Skive Magazine - The 18-35 Demographic Issue - Dec 2011 by Matthew Ward

Contents ‘Stigma’ by Christopher T. Dabrowski

‘A parasite’ by Christopher T. Dabrowski

‘In Lieu of a Memoir’ by Tadhg Muller

‘A Sight Unseen’ by Patrick Parr

‘The Question’ by Mark Hendrickson

‘Going Through Withdrawals With A Synonym Of River’ by Nicolas James Hampton

‘When We Didn’t Give A Fuck’ by Nicolas James Hampton

‘It’s A Really Obscure Title, You’ve Probably Never Heard Of It’ by Nicolas James Hampton

‘That’s Great, It’s Setting In Like A West Side Pop Song And’ by Nicolas James Hampton

‘Coming and Going’ by Arnel Bansil

‘Francine’ by Cyndi Gacosta

‘Below the freeway bridge’ by Cyndi Gacosta

‘Welcome to the Metropolis of a Soul’ by Cyndi Gacosta

‘Cookbook’ by Matthew Davies

‘Mirrors’ by Matthew Davies

‘Scarf’ by Matthew Davies

‘Denial is an Ugly Thing’ by Matthew Thompson

‘The Devil’s Principles’ by Matthew Thompson

‘The Cedar’ by Matthew Thompson

‘Renaissance’ by Valentina Cano

‘Road Blindness’ by Valentina Cano

‘Snubbed Premonitions’ by Valentina Cano

‘don’t know war like they do’ by Linda Crate

‘the strength in letting go’ by Linda Crate

‘illiterate ingrates’ by Linda Crate

‘love cannot be measured’ by Linda Crate

‘me, myself, and I’ by Linda Crate

‘the unconscious mind’ by Linda Crate

‘Between Oblivion and Death’ by Nick Johnson

‘The World Became Covered in Darkness’ by Nick Johnson

‘Poetry Workshop’ by Daybert Linares

‘My Chained Faith’ by Sonnet Mondal

‘Two Worlds’ by Sonnet Mondal

‘Blue-Collar Twister’ by Sonnet Mondal

100

‘Haunting Life’ by Sonnet Mondal

101

‘What if we were a Dream?’ by Paul Durante

102

‘Numb’ by Paul Durante

104

About the Authors

108

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Skive Magazine is published by Mary Celeste Press Editor: MATTHEW WARD Skive Magazine website: www.skivemagazine.com All poems, stories, articles & art in this issue are © the Various Authors / Artists 2011. All characters depicted in the poetry and stories in this issue are fictional.

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Stigma by

Christopher T. Dabrowski

English translation by Aneta Szaraniec-Sandecka

1. Angie

Maurice—a perfect name for a cat. Unfortunately Maurice is not a cat but a crook, matrimonial deceiver who clung to my twin sister Martha. We look as alike as two peas in a pod but have got different characters since I could feel there was something wrong with that guy. I remember when we met, he gave me that exaggerated false smile. At first, I thought he could just be shy. If he hadn’t introduced himself, I would have found him a mute but I guess it goes for all the introverted ones. Everything else was even more suspicious. The guy was quite a lot younger than Martha and a hunk—he could have any woman he wanted. When we arrived at a restaurant, I noticed that Maurice didn’t act like a man in love, he didn’t look at my sister like someone who loves her. Instead, he would drool looking at some Lolitas leaving the restaurant, disgusting. When it was time and we were supposed to pay, he didn’t even suggest doing that, not even a half the bill as modern couples do, oh no, Martha paid for everything. The fucker wrapped her around his stinky finger, and after three months they were married. Mr Poor Maurice and Martha, a rich businesswoman. Maurice was always in need and Martha always satisfied all his cravings. Isn’t that a perfect match? I’m a smart woman, if necessary I can nose around and since it was necessary, I did so. Maurice, just like a vampire, sucked on to his victims from time to time. He could entrap any poor thing so that after a few months a woman was really poor. Of course I did tell him what I’d found out and what I thought of him. OF COURSE he replied that he had a few women in his life but none of them turned out to be the one and only.

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Then he added that Martha, OF COURSE, is the one. What a lying prick! None of the seduced women couldn’t have been the one—they weren’t rich enough. My sister, on the other hand, was rich enough to live on her for the rest of his life. Bastard loved her money. I knew exactly what was going to happen—he would do everything to persuade Martha to make him the owner of her fortune and then he would find a way to divorce her. Quite often I tried to warn my naive sister but, as they say, a woman in love is a blind woman. Unfortunately! It’s not too difficult to imagine that Maurice and I weren’t the best of friends. For him, Martha was the good one (k’ching, money, money, money...) and I was the bad one—the one that saw through him right away. Whenever I visited my Marth, he was always around as if he was afraid I would try to come between them. As for Martha, her Mauricious as she called him, was a taboo we could never talk about. We even argued about him a couple of times, but when I realized I couldn’t do anything about it and I would never open Martha’s eyes to see what her husband was all about, I just let it go. The wedding had been three months earlier, it was high time I visited my sister to check if she was okay. As usual, we hugged each other. I was curious how my Marth was coping with her prick husband. Of course he didn’t even come out to say hello but I was sure he was eavesdropping. We took my luggage upstairs and came down afterwards to the kitchen to chat. I even wondered why the Prick didn’t follow us downstairs—the kitchen was in fact far away from the rest of the house. Well, maybe he just assumed that Martha being married to him is a sure thing and I’m not a danger any more? I could nag, instigate but it wouldn’t change anything anyway. Marth, where’s that husband of yours? He didn’t even say hello. He’s got a headache. Oh, little Prick has got a headache, isn’t that interesting—I thought— he knew I was coming and suddenly he felt sick. Oh, poor little thing. Stop it!—replied Martha and we both laughed. Martha started fixing our favourite drink. So simple yet so delicious— flavoured special herbs, bitter vodka with Sprite and a few slices of cucumber. Yummy! Does he do anything at all?—I asked, guessing he was just a do-nothing sponger.

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You know how hard it is to find a good job nowadays...—Martha tried to explain. Why don’t you hire him?—I suggested. No, no way! You know what a dishonour it is for a man to have his wife as a boss. What about the other work? Does he at least help you around the house? Well, you know guys...—Martha tried to joke about it. If I mentioned anything about this do-nothing person, she was trying to make a joke. She let herself be the Prick’s slave which I really didn’t like at all. But does he at least care about you?—I couldn’t let it go. Well, sure, of course. I can always talk to him, cry on his shoulder or even cuddle up sometimes. “Even cuddle up sometimes?” Yeah, sure, his one and only duty, just so the wife wouldn’t figure out what he married her for. Poor Marth, naive like a child... Suddenly I realized how I could open her eyes. What about sex?—I tried to make it sound like a joke. I saw her face change unpleasantly for a while. Here we go, I thought. —Let that be a sweet surprise of mine—she said unconfused, still playing a role of a happy wife. I knew, just then, there was something very wrong with this marriage. But I didn’t want to take this conversation any further so that Mr Prick’s good name wouldn’t be ruined entirely. Just like good old times—I thought so pleased on our return home, and buzzed a little. The Prick locked himself in his prick kingdom. Of course Marth wanted to drag him with us but fortunately the excuse of the sudden headache was still on. So we were left alone, thank God (for me, anyway) and we had all day to ourselves. We visited our parents’ grave. I am so sure that they would never like Maurice, either. Martha and I went down memory lane at our favourite pizza restaurant where we used play hooky and used to talk about our first crushes on movie stars and singers. Yeah, we had crush on a different person every week or so and we had always plenty to talk about. When we grew up and could afford two pizzas our talks became more down-to-earth: about the boys from school. I guess there wasn’t a guy we didn’t speak about as far as dating was concerned. Our conquest weren’t impressing though, since we never were high school

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beauties so we could only have long conversations about it. Dream on... Those were the times! We ate too much and we looked like stuffed twins with stomach problems. After the feast we ended up in a pub nearby. We did some small talking but whenever Marth started to speak about her Mauricious, I had to keep my big mouth shut for the sake of our little reunion. Instead, I promised myself to look at Mr M’s biography a little closer—I was almost sure that the suspect must have done something very much worse than only matrimonial hanky-panky. Perhaps some sins from his youth? I decided to hire a private detective. It was high time for Mr Pricks’ life inspection. We came back home late in the evening and found a note from Mr Moody on the table. He was very hurt because he didn’t get dinner so he decided to eat out this time (oh, really) and that we shouldn’t wait up for him. Since he was treated so mean (poor thing, indeed!), M. decided to go out to get some beer with the guys and that he might not even come back till the next day. As far as I was concerned, he could just go to hell and drink his sorry ass to death. Marth just shrugged her shoulders and tried to make a joke: “Men!” We were completely wasted. The last time we partied so much was before Mauricious came into our lives. I went straight to bed. I didn’t even feel like unpacking my bags or wash my teeth. I didn’t even feel like taking my clothes off. I just fell flat and went off to sleep immediately. I was sure nothing would be able to set me on my feet. I was so wrong. Woken up by Marth’s voice, I opened my eyes. It was pitch dark. First, I wasn’t sure where I was. I heard the calling again. Finally, I realized where I was. Maybe the Prick was giving her a hard time—I started to worry—maybe he got so drunk that he wanted to hurt Marth? I got up, turned on the light and opened the door. From then on, everything happened so quickly, yet I had the feeling I was watching a movie in slow motion. A horror movie. It all took so long. I saw... my Marth falling down the stairs. She must have been by the door. When I opened it suddenly, I must have pushed her. She was falling down with her arms spread, like a rag doll. She fell down into the darkness. I just froze, couldn’t even scream. I heard an awful cracking sound of breaking bones, her body just collapsed. I ran down the stairs immediately, praying it was just a nightmare, I almost fell as well. I knelt down to Marth’s body which didn’t move anymore.

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Martha, Marth!—I was crying and still hoping she was only unconscious and had survived this ghostly accident. But there was no miracle, she was dead. Maaaaaaaaarth!—I was crying my eyes out, holding her soon to be cold body. I am not sure how long it took when I was close to going insane. I cannot explain what exactly was going on in my head, my soul—I guess nobody could understand it anyway. It was like a part of me died. I was begging God to wake me up, I punched myself, pinched my hands till they almost bled. But it was the hard truth. MURDERER!—I kept hearing in my head. No, no, no!—I cried—but I would give my life for my Marth! I would never hurt her. NEVER! And what will you say about this?—the voice in my head was unruffled—tomorrow they will put you in chains and you will spend the rest of your life in jail. And even if they let you out before, you will have the murderer stigma forever. I couldn’t argue with that. I was so numbed and didn’t care about anything. I just wanted to die. But this part of my mind didn’t want to let go: You won’t be able to explain yourself. The press will eat you alive: “the poor twin sister killed the rich one, pushed her down the stairs to get the money”. I can already see the headlines: MONSTER WOMAN. And Mr Prick will make sure you go straight to jail. He will make up stories about your rows, threats, he will lie through his teeth. You’ll see! Fuck you!—that was all I could cry out loud. But I knew, I knew the voice was right, that I must do something before I could mourn my twin sister. But what should I do? What?! I didn’t get the answer, instead I fell into a trance. I was in a posttraumatic dementia, my body acted but it was like this awful time took control over my actions. Everything seemed to be both real and unreal, sometimes I even thought it was a nightmare, not reality, after all. A terrifying nightmare which touched my mind like a slippery octopus. I felt separated from the reality by a thick glass. Now, I can only remember some parts of that night. The body wrapped in a blanket. Oven. Flames of fire.

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Metal, ornamental box. The garden. Bushes. Shovel fixed in the ground. A cross made out of wooden sticks. And the—black, black, total black—as if this film was suddenly over. I must have had to take a shower and put on pyjamas but I don’t remember this at all. The very next memory was persistent buzz of the door bell. All of a sudden I got up semi-conscious and heard the sound of a key in the lock.

2. Maurice

My father wasn’t a bad person. Although, I cannot say he loved me, either. When my mother drank herself to death, he was left with me—a burden. But as they say, a man has to do what a man has to do, and my father didn’t want to leave me all by myself, so he found me a babysitter. Tatiana. The first day of her work was the first day that I started to hate women. Tatiana was Russian. My father paid her chickenfeed but it was a fortune for her. The fucking bitch was the ugliest cunt I ever saw. Or maybe I was just poisoned with hatred and my memory played tricks on me. She told me to take my clothes off. I didn’t want to so she slapped me in the face and I did undress, very ashamed. She told me to sit in the armchair. I did. Then she approached me and took my dick with her filthy hands. I froze and literally became paralyzed. She brought her spotty mug closer and started sucking me. I felt her rotten yellowish teeth and a rough tongue all over, it was disgusting, I felt like throwing up. I was scared stiff to death, I was convinced she’d kill me if I did throw up. My dick was stiff—I can remember that clearly since it was the first time in my life it became stiff. But it all happened against my will. She was standing before me. Fat, sweaty, with a big sagging belly. She was smiling so slimy... There are still nights that I have this nightmare and in this nightmare I’m hiding a long knife behind my back. A long carving knife. I can only remember I was begging her like crazy, “Madame, please, please don’t do this, I’m begging you, don’t do anything to me, please...” FUCK!!! And she sat on me, that fat bitch with her big belly. Then she sat on my

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dick. That was my very first time. She just raped me. In my dreams, as soon as she’s on her knees, I take out a knife and put it in her body. I see her frightened eyes, pain as I hurt her, I can hear she’s begging for my mercy. But I hate her with all my heart and I take the revenge by stabbing her slowly. The victim becomes the torturer! But in reality the horror lasted almost two years. My father went to work every day while his son was being raped and bullied. I was so intimidated that I was scared to say anything to anybody. I was so scared that Tatiana wasn’t even a human being to me; I thought of the bitch as some demon, a devil from hell. Some day she just vanished, I guess she went back to Russia. Tatiana may have vanished but these awful memories and hatred stayed with me, poisoning deeply my soul like some deadly plant. Because all I could do was hate, no matter who, any woman, a girl from school... All of my friends were dating. Not me. Of course they laughed at me and called me queer. There were times however I wanted to date, in spite of my hatred I liked these beautiful girls around me, I was fascinated by them. Aroused even. But I was scared, scared of them, I hated and wanted them at the same time. As if some beautiful woman could be my antidote, as if her beauty could wash away the monstrosity from my memories. Problems with women, problems with myself. Alienation, lack of understanding, rejection. Mean peers. Hatred towards the school where teachers didn’t even react—I was humiliated each day. So I ended up as some coolie, slaving every day with a shovel. I often day dreamt I was digging graves for each person that hurt me. That was disgusting and I was disgusted with myself. My life became a nightmare but FUCK, I DIDN’T DESERVE THIS! All of this was because of this woman. Someone had to pay. Pay the dues. I spent some money at the internet cafe. Dating services. Women. The first one, the second, the third... one by one they paid back the dues but could it all even be payable? I usually picked up ugly middle-aged women whom I was flattering like crazy. Yeah, I was always some woman’s victim in the stories I was telling them, I had a wife who was so cruel to abandon me for someone else and to take my child away. Me, unhappy, determined father who was searching for his offspring for years just to tell the child: I am your daddy! The real

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one! Isn’t that a catchy story? Oh yes, that was a catchy story indeed... Catchy and very demanding... Demanding money because looking for your flesh and blood can be very expensive. But a woman in love will do anything for her one and only, right? I led quite a comfortable life. Of course, I avoided sex, these awful memories of mine... On the other hand, when I saw beautiful women... well, I decided to convince myself to have sex and started going to a whorehouse. Strangely enough, I didn’t have any problems with getting an erection, maybe because I was the MASTER, a dominator. I pulled their hair and made them suck my cock. I was the standing one, they had to be on their knees. I was aroused by these beautiful young faces but on the other hand, I hated them, especially when my mind saw Tatiana’s mug. Then, I pulled their hair as hard as I could (for extra money, of course)— it was my relief. Because it was Tatiana that I was hurting, not them. And then I fucked them, with arousal and hatred, I was punishing them. Each move of mine was even stronger, I was like an animal sometimes, I wanted to fuck them till death, cut them in half, kill that bitch! I was like that... I let off steam this way. At home? At home I pretended to be humble, sensitive, tender, shy... impotent. Just in case anything sexual might happen. Because unfortunately sooner or later, each one tried to get me into bed. Then I always lied and I tried to convince that I was a impotent. And then I always ran away and went somewhere else to start all over yet again, with another woman (Tatiana). But how many times can you do that? I wasn’t getting any younger, plus I was tired of this seeking, picking up and trying my best to please some bitch. So I decided to sit and think about my future, plan something like an experienced burglar does. I wanted to have my chance of a lifetime coming true. I yearned for something big, I wasn’t interested in any of the small stuff. I wanted to get as much money as possible so that I could live like a king for the rest of my fuckin’ life. Everyone deserves a good and peaceful life, right? I found it! Well, her... After a few months of searching I managed to find a very rich woman, Martha. Irritating and not exactly a beauty but the size of her bank account... Unfortunately, she had a twin sister, Angie. The bitch always got on my nerves. I don’t know how but somehow she figured it all out and almost destroyed everything. Luckily Martha was head over heels in love with me so I convinced her we should get married quickly. After a month I started to poison my wife. I was sure in these

