Nutshell Magazine Issue 1 by Nutshell Magazine

e l c o m e

to issue

N utshell m agaziNe

a refreshing new literary and artistic venture bringing quality work and entertainment to your commuting, queuing and leisure time. Nutshell's inspiration comes from the city and its role in everybody's lives whether they choose to be in or away from it. at first it seemed natural that the city would be london – that’s where we are based – but we received submissions from all around the world - italy, canada, the us, south africa - and the scope of the magazine changed to reflect that fact. in this issue you'll find poems about nightmarish circus directors and wheezing commuters, artwork that turns death on its head, short stories about rapping pets, as well as an interview with Blake morrison in which he discusses that most controversial of genres, the literary memoir. Nutshell is brought to you by a collective of writers and word-fanatics. We are completely independent and if you wish to support us or contribute you can do so via our website. We believe there should be a wealth of independent, literary and artistic magazines available and we can’t wait to join the others amongst your favourites!

editor: faye fornasier editorial board: emma gibson ian mclachlan helena michaelson Rebecka mustajärvi cover art & illustrations (pp 1, 3, 31): siobhan maguire

email: editorial@nutshellmagazine.com address: Nutshell magazine 77a Dartmouth Park hill

london NW5 1JD flickbook design: emma fitzgerald

www.nutshellmagazine.com

Rebecka Mustajärvi

The Tarn all day it is there, hanging quietly at the end of the horizon, a white sheet lost at the beginning of the forest. the silence in which animals hibernate, the silence in which i calculate the stiff second before the thunder falls on roofs in a rage, her anger a tirade, unravelling full of electricity. the darkened crow, the fox-eyed howl, blocks light and the windows are faint with dizziness. time endlessly paints himself on my walls, i sit in his gallery, ticking.

The Circus Director i have nightmared the eyelids of thousands, popped their locked up hearts wide open. they have seen me in their dozens in multiple costumes waving my fanatical arms into nothing before flaunted at a circus: the clown’s bulldozer laugh, his eyes are dogs that bite your head off; the ballerina’s bravery so reckless she could slip her tulle into carnage; the manège trapping the elephant, sea-big and scared in a circle you cannot run from.

Pin-striped into my own prison of high-hats and microphones i cannot live alone. a house is not a home, without the tail of ten caravans strapped on. how could i not be the director of a daydream? hell, the kids love it, they even scream when we choke their popcorn in spotlights and steam. unjust like the lottery i live for tickets that rip at the slit of the throat of the tentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s circumference. i am the pinnacle of this six-sided drum. i can hear the balloons come undone. Welcome.

Rebecka Mustajärvi

Anne-Lise anne-lise stalwart like a ship over the ocean of her bathroom leak. it is a sight to see, as she sighs like an elephant. the pipes, oh the pipes, have blown their brains out, she whines to her daughter on the phone, the puddles flash their brain mass in the half-light on the road to the dining room. her son rings the doorbell and when she opens her mouth to speak, cursing is not the word for it. angry as a radiator she trots between the plumbers and the coffee cups. how can earth spurt such misery over one woman? in eighty-five years, i have not seen the like of it. first, the washing machine, now this! the cat’s taken flight to the top of the stairs, knowing she hasn’t managed them for fifteen years. the son’s rather wishing he’d done the same. ‘all is hell’ she yells, then mauls him with a ginger-thin biscuit. the doorbell rings again and son and daughter in law enter with the spanner. the bending and bashing has wrenched the plumber’s tools like a twisted twig, all wiry and sick. the phone rings again, the neighbours’ turn to offer ears multiplied. ‘No, none of the children have tried to help’ she lies, while son two escapes through the backdoor. ‘… all seven of them, none any good … yes one would have thought, but you know, heads like wood … old age, it is sad … all alone. Do come round rather than phone … i’ve plenty of water for the whiskey, you know.’ the house has just been sold. Rather an empty luggage trunk it will stand, damply proud as a tree, a whole nine months, a pregnancy in its own right, before they come. the Danish, the Danish, she says, are a funny kind. Buying a house just to leave it behind.

Lettie Ransley

Cockling at 10, the sea calls it a night and retreats down the bay, leaving behind a litter of shells and light. a few unwary stragglers – the night's casualties, broken-bottle bright – crust quietly in pools. We move in among silences – bounty-hunters, claw-armed marauders of the cockle-beds. the small sounds of our ambushes die through the hush of the afternoon until the plastic bucket is full, and sand-lugged shells await our coming in a blue-luminous gloom. * afterwards, we bear their last remains back to the sea with reverence, boiled dry as bones. in moonlight we fling them wide over the murmuring surf, our fingers sheened with oil and bitter herbs, trying to forget the breaking of their lock-jawed silence: how the mute plea shaped and seethed in their strange mouths.

Catherine Edmunds

laptop on the train his fat fingers flounder between keys as he types dirty messages to his girlfriend that read as if he's a stud instead of a bulk a sweating bulk wheezing with the exertion of moving two fingers on a laptop

Martino Sorteni

Alexander Eisenthal

Touching can be a terrible thing; when i first felt it and thought it might not have been meant i was crying for hours about the unspecific world and returning to the loneliness of smells – as in before i’d traced your loveliness, before it lingered around your brilliant indifference to my fevered calculations (didn’t you notice how i organised mad exotic birds to fly past my window to distract you so i could delight in your face uninhibited or how those parakeets have stopped now we’re comfortable and staring’s not so gauche). Now if you don’t come in to my thoughts one moment it’ll be the next that’s the sequence of my relaxation, like my prosody here’s just seeing how many words’ll fill the thought, my dream’s so simple: i’ll spend a lot of my time with you, forever; when you’re quiet and still everything settles, and because i can sense you sensing me in the muscles i’m watching on your back i can create the world for you that’s there in your fingers when i touch them, quite accidentally when we both notice how annoying that actress is, or how much better soho is than old street, or when i watch your eyes moving on, over the crowd, beautifully, because smoking never felt so undamaging because matching pyjamas never looked so good because it is so much more important for you to look at the view than the company, which is just right really and one of the endless reasons that i’ll always be that company, silent if needs be, touching quietly your hand that looks just like your eyes and everything.

Alexander Eisenthal

Infanticide Walk down to the shops & save your breaths you can’t help anyone while the change in your pocket’s deafening your sanctimony you quieten down & take a strepsil it achieves you a passable romance with all throats intact you throw a poison pellet over your left shoulder i catch it in my teeth and we’re off down along the path to the tree stumps Because i want so much to pick up the slug underfoot Your bag’s all empty & you are hungry a problem shared is a problem doubled you speak and i cut your head off i cradle your windy locks in open water your piping veins

i bring my lips to yours but your breath smells like moss in car-park paving-cracks i step over superstitiously trusting in the ebb and fall of angry sectarian dischord history untrousered my good calf kicks off the entrailing traps of seaweed but i quite carelessly gulp an oesophagus-full of salt water blood and tiredness it hits me in the lungs mouth-to-mouth resuscitation from a dismembered head is a parody of mouthto-mouth resuscitation all i am waiting for is the call confirming the triumph of life -sciences over the hesitating coward in the cage any foghorn will do

