CultureCult Magazine (Issue #13) (Monsoon 2019)

A Magazine of the Arts, Literature & Culture

CONTENTS Issue Thirteen ● Monsoon 2019 Volume Four ● Number One

02

NON FICTION

E DIT O RIAL Jay Chakravarti

ELLIOT NEWBOLD The Good Fight

06

CO VE R STO RY

SHRADDHA MADHOGARIA

KISHORE SEN

“Mein Kamph” or Ours?

Primitive Modernity: The Art of Rabindranath Tagore

PARVATHY MENON

43 22 27 23 20 48 42 21 38 49

AMANDA MORNINGSTAR EDILSON A. FERREIRA FABRICE POUSSIN

JARED MORNINGSTAR Saying Goodbye to Baby Blue

MICAH CASTLE

KAL SITOTAW

Three White Demons

Black and White, with Red

RICHARD MILLER

28

S H O R T F I CT I O N S

PATRICIA EVANS

RACHEL ROTH

24

NOVELETTE

IRIS OPRI

LYNN WHITE

50

FICT IO N

HEATH BROUGHER

KENNETH POBO

44

BOOK

‘A Princess Remembers’ by Gayatri Devi

POETRY

40

VICTOR ANDRÉS PARRA AVELLANEDA Collateral Degradation

Editor JAY CHAKRAVARTI (Jagannath) Editorial Team S. DUBOIS || SHANKAR BHUSHAN © CULTURECULT Layout Design /Cover JAY CHAKRAVARTI Published by Jagannath Chakravarti from 11/1, Khanpur Road, Kolkata - 700047, West Bengal, India. All rights reserved. No part of this magazine can be reprinted/ reused in its entire form or in part without the written permission of the publisher.

Visit www.CultureCult.co.in

47 39

EDITORIAL

JAY CHAKRAVARTI Burning Lungs

As I write this, my social media timelines have been overrun by news of the multiple wildfires destroying the Amazon rainforest over the course of the past few weeks, largely unreported by mainstream media till a couple of days ago.

The fires have spread over a large part of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil and its neighbouring nations Bolivia and Peru. Environmentalists and concerned humans around the world have unanimously 'blamed' right-wing Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro for this unprecented “global crisis” which is seen as a direct result of Bolsonaro's claims that regulations to protect the Amazon has caused a hindrance in Brazil's economic growth. Bolsonaro had reportedly encouraged farmers and loggers to clear portions of the Amazon, harming not only the delicate ecosystem of the Amazon, that produces 20% of global oxygen and houses 10% of the world's animal species, but also infringing upon the right of the indigenous communities spread across the Amazon.

As the right-wing narratives inevitably come to the fore with their usual gamut of excuses, citizens sharing news of the fire are scrutinised for sharing less-than-accurate news or dated photographs that are nonetheless, spreading awareness about this crisis, which Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo termed a “crime against humanity”.

Bolsonaro has called this global outrage “sensational” and warned foreign governments not to meddle in their internal affairs, at the same time admitting that the fires “may” have been manmade and that Brazil may not have adequate resources to douse these wildfires.

Bolivian president Evo Morales has meanwhile ordered the largest air tanker in the world to combat the fires that have spilled over from Brazil.

Among the multitude of excuses that has been propagated by yellow media (champions of claiming climate change to be a ‘myth’) there is the perceived truth of “forest fires” being essential part of ecosystems to survive and renew, such as in some forests of United States or Australia.

However, forest fires are not a natural part of the Amazon ecosystem. The few accidental fires that Amazon has to endure are quickly doused by rain. It doesn't take much to imagine the plight of the animals, either. Who knows how many undiscovered species this fire is rendering extinct as you read this!

Who knows what else may be happening in other nations presently led by leaders who are populist and prefer speaking the language of power to logic, empathy and compassion.

JAGANNATH (JAY) CHAKRAVARTI

is an Independent filmmaker based in Kolkata, India. Besides fulfilling the duties of the founder/chief editor of CultureCult Magazine, he enjoys dabbling in several forms of artistic expression including poetry, painting, film criticism and acting. He holds a Masters degree in English Literature.

Kaalkut This August the 15th, CultureCult unveiled its Bengali e-magazine "Kaalkut". Four years ago, CultureCult began its journey as an e-portal as ART on Page 3 and 5: Author

02 CultureCult Magazine Issue 13

well, before beginning its run as a regular publication.

Besides the obvious phonetic similarities between the phrases “CultureCult” and “Kaalkut”, there are two distinct reasons why I decided upon the name Kaalkut.

The origin of the word is Sanskrit, and it can be traced to a well-known mythological event in the scriptures of Hinduism. My first editorial for the magazine muses upon this event and the origin of Kaalkut.

What my editorial essentially skips over, rather unfairly, is the celebrated Bengali author who would write under the pen name ‘Kaalkut’, and who has been a personal favourite ever since a dear friend recommended the books author Samaresh Basu would write under his adopted pseudonym.

It is very easy to disassociate Kaalkut from Samaresh Basu, essentially because Basu is most

A VIIRS scan depicting the Brazil fires and smoke August 20, 2019 Image Courtesy: NASA

quickly recalled as the controversial author of works such as ‘Prajapati’ (The Butterfly), which faced charges of obscenity and had its days in court. Kaalkut’s works attempt to look for the naked truth just like Basu’s narratives would, but the search would be laced with the autobiographical considerations of an ever-vigilant, self-assessing soul that staunchly refuses to let go of his beautiful conscience, resulting in unforgettable narratives that are rich in material and philosophical beauty.

By adopting the name Kaalkut, we also wish to pay homage to the beautiful heart and mind of Samaresh Basu. []

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COVER STORY

KISHORE SEN

PRIMITIVE MODERNITY Tagore the Artist Part one of a series of three articles on artists of the Tagore family. This article is centred on the versatile Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, who only bloomed into a visual artist in his 60s

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Art RABINDRANATH TAGORE

The Bengali population, both in India and Bangladesh and the large diaspora living around the globe, have fondly inculcated Rabindranath in their daily life and cultural activities.

Rabindranath Tagore is perhaps most fondly remembered for his music. The popularity of his music has only grown in the years post the liberalization of his entire body of work, after a gritty copyright battle that let Visva Bharati, erstwhile protectors of Tagore's creations, guard over the bard's works till 75 years after his death.

Close on the heels of his music and lyrics comes the magical charm of his poetry and prose, spread over a chiselwork of quaint little short stories and large novels alike. A little further behind stands his dramas and plays, considered "unstageable" till the mould was broken by Sombhu Mitra, a stalwart of the Bengali stage, in the 1960s.

His articles, and maybe even his philosophy, bring up the rear in this age of hyper nationalism gripping the globe. Tagore recognized himself to be a truly global citizen, a concept alienating itself from the contemporary world one day at a time.

Despite the distance between Tagore's fame and philosophy in modern Bengalis, he is almost unanimously

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revered as "Kaviguru", the sage among poets/ master of all poets. The one aspect of Tagore's expansive body of creations that is often overlooked by these same enthusiasts is the two and a half thousand paintings that Tagore created.

Tagore took to painting in his 60s, surprising even for the versatile genius that Tagore was. Free from traditional methods of painting since Tagore was essentially an untrained artist, his body of work is often written off as doodles or experiments that are definitely not as successful or timeless as his other creations.

Tagore's motive behind his creations, however, was far from that of an eccentric man in his dotage revelling in the newfound. Tagore's art had a philosophy that may be forgotten by modern Bengalis, but is nonetheless a unique and celebrated form worth a careful glance.

Art and painting used to intrigue Tagore from childhood, and he reportedly tried his hand at it when he was young, but realised soon enough that drawing was not his cup of tea.

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Throughout his life, he would decorate the struck off portions of his manuscripts by turning the errors into ink doodles of a mysterious, wave-like quality.

These decorations were particularly pronounced in the manuscript of his collection of songs and poems, "Purabi". These decorations reportedly caught the eye and fancy of Victoria Ocampo, the celebrated Argentine writer and intellectual.

As a matter of fact, it was Ocampo who took the lead to organise the debut exhibition of Tagore's paintings in Paris in May 1930. This exhibition would later travel to major cities in Europe, Russia and the United States.

Tagore, who was reportedly unwilling to hold an exhibition of his paintings in India due to the belief that his art would not be received well by his countrymen, found favourable reviews and enthusiastic receptions wherever he displayed his artworks.

Ananda K. Coomarswamy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, mused, "An exhibition of drawings by Rabindranath Tagore is of particular interest because it puts before us, almost for the first time, genuine examples of modern primitive art. One may well wonder how those

artists and critics who have so long striven for and praised the more calculated primitivisms, archaisms, and pseudo – barbarisms of European origin will respond; will they admire the real thing?"

Tagore's paintings are characterised by an overwhelming use of lines in ink, and they are noticeably short on green and red, two colours that Tagore did not perceive as well due to his colour blindness. At the same time, his use of golden autumn yellow and shades of brown lend a primitive quality to Tagore's paintings, as enumerated by Coomarswamy.

Despite the tradition of Art that was being developed at Visva Bharati (the university started by Tagore) by the likes of Nandalal Bose, as well as the influence of the other artists of the Tagore household (Abanindranath Tagore and Gaganendranath Tagore), Rabindranath developed a style of his own that seemingly owed its roots to the European artistic tradition rather than its Indian counterpart. However, as Tagore ruminated himself, he considered his paintings "verses in lines", with the inherent rhythm that pervades all art. Tagore didn't consider his

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paintings to be an amalgamation of lines but something bigger than the whole, that reflects the philosophy of his poetic imagination. Tagore has claimed to imagine (reimagine) all of creation where the lines become part of God's creation at large, where these lines seemingly fall into places after "wandering aimless like a lonesome gypsy woman".

Tagore reportedly never planned his drawings, choosing instead to resign to the vagaries of points, lines and colours until his innate sense of rhythm, art and indulgence created something that Tagore could remotely recognise as "art". Tagore was famously undisciplined regarding his choice of painting surfaces, and quintessentially unorthodox in his use of painting materials. His primary motivation for art seemed to have been a childlike curiosity to fuse lines and colours into a coherent rhythm,

thereby producing something that his refined intellect, well versed with the works of European and Indian artists alike, could consider to be "art".

Art historian Dr. Stell Kramrisch found elements of expressionism in Tagore's canvas, finding the common thread of "document of tendency", visually profound in the 'primitive' stylisations of painter Emil Nolde.

Tagore's paintings can be broadly classified into three primary categories. The first being portraits, strange male and female faces that may be unrecognizable as portraits but present a quaint study of gestures, expressions and inkstrokes. The second category is that of strange birds and animals, those that may have missed their possibility of existence or which may simply be something out of a

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wildly imaginative dreamscape. The third category is the landscape. Tagore's landscape paintings, undeniably influenced by the lush nature on display at Shantiniketan (where Tagore set up his university), large swathes of which still remained safe from the criminal trespass of man.

