LJF Issue Two

LONDON JOURNAL OF

FICTION

1

London Journal of Fiction Issue Two: Summer 2016

First published 2016 by the London Journal of Fiction Copyright Š 2016 the London Journal of Fiction The right of all persons so listed to be identified as the authors of their work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents act 1988 Cover art by Christabel Forbes ISBN 978-0-9935438-2-1 All rights reserved Designed and typeset in Bell MT and FreightText Pro Printed and bound

by Y Lolfa Cyf. in Talybont, Wales A CIP catalogue reference for this book is available at the British Library www.londonjournaloffiction.com

3

Contents Preface

5

Adam Thelwall

Fiction Editorial

6

Arthur Thompson

Poetry Editorial

7

Marjam Idriss

My Friend the Oktavist

8

Mike Fox

Losing Sense 19 Lauren Bell Maremma 24 Brandon Marlon Buffering 26 Chris Campanioni Gallery Walk 40 Matilda Morrison Transformation 49 Elizabeth Yalkut The Imam and the Compass 50 Samuel Usayd Ilyas Serenity in Dining 57 David Olsen The Deaf Araucaria 58 Gonzalo Garcia Census 69 John Aaron Rosen Nightangel 72 Beth Jellicoe Transport 84 Mark Brandi High Jinks 91 Alex Coulton The Scholarship 99 Mrinal Kanti Ghosh The Bear was Addressed as ‌ 106 Rica March The Outcome 114 Robert Boucheron Water's Movement Breaking ‌ 123 Maximiliane Donicht Submissions to the autumn issue are currently open. For more information see our website: www.londonjournaloffiction.com 4

Preface We are very fortunate to be able to bring out the second issue of the London Journal of Fiction so soon after the first. This is entirely due to the incredible support we have received from our readers, our writers and many others in the literary community who have made their contribution.

The literary scene is thriving at the moment, due in part to the crop of talented new writers which is currently emerging, but also to the way literature has comfortably slipped into the twenty-first century and made e-books and e-zines its natural home. Niche magazines can now quickly find their audiences, wherever they may be across the globe, and writers can exchange ideas more easily than ever before.

We have found support and submissions flooding in from unexpected places and are proud to facilitate connections between talent from diverse backgrounds. This collection of pieces represents a meeting of minds, ideas and styles: just as interesting for their differences as for the features which make them cohesive.

The number of excellent and varied submissions we received for this issue left us with the difficult task of turning away great writing, in addition to granting us the privilege of publishing pieces we really want to see in print. We are happy to see many familiar names sending in their second or even third round of submissions, sitting beside the many new writers who have found their way to our inbox.

We look forward to seeing them develop and evolve as writers, and hope you enjoy reading their work as much as we have.

Adam Thelwall 5

Prose Editorial Summer is a time of senses heightened. Hot days stretch into warm nights. Everything is alive and verdant. The stories in this issue are no exception and we have only our talented writers and supportive readership to thank for that. Each piece conveys something which has slept through winter, yawned in spring, and now writhes, before our eyes, in the heat of summer. Though brimming with life, not all are a bed of roses. There is no aromatic tingle here, no opiate to dull the senses.

The senses excavated are not the typical. Samuel Ilyas introduces us to an imam who finds his sense of direction. A tree-growing contest shapes a young girl’s sense of identity in Gonzalo Garcia’s dash through magical realism, while census-taking makes us question what it means to have an identity in John Rosen’s short narrative. Beth Jellicoe touches on deeper sensualities rooted in human connection when a celestial being explores London by night. Lauren Bell conjures up an acute sensitivity to sound so powerful it threatens to tear one family apart. In Mike Fox’s piece, we muddle through the ups and downs of a singer until he achieves a greater sense of purpose. But Matilda Morrison’s meditation on a researcher’s personal life leaves us wondering whether there is even such a thing. Finally, paralysing fear and silent fascination are all too close to home in Chris Campanioni’s look at ISIS propaganda campaigns.

The summer issue knows no boundary nor shape, be it geographical or stylistic. Senses are bottled in different ways: traditional narrative, short bursts of consciousness, and minimalistic screenplay. All to taste. We proudly present you with exceptional works of fiction ferried from exceptional writers across the globe.

Arthur Thompson 6

Poetry Editorial The dissonance that comes from seeing unseen and lending sight to a reader who is never there, permeates the poetry selection in this issue of the LJF. The writer observes undetected and takes control of other’s perception. Transport’s voice studies the stepfather, the once-removed figure that the child cannot understand. In David Olsen’s Serenity in Dining the speaker turns the chicken’s unappetising cavity away, shielding the guests yet forcing the reader to envision the empty hole. In Transformation, the speaker reacts to unwanted eyes by claiming ownership of how she wants to be seen and read.

What this says about the relationship between the writer and their readers, I’m not sure. Perhaps the reader resents the writer for controlling what they see and what they imagine. I know I sometimes do. Perhaps we love being controlled. Perhaps, poetry is about reclaiming control of how we see and are seen. Perhaps it’s all about trust. Perhaps this whole paragraph is a longwinded bondage joke.

The LJF contributors, while published in a journal that claims to be geographically specific, are writing and reading from every continent. For most of us then, we have no access to each other except through these representations. London Journal of Fiction might be a small journal, but in another sense it is colossal. The child then, who observes the stepfather, and weaves his story without permission, is perhaps responding to the uncomfortable sensation of having his story spun out of hand. Perhaps the simultaneous intimacy and anonymity of poetry lets those of us whose stories have been spun by others, rewrite.

Marjam Idriss 7

My Friend the Oktavist Mike Fox The day his balls dropped, like anchors seeking a mooring in adulthood, he realised he was different. He was fourteen, and suddenly his voice was lower than his father’s. Much lower. I could understand this; it had been the same with me. Freak empathy, I suppose you could call it.

From that moment on his speech had an entirely gratuitous resonance, like the fart of an elephant. No voice needed to be so deep. And the older we got, the lower our voices went. After hovering briefly in the nadir of baritone we descended to bass, basso profundo, and then…

It served no purpose other than to distinguish us, unhelpfully, from the rest of the planet. Men were threatened by it, women frequently disturbed, but mostly not in the way we might have hoped.

And of course, because we could sing, we were drafted into choirs. I became a sort of pseudo organ, booming and droning away while the others filled the air with butterfly sounds.

We didn’t meet until we were nineteen, which was extraordinary when you think about it: two of the rarest voices on earth, living in small adjacent towns. Of course we became friends. How could we not? One sentence each and we knew what the other’s life was like. We were walking tubas, every utterance amplified by its strangeness. Though we looked quite different people assumed we must be brothers. And, in the light of our circumstances, I suppose we were.

8

In some ways it was harder for me. He, after all, had the chest of a walrus. Those meeting him had some physical forewarning. I was slight and tending to asthma, which made it all the more ridiculous.

‘We should sell you to a circus,’ my mother said, soon after the plummet. It was a remark to warm the heart of any cashstrapped psychotherapist.

We met, inevitably, at a choral contest. Tone quality, harmony, interpretation, deportment: the judges eyed us from the front row and scribbled. Behind them the tribes of partisan sub-groups collectively known as an audience sat willing their children’s rivals to lose. Invariably, at such events, if either of our choirs won, we were described as the ‘point of difference’. The term could summarise our entire existence.

But it was his speaking voice I heard first.

‘This must be your swan song in a youth choir, I imagine?’ He was standing behind me in a tea queue.

I was primed to take offence. Five years of bullfrog impersonators had made me edgy. But this was different. His voice sounded natural, authentic. My anger melted to astonishment.

‘Nothing personal,’ he said, misreading my reaction. ‘It’s just that I’m getting on a bit for this, and you look as though you are too.’

‘I’ll be twenty in August,’ I said. ‘After that I won’t be eligible, thank God. Unless they forge my birth certificate, that is. I’m sure they’ve thought about it’ Now it was his turn. You could almost see his forehead palpitating as he computed the situation.

‘Bloody hell,’ he said, ‘I’ve met my doppelgänger.’

‘How are you?’ I said, offering my hand. At that moment we reached the front of the queue.

We found a table, introduced ourselves, and began to compare our lives. Like me, Damien had reached puberty late and unprimed for its consequences.

9

MY FRIEND THE OKTAVIST ‘My mum and her sisters are all on the low side of alto,’ he explained ruminatively. ‘I wondered if that could be anything to do with it. You’d call my dad more of a tenor. And anyway he can’t sing.’

Obviously we’d both given our situation a lot of thought.

‘It’s the same with me,’ I said. ‘There’s no genetic explanation.’

We shared coping mechanisms.

‘I had to sing The Skye Boat Song at morning assembly,’ he said, his palm and forehead meeting at the memory. ‘Just me and the music teacher on piano. I eyeballed three of the bastards making faces in the front row and picked them off one by one later.’

‘There you have the advantage of me, Damien,’ I said, gesturing between our respective physiques. ‘I had the same experience but with me it was Ol’ Man River.’

‘Grotesque,’ he said, grimacing.

‘I just had to take it on the chin,’ I continued. ‘Although one of the other guys in class was still a soprano at sixteen. He had to sing Pie Jesu. It diverted some of the flak. After that I carried beetroot in my pocket. If they looked likely to ask me again, I chewed it and told them I had a sore throat.’

So we bonded immediately. We got it out of the way, were friends from that point on, and mainly talked about other things.

Within months we were both too old for youth choirs, and a succession of furtive choirmasters came to our homes, hoping to recruit us to sing in the big league, like football scouts but without any money.

We both succumbed. I suppose flattery is an antidote to ridicule.

In a choir of adults we were less conspicuous. But only just. And perhaps our talent, which is how it was beginning to be described, began to sit a little more easily in our lives. After all, by our very presence we extended any repertoire. Rare compositions requiring the double low G, or even the Contra F, were no longer an obstacle for the choirs we joined. You could see the choirmaster calculating the extra marks for

10

MIKE FOX adventurousness as he introduced works by Chesnokov, Alexei Levov, or even something obscure by Rachmaninoff.

A point came when we began to ponder the significance of all those Russian composers.

‘Do you think…?’ Damien asked one day when we compared out latest programmes.

‘Must have been,’ I said ‘Any Russian ancestors?’ he asked, eyebrows askew.

‘Unlikely, and if so distant,’ I said, and we discussed it no further.

But you can’t live all your life on the outside. After all, there were two of us, we were mates, and we kept tabs on one another.

We were each encouraged to do additional training: growling scales, bear-like harmonies. And gradually we both began to recognise a change. There was something about those exercises, for all their monotony, that held us pleasingly to the earth. Sopranos and even tenors were creatures of the air, but when we joined them in song we became the deep, rich soil beneath.

So we slowly came to feel a new appreciation for the hand, or rather thorax, that life had dealt us. In the past my light build had deprived me of gravitas. Now I began to see my voice as a form of compensation. As for Damien, I noticed he started to inhabit the music more completely, almost as though he was method acting. His mannerisms heightened and he became involved in the libretto. And clearly some of the sentiments were beginning to resonate.

‘May those who dishonour my soul be put to shame and consumed!’

He bellowed this out as though it was autobiography.

It seemed to me that the pieces he was asked to sing, grave and portentous as they tended to be, were seeping into his character, purely by the mantra of repetition. Judges began to comment on his ‘presence’.

But then our paths diverged.

11

MY FRIEND THE OKTAVIST Not all women found my voice alienating, intimidating or extra-terrestrial. Fiona certainly didn’t. Our sex life was highly vocal and she quickly became pregnant. And so I married her, the daughter of a conductor, and, ironically, stopped singing. For the next couple of years too much else intruded.

Damien carried on, his life growing increasingly nomadic as the realisation of his rarity grew. And now there was money in it.

For a while, it seemed to me, he became a sort of hired gun for ailing choirs. He was always travelling somewhere.

‘Can you imagine?’ he said, as we stole time to meet for coffee one Saturday. ‘Flown in from Oslo for a bloody Eisteddfod. Everyone else was Welsh. They slipped me an envelope and said, “Just sing, don’t talk.” I had to pretend to be crippled by shyness.’

Then his brow contracted and he looked at the table.

‘The strange thing was, in amongst all the crap, I saw a couple weeping when I sang my solo.’

‘That happened to me once too,’ I said. ‘Made me think, I must admit.’

We sipped our coffee silently for a while. Then he said, ‘I’m off to the World Choir Games in Sochi in a fortnight. Mixed adult choir category. We were invited out of the blue.’

I hadn’t foreseen this.

‘Do you really want to?’ I said.

‘It’s more that I think I need to,’ he said. ‘I’ve decided to try to make a go of this.’

We looked at one another as though we each needed to assimilate this new development. Damien was embracing his minority status.

The next time I saw him, perhaps three months later, he had grown a beard and a broad paunch.

‘It’s an effect of the repetitive protrusion of the lower lung,’ he said rather defensively, when he saw me looking at it.

12

MIKE FOX ‘Undoubtedly,’ I said. ‘How was Sochi?’

‘Mixed,’ he replied. ‘After the first rehearsal they insisted on testing me for steroids: “One so young cannot have such a voice through nature alone.” ‘ ‘Christ, whatever would they make of me?’ I said.

‘Beyond their power to fathom, I think,’ Damien said, not unkindly. ‘We travelled by train from Moscow to Sochi, and then they put us up in the Olympic village. Perhaps that’s why they tested me.

It might have been my imagination, but I thought I could still smell liniment in the changing rooms. Maybe there were some left over chemists from the games with nowhere else to go. The only thing was, once they realised I was clean, the organisers changed completely. There were rehearsals, stage rehearsals, qualification concerts and evaluation performances before you got to the real thing.

And little men kept appearing in the empty halls, trying to look inconspicuous. Eventually toward the end – we won by the way – one of them approached me and invited me back. He gave me this.’

Damien passed me a small white card, headed ‘Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation’.

‘Who was he? Some sort of ambassador? I asked.

‘I can’t say for sure,’ Damien replied. ‘He only wanted to be known only by his initials, “ZZ.” ’ ‘God that’s creepy,’ I said. ‘Sounds like the KGB. You’re not going are you?’

‘I’ve decided that I will,’ he said. ‘They’ve offered my fare, accommodation, and a two-year contract with the Moscow Fortitudinal Choir. They’ve invited me to be their resident oktavist.’

‘Octavist?’

‘It’s spelled with a k,’ he said, as though he could see the word above my head. ‘Means the same thing though.’

‘Do you mean – what we were thinking…?’

13

MY FRIEND THE OKTAVIST ‘Apparently so. There aren’t many but they do exist and always have done. They sing an octave below bass. Great hairy brutes probably – I haven’t seen one. ZZ said they “enjoy a unique status within the cultural traditions of Moscow.” He got quite emotional when he said that.’

‘Then they’ll view you in the same light Damien,’ I said, reaching over to pat his shoulder. Somehow it was a catalytic moment for us both.

I saw him off at the airport. The odd postcard, bland and uninformative, arrived over the next two years. No texts, no emails. I wondered if my pal was under surveillance. By the time he returned, Fiona had produced twin girls, and I was managing the querulous assembly that constituted her father’s orchestra. We had a small house and a large mortgage.

By contrast, when we next met, Damien exuded an air of freedom. His waist now inhabited even more space: he was substantial in every way.

‘A stipend in roubles?’ It was as high as my voice would go.

‘They said it was a way of expressing their pleasure,’ he said.

‘We had to sing before the president. There was a lot of vodka.’

And that wasn’t all. As I was taking this in, a straw blonde Valkyrie, broad of hip and high of cheekbone, entered the cafe and stood behind him, placing a proprietorial hand on his shoulder.

‘This is Aggie,’ he said.

Agniesza beamed at me.

‘I hear only praise of you,’ she said.

Damien looked up at her, the whites of his eyes showing like a puppy.

They married days before her visa ran out. Agniesza became his agent. Within year an oratorio and a requiem were written specifically for him to sing. His rise after that was hard to monitor. Soon he was booked three years ahead. Prestigious venues sold out. He 14

MIKE FOX appeared on chat shows. He was all over social media. He had transcended the constrictions of classical music. He appeared as the voice of a bear in a Disney cartoon.

But nothing changed between us. We still met for the odd beer or coffee. I asked after Aggie, he asked after Fiona and the kids. It helped that our wives had liked each other at first sight, and approved of the whole thing. In their different ways, I think they understood the nature of our friendship. Perhaps better than we did.

A nd so it was at one such meeting that Damien made his suggestion.

‘Come and do it with me,’ he said. ‘We can sing the Pearl Fisher’s Duet. Piece of piss.’

‘But that’s for tenor and baritone,’ I stuttered.

‘I can square it,’ he said. ‘Why should the castratos have all the good tunes?’

‘Does it work like that?’

‘Depends who you know,’ he said, shrugging his heavy shoulders. Since returning from Sochi Damien had clearly acquired a new level of influence. I should mention he wanted me to sing with him at the Last Night of the Proms.

‘Of course you’ve got to do it,’ Fiona said when I consulted her that evening. ‘I’m not at all surprised. I always thought he’d ask you to do something sooner or later.’

‘But the bloody Proms,’ I said, ‘and I haven’t really sung since…’

‘We got married,’ she interjected. ‘I’m well aware of it, and frankly you’re not the man you could be as a result.’

After that it was inevitable I would go ahead.

Damien’s home now stood in a private half acre in Surrey, and we began to meet there regularly. Aggie, seemingly proficient in all she did, accompanied our initial rehearsals on piano in their oakfloored music room.

15

MY FRIEND THE OKTAVIST ‘My two boys,’ she said, patting our cheeks at the end of the first session.

It was a strange experience; standing beside Damien in that small but resonant room, the three of us knowing that the world awaited the resulting performance. Aggie fed us before and after, and kept a decanter of port by the piano for our throats. She was a force of nature, and Damien by now at very least a sub-force, and both radiated conviction. I don’t think it would be fanciful to say that as our preparation advanced I felt and absorbed some of their power.

Orchestral rehearsals followed. They proved an odd contrast to my day job. I was working with a similar group of people, but now as a soloist rather than a dogsbody. I found the change abrupt, and felt shabby, and once more insubstantial.

‘We’ll hire you a tux before the dress rehearsal,’ Damien said, as a button came off my suit jacket.

The evening itself arrived quickly. At Damien’s suggestion the four of us walked to the Albert Hall from our nearby hotel. I sensed he had been monitoring my equilibrium and probably thought I could be unhinged by a limo. He himself appeared untroubled by the prospect before us. Aggie and Fiona made an obvious attempt to keep the conversation light, but he seemed genuinely unconcerned, strolling the Kensington pavements like a man sauntering towards his shed.

I, however, was concerned. As we approached, then stepped into the elderly building and all its history, I felt the compelling mixture of terror and validation known to all musicians who suddenly, unexpectedly, make good.

Once inside, our wives headed for the bar, and we were taken backstage to be cosseted, dressed, miked and made up. I baulked at the eyeliner, but Damien said, ‘Just let them slap it on – it’ll look right on the box, trust me.’

Who was I to argue? My fate was no longer my own.

16

MIKE FOX As competent people moved purposefully around us I lost sense of time, and before I could muster any stillness we were called to the stage entrance. We said little. Mainly I vomited. Then the preceding sonata ended, and the stage director made a beckoning sweep of his hand towards the auditorium. ‘Come on mate,’ Damien said, and I followed him as he strode the narrow path through the brass and woodwind.

