Fiction

Marc Nash; Exege(ne)sis

October 1, 2017 — Leave a comment
Exege(ne)sis

In the beginning was the word and the word was God

In the beginning was the wor(l)d and the word/world was go(o)d

In the beginning was not the world, because God was supposed to have created it. Not in any procreative, progenerative way, since there was no conjoining of the sexes in reproduction, unless you buy into the male-female polarities of light/darkness, earth/sea, sky/ground.

The word or the world could not be good, since there was no other moral being yet extant to judge and pronounce upon it thus. If the Divinity is pronouncing his own work as good, it’s a little unbecomingly arrogant of such a numinous Being to do so. Blowing his own trumpet as it were and we all know where trumpets and the number seven can lead don’t we Jerichoans?

In similar vein there could not have been the word in the beginning, sine there was no one around to utter it (other than the Divinity uttering a ‘shezam’ or similar conjuration word). In certain Far Eastern theologies, there is a primordial sound, the moment of its first striking being the act of creation itself, from which all life and energies with their vibrations stem.

And God said, Let the earth bring the living soul after its kind; the beast and the thing moving itself and the wild animal of the earth after its kind; and it was so.

There is no capitalisation of ‘earth’ gainsaying the investing of gender in the manner of a Gaia and yet this is followed by an immediate polarity of the (higher) living soul and the (base) beast. ‘After its kind’ suggests the generations reproduced through sexual procreation and this is of course the (spare) bone of contention in The Garden Of Eden. 

The word ‘after’ has been interpreted as ‘according’, that is within its delineated phylum, genus and species type. Genetic groupings are demarcated, yet allowing for theological prohibitions on ‘pure’ and ‘unclean’ animals that seem to cross several classificatory elements and forms the basis of the Jews’ Kashrut dietary laws. They wouldn’t eat animals that seemed to diverge from recognised groups in no matter how superficial a manner.

‘The thing moving itself’ undermines its own theological dialectic. One interpretation has this being worms and other legless creatures crawling along the ground (the snake of course was not thus shaped until God ripped its legs away in Eden). Modern science also suggests the primary existence of single cell creatures, clustering together into slightly larger aggregates. So something that superficially resembled an eye, though of course lacked for a developed retina and cortical and synaptic brain to function as oracular, clumped together with some cells that provided a degree of locomotion across the ground. Incrementally in time, the aggregation grew in sophistication and the eye was able to link up to specialist cells to facilitate it to ‘see’, the brain and central nervous system wired up the muscles so that the animal could walk and the rest is Natural History.

But what of language? That first word? In the beginning was the word and the word was Gravity. G-Force.

Of course the first enunciated word was nothing as complex and intricate as ‘gravity’. Yet without gravity there would in all likelihood have been no first language, no opening gambit, no referential system at all. For as mankind evolved in among that confusing welter of sense experiences in his environment, there were a few things he noticed followed rigid patterns.

rain always fell down on their heads

mountains always pointed upwards

their spears and rocks would always eventually touch down on the ground

as would their urine (men only)

trees grew vertically

while their shed leaves tumbled back down to earth

birds flew higher than men’s heads

scorpions crawled at men’s feet

avalanches and waterfalls crashed deafeningly descendently

volcanoes belched their fire and smoke ascendantly

Ergo a brace of things man could stake his tongue with. Up was skywards and down was plunging towards their feet. From this they were able to extrapolate words such as here, there, right, left, near, far, under, over. Me and you as in a spatial configuration. Us and them. “My God good, your god no good”. Heaven and the abyss. They didn’t just admire mountains, now they scaled them through shared language enabling co-operation and teamwork and preparation of resources. Upwards ever upwards. Eventually they would tunnel and mine beneath the earth and quarry metals and powering fuels. And all thanks to gravity establishing a few regular ground rules.

In the beginning was the logos and the logos was G-d.

If the Greek word ‘logos’ means the unifying principle of the world, then it cannot truly be translated as ‘Word’. For words partition, categorise and define. Words undermine the monistic, the belief in the one, for they introduce and encourage relativism.

In the beginning was the end of the world. And the world was begun (conceived) and ended (divided and dissevered) by the word.

Sheelagh Russell-Brown; Time Was

October 1, 2017 — Leave a comment
Time Was

            A lilac bush still grows upon the spot, its roots dug deep into the rubble.  If you look closely, you’ll see some tiny cogs and wheels, some bits of gilt and glass.  Look closer still and fluttering in the breeze but pinned down by the stone are ivory pages, covered with words in crimson ink.  It seems this is not fertile soil, and yet the purple blossoms scent the air.     

            The purple blossoms scent the air where once the builders worked, placing stone on stone until a house grew from the ground, its roots deep in the soil.  They worked each day from rising sun until the sun had set, and yet they did not know for whom they worked.  Only that each Saturday there was their pay in envelopes of ivory with their names in crimson ink. 

            Stories grew up as well with each layer of stone that was laid.  Stories of its beginning and of its predicted end.  Of who had been the first to clear the spot, the first to build up a city round it.  Of why this little piece of barren land had since then stood empty all those years until the builders came there with their tools.  Of how a pile of stones had then appeared, a pile that seemed to grow no smaller till the last stone had been placed.

            But no one knew how long it had been there.  No one knew when it had begun.  They had no “once upon a time” with which to start their tales, nor any “happily ever after” for their endings.  The stories grew like the lilac bush whose first budding no one could recall.  As if the stones had waited in the earth for the first to fit their edges side by side, to fill the seams with caulking that would hold them all together, to make a tale that grew so seamlessly no one could see the builder in the end.  The stories piled upon each other as if digging down into the earth and reaching for the sky.  The days passed into nights and nights to days, but time stood still while the stories were being told.