The female faces in his "Heads" series were reportedly inspired by Tagore's deceased sister-in-law Kadambari Devi, who had committed suicide when Tagore was still a young man. A lot has been written over the years regarding Tagore's relationship with his sister-in-law. What we know

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KISHORE SEN is a retired advocate and educator who is a lifelong admirer of Tagore’s creations. He lives in Malda Town with his family.

for a fact is that she was perhaps the single greatest source of inspiration in the Bard's life. It is therefore of little wonder that a large portion of his paintings try to capture the sadness of the deceased muse of Tagore.

A man of humility rather than hubris, Tagore himself had a modest opinion as far as his paintings were concerned. Regarding his strange manuscript doodles that would go on to be regarded as visual ornaments, he had expressed that it was the desire to make something of the corrections, to connect them into an adornment with an inherent sense of the artistic rhythm.

The instinct for rhythm and the desire to create a mellifluous fusion of lines and colours, were behind Tagore's later year paintings. He admitted his lack of training in traditions of the fine arts and reportedly lamented to artist Jamini Roy that his paintings were probably not "complete" in a traditional sense of the coinage.

Complete or not, Tagore's paintings are nonetheless visceral experiences of sharp penmanship and unusual subjects. Be it strange birds or animals of faux -prehistoric origin or the pensive nature of Tagore's painted women, it is high time that Tagore's artworks are evaluated anew in the light of the post-Milennial era. []

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POETRY

IRIS ORPI

Photography ANNIE SPRATT

Shades of Fall Then autumn rolled in like bales of brittle melancholy half brown, half orange across the unswept streets of early evening.

Something about the silent slipping of fall always feels like an unsaid goodbye to mark a parting that’s been coming for a long time.

The words never had to be said, but the moment to say them passes. And then things change: it’s a little colder and hours are shorter, the trees are bare and the colors of coping are earth-toned, as if to pull the high and dizzy spirit back down to its rich, dark beginnings. []

IRIS ORPI is a Filipina poet, novelist, and screenwriter living in Chicago, IL. She is the author of the novel The Espresso Effect and the collection of poetry Rampant and Golden. She also wrote the original story and screenplay for Sons and Brothers, which garnered four awards at the 2018 International Excellence in Visual Media Awards, including second place for Best Film. Her work has appeared in dozens of publications all over Asia, North America, Africa, and Europe. She was a 2014 Honorable Mention for the Contemporary American Poetry Prize and a 2018 nominee for the Orison Award for Poetry.

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Macramé My spirit’s prospering chained to the drumbeat of the emergence of yours, benign, penumbral rhythm, flesh-sound in the eye-silence reverberating messages, responsorial: dark sky, bend frayed dawn, hum many heavy hours, open undo your fists outdo your firsts become endless, end.

There is power in arriving in pairs, August and alive charged with the bounties of freedom and its fruits, inhaling and falling.

Touch the locus of the sun.

I see your love both flowing and tangled.

How are we to be measured if we share a common shore and get invariably attached to stories not of triumph but that have rebirth as their second acts? []

LYNN WHITE

Photography TIM FOSTER

POETRY

Speak To Me It was a shock to meet you here, to see you sitting on the bench reading so nonchalantly.

I know you’re just a statue but you look so like me.

I want to sit beside you to have a conversation.

There’s space on the bench a space beside you.

So would it be ok to sit there?

I know you’re just a statue and your clothes tell me you were alive a long time ago.

But even so, I need to know you, to know something of you.

To know what your life was like.

To know why you’re sitting here statuesque, looking like me.

Have you been waiting for me to sit beside you?

Have you been waiting for me? []

LYNN WHITE lives in north Wales.

Her work is influenced by issues of social justice and events, places and people she has known or imagined, and exploring boundaries of dream, fantasy and reality.

She has been nominated for a Pushcart and her poems have appeared in many publications including: Apogee, Firewords, Indie Soleil, Light Journal. Find Lynn at: https://lynnwhitepoetry.blogspot.com

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POETRY

EDILSON A. FERREIRA

Photography EBERHARD GROSSGASTEIGER

Pride “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” - Genesis 1-27

This is how our history has been told in your book, in the words of your saints and prophets, a matter we must never doubt of.

Forgive us for questioning, but where the power and mastery we should display, which we have been looking for so long?

Where the wisdom and clearness like yours, where our eternal life or, at least, someone like that of Methuselah, who lived for nine hundred and sixty-nine years?

We lived by your side so little, and quickly You banished us, locking the Paradise Gate, there placing those cherubims brandishing their deathly flaming swords.

Perhaps, in lieu of immortality, we developed greatest and warmest a love, for and from each one of us, what You could ever dream of.

Perhaps, may You believe, having forgotten your primeval purpose, boldly, unconsciously, so we would prefer to continue living. []

A Brazilian poet, EDILSON A. FERREIRA, 75, writes in English rather than in Portuguese. Largely published in international journals in print and online, he began writing at age 67. He was nominated for the Pushcart Prize 2016. His first Poetry Collection – Lonely Sailor – is coming soon, scheduled to be launched in London, November 29th 2018, with one hundred poems. He blogs at www.edilsonmeloferreira.com

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Photography BRENO MACHADO

HEATH BROUGHER

POETRY

Pulse Huxley said Mankind must be patient with our linguistic eccentricities -there is not yet a spiritual calculus -our hearts beat like waves upon the shore -maybe some kind of intrinsic terrestrial pattern ingrained in all living creatures as they were battered and pounded onto land -cycles -rhythm of life -thunderstorms -the electricity of life -the sheer importance of the continuous waves lively keeping up their constant barrage -the pulse of the Earth. []

Both of My Hands My retriever hand burns golden holes

HEATH BROUGHER is the winner of Taj Mahal Review's 2018 Poet of the Year Award as well as a multiple nominee for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Award. He is the poetry editor of Into the Void, winner of the 2017 and 2018 Saboteur Awards for Best Magazine. He has published six collections of poetry, the latest of which is The Ethnosphere's Duality (Cyberwit, 2018).

in the sheer beauty of Existence itself when it reaches into other realms.

Not black and empty holes but bright holes brimming with endless possibility, Truth, the fathomlessness, The Great Spiral, shining outward, replacing death with birth, bats with birds—the beautiful ugliness of it all pouring out like a sieve as my other hand pulls open the Tao for all of creation to look upon. []

CultureCult Magazine Issue 13

23

FICTION

JARED MORNINGSTAR

Saying Goodbye to

Baby Blue

Glen Roberts, 8/11/06…

Dave “Mr. Buzz” Richmond, 4/4/05…

Rockin’ Robin Summers, 1/29/03…

Damn it, where are the 92s?

Mark then nearly stumbled over a broom that someone forgot to pick up when they were cleaning out the old Baby Blue Cadillac Diner.

Or maybe they just left it behind to end up in the pile of rubble. It’s not like it had the value of the old pink and blue vinyl-covered booths or the jukebox that still played the same 45s he remembered as a kid. All of that stuff had been removed, probably to be sold at some auction and eagerly snapped up by some guy who had a dream of starting his own vintage joint, thinking

24 CultureCult Magazine Issue 13

Art KATSUSHIKA HOKUSAI

he’d capitalize on the latest retro trend.

That trend hadn’t been enough to save the Baby Blue, which was authentic, built in 1953. It was named after the original owner’s ’52 Cadillac that he always parked in the same parking space every time he came in to work. After the owner died, his son permanently left the car parked in that spot in tribute. It rusted out over time, its paint blemished, and was sold to the scrapyard just before the diner closed. The family tried to keep it open, but their older clientele had passed away and their younger clientele began to frequent the corporate diner in the nearby shopping mall instead. The food was bland and overpriced, but the staff performed a well-choreographed dance on table tops every hour. The Baby Blue just couldn’t compete.

Mark’s grandfather haunted the old diner when he was alive, according to his dad, who told him the same story many times about how Grandpa could eat more chili dogs than anyone else, and that it was too bad no one was keeping score back then so he could prove it. Shortly after Mark was born though, the Baby Blue did start keeping

folks here who want to start something themselves, something that’s just theirs. Pretty soon, these chains are going to destroy what makes this country great: a dream for everyone. It’s inevitable” His father had taken Mark to the diner to celebrate all of his childhood accomplishments. He was a humble man, a manufacturing plant worker. It was true that he was pessimistic about many things, but he believed in his son, that he could have the life he never did. Mark wanted to be an astronaut as a child, and his dad told him to aim for the stars over many a chocolate ice cream cone.

And when he made the diner’s wall of fame on his 14th birthday, his father beamed with pride, saying it was his first step to the moon. They both laughed at the absurdity of comparing getting a job with NASA to eating hot dogs, but it made Mark hopeful nevertheless.

“Look here, son. Every damn person here ends up in the same line of work, going in every day with their heads down. They either slave away in these factories or end up living another carbon-copy miserable life. It’s no good. Do something that makes you feel alive, not like you

Suddenly, he felt something he had never felt before: disappointment in himself. His eyes dropped to the floor. score; to create a much-needed buzz, the restaurant began putting the names of anyone who could eat at least ten dogs in 30 minutes on little hard plastic nameplates and glued them to the wall. The date of the accomplishment was posted as well. Soon, the diner had its own everexpanding wall of fame. And on October 26th of 1992, Mark’s name joined that wall…

A car suddenly pulled into the parking lot. He almost panicked.

What the hell? It’s almost 3 AM! The car pulled out though in a few seconds. Apparently, the driver had no intention of investigating a trespasser on the premises. He sighed, relieved.

Mark wasn’t a trespasser though; he worked for the demolition company that was charged with tearing the place down. They were building an Applebee’s on the site.

Applebee’s. His dad would be pissed. Any time that a new McDonald’s, Holiday Inn, or Walmart came to town, Mark knew he’d have something to say, and he knew exactly what it would be.

“Smithton is starting to look like every other town on the interstate. All these places do is kill the dreams of

are dying.”

“I will, Dad.” “Good. You’ll make it to the moon, and then Mars, and then they’ll name a star after you. It’ll be your star; no one else’s.”

A couple of years later, his father died. Work accident. When Mark heard, he felt like his heart had stopped.

He told his mother he was okay, but she knew better. To comfort him, she suggested they go out for ice cream, as it would have been what his father would have wanted, but Mark refused and locked himself in his room.

The next day, he emerged with the most stoic expression his mother had ever seen, and Mark told her that he was going out to look for a job. Over the years, he worked several: mowing lawns, tree removal, pest control, etc. He gave up on going to space and spent what little money his dad was able to save to send him to college on alcohol and vocational school. There, he took contracting classes, and eventually started working for the demolition company. He figured that if things were meant to be destroyed, he might as well be the one to do the deed.

Mark never went back to the diner, until now,

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hours before it would be gone forever. When he heard the building was to be torn down, he smiled. He had tried to block any thoughts of his father from his mind for years.

He hadn’t even been able to visit his father’s grave. Mark figured this, maybe, would finally bring him closure. It was time to stop running away. The night before the demolition, though, he felt something slowly rise in his chest, like the reflux he used to experience after eating too many chili dogs.

Chili dogs. One thing led to another, and soon his mind turned to his memories at the Baby Blue with his father.

Mark thought he felt his father’s hand on his shoulder. He heard his voice: “Dream son, dream big.”

