EXILES: An Outsider Anthology


Edited by Paul D. Brazill





All material herein contained © the respective authors 2016.





All rights reserved.





Dedicated to Jeff Luke & Colin Graham.





Published by Artizan

Cover illustration and book design&production by Artizan





811.111-822

EXILES [Elektronski vir] : an outsider anthology / avtorji zgodb Heath Lowrance … [et al.] ; edited by Paul D. Brazill. - Slovenska Bistrica : Artizan, 2016





ISBN 978-961-94000-1-2



1. Lowrance, Heath 2. Brazill, Paul D.

COBISS.SI-ID 87477505





Heath Lowrance: We Are All Exiles: An Introduction



K. A. Laity: Eating the Dream



Chris Rhatigan: Midnight Train to Delhi



Steven Porter: Boxing Day in Muros



Patti Abbott: We Are All Special Cases



Ryan Sayles: Never a Vessel Large Enough



Gareth Spark: The Solomon Sea



Pamila Payne: Agent Ramiel Gets the Call



Paul D. Brazill: The Weather Prophet



Jason Michel: The Rain King



Carrie Clevenger: Dullcreek



David Malcolm: In America



Nick Sweeney: The Place of the Dead



Sonia Kilvington: Disappearing Act



Rob Brunet: What Friends Are For



James A. Newman: Pacific Coast Highway



Tess Makovesky: Dead Man Walking



Chris Leek: Shut Out The Light



McDroll: Flying In Amsterdam



Renato Bratkovič: The Tribe



Walter Conley: Wetwork



Marietta Miles: Digger Davies



Aidan Thorn: Taking Out The Trash



Benjamin Sobieck: Missing An Ear



Graham Wynd: The Tender Trap



Richard Godwin: Falling Through The Hourglass



Colin Graham: Reflections on a Decade in the Wild East



Biographies



Acknowledgments





We Are All Exiles: An Introduction


Heath Lowrance





We are outsiders. Always and ever and that’s just the way it is.

We are born and we live and we die, and through it all there are moments of close contact, of emotional resonance, with other human beings who are also born and live and die along the way, but those are transitory moments. Brief respites along this lonely journey we ultimately have to take alone.

Our minds are closed circuits.

We feel this certainty most acutely when we travel, don’t we? I mean, have you ever travelled alone? Have you ever driven a long, long distance to some other place or taken a bus trip or plane trip to a foreign land? Along the way, there’s such a sense of isolation and smallness; it is a melancholy feeling, when that aloneness speaks so loudly in your heart, but it is also oddly delicious.

Isn’t it?

It’s delicious because it is freedom, in a sense. You know all at once you’re a sort of observer, on the outside, just passing through, thanks, and while you’re on that journey nothing touches you. No one really sees you, and that, that, is freedom.

And when you arrive at that destination, you are even more outside than ever. The city you’ve found yourself in is a mystery to you and, if the city cared to know, you would be a mystery to it as well.

You are well and truly an exile, then. You always were, yes, but now you really understand it.

Is that depressing? I suppose, if you are someone not comfortable with being alone. Some of us are not uncomfortable with that, though. Some of us embrace it. Some of the writers in this volume, for instance.

When I was in my early 20s, I took a road trip to New Orleans, with a good friend. Mardi Gras. After we checked in at our motel, we decided to split up for a while (which I couldn’t wait to do) and I wandered the streets of the French Quarter on my own. I ogled pretty girls. I drank Hurricanes. I walked. And for a very long time I just leaned against a wall on St. Anne St and watched the hordes of human beings all drinking and dancing in the street and pushing back as long as they could that other world that awaited them once the party was over. A few people tried to speak to me, tried to pull me in out of my exile and into theirs, but I didn’t want it. I wanted to relish the feeling of being outside and right in the middle at the same time. At least for a while.

Many years later, after a failed marriage and a failed life, I was driving on my own from Detroit to Murfreesboro, Tennessee (never mind why, it’s not important) and the miles of I-75 were rolling by me in the dark. It was autumn, and cold. Somewhere in Kentucky, with 20 bucks still in my pocket, I pulled over at a rest stop to grab an hour or two of sleep. The rest stop was deserted. I got out of my car to stretch, and for several minutes the world was still and quiet and not even a vehicle went by on the freeway. I remember standing there by my car, smoking a cigarette, marvelling at the silence and the blackness of the night and the cold, and that feeling came over me again, that knowledge of exile. And that comfort with the idea.

Later on that night, about 4 in the morning, I would run out of gas and money and abandon my car and walk until daybreak. Cars would pass, but I ignored them and they ignored me.

I had a dream when I was a boy, about a strange man who lived on the back porch of the old house I lived in at the time. He was tall and thin and covered in spider-webs; he wore dusty black clothes and a blank-face plastic mask. The eyes that peered out from the mask were the same colour as mine. Spiders would creep out from them. In the dream, he took my hand, and whispered, “You are alone. You are not free except in your aloneness.”

I still remember that dream, very vividly.

You can only ever be free as an exile. As an outsider. And the truth can only ever be uttered by someone removed from the world, at least by a degree.

So what you’ll find in this volume is a sort of truth, or truths. There are essays here and there are stories, and there are some that are harder to determine. But they all speak the truth. Paul Brazill invited a select group of writers to participate, writers I assume he has some amount of faith in, and his instinct has paid off admirably, I think.

These are stories written by exiles, about the feeling of being exiled. The glory and the sadness and the insight that can only come with being on the outside. While reading them, you’ll feel that transitory connection I mentioned, because you’ll recognise similar hearts. But you’ll only know them for a moment. Just one brief, illuminating moment, and if you’re strong and if you’re true, you’ll face your own exile with a braver heart.





Eating the Dream


K. A. Laity





Out here you can see America, the real America—small roads, small towns, small minds, all littered with the detritus of waste, despair, and greed. I spend my days chasing the broken white lines of the numbered passages between those towns. I have crossed the borders of the whole forty-eight on an elliptical path that gives a wide berth to the yellow clusters of city centres on my ragged maps. I know cities. It's not any kind of prejudice that I don't visit them anymore, just a need to avoid the limelight; the shadows it casts are too strong for someone of my age and looks. The lights of a small town are just right, a bouquet of neon, headlights, and flickering fluorescence. Makes me feel pretty.

Today I'm driving an old red Honda. It's been a while since I have driven a stick shift and I'm always amazed how quickly the rhythm returns. What is it about shifting gears that turns you into Mario Andretti? I had to catch myself. Smiling, laughing, and singing along with some old rock-n-roll tune about love and longing—I had let the needle creep up to almost ninety. No need to get anyone's attention—not that I don't have a valid driver's license and a clean record. The danger is you never know when you'll meet someone who isn't sufficiently numbed by television and advertisements, someone who still pays attention. Or more importantly, someone who notices things.

Among most people I can pass.

But in the daylight it's harder and this is a glorious day of wide open blue skies from horizon to horizon, a glistening sparkle charging from every shiny surface. Birds sing so loudly and so energetically that droppings fly out their other ends from the sheer strain of it. It's a day for grins and fast driving. Even this rusty Civic seems to spring to the challenge and I pass by many a potential town because I have to keep driving, feeling the wind whip by through the open windows, seeing the countryside slip away. It's almost like flying, and I bury the thought and the melancholy it provokes. Just for today I will be happy, just for today I will enjoy what I have: an open road, a fast car, and my freedom.

When at last I have to stop, dusk has crept across the plains. Blue has already become lavender and the big orange globe has sunk wistfully beneath the crust. At the gas station I pat the Honda tenderly and fill it with premium grade gasoline. She deserves it. I look around me. I could be anywhere. The gas-n-go is one of a chain, though not one of the big ones. Coffee is cheap and the adverts garish.

What could be in a 99¢ hot dog that you would want to eat?

People poison themselves with what is cheap and easy. Less than a hundred years ago, dinner was still an occasion. Where's the joy? Where's the real pleasure? I shiver at the thought of trying one frank just for the vicarious thrill, but it would be risky. Even though my over big jacket disguises my form, the harsh interior lights always make me feel naked and unbearably wrinkly. Ah, vanity! I have been so grateful for the rise of the self-service station. It's a pity people have adapted to it, too. They just don't appreciate their liberty to come and go. I have been hiding so long; it makes me weep to see what freedoms they relinquish without a moment's reflection or even the slightest tear.

Having crossed that invisible border and entered town proper, I reconcile myself to getting something to eat. It's not really dark enough, but in these small towns darkness hangs at the fringes and in the corners of the strip malls. There's a place where all is hidden, forgotten, non-existent, one where nobody knows your name. It doesn't take too long to find one.

In the south the euphemism is "gentleman's club." Some dim remembrance of a lost time that perhaps only existed among a small elite, or perhaps only in the pages of bright magazines and thick novels, today it means nothing more than darkness, longing and money. Sex is there, but it's a by-product. The main transaction is between loneliness and cash. Surrounded by teeming populations, they are all so alone. Some fear, some loathe, but they are all alike in their certainty that intimacy cannot be theirs any other way.

I talk to them about it, sometimes, why they think they cannot have it, why it eludes them. For many, it is simply that they are unwilling to exert the effort it would require. They want the world and they want it now, but lacking any extraordinary ability, they have nothing with which to reach out and snare it. But others see only a shadow world, twisted and darkened by their own stunted failures, with disappointments piled like corpses to cover any glimpse of their own true reflection. They cannot see their own beauty while they work seemingly day and night to erode it. Even in their imperfection I find glory, but they are blind.

Of course there are the tourists, too, but I leave them alone. They are just around for the night, the fun, the occasion. They have friends and families who will miss them. They are not safe.

I used to visit more places—bus stations, diners—but the choices were so hard. Who was a student? Who was simply poor? The poor should be sacred. The homeless are no good—so many of them are either alcoholic or mentally incapacitated. Such a sad waste. It was so random at first, but you know how it is when you first strike out on your own. Your ears are so full of dreams and youth that advice from those who know more or better inevitably falls on deafened ears. I would be different! I was so certain. And they were so cautious—I would not live their life of safety and secrecy. This country was mine, too, and I would share in all its promise and wide vistas.

I can chuckle now, but I was so sincere. And persistent—while I did not succeed as wildly as I had hoped, I have indeed carved out a different life from my parents, one they could not imagine, scarred as they were by their lives in the old country. When, infrequently, I stop back home to see them, they fuss and tsk and cry inevitable ruin, but I think they're happy for me—except, of course, for my still being alone. Yes, I know—my cousin Hardraed, up in Canada where he says things are much looser, much freer; they always remind me about him. His folks say he has settled down a lot and my mother raises her heavy brows encouragingly to me, but I always shrug it off. Yeah, soon, yes, I know I'm not getting any younger, but of course my secret dream is that there is another way. We cannot be the last of our kind.

So the lonely men, I understand. I'm not alone—I can talk to my folks anytime I want to or to any of the others of our race, though as the decades pass their voices seem increasingly feeble and faint—but I am in a sort of exile out here. As the country has become more and more built up, I have tended to keep increasingly to the prairies and mountains where there's still a good bit of space between the yellow and pink blobs on the maps, where I can choose when to see people and enter their realms.

It is not the life of legends, but legends adapt.

Perspective: that's the advantage of a long life. Wasn't the vanishing hitchhiker just the vanishing pilgrim centuries before in the Middle Ages? Somewhere outside Santiago de Compostela the stories would have spread, the pilgrim returning from the holy lands, back to the loved ones who feared him or her gone. Arriving at the village home to find him—alas!—no more among the flock. The tears, the confession: he had been missing since the last crusade. Loneliness, loss, confusion, heartbreak—it is the human condition. An occasional few rise above it, find the secrets of the universe, of happiness, of genius. But so few.

Tonight I slip in the club, paying the $20 cover to keep out the riff-raff, but the doorman has no curiosity about my slouched form. His ideals have been worn down by the steady drip of sadness, loneliness and cheap sorrow. I paid my money, so in I go. It is the same at a thousand or more oases across the great swath of the middle and west of this country: dim corners, desultory stares, and a haphazard décor poised somewhere between fantasy and squalor. Neon, the elixir of pizzazz and glamour, flickers to the siren calls of booze by well-known trademarks. "Hot girls," the sign promises, but the stage offers only a lukewarm creature of mechanical movement.

She swings lazily around a pole, her mind elsewhere—bills, pimps, drugs, or maybe just a day job. Who can say? Their lives are as varied as their jobs are the same. I have talked to many over the years and developed a grudging respect. They live here, too. They know the score, and if they do not fight it, they make their use of it. Who am I to criticise? On nights when I have indulged in the fiery waters, I think of razing the place to the ground with my own flames, but I do not do it. Indeed, I seldom think of it anymore. But the fiery waters play havoc with one's thoughts—it's easy to see why they all indulge.

Drunkenness makes us all gods.

I cast about for a likely one. It seems early and I feel choosey. At last I sigh and I settle at an empty table, deciding to wait for a more propitious time. There can't be more than half a dozen seats filled, half with tourists, so I can bide my time. When the waitress comes by, swinging her hips in a mockery of seduction, I order champagne and laugh at myself. Such nonsense. It would be better to stick to beer, but the exhilarating drive has whetted my appetite for delight and only champagne can match that gentle bliss. I can see the waitress' eyes glow: hey, big spender. If she could see me, really see me, would her eyes glow? No, they would not; I have seen it too many times. Once in a while, once in a very great while, my revelation brings awe not abjection, but how long has it been? Years, no doubt. Visionaries are so few. And fear these days is omnipresent, stirred daily and ladled with paranoia from the cauldron of power. No wonder they seek escape.

The champagne is cheap, yet the bubbles tickle my nose no less. The pleasure is small and exquisite, like a well-carved jade ink stone. It is their inability to appreciate such small blessings that leaves so many of them unhappy. They dream of wealth and abandon. Even here, the televisions blare their endless coaxing of spending and oblivion over the bar opposite the stage, their ignored competition. Spend and you will be happy; this car will bring you sex; buy this beer and you will never be alone again. The girls change places, another on stage; taller shoes, lighter hair but still the same weary combination of strut and languor. I have reached the bottom of my glass for the first time when at last I spot one.

He sits alone at a table for three, jacket on, hat low. We are both in disguise—or is it simply our natural plumage? His hand rests lightly on the edge of the table, his fingertips clasp a sweating beer bottle. Despite the darkness I can see one swollen bead of moisture roll lazily down the side of the bottle and join the pool at the bottom of the amber glass.

My eyes are like that, meant for distance. Even the flickering colours in here do not distract my sight. He is alone. That matters most, and I can tell from his posture, from his beer, from his clothes that he expects that his state will not change. But tonight it will. He is here seeking the communion of flesh and dreams that makes him feel less alone for an hour or two, yet more alone later. I know, I have talked to his twin in so many small towns. So lonely, so lonely.

I wait until his beer is half-empty. He has not relaxed, exactly, but he has released the clench in his other fist and appears to be marking the languid moves of the stripper with some desultory attention. Enough, anyway, to distract him from my approach, so I have to clear my throat to ask, "Is this seat taken?"

His surprise is genuine. An actual woman accosting him was certainly not part of his plans for the evening. The surprise quickly metamorphoses into suspicion. I would want money, no doubt. The radiating hostility makes clear his unwillingness to offer any. I sit down anyway, slipping my now half-empty bottle of champagne onto the table opposite his brew. He maintains his glare and I avoid challenging him. I will always be nervous about my appearance before them. My brothers, pure in blood, could never pass this close. Fortunately my hybridity shows most in my face. Yet its incongruity can easily provoke suspicion and unease. I keep my head down, look at him out of the corner of my green eyes. It is the habit of years to draw my nose back into my face as much as possible, a practice that gives me the false sense of confidence in the murky anonymity of the bar, but never completely removes the fear that my truth will be seen.

But they never look you in the eye here.

True to that edict, he squints across the dark expanse of the table to take in my form—or as much of it as he can guess beneath the voluminous folds of my wrinkled coat. He sees woman because it is what he desires. Auburn curls cover most of my head so the points of my ears and other protrusions are masked in the tumble of hair. I seek in vain to recall a line from an old movie about a homely female character who disguised as a man was merely passable, but as a woman, she "was a dog." The description fits. Among my kind I am merely passable—diluted blood perhaps drawing scorn from the oldest, but who among us immigrants can claim any purity of essence? But to pass as a human woman, I must rely on darkness, the tricks of the light and the broad strokes of assumption. Curls, the right profile, somehow they may add up to "female" though I show as little skin as possible to conceal my florid hide and the scales—tiny, even graceful for our folk, but nonetheless distinct.

It must be working because his cautious face has begun to look speculative. Sometimes we do come to money. I have had decades to figure out how much is too much—and how much suspiciously too little. The art of haggling—old as the species—will never dull. Everyone wants a bargain. The desperate ones—like this one—they will not offer money. They are far too cautious. But the lure of sex often eases their doubts, particularly when the exchange can make them feel magnanimous.

"Gotta place?" I ask quietly, so quietly that he must bend toward me. He fingers his beer, noncommittal. "I need a place to stay," I wheedle. "I got no money." He can draw his own conclusions about what I might have to trade.

"Why you drinkin' champagne, then?" he asks, proud to be so observant. He was no pushover, he congratulated himself. Not born yesterday, as many might say.

Hmm. Good point. "It's my birthday," I say with just a little catch in my voice, fueled by the sudden inspiration. For all I know, it could be. Silently I curse myself for my giddy purchase. Ah well, it still tasted wonderful. He remains mutely watchful. I reach in my pocket and pull out the crumpled bills and change hiding there. "It's all I got and not enough to stay somewhere. Maybe buy a burger. How about it, mister? I'll make it worth your while." Perhaps not in the way he intends, but what price miracles?

I can see the thoughts ticking around his brain, weighing risk against gain. He looks me up and down, not to gauge my beauty—beauty is beyond his wallet—but to gauge my danger. I am large. There's no disguising that. But this culture makes size a shame for women and I have learned to mimic the hunched reluctance such females descend to as the ruthless ebb of confidence creeps away. To complete the effect, I twist my fingers nervously as if in suspense of his decision.

Inside I am calm. If not him, then another will come. Yet I admit to liking the game. My father is scandalised, but I enjoy this playing at concealment; it makes the revelation that much more pleasing. Where did I get this flair for the dramatic? I hear the chorus of my family's disdain: human culture. It's true. They fascinate me, especially their depictions of us. Our old heroic stories, passed from one generation to the next for eons uncountable, show the slow dissipation of our folk. The stories have become stale, without resonance. Every one of us knows the story of how Kulili first spat forth the fiery ball that became the world, how we ruled for ages keeping the lesser creatures in order—until these upstart humans found out we gods could die.

Then our heroics became tragedies, while their heroes grew bigger than human size. They never realised what they had lost, how tiny they made their world without real gods, without goddesses who spoke. Oh, one or two through the centuries has paused to think, to speak out, to decry the crimes of their kind. But it is rare.

Even we gave in over the centuries, sought seed from one or two along the way, diluted our essence, the old timers say. If we could not have awe, perhaps we could absorb them. It is we who were absorbed, made smaller, made less. It is to such crimes I owe my delicacy, but to legends I owe my majesty—however much it has been reduced.

And I can still breathe fire.

I remember as a wee one, sneaking into a play by Marlowe and grinning with delight, for he understood us. Not entirely, and certainly the limitations of Elizabethan costuming were not up to the job of accurately portraying our majesty, but he came the closest to touching the magic—no wonder he died so young. Who that is shadowed by our flames is not scarred? And that appalling George. Saint! Marlowe knew what a rank opportunist that "defender of the realm" truly was. He wasn't even English. But how the English love their unlikely heroes—even fake ones like that. They made us their enemies, their monsters, their triumph. At least there was still awe then.

Of course, centuries are a long time for their little lives and they cling to each sparkle of the extraordinary in the hope that it will shine on them, too. Until they decide it is nonsense and belittle us into oblivion. Anal nathrach, indeed. I think that was about then that we left England for the open plains of America, just as so many of them were beginning to do. Although not all of us left. A few years back, my great great uncle on my mother's side posed for William Blake, another uncommon mind. He saw angels, he saw us. The other humans hated him. Blake knew what he saw and painted it with as much accuracy as he could manage. His name will live on as long as we do.

But how long is that?

"All right." The words startle me out of my reverie of reminiscences. My victim has acceded. I nod and gulp down the last of my bubbly and we both scrape back our chairs to depart. Accompanied by a fanfare of gaudy rock-n-roll, we wind our way through the maze of tables, more of them taken now than when I arrived, and head for the door. The doorman nods—acquiescence, congratulations, acknowledgement? Who knows?—and we step once more into the warm spring evening. To my surprise, he does not make his way to a ramshackle beater, but across the parking lot and down a side street of low-rent apartment blocks. At least I won't have the nuisance of driving someone else's car back to the club. Or walking far; I hate to walk. I don't mind driving, in fact, I love it. But walking; somehow it's just undignified.

Flying isn't safe.

At the third building, distinguished from its predecessors only by the lack of pizza boxes stacked haphazardly outside, we turn. Walking into the dimly lit lobby, I immediately discovered the reason for the lack of detritus outside—here, they were stacked inside. When I say stacked, I mean only that the pile was taller than it was wide. It made it easier to draw my nose in tighter. I can understand why people treated like refuse in turn see the world as their trash heap, but it does not make it any easier to bear.

We skirted the pile and began the slow ascent up the filthy stairs. I was tempted to let my tail hang out behind me and clear the clutter in my wake, but there was still the chance someone might see. Conversations reverberated from the corners of the stairwell, distinctly voiced but muffled by the twisting path of the cage. It was early enough in the evening that the voices were low and cordial—no doubt later they would be mostly belligerent with too much liquor and too little hope. The phrase "death trap" ran through my head, and all the hours on the road added the echo "suicide rap." I almost chuckled.

Lyrics float up from the subconscious. I can be almost anywhere in the country and sing along with the songs on the radio. There is a small but exquisite pleasure in knowing all the verses of "American Pie," of knowing that tiny tweak of disappointment when you realise they're only playing the short edited-for-Top 40 radio version. For all its differences, for all its divisions, this is one nation, united by song.

My dinner scrapes his key into the lock and shakes it loose. He flips on a light to reveal the glory of his homestead. It's surprisingly cleaner than I would have thought looking at his clothes. I follow him into the kitchen-stroke-dining room and breathe in the smell of spaghetti with too little garlic. He motions with a jerk of his head and like a docile pet, I tread behind him towards the bedroom in the back.

The hall is unadorned. Usually a sign that I have chosen wisely. Pictures mean family, friends, a life. I must eat, but I need not compound the tragedy. I do not tell myself I am only being cruel to be kind; they are not all Poor Maries. But they offer nothing to the world, no magic, no art. Anyone with a spark—however untended, however faint—and I walk away. I'm not saying I recognise genius. Yet I am certain there is nothing here but squalor and an incurious motion forward. Who am I to decide who lives and dies? Who indeed. I am what I am.

The bedroom itself remains dark even after he switches on the small light beside the bed. Entirely unsuitable for my transformation, my revelation. More light. I look for a switch on the wall. He mumbles something indistinct and shrugs off his coat. I turn away, as if modest—no modesty here!—and kick off my boots to give him the impression of my acquiescence. He gets busy chucking off clothes and I shiver with anticipation.

He slips into the bed and I turn swift as calamity and flip on the light. It catches him awkwardly, one leg over and one under the covers. His look of surprise shifts to surly annoyance. It is an unspoken part of the deal that we do not reveal ourselves. In the light he looks so much less, years of neglect and aimlessness have cragged his face with a permanent frown and the scarring furrows of hard time. But I will change his expression one last time.

I throw off my coat, throw back my shoulders and stretch my wings across the too-small room. Even in the flickering fluorescence of that squalid room, I know I am magnificent. The pulsating light caresses the scales of my flesh and I open my mouth fully, drawing a jagged breath of power. My nose, released from its habitual snub, draws in the bland stench of the room and the suddenly pungent sharpness of urine. Behold, O man. Behold a god before you. I give just the slightest ripple of flap to my wings and see the awe mirrored in his swiftly glazing eyes. I lash my tail behind me, revelling in the play of the musculature.

It is enough. He does not move at all when I step forward, grab his neck and wring it like a chicken's. I plunge the other daggered hand into his chest and pluck his trembling heart from its cage and bite into it with relish. It is not bitter, though you might expect it, but it is his heart. For a time, it was always livers—rich, decadent treats—but too often I found them choked with gall, hard granules that were unpleasant to crunch and bitter indeed to eat. People just don't care for livers as they should. Too much junk food, too much food period. Hearts though, even if they're bad, taste good. Sometimes a little too much fat around them, but strip it away and the centre reveals itself all the juicier. I savour each bite like the treasure it is. "You are a sacrifice," I tell his inert form, "I will leave and trouble your kind no more for a time."

A bit of truth, a bit of a lie.

I turn and she's there. No more than ten or twelve perhaps, as they reckon time. Her eyes take me in from the dainty twisting horns on my head, through the auburn curls, the magnificent stretch of my wings, down my powerful thighs to the claws on my toes. She is amazed, but amazed and unafraid. I resist the urge to wipe the blood from my mouth. I let her see me as I am. Let her know my strength, my powers. I curl my tail around my ankles and gaze into the depths of her soul.

"He beat me," she says at last. "He wasn't my dad, really."

"You are free." I am feeling magnanimous.

"I dreamed you."

"I am real." Make no doubt about that. I reach out to draw two bloody fingers through her tousled hair. She flinches but does not move away. A couple of strands stick to my claws and I suck them and the blood into my mouth. Exquisite.

"No, I dreamed you. For three nights, I have dreamed you."

Ah! This is good. "You have a gift. You must never forget this. You are not like other people. Do not let them make you so."

She nods. So rare to find one so young—but what was Blake? Seven or eight? Perhaps they are born this way and it is the dull weight of normalcy that weighs them down, that crushes them into mundane blindness and deafness.

"Hold out your hand." She complies quickly, cupping her hands before her. I grab a curl of my hair and slice it off with an extended claw and drop it in her palms. Then I rub may hand up and down my forearm, releasing a spray of dry, flaky scales. Enough land in her hands. "When you doubt, you will have these. Remember. The extraordinary is all around you. Do not let this happen to you," I say pointing to her father's limp flesh.

"Can you breathe fire?" she asks at last, and her eyes shine with the madness, the excitement, the spark that lights the ones. I hope it is not too much, that she has the strength to bear it, but that will be her journey not mine. I imprint her face on my memory. Twenty years from now, who knows? She may be mad, she may be magical. I have done my part. All but the final thing, and that too, I will do tonight.

But first, the fire. Always fire.

I answer her by turning to the mangled form on the rusty bed, opening my jaws and belching forth a roar of flame, red, green blue and yellow. It latches onto the flesh like eager seedlings springing forth, growing swiftly. Freed from my chest, they crackle with delight and multiply—sisters, brothers, cousins all. Beds are burning, the burning bed, a hundred years of their culture crowds in my head at any given minute. The hungry flames will not be content with a bed and a body.

"You must get your things. There is one more sight you must witness."

She turns at once, cradling the gifts in her hands. Within minutes she is back, a Hello Kitty knapsack slung over her shoulder, a heart shaped box clutched in her hands—her treasure. I have bundled my coat and boots together. There is no need to disguise myself tonight. I am celebrating.

In tandem we walk out the door, the restless consummation burning behind us. We have only trod down a few stairs when the gasps begin. Warding off the evil eye, praying to Madre de Dios, or signing the cross in my wake. I can laugh but I want to show dignity, always dignity on a night like this. The revelation will be complete.

From the steps I bend once more to touch her forehead and repeat only, "Remember." Then I stretch my wings and bound into the air like a tiger, no longer the hidden dragon but there for them all to see. But I know only she will truly see.

The rest? They'll see something smaller, a dream perhaps, a demon, something they can explain, something they can contain in their too-small lives. A whisper at most, a frightened story, something to fear—but not for her. For her I will be a legend alive, for her I will be a truth, the revelation that there is so much more, so much more than any of them are willing to admit, so much more that they cannot—no, that they refuse to see. And she has been blessed by a god. I feel her eyes upon me in my flight. As I soar over the squalor below me, I feel free myself. How long since I have stretched my wings! How long since I have found one who can see, who can know, who can tell the story to the rest of them? And I realise that I will never go to Hardraed in the north, never have little hybrid offspring with him, never give up on the possibilities here in this land of misfits, on the chance that our kind will revive, will rule, will thrive.

Forget Canada: I am legend. I will dwell in the heart of America.





Midnight Train to Delhi


Chris Rhatigan





Sometimes, Olivia didn’t understand this country.

Scratch that, pretty much all the time.

The auto-rickshaw rumbled down Jodhpur’s main drag, cutting through the intense heat that had dragged on into the night.

Up ahead, a man with a switch struck a cow over and over again.

But just yesterday she’d been walking down one of the city’s many narrow, twisty-turny roads. A cab driver tried to pass a cow—as well as a vegetable seller, a herd of goats, and two scooters. The cab’s side view mirror brushed up against the cow and the driver stopped, rolled down the window, kissed two fingers and placed them on the cow’s head.

He was asking the creature to forgive him for his transgression—or so it seemed to her.

Now this other guy’s beating the snot out of the animal because it doesn’t move fast enough for him.

Made no sense.

She said to the auto-rickshaw driver, “Don’t people here worship cows? Isn’t the cow a holy animal?”

He didn’t turn around. She figured the language gap was too big, or that her question was ignorant.

She sighed, then rifled through her bag to double-check for her train ticket. She would go to Delhi on the 23:55, catch an early morning flight back to Boston via Amsterdam.

She had enjoyed her time travelling solo in India. It had been a dream of hers ever since she visited the Golden Triangle with a tour group in college. This time she wanted to really see the country—not just the Taj Mahal and the Red Fort. And she had done that—eaten chana masala so spicy it made her cry, gotten lost among block after block of bright cobalt houses, drank chai at a roadside stand, even played cricket with a group of teenage boys who laughed at her inability to hit a single pitch.

But she was ready to go home, ready for plentiful toilet paper and toilets that didn’t require squatting, ready for streets that weren’t filled with garbage, ready to wear clothes that didn’t instantly become sticky and slick with sweat.

The auto-rickshaw arrived at the train station. She got out, slapped a 50-rupee note in the driver’s hand.

“Dhanyavad, ji,” she said as she walked away, not giving the driver a chance to claim that she owed him more than the price they’d agreed upon.

She found her train platform quicker than she thought she would, and now she had an hour to sit around before the train arrived. Jodhpur’s station was less confusing than stations in the larger Indian cities—with their rooms full of families sleeping on bare concrete, bustling commuters by the thousand, and an array of scam artists ready to pick off confused foreigners.

She pulled out the John Grisham paperback she had swiped from the shelf at her guesthouse and sat on top of her backpack. She’d only read two pages when a man shuffled up to her, his black rubber sandals scratching the concrete.

“Excuse me ma’am, which country?”

This kind of thing was common. Jodhpur didn’t have the developed tourism industry of Jaipur or Rishikesh, so she was often the only white person around. The man would ask her the ten questions in English that he knew, then wander off or recommend his “friend’s” overpriced restaurant or tourist service. Most of this was harmless enough, even pleasant if she had the chance to ask a few questions herself. Although she’d read about so-called Eve teasing of women both Indian and foreign—and it sounded like a euphemism for sexual harassment. Women here were required to dress conservatively, covering their arms and legs. Unlike most Western tourists, Olivia had conformed to this expectation, no matter how hot the sun beat down on her.

“I’m from America.”

“America? Obama very good, yes?”

“Yes, I like President Obama.”

“California?”

“What?”

“California, you come from there?”

“Oh. Sure, yes, I live in California.”

“You like India?”

“Yes, it’s very beautiful. The food is very good.”

“You like me?”

She hesitated. She wasn’t sure if he was playing around or what, but she was tired of the inane conversation anyway. “I’m going to go back to reading now.” She picked up her book to drive the point home.

He took a step closer, loomed over her. He smiled, exposing a row of whisky-coloured teeth. “You like me, yes?”

“No,” she said. “Now please leave me alone.”

“You no like me?”

She stood. She was about an inch taller than him. “Please, please.” She dusted off a word she remembered from her Hindi phrasebook, the chapter titled Awkward Interactions. “Jao!” she said, “Go away!”

“Oh, the American speaks Hindi?”

“No.”

Her answer didn’t dissuade him, and he rattled on for a while, continuing to end sentences with “…yes?”

She didn’t understand anything else he said, but didn’t need to.

She slung her bag over one shoulder and hustled back toward the main entrance. It was busier over there, and she would stay there until her train arrived.

He kept calling for her, “Why you no like me?”

She ignored him, picked up her pace.





***





Olivia was reading about a lawyer doing exciting things a lawyer would never do, but her mind was elsewhere.

When she looked at the interaction objectively, it wasn’t that bad. She hadn’t seen the guy in about twenty minutes now. He had just been looking to have some fun at the foreigner’s expense. That much was clear. If this was the worst thing that happened to her, she could deal with it.