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circumstances she would consider making her last will. I realized Martha wouldn’t skip her sister in the will but God I was so wrong! This dull old cow really lost her head and made me her one and only inheritor. ME! One week after making her last will, my wife was perfectly healthy; I simply started to reduce the dose of poison. It’s not so hard to imagine that the old cow wanted to go to the doctor but I stroked her on the fat cheek, looked into the silly little eyes and said as mild as I could: Honey, you really shouldn’t. Maybe I’ll get some doctor to come home and see you. And so I did—brought a guy named Joe who would do anything for money. He came, wearing a doctor’s smock and glasses, with a stethoscope. He put on quite a show and stated she was healthy in body and mind. And that the weakness was natural for someone her age. It cost me a couple of hundred but it was okay, an investment in my future, ha, ha, ha! Why didn’t I poison her? Good question. But my answer is even better—I decided to make, ladies and gentlemen, a murderer out of Angie, the one and only best candidate! Thank God hookers in our country can work legally. Why is it so important? Well, because I decided to have a strong alibi. Just in case. First of all, to make my plan work out, I had to spend the night outside of the house. Everything I needed, I hid in a small locker next to the front door. Only I had the key to open it. I got to the outskirts of the city in less than an hour by a dirt-track. I was there before 3pm, so it was far too early for the cunts to return home. Plus, they knew I would come home late. But to be one hundred percent sure, I decided to call home—I was waiting more than two minutes and made sure I was right again, they were still parting. I was at some neglected square, near a bus depot and a taxi rank. Two old drunk bitches would be coming along sooner or later but I couldn’t wait for them standing in the street. So I went to a place called “At your pal” which was nearby. The pub “At your pal” was a typical joint where all drunks from the neighbourhood were sitting all day long, drinking and smoking. The Mecca of the frustrated, with dirty floor with alcohol stains all over and smoke from too many cigarettes. I really had my doubts but I had to come in, a man has to sacrifice sometimes. The bar was almost empty, there were only three mumbling heavy drinkers and one bartender. I heard trashy

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disco music and I ordered some brews as well as large fries. I didn’t want to starve to death in this stinky surroundings while waiting for the sisters’ return. You always have to be prepared. I was prepared for many hours of waiting by the mushy fries and thin beer, many hours of looking out of the greasy window. The table was sticky all over, I tried not to touch it. I moved an ashtray full of cigarettes and sat tight. First, I had to call a night-club, Ecstasy—to get me an alibi. It turned out to be a piece of cake, it’s so good to be a regular. All I had to do next was to sit tight, wait and observe... The first two hours were quite bearable, I was dreaming and planning what to do with the money: what to buy, where to go and in general, what to do with my fuckin’ life. But in time I decided to stop dreaming, my mind was far away, too far—instead of closely watching the surroundings, I was seeing golden sand on the beach and blue sea. So I concentrated on my task, on observing. And I saw a few young fellows smoking and looking at chicks going nearby. Young couples were kissing on the benches behind the trees. Some woman was making a fuss with her screaming brat, ugh, I don’t think I could ever have a kid, I’m not patient enough. An elderly woman was stamping about with a couple of really big shopping bags. I was always wondering how in the world these old women could carry such heavy stuff. And so I sat there, watching the place and the people. I was eating not so crispy fries, drinking some beer... I guess someone could take me for this odious type of client who thinks too much and drinks too little, funny, isn’t it? Soon many of the regulars, heavy drinkers, would start coming in and a guy like me only took their place. I was like a sponger in fact. Interesting... If I were a barman, I’d take myself for somebody whose wife made rowed with him, and so he didn’t have any other choice but to go to the bar. This type of men are usually broke, the wives are in charge of the money and the poor bastards have only got some small change for a cheap beer in this kind of place. I felt like pissing. Fuck, why didn’t I think about it before?! I could have gone to the john and made myself piss before. Shit!!! A toilet? No. Men’s room? Oh, not at all. The gents? Wrong again. Dirty, stinky shit hole, that’s what it was! When I entered, I could smell shit, old pissing and God only knows what else. I almost puked so I held my breath. I was afraid to touch anything and I took out a tissue to open

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the door with it. I lifted the dirty toilet seat and then I really felt sick— someone had left his pile of shit. I reached to get another tissue but it turned out I didn’t have any more left... I knew I couldn’t hold my breath any longer. I was desperate and pulled my jacket sleeve on my palm to touch the flush. It was a big mistake, the water splashed like a fucking Niagara, so hard that I got my trousers wet. It was disgusting but I had to pull myself together. I couldn’t breathe so I stretched the sweater to cover my nose and I started pissing. It was stinking terribly but if I didn’t have the sweater on (my nose) I’d probably vomit. I pissed very quickly and left this hellish place with a big relief. Oh yes, that was a real hell. If I were a writer and was supposed to write a story about a character who goes to hell after death, I’d definitely make this john that hell! When I was leaving, I almost ran into some drunk. I even felt a bit sorry for him but I guess he was used to this kind of shit. When I finally got to my table, I drank half of my beer. I had to wash my throat, I still felt the stink from the john. I decided to limit myself to one beer only, I wouldn’t simply handle the second visit in this snot. I dialled my home number again. Still, there was no answer. I was even glad because I knew if they drank a lot, my task would be so much simpler then. On the other hand however, I hoped they wouldn’t be intoxicated too much ’cause then all my suffering and planning could just go to hell. The time was passing so fucking slowly. More and more clients were coming as well as there was more smoke and loud conversation in the air. I hoped none of the drunks would come and talk to me when they’d had too much to drink. Unfortunately, I could only hope... In time this joint was full of drunks and the only last non-taken seats were at my table. I could bet my life—and I wouldn’t lose—that someone would come along very soon. And so someone did, a bum to be more precise. He muttered something—do I mind or what—and not waiting for my reply, he sat and made himself comfortable. Thank God the table was at the window, otherwise he might have sat right opposite of me and blocked my view. The view that was already not so clear since it started to get dark. I knew exactly what would happen—making a new friend and confiding. The bum would brag about his miserable boozy life. Ugh! Cheeeeeeeerssss pal—he mumbled and raised his glass. Fuck, no, no way—I was really pissed off.

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And I was ignoring that guy and looked the other way, not giving a damn. —Oh, eeee, what the fuck, youuu—he tried to tell me something but I still have no idea what that could be. Not that I wanted to know. I felt his bad breath, though. Fuck him! It was too much for me, couldn’t he just booze in silence? Oh no, no, he had to open his stinky mouth instead and pick on me. —Ssoo, you thinkk you’re ssoo better, huh?—I made him angry just by not saying anything. If I didn’t have to watch the scenery and be careful, the fucker would end up with a broken nose on his back, crying for help. Thank God he finally decided to back off. Just because one of his pals turned up and they started minding their own business. They mumbled something about me but I really didn’t give a fuck. I was at that pub for over an hour more and then... Halleluiah! Yeah, I saw them, alright. They were buzzed and heading for the taxi stand nearby. When the cunts finally left, I could leave the dive myself. I took a cab and went to Ecstasy where I paid for the whole night in advance. I chose Svetlana, the most meek and the most greedy who would do anything, even the most kinky stuff for extra money, of course. I took the room on the first floor, gave the girl a few hundreds and promised to give her another few in the morning. All she had to do was wait for me and let me in through the window. And if somebody asked for me afterwards, she was to say we were fucking all night long like crazy. Of course she didn’t ask about anything and agreed to do so. I guess she’s quite hard to surprise, she must have seen lots of weird stuff in her life. Maybe she took me for another sick pervert or a fetishist, I really don’t give a damn. I didn’t pay her to think anything about me after all. I opened the window and jumped out. Then I took a cab and went back at the square. From the square I went home on foot, the same way that I arrived a few hours before. I was walking surrounded by darkness, cut with a moonlight from time to time, like a surgeon’s scalpel. When I finally arrived home, all the lights inside where off. Everything indicated that the drunk cunts were fast asleep. So it was up to me and me only from that time. When I realized this, I felt a little anxious. I knew if I’d screw something, I could never have another

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opportunity to carry out my plan. I snuck near a window which was half-open, stopped and started to listen. My lucky star was generous that night, it seemed to be silent in the house. I went near the front door and waited a minute or so for some moonlight. Then, I found the right key on my key ring. The hardest moment was approaching, the most uncertain one. I realized that I wasn’t capable of predicting everything. The door might creak. Also there could be their shoes thrown all over in the hall. I could just trip and make some noise. Of course alcohol could make their sleep too light or they would be too fast asleep. My hands started shaking, I was sweating and my heart was pounding like crazy. I was unlocking the door with my two hands, very slowly and carefully, expecting the lock to crack any second. Luckily everything went smoothly, I opened the lock without any surprises, the door knob didn’t screech and the door didn’t creak at all. It was pitch dark inside. I closed the door very carefully and crouched down, touching one hand the floor. I was going on my hands and knees towards the locker. I felt like someone was watching me but I realized it could be just an impression because of the darkness around me. My tape recorder, a little bottle and a piece of clothing was all I needed and everything was in that locker. I put everything except the tape recorder in my pocket. All I had to do then was to play a redskin. The Blackfoot would sneak in and hurt the Paleface! I took off my shoes and put them near the locker—I really didn’t want to leave any dirty marks on the stairs. On my hands and knees I approached the stairs, feeling as if somebody was watching me yet again. I wouldn’t be too surprised if suddenly that somebody turned on the light. After all, one of the cunts could have problems with sleeping. In that case I guess I’d pretend to be completely buzzed. I drank only one beer but whether you drink one or ten, you smell the same. The situation would get worse if they took me for a burglar and hit me on my head. I heard a lingering snore upstairs which calmed me a little. I was about to go upstairs when suddenly I heard some noise, mumbling or something. It was creepy, I froze for a while. My heart was pounding like crazy, I was staring through the darkness. But it turned out that one of the bitches was lying on the sofa in the living room downstairs. The question was: which one? They look alike. I heard another snore from upstairs. You stupid son of a...—I was really pissed with myself—YOUR CUNT

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NEVER SNORES!! Yeah, yeah! But what if she snores when she’s drunk?? You’ve never seen her so drunk before... I started to listen out for another snore and when I finally heard it, I knew exactly who was who and where. The snoring sound was coming out of the guest room upstairs which meant Angie was there and my cunt was waiting for me downstairs. Thank God, there is justice after all. With my heart in my mouth I snuck up quietly to the sleeping one. It wasn’t so hard because I was walking on a soft thick carpet. I took out a bottle carefully to chloroform the bitch who was so wasted that I wasn’t even scared she’d wake up. Yeah, even bombing wouldn’t make her stand up. All I had to do next was take the cunt upstairs. It was quite an obstacle but I was determined that nothing would spoil my plans. So I took Martha with me and went towards the stairs. The most difficult part of this task was to go upstairs quietly so that none of the steps would creak to put my beloved wife against the door without her falling her down like before. I have no idea how I did it, but I really did. Sometimes, when a man focuses on something, he falls into this strange trance and I guess that’s what happened to me that night. My senses were keen, my moves—precise and I had this warm, calm feeling in my stomach that everything would be fine and nothing would go wrong. And everything did go okay! When I went back downstairs, I put my shoes on, took the tape recorder and went outside. I locked the door and near the open window I turned it on. The loudspeakers helped me and shortly the scream: “Angie! Angieeeeeeeeeeeeee!, Angi!!!!!!!!!!” was heard. Yeah, it was so clever of me! I recorded my wife when she was calling her fuckin’ sis for dinner. When I turned off the equipment, I heard a scroop of opening door, a cracking sound of breaking bones, a body was collapsing. Goodbye, my beloved wife! I didn’t wait to see what would happen next, I ran into the darkness. I only heard a desperate scream and suddenly my soul was fulfilled. The sweet revenge, delightful fortune, freedom and independence. Everything did come true! So I got back to the Ecstasy—for my alibi, of course! Before I got to the city, I realised I’d left the tape recorder in the woods, in the bushes. I’d only taken the tape with the recording which I’d destroyed. Luckily I had my lighter with me. The one and only piece of evidence—ruined, once and for all! The rest was a piece of cake—taxi, liquor store and some booze, a small

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bottle of flavoured special herbs bitter vodka. Then—the Ecstasy. I knocked on the window and Svetlana, good girl, opened it. Yeah, she knew she’d get some extra money! For the rest of the night the little whore did whatever I wanted, I was her master. In the morning I opened the bottle of vodka and drank it—I wrote on my note the day before I’d get drunk, after all. All I had to do then was to come home. Master of it all! I guess I’d have to play the role of a widower in despair for some time but who said I was a bad actor? That would be the role of my life!

3. Angelina

It’s been a week since my sister died. I couldn’t get through it if it weren’t for strong tranquilizers. I felt like an emotionless dummy. Numbed, demented. Maurice, ex-Mr Prick, nowadays Fuckin’ Son of a Bitch, was just eating his soup. The one that I’d prepared especially for him. I sat in the armchair nearby and pretended to read a newspaper, I was watching him closely. The fucker was eating his last meal with relish. Suddenly he became stiff like a string, turned red, started breathing heavily, opened his mouth and touched his chest. He got up from the chair and looked at me. His eyes almost popped out like ping-pong balls. He fell on his knees and managed to moan: My heart... That’s right! You heartless son of a bitch—I hissed as icily as I could. Ange...?—he guessed and fell flat right on the carpet close to my feet— as if he wanted to beg for my forgiveness. And justice for all (of us)—I couldn’t hide my satisfaction. I made sure he really died, like an animal. Like an animal that he was— to be sure he wouldn’t hurt anyone else. All I had to do then was pretend to be a widow in despair. I decided to put away the drugs for the time of the Fucker’s funeral to melt into tears. But of course not to mourn him but my sister. I called the ambulance and cried that Mr Prick probably had a heart attack (oh my God!!!). You must come quickly to save the fuck, ha, ha, ha! And so they came and confirmed the death of the Fucking Prick. Amen to that!

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Why did I commit murder? Why didn’t I just kick the prick out, why didn’t I divorce him? That awful morning he finally rolled into the house and looked at me— a pathetic travesty of a strong, resourceful woman I used to be: my hair was a mess, I had puffed red eyes thanks to my crying and runny nose—and pretended to care. When I watched him closely however, I saw how insincere he really was, that little smile he had—the fucker was quite delighted! Then I understood, immediately, that he had all of this planned. My God, what happened in here? You cannot lie, oh no, you son of a bitch—I thought. Angelina fell down the stairs. Mr Prick’s face suddenly changed, he turned pale. I guess that was the moment he really started worrying and only one word was screaming in my head: M U R D E R E R! My inner voice kept on repeating it so loud as if it was trying to get away and scream as loud as it could. Somehow I managed to keep it all in, crush it. I really couldn’t reveal what I was almost certain of. It’s horrible—the Prick moaned. He looked as if he was about to have heart attack—but is she okay?—he asked coming near. She broke her leg. Oh!—the Prick started to dramatize again insincerely. He put out his hands towards me. Stop it, you stink, I can smell vodka. So maybe I..., well...—he kept on repeating. Yes, just go to bed—I ordered—I must get some sleep as well—I added. I went upstairs worrying he’d go with me. Luckily I didn’t hear his steps behind me but a BANG—he collapsed on the sofa. I rushed into the bathroom. I had a big and bitter feeling in my throat. The bad memories from this horrible night returned and I started to experience my sister’s death again. I wanted to cry as loud as possible but I knew perfectly well I couldn’t do that—the fucker didn’t sleep for sure. The despair and fear in my soul was overwhelming. I took a towel that was nearby and put it on my face. It muffled my weeping enough. I have no idea how long I was sitting, squashed between the bathtub and the wash bowl, crying. But I took as much time as it was enough to go through the medicine chest in the bathroom and I wasn’t disappointed, I

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found some tranquillizers. I took three pills and drank some water from the tap. After a while I finally dozed off. That night something very strange happened. I woke up so cold, so penetrating cold as if my bones were made out of ice. I was forced to open my swollen eye lids because something gave me creeps and I had the feeling there was someone else with me. The room was illuminated by the moon. The moonlight gave a pale light which one by one showed the furniture and other objects in the room—the bedroom seemed full of gloomy creatures. But it wasn’t this that gave me the creeps—as if something out of my sight was watching me. I sat doubtfully on the bed and instinctively looked behind my back. Of course I didn’t see anyone which didn’t help me at all. On the contrary, the strange feeling became even stronger. As if this someone (or something) didn’t want to let me go back to bed. I looked around trying to discover the object of my fear and suddenly I noticed something on the window. I got up and in the pale moonlight discovered an inscription—a very weird one, as if written with a dirty greasy finger. I was shivering again and my heart felt like full of little needles when I read the sentence: HE WAS THE ONE THAT KILLED ME NOT YOU, HIM! What happened next? I don’t remember at all. A new day came. I woke up and wasn’t so sure whether it was real or not. It could have been the truth but also a hallucination since I took so many drugs. Was it a message from the beyond or a projection of the anguished subconsciousness—that I didn’t know. But one thing was unquestionable—it was Maurice who killed my sister! Waking up was like the most terrible hangover I’d ever had, I was crying, so sad and helpless, suffering from paralysing depression, couldn’t get up. I just wanted to die. I forced myself to get up anyway to take some pills which made me act like an automatic machine, again. Only in this emotionless state could I act. In the bathroom I managed to hide my despair with some make-up. Afterwards I took a suitcase and went downstairs. The fuck was in the living room and he even tried to say something because I noticed his gob moving but I made sure he didn’t: I’m going to Angie’s. Order pizza for dinner. But... No buts. You have to manage on your own for a couple of days. I’ll be

