Luke Richmond Luke likes dinosaurs more than people. Follow his blog for pictures of leaves and popstars. expletivesdeleted.tumblr.com
Bradley Roberts Bradley is a medical student trying not to be scared of writing and art. Strongly identifies with witchcraft and necromancy.
Sean Barry Sean makes coffee for that one coffee company that everyone knows about and writes about music that too few people know about. He is 23 and lives just outside Atlanta, Georgia. He prefers cats and doom metal. 24thoughtspersecond.com
Edd Cockshut Edd is a History graduate from Leeds currently meandering through young adult life. He enjoys reading, occasionally writing and letting his cynicism get the better of him. thegameshole.wordpress.com
Joshua Blackman Apparently a human, tenuously a writer, Josh divides his time between Twitter and angst. @josh_blackman
Alice Selwyn Brace Alice Swelly lives in Paris and has weird dreams (possibly cheese-related).
John Scammell John is a 21 year old graduate who works in a supermarket. Writing to remember, writing to forget.
Joe Wilson Joe is steadily working his way toward world domination, although his plans at the moment consist almost entirely of amateur theatre and temp work. He remains optimistic.
How to Drive a Manual Car at 22 with no College Degree ‘Sitting in that McDonald’s parking lot, I knew everything was about to change.’ is a weird sentence to see written out, especially if it’s one you consider using as the introduction to a deeply personal essay in which you attempt to get your audience to sympathize with your struggles to accept life shifting beneath your feet. For one, it’s hardly long enough. It omits many significant details like how you were sitting in your 2003 GMC Envoy which you had named Lars 5 months earlier when your father gave it to you, or how Lars had started shaking suddenly and quite violently on Georgia 400 as you were returning from your father’s 50th birthday celebration on July 12, 2014. It doesn’t indicate that the realization hit you as you were calling your father and stepmother to come rescue you, because you were too nervous to drive the remainder of the way back to your mother’s apartment. It doesn’t delve into the half hour of waiting and panicking and fiddling with your phone as you volleyed between giving your parents your location and negotiating with your partners (Starbucks for ‘co-workers’) to get your shift covered the following morning. Sure, it’s an eye-catching introductory statement, but where’s the pathos? Where in those 13 words does it say that you felt like vomiting from the anxiety of having to face your father again about having no money set aside to pay for your car to get fixed? Hell, going back and looking at it, you don’t even mention your father. Isn’t that what this essay was essentially going to be about? Wasn’t your aim to show how your interactions with your father and step-mother and mother that night and the two subsequent weeks have led you into a new sort of chapter of your life full of uncertainty? Don’t you think maybe someone in your audience could have the same sort of doubts about their life, or perhaps even likelier, the same sort of fears of disappointing their parents? Why don’t you try and reach for their sympathy? Well, it might be somewhat difficult to achieve that with
a sentence like that at the top of your page. A sentence with a format so rudimentary and overdone, that when you see one like it, you’re likely to know exactly what’s coming. First come the immediate results, like the lectures filled with such fervent frustration about your poor economical habits and your irresponsibility towards yourself and your family, and how living with one set of parents would have had you on the right path as opposed to the one you were currently following living with the other. All this you received on your way back to your dad’s, at your dad’s, and on your way back home to your mom’s the next morning. It’s hard to escape talks with your parents when they’re the ones having to support you, after all. Then comes the surprising twist, when you get word back from the mechanic a day later that Lars is irreparable. And then the all too significant line is drawn from Point A (those three days in July) to Point B (here and now in November) where you trace your path of growth in so many steps to demonstrate that you’ve truly entered a new point in your life: 1. In the days following, your parents call you with a deal: A new car will be bought for you for around $6,000 if you can try your very best to get back into school in the fall. 2. They find you a car. It’s a 2009 Toyota Yaris. It’s under budget and economical and safe. It’s everything they want for you. But there’s one caveat: it’s a manual. 3. You find out it’s mostly too late to apply for most schools for the fall semester, so you all but give up the effort. 4. Your parents discover this fact, and in a passionate lecture over the phone, threaten to return the car. Harsh words are exchanged in harsher tones. It sticks with you. 5. They don’t return the car, and a week or two later, you retrieve the car from your father. The fact that this is your final and ultimate bailout is well established. It’s tense. Which is unfortunate, because this is the first time he’s meeting your new girlfriend. 6. Your mother drives the car back home. You’re still months from learning to drive the thing. 7. You return to daily life. Your girlfriend keeps your spirits high. She’s seemingly the only person in your life whose love doesn’t seem conditional. You hold onto her tight.
8. You stop talking to your father. 9. Two months later, you and your mom move with her boyfriend to a new beautiful house 20 minutes away from what once was home. Ironically, you live closer to your dad, to whom you’re still not talking. You don’t want him to know that you still can’t drive the damn car. 10. You begin writing. You write about music, movies, and anything else you’re passionate about. This seems like something you could do for a living. Your girlfriend encourages you. You continue to hold onto her. 11. Finally, less than a week before Thanksgiving, you scramble for an excuse not to go to your father’s for the holiday. It breaks your heart, but you fear the negative atmosphere. You fear making up for your actions. You fear your own family. 12. You don’t have everything figured out, but you’ve got a bit more certainty than you did in July. You accept responsibility in waves. A little each time. 13. As catharsis, you write an autobiographical essay to be read by everyone. You pretend proof of your new beginning is in the words, but through meta references, run-on sentences, and generally poor formatting, your audience realizes it’s really writing the essay itself that brings a new chapter to your life. 14. You still can’t drive the damn car…but maybe now you’ll talk to your dad about it. Sean Barry
A Nightclub
(in Three Movements) I Lights upon lights upon lights upon lights upon limbs twisting in oceanic flux. Pulsing, lapping, thrashing, crashing – unfocussed, focussed, focus, try to focus. Speakers beat out primal rhythms as leering brutes stalk viscous floors, stick stick sticking wet tongues and hands into the shirts and skirts of incorrigible flirts. Ginsberg’s dynamo roars tonight! We fizzing coils of wire… Nauseous, I try to recall how I got here, who twisted my arm, how angels conspired. The customary Monday-night-at-the-pub had proceeded much like every other: with convivial conversation, with the usual improprieties. But this time, owing to some errant impulse, it had cast off its shackles to become a more rapacious beast, spurning my superego’s lecture on ‘Work Night Drinking and Its Consequences’. This, in truth, wasn’t entirely unexpected. For the past few months I’d been feeling increasingly detached from the mundane footage of my reality, the director of which was a bungling Bergman. Unanchored, disillusioned, I hankered for purpose, for grit, for tumult, for sex and jagged poetry, for the sharp-toothed chaos of amphetamine-addled nights. I’d read in books by Kerouac and Burroughs about decadence, transcendence, obscenity and savagery – concepts far flung from the dilapidated desk at which I hammered out third-rate essays. Here, in this carnival of tight shirts and loose morals, I could exercise my baser instincts, submit to the succulent whims of a less prohibitive consciousness. What? Oh, sorry. Double vodka and coke. II Surveying the room, dry-mouthed and wide-eyed, I watch civilisation undress its unconscious. Two men erupt into a haphazard fistfight. Another vomits over his shirt and shoes. A dark-haired girl, eyes starry with tears, slumps sullenly against the far wall. All are staging (camera flash) a plotless tragedy in