We stood together, adjacent to the conductor, our backs towards the strings, with the audience before and all around. Damien beamed out toward them and then glanced sideways at me. I knew that look. In any other situation it would have been a wink.

I felt my terror evaporating. Being onstage, on that stage, augmented his already imposing presence: he was completely up for it.

And standing next to him as he centred himself before the orchestra began, even I began to experience a certain omnipotence.

The audience grew silent, the strings played the first chord, and Damien began his libretto. Taking my cue, I joined him and we sang together. We sang to the circle, we sang to the gallery, we sang to those standing before us in the arena, and to the sober air above their heads. The might and nuance of the orchestra poured into our spines and fed our voices. By the second refrain I looked out at the grandeur of the hall and saw only colour, shape and light. In those moments, as our song grew and unfolded, Damien was new to me, and all that had happened to him seemed suddenly inevitable. I felt as I had never felt, or might ever again. When the applause came it sounded like hail on a vast glass roof, and Damien took my arm to lead me off, as he could see I was lost to the physical world.

Late that night Aggie and Fiona poured us into taxis and we made our separate ways home. A few days later a cheque arrived, and from its size I guessed that Damien had insisted we were paid equally.

17

Our performance drew favourable attention from the wider press, although it was described as a stentorian onslaught by a critic from The Choral Almanac. It was true that Damien’s stage demeanour could merit the term ‘disinhibited’, and maybe, standing within his aura and facing that assembly, I had caught some of his mannerisms.

But we didn’t care.

We met up for coffee a couple of weeks later. My life was normal again. We had exchanged emails since the performance, and now felt no need to discuss it further. Our bond had been made public, and we had sung all we needed to say.

Before we got up to leave Damien looked at me, and something in his eyes reminded me of that first meeting in the tea queue.

‘Who’d want to be a tenor?’ he said.

I looked back at him, now a man who could command the attention of any room he entered.

‘Not me,’ I said.

18

Losing Sense Lauren Bell Sometimes sound gets to me, and when I say sound I don’t just mean noise as in a dog barking or someone dropping a plate; I mean sound. Any type of sound: people talking, mobile phones ringing, even the clicking of a camera. It wriggles and worms its way beyond my eardrums, nestling in the fug I call a brain.

I wouldn’t call my condition abnormal; to be fair I wouldn’t even call it a condition. It’s more like a tick – something that manages to crawl beneath my skin and set me off. That’s all it is – a small tick. I have tried telling Mother this on numerous occasions but she doesn’t listen. She already knows what I have, apparently, and it’s definitely not a small tick. It’s something much more complicated than that, something that has to be controlled by medication.

The little white pill goes into my mouth with a sip of water, and almost instantly sound disappears. It seems to dissolve like washing-up tablets in water, reminding me of a magician’s trick; what was once there has now vanished.

Mother first noticed something wasn’t quite right when I was eight. My music teacher would call her in at the end of the day and tell her how restless and distressed I had become. But it wasn’t just Music. My other subjects: English, Maths, Science, History etc. were just as bad. You see, it was other people’s voices reading out that did it, stopping the words from entering my head and making sense; or it was the horrible screeching of marker pens on the whiteboard, or even the chemical reactions which created pops, fizzes and bangs, making my head and ears ache with a terrible ferocity I hadn’t felt before.

19

LOSING SENSE And there were other sounds too – the ringing of the bells at the end of each lesson, teachers yelling at students to stop running down the corridor, the squeals of kids having fun in the playground.

It all got too much for me and I ended up staying indoors, shutting myself off from the rest of the noisy clan, lying down on the floor with my hands clasped over my ears.

At first, Mother would tell me off, snapping at me that I needed to pull myself together and start acting sensibly. Why couldn’t I be like those nice little boys Connor Rice or Matthew Bowen? They seemed friendly enough. I told Mother none of them were nice because they all made too much noise. She sent me to my room as soon as I got in and started talking to Father about my “peculiar” ways.

Father had very little to say on the matter. To him, I was just going through a silly phase and would soon snap out of it when I realised I was getting nowhere with it.

But I didn’t.

Over the next six months, my ears got worse; if ever there was a sound I didn’t like, I would stop what I was doing and clamp my hands over my ears. It didn’t stop the sound completely but it muffled it so that it was nothing but a distant whisper haunting my ears.

I could be like that for ten, twenty, thirty seconds. It all depended on how horrible the sound was.

‘What is the matter with you?’ she asked one morning as she dropped me off at school. I replied simply: there was too much sound in the world. I saw Mother’s lip quiver then, her eyes sparkling with unshed tears as she turned her attention back to the road.

And just when I thought that was the end, Mother made an appointment for me to see a “special” doctor – a psychiatrist.

‘There must be something wrong in his head’, I overheard Father telling Mother one evening before I went to bed. ‘We have to get him properly looked at, to see if we can stop all this nonsense before it goes too far.’ Mother’s voice was very timid. She kept say20

LAUREN BELL ing ‘yes, yes’ and ‘of course you’re right’, as though these were the only words she knew.

The “special” doctor was unlike anyone I had met before, he was an owlish sort of man (and by that I mean he looked like the human reincarnation of an owl) who kept his hands in the shape of a steeple throughout the entire appointment. He also had this habit of cocking his head to one side, studying me as though I was the owl.

He hastily signed a prescription sheet and handed it to Mother.

He told her to take it to the chemists downstairs who would work their magic. When he said this last word, he turned and winked at me like this was some sort of game we were both playing. I didn’t know about him but I certainly wasn’t playing any game.

The drive back home was quieter than usual with Mother blinking rapidly behind the wheel. She must have had an eyelash in her eye. I wanted to reach over and wipe it away but each time I went to, she turned her head in the opposite direction, looking out of the window.

She showed Father the pills, holding them at arm’s length as though they were under quarantine and said, ‘The doctor recommended he take these now.’

Her voice broke and I watched as she stuffed a fist to her mouth.

‘Well, the doctor knows best. Let’s just hope they do the trick.’

Again, that word. There was no trick, no magic concerning my small tick – it was just something that was. My parents thought they could cure me; a few white pills would do the trick and lift the storm that tore through my head whenever I heard a horrible sound.

Their endeavours were futile.

I kept taking the pills the “special” doctor prescribed me despite their disgusting taste for the temporary relief they gave me.

For a few hours, all sound was drowned out and I was stuck with invisible pillows against my ears. In these moments I could fully concentrate on what I had in front of me; my grades at school soared 21

LOSING SENSE and for the first time in my life, I was making friends. Aaron, Daisy and Callum accepted my small tick.

So why couldn’t my parents?

At home, they avoided me like the plague, preferring to eat their meals in a separate room (they knew I hated the sound of plates being scraped clean). I told them my medication was working and suggested that we all eat together now but they were reluctant to do so.

They seemed to stop doing a lot of things which made me angry.

My ears weren’t that sensitive and besides, there were some sounds I liked such as Mother’s singing and Father humming as he got ready for work. I also loved the sound of the ping on the microwave, birds chirruping and water filling a bath.

I went from taking four pills a day to just one. It was hard to begin with, my ears played tricks on me (see, that word again) making me think I had heard sounds that weren’t there. At one point I even heard voices calling me, saying things were going to change. I had no idea what they meant, whether they were trying to help or warn me. I never told my parents about this. I suspect that if I did, the “special” owl doctor wouldn’t be the only professional I would see.

But at least it meant I could spend more time with them: we would all eat at the table again and watch TV together. There was the odd occasion when Father scraped his chair along the kitchen floor or when Mother let the kettle go on whistling which forced me to cover my ears. I saw the look which passed between them, a look of panic and fear.

Why weren’t the pills working? The doctor said they would.

I stayed in this position for fifteen seconds and when my hands came down, I tried to smile as though everything was okay. As soon as I was excused, I ran into my bedroom, lay on my bed and closed my eyes. All I could hear was my rapid breathing. Everything was normal again, peaceful, perfect.

22

LAUREN BELL My parents are still none the wiser. I figured that it would be for the best if they never discovered the truth. If I take the small white pills all the time then I am denied the sounds I love, the ones I cannot live without. I find that if I take them sparingly on the other hand, I can still discover moments of beauty in episodes of chaos.

And if I have a really bad day, I can always go to my bedroom and gaze at the pillars of pills Mother thinks I have already taken, and count myself lucky that they’re not already inside me, working their supposed magic.

23

Maremma Brandon Marlon Luxuriating in therapeutic thermal springs affords a reprieve from a fortnight of tramping across quondam marshes, through sunflower fields and vineyards, past hay bales and cypresses.

The mind craves downtime to absorb stimuli and coalesce the landscape's specters lingering in the shards of Etruscan artisanry, loitering at the Roman Gates, lazing by windmills.

Regional memories strut along the landscape, insinuating themselves in lockstep with clock tower chimes, surfacing into awareness even as hot, sulfurous waters bubble and spume.

In my lassitude I toss my head back and shut my eyes, recalling the fish stench from when I earlier nosed a dolium of garum meticulously preserved, yet somehow it all seems the residue of a fugue.

Perhaps tonight, after a repast of seared sea bream with olives, artichokes, zucchini, and kale, after climbing nearby hills full of metals, I will meet with Dante's ghost at sundown.

24

If so, I will lay down my rucksack and inquire where he has been and whether he ever slept overnight on a farmhouse roof with the stars his guerdon, then spill waterfalls of gratitude for the experience.

25

Buffering Chris Campanioni Scene 1, item 1: The camera moves as if the wind.

Unreachable valley of sand, curving tire tracks, vista of blue sky and black leather boots, a close-up of parting lips and the sand parting in the march’s wake: a mouth without teeth or tongue.

Audio track mutes in place of the alarmed tenor of North American news anchors, voices superimposed on voices until nothing is legible except the pitch. a crackling in the auditory like the removal of a head Even this is a prayer. Even this.

DISSOLVE TO VO: “The media wing has relied on veterans of al-Qaeda media teams, young recruits fluent in social media platforms, and a bureaucratic discipline reminiscent of totalitarian regimes. Battle scenes and public beheadings are so scripted and staged that fighters and executioners often perform multiple takes and read their lines from cue cards. The overriding goal of the Islamic State is not merely to inflict terror on an adversary but also to command a global audience.”

26

EXT. – COURTYARD – DAY Two men kneeling, blindfolded, hands tied behind their backs, naked besides a white tunic, the better to show the juxtaposition of red. A caption slides across the screen: The beheading takes place only when the camera crew’s director says it is time to proceed.

A man wearing a black baseball cap sits at a wooden chair and fidgets, folding fingers together as if to contemplate the shape of the sun or its location in the sky, which is quickly turning royal blue.

Soon, it will be purple.

He crosses and uncrosses a leg. He calls Junaid, who’s in charge of media. He waits for confirmation, which comes as a pat on the shoulder from an assistant who swoops in and hasn’t swooped in yet. He checks his mobile. He phones his wife, Fatima. He phones his friend, Ahmed, who runs the club he frequents on Fridays and Saturdays, and sometimes, Tuesdays. It’s Wednesday.

CLOSE-UP OF A TATTERED NEWSPAPER, QUOTE UNDERLINED IN RED MARKER “The group is very image-conscious, much like a corporation,” said a U.S. intelligence official involved in monitoring the Islamic State’s media operations. Its approach to building its brand is so disciplined, the official said, “that it’s very much like saying ‘This is Coca-Cola’ or ‘This is Nike.’”

27

BUFFERING

INT. – VIDEO ARCHIVE – DAY “Why do so many of the victims in Islamic State beheading videos look so calm?”

I ask, looking at the footage with a colleague of mine at the university. She gazes at me and turns her palm upward, as if to say, You don’t know?

She’s an expert on the subject and I know nothing; as a rule I’m only always asking questions. Of myself or others.

That’s why I came to the conference yesterday afternoon. That’s why I’m here. To watch the footage and learn more about what it contains. I teach a course on celebrity and wish fulfillment and the Age of the Internet, and I want to connect networking threads that ISIS already did much earlier, using social media and mankind’s penchant for glamorization and documentation to multiply and prosper.

She zooms in on the expression of the child who is about to lose his head. The frame is frozen but we’ve already watched this one twice.

In 2.4 seconds, the child’s head will roll, coming to a stop near his left hip. The camera crew will be visible, briefly, as one man removes a reflector that was out of frame, and another lowers a boom mic. So calm, so calm, so calm. My colleague looks at the screen and then at me.

“They don’t know it is real.”

28

CHRIS CAMPANIONI

CLOSE-UP OF A TATTERED NEWSPAPER, COLUMN UNDERLINED IN RED MARKER Al-Qaeda’s releases always exalted its leaders, particularly Osama bin Laden. But the Islamic State’s propaganda is generally focused on its fighters and followers. Appearances by leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi or his senior lieutenants have been rare.

EXT. – COURTYARD – NIGHT The hooded executioner raised and lowered his sword repeatedly so that crews could catch the blade from multiple angles. Nearby, half a dozen men were carrying bodies in a wheelbarrow, two to a machine, legs dangling on the sand. They pause at spots of sand marked with a mounted X. Here they deposit the bodies, arranging them to be photographed.

Before each image is captured, a man smears the dead’s face with moist cloths, washing away dried blood. Next, the man lifts the corners of the dead’s mouth into a beatific smile, and raises their index finger in a gesture adopted by the Islamic State as a symbol of its cause.

The caption reads: Let us exalt our heroes and their sacrifice

INT. – VIDEO ARCHIVE – DAY “The frequency and volume of releases by the Islamic State are staggering by comparison,” my colleague says, turning to me again, 29

BUFFERING watching my expression. Probably she is wondering why I’m not taking notes or whether I am keeping this all to myself. All for me. All inside of me.

“The group has produced hundreds of videos in more than a half-dozen languages, puts out daily radio broadcasts, and garners as many as two million mentions per month on Twitter.”

My iPhone lights up. Someone, somewhere has followed me.

I turn my gaze behind me to see a door closing. A drawer opens. The monitor down the hall is alight, except I can’t figure what’s on the screen. Three men are wearing black headphones, the kind that encircles their skulls. They seem amused, looking with wide eyes and grinning intermittently. Or maybe it’s me who is amused, looking at them when I should be looking elsewhere. It’s difficult to see and now I have to squint.

“Are you okay?” my colleague asks, noticing my eyes or maybe my lack of focus. I nod and point my finger.

There is a window, above the monitor we are seated at. It’s day, maybe noon or one-thirty. I don’t wear a watch anymore. Hardly anyone wears a watch anymore.

The sun’s rays streak through the glass, bisecting my chest and face, half in shade.

It’s awhile till I can open my eyes again.

30

CHRIS CAMPANIONI DISSOLVE TO VO: “Discrepancies among frames showed that scenes had been rehearsed and shot in multiple takes over many hours.”

EXT. – VILLAGE SQUARE – NIGHT Close-up of a palm on goatskin. A moment of silence before the beat kicks in. A man seated, legs crossed, with the daf in both hands, one on each frame width-wise, as if the instrument were a mirror.

Camera pans out to reveal a group of singers and performers, tanbur, violin, oud, saz, small cymbals that match the vibrating camera when they shake, trembling as its gaze moves from figure to figure.

A man has just finished installing a screen the size of a small billboard, hanging at the center of the village square. He sighs and unfurls his arms. A cloud of sand kicks up at his feet and the camera follows it around a bend; a laptop barely visible behind the screen; two men with headsets barking directions in and out of focus as a crackle emerges.

A spotlight in the square and all is silent. The image on the screen begins to move.

Crowds have gathered from three neighboring villages for this.

Quick cut to a teenager, lips parting in a broad smile. His legs are folded beneath him as he claps, applauding the movement of the images on the screen, the music which accompanies it.

“It’s like a movie theater,” said Abu Hourraira al-Maghribi, a 23-year-old with a shaved head who wore an Adidas hoodie when he 31

BUFFERING met with reporters in prison. The videos are drawn from the Islamic State’s expanding film library, he said, depicting “daily life, military training, and beheadings. And be … and be … and be …

The video is buffering.

INT. – VIDEO ARCHIVE – EVENING “What’s going on?”

“The video is buffering.”

“What’s that?” I ask.

buffer noun buff·er \'bǝ-fǝr\ 1. fellow man; especially: an old man (slang British) 2. any of various devices or pieces of material for reducing shock or damage due to contact 3. a means or device used as a cushion against the shock of fluctuations in business or financial activity 4. something that serves as a protective barrier: as a: buffer state b: a person who shields another especially from annoying routine matters c: mediator 5. a substance capable in solution of neutralizing both acids and bases and thereby maintaining the original acidity or basicity of the solution; also: a solution containing such a substance 6. a temporary storage unit (as in a computer); especially: one that accepts information at one rate and delivers it at another 32

CHRIS CAMPANIONI

verb buff·er 1. to protect (something) from something 2. to lessen the harmful effects of (something 3. computers : to put (something, such as data) in a buffer “No,” I cut in. “I know what buffering means.”

She looks at me as if she’s expecting me to say something else.

“I meant, why did an advertisement for Justin Bieber’s Purpose just pop up?”

She laughs, looking at my finger, still pointed. Justin Bieber shadowed and stark, genuflecting in prayer with his fingers barely touching. A gold watch on his left wrist. Seven chains around the other.

“Oh, that.”

DISSOLVE TO VO: “The videos reflect an increased awareness of global pop culture. A recently released training video from the Ansar Battalion, an Islamist rebel group in Syria, features action movie style cuts between slow and fast motion, as well as CGI that mimics the bullet time effects made famous in The Matrix. Religious verses that often serve as the soundtrack to these videos are now auto-tuned. Somalia’s AlShabaab, whose videos are often directly aimed at recruiting Americans, has dabbled in hip-hop and nasheeds sung in English; at other times, the videos are designed to mimic video games.”

33

BUFFERING

INT. – VIDEO ARCHIVE – DAY YOU Senior media operatives are treated as emirs.

ME Emirs?

YOU (sharply) More important than soldiers.

Their monthly income is higher.

They have better cars. They preside over hundreds of videographers, producers, and editors who form a privileged, professional class with salaries and living arrangements that are the envy of every soldier.

ME Isn’t ISIS concerned about the fall-out? A drop in the soldiers actually willing to fight its war?

YOU (shakes head) The overriding goal of the Islamic State is not to inflict terror on an adversary. (beat) Now it wants to command a global audience. (beat) You teach a class on narcissism, right?

34

CHRIS CAMPANIONI

ME (nods) So by glamorizing the soldiers, the videos function as a way to remove the boundaries between public figures and private citizens. Soldiers are celebrities while the leaders who pull the strings recede into the background.

YOU (shrugs) Not even the background.

Almost categorically removed from all propaganda material. (gulps coffee, makes a face) The attacks in Paris were carried out by militants whose attachments to the Islamic State exist mainly on the Internet. Ninety percent of the members of the Islamic Caliphate are being recruited online.

ME (counting, eyes pulled peripherally) YOU (fingers tap the desk) Don’t bother doing the math.

ME I wasn’t actually counting.

35

BUFFERING YOU It’ll rise by next week.

ME Then what?

YOU Then what?

