Uncanny, Collapse: Chapter 1

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WARWICK UNCANNY: Undergraduate Literary and Creative Magazine Volume 10, Issue 1, 2023 CREATIVE EDITION © 2023 Warwick Uncanny Warwick Uncanny takes Non-Exclusive Rights for all included works. All rights revert to their respective authors and artists upon publication.

No part of this publication is to be resold, reproduced, or repurposed without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Warwick Uncanny will not be held legally responsible for any occurrence of plagiarism committed by any of its contributors.

We reserve the right to omit work of any contributor suspected to have committed unethical or unlawful action.

Team Editor-in-Chief Chloe Peratikou Managing Editor Allaya Rasul Deputy Editors Rose Raju Thomas & Thom Lea Sub-Editors Tom Gray & Bahirah Sawan Assistant Editors Bella Hucknall, Aliza Nini, Saqib Iqbal, Charis Jackson, Isabelle Nathan, Emma Baker Marketing and Publicity Co-Ordinators Rhea Panwar & Emma Hawes Website: www.warwickuncanny.wixsite.com Instagram: @warwickuncanny Twitter: @warwickuncanny Facebook: Warwick Uncanny

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Cover design and contents design by Rhea Panwar & Emma Hawes `

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Contents: Editors’ Forword

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Collapse

By Tijen Mustafa

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You Must Go to Parties

By Grace Cleary

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Cut Me In Two

By Eugenia Perozo Paoli

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Baby

By Eli Langfere

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Might Reach Forty

By Joseph Hamilton

20

Losing Game

By Amelie Chadwick

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I Can’t Hold You Together Anymore

By Ollie Jones

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Cutting the Sickle

By Daniels Dūna

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Secondary Anxiety

By Evelyn Gower

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Rebirthing Collapse

By Amrita Tewari

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Link / QR code for video: https://youtu.be/u9m4yDylKhY

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You Must Go to Parties

After Alex Dimitrov All the parties you spent trying to say the right thing, complimenting and half-hugging and asking about the boyfriend or the ex.

The nights you wanted to curl up in your best friend’s bed and have her wake you up snoring, be annoyed and drift back to half-sleep. Wake up cramped and comforted with no need to send a message about how lovely the company was or the food or the place or the drinks.

You must go to parties, make an effort to be pleasant and funny.

Who’s to say what will happen, mid-twenties, when your best friend marries the boy she cries over now but is ultimately good and there is a small child in her bed to wake her, cramped with worry?

Where is comfort then?

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You Must Go to Parties

Come back to the parties and find no-one, acquaintances vanished into their own comfortable suburbia.

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Cut Me in Two

Believe your eyes reader, it is me. Heidi Klum. International supermodel.

Television host. Producer. All around, beautiful blonde bombshell with a body to kill for. Writing to you from beyond the grave, as some of you may suspect; I am here to tell you about what really happened. Now, if you love those movies where the pretty blonde girl screams, and the ugly masked man stabs her to death, and you see the blood squirting and it tickles something a little twisted

inside you, then you might not want to read my story. Or if you love when Netflix goes through a lengthy eight-episode arc just to retell the most gruesome details of a serial killer and what he did to girls’ dead bodies, then let me save you some time and implore you to look away. This gore is all my own.

For those of you who are still here, let me start the story on the night everything changed. Halloween 2022. This should ring a bell as I made headlines when, once again, I overcame my body. I must say, looking back, I felt incredible in that sweaty, slimy, seven-foot worm costume. Laying down on the red carpet, overshadowing my husband, looking ravishingly cylindrical, I thought: I am the winner. Why would anyone try to compete with me? Who else could barter with their body like I did with mine all those years that led to that triumphant night?

And it was that body of marble and magic that carried me into the

basement of the Moxy Hotel on the Lower East Side. Amongst the stars, I was myself. I hopped and bopped next to Questlove and, even now, existing in the dark, I am really very proud of that.

Between the bopping, from inside my refuge, I started having these involuntary flashbacks to my Victoria Secret days. I saw those legs of mine that went for miles and the brunette hair that I ditched and that smile. You know the one. There wasn’t anywhere else I could’ve been or would’ve wanted to be.

These days, feminists will say I was a product or whatever. Walking on that runway I felt power. My hips in the flow of a sexy pendulum, making men sway their heads to their rhythm. So reliable. Undeniable. It was about power then 8

Cut Me in Two

and it is about power now. I see it, from the DJ booth looking down at everyone with their crazy costumes. Three headed deities poking people’s eyes out.

Massive wigs that nobody can see past. They want to be this body. They want to compete. But that night and every night I have been the winner, that is just a fact. I have made sure of that.

