around her cheeks as she’d turned to face each point of the compass in turn, looking up th he roads leading north, south, east and west. How she’d whispered her grandmother’s words, in her grandmother’s tongue, into her daughter’s ear: ‘You won’t stay in this place for long, Sweetie Pie. There’s a big wide world waiting for you’. Emily reminded herself that this surgery was a necessary evil; her daughter’s first step towards claiming independence, towards being able to go out into the big wide world with a spring in her step and a smile on her face. *

38

It was soon over. On the children’s ward, the surgeon gently removed the dressing and pronounced the surgery a success. Emily clutched her husband’s hand tightly, to quell her desire to throw her arms around the surgeon and smother him with inexpressible gratitude. The worst was over. Their baby girl was going to be all right. Everything was going to be all right.

That evening, she curled up on the pull-out bed next to Baby Girl’s cot. The ward’s lights were dimmed and curtains were drawn. Once again Emily slept fitfully, waking up every time a nurse came to check blood oxygen or temperature.

Usually, she would sit up only to be soothingly urged, ‘Go back to sleep – we’re just doing her checks’. Except one time she awoke and sat up just in time to see a dark figure walking through the drawn curtain, leaving behind the faintest trace of smoke lingering in the air and her name on Emily’s lips.

That was the last time she saw, heard or smelt anything untoward. Anxiety, she told herself. A multi-sensory manifestation of her fears and anxiety.

She almost believed it. *

As Emily predicted, they did not stay long in the sleepy village of Baby Girl’s birth. A baby brother made a bigger home a necessity, and sceptical of religion they wanted a choice other than their local Christian primary school.

It was whilst she was on her second maternity leave, over a year later, that Emily took Baby Boy to a song and story session at their new local library. At the end of the rhyme time, as she was rooting inside her changing bag for a clean nappy, her eyes happened to fall on the spine of a book in the local history reference section. Its cover was plain, its pages yellowed. It looked out of place among the more recent offerings with their coloured photographs and modern covers. Emily tucked her son into his pram and reached for the slender volume, which was titled: Janet Horne and her Unfortunate Sisters: an Investigation.

39

The words on the yellowed pages carried the faintest scent of decay; rotting autumnal leaves swept along by a cold breeze. Emily skimmed the chapter titles and the foreword as quickly as she could, her son’s impatient grizzling increasing her own feeling of being on-edge. Yes, there it was, as she’d guessed it would be: the title of one of the chapters was the name that had come to her in sleep. The woman with whom she’d shared a bond. The woman she might have become, had she been born at a different time.

The male author had used ‘an investigation’ as a pretext for raking over the seamier side of history, seeming to rejoice in descriptions of agony and shame.

Emily closed the book, not wanting to read the gory, salacious details.

Later that day, after she’d picked Baby Girl up from pre-school, they visited the graveyard one last time. Her daughter helped lay five roses on the cholera graves, thinking that they were leaving them for the fairies. Then they walked to the crossroads and there, hidden on a grass verge, Emily found the stump remains of a stone pillar. Lichen had overtaken the rock and obscured the date carved centuries ago by a long-forgotten hand. This was the place where, if scanty records were to be believed, the execution had taken place. With her own eyes Emily had seen the elder woman, but she hoped that her child at least had escaped the same terrible fate.

Emily placed two roses at the foot of the stone; one for the witch and one for her daughter. No, she chided herself – be accurate. Perhaps she came to you because she recognised herself, because your situation was a mirror to hers. But you are not a witch, and neither was she, nor her child.

40

She wanted to call out: You were a wronged woman and an innocent girl. I’m sorry for your suffering, and I hope that you find peace. I hope that you are together again.

But she did not say those words aloud, because it was a fine summer’s day and there were people mowing their lawns and walking dogs and washing windows, and they would think it odd to hear her shouting to the four points of the compass.

Instead, she impulsively reached into the change bag and removed the purloined library book from its depths. Regretting that she had neither lighter nor matches, Emily enacted her own small justice. She tore the book into handfuls of paper and poured the contents of a water bottle over them, until every page was a sodden pulp, a ball of paper dough in her hands; words mashed together and made illegible, destroyed forever. The book was wrong. The voices had been wrong.

There were no witches here. There never had been.

Rebecca Roberts is a writer and translator from Prestatyn in north Wales. The author of ten novels (published by Gomer@Lolfa, Gwasg Carreg Gwalch and Honno), she writes in both English and Welsh. Her first YA novel, #helynt, won the 2021 Tir na n-Og Award and 2021 Children and Young Person's Book of the Year award.

41

Otherworld

ROSY ADAMS Macsen is waiting for her. His one brown eye looks at her hopefully, but the other eye, silvery blue, seems to be looking somewhere beyond. She takes a deep breath and opens the door. Macsen rushes outside, his plumy tail waving like a flag.

It’s all new for him, but Ailie used to walk this same route everyday. Through the woods, up along the sheep tracks that lace the skirts of the mountain, then back down to the river path. It seems like she’s been away for far longer than a year. Maybe because so much has changed.

Macsen dashes down the path, circles back to check on her, dashes away, a pushpull game that gets her out the door and walking in spite of herself. He is a part of her recovery. Her psychologist calls him an Emotional Support Animal. Ailie calls him Friend.

