Issue 14 nature

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NATURE Allison Glasgow Xanthi Barker

Kama Shockey Samuel Simas Amy Oestreicher And

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D J Cockburn

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Contents

Editor’s Introduction…….………………………………………….……………………………3 About the Frog………….…………………………………………………………………………4 Fractal Tension……………………………………………………………………………………18 The Judges………………………………………………………………………………………...24 The Judgement…………………………………………………………………..……………….25 The Quahogger………………………………………………………......……………………….30 When A Bear Comes for A Visit.……………………………………….……………………...39 Hold Me Hunting………………………………………………………………………………….46 Berkshires……….…………………………………………………………………………………61

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THE RED LINE Hello Again Readers, Five new stories for you, and an article on how to build tension in a story, one level at a time.

We’ve got stories of vivisection, inebriation, bears watching television, Sharpeis, and Quahogging. Can’t say fairer than that. The judging and feedback follows our first story, then we have our Judge’s article on tension-building.

Having read about seventy stories a month for the past year or so, we can’t begin to tell you how important tension is. You probably won’t believe it, but editors are the most generous readers that you are going to encounter (barring family, and some friends). Editors want your story to be good, they want to be entertained, in fact sometimes they are desperate to find a story of sufficient calibre. Actual readers don’t care who you are, and aren’t really prepared to give you that slack (unless they’re life long fans). They don’t notice the mechanics of the craft that much, nor do they really care about them. They just like something and care about what happens, or they don’t. Tension is one of the key tools to holding a reader’s attention.

Just a bit of an announcement about future issues as well. In an issue-or-so’s time we’re going to start reducing the number of pages for each issue. That means we may have to restrict the number of stories from the short list that make it in, or restrict the number of words per story. So, although the word limit remains 4,500 words, it’s worth noting that if we have two stories of the same quality, the shorter story is more likely to be short listed. More later...

Best Wishes

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About the Frog

By Allison Glasgow Mrs. Marquardt is so ugly, squat and squashed in too tight pants. She teaches Biology to the freshmen at Litchfield High School. I am not a freshman, I am a senior who missed freshman Biology, who fell asleep under the stage in the auditorium for the bulk of a year.

I need freshman Biology to graduate. My guidance counselor, Mr. Sorka, told me last spring when I started visiting his office with a copy of the US News and World Report’s Best Colleges. I’ve narrowed my choices down to 318 schools, tabbed with fluorescent post-it arrows and ranked by distance from Li-

tchfield, Michigan. I told Sorka that I want to try for them all and together we’ve already submitted twenty or so applications. This takes an extraordinary amount of work. I have armed myself with a binder of signed references from my boss Steve of Steve’s Hardware, my American Government teacher from tenth grade, and checks I forge from a book of blanks stolen out of the junk drawer in our kitchen. My college application project requires its own backpack that I keep in the trunk of my car. Sorka thinks I am crazy, I know.

When I first started visiting him, I thought Sorka was a therapistcounselor, like the therapist the school hired when Kristy Jurban’s sister mixed meth and coke and catapulted through her windshield. That counselor was real

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The frog dissection is saved for the last experiment, prized as the pinnacle of high school Biology, and I had noticed the vats lined up on the teaching bench from the first day of class. A fifty year supply at least, they never spoil.

good at squeezing shoulders and coaxing phony tears, but she was only hired for a week of commemorative tree-planting. I need a therapist-counselor like her, or like the woman who led the group session for children of divorce in 4 th grade. My parents weren’t divorced, but my teacher thought I needed to talk to someone because that was the year my mom was deployed to Iraq. I was the only kid in the whole town with a parent at war—a category of one. It all worked out though because Mom came home so full of PTSD, divorce followed her through the door and I finally fit in at school.

I don’t see Mom anymore. She lives in Montana with a woman from her unit, like I never happened. Like nothing happened, except Iraq. I remember what that divorce counselor said about kids, and how it’s not our fault, like how I couldn’t stop that shit any more than I could stop a train by standing in the middle of the tracks. I need someone to tell me more things like this, some au-

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thority to say that just because I think it doesn’t make it so, but Sorka’s a guidance counselor, only qualified to print transcripts.

Sorka called my dad because he thinks I’m batshit and all the combing of my transcript revealed I was in danger of not graduating. Dad doesn’t care if I graduate, not in any real Dadly way, but I think he put the fear of God into Sorka. My dad is Speaker of the city council, perpetual mayoral candidate and Sicilian with a fetish for mafioisms. He’s no pinkie breaker, but loves to puff up like a Whoopie cushion, bullying city employees with sneers and tough-guy handshakes. I’m sure he told Sorka to “fix it” and that’s what Sorka thinks he’s doing by allowing me to retake freshman Biology. My buddy Sorka even accommodated fellow burnouts, other seniors who failed freshman Biology the first time, enrolling us all together. We outnumber Mrs. Marquardt four-to-one.

Mrs. Marquardt’s at the top of my death list, a notebook where I keep notation of people I’d like to see dead. She’s always number one. Mom is two or three, sometimes Dad, and Willem Defoe because I don’t like his face. I don’t write this shit down anymore because when Kristy’s sister died, Kristy was on my list and I felt like it was my fault. I buried that notebook in the bottom of my closet with all the other things I pretend to forget, but I can’t turn my brain off.

Like a bad habit, like picking a scab, or chewing on my tongue. Mrs. Marquardt is still number one.

I bet she feels similar about me. Once she caught me off guard at work, dozing in the plumbing aisle at Steve’s Hardware. She came up behind me

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clutching a pipe, but when she recognized me in my red apron, her face soured and she turned right around and walked out of the store. I was ready to be nice.

It’s my job to be nice.

Fuckwit Steve made me the weekend plumbing expert because I can tell the difference between PVC and ABS. But that’s it, that’s all I know. I get a little sweaty when helping old people with what fitting they need, tee or elbow, and what gauge. I like sensible people who bring in the pipe, like Mrs. Marquardt. If she’d given me the chance, I’d have pointed to the red bins and said let’s find it together. I am proud of those bins, I carefully sort and organize the parts on every shift. I am supposed to give advice, but one day someone is going to say to Steve, “that girl you got in the plumbing aisle doesn’t know shit about toilets,” and they’d be right. If you come in with the pipe, I can find the match, real easy. You go home, fix it and it works. You don’t bring in the pipe, I’ll try to make something up to help you, but chances are you need to call a plumber. I’m not a plumber. I just work on Saturdays.

Under other circumstances, minus Mrs. Marquardt, I might like Biology. I like the lab, learning about the mechanics of organs and neurons, the occupations of cells. Science isn’t invisible like math. I see it in my hair follicles, my pupil dilation. I feel science in menstrual cramps. Science is like real-life magic, everything is orchestrated and functional. Biology makes me think of God, like God has a factory and we are manufactured self-sufficient. I don’t like to think about God outside of science. I like knowing that all of the questions have an-

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swers even if they haven’t been asked yet.

I have lots of questions. So far we’ve learnt about life, but I can’t wait to get my hands on the dead things, the dissections. I even like the smell of the preserving chemicals. The smell of this stuff keeps the other smell at bay. In those news stories when people find dead bodies, they talk first about the smell. I know how rancid meat stinks, I’d just open any of the takeout containers crowding my refrigerator to get that particular experience, but humans must be different. The decomposition of our clothes, our stomach contents, something makes our odor distinct because if it were just rotten lunch meat, these people, the dead body detectors, wouldn’t want to Clorox their nasal passages. It’s that bad— they never forget.

The frog dissection is saved for the last experiment, prized as the pinnacle of high school Biology, and I had noticed the vats lined up on the teaching bench from the first day of class. A fifty year supply at least, they never spoil.

The opaque containers are filled with fist-sized, plasticy amphibians suspended in a solution. Right now we are imprinting chicks: Lab Assignment number eleven. Gauging a chick hatching is a crapshoot, so this is a crap experiment.

Out of one hundred and sixty-eight hours in a week, we’re only in the classroom five, so that’s a three percent change we’d even be there for the event, which defeats the purpose of the entire task. Of course the chicks cracked overnight which begs other questions like, who fed the chicks when they broke out. Did Mrs. Marquardt take the eggs home with her and feed them regurgitated seeds

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from her fucking mouth? We come to class and there are chicks instead of eggs and she’s like, oh look! Chicks! The class was excited, the chicks, so damn poufy and sweet.

One student from each bench was to be elected Mother. We chose Kenneth, the sole guy in our lab group, figuring it might be his only chance. The first day went well, Pot Queen named the chick Tybalt, and Tybalt dutifully bonded with Kenneth, toddling along the lab bench. The next day, though, Tybalt was indifferent and we began to wonder if there was any system for tracking the individuals, or were they a gang of interchangeable doppelgangers.

Likely the whole imprint experiment was a complicated exercise in animal cruelty, but we took it personally, suspecting particular menace by Mrs. Marquardt aimed at failing our senior bench.

