Litro 184: Memory Edition US

Contents

Issue 184 Summer 2023

Editor’s Letter

Eric Akoto

Contributors

Fiction

“Gorgeous” by Matthew Perkins

Essay

“In Pursuit of Family” by Rukmini Girish

Fiction

“We Are Near the End Now” by Terry Dubow

Fiction

“Baby Clean” by Hannah Thorpe

Flash

“Other Poetry” by N/A Oparah

Essay

“The Smell of Home” by Farzana A Ghani

Flash

“René Magritte’s The Banquet” by Dorothy Lune

Fiction

“Tuscany! Tuscany!” by GC Perry

Essay

Eric Akoto eric.akoto@litrousa.com | Oindrila Gupta Oindrila@litrousa.com | Catherine McNamara Flash@litrousa.com | Zadie Loft Zadie@litrousa.com | Serene Allen media@litrousa.com | Javeria Hasnain javeria@litrousa.com | Monica

Cardenas | Kik Lodge kik@litrousa.com | Siyona Lal Siyona@litrousa.com | Sara

Prasad sara@litrousa.com | Bobby Wilson bobby@litrousa.com | Cover Image by Javier Rey [Mirages #10] ©Javier Rey. | Contents Page Image by Eric Akoto | General Enquiries +1 (646) 478-7271 | Subscription Enquiries subscriptions@ litrousa.com | All other enquiries info@litrousa.com | Address 33 Irving Place, New York NY 100003, USA © Litro Media 2023 | ISSN number: ISSN 2687-735 X

“Finding Flow” by Samantha Pyrah

Flash

“Maps to Lost Futures” by Carella Keil

Essay

“I Don’t Have a Very Good Memory” by Gavin Baird

EDITOR'S LETTER

Memory isn’t necessarily the first thing that comes to mind when you think of summer. Sun tans, ice creams, beaches: sure. Vacations, relaxation, parties: hopefully! But memory, nostalgia, meditations on the past: no.

Yet, in our open call for submissions this summer, it was memory that came to the surface as an overarching theme. There was memory of past relationships, of families, of people we used to be; memories of past summers, childhoods, and the C-whoshall-not-be-named pandemic of 2020 to 2022.

Reading through all these reminiscent stories and essays caused us at Litro to pause and reflect. To remember all the events and occasions of the summer as we worked on bringing this issue together. There’s been wildfires in Canada, and orange skies in New York. Cinema successes for Barbie and Oppenheimer, and unprecedented strikes from Hollywood’s actors and writers. Hip-hop turned 50, Twitter became X, and there’s been heatwave after heatwave after heatwave. Remember all that? It’s funny just how quickly memory can drift away.

So as the world heated up, and summer brought its fair share of news stories and turmoil, we’ve opted for a slower version of summer. A summer after the heat has died down. A summer that simmers, not boils. As August draws to a close, we invite you to take a dip into the pool of stories and essays we’ve curated, and allow yourself to reflect on the summer just gone.

Opening our issue, Matthew Perkins brings you a story of love, the beach, bodies, and the fluidity of gender identity in “Gorgeous.” Rukmini Girish’s essay, “In Pursuit of Family,” takes us to India on a summer vacation, and meditates on the meaning of family. As a change of pace, Terry Dubow’s “We Are Near the End Now” and Hannah Thorpe’s “Baby Clean” narrate the lives of young women navigating the realms of dating, mothers, and employment in America’s busiest cities. Our flash pieces from N/A Oparah, Dorothy Lune and Carella Keil give insight into a mother-daughter relationship, the voice behind a painting, and the way grief and memory intertwine. Farzana A Ghani takes all the memories of family and childhood and gathers them into an essay on food as she attempts to cook her first solo Eid as a second-generation immigrant. As the issue heads towards its end, GC Perry’s “Tuscany! Tuscany!” details the violent breakdown of a marriage, and Samantha Pyrah tries to reconnect with nature in the face of the pandemic and climate crisis in “Finding Flow.”

And rounding off this issue, we have a very special essay by Gavin Baird. A powerful, honest piece from a survivor of the 1996 Dunblane massacre, “I Don’t Have a Very Good Memory” gives us the theme of our issue. Our earlier news round-up didn’t account for the 470 mass shootings that have occurred across the US so far this year, and we hope this essay can serve as yet another reminder of the long way we have to go for the victims and survivors. So, whether you’re dipping a toe in, or submerging yourself all in one go, we hope you enjoy Litro’s summer issue, and we’ll see you again in the fall.

Eric Akoto

Javier Rey

ERIC AKOTO

Mirages #10

Javier Rey

About the Cover Art: Mirages. The idea of the monumental, utopian, and modern city is constantly debated due to its own fragility. The idealization of the city is weak and vulnerable, threatened by the rudeness of its inhabitants. Mirages is a project that interprets this unrealizable idea of the city, creating a route of buildings that seem to float unpolluted, breaking the uniformity of the sky and integrating into it like castles of glass, where contemporary society deposits the idea of unattainable perfection. These crystalline masses reflect the sky as if they were above all things, camouflaging themselves, creating a bridge between the natural and the artificial.