            It grew tall as a tower.  A clock was placed upon its top. Then it was done.

            When it was done, they came.  The people who wished to live inside though no word had gone abroad outside the little corner of the town in which it had grown.  Grown like the lilac bush that suddenly appeared beside it in full spring bloom though it was almost winter.  Two people took the rooms that day, one to move in and one whose story awaited her leaving, and all the floors above stood empty.  Empty like hours waiting to be filled with inspiration. They were not to be let, it seemed, but just to stand as if in expectation.

            Two people came and took the rooms.  A woman with skin like ivory parchment, the veins beneath showing like crimson ink.  Her eyes, though wide and seeming open on the world seemed also not to see what was all about her, no flicker of awareness in them.  No sign of noticing until she was inside and sat herself at the desk that had suddenly appeared, growing from the floor as though rooted there.  There were some notebooks on the desk, a set of pens, a well of crimson ink.  No one knew just when they had appeared or who had put them there. She sat and then she wrote.  But the stories stayed inside the earth and floated in the sky that changed from day to night and then to day again.  They waited in the purple blossoms outside the glass.  The branches of the lilac bush tapped against the window above the desk as if asking for admission.  And still she wrote.  Her eyes were fixed upon the pages that filled the books, the books that then were set aside, another in their place, waiting for stories that would not come.  Only the names, the seeds of stories.

            She sat and wrote through all the seasons, the lilac tapping at the glass as blossoms and then leaves fell to the ground outside, as rain and sleet and snow traced paths upon the glass and winds rattled the panes within their frames.  And then the door stood open, and she was gone.  Some leaves of ivory rose upon the wind, with crimson tracings on them.

            A little man appeared a few days later, a little man round as an egg, whose spindly legs could hardly hold him as he toddled through the door.  He carried a clock in his chubby fingers, along with a bag of tiny tools for working with tiny gears and cogs.  Inside, some shelves were set, growing from the walls like lichen on a tree.  The windows had been shuttered, the only light from lamps set about and their reflection in the glass of all the clocks that were brought into the room and then were carried out again as men and women, and children too, would come and go and take their stories with them.  The lilac still tapped against the glass, asking for the shutters to be opened.  The shutters remained closed, the tapping competing with the sound of ticking and of chimes, of chains being pulled up, of wooden cuckoos calling to wooden mates.  Like the sound of a death watch beetle, it persisted in its pleading for admission.  Until the door stood open once again.  

            The birds made nests inside the branches, inside the cracks between the stones, above the clock set in the roof.  They lined the nests with bits of ivory paper, traces of crimson words upon the scraps.  They picked up tiny shining cogs and decorated the nests that sparkled in the sun with all their glitter.  And springs and summers, falls and winters passed, till loosened by the wind and rain, the stones that held the room within had fallen one by one.  The only sound the ticking of the death-watch, the scratching of the lilac branches against the glass.  The stories that rose upon the wind as it whispered among the stones.

*

Biography

After having taught at an international high school in the Czech Republic for seven years, Sheelagh Russell-Brown is now a lecturer in English literature and a writing tutor at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.  Her research interests are in nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and European literature, the portrayal of the Roma in art and literature, and the foregrounding of marginalized female roles in neo-Victorian literature.  She has been published in The Fem e-magazine, in Abridged poetry and art magazine, and in Tales from the Forest e-magazine, and will have a short story published by TSS in November of this year.  She has also won second prize in the first Irish Imbas Celtic Mythology Short Story Contest, and was shortlisted for the second Irish Imbas contest, as well as for the 2016 Fish Publishing Short Memoir Competition.  She is a contributor to Backstory e-magazine, to Understorey e-magazine, and to Historical Honey.

Mitchell King; The Fairy With The Turquoise Hair

October 1, 2017 — Leave a comment
The Fairy With The Turquoise Hair

Our father and I live in a house full of goggles. Goggles on the couch, the counter, the floor, the chair, goggles on the stairs. Our father purchases a new pair every week. Some are heat seeking. All are night vision. In his spare time he tinkers with magnets and forked willow branches. At night he takes these and walks along the cross-roads. He always finds water, he never finds the dead.

On the existence of Dreamed things after the Dreamer is deceased there is little scholastic work. There are reported cases of Dreamed jewelry lasting upwards to a hundred years after the Dreamer has passed, but that the thing has ceased to exist or that it has been lost to time is indeterminable. In Maine there is a woman with turquoise hair. The locals claim that she has lived in the same house for at least 60 years and has not aged a day over 35. She is a Living Dream.

“Do the hands look familiar to you?”

“It’s singular.”

“What?”

“It is the same hand every night. So it is the same hand just…repeated.”

“Do you recognize the hand?”

“No.”

“That’s strange.”

“Why?”

“Because I do.”

I left the table and looked out the window. It is spring and some of the hands are finally rotting. Butterflies are attracted by the smell.

*

Biography

Mitchell King is a runaway witch living in Kansas City. Someday he hopes to colonize the moon.

Diana Powell; Triptych/Collage/3 Maidens

October 1, 2017 — Leave a comment
Triptych/Collage/Three Maidens

Triptych – a set of three pictures or panels, usually hinged, so that the two wing panels fold over the larger central one.  Often used as an altarpiece.  O.E.D.

Collage… an art form in which compositions are made out of pieces of paper, cloth, photographs, and other miscellaneous objects, juxtaposed and pasted on a dry ground.  O.E.D.