Because Mrs. Marquardt hates us. We are never doing the experiments correctly and our lab manuals are filled with coded insults about her face. Pocked and fleshy, she wears an enormous amount of makeup. Our offense is at the effort. The deliberate awfulness of eyeliner and dry, violent lipstick, the plasticwrap suction of her wardrobe—like someone underlining every single word in a

sentence until the paper rips. And she’s mean, as mean as she is ugly. We act jerky, and she silently takes points off our lab assignment, the only warning, the sharp pop of the red felt pen she uncaps with her teeth. Mrs. Marquardt documents our rudeness in the participation square of the grading rubric—sometimes massacring forty percent off the letter grade. With each return of an assignment,

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inscribed in her bloody script a monstrous D, we are goaded. Guaranteed to begin the next assignment spitting evil while she lurks by our bench, stone-cold as a mass-shooter, mercilessly flicking the points off with her pen.

Tybalt was a line-in-the-sand. Corinne initiated the case against Mrs. Marquardt, her plan serendipitous with the rage-filled Sharpie unicorn Pot-Queen was doodling on the nose of her Chuck Taylor. Corinne used the Sharpie to draw a single dot on the chick’s toenail. Pot-Queen, a moral vegetarian—now vegan as she was witness to the profundity of eggs—nearly blew it by screaming, “You’re like Maybelline, like some horrible animal-testing plant! The fumes alone are killing all his brain cells,” and commenced a monologue so tedious, Corinne promised to do her Trigonometry homework as penance.

The identifying mark worked. The next day, the Not-Tybalt on our bench was without a dot. Corinne spotted our chick two benches down and she wasted no time proclaiming Mrs. Marquardt at fault. “You mixed up the chicks Mrs. Marquardt.”

Mrs. Marquardt ambled over, red pen at the ready.

Corrine, whose father was a lawyer before keeling to massive coronary

failure last summer, thinks she is well on her way to rhetoric genius, but the loss—the discovery of the degree to which life can suck, just makes Corinne pushy, sometimes combustive. We all, Mrs. Marquardt especially, have the misfortune of Corinne post-dead dad.

“Put that pen away, Mrs. Marquardt,” she said. “You don’t scare me. You

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want to screw us and I finally have proof. You mixed up the chicks.”

Mrs. Marquardt said, “I did no such thing, and you’ll notice, no other lab group is having your problem,” which meant nothing. No one was learning anything in this class, the freshmen were just trying harder to fake it. Their sheepish mass blinked silently in our direction, settling in for the confrontation.

Corinne said, “But, this isn’t our chick. You’re a liar. He’s over there. I marked him because I knew you’d cheat.”

“Hand over your lab manual.”

“But you are lying—“ “I’d like the entire bench’s manuals,” Mrs. Marquardt said. This was a first.

“Why?” said Corinne. “You’re going to fail us?” and then to us, “She wants to fail us.”

Mrs. Marquardt reached past Corinne and took her manual. I handed mine over easily and Pot Queen shrugged, having not bothered to bring it to class.

Kenneth made a move to relinquish his, but Corinne intercepted and clutched it to her belly. She said, “Mrs. Marquardt, please, you are screwing up Kenneth’s whole life. This fat bastard will flunk out of school.”

This is true, the failing part, and well, the fat bastard part too, I guess. We all need to pass the class, but Kenneth’s stake is dire. For Kenneth there are not summer school options, no extra-curriculars with which to negotiate. He told me on the monkey bars of the elementary school last week with the moon, full and yellow, tempting us past curfew. He needs a C in all his classes or he will be

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held back. I snorted when he said it. Who fails out of school? We are good kids, maybe a little too high, but not flunkies. The confession made me consider all kinds of uncomfortable things about Kenneth and what it must be like to grow up without a dad who will claim you. Living in a trailer park part-time, extended relatives’ basements, the other. Kenneth, who started work as a bus-boy at thirteen. Kenneth, who supports his mom, since diabetes took her eyesight. If he fails, he says, that’s it. He won’t bother returning. He thinks he can be a tattoo artist, open his own shop, but Kenneth is crap at drawing. Drawing is not subjective. I told him, as kindly as possible, he better get good with the needle, invent new piercings, or something. Own the shop, sure, but let the artists do the drawing. Kenneth can’t see reality past the next electric bill.

Knowing about Kenneth and his socio-economic quicksand, Mrs. Marquardt took his manual. She pulled it, a surprising yank, out of Corinne’s grip.

Corinne didn’t fight much, because who’s going to physically challenge a teacher, but she was fuming mad.

Corinne scuttled all her belongings into her bag and swung it over her shoulder, cussing, “You’re a cold-hearted bitch. You’re going to hell. I am going

to the principal’s office with this shit, Mrs. Marquardt. You won’t get away with it.”

Pot Queen waited a beat before heading after Corinne, leaving me and Kenneth to watch Mrs. Marquardt bypass the rubric and draw an F onto both of our imprinting lab assignments. With Corinne’s manual, she walked to the gar-

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bage can and dropped the whole thing in. A lone freshman cooed “Damn,” in the background.

This was when I stole the frog. In the minutes of chaos following Corrine’s ejection, Kenneth apologized to Ms. Marquardt, over and over, with an unanswerable questions about his grade winnowing her patience. I snuck to the barrel. Bare-handed I snatched a frog out, and wrapped it in a paper towel. I pushed the frog into my backpack and sat back at the bench, my nose tingling with chemicals. I watched the skin of my hand rewind, imagined it shrinking into a fetal flower, but formaldehyde isn’t a time machine. It’s only a preserver.

After class, Kenneth and I skipped second period. We straddled the wall bordering the dumpsters behind 7-11, prepared to jump to either side if approached by someone with authority, but that never happens. A relief, for all I need is Kenneth goddamn breaking his neck over the peaceful need of cigarette.

I cannot have that on my conscience.

I showed him the frog, limp limbs splayed in a forever jumping jack. Kenneth didn’t want to touch it. The plan was to leave it in Mrs. Marquardt’s desk, tuck it into a far corner of drawer where it will eventually curdle into death-rot,

liquefy, and stink up her awful shit-filled life.

We speculated briefly about Corinne’s and Pot-Queen’s where-abouts.

Neither of us felt much like contacting them after class. They didn’t know where to find us because this spot is only ours. We have been friends since sixth grade, whereas Corinne and Pot-Queen are high school additions. Like addi-

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tions, they extend off the foundation.

We sit with the frog between us and Kenneth says, “It’s not going to work.”

“What?” I said.

“Any of it.” *** At Steve’s Hardware, I’ve learned that people can be seriously dumb about plumbing. People think that because a pipe’s job is to transport water, it is impervious to rust, but if it’s metal, usually galvanized steel, of course it rusts. All you need is oxygen and water. When a pipe rusts, it does so inside out. The inside-surface crumbles orange chips that sludge together with water until they clog. That’s when people dig out the Drano and the plunger. Drano can’t do shit to metal, just collects with the clog. The suction of the plunger brings all those rusted flecks up the drain in a gurgling red-brown chemical paste. Where they expect a simple hair clog, they get hair and guts. Like a horror film, a foamy retching of the pipes’ innards. It looks exactly like old death, dried, then rehydrated blood. And the smell is iron, metallic, earthy and strong. I’ve had people

tell me there’s an animal corpse in the pipe. The Drano did something horrible, they say, started dissolving the creature back up the drain. They have genuine fear when they tell me this story, like they are living in a hell-house. But, no. It’s just rust, I have to tell them. And they had better replace that pipe.

This rust-stuff and people’s unwillingness to deal with gross shit offered

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an opportunity. I started a side business for the truly inept, borrowing tools from my father’s unemployed collection. My customers are elderly. If they are looking for something easy and tell me they are going to install it themselves, I’ll offer to come by their house after my shift, and put in the piece for twenty bucks.

It’s a feel-good, simple gig.

The weekend after the frog, Steve calls up and asks me to help an old high school buddy of his replace a kitchen pipe. His friend is disabled, Steve says, wounded in Afghanistan. I wouldn’t do a job like this normally. I only help old people, but I trust Steve, and after he patiently signed two-hundred references for my college application project, I feel I owe him one.

I schedule the install after a takeout dinner with my dad on Sunday. The meal is spent enduring a jowly lecture of his disappointment. All my potentials, lying in the mass grave of my public school record. I should be ashamed, he says. But there’s still time. Of course there’s time. I am only fucking seventeen years old.

It’s merciful to have something else to do, to tell my dad, I gotta go. I’m not sure of the pipe though, so I stop by Steve’s on the way to the job’s house

and grab four different sized PVC traps with Teflon tape for the threads. I stuff them into my backpack, hoping one would do the trick. When I ring the bell, I am greeted by an ageless-looking man with half his face melted off. He has no right ear, no place for an eye. The whole side of his head is sort of caved and shiny like a giant raisin and it is so devastating to look at that it’s all I can mus-

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ter to say, “Hello.”

He says his name is Wes, and leads me the sink. I only notice his prosthetic arm when he says, “I would do it myself, but I don’t have a hand.”

“I do,” I say, wiggling my fingers stupidly.

In this moment Mrs. Marquardt comes into the kitchen carrying a bag of Boston Market. I see her, like a dream of falling and screaming without impact.

