It’s not the kind of question you ask at breakfast. It waits. Lurks. Slinking into the places you’d rather not be: in the mildew-laced corners of motel rooms, the backseats of rental cars with traces of stale breath and strangers, the forgotten pews of ruined chapels where the wind mumbles louder than God.
Continue reading “Are Ghosts Real? By Katelynn Humbles”
The Underground train rocked, and my cello case toppled towards Lonely Lennie from Leamingston Spa.
“If that hits me I’ll sue for PTSV.”
PTSV? Was he special forces? A veteran of some kind? I’d never met Lonely Lennie before and profoundly hoped this would be the only time. I hid behind a cushion whenever any kind of violent super-hero came on television. Lonely Lennie read my confusion.
“Post Traumatic Stress by Violin.”
I should have been ready with a smart answer but didn’t want to breathe. Lonely Lennie smelled like a 3-day ashtray.
“Get a taxi ‘stead of taking up space with all that clobber.”
Presbyterian Percy, a plumber from Pimlico, emphasised his words by waving a spirit-level like he was D’Artagnan and a nasal voice from behind a girly magazine announced, “S’not right. Shouldn’t be allowed.”
Presbyterian Percy poked the magazine cover.
“What shouldn’t be allowed? Your picture-book or that guitar?”
“Cello,” Corrected nasal voice and a tramp in the reserved seat chipped in.
“Bloody hippy living off our taxes. Puffing on bubble pipes. All that free love.”
“Free love? No such thing.” Lonely Lennie was on a promise if he finished tiling the bathroom by Saturday evening and he’d run out of grout.
I briefly wondered what a bubble pipe was and then tuned the other passengers out. The next stop, adjacent to a redundant station, was mine.
Mine and Rosalind.
I gazed at the underground map and divided Victoria into syllables. It worked, sort of, but when I did the same with Rosalind it was music. Like Bruce Springsteen and Rosalita.
I was nuts about Rosalind and leant my cello case against the wall. Apart from cobwebs the station was empty. I checked my watch. Where was Ros-a-lind? I’d chosen an abandoned wooden trolley to sit on and the bum-numbing surface fuelled my impatience until the cello nestled against my shoulder with the nonchalance of a familiar lover.
Notes from The Swan danced like pixies amongst the cobwebs and my heart slowed.
Crotchets and quavers from Camille Saint- Saëns.
Choreography by Nureyev taking me on a magic carpet ride.
Better than chemicals, better than puffing green. Better than anything.
“Sorry, Nigel. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Delays at Shepherds Bush and Notting Hill. The central line’s a mess.” Rosalind’s words tumbled over each other and she smiled. A sparkling grin guaranteed to sweeten the sourest of moods and I dived in.
Would Ros-a-lind be my first girlfriend?
“Your playing is beautiful. I love The Swan. Heard you miles away.”
I preferred Rosalind’s saxophone to my humble cello. She could make her saxophone wail like a widow at the graveside.
Now that was magically beautiful.
“We’ve got the second carriage. No one here, apart from Billy Bong. He’s in the other one.”
“Hi Rosalind.”
Billy Bong with a pony tail and a pirate eye-patch, smiled at each of us in turn.
“You must be Nigel.”
A musky odour surrounded Billy Bong and I didn’t want to get near in case I got high on whatever he was smoking.
Never can tell, best keep your distance. Mother always said.
Should I shake his hand or do some kind of hippy greeting? Without mother to advise me I opted for a half-wave.
“Let’s go. Catch Saturday shoppers with money to burn.” Streetwise Rosalind picked up her saxophone case. “They’re more generous than people going to work. We have to get them before the pickpockets.”
Pickpockets?
Someone had brushed against me at the ticket barrier and I groped under my shirt. Rosalind stepped back.
“What are you doing?”
“Checking my money belt.”
“You have a money belt?”
I’m used to ridicule for some of the things I do and nodded.
“Where do we start?”
I’d managed to keep both the panic on my shoulder and Rosalind at bay by changing the subject. Cobwebs in dark tunnels and panic would be all over me like measles. I pinched the base of my thumb until it hurt.
“How much?”
“What?”
“How much is in your money belt?”
“ Don’t know.”
£19.87. . .Don’t tell her, she’ll laugh.
“Where do we start?”
“Oxford Circus. Yuppies with money to burn. No football fans.”
I hadn’t considered football fans with their tribal posturing and the shakes started. My knees first and Rosalind, bless her, touched my stress-filled face.
“Don’t get yourself at it Nigel. We’ll be good for an hour. Forty quid easy.”
Don’t get yourself at it? Try being panic-pants me and say don’t get yourself at it.
Rosalind led the way, a tunnel and my fears avalanched. It was dark as night. Yucky dust-covered cobwebs brushed my face. There had to be spiders. Great big ones. Man-eaters. Football fans, taunting and squaring up to each other.