Feature

The Awkward Truth An Interview With Blake Morrison Blake morrison’s career to date reads something like the list of desirable jobs a highly ambitious graduate of english literature might make, realising that the finals are done, and that life looms ahead. he’s done it all. starting out as a poet and critic, morrison worked for fifteen years on the book pages of various papers, acting as literary editor at the observer and then the independent on sunday. his most famed work, and When Did You last see Your father?, a memoir about his father’s life and death was published in 1993, and was followed in 2002 by things my mother Never told me, a memoir of his mother, based on letters his parents sent each other before his birth. his ‘father book’, as he endearingly calls it during our meeting, has since been turned into a successful feature film, starring Jim Broadbent, colin firth and Juliet stevenson. morrison has published many other books, including two novels and a book of shorts called too true, has written plays and libretti, and as a freelance journalist he writes reviews and features for the guardian. his other part-time post is at goldsmiths university, where he is Professor of creative and life Writing, a thriving department that offers post-graduate study. i go to meet morrison in his office at goldsmiths, the same office i used to visit twice-termly during my time as his

student, and linger outside the door, catching snippets of the conversation he is finishing up with a current ma student, on the finer points of a sex scene. he is as patient and kind to this student as i remember him, a modest man and a hard-working tutor, with an exacting editorial eye: ‘What do you mean he strokes between her breasts?’ i hear him ask. i plan to talk to him about truth and fiction, about the differences inherent in journalism and novel-writing, about what memoir means, and it gives me a thrill to realise that this is my own first journalistic exercise, and that i’m already practising a technique i would hesitate to use in fiction – the wholesale and openly disclosed use of eavesdropping. morrison has said that in the first poetry workshops he taught, and in his first book of poetry, Dark glasses he made an attempt to be impersonal, trying keeping the real events of life away from his students’, and his own texts. But the decision to write from life, in the publication of and When Did You last see Your father? heralded a new interest in literary memoir in British writing, and led him to open the lifeWriting seminar he now teaches at goldsmiths. i ask him: how did the shift take place? Bm: i think it really was the death of my father – as simple as that. maybe also

getting older and feeling you’ve only got one life – what have you got to hide? Why can’t you volunteer personal material? it may have happened anyway – but it doesn’t happen to everybody, lots of people go on being quite impersonal to the end. suddenly, my father’s death was the central subject matter to be faced, and i had to use it. i did toy with the idea of disguising it all and turning it into a novel but that seemed pointless and cowardly. at the early workshops here, i ‘d say “No personal material – we’re round this table looking at this text and everything has to be in that text. We don’t want to know what lay behind the text.” it wasn’t anti using material, but it was a way of disciplining the workshop, so that you could focus on the writing.

at the time of your father’s illness, your notebook was ‘writing’ at the front and diary at the back, and it seems to me incredibly courageous that those back pages are what you opened up and published. You felt you had to write about what was going on – but how did you make the jump? Bm: i ‘d started writing down memories of my father, almost like little short stories and then i began to see a structure emerging for the book which depended on going backwards and forwards in time. the more recent stuff was all in the diary and i had to use it, some of it just as it went in. Really i had no choice – if i was going to do the book i wanted to do, i had to use the diary stuff. i had no idea whether what i’d written would appeal to anybody else, until an editor, Bill Buford at granta heard about it and asked to see it and thought it was working. it was all fairly raw, but at the time everything felt raw, so it was quite a natural way to work.

it was therapeutic for me. People say time heals, and maybe it does, maybe if i hadn’t written the book, then by now i would be ok. But there’s no doubt that it speeded up that process of feeling better. i did go and see a therapist for about six sessions 2 or 3 months after my father’s death, and that had no benefit for me as far as i could see. i remember doing a sort of merry dance around her, not wanting to reveal things, and going off at a tangent, and not wanting to face things that i faced much more readily in the writing. it was a way to confront it. i’m really interested in what ted hughes said towards the end of his life about writing Birthday letters. he wrote in letters to people, including his son, how he wished he’d done this earlier – there’d been this ‘great thing’ he’d never addressed, and he felt such an unburdening by having finally put it all together in a book, and a weight was lifted from having done so.

You’ve written in every field there is – poetry, fiction, journalism, drama, libretto – do you feel there are different skills you have to bring to bear to them? Bm: Yeah i think there probably are different skills. When i was a child i thought i was quite narrow and it has been great to try things – to have a go! With fiction and journalism there are obviously things in common , to do with narrative skill. orwell would say probably that they are the same discipline and that pure prose should be clear as a window pane, and so on, but there are differences too. Particularly because i came from the poetry background i’m interested in phrases and sentences that can’t be pinned down and rationalised and unusual words and so on – there is always that freedom and possibility in fiction

you don’t have in journalism.

to be ambiguous, to be abstract? Bm: ambiguity is a very good example of that, because sometimes you want to exploit the ambiguities of the sentence. some journalism can do that, but mostly it’s about having one meaning, and clarity, not plurality – the multiplicity of truth.

american writers who use memoir or truth are often much more postmodern or tricksy or are questioning – what is truth? Whereas the multiplicity of truth is approached from a different angle here, and when writers in the uK ask about truth, they seem to do it by avoiding the personal. Where do think that difference comes from? Bm: i think you’re right. Dave eggers’ book, a heartbreaking Work of staggering genius – that potentially could have been a very powerfully emotional memoir about losing two parents when you’re still in your twenties and having to take care of your eight year old brother. and that story is told and is there – but it’s like tristram shandy! it’s got footnotes, it’s got this preface saying you can skip straight to page 162. the whole business of reliability is kind of fore-grounded. it’s tricksy. James frey did get it in the neck for publishing a million little Pieces as a memoir for what was later admitted had a degree of fiction about it – americans were outraged, oprah was outraged – so obviously americans have the same notion as us of some sort of contract about telling the truth, and if somebody publishes a memoir but is lying, it’s not on. But Philip Roth plays with it – plays with truth and fiction, has his arguments

between Nathan zuckerman and himself. its true – we don’t have so many people who are playful in that way. if someone’s got a good family story, they tend to tell it straight. i wonder whether Julie myerson would have been pilloried to the same extent in the states? Perhaps not – perhaps there’s something about the smallness of the london media and the literary media – where there’s a sort of ferocity about ethics. i suspect she wouldn’t have had that reception in the states. i’ve read the book and i think she pulls it off. one of the big issues in the media has been that somehow it’s just her version of events and she’s unfair on the son. But at the end of the book, she writes about sitting down in a café with her son having given him the book to read the week before, and he goes through it and his comments are recorded, and some of them are very critical of her by implication, very tough on her. But she’s put them in. i think it’s open to the reader to hate her – i think the idea that she’s foisted some selfregarding memoir on people which doesn’t allow for another point of view is untrue. Philip Roth says somewhere that every autobiography has a counter-text – you know that there will be other people in the margins who actually will remember it differently – who would like to present their own version of events – and it’s always open for people to do that – as his ex-wife, claire Bloom, did. i think you should strive for the truth. You can tell when a book is a special pleading on behalf of the author, and you’ll take against it. in other words i think you want to try to represent a rounded view, even if its told from your point of view. You somehow want to acknowledge other points of view in so far as you can.

to say that implies that i do care about the truth. i didn’t feel in the books about my parents that i could change facts as i remembered them. that would have been falsifying in a way that seems wrong. Not that i’m such a good person, so full of integrity, but it would be selfdefeating. What’s interesting about memoirs and non-fiction is that sometimes a really awkward truth turns up that demands to be understood. You could not have made up the fact that the ‘other’ woman in my father’s life, who my mother had every reason to despise, was actually tremendously close friends with her after his death, and that even before his death they had a perfectly okay relationship. if you were dealing with that in fiction there would be a whole plausibility issue to be faced. it might just seem far-fetched: but it’s the truth. there’ve been little awkward facts i’ve had to deal with in memoirs that i’ve been glad of, because they’ve forced me to deal with the more difficult things, the harder to believe things.

fiction will always looks for drama, for conflict. Bm: Yes, but as long as there’s enough narrative power in a story, and you can find it without overt or sensational or melodramatic conflict, then that can be much better.

i guess it boils down to the question: what’s more important a good book, or the truth? Bm: What’s more important from what point of view? there are people who will say, “i’m not going to publish this book because doing so will destroy this or that friendship.” it might have been a really good book, but they’ll say no. actually, its

not the truth that’s more important, its life that’s more important. “i can leave this book, but i can’t lose this friendship.”’ it’s a balance. in the life-writing group its something we talk about a lot. i encourage people to feel they can leave things out. Not make things up – but omission is a useful thing. You do have to think about what makes a good book, and memoir requires you to practise those skills as much as a novel. People might have a really good story, but it’s how to make that story work – that’s what workshopping is all about. it’s weird how long it took us to accept that writing could be taught. When i was young, uea was the only place teaching it. as with any art, there are skills that can be learned. the idea that as a writer you’re born a genius and it will come out is rubbish.

