Scrittura Magazine Spring 2020 Issue 19

Scrittura SPRING 2020 / ISSUE 19

LITERARY MAGAZINE

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Scrittura Magazine © Copyright 2020 All Rights Reserved.

Scrittura Magazine is a UK-based online literary magazine, launched in 2015 by three Creative Writing graduates who wanted to provide a platform to showcase new and exciting writing from across the world. Scrittura Magazine is published quarterly, and is free for all. This means that we are unable to offer payment for publication.

Submissions information can be found online at www.scritturamagazine.tumblr.com EDITOR: Valentina Terrinoni EDITOR: Yasmin Rahman DESIGNER / ILLUSTRATOR: Catherine Roe SOCIAL MEDIA ASSISTANT: Imani Dunkley WEB: www.scritturamagazine.tumblr.com EMAIL: scrittura.magazine@gmail.com TWITTER: @Scrittura_Mag FACEBOOK: scritturamag

InThis Issue 06 07 08 09 11 16 18 20 23 28 29

Axe Gareth Culshaw

Before The Shades of Dyeing Neil K. Henderson Crossing Out Ed Blundell Monkey’s Paw Kushal Poddar Changing a Lightbulb Trahearne Falvey Ever Brush Away The Sleep Christopher Laverty Geometry And The Soul’s Confinement Peter George Kareena of Aleppo Geraldine Douglas Head Under Water David Brookes Glass Harmonica Kate Rigby Breakfast With a Hippopotamus James Bell

30 32 33 35 40

43 48 49 51 54

My Child Geraldine Douglas No Mans’s Island Lynn White Tall Tales Ed Blundell Honesty Log Laurence Edmondson Shrinkage And Enlargement of The Avian Kind Peter George Mother Me Lara Saunders The Circle of Death And Life Geraldine Douglas The Ghost of an Elf Neil K. Henderson Roses For Her Birthday Alison Frank The Pedlar And The Fish John Baverstock

A Note From The Editors

Welcome to the Spring issue of Scrittura Magazine! And a brand new look! We’ve had a

makeover, and are so excited to share our new style with you all. As you flick through the pages of this fresh issue, please enjoy the sleek new design, and do let us know what you think!

We’ve got a bumper issue for you, filled with talent and creativity to keep you company through these strange uncertain times that we find ourselves in at the moment. We have some poignant poems, including My Child, pg 30, which is dedicated to those who have lost a child, and tales of war torn lands in Kareena of Aleepo, pg 20.

If you fancy a longer read, Mother Me, pg 43, explores the pain and grief of giving up a child.

And if you’re looking for something a bit more light-hearted, why not try Honesty Log, pg 35, a tale about a man addicted to the internet, or Roses For Her Birthday, pg 51, which features a bit of romance, if that’s what you’re after!

Our cover art this issue is a wonderful illustration to accompany the poem Breakfast With a Hippopotamus, pg 29.

A huge thank you to our contributors, and everyone who sent in submissions for this issue. If you’d like to submit something for our summer issue, our current deadline is April 30th 2020.

An extra special thanks to our wonderful designer Catherine, for not only a fantastic issue, but a beautiful new logo and fresh new look. Also thanks to our editorial/social media assistant Imani Dunkley for all her help promoting the magazine and getting your work out into the world!

Valentina & Yasmin

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Axe Gareth Culshaw

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I watched him heave the axe in a half moon arc. He brought it down with the force of wanting to split the world in two.

So he could see if his father was there, waiting in the next.

Before The Shades of Dyeing Neil K. Henderson

Have sorrow for the kingfisher at twilight, Who sees into the nature of creation.

He weeps for what he’s driven to achieve, The death of silver beauty in the stream.

Yet, washed by healing haze of night-rain, He appears anew fresh-coloured in the day; While I am stuck within the purple veil, And haven’t been created yet.

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Crossing Out Ed Blundell

Just before Christmas, writing cards, My old address book, now well thumbed, More names struck out than still remain, Crossing over new names of those Who left us sometime recently.

I wonder as I sit and write, “All the best for the coming year.

Have a good Christmas. Keep in touch.�

Will next year bring another card Or will I scratch another name?

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Monkey’s Paw Kushal Poddar

A teargas shell tore off my bro’s hand; since we called him a primate in childhood we kept the hand, nicknamed it ‘Monkey’s Paw’, presented it before every guest in our house, cherished their shriek; the severed limb just wouldn’t rot; the second hand revolutionists often borrowed it for their demonstrations, but no one asked my sibling what the paw meant to him. Probably a missing link in the evolution chain between Adam and Cain.

He wouldn’t have answered anyway, rather scratched his arm’s end the way one alley cat scratches the blind bricks when cornered in dire need of some magic.

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Changing a Lightbulb Trahearne Falvey

When Cora started seeing landlords, she started seeing them everywhere. That is, when she started seeing a specific landlord, with a Cartier watch, a convertible and a birthmark on his right buttock, she became aware of the existence of landlords in a new way. Before this, Cora had never met a landlord.

As a child, her mother would place her in a room with the television up high before closing the door and spitting curses down the phone, weeks before they moved, again, to a new flat. Now, she paid rent by transferring money – the exact amount of which she could not think about without feeling as though she were staring down at a dark concrete floor from the roof of some impossible tower – to an immaterial body known only as ‘TrustRent’. She received no confirmation that they received the rent; in fact, six months into the tenancy she answered the phone to a voice that seemed to belong to a teenage boy worming his way out of a K-hole, repeating the words ‘TrustRent’ and ‘money?’. This voice, it transpired later, after she had print-screened and emailed all six months of evidence, was not TrustRent but a separate company contracted to deal with tenancy disputes, and Cora couldn’t help feeling both cheated and a little disappointed.

It was at some point after this that she removed a book from the case and found its pages damp and blackened, and that the section of wall where the book had been had grown alive. As she threw more and more books onto her bed, the widening gap bloomed and spilled with greens and purples. She discovered that the mould had chewed through sections of the book case, and gnawed its way into her carpet. She made a cup of strong, sweet tea, stared at the wall and sent an email that would never be read, then replaced all the books and sat on the bed, shivering from air hissing through a crack in the window. To avoid thinking, she made herself a profile on an app where it was possible to identify as

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‘sapiosexual’, ‘transmasculine’, ‘switch’, ‘dom’, ‘two-spirit’, ‘neutro’ or ‘other’. It wasn’t all too different from other apps; it was fun and tedious and sexy and repulsive, and most people seemed to converse only in acronyms and pictures of male genitalia, but here the acronyms were cryptic and some of the genitalia came hidden in lace underwear. There were shiny straight couples, with photographs taken against the backdrop of Chichen Itza, or the Piazzale Michelangelo, or their suburban gardens, seeking ‘unicorns’ or ‘bulls’, there were girls with blue or pink or green hair looking for ‘fun’, and there were endless headless torsos stating they were ‘up for anything at least once’. She scrolled, and swiped, and sighed.

Almost two weeks after joining the app, she decided to like a profile. This profile was indistinguishable from at least a hundred others: the user – K, a ‘heteroflexible male’ – was suited in one picture, seminaked in a gym in another, ‘into power play’ and gin. He was ‘often abroad’ and had ‘no time for timewasters’. Cora realised that she had become bored with bookish, lefty boys who smelt of stale sweat and cheap soap, the way they would ask how she was over and over again before pushing her head into the upholstery of their shitty sofas so that crumbs of tortilla chip and fragments of fingernail adhered to the space under her bottom lip. She was bored of looking into the eyes of people her age and income bracket over a glass of wine from a box, and seeing the reflection of her own impossible future.

Scrolling through the pictures of K’s profile, she wondered what it might be like to have sex with money, to be bought underwear, taken to a hotel, drawn a bath, and abandoned in the morning.

K picked her up after a week of artless messaging, punctuated by outpourings of lust expressed through image. He promised to buy her sushi, the good kind, and Grey Goose, because she had tried neither, and came through. Miraculously, he looked almost identical to his pictures: difficult to age, with a face that seemed computer-generated. When they ended the night in a hotel room in an area of the city made of glass, he used his silk tie to cuff her right hand to the bedpost, and treated her body like an investment. Afterwards, she put her face against his skin and, under the residue of sandalwood shower gel, found not only an absence of sweat but a kind of clean neutrality, a void. If he had internal organs, they were deep under an armour of muscle that had been bought from too much time and a circus of personal trainers. She traced the lines and ridges of his body with her hands, circling the mole, the one concession to character, with her fingertip, until he told her that she could stay the night, for breakfast, anything she liked, but that he had to go. When he left, she took a tiny bottle of vodka from the minibar and, as she drank it over ice, swept her hand over one of the room’s smooth walls, looking for anything – a protruding brick, a bump in the wallpaper, a patch of damp.

