Gold Dust magazine – Issue 21

Twice-yearly magazine of Literature & the Arts Issue 21 - June 2012

Welcome to our summer issue!

This issue marks 8 years of publication for Gold Dust, a time to reflect on the many new and established writers we have been priviledged to get to know over this time. For some writers it has been their very first experience of publication, and it is always lovely when we receive their proud emails to let us know! Equally, it is exciting to give a new platform to more experienced writers, who may not have appeared in a literary journal before.

Gold Dust has always included as much prose as poetry, but we are also open to including other styles. In the past 8 years, we have published novel extracts, flash fiction, poetic prose and plays. With this last genre in mind, we are very pleased to announce that our play event, Gold Dust Speaks, will take place on Saturday, 14th July at the London Theatre – read all about it from p4 – and do come and join us, it’s a night at a London theatre of 3 plays for just £3!

As always, our favourite prose piece and poem each win a £20 prize. This issue, The Angels

by Ralph Goldswain (p10), was selected for our Best Prose award, while Sonnet to a Razor by Freya Pickard (p41) was chosen as Best Poem.

Omma Velada (GD magazine founder)

Gold Dust magazine www.golddustmagazine.co.uk mailtallulah@googlemail.com Prose Editor & Cover Designer David Gardiner Poetry Editor Jolen Whitworth Photographer Eleanor Leonne Bennett Webmaster, DTP & Founder Omma Velada Proofing Jo Fraser

Join us Mailing list: www.golddustmagazine.co.uk/MailingList.htm YouTube: www.youtube.com/user/golddustmagazine Facebook: http://tinyurl.com/golddust MySpace: www.myspace.com/golddustmagazine

Artwork Cover photograph & design Eleanor Leonne Bennett Images All prose & poetry photographs by Eleanor Leonne Bennett, except where indicated

Circulation Online (www.issuu.com/golddust): ca. 3,000 PDF (www.lulu.com/golddustmagazine): ca. 500

Contents Regulars

Features

26

How to sell your novel online Omma Velada

52

Contributors Our writers’ bios in all their glory

4

Gold Dust Speaks David Gardiner

54

The Back Page Gold Dust news Source: ELB

1

Editorial

by GD founder Omma Velada

Short stories & Flash fiction

10

The Angels by Ralph Goldswain BEST PROSE Fantasy

14

The Action Hero by Benjamin Evans Drama

20

Another Time, Perhaps by Wayne Dean-Richards Drama

22

The Swimming pool by Karen Tobias-Green Drama

32

Some Paper Flew Like Dust in the Wind

by Geoffrey Heptonstall Drama

38

Chrysalis by Gary Budgen Drama

42

INTERVALS by William Jackson Drama

46

My Beautiful Smile by Anne Goodwin Drama

Chrysalis (p38)

by Gary Budgen

Poems Halls Hell – A whimsical tale ...

Daniel Niall Campbell

30

Farm Horses in a Full Moon Michael Shorb

31

Nothing Miya Reekers

36

The Grove of Trees Danny P Barbare

37

Do not look them in the eye RM Francis

41

Sonnet to a Razor BEST POEM Freya Pickard Source: stock.xchng

29

BEST POEM The Razor (p41)

by Freya Pickard

Source: ELB

Reviews

BEST PROSE The Angels (p10)

by Ralph Goldswain

13

Wondering About Many Women

by Derwent May Reviewed by Geoffrey Heptonstall

18

Dark Matter: A Ghost Story

by Michelle Paver Reviewed by David Gardiner

21

Neon a literary magazine Reviewed by David Gardiner

50

Serpentine

by Catherine Edmunds Reviewed by David Gardiner

Gold Dust speaks

PLAY EVENT

Come and join us at our next Gold Dust event!

In March this year, the Gold Dust team announced an exciting competition offering playwrights the opportunity to have their plays performed at a London theatre by students of The Central School of Speech and Drama, as well as a £100 prize and publication in the next issue of the magazine for the overall winner. With such good prizes on offer, we had lots of interest and some wonderful submissions, but we only had time for the performance and judging of three plays, so some difficult choices had to be made. With the performances always in mind, we weighed up the dramatic effect of each piece and with our usual democratic team selection process, arrived at our three finalists. We look forward to an exciting evening at the London Theatre in New Cross on Saturday, 14th July, where the overall winner will be decided. The event is from 7:30pm to 10:45pm and there will be a £3 charge for tickets to cover the hire of the venue. Please join us for what promises to be a really great evening!

The judges are: Vishni Velada-Billson, theatre director & arts educator.

The places that Vishni has worked include the Unicorn Theatre, Central School of Speach & Drama, Clean Break Theatre, Oval House Theatre, Kazzum Theatre, Lyric Theatre, and Half Moon Young People's Theatre.

Emily Nightingale, playwright & arts educator.

Emily’s career has included work at the Half 4

Moon Young People's Theatre and the Oval House Theatre.

The winning short play will be published in full in Issue 22 of Gold Dust, due out shortly before Christmas 2012, and highlights from the London Theatre event will be uploaded to the Gold Dust magazine YouTube channel.

The evening will include some short readings of poetry and prose, and we are priveliged to have Lily Brooke, the amazing teenage singer/songwriter/pianist from Newcastle-on-Tyne, to provide the music.

Lily Brooke

Lily, who turned 15 in April, was the winner of the Peterlee Xtra Factor competition and a regional finalist in Open Mic UK, the country’s biggest competition for singers. She has performed on local radio and at Sunderland Fringe Festival and the Newcastle Evolution Festival, as well as many local venues, and has been

Gold Dust speaks – Play event nominated for 'Young Performer of the Year' in the Pride of South Tyneside Council Awards.

Her channel on YouTube has received in excess of 22,000 hits.

To help create some buzz for the forthcoming event, we asked each of our playwright finalists to answer the same four questions, which were: Q1. Is there a particular playwright or play that has influenced or inspired you more than any other?

script?

Q3. What do you see as the playwright's responsibilities as distinct from those of the director, the actors and the crew?

Q4. Tell us something about the way you write. Do you start with a character or a plot or a situation or something else? Do you have any kind of routine?

You can read our finalists’ responses to these questions in the article that follows.

Q2. If you were judging this competition what would be the most important things you would be looking for in a winning

Gold Dust

Gold Dust Speaks event Venue The London Theatre, New Cross

Date & Time Saturday, 14th July at 7:30pm

Tickets £3 in advance (please email mailtallulah@googlemail.com)

Program – Performance of 3 plays, all finalists in our playwright competition – Music by Lily Brooke – Poetry & prose readings by [names here] – Announcement of overall playwright competition winner Issue 21

June 2012

www.golddustmagazine.co.uk

5

PLAY EVENT – INTERVIEWS

Gold Dust speaks As discussed in the above article, in anticipation of the performance of the three shortlisted plays at our ‘Gold Dust speaks’ event, we asked each of our shortlisted playwrights to answer the same four questions.

Q1. Favourite playwright: Is there a particular playwright or play that has influenced or inspired you more than any other?

Q2. Judging criteria: If you were judging this competition, what would be the most important things you would be looking for in a winning script?

Q3. Playwright’s responabilities: What do you see as the playwright's responsibilities as distinct from those of the director, the actors and the crew?

Q4. How I write: Tell us something about the way you write. Do you start with a character or a plot or a situation or something else? Do you have any kind of writing routine?

Here are the fascinating results...

Michelle Markarian Winning play: Parents of Typical Children (Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA) Q1. Favourite playwright Edward Albee’s work never fails to inspire and amaze me – it just hits on so many levels. I saw a production of The Goat, or Who is Sylvia a few years ago in London that absolutely blew me out of the water. Wallace Shawn is another playwright who dares to take the audience places we didn’t know existed. I admire Teresa Rebeck’s work; her characters are easy to identify with. I love Neil LaBute and his willingness to take on the crueler side of human nature. David Mamet’s dialogue is fantastic – as an actor, I like performing Mamet’s work because he writes the way people speak so the lines are easy to learn.

I go frequently to the theatre and each experience influences and educates me, even if 6

Michelle Markarian

something isn’t working – especially if something isn’t working! But all playwrights are an inspiration, even ones I don’t like.

Gold Dust speaks – Interviews Q2. Judging criteria I like humor, originality, charm and daring – I like when a play takes you somewhere you’re not expecting to go. I would, being practical, look for a script that’s not too complicated to stage. I would probably choose a comedy over a melodrama, but that’s a matter of taste...

Q3. Playwright’s responsabilies The playwright writes, and if necessary, rewrites, the play. The playwright can also make him or herself available for clarification should the director and actors and crew need it, but only if asked! Once the play is written, the playwright’s job is done. The director provides the vision, the actors provide the emotion, and the crew provides the effects. Each responsibility is dependent on the other, but discrete. Part of the fun of being a playwright is seeing what a director chooses to do with the work. I find I am often surprised by the results, and I like surprises.

I don’t think that playwrights should direct their own plays. I have acted in my own work, but under someone else’s direction, with the understanding that I am an actor and not the playwright. I once saw an Albee play in New Orleans that was a complete disappointment – it were as if the director didn’t understand Albee at all.

Turns out that Albee not only directed it, but cast it himself!

Q4. How I write Usually I start with a situation – wouldn’t it be funny or truthful or provocative if?...then the characters develop around that. Sometimes I finish a piece and realize that people in or on the periphery of my life influenced the characters, but I don’t set out to do that intentionally.

What tends to happen is once I have the premise, the characters just start to write themselves, even to the point that when I think I know my ending, the characters lead me otherwise.

Issue 21

June 2012

That’s when I have real fun.

I’m in a writer’s group, so I produce new material often. It’s not always good! When I’m not having fun, when the characters refuse to write themselves, when I’m forcing myself to write out of obligation, the results range from marginal to crummy. Without inspiration, it’s just exercise, but I think it’s still output I learn from. When I’m truly dry, I do something else creative – cook, play the mandolin (badly), paint a watercolor, journal. Then inspiration usually comes. Movement also inspires me – riding on trains, airplanes, swimming – by moving, either the ideas catch up to me or I catch up to them.

Dave Turner

Dave M Turner Winning play: Southend (Newcastle-on-Tyne, United Kingdom) Q1. Favourite playwright Certainly I am very influencd by Shakespeare in all my writing, but not to produce verse plays. Of more modern playwrights, I would say that Alan Bennett is the strongest influence.

www.golddustmagazine.co.uk

7

Gold Dust speaks – Interviews Q2. Judging criteria I would look for a plot that develops in such a way that the audience is kept guesisng about how the play will end, characters that seem realistic and true to themselves and engage our feelings, whether it is sympatheticaly or with some disdain.

Q3. Playwright’s responsabilies The most important responsibility of the playwright is to engage the audience so that they want to know what happens to these characters.

A great play will do this, but also say something about what it is like to be human and inspire and motivate us.

Q4. How I write I usually sart with a simple specific idea of the play story or poem and allow the characters, plot and poetic themes to develop as I write.

Q1. Favourite playwright I was not inspired by Shakespeare at school – but I love him now! His structure may be off, and he has many plot inconsistencies, but he tells a great story, with characters under pressure and universal human emotions that are still true today. Now the cliché is out of the way – John Osborne's Look Back in Anger made me want to be a playwright – gutsy and real and honest.

Since then (many years ago now), I went on to discover Beckett, Artaud, Brecht, Ionesco, along with contemporary Australian playwrights David Williamson and Andrew Bovell. Although I wasn’t in London during the Royal Court 90's I've the loved reading Ravenhill and Kane, plus from US I really enjoy John Guare and Edward Albee, and John Patrick Shanley’s short plays. So I'm a bit of a magpie really. I read a lot, like most of it, and go and see as much as I can afford.

Q2. Judging criteria A script should have forward momentum (even if the narrative is not temporally linear). I like characters that are complex and at times surprising. She or he should want something to happen either to herself or himself or to someone else – a character is defined more by what they do (or don’t do) than by what they say. And I personally prefer scripts that relate to contemporary society and how we see ourselves in the world; that reflect our lives back to us in all its ugly beauty.

Vivienne Glance

Vivienne Glance Winning play: Modern Gods (Subiaco, Western Australia) 8

Q3. Playwright’s responsabilies After delivering an engaging, challenging script that captures the curiosity and imagination of the director, actors and crew, the writer’s role, in my view, is pretty much to allow them all to bring their passion and experience to realizing the play. For a new work, though, I think a playwright should be available to help test the script on the floor, and to redraft and tweak to make the play better. No matter how hard I try, I know

Gold Dust speaks – Interviews my script will not be perfect and can always be improved, and working with great people can help it enormously.

Q4. How I write The easy part is the routine: when I have a project in development I like to work on it first thing in the morning. I try to write for at least three hours without a break and I don’t answer the phone or look at emails etc. Research and other tasks, such as sending work out, or meetings etc, are best tackled in the afternoon, and I seem to slump around 4pm anyway. I earn my living thorough ad hoc projects, so I’m pretty much in control of my writing time.

I can create work from different pathways.

Sometimes a story or person I read about, sometimes by a moral dilemma, sometimes by a mental image or an artifact inspires me. I let the idea sit and a brief synopsis usually forms along with the necessary ‘starting characters’.