which I appear to play no part, whose sprawling meanings lie not in ‘character’ and ‘themes’ but in hidden networks of warring desires – in inflections of voice, in a lingering gaze, in the sudden, involuntary movements of flesh. This (eureka!) is where our real lives reside, wriggling beneath the masks and manners, in the countless firing impulses of the animal mind. Ejected from this reverie by the sound of smashing glass, I set about finding my friends, if indeed they are here at all. They wouldn’t have left without me. Would they have left without me? They might not have even come here at all… Panicking, I move swiftly towards the bar, but am distracted by a subtle change falling upon the room. A slowing, a fluidness, a coming euphoria, divine and unburdening in its influence. It is as though I’m being swept up in some unseen tide. Ebbing and flowing, ebbing and flowing. While the circumstances of my arrival continue to elude me, it’s clear from this my now mesmerising hands that I’ve ingested some psychoactive substance, the effects of which now wrestle with my anxiety. But what? Who gave it to me? Moments cascade in, sharpening my surroundings to form a new heightened reality – aquatic, visceral, fragmented, shifting. Now and then, in this tumultuous aquarium, a familiar face will swim suddenly forward: the childhood friend with whom you invented stuff in common, the inscrutable coquette whose idea you adored, the Indian boy who sat at the back in Maths, scoffing at his classmates and scrawling poems about communism. They’re all here, rolled up in the relentless now – singing, shouting, whirling, vomiting in a complex interplay of light and sound. III The smoking area smoulders in the brisk black night, alive with spirited movement and discussion. The sky is clear and vast, unsullied by clouds or city lights, but no one looks up, only at their feet or each other. Gathered here, away from the relentless bass, is a dense array of colourful characters, sipping sticky drinks from cheap plastic cups. Item 1: A tattooed goth more piercing than skin. Item 2: A sad, bald man of about thirty. Item 3: A tall, bespectacled boy plus one ill-fitting leather jacket.
Kettled by bouncers and cold steel railings, they exchange views across vast invisible chasms, praying that the few syllables that are heard be understood. They’re aflame, for now, but what about in ten or twenty years? After the party, when the world has had its way. Most will fall sideways into invented careers: telemarketing, human resources, social strategies, PR – careers that late capitalism fearfully vomited as it floundered in the face of new threatening technologies. Some will become bankers, investors, CEOs, nourishing squalor in their hearts in stately Surrey mansions. Some will become writers, artists and poets, conjuring rich, opulent worlds in rat-ridden hovels. And others, others won’t become anything at all. Others will toil terribly through the dark labyrinth of the self. Others will say nothing as they’re licked by inner flames. Others will leap boldly from vertiginous office blocks, crashing to the ground to rapturously escape their own minds. Others will end up ash and white smoke, pirouetting towards the heavens to dissolve beneath the stars. Joshua Blackman
Becoming Neptune - or The beginner attempts to control the tide So you want try to control the sea. You resolve to become the writer of your very own world. You are scared of drowning in the sea you create though, so you start small, easy. You sit down and write yourself a world where you pull a puddle out of the ground; it isn’t the sea you sort of secretly hoped you’d effortlessly end up with. You don’t want to take the many steps it’ll take to get from the puddle to the sea and you try to jump between the two and end with a huge mess. You try a few more times. Similar results. You end up at a point where you are too afraid to even try starting up again. So you try another approach. You will start big, you say firmly to yourself. You will accept the world you end up in. You will not criticise its flaws – you will work on them. So you close your eyes. You imagine a vast sea. The sea is a rich blue, and undulating up and down, crowned in a soft white foam. The sky is clear. The sun is bright. You open your eyes and try to write it all down. The sea in your mind was a rich blue, and undulating up and down, the foam in your mind was soft and white. The sky was clear. The sun was bright. That’s not the world you have managed to write into being, however. You find yourself sat on a small rock with water up to your waist. At least you assume it’s a rock. It feels like a rock. You can’t really see it though. The water is still and featureless but mostly a thick, opaque grey. It extends as far as you can see to a flat featureless horizon. The sky is a grey almost indistinguishable from the sea. There aren’t any real clouds to speak of either. Just a few oddly flat white wisps. The sun is more a dull light bulb than the impossibly huge golden furnace it is in reality. You’re a bit disappointed. Oh well. You need to start somewhere. Besides, you have drawn a whole world into existence! That in itself is something. You still
need to make yourself work though. You set a deadline. 10 days and you’ll stop. Show the world the space you have written into existence no matter what you think of it. You splash about in the water a little. Nothing much happens. You need more drama. You try to raise the water up to your neck. You find that easy so long as you keep it flat and grey and dull and that oddly seems-too-thick-somehow consistency it was already. You splash about a bit more. It’s getting pretty fun, like a weird day at the beach. Then the sea begins to move before you, a sea serpent rises from the water causing waves to crash about your almost-submerged face. You didn’t write him into here. At least you didn’t try to. He’s a lot more vivid than the rest of your little world, a hot red with bleached white frills. His head slips down to your eye level and his warm, wet breath crosses your face (you realise now you forgot to add temperature into your sea – it suddenly starts to feel pretty cold). He is here to tell you that you aren’t good enough at this. Here you have a choice – fight him now (you won’t win, after all you aren’t very good. You literally created a flat grey soup in a neutral space) or you ignore him. He’ll get bored and swim off. You can kill him once you’ve had time to practice. Once you have the ability to write yourself stronger. That’ll take time though, and waiting isn’t something you are used to. But you hold out. He slinks back into the grey. You want to make this world a little better. A little more interesting. But you promised – you would not give up on this world, you would work on it. You announced it to the world for all to hear. You can’t just start again. You have to work. So, you rend a deep cavity in the earth through your writing and let the rock you’ve been sat on drop deep into it. It closes hard and shakes the sea. You feel a little lost. You want to create an island paradise in an instant to land on. Don’t rush ahead. You are the writer. You cannot drown in the world you have written into being. Only the other you, the written version can – and only if you want to drown yourself. You cannot get carried