DISSOLVE INTO INT. – MEDIA DIVISION HEADQUARTERS – DAY Panorama of a two-story home in a residential neighborhood. Bicycles and lawnmowers. Fake grass. The sound of running water and a faucet turning. Armed guards in military garb patrol the entrance, where two white vans have just arrived, the blue FORD insignia above the bumper still shiny.

The van doors slide open, revealing laptops and memory sticks in an open chest. Chest to hand, hand to chest, this time held in place between the breasts. Three armed guards ask for credentials three times. Three times credentials are approved and the camera moves on.

Inside the building, the camera moves through each floor as if giving a tour to prospective homeowners. Slow, deliberate, hanging for applause.

Four rooms to a floor, each room stocked with cameras, computers, memory sticks, reflectors, and lighting lamps. All the computers are connected to the Internet through a Turkish wireless service. Pornography plays on each monitor, except one.

36

CHRIS CAMPANIONI

A lanky pale man wearing a gray TaylorMade visor over his dark brown hair hunches over a desktop, editing footage from earlier in the day, moving video showing the construction of public markets, smiling religious police on neighborhood patrols, and residents leisurely fishing on the banks of the Euphrates to one folder. Moving beheadings, immolations, and round-table rapes to another. Syncing music and mixing sound effects to segue from scenes. His nametag reads: Jim Williams. Two women are moaning on the screen around him. Moaning, wailing. So staged it sounds real.

Three women, four, five.

DISSOLVE INT. – VIDEO ARCHIVE – EVENING ME Social media enables the role of the viewer who is constantly watching but also watched— YOU (softly) A viewer under surveillance.

ME —from a perch of simultaneous moral superiority and self-denial, creating not only a compartmentalization of horror, but also its justification. (beat) The Internet provides the buffer.

We are all of us buffering.

37

BUFFERING

YOU (reads from cue cards erratically) Erin Saltman … a counter-extremism researcher … at the Institute for … Strategic Dialogue … cites “desires of adventure … activism, romance … power, belonging, along … with spiritual fulfillment” … as the main allure that ISIS … provides its recruits.

ME These outcomes sound a lot like the ones promised to us via the Internet.

Its glamorized re-presentations of everyday life.

DISSOLVE INTO VO: “The group exerts extraordinarily tight control over the production of its videos and messages but relies on the chaos of the Internet and social media to disseminate them. The terrorist group’s rise is a result mainly of its demonstrated military power and the tangible territory it has seized. But a remarkable amount of its energy is devoted to creating an alternative, idealized version of itself online and shaping how that virtual empire is perceived.”

EXT. – VILLAGE SQUARE – NIGHT Silence again. The smell of goat skin, salt, human flesh, excrement.

The daf in both hands but each finger is still. The boy in the Adidas hoodie re-emerges on screen, still smiling, addressing the camera, 38

CHRIS CAMPANIONI and the crowd he imagines gazing through it, he can’t say where or when, or on what occasion; sometime later, definitely tonight.

“Some were like Van Damme movies,” he said, referring to JeanClaude Van Damme, the Hollywood action star. “You see these men fighting, and you want to be one of these brave heroes.”

Outside the frame, it was night in New York City too. I could see the moon, or a slice of it, in the window which hung over the monitor and draped the room in half-lit silver. I was alone and had been for some time. When my phone buzzed I didn’t bother to glance at the screen. The machine stayed in my pocket, alerting me about something I probably did not want to know, or admit, or understand. Any or all three, some combination I had only just considered. The description on the film I’d just watched beamed back at me as I hovered the mouse over its author.

His videos continue to circulate online.

39

Gallery Walk Matilda Morrison i. The Drink This is what it’s like: You have gone too far beneath the water, and everything around you is dark. You swim wildly, flailing, seeking the surface, but each movement only drags you deeper. At last, the burning in your chest overwhelms you; your muscles grow tired; the pressure envelops you. She is in your eyes, your veins, your lungs.

She is everywhere.

Or sometimes: You have fallen asleep in the sun, and your skin has become an angry red. You awaken, disoriented and sun-sick, radiating with fever. Your throat and tongue are swollen, powder-dry.

Exhausted, you reach gingerly for the cool glass by your side. You pull it to your lips and find: nothing.

She is nowhere.

This is what it’s like to miss her.

I. Bona Fide I am a born hand wringer. The night before I started kindergarten, anticipating disasters to come, I packed my bunny backpack with a can of soup, some loose gummy vitamins, and three pairs of backup underwear. I also included a recent family portrait (my aunt, my uncle, Josie, and I, framed), worried that I might forget their fac-

40

es. I spent that first day in terrified silence, crying occasionally and sneaking off to my cubby to check that the picture was still there.

Since then, not much has changed. I have never gotten a speeding ticket because I never got my driver’s license. I brush and floss all of my teeth on a twice-daily basis. I am rarely sick and never late.

Not boring, but dependable. The kind of person you might call if you were looking for a very good cat-sitter.

Perhaps the one thing that sets me apart from your average anxiety-riddled glasses wearer (besides my fashionable frames) is my job: I work on species restoration and lead educational tours at the state park. Or in cooler terms: I am a bona fide park ranger.

Everyone loves a lady in uniform! (I generally lead with that line at parties and am occasionally rewarded with polite and uncomfortable laughter.) Though I must often write brochures and interact with tourists, I chose this job because it lets me work with my birds.

The birds I’ve been studying, the vireos, have been disappearing rapidly over the past several years. Most of my days are spent walking stealthily through the forest, listening for them, noting any new nests and tracking their movements. Too often, lately, I find only bodies when I locate the tagged birds. In these cases, I have to take them to the lab at the university where Jorge can analyse them for parasites and pathogens.

It was during one of these ornithological necropsies that I met my wife, Amita.

II. Exposure The bird we were working with at the time was an adolescent, with patches of natal down around its chest and neck. Jorge had already begun to remove its intestines when a student called him over to check on a temperamental freezer, leaving me momentarily alone at the examination table. Though I was not required (or, frankly, encouraged) to sit in on the necropsies, I felt that my pres41

GALLERY WALK ence in the lab fulfilled a certain duty I had to the birds. Mostly, I think, I wanted to be there when we finally determined the nature of this plague. In my mind, I envisioned Jorge pausing mid-sentence as he lifted some organ closer for examination. After a long moment, he would slowly ask me to go to his office and find such and such a book, which I would do, efficiently. By the time I returned, his bloody gloves would be removed. He’d take the book from me without speaking and begin flipping through the pages; he knows what he is looking for. “This,” he would say at last, pointing to an entry. “This is what’s been killing your birds.” And I would nod. And I would know what to do to save them. And then I would do it.

I was imagining this scene again as I stared, fixated, at the delicate body on the table, its organs splayed out around it, its tiny beak stretched open in a scream.

“Gross.” I looked up. She was standing near the door.

“Are you looking for Professor Abrams?”

“I’ll wait. I don’t mind if you, you know…” She gestured at the eviscerated bird.

“Oh, no, I’m not…I’m just…” Just staring at it like a serial killer.

“I’m just guarding it. He asked me to guard it.”

“Are you worried it might fly away?” She laughed at her own joke. Not a giggle but a full, low chuckle.

“You can never be too careful.” I smiled awkwardly for several seconds. I checked my watch. Then sent a text. Next, I decided to become fascinated with a laboratory safety poster. She stood there, comfortable, unfazed; she could wait like this for hours.

I checked my watch again. Fifty seconds had elapsed. “So,” I finally said, “You’re a biology student then?”

“Ew, no,” she laughed again. “Just kidding. But actually no.”

“So you’re…?”

“I just started the MFA program.” Now that she said it, she did have some of the classic markings of a creative type. The pencil 42

MATILDA MORRISON behind the ear, the lace-up boots, the interesting tattoos peeking out of her sleeves.

“Oh, cool.” (It was; she was.) “How do you know Jorge, though?”

“My thesis project is, well, it’s kind of hard to describe, but basically for part of it I need to have a lot of studies of bone structures and anatomy, and Jorge lets me borrow animal skeletons.” She said all this very quickly, and seemed, for the first time, the smallest bit flustered. I imagined she had had many opportunities to practice these lines before. She shifted a bit and took in my uniform. “And you’re… some kind of bird cop, I assume?”

“Try bird detective.” I said this as a throwaway joke, just saying something to say something, but she immediately began cackling hysterically. She doubled over laughing and stood back up with tears in her eyes. Each time I thought she was done, she’d look back at me and start cracking up again. There were a few moments when I worried that she might pee on the floor.

Jorge came back at the tail end of her final laughing fit. She was completely flushed, and was still letting out occasional chuckles at odd intervals. She wiped her eyes and took a breath while I just stood there, a little bit baffled. Jorge raised an amused eyebrow.

“I hope you weren’t waiting too long,” he smiled at her. “I have your little buddy in my office.” He paused, calculating for a moment.

“Shall I bring it over? I don’t want to have to make you walk.” He winked at me behind her back.

III. Us, Together The beginning played out like you might expect: she texted me her phone number, we had several successful dates (The Avengers, the arboretum, dinner downtown), she stayed over a few times, and then one day, all of the sudden, we were us, together. I noticed it a few weeks in, when we were on the couch (reading and sketching, respectively), and she had fallen asleep, the pencil quietly slip43

GALLERY WALK ping from her long fingers. This was not a rare occurrence; she was asked to produce a lot of work, and often resorted to caffeine (and occasionally harder drugs) when pressed for a deadline. She’d been resting gently for nearly an hour when, out of nowhere, she let out a loud, silly-sounding snore. I laughed to myself and then looked at her. Her black hair hanging over her face onto her delicate collarbone. Her soft arm bent into a pillow. Her legs resting heavy in my lap. Maybe that was it, the weight of her, that let me know that we were us, now. Together.

Being us was easy at first, certainly easier than being just me.

Ever since my aunt had died, my uncle had become colder and more reserved, and with Josie in college across the country, I’d been feeling a bit untethered. Ami gave me something to hang on to, something besides my scattered family and my dying birds. She was brilliant and goofy, and she liked to surprise me with little cartoons based on things that I’d told her about my job. She loved Jane Austen and bell hooks. She taught me how to embroider (I made a little bookmark for Josie) and how to shoot a free throw (I made one!) (after fifty or so attempts).She said she liked when I stayed over because I made better dinners. I liked when she was over because, well, I liked her.

After a few months of dating, I moved into her apartment, bracing myself for the worst. Surely this is when things would become difficult? But they didn’t really. There were a few tense conversations about dirty dishes, and about the number of skeletons that it was acceptable to store directly on the nightstand (zero, if you’re wondering), but we quickly fell into a comfortable routine. I waited eight more months for something to go wrong. Then I proposed.

IV. Missing Pieces The first few months of our marriage coincided with an unprecedented wave of filial cannibalism among the vireos. Mothers had begun pecking their infants to death (and, in many cases, eat44

MATILDA MORRISON ing them or feeding them to their other babies). I was spending almost every night in the lab with Jorge, talking with him about the potential cause of this troubling behaviour and helping him find relevant research in archived journals at the university’s library.

Jorge initially suspected that the mothers had begun targeting their weaker (and therefore, potentially infected) offspring in order to protect themselves and their other babies from the disease.

He had assumed that the missing chunks in the corpses were due to normal scavenging; this was before I observed several mothers consuming the babies’ bodies.

With that discovery, Jorge was forced to change his hypothesis.

Eating an infected bird would not reduce the spread of the infection, but increase it. This led Jorge to believe that the mothers themselves were also infected, and that perhaps whatever it was they were sick with had reached their brains, making them unwitting disseminators of contagion.

The vireo population at the park had been roughly 1,500 when I had first begun working there, and at they point, they had been considered “threatened.” The birds now numbered just over 300 by last count; their time was running out. Even if we knew what was infecting them, it was very unlikely that a simple cure would already exist, let alone be readily accessible and easily distributed to a forest full of wild birds. Think of the number of people who devote their lives to curing human disease. Think now of how many of those human diseases are left uncured, of how many of those scientists die without having made any significant progress. You can imagine, then, why almost none of the vireo-specific diseases have been extensively researched, why there are no telethons or relay races to support a cure for avian cannibalism.

This was a trying time for me. I lay awake next to Amita every night she was home, feverishly recalling articles I’d read, hoping to crack the case of the dying birds. Sometimes, on the verge of sleep, 45

GALLERY WALK I would be jolted awake again by the vision of a mother eating her baby, its bloody, featherless body hanging limply from her beak. I tried my best to be a caring partner, but the stress and lack of sleep made me snippy and lethargic. When I had free time, I no longer wanted to spend it playing basketball or going to the movies. I just wanted to sleep, or maybe watch TV. Ami seemed surprisingly okay with everything; she was also busy, finishing her project after two years, which would be on display the week before her graduation. She stayed awake and played with my hair to help me fall asleep. She made me chamomile tea and rubbed my shoulders, told me she didn’t mind that that was all I wanted right now. Her areas of the apartment became cleaner, less cluttered with sketchbooks and bones.

These were the things I would have noticed, had I been paying attention. The clues that I missed.

V. What’s Wrong How many bodies have you seen?

One and a half.

Who was the first?

My aunt.

What kind of soda were you buying when her heart stopped?

Grape Fanta.

Why did she die?

Because I wasn’t there.

VI. Lucky Girl I arrived at the hospital several hours after they had picked up Amita. I keep my phone on silent while I’m at the park, so I didn’t 46

MATILDA MORRISON hear the doctor’s message until just before sunset; a co-worker closed the information kiosk early to give me a ride over.

“You’re lucky,” said the doctor when I finally arrived. Ami had been found in the studio by a fellow art student, found before her breathing had stopped. She’d been on her side instead of her back, which meant she hadn’t drowned in vomit. She was comatose, but she was not dead. Lucky means something different in hospitals.

A nurse took me to her bed and asked if I’d like him to call anyone close to Amita. I gave him her oldest brother’s phone number and then pulled over a flesh-coloured chair from the corner of the room.

I put my hand on her arm and looked at her face, asleep. The heart monitor was beeping steadily along, a low, slow tempo accompanied by the whirring of machines, punctuated by the occasional rumble of a stretcher or wheelchair rolling past the long curtains. I talked to her.

Minutes.

I missed talking with her.

Weeks.

She moved her hands.

I waited.

VII. Pieces Temperance: A wreath of California poppies framing a bird’s nest with a golden badge lying inside it. [Embroidery on textiles; mixed media] The Fool: A chubby rabbit leaping into a rose bush, its mouth full of clover. [Pastel on paper] The Lovers: Two women sitting back-to-back, fingers intertwined, with their hair braided together down the middle. [Oil on canvas]

47

Death: A hungry bird pecking at a sea of bones. [Ink on paper] Strength: A woman extending her arm to a mountain lion, red threads hang down out of all of her wounds. [Embroidery on textiles] Eight of Swords: A portrait of the artist, blindfolded, rough paint strokes forming bars in front of her. [Acrylic on canvas] The Star: White cactus flowers blooming in the dead of night; a nest full of beautiful eggs protected in a hole at the cactus’s centre.

[Mixed media on textile; eyes open in a hospital room]

48

Transformation Elizabeth Yalkut There's a man who sleeps outside the subway, who's claimed the gap between the stairs and the newsstand.

"Hey, girl," he shouts at me, and instead of dropping my gaze, instead of hurrying across the street, I step closer.

"Fuck you, I'm a dragon," I tell him, my breath boiling white in front of me.

My bones crack and splinter and my skin sloughs away, my tongue becomes serrated; but that's not the real transformation.

Anyone can have scales keeping them safe and fire inside their heart, acid churning in their guts.

But me, I believe I am a dragon, and when he recoils, it's not the smoke I exhale that he's choking on.

49

The Imam and the Compass Samuel Usayd Ilyas Amir was about to take the first sip of his afternoon tea when the doorbell rang. He paused as the sound entered the kitchen, the surface of the tea rippling just below his moustache. For a while he tried to guess who it might be, and if they were worth interrupting his afternoon ritual for. The bell rang again. With a laboured sight Amir lowered the mug, laying it to rest on the exact same spot it had occupied before. Annoyed by the intrusion he stood up slowly, out of protest, then walked towards the door at the same sluggish pace.

Amir was a small man, as short as he was skinny, but in the narrow corridors of his terrace house he was able to maintain the illusion of being taller than average. Something he felt important for his image as a figure of authority. When he reached the door he stopped, hand resting on handle he recited a quick dua1 to himself as he always did before opening a door. It was a superstition he had inherited, along with his hooked nose and dark skin, from his father, and it had saved his life on more than one occasion. As the local Imam he was a natural target for the Jinns2 and devious spirits that inhabited the woods nearby, and came into the city ever so often to terrorize the people.

It was dangerous this time of year. Just the other week a woman was heard screaming behind the library, and had her auntie not rushed out to find her, wielding Qur’an and walking stick, the woman would surely have been killed by the four legged man that attacked her.

Amir was certain that the Jinns were getting more violent. This year 1 A short personal prayer.

2 In Islamic tradition Jinns are beings or spirits that live in a parallel world to that of humans. They are not usually visible to the human eye, and whilst some are said to be sinister they are not evil by nature.

50

alone he had been assaulted a dozen times, once even in his own home. Whilst he was reading a book about the Amazon his cousin had bought him a Jinn crept down the chimney, bursting out of his fire-place in the shape of a Brazilian python. At least that one had a sense of humour, he thought.

It must have been particularly brave as well. The framed Shahada3 that hung on the front door was usually enough to keep the nasty ones away, and if not the dua would always do the trick. His father’s superstition thus served him well even if it began as a familial idiosyncrasy, an unintended homage to a man long dead. On this occasion, however, it proved unnecessary. It was a man, not a Jinn, that was responsible for disturbing Amir’s afternoon. In fact it was a man he knew well. William was his name. Or it wasn’t really, but he had decided to adopt an English name when he first moved here and became so committed to his own lie that he had forgotten what his parents used to call him in Pakistan. Hence his adopted name, William, became his only name. A situation that had never caused any confusion because his parents never visited. William was much bigger than Amir. His shoulders were so wide that when he was invited in he had to pass through the tiny door-frame one shoulder at time, and even then it was tight.

‘Bolt the door behind us’, he said to Amir after he had successfully squeezed his body into the hallway.

Being familiar with William’s excessive paranoia Amir did so without question, then followed his large visitor into the kitchen, where his afternoon tea was still waiting for him. It was only when they were both seated that Amir noticed William looked even more nervous than normal. Despite the cold English winter his beardless face was covered in thick beads of sweat, and his fingertips drummed against the wooden table with unnerving regularity.

3 The Muslim declaration of faith, translates as: “There is no god but God. Muhammad is the messenger of God.”

51

THE IMAM AND THE COMPASS Something’s not right. But before Amir had a chance to speak William reached into his pocket and dropped a small square trinket onto the table. The click of the stone object on waxed wood was quiet, but somehow chased every other particle of sound out the room, leaving the two men frozen in the purest of silences. Their eyes converged on the object. It was black, deep black, the same black as the space between stars, which had neither beginning nor end. That was the only thing that struck Amir. Apart from that the object was visually quite unremarkable. Nothing more than a little stone cube. Yet still, something about it commanded Amir’s attention. Afraid to break the silence he motioned towards the object to indicate his desire to touch it, which William, also without the use of a single word, told him he could.