He shook his head. Must be the indigestion. As he went into the bathroom to take an antacid, he looked at the sky through an open window. It was filled with stars.

Mark turned around and saw his face in the mirror. He had aged so much in the last few years; how had he not noticed? Suddenly, he felt something he had never felt before: disappointment in himself. His eyes dropped to the floor.

Who am I? What am I? Mark paused for a moment before the answer came to his mind.

I am… nothing.

Then he thought of his nameplate on the diner wall. An idea came to mind. He had the keys to the diner, and he knew that no security alarm would be set. What would be the point? He felt ridiculous as he put on his work boots, but it didn’t matter. He had lost everything else, he decided. Who cares about dignity? His stomach was burning, or maybe it was his heart: he had to have his nameplate. Not just for him, but for his father. He grabbed his flashlight and walked out the door.

The streets were dark. Mark pulled his car around into an alley and crept quietly towards the diner’s back door. Upon entering, he walked into the area that was once the diner’s kitchen. He had never been in there, but he knew it as though he had worked in that kitchen his whole life. That’s how strong the smell of grease was that

used to emerge from it into the dining area, permeating the whole place. Now, it just smelled of dust. His heart sank for a second, but Mark kept his focus. There were so many nameplates on that wall, thousands, and he could not for the life of him recall where his was.

Man, this is going to take a while.

Occasionally, he’d get sidetracked by a memory or a noise or that car that pulled into the parking lot at 3 AM, but he remained cool for the most part. Using his flashlight, he searched every row and column of nameplates.

Common dates were generally kept together, but the organization still seemed sporadic. At times, he felt like a boy, seeing familiar sites within the diner: that big scratch on the floor, that picture of a fat man with a bib who looked so pleased that he was about to devour a big hamburger like he’d seen served to so many folks he sat beside over the years. As the clock kept ticking though and his efforts continued to be fruitless, his joints started to ache and he felt wrinkles forming on his forehead. He became more and more desperate. Sweat trickled down his forehead as he found the 96s, the 95s, and the 94s…

It has to be here. God, it has to be.

Then, the dates stopped. Mark figured he must have missed something, so he quickly retraced his steps, reviewing the nameplates again, hoping beyond hope that somehow, certainly, his story, his place on the wall remained. But it was not to be. Eventually, he realized that the diner must have decided to remove all nameplates before 1994to make room for newer memories. Memories that soon would also be forgotten.

Tears welled in Mark’s eyes. He needed a breath of fresh air; it was hotter than hell in there. There was a window near where he used to sit. He walked over, opened the window, and took a deep breath. He decided to look up at the night sky; he wanted to see the stars. Instead, there was nothing but darkness. Cloud cover had set in.

Mark fell to his knees as his reality was apparent: a couple of hours later, he’d have to go to work, like so many others, with his head down. He felt 80 years old as he walked out of the Baby Blue, this time forever. []

JARED MORNINGSTAR is an English Teacher and Professor first who loves writing and occasionally can produce a good piece of poetry or fiction. He is constantly trying to find the light in a world of social and political darkness. He loves literature, music, roadside diners, and vintage motels, but not as much as he adores his wife and children.

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FABRICE POUSSIN

Art EDVARD MUNCH

POETRY

Another Valentine’s It had been long since first they toasted to a new year another valentine’s to remember by the river over the sharp cliffs magenta and silver rocks defense to their previous haven.

Along in the multitude of strangers lost souls on the verge of another collapse they seemed to glow with renewed days facing the blinding truth of a star on the edge of what mysteries the morrow may yet soon reveal.

They braced each other with arms sharp as razors upon the naked breast and cut deep inside the beloved bodies another test to an uncertain destiny a ruby paste began to flow to the river as a reddish curtain rose to hide the scene.

Contemplating an absolute ecstasy their lips touched in eternal glee now that time had set them at last free they took flight above the great abyss hers or his, the essence had become one of the same flesh they bled now to infinity. []

FABRICE POUSSIN teaches French and English at Shorter University. Author of novels and poetry, his work has appeared in Kestrel, Symposium, The Chimes, and many other magazines. His photography has been published in The Front Porch Review, the San Pedro River Review as well as other publications.

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NOVELETTE

MICAH CASTLE

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Art UNKNOWN ARTIST FROM IRAN OR CENTRAL ASIA

Thomas Little sat in his office at the University of Cherry Brooke. He rifled through the essays on the book, Leviathan, he assigned two weeks previously.

Each one seemed to be worse than the last, until he came to the end of the pile and realized one student simply put, “I don’t know” and the date.

“Jesus Christ…”

He tossed the papers on his desk, leaned into his chair, which creaked with his shifting weight, and rubbed his forehead.

Students get worse and worse every year, he thought. I wasn’t like that in college, was I? It was only ten years ago, in 1989, that I sat in the same seats they do, but… No, no. Well, maybe sometimes but still. Who the hell only writes three words for an essay? Don’t they realize they’re paying for this class? God, I hate this job but it’s not the work, just the damn students.

He sat up and glanced around his office. A blade of light came in through the small window near the ceiling, illuminating his desk and the dust motes that drifted around him. The walls were lined with leather-bound books he collected over the years, some purchased when he was on vacation in other countries, others given to him as gifts during holidays and birthdays. The dust collected on them showed that they were nicer to look at than to read. The only other chair in the room sat

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WHITE

DEMONS CultureCult Magazine Issue 13 29

across the paper and pen littered desk, empty. The smell of stale coffee and must filled the room.

Professor Little checked his wristwatch to find it was almost lunch time.

“Thank God.” As the big hand moved and rested on the twelve, his phone rang.

Damnit.

He picked it up and put it to his ear.

“Professor Little.”

“Hey Tom, it’s Joe.” “Oh, hey, what’s going on? Usually you only call me after work, when you want to go to the bar.” Thomas said as he mindlessly tapped on his knee.

Joe laughed. “Not today, unfortunately. I’m at work, at a site.”

“What kind of site? Typically, the ones you excavate for the University are in the middle of nowhere with no electricity or signal.”

“A modern one, surprisingly. You know of Briswich?” Joe sounded like he was straining himself to talk normally, as if he had to hurry to get out whatever he wanted to say.

“Yeah, that rock climbing gym I go to is near there. Why?” “Can you come down?”

“Wha— why?”

“I think this is something you’d be interested in, something that you’d definitely want to check out. It’s very sci-fi, like those books you like to read so much.”

Thomas looked at the ungraded stack of papers on his desk, then his calendar. It was Friday. He could leave early and should be able to get back quick enough to finish his work. Even if he had to stay the night at some hotel, if the papers were done by Monday morning, he shouldn’t have any problems.

“Yeah, I guess I can.”

“Great!” Joe shouted. “Wonderful. Okay, when you get into town, go straight downtown. From there, take a left at the first four-way onto Lake Drive, then keep going for a bit, eventually you’ll come to a steel fence. Park there and text me, I’ll let you in.”

“Okay, see you then.”

Joe hung up, then Thomas quickly grabbed his keys and left his office, locking the door.

The steel fence seemed to stretch for a mile and looked to be much larger than Thomas anticipated. It reminded him of the giant fences they used in prisons to keep prisoners in. The tops didn’t have barb wire, but cameras were perched periodically throughout. Beyond was a stretch of grass then a large, white tent. Thomas cruised down the vacant dirt road, then a booth appeared a few yards away on the side. The rest of the way was blocked off.

At the fence, he texted Joe. K. Be out in a minute.

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After a few minutes, Thomas saw Joe come out of the tent and walk up to the booth. He spoke to the guard for a moment, then waved to Thomas to drive in, which he did and parked on the side of the road, for there was no parking lot or driveway passed the gate.

Joe ran up to Thomas’s car before he even got out of the vehicle. Thomas could hear the clanking of tools in Joe’s belt before he appeared in the driver’s side window.

“Okay, I’m here, now what?” he asked.

“Come! Come, look and see what’s been found.”

Thomas walked a foot behind Joe as they crossed the grass. Joe’s shirt was wrinkled and splotched with dirt, his cargo pants were rolled up to his knees, and his boots were caked in dried mud, but Thomas suspected the dirtiness of Joe was not from this site but from countless others in the past.

Joe opened a flap and ushered Thomas into the tent. Immediately Thomas stopped and took a step back.

There was a steep hill before them and not the archeological site, with tables and tools and ancient bones, he believed would be inside.

“C’mon, over here you big baby.” Joe walked over and called from a makeshift bridge that extended to another hill.

Thomas cautiously followed Joe across the bridge, which reminded him on an extended handicap ramp laid flat, gripping the metal banister for support and trying to keep his breathing under control. He was used to heights, but the way the bridge creaked under his weight sent a chill up his spine.

He sighed with relief when they came to the other end of the bridge. It led into another white tent, one much larger than the previous one, and the site was at last revealed to him.

Three white monoliths took up almost all the room inside the tent. They weren’t smooth but sided like a geometrical shape. The bottoms had three sides, and the lines formed a point at the top where the peak arched over the ground. They formed an imperfect circle around a patch of greenery between them. The monoliths reminded Thomas of devil horns, curving and sharpened near the top and thick at the bottom.

He wasn’t quite sure what he was looking at. They were like ruins, but there were no signs of the past like hieroglyphics or runes or crudely painted cave drawings. A faint remembrance of Clarke’s A Space Odyssey’s giant black monoliths flittered through his mind.

After a few silent moments, he asked, “So, what are they?”

“Originally we thought they were just statues.

Maybe a group of art students ran up here with supplies and crafted them, but that’s unlikely. They would use cheap materials, like papier-mâché or clay or something like that. The chemicals making them up — I’ll get to that here soon — are too rare or specialized for normal people

to get their hands on. Plus, it would be nearly impossible to get enough supplies up the hill and make this thing overnight.

“So, after brainstorming for days, and although it’s very unlikely, our best theory is that they are marking points, like putting an X on the map.”

“An X on the map?”

“Yeah, like when you want to get to Orlando, Florida or wherever. You get the map out, mark that place and try your damnedest to get there without getting lost.”

Thomas nodded. “Okay, but what or who could leave a mark like this and in this place?”

“We don’t know. We did toy around with the idea that someone rich had a helicopter and simply made them elsewhere, then dropped them off here, but why would someone waste the resources to do that?”

Thomas shrugged.

Joe walked around each monolith, weaving as if he were dancing with them. “Their chemical composition is a bit odd. It combines things like gabbro, which is found in volcanic rocks; chondrules, which is from meteors; chlorargyrite, which is found in naturally occurring silver;

experts — whoever they are — were unable to decipher what they are or what they’re used for.

“So, why’d you call me?” he asked, getting near one monolith and placing his hand onto it. He felt a cold chill creep up his arm before he pulled his palm away.

“I really wanted it to show it someone, it’s way too cool to not share, even though it’s against the rules.

So, I thought who better to show off to than my best bud, Tom? I know you’re into those sci-fi books, and this seemed right up your alley. So, I said, ‘What the hell?’ and called you.” Joe had a stupid grin stretched over his face, which almost removed all the wrinkles around his eyes.