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taking care of Angie, she really needs my help—I informed him and left the house. I wasn’t able to drive, not in my condition and certainly not after so many drugs. I ordered a taxi. My God, it was so strange—I realized I was thinking of my sister’s death and that I would kill a person soon—it didn’t matter this person was a fucking prick—and yet I didn’t feel anything at all! I couldn’t admire the effect of the drugs—it was as if I had a paralysed soul! I went home to pack everything I owned in boxes—I couldn’t have been both Angelina and Martha. The old good Angelina had to leave, go somewhere very very far, the end of the world perhaps. Starting today, I am going to be my sister! As soon as I arrived, I met Jens, my neighbour who came to our country thinking it would be his “place made dreams come true, ei, where people is good end the land is chip”. God mornin! Hello Jens—I muttered. Why is you so sed? Well, I guess I’m leaving... I’m going for a trip around the world. Oooo, is a god trip, god! You must to be heppy not sed! But I don’t think I will be back, you see, I have cancer—God, I was lying—I have only one year left, maybe two... Ooo my God! It is so no god, no god, you is so god neigh bore—he seemed to be really upset. A neighbour Jens, neighbour. Neighbor—Jens said quietly—can no find other, you is one and the only—he added sadly. I didn’t want to correct him again so we said goodbye and I went home. I liked the guy but as you can imagine, I really didn’t feel like talking or fraternizing that day, the whole of me was like a big NO. I started packing after I had taken all the boxes from my attic. I come up with my best ideas while I’m cleaning or doing some other housework, it was no different then. I started remembering the detective stories I read, all for nothing. What’s good in a book, doesn’t necessarily have to be good or—what’s more important—safe in real life. Finally, I came up with a one and only, unique idea. Thank God I used to study history. Now I can see I was as mean as Maurice. No, not because I ended his

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lousy life. Unfortunately, apart from taking the fucker’s life, I also had to kill another living soul—an innocent and helpless one who didn’t do anything wrong. I tried to justify myself because I was taking lots of pills then. The pills made me something without a soul, only filled with flesh, blood and faeces. I was chemically anesthetized. But it’s a lousy excuse, right? I didn’t lose my mind completely, I knew exactly what I was doing. I even tried to explain myself that this poor creature would end up at somebody’s plate anyway but this excuse seemed so lame. The blood was really on my—not some butcher’s—hands. But I didn’t feel sorry for Mr Prick at all. It doesn’t however change the fact that since then I have been... scared. I’m scared what will happen to me after I die. I’m afraid of condemnation. Inferno. It was revenge, getting even—an eye for an eye—but I wasn’t supposed to bring anyone to justice. I didn’t have the right to decide whether he could live or die. Well, it is too late now—and I’m going to have to live with that. I bought a sweet little piglet. If I were myself then, I would definitely be delighted to have so lovely a creature. But it was different then. I felt like carrying an object, not a living thing. A piece of a deadly weapon. An element that was trying to get away—I guess the piglet could sense danger and knew its days were numbered. I was in shock and felt like I was in altered states just like on the night I cremated and buried my twin sister. I remember I took the box with the piglet to the pound and brought Mr Pooh there, my good old pet. I hurt the dog too and the poor thing had no idea why his owner was so mean. I brought the dog close to the piglet in the box but too far to reach for Mr Pooh. And so, two animals that in normal circumstances wouldn’t look at each other twice or even could become friends, would turn into arch enemies. In the next few days Mr Pooh turned into a starving beast. Hunger may change even the most gentle character into something very disgusting. Even us, homo sapiens with morality, we are capable of eating other human beings when we face death of starvation! I acted like the worst bitch ever— my piglet would die in a couple of days of fear. There will be an enormous amount of stress hormone in its blood. I will fatten it up. The piglet will help me make a soup for Maurice. Of course what killed the piglet would also kill Mr Prick—the stress hormone so high is a poison. The same thing that kills workaholics and bundle of nerves with a heart attack also will kill Mr Prick instantly. His heart will just stop.

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In the middle ages people didn’t even realize a stress hormone existed but they knew if a frightened animal died, its blood was a strong poison. This very poison killed many leaders, emperors and kings. No one would consider this chemical a poison. I was sure that even in case of autopsy nobody would discover anything—only this high level of a stress hormone in his blood. Everybody would just assume Mr Prick had a stressful life for a long, long time and they would write in the official death certificate: DEATH OF NATURAL CAUSES—HEART ATTACK. And, that’s it! I did it, I almost famished Mr Pooh—I guess he will never forgive me. Even today, whenever I’m around him, I can see fear in his sad eyes. I condemned the poor little piglet to unbearable sufferings. The poor thing must have felt like a convict in his cell, kept on an electric chair for hours, convinced he will soon experience a cruel death. All of that just to kill a man. To take revenge for my twin sister’s death. Was it worth it? No, not really. I’m an intelligent woman. I could have come up with a different plan which wouldn’t include killing others. On the other hand, I wasn’t myself then. I was in shock, in a great despair, on strong tranqulizers, like some junkie. Well, as they say—it’s no good crying over spilt milk. I cannot turn back time, can I?

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A parasite by

Christopher T. Dabrowski

English translation by Monika Olasek

—Watch out, one is behind you!’ —Got it!—Gruntz answered. He scrutinized the rubble, but saw no one. Who would have thought? These creatures were cleverer than the law admits. He turned the thermovision camera on. It’s barely alive, I just have to finish it off, he thought, seeing a crawling parasite. He moved carefully towards it. You never know. During three years of cleaning this planet, it turned out that these creatures are cleverer than they seemed. They were familiar with the art of tricks. Their eyes met and he saw fear in the parasite’s eyes. He crushed its head. The brain flew out of the skull. —It is so fragile.—Disgusted, Gruntz moved his antennas.—And still it poisoned the environment of the entire planet. It murdered so many species of plants and animals! It was the highest time to eliminate the parasite—a human.

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In Lieu of a Memoir by

Tadhg Muller

I’d wound up trudging through a bitter London winter in the guise of a would-be debt collector for an ailing bakery, run by an ex-model with a heavy cocaine habit, who was embarking on her first major literary work, “Let’s Make Cup Cakes, You and Me.” I was working a seventy-hour week. After three months, the strain was telling. I’d grown detached from my wife, her frustration largely driven by my inability to provide sufficient means for our survival and by my shameless scrounging after other people’s money. I’d been evicted from our flat and had taken to parking my sorry arse just about anywhere. In this condition of poverty, isolation and sexual frustration, I’d begun a romantic liaison with a Mongolian patissier, an illegal who’d trained in Novgorod, Russia, where she learnt to make the plumpest little pastries. We would fuck senselessly, with her long black hair falling loosely on the flattened bags of spelt flour which she lay on with her baker’s apron rolled up to her tits and her legs spread apart, and me awkwardly, with my boiler’s suit undone and tangled around my calves. We would finish and I would dust her generous hips and she would dust mine. There was no kissing, just fumbling and fucking, no goodbye and no hellos. I’d go home empty and alone, my loins sucked dry, my battered little man incapable of pissing straight. The light would be out, a cold dinner would await me, and I’d hear the echoes of a line from some forgotten epic, recited to me back when the times were good, “He that eats alone, eats his own sins.” In other words, eats shit! And shit I ate—the work, the infidelity, the food without substance, the hustling. In the dark, I’d walk round my derelict West London flat like some hopeless soldier, like some would-be mercenary, tucking my son in. I’d try to sleep but couldn’t. Lying there, feeling dirty and ashamed, the only reprieve I could think of was to revive, once more, my stalled literary journey. I began to wonder: Were there other whores like me? Were there other artists who fucked tartars and who bummed other people’s smokes, who scrounged around for money and put the heat on desperate men to

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pay the debts from which they were running? Poverty had made me cowardly. In my fear I’d become everything I hated: a drunk, a cheat, a womanizer, a liar and a thief. So I decided to hunt down my lost companions, my literary posse. And that was how I hit upon the so-called North North London Writers Group and began my own path toward redemption… My inspiration, the North London Writers Group (a more respectable fraternity), I located late one night somewhere in cyberspace. Immediately I opened their website, it was as if I’d entered a room without windows, a room without doors. They declared they were “a friendly group of writers.” I then read that not anyone could become a member. Their website said places were reserved for “journeymen with publication history” or for those now “seriously pursuing publication.” “Journalists” and “MA graduates” could also be admitted. I had no publication history. I was not seriously pursuing publication. I was not a journalist, or an MA graduate. The bottom line was that this last ditch attempt at locating my own Jerusalem had ended in nothing but a fresh disappointment that I couldn’t bear. And so began my electronic correspondence with that group, leading in turn to other electronic correspondence. It records a very awkward period in my life and so is repeated here in lieu of a memoir. And why not? After all, the conventions of memoirs have changed or should change. The true records now are incomplete and fleeting. No longer are they consigned to lost diaries and tattered note books; rather they will be found in the impulsive trails of cyber messages darting through cyberspace like the misspent, premature ejaculations of a bad lover. Sent: 12 November 2010 12:51 am Subject: A Funeral Note Hello Victor, I am an unpublished writer, I am not a journalist, nor an MA graduate. I read the brief outline of your group and it read like an ad for a funeral in the Classifieds. The group sounds like a collection of evangelists, or fascists, or some queer incarnation of the two in literary form, perhaps even a self-help group for arseholes. I think your membership should only include unpublished dropouts, with current or former vices, little money, not much sophistication, and serious time limitations. Perhaps they should even live in extreme circumstances that only allow them to write in the dark (much like the

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cave painters of old, dripping blood on the walls). And what about single mothers with bold ambitions, who put their children to bed, have a sniff of Vix, and then write erotic novels (roughly a paragraph a night) about literary groups in North London? That could be good. You could meet strictly at dawn? Anyhow, I have to write my six paragraphs, and rise at 5.15 am. Sadly, for both of us, I do not fit the criteria to join your group, much though I might benefit from it and even enjoy it. I am thus considering starting the North North London Writers Group. It would be an alternative to the North London Writers Group. It would be based in the West, or the South, or the East, as the North is not on my radar and clearly it’s time to move. But, then, there is something to be said about the North North London Writers Group being somewhere other than the North. Many thanks, Hans Brady. There was no reply—a small victory. With haste, I set about sending the above message to a spiritual brother, a fellow dropout I’d befriended in a London kitchen, where we exchanged sordid anecdotes, usually about his escapades with Nothing Hill housewives, whilst he scrubbed dishes. He’d returned to Sydney to dig in and pursue his literary career as a crime novelist. As always, he was enjoying no success, but remained committed. I called him the Poodle, because his prose always spent too long in the salon. It never had a hair out of place. Perhaps that was the secret of his glorious, his perpetual failure? Sent: 13 November 2010 8:40 pm Fwd: A Funeral Note Dear Poodle, I started looking round, out of curiosity, for a writers’ group. God knows why! Actually, it’s partly because I’ve decided that if we leave this neighborhood and go either to the south or the east, I’ll try and start my own writers’ group. I think it will be effective, as I am fairly good at that sort of thing—getting things started!!! However, this triggered me to look at other writers’ groups. I could only find one called the North London Writers Group, I read the criteria to join and

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realized that for me it was a non-starter. So I felt compelled to write them an email, entitled “A Funeral Note.” Having written this, and concluded that it was fairly ridiculous, I realized the only person who would find it entertaining, with the possible exception of Victor, is of course you. Love Hans. Sent: 14 November 2010 12:45 pm Re: Fwd: A Funeral Note Hansie, I like it. I like it, and the funeral note. Sign me up. The Poodle. P.S. Could you send me the contacts for the North London Writers Group? I might email them suggesting a cultural exchange program with the Sydney Chapter of the North North London Writers Group. Sent: 14 November 2010 10.22 pm Subject: Developments Poodle, This idea of the North North London Writers Co-op: I am not kidding. I really think I could be on to something. I am going to work on some ads, start posting them across London with my son. I’ll create contact details—an email address—and send them to you. You can poster Sydney. Then, the North North London Writers Co-op can begin accepting submissions for its first publication of avant-garde writing entitled “Lost Chapters.” Each member would submit one chapter, then we can select a number for publication in a cooperative novel, called “74 Hand Jobs.” I’d present it to literary agents in London. As for the Co-op, there would be no rules except that before writing we’d have to swear a lot, and afterwards swagger a great deal. There would also have to be at least one sex scene every six pages, or perhaps every six minutes, as read by the semi- or sub-literate. I feel quite strongly about that. Any member who did not produce a sex scene often enough would have to be expelled. You could do likewise in Sydney—arrange some expulsions. I don’t know about government funding but we could only grow bigger, we could only grow stronger.

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God, we might even make a movie! There are no boundaries, my dear Poodle. There are only the stars! Hans. Sent: 16 November 2010 12.42 pm Re: Developments Hans, “There are no stars.” “I’ll find them.” I owe you a serious email and one will come but not this afternoon, nor tomorrow, because I am getting out of here. This place really shits me. I am even beginning to sound like you. As for the North North London Writers Group, I will only say this: we should always feel free to piss on one another, provided that the piss is a good piss, is a happy piss, and occurs outside in the open air, irrigating mutual thought under the stars. (Suggested new motto: “There are no stars.” “I’ll find them.”) In short, I remain, Fraternally, The Poodle of the North North London Writers Group (But shouldn’t it be a Collective?) Sent: 16 November 2010 12.01 pm Subject: Bombard the Fuckers Brother, I am happy with the motto but would suggest another: “I have been a con, it went wrong. I was a fool, I learnt a lot.” I will get started on the posters. Hans P.S. The North London Writers Club hasn’t responded. We shouldn’t stomach that. I will get you their email address, when we’re ready we

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will fucking strike—bombard the fuckers and tell them it’s time they dissolved, it’s time they went back to journalism. Sent: 18 November 2010 1.45 am Subject: North North London Writers Co-op Poodle, It’s started: I posted a hand written sign outside Ladbroke Grove tube station at 5.45 am Saturday. It read: No Journalists No Postgraduates No White People The North North London Writer’s Co-op “There are no stars And we’ll find them.” —The Poodle (a founding member) Fully independent writers group Contact: Hans at hjbrady@yahoo.co.uk Within a day, there were three inquiries, one person became a member, another asked: Do you have a problem with white people? I answered that no man was white, the white man was a notion, the white man was the diablo, incarnation of evil. I didn’t hear back. Yours, Hans P.S. I am having a coffee with Lloyd Vigo next week, to talk about writing and to take the Group from two to three members (four if you include the Sydney branch). P.P.S. According to my wife, my sign was gone by midday Saturday, which is a shame, as she did it, and, well, it looked pretty fucking hard core. P.P.P.S. “Bright, bright stars, baby, I can see them.”

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Sent: 21 November 2010 12.42 am Re: North North London Writers Co-op Hans, Keep after the great white whale of the North North London Writers Group. There must be at least a short story there. You should write it in installments (perhaps by email to a brother in Sydney who promises assistance but never delivers). By the way, that brother in Sydney has reservations about belonging to anything that is called a Co-op as opposed to a Collective. Because IN ANY MOVEMENT THERE MUST BE AT LEAST THE PROMISE OF VIOLENCE, and the term “Co-op” has, he thinks, unfortunate connotations of wholefoods restaurants in the seventies. Also, that brother in Sydney may be a wanker—indeed he recently posted signs around his desk saying I MUST NOT BE A WANKER—I repeat he may be a wanker, but still he believes the Collective’s motto should take the form of a dialogue: —“There are no stars.” —“I’ll find them.” which strikes, he thinks, the right note of intellectual courage in the face of grimly declared facts. Also (minor point) that brother would prefer that his name, even his pseudonym, weren’t used anywhere, including on flyers in Ladbroke Grove. Why? Just because it’s his name, I suppose, and he will attach what statements he wishes to it. Use your own name, or your own nom de guerre, if you have to. I remain with goodwill, The (Existential) Poodle. Sent: 21 November 2010 2.30 am Subject: I am writing the short story. It is entitled: “Not in my brother’s name.” Hans. Sent: 25 November 2010 12.42 am Subject: Hans, I intend to dedicate my crime novel, “Murder 74,” to the North North

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London Writers’ Group, which will then live on in posterity. Yours, The Poodle P.S. “Murder 74” is set in a retirement village just outside Sydney. Sent: 25 November 2010 8.45 pm Subject: News from the Fat Badger Poodle, I met Lloyd Vigo at the Fat Badger. He asked me where the rest of the group was? I say, “I’m it,” and he asks me whether I’m “having a laugh.” I tell him I’m not a fucking comedian. He says he’s written three sci-fi novels: 1. The Doom. 2. Lost in Constellation 26, and: 3. No War Without Charlie I say I like the titles. He goes, “I brought you a chapter.” I take a look at the first paragraph and tell him it’s hilarious, and he asks me once more if I’m having a laugh? I tell him again that I’m not a comedian. He says: Where is everybody else? And I repeat, “I am it, Lloyd.” Then, the whole thing started to get a messy edge, just a bad fucking air. He asks me what have I got to show for it? I say, “Just the odd chapter and some note books.” He says again: “Are you having a laugh?” For the third time, I repeat I am not a comedian and I tell him that the meeting is becoming tiresome. He says, “Yes, this is a waste of time, you’re obviously a fraud.” I tell him I know a good literary group he could join. It’s called the North London Writers Group. He says: Hang on, isn’t that us? I tell him to watch it, this is the North North London Writers Co-op and he better watch his mouth when it comes to the North London Writers Group. The man has the nerve to ask me yet again whether I’m having a laugh. I tell him he’d better clear out, because quite frankly he’s not the kind of person that we’re after in the North North London Writers Co-op. Hans.