Best Friend.

Only Friend.

Determined buds brave the early spring chill. Each day they will be a bit bigger and a bit rounder until they burst open to reveal new leaves. She remembers this: the translucent green of new growth, looking so fragile and tender it makes her ache to see it.

Her boots sink into black mud. The ground is waterlogged from weeks of downpours. It stopped raining early this morning but when she stands still she can hear water trickle and drip everywhere as it makes its way to the river.

She startles at a rustle in the undergrowth. It’s not a usual sound. She knows the noises of the woods. Rabbits and squirrels, birds and foxes, wind and rain.

It sounds like something big.

She can hear twigs snapping and leaves rustling.

Macsen watches the undergrowth, his hackles lifting the length of his spine. She sinks her fingers into the thick ruff of fur around his neck for reassurance, although she’s not sure whether it’s for him or for her.

The rustling gets louder and closer, and then a hound bursts out. There are broken pieces of bramble snagged in its rough white coat. Russet ears prick and its tail curves up and over its back. Orange eyes fix on Macsen and it curls up its lip to show yellowed teeth. Macsen holds his ground, a growl starting deep in his chest. She can feel the bass vibration under her hand. More hounds appear, flowing from between the trees until a full pack is surging and yammering and yelling, filling the path in front of her.

The stand-off is broken as the first hound wheels away to re-join its mates.

Ailie is transfixed. She’s still scared. Macsen stands firm beside her and she can feel him tremble, but she can’t tell whether it’s from fear or excitement.

42

The pack pays them no mind as they cast about for a scent, tails up and waving like a collection of metronomes.There is something magical about their sudden appearance.

She’s half expecting to see a white stag appear in the distance.

She reminds herself that these are flesh and blood hounds. They must be, because Macsen can see them too. There is no such thing as magic.

She sees no hunters or quarry, but somewhere ahead a hunting horn sounds and the pack rushes away in a roiling, baying mass.

Ailie and Macsen follow. The hounds have left a trail of paw prints, proof that she hasn’t imagined the whole thing. Macsen rushes to and fro, tail held high, sniffing and marking all the places they have been.

She has been in these woods before during a hunt. The first and last hunt she took part in. She remembers clinging to the saddle with one hand, the reins in the other, tack leather creaking as her pony plunged through the undergrowth after the others. Her sisters ahead, as one with their mounts. She caught glimpses through the trees as the pony scrabbled to keep up. Horses with arched necks and pricked ears leaping over fallen branches, riders crouched low over their withers, urging them on, and the hounds, always in front, flowing like a wave.

Ailie was scared and tired, and wanted to go home. It felt as if she’d been riding around in the woods for days, trailing behind the rest of them.

Finally, she caught up, but not by design; her pony took her wherever the others went, and they had stopped long enough for its short legs to close the gap.

The hounds were a yelping leaping mass. One of the huntsmen waded in, laying about him with his whip until the pack relinquished the torn remnants of its catch.

Ailie found herself at the front, the other riders having jostled her forward. The huntsman came up to her with a mangled piece of fox, only recognisable by the remaining scraps of reddish fur.

She didn’t realise what he was doing until she felt the still-warm blood daub her forehead. A drip rolled down the side of her nose and onto her top lip. She licked it reflexively. The rusty tang of it filled her mouth and she thought that if you could taste the colour of the creature’s fur, then this is what it would taste like.

It seemed to her that she saw the fox as a cub, then as a youngster, a mother, and finally as a fugitive running before the dogs, and she felt the agony when they caught it.

She could hear screaming, and it took her a moment to realise her mouth was open and the screaming was coming from her.

One of the hunt followers had to drive her home, while her sisters led the pony back.

Too sensitive. Over-imaginative.

43

Those were the things that were said when she was a child. When she grew older people said she was neurotic, an attention seeker.

Since her year in the madhouse no-one says anything, but the silence speaks volumes.

Further up the track, the trees thin out and eventually disappear. The track itself dwindles to a sheep path winding obliquely up the mountain through the brittle stands of last year’s bracken.

Spring hasn’t yet reached this high. The only thing growing is wiry mountain grass, cropped short by unkempt mountain sheep. They look sideways at her. Yellow eyes with weird oblong pupils. No surprise that drawings of the devil often have the eyes of sheep.

There is a cutting wind away from the shelter of the woods, but walking up the steep incline keeps Ailie warm, and she enjoys the scouring cold of the air in her lungs.

The shepherd’s hut appears as a tumble of lichened stones by the path, rising into grey walls roofed with decaying sheets of corrugated iron.

The weather is dry today, but she knows what it sounds like in the hut with the snare drum rattle of rain on the roof. She remembers lying on their coats, cwtshed together, her and Aeron Jenkins, fifteen and already muscled like a grown man from helping on his dad’s farm.

She hadn’t meant her first time to be in a tumbledown shepherd’s hut in the middle of a rainstorm, but Aeron was achingly good-looking, the year above her in school, and one of the popular crowd. She was so flattered that he wanted her that she never considered if she really wanted him.

It hurt, that first time, which she wasn’t expecting. She cried afterwards, and he held her awkwardly until the rain stopped. They walked down the path together and he left her at the end of the driveway to her parents’ house.