Thomas chuckled, and said jokingly. “Well, thanks Joe. You’re my buddy, too.” Then he asked, “Have you considered digging around it?”

“Well of course we have, we’re not that dumb.

That was the first thing we were going to do but then our supervisor said to wait, to keep everything intact and see if we can figure it out without disturbing the area. He’s trying to get a GPR, a ground-penetrating radar, first, to make sure we’re not digging anything important up. The moment you and I are done here, hopefully we can get the

It was found that the natives avoided it because they believed it to be cursed. They called it the Three White Demons, since they kind of resemble the horns of the Devil. and galactosamine, which is found in cocoons. That’s just the ones I can recall. There’s a huge list of properties, so long and with so many complicated names I can’t remember them all. Experts are dumbfounded by what it is, or what it does, or where it came from. Even after the other two sets we found—” “Other two?”

“Yeah, there’s two other sets, just like this one.

One was found in a desert in Africa and the other was found in the Rainforest in Southeast Asia. The latter took a bit longer to find, since the natives that live there avoided the place like the plague. But eventually some traveler came upon it and reported it to the authorities — luckily, he didn’t go to the press with it, or our job would’ve been a hell of a lot more difficult. It was found that the natives avoided it because they believed it to be cursed. They called it the Three White Demons, since they kind of resemble the horns of the Devil.”

Thomas took a minute to make sense of the information. What Joe said sounded like something out from a science fiction novel, and somewhere in the back of Thomas’s mind, he hoped it to be true. He had more important thoughts, though. Three markings on the planet made from some odd combination of materials and even

ball rolling.”

Thomas nodded, then a silence fell over the tent.

For at least ten minutes, he tried to think of any possibility that would explain the monoliths. He walked around each one, inspecting them. When he stood in the center of them, it felt like he stood upon something hollow, like standing on the cement slab above a storm drain. He looked at the grass, but nothing was different than the rest of the grass. For a brief second, he thought the ground was going to give out and he was going to fall, but he quickly pushed that irrational fear aside, shaking his head.

He left the center of the monoliths and continued to meander. The heat is the tent began to swell and sweat began to form on his forehead.

“Okay,” he abruptly said. “So, even though it’s far -fetched, I think you might be right that they’re markings, from where or for what, I don’t know. Maybe they’re coordinates? But that really makes no sense either… Maybe the three are connected in such a way we cannot tell they are, like our technology hasn’t advanced enough to see the hypothetical line between the three… But that’s a little bit out there… Maybe… Hell, I don’t know, there’s just not enough information to go on.”

Joe slowly nodded. “Hmm… connected, yeah, that could be. We thought of that in the beginning but

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there’s no evidence to support that, besides them all looking alike. Like you said though, there isn’t much to go on.

Maybe once we start digging we’ll find some more information. I’m itching to see what’s below these things.”

Joe’s cell phone went off.

“Shit! sorry, hold on.” He said to Thomas, then answered the call. “Uh huh… Yeah, no, okay.”

He hung up.

“I’m sorry but it’s time to go buddy. Thanks for your help but now the real men gotta’ work.” Joe slapped Thomas on the back and escorted him back to the bridge, then to his car. The sun had begun to set, and the sky burned with a fiery orange and yellow. The warm leather radiated through Thomas’s clothes as he sank into the driver’s seat. Joe leaned in through the open window.

“That was the supervisor. We’re using the GPR at 11:30 A.M and depending what we find, we’re digging at 12:30 P.M.” “Can you call me after you’re done? I want to know where this goes.”

Joe grinned, chuckling. “Absolutely, but it’ll have to be on the down low. I don’t want my boss to find out I’m some kind of mole.”

Thomas eyed the cameras along the tall steel fence.

“I forgot to ask. What’s with all the secrecy?”

“When we got wind of the other two monoliths, and the potentiality of them being markings of some kind and with an unknown origin, the government came down with an iron fist. They’ve been keeping the monoliths very hush-hush, that’s why it hasn’t been in the newspapers or on T.V. yet. I think they want to take them and store them at Area 51 or something,” he said, laughing.

“And although you see no guards, except the guy at the booth, or military now, you bet your ass you’ll see them soon once we have more concrete answers. I suspect they’ll be down here in drones before we can put the shovel into the dirt. We have freedom now but I’m sure my supervisor will be overruled the whole way afterwards.

“Anyway, gotta’ get back.” Joe slapped the window and straightened himself. “Call you as soon as I get something. Beers after everything’s done and over with?”

“Absolutely!”

“Great, can’t wait! Have a good one, Tom.” “You too,” Thomas said as he started the car and drove away from the site.

II A Week Later It was nearing two o’clock when Thomas returned to his office for his lunch break. One of the students he nearly failed had come up to him after class had ended. The boy tried to plagiarize a paper, but Thomas quickly put an end to that.

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He sat into his chair, opened his desk and took out his lunch. Peanut butter and jelly with a small plastic bag of oatmeal cookies and his thermos filled with ice water. As he sank his teeth into the sandwich, the phone rang. Quickly he set down his lunch, wiped his hands on his pants and picked up.

“Professor Little,” he said with a mouthful of peanut butter sticking to the roof of his mouth.

“I, uh… yeah, this is Joe. You okay?”

He took a swig of his water, then sighed. “Yeah, sorry, middle of lunch. What’s going on?”

“Well we got out the GPR and set it up, but right before we started on Saturday, like I said we would…

Something happened.”

Thomas leaned forward and put his elbows on the desk. “What happened?”

“It’s more like what showed itself than what we actually discovered. A hole appeared in the center of the monoliths. The grass and dirt seemed to just vanish before our eyes. From what we can tell, it’s nearly bottomless, probably goes down at least two hundred feet.”

A hole? To what? The familiar feeling of falling washed over Thomas, he took a deep breath and closed his eyes. “Has anyone gone down it yet?”

Joe laughed. “Hell no, no one wants to go down there. Too much of a risk. The hole is large, big enough to fit an average-sized adult, but we would rather take the slow approach with machines before sending a live victim.

God only knows where it goes or what’s down there. Anyway, that’s not the weirdest part.

“When the hole appeared, two others appeared at the other two sites, at the same exact time. It’s like the monoliths knew we were going to dig and they decided to just show us their hand. We’re all scrambling to figure out what to do now. My supervisor is afraid that if we try to dig around them anyway, it might make other things happen, maybe make the whole hill collapse or something.”

“Three holes, simultaneously…” Thomas murmured.

“But hey, look, I gotta’ go. I’ll call you back when we figure this out. Have a good one buddy.”

The Professor let the phone drop onto his desk.

Are the monoliths sentient? he thought. Or was the triggering of the holes just that, a trigger. Perhaps timed, set in such a way that at that moment they were going to appear anyway, even if the diggers were there or not.

Thomas leaned into his chair, heard the squeaking as it adjusted to his weight.

What could be down the hole? Could whoever place the monoliths also have dug the holes as well? How would they manage to make them suddenly appear?

Thomas opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling aimlessly, then a previous question came into focus.

What if the monoliths are sentient? What if they’re like the ones in A Space Odyssey and they were placed by some species from somewhere in our universe? What if

the hole leads to another world? But… what if it’s the opposite? The hole could lead to some obscure strange place with otherworldly creatures who would only attack a newcomer to their domain, or, he thought grimly, it could just be a regular, deep hole that would lead to the death of anyone who fell down it.

He knew these ideas were mostly fueled by all the science fiction he read over the years, and he truly believed that these were just the kind of theories crazy people believed, but there was a thrilling energy that came with them that made his heart race and his body feel energized.

Although Thomas was not part of the archaeological team, or qualified to even know about the site, he felt he had to be closer to the monoliths, to study them, to hypothesize and discover their origins, their meaning. It was a mystery that he needed to solve. And, beyond that, his mind refused to pull away from the frenzy of potential outcomes of going down into the hole that appeared. He knew he wouldn’t be allowed to go down, knew that even if he halfheartedly mentioned it to Joe, he would instantly be turned down.

An English professor? There’s no way in hell you’re going down there, Joe would say.

Perspiration had formed over Thomas, and his hands curled into fists. Then he slowly relaxed his hands, stretching them over the armrests.

He didn’t want to be left behind in this next discovery. He yearned to be a part of something new and nothing would stop him. He thought of the protagonists — David Bowman, Dr. Goodwin, Randolph Carter, and so many others — of all the great science fiction novels he consumed over the course of his life, and somewhere deep down wanted to be like them, wanted to adventure into the depths of the unknown and experience something greater than the Earth and mankind could ever offer.

But, for now all Thomas could do is impatiently wait for Joe’s next call.

III A Week Later Joe called him on Wednesday, revealing that they decided they would send down a camera and a microphone, with a small light attached, into the hole for a hundred feet.

They let it dangle for three hours, then pulled it back up and turned on the recording. The first portion was merely layers of dirt and stone whizzing passed the camera, and the sounds of the machine bumping into the walls. Then when it stopped moving, the remainder of the video was just a still shot of the layers of sediment.

Thomas suggested they didn’t go down far enough to really get anything, and Joe agreed, but his supervisor wanted to wait two weeks to drop anything down further into the hole. His supervisor wanted to collect samples at the hundred feet level and see if they could

come up with any remnants of what made or caused the hole.

Thomas then waited for another call from Joe. He went about his work with a zombie-like demeanor. Idly he sat in his office and graded papers, conducted schedules for the semester and thereafter, created assignments for the upcoming weeks. But outside of work, he feverishly researched geology, cosmology, the study of ancient sculptures, and anything else that could relate to the monoliths or the holes. His evenings were spent trolling the narrow book-lined aisles of the University library and hunched over his desk at home.

He was so focused on his work that he would forget to eat and even almost forget to go to the bathroom. What was further down the hole consumed his mind to the point it even felt more important than his bodily functions. When he slept he made sure the ringer on his cell phone was as loud as it could possibly go, and when he was in the classroom, he always put it out on his desk, so he could grab it at any moment.

When he was returning to his office, it rang in his pocket. He had two heaps of papers and folders wrapped in his arms and he ran to his office, weaving passed countless students and teachers, nearly tripping and spilling the documents over the floor. It was a miracle he opened the door, but when he did he lunged into the office, threw the piles onto his desk and whipped out his phone.

“Hello! Hello?” he said, sweating.

“Damn Tom, why are you shouting?”

“Sorry, I’m just… Uh, sorry. What’s going on Joe?” “So, the results from the samples came to nil. After that, we lowered the camera and microphone further down into the hole, about two-hundred feet. Then we left it sitting there for six hours. We just brought it up now and we’re about to watch the recordings.”

“So, why’d you call me, if you hadn’t watched the video yet?” Thomas spat.

“Whoa, calm down there buddy. You told me to keep you updated, so I am. There’s no need getting your panties in a bunch.”

“Yeah,” Thomas said, wiping his forehead.

“Sorry, okay so, can you call me when you do watch it?”

“Uh huh, yeah, I’ll be right over.” Joe said to someone else, then said to Thomas. “Will do, bye.”