Peter covered his chest, shoulders and legs with spray-on sun cream. A fly settled on his knee. It padded across his leg, brushing through the hairs, until, and he didn’t know why he did this, he sprayed it with the sun cream. One of its legs was stuck, glued to a hair on his knee. It finally made its escape from the sticky area, crawling up a hair just below his shorts that was longer and thicker than the others. When it got to the end of the hair, it realised that it couldn’t go any further and was forced to turn around, to head back towards the root. Peter flicked it away. He opened a can of beer and looked out at the lake and tried to let his thoughts run and run, as he had been looking forward to doing all day, letting them settle on whatever they settled on.

He wasn’t alone by the lake. Couples sat, two by two, rubbing sun cream on one another, reading their books, lying top to tail or side by side, one arm around the body next to theirs, the other flung above their heads, touching each other’s hair or holding each other’s hands so that their arms looked like the antennae of a single insect being.

Those who weren’t paired up were, like Peter, mainly young men who looked like they had stopped off at the lake on their way home from work. One guy, his blonde hair wild and matted, threw his bike into the sand, took off his cotton shirt and, as Peter watched, dropped his khaki shorts and his underwear. Naked, the man walked into the water until the water covered his thighs and obscured the tattoo on his leg. A dragon? A single tentacle?

Peter imagined himself and the man lying next to each oth

GORGEOUS

Matthew Perkins

er, the man’s tanned, tentacled leg wrapping around his own. There was something macho and unthoughtful about how the man let himself slap into the water, so unselfconsciously un-deft and handsome. With that slap he was gone, swimming away, out into the lake.

Peter had brought along a copy of Women in Love. He had just read the chapter in which a young man, a bookish type with a little beard and spectacles, sits beside a lake and watches his handsome friend, a tall Nietzsche-reading industrialist, swan-dive into a lake from a wooden jetty. The bookish man watches as his handsome friend glistens, moving across the jetty like a beam of light, and when he dives, the man shimmers like the surface of the water, before he hits it and vanishes.

Peter’s English teacher at school had once taught D.H. Lawrence at an American university but had ended up at Peter’s school in England because he hadn’t liked the idea of teaching the work of one man for the duration of his career.

At times, Peter’s English teacher had seemed desperately sad. One November day, Peter had come into the classroom to find his teacher looking out at the drizzle over the school fields. His teacher had said: “See that? That’s how I feel all the time.”

Peter’s teacher had also told him, another time, when Peter had been packing away his books after a lesson, “If I wrote a book on Lawrence, I would call it, Landscape and Memory.”

But Peter came to understand that his teacher had close to a contempt for Lawrence, the kind of contempt

that people only feel after years in a doomed and painful marriage, where neither person understands the other, not really.

“For someone whose novels were banned, were censored, by the British courts for being so explicit, what a conventional view of the sexes Lawrence has, boys. The sky is the sky. The earth is the earth. The men and the women till the fields below the great expanse of sky.”

There was something about the scene before him now, as he sat beside the lake, which reminded Peter of what his English teacher had said. Men and women sprawled half-naked, or completely naked, by the shore. The bodies of the men, hard, muscular, glistening like the surface of the water. The women wearing serious expressions and floral dresses, which they pulled off and left in piles on the shore as they stepped, cautiously, across the stones and through the reeds to get into the lake to swim. They thought of themselves as manly men and womanly women. There was something old-fashioned, kitsch, and a little frightening about all of it.

One day, he had asked his teacher about the scenes in the novel in which men did have, what seemed to him at least, pretty racy encounters with other men.

“Don’t you see that there’s something dishonest about these scenes?” Peter wasn’t sure.

“Remember, his male characters fall in love with the women,” his teacher explained, “not with the men. Don’t make the mistake of seeing him as too revolutionary or too queer. I made that mistake myself.”

IN PURSUIT OF FAMILY

Rukmini Girish

I have been to this flat in Ashok Nagar only once before, in 2017, when I visited Raghav Maama and Parvati Maami before my parents arrived in India. That time, we sat and drank filter coffee (they don’t make tea and twenty-four is too old for hot milk) and ate homemade mixture and thattai and looked at photo albums of their son’s engagement and a poojai they had done recently. It’s been almost two years and I know I wouldn’t have been able to navigate the courtyard in the dark if I was alone. But Maya Chithi has been to this apartment many times, and she walks us around corners and through passages until finally, we take a lift up to the third floor, take off our shoes and knock on a gleaming wooden door.

“Vaango, vaango.” My mother’s uncle ushers us in after sticking his head around the door. Raghav Maama’s neat little mustache has been growing whiter over the years, and his hair is now almost entirely white. His wife, Parvati Maami, has gone significantly grayer as well, and she’s limping a little as she comes out of a room off the main hall.