K never asked her what her parents did, or what her favourite film was, or whether she believed it was possible to have ‘legitimate concerns about immigration’, and she never asked him. When they spoke, it was about the time and place he would have her picked up, whether she wanted to eat Korean barbecue or Basque pintxos, drink mezcal or bourbon. Every time, it seemed as though he had only just had a haircut, but when Cora swept a hand through his hair it came away clean, not flecked with tiny black lines. His suits were sculpted anew for every fluctuation, and he wore them like other people wore denim. He talked to waiting staff as though they were inconveniences but tipped them forty per cent. They went to the opera where he noticed her yawning and fucked her in the bathroom before the interval. He named a cocktail after her, and then a star. He bought her clothes, too, but she only wanted his, unbuttoning his blue Armani suit jacket then slipping it over her body while he thrust into her.

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They were always moving – from the car to the lobby, the lobby to the elevator and up to the bar, from the bar to the table, from the table to the hotel room bed – that Cora never stopped to think about anything, certainly not what she felt, or what this meant.

The walls of the hotel rooms were always smooth, the baths deep, and the breakfasts made of maca, amaranth and activated charcoal. She could stand at the expanses of glass, warmed air caressing her bare skin, and watch the night-time lives of residents in the surrounding towers, the little arithmetics of putting children to sleep, making dinner, finding time, saving money. She forgot about the mould creeping across her room until she received a text from her flatmate Janey asking how she was, which she ignored, and then another, when she was picking at a plate of exotic fruit she couldn’t name, saying that they had been sent a letter informing them that the rent would be increasing in the New Year. A seed from something that might have been a custard apple became lodged in the gap between a wisdom tooth and a molar at the back of her mouth. She took out her phone and started to scroll, and realised that it was nearly Christmas, the twenty-first of December. She pictured Janey alone, shivering under layers of damp duvets through the year’s longest night, and caught the bus home.

Theirs was a ‘garden flat’, which meant ‘dark basement prone to flooding’ but also meant a square of patio dotted with pot plants in various states of dying and a chiminea left over by the previous occupants. They pulled on every jumper in the house and went outside with a month’s worth of cardboard recycling, Portnoy’s Complaint and Rabbit, Run, which had been irreconcilably damaged by mould, and Hillary Clinton’s Hard Choices, which hadn’t, as well as every letter they had received from TrustRent, every bill from the water, gas and electric company, and every unopened envelope from the Student Loans Company. They smoked a joint and listened to Springsteen on the record player that had belonged to Cora’s father. His copy of Born in the USA always got stuck on ‘can’t start a fire’, which Cora found hilarious and comforting, and let it stammer away until she realised that for Janey it was probably infuriating. On the backs of the envelopes they scrawled the faces of politicians in thick, black marker because, although they had been trained to think in terms of material processes and historical forces, it was much easier to channel rage at a face. Some of the faces looked like frogs, or lizards, or toads, and they added them to the fire one at a time, chanting their names. Each face was illuminated for a moment, flickering in the epicentre of their collective attention, before melting into ash.

Cora worked at the pub every day over Christmas and didn’t hear from K. She would get in late, stinking of chip fat and stale lager with coffee grounds under her fingernails, exhausted but with a body too cold and a brain too full of hum and chatter to sleep, so she would swipe and click her phone for hours. Kittens pawing at jelly, fast-forwarded hands making a Baked Alaska, a woman calling for the cancellation of another, and then a clip of a news anchor interviewing an activist about the fees attached to renting. The activist in the clip was pale, with the sheen of moisture under his thin nose, and as he spoke he said the word ‘like’ six times, and not to draw comparisons, and he said ‘you know?’ twice, and even when he was not asking a question he allowed his voice to float into a space where nothing held shape. Cora found herself embarrassed by his weakness. She wanted him to take everything shitty and crystallise it into something hard and sharp to thrust into the eyes of the viewers, but instead he stuttered and simpered in the cold and wet, unable to formulate a convincing response to the accusation that tenants couldn’t change lightbulbs. She felt embarrassed, but then she thought about the way the anchor wouldn’t let the activist finish, how she spoke in assertions rather than

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questions, and how the activist was in the wet and cold while the anchor was in a studio, and she felt ashamed of her embarrassment. The anchor, of course, was a landlord. When Cora realised this she slipped K’s suit jacket from her shoulders and stared at it. K had fucked her while she wore the jacket at midday on a Monday, three on a Wednesday afternoon, five on a Thursday. She had never asked him, and now she did not need to. She understood. She thought of his impossibly smooth face and saw windowless rooms, crumbling walls, frozen bones. She saw the faces of politicians and television presenters shuffling through the screen of her phone, and understood.

A landlord would own an expensive watch, but it might be a minute late, or an hour early, or, perhaps, worn upside down. They would drink coffee made from beans that had been consumed by elephants in northern Thailand, or Hawaiian bottled water that had been gathered from a thousand feet below sea level, or beer brewed by nuns on an island in the Oslo fjord. They would never use a public toilet.

Sometimes, they smelt of dairy and chlorine, or cologne, or, as K did, of nothing at all. This was the surest sign that they owned whole streets, neighbourhoods, cities: they had none of the hot, pointless yearning of bodies, the constant shifting required to keep the machine going. They could just sit, or lie down, or fuck slowly in a gradually cooling bath, and always they would be accumulating. In their sterile faces, Cora could see the silent bank accounts that stretched far into the future, sustaining the clean, lacquered lives of their children, and grandchildren, and great grandchildren. These landlords were rarer. Unlike those who owned a handful of houses, Cora never brushed against their suits in the cheese aisle of the supermarket or heard their names announced by a barista, but they used space like anyone else. Sometimes, she’d see them from afar, ascending a sleek tower in a crystalline elevator, or emerging from the sort of restaurant which didn’t publish its prices. Sometimes, a car would pass her on the street and she’d know that sitting in the backseat, separated from the driver by a wall of darkened glass, was someone like K. When they met again, at the end of January, in a bar a thousand metres above the ground, he was tanned and his hair bleached at the tips. ‘Cancun,’ he said, though Cora hadn’t asked. He told her he was going abroad again, to Barbados for two weeks, said the cold didn’t suit him. She thought that he was going to invite her to come with him, and imagined a life in which she did not need to close eyes and cross fingers tight for the end of the month, but he took a sip of his margarita, and said nothing.

The drinks were made with a bottle of tequila that cost more than she had ever made in any one year.

After her first drink she decided that she would leave after dinner and never see him again, but after her second she remembered the time he’d filled a bath with champagne and let her swim in it. They ate baby octopuses massaged with salt and lime, sea bass in tiger’s milk, a mousse flavoured with yuzu and pandan leaf. Later, Cora watched him standing in front of the glass wall in that night’s hotel suite, hands thrust in pockets, and wondered how many of the little lights flickering in the windows he could claim ownership over. When he removed her dress and pushed her down onto the bed, she found that his tan skin tasted of metal and that his absence of scent made her nervous. She caught the reflection of her performance in the glass, biting his ear, licking down the dark hairs that led to his cock, and felt a wave of nausea flood her body. She took his tie from the floor and tried to loop it around his wrist but he grabbed her arm and held it behind her back, laughing.

After he had showered and left, stroking her hair and leaving a twenty for a taxi, Cora ran a bath while packing her rucksack with the tea bags, sachets of sugar and ground coffee, the cafetiere, towels,

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bathrobes, toilet paper, little bottles of shampoo and conditioner and the contents of the mini bar. She stripped the damp bed of its Egyptian cotton sheets and stuffed them into the rucksack, too. In the tub, she held ears under water and nudged the hot tap with her toes when it cooled, only getting out when her skin had wrinkled all over and she was bored of the white ceiling. Instead of pulling the plug, she twisted both taps all the way round and watched as the water reached the top and began trickling down the sides, forming puddles on the slate floor. She cupped her hands together, gathered water, and threw it across the walls of the suite, over and over again, willing the white paint to ripple and bubble.

It wasn’t enough. She turned the shower on and got dressed as steam spilled through the room, soaking the fibres of the mattress, clouding the glass wall and blurring her view of a couple in one of the flats opposite making midnight pasta. She would leave it all running, then fall back down in the elevator to a world where things grew out of cracks, to Janey who would help her start another fire for the suit jacket and its contents: a stick of gum, a receipt for two bottles of Cristal, purchased four months ago at three in the morning, and five business cards branded with K’s full name and the titles of abstract empires. She would stare at her phone deep into the night, consider doing it all again, then delete the app and fall into dreams of black ties too tight around her throat, the shells of oysters entombing her in darkness, and then, finally, a glass house, emerging radiant from the end of a blower’s pipe.

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Ever Brush Away The Sleep Christopher Laverty

Ever brush away the sleep that around the mind may creep – not the one of lunar hours when it flies to airy bowers, but the slumbers oft that steal over waking eyes they seal – stealthy elf that leads it stray, blind to high delights of day.

As the treasures of the mind need we seek not far to find – for in forest, field or hill, native glows might senses fill with undying, deep delight – banishing the psyche’s night; wonders chanced in earth or skies startle open eager eyes, while the keenest ears discover flowers laughing with each other; scents of lilies, daisies, roses, stir and quicken wakeful noses –

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riches of the beggar’s world, that in visions near lie furled.

Sometimes though such pleasures seem fleeting rainbows of a dream, towers carved on clouds from ice, which our hopes like moths entice, when beguiled by phantom flames soon a nameless grave them claims.