Then I start writing. What I write first may not be the beginning of a story. I can write several disconnected scenes around the idea and then see patterns and begin to shape it. I fundamentally

believe that all writing comes from re-writing and I will build scenes, remove them, change characters, redraft it with an eye to form/structure or lyrical language, how a character can be developed further etc. and so on until I feel I have something that works for me. Then I write it all again. It’s a layering and scraping back, a little like working with oil paints, I suppose, until there is depth and texture, colour and content.

The following entries were highly commended: Underneath at Archie’s by Robert Black The Real Family by Michele Markarian Bringing Rights Home! by Debora Singer 96 by Duncan Hendry

Buy your tickets for Gold Dust Speaks!

Tickets to 'Gold Dust Speaks' cost £3 and can be purchased in advance.

If you would like to purchase tickets for this special event, please email mailtallulah@googlemail.com for payment details.

For listing and venue details, see The London Theatre website at: www.thelondontheatre.com

Gold Dust Issue 21

June 2012

www.golddustmagazine.co.uk

9

The Angels

SHORT STORY BEST PROSE

by Ralph Goldswain There were six of them, in peaked caps, thin shirts and tight blue trousers...

T

hey came in the afternoon. They arrived at great speed and stopped abruptly in a haze of dust. The big grey wagon’s growling ceased and it stood silently in the softly dropping ashes. A side door slid open and they got out. There were six of them, in peaked caps, thin shirts and tight blue trousers.

They stood with their backs to the wooden fence that separates the open place from the town hall. We stared at them and wondered at their wagon, which had moved without any animal pulling it.

‘Who are you?’ we said.

The newcomers laughed.

‘Well we’re not exactly angels,’ one of them said.

‘Just kidding,’ another said.

‘We are angels.’

‘What are angels?’ a child said.

‘Shhh, child,’ his father said.

‘Fear not,’ one of them said and they all laughed again.

There was even more laughter when another said, ‘Glad tidings of great joy we bring.’

‘What do you want?’ we said.

10

‘Food, and refuge,’ they said. ‘Somewhere to disappear for a while.’

We led them from the open place to the town hall where the midday meal had just finished.

They sat down and we served them. Someone drew fresh water from the well and brought it to them.

‘We need to sleep,’ they said.

We took them to the mayor’s house where there were many rooms with beds.

Then we went back to the town hall. Someone had gone to fetch the Wise Man and he sat on a chair while we gathered around him, sitting on the floor.

‘Angels are messengers from the God,’ he said.

‘The God?’ we said.

‘In the Time Before there was the God,’ the Wise Man said. ‘He wrote a book, which I will tell you about.’

We sat until dusk as the Wise Man told us stories from the book - about peoples who fought each other, about kings who did good things and bad things, about a great leader who led his people out of slavery and about a man who came

to save all the people. The story had angels in it who brought messages from the book’s writer. There were many angels in the first part, fewer in the second part - the story about the man who came to save the people.

‘Why have the angels come to us?’ we said.

‘To heal us,’ the Wise Man

The Angels by Ralph Goldswain gels,’ the Wise Man said. ‘You must do everything they ask of you.’

In the evening the angels came out and went into their wagon. When they emerged they were holding small iron items. They pointed them at the fence and then there was a big noise. Parts of the fence splintered.

‘Take note of this,’ one of the angels said. ‘Don’t give us any grief.’

They went back into the mayor’s house.

‘Take your family and go,’ they told the mayor.

The mayor and his wife, their three sons and two daugh-

Source: ELB

said. ‘To relieve us of our pain.’

We thought about our pain. The Wise Man had told us that in the Time Before many people lived to be old. Their skin didn’t rot and fester. Some of us escaped the festering skin but everyone had something inside that twisted their bodies with pain and killed them.

‘How did the man save the people?’ we asked.

‘He took their sin away.’

‘What is sin?’ we said.

‘Sin is the bad things we do. The man believed that sickness is caused by sin.’

‘What shall we do?’ we said.

‘You must obey the an-

Issue 21

June 2012

www.golddustmagazine.co.uk

ters, started to leave.

‘The girl stays,’ one of the angels said, pointing to the older girl, the one who had escaped the skin sickness.

The girl looked at her father.

‘You must stay,’ he said.

‘Upstairs,’ one of the angels said. ‘Get away from the house,’ he told us.

We moved back and stood watching the house from a short distance away. After a while we heard the girl scream. She called for her mother and her father.

One of the angels came to the door. ‘We are not hurting her,’ he said. ‘Go home now.’

In the morning the angels summoned the mayor.

‘Do you have petrol?’ they said.

‘What is petrol?’ the mayor said.

‘Forget it,’ the angels said.

‘Where is my daughter?’ the mayor said.

‘Sleeping,’ they said.

‘Did you heal her?’ the mayor said.

The angels laughed. ‘I guess you could call it that,’ they said.

We returned from the fields at midday. One of the angels came to the town hall and told us to take food to the mayor’s house so that they could eat.

After we had eaten we gathered around the Wise Man. ‘Tell us about the man who came to rid the people of their 11

The Angels by Ralph Goldswain sin in the Time Before,’ we said.

‘The man who came to heal them. Has he sent the angels to us?’

‘Yes,’ the Wise Man said.

‘He is the son of the writer and he is also the God.’ The Wise Man told us about the visit of an angel to the man’s mother and how the man was born after that visit. He told us that the man went around healing people, especially people with the skin sickness. He told us that in the Time Before people worshiped the man.

‘What is worship?’ we said.

‘Recognising that he is the one who made the people and being grateful for that.’

‘We don’t understand,’ we said.

‘In the Time Before,’ the Wise Man said, ‘they believed that the God made them. And that he saved them from sin. So they spent much of their time giving thanks and praising him for his greatness.’

In the evening we looked through the window of the Mayor’s house. The angels were sitting around the table.

Each one held some small thin tabs in one hand. They each pulled one of the tabs out and threw it on the table, taking it in turns. From time to time one of them would shout and throw his arms up and the others would push piles of metal discs towards him.

‘What are they doing?’ we 12

said.

‘It is preparation for the healing,’ the Wise Man said.

‘They are communicating with the God.’ There was no sign of the mayor’s daughter.

Many days passed. We went to the fields every morning as usual and came back at midday. We gave the angels food and drink. Sometimes we saw the mayor’s daughter through the window. She served them water and food as they sat around the table communicating with the God. At times one of them would reach out as she passed him and touch her, stroking her leg or her breast.

In the afternoons the Wise Man told us more about the book. He told us that in order to save the people, to rid them of their sin and heal them, the man had to die in pain – that he was taking all of their sin and pain away from them and on to himself. He told us about the circumstances of the man’s death and the brutality and pain of it.

‘When will the angels heal us?’ we said.

‘You must ask them,’ the Wise Man said.

We went to the angels.

They came out on to the veranda.

‘Are you going to heal us?’ we said.

‘In the way we are healing the mayor’s daughter?’ one of them said and the others

laughed.

‘Yes,’ we said.

‘Looking at some of you, I would die first,’ another said.

‘What shall we do?’ we said.

‘Your problem,’ they said.

We went to the town hall and held a meeting. We agreed that what the angels had said was they were going to heal us but that they were waiting for us to take a positive step. We decided on a plan and discussed the details.

Some of us went to chop the trees down. Late in the night, twelve of the healthiest young men sneaked into the mayor’s house and on a signal leapt on each of the sleeping angels in pairs, one holding him down, the other tying his hands behind his back. The young men made them stand up then brought them to the veranda.

The mayor’s daughter came out to her parents, sobbing. She told us that she was carrying a child.

The angels were shouting, demanding to be released.

‘We want to be healed,’ we said. ‘We want to be rid of our sin.’

We held flaming torches.

We surrounded the angels and drew them to the open place where the six crosses gleamed in the torchlight.

‘We will worship the child,’ we said.

Gold Dust

Review

Wondering about Many Women

by Derwent May £7.19 (Paperback) 46 pages Greenwich Exchange (2011) Reviewed by Geoffrey Heptonstall

F

or decades Derwent May has been one of the most familiar figures on the London literary scene. From nature notes in The Times to a mammoth history of the TLS, by way of novels, critical works and full-time editorial jobs, Derwent May has been a tireless advocate and enabler of good writing. His enthusiasm and encouragement is as admirable as his pitch for literary culture, without a hint of rancour, in an indifferent world. Occasionally, in rare moments of reflection, he has written a poem. At last they are collected.

Scattered across publications, some of which are long gone, and now gathered in one volume the poetry coheres into an oeuvre. There is nothing occasional about these poems. Crafted with care, the fine turns of phrase and striking imagery, the witty, incisive observation, these poems read as a whole articulate in fine words a way of looking. So achieved is this work I can’t believe there haven’t been other volumes. In all these years one of England’s finest poets has been reticent about speaking of his vision.

It is to do with love. It is to do with the women he has loved. These loves have stimulated the poet’s appetite for life. Energised by a love of beauty, in human terms, in nature, in speculations about the world, his pen is empowered to create something indelible and enduring among the ephemera of thoughts and feelings.

This is a poem about having, Pressing of things against the senses…

Sense creating the terrain.

The language is richly sensuous, as is the feeling that empowers the words. This is a poet for whom

Issue 21

June 2012

emotions are as tactile as skin. When he writes of the transient nature of life he is enshrouded in memories he almost can touch. Death approaches us all.

It has taken many who contributed to the world this long-lived writer has known. He is wistful about the sense of loss without the least sense of bitterness.

May is dismissive of ‘those prudent men who calculate their coinage’. Time is to be spent living.

The poet prefers Javanese girls laughing under their baskets: ‘What strange faith passes there?’

But, now I think of it, surely there was a novel of May’s from many years ago, Laughter in Djakarta.

Indonesia is evidently a personal experience. May remembers his time there in the poem A February Memory. He remembers especially the young woman who cooked for him. The Javanese girls in the other, quoted poem we may assume also to be a memory. Thinking back can be a way of thinking clearly.

Time has withered the skin of those young women, and it has stilled, or silenced for ever, their laughter. But the question, whispered beneath warm smiles, is memorable enough to be asked as if we never grow old. Timeless questions never die. Certainly, there are those, and Derwent May is of their company, who never grow tired of asking questions to which there are no obvious answers. If the answers were obvious there would be no questions. If things were so simple as that there would be no poetry.

For some there is no knowledge, Only the drifting of the air Quite. Writing does not drift, however it looks to the contrary. There are writers who are never still.

There are writers who spend all day in café-bars. In their own ways they all are moving purposefully. For Derwent May the purpose is to celebrate the many ways of being alive. May he live for ever, and may he write many more poems.

www.golddustmagazine.co.uk

Gold Dust

13

The Action Hero

SHORT STORY

by Benjamin Evans

It makes me laugh when I think about it...

I

am pedalling towards a village. It’s a small village, with a few stone houses gathered around a shop selling statues, a church with a graveyard, and not much else.

Beside me on the road there is a man walking. He has a tiny dog and is talking to it like it’s his wife.

‘You always do that, don’t you Lily. Every Saturday. Hurrummph. Ev-er-y Saturday.’

I wonder what has happened to his wife. I wonder if she died. I always think about this when I see a man with a dog.

I keep pedalling and come to the centre of the village. It is a bit bigger than I thought there is a pub and a green and a stream that rushes towards a waterwheel - and it smells funny, like our back garden on the day Grandma comes round for tea. I like that smell.

I have seen a hundred villages like this in the weeks that I have been pedalling and I don’t like them. You can’t hide in a village, even if you are pedalling on a bike. The man talking to his dog, the farmer holding a gun, the little girl making a chain out of weeds - they all stare and want to know who 14

you are and what you are doing. They all want to stop for a chat.

I really want to keep pedalling but they are not going to let me. From the moment I saw the man and his dog, I knew this would be the village where I would have to stop. As I eat my ice cream I can see them hiding behind curtains and hear them rustling in the bushes, loading their guns and laying traps in case I try to escape. No more pedalling for me. No more journey. I have to stay in the village forever.

It makes me laugh when I think about it, because fifty days ago I didn’t want to leave the village at all. As I pedalled away from the school gates, past the weeping willow and the lawnmower shop, I felt sick and wanted to start crying.

‘Why do I have to leave?

Why me? It wasn’t my fault, I didn’t mean it. She’ll forgive me, I know she will.’

But then I heard the voices again, like knives being sharpened for dinner, and I remembered I didn’t have a choice. I had to pedal, no matter where it took me. I had to leave the village as quickly as I could.

I crossed the bridge over the lake and pedalled hard, not looking back until I reached the chapel on top of the hill. They hadn’t seen me. They weren’t chasing anymore. I could sit and eat a jam sandwich and no one would bother me.

‘The village looks much smaller from up here,’ I thought as I ate. ‘It’s like one of those toys we have at home, where you can build something, then break it down and build something different instead. The church with the bent steeple, the school, the headmaster with the ruler, the policeman with the belt, the kids who throw mud, Vanessa with the big come-on I could smash them all down, flatten them on the ground and build something better. It would be easy.’

I finished my sandwich, made a fist and aimed it at the village. Then I started pedalling.

Someday I would come back and knock them down for good.

After a bit more pedalling I started crying. The fields were funny colours and the houses strange shapes, and the road big and full of growling cars that tried to bite you. There wasn’t

The Action Hero by Benjamin Evans anything I knew and there was no-one I could stop to ask for help. Even the grass on the verge wanted to wrap around me and cut my throat.

I sobbed and sobbed.

‘Why? Why can’t I go back? Why do you all hate me?’