The following Monday everyone was talking about Aeron Jenkins and Cerys Kington becoming an item, and Ailie was back to being the strange girl with the overactive imagination. Thinking back, she realises that Aeron hasn’t said a word to her since then.

The shepherd’s hut is much the same apart from a few more holes in the roof and a few more stones tumbled from the walls.

Macsen runs ahead to investigate it, but when he reaches the doorway he springs back and lets loose a volley of short sharp barks. An awful noise is coming from the hut; a screaming, squealing, guttural racket. She calls Macsen to heel, and despite her fear she ventures close enough to see inside.

The doorway is filled by a huge black sow. Her small eyes are bright and clever, and she stares at Ailie in challenge. Ailie backs away slowly, keeping Macsen close.

When they are far enough away that she no longer considers them to be a threat, the sow harrumphs and lies down, rolling onto her side with a gusty sigh. A litter of piglets, pink, black, patched and spotted, scramble over her belly in search of milk. PN PN

Ailie has never seen pigs up here before. It’s common land, but it’s usually all sheep and ponies put to graze the mountain.

She walks on. The path slopes downwards, parallel to the descent of a stream springing from higher up. It spills over rocks and cuts channels through the turf, growing wider as it collects rainwater runoff and absorbs other, smaller streams, before being absorbed itself by the river that runs the length of the valley.

The path follows the river downstream, sometimes level with the water, sometimes climbing high above. The banks are mostly wooded, the roots of the trees making a natural barrier that contains the river when it rises.

There’s a sweeping bend where the water slows down to form a deep pool. Above it is a flat rocky outcrop. In good weather the local teenagers use it for sunbathing, and as a place from which to jump into the river.

It’s too early in the year for swimming so she’s surprised to see someone at the water’s edge, lying down with one arm in the river up to his shoulder. Despite the cold he’s shirtless and she can see some clothes hanging over a branch, out of the way of the water.

He hasn’t seen her, and she feels awkward about standing there watching, but before she can retrace her steps he pulls a trout from the water. It twists frantically as he prepares to kill it.

“Oh don’t hurt it! Put it back, please.” The words escape her before she can stop them, and as he looks up and says her name she recognises Sami Jones.

“But what if it’s the Salmon of Wisdom? I could be the next Taliesin.” He’s teasing her, like old times.

“That’s not a salmon, it’s a trout and you know it. Please put it back Sami. Look, it’s so scared!”

He sighs, and lowers the fish into the water, where it hangs motionless for a moment before slip-sliding away into the shadows beneath the bank.

She had jumped in there, once, despite not being able to swim.

There was a group of them, summer holidays after their GCSEs were over and they were all a bit drunk with the possibilities of the future. She wasn’t really one of the crowd.

They tolerated her as long as she was quiet.

The girls lay back on their elbows, displaying their breasts to maximum advantage, whispering and giggling and side-eyeing the boys, who shouted and wrestled each other and pretended they hadn’t noticed all the legs and cleavage on show.

45

Ailie sat to the side with Sami, the one person who didn’t mock her for being strange.

They had been talking about where they were going next, which turned into where they had come from, and then the Morgan boys overheard and said Black people aren’t Welsh, no offense like, that’s just how it is, and it was getting to the point of shoving and shouting, and she couldn’t think of how to stop them, so she shouted ‘look at me!’ and ran straight off the edge and into the river.

The water stung like a slap before swallowing her right down to the bottom. It felt timeless down there. She saw a shoal of minnows darting away, flashing silver in the wavering sunlight, and something larger moving in the deepest part that might have been a salmon.

It was Sami who pulled her out while the others panicked, despite the Morgans’ earlier assertion that Black people couldn’t swim.

As she coughed and gasped on the bank he said “ti’n iawn Ailie, you’re okay” and called her twpsyn bach as he rubbed her back to help her expel the last of the river from her lungs.

“That fish was going to be my supper though.”

“I could make you some supper, if you want.” Again the words seem to escape before she can stop them.

“Gwych, thanks. Are you staying in the bwthyn now?”

She nods, yes.

“I’ll walk with you.”

“Okay.”

He reaches for his clothes, pulling a t-shirt over his head and shrugging a jacket onto his shoulders. Macsen sniffs at his legs politely and Sami strokes his head and scratches him behind the ears in just the way he likes.

There is nothing for it but to walk home along the path that leads away from the river.

Rhododendrons crowd close, and taller trees arch overhead to make a dark green tunnel. Macsen freezes as a large fox emerges from the undergrowth ahead of them. It pauses to examine them, then melts into the shadows.

“Oh, how lovely!” Ailie says.

“What’s lovely?”

“The fox. Didn’t you see it?”

He shakes his head.

The awful dread is rising, wrapping itself tight around her chest, pushing up into her throat as a hard lump. The pills aren’t working.

46

Further up the path are the red-eared hounds. She can hear them giving tongue, and the silvery notes of a hunting horn calling them onwards.

The dread is squeezing her chest so tight she can’t breathe. Her head fills with the sound of her pounding heart. The pills aren’t working. They’ll take her away again, and this time it’ll be for good.

“Ailie!”