You may be wondering, who cares Heidi? We get it, you were rich and

famous and beautiful and in love, you had it all. And that is what I thought too, I really did. But then, something odd happened. As it does in any good story.

I went out into the crowd, happy, dancing and jumping, and they were disgusted by it. Repulsed. Can you believe it? These people, the people I invited, were looking down at me. And, you know what was the weirdest thing? I loved it. I danced harder. I jumped and felt my costume lift me into the moist, soil-filled heavens and set me back down with the mere mortals that surrounded me. I watched their faces contorting fake smiles. Some people even left! I made them leave! That rush of power I used to get on the runway that kept me fed for so many years was rushing through my gills like it never had before. This feral ecstasy was cut short by my husband. They never stay fun for long, do they?— men. They must feel so close to me. Like they know me. He took me aside and whispered,

“Babe, time to take it off, no?”

Ever the compliant wife, I shed my skin and allowed everyone the safety of my near nakedness in a sparkly see-through bodysuit. The safety of a glowingly transparent woman. It was alright, I had made my discovery.

Later that night, I laid on the side of my naked body in my king-sized duck-feather mattress. My husband ran his fingers up and down my body with love.

“You’re so beautiful.”

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Cut Me in Two

Was there a tone of relief in his voice? I tried to move on from the thought, but I dreamt of how we first met. His eyes a pair of apple seeds amongst all the others in that audience.

Now at this point in my tale, you might be confused. Where are the guns?

Where is the secret mafia boss I ran off with? The jet skis, Heidi, where are the

jet skis on the Hudson River that took you into the night? I promise you this is all relevant. Although, I hope some of you might already see where this is going. Maybe the models. They get me.

A few days later I had a photoshoot for Givenchy. I went and sat in the chair, and they did that thing you see in the movies. The sticky blobs under your eyes and the face masks and hair masks and neck masks. And there she was. The girl next door, the girl your parents love, and your parents hate, the poster on your bedroom wall. Don’t you get it reader? I was everything.

There I was, against the white backdrop with a gold dress and those gold locks, and I started doing my work. I smiled and smized and opened my eyes wide and then made them small. I twirled my body how I knew they liked it and in ways I knew they would. And then, in the middle of my performance, the

thoughts from the other night came back. I craved the high I had felt. Control is a funny thing. You never know if you have it, but you never stop wanting it.

So, I did all the wrong things. I hunched my back and made ugly faces and stuck my tongue out. I wanted to look fat and bald and have a long hair sticking out of a crusty mole on my chin. Just to know what would happen. I was a mad scientist and would do anything to recreate the results of my accidental Halloween experiment. I braced for it. For the shrieks that would pierce my ears when the director called me a foolish bitch and cursed me for wasting his time. But, when he finally looked up from his camera and we locked eyes in a second that seemed to last the lifetime of my eternal body, he said, 10

Cut Me in Two

“Heidi, sweetie, this is amazing, look at you! Give me more! Don’t stop darling!”

It didn’t matter what I did, he loved it. Every inch of my cursed beauty and of my attempts to rid myself of it. Once again, I had something everyone else wanted and chased their entire lives. I gave up and let muscle memory take over as my thoughts trailed away. Surely there was something I could do to

make them dislike me. Shave my head? Androgynous queen, the headlines would say. Say the wrong thing? No, I'm blonde and beautiful, my words are like cotton candy. Sweet, and quick to disappear. No, this body of mine would not do for my search. For what I really wanted to do. Which was to bleed, to feel, be human. So, as a good scientist does, I went back to the beginning. To sit under the same tree, so that sweet red apple would fall on my head. As I stood there, in the spotlight of yet another thin scarfed, open chested, beautifully metrosexual European photographer with barely anything to cover me, I thought of the costume at the back of my closet. Waiting for me. Calling my name like mermaids who eat sailors for an afternoon snack. I imagined looking at myself in the mirror with that hideous mask and smiling coyly, truthfully. I faced the wall, turned my head towards Sven and bit my finger as I gave the camera a smirk.

“Heidi, amazing! You look like you have a dirty secret! Men love that.”

Oh, Sven. They think they do. They think they do.

After that, I thought about the past and realised that none of it mattered. The perfumes, the catwalks, the red lace, the boys, the sliding hands, my impenetrable smile, felt like a distant memory that some other body had felt and touched. And it was such a delicious feeling! There was no other option for me than to escape. That may sound somber, reader, but my option is an option. So, in my last week in this old shell of mine, I gave away gladly the remaining 11

Cut Me in Two

crumbs of myself. I posted pictures my fans would love, of me eating rainbowcolored bowls of fruit that I held in front of my uncovered rock-hard abs. I let my husband make love to me in all the ways he always imagined he would when he married international supermodel Heidi Klum. I let my kids tug at my sleeves this way and that and didn’t yell at them when they called for Mommy for the sixth time in twenty seconds. And I was happy to be a conscious martyr

for a week because I knew, deep down in the ground, what was in store for me.