Professor Little sunk into his chair, setting the phone on the desk, and stared up through the dust motes at the yellowed ceiling. He rested the crook of his neck onto the back of his seat and closed his eyes. Slowly he drifted off.

It felt like only five minutes had passed when the sudden electronic ringing woke him. He spasmed in his seat and jolted up, snatching his phone and said quietly, “Hello” into it. The light coming in through the window had darkened, and his wristwatch showed it was almost six o’clock.

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“Hey Tom, it’s Joe again. We watched the tape.”

Thomas leaned forward, “Yeah? What was down there?”

“Yeah, two hours ago, and I can’t tell you what we saw or didn’t see.”

A cold wave fell over Thomas and a pang of pain shot through his stomach, as if he were sucker punched.

“What do you mean?”

“I can’t confirm or deny what we did see or not see on the tape. I cannot hint or tell you anything. I’m sorry buddy, I really am, but this thing is bigger than all of us. We tried to keep our recordings and viewings within the department, but the government apparently caught wind of the video and some FBI goons in black suits came in unannounced and took the tape from us after we finished it.

“As you could guess, they watched it and, after some phone calls I heard them make in the hallway, they have full control of what is or what is not down there, and the dig and sites themselves. They’re coming in tomorrow and locking the place down. I don’t even know if I’m going to be allowed in anymore. It sucks but— “I gotta’ go. I’m sorry Thomas, I really am.”

The empty, deafening silence immediately felt suffocating and Thomas stood up, undoing his collar. He snatched the phone up from the desk and chucked it across the room, it broke apart against the wall. Thomas threw off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves, all the while clenching and unclenching his hands. Everything felt hot, too hot, he felt that the sweat seeping out from his pores steamed around him.

How could they do that? How could Joe do that!

The monoliths were from somewhere else and that hole lead to someplace unknown! He just knew it! He felt it in his bones, in his very soul. Although it made no sense from a rational standpoint, it made sense to him. There was no rich man who dropped it off in a helicopter; there were no art students who quickly made these sculptures across the world, simultaneously — not to mention the hole that had no explanation as to where it came from, or who made it. There was nothing but the unknown beyond the creation of the monoliths, the hole, and whatever else was dwelling down below.

It was the stuff of legend, it was the stuff of the unimaginable! Thomas had to know what was down there, he had to be a part of the potentiality of being one of the few first founders of something groundbreaking. He wasn’t just an English professor, he wasn’t just some guy in Cherry Brooke teaching dumb students things that they hardly had appreciation for, he refused to be someone who would be forgotten once he passed to only be remembered by his love of novels and his motivation to teach.

Thomas began to calm, and his pace slowed. He stood in the center of his office and looked up at the small window near the ceiling. He closed his eyes and felt the

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faint warmth of the dying sunlight. His mind was like a tempered ocean now losing its rage, its strength. It had now simmered to a serene pond, and with this, his thoughts moved from one set to another.

He would be remembered. He would experience the world underneath the monoliths that he knew existed, no matter what Joe could or could not say. He refused to wait any longer. His name would be inscribed onto the monoliths once he came back with otherworldly knowledge and be the first adventurer into the realm of unknown.

He, and he alone, would be the man that humanity would remember as the harbinger of another world.

IV That Night The cloudless night sky twinkled with stars, and the halffull moon faintly illuminated the open trunk of his car.

Thomas double checked his supplies before walking the mile to the steel fence: a thick rope that stretched only one hundred and fifty feet — the largest he could purchase from the store inside his gym, but he believed he could manage the rest of the way down — spiked boots, and a head flashlight. He wore a black sweat suit and gloves. He considered bringing pulleys but was uncertain if they would hold well enough in dirt, also he had no intentions of coming back up once he went down.

He gathered everything into his large gym bag and swung it over his shoulder, closed his trunk with his free hand, and crept to the fence. He noticed there were a few guards stationed at intervals around the fence. Silently, crouching, he moved to a corner at the end of the fence where no guards currently were. He also made sure to position himself away from the nearest security camera. Thomas scaled the fence to the top and tossed the bag over.

The hollow, rattling sound it made when it hit the ground made him wince and look over his shoulder. No guards seemed to notice. Slowly he straddled the top of the fence, then made his way down.

After he picked up the bag, he made his way to the first tent, which he discovered to be empty upon entering. As fast as he could he moved across the bridge, almost slipping on the moisture blanketing the planks of metal.

When he entered the second tent, he went to the nearest monolith, knelt and unpacked the gym bag. He first took out the rope and tightly wrapped it around the monolith. Then he took off his shoes and put on the spiked boots. He tightened the flashlight around his forehead and switched it on, sending a beam of light across the tent. Thomas coiled the rope around his one arm, and walked to the hole and looked down, seeing only the gloom far below. Even the light from the flashlight hardly penetrated the darkness.

`

He wiped the sweat from his eyes. A few deep breaths hardly calmed Thomas’s jittery body.

Should I go? he thought. Should I plunge deep into the abyss? Is what I believe is down there, actually down there?

Come on Thomas, don’t think like anyone who has ever doubted you. It’s always been said to become better than what you are is to do something that makes you uncomfortable at first. Below that darkness is a world that will welcome you and, in that way, the world you’re in will do the same.

Slowly he inched his feet over the opening and turned. He took the rope into both hands, and one foot after another, Thomas scaled down the hole. With every foot, the opening grew darker and darker until all that he could see was utter blackness. He glanced around, but it only illuminated the small space around him, nothing

At some point the whooshing stopped and silence overwhelmed him. He wasn’t sure if he had finally come to the other world or that he had gone deaf. Thomas opened one eye to find himself still in the darkness, and when he looked down, he could see nothing beyond. He was still falling but there was no sound. He brought the tip of his boot to the wall and heard the feverish scrapping of dirt and stone.

Wherever he was had no naturally occurring sound. The Professor closed his eyes again and waited for the return of the whooshing. The lack of noise seemed to drive him closer to unconsciousness. It was as if the soundless atmosphere was a sound of its own and it carried weight, feeling overwhelming, suffocating to the point that he believed it labored his breathing and thoughts. An immediate drive to fill the void overcame him, so Thomas began to scream. It echoed up and down the hole, it rever-

He would be remembered. He would experience the world underneath the monoliths that he knew existed. He refused to wait any longer. His name would be inscribed onto the monoliths once he came back with otherworldly knowledge and be the first adventurer into the realm of unknown. above or below his body illuminated. Even with going to gym every week, his arms burned with fatigue as he descended, and he could feel his muscles throb with pain.

Despite what he learned in geology in college, he became colder and colder instead of feeling warmer as he slowly moved deep below. His breath came out in tufts of white and even with gloves, the cold bit into his fingers. It felt welcoming on his tiring body, but Thomas had to grit his teeth to stop them from chattering.

It came quicker than he anticipated, but he came to the end of the rope. He looked down into the darkness, then looked up into the other darkness. He had little energy left to keep holding onto the rope and, even if he wanted to, there was no way he was going to be able to climb back up. If it wasn’t for the cold his exhausted body would be covered in sweat and a rancid smell would be wafting up through his collar.

He closed his eyes, then let go.

The frigid wind whipped his face and an unrelenting whooshing filled his ears. He wrapped his arms around his chest and put his legs together, like he used to do in the public swimming pool as a child, the pin needle dive.

Hundreds of yards flew passed him like the rings of sediment he knew surrounded him. He kept his eyes shut against the powerful wind, for he knew if he dared to look at what was happening he would certainly pass out.

berated off the dirt and came back to him.

Even after fifteen minutes of continuous shouting, the whooshing never returned, no sounds ever returned.

After a while he was forced to stop, his throat raw and the taste of blood coating his tongue. He opened his eyes again and peered in between his legs. A silvery, mirror -like reflective disc filled the entire hole. When the light hit it directly, it became blindingly white, like looking directly into the sun. Thomas looked at the wall next to the disc, which partially illuminated it. It seemed to ripple like water, but it was perfectly glossed over.

This was it. This was the entrance to the other world. Thomas turned off the light, took a deep breath and closed his eyes. Each second was like an eternity but at last he felt his feet enter then his body followed.

V ?

When Thomas opened his eyes, he was looking out at the solar system from some unknown distance. He felt like he was in a dream but awake at the same time. Somehow, he could distinguish and examine the gigantic planets, but was far enough away to see everything, as if in this dream-

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but-waking-world he had the ability to focus his sight onto a planet from a great distance, like a super telescope. He idly floated in space but didn’t feel the immense cold nor was his breathing impaired.

He looked to the Earth. The sun behind it gave it a halo of bright, vibrant orangish red. A beam of vivid purple light shot across the span of the solar system to Earth, then another did so in another spot on the planet, then another. When the beams evaporated into tiny microscopic beads of violet energy, drifting away in the abyss, the monoliths were left on the Earth.

They seemed superimposed onto the planet, but he knew that they weren’t really that large. The Earth became transparent, he could see the rings of the planet, the crust, the upper and lower mantle, the inner and outer core. The holes from each monolith left an empty line from three sides of the orb and converged at the dense inner core of the planet.

The world began to rotate like a disc, but the core remained steady. It became a blur of browns and blacks, of yellows and reds. Its rotation became so fast that it seemed to form a solid image of an eye, the core the iris, the rest a combination of reds and browns. Like veins, a reddish blue fluid burst into the three holes and flowed down into the core. The liquified metals of the outer core cooled, and the inner core became a blinding white. Waves of vapor flooded out from behind the planet, drifting off into the abyss surrounding it.

A glowing ivory chain of lights came down from the universe above. It attached to the core, as if the end of the chain was magnetic. The slack chain tightened, and the Earth folded into itself, like the top of an umbrella being closed, then in a blink of an eye, it vanished up into the heavens.

He prayed this place was truly a dream, but somewhere deep in the back of his mind, he knew it wasn’t. It felt too real, it looked too real, the pain he felt was too overwhelming. Tears formed over Thomas’s eyes and he felt like a mother who lost her baby at birth. That was his home, that was his life, he was to be championed after his discovery.

He was about to close his eyes, as if that would hide the horror he just witnessed, when more monoliths appeared on the other planets in the distance. As if Earth was practice, the monoliths appeared in the beams of light on all the planets at once.

They grew transparent, the core of each much different than the others; some liquid, others solid, but all glowed with different hues. They spun rapidly, the liquid from the monoliths came down into each one, changed them, then the chain from above was dropped and pulled back up. In all but five minutes, all that was left now in the solar system was the Sun. A black ball with violet phosphorescence floated into space, drifted passed the waves of flames surrounding the Sun, and placed itself in the center of the ball of fire.

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As the sphere exploded, tarry veins shot across the star, settled into its surface, and pulsed. The Sun dimmed with the beat of a dying heart.

When the last flicker of light vanished from the massive burning star, the veins glowed a blaring white and like a mirror, shattered. The Sun broke apart and fell into the abyss below.

All that remained was the black ball, that after a few moments, dissipated and turned to ash.

