The Fable Online Issue 2 April, 2015
Editor-in-Chief Sarah Kedar
Š2015, The Fable Online|Contributing Authors Picture used in cover creation by Jonathan Leung, used by permission. Font used in cover creation developed by Chris Hansen.
Contributing Authors Bobbi Sinha-Morey Bruce Costello Clio Velentza John Cambridge Kasturi Patra Laurence Wilson Michael Constantine McConnell
Poetry
The Collector Of The Sun by Bobbi Sinha-Morey
In the sanctuary of a thousand tears a wind plays over the pipes as the days pass like a dream; and, in the stillness of dawn, an onyx slate is left to prophesy by for Cyrus, the collector of the sun. Her pale slippers with silver laces await her on terracotta tiles, and a white linen sailcloth, her palette for messages carried away by feathered things over the sea. In the ripe air of daylight she again feels trapped in the heart of a quartz, a world made of white. Once untied sashes fluttered about her and dragonflies unfolded their wings; now the violets and red flowers she’s touched have turned to dust. When there is no light or waking she hides herself
away where there is no sky, only the unbreathable womb of solitude.
Bobbi Sinha-Morey is a poet living in the peaceful city of Brookings, Oregon. His poetry can be seen in places such as Plainsongs, Bluestem, Open Window Review, Pirene's Fountain, Bellowing Ark, The Path, Quail Bell Magazine, Carillon and Penny Ante Feud, among others. His books of poetry the Glass Swan and Candle Song, as well as others are available at Amazon and Write Words, Inc. He blogs at Bobbi Sinha-Morey – Poet.
The Lecher by Michael Constantine McConnell
Poseidon lay on a beach towel, drunk on margaritas held aloft by sand castles of brown women in full spate, and Delilah asleep around his thunderous trident. He used to drink at the bars to meet people. Now he goes to be alone as drowned Atlantis burns to the ocean’s floor beneath a snoring tide.
Michael's poetry and prose have been featured in such anthologies as The Best of Electric Velocipede, Body and Soul: Narratives of Healing from Ars Medica, Reading Lips and Other Ways to Overcome a Disability, and Solace in So Many Words, for which he was nominated for a 2011 Pushcart Prize in the essay category. Originally from Detroit, he is currently a proud resident of San Marcos, Texas, pursuing a doctoral degree in Developmental Education at Texas State University and singing in degenerate Scots-Irish bands after sundown.
Flash Fiction
Dry White by Clio Velentza The door I walk through leads to our kitchen, but it is not the kitchen door; the kitchen door opens across the room and in walks Leah taking no notice of me, as if she’s on stage and I’m part of the audience. She fiddles with the coffee machine, humming a song. The fruit bowl is brimming with glossy apples and she strokes them before selecting one and cutting it into quarters. She carries on with her monotonous humming. Bottles of the wine we make in the basement make a forest on the kitchen bench. My favorite mug is in its place on the window ledge. Its rim is covered in dust. Leah too seems covered in dust; her swollen eyelids don’t open all the way and she holds her head up with effort. A rainbow of bruises is spattered across her face. Bracelets of inflamed flesh decorate her wrists, shiny where the skin is burned. I stand and watch as she drinks the coffee and eats the apple. Her eyes are pinned on a photo of us that’s stuck to the fridge. The sea is so bright behind our forms that our faces blur into darkness. Leah’s worn face comes alive, she jumps to her feet and grabs the photo, tears it into small pieces and throws it in the garbage. She leaves the kitchen and wanders around the house and, having no choice, I follow. All the windows are shut, the phone uprooted. The bathroom smells of wine, our own dry white. I can see the yellow smell hanging from the walls. There is another scent in the air, indefinite but visible: a rosy mist of floating iron particles. Leah goes down into the basement. Crates, empty bottles and buckets are scattered about. One shelf is heavy with books on wine-making. My chair is fallen on the floor. Sometimes I would sit in it while the wine fermented in the barrel, pull out the side plug and eavesdrop on the low bubbling hiss. But now the barrel stands upright. Leah pauses, opens the lid and covers her mouth with her hand. I peer into it. It must be some kind of mirror, because I can see my face in its dimness. Eyes and mouth wide open. My clothes are covered in brown stains. My shoes are submerged into the sticky fluid that covers the bottom. And suddenly I remember everything I’ve done. Leah closes the lid. For a moment she stands still, gazing at the damp barrel. She touches her face, flinching in pain. Then she turns and pulls herself up the stairs, locking the
basement behind. Her litany of humming fills the empty corridors.