But, enough of sad sappy old me. Now we get to the fun part. In the dead of night, I jumped into my closet like an Olympic diver to get my shiny new body. While everyone dreamt the dead hours away, I hopped inside and watched the world I had once known disappear. The costume and my body talked high above the clouds of the Earth, where nobody would hear them, and agreed to live as one. Because, even in a fictional story, who would refuse Heidi Klum’s exceptional, money making, heartbreaking, showstopping body? It was a sacrifice I was more than happy to make. I began to I understand that day why men liked to destroy pretty things.

I stood in front of the mirror and watched my old shell slip away and morph into something so much greater. The narrowing of my frame, the disappearance of my feet. My organs becoming one in my new test-tube shape.

The eternal legs and toned ass and blonde hair had gone forever but not that smile. That smile, which had peered out on Halloween and terrified everyone.

Smiling baby. Now only one centimetre wide and ten centimetres long, I had a whole new perspective. I saw the red bottoms of enormous heels that used to carry the old body around. Only now, they seemed more like blood washed mountains, fresh from sacrificial rituals. I could also see the specks of coke my husband thought I didn’t know about, snowballs of fun and violence and escape.

If only it had been that easy for me.

You might expect for me to have felt a smidge of sadness, reader. After all, Heidi Klum’s supermodel body had been the bearer of so many gifts. Fame 12

Cut Me in Two

and fortune and, perhaps, a certain kind of love. But God I couldn’t have cared less. Because what is fame and fortune if to get there, you had to leave a trail of breadcrumbs made from your limbs and now you can’t feel anything? I could have tried to slit my wrists, saved myself all this trouble, but I am certain Heidi Klum’s skin could have never ruptured. Not while other people were watching.

And this had been so much more fun anyways! So much less gloomy! This tiny

house I lived in now, that I would spend the rest of my days in, felt so solid. The knowledge that if someone stepped on me, I would just disappear, tickled me. I was like a rock and the tight density of myself made salty tears of joy slide down my mucus covered body.

Before I knew it, there I was on the high street of my fancy neighbourhood of the Big Apple squirming away at four in the morning. Never to return. Who would have thought you could feel this free without limbs! You know that feeling when everything sucks and you just want to leave your body, reader? When the whole arms and legs and face thing just gets too much, and you want a break from it all? Well, I did it! And it felt every bit as liberating as you can imagine! And when some random guy saw that he almost stepped on me, and I heard him say “Fuck, ew,” and I saw the relief on his face? My wormy body drifted happily across the city until I found myself at the park.

I felt the instinct of my new biology kick in and was overcome with an unfamiliar delight at the smell of fresh cut grass and soil. I lifted the top part of myself, where my grin still shone through, and plunged into the depths. Down I went into the wetness, into the richness of the dirt that breeds life. As I felt my body absorb the surrounding water droplets, I thought about how much women resembled soil. Fertile grounds to sink your roots into. But I was a worm! And those were worries of my old human life!

When curiosity gets the better of me, I emerge out of my new home.

Initially, I wanted to relish in everyone's guesses of what happened to the supermodel, knowing nobody would ever get it right. It was on every billboard 13

Cut Me in Two

in the city. ‘MODEL MISSING.’ ‘BIG REWARD.’ Blah blah blah. Some said I was dead in a ditch, others that I was being eaten by jellyfish at the bottom of the ocean somewhere. But I told you in the beginning of my tale and I will tell it to you again: I did this to myself. To this day, I wonder if anyone ever realised the costume was missing and thought it strange. I hope someone did and thought that maybe I lived in the underworld now—and that maybe I liked it.

And yes, I’m alone now, and life will be short and sweet. But when I think of my old life and my old body it all smells of cleaning supplies and bleach and brings me tremendous sadness. In the soil, I always smell of possibility. This body of mine made me free and it kept me fed. It made me real.

P.S.: The real Heidi Klum is safe and sound somewhere having a great time. I think.

Author’s Note: As a child of the internet age, I’ve grown up being witness to how the infinite lenses of iPhone cameras have affected the women and girls of my generation.

I’ve watched how the hyperawareness of being perceived has taken us away

from our bodies. The obsession with beauty, containing both reverence and spite towards women, has collapsed our sense of self. In writing this story, I wanted to explore the implications of this collapse. What does it do to our autonomy?

