February 2014

February 2014

Writings by the Say It Right Writers Circle themed around SECRET PLACES FICTION: The Top Of A Parachute – Ozark Bule FICTION: Ghost Story – Phil Chokeword FICTION: Culter – Alan Marshall FICTION: Secret Places – Ali H FICTION: Secret Places – Ben Smith

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The Top Of A Parachute

By Ozark Bule Psychologically unfit for life as an adolescent, with only unrequited friendships and a chronic, though thankfully terminal, case of the Family Failing. The schoolboy denied who took his life lessons from So-Cal bands and his politics from Billy Bragg cds never stood a chance. As Louise Michel wrote, school is a prison sentence for a crime we don’t commit. Our facility for juvenile offenders was so tame that the toughest kids around were a gang of trainee hairstylists, who would stalk the schoolyard providing indispensable hair dressing tips. And apparently I needed a haircut.

The boy not especially likely to – I jumped through hoops, waited for busses and fell in love with love and my scrawled Edexel Poetry Anthology. The Library should have been a refuge for people like us, but a Stalinist silence was maintained by Pol Pot with a dewey system. Looking back, she may have just been an underpaid and unappreciated worker trying to make life tolerable. Shyness, and a fear that this totalitarian librarian would judge my reading habits, forced me to steal my way through the school’s collection of Penguin Classics.

Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote that to schoolchildren, all teachers are Nazis. Maybe he went too far; but we would have been surprised to learn that any of them were human.

Any sign of personality was regarded as a criminal oddity which sent rumors circulating – did the drama teacher hit a child or seduce a sixth former? Was he caught buying drugs from, or selling them to, a year 8? All we knew is that through chance or whim, or even kindness, the metallic shed under his domain was left unlocked and unattended throughout the day.

Drama Hut, Drama Hut - my heart’s CBGB. Send me your huddled masses; your punks, geeks, losers and freaks. Those with anger issues or academic pretentions. Obsessive compulsives with Warhammer or vinyl collections. All those who regarded the football cage as the Somme – we hid together. With Different Class on the tape deck and Annie Hall in the video player. We survived lunchtimes with the spirit of an underground station during the blitz. Listening to the faint echo of the outside world we could only make out the words: ‘kill the pig, cut his throat, bash him in’.

New members were treated with suspicion at first, a panic attack in the props cupboard was our initiation ceremony. Soon everyone was accepted as part of our anti-gang.

When the clock hit 12.45 we ran to our sanctuary and held our breath until everyone arrived. One Wednesday a search party was sent for Big Alex, the boy who constantly bickered with his imaginary friend. He was sheltered by an even more revolutionary underground cell: chess club.

One day – with the force of West Baltimore police busting a drug den, but with no provocation – teachers forcibly removed us from the hut, locked us out and pushed us back into the open, where our overgrown ginger locks caused offence to the world.

Now ten years have passed, as we prayed they would, and the nightmares have become less frequent. I only hope that the graffiti politely penciled above the hut’s entrance remain:

Please understand. We don’t want no trouble. We just want the right to be different.

That’s all.

Ghost Story

By Phil Chokeword I worked out in the end that when you lose something you value - no matter what it is - its always the same feeling. Everything else stays in place but it’s not the same because whatever you’ve lost used to make everything else seem better. That’s the same whether it’s your shitty job being more bearable because you’ve someone to come home to or looking forward to your morning school run because you can listen to that Twisted Wheel compilation in the car. It’s clear what will fix the problem though – you just replace what you’ve lost or find something you like as much.

When you’re what’s lost though, it’s the same as wondering around our estate at night.

Everything is dangerous, everything is familiar but unfamiliar. You don’t know which way to go for the best. How do you fix something like that? You just have to find the right path somehow.

I was lucky enough to stumble out but it took me a while. Whilst I was wondering aimlessly, I worked a million shit jobs just to keep in booze and threads. I remember one job in one of those office blocks that look like the future if the future came preworn. The complex it was part of was all grey concrete and weird walk ways, pebble dash, balconies and tunnels. It was full of passive aggressive cunts but it helped me make ends meet, along with shifting the occasional car stereo.

There was a spot out the back of the building that I used to go to spend my breaks. It was bad enough having nothing to say during my shift, I wasn’t going to make awkward small talk over sandwiches as well. I’d make a cup of tea and smoke on the steps of the delivery entrance and pretend that I was a million miles away in a secret hideaway that no one knew. I never saw anyone and I liked it like that. That went on for a few weeks.

One day though, I went down to find a young woman sat there reading. It was early May and I remember she was wearing an old fashioned summer dress. It was dated but it looked pretty on her so I remember it really clearly. It had a blue floral print and she had scuffed knees. I said hello and nodded and she smiled at me and went back to her book. I leaned against the door of the goods entrance and kicked my Docs against the concrete and looked out into space, trying hard not to look at her. It was awkward but in a good way, not like sitting in the staff room with a bunch of people that I had nothing in common with.