Maiden… a young unmarried girl, especially when a virgin.  Three – Elin, Alice, Gwawr.

Elin:  Triptych.  We have one panel each.  It is hinged, but all the panels measure the same.   For we are the same – equal – though our stories are different.   We would not want one to have favour over the others.

 It will not be used as an altarpiece.  The vicar would spurn and shame it.  It is a story of love, earthly love; and of customs and beliefs that the Church has long worked hard to bury deep or drive away.

Alice:  three collages, one for each of us, done by each of us, telling our own particular story.  Collage – some think there is nothing to it, that it is a children’s game of sticking bits and bobs onto a piece of paper;  a schoolchild’s pastime, to hang on the wall around the classroom, for smirking parents to admire and claim.  Some think it doesn’t deserve the name of art.   And, true, we are not skilled painters, and we borrow the skills of others, and make use of what nature gives us – leaves, feathers, flowers;  an abundance of treasure left for us to forage and farm.    So, yes, we acknowledge a melange of talents and materials.  But we also assert that there is art in an idea, and the interpretation of a story.  A concept brought to life – that is what we have here.

And isn’t it so much better than a photograph, or picture?  For you can touch the rises and the depths, the substance, as if your fingers are wandering amongst it.  You can feel the texture and the shape, then reach down into the essence, as if you are entering the story of the picture. As if you are there…

 

Gwawr:  Maidens then, but maidens no longer.  No, not now, of course not now, after all these years gone by.  For it was a long time ago that it all began, in that past when we were young, and carefree, and summers lasted forever.   Now, we are neither one thing or another, lost in the age of in-between.   Longer in tooth, wider in girth, greyer in colour.  No longer those peachy girls who played and plotted and loved together.  But not yet there with the Old Women in the Square, dried up, spat out, bitter.

But we are still together – that much can be said, for sure.  Still three.   Three.  Three it always was, three it has always been, will ever be. Woven, linked, inseparable, entwined – call it what you will.  Three, for ‘happy ever after’…

 

Yet…

… things shared, held in common, amongst us, yes –  but also things different, both in the triptych, and in our lives. So themes are interwoven, yet parts stay separate;  stories are shared, but with secret chapters;  trusts are held close, then wilfully abandoned.

So…

… a photograph of a place at the centre of each panel – but each of somewhere different.  A valley, but a different valley – Grwyne-fechan, fawr, Ewyas.   A tree in each, its roots at the bottom, the branches stretching up and round, to twine throughout the whole picture.  But not the same tree – birch, oak, ash.

… words flowing in a fluent, scrolling script, but different words for each.

 Mementos, souvenirs, relics, kept for all this time, in boxes, drawers and cupboards.  Under the bed;  under the underwear;  tucked behind.  Hidden. Till now.  ‘Look at this!   And this!  Can you believe it?   Remember?’ Laid out, picked over, chosen.   Mine, yours, hers.  One for you, and you and you.  Two for you, three for you.  On and on and on.  This, that, the other.

Three beds.   Oat-straw;  leaves of mountain ash, mixed with the seeds of a spring fern;  mattress of maidenhair.  All the same size, all just as comfortable – no Goldilocks dilemma here.

Three seasons, one for each –  Spring, Summer, Autumn; colours tuned to each.   And in each, a different Spirit Night, Ysbrid Nos, when strange things happen, futures are revealed, and ghosts walk abroad.  Three Spirit nights, three festivals, three fires.  Three ways of knowing – rhamanta;  divination;  dewiniaeth.  And we chose to lift the veil ourselves – no need for witches or conjurors!  Ignoring what we were told by those who thought they knew better; the reverend in his pulpit;  the teacher in the school.   Our mothers and aunts in the kitchen… who had, we knew, done these things themselves when they were our age, all those years ago.  But, of course, they, like us, did not listen.

So…

 

… three stories.

Three loves.

Three collages.

One.  Two.  Three.

Let us look at Elin’s first.

 

Elin’s Collage.

A sliver of birch bark.   A dried flower – a yellow cowslip, chosen over a blushed May.  It could have been either.  Or both.   A sixteenth birthday card.

The words of Ruth.  Ruth, chapter one, verse sixteen.   Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee:  for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge:  thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.  As if I attend to the reverend and vicar, as if I believe in the Word.

 A valentine!  I have placed the card itself, still having it after all these years, kept in my box of treasures beneath the bed. A valentine he had made himself, even writing the poem; a verse of exquisite charm, the letters of his name wrought into it, so that I would know it was him, even though he shouldn’t say.  

The season is May – to show when we first stepped out together.  May Eve, the Spirit Night chosen for me.  Nos Calan Mai, the hours before May Day.  So, here are nature’s signs of that fulsome time of year. 

The colours are the greens and whites and pinks – the growth and the May blossom.  The puzzle of abundant hedgerows looking as if they have been kissed by winter again, while others are snagged with fairy jackets, made by the lambs pushing through them for pastures new.

What else?

A ribbon from the maypole we danced around the next day.   (Yes, I kept a strand of that, too!)

A spiral of dried apple-peel. 

A D drawn in silver glitter.

Mistletoe…tea leaves…  See!  Feel!

 

Alice’s.

These are my colours, dappled and speckled with contrasting hues.  A bright summer medley, with shades of midsummer flowers – the pink of the wild rose, and yellow for  honeysuckle tumbling over cottage walls.  Blue skies, fluffy cotton-wool clouds. (Real cotton-wool, of course).  It is a picture of the heart of the year.

 He had made me more than a valentine!  He had made me a love-spoon, the most intricate design, with hearts and keys and chains.  But I cannot put that on my collage – too large and too heavy – even if I had it…  So I have cut a picture, instead, and glued it in its place.