Long those towers lie submerged seized by waves that seethed and surged – spirit-wrecks in oceans sunk, that of dark despair had drunk.

Greyer days of late left hope like a fallen mirror broken – shattered dreams in fragments lay, wherein mock reflections play.

Yet the mirror tells but lies, but deceives the psyche’s eyes – just a rousing sound or sight animates the soul with light – worlds of wonder soon are born – hear these birds now herald dawn – sleeper – wake – the kingdom’s won – see those fragments leap in one – buried wrecks from depths will rise – towers of ice on clouds will rise – morning breaks – come see the dove joyful circle skies above – come climb mountains castle-crowned – view the silvered scene around.

Ever brush away the sleep that around the mind may creep – stealthy elf that leads it stray, blind to high delights of day.

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Geometry And The Soul’s Confinement Peter George

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I cannot draw a straight line To combat my despair, And the ruler defies my navigation, Slipping in my hand.

Frustration and ineptitude Meet the storm.

The botched triangle Is a crumpled and ejaculated mess.

But let me examine And sympathise with this desire For straight lines and curves, Rockets and bridges, And photographs of pyramids and snakes, Whatever the soul might signify In the torn and dirtied magazine.

A circle at the pencil’s compass point Would engage my heart, my spinal column, and my tongue, My tongue involved with my standing up, My cheering, and my clapping, And my singing mother bouncing off the wall in the room Where I desire my circles and my lines, and rockets and bridges, And photographs of pyramids and bodies to be searched.

Do I not want a fleet of missiles aimed towards the moon, Whatever the soul might signify amongst the squares That will not come when I demand My hands should find and mark their shapes?

Yet geometry, and the will to persist, are written on my heart, While my mother’s singing is a vibration In the torn and dirtied magazine of geometry and God. It seems, however, that rockets and bridges Could yet carry me forward with bodies to be searched.

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Kareena of Aleppo Geraldine Douglas

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The air looks like blood, gruff winds pang my face.

It hurts to live.

Kareena, eighteen of Aleppo, sister to Jamal, a lamb taken by toxic wolves.

His remains caught in whips of breeze where petals gasp for air, his scarlet cracks the road.

Where cypress trees once jingled leaves of olive eldest brother Hassan fled, passing pomegranates slopping their heads, dripping ruby slush.

Sister Fatima tattooed with guilt hides amongst almond trees in vacuums of winter whims as larks watch their shivering shadows.

The aching moon howls, grass grows quick between bombshells.

Punctured children cup hands for bread.

Tuna dodge shrapnel instead of hooks.

All coloured tulips now little ashen bubbles.

Mamma crushed by bricks, rubble and stone.

Baba captured and disappeared, no autopsy will be revealed.

Why can’t the moon lay silver on my country?

Or the Syrian sun throw gold coins?

Red dye pumps my body, my face outlined by fear longing to smell scented cypress avenues once more.

Will any God help me?

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Head Under Water David Brookes

I’m under water. It’s where I want to be. Bubbles trickle out through my nostrils and marble in my hair. I’m floating face-down and motionless, like a corpse. As my lungs contract more bubbles escape from between my tightly-pressed lips, and I feel each one roll up my cheeks and then fly skyward.

I can feel the white, glossy tiles of the pool around me and below me. I can see their reflected light through my eyelids. The light is not warm. It doesn’t nourish me. There is nothing to grow in the compacted cloth of my airless lungs, no seed to coax and nurture.

But I feel the light like another layer between my skin and the water I float in, like something painted on me to make me brighter, make me thoughtless and better.

When I can hold my breath no longer I right myself and my gasping face breaks the surface.

Even when the chlorinated water has drained from my eyes my vision is still blurry until my blood absorbs its vital O2 and I am replenished.

Standing chest-deep in the water, I look around me. This sports centre has a spectator pool but the bleachers are mostly empty. I am only practising. There is no-one to marvel at my – I check the clock on the wall – nine minutes of submersion. Only nine! I need to get better.

I search the small, disinterested faces of the few people sat on the bleachers. Karen is not here. I shouldn’t have expected her to be, because she wasn’t here when I went under. Why should she be here now? * I’m sitting on the top deck of the bus. It’s raining so the pavements, yards and shopfronts below are

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oily-looking. Their wetness makes them seem slack and collapsed, barely holding their natural forms, like a sautéed piece of vegetable. Everything looks like it could be decohered and washed away with a strong wind. I imagine the woman in a raincoat, the dog on a lead, the parked ice cream van under a tarp, all liquescing and trickling like paint down the drenched street.

The podcast in my ears is about cicadas, some species of which live half-asleep in the earth for thirteen years, sucking fluids from tree roots as they wait. I check my phone – no missed call or text from Karen. It’s been two and a half days, which feels like an eternity. After thirteen years the adult cicadas emerge, moult, mate and die. Then the offspring crawl into the earth, their turn to wait.

My feet are leaden as I disembark the bus and trudge around the corner to my building, then up the seventeen flights of stairs to my flat. I need the cardio exercise to give my lungs volume. I need the distraction to get me home.

I drop my keys and a bag of groceries on the counter. The intention was to cook but my jeans are wet and the smell of pool chemicals on my skin is overpowering, it’s in my mouth. I probably won’t eat. I check my phone’s screen for messages. Then I go to stand by the window and watch the rain fly sideways.

Sometimes you can feel my building sway. When Karen and I moved in together I said how unnerving it was. I got the mortgage because I wanted to feel secure, anchored. But I felt like I was at the thinnest branch at the top of a tree, cold and at the whims of the gale, holding on for dear life. She said that it was totally safe. Tall buildings are designed to sway, like bridges. It’s what stops them falling down. She’s a qualified architect and knows what she’s talking about, but it doesn’t feel totally safe to me. It makes me want to sit down hard and wait out the storm. * I have a junior admin position in an office. Sometimes there is a form and I take information from another document and enter it into the form. Every hour I wish I had a cigarette. I quit last year when I began to compete nationally because I need the lung space. But it doesn’t stop me wanting a smoke every hour and I have to go to get a coffee or a Coke instead.

In the kitchen, as I pour my Americano, Madeline asks me how the training is going. ‘Great,’ I say, ‘I’m up to eleven point five minutes but I only managed nine yesterday.’

‘What’s the record?’ she asks.

The world record for holding one’s breath underwater is 11 minutes and 54 seconds. It is held

by Branko Petrović of Serbia. The discipline is called ‘static apnea’ and I will break the world record three days from now. * I give in and text Karen. It’s been four days and eight hours. It happens when it’s late, when I’ve had a bad day at work, or when training hasn’t gone well. It’s so easy to type and hit send and I do it fast because I know that if I actually stopped to think about it then I wouldn’t send it. But I want to hear from her, I want to know what her decision is. I don’t ask, but I want to know.

The apartment was built during a boom in the 90s and has large rooms. I can’t afford the mortgage on my own, but Karen said when I took it out that she would contribute for as long as she lived there with me. The mortgage was in my name and it was my decision, she warned me. I knew that going in. Anyway, the bathroom is large but cold feeling, grotty. The room is never warm even

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when I pour a scalding-hot bath. I’m grateful to slide into the water and really feel it. The white tiles of my bathroom don’t shine like the white tiles of the pool. I don’t see any light through the rising steam, and my face is icy cold until I submerge.

Normally I don’t count because it makes the time drag. But I’m not wearing my watch and I don’t have my training buddy, Sam, with me. I’m only supposed to train with someone in the pool, beside me. The longer I hold my breath, the more likely it is that I’ll fall unconscious. Underwater, my body uses up the oxygen in my blood. Cutting off oxygen to the brain will quickly cause permanent damage and death. Karen doesn’t understand why I do it.

A year ago I signed up to a website designed to help people meet other people. Invitations to social events are posted and you go there to meet strangers you hope will become your friends. Like a dating app but for lonely types. I’d joined a group for people who liked to hike. I noticed Karen the first event I went to, a circuit around the old city walls of Lincoln. I am attracted to people who are bright, I realised. Karen has pure white skin, accentuated by deeply black hair. I saw her shining but we didn’t speak. She was at ease and knew most of the other people there. I found out later she’d been going to a lot of social groups. She loved to meet other people.

We didn’t talk until a few weeks later, during a hike through Sherwood Forest. We stopped under the giant old tree known as Major Oak. It’s supposedly where Robin Hood and his Merry Men sheltered. It’s one big tree, its branches so thick and long that they now need to be supported by columns to stop them collapsing under their own weight. Karen was standing beside me in the mud, admiring it.

‘It’s very impressive,’ I said, feeling gutsy.

She said, ‘Yeah. It’s almost a thousand years old.’

I loved how large and ancient it was, that it was a link to the past, a piece of legend. I thought Karen loved it for the same reason, but I found out later that wasn’t true. She thought it was impressive not because of how old it was, but because of how long it had survived. Year after year, for a millennium, the tree had endured whatever nature and mankind had put it through. At the time I could hardly tell the difference.

Later, when we were not officially in a relationship but living together, she would trickle lifegiving water into a small tray of herbs on the windowsill. She almost seemed to resent having to look after them, even though she didn’t need to grow herbs at all. You could get a bag of fresh coriander from the store for 70p.