Still, there was something off in the way he turned from innocuous to aggressive without warning.

An automated voice announced that the train to Delhi was going to be late.

She groaned. Who knows how much longer she’d have to sit on her bag, baking in the oven heat.

She rested the book on her knee, watched two rats fight on the dark tracks. When was her flight again? Was she going to make it? She opened her bag and dug around for her itinerary.

“Excuse me, my friend.”

He was back. This time with a taller guy who had lopsided eyes and a mustache that only covered his top lip.

“I’m not your friend.”

“Yes you are.” He looked to the man next to him. “We are all good friends now.”

She pulled a cell phone out of her pocket. “If you don’t leave me alone, I’ll call the police.”

“Police?” The man cackled, then translated for his friend.

It had been a bluff, of course—her cell phone didn’t work here, she didn’t know how to call the police, and, even if she could, she doubted they would be of any help.

People in the crowd stared wide-eyed out of idle curiosity or concern.

She took a step back. The man moved closer to her and his friend swung around her back.

“You stay here in India,” he said. “We show you around.”

“No, no, I’m going home—”

He reached out and grabbed her arm. His grip was surprisingly strong, but she slid out and collided with his friend behind her. She could tell her arm would be bruised.

Then she heard a loud voice, a woman’s voice, calling out something in Hindi. The man’s response was short—he flicked his hand and didn’t turn around, his focus still on Olivia.

The woman emerged from the crowd. She wore the khaki uniform and black felt hat of train station security.

She carried something similar to a cricket bat.

And she didn’t hesitate to use it.

She struck the back of the man’s knees hard. He yelled and collapsed to the floor.

The crowd gasped. She couldn’t tell if it was in shock or admiration.

The woman raised the cricket bat and nailed him in the head.

He was silent. A trickle of blood ran onto the concrete.

The woman called out and another woman came forward. She was dressed in a pink sari and definitely not security. The two women conversed briefly, then picked up the man’s body, moved it into a nearby room, shut the door.

And like that it was over.

Olivia looked around her. The man’s friend had disappeared. He had probably run away at the first sign of trouble. The crowd had already lost interest in the drama and returned to talking, drinking chai, and sleeping.

Like none of it had ever happened.





***





The train pulled into the station minutes later, defying the announcement that it was going to be late.

Olivia didn’t know what to do. She wanted to thank her protector, but didn’t want to knock on that door. What was even happening back there? Was this brand of vigilante justice common?

She debated her decision until a conductor hopped off the train and requested her ticket. He seemed used to dealing with lost foreigners and directed her toward her seat in C car.

Her bunk was on the bottom of a row of three and across from an identical row. She had a pillow, sheets, a blanket, and a free bottle of water. Sure beats the fuck out of Amtrak, she thought.

She settled in, as did the other passengers around her. They fell asleep soon after, their snores forming an irritating chorus.

Olivia, however, spent the trip staring at the bunk above her, replaying the night’s events in her head.

She added them to the list of things she didn’t understand.





Boxing Day in Muros


Steven Porter





It didn't seem much like Spain as he got off the bus. Fishermen were hauling in their nets to the rhythm of an invisible choir. Rab grabbed his faded sports bag from the luggage compartment and entered a cafe. He sat by the window observing the forest of green clouds that lay upon the hills. A waitress approached, taking a notepad from the pocket of her apron. She said something in Spanish that he didn't understand.

“Un café s'il vous plait,” he said.

“Tú eres francés?”

“Er, no, I’m not French.”

The puzzled waitress smiled politely. He was glad the place was empty. The choir sang Tidings of Comfort and Joy. Gulls spiralled in the grey afternoon sky.

“Un café solo.”

“Gracias.”

He looked down at the wee cup-like thing the waitress had put in front of him. Sunny Spain where the coffee was small. It was like one of those adverts you used to get on the back of old cereal packets. Gift not actual size. He swallowed it in one gulp, paid the bill and said adiós to the girl.

The hostel on the main street had a stairway with brightly tiled Celtic designs. He climbed up to the second flight and gave the bell a long ring. Serpents and dragons glared down from the walls. A young man in a sky blue tracksuit opened the door, and scanned him from head to toe.

“Sí?”

Rab had learned some Spanish for a holiday on the Costa del Sol a few years back so this shouldn't be a problem. Sounds came from his lips. The bloke was nodding, he must have understood.

“You are English?”

Thank Christ. The bloke spoke some English.

“Scottish. You know, Sean Connery, Billy Connolly…”

“Ah whisky,” the bloke said, making a drinking motion with his arm.

“You've got it,” he replied, forcing a grin.

“Want a room? This way.”

He followed the bloke up the stairs to the top floor. The room was small but it had a television and large windows overlooking the harbour.

“A nice view, no?”

“Muy bien,” Rab agreed, sticking his thumb in the air. The lingo was coming back to him now although he still had the habit of speaking schoolboy French with foreigners.

“One night, only twenty two Euros. If you like a bath, towels are there.”

Was the bloke suggesting he needed a wash? Anyway, the room seemed okay and he would take it. All Rab needed was a base from where he could check things out. Maybe even look for work. He could bring the family over when things settled down. He owed it to Sandra and Marti to make a real effort while he was here. He handed over his passport as a deposit. The bloke thanked him and disappeared down the tiled stairway.

Rab sat on the bed and tore the cellophane from his last pack of Bensons. Soon he would have to smoke the foreign shite. Maybe he would just give up. He put the TV on with the sound down and listened to the choir outside singing the Little Drummer Boy. Parum parum pum. He watched some pretty women with thigh-length black boots dancing out of time in Santa Claus outfits. When the adverts came on he went to the window. A thin rain showed against the fishing boats rocking in the harbour. Music was booming from speakers on the seafront.

Rab put on his raincoat and went back out into the drizzle. He passed the cafe where a different waitress was now working. Parum papa pum. In the plaza, teenagers were laughing and smoking. Families were out walking their dogs, strange dogs, wee things with coats and flat faces. Wee things that had probably had a better Christmas dinner than he had. He thought of yesterday in the freezing Santiago hostel where the window didn’t shut properly. Too tired to go out, he had stayed in bed eating chocolate bars and tangerines while drinking 7-Up.

He was climbing the hill now, moving through the narrow village streets. A chant entered his mind. You are a lucky man to be on this trip. A lucky man. A bloody lucky man to be on this trip. Five numbers on the lottery wasn't life changing in itself. But it was a start and a chance to break away from the Alligator trap. Every time Ally appeared at the door he ended up getting drunk. This time it had started when the Alligator joined him for a can of Tennent’s while he was watching Marti's cartoons on the DVD. After another the Alligator asked if he fancied a couple down the Beastie.

“I can't Ally. I'm skint.”

“Doesn't matter Rab, my wages are through.”

“It's not a good idea, Al. Sandra will kill us. We've got the bike to pay for now. It arrived from the clubbie this morning. It's in the shed if you fancy a look on your way out.”

Ally admired the bike already customised with Simpsons stickers. He read the message, Merry Christmas Dude, love from Mum and Dad.

“It's a cracker, Rab.”

“You think so?”

“The kid will love it.”

Nothing had changed in the Red Lion. The racing on the TV and the same crowd of arseholes propped up at the bar. They broke into a chorus of 'The Wanderer' for Rab's benefit.

“I'm the type of guy who likes to roam around…”

“Ha fucking ha.”

“They're into the final furlong; Spirit Level is losing ground…”

The Alligator cursed, tore up his betting slipped and tossed it onto the floor. The first pint was good. It even had a taste to it; a certain refreshing quality you might say. Rab bought some fags from the machine with the money he'd borrowed. He offered the pack around the bar and each arsehole took one for granted. The second pint didn't do much for the taste buds but the old glow was there. Rab put 'Glory Days' on the jukebox. Alligator Springsteen sang along, balancing an air guitar on his knee. A Regal mist descended.

The next morning Sandra was standing in the shadow of the doorway.

“See you later. I'm taking Marti to the playgroup.”

“Listen Sandra, about last night.”

“I haven't got time, Ally.”

“Bye Dad, bye Uncle Alligator.”

The door closed on Sandra and Marti. Looney Tunes rang out on the TV. A stick of dynamite blew up the coyote. Roadrunner sped into the distance. Meep meep. Rab sighed, half-relieved. The Alligator scratched his nose, flicked ash from his jeans.

“Where the hell's the bike, Ally?”

The Alligator shrugged his shoulders.

“Forget it, Rab.”

He'd thought of buying Sandra something nice in London; a fancy perfume from Harrods perhaps. Instead he just walked around the block at Victoria Station. A few overpriced restaurants and bars, scrounging pigeons. London, England. London Sucks. He considered going home. Then he saw the luminous green lights on the front of the bus.

SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA

Maybe he wasn't using his loaf, like Sandra always said, but what the hell. He paid for the ticket and went ahead. Kept moving forward. It was a long journey but it was easier than flying. He had to get really tanked up for that.

Heavy rain fell on Muros. He was sitting on the church wall, listening to the sea and glad to be away from all that crap. But these hills, the rain. Speed bonny boat like a bird on the wing. He inhaled deeply through his nostrils, breathed out, then reached into his pocket for another Benson. He lit the cigarette and descended the narrow empty streets. He walked past the beads of festive lights and noticed the green tree logo at the entrance of a supermarket. It was just like the one at the end of his street, near the Red Lion. Good tidings we bring to you and your king. Rab took refuge from the rain. Detergents, biscuits, frozen foods but most of the brand names were alien. He emerged with a Mars Bar, a bottle of sherry and four cans in a plastic bag. It was growing dark as he walked out of town, along the hard shoulder, into the car headlight beams. The rain, lighter now, turned from grey to black. He took a mouthful of caramel and glucose. A cyclist pedalled powerfully into the darkness.

Rab turned left onto the tiny beach, unscrewed the top from the bottle and drank it hard. Then he took off his socks and shoes and walked across the shards of shingle. He hadn't arrived yet.





We Are All Special Cases


Patricia Abbott





Polly was lying on the bed, book in hand, when she heard Saul’s footsteps on the uncarpeted stairs. He’d paused on the floor below again, probably fumbling for his key. They’d forgotten the European practice in numbering floors and each time he came back to the flat, he stopped at the wrong door. If they’d remembered this detail last autumn—realising they were on the fourth floor and not the third—they’d never have rented this place. Then she wouldn’t have sprained her ankle on the final step, an irregular one, worn down from too many tourists with heavy suitcases. In theory, she loved Paris; in actuality it was a strain—never mind the pun.

“There’s such a thing as being too fond of familiarity,” her husband, Saul, had said when she raised a few doubts about the trip. “You’re too young to find change so difficult. Doing new things is like a statin for the brain.” He was always full of observations like this, usually involving some failing on her part.

Was fifty-five years young? And it wasn’t really about age. It was primarily about her fear of flying, but since he’d put her through extensive therapy over this issue, she never mentioned it—just loaded up on Xanax. She doubted she’d ever fly without anxiety.

“Do you realise when we went to Brazil, you came down with a stomach virus. And in Kyoto, you lost your voice.”

“Coincidences?” she said weakly.

“I don’t think we’ve once left the States without some sort of mishap.”

Was this true? Had she always been this awful at being a stranger in a strange land? What about their honeymoon in Dublin? Food poisoning, she remembered. They’d put her on a drip at the hospital there. Fearing air bubbles would enter her bloodstream, she never took her eyes off the IV.

“That can’t happen nowadays,” the nurse had assured her. But she’d read too many mystery novels to believe her.

This trip, Polly sprained her ankle the very first day. Immediately looking up to Saul for sympathy, she saw a flash of anger in his eyes, a stiffening of his back. He practically had to carry her down the steps to get to the pharmacy, and he did it wordlessly

“Stay off it for a few days,” the Parisian pharmacist suggested in perfect English. “You’re in Paris for a fortnight, right? You have time then.”

Once years ago, she’d sprained a second ankle by putting too much weight on it. That was in Montreal. She was particularly clumsy on cobblestones.

Thoughts of the past flew out of her head as Saul finally got his floors straight and the door opened. She heard him putting the wine in the fridge. “Should I leave the cheese out?” The flat was so small he didn’t need to raise his voice. “I got some great Emmental. We’ll have ourselves quite the little feast tonight. Wait till I tell you about the Picasso Museum. It’s practically around the corner. Maybe you can get to it in a day or two.”

“Hope so,” she said, putting her finger in the book. She paused, debating. “Saul, it’s still there.”

He stuck his head in the doorway and sighed. “So it’s back to that again?”

“Am I supposed to ignore it?”

“No, but you’re letting it—if there even is an it—take over.”

She knew he’d like to point out other examples in her long history of preoccupations, but he left the room instead. Flouncing back, she opened the book and began to read. She hadn’t expected to like this book, but set in Paris, it was the perfect choice. The streets in the book seemed as real as those she saw out the window. Sometimes life seemed safer a book’s length away. And safer yet, when she was reading in her own bed at home. This bed was more like a futon. It seemed stuffed with grains of sand.

“I prefer it,” Saul had said the first night. ‘Better for my back.”

“Why not sleep on the floor then?”

She sat up, watching him prepare to settle in with a book. “Could you just take a look? Please.”

She watched from the bed as Saul, sighing and slump-shouldered, walked over to the window and threw it open. The noise from the sidewalk café below drifted up. Someone was playing a radio. Saul closed the window with a bang. “Ugh. I came to get away from American music. Good thing it isn’t hot and we can close it. Bet that noise goes on until three.”

Up on her elbows, she could see bright light flowing through the fly-specked glass. “Do you see it? Is it still there?”

“Yes, yes, I see it. But it’s definitely a costume, Pol. Not half as large as it looked last night either. The light behind the curtain probably magnified it somehow.”

The wings had seemed gigantic then, taking up half the window. She was awestruck. Saul—not so much. He always wanted to see things as benign, normal. He’d never have spotted Raymond Burr murdering his wife. A bank of lit windows, in fact, would have no draw for him.

“Look at it through the camera, Saul. You can see it better with the telephoto lens.”

Her voice was too shrill, but why did he insist on diminishing it? Making it seem smaller, less magical. These wings were all she had of Paris after all. He followed her instructions, snapping a few pictures even. He’d tried this last night, but the light was stronger now. He looked at what he’d shot and shrugged. “Probably a dancer lives there. Swan Lake? Isn’t there an opera about birds too?”

“No one could dance wearing wings that big.” She was positive, having taken dance classes for six years.

“Okay, so then it’s a costume for a play.” He put the camera down and came into the bedroom. “A masquerade. Trick or treat. ” He looked at her. “The doctor didn’t send you to bed, you know. Just said stay off your feet. You could sit in a chair at least.”

“It was only a pharmacist. And it’s months to Halloween.”

It was now, in fact, May—the month they’d thought best for their twenty-year anniversary celebration even though they got married in July. Paris seemed the perfect destination. It wasn’t as foreign as most of the places Saul wanted to go. Just last year he’d suggested New Guinea.

“Do the French even celebrate Halloween?” He sat down on the bed, examining her ankle. “Swelling’s gone down. Hurt still?” He pressed on it lightly.

“Not unless I try to walk.”

“Maybe you should try and walk around more. I think most doctors don’t believe in keeping off it after the first day or so. It stiffens up.”

“It feels better when I don’t put weight on it.” Was she getting lazy? She couldn’t remember the last time she felt like walking anywhere.

“How can you stand it—coming to Paris and hardly leaving this place? If it were me….” He paused and looked back at the window. “Maybe it’s for a costume ball?”

Conciliatory so she’d be too. “I guess I could hobble across the street for a crepe.”

He smiled. “I’ll open the wine.”

She’d first noticed the wings after limping out onto the tiny balcony for some air last night. In one direction, lay a noisy creperie; in the other, a pricey shoe store. But across the narrow street was a window much like theirs—except for the wings, seemingly suspended in space. Angel, swan, it wasn’t clear.

“These flats are small,” he said when she called him to look. “Maybe that’s the only place to store whatever it is. Be gone by tomorrow.”

But it wasn’t. She’d looked at the wings so often today she thought the impression had been seared onto her retina. Television programs were all in French so what else was there to do? Read her book. Look at the wings.

When they got back from dinner—and Saul was right, it did feel good to get out despite the flights of steps—the apartment across the way was dark. And although she tried, she couldn’t tell if the wings were still there. It felt like they were, but she thought that if she mentioned this to Saul, he’d scoff. Felt like it. An odd thing to say. How could you feel like something was there? Shadows perhaps, a heaviness.

She couldn’t sleep. Her ankle throbbed. She didn’t want to drink more wine—he blamed last night’s hysteria on it. She’d slept too much today, drifting in and out of sleep while Saul visited the Picasso, Musee D’Orsay, the Rodin Museum. He’d brought back postcards for her.

“Of course, you can look at practically everything online once we get home. Not that it’s the same thing.” He said this as if she’d suggested that it was.

Tucking the book under her arm, she crept into the living room, turning on the lamp on the desk.

It took a minute to see it, and she would have expected to scream but didn’t. The wings had migrated over the course of the evening. They had, in fact, travelled across the street to the inside of their window—not ten feet away from her now. Had Saul left the window open? No, the noise from downstairs would have been too loud to ignore even this late. She’d like to shut the window now but stood frozen.

Now that the wings were close, she could see they were much larger than she’d even imagined. They were about her height but much wider. The wings span must be ten feet. It wasn’t a costume or anything like it. Whatever it was, and she didn’t have the answer to that, it was quivering: alive. Although quiver was the wrong word because it implied some sort of hesitation or fear. It was undulating, heaving like a beating heart perhaps.

When she looked across the street to the creature’s former home, the window was wide open, the curtains streaming outward. What had made it seek her out? Had it watched her as closely as she watched it? Had her all day vigil encouraged it? Had they made some sort of connection?

Slowly, she drew closer to the wings, looking into its eyes. And there were eyes, on each side of its head. A moth, she thought, and a giant one. Its colouring was not the white it appeared to be from across the street, but something closer to a lavender-gray. It twitched, fluttered, surged. She put out her hand.

“Polly, are you up again?” It was Saul from the bedroom, his voice sodden with sleep. “If you got more exercise….”

“Just looking at the wings,” she said, deciding not to tell him of the emigration. She could hear his sigh, and she sighed too.

Suddenly, there was a fluttery movement and she was enveloped, inside the wings. Like a delicate embrace. Inside, the wings were not quite solid. She could see through them, out into the night, back into the bedroom. She’d never felt so safe.

“You’d better come into bed and get some sleep,” Saul said, sounding sleepier yet. “You don’t want to miss any more of Paris.”

“I won’t,” she said with confidence. Had she ever really felt a fear of flying?

And with that thought, Polly flew out the window and into the night.





Never a Vessel Large Enough


Ryan Sayles





Plimpton sat on the stone outcropping and watched the endless waters lap all around him.

The outcropping was a strange thing. It was broad and so perfectly flat if it wasn’t out in the middle of nowhere he’d swear it was intentional, man-made even. But there were no men out here. Not anymore. There was only a vast expanse of ocean that stretched away to the horizon, where it drowned the fat setting sun like kittens in a sack.

The waters were still as a graveyard, the ripples on top being gently stirred by a cool breeze that only made Plimpton hanker after something stronger. It fluttered over his sweaty face, teasing him like a bottle of booze with half a swallow left in the bottom. Something that could only increase his yearning and never satisfy it. He drank it down anyway.

Plimpton leaned over the edge of the outcropping, looked the two feet down to the surface. “Gorgeous,” he said, and it was the first word he’d spoken since he was marooned. The sound of his own voice startled him and he almost jumped. He ran his hand down his face, heard the sandpaper of his unshaven cheeks abrade his palm.

He cleared his throat, said, “Not like me to go so unshaven. It don’t sit well on a face like mine.”

He reached down and stuck one long finger through the water. Where he was it was shallow and clear, and the bottom was layered with stones, pebbles, rocks and more of the same. More numerous than taxis in New York City. Than stars in the sky. Than reasons Plimpton had to spit in the face of humanity. The bottom sloped off at a gradual taper as it extended out beyond him, as if he were on the summit of a great underwater mountain whose peak barely breached the surface.

“Surprised we didn’t run aground with how shallow it is all throughout here,” Plimpton said. “But I guess a boat that small didn’t draft much.”

He leaned back and the sun turned from a burnished orange to an infected red as it slunk below the western line of the world. Plimpton examined his cigarettes. Two days ago they had dried out enough to smoke. He flicked his lighter and added a little more fire to the sun. Through an exhale he tried to laugh, said, “Dear Lord, I hate people.”

His mind wandered to fill the spaces that the beautiful nothingness around him did not. Memories like splinters cropped up. Slivers of how his wife looked. “Lana, sweet, sweet Lana. I’ll never forgive you,” he said, ashing into the water below. It made an infinitesimal sizzle before the lapping water, gentle as a newborn’s breathing, carried away the black specks to the more colourful stones beyond.

“Nope, never gonna happen. The kids neither. I hope you told ‘em. Cuz I was gonna when we got back. And that wouldn’ta been somethin’ they wanted to hear from their old man. Nope.”

A hat came slowly gliding along by him. A red trucker hat, the brim chewed up and threadbare like a soul at the end of its life. The mascot was some animal running along the front, sun-bleached and faded. The left side charred where the owner—some Midwestern boob named Earl that Plimpton hated from the moment he heard Earl’s hayseed accent—got too close to the inferno on the boat.

“Earl, where’s there’s smoke, there’s fire.” Plimpton took a drag and puffed out rings like he were a steam engine in a children’s storybook. “Idiot.”

The nearly invisible wake of the hat led behind Plimpton, and his gaze followed it enough to see the girl floating face down, her bright yellow sundress caught on the stones below. An anchor. Holding her in place for all eternity, maybe fifty feet away from Plimpton’s outcropping. The woman—she was the one who got excited when the boat said they’d be serving shrimp cocktail that evening—her blonde hair swirled around her head. Limp and free, stirring in the eddy made by her body.

He could have looked further, seen some of the others, but he didn’t. Didn’t need to. His gaze settled on the crown of the setting sun but for the thousandth time since they went down he just saw the boat fire. Felt its heat licking at him. Drawing its flailing tongues along his skin. Its mouth gnawing at the deck boards, shooting off like rockets with the veneer the crew had sealed them with. How the screams erupted just before the gas tank did.

“Come take an intimate cruise, they said,” Plimpton bellowed into the cool evening air. “Come be on the only cruise boat that has twenty passengers and six crew, they said. Come fall in love with your wife all over again, they said. Come get away from your life, they said. Come get away from your hollow, meaningless life.”

Plimpton tossed his cigarette butt out into the ocean. It dunked and fizzled out, giving some new sound to the silence of it all. “My life was fine. You hear me, Lana? My life was fine. It was the people in it. Dear Lord, I hate people.”

The brilliant flick of his lighter cascaded reflections off the mirrored surface in all directions. He dragged deep on a new cigarette, as he shuffled the pack in his hand. He saw four more smokes in the box, jumbling around inside. “Gettin’ lonely in there, boys.”

Plimpton examined his hands for a while as the embers of his cigarette died down. When it was smoked to the filter he threw it away. Thought about lighting up another one. Decided to give it five minutes.

He looked out to his diluted reflection, saw his shadow dance in the weak light. “Strange thing,” Plimpton said with a smile, “there’s so much openness all around here, just miles and miles and endless miles of blue sea and no people, it sorta gets to a fella after a while.”

He looked down and used his bare foot to nudge the closest corpse, which had been bobbing up and down next to the outcropping for the last few days. “You gettin’ all this Lana?”

His wife’s bloated body just rocked back and forth, and maybe that was acknowledgement enough for Plimpton. “I’m doin’ what you asked. I’m opening up to you.”

He made air quotes around that last statement. She’d been dragging him to a counsellor’s office for months now, and all he gained from those sessions—besides huge bills—were catch phrases like that. Opening up, love the life you’ve made and Love yourself and then love another, but you must love yourself. He scratched his head like any lost man would do when he looked around and saw his life settling out. “That blow up I had on the boat, I think it might have been what them psychoanalysts call a break or some such. I shouldn’ta got so hostile.”

Plimpton lit another cigarette and turned a full one-eighty on the outcropping, putting the sunset to his back. “Sorry about all that,” he said. None of the dead floating out there in his new field of vision acknowledged his apology. Twenty passengers and six crew. They just swayed and undulated in the current, burned or ravaged or both or worse. The smouldering husk of the boat, capsized and stabbing up to the sky like a plea to God. What little was left of it was scorched and disintegrating.

He studied the blackened planks, like charred teeth in an ancient jaw. Plimpton breathed in deep through his nose, inhaled the cinder-filled smoke and the stench of the rotting passengers. “All I wanted was to be left alone.”

His mind kept flashing back to how he boiled into a rage while the cruise was passing through this little oasis. How Lana told him she blamed him for a lifetime of never wanting to go anywhere because of how he was towards other people. How they finally set sail and she asked him for a divorce and confessed all the things she’d done behind his back. How everyone on board the ship was as guilty as his whoring wife and no matter how much fury and vitriol Plimpton poured out onto the world, Lana and those crew and passengers could never be a big enough vessel to contain it all. How he discovered how easy it was to think ugly. To feel ugly. To act ugly. How he discovered how easy it was to set a fire. To set death. To set something irreversible.

Suddenly Plimpton started to cry and shot to his feet, shook his fists to the cloudless sky. “I want y’all back, if it matters! Do ya’ll hear me?”

The passengers didn’t respond, but instead they remained swollen and waterlogged and purple and just sunk a little further down into the gorgeous and isolating waters that extended on into forever.





The Solomon Sea


Gareth Spark





John Teach arrived from the west. Dark clouds followed him like a curse and, as always, there was a smile on his face. He waved from the boat.

Dr. Shaun Ross watched from the iron jetty. It shook as the boat swung against it on the swell. The Australians built it, or maybe the Japanese, during the war, and forty something years of Ocean and storm had left their mark. After tonight, such matters would no longer be his concern. Ross, whose already slender frame had wrapped closer to his bones after two years, off and on, in the tropics, lifted his thin, tanned arm and returned the gesture.

His reluctance only made Teach laugh. “Cheer up, mate,” he shouted, his English accent tainted a little by a decade working with Canadians, “might never happen.” Ross shrugged. Teach jumped down from the oil and dirt streaked fishing boat onto the jetty. He glanced to the fisherman, an islander with long hair fastened back into a ponytail. “Well,” he said, “told you he was dying to see me.”

The man laughed, revealing a mouth filled with teeth stained red by the betel seed he chewed enthusiastically.

Ross stepped forward and peered into the stern of the boat. Shoved into the corner were two bundles of blue tarpaulin, lashed to the side with bright orange twine. He felt his throat dry and his tongue rubbed against the roof of his mouth like sandpaper. “Is that them?”

“Sure is,” Teach replied, stepping up to his colleague and squeezing his shoulder. “Told you I could do it- You can get anything you want in that town, anything in the whole bloody world.”

The storm was coming closer. Tall palms growing along the side of the beach to the left shook with the first touches of the wind and there was a crackle in the air, electricity, but rushing, as though all the expanse of the Solomon Sea had impelled it from the lightning's heart. Ross sniffed the ozone rushing up from the west and the first drops of rain hit his tired, dirty face. “Okay,” he said, unsure, “ok, so what do we do now?”

“Just what I said.”

“Have it all figured, don’t you? Well what about the weather?”

“What about it?”

“Doesn't that change things? Just a little? And you’ve brought them now, I mean, you’ve actually brought them?” He glanced at the boat then closed his eyes. “Holy shit, it’s all real, isn’t it?”

“Don’t wimp out on me, doc,” Teach said. “It wouldn’t be advisable.” He towered over Ross at a little over six feet, immaculately groomed, as always. Ross wondered how he did it when they made their living scrabbling through the jungle mud, blasting holes in pestilential hillsides.

Teach’s dark blond hair, parted at the side, smelled of bay rum and gel and there wasn’t a trace of dirt or stubble anywhere along his strong jaw. His ironic blue eyes examined the sky above, and Ross remembered, a little enviously, what an impression the Englishman had made at the last Toronto Investor’s conference. The memory brought his struggling thoughts back around to the situation and he followed Teach along the mud streaked asphalt road to the site.

The yellow steel gates were open; a company guard, armed with a Chinese copy of an AK-47 and a thick, hand-rolled cigarette, watched them pass with dark, liquid eyes. “Are you sure we need to do this?” Ross asked, struggling to keep pace. His thinning hair, the colour of an old silver coin, blew forward around his face. “I mean are you certain?”

“When have you ever known me not to be certain? You knew it would come to this, doc, you knew when you came to me. It was your idea, remember that.”

“I do, I know…”

“So don’t come the bastard with me now. You and me, we’ve done well out of this. Fair enough, we didn’t expect it so soon, but we knew it was coming. Six months those self-serving swine in Port Moresby been after a piece of this, and now they got it. It’s just we didn’t anticipate them bringing in the other bunch, did we.”

“There must be a way…”

“If there was, I’d have thought of it. Now help me get the papers.”

They reached a cheap tin hut sheltered beneath lush, dark vegetation. Teach shoved his hand beneath the white Fiuri Mineral and Exploration shirt he wore, with its embroidered FIMEX across the breast pocket, and pulled out a key on a black plastic cord that he lifted over his head. Ross stood close to his shoulder and could smell the other man’s cologne. It had a bitter, coppery aroma, like old blood. “You’re right,” Ross said, smoothing back his wet hair. Rain thundered on the roof of the hut like a thousand pieces of change falling from a slot machine. “Let’s do it.”

Teach unfastened the door and entered the single room that served as site office. It reeked of stale coffee and mouldering paper, and the large folding table in the centre was littered with crushed Styrofoam cups, maps, ore samples, Geological and financial journals a couple of months out of date, photographs and two PCs, either end, each covered by protective plastic sheeting. Teach walked straight to a brown filing cabinet in the corner and pulled out a sheet of paper covered with coloured graphs. “This goes,” he said, “first of all, and then this.” He handed a card folder to Ross. “Keep hold of that,” he said, “copies of Fiuri’s e-mails, phone logs, everything he said to destroy. If ever we go down, he’s coming.”

“You kept them.”

“What?” Teach smiled. His teeth were very white against his tanned face. “It didn’t occur to you that we should? You’re a smart bloke, I would never say otherwise, but your naivety astounds me, Doctor.”

A blinding white flash lit every wrinkle of Ross’s pale face. His lips were tight and he watched the other man collect dozens of files and drop them into a steel attaché case on a small table to the side. Thunder growled through air as thick as wet wool and Ross wiped sweat away from his forehead with the sleeve of his shirt. He couldn’t breathe.

Teach noticed a photograph on the top of the filing cabinet and made an amused noise. He lifted it down and held it up over his shoulder for Ross to see. “Remember?” He asked. It was a photograph of Ross, himself and the headman of Kalantan, a village in Indonesian Borneo, the day the latter signed over his land to McLaren Minerals. The village had gone now, as had the man.

“I don’t know why you keep that,” Ross said, his voice raised above the rain. “Why would you want to remember that?!

“You should remember it, doc. The things that happened there, well, that’s who you really are, isn’t it? They let you into their village and it was as if they were letting in a disease. Gives a man character, holding onto the bad. Wish I was a fly on the wall in McLaren’s office when he finds out about this place, I really do.”

“He’s only getting what he deserves.”

“We all do, pal, in the end.” Teach looked at the photograph again, then pulled it out of the cheap frame and proceeded to tear it to pieces. Ross glanced over his shoulder at the door as another burst of white lightning shot through the sky. “I don’t want anything left.” Teach said, closing the case.

A white telephone in a far corner of the office began to ring and the clear, high note cut through the constant rumble of the storm like the first pain of a headache. The two men looked at each other and let the phone ring. Teach stared into Ross’s dark eyes, his hand frozen above the handle of the case. “Should I answer?” Ross asked. The New England accent became thicker when his nerves ran high.

Teach shook his head and grinned. “I don’t think that would be the best idea you ever had, would it, Doctor?”

“When are they arriving?”

“The independent experts,” he replied ironically, “oh, any day now, not that it matters. Soon as McLaren did his due diligence tests on the core samples, that was it; serves him fucking right.” The phone stopped ringing. “I liked his e-mail though: “We demand a meeting to discuss the samples.” Shouldn’t have been so greedy, as if we're standing on 71 million ounces of gold, as if we ever were. The brown sticky stuff is about to hit the twirling metal thing, my friend. We’ve raised hell.”

“You sound proud.”

“I have a few million reasons to be.”

“This whole thing makes me sick.” Ross sat on a white plastic chair and ran a hand over his closed eyes. The red mud on his fingers had dried and crumbled where it touched his skin.

“Then why do it?” Teach asked.

“You know why. There was gold here, I was sure of it. Salting the samples would drive up the stock; give us enough capital to find it. It got out of hand. Leastways, we can hit them where it hurts, I guess, make up for before. That’s the most important thing.”

“Not money?”

“It’s not always about money.”