away by your own tides like you can in real life. You may not be able to direct the subtleties of their flow, but still, they can’t drag you away. It has become the one place you are safe. It’s boring but it might not be soon. You don’t know that of course but you have to try, you tell yourself. We will give you the time you need. We will check in on you later. A seagull flies over head. Seagulls never stray far from land. Brad Roberts
Day 1 In which you are born, and the world proves itself unnecessarily confusing. The world is bright and full of noises. You’ve never really had to deal with senses before, but suddenly they’re the main focus of your existence. Every part of your body seems to have something very important to do: eyes at the front for visuals, an ear on each side of the head to deal with all those sounds, and... dear god, smells! You’ve never considered the idea of a nose having a use before (or at least, you don’t think you have - the concept of time in general is foreign to you, so it’s hard to tell if you remember something or if you’re seeing it for the first time and just think you remember it). Your nose is now a hub of information, although you’re having a lot of trouble distinguishing what smells are coming from where, let alone deciphering what they represent. You vaguely wonder if there’s a way to adjust the nose to make it more accurate... Breakthrough! Not on the nose-adjusting front, that’s still something to get to in the future (you’re pretty certain now that there’s a future – existence can’t all be the present), but your attempts to fix your nasal abilities has brought your hands into play, and it’s all very exciting. While your face seems to be a rather static entity, beyond the ability to wiggle your head from side to side, your hands offer a whole new world of opportunity: you can move them from side to side, or up and down, or even move one from side to side while moving the other one up and down! A wave of joy rushes through you at your discovery (has anyone else figured out how awesome hands are before?) and before you know what’s happening you’ve let out a gurgle. Yes, that was you, making a noise all on your own (so you hastily rewrite your mental hypothesis about the origin of sounds, since clearly there must be some use for them beyond mindless distractions, assuming you can find some way to give meaning to each sound so you can pass your thought processes on to other people). Speaking of people, you’re gradually becoming aware of the
presence of other people around you. They’re horribly out of proportion, with long, skinny figures and heads much smaller than their torsos, but you’re pretty sure they’re humans like you are. Through a combination of your senses (eyes AND ears – you’re getting really good at this) you can determine that they’re the ones making most of the noise. More specifically, one of them in particular (who has too little hair and too much in the cheeks for your liking) keeps bobbing toward you making highpitched noises. When she catches your eye, she extends one of her creepily long, thin fingers toward you. You instinctively reach out and grab it, wrapping your strong little fingers around hers in an attempt to stave her off, but you only succeed in getting her to make an even louder, higher-pitched noise as her mouth curves into some kind of evil grin. Definitely one to watch out for. The others in the room are rather fuzzier, although you can at least tell that they’re the same basic (and wrong) shape. Tilting your head back enough reveals that there’s another one of them right behind you, and much closer than the rest of them too. Like your new arch-nemesis, her mouth is curved up, but her expression is much more inviting. As soon as you catch her eye, your entire world spins (did she make that happen?) and before you know it she’s in front of you, and the rest of them apparently vanish from existence (you’ll have to look into that later). For now, you’re distracted by the strong red colour of her lips, which stands out a lot more than the rest of her rather dully-coloured face. As you had a moment ago, you reach out a hand toward those lips (which are suddenly a lot closer than they seem), and you’re met with a much softer feeling as your finger pokes her face. She laughs – a soft, beautiful sound – and then her massive hand wraps around yours and moves it away from her face. Her eyes are locked on yours, and her mouth is making sounds (presumably she’s trying out your communication idea, but since you haven’t devised a noise-to-meaning chart yet it’s impossible to tell what she’s getting at). Who knows? Maybe this ‘life’ thing will work out after all. Joe Wilson
Ants Many people on this planet face unfortunate beginnings. Undoubtedly countless individuals face hard choices simultaneously, each one firmly confident that their problem was of the most vital importance. Charlotte faced a similar peril. Like many her age, she had just finished University and was now looking to make her way in the world. The grim spectre of employment beckoned her towards him. Charlotte saw this spectre as a grim older man, wearing a three piece suit complete with novelty tie. Sweat dripped down his brow and he fingered a large chain which clanked under his attention. With his free hand, he extended it towards the rows upon rows of people running towards him; some reluctantly, some with open arms and some with a speed born of sheer desperation. Employment welcomed them all, regardless of size, shape or creed. He faced the willing with a smile as he placed a chain and shackle round their necks. Every so often he would smile welcomingly, revealing rows and rows of razor sharp teeth. Charlotte felt determined to resist this spectre. She had thoroughly enjoyed her education, she enjoyed the studying and the intellectual challenges presented to her and now she found herself presented with a horrific choice. It follows that one must walk towards the spectre in order to live but Charlotte found the thought of giving herself up to the monster she saw before her horrific. She pondered that this must be her own immaturity speaking. How would society exist if no one entered into employment? You worked hard and enjoyed your spare time, you voted, paid your taxes, and had opinions about current affairs and inclement weather. This is what adulthood was like. Charlotte looked into her future, it seemed dull and listless and worst of all, essentially devoid of purpose. When she thought these things, Charlotte’s concern only increased. She baulked at the thought of being accused of pointless cynicism, sometimes her troubled thoughts lead her to ponder her own selfishness. Charlotte did not have the arrogance to think that she was the only individual, who could have these thoughts, and she was aware that this was a process that was surely common across the world. Despite this however,
the thought of doing the same thing, a thing which you did not enjoy or even detested, for half the time a person occupied this earth was a concept she could not handle. Why must you subject yourself to misery in order to continue existence in modern society? Why must you be shackled by the dreadful spectre? What if you refuse to partake in this charade, would you be cast out into the wilderness and deserted by friends and family? These are the kinds of thoughts that troubled Charlotte when she thought deeply, often as she occupies the semi-lucid state in-between being awake and being asleep. After just one such an occasion, Charlotte found herself dreaming vividly. Her ethereal form soared high above an enormous ant colony and she was filled with an insatiable curiosity and decided she must take a closer look. This ant colony was unlike those that Charlotte had heard about; usually burly soldier ants stood guard over their fellows and protected them from any potential threats but in the ant colony of this dream world Charlotte could only see workers. Lines of these workers stretched for further than Charlotte could see, the ants must have numbered in their millions as multiple lines stretched into the misty horizon. Each ant clutched in its mandibles a small piece of plant matter, each one fulfilling its duty to the colony by bringing in nutritious vegetation to be used for whatever purpose it was suited best for. The columns of ants were moving surprisingly quickly, all towards a singular goal that Charlotte couldn’t quite perceive. Instantly she knew that it was imperative that she must discover what these ants were working towards. She couldn’t understand why this knowledge was so vital to her, all she understood was that she must possess it. In the moment Charlotte thought inwardly instead of observing her surroundings, her surroundings changed in a flash. She now found inside a large earthen hollow. There was no lighting and yet she could see everything below her with ease. As she gazed down upon the ants moving to and fro with rapid pace, she became aware that her human body would never fit into this space. She was far too large to occupy a space made for, and built by, ants. Her thoughts wandered as she peered down to see what was happening beneath her. Each ant was bringing in their cargo and depositing it in rows along the floor, within moments an ant running from a