Why does the way we present ourselves seem to carry so much meaning in asserting this autonomy? Moreover, how do we recover from collapse? I thought there was no better place to explore these themes than with the image of female celebrity. The internet’s reaction to Heidi Klum’s worm costume in October 2022 collapsed the idea that everybody had of her, and this story seeks to put a mirror up to the discomfort that society feels when beautiful women become real.

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Cut Me in Two

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Baby

He is sick, your son. He sickened, and he infected your daughter, too. That is what happens when he violates, he makes the girls feel as filthy as his plague.

The water at this time of year is thick; the liminal of frozen and unfrozen. On the south edge of the lake is a short pier. Despite resting on stilts, it is the same low height as the shore of mud-coloured sand. In heavy rain, an inch of water swims darkly above the planks. A chain railing hangs, always still.

Dawn is here; her morning is blue as melancholy, mourning the dark familiarity of night. Her lilac mist perforates the air like long-forgotten bullet holes, light poking through, kissing retreating shadows goodbye. Fog conceals the water’s northern edge. Trees gather around, gnarled roots curling into rocks and mud, branches reaching to protect water from sky. Trunks, wide and old, conceal me.

My walk to the end of the pier traces ancient tracks, scarring rotten timber for future steps. The soft thump of my footprints resounds over the lake's silence, drumming a sleepy heartbeat into damp wood.

Do you think about him? Do you wish he was a toddler still, red cheeks that flushed with life? Do you think of the pulse in his neck, that you gazed at while lying with your baby in new, morning light? How easy now, to watch that weakening pulse seep from a wound. Does he live in your mind as a separate entity? Is he but a shadow of your baby? So you must only turn off the light to delete his darkness. Only the smell of your warm milk, the down of silken hair, his warmth inhaled into your lungs.

I stand at the end of the pier. Echoes of my footsteps ring across the water's quiet surface despite my stillness, his skeleton curled at my feet, foetal; we are statues above the black water. His skull is grey, hairless. It decays in an inertia of collapse. His skin rotted past leather, and moth-eaten. Bones lay bare now, no

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Baby

flesh or clothes simulate decency. He decays, but he never got to age, unlike my ageing, at his intervention.

Do you feel shame for your creation? His forehead, balmy with sleep, under the press of your lips. Did it hurt, when he tore you, ripped from your insides? The sweetness of your womb. You need to convince yourself: little girls have made bunny ears with their fingers. Lamp light has cast a shadow monster on the wall.

But I believe that your mind has a crack in this wall, in the room that hides your son's shadow, and that crack bleeds words. He is sick, my son. He sickened, and he infected my daughter, too.

Above him now I stand as a god, as he was the god that stood above me, and struck me with the thunder of enforced worship. All the things I could do to him; he is as defenceless as I was.

I think in desecration.

Stamping the skull, grinding bones to dust with my heel. Kicking the body into the water. The delicious splash it would make as it broke the surface of thin ice and sunk into black depths. But I can’t pollute the lake, for every time I swim, he would touch me. The nymphs in the weeds who brush elbows with silken feathered beasts and small-scaled things would taste his sickly body every time they breathed water through their pale gills. I know how he tastes, and I will not share that with my precious ones. I do not damage this place. I will not learn hurt from him.

Defile, debase. Who would this impact? Him? No - he is gone. Only one person remains that this could hurt. You. His mother. Defile, would it hurt you?

Debase, do you want to hurt him as I used to? Defile, debase, for the child he

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Baby

wouldn't let me be, defile, debase, for the sister that you gave him, defile, debase, for the baby he once was.

I am left with this thing called your son. Collect him. If you don’t, I understand; I will burn him. For you. But his ashes will not scatter to breathe these sweet breezes. We don't want a reminder of his heavy breathing, the one that hitched in his throat. His first breath waited to scare you; his thousandth breath still tries to scare me. Your fear hung from the silence after he was born, blue and anticipating the cry. Did you know that that sudden wail, that shot relief through you sharper than the snapping of a neck, should have been his last? Would you go back now, and smother the baby while you had the chance? Could I ask that of you?

No. Instead, I tend to other things. Repairing the pier’s wood, planting flowers and vegetables and berries in the grass, touching trees and asking of their day. I will light a fire in this hearth, and his presence will be gone, less than a shadow on the wall.

The younger, sister skeleton is here too. She is smaller and older than he. She waits for you, buried beneath the berry bushes. The fruits will be saved for the birds, the deer, the bugs, and a pie, for you, if you ever visit. Maybe you will taste his hurt as we did.