Mummm. . .
The base of my thumb ached.
Fifty yards from the exit Rosalind squeezed my arm and I yelped, sure her pinch was the bite of a cobweb dwelling, man-eating spider wearing a Millwall football shirt.
“Keep it down.” She motioned at a figure bent over a sports-bag, “Shoplifter.”
“Shirt-lifter?” A term used by my mother whenever anyone mentioned her ex-husband. Was the figure bent over the sports-bag a shirt-lifter?
“Shoplifter Nigel. Shoplifter.”
Clarification didn’t matter. Both words unfamiliar as girly magazines and bubble pipes.
“Why doesn’t he take his stuff from the bag?”
“They have to be ready to run.” Rosalind looked at me like I’d arrived on a flight from the moon, “From security guys. They don’t take prisoners.”
“What do they do?” My voice high-pitched and squeaky, “Beat them up? Keep it for themselves?”
Rosalind shushed but it was too late. The shoplifter’s head swivelled like a meerkat and I searched the shadows. Never mind man-eating spiders, David Attenborough must be around somewhere. Rosalind was tightly coiled. Fight or flight?
She was excellent at both, saved me from school bully Doug-The-Thug and his gang more than once. The shoplifter wasn’t fussed about Doug-The-Thug and took off. So did Rosalind, towards the bag he’d abandoned. Wires, batteries, insulating tape topped off with a flashing digital timer. The number nine flickered and she shouted. The clatter of her feet noisier than her words and faster than the digital blinking.
I had no chance of keeping up with Rosalind and grabbed a handful of wires.
Seven.
You prat, what are you doing? Where did Mr. Calm, grab a hand full of wires, come from?
Five.
Hang on, what happened to six?
“Pull!” yelled Mr. Calm.
My fingers slipped and I swore out loud for the first time in my life. A word I didn’t know I knew.
Three.
Huh?
I wrapped the wires tighter and yanked. . .
Bongo drums rumbled in a Meytal Cohen style. The double beats quicker than a hand could move. Like the drummer had overdosed on slimming pills. I must be downstairs where Satan dwelled with horned demons, school bullies, football fans. The floor would be a mass of spiders and I trembled.
Come on you tart, open your eyes.
Mr Calm still with me and I looked down. The shoplifter’s unblinking bag at my feet. Wires embedded in my fingers.
“Run! It’s a fucking bomb.” Rosalind’s words, those I’d missed earlier and I hunched my shoulders. Glad mother hadn’t heard me utter the Eff word. My feet drummed erratically when the cello on my back kicked like Frankie Dettori with the man from the Inland Revenue on his tail.
Rosalind was scrunched up on the wooden trolley, hands around her knees. A questioning stare reinforced by raised arms, palms outward.
“Didn’t go off.”
“What?”
“It didn’t go off.”
“Why are your fingers bleeding?”
I turned to our carriage and opened the padlock. Stopped. Looked down.
“I don’t know.”
“What are you doing?”
“Going home.”
I didn’t care if Lonely Lennie and his cronies were on the train. Mum laid-in on Saturdays, catching up on East Enders, and I crossed my fingers. Perhaps she hadn’t read the post-it.
Image: London Underground train full of travellers from pixabay.com. A red and white train with the doors open and lots of passengers inside.
The thirty-four days of my mother and father’s divorce felt like thirty-four excruciating weeks. It felt even longer on weekends, depending on what sort of breakfasts I shared with my mother at the dining table, all alone in utter, galling silence. One of her chief concerns at the beginning was my curriculum, then came my appetite. “Are you okay, son?” she would ask from time to time. I proved to be a lot tougher than she had realized. Meanwhile, the ten-pound weight loss she had suffered thus far to her own detriment appeared in full display from her cheekbones to her stomach. She would water the indoor snake plants several times on her days off if I failed to remind her not to repeat this process. I had to deal with the most critical ingredients missing from her once-palatable recipes.
Continue reading “Full Circle by Soidenet Gue”
I sit among the dandelions by a black glimmering tombstone. It shines bright and final—never a dull moment. A picture of an old woman glares at me—her trespasser. The sprig of fresh lilacs in the bronze vase speaks of a loved one. A dog stands on the road staring at me.
Continue reading “Still Speaking by Christopher Ananias”
I park Nate’s Mustang convertible on the darkest stretch of the bridge, far from the street lamps, where the wind hums an eerie tune through the rails and the thrashing current of the river drowns out any voice of reason. My cell phone shrieks and pierces the competing noises of the night. It’s him. I answer.
“Esther! Where the hell’s my car?”