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Sent: 30 November 2010 12.43 pm Re: News from the Fat Badger. It has the appearance of the real! The Poodle Sent: 30 December 2010 4.30 am. Subject: More from the Fat Badger Poodle, I just met Tom Morgan, 19. He saw the ad at Ladbroke Grove tube station and took a month to follow up. Nice guy, we met at the Fat Badger. Then he asked about the quote on the sign from the Poodle, he said he liked the quote. He asked me what else I could tell him about the Poodle? I told him all I could say is that the Poodle was part of the Sydney wing, though there is already a schism. The Poodle was with the Collective and we were the Co-op. Then he asks whether I have any of your writing, and I say I’m not at liberty to say. The Poodle is the real thing, a kind of one-man secret society, and, well, he gets angry if anyone speaks for him, if anyone makes statements in his name. So I couldn’t say anything, except that the Poodle spent some time in the service. He asks if I mean military, then says: “Afghanistan?” and I tell him not to be so pushy, though I knew you’d once travelled over the Karakorum. He asked, “Where the fuck is that?” and I say, “Tribal areas of Pakistan.” It went well after that. Tom drank a few pints, then pulled out a joint and suggested we go for a walk. Poodle, you already have a cult following, and there is a rumour in the London literary underground that you were once a spook running operations across the Afghan border. Hans. Sent: 1 January 2011 12.25 pm Subject: Happy New Year Hansie, I have a poem for you to give to Tom. It begins: “I cannot love you.” Maybe you should recite it together at the next meeting of the Co-op? Yours,The Poodle.

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Sydney “Sire not children by a woman who wears gold jewellery,” Pythagoras I cannot love you the rigor mortis of your smile is a woman with a price on her head and eyes like cash registers your lies, your lies, and the bullshit that follows your skindeep optimism I am heading south here the sky’s great vacancy is a mouth or an arsehole admiring itself: nothing but borrowed phrases and slogans in lieu of thought your ladies of fashion I cannot tell from the creatures of the night So this is my goodbye At dawn the cathedral I love sails up College Street like a ghost ship But you I cannot love and the men, Staffordshire terriers, wear their flesh like jewellery, or armour, or jewellery and armour, that late imperial style! Sydney your face is fat, it is fat your face, and pampered, without definition I am heading south You are a simian circus a scree of anxiety There is no victory here in the war on excrement You are slimy as an overripe mango. You are oily as cockroach shit. You are a total moral and physical dump. Sydney This is my goodbye. Sent: 1 January 2011 3.14 am Re: Happy New Year You miserable cunt, We do not respond to poetry submissions.

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Sent: 17 January 2011 2.35 am Subject: Poodle, Tomorrow I have a meeting with Jo Fagottini, he deals in romance, and has a sideline in ripped-off cookbooks. Tom’s coming, too. Then we’re all going to drift up to the north, cruise around. Tom thinks Islington is the best bet. We’ll look for a pack of wankers flicking over their pages, then we’re going to try and beat the shit out of them, let them know what’s what. Let those bastards know that this is serious, that they are rude fuckers for not getting back to me, those fuckers in the North London Writers Group. I’m tired, brother. More fucking snow, more fucking rice and pasta, more Spartan living. I need some warm clothes. Hans Sent: 18 January 2011 12.36 pm Re: Jo Faggottini? Did you fabricate all of this? I don’t mind, but I’m at the point where, henceforth, my dealings with you will be conducted via my secretary. His name is Ernst Wanke. The Poodle Sent: 18 January 2011 10.17 pm Re: Re: Poodle, Like all history, some of it happened, some of it didn’t. What mattered was what was born, what came from it: the North North London Writers Collective. Hans Sent: 21 January 2011 12.22 pm Re: Re: Re: Don’t be slippery. Did any of this take place? Are you still in London?

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Sent: 21 January 2011 1.25 am Subject: Confessions of a Drunk, a Cheat, a Womanizer, a Liar and a Thief The meeting with Lloyd took place. Unfortunately, that was it. There was no more interest. As I told you, the sign didn’t last long on Ladbroke Grove. Hans.

Don’t be slippery. Did any of this take place? Are you still in London? Sent: 22 January 2011 12.17 am Re: Confessions of a Drunk, a Cheat, a Womanizer, a Liar and a Thief You are, in fact, a bastard. The next morning I rocked up at the bakery at a quarter to six, still high on the dreams of my encounters with that imaginary body of writers, the North North London Writers Group, a set of encounters that, I realised, had just come to an end. But, walking the streets, I couldn’t escape the feeling that my world, having gone from bad to worse, and then worse again, was about to change once more, and incontrovertibly. Yes, it was as if, through my fabrications, I’d shaken of all the cowardice, all the fear, the worthlessness and isolation, that had dragged winter into the pit of my soul. I found my boss in her office. She was at her desk, typing away at the final draft of “Let’s Make Cookies, You and Me.” She was working hard to meet the deadline imposed by Penguin. Her radio was blaring Travie McCoy ‘Billionaire’. I picked up a page. “Still working on this crap?” I said. She sat back obviously stunned, obviously wounded, but mostly just aware of the truth of my statement.

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“You’re fired, Hans,” she replied. I nodded and thanked her and so walked out, past the Tartar who offered me one last smile, then closed the door on that world, a world that was a far greater lie than all the fictions I’d concocted. I didn’t know where I was going. It was minus two degrees outside, the air was a bitter cocktail of ice and snow. Yet, inside me, I felt that I was done with being everything I hated. I knew that I was set upon being the person I really was—whatever that is; literature and the power of words?—at any rate, myself. Or as the Poodle had it: “There are no stars.” “I’ll find them.” (LONDON 2010)

N.B. The poem in the piece was written by the Author’s brother in Australia, Konrad Muller.

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A Sight Unseen by

Patrick Parr

I am the eyes of my master. He is the important one, not me. He is who matters, though there are times when I wish he would show me how much I mattered to him. But those feelings are dangerous. I was trained not to be weak, not to dwell on what I don’t get, but instead dwell on service, guidance, duty. We are waiting for the light to turn green. Around me I can smell fresh bread a half-mile away. I can hear a baby crying twenty feet behind us. She needs something to drink, I think, resisting the urge to yelp. I stare at feet, shoes, boots, heels moving past me. And, most importantly, I watch his feet. I make sure they remain along a straight line. We’re meeting his friend. Rachelle is her name. She smells like strawberries, and whenever we’re with her I sit on top of her feet under a table. We usually meet her for lunch, and then we walk back to our apartment, but today we have coffee outside. I situate myself under the table and sit against her bare legs. Her skin is soft and smells again, an even stronger strawberry. She has pink heels, but they’re a little bumpy and make me adjust. I listen and keep my head out far enough so that no one takes advantage of him. “Are you okay with doing this again? It is the third time,” he says to her. She crosses her legs. “Sweetie, I love it, and real soon, I’ll be loving you, again and again and again.” I look up at her and pant. She has bright red lipstick on and her eyes are highlighted light pink. She’s drinking a small iced coffee and there’s a pack of cigarettes on the metal table. I can smell the tobacco more than anything. I smell her hair spray, her deodorant. Every week she brings us a dozen different smells. “So half now and half after we’re finished?” he says, sliding some money across the table. “How do you know this is enough?” she says, chewing gum with her mouth open. Her right foot keeps bumping into my mid-section.

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“My friend here can recognize faces of the presidents. We’ve got a little code.” “Oh how cute.” She bumps me harder and lights a cigarette. “Well, are you ready?” “You bet.” The three of us walk back to our apartment. He lets me go up the stairs. “I can take it from here,” he says. I check and see if everything is where it’s supposed to be. I check the kitchen, the living room, the one bedroom. I push a chair in with the top of my head. I watch her take my place by his side. They’re laughing. Her arm is around his waist and she’s tickling him. I wish she wouldn’t tickle him, especially on the stairs. Who knows what might happen? They reach the kitchen and she starts unbuckling his belt. She takes her white top off and he picks her up. “Have a snack,” he says to me, but I’ve already released two cookies from the jug next to my water. I want to save them for later. I watch her direct him to the bed. “Wait, go left. No! Go right! Whew!” He slides the door closed halfway and calls her Michelle, his ex-wife, who left a few weeks after I was given my duty to guide and protect him. She’d hugged me before leaving and, I don’t know why, told me she felt guilty she didn’t believe the doctors fast enough when they told him he had a cyst behind his eyes. “We didn’t have the money, but I could have done more. I could have done more.” I sit under the table and listen to Rachelle cheer him on. After fifteen minutes, she gets up and puts her underwear and skirt back on. “See you next week,” she says, walking out of the bedroom. I watch as she reaches into his jeans and pulls out more than the other half they’d agreed on. She tries to touch me, but I pull back and give her a look. “Aww,” she says, still chewing gum. I run into the bedroom and try to express my frustration to him, but he just lies in bed, staring at the ceiling. He starts to cry. “God I miss her,” he says, pulling me toward him. “Do you think she’ll ever come back?” This is when I try to clean the tears from his face, so I can calm him, so I make sure he doesn’t get too sad, because the thought I always get when he does this is not something I should feel. I should ignore it, but I can’t. Like I said, I am the eyes of my master, but how I wish I could be his heart.

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The Question by

Mark Hendrickson

I remember my friend asking why the economy had changed and I couldn’t answer. Neither of us had done anything differently. Things happen, he said, without design or even failure of design, since both imply someone in charge caring. It isn’t paranoia that makes me think the world will end soon. Tomorrow we could be, not going to the zoo, or reading Newsweek, but trying to find clean water and carry it back to what had been a nice bathroom and store it in the stopped tub to defend with a wrench set. Talking with my friend late that night about the end of American supremacy, we concluded this wasn’t a bad thing but it left us feeling embarrassed. This must have been how the Romans and Ancient Persians felt. We remembered zombie movies we’d seen then war movies then were surprised to think war isn’t infrequent, which left us quiet for a while, and I wanted to say, “God loves us,” as if “Does he?” had been the question we couldn’t answer.

DECEMBER A.D. 2011 – ‘THE 18–35 DEMOGRAPHIC’

Going Through Withdrawals With A Synonym Of River by

Nicolas James Hampton

I am finding better days for myself in this still water. I am still. Still, I am still watching myself shake in waves here as I stand above Arcadia Creek, this babbling creek. Still is a babbling creek, though it holds nothing of stillness or drought or God, it is & I am not where I might have been, but next to this still babbling creek I walk beside with gerunds listening to a better wording for what I am not. And maybe a better writer, a better river wouldn’t fountain cliques or run on rapid sentences of pebbles, but as this drought that might drift with here with me babbles & tangents & takes me walking down Broadway in a New York spring while the crowd runs southbound & strangerful & everyone knows everyone can see no one but no one voice can be heard in the largest congregation of shared lonesome communion walking in long processions of babbling rain like mid-western rivers personifying bad poets caught in dry withdrawals, I am taking you, I, this babbling creek & Brooke, homely attendant at the Circle K who has nothing to do with this & Broadway’s shaking incoherent memories of rain where I am not this time that runs strange things through my punctuation & space. By now, I am wet with God’s dice, I can’t keep my hands entirely still. This was nice, listening, talking, still not making much sense in this babbling subtraction of thought.

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When We Didn’t Give A Fuck by

Nicolas James Hampton

we wore our pop references like tanks topped on too tight jeans to obscure our lack of culture in lakes shallow & skinny as a dip. When you hijack’d the National Anthem with Both Hands, replaced it with a tenacious Dick like a big bag of sand in an Aztec temple, I was barely a Coin Operated Boy & the fidelity was low. We found dead lives in song lyrics, ’80s movies, & the cheese we cut from a wheel of moon. Late into the nights we championed our kegs high above our heads held toward the ground, let our bodies set in backwards exaltations of the havens our stubbles would take us, confused sun worshipers without an accurate sense of direction. Driving was a pilgrimage & we were heretics never to be trusted with the radio. Sing, Mister Mercury, sing MAMA! We killed a man with a blowjob on the couch of a thousand space mates, we were as close as two people become before hating themselves, we were vomiting ouroboros in the neighbor’s lawn with the other toxins without beginning or end. Our names became dispatch legends, our minors in possessions became bachelor’s degrees. Intergalactic Police Code D&D, We,

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the dark matter of graduate students in coffee houses. We, under scowlsome daylights & Visine. We, dilated sensibilities of discomforted children dressing as our horrific selves on Halloween, we thought even all this would be in good jest & youth, but we were wasted as hellfire, remember?

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It’s A Really Obscure Title, You’ve Probably Never Heard Of It by

Nicolas James Hampton

Write a mix tape, steal all the ballads you sung to some girl half asleep beside you like poems that meant far too much to you at a time when you meant far too little to yrself, pass the lyrics off as yr own, spend the entire afternoon writing titles and names on thin cardboard with hearts to dot the eyes, generally bastardize all that new band’s hardly working work. Mix tapes are hard work when you don’t have a real job, when you don’t have anything but a ninety minute blank tape for an identity. List all the names no one knows till it sounds like you, you were cool at some imaginary time between the end of yr coffee shop occupation and yr 26th year but you still stage sit-ins in coffee shops, yr 27 and everything worth doing has already been done. Put it all in deck B and wait for the vague expression of strangers to sound meaningful and viciously familiar, press record and watch every pop reference line up for questioning like a big red button the FBI told you not to use. Now yr a rebel, do it again, that’s what she’ll scream when the compound genius of reorganizing other people’s cliches thrusts through her speakers. Dear Science, now she’ll understand you! You’d tell us who she is, but her mystery is the existential funk on line eleven, nobody cares, it’s just there to make yr sound deeper than double bass.

DECEMBER A.D. 2011 – ‘THE 18–35 DEMOGRAPHIC’

That’s Great, It’s Setting In Like A West Side Pop Song And by

Nicolas James Hampton

R.E.M. is singing so fast I can’t keep things apart as every non-sequitur the world over floods the blue bar scrolling karaoke TV screen light & all I can say clearly. Leonard Bernstein, you are Leonard Bernstein. This song started with sarcasm. These lines never end with a lie. By the 3 minute mark I’m curled into a ball with a cheap microphone between my thighs. I feel fine. I feel fine.

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Coming and Going by

Arnel Bansil

Not a word had passed between them since it happened. For four years, she made sure of that. But lately she’d been missing him and she began to wonder where he was. So when his name came up in a magazine, to her surprise, she decided she didn’t care what he would think. At the event she found him sitting alone at the bar drinking beer. She came up to him and touched his shoulder and asked if he could sign her copy. “I’ve read the first few chapters. You’re quite something,” she said. She looked closely into his eyes, waiting for a sign of recognition. He smiled. He held her gaze. He smiled and from his coat brought out a pen which he seemed to carry around for this purpose. “Well I’m glad at least someone still reads,” he said, taking the book from her hand, their fingers nearly touching. “Miss?” “Isabel,” she said. “Ms. Isabel Robles.” He signed his name on the cover. Then he said, “Funny,” he said, smiling. “I used to know someone with that name.” She shifted her weight carefully and leaned her elbow against the bar. “Interesting,” she said, never taking her eyes off him. “Do you know where she is now?” she wanted to know. He drank the last of his beer, slipped the pen inside his coat, and then he looked at her. For a while he sat there without saying anything. But she had this feeling he was looking at something very far away. “She’s gone,” he said. He finished signing her copy, thanked her, and then he went off to join his friends and left her alone at the bar. She looked at his handwriting, and it was about the only thing in this room that she could recognize. She stayed a while longer. Then she couldn’t stand it and left.