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Might Reach Forty

Take the slip road to Clevedon as 40 turns 41 Later now so the reds strike more like yellow He said “Don’t Look at The Evening Sun” When the corridors of light are far too narrow The tarmac melts shrubs and so melts the verges The dry wood spits, goading passers-by But we keep the heat stored for speeches and verses And so beauty’s last laugh is a warning sign A masonry oven burns with ease fully fledged In waves the marine lake seems to breathe and jive From Clifton, the distance, too far from the bridge And our sunspots grow, the end never enters mind I can see how viewing is everything, not the real thing And here he remarks on the summer’s muted fear Are we now within the last blissful evening?

I know we won’t sit as close to the shore next year.

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Losing Game

the girl is not dying yet she is living and she gasps/grasps at her reflection in the tides in the bark in the earth, sees it tie her bramble-thick hair in knots and strangle her, blinks, drinks the prophecy of it and leaves it to rot in her stomach. atrophying. she might be atrophying, she isn't sure how long it takes to decay but the place she finds is sick and burying itself prematurely, an infant in love/death's teeth. time sits and watches but doesn't listen so she screams in/out

the silence and it tastes victorious of freedom not kingdom not queendom not dominant not knots in hair, suffocating. a flicker of movement and now time is moving, touching her, eyes and tongue open, she breathes in and drowns - no, remembers drowning. the end of this is a miltonese painting but she's too young to be there yet so she feels it a future a fate pressing at her temples like fingers or a headache and keeps it out cloying at her, clawing. it demands an entrance she won't give, it wasn't her who did this, it was the only other being the only other love the only other self, oh, she had forgotten. she can't hear her because this is the past and because all she can say is nothing but she watches herself swallow with someone else's lungs watches herself marvel at the way water has a gravity, a force watches herself through ice. she used to wear this dress the one she will die in, it's beautiful but this isn't her, wasn't her, wasting away, she has spent so long being this mirror image, glassy insubstantial glowing suspended

like lilies. like gossamer. the not-her held flowers tight-fisted loving as she froze drowned died to death/life. it happened so long ago. it's happening again. time shivers and lets go of her and she has to be her, now. her self. herself. ah. the gap closes. *

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(EXT. DAY, the sky's edges well-worn with countless handlings, brush strokes almost visible.)

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Losing Game

[the girl, who has been unnamed for as long as she's existed, looks at another girl, her beloved soul-half, lying misremembered in a white-sheeted not-grave and feels the claws of guilt sink into the bone of a shoulder blade and climb over to grin into her ear. she can hear its teeth, the presence of them.] girl: you died you drowned you died i kissed the water out of your lungs you died you drowned i drowned you

lover: i'm alive you brought me back girl: does this make you a ghost lover: i wish i was something so permanent girl: what? lover (decaying): [the girl is afraid, afraid she shuts her eyes and the blackening mould recedes like a flood played in reverse] girl: don't leave me lover: you pushed me girl (trying so hard not to remember): i held you lover: you held me under girl: i thought we were pretending [the world shifts. the girl is the one in the bed, her lover looks at her with

an eyeless smile.] lover: we were always pretending [girl wakes.] *

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it's not enough, she realises, suddenly, horribly. none of this has been enough. all the

suffering 24

Losing Game

the change the pushing through, all of it could be endless - not without an end, but without the right one. the epiphany hurts her, sours her she breathes and she falls

to her knees (from the distance, no longer visible. the watching creatures move slowly back into the dark) and

aches for what she doesn't yet know if she's lost.

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I Can’t Hold You Together Anymore

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Cutting the Sickle

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Cutting the Sickle

2022, July 11th

The crooked clock hand stops moving. The ceaseless ticks that had for so long marked my days as an apartment-bound pensioner have gone into oblivion.

I feel lost; I had grown so accustomed to the way it moved with my dwindling days. How it followed me into every lonesome birthday, New Year's Day, and everyday dinner – time seemed like a silent companion that would never leave my side. A defeated sigh escapes my lips, it’s time to retire for the night and head to bed. There’s no use in staying here with this dreadful silence.

I try to get up, but my legs cave in and I stagger against the bookshelf.

My hands frantically clutch a dozen family photographs and yellow books – before I inevitably fall alongside a dozen twirling pages. All that my eyes can

gather are a few faded chapters of my long life, shimmers of light in a ceaseless waterfall of memory before I feel myself drifting into a deep dark depth. So far from myself. So far from the old grandfather clock that had accompanied me.

1951, September 13th

Autumn leaves, wrinkled and torn, flutter in front of me. They travel alone, some yellow and some orange, into vast fields of tall grass – in sharp contrast against the distant pine forests that cut into the setting sun. Youth returns to me as if it had never left, that childlike feeling of boundless potential fills my heart. The body that I had neglected and broken, poisoned and worn out, feels clean again. I turn my head and look at my old countryside home, its foundations of stone unspoiled by moss and its glistening wooden panels still in place.