‘They’re just so fucking pathetic!’ she said, slamming the miniature watering can onto the windowsill beside the plants. ‘Every day I get here and expect to find them dead. I wish they’d hurry up and fuck off out of this world if they’re not going to fight.’

She was breathtakingly beautiful and exciting to be around. Everyone said it, and she knew it.

I’d try to tell her how much I loved spending time with her, how much I needed it. She knew what I was getting at, but she wouldn’t let on that she was thinking the same thing.

‘I want to end up with someone like you,’ I’d say, clasping her tightly in an elevator, or outside a restaurant.

‘How can I be with anyone else when I’m with you all the time?’ she’d reply, and it would be said with a dazzling smile, a boop on the nose. But I hadn’t asked her a direct question and she hadn’t given me a direct answer. She did not want a relationship. She didn’t want to be tied down, to have to compromise, to lose herself, to lose her options, to lose touch with her friends. She would convince me to watch the latest episode of a show she was obsessed with, but then she would answer a string

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of texts whilst curled up beside me on my cracked leather couch. I would wonder what plans she was making, and who with, and if he would be the one that she settled on. If she ever settled at all. She still went to the social meet-ups, as though she could never know enough people, or as though she were searching for a particular person. Someone she’d met once but lost touch with. Someone she’d imagined but not yet found. Or just for the variety of it, because when you’re uninhibited and young, a hunger for new experiences only gives you good things, for as long as you’re strong enough to endure the unexpected.

Then her phone would go back into her pocket, and I’d tell myself I was overthinking things.

There was no rush. She was there with me, wasn’t she? All I had to do was hold onto her.

Gulping air, I rise from the bathwater. It spills over the sides onto the cracked tile and discoloured grout. I think it’s been close to eleven minutes because the water is cool now. Normally I don’t think about anything when I’m under.

I am giving her the space she had asked for, and I try to imagine that space as being filled with sunlight, warm, a positive thing that will nourish us rather than come between us. But most nights I am apart from the warmth of her, and stepping out of a cold bath into a colder room is excruciating. I check my phone as I towel off. There are no messages. * I train hard the next day at the pool, giving myself an hour between attempts. I’ve never beaten the world record before but I know I can do it.

After that, I take a day off. I walk around the city. It’s April and drizzly. The sounds of the traffic, people, birds, dogs are all enhanced somehow by the extra layer of wetness on everything. My clothes are slightly damp and chafe; I sit in a pub and try to read, but I can’t focus on the words.

Then it’s game day.

It will take place at the local pool. My buddy Sam did most of the organising for me. Sam is the guy who first got me thinking about static apnea. I think it was just a way to restore some of my confidence and distract me after things got difficult with Karen, but I don’t care about his reasons because it’s working.

Sam called to say he’s already there, with the witnesses and timekeepers and videographers, and all the other people you need present to follow the Guinness rules in order for your record to be accepted.

When I arrive at the pool, I don’t go straight in. My ritual is to climb to the rooftop. I mount a dumpster, then haul myself onto the roof. Then there’s a service ladder that takes me up to the higher portion. Looking down through the moss-mottled glass ceiling, I can see the blue-white pool, the bleachers. There are maybe ten people there, milling around. I don’t see Karen but it’s hard to tell with a bird’s eye.

I go to my usual spot and lie down against a slanted section of roof, my heels perched against a short brick ridge above the gutter. I’m the equivalent of three storeys up. The brick and concrete are wet.

Lying with my hands behind my head, I take very long, very deep breaths. I’m filling my blood with oxygen. Some people suck down near-pure O2 before attempting a record, which doubles their time underwater to over 24 minutes. But that’s considered a separate category and it’s not my thing.

I’ve undertaken months of anaerobic training.

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Just give me half an hour of fresh air, up here where I can’t taste the traffic fumes, opposite these tall chestnut trees whose little leaves wink wetly at me in the breeze. Their roots go deep down, drawing up water from the rich earth. In another part of the world, there could be cicadas down there, supping during their thirteen-year hibernation.

I think about Major Oak. I think about Karen, and all the warmth and chilliness and bitter rowing and delirious sex and silent, loving peace as we drifted off to sleep beside each other.

Ten minutes later I’m showered, powdered up, and Sam is helping me slip on my one-piece Neoprene wetsuit. It has a cowl that covers my ears. The foamy suit keeps me warm in the water, which slows down metabolism. Goggles with nose plugs hang around my neck as we walk barefoot to the pool with tacky slapping sounds.

I haven’t told many people about my record-setting. I needed only two witnesses, so I asked Madeline from work and her flatmate. There she is, waving and hollering at me.

I don’t see Karen anywhere. When I invited her I made sure to let her know how important it is to me. I know she’ll come, but she’s always late for things.

A handful of the other people here are just waiting to use the pool, some of Sam’s apnea crowd, and the independent film crew and log keepers who will evidence my effort. My heart twists with the first spasm of anxiety.

I climb down into the shallow end, feeling the pressure build outside my suit. There is no change in temperature, just the pressing in on all sides as I descend the cold, ridged ladder up to my stomach. I wet the inside of the goggles to stop them steaming up, then pull them into a comfortable position that I think I can endure for at least twelve minutes. I reset the timer on my watch with a bip.

‘Ready?’ Sam asks. I nod. He says, ‘Do your best but don’t be stupid.’

We wait until the record-takers are ready. Then I suck in as much air as possible and allow myself to fall, fall forward into the water, until it covers my mouth and nose.

I start my stopwatch, then I drift like wood and stop thinking.

The first few minutes are easy. Then at around three minutes the carbon dioxide builds up in my body and I have to fight the urge to exhale. But there’s still oxygen in my blood. Anyone can get past this.

The mammalian diving reflex kicks in. It’s been observed in animals like hippos and otters.

When the airways are cut off, the body automatically slows its metabolism. Your heart rate goes down.

Like a seal.

I stare at the gridwork of tiles below me, the play of bluish ribbons of light. At five minutes I want to gulp and swallow and suck in more air. My diaphragm bucks and twangs but it’s just a threshold I have to get past. It feels bad but there’s no real risk. I can keep it going, through the pain and discomfort, the horrible constriction around my chest.

I know that in another few minutes, my lungs and muscles will begin to tingle. Then the burning. The pressure in my brain will start to build, like a balloon inflating inside my skull, pushing outward against my eyes and sinuses. I’ll want to inhale water just to end the pain.

But I can do it, as long as I just keep going. Just keep going, no matter what. And the longer I’m down here, bathing in the reflected light of the white tiles, the more chance there is that I will rise and burst through the surface and see her there, waiting for me.

*

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Glass Harmonica Kate Rigby

In another life we met at school, puzzled over the square on the hypotenuse, enjoyed competitive haircuts, failed to clear the high-jump rope.

In another life we conspired.

You were a gauzy fairy while I was a flying ant.

We annoyed others.

In another life you joined the circus, balanced on horseback in a tutu.

I told stories until they were real.

In another life you ran away, became a barrister, wore a wig, hid your wings in a gown, performed in court, annoyed others.

In another life you represented me when morality had fallen away.

In another life we played the harp and tinkled the glass harmonica.

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Breakfast With a Hippopotamus James Bell

the whole body moves like a rotund dancer on a sprung floor high on rock and roll to express how breakfast has been interrupted when grass is still lush with dew at 8 am

the location in a nook of acacia has the look of the habitual

we see from his dampness he has bathed to refresh his flesh an early wallow somewhere where there is mud and a deep pool

the intrusion on his routine is reflected in an evil eye his dance and roar represents

a very still malevolence that says our time with him has now finished time to start the motor and go

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My Child

Geraldine Douglas

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I am the narrator streaming with words…

A mother, less…

Absent of your being, a silent cocoon deafens my spirit, an unseen, derelict space.

Secret chord, violet, soft chiffon link, stronger than steel, unites us.

We will meet again.

Nothing prepared my soul for that moment when the world became a stranger.

Rainbow’s edge pierced my being.

I fell…

I fell to sodden earth and died inside.

Still…sunbeam swords christened foiled lakes and swans delight beneath a bewildered moon.

Scribble blindly, pencil darts to virgin paper.

Soul reflections compete with fantasied desires…

Punch mountains, sweep all lands…

Just to say ‘Goodbye’, and hope for solace in unfinished future dreams, where the world will dazzle in optical illusion.

I do not see you…

I feel you, a weighty purple mist.

Your thought forms divert vibrations to my psyche…

An explosion of art, my mind’s eye amazed.

Love delivered; an apron filled with roses.

Heaven reopens, corn is gold, mother nature gifts a ruby around my heart.

I tread earthbound paths, searching for my shadow, I belong to nothing a figure of fate.

Winds moan a lifetime of mourning.

In dreamscapes you kiss my forehead once again, my shattered spirit briefly expires.

We walk where bluebells drip indigo, their waxen bells shine as ancient sapphires.

Love you, my beautiful child.

Dedicated to all parents who have lost a child.

Remember this…We will meet them again!

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No Mans’s Island Lynn White

No man is an island wrote Donne centuries ago.