A random throw of sequins, standing for glow-worms, leading the eye to St. John’s favourite flower.  Yellow, again.

A ladder cunningly wrought from yarn, let down from a stencilled window.

Valerian, the cat’s sleep potion, dried, and powerless, with time.

A dice.  Yes, a real dice, fixed firmly in the centre, meaning  ‘a throw of the dice’;  one, two, three…six.   Six lads I could have had, six for me to choose from.  Six, who wanted me above all others – me, the prettiest girl in the valley, and all the Mountains round.  But I was the one who didn’t know which she wanted, who couldn’t decide and didn’t care. Eeny, meeny, miny, mo.   Or the flick of the wrist, a throw of the dice, pick this, that, or the other…that’s all it meant to me.

Gwawr.

Mine speaks of autumn, the time of All Hallows.   Hallowe’en.  Nos Galan Gaeaf…when he first stepped forward from the flames.  So it is coloured in the tints of the falling.  Oranges, reds, browns.   Leaves grace the corners, picked from the ground, blown by the giants’ breath.  An orange sycamore, yellow oak, red rowan,  against the black background – chosen for that darkest time of the year. The time of the spirits, coming back into the open, coming to play with our hearts, and wreak havoc with our souls.

Mine speaks of… But I won’t tell you more.   I will keep it secret till it is my turn to tell.

 

Elin.   That summer, when we had all turned sixteen…

Alice.  But it had started before the summer… it was in the air all that year.

Gwawr.   Yet surely it was Spring when it truly began…

Elin   Except we called it summer then – May Day, the first day of summer.  Calan Haf, Calan Mai.

So…that summer, spring, season …  Call it by any name you want.   I remember, we all remember.  We talk about it still. And have made this triptych for it.  One, two, three.  Like the stained glass window above the altar, shards and facets are stuck together, to make our picture story (not so different from an altarpiece, after all.)  A story of that time…of then.  Let us begin.

 

*

Biography

Diana Powell lives and writes in the far west of Wales. Her stories have featured in a number of competitions, including the 2014 PENfro (winner), 2016 Sean O’Faolain (long-list), and 2016 Cinnamon Prize (runner-up). They have also appeared in several print publications, including The Lonely Crowd and Crannog. She is currently working on a novella, due to be published in the Spring of next year.

Fiona Perry; Circumnavigation

October 1, 2017 — Leave a comment
Circumnavigation

“How much longer will I be allowed to stay here?” I asked myself before shooing away the question in favour of surveying the scene before me, savouring it like satisfying sips of sweet, hot tea. It was the well-organised, tidy bedroom of a new mother. A fully stocked change station rested against a wall and the air was laced with the carnal scents of breast milk and waxy cradle cap.

I could see my daughter, bathed in the bluish light of early dawn, sprawled across the bed, all postpartum plumpness and flushed cheeks. More mature and rounded than I remember her, she looked like a big brazen, unfurled summer flower. Her baby daughter lay nestled in a standing Moses basket, arms beautifully outstretched and bent at the elbow, fully surrendered to sleep. She was fascinating; stark white skin, mini aquiline nose and hair as black as rook feather. Our family blood was coursing luxuriantly through her minute veins. I cast my eyes over her long fingernails and the small patches of dry skin on her hands. Overdue. Reluctant to leave the sanctuary of a warm womb.

I heard the click, clap and whoosh of a boiler flicking on. Water trickled into pipes and moaned its way into concertina radiators, filling the room with dusty heat. The child’s legs jolted for a second before she squirmed and settled, chewing toothlessly at her fist. 

*

The electric element hissed as the potatoes boiled over, spilling snowy froth onto the stove top. I sighed as I turned off the ring, grabbed a dish cloth and mopped up the mess. I am not fit for this today. As I squeezed the sponge free of starchy sludge under the running tap, I fixed my gaze on Geraldine. She was sitting, staring open-mouthed at the wall mounted TV, a newspaper open in front of her on the table. She had been extravagantly ignoring me for the last twenty minutes. I strode over and turned off the TV before returning to the kitchen area. She began reading.

            I banged the fry pan on to the stove, dropped in a slice of lard and watched it turn from white solid into colourless liquid before adding sliced onion.

            Our usual cosy kitchen ritual, which involves my hovering over Geraldine and giving her lots of detailed instructions, had been disrupted because she had walked off, unceremoniously, as I was asking her if she could slice the onions thinner and into crescents rather than circles.

            “The Church is in some trouble,” she piped up, tilting her head towards the TV, referring to the last news article.

            “It’ll take more than a few bad apples to harm the Church,” I said draining the potatoes over the sink, “it will weather the storm alright.”

            “But it’s more than that, isn’t it?” she said, rubbing the back of her head in a small circular motion with her middle finger as if massaging the words out, “terrible crimes were covered up. Even now, those poor people continue to be abused by the Church’s denials.” Observing her closely, I thought, that barnet could use a hairbrush, she looks like she’s been dragged through a hedge backwards.

            “It’s not in our gift to judge these things. We trust in the Holy Spirit at work in the Church. It’s the best we can do,” I said, vigorously mashing the potatoes. I bashed the masher on the side of the saucepan to release the remnants of potato clinging to it and replaced the lid on the pot. I was momentarily distracted by a small twitch that had appeared on my upper cheek.

            Geraldine opened her mouth trout-like to respond but then seemed to think better of it. She drew a long, loud breath instead and changed the subject, “What’s the step ladder doing in the hall?”