“I disagree. It’s all about money. Not love, not pride, not remorse or good or evil, not sex, patriotism, or revenge. Money. Pure, easy, like a blade slicing through everything”

“Then you must be the purest man in the world right now, John, mustn’t you?”

Teach laughed. He sat in a chair on his side of the desk and opened a melamine-fronted drawer that scratched on decaying steel runners. “I feel for you, I do.” He lifted a half full bottle of Teacher’s whisky up onto the cluttered desk top, and poured a good measure into a white Styrofoam cup that had lain on its side before him. The drink was good, and fell behind his ribs like a stream of flame. “I’m going to miss this place,” he said, wiping sweat from his broad, unlined forehead with the side of his finger and flicking it onto the wall beside him. Ross stared into the space before him, his mouth small and tight, pushed back against his teeth. The knuckles of his clasped, shaking hands were pale. Teach continued. “The rain, two weeks without stopping, the leeches grabbing hold of the end of your thumb as you dig, the scrofulous locals and the guards cheating at poker.”

“You cheat.” Ross said. It sounded as though he had just woken after a drunken night; the words came slowly, thick as syrup, and dribbled over his tongue.

“I don’t trust in chance.”

“We should go,” Ross said, standing suddenly and running a hand through his hair. The action seemed to calm him and some of the obvious tension disappeared from his shoulders. “That boat captain won’t wait forever.”

“I don’t think I’d dignify him with the title, but in everything else you’re correct.” Teach poured another drink, stood and raised his glass. “Gentlemen, I give you the fabled FIMEX gold reserve. She’s been drilled more times than the last girl in the club on Saturday night, but she’s got a hand to play yet.” He downed the scotch. Lightning flashed in the greasy windows and lit his face, black and white, and Ross saw a savagery in the other man’s eyes that vanished with the suddenness of its appearance. “Let’s go.”

The men moved out of the site office and back the way they came, passing abandoned machinery and yellow trucks parked so tight against the dark forest that pendulous leaves and dripping branches hung over the dirty metal. A light was on in the worker’s hut and Ross heard one of the men singing as they passed. They wore ponchos of thick green plastic and the rain’s force pushed the hoods down onto their faces as they splashed through ankle-deep puddles of brown water warm as tea. A figure stepped from the hut and shouted something unintelligible after them. He was a small twisted man, shirtless, whose bones showed clearly beneath leathery skin. He weaved unsteadily out into the rain, then retreated back to the shelter of the porch. “Am nam ga I ola?” He shouted again. It was Liak, the supervisor.

Teach turned and shrugged his shoulders. “U waisi ya?” He called back.

Ross pulled the hood up from his face. “What does he want?”

“Nothing,” Teach replied. “He’s drunk on the whisky we brought back, they all are. It’s how it should be. They know we‘re going back to the mainland, and advised against it, because of the weather. That’s all he’ll remember. Come on, pal. Shake a leg.”

Silent machines towered above the road like the skeletons of long dead beasts, dripping with water. The thunder had passed, and there was only the sensation of it now, like the cold of a cloud passing over land, on the far side of the mountain. The forest on either side sang with a thousand voices as the rain hammered against broad, wet leaves and soggy fallen boughs. “Yep,” Teach shouted to Ross. “I’m gonna miss this place.”

“Is everything arranged as we said?”

“You know it is.”

“But I don’t, do I?” Ross pulled hold of Teach’s shoulder. “You know what I’m giving up, doing this? It’s ok for you, but I have a wife, I have a child.”

“Don’t get emotional with me now. You divorced the wife and you can’t have seen that kid for a year, at least.”

“Still…”

“Still nothing. Don’t pussy out on me. When you cut off an arm, you have to tie every vein or it’ll piss blood everywhere. That’s what we’re doing here, fastening it off. You think the boys in Port Moresby are going to forget this? You want to resurface someday, it’s up to you, but I’m long gone.”

They walked in silence back to the wharf. Ross could smell the churned up sea and felt the soothing cold of it against his skin. The humidity of the inland was stifling, and he was glad to be leaving. There are times, he thought, when the tide takes you and you cannot swim back.

The open fishing boat banged against the metal struts of the jetty and its aluminium and canvas T-top shook violently in the wind. Teach pulled the hood back from his face and pulled Ross to a halt beside him. “Last chance,” he said, his pale blue eyes dancing with frantic light. “This is your Rubicon, Dr. Ross. You step on that boat and that’s it. If you stay here, well, who knows what’ll happen.”

Ross stared at the boat and clenched his fist. The wind had blown his hood back. “There’s nothing else we can do,” he said slowly. The boat captain watched him from the vessel. His long hair hung forward over his shoulder like something that had crawled there to die. “Events ran away with us and there’s nothing else left.”

“So get on board,” Teach said, swapping the case from one hand to another.

Ross stepped down into the boat and nodded at the captain. “Mweluluga waiwaisana,” he said. In two years, that was the limit of his Matong.

The man shrugged his shoulders and turned to the wheel, kicking the engine into life.

“You just said good morning to him,” Teach said, stashing the case into a compartment at the side of the boat, close to the wooden bench. Ross sat and glanced at the two tarpaulin wrapped bundles. A hot wave of nausea rushed up through his chest and out to the tips of his fingers, pressing his nerves like hundreds of heated needles. He closed his eyes. The sea pitched and rolled beneath them as Teach cast off and the boat, its engine spinning in air as the waves lifted it, pushed very slowly away from the dock. A Hypalon inflatable boat trailed after them, connected closely to the larger vessel with a thick yellow cord. Teach sat opposite Ross. His body rocked side to side with the motion of the waves and he grinned. “Don’t get sea sick do you?”

“Shut up.”

“My friend will meet us at Enauta,” Teach continued. “First light.”

“You have it all worked out, haven’t you?”

“I haven’t been idle this last week, doc.”

Ross nodded to the bundles. ‘I can see that.’ A smell of spoiled meat and open sewer lingered on the boat and Ross sniffed loudly.

Teach raised his sandy eyebrows. “The humidity gets to ‘em,” he said.

The looming shape of Matong receded gradually into the distance and, once it had vanished, Teach stood and stretched his arms. The sea had calmed, and the boat no longer keeled violently. Teach stepped over to the captain, whispered something in his ear and turned to Ross. ‘Ok, doc, time to show you what I brought.’ He pulled a long, yellow-handled diving knife from a scabbard on his waistband and knelt beside the closest of the bundles. He slipped the blade through the PVC cord, and then slit through the tarp, upwards, towards Ross, who watched the procedure with appalled fascination, craning his neck to get a better view. “I think it’s passable,” Teach said, pulling the last of the tarp away. “For you, I mean.”

The body of a small, dark skinned, grey haired man dressed in the white FIMEX shirt lay on the deck. His face bore an anguished expression, eyes open, and Ross turned and vomited down the front of his poncho, holding his fist up to his mouth and turning away. “No time to get squeamish,” said Teach; “take the legs and drop him into the inflatable.”

“Where did you get them?”

“A yacht.”

“You killed them?”

“No,” Teach said, as though speaking to a particularly recalcitrant child. “Our boy over there did, and he had a nice shiny yacht to pilfer for his trouble. He only makes a dollar a day, life don’t get much cheaper.”

“But you said you were getting them from the morgue? Or…or…”

“And how many white men do you think drop dead in that town on a weekly basis? I made do and you’re lucky we got these.”

“He doesn’t look anything like me!”

“He will after the birds and sun have been at him.”

Teach pulled the body up by the arms and its head lolled forward. ‘Now are you going to lend a hand?’

Ross took hold of the man’s legs and looked away. The pulse beat at the side of his neck so hard it hurt and he heaved the body up onto the side of the boat and down into the inflatable, where it fell onto its back. Ross saw bruises the size and shape of fingers on either side of the man’s throat and stared as Teach cut through the tarp covering the second body. He fell as the boat pitched and cut his finger. ‘Jesus', he said, sucking at the blood. “I don’t have any luck.”

“Who were they?”

“Couple of French guys, so I don’t feel too bad; mine doesn’t look much like me.” He gestured to the curly black hair of the second body, which was dressed, as the first, in the company uniform, but bore a name badge reading JOHN TEACH. “But I don’t care, c’mon doc, same as before.”

“I can’t,” Ross said, holding a fist to his mouth. “I can’t.”

“Fine.” Teach pulled the body up to his shoulder with little effort and sat it on the edge of the boat. “You weren’t so squeamish in Toronto, were you? Sitting in a strip club, telling girls your new star sign was the dollar. What is it they say about omelettes and breaking eggs?” He waited a moment and pitched the body forward into the inflatable. Its head struck the rigid wooden floorboards with a crack like a twig snapping. Teach smiled, and turned to Ross. “RIP, mate, you just died at sea.” He slid the knife through the cable fastening the inflatable and the two men watched it drift into the darkness.

“So what happens now?”

Teach pulled a pack of Marlboro from the pocket of his jeans and a gas lighter emblazoned with the crest of a British Army regiment. He watched the last traces of the inflatable, a dark wet shape against the undulations of the waves, the two bodies white broken shapes, nestled against its sheen, and struggled to light a cigarette. He didn't answer.

Ross took a seat on the wet, painted wood of the bench. Something, a coin, or a keying, had worked loose from the opened tarpaulins and slid noisily from one side of the deck to the other as the boat turned for the mainland. They had an hour of darkness remaining. “What if somebody who knows us finds them?” He asked in a soft, plaintive voice. “What if they can say, plainly, that it’s not us?”

“Nobody will,” Teach said. ‘They’d have to ask Marie to do an autopsy, and she’s on side. The bodies will be cremated as soon as she’s done, identified by her as us. I’ve thought of it.’

“And supposing that little boat sinks, and nobody ever finds it?”

“Then they’ll presume we’re dead anyway, when they can’t find this boat.”

“What do you mean?”

Teach winked. “I’ll show you when I’ve finished this fag.”

The cloud had started to clear from the upturned bowl of the sky, and a sprinkling of stars, of almost unnatural lustre, seemed to throw themselves across the dark indigo night as the boat pushed forward through the sea. Ross looked at them and tried to silence the small, strong voice inside him, warning that his part in this would come back upon him, maybe forever.

Teach leaned against the aluminium siding of the T-top. He held the cigarette in front of him, watching its brightness grow large and then shrink back as the wind pushed it. He nodded to the doctor and said, “So how does it feel?”

“What?”

“Being finally free.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will.”

Teach flicked the cigarette butt away and turned to the captain. The man’s eyes were intent on the lowering mass of the mainland, as it rose and fell ahead. Teach whispered something to him in Matong and the man replied in a high, musical voice. Teach laughed and put his arm around the captain, glanced back at Ross, pulled the diving knife from his waist and, with a single fluid moment, drove it into the man’s back and through his heart. Ross leapt to his feet so suddenly he slipped in a pool of seawater on the deck and ended up on his back. He looked up and saw the captain turn and gaze down at him with pain stretched eyes as Teach stepped past him and took the wheel. The captain collapsed to his knees with a bang and then his eyes flickered as they lost connection to whatever Teach had just taken from him, and he fell forward, dead.

Ross kicked his way backwards across the wet deck and spluttered, “What the fuck! I mean, Jesus Christ, what you do that for?”

Teach spoke without turning, glancing down at the instruments before him and correcting the course. “You should have seen how easy it was for that boy to kill. You honestly think it wasn’t on his mind to do us? Anyway, he would have talked in the end, they always do; he had blackmailer’s eyes.”

“I just…I just…you killed him. How did you kill him? Just like that.” He stared at the blood washing towards him through pieces of old rope, seawater and oil.

“Mine was an adventurous life before I met you. Now be so good as to take the wheel.”

Ross stood and weaved towards the wheel, stepping widely around the dead man. He could no longer feel his legs and blood thundered at his temples. He pictured his daughter, far away, and knew now he was as lost as he would ever be. Teach slapped his shoulder and said, “Keep her steady.” Ross concentrated on the course, turning the wheel. He heard thuds, scrapes, and fatigued groans as Teach tossed the captain into the Solomon Sea.

The mainland was close now, and the sky to the east had started to grey. Teach appeared beside him and took control of the wheel gently, steering for the mainland and the cove of Enauta.

Ross swallowed and then, suddenly, began to cry. Tears forced their way through his sore eyes and carved channels through the dirt and mud smeared across his face. Teach turned and looked at him for a long time and Ross, expecting some cutting remark, some acerbic attempt at wit, stared back through the glass of his misery with uncharacteristic defiance. The other man reached across and squeezed Ross’s shoulder firmly. “It’s never easy, doc.” He turned back and steered the boat towards dawn. The sun was breaking. Ross watched it burst across the blue horizon and felt the heat of it against his skin. Teach continued.

“Think of it like this; between us, over the last two weeks, we’ve made fifty million dollars.”

“I know,” Ross replied quietly, never taking his eyes from the sun, allowing the sudden nuclear light of it to burn across his retinas as though it could scour them clean.

“That’s worth anything, in this world or the next.”

Ross blinked his eyes closed. It was going to be hot. “We’ll see.”





Agent Ramiel Gets the Call


Pamila Payne





November 2nd, 1942, approximately 4 a.m. FBI Special Agent Liam Ramiel observed Misoni’s black Ford sedan back recklessly out onto the road, then speed away in the pre-dawn darkness. Antonio Misoni, AKA Romeo, a suspected killer for hire from New York City ran a motel just outside of Ozona, Texas. The Bella Vista was “allegedly” a mob-financed front for money laundering, drug trade, harbouring known fugitives from the law and other miscellaneous vice.

Agent Ramiel didn’t know how or why the up-and-coming young Misoni had been exiled from New York City. He did know that if he proved the man belonged behind bars, it would clear his name. The evidence he'd gathered against him in New York was circumstantial. He'd come to Texas to get something concrete. He'd come to Texas to take back his life.

The arid, open landscape across the road from the motel afforded a surprising amount of cover. It was all low, irregular hills with occasional rock formations. The foliage was sparse—sagebrush, straggly desert willow trees, catclaw acacia shrubs, and clusters of prickly pear cactus—but the variety of shapes broke up the line of sight. A man could disappear out there.

He’d set up an observation base behind a well-placed cluster of rocks and shrubs about 20 yards from the road. His line of sight cut through the driveway all the way down the left side of the motel courtyard to the back end of the grounds. He could see who went in and out of the lobby. His field glasses showed him enough detail to recognise faces.

Despite the fact that Misoni was only twenty-three, Ramiel had been particularly disgusted to find that he kept two minors at the motel full-time to help with the work. The teen-aged boy appeared to be Misoni's criminal protégé and lived in little better than slave-like circumstances. The young girl, perhaps a little older than the boy, but certainly underage, kept house for him, but her primary role was all too evident.

Ramiel had watched them with growing unease and worried in particular about the girl. She dressed and behaved like a grown woman, especially in Misoni's presence. But Ramiel had seen her and the boy playing like children in the courtyard, engaged in chasing games with the dogs, singing and acting out skits from radio shows, he supposed, it was hard to tell.

What came through clearly was that they were just kids who looked to Misoni as the authority figure. The girl didn't appear to be staying against her will, but he doubted she understood what kind of trouble she was really in. At any rate, he added contributing to the delinquency of a minor and statutory rape to his growing list of charges against Mr. Misoni.

His current surveillance trip had coincided with a visit from a trio of known gangsters from Los Angeles and their female companions. Misoni had seemed eager to impress them. He’d given the men a tour of the facilities that included a lengthy visit to a small utility room at the back end of the motel. Ramiel suspected it was the entrance to a hidden basement.

The visit had been mostly quiet and unremarkable until after dinner. The women, including Misoni's young girl, had retired to one of the rooms at the rear of the motel. The men had assembled in the lounge near the pool.

From there–though he had observed the motel all through the night–he couldn't be certain exactly what had transpired. Not long after the young girl had joined the other women in the motel room, he'd felt a small earthquake. He didn't think such a mild act of nature could have been the cause of the group's odd behaviour, however. It seemed purely coincidental. His only theory was that the whole lot of them had taken narcotics of a hallucinatory nature and were suffering the effects throughout the night. Nothing else he could think of would explain their strange actions.

He’d witnessed queer flashing lights of unknown origin coming from different areas within the motel grounds, and at one point near the time of the earthquake, had mistakenly assumed one of the rooms at the rear of the motel was on fire. He couldn’t imagine how they were achieving the lighting effects, or to what purpose. He’d heard a single gunshot at 3:39 a.m. He’d watched in mounting perplexity as the suspects had moved about the grounds of the motel singly and in groups, erratically and strangely all night long.

Then the gangsters and the two kids had piled into Misoni's car in a panic. But by Ramiel's count, one of the visiting couples had stayed behind.

He put his field glasses away in their case and tucked it behind the rocks. He had to inspect the site.

The remaining couple and the dogs were an unknown factor. He was more leery of the dogs, though. They could be trouble. He hadn’t caught sight of the dogs or the missing couple in the last few hours. He’d be keeping an eye out for them.

He picked up his camera, a solid, trusty Rolleiflex he’d been using for years, hanging it from his neck by the strap. Its use in low light situations was naturally limited without a flash unit, and he was only going to take a quick look around, but he hated the idea of missing opportunities to gather photographic evidence.

It took him only a few minutes to hike over and cross the road. He could still see the glow of Misoni's headlights off in the distance.

He made a careful approach, entering the driveway along the side opposite the reception area. Light spilled out through the window and door of the lobby, showing it to be empty. He considered investigating Misoni's living quarters and office, but he felt there was more to be discovered outside.

He hugged the wall and scanned the courtyard. The motel grounds offered plenty of dark cover broken only by the kind of light that conspired to keep secrets, dim porch-lights above the motel room doors, amber glass lamps burning in the open lounge at the rear of the yard, and the blue moon upward glow of the pool. A teasing, warm breeze blew against his back. The place was quiet and lifeless. It had the familiar feel of an abandoned crime scene.

He moved forward cautiously, noting that the big green Cadillac the gangsters from Los Angeles had arrived in was parked outside of the last room on the left side of the motel. The door to that room was open, but the room was dark. All the rooms were dark. He proceeded along the right side, scrutinizing the windows and passing with stealth.

Midway back, the surface of the pool caught his attention. The water was rippled, as if someone had recently been swimming. Squirming blue ribbons of reflected light danced up onto the underside of a white sun umbrella attached to a table next to the pool. He felt drawn to the poolside. He found himself standing under the umbrella, looking up at the undulating streaks of light, organic and alive, like glowing strands of seaweed.

His doctor's voice from a dream or from a memory said softly, "There is evidence of… sexual trauma…."

An electric shock of alertness snapped through his mind and he glanced wildly around him. The lounge was empty, as were the patio around the pool, the courtyard, the walkways, and the parking lane. The windows were as blank as blind men's glasses.

He heard a soft, gentle splash. Aqua blue pool water, bright and crystal clear in the underwater light, gently lapped against the tile. He walked over and looked down into the water.

A woman’s pale nude corpse, face partially obscured by her long, lurid red hair, lay at the bottom of the pool.

His first instinct was to dive down and bring her up, to attempt resuscitation… but she was so very dead.

So beautifully dead under the water.

His camera was in his hands and he looked down through the viewfinder trying to get a good angle on the shot. He squatted down and leaned out over the edge.

As he clicked the shutter, a flash went off, revealing people dressed in party clothes standing all around him. They glanced over at him for a split second. He saw them in his peripheral vision and looked around, confused. He had no flash attachment on his camera… had someone just photographed him?

He stood up and turned away from the pool, only to find he was about to step right off the edge into it and almost lost his balance. It was as if the ground had simply tipped him in the pool's direction. He backed away slowly, unnerved and wary. He glanced over his shoulder and was blinded by another flash right in front of his eyes.

He couldn’t see through the blaze of afterimages, but he could hear the sounds of a cocktail party going on all around him: ice tinkling in glasses, people talking, laughing, strange eerie jazz music coming from the lounge.

As his vision cleared, the sounds faded away.

He unholstered his gun and scanned the empty courtyard, the unchanged blank windows.

A phone began to ring toward the back of the motel. Nothing moved. The ringing of the phone echoed through the deserted grounds, as loud and urgent as a fire alarm.

Ramiel left the pool area and followed the sound to room number 15, the room with the open door at the end of the row. He approached the doorway cautiously, gun drawn, and looked inside. The room appeared empty. The dim porch light allowed him to see a table scattered with highball glasses, a bed with a mussed cover.

The phone rang and rang. He glanced quickly over his shoulder, then entered the room. It smelled faintly of dime-store perfume and burned hair.

The phone sat on the bedside table, illuminated dial glowing, its body shaking from the force of the bell inside it.

Ramiel picked up the receiver and held it to his ear, listening.

A woman's clear voice said, "Detective Ramiel. I’m so glad you’ve decided to take my assignment."

Ramiel glanced around again, hesitated, then asked quietly, "Who is this?"

She ignored his question and instead instructed him, "Turn on the lights and take a look around. You have plenty of time. It’s going to be such a pleasure working with you."

The line went dead. Ramiel stared at the phone, confused and intrigued that the caller had known his name, though she had mistaken him for a detective. He hung up the phone.

He didn’t turn on the light, but he did look around the room. He couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary about it. From the highball glasses on the table, some kind of game board, a stack of cards and the few articles of women's clothing scattered around, he deduced that he was in the room the women had been passing the time in while the men met in the lounge.

He stepped back out into the walkway and slowly approached the next room. The door was closed. He looked around, thinking. The dead woman in the pool had been paired with the gangster who was still unaccounted for. There had been one gunshot. The window was open, the shade up. He sensed no movement. He heard no sound. He stood still for a few more moments, then quietly opened the door.

He saw nothing but a dark, empty motel room. This one didn't even look like it had been occupied. The bed was made and no personal effects were laying out anywhere in plain sight. And yet, he sensed something was off…. He paused, not liking what he was about to do. He flipped on the light.

A body swung gently back and forth from a rope, hanging by the neck. It was an adult male, dressed in black trousers and white button-down shirt, medium brown hair. Ramiel couldn't determine his age by sight, his face was too swollen, purple, distorted. Glancing up to see what the rope was secured to, he saw that the man had been so determined to do himself in, that he had broken through the plaster in the ceiling to expose a beam.

How could I have missed that? he thought. Even in the dark, the body was right out in the middle of the room. Well, there was the other gangster.

He holstered his gun and took a picture. His camera flashed.

Chills ran up the back of his neck as he stared down into the viewfinder of his camera and absorbed the absence of the hanging corpse. He looked up and confirmed that the body was gone.

On the bed—previously un-mussed, perfectly made with a blue chenille bedspread—a different adult male body lay tangled in bloodied white sheets, his hand on a gun tucked up under his chin and all of his brains splattered onto the wall behind him. Ramiel hesitated, his finger on the shutter button, staring. He pointed the camera and looked down into the viewfinder, the body was there. He took another picture. Flash. The body was gone.

He turned on his heel and left the room, walking to the room next door. He threw open the door and flipped on the light.

Four men had been gunned down while sitting at a folding table playing cards. There were bullet holes and blood spattered everywhere, the work of a machine gun in a determined hand. He aimed his camera, depressed the shutter button. Flash. The bodies and the mess remained. He felt a weird sense of relief.

He stepped out of the room into the walkway. He was back at the end, outside of room number 12 where he'd started. Twelve? No, the last room had been number 15. But there was no room number 15. There’s only twelve rooms here, he thought, why did I….

He took a couple of deep breaths, tried to clear his head. He'd gone too long without sleep. This was bad timing, but clearly he was succumbing to the effects of sleep deprivation.

He glanced over at the dark archway that led out back behind the motel. That's where it happened, he thought, feeling the metallic jitter at the base of his skull that signalled an oncoming headache. That's where it happened to me.

He heard the sound of a typewriter. He followed the noise to the door that had “Utility Room” painted on it in neat white letters, and listened to the familiar patter of steady typing. He put his hand on the doorknob, the sound of typing ceased. He listened a moment longer, then opened the door.

The empty office inside was exactly as a detective’s office should be, only more so. All the usual elements did their duty: manly no-nonsense office furniture, dark woodwork against light plaster walls, a metal ceiling fan that squeaked and jittered. A steelcase filing cabinet hunkered down next to a water cooler, a half-empty bottle of scotch and a couple of glasses on top. It was all very well done, like a movie set designed by a decorator who had only ever seen detective’s offices in other movies.

He glanced over at the steel panel desk where an articulated chrome lamp threw down a harsh spotlight. A black, insectile Underwood typewriter sat beneath the lamp like a specimen bared for study. A sheet of paper stuck up out of his typewriter, wilting.

His typewriter…

He shut his eyes to keep from looking at the crime scene photos taped to the walls. He closed the door and went out into the clearing surrounded by a grove of tall trees. A large cinderblock incinerator shed stood off to one side, smoke pouring out of its chimney, hot orange light spilling from its open doorway.

The smell in the clearing was an intense, throat-choking odour of burned meat. Ramiel walked to the incinerator and looked through the doorway, immediately covered his nose and mouth and backed up a few steps. A male body had been crammed halfway into the burning oven head first. The corpse's lower back and legs dangled off the edge of the opening, sizzling around the edges.

Ramiel held his breath, stepped up and took one quick shot. Flash. He backed away. The body stayed put.

He noticed a gaudy white fedora on the ground outside the incinerator and stooped down to look at it. The missing gangster had been wearing it when he’d arrived.

Fire and water. What a pretty couple they would make on his wall.

He stood up and gazed out into the trees that bordered the clearing in angular slashes of black on black. He stared down the pathway that led to the ending place in the grove. He put his hand on the back of his head where the pain lived and remembered the feel of the gun muzzle.

He stared until his eyes picked out three dark shapes on the path and he heard their howling. He fired a shot over their heads, clamped his camera to his chest and took off running. The dogs chased him all the way out, but skidded to a stop at the road’s edge. Ramiel continued running across the road and out into the land beyond.

"You've got plenty of time," the woman on the phone had said. But as he walked through the pungent sagebrush in the starlit dawn, he felt certain that he had no more time of his own, no time at all. He was living on someone else's time now. He was a motel detective.





The Weather Prophet


Paul D. Brazill





It had been another one of those seemingly endless days when, like King Midas in reverse, everything I touched turned to shit. True, cold calling was a thankless and futile task at the best of times. In fact, most people in the company hated it but me, well, I just seemed to have a knack for it. A silver tongue. An innate ability to worm my way into people’s affections. To get them to fork out their hard earned cash for something they neither needed nor desired. To sell ice cream to Eskimos, as Foley, my boss, said. But recently, knockback had followed knockback and I’d started to feel as if I was losing my touch. I could see the predatory looks in the eyes of the young Turks who were so eager to take my position as top dog in Premier Properties. Something I was not going to allow happen, for sure.

The working day eventually ground painfully to a halt and I inevitably ended up sitting by myself, drowning my sorrows in a dreary hotel bar, staring out of the window as the autumn rain lashed the deserted car park. Letting my resentment bubble and boil. As was my wont.

“Think there’s a storm on the way?” said Shelley, the pasty-faced barmaid, as she collected the half-empty glasses from the table next to mine. An uproarious group of young women had sat there for a while, knocking back tequila slammers and spewing out dirty jokes. A tiddly hen-party that had called in to shelter from the rain. I’d attempted to start a conversation with the dowdiest but the women had quickly made a hasty exit, of course.

“Do I look like a weatherman?” I said to Shelley, and glared at her. I didn’t need her pity-induced small talk today, that was for sure. The Half-Moon Hotel was a charmless place, catering to travelling salesmen for the most part but it was situated halfway between my office and my apartment and I called in after work most evenings for a drink or two. I occasionally chatted with Shelley, coming on all empathetic as she prattled on about her tedious family. Her monotonous life. On days like this, however, I preferred to get drunk in the company of my own self-loathing, thank you very much.

Shelley flushed and went behind the bar, noisily restocking the fridge with overpriced bottles of beer. Muttering under her breath. Her angelic exterior quickly crumbling. Predictably showing her true colours.

But then, most people were predictable, truth be told. They just couldn’t see outside the limits of their own experience. Couldn’t think outside the box, as Foley, would have said. They had a paucity of imagination.

When most people first clapped eyes on me, for example, their initial reaction was usually one of revulsion, followed quickly, perhaps, by pity. Sometimes hilarity. And maybe I would have been the same as them if I hadn’t been born a hunchback. Maybe I’d have been just as blinkered in my worldview but my disability gave me a unique perspective on life. Gave me an edge, really. A liberating cruelty.

There were many worse things than being a freak, after all. Being ordinary, mediocre, drab were much, much worse. Like Shelley. She was a mousey blonde with a mousey personality. One of life’s perpetual drudges. She did, of occasion, have her uses though and so I thought it best to make my peace with her. I limped over to the bar and gave her a weak smile? The limp? Oh, that was a fake, apart from the hump I was in the best of health but better to be hung for a sheep than a lamb.

“Sorry about being so grumpy, Shelley,” I said, drooling a little. Yeah, that was fake, too. I wiped my mouth with a napkin and put on a sigh.

Shelley beamed a 100 watt grin.

“No problem, Ed, we all have our off-days.”

If the time was right, I would, perhaps, have gone into a long moan-ologue about how every day was an off-day for someone with my… problems but I wasn’t in the mood for a pity party so I just ordered another gin and tonic and then hobbled back to my seat, quickly followed by Shelley, who placed the drink on my table with an exaggerated flourish before heading back behind the bar.

A storm had indeed picked up, the sound of the rainfall mercifully drowning out the Joni Mitchell songs that were leaking out of the sound system. The front door noisily burst open and a group of shiny-happy-people loudly rushed in, eager to get out of the downpour. Two men and two women. Mid-thirties. All nice enough looking and well turned out in clothes that were fashionable but not overtly so. One of them spotted me looking over and turned to his friends. Whispered. They glanced over furtively and smiled uncomfortably. Ordered their drinks and retreated to a table as far away from me as possible.

Any other night, I would have had some sport with them. Maybe shuffled over and tripped so that I fell into their laps, accidently grabbing one of the women’s breasts. But today I had little energy for anything. I picked up my briefcase and took out a paperback book that I’d bought from a second-hand book shop during my lunch break. Sniffed it. Stroked the cover, which depicted some sort of elaborate machine that had been invented purely for the purpose of inflicting pain. I began reading and was submerged in a world of glorious suffering when someone stood over me, coughed and spoke.

“Gorra love that Kafka,” she said in a strong Liverpool accent.

I looked up as she took off her rain hat and let her long black hair fall loose.

“A greatly misunderstood humourist,” I said, straining a smile.

She took the book from my hands, frowned and almost threw it across the table.

“When I was a kid I thought a penal colony was a country full of dicks,” she said. Took off her raincoat and hung it over the back of a chair. “Maybe I was right.”

She pulled out another chair and sat next to me. Straightened her short black dress. Picked up my drink and sipped it.

“Gin makes you sin,” she said. She spat an ice cube back into my glass.

“Do I know you?” I said.

“Well, you do now.”

She held out a perfectly manicured hand. I took it. It was ice cold.

“I’m Roma. Shelley’s sister. She’s told me a lot about you. A lot. “

She winked. I flushed and glared at Shelley who was behind the bar cleaning glasses. She looked uncomfortable and averted her gaze.

“The resemblance is … is …”

“Not biological,” said Roma.

“Ha!”

“We’re both adopted.”

Roma clicked a finger and Shelley rushed over from behind the bar.

“What can I get you?” she said with voice like shattered glass.

“Double Glenfiddich for me and another gin for the Elephant Man,” said Roma.

I flushed with embarrassment, rage and… desire. Roma held my gaze and I felt myself becoming aroused. She slipped a hand under the table and patted my hard penis. Dug her nails in.

“Patience… you repulsive troll… patience.”

I was uncharacteristically at a loss for words. Roma fiddled with an unlit Gitanes Brunes and we sat in silence until Shelley brought the drinks over.

Roma put the cigarette back into its blue packet and sipped her drink.

“Shelley tells me you’re a man of very special needs,” she said.

“I am.”

“Well, I’m certain I can help you satisfy those needs, with the right financial motivation.”

“That’s good to know,” I said, burning up. Skin prickly. Throat arid.

“Sure you can afford it, Quasimodo.”

I gulped.

“I can, I can.”

And I could.

My affliction had been due to some dubious pharmaceuticals my mother had taken during her pregnancy. She had subsequently been awarded a massive compensation payment from the manufacturer which she’d kept in a trust fund for me that I couldn’t access until I reached the age of 24. Now, well into my thirties, despite living quite frugally, I used it from time to time for holidays, and yes, occasional trips to see call girls. I had many special needs after all.

“More booze?” said Roma.

“Oh yes.”

She raised her arm like a flamenco dancer and loudly clicked her fingers three times. Shelley brought another round of drinks over, we drank quickly and then the night dissolved into oblivion.





***





A thunderstorm ripped the night open and dragged me from my sleep. My swampy brain slowly focused on the silhouette of Roma’s naked body as she stood in front of my bedroom window, the tip of her cigarette glowing and disappearing as she sucked on it. A neon sign flickered and flashed outside, lightning flashed and then everything turned pitch black.

“Power cut again,’ I said. ‘I’ll find a candle.”