Since my mother and I are only in Chennai for a week, they’re hosting a potluck dinner with most of my mother’s cousins, the part of the family I spent the most time with growing up. When everyone arrives, the living room fills with laughter, conversation and familiar jokes. Dinner is brilliant, as I was expecting it to be. They have remembered that my mother likes the tamarind

tang of vathakuzhambu and I love potato roast and appalam. So dinner is rice with those and a massive assortment of other accompaniments—ghee, karuveppilai podi (which I never buy in the US because curry leaves lose their potency after a few days in the fridge, let alone when powdered and shipped across continents), tomato rasam tangier than my mother’s because it probably contains tamarind too, a coconut-based aviyal studded with vegetables, tomato thokku and kalanda thayir chaadam with bits of ginger, green chili and koththamalli. As we’re serving ourselves second helpings, I ask my favorite of my mother’s cousins how her children are doing. She tells me about their schoolwork and what the older one is planning to study in college, and I marvel for a moment at how my most enduring memory of that child-who-is-nearly-anadult is how she once bit me so hard I saw the marks of her teeth in my skin for the next half hour. We laugh about that. And then she says, “You know, they were saying konjam bore adikkarathu after this latest wedding. No more family functions until Ruki’s wedding; that has to be next, no?” She looks at me. I look at her. And I laugh and raise my eyebrows in what I hope is a mysterious fashion, and then retreat to the sofa and sit down next to Maya Chithi. I was expecting questions about boyfriends and marriage too, and I was never planning to come out to my family on this visit, but something begins to niggle at me. I no longer understand the distinction between what is communal and what must remain unsaid. Rather, it makes no sense to me. My weight, my prematurely

graying hair (less the hair than the fact that I choose not to dye it), earrings, weddings—everyone will talk about those. But not eating disorders, not periods, not sex and relationships, not the messiness. Never that. That is to be hidden away in silence, under cover of darkness.

A time when things were simple: playing cricket with Vasu, my mother’s youngest cousin on the terrace of my great-grandparents’ apartment building. He is almost caught between generations, fifteen years younger than everyone else, only seven or eight years older than me. His bat was too heavy for me, and the terrace was crisscrossed with pipes and clotheslines and probably a few stray bricks. We played carefully, he aware of my youth, I that hitting hard would mean going down five flights of stairs to retrieve the ball. My great-grandparents’ apartment contained rules and regulations I couldn’t always fathom. On the terrace, knocking a ball around carefully, we were free. He is sitting on a sofa opposite me and to the right, in the same room for the first time in eleven years. He has just got a new job, he told us, at Sodexo, and is starting the next day. He is still tall, his front teeth slightly crooked. His hair still grows straight out from his head. But to see him is to see double, a partially mythical figure superimposed on top of the self-effacing boy I knew. I realize that I have never heard him state an opinion. I knew him as the obedient son, who ate what his mother served him. He is the only son of an only son. He is the one who is supposed to carry on his grandfather’s name and legacy. Lately, I have begun to wonder what that pressure does to a person. We have heard very little about his struggles with addiction since the initial shock of

WE ARE NEAR THE END NOW

Terry Dubow

I write poetry inside of my blog posts, and none of the higher-ups seem to mind as long as the search engines sniff the keywords.

Golden khakis with melancholy. A mid-length skirt the color of vinegar with vigor in the hem.

I’m a single lady living alone in a one-room sad-dad apartment near the Richmond Bridge. Two blocks away, the San Francisco Bay does nothing all day but rest like bathwater and wait for night or a freighter to disrupt it.

I don’t call my folks. They just ask or they don’t ask about my writing and their voices pinch.

A set of knuckles on the door. I stare at the portal.

I am twenty-four, which incidentally equals one-quarter of the principal I owe to the Wells Fargo machine, the Biden Administration, and my hefty uncle in San Diego. All that money for a Masters in Poetry. I can never get that top number down.

My one professor wept for me and my class and then vomited into a wastebasket. She was having a bad day. Her own top number was choking her like a cock in the throat as she gazed out at us little lambs, accruing numbers on servers in the distance, and she couldn’t take it one second longer. We all got passes in that class. Poetry in Late-Stage Capitalism the class was called. Back to the knock on the door.

I lift my eye to the concave lens. I see the screen of a phone open to the vaccination app. Whoever is on the other side of the door is clean. I’ve been vaxxed twice and boosted, but the vapor trail of this Armageddon has not lifted. We are near the end now. On the other side of the door, I find my landlord, Jason. A portly man, maybe forty, with fashion-model eyelashes and a pencil thin mustache and a Stitch Fix subscription. He’s trying.

“Did you hear about the zebras?” he asks through the cracked door. I keep the chain attached, and he doesn’t seem to mind. Behind him, sunlight.

“What zebras?”

“From the zoo. A pack of them escaped. They’re wandering.” Big as he is, he’s out of breath.

“Which zoo?”

“San Francisco.”

I am new to the coast but not that new. “That’s a bit far, right?” He begins to nod. “Oh yeah. You’re in no danger.”

I bob my chin but don’t speak.

“Just thought I’d tell you, Em.” The slight grin on my lips is forced. My dad called me Em and him alone until Walt who used it like a shiv. “Jesus, Em. Take a breath,” Walt would say.

“Well, thank you for letting me know,” I tell Jason.

“I’ll keep you posted,” he says and then doffs an imaginary cap like he is my chauffeur.

*

What I’ve learned about search engines is that they’re an awful lot like people. They scan the horizon for evidence. Digital blips that in isolation mean nothing, but, in aggregate and context, they can signal meaning. One zebra in a zoo is a display. A dozen in a Trader Joe’s parking lot is a happening.

