What Came Out Of The Box

He carried the head of Stooky Bill along clifftop paths yellow with gorse, above the beach where dinosaur footprints claw the rocks.

He thought about Genesis; he dropped his Woodbine and crushed it underfoot. Uncoiling his tie, he thought,

‘What if, in the beginning, on his first attempt, God’s creations…failed to work?’

The idea filled him with hope.

On that new morning, shadows then sunlight bled through the glen – silver evolving to gold.                                       

***

In a green glade, a chime of water pattered from a wall of old stone, curving like the dark side of a half-moon. Droplets glinting reminded him of the diamonds he once tried to invent from an alchemy of base elements. The memory made him sit  and rake his hair.

Hush descended and the rhythmic plink of the water swelled. The world basked in a lush soporific lull. Insects circled in shafts of light.

***                                                      

From his knapsack he wrenched the head of Stooky Bill and propped him up in the moss amongst the butterflies.

Bill’s features kindled forming bulbous scowls and glowers. In a rasp like a dry susseration of kicked leaves, a crackling became words.

‘You…set fire to my hair’, he said. ‘You scorched me.’
The Inventor yawned and slid off his shoes, massaging his feet in their pneumatic undersocks.

‘Haha’, he replied. ‘Experiments go wrong.’

He gurned a silly grin as compensation.
Bill growled for a while then he said,

‘When you’re not looking…I’ll have revenge – an eye for an eye’.

He leered.
The Inventor scratched his peeling sunburn. He recalled the human eye he once took possession of – to study how it worked, how it saw, if it could be fabricated and a new one invented.

He sighed.

‘And one day’, he said, ‘I’ll succeed’.

He bit his lip and his face dissolved.
‘I know the future’, said Bill. He lurched forward, his grimace distorting.

‘…and I guarantee your success’.

His voice sharpened and heightened: sly, zealous and hammy.

‘But out of your box of tricks you’ll summon a devil’, he said.

‘A putrifyer of minds…an un-stitcher of decency…a swindler of time…’
The Inventor chomped on his luncheon meat sandwich. He interrupted, tutting.

‘How can you know anything?’ he said.

‘You’re not alive’.
Bill’s chin plummeted.

‘I know secrets’, he said.

‘They would shock you.’

He seethed and jolted.

There was a pause and the trees shimmered. Over the cliffs, the sea dragged in shingle with the waves. A whirling murder of crows brawled across Fairlight Glen.

***

The Inventor rose and scooped his palms under the spring. He snatched up the clunky head of Stooky Bill and eyed him – the singed hair and the cracked cheeks. He fought an urge to sling him far into the copse, but instead he cooed.

‘Will you help me?’, he asked.

Bill’s lips twisted into a rictus.

‘Will you do exactly as I say?’ he answered.

***

At that moment, the sun vanished and the glade dimmed to a monochrome. A gust of wind snaked through the undergrowth; the giant ferns flustered. The air smelt feral – heavy with intent. The Inventor hurried off up the hill just as a silver veil of rain descended.

When the first flash of lightning blinded the landscape, he was out in the open meadow.

Stooky Bill wriggled, still in his grip, biting for attention.

‘If you want inspiration’, he said, ‘deep profound inspiration, my advice is to get struck by lightning.’
The Inventor snorted.

‘How ridiculous’, he said.

And yet he stopped. He peered up into the downpour, into the pewter sky where a window of ivory light revealed the hidden realms. From it, a crepuscular beam captured him in pearlescence and for a moment he thought he saw moving figures in the glow – angels or ghosts.

He shut his eyes and prayed to the deity of brainstorms, the god of invention. He exhaled with a theatrical whine and spread his arms wide – slavish, a willing initiate. As the wind whipped and the rain spattered and thrashed, he waited for revelation.
But nothing happened. Over the English Channel, opaque lightning skimmed the horizon far away. The Inventor slouched home, with his tweed suit sopping and the beginnings of yet another cold.

***

For a long time afterwards, Stooky Bill refused to speak and increased his puckish tampering with the instrument dials in the workshop. The Inventor continued his experiments frequently having to check the safety of his settings. Then one day, out of the blue, Bill reanimated and addressed him.

‘Do you want to remain a failure all your life?’ he said.
The Inventor made an O shape with his mouth.

He replied, ‘What the hell have you been doing with my equipment?’

‘I’m trying to help you succeed’, said Bill.

The Inventor scoffed at this. He chewed his fingernails.