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Cutting the Sickle

Everything from the barn to the fence posts firmly stands, untouched by the violent tempests that were soon to topple them. My cheeks burn with a smile, I still remember every detail of this place. The charred circle on the counter that my mother burnt by accident, the crack on the ceiling that my uncle made when drunk, and the uneven wooden veranda that steamed up like a sauna. I even remember the story of how my great-grandfather built the house

with his brother. They travelled to St. Petersburg with nothing but lint in their pockets, hundreds of miles from their homeland, and returned with enough money to buy this land and build a new home. What a thing to do, especially back then! How I missed being here, how I missed daydreaming and watching the setting sun!

I turn my head back to the view. A cold feverish chill seeps into my small

bones. On the winding dirt track, an olive-green truck inhales the clean countryside air and exhales a black mist, it slowly bumps and trudges along toward me – towards us. I run inside; it all goes by in a blur. An olive-green cap adorned by a red star, brash yelling in a language I can’t understand, and a repeated sequence of questions. I’m grabbed aside, a burning pressure hitting the back of my eyes. This dreadful day... why did I have to return to this dreadful day? They ask me the same question repeatedly. I stand there frozen.

Minutes pass, and a man lights a papirosa and finishes it whilst inspecting me. He slowly reaches into his leather pouch and takes out a pistol, the light reflecting off the barrel forces me to close my eyes and retract my gaze. I squint, but no tears squeeze out – they've seemingly dried up. Another flash hits my eyes, a stinging ring rolls through my ears. Beside my feet, on the floorboard, there is now a small hole. Two more abruptly appear. More yelling,

more questions, more shots – I can hardly focus on what they are saying. From all the chaos and all the noise, I finally make out that they’re asking about my nephew. A final crackle echoes throughout the small room, a flash thunders all 30

Cutting the Sickle

around me and I’m lost in the abyss of the bullet holes that line the shadows of my legs.

I’m neither here nor there. The cold desperate shock that shook my hands and twisted my stomach had swallowed me whole. Those men, the wraiths that plowed the country with sharpened sickles, were there that day for our nephew and our home. It was all very formal; everything was signed to his name, so he was on the register. He was to be deported, alongside tens of thousands, so that the state could take everything. Collective farms, and kolkhozes, disposed of all private property. We had become starved slaves on our own soil, my childhood disappeared alongside the world that my great-grandparents built... just like a train bound for nowhere.

1964, August 11th

A sweltering cloud of steam, a high-pitch whistle, and a beige-yellow passenger wagon behind me. My hands tremble as I check and puncture the last few tickets handed to me, I frantically look to the front – there is no movement just yet. I let another two men on and hop onboard, just before the heavy metal wheels start to slowly move, I finally get on and shut the door. A colleague of mine called Ojārs, just a year older than me, taps me on the shoulder and laughs.

We are the two laziest ticket inspectors that have ever graced these tracks; this must be the best job I’ve ever had.

“Village disco, two days – you have to come,” he adamantly tells me.

“I don’t know, I planned to go visit the city around then.”

“Come on! I’ll bring the accordion; I even have someone that I want to introduce to you. It’ll be worth it, I’m telling you.”

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Cutting the Sickle

“I’ll only come because you’re leaving for school, I couldn’t care less for anyone there.”

“Good man,” he mumbles whilst leaning on the dusty metal wall – his head now turned to the forests that pass us outside. After a few hundred meters and a sharp exhale, he turns back to me. “You’ll think I’m crazy when I’ll tell you this.”

“Tell me what?”

“I’m already tired of this... and I’ve just started.”

“I don’t follow, tired of what?”

“This, everything. The whole thing is so tiresome, everything we’re made to do is so tiresome. Even trying to shove samogonka down my throat has become

work. All this pretending, all those directives, it’s as if they have no point – that they’ll just lead into nothing.”

“Stay quiet, please. You’re talking as if you’re already fifty,” I joke.

“Don’t laugh, you’ll think the same thing. Just you wait, when you’re sitting in your state-granted apartment because you have kids you never really wanted with a wife you never really loved, you’ll remember, and I won’t be there to laugh.”

“Yeah, yeah – what do you even mean by not being here?”

He slyly glances around and happily whispers, “West Germany, and then America.”

I cough up an almost hysterical laugh from the bottom of my lungs whilst he looks down with simmering anger. I breathlessly murmur, “The only place you’re going is the sanatorium.”

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Cutting the Sickle

“Better than your idea of a life. See me, I’m a free spirit whilst you’re not. You think about your pockets, I think about flight. If it were up to me, people with your mentality would be in sanatoriums,” he pouts.

“It was only a joke.”