Then I thought about Vanessa, about how she had choked on the water in the lake and spat it in my face, and I started pedalling again. I was an adventurer, and adventurers didn’t need help. They liked strange colours and shapes.

I kept on crying like this, over and over, and thought that maybe I should go back to the village and tell them I was sorry.

Then I ate a jam sandwich.

‘If I go back to the village I’ll never be allowed out again. The strange fields and the cars with the teeth - have become my friends. I still don’t like it when it gets dark or when a hundred roads come at me in a big circle, but I’m not scared anymore.

Nothing awful is going to happen. It’s loud out here and it smells a bit funny, but that doesn’t mean it’s dangerous like they said. It’s just different, and different is good. Different means I’m not going to be locked in the ‘bad’ room. Different means they won’t shout or hit me in the face with a ruler.

Different is safe. Everything will be okay as long as I keep pedalling.

‘I never wanted to hurt Issue 21

June 2012

anyone.’

Soon the villages stopped completely and the green and yellows combined to form a great orange ocean. Houses were lined up in rows as far as I could see, and flats in blocks stretched up as high as the sky.

I felt sick as I pedalled into it.

‘What if they are like them?

What if they stare and shout, and hit me all at once? I don’t want to go back to the village but I don’t want to be here either.

‘I didn’t want to hurt her. I didn’t want to hurt anyone.’

I pedalled faster and stayed in the middle of the road. It felt safe there. It was like the grey sky on a stormy night - trucks thundering, lights flashing bang, crash and roar. I liked nights like this. They made me feel excited when I lay in bed. I wanted to be in the sky. I wanted to be where the action was.

Then as I pedalled on, the night became even more exciting. From the shadows colours jumped out at me - greens and yellows and pinks - then danced and spun like performers in a circus; cars crowded together and lined up in formation, a parade at the centre of the party; music boomed and thumped with the sound of a thousand falling bombs; and people were gathered everywhere, more people than I had ever seen, shouting in words I didn’t un-

www.golddustmagazine.co.uk

derstand, in packs like legions of troops going to battle, dressed in pink and purple armour that showed off their flesh, all beautiful and muscley, all ready to exchange blows. I had pedalled into a different world and there was a war and a party going on all at once. I should have been scared. I should have turned round. But I didn’t.

I couldn’t. It was like escaping from a dream and I couldn’t wake up.

Around me people spread and gushed in cascades of movement and action and I stared as I pedalled through.

None of them stared back or shouted. They all had better things to look at.

With each mile it became more like one of those films I’d watch at home, where the guns are firing and the bombs are falling and the hero runs in slow motion. I was that hero. I was the hero running through the battle who no-one can hurt. The action hero. Pedal pedal. Pedal pedal. Action! Boom!

I lay on a bench that night and I felt stronger and more important than ever before. My arms were big and muscley, the scars on my back were tough and the ideas in my head were clever and important. When I thought about the people in the village – the headmaster who shouted, my mother who threw me into the yard and the kids who threw bricks and called me a queer - I 15

The Action Hero by Benjamin Evans didn’t feel anything. They had never been to the city, they hadn’t seen what I had and they would never be heroes like me Then, as more explosions flashed in the sky, I thought about Vanessa. I thought about pulling her body from the lake limp and slippery like a fish; I thought about her skin - white and cold and oiled with blood; and her lips - red and bloody and giving me the come-on. I thought about her face floating up to mine, kissing me and smiling and telling me that we could stay together forever. If only she was here now we could be safe. In the city they would leave us alone. No-one would stop to look or shout.

The sun rose and I woke to the sound of running feet and shouting voices. It was exciting but quite scary and I got back on the bike and pedalled away.

After a while the roads became thin again and the lights stopped flashing and the colours turned back to yellow and green. The city had gone, the country was back and it made me feel bad. I wanted to be an action hero all the time, and even though I was pedalling and moving through fields it was different here. They’d be watching me. When the trees dangled over the road they would wrap their branches around my neck. The birds would shout every time I ped16

alled past: ‘Chirp, chirp chirp. He’s here, he’s here. Chirp - look out!

Stop! Don’t let him get away.’

And the wind, it tried to blow me into the bushes and the rivers, so they could swallow me up.

‘Whoossshh - chase him down. Whoossshh - tie him up.

Throw him in the river. Let him drown.’

And the villages made me cry now, worse than ever. I would stop and eat an ice cream and my tears would drip and melt white mess onto my shoes. I would see women in the shops look at me and whisper, and men on the farms put down their tools and load their guns. Then in the lakes I would see her, floating on the water, her white body bruised from where I had hit her and her legs spread out from where I had ripped them open. I had to keep pedalling. I couldn’t stop for ice cream anymore.

I didn’t mean to hurt her.

I pedalled and pedalled and pedalled until finally twinkling lights appeared in the distance. A warm feeling came into my stomach and I stopped being scared. Storm clouds gathered in the sky, bombs started to fall and I rode into town like the hero returning to save the day. I was still the strong man. I was still the action hero, and I wanted to stay like him forever.

I think that was why I had to kill the dog. I had to show them how strong I was, make them stop whispering and reaching for their guns, be the action hero and keep him inside me.

It was after lunch in a village on the forty-fifth day when it attacked. The afternoon was quiet and sunny, I was happily pedalling causing no problems to anyone, and the village was much like the others I pedalled through - it had a shop, a pub, a pond and a road, and people who stared.

‘Sssshhhh,’ hissed the trees, waving their branches.

‘Ssshhhh. Don’t worry. I won’t hurt you.’

‘Thunk,’ clattered a fence, blowing in the wind. ‘Thunk.

You. Get off. Get off me you brute!’

I pedalled hard to get away.

‘Thud-thud-thud,’ the dog pounded. ‘Thud-thud-thud.’

‘Stop. You’re hurting me, stop!’

Then I saw it running beside my feet, white fur like an angel and red eyes like the devil.

‘Bark! Bark-bark!’

It leapt at my legs.

‘Bark! Bark-bark!’

I pedalled harder.

‘Bark!’

But couldn’t get away.

‘Bark.

The Action Hero by Benjamin Evans

I didn’t stop until I reached another city and was able to breathe. Around me bombs were exploding and guns were Issue 21

June 2012

firing and soldiers were running, and everyone ignored me. I rode through now with her alongside me, holding onto me as I pedalled, kissing my neck and saying that she loved me. I was the action hero and I wanted to stay here forever.

Source: ELB

‘You killed me.’

‘Bark.

‘You put your hands around my neck.’

‘Bark.’

‘Then you squeezed tighter and tighter ‘Bark.’

‘Until I couldn’t breathe.’

‘Bark.’

‘And threw me in the lake.’

‘Bark.’

‘And left me alone, naked, to die.’

‘Bark!’

Cold bone clamped onto my leg and bloodied fangs pierced the flesh in my thigh.

Streams of blood flowed onto the road.

‘It!’ Kick.

‘Wasn’t!’

Kick!

‘My!’ Kick, kick!

‘Fault!’

I stopped the bike, picked up the dog by its neck and throttled it as hard as I could. Then I put it down and stamped on its head.

‘It wasn’t my fault!

It wasn’t my fault!

I didn’t mean to hurt her!

It wasn’t my fault.’

Then I started to pedal again.

But the action hero had to keep moving. If he stopped it would not be long before he found himself back in the village getting kicked and laughed at and thrown in the lake.

‘Ha. Ha ha! Look at the freak, the freak can’t swim.’

‘Ignore them,’ she’d say as we walked back to school. ‘Just be yourself.’

She was right. I was myself. I was the action man and she was beside me.

As we left the city and rode into the villages I heard more dogs barking and people barking too:

www.golddustmagazine.co.uk

‘Bark. Bark bark bark!’

But it didn’t matter. I just ignored them and talked to her instead.

They wouldn’t let the action man keep going though. Even after he’d been pedalling for fifty days, and had found the person he wanted to be and the girl that he loved, they forced him to stop. The city, the lights, the excitement - all of it was to be taken away so he could go back to a shop, a church, a pond and a cell.

It’s funny because as I sit here now, licking my ice cream and watching the children on the village green, it feels a bit like the city again. All around they are moving - loading their guns and laying their traps and preparing for the explosions and in the centre of the action is me, with the girl alongside. I am the hero.

I finish off my ice cream, stand up from the bench and start pedalling again, and that’s when the shouting begins.

‘Bark. Bark bark bark bark bark bark bark bark!’

‘That’s enough. We have you surrounded. Step away from the bike and stay where you are. Don’t make this more difficult than you have to.’

They won’t let me move.

They won’t let me be the action hero. They won’t let be myself or be with her. And I don’t like it.

Gold Dust 17

Review

Dark Matter: A Ghost Story

by Michelle Paver ÂŁ4.99 (Kindle), ÂŁ7.79 (Hardback) Orion (2010) 256 pages Reviewed by David Gardiner

T

here are essentially two kinds of ghost story: the ones where you're unsure at the end whether the supernatural was involved or whether everything might have taken place within the mind of the protagonist, and the kind where there is no doubt regarding the objective reality of the phenomena encountered. This one falls into the latter category. As the title implies, it tells of goings-on which belong to the real universe, but not to the small part of it of which we are usually conscious.

I thought at first that Ms Paver was guilty of an anachronism in having borrowed a concept

18

from modern physics as a title for a novel that takes place in the 1930s, but her own notes set the record straight. It seems 'dark matter' is an idea with a very long lineage, merely revived in modern times as a name for that 90% of the universe's mass of which science can offer no account.

The central character, as in my own recent novel, is a radio engineer, and the real yet invisible radio waves with which he deals serve as a metaphor for the other unseen entities that populate the 'dark' world of Ms Paver's title.

The entire book is very visual and filmic, in its atmosphere reminiscent of John W. Campbell's 1938 novella Who Goes There?, filmed three times (most successfully as The Thing in 1982 by John Carpenter), which also deals with the infiltration of an Arctic scientific station by a malevolent and terrifying entity, and the increasing isolation and insipient madness of its dwindling crew. One quickly sees that Dark Matter too would make a very fine film in the hands of a sensitive director.

Review: Dark Matter: A Ghost Story by Michelle Paver Ms Paver goes beyond the mere events, into the mind of her protagonist Jack Miller, and as well as his growing terror, paranoia and weakening grip on reality, manages to present convincingly his same-sex infatuation with a fellow expedition member, and indeed to touch on all the issues of class and politics that characterized the period in which the story is set. What she does best and most of, however, is scare her reader into that frame of mind we all remember from our childhood, when we felt the need to sleep with the lights on, or better still in Mummy and Daddy’s bed with the covers pulled up over our heads.

wooden cabin shaken by the howling wind, imprisoned in a freezing permanent night, in which nevertheless we are not alone…

My only misgivings, which are small, concern the ending, which I will not give away but which I think is a little pat and slightly drawn-out, not quite worthy of the rest of the novel; and a tiny practical quibble that I have as a lifelong amateur radio enthusiast: radio valves would not be destroyed by becoming wet, any more than ordinary light-bulbs would, and a more satisfactory plot device would have been to have the radio mast blow down in the storm, something which Jack could certainly not have re-

Chronicles of Ancient Darkness Michelle Paver’s 6-book series for young adults is set in prehistoric times and includes the best-selling Wolf Brother

Ms Paver’s scientific background and love of the far north shine through in this novel, and the standard of research into the Arctic setting and background detail generally is impressive.

She is also a brilliant descriptive writer, to the extent that the location is perhaps the most important character in the story. We forget that we are reading a book – we are inside that lonely Issue 21

paired on his own. But these are such petty criticisms of such a thoroughly sinister and disturbing book that I feel ashamed at having raised them.

There aren’t many good traditional ghost stories being written – don’t miss this one.

June 2012 www.golddustmagazine.co.uk

Gold Dust 19

FLASH FICTION

Another Time, Perhaps

by Wayne Dean-Richards “Why, tell me that: why do you think you’ve got to leave?”...

20

for him and it was killing her, that was why!

Had he started looking at young blondes and she’d noticed and that was why she’d lost her passion for him? Angie wondered. Or had she never felt passion for him and somewhere along the way he’d realised it and that’s what had made him start looking? Before she spoke, before she gave him his answer, she needed to know which of these it was, her need manifest as a blade twisting deep in her heart.

Brendan wandered if this was to do with the miscarriage: a shadow in which they both still perpetually walked. Suddenly he wanted to tell Angie

how he always looked for their daughter’s likeness, couldn’t help himself, looked for her knowing she’d be grown now, imagining her blonde and beautiful, like her mother, but now wasn’t the time.

Angie pulled a strand of hair away from her eye, the blonde shot through with grey.

“Tell me, please,” Brendan said. He let go the table but rocked back and forth on his chair.

Angie reached for her tea, her delicate fingers closing round a cup that was no longer warm. “Another time, perhaps,” she said.

Gold Dust Source: ELB

T

hey sat at a small café on the top floor of the mall, the mall crowded and warm, despite which Brendan wore the suit he’d bought for a job he didn’t get. The suit was too small. It always had been. Angie had been with him when he bought it. She’d thought about saying something then, but hadn’t.

Breaking two minutes of silence between them, Brendan said, “Why, tell me that: why do you think you’re got to leave?”

She saw him grip the edge of the table, blood draining from his hand. The proximity of so many people made it hard to think. She had a view of the escalator: of people spilling off at the top. The woman stepping off now wasn’t Brendan’s type, no, but the blonde behind her was. “Because...” Angie said.