She feels hands gripping her arms.

“Ailie, look at me!”

A warm mass presses against her legs. Macsen. Her breathing eases a little.

“You’re having a panic attack. It’s okay. Listen to me. I know you can see things I can’t.

I’ve always known.”

Her heart slows, little by little. She reaches for Macsen, feels the damp-cold of his nose, the warm-wet of his tongue licking her hand.

She looks at Sami. She’d always thought his eyes were brown but this close she sees how much green is in them.

“It doesn’t bother you that I’m crazy?”

“Just because I can’t see it, doesn’t mean there’s nothing there. I hear stuff.

Sometimes I know things. Runs in the family. My mamgu was like you, she had the Sight.”

“Everything I see is real?”

“Yes.” Sami lets go of Ailie’s arms. She hears the hunting horn again, and the baying of the pack away in the distance. A ghost-pale stag with vast branching antlers appears on the path ahead. It pauses to taste the wind, then leaps into the woods.

She reaches for Sami’s hand. They walk together, fingers twined, Macsen alongside, keeping his one silvery blue eye on the Otherworld.

Rosy Adams grew up in the Bannau Brycheiniog where she spent most of her time in the library or up the mountain. Her writing has been published by The Lampeter Review, Grim & Gilded, Lucent Dreaming, and The Amphibian amongst others, and she edited and contributed to (un)common: anthology of new Welsh writing published by Lucent Dreaming. She is inspired by myth and fairy tale, and is currently working on a short story collection.

47

Missus Lummas and the Devil’s Coach Horses JONAH JONES

Across the old graveyard that the elder folk called Merryfield, the wind whispered in the leafless hawthorn. It told those who lived there that Missus Lummas was on her way. The twisted ivy, scurrying voles and pots with tired flowers drooping over their rims, whispered back ‘We know.’

To the alarm calls of blackbirds, Missus Lummas came down the muddy lane. She was getting more bent in these last days. Yes, the body was shaming itself but the eyes and the spirit were undimmed and there was no slackness in her heart. She was wearing her woolly hat with her autumn coat and wondering whether she should have added more layers as she sloshed through the puddles. These days, she was never as warm as she used to be. Winter was nipping at her neck, causing her to stiffen up. Tomorrow maybe, she’d add a scarf. She adjusted the canvas bag across her shoulders and stepped stronger towards the sleeping place by the church.

Through the blackened oak lych-gate she went, smiling at the ghosts on the far side as the creaking of the hinges brought them from their slumber.

‘Hello everyone,’ she greeted them as they gathered around the field where the merry-folk continued their lives.

From her bag, she took out a battered plastic container full of water and a bag of fresh flowers gathered from the nursery. She looked around and judged which grave needed her attention the most.

Jeremiah and Sarah’s resting place was a touch weed-bound and the flowers needed replenishment, so she began there.

She took a cushion from the bag and knelt down before the headstone to brush the lichen from their carved names.

‘Hello, both,’ she said. ‘Tis me – Mary.’

‘Hath been a long while,’ Sarah mildly admonished. ‘We thought you’d gone and disremembered us.’

‘Well, no – it’s been a while but I’d not disremember you. I been busy with all my other friends.’

She took the wilting flowers from the vase and replaced them with fresh, tidying the leaves away at the same time.

‘I’m a popular lady, you know.’

She added some water to the vase, then rearranged the flowers.

‘There now – you see? Things are still beautiful on this side.’ Jeremiah and Sarah brushed her check and whispered sweet thoughts about what was to come.

48

Peter began to feel disquiet. Who was she talking to? Herself? Some wraith he couldn’t see? He backed away down the lane. He wasn’t afraid of the old lady but maybe there was someone else, some-thing else there.

Missus Lummas stood awkwardly, using the headstone as a support and addressed the listeners in general. ‘At least you don’t have to worry about arthritis no more.’

She tidied a few more graves, talking to their residents all the while. Some sad, some resentful, some even vengeful, all the things they had been when they had breath. All the old villagers were there and a few of the wicked spirits who follow us all, teasing, tricking and sometimes even soul-stealing, some buried in unmarked graves, some just coming out of the dark never-consecrated ground. She had time for them too, but with less of a smile and a touch of a stern expression about the eyes. You don’t want to give the Dark Ones too much leeway. ‘You don’t belong here,’ she would tell them. ‘Not while I still lives in this village.’ For those that can see, the shades followed her around Merryfield and blessed her for keeping the faith. She stood for a moment in front of Trevor’s grave and smiled. She knew that he was no longer there. He lived in their house – well, some of the time he did. As she left the graveyard, in the rustle of the dried leaves, the good old folk wished her well, while the Dark Ones slunk back into the shadows to await a better opportunity.

Along the stream she went, past the deep pool, busy with coots, and into the main part of the village, smiling at those she met, stroking Pa Daly’s cat and thanking the blackbird for his song. That day was the last of the gifted times.

Covid came and amongst other things taught a large swathe of the cyber-bound population that they could work from home, given fast Internet. Energetic young things with lots of money but heretofore constrained by access to their offices, found that they could enjoy a quieter, more fulfilling and less frenetic lifestyle, away from commuter country.