I turn my light off when I write. I need to be in a Chernobyl-type clean room—otherwise, the enormity of the waste overwhelms me. When it’s me and my notebook, I pretend that I’m writing a novel or a chapbook.

“I am twenty-four, which incidentally equals one-quarter of the principal I owe to the Wells Fargo machine, the Biden Administration, and my hefty uncle in San Diego.”

BABY CLEAN

Hannah Thorpe

You’ve been replacing most meals of the week with lemon juice and cayenne and you tell anyone who will listen that they just have to try it. When you next see your mother and she comments on your physique, you tell her the same thing. Tell her it’s good for circulation, for the heart (probably). Tell her breakfast is overrated. A puritanical scam, a Kellogg marketing scheme. A bit sexist, if she really wants to know. A bit authoritarian. Ultimately, just an old wives tale, and who needs those when for a few hours you can feel like Kate Moss, that flat belly kind of happy, that euphoric eat—you—from—the—inside—out kind of high that is superiority. When Emily Myer asks what your secret is, you use the word cleanse. It’s buzzy but righteous. It gives sainthood, gives seeking your bliss. And for a few hours that is what it’ll feel like. Bliss, absolution, calm. It feels as healthy as the right people say it is. Not just good for your kidneys, or liver, but good for something more. Good for your mind, your self - control, your wallet (if you don’t buy organic). Good for your self-worth if you don’t think too much about it. You mix kosher salt into filtered water and let yourself feel good.

On the weekend, you go out for drinks with a man you met online and try hard not to tell him your astrology sign. That’s date three material. Instead, you tell him you were raised Catholic (a lie), but save the question of belief for pillow talk. It’s

better that way. You focus instead on aesthetic, the prayer candles, the rosary beads, the Virgin Mary holy card you’ve taped to your bathroom mirror for comfort, for edge, because you got the idea from Mapplethorpe, Catholicism for its accoutrements, or so said Patti Smith. You won’t go on a second date if he doesn’t know Patti Smith. When he goes to the bathroom, you ask the bartender for a shot of something clear and knock it back fast like you did in college. It burns the same way. Hold your fingers to your lips and say something smart. If you can’t think of something smart because the liquor is making a molotov cocktail of the lemon cayenne in your stomach, just smile. Most likely, the shot will be complimentary.

In the morning, with the gentle kind of hangover that inspires indulgence, you light some candles and look out the window and drink coffee until your heart feels like it’s simmering in it. Eat nothing else until one in the afternoon when the marine layer finally recedes back to the West Side where it belongs. Don’t think about the night before. Don’t think about the way your mouth feels too wide when you laugh or the way you wave your hands. The best trick of your twenties is to eschew self—reflection. Practise this. It will make you seem bold. Accept your grandmother’s invitation to brunch. Now that you’re again living close to home (advisability tbd), she will expect to see you weekly. That’s untenable but you can manage once a month. You will manage, or else the flippant way your mother threatens to disown you will turn frank. You ask your grandmother what to wear

and she says floral. Wear black. You don’t own a sundress anyway. Think, maybe you should. On the way to the restaurant, stop at a boutique that is overpriced yet understated and spend a week’s worth of your paycheck on a formless, white dress that is meant to be chic. Your grandmother will call it a mumu. She will hate it more than the colour black. With your physique, you could wear anything, but waifs don’t wear bodycons. Your grandmother will order a mimosa easy on the orange and this will make you smile, this will make you relax into the art nouveau booth seat, and when you’re halfway through a second drink of your own, you will start to be candid. Tell her you’ve been dating. Tell her he’s an accountant but not boring. You’re not sure if that’s true but say it anyway. Say you’ve been cleansing but you’re cheating for this eggs florentine. Hum when you taste the hollandaise. You’ll regret all of this the next day, but in the moment you feel unfettered. Use the English muffin to sop up all the sauce. When you get home and feel too full to move, assume the foetal position around your phone and trust the algorithm. It knows what you want even if it’s not what you need. The rabbit hole is deep. Spousal inspo à la Birkin, vacation inspo à la Rohmer, ideation inspo à la Ophelia. Simone Weil’s food diary (offensive), Sylvia Plath’s (inspirational). Imagine all her cups of tea, the extra finger of amber brandy, strawberries from the garden, a bottle of pink champagne. Imagine too the custard and dough, the expensive meat, the stuffed peppers and shish kebabs, the roast beef, the apple cakes cooling on the windowsill. It’s masochistic,

OTHER POETRY

N/A Oparah

My mother has been texting me full chapters of the bible. Her mornings, my evenings. I can tell that she is doing it from memory and while freshly conscious, because there are a lot of mistakes. Not so much typos and extra spaces, though there are, of course, those too; but altered emphases—parables taking on different plot twists and morals. There are more women in the hungry crowds, more prodigal children. Jesus’s words, instead of their usual red, are in all caps. This Christ is long-winded and less poetic. He seems angrier or maybe just more sure of what is right and how he’d like the world to live like him. Her Jesus is more generous, though. Somehow. Giving not only his body and blood, but providing small, day-to-day conveniences, like cooking and cleaning. Her Christ notices and talks about things like the dust collecting in corners—he finds a way to relate this dirtiness to regret, to neglect, to needing attention. My mother has been waking up earlier and earlier to send these texts. 5 a.m., then 4 a.m.; once, 3:17. They come six, seven at a time, vibrating pseudo-silently against my work desk. I called her once to ask her why she was awake, but all she wanted to talk about was what she just sent and if I already knew their story. “Matthew One,” she kept repeating. I could hear the sleep in her voice, how in need of water her body was.