The first thing Amir noticed whilst holding the box was that it was significantly bigger than it had looked in William’s hands. It was heavier too, and its surfaces smoother than imagined. He traced his fingers along its cold edges, until he noticed a thin ridge camouflaged against the black. It opens! Within seconds of his discovery Amir had pried the box apart and realized he was in fact looking at a compass. There were no markings on its face. Only a single needle, the same endless black as the box.

‘It doesn’t point north’ William, having waited patiently whilst Amir explored the object, could no longer bear the silence.

‘So buy a new one’, Amir snapped back, ‘I’m an Imaam not a mechanic.’

William shook his head, in the same clumsy way he always did.

‘No you don’t get it. It’s not broken, it’s enchanted.’

Amir had seen a lot of strange things in the twenty-five years he’d lived here. There were women who came to him convinced their husbands had cursed them, butchers that were adamant their meat came back to life by night, one young girl even claimed to be a 52

SAMUEL USAYD ILYAS reincarnation of Amir’s wife, ten years after he himself had buried her. But an enchanted compass? This was ridiculous even through his eyes. Nevertheless he decided to humour William, who had always been kind to him, and whom he liked despite his naivety.

‘Oh yes?’ he said, ‘and why would someone cast a spell on a compass?’

‘I do not know why. All I know is that I bought this from a street vendor in Pakistan a few years back, for Sookie, you know how she travels a lot and needs one for her prayers, and when I got back to the hotel I noticed it was pointing west. I thought it must be broken, even tried to take it back but you know how these street vendors never stay in the same place…’

Amir suddenly remembered his tea. ‘…I kept it though, mainly because I couldn’t bring myself to throw away something I’d spent good money on. It looks nice too, thought I could get it fixed…’

It was probably cold by now. Maybe he shouldn’t have opened the door. ‘…I found it lying in a draw a few weeks ago and noticed now it was pointing south-east. I took it to Sa’id to see if he could fix it, because if he can’t fix something it can’t be fixed, but he said he couldn’t figure out how it works. Took it apart completely and found nothing, no magnets, no circuits or gears. Nothing that can explain how it turns. It shouldn’t be moving at all…’

Amir pricked up. Although he was still annoyed about the prospect of drinking cold tea he was starting to get more and more interested in William’s mystery. ‘…so I got to thinking, if it’s not pointing north it has to be pointing at something, right? So Sookie had this idea, you know how she’s always been the brains in the marriage. We got a map, drew one line going south-east from here then going west from Islamabad, and you’ll never guess where they crossed.’

53

THE IMAM AND THE COMPASS ‘Where?’ this time Amir struggled to hide his curiosity. He lent forward, in order to shorten the distance William’s answer had to travel, for a moment completely forgetting about the cup of stale tea still sitting in the same spot he had left it in when the doorbell rang.

‘Mecca.’

The force of the response pushed Amir back in his chair. A magic compass that points to Mecca. Now this was interesting, if it was true of course.

‘Are you sure?’ Asked the still somewhat sceptical Imaam.

‘Positive. Sookie’s brother went on Hajj last week so I asked him to take it with him. He said he wouldn’t have believed it had he not seen it with his own eyes. No matter where he was in the city the compass always pointed right at the Kabbah.’

Amir listened intently. The initial shock of the revelation had worn off, and he had since sunk into a state of deep reflection, playing with his moustache whilst he thought. He’d never heard of anything like this. This was not the first time his occupation had brought him into contact with enchantment, but this case was considerably more complicated than most. It is a known fact that magic is haram4 , and so ordinarily it is practiced only by deviants, to trick believers and lead them astray. Cups that make any drink alcoholic, gloves that force their wearer to steal, clocks that made households lazier with each tick – these were the sorts of enchanted objects Amir was used to dealing with. Thus, once the source of the problem had been identified it was easy for him cleanse the object of its curse, or failing that simply destroy it. The compass, however, was not so black and white. Yes it is driven by magic, which by nature is against the will of God, but at the same time it facilitates the worship of that same God. Amir did his best to hide his confusion, but his mind continued to grumble. The act of its creation was shrouded in subversion, and yet its purpose is entirely pure. The question was what is more important, 4

Literally 'forbidden', usually used as a word for sin.

54

SAMUEL USAYD ILYAS its origin or its existence? William watched in silent wonder as Amir debated with himself, waiting for the verdict, which, as always, he would treat as the unquestionable truth.

‘It must be destroyed’, Amir finally declared.

Although William was slightly disappointed by the decision he nodded, reverently.

‘Leave it with me, and I will ensure that is disposed of according to Allah’s will’, Amir continued.

Ever obedient, William lifted himself from his chair, gave a tiny bow in Amir’s direction, then saw himself to the door. Once Amir heard the front door slam shut he picked up the compass, and began to inspect it again. It was remarkable. Who could possibly have come up with such an idea? A Muslim who had allowed themselves to be tempted by the spirits? Or maybe a magician with a twisted sense of humour? The mystery was as perplexing as it was enticing, and it was only when the sun began to rise that Amir realised he had spent the entire night lost in his own curiosity. Perhaps it doesn’t have to be destroyed, he thought. It does after all, serve a holy purpose. Does it really matter how it was conceived?

An idea suddenly came to him. For some time now he had considered leaving the city. It had changed since he first arrived. The days were darker than they had been, the nights colder. The wind was more aggressive than before, biting into his skin with more venom. As if the elements were committed to reminding Amir he was no longer welcome. England is no place for Muslims nowadays, he said to himself. Not that it had ever been easy. Memories of abuse from the early years still linger, still hurtful. Pain found him in angry words thrown across the street by passers-by, or sometimes unsaid, bundled into searing stares. Each time reminding him of his isolation. Until recently though those experiences were left to collect dust in the depths of his memory. Now it was starting again. The looks were less threatening than before, carrying fear instead of ha55

tred, but that’s how it begins. For the time being people mutter their violent words under-breath, for how long? Maybe the compass was a sign. He had given the best years of his life to this city, to this country, and what did he have to show for it? Yes there was the Mosque but they could easily find someone else to take his place. He didn’t recognise most of the faces there these days anyway. Since his wife passed away he had no family here, no children, only a house full of books and a long list of acquaintances who came to seek the wisdom he learnt from them. What reason have I stay?

With a solemn flick of the thumb Amir closed the compass, placed it in his pocket, and went upstairs to pack.

56

Serenity in Dining David Olsen I wear a fine bespoke suit and greet the regulars with a confident smile, remembering their likes and dislikes, including their preference for water – sparkling, still, or iced – the choice confirmed by unobtrusive hand signals to the assistant server.

From a memorized list, my sommelier is ready with suggestions to match selections from the evening’s menu; he’s unfazed whether the chosen wine is moderate or extravagant in price.

When the duck arrives on the guéridon, I carve one breast with the right hand, the other with the left, to avoid rotating the bird and exposing its unappealing cavity to the guest.

Three or four hours later, I supply complimentary cognac with a bill of four figures, while maintaining absolute poise, never revealing my thoughts to the people I serve.

57

The Deaf Araucaria Gonzalo Garcia Grandma Lela says trees can hear you, that they understand old words. I’ve spent the last two weeks talking to it, saying, grow, please grow, if you really wanted to you could be a skyscraper. But it doesn’t even wave a branch in the wind, which grandma tells me is how we know they listen. I’m beginning to suspect that only grandma can speak to trees because she’s as old as her words and even looks like one of them: all the cracks on her face, the way she never moves from the chair, and her room always smells of mint because she stacks leaves to dry on the heater.

I don’t have much time left, but grandma refuses to buy me a new one and my parents won’t come back until the end of the summer. Two days from now, the judges will come and measure it. They will laugh. They won’t even take the measuring tape out of their briefcases and they’ll pat me on the head. They will ask me if they got the wrong tree and I will smile and say that everyone makes mistakes and then I’ll point at anything else in the garden because even roses are taller. But grandma will correct them. She’s always correcting people. That is the right one. That is the deaf araucaria.

Can’t you see it doesn’t wave? And they will laugh even harder next door because it makes my neighbour’s tree, the pine filled with cone grenades, look like a rocket ready to go off to space. Everyone will know. Old men will meet in the plaza to talk about it. Did you see Camila’s deaf tree? Or was it a flower? Whatever it is, it’s so deaf. The girl likes flowers. The girl kills trees. If only she were a boy. Trees are the business of grown-ups. She should be making mud pies like all the other girls. She’ll get hurt one of these days if she keeps climbing 58

trees. Does no one love her enough to tell her? The Devil is in that house and now they’re paying for it. Why do you think they got avocados in July?

To lose in a town so small is to lose far more than you ever could in a city. It was Patricio Rivera, the melon man, who yesterday told me all about it.

“What will happen if I get last place?” I asked, as he fed his horse.

“Ay, last place, my little miss boss? Are we really going there?

Are you sure you want to know?”

“I’d like to be prepared for the worst.”

“Ay, Dios mío, Camila, praised be the Lord. Even Rudolf is dead quiet now, can you see? Look,” he said, stroking his horse’s head.

“Don’t say these things, please. Ah, Camilita, Camilita. This town is so small. You will lose much more than you would in a city. What will happen is people will remember. They will always remember.

And their children will remember. The girl without a tree. They will say that at first. The girl without a tree.”

“That’s not so bad,” I said with a smile.

“What, are you crazy little miss boss? Don’t say this. You got Rudolf kicking now, look how he kicks. Epa, epa, calm down, jeez, man. What did I do to deserve this animal? Now he won’t stop until I give him a melon. Look here…” He took a knife out, cut a melon in two and let Rudolf lick it until he became still. “Please, you must understand. They will say that only at first. But then with the years, little boss, with the years one of them, because there is always one, just like a bad melon,” he showed me a rotten melon before giving it to Rudolf. “One of them says, hey, isn’t that the little boss who burnt her tree down and got caught trying to steal the prize? She was called Camila wasn’t she? Yes, that was her, she couldn’t stand losing so she burnt it, I remember very well.”

“But I didn’t. And I won’t.”

59

THE DEAF ARAUCARIA “But this don’t matter. Little boss, to their children you will be the thief who burns trees. You did it. You do it. You’ll always do it, burn tree after tree, and more and more people will remember and with time no one will be able to see you as you are now. You won’t even find yourself in a mirror. This is the worst fate, little boss, disappearing slowly. Right Rudolf?” he asked his horse, who just stared right past him. “Stupid animal was sent here to punish me, I tell you.

Little boss, you should pray, pray that those looking after you are in that soil you put the tree in and that it grows all the way to the sky.”

“We buried Simon the cat there last year. Does he count?”

“Dios mío! The black cat? The ugly one that used to hiss at Rudolf?”

“Yes, and he was hissing at you.”

“In the name of the Father, miss, this is why it’s happening!

Please don’t say no more. I can pray for you even more, but only if you buy a few melons. How about six melons, yes?”

“But everyone knows you sell rotten melons.”

“Santísima Virgen!”

And now there’s a storm. The araucaria is in the shed because the sudden gusts might split it. Grandma’s watching TV, a show where fatties come up with words out of a mess of letters. USUFRUCT is on the screen and grandma looks it up in her dictionary and bends the corner of a page. It lasts forever.

I told grandma yesterday, after the melon man took off with Rudolf, that we should put the tree out in the storm so its branches can wave in the wind and then maybe it won’t be deaf anymore. She just frowned at me and locked the shed.

“Do you like being spoken to when you don’t want to speak?” she asked me.

“No.” “Well, then, neither does she,” she said, checking its branches.

60

GONZALO GARCIA “But how will I win then? If it won’t grow I won’t win and everyone will think I like burning stuff. The melon man said so.”

“That man is a drunkard, Camila. Remember what I told you about drunkards?”

“That they fell asleep a long time ago and they need a kiss to wake up, like the princess in that movie.”

“Yes. Let’s hope Rudolf helps him because with those teeth he is not going to get anyone better,” she said with a smile.

She closes her dictionary and takes her glasses off. The rain is louder than ever on the shed’s tin roof.

“It’s getting louder,” I say.

“You really want to win this?” she asks me.

“More than anything.”

THAUMATROPE appears across the screen, but grandma just looks at me.

“Let’s do this,” she says, “this game is pointless.” She turns the TV off, gets the keys, and heads outside.

I wait for Mrs Coca to come out. She doesn’t so I knock again.

She might not come out though. She’s been hiding ever since her husband lost his job at the coffee plant. Kiki, who lives across the street, says she saw Mrs Coca kissing her dad the other night. I told her that her dad was a drunkard too, and that Mrs Coca was probably just helping him wake up, but she just looked away. I knock again.

The curtains move and I see Mrs Coca’s face between the vines that have by now taken over her window.

She comes out in a bathrobe, glasses too low on her nose for them to be of any use.

“Can you see me?” I ask her.

“I can see you,” she says, lighting a cigarette and looking to both sides of the street. “What do you want?” she asks with her chin up.

61

THE DEAF ARAUCARIA “I’m in the tree growing competition, and because my tree is deaf, it just won’t listen to me and it won’t grow. Grandma is planting it again, and she said the only way to make it grow is to bury old things along with its roots. Anything will do. If it has words, ever better. It listens to old words, you know?”

She looks up at the sky and makes a perfect smoke circle.

“I’m sorry, you selling something? I’m not interested.”

“I need old stuff you don’t use. Anything will do.”

“I can’t deal with this,” she says, rolling her eyes and turning to leave. “Not this early.”

“Wait! Kiki told me. Kiki told me what you did, how you wanted to wake her dad up. Everyone will know,” I say and she stops and looks at me again, stepping on her cigarette.

She opens the door to her house and reaches for a small glass bottle on the floor by a stack of dirty shoes. Her house is covered in Christmas decorations although it’s not even October and she doesn’t have any children. There’s a ceramic Santa on the table between us.

She lights another cigarette and uses Santa’s bag as an ashtray.

“Old things, you want old things,” she says with an eyebrow raised, tapping the cigarette with one finger.

“Yes, please.”

“And it can be anything.”

“Anything at all.”

“Wait here,” she says.

She walks over to her room. She shouts at someone, a man. The man mumbles something and she shuts the door before he can finish. She’s carrying a white dog in her arms.

“Don’t worry, it won’t bite,” she says with a laugh that breaks into a heavy cough. “Take him. His name is Poncho. Don’t worry,” she says, taking my hand and pressing it on Poncho’s head. “He’s rather well behaved. You can take him. He used to be my husband’s.

He spent a whole month’s paycheck to have it stuffed, can you be62

GONZALO GARCIA lieve that? Look, he put a fucking lamp inside it too! Look,” she says, taking both of my wrists, her face disappearing behind smoke.

“Take it before this… lazy bastard!” she shouts, “comes out crying.

He’s afraid of the dark. Afraid of the dark!”

“Thank you Mrs Coca,” I say, and then run out with Poncho’s glass eyes staring right into mine.

I put the dog on the far end of the living room, right between an old broom and the stack of old canon balls, because the wall there is also white and grandma, who often mistakes candles for stars and shadows for people, won’t see a thing. There is no way she’ll let me bury Poncho. We would have to make a bigger hole too. Maybe if I carry him in parts grandma won’t notice, but will the tree still know? Will it understand poor Poncho, Mrs Coca’s best friend and her husband’s late lamp? Will it know about the last time he barked?

Grandma’s talking to the tree in the shed and she turns to me with a smile.

“Did you get something? We really ought to bury it soon.”

“I did. It’s an old lamp. But I don’t know how I should bury it.

I’m afraid you’ll get mad.”

“I won’t get mad, Camila, but you better hurry. We’ll need a lot of things. Your tree is really stubborn.”

I take my bike and ride to Kiki’s as fast as I can. She always knows how to solve my problems before I even tell her about them.

Franco, a kid from the class below us, says she’s an extra-terrestrial. She knows the future. Franco says that this is the sign of a true alien, that he saw it on TV but I remain an agncrostic (or something like that) about it. Still, this one time I lost my lunch money and Kiki came up to me and gave me her lunch before I even noticed my wallet was missing. Then, she gave me her bike before I told her I had no money for the bus either, and she said something about travelling

63

THE DEAF ARAUCARIA far, something I couldn’t understand, and she left God knows how, without saying goodbye or anything, like extra-terrestrials.

I get to her place and she’s already waiting at the thin metal gates.

“Is your tree still deaf?” she asks.

“Yes!” I say.

“Go to Comandante Chalo’s house,” she says, pointing at the end of our street.

“Isn’t he dangerous though?”

“Yes, he’s crazy. My dad told me he was a bad communicationist, that he used to eat babies. But at least he will know something about communication. His house is full of old newspapers. You should go and get them!”

“That’s –” “– You’re welcome,” Kiki says, and she slides a glass door open and the brightness inside swallows her whole before I can say goodbye.

I pedal harder than I ever have to Comandante Chalo’s house.

I’ve only ever seen him once, during the national celebrations when the navy marched through town last May to play some drums and show us their gun collection. Chalo was shouting at them and no one could hear him. He was only wearing shorts and nothing else, when he then decided to block the march, arms and legs wide open, and everyone laughed because the navy people just marched right by him as if he weren’t even there, and he was still screaming and crying and I’ve never seen him again. I hope he changed because he really wasn’t very good at being a communicationist if everyone in the army could ignore him.

I knock on his tin door. There’s a tiny gap at the top that slides open and I see eyes and a black moustache.

“What in the Devil’s name do you want?”

“My tree is deaf.”

“Everything is deaf.”

64

GONZALO GARCIA “No, I mean it. I need old words and I know you’re a communicationist. My grandma, Lela, from across the street, said I needed old words and then it would remember to listen to me and grow. It’s for the competition.”

He doesn’t answer and shuts the gap above the door. I pick up my bike and get ready to leave. So much for communicationists. I set the bike to the lightest gear, but as I start pedalling, his door opens to a metallic screech.

“I have old things. In fact, I only have old things, really,” he says, rubbing his belly.

“Is it a dead animal? I can’t take another lamp,” I say.

“What? Look, do you want to come in or not?” he asks, waving at the old people playing cards across the street, who are now starting to laugh.

“Yes, please,” I say.

We both walk along the longest grass I have ever seen. This man truly is a communicationist because nothing here is deaf. The bees zoom past me, the crickets are practising grass bow strokes for the night to come and there are even fish swimming in a narrow canal that runs through the garden filled with cherries that fall on it in quiet splashes. Then we get to the house and I can only hear the hum of the storm about to start again.

“I tell you, little girl. Get your things. As soon as you’re eighteen of course. Because otherwise it’s not legal and they’ll all be after you. Just get your things, and get out of this town. All these animals.

All these pigs. They’re all backstabbers. They smile now, did you see them outside? Smiling, always smiling, and then, then they will –” “ – I know, I know. They will say I burnt my tree and stole the prize when I didn’t do anything.”

“Exactly. They will say things like that.”

He walks to the living room and picks up a mate cup with its straw and slurps to the end.

65

THE DEAF ARAUCARIA “Sit, sit. You’re safe here. I’ll tell you a secret.” He picks up a piece of tinfoil and wraps it around his head. Then he makes a hat for me too. “Now we can speak in full confidence. You must know that this is the only safe place in this town.”

I sit in front of him while he drinks his mate. The floor is all made of newspaper. The windows are covered in newspapers.

And all the way around the walls there are news clippings and old photographs.

“I can see why people in town say you’re a communicationist.”

“Communist. They say I’m a communist,” he says, “a communist. At least that’s what they say,” he says, putting his mate down and cleaning his moustache.