line perpendicular to the column Charlotte was observing picked up the debris and marched swiftly back out of the open space and into an inky black void. Charlotte was filled with an insatiable desire to know the eventual destination of these ants and made to follow them. She soon emerged from the ant hill in which she had been and saw the column of marching ants extending into the distance. The desire to know where the ants were going overwhelmed her completely. She felt that her entire existence depended on this knowledge and she willed herself forwards. The parade of ants continued to extend no matter how much progress Charlotte made, it seemed to not matter how far or how fast she moved, she was unable to see anything other than a continuing torrent of swiftly moving insect bodies. They marched with a singular purpose that Charlotte knew consumed their whole being, she understood that until she felt as they felt she would never be privy to their destination. She head swam with these thoughts as her vision began to fade, blackness enveloped her completely as she let herself fall into the inky darkness which had opened under her. Charlotte started and awoke. Her first sight was of a huge piece of vegetation in front of her, being grasped by an insect’s jaws. Charlotte gasped in shock and subsequently the jaws parted and the piece of vegetation fell to the floor. Charlotte realised, with horror, that the formless spirit that had carried her conscience through this dream world had now inhabited the body of one of the very ants she had observed mere moments ago. Looking around her she quickly discerned that she was in one of the tight columns she had observed earlier, marching towards the distant ant hill. She felt strangely calm and began to awkwardly grasp at the accidentally discarded vegetative matter with her newly discovered mandibles. She somehow knew exactly what she must do; she must deliver her treasure to the ant hill. The thought of this new purpose consumed her entirely and, having retrieved the cargo that was suddenly so precious to her, she began hurriedly falling into line behind the other ants. She occupied herself with the thought of that far away land on which her entire being now hinged. She was still no more enlightened as to the eventual destination of her payload but she understood nonetheless that she was but one vital cog in
an infinitely large machine. Charlotte knew that once she had reached the ant hill she would just have to return from whence she came to retrieve more vegetation. Somehow this didn’t seem to matter. She marched ever onwards with her fellow ants. She was comforted by the rhythmic stamping of ant feet upon the hard ground, beating out an enchanting melody of certainty and drive. Charlotte soon became lost in the rhythm of the march and time became irrelevant to her, instead she occupied herself with thoughts of the completion of her goal. That was the only thing she could think of. The awareness that her task was essentially endless made no impression upon her, right then in that singular moment she was totally and completely occupied. She had purpose and meaning. She knew what she must do and she willed for the completion of her task so completely that she felt she would surely perish if she could not finish it. In that brief moment her conscious found nirvana, she lived to fulfil her purpose and her purpose fulfilled her. It would be appropriately dramatic to say that Charlotte awoke with a start, soaked in the cold sweat of terror. Unfortunately she awoke quite normally, quietly and blearily blinking at the rising sun peeking in past her curtains. The events of her dream floated to the surface of her memory and troubled her. She remembered how she had felt when she had occupied the form of the ant and hoped she should glean no deeper meaning from it. Charlotte rose from her bed and collected herself. It was, after all, only a dream. Edd Cockshut
First.
The Weekend
A first forever with a thirst for never hesitating where impulse is concerned When there’s bridges to be burned And yearnings to yield to.
I mixed my blood into the soil Down by the roots Maybe something beautiful will grow My walls Fell down When I noticed the brickwork behind the wallpaper Which had weathered into the fine indents Of Mortar And that all night I lied and stole Kisses In plain view I could have done with some walls then I could have done with protection From these nights Which begin with me knowing how they’re going to end With you Kissing me awake And me Kissing you away But then you look at me With smiling eyes And hold me at crooked-arm’s length Lingering on goodbye That gaze Will last an eternity Burnt into my retinas Like a thought which should never have occurred But may be something beautiful And maybe something beautiful will grow I mixed my blood into the soil Down by the roots.
Pregnant; pause Forget the day of the week Forget the time of day Forget that a world exists outside of these four limbs Which wrap around me like a ribcage Because somebody mistook me for their lungs.
Alice Brace
My Dad couldn't handle being in crowds. It made him agitated, the thought that they might all be looking at him, noticing him, wishing poison on him. So if we went to the park we would only go on a miserable looking weekday when the crowds were all too busy with their own lives. That Tuesday started with a grey light like fog out the back door looking over the garden, which left the feeling of water on your face despite the absence of any actual rain. It was like a cloud had fallen to Earth and sat brooding on our house like a hen. I woke up when my Dad brought me tea. We lived alone, me and him, so I always knew his exact meaning from the way he said something. Even at a young age, when the others were around, we shared an intense understanding of one another. We liked the same things. No, no we didn't. We liked different things, but in the same way. I liked to draw cartoon animals with bulging ping-pong ball eyes in human situations. My Dad couldn't draw but he liked science, so he'd go off and read up on whatever animals I'd been drawing, then tell me all the facts he'd learnt about them. The silly facts he told me back then would be the same facts he'd tell me for the rest of my childhood, word-for-word again whenever that particular animal or whatever would come up in conversation. It was the same with things like names or events or little elements of everyday life. Certain topics would trigger the same turns of phrase he'd trodden into habit years before. I remember how I'd lie on the floor with my palms on my cheekbones, listening to him lecture about stuff I couldn't quite understand, but with intense interest. It just felt good to listen. He became frantically happy to see me care about what he said, even if I'd heard it all a good few times already. In my teenage years I grew sick and angry of his lectures, the same ones played over and over, like the few albums you owned and listened to repeatedly. When you grow older and you try to discard childish things, but however much you try to forget them you find they follow you through life and inform you forever.