Because the deadness inside her was growing: gathering force and momentum and threatening to sweep her away like driftwood in a swollen river.

And he wasn’t there to pull her out, it felt like he wasn’t really there and she felt no passion

Review

Neon – a literary magazine £2.50 (Print) FREE (e-book) 40 pages Reviewed by David Gardiner

A

print copy of this publication was sent to me for review by the editor, Krishan Copeland, so I will do my best to assess it fairly.

Perhaps a little unkindly, my immediate thought on seeing this one was: ‘school magazine’. It’s format is A5, with 40 pages (inclusive of the covers) stitched in the centre by two staples. There is no colour, but the front cover is a half-tone image and there are eight more halftone images inside, each one heavily framed in black. Visually I have to be honest and say that I thought it a bit drab. Technically speaking, it’s hard to say if it’s a home desktop printing job or not, but if it is, it’s quite a good one. The magazine has been published quarterly since 2006, making it just two years younger than Gold Dust, and it sells at £2.50 per copy, or can be downloaded as a free e-book from the magazine’s website at www.neonmagazine.co.uk. A £5 flat fee is paid for all work published, or, if preferred, contributors can have two printed copies of the magazine. Its declared focus is ‘on work that is beautifully written, cold and contemporary’.

Use of the word ‘cold’ I found intriguing, but after reading all of Issue 28 I didn’t feel any more enlightened as to the intended meaning.

Issue 21

June 2012

The edition of Neon I received had no editorial, and no articles, features or interviews, but I see from their website that they have occasionally included such things in the past – all necessarily very brief. The regular offerings are mainly poems, or stories so short that they sit on the borderline between poetry and prose, with just a single exception in the issue supplied, a story of a few hundred words called An Ending by Alanna Belak, which is a variation on the ‘waiting for the end of the world’ theme, but not, I fear, a very original one. It’s quite atmospheric though, and enjoyable as a somewhat bleak mood piece.

Any comparison with Gold Dust would be meaningless. Neon occupies a completely different niche in the small magazine market. It appears to be a one (or possibly two) person operation, and getting something ready for publication four times a year is a gruelling task, as we well know at Gold Dust. Despite having a larger team than Neon we gave up on our original quarterly schedule, and now find it difficult enough to meet our more modest twice a year ambitions.

Neon has a different mission – it simply gets new or lower-profile poets and prose writers into print and read, which is exactly what most of us thirst for. It’s a good thing for us all that such publications exist, and that people like Krishan are willing to put in the necessary effort to keep them going. I have nothing but gratitude and admiration for him, and all those like him.

www.golddustmagazine.co.uk

Gold Dust 21

SHORT STORY

The Swimming pool

by Karen Tobias-Green

The sun shone with an intensity it never had in real life...

D

riving from Ripon to Cumbria was the longest journey Claudia had ever made by

herself.

“She’ll be like a bag of bones when you see her,” Father warned.

“If you see her. Apparently she hasn’t left the house for weeks.” Tom smirked.

Driving alone she was so unattended, so autonomous that she might not even exist.

She could tilt the wheel and drive off the road into a ditch, upend the Mini and leave its wheels spinning, struggle free from the crumpled driver’s door and run for the hills. There were enough biscuits to last at least a week.

Entering north Stainmore she was still preoccupied by the dream she had had the previous night. She was back in Marie’s garden where they used to play as children, herself, Marie, Tom and Amanda.

Marie had the most beautiful swimming pool, tiled on the bottom with a glorious mosaic of green, yellow, red and amethyst tiles. A swimming pool, outdoors, in North York22

shire – it was unheard of, extravagant and outrageous. Except at the height of summer it was too unbearable to do more than paddle in, shivering in bathing suits or trunks, wearing dark glasses pushed back on their foreheads like film stars, speaking through blue trembling lips.

But she had loved the swimming pool, loved its colours and its exotic promise, loved how out of place it was in that neat, quiet lane of large, unremarkable houses. The sun shone with an intensity it never had in real life, its light bouncing off the surface of the water, the tiles beneath swaying and glittering, a riot of colour, like a living garden or a basket of gems. She could hear Amanda’s voice, feel a gentle hand on her shoulder.

“Well, are you going in or not, softie?”

“I’m building up my courage,” she replied, her voice fluttery with nerves. Although she loved the swimming pool she couldn’t swim. It was a skill that had eluded her.

Mother had taught Tom and Amanda to swim when they

were toddlers, but by the time Claudia had reached toddling age Mother was too ill. She sat in a chair in the front room, by the window, a blanket over her knees, growing slowly thinner.

That was how she remembered her, a blanket shrinking before her eyes. But now, at the edge of the swimming pool, she wished she could take a graceful dive into the glittering water, cutting through the blue like a professional swimmer. It would be good to look as sharp, as agile, as brave as Amanda with her long brown legs and grown up shapely bikini. Her own costume was a spotted one-piece, a little loose on the behind. Tom said it made her look like she was wearing a nappy.

Tom was in the pool with Marie. They were leaping and squealing like two seals. Tom splashed Marie and Marie splashed Tom. They didn’t seem to feel the cold, or perhaps it wasn’t cold at all in the dream – the sun was certainly as bright as a fiery ball in the sky and heat was coming from somewhere, although her own skin felt chilled and damp, as

The Swimming pool by Karen Tobias-Green seemed to break the surface.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw what looked like rose petals, fanning out gently over the blue water. Claudia watched her enviously, still unable to leave the safety of land.

I want to be there too, she murmured to herself. Her voice sounded strange in her ears.

It was frightening, how quickly she had reached the road that led into Ambleside. Eventually she pulled up outside a small, red brick terraced house in a quiet lane. She went to the door and knocked softly. Before she had time to imagine any kind of outcome to this knocking the door opened and Amanda stood there, pale, thin, but somehow – with her set, pointy jaw and brisk gesture to enter – a solid presence.

“Hello. I expected you earlier.”

Source: ELB

though she was standing in the shadows.

“Why don’t you join them?” she said to Amanda, nodding over to the other two.

“I might do,” Amanda replied languidly, “or I might not. Come on,” she tugged impatiently at Claudia’s strap, “Just jump. It’s not deep at this end.”

The light was incredible. It had a sort of platinum quality, brighter than silver, sharper than steel. Marie and Tom were swimming together, still at the far end, still laughing and splashing like seals, but the light lent them a far away sort of dignity, smoothing out their movements and diffusing their sounds until they looked as though they were engaged in some sort of delicious dance.

Amanda dived into the water from half way down the pool, a low, effortless dive that barely

Issue 21

June 2012

www.golddustmagazine.co.uk

This was no surprise. Although no details of expected time of arrival had been given, Claudia had no doubt that in her own mind Amanda had a different version of events.

“It’s the first time I’ve driven this far. On my own.”

Amanda pursed her lips.

This made her thin face and sallow features even more pronounced. Her former prettiness looked like it had been eaten away. “I’m surprised they let you out on your own. Anyway, put your things in here. We’ll take them up to your room later. Do you want a drink?”

Amanda nodded and followed her through into the kitchen. The room was small with white kitchen furniture and old fashioned cupboards and rows of glasses on spindly shelves all along the length of one wall. The most striking part of it, though, was the mosaic tile pattern that covered the whole of the wall opposite the shelves, the one that also held the open window through which the sun shone, reflecting globules of coloured light all across the ceiling. Amanda drew her breath in sharply. It was the swimming pool floor, transferred to this innocuous space, its beauty shrunk to fit but in no way diminished. For a moment or two she stood there and stared, taken back to the moment she had perched on the edge of the pool, not ready to jump and had watched 23

The Swimming pool by Karen Tobias-Green

Source: ELB

Amanda almost lazily stretch up, stretch out, dive in.

“Tea? Or coffee?”

Amanda’s voice still had that edge to it, as though her time was being wasted and she didn’t much care for it.

“Tea. Thank you. Did you decorate in here yourself? This mosaic wall pattern, it’s really…lovely.”

“Is it? I suppose. Gets grease in the cracks when you cook. I have to keep wiping it down. Pretty, I suppose, but not very practical. Do you still have sugar?”

They left the kitchen, balancing tea cups, and passed into the sitting room, also very white and barely furnished.

Amanda sat on a bamboo chair and motioned Claudia to the only upholstered one, covered in overstuffed cushions and

24

throws.

“So, what brings you here? Did you think I’d be in need of some sisterly advice?

How to survive being abandoned by your husband? Because if you did, forget it. And anyway, you’re hardly one to offer advice on that.”

It was a rare sensation for Claudia, anger. Generally she was a calm, some might say unnaturally buttoned-up sort of person. The most she could manage after a long drive was a mild sense of irritation.

“I came to see you because it’s been such a long time, and to be honest I needed a bit of a break.”

Amanda snorted. “Of course, who wouldn’t? I don’t know how you stand it with those two, leeching off you, using you as staff. They should

at least pay you a housekeeper’s wage.”

“If that’s all you want to do, get digs in at me, then I might as well turn round and drive straight home.”

Amanda pushed the sugar bowl towards her. “Here, sweeten up with this, and don’t be silly, talking about going back. I’m really glad you’re here. You know I am.”

Claudia unruffled her feathers a little and stirred sugar into her tea.

“They send their love, Dad and Tom. They’ve both been worried about you.”

Immediately Amanda snapped back “There’s no need.”

They drank their tea in silence. Claudia, despite the prickliness of her sister, felt a calmness descend on her in

The Swimming pool by Karen Tobias-Green this tranquil place.

“It was that mosaic that really surprised me,” she began after a while, “the one in you kitchen, you know.”

“What?” Amanda looked at her as though she though she was mad.

“The one in the kitchen; it’s so strange. It’s just like the swimming pool at Marie’s.”

A clock ticked.

“That was a very long time ago.”

“Had you forgotten?”

Claudia asked her.

“How could I forget?”

Claudia stirred her tea to fill the silence. “But it does look the same, doesn’t it, your kitchen wall and the swimming pool? How odd is that? I’m surprised you hadn’t noticed, because it’s so unusual, and because we loved going there.”

“So what do you remember about Marie’s swimming pool?” Amanda looked at her intently.

“Well, I watched you diving. I wished I could dive. And there was always Tom and Marie there, messing about.”

“Yes. There was.” Amanda sat stiffly in her chair now, her legs pulled under her.

“The last time we went there was just before we sat our exams, just before Mum died.”

“Was it? I thought we might have gone again after Issue 21

June 2012

that. Surely we went back after that?”

“No. Never. Never set foot in the place again.”

“Well, anyhow, it was a lovely swimming pool, and we were so lucky to be able to use it. You don’t get that often, growing up in rural England where it always rains.”

Amanda surveyed her carefully.

“You’re a real little Pollyanna, aren’t you? Always so glad that we had this, glad that we had that, glad that we escaped with our sanity from that bloody madhouse we were brought up in.”

“Now, come on. There’s no need for that.”

“No?” “No. But as for the sanity, well, I’m not sure of that!” She laughed self-deprecatingly but Amanda continued to regard her with great seriousness.

“That swimming pool, it was cold, don’t you remember?”

“Well, it would be. The weather here, it’s never tropical …”

“It was freezing. And the tiles were always coming loose. The last time we were there, I scraped all the soles of my feet and my toes when I dived in. I remember it clearly.

My feet started bleeding and the blood came to the top of the water in streaks, red streaks. I can see it now.”

www.golddustmagazine.co.uk

Claudia sat there, the light from the window showing up small lines around her eyes, furrows of concentration between her eyebrows, the beginning of visible signs of age.

Amanda crossed and uncrossed her legs restlessly.

She seemed too big for this small cottage, in the same way she had always seemed too big for the small lives they had led when they were growing up. But going away from home didn’t seem to have brought her much happiness: a degree from a university that she had never used, a relationship that had ended in recrimination and a house that wasn’t hers and whose walls couldn’t contain her frustration.

Claudia struggled to remember the swimming pool as Amanda had described it but to her it always had been, and always would be, a thing of beauty.

“Let’s go out for a walk.”

She stood up decisively, her face clearing.

“I remember now,” she said, brightly, “I remember what you did. When you dived in the pool and cut your foot, I saw the pink, coming up to the top of the water. I saw the pink but I didn’t know what had happened. I remember it now.”

She turned to Amanda, her face wreathed in smiles, “I just thought it was flowers.”

Gold Dust 25

How to sell your novel online Essential marketing tools for novels published in the digital age...

What is SEO? SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation.

Great – what does that mean?!

The internet is a really, really, really big place and so just posting content and hoping people will find it is a bit like publishing a book without following it up with any marketing – no-one will ever actually read it!

In fact, research shows that most people don’t even read past the first page of search results, so you can see how important it is to get your marketing messages to show up on that very first page. That way, information about your book gets read online, so that your target audience knows about your book - and how to buy it!

SEO is simply about getting your web content noticed amongst the vast jungle of pages that is the internet.

And when we talk about SEO, we are really talking about Google – which accounts for 78% of all search engine searches.* 26

Source: stock.xchng

S

o you’ve published your book – congratulations. But before you break out the champagne, it’s time to start the real work, persuading people to actually read it! Without the might of a huge mainstream publisher behind you, you are probably going to be running your own marketing campaign. And where better – and cheaper – to begin, than online? You can reach huge numbers of people at the click of a mouse. That is, if you know a little SEO…

Your SEO strategy divides neatly into 2 areas: 1. On the page SEO 2. Off the page SEO

On the page SEO Things you can do – or ask your webmaster to do - to improve your own website

Keywords Your whole SEO strategy starts here. These are the words your potential readers will type into Google.

