Curio (An Excerpt) 

Fog.

It was a bit like Fog. Or at least, this is what she assumed. She had never actually seen fog. Joseph had described it to her before, once. He would often ‘accidentally’ reveal new words to her when she talked to him about her dreams.

“It’s a weather phenomenon. It’s very heavy and hangs quite low in the air, reducing visibility.”

“Like clouds falling from the sky?” she had chirped.

Joseph had sighed. ‘Sky’ and ‘Clouds’ were a few of the words he had let slip during their sessions. Strictly speaking, Pleasance wasn’t supposed to know about The Outworld. Her purpose lay beyond that, or so she was constantly told by the Wardens of the Sanctum. Pleasance had still longed to see a ‘Picture’ of the sky (another word harvested from Pleasance’s stubborn curiosity). But of course, pictures of anything from the Outworld were forbidden. The only pictures Pleasance had were the ones she saw while she slept, and they were always the same.

“Yes. Like clouds falling from the sky,” Joseph confirmed for her.

He always had a very strange look when he spoke of these things. Pleasance observed this on a day that she had probably overstepped her limit of questions.

She did so intentionally.

His eyes became almost long and seemed as though they did not look at anything. Sad, he looked very sad.

It was probably because he wasn’t supposed to answer her questions, but often did.

Or maybe he wanted to see pictures too. Life at the Sanctum was awfully dull.

In any case, what she saw right now was fog. Or at least that’s what it felt like. Could fog be a feeling like Happy or Hungry? She couldn’t really be sure if she was seeing this ‘fog’ because she knew for a fact that her eyes were closed.

…

“It is time to wake up, Pleasance.”

She had actually been awake for a while. She had learned to stay motionless if she wanted to stay awake during ‘sleeping hours’. If NaNa detected any movement that didn’t cohere with proper REM sleep she stuck you with a sedative. She was quite unapologetic about it too.

“It is time to wake up, Pleasance.” Pleasance continued her act, breathing evenly with her eyes closed. “It is time to wake up, Pleasance.”

In the beginning, she felt sorry for NaNa. The only things that made her real were the quarters she was ‘programmed’ to oversee. That was before the fifth time she had stuck 7 year old Pleasance with her arsenal of substances for refusing to go to sleep. She wasn’t so sympathetic after that.

“Programmed” she remembered Joseph explaining. “It means NaNa has… a pattern built into it so it can carry out tasks to help the department. Like making sure you eat your vegetables.” Pleasance had glared at the small pad on her cell wall that served as one of NaNa’s physical conduits. That strange mechanical arm of hers was always lurking somewhere too.

“Why doesn’t she have a face?” she had asked, Joseph had laughed at this, it was one of the few times she had seen him do so.

“It’s… She’s not human Pleasance. But she was designed by humans. Think of her as a kind of puzzle.”

Pleasance had done a variety of puzzles at the Sanctum. She rather enjoyed them.

“It’s time to wake up, Pleasance.”

However, NaNa was a significant exception. She remained still.

“Preparing to administer adrenaline dose…”

At this, Pleasance sat bolt upright, all smiles.

“Good morning NaNa! Are you feeling well?”

“My systems are operating at 97.4%.”

“What about the other 2.6%, are they feeling well?”

“Any complaints regarding my performance of duties should be logged with the Administrator’s Circle.” Pleasance shifted out of her small bed..

“That’s not what I meant. I asked are you feeling well?”

“Wellness implies the human sensation of feeling emotions. I cannot answer your question.”

“So you are not well?”

“I cannot answer your question”

“In that case I hope you feel better.”

“Feeling better implies the human sensation of feeling emotions. I cannot comply.”

“You are funny, NaNa.”

“Funny implies the human…” Pleasance mouthed NaNas response along with her as her closet revealed itself from the always seamless wall. She began to dress for therapy. This was her usual morning spar with NaNa, the real fun would start later.

Joseph had promised her a new puzzle today. And afterwards she would have questions he probably wouldn’t be allowed to answer.

*

Biography

Aisling Lynch is a Daydreaming Enthusiast with a penchant for nonsense in all its forms. Sometimes it’s coherent enough to be written down, sometimes it’s better off left in her head.

The Forest 

The forest looked the same as always as Meredith approached it; monstrous and towering and far too green.

The quickest way between neighbouring villages was through these trees but everyone laboured instead on the long cobblestoned way around, picking over rain-slick stone on wet days and ignoring the dry shelter the trees offered.