            “Your father is going to have a look in the roof space when he comes home. There is a dripping sound above the spare room, even on dry days.”

            “I’m surprised you can hear anything over the racquet of the knitting machine.”

            “I hear it when I’m seaming,” I said, in an unintentionally shrill voice. The sound had been a source of irritation for a whole week and Lorcan still hadn’t made time yet to look into it.

            She turned her attention to the paper again.

            I began to slice a cabbage on the bench which divided the kitchen and dining room so I could take surreptitious looks at her. She had lost weight. Her long face was pale and blank, it depressed me. She wasn’t the vivacious, robust girl that left here after Christmas to return to University. Her shoulders were slightly rounded. Had they always been like that?

            It dawned on me that tertiary education was transforming my daughter in peculiar ways. Merely thinking about this caused a hot throbbing pain behind my eyes. It didn’t help that her ludicrous words from last night were also churning over in my head; “Well, I have a bit of news. I would like to drop out of Medicine and read History instead.” Just like that.  She said it in the same tone of voice a normal person might say, “I think I’ll have the Battenberg instead of the iced finger.” I knew we should never have let her study in England.

            Now she was even questioning her faith. I wanted to scream at her that life is not supposed to be easy. Every temporal problem is not easily solved. It’s is not a perfect institution but the Church is our only chance of salvation.

             None of this was to be discussed- yet. I had been given my orders by Lorcan before he left for work, “Say nothing. We’ll talk about it when I get home. Leave that child be,” he instructed, followed by something about ‘too tight a leash’ and ‘live her own life’.

            I hadn’t fully grasped it all. I had switched off while he was still talking, as I do, when he gets all high and mighty. 

            I placed the cabbage in a colander and gave it a good wash.

            This is the fear and hurt you face when you have an only child. All of your eggs are in one basket.

*

Biography

Fiona’s short stories and poetry have been published in The Irish Literary Review, Spontaneity Magazine, Into The Void, Dodging The Rain and Skylight47 amongst others. She grew up in Ireland but has lived most of her life in England and Australia. She currently lives near a volcano in New Zealand. Follow her on Twitter @Fionaperry17.

Kelly O’Brien

April 23, 2017 — Leave a comment

*

DNA

She remembers the sky was yellow as the sun set slow and low over suburbia. She sat at the kitchen table, the house growing dark around her, last bits of light filtering down through the hall from the glass-paned door. The tea on the table was cold.

Upstairs she could hear her brother moving through the rooms; the soft thumps of boxes on the floor, the low whine of wardrobes being opened and then closed indefinitely. She walked up the creaking stairs towards him. The carpet was a strange shade of brown, slightly bleached from the sun and patterned in a way that clung tightly to a time she had never lived in. It reminded her firmly that the house was most definitely not her own.

“How is it going in here?” she asked, reaching down to turn on the bedside lamp. He hadn’t noticed the darkness creeping in.

“Almost done.” He said, turning to look at her. In the yellow lamp-light she could see particles of dust floating through the air, years of dust her brother had raised by his stomping through the small upstairs of the small house.

She leaned against the door frame as he reached up to the top shelf of the press and pulled down a pile of towels. He dropped them onto the bed and held one up to the light.

“I think I can see you through this, it’s been washed that many times.”

She exhaled a laugh and reached out to feel the threadbare towel. “Bin?” she asked.

“Bin.” He agreed, dumping them into an already-full bin liner.

“Good luck getting that down the stairs.”

He grinned at her quick and bright and he was suddenly seventeen again. “What are you talking about? I’m a master.”

She shook her head and moved across the landing, checking the empty rooms. The smell was the same, slightly musty, like the windows were never really opened, and slightly sweet, like powdered make-up.

She opened the drawers of the dresser in the box room, making her way down towards the floor. In the last one she found a hairbrush she had used as a child. There were still hairs stuck between the thistles and she pulled one out, considering it. She wondered if she should feel something but all she felt was a strange sort of detachment from this piece of DNA that used to be a part of herself. She let the hair go and closed the drawer, walking into the next room and dropping the brush into the bin bag.

“Is that yours?” Her brother asked, glancing over at her.

“No. It’s nothing.”

He didn’t reply, picking up one of the full bin-bags so that she couldn’t see his face. “I’m going to start bringing these out to the car.”

She nodded, walking over to the window where the sun was dipping beneath the rooves of houses that stretched out row upon row. In the distance there was smoke rising up and drifting into the lowering dusk.

As a child she had played down the back of the garden, behind the tall foliage so she was hidden away, out of sight, out of mind. Granny would call them for dinner and they would run up the garden path, tumbling over one another like baby animals dying to be fed.

Time has strange ways of moving and in that movement she felt its waves rush all over her and she was neither here nor there, a child nor an adult but somewhere so inevitably in-between. This was not home anymore. In the evenings after dinner they would lie on the floor on front of the television until they were bleary-eyed and ready for bed. She felt bleary-eyed now as the top of the sky turned purple. She wondered where they all went, scattered like seeds in different parts, or like ashes. They had never been tied by blood and that’s what runs thickest of all, she thought, watching her brother on the street below, loading up the car. She ran her finger along the edge of the windowsill, picking up dust. That’s what used-to-be too. At least she wasn’t alone, feeling like she left her residue everywhere she went. It was a messy business.

When the car was packed they stood in the purple darkness. In the empty hallway she felt displaced, disconnected. She had been a child here. They had been children here. There were once heads on pillows and bare feet down the hallway and piles of laundry so high they would topple over onto the carpet and the folding would begin again. It didn’t seem as though it had ever happened, as though any of it was real. In the dark hall she could barely see the threshold between her and the kitchen, one room blended into the other.