Continue reading “The Sound of the Spare Key by Zenith Knox”
It’s an April Sunday afternoon, the long, wet, cold winter has not yet relented. Alan sits staring at the blank email on his laptop. He’s meant to be sending a newsy update message to his brother in New Zealand. The rain splatters against the window. His brother was wanting him to come to New Zealand on holiday. Apparently, there’s a beach on the Coromandel peninsula where a hot water spring bubbles up through the sand: you could dig yourself your own hot tub, and sit there watching the tide roll in…
No fuckin’ chance of the Coromandel peninsula this year, bro.
Continue reading “Literary Imitations and Good Mental Health by Michael Bloor”
“You’re too young to be gallivanting around looking for a job.”
“I’m nearly fourteen,” James puffed his chest out. “And jolly reliable.”
“Who says?”
“My sister.” He switched to a well-spoken accent, “One should always consider James for tasks of this nature. He is excellent and jolly reliable.”
Continue reading “The Milkboy and The Vampire by Michael Shawyer”
Boredom kills. Not just in stories but in life as well. When I was young I spoke of a distant future that would be enriched by callow memories of youth. For some reason it always involved sipping Jack while sitting in a rocking chair. Even then I knew that was bullshit. You can kill, maybe, an hour a week doing such, but you are still alive and require much more than forty year old stories to continue the experience. The young tend to shelve the old, even when the young are the old.
I am prone to boredom. We all are, but some much more than others, and I am too easily bored. Throughout life I have gone from one new obsession to another and, to date, I am the only one left standing. I am bedazzled with a subject for months then one day it is over. Rock collecting, astronomy and many other fiery enjoyments fell off my imagination, as did pressing wild flowers and, yes, the three week interest I had in the accordion.
That, however, is the way of children. When we become adults it is assumed that we will develop sticktoitiveness. Music has been in and out of my life for years, which makes it the Methuselah of my interests. I was keen for it from fifteen to forty then stopped listening, save for the jukebox in bars, for about ten years. It has come back only because I have given up on new music and I do not care what others think about that.
Writing has a strange place with me. It is immune to boredom but it has never been an obsession except when doing it. That is the difference, mainly the other stuff was heightened by my imagination of it, while writing has never had to pass the test. It is just there, something I can do (good and bad). But I didn’t take it seriously for a long time. John Boy Walton is to blame for that. On The Waltons it was clearly made that you must go to college to be a writer the same way you go to dental school to be a rapist, I mean dentist. It wasn’t until later that I finally learned that most people attend college to get drunk and have sex. John Boy lied.
Dorothy Parker stopped her schooling at age fourteen, probably the same for Shakespeare, and Capote didn’t finish high school. In fact the more I read the more I understood that writers are often smarter about life than are college students. You do not need to pay tuition to get drunk and have sex.
This was an eye opener.
To combat boredom I read at least three books at the same time (no, wiseass, not literally). I also have all kinds of stories and articles and even books of my own going at once. I counted and there’s over forty of them, but I only work on three at a time. I would have to not open anything new and write well into my hundreds to finish the stuff I have going now. That does not bother me. I still open new stuff. Changing constantly is useful against boredom. And so is humour, not the silly TV stuff, but actual almost organic humour that is found in the crash and thud of being.
Drugs and alcohol are never boring but it’s a shame they turn on you, how they wear out their welcome, but they are not wholly bad. I have always said “forget moderation.” That’s the same as telling your spouse that you are willing to love her/him to a responsible degree but no further. If I loved someone I would want it to be reckless and mad. Nilla wafer love affairs, I imagine, are boring. Yet they lead to fewer restraining orders.
Winning the battle against boredom is why writers tend to live long lives, nowadays, at any rate. Also, effective treatment against tuberculosis and syphilis has raised the mean death age for writers as well. Moreover, writers seldom drink themselves to death today, the way O. Henry did (who was found as good as dead in a hotel room with nine empty jugs of whisky under the bed). Oh, we drink just as much as ever, but evolution has toughened up our livers. Call me a bigot, but I do not think that a person can truly write about the darkness in the human race (Ann Frank the exception) without having had some experience in alcohol, ongoing or in the past. There’s a special feeling that comes from waking in bed with someone whose name you do not remember. That sort of thing opens a lot of mental doors.
Suicide, though spoke of often is not as rife among writers. It has been a long time since Plath, Woolf, Hemingway and John Kennedy Toole voluntarily checked out. Musicians, so it seems, have taken over that department. Mental illness and boredom make a lethal mixture. You cannot do much about the first but the second can be alleviated if you are willing to use whatever mental illness and/or addiction you have as a positive resource to learn from; do not hide it as a dark shame that you have let people tell you how to think about. But this comes with a risk, people have their own problems, yours had better be interesting.