“OK. Well, can you still make trees listen?”

“No. I don’t think I ever could.”

“Are these old though?” I ask, picking up a newspaper from the floor.

“Yeah, they’re all old. The only thing they left me. Those animals!” he shouts, hitting the mate cup against the table and adjusting the tinfoil over his ears.

“Can I have some of these newspapers? You have so many.”

“They called me Comandante. But I hated their guns. I hated them too. They have so many guns, did you see them? They hate us. People like us.”

“You have so many newspapers. I would definitely win. My tree would hear me out with all this stuff. And Poncho the dog would be a bonus. It would be the tallest araucaria in the world and people would see it from Santiago. I could even tell the mayor to name it after you, Comandante Cha – ” He frowns at me, gets up and walks to the door.

“No!” he shouts, showing me his teeth and sweating on the neck.

“I won’t have a thing to do with these people. The Mayor? I knew it!

I knew they’d use children to do their dirty work. No! Leave now!”

“But they’re old words! I need them! You won’t ever need them.”

66

GONZALO GARCIA “They are all I have left! All that I have! Get out!” he shouts, making a ball out of his hat.

I crouch under the table and take any newspapers I can find.

The pages tear, the words fall apart before I can catch them. Just like in grandma’s TV show, I will have to put them back together. DETE, DISA, SCISM, all the old words now a code.

I run with my eyes closed, past the Comandante and his screams, past long thick grass blades that stick to my dress until they cut. I drop the papers in the bike, basket and pedal once again, the old people still playing cards and laughing, a pack of stray dogs following me and barking as it starts to rain, trying to bite on my socks and Kiki the extra-terrestrial at the end of the road just picking flowers and staring at the sky and as soon as the dogs see her there’s lightning forking out from the mountains, starting miniature fires, smoke signals in black, and the dogs turn away and run faster than they chased me. Kiki waves at me, offers me a flower, but I just keep pedalling home.

“It’s burning,” she says as I pedal away, “it’s all burning.”

Poncho didn’t fit in the hole. He was so stiff. Grandma made me give it back, and Mrs Coca put him in the trash right in front of us.

We tried the newspapers but by the morning the araucaria had died.

It dried up, even shrunk. It cracked at the trunk, the roots bulging out in waves. Grandma said it’s because it didn’t understand people, and she apologised that the old words didn’t work but I know it’s because they were broken.

The judges ring our doorbell and grandma tells them the bad news. Next year, she says, maybe next year, and shuts the door. We can hear our neighbours cheering. Their pine tree is the largest one I’ve seen. The melon man outside cheers for them too. I told you the Devil was in that house, he says. They can’t even grow a tree, I saw it, it was shorter than my marriage, he says. Did you see the fire last 67

night? Do you think it was little Camila who did it? Look at Rudolf kicking. You see how he agrees with me? He saw it too, he says, and then laughs with the rest of them. I turn to Kiki who tells me not to worry, that next year will be better, that she just knows it, because we’ll be older and we’ll have our own words ready for the spring.

68

Census John Aaron Rosen A small woman in her late forties shouted out to a room full of people gathered in a Census Training office, “Which one of you is Eddie Bubbs, social security number ending in 1143?” Her functional iron gray hair was combed forward on her head, and her overbite and knotty neck lent her words a choppy dry sound. Edgar Stubbs sprang with great alacrity out of his plastic bucket-like seat on the mezzanine level of the Department of Statistics. In her office was a plethora of vinyl bound books with impressive government seals on them, as well as a Sudoku book or two which Stubbs imagined was for her lunch break. A ruthlessly ground-up pen with a multitude of beaver-like divots was rolling off the desk. Stubbs could see she had various documentary proofs of his existence.

“We’ve got uncounted case files, notice I said ‘we’ not ‘I,’ up the wazoo here, so I’m going to sign over a case book to you, notice I said ‘you’ not ‘me,’ right now, and spare the pleasantries. I need you out on the street asap, notice I said ‘I’ not ‘we.’”

All of Stubbs’ cases were on forms inside the three-ring black vinyl binder of the DOS (Department of Statistics), and each form corresponded to an address in the city. Potential souls, as Stubbs thought of them. Every evening he was required to come to her office to submit daily pay forms, completed cases, and to receive new case books and assignments.

In addition to these black binders, each agent of the Bureau of Enumeration received a nylon shoulder kit bag which consisted of standard issue: carbon copy pay, confidentiality and appointment forms, number two Bureau of Enumeration pencils, a grid map of 69

CENSUS the city, numbered case files with address labels printed on them, spare erasers (so important), extra pencil sharpeners (ditto), and his personal favorite, the official BOE badge with the insignia of the DOS emblazoned on it.

Life is a series of tasks, and some people need more preparation than others. With the official opening campaign of the Bureau of Enumeration’s census only twenty-four hours away, Stubbs decided to undertake a dress rehearsal. He packed all his materials into his shoulder bag, and map in hand, began to make his rounds, though without actually knocking on any doors. His badge, in a small carton with cotton around it, was the only item left behind. After several hours the kit strap dug into his shoulder, and his feet began to ache.

This was not a great concern to him however because he planned to remove his case files (his souls) from the binder and leave the binder behind. Carting around the entire binder with embryonic souls was only a training tactic. Think how much easier it would be when the time came tomorrow and he didn’t have the binder with him. Stubbs declared the dress rehearsal a victory and caught the North South 35 line back home. There was a slight drizzle, and little silver globes of gas were clinging to the windows of the bus, like stars to a night sky.

The moaning and sighing of the 35 line making its stops put Stubbs to sleep, and when he awoke the bus driver was asking him where he wanted to get off.

“Let me off here,” said Stubbs, climbing out, with the gates of the harbor in front of him and a marshy area on its west side. He had been to this spot before, but now he was heading in a different direction, and he had a binder full of souls hanging from his shoulder as he stomped along the short cut through the marsh back to the main avenue.

When the city’s drainage system couldn’t cope with a deluge of rain, it was pumped into this area, creating temporary ponds and minor lakes among which grew tall thick weeds and plants. Some 70

JOHN AARON ROSEN of them contained large fuzzy pods known as Asclepias Syriaca, or Common Milkweed. If the pods were broken, they emitted a thick poisonous milk with a bittersweet odor. The Monarch caterpillar could ingest this milky sap without death, and in doing so, became immune to predators, and the Viceroy butterfly could mimic the looks of the Monarch to avoid predators as well. In the pantheon of Hindu gods, the great creator was drunk on the same milky sap when he created the universe.

71

Nightangel Beth Jellicoe Marcel was getting used to the foxes now. At first it had been startled and mistaken them for moving shadows darting about the streets. That was when it had first arrived and its vision was still adjusting, which felt like a long time ago.

Fox, it wrote: a mammal about the size of a domestic dog, moving on four soft points, tipped with a brush at one end, a small walker of the night; their missions are unknown. Humans allow foxes to wander about at will, taking irregular paths about the city. They let the fox exist at night but in daylight it is hunted in some places. In other places, treated with contempt or revulsion. They allow it to exist when they cannot see it. Why? Do they believe foxes are ancestral spirits? Demons? Or something else?

It was still afraid of foxes. Their stares were so bold and they slipped into its line of vision silently, it was unnerving.

Marcel had walked several miles north into the suburbs. Now the city became fluid, shifting as the night deepened. Now the streets broadened. The trees stretched up, becoming great baskets of shadows. The moving flashlights wailed like strange sad birds.

Doors were locked, windows blocked, sounds magnified, and time swelled into something rich and large: instead of passing it piled up on the miraculously quiet streets. You had to edge through time sideways, step by step, and if you liked you could sidestep it and make the night last forever.

People had told it that nights were dangerous, but it had never encountered danger at night. Only differences in people. Now they spilled out of pubs at closing time with hot eyes and heavy faces, 72

their voices carrying several streets ahead of them. They leaned out of windows and stared down at the street. They stood or sprawled in doorways smoking, or wandered in zig-zags back to bus stops where they talked to strangers like they were mirrors. Humans dodged monsters that they imagined were there, but they leaned up at bus stops against huge men and confided their life stories. They saw dangerous strangers to a taxi, and fell into the arms of other strangers. The rules that it spent the days memorising were turned upside-down at night.

This was all useful for its research.

But out here where it had wandered, all was deserted. Late night companions were scattered about here and there – a fox, a mouse, a human in a doorway, another human sitting on the street corner drinking from a can of Carlsberg. When they saw it move past without saying anything they said “Good night” which meant they were happy to see it leave and sometimes they didn’t say anything.

Often it wondered what they saw. At night it slipped back easily into its old form, but in the shadows and under the hood it wore, would any human see it? Doubtful. Would any human ever really, truly see it? Even more doubtful.

Tonight was different. It was not sure how yet but it was sure it was different.

There was an iron fence at the side of the street. On the other side of the fence was a graveyard. As Marcel walked it brushed the metal, and after a minute it sat down with its back to the fence, leaning back its head so it touched one of the posts.

It was a fluid creature. It felt the coldness of the metal permeate it, felt itself slipping into rigidity. Chilly steel, wound about with moss as soft as hair…

No! And it pulled itself away.

73

NIGHTANGEL But why not? All right, it had been warned. But it was night, and at night you could be anything you wanted to be. You could possess anything you wanted, even by thinking about it. You could become night.

It thought without words: I want to become night, the tangle of branches and stars and dirt. I want to be the night that turns the rules upside down and fills the world with lovely misrule. I want to become night when people sleep and the world is awake. I want to become this night that is different from every other night before and after in the history of the world.

It slipped its hand through the base of the fence and crumbled the dirt, very gently, in its fingers. It kept scrabbling in the dirt, without looking, till its hand closed around something light and waxy. A feather. It spread out its hand, trapping the feather underneath, and its sensory processes began to rush and roar. It felt the weight of the gravestones, the thump of wild blackbirds circling and landing on the grass, the scurrying of small creatures, the buzz of insects, feet thumping and lifting and running. Now the roses, their pale roots.

Now the weight of trees. Now the fragile bones. Oh, it felt so good to do this, so wonderful, it was like being home again.

Now it was night, from the soil upwards to the top of the trees.

It recorded it all: a sensory experience beyond and without words. Now it was coming back, wrenched into itself again, brought back by the sound of loud laughter.

Back home, everyone had told Marcel to maintain boundaries: these are your scripts and your rules, memorise them or you’ll be in trouble. It was common sense, something which its people prized highly.

Guard yourself, they said, maintain a deep privacy and solitude, watch out for warning signs of corruption, and most of all be on the lookout for loss of selfhood. If you lose yourself you have nothing left.

74

BETH JELLICO After one such briefing, one of the university workers had sidled up and whispered that the experts had never visited Earth, and they all viewed it as a small dirty place full of potential catastrophe.

Being naturally conservative, they prepared visitors for the worst, even if the worst was unlikely to happen. The worker said that it was inadvisable to possess humans. “It’s been tried before, but it’s tricky.

They’re too subjective. You lose parts of yourself in humans, and then you can’t get them back again.”

In their language, the word for possessing and being possessed was the same; there was no distinction. The word branched out from an older word, kathur, which had associations with trust and fear and deep, irrevocable loss. What this lack of distinction meant was that when Marcel had possessed the graveyard, the graveyard had been Marcel. The boundaries between the two had entirely blurred, and indeed Marcel had briefly stopped existing as it knew itself, anyway.

“Are you all right?” the human said, his face illuminated by the broadbeam. Possibly male, five foot nine, with small black hair and deep-set eyes. The face was flushed, and he was wrapped in a coat with a fur hood. Marcel caught a strong yeasty smell and under that was a metallic scent radiating from the hands. Behind him was a bunch of chattering friends, young men holding drinks; they were so loud that it instinctively shrank away.

“I saw you and you were like… not there.”

“Is it a boy or girl?” one of the friends said. Another friend stumbled over to the edge of the pavement, leaned down, and heaved. There was a revolting noise, and there was laughter as two of the boys tried to pull him back. Loud, wild laughter, like foxes screaming. “Look at Jack. He’s wasted.”

“I’m okay,” it said, recollecting the script.

75

NIGHTANGEL The human shifted from foot to foot. “Are you sure you don’t need like a cab or something? We can call you a cab. Or you can come in if you want.”

He sounded embarrassed; or was he choosing his words carefully because of the drink? The friends were all distracted with the vomiting boy, so none of them were paying attention. “We’re just down the street. It’s a house party.”

A house party? But there would be noise, wouldn’t there? And a lot of eyes, a lot of people talking and looking.

“No,” it said, and by some miracle remembered an old script.

“I’m going to call a friend. I’ll be fine.”

“You sure? If you want to go in, it’s number 9, Rosen Road.

Say you’re Tom’s friend, yeah?” And he glanced back several times, but his friends pulled him away; they were going down the street to the corner shop.

Marcel found number 9 without much trouble and lingered outside. The front window was dark, but the fanlight over the door and the top two windows were blazes of light. Shadows moved inside the windows. Music was spilling over the side gate, along with a clamour of voices. Sometimes a high voice rose above the rest, but the words were indistinct.

It wondered how old the house was, what its language was like, and what kind of people had lived there. It was more curious to know if anyone inside the house was kind.

While it wondered this, a line of people - two boys, two girls -threaded their way out of the house. They passed by Marcel, walked unsteadily out through the open garden gate, and crossed the road.

There wasn’t much of a chance to see them in the dark. But a minute later there was a thump and squeal: one of the young women had fallen on the road. Tumbled straight down, legs flat, like the mannequin that Marcel and its friends had used to study human anatomy.

76

BETH JELLICO She had dropped her bag upside down somehow, and its contents had scattered all over the pavement.

The other couple and the boy were impatient. Hot irritation was rolling off them like sweat.

“Ah! What have you done now?”

“Look at this mess.”

“She’s so drunk?”

The fallen girl just sat and laughed. Marcel approached, transfixed. Her coins and jewellery and cards and papers were scattered all over the pavement, and there she was, wracked with these huge gulps of laughter. It was so big it consumed her; her jaw dropped, shoulders heaving up and down, arms waving like the baby Marcel had seen yesterday in the park. Was she laughing? What was she doing? It sounded more like sobbing. There was the couple, leaning on each other, tutting. There was the boy standing apart, hands in his pockets. Now he leaned down as if to pick up something, one of the cards perhaps, but he seemed to realise the enormity of the mess; his shoulders slumped and he stood upright again. And the night was pierced by the girl’s strange, fierce, anarchic laughter.

The moment seemed to go on for a long time. It did to Marcel, who had sidled up without being noticed, and maybe it was a long moment to the laughing-crying girl also. Her laughter kept bubbling up in great wails. Whenever it thought she would finish laughing, pick up her things and go back to the night, more laughter would come, and it was only broken by the noise of a bus rattling up the street.

“That’s us,” screamed the other girl to her friend. She sounded relieved. “That’s our bus.”

“Let’s go.”

“What about her?”

The girl had already sprinted off with her pass in her hand, waving it frantically. The boy and the other girl looked from the bus to 77

NIGHTANGEL the sitting girl, and they shrugged at each other and ran for the bus too. Their laughter flew behind them like a ragged flag.

It knelt down next to the laughing girl and slowly, methodically, began to pick up her things and put them back in her bag. Putting the coins back meant picking up the girl’s wallet, but she didn’t seem to mind or even notice. Marcel looked at the ID inside the wallet.

“Iona?” it said, struggling over the strange syllables. “Iona Erskine?”

The girl seemed to realise, then, that someone else was there.

Her cry-laughter had subsided. She held out her hand for her wallet simply, like a child asking for a gift. Marcel handed Iona the wallet and picked up the coins. It placed them carefully in the little pocket inside.

“Named after an island,” she said. “Little holy island. Never been there. Have you been to Iona? What’s it like?”

“I haven’t been to Iona.”

“That’s funny, ‘cos I haven’t laughed that hard in ages.” Her voice was wavering, slurred with drink. “I didn’t think I would ever laugh that much again. Where’ve they gone?”

“They’ve gone to catch the bus.”

The girl leaned her elbows on her knees and said, “Let me tell you something. Did you see that girl with the red hair?”

“I did,” said Marcel, picking up a fifty pence piece.

“She’s my ex.”

X? Oh, ex. Colloquial.

“And I could tell him a few things,” said the girl. “I could tell him she’s demanding and needy and she’ll never be satisfied. I could give him a few tips on how to please her, since he’s absolutely shit in bed and has the sex drive of a… what’s the one that hangs on a tree?

- a sloth. Sex drive of a sloth… And Kara’s the opposite, if you know what I mean. But I won’t, I’m going to mind my business, because I’m a nice person. And in return for me minding my business, they just fucking dumped me for the 168 nightbus. You can’t trust people, 78

BETH JELLICO can you? That’s what I always say, um, what is it I always say, oh right that’s it - trust no one.”

Then she rocked back and forth, while Marcel looked at her in fascination. It had rarely seen humans speak their thoughts.

“She keeps kissing him in front of me,” said Iona, lying back on the pavement while Marcel turned its attention back to picking up the mess. “I think she knows, I think she knows what she’s doing, she’s rubbing it in my face. Because I’m just her little gay friend and she wants to hide what we had because it was an experiment and she’s so bloody normal and legitimate now, with her boyfriend and her frigging chemistry degree. Looking at me like I’m one of her science experiments gone wrong. What’s your name?”

“Marcel. Or Marcelline.”

“Marcelline. What’s that? French?”

Marcel thought of telling her the story behind its name, but it felt awkward to speak at length, so it just said, “Yeah.”

“Are you French?”

“No.” “Excuse me asking,” said Iona, who had shifted into lucidity for a minute, “but like, what gender are you? Are you, like…?”

“I’m an anthropologist.”

“Where are you from?” said the drunk girl, sitting up against the garden wall. “You don’t look like you’re from here, if you don’t mind me saying. You’re from another country, isn’t it? Right?”

“Far,” said Marcel, pointing at the sky.

Iona stared in incomprehension, but then her face cleared and she giggled. “Oh, one of those ones. Yes. I’ve always wanted to meet an angel. I’m Catholic, you know, we believe in angels. Did you come from the star of Bethlehem? Did you know that song? It goes,” she tried to remember the tune, “Said the little lamb to the shepherd boy, Do you see what I see?”

79

NIGHTANGEL “No,” said Marcel, mentally recording the song for future reference. “I’ve picked up everything now. I don’t think you dropped anything else.”

Iona said, “Look, I don’t care. I mean thanks, but I don’t care. It was nice, dropping all that stuff. It was like, I’m free. Like look, my money’s going all over the street, whee, I’m nineteen and I’m free.”

She tried to stand up, gave up, sank to her knees and said, “I feel so stupid.”

Marcel sat beside her, settled itself so as to be comfortable against the wall, and said, “You are not stupid. You’re just very drunk.”

“I know I’m drunk. That’s not the problem,” said Iona. She managed a smile then. “It’s the fucking solution, if anything.”

“What do you mean?” said Marcel, who was caught uncomfortably between its detached academic interest and the reality of the girl before it.

