Li Tsai stood beside the groundship and studied the ruins of the ancient city. She’d learned in school that the inhabitants of that unhappy place called it Denver, in honor of some forgotten politician. Today those people were naught but dust and troubled memories, she thought, shifting her glance towards the new city standing alongside the bones of the old: Deng Xiaoping, city of the people.
September 24th, 2014 10.15am
He sits on the comfortable sofa and assesses his surroundings. He is in a spartan, minimally furnished room on the second floor of a nondescript Syrian apartment. There is a lamp-shade to his left, and a small coffee table in front of him, on which there is a bowl containing some dates. Somebody has tried to insert some signs of civilization, and he appreciates this. Outside, staccato gunfire is the false fire-cracker sporadically popping in the distance. The automatic bursts have an industrial sound quality, as if the trigger-happy fanatics shouting their devotions are contractors hired to destroy the city incrementally by hosing it with their bullets, and their RPG rounds.
“You want?” asks one of his swarthy captors unable to develop the question any further, because of limited English.
A laptop illuminates the otherwise darkened room. On the screen is a website that she is all too familiar with, the one that has been taunting her for months. A new photo has been uploaded within the past couple of hours. She pulls out a chair but chooses not to sit – the surfaces are damp and the whole apartment smells of bleach and lemon.
The website is seemingly old fashioned by design. Page backgrounds are dark with a watermark logo. Fonts are bright and dated. Items jerk around the page whenever a window is resized or moved. An animated under construction image rotates and hovers in view at all times.
The homepage shows fourteen captionless photographs. The image quality is poor and they appear to be scanned copies of original prints. Each image shows a minor celebrity in a state of undress, always draped across an object or a piece of furniture. The pictures are unflattering and raw. The first image shows a reality star splayed across a four poster bed. The next is an ex-soap star lying face down into a giant beanbag. A television presenter slumps backwards over a pile of cardboard boxes.
And so on.
We meet every morning in the coffee shop next door to the hotel. There’s Zia, with his three shots of espresso and who knows how many packets of sugar. Ali takes his coffee with plenty of cream. Aqmed orders one of those fancy drinks with an Italian name I wouldn’t dare try to pronounce. Every day something different. “What is it today?” Zia always asks Aqmed, as if there’s something a bit too girlish about Aqmed, a man who doesn’t drink his coffee black and strong. Then, of course, there is me. Omar. I am a tea man.
Leaning against the grimy brick Mel scuffed her feet on the flags. She flicked a fag end into a puddle of scummy rain water. Her fingers quivered and shook, fiddling and picking at the little gold clasp on her shoulder bag. She sniffed, wiped the back of her hand across her nose. She needed a fix but couldn’t have one yet, she needed to keep her wits about her. She hated being out on the street, well of course she did but it was Saturday and so there was no choice.
She sat in the chair waiting. Let it come, she thought. I am prepared for every eventuality, and when it comes I will not be surprised. Nonetheless, she was tense, apprehensive, alert, and when the doorbell rang her blood froze. Now, she would say. Here it comes. She tried to hide, inside the room, inside herself, but still she heard the sound of the doorbell like someone screaming in her ear. She tried to make herself smaller and smaller and sometimes even fled to the farthest corner of the room. The farther away she was the less she felt the threat. Sometimes she turned her face to the wall and began to count, ring by ring, and if the ringing did not stop began to mumble words of entreaty or supplication.
Melvin Mudlicker sipped his coffee slowly as he worked the numbers on a napkin at his fifth favorite diner.
Circumstances once a week brought him to this part of town and he had grown fond of one of the attractive young waitresses who always asked how he was doing, how his business was doing and if he wanted his coffee refilled or if he wanted his usual, a turkey burger deluxe with fries, hold the pickle and tomato.
They had developed a nice rapport, rhythm and flow together.
He was a tall sheepish gentleman in his late fifties. His eyes were gentle, his chin was weak, his shoulders were starting to stoop. His legs were thin and wobbly, his hair was thinning and gray. And he walked with the hesitant stride of a crane, his head bobbing forward with every step. Watching him amble along the street, one would never guess him to be an artist. A servant, perhaps, a beggar more likely, but not an artist: a soul unencumbered by earthly snares and committed to only the Muse. But an artist he was, and no mere artist at that. He was an artist in the most gallant of mediums: the daring realm of street performance.
Holly spots a lucky omen far downhill: every backlit tree in a row of poplars along a stretch of the Port Washington Narrows is clasped like hands in prayer, except one. A single, stunted, sloppily unfurled poplar, unloved in shadows, holds the luck. It watches out for the others; it allows them to be confidently pretty by giving the eye something less to compare them to. “Unpoplar,” as Ogden Nash might’ve put it.
The golf course trees, however, don’t say much of anything to Holly. Coddled elms and hand-fattened maples protected against the harsh November winds that howl down the Narrows like steamed souls passing through cracks in hell, have little in the way of luck. They might as well be painted onto the surface of the eye. Stage prop trees.
Continue reading “Time and Chance Happeneth to All Gods by Leila Allison”
It is seven-thirty in the morning and if I were to turn this railway platform on its end, I could stand here and watch the composite parts separate.
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