“Don’t bother,” said Roma.

She leaned over and put out her cigarette on my shoulder. The pain was… delicious.





***





The cold morning air tasted like lead as I wandered from my apartment to my office. It was a short walk but I felt exhausted as I sat at my desk. The morning was like wading through treacle, sipping muddy coffee and trying to concentrate on my work. When lunchtime came around, I walked up to Foley’s office. Knocked.

Foley looked up from his lap top. He was bleary eyed and unshaven but he still kept the good looks that had earned him a highly successful modelling career when he was younger.

“Shit, Ed you look worse than I feel. You been burning the candle at both ends again?”

“Something like that,” I said. “Look, I need to go home and catch up on some sleep. I’m no use to anyone today.”

Foley looked as if he was about to say something about me being useless every day at the moment but he bit his tongue. I know I filled the company’s quota of disabled staff and was pretty much unsackable.

“Do what you need to,” he said and went back to Facebook.

I left the office and headed for The Half-Moon Hotel. I was relieved to see that Shelley wasn’t working and walked up to the bar, forgetting about putting on the fake limp.

“G& T, Ed?” said Alec, the barman, a fading playboy with slicked back hair and the smile of a vampiric shark.

“A bit early for the hard stuff. Just a half of Guinness.”

I was tempted to add ‘and that’s Mr Ross to you’. I hated the way people immediately assumed they were on first name terms with the disabled.

As I sat at the bar and sipped my drink, I stumbled through my foggy memory of the previous night. I certainly didn’t remember drinking a great deal but I really couldn’t remember leaving the hotel bar. Apart one moment of wakefulness the night was a blank.

I started to feel a little better and invariably ordered another drink.

“Is Shelley working later?” I said.

“I doubt it,” said Alec. “She was supposed to be working today but she phoned in sick. First time for everything, I suppose.”

“Yeah?”

“Oh yes. She’s never sick. You know how bubbly she is. Sweet enough to give you diabetes. Still, since The Vamp appeared on the scene …”

“The Vamp? Oh, Roma, her sister?”

I started to get excited just saying Roma’s name.

Alec laughed. Licked his teeth.

“Sister? Well, they certainly didn’t kiss like sisters when I saw them in Le Madame last week.”

Le Madame was an infamous gay nightclub on the edges of the city. Images and words scattershot the sludge that passed as my thoughts. My throat went very dry. I slugged the Guinness but felt like choking.

“You look like you’ve just seen a ghost,” said Alec.

“I’m the fucking ghost,” I said.

I rushed back to my apartment, sweat oozing through my pores. Ignored the lift and ran upstairs. A click and I opened the door into the darkened room. The heat and the smell of sex smothered me.

I switched on the light. The place had been trashed, of course. My Laptop was gone along with a couple of watches and some other pieces of jewellery that could be described as being valuable. They’d even taken my phones. I knew that my credit cards had been taken before I opened the drawer to my desk but I looked anyway.

I was shaking as I went to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator and took a bottle of Finlandia vodka from the freezer. Poured a more liberal amount into a dirty glass, drank it down in one but couldn’t wash away the thought that Roma- and presumably Shelley- had somehow got my bank account’s pin number from me. Wondered how much cash they could withdraw in one day. Could they take it all?

I knew that I should get in touch with the bank and the police and try to sort out the mess but knowing wasn’t the same as doing. As the song said, ‘between thought and expression lies a lifetime’. Or something like that.

I poured myself another drink. Sipped it slowly as I walked out onto the balcony and waited for the storm to break.





The Rain King


Jason Michel





Christ, will it ever stop?

This rain.

Forty days and forty fucking nights.

The constant rat-a-tat-a-tat against the windows seems to have been hammering forever. I do not think I can remember the sun anymore. This downpour and wind howling and rattling. It sniffs around the window pane like a sodden bitch in heat.

Like God’s own tears - for He is in the deepest of all solitude. Mad and lonesome, as He toys with the tiny people that flicker in his dreams. Pulling them here and pushing them there. Flooding them out of their homes with a spiteful deluge.

As I gaze out of my window, seeing the crazed and twisted shadows of the trees dancing across the road, I know that the sun has finally been eaten by the Devil.

I keep telling myself that I have seen the sun before. That it was not just a dream. It felt strong when it shined on my face and blinded me. It was all things warm and good. The halcyon times of life: the closeness of those we love. The closest I get to the scorching globe now is when I light my cigarette and inhale. That click and scratch of ignition. The flame leaps out of its hiding place. A spark of energy trapped here along with rest of us.

Hoping to get away.

To get back to the sun.

Staring out onto Brixton High Street, I see the dealers and the betters, still trying to hustle amongst the puddles and gutter torrent. One runs awkwardly passed, holding his hands over his head in a vain attempt to stay dry and avoid slipping arse over tit into a puddle, as I take another swig of my green bottle. Even my wine tastes wrong today. Yes, it is of humble origin and yes, I have been drinking for three days, but it at least makes me feel. Sometimes that is the most you can hope for.

To feel.



***



It will soon be time to emerge from this room that has been our prison.

Our kingdom.

It is quiet here now except for the onslaught outside.

She is sleeping.

I turn from the window to look at the lady in my rented bed. I cannot take my eyes off her once I start staring. The fear of her vanishing, of my losing her is too great. The curves of her body shine in a chiaroscuro against the darkness of deep places. The subtle and moist holes that I have discovered and explored. Her armpits and neck and cunt.

Her body beats rhythmically as she breathes and I can smell the stench of my love on her breath, on her thighs. Every now and then, she twitches in her dreaming. I momentarily wonder if she is dreaming of me. I only paid for one night and now look at us. I have fallen in love in seventy two hours. A fool standing on the edge of a cliff.

I take the crucifix from around my neck.

It feels heavy as I kiss it.

I hang it on a nail above the bed’s headrest and then I place my lips on her forehead.

She will need all the protection she can get.

I can see it all in my mind's eye.

I know she will have to go back to the man she works for to pay him his thirty pieces of silver. He will wonder where she has been for such a long time. Why she has not been out earning. Then the cockroach will hit her as he has done so many times before. Hit her and then do worse. Then he will ask who she was with. If he hits her hard enough, she will tell him about me and he will come looking. And Hell will find me.

Unless we run. Unless we pack our bags and disappear into the rain. Go anywhere; even to fucking Scotland if we have to. I am not a strong man. No hero. A mere coward, longing to get back to the sun.

I roll up a fag and light it. Spark jump in front of my eyes.

Somewhere on this Godforsaken world light is poking out from behind the clouds and a beautiful morning is beginning to unfold on a world made fresh, but not here. Here smoke rises, blackening the air. Raindrops piss down and take our futures with them.





Dullcreek


Carrie Clevenger





I married her in 1912, down under the weathered steeple of the First Presbyterian Congregation of Dullcreek, Pennsylvania. She wore a little blue garter on her left leg and didn't tell no one until I went after her later that night. She stepped in close to me, so close I could smell her smoky breath, like smoked pine and I knew I wanted to taste her mouth on me. She was a good woman, lithe and classy, with short dark-golden locks pinned in the waved style of our heyday. Sometimes she wore hats, complete with the flourish of a male peacock feather tucked in the band. Annette was a sweet dame, with cherry-filling lips and a smile like light on water.

We giggled in the seats, her hands gentle on my stomach, my neck, all the way up to my mustache, where she carefully peeled away the super-sticky resin holding it on. Les and Annette Smith. It didn't take much to make the convincing picture. I wore my pa's suspenders and boots, and the clean cotton shirt was stuffed just enough to present a slight over-belly above the worn waist of my trousers.

And my Annette? Sweet flower she was, so convinced that any kind of destiny that involved me was certain to take her to Heaven. She believed in the Lord, up until her last breath. A distant smile and her dark eyes focused on me once again.

“Make them see Lesley,” she'd said, with her soft graceful fingers curled around my own. “Tell them. Don't be afraid.”

The day my Annette died was my momma's birthday. And my momma had herself the same situation we was in. Only my momma was a pretty woman, delicate in bone and sculpted of cheek until the Rotary club of Something or Other came upon her in the road and called her the name of a dam. She always used that word when she told the story. She told it to anyone who would listen through those bars, and that was for a long time since women weren't allowed to have death sentences. The state saved her until the one night I was born.

But with Annette, I'd tried. We'd gone out, and Annette even kissed me deeply before going into the cinema like a man and wife. I wore the pants; she wore the fancy stoles and dresses. She curled her eyelashes and spritzed on perfume that made her smell like a movie star. She sure was a star in my book.

When the mayor found out that we'd gotten married right under his nose, we were separated immediately. I was found guilty of impersonating a man and thrown into jail. Annette was not to see me for six months while I served my sentence, learned the talk, walked the walk and endured all kinds of messes that ladies should never run into.

Good thing I'm not a lady.

Annette picked me up at the gates in our old Ford, a subtle defiance to what the law stated. As long as there were no public displays of affection, they'd allow it. As long as I denied what I'd made mine back before she was fully a woman, they'd allow it. We took a faith and lived separate lives, all the while meeting in the dark with pressed breasts and heated breath. She bit my lip and I tugged her pretty curls. She'd use her fingers and then her mouth, and I'd lie across her and repay the kindness.



***



The sun came unexpectedly one morning—we'd fallen asleep in the same room together, naked—and the innkeeper came to the door with master keys and opened the door on our shame.

Then the men came up. There were so many of them. My hands were torn from her hands, and they beat me up in front of her, before taking her away. My lip still stung from where she bit, but hairy knuckles bloodied it good.

“Les Smith, if that is your real name, you are under arrest for homosexual acts and other abominations in the eyes of God. Annette's coming with us, and you're going back to prison.”

Defeated, I let them jerk me whichever way they wanted, and did not respond as my naked breasts were covered by scratchy wool. I didn't flinch when backhanded; I just got back up off the floor and walked behind, head down but my eye straining to catch a glimpse of dark-gold curls.

Nobody figured the classy lady'd shake loose of their grasp and run, skirts fluttering around her shapely legs but I did. I knew Annette. I knew she wouldn't just accept the fate handed to her. Maybe she didn't see the gap between the rails and thought she could beat the train and leave her pursuers on the other side of the tracks, but the heel of her dainty little boot caught and held her fast, and then there was the train, and then there I was, chained and bloody, but her head was in my lap and a man lay dead in the street because of me.

We were twenty. I don't think she knew what'd happened. Her eyes reached up to mine and held my gaze with love. I saw those pearly-whites once more before the scarlet came. They said she had no pain, it was a fairly clean cut just at the waist, but I folded myself in half just to touch my lips to hers and lay cheek-to-cheek with my Annette because my hands were still cuffed behind my back.

I got to spend the next twenty years in Rockview Pen contemplating who Les was, busting rocks and being touched nearly every damn day I was in. I got an “A” tattooed on my bicep, curly and black. Turned out Patti had a friend that had a girlfriend that went by Pisces who did some pretty good work. Amber thought I did it for her, but in my heart it was for Annette. I never told Amber the truth. On Cell Block 9-B, you got asked how you got there a lot, being Death Row and all. I still told them the truth. The truth being that I killed a man, and he happened to be the Sheriff, and that was that.

Patti ran the block and looked the other way if some of us happened to be touching some others of us. Granted not all of it was wanted, but somewhere deep inside I say it was all needed. Cell Block 9-B was like a staircase rising to meet the final beyond. I had to think of what I did was justice. It couldn’t have transpired any other way. It wasn’t ‘til I was thrown into the holding tank for Cell Block 9-B, wet and shivering that I found hands that didn’t hurt. Well they didn’t hurt as bad as big hands. Big hands slapped you around. They paired with deep voices, and the distinct odour of week-old socks when the zipper was pulled.

Yeah, it was me that got all dolled up as one of the whores from the Sheriff’s favourite watering hole. I wore stockings for the second time in my life. I stood in nothing but those stockings and a garter belt over the Sheriff’s head and unloaded a gun into his face. His eyes were a mess of nothing, oozing white froth as his frontal lobe cooked from the gunpowder blast. I let him stick his thing in me, just like I had with scrawny Milton. Leopard tried, but I wasn’t having it. Jasper, Bradford, Henny? They never got lucky. Milton went by Mick, but I called him Milt. We got trussed up on a fresh jug of Tennessee moonshine and sang ballads to the geese attempting to doze nearby. The moon was my witness as I told Milt I hadn’t ever loved a man, but if I ever started, he’d be it. He stuck it in me and I moaned liked I needed that thing to go in and out. I knew how useful fingers could be, but Milt knew more of what a woman needed than I did. When I was drunk, I just wanted to be everywhere at once.

Leopard was a brawny sort of Scotsman, but I could still outpace him when it came to drinking. He held the corner of the buggy up one night while I fixed the wheel. We kidded around about things and women, and he confessed that he knew about Milt and that he was in love with me.

“I’m not attracted to men,” I explained quietly after some time. I wanted to reach out and touch his spotted skin but I only clung to the windowsill and picked at the steering wheel while I tried not to hear Annette scream in my mind. I’d always hear that scream, sure as I heard the cock crow a half-dozen times every morning. The early thunder mimicked the rolling echo of the gunshot that sealed my fate there on Death Row. The wind moved every blade of grass and our hair while the earth held its breath and waited for the rain to come.

He touched me first. Wasn’t like I didn’t know men at all; they were just built wrong. Hard angles and rough hands. Nothing soft but the red hair on his arms. Drops fell on his nose. I laughed, even though I shouldn’t have. He took it as an invite until I pushed him away. I’d been broken once. I wanted to keep the sweat mine.

Leopard rolled us each a cigarette instead. We smoked and tried to pretend that the air wasn’t heavy. Lead paint would have been tastier than the flood of regrets that poured into my brain.

My last meal was Amber, but I took my time. The sounds she made echoed through her thighs around my ears. Her body shook and I let the feelings just carry me off to some other place. Fields of russet and gold. I figured food would be useless. The dead don’t eat, but the living want a fleshy solace. My momma taught me to read, and make decisions for myself; to stand up for what I believed in. I believed her until the day came and she had a chance to redeem me. Instead she cried.

The tattoo was still fresh the day I was to be hanged. A governmental pardon was extended in the form of a phone call just as the noose was fitted around my neck. They had me wearing a skirt and sensible shoes that they borrowed from consignment.

Evidence had surfaced where the Sheriff was burying bodies in his cellar. His wife hadn’t gone on a family visit; she’d been buried under the potatoes.

When I got out, no one was waiting for me. I took a bus south, down where the Mississippi is redder and I staked me out a tiny plug of earth. I put on my daddy's fedora after getting a haircut from the nice barber just outside of town, and lit a cigar as I planned my homecoming back to Dullcreek.





In America


David Malcolm





I travelled to America for the first time, and, indeed, the only time, in the spring of 1968. I flew of course. I recalled the grand ocean liners with some nostalgia. It seemed somehow a more befitting way to go to the New World. But this was the second half of the twentieth century, and with a shrug I settled for the Air France jet liner from Orly to New York. I travel at ease nowadays. I had enough of long and unpleasant journeys when I was younger (and not so much younger). I caught the Toulouse-Paris express at Brive-la-Gaillarde. In Paris, I stayed at a small hotel I know in the 15th. It is very bourgeois, but then so am I. I dined alone that night near the Luxembourg Gardens. I think the proprietor did not remember me from when I worked in the city, but that, strangely, gave me a satisfaction. I was not known. I had been forgotten. The next day I meet Henri in a café near his building. The spring sunshine was warm. Pretty girls clicked by on high heels. We chatted of his children, of office politics, and he confirmed her present address. I had sent my deposition in some weeks earlier.

“You are going for sure?” he asked.

“I have the ticket in my pocket,” I answered.

He shrugged and made a moue.

“It has been so long,” he murmured.

“Ah, so long,” I said. “So long since North Africa, so long since Vietnam, so long since Algeria, so long since we were both younger, so long since we bathed our children and read them stories at night. So long, my friend. I am interested to see the effects of so long.”

Henri stroked his moustache. “On whom. I am interested on whom.”

Boston, they say, is the most European of the cities of the United States. I reached it after a rather tiring journey from New York. It seemed foreign enough to me. But perhaps it is no more than the language. My English is good from the time of the War, but I use it little, and here, and in New York, they spoke so fast. I am not young any longer either. The journey also had somewhat wearied me. I had, indeed, started to worry about why I was here. However, my daughter had ’phoned ahead and booked me a room in a pleasant, spacious hotel in the downtown area, a few minutes from a large public garden with fountains. I walked in the evening, in the warm spring air, and watched the crowds bustle. Lovers met. Business men and secretaries with clothes not so different from those in France were heading home. There was even a metro. I went to bed early after dining in the hotel (an American steak!). I slept the sleep of the just.

At four – as always - the dreams came. They were the usual variants. We were on a hill top in Vietnam with shells coming in. I was making love to my dear wife and her face became all of a sudden that of an Arab girl we interrogated in Marseilles. I walked among bloated corpses in the desert beside burnt out tanks and guns. Too much twentieth century, I’m afraid. My own hands far too dirty.

I took a cab the next morning to East Boston. The streets were narrow. Wooden tenements lined both sides. They had wide front porches and stretched back – it seemed huge distances. This was a New World architecture, I thought. There were bars with Irish names and small shops with Italian flags hanging outside. Men stood on street corners and watched my yellow cab.

She opened the door a crack. I had taken off my hat and bowed slightly to the eyes in the gap between door and lintel, over which a thick chain stretched.

“Bonjour, madame.”

I think she recognised me at once. Her eyes widened slightly. She stared at me.

“Vous permettez. Vous vous souvenez de moi?”

Did a smile cross her lips, there in the space between door and frame? I hope so.

“But, Captain, of course.”

Later, sitting by the table, on shabby chairs that smelled of dust, the sunlight filtered through lace curtains, she smiled again. We spoke English. She let me understand she wished it. Her voice was as soft as it once was.

“Is it still Captain, by the way? This coffee is weak, isn’t it? It’s the best I can get. Sometimes, in a café downtown . . . well, but it’s expensive . . . though at least drinkable.”

“I became a colonel at the end. But I do not use my rank. I am private now. No, the coffee will do well. We are in America. I suppose it is un café américain.”

“Always adaptable, Captain. I admire that in you. Flexible, Viktor said. A good man, but flexible. A good man and flexible, I thought.”

“Those were odd times. He turned out to be right.”

“And you?”

“For me it turned out I was also right. Or I became so. I went to London to join the Free French. I took part in D-Day. We fought through the bocage. We reached Paris.”

“Ah, Paris,” she murmured and looked away.

“You are private now. So this is not official?”

“Madame, look at me. I am retired. A grandfather. I grow flowers in my garden in le Limousin.”

“Tell me about Paris.”

“Ah, what would you know? The lights by the Seine. The smell of fresh bread in the morning. A thousand-thousand little cafés. The deuxième - narrow streets and restaurants. The Boulevard St Michel with the pretty students and the young men so serious. St Germain-des-Prés.”

“Il n’y a plus d’ après . . .”

“A St Germain-des-Prés . . .”

“Il n’y a pas d’autre fois.”

We smiled at each other.

“But you recall it from 1940. You have not returned since then.”

“That is a statement, not a question, Captain. No, I have not.”

“I was surprised to be contacted. After so long. A friend – in the Ministry – the Americans sent a request. To account for those years. You gave my name. He called me. I was flattered you remembered. So you wish to be a citizen of the United States? Vous avez attendé longtemps.”

She rose from the couch on the other side of the table and passed toward the window to her left. She moved the lace curtain slowly to one side. The window looked onto the wooden boards of the next building. Perhaps she could see the street from where she stood.

“I never felt the need before. We always planned to go back. Someday. Soon. Later. We became resident aliens. And then later . . . well,” she turned to me. “Well, I held on to it somehow. Being foreign. Bernie . . . my second husband . . . but you know, I expect . . . Bernie was happy with it. For him I was Europe. A Jewish classicist. His parents from some horrid little shtetl on an empty plain in Russia. I would tell him stories of Paris before the War, of Prague before Munich, of . . . well, you see.”

“And now?”

She looked out the window again.

“Colonel. I am fifty-three years old. I am not leaving here. I am on my own now. It will be easier to be a citizen.”

“I do not think they will make trouble for you.”

“But they checked.”

“There have been some scandals. The Americans took in some very bad people after ’45. They needed to be sure.”

“And they ask a Vichy police official to give me a clean bill?”

“I was . . . briefly . . . what you say. Since then I have paid my dues, I think.”

We looked at each other. She smiled quickly.

“It is to laugh, I suppose. In ’43, we were okay. In ’48 too left-wing. In ’50 they would have sent Viktor to jail if they could. And now they want to check if I was a fascist.”

“I wrote the right things. I made sure my friends in the ministry sent it straight to the Americans. You were a hero of the resistance. You shot a German officer after all.”

She sat down on the couch again.

“Do you still smoke, Captain?”

“Madame, a little. Now, at my age, so much caution. Moderation. But, yes.”

“And a French brand?”

“With me. Of course. In Vietnam, even. I never took to the American issue.”

I opened my cigarette case. She took a Gauloises. I lit it. She sat back and drew in a long breath.

“Tell me what happened.”

“To whom?”

“Who do you think?”

“Ah. We travelled south. The British were in Cameroon. We joined the British Army.’

“No. Really?”

“No. Not really. Somehow – it was war-time – somehow you got places – somehow we got to London. I joined the Free French. Richard – this was ’42 by now – Richard . . . went to work for the Americans. His languages were excellent. You know that. He knew France. He had a good record. In those days, the Spanish War experience did you no harm. Later he was able to bury it. We fought the Germans. I in the desert, in the fields of France. I ended up in Vienna liaising with the Russians. Richard . . . well, travelled widely.”

“He cabled me once in California. He was passing through. He asked to see me.”

“And?”

“No. I couldn’t. What would have been the use?”

“He was very unhappy, I think.”

“And that is the only reason he would contact me? No, no, forgive me. That was unfair. I thought so too. But I was unhappy also. I could see no point.”

“Viktor.”

“Oh, Viktor had already gone to South America. They had made it most unpleasant for him. He was in Mexico already.”

“He died there.”

“Yes. They said . . . a car accident. Crossing the street. He was abstracted. He often was.”

“They said?”

“Well. . . . I had met Bernie already. In the defence committee. He made things safe for me. And then he came to Boston to teach. Cambridge is lovely, isn’t it? Have you been? No? Go. So many . . . interesting people. And if I had dark times, well, a half of the faculty had lost all their families in the War, so it wasn’t unknown. Compensations of genocide.”

She smoked for a few minutes. I remained silent. The question came at last.

“Tell me about him.”

“When did you meet that director?”

“It wasn’t the director. The writer. Usually nobodies in Hollywood. But someone has to write those words. I don’t remember what we told him. I don’t think it matters. They tell the story they want. You came out quite well.”

“Yes, I suppose. You know, no one ever worked out it was me. Not in General Staff. Not at the Ministry. Not in Intelligence. Not even the Americans. Maybe they don’t watch movies.”

“Tell me about him.”

“Richard is dead.”

“At my age . . . that is no surprise.”

“Why do you need to know?”

“Why are you here?”

“By 1950, when he cabled, he was drinking a lot. He was working for an organization that supported Franco and Salazar, paid people to execute Greeks who’d fought the Germans, co-operated with ex-Abwehr men, and sat back when Viktor’s Czechoslovakia was handed over to fascists again.”

“The communists.”

“You forget. Richard was in Spain. He had little time for communists.”

“And?” It was her hard Popular Front face. Viktor would have been proud.

“And. They say he was careless. Like Viktor. A stupid death. Willed. In Paris, at least. He dropped down in the street. Dead by the time they got him to hospital. His heart, they said.”

“À bientôt.”

“Merci, capitaine.”

“C’est rien.”

“All so silly, really. We fight. We suffer. We win. We lose. They make a silly film about us. We become immortal. But not us. Not our story. Not really.”

“No, Ilse. No.”

“No, Paul.”

Later as she showed me out, she said something else.

“I had a daughter, you know.”

“No, I did not.”

“Yes, born in the New World. In 1941. In June. In California.”

“And she . . . ?”

“She lived. I gave her up for adoption.”

“Why?”

“Oh, Viktor. The cause. Because I wanted her to be safe here.”

“Have you . . . ?”

“Oh, yes. Not contact. But I found out where she is. Who she is.”

“Will you tell me?”

“No. She’s safe from unhappy Europe, from all that history. She is very beautiful and very clever.”

What was there to say? I made my adieux, and picked my way carefully down the wooden stairs into the hot spring sunlight. I needed suddenly to go back to le Limousin, to my garden, to my dear wife. I needed desperately not to think, not to remember. I wanted my nightmares again, not a new one, not a new regret.





The Place of the Dead


Nick Sweeney





Our day from Casablanca to Marakech started in a sunstroked lorry with a comatose driver. We crawled past the orange trees into the scrub, then onto roads lined by bare red rock. We stopped for hours at Settat, where the driver made deliveries and supped tea with his mates, and we dozed, heads on our bags. The ride ended abruptly in some dirt-track town name of Semda. We argued, because the price agreed had been door-to-door. “A man comes,” we kept being told.

“But we’ll have to pay him, too,” Yvonne repeated back, getting only infuriating smiles.

The man came, in a white Renault Five covered in red dust, drove us through the parched weeds that signalled the limits of towns. We saw fields of sunflowers sunburnt to a crisp. The scrub became oasis, rubbish dumps among the palms. Our man said, “You think that’s funny?” We shook our heads, wanting to say, not funny exactly, but kind of weird, and stupid, and ultimately, yeah, sort of comic. “And what do you do with your rubbish in England? Your nuclear waste you throw in the sea, your acid rain, in the air. That’s funny.”

“True,” Yvonne agreed. “Not our fault, though.”

We didn’t want to be reminded of England. It was a place we tried to forget as soon as we got off the ferry from Algeciras, in search of different planets masquerading as great continents.



***





We’re prey to sickness in this dream city, and in such moments we have our own dreams. We frequent chemists where they wrap everything in fancy paper and seal it with Sellotape, even packets of antibiotics, and of course we’re in and out of hotel bathrooms at a proper trot.

We stroll out, squeaky clean from showers. A boy makes an urgent face, holds out his hand. When Yvonne bends to make her opinion about his enterprise clear, he snatches her sunglasses from her nose and runs, disguises himself as a hundred similar boys. She stands on the rue de Bab Agnaou, eyes surprised and hurt. It seems like I haven’t seen them for a long time.

We hurry now, Yvonne making much of shielding her eyes. “He wants to be our guide,” I say, as a man walks alongside and rabbits away in French. It’s a game we play when being hustled, make ordinary-sounding conversation to avoid performing the frosty British glance ahead.

“I know.” She’s not playing.

He switches to English, to demand, “What is your name?” They don’t care what it is, just know that saying, I’m not telling you is, for some reason, difficult.

I go, “Oh, not now, pal, eh?” and he fades away. Teen boys, a leather-faced hag, and a water-seller shout hallos at us. We walk this cheery gauntlet, find the chemist.

Back home we would have called them pharmacies for a few weeks, then would have junked that, would have called them chemists again, without thinking. Inside, men drink tea, talk, create a nicotine fug that hangs in ceiling-high sheets. We buy stuff for the runs. Yvonne is prescribed antibiotics, but is more interested in sunglasses, tries them on, labels hanging over her nose. A man tries to help her. How can you help somebody try on sunglasses? I’d bought her the stolen pair for her birthday, all the way back in cold old March back in cold old Durham. I don’t remind her of this, because she gets attached to the sentiment of such occasions, and to the objects that fix them in time.

There’s none of that here. In Fez, our guide, who would accept nothing from us – “Nothing, I insist. We have friendship, yes?” – had wanted my watch, as a present.

“My dad bought it for me,” I’d lied.

“Yes?” He’d waited, puzzled.

“Anyway.” I’d given way to the prosaic. “I need the time – we’ve got to catch trains, get buses.” I’d spread hands in that impatient explanation of the fucking obvious.

“She has a watch.” He’d pointed to Yvonne, his only acknowledgement of her. She’d looked at him dangerously.

“Hers doesn’t work,” I’d told him.

In the streets there are men everywhere, walking, lounging, sitting, grafting, hustling, in sand-blasted bangers, on rusting bicycles, on mopeds with no brakes, robes flowing. Young men have the look of young men everywhere: neat, sassy. The older ones are over groomed, like faded celebrities guesting on game shows: shirts open a button too far, tight trousers, hair too thin and yet too long; kind of seventies. “Eighteen seventies,” Yvonne says.

We laugh, complacent in the feeling that we can, because we know each other as well as we do. We’d always laugh in the end, no matter what happened. Or so it seemed to me.

You can’t walk down a street for more than a few minutes without being hassled, but you have to just laugh. “Of course you do,” one of the old boys who ran the Tanger Inn in Tangiers had warned us. “Or go to Shoeburyness.” We were wary of his sharp tongue, all the put-downs he’d learned from the witty queens who’d quipped through evenings there over the years: William Burroughs, Allan Ginsberg, Joe Orton, Kenneths Halliwell and Williams, they’d all flopped at the Tanger Inn. We wondered if they’d been told the same thing, or was it one of them that said it in the first place? We didn’t have much choice, anyway. We didn’t know where Shoeburyness was.

We sit outside a cafe in the shade, take a long time over tea, say nothing.

A paper-seller approaches. “Independent,” he says, the way Inspector Clouseau might have said it. “English paper.”

“We’re on holiday.” I find easy French lying in my head for years, just for that moment. “The world can do whatever it’s going to do.” A man at a nearby table laughs at this philosophical paste-job, and I feel safe enough to turn and smile.

Across the road some twat crashes his moped into a car. Voices are raised and fists are shaken, but it’s too hot for a proper row. People gather, take sides, but the two parties drive on, fuelled by their pride.

Tangier had a vaguely Spanish feel, but was also as tacky as Blackpool. We’d pictured Burroughs wandering around as the invisible man, improbably, in black, hat like a priest’s. Fez was a sulky trio of towns we never got to grips with. Rabat was sea-sprayed from the Atlantic, and seemed to have a wish to stay French; we were able to drink diabolomenthe and on a hotel television watch American cyclist Greg Lemond piss off an entire nation to steal the Tour de France by eight seconds. Then we had a drunken blur of a night with on-the-road Australians, a troupe most of whose names and faces we never pinned down. Things stir in our guts as we sit in the thermal shade of Marakech. Dark patches appear on Yvonne’s dress. My eyebrows hold a huge drop of sweat, then let it fall in my eyes, startling, stinging. We pay our bill, then head for our turning. We spend ages in the loo, then drift into a dark sleep, apart on the huge bed. A voice buzzes words from our guide book into my ear as I drift off: People winter in Marakech. They are said with scorn.





***





Evening in the Djmaa el Fna, the Place of the Dead, said by that fanciful guide book to be the most adrenaline-inducing place in the whole of Africa. “Guess that depends,” one of the Aussies had drawled in Rabat, “on whether you’ve had a drunk twelve-year-old pointing a Kalashnikov at ya.” Smoke pipes from makeshift restaurants, the air pungent with the smell of animals roasted in their own innards. Storytellers drone out tales we will never understand, but we listen all the same, mesmerised. A man tears up newspapers, but his patter goes on too long, and we never get to see what he does with them. A woman sits in a tent set up around a Peugeot and does what looks like fortune-telling, but for all we know it is bingo. An American voice brays, “Hey, look at this,” almost into my ear, and his companions hurry by, all excited, all going, “What? What?”

A man puts a snake around my neck, a woman in purdah slips bangles onto my arm, a pre-teen dancer shimmies and crashes finger-cymbals under my nose, and a hand goes into the pocket of my shorts. I grab the pickpocket’s hand, but am not interested in hanging onto it. I put a coin into the hat offered by the dancer’s friend, who thanks me with bared teeth. Yvonne dutifully takes a snap of me and the snake. “Hurry up,” she says impatiently, to do what I’m not sure. I won’t see the photo, but I imagine it is me who looks impatient. The serpent is removed and I dish out more coins. “They pull their fangs out,” Yvonne says glumly, of the snakes. “A bit cruel, eh?” I agree cautiously, and move away, feeling the bangles snatched off my arm, old-lady curses hissed into my ear.

We pause by a dentist. On a card table in front of him lie all the teeth he has pulled, torn from thousands of heads, all colours from gleaming white through yellows and browns to gleaming black. I stare, mouth open until I snap it shut, certain I’ll dream of this man someday.

I move money, leave my shorts pockets empty. I’m tempted to pull them out, make a point. You could stand in the Djmaa el Fna with all your money, no matter how much you’ve got, changed into one dirham pieces, and it would be gone in five minutes. I think how even Paul McCartney could do that, though it might take him a little longer.

We take a break from it all, walk along the edge of the square. “I could do with a beer,” I say.

Yvonne reminds me what one of the Aussie girls told us in Rabat, about not being able to get a beer in Marakech for love nor money, her glum face. I would have been glum too, if I’d come all the way from Oz just for a beer. I remember the girl’s face, then: intense, bony, glasses, sticky-out ears, sort of… rabbity.