“Go back to sleep,” I said, like a warning. I had to promise to read the texts once I hung up before she would get off the phone.

Mary and Joseph were recast—bigger roles, more lines and clearer backstories. They seemed more the point than their mysterious and magical child. There were more flashbacks, both structurally and in Jesus’s long speeches, to their lives—how Mary grew up, why she and Joe were chosen as creators of the ultimate creator, how their lives did and didn’t change when their young son left them. I did enjoy this particular shift in focus; it was a strange fanfiction.

My mother used to want to be a pastor. But she lived enough of and quit that dream by the time its utterance ended. As if the sentence were proof and practice enough. As if life could be reduced to what is said and recorded—that living doesn’t necessarily need to happen, that being is just a matter of agreement and faith. She knows too much about following her own desires. Too much about early deaths and the necessary, predetermined sacrifices of the select few. She understands that to speak of oneself as anything other than “a means to an end,” is to waste words. Those desires, those parts of us always get edited out.

Really, I think all she wanted was to create something, anything that could live outside her and matter in the ways she wanted them to matter. I think she wanted proof she had something to offer, that her opinions, beliefs, ways of seeing and hearing, when trusted and applied, would make things better.

Now, we’re past the psalms. She tried translating all those painful songs into prose. But without a clear plot or grounding characters, she didn’t really know where to go. It would just become other poetry. She must’ve realized this, because I only got a few translated chapters from the whole book of Psalm before she quit and switched to Job.

Instead of ignoring them, I started thumbs-upping all the texts she sent after skimming them. This confused her. Especially if I liked a text about evil or pain or giving into desires.

“WHY WOULD YOU LIKE THIS,” she’d ask, in all caps like a God.

“It just means that I saw that particular text message,” I’d reply.

“Oh,” she’d say. “GOOD,” she’d add.

The next day, after turning Job into a single mother of three, who lost all her children to the other sides of the world (she called this “geographical deaths”), she sent a text that said “ONLY LIKE THIS IF YOU HAVE READ AND TRULY UNDERSTOOD HIS SUFFERING.”

I didn’t like this text. I called her instead. Taught her how to hold the phone the perfect distance to frame her whole face while using video. She didn’t mention Job. She asked about my day and tried to remember what city I was in. She asked if it was late or sunny or cold or safe where I was. She interrupted my answer to say she misses me, misses being close and knowing those answers before I have to tell her. She said that it was nice to see my face. She said it’d been too long, that she’d forgotten how beautiful I was. I agreed, then reminded her that I came from her. That all she was seeing was a slightly altered, otherworldly, version of herself.

THE SMELL OF HOME

A Ghani

My past is a diet of rice and roti. Fluffy round discs sat with most meals and large pots of rice and meat cooked on weekends and Eid. Daily, steaming curries, ladled out by my mother at the table while we waited, mopped up, sometimes reluctantly, with roti, which came wrapped in a cloth sitting in a changair, a relic from my mother’s bridal trousseau. The handwoven flat basket, along with other kitchen goods, made the journey with her overseas, leaving her own widowed mother behind to watch for Airmail letters she would never be able to read. I did not pay enough attention to my mother’s story about how she made her own, a bridal rite of passage. I knew it was a different changair that sat royally atop our kitchen table, concave and smiling, run through with flecks of gold, pink and beige, draped lovingly with a neatly woven cloth. The curries my mother made were varied and flavorsome but to us were never as good as the fish fingers and chips we longed for. Children of immigrants, we hungrily ingest the Western word, “curry,” displacing the traditional word “salan.” Language is curious: it sneaks up like milk froth, when you least expect it, and just like that, it spills over and a word is misplaced because the English you were born into has coated your tongue, thick and gelatinous. I know in my bones that English is not my additional language, I know it has surpassed the tongue of my mother and etched itself onto me, the tattooing process slow and painful over the years, but the ink has dried irrepressible, inerasable. Now the

tongue of my mother round and alien in my mouth.

For raw ingredients, I always find the words of my mother resurfacing, having never learned their English equivalents until adulthood; jeera, thaniya, haldi and marcha all sear up, spitting and hissing in ghee when I consider my cooking. No matter what, no matter how hard I try to recreate it, my cooking pales in comparison to the matriarchs around me: my mother, my mother-in-law, my older sisters. The

tastelessness of my green chatni, the never-quite-thick-enough curries sitting in puddles, the very-nearly dry chicken, all point to one thing: I will never be them.

