Under The Fable Issue 1

Issue One 30/05/2015

Under The Fable

A Little Note From The Editor

Welcome to the very first issue of Under The Fable.

It’s been a lot of fun and a lot of hard work (mostly fun, and hot dogs) but now, here it is, in all it’s glory.

Thank you to everyone who has put up with our nagging on the interweb, including Cornelius and the Cornetto, my favourite new Indie band (look them up on the ole YouTube) and of course my very talented team of Creative Editors, Sub-Editors, Social Media Whizzes and Photographers.

Everyone has worked harder than 1000 monkeys with 1000 typewriters and now you can enjoy it too.

A special thanks to everyone who submitted, and of course, Larry the cat.

The Contents: Poetry: Page 3 - 14

An Interview with Kerry Wilkinson: Page 14-18 Prose: Page 18-72

A Poem

By Larry The Cat

Who am I? they call me Larry but they don’t know that I am so much moreI am the King of the cushion pile, the master of the keyboard, and the defender of words My name is Larry and I am one hell of a cat.

Conjuring of the morning Sun

by Taranum Bhatia

As the Sun conjures up in the morn sky the emotions are sundry, and feelings nigh.

Far in the distance, the greens of the tombs muzzle with the song of the Bulbuls' melodious puzzle.

Orange coloured fans adorn the muddy path as pink buds try to blossom against the winds wrath.

Morning meditation runs along the narrow alleys and the Sun's rays filter through dewy valleys.

As the Sun conjures up in the morn sky the emotions are sundry, and feelings nigh.

Crests and troughs of the water are mesmerised with myriad specimens and the tree-lined island within the lake pays homage to fish-eating Pelicans.

Rapture of many facial portraits fills the wooden boats which have far left the anchorage to rudder in the watery floats.

Far in the distance, the greens of the hilly terrains sing a rhapsody played upon the nature's string.

As the Sun conjures up in the morn sky the emotions are sundry, and feelings nigh!

The First Time I stood in the Grass Lydia Collins

I must have been a few months old, chubby cheeks – rosy and pinched.

Strangers purring over my golden tufts.

Giggling at my ‘firsts’, and sighing loud when my throat ran away from me.

Three seconds and I fell, made friends – creatures tickled my ankles and toes.

Nose pressed into the dust of the ground, fingers linked with the emerald blades a pinky-promise to pin this moment in mind.

Land-ink seeped into the bumps of my knees, digging homes into that time I couldn't clamber onto the sofa. Or that time the cat forgot I was a ladder propped against a cardboard wall.

But my hands seemed at home in the mud-clay.

High-up helper hoisted me to my new pose and I pretended my legs were pillars and walls. though the blades stood taller than my ankles.

Heel tried a goodbye, but bottom crashed, chubby palms and fingers tickling khaki.

The Laughing Policeman Karl Jane They sat in rows, on barstools, like punchlines between the cars.

The ashtrays had retired, jokes hung over the barman's head.

Four more smiles, he whispered, between Cadillac lips.

Still he'd shoot the morning, back as he smirked, without a pause for the day.

Comradery dictates they'd do the same to keep the skittle ball rolling.

Rusty whisky in a hallowed glass, faces rifle butt red, six more of the same.

Padded leather shoes, half-a-salary suits, the uniform of the seasoned performer, perfection in a building made of prison scars.

No one ever stares at the walls long enough, anyway.

He'd tell you his secrets, but he always lied about his past.

Syllable after syllable, expertly timed, glasses would rattle, nails hammered into the bar, outsiders would mumble: he sounded just like fireworks because that's exactly what he was.

He was both drum roll and the snare, accolades slid into his arm one after another, It still echoes in the basement.

His stage show lives on: Encore! Encore!

'Laughed so hard, I nearly bought my own beer'

The Road to Piccadilly Adrianne Howard-Ricketts I’m observed by fairies in the darkest of skies.

The red and the greenlittle drunken nymphs tied, one by one wrist-to-wrist to keep from falling...

I’m falling face first into a sea of faces sweaty upper lips and cavemen eyes, moving to a beat that matches their pulse: Thud.

Pause.

Pause.

Thud, Thud, Thud!

I’m with him – and he’s falling into the dark side of his mind, soiled by the ground and the curious blue pill sheltered on the shore of his tongue This sea is the ground.