I think that there is an extra allegory to be found in Hawthorne’s nearly two hundred year old story Young Goodman Brown. For those of you who have forgotten it, Goodman went into the forest surrounding Salem around the time of the witch trials and discovered that every last Puritan in the village, himself included, was at best a basic hypocrite while most were evil hypocrites. The allegory extends to writing; you go into the woods full of writers thinking some to be superhuman geniuses and come out with the hideous realization that they, like you, were/are insane slobs with dark secrets. The job is to realize we are all insane slobs and accept it. I, for one, am rather comforted when I read about the “shortcomings” of famous writers. Twain (another non-college goer) had a terrible temper, Capote, when drunk, was a vicious little bastard, Dickens had family troubles and I would not be surprised if it were discovered that Shakespeare was not a fella to trust alone with your wife (nor the wife with Will). It is just fine by me that all are human, it gives our temporary moments of godliness increased esteem in my eyes.
Hmmm, again this part appears that it will end like smashing into a tree with Ethan Fromme at the wheel. Even a fancy literary comment fails to make the sudden segue from the opening topic to the wonderful Week That Was smoother. Alas, we carry our crosses uphill and the best you can hope for is an ending similar to the one the repentant thief got from Jesus. Barabbas? Or maybe that was just a movie. Hmmm, even a biblical anecdote fails to decrease the jolt. Oh well. So brushing this mishmash of pseudo philosophical musings aside, it is now time to re-visit the six wonderful performers of this Week That Was. They are far from dull.
Dale Barrigar Williams appeared on the second Sunday of the month, as is his habit. He knows about drugs and booze (enough to quit them) and is extremely well educated, but he hasn’t let any of that get in the way of his humanity. This month in his Eliot Behind the Mask, Dale once again merges his humanity with his PhD and presents TS Eliot as a real person and not a mummified great of the past. This is a perfect example of going out into the woods with great writers and seeing one toss a smoke bomb!
Monday delivered Man With a Shopping Cart by Tom Bentley-Fisher. Poor William has an obsession with shopping carts. But soon enough they fill with hard, even brutal memories. The metaphor should be obvious but Tom enriches the tale with images both wonderful and frightening. You can’t fit this one into a box.
Tuesday brought a second story that fled expectations that built within it. The First Thing She Notice Disappear Was a Kangaroo by Michael Degnan leaves a great many questions for the reader to consider. Michael also presents a well written, believable POV for the seven-year-old MC.
Wednesday’s Tilda the Ice Maiden and her life in the tundra 1785 bce by Linclon Hayes, opens with a rare, once in a lifetime sentence; the sort of sentence all writers crave to create. And the lives up to its opening; it hooks you into a world of surprises, as you might deduce from looking at the title.
There is a fantastic moment in A Eulogy For Us by Darleine Abellard, that catches you off guard and lifts this much higher than other funeral tales. The entire work is top rate, but the summation of grief towards the end raises this one to a new level of excellence.
We closed the week with Everybody Prefers Iceberg Lettuce by Genevieve Goggin. You know an author has done well when she reminds you, in spirit, of another writer. Here I got Anita Loos in mind, who created hectic and entertaining Lorelei Lee (played by Marilyn Monroe in a film that had to water down some of the wilder stuff in Loos’ prose). A century lies between the two writers but this one has the same special elan.
Congratulations to the Ladies and Gentlemen of the week. They kept our minds active and carried us pleasantly into the future.
Yes, I Close With Yet Another List
Sometimes I wonder how it all began. When did I figure that list making was for me? I think the David Letterman Show reinforced my list making in the 80’s, but I was already doing such before I first saw his nightly Top Ten. I do not recall making lists as a child, but ever since I was around twenty I’ve been writing them. Could be I was abducted by aliens way back when and instilled with a desire to make lists for reasons as unexplainable as the “Sacred Mysteries” of the Christian church. Who’s to say?
Regardless of the inspiration, today’s list is dedicated to short story writers of yore who often produced works well worth remembering. This list has been up before, but it contained other items. Some are still famous, some are unfairly buried by time. As always, please add your own suggestion.
Leila
This week a bluesy song from (incredibly) forty year ago
The funeral had been over for hours. The condolences had been murmured, hands shaken, and hollow nods exchanged. Tyler sat alone in the quiet living room, staring at the floor like the right combination of thoughts might finally break him open. However, he could only think about one thing: the clock on the wall ticked too loud. Each second landed sharp and mechanically like a hammer in the silence. The steady, unshaken rhythm, indifferent to the weight of grief pressing against Tyler’s ribs, was too precise for this raw moment. He tried to focus on each tick, breathing in and out on every other one. Time was moving forward, unaware that his best friend, Patrick Andrews, would never move with it again.
Continue reading “A Eulogy for Us by Darleine Abellard”
Let’s make one thing clear: I’m not a necrophiliac.
But I am in love with a three-thousand-eight-hundred-year-old corpse.
There.
I said it.
Ethics committee be damned.
Continue reading “Tilda the Ice Maiden and her life in the tundra circa 1785 BCE by Lincoln Hayes”
literally stories 