You’ve said that when you were growing up, creativity seemed to be a long way away – down here in london, and you came here to find it. But then so much of your work is set up North. Do you think that distance was necessary? Bm: i’m not sure – i just wanted to be in london and live in london and i’ve ended up staying here – i never thought ‘oh, if i live down here i’ll be able to write about up there,’ but the north does retain something special for me. at the end of the book about my mother, there are quite detailed descriptions of the garden by our house and so on, and i suddenly realised – that’s all gone for me now, because she’s gone, and i don’t go back anymore. When i used to go back, i would often have a few days on my own and inevitably i would jot things down. that’s missing now – so perhaps gradually i am shedding the north. south of the River [morrison’s novel,

published 2007] was a big deal because it was set in the south – i’ve never done that before – 30 years of living in london and i’ve never written about it, until now! i still have this connection with this theatre company up there and they like the northern idiom and voice so therefore there will still be that pull – but maybe something has changed in the last few years. i am a bit regretful. it’s like losing basic sources and memories – and particularly with memoir you still want to have the memories there. every time i went back, my childhood from the age of 6 was still there – the locations were still there. for many people that’s not possible. i’ve had people in the life writing group talking about revisiting an old family home and i could still access that – and i still can because my sister lives there – i think that’s incredibly lucky – but it’s not there for me as much as it was. i did want to open my parents up to a wider audience than just family history – there might have been a sort of psychological emotional dimension to it as well, in that my father was dead, but i could keep him alive in a book. he was known as a big fish in a small pond and i’ve put him in a big pond and seen how he does splashing about to others. With my mother i didn’t think i’d ever write about her – but when she died she seemed too important not to write about. and it was interesting to write about someone self-deprecating.

and your dad’s swum very well in these rivers! Bm: there are a lot of fish like my dad – that’s what i’ve discovered. he seems to have a lot of resonances for people, bells are rung about their fathers. maybe that’s inevitable writing about parents – but he was a larger-than-life character and i suppose that’s what helped.

You’ve said that writing can be healing and therapeutic. is that something you’ve always found? Bm: Yes. it’s certainly been the case for me. obviously, it doesn’t make a readable book necessarily, the fact that you’re writing something down and it’s cathartic for you does not necessarily help anybody else. But something that’s therapeutic for you can be therapeutic for other people too. there are some people who are so anti the idea of literature as therapy that they can’t see that some element of therapy might be involved in the writing of it. so what? it’s still perfectly permissible, and doesn’t mean a bad book will result.

it certainly doesn’t in his case, i think, and go home to order books by Dave eggers and James frey on amazon.

Lisa Owens

Michael Ferrari

With Polite Regards to Writer/Director John Singleton i really wish i had never let my dog, Yukon, watch Boyz n the hood. as a pet owner, that may have been one of the worst mistakes i could have made. even though i knew he was a black beagle-spaniel mix, i never realized that he considered himself african american, and i never imagined that a friday night with a rented modern classic would have such an effect. But, man, that John singleton-directed film really opened a world of racial tension to my dog. he watched Boyz n the hood twice more and then rented menace 2 society. he watched New Jack city and Juice after that. then, he gradated on to other african american-centric films, such as shaft and the inkwell. he really likes spike lee joints. his itunes account last month totaled $45.00 in charges, all songs by prominent rap, hip-hop and R&B artists. he bought an N.W.a. box set. i didn’t even know they released a box set. i was really proud of Yukon for going beyond the hobbies of a

normal dog. instead of chewing on my furniture and chasing around a frisbee, he was blogging about the cultural relevance of hip-hop and the argument about whether it was a decline or an ascension that brought it into the ‘gangsta rap’ genre. i was really proud of him for expanding his cultural mind. But then he started talking in slang. it was cute at first, especially when he taught me that on the streets, a twenty-dollar bill is referred to as a ‘dub’. But then he started saying a lot of odd things. he told me about the ‘rules of the street,’ and started referring to me with a lot of racially charged nicknames, most often using the term ‘white boy’. he began talking about resolving altercations small and large through really violent means, such as holding me at knifepoint when i insisted on using a leash for a walk. he wouldn’t stop yelling ‘oppression’. he used to get along really well with the neighbor’s white shi tzu, tink. We used to joke that they were doggy dating. Now Yukon

refers to tink as his ‘snow ho’ and makes crude comments about her ‘narrow, white ass’, so the neighbors won’t let the two of them play together anymore. last week, i tried to get him to stop chasing and barking at the mailman. he responded by telling me he planned to ‘cap that pussy for getting up on his shit’. and even though the police – or ‘the po-po’ as Yukon calls them – left a citation, i still thought it was cute. But then, Yukon dropped the ‘N’ word. You know, that ‘N’ word. and i knew it was time to put my foot down. i told him if he wanted to learn more about african american culture and his roots, i would support him wholeheartedly, but i would not tolerate that kind of bigotry under my roof. he screamed, once again, that he was being oppressed. he called Jesse Jackson. things haven’t been the same since. after that, he wasn’t just a black beagle-spaniel mix who happened to live in a white man’s home. instead, he was a black dog living under ‘whitie’s’ roof and ‘whitie’s’ rules. it has become really hard to discipline him. for instance, last week he humped my girlfriend’s leg. he knew that was wrong, so i gave him his punishment: a light smack with a rolled-up newspaper. he screamed ‘Rodney King’ and called it a racist hate crime.

the tension has gone down a little since that incident, but i still have a few protesters sleeping in my yard. i tried sitting Yukon down to explain that the african american culture is one of beauty and charm with a resilient heritage that has already been tarnished by too many years of bigotry, hatred and tension. i told him his behavior was not that of a proud african american, but that of a colorless hooligan. i informed him that the situation had become dire, and as a punishment i would stop buying his food at the gourmet pet food store in New hope and instead save $6 by purchasing Puppy chow at target. two weeks after that discussion, i was ambushed into an interview with cNN’s anderson cooper. i was interviewed via satellite in response to the discrimination lawsuit Yukon filed against me. also fed into the interview via satellite were Jesse Jackson (again) and the coach of the Rutgers women’s basketball team. they asked what i had against black people. i told them i didn’t have anything against black people, and that my best friend Yukon is black. i even told them that i own every season of the chappelle show on DVD, even the season where he left to go to africa. it didn’t go very well. i lost my job after the

inter-view. my girlfriend dumped me because her friends said i’m racist. i’ve gotten a lot of nasty letters from star Jones. i think oprah prank-called me once too. the rapper 50 cent was asked about me during an interview on a radio show. he said i was demeaning and had no respect for an entire culture and its people. it was right before they aired his new song about paying a woman after ejaculating on her. i received a really nice fruit basket with condolences from Don imus. and Yukon hasn’t really stopped his behavior. last week, Vh1 offered him a reality show where he has to pick a potential wife from a group of 15 women,

each of varying creeds and ethnicities. the show is called Doggy style: finding a ho fo’ sho’. i was proud of him, so i decided to retract his punishment and picked up a bag of his favorite gourmet dog food. i think he appreciated it. even though he still calls me ‘white boy,’ he still asks to sleep at the foot of my bed, and still crawls up on my lap and naps while i pet him behind his ears. in retrospect, i really wish i showed him i Know Why the caged Bird sings instead of Boyz n the hood.

Bruce Barnes

Through The uninitiated call it getting 'dressed', the sex starved 'undressed', leaving nothing to the imagination. If I were you, wrestling with undergarments, or buttons that are never outdone, I would have fun....' you are what you are putting yourself through'; the generous stretch of elastic, the embrace of your waistband, a collarful hug that is head and shoulders above tired 'on and off'.