And there she is again, out of a hostel as we pass. They hail us, our transient Aussie friends. They’ve heard of a place that sells beer in the new town, and we join them. It does indeed sell it, and plays loud western music. We are the only people in there. We drink and dance, catch up with their names and journeys. Yvonne soon cries off, knackered, and fearful about alcohol with antibiotics. I feel guilty about her wandering back alone to the hotel, but she insists it’s no big deal. I don’t feel guilty about snogging in a dark corner of the bar with Elaine, the rabbity girl, beer sweet on her breath. Nor about our detour to her hostel dorm, and the skanky smell of her, the sight of her underwear, not washed often or thoroughly enough on the road, as I fuck her, quickly, fearful all the while of the return of her friends.



***



Terrace of the Cafe de France, Yvonne and I drinking bad cappuccino, watching the square’s night-time business; smoke rising and fading, lights on and off, acrobats hanging with precarious magic in the air for long seconds, pipes and drums sounding, and behind it the clatter of the dancers’ cymbals. None of it drowns out the voices of thousands of people with stories to tell, all the living, all the dead; it’s not the place of the dead to tell stories, but just the same we hear them, transfixed.

“It was that little four-eyed bitch,” Yvonne says. “Wasn’t it? I knew, from the way she looked at you, not only here, but in Rabat, too.”

I hadn’t noticed Elaine looking at me in any particular way in Rabat. As it’s almost like Yvonne didn’t go back to our hotel, but waited outside the bar and followed us back to the dorm, watched us through a window, it seems undignified to deny it.

She’s gaunt, and sick, and I am, too. We can feel the Place of the Dead inside us as well as around us, and, at a further remove, the continent beyond it. It has preoccupations of its own, and stories we will never learn, and we know for sure where we belong, back home, together, headed our separate ways, to tell our own stories.





Disappearing Act


Sonia Kilvington





Grasping her mug of freshly brewed coffee, Alice slumped down onto the sofa, in anticipation of watching the latest episode of ‘Missing’, the gripping crime thriller she had become addicted to. It was still quite early on Sunday morning, her only opportunity for time alone to watch TV, as her husband preferred to have a lie-in. Neil had never been a fan of ‘Missing.’

Alice barely watched the exciting recap of the previous episodes, which they always showed before the titles, as she had been thinking about the plot and imagining possible scenarios all week. But just as the handsome detective was about to make a vital announcement about a potential new witness, the unwelcome squeal of the doorbell interrupted them both; Alice put down her coffee, carefully, so as to not make a white ring on the wooden table, which would infuriate Neil.

As she opened the door, Alice caught sight of the young policewoman, not as glamorous as the one on ‘Missing’, but she had an air of purpose, which seemed to be a bad sign. This visit was obviously not about the unpaid parking ticket she got in the town centre, and Alice could only manage an obliging nod as the police officer asked if she could come inside. I hope she’s not going to ask me to sit down, Alice thought, as in all the best crime dramas this was what they said before breaking very bad news.

“You may need to sit down,” said the policewoman firmly as Alice slithered down onto the sofa, switching down the sound on the TV, at what unfortunately appeared to be the first solid break in the case. After introducing herself to a glaring Alice, (who couldn’t stop herself from fretting about the new development in the case), the policewoman began,

“There has been a confirmed sighting of your sister Alison at Leighton-on-Sea,”

“This is about Alison?” Alice blurted out, suddenly finding it harder to breathe; her asthma making her emit strange rasping sounds as she tried to force a little air into her reluctant lungs. She looked directly at the young officer, wondering if she had heard correctly, and that by some minor miracle her runaway teenage sister was alive and well in Leighton-on Sea; rather than one of the more terrible scenarios she had tried not to imagine too often: her sister being dead in a ditch, fallen down an abandoned mine shaft or being the unlucky victim of a macabre serial killer.

“You mean she’s still alive?” Alice asked, trying to process the information and make some sort of sense of it. It had always been her mother who had encouraged her to think the worst, but in her heart Alice had never really believed that her sister was dead. She was always too headstrong and lucky for a fate like that. If Alison was ever going to be found, she would probably be married to a millionaire or sipping champagne on board a yacht in the South of France; but the abandoned mine shaft scenario, in particular, did have a certain appeal.

“Your sister was spotted alive and well in a supermarket by an ex-neighbour of yours, who recognised her and called the station.”

“I don’t understand: where has she been all of this time? How could she have put my family through all of that stress and worry?”

“You really need to ask her yourself. This is the address she gave us for the hotel in Leighton-on-Sea. She asked us to pass it onto you.”

“She has just reappeared as if nothing has happened at Leighton-on-Sea. Why now? Did she tell you why?’ Alice demanded.

“As I said, you will need to talk to her in person. She is waiting for you at the hotel,” the policewoman replied, standing up and straightening her uniform. It was clear to Alice that the woman had no more to add to this situation and was insistent upon leaving, despite her more than generous offer of a cup of freshly brewed coffee.

Alice reluctantly showed the officer to the door, checking the TV screen discreetly as she passed. ‘Missing’ was on its final credits. Alice became transfixed as a silent washing powder commercial took its place. What on earth was Alison doing in Leighton-on-Sea? It was the place which they had taken their family holidays when they were both children. Alison had always been very fond of it. Was it really possible that she had been hiding out there the whole time?

She tried to remember those early carefree holidays. Alison had always loved it there, as they all had, it had been the scene of her first holiday romance with that skinny hairdresser. What was his name again? Ian, yes that was it! Alison had been love struck, but Dad had insisted that Ian was too ‘wishy-washy’, which he thought was a clever joke after watching the ‘wash and go’ shampoo guy on TV. You could hardly imagine Dad declaring to all of his mates at the pub, that his beloved daughter (who could apparently do no wrong), was in fact engaged to a skinny hairdresser. Dad had hit the roof when she had told him (Alice had never been good at keeping family secrets), and had insisted that Alison find herself a more suitable boyfriend. Then along came steady but dull Neil and the next thing we knew, Alison was getting engaged to him.

How much she had envied Alison! Always getting everything she wanted; Dad had still given her the managers job at their family furniture shop, even though she hadn’t been able to grasp the basics of the accounts. And she was so ungrateful too! Always moaning about not being able to go to art school; but Dad never allowed her to fritter her time away on that rubbish and had insisted she get a real job with a proper salary in their own furniture shop.

And after she had gone? Neil had been inconsolable for at least two weeks, but he was still technically available, and Alice had seized her chance, stepping out from behind the scenes to slot almost seamlessly into Alison’s role in the family: although no-one had ever given her credit for making a success of it! Alice had become Alison; even their names seemed fated to be interchangeable.

But now Alison was back - what did it mean? Alarmed, Alice scribbled a hasty note to Neil, ‘Gone out – family emergency!’ she felt the exclamation mark at the end added quite a nice touch of drama. They always used them on vital messages on ‘Missing’, although Neil would not appreciate this. She was leaving him on his own and he hated even a slight alteration to his Sunday routine. Alice was glad she wouldn’t be there when he read the note as his temper was terrible when he didn’t get his own way.

Alice grabbed her handbag and mobile phone before she had a chance to talk herself out of the trip; fortunately there was already a full tank of petrol in the car, so she didn’t have to stop on the motorway. And thankfully, the journey only took an hour and a half, which was just as well as her concentration was not what it should have been; but who would blame her under the circumstances, with all those scary scenarios she had invented to explain her sisters disappearance, playing like a horror film in her head? She could still remember the day her mother had broken the news. She had returned from her swimming lesson, only to find a police car pulling out of the drive.

But after an initial flurry of activity, which actually, only consisted of a few tired looking posters being plastered on local lampposts; very little had changed. Although the police had never actually admitted to it, Alice was sure that Alison was not one of those high profile cases that make the evening news, or attract more than a few lines in the local paper. It wasn’t her fault but with her mousey hair and pale, drawn face, Alison was neither striking nor particularly interesting, and at almost eighteen, the police said there was not a lot they could do about it. Secretly Alice had always suspected that if only Alison had made a little more effort with her appearance on the day that she had gone missing, a lot more effort would have been made to trace her whereabouts.

As she drove past the coastline, Leighton-on-Sea appeared to be very much as she remembered it from her childhood holidays. A few of the old shops had closed, but the promenade at the seafront had barely altered since Victorian times. Alice parked her mini in the car park of the impressive ‘Grand Hotel’. While she and Alison were children, a stay at ‘The Grand’ had always been out of the question, they had always stayed at a local B&B, and so a visit to the ‘The Grand Hotel’ with its imposing marble entrance, even in these circumstances, was a new and not entirely unpleasant experience.

With her head full of questions and well-rehearsed scenes ranging from anger to disapproval, it seemed that the reserved and rather genteel atmosphere of ‘The Grand Hotel’ inevitably took the edge off Alice’s attitude of resentment. In fact, she realised that she was actually now more curious than angry as the door to room thirty five opened and a smartly dressed, blonde business woman opened the door.

After some careful scrutiny Alice realised with a little astonishment that this attractive and wealthily dressed woman had once been her younger sister Alison. Following her into the room, to the very plush red sofa, her set of well-rehearsed questions seemed to fizzle out as she sat and gawped at the woman opposite, not quite sure of how to take it all in.

“You must have so many questions to ask me?” prompted this new version of her old sister in an unfamiliar, possibly Australian accent.

“I did but they all seem to have disappeared,” replied Alice helplessly. It had occurred to her not to utter the only sensible sentence currently running through her mind, which was ‘so you’re still alive then?’ as it just seemed ridiculous right now.

“I’m sure you must be wondering what happened?” Alison asked again (she was obviously very keen to get on with being the star of her own story).

“Yes, of course” Alice replied a little reluctantly as she was now held captive to listen to Alison’s no doubt thrilling tale; but fortunately her phone was bleeping nosily and repeatedly with nasty text messages from Neil. At least he had stopped Alison from getting into her full stride, so that was something to be thankful for. Alice switched off her phone. For once Neil could wait.

Alice was in the process of composing her face into a concerned but interested expression, when the bathroom opened and a well built and rather handsome man appeared in the doorway. “I’ll leave you girls to catch up” he said with the same strange accent as Alison. As he crossed the room and closed the door behind him, Alice decided that his remark was very patronising as they were hardly two young girls catching up with a coke at the school disco.

“Wasn’t that?”

“Ian, yes it was, replied Alison serenely. You see after Dad stopped us seeing each other, we had no choice but to run away together…”

“To Australia?” Alice ventured.

Alison glared, “Yes actually, we did - how did you know that?”

“Just by your accents,” Alice said casually, while thinking that you didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to solve that particular mystery. “Obviously we didn’t have a clue what had happened to you. It was so awful… not knowing if you were… alive,’ she said, her voice rising a little more dramatically than she had intended. Best not to overdo it.

“Yes I realise it must have been such a terrible blow for you all,” Alison said with a wild flourish of her hand.

“Then why didn’t you call and tell me you were OK? It wouldn’t have taken that much of an effort to have made a phone call?”

“Oh… Don’t you remember what it was like for us both back then; with Dad making all of the decisions for us and then forcing us to fit in with them?”

“Of course I remember! But that’s still no excuse for all of the worry you put everyone through!”

“I was seventeen, in love for the first time and I didn’t really believe that I would be missed! You were the one who should have had that awful manager’s job at the furniture shop… and you never even tried to disguise your crush on Neil. I believed that with me out of the way you would get everything that you wanted. Both Neil and the job, neither of which were of any use to me.”

Alice grimaced, painfully aware that Alison’s cast offs had irretrievably lost their sheen.

“Wait a minute, are you now saying that my life didn’t make you happy?” asked Alison with what appeared to be genuine surprise.

“Nothing turned out quite as I had hoped”, replied Alice bitterly.

“But you’re still managing the furniture shop?”

“The business was sold when Dad ran off with that scrawny delivery woman from Doncaster. I worked as the manager at the local dry cleaners for a couple of years, but they were hit by the recession and I was made redundant,” she recounted sadly. “What about you, you look as if you have done well for yourself?”

“We managed to make a go of it Perth. Ian and I have a chain of hairdressing boutiques. We have done quite well,” she replied breezily, taking a photograph from her purse and passing it over to Alice, who dropped her head instantly.

“They are our two boys, Daniel and Peter… Do you and Neil have a family?” she asked.

“No, it never happened… and Neil refused to discuss trying for adoption,” Alice blurted out. Now that Alison had taken her ultimate revenge, it was definitely time to go, but as Alice stood up the room began to sway uncontrollably and she fell back onto the sofa.

Alison looked alarmed, “My goodness, you look so pale, you must lie down - you cannot drive home in this state… would you like me to ring Neil for you?”

“No, no, please don’t do that” said Alice grabbing her mobile phone from Alison’s hand. The last thing she needed right now was a lecture from Neil. She would send him a text later; he was due to visit his mother at three o’clock as he did every Sunday and he always turned off his phone during the visit, so that his mother would not be disturbed.

When Alice woke up it was already dark. She panicked for an instant, not remembering where she was or why she was in a strange bed. As her fingers finally found the light switch, her first thought was, ‘is this real, has Alison really returned, is she actually sitting in the next room or had she just imagined it all?’

But when she checked her sister was right there in the hotel sitting room with Ian. It was after six and she had missed her chance to text Neil while he was at his mother’s house. She flicked open her phone: twelve angry messages lit up the screen. She didn’t have time to deal with him now as there was something important she needed to find out first,

“Listen, I have to ask, after all of this time, why have you come back now?”

“Ian’s mum died and we came back for the funeral. We are staying on for another week, before going home to Australia: I know its short notice but we wondered if you would mind us booking you into the hotel, so that we could spend a little time together before we fly back?”

“We would take care of all of the bills of course,” said Ian emphatically.

“Neil will be furious if I don’t turn up tonight!”

“I remember Neil’s terrible temper” replied Alison bitterly; that was one of the main reasons I left. It was unbearable with him and Dad trying to control my every move.”

“But you could have still have told me what you were planning, you didn’t have to leave me in the dark,” said Alice angrily.

“You would have told them both, and I wouldn’t have stood a chance of having a life of my own! You always did exactly what they wanted; don’t you remember?”

Alice’s thoughts raced back… and reluctantly she realised that Alison was right! She had always done everything that had been expected of her… and look how well that had turned out. Alison’s cast off life had proved every bit as empty and pointless as she’d always known it would be. She skimmed hastily through the text messages from Neil, “I’d like to stay with you at the hotel,” she muttered, just as another vicious text bleeped onto her phone. She switched her mobile off and threw it into her handbag.

Maybe it was not too late to perform a little disappearing act of her own? After all, you could say that it was becoming something of a family tradition. Tomorrow she would get her hair done at that posh salon on the seafront. Ian wouldn’t mind picking up the bill. She really needed something a little more glamorous; ash blonde highlights perhaps. Like that detective on ‘Missing’. It’s my time to stand in the spotlight, she thought, imagining how she would feel, starring in her very own episode of the show.





What Friends Are For


Rob Brunet





Tyler tramped through blackberry vines and cussed the bleeding scratches on his forearms. The thorns had trashed his uniform shirt. Sixty-five bucks a shot and his police clothing allowance only nine hundred a year. Maybe he could wear it in winter, when no one would see the shredded sleeves. Typical of Jake to let a good path grow over.

Jake hadn’t said shit about why he needed to see him—right now, damn it—in the oak stand out back of his daddy’s farm. He’d just hung up and refused to answer Tyler’s dial backs. The rattle in Jake’s voice told Tyler he was serious when he said he was the only one who could help. “’Cause you’re a cop,” Jake had said, “and you’re still my friend. Right?”

That last bit stung. He and Jake had been like brothers growing up, especially after Jake’s mother split. Right through their teens, they’d been inseparable. Shared a few girlfriends, drunk themselves blind, and grown some of the meanest skunk weed known to the county. He’d kept coming to Jake’s bush parties until halfway through the Academy. ’Til it became too damn hard saying ‘No’ to a joint every six minutes, knowing one failed drug test would cost him his job. ’Til he turned his back on his past and everything in it.

He pushed through the last of the blackberries and emerged on a rise with a long westward view. Below him, the farm stretched down toward the highway, hay undulating like water in the stiff autumn breeze. Jake should have cut that by now. It wasn’t like his old man would sober up and do it himself. Anytime Tyler ran into Jake these days, the guy had grown a bit more like his father. A little more wasted. Untethered from reality.

“OVER HERE.” The shout came from deep inside the trees. Stepping from sun to shade, Tyler breathed the leafy cool air deep into his lungs, and headed for a bright patch a couple of hundred feet in. He made his way easily, the forest floor firm and clear of underbrush, protected by a canopy of maple and oak whose leaves only began well above the ground.

“UP HERE.” Tyler looked skyward and spotted Jake perched on a branch a good forty feet high. “Be right down,” he said. Tyler watched him shuffle and swing from limb to limb. When he reached the bare trunk, he used a strap and arborist spurs to bounce the rest of the way.

“What’s so important it couldn’t wait?” Tyler asked.

“He’s over here,” Jake said. “What took you so long?”

“Who?”

“It’s Randy. Been dead at least an hour. I called you right away. Climbed up to get a signal.”

Tyler scrambled over branches full of leaves to where Jake pointed at a pair of boots sticking out from under an eight-inch limb. He pushed a branch out of the way to reveal the rest of Randy’s body, splayed back like an empty pelt, torso twisted where the falling tree had snapped it in half. The dead man’s jaw hung at an odd angle to his face, the weight of his head stretching back his limp neck so far he looked like a horse, neighing.

“Shit, Jake, what happened? You should’ve called an ambulance, not me.”

“He’s dead. What the hell’s a doctor gonna do?” Jake stuck out a foot and jiggled Randy’s boot. “See? He’s a goner.”

Tyler bent and put a hand on the man’s neck. No pulse and cold to the touch. Randy’s head lolled like a cow’s udder. Tyler turned it to one side, revealing a gash on the back of his skull, deep and caked with blood. “How long has he been dead?” he asked.

“Told ya. Like an hour,” Jake stepped across to a fresh cut stump, sat down, and lit a cigarette. “You still smoke?”

Tyler shook his head.

“Who else am I gonna call?” said Jake.

“What happened?”

“What’s it look like? We’re cuttin’ trees and this moron didn’t move fast enough. I yelled ‘TIMBER’ and everything.”

“Cut the crap,” Tyler said. “His head’s full of blood. Dried. And he’s stone cold, not like he died an hour ago.”

Jake took a drag and scratched the stubble on his cheek, cigarette clenched between his knuckles. “Could’ve banged his head on a rock when he fell, maybe?”

Tyler let the branch snap back to cover the dead man’s face and upper body. “Why don’t you tell me what’s going on,” he said.

“You’re my friend, right?”

Tyler said nothing.

“Well, you’re a cop anyway.” Jake took another haul, rolled the cigarette between two fingers, staring at it. “So, maybe I wanted to know if this looked like a real accident. Or not.”

Tyler’s knees turned to mush. He staggered away from the body and collapsed against a rotting log. “You killed him.”

Jake offered the pack of smokes to Tyler again, and this time he took one. “Not so much killed as got the better of him,” Jake said. “He came at me with the axe. All clumsy-like. Went down hard.”

“Why the hell—?”

“Somethin’ I said. About his wife.”

Tyler watched the tree tops start spinning, and he wanted to puke. The nicotine prickled his legs. First smoke he’d had in six years. The old timers on the force teased him for how straight-laced he was. Half of them had known him as a teenager, bad-ass as they come, hanging out in these very woods with Jake, Randy, and a gang of wannabes each tougher than the last. By now, most had either moved to the city or got themselves hitched and found work lifting heavy boxes on and off trucks, spending Saturdays at the Wal-Mart with ‘Honey and the kids’. Meanwhile, Jake was Jake, just like he ever was. Tyler asked him, “What the hell did you say to Randy about Sharlene?”

Jake spat, licked a drip of goober off his lip. He glanced at the dead man’s boots then looked the other way.

Tyler said, “Jake? What could you say to make him take a run at you with an axe?”

Jake turned back toward him and smoked in silence. He took three good drags before he spoke. “Told him the reason they only got the one kid.”

“Jake, you didn’t—”

“Told him he’s a fucking loser. A drunk. And she didn’t want any looked like him, anyway.”

“Shit, Jake.”

“Said how come his kid’s got black curls ’stead of red. C’mon, Tyler. You think he never wondered?”

The patch of sky faded blue to white as Tyler collapsed against the spongy log. He remembered chasing Sharlene through these trees, pockets full of acorns, a bunch of kids defending tree forts, when girls were just guys with different names. He remembered her older, that long black hair smelling like oranges. She taught him to braid it. Tree forts coming in handy all over again. He said, “Randy never knew…”

“Maybe he shoulda. Maybe it wasn’t right you goin’ straight like you did. Walkin’ away from all of us. Leavin’ Sharlene an’ everything.”

“If she’d have given me a chance.”

“Gimme a break, Tyler. You were scared as shit you’d get kicked out. Never mind her old man woulda brained you, rolling his truck, and her in it.”

“She could’ve got an abortion."

“Look at you playin’ God,” said Jake. “Smartest thing that bitch ever did, roping Randy quicker’n a lame calf and making him believe the kid was his.”

Tyler stared at the cigarette ash grown long and curled downward. He stuck the butt in the earth, patted it tight, and stood.

“You got what you wanted.” Jake spat. “A fucking badge.”

“You’ve got to leave, Jake,” said Tyler. “Get the hell out and not come back.”

“Where am I s’posed to go?”

“Disappear,” Tyler said. “Only a moron would believe this was an accident. Who the hell drops firewood in September?”

“Coulda been for lumber.”

“Could be you’re fucking crazy, and so am I for not arresting you.”

Jake looked at him, emotionless, taunting.

“I give you two days,” Tyler said. “You better be gone.”

“What should I do with him?” Jake asked, with a shrug toward the corpse.

Tyler turned and walked away. He took the long way down the hill, avoiding the blackberry, and drove the cruiser home to change his shirt.



***



Sharlene showed up at the station late afternoon, at shift change, to file a missing person report.

“He’s never been gone this long,” she said, “not without calling.”

“How long have you been married?” asked the cop at the counter. He sighed, as if lifting the pen to complete the form was the hardest thing he’d done all day.

“Six years,” she said.

The cop shot a glance at Tyler as he stepped out from behind a half wall where he’d been filing his day report at a shared workstation.

“Afternoon, Shar-Sharlene,” Tyler said, choking on her name as it crossed his lips. “Want a muffin? They’re fresh.” He picked up a lemon-cranberry for himself as she shook her head.

“Tyler,” she said, “it’s been a while. How’ve you been keeping?”

“Can’t complain,” he said. “You’re looking fine.” Woman still knew how to wear a sweater.

“He’s been gone since yesterday.” Sharlene dropped one shoulder as she straightened herself and turned toward him. “He missed work today. If the bastard’s drinking again…” She looked at the scratches on his arms. “What happened there?” she asked, pointing with her chin.

Tyler shrugged and peeled the top off the muffin. He chomped half in one bite, crumbs sticking to his upper lip. He noticed Sharlene watch his tongue as he licked them off. “I’m sure there’s an explanation. Did you check with his brother? Boys can lose track of time when they get together.”

“He’s been off the bottle coming on four months. Hardly even smokes dope anymore. He cut his family out. To stay sober, y’know.”

“Still, he might have—”

“I called,” Sharlene said, “and they haven’t seen him.” She took a few deep breaths and chewed her lower lip. Tyler had a vision of afternoons in a tree fort. Then another vision replaced that: Randy’s boots.

He said, “We can’t start a manhunt for every guy goes on a bender, Sharlene. I’m back on shift in the morning. I’ll ask around. Visit his old haunts.”

“He’s all changed.” She trembled.

Needs a hug, Tyler thought.

She said, “Best thing he ever did was start Twelve Steps and stop hangin’ with Jake. Baked half his brain with that boy. But he’s straight now. He’s mostly good.” Her eyes full-on crying, she wiped both cheeks, smearing blue eyeliner. “Find him for me, Tyler. You do that?”

The counter cop, without taking his eyes off Sharlene’s sweater, said, “I could send a unit by Jake’s farm. Make sure they’re not deep in home brew.”

“I got it,” said Tyler, and he gave Sharlene that hug she needed, his nose in her long black hair, smelling her shampoo. Still oranges. He asked, “How’s your boy?” He felt her cling to him and he held on extra-long.





***



The boy was in bed before Tyler showed up at her house. He’d kind of hoped he would be, had only ever seen him twice and both times were before he could speak much. Could be all that would change, but Tyler didn’t think he wanted to look into the kid’s eyes right now, knowing what he knew.

Sharlene did a double-take, thinking he brought bad news, but she asked him in for tea when he said he was just checking up on her. “Nice of you, Tyler, pretending to care and all.”

“That’s hardly fair.”

“Tell me about fair, Tyler. Tell me what’s fair about me raising your son with a man who can’t half stay on the rails. How’s it fair you got your schooling, got your job, and all I got was left behind?”

“You didn’t have to keep the baby.”

Sharlene looked set to claw his face. Instead she stood and waved a limp arm toward the door. “OUT. You don’t say that about my boy in my house.”

“He’s mine, too.”

“Bullshit,” she said. “Being a father’s got nothing to do with getting someone pregnant.”

“Like I’d know. You never gave me a chance.”

She wrapped herself tight in her arms. He stood and stepped toward her but she shook off his touch.

He said, “That night, Sharlene. When you told me. I promised you I’d make things right, if that’s what you wanted.”

“You were blind drunk.”

“I meant every word,” he lied.

“You meant shit, Tyler Malone. Once you saw I was okay, my daddy’s truck a write-off, you couldn’t run fast enough.”

Six years ago, the road had been wet, covered in leaves. He should never have got behind the wheel, but he’d wanted to be alone with her. She’d wanted it, too. His last weekend pass for three months.

Standing there shaking in her living room, the boy sleeping behind the paper thin wall, she said, “And letting Jake take the rap. Pretend the wreck was his fault?”

“He offered,” he said. “I’d have been kicked out the Academy before I even got started.” That much was true. Jake said who’d give a shit if he was the one who totalled her old man’s truck? It’s not like he had a license anyway. No insurance. No money. Living on the farm with a penniless drunk, selling hay. Nothing to lose. What are friends for?

“Some pal,” she said.

Something about her softened. He watched her shoulders slump. He handed her the mug of tea. She took it and let him touch her fingers. She held the warm drink to her chest. He pushed her hair away from a tear-streaked face, watched how it caught on her sweater. He leaned in to smell the oranges and backed away as she flinched.

Maybe not tonight, he thought. But maybe again. Maybe with time.



***





Next day, Tyler drove by Sharlene and Randy’s a couple times while on shift, but the driveway was empty. Probably took the kid to her parents, and he wasn’t about to go check. Her father’d never had much time for him.

She’d been right about how he’d used Jake, of course, but she’d done no better. Randy mooned after her for years, while she acted like he wasn’t there. Not ’til she needed him. The guy didn’t stand a chance when she bared her nails. A slouch like him would’ve been lucky landing any halfway decent woman, never mind a catch like Sharlene. The instant family bit sealed the deal.

It wasn’t like Tyler resented Randy winding up with her. And she was right about the boy: he didn’t have a clue what he’d been missing, didn’t know to care. After a while he’d even stopped worrying that Jake or Sharlene would let on that he was the one driving that night. What could they gain by it now? Still, a life lived straight could be lonely as hell in these parts. With Randy gone, maybe this was his chance to change all that.

He gave Jake one more day to disappear, then drove over to the farm to make sure he’d cleaned up proper. On the way up the lane, he passed a tree with grey planks strapped across the lower branches, ten feet off the ground. Their first tree fort.

The boy would be five. Maybe he could build him one.

Someone had cut the hay in the front forty. Jake must’ve done that for his father before leaving. At the top of the hill, it had already been raked into windrows. He shook his head; even stoned, Jake ought to have known better than to do that before it was dry.

Two trucks and a hay wagon were scatter-parked between the farmhouse and the barn. If Jake had left, he’d gone on foot. Cursing, Tyler walked straight to a man-door on the barn’s long side. When he pushed it open, the pot smoke was so thick his eyes teared up. He ducked under the door frame into the barn and peered through the haze. Jake was sprawled across a stack of hay bales, haphazard. He waved Tyler in with a slow-motion sweep of his arm.

“Back so soon?” Jake said. He pulled deeply on the joint he was smoking and offered it to Tyler. When he refused, Jake studied it, as if deciding whether it was worth butting out. He took another hit and dropped the roach into a half-empty beer bottle by his side. He said, “Time flies.”

Tyler crossed to the workbench. He moved the chainsaw out of the way so he could get at the window, its panes smeared with decades of grime. The saw’s blade looked soaked in chainsaw oil. Nothing about Jake was clean. Wood screeched as Tyler yanked the window open. Fresh air rushed in, sucked through the door he’d left ajar behind him. He watched the smoke dissipate while Jake rubbed his eyes.

“It’s been two days,” Tyler said. “You’re still here.”

Jake laid his head back on the hay and said nothing. Watching him collapsed there, oblivious to the surrounding decay, Tyler wondered how close he’d come to being like him. Would one more summer have done it? If he’d been the one to end up with Sharlene and the baby, would he have got stuck in a dead-end job? Escaping to the woods on weekends? He said, “It doesn’t matter whether you meant to or not. You killed a man.”

Hay stuck in his hair, Jake said. “Who the fuck’s gonna miss that asshole, anyway.”

“Why’d he come out here?” Tyler asked. “Sharlene said he’d sobered up.”

Jake threw his arms to his sides, making the hay his throne. “Like you, like everyone,” he said. “I’m no good for nothing. Party’s over.”

Tyler watched him light another joint.

He exhaled a sweet-smelling cloud and said, “She kept him on a rope so tight he choked when he looked sideways. Only ever came to see me when he couldn’t hack it no more.” He took another deep toke. “Imagine. Tell your wife you’re at AA, and go get high with good ol’ Jake. Good ol’ stuck-in-the-bush Jake.”

Tyler dragged a bale over and sat across from him. The hay was damp, like the bales under Jake. He could smell it. They’d waste for sure, no matter how dry the barn. He asked, “Did you bury him at least?”

“Lettin’ the wolves pick him clean. I’ll get around to it.”

“Shit, Jake, what the hell do you expect me to do? You’ve stuck me in a corner.” Tyler hung his head and tapped his shoe, sending up a puff of fine black dirt from the floor. Jake’s boots, facing him, were covered in oil, bits of hay stuck to them, across the toe. He said, “Sharlene filed the missing person.” He stood and paced to the door and back. “She’s looking. How long before she comes here, d’you think?”

Jake snorted. “Bitch can’t stand me. Never could.”

“Can you blame her? Look at you. And now you killed her husband?”

The farmer sucked hard on the joint and stared at Tyler. Looked through him, like so much smoke. “It was an accident. They happen.”

Tyler walked over to the window and gulped fresh air. Did anyone really have to know? Guy like Randy, he could’ve run. Fell off the wagon or just got sick of the life. What difference did it make? This was Tyler’s chance to make things right with Sharlene. He crossed to where Jake lay on the hay and kicked a bale.

“You got wet hay tossed in here like sacks of shit,” he said, “sure to rot. A dead man lying in your woodlot. You’re a mess.”

“Friends are supposed to help.”

“I gave you a chance to leave.”

“You owed me.”

“She’s gonna come by,” Tyler said, “and then what?”

Jake blew smoke in his face. “Who’s to say she didn’t already?”

The heater on the joint went bright red, the barn so quiet Tyler could hear the pot burn. Over Jake’s shoulder, he saw the chainsaw. Wet. And Jake’s wet boots with the straw stuck to them. It was red, but it wasn’t chain oil. Too thick.

He looked again at the pile of hay bales, Jake laying across them. Not a neat stack. More like they were piled on top of something. Someone.

“Whatcha gonna do now?” Jake asked. “Run me in?”

Tyler crumpled down beside him. The blackberry scratches on his arms were dry scabs. He shivered. From behind the pile of hay, Jake handed him a sweater. “Here, this’ll keep you warm.”

Tyler pressed the sweater to his face and breathed in oranges. He reached for the joint and took a haul. He said, “Remember the tree fort, Jake?”

“The first one?”

“Yeah. Remember how scared I was?”

“You always thought you’d fall out,” said Jake. “Made me promise not to let you.”

Tyler said, “Always there for me.”

“Still am.”

Sworn to serve and protect, Tyler thought. “You never told anyone.”

“What friends are for.”

“Bury them, Jake,” Tyler said. “Do it right.”





Pacific Coast Highway


James A. Newman

(based on a story by Kevin S. Cummings.)





I was hitching outside Frisco in ’78 with nothing except time and the road to consider when a ’64 Dart pulls up with a huge bear of a man drinking suds with his window rolled down. Reaches out a hand and taps his door.

“You getting in or not?”

He was wearing a Hillbilly blanket coat, plaid shirt and a week’s worth of beard. He looked unstable but I’d taken risks before and I’d take them again.