Wes introduces me as the plumber-girl, and Mrs. Marquardt says “oh,” purses her brow, and ensures the hem of her shirt is taut over her waistband. It is weird to see her in street clothes, not her failed sexy-teacher attempts at pencil skirts and V-neck sweaters. She looks just normal, her hair flat and there is no makeup caked under her eyes. She’s not suddenly pretty or anything, but she looks more like a mom, more undefined and unremarked.

I let her pretend we don’t know each other. There aren’t any hospitalities, or chit-chats, I just say I’d better get started as I can see they are ready for dinner. They don’t stand around watching me, but sit down at the kitchen table to eat. Under the sink has already been cleared of all the cleaners and mouse traps in preparation for my arrival, the bottles lined neatly along the floorboard. The

skeleton of a galvanized elbow sits in a bucket under the plumbing network. I examine the crumbling pipe, its leak stemming from serious rust disintegration of any handhold. Ms. Marquardt must have taken out the pipe, which couldn’t have been easy, and come to the store looking for help. When she saw me she decided she’d rather suffer an unusable sink, and now here I am. Thankfully,

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I’ve at least brought the right pipe.

As I work, I eavesdrop self-consciously on the dinner procession. They are largely silent. It feels wrong, unnatural even for Mrs. Marquardt. She doesn’t want me in this home. I have intruded on her private life. I wonder if they are married. I begin to panic that silent Mrs. Marquardt is looking down at me in satisfaction. Me, in this awkward position, slowly and thoroughly becoming saturated by the greasy, pungent slime of her refuse. There’s no noble way to lie with my head in a cupboard. She should be doing this, sparing her molten husband the humiliation of my generosity. Mrs. Marquardt can’t spare the decency of a “hey how are you” and I begin to imagine she will tell Wes what a horrendous student I am as soon as I leave. I might deserve it, the frog comes to mind.

Me and the frog demonstrate little moral boundaries. But that is school—my pipe install business is different, it’s like a goddamn community service. Here I am doing a good deed, helping a veteran without ripping him off and I can feel her contempt scandalizing my one decency.

I finish the job, test the pipe and try to wash the orangey flakes that have powdered to stain in my palms. It is hopeless, for as fast as I want gone. Amidst

the luminous, metallic suds, I make a bold decision. I pull the frog from my backpack and stuff it into her garbage disposal. I will slip out of that house, sure of my status as the better person. I’m not the asshole, Mrs. Marquardt, it’s you.

Bitter old, ugly old, you.

But when I turn around, she’s gone. Wes is sitting alone at the table with a

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beer. I can’t tell where his gaze is, his normal half pointed away from me.

“Thank you for your service.” The words discharge from some silenced, masticated portion of my tongue.

He turns to face me, a single eyebrow shrugged on his forehead.

I think of my mother doing sit-ups on the living room carpet before her morning run. Her heather gray Army sweats, her hair slick to her scalp and braided like an extra spine down her nape.

Her breath pushed so hard from her gut, it would wake me from sleep.

“My Mom died in the Trade Center,” I lie.

He nods. He’s looking at me and I look back. No longer alarmed, I want to study his face close up. To work out each ripple, trace it with my finger like a puzzle maze, where the creases connect and where they don’t. Once I start looking, I want his face in my hands, to smooth it out, or remold it into something else.

“That was a long time ago,” he says. “Do you remember her?”

“Yeah.”

“She work there?” he asks.

“No. She was walking by.”

“That’s fucked up,” he says and takes a pull of his beer, his no-face eclipsing his good-face.

“Yeah,” I say, turning quickly to the sink and shoving my hand back into the disposal, catching my pinky finger good on the chopper. I yank the frog out

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and palm it behind my back. “I gotta go,� I say and half-run, leaving splatters of blood on the linoleum and the hallway carpet and all the way out the door.

In the driveway, I know I will vomit, but I don't. I walk past my car and through the rows of identical houses until I am standing on the perimeter of the high school football stadium. A moat of transformer towers bisects the suburb.

The hiss, electrical pops, charge my brain like the swell of a symphony and I let it be. In my hand the frog remains, undecayed and smelling exactly like it did yesterday.

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Fractal Tension

by D J Cockburn

D J Cockburn is a writer currently based in London, after having spent most of the last twenty years meandering around the world teaching or doing science of one sort or another. Here he mixes the science with the writing to give some advice on how to induce a state of tension in your readers.

It’s not exactly a novel statement to say that tension is central to fiction, but it’s taken me a while to recognise its fractal nature. The role of tension is to keep the reader’s eyes on the page and their mind on the story, which the best stories do with tension at multiple levels. There’s tension in the overall story arc, but there’s also tension in individual sentences of dialogue or description. Hence tension is a fractal phenomenon, operating on multiple levels at once.

Macrotension A lot has been written about macrotension, which drives the overall story. At its broadest, tension comes down to what the main character wants. Perhaps they want a pay rise. Perhaps they want to know whodunnit. Perhaps they want to get out of the cave without being eaten by the monster. As long as the reader cares whether the character gets what they want, they have a reason to keep reading.

A short story doesn’t have space for more than one over-arching source of tension, but at the same time, macrotension only goes so far. If one source of tension was enough, the character who doesn’t want to be eaten would be able to spend several paragraphs running away until she runs out of the cave and gives the monster the finger. Meanwhile the reader would be skimming for something to happen, and more likely to be imagining the Benny Hill soundtrack than caring whether she makes it out alive.

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Intermediate tension There needs to be an intermediate level of tension. There must be obstacles to overcome, whether the character’s objective is to survive a monster attack or get a payrise. The obstacles may be physical, but often carry more tension when they are rooted in the character’s psyche. A character faced with something they don’t want to do on the way to what they really want generates a lot of tension.

Suppose the character wants a payrise. We all want one of those, so it’s easy to understand. But suppose they have to do the dirty on their colleague to get it.

Then they have to decide how much they really want the payrise, while the reader has to ask themselves what they really want the character to do. If the reader doesn’t know what the character will do, they are strongly motivated to keep reading to find out.

The character that generates the most tension is often the one caught between two unpalatable choices. What they really want is to not have to make the choice at all, but that’s not an option. A classic example would be Graham Greene’s The Tenth Man, in which the characters are trapped in a cell knowing some of them will be executed. The ideal outcome of escaping the cell is not available. The characters are forced to address what is under their control, which is who will be executed. Nobody can get what they want, so the tension is driven into every word of the narrative.

It was such a powerful situation that Greene later expanded it into a novel, but it’s worth a look at the original story just to see how understated tension can be.

Microtension in the prose The most basic level of tension is microtension, which is what turns a description of what is happening into prose that seizes the reader’s attention and won’t let it go. For example, the protagonist of Rachel Swirsky’s Portrait of Lisane da

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Patagnia is described painting a subject with whom she’s had a rather chequered relationship. She could have simply described it in terms of brushes and paint. She didn’t: Angry oranges now, bright and uncompromising, jagging down the canvas like lightning bolts. Snarls of unflinching, determined white, tangling in the corners and then stretching into tendrils, writhing blindly toward something neither they nor I could reach.

The shapes and colours come to life, showing us all we need to know about what’s going on in the protagonist’s mind.

Another example, using dialogue, from Charles Stross’s Down on the Farm: Andy knows how to bait my hook, damn it.

“What kind of job?”

“There’s something odd going on down at the Funny Farm.” He gives a weird little chuckle. “The trouble is going to be telling whether it’s just the usual, or a more serious deviation.”

Andy could simply have said ‘go to the Funny Farm and find out what’s happening’, which would be a clear and unambiguous statement of his position and the direction of the story. It would also be boring. Instead, he threw in a few details to get the protagonist’s interest, and the reader’s with it. If you’re anything like me, you now want to know what the Funny Farm is and will keep reading to find out. At the same time, this brief exchange has established the protagonist as someone motivated more by curiosity than caution.

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Planning microtension From a writer’s perspective, I find microtension can be the hardest level to achieve because it’s not possible to plan the tension in every line. It has to arise organically. It took me some time to recognise that, in one of those contradictions that suffuse fiction writing, microtension arises from planning even though it can’t be planned. Both the examples above arise from putting characters together who are less than straightforward with each other. Happy marriages and equal partnerships do not generate tension unless they are disrupted. To use an example everybody will recognise, the moment Han Solo and Princess Leia acknowledge their love is the moment they are separated. From that moment onward, they were going to be deadly boring to have in the same room.

An often overlooked source of tension is the setting. When planning a new story, I always take a few minutes to think about whether I’m in danger of ending up with some sort of lazy default, or whether I could put the story somewhere that reflects the themes of the story. If I can, I’ll be able to use imagery and description to add to the microtension. Some writers set their stories in cities that become part of the fabric of the books. Raymond Chandler’s novels are so rooted in Los Angeles that it’s impossible to imagine them happening anywhere else.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón uses Barcelona in the same way. I have a very clear sense of those cities from reading those authors, even though I’ve never visited either and probably wouldn’t recognise them from the novels if I did. Chandler and Zafón picked out the details that added tension to their stories, and used them to play off their themes and characters, which is something that could be done with most locations.

The dark corners of Barcelona and Los Angeles lend themselves but it’s possible to find tension in any location . Just consider what the place hides, and what it may reveal.