He understood the predicament understood that man, or wo-man is one part of a whole which is one part of something larger and so on into mind-blowing infinity.

No man, or wo-man can stand alone and reach their potential in isolation or when isolated on some small island however grandiose the delusion.

And a small island cannot thrive. if it makes its sea an impenetrable wall to protect it from the to-ing and fro-ing of all but the tides it will stagnate sink into decay turn in on itself until the walls are broken and the seeds set free to fly away.

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Tall Tales Ed Blundell

After “The Boyhood of Raleigh - J Everett Millais” I sailed to where the world ends once, Where dragons be and giant fish, So big they swallow up whole ships; To brave new worlds and golden lands Where people’s heads are upside down And precious stones lie on the sands.

Oh, if I were a lad like you, I think I’d run away to sea.

Great things await for he who dares To search for wonders and new worlds.

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Honesty Log Laurence Edmondson 2.11 I need to confront this. Nothing can change until I am completely and brutally honest with myself. Let this be a record of pure truth.

I’ve reached a point where just about every second of freedom I’m given is spent alone at my computer, either reading and writing comments below articles on the Guardian website, or masturbating. I exist as my online Guardian pseudonym more than I do as my actual self. The biggest priority in my life is how many upvotes my online comments receive. These are facts. The only situation in which I’m not consumed by the buzz of upvotes is during masturbation breaks. These breaks are frequent. At least five a day. The amount and quality of pornography on the internet today is simply ridiculous.

I just masturbated right now. I wrote that sentence about porn and immediately lost my train of thought. I stared at the page, willing the pen in my hand to keep writing, but I was only delaying the irreversible, and in a matter of seconds I had moved to my computer and opened my favourite playlist on Pornhub, ‘Beautiful Busty Bouncers’. It is a sequence of 100 videos, mainly frontal shots of busty women in the reverse cowgirl position. It’s got its own shortcut button on my browser. I’m there in one click. The playlist adds up to about 30 hours of the same view of the same action, and I have an undying urge to work my way through every last second of it. I’m a reasonably intelligent man, I have a degree in philosophy, yet I’m hopelessly transfixed by flapping lumps of flesh.

I just did it again. Sixth of the day.

This isn’t a life. I don’t even know what I want from life, but this isn’t a life. I’m comfortable with not having any grand ambitions, I just wish I was capable of doing something else with my time.

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Nobody knows this. I let the few people who know me think of me as studious, sensible, aloof. I tell them that of an evening I read books, watch films, watch football, when the truth is, I can no longer get through one page of a book without stopping to click refresh on a comment forum, and the times when I could watch a film or a game from beginning to end without distraction seem like a distant, faded golden era.

I’m glad I’m writing this. I feel awakened. It’s astonishing how long I’ve been deceiving myself.

The truth has to exist, even in this small private way. This has to keep happening.

3.11 I had a decent day at work today. Being a librarian is fine. I like the peace, I like existing in a remnant of the past, where people still physically stretch and squat and reach for their information. My problem doesn’t rear its head at work; the computers aren’t for personal use and ever since I got a formal warning about toilet breaks I haven’t had a smartphone. In these conditions, when the temptation isn’t there, I function, I get on with it like it’s the most normal thing in the world. But when the countdown to home time begins, when the freedom to indulge my urges draws near, how quickly it all collapses. I waddled out of work with an erection today, from the excitement to be going home to Beautiful Busty Bouncers. I spent the bus journey trying to look calm while imploring myself, over and over, to ‘lose the boner’. (This, from a 35-year-old man who once wrote a well received dissertation on Montaigne!), then I got home and ran, actually ran to my computer and hammered out two ferocious wanks, back to back, before another thought could enter my head.

Then the Guardian commenting began. As usual, first there was a progress check of my posts from yesterday. I clocked how many more upvotes my comments had received, and responded to any replies I deemed necessary. Then I went to the homepage and browsed the top stories. I scanned a few articles then hit the comments sections, handing out upvotes to those that impressed me, waiting for the inspiration to enter the discourse myself. My eyes lit up when a new Brexit story came up. I thought of something relevant and witty to say, and I speed-typed it, foregoing a spell check, to get it posted amongst the first few comments. The upvotes started flooding in immediately. To me now, the me I’ve become, this is what joy is. This is what passes for joy.

I celebrated with a long, slow, lubricated wank. The kind where I transfer my web browser to my 40-inch flatscreen TV and sprawl on a beanbag in front of it. It lasted fifty minutes.

After that, I tried to watch a film. I found a decent stream of the new Woody Allen offering, and managed the first half hour before returning to the Guardian. I had to check the upvotes. 72 and rising. On the crest of that wave, I opened another tab and attended to the secondary strand of my comment obsession, where I roam around the forums, on the look out for comments that are reprehensible or obnoxious, and try to dispense justice with well worded, well argued, sometimes subtly insulting replies. I found a few egregious cases, and gave them some of their own medicine. I know I’m not making a difference. I know the chances of changing someone’s mind are miniscule. I know that a difference of opinion on the internet is only a fast track to mutual hatred. I know how pointless it all is. But it’s the readership, the audience. It’s the other people, the ones who already agree with me, people of intelligence who can show their appreciation for my interjections with their upvotes, and sometimes comments of praise. This is the drug.

When the guilt finally won through and I tore myself away to start writing this, it was past midnight. Another evening gone.

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4.11 I’ve started turning the computer off while I write this. As long as I’m writing, and then reading back what I’ve written, I’m doing something different, I’m attending to my problem, I’m making progress.

I spent a long time at work today trying to work out what I want. I tried to define the difference between ‘want’ and ‘should want.’ For example, do I want a girlfriend, or do I just think I ‘should’ want a girlfriend? Is my dire form in that regard down to my chronic shyness and unattractiveness, or do I just not really want to be in a relationship? Just because it’s the ‘done thing’, does that mean I should spend my life yearning for it, living in perpetual disappointment? Should it have to feel shameful to maybe not want that?

But it can’t be just me, the beanbag and the big screen for the rest of time.

I haven’t been with a woman since my final term of university, 14 years ago. She was the only one. She was shy, clever and sweet, but very plain. We slept together twice, both times extremely drunk. After the second time I stopped answering her calls. I told my friends that it was because we didn’t have anything in common, and I’ve told myself that ever since, but the real reason was because I didn’t fancy her. Even then, in the early days of internet porn, my notion of sexual attraction had already been cemented in the unattainable. Since leaving university, the gulf between the women I’m attracted to and the women I’m capable of attracting has become so vast, that unless I can drastically change my ways, it is 100% certain that I will be alone forever.

Even that last paragraph was enough for me to stop writing and turn my computer on. I was on the beanbag for half an hour. When I’d finished I went on the Guardian. My Brexit comment was up to 344 upvotes. I must have refreshed the page ten times without any change to the tally before returning to the homepage. I browsed it, telling myself that’s all I would do, and ended up on the comments section under a review of the Woody Allen film I tried to watch. I read every comment, then went back to one that had caught my eye. Someone had criticised Allen’s classic, Hannah and Her Sisters. I wrote a respectful but robust rebuttal. I waited another half an hour for a reply, which didn’t come. Only then did I turn the computer off again. Then I put the TV on for the football. It looked like a good game. There were fifteen minutes before half time, which I managed to watch uninterrupted.

At half time I warmed up some food, then ate it while watching more of the match. I saw two goals.

During the replay of the second goal, the co-commentator said, ‘And the bounce, it’s the bounce that does him.’ The phrase stayed in my head. Five minutes later the computer was on again and even though the game was a real thriller, I swapped it on the big screen for the playlist. I missed two more goals, including a last minute winner.

I need to get out of the house for an evening. Break the cycle. I just texted my friend, Luke, to see if he’s up for a few drinks tomorrow, and he responded in the affirmative. Luke’s a good man.

We meet up every couple of months. He’s the only person I come close to admitting my lifestyle to, but even then it’s done in a jokey way, as though I’m self-deprecatingly exaggerating my habits when actually I’m admitting to about a quarter of the true extent.

Tomorrow night I have to make a concerted effort to get out of my shell. I have to do at least one of two things. Either: properly open up to Luke, share everything with him and see if he can help; or: properly have fun, the best case scenario being talking to a female. Imagine that.

5.11 Met Luke in Wetherspoons at 8. We had a few pints, caught up on the usual subjects, me regurgitating recent Guardian comments like they’re spontaneous thoughts, him lapping them up. We played

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the quiz machine, won £3, put it all back in, lost it. Ended up at a table near a group of five girls. They were young and loud but not too crass, and they all had nice dresses and hair. At one point two of them went over to the quiz machine. I watched them play and lose quickly. When they came back I plucked up all my courage and got eye contact with one of them, then forced myself to speak.

‘How did you do?’

‘You what?’

My heart was pounding. ‘On the quiz machine. How did you do?’

‘Shit! The questions are too hard.’

‘Which one did you play?’

‘Millionaire.’

‘Oh right.’

This was the longest conversation I had initiated with an unacquainted female in several years.

I had run out of things to say but Luke, apparently spurred on by the step I had taken, chipped in with: ‘You should play Pub Quiz, we won three quid on it.’