Martino Sorteni

Alvise Bittente

To Each Artist Their Way, Like Fallen Women

Happy-go-lucky parody of much acclaimed street art, intended as a compromise with its whoreish exhibition in any gallery or museum. Street art as prostitution, brazenly betraying its illegal and outdoor nature by exposing itself in the brothel of contemporary art.

Alan Spencer

Coming Home they look at me as if i’m a guest; the woman is wearing a black gown, a gash of red silk from trachea to thigh; the man is barefoot, flared black jeans, hair as dark as a beetle’s back. ‘this is my flat,’ i want to say, but the man flicks his steaming cigarette and a white cat jumps on to his knee. i look at the telephone content on the floor. trees sway like drunken giants. ‘there’s room enough here for four of us,’ he says. the white cat stares at the trees. the woman smiles and a rush of coffee conquers my nose. i put down my coat, pocket my keys. i glance at the table, its blind blue vase; pink-white orchids are opening their throats. i want to hear my own voice, but the orchids parley, con fuoco, peaks of laughter grazing the walls.

Alan Spencer

The Grey Car is half-alive to hopping magpies as the sun alights on its side-mirror. Dirty flanks, whitening tyres, sloping shadows inside. the brick-reflecting roof leads into cropped hedges, pockets of birds and breast-warm twigs.

Heba Zaytoun

J.L.Bogenschneider

Clergy every morning and evening for a full year, from september through to august, i walked behind the rumbling constructs of euston station, down Drummond street and past the grim-grey brickwork of st. anneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s on my way to work. it took until midJanuary with the christmas hangover finally dissipating into the frosted air for the words and the image to coalesce into more than a background detail. What struck me more than anything was the white outline of a heart around it. the paint was beneath so i presumed that at some point, just after non-ecumenical parking became a problem, someone had decided that that particular spot was the best place to fix a prohibitive sign. once i had noticed it i became quite taken with it and couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t get it out of my head. every morning i would fix my route so that it brought me past the wall. selfish bastards, the clergy. the thing is there was never anything or anyone parked outside, which made me wonder if it was a space reserved for priestly emergencies and, if so,

what such a situation might constitute. last-minute last rites? exorcist on call? after weeks of absent-minded last-minute dashes to work i finally took some time out on my day off to walk the fifteen minutes or so down the road with my camera to take a series of pictures. i didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t quite know what i was going to do with the results, i only felt it was important to capture the image. i wondered if i was allowed to take photographs of a church, or if there was maybe some obscure by-law preventing it; i imagined an elderly red-faced

irishman all in black stomping out of the church demanding to know what i – heathen! – thought i was doing. en-route i concocted possible stories, scenarios: i’m an art student; i’m a catholic art student; i work for the council. i didn’t think anyone would take me seriously if i told them that i simply wanted to take a picture – i was clearly up to something. in the end no one approached me despite the fact that i looked as unintentionally shifty as i possibly could. i took over twenty shots from various angles and distances before returning home to spend the rest of the afternoon developing the images, playing with them, trying to draw a probably non-existent deeper meaning from them. the sign itself meant that the church wouldn’t give you anything it might want for itself; i’d learnt that at an early age. But the heart; who draws hearts on churches? Who draws hearts anywhere other than in the margins of their school books? i found it endearing. there was a college just across the road and i wondered if it had anything to do with the students there. Not that there would be any way to find out. that night i dreamt of cars and melted snow and love-struck

vandals. the following monday i called into a print shop opposite the office and handed over one of the photographs and an old, red tshirt i’d found stuffed down the back of the wardrobe. they told me to come back at the end of the day and just after five o’clock i was handed a freshly pressed garment with the ecclesiastical order printed across the front. i wore it on the way home, hoping for an event, an epiphany born of cosmic coincidence to occur as image and reality came into one another’s orbit, but the street was empty and the rest of the walk home was similarly uneventful. as with most minor obsessions it eventually filtered itself into the recesses of my mind over a period of months, although i continued to wear the shirt. By the time autumn came around again i had moved west; to the other side of the city where the church walls were unblemished. it was over a year after this that i found myself walking along my old route, on my way to meet up with a few friends in the neighbourhood. the church was, of course, still there, but the sign was gone, although the heart – which i now saw was incomplete and unenclosed – remained.

Kat Redstone

The Crab time trips cruelly at andy's heels, leading him always to the girl. Not passion, nor lust, nor want, Just dull malaise and habit. lying in bed, spent, Blowing smoke furls, he considers her: the rucked up micro-skirt and tiny pants. 'is her malevolence manifest in her face?' she scuttles over him, a kittenish effort, though he is reminded more of the crabs at chesil Beach. he half expects a pincer-claw to snap off his flaccid cock. he rolls away, foetus-curled, Drumming up words with his fingers. the smell of her has seeped and soaked through his sheets. he can barely breathe through the clouds of her. she misunderstands. Wraps herself around his back. he twitches. or rather it twitches. 'No! Not now.' sternly, so it stays. later, on a bench licking their 99 flakes, he says its over. she works up a storm

Kat Redstone

and in opposition he stays calm. he notices, as she wildly flails, the flecks of ice cream on his shirt. 'Don't say it. Don't say it.' his silent mantra. But she roots within her arsenal, selects with care, 'i love you.'

Andy chipped walls and thicket hedges, an astra blocks out the dying, orange evening light and the cries of contained delight. inside, andy, Pale, short, Blinking in the dark, surveys the scene. the couples form, Room to room. the sighs begin, the moans which Rise fall and scatter across the floor. andy hears, selects a beer, and leans against the wall.

Next door, the slap of flesh and rubber, staccato, Beats the metronome of desire. his own imagination lends him to crave a simple pleasure, 'Does no one want to kiss and while away with wine-sodden chatter? to lay out stretched upon the kitchen lino, cling to my thin frame?' the 'No', it rolls and floods from Room to Room Where bodies locked in twos, threes, fours. from the dungeon in the basement, Where tea-lights flicker on the floor. and comes to rest in the quiet bedroom Where pornography plays to No one.

Daffni Percival

The Quiet Road The road unwinds. I have been here before and find no change save, perhaps, a mushroom grown in secret from the woodland floor. The lane has no name; I call it the quiet road, not for the lack of traffic it leads only to the forest and one farm but because it winds through larch trees, which, in the autumn when the forest pines stay obstinately green, drop their needles like brown snow, muffling the sound of water seeping through the rocks and moss below.

Alice Falconer

In her Prime ‘Why won’t you tell her?’ they were dividing between them everything they had owned together, and had agreed not to discuss other things. ‘i thought you wanted to talk about the cat.’ ‘marmaduke is mine,’ he said firmly. ‘But i want to know as well – When will you tell her?’ concentrating on the road, she heard his voice distantly. the phone was hot against her ear. Between her and the fields, a brown strip of trees flashed by, sagging and disintegrating in the constant rain. ‘Not yet.’ she pressed harder on the accelerator. Queasy with something; she felt unwholesome, but in the flip-down mirror there was an ordinary face, even cheerful. to save money she had cut her fringe herself, foolishly short. ‘it would upset her, i know it.’ James did not reply. this habitual silence, pressing out her explanation, irritated her even in the midst of his concern. ‘she’s ill.’ ‘But it’s great news! What if you win?’ ‘i’m here now,’ she lied. ‘i’ll call you later.’ she closed the mobile and dropped it on the seat beside her. it was James’s car – she drove so rarely she did not own one. she saw