“Your joke was stupid,” he states whilst turning his head back to the window – imagining something I could never hope to.

The memory, the tracks we were on, and the blurred greenery outside, scatter into obscurity. He was right, although he didn’t even make it past the borders of his home municipality after graduating, I did end up living like he said I would and without him there to laugh at me. Ojārs went away young, he never even reached the age of fifty, unlike the poet Vācietis with whom he shares a name, because of some undiagnosed fault in his heart. He introduced

me to the woman that would become my wife, Malda Vītole... Malda – how slowly that fell apart. She looked at me with such hatred in her final days, never saying a word. I knew what she was thinking about as she lay there dying of lung cancer in her old age: the day that it all caught up with me. I can still recall her distinct silence, the same one that returned in her cruel last days.

1987, March 5th

The static of a stuttering radio drones on in the background, trying to sing a few cheerful songs but to no avail. The city hums beyond the confines of our open windows. Her deeply set stern eyes follow me, almost beady and black to my muddled and hungover mind, wherever I move to find comfort. Nothing loosens her cold grip on me. Guilt is inescapable, it weighs down my already weathered joints and tarred lungs.

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Cutting the Sickle

I finally break and mutter, “So, don’t say anything. Just keep quiet, I’m sure that will solve everything – the same thing as always. Maybe speak?”

She doesn't say a word, her head turns to the wooden apartment door.

I keep speaking, “I’m sorry. I know what I did and I’m sorry, I want to talk.

Can’t we just talk? Why do we have to do this, why do we have to keep doing this? You’re not achieving anything with this act.”

It’s as if she doesn't have a pulse.

“You’ll just bottle this up, I know you. You’ll start shouting and yelling and giving me divorce threats like every other time, why hold back now? Why can’t we just get it over with? Why wait, why drag this out?!”

Nothing. More silence. This is unbearable.

“We’re not living like this, it’s all rotten. All of this – what we have – is just falling apart. You think there will be a family after we’re done? You think we’ve raised our children in any proper way? Why do we pretend? You know where this is going, we all know where this is going.”

She gently shakes her head.

“At least you heard me,” I bitterly huff whilst taking out a cigarette. For a moment, the thin grey smoke bites into my eyes, dampening them for just a small moment – enough to make me seem human.

The grief of collapse sometimes blinds us to the fact that it is a miracle; the ashes of old forests can grow trees more bountiful and beautiful than the ones that stood before them. My daughter is a testament to that fact, so much good came from her, despite how much I let her and everyone else down. I can

feel hope when I look at her in old beige photographs – a feeling that once ran through me like an endless current on a few fateful nights at height of the Atmoda. Everything we loved, from our children to the vast wilderness that 34

Cutting the Sickle

we’re so deeply tied to, triumphed against all odds. It was a rushing tide that no bullet or lie could withstand, a destiny that saved us from the oncoming twilight of our land and people. Perhaps I wasn’t the father or husband I should have been, perhaps the family I had was crumbling partly thanks to me, but for a moment I felt like I had done something – that I helped fight the system I once blindly followed. If only Ojārs would’ve been there, he would have joined me

so enthusiastically.

1991, January 15th

I rest my back against a haybale, specks of yellow dust covering me as my bones soak in the orange glow of a makeshift fire. On the cobbled city

streets, a thin layer of snow begins to melt. The winds howl through the barricades that stretch through our ancient capital, slithering past rusty trucks and graffitied brick barriers, changing direction every couple of minutes.

Around me are faces just like mine, all holding the same solemn expression despite age, or looks, in the warmth of our shared flame. It was only a night ago when the occupying forces had started another round of terror against us, treading on human life as it has for fifty decades of military occupation.

In the masses of people, people who have decided to take the future into their own hands, I see the extraordinary. Students, farmers, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, police officers, and foresters – hundreds of thousands more of those that I linked hands with just a year ago in the Baltic Way. Two million people in an unbroken chain across three sprawling countries. We have done everything we could have and more, in these closing days we will see get to

meet that elusive concept that we call ‘freedom’. Through these long frightening nights, we will vanquish the leather boots that stamp down on us. This crimson

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Cutting the Sickle

union, born from genocide and fueled by oppression, will collapse into the very nothingness that it has taken so much inspiration from.

There is no greater privilege than to stake your life and own well-being for the future of your children, I learned that all too late.

2004, August 2nd

Silhouettes of pine forests stand against the slowly setting sun, green and shadowy against the horizon of violet and yellow. I know now that I am nearing the end of my long journey. White dust spits out from underneath the wheels of my jeep, settling into the tall overgrown grass that sways beside the winding road, as my blurred eyes inspect every passing tree and boulder. The car stops,

and we step outside. The soft green blades drag against my tanned wrinkled arms, worn out and heavy.