In an unimaginable darkness, Thomas curled into himself and cried. He wailed and prayed, his body trembled, and he soiled his pants. He wanted to go back, he wanted to be home, he wanted to talk to Joe, he wanted to be in his office with the dust and ungraded papers. He wished that he would’ve said no to Joe when he first asked him to come see the monoliths, he wished that he would’ve just went on about his day like normal and ignored the temptation of something new… God everything was gone — gone, gone, gone! — all gone, and now he was all alone, forever. There would be no more life, no more light, nothing except total, endless blackness.

Thomas closed his eyes even though he couldn’t tell, for the darkness of his eyelids matched the darkness outside of them. At some point the nothingness overwhelmed him, made his mind heavy as if it was filled with cement, made his breathing labored as if his lungs were riddled with cancer, slowly he drifted into unconsciousness.

When he awoke, he was in a room. The ceiling was reflective and curved like the inside of an eye coated with a large mirror. A hole was carved out of the wooden floor. The world seemed hazy, as if he wasn’t seeing everything but only bits and pieces. He rubbed his eyes. There was someone else here. A small child, no more than eight-years-old, with glowing ruby hair and ivory, unblemished skin that seemed to illuminate the room. His body seemed flat, deflated, containing no muscle tone or bone structure of a normal boy. The child had two onyx eyes but no nose or mouth. Gripped in his two hands was a brilliantly white chain that vanished below the floor.

Thomas silently watched the child pull the chain up and set what he caught onto the floor. Immediately he noticed his home, the folded planets.

Despite the intertwined feeling of terror and wonder, he shouted, “Hey!” His words echoed through the palpable space, as if he spoke from a great distance underwater.

The boy continued his work as he detached each planet from each link of chain. He never looked up.

“Hey!” Thomas shouted again. “What’re you doing!”

“Making a collage.” The child’s voice emanated all around Thomas, as if the air spoke.

Taken aback, it took a moment to respond.

“What do you mean?”

`

“I mean what I said.”

The child gathered the paper-like planets, stood and went over to the lowest part of the ceiling. He wiped his hand onto the back of one, then stuck it to the reflective roof. One by one, he arranged and stuck the planets to the top of the room until he had run out. He took a step back, inspected it and nodded, then returned to the hole.

“That was my home!” Thomas screamed, pushing himself onto his feet.

“So?” The boy said, taking a handful of monoliths from an unseen pocket in his leg and tossing them like confetti into the hole. He leaned forward and watched them drift into the nothingness below.

“What do you mean, ‘so?’ There were people there! There were lives! There was love and friends and stories!”

“So?” Thomas ran across the room, but as he neared the child he realized that the child was far larger than himself.

Thomas was six feet, but the boy seemed to be at least a hundred feet tall. The room grew as well, becoming an enormous place, nearly as big as the solar system itself. His movement slowly stopped as he stood at the foot of the boy. The drive to know what or why his home was taken pushed away the slowly growing fear inching up the back of his mind.

“Why… Why would you do this?”

“Because I want to. The ceiling is bare.”

“So?” “Exactly.”

The boy took the chain, which shook the ground, and dropped its ends into the hole.

It sounded dumb, but it was the only question Thomas could think of to ask. “Can you put it back?”

The child shook his head as he eyed the hole, waiting patiently for more patterns to place upon his

ceiling.

Thomas moved over to the gigantic hole, which looked like an ocean of blackness. He glanced down and saw the nothingness of space.

“Where is this place? And who are you? Are you God?” he asked, without turning to the child.

“This is my room, and I am me.”

“And you are what?”

“Me.” He knew he should be more terrified of the situation; he should be swimming in a sea of madness, his brain should’ve exploded at the mere thought that his planet being plucked from a puddle like an origami bird, but all he became was frustrated by the boy. He was a child, an uncaring, selfish child that couldn’t give a straight answer.

And below this annoyance, he wondered what he should do next.

Thomas could leap into the dark ocean or remain in the room with the child. This is what his life came to, and he felt a pang of regret in his stomach for taking matters into his own hands and scaling down into the hole.

The boy pulled the chain up through the hole and set it on the ground. One by one he pulled papery planets from the ends.

“Is there a way to get back?”

“To where?”

“Where I came from.”

“No, but you can jump in and see what happens.”

The child said as he gathered the planets and walked over to where the solar system was plastered.

He didn’t think the boy deserved to be thanked.

He stood on the edge of the black ocean and closed his eyes. Thomas formed fists as perspiration covered him and he whispered a small prayer, then jumped into the abyss before him.

“Goodbye,” was the last thing Thomas heard before consciousness swam away from him. []

MICAH CASTLE is a weird fiction/horror writer. He has been published in various magazines and websites, and has three collections currently out. He enjoys hiking, playing with his animals, and can typically be found reading a book somewhere in his home.

CultureCult Magazine Issue 13 37

POETRY

RACHEL ROTH

Photography EBERHARD GROSSGASTEIGER

Inside the Beaten Castle If I cry for the man in the castle it is because he has forgotten how I see his damnation and feel his salvation But it’s not enough for a full redemption He’s not patient like Rapunzel, waiting for a rigged rescue He’d rather be impaled by the thorns of his roses after a fateful tumble Once it’s barren we’ll tear it all down I cry and I cry but I cannot stop Was there a time when my eyes were dry?

Tell me if they were because I can’t remember The time for atonement has passed, for me as for you Forgive me!

The rank of divine sacrament controls you Blind! Blind is the word you’ve become Some dirt cannot be washed off before it festers around the eyes Right where the windows lie, not even the dead are this solemn I wish I could fix it I wish we had more time Inside the beaten castle lives a grey swan swimming perfectly imperfect Guarding its doors are three dreaded hounds Why do you need them when you only wish to keep out yourself?

Where Atlas bore the world, you’ll bring it down You are Jack trapped between ground and sky Just like your own father and his before him, you’ve become blind Every way out is locked, you waited but nothing fills that black hole I wish I could hate you I wish I could’ve helped you Shame conceals you in the castle The damage is done, and you now are as blind as Odin I wish you weren’t such a dreamer I wish you tried harder I cry for the man inside the castle, for he never stopped dreaming Locked inside the beaten castle at different times and different lives We weep for all that we had lost I wish it weren’t the end I wish I never grew up []

38 CultureCult Magazine Issue 13

RACHEL ROTH is a graduate of the University of South Florida in St. Petersburg with a bachelor’s degree in English and a Certificate in Creative Writing. They formerly wrote film and restaurant reviews for a lifestyle magazine, CapeStyle Magazine and currently writes film-related articles for the entertainment website Hidden Remote. Their poetry has been featured on Showbear Family Circus and in an anthology collection from Indie Blu(e) titled

This is What Love Looks Like.

VICTOR ANDRÉS PARRA AVELLANEDA

SHORT FICTION

Collateral Degradation Microplastics were dissolved in oceans and food, reaching pathological concentrations. PhD Jessica Michel Rivera, while carrying out important research on populations of marine organisms, warned of the danger that this represented. As always, her warnings were ignored.

They acted as hormones, producing a greater incidence of psychiatric and neurological problems; in addition to their epigenetic effects related to the appearance of new types of cancer.

Plants grew faster, there was more CO2 producing more sugars than nutrients. Healthy eating was useless, what was eaten was practically plastic with many carbohydrates.

It is not strange to see in this hot year 2056 people wandering the streets, shouting and attacking anything that moves; drooling, spitting blood, eyes exorbitant. They are all genetically unviable, they are walking tumors.

It is easy to heat the plastic. Now, that it is scattered in the body, in each one of its nerves and with the temperature of this suffocated atmosphere, explains how one can lose one's sanity, feeling oneself burning without having any flame really burning it.

An epoch of conflagrations, everything burns and extinguishes in ephemeral instants; buildings, streets, thought and ultimately: the humanity. []

VICTOR ANDRÉS PARRA AVELLANEDA was born in the city of Tepic, Nayarit, Mexico. He is a Biology student at the Centro Universitario de Ciencias Biológicas y Agropecuarias (CUCBA) at the Universidad de Guadalajara (U de G). He is a widely published writer interested in the genres of science fiction, terror, mystery and short stories.

Photography ARTEM BELIAIKIN

CultureCult Magazine Issue 13 39

NON FICTION

ELLIOT NEWBOLD

Photography KELLY SIKKEMA

THE GOOD FIGHT Sometimes I pull up the suicide statistics for people who have bipolar disorder. I don’t know why I pull them up, I know them by heart. For most people with bipolar, you have around a 17% chance of death by suicide. For those who have attempted suicide before, like myself, the odds are closer to 23%. If you survive your twenties, the numbers are a little more favorable, but still not pretty.

I look at the numbers again, and internally translate them into a language I speak: there’s almost a 1 in 4 chance that I will die by my own hands.

It hurts again, despite the number of times I’ve stared at the numbers before. It hurts because I’m trying so hard to fight it, and despite all of my furiously stubborn attempts at staying alive, I cannot shake the feeling that there is no other way for me to exit this world apart from suicide. I think about the devastation it would leave behind me, and suddenly the air around me is so heavy that I cannot stand anymore. I let my knees give out, and fall into the chair behind me. But the air refuses to give up, and quickly burdens me down so much that I cannot even sit. I slide out of my chair, oozing onto the floor, struggling in the suffocating embrace of depression. I squirm like a salted slug and think the same thoughts as always.

I probably lose in the end, I know it’s probably not worth fighting... but I fight anyway. Most days I don't even know why I fight, except that at some point I decided I would and I’m too stubborn to admit I was wrong. I know that, if I kill myself, it will leave tear a hole in the people who loved me. I know many will blame themselves, believing that if they had simply done a little more, I might still be alive.

Many people talk about suicide being selfish. I look at my fight, and can’t help but feel like fighting is more selfish than letting go. The harder I’ve fought, the more I’ve embraced being positive and encouraging to those around me. And these things lead people to care about me more, to be impacted by me more... to be more susceptible to the rift I will leave behind if I kill myself. The more I fight, the higher the stakes become for failing. The more kindness I spread in the world, the more it will suffer if I fail.

Somehow, in my attempts to be generous and selfless, my mental illness had stripped me of even that, turning it sour and evil. The more good I do, the more I could hurt the world.

Sometimes I pull up the suicide statistics for people who have bipolar disorder.

I don't know why I pull them up.

I know, in the end, I will kill myself. []

40 CultureCult Magazine Issue 13

ELLIOT NEWBOLD writes, and everything he writes winds up being sad. Even the happy stuff. That fact represents his entire personality.

Help is ALWAYS at hand: INDIA: Vandrevala Foundation 18602662345 help@vandrevalafoundation.com Sneha Foundation India +914424640050 USA: National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (Lifeline) at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), or text the Crisis Text Line (text HELLO to 741741).

Art REMBRANDT

POETRY

KENNETH POBO

Art FRANZ VON STUCK

Change Back “The climate will change back.”

Donald Trump

Once upon a planet, ghastly beings called people decided they alone would rule-this required oil and money.

They didn’t see death hover Above their tallest buildings.

The atmosphere thickened with CO 2 and methane.

They couldn’t breathe.

Crowded cities washed away under deepening seas.