The next day, she was there. The day after that, I brought a book too and we sat at either ends of the stair case, me hung over against the doors whilst she slouched at the entrance to the stair well. It went on like that all summer, both of us comfortable in our silence, me never saying more than hello and her just smiling. In the end I started to look forward to sitting there with her. I never read as many books before or since.

It went on until one day, someone asked me where I went with my tea. I don’t know why I didn’t just bat it away, but instead I told them that I sat in the delivery entrance with a woman from one of the other offices in the complex. As soon as I said that, it felt like I’d invited the world along with me. It didn’t seem like such a secret place anymore, just some dirty concrete where I nursed my comedowns.

She wasn’t there that lunch time. It rained solidly for the next two weeks, and it was too wet to read. I went and smoked alone and awkward in the drizzle. I guess when it was dry enough again to sit out properly, she’d moved on to another job.

I quit my job a few weeks later and moved away. It took me a lot more years to find my way and stop feeling so lost. I’ve killed too many brain cells to have too many memories of those years except that for a long time, I missed having somewhere secret to go. Sitting there with her reading made everything else seem ok, like it rippled out

and made it all seem bearable. It took me a long time to replace that feeling. I don’t know why.

Cutler

By Alan Marshall Gary Barrett was an archaeologist, and due to the hair-thin slice across his throat and ever increasing pool of blood filling the trench he was lying in, he was soon to be a dead archaeologist. He lay there amid medieval ruins, with wide eyes and lips moving in disbelief, whilst his asphyxiating brain grasped at what had just happened. Meanwhile a large stone slab in the bottom of the trench stared back at him with yellow eyes from within a deep black fissure.

To make sense of the predicament Gary was grappling with, and why he was soon to be an ex-archaeologist, it is necessary to shift our viewpoint to the underside of the slab, moments before the crack came into being.

At the bottom of his deep, onion-shaped oubliette sat Cutler – Patron Imp of cut-throats, disemboweling, stabbings and dismemberment. He was used to the rich brown darkness around him, which had remained largely unchanged since he was incarcerated over six hundred years before, but today there was scratching high above him where his prison tapered to a thin bottle-neck.

That was new.

Cutler sat back against the cold stone and at picked his long nails with an improvised flint blade.

I suppose these days imps need some explanation, but back when structures like Blacklitch Abbey (for that is where we find our recumbent archaeologist) were painstakingly constructed, the world was a different place. For every carved corbel stone and stained glass window in the likeness of a revered and worshipped martyr there existed a less exalted patron imp. Imps of disease and misfortune – of lost limbs and sewerage, rat infestation and missing children – and Culter was but one.

Once the Church recognised that their fervour to control the masses with a vengeful god had necessarily created legions of evil entities to counter-balance the good, they also realised they had to keep a lid on things – quite literally.

In a zealous crusade the monastic brotherhoods tracked the imps down and flung them into hidden dungeons with entrances sealed below towers of stone, or with sacred relics built on top to keep them imprisoned, often devoting their lives’ work to making sure the wretched creatures stayed put. But time and fate have long memories, much longer than the fashion for gothic masonry and bearded holy-men. Slowly the abbeys crumbled (with some assistance from certain Tudor kings) but the underground chambers often remained overlooked, just waiting for unlucky souls like Gary to stumble across them and release their eager occupants into a more secular, less deserving world – this has happened many times before of course and perhaps explains a lot about the state of today’s society – or perhaps it doesn’t, either way that is for a different story.

The scratching was getting louder.

Cutler shifted his lithe black body in the darkness and began to climb the stone blocks with long sinuous limbs. His clever fingers bit into the ashlar joints as he inched his way closer to the surface.

Soil rained on his head from above, and through the newly uncovered crack in the slab sunlight streamed into Cutler’s dreary world. He grinned with a mouthful of needle teeth and reached upwards towards the crack with his black knife poised.

The first Gary knew of Cutler’s presence was when a grey arm flashed from the void below the slab and whipped across his neck with long remembered precision. He didn’t feel the blade at first, but when he did it was already too late. The slim ribbon opened

like a mouth and a thick wave of crimson began to soak into the front of his hi-vis jacket.

Cutler waited. When Gary’s eyes eventually glazed over and the tiny trowel clattered from his grip, he pulled himself through the narrow crack and breathed a six hundred year overdue gasp of fresh cool air. A jagged grin lit his face at the sheer possibilities that awaited him.

Searching Gary’s pockets he found a dumpy Stanley knife and weighed it in his slender hand expertly. With one fluid sweep he opened Gary from navel to Adam’s apple and watched his innards slide untidily into the trench – he hadn’t lost his touch. Cocking his head to one side Cutler deliberated before ditching his curved flint in favour of this new toy.

Hopping over the corpse he slipped away into the abbey ruins, a free imp, swiping at the air with the stained Stanley blade.

You have to move with the times, he rationalised.

In the background Gary steamed gently.