Clio lives in Athens, Greece, and loves stories of all shapes and sizes. Her fiction and non-fiction has appeared in print in the anthology 21 New Voices, online in the literary magazines Maudlin House, Fifty-Word Stories, Literature.gr, 25th Hour Project, FractalArt, and is forthcoming in Whiskey Paper, Hermeneutic Chaos and Gravel Magazine.
Missy's Man by Bruce Costello The painting showed the back of a man in a red satin jacket sitting at an ancient writing desk, a quill in his left hand, poised over a scroll. Beside him, a candelabrum was burning with three candles. Wisps of blue smoke curled upwards. Castles seemed to flicker and float around him – forests and cottages, dancing soldiers, fairies with wands, lovers hand in hand and a black cat playing a flute for a nightingale, its beak open wide in song. The man in the painting turned his head and looked directly at Missy. She stared at him, open-mouthed. His eyes, in a lovely sky blue, were wide and deep; his cheeks, rosy and full, like an angel’s; his mouth, delicate as a child’s; his nose, Grecian, and exquisitely proportioned. He had a high, proud forehead, topped with long golden hair, like a fairytale prince. The man stepped out of the painting and entered the room. He seemed to hover, then to float, and moved silently towards Missy, his body shimmering in a luminescent glow, shafts of light darting from his eyes. He stood in front of Missy, so close they were almost touching, his gaze soft and caressing yet piercing and gently chiding. She could feel the warmth of his body. “Who are you?” asked Missy. Her voice was a whisper. “I am the man who sees past a woman’s words to the soul below, where goodness resides, and kindness beyond measure. I am the man who understands, who forgives and loves, the man who quietens fear and calms unwarranted guilt. Who understands what women want, and heals with soft, empathic words and loving touch.” “But, I’m not used to this....why me? I don’t deserve... good things!” “You do.” he said. She stared at him, wide-eyed. “Come to me. You need to be held,” he murmured, stretching out his arms to embrace her and pull her to him. He held her tight against his firm body, resting his chin on her brow, then released her with a silver sigh. Missy sank onto the floor at his feet, nestling her head against his knees. He bent down and kissed her forehead. His golden hair flowed across her face and his breath was fresh and cool like a waterfall. He raised Missy to her feet, gazed into her moist brown eyes, and led her to the couch.
Wordlessly, coaxingly, he caressed and soothed her until something broke inside and she began to cry and talk. When she had cried and talked enough, she smiled and unbuttoned her blouse. The man’s hands began to explore her body and his presence enveloped Missy like a warm bath on a cold winter’s day. ### A raucous voice broke into her reverie. “I’m sick to death of you, wasting time mooning over your stupid art books,” Fred her husband screamed, advancing on Missy with bloated red face and swinging fists. “Where’s my fucking tea?”
Bruce Costello is a New Zealander. After studying foreign languages and literature in the late sixties, he spent a few years selling used cars. Then he worked as a radio creative writer for fourteen years, before training in psychoanalytically-oriented psychotherapy and spending 24 years in private practice. In 2010, he semi-retired and took up writing for fun and to avoid housework. Since then he’s had 65 stories accepted by mainstream magazines and literary journals in six countries. He still does housework. His work can be found in That's Life's Fast Fiction, Turbine, Snorkel, Flash Frontier, EWR: Short Stories, Fiction on the Web, Modern Day Fairytales, The Bookends Review, et al.