The earth thousands have stepped upon, footprints falling further into the soil and another, forcing it deeper until the earth is our footprint – one and all.

We’re all falling: In love, in awe, into the wondrous dream-as it felt.

Whaur Gallop Kelpies Gallop Whaur Kelpies Stuart Turnbull Stuart Turnbull Unknown yet,sweet, your soft, and selkie skin, Unknown yet, your soft, andsweet, selkie skin, Whaur undaunted widwithin, seek that within, Whaur undaunted A wid seek Athat Fair the comforting Fair the comforting caresses I’dcaresses win. I’d win.

Taesadness weep, my bybring, the sea A bring, Tae weep, my bysadness the sea A Alone, alone,ochone,’ ‘ochone,tae ochone,’ Alone, alone, ‘ochone, sing, tae sing, Unknown yet,sweet, your soft, and selkie skin.

Unknown yet, your soft, andsweet, selkie skin. wanaye, a’ bottle, aye,anwith With wan a’With bottle, with twa aw’twa an aw’ A keek thing an unkent alang the shore.

A keek an unkent alangthing the shore.

Fair the comforting Fair the comforting caresses I’dcaresses win. I’d win.

Haud ma’ an’hand, haudwhit’s ma hand, whit’s in the sand?

Haud ma’ breath, an’breath, haud ma in the sand?

Whaur kelpiesA galloped lay doon saddened.

Whaur kelpies galloped lay doon Asaddened.

Unknown yet,sweet, your soft, and selkie skin.

Unknown yet, your soft, andsweet, selkie skin.

Uisge Beatha A drink huge, Uisge Beatha A drink huge, a malty seaa malty sea Wud be that there becarin’ someone carin’ for me Wud that there someone for me Fair the comforting Fair the comforting caresses I’dcaresses win. I’d win. sea-lochs whaurwis myabandoned hope wis abandoned In sea-lochsInwhaur my hope At mid-summers height, wis you A foond.

At mid-summers height, it wis you Aitfoond.

Unknown yet,sweet, your soft, and selkie skin Unknown yet, your soft, andsweet, selkie skin Fair the comforting Fair the comforting caresses I’dcaresses win. I’d win.

Beauty and the Beast Adam Ward She forgot to watch the rose on the window sill, the last petal browned long ago. Thorns slouched; slipping down the brittle stem. A moment above water.

I remember: she took it with her paw, peeling the leaves, drawing the bedclothes to her chinny chin chin she would not let me in.

When the water began to fog – I curled up in her chest – the red mane dropped, floated across the surface, little veiny canoes, drifting like magazine pages.

I remember: her padding her phone, licking her lips, clawing a gash from chin to ear and whose been sleeping in her bed?

Ghosts of my footsteps bounced from her walls she had left me an empty house – over a card table, a xylophone of ice in a tumbler. She called him ‘Beauty’.

I remember: how she roared, talons bleached. Curled around the handle of thundering luggage run run as fast as you can But she forgot to take the rose from the window sill, the last petal browned long ago.

Ink Dani Moriarty

You’re the cracked screen to my iPhone, the too-short laces to my Converse.

You’re the chip in my glasses, and the itch as I try to sleep.

You’re the Trojan to my laptop, the slip to my eye-liner.

You’re the cable tie to my Christmas toy and a ladder in my new tights.

You’re the cat hair on my clean coat.

Your voice is a siren to my hangover, you’re the toothpaste on my work shirt and a knot in my favourite necklace.

You were the rain to my fountain pen.

Now I write in Biro.

When You And Me Ghazal Choudhary

When you saw me.

Echoes of your honey coated words slithered along the canals, pouring over fresh enamel. Sticking and stiffening like soft butterscotch, on a winter night.

When you were with me.

Tremors raked through me: the old man with his leaves in his garden. His cat meowing at his constant probing. I was new skin under a Doctor's scalpel.

When you left me.

Levels rose in the plastic buckets, tipped over by the careless child. He chuckled merrily like Bart at Scratchy. All my trying flooded the floor. Smooth cherry-aide.

Ella Dani Moriarty My fairy-godmother is in the toilet decorating tiles with chunks of vodka-soaked chips.

Prince Charming is drinking ash, leaning leather jacket against brick, leering at silicone-boosted cleavage.