Over millions of years, the planet began to heal, the ghastly beings became fossils that no one studied or carried around for good luck. []

Beautiful Funerals Maybe we were entertained so much that we couldn’t hear steps behind us.

Maybe we watched so many games that we followed scores instead of dreams.

Maybe we had so much stuff to buy we couldn’t see sadness in the check-out line.

We became professionally numb, Vicious but blank.

When we heard the many cries for help, we slammed our cupboard doors harder, turned up Spotify.

When we saw children with distended stomachs, we went outside to check the tires.

Death makes plans for us, beautiful funerals held for people who died decades earlier. []

KENNETH POBO had a book of ekphrastic poems published in 2017 by Circling Rivers called Loplop in a Red City. His work has appeared in: Nimrod, Mudfish, Hawaii Review, Atlanta Review, and elsewhere.

42 CultureCult Magazine Issue 13

AMANDA MORNINGSTAR

POETRY

AMANDA MORNINGSTAR has been a poet for many years. Not a good one; that came more recently. She enjoys writing about all of the questions of the universe, and spends the rest of her time just being happy.

Water On Mars I almost remember before I was born. But today feels like a memory just the same. When asteroids have enough gravitational pull to become a planet, that’s when the narrative can grab at the craters and crevasses.

“The Earth can heal itself.” When I dream, I remember that I existed before I could dream. I can almost remember when the sun collapsed in on itself and God said “let there be light” and there was and the Universe spun out of control and the Earth could heal itself. God created dinosaur bones out of real dinosaurs. But only so man could understand context, I only remember erosion. My Sunday school teacher said Mars was a prototype. “What makes you so special?” I asked God why Eve was made from Adam. “Form follows function.” The flood was my fault, I dreamt of water. The universe has density, inspired by other fabrics. “Mars was a prototype.” God believes in science but science only believes in itself. []

The Current It has always been. This moment.

I close my eyes and I hear the beginning. The energy understands time, and secrets of gravity and vibration woven together into music. And the rhythm of our harmonic pulse drives us. Down a path unconscious, familiar. Memory arcs over and… Again.

I hear the open space. Draw close. The beat of my every step in the journey to you. I am grateful for the strength of stars. In a universe that only expands, and in the weakness of mankind, exists. Your heart. []

CultureCult Magazine Issue 13 43

NON FICTION

SHRADDHA MADHOGARIA

MEIN KAMPH OR OURS ?

I always had strong views against autocratic rule but it has always been in my head, or so I thought.

As a child I have read about Kings ruling a kingdom. Read in fairy tales, in mythology. Even the God my religion worships are Kings who fought evil and brought peace to their kingdoms.

I grew up with the belief of a Man or a King taking care of the whole family and somewhere even now after years, some part of me still acts in worship for the men in family. The act to keep men happy, the act to do what men ask us to do.

Despite the fact that we have Joan of Arc and Rani Laxmibai of Jhansi , it has always been the patriarchy that dominated my childhood fundamentals.

But part of growing up has been my constant questions against what I was taught and what I have been conditioned to believe.

Why was I doing those acts of worship?

Why was patriarch the ruler of the house?

Why is there such fear in me when it comes to going against them?

The more I have asked, the more flaws I have discovered in my heroes and my thoughts. And the first question I asked was because of Hitler.

The first time I heard about Hitler, I was 13 years old.

“Mein Kamph”, said my brother to me, “read that book. It’s a great book. Everything about Hitler in his own words” said he.

“He was crazy, yet great”

44 CultureCult Magazine Issue 13

And that word stuck with me.

“Mein Kampf”.

A word that has always sounded fascinating to me.

For days I had repeated it like a magical word that will open doors for me, doors that will transport me to a new world. A world full of mysteries and answers. However, I have never read that book. I had many chances to borrow, to buy but could not. It was as if somehow, the door wants to remain shut, like my subconscious is not ready for that world, for those answers, for a truth.

Despite this, Hitler has always piqued my interest, so much so that I even started German lessons making myself believe that I can only read the book if I learn German, knowing very well that there are English translations available too.

And, over the period of 16 years I have read numerous World War books, seen World War based movies, read different documentaries about Hitler and Nazism written by journalists and historians.

Come to think of it I even realised few days back

Even now when I write this, a restlessness settles in my stomach that wants answers to it.

The answer is ‘Mein Kampf’ but I wonder is it really him I am wondering about? Is it the whole humanity? Or is it myself I am merely seeking answers about?

It was astonishing how Hitler united Men and women for a single cause but I am more bewildered by the fact that people did unite, so much so, that they did not even hesitate before taking actions against those whom they once had called friends and family, with whom they once played cards, sang songs, made love, took oaths of brotherhood.

And why?

I digress here slightly.

I read something in Library one day as I was just browsing through.

“Fear is implanted in us as a preservative from evil” - Dr. Johnson.

I cannot help but quote it here. Today it seems appropriate like a piece of a puzzle settling in.

Fear has driven men and women alike to duty than act of love has ever done. that it takes a lots of guts for me to pick anything that is related to World War II. And every time I do this I plunge into a deep pool of just questions and emotions that takes days for me to resurface from and it is during these episodes that I get closer to the man, scourging the internet and library to read about him.

Well why am I ranting about Hitler? What has he got to do with all this?

Frankly when I read about Fascism or Nazism, all I think about is Hitler. Even if Fascism comes from Mussolini and Nazism adopts principles of the former, according to me Hitler is in itself a movement.

I don’t question the autocracy of Italy or Russia or Spain but I question him.

Was it just because he hated Jews? Or was it out of his fear for them?

Was it because of that one man that made him what he was? And, What drove him to such a point where he gathered nations under the umbrella of ‘Nazi’ just to exterminate the world ?

“Fear” Fear has driven men and women alike to duty than act of love has ever done.

And thus Hitler’s fears became everyone’s fear and his evil became everyone’s evil.

At times I have listened to the recording of his speeches, and I have felt like I am listening to him live and being filled with this raw emotion, of anger which comes from a deep seated fear in me. Fear of loss, loss of any kind, anything, anyone.

It made me imagine how everyone present must have really felt, like me or did they burn with a more powerful fire of fear?

Adam Michnik- a Polish historian, essayist, former dissident and a public intellectual said, “I do not accept being a prisoner of fear. Of Communism, of fascism. That, one can bear. But of one's fear. No. Never.”

And come to think of, this has been true for every autocratic movement there ever has been.

CultureCult Magazine Issue 13 45

Book burning by the Nazis

Something must have driven the Italian politician to start the National Fascist Party?

Is it not the same fire that burnt underneath, that lighted the pyres for the rest of the world?

Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini, the Italian politician himself said, “Fascism is a religion. The twentieth century will be known in history as the century of Fascism.”

He is long gone, dead, movement eradicated, party dissolved, communities broken but have they?

But is it not true even in the 21st century?

Even today despite us proclaiming our world is democratic, are we really?

Does not Fascism and Nazism reside in every nook and corner of the world?

In workplaces, where a manager gives speech on unity yet defames members of other team, where he puts forth a goal of not being the lesser known, of not being trampled, of being the best, where motivation is driven by words like ‘how we can be best than others?’, ‘how we are better than others?’, ‘what do they have we don’t?’’.

In small friend circles where there is always that one who makes all the decision, who drives a revolution against anyone whom he/she considers to be wrong according to their beliefs which results in the total abandonment of that friend from the group.

In every human being, be it you or me.

I quote Alejandro Jodorowsky, a Chilean-French film and theatre director, screenwriter “I am not like Hitchcock, directing the reaction of the public or the audience. I don't like that. I think this is some kind of fascism - 'You need to react like that.' No. No. It's not like this; everyone needs to react as he can.”

Yet, is it not that everyone of us wants every other person to be alike, act alike, talk alike? Our apathy should be theirs, our sympathies should be theirs, our empathies, our pain, our angers, our fears.

Is it not this very philosophy of ‘One Rule' that has made me worship men in my world?

Am I not unconsciously conditioned to be a Fascist or a Nazi for the exaltation of my home?

I do not write for or against Fascism today for there is no side.

Fascism runs in our blood.

We are all Fascists.

“The struggle is so great that the triumph over fascism alone is worth the sacrifice of our lives” - Federica Montseny (Spanish anarchist, intellectual and Minister of Health during the social revolution that occurred in Spain) []

SHRADDHA MADHOGARIA is the founder/writer of Redpolkadots, a blog she started four years back as a means to convey her ideologies. Every piece of writing Shraddha conceptualises are weaved with personal experiences. Shraddha is philosophical yet a creative geek. Sarcasm adorns her humour and she laughs at the oddity of nature that are humans. An IT professional, she currently resides in Melbourne, Australia.

46 CultureCult Magazine Issue 13

Photography CHRISTIAN CHEN

Black and White, with Red

PATRICIA EVANS lives in the sporty, open air city of Vancouver but prefers something darker. This has led to her lifelong love of reading and writing horror and speculative fiction. Her stories have been published in Micro Horror, Scy-Fy and The Yellow Booke Anthology of Weird Fiction. She is a recovering lawyer, who practised matrimonial law, where she came across many situations more blood chilling than even the worst horror story.

PATRICIA EVANS

SHORT FICTION

I see the black marks on my white carpet; they look like they were made by someone with feet as small as mine. I didn’t make them, but the marks upset me a lot. I love my snowy carpet, white as the hair of an albino, and spend a lot of time and effort in making sure that it, and everything in my apartment is spotless. I don’t want fingerprints on my white painted walls and doors, and wash them as soon as I see the tiniest mark.

One morning, I notice a fall of soot on the fireplace hearth; it has spread its darkness all over the alabaster carpet. When I go closer, I see there are two dead sparrows in the fireplace. At least, I think they are sparrows, but I don’t know for sure because their heads have been pulled off. I put them, carefully, in the garbage. Sparrows, and all birds, are dirty creatures At night, I sometimes hear rustling. I sleep for a while and then jolt into wakefulness. I don’t know why but I think there might be someone walking around. I have a lock on my bedroom door and although the handle never turns, it seems there is someone standing just outside, hesitating, looking for a way through the door. I want to get out of bed to check, but I always seem to fall asleep before I can do so. When I look at the door in the morning, I see black marks on the snow white wood, as if someone has been pressing gently on it. I clean them off every time, but they keep coming back, so I know that someone is touching my door.

When I ask the landlord, he frowns and says, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. There’s no way anyone can get into that apartment.” But his eyes say something else. He could know what’s going on, be a part of it. I’ve never trusted that man. In fact, now I think about it, I have seen him lingering outside the doors of apartments, pretending to look at the woodwork to see if it needs painting. Sometimes I see things that aren’t there. But I’m sure about the sparrows, because I found the heads in my garbage can.

One day, I slip and strain my back, so I have to stay home from work for a couple of days. As I lie on the couch, I hear a noise in my hall closet. I limp to the closet; when I open the door, I think I see a hand pushing aside the panel at the back. I live in an old apartment building and the closet was built in later, so the panel leads directly into the space between the walls.