‘Really?’ said the other girl.

Then Luke amazed me by saying: ‘Yeah. Wanna try it? Work as a team? It’s on us.’

Suddenly we were standing at the quiz machine with the two girls in between us. We called out the answers and they pressed the buttons. We won two pounds and let the girls have it. We all exchanged high fives. One of them touched me on the arm and said I was ‘well brainy’.

Back at the tables their friends showed no interest in us and the follow-up chat fizzled out immediately. But when they got up to leave, our two girls made a point of saying ‘seeya’ as they left. Luke and I talked about them giddily. We knew that nothing more could possibly happen between us – they were far too young for a start, as well as out of our league – but it had been a nice moment of excitement all the same. For a while I was filled with a great feeling of hope for the future.

Later, in the Rose and Crown, I tried to get philosophical with Luke. I asked him what he thought constituted a good life. He said ‘being happy, doing what you enjoy, and making enough money to get by comfortably.’ Then I asked him ‘what if you do something you enjoy, but you still feel ashamed of it?’ He asked for an example. I paused for a while, then said ‘like a drug addict.’ He said ‘well that’s different, because it can kill you. A good life means keeping an eye on your health as well.’

He started talking about a friend of his cousin who had died from drugs, and the urge to spill my truth faded away.

At closing time Luke was keen to keep the night going: ‘Back to mine, couple of tinnies, watch some comedy?’ There was such simple, honest enthusiasm in his face. I could easily have stayed with him, we could have carried on with the talk, told each other our truths, deepened our friendship, discussed what solitude is worth, what we could do to help each other…

But what did I do instead?

I told him I was too pissed and needed to go to bed, then rushed home to thrash around on the beanbag at an infuriating half-mast for nearly two hours. That’s what I did instead.

6.11 Something has happened.

I woke up at midday, feeling determined not to slip into the usual routine. First thing I did was write the whole report of last night’s events without pause. Then I had some lunch and put the football on. There were three live games in a row. I half slept through the first one, then watched the whole second one, and didn’t relapse until halfway through the third one. Then the floodgates opened. I spent

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the next five hours reading and writing comments on the Guardian’s football section, while checking in on Beautiful Busty Bouncers so regularly that I reached the end of the playlist and started going through it again.

The moment came around eleven when, after ejaculating for the seventh time of the evening, I stood up from the beanbag and set off towards the desk. In my haste to reach the computer (to check if any invisible strangers had responded to my unqualified tactical appraisal of Tottenham’s use of a back three), I tripped over the underpants that were still round my ankles and fell flat on my face. I stayed on the floor and considered this reality. Soon I was sobbing. When the crying stopped I stood up, pulled up my underpants, went to the hallway, put a shoe on my right foot, came back into my room, yanked the router out of its socket, laid it on the floor, and stomped it into pieces. I can’t remember anything making me feel more alive.

7.11 Today has been glorious. I walked the four miles home from work via the supermarket, then made a curry while listening to the radio. I have just finished reading a whole book, ‘The Stranger’ by Camus.

The joy of doing these things has been indescribable. I have nothing to confess.

Okay, now that I can’t sleep, I confess to feeling some craving for my vices. This is understandable. I was unprepared for what I did last night. But I’m glad it happened. The Honesty Log wasn’t working on its own. Drastic action was needed. It was mad, it was weird, but I took charge. This has been the best day.

Tomorrow is key. I need to work out what the next move from here is. Obviously, nobody can live without the internet forever, that will never happen to anyone ever again, but I have to use this window of contemplation to work out a way of existing alongside it.

8.11 I devised a new regime for my free time today, so it was okay for me to buy a new router on the way home from work. The rules are as follows: two hours of commenting per day, and two porn sessions.

No more. That is still a reasonable allowance for my staple vices, leaving the rest of the evening for reading, cooking, walking, thinking, reconnecting with people, rekindling my soul, and so on.

The first wank, I say unapologetically, was heaven. Then I made my return to the Guardian where there was a Trump article with the comments section open. I got a good one in. Upvote Central.

Even so, when my two hours were up, I logged out with ease. I can pick that up again tomorrow. The second and final wank was also a classic, and I drew it out for as long as possible. It’s about quality over quantity from now on. A pleasure enjoyed with a sense of occasion beats mindless gluttony any day. As I exited Pornhub, I couldn’t help noticing a link entitled: ‘NEW Playlist: Beautiful Busty Bouncers 2’.

The temptation to click on it pressed somewhat, but I managed to walk away from it with a wry smile, like a suave but faithful husband politely turning down the advances of a saucy young seductress.

Since then I’ve been reading some Russell and writing emails to old uni friends. I’ve smoked a few cigarettes tonight, a temporary measure for dealing with the craving. Which will fade. It has to. I can do it. Beautiful Busty Bouncers 2 is out and I’ve got a top Trump comment on the go, but I can do it. I can do it. I have to do it. I have to do it. I have

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Shrinkage And Enlargement of The Avian Kind Peter George

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Doodles and works of art erupting from egg shells, And feathered creatures etched in rock, As descendants of meat-eating dinosaurs, Were never posed by the lady employing words In her room at the Lodge.

The bees in the garden of dementia According to my mother were little birds.

A doodle may include For the stranger who is lost The tooth of a dinosaur and a hurricane’s spin.

A work of art may have an ostrich with a human head.

Each person who is or is not a stranger in any garden Should have a brain’s worth of birds and blue skies.

Birds were a standard mental requirement Before the rise and fall Of the dinosaurs appeared In ancient rocks, plastic models, magazines, and books, And in films and on TV across the continental crust, And in the garden of dementia, And of keeping a mask of brilliant sunshine upon the face, Where the Lodge’s wall confronted the traffic on the road.

Josephine May George having closed her eyes, My mother’s mask would persist In the silence of dementia.

She could no longer stand and feed The birds with crumbs and seed and Vera Lynn Singing to the troops.

Nor did she order the shrinkage of the land Where birds could breed solely by permission of humankind, While people struggle to be polite To strangers in dementia’s garden, At the Lodge of broken birds lying shattered in the sun.

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Mother Me Lara Saunders

Junk sick. Seconds slip. You feel the pressing weight of that clock on the wall. Time weeps at the edges of your sandcastle self.

All that matters about who you are is going... going...

‘Here you go Mum,’ Ashanti hands you a paper plate of food. You eat as though it’s book learnt.

Truth is, you’re gut-sick and hunger sore all at once and all the time.

I know this. I know you.

Your scalp is itchy, hair stiff under too much dry shampoo. You smell sticky with vanilla body spray.

Last week you cancelled this, your final contact with your child, because you had impetigo. The social worker didn’t believe you. Now she’s arranged party food as if you’re here to celebrate something.

Paint to make hand prints for you. Of you.

Before today, this woman has had your hair tested for drug use. Before today, she’s had your mind scraped apart, written down and autopsied in a courtroom. While you sat ashamed, under high ceilings and shuttered light.

They sliced you into paper to wheel you around in suitcases. Ring-bound and tied down.

You named her Ashanti because someone said it means ‘Undefeated.’ Also, you never read past the As. You won’t admit that, but I know.

A month ago, you sat opposite this social worker. Silence was sullen, tugging at the sleeves of itself. Frustrated weeping in an inside corner, but on the surface, you were dry-eyed; defiant. Defeated.

‘I’m asking you these questions Emma,’ this social worker said, ‘so that I can write them down.’

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‘I’ve never seen you without a fucking pen,’ you mumbled. Too quiet. You coward.

She carried on, ‘I’m making a book for Ashanti. I’ll pass it on to her permanent carers so that she knows about you when she’s older. She’ll know that you loved her.’

‘I do love her,’ your eggshell voice cracked over the words.

That’s all you could say in that room with the alarmed metal strip along the walls. If you leaned forward to hit the social worker, or squeeze the life out of her or shake the truth into her made-up mind, she only had to reach out and be saved.

There’s never been a room like that for you. *** Last night you sat on cardboard in the stripped-out building that was once a factory. Full of space, aching under its own vastness. Creaking in the dark.

Bec’s body looped over itself as she held her knees together. Her hair was tied back in a scrunchie she found at the park. You noticed the angles of her hips below the slipped waistline of her jeans. The lace top of her underwear. Frayed elastic. Her eyes were fixed points, staring at you, then at the ground, then at the glowing cigarette in her hand.

‘Just find her on Facebook.’

You couldn’t get a fix on anything because of the oxys you’d taken earlier.

‘She won’t be on Facebook,’ you drawled, slack-mouthed, creamy spittle. ‘She’s only...’ Years slipped away as you tried to count them. You could only remember August.

August is when she split you open from snatch to arsehole. They handed her to you and the hairs quilled up on your body. You were ripe and alive. Clay formed, curve edged and thumb-printed.

You thanked the midwife you’d been swearing at. Knock-kneed in stirrups, blood smears on your legs, wobbly voice. You said you’d never go softly again but there you were, sprawled out, simpering.

‘She’s not on Facebook now,’ Bec said, picking the words out of her teeth. ‘She’s not there now but in a few more years. Only a few more years, then she will be.’