Silver Vauxhall carriage and neon yellow sign, perverted comments by growling breath. Goodbyes.

Knee against concrete, skin splits with tights. Teeth carve into cheek like nails in play-dough and cider-slurred swears echo.

Black suede heel litters carpeted taxi floor.

Dad Bethany McTrustery He used to polish my school shoes before bed until faces grinned from the glossed surface.

Lined size fours by size eleven Oxfords.

Blackened sides would nudge ice shone caps and the laces would intertwine like fingers.

He would hum ‘A Day in the Life’ tunelessly and sweep the duvet over me in goodnight.

Then he’d read me ‘The Little Princess’ and flick the light switch. “Sweet dreams.”

He left the door open so light peeped through.

He liked to whistle when he read The Times and dabbed thumb with tongue to turn the page.

I knew when war was mentioned in an article, his nose would crinkle like a shirt from the dryer and his whistle would fade to a slow exhale.

He threw his coffee dregs on the carpet and nearly booted the cat, thinking it was a fox, habits formed from months spent in Afghanistan.

He skirted walls when he walked me to school, “Get out of the open, it’s too dangerous.”

He went binge drinking and purged his body, throwing up in a basket of washed clothing.

He forgot where the toilet was and wandered away, pissed against garage wall and hosed it at dawn.

My parent’s evening, attended straight from parade with service medals flashing like gun muzzles.

He flinched at the shouts and bustle of children and cried when he drove me home. I don’t know why.

An Interview With Kerry Wilkinson A wrong turn, a McDonald’s related delay, train tickets in the wrong direction, and a suicide. This isn’t the plot of the latest crime novel or spy thriller, this was simply the journey to Preston to interview Kerry Wilkinson, the bestselling author of the ‘Jessica Daniel’ series, ’Andrew Hunter’ series, and the Young Adults ‘The Silver Blackthorn Trilogy’. It was nearly a disaster, as Gareth and I almost fell into ‘Happy Bunnies’ café, disheveled from an eventful journey, an hour late. Patiently waiting our arrival, Kerry Wilkinson sat nursing a drink as relaxed as a sloth in a hammock. The staff at the café were also very good, especially considering we had missed our booking, and I am pretty sure they didn’t spit in our food.

I don’t know what we expected from an author who rocketed to fame overnight, going from the bestselling self-published author, to Pan MacMillan’s novel machine. What we were treated to, as well as the best lunch us students have had since our first term, was a man forthright, honest and down to earth. But where to begin the interview? Seeing as we were sitting in Lancashire, and his Jessica Daniel books were based in Manchester, there was only one icebreaker I could think of.

AW: Are you from around this area then?

KW: No, so I was born in Bath, and I came up to go to university at Preston, back in 2001 I think. I mean I have moved around Preston(ish), but never left the North West yet. I’m stuck.

AW: What I am very interested in is how you went from self-published to being published by Pan Macmillan.

KW: It was all kind of an accident anyway, I was working as a sports journalist for Daily Star Sunday. I didn’t have a title, but I was kind of third in charge on the sports desk. I turned thirty and thought, I am not sure I want to be doing this forever, and so I was looking at things I could do to fill my time really. So I made a list of things I could actually do if I put some effort in. So I wrote a book, and then, I was looking at ways to publish it, and of course there was the traditional way of going through an agent and publisher and so on and so forth. I just kinda thought, when I was reading

the chances of being picked up are almost zero anyway, but the fact I had taken the time to write a book and I figured out what I wanted to do was quite a positive experience for me anyway. I didn’t want all that positivity to end up being something really negative and be rejected over and over and over.

I was on Amazon one day, and there was a self-publisher button at the very bottom, so I looked into it, and it seemed really easy, and I thought I’ll have a go at that. Three months later I was number one on the kindle store, and sold thousands of books and so on, and there was a lot of publicity around that, as I was the top selling e-book author at the end of 2011 and I was in the Guardian and the Mail. Just through that I had loads of agents contacting me, so it had gone from me not contacting agents because I thought I would get rejected, to having more than twenty emailing me in the space of two days, and publishers were emailing me directly. The whole thing had happened like an accident.