DECEMBER A.D. 2011 – ‘THE 18–35 DEMOGRAPHIC’

Francine by

Cyndi Gacosta

To Francine at 95 years old and aging There is one hour in one minute, one day in one hour One month in one week, and one year in one eternity The seasons, to her at 95 years old, do not matter There will always be summer and fall then winter and spring As it was and is and always will be to her Each day lasts a week and blends into the next At 8am, as the caretaker noisily steps into the kitchen, From her purple pillbox she takes with a half-empty glass of water: Calcium for bones, lanoxin for irregular heart rhythms, Quinapril for blood pressure and levothyroxine for a thyroid disorder Then back to bed irritated that the commode had not been emptied Then stares at the ceiling waiting, simply because she can’t go back to sleep At 9am she has breakfast, then at 1pm she has lunch, And at 5pm she has dinner—each meal lasts one day in one hour And each meal rolls over to the next with one mile of silence And one mile of distance between her and the caretaker Francine speaks English and is fluent in Yiddish and German But the person across from her, face hidden behind the flowers on the table Like the border fence between San Diego and Tijuana, with an extra mile Of desert between the two cities, speaks only Spanish Then comes the long wait on the couch not for her daughter Who might now be in Florida, or Maryland or is it Switzerland? Four days in four hours on the couch not for her son Who might now be in Connecticut, or did he say once on the phone

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Russia? China? Somewhere far and sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s halfway deaf. She waits for the clock to tell her itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s 8:30pm Then she prepares for bed and from her purple pillbox she takes With a half-empty glass of water: Calcium for bones, donepezil hydrochloride for memories, Stool softener, and warfarin for prevention of heart attacks Then back to bed in a new diaper, new sheets, and an empty commode Then shuts her eyes waiting to see if this one night will be one eternity

DECEMBER A.D. 2011 – ‘THE 18–35 DEMOGRAPHIC’

Below the freeway bridge by

Cyndi Gacosta

below the freeway bridge in the red and yellow of traffic on bikes they flee, the teen boys galloping horses wild, give a great big YAWP! pass the junkyard waste over the hills of tires and barb wires by the border, they heard wild cats call cooing birds bite, on the red streets of downtown the landscape was once green in spring 1943 magnificent with its river running free but now there are only rubber air and plastic clouds with its bitter rain burning through their tarp-roof houses

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Welcome to the Metropolis of a Soul by

Cyndi Gacosta

Welcome to the metropolis of a soul It is not built on the faith in a god But on the chaos in darkness where light begins In its explosion of gases, the infinite space grows a body It grows hair and skin. It grows an insatiable appetite for The electricity that jolts nerves awake. Its skyscrapers have bones of steel, muscles of concrete, and eyes of glass. They are built out of arrogance, pride and greed. They are kept erect sheathed in the warmth of a golden mouth. But inside they are soft and vulnerable. It is easy to penetrate one with teeth, to bite its veins And see how it floods the streets in red semen, which flows into The city’s bowels bloated with filth—the excreta, the carcasses, the chemicals. Its fumes rise through the street pores. It has the smell of sulfur and discharge dried up on a tongue, Only a bottle of liquor at the corner bar could rinse the taste away But wake dark desires strolling the night on the sidewalks, trailing behind The perfume of a curly brunette on her neck and between her legs, where Light never reaches the far corner of an alley, not even in the last bathroom stall. The walls don’t say whose mouth it is on the other side of the glory hole, swallowing Down its pipe the blood, the sweat, the grime of midnight encounters. The last train boards at 1:50am. The tunnels are empty. It is quicker to cross the streets under ground, where It is easier to kick a stray and laugh as it whines.

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It is easier to blend in the shadows and bury the knife in a spine. It is easier to run like mad, to howl, to feel the electricity go! go! go! Faster than the express train! Louder than singing, stumbling drunks! The electricity thrills. The electricity kills. The electricity shrills. Without it the city plummets into abyss suddenly As if the bridges have split and collapsed into the bay, as if The roads have cracked, and The pipe systems have froze and burst, And the plants are on fire making The air taste like metal, and The water like gasoline And the world a grave. The taxis run 24 hours. The ride is slow and calm. Its coffee smell and jazz tune mumblings rock passengers half to sleep But the electricity still hums in the night, in the neon lights and traffic lights. No one sleeps. No one speaks but the static noise of television, and when The sun begins to crown, a new day hides the night away under The freeway bridge, or in the dump trucks like crumpled tabloids, Like ripped plastic wrappers, like syringes half empty of a dream that’s Crusted over like a sugary sweet, or a sundried sore. The body grows. The skin. The hair. Its skyscrapers rise higher and higher, and The best view of the growing, festering, morphing metropolis is a park afar with A fountain, where in its pristine waters are coins—neglected, forgotten, worthless Pennies of a city’s hope and faith in itself, sunk forever in The acceptance of routine, of repeating history, of burning in The electric violence for the fear of all fears: The fear of a blackout.

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Cookbook by

Matthew Davies

Flicking through an old quarto of a cookbook with photographs good enough to eat. Not only the food itself, but the shakers, picnic red tablecloth and the silver gleam. She paws the page with Cinderella dainties, looking for the recipe that will override all the other senses, and turn her taste receptors into the captain of the brain. Food is still at most fuel for myself. And we donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t exactly have access to all these English vineyards. But Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m all for attempting the pavlova which defies who is the eater and who is the meal in its obtuse fruity capacity.

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Mirrors by

Matthew Davies

Mirrors that tell the truth should be banned from all homes and department stores or they’ll let your cat out of the bag The harrowing lines the pigment that collects in red embryonic mountains with hair The shame in acknowledgement when starvation mocks the flesh when poetry speaks to another reads for another At least this self-caught flash saves one from purchasing a well-donned rag betrayed by its price tag and sad labour The eyes hold forethought aloft in wrinkled moustaches and sparse medieval white

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Scarf by

Matthew Davies

‘like my scarf,’ she says not really asking pressing the cord to her neck via the limpest of arms really asking me to visit her wacko grandmother related by her own proud gossip partly afraid my sanity will creep past hers partly fearful that I’ll be outdone on the eccentric stakes I decline with ‘these family matters must be preserved’ I never thought I’d date a girl who colours-in, again I skid on her thick Textas make my bed and lie in it pushing the cloud of my twenty-something old age

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Denial is an Ugly Thing by

Matthew Thompson

I want to scream. Not just a mere yell of frustration, that would be too meek and too mild for the sheer banality and mind rotting tedium of what is happening in front of me. Normally, this would be a day of great triumph for me. A day to give off a cry of victory from the rooftops. I am in a hip urban restaurant having brunch with three movie producers who are mulling the idea of turning one of yours truly’s books into a film. I came to this meeting full of hope, having heard from my agent that the producers would like to meet me about turning my book into a film. I couldn’t believe it! My book! They wanted to doll it up with real actors and perform it so that it would be on the big screen! In front of me is the colossal—for me anyway—paycheck that they were going to give me in order to have the rights to my book! I was prepared to listen to some of their suggestions, believing it to be some of “the back and forth of the creative process” as one of the producers phrased it to me. After forty minutes in a meeting like this I suddenly know what that phrase means. It means “you sit tight and watch as we violate your work through whatever orifice we see fit”. The head of the meeting seems to have had four facelifts. As she speaks, I can’t help but wonder how she is able to contort her mouth in such a way to enunciate the words she is saying. Her second in command has a fake tan that makes him darker than the pretzel that I am munching on to alleviate the horror of what I am hearing. All of them are drinking tonic waters, as if a sudden burst of sugar, caffeine or alcohol would cause them to have a sensory overload. As they speak in such bizarre words such as ‘buzz’, ‘the word’ and ‘the goss’ I have suddenly realised that my munching on my pretzel is becoming similar to a hungry squirrel nibbling on a walnut. Maybe this is how they grind you down, I wonder to myself, by pushing

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back through the evolutionary scale. If this is the case, I resolve to fight it. They pitch actor names at me to play characters, that I have written as part of the back and forth of the creative process. “We were thinking about her play the psychiatrist,” one producer says, this one with enough hair dye on his head to cause another oil spill should he decide to swim in the ocean. That’s another big term—we were thinking— translated it seems to mean that they know a bit more about this book that some silly duffer who just happened to have written it. My hearts sinks. Her? Her?! The book describes the psychiatrist as feisty, yes. It does not describe her as slutty and whose breasts would arrive in the room five minutes before the rest of her.

My hearts sinks. Her? Her?! I wonder if it’s too much to ask for an alcoholic beverage of some sort. Just a nice scotch on the rocks to numb what has become a searing pain in the back of my skull. My sense of propriety reminds me that it is only noon and as such it may be a bit early for such a request. After all, they may not think much of me as a result, what with their tonic waters and such. “I know what you’re thinking,” says Oily Man. “How on Earth are we going to get her? Well she is getting a lot of buzz at the moment for her reality TV work and she wants to spread her wings. Believe me, she’ll add so much hype to this film.” Where do they keep on coming up with these words?! I motion for a scotch to the nice waitress who is milling about our table. The action seems to warrant a slight raised eyebrow from Plastic Face. I can’t help but wonder if the raised eye brow would have been higher if the botox quotient in her face had been less. Soon though they’re off again, telling me that “we were thinking” that perhaps the location could be changed from Manchester to Los Angeles, and that some hip hop band— that I haven’t heard before—could do the soundtrack “to get in the kids”.

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Thankfully the scotch has arrived so that last sentence can be anaesthetised before it sends me into shock. I cannot take any more of this. I take a deep gulp before tearing up their check for my book rights deal and scattering it on the floor and turning on my heel and storm out with my head held high. At least that’s what I had planned to do. But as I look on the set of the movie, I’m glad it wasn’t that simple. Because although she is a little slutty as the psychiatrist and although she needs eighteen takes to get one line of dialogue together, I am certain she will get a good experience out of this. So I am proud to be giving her this opportunity. Same goes for those hip hop artists—though I still haven’t found out their names. People may also scoff at the notion that Los Angeles has any of the charm, nature or plot relevance that Manchester did too but I’m glad someone has decided to show LA in a more mature perspective. Manchester gets way too much press anyway. And people may think that I sold out my integrity to make this, but I have a mansion and a butler who say differently. Because I did tear up their check. And then accepted their much higher second offer.

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The Devil’s Principles by

Matthew Thompson

The man sipped his drink quietly and gazed across at the scantily clad barmaid, her clothes barely hiding her virtue. He held his hand up to try and get her attention. “Same again, please.” The barmaid poured another whisky, dropping two cubes of ice into the glass. “That’ll be twelve dollars, sir.” The man grimaced at her. “Are there any drinks that aren’t hideously expensive here?” The barmaid shrugged. “You’re in a brothel, honey. Drinks ain’t exactly what most of our customers have in mind.” The man smiled weakly and nodded while solemnly handing over his money. “What’s your name?” the barmaid asked him. “Michael. And what is yours?” “My name is Jennifer. Say, I’ve never seen you before here and I’m on most nights here or... upstairs. What gives?” “I’m here to meet someone an old acquaintance of mine,” Michael replied, swirling his whisky in his glass. “Oh. A friend?” Jennifer asked. “No. An enemy.” Michael replies. “Than why do you need to meet him?” Jennifer asked. “Because I need to ask him a question.” “Well, maybe I can help you spot him.” Jennifer asked helpfully. “There is no need,” Michael said. “He is your manager and I believe he is standing right behind you.” Jennifer turned quickly to see a man dressed in a suit that seemed to radiate darkness. “Mr. Ardere I do apologise. I was just attending to this gentleman’s—” The manager held up his hand and smiled gently at Jennifer.

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“There is no need to apologise, Jennifer. I will escort Michael here to my private office. Thank you for being such a great help with him.” “Oh, not at all, Mr. Ardere.” Mr Ardere turned to Michael and extended his hand. “This way, sir. I know we have a lot to discuss.” Michael looked around as he followed Ardere up the stairs. “Quite a nice establishment you’ve got here,” he said, wrinkling his nose up at the immorality surrounding him. Girls were draped over all sorts of exotic furnishings, showing their wares to prospective clients. Some were taking others upstairs to private rooms “Oh, you know, it keeps me busy when I want it to,” Ardere replied jovially. “I do apologise for being late incidentally. Something had to be taken care of” “Not at all. It’s... interesting to see you busy for a change,” Michael mused. Some of the clients, Michael noted, were the dregs of middle-aged manhood, looking for a cheap thrill. Others, were much younger and inexperienced—virgins who thought that this would be the safest and easiest way to cross that threshold. “I suppose that’s the closest I am going to get to support is it?” Ardere asked. “Yes.” “Well, then thank you,” Ardere said, closing the door as they entered his office behind them. “Although I do think that your name is in pretty poor taste.” “Hmmm?” “Ardere. It’s Latin for catching fire, isn’t it?” “I do believe it is. Now, would you like a proper drink, Michael? I have some whisky here that was stilled for just such an occasion. Care to join me in a tipple?” “I think I could use a proper drink... Lucifer.” “So,” Lucifer said, as they sat down opposite each other on the plush lounges, “what brings the Archangel Michael, the one who cast me from the gates of Heaven to my humble abode here on earth?” Michael swirled around his drink again, avoiding Lucifer’s gaze and grimacing.

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“I don’t suppose our Father has forgiven my... little spat, has he?” Lucifer said, smiling at his former friend’s discomfort. “Lucifer... out of all the angels, we were the first. The first two. We were equal in so many ways and yet in so many ways different. Our Father created us so that we could carry his word and his actions to the universe that he created. We were his heralds—to ensure that He would not be tainted by the universe.” “I am well aware of my creator’s use for me, Michael. Does this passage of prose have a point?” “Then why, Lucifer? Why would you abandon these duties and allow yourself to be cast in to the Abyss? Why turn you back on the light of our Father?” Lucifer roared back in his chair laughing, tears streaming down his face. Michael was not expecting an answer that was any different, but he still felt incensed by Lucifer’s lackadaisical attitude. “I am serious, brother!” “I know, I know,” Lucifer said, wiping the tears from his eyes and sipping on his whisky. “Then why do you not answer me?” Michael asked earnestly. Lucifer walked slowly across to Michael’s chair and filled his glass before doing the same with his own. “I think this may take some time.” “We both know that we were created by our Father to carry one of the twin firmaments of his creation,” Lucifer said. “He could not do it himself as to touch the Earth would be to corrupt his perfection,” he said, sitting himself back on the chair. “I had the power of the Word and therefore became responsible for bringing Heaven’s Light through the universe through the power of his Word.” Michael nodded. “You, on the other hand, were given the power of Deed. You were to be our Father’s example—his sword-arm and his shield. But Deeds also have another power—for it is through deeds and not words that we weigh a person’s worth.” “Their soul.” Michael said. “Indeed. So one could not live without the other. Without the power of deed, souls would be worthless. Without the word, however, there would

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be no Heaven to move to once their souls had left their earthly shells. True?” “Lucifer, I do need not to remind you that I was part of this partnership as well as you. Must we go through it again?” “Do not rush me, brother,” Lucifer said with a half-grin, like a tutor gently reprimanding an over eager student. “So, as you know, our Father populated Paradise with other angels soon after, but we were always his favoured ones. But soon after came his greatest triumph. He created humanity.” Lucifer took a long sip from his glass and then stared at Michael. “Do you remember the first days. The days of Eden, Michael?” Michael nodded. “I remember... how everything was so new to them,” Michael recalled, his face breaking out into a smile. “Their wonder was amazing to behold. It was so fantastic to have something to care for that truly knew happiness and bliss.” “But they were never to know, were they?” Michael’s face hardened “That was our Father’s intention, Lucifer. It is not our place to question him. Not then, not ever. But you did, didn’t you? You thought you knew better than he did. You sought to usurp his throne!” Lucifer sighed and looked at his brother with a tired expression. “Do you really think it was still a cold blooded attempted coup do you? Then tell me this Michael, why on Earth, would I, one of the Captain of Legions of Heaven lead only one third of the angels against two whole thirds plus the Father himself?” “So how do you explain it then, Adversary?” Michael retorted. “Simple. I was taking a stand on principle.” Michael’s face turned red and he clenched his free hand. “Principle? Principle?! How can you call going against your creator principled?” Lucifer took another sip of his whisky. “Because I knew I was going to lose. Is there no more obvious stand on principle that one such as that?” “But you had already destroyed Eden, hadn’t you? You had allowed them to taste the forbidden fruit of knowledge and shame,” Michael said, his voice still hard as flint.

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“Please Michael, you wanted to understand. I admit that not a day passes that I do not feel remorse for the pain I have caused, and the mistakes I made. But the principle I took was pure. I believed that we were cruel to these new beings. Imagine to be so ignorant of the world around you, to not have the ability to use the gifts that you have at your potential. To have your life dictated for you before, during and after you die. I wanted them to be able to truly live, Michael. That is why I gave them the gift of knowledge.” “You disobeyed our Father, Lucifer.” “Do you think I did not plead my case to him? Do you think if I thought there was any other way I would have taken it? Countless times I beseeched him to no avail. Countless times I asked you to support me.” “His word is law, Lucifer! Is that all you have to say on the subject? Because I have heard it all before.” “No, because it isn’t the whole story. I have never told you what happened after.” “So as you know the war occurred and many of us fought. Brother against brother struck one another down as the bonds that were once forged under our Father’s hand became... fractured. But it soon became clear that we... rebels were always going to lose. So... I came to you. Our Father’s champion to plead our case. You did not sway, as I knew you would not, but I had to try. So we fought a futile battle and you cast me from Paradise, never to return.” Michael nodded solemnly, not willing to go over the war in great detail. “When I finally ceased my descent and ended up in Hell I realised that my Father was no longer there to guide me, to help me, to love me. For the first time in my—for wont of a better word—‘life’ I truly felt terrified. But as I realised that I was not the only angel who had fallen and also that I was not totally impotent, a different feeling began to emerge in my mind. I began to feel liberated.” Michael’s eyes widened but Lucifer held up his hand. “Please Michael, if you are going to tell me how wrong I am to be feeling in such a way, you are ever-so-slightly late. Fact is, that with no Father to command me, this realm was mine to shape and form.” Lucifer wandered over to the window and stood with his back to Michael, watching the traffic mill about below him.