There she stands, hidden and obscured by wines and thick brambles, nearly fallen apart. Weathered by unforgiving time – but still standing. Stolen by cruel strangers – but still standing. Smeared and cut out of all atlases – but still standing. Her rough beauty doesn't scare me and neither does her heavy

past; this will forever be my home.

My legs slowly wander off until I come to sit on an old mass of stones.

My daughter follows in my footsteps.

“So much I could’ve done,” I admit.

“You were only a child; you couldn’t have done anything.”

“I’m not talking about this place; I’m talking about everything after it. So much more that I could’ve done and given. I’ve done too little too late; you know this the best.”

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Cutting the Sickle

“You’ve done enough, you don’t have to mull over things that have been – it's not healthy. Let it go.”

“Maybe you’re right,” I say underneath a silent exhale.

“Mhm.” “I’m going to sign this place to your name.”

“But you just got it, this is your childhood home.”

“It is, and I want you to have it.”

I look out, past the place where I once stared out into the dense pine forests and sprawling fields as a warm smile rises on my face. Behind me, I hear the echoes of my mother’s voice calling us to dinner. The shuffling of branches, the singing of birds, and the mooing of cattle ring all around me – their melody

is still there if I listen hard enough. The grace of my parents and their world is long gone but sometimes, if the mood is just right and the wind quiet enough, you can hear them through the long veil of eternity – hear them as if they were still here. To remember how beautiful and welcoming this melancholic ruin once was - it is my life’s greatest privilege, enough to fill my heart with joy.

The warm winds go through me. I’m ready to meet them again.

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38

Secondary Anxiety

I’m not sure I’ll ever miss getting ready for the day in a freezing cold house and having a bit of dry toast to try and not feel so sick at the thought of those gates of skipped maths lessons in the toilets my feet on the seat to stop my head of year seeing them chewing gum under the table sticking to 30 denier tights, sheer with a grease mark the shape of someone’s undeveloped bite like drinking wine at a friend's house for the first time sickly sweet summer fruits rose teeth on the screw top because your hands are sweaty you're laughing, until you're having a panic attack but you'll still do it again because what are you without these weekends?

I’m making wishes on stars and candles and numbers on the clock which probably won't come true but it's the only way I feel brave enough to try to change this life I have.

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40

Rebirthing Collapse

I I stand here looking at the familiar four identical walls.

The same walls that have stared back at me since I was born.

My world is these walls; they push me into place – a place I have constructed myself.

As I stare at the eroding cement sandwiched between the even-layered chestnut bricks, I feel the comfort of the smooth uniformity hugging me, refusing to let me go.

I have never sought to go beyond, comfortable with my place at the bottom of the structure.

They grow taller every day. As high as the eye can see.

An illusion of openness, but there is only so much I can explore.

Retracing the same steps, making the same turns, repeating the same cycle; knowing what is to come without looking.

That is what it means to be in the security of these four walls.

II I notice cracks littering the sturdy bricks, Growing as I do.

My index finger traces the cool surface, feeling the now uneven texture of the rustic bricks, Chestnut chunks chipping under my gentle touch.

Years pass.

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Rebirthing Collapse

Suddenly, the structure around me collapses. Without warning and all at once.

The cement flakes into dust, blinding me – Breaking down the old me. Collapsing the structure that soldered my life together.

I stand in the centre of chaos with no direction, rubbing my eyes as spots dance across my vision, Greeted with the sight of thick jagged clumps as dust swirls around me – How to act in the midst of this collapse?

III The structures around me have collapsed.

The anxiety rushes to my brain, Painting my cheeks until they resemble succulent strawberries – the kind you only find in summer.

I reach down to grasp a bitesize fragment of brick. I hurl my arm backwards with all the strength I can muster and throw it into the nothingness.

A few seconds later I hear the muffled thud of the brick landing.

Without moving, I lean forward to find the fragment, but it is too far gone.

My mind is buzzing with questions: What is this place?

Where am I? How do I react to this collapse?

Tentatively, I inch forward.

My eyes dart from brick to brick, staring, worried they will retaliate against my meagre movements.

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Rebirthing Collapse

Nothing happens.

I stand in silence apprehensively.

Nothing happens.

“Hello?”

Nothing happens.

I take another step forward. And another. And another.

I am walking now.

As I move forward, I feel sharp chunks grazing my exposed ankles, but I do not care.

I need to carve my own pathway – So, I pick up the pace.

Daring to be yourself is challenging in the face of a collapsed structure, But my time has come: I am ready.

I am running into the nothingness now.

It is time to birth something out of this collapse.

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