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THE JUDGES

D J Cockburn’s fiction has been published in Buzzy, Interzone, Stupefying Stories and most recently in the Qualia Nous anthology, as well as having won the 2014 James White Award.

He has supported his unfortunate writing habit through medical research on various parts of the African continent. Earlier phases of his life included teaching unfortunate children and experimenting on unfortunate fish.

His website, where you can find more writing advice, is athttp://cockburndj.wordpress.com/.

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THE JUDGEMENT

The winning story is: About The Frog, by Allison Glasgow I found this a well written piece of teenage lack of direction that took me deeply into the mind of the main character. If I have a suggestion, it's to make sure it's clear that the story arc is firmly focused on Mrs Marquardt from the beginning. She's introduced in the first paragraph, but then there are several paragraphs of exposition involving Sorka, who fades away by the halfway mark. My attention was beginning to flag until the point where Mrs. Marquardt found the narrator dozing in the hardware store, which nailed her character and her relationship with her problem pupils. From there on, the story didn't falter.

The Quahogger: I enjoyed this story, which read like a muddier version of Hemingway's 'The Old Man and the Sea'. It had the same theme of a fisherman's stubbornness

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in the face of predators robbing him of his catch. It read well throughout and it was only after a fair amount of thought that I had to place it second. Part of that is down to the quality of the winner, but a less abrupt ending may have made the story a little more satisfying. The story opened with Jules sneaking away from Patti, which established that he had a life beyond quahogging. A stronger ending might have shown him returning to that life rather than leaving him floundering with no pants and one quahog.

When a Bear Comes for a Visit: It's difficult to try to rate a story shooting for humour against stories that aren't, as whether humour works or not is even more subjective than the other ele-

ments of assessing a story. Personally, I'm not keen on anthropomorphised animals, but that's just me. The misunderstandings between two peaceable characters were well set up and it was a rare case where the omniscient viewpoint was both necessary to the structure of the story and well executed.

Hold Me Hunting: A well-told story of a young woman who seemed to be looking for something to do with herself. I found the writing well-executed and the relationships wellrealised, but I found the structure a bit flat. Most of the story was taken up with a rather awkward dinner with Albion and Melanie with the occasional flashback

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to an unsuccessful attempt to return to nature in the Bulgarian mountains. The canine first aid at the end struck me as a rather laboured attempt to tie off the story, although the incident was very well described. In fact, it's possible that basing the whole story around the injured dog might have given it the arc it was lacking. As it was, Lili didn't seem to want anything or have a problem to solve, so the succession of things that didn't work well for her came across as rather self-pitying.

A couple of specific pointers: I find the best stories open with a paragraph that introduces the protagonist and forces me to care about them. Hold Me Hunting spent most of that paragraph on backstory about Lila's family situation before I even knew her name, which was something of a wasted opportunity.

It's also worth checking facts the viewpoint character would know. If Lila had been with someone as tuned into the mountain flora and fauna as Ivan apparently was, she would have known what fish she was eating and wouldn't have called them 'sardines', which are found in the sea. I find simple slips like that throw me out of the story and stay with me in the same way that I won't remember the thousand paces I might make in a day nearly as much as I'll remember the one stumble.

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Berkshires: This was beautifully written description of a mood in the midst of nature, but I had the impression that it wants to be a poem rather than a story. Not much happens except that the characters walk around and muse on how unhappy and aimless they are. I found the repetition of 'sleeps in the room next to mine, in his childhood bed' slightly irritating, while it might have been a good way to break up the stanzas in a poem.

The author is clearly a master of getting the language to do her bidding, but I felt the story needed a stronger structure to work.

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The Quahogger

by Samuel Simas

Jules was used to the mud, and being stuck in it. He was a quahogger, and no quahogger worth his salt was free of summer-time scars, blisters, and stories to tell about the quahog that got away. At the end of that day, the day Jules got stuck in mud thicker than wet cement, he limped back to his orange truck, a bag of empty beer cans jangling behind him, mud like war paint on his face, blisters on his back, and an empty cooler.

At 6am, Jules grabbed a six-pack of beer, a cooler, and the gray mudders to keep his feet dry. Then snuck out of his house before Patty had a chance to wake up, to ask him to mow the weeds growing high enough to kiss the windows. Jules tiptoed out and took off in his orange truck toward Wickford. He pulled into the spot under the shade of John Crest’s Willow where the sun

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warmed his truck while he hunted quahogs in the marsh. He left the doors unlocked and toted his belongings across the sandy lot. Bill, the fisherman, was scraping barnacles off his boat, The Desdemona. He paused, looked up at the sun that had blossomed into the sky, and then waved the first hello of the season to Jules.

Jules waved back and said: Supposed to be the best season we’ve seen in a long while.

Bill’s sun-wrinkled skin wasn’t yet turned pink from days sailing out and around the harbor. He looked younger than he had six months ago when Jules had seen him last. Bill nodded, his hat tilted, shadowing his face.

Is that what you heard? Good, then, Bill replied. Bring me what you find, like usual. I’ll give you a bonus since it’s the first day of the season.

Jules nodded.

How’s Patty, Bill asked.

Just fine, Jules said. The two men had outgrown the empty exchange of too many words, so Bill went back to scraping barnacles, and Jules hauled his gear to the dock.

Jules trekked down the shoreline towards the mouth of the bay where there was nothing except sunshine and slow-moving water and quahogs to be dug. It

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was too early in the summer to hear kayakers bickering, splashing water, and scaring away the loons perched like hidden sentinels in the reeds. Jules liked the season’s silence. It was a reprieve from the loud talking of his wife, and the predictable up and down of newscaster’s voices on the television.

The silence cleared his mind to think about shards of china smashed against the formica countertop the night before, and the guilt that rose up like bile and bit his throat. Patty, walking behind Jules into the kitchen, her hands full of dishes, asked if he was going to disappear again now the summer had come and softened the mud. Would it mean less days spent working at the autoshop and smaller paychecks?

Jules answered her with the way his eyes slid down and searched for new

wrinkles or liver-spots in his hands. He’d say, Come with me, Patty. But he didn’t want her there. Quahogging and the squish of the mud playing concert with the cawing of seabirds was one of the special memories Jules liked to keep secret, for himself. He enjoyed the bay’s tranquility and wasn’t bothered by the rank smell of low-tide and rotting fish forgotten on land.

He cracked open his first beer around 8am to keep his mouth wet while he turned up earth, the cooler floating next to him like a duck in the mire.

Jules had taken to quahogging like a paramour after Patty retired, and he spent his summers using a rake to dredge quahogs from the muck and drinking beer before the sun made it too warm. Sometimes he packed a few quahogs

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away into the cooler as soon as he reached for his second beer, sometimes he didn’t find any until noon. He thought he had pulled every shellfish big enough to eat out of the mud, but Jules would go back the next day, and there they were, those damned quahogs, in places he was sure they weren’t the day before.

This both amused and angered Jules. If he were a competitive man, it surely would have instilled a sense of failure in him. But he was sure of himself and his ability to track the critters under the mud by bubbles they let float to the surface. When he plunged his rake between seaweed and reeds, and the basket filtered through to pebbles and mud, Jules laughed and did it again. Damn things are conspiring against me! So, he drank more beer and dug more deeply.

He took his rake and dug in, once, twice, and then again, but nothing came

up. He saw bubbles and was convinced quahogs were under his feet. Each swipe of the rake dredged up muck and sank water into the hole, and Jules didn’t notice his feet sinking deeper, past his ankles and up to his knees. Another basket-full and Jules found a quahog. It was as big as the palm of his square hands, all shut up and solid at the bottom of the rake’s basket.

Jules scooped it out and ran his thumb over the gray-blue shell, pushing away the mud and seaweed. He took the beer and finished the bottle in one go.

Then Jules sat on the bank, the quahog in his hand, measuring its weight. Cool water seeped into the seat of his pants, and he didn’t move. He didn’t like to spoil a moment, if he could help it.

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As white and as quiet as clouds, the loons were still, watching him from a nest atop a structure like a lonely telephone pole in the middle of a marsh. Gentle wind ruffled their plumage, but still they didn’t stir. The loons were Jules’ favorite bird in the marshes. Patty would clap her hands in the bed of the truck while they watched the sunset if she saw one. She’d point and say, Look there, Jules, it’s your bird.

He liked how they were the guardians of the marsh, like owls in the forest.

They seemed wise, as if, given enough time, they could teach Jules something about finding quahogs.

Jules reached for the cooler, threw the quahog inside, and grabbed another beer. While he sat, he watched another quahogger down-shore. Unusual to see another one this early. He could make out the hunch of the quahogger’s back and the top of his red hat sticking out from the green and gold of the reeds. He looked like a gleaner in an old portrait, but Jules recognized the purple-handled rake. David Flynn.

I bet he hasn’t found a quahog as big as mine.

Quahog in hand, Jules examined it, turning it over and over again until he felt he had memorized the gray-blue ridges. Jules finished his third beer and picked up his rake. When he stood he saw the foamy white wake of Bill and The Desdemona gliding by on the bay’s calm water. Jules waved for a while un-

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til she blared her horn, and then he started digging again.