Good cooking takes time and sacrifice; good Pakistani cooking takes much, much more. Afternoons of resentment resurface: my brothers lounge on sofas, draped like jacquard covers,

or brazenly wash cars in the blaze of summer, whilst we stand, burning hour upon hour in the kitchen, washing, chopping, learning, watching. I remember the anger I felt about the expectation that we would remain upright for so long, learning complicated steps, the unquestioning expectation we would embrace mundane tasks: the piling of vegetables while onions singed eyes, always standing, throughout the day to keep the family fed. There was a hierarchy in the kitchen: I washed dishes whilst my older sisters carried weightier burdens. I cared little for learning to cook and did so sullenly because standing vigil in the kitchen took me away from books and towards convoluted methods of stirring, of scraping down stainless steel with wooden spoons to avoid masala sticking to sides. In adulthood, I still crave to be elsewhere, adding recriminating blocks of frozen ginger and garlic to the electric pressure cooker to reduce my sacrifice at the culinary altar of the kitchen. I want anything other than slicing, sizzling, stirring, spattering myself with foodstuffs, always smelling faintly of onions and meat juices. Teenage resentments echo through the ages and now, in my forties, I look at my feet, ankles thick and inflexible and see my mother, always standing, sometimes leaning on a chair, sitting to slice, standing to stir. I survey my ageing body and I see my mother, her painful back, her waterlogged legs. I am now her, with my own family, sacrificing and standing, pressing knife to board, grease on my face, all

“You do not have to learn to cook because you are girls; you have to learn to cook because you need to eat, and you need to eat well.”

Farzana

RENE MAGRITTE'S THE BANQUET

Dorothy Lune

Oil on canvas, June 21 1958

Pink:

I watch the sky fold into origami ducks for me, it sensed that I’m held in grass like supple sprigs. My head bangs brick every few seconds, so a single knuckle found a joint to latch to.

Vermilion:

Mass of tree hide behind the boldening bauble, I convict each tree of cowardice, I instruct them to watch how I bleed out from off folds now, & every so often I disregard it when I visit his unmarked grave.

Chartreuse:

the coffin as makeshift as his teeth were, I prefer justice over court— speak of the devil, I played tennis in a viser, I can’t bring myself to set an arbitrary goal— I can’t bring myself to freshen up & arrive.

i. Pink

ii. Vermilion

iii. Chartreuse—

TUSCANY! TUSCANY!

GC Perry

I saw it out of the corner of my eye. The knife. Cartwheeling through the air. A breadknife. I had cut my finger on it earlier that week. It takes a while to get used to the knives in these rental properties. These upmarket villas’ knives tend to be sharper, more keen, than our ones at home. It always makes me think that I should get ours sharpened. One day I may get around to it.

I was clearing the breakfast plates when Julia threw the knife. Instinctively I turned my head away and raised an arm. The blade struck my forearm—blunt side, mercifully—and clattered to the tiles. Julia, hair awry and eyes still puffy with sleep, screamed. No words, just an inchoate, primal noise. She picked up a plate, still smeary with strawberry jam, and hurled that too. It thudded into the wall behind me then shattered on contact with the hard floor. I retreated to the safety of the downstairs bathroom, sat on the toilet and listened to the avalanche of breaking crockery and guttural expletives drowning out the chorusing cicadas from the nearby olive grove and the screech of the swifts overhead. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror: sunburned, balding, paunchy. Depleted. From the other side of the door, the sound of metal and crockery raining down on terracotta continued. I tried not to think about the deposit or the inevitably awkward checkout conversation with the hosts. I had not seen Julia like this before. She was usually so house proud and fastidious even in holiday rentals where she would get up early before checkout to clean and tidy while I packed the bags.

The summer in Tuscany. A rented stone villa dripping with intensely pink-purple flowers—bougainvillea, maybe? Gently undulating gardens artfully landscaped with a meandering pebble path leading to a generous pool. Adjoining the main building, a vine-strewn pergola in the eaves of which a family of house martins have built their nest. The drive through the ancient olive grove to access the property; the trunks impossibly twisted and knuckle-barked. The view from the veranda looking out over the lushness of the Tuscan landscape. Nothing but dense green punctuated by terracotta-colored hilltop towns; in the far distance, San Gimignano boasting its dozen towers signalling heavenward. It had been a mistake to have come here.

Not more than a couple of days in, insipid routine had settled upon us. Silent breakfasts. Long mornings of reading. The occasional swim. Desultory conversations about what trip to include in our day. A lunch in one of the hilltop towns. The piazzas soon indistinguishable from one another. The food unremarkable, or worse. A gelato, the outing’s predictable highlight. A silent drive back to the villa. Glasses of wine and a light meal beneath the pergola to the accompaniment of the cicadas and the scent of citronella candle smoke. Then to our separate bedrooms: her idea, she says she sleeps better and she needs this holiday to relax. To be honest, I prefer it too: sleeping together seems an absurd and unnecessary intimacy these days. A custom more honored in its breach than observance.

I ponder the inevitability of our situation. Certainly, as I gaze around the piazzas, I see couples just like Julia and myself. Affluent, ageing, mute. Mutely antagonistic? Occasionally, I see couples in animated conversation, interested in each other’s talk, sometimes even laughing together. They are the exceptions, I think. Are they just lucky? Perhaps they are drunk?