‘It’ll cause an accident’, he muttered.

Bill continued in a pompous tone.

‘I suggest a new beginning, John’, he said.

‘A renewal of our efforts. I’m taking charge of the experiments now’.

The Inventor balled his fists. His face flushed. He glared at his shoes.

Then he roared. He grabbed Stooky Bill by the throat and squeezed. He shouted obscenities. He hurled him against the wall with a savage thwack and stormed from the room.

***

The next day, he returned. As the door swung open, the workshop seemed different: fresher, with a keen new clarity like the green smell of foliage after rain. He searched for Bill but his box was empty. He fetched James instead to sit under the lights.

The tests continued as normal but the electricity kept flickering on and off; so the Inventor examined the plugs and wires – and that’s when it happened. A crackle juddered the rig, a venomous hiss of a spark; and the next thing he knew, he was hammered across the floor to the opposite end of the studio, thrust backwards through space by a thousand volts.

As he lay howling, the angels from the portal of ivory sky seized him. They whispered and whirred; they exhaled sibilate cryptic knowledge over him like a crystalline mist. They bound him tightly with a crisp bolt from the blue and anointed him with eminence.

‘I’ve been initiated’, he raved, and in a hoarse bark, he cried out again and again for Stooky Bill; then he sobbed until he laughed.

***

Afterwards, the Landlord of the building inspected the damage. He surveyed the workshop with a thunderous face.

‘Your demonstrations are unsafe’, he said.

The Inventor gestured with bandaged hands, his voice febrile, frenzied.

‘But I’m doing very important work here’, he said.

‘I’m sending moving pictures through wireless – this machine is called a televisor. It will change the world’.

The Landlord stared at his equipment – the tea chest, the bicycle lights, the darning needles and the hat box. He grimaced through his moustache.

‘He’s a lunatic’, he thought.

Then he asked, ‘Why are you holding the head of a ventriloquist’s dummy?’
The Inventor tittered.

‘This is Stooky Bill’, he replied, ‘my effusive muse.’ He hugged Bill like a puppy.

‘He’s made me see the light!’ he said.

‘And in return, wooden though he is, I’ve promised Bill a gift – that he’ll become the world’s first

televised actor’.

He screeched with glee.

‘Him! An actor!’

The Landlord stiffened. He reached into his coat pocket.

‘Sir, I must evict you before there’s another catastrophe’, he said.

‘Here’s official notice’.
He placed an envelope on the table, half in the light, half in the shade; and on it, bold handwriting spelt out a name – John Logie Baird.

A gleam of pale sunshine touched the Inventor’s cheek, reflecting off the rim of his glasses as his smile waned. And then the scene faded – in colour, in brightness, in sharpness, in contrast, until all that remained was a dark grey mist in a hopeless storm, dissolving away into a single white dot.

*

Biography

Aviva Treger was born in Hastings. She studied Ancient History at UCL then later trained as an actor with Questors Theatre in Ealing. She’s a new writer, with two short stories published in her first year – ‘Wake Up To Yourself’ and ‘Unturn This Stone’ both appear in story anthologies: their genres are sci-fi and speculative fiction.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Aviva-Treger/e/B01MSS5CE4/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/16117082.Aviva_Treger

https://www.facebook.com/aviva.treger/about?lst=658070915%3A658070915%3A1500139235&section=bio&pnref=about

Trinkets 

In his eyes the medals themselves were little more than trinkets, the small scraps of hard shiny things which magpies would retrieve, according to David Attenborough, to impress their prospective mates. He never gave voice to this view, knowing too well the reaction it would augur; vague but passionate protests informing him that medals meant bravery and valour and honour, that they represented in their featherweight physical presence some ineffable something which mattered in deep, philosophical terms. Lightweight medals were, he’d be told, rendered heavy by the meaning attached to them. The Jesuits were right, though; you couldn’t take it with you, macabre as the thought may have been. For all practical, rational intents and purposes, communion was wafer-meal and medals were merely trinkets. The war, commemorative jewellery aside, was a leaden weight all of its own, and each alone knew whether it left them proud and honourable or empty of anything other than nightmares of abetment.

As a result of his dim view of them the medals spent the early years of their lives—the later years of his—sitting at the bottom of a thin-wood sock drawer, safely entombed away from imaginary thieves. An ideal army man would have no trouble tracking down these thieves to retrieve his honours, but he was getting old, his chest weighing him down when he walked, his gait stooping. He never knew whether he would bother to retrieve the medals if they were to go missing; he never wanted to know, uncertain what the trinkets meant to him and unsure what he wanted them to mean. What meaning he was intended to gleam from them.