The Aftermath by Kasturi Patra I would like to write about this weight my exhausted soul carries- day in, day out. I would like to come to terms with the emotions which are playing a tug of war inside my head, manifesting themselves in a splitting headache. Nah! Who'd like to see black and white, drab, melancholic pictures in this age of Instagrams and Pinterests? Go away...just close the door behind you. I'm not expecting visitors. No friends, not even one streak of that bright cloying smile of the Sun. All I crave for is ink black darkness. I wish I was blind now. These days I wake up to one stale morning after another. Some days are bad, some are worse. Some days I wake up with a sick feeling, as if I'm about to throw up. On other days, it's just a persistent dull ache at the bottom of my stomach. Well, I don't mind this ache anymore. It seems to be my constant companion these days. This morning I woke up to a feeling of wetness. Then I remembered. It was late at night. I was walking back from work. My house being just a few blocks away, I loved that nightly ritual of spending time with myself in that brief walk while wrapped up in my thoughts. Now I feel that maybe I loved this loneliness a bit too much and hence, it wanted to return the favor. Suddenly I felt like I was being hunted. I fiercely ran for dear life, through the maze of narrow lanes, until I tripped on a branch and fell. From the ground, I could see it. The jet black, slimy snake. Its eyes glowing like embers, its tongue flicking in and out. I shut my eyes in horror, flinching at the prospect of being stung. Tick tock, tick tock, one second, two seconds..nothing. Then I felt it. The scaly body slithering inside my skirt, against my thigh, moving upwards. I screamed and was jolted awake. I felt the wetness beneath and realized in shame that once again my body had succumbed to the fear. I woke up with my heart pounding against my chest like a mad drummer. I had to wait for some time to catch my breath. I undressed, stepped into the shower. As always, the cold water tried its best to remove the slime, but deep within I knew that no amount of cleaning would suffice. I stepped out of the shower, changed the bed sheets and got dressed for the long day
ahead. I sat with my work. My editor had been kind enough to let me take a break. It's been two months now. I'm not sure how much longer he'd wait for me to show up. But even if I try with all my might, I haven't been able to write one single coherent line since that night.. I keep scribbling words and phrases, in my notebooks, on my walls. Like pearls broken from a necklace, those are strewn all around me. But I can't tie even a few of those into sentences. I can think of perfectly crafted sentences though, but the moment I try putting them on paper, they seem to melt away into nothingness. I feel so empty. I can't fathom what should be my next course of action. If I lose my job, I lose this house. Then, I would have to go back to Mom's and the idea itself is so exhausting. With her constant efforts to comfort and advise, she irritates me. I can't explain her that her words hold no meaning for me, All I crave for is silence. And nothingness. I cannot bear listening to people who keep speaking to me anymore. Not that they did not try breaking my silence. My friends kept visiting, but finally gave in to this ice-cold wall of silence that I've built like a fortress around me. These days all I do is stare out of my balcony into the green park, the cars, the people and I envy the mundane life that seems to be going on in a parallel universe. I feel like I'm watching a movie. I want to be a part of it, but I'm just the audience. I can't ignore the irony. All that this once ambitious, high-flying girl craves for now, is a bit of mediocrity in her life. I stare into the apartment opposite mine and I feel pangs of envy, watching the stay-at-home mom busy with her toddler. Had I been this way before, I'd have been married to Chris with a child of my own, inside my own comfortable cocoon, doing a comfortable job, looking after my kid-nothing remotely risky. Everything would be so perfect. Why did I sacrifice that life? Dear God, only if I paid heed to his words, that crime journalism is risky, it will take a toll on our lives. Instead, I left him for my career. I was so proud of being offered such a challenging role at work. I was the blue-eyed Princess of my editor. And then, all of Chris' words came true. My job took a toll on my very existence. It's all my fault. I know God is punishing me for something. I'm not sure for what though..Is it for being too ambitious for a girl? For putting my career ahead of my love? For being too brave (or, is it reckless)? I don't know the answers.
All I know is that I have to endure one more day before the night creeps in and tries to suck away a bit more of my soul..