Mornings and evenings, I sit in the shade of the pergola, a book in my lap and watch the house martins as Julia works through her Puzzler. Two weeks in to our month away, their trips to and from the nest are more frequent. I see them arriving at their lumpy, wattled nest with beaks a mess of insects. The nest erupts in the high-pitched keening of their young. They are attentive parents.

Of course, Julia and I have been happy. Very happy. Just not for some time. No parent should bury a son and it took a toll on both of us. I do blame myself, to an extent. So does Julia. I was emotionally distant—is that what it’s called?—and perhaps if that had not been the case Mark might not have felt so hopeless and alone. But maybe I overstate my influence on him. Is it odd of me to still think about the train driver? To wonder if he saw Mark’s face before the impact? Despite the desperate violence of his passing, it gives me satisfaction to know that his suffering is at end. What a terrible thing it was; it is over now. We have a daughter, Louisa, but she lives on the other side of the world. I always wonder if that was

FINDING FLOW

MAY 2021

I am sulking. Arms folded, and despite the cloudless sky, a face like thunder.

“I don’t know why you’re angry with me,” Jeff says, the map hanging uselessly in his hand. “It isn’t my fault.”

We’re looking over a five-bar gate into a valley just south of the village of Rotherfield in south-east England. “PRIVATE LAND” shouts a sign on the gate. “TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.” Somewhere below us, the map indicates, the Rother rises.

“I’m not angry at you,” I snap.

But I am, a bit. Not just because he’s taken charge of the map, as I knew he would if I invited him along, but because he’s a law-abiding citizen. I want someone to egg me on to climb over the gate or duck through the fence, because I lack the brazenness to do it alone. This, of course, is the real reason I’m annoyed.

“…I find you in the reeds, a trickle coming out of a bank, a foal of a river,” writes Alice Oswald’s walker in Dart. That’s how I envisioned my river journey beginning. I would stride across the undulant hills and wooded ghylls of the High Weald—a lone enraptured female—to find the Rother bubbling out of the primordial clay. From there, I would follow the valley it has carved over millennia to the sea, 35 miles east. In going with the flow of the river, perhaps I would rediscover my own.

But we can’t get to the source, so the whole plan is doomed. When Jeff suggests we start the journey further along, I refuse, and we drive instead to a staggeringly posh country pub and drink white wine in the brittle sunshine. I wasn’t myself then. I was emerging from a deep and dark depression that had begun a year earlier and although the darkness was lifting, I was still fragile. My light, like that of a flickering candle, could go out with the slightest blow. But the idea of walking the Rother persisted. There’s something comforting in the linearity of rivers. As Olivia Laing puts it: “A river has a certainty with which it travels that makes it very soothing, particularly for those who’ve lost faith with where they’re headed.” Perhaps that is what drew me to the river in the first place. It was the spring of 2020 and, buckling under the weight of the pandemic and the climate crisis, I felt as if the world was falling apart. And yet, each day, the sun rose, the birds sang, and the trees burst into bud. Everything carried on as usual. I tried to do the same until one day, I couldn’t. *

MAY 2020

I am running by the Rother, taking my “daily exercise.” Running has always kept me sane and given me focus, but on this day, with no warning, I run out of purpose. It is like hitting the wall in a marathon. I slow to a walk, my legs shaky, my breathing ragged. There’s a gap in the rushes where the riverbank drops down to a grassy apron. It’s meant for anglers, but there’s no one there so I sit, drawing my knees up to my chest and staring out at the water. The thick-stemmed yellow

water lilies boast sturdiness, anchored by roots spiralling down into the darkness of the water. I feel insubstantial, as if I could just drift away like pollen. A cuckoo calls from the stand of trees on the far bank. Warblers flit and dart among the whispering reeds and insects shimmer in a shaft of light penetrating the shade of a weeping willow. The sweat dries on my back. My breathing slows. Eventually I feel calm and walk home. I return to the river almost every day after that, getting to know my “patch” as thoroughly as my own back garden. It becomes my sanctuary and solace. Sometimes I run or walk alongside it, sometimes I kayak or swim. Other times I just sit and watch or spill tears into its poor-to-moderate-quality-rated water. There’s a term: topophilia. It describes the emotional, affective bond a person can feel for a place, a bond that grows with familiarity. It might be farfetched to suggest that the feeling is mutual, but the more I immerse myself in the life of the river, the more it seems to reveal itself to me. Moorhen chicks scuttling after mum in the shallows like clockwork toys. Dragonflies mating mid-air. Two jackdaws sitting side by side, like a pair of polished shoes. “Every time you notice something,” Kathleen Dean Moore writes, “every time something strikes you as important enough to store away in your mind, you create another piece of who you are.”

The first time I see the iridescent blue streak of a kingfisher, I can scarcely believe my luck. But then I see another, and another, until sightings become commonplace. I’ve lived a mile from the Rother for almost a decade, but all this time, it seems, I’ve been looking but not seeing, listening but not hearing.