At the same time this happened I changed jobs, and got a job on the BBC sports website. It was like the job I wanted forever, since the BBC Sport website had taken off that’s the job I wanted. More than one publisher were asking to give me money to publish my books. I looked at it as a financial thing, so I knew roughly how much money I would make selfpublishing compared to how much work I would have to do, compared to how much they were offering and I thought: ‘why not?’ Now I am in supermarkets and places I just wasn’t before.

GD: Why do you think your books took off? I mean thousands of people self-publish.

KW: They do, but back in 2011 they didn’t and that was the point. So when

I self-publish there were about eight hundred, nine hundred thousand on kindle, which sounds like a lot, but when you take out text books, there weren’t actually that many fiction books on kindle, not comparatively. Now there is more than three million. Lots of people have read about me, and Mark Edwards and Rachel Abbott. They’ve read our stories and thought ‘I could do that’, so there is three million books on kindle now. A big part of it was about timing, I was in the right place at the right time.

I was writing about crime which is always popular, and I was writing about a woman, so I had a crossover with a kind of chick lit audience. A lot of it was luck, and if you look at the most popular self-publishers now, most of them are still the same as those who were publishing in 2011 because they had built an audience in those years. People self-publishing now for the first time, perhaps I can’t coming through and you don’t see so many stories about that sort of thing.

AW: Do you find it less work now you have a publisher rather than have to edit your own stuff?

KW: It is and it isn’t. The work still comes back to me, and I am still the one who has to go through it in the end to make sure they haven’t edited in any mistakes, which happens. You’d be surprised at the final drafts that come back and you spot a missing word in a sentence or something like that. It is a little bit less work than it used to be, but it’s not loads. The level of professionalism is better as they are experienced and they have been doing it for years.

AW: What about inspiration do you spend a lot of time in Manchester writing the Jessica Daniel series?

KW: I don’t suppose I spend a lot of time, I mean, the good thing about Manchester is it is not enormous. I mean it is not New York, or London, you can get from one side to the other fairly quickly. And there are all sorts of social classes. You have rich footballers, rich businessmen, and then a mile away in Eccles there are some of the poorest estates in Europe, which as a writer gives you a hell of a lot you can come up with. Which in London is harder to do because everything is farther away, which makes Manchester one of the most perfect things to write about. You have such variation. It means you can have a police officer working the entire city and working all these different areas.

AW: Who do you read? Who inspires you?

KW: Ummm. I read quite a lot of comics. I subscribe to Marvel unlimited app. It’s amazing. It’s like, six seven quid a month and you have access to like fifteen thousand comics over the last fifty years. It’s amazing. I am reading Daredevil at the moment, because of the TV show, I have read it before but it’s brilliant. I love it.

Kerry Wilkinson released ‘Renegade’ this month, the second in ‘The Silver Blackthorn Trilogy’ we at Under The Fable were treated to a reviewers copy.

I didn’t know what to expect. I was surprised to find myself enjoying it, not in the same way that I enjoyed turning the pages of ‘Scarred for life’, giggling in the bath at one of Jessica’s sarcastic asides. I enjoyed it more for the dark storyline and how the landscape of England had been changed in Kerry Wilkinson’s dystopian vision.

Silver is an unusual character, coming of age, and escaping the maniacal King Victor and the Minister Prime. There are smattering’s of Maze Runner, and Divergent littering the text, but in a very English way. Silver has found herself in a warped and suspicious world where it is nearly impossible to know exactly who to trust.

If you are a fan of the recent influx of teenage dystopian novels, then this would be the book for you. The storyline breaks no conventions, and isn’t startlingly different from the ideas of Suzanne Collins and Veronica Roth, but it is well written. The pages turn themselves, the book just wants to live in your hand, and you would need to book time off work if you are one of the older kids that have found themselves reading this book. Under The Fable give this 4 Stars, and are already queueing outside the bookstores for when the third and final part of the trilogy is available.

The Novum Adam Ward They just don’t pay us porters enough. We scurry along, wheeling the corpses, or the dead-in-waiting, from one end of this antiseptic shit-hole to the other. Saturday nights are the worst. We have a running weekly pool in the canteen: how many lightweights get themselves fucked up on a Saturday night? The earlier morons are usually the easiest. In and out faster than Dawn French in a kebab shop. The stabbings don’t usually come in until late. Mostly stomach wounds, some cheeks parted by the kiss of a blade. But this guy, this one guy, he looked like a rocket had been launched from his neck. His face was slate. His chin was speckled claret and black.