Eg ‘Regency Romance writers’ ‘Crime novels’ ‘Best comic fiction’ Good keywords are: • unique as possible, so more focused on your target market • focused (assuming you want sales, rather than traffic) • being searched on – how much search is this keyword getting per week? (You can check with Wordtracker, Wordze or Keywordspy)

How to sell your novel online by Omma Velada Once you’ve decided on your most important keywords, you need to target your site around them, like this: • Title tag – this is the text that shows up in the reverse bar of the browser and is also used as the words to describe your page when added as a bookmark. Importantly, title tag text is also the text used for the title of your webpage on all major search engines. So, as you can see, they are pretty crucial!

How do you put in a title tag? For the HTML code, along with details of where to place it on your webpage, see w3schools.com and type ‘title tag’ into their onsite search box.

Use relevant, compelling title tags - the title tag can hold 70 characters before the search result shows an ellipsis (…). Make sure it includes your most important keywords, but also draws people in to click and read the rest of your website, e.g. ‘Crime writer Alex Smith’s astounding new novel’ • Page titles – when you give your web pages a title, don’t forget to use your keywords • Visible page copy - use your keywords liberally on the page (but not too liberally – otherwise you could be accused of the ‘stuffing’ violation, see below).

• Headings & subheadings - ensure your keywords are the most prominent words on your webpage.

• Images – alt text (the words that specify an alternate text for an image, if the image cannot be displayed), image titles and even the image file names should contain your keywords • URL structure – Your URL is the address of your webpage and for the purposes of appealing to Google’s algorithms (which favours shorter URLs), should be concise. Dashes are better than underscores, because a URL such as ‘word1-word2’ can be returned for searches of either word.

Issue 21

June 2012

Content Pages should be well-written, with quality content, and up-to-date, so that people want to keep reading, come back, even link to you.

Speed Check your site loads quickly and speed it up by cutting image sizes. 20-40kb would be a reasonable size. After resizing, you can sharpen your images (the sharpen mask in Photoshop is the perfect tool for this). If you have Photoshop, you can save your photos with its ‘Save for web’ option as JPGs, around 30 quality and a 72dpi resolution.

Another trick is to slice up a large image – you’ll often notice that the header of a website has been chopped into three or four fast-loading, yet seamless, sections.

Sitemap and Interlinking A Sitemap is a file that contains your individual webpage’s URLs - an index of your website. It’s quite easy to set one up. If you use WordPress, there is a simple plug-in (Google XML Sitemaps), otherwise you can use an online generator (XML-Sitemaps) or simply make your own.

As with a sitemap, links within your own website pointing to your own pages (where relevant) help Google’s crawlers find their way around your website and so better evaluate it.

Off the page SEO These elements are influenced by readers, visitors and other webmasters

Links Have other related websites (lots and lots and lots!) link to you. The more links (from high-ranking, relevant websites) you have, the higher you go in the rankings. First, you might want to take a look at who already links to you, if anyone! You can check quickly and for free online at

www.golddustmagazine.co.uk

27

How to sell your novel online by Omma Velada www.linkpopularity.com. So you find out you only have a handful of sites linking to you, how do you get more links?

There are two ways to get links – organic/natural linkbuilding and artificial/automated link building.

Organic/Natural linkbuilding • write great quality content – this is a surefire way to get links over time • blog about the latest news or post infographics (graphics that show data or other information) – people love to link to useful things – statistics, news, so give them something great they’ll want to link back to!

• guest blog, or write for ezines – with links back to your website in the content, of course • hold a contest – if you can find a sponsor to donate the prize in exchange for links or publicity, it won’t even cost you anything!

• broken link building – when you find a broken link on a relevant site to your own, offer to fix it with replacement content that you host from your own website – win-win, as the website gets a repaired link, while you get some link juice for Google!

• widgets – these can be something useful for your readers, such as a fresh line of text from your novel each day, something they will want to put on their website. The widget code contains the link back to your own website.

• interviews can generate plenty of links, as the interviewee will likely promote the interview along with you by linking to the item on your site and encouraging others to link to it.

• testimonials – look for websites pushing novels or fiction similar to yours – if you put your name to a well written review, you’ll often get the chance for a link back to your own site underneath.

• link exchanges • buying links • forum posting – a great way to build links – you post a thread relevant to your keyword or website with a link in it, so long as the forum allows dofollow links (links that allow a click through to another webpage).

• blog commenting – if the blog owner allows dofollow on all the commenter’s links it’s a two-way deal – the owner gets comments and you get link juice!

To find great links, it’s a good idea to build relationships with webmasters, through tweets, emails etc. Offer an interview, a guest post, etc.

Link to them. Then you can ask for that precious link in return.

If a webmaster agrees to link to you, have them use your keywords in both the anchor text and the anchor title. The anchor text is used to describe the link. The anchor title is an attribute that can hold your keyword inside. This link has both anchor text and anchor title: <a href=www.golddustmagazine.co.uk title=”magazine for writers”>Gold Dust magazine</a> And finally…

Violations Beware of annoying Google by breaching its code of conduct. If you excessively use keywords (known as ‘stuffing’), or hide them with white font on a white background, for example.

If lots of people choose to block your site from their search results, it will also count against you.

Gold Dust

*NetMarketShare

Artificial/Automated linkbuilding 28

Halls Hell – A whimsical tale of cider and ale with milk gone off and bread gone stale

Issue 21

June 2012

for cocaine is a novelty for some, but a must for others, I’m just glad that I am not fussed for I like my whiskey, my port and my beer but no class A substance could even come near that’s enough anti drug ranting for now let’s try to find upsides to halls somehow for it makes you appreciate small things in life like clean dishes, clean spoon, a fork and a knife pound coins are like gold dust, a very rare find a fivers a treat, and a tenners devine buying your own food makes you realise in time the value of money, and living in grime for living in halls is in a way bad and in a way good cos it makes you glad that halls is for first years, next year is a house fast internet, clean kitchen without the mouse that’s right a mouse, or should I say rat don’t worry, a guy came and got rid of that or at least we hope, well we’ve heard no more noise except for the fire alarm, god that annoys the hell out of all us, just when its late welcome to halls, best of luck mate

www.golddustmagazine.co.uk

Daniel Niall Campbell

Source: ELB

Packed up and eager, off I went to the heavenly hell of Nottingham Trent the Uni the heaven, the halls the hell walk in the doorway, what is that smell?

Halls are like houses just dirty with junk where people don’t study, just sleep and get drunk but if you do graphics, then you know of course 9:30 is ‘orrible when you’ve been on the sauce the Uni, the staff and the course are all fair but don’t for one second doubt that I care because Nottingham Trent isn’t Uni, it’s home just don’t leave the flat after dark if alone cos the folk who go roaming those parts after night aren’t the kind to be kind but the kind who will bite i’m making outside to be vile and unsafe its not bad, just be careful and stay with a mate because muggings do happen, police have to come and it ruins your night, and makes you feel dumb so put your damn iPhone away, use your head you’ll enjoy your night out and you’ll keep it instead one morning at 8 I walk out of my room to the kitchen , which is empty I assume to find two flat mates sitting ready the kettle on the side, boiling steady I tell them I’m proud of them, though they look dead turns out they haven’t bloody been to bed “Dan we tried to make it awake through the night but we got tired and discovered, to our delight the cocaine we still had from the night before so we took a little, then we took a bit more this was at five, now it is eight and we both feel really wide awake” but I sent them to bed, they reluctantly went bitter on the money both of them spent

29

Farm Horses in a Full Moon this full moon gaining traction above a stand of oaks, the horses can hardly contain themselves, like restless children they call among shadows, singing some tune long ago honed in their blood, dancing on a stage between meadow and moon their beauty a liquid copper flowing in a night alive with delights.

Source: stock.xchng

Michael Shorb

30

Nothing When nothing is left The toilet paper has run out The Rice Crispies have been eaten The lights have been shut off The fern has died The cat has run away When there is nothing left and we sit And eat nothing because The fridge is bare You can sing that song Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve always hated And I I will listen Because When nothing is left There is always us.

Source: ELB

Miya Reekers

Issue 21

June 2012

www.golddustmagazine.co.uk

31

SHORT STORY

Some Paper Flew Like Dust in the Wind

by Geoffrey Heptonstall The long snake made its way into the water...

‘T

his is ridiculous!’ she screamed, although no-one was laughing. She certainly wasn’t laughing. Her features were taut across her face in anger. Her voice was fraught. Something in her had worked its way from the shadows into daylight. She wasn’t afraid to feel what she felt. She wasn’t afraid to say what she felt. ‘It happens every day,’ she went on at the man in the delivery van. ‘Every day. I can’t get out. And I’m going to be late for work. I’m sick of this because of you.’

‘I’m not being funny, but I’ve got to park here,’ the man replied. ‘Got to. Nowhere else.

Be as quick as I can, sweetheart.’

‘But I’m late. I’m going to be late.’

‘Well, then, my love, the sooner I ge…’

‘Look, I’m speaking to Mr. Briggs about this. It’s simply ridiculous.’ With that the woman succeeded in guiding her car past the delivery van and onto the narrow street.

With a needless roar of defiance (from the woman, not the 32

car), she drove away into the square. There she had all the space she needed. The delivery van might have used the square quite easily. She would speak to Mr. Briggs about it, but not now for she was almost late for work. The clock chimed the last quarter before nine.

Some paper blew with the dust in the wind. Even a few long-fallen leaves skimmed across the empty space, although it was late in the season. Something of one time of year strays into another, like cool days in June, like warm days in October. People were talking about spring because they had lived in another country all their lives until yesterday.

They didn’t know about English seasons. They were amnesiac optimists. Today Bec had no time for them. She had no time for the angry woman in the car.

Bec had no time that morning for anything but the problem inside her.

Bec did not feel at ease.

Something she had eaten. Or something that was troubling her. Worry hurts. She felt not pain, but discomfort within.

Nothing as exact as pain. A

general ache. It was not going to leave her in the open air, as she had thought it might. The sight of life, the prospect of the day’s routines, can lift the burden of anxiety. This was physical hurt. It needed attention.

Bec called in at what she supposed was a pharmacy where she could explain her problem. ‘You need milk of magnolia, dear,’ the assistant said with a condescending tone. It was the voice of a dull mind which masked its lack of imagination through exercising whatever power it could find.

This was a perfect opportunity.

‘Alternative medicine here, dear,’ the dull woman explained, ‘as you’ll be able to see on the door as you go out, won’t you?’ She could have tried persuading Bec to buy something, but she chose her little triumph.

Bec hadn’t noticed this place before. Perhaps it was new. They came and they went, such places. All sorts of places changed hands. What had been a dress shop was now a café. Soon it might be empty with a Lease for Sale sign. Then it would be open

Some Paper Flew Like Dust in the Wind by Geoffrey Heptonstall again, selling cheap trinkets, before turning into another café. It wasn’t always like that.

Now it was the same everywhere.

Bec barely heard the crunch of an old and dry oak leaf that she had crushed beneath her foot as she walked.

She hadn’t seen the leaf. She didn’t care about the leaf. The trouble inside enveloped her thoughts. She needed a pharmacy. The trees swayed in the winds across the Fens. The high winds were coming in from the sea and the featureless levels that were land reclaimed from the sea. This was no place to live in winter.

All manner of complaints could be attributed to the climate: colds, fevers, rheumatism and a general feeling of gloom. Despite all this, people stayed from a variety of motives, including inertia. The English desire to be settled and at peace had proved stronger than the need to be warm and well. Bec resolved not to remain here longer than was necessary. If it were possible in the spring she would go elsewhere, for a while at least.

In the meantime she would find a reputable pharmacy that could sell her the simple remedy she needed to ease the ache that had woken her early.

She would not be working today. She could not work until the ache was dispelled. Her mind was too distracted to pay Issue 21

June 2012

attention to anything else.

In a small, quaintly-named side street was a pharmacy Bec had used many times before.

She ought not to have gone anywhere else, certainly not to that vulgar woman with her milk of magnolia, dear. Once she had the remedy she could go home again, and wait for the magic to work. There was some relief in the fact of having the medicine in her hand. The thought did not take away the problem, but it did lessen the anxiety. There was an end in sight. It was a problem that submerged all else. Bec had no memory of the incident between the woman and the delivery man. She had no thought for the dry leaf breaking beneath her feet. She had no thought for the clouds threatening rain, or possibly hail.

The oaks in the square were so known to her she hardly noticed them even on days when she wasn’t distracted by feeling unwell. Bec didn’t think then that in years to come it was to be the oaks above all that she would remember. Of everything that was memorable in this place those trees would linger as symbols of her life there. Had she known, and on that morning cared, she might have taken a fragile, autumnal leaf, and preserved it as a memorial to this day. Of course she did no such thing. Why should

www.golddustmagazine.co.uk

she? The ache inside her was certain to go, and its discomfort buried all else that was about to happen in her life. It mattered now. Now it was all that mattered.

When it was gone it would barely be remembered a day or two later. These things happen. They are soon forgotten.

They are best forgotten. Bec was sure to pass that alternative medicine shop another time, walking by as she had done any number of times before. As strangely as it had appeared it was sure to disappear, like paper blowing with the dust in the wind….