her usual seat from the driver’s vantage, the familiar unfamiliar. as if her ability could vanish, she felt as frightened as a child that has undone the handbrake and begun to roll downhill. to distract herself, she brought out her most pleasurable thought, the shortlist, and turned it over in her mind like a possession. ‘it’s good that it’s less known,’ her agent had said. ‘more chance of winning.’ as he spoke he popped a chalky indigestion tablet out of its packet, although he would wait for her to leave before crunching and sighing. a stooped, balding, tired man in a run-down agency, he was still reliably optimistic, assuring his writers that he, Jimmie, had faith in their work. ‘this is good stuff. You’ll be remembered for this.’ and she believed it, although she did not think that he did. *** When she turned into the drive margaret was waiting. ‘Darling!’ the new house was large and square, each giant room – scattered with lonely furniture – identical in proportion to the one before. a monstrous dollhouse, its proportions were familiar to Julia from her childhood. margaret no longer wrote, but her last horror novel had again

been made into a film, the house had been bought, and the upheaval made it seem that margaret’s own life had advanced. she insisted on the ‘grand tour’, and Julia cooed without attending, still possessed by her thoughts. she knew it already – the marbleised columns in the hall, laughable in their old-fashioned ostentation, the crowd of paintings, each the size of a tabletop, the garden empty as a field, and the old stables, ‘done up’ into a miniature house, where she, Julia, could stay any time she needed … ‘any time things go wrong for you in london.’ ‘thanks, everything’s fine right now, but thanks.’ ‘Right now, yes. But it’s a precarious existence, isn’t it? Waitressing… When i think of where i’d got to by your age. But we all take different paths through life, don’t we?’ ‘my path is fine; you know i never expected to make any money.’ even to herself, she sounded churlish. trying to regain her footing, she took a deep breath, and immediately margaret said, ‘Don’t sigh, darling. i didn’t mean to upset you. i hope you’re making enough to live on, that’s all. i know how important it is to you to feel independent.’ Julia thought of the café – the owner, sweaty and thoughtful, whom she had dissuaded from piling copies of her book by the till. her horror of being a ‘local author’. ‘every little helps!’ he had said, ever kind. ‘i am independent.’ she had

slipped back, with the intonation of a sulky child. ‘Yes, of course. Now do come to dinner. i’ve slaved all day, made your favourites.’ Rob, margaret’s trophy, lounged in the dining room. he had the face of an old satyr, big nosed, hair bushy and receding, his sharp knowledgeable eyes holding Julia’s. alert, his body seemed held in readiness even while he reclined in the armchair, offensively vital. ‘But tell me, darling, are you surviving? i would be happy to give you an allowance; the royalties are still rolling in. Really, what do you live on?’ Julia admitted the mouselike sum, and margaret shrieked. ‘at least i can feed you!’ she exclaimed, and began to fetch dishes. ‘i can hardly eat, with my condition, but it’s good to see you both satisfied.’ as she ran in and out, clanking plates, she constructed a city of food on the dining table, fitting for the size of the room, though not its people. standing, margaret watched Julia and Rob pick up their cutlery. her jacket sagged on her shoulders. ‘i still remember your first poetical jottings – adorable. You were inspired by me, i’m sure of it. i was tapping away all day, reading you scraps – you were my first critic.’ she saw a patch of empty plate. ‘more?’ ‘it’s delicious, but i couldn’t –’ ‘Just a little, you must remember how much i love cooking for you, especially now that i hardly eat …’ and so Julia did – fried, boiled, stewed and burned, and

margaret heaped her plate until Julia, courtesy spent, pushed it away. ‘is it that bad? i wanted to feed you up, you look so hungry, i thought you probably couldn’t afford –’ ‘Why don’t you roll her down to your study and show her what you’ve been working on,’ Rob said. ‘study’ sprang out from his sentence as though he flicked her with the word. ‘all right!’ she said brightly. ‘the most important room in the house!’ Julia moved delicately, cradling her stomach. margaret’s copy of an old-fashioned study had all necessary accompaniments – a leather armchair, a wall of bound classics, an antique oak desk stacked with clean notebooks. the sunlight slanting through the window imbued her with apparent health. Julia had hunted out the symptoms of margaret’s illness as soon as she had ended that phone call. all through it, she had wanted to ask – ‘But what will it do to you?’ indigestion first – burning. You stop being hungry. You begin to hate meat. those are the early signs. go to your doctor and complain of heartburn, tell him you find meat repellent, and you have a chance. But who does? ‘i really am worried about your prospects, darling, your future. if you can’t live on what you get now, well, when i think of where i was at twenty-nine –’ in the late stages – pain, nausea, weakness, vomiting. getting thinner and thinner. ‘Perhaps if i wrote horror …’ Julia

said. ‘of course, i’m not a poet, pure in heart, et cetera. i wrote for a living. and i think i’ll be remembered, don’t you? the critics, so snobbish, but you have Poe, you have mary shelley, you have, Poe, of course, and –’ Julia thought – Radcliffe, James, la mare, and all the names came crowding into her head. she read horror stories insatiably, nightly, as gruesome as possible. But she only said ‘You said ‘wrote’. aren’t you still?’ ‘of course yes, things are on the boil. and how are your scribblings?’ ‘a few good reviews.’ ‘oh well done, sweetie.’ ‘and you – who’s your agent, now?’ ‘No agent – not at the moment. But my last always said i’d made something permanent, and i agree, don’t you? Not just because they were popular …’ Julia saw that margaret’s hair was still bleached and blowdried, her fingernails were manicured. ‘i was mentioned for an award, do you remember? i’ve been trying to remember when, i thought …’ ‘mentioned? What does that mean?’ ‘that article, that times article.’ it was an old piece, more than ten years old. "somewhat more sophisticated than the first." Julia quoted, accurate to the quick. ‘Do you know the kind of horror people read now? grotesque. You could never catch up.’ ‘ultra-violence,’ margaret said dreamily. ‘You’re right, darling. my books are old-fashioned. But that’s

why they’ll be remembered, don’t you think?’ ‘i don’t know, mother. i don’t read horror.’ ‘Well, no. Your tastes are more refined.’ she tried to regain lost ground. ‘But how can you know what people think – how you make them feel? When i was younger, letters flew in. it was so exciting. Readers took my books to heart, they really meant something …’ Julia waited sturdily. ‘my agent told me i’m on the shortlist for the fellowes Prize.’ margaret’s sad eyes met hers. she clutched the door post. ‘What is that, anyway, i can’t remember now? i’m sure it’s ever so...’ ‘in fact,’ Julia said, ‘i have won.’ margaret stilled. she gazed softly at Julia with her mouth open, her expression wondering. ‘oh no,’ she said accidentally, and then, ‘Wonderful …’

‘for this second book. i only heard recently.’ she paused. ‘today in fact. i wanted to tell you first.’ ‘Wonderful …’ ‘i don’t think i’ll stay, margaret. i have to be in london tomorrow. there’s all sorts of administration to get on with – terribly boring, but necessary – you understand.’ ‘oh yes – yes, of course.’ Julia descended the staircase rapidly and seized her cases, alive to the smooth workings of her body. her heart pumped gleefully. into the hush behind her she called, ‘Bye! thanks for dinner!’ as she rushed into the cool evening air she heard her mother cry after her – ‘i want you to know, darling, i’m so happy for you. so happy …’

Colin Reed

Silly Little Play scene: anywhere, anytime, although perhaps early evening on the corner outside a trendy east london pub. the characters: two young people, probably men. one in a particularly flash outfit, the other quite anonymously dressed. one: Yes! Yes! i’ve done it! other: Brilliant! thanks. You know, i always knew i’d do it. other people doubted me, but i knew that if i stuck to it, i’d get there eventually. and now i’ve shown the lot of ‘em. i’m very happy for you. What is it you’ve done? Well, i can’t say just now, cos it’s not actually finished yet. But i’ve done the hard bit, so any day now … cool. Well, let me know when it’s ready. Will do. are you doing anything? i’m sure i will … But you’ve not decided yet? No … Well you need to decide. You’ll never get anything done if you don’t decide. Deciding is the hard bit. mmm … ? it’s just … there are so many options. Don’t think about the options, just say to yourself ‘i am going to do it’ and then do it. easy. is that what you did? Yep. and it was that easy? Yep. oK, i’m gonna do it!