The day went by in this fashion until the sun and the beer and the work seduced Jules into fatigue and he fell asleep on a drier spot of the marsh between a thick of reeds and the soft marsh grass.

Jules woke to the sound of the ocean pushing and pulling the shore, the papery noise of reeds rubbing together, and the sharp pecking of a loon’s bill on his cooler. He rolled over onto his blistered back and pulled his arm out of the mud it had sunken into. The loon pecked at the white plastic top of the cooler, sticking its bill into the cracks it had made. Jules waved his arms and threw handfuls of mud at the loon, but the mud fell apart in the air, and his arm-waving did nothing except throw him off-balance and cause him to trip, stumble, and then fall back into the mud.

Sitting in the marsh, Jules groped for a stone, but the first object he found was an empty beer bottle, and he launched it at the loon. It sailed through the reeds and hit the cooler on the side without shattering. Quahogs spilled out, and

the loon scooped one, two, and then a third before spreading its enormous wings and sailing into the sky. Jules sat in the mud, watching it fly, blending in with the clouds. His mouth hung open, shocked at the betrayal and dry with sleep, but he had no beer to drink. Time to head back in.

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So, without looking to see what remained in the cooler, he nabbed it, and it came up from the mud with a great sucking noise. Then he collected the beer bottles and his rake. His pants were heavy with mud, and he had lost his shirt somewhere between where the shore began and the edge of the marsh. Blisters screamed on his back.

Jules trudged back, watching the loons watch him. And for the first time since he could remember, he didn’t like the loons. He traced the path of the loon that had stolen his quahogs to a perch on the far side of the shore. He stopped about halfway back to where the dock jutted out like a set of crooked teeth into the water. Boats undulated in their moorings. A strong breeze carried the saltysweet smell of ocean water.

The Desdemona was nothing more than a dot, dipping up and down, on the sea, the only boat he could see. Jules gauged the time and the sinking sun.

Soon it would be too dark to see the bubbles they left behind. He rustled the six quahogs left in the cooler, and then he thought: I’m going to get my quahogs back.

He turned north in the direction of the loons’ nest. Something about the way his shoulders dipped forward and the way his gray hair matted with mud to his forehead seemed to make the loons nervous. They fidgeted and preened their feather faster than before.

Mud sank into his boots and made his burden heavier to bare. He began

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pulling at reeds to help him through, trying not to lose speed. Reeds ripping echoed loud and angry through the marsh. Hearing the ripping, three loons took flight and circled around the pole, the nest, the sky. They dipped and dove in and out of the reeds, sometimes coming up with fish. They moved closer towards Jules at a rate made almost imperceptible by their circling. He trudged forward, the pole several hundred feet in front of him, further than a stone’s throw.

The loon that had taken his quahogs sat on the pole, watching his loonfriends flying around, staring at Jules. It had dropped the quahogs in the nest and then picked one up, taunting him with it. Jules stooped down to pick up a rock, but there was only mud, and that wouldn’t do. He shook his cooler and popped open the lid. He grabbed a quahog and threw it.

The quahog lost speed and sank below the top of the reeds, lost again to the marsh. The loon, seeing this happen, let the quahog drop from its beak, and it fell back into the nest. The further Jules moved towards the nest, the further away the dock became. This part of the marsh was thicker, wetter, and it was sinking Jules down into it. He was up to his knees in mud as thick as oatmeal, and he could no longer see David Flynn’s red hat like a zit looming in the marsh. The Desdemona had disappeared past the breakers and the jetty.

Fifteen feet later and Jules could not lift his right foot. Mud had come up and around the top of the boot and sank down deep within it, gluing him to the marsh. With one hand he held the cooler, with the other he grabbed onto a thick

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patch of marsh grass and pulled himself toward it. The loons circled above him now. He wiggled and fought against the marsh, but the marsh was winning. It ate the boot off his foot and dispatched with it somewhere in it’s depths. Jules, struggled to pull himself out of the waist-high mud, but he needed both hands. I can’t let go of this cooler.

He placed the handle between his teeth and bit hard. Then with his other hand, he pulled on the grass. He pulled three fistfuls of grass off the marsh before plugging his fingers into the ground and drawing himself onto a firm portion of land. One hard yank, and the other boot was taken, too. But I still have the cooler. He pulled again and his belt began slipping down past his waist.

Jules gave one final pull. He pulled himself out the mud more slowly than a cloud streaks across the sky, but he was on land, the cooler still between his teeth. When Jules reached down for his pants, the loons were still circling above him. And then, when he stood, the cooler rotated and dumped the remaining quahogs out onto the mud. The loons dove, and Jules jumped. By some grace, he snatched a single quahog out of the mud before the loons descended and swept the others, and his pants, away within the space of a breath.

Ί

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When A Bear Comes for a Visit

By Kama Shockey

The bear moseys up to the cabin, sees the trail of smoke rising like it is in a hurry, and his nose perks up. He smiles, showing his large bear teeth, canines and bicuspids that will frighten the owner of the cabin if he happens to be looking out of the paisley drapes at this exact moment. Luckily he is in the shower and singing loudly to the radio, and therefore doesn’t hear the bear open the door that the man didn’t think to lock, because who would be wandering the woods this late at night?

“Baaaaaby, hit me baby one more time…” the man croons. The bear covers his tiny ears with his enormous paws. This man cannot sing, he decides.

The man thankfully becomes quiet and turns off the shower, unaware of the fully grown Brown Bear who waits calmly for the man to come out of the bathroom and feed him. The bear’s stomach growls and for a moment he worries for the man’s safety. He isn’t the friendliest bear when he is hungry and he is ravenous now.

He searches the cabinets, ripping the doors off the hinges, because the wares are easier to get to without those troublesome obstructions that only hide what is behind them. The man will thank him for making the cabinets easier to get into, he is sure of it. He smells wonderful things coming from the stove, the stove that makes the sweet-smelling smoke coming from the chimney, but when

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the bear touches the pot over the flame, the black metal singes his fur and he roars.

“What the…?!” the man yells, throwing open his bathroom door. He shrieks the way the bear imagines only the females of the species are able. The bear cocks his head to the side, nursing his wounded paw, and the man mimics him, mouth agape. Hasn’t the man ever seen a bear before? He lives in the woods, after all.

“What the hell?” the man asks. He backs up a step, then another, reaching behind him for something the bear can’t see. The bear worries for a moment that the man is one of those humans who carries those large metal rifles and uses them on unsuspecting guests. Those types of rifles had killed old bear Potter and

his brother and so, naturally, this bear is wary.

“Don’t shoot,” the bear instructs, “I am only in search of food, of which it seems like you have plenty, as you can tell by my recent renovations to your cabinets. See? Isn’t it better to peer into your food receptacles without having to move those cumbersome doors first?” The bear sweeps his arm back to indicate the work he has done to help the man.

But all the man hears is, “Arrrrrr! Grrrrrrrrr! Arrrrrggggggg!

Roooooooaaaaaarrrr!” and sees the bear point back to all the havoc he has wreaked. The man thinks the bear is angry and so he panics. He pushes power on the remote he finds behind him, because he is not one of those humans with a

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rifle. In fact, were the bear more calm, the man would show him the certificate hanging in the bedroom, the one that speaks of congratulations for taking an animal safety course and passing with honors. This man has solemnly sworn not to harm another being, human or otherwise. Ever. Even when a large brown bear enters his home without being invited in.

So the man turns the television on, in what he thinks is a genius attempt to calm the bear with scenes from nature. Maybe the bear will see how utterly out of place he is in the man’s tiny cabin and remove himself. As soon as the television is on, and the bear momentarily distracted in his search for food, the man ducks into his humble bedroom, which could use a good scrubbing, he decides, and locks the door. He hopes the bear won’t notice his absence and come searching for him, hungry and on the scent of raw man-thigh for dinner.

And it works. The bear is distracted. He sits on the man’s threadbare

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couch and with an elbow to his knee, a fist under his chin, watches the end of the program that is on. He catches something of a worm and of his magnificent transformation into a butterfly. Oh what he would give to be able to transform into something so light, so nimble and effervescent as a butterfly. He is aware of his gracelessness and it is his least favorite attribute. His wife never complains, but then she is quite the lumbering oaf as well.

The man cheers quietly in his bedroom before coming to the sad realization that his half-hatched plan has worked. Now what will he do? Will the bear remain indefinitely? The same had happened to his sister’s child when she’d put on the cable in the city for her son when he ran rampant through the house. He was subdued, yes, but his eyes remained glued to the television indefinitely. The

man does not have a back up plan to remove the bear from his cabin and he worries. For he is hungry too and he has not thought to bring a slice of meat, some bread, even some water recently pulled from the creek into his bedroom before locking himself in. He will just have to wait it out, hope the bear gets bored with the nature channel, the only channel the small cabin can receive this high in altitude.