Kasturi is a financial analyst from India, with a passion for creative writing. Her business articles are regularly published on websites such as Forbes and Seeking Alpha. She has been an avid literature reader all her life, but only recently could she summon enough courage to start writing about her own feelings and experiences. She is proud of being one half of a crazy cat couple. She can be reached on Twitter @PatraKasturi
Short Story
Blood on the Moon by John Cambridge Fedor stood in the doorway of the tiny shed watching the sliver of light in the sky. It was the phase of the moon his son had liked best. Not when it was full and bright; not when it was a tiny, hard to find crescent, but a few days after, when it began to grow. "It’s getting bigger, Papa, it’s getting bigger," he would say, running into the house. "Yes, Myroslav, it’s getting bigger," Fedor would say with great patience because it was the same thing his son said every month. When clouds covered the sky, Myroslav would still know when the moon was growing and he was right because Fedor checked the calendar at the mine where he worked that showed such things. Pain lay sharp in Fedor’s chest. Hurting that kept getting worse. It was almost a month since his son’s death, yet the agony he felt as the moon rose over the old village was greater now because of the terrible thing Fedor had done. Noise from behind made him turn. His mind, playing an evil trick made him think it could be his son. But that was impossible. Myroslav was dead. It was the donkey stamping in his stall he heard, the only other living thing on the property. Tears struggled down Fedor’s face. Deep grooves under his eyes, etched there by many summer suns, caused teardrops to go sideways. Then the streams of wetness changed direction in wind-eroded gullies in his cheeks. The tears barely hesitated in faint laugh lines around his mouth before soaking into the delta of his beard. "My son, my son," he murmured and a new flood of tears ran out of his eyes. His son, who loved the moon so much, would never see it again. Since he was a young boy, Myroslav had watched the sky. He would wake in the night and go into the yard. Stay for hours, standing still, saying nothing, watching the path of the moon across the sky. Attempts to bring Myroslav inside had always failed. Fedor pleaded with him; his mother begged him. Cold or hunger didn’t drive him in. Only heavy clouds bringing sudden rain or freezing snow could, and even then, Fedor knew, he only came in because the moon could be seen no more. Myroslav’s lunar bonding would only stop when the moon set. Then his son would get a few hours sleep before he went to work in thefields. Fedor’s wife, when she was still living, had argued that they should take him some place, get him some help, it was wrong to look so long at the moon. "What matter, what matter. He will hurt no one," Fedor told her."Let him look, let him
look. Maybe he will grow out of it?” "Grow yes, he is almost bigger than you, already. And strong too." "Ah, Nini, did you see him with the puppy? Gentle, so gentle he is. He is happy here. What harm is in it?" Oy, what harm indeed. Maybe it was my fault? If he hadn’t given Myroslav enough money for two hard candies, maybe nothing would have happened? But he had worked so hard, carrying water all day in the hot sun, pouring pail after pail on the potato plants. "A fortune, Papa, a fortune," Myroslav said as he ran to the store with his three pennies. Fedor smiled. He had tried to teach him to count, at one time had got all the way to six. But what matter, what matter? There were only two of them, now. They only had four spoons and one donkey. Fedor had seen him give one of the candies to Michaelina, the young girl next door. No, not a girl, He had seen the bumps under her blouse, a young woman; the eldest female in the household now that her mother was dead. She had to look after her two younger sisters, cook for her father. So many women in the village had died of the same sickness, so many men, too. Now Myroslav was dead for a different reason, and Fedor was all alone. He wiped tears from his eyes. An icy shudder started at the top of his head and shook its way down his body. The donkey shifted, stretched out his neck. Fedor moved into the shed, reached out to pat the donkey's nose, put an arm around his neck. He wanted to feel something alive and warm under his hand. If only he could go back and change things, not give his son any pennies, not go to work and leave him alone with the young girls next