Brilliant! But what am i gonna do? Doesn’t matter. it’s making that decision that’s the hard bit. cool … hold on … When you say ‘that’s the hard bit’ … ? Yep … and you said earlier that you’d ‘done the hard bit’ … ? Yep … Do you mean that this ‘hard bit’ is the same ‘hard bit’ that you’ve done? (…) so all that ‘Yes! Yes! i’ve done it’ was a little bit premature wasn’t it? (…) i mean you’ve not actually started anything yet have you? (…) are you listening? Yeah … i hadn’t really thought about it that negatively before. i’m more of a can-do kind of guy. fair enough, but what can you do? You name it. engineering. No. Playing violin. No. scuba diving. Yes. Really? … No. But i can swim. and i can breathe. so it can’t be too hard can it.

Enrico Palandri

A dog just barked. Distracted by the world i return to our silence. i repeat your name i stencil inside my eyes the way you hold your cigarette and look at me bemused. i’d like to wait But can’t because each instant feeds this longing and when you ask me again ‘What’s up? Why do you look at me like that?’ how can i say ‘Nothing. there are no sounds in this pub, and no chairs. and a howling dog in my heart echoes the world that i lost.’ You would laugh and mock my words, and with some off-hand smirk, shrugging off my angst you’d add ‘You’re going too fast’. i should like to be more precise: ‘Yes, and i’ve just been undone, like a meteorite that falls from the skies and the air’s friction has destroyed it even before it lands.’ You would laugh again, and my soul Would rise and disperse among those little clouds of smoke that so enviably now are caressing your nose. hence i just look somewhere else and say ‘Nothing. Nothing’s up.’ hoping that perhaps when you reach for your coat,

and look at your watch and announce to your little audience ‘it’s late, i must go!’ that just perhaps You will touch my hand Without saying ‘i’m sorry’.

Emma Hamshare

Helena Michaelson

Creation Story 4 Shorts

moompfish What is incredible to Becky, as she clods along noisily, saying nothing and refusing ice-creams, umbrellas, sun-hats, hands to hold, leaflets to read and an enormous pencil stamped with the logo of the portcullis and the legend ‘Who goes there?’ is that no-one seems to mind. they talk among themselves, laugh, point things out to each other, respond with jokes, and pose for photos. When she is made to pose they say, ‘Don’t smile, now Becky. let’s have moompfish to remember.’ they sang along to eurythmics in the car on the way, and continue to hum, queuing for tickets, the loo, an entrance to the dungeon. she disdains from humming along, but she cannot avoid the festering self-doubt, when panting up the steep stone stairs into the tower, she hears them whistling sweet Dreams in unison. they congregate in the bluster and sunshine by the turrets and attempt to pick out their car from the rows and rows of gleaming

sunroofs. she wriggles from the arm that attempts to hug her shoulders, but then stays near, moves nearer, and is the one to find the fiesta. Down in the dungeon they become respectfully quiet. she sides with them, along the short cold wall, away from some boys who are monkeying about with the shackles. and when they picnic on the hill, despite herself, despite every effort, she can refuse neither a sandwich, nor, when they wander over to market stalls, the offer to choose a new tape for the car. it is not the kind of thing she can leave to the whimsy of her sister’s taste, which has so far landed them with Kylie and tanita tikaram. she spends a long time gazing at the uniforms on sergeant Pepper’s but settles finally on the Best of herman’s hermits, which she then carries proudly in the joey-pocket of her jumper, zipping along its nubbly ridges with her thumb nail. from the front passenger seat, on the drive home, comes the question, ‘What’s that at the side of your mouth Becky?’ she looks up,

confronts the chub of her cheeks in the rear-view mirror. ‘is that a smile i can see?’

Bum after lunch, wandering the house with nothing to do, she came across the sight of francesco’s bum. the door to Bea’s room was open, and as she passed by, she glanced in just like anyone would. it’s possible that if no-one had been in there, she might have gone in to look at the books on the bookshelf that was made of a plank resting on bricks, or the collection of ticket stubs blutacked to the wall, but she hadn’t been snooping by anyone’s standards, and it wasn’t her fault if she was downstairs by herself with nothing to do and people were leaving their doors open. People should not leave doors open when they’re doing what these two were doing. she hadn’t stopped to stare, or anything like – but since seeing it – the bum – in its state of quick motion, and glimpsing towards the head of the bed, beyond francesco’s matted brown hair, the bold red dye of Bea’s, her pale neck stretched back, and hearing their quiet synchronised mutterings of the word ‘fuck’ again and again – she had felt a rush of adulthood

and knowledge – as if it had been her body he’d been working on. she had to lie down on her own bed for the rest of the afternoon, and tell herself over and over, i have had a sexual awakening. certain things about her sexual awakening really surprised her: that francesco and Bea were both wearing socks for example, and that francesco’s manypocketed trousers were still clinging tenaciously around his thighs. Perhaps this was the very romanticism she would have to rid herself of as she flung herself towards adulthood: the idea that people would bother to undress – and close the door – before fucking. or perhaps this was romance itself – passion too great to withstand those moments of forethought. she hoped it was that.

grieve some nights, when her mother was dying, she would crawl into her bed and sleep there instead. she knew it wasn’t fair when the coughing and the fevers could wipe out whole nights on their own, but sometimes, waking in the night, she couldn’t help it. she would find

herself up and out of bed, eking out her steps so that the five paces across the hallway would take treble the time they did in the frantic hours of the day. her mother’s bedroom looked down over the gardens, and was quieter and darker than her own, and she had to paddle her hands in front of her to feel out her way to the bed in the dark. her mother’s dry, open mouth would sometimes suddenly shut – the pattern of her breathing shifting from long rasping stutters to a series of gasps and snorts, and Becky would freeze in Burglar Bill position – her back hunched, her knee lifted for a silent step, her arms wide open for balance. hitting the bed with her hand or her knee didn’t always bring back her sense of orientation. she would still have to pad around its outskirts, softly touching down on the bedcovers until her hand reached the fresh coldness of an unused pillow. is this selfishness? she’d think, pressing her stomach right up to her mother’s back and flinging her arms across her. is it childishness that makes me need this? she didn’t know how to answer herself. she was a child. she was a self. she didn’t know any other way to be, except that in the daytime she put on the best act she could and somehow got away with it.

she did grieve. she'd never say she hadn't grieved, because there's no way around it, there's no way not to grieve, because whatever you do when your mother has just died, it is an act of grief, and whatever you think is a thought of grief and whatever you say, the grief strung up around your vocal cords is let loose so there's nothing you're saying except – my mother has died, my mother has died. except, you are saying other things. You're saying things about sandwiches and wine and you're talking about tV shows and funerals like they're on a par – like the committal of your mother's body to the ground is an acceptable part of your everyday; like the bewildering lonely sickening horror that you will never see your mother again is something you're willing to believe is a truth. strange deadlines of grief came and went; each one brought more concrete evidence that she and her grief still existed even though her mother didn’t: my mother has been dead one week and i can sleep a whole night through. my mother has been dead one month and i can read about two whole pages before i lose my concentration. my mother has been dead two months and i can make the best green curry this

side of thailand. my mother has been dead six months and every so often i achieve a three-point turn on a quiet road. my mother has been dead one year and i can wear her purple jumper with the beads and watch the hudsucker Proxy and only cry a normal amount. my mother has been dead eighteen months and i can rent out her room to my friend and charge next to nothing for the privilege. in the other, non-concrete world, the grief wasn’t shifting. her mother appeared frequently; looking more or less like herself, but with a personality warped by death, so that she was cold or pissed off, secretive or not-to-bebothered. Becky was always missing the mark, breaking down in floods of tears when she was supposed to pretend that nothing was up; asking the unanswerable; knowing or not knowing or knowing and not knowing that her mother was dead and being so overcome with joy to see her that it was a turn-off. once, just once, she got to hold her – to hug her in her dream. But there was no continuity. in the next dream, her mother was drowned in sadness again, or unreachably distant and yet right there, a sour, dismissive version of herself. often, in the dreams, the grief was not hers at all, but her mother’s, and she

would fail to be a comfort. there was always the sense of being on guard, of not letting slip the truth. her mother was not to know she was dead. her coldness, her absence, they seemed to say, ‘You don’t own me, Becky,’ and that her decision was final.