“Ready?”, he asked her. He was still there, the single thing in her life that confirmed who she had once been, that her life had been anything other than what it was right now. She looked up at him, his face blurred in the darkness. “Yes.”

They closed the door, double-locking it for safe-keeping. In the car the back seats were loaded with bags but they stopped off at a dump, throwing them into the skip, where the old baggage looked like everyone else’s old baggage. When the car was empty, her brother pushed the seats back into place so it looked like nothing had ever been there and then they drove.

In the morning they were far away from the suburbs, out near the sea where she felt like she could breathe. It was early and her brother was in bed, the air still cool as the day dawned over the sand dunes. She stepped out onto the deck with two mugs of tea, handing one to Granny and sitting down beside her. The sky was yellow as the sun rose and she thought about what it meant to come home.

*

Biography

Kelly O’Brien is a third-year undergraduate in Trinity College Dublin and is studying English.

Marie Mac Sweeney

April 23, 2017 — Leave a comment

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Rations.

Here’s that dream again.  I’m mounting those polished steps.  I’m skating along the refectory floor.  I eye the tables, food the nuns and boarders have left behind, entire slices of bread, an uneaten sausage, the gooey tops of hard boiled egg, oceans of cold toast.  Soon I am at the other end of the dining area, moving towards a glass panelled door into the school.  The arrangement is odd, our having to pass through the dining hall on the way from the cloakroom to our classrooms – but that’s how it is in this building that has grown, from one large old house into the renowned establishment known as St Nennoc’s Secondary School for Girls.  Nennoc was a virgin of course, and all the nuns embrace that particular abstinence, but they don’t go without their food.  You wouldn’t expect them to, would you?  The ache of an empty stomach!  Too much torment on top of all those other deprivations.

 

I should have eaten the food.  It was there, for the taking.  I’d need to be quick, of course, and covert, but I should have taken the food. The odd fact is that Sister Benedict organised the long-term loan of a cello for me.  That made it possible for me to remain a member of the school orchestra for five years.  I played Brahms, Mozart and Schubert, often on a groaning stomach, but no one ever offered me food.  Maybe I should have asked for the food. Why did I not plead for food for my empty belly and my struggling mind?

 

My dream trails after each morsel.  The kitchen.  There is a bin there, made of white enamel.  The discarded food crowds into it and remains until Adam comes.  It goes with him to the pig yard at the far side of town.  Those pigs grow fat on my uneaten food.  In my dream I am waving my arms about, beating them off for the last delicious morsel.  One animal rams me so hard I fall into their muck.  Sister Immaculata holds out a hand and pulls me out, but she is laughing. I smack her full on the face.

 

Brightness comes from a high slit in the wall. I try to understand the geometrical pattern before I realize it is composed of bars.  A man opens a door, jabs a slice of bread and a mug of watery tea towards me.  I am acutely aware of the famine in his brown eyes. There is only a blade’s width between his breath and mine.  I fiddle with my Child of Mary medal until he retreats, locking the door.
“How do you plead?”  The voice is stormy, accusatory.

“Hungry, sir.”

Light from a stained glass window spills across the judge’s flushed face.   I trace a jade green beam until it targets his nose.  He hisses with anger.

“You’re a thief, girl, is that not so?”  He is chewing gum.

I believe the whole truth should be told only in the last extremity.  We are not there yet.  “Only from a pig,” I explain.  “But not even from her ‘cos she upended me.”

His scorching voice sears the courtroom.

“I see. A pig.” And as an aside to Sister Immaculata who is sitting in the front row with seven companion sisters – “this ‘girl’ – he holds the word out as if on a pair of disinfected tongs – “this ‘girl’ is calling you a pig.”

My tummy is rumbling so much I cannot contradict him.  As I watch the judge toss the chewing gum around in his mouth I begin to salivate.  The sisters share some chocolate biscuits between them and I moan.  A woman at the back of the crowded court opens a wrapped sandwich and I shout out.  Soon I am in a holding cell.  It is brighter than the gaol, and a bit warmer.

 

That noise.  That boisterous chatter.  It filters towards me through a narrow pipe.  It is the jury.

“Sure, isn’t the poor child hungry?”  That sounds like an old lady.

“A cheeky hussy!  Did you hear the way she spoke to the judge?”  He is elderly, full of his own importance.  More bluster.  I hear crisp packets crinkle, the crisps collapse into mouthfuls of mushy fried potato.

“Look at this.  See here, look at this.”

A rustling newspaper.

“There’s a report here.   One in four children goes to school or to bed hungry.  See, it’s all here.”  His voice rises.  This one sounds young and eager to persuade.

“She assaulted a nun.”  Ponderous, judgemental.

“But she was hungry.”

“That was yesterday.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Yesterday.”

“You have to understand that the report was referring to ….”

There is a clumsy silence.  The restless breathing of twelve people surrounds me. They are older than I am and well nourished.

Soon the jury chairman declares his authority.   “I’d like to wind this one up soon,” he suggests.  “After all, it’s almost time for lunch.”  He sniggers.  Several voices agree.

“That report our young friend has mentioned – that is for today,” he continues.  “But the prisoner before us tried to steal food yesterday. I repeat yesterday. We have to judge her according to the date and facts of the case.  I say she is guilty.”

“And she assaulted a nun”.

“She was hungry.”

“She assaulted a nun.”

“She was planning to steal from the convent.”

“She could have asked for bread.”