‘What if they change her―’ you lurched forward. Felt your stomach twist and ache, full of itself. A bag of bile. Spasm. Release. Swallow. ‘― name.’

Bec shook her head. ‘They can’t...they can’t change it.’

‘She’ll be called Phoebe,’ Harry’s voice from the corner.

‘Or Pritchard,’ Freddy gasped ― an almost laugh. A sound made in deep space, that bubbled up through his body like a climax that wouldn’t stop. Finally, the laugh split his lips.

‘Pritchard!’ Harry’s again. ‘Pritch...Penelope!’ he tried, but the joke failed and died in the dried air. The men slumped back, astronauts again floating in the jellied eye of the dark sky.

You moaned long and low like a cow bending down to pain.

‘Listen,’ Bec said, ‘they can’t change it. She’s too old, yeah? She’s at school.’

‘Not the school I wanted. Not the one I went to. She’s somewhere else...somewhere ― they won’t tell me where.’

‘Yeah but she’ll always be Ashanti and, babe, you’ll be able to find her. It’s as simple as writing her name.’

You wrote her name in the air with your finger and it hovered in the space before your eyes.

‘Ashanti.’ You breathed. Undefeated. It will all be okay, you thought. One day you’d tell her about it yourself.

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‘I think I’ve had too much,’ Bec mumbled. Plate-eyed she stared, swallowed and swayed. Her hands clenched and relaxed, clenched and relaxed. Relaxed.

Moments later you were sinking down low into the comfort of the cardboard. You were floating on thermals in the warm winter air. A spent needle on the floor. *** This morning you woke to cold longing. You tried to draw the warmth back over you, to blanket yourself again in all that perfect. You ached to the nail and root of your body.

Then you thought it would be better not to see Ashanti after all. You wanted to and couldn’t.

Goodbye. Goodbye. Tears clattered and rolled inside you like pebbles behind your eyes.

You saw Bec. She had been lying on the best seat in the house: two squares of foam placed together. You were glad about that. When you saw her bundled up, child-sized, lying there on the best seat in the house.

Her cobweb eyes were nothing and her skin mottled, greenish like snakeskin. What’s left behind was shed. Bec’s body prison.

She was not resting. Not peaceful or safe. Not sleeping, not wide-eyed staring ― not any other things. Not any other things that she had been. A curled body, soft hands at her stomach as if she were thinking of them, of her own lost babies.

You should be thinking only of Ashanti but Bec’s still there. In that soupy, thick as fog tunnel of furred thoughts.

You rose. You turned and stumbled to the door and into the wide, wild, open, outside world.

You knew you’d go, Emma. You and Ashanti one last time.

It’s never been a choice. *** ‘Can I take a picture?’

Rainbows slide down the walls, making promises that can’t be kept. There are so many toys.

You’ve brought her a pink taffeta skirt, sweets and a St. Christopher on a golden chain that’s already in knots.

‘Can I take a picture?’ the social worker asks again. Asking again for more, as if she hasn’t had enough. ‘For Ashanti?’ she adds.

You nod, not looking at the woman. She’s not here, she’s the space on the chair that you don’t see. She’s a blurry mass of concentrated hate. She has a spongy body and two drip-drop eyes. She’s younger than you, you think. There’s two of them today, the second is a man. His pity gaze sticks.

‘Come ‘ere,’ you call Ashanti. You slide a strand of hair behind your ear and tuck your hands into your sleeves.

The woman fixes the lens on your face and you feel a many-eyed gaze. You imagine thoughts Ashanti will have about you. Your meth mouth, lip scab, lank hair, limp arms, thin skin, bone-deep dirt.

Ashanti folds herself into you and you smell her: wheat and honey. Her hair feels warm, sunglazed through the window.

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‘All done,’ she says; that woman you do not see.

But you do. I know you do.

‘Don’t cry mama,’ Ashanti twists away and your hands reach for her, gaping in the air she left behind. *** You sat dry-mouthed in court and saw those photographs laid bare. Pictures of your Ashanti, lousy and wiry, dressed in thin cotton that stretched over her elbows and split at the knee. Pale because she was getting over a cold-bug you said. She wouldn’t let you comb the lice out, you said. She doesn’t sleep well, you said you said you said.

Then the pictures of the house and all the mess creeping over itself like vines. Like monsters growing two heads were the piles of laundry of dishes of dog shit of gently decaying food scraps.

When Ashanti was born you had a social worker who helped you, once, with the dishes. She was pudding shaped and jowly with short sticky up hair. You remember how she dyed it a red that turned to peach that turned to coral. It grew out and she was gone. She would take off her lanyard and walk up the drive as if she were a friend or an auntie or even a mother. A mother coming to help her daughter with the washing up. But you don’t remember her name, do you?

‘We’ll get there, dear heart,’ she said when you admitted that you had not slept in weeks.

‘Oh, bless your heart,’ she whispered because your Mum didn’t believe you about the rapes.

You told her about your brother. Funeral flowers in football colours.

You didn’t tell her about what you did next and where you found that bliss you can’t describe. It started with smack and then ice and now you’ll do anything. Now you’ll do anything.

But you didn’t tell her that. Because all the world’s been feeling good, except you Emma. What’s in here and goes in there is your treat. *** The social worker gets twitchy. She looks now and again and again at her phone, holding it like a lifeline in her hand.

You’re on the floor doing a puzzle with Ashanti and you didn’t know she could do puzzles yet.

The world wobbles, tears brim and fall. Ashanti looks up as you sniff more tears back. She doesn’t ask you not to cry. She just tucks herself into herself like she always used to. You want to say sorry, so you do. It’s a sound more than a word, a howl, hushed because it’s dangerous. You are all water and mucus as time pulls noose tight. Ashanti looks over at the social worker when she stands with the scrape of the chair. You ignore her because you’re still not seeing her are you, Emma?

Dry up and move on. ‘Are you enjoying your school hon?’ Honeypie, apple of my eye, my skinnamarinky do.

‘Yeah, Mum takes me,’ she bends her head over the puzzle.

What. You stare at the parting of Ashanti’s hair; a shining crescent.

‘What?’

Ashanti doesn’t speak so you look at the social worker at last. Her name is Melody and you’ll know that name forever.

‘Why is she calling that woman mum? I’m still her mum.’

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‘It’s Ashanti’s choice, Emma. We don’t encourage children to call their foster carers―’ ‘But hang on. She’s getting a new mum ain’t she? That’s what you keep saying. So, what, she’ll have a real mum and then another and then another. Ain’t we supposed to have just one?’

‘Emma I’m happy to talk to you about this after contact. It’s time to say goodbye now.’

‘No, no please don’t,’ your trembling voice, bare as stripped bark and soft now. ‘Let’s finish the puzzle, yeah?’

Ashanti breaks the pieces apart, watching with amber eyes.

‘We’ll start again.’ You jam the pieces back together in the wrong places. The picture is jumbled up and arms stick out of faces and teacups sprout from teddies.

Melody steps closer and Ashanti goes to join her. You catch your daughter by her shoulders.

Arms net her into a stale cuddle that stinks of cigarettes and dustbins and your need.

‘I love you. Remember that. I love you. I’ll always be your real, your proper mummy.’ A phrase you learnt from Melody pops into your head, ‘your tummy mummy, right? That’s it. Be good for your other mummies but don’t forget about me. No one can love you more than me.’

You hold her for a long time, the seconds sting and still you hold her. You hold her until she stops trying to pull away. Until you feel her arms loop around you and make you feel threadbare. You think she has the hiccups at first, but she’s crying. *** Remember how you brought her home from the hospital. The heat pump in the house wasn’t working, but she was warm. Rolled in blankets and wearing a hat with ears. You stared down at her and didn’t mind the dripping tap or your foggy breath and the rotten wood window frames.

You watched her and you said, I’m your ― Mummy I don’t want you to go.

Remember walking your baby bundle to the window where you shivered at the dipping sun.

You tipped her to the world to show her what there was. You promised her that she would want for nothing. She would ‘― have another chance. We’ll ask the judge to give you just one more chance.’

Remember how nothing mattered outside the rise and fall of her baby body. Her rising chest made mountains. You watched her deep, sweet pillow breaths. Stroked her fine curls, that were the same colour as your ― hair that is wet with her tears. You will remember this day. When you held her in your arms and she asked, ‘Why didn’t you look after me carefully?’

Carefully you set her down in the bassinet. You lay yourself long next to that delicate, bodyborne, beloved child who made you.

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The Circle of Death And Life Geraldine Douglas

The church blazed bright, so intense it was almost audible, all golden, a vividness of peace…

As alabaster feet of angels danced on threaded dew.

My heart swells, seedlings shred by preying puppets.

Thirsty, chilled I walk, crushed, this lifeless earth to roam.

Lips leaded, crave bloody colour, berries of scarlet drip from shoulders of branches… on hands and knees I lick their juices.

I remember daffodils wrapped in papery blankets…

Sparkling February’s dew with tinges of white-gold.

Then painless. A colourless rose, a passing phantom, a tongue-less ghost… it’s spirit no longer breathes.

Primroses shy footsteps tip-toe around sentient oaks, vibrant bark hums through naked twigs.