“Anyway,” said Iona, resuming without really listening, “it’s stupid because if you knew you loved someone you wouldn’t tag along with them all the time, would you? Like, if you knew you loved someone, why would you go to a party with them and their stupid boyfriend, even if you knew you’d have to sit there getting more drunk while they get off with each other all night? Why would you get off with another guy, that other one who was there, I can’t remember his name, and even ask him to come back to yours so you can fuck him, even though everyone knows he’s sleazy and he’s got three hundred side girls and you’re not even into men, I mean, why would you do that, Marcelline? Why?” Marcel tried to work this story out and failed. Like the story of the man spinning straw into gold, it thought, some humans seemed to spin their bad luck into absolute misery. Did she want to do that?

Did she feel there was anything else to do instead?

80

BETH JELLICO “I don’t think I know what love means,” it said at last. It moved its hand to put its hood down just as Iona lifted her own hand, about to say something, and so their fingers collided.

The brief brush of their hands shot through it like an electric shock. Possession and being possessed. Images flickered before its eyes: a boat in a blue bay, a girl with red hair, a room with a bed and birds painted on the walls. There was shouting, laughing, and the sensation of being blown upwards to a great height, about to come plunging down again. Faces flickered in and out, opening and closing their mouths. The world whirled, unsteady on its feet, fun! carnival! but so empty, so sad. The taste of vodka, Amaretto, greasy chips, and under it all was a fiery heartsick restlessness.

Marcel whisked its hand away.

“I’m sorry,” it said to Iona, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, that wasn’t meant to happen, it was an accident. I didn’t mean to do that. I try not to touch people. It’s - it’s risky. You learn too much about them.”

It felt its hand was burning. It turned and saw the side of Iona’s face.

“You are an angel, then,” said Iona quietly. “I saw it.”

The look of adoration in her face hurt it inside somehow.

Now it was standing up and saying firmly, “I need to go. You should probably be getting back inside. Someone will help you get home.”

Iona boggled. “Aren’t you staying?” She patted the ground beside her. “Stay. Don’t hurry. Stay here and do that again. I want to - I want to have it again. That was…”

“I can’t,” said Marcel. It could feel its circuits frying, and its energy was dropping fast now. Too much noise, it was all too much.

“I need to go. I can’t do this. It’s not fair.”

It waited while Iona stumbled to her feet.

81

NIGHTANGEL “Never had something like that,” Iona said to herself. “Never seen inside someone… like… everything melting and blurring and falling away…”

Marcel walked her to the gate. The party was ebbing down now, but there was still noise and chatter from inside the house.

“You’re kind,” said Iona, when they reached the gate.

“Thank you,” said Marcel, wondering if it was in fact kind. Iona’s expression made it hurt in an unquantifiable way. Humans were so difficult. It watched Iona walk to the door, more steadily now.

“Wait a second,” said Iona.

She ran back to the pavement, turned her bag upside down, and everything came cascading out again.

“Faugh a ballagh,” she shouted. “Faugh a ballagh. Up the wolves.”

Then she called out, “I met an angel tonight, Kara Williams. I met an angel. Are you happy you ran away now? Do you see what I see? You never saw what I saw, and you never will!”

The door opened and someone leaned out and yelled, “Iona, what are you doing now? Who’s that?” At that, Marcel made a quick escape.

In the daytime a week later, in between classes, it caught the bus and walked to 9 Rosen Road. It looked very different in the sunlight; it was hard to believe that people were so wild and strange here. Or so savage as to abandon a girl in the street.

The pavement was clear, not a single stray coin.

A woman with two dogs came out of number 10, and looked at it oddly. “Does Iona live here?” it asked. But then it remembered that Iona was a guest at the party, that this wasn’t her house, that this address was the only connection it had - except her name.

It looked up her name, reluctantly, and found her online; but she looked different in the photo, very composed and shiny, and it was a little intimidating. There was a little tab saying ‘Message Iona’ but it didn’t write her anything.

82

BETH JELLICO It managed to find out what faugh a ballagh meant by asking someone at the university who spoke Irish Gaelic. Once Marcel knew what it meant, it adopted the phrase for itself. Clear the way, it said to itself sometimes, faugh a ballagh, here I am, coming through. It sounded brave, straightforward, and all the things it, Marcel, was not.

Meanwhile, on its midnight walks it sometimes remembered to keep an eye out for a shock of red hair. (Had her hair been red?

Hard to tell in the sodium lights.) On one of the walks it thought it saw her, leaning out of an upstairs window, but swiftly realised it was an older woman. Lit from below, and with her red hair down, she looked young.

One night by the graveyard a fox slid out of the shadows, into the edge of the streetlight’s circle of yellow, and eyed it. The fox was fearless. Marcel backed away, and the fox stayed where it was. The two eyed each other with wary respect. The fox stood and waited till the other one walked away.

It was no good; however much Marcel told itself not to fear them, foxes still filled it with uncertainty about what this world was, the mystery of it. How did people manage to live here? Perhaps they managed it by distinguishing night from day, by deciding that what happened at night stayed in the night time, didn’t really matter.

Marcel found it impossible to do that. It felt it had lost part of itself to night. Even when it was back in its room in the morning, putting its jacket on and practising its human face, or when it was walking to the shop or on the bus to the university or burying itself in books, its mind would fill up with night. Then it would be transfixed for a while, replaying its memories of the fox, the night-time, possession and Iona.

83

Transport Mark Brandi

1.

He came to our house.

With his wife and kids.

They were from Melbourne.

Everything was better there.

Same as my dad.

Steel-eyed Italians.

Crisp slacks.

Ironed shirts.

Leather loafers.

He used to be blonde.

Eyes that were hazel.

He looked different from us.

Our coffee eyes and blackened skin.

Strange among our strangeness.

He was from Rome.

He worked on the trains.

That’s all I knew back then.

84

At the kitchen table.

Talking work or politics.

Other things that were serious.

2.

He was smoking.

He was always smoking.

And talking in a deep voice.

‘Ti piace banana?’

I frowned.

‘You like this bananas?’

I was suddenly unsure.

‘Yes?’ ‘This bananas,’ he expressed a thick plume of blue smoke, ‘This are good for you, yes?’

I tried to peel it, but it wasn’t ripe.

I broke the end with my teeth.

The starch bitterness curled my lips.

He took another deep drag of his cigarette.

Eyed me suspiciously.

‘You don’t like me, do you?’

85

TRANSPORT 3.

I looked at my mum.

Her perm and blue summer dress.

I wished she would say something.

I lowered my gaze.

‘Yes … I do.’

He smiled just halfway.

Like he knew.

Stubbed out his cigarette.

‘Life. It isn’t perfect, you know?’

That’s what he said to me.

I was ten years old.

4.

He lived in Broadmeadows.

Me and my brother.

We stayed there one time.

The streets.

Cars with no wheels.

Strange mongrels on thick, rusty chains.

The neighbours.

Like zombies.

All out on front porches.

86

MARK BRANDI

We watched The Twilight Zone.

In silence.

On a black and white TV. Our zia made pancakes.

Too thick and full of sugar.

I got homesick and cried for our dog.

We didn’t see him much.

He was at work.

Checking the axles.

Once the bodies were taken away.

That was his job.

But I didn’t know that back then.

5.

Two weeks ago.

First time in years.

The last time too.

Like a small bird, laid sideways on the bed, gasping for breath.

My zia tried to feed him.

A syringe of puréed food.

There were no machines.

No flashing lights.

Just nurses who turned him over.

87

TRANSPORT

Before I left, I went to him.

His pale eyes locked in some distant, serious concern.

And I told him something.

6.

His funeral was in West Melbourne.

St Mary Star of the Sea. Same church he got married in.

They fought like stray cats.

Til they got divorced.

For a while after too.

The priest was a Spaniard.

Talked of prayers and confession.

Of Hell and of Heaven.

My zio was an atheist.

7.

The burial was in Sunbury.

A tiny cemetery.

Out past the airport.

Miles from anywhere.

88

MARK BRANDI

In a dense, sticky moment before summer.

We were all bad suits.

And poly-cotton shirts.

Planes thundered on descent.

So loud and so close.

You could almost touch them.

The earth shook violently beneath our feet.

And I’m sure we all wondered the same thing.

8.

The priest was in a rush. So it all happened quick.

We dropped red roses.

They lowered him down.

As a plane erupted through the clouds.

And one of the straps broke.

9.

‘Just pretend I’m not here.’

What the gravedigger said.

As he jumped on the coffin.

Stomped it into place.

89

10.

In the car park we gathered.

Shifting feet.

Bad sunglasses.

Unsure how to leave.

I told my zia it was a good service.

‘It didn’t go perfect,’ she said.

I kissed both her cheeks.

‘He wouldn’t expect that.’

Another plane boomed through the sky.

I looked up this time.

Watched its steep descent.

All that violent, beautiful disruption.

Of departure and arrival.

90

High Jinks Alex Coulton I realised I’d lost the fifth Guardian on the same night that Bill Laughlin told Jinks he was going to kill himself.

At the moment he arrived on the doorstep, I was turning the house upside down, and Jinks, stretched on the sofa, was saying, irritably, ‘Don’t be so paranoid. So what if it wasn’t packed? You’ve got the other four.’

I was gritting my teeth, unwilling to explain my growing disquiet, when the doorbell rang.

‘You fancy him,’ I had said to Jinks when I was first introduced to Laughlin at the Warden’s start-of-term drinks. ‘Come on, admit it. You do a bit.’

Jinks had just rolled her eyes. ‘I do not fancy Bill Laughlin. He must be over sixty. He’s a priest.’

But it was Laughlin, whom she’d known since he taught her at university, who’d persuaded her to accept the job at the school and come back to England, and often, in those early weeks I thought I’d caught him looking at Jinks in a dangerous way, as if the two of them were on a cliff top and he was unsure if she were going to push him over. So it was no real surprise to me when he arrived on the doorstep that night, soaked to the skin, rain-drops rolling off his leathery face, black Jesuit’s robes falling around him like broken wings.

‘Sorry to disturb, Curtis. Can I have a word with Jennifer?’ He might have been the school chaplain but you could smell his breath five feet away.

‘She’s all yours,’ I said, gesturing to the sitting room. ‘Would you like a drink? Whisky?’

91

HIGH JINKS As I retreated into the kitchen, I heard Jinks saying, ‘What’s happened?’ and Laughlin saying, bitterly, ‘That bastard’s driving me mad. Honestly, Jennifer, I think I’m losing my mind.’

I took longer than I needed to mixing two whisky-and-waters, and when I went back in, Jinks was sitting next to Laughlin on the sofa. When I looked down, I saw that she was holding his hand.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I do hope I’m not interrupting.’

Jinks looked up at me, almost imperceptibly shaking her head.

‘Bill’s having a bad day,’ she said.

‘Really?’ I looked at Laughlin. He was sitting on my sofa drinking my whisky and holding hands with my wife. ‘What seems to be the problem?’

And I listened with half an ear as Laughlin recounted how he’d been crossing the grass between his house and the Theology department when he’d heard something, a sort of keening, and it was most peculiar because it seemed to be coming from somewhere above his head.

‘A keening?’ said Jinks. ‘What, like a baby?’

Laughlin looked away. ‘No,’ he said, eventually. ‘Not like a baby.

More a sort of …a sort of moaning.’

‘Like someone in pain?’

Laughlin blushed. ‘Not in pain, exactly.’ His hands were twisting in the black folds of his lap, and, as if to try and change the subject, he suddenly stood and picked up Obatala, the fourth Guardian. Nine inches high and erect on the mantelpiece, he clutched a razor-sharp spear in his hands, spindle legs splayed as if for a fight.

‘Extraordinary little chap,’ Laughlin said, head on one side.

‘From Africa, is he?’

‘Nigeria,’ I said, ‘Made by Yoruba tribesmen.’ I was about to tell him that the Guardians were fetish objects, hardly little chaps, and that they clasped in their skinny black hands the dual powers of creation and destruction. But as I opened my mouth to continue, Jinks 92

ALEX COULTON gave me another warning look which clearly said, don’t start, so I just reached for my drink instead.

Laughlin, however, seemed fascinated. How old were they, did I think?

‘Oh,’ I swallowed some of my whisky. ‘About three thousand years.’

Laughlin gaped. ‘1000 BC,’ he said. Then, as he ran his finger down Obatala’s spear, ‘Is this iron?’

When I nodded, he said, ‘You must look after them awfully well. Not a hint of rust anywhere.’

‘The Guardians couldn’t rust if they wanted to,’ said Jinks, taking Obatala from Laughlin and lightly rubbing the spear which he clutched in his hands. ‘The tribesmen seal them with poison.’ With her other hand, she raised her glass, and, as she swallowed, I fancied there was a flush like arousal along her throat. She looked up and caught me staring. Yes, there it was - a sudden shimmer on her skin, like wind and sun on wheat.

But just then the telephone rang. By the time I came back into the room, ten minutes later, Laughlin was gone, and Jinks had abandoned Obatala and was marking exercise books. When she looked up and saw me in the doorway, I said, ‘So. What was all that about?’

‘Redican, of course,’ Jinks said. It was then that she told me that Laughlin, with a hollow laugh, had told her that Redican would probably end up driving him to suicide.

• In Jinks’ first week in the job, Redican Dooney, her Head of Department, hit the roof because she didn’t order enough tea and coffee for a teachers’ conference that he’d convened. Three days later, he summoned her to a meeting, pointing out that she’d sent an email out with a wrong date in it, let out a class five minutes late, and failed to respond quickly enough to a reference request for a boy in her sixth form class. He was relentless and ambitious, the sort of man who thought nothing of working all night if it would get the job 93

HIGH JINKS done. Jinks said he was the offspring of a computer and a rattlesnake.

Dooney said she was sloppy and disorganised.

‘Little things, Jennifer,’ he’d said. ‘But enough bits of grit in the machine, and it begins to fail. You’re imprecise. It rattles the team.’

The day after Laughlin had come round and drunk our whisky, Dooney told her that her lack of organisation was bad for the spiritual welfare of the Theology department, and Jinks formally resigned as his deputy, vowing to continue only as an ordinary teacher until the end of the school year. Looking at her pallor and the rings under her eyes, and thinking of the empty packets of Zopiclone on the bedside table, I was relieved. But for Jinks, I knew it would signal a sort of humiliation and defeat that she wasn’t used to.

That afternoon, I heard the front door opening, and stopped my obsessive search for the missing Guardian. I had been reduced to looking everywhere – behind bags of sugar in the kitchen cupboards, under folded towels in the scullery, in coat pockets and the insides of shoes and my initial irritation was beginning to be replaced by an irrational and creeping anxiety. Coming out of my study, I saw Jinks standing in the hall. Her hands were shaking, and as I came closer I saw a look in her eyes I’d only seen once or twice in the worst of our arguments.

‘I fucking hate him,’ she said.

‘Dooney?’ I said.

When I think of Dooney now, it’s with a shudder of revulsion mixed with pity. But that afternoon, I merely said I didn’t think a little man in two-tone shoes was worthy of an emotion as strong as hatred. Jinks did not smile.

‘It’s not just me,’ she said. ‘Now he’s making a formal complaint about Laughlin.’

I laughed. ‘Why, has Laughlin drunk all his whisky as well?’

Jinks just looked at me. ‘It’s not that sort of complaint,’ she said.

I stopped laughing.

94

ALEX COULTON ‘Surely,’ I said, ‘Laughlin’s not into that.’

‘Of course he isn’t! He might be an old soak but he’s not a – a - ` She tailed off, unable to even say the word aloud. Then she shrugged, savagely. ‘But guess who made the allegation?’

I shrugged, looked at her closely Her eyes were kindling, and for a mad moment I fancied I saw a red spark in the depths of her irises. But through the window behind her a bloody sun was setting fast, and as she shook her head from side to side, the effect vanished.

She’d only just said, tonelessly, ‘Dooney’s son Sam, of course,’ when we heard the loud crash, and the sound of splintering glass from the next room.

• ‘Mirrors don’t just break,’ Jinks observed a moment later, as we stood in the sitting room doorway. ‘I mean, unless you’re the Lady of Shalott.’

There was a small, dark dent in the mirror’s surface where small shards of glass had fallen away. The edges of the indentation sparkled, but the overall effect to me was that the mirror had grown a small and ghastly eye.

Jinks said she needed a drink, and went into the kitchen. I was about to turn and follow her, when something caught my eye. The four Guardians were reflected in the broken surface, lined up just as I’d left them after Laughlin’s visit; the three Yoruba kings, and Obatala, the Creator. A space beside them should have been occupied by Oludumare, the Supreme God. The Destructor.

‘Always look after the Guardians,’ my mother had said before she died, ‘If they are to look after you.’

But something about the configuration of the Guardians was now wrong. Obatala was no longer holding his spear. And when I looked down, between the back of the sofa and the floor immediately beneath the mirror, I could see why. It lay on the carpet, surrounded by tiny shards of broken glass.

95

HIGH JINKS • I didn’t tell Jinks about Obatala that night, mostly because when she came to bed she was out cold almost immediately. But I came to in the night with a start. I lay still for a moment, listening, watching the red digits of the bedside clock blinking. 2.39 am.

Then I became aware of Jinks. In the half-light, I could see that her eyes were closed, but I realised then that the sound that had woken me was her murmuring. As ever, I listened to these nocturnal emissions with the pricked up ears of the jealous lover, wondering if she would give up a secret in her sleep. But the words, although repeated were blurred and unrecognisable, as though she were speaking in a foreign tongue. It was only when I adjusted the sheets to cover us both, that I realised she was both asleep and feverishly hot, and that her hips were rocking. The rhythm was undeniable, and the hunger that was rippling outwards through her whole body consumed her, so that her back arched and her neck twisted backwards and upwards, like a heron swallowing a fish. I watched for a while, but in the end I gave in, and reached out for her.

The next time I looked at the clock it was 3.14 am.

• By the time Jinks arrived home for lunch the next day, the police cars were swarming on the drive.

‘Bad news?’ I said.

Jinks’ eyes were blazing again. ‘Mandy Stubbs found a body in the Clump this morning when she was walking her dogs.’

Stunned, I remembered Laughlin’s whisky breath, his paranoia, the robes which had hung around him like the broken wings of a bird. I remembered what Jinks had told me he sometimes wanted to do.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I said.

‘I’m not,’ said Jinks, reaching out for the whisky bottle. ‘It was Redican Dooney’s. He’s as dead as a doornail.’

96

ALEX COULTON • A little while later, we took our drinks into the sitting room and sat on the sofa beneath the broken mirror. Jinks stretched her neck back and closed her eyes. ‘I know I should feel upset,’ she said. ‘But I don’t.

And what’s worse is, I don’t even feel upset about not being upset.’

‘Shock,’ I said. But I saw again the red spark in her eyes, remembered the animal violence of her hips in the night. Without looking at her, I said, ‘Do they have any idea what happened?’

Jinks opened her eyes and blew the air out of her cheeks. Then she shrugged. ‘Police won’t say anything. Dooney’s wife says she thought she heard him go out of the house at about half past two.’

‘Really?’

‘Yup. They’re checking the campus CCTV footage to see what they can find.’

‘You don’t think it was - ` Jinks rolled her head sideways on the back of the sofa so that she could look at me before she said, ‘Laughlin flew to Dublin to a chaplains’ conference yesterday morning. As far as we all know, he’s still there.’

We sat side by side, and silent, on the sofa, staring at the mantelpiece. I saw again the clock radio, saying 2.39am. But I couldn’t stop looking at Jinks.