“She was afraid to ask for bread.”  The young man brings his fist hard down on the table.  “And she shouldn’t have to ask. Her parents shouldn’t have to ask.  Her father works.  Her mother looks after four children.  Her family should have a wage adequate to their needs. They should be able to properly feed themselves.”

“An adequate wage,” echoes the old lady, but the other voices are draining away.  I want to shout back at all of them, but I’m still asleep.  I dream me a rasher of bacon and two slices of fried bread.    

*

Biography

Marie MacSweeney was born in Dublin of Kerry parents. She writes poetry and short stories, and also had two radio plays produced by RTE. Published in several journals and anthologies, she is a winner of many awards for her short stories and poems, including the Francis MacManus Short Story Award, The Bookwise Short Story Award, the Phizzfest Poetry Award, David Burland Award and the Kells Poetry Award. Two poetry chapbooks were published by Lapwing. These are ‘Mother Cecily’s Music Room’ (2005) and ‘Flying During the Hours of Darkness’ (2009). The latter also includes her translation of the great ‘grief poem’ Caoineadh Airt Úi Laoghaire. Marie has also published ‘Our Ordinary World and other Stories’ and ‘Letters from a Recalcitrant Woman’. An E-book, containing poems and stories, ‘Cooking for Galileo’ is her most recent offering. She has broadcast many radio scripts and written essays for the Historical & Archaeological journals of both Meath and Kerry. She lives in Drogheda by the Boyne.

 

 

 

Deirdre Sullivan

April 23, 2017 — Leave a comment

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PINNIPED

Water’s not for drinking, it’s for living in. For living in. Land’s for being awkward. Mating, molting. Waiting till a coming threat has passed. It is, at best a temporary haven. Huddle on it like a gang of bears and then go back.

You don’t sense when he sees you.

You had always assumed that there was something in you, that would sense it. The dull throb in your blubber for a shark, the hub-bub in your gut when storms approach. The body nature gave you can sense danger. It always had. It always did before. But looking back, you don’t remember anything but snuggling in a pile. The warmth of necks, the soft gape of a stomach flat on stones. Unfurl from the blanket of your body. Stretch out foreign limbs, and miss your whiskers. How can something sense things without whiskers? And maybe that was your mistake.

It doesn’t have much weight. This thing you’re in. It doesn’t have the heft. It can’t survive. It’s cold and you climb back. Pull who you are back over you. But it was there. You stretched it. It was seen. And that’s enough.

They don’t do courtship displays, these things. They wait and steal the pieces of your body you slough off sometimes to stretch in sun. The water’s life. The land is just for mating, danger. Smelling. You do not need to smell things underwater. It’s salt and life and warmth and depth and blood. The tangy tastes make nostril breath redundant.

You dove that day, you emptied half your lungs to climb down deep inside the haven hearth of ocean. Your flattened heart was steady going home. The welcome dip of entering a place that you belong to, that belongs to you.

Of coming back.

You think of it sometimes. On cotton stuffed with feathers. Listening to breath and blinking eyes. You pant to calm you down. It’s all too much. The part of you that made you yours is hidden. Somewhere in the house, it’s folded up. It isn’t very big. You are a female, small and compact. Round. You miss your fins, the front ones and the back. What you have now is slower, more specific. He follows you, and eyes you as you move. He took you home. As though you were a shell, a fish, a bottle. He taught you to perform tricks and tasks. Social and personal. Your captor keeps you busy. Sometimes you show him teeth. He thinks you’re smiling.

Near-sighted in dim light, you did not see him. Fingers out to grab the meat of you. And that was the beginning. You didn’t know. You heard no tales of this beneath the ocean. Land’s another place away from Shore. The ones who disappear are eaten up. If you return, a welcome without question. This thing you know but you can’t find a way from here to there. To where you need to be. And it has been so long. Since you felt whole.

You call to them sometimes from in the kitchen. Your warble voice shapes proper ocean tongue. Not flaccid codes for things you do or want. He does not like your language and he quiets you with eyes and grunts and hands. Eyes fill ocean water in the night. It pools but it is not enough to claim you. You need more meat. You need it on your bones. To calm and soothe. To claim you, happy, home.

*

Biography

Deirdre Sullivan is a young adult writer. Her short story collection, Tangleweed and Brine (Fairytale retellings) will be released in September of this year, and her previous work has been shortlisted for the CBI award, the BGEIBA, and the EU prize for literature. Her short fiction has previously been published in Banshee, The Irish Times (online) and The Galway Review.

Colin Watts

April 23, 2017 — Leave a comment

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Hoarfrost

I remember telling you I was getting set in my ways. ‘Too much of this,’ I said, ‘and not enough of that. We should go on a journey.’

‘I’ll follow you to the ends of the earth,’ you said. ‘I’ll follow in your footsteps as if you were famous.’

‘I am famous,’ I said, ‘but only among two or three people.’

‘That’s enough for me,’ you said.

‘I’ll look after you,’ I said.

‘Thank you,’ you said and we set off.

We headed north, using a compass that came free in a packet of cornflakes.

‘How will we know when we get there?’ I asked.

‘I’ll know,’ you said.

You wore your jungle hat and your flower festival wellies. I wore my survival kit. You looked like a garden in summer. I looked like one in winter.

By the time we got to the edge of the city it had started to snow.

‘Now I can follow properly in your footsteps,’ you said.

We came to a pinewood, with trees planted so close and rising so high and straight, that nothing grew between them. Normally you can hear birdsong and the wind whispering high up and far away. That day, all we could hear was our own footsteps, crunching on dead pine needles. It grew dark as we walked deeper into the wood and the snow piled up on the canopy above. We started to sing The Teddy Bears’ Picnic, but our voices leaked into the ground, so we sunk into silence. I wanted you to hold my hand, but the trees made us walk in single file.