door. There had been no sign that Myroslav had done anything wrong until Fedor spotted the blood stained girl’s underwear buried under the potato plants. Should he have warned Myroslav never to touch girls? He knew Myroslav had often stood and watched the back door of the neighbour’s house until Michaelina or one of her sisters would come out, but all he had ever done was to wave and say hello, never more, never more. He had never touched one of them. But Fedor knew a terrible thing had happened. What could he do? What could he do? Michaelina would surely tell, and then the police would come. It would kill Myroslav to go to jail. If he could not look at the moon he would suffer a thousand deaths every night. If he could not wander in the fields or water his plants, he would scream in agony every
minute. One time the door to his room had stuck— only for a moment. Myroslav had cried, pounded on the door in a panic, so afraid, so afraid. It was impossible to watch him every minute of every day. He seemed to need no sleep but Fedor’s old bones required more and more. They could not move away. There was no place to go. This was the land which had been their father’s and his father’s before that. All night Fedor had thought. He could only come up with one answer. The day after he had found the underwear, shortly after the sun rose, Fedor hitched the donkey to a small cart. He lifted a shovel that weighed a thousand pounds into the cart, an axe that weighed a ton, a small bag of Myroslav’s clothes that dragged on the ground as he carried it to the cart. As they made their way through the village people called to them. "Where are you going?" a woman asked. "To a cousin’s," Myroslav called out. "To a cousin's," He waved and smiled, "the other side of the river." It is what Fedor had told him. The old woman looked at a neighbour and shrugged. They would know there were no cousins. "Who will water your potatoes?" asked a man. "It will rain soon," Fedor told him. "Who will make the potatoes grow?" someone called. Fedor had no answer. Myroslav could make potatoes grow in soil that looked like stones. Sometimes he dug up plants before they were ready, the tiny tubers no bigger than peas, but he would plant them again in a better place and they would flourish. "Who will watch the moon for us?" another old man asked, laughing and slapping his knee. Fedor hung his head. No one could watch the moon like Myroslav, yet if he was arrested and put in a cell with no window—Fedor shuddered to think what torment his son would suffer. He slapped the reins on his donkey’s back and continued down the road. Fedor hadn’t slept a night since, and this night did not differ. He wiped wetness from his whiskers with large knuckled hands, brown from sun, green from weeds, black from soil. "Will the pain ever end?" he asked the morning brightness. There was movement, a flash of white. Michealina stood outside her back door in her thin nightdress, glowing pink in the new sun. She looked one way then the other, glancing across to where Fedor stood. He knew she could not see him in the shed, the sun behind him.
She took one step, her eyes darting back and forth. Another step and she looked around again. A groan almost escaped from Fedor’s lips as he watched her. My Myroslav has done that to her, made her afraid of her shadow. And no mother, no mother and her father away in the mines to make money so they wouldn’t starve in the winter. Michaelina left in charge of her two young sisters; her body changing and no one to talk to. She was through her back yard now, earth packed so hard it was like stone, hurrying, not looking any more, but dashing as if she were being chased. Then she was in his back yard, in the potatoes. She knelt down. Fedor frowned as her head twisted one way and then snapped in the opposite direction. Who was she afraid of? She knew Myroslav wasn’t here. The whole village knew. He watched as she dug in the soft soil around the plants, earth that Myroslav had made workable. He noticed for the first time that she had something in her hand, something white and folded. He saw smears of red just before her hand darted into the hole. It came out empty and she quickly packed dirt over top and ran home. Fedor leaned his head against the shed wall. It was the only thing that kept him from collapsing. His eyes squeezed shut trying to stop the sun from flying across the heavens, changing into a moon that grew until it filled the sky and dripped blood from a hundred wounds.
John Cambridge and his wife live in British Columbia.