In the late days of a hot summer, berries grew fat on the woodland bushes, ripening till they burst against the ground for the birds, untouched by human hands.  In the winter, the thick dry trunks offered a bounty of firewood to the little frozen town, but no-one would cross over into the thickets to take any despite their blue fingers and chattering teeth.

She had been terrified of these trees as a girl, staying far away with the rest of the children. You couldn’t look at the trees too long, the town elders said, because the forest would look back, and then it would find you and take you into the trees and you’d never come home.

Mother had said bad children were taken by the Forest. Children who didn’t say their prayers and were wilful and wild.

She stood on the border of the Forest now, wobbly on too-thin legs as she stared up at the trees.

Her nightgown was a blotched grey, stained and stinking of sweat under the yellowing armpits. It grazed the dew-wet grass as she idled by the old trunks, toes curling hesitantly against the wet grass.

She still felt heavy with the fever that had overrun her for the last two weeks, too-hot and too-cold and so so tired. Her hair stuck thin and greasy to her skull, skin nearly baggy on its own skeleton.

The forest loomed overhead, green and brown and speckled with life and it made her feel so small, as it always had.

She took a step into the forest.

Then another.

The baby stirred in her arms. He was as sweaty and weak as she was, flushed with fever and refusing to feed. Only three weeks born and he’d only the energy to fret and fuss quietly, mouth too dry to issue a cry that made any sound. Her heart ached for him.

Elder Morton said he’d be dead by dawn. That she should do the kind thing and wrap his little head in a soft feather-down till he passed, like she had to with the others that came before him.

The trees looked just like trees as she passed, mossy and dotted with mushrooms and birds’ nests. The normality of it all made her skin crawl, and she clutched the bundle tighter against her chest. There was no monster greater than the one your mind could conjure when left to its own devices.

A rustle from the left had her eyes darting like a frightened deer, half-expecting to see all the lost children from her childhood and from generations before, still young and wild, dancing barefoot to pagan songs.

  Instead a red-furred squirrel scuttled up the broad trunk of an ancient oak,  a nut clasped triumphantly in its cheek-pouch.

Meredith forced a breath that went in too cold and came out too warm, and continued deeper into the woods.

After an age of walking, the two travellers reached a clearing where Meredith bent, setting the little body down on a half-rotten tree stump. A caterpillar wriggled by, undeterred as the baby stirred at the sudden absence of his mother, tiny fingers twitching weakly for anything to hold.

 For a moment she reconsidered in a surge of panic. She should be in front of the hearth with her child, letting him pass peacefully. The thought of a forest-taken little boy eternally dancing barefoot among the trees had seemed like hope a few hours before, and now it felt like it was going to choke her.

What had she done? What if she was wrong? What if they found out she had done this?

Meredith had half-reached to him again before she steeled herself, and her hands curled into fists and dropped back to rest against her filthy nightgown. 

“This is my boy.” She said to no-one in particular, and the first time she said it nothing came out, so she licked her lips and forced herself to croak  it again. She sounded weak and reedy, and she hated it.

“Please be kind.”

Wiping her eyes, she straightened, took a deep breath and tottered away on unsteady legs.

The woods were quiet behind her.

*

Biography

Jennifer (Jen) Nolan is aspiring writer in her mid- 20’s. She hails from County Kildare, where she writes lots of fantasy-based nonsense while she studies Animal Care.

The Waltz of the Flowers 

   Whenever she told the story later, Kalini added in all things she should have noticed at the time.

   The first warning was tapping when she played her muse-music. It was louder during The Waltz of the Flowers than Ravi Shankar, but Tchaikovsky wasn’t for everyone. When the muse took her, and she jotted down images before they floated away, the tapping sounded like the beating of tiny wings. There would have to be thousands, and what would be that small and that active in Sussex in the autumn? The butterflies had gone, hummingbirds were absurd. It was possible that her enforced solitude in her hard-won cottage had caused her to imagine fairies. But her book deadline was encroaching and the hummingbirds and fairies had to be captured on the blank pages.  She considered mentioning it in the Hand and Flower, in case it meant problems with her new/old cottage, with the Victorian plumbing, or the Tudor beams or the possibly Renaissance wiring. But she hadn’t lived down the ‘Cosmopolitan Incident’ yet. Larry-the-landlord still said  there, so much better than that flowery muck” every time he handed over her glass of cider. Nine weeks later.