He watched me drink my tea in bed. It was the first Tuesday after my Easter half term, and I'd been ill off school the day before. When he said “April, its a perfect day out” I knew I'd be having one more day off classes to take him to the park. The entrance of the park was through an old wooden archway that was dark and splintered with rot, but covered in dark fantastic leaves that made it look like ironwork. We went about our usual route, beneath the low trees, past the pond which always had dust floating above it in the daylight, through more trees until we wound up at the rhino pits. And there the rhinos stood, blinking in the mist. “Why don't they stand out of the rain, underneath their little roofs?” “They don't know its raining, April.” “Are they that stupid?” “They're not stupid. Rhinos are quite intelligent creatures. But look at their skin.” The skin was thick. “The skin is thick, you see, so they barely feel the rain or the cold.” The rain made the only sound for a while, as we looked down at the rhinos. “So daddy, how do they feel nice and warm on a hot day if they can't feel the rain or the cold?” He stood away from the railing and looked back at the trees in the wind. “They don't feel that either.” There was a hole in the corner where the rhinos did their business. It was knotted through with streaks of green and red, but otherwise had the same grainy colour as the rest of the cage. "So if I rubbed one on the nose, it wouldn't know I was rubbing him on the nose?" He laughed. "Well he'd know you were rubbing it, because he'd be able to see you. It just wouldn't make him feel nice, like if you rubbed a person on the nose." "So it would hurt him?" "No not hurt. Rhinos don't get hurt easily."
"But they don't feel good very easily either?" "No." "So they don't feel things at all then." "That's not it either April." He started pacing away from me. I ran to catch up. "So what is wrong with them?" He took a long breath and looked at me smiling big and sad. "There's nothing wrong with them. Nothing at all. I'll be back in a minute I need to pee behind that tree." I wondered back to the rhino pit and sat up on the railing to look at the rhinos. As the rain grew suddenly heavier the herd let out a collective moan and moved to a shelter built into the wall of the pit. The movement of the herd revealed a single rhino stood in place. His eyes were shut tight, and his head was shaking gently left and right, as if talking to himself, "no, no, no." I turned back to my Dad, hoping to see him walking back towards me so I could beckon him quicker toward this weird rhino shaking his head. But my father wasn't walking back. He sat with his legs crossed, back against the tree. When I waved he turned his head away. So I turned back to the pit and the rhino was no longer shaking his head with his eyes closed. His eyes were open. So was his mouth to reveal a big tongue. And he stood on his hind legs like a dog. I leant closer to see more. I fell and landed neatly in the rhino toilet area. Darkness and warmth. There was no way I could have been breathing, but I remember feeling completely safe for a moment. No thrashing. No pain or panic. Just whale song as my heart throbbed in my ears. I settled into the black Earth like cement. Numb and dying. Quiet as the night. I was hoisted out to the sound of my own screams and frogmarched to the car, wailing and crying all the way home. I sobbed quietly for the rest of the day, vomiting occasionally in the bathtub while my Dad brought me drinks. “The Wyland tribe of the south actually use a mix of mud, rhino shits and water instead of cement to reinforce their building developments.� He sat on the closed toilet and lectured me for
comfort. For once though I wanted to be alone. The rhino shit dried onto me in a thick skin that hardened like armour. John Scammell
HAPPY VALLEY So picture this: I’m half my height but probably twice my width, bright eyed, bushy haired, mouth full of picnic and absolutely loving it, face smeared with sun cream and sticky abandon, bare legs hairless but compensating with grass stains; I am eight years old, I am with my family (mother, father, sister) and I am in Happy Valley. One of the great things about Happy Valley is that it’s actually called that: it’s not a damp attempt at artistic licence or optimistic pastoral euphemism or even a cynical, satirical jab at optimistic pastoral euphemism (god forbid); the place was actually called Happy Valley. Of course, I had never really second guessed the sincerity or validity of the name, or taken it at anything more than face value. When you learn the names with which to call things, they become inextricably linked, the name and the object: a tree is a tree, the sky is the sky and Happy Valley is Happy Valley (even if you aren’t Saussure). We call the language we are raised learning our ‘mother tongue’, aptly (though we don’t realise just how apt until much later), and as such, our relationship with it is somewhat maternal: before we open our curious, teething mouths to speak, there’s (usually) no need to mull the words over, to debate sentence structures, conjugate verbs, navigate subjunctives (I suggest that you don’t), explore etymologies, check meter, test phonetics, conjure up poetics. There’s sibilance and similes and synonyms and antonyms and assonance and anapaests and adjectives and … I don’t know what else, anticlimax maybe. And all of these are ways in which we can actively adorn the words that are about to step out of our mouths and into the chilly silence, although we don’t, at least, not consciously. But, of course, our mother tongue’s not having us going out dressed like that, so it dresses our words for us, throwing on a thick, woollen pair of auxiliary verbs or a just-knitted polysyndeton without us realising (or even knowing what they are). And because our loving mother tongue does it all for us – completely selflessly, mind you, only asking that you call once in a while… – we tend to just sort of accept its presence, neglecting to delve deeper or observe it subjectively in order to more fully understand it: it is only ever our ‘mother tongue’, never our ‘aunt’s sister tongue’ or ‘the woman that we
live with who actually carried us for nine months inside of her which is actually mad when you think about it tongue’. Moreover, the words that belong to our native language seem equally untenable; arbitrary, yes, but in our early years our mother tongue has a monopoly on understanding: while you’re living under this roof you follow these rules and for god’s sake don’t question their wording. Okay, let’s come back: re-picture the child from the first paragraph. Except this time it’s November and he’s maybe eighty percent hidden underneath winter clothes, so try and picture a sentient ball of navy fleece, with a nose and pair of windreddened cheeks peeking out on top. Got it? Good. Now balance the whole thing a little precariously on a pair of wellies so thick and wet with mud that you wouldn’t know they were green, just by looking at them, and voilà! I’m back. I’m with my family again, so you can draw them in too (different sized balls of fleece will be fine). I’m not going to ask you to picture two mothers – one humanoid, one tongue – as that’d be somewhat grotesque, but if you did just now then we’ll run with it. I’m still in Happy Valley, too – we never really left – and though I am happy in this particular moment we’re drawing together, you and I, this is again purely incidental and not influenced in any way by the pathetic fallacy of my geographical location or its fitting name. Disclaimer over. It’s cold, the kind of cold that makes people want to spend time together, but the air is dry. It did rain the day before and a bit through the night, though, so the whole valley is saturated with this lush, slippery wetness. In some low spots, the rainwater has pooled in temporary puddles that are very briefly still (with some grass tips reaching up for air just past the surface) before their glassy placidity is completely shattered by the thrust of two mud-caked rubber soles. The water bursts up around my boots and rearranges itself in an infinite number of inscrutable forms, but even before the last fluid fragment completes the arc of its sudden trajectory, the wellies are gone and I’m off again, leaving the puddle to clean up after me. We won’t skip the next thirteen years, but we’ll skim through and take down a few notes. An abridged version includes (but is not limited to): divorce of parents; minor preteen perceived breakdown; contrived division of week (as close to a 50/50 split as you can really get, but); relocation; re-marriage