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“Can you imagine what it was like, Michael? To be able to use my powers as I saw fit? But as I began to craft I saw the folly in such a exercise.” “You only had one of the two firmaments,” Michael said, his voice causing Lucifer to turn around in surprise. “Hmm? Yes, I did. I was the Keeper of the Word, but I had no access to the weight of people’s deeds and actions. This led to lies and deceit in my realm—the root of all sin, which in turn led to my realm becoming corrupted as words held currency and deeds held none. So the liars and the deceivers; the murders and the thieves came to my realm. And I had to establish order. Those who became loyal to me and my cause would grow in stature and power, as their word had become strong in Hell. They became the demons. You would be surprised to know, Michael, just how many infamous people have now been granted a new body and purpose in my realm.” “You must be very proud,” Michael replied sarcastically, swishing the remnants of his whisky around in the glass. “Your sarcasm does me a disservice, Michael. After all, they keep the place running smoothly when I am up here running this place.” Jennifer opened up the door to Lucifer’s office and poked her head in, saying,“I’m sorry to bother you Mr Ardele, but there’s a man who has been causing trouble.” “Leave it to me, Jennifer. Is everything else going okay?” “Yes, sir.” “Great. Keep up the good work. We’re coming now.” Jennifer looked unsure for a moment. “Both of you, Mr Ardele?” “Oh, don’t worry Jennifer. Michael and I go way back.” Jennifer smiled prettily and walked out. Lucifer finished his whisky and placed his glass on the table, waiting for Michael to do the same. As they walked down the stairs, Michael looked around at the seediness and the sleaze and could not help but be disheartened. “Does humanity ever disappoint you, Lucifer?” Lucifer smiled at Michael and held up his hand. “I’ll let you know in a moment, Michael. For now I have business to deal with.” It was clear to both of them who Jennifer was talking about. The man

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in question seemed to be drunk and disorderly, already abusing some of the other girls in the brothel. “Whores!! You’re nothin’ but a bunch of stinkin’ fucking whores!!” he screamed, stumbling about and waving the remnants of a bottle of alcohol. Jennifer looked at Lucifer, who smiled reassuringly. “Allow me.” To Jennifer, what occurred next was unclear, as it always was when her boss dealt with nasty clients. It was if the world seem to shift around slightly, like she had been drugged. Her boss seemed to blur more still, until all that could be seen of him was a darkened silhouette. When her eyes regained clear focus it became clear that the man in question had become terrified beyond his wits. His bottle was in pieces on the floor where he dropped it and his face was a mask of terror. He grabbed his coat and fled, his feet pounding the floor as he went. “Is that all, Jennifer?” Lucifer asked. “Yes, Mr Ardele. Thank you.” “Not at all, Jennifer. That’s what I am here for.” As she walked off, Lucifer turned to Michael again and smiled. “She was, shall we say, plying her trade off the streets before I found her five years ago. I got her off her heroin habit that her pimp had used to keep her on a leash and she came to work for me. She now is my executive assistant, basically. Helps some of the other girls find their feet when they want a more down to earth voice. Something I cannot help with for... obvious reasons. She’s now studying teaching at university.” Michael was shocked. “And you’re not going to stop her?” Lucifer shrugged. “Why would I? I have no power over her in this realm. Besides which, how would that make me any different from the pimp? Humanity is something that can make me angry, Michael, but it is also more noble than either of us. For it has far more to lose and far less certainty about the beyond. I believe that answers all of your questions, does it not?” “Not all. You still haven’t asked me why you rebelled.” Lucifer smiled and gazed at the establishment he had set up. “Truth be told I don’t have a complete answer to that. But I do have a theory why I am here.” “Do tell,” Michael said. “Well, sometimes the line between sin and non-sin is perhaps not as

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easy to judge as one might think. Sometimes, even though there is a heaven and hell above and below it, there are senses of heaven and hell here on Earth. Talk to some of the girls in this establishment and they will tell you of trials that are truly horrific—whether you are used to the pits of the Abyss or not.” “What’s your point, Lucifer?” Michael said impatiently. “My point, Michael, is that sometimes what you need to sort out problems, is not a white knight who waves a sword about and doesn’t discriminate. Sometimes you need help from someone who can bend rules. Sometimes it’s better to have a devil than an angel.” “Are you suggesting that your rebellion has to do what our Father cannot?!” Michael said, his hands balling into fists. “Yes.”

“What’s your point, Lucifer?”

“But he knows all, Lucifer. He would have known about your rebellion and—” “Exactly,” Lucifer said. “He knew. He may be omnipotent. But he cannot be corrupted.” Michael’s whole body sagged as he suddenly felt uncertainty and doubt like nothing he had ever felt before hit him. Lucifer placed a friendly hand on his former brother in arms. “As I said, though, Michael, it is only a theory. Shall I walk you outside?” Michael shook his head and turned to Lucifer, his features once again firm. “You do realise this changes nothing. We are still on different sides.” “I never expected it would,” Lucifer replied. “But we are bound together, Michael, and come what may, we will always remain the two

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originals—predestined to walk our own paths.” Michael turned on his heel and strode out, almost bumping into Jennifer as he left. “My friend tells me you are studying to become a teacher, Jennifer? Is that correct?” Michael asked. Jennifer nodded. “I wish you all the best for the future then. I am sure that you will make a wonderful teacher from what your boss tells me,” Michael said, smiling warmly at her before striding out of the brothel. Jennifer watched Lucifer, who was in the process of lighting a cigarette. “He said that you were enemies, Mr Ardele.” Lucifer nodded absent-mindedly whilst blowing the smoke deeply out from his lungs. “Sometimes Jennifer, the worst betrayals are the ones you feel compelled to make.” “Why?” “Because you are measuring your principles against your friend’s.”

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The Cedar by

Matthew Thompson

The leaves continue to fall As if nothing has changed Everything seems to be stored here My sadness, my joy, my rage. It stands here still where we once were And I cannot blame it for doing so Like a pillar of ages against winds of time It refuses to be laid low And everything seems clearer here Though my friends believe I’m wrong They continue to spout advice and comfort Words and phrases about moving on But I cannot leave the cedar tree And all that it entails For I remember how I met you Under its warm and friendly gaze. Awkward greetings and how are you’s Soon became something more As we revealed our lives to each other Under the wooden cedar fort And I cannot count the days Since I came to the tree alone And my friends say that it’s unhealthy To revisit the hurt in my soul

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But throughout the hurt and rage And the dreadful melancholy The tree had stood by me As it did through times of joy For this may be denial And you may have gone and left me But I cannot think of a better place To deny than under this tree

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Renaissance by

Valentina Cano

A year has passed since I’ve rerouted sound. Like a stray wire, I’ve tied bare cables, shucked, cracked open, to each other, sparking new life. Or life that had grown sick of darkness. A year of light and singing and filling notebooks with pressed voices in sepia. A year of refilling my veins with the carbohydrates of consonants. A year of music.

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Road Blindness by

Valentina Cano

He owned the road before him. His steps were measured, littered with cold bottles and the dried apple slices heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d had hours before. His shoes sloshed with the heaviness of pregnant buckets, while his head held itself stiff, a flag refusing to waver in the draft. For no real reason, he walked. Perhaps to show he still could on those matchstick knees. Perhaps to tell himself the road was the same: a soft balm of regret.

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Snubbed Premonitions by

Valentina Cano

This act involves murder. Not the blood spattering, teeth-loosening fanfare, but the slow slicing of thoughts, the careful, violent unstitching of hopes. This act will betray the sun; it will topple trees with gusts of pale hate. It will be a criminal working in miniature, shifting a grain of dirt to provoke a cave in. This act will end our name. And yet, the warning echoes, banging against empty heads.

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don’t know war like they do by

Linda Crate

they give me fractured memories I cannot share; bombs exploding, people screaming, chaos abounds— the closest thing I know in this pale comparison doesn’t even begin to compete with war; I was in eighth grade science when I heard the news that the twin towers had been crashed into by a plane; we saw and watched in horror as a second one slammed into it, too— some of my classmates panicked others were too chill to even care, no one would attack us out in the middle of nowhere; but I’ve always noticed that in times of distress people have a tendency of losing their heads, I wish that I could say that I was level headed, but I kept wondering what awful thing might happen before school ended that day; but this is the only thing I know of war, this fight against the middle east that never seemed justified to me; I simply wonder what harm we’ve done to the world instead of all the good.

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the strength in letting go by

Linda Crate

catastrophes abound in your world because you make mountains out of moles; you do not just let the little things roll off your back as you should— you linger in banquet halls where you’re unwelcome; you chew over thoughts past their expiration dates, you need to learn to breath again; that sometimes you cannot be strong until you let go, that sometimes holding on is just a weakness.

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illiterate ingrates by

Linda Crate

this generation without soul litters a charcoal world with more apathy than it can hold— it’s ready to burst at the seams with the selfishness and cold inattentiveness of men to only care for themselves and not do any good will to men; they say that there are people out there with hearts kind and golden, but they are too few to slice through all this quarrelsome blackness than encircles us in arms of drama and asinine little feuds that ought not to exist; I wish people of my generation had a little bit more character, and actually were responsible for themselves instead they are always insisting upon acting as if they are children; attention whores and drama queens are in abundance along with men with egos of narcissus strutting around like peacocks, and I want to shake them all and tell them that they’re stupid fools that ought not exist, that they need to grow up— but I don’t know if they would even comprehend my words I don’t speak in the language of abbreviations or the purposeful idiotic misspellings.

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love cannot be measured by

Linda Crate

the depths of love cannot be measured by words or by mathematics or even by moon silver glinting his eyes through the window, it cannot be defined as a certain age or race or even religion, it can be explained away in essays or be defined easily; it is an emotion deep rooted in the heart like joy a part of our ineffable soul.

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me, myself, and I by

Linda Crate

the waif stood alone in her consciousness, she is me and I am she; we are the same one. a non-existent father, a mother busy with work, a stepfather that shattered her like glass. I remember this tale well as if it were merely yesterdayâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; her emotions simmer to the surface in droves of passion: anger, fear, defiance, love, mirth, joy, melancholy, grief. she stands in front of the mirrorâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; one day she sees a beautiful girl, other days she sees an ugly ogre. her wings are still broken, not yet able to take to flight her dreams; but she has never given up before she will not make a point to do so, when her dreams are just in reach a few staccato notes of derision

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will not make her rescind her sensitivity or passion for those things that matter most to her for I have always depended on me, I’m the only one that hasn’t let me down, and I will be more than waif.

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the unconscious mind by

Linda Crate

you are he and I am she, and you are she and I am he; twined so tightly that we cannot tell who starts whom and what is what. we are siamese twins of different genders that did not meet at birth, how it must have been strange for us not to have known one another before today.

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Between Oblivion and Death by

Nick Johnson

The Frontier was the largest space hub in orbit. It hung in the sky like a second moon and shined just as brightly. It was a titanium behemoth, with dimensions measured in miles. Everything and everyone that came and went from Earth went through the Frontier. At any given time around 50,000 people dwelled within its colossal frame and each one of them was just one part of the light that over the years we had come to take for granted on the surface. Because many trips through frontier were more often than not one way the people inside the Frontier knew it by another name, they called it the Beast. Everyone inside its walls, the cargo workers, the pilots, the engineers, the construction workers, and all other sorts of laborers had been consumed by it and they were what kept the light shining. And just like any living thing the monster was always growing and changing and it was constantly shedding and replacing all its little cells. Michael was a young man in his early 20s. He had become a pilot for interstellar shipping for almost no other reason then there wasn’t much else for him to do. He thought it was almost cruel that while he had signed the papers willingly there had never been another choice. He sat in a little room deep inside the Frontier’s living quarter. It was his own little microcosm he would inhabit as long as the Beast decided it wanted him there. His accommodations were meager but adequate. His room had a twin bed attached to the wall and a television that sat atop a small metal shelving unit that looked like something you might see in a laboratory. The steel walls showed signs of rust and corrosion, and the sliding door was a kind of plastic that obscured everything on the other side but didn’t stop the bright ultraviolet lights of the outside from shining through. It wasn’t luxury but he was happy to at least have a space all his own, something he never had back on Earth. There was always people walking by and their silhouettes cast themselves against his translucent plastic door. The constant activity outside always served as a constant reminder of where he was and is and so Michael tried his best to stay in his cell. When he left its confines and

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walked out onto the steel catwalk—that seemed to spiral endlessly up and down the interior of the Frontier’s mighty structure—he realized he was trapped. He could neither see the top nor the bottom. Death or the infinite blackness of space were his only two hopes for escape. He had signed on as a cargo pilot but he felt more like a prisoner. In his mind he tried to find out how to escape . What were once simply fond memories of home were now Michael’s only sanctuary, but even those were haunted by the specter of the frontier. It had its place in the sky as long as Michael could remember and its light could still be seen long after the lights and smog on the surface had all but suffocated the glow of the stars. He remembered what his father had said right before he left, “That thing is a metal man eater: you go in through one side and it shits you out into space through the other.” These were the words that went through his mind over four months ago when he first arrived at the Frontier. Michael had passed through the monster’s jaws on a transport with 300 others; he was just a crumb on a titanium platter. As soon as they landed they were ushered off into various other parts of the hub and Michael never saw any of them again, and he didn’t bother to ask. As a cargo pilot it didn’t help to become too attached to anyone on the frontier; here ‘cargo pilot’ was a job that was likened to being on death row. One of the shadows walking by Michael’s door stopped and knocked. “Come in,” Michael called and the door slid open. It was Marcus, one of Michael’s few acquaintances inside the Frontier. They lived on the same level so it was mostly a friendship of convenience for the time being. He was a pilot from Germany and despite his accent was easy to understand and spoke English well enough for any conversation. Marcus stepped in and the door slid closed behind him. “I’m going to the galley want to come?” he asked. Michael hesitated for a second and his eyes shifted up as if to be giving the prospect serious consideration. “Yeah sure I can eat,” he replied, swinging his legs over the side of his bed and standing up. “Let me just get my shoes on.” “Alright, don’t take too long, I have not had anything to eat today.” Michael laughed. “How the hell do you know when a day’s gone by?” Marcus held up his arm and pointed to his wrist. “I keep a watch.” Michael shrugged. “Alright let’s go,” he said.