Samantha Pyrah

MAPS TO LOST FUTURES

Carella Keil

When there is no one left to call at 2am, and I can’t handle being alone, I imagine what you’re doing on the other side of the world. Are you getting your children ready for school, or kissing your wife awake between sips of coffee? Who is your wife? How many children do you have? What are their names, and do any of them have your pale blue eyes, or write left-handed? Are you running off to a job, and what job, do you like it? Or are you still a student at the university? Is it mathematics or medicine or philosophy, or something else entirely now?

At 2am on the other side of the planet, are you riding your bicycle from mountain slope to desert-edge? Are you gallivanting off on a wilderness adventure? Or are you visiting my mother and debating science with my father, cavorting around the park with my nieces on your back and our siblings in tow? Am I still the bad one, the odd-one-out, the only happy-family-puzzle-piece that doesn’t fit? Do you have a smile on your face, or are those tears in your eyes? Are you happy? Are you still cancer’s captive child, or an adult grown and free? Did she set you free?

The adventure idea works best for a while; it’s the easiest one to imagine, independent of time and change. Like me, you are always alone. Dissatisfied with what you find, questing for more. The ribcage doesn’t like it when you inhale too deep. Don’t you know, the heart gets lost in so much empty space?

When I try calling you at 2am on the other side (surely there must be reception somewhere), you can’t describe the foreign vistas, or what you see when you climb the tallest trees. You can’t tell me the time of morning the stars fade out, or whisper of sleeping beneath the Milky Way’s tentacles. You will never draw another map for me, or tell me stories of your adventures.

Maps to Lost Futures

Tell me the time of morning

The stars fade out

Whisper to me

Of sleeping beneath

The Milky Way’s tentacles. tracks. There is no wife or girlfriend to kiss. There is no uncle, no brother, no twin.

There is no daughter with pale blue eyes, and no son, no philosophical queries solved or parking lots with your bicy cle’s fresh tire-

2am fills up with all the empty space of you. To it I’ve added all the empty space of me. In my loneliness, I hold my breath for a long time, afraid of imagination, afraid of change. Night after night, I dream of the smiling-happy-family puzzle, before I broke it. Before I scattered all the pieces, pushed you all away. I’m in between, my beginning and your end. Before you broke it. Before you scattered all the pieces, pushed us all away. I’d draw a map, but there’s no one to find it now.

1Poem first published in Paddler Press Vol. 6 “Changes” (October 2022)

I DON'T HAVE A VERY GOOD MEMORY

Gavin Baird

I don’t have a very good memory.

I often wish I was like Knausgaard with his full, granular recollections. I read the first volume of his opus on the tube to work. One morning commute was ten pages about a breakfast he’d eaten a decade ago. He’d had two fried eggs on lightly buttered toast, and he’d eaten them slowly. I went down to the work canteen and got myself two fried eggs on lightly buttered toast, sat round the far corner away from the thoroughfare, and ate them slowly.

When I think of him, I think of those eggs, and I remember a run. I was home for the weekend and my mum was well, which always makes a difference. I ran down past my old school, out through the fields and onto the farm road and then further, beyond the sphere of my childhood, onto unfamiliar paths and over new streams.

The sun was glistening off every conceivable surface including at one point, I swear, a cow. I was listening to a New Yorker podcast where Knausgaard reads a short story by Naipul. He had chosen it because it bore close relation to his own work; such precision in its meandering recollection of a cottage in Middle England that Naipul had visited after university. The story went nowhere, other than further and further into the details of the memory. Knausgaard read it in his gruff, beautifully accented English at a bucolic pace, only marginally slower than I was moving as I tried to outrun the length of the story. I remember it because I was so fully content.

There’s birdsong in the memory, but I don’t know how I could have heard that with my headphones in. *

I don’t have a very good memory.

Photos help.

I’ve got a friend who has aphantasia, which sounds far more exciting than it is. It’s a life without pictures in your head. Her mind can’t conjure them. I asked her what’s in her brain and she said “words and thoughts.”

This friend takes lots of photos so her memory is on her phone and, more distantly, in photo

albums that her mum curates for her. I wish someone had curated my life into photo albums. It would have helped with this memory problem of mine.

When I go home, my mum will try desperately to sit me down and go through her old family albums, trying to introduce me to aunts and cousins, uncles and great grandparents, all long dead. I was born into the aftermath of all of that; I find it hard to care. Even if I wanted to, I wouldn’t be able to remember the names, although occasionally one sticks when it is served alongside an interesting story. Like Mum’s Uncle Billy, who met a girl on the harbor in Dunoon, asked her to wait for him, went to America, got a job, made enough to buy a ring and sail back, found the girl working in the café on the high street, took her back to the harbour, proposed and made her my mum’s Auntie Jean. Them I remember. Mum, I suspect, wants me to remember for the same reasons I put photos on Instagram. It makes her feel significant, something that will remain beyond her, a life’s residue, but only if it’s passed on. I keep telling her to write it all down, but she won’t for some reason.

I was in Washington a couple of years ago, and my mum insisted on putting me in touch with Billy and Jean’s daughter. They’d moved straight back to America after the wedding and Helen was born. They’d returned to Scotland often enough that the family remained close. Helen was an old woman by the time I met her, in her 80s. We arranged