The bear watches with frustration as an ad for tuna fish comes on. His anger is two-fold. He is hungry and the tuna fish dancing on the screen, looking ridiculous in glasses, reminds him of that hunger. Also, where is the butterfly and what happened to her? He roars at the screen and loafs into the kitchen again to find some food, keeping his ears perked for mention of the butterfly’s return. He

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finds a can with the same idiot fish in glasses on the side and pierces it with his middle claw, tearing off the metal lid with ease. He sticks his small tongue into the can and in one swipe devours the fish, throwing the can on the floor so the man will notice he is down a can of tuna next time he goes to the market. He does the same with three more cans until he can hear the sound of his program return. Groaning with pleasure – the tuna has done the trick – he sits back down on the couch that now slopes in the middle under the bear’s weight. He thinks to go ask the man to join him, that maybe he would like to share in some light watching and conversation, but before he can get up, a large brown bear fills the screen. The bear smiles.

He would know that golden, honey-colored pelt anywhere. He’d fallen for

the way the light in the meadow shimmered off the coarse hairs, the way that supple bottom that is now framed in the black plastic of the television set sways back and forth. A rumble forms in the pit of his belly and he sits back, aroused.

No need to invite the man for this, he thinks. When had his wife been close enough to humans to be filmed, he wonders next. No bother, she is there now, and he misses her. He hates foraging for food so far away, but this is a welcome surprise. Until the camera pans back, across the grassy field his wife walks through.

He sees the look on his wife’s face, sees her teeth exposed in a way most find menacing, but what he knows to be a look of matched arousal. She is heading toward his brother, a larger, tougher bear than most others in the area. He has

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the same look the bear had on his face before the camera lens had widened. The look of mating. The bear sits up straight, furrows his brow, and if the man is unlucky enough to be peering out his door right now, he will be frightened enough to wet himself.

He isn’t though, and in fact he is trying to jimmy the lock on the window in his bedroom in a meager attempt at escaping the bear in his living room. How can he know the bear is otherwise wholly distracted?

And he is. The bear paces, unaware of anything except the growing tension on the screen. His wife sashaying towards his brother – his brother! – right on television for anyone to see! When they reach each other, the music slows and the two bears embrace, begin the mating ritual that the bear himself had per-

formed with his wife not months before! He is mad. Furious. Filled with venom.

He tears out of the house just as the man topples from his window at the bear’s feet, looking up with surprise to see the bear looming above him, looking more deadly than he ever imagined an animal could look. The man wishes he didn’t have that damned certificate hanging on the wall in his bedroom. Wishes he had a rifle instead. The bear roars, leaps over the man and careens off into the woods at a pace that astounds the man.

The man picks himself up, realizes he has indeed wet himself, and goes into the cabin to change, glad his plan to send the bear home has worked.

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Hold Me Hunting

by Xanthi Barker

Right after I returned from trying to be some kind of Indiana Jones in the broken mountains of southern Bulgaria, my step-mother took it upon herself to put some flesh back on my bones. She arrived on my doorstep, clutching her hand-

bag, and tutting at my drawn face before I’d even opened the door. She knew it was drawn, she said, from the sound of my voice on the phone from the airport.

I hadn’t invited her. She had a way of appearing out of nowhere. The first time, two months after my mother moved back to South Africa, she’d at least taken note of my teenage snarl and kept quiet. This time she couldn’t help herself.

“Lila!” she exclaimed.

“Hello.”

“You look terrible.”

“I need to wash.”

“You need a good meal. Come on. I’ll take you home. I’ll run you a bath.

Your father’s expecting us.”

I wanted to shower. I wanted all that dirt and detritus scrubbed off me and flushed to the sewer. I didn’t want to stew in it like some kind of failed pudding.

But she started to edge her way into the room, a slow-motion swoop, so I grabbed my things and went with her.

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When we arrived, their house was empty. I turned to frown at Melanie.

“He’s in the garden,” she said. “It’s ant day.”

Outside Albion was basking in the orange evening light, sprawled in a white plastic chair, free-pouring vodka into his brass cup and staring at the grass.

“Lili!” he said, throwing a fist up behind his head. “You’re here — the ants.”

I went over and stared into the ground, images of the last few weeks flashing back to me — the corner-of-the-eye slip of a brown snake through the tall grass, geckos skidding across rocks. I blanked them out one by one, staring at the swarming black dots. My skin itched. Albion raised his cup towards me.

“Watch,” he said. “Look at them. It’s beautiful, incredible. The flying of the ants! It’s—” I turned and looked back through the French window, catching Melanie’s accusatory stare. Seeing that I was heading back inside, she cranked it into a smile which snapped as I opened the door.

“Oh great!” she began. “You can give me a hand. It’s chicken and white wine risotto — help yourself to the white wine, if there’s any left — ha.” She nodded to the almost empty bottle. “God I’m tired. I woke up at six to walk Fatty before

work, had to rush off at lunch-time to pick up your father’s dry-cleaning, straight to yours after work to fetch you — it’s been non-stop.”

Fatty was Melanie’s un-ironically named Shar-Pei, not my father, who was also, I noticed, surprisingly rotund. The folds of Fatty’s skin had long bulged passed anything that could be described as ‘folds’ — they were bright red creas-

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es stretched open, pouring out flakes of scabs and skin. He couldn’t sit down.

His rear-end wouldn’t fit underneath him. Instead he flopped forward like a seal, his back-paws turned upwards.

“Can you just keep stirring?” Melanie continued. “Are you starving? You must be starving. I’ve got some cheese and crackers. Some nuts. Have a cracker.

Go on.”

My father shouted from the garden for more vodka and she tied an apron around my waist. “Well just help yourself if you want anything,” she said, winking at me as she reached for a fresh bottle of Glen’s.

I began to stir, the pearls of rice still swirling through the water. I thought of the river, the one closest to our camp, that hissed all day and night. Lying down at the edge, I would let the icy water rush over my body. Then the indigo sky with its glistening dust of stars, the cricket-swamped air, the scratchy canvas of the hammock — we’d lie beneath the mosquito net, listening to the hush of the water. The crooks of my arms were still mottled with river-scum.

In the pot I watched the rice’s own constellations as it began to coagulate.

Fatty sloped in and flopped down at my foot, pawing the ground. He had to paw

with his whole leg, since he was pressed to the floor. He wanted some cheese — this was his signal. He knew which shelf of the fridge it was kept on, Melanie would tell anyone who would listen. I cut him a little cube and threw it down.

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We made cheese in the mountains. Adding salt and vinegar to the milk we bought from an old woman who lived in the closest village, kneading it through cloth above a wooden bowl. She gave us the milk in return for odd-jobs — her son and husband had both died years ago. It tasted like fumes. Goat-fumes. Delicious, salty, over-powering, toxic, wilderness fumes. We ate it with hunks of bread, ripped open, that we bought from the village shop. Mostly it was stale by

the time we ate it. Chewing took hours. But our funds were low, and the village was a long distance. Ivan didn’t want to move closer.

“What difference does it make?” I said.

“If you don’t know, you shouldn’t be here,” he replied.

I chewed on my petrified chunk.

Melanie came back in and pulled a stool up to the counter. “I’ve been on my feet all day,” she said. “I want to hear about your trip. We both do. Over dinner. It’s been such a hectic week.”

My cheeks burned. I pushed my fringe away from my forehead, added the last stock to the pan.

“It must’ve been tough out there,” she continued. “I didn’t think it was right for you. You’re such a city girl — always have been. Even as a child. I thought it was madness really, all this wilderness obsession. But it’s good you found out for yourself, I suppose. I could never have done it. Your father, maybe. But then

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he grew up way out. Us girls need our home-comforts, don’t we? Somewhere for a sit-down and a bit of telly.”

The more she spoke, the less I knew how to. In the centre of the rice, memories kept appearing. Ivan’s grin — crooked, leering — as he pulled me into the tree, pulled off my top, licked the sweat that prickled on my chest.

Once I woke first and crept out without him noticing. In the early days. He was exhausted from building, from mapping out the area, climbing every tree to see its vantage points.

“I want to know exactly where we are,” he said. “From every angle, from every point-of-view. I want to know what the shepherds would have known, before the soldiers came, what the children knew.” There was force in his voice, like I might try to stop him. I must’ve looked hurt because he added, “To protect our home.”

I wanted to do something too, to add something. So I took the basket and filled it with wild flowers. Pink ones, yellow ones, dragon-shaped ones, flowers that looked twisted out of psychedelic art. When my bundle was sufficiently big,

I filled a bucket with water and placed the flowers in it, set it on the middle of our tree-stump table. Sat there fizzing with the thought of him waking up to find it.

But when he saw it, his face dropped. He grabbed the flowers from the bucket and stormed off into the woods. “We’re supposed to be living with the forest,

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not destroying it!” he said. Wild-flowers were not to be picked. Was I a complete capitalistic, industrialist, murdering idiot?

“I was just trying to make make it more homely,” I pleaded.

“We are not building a home,” he said.

“Daughter! Darling daughter, you’ve created a master-piece! The smell! Oh that aroma, thank you, thank you. The ladies of the banquet have arrived to take pity on this old vodka-man. Let’s sit down, sit down.” My father stumbled through the kitchen to the dining table, throwing his hands around and dragging wet blades of grass across the tiles. “I want to hear about the crazy places, the wilder -nests, the love-and-tumble, tell me, tell me, let’s sit down!”