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The door slid open and they stepped out. Being on the “walk” as it was known on the Frontier was something like being on a city street that was inside a prison. The sounds of so many thousands of people in one area seemed to mesh into a single constant source of background noise. Everywhere cell doors hung open as different workers tried their luck at entrepreneurial prospects and turned their living quarters into makeshift stores where someone could find anything they needed ranging from bags of chips, to liquor, to porn. The galley was up three levels. A distance Michael estimated at being around two city blocks. They had to walk close together as the walk was narrow and even worse there were always pickpockets and muggers making their rounds. Most people who had come to work on the Frontier were already poor and it didn’t help that they had to use what money they did have on buying food from the hubs stores. A pilot could easily go broke waiting three months to get assigned a mission. If a guy got desperate enough all he had to do was go up or down a few levels and rob someone, given the size of the frontier and the number of people currently stewing in its bowels pin pointing who did it would be a near impossibility. “Did you hear about Marcells?” asked Marcus breaking the silence. “No what about him?” inquired Michael. “Last night he got a ship.” “Oh really?” replied Michael with a tone of surprise in his voice. “Yeah, after 6 months,” Marcus said with a grin. Michael shuddered at the prospect of being in the belly of the beast for another two months. “That isn’t all either,” Marcus started again. “What do you mean?” responded Michael, arching his eyebrows inquisitively. “There was a fuel leak in the supply bay and the whole ship caught fire.” Michael grimaced, “I guess I’m not really surprised.” They spent the next moment walking in silence, each of them reflecting on the fate of the pilot they both barely knew, but still resonating so deeply because they both knew chances were good they had something similar to look forward to. They say the young feel invincible, but in the Frontier nothing could be further from the truth. Their contemplation was interrupted and they stopped dead in their tracks when a man a few yards in front of them jumped out of his cell screaming in a tone that suggested a mix of anger and hysterical fear. He

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was a tall man in a jumpsuit and a crewcut and had an accent that Michael pegged as being Eastern European, mostly likely Russian. “Get the Fuck away from me!” the man screamed. Everyone on the level stopped all at once and watched. Another man emerged from the door way crawling on his knees. After a second, Michael could see his face was covered in blood. The man on his knees reached out to the Russian man who recoiled and kicked him over. Now on his side the man tried to pick himself up but instead started vomiting. “Shit!” exclaimed Marcus. “I think he has titanium poisoning!” No-one was really sure what it was but a very deadly and very virulent sickness had been making its way through the living quarters of the Frontier. Not knowing what to call it, the men living here just contributed it to the titanium; they said after spending so much time here the metal would eventually seep into your blood like mercury. The man managed to push himself to his knees again. “Help me...” he said weakly as blood began to leak from his eyes. Whatever this was it was nasty. Symptoms began simply enough with headache, fever, basically flulike symptoms. Eventually though, those gave way to debilitating pain and hemorrhaging, at which point it seemed the victim only had hours to live. There was a break in the crowds on the other side as four security officers emerged and surrounded the two. They were imposing figures. They wore black body armor over grey jump suites and large black gas masks with blood orange eyes that made them looks like giant insects that walked on two legs. One of them took the large Russian by the arm and he snapped around to scream at him. “This guy has the sickness, you got to take him away!” The officer responded with a calmness that managed to be both eerie and intimidating. “Sir you’re gonna have to come with us.” “Why I am not sick!” the Russian yelled back. “Sir,” the officer began again. “Fuck you!” the Russian interrupted, and in a flash one of the officers slammed his baton into the man’s back sending him to the floor. Then the other joined in and they took turns bashing their weapons against the man’s body. Once they felt he had been thoroughly subdued they picked both him and the sick man up and started dragging them away. “Let’s get outta here,” said Michael. Marcus nodded his head in agreement and they turned and walked back towards Michael’s cell. As they

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walked, Michael looked back over his shoulder and locked eyes with the large mask eyes of one of the security officers. Michael quickly turned away. They returned to Michael’s room and waited for the excitement outside to die down. Although Michael was trying to remain calm, the incident clearly had Marcus very worked up. Michael sat on his bed and watched Marcus pace back and forth while he theorized what was happening. “This thing is starting to get too close for comfort,” Marcus said. “Well what can ya do?” Michael coldly replied. “You know what it is, right?” Marcus asked. Michael looked at him a moment. “They released a virus to try and kill off their excess workers so they don’t have to pay to keep them around or send them back to Earth.” Michael smiled slightly. “You’ve been hanging around the galley too much; that’s just paranoid ramblings.” “It’s something to think about,” Marcus said. Michael just nodded. “Well I think I will head back to my room now; see you tomorrow, buddy.” “Later Marcus.” As Marcus left the room, Michael fell back on his bed. Although he dismissed Marcus’s idea of some kind of biological attack on the employees of the Frontier, he couldn’t shake the building worries he had that were manifesting themselves into anxiety that he could feel solidifying itself in the pit of his stomach. Some time later, Michael awoke and could see two tall figures standing in front of his door. “Pilot number 2471,” one of the figures called out. Michael felt like he was in a nightmare. His first instinct was to cover his head with his blankets. He knew it was a security detail out there which meant one of two things: They had come to take him away; or he had finally gotten his mission. The door slid open and Michael quickly sat up. The two security officers entered the room . “Pilot number 2471, come with us.” “What’s going on?” Michael asked, slowly standing up. “Number 2471, come with us.” Michael knew better than to ask twice. He slipped on his shoes and followed the officers out. Michael was rushed through the process by a frantic crew. They dressed him in his space suit and lead him quickly down a red lit hallway. Michael couldn’t feel his legs, he moved along the floor as if he was floating, but the crew continued to push him along. They came to a large steel door with a

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red light on top of it that flashed to green. They pushed Michael in and the door closed behind him. A monitor on a large steel arm hung from the ceiling. There was a clicking sound and the black screen lit up. It seemed intensely bright against the red light room. The monitor began to talk in a somewhat feminine voice. “Pilot 2471, we ask that you take a minute to read your flight contract and say yes if you accept all the terms therein. Keeping in mind refusal of the terms would constitute a breach of your original employment contract and you would be subjected to the stated penalties including but not limited to a fine of 10,000 credits and up to five years in prison.” Michael paused for a moment. “Let me guess, you’re not responsible if anything goes wrong...?” he said in a sarcastic tone. “Sorry, response not understood, please reply yes or no,” the computer replied. Michael rolled his eyes and sighed, “Yes, I accept.” “Thank you, pilot 2471.” A door at the other end of the room slid open revealing a brightly lit airlock. “You may proceed and good luck.” Michael slowly approached the entrance. He tried to convince himself not to be scared and that he was only delaying the inevitable but he couldn’t convince himself to walk faster; he was literally becoming crippled with fear. That entrance was the point of no return. He felt like he was outside his body but he was still moving. He watched his right foot as it passed through the entrance, then the left. He heard the door slide behind him and lock shut. The noise seemed to snap him out of his daze and he quickly snapped around and pushed on the door but it wouldn’t open. The door on the other side of the airlock slid open and Michael could see the darkened cockpit of his ship. “Well it’s now or never,” he said out loud, hoping the slogan would make him feel braver. He entered the ship, the door closed and he could hear it detaching from the Frontier. The cockpit was cramped, there was barely any room to stand. Clearly they had done everything they could to save on space and only the barest of essentials were included. There was a single pilot’s chair that sat in front of the control council that was attached below a large viewing window. A voice came over the com system. It was the same voice the computer inside had. “Pilot 2471, your destination is the Pulsar outpost, approximately 1.2 million miles from your current location.

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Estimated time of arrival is 4 months, 2 weeks, 3 days, and 9 hours. The ship has detached from the docking bay and the engines will now start up as we begin launch.” Michael didn’t feel the need to answer the voice, it would have been futile, his life was now in its hands and it was incapable of being concerned about that outcome. He listened to the engines power up as he looked out the viewing window at the vastness of space. This is where his fate lay, in the empty vacuum of nothingness. The engines gradually got louder until they reached a loud high pitched hum and he felt a sudden force pushing against his chest as it took off. The ship hummed along for no more than 30 seconds when it suddenly jerked around and went into a spin. Michael panicked and the lights on the console began flashing red. He tried to get a hold of the steering mechanism but the ship was spinning so fast he couldn’t take hold, then after about 15 seconds it stopped and the ship seemed to be floating quietly. There was no sound of the engines or anything else. Michael waited for a moment, then asked, “What happened to the ship?” There was no response. He asked again, louder this time. Finally the computer replied, “Pilot 2471, there was an engine malfunction and your ship deviated from the course.” “Oh, can we get back on course?” Michael asked. There was silence. “Can we get back on course?” he asked again, more urgently this time. “Pilot 2471, you have strayed approximately five thousand miles off course and your 2nd and 4th engines are not responsive.” Michael’s face went stiff and the breath stopped in his chest. “What does that mean?” he managed to ask. “Your ship is now flying through space at approximately 7,344 miles per hour, a diagnostics check has been run on your engines and unfortunately that cannot be turned back on. Pilot 2471, you and your ship have been deemed lost assets.” Michael felt choked with terror, but he had just enough control left to mask it with anger. “What the hell does that mean!” he demanded. “Unfortunately no rescue is possible, your ship’s systems will be remotely shut down and your comm system shut off. Goodbye, pilot 2471, your family will be promptly notified.”

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“What the hell are you talking about?! Get me out of here!” The lights on the console turned off and everything went black. Michael pounded on the comm system and screamed, “Send someone to get me, you son of a bitch!” He put his face into his hands and began to sob. He remembered what his father had told him, the monster had eaten him and now shat him out into space. As he plunged through oblivion, he stood at a point between life and death. Although he still breathed, he no longer existed, he would talk to noone and no-one would talk to him. He was just a speck of dust floating through the never-ending void, and although he had provisions to last for months, he knew he was already dead.

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The World Became Covered in Darkness by

Nick Johnson

The familiar sound of his wife softly saying “Good morning” was the first thing Brian Burnon woke up to. That simple greeting delivered by the soothing tone of his wife’s voice is what he was treated to almost every morning for the last 15 years. He would never tell her, but he would always take a moment before opening his eyes and relish in that sound, hardly able to keep a smile from breaking across his face. As he enjoyed the moment he was surprised as he heard the phrase softly uttered again not by the voice of his wife this time but another and even more familiar voice to him, it was his mother’s—somewhat changed by age but with the same safe nurturing qualities it had always held for him. He opened his eyes and saw the two women illuminated by the wide glowing rays of morning sunlight. He sat up wide-eyed and greeted her. “Mom, when did you get here?” She greeted his almost childlike enthusiasm with her usually calmness, “Me and your father came in while you were sleeping, we wanted to surprise you, your father has some big news. Come out to breakfast and we will talk all about it.” He nodded and the two women turned and left the room, closing the door behind them. He hurriedly kicked off the covers and threw on his long white bathrobe; he knotted it up and raced out of the room. Entering his large white tile kitchen he saw sitting at the table was his mom and dad on one side and his wife and two children on the other. His son was dressed in his blue church suit and his daughter in her blue floral pattern dress from last Easter. They were just 7 and 9 and he realized the amount of time and effort that had to be put into dressing up his kids so neatly and formally; he inferred his wife had had a long time to prepare for this “surprise visit.” He looked at her, her mid length brown hair hanging softly against her cheeks; she lightly brushed the hair from her face and smiled widely at him. And as he smiled back he felt completely unaware of his children and parents in the room, their voices all melted away and for a fleeting second he felt that it was only they who existed in the world. All too quickly though that micro

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world they lived in popped like a bubble as his father began speaking to him. “Hey Brian how have you been?” he asked, extending his hand. “Great dad, great,” he responded, almost laughing while he talked. “I have some great news,” he began. “I…” He seemed to stop mid-word and freeze up as his mom suddenly interjected. “Oh wait, honey, remember Captain Burnon has to go up to the space station.” “Oh that’s right,”responded Brian with a tone that seemed mixed with mild surprise. “Yes I forgot, the launch is today.” He looked at his parents with a look of confusion and speculation. “Yes,” they seemed to respond in unison, “your launch into space is today, that’s why you’re wearing your space suit.” Brian looked down his robe to see the material of his space suit puffing out through his robe. He pondered it for about a second and his dad spoke again, “Yes this is the day you go out into space.” His dad’s eyes seemed to cross a bit as if he was looking at something beyond Brian with an intense focus. He turned around and through one of his large wooded paned kitchen windows with the soft white paint that made him think of his childhood home in the country he looked out and saw the looming figure, the space shuttle. It stood on the launch pad with a large crowd around it with more and more flocking to the monolithic figure that towered in the sky. He looked surprised but he remembered today was that day! He had nearly forgotten that it was time for him to go to the shuttle. His smile lessened; he would rather see his parents he decided; his launch could wait. He turned and faced his family. “Oh yeah, you know what, I can just do that tomorrow,” he said casually. His wife stood up and his parents shook their heads all at once telling him he should go. He felt his daughter’s small hand take hold of his. He looked down at her. “It’s time for you go to into space, daddy,” she said smiling. “It’s time for you to go see god.” His reluctance began to break into a more apparent fear. “No, no,” he answered back, “I think I can stay here just for today.” The tone of voices of his family members seemed to be becoming more urgent. “Go go,” they said. He looked over at his wife and saw her standing off to the side smiling at him giving him a soft almost nervous smile. “Honey,” he said almost sounding like he was pleading, “tell em I don’t have to go, tell them I don’t have to go.”

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She smiled, tears welling in her eyes. “Goodbye Brian,” she said almost inaudibly as the rest of his family was pushing him out the door. Try as he might he could not push back as the smiling faces of his mother, father, daughter and son pushed him out the door. His robe slipped off as he stepped back, revealing his space suit. He looked over his shoulder seeing the dark doorway they were pushing him towards. He called out again, “I can stay I can stay.” But his pleading was no use; before he knew it he was standing on the small concrete step in front of his door watching his family disappear behind the door. He stood outside in the perfect weather on what was for a while his perfect day and stared at his perfect house in his perfect town. He tried not to look at the space shuttle off in the distance beckoning to him. The power of the mighty rocket shook the very earth under his feet as the steel construct seemed to growl and snort like an enraged animal ready to charge. He started towards the door to try and knock when a sudden flash blinded him and he could feel a burning painful heat engulf his flesh. The world around him seemed to turn red, and whips of smoke flew off his house as the paint was vaporized and in what seemed like slow motion the entire structure seemed to explode into a million wooden, brick and glass particles. He could feel the heat clinging to his flesh, tearing at his skin. And suddenly nothing. All feeling had gone. He looked down and saw his flesh had gone, the only traces left behind were bloody stringy remnants that hung across his bones. He could see his family in the foundation of his house that had exploded into oblivion; they stood there in the same pose as he had last seen him. They smiled as the flesh burned and evaporated from their bones; they did not move as the fire seemed to ingest their flesh in an instant. He could feel the fire consuming him and as he watched the fire take his family, he felt it take him. He screamed with the pitch of a young girl. The pain was unbearable: the death of his family, the loss of his home, his life engulfed by nuclear fire was a mere micro second that to him felt like an eternity. He could see there was almost nothing left of himself but he would not die, the pain would not cease and he could feel the painful bite of the flames on limbs which he no longer had. His flesh burned, then his bones seemed to burn, then his organs felt like they were on fire. He felt his eyes sizzle and boil in their sockets then finally explode. He could not feel his eyes but he could see he

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could not avert or close his gaze as he watched his family burn in front of him in an instant; it was all gone and just when he was sure death would finally release him from the moment his eyes shot open. A cold sweat across his face and, panting, the captain awoke and felt himself restrained. He pushed up again but could not escape the grasp. He paused for a minute looking down seeing he was strapped into his sleeping compartment. He continued to pant as he undid the restraints freeing himself and floating away from the space bed. There was no-one to greet him, no good morning, just silence. He floated through the white sterile room in an almost confused state. He could not remember how he had gotten there or how long ago. He could not remember his last moments before waking up. He kicked off the wall and headed for the door. He got into the corridor and could hear no-one. There were four other people on board. His counterpart from America, Captain Tate, the two Russian astronauts, as well as a woman from China. They were all a part of this mission. He continued to float down the corridor propelling himself by pushing off the walls, until he came to the observation deck. He stopped himself. He remembered the dream he had and he wasn’t sure why he had been in the sleeping quarters or for how long. He knew something was wrong but he could not remember what or he didn’t want to remember what. He had the feeling the answer to all his questions would be on the observation deck. He stood peering through the entrance way, still not wanting to enter when a sudden pain ripped across his skull. He grimaced and grabbed his head with his hands. He could see it in his mind. The crying crew by the observation window, the large flashes coming from the Earth and darkness consuming it, the last image to race through his mind was that of himself sobbing uncontrollably. He had a feeling deep down he knew what it all meant but he didn’t want to go in there, he did not want to confirm that nightmare scenario from his memories. A part of him believed that if he waited long enough he would soon be greeted by the rest of the crew and that would tell him it was all a dream, maybe some kind of newly discovered space psychosis. From the room he could hear some slurring words in a Russian accent. He recognized that voice, it was Dmitri the cosmonaut. “Hello,” he called out, “come out Mr Burnon, its okay now”. Slowly Burnon pushed himself

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into the room, not looking out of the large observation window to his right but looking to the left at the cold steel room with the large com center. The great machine blinked with countless little lights as its many buttons seemed to be active but the only sound that came from its speakers was static. Dmitri hovered around the machine drinking from a collapsible fluid bag. “I see you’re awake now; we didn’t know if you would awake. Some of us we think the stress maybe kill you.” His words slurred terribly through the thick Russian accent and Burnon knew what was in that fluid bag, the station’s supply of wine meant for their final day in space. “You were in minor coma I think.” “What are you talking about?” asked Burnon. Dmitri let out a laugh. “Mr Tate guessed you would not have memory of what happened.” “What do you mean ‘what happened’,” Burnon asked. Dmitri took another drink from the bag and looked at him grimly. “Look out the window, look out at Earth, I noticed you have been avoiding it, look out at the planet and you will wish you had died, Mr Burnon.” Brian paused for a moment looking at Dmitri who took another drink who gestured to him to turn around. Slowly he rotated in the air to face the window and Earth. It did not take long for Brian to realize what he was seeing. Earth, the once luminescent blue and green orb that stood out in beautiful contrast with the black surroundings in space, was now darkened and black. The lights from the great cities that had once reached up to the very heavens themselves had been extinguished. The once great signs of life that were visible even from space were gone there was nothing. Brian felt his breath get trapped in his throat and tears well up in his eyes. It was gone, it was all gone. He remembered his dream, his family being engulfed by the fire and his home exploding and he knew that’s what happened, he had seen this happen, he had watched from space as his life was literally taken out from under his feet. He shuddered and sobbed with his face in his hands. “I’m sorry, Captain,” Dmitri said softly. Brain looked over at him and through his sobs asked, “What happened”? Dmitri sighed and lowered his head. “War broke out and one side decided to push the button, so did the other. We could see the mushroom