Glynebury was one of those near-Disney villages snuggled in amongst the gentle Cotswold Hills, built of the local honey coloured stone and set back aways from the hectic world. A place where fairy tales might be brought to life and the folk of those tales might go freely about their business amongst the mortals without let or hinderance.

Open-minded soul that she was, Missus Lummas enjoyed the company and the vitality of the newcomers, especially the children, and they, for their part enjoyed hearing her stories, seeing her photographs, watching her attending her herbs and singing her strange songs as she did so, dressing the well, marking the festivals, saluting the sun and whispering to the moon to thank them for their blessings.

Their parents, trapped in middle age with all the restrictions that can bring, saw only the looks of the village, as if it were some film-star with no personality save for the script.

49

They failed to see what had brought that beauty to this place – the toil and the grief, the skill and yes, the magic embodied in these stones.

They were unable to see the hosts of the dead that had made this place, those who had laid stone upon stone, cut the roads, pollarded the willows and coppiced the hazels all for building their own idea of home.

While she was on her way through the village one sunny crisp day, Missus Lummas came across the children, some newcomers, some of the village, all gathered around the village pond. They were all using nets to catch whatever they could under the tutelage of Miss Gillian, the teacher at the school.

Whatever they caught was carefully placed in a plastic bowl and examined and then photographed with their mobile phones and checked against nature history apps on the same phones.

‘In my day,’ Missus L. said ‘we had to draw them and then go look them up in books.’

Miss Gillian smiled. ‘Same thing but quicker.’

They’d caught a dragonfly nymph and it looked up at these monsters as they looked down at its features. One of the girls said that she thought it was ugly.

Watching the little hunter as it walked around in the bowl, Missus Lummas only partly agreed. ‘Maybe ’tis, maybe ’tis - but when she comes up out of the water of her own accord in the spring, ’tis one of the most beautiful creatures you’ll ever see.’

As she always had done, on the fifteenth of December, the day after her husband Trevor’s birthday, Missus Lummas put up her Christmas lights. When he was alive, he and she had agreed that they weren’t about to confuse his birthday with Yule. Now he was gone, she would place a birthday candle on his grave, while he laughed, then would turn her attention to the rest of the family on the following day.

Each year, she would add some new set of lights to the display inside and outside her cottage. This year it was a polar bear with a smile on his face, set large amongst the gnomes, elves, reindeer, holly and guiding stars.

‘I’m calling him Arthur. What do you reckon?’ she asked Robin.

‘I reckon I likes it.’

‘Not too much of it?’

‘Can’t have too much jollity, come Yule.’ He danced a measure or two. ‘We do thrive on lights an’ stupid music.’

“We certain do,” she thought to herself as she went to visit Godfrey later that day.

Lights, music and cheeriness. There were times when Godfrey could do with those things, poor old thing.

50

‘Sometimes I gets lonely,’ he would tell her.

‘You can always call on me. I got a house full of all sorts of shenanigans. Children all over the place. Some of them aren’t even mine, they come out o’ the woods like Jack o’ Lantern. There’s times when I could do with a tad less of the rumbustion.’

‘You got childer of your own?’

‘Aye. They got a folk-law father I reckon, but they arrives full-formed and primed for mischief, their little ears twitching as they listens gleeful for trouble. And they calls me mother, so I must be.’

‘You’re doolally, Mary Lummas.’

‘I knows that an’ all.’

So to Yule herself when the sun stands still to reflect upon his history. A joyous moment to be celebrated by the folk from both sides of the curtain. A bonfire lit and much merriment from the mid of the night when the sun is furthest away.

Missus Lummas restacked the wood before lighting her own fire. At first shifting, a Devil’s Coach Horse sped out and threatened her with its arching tail.

‘You naughty thing,’ she chided it. ‘Don’t you go using that bad language on me.’

The pugnacious little so-and-so wasn’t going to stand down.

‘Get away with you,’ she told it. ‘I ain’t going to harm you, Devil’s child though you be.’

The beetle seemed to know that what she told it was the truth, so it lowered its tail and skedaddled off somewhere safer. Next layer down, she found the reason for being cautious; a hedgehog rolled up in a tight ball in amongst the debris at the bottom of the pile.

‘Missus Tiggy, Missus Tiggy,’ she chided her, ‘you mustn’t go sleeping in people’s woodpiles or you’ll not be here for the new year. Not all folks are careful as your Mary.’

Gently she laid the dried grass and leaves back over the sleeping creature and crept away.

Godfrey came to join her as the light faded. He brought her some fox candles and a good jar of mead, that they sipped together as they lit the candles, then laid out their new clothes on the grass next to the dancing ground.

51

Missus Lummas blessed her stack of wood and put the fox fire to it. They drank the mead as they watched the gleeful flames get a hold. Once it was cheery enough, she stepped lively with the others to the sound of pipe, tabor and the tinkling instruments of the Fair Family. A shuffle, a bow, a curtsey and a shy smile as they set about their steps, set down in ancient times. The old lady and the old man slipped out of last year’s clothes as a snake does with its skin and cast them onto the pyre of the passing year. Still dancing, they sang to see their old coverings being given spirit form, a smile on everyone’s face as they watched the consummation. Farewells were said to the misdeeds and foolishness, the false gods and fallen idols of the past year as the blue-grey smoke rose up towards the clipped fingernail of a moon.