Wet fish she is picking at the overcooked sole on her plate, having scoffed the mash with more gusto than decorum, when Peter, who they’d sat her next to as a potential set-up, leaps up from his seat like it’s attempted to bite his arse and she realises she’s elbowed her wine all over his lap. fucking dinner parties. martha pushes a pile of napkins into her hand – like she’s going to be the one to mop up the mess – and Dan rushes off to get the dustpan and brush and there are lots of oohs! and laughter and ‘Don’t worry, Becky, it wasn’t real crystal.’ the wine is white – and a something or other of importance that has been talked about at great length – but Peter is acting as if the wine is going to not only stain, but actually burn through his trouser leg, and is attempting to avert disaster by pouring a whole bottle of Perrier over himself. this

makes Becky like him a lot more. Not so Dan and martha, who are very into their fixtures and fittings, and are quietly convulsing as their carpet begins to fizz. this Peter person comes across as a bit of a wet fish; but she gets the sense he might be a tuna or a swordfish beneath it all. he doesn’t drink. he doesn’t smoke either, but he joins her outside on the roof terrace and glances sideways at her when she lights up her second cigarette. ‘Don’t,’ she says. ‘i know. my mother died of lung cancer.’ he takes a moment and then says ‘i thought you seemed sad.’ she is shaken by his honesty, and a sucker for it, and she puts all her effort into pretending she isn’t, sucking instead on her cigarette, on the cold air, on any strength left in her, but her sadness is a sea which fills her. her sadness is an ocean. it laps the shores of her being. it takes so little to overcome the breakwaters. he says, ‘my dad’s dying at the moment,’ which seems an odd way to put it. his eyes are wet, and her eyes fill too, but they look at each other, and it’s like she’s watching as his sea comes to shore. ‘i’m sorry,’ she says. he nods at that. ‘it’s shit. it’s shit, isn’t it?’ ‘it is,’ he says. ‘it’s shit.’ she finds that they are

touching; that she has her hand on his arm. his sweater is softer than it looks. later, comfortably drunk on her taxi ride home, she realises that when she’d used the phrase ‘wet fish’, she was aiming for ‘wet blanket’. But still, he was definitely a fish of sorts, and not a blanket at all. Becky has a feeling for fish that no-one else seems to share, and when she’s in a certain frame of mind she likes to think of them in the world before there was land. she makes up creation stories; like, in the beginning was the Water. it was slate grey, and blue and green, pink in the evenings and yellow in the east. there was water and also adjectives. there was water and also colour, direction, time. in addition to water, there was the moon, and the waters were black and silver beneath it and also there were stars, zillions of stars but the question is not how many there were but for how long they’d already been there. even at the beginning there was the past to contend with. there was plenty at the beginning. there was water. the water was spherical and it had no boundaries. there was weather and there were tides but the tides splashed rather than crashed because the water met only itself. there were storms, and rainfall, there was sun and snow. in

certain places the water could turn itself into sharp white shards, and this was a revelation to the water, because when it roamed towards the shards, sometimes it would find itself staying there, a part of a shard itself, but other times it sloped up towards it and stole back pieces of itself it didn’t know it had left there. there were adjectives, but the water had no way to make use of them and didn’t know much about explaining itself. still, the water had depth. it had character, and taste. it was profoundly salty and profoundly acquiescent, so nothing fazed it, not even, when in time, with the salt, and the slow swish and swirl of the waves, and the raging of the storms, and the eruptions of volcanoes from deep within, the water started to grow fish. and the water was neither happy nor sad that the fish had

appeared, and the fish, too, they didn’t really care whether they lived or died. they would dart and weave near the surface of the water, but this was only a guise of nerves, because further down, in the depths, they also darted and weaved and it was not a sense of impending doom that made them go, but something else – something like the innate fishiness of being, in which all you’ve got to do is dart and weave, breathe, feel the feathery brush of fins against your scales, nibble the edges of plants and cannibalise without mercy, shit, leave fertilised eggs in the hollows of rocks and never think of them at all, grow bigger, grow older and stop. Just stop. Just stop.

Emma Hamshare

Maria Ilieva

The Grey City unknown is my city without you. the bus stop is strange. and even the neighbour. like read newspapers roll the days of the calendar. soaked wet, grey of worries along the boulevard the soul creeps. Quietly in the blue dusk a bell can be heard. With a chord of the stalls in the morning. the sky is silent. uncaressed hand looks for a trace in me left by you â&#x20AC;Ś With fingers you have painted grey blues. the ashtray is full of thoughts.

Claire Booker

Glad Tidings a strange nativity has bloomed at number twenty two. snow White (but no dwarves) virginal among the pert and purple winter pansies, anticipates the sign of hope in deserts of pea shingle neatness.

cctV in use hangs slipshod on the lintel â&#x20AC;&#x201C; uncertain star protecting german shepherds (poly-resin moulded) a lantern at each throat, silently watching their flocks of jubilant gnomes. No wind turns the mill wheel: a plastic fish struggles mutely on its line, unseen by mallards that baste in tin foil lakes, and wait for tidemarks of discarded fir along next monthâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s pavement.

so this is christmas seeps beneath the pzschizsh of Polish builders laying roof tiles. twitching lights wink back a semaphore of gaudy gladness and passers-by with smiles attempt to catch the who and why of private lives ventriloquised in garden bric-Ă -brac. groundsel, yellow starred, shoots a crack beneath the steps. No faces at the pane. Just a cactus patient in its pot.

Emma Fitzgerald

Claire Booker

The Fckoff Man i met him in the cut; not met as in to greet or shake the hand, but met the sly unfolding humour of his voice.

fckofff! the missing vowel wryly tucked inside the pocket of his larynx echoed teasingly from up behind toy trucks, bucking broncos (battery-run) duct tape on crates and hucksters smiling at their luck, past rucks of slips and cambrick throws, the crux of matters lost in plastic bibs (2 for a £1) and cD stacks, ululations of fraught kids struck by fraying mothers stopping for a length of curtain track, some shake ‘n Vac, to feel the fleece on nylon rugs or poke Dont touch me til i’m yours! ripeness.

fckofff! fckofff! the cuckoo clockness of it, castrato soaring high above the millipede of people shuffling, swaying, weighted with their worries, likes and what’s for tea? squeezing tight between the hug of stalls, the chip-fat smell and flap of pigeons crapping on protective netting. then one day i saw him, the man who Daphne claimed had called trot on! behind the Pick & mix; his only claim to flesh-hood two brief words.

this time i matched him: the movement of his lips and slow deflating hiss of anglo-saxon, a coat two sizes small, his face strapped tight, the not-so-subtle cabbage-water smell that made me speed, catching sideways as i passed a sharp suck in of breath.

Rory Gibson

The Bubble of London the bubble of london is a wondrous thing it makes your feet sore, it makes your eyes sting But under the streets are a thousand unknowns like wervals and lerchins and other such crones.