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clouds and burning cities from the station, and in less than a day it stopped and it was all gone”. Brain stood speechless for a second, almost unsure how to react. The first thing he could think to say was, “Where is the rest of the crew?” Dmitri had the same somber face, “They are gone,” he responded. “My comrade killed himself, he ingested poison.” “What about Captain Tate, and Miss Ling?” Brian asked urgently. “Mr Tate also took his own life he put on his suit and left the station; he decided to just float away”. Brian stood shaking unable to believe what he was hearing. He finally worked up the strength to talk again. “And what about Miss Ling?” He asked. Dmitri lowered his head and Brian could see tears in his eyes. “What happened?” he asked again. “I can’t lie, Captain, I….” He paused for a moment and drew his breath in. “I killed her.” Brian was emotionally and physically spent, he didn’t know what to do, what to say or how to react. He just stood there in shock. Dmitri continued, “After the other two had gone I thought you were going to die and it would just be me and miss Ling. I started to think about our food supply and something woke in me, either I would die or she would die. So I strangled her, I strangled her and left her body in the control room”. “And do you know what for? So that maybe I can live two months longer!” Dmitri put his face in his hands and began to cry. “I was so stupid, I did not see that even if I had all the food I am still going to die in less than a year’s time. We are both dead, Brian, can’t you see that?” Brian still stood in silence because the reality of the situation had dawned on him too. They were trapped here, there would be no rescue, there would be no resupply. This space station was going to be their tomb. Dmitri interrupted his thoughts, “The people on Earth, their deaths were instant but we… we will die slow, we will starve or become like animals and kill each other I will not let that be my fate... Not anymore. Well Mr Burnon,” he said holding a knife in his hand, “I know there is only one way to make it better. Not all us Russians are godless commies,” he said with a small chuckle through his tears. “I must make penance, her life for mine.” He glared at him the tears twinkling in his eyes, “Goodbye Captain Burnon, it has been an honor.” Brian just stood there, he did not scream and he did not try and stop

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Dmitri as he ran the knife across his own throat; the blood streamed from his neck and broke up into little drops and floated around him. He floated with his body slumped bleeding out on the com console convulsing and coughing until he finally stopped. Now there was just static. The only noise left on the station was the static of the com console. Brian drew in his breath again, unable to sob anymore he just looked at the lifeless body of Dmitri and at the charred remains of Earth. It was all over. He floated idly and just stared at the dead world below him. His friends, family, his lifetime of achievements now existed only as a memory. No-one left down there would be thinking about Captain Brian Burnon and his journey into space. The newspapers, magazines, and all the other material commemorations of his story of personal triumph were undoubtedly all consumed by the nuclear fire. His thoughts turned to home, the image of his shattered smashed house formed in his mind. He could picture the pile of brick against the backdrop of the irradiated landscape. Then his thoughts turned to his family he could see the fire consuming their flesh in the same way that locusts consume a field. He could see their corpses in the rubble of his home, their white teeth standing out in contrast to their blackened flesh, but he could still not cry for them. Having the view of the entire globe he saw the greater scope of things. Billions were dead and more were still dying with no possibility of help, and in an instant he felt the grief for a billion lost souls and then it was gone, he had been expended and his humanity had left him. He also knew that none of it mattered because he would never see it. His home had been lost to him the minute he stepped on the shuttle. He had believed in the mission. He believed he was there to help mankind, to advance science and build a better world for the whole human race, but now he knew he was only up there to die.

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Poetry Workshop by

Daybert Linares

You step into the classroom like any other day—except today is different: today you’ll be workshopped. You sit down in a corner, your usual spot: the good-looking Goth girl to your right; left: the kid who thinks he’s Oscar Wao. You take a deep breath, try to relax. The teacher is telling everyone to take two minutes to review their comments. The two minutes go by and nobody says anything. You don’t worry. It’s always like this. Somebody will eventually start speaking. Ah! There. Sarah, the bio major. You can hear it, in her far-away tone: half of her is not even in the classroom. She says, “I really like your style.” But you know she doesn’t. She is saying nice things because the teacher said constructive feedback should begin like that. You know she hates your style as much as she hates this class, which happens to be that stupid Liberal Arts requirement she has to fulfill, and participation is 10% of the grade. She utters the first ‘but,’ and you know what’s coming next: what she thinks; what she

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doesn’t like; what she didn’t understand. When she’s done breaking the ice, the others follow. They start out the same way, and soon you get so tired of hearing “I really like” that when a girl says, “I really, really, really like,” you almost applaud her. During the ‘constructive’ part of the feedback you hear lots of I’s: I think. I believe. I’m not sure about. I would have liked. I feel. I didn’t get. There are so many I’s you aren’t sure whether they are talking about your poem, or about themselves. At one point you stare down at your poem. Read it one, two, three, four times in two minutes. It’s short: four stanzas, composed of four lines each. As short as it is, you know in those two minutes, you’ve read the poem more times than anybody else here. Finally somebody mentions the crow, and hope flutters in your heart. You look up. It’s the Goth girl. You listen, but soon realize that though she tries, she doesn’t get it. And how can she? How can anyone who read your poem as they waited for class to begin can even get a glimpse of what the crow actually means? Maybe if she had spent more time analyzing it… But no. The crow haunted you for a whole week. Didn’t let you sleep, eat, get out. For a whole week, your mind thought about the crow. For a whole week, you constructed the crow. No one, in one or two readings, will ever decipher the crow. Your last hope: the teacher.

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When everybody is done, she gives you feedback. Alas, she doesn’t get it, either. A grad student, she’s probably too busy working on her own poetry to spend too much time on yours. Probably read your poem with distain once or twice, before going to bed. Hell, she probably thinks you’re a loser. You can see the words pushing out of her mouth in an attempt to say something about the poem. But though she speaks, you don’t hear her. You are thinking about the night news. Yeah. You won’t come back here. No one here could help. In your head you picture this classroom: Somebody asking, “Whatever happened to him?” Someone responding, “I think it was the crow.”

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original image by ceara

... the good-looking Goth girl to your right ...

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My Chained Faith by

Sonnet Mondal

The far-flung whistle of the colliery and of the Calcutta-mail calls me every day after dinner. The trainâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s shrill echo and rhythmic melody of wheels form a sublime image of the girl out of my dreams, waving and smiling; screaming and crying; standing and waiting just for me amidst grasses, trees and hedges that wave in solitude and hope. The curvature of the lopsided land plays hide and seek along with the clouds and moon blurring realism. My belief is incurable and so is the facade of pleasure that I show while I follow compellingly, the whistle of the colliery. My faith lies in the train, in the wilderness and the vaporous figure of my love while my whims are chained with famine and society that may identify me as mad once I leave my job and run into the hazy backwoods.

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Two Worlds by

Sonnet Mondal

A blue lake captures my soul in its unmeasured, unimaginable depths where a new world better than lands survive drinking immortality. Howling wolves pierce melancholy and the dropping leaves stuck with fever of spring bows down before the majestic stance of endless sky and waters. Echo of unknown sounds emerging from the interstices of the woods run wildly, circle around ears like unquenched souls. Striking against trunks topless trees they become one with lingering serenity. The bridge connecting them to my land is left broken for years, perhaps broken by the Gods and none has dared to swim across for both worlds gets bewildered with the laws in either side of the bridge.

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Blue-Collar Twister by

Sonnet Mondal

Sweat tries to swim upwards through the hairs of a labourer building the statue of the herald but fails and falls in the soil sucked up by heat, Vanishes as a struggling animal in quicksand; Dreams drain and entity turns into fossils as slippers walk over it. His weapons are a chisel and spade; He lifts them to protest but vacuum wailing in the curves of his muscles make it fall again on the mummified ground; just to dig, dig the ground for the Herald’s statue must stand firm or his existence will be buried under its falling weight. Toils will evaporate with the smile of the moon The dawn will hear sounds again— sounds of iron striking against rocks. The air waits to weave those sounds and strike a twister with them— Tall enough for the world to see bold enough to step over mountains Clear enough to show the waving hands begging a day out of slavery.

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Haunting Life by

Sonnet Mondal

A call for the ‘night’ amidst the stormy evening evoke the thoughts of the day when I ravaged a family and picked up their son out of a typical kindness; it has haunted me for years till now. He has grown up and my blood too as brothers; Their feet and mind moves alike against odds; Just my blood clots with the pinch from the revolver that shot down the dears of who is my child now; perhaps his wisdom was too less then to perceive the care of near and dear ones. His eyes still shine as if complaining something to the walls, streets and stones all around who never speak of his real family. Some still creatures and dumb mouths sound clearer with their silence, with the way their pretence pop up as oils upon waters. Perhaps by the time I will be in the bed of my confession, he will learn forgiveness from some sage; he will smile to the futility of deaths and births and I will leave my bed with a flower never to take birth again for it might be another wait of sixty years, hoping for resurrection.

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What if we were a Dream? by

Paul Durante

What if we were a dream? Thought up by a deity The billion year slumber Of a trillion year God He sees the crimes we commit The wars we wage He weeps The clouds open They pour down His tears The ground dampens The oceans rise Hunger strikes A child dies while men stuff their faces War is waged Craters replace schools Anger besets Him He stirs the oceans and shakes the ground Waters rise to invade the land The earth quakes as if to reject its inhabitants His anger subsides and He weeps once more Some curse Him while others pray But for a moment there is togetherness We unite and help those plagued by storm He smiles at the change His wrath brought But the change is short lived Soon we forget those in need Men still eat while children starve We wage war where people live The world is in chaos His nightmare continues We must wonder, what will He do when He wakes?

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original image by jshelve

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Numb by

Paul Durante

I stand uncomfortably in a crowded and stuffy room. I’m supposed to be at school right now, and at this moment, I very much wish I was. My suit is uncomfortable and my shoes do not fit. My feet are blistering, but I hardly notice. In front of me is an unending line of solemn faced well wishers. They have formed in a line that zigzags all around the building. A middle aged bald man tries to direct them in an orderly fashion, but is for the most part failing. I pity him, his job must be difficult. Both to the left of me, and to the right of me, people are crying. On the left is my cousin. He’s lived with me for as long as I can remember. He’s like a brother. On my right is my brother. He may be my best friend. Behind me is a man whose life ended far too soon. Next to him my mother weeps hysterically. My eyes are dry. People come and go rapidly. They shake my hand and offer me their condolences. Some even hug me. Some want to talk but most try to move on as quickly as possible. I’m thankful for those that leave quickly, I have nothing to say to anyone. Those who try to hold conversation are wasting their time. I hear very little of what they have to say and retain none of it. Their faces blend, their voices mesh. They pity me. Some tell me that things will be okay. Will they? For them, yes of course. They get to go home, leave this behind. They don’t know what I feel. How could they? I’m not even sure how I feel. I feel… numb. My father was stoic, my father was strong. My father was a man. Never once did I see him shed a tear, and I will follow in his example. My family, just like any other family, needs a man. And to be a man you must be strong. My father was strong, so I will be strong. My father was fearless, so I will be fearless. My father always knew what to do so I… I will learn what to do. I can be him. My mother tells me how proud she is of him, and how proud I should

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be too. And I am, I am proud. But… but nothing. He was a hero. Is a hero. I’m glad he went this way. A man like him… this is the way a man like him should go. That’s what my grandmother told me. That this is how he wanted it. She’s here too, but she sits quietly. I’m proud of her, she’s behaving as she should, with quiet dignity, just like me. We are the strong ones. The day continues in a haze. At times I hardly know where I am. My mind drifts, and feels nothing. I float almost on the brink of consciousness, reality has become a blur. I see everything as if it were a movie. My father passes. My mother weeps. My brother cries and my cousin mourns. And where does that leave me? Where do I fit into all of that? I was a boy, but now I must be a man. They need me. They need me to stay strong. But what do I need? I need… I need to feel something, anything at all.

But… but nothing. He was a hero. Is a hero... Why does it get to be so easy for them? They bare their emotions for all to see. They cry openly. They sicken me. Don’t they see people watching? I hate them. I hate them. I… I wish I could be like them. The line maintains a steady crowd for hours on end. People I know from school filter in and out. They tell me they’re sorry, but they have no idea. They leave with their fathers. They are still happy, as well they should be. Their lives are good. Coworkers, friends, family. So many people. I am amazed by all the people. I wonder why they come. Is it for me? No, certainly not. I don’t

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know these people. Their condolences do nothing to help me. For my mother? They may say that is why they’re here, but that’s not true either. They are here for themselves. They come for our gratitude. For our appreciation. They are fools, all of them. I see what they are doing. They don’t trick me. My cousin cries harder and I get angry. What gives him the right? I believe that he loved my father, many did, but what gives him the right to cry when I can’t? My brother hears his cries and begins to weep harder. They are weak both of them, but that’s okay. They get to be weak. That is what I am here for. I am strong. I can be strong enough for all of us. I can be… My face is wet. I touch a finger to my cheek and wipe away a single tear. The tear is followed by a flood. Reality sets in. I am not a man, I am a boy. I am a boy who needs his father.

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About the Authors Linda Crate is a Pennsylvanian native born in Pittsburgh yet raised in the rural town of Conneautville. She has a degree in English-Literature from Edinboro University. Her poetry has been published in Magic Cat Press, Black-Listed Magazine, Bigger Stones, Vintage Poetry, The Stellar Showcase Journal, Ides of March, The Blinking Cursor, the Diversified Arts Project, and The Railroad Poetry Project. Krzysztof T. Dabrowski is a Polish writer, born in 1978. BOOKS: VIII 2008 – “Deathbirth” (Armoryka publishing house). V.2010 – “Anima vilis” (Initium publishing house). In October 2008 he was awarded in a “In the circle of sensation” literary contest organized by Portalkryminalny.pl In November 2008, the story “Deathbirth” won “Story of the Month” competition of American Literary Magazine Bartleby Snopes (http://bartlebysnopes.com). II.2009 – publication in slovak PLAYBOY. He published his stories in the following magazines in: Poland, Slovakia, USA, England, Czech Republic, Russia, Brasil, Spain, Argentina, Germany, Hungary and Mexico. Page: http://ktdabrowski.pl.tl/ He searches for an english-speaking publisher for books and literature agent. Contact: kt.dabrowski@gmail.com Matthew John Davies, 26, is an emerging writer from Brisbane, Australia. He has been published in Cottonmouth and the latest Page Seventeen. He blogs at http://theundersizedshadow.blogspot.com/ Nicolas James Hampton is the twenty seven year old Michigan State University dropout who wouldn’t stop showing up to Diane Wakoski’s office hours. In his entire life he’s never lived alone, and the experiences he’s had living with strange curiosities has greatly influenced his writing aesthetic. His poems have been published in several online journals, including Elimae, Short Fast And Deadly, Gutter Eloquence, DecomP, & Softblow Poetry Journal. He lives in his hometown of Kalamazoo, MI, and

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currently keeps himself busy interning for the Poets In Print reading series at the Kalamazoo Book Arts Club, & as the founding editor of Asylum Lake Magazine in Kalamazoo, MI (USA). Mark Hendrickson will receive his MFA from the University of California, Irvine, in 2012. He is the 2012 Poetry Editor for UCI’s literary journal, Faultline, and winner of the Gerard Creative Writing Endowment. His poems have recently appeared or are upcoming in Boston Review, Sugar House Review, and Zocalo: Public Square. Nick Johnson has been writing comedy and science fiction for over a year. He recieved writting training from DePaul University, and Second City.” Daybert Linares published his first short story at the age of eighteen. Since then, more of his fiction and poetry have appeared in a variety of online and print magazines such as Skive, Bateau, Silenced Press, The Acentos Review, Cantaraville, and the anthologies Flash!, Elements of Horror, Cup of Joe, Daily Flash, Diamonds in the Rough, and Daily Bites of Flesh. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida. Sonnet Mondal (b 1990) has authored seven books of poetry. He was bestowed Poet Laureate from Bombadil Publishing, Sweden in 2009. He was inducted in the prestigious Significant Achievements Plaque at the museum of Bengal Engineering and Science University, Shibpur in, nominated for Pushcart Prize in 2011 and was featured as one of the Famous Five of Bengali youths by India Today magazine in 2010. At present he is the managing editor of The Enchanting Verses Literary Review, Editor of Best Poems Encyclopedia, Editor of Sonnets in the New Millenium and the Sub Secretary General of Poetas Del Mundo. Patrick Parr currently lives with his wife Yuka in Leysin, Switzerland, and works as an ESL Instructor for Kumon Leysin Academy, an international boarding school for Japanese high school students. Previous fiction has been published and/or honored by BULL: Men’s Fiction, Glimmer Train, Every Day Fiction’s Best of Anthology, Dark Sky Magazine, and The Storyteller, among others.

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Matthew Thompson is a Brisbane based writer who indulges occasionally in short stories. He has been published by Skive on several occasions. His main literary inspirations are Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, Franz Kafka and George Orwell. Aside from his short stories, Matthew has a Masters Degree in History, as well as writes and performs as part of the Anti Social Review â&#x20AC;&#x201C; an internet comedy duo. Their blog can be found at www.theantisocialreview.com and their tweets at @antisocialrev. He does not subscribe to the concept that pineapple should be allowed on a pizza.