Unfortunately, a group of the newcomers making its tipsy way back from the pub was drawn to the light of the celebration like the mindless moths of summer. They saw the old folk in their nakedness, while failing to see their innocence or company of friends.

They looked one to the other and pursed their lips with thongs so tight, they might tear the very fabric, before creeping away back to their tidy houses, away from that wild fire and all that it represented. Robin and his cohorts even tried to lead them back to the dance but they never saw him nor yet his merry troupe. All they saw was their own meanminded ways under threat.

That was when the division began. As the sun gained strength, so the shadows it cast became darker.

They talked amongst themselves, during which time the construct that Missus Lummas was in some way contrary to everything decent came into being. Two of the more extreme went so far as to talk to the vicar. They described what they’d seen and concluded ‘What if the children had seen her and that strange old man?’

‘Did they? At midnight?’

‘No – but they might have done.’

The vicar pointed to the gargoyles along the church roof. ‘We have demons protecting God’s house which is built on a pagan mound. You have to understand that the two ways of worship are here in this place. Once doesn’t disturb or interfere with the other – they are in balance.’

52

The newcomers felt let down. Christianity was surely on the side of the respectable, the well-behaved, those who were comfortable in their beliefs, yet here was a minister of the Lord, telling them that pagans had equal rights. They didn’t even need to discuss it amongst themselves. They knew that they were all in agreement when it came to such matters.

Then, to cap it all, on Christmas Day, those newcomers who attended but two days a year, were outraged to see Missus Lummas sitting there, bold as you like, smack in the middle of the middle pew. A woman tantamount to being a witch in the most Christian of places, on the most Christian of days. It was to become another rigid layer in the carapace they were building themselves. They were becoming like the Death Watch beetles in the rafters of the church, boring away at its structure while remaining in its embrace.

Saint Stephen’s Day was due to be the first splinter-cold night of the season and so Missus L. and Godfrey set off to anoint the stones.

The undines from the stream and the frost trolls from the hills where the stream begins, all came to help in the enterprise, so there was already good crowd at the stone bank when the villagers arrived with their buckets full of water from the undines’ home, Miss Gillian and a gaggle of her pupils, following on.

Some of the newcomer children asked what they were doing, so Miss Gillian introduced them to Godfrey.

‘This is Mister Standlake. He’ll tell you all about it.’

As Miss Gillian knew full well, Godfrey was a good storyteller, so his audience would see the worthy and the faerie in this continuity of olden ways.

‘We’re making new stones for the building,’ Godfrey explained. ‘We gets the water all on ‘em and then Jack Frost do come and split ’em with ’is long icicle fingers,’ Godfrey waved his own fingers close to the children’s faces, an expression of menace on his face, causing them to squeal with delight, ‘and we got new stones for the walls and the roofs.’

Next day, Godfrey knew he’d caught himself a chill. With runny nose and rheumy eyes, he sniffled and grumbled, then told Missus Lummas ‘’Tis more than a simple chill. ’Tis dark and it’s a-whispering sorrow.’

‘No more of that talk.’

‘It’s been coming closer for weeks now. Some days I don’t want to open my eyes on account of what they might see.’

He looked at her and saw how sad he’d just made her, so he added ‘An’ some days I don’t want to shut them on account of what I might miss.’

They smiled together as they acknowledged that soon Godfrey Standlake would have those blue eyes of his closed for good.

53

As she walked home, past Merryfield, Missus Lummas reflected upon the ways of things. She and Godfrey had been keeping the Dark Wanderers in place for decades.

What would happen if Godfrey was no longer there?

Twelfth Night was a good ’un, even though Godfrey wasn’t able to get to it. Missus Lummas’s cottage rang to the music and the laughter of the mighty and gifted Old Ones.

Come The Witching Hour she was tired and sat on the chair by the door, watching their frolics and gadabouts.

‘It’s been a grand Yule this season,’ she said to Robin. ‘We’ll take down the decorations come morning.’

Robin looked around the room, flew to the window to look out at the lights, then returned to Missus Lummas. ‘Would be good to keep for a while.’

‘But it’s tradition.’

Robin looked serious like she’d never seem him before. ‘Godfrey knows his eyes.

There’s dark pilgrims a-coming, conjured by darkness in the others. Our home is becoming their shrine.’

In the early starlet hours when the Lord of Misrule was too tired to pay attention and the defenders were all asleep, the Lord of the Hunt came for Godfrey.

Missus Lummas went to see him the following day with some left-over honey-cakes to discover his door wide open. The dead leaves had piled up inside the house and around his feet where the wind and the trees sought to help his passing as he sat in his big battered comfiest chair. The easy expression on Godfrey’s face told her that he’d gone gently. He was wearing his tweeds, like he was ready to go out, or maybe to keep warm with the door open for the sake of his soul leaving. With the leaves covering his feet and his lap he looked like Missus Tiggy.

She caught a glimpse of his death candle floating under the trees by the tumbling brook and left the cakes for his spirit that maybe wanted to linger. Then she turned to see a flit and a flicker of the Dark Hunters in the corner of the room and shooed them away.