Jasper's Rant by Laurence Wilson Jasper ordered a pint of Guinness, it was after six o” clock in the evening and Jasper was entitled to his first of the day. “Do ye have a paper behind the bar Jack?” He called to the red-faced man pulling his pint. “Anything will do even the Times” he smirked. “It was far from the times you were reared Jasper, and anyway they use words with more than the one syllable. You’d be fucked”. A general guffaw of laughter greeted this exchange, even though, the six other patrons never once looked in the direction of Jasper or Jack, they remained focused on the telly in the corner which was showing evening racing from Listowel on ATR, the 6.20pm eight furlong Delaney's Handicap. The bar in Lynch was an old style, spit on floor, horse racing on the box, men only. The kind of place where women were not seen during the week. Oh! they could be seen there on a weekend or a Friday evening but Wednesday at 6.30pm if a woman was to be found in Lynch’s, she was sitting in the lounge with a large gin and tonic. Jasper quietly read the paper and as he settled into the second pint of the evening the door from the street opened and a small thin man dressed in a stained navy jacket and scruffy dark jeans limped up to the bar. The limp was pronounced and made his gait very irregular. He pulled out a stool and with his back to the bar awkwardly clambered up, then pivoted the seat around till he was facing Jasper. “How are ye Jasper?” then without waiting for an answer, he called to the barman “a pint of Heineken Jack.” Jasper turned from his paper and looked the newcomer up and down “Oh I’m alright, how about yourself, did you get that other thing sorted or what?” “No, I have to meet with ‘your one’ down the Social Welfare on Friday.” “So you got no money this week?” “I’m alright, I went to the Vincent de Paul and gave them a hard luck story about me moth dumping me and the kids out of the house, I took the oldest young fella with me and told your man I was living with me poor widowed father and the kids hadn't eaten anything but cornflakes in two days. The young fella was brilliant, bawling his eyes out for his Mammy and laying it on thick. They threw me €60 and said I should come to them on Monday if I am still at me Da’s and we would have a ‘consultation’, sort something more
permanent.” Jasper shook his head, “Ye know what BT, you’re an awful man altogether. One of these days they are going to catch on to ye.” “What me, the poor cripple. Never!” His actual name was Damien as in Damien Clancy but the only person ever to be heard calling him Damien was his father. Everyone including his partner of nine years and the mother of his three children called him BT. Nicknames were a commonplace in Lynch’s bar, but Damien’s nickname was unusual. Damien earned his nickname as a child. He and a couple of his seven-year old pals were playing football in one of the boys front gardens. The ball went over the garden wall and out onto the road. Damien chased after it with the single-minded blindness that all children in pursuit of a football possess. The car was not travelling at any great speed but then cars were made of sterner stuff then, and Damien was small for his age. The resultant accident left him with fractures to his left tibia, right femur and fibia. The worst of the injury was to the right-hand side of his pelvis, not so much fractured as smashed to multiple pieces. Damien spent three years undergoing various operations and treatments. He was ten years old before he was able to hang out with his pals again. Before the accident the boys had called him Dame’o, short for Damien, but now as he returned to their lives with his stumbling walk and unwieldy crutches, he was christened anew and his revised nickname had a cruel barb to it. Dame’o was now ‘Born to Dance’ and as time passed this was shortened to B.T.D. which over the intervening years had dropped the D and lost its original meaning, now it was just another nickname, BT. The barman served BT his pint, the head oozing from the side of the glass and onto the bare wooden counter. “Well here’s to the V.D.P. Fair balls to them,” he said as he raised the glass and swallowed half the pint in a single gulp. “How is your Da anyway, I haven't seen him in here for ages,” asked Jasper nursing his own pint in a much more frugal fashion. “Well I hate to admit it but I’ve not been in the house in a couple of weeks, I’m up to me tonsils with a few things, you know yourself.” Jasper did not know or believe that BT was anything but a complete waster and the only thing he was ‘up to’ was no good, his father on the other hand was a gentle and hardworking man whom Jasper had great time for. A man who had reared four kids on his own following the early death of his wife, Mavis, who had died in a car crash. The family was haunted by car accidents. Both men turned as the door from the lounge opened and Sean Finn came in. Sean looked around the dim bar till he spotted BT and