When I tell the doctors what happened next they always try to calm me down, and give me some of their pills. But I see the hand with the cleaver, raised over my head. I see it come down. I see my other hand lying in the rich, red blood that has spread over my beautiful white carpet. It makes a wonderful contrast. Red and white are my favourite colours. I don’t know who has done it to me. It must be the person who tore off the head of the sparrows, the one who lives in the space between the walls. []

CultureCult Magazine Issue 13 47

POETRY

KAL SITOTAW

Photography OSCAR KEYS

Nostalgia The seconds ticking away, Amid this deafening silence, Are reminders of the times gone Of cruel yesterday, Ever softly caressing meTeasingMy foolish arms stretch, To keep, to hold on toWhatever remainsAlmost succeeding until, it Escapes my grasp by so muchLeaving only its memory In the palms of my hands; Enough to awaken my heart, Yet again, In song with every beatI miss you.

I miss you.

I miss you. ...

Photographs

I use my poems, to draw your face; Those brown eyes, staring into space, As the rays of the sun, bounce off the grass; These verses, they are my journeys, Through captured moments that I lived with you, In molecules, You in slow motion, within the stillness; You with me, always, As yesterday keeps on playing and replaying, Somewhere in time and space, Permanently printed in this universe, In the union of our lifetimes. []

KAL SITOTAW young, aspiring author and poet from Ethiopia. She has been writing since a young age. She likes to explore philosophic and psychological aspects of humanity through her fictional work. Her poems mainly revolve around love, loss, longing and meditation

48 CultureCult Magazine Issue 13

Art WASSILY KANDINSKY

RICHARD MILLER

POETRY

Birthing a Star Turns out, we frantic, anxious ones were onto something all along: the only song worth singing is the one which seizes you by the crown and drags you from dim safety into a cold catastrophe of light.

Put another way: might makes right.

Might sunders barriers, establishes the sovereignty of possibility.

Might dwells freely in the interval between the moment the coin is tossed and the moment it lands in the palm.

RICHARD MILLER is an avant-garde poet currently residing in southern Pennsylvania. His work has been featured in Aubade, New Reader Magazine, Rizal Journal, taxicab, the Undertow Review, Petrichor, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Foliate Oak.

Externally, a wintry calm achieves apotheosis when the various internal calamities exult in their own discord.

But this is not a hard-won reward, as conventional wisdom would suppose; merely the beginning of something unnervingly spectacular. []

CultureCult Magazine Issue 13 49

BOOK

PARVATHY MENON

cÜ|Çvxáá `xÅÉÜ|xá 50 CultureCult Magazine Issue 13

A Princess Remembers Publisher: Rupa ISBN 10: 9788171673070 She is the daughter of the Maharaja of Cooch Behar and the widow of the Maharaja of Jaipur. She was raised in a sumptuous palace and shot her first panther at the age of twelve. She became one of the first women to win a seat in the Indian Parliament, John F. Kennedy once introduced her as “the woman with the most staggering majority that anyone has ever earned in an election.” She was also considered one of the world's most beautiful women.

In this compelling memoir, Gayatri Devi describes her carefree, hoyden childhood with her brothers and sisters in the palace of Cooch Behar and their adventurous trips to London and the continent, her secret six-year courtship with the dashing, internationally renowned polo player, Jai, the Maharaja of Jaipur, her marriage and entry into the glittering life of the 'pink city' of Jaipur and her struggles to adapt to unfamiliar customs and her husband's two other wives.

A Princess Remembers is the fascinating life story of one of India's most elegant women and one of its most powerful.

A princess remembers…

“When we arrive at Udaipur station, the railway carriages wasshunted into a special purdah siding,where the Maharani was waiting to greet us. Immediately we were made aware of how completely we were to be sheltered from the public gaze. In Jaipur our purdah cars now merely had darkened glass in the windows replacing the curtains of earlier years,but in Udaipur we discovered that we were expected to go about in a car with heavy wooden shutters, enclosing us in a blind, airless box. When we went on a trip on the lake, our boat was tightly veiled with curtains,and the camera that I had bought with me turned out to be both useless and a source of some embarrassment” - The autobiography of Jaipur queen or the Rajmata of Jaipur palace, her highness Gayatri Devi’.

When I chose this book from among a number of legendary autobiographies, I had the intention of going through the rich tradition, the royal and gracious lives of the rulers of British India, that too from the words of a Maharani herself. The book had served my intention and at the same time gave me some insights on the other side of a palace life– the difficulties of being a princess, the responsibilities of a ruler, the limitations and accountabilities of being a woman and furthermore the need for standing independently.

The book begins with the princess remembering about her dreamlike childhood spent at the sprawling Cooch Behar and Baroda palaces and in London. Gayatri Devi’s mother, the daughter of the Maharaja of Baroda herself was a very strong and independent lady. She showed the courage to break her engagement with the

Maharaja of Gwalior, when such an act by a princess was unheard of in India. Leaving all the allegations and criticisms, the conflicting stories and the impact that it had on both the princely states behind, she stayed for her love and finally secured the wherewithal to marry the Prince of Cooch Behar. That boldness in her character was visible throughout her life- when she lost her husband at a very early age, when she had to come back to India and start living with her two sons and three daughters, when she got involved in the ruling of the princely state of Cooch Behar, and finally when she had to agree to her daughter’s marriage to the Maharaja of Jaipur as his third wife, which had provoked a great deal of sensation and dire predictions.

Unlike the Cooch Behar way of life which was far more westernized, sprinkled with freedom and far from the purdah and zenana life which the royal ladies were bound to follow, Jaipur had a long tradition which was closely knit and confined by the customs of orthodox princely life which further demarcated the cultural and societal aspects from that of normal daily lives. A girl who was brought up in London, experienced a fairy tale life of power, freedom and royalty, who was still in her teen age would have to get adjusted to the real and restricted palace life with a third wife status and that was the most challenging and skeptical part of her marriage with the Maharaja of Jaipur. But, throughout her life Gayatri Devi had proved that all these were just pointless skepticisms in front of her love, respect and admiration towards her husband. She had made it as a point that the lessons taught by her husband- The maharaja of Jaipur, who was a dashing polo player, who had travelled around the world and celebrated

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She has described how her grandfather, mother, brother and husband had managed to play their roles so effectively and how dedicated they were to the people of their states. She emphasizes that it was not just about dealing with the outside world.

Managing the show inside the palace was also such a hard affair. The ladies, especially the queen should have the special skill of supervising and implementing the day to day activities of the palace, be it a lunch or a dinner party or the festivals and ceremonies that are to be held, welcoming the distinguished guests to the palace- right from deciding what should be listed in the menu till what sport is to be played for entertaining the guests. Though it is quite evident that the related menial duties would be delegated to the flocks of staff which each palace would have employed and it was their responsibility to ensure smooth running.

We have to admit the fact that the palaces of those days were real establishments where hundreds of people were employed and a series of activities were carried out on a daily basis. I was dumbstruck at the employee statistics of these palaces.

The princess remembers…

his life to the core, but always lived his life for the people of Jaipur had helped her transform herself into a complete Queen. His principles, view points and decisions had helped the Maharani to face the challenges of her palace and public life, political career and finally the realities of fading power.

From a layman’s point of view, being a ruler can be such a thrilling affair. They could enjoy all the luxuries and could lead a splendid life in fascinating palaces, holidaying in foreign countries, partying and passing time with those games and entertainments that were categorized as royal.

The maharani’s description on how her life as princess and later as a queen was set up, with careful detailing of the interiors of those outlandish palaces of Cooch behar, Baroda and Jaipur, can definitely make us think about the extraordinary and blissful life that the royal community would have had. But, she is pointing to the fact that being a ruler is not that easy and the responsibilities and hard work involved in it is rather high.

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“Our palace staff in Cooch Behar probably numbered about four or five hundred. Twenty gardeners, twenty in stables, twelve in the garages, almost a hundred in pilkhanna, a professional tennis coach and his assistant, twelve ball boys, two people to look after the guns, ten sweepers to keep the drives and pathways immaculate and finally the guard. Indoors there were three cooks, one for English, one for Bengali and one for Maratha food and each of them had their own assistants. There was a state band of about forty musicians which played every night before dinner as well as on special ceremonial occasions…”

And in addition to these, they had the list of maids, governesses, tutors, personal servants, secretaries, ladies in waiting, ADCs and so on…

The maharani was trying to unveil the secluded life that the zenana ladies were leading, the ignorant and undemanding community who always had to hide themselves from others and were adjudged to spend their lives behind the veils. Despite these conventional restrictions, the zenana ladies were enjoying life in their own world. A woman’s life inside the purdah would be much active and fuller than one could imagine as they had to run the large household, had to get trained in the basic art of home making, had to learn their husband’s way of life and get accustomed with the practices of her husband’s family to play the role of a daughter-in-law, wife, mother and grandmother effectively. But the maharani realized that if the ladies are to be freed, they should be informed and edu-

cated and for that she initiated the concept of educating the girls from the noble families and elite classes.

She was of the opinion that it was in this higher sections of the society that the custom of purdah life was more strictly followed and were being rigidly instructed to spend their lives inside the zenanas. She was aware that it was not an easy task and after a long hard struggle in persuading and convincing the families, The maharani Gayatri Devi school was opened in Jaipur. I have many times come across this institution’s name in national dailies and websites, but had never realized its prominence in the educational history of India for being the first school for girls in the country.

The freedom movement in India and the way life had changed after India became democratic, the complexities of getting adapted to the new government and how their princely life had to be changed has been depicted, with her feelings about losing the royal identity and things which they had believed to be theirs till date. The fact that the Rambagh palace which had been known to be her home would have to be converted to a hotel, the private plane which was owned by her was to be forgone as a part of cutting expenditure and the way she had to realise that they were no longer the rulers of Jaipur, had no power to get involved in its matters, deeply touched her. It was through many such emotions and disapproval towards the ruling government that she decided to enter into politics and soon became the MP from Jaipur with a majority which had won her a place in the Guinness books of world records.

Politics was a pretty new playing field for her and the disagreement with the government had created certain difficulties for her, especially during the General Emergency. She had to spend five months inside the Tihar jail. The principles and strength which she possessed helped her to withstand everything even after her husband’s death.

She has also shared her disappointment at the deterioration of Jaipur city and how expressed how helpless she felt to witness the many unethical and antidevelopmental activities taking place in Jaipur and Cooch Behar.

The tragic death of her brother and sister, loss of her elder brother, mother, her husband’s second wife with whom she shared a special relationship, and her own husband had definitely affected her life in one way or the other. But surely keeping her duties in mind, she continued with the role that she had been playing in the society till she passed away in July 2009.

In an interview which was given to ‘Times of India’ she said, “As time goes by, everything changes. You start seeing things from a different perspective. Really, the toughest thing in life is to live without people you love. It was tough when I had to be on my own after I lost my mother, brother and husband, Jai. But I've had a very happy life. No regrets.” []

PARVATHY MENON is a freelance writer working in the corporate banking industry in Chennai. She has got her works published in a number of print as well as online magazines and platforms including The Indian Fusion, Springtide magazine, Story mirror, India opines, The companion magazine, Unique times, The Indian Economist and so on. Her research papers were published in a couple of national and international research journals and networks.

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