• Later that week, the police released information about the CCTV footage on the path. It showed Dooney, head down on the footpath between his house and the Theology department. It was at 2.33am that something had apparently given him cause to stop, the police said. He’d looked up into the trees which lined the avenue, the same trees into which Laughlin must have looked two nights previously, head on one side as if listening to something way above his head. Then he had stepped off the path and out of the camera’s range. The corner estimated his time of death as occurring shortly 97

afterwards, at any rate by 3 am. The person or persons involved were likely to be cool-headed and professional killers: Dooney had died from two brutal puncture wounds, right through his heart.

Two other things happened on the day the body was discovered.

Bill Laughlin rang Jinks from Dublin to say that Dooney’s son Sam had dropped his allegation. And whilst Jinks was on the phone, the doorbell rang. Outside was a courier from the transportation company we’d used to bring all our boxes over from Cape Town. He’d brought our very last suitcase which had been mistakenly packed onto a different shipment in South Africa. Oh, we hadn’t been told?

He was sorry. He was sure he could arrange a discount if we were to use the company in the future.

When I unzipped the case, there he was, lying on top of some folded summer clothes. The Supreme God. The Destructor.

I put him down on the kitchen table and stood back to look at him. Against the white of the table cloth he looked quite harmless, just a little black statuette, less than a foot high, holding not one but two needle-sharp iron spears in his tiny hands. ‘Creation,’ my mother had told me, ‘and destruction.’

It was only when I picked him up to move him that I felt it, something thick and sticky on the two objects grasped between his fists. I was staring down at the dark red marks they left on my hands when Jinks stepped forward.

‘It’s alright,’ she said, and I saw, just for a second, a red spark in the depths of her eyes. My heart stopped.

Then she smiled, nodding at the fifth Guardian and looking quite normal again.

‘He’s just beginning to rust,’ she said.

98

The Scholarship Mrinal Kanti Ghosh Ibrahim’s birth had been a very difficult phenomenon from social, economic and political perspectives. But it, unlike the birth of Saleem Sinai, cannot be called a national phenomenon because he does not, in effect, belong to any nation- may it be India or Bangladesh, though his grandfather cheered, with national flags in hands, the independence of three countries- East Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. While giving birth to Ibrahim, his mother, Alifa, herself an eighteen-year-old girl, pale and thin, was suffering from heavy blood drainage. She needed to be hospitalized, but there was no hospital in Moshaldanga. So Ibrahim’s father, Abdulla paid an Indian who masqueraded as their family member so that Alifa could get admitted to an Indian hospital. But it took too long a time, and Abdulla returned home the next day with a new life in his lap and a dead body lain beside him on a bullock cart.

Ibrahim is now a boy of fifteen, short and slim; his long chin does not go well with his curly hair. He reads in class eight in an Indian school adjacent to Moshaldanga, where he got admitted because of the recommendation of a local Indian leader in whose lands his father works. Ibrahim’s father is the sole earning member of his family, and his grandfather, Karim, with Ibrahim’s help, runs the household chores. Because of Abdulla’s absence in the house for most of the time, the grandson shares a special bond with the grandfather, and they both with an old radio that Karim got as baksheesh from a Britisher. Ibrahim tells his grandfather about his experiences in school, and Karim tells his grandson about his life experiences. And when one session ends for the time being, they 99

THE SCHOLARSHIP listen to the radio- mainly folk songs and broadcasts in Bangladesh and India. And they always expect either their government or the Indian government will say something about them.

With time Ibrahim has become an introverted boy. Spending twenty nine hours a week in an alien atmosphere in school has made him so. He has no friend there. He feels that everyone there thinks he is just an outsider who is receiving their education illegally. The students even think that because of his presence in the school they are being deprived of their right to education. Such thoughts have made him feel like a thief. He can clearly smell their dislike for him.

Though he attends the classes, his name does not feature in the school admission register. When in the class room every student responds to the roll call, but he can’t. Even he feels that he has no right to ask any question to the teacher if he has any problem understanding the lesson. Thus he has become a down-cast castaway. Standing in the prayer line in the school when he chants the Indian national anthem, he feels like an Indian, but for other times in school he is made to feel like a Bangladeshi, and when in home he feels his life has stuck in limbo.

6th May, 2015: It is a hot day in West Bengal. Ibrahim reaches school early and sits on a bench just under an electric fan. He is silently sharpening his pencil. ‘Vacate the place and sit somewhere on the last bench,’ some boys come buzzing and rasp authoritatively.

‘Why’ is the simple question Ibrahim poses.

‘This is our school. We rule here. Do as we say. Don’t ask too many questions.’

Ibrahim refuses to be dictated to by them. So they start beating up on him, and he tries desperately to save himself. Hearing the hullabaloo a teacher comes and asks, ‘What’s going on here?’ Everyone

100

MRINAL KANTI GHOSH stops, and Ibrahim states the whole fact truthfully. After listening to Ibrahim he asks other students, ‘is it so?’

‘Yes, sir,’ collectively they answer.

‘Look, Ibrahim,’ the teacher thinks he is saying it logically, ‘as it is an Indian school, it is very much normal that Indian students will be given the first priority. You should sit somewhere near the last bench.’ The teacher goes out of the room, unconcernedly, as if he has settled a trivial dispute among boys.

Boys start shouting triumphantly while Ibrahim collects his bag and goes to the last bench. For the next few hours he remains unmoved and downcast, surmising, in silence, his fate. He spends that whole day being unnoticed by teachers during classes, and bearing with the taunts and jibes thrown directly at him by the boys at intervals between periods. The environment is becoming worse for Ibrahim, and being unable to take it anymore he secretly leaves school at break. Running all the way home has made him almost out of breath and thirsty. Dropping his bag on the mud veranda he pours himself a glass of water from a pitcher, and drinks the whole glass.

‘Why have you returned so early today?’ Karim asks, emerging from the room while wiping an aluminium dish with a piece of cloth.

Something unpleasant, Karim senses from Ibrahim’s silence, must have happened to this boy. Karim sits beside him. Running his fingers through his grandson’s hairs Karim consoles him, ‘Take a look at this dish. These stains don’t go despite my cleansing it again and again. But I don’t throw it away. It is my necessity.’

Keeping his head on Karim’s old chest Ibrahim whimpers, ‘Why are we in Bangladesh?’

‘Perhaps we are destined so.’

‘How far is Dhaka from Moshaldanga?’

‘Dhaka has never come here, and I’m too old and rooted here to go there.’

‘Are we free?’

101

THE SCHOLARSHIP ‘I’d just celebrated independence thrice.’

‘Then what’s the utility of being citizen of a nation?’

‘I don’t know. But it seems that if you pluck a flower from a tree, the tree doesn’t die, it is the flower that dies.’

Ibrahim stares at the dog resting under a tamarind tree in front of their house. The dog too is tired of the hot sun. Karim realizes that Ibrahim’s eyes are vacant. He is not looking at anything.

‘What has happened?’ Karim speaks in a very soft tone, rubbing his hand on Ibrahim’s back.

After Ibrahim restates the whole fact, Karim pats his back. Karim has a lot to say. His mind is brimming with desperate words.

But he can’t say anything. He knows he can’t do anything. He can only sigh, and he sighs deeply. He again starts patting on Ibrahim’s back and stares at the yellow leaves falling silently from the tamarind tree.

When the stony silence of the hot noon appears like a huge sea monster trying to engulf them, Karim tells Ibrahim to fetch the radio. Ibrahim fetches the radio and turns it on. A vatiali song is being aired. The song being placed against the background of the hot noon creates a little heaven in the little mud house of Moshaldanga.

1st August, 2015: After almost three months Ibrahim is going to school today.

Last night it had rained. The weather is in mint condition. Ibrahim, as jubilant as nature, crosses the school gate and is walking nonchalantly across the yard towards the classroom. Entering straight into the classroom he sits on the second bench. He feels that all the eyes present in the room at that time are scorching him. He becomes nervous, though he is trying hard to show ‘I-don’t-care’ attitude.

The situation becomes so uncanny for him that he cannot even look around. As soon as he faces the blackboard he sees a placard that reads: “Trespassers will be prosecuted.” Frightened he picks up his 102

MRINAL KANTI GHOSH bag and goes to the last bench. During the classes he remains, as usual, unnoticed by the teachers.

While returning looking back he sees that a boy is running towards him. Ibrahim gets more frightened. But he stops and waits for the boy to come. Coming near the boy gasps, ‘Are you leaving for Bangladesh or staying in India?’ Ibrahim shakes his head and says, ‘I don’t know.’

As he nears his home he sees that many people have gathered under the tamarind tree in front of his house. They all have Indian flags in their hands, and have worn tri-coloured caps and t-shirts.

Everyone is smiling and breathing sighs of relief. Still the school bag on his back, Ibrahim approaches his grandfather and asks, ‘what has happened?’

‘Enclaves will be exchanged. Our problems will be solved,’ Karim utters these words very excitedly as if he has as many years left as Ibrahim to begin a new life.

‘Are we leaving For Bangladesh or staying here?’

‘We are staying here. My forefathers were born here, I was born here. It is very difficult for me to be uprooted.’

Suddenly Abdulla comes and picks Ibrahim up on his shoulder. Karim gives him a flag. Ibrahim smiles, Abdulla smiles, Karim smiles… The whole crowd smile. Abdulla jumps on the cemented platform formed around the tamarind tree and announces: ‘Now my son will teach us how to sing our national anthem.’ Ibrahim feels a little bit embarrassed. But collecting himself he asks the crowd to queue. Everyone does so. He starts chanting ‘Jana gana mana…’, and others follow. Sometimes he stops and corrects them, and again sings with them.

That night when they are about to dine, an uproar arises. The uproar is gradually nearing them. After five or six minutes it stops.

Now only subdued mutterings are being heard. Abdulla peeps through the window and sees in torchlight that about fifty men have 103

THE SCHOLARSHIP gathered around the tamarind tree. Two houses are burning in the distance. Clouds of thick black smoke have made the night even darker. A hoarse voice breaks the stiff silence: ‘All the Musalmans here are ordained to leave India. This is our country. They have no right to stay here. If anybody dares to rot this holy land, his life will be at stake.’ These three in the house, like frightened rats, look at each other and wait for what next is going to happen.

2nd February, 2016: It is the mildest winter West Bengal has ever experienced.

Wearing the school uniform Ibrahim enters the school-yard. He appears a little bit taller in long, blue trousers and white shirt. The sense of timidity has gone. He feels, though not very strongly, to be one of the students of this school. He has four or five friends.

Ibrahim goes into the classroom, puts his bag on the second bench and moves out of the room. His friends are calling him to play with them. He joins them. In the middle of their play the prayer-bell rings. Everyone assembles in the school-yard and class-wise stands in queues. The headmaster comes and stands on a raised platform in front of the students. He has some parcels in his hand. After the national anthem is sung, he announces: ‘Seven of our students have got Minority Scholarship from the west Bengal government. This scholarship is conferred to encourage the bright students from the Muslim community in our state. I’ll call them by name and they will come one by one and collect their cheques.’ The headmaster starts declaring the names. When Ibrahim hears his own name, He feels a wave of joy shakes his body. His eyes spark. A sense of being Indian pats him on the chest. Collecting the parcel he holds it tight against his chest in an adoring gesture. For the first time a nation reminds his name. For the first time a boy from Moshaldanga receives the service of a nation. For the first time he realizes what it means to be the citizen of a nation. After the prayer when others are heading 104

MRINAL KANTI GHOSH towards their respective classrooms, Ibrahim, with the cheque in his hand, rushes homeward. The scholarship has injected in him a sense of freedom he has never experienced before. ‘This country is mine too! I too have some rights on this land. This air, these trees, this sky, these ponds, those benches in the classroom, the school admission register…they all are mine too. I am a part of everything around me. I can protest; I can claim my right. I am free.’ He feels his life has taken a supersonic flight. Reaching home he sees that Karim, leaning his back on the wall, is listening to radio. Ibrahim shows him the cheque. Taking the cheque in his hand Karim softly moves his fingers over it. Holding Ibrahim tight he complacently stares at the new leaves sprouting from the old tamarind tree and Ibrahim expectantly looks at his deep eyes in an attempt to read them meaningfully. And the radio fills the air with “Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high…”

105

The Bear Was Addressed As Grandfather Rica March Alexandra had stolen a bar-heater and two cushions from a cupboard. She had not brought the kind of clothes she needed here and had had to find the things she needed, poking around. When she heard footsteps she would bend to turn the heater off, so she could pretend she only had it on occasionally, and sit up straight, trying to appear serious.

It had turned out Torsten was going to be busy. The house here was built in the local stone; a pink-orange granite that she had thought she might like much more than she did. In truth, it was pretty, but the pressure to enthuse had dulled her liking of it. She had found herself dazed by the need to make conversation and had come to hate her own reliance on it, on the beauty of the local area, and how köstlich the local food was. Worse still, the idea was beginning to lodge in her mind that beauty came only with inconvenience.

(Because was this place not inconvenient, for anything she might want?) And the house, being old, had problems. Problems meaning pests that, as far as she could tell, would be better off dealt with professionally: mice, but also rats and raccoons. Torsten’s family called these guests ‘difficult relatives’ and spoke about them with a chuckle and a nod. Torsten’s father thought they were paying a visit in the walls or down beneath the boards, so Torsten had put on his overalls - Alex had not known he had any - and gone to join his Father.

Alex could hear them. She thought she could. Torsten’s voice had taken on a new, public tone in the days since they arrived. He had talked a lot about the regional ecology. The re-appearance of wolves across the Polish border had sparked new interest in apex 106

predators, he said, and there was talk now about re-introducing bears, which would be good for the management of small-mammal populations.

Above the small desk in the study was a short shelf of books and a dusty-framed watercolour of the forest. She recognised it from where Torsten had slowed to point at it. A few of the books were old and had stately paintings of former predators of the Bavarian Alps, or line drawings of rabbits and voles, drawn at each stage of dissection. But many of them were new text-books, with intricate diagrams representing, she thought, ecosystems; what at school they used to call the food-chain.

She too was interested in systems; not in how and why people began to speak, (though that was what people always assumed when she told them what she did) but in where language ran away from itself; where it conjured and dissimulated. She would give you this fact: across Northern Europe and into Russia, the bear was not mentioned by name; he was known as the brown one, honey-eater: Bjørn, Bär, Bear; Medvjed, Medvěd, Me∂ве∂ь. His original name was Rktho.

Alex had tried to mention this at dinner, but everyone had smiled above the pork hock and continued to eat. She had not mentioned the less known fact that among the Sami of lapland the bear was addressed as grandfather and hunted. Keeping your foes both near and far; as was appropriate for family, she thought.

She was meant to be reading now. She has not read as much as she had hoped. She had imagined staying here they would be free to take walks when they liked, to visit the lake, to go in search of wildlife, as Torsten had talked about. But instead a quiet system was operating. It was a system Alex did not understand and that no-one had explained to her, but Torsten had shaken out his overalls and left her. Alex had not expected this. But she was trying not to believe in the notion that her mind was constrained by the physical lack of freedom she was experiencing; that after all was just a superstition, 107

THE BEAR WAS ADDRESSED AS GRANDFATHER or at best an effect: something she should be able to think herself beyond.

When the house appeared to be silent Alex would sneak down.

To save the men from being bothered Torsten’s mother took the dogs into the village at ten. It was a long walk and if Alex did not want to risk joining her she needed to wait, as though asleep, until after she had left. Then she could pad down and make herself rye toast and Espresso, or as close as she could get to it.

It should be said that Alex had an irregularity in her right leg.

She had heard different versions of how she acquired this; a fall from a tall stone wall, a bad time in a bumper car, some accident on a necessary hike she was probably too young to be on. What she thought was that no-one was paying attention and no-one knew. By the time it was noticed the bone had begun to heal and the doctors were in two minds about resetting it. As a result Alex’s right femur joined her hip at an unusual angle. It was not always a problem. Ambling about the house you wouldn’t notice and even on a longer walk it was not immediately apparent. Alex had developed a style of walking, throwing the hip out a little, that just looked like a particular walk; not like she was in difficultly or in pain. It required some degree of concentration, though, and more so as the muscles became tired. She was no longer in the habit of explaining this: she found people either forgot or adjusted their pace so solicitously she became self-conscious. This was one reason why she hadn’t yet walked into the village with Torsten’s mother. The other was that she did not wish to see his mother’s face crumple into a rag of pity, if she was forced to explain it.

Downstairs Torsten’s mother was talking to the dogs. Alex heard the thutch, thutch of claws on wood and the auh! auh! of dogs circling themselves in excitement. She waited for quiet, then she went down. The kitchen, like the house, was large and attractive.

108

RICA MARCH Bought in the 1970s she had heard how Torsten’s mother used to chase raccoons calmly with a broom each morning, and how they had nothing but a pinned tarpaulin for a kitchen door the first year.

‘It was probably quite dangerous,’ Torsten’s mother had said, beginning the routine.

‘Of course we put a door in before you arrived,’ Torsten’s father continued, ‘not that it made much difference.’

Torsten had swigged at his beer, beaming. There was a photo of Torsten as a toddler, his chubby pale legs flailing from the entrance of a badger set. Alex had cooed at these photos, as she was meant to, until her face ached.

She opened the kitchen door onto the garden. The wooden veranda was warm. She bent down trying to look half-casually under the slats. There was a man-sized runnel at the back, sloping down.

At the bottom of the steps she prodded the shadowed ground with her toe; it was ashy, silty stuff; dust and earth. It made her think of bird dung and tiny skeletons; the kind of place you wouldn’t want to go feeling your way around, but she could hear their voices down there, cheery and amused; ursine, grunting; pleased with the necessity of all this work.

In the fridge things were boxed and wrapped. There a small amount of cheese. Good cheese could only be bought in S-burg. She made some rye-toast and took a square of cheese, a small square, from the least fridge-burnt corner.

She would go for a walk around the garden, there was no reason not to. The grass was damp, but in the sun it was quite pleasant. The birds’ chirping thickened, then fell away, then thickened again. She walked with her plate, munching and looking. Down by the cellar door was a half-covered pit. She put the last lump of cheese in her mouth, chewed quickly and looked in. Torsten did not notice her at first. His father was crouched down, half-disappeared into the wall.

‘How’s it going?’ she tried.

109

THE BEAR WAS ADDRESSED AS GRANDFATHER ‘Complicated,’ he said.

‘Mm,’ she said.

And that was that.

In the study, she put her hands over the heater and resisted the urge to stand up. Her view if she stood up was of a big squat chimney and only if she craned, of the corner of the pit. Beyond that was the forest road leading into the village. Downstairs she heard the scrabble of claws on wood. Torsten’s mother talked to the dogs.

She would give them their lunch, then she would go to see Torsten and her husband and make them lunch too. Alexandra, having eaten breakfast tactically late, had betrayed some silent law. She was failing, she knew that. She should go down, roll her sleeves up and offer to help. She should sit by the kitchen fire and talk as Torsten’s mother made lunch.

She heard footsteps, but even before the door brushed open she knew it wasn’t Torsten. She straightened up, adopting what she hoped was an involved air.

‘Hallo!’ Torsten’s mother’s shoulders were sturdy and practical and her shirtsleeves showed flushed red arms, turning white where sleeves met flesh. Was she okay up here, she wanted to know. She had brought her a blanket in case she was cold. Alex thanked her and spread the blanket over her lap: much better, she said. She was relieved she had turned the heater off.