authoritatively commanded “Come ‘ere I want a word with you.” With a lurch, BT spun on the stool and fumbled himself to the relative stability of the floor. He followed Sean through into the lounge and as the doors closed behind him Jasper saw them make their way towards the Gents at the back of the premises. BT was gone only a short time and when asked on his return by Jasper what the ‘Finn’ fella was looking for, he mumbled “Ah, it was only a bit of business.” Jasper said no more but understood that business was bad business; drugs. He finished his pint, got off his stool and called farewell to Jack the barman, without looking at or saying another word to BT he exited the pub and as he let the door close behind him he heard BT call out “What got into him?” As he walked away from the pub Jasper indulged himself in a familiar train of thought. The youth of today were damaged goods, they were crippled in mind and spirit. Drug use and the means people used to obtain them were a cancer working at the heart of these old working class communities and it was damaging everybody. Men, women and children were affected directly and indirectly, their aspirations compromised and reduced to savage survival. This drug stuff was not a new thing. Jasper believed it had it’s beginning with the heroin epidemic of the late nineteen seventies and early eighties. This had devastated the communities of the inner city. The fact that the family gangs that ran the trade were led by graduates of the industrial schools of Artane, Daingean and Letterfrack was no coincidence to Jasper. These same men had been battered, buggered or abused as children while they were serving time for mitching from school or petty larceny. Official Ireland paid no mind, had no responsibility to care for and looked the other way when called on to act to protect these children. It was the late eighties before any attempt to tackle the drugs problem was pursued and that was only when the children of Dublin 4 and the rest of South Dublin began to be directly affected and of course by that time the cat was well and truly out of the bag and there was no getting it back in again. It was a new century before the country could face up to the reality of the evil, ‘holy’ men who ruined and ruled the lives of so many children and then there were all those young girls, hidden and locked away, slave labour, their babies stolen from them and sold or given up for adoption to strangers. These girls came from the same streets, the same houses as their battered brothers, they were for the most part working class girls, they were victims of a state which persecuted the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, Jasper spoke out loud, “No wonder everyone wants to feck off
to the states.” Jasper was a self-educated man who had left school at the age of twelve. He always had a sense of not really belonging but he believed that as an outsider he could see what those stuck in the middle of this mess could not. The drug use and the associated violence were a direct product of a sick system of governance whose only role was to service an elite who promoted and followed an agenda which had no place for the working classes. He felt the ruling party in Ireland had abandoned the ideals of the founders of the state and that there was no place for ordinary people, working people, small farmers, the corner shop owners, the people who went out to work every day to earn a living and not a million. He as a young man had moved to the North of England to labour on housing sites in Bolton, Manchester and Liverpool. He had spent many evenings in pubs listening to older expats, who had come over to England in the Fifties, bemoaning the fact that they and thousands of men and woman like them had been forced to take the ferry to Holyhead to get a bit of work, escaping a failed state which could not supply the basic needs of its citizens, work, food and shelter. A state in which the only money ever available was tied up with the public service or the church and you were required to either kiss or take it up the arse to get access to that. A state dependent on the envelope sent in the post every week from the thousands working for the auld enemy. Their familiar rants never really left him and he heard himself echo their very words sometimes late at night, after a skinful, as he described to his bar buddies ‘this great little country’ that they all lived in. The country he was forced to leave to earn a crust was the same country that the kids were leaving today, the same old shite their fathers, mothers and grandparents had lived with. As he came to the close of these rambling monologues, he would finish with a phrase which was common currency in his youth ‘It’s who you know and not what you know that gets you anything in this kip’. Jasper was one of those individuals who stood to the side of life and watched, unable to fully commit to participating. He was one of those people who never find their other or better half, who never find a partner. He was not all that interested in sex and at the age of sixty-eight it might not be a surprise but in truth he had never really been that interested. His sexuality was ambiguous though he had experience with both sexes and these days was attracted to neither. He had no children and his parents were long gone but from this isolation he felt a deep compassion and sadness for the kids growing up
around him in a world that appeared to brutalise them. He recalled his mother sending him a letter each week while he was away in England. The weekly letter would outline the coming’s and going’s of the locality. The stories of a lonely woman who missed her only child and who sat in her bedroom each day and gazed out the window at the everyday activities of her neighbours lives. The simple story of who was pregnant and who was going away or a tender tale of kindness about the young lad who lived next door, Damien Clancy, who had stopped playing football with his pals to help poor Mrs Banks struggling to carry her weekly shopping from the local store and when pressed with a reward, not accepting any payment for his assistance. It must have been the wind that made Jasper’s eyes water as he continued his slow weary walk home.
Laurence Wilson was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1961. He grew up in a working class district of Dublin called Crumlin. At the age of fifteen, he got employed with Bord Fáilte (Irish Tourist Board) as an office boy. He met his better half, Jennifer, they have one beautiful daughter, Jessica. He took a severance package last year and now has the time and purpose to apply himself to writing.
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