The long snake made its way into the water. It was an ugly, malodorous creature with a hot sting. When the flood came the snake was engulfed and thereby drowned. It vanished never to be seen again. Bec was rid of it at last. An hour had passed, no more, though it seemed like days. The pharmacist had told her that this new medication worked fast.

He seemed impressed, although Bec was unsure. Perhaps he was a good salesman? The best salesmen seem the most trustworthy.

But, no, he spoke the truth, as he was qualified to do. And he didn’t try to be superior. He was unassumingly in command. He knew what to do. He was right about the remedy for the ache inside her.

33

Some Paper Flew Like Dust in the Wind by Geoffrey Heptonstall Once it was out, and Bec was thoroughly cleaned, she felt exhausted, but she was relieved at her deliverance.

There was worse suffering in the world. That had been no comfort to her then. The minor irritations of life are the price to be paid for the privilege of not suffering all day every day.

The Indian pharmacist – what suffering had he witnessed?

Or had he been privileged not to see too much? Do the rich notice the poor?

When someone begged for money in the streets Bec always faced a dilemma. How was she to know if this person really was in need? They always looked the part. Of course they did. She felt easier with street performers. Some were very skilled, and they deserved a more dignified arena than the streets. She thought of the accordion-player in the shopping arcade. The last time she heard him he was playing Chaplin’s theme from Limelight, a film she had seen only a few nights before. The acoustics of the arcade lent a resonance to the music. It was not great music, but it was lovely to hear its cadences in that setting.

On the other hand there was the old man who claimed to be a Jewish actor, giving readings from various familiar works, the obvious choices to illustrate his theme. When Bec 34

saw him he was ruining Shylock’s ‘Hath not a Jew..?’ speech. The next time she saw him he was an Irish actor reciting something from the Celtic twilight in an accent that had never seen Ireland’s Eye. But Bec could not be too derisive of the dreams of a man who was happily fulfilling some ambition long buried inside him as he toiled at the government forms he filled in all day year after year. He was not asking for money, only a few moments’ attention. He wanted people to listen so that he might be for that afternoon the actor he had wanted to be all his life. It was necessary to have dreams.

Bec called Quenby to say that she felt much better, and so she was intending to be in at two in the afternoon. Quenby suggested she wait until tomorrow. ‘You need to rest,’ he told her.

He was right, although Bec didn’t like admitting that Quenby was right about anything. He had an annoying manner of standing with his pale face and slight frame, watching everything that happened. There were no secrets he couldn’t discover, or so his eyes said. They were grey eyes. They were not smiling eyes.

He was not nasty. He wasn’t even overbearing.

There were worse people to work under. The problem with him was that he was annoying because he was there. When he wasn’t there it was curious not to have an annoying presence that everyone could moan about behind his back.

That, Bec thought, was his true purpose in being there - to give the staff a focus for their discontents. Everyone made their own decisions. The office ran

Some Paper Flew Like Dust in the Wind by Geoffrey Heptonstall else would have thought of that?

Bec’s work, like everyone’s, was routine. There was something comforting about the routine. People said the same sort of things. One person always talked about his meagre salary. Another lived for her visits to France and Italy. Everyone knew about her fondness for remote farmhouses in Languedoc, and for

Source: ELB

itself, so it seemed. Quenby made very few decisions that weren’t obvious or weren’t based on precedent. His style of management was to confirm what couldn’t be avoided, and to insist on changing what was in the process of changing of its own accord. On warm days he announced his decision to turn the heating off. He made the decision seem as imaginative as it was judicious. Who

Issue 21

June 2012

www.golddustmagazine.co.uk

hill towns in the Apennines.

From time to time a customer asked an interesting question. Occasionally there was a query that was truly difficult. Occasionally there was a change in the routine. But most of the time it was the same.

Customers were polite on the whole. Some might be vexed, but few were rude. Even the anger was courteous. ‘Look,’ they would begin, ‘I know it isn’t your fault, but I have to say this isn’t good enough.’

Lost tempers were followed by genuine apologies. ‘No, no, we quite understand,’ was the standard response. How many times had Quenby said that?

The problem was that he didn’t understand. He could never see that anything was wrong.

He was something of a good-natured fool, the more foolish for thinking he was bright, and for thinking he was right. But he had shown genuine sympathy when Bec had called to say she didn’t feel well. He looked concerned when she came in the following morning.

‘It was nothing,’ Bec replied. ‘Soon gone. I feel much better.’ She was pleased to be back in another ordinary day, her thoughts no longer drifting now that they were focussed on the task she had left unfinished the day before yesterday.

Gold Dust 35

The Grove of Trees Happiness Is The Greenery The Grove Of Trees Swaying To And Fro In Harmony, Leaning Against Each Other And Singing

As This Is The Dance Of Life-In The Wood.

Danny P Barbare

Source: stock.xchng

Arms Interlocked, Feet Sturdy

With Children Of The Undergrowth Dappled With Laughter And Playing

36

Do not look them in the eye On the street What a swing they sway with How they glide and burned and dragged.

On the corner they cut me off.

In perfect click clocking, we stumble to face, with a look up – look down it was practically the same day again a calendar route, I nearly pulled downwards like a sand-measure.

They spy-glassed me, and then he came, they rolled riled like two tiny tempests traced in tracksuits.

They mullered me with their declaration but my dials were never ready for contortions and so I froze, I look up – look down.

They ordered me there to consider my footwear.

On this street, you have become a Gerd to me, and you tricked me with vantage, sword and horse knowing that it was far, and the constellation was done for.

There I was again, timing in August, subservient, you said ‘Ah!’ You parcelled me with your watch straps, You ‘Ah’ as all cells grow greasy, and I collect coins, just to count and recount.

Ladyworm sews silk, and spins another dowager, In dreams of days and weeks and onwards those leashes lead me towards chimes.

And then now, once again another hallmark, a challenge through all the slow reconsiderations between looking up - looking down, where two aged plains are buckling and breaking into each in the beat.

Source: stock.xchng

RM Francis

Issue 21

June 2012

www.golddustmagazine.co.uk

37

Chrysalis

SHORT STORY

Gary Budgen He wheeled himself in, away from the house with the smashed-faced tv...

H

e could begin his life again now that the new conservatory was complete. He wheeled himself in, away from the house with the smashed-faced television and the heavily curtained windows. In the conservatory the heat was amplified into a subtropical haze but the light was scattered on the surface of the panes and recombined into images set to his neural signature.

At the moment it was the standard factory setting of a South Sea island. But soon, as the brochure had explained, the sympathetic glass would adjust and begin to show him the idealisation of his inner desires.

He let the old woman who looked after him put plants in the corners of the conservatory. Now he would sit and absorb the heat and wait for the glass to change.

“Why did you smash the television?” the woman asked.

“Didn’t like what it showed me.”

“I’ll get some spray for these plants; get rid of all these worms.”

“They’re not worms.

They’re caterpillars. In a few 38

weeks they’ll change...”

He imagined his future in an iridescent butterfly house, the view above and around him of his idealised wishes.

The next morning he read poetry, Marvell and Donne, and the conservatory glass showed the massed leaves and branches of Epping Forest. Above the top of his book the green blur comforted him. Only once was it broken when something flitted between the trees, a flash of orange and indigo of a woman’s summer dress that he recognised.

Later that afternoon the screens adjusted again and now revealed what he had suspected. It was Wendy. It was the beach at Broadstairs on their first holiday together. She strode across the sand toward him, the wind twining her sarong around her, making her, for a moment, an exotic creature, deliciously serpentine.

“These worms are taking over,” the woman said when she brought in his late afternoon tea.

“I’ve told you...”

But already she wasn’t listening, adjusting the cushion at the back of his wheelchair, his atrophied legs.

“You don’t have to make a fuss.”

“There’s nothing wrong with you. You could get up if you wished.”

But he knew that his legs were brittle sticks. Last time he had tried to walk he had fallen and writhed on the floor in front of the television unable to reach the control.

Chrysalis by Gary Budgen though she would say something. She began to mouth the words but then the scene would shift and he would glimpse her in the distance again, and all he could do was wait for her approach.

“You really must do something about these...these things,” the woman bustled in, “if they aren’t worms then they must be maggots. Something nasty.”

He didn’t want to hear; he knew what they were even if they were proving stubborn to any metamorphosis, reluctant to be reborn.

“Anyway why are you spending so much time in here?

Why don’t you come back into the house? You can afford a new television. I can order it...”

“No...I...I don’t want to watch television. Everything’s

Source: stock.xchng

Perhaps it would have been better not to spend all his time in the conservatory, but the alternative was the house itself. He took to sleeping in the conservatory, in his chair with a blanket thrown over him, or even managing to manoeuvre onto the couch. At night, without sunlight, the glass was opaque, and in the dark he listened to the movement on the plants, the caterpillars crawling and chewing in preparation for their change.

He awoke always to Wendy filling the upper glass walls and ceiling of the conservatory. She approached from middle distance down the meadow from Glastonbury Tor, and jumped down the sand dunes of Harlech beach from the summer after.

When she got nearer, her face filling whole panes, it was as

Issue 21

June 2012

www.golddustmagazine.co.uk

changed. Nothing makes any sense anymore.”

“What do you see in those windows?”

“Go away.”

It was almost as if he might hear what Wendy was saying. He strained in his chair, stretching out his neck towards the light, the scattered light that reformed into endless versions of Wendy. He needed to get nearer and venturing back into the house he found an old walking stick from their days of hiking. He managed to push himself up out of the wheelchair and stand. Closer now, her lips were like gigantic bulbous pods, latent with meaning. But before he could make it out, he wobbled and fell back into his wheelchair.

“I love you,” he told the conservatory glass.

When the woman brought his tea he glared at her to go away.

He waited for Wendy to come again and there she was sauntering down a tree lined avenue in the grounds of Audley End House. Her hips swayed beneath her bright summer dress.

Now she was saying something again. What is it? What is it?

He was standing now, leaning on his stick he could almost make it out. And his feet squished something. The floor was covered in caterpillars.

“You’re standing up!” It was the woman. Then she saw the floor, “My God, all these worms!”

39

Chrysalis by Gary Budgen

Source: ELB

He stared at Wendy it was almost as if she could understand.

“She’s trying to tell me something,” he shouted.

“Who?” “Wendy.”

“Wendy? Is that what you see up there?” The woman began to make a sort of gulping noise, the lump in her throat moving; at first he thought it was a laugh, but as she turned and fled he realised she was sob-

40

bing.

Across the floor he watched the caterpillars turning, struggling to be somewhere else.

Using his stick he climbed up onto the sofa and managed to get his face as near as possible.

Wendy’s lips loomed before him – the slow tearing away of one from the other, the tiny strands of spittle as she mouthed the all important message...

Then an enormous droning filled the conservatory and the

woman rolled in pushing the vacuum cleaner, ripping the caterpillars from the floor, churning their bodies in the wheels and rollers, destroying any potential they had ever to change.

“No!” he screamed.

Before he knew what he was doing he swung the walking stick in a horizontal arc that should have hit the woman on the head, should have cracked her skull, except it missed and smashed into the conservatory.

The crash was spectacular, instantly short-circuiting the image.

The young woman he had seen there was gone forever.

For a moment the air was filled with a flock of glass shards, they flew around for a moment as the air rushed in from outside.

They caught the sunlight, multicoloured creatures sparkling like spangles.

He climbed down from the sofa, throwing away the stick as though it had suddenly become a snake. As it clattered on the floor he went over to the woman.

She leant on the vacuum cleaner, exhausted, tears rolled down her lined face. But now he could see though the mask of years.

“Wendy,” he said, “you’re so old.”

But as he made to embrace her he had seen his own hands, wrinkled and spotted.

“Yes,” she said, “yes.”

Gold Dust

Sonnet to a Razor BEST POEM Handle curved with silver blade, prevention Against Nature’s way. Yes, this cutting edge My only friend is. It will not mention These dreadful growths that tangle like a hedge.

Sharpness cuts the fur away, revealing Bleached and waxen flesh – I dare not show the sun My legs. Not yet! (To use that waxing Hurts so much!) Thus, my razor is the one Who will strip and tear and cut until my Skin is smooth and clean. Sore! But no longer Rough with winter hair. Pleasing to the eye My legs will be – when fake tans are stronger.

Such a fuss is made, all to get a tan In the frantic search to find my man!

Source: stock.xchng

Freya Pickard

Issue 21

June 2012

www.golddustmagazine.co.uk

41

SHORT STORY

INTERVALS

by William Jackson Carter felt the blood pulsate in his hands...

T

hese tears flow in reverse, up laminated cheeks, back into the eyes, on up behind the forehead to their source.

don’t tell me you’re at it again!”…

brush to gather up the splintered aspects of my persona.

I’ll buy you a five gallon wet/dry vac.

Once upon a time…

Pencils and pens must all point in the same direction, so that connotations float upon a sea of prose.

Your room darkens, the corners soften.

…and you lived happily ever after.

…you went up the hill, to fetch a pail of water…

This soul takes its cue from a transplanted liver. …at the very top is Abraham, waiting with a knife…

What, is that supposed to be you telling a story?

And being intensely aware of partial feelings.

Very funny. You don’t realize this’ll all be over before you can say “O. Henry.”

What, just as our thumb was placed in opposition to our fingers, affording better grasp, and we were learning to walk upright? I don’t believe it.