Both Godfrey and Robin had been right but who was doing the conjuring?

After they’d gone skulking back to their unholy houses, she felt that shiver of anticipation of the cold and the darkness to come. Even though the days were already growing longer and the sun rising higher, there’s a different make of darkness, a cold that comes from another place, and she shivered in anticipation of their coming.

That’s why she kept the lights up, inside and outside her cottage, as she began to see the shady pilgrims in the trees, approaching the village on the old road, getting closer night by night to the shrine they sought.

‘Who are they?’ she asked Robin.

‘Those as don’t dance.’

‘Who conjured them?’

54

‘Those who won’t.’

She set herself to clearing up Godfrey’s life-shell; getting a funeral arranged, seeing what to do with his few possessions. He had no family as far as she knew and so it would be best to sell everything and give the money to the poor folk. She saw the estate agents in town and got them to put his cottage on the market and then set the solicitors to be executors.

When she got back to the village, there was a delegation of newcomers waiting for her. She invited them in and put the kettle on.

They didn’t want to stay, they only wanted to make sure that the cottage wasn’t going to go to someone, well, not in keeping with the village.

‘We never vetted you,’ Missus Lummas said but it was as if they hadn’t heard her.

Missus Lummas looked at their well-educated, poorly-spiritualised faces, saw the dark carapace hardening behind each mean face and knew that the village was doomed, so said no more on the subject. The dark pilgrims would soon take possession of their holy places and she was sad to note that her own defences were up, like she was already standing at the parapet of a castle. These hard-shelled people were causing her to become like them.

The spokeswoman with the wide-eyed scowl of a sparrowhawk added that they thought her lights should come down as they were out of keeping, too.

‘But the children like them.’

‘They’ve never said so to us.’

‘Not your children, mine.’

The others looked at each other and said nothing about whatever she might think were her children. The woman was clearly living in a fantasy and her children a figment of her deranged mind. They tacitly agreed as to the old woman’s mental state, while her children danced around and made faces at them. However as they left, they became aware of something menacing close by. Not knowing that they were themselves the source of the menace, they cast that disquiet upon Missus Lummas. She became a witch to those that had never understood or encountered witches.

That evening, she went out to talk to Godfrey and see that he was all right in the moonlit woodlands. They conversed about not much at all until he asked her if he was dead or dreaming. She was honest with him and told him he was dead. He nodded and said it had to be high hard for her to say so and that he was much obliged. She watched him drift away into the mists, then turned for home, mindful but not sad. There was an unpleasant surprise waiting for her when she got there. Her garden was dark; a darkness brought there by the newcomers.

55

They hadn’t just taken down her lights. They’d smashed them. The stars, the trees, the holly leaves and worse than that, poor Arthur and Prancer and Ronald the Red Squirrel, all broken and sad, spread across her lawn. They could have unplugged them and set them to one side but no, these black-armoured souls had to destroy for their own satisfaction.

‘Who done this?’ she asked out loud, though she knew the answer.

Robin tipped his head to one side. ‘All of ’em. All the newly come. Led by the one who looks like she got her mouth smacked with a horseshoe.’ He drew a horseshoe in space, points downward as he put a mock frown on his face, imitating hers, then let it slip into a truthful expression of sorrow.

‘Them ungodly pilgrims have reached their destination an’ raised their banner.’

Missus Lummas nodded. What a source of hate had come to the village. What was she to do now? Stay and fight? Stay and pretend nothing was untoward? Or leave?

Leave this home of eighty years, with all that it meant to her and Trevor. Leave her own life behind? She looked down the path to see Peter standing outside her gate, a rubble sack in either hand.

‘I’m sorry, Missus Lummas,’ he said, ‘truly I am. I liked your lights. I think what those people did was evil.’

‘Ah no, Peter, evil’s too strong a word. Let’s just leave it at nasty. What they done was nasty.’

He started picking up the pieces and putting them into the rubble sack.

She joined him and together they continued to clear the wreckage. Peter was a shy boy and didn’t talk except to say as they finished ‘I’m going to save up and buy you some new ones.’

So there was good in amongst the bad, she thought as she smiled at him. The seer in her knew that she’d seen her last Yule in that place. ‘I tell you what, Peter, save up and buy lights for the next one who needs them.’

56

He bowed his head, smiled at the fleeting figures of the family, and left with his rubble sacks like some kind of reverse Father Christmas, knowing who was going to be bad and who was going to be leaving.

The family and Missus Lummas watched him go.

‘There’s a dam cracking upstream,’ Robin said. ‘You’d better get out before the flood.’

‘How’d you mean?’

‘Now they done this, they reckon they can be hanged for a sheep as well as a lamb.’

Missus Lummas knew that he was right. Mayhem had been justified and murder would soon follow. It would be like all those other times when evil called itself good and stood behind the banner of holiness.

‘You coming with me?’ she asked.

‘O’ course. There’s nought for a goodfellow here.’

As she began packing, she heard noises in the garden and opened to her door to find the children all standing there, looking sad, with Peter at their head.

‘We don’t want you to go,’ he said.

‘How did you know? I didn’t know meself ’til just now.’

Robin smiled. ‘This one can hear us thinking.’