“I’m just finishing dinner,” I said, banging shut my imagination.

“She’s just finishing dinner,” chirped in Melanie, throwing me a pert look.

She came over and stood directly behind me, watching the pan over my shoulder. “You look a bit peaky,” she muttered, “why don’t you sit down?”

I left the spoon in the pot and went to sit at the table, stared at Albion, at his quivery face and half-closed eyes. Fatty waddled in and flopped down beside

the table. “Not to eat, just to watch,” Melanie explained. He would eat afterwards, when our endlessly re-filled portions stopped depleting and Melanie couldn’t bear to think she had no one left to pour love into. Poor Fatty, he couldn’t know how many warped human sentiments could be boiled up and disguised as food.

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Perching like a sparrow on the chair beside my father, Melanie served us — huge dollops of creamy white mush. I didn’t think I was hungry, didn’t want to be, but after one mouthful I was starving. Melanie smiled as my father and I gobbled it down, eyes fixed on our plates. Her own plate, half-filled and carefully seasoned, she occasionally prodded between her jabbering narration our lives.

Albion was planning to build a shed at the bottom of the garden. For birdwatching.

“I didn’t know you liked bird-watching,” I said to him, smiling. He smiled back and I held his gaze, narrowing my eyes, trying to let him know I knew his real intention. What we were all looking for. My brother, a doctor, worked a thousand hours a week just for that reason. I guess I should’ve been pleased Albion wanted to disappear into his shed, and not a different continent.

I was only unlucky that my escape hindered somebody else’s.

“I want to be alone, today, is that OK?” “Of course, that’s fine. I’ll go to the river and swim.”

That was day one.

“I want to be alone today, is that OK?” “Sure. I don’t mind.”

“I want to be alone today, do you mind?”

“No, no, it’s fine.”

“I need to be alone, OK?”

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That time he didn’t wait for my answer.

“I need to be alone for a few days, I’ll be back, will you be all right?”

I was glad then, even though he’d laughed at me, that I’d brought more than one book to read.

When he got back I made him a huge dinner of wild asparagus and a fish I’d managed to catch and he kissed me all over, and again when he’d finished eating it. Then he got up and said, “I need to be by myself now,” and disappeared into the trees.

We tried not speaking for days. He said it was an interesting experiment with yourself. We could communicate with touch, he said, kissed my neck, traced his lips down across my stomach.

Then we tried no eye contact. I felt like I was bring punished, shamed, made to walk four steps behind. He was doing the same, I figured. But I hadn’t wanted it. I couldn’t control it.

“I need to be silent” Well I need to talk.

“Then go back to London, to the city.”

I need to talk to you.

He looked helpless, shrugged. I bit into my lip and kicked a tree-stump. He winced. He hated any violence to the forest.

“You look so thin!” Melanie cried when my right hand slowed its shoveling.

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“Do I? Well I’ve been doing a lot of exercise.”

“And not eating. What did you eat out there anyway? A lot of tins?”

“Mainly fish and bread. Plants we found. Ivan knows all about foraging.”

“But can he cook? Without pots and plates and things?”

I thought of our greasy fingers picking the flesh off sardines that had been alive half an hour before. Washing our hands in our bucket-sink and burying the bones down the track.

“He’s OK,” I said. “We had lots of barbecues.”

“With sausages from the village and things?”

“Sometimes.”

“The art of the barbeque!” Albion interrupted, his fork lifted over his head.

“My darlings! It is a marvelous practice — al fresco, they call it. We are the savages really — eating in here. What are we doing?”

“Would you prefer to eat outside, Albi?” Melanie twisted her napkin round itself.

“There is no better dining room — the stars, the spice, the salt-night-sky—” “Well let’s go then,” Melanie said, getting up so fast that her chair

squawked. “Lili, you take the glasses and the napkins. I’ll get the plates. We’ll go outside. Why didn’t you say before Albi? Take your wine outside and Lili and I will bring the dinner things. Go on.” She started to re-arrange the things on the table as if she might find a way to grab them all at once. Albion was swirling

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his wine round the bottom of his glass, saying nothing. I got up too slowly and he noticed my reluctance.

“Kind, kind Delilah. Lady of the gracious hosting. Do you know what that means?”

He was trying to apologise for Melanie. I balanced all the glasses on my empty plate, ignoring her tensing shoulders.

Outside it was dark, the air thick with midges. My father’s monologue began, at last, and did not end but rolled on, rolled on — all about his bird-house, his pigeons, his childhood in the Cornish hills. Melanie fussed and filled our plates and tutted when Albion dropped a whole spoonful on the floor.

“Fatty must learn to hunt somehow. He cannot eat forever off a plate,” he said.

Melanie visibly suppressed her response. “He’s not even out here,” she said.

I drifted off, smiling, picturing Fatty in the mountains, introducing him to Ivan, training him to catch rats and hares, faintly aware that Melanie had found a moment for her own monologue and was going on about her niece, a hopeful

ballerina. Unfortunately for me, I spluttered laughter just as she mentioned the family’s suspicions that the girl had anorexia.

“Why is that funny, Lili?” she said.

“I wasn’t — sorry. I wasn’t laughing at that. I was day-dreaming. Sorry. No. That’s so sad. I mean— The pressure—”

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Melanie’s face hardened. She had wanted to be a ballerina but her foot was crooked. Something like that. She’d had to stop really young, too young to get anywhere. I’d forgotten about that. Whoops. The wine was bubbling through my head.

“Lots of them are naturally thin, actually. It’s all about body-composition.

Some people don’t pile it on in an instant.”

She stared at my father. He stared at the sky. I stared at my plate.

“Is there anything sweet?” I said.

“What? Even after all that risotto?” Melanie glanced at her own barely touched plate. “Well, if you like there’s a chocolate and lemon cheesecake. It’s on the counter. There’s cream and ice cream in the fridge, too. And bring some cheese for your father. And two plates and forks.”

“None for you?”

She didn’t hear me. She was forking up single pieces of rice and eating them, one by one. My father poured himself another glass of wine. I walked back inside, trying to calculate how much it would cost to get a taxi home.

One glance through the glass door and my haze was shattered. I frowned,

hurried inside. The floor was smeared with black sludge. A chair was on its side.

A glass was smashed. An oozing trail of red and black led around the side of the counter. The risotto that had turned to rock in my stomach started to churn.

I approached the counter as I would a snake, my heart shuddering. But when I saw the end of the trail, I understood the ridiculousness of that fear:

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nothing here could move. Fatty, lying in his usual beached pose, surrounded by this black and yellow stuff, a smell rising off him that would’ve floored me had I not so recently learnt to gut rabbits. Blood pooled out beneath him, merging with the sludge. I knelt down to see what it was.

Melanie’s cheese-cake.

“Jesus, Fatty.”

I reached to stroke his head. He must’ve climbed up to eat it, knocked over a glass and slipped off into the shards. He had either been sick or simply unable to disengage himself from the cake, smearing it across the floor. Goose-bumps rose on my skin. I tried to shout but choked on my own guilt. Why hadn’t I screamed when I first saw him? I leant down to check if he was breathing.

He was. Shallowly.

“Melanie!”

She would be in a daze, I thought, thinking about her alternative ballet-life.

She would not hear me.

“Melanie!”

She would walk inside, thinking I couldn’t find the cake, and, looking

straight at me, would miss all the evidence that should have warned her.

“Melanie!”

Maybe I hadn’t shouted loud enough, urgently enough. She would look me in the eye and I’d see she was confused by my distress. Then she’d come closer and I’d look guilty, standing red-handed above her precious beast.

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“Melanie!”

She’d turn white and scream and reach behind her for the chair and she’d start to shake and sob and my father would sense something was wrong, and heave himself towards the house. He’d come inside and locate another bottle of wine before noticing what had happened, because he wouldn’t want to look self -conscious, needy. Then only on his way out would he notice that no one had moved and so he’d turn around again and Melanie would still be shaking in her chair and he would come over and he would look down and he would see this panting, bleeding dog on the floor and he would look at me for a moment like it was my fault and I would take that momentary blame because after all, I was just standing there, frozen, doing nothing.

But then he would nod at me, in one jerk re-arranging the universe, meaning that it wasn’t my fault, that I could help, that it would be OK. And he would go to Melanie and put his arms around her and I would remember I was not a child and I would go to the telephone and call the operator and ask for an emergency vet and I wouldn’t blink when I was put on hold and then I’d explain the situation and only when the vet asked where the dog was bleeding from would I

realise how mute and blank and passive I’d become, how completely frozen in the face of neediness. How I had only tried to fix what was not broken.

I knelt down beside Fatty, stroked his head, whispered to him, lifted his side a little to glance at the cut. The smell was obscene. My fingers were covered in blood. I grabbed a tea-towel and pressed it against his skin. My movements be-

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came fluid and economical as I followed the vet’s instructions and heaved Fatty onto his back and out of the mess. I pulled a shard of glass from his stomach.

She told me to do that. When she knew he was breathing, she put me on hold.

He whimpered and gurgled and cheese-cake oozed from his mouth. I wrapped a tea-towel up tightly and pressed it to the wound. My father brought over a bottle of water with a teat which I eased between his lips, careful not to choke him.