Feature

The Literary Pilgrim Je m'en allais, les poings dans mes poches crevées; Mon paletot aussi devenait idéal: J'allais sous le ciel, Muse! et j'étais ton féal; Oh! là là! que d'amours splendides j'ai rêvées! Arthur Rimbaud

Paris: home of art, food, love, regicide. after what feels like decades of building work, those of us who live in or near the euston-Pentonville-caledonian triangle of horror can now enjoy direct access to this ville-lumière, courtesy of the new eurostar terminal in st Pancras. for as little as £59 return you can hop on a train in Kings cross and walk off at the gare du Nord in pretty much the same time as it would take you to go from camden to Brixton by bus on a busy day. my favourite chose du jour about Paris is the Vélib’ service: a really simple, really wonderful idea. using a code card similar to our oyster – but, behold! free of charge – which you can get from one of the dispensers found next to every Vélib’ bike rack, you can pick up a shiny, perfect bicycle just outside the station and ride it wherever you fancy. all you need is a bankcard and a smile on your face. then, having a thè à la menthe, you can leave it at any of the hundreds of other spots available all over the city and forget about it. have

a walk, get lost, then find another one, pick it up, and carry on exploring. although already available in many other cities, this eco-and-walletfriendly service seems tailored just for Paris. Voilà! New cycling lanes have taken over the streets, allowing cyclists to ride the wrong way down most one-way roads, and thus to enjoy quick and easy access to any location as well as a good banter with stressed car drivers. for me, this new way of moving marked the beginning of a new type of exploration: the themed pilgrimage on wheels. my aim is an old favourite: finding dusty, charismatic cafés where a rebellious Rimbaud or scandalous Baudelaire might once have ordered a glass of red and created wonderful drunken poetry. Needless to say my level of enjoyment was inversely proportional to my level of awareness: my first stop is much more vivid in my memory than my last, a somewhat vague, albeit extremely colourful, recollection of laughter and the echoing of bicycle bells in the cobbled streets.

Whether you are a new visitor or a returning habitué, i thoroughly recommend the experience, as it allowed me to bond with the city in a way that wouldn’t have been possible pre-Vélib’. here are a few tips for those who wish to further this exploration. first, when looking for a tavern or wine bar be prepared for disappointment and never fail to make a Plan B. these bars have unusual opening hours which they very often don’t respect. somewhat unsurprisingly i found a waltz of the best patisseries or a tour of the smelliest cheese shops to be very pleasant makeshifts, but in terms of entertainment Paris has much to offer to anyone, from the cineaste – with more than 70 cinemas in the city – to the shoe fetishist – with two unmissable louboutin shops. for an early opening classic try le fumoir, a charming, chic café off Rue de Rivoli, right in front of the louvre. coffee and citron pressé are a treat and you can surf on the free wi-fi while you wait for the aperitif. in Paris, hospitality is not a given and your maître d’ might not be happy to see you at all. it appears in fact that most – if not all – taverns live entirely off a close group of regulars, (mostly friends of the owner) and will react to your entrance the same way you would if they walked into your living room: with a mixture of annoyance and indignation. some

other hosts will simply ignore you hoping you’ll give up and leave, which was my experience in la crémerie on Rue Quatre Vents. if visiting this delightful butchery-turned-tavern, please steer clear of the house wine and, if wealthy enough, concentrate on their (surprisingly italian) speciality, the burrata, a creamier, tastier cousin of mozzarella.. finally, if you are a wine lover, you will enjoy the winner of my wine bar contest: legrand filles et fils, a hidden gem on Rue de la Banque. Don’t be confused by the street entrance: the unbelievable, old fashioned sweet shop stacked from floor to ceiling with shiny, red, enamel jars and glittering glass pots full of the most colourful, exciting sweets is something you’d only expect to find in a Just William story, but walk through it and you’ll suddenly find yourself a much more mature setting. a warm, elegant, unfussy wooden bar where the staff are friendly and the cornichons are on the house. order a glass of red wine, stick your nose deep into it and peep at your reflection in one of the mirrors behind the mountains of shiny bottles – are you french yet? Perhaps not, but pull out your book, notepad and pencil and you’ll be a literary Pilgrim. ff

Davide Zucco

54 54

Contributors Bruce Barnesis an escapee from North london, now living in Bradford, West Yorkshire. he has recently won the 6th leeds Peace Poetry competition and the torriano Poetry competition 2008/09. alvise Bittente is a prolific artist from the lido of Venice, italy. his punctilious, provocative work has been exhibited in london, athens, New York and shanghai among other cities. J l Bogenschneider www.abctales.com/user/jlb claire Booker is a south london playwright. her work has been produced in Britain, australia, france and spain. she enjoys the fluidity and immediacy of making poetry happen. these are her first published poems. www.bookerplays.co.uk catherine edmunds, poet/novelist/illustrator, has a literary style best encapsulated in the title of her poetry collection: wormwood, earth and honey (circaidy gregory Press). her artwork veers between delicate portraiture, exploding dogs and decomposing toads. www.freewebs.com/catherineedmunds alice falconer works for the man but writes stories on sundays. she has stopped smoking but still bites her nails. she likes walking along the canal to Victoria Park while dreaming about living in a houseboat. michael P. ferrari is the author of the dark comedy assault on the senses published in 2007. he spends his free time making his girlfriend shake her head with confusion. he lives and works in Philadelphia. www.assaultonthesenses.com emma fitzgerald: illustrator by degree, animator by employ. Visit www.emmafitzgerald.co.ukfor stop-frame animations about ghosts and dinosaurs, drawings of matchboxes, and the most time-consuming music videos made for £200 you will ever see. Rory gibson lives in hexham. he attributes his poetic genius to being force fed cabbage in his formative years. emma hamshare, designer from the london college of fashion, won a marchpole scholarship for a collection based on simple geometric shapes that fit together as musical notes in a melody. www.arts.ac.uk/showtime/788 maria ilieva is a poet from Plovdiv, Bulgaria. she is the author of three poetry books: a Distant touch, Do the Birds Dream, and Bell’'s chord. her poems also feature in various anthologies. http://art.mecho.name siobhan maguire is an illustration, animation, embroidery, bird and bow enthusiast. www.siobhanmaguire.blogspot.com helena michaelsonstudied english at cambridge, and completed an ma in creative and life Writing at goldsmiths. she works as a freelance writer, reader and tutor and is studying towards becoming a counsellor. Rebecka mustajärviis possibly the world’s youngest pensioner, in love with wool, (finger) waves, and words. lisa owens, from Kent, england, is currently studying illustration and animation at Kingston university. her work explores the themes of globalization, modernism and reinvention. http://lisaowensillustration.blogspot.com/ enrico Palandri is the author of many successful novels including Boccalone and the Way Back. he lives between london where he teaches at university college., and Venice where he teaches at ca’ foscari. Daffni Percivallives in Wales with two collies, three sheep, an old cat and some ducks. she writes and publishes poetry and children's stories, paints and occasionally teaches languages to keep the wolf from the door. http://www.merilang.co.uk/shop.htm lettie Ransleystudied english at oxford, and subsequently at Queen's university Belfast, where she edited a collection of student poetry and prose entitled tidelines. she now works for a london-based literary agency. Kat Redstone is a london based actor, writer and musician. she studied english and comparative literature at goldsmiths and graduates from mountview school of theatre arts this year. she has co-written a play, the Bee, with alexander eisenthal, and is currently working on a book of poetry. colin Reed is a london based actor from Blackpool. currently on tour around spain, he can usually be found haunting the streets of e1. it is an ambition of colin's to run his own theatre company. martino sorteni, artist and flâneur, lives between Venice and milan. he recently acquired an oversized chopper bicycle with which he moves through the Venetian maze. alan spencerlives in oldham and writes poetry and short fiction. his poems have appeared in various magazines and an anthology transparency (crocus, 2005). heba zaytounstudies film in New zealand. her hobby and passion is creating digital art with an open interpretation of the use of colour. http://www.ventirr.deviantart.com Davide zucco is a young artist from Belluno, italy. he mainly produces paintings and drawings, but also installation pieces which are often accompanied by live music.. www.rekal.org