of mother; mild rebellion in the form of a) standard nu-metal vague holistic anger phase, b) adoption of introverted hobbies (i. reading, ii. writing) and c) vegetarianism & subsequent period of major weight loss; birth of half-brother; acquisition of first real friends; first perceived love interest; attempt to learn French, with its soft vowels and romantic approximants and alien grammar; minor early-teen perceived breakdown; attempt to learn German, with its guttural consonants and violent fricatives and alien grammar; numerous other perceived (inc. one valid) love interests; reinforced interest in literature w/ arrival of Dead Poets’ Society-esque teacher; staunch opposition to said teacher’s departure and subsequent creation of Dead Poet’s Society-esque society; relocation of mother/step-father/halfbrother to rural France; reinstatement of intact week; relocation of self to University; further reading; first legitimate admission of love; standard lite-existentialist realisation and subsequent minor late-teen perceived breakdown; acquisition of first friends not local to Happy Valley; further writing; excessive (but to be expected, right?) alcohol consumption; half-baked counteractive renaissance resulting in a) interest in exercise, b) attempts at extroversion and c) a good ol’ carpe diem attitude; finally, graduation. The arm and hand holding the mortarboard swings up, lets go, the tassel lingers for a split second amidst the fingers but then it’s airborne. I think about trying to catch it, but it lands a good ten metres away. The same thing happened to pretty much everyone else, so it isn’t a big deal, and as I half-run over to pick it up (it was rented) I think about whether or not the name comes from a mortar, as in the cannon, remembering the hat’s rising and falling through the air like an aimed projectile. I can’t say my projectile was a particularly well-aimed one, though: after graduating, I moved back into my family home. If this were anything more than a tenuous metaphor, I’d be dead by now, along with the whole platoon. As it is I’m still alive, though I don’t particularly feel it right now, standing, worn out and doubled over, hands on my knees in Happy Valley. So picture this: I’m half my height and exactly my width (a work in progress), bright running shoes, bushy beard, mouth ungracefully panting and seeming to have a terrible time of it. I’m trying to keep up with this exercise thing but I keep getting distracted by my surroundings. It rained this morning and water
has run down the verges of the valley and collected in the centre. I think about how strange the name really is, and wonder if the person that put the place and name together realised this, or if they just went with something positive but arbitrary; but things mean other things, right? I mean, that’s what I’ve spent the past few years coming to terms with. Sure, a tree can be a tree, but it’s also childhood, a gallows pole, the meeting of nine Norse worlds, the concept of stoicism, a penis, a self-sustaining ecosystem, or even a certain deity’s private knowledge stash. I can’t remember the last time a tree has just been a tree. And ‘Happy Valley’ is a name just asking for alternative interpretations, isn’t it? It’s almost poetic in its unpoeticness, too obvious and blunt to be just a nice name. I think about what this place was like before it received its optimistic title; maybe it was all just flat land before words changed it and locked it in place: an indifferent field, or even an apathetic copse. The ‘Happy’ seems so imperative – more than that: a little forced – like an insurmountably large weight dropped in the centre of the scene, forcing the landscape down with its connotative expectations. I envisage the word as a great pair of wrinkled hands – complete with gaudy rings and garish painted nails (that must’ve required thousands of gallons of varnish to finish) – shaking down from the sky: Great Aunt Nature pinches the cheeks of the earth and forcibly coaxes a hesitant smile from the topography. The hands retract and the landscape is left to harden into a strained grin put on for the distant relatives it doesn't really know and won't see again. When you’re young you just go with it, accept the cheek-pinching and instructions – no matter how patronising – and you refer to things with the words that you are given and in the ways you are told to. I’ve always known this place as Happy Valley, always thought of it as a place where good things happen, but you know what? I can remember breaking my arm here. I remember flying over the handlebars of my friend’s bike (riding without stabilisers for the first time), and landing in the nadir with my wrist bent crooked over a rock the size of my head, and it hurt so bad and I cried so much that I pissed myself, and there was blood and piss all over my clothes, and I cried out for what felt like forever but my family and my friend and my friend’s family were all together at the top of the valley, and they were eating and playing and laughing so no one heard me
crying, and this place, even then, was still called Happy Valley. But right now my arm is intact (and has been for fifteen years) and if there's blood or piss on my clothes it's a negligible amount. I am here, standing in the place called Happy Valley. I'm near the bottom, where the two slopes resignedly converge and by where this morning’s rainwater is still trickling down towards. The place is a natural trough, and the water is pooling up in the centre, but slowly, so that the surface remains completely still, reflective. The valley is doubled and it lingers. I don’t know what it’s called when water does this. It’s probably too large to be a puddle, but it isn’t a pond either, as eventually the water will drain away into the soil, or dry up (if it were warm enough). The surface looks smooth and solid like mirrored glass, but the water only pools there temporarily. I start running again and prove its impermanence with the toe of my right shoe; the pristine reflection probably warps into a myriad expressionistic, fluid shapes, but I don't bother to look down to make sure. I pass through it, only half appreciating the symbolic action because it's also fucking freezing, and as I run I watch how the two sides of the valley rise up and seem to roll away from each other. They look like two lovers who've gone to sleep on an argument, or the inside of a V formed by two colossal fingers in a crude hand gesture, or the god-knows-what stained insides of a hastily emptied cocktail glass. But mostly they just look like two sides of a valley.
Labyrinth for the Bored Narcissist
Jono Ganz
It had happened when George was a kid on holiday in Scotland with his recently divorced dad who was spending most of his time too lost in thought to pay attention to his son at all. George had taken to hanging out with a short, stocky, needlessly intense local kid named Ed in a forest nearby his aunt’s house where they were staying. They were walking aimlessly, but the fact he
was following Ed’s pseudo-determined lead made it seem of the utmost importance, like some fantasy quest, like something outside the realm of standard distractions from the boredom. Conversation came in short bursts between episodes of strange, hanging silence. They walked through serpentine paths and over a stone bridge that was suspended over a long-ago dried-out river, moving quickly and without halt until Ed found a long, thick stick, whereupon he sat on the floor and took out a penknife and arduously carved the stick’s end into a sharp point. George sat in front of him watching intently, reverentially. To him Ed was older, wiser, cooler. “Okay.” Said Ed, bouncing the new spear up and down in his hands. “If I wanted to, and I stabbed you with this, right now, you’d die. I could kill you. I could just do that.” “Wow” George replied, open mouthed. He followed the kid out of the forest and through fields of private land, shoving their way through the dividing bushes. They walked over tilled fields, over crops, past busy herds of sheep. The kid stopped George when they found themselves close to a horse which was watching them with animal curiosity. “Alright, George.” Said Ed, “watch this.” He ran at the horse, which began to step back hesitantly, and he threw the spear. It lodged into the horse’s side, through the thick hide. The horse produced an unholy scream. It ran past Ed. When it went past George the hanging spear almost hit his head. It bounded into the distance: blood poured from it, leaving a horrific trail on the ground “Why did you do that?” asked George. “Because fuck that horse.”