Then don’t.

“O. Henry.” …There, I said it, and nothing happened.

Well try again.

It’s too late to start over.

No, nothing. Except once again you’re so busy proving you’re right, you don’t know what the hell’s going on.

That fancy, illegible invitation was just another come-on for morons.

You’ve been saying that for years, as an excuse.

…but no archangel appears to save you or the day…

And thanks to those years, now it’s really true.

A cataract of platitudes that take up time and space.

That doesn’t mean we should throw in the towel.

Oh no? I happen to be the interpreter who with wax speech, semi-diaphanous phrasing, explicates the fine print in our soul’s contract, like a Jesuit on vacation.

…luckily, Isaac shows up at the last second and says, “Dad,

Would that I had a towel to throw in, plus a dustpan and

Yeah, yeah, another schoolboy with his Ur-text, analyzing

42

INTERVALS by William Jackson every single syllable until none of it makes any sense. As if your amateur soul-searching merited an audience, its own grubby cognoscenti.

from being an alcoholic to a workaholic; or from drug addict to religious fanatic. The same way St. Augustine was able to change faiths, but not his mean-spirited character.

You can’t judge a man by his Confessions.

“At least I try…” Now you sound like a pathologically optimistic little girl with a mouthful of braces, belting out a Broadway tune. Or one of those people who think they’re making progress because they switch

That’s good, because we have nothing of interest to report, let alone boast of. In fact, if some misguided fool were to document our comings and goings, or better said, our string of downfalls, the visor on their

However I am working on a fat tome called The City of Man. Silly pretension begets aesthetic convention, a candycoated synthesis of days gone by; that film script too vapid to write or revise, let alone produce. I say, enough of this pointless, morbid reasoning.

Let’s just try to be normal automatons, wanting what we can’t afford, being dissatisfied

Source: stock.xchng

At least I try. By the time you get up the nerve to seize the day, the sun’s gone down.

cap would be eaten away by moths and locusts, their well, poisoned with instant iced tea.

Issue 21

June 2012

www.golddustmagazine.co.uk

43

INTERVALS by William Jackson when we finally get it.

Right, we’re to go on like blind mice, without any explanation for this boxcar of events about to lurch forward, or why this train’s not bound for glory, but straight to the land of forktongued harpies licking the cocks of altar boys.

Why be in such a hurry to resolve all our doubts? New and bigger ones will only be along that much quicker to take their place.

I can’t believe how foreign I’ve become to myself; not a country in the world would give me a passport.

And even if we could turn back the clock, to amend crucial moments– zero times anything is still zero. the land of fork-tongued harpies licking the cocks of altar boys.

that floods one’s stomach with warm joy. events about to lurch forward, or why this train’s not bound for glory, but straight to Right, we’re to go on like blind mice, without any explanation for this boxcar of You still want explanations?

The calluses on our arms are from so many people giving us the brush-off, and that hole in our thorax is where all the anxiety rushes in…

The City of God.

We’ll just have to settle for the mere semblance of happiness, since we can’t get the real kind

…which makes perfect sense, as behind our mask is just an-

Source: ELB

Because, we’ve become so foreign to ourselves, not a country in the world would give us a passport.

We’re related to everything we ever did. That’s our nationality.

44

INTERVALS by William Jackson other mask, and behind that, a void…

The City of Man. …Oh, once in a while we put together a poem or a Parthenon, but mostly we’re too obsessed with our own minutiae…

The Concussions. …and later, when we’re bobbing on the wake of our own actions— let’s not forget that insane chapter…

We never seized the day. Not even one. …though why am I saying “chapter,” when there hasn’t been a narrative block or even a few lousy scenes… contract between God and Satan, like a Jesuit on vacation.

I’m the law clerk who with wax speech, semi-diaphanous phrasing, deciphers the …if anything, it’s simply a game, a monopoly card that reads: “GO TO HELL. GO DIRECTLY TO HELL. DO NOT PASS GO. DO NOT COLLECT THIRTY PIECES OF SILVER…” “St. Augustine.” …There, I said it, and nothing happened.

Issue 21

June 2012

you philosophizing? …then again, it’s both more and less than a game, rather a never-ending process of estrangement, a slow-motion pantomime whose stage is not all the world, only dark blue shadow on a thin crust of snow… grasp, and we were learning to walk upright? I don’t believe it. just as our thumb was placed in opposition to our fingers, affording better …or to be more precise, one giant horror museum, not the cultural institution you wanted named in your honor, with a mechanical Da Vinci Man doing jumping jacks on the ticket counter, swinging limbs of contrived proportions to describe a perfect circle, astounding crowds of visitors from towns where everyone dies of cancer or boredom…

And being intensely aware of partial feelings.

In that case, we’d better start over.

It’s too late for significant change.

You’ve been saying that for years, as an excuse.

And thanks to those years, now it’s really true.

That doesn’t mean we should throw in the towel.

Would that I had a towel to throw in, plus a dustpan and brush to gather up the splintered aspects of my personality.

I’ll buy you a cordless vac.

I’ll buy you a fifty gallon drum. …who get their dose of Greek tragedy from a Washington anchorman, between commercials for tampons and light beer, and their future told by a vivacious weatherwoman as she gives the barometer reading and shakes her ass, blaming frowsy midwives for the incontinent skies…

Very funny. You don’t realize this’ll all be over before you can say “Immanuel Kant.”

What, just as we’ve entered the computer age, and are about to find a cure for hiccoughs? I don’t believe it.

Then don’t.

“Immanuel Ka—”

What, is that supposed to be

www.golddustmagazine.co.uk

Gold Dust 45

SHORT STORY

My Beautiful Smile

by Anne Goodwin It would never have happened if sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d let me borrow her car...

I

'm walking past the plate glass windows of the Wellcome Foundation when they hit me with it. Above the roar of the traffic along Euston Road, cocky as a novelty ring-tone: "Cheer up! It might never happen."

I don't flinch. I know what they're after and they're not going to get it. I keep my head down and walk on. For all they know, I might not even have heard.

Yet I can't stop my mind flicking through all the things I could've come back with. If I had a pound for every time I've had that said to me ... I wish I had the guts to march right back and smack them in the mouth. If I had a pound for every time I wouldn't be getting into debt to fund the operation.

To settle myself, I do my meditation as I walk along, listing all the things around me that are grey. My boots, my scarf, my leggings. Tarmac, pavement, sky. You know where you are with neutrals.

My second favourite colour is beige.

46

The ash falling from the cigarettes of the lads outside the Wellcome. My treacherous handbag. My hoodie. Roll on the day my hair goes grey like my mum's.

It would never have happened if she'd let me borrow her car. I'm all right driving: snug behind a screen, leaving the lights to take care of my non-verbals. A flash of the headlights can be as gallant as a curtsy going: "After you!" Or as sour as a clenched fist and a scowl: "I was here first!" I sit at the wheel marvelling at the vehicle's virtuosity.

But mum doesn't trust me to drive in central London, so both this week and last I came down by train. I told her I was meeting a friend at the National Portrait Gallery. She wrinkled her nose so I said it was a girl I'd met on the chat room. Mine must be the only mother in the world who wishes her daughter would spend more time online.

It wasn't so bad on the train. Both times I've managed to get a seat on my own, the back of the seat in front like a

shield. I should've realised last week that the Tube wouldn't be so cosy. That's why I decided to walk from St Pancras today.

It's not a great trek to Harley Street if you're young and fit.

But I hadn't bargained for the men on their smoke break.

It was raining last week

My Beautiful Smile by Anne Goodwin crease in the grey leather of my bag. I had my iPhone inside, but I didn't think I'd get a signal. Besides, I've moved on from Facebook and Twitter.

And those emoticons my mother loves so much make me want to scream.

As the train began to slow down for the station, I stood up and shuffled into the aisle.

That's when I did the stupid thing: I noticed the woman opposite had a handbag identical to mine.

Of course, she noticed my noticing. It was the recognition she'd been after from the moment she sat down. To underline the point, she cocked her Source: stock.xchng

when I came for my assessment, so I didn't have much choice. I took the Bakerloo line: only two stops to Great Portland Street. At first, it was fine.

Grey faces turned in on themselves. Ears plugged into iPods or lost in the music of the train. Eyes fixated on newsprint or, more often, on nothing. No one giving a monkey's about anyone else. Until a woman flopped onto the seat opposite at Euston Square.

She'd just made it on board before the doors closed.

She wriggled into place, itching for some acknowledgement of this wondrous feat. I kept my head down, intent upon a

Issue 21

June 2012

www.golddustmagazine.co.uk

head, raised her bag and grinned.

A lorry driver, seeing another truck approaching, will flash his lights to acknowledge a kindred spirit. But I wasn't in the car and all I had to offer was a blank stare.

The clinic was done out in beige, although they'd probably call it oatmeal. But the decor made the prodding and the prying somewhat easier to bear.

Once the tests were over, the doctor pronounced his verdict. "We can't give you a smile you can turn on and off. You can't activate a muscle if there isn't an existing nerve. But we can tighten things up around the mouth. You'd still have a fixed expression, but you wouldn't look so glum."

It was what I'd expected.

Even so, I felt the emptiness inside me grow.

He widened his eyes. "If you decide to go ahead, we'll do some mock-ups on the computer so you'll know in advance how it's going to look.

There's a degree of choice over how big a smile you end up with."

I knew exactly what kind of smile I wanted. I'd been scrawling red crayon over photos of myself since I was four years old. But I'd been around hospitals enough to know how to play the game. "That sounds great."

47

My Beautiful Smile by Anne Goodwin "Right. Have a think about it and let me know what you've decided next week."

"Why wait till next week?

I've already made up my mind."

The doctor patted my hand. "Most people appreciate some time to think it over."

"I've been thinking it over all my life."

"Then one more week won't make much difference."

He twitched his cheek muscles. "Go home and talk it through with your parents."

"I'm not a child!" My date of birth was on all the paperwork. "I don't need my parents' permission."

He arched his eyebrows.

"Of course not. But their views might be of some use."

"What do they know?

They haven't got the syndrome."

He wrinkled his forehead.

"They could help you weigh up the advantages and disadvantages."

"Disadvantages?"

He narrowed his eyes. "A smile you can never switch off.

Looking cheerful when you're feeling sad."

"I'm willing to take that risk." I thought of telling him about the woman on the Tube.

Yet, with his flexible face, the doctor had as much chance of seeing it my way as my parents. "At least I'd get it right half the time."

48

His jaw dropped slightly.

"I'm going to arrange an appointment for you to see our counsellor."

"I don't need therapy."

He pursed his lips. "I'm not prepared to operate until I'm convinced you've worked this through."

"I've got to be vetted?

When I'm the one who's paying?"

"It's in the practice guidelines."

I pointed at my face with both hands. "What the hell does a do-gooding counsellor know about living with this?"

The doctor pulled back the corners of his mouth. "You'd be surprised."

The counsellor smiles as she collects me from the waiting area. Smiles as she directs me to a comfy chair.

I've been meaning to play it cool, but before I know it I'm launching into the story of the handbag woman on the Tube.

"People are such narcissists.

They keep pushing for a reaction."

"You didn't like having something in common? Or was it that she wanted to share it with you?"

Her questions niggle me. I change the subject, jabbering on about the staff outside the Wellcome Foundation. "You'd think after twenty-three years I'd have learnt to avert my

face."

She smiles. "Why did you look at them?"

"I didn't fancy them if that's what you're thinking."

"Not at all," she says. "I was thinking of something far more fundamental."

There's a tickle in my chest as I remember. "I thought it was amusing. The incongruity, you know. Three men smoking outside this flashy centre for health care research."

Again, she smiles. "You wanted to share the joke?"

"But I just looked gormless."

"You couldn't share the moment because you couldn't smile."

"Exactly!" This is going better than I expected. "Which is why I've got to have the surgery. To make that basic connection. To come across as a human being."

The counsellor doesn't speak. Her smile says it all.

"If I had a pound for every time my mum's told me I'm fine as I am ... I know my parents love me, but it isn't enough." I think again about the handbag woman. I was annoyed she wanted my attention. Yet, deep down, I was as desperate to make contact as she was.

"You never get used to it.

You'd think, wouldn't you, when it's a condition you're born with, it would seem normal to you,

My Beautiful Smile by Anne Goodwin struggle to understand. "When I was a baby -- so I've been told -- it took a while to get a diagnosis. They thought I had a learning disability." I stop, startled by a new idea. Not even an idea, but a feeling. Not quite a feeling, but a space. An emptiness, a hole, a lack. I grope for the words to explain it. "My parents ... when I couldn't give them what they expected ... what they needed ... they must have felt as scared and confused as the strangers I pass in the street." I don't bother with the tissues. I let the tears fall. I'm hardly aware of the counsellor now, sitting across from me as I face up to who I am. And how it was in

Source: stock.xchng

even if others find it odd. But I hate it. The reaction I get from strangers most of all. They see my face and they don't know what to make of it. There's just this mask. It makes them uncomfortable, and they retaliate.

Come out with something that sends the bad feelings bouncing back to me." I reach across and take a tissue from a box on the low table between us. "No one ever says, Oh poor you, it must be so hard having Moebius. It's always, Cheer up! It might never happen."

She watches me, still smiling. "It's so isolating."

I'm impressed she's caught on so quickly. And a little scared. Even my parents

the beginning.