I get in and he drives without words, just the sound of the traffic and radio fuzz and that lump of a man sucking back his beer.

He played with the radio tuner, found some Willie Nelson. Grinned apelike.

"Which way you heading, boy?" He asked.

"The City."

"Which city?"

"It doesn't matter," I said. It didn't. Cities were much the same. You needed them to find work and sometimes find a woman. A small room with a forty-watt bed lamp and a landlady with more rules than the bars and the pool halls. Had a notion of rekindling a high school flame in Frisco but nothing solid. Anyplace would do.

We pull up in one of those scenic spots looking over the city, night had fallen, sunken, twinkling lights from the city below blinked like drunken stars, sounds of birds roosting above in skeletal trees.

He looks over at me says:

“So, where you from boy?”

“All over,” I told him. “been hitching long as I remember.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes, sir.”

“So there ain’t nobody that knows your whereabouts right about now?”

“Just you and myself.”

He opened the window and spat.

Tossed out the beer can.

His face tensed. "See that there seat you're sitting on? The last hitcher and I made it right there on that seat at this here very spot. I say right on the seat, but he was kinda hunched over, one hand on the back of this here head rest the other on the dashboard. You won't wanna go struggle like that 'un did. Because," he held my chin in his tobacco stained fingers and brought my face closer to his "I prefer it when they struggle, see."

I managed a smile and thought of the girl from high-school, the blinking electrical lights and the cool lump of .22 Mexican junk that I kept in a concealed holster for occasions such as these.

That ’64 Dart took me as far as L.A. where I traded her for a Mustang, 1968. Flame red.





Dead Man Walking


Tess Makovesky





Johnny grinned under his stocking mask as he shot the lock off the airport security depot door. This was the life; this was the mayhem he loved. A bit of strong-arm stuff, a bit of arm-twisting or fingernail-pulling, a bit of blagging with a shotgun in one hand, just to make sure people did what they were told. A heap of cash at the end.

This time was better than usual. This time the target wasn't just a post office or a bank; this time there'd be millions involved. Cash, bonds, jewellery, electricals, all stored neatly under one anonymous warehouse roof, waiting for transport around the world. The airport wouldn't know whose army had hit them; by the time they woke up and smelled the coffee it would be too late.

And this time, Johnny's plans had given him a licence to kill. He couldn't be done for murder if he was dead.



***



"You sure this'll work?" Maggie had said, only the previous night.

"Course I'm sure. Wouldn't be doing it otherwise."

"Yes, but… What if they don't believe you're dead?"

"Trust me, they'll believe it. They'll believe it because they want to believe it. I've been a thorn in their side for far too long. And everything's been prepared."

He was right. Everything was prepared; he'd worked hard to make this work. Found some old homeless guy on the streets who looked as much like him as possible - same height, same build. Given him a few of his own more obvious scars, then whacked him over the head. The guy had begged at the end, but Johnny didn't care. He was a nobody, shoving a cart round the neighbourhood night after night and getting pissed. Nobody would miss him, nobody would even notice that he'd gone. Besides, Johnny needed him dead.



***



The alarm was going ballistic so Johnny shot that too. It wheezed, gurgled and died, pretty much how the homeless guy had died. But at least the racket stopped. Now he could hear himself think, and concentrate on the job. Two more security doors between him and the loot, but the C4 should take care of those. Movement in the shadows caught his eye - uniformed security guards. Well, he'd expected them; it was nothing a spray of bullets couldn't cure. He hefted the gun, pulled the trigger, waited for the thump of bodies hitting the concrete floor. There'd be others along, of course - the alarm would have seen to that. He figured he didn't have long before the place turned into the Alamo.

Doors wired, he scuttled for cover and hit the switch. An ear-splitting crack and the doors were gone, leaving only dust and the smell of hot metal in their wake. Johnny ran through the debris to the riches within.



***



He gave himself ten minutes and not a second more. He'd worked out distances to the local police HQ, and the state of the traffic at this time of night. Some of the blokes he knew were inside thanks to their greed - to going on with a job long after it was safe. Not Johnny. He was too smart for that. He'd got this all worked out. Grab what he could and load the van, then make his escape. He set to work, rummaging through boxes, taking the small, high-value stuff: cash, phones, gold; anything Maggie could sell on with a minimum of questions asked. No point leaving her with a pile of stuff she couldn't fence.





Maggie was waiting three blocks over with a different van, with the homeless guy in the back.

"All right, Johnny-boy?"

"Never better. It all went to plan."

They'd known each other too long to need small talk. He grabbed her round the waist and shared a smacking kiss, then patted her on the arse. "Come on, lass, there's work to do. Give me a hand with this stuff."



***



Johnny shot both Maggie, and the homeless guy before he went into the canal. The bullet only grazed Maggie's arm, as he'd intended it to. That way, it would look like they'd had a falling out. Like he'd shot Maggie and she'd shot him back in self-defence. The body made an impressive splash when they chucked it in. It bobbed for a while, then the weight took it slowly, spinning, into the murky depths. Until the chains snagged on something near the bank, and the whole grisly parcel lay half-floating, half-submerged, waiting to be found.

"That should do nicely," said Johnny, rubbing his hands, and climbed back into the van.



***



She dropped him off at a nondescript motel. The sheets were as stained as the walls, but it didn't matter because he'd only be here for a day or two at the most. Just until the coppers found the body, put two and two together and came up with five. Then he'd be safe to move.

He switched on the tv and tuned to the first news channel he could find. At first there was nothing. He sat and drank beer, and filled his stomach with chocolate and peanuts from the mini-bar. After an hour reports filtered in of the raid on the security depot. Fifteen million, they reckoned he'd got away with. Johnny just grinned. He knew it was nearer twenty-five. Even after the fences had knocked Maggie down, there'd be plenty left over to re-build their lives.

Finally, the bit he'd been waiting for. "Police report that a body has been recovered from the Grand Union canal. Unconfirmed reports suggest the person had been shot before entering the water. It is not yet clear whether police are linking this to the airport security robbery. More details to follow."

Johnny kicked off his boots, lay down on the crumpled bed and put his hands behind his head. He loved it when a plan worked this well.



***



"What the fuck d'you mean, it didn't work? Of course it fucking worked. It's been three years and there hasn't been so much as a whisper that I might still be alive."

Maggie shrugged around the blanket-wrapped bundle in her arms. "Go ahead and believe that if you want."

"Yes but we had it all planned. Down to the last detail. Do the job, fake my death, then come back to life and share the spoils. How could it possibly go wrong?"

"Well, for starters, you're dead."

"No I'm not, I'm standing here talking to you." The bitch wasn't making any sense.

"I know that but the authorities don't. They think you're dead. Which means no home address, no benefits, no job, no passport to fly off somewhere else. No money, no bank account, no record that you still exist."

"We talked about all that. We had a new I.D. lined up. All the papers and everything. Don't tell me you've forgotten that?"

She stared at him, eyes wide. The bundle stirred and began to cry; she held it close to her face. "I don't remember any of that," she said.

"You're lying, you fucking cow," he said. "And whose is that, anyhow?"

She shrugged again. "Got a new bloke now. A good bloke, who can provide for me without disappearing for three whole bloody years. I don't need you in my life, Johnny. And don't you think about killing me, because I've got the whole thing written down. If I vanish, Philip gives that to the police. And you'd go to jail for the rest of your miserable life."



***



Johnny scowls under his woolly hat. His whisky's almost finished and the shops are closed; at three in the morning even the off-licence on the corner is shut. He pulls his collar up and wishes he'd thought to nick a scarf. There's a cold wind blowing leaves and litter round his feet; they're forecasting rain and his borrowed boots leak.

He still can't understand how it all went so wrong. How all his plans came to nothing, how he ended up like this. Maggie got away with it. Maggie got all the cash - hers and his - and lives in a four-bed house with two cars parked outside. He sees her, sometimes, when she comes to shop in town, but she never notices him. He's like the litter - he blows around with the wind, gets under people's feet, but remains unseen. He'd kill her if he could but he's scared she was telling the truth. He'd get a minimum of thirty years and there's no whisky in jail.

He's a nobody now, shoving a cart around the streets and getting pissed. He wishes he could finish it but killing other people and killing himself are two different things and he doesn't have the nerve.

His brilliant plan failed. His licence to kill expired. It left only cold and loneliness in its wake.





Shut Out The Light


Chris Leek





Deep shadows muffled the spill of candy cane neon coming from the roof of the Su-Su Lounge, leaving only a faint glow that made the beads of sweat on Tommy’s forehead look like little pink soap bubbles. I knew I should do something, but I didn’t have a damn clue what that something should be, so I just sat there with my hard-on in full retreat and the gunshot ringing in my ears.

Tommy’s face looked different. Somehow it seemed naked, as if he’d shaved off a winter beard, but that wasn’t it. It took me a moment to realise his dark glasses were gone and that I could actually see his eyes; the pupils all fat and bloated from the oxy that rocked through his veins like the encore of a Led Zeppelin concert.

“Get out of the fucking car, peckerwood,” Tommy said levelling his gun at me.

There was a tremor of emotion in his voice. I couldn’t tell if it was real or just a side effect of the painkillers he’d been popping like candy ever since he came home. Tommy’s hand was shaking too, blurring the playing cards tattooed on his knuckles. He’d got himself inked in the hospital, letting some amateur needle jockey in the next bed stain his skin with bad art. The cards themselves were all diamonds, the dime, jack, queen and king on his fingers and the ace on his thumb. A royal flush wrapped around a .357 Magnum was a winning hand whichever way you looked at it.

I stumbled out of the car feeling drunk in spite of the fact I had only downed a couple of beers before I took Amber outside to fool around. That was when Tommy showed up. He yanked Amber off my lap and smeared her across the hood of my Mustang like she was some kind of custom paint job. Tommy helped me build that car. It was as much his as it was mine, although Amber had been mostly his.

I crouched to down next to her, being careful not to tread in the halo of blood that had formed a near perfect circle around her head. I searched the smooth skin of her neck, feeling for a pulse and finding nothing but regret.

“Shit Tommy, she’s dead.”

In the half-light her blood showed up oil-slick black. I dabbed the puddle with my finger and rubbed the tacky liquid around on my thumb. It was warm and sandy to the touch and I found myself thinking of the time Tommy, Amber and me had taken the Mustang down to Ocean City for the weekend. Amber won $200 on the slots and we all got wasted on margaritas. That was a lifetime ago now, and this was a long way from being a day at the beach.

“Two-timing bitch had it coming,” Tommy said and spat.

I couldn’t take my eyes from Amber’s crumpled body. The angle of her legs; the way her arm hung awkwardly down behind her back. It was all wrong. I knew it had been wrong between us too, but I couldn’t stop myself, any more than she could. We were the only two people who really gave a shit about Tommy and that bound us to each other as much as it did to my brother.

It had been over between them long before Tommy thought to punctuate the relationship with a bullet, only nobody had actually gotten around to saying it. In fact it had started to be over the moment his plane touched down at Andrew’s Field.

Tommy nearly died in that desert shit-hole and seeing him now with his hands trembling and the hurt carved deep into his face, I almost wished he had. The guy who came back from Iraq half blind and shy one foot looked like my brother, but that was where the similarity ended. The real Tommy was still out there somewhere, lost in all that shimmering heat and dust.

“Who’d of thought it? My own goddamn brother,” Tommy said like I was some big disappointment to him.

I felt the hot barrel of the .357 against my neck, smelt the rich odour of gun oil mixing with the sharp tang of spent ammunition. I was a mumbled curse away from joining Amber in what the newspapers would probably call a crime of passion. That would be the final perverted irony; passion didn’t have a damn thing to do with it. I didn’t know if I loved Amber or not, but I knew she would never love me back. I was just the closest thing she could find to my brother, or more precisely to how my brother used to be, before he started answering her concern with his fists.

Tommy never spoke about what happened to him in Iraq. He just let it burn him up inside. It seemed like he needed the pain as much as he needed the pills. In the end it didn’t matter to him whose pain it was, just as long as he got his fix. I suppose that was his way of coping, and I was Amber’s. I’m not sure that I ever found mine.

“Look, Tommy, I —”

“Save it, Joe. I don’t give a shit. I thought you had my back and all along you’ve been fucking me behind it.”

I glanced over at Amber, her hair draped over her face in a shroud of bottle-blonde, saving me from the agony of her last expression.

“Amber was the one I was fucking,” I said loading all the meanness I could find into the words and aiming at the place where his heart used to be.

He leaned over, brought the pistol down across my face and gave me a real close up look at the parking lot. On balance, I probably deserved it.

“Think long and hard about the next words that come out of your smart mouth, Joe. They’ll likely be your last.” He said shifting his weight from his good leg.

I hawked up blood and rubbed the lump already swelling above my eye. I was done with thinking.

“You want an apology, is that it. Well fuck you, Tommy. How about you apologise to her?” I gestured towards the empty impression of the woman we shared. “God knows she’s the only one here who deserves it.”

“She was cheating on me with my own damn brother. I’d say she already got all she deserved.”

“Damn it all, she was in love with you, man. It was only ever you. Can’t you see that, you dumb fucking… cripple?”

He raised the gun, meaning either to club me again or shoot me. I didn’t wait to find out which and swung my arm around sweeping his leg out from under him. The plastic foot they gave him at the VA hospital was more for show than for standing on and he toppled backwards, hitting the ground hard enough to knock the wind out of him. I jumped on top of him and wrestled the gun away, tossing it under the car before he fully realised what was happening. When he did, he jabbed out a fist that caught me flush on the chin. I shook it off and punched him in the gut. Suddenly it was like we were back in high school and the last ten years had never happened. The Fallon boys were rolling around in the dirt and beating the crap out of each other again, just like old times.

Tommy kicked out, trying to buck me off. I held firm so he threw another punch that skimmed past my shoulder on its way to the bridge of my nose. The force of it jerked back my head and blood started pouring out of my nostrils, making me see two kinds of red. I balled up my hands and drove my knuckles into his face; pounding on him like Stallone pounded the Russian in that Rocky movie we loved as kids.

“Ow, my fucking eye,” Tommy yelled and clutched his face.

“Oh shit, Tommy. I’m sorry man, you okay?”

I pulled his hands away and saw that same old look on his face, the one that said sucker. Tommy unloaded a haymaker that filled my head with crackling static and then he grabbed my shirt, heaving me off of him. We both lay on our backs, bleeding and gulping down air. It looked like he was smiling. I guess I was too.

The roadhouse door slammed back on its hinges and outlaw country tumbled into the night, followed by a crowd of good ole’ boys, laughing and back-slapping and making for home. The shot that had killed Amber had gone unnoticed—in this neighbourhood a full scale artillery barrage might have been overlooked—but now the bar was starting to empty, a bled-out body in the parking lot wouldn’t be so easily missed.

“C’mon, we need to get out of here,” I said getting to my feet and hauling Tommy up after me.



***



I drove west heading out of town and towards the state line. Tommy had picked up the gun and held it in his lap, although he no longer had anything to point it at. His other hand shaded his eyes against the glare of oncoming headlights.

“What happened to your glasses, man?” I asked.

“What do you care?” he said like he was still eleven years old and I was nine.

“Shit Tommy, I care. I’m your brother ain’t I?”

“Well, you got a damn funny way of showing it, bro.”

There was a cop running a speed trap outside the old rendering factory on Fairview. I passed him doing an easy thirty-five. It must have been a slow night as he immediately pulled out and sat in behind us, matching every turn I made with an unnerving inevitability. Mom always used to say how her boys had their own special kind of gravity when it came to attracting pretty girls and trouble—it was funny how often those two things went hand in hand.

“Just be cool,” Tommy said.

He sounded strangely calm and just for a second I caught a glimpse of my big brother again. The bad-ass Ranger who’d served two tours in the asshole of the world. The guy I’d looked up to my whole damn life.

The police cruiser stuck to us like a bad smell, all the way out to the turnpike. When we reached the intersection the lights were on red. Tommy swore under his breath as I slowed to a stop. The cop rolled up alongside. I didn’t need to look over to know he would be giving us the stink eye, but I did it just the same. I don’t know what made up his mind, perhaps it was the blood stain on the hood, or the fact that Tommy looked like a nailed-on possession bust. Either way, he hit his cherries and made the question redundant.

“It’s your call, man,” I said to Tommy.

He only took a beat to decide. “Gun the bitch.”

Blood was blood and like the ink on Tommy’s knuckles, it didn’t wash off. I dropped the Mustang into gear, mashed the gas pedal and popped the clutch. The tires searched for grip. The smell of scorched rubber tugged at my busted nose and the Fallon Boys took off on one last pony ride.



***





Mile markers loomed out of the dark and vanished again in one liquid motion that made me doubt I had even seen them in the first place. Somewhere behind us, just beyond the last bend a siren tore up the night. I glanced down at the fuel gauge. I had put some distance into the cop, but at a cost. The needle was hovering close to the red. I kept my foot down just the same. I was running for my life, for Tommy’s life and in a weird, fucked up kind of way, for Amber’s too. The truth was we had been running long before anyone started chasing us.

“We’re low on gas, Tom. It looks like this ride is going to end, badly.”

“It already did.”

Tommy turned toward me, wincing as the high-beams of a second cruiser swung out from a side road and filled the mirrors with reflected light. The whole story was there in the red rims of Tommy’s eyes; the pain of existing and the desperate need to medicate against another day.

“Fuck it. Fuck the whole damn world.” Tommy sniffed and pressed the .357 to his temple. “I gotta shut out the light, Joe.”

“Don’t Tommy, that ain’t the way, man. You do that and nobody wins, not you, not Amber, not even the cops,” I said hooking my thumb at the cruisers spread across the road behind us.

His hand was shaking again. I reached over and gently lowered it back down onto his lap.

“You don’t know what it’s like man, everything is just too damn bright,” he said, tears welling up in his shattered eyes.

“Easy bro,” I said leaning forward and snapping off the Mustang’s headlights. “I got you.”

We raced through the darkness on fumes and instinct, doing ninety-four-to-the-hour; the gas warning light burning a red hole in the dash and Tommy’s face streaked with tears. Maybe he was only crying for himself, perhaps that’s all any of us ever really do in the beginning. But you had to start somewhere.





Flying In Amsterdam


McDroll





Breaking my neck wasn’t an option but I sprinted down the street regardless, knowing that I could slip any second on the wet cobbles of the picturesque Amsterdam side street. Not that I was stopping to admire the view. I enjoy running, under normal circumstances, but today wasn’t going well, strike that, life wasn’t going well. A new start in a different country was supposed to get me out of old habits.

Promise of a modelling contract, thought I’d made it big, idiot, could leave the desperation behind me, wrapped up tight and thrown into the rubbish skip where I’d thrown every last item I owned other than a change of clothes and a couple of photos. Took all the cash from the biscuit tin under my bed, hidden under the floorboards, wrapped it up tight and stuffed it down my bra. What a sad case I am. There wasn’t much worth keeping. A few CDs, a couple of chick-lit paperbacks and an umbrella. Not much to show for twenty-one years of existence.

I could feel him behind me and he was catching up fast, his greasy, panting breath on my neck and I could almost feel his slobbering tongue licking my ear. I pushed everyone out the way, desperately trying to avoid his sweaty hands. The blathering women, the yowling babies with their young mums, the lazy tattooed boys. I sent them all spinning in my frantic bid to get away from my pursuer. The tourists on their bikes stopped to stare.

I was breathing in gulps, my arms flailing recklessly at my sides, trying to keep my legs working; the oxygen had been sucked out of the atmosphere. What had I been thinking? Now I regretted my actions. I plunged on, past the traffic and down towards the canal. If I could make it to the corner maybe I could give him the slip.

There was no modelling contract. Discovered that as soon as I turned up at the dodgy looking address that I’d clutched in my paw all the way over on the ferry. Innocents abroad. Desperation can do strange things to your judgment. Wasn’t ‘models’ they were looking for, just fresh meat. I ran. Haven’t stopped running since. Doing my best to survive… again. Different country, same story. Still an outsider and now an exile too.

I heard a clatter behind me but didn’t look back, afraid I’d lose time and didn’t want to give him a chance to dive at me. It’s not a good idea to run when you’re seven months pregnant, but I had to sprint to save my life. Pregnant, just have to accept it. My own fault. More poor judgment.

I held onto my belly as I ran further down the street but my swollen breasts started to ache as they strained to be set free. I’ve been in scrapes before but not like this, not pregnant. I heard a commotion and more shouting. Not sure what they were saying. Can’t get a hang of the language but I knew the tone well. He must have battered into some old biddy, but I daren’t stop to look and made a swift turn round the corner, across the road, into the traffic.

The lane smelled of chip fat, backing onto one of the many cafes selling Vlaamse Frites to queues of people looking for a quick snack, the stink hit me like a damp blanket in a dog’s basket. Another downside of being pregnant. I stopped, hands on my knees, tried to catch my breath. Thank goodness it was a fat slob who was chasing me, I hoped he’d had a heart attack.

I took out a smoke from the packet under my sleeve and lit up. The bump gave a big kick, obviously not too happy about being jiggled about so much. The exhaustion in my legs made my calves as tight as the grip my old dad used to have round my neck. I leaned back on the door and took a big drag and waited for my heart to slow down.

I dropped the black leather bag against the wall. There had to be easier ways to earn a living than this. Who did I think I was; the Artful Dodger? There was no sound of footsteps or shouting so I began to feel sure I must have lost him. The look on his face had been hilarious. Lazy toad. Liked strutting around the shop in his uniform with his wee cap, mumbling into his walkie-talkie, but when he had to chase me down the street, well, he obviously struggled to fulfil his duties.

Normally, getting away from trouble was easy for me. Back home I’d be in Markie’s and scout around. Look for some old dear with an expensive looking handbag. Wait until she was absorbed choosing a big pair of knickers and grab her bag from behind and make off, faster than a flee on a greyhound’s back. I’ve always been told I had promise at the running and I even won medals for it at the school. My teachers said I had a big future if I stuck at it, and they were right. I made a good enough living. But it wasn’t living, was it? Wanted something better. Now look at the mess I was in.

In a foreign country without a friend or two Euros to rub together. No prospects yet again. Could say I was at square one, but it was worse than that and then I made the most stupid mistake of my life. I went and got pregnant. Was okay at first, didn’t show, being a skinny girl with a tall athletic build. I was never going to get all bloated, the size of a beluga whale by the time I was four months gone, sitting eating cheesy chips in the café, wondering why my ankles were swelling up. I just got a wee bump that I could hide easily with a longer t-shirt, and it never made much difference to me, until now. I’m seven months gone and the baby’s getting big, moving a lot.

First of all I’d thought about getting rid of it. Let’s be honest here, the lad that did this to me wasn’t exactly father of the year material. He’s probably got a wheen of weans already. It was just one of them stupid moments that I regret with all my heart, but you know, I’d met up with a gang of girls over in Amsterdam for a hen night. They were from East Kilbride and when they discovered I was Scottish too they invited me to tag along, probably thought I knew all the best bars and that. I went a bit further than normal with the booze. It was the shots that done me in. I’d been dared to drink six in a row and if there’s something anybody knows about me, it’s my competitive nature.

I downed every last one to cheers from the girls and I was so pleased with myself, I know, what a stupid thing to be proud of, but there you go. Add in a snort of Persil in the lavvy, a wee treat seeing as the girls were celebrating, and I was flying high.

I usually wouldn’t have given him houseroom but that night I just thought I was untouchable and some quick dirty sex up against the back wall of the bar seemed like a fun thing to do. Him being all foreign and all. You know what it’s like. Condom, don’t be daft. I was hot, he was desperate, it was over in a couple of minutes and I was back inside with the girls.

You can guess the rest. Six weeks later and I’d missed my period. Bought a test kit and sat in the toilet at the bus station waiting to see that wee blue line appear. I didn’t cry. It seemed unreal. I stuck it in the bin and got on with life as usual, didn’t tell anybody. Thought all the time about getting rid of it but couldn’t work up the courage to do it. Pretended it wasn’t happening at all. Can’t do that now.

I finished my cigarette and threw the butt down and ground it into the dirt with the toe of my boot, thinking of the mess I’d made. This bag needed to be worth it. When I snatched the strap from her shoulder, the woman had turned round with such a shocked look on her face. I spotted an obscene diamond ring on her finger when she grasped at the air trying to get the bag back, but by then I was off. She started to scream, they always do. Too bad. I’m sure she can afford it.

I would never grab a bag off some poor old soul shuffling about carrying her tartan shopper, her legs aching with varicose veins. No, it’s always the better off older ones I go for. I look and see what clothes they’re wearing. Leather gloves are always a giveaway. Those soft tan ones, real expensive, and I can tell a leather bag from a knock-off any day. I’m not heartless, you know. I just take from the ones that can afford it.

My heart had stopped racing and I could breathe again. Time to see what my wages were. I picked up the bag and unzipped it. Nice and tidy, not full of receipts and packets of paracetamol. An umbrella, a Blackberry, car keys with a BMW fob, a Chanel lipstick, a compact and a very nice leather purse.

I always enjoyed this part. There was no saying what you might find. Some days it was a total disaster, €20 and a packet of mints. Very occasionally I hit the jackpot. Even got a passport once. Today was a bit disappointing. €50 and a debit card. Not much for all that running. I took the money, the card and the phone, and chucked the rest over the wall beside the takeaway boxes.

Decided that I should go home. No point trying anymore today. Too much of a close call. It was then I felt the warm, wet sensation running down my legs. I touched it and brought my hand up to inspect. Blood, and lots of it. I looked around to see, stupidly, if there was somebody I could shout to for help but, just at that point, a pain ripped through my stomach from my groin to my ribs. I sank down onto the dirty ground and groaned. The blood kept coming and I started to feel sick. I had a sudden urge to push; but I knew what was happening.

I saw two shiny black shoes in front of me. I let out a low groan, knowing that my body was doing stuff that I could no longer control. The fat slob gobbed on me before calling for help on his walkie-talkie. What a mess.

I want to go home.





The Tribe


Renato Bratkovič





It's hard to be a superhero! Jumping around from one roof to another, flying in the air, throwing around criminals, risking your life to save lives and property of the people, who don't even think to thank you at the end, you know

He brings his cigarette up to his mouth with the trembling hand, inhales passionately and strokes his hair – with that hair and beard he's more Jesus than Batman.

And as if that wasn't enough – the cops start getting on your nerve… Armoured, with water cannons, helicopters, tear gas…

Are you going to… move? I ask.

Is it my turn?

I nod.

He stares at the chessboard, assessing the situation. While he was “reliving” his heroic achievements, I squeezed his King into the corner and I wonder how he's going to pull out. Unless he jumps on the roof.

It's fucked… And you need to hide your real identity. From your… parents, partners, kids.

He touches the King and pulls his hand back.

They fucking killed them, when I was twelve. My parents. It's when it all started. I was sleeping when it happened. That's why I've never closed my eyes again ever since. Shit happens at night. Bastards come out. But I'm usually faster. I always prevent the shit if I can. Unless I can't.

He moves a pawn with no reason.

Always?

Always!

And you haven't slept since age twelve?

Never!

Checkmate, I say. Perhaps it wouldn't hurt if you snored a bit, huh?

His eyes glow dangerously and he's red in the face. I move back slowly with the chair, before he gets a chance to jump on me.

Nurse? Nurse?!





* * *





It's even harder to be a cop…

The image of the hospital becoming smaller and smaller in the rear view mirror is liberating, but the thought of having to come back again tomorrow eats me alive – being there on the last day of the year. I dig my mobile from the pocket.

Commander, I say and I can hear the ringing. I switch to the speaker phone and an eternity passes before he picks up.

Anything new?

Uh-uh, I shake my head. I'm not sure if he's faking or he's really totally fucked up … Can you imagine all the bullshit he's saying – like he's a fucking Batman or something. We're not getting anywhere.

Look, I don't give a fuck. I want information, I want names, I want anything as long as I can nail the son of a bitch – let the fucking sheep see what happens if you fuck with the Mayor!

But…

No buts, you damn well know, where the money for the wages come from – yours too, in case you've forgotten! And don't use your phone while driving!

But… – toot-toot comes out – we're committed to justice and truth!

I try to call my wife, but she doesn't pick up at all.

I slow down near the Wall for the security guards to notice me – they know my car by now, so I don't have to stop. I just blink with my lights and they open the gate.

Fuck the City





* * *





It all started about a year ago. The Mayor made people mad with his arrogant, notorious corruption scandals and acting like a fucking star in public. Crowds in the streets wanted to let him know it's over, we don't want you so pack your bags and fuck off. They just wanted new faces, not the old asses warming each others' chairs.

When he called them The Rise Of The Zombies, it looked like the protest movement was going to develop into the revolution, each time more of them showed, but there were also more of… us – water cannons, armed police, horses, helicopters, tear gas

The Mayor backed out for a while, while we were bouncing granite cubes with our heads instead of his; he appointed new staff and waited for the people to calm down, and then he came back. Again the apathy prevailed, people saw they hadn't reached anything, they started to tolerate his behaviour again, and many even moved out of the City.

Professor Vladimir didn't move. He spent a couple of months in jail and in social work under the conviction of organising demonstration. He kept encouraging his students for active citizenship, calling people to revolt through social media, writing a blog, with which he continuously pestered the Mayor and the City Councillors, and organizing guerrilla interventions. Of course he was subjected to constant surveillance, they even threatened his family. His wife could not take it for long; she packed, took the kids and left. He got sacked at the University and after a while kicked out of his place, as he was unable to pay the bills. Did it stop him? Fuck no!

He took off his clothes and made himself comfortable hanging around the City Hall, holding a banner “Naked Truth – Nothing To Lose!”. No one took him seriously at first, but a couple of men and women, sharing the same fate joined him after a while – some of them had already been homeless, the others were kicked out because of the unfortunate circumstances. They had nothing to lose anymore, so they too stripped naked and stood next to Vladimir, holding banners, like “Fuck you, there's nothing more you can take from us!”, “You can kiss my ass, Mayor!”

Those were just desperate tries to reanimate the protest movement, which did not evolve into the political party; it evolved into the tourist attraction.

Well, the Mayor slowly became tired of nudists populating the most beautiful City in the world, so he had them dispersed, built the fence around the City Hall and ordered an armoured police force to keep the protesters away. Vladimir had to change the strategy.

Comrades! he announced solemnly, The time has come for our movement to get back to the roots! We need to take things into OUR OWN hands – no one is going to give us anything, but no one can take anything away from us either!

He explained how he had seen the future of the movement and suggested, that they populate the caves out of the City and try to live on what nature can offer. The trouble was, that the winter was coming, and nature had very little to offer. So they adapted the strategy slightly – they would come to the City from time to time, loot what they were entitled to from those who got them to where they were now, and return to their shelters.

They were taking from the corrupt City Councillors, business scum, fat bankers… who were soon fed up and demanded that the Mayor and the police provide protection of their interests and privacy from the wild plundering tribe.

Overnight the Mayor built the wall around the City, employed security guards and installed surveillance cameras. Before the last brick was laid, some more people joined the Tribe. Here and there they managed to enter the City or they “expropriated” someone outside of it.

But Vladimir was a true leader – he didn't command, he inspired. And he was always a spearhead, never a dweller in the comfort zone. Some also said he was well-endowed, but the information was not confirmed.

The man I played chess with I don't know how many times up to today, did not give the impression of a great legend.





* * *





I needed a drink. After playing a nutcase for so many days, you slowly become one whether you like it or not. The Commander is fucking me to solve the case with a punishment to serve as an example for others and the Mayor has to be a winner. That's not why I became a cop, for fuck's sake!

Sitting comfortably in the darkest corner of the bar I spread my notes and the book “The Naked Truth: Who Are We Letting Fuck Us From Behind?” – I've read it from start to end and back, and Vladimir explains in it the situation our society is in today on the global and on the micro (the City) level. He's pointing his finger at the Mayor and all the scum, gathered around him. And at the Commander too. They cooked up what we have to eat today, and there is no sign that any changes are about to happen in the near future. And we are paying for it, of course, guilty of nothing, owing nothing – but we were just watching and doing nothing to prevent all the corruption, manipulation and theft..

In many aspects I could not agree more with him.

Thank god the waitress shows up, otherwise I might have started to seriously consider the option of taking off the clothes myself and running the hell out of here.





* * *





I take a few deep breaths. It's so cold it hurts, but on the other hand it feels liberating. And if the truth be told, I had a glass or two too many. I spread my arms and turn around. It's a full moon, the City sleeps peacefully. Undercover cop… Under what cover?

I start running and I run for about ten minutes, then slow down in the middle of the forest. I feel as if my warmed body is being stung by a million needles.

A branch breaks in the distance.

I turn back and step slowly, but two guys block the path – both of them completely naked too.

My hands slide down my body trying to find pockets that don't exist. I take two or three steps back, turn and run the other way, but there's already a group of naked guys there, determined to not let me go away.

Where'd you think you're going?

The rigorous voice belongs to a four foot tall busty blonde, who's apparently an authority around here.

Eeeeehm, basically …

Fade out.