   The second sign was a murmur when she watched TV, almost like someone was repeating the dialogue. It was loudest during Gardener’s World, and non-existent during Question Time. But her closest neighbour was 500m away and Mr Post only listened to The Archers. This time, she called in Ethel-the-electrician, who drank two cups of strong black tea and stared at a samosa, then poked at the TV and talked about echoes in an old house and people from the city who might not be used to that. As a parting shot, she peered at the green shoots of crocus that were pushing their way up along the freshly scrubbed path, and said “they won’t last long, soil’s too acid. Most people don’t bother, tidier that way.”

   Kalini took her camera for a proper explore around Lower Seedscombe that weekend. She’d fallen in love four months before with the polished pump outside the grocers, the thatched roofs and the immaculate rows of window-boxes. Swathes of colour and almost total quiet, perfect writing atmosphere. Kalini hoped Ethel had meant she was growing the wrong type of flower, as she zoomed in on a tub of daffodils. The light glanced off a very green leaf, she poked at petals and pinched leaves. All the flowers were artifical. Not an insect to be seen or a bird to be heard, and not what she’d expected from the countryside.

   When golden sticky fluid started dripping down the walls, Kalini went by herself into the attic to investigate. As she opened the hatch, the buzzing boomed over her like a helicopter. She poked her head through, afraid the plumbing was about to explode, and wondering how she would explain that in the post-office. The floor and beams were coated in sticky white and yellow gunk, and the air was thick with stripy, fuzzy, possessive pollinators. She slammed the hatch shut, rested her head against the cool wooden surface for a few minutes, then edged the corner down. Still bee-infested.

  Kalini thought of all her acquaintances in the village and what they would do, breathed in slowly and fetched her stereo and Tchaikovsky CD and a sun-faded Encyclopedia Brittanica.

   “Right, ” she said, because the insects were listening and she had to start confidently. “There are 900 cells in a bee’s brain.” She had wanted to experience nature.

   The village got used to Kalini wandering around with a bee escort. Larry learnt to make beehives, Mr Post listened to Gardener’s Question Time, Ethel planted lavender. Kalini’s honey was sweet and moreish and won awards. And everywhere she went, the villager’s newly-planted flowers bloomed.

*

Biography

Anita Goveas is British-Asian, based in London, and fueled by strong coffee and paneer jalfrezi. She was first published in the 2016 London Short Story Prize anthology, most recently in Flashback Fiction, Mojave Heart review, The Brown Orient, formercactus and Spelk. She tweets erratically @coffeeandpaneer

Sample #1

Perhaps it would have been better, somehow, if this had been sample #142 or #96 or #305, something innocuous and meaningless but no, it was sample number one, the first, and he already wanted to taste it.

He’d tried blaming a few other things. Perhaps it had reached some telepathic tendrils into his mind at the point of death to make him look at it hungrily because, hey, it wasn’t dead, it was just lying microscopically still, waiting to be ingested so its parasitic foetal cells could awaken and attach to his stomach lining and grow inside his blood.

Or: this was an important scientific experiment that needed to happen now before endless committees talked themselves into a tangle, and the whole thing got entrenched with the bioethics lot and tied up in the finickity parameters of some drawn-out lab test in which he would almost certainly not be involved.

Or: he needed to step up and be the pioneer because there were millions starving back home, billions soon, and here on Europa there was a nearly endless supply of these nutritionally rich organisms whose alarming rate of reproduction and ease of capture meant they were almost begging to be used to save an ailing species of twelve billion superior mouths.   

But truth was, he just wanted to taste it.

He just wanted, more than anything, the experience of pressing the monochrome dough between his teeth, feeling the spread of its fizzing oil across his tongue while that sharp, salty, oaky aroma filled his mouth and coated his throat and washed him through. He’d seen the salivation of the others. They’d all thought it. But none had the guile, or the access.

So, he slipped the scalpel from his sleeve, angled his body to block the cameras, and sliced out a decent chunk from the thirteenth petri dish of Sample #1. It was the part he’d identified, in his head, as the flank. The morsel and the scalpel went back into his sleeve as he lowered the thirteenth petri into permanent cold storage.

Later, as he cooked it, he thought he saw, just for half a second, the meat twitch into life. He grinned at himself. He chuckled, he whistled, he shook his head, for it must’ve been the spit of the oil, the kick of the flame, a trick of the eye.

*

Biography

David Hartley writes strange stories about strange things for strange people. His work has appeared in Ambit, Black Static, and Structo, and he is currently studying for a PhD in Creative Writing at The University of Manchester.