He turned to look at the unlit path as the shadow pilgrims started to creep closer, bold as you like, their eyes gleaming with twisted glee, their bony hands grasping at the good air.

‘You got to leave,’ Missus Lummas told the children. ‘They’re coming. The Dark Ones.’

The children looked around. Most of them had yet to perceive such menace but Peter could see, good and true. He started to organise the others and to shepherd them back towards what seemed to be the safety of their own homes as Missus Lummas and her house-friends formed up to stand against the Darkness.

57

Then the truth of it became warped and shifted in shape. The newcomer parents arrived and were terrified by what they saw. In the intensity of their triumph, the soldiers of darkness had become visible even to those with little spiritual awareness. They had a clear vision of Missus Lummas consorting with black-faced, snarling demons as their children fled.

In their minds there was a time-tested means of dealing with the evil represented by the old lady.

One shouted ‘Drown the witch!’ and like a demonic choir, they all joined in that baleful chorus. Every one of them had joined those legions that prey upon those who cannot defend themselves and this old lady had become the focus of their monstrous fear, until they had been true to their crazed word.

As the water of the deep pool poured into her lungs, so the darkness crept into the newcomers’ souls and took up residence.

That was a year ago to the day.

During that cycle of the seasons, Peter spoke politely to adults because it was easier than facing them with their sins. On their part, they pushed the raging of the witchmurderer down into that part of themselves hidden from the light. In the new balance, people no longer perceived the Dark Ones because the Dark Ones were no longer separate.

From the wild places, Robin watched to see if there might be a new hob-side home for the likes of him and the greater family. Maybe when some of the children grew up, there might be somewhere suitable. Robin wasn’t expecting anything, though. When they become adults, most folk don’t see the Fair Family, let alone integrate with them.

So it was that Peter sat by the stream one easy day. It was mild for the time of year, yet he was surprised to see mayflies rising from the water and flying up into the shafts of sunlight. Snowdrops, then primroses and Sow’s Bread burst from the ground as the birds’ chorus near drowned out the sound of the stream. Jack the Napper raised his hooded dark spires around and the fresh-skinned lizards ran over the stones too split to be used.

From the drowning pool next to the rapids where the wagtails hunted, Missus Lummas rose up and smiled at him.

‘Now then, Peter, we have work to do.’

Jonah Jones lives in Llantwit Major and has several short stories and poems published in various anthologies and magazines, together with stage and radio scripts produced and broadcast. He also writes and directs short films.

58

WANT TO READ MORE FROM OUR WORDSMITHS? Guinevere Clark Journals: Atlanta Review (2020), Blackbox Manifold (2021), Poetry Wales (2023), Lucent Dreaming (2024) Founde of Poetry Into Light Gareth Writer-Davies Cry Baby (Indigo Dreams, 2017), The Lover's Pinch (Arenig Press, 2018), The End (Arenig Press, 2019), and Wysg (Arenig Press, 2022) Carolyn Thomas Stories in Lipstick Eyebrows (Honno Press, 2023) and Painting the Beauty Queens Orange (Honno Press, 2021) George Sandifer-Smith Empty Trains (Broken Sleep Books, 2022) and Nights Travel at the Right Speed (Infinity Books UK, 2022) Sheila Jacob Spotlit Under Street Lamps (Yaffle Press, 2024) Catrin Mari Disabled Tales (Literary Magazine) www.disabledtales.co.uk Sue Regan ‘Falling Light, and Slow’ Diamond Twig Poem of the Month Diamond Twig Press Rebecca Roberts Author of ten novels.

Jonah Jones Writing published in various anthologies and magazines, together with stage and radio scripts produced and broadcast.

Sue Moules The Moth Box (Parthian Books, 2013) Angela Graham Sanctuary: There Must Be Somewhere (Seren Books, 2022). A City Burning (Seren Books, 2020) Star: poems for the Christmas Season (Culture And Democracy Press, 2024) Angela Arnold In|Between (Stairwell Books, 2023) Charly White A Collection of Wildflowers (2024) Arkbound UK M.R Smith Work included in Zines' such as Myth & Lore Zine and themed Zines from Coin Operated Press Barbara Hughes-Moore Her short stories have been published by Horror Scribes, Roath Writers and The Folks Catrin Lawrence Short fiction published by Gwyllion Magazine, and appeared in anthologies by Black Hare Press and Parthian Books Rosy Adams Short fiction in Queer Life, Queer Love (Muswell Press, 2021) and (un)common: anthology of new Welsh writing (Lucent Dreaming, 2024) Elizabeth Lockwood Waves of Stardust (Turquoise Quill Press, 2022) Rain and Leaves (Turquoise Quill Press, 2024) Ghosts of the Water (Turquoise Quill Press, 2025)

Perry Wyatt Three books published thus far with the most recent being The Burning Tower (2024, Cambria Press).

Her poetry has been published internationality.

Kornelia Uzbaniak Illustrations can be found at @paltry.dust on Instagram. She is also present on TikTok and Threads.

Kornelia is open for commissions and collaborations.

Submissions for our Winter 2025 Issue Open in November 2024

JOIN US ONLINE

These Pages Sing acknowledges the financial support of the Books Council of Wales and Creative Wales