--George left fairly early on, intending to go to nowhere too new, the dull sun of a young year faintly illuminating each window on the other side of the road from the where he was walking, which was cold and austere with shadow. A street of two story houses, all varied, all bland. Stark and spiky weeds stabbed through cracks in the pavements, damp-looking potholes carved up the road. Cars were lined like corpses, some with dents that splayed out sharp metal, some with cracked paint. One had a recently broken-
in window: glass littered the pavement, the radio’s been torn out. A wrecked and abandoned caravan, full of wavy sheets of asbestos (left here, presumably, to avoid the high cost of dumping it legally). The sky above is grey like a puddle, like the dirty clouds and the hollow white of a dead sky of a nothing day have been mixed together into a blurred dullness. He follows a crumpled and slightly wet sheet of A4 paper with a screenshot of Google Maps printed out: he’d had 3 false starts down wrong roads from Mordon station before he was able to figure out true north. He sees the building: like every other house, it is a house. When he’d seen the advert [come to our research facility, perform simple task, be paid £1000 up front], the eccentricity of it oddly creeped him out, so much so that he told a mate - unsure himself of if he was being ironic - where he was going, and to keep that information in mind if he vanished, or turned up in the evening news face down on a river bank, or whatever. He put on a business smile, and rang on the doorbell. Welcome to the eternal nature of beginnings: being led forth into the always unknown. The guy that answered was probably in his early 20’s. He had slicked back hair. The sort of startled, put-upon confidence of the young. Dusted stone grey business suit, worn like a costume. “Hello!” says the young man “You must be Mr. George Droste. Hi.” He puts out his hand to shake George’s. George is in his 40’s, a plump and stately figure, a balding head with sweat perennially carving a path through wrinkles and furrowed brow: he suddenly feels nauseated at the power imbalance here, what feels like an interview, trying to impress someone who was born when he was old enough to conceive him. He grips the kid’s hand as tight as he can, guides the shake with his own force, drags it on twice as long as conventional standards would dictate. He then realises that he hasn’t said a word by the time he’s finished the shake. “Hi, yeah. What’s the nature of this, then? I’m assuming some psychology experiment, some uni thing you’re doing?” Is this clever? What if the kid’s a professional? Has he offended him? He’s probably just some research assistant. Fuck, maybe an intern. A work experience kid. “Sure, sure. Come on in.” The kid guides him through the house. There’s a wooden
staircase of chipped and uneven steps, almost medieval in that way, which goes up into bare darkness. The walls are bumpy with waterlogged paint. There’s mould in the corners of the narrow hallway that runs alongside the staircase as he’s led past two white doors and to an open door that lies at the end of a hall, and both him and the student have to manoeuvre past a damp mattress to get through it. They enter a kitchen. The light is spare. Three windows have been painted over black, and there’s two more people of about the same age as the kid that led him in, a boy and a girl, who are also dressed equally colourlessly, the girl with her hair up in a tight bun, a dress that’s almost puritanical in colour and shape, the boy in a box-shaped suit, shaved hair and a thick, outwards, messy beard, skin wrinkled and scratched far beyond his age, stressed and firey eyes. They look at George. Their mouths are straight. “Okay.” Says the kid that led him in, as he walks to a door that George expects will lead to a garden and opens it. It leads down a long, dark hallway: there’s something odd about it, about the way the small amount of light that gets in hits the walls of it, but he can’t quite figure out why. “Come on in here. We’re going to shut the door behind you, and you simply have to walk to the end. Afterwards, you’ll get your one hundred pounds.” “…the advert said a thousand.” “Oh, sorry, sorry, yes, a thousand, you’ll get your one thousand pounds. Go on in, George.” George walked through the door, and the kid slammed it behind him. - - Pure dark. Whatever faint movements of anything that could be called colour or substance was just the workings of his imperfect eyes and insinuations of his brain. His steps on the floor reverberated with a thin, metallic sound, almost the sound of cracking. When the lights came on he had to shield his eyes with his hands: he could see the shape of the hallway burnt onto his retinas behind his palms. He slowly moved them, opening his pained eyes. Every surface was a pane of glass. Mirrors, all mirrors, with uncovered lightbulbs hung from the centre of each one on the roof. He looked to his side. Reflections on reflections, thousands of the few lightbulbs, reflected on infinity, some as
large as the actual light bulbs – to the degree that it was difficult to tell which were there, and which were reflections – and some distant and minute, like far away fires seen at night time. In any direction he looked, he could see himself, repeated over and over, a lumbering, bent-over, tired and pathetic looking man, open mouthed with befuddlement, lost between so many lights that somehow still rendered the main impression as an unfathomably vast darkness. He sat down and gazed side to side, trying to drink it all in. “You know why you don’t get this back in London?” his dad had asked his nine year old self, sitting on a Scottish coast at eleven in the evening, in exhausted winter, staring into stars, pinprick points of light everywhere, and the magnificent ethereal dust of galaxies. “Because Scotland is closer to the top of the world?” “Nah son! Because light pollution. All those streetlamps, all the lights from house windows, the headlights of cars, all of it, it drowns out the light from the sky.” George moved his head, looking up over the sky, laid out like a cathedral roof. He felt dizzy. He felt afraid, but in the childlike way: it’s not even that he couldn’t place what he was so scared of: he was too scared to even try. It rattled in his nerves. He stood up on the mirrored floor, and looked down - he felt the blood rush to his head and the shrivelling up of his terrified scrotum: he felt the way he did near cliffs. He could see an infinity of a pure drop downwards, even though he knew there was no possible way he could fall. He sat down, breathing in sharp, cold breaths. He needed to get drunk in airport lounges to even get on planes. He had sat in the centre of his capsule in the London Eye when he’d taken someone out on a date on it: he spent most of his time there with his eyes closed, feeling pathetic, feeling like a show: he liked to think of himself as a hard bloke, as someone who could just swallow whatever hardships life threw at him, devoid of distracting emotion. There wasn’t a follow-up date. He tried to remind himself he was just in a hallway. He looked up. He could see himself, over and over, horrified, frantic, caught like a wasp under a pint glass, again and again and again.