When he died, the medals became his youngest son’s, taken from one drawer to be ferreted away into another, the charity-shop beech-wood dresser too big and imposing for a one-storey starter home bedroom. The bedroom was overstuffed, its space stolen by both the dresser and a double bed big enough for two and too small for a third. The move came after the baby and the medals, like so many other trinkets over the years, went missing somewhere along the line. Some evening when they were out, a rare treat during the baby’s first year, the medals were stolen away, the earache squawk of a car alarm ignored by anonymous neighbours, the medals missing along with the no-cash which young parents keep at home, a handful of costume jewellery earrings, a half-dozen syringes, and a car radio, invaluable back then. The pile of erstwhile belongings, an odd mix, was deposited on the forest floor inside the thick woods at the foot of the Wicklow mountains.

The medals were stashed at the foot of an oak, overgrown and towering, blotting out any rumours of sunlight and the rattling persistence of rain. Over time they grew worn, mildewed, the skin of thin gold wearing grimy with age. There were great intentions to retrieve the medals, to resell them for far more than their former owners thought they were worth, to pawn metal into money and opportunities, the freedom to leave. The handful of syringes, though, were filled with insulin, pig’s insulin back then, great unfiltered quantities of it. The mistake was obvious a second too late, a gift which looked too good to be true and was. The medal thieves never did get a chance to return to the woods, sitting and succumbing to hypoglycaemia, the shivering mix of dry-mouth lethargy and a hot-temple tension headache, muscles feeling numb and atrophied as they watched the light of a living room fade into murky, single colour stillness.

The medals sat, eventually knotted over by tenacious weeds, coated by dewy moss and settled into the earth. The forest was a reprieve in winter and summer alike, from torrential downpours and muggy heat respectively. The medals were side-stepped and tripped over by two generations of dog walkers and underage drinkers, by awkward first shifts and newlyweds, by divorcees and last chance widowers. They sat undisturbed for years, precious metal reclaimed by the scattered rocks and piles of overgrowth.

The forest was scheduled for demolition when he visited, and he was surprised to find himself discomfited by the empty darkness of the fairytale woods, still as large and looming as he remembered it being when he was a boy. He grew up near the woods, or so he had been told; he was too young to remember when they moved, when a rash of recent robberies unnerved his parents, convincing the young couple this was no place to raise a child. If they lost anything of value, they never mentioned it, though very little was of value to them, his mother reminding him “You can’t take it with you”, a phrase which never sat right with him.

Peering into the depth of the woods, he wished he hadn’t brought his youngest. At six, she was old enough to explore, roaming far enough and covering ground fast enough to get lost, but too young to find her way back. She was already leading the charge, stumble-running through the uneven floor of the forest, little footsteps just missing the protrusions of rock and tripwires of tree root-piles. She stopped before the first clearing, her magpie-eyes distracted by something shiny. He winced, walking to her in brisk steps, hoping she was reaching for the glossy gold of a King crisp packet and not the sharp point of a half-crushed discarded can of Dutch.

She picked it up before he could pick her up and walk her away, a little handful of gold, lighter than it looked, its surface tarnished but unmistakeably real precious metal. He frowned, following her eyes to the pile in front of her. They could have been real for all he knew, a discarded handful of commemorations, gold plated and weather-beaten, or they might have just been convincing costume jewellery, the same as the earrings beside them. Trinkets, worth whatever they meant to you.

*

Biography

Born in Blackrock, Cathal now splits his time between Dublin and Mayo. In university, he authored opinion pieces and satirical cartoons for the University Observer and film criticism for the College Tribune, and was selected for UCD’s career mentor programme. He contributed “Malahide” to online collective ‘Snakes of Various Consistency’, and he is an editor and co-founder of the online poetry, non-fiction, and literature collective ‘Cold Coffee Stand’ (www.coldcoffeestand.com). His story “Hearts/Sinews” was short-listed for the Hennessy New Irish Writing competition and his poetry has been published in The Rose Magazine (‘Hark’, Issue 4). His debut novel ‘Innocents’ will be published by Solstice on September 30th, 2017. Excerpts from ‘Innocents’ have been short-listed for the 2015 Maeve Binchy Award and the Cuttyhunk Island Writer’s Residency.

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.