Melanie flittered back and forth, trying to find his toys, then his treats, then his blanket.

I thought of the blanket I tried to weave Ivan out of feathers and string, how sure I could be that it was tattered and lying on the forest floor where he’d trample over it. I thought of the image I had of us both in feather cloaks, crosslegged by a fire, humming prayers and love-chants, binding our minds together.

What a badly aimed fantasy.

Melanie got to the door and turned around, got to the table and turned around. Fatty’s stomach kept pulsing. I closed my eyes and stroked his side. Albion stood by the counter and sipped at a wine glass he hadn’t noticed had grown empty. I waited for the doorbell, held Fatty’s paw, waited for the people

who could heal him.

Way up in the crumbling mountains, Ivan clutched his jack-knife, didn’t think about me, waited for everything, every word, to leave him.

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Berkshires

By Amy Oestreicher Matt lives with us now, he is working close to home so he sleeps in the room next to mine, in his childhood bed. It’s a lovely feeling, as though I have a brother and friend now. His energy transforms the entire house to the point where setting the table, washing the dishes, or putting the milk away all become a kind of happy ritual. I secretly enjoy quibbling with him or waking him up in the middle of the night, anything to stir up some good old sibling rivalry that I was never able to have before. My three brothers, 11 to 13 years older than me, belonged to a realm of their own, unexplored by me. But now, Matt sleeps in the room next to mine, in his childhood bed. We go through the day together,

and perhaps we have finally discovered the person behind the sibling. It’s the illumination of a part of him that I was unable to see before, the realization that not only do I love Matt, I like him too. A deeper kind of love, a trust, sprouts from this awareness. As I watch our relationship evolve, I can’t help but reflect on a poignant glimpse I got of Matt the Person during a week we spent in the Berkshires.

I had never seen Matt with his head shaved before. It drew more attention to his prominent facial features and gave him a European look. His beauty was an austere one, a noble, antique beauty that inexplicably connected me to history, to

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ancient earth through his unyielding eyes. He kept a firm stance, his feet clutching the earth as if he were drawing it to him like a breath. And then the exhale, the involuntary lift of each foot as a release, only to press it down into the leafy earth again. Reveling in the tension of opposites and then repelling it. He marched on and on like this, purposeful and elegant. So elegantly, in fact, that a subtle imperfection became more and more glaring with each step. His arms seemed to be split into tiny segments; they seemed to lack the natural flow that connected them into a fluid whole. So he made awkward, sporadic motions with his arms, as if his stabilizing energy only ran longitudinally. I envisioned him with no arms as I trailed behind him, and then without a body, only as a narrow strip of vertical florescent pink energy, bobbing determinedly up and down the path like the dancing broomsticks in Fantasia. I felt sorry for him for having to keep his burning line of pink energy in his awkward body, sorry that he couldn’t bob up and down the trail like an enchanted broomstick. Instead, here he was, a precious remnant of an olden, nobler way of life, trapped in a body he didn’t know what to do with.

But with a shaved head, the energy seemed to flow off the top of it and resist gravity, pouring upwards to the heavens, only to be returned by the trees, by the life hovering over the dark path. All of nature seemed to return it like a sigh, contented, as if they had finally found an outlet, a friend. It all flooded, everything, back into his naked head, filling him with inward glow. I couldn’t help comparing him to the leafless trees that surrounded us – they both had found the

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soaring art within their grounded forms.

The feet stop, the head regains its balance on stately shoulders as it turns to me.

“You okay?”

“Yup.” It was pink after all – a florescent pink energy that oozed between his lips with

his voice, blending to make a resonant, heavenly sound. A layer of warmth subdued its tremendous depth, and it was almost like hearing a waterfall from indoors.

With a bit of effort I caught up to him, my trotting not half as graceful or noble as his. In fact, I didn’t appreciate how Matt had effortlessly avoided the dismembered tree trunks on the floor until I tripped over every one of them. And it wasn’t until then that I realized how much of an intruder I was on this undisturbed tree cemetery. We were the prowlers who had once dreamt of an everlasting communion with nature and now stealthily peered over the barrier that separated us from the natural, flowing world of freedom and beautiful simplicity. With our feet resolutely pursuing the trail, we centered ourselves in the natu-

ral world, and wholeheartedly believed, for a moment, that we had a right to belong to it.

Whether we were the trespassers, the aliens or not, I was able to catch a glimpse of the world as it was intended to be - the realism thrilled me. In a world of perfect geometric shapes, of painted signs, of bright red automobiles, it was almost

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a relief to catch the world in disarray, in asymmetry. The trail seemed to want to tell us a story with all its many paw prints, bird calls, and huge daddy long legs crawling under rocks - its moist air and shadowy trails, rocking trees comforting one another in their dark forest community. The whole picture seemed like its own miniature fairytale, untainted by our “improvements” and “progress” throughout the ages, and I believe that Matt and I were in simultaneous awe of it all.

Oh…this Berkshire trail is bursting with magic…in the twitching of the bushes, in the swirling shadows, in the fact that we are living in someone else’s world… to think that we share land with creatures and creations so different from us! Inanimate objects that have so much to teach us, that have adapted to the ways of

the world far better than we have, that possess inconceivable wisdom! Objects that are (consciously or unconsciously) all we truly want to be. And we haven’t completely obliterated them yet! We almost, sort of, kind of live harmoniously!

I wasn’t uncomfortable with the silence until I realized it was there. Matt and I had hardly spoken since we started off on the trail, but I suddenly grew very curious to know if he was thinking anything along the lines of what I was.

“Hey Matt…I love you man.” I don’t know, it was the best I could come up with.

“I love you too Ame.” His awkward arm tried to find its way around my shoulder. So little was said, yet it was enough, it was a kinder silence now. Here we

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were, brother and sister, whimsically walking a grand path to nowhere, overwhelmed and frenetically trying to slice pieces of meaning from all the beauty soaring around us, trying to ground ourselves in a world that we wanted so desperately to belong to. Matt had seemed like such an enigma at home, and now that we had unitedly exposed ourselves to the faceless world of nature, of beauty, we were no longer rivaling siblings but two common truth seekers. And suddenly I understood him a lot better.

It was very bizarre what happened next. The leaves wobbling on branches, the moss gathering in unclaimed territories, the rich browns and the melodious silence, it all seemed so poignant. It was such unperturbed beauty; what it was

was a beautiful mess as if some divine energy had a penchant for modern art.

And it all manifested in me as a kind of melancholy. The overwhelming scene had softened into wistful thoughts, into a realization that the life we lead as modern humans is something very different from what the earth could have ever intended for us, something very unintentional I would like to think. It’s becoming harder and harder to recognize that we want life like it was – a life that we’ve never experienced, but sensed, and instinctually yearned for with every stroll by a pond, with every deer we see leap across the road. And this instinctual yearning was agonizingly intensified in the midst of the Berkshire natural splendor.

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“Matt.”

“Hmm?” “I don’t think I’m very happy.” New, New Words. We felt their weight together.

“What-do-you-mean?” “I-don’t-know.” He had to know what he meant; he had to feel it too.

Crumble crumble crumble. The obnoxiously crunchy leaves on the trail heightened the tense speechlessness.

“I just feel like…if I were happy then I wouldn’t be thinking about it, right?”

“Hmm.” God I hate when he does that.

We had introduced each other to a very unfamiliar concept and so, quite intrigued, we carried on, marveling, suggesting, denying, our words fading in and out of awareness.

I think I did more things in that week than I did in the whole summer. We hiked eight mountains, saw countless overlooks, played soccer on beaches, slept in his friend’s cabin, saw two Shakespeare plays, got the most amazing view of the mountains and the whole Berkshire layout, had our car break down. Meeting his friends, chasing after the setting sun in his Jeep, watching the sky turn to night in West Stockbridge, having leftover Chinese food for breakfast every

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morning, my feet turning to jello on the pavement after enduring the Mount Holyoke hike, it was all so wonderfully capricious. But the memory that stands out the clearest is a moment that I gave no thought to while it was actually taking place. Matt and I had wandered down roads paved onto hills in search of a swimming pool and we finally caught it hiding behind a garden gate, guarded by a stern evergreen tree with a robin flitting about its head. The pool was right in the middle of those magical Berkshire Hills, those huge, motherly, majestic hills surrounding Matt and I. It was as if those voluptuous hills had centered themselves towards us and graciously offered us their home, their hospitality, a glimpse of their family. Matt and I sat ourselves down on a grassy hill and were helplessly humbled and awed by the raw enormity of nature, of these hills who seemed to be shelter, parent, and enchantress all in one. What startled us the most was the interplay between the enormous and the miniature; the contrast was mind-blowing. The crows circled around the mountains as though they were dropping their giant friends a visit, and every mountain seemed to gleam, and give their tiny friends the warmest greeting an old friend can give.

Big and small seemed to fit for the first time.

My brother Matt is a person, is my friend who sleeps in the room next to mine, in his childhood bed. Like me, he is trying to piece together his own worth from the aimless mission of life. Like me, he is finding solace in happiness in the enchantment of the natural world.

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