My treasure scattered to all who loved me, I wear nobody’s face, eyes translucent revealing a tint of pressed magnolia.

I will dissipate into the mists of spring, as sweet, shrill melodies fizz like sherbet and haunted silences are no more.

I am Home.

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The Ghost of an Elf Neil K. Henderson

An eminent Victorian took his toast, And buttered it with the holy ghost.

The ghost did not behave as he expected, Although he blessed the toast and genuflected.

“Strength of personality won’t help you,” Crooned a voice he’d never heard in any choir.

“Strength of personality won’t help you, The day you set your arse on fire.”

It might have been the voice of Frank Sinatra, But an elf it was, once trapped in the hereafter.

It said, “You cannot make a centipede surrender, If you’ve only got one arm.”

The old man took his sacred toast and butter, And threw it out upon the leaded gutter.

The one-armed elf made after it with greed, But lost out to a limber centipede.

“Strength of personality won’t help you,” Is the moral, ye who upwardly aspire.

“Strength of personality won’t help you, The day you set your arse on fire.”

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Roses For Her Birthday Alison Frank

Every year on her birthday, Mum received an imposing bouquet of yellow roses from her former boyfriend. I used to enjoy telling my friends, just for the reaction. Every year, on the 18th of May, I’d say, casually, ‘My mum got a bunch of roses from her old boyfriend yesterday.’

‘What? Her old boyfriend sends her flowers? What does your dad say?’ ‘Nothing,’ I’d reply, then drolly correct myself. ‘He says it saves him from having to buy them.’

It was hard for me to see my family from other people’s perspective. I guess it’s the same for everyone; whatever you grow up with is your normal. It was only when school swimming lessons and their communal ablutions began that I realised that slips and talcum powder were foreign territory to others: an anachronism passed on from Mum to me and accepted without question. My friends didn’t understand the need for synthetic underskirts to keep wool kilts from scratching their legs. They wore big cotton shorts printed with colourful patterns, like the Joe Boxer smiley sticking out its tongue. I abandoned my qu aint underthings instantly, and Mum was confronted with the surprising errand of accompanying her teenage daughter to the men’s underwear section. As for the demure paper shaker of lily-of-the-valley talc that she slipped into my swimming bag, that too was rejected after a classmate, with a sidelong glance, asked curiously, ‘what’s that for?’ and I had no clear answer.

But the birthday roses—their glamour made up for the fusty shame of our family’s other idiosyncrasies. My teacher, Mrs Setrakian, overheard the story one year, and asked astutely, ‘what colour are these roses?’. I told her.

‘Yellow is the colour of friendship,’ she said with approval. ‘How nice it is when men and women can remain friends. How wise of your father not to be jealous.’ Sometimes I wished that Dad could be jealous: one of those manly men who wears white sleeveless undershirts, a gold necklace

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or a heavy ring, and leaves the scent of aftershave on your cheek when he kisses you—someone like my uncles, my mother’s brothers. Dad smelled of nothing but soap or shaving foam. So indisposed to jewellery, he didn’t even wear a wedding ring. Striding about the house after work, he would be wearing the white t-shirt he’d had on all day under his buttoned-down dress shirt. And instead of a making a scene when the roses arrived, he would glance mildly at them and say, invariably, every year, ‘Well, aren’t those nice.’

My mother, on the other hand, always rolled her eyes and laughed when she opened the front door on her birthday to find the great cloud of cellophane on the doormat. ‘I could never have married him,’ she would say each year, in response to a question that nobody bothered to ask. ‘With him, it was always “on to the next thing”. He’d start a business, then he’d abandon it after a year to start some other project. Zero commitment.’ Once, when I was older, I pointed out that he was committed to sending flowers, at least. She ignored that, and proceeded to enumerate his other faults, as she did every year.

‘He was so pretentious—he bought a title once, Lord of Kidlington. Can you imagine?’

I had always known about the title, as I had faithfully copied it, every year, from the gold address sticker on the back of my birthday cards to the front of my thank you letter’s envelope. Because every year I received a birthday card from my mum’s former boyfriend, around my birthday on the 17th of November (never earlier, but sometimes fashionably later). I loved that it was never a children’s birthday card decorated with kittens, puppies, or my age (which he certainly didn’t remember). It would be one of those blank cards equally suitable for grown-ups, with outlandish or ironic photos on the front: a frog wearing lipstick, a goldfish decorating its bowl with trendy 80s furniture, or a guy with a mohawk carrying an enormous cake with pink icing and sparklers. Inside the card, along with a message and signature in an extravagant cursive, illegible to me, there was always a generous sum in a foreign currency. As she walked me to our local branch to exchange it, Mum would ask with disapproval in her voice, ‘Where is he this year?’. Tilting her head back to peer with vague interest at the banknotes, she would say again, ‘I could never have married him.’ When I was younger, she used to explain, ‘he gambled. When I was a lodger in that house of his on Alabaster Avenue, every Saturday night it was games of cards, whiskey and cigars, into the wee hours. I couldn’t stand that.

I used to put a wet towel against the bottom my door to keep the stench out.’ On my seventeenth birthday, she offered a new reason in an undertone as we passed between the bank’s concrete planters with their succulent pink begonias. ‘He was a womaniser. Once he took me to the Lake District to visit his friends. It was only when we arrived that I realised he expected us to share a bed. The nerve!

I made him turn around and drive straight home. We didn’t get back ‘til 2 a.m., and we had to have the windows open the entire time so he wouldn’t fall asleep at the wheel.’ This seemed a quaint story, when I thought of the rumours I’d heard about girls at my school, the handful who had boys waiting for them outside the gates.

Mum and I planned a trip to Paris together, in celebration of her fiftieth birthday, and in late celebration of my eighteenth. With Dad on one of his rare business trips, Mum was having trouble arranging transportation to the airport. She had been so busy making sure our luggage was in order, she had forgotten to reserve our airport limo in advance. ‘And now I’ll have the stupid flowers to deal with! Why don’t you nip next door and give them to Mrs. Price? It’ll brighten her day a bit, bless her.

Her cleaning lady can put them in water.’ I opened the door, but there were no flowers. When I told her, Mum gave me a blank look.

‘What?’ She had been simultaneously putting her chequebook in her bag, applying lipstick, and

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asking the operator to put her through to the limo company again. There was an uncharacteristic lull in our pre-departure hustle. She asked again for a cab, in vain. After she hung up, she said, with new respect, ‘Maybe he died. He was eighteen years older than me. He had two sons, but why would they think to contact me? I’d never know anything about it.’

Our morbid mood evaporated when the doorbell rang. ‘That’ll be the roses,’ said Mum, with an indulgent smile, and opened the door.

He didn’t have flowers, just a tight grin. Mum erupted in high-pitched exclamations of astonishment followed by a flood of ribbing camaraderie, while I stood by like I’d suddenly forgotten what I was there for. He was shorter than me, his skin tanned, like a nice handbag, from too many seasons in Marbella. On meeting me, the glamorous little figure with his continental ways went in for the kiss on both cheeks. I, expecting only one, went in the wrong direction, and kissed him full on the mouth, which was unpleasantly damp and smelled of stale cigars.

As I began the unending journey of living down that moment in my own mind, my mum’s old boyfriend showed us to his ancient Jaguar. Mum sat like a queen in the front, while I had the slippery leather expanse of the back seat all to myself. As he passed his small arms one over the other to turn the corner at the end of our street, I slid towards the passenger side, and spotted a gold chain peeking out from the cuff of his lilac shirt, nestled amongst the hairs on his wrist. Every ten minutes of the journey, my mother thanked him for driving us all the way to the airport, saying he really didn’t need to. He kept laughing what to me was a fake laugh, actually enunciating the words ‘a-ha, a-ha ha ha’. I don’t know whether Dad ever met him. Maybe that was why he was so laid back about the roses.

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The Pedlar And The Fish John Baverstock

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Desperate to find a fish, The Pedlar roams the street, Looking for that vulnerable person, Prepared to taste his sweets, “Have a bit of this, it’s yours free to try” Then stands rubbing his hands, As you slowly start to get high, Sweets become more readily available, As you take a nibble of the bait, So, eager he is to seal a deal, He offers you a special rate, Once you are on the hook, You start to run up a debt, Soon he’s applying pressure, For the money he wants to collect, He’ll keep supplying you with a fix, But you must subscribe to his deal, Some are forced into prostitution, Whilst others will rob or steal, As your addiction starts to take a hold, You will do anything for cash, What started out as a little itch, Turned rapidly in to a rash, That harmless bit of spice!

Was now replaced with Crack, Another fish landed in the Pedlar’s net, That he won’t be throwing back...

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Scrittura LITERARY MAGAZINE

CALLING FOR SUBMISSIONS! We are looking for prose, poetry and scripts to publish in our online literary magazine.

Deadline: April 30th 2020 Enquiries/Submissions: scrittura.magazine@gmail.com Please visit our website for our submissions guidelines: www.scritturamagazine.tumblr.com @scrittura.magazine @scritturamag @scrittura_mag

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Scrittura LITERARY MAGAZINE

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