He began to walk forward, then tripped over. He couldn’t orientate himself. Everywhere felt like a plausible direction. He crawled forward on his hands, trying to look straight, and then got on his knees, slowly rising to his feet, taking hesitant steps, moaning with fear. --He was trying to ignore everything else: to just look forward down the hallway as if it was the hallway it was, as if the vast space in every direction around him was an illusion, which it was. Moving forwards, with his arms out to the side like a tightrope walker, placing one foot in front of the other. He tried to figure out what was going on, what the point of this hallway and him being made to go down it was. Some psychological experiment? A prank TV show? Fuck them if it was that. They’d have to get him to sign a waver, wouldn’t they? He hadn’t signed anything. He’d watched a vast amount of television, they would have to blur his face if they put him on at all – no one would know it was him, he wouldn’t face the humiliation of what looked like a total mental breakdown due to the presence of some mirrors. Would they not give him the money if he didn’t allow his face to be shown? He noticed that by thinking about this, and by getting angry at it, he was distracting himself from the fear – and then when he noticed this, it returned, like some fluid that rushed from his head and into his heart and limbs, an unholy weight. The feeling was almost impossible, somehow both claustro- and agoraphobic, trapped in a small box, lost in space, and even this was combined with the sensation of being on the ground and gazing up at an impossibly high wonder whilst also being on that wonder’s top and edge, gazing at the sudden possibility of death from the fall, and then anger - a headache-inducing anger at how little it turned out he was in control of his own mind. After a minute of walking, he came to a divide: a sort of v shape in front of him, where the hall split in two, up-right and up-left. The new curvature of the mirrors meant the geometry of reflections upon reflections became stranger, flying off in new directions. He looked down both ways. He felt like two people feeling two
different things. The first was a gruff man who was pissed-off by realising that this was some ridiculous fucking maze, and he couldn’t just walk out and get his money and go home and have a beer and a wank and forget about all the embarrassing weaknesses of self. The other was the lost kid that George would die before he’d admit he knew he was. He chose the right hallway, deliberately avoiding thinking about this decision at all: he knew it was absurd: no rationalisation could possibly put one side over the other. The hallway continued to creep out at angles. It continued to provide him with choices of direction. It continued to display himself from all angles in all directions, his face crunched with anger, the back of his fleshy, almost-hairless head, like film projectors playing a repeating sequence over and over again of this lost man moving, shot from every side. The hallways would sometimes tilt downwards. Sometimes up. He soon found himself walking down a straight hallway that was much longer than the others. He figured this to be the end, and paced forward, faster and faster. Twack. Face against a mirror in front of him, he hadn’t even noticed his own reflection running up to meet him. He turned to either side: this hallway led nowhere, he could only turn back the way he came. He stared at himself in front of himself: there was a bright red mark on his head where he’d bumped the wall, an expression that was pathetic, aggravated, adrift and terrified. He hated what he saw. He was breathing quickly. Almost hyperventilating. He started to roar. To scream. He clenched his fist, and punched the mirror as hard as he could. It shattered. The mirror’s many reflections blinked off like a light: now there was a single black wall, repeated around him as many times as himself. Glass litters the floor. Shards of it stick of the back of his right hand: blood is gushing out, and in one place spraying. He starts to feel dizzy: the world starts to darken for him, he almost falls over backwards, but he tries to control himself, taking deep breaths, leaning his left hand on a wall. He starts to remove pieces of bloody glass, taking sharp, pained breaths with his extraction. He then holds his left hand over the bloody mess, trying to apply pressure. He arduously tears off part of his shirtsleeve, and wraps it around the hand, then moves away from the place that the glass is littered and sits down,
trying to stay calm. He sits down. He lets his head drop back and closes his eyes. His balding head is cold against the mirror.
Who we are
--“Hello?” he says, “I’m ready to be let out now.” He looks side to side. “Hello?” he starts to yell, “I’m hurt – I’ve hurt myself. Real badly, I’m seriously injured, I need medical attention, I need to go to A&E. Hello? I’m feeling very unwell. Please, help me.” He stands up, and feels dizzy when he does – the world sways – “Please! Fuck! Fucking, Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! You! Fuck! Fucking! Please! Help! Fuck! I’ll fucking, sue you for fucking, fuck, everything! Fuck!” He staggers forward. This new thought lights up his mind. He can just sue them. He can sue them, for everything. He walks forward. He’ll just go back to the door he was let into the maze through. Easy. But how much money would they actually have, these weird students? No. Putting this together would have been expensive. It’s a corporation. A TV show, a really shit, uninteresting TV show. He’ll sue it, and it’ll never come to air. He keeps walking forward, and comes to a halt. Two hallways to either side that go backwards at an angle. He thinks. He thinks hard, and he knows, he knows that he did not arrive through a hallway that in any way resembled this: everything was always simple, forward, or two diving hallways that both went forward. Nothing like this. Never a choice between three. He looks at his Nokia phone. He’s been in here for about two and a half hours. Four hours after this, he loses the motivation to walk and choose between turns. He simply sits down, and stares at his reflection. Tired: crow’s feet, bleary red eyes from crying. He has yelled himself hoarse. He takes out a set of keys, and carves something into the mirror. A stick man. Then another stickman in front, holding a spear. A stick horse in front of this stick man, running away. The lights go out. Rory McCarthy
We set a theme for every issue - a creative prompt that can be interpreted however you see fit and in whatever form you fancy (short story, sonnet, haiku, comic strip, you name it) - and submissions are brought together, along with visuals from our glorious art team. You’re holding the result in your hands: a compact collection of prose, poetry and pictures, varying in structure and content but all tied to a single theme. But enough about us - we want to hear about YOU. We want to get as many people writing as possible; people from all sorts of backgrounds with all sorts of thoughts and feelings and artistic visions. Even if writing terrifies you - ESPECIALLY if writing terrifies you. Write under a pseudonym, or write under your own name and send copies of the zine to your friends, your awkward acquaintances, your worst nemeses. Just write! It’s easy to get involved: just drop us an e-mail at tidezine69@gmail.com or visit tidezine.tumblr.com. We release Tide quaterly. This is the spring issue (see what we did with the theme? Ey?) and our next issue will be out on in the first week of July! To allow you beauties plenty of creative time to get your submissions in order, please send in your pieces by Midnight 14th June 2015 The theme of our next issue will be ODYSSEYS So get writing and come get swept away by the Tide!
The Tide
Team
Jono Ganz Editor
Jono is part of that power That always wishes evil And always performs the good
Claire Joines Illustration & Design
iscariotrising.bandcamp.com Illustrator based in Birmingham. Lover of goats and skeletons. @clairejoines / clairejoines.com
Rory McCarthy
Kate French
Emotional Support
Illustration & Design
Rory is a London-Irish writer who’s into sad folky music and sad experimental fiction, and is tremendous, tremendous fun. @roryisconfused
Kate escaped from London College of Fascists and is currently working on her first Poddington Peas retrospective. kgsfrench.tumblr.com