Could Torsten’s mother get her anything?

‘Ah, ne, ne.’ She was fine.

‘Eine Tasse Tee? Etwas Kuchen?’

‘Ah, ne, danke.’

‘Well,’ Torsten’s mother pressed a bright smile across her cheeks, ‘come down if you’re bored, if you need a break.’

110

RICA MARCH What made her do it? She saw Torsten’s mother walking toward the pit, her feet moving over uneven ground, the tray she carried still as water. Alex took her coat. She could say she had wanted to stretch her legs; to get her mind going. And wasn’t it true? Wasn’t there something magical about walking, the way it freed your mind?

She stretched her arms to the sides and looked around; just a little walk, a little amble, nothing serious. She’d go back soon and sit by the fire with Torsten’s mother and talk: why not.

She had passed the river when she realised she was half way to the village and may as well keep going. The track became a steep hill of skidding gravel on the last turn before the approach, but she skipped down, arms balancing. The streets though were empty, dusty shutters pulled over shop windows. She kept walking. What if she had to admit she had gone to the village on an afternoon when everyone would have known it was closed? The next street showed no more signs of life. At the end of it a cart appeared, which might have been moving or might not. When she got closer she saw the cart was piled with squashes and great, dark, wet looking bundles of leaves and a young girl sat on the side, bashing her heels and throwing small clouds of dust into the air. The old man pushing the cart nodded Grüß Gott as they passed and Alex returned the greeting.

She saw soon where the man had come from: the road led around the corner onto a main square, in the centre of which stood two short lines of stalls. She walked past a stall selling pale-green orbs with shoots pointing upwards, and wine-dark tubers, piled on a dusty sheet on the ground. She nodded at the man sitting behind them, and was going to ask what they were called before his expression discouraged her. Another stall sold large hooks, and cast-iron rods, which must have had a purpose familiar to the people around here. She regarded some long sausages; some pale pink, others blooddark, threaded with fat like marbles. Two dogs sniffed in mournful circles a foot from a sack of leathery strips. Alex turned the corner.

111

THE BEAR WAS ADDRESSED AS GRANDFATHER She wanted, she realised, to buy something just for the pleasure of it. A cheese stall displayed two types of cheese: one white like marble; another wrapped in cloth: no platters of cubed cheese, no tiny wafers. The cloth-cheese might have been the pale cheese wrapped.

She bought the pale cheese.

It was when she had climbed the gravel track she realised her leg was hurting. She could not see the house. She made herself walk the next two hundred metres before she sat down on a low rock. The forest to her right was dark, the sun too oblique over the next mountain to reach where she stood. She took out the cheese and pulled at one corner. It resisted, then burst. She threw what she had caught into her mouth and looked at the crumble of pale cheese on the dark soil. She looked up at the forest. It was a normal pine forest, the floor covered in pine-needles; little other vegetation. Row after row until the trees merged in a dark blur.

It was better to acknowledge it: what was she thinking of?

An article on how you should keep all food in sealed containers, wrapped twice in plastic bags. Not here though? In Canada. Kanada.

She moved all the same away from the pale cheese.

She looked around. She walked ten paces, looked at the silent forest again. Could she run on her leg? Probably. Probably she could. You never knew what you could do. She patted her phone in her pocket. Then she allowed, perhaps even encouraged, herself to laugh. Yes, it was strange what the mind did; how it delivered up your anxieties; and how unregenerate they remained: a form lumbering, a dark forest; claws, teeth and those desperate little plans: wave your arms or play dead, shout or stay still. Brown one, honey-eater.

When she opened the door, there was no-one; no bustle in the kitchen, none of the distant rasp or thump punctuated by conversation, alternatively sardonic and urgent, that she had come to expect.

112

RICA MARCH She looked in the living room and the kitchen. Then she walked upstairs. Torsten was not in his room. She dropped her bag on the floor and sat on the bed. Her leg hurt. She looked at the light cottony clothes she had brought, the pretty sandals she had not worn. Torsten had not noticed she was gone.

It was then she heard the kitchen door slide. From upstairs she saw Torsten. There was a new energy in his walk, something full-shouldered, with a festive kind of urgency. On the way back he noticed her.

‘You missed it.’ He said.

‘Ummh?’

But he barely paused.

Fine, Alex thought. She forgot now about the ache in her leg.

Torsten was on the veranda with his parents. They looked openly giddy, all of them; like children; like they had when Torsten had arrived back.

‘Können sie das glauben?’ His mother looked from Torsten to her husband. Torsten stood with his legs spread, as did his father.

Each of them leaned on an implement that Alex was unable to make out. No-one turned to notice her.

They looked to where the mountain rose among the pine trees.

‘There!’ His mother said, then, ‘no, no, maybe not.’

Alex followed their gaze.

The trees did not sway, but their branches seemed to brush and sweep and the cloud-shadows on them moved, faded and then came again into focus. She loosened her gaze to see better. The scene swam. A dark patch grabbed her attention, then disappeared.

Torsten spoke, and she could not at first understand him.

At the foot of the steps; something grey, scored down its centre with red. A squirrel? A racoon? She did not know who, or what, had killed it.

113

The Outcome Robert Boucheron The news was unsettling: the mysterious figure who inspired a two-week reign of terror was not some drifter from outside Hapsburg, but a woman everybody knew. Alice Ryder had been in the public eye from her teenage years to her current social position, as the wife of Captain J. D. Ryder, the chief of police. Charity work for the Police Benevolent Association and First Baptist Church counted in her favor. Blonde and sleek, she always wore a smile.

Everybody knew the victim, too, but Ralph Willis was only a musician. He made his reputation elsewhere, and when he returned, he went to some trouble to stand apart. “He gave himself airs,” they said. In its most extreme expression, voiced by Cecelia Gross, the sentiment went something like this: “What Alice Ryder did was wrong, of course—we can’t go around shooting people we don’t like, no matter how grievously they have wronged us. But she was having a very bad day. She was distraught and confused, at the end of her rope, and running on sheer nervous energy. Lord knows, we all have days like that. In her state of mind at that moment, she probably did think she was defending herself and her family. Put in the same unbearable spot, I’d be tempted to do the same thing. I wouldn’t actually pick up a gun and use it, but I can see how she might want to.”

Held in a hastily refitted cell in the Quidnunc County Jail, the accused remained defiant and uncooperative. She had the unwavering support of Jesse King, the pastor of First Baptist Church. A sinner she might be, but thereby all the more deserving of Christian love and compassion. Ralph Willis, dead and gone, somehow 114

dropped from the equation. To the Reverend King, a lifestyle that included heinous sexual acts disqualified a person from forgiveness.

The trial took place late that year in the ornate Quidnunc County Courthouse, the Honorable Linda Heatwole presiding.

During the summer months, the prosecutorial team of Dan Davenport, Detective Stewart Blake, and the Hapsburg Police Department were stretched to their limit. They gathered evidence and constructed a case with little experience to draw on and few resources. Their annual budget was never intended to cover such an event. Davenport knew that a mistake on his part would seriously hurt the chance of obtaining a conviction. And a solid conviction was the only hope of keeping his job at the next election, given the furor aroused by the case.

Not knowing where to turn, J. D. Ryder turned to Webster Fagle, who agreed to help defend his wife Alice. The basic facts were established: she was present in the basement at the time of death, she fired the gun, and she concealed the crime after it was committed. Playing shrewdly on his client’s high profile, Fagle referred to her as “Mrs. Ryder” when her status as wife and mother was important and “Alice” when he wanted to present her as an ordinary woman under extreme stress. He nixed the phrase “temporary insanity” as out-of-date and unlikely to garner sympathy. He did not request a psychiatric evaluation for issues related to anger management, self-image, and fantasies of revenge. Instead, he stuck to the facts.

“Alice was in a desperate state of mind brought on by her husband’s actions and by her own over-exertion that day, a grueling long-distance run that exhausted her frail body and clouded her judgment. The victim may well have taunted her, as his reported comments over the years lead one to expect. Alice was stressed to her limit, and an unwise word made her snap.”

The plain yellow pencil Fagle had been waving hypnotically in the air during this speech abruptly snapped in two.

115

THE OUTCOME In the end, Fagle convinced the jury that the prosecution had not produced sufficient evidence of premeditation, which would make the crime a murder. One shot at close range by a woman who had never used a gun before turned out to be “lucky,” in the sense that it was fatal. The jury agreed, and they convicted Alice of manslaughter. Judge Heatwole sentenced her to ten years at the Women’s Correctional Center. Little more than an hours’ drive from Hapsburg, the modern, well-equipped prison would allow the guilty mother to stay in touch with her three children, who were a poignant presence in the courtroom.

Cleared of involvement in the death of Ralph Willis, but tainted by his long affair with the deceased, J. D. Ryder fought for reinstatement. Again, public opinion and his prior record came to the fore. Just as Alice was seen as a woman stretched beyond the bounds of endurance, Ryder with his aura of a football hero and his honey-bear looks basked in a sympathetic light. He was a valued public servant, a man who had been led astray by one who could no longer give his version of the story. Again, there were the three innocent children to consider. Interest in their plight was keen.

How would he manage as a single father?

Once the court had done its work, Officer Norman Coles stepped down from his temporary height as Acting Chief, and Captain Ryder took up his old job. The cost of the trial, both personal and financial, was high. The Ryders’ savings were gone, and they were now deep in debt. They were able to stay in the brick ranch house thanks to a special effort by friends and relatives. The three children continued to attend the public school, where they became an exercise in tactful avoidance.

Ryder strove to live down a role in the media as a “gay cop” through strenuous public expressions of devotion to his wife. The marriage endured, but his membership in First Baptist did not. J. D. had formed a visceral dislike of what he called the hypocrisy of 116

ROBERT BOUCHERON the congregation. In his opinion, Jesse King’s loud denunciations of sexual perverts, as well as his oily wails of pity for poor Alice, were enough to turn a man’s stomach. An unconfirmed rumor had the stalwart policeman “seeing” Miss Lilac Arugg, the drag performer, to whom he supposedly confessed a desire to “explore that side of myself.” At any rate, he became a regular at the Sunday night performance of the Ladies of Illusion.

• Bobbie Sue Metzger applied for the vacant position of organist and choir director at St. Giles Episcopal Church. She was one of five candidates, all of whom interviewed with the rector and the vestry.

Most important, all five conducted a trial rehearsal with the choir. It was a time-intensive process, worthy of a high-level government appointment, and of great interest to those involved. The choir, used to the light artistic touch and bantering humor of Ralph Willis, found Metzger to be “too serious” in manner and “doctrinaire” on the subject of historically correct performance. Music was an expression of joy, the consensus went, and they wanted to have fun while singing.

The rector had the power of hiring. In the end, Theodore Percy chose a young graduate of the conservatory at Shenandoah University, a gifted keyboard player who was enthusiastic about working on voice with older adults. Miss Hannah Lee was also offered an assistant instructor position in piano at Poindexter College in Hapsburg. Combining the two part-time jobs made perfect sense.

Metzger was philosophical about losing the post to a younger rival, a slender girl with glossy brown hair and a smile that would not quit. To tell the truth, the girl resembled herself twenty years before.

“First Baptist is my home,” Metzger said. “It’s been my family’s church for ages and ages. Being allowed to play the organ there was my childhood dream come true, and every year that passes brings a deeper understanding of what music ministry can be and a deeper

117

THE OUTCOME satisfaction in doing it. This way, I can continue to worship with my family, and our Sundays will not be disrupted.”

• His year of indentured servitude up, Jimmy Lense left the Vindicator for a metropolitan newspaper. Walter Nickles had predicted this outcome, and as promised, he gave the young man a handsome letter of recommendation. Lense had shouldered an impressive workload during the Willis murder investigation and trial. It was time for the ambitious cub reporter to move on. Now that the excitement was over, it was back to business as usual.

“But I still need a helping hand,” Nickles said to Louisa.

She had come at his bidding, as on that morning in spring.

They sat in the newspaper office with its antique storefront on Main Street. The issue on the sentence of Alice Ryder had been put to bed, the weekly articles on the Willis case were done, Lense had departed, and the place now seemed empty and quiet. Nickles looked weary and disheveled.

“How would you like to go from part-time stringer to fulltime galley slave?”

“On what terms?” Louisa asked.

“The same as for Lense. The pay is lousy. The hours are unpredictable. There’s a daily risk of getting yelled at and shoved around, either by an angry crowd on the street or by yours truly. The possibility of advancement is nil.”

“What about fame and glory?”

He laughed.

“At least your sense of humor is intact. May I think about it?”

“What is there to think about? You know what the job entails, and you’ve shown that you’re more than capable.”

“Jimmy was also your photographer.”

“Come to think of it, how are you with a camera?”

118

ROBERT BOUCHERON “No better than I should be. What did you do before you had Jimmy on staff?”

“I took photos myself. His were a vast improvement.”

“Then one of us would need to hone our skills, unless you hire a freelance.”

“The Vindicator can’t afford to hire an expert.”

“With all your other tasks, would you have time to take pictures?”

“Let’s not get distracted by technicalities. When can you give me an answer?”

“Honestly, Walter, I don’t know. Tracking down leads and badgering sources is hard work, much harder than I imagined. Writing the story is a breeze, by comparison.”

“And then I have to edit that long-winded copy you give me.

Look, Louisa, you’re a natural. I’m practically begging you. I’d be on my knees, if it weren’t for the fact that you’d have to lift me bodily from the floor.”

“Please don’t make me touch you. I admit to being bitten by the bug. And passing the time of day in a newspaper office beats doing household chores any day.”

“So you’ll take it?” His eyes lit up.

Louisa tortured him with a mischievous smile. Her son Galahad had found a paying job, an apartment, and a girlfriend, all seemingly overnight. Except for the elderly pug Jasper, she had no responsibilities. No man could ever replace her late husband Harold, but Walter Nickles had an uncouth charm. At last, she released him from suspense.

“Oh . . . why not?”

• Patrick Willis, who had been cleared earlier in the death of his brother Ralph, stayed on in Hapsburg. As he told anyone who cared to listen: “I hit bottom. There was nowhere to go but up.”

119

THE OUTCOME He became a regular at the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in Brickfront Methodist Church, where Wesley Grubb acted as his sponsor. Returning to his old line of work, he found a job in sales, less glamorous than the new cars he had once purveyed, but a step above discount retail. He became the new Transition Coordinator for Shady Grove, a retirement home for senior citizens. In this position, he fielded inquiries from tottering seniors and their anxious grown-up children, talked up the benefits of Shady Grove to luncheon groups all over town, and helped new residents settle in.

Patrick himself settled down with Jolene Pitt. When her roommate moved out of the shared apartment, Patrick moved in. At Jolene’s suggestion, they even tied the knot, in a small affair at Brickfront Methodist. Wesley Grubb sang for the wedding. The reception took place downstairs in the Fellowship Hall. Patrick was sober now, but no less of a ham in his new role as a repentant sinner.

“Why such a vibrant, attractive woman with a good many miles left in her would want to get hitched to a broken down old hack like me is beyond comprehension. But if that’s what you desire, my dear, I am happy to oblige.”

Privately, Patrick was shocked by the pride he felt in his grownup son Skip. He admitted to Mary that she had done an excellent job of bring up their son despite his absence, or maybe because of it.

He attended Skip’s high school graduation, where he met a few old friends and acquaintances. Patrick thrived on such connections. Jolene encouraged them as a substitute for the poker games, gambling, and late night parties he swore to give up forever.

• Immediately after graduation, Skip started work as the new mechanic, or Vehicle Technician, for the police department. Captain Ryder had interviewed him in the spring, before the awful events of the murder, investigation, and trial. The young man could never know, but it was his uncle Ralph who suggested it to the police 120

ROBERT BOUCHERON chief during one of their last Sunday afternoons together. Skip had a natural talent for repairing things and putting machines back in working order. He had done an emergency repair on the pipe organ at St. Giles for a Christmas concert. Ryder wanted to hire someone local, someone less apt to leave for a better-paying job in a bigger city. So, with the ghostly blessing of the slain musician, all parties were content.

Mary Willis could not quite forgive and forget, but she was able to find a certain level of peace. All outstanding debts were paid and legal judgments were satisfied. Maybe in time her emotional wounds would heal. Meanwhile, attorney Sam Dobbin successfully steered Ralph’s will through probate, and he settled the estate.

The legal process took some months. Ralph’s nephew and heir was a more considerate son than could be imagined. About the same time as the murder trial concluded, then, Skip and Mary Willis took possession of Ralph’s house.

Thanks to the repairs and restorations by Joe Flibbert, the old Victorian on Myrtle Avenue was in excellent condition. But what to do with all the antique furniture? Heavy, made of dark walnut and mahogany and embalmed in varnish, the occasional tables and bulbous whatnots cast a funereal shadow. Skip told his mother to do whatever she wanted. After checking with Father Francis McCaughey at Paraclete Catholic, Mary donated several items to the parish house, where they replaced some sadly worn castoffs. In the grateful priest’s opinion, the Victorian furniture gave the bleak modernist structure a leg up on style. Mary threw in some plush carpets and elaborate draperies to complete the transformation.

She contemplated the bare space of what was now her house, breathed a happy sigh, and went to answer the front door bell. It was her neighbor, Blair Wolfram.

“Excuse me for being nosy, but I had to see what you were up to.

Call it an occupational disease—I’m an interior designer.”

121

“You came in the nick of time. I was wondering what to do next.

The things we brought from the apartment look a little lost here, with the high ceilings and the tall windows.”

“I see what you mean. It’s a problem of scale. Would you like me to help?”

“Oh, Mrs. Wolfram, appearances can be deceiving. I don’t think we can afford a professional design service.”

“For a neighbor, the service is free. I’ll help you and your son decide what to keep and what to add, and how to arrange things.

There are oodles of low-cost ways to make a home look good and feel comfortable.”

“That sounds wonderful!”

“My husband Eric and I are glad to see the house occupied again, brought back to life. Come to our house whenever you like, and meet the baby, Eric Junior. And please call me Blair.”

“Thank you, Blair.”

“By the way, the new shrubs around the foundation look lovely.”

“Do they? I was so busy with the house and its contents, I didn’t notice.”

“Step outside with me for a moment.”

The two women walked out the front door and into the yard.

“I confess I prefer Ralph’s taste in plants,” Mary said. “Rhododendron, holly, and juniper.”

“He put them in just before he died,” Blair said. “Eric happened to pass by while he was digging.”

“And look at the hydrangea, covered with blossoms.”

“Beautiful. You can’t go wrong with evergreens, but there’s something so right about blue hydrangea.”

122

Water's Movement Breaking Sunlight Maximiliane Donicht Like a house of glass shattered by a single stone shards of sunlight float away without moving on

123

Many thanks to all those who contributed to this issue.

The London Journal of Fiction is a quarterly publication - for details of our next issue, including submission details, please see our website www.londonjournaloffiction.com

124

PROSE Mike Fox Lauren Bell Chris Campanioni Matilda Morrison Samuel Usayd Ilyas Gonzalo Garcia John Aaron Rosen Beth Jellicoe Alex Coulton Mrinal Kanti Ghosh Rica March Robert Boucheron

POETRY Brandon Marlon Elizabeth Yalkut David Olsen Mark Brandi Maximiliane Donicht

125