The infant whose mother doesn't have a clue: frowns when I need her to smile, pouts when I need her to delight in me. "I've felt so lonely. My whole sodding life."

I stare at the oatmeal walls, wailing for what I never knew I'd missed. It's going to take more than a surgical smile to put that right.

After a while, I seem to run out of tears. I don't know what I think any more, don't know what I feel. But something's shifted. Lurking at the bottom of that deep dark hole, there's an extra piece of me. I look up at the counsellor. It doesn't matter that I can't produce a smile.

She's sitting exactly as before, back straight, legs slightly apart, hands resting in her lap.

And she's smiling, her face a mask of eternal pleasantness.

"Oh my God!" My hand goes to my mouth, although I've no expression to hide. If I were in the car, I'd be tempted to flash my headlights.

Or maybe not. It strikes me that in all my years of longing, I've never really asked myself what constitutes a smile.

She tilts her head, still wearing that inane grin. "Yes?" I pick up my bag. There's nothing more this place can give me. Not now I can plunge into the hollowness inside me, and touch the edges of my beautiful smile.

Gold Dust

Issue 21

June 2012

www.golddustmagazine.co.uk

49

Review

Serpentine

by Catherine Edmunds $5.95 (e-book) BeWrite Books, 2012 XXX Pages Reviewed by David Gardiner

I

t took me a while to understand what was going on in Serpentine. Until I was about a third of the way into the story my reaction was fairly negative. I could see that it was a very well-written book, but one whose heroine I found difficult to like. The Nietzschean quotation at the front: ‘Art is the proper task of life’, seemed to require of me that I excuse all kinds of unattractive character traits in the protagonist on the grounds that she was faithful to this imperative.

The beginning part of the novel is concerned with Victoria’s search for something or somebody, the man of her dreams presumably, and she goes from one prospect to the next, a latter-day Goldilocks, always finding fault, always deciding this particular lover isn’t quite right in some crucial respect. Her ‘ex-boyfriend compartment’, we are told, contains ‘last year’s historian and at least three members of the university rambling club’.

José, her recent Spanish holiday lover, seems like a stereotype Latin philanderer except for his attempts to communicate with her and continue the relationship after she returns to England – attempts that make her uncomfortable and ambivalent for a while, and which 50

she tries to reject – but José is persistent and is destined to come into her life again. For now though he haunts her thoughts and her dreams, a hedonistic ghost to mock her seriousness and undermine some of her romantic illusions and the insincere façade she has created for new love Simon. Not being much drawn to Victoria I find myself warming to José instead. But I am being led up the camino del jardin.

Simon, the Adonis-like antique dealer whom she meets on a train, at first comes across as repressed and formal and prematurely old – the incarnation of Eartha Kitt’s Englishman who ‘needs time’. Difficult to believe in at first, he is in fact a very well-drawn character and one who grows on the reader throughout the novel.

John, her best friend’s ex-husband, is chronologically older and has a large number of unpleasant character traits, starting with a tendency to domestic violence. With the exception of Simon I think it’s fair to say that the male gender doesn’t come out of this novel very well.

The things I initially disliked about Victoria were her seeming self-absorption, seriousness, and lack of warmth or empathy in her personal relationships. It was clear that she had needs, but less clear that she was interested in or capable of meeting the needs of others. I frankly wondered what all the men saw in her.

For a while I think my inability to like Victoria became a barrier to my enjoyment of the novel, but quite soon Edmunds provided me with sufficient insights to understand her better and care about her a bit more. This progression, I might add, continued throughout the course of

the novel.

But a far more fundamental truth also dawned on me as my reading of the novel progressed. I grew to realize that I had come to this story with a whole basket of assumptions and presuppositions, and was trying to force it into a mould in which it did not fit. This is not a story about a young artist’s love affairs, happiness or physical or emotional wellbeing. It refers to those things, but its theme is much bigger. The clue is in the opening quotation from Nietzsche.

Another quotation that kept coming to mind was one from Aristotle’s Ethics that we kicked around in a seminar many decades ago: ‘What can be the good of each but that in whose name all else is done?’. What is it that really matters about an individual or about life itself? What are the terminal values, the things that are good in themselves and require no further justification, and what are the lower order values that exist to serve these?

The fact of the matter is, it doesn’t matter whether I like Victoria, or even whether Victoria likes herself. It doesn’t matter whether she is a bit of a bastard or whether the man she ends up with is a bit of a bastard too. It doesn’t even matter whether they are happy together or whether their relationship is tempestuous and destructive. Those are all lower-order considerations and not what the novel is about. The novel, quite simply, is about art. It is, I think, an examination of the conditions under which art flourishes, and the conditions under which it withers and atrophies. Once I had grasped that basic fact every-

Review: Serpentine by Catherine Edmunds

thing else fell into place, and I found myself in awe of the skill with which the thesis had been constructed.

In some respects Edmunds makes heavy demands of her readers, but she gives a great deal in return. It is a novel that you often want to argue with, full of characters that you want to take aside and tell to lighten up, or grow up, or stop hurting one another, or stop expecting the impossible from human relationships. It forces you to take sides, and to examine your own beliefs about what the proper task of life should be.

And this is accomplished through elegant prose, and without a wasted word or a dull moment. Is it reasonable to ask any more of a novel?

Gold Dust

Catherine Edmunds Catherine is a musician, artist and writer. Examples of her work can be seen at:

www.freewebs.com/catherineedmunds and she maintains a blog about her creative life at:

www.catherineedmunds.blogspot.co.uk Issue 21

June 2012 www.golddustmagazine.co.uk

51

Contributors This issue, we received over 70 short story & over 40 poetry submissions from all around the world, including the US, the UK, New Zealand, Australia, Nigeria, Canada, India, France, Spain and Ireland.

Short stories Ralph Goldswain Ralph Goldswain is a compulsive short story writer and has been published in journals and anthologies both in the UK and the United States. He is a retired teacher and has more time, now, to indulge his passion. Ralph lives in London, where, among his many interests, he attends to his grandfatherly duties, conducts short-story workshops, participates in public readings, pursues his other passion, Shakespeare, and, of course, continues to write stories. Ralph co-founded a writers’ group some years ago that meets weekly in a pub: it is well attended by local writers, who have the opportunity to share their work with other writers.

Benjamin Evans Benjamin is a writer and endurance athlete hailing from Guildford in Surrey. In between racing marathons he produces works of philosophical fiction, inspired by the existential novels of Camus and the hard boiled school of Chandler and Hammet, and has completed two novels for which he issearching for publishers. His work is characterized by searches for identity, as the children of an accelerated culture grow up to find a world with the brakes slammed on. It is about looking behind and through, to find the reality behind the away from the office and the shop window, and the trials and tensions that come with this. He studied Philosophy and English at Leeds University and also a Creative Writing diploma through the Open University, and is now trying to realize a lifetime ambition of having a top 100 bestselling novel while in the top 100 UK marathon runners. I am close to the latter but still dreaming of the former! Further works can be found at his webpage: www.benjaminevans.co.uk.

Wayne Dean-Richards Wayne Dean-Richards is a teacher, father of three and the author of many pieces of short fiction, published in both the UK and the US. His stories Me and Groucho and I’m Bruce Lee were published in previous editions of Gold Dust. He is an accomplished reader of his work, both live and on radio. Some of his short fiction was collected in the critically acclaimed At The Edge, and a novel - Breakpoints - is available from Amazon. See www.waynedeanrichards.com for more details.

52

Karen Tobias-Green Karen writes short stories and poetry. She lives in Leeds with her husband and 2 teenage children. She teaches dyslexic students in an art college and enjoys exploring the links between art and the written word. She has recently had a poem published, hot on the heels of her story in Gold Dust, and is a firm believer in creative momentum.

Geoffrey Heptonstall A Contributing Writer at Contemporary Review, recently Geoffrey Heptonstall has published stories in Cerise Press, Litro and Sunk Island Review. He has published poetry in Adirondack Review, The Bow Wow Shop, Caught in the Net, Decanto, Enigma, Incandescent, Inclement, International Literary Quarterly, Living Poets, London Grip, The London Magazine, The PEN, Poetry and Audience, 10x10, Turbulence, The Third Way and The Write Place at the Write Time. Essays and reviews appeared in The Bow Wow Shop, Cerise Press, The London Magazine, Prole, The Tablet and The TLS. Gary Budgen Gary Budgen was born and grew up in London, where he still lives. He has, at various times, been a switchboard operator, database developer and university lecturer. His work has been published in magazines such as Interzone, Dark Horizons and Aoife’s Kiss. Most recently his work has been in two anthologies, After the End from Static Movement and Where Are We Going from Eibonvale Press. His website is at: www.garybudgen.wordpress.com William Jackson William Jackson studied Comparative Literature at Cal State Fullerton and also Art at the Barnes Foundation in Merion, PA. He lived in Madrid for twelve years, writing, and teaching ESL. His book of short stories, The First Step, was published by Neshui (St. Louis); individual stories have appeared in various literary reviews in the US, UK, and New Zealand. He currently works in a group home with brain injury clients to support his fiction habit.

Anne Goodwin Anne Goodwin has had some of her short fiction published online and in print. Recent favourites include Doctoring (Rose & Thorn, Spring 2010), Elementary Mechanics (The Yellow

Contributors

Poems Daniel Niall Campbell Daniel Niall Campbell landed naked on earth on 12th February 1991 pretty much like the Terminator. He went into a bar full of bikers, took some clothes and a motorcycle, forgot completely about his mission of killing John Conner, and has been residing in the East Midlands ever since. He likes collecting guitars, illustration books and those little cardboard things at Debenhams that you spray perfume onto, because the designs are always really interesting. He once made a sock monkey, which made him think that he could become a world renowned poet, so he learnt to spell, bought a shiny Apple Mac computer, and set to work changing lives with his rhymes of wisdom.

Michael Shorb Michael Shorb's work reflects an abiding interest in environmental issues, history, and the lyrical form, as well as a strong focus on satirical material. His poems have appeared in over 100 magazines and anthologies, including The Nation, The Sun, Michigan Quarterly Review, Queen's Quarterly, Poetry Salzburg Review, Commonweal, Rattle, Urthona, and European Judaism.

Miya Reekers Miya Reekers is currently studying fiction as an MFA student at San Francisco State University. She has been a contributing writer for two local San Francisco blogs â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Haighteration.com and sfblotter.com. She is currently working on a collection of short stories that she hopes to complete by 2014.

Danny P Barbare Danny P Barbare has been writing poetry on and off for 31 years. His poetry has appeared in over 500 online and print journals around the world. His poetry has appeared in the Santa Barbara Review, Boston Literary Magazine, The Houston Literary Review, and Writing Ulster. He says it helps take rejection like a grain of salt or sand. He resides in Greenville, SC where most of his poetry is set. He enjoys mostly writing in free verse.

RM Francis RM Francis is a poet living in Leeds. He grew up in the Black

Issue 21

June 2012

country and Studied English Literature at Portsmouth University. He is Editor of My Father Lost Me To The Beast At Cards and has had his work published in Inclement, Ditch, Bare Hands, Awen, The Journal, Message in a Bottle, Venus in Scorio, Burning Houses, Sad Poems and Fire.

Freya Pickard Freya Pickard is a novelist and poet living in England with her partner in a little house on the side of a hill. Her first novel, Dragonscale Leggings, was published in 2009 and is available to buy from Amazon (UK). She is currently working on a futuristic series, as well as drafting a novel about living with depression. She runs two blogs: http://dragonscaleleggings.blogspot.co.uk http://purehaiku.blogspot.co.uk

Reviews & Features Omma Velada Omma Velada read languages at London University, followed by an MA in translation at Westminster University. Her short stories and poems have been published in numerous literary journals and anthologies. In 2004 she founded Gold Dust magazine. Her first novel, The Mackerby Scandal (UKA Press, 2004), received critical acclaim. She has also published a short-story anthology, The Republic of Joy (Lulu Press, 2006).

David Gardiner Ageing hippy, former teacher, later many things, including mental health care worker, living in London with partner Jean, and Charlotte the chameleon. Adopted daughter Cherelle has recently moved to Australia with her boyfriend. Four published works, SIRAT (science fiction novel), The Rainbow Man and Other Stories (short story collection), The Other End of the Rainbow (short story collection) and Engineering Paradise (novel) as well as many anthology entries and competition successes. Interested in science, philosophy, psychology, scuba diving, alternative lifestyles and communal living, travel, wildlife, cooking and IT. Large, rambling home page at www.davidgardiner.net.

Source: stock.xchng

Room, Autumn 2011) and How's Your Sister? (Greatest Uncommon Denominator, 2009). Anneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s story Madonna and Child was published in Gold Dust Issue 20. She is also working on two novels and has a writing website at: www.annegoodwin.weebly.com.

www.golddustmagazine.co.uk

53

The Back Page

XXXX

Watch this space...

Issue 22 of Gold Dust magazine It may seem like a long way off now, but put a note in your diary that Issue 22 will be out in November, in good time for your winter reading!

Anthologies Our 2 anthologies are available for sale from www.lulu.com/golddustmagazine

Liquid Gold (Lulu Press, December 2010) Anthology of poems ÂŁ6.50

Solid Gold (Merilang Press, January 2010) Anthology of short stories ÂŁ4.50

To submit to Gold Dust magazine Our (short) submission guidelines can be found at: www.golddustmagazine.co.uk/Writers

54