Secret Places

By Ali H There were a few places she went to but never told anyone else about; just places she could go and sit when she was tired or when her sister’s kids were screaming, or when she could tell Ray’s temper was fraying and the little veins on the side of his neck had started to protrude.

Her favourite place was about a thirty minute drive away. You headed out of town until the orange glow of Escondido had disappeared in the rear view mirror and the air came in through the window in hot, gritty gusts. There was a small dirt track, almost invisible in the dark, which veered off to the left. It led off the highway and out into the desert towards a little outcrop that faced east away from town. If you climbed up the side and half-stepped along a lip of rock you could get to a little alcove that was just about big enough to lean back into comfortably and dangle your legs over the edge.

All you could see ahead of you from there was the junk-strewn wasteland of the desert and the eerie silhouettes of cactuses contorting their arms up towards the sky, and then above that just stars, stars, stars.

She pressed her back into the rock and wiped the dust and sweat from her face with a grubby sleeve. The night air was warm and heavy with the scent of mesquite and creosote bushes. She could just about hear her own breathing over the din of the cicadas. There was something comforting about their constant noise in the face of the emptiness that surrounded them: the sheer persistence of it. She thought briefly about how many millions of them there must be out here - hopping around the scrub and the rocks all noisy and directionless - then lit a cigarette and exhaled slowly. It felt like peace, all this nothingness. She loved the sense of time dragging on and on and nothing changing. It felt comical and beautiful at the same time.

She allowed herself three cigarettes, dropping each one into the rocks below and watching them glow red and then fade into the darkness. When the last one had died out it was time to go back. She was still wearing her work clothes and the sticky smell of fat and oil followed her as she climbed down the familiar footholds. The night air had cooled and a slight breeze was picking up from the southeast. She tiptoed her way between clumps of sage and abandoned tyres until she reached the car, squinting in the dark for anything that resembled a scorpion, though she hadn’t seen one out here for years. She leant against the side of the car and felt the cold of the metal against her shoulder blades, closing her eyes briefly and turning her face upwards for a last gulp of air before she got into the car and drove back. She opened her eyes and grinned. Ursa Minor and Camelopardalis hung in the sky above her, and there was an occasional flicker as a shooting star fell across the horizon. The moon was a gentle flash of white.

The road back into town stretched out below it, snaking away towards the dim, orange glow of home.

Secret Places

By Ben Smith With a mind like this who needs enemies.

Iron Chic - Awes-nificent Far away, down a winding path there is a wall and in that wall a door. A door to somewhere, that should be familiar yet my memory won't release thoughts of it.

Standing in front of that door I feel foreboding, my palms sweat and a sense of nervousness and unease fills me. I look up at the grey sky, the clouds are heavy and inert, they reflect my mood perfectly. There are no birds here, no small creatures, even the slight breeze I feel on my skin doesn't stir the branches of the surrounding trees.

The result is silence, total silence. No sound. Even my breath and the beats of my heart in my chest seem quiet as I near the wall, the door.

That door is part of me, some friends say it haunts me. In moments of clarity I know what lies on the other side. Looking up over the wall I can see that the trees grow thick and the branches mesh obscuring the sky. I know it grows darker beyond the door, the footprints in my memory are deep into grey clinging mud. I remember running the other side of this door and that it was not for pleasure. I push at this memory but I don't know what I was running from or possibly running too. I just remember fear, shortness of breath and the image of my feet as they push the mud apart and spray water from shallow stagnant puddles.

I look down at the handle of the door tinged orange, red and brown with surface rust and lightly push down on it. I know it's locked but yet I try it anyway. I don't know how I unlocked this door before, I don't know why I am facing it now and seemingly compelled to open it. I know my memories of the other side of this door are not happy and yet I feel this need to go past the stone walls that block my path and explore beyond. Maybe it's because all my walks these days lead to a defined destination, no aimless rambling any more. So this barrier frustrates me, the unknown terminus of the path beyond the door. A destination I want to reach even if it is somewhere I should not wish to go.

There is a loud crack from the other side of the wall and a crow climbs laboriously from a tree branch now broken and hanging limply. As if to recognise my presence it emits a loud caw and flies over my head down the path I've been walking to reach this point. The noise and movement startles me from my reverie and slows the thoughts swirling within my brain. I can feel my pulse racing as my heart suddenly beats loud and strong in my chest. I look at the time almost as a reflex act and realise that it is time I was going. I turn and start to walk away from the wall, sure of my footing and destination again. After going a few metres I glance back at the door, an immobile challenge.

I know I will walk this path again through habit or choice. I'm drawn to that place despite the negative feelings it instills in me. Wainwright is attributed as saying 'there's no such thing as bad weather, only unsuitable clothing'. I wonder what he would suggest for the clouds that appear within my mind whilst walking. The inclement thoughts that need exploring but require steps to be taken to avoid them affecting your comfort and health. For now like him I guess I'll just find contentment in the companionship of these paths I tread and the natural world I meet along the way.