* * *





The splash of ice-cold water makes me come to myself, but I can't move, being tied to a chair – a kingdom for a scratch on my balls.

O, good morning!

I'm not going to hurt you! I shout.

The group of naked guys burst into laughing, but the busty one looks dead serious.

Would you mind explaining to me what the fuck are you doing here?

I needed a beer… And then I went for a walk.

It happened so fast, that I'm not sure whether I first heard a slap or felt the pain, but the broad is not in the mood and she hits good.

For a walk? Wearing this?!

She holds a ball of wire and a microphone I always have on me.

That was in the car, I tell her.

It sure was in the car, you couldn't have it wrapped around yourself running out naked, could you?

Obviously.

Don't be a smartass! Why are you here? Why are you naked and wired and what are you doing here? Have you talked to Vladimir? Is he alright?

Hey-hey, wait a minute… I can't even listen that fast, let alone talk or think. He's alright, except…

I'm not sure what to say, and she doesn't know how to understand this.

Except in his head, I answer.

Were you in hospital with him?

I nod.

You don't look insane.

I'm not. I'm a cop, I admit. I'm on your side.

She thinks a bit and nods.

Some of us are in there so we keep in touch with him – it's a bit difficult now because of the Wall and we keep getting confused messages from him, so I'm not sure if he plays a nut or he's become one. But tempus fugit, you know! What are you going to do with this? She points at my mobile recording studio in her hand.

It's my tool, I intend to continue using it.

I meant what you recorded!

I should continue the investigation… The Commander has ordered me… to solve the case so that the fucking Mayor comes out as a positive character – and I just can't stand the prick!

The busty one gives the others a look.

And … will you?

I don't know…

You don't know?

I don't know what you're going to do with me.

Her lips form a smile – she's not that bad. She nods to them to untie me and parks another chair next to me.

Guys, I think he's cool, she smiles at them and turns back to me. How's Vladimir? When was the last time you saw him?

Today, I shrug rubbing my wrists. I think he's okay, except for the bullshit he talks…

And you're going to see him again tomorrow?

I nod, which brightens her mood.

And you're going to do your job or what's right?

I think you're perfectly clear what I'm going to do.

You'll investigate, my darling, in-ves-ti-gate… she chirrups lightly. “No time for planning, tomorrow's the Holiday!





* * *





The tables are situated in a ‘U’ shape, so there's a lot of space in the middle, in case someone would like to dance. Tonight we can stay awake till midnight. The medical staff is practically complete.

The halls are decorated, the canteen is pleasantly lit with dim coloured lights and the holiday music adds greatly to the atmosphere. Enter the nurses pushing trolleys with soup and plates.

Vladimir sits in the middle – looking like that and mobbed by those sitting next to him, he looks like some lost version of The Last Supper. I guess it's no wonder that he's attracting followers. What's funny is the fact they got him in the first place. He obviously had his own personal Judas.

Bread anyone? he asks and nods at me – Hey, chess grandmaster? You?

I stand up slowly and move toward him. He waves to the guy on his right to make room for me.

Sit down.

His voice has some kind of a hypnotic quality now, which would hardly accept no as an answer.

My plate is over there, I point at my place.

Sit!

What about…? I shake my head at the guy still standing behind me.

Vladimir dismisses him with a gesture, and the guy nods and occupies my place.

Had a good sleep? he asks.

Excuse me?

He looks at me, wondering if I am taking him for an idiot.

I nod.

I had a good sleep last night.

Good! You need to be fresh tonight.

The squeal of a microphone interrupts us, someone coughs and starts testing the sound: One, two, one, two,

The psychiatrist coughs again and starts: Good evening, my darlings! As you all know, the old year is bidding farewell and you can stay awake a little longer as an exception tonight. We'll have some fun and await a new year together! And may the new year be the year of change for the better.

Oh, it will, it will! Vladimir shouts and everyone applauds.

Of course it will! the doctor nods. I suggest we all start with the soup so it doesn't get cold. Then we'll make a short pause, as our nurses have prepared a short program for you, – he waves to the unit of nurses behind him – and then the main menu and, of course, the dessert. After that we are going to sing, dance and admire the spectacular fireworks, a generous gift from the Mayor!

We will, we will!!! Vladimir applauds enthusiastically, and the crowd does the same. He looks at me and asks: You got that?

What?! I act surprised and feel the wires around my body.

He doesn't give an answer, but starts the soup greedily.

Nurses have prepared some New Year play for children and they jump up and down all over the place, dressed as Santas, elves and reindeers. The Commander is going to pay for that!

Vladimir pokes me every now and then and blinks at the girls – they're not bad or something, but I prefer their real performance. Right now I'm feeling the urge to ask for the pills.

After the main meal the doctor shows up again. He holds his glass of wine right next to the microphone and knocks on it with his fingernails.

May I have you attention, please!

Every pair of eyes in the room turns to him, every pair of ears eagerly awaits what he is about to tell.

My darlings, the evening is about to end – it's ten to midnight and the year will end. Let's raise our glasses, mine with wine and yours with water for the pills, but you raise your glass with people not with drinks, right?

Vladimir seems very calm, his eyes look dangerous however.

To all of you, the doc continues, to all of you I wish a happy, and above all HEALTHY New–

Healthy?! Vladimir interrupts him. HEALTHY?!!

The eyes (and ears) are now directed toward him.

Let me tell you something, doctor – it's not US, who's sick, it's YOU and all the world around us, okay?! We are only guilty of being quiet all the time and doing nothing to prevent you fuckers from pulling our balls!!

Vladimir takes off his patient’s robe.

But every story has an end, doctor, remember that!

Vladimir takes off his pyjama top, the others stand up and start taking off their robes.

It's not that I'm surprised or anything, but I haven't told Vladimir a thing about yesterday, about meeting the Tribe and busty's good mood at the end, but they apparently managed to communicate about what I think I'm going to witness soon.

The madhouse, doctor – Vladimir kicks off his pants and pauses at the last table, and I'm a bit disappointed about the legend – the madhouse is out there, not in here!

He grabs the chair and breaks it on the table – what remains in his hand is a lethal weapon. The doctor is stunned.

And now we – the healthy ones – are going to cure the really sick ones!!!

He smashes it over doctor's head, and now everybody – including half of the nurses – strips naked and grabs their chairs and the violence explodes.

Vladimir walks back toward me – I stand up and don't know, what to say or do.

Take off your clothes!!!

What do you mean ‘Take off your clothes’?

Look, pal, don't think I don't know you're not wearing any pyjamas under that robe! My boys and girls here were watching you drive away every night. And I know you've personally visited the Tribe. Quit playing dumb, now you've got to make a decision – are you with us or against us?!

We look at each other for a couple of moments, then I take my robe off.

Did you record everything?

I nodeand take off my shirt and jeans.

A victorious smile appears on Vladimir's face.

I pull down my pants and socks and straighten up.

Vladimir raises a brow, which I interpret as envy.

I remove my wires and the microphone, grab the closest chair and smash it against the floor, so a nicely spiked leg remains in my hand.

Well, let's smash some greedy mouths! Vladimir screams and leaves the canteen and the whole Tribe follows – the Tribe meaning myself, as well. The fireworks begin outside, and the City rumbles.





* * *





One, two, one, two, testing… So, Commander, that's how the revolution started in the Madhouse, which – as you've probably heard already, unless you and the Mayor are having fun with our money and young girls right this moment – is outside. Heads will fall off, mouths are going to be smashed, there will be fire and blood. What you stole from us, will be taken back, one way or another. Most probably, another!

We both well know whose side you're on. Your mouth is next in the line, we're going to get you.

Once you're naked, you've nothing to lose, except your soul – I haven't lost my soul! Do you hear the doorbell? Do you hear it?!





Wetwork


Walter Conley





I’m from Connecticut. I’ve lived all over the United States. Right now I’m living in the SoCal desert. People from other parts of the country, who don’t know any better, try to claim their hometowns are just as hot in the summertime. They say things like ‘It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity,’ or ‘Once it gets above a hundred degrees, you can’t really tell the difference.’ Bullshit. Try stepping outside when it’s 121 degrees and tell me it’s no worse than upstate New Hampshire.

That’s what it was on the day George asked me for help. I was at a liquor store in Hemet, my current residence, choosing a six-pack for the night. It was Friday afternoon. I was tired from unloading trucks and scheduled off tomorrow and I just wanted to sip a few beers, watch TV and hit the sack. I had the door to the fridge open. With my shoulder against the glass, I basked in the puffs of chilled air. I felt someone behind me. Probably the clerk, I thought, about to make me shut the door. I pretended not to notice. Then I heard his voice. There’s no mistaking George’s voice—so sharp and dry it conjured up images of Clint Eastwood being marched through sand with a rope around his neck.

“Henry Neill,” he said.

My real name is Henry Sloan. Since I’d fled Wellesport, Connecticut—after getting into trouble the previous autumn—I’d gone with Neill. I kept the Henry because that’s what I am and there’s no way around it.

George was in a wife-beater, board shorts, socks in leather sandals. I don’t understand wearing socks with sandals, but that was the code. Maybe you had to be a native.

“What’s shaking?” he asked.

I said, “Eh.” Is there a proper response to ‘What’s shaking?’

“Big plans for tonight?”

There it was. I’d met him last winter at Crown Billiards on State Street. We hit it off, hung out now and then. I liked George. He was a laid-back guy with a good sense of humour, but always had a favour to ask.

“I’m going to eat a bag of peanut M&Ms,” I said, “then floss for a while.”

He nodded as if he believed me. “Think you could do me a little favour? Give me a hand with something?”

“No chance.”

“I have to move Lisa’s stuff out of the house. I got a truck. I just need help loading and unloading it.”

“Is that all?”

“Yeah. Nobody else will come through for me.”

“Big surprise.”

“Come on, man.”

“I’m beat. Had a long day.”

“We can do it in one trip.”

“You can do it in one trip.”

“Please?”

“Shitballs,” I said. “All right. But you’re paying for my beer.”

“No problem, dude.”





* * *





We rode in his pick-up, a loud, clunky blue GMC from the Disco era. George worked in construction. Tools and empty beer cans rattled in the truck’s bed as he hit speed bumps and took corners without braking. In retrospect, I’m not sure the truck even had brakes.

He rented a two-bedroom ranch, stucco and tile, where Hemet spread into a valley of farms. The rainwater lake that bordered the farms was as parched and cracked as George’s voice. There were swarms of flies clouding the air, riding the smells of cow shit and mouldering fruit. A plain white delivery van sat in his front yard, backed to the stoop, its windshield and left headlight busted.

We coasted in beneath an olive tree. George killed the engine and it pinged. Added to the odours from the farm was the tang of boiling, outdated anti-freeze. Even in the shade, with the day half gone, it felt hotter than it had downtown.

“My uncle’s truck,” he said, kicking his door open. “He doesn’t use it anymore. What the hell. It runs, right?”

“So you say.”

I grabbed the twelve-pack of Killian’s Irish Red I had him buy me, followed him to the house. A terrible thought occurred to me.

“Hey,” I said, stopping him. “She’s not here, is she?”

“Nah. She’s gone,” he said. “History.”

“That’s cool. I don’t mean it like that. Nothing against Lisa, you understand.”

“You don’t have to explain yourself to me.”

The couple was at their best when they were apart from each other. In the same room, they were a nightmare. Something about George brought out the worst in her.

We went inside. It was dark and, compared to outside, almost cold. Boxes, furniture and garbage bags full of clothes were stacked against the walls. Not much, considering it was everything Lisa owned.

“Beer,” he said.

I gave him a bottle, took one for myself. We chugged those and started two more. George ducked into a back room. I sipped my beer. He came back with his shirt off.

“Is that necessary?” I said.

“I don’t like to work with a shirt on. I’m Italian.”

“You work all day with a shirt on.”

“Right. And when I don’t have to, I don’t.”

“Fine,” I said. “Just don’t rub up against me or anything.”

“I won’t.”

We hefted a couple boxes. George already had the truck’s roll-up door open and the ladder-like aluminum ramp set. He walked in first, tossed his box toward the cab. Then he turned and reached for my box.

“You bring them up,” he said. “I’ll stack.”

“I do all the work, you mean? Fuck that. Get your ass out here or I’m going home.”

“All right, all right. Jesus. I thought you came over to help, but whatever.”

We humped the furniture in together. There was a hutch, a dresser, an old chest, a wicker chair shaped like a seashell.

“If you’re going to drop something,” he said, “yell so I can drop it, too. Otherwise you’ll break my fingers.”

We didn’t drop anything. An hour later, we were finished drinking the Killian’s and loading the last of the clothes. I felt like taking a nap.

George fetched his dirty, sweaty wife-beater from the bedroom and we climbed into the truck. It lurched as the starter caught. Charcoal-coloured smoke blew across the yard. I hooked a finger into the foam insulation swelling through a tear in the dash.

“Don’t pick that out,” he said, putting the truck in gear. “My uncle will kill me.”

“Where are we headed?”

“San Jacinto. We take this stuff to the house and that’s that.”

He groaned as he wrenched the wheel to make a right-hand turn, heading south. We left Hemet for the dusty hills and fields of San Jacinto.

“Is Lisa there?” I said.

“Not yet.” He pulled the truck into a small shopping plaza, parked at a liquor store. “One minute.”

He came out with two paper grocery bags, ice and a Styrofoam cooler. The larger bag had a fresh twelve of Killians, the smaller he had rolled into a ball.

We drove for the mountains at the southernmost end of town. The sun had dropped out of view and the landscape was tinged yellow. George skirted the mountains. On the backside, he turned onto a dirt lane that zig-zagged upwards. We crossed a narrow bridge with no railings as high as the neighbouring peaks. George took us down into a flat valley. The houses were all dark. There were no cars on the road or in the driveways. Wires on the telephone lines were sagging. The place was eerie. It felt like a Twilight Zone intro.

George made a U-turn, then backed to the garage of a clapboard house with a rickety porch.

“This is it,” he said.

We unloaded the truck and drank some more and sat for a while. George sighed. Instead of returning the way we’d come, he continued along the road past the house, up the hill on the opposite side. At the top he turned one hundred-eighty degrees and shut off the truck.

“What are we doing now?” I said.

“Chill out, man. I need to rest my eyes for a sec.”

“I have shit to do.”

“Like what?”

I was too tired to lie, so I had another beer and closed my eyes with him.





* * *





It was morning when I opened them again. I was as hungry as I was hungover. George gave me a lukewarm beer, got one for himself. He dug a sack of peanut M&Ms from the scrunched-up bag in the cooler and passed it to me. I shoved a handful into my mouth.

George grabbed a handful for himself.

We were sitting on the edge of a cliff. Beneath us was the valley. There were mountains on three sides, with the fourth side, directly across from us, containing a massive concrete wall. I’d mistaken the top of that wall for a bridge last night. In the far corner was a taller concrete structure that looked like a high-rise with a dozen pair of enormous round holes in it. Parked above were dump trucks, graders, backhoes and pick-ups with light bars.

A whistle blew.

Water began to gush from the holes in that concrete face, bottom pair first, next up, all the way to the top. It crashed into the floor of the valley with a rumble I could feel. I knew where we were, then. San Jacinto had announced plans for a man-made reservoir months ago. There was a story in the paper about how the city had forced residents of the valley to relocate. I watched the water ripple toward the vacant neighbourhood, toward the house where we had delivered Lisa’s junk.

She’s not here, is she? I’d asked at George’s house.

Nah. She’s gone. History.

Is Lisa there?

Not yet.

I remembered the old trunk we had lugged into the house below. She is now, I thought. I turned to George. He grinned at me, M&Ms mashed into his teeth. I lowered the bottle of Killian’s between my legs, stared at it, listened to that roaring tide and fought to keep the world from spinning around me.





Digger Davies


Marietta Miles





“Down the last one, my man Otis has to clean up,” bar keep Barney croaked. Wiping down a nearby stool Barney counted out the register money while drinking a beer. “Last one is on me buddy,” he pushed the register closed and its little bell sounded softly.

“Thanks Barney,” Digger Davies let the rock gut whisky shoot past his teeth, roll down his tongue and burn the inside of his throat. “Otis seems to be working out. Hard worker and all,” Digger knocked back the last of the whisky and stood from his stool. Digger watched the odd man Otis mop the floor near a silent jukebox. He then moved to the bathrooms. Otis was a queer looking fella indeed. In addition to being ugly as sin, tall as a post and lurched forward like a gimp Otis had a scar etched across his useless right eye. The bumpy mark gave most people pause. It was hard for folks to look into Otis’s face but Digger did not mind so much. Digger was no beauty himself.

Ugly Otis was new to the little town of Turnip. He’d arrived three months earlier with nothing but his empty lunch pail and a worn silk flower petal in his pocket. Wandering about the little mountain town for a day or two he eventually arrived at Barney’s Bar. Barney was home to the misfits of Turnip. The town’s downtrodden and lonely always found a seat and a drink waiting for them at Barney’s. When Otis first showed up Barney gave him dinner, asked him questions and chatted about Turnip and the people who lived there. Barney was of course wondering if Otis was a good worker, he was poking around for information. Otis never spoke a word only smiling and nodding in response to the probing. His big toothy grin was at first frightening and then simply sad. Otis was just a slow witted, mute lump.

“Yup, hard worker but not much company,” Barney laughed and then burped past his wiry, shabby whiskers. He absent-mindedly patted his mustache down. “We’ll see you tomorrow night Digger.”

“Yup,” Digger walked out of the small bar and let the heavy wooden door slide shut behind him. Once he put his foot to the pavement the bright neon lights of Barney’s clicked off. At fifty Digger seemed much older than his years and his nightly visits to the bar did not help. Pulling his unzipped jacket tighter he let the chilly north wind sweep his face. He stumbled down the street, past a small stand of trees and headed for his little house on the edge of the county dump. Lonely Digger managed and worked the landfill. Behind him he heard the soft whoosh of Barney’s door open and then slip closed. Digger walked home. In fact Digger walked everywhere, for the sheriff thought it best, considering Digger’s inclination for being drunk and crotchety.

Several years had passed since Digger’s wife Matilda had left him. They had been sweethearts at Turnip Mountain High School. Matilda was bouncy and beautiful with black hair, blue eyes and a soft spot for Digger. Thinking back to her now Digger could admit how much he missed her. Even as she grew older and her curves grew looser he loved the warmth she gave him. Digger and Matilda had been happy to grow old together.

One day, not long before her birthday, Matilda clipped an ad from their little local newspaper. The town of Ashland, a much bigger town than Turnip, was hosting The Southern Woman’s Flower Show. Matilda loved her flowers. Real flowers, fake flowers, bushes or ornamental trees, Matilda became dreamy when she tended and looked over blooms and blossoms. And Ashland had street trolleys, a real bus station plus two tall buildings with spinning doors. It would be a real treat. Digger, feeling quite clever, sent Matilda to the flower show for her birthday. Since times were tight she had to go alone for they could not afford two tickets.

“You want me to bring home tulips for you?” Matilda laughed quietly and she teased Digger. Though she hoped he would say yes because tulips were her favourite. Side by side Matilda and Digger sat on the bench waiting for the bus to Ashland. His hands were in his pockets and hers lay in her lap. Digger chuckled, gently shook his head. At last he spied the bus rambling towards the parking lot.

“No flowers Maddie,” he kissed her on the cheek. “We ain’t’ got the money right now. We’ll get your flowers before spring,” he stood from the bench and reached inside his pocket. “Here, I want you to take this, just in case. Ashland is a big town. There may be hobos and other shiftless types.” Digger handed Matilda his old army knife. He had served his time in Korea and returned from that war with a few trinkets. But his knife was his favourite and so Matilda knew he was quite serious.

“Oh Dig, what am I going to do with that?” she laughed. His face remained puckered and at last Matilda relented. She took the knife and slipped it into the pocket of her camel coloured coat. In the other pocket she had coins for a coffee, a pack of gum and her return ticket.

“Just in case Maddie, just in case,” Digger answered. With his forefinger he made a jabbing motion, as if he were stabbing an unseen attacker. Then he smiled and kissed his wife on the cheek. Holding her elbow he helped her onto the bus. “See you tonight dear.”

Evening came and Digger was again sitting on the bench. But Matilda never stepped from the bus. Matilda never came home. Digger drifted about the bus stop waiting and worrying. Turnip was so small there was not even a station so there was no one for him to question. At last he quizzed the bus driver. The operator, not the driver from the morning, said there were only two people waiting for the bus in Ashland. Both riders were little old men.

Otis was beginning to give into fear and dread. He made up his mind. He was going to find Matilda. As it was the last bus of the night Digger threw his money at the operator and jumped on the bus, praying and grumbling all the way to Ashland. Once there he searched the station.

“I need someone. I need to speak to the driver from the bus this morning? My wife,” Digger’s voice was cracking and his heart was seizing. Nothing felt right and the panic that took over his body reminded him of his war days. “I’m looking for my wife. She never came back,” he stood at the ticket counter nearly screaming. The short, pig-faced man working the booth simply stared at him, showing no emotion, showing no concern.

“Sorry sir, the shift change was several hours ago. I don’t even know where the manifests are. I couldn’t tell you who was driving the bus.”

“He was tall, I know that. Very tall,” Digger’s hands were shaking. His face was growing wild. Otis pounded his fist on the counter.

“Sir, you should speak to the police officer over in the corner. He can help you. For now,” the snotty ticket agent continued and shooed Digger away. “Would you please exit the line so I may help someone else, thank you?”

Digger remembered that night even now. If he let himself Digger could feel the way he did on that day, the day he lost his Matilda. He hunted for her in Ashland. He searched the grand hall where the flower show had been held. Digger even investigated the dark alleys, the quiet parks. It was as if Matilda had never been. It was as if she never existed.

Some men are only good for something when someone believes in them. This was true of Digger. After Matilda disappeared he felt worthless and lost. He missed hearing her in their tiny kitchen humming an old tune while fixing pork chops. There were days he swore he felt her in the bed next to him. Digger even found himself smelling her almond oil shampoo every night just so he could fall to sleep. But when he heard the ugly rumours that she had left of her own device his sadness turned to anger. Digger took to the bottle and checked out of life. Digger decided he would feel no more.

“Son of a bitch,” Digger barked to icy wind. It was getting colder as Digger reached the gate to his front yard. His feet ached from working and walking. Digger’s back was sore and he was thinking about his lonely bed. He listened to the wind blow. Digger heard the chatter of night birds as they planned their trip further south. He pushed through the gate, checked his broken mailbox and put one foot on his front porch step.

Digger recognised the rough sound of gravel and dirt under boots. He had encountered many drifter types on the property. Most times they just wanted to sift through junk at the dump to see if they could find anything of use. But tonight, like most nights, Digger was not in the mood for company. Digger was set on being alone.

“Come back tomorrow pal,” he turned to face the visitor.

A tall black shadow stepped from behind a dead oak. The body was twisted and gnarled looking with arms that seemed obscenely long. Moving quickly, without making a sound the black figure was on Digger. The nasty smell of the shadow made Digger nearly throw up. The smell was that of old waste and a dirty bathroom. Down, down to the ground Digger fell. He was in the dirt and the massive, angry freak straddled him, sitting on Digger’s hips.

“Digger. Digger. Digger!” Otis growled from beneath his black hood and then shoved it roughly from his face. “She called for you all night old man.” Otis pulled out Digger’s army knife and flicked it open violently. “She got me pretty good. That little wifey of yours,” he pointed the blade at his mangled eye. The voice that came from the cave like mouth was deep and gravely, ugly and mean. Mad man Otis swept his arms high above his head, holding the knife in both hands. Thrusting his arms down Otis pushed the blade deeply, brutally into Digger’s belly. So deeply in fact Otis’ big meaty hands became stuck. “Her eyes were so blue when she died Digger.”

Digger Davies’ eyes yawned wide and looked muddled. He let out a long whine of air. Otis pulled his hands from Digger’s blood pooled cavity and brought the knife down again. With this hit Otis broke the ribs underneath. Digger moaned and started to cough. Stunned, Digger barely moved to protect himself. Blood was just now beginning to drain from his opened mouth when he saw a flower petal fall from Otis’s side pocket.

Digger was beginning to understand. He knew this was not a dream or a drunken vision. This was very real. Desperately, sadly he also came to realise what happened to his sweet Matilda.

“Maddie,” he whispered and gurgled through his leaking blood. Otis stifled a dark laugh, took a deep breath and pushed Digger’s chin up, allowing the knife access to his pale, chubby neck. Digger was drifting. Dying and suffering did not matter to him any longer. Digger’s sadness disappeared. He shut his eyes tight and a small, restful smile stretched across his lips. Now he knew what really happened that day so long ago. His pretty Matilda had never stopped loving him. She had always loved him and would have always loved him if she had been allowed. Digger relaxed and his broken body settled into the dirt. The knife hung close to his jaw. The first thrust resisted and then easily sliced through his skin. Digger allowed the life to slip from him. He let the darkness close in, for he was finally sure after so many years, he would see his Matilda again.





Taking Out The Trash


Aidan Thorn





After all the shit I’ve done for Tony Ricco, I can’t believe I’m copping a pull for doing his fly tipping. I thought I’d been careful, you know, made sure no one was about. But I must have got sloppy because no sooner had I got 100 yards down the road than the flashing blues were lighting up the night sky. I thought about trying to outrun them, but this old Bedford couldn’t beat a squad car with a five-mile start let alone from a near standing one.

This is the second time this month I’ve been sloppy on a job for Tony. Still, at least he doesn’t have to know about this one – I’ll pay the fine and he’ll be none the wiser.

I could hardly keep the last time from him though - seventy-grand’s worth of his gear went missing from the back of my van when I forgot to lock it up. I had to tell him what happened or he’d think I’d robbed him – I took a deserved beating for that one. That’s why I’ve been demoted to jobs like tonight – dumping a load of old crap from a nightclub Tony’s just taken ownership of.

Tony reckons I need to prove I’m not going to fuck up again before he can trust me with anything serious. Nope, there’s no way I can tell him about this – I’d be taking out the rubbish for the rest of my days.

“What brings you up here then Eddie?” asks the copper now stood driver side of my van.

I recognise him but can’t put a name to the face.

“Couldn’t sleep officer so I thought I’d take a drive.”

“Right, so that wasn’t you we just saw dumping a load of crap from the back of a white Bedford van then?”

The officer tapped on the side of my van to emphasis his point.

No way out of this one then!

“Fair enough, sorry, it’s just I’ve got a job on tomorrow and I needed to clear the space. The council dump was closed so I just found a quiet spot,” I lied. “Just let me know what the fine is and I’ll sort it out.”

“Not so fast Eddie, I’ve got a colleague up there at the moment looking through exactly what it is you’ve thrown out.”

I panic at first but then I remember that Tony told me I could dump the load anywhere – there was nothing to tie it to him or the club.

The officer’s radio crackles, “Stevens, you’d better get yourself up here.”

Stevens, that was his name!

Officer Stevens signalled me out of the van and instructed me to follow him. The night smelled of coming rain and I hoped this would be over before the heavens opened. I turned the key, the Stones track ‘Before They Make Me Run’, that had been masking the lumpy rattle of the engine cut out. The engine gave a coughed as it stopped that suggested it might never start again – although it always did.

At the dump site another officer – one I didn’t recognise – was crouched, shining a torch into a discarded bag.

“We’ve got body parts,” he said turning his head in our direction.

Before I had time to react officer Stevens had grabbed my hands and snapped cuffs around them.

“Look, lads I don’t know anything about any fucking body, it’s not my rubbish it’s…”

Stevens kicked my legs from under me and restrained me on the ground with his full weight. He wasn’t particularly big but his strength suggested wiry gym muscle was packed tight under his uniform.

“Jim, go to the car and call this in,” Stevens called to the other officer.

“I’ve got my radio right here I can call it in now,” came the reply.

“Do it in the car!” Stevens snapped back with menace.

I was eating dirt and couldn’t see, but heard the reluctant footsteps through dry leaves of the other officer disappearing in the direction from which we’d come.

“Now what were you saying?” Stevens asked.

He’d eased the pressure off of my back just enough that I could talk but still had a firm hold that even uncuffed I’d have struggled to breach.

“I was saying that I don’t know anything about a body. That’s not my rubbish. I’m just doing a job for Tony Ricco. He told me it was rubbish from a club he just took over.”

“Did you hear that?” Stevens said after a pause.

Stevens wasn’t talking to me. He had stood up – I guessed the other officer was back, but the leaves hadn’t signalled his return. I rolled over to see what was happening. The side of Stevens’ face was lit with a blue-white glow from a mobile phone. He leaned back down over me and held the phone to my ear.

“Hello Eddie, lad.”

I felt fear kick me sharp in the bowels as Tony Ricco spoke from the other end of the line.

“You’ve got two choices now, you can stick to your story and Officer Stevens there will snap your neck and claim you struggled to get away. I’ll then pay your family a visit and make sure they join you on the other side – I’m good like that, wouldn’t want to split up a family, like. Or, you can keep quiet, take the fall and your family get to visit you once a week safe and well.”

There was no choice.

“I’ll keep quiet.”

“Good lad Eddie”

Stevens started to take the phone away. I called out.

“Tony!”

Stevens’ hand stopped.

“Why?” I asked.

“You lost me a lot of money earlier this month Eddie. You didn’t think I was going to let that go unpunished?”

I thought about how I’d be spending the next 20 years of my life and wished Tony had killed me. Not only was I going inside, I’d be doing so on the outside of Tony Ricco’s circle. This meant I’d be fair game inside to any scumbag that wanted to have a pop – and they would.

“Why didn’t you just kill me?”

“What would you learn from that?” Tony replied. “This way you get to think about it for the rest of your days. And, if you do anything stupid inside, like top yourself – same rule applies, your family dies – you die, they die.”

The phone went dead.

“You should think yourself lucky,” Stevens said. “That fucker in the bags over there is the bloke who robbed Tony’s gear from the back of your van. Tony must like you.”

I didn’t agree with that. I was done, there was no way back for me and with me in prison and outside of Tony’s favour I had no guarantees of safety for those I loved. I’d have swapped places with the thief given the choice. And Tony knew that.





Missing An Ear


Benjamin Sobieck





From the back of the public bus, Mollie scanned their faces. One. Two. Three. Four. Four people entering from the stop by the liquor store.

“I’m anxious when I’m by myself. I’m depressed when I’m around people,” Mollie said.

“And why do you think that is?” Dr. Paw said.

“If I knew why, I wouldn’t be here.”

“Of course. Let’s talk this through.”

“I hate talking,” Mollie said.

None of the four faces belonged to him.

Mollie recalled his appearance. He wore a dress shirt – no tie – each morning. Light blue. Four buttons cinched. Two left open. One on the bottom. One on the top. Cheap, white T-shirt underneath. A slicked back, 45-degree part to his longish hair. Two crooked incisors.

And only one ear.

“If you don’t learn to control your anxiety naturally, we’ll have to start you on a prescription, Mollie,” Dr. Paw said. “Try exposing yourself to new social situations a little bit at a time. Once your comfort zone expands, it never contracts.”

Mollie rubbed her temples. Glanced out the window from her seat. Spotted two cops on bikes wheeling along the sidewalk. Imagined they could read her thoughts. How fast could they pedal? The busy bus route put a mere eighth-mile between stops.

Her fingers slid down into her pocket. They squeezed the hard rectangle inside until the shivers rattled her entire arm.

“There’s this guy. On the bus,” Mollie said.

“Have you tried talking to him?” Dr. Paw said.

“Not yet. I wish he’d just know to talk to me. Like flag me down one day after I get off.”

“It’s not fair to place those expectations on him. He needs to know you want to talk.”

“I don’t like to talk. I just want him to notice me,” Mollie said.

“If talking is out of the question, what would happen if he did flag you down? Doesn’t make much sense,” Dr. Paw said.

“Don’t you think I know that?” Mollie said.

Three more entered the bus at the next stop. One. Two. Three. Mollie counted their faces. Checked the ears. Two. Four. Six. Six ears.

He wasn’t there.

Too much planning went into this for him to not show up. Mollie gripped the rectangle again and thought about the bike cops.

Maybe they’d notice her instead.

“I have this fantasy where I’m being followed,” Mollie said. “It ends with a man rushing up to me. He returns a lost item, like my purse, then asks me on a date. But I say no. Denying him makes me happy.”

“But you’re also denying yourself in the process,” Dr. Paw said.

“That makes me happy, too.”

Two more stops went by without the man entering. The bus pulled into the final stretch. If the man didn’t get on soon, Mollie knew the day was bust.

Unacceptable, Mollie thought. She’d spent hours practicing in front of the mirror. Her posture. Her words. Her mannerisms.

“Make it count,” Mollie had said to her reflection. “You only get one chance.”

It took a solid week for her to work up today’s courage. It could be several more before she was ready again.

“Make it count. Make it count. Make it count.”

“What other scenarios do you play in your head?” Dr. Paw said.

“If I told you, you’d lock me up,” Mollie said.

“You’re in a safe space. You can talk to me about anything.”

“Promise?”

“I promise. Everything you say is between us and no one else.”