First chance I got, I put my hands in his trench-coat pocket. I pulled his phone out and threw it into the bin. They just don’t pay us enough.

The guy died of course. Bucking like a washing machine on fast spin. Spitting crimson blobs, and drooling pink. About as pretty as it gets.

Fuck it. In this town, this was probably justice. The bacon will probably assume his phone was lifted in whatever ruckus put him here. I retrieved the phone when my shift ended and I had scraped the carnage off my hands.

I hadn’t never seen a handset like this. N-I-D. Not a brand I knew of. Thought it was probably some Jap shit. Took me about five minutes to work out how to turn the fucking thing on. The screen lit up, a luminous green ‘Device Not In Range’ flashed twice. It didn’t work in Kettering. Not in Corby. I didn’t have a fucking Scooby how to sell it online.

This shit wasn’t even on Google. In hindsight, I should have binned it. It was no trouble when it was just a ‘Device Not In Range’.

Wednesday, ‘Plenty of Fish’ led me to London. A safe score. I’d listen to her chatting bubbles for a bit, then seal the deal – If you get me.

Didn’t quite work out like that. I forgot I had the N-I-D in my jacket. I was spat off a sweaty train in Saint Pancras when it shrieked. It was like a five AM alarm, or a frigging loud heart rate monitor. It almost vibrated out of my pocket. A handful of businessmen turned sharply towards the noise, when the scarlet letters flashed upon the screen. ‘Device In Range [press to activate].’ What choice did I have?

****

Sutherland nearly fell from his chair. There were no scheduled insertions, so why was the Novum siren sounding? The clock was already down to eightynine seconds, the furious red numerals flashed. What on Earth? He turned to the black box and thumped the red button.

‘Code One. I repeat, Code One.’ The clock was down to seventythree. He looked at the Novum, its black contents yawned back at him. The clock reached sixty-two. Sixty-one. And the cubicle light next to the Novum flickered on ready for its recipient. As if I haven’t got enough to deal with.

He walked out of his office and into the laboratory, only moments before troops of men fattened by body-armour pushed into the room and faced the cubicle. Fifty-one. Security fell into an offensive formation and aimed their rifles towards the cubicle, now already bathed in an umber light.

Forty-three seconds left. How many days is that? Sutherland strode to the computer at the far end of the lab. Thirty-seven seconds. Three days left.

The computer screen flashed – Decontamination Process Online Sutherland looked back to the clock. Twenty-seven seconds. Sutherland muted the siren, and then the room held its breath. **** There was no sound. Just a nanoseconds black, then a forest. The tramping of feet, the rattling of wheeled suitcases, and the cacophony of voices all gone. The air was dead. The N-I-D screen switched off in my hand. This was fucked up. Like I’d bolted three ton of shrooms down my throat. The tree bark was blacker than Guinness. Gnarled arms, feathered with Pakicoloured leaves, twisted into fists exploding with sharp spines. Something screamed.

The tan leaves twitched and the scream came again. It sounded like a bitch in labour. I took two uncertain steps backwards. The scream again. The foliage burst, spitting out…something. It was a dog. But it had tusks, so it wasn’t a dog. It was a boar. But it was spotted like a leopard, so it wasn’t a boar.

I could hear it shredding the ground behind me. Needles ripped into my face. Fuckfuckfuckfuck. The trees were clawing me. But I ran, despite the forest shredding my arms and chest. A spiny fist gouged my cheek. Something sticky and thick slithered down my neck. The beast behind snapped and wrenched my denim jacket. I was lurched off the ground as the thing tried to shake me like a doll

I released my arms from my sleeves and was flung into the shrubbery.

There was no ground behind the bushes. I just fell.

Adam had heard the Novum siren squeal. It dragged him from a dream. He had lain in a yellow glade, slumbered lightly, and woke to a looming city of glass. Fog glided like ghosts around his feet, and the sky spat mustard rain at him. He hadn’t aged, and the world didn’t know him. Then the siren brought him from his sleep, back into a stone room. He pawed at his blurred vision.

Feet thundered past his cell. This meant something was amiss.

Something was happening to the Novum. Did he enter it? He remembered running through the crowd, yet the immortal still found him. The man who never slept. The tall man with the trench coat had broken into his room and took his device away. Did he enter the Novum? That was unthinkable. OneMississippi