Suddenly they were flashing by us, as if we were flying through the wood. Up in the canopy, ice-maidens were singing, though the birds stayed silent. Then we were outside, the wood flying off, shaking itself like a wet dog, showering us in a flurry of snow. We watched it disappear over the horizon, hurtling through a black and white rainbow, leaving in its wake a plume of scarlet smoke. The snow fell away, leaving us the wind, a meadow thick with hoarfrost, and low clouds hurtling by.

We were alone in the meadow, except for a massive pink sofa. I helped you up. The sofa was warm and dry.

‘If you look after me, you said, who’ll look after you?’

We slept for a time like cats, our limbs curled around each other. You purred in your sleep. When the light began to decay we knew we had to move on. My compass whirled as I held it out, then twisted my hand until it pointed me due north across the frozen meadow. You trod in the slightly famous footsteps I made in the hoarfrost. The compass gave off a steady incandescence, enough to guide us once the light had gone. To keep us going we plucked and ate the hoarfrost. It tasted of whatever we wanted it to. You had caviar and champagne; I had bacon sandwiches and tea. We never tired and never felt the cold.

After many days, or was it weeks? we found ourselves back at the sofa.

‘Do you think this is the ends of the earth?’ you asked.

‘This may be one of them,’ I said. ‘I’m sure there are many others. Up there.’ I pointed to the clouds. ‘Over there.’ I waved my arms across the meadow. ‘Back the way we came. You should know,’ I said. ‘You said you would know when we got there.’

‘I know,’ you said. ‘But I wanted to make sure you did too.’

I realised I didn’t believe you, and that was when you started to fade. I tried to hold you, but you became ever more insubstantial, my hands clutching at air.

‘Who will look after you now?’ you asked, as you flattened to the merest outline. Then there was nothing left of you but a whisper of champagne breath, condensing into ice fragments and carried away on the wind.

*

Biography

Colin is seventy three, married, with grown up children and has lived in Liverpool for many years. Publications include two poetry collections in print and short stories on-line and in magazines and anthologies. He’s had plays performed in and around Liverpool.

He cycles everywhere and cultivates a quarter of an allotment. He is a long-standing member of the Dead Good Poets Society and co-runs a regular Story Night at The Bluecoat Arts Centre in Liverpool.

Facebook: Colin Watts

Twitter: Colin Watts @FentimanW

Website: http://www.colinwatts.net

 

 

Erica Goodman

January 22, 2017 — 4 Comments

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Letters to an unfinished, unsatisfying love

I still spend so much of my time thinking of how we could be together, imagining how our lives could meld into each other. I imagine coming home to you, to lie in bed beside you each night, and how we would get to know each other. I imagine bringing you across the ocean to my homeland, driving you around to see the still lakes and green pines, to sweat in the summer heat and play board games while drinking wine with my family. I imagine having you all to myself, all of your affection, and your attention.

I think about the beginnings of our own family and what our child would look like. A baby in a bear coat, tucked into a pram, as we take her on chilly walks through the park, near the wild and unpredictable sea. I think she would be a beautiful baby girl. And you would love her until your heart exploded. I would become second best, as she would be your new favourite. But that’s okay – because you were always a bit distant from me anyways. I would realize, painfully, that I never quite had you all to myself, that I yearned for a child only to be closer to you – and that it never quite works out that way.

Regardless, she would make me feel close to you, in a way that you and I alone could never do. I would keep her close as a way to hold on to you. I would give her everything I wanted, but couldn’t get, from you. I wanted a rock, a container, someone to hold me – physically and spiritually – in allowing me to express wholeheartedly, ME. Perhaps you have been doing just that the entire time. I have thrown so much at you – keeping secrets about my past, avoiding confronting you when I was upset, threatening suicide, panic attacks from overwhelming anxiety that I could not explain to you.  Am I expecting too much? Or am I entitled to more? Do I deserve more? Maybe the things that I want are what you can’t give me. Maybe the things that I want are not what I need. Whatever it is, you have undeniably helped me to grow.

I will contemplate over and over again what it is that I want and will still be unsure. In my head and in my heart, I have never been more confused. You won’t give me what I really crave – the affection, the attention. Yet I cannot get enough of you. This in between state of ours, our cycle of being close and then distant, pulling away and then coming together, is possibly what I relish in. I want to feel the passion, the pain of not being able to separate myself from you – but I want you to feel it too – and be in it with me. I want us to be together, as you yell at me how you love me, push me down to keep me from leaving. Make it difficult, make it messy. Let your emotions fight for me.

I don’t know if I’m ready for you. Ready to be settled, stable and easy, with you. Are we only holding on because it’s easy? Or because we can lie to each other and to ourselves and keep it easy? Each time you think we are in a good place, a happy place, I feel unhappy, ready to cause sabotage. I need your reassurance that you are happy with me. I need it constantly. I need it harshly. Remind me of my own self-worth. Stop your niceties and throw me in the gutter. Then pick me back up again and tell me that you love me. That you’ll always be there for me. And I will continue to sacrifice my life for you, believing that I am in the right place.

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Biography

At heart, Erica is a traveller, a yogi and an artist without a medium. Her life isn’t defined by boundaries. That is, not by what work she does, or what country she lives in. She has always loved to write, and it draws itself to her when she needs deep expression. We don’t know where in the world she is now… a good chance not in Canada where she is from. Hopefully she is somewhere walking in Big Nature, practicing how to love in this world, and continuing her mission to express her discoveries to the rest of us.