Mollie rubbed her temples.

“OK,” she said. “There’s one I play through at home in front of the mirror. It starts on the bus and it ends like…”

Two. Four. Six. Seven. Seven ears entered the bus. The man got on at the last possible stop.

Mollie rubbed her temples. Watched him sit down across the aisle from her. Glanced out the window. Spotted the pair of bike cops again.

Could they see her nervous face through the window? Did they know?

Mollie couldn’t worry about that now. She reached into her pocket for the hard rectangle, then counted down.

Five.

Four.

Three.

“Mollie, under no circumstances should you act out what you just told me,” Dr. Paw said.

“It was only a fantasy,” Mollie said.

“You must find healthy outlets for your anxiety. You need to be able to interact with people without breaking the law.”

Two.

One.

The man’s face unfurled into shock as Mollie approached him. She twisted the rectangle out at him, pantomiming her contortions in the mirror at home.

“I like that he’s missing one of his ears. Makes him safer to me, more approachable. I want to do something with his good ear. It’s like a key to me,” Mollie said.

“No, Mollie. That’s just flat out wrong,” Dr. Paw said.

Mollie’s breath jittered as she spoke.

“Here’s the phone you lost last week,” she said. “I’ve been meaning to give it back to you.”

She wagged the smartphone at him like bait on a hook. Her face surely revealed the lie, but she couldn’t tell if he noticed.

Because the man hadn’t lost the phone. Mollie picked his pocket last week for no reason other than to give it back. It was her way of initiating conversation, but not Dr. Paw’s.

“Thank you. I couldn’t afford a new one,” the man said and took the phone.

“Oh, uh, yeah, ah, you’re welcome,” Mollie said, followed by a long pause. Her legs wobbled as the bus braked hard.

The man smiled.

“Would you like to sit down?” he said.

“Sure,” Mollie said and took a seat next to him. She exhaled, then recited her line from the mirror. “So…do you…um…work around here?”

“Yeah, I’m a manager at a frozen yogurt shop. The one at the mall,” he said as the bike cops wheeled past by the bus.

“Really?” Mollie said. She lived off the stuff. “I love frozen yogurt.”





The Tender Trap


Graham Wynd





Just like Romeo and Juliet it were. Hang her dad and his rules. It had always been thus and would always be, and damned if he was going to let the old man interfere. Fourteen she had been when Clobber and he, hopped up on crank having knocked on old Charley's door and found him not home but his gold right enough. Freed it to their pockets him and Clobber did, laughing like mad men as the leapers crawled under their skin and then like the sun coming out on a summer's morning there she was by the candy store on the pier.

Tawny hair and golden flecks in her big puppy eyes and a womanly figure even then: Rosalita. The sounds of her name even then rolled around in his mouth like some kind of expensive whisky. Roh-zah-lee-tah. Her and that eejit Mary Knock who tried to stand between them and disparage his parentage (not that he didn't do so a hundred times a day his own self).

Nothing could stand between Rosie and him. It was fate, kismet. And fortune's fool was he.

"My name’s Ray but my friends call me Spear." He bowed low with exaggerated elegance. Mary rolled her eyes but Rosalita smiled as if accustomed to this sort of homage.

"And who is your Sancho here?"

Clobber just stood gazing adoringly at her so Ray elbowed his friend and added apologetically, "This here's Clobber, but he don't mean no harm."

"He's a bad one and that one's worse!" Mary had her hands in fists on her hips.

"Let every eye negotiate for itself," Ray said, his hands itching to fondle the prize.

And his Rosie – his already – said, "Trust no agent. Beauty is a witch."

"Oh, for feck's sake," Mary said, then stalked off to abandon her friend to the luck of the stars. Clobber was easy enough to send home like a puppy, though more like a puppy-headed monster. Together they strolled off hand-in-hand. The lights of the pier twinkled like the stars.

Her kisses tasted of burnt sugar. Her skin smelled like caramel. And late that night when he walked her home, the very last thing she let him taste, her sweet honey and she murmured of pleasures awaiting him as he licked it from his finger. Drunk on her perfume he wandered to his own bed, lifted by wings and the last hit of whizz.

Despite their youth Ray knew it was a marriage of true minds and he would not admit any impediments, be it her old man or his or the powers that be. He was old enough to leave school now, not that he'd had much to do with it for some time since he'd copped on to the fact that it was a system to make people compliant. No victim he. The good Will book had all the treasure he needed.

Night after night he marched through her defences, celebrating each victory with a kiss. Yes, she loved him, like no other she loved him, their world was in each other's arms. Until her father bellowed and she had to run back to do the washing up, to fetch the wee ones, to iron his shirts.

"I'm the stand in for mother," she muttered darkly, her gold eyes flashing.

"Folly," he cooed and soothed her anger but it was not enough.

"I must be free," Rosalita said one late night as he wheedled her for the final gift, her tongue, her hands not enough. "All we need is courage and opportunity. My papa keeps all his money under the mattress. We could have a new life."

"A fell deed," Ray said, troubled in his mind but the little head whispered assent. "If it were done, it's best done quickly."

"Tomorrow."

His Rosalita, his Rosa, his Rosie, Juliet of his spirits, Madonna of his dreams -- she would be his and they would be free and far from these gull-choked streets, far inland away from the salt air of the pier.

The wee ones all abed and her pa stupored with free liquor conveniently left to be found; all Ray had to do was break through the window, a thief in the night. The light from the hallway cast raven shadows through the room where Rosie's dad snored splayed across the bed.

"I already got the money," Rosie assured him, slipping an arm into his. "Do it now!" Her eyes shone like scarabs in the gloom. Ray hefted the knife, the black handle slick in his suddenly-sweaty fingers.

The man had grey in his hair. Forty seemed an interminable age away, but Ray felt it loom somewhere ahead of him like a ghost awaiting. He hesitated.

"Do it," his love repeated. "Be the man. Be so much more the man."

And still he hesitated.

So she took the knife herself and plunged it into his chest with a grunt. His eyes flicked open, dazed, then closed again as he let out a moan and the knife, buried to the hilt, rose up and down as the blood pumped out until at last it stopped and the night silent but for the unexpected shriek of an owl outside.

Rosalita took a ragged breath. "Who'd have thought he had so much blood in him?"

Ray wiped the sweat from his brow. "We should clean the knife, hide it." But he shrank from touching the crimsoned blade.

Rosalita grabbed the handle and yanked it back out. She stared at her reddened hands as if mesmerised. "You best go out the way you came. Silence until the heat is off."

Ray nodded, kissed her deeply, then crawled out to window to his exile, knowing his sun would not shine until he saw her again.

It took less time than he had expected. Especially once the blues found the inexpertly cleaned knife in his closet. He saw Rosie at the trial, tearful in her fancy new clothes. Clobber said she'd moved off, the wee ones lived with an auntie. The sun had gone out.

What a mortal fool, he.





Falling Through The Hourglass


Richard Godwin



“…the only common expression of those madmen hiding under an appearance of wisdom until the madness seizes them and hurls them desperately toward a woman's body to bury in it, without desire, everything terrifying that solitude and night reveals to them.” - Albert Camus, Exile and the Kingdom.





Sunday, the time of lost weapons, such lucid words. Lost to others, the narrative in transit, man seeking dawn.

Direction has the sound of breaking bones. They splinter beneath memory. Memory is the thing you cast away a long time ago before the road and the endless miles spun beneath your dreams. Direction is not a point on a compass, any more than a breaking wave is the axle on a car.

I hitched a ride as sharp hailstones cut my skin. It was the day that knowledge was born and I crawled beneath the discarded placenta of unnatural birth. The tattoo on my arm that read “Home is never North” was bleeding as I climbed inside the truck that bombed down the deserted highway.

The driver almost broke my fingers with his grip.

“I’m Don,” he said.

“Mike.”

Don used to pour meths in his tea and sit there talking of the times he made all the money.

His words sounded like a song I used to know, it was a melody whose words were lost to me and which stung my veins.

Don had huge hands, as big as two doors. They were made of wood and his knuckles were hinges. I liked that because the house we stayed in that month had no doors. He’d blown them off when he let off the bombs. Fire lingered in the slow dawn that bled pink across the scarred landscape.

“Mike,” he said, “they’re coming for us, suck on a pill while I shoot them.”

They came every Sunday. Their images were etched in the hills. They’d been trying for us for years. They travelled up hills and across farms to where we sat drinking iced tea. We needed them. We were wanted men, you see.

As Don picked up his rifle it looked like a toothpick in his fingers. And I watched as the cops fell to the ground. The gun shots sounded like a gate crashing shut in my head over and over again, and a millions birds took flight in my brain, yellow and blue, chattering like parrots in the jungle.

It was blazing hot that year, the earth caught fire, and I saw the naked forms of soldiers rise from the mounds of split and severed soil, ochre in their martial glory. And I was ochre and lost and ruined and beside me was a warrior, a son of sorts.

Where are my soldiers now? Do they sing broken songs at dark when the fields are screaming and no one can hear at all?

That is what the road sounds like after a time. An immense noise then silence. It’s a silence that deafens you. It is filled with the sound of bones crushing beneath wheels.

Don at the helm, hope in the injuries he sustained, the scars like stanzas crawling across his wasted skin in a glory of epic verse. This was the time we lived in the in between, we sold promises like a last breath to the desperate sick ruined people we encountered on our way, knowing we were running out of highway.

That Sunday Don fired at the police but there were more coming. They followed one another like a line of ants up the hill to our fortress.

“I’m bringing them down,” Don yelled over the noise and the smoke, “they are mine Mike, for they do not come here to venture with laws that have no place in the hills.”

His eyes shone out of his face like torches and his head was made of rock as he shot policeman after policeman.

I picked up a gun and fired blindly into the day.

I chewed on some of the blue pills, my mouth awash with a rancid taste of rust and melted butter. And even the visions, glorious images from a heaven on the tip of your finger, even they did not abate the knowledge that they were coming for us, that we couldn’t hole up there anymore.

A newspaper flapped in the breeze and I saw Don’s face staring up at me from its yellowed pages. It was his mirror, a signal proof he’d existed and been someone, the person sought by the police. I didn’t count the bodies they claimed were his personal achievement in a fallen world. I didn’t read their analysis of his crimes. What are crimes in this poisoned maze? What black promise first broke you?

Don had a polite way about him even when he was violent, and I’d become hooked to the action way back when I first drank whisky with him in a bar in the desert. It was a shelter where the barmaid had a familiar face. All the women serving drinks in sand. They fall through the hourglass. Between her words she said things to me, the coded things we know in our sleep. She had a key on her hip and I wanted to find the door it opened. I knew the door led South.

Don and I lived on the edge of time and for a year I found direction with him. He took me from the road of wandering, thumbing rides with strangers who all smelled of sexual need and shame. Cold sweat ran down their backs as they went to wash the memory of me away. I’d already been washed down the drain with the jagged razors I recall one bright summer morning. There’s always crying in the wind, a woman’s voice from long ago, no face, I managed to blur the edges of that. I wanted to paint a set of eyes and lips on that hole in the heartland. And so I journeyed. Travelling through small anonymous towns in the dark I searched for the day.

When Don killed the cop it all became defined again. I could feel my heartbeat for the first time in years. The edges of buildings looked like razors. Straight razors set there by a hand whose inviolable rules denied all rebellion.

We headed to his pickup and down the tracks that crumbled beneath our wheels. Don spat a yard of blood into the lawless air. He was injured and didn’t care because we were immortal in those days before time found us.

We slept through hot days in a nowhere motel. We were wanted and that meant something.

We entertained women from local towns and found their faces grew full of spite at their knowledge of who we were and might become.

“I have to find her,” I told him.

“Your wife ain’t coming back,” he said.

I’d entertained him with a lie, and the truth was I’d never been married, it was something I’d said to make him feel I’d lived once. My sense of deceit sickened me. I never wanted him to know. Such commissioning of respect once revealed as an adolescent ruse is the cause of more loss than men can articulate.

One day in a bar I sat sipping beer while Don went to steal a car. And I knew it had to end, that they would find him and I would be cut loose. The barmaid had small soft tortured eyes which turned the other way as I ordered another round, a solitary drinker remembering his life before the action came around.

Then she turned and fixed her hair in the mirror.

She saw me watching her.

“Turn you on?” she said.

I took her wrists and stroked the scars.

“Your old man will beat you to death with an electric plug and you ask me that? I am your son, I always loved you.”

Then I heard the gun shot. My whisky rippled in the sleeping glass.

Don was outside revving the engine and we drove through cities where the ink was drying on the lives inside the homes we passed. And one afternoon they caught him. I watched from a dripping doorway as they hauled him off in chains. It took six men to take Don. He removed the door from their police car and smashed one of the cops in the face with it.

Who knows how many he’d killed? Do statistics cure us of the lies?

The police were stealing cargo all along, dealers in prestige, they’d brokered deals with every moneyed person along the scar that was the road.

In jail Don tortured a prison guard. He spent a night taking this guy apart. He ran a soldering iron across the man’s face. He set fire to his head with his Zippo lighter.

But if I told you there was gentleness in Don would you believe me? If I told you he once gave all his money to a starving woman would you think I was lying?

If they burnt you with electrodes who would you be? If they took away your face how would you sound?

I drink beer now that is stale and flat. The road is open, but there is only the noise of the wind and the voices that fill the air.





Reflections on a Decade in the Wild East


Colin Graham





Hedonistic triumphs, drunk tank nightmares and a barren existence of seemingly perpetual solitude, were the highlights and low points of over a decade of living in the former Communist Europe.

Throw in a whirlwind turnover of jobs that made me look less like the stayer I am - with my experience in first St. Petersburg, then Warsaw and more recently Belgrade - I can look back with some surprise that I got through more than ten years of living in the former Communist region of Europe.

Three years in Russia, six in Poland and two and a half years in Serbia were achieved - if that’s the right word - via a combination of luck, commitment and sheer bloody-mindedness - which often edged me towards the self-destructive.

Circumstance took me to Russia in 1998, after the college I was working for as a lecturer in English and Philosophy discovered it was in dire straits and had to make staff cut backs. I seized the opportunity with both hands and applied for voluntary redundancy and was deliriously happy when I found I was one of a handful who got it.

The severance pay meant that I had cash to spare at a time in St. Petersburg when Russia as a whole was apparently being flushed down the toilet. August 1998 saw Boris Yeltsin default on the country’s debts and devalue the Ruble. Watching from the UK while my visa was being sorted wasn’t a happy experience: the old aged pensioners ranting at TV cameras with empty shopping bags, the long queues of the desperate trying to change their increasingly worthless rubles into dollars and the cloud of despair the western media eagerly sought to form over the Russian nation had me worried to say the least.

My wife – from Poland – was doing a degree in Russian at Birmingham University so she was due to go to St Petersburg on her gap year. When I got my job, teaching English as a Foreign Language at a school in the city, it meant we could continue living together.

St. Petersburg before my arrival and the onset of the crisis had been a mad place anyway by all accounts. It had just been more expensive in dollar terms. The freefall of the Ruble meant that so many lives were supposedly about to fall apart but a night out in the former capital would soon disabuse you of that notion.

I had already experienced that fresh, unbridled hedonism when I visited Poland on an annual trip made over the years. Most of the clubs of the time have long since closed down. There was one, called Blue Velvet – a converted public toilet in Saski Park, where later thousands would kneel to pay homage to the late Pope John Paul II – whose laid back values were those of the Russian clubs I visited later on.

Ecstasy, speed and LSD were all on the menu in that venue, as was the chill out room concept, perhaps one of the 1990s’ most splendid inventions. I would lie down in one in St. Petersburg’s Griboyedov club - the best of the lot - when I needed a break from the intense partying, and found a helpful cushion being pushed beneath my head to sleep more easily. I would gently slumber knowing that kindness surrounded me.

But some of them could get surly too. Not least to foreigners from the west. Being stopped by the St. Petersburg militsya and having your money taken from you was a constant bane of mine and many other Brits’ existence. The police would approach asking for your passport to check your identity, then pilfer the contents of your wallet. Complaints from embassies and others were ignored completely.

Being locked up in the infamous ‘Kolska’ drunk tank in Warsaw wasn’t much fun either. Forcibly stripped, having a ‘blood test’ needle shoved in your arm and then being wrestled into a cell with bruised and bloodied fellow inmates was the most profound culture shock I could have imagined. No one had told me of the place’s existence in the first instance. And as far as my wife was concerned, I had simply disappeared.

I went missing in Serbia for completely different reasons. Most Russians of 1998 seemed to take me and other westerners to their hearts, except for the official exceptions mentioned above; the Poles were less concerned in 2001 because they had loads of foreigners in their midst already. The Serbs, even in 2009, thought you were mad to have wanted to come and live in their country.

And yet they treated you with the utmost friendliness when you sat down with them. Many would also insist on paying for everything, when it wasn’t necessary. Then they would disappear as if you never existed. Never a phone call, nothing. Their Orthodox brothers and sisters in Russia were completely the opposite, where friendship seemed the be-and-end-all to everything.

The Serbs’ attitude could be covert revenge for NATO’s bombardment of the then Yugoslavia in 2000. Perhaps. But that wasn’t my doing, nor was it millions of Brits or Americans’. A lot of us didn’t agree with it in the first place.

But in Russia I was smacked in the head for being in someone’s way and in Poland there were plenty of ‘hooligan and me’ opportunities, let’s just say. But in Serbia, everyone kept their distance. In this, the hub of the former Yugoslavia, where there were apparently a number of war criminals knocking around, you found that you were in one of Europe’s safest cities.

And yet, given time, I was plunged into the least safe of circumstances, because the Serbs often abandon you. You could get beaten up quite easily in Russia and yet your Russian friends would rush to your aid without a second thought. That is a paradox you had to get used to and given the Belgrade experience, it is a pleasant alternative on the whole. Because you are very unlikely to get punched in Serbia, despite the fact that NATO strafed various parts of it to bits.

But you were also likely to be left completely to your own devices, with not so much as a call from an acquaintance to ask after your health. That can be very hard to deal with. However, as with so many other things in life, eventually – no matter how glacial the progress – I did find that my fortunes began to change for the better.

Poland might seem to lie culturally opposed to the two Orthodox countries but in fact it shares a good deal in common with each in contrasting ways. Whilst they are certainly as hospitable as the Russians in a more straightforward manner than the Serbs, the Poles are also as pious as their southern European counterparts in some striking ways.

While in Warsaw at the time of Pope John Paul II’s funeral, I was struck by the number of teenagers who genuflected in the dirt to pay their respects. This was a deeply conservative Pope who was implacably opposed to the sexual revolution that swept the country and the rest of Eastern Europe after the fall of Communism. But yet there they were: the hormonally-challenged on their knees in worship.

And in Belgrade, the huge St. Sava Cathedral was home to relays of youngsters lighting candles to icons, while on their way to or from work or college. The girls often wore the tightest of jeans or the shortest of skirts yet they oozed piety at precisely the same time.

Yet when young Russian women dressed up they did so for the least holy of reasons.

A typical night in a St Petersburg club involved a compere encouraging young men and women to get up on stage and take their clothes off to the booming sounds coming from the DJ. They obliged with abandon. It was often very amusing but also a turn on, because in the epicentre of the former Soviet Bloc, where it was once remarked that "sex didn't exist" this is where freedom reigned.

In my experience, the new-found liberty had the Russians topping the bill as the most unfettered. Yet, it was the Poles who started the whole process with Solidarnosc and the Serbs - as part of the then Yugoslavia – were not even members of the old Communist bloc, giving them some liberal leverage in the whole mad process of change.

It was a world turned upside down, my experience part of an imperfect yet exhilarating ride on an insane roller coaster.





Exiles: Biographies





PATTI ABBOTT

Patti Abbott's stories have appeared in more than 100 publications. She is the author of two ebooks, Monkey Justice and Home Invasion. She is the co-editor (with Steve Weddle) of Discount Noir. Her new novel, Concrete Angel, will appear in the U.S. and UK in both print and ebook in February 2015 through Exhibit A Books. She lives outside Detroit.





RENATO BRATKOVIČ

An ad man, or mad man, from Slovenia. He's been writing dark stories to keep sane since the summer of 2011. His first short story collection Don't Try This At Home was published in 2012, his transgressive noir short “High Midnight” appeared in Noir Nation 3 in 2013, and bilingual “Kravata / The Tie” was published with Artizan, the little ad agency and publishing house, he runs with his partners. He’ll be happy to brag about his story appearing along some of the finest writers in this beautiful book with his mates, holding a beer in his hand. He writes and blogs in Slovene and in English, and although he'd never admit it, he's trying to make the world better place through literature (promoting great writers at Radikalnews.com and publishing with Artizan). He lives with his wife and two kids in Slovenska Bistrica.



PAUL D. BRAZILL

Paul D. Brazill was born in England and lives in Poland. He’s the author of A Case Of Noir, Guns Of Brixton, Roman Dalton- Werewolf PI and a few other tasty snacks that you can find here. He’s had stories published in various magazines and anthologies, including The Mammoth Book Of Best British Crime 8, 10 and 11. He also edited the charity anthology True Brit Grit, along with Luca Veste. He’s a member of International Thriller Writers Inc. Find out more at pauldbrazill.com.





ROB BRUNET

Rob Brunet’s debut novel is Stinking Rich, from Down & Out Books. His crime fiction has appeared in Thuglit, Shotgun Honey, Out of the Gutter, and Noir Nation among others. Before writing noir, Brunet ran a digital media boutique producing award-winning Web presence for film and TV, including LOST, Frank Miller’s Sin City, and the cult series Alias. He tweets @RRBrunet and rants at www.robbrunet.com.





CARRIE CLEVENGER

Carrie Clevenger enjoys documentaries, non-fiction, Blue Moon, music, and coffee. Sometimes she writes poetry and short stories that have bad endings. She's the elusive sort and has a horrid fear of meeting people, but socialising isn't exactly how good books are written. Carrie is the author of the Crooked Fang series and has many more awful things planned. You can reach Carrie at www.crookedfang.com, Personal blog (and short stories) at www.carrieclevengerstories.com, On Twitter as @CarrieClevenger.





WALTER CONLEY

Walter Conley's poetry and fiction appear in the small press, anthologies and sites like Mad Swirl and Danse Macabre. His latest publication, the short story "Chicken," can be found in All Due Respect Magazine #1 and is currently being developed as a novel. Forthcoming are stories in the books Drag Noir and Lost in the Witching Hour. Walter blogs at www.katharinehepcat.com is online at www.facebook.com/wconley2 and can be reached at pitchbrite@gmail.com.





RICHARD GODWIN

Richard Godwin is the author of critically acclaimed novels Apostle Rising, Mr. Glamour and One Lost Summer, Noir City and Confessions Of A Hit Man. He is also a published poet and a produced playwright. His stories have been published in over 34 anthologies, among them his anthology of stories, Piquant: Tales Of The Mustard Man. Godwin was born in London and obtained a BA and MA in English and American Literature from King's College London, where he also lectured. You can find out more about him at his website www.richardgodwin.net, where you can also read his Chin Wags At The Slaughterhouse, his highly popular and unusual interviews with other authors.





COLIN GRAHAM

Colin Graham was a Birmingham-born writer/journalist who spent a large slice of his life living in Eastern Europe, with stints in Russia, Poland and Serbia. He had short stories published in Pulp Metal Magazine, Thrillers, Killers & Chillers, A Twist of Noir and Radgepacket 5. His non-fiction was published in The Guardian, The Lancet, The Independent on Sunday and History Today, among a number of other journals.



SONIA KILVINGTON

Sonia Kilvington is a journalist based in the beautiful Mediterranean island of Cyprus. She has written for several prominent lifestyle magazines on the island including Status; a glossy arts and entertainment magazine, based in Limassol, and the Russian/Cypriot business magazine Legacy. She is perhaps best known for her interviews with prominent figures in Cyprus’ arts and entertainment and successful British and international crime writers.

Sonia is a published short story writer, poet and novelist. She has a B.A. Hons Humanities as well as many qualifications in creative writing from Leeds and Teesside universities. She lives in the beautiful Cypriot village of Oroklini with her husband and daughter, and has recently published her second novel in the DI Flynn series, Buried in the Hills; an exciting murder mystery set in Cyprus. Sonia is currently writing the final part of the DI Flynn trilogy; The Island of Lost Content.





K. A. LAITY

K. A. Laity is the award-winning author of White Rabbit, A Cut-Throat Business, Lush Situation, Owl Stretching, Unquiet Dreams, À la Mort Subite, The Claddagh Icon, Chastity Flame, Pelzmantel and Other Medieval Tales of Magic and Unikirja, as well as editor of Weird Noir, Noir Carnival and the forthcoming Drag Noir. With cartoonist Elena Steier she created the occult detective comic Jane Quiet. Her bibliography is chock full of short stories, humour pieces, plays and essays, both scholarly and popular. She spent the 2011-2012 academic year in Galway, Ireland where she was a Fulbright Fellow in digital humanities at NUIG. Dr. Laity has written on popular culture and social media for Ms., The Spectator and BitchBuzz, and teaches medieval literature, film, gender studies, New Media and popular culture at the College of Saint Rose. She divides her time between upstate New York and Dundee.





CHRIS LEEK

Chris Leek is the author of Nevada Thunder (Snubnose Press, June 2014), Gospel of the Bullet (One Eye Press, September 2014) and the short story collection, Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em. He is a 1/5th of Zelmer Pulp and a contributing Editor at the western fiction magazine, The Big Adios. He can be contacted at: www.nevadaroadkill.blogspot.co.uk.





HEATH LOWRANCE

Heath Lowrance is the author of the novels City Of Heretics and The Bastard Hand, as well as two short story collections and several novellas from various small press publishers. He has been a tour guide, a private detective, a singer in a punk band, and various other more illicit enterprises. He was born in Huntsville AL, and has lived in Calhoun TN, Memphis TN, and Detroit MI. He currently resides in Michigan's state capital, Lansing.





DAVID MALCOLM

David Malcolm was born in Aberdeen. After studies in Aberdeen, Zürich, and London, he lived and worked in Japan, Poland, and the USA. For many years he has worked at the University of Gdansk in Poland. He lives in Sopot, Poland.





TESS MAKOVESKY

Liverpool lass Tess moved away to work at a tender age. Since then her movements around the country have resembled a game of ‘Pong’, but she’s now settled in the far north of England, where she roams the fells with a brolly, dreaming up new stories and startling the occasional sheep. Although officially a history graduate, Tess has long been a student of the darker side of human nature, and one of her favourite hobbies is watching and listening to the people around her. Many of her stories feature revenge, but she’s never been tempted to get her own back on anyone herself. Except, of course, by writing them into her stories, several of which have now appeared in the likes of Shotgun Honey, Pulp Metal Magazine, and Out of the Gutter Online. You can follow her ramblings at her website, www.tessmakovesky.wordpress.com.





MCDROLL

Fiona Johnson is an exile form Ayrshire having lived in Argyll, Scotland for the last 30 years. She still misses the rolling green fields and the Ayrshire cows but over time she has come to terms with the hills, lochs and sheep. Writing under the ridiculous name of ‘McDroll,’ Fiona has several short story collections which a few people have a couple of pennies in a hat for, keeping her in the luxury she has come to expect as a taxi driver and mother of two demanding musicians. Currently drawing inspiration from family history research, Fiona hopes to have some new writing ready for her clambering fans within the next five years. Find out about more of her nonsense over at McVoices.



JASON MICHEL

Jason Michel is the Dictator of Pulp Metal Magazine.





MARIETTA MILES

Marietta Miles has published stories through Thrills, Kills and Chaos, Flash Fiction Offensive and Revolt Daily. Her writing can be found in anthologies available through Static Movement Publishing and Horrified Press. Most of her stories can be found here: mariettamiles.blogspot.com.





JAMES A. NEWMAN

James A. Newman is exiled in Bangkok where he writes dark pulp fiction and short bizarre short stories across many genres. He best known for the Joe Dylan detective series, the latest of which The White Flamingo ruffled a few feathers in the crime noir charts. Newman is also the founding editor of Spanking Pulp Press and host of ceremonies at the Bangkok Night of Noir crime literary fest. This short flash fiction piece was inspired by a tale told by friend and blogger Kevin Cummings who may or may not have been the hitcher on the Pacific Coast Highway circa ‘78.



PAMILA PAYNE

For the last fifteen or so years Pamila Payne has been living with a bunch of dead guys at a motel in West Texas. Like the characters in her stories, she’d really like to move on, see the world, go places. But she’s just like them. Anchored by love, worn down by circumstances and fascinated by how much there really is underneath it all. So she keep writing their stories and tells herself that someday, when she’s got this all out of my system, she'll write deep, meaningful literature about… something else. In the meantime, you can find her at The Bella Vista Motel.





STEVEN PORTER

Steven Porter was born in Inverness, Scotland, in 1969. He is temporarily ‘exiled’ in Italy. “Boxing Day in Muros” was previously published online by Dogmatika and appeared in Steve’s collection Blurred Girl and Other Suggestive Stories. His short fiction has appeared in other anthologies such as Byker Books Radgepacket series, True Brit Grit and Off The Record 2 - At The Movies. He also wrote the script for Beyond The Haar, a Grand Jury Prize winner at the 2013 Amsterdam Film Festival. In addition, he has published two collections of poetry: Shellfish & Umbrellas and 16 Poem(a)s, as well as the travelogue The Iberian Horseshoe – A Journey and the novel Countries of the World. Details of how to get hold of these can be found at Steve Porter’s World of Books blog at stevenjporter.wordpress.com.





CHRIS RHATIGAN

Chris Rhatigan is the editor of All Due Respect. He is the author of more than fifty published short stories and the book The Kind of Friends Who Murder Each Other.





RYAN SAYLES

Ryan Sayles is the author of Subtle Art of Brutality and That Escalated Quickly! He won Dead End Follies' 2013 award for best newly discovered talent. Subtle Art of Brutality was nominated for best crime novel at Dead End Follies and top Indie novel at The House of Crime & Mystery's 2013 Readers' Choice Awards. Ryan is a founding member of Zelmer Pulp and on the masthead at The Big Adios. He may be contacted at Vitriol And Barbies.wordpress.com.





BENJAMIN SOBIECK

Benjamin Sobieck lives somewhere in the Midwestern United States. He is the author of the forthcoming Writer’s Digest guide to firearms and knives (late 2014), the Maynard Soloman crime humour series, the Cleansing Eden crime thriller novel and many short stories. His website is CrimeFictionBook.com.





GARETH SPARK

Gareth Spark is a Northern English short story writer and Poet whose work has appeared widely in the small press and on-line.





NICK SWEENEY

Nick Sweeney’s short stories have been published in Ambit, Eunoia Review and other magazines. Laikonik Express, his novel about friendship, Poland, snow, vodka, and getting the train for the hell of it, was published by Unthank Books in 2011. Much of his work reflects his fascination with Eastern Europe and its people and history. His other obsessions are Byzantium, Balkan music, bike racing and art, all of which creep into his work from time-to-time. He lives in London, works as a freelance writer and editor, and plays guitar with Balkan troubadours the Trans-Siberian March Band.





AIDAN THORN

Aidan Thorn is from Southampton, England, home of the Spitfire and Matthew Le Tissier but sadly more famous for Craig David and being the place the Titanic left from before sinking. Aidan would like to put Southampton on the map for something more than bad R ‘n’ B and sinking ships. His short fiction has appeared in the Byker Books Radgepacket series and the Near to the Knuckle Anthology: Gloves off, as well as online at Thrillers, Killers ‘n’ Chillers, Thrills, Kills and Chaos, Shotgun Honey and Near to the Knuckle. He released his first short story collection, Criminal Thoughts in December 2013.





GRAHAM WYND

A writer of bleakly noirish tales with a bit of grim humour, Graham Wynd can be found in Dundee but would prefer you didn't come looking. An English professor by day, Wynd grinds out darkly noir prose between trips to the local pub. Wynd's novella of murder and obsessive love, Extricate is out now from Fox Spirit Books, and the print edition will be available soon, which will include the novella Throw The Bones as well as a collection of short. “Headless in Bury” will be in the Missing Monarchs Fox Pockets anthology and the short story “Kiss Like a Fist” appears in NOIR NATION 3.





Acknowledgments





This book is dedicated to my late friends: the artist Jeff Luke and the writer Colin Graham. Jeff was one of my closest friends. Someone that I knew from our time in comprehensive school up until his death in 1995, when we both lived in London. His niece Paloma Sandhu has done a lot of work raising money for The Marfan Foundation, and all proceeds from this book will go to them.

I knew Colin when I lived in Warsaw and shared a many a good drinking session and chinwags with him. The last time I saw him was about seven years ago when he visited me here in Bydgoszcz and we went to the speedway together, he was writing an article about the rivalry between Bydgoszcz and Torun speedway fans. We had regular contact after that via Skype, SMS and Facebook. He died suddenly while I was curating the book, which includes a piece that he kindly donated.

Both Jeff and Colin were vibrant and talented people and are sorely missed.

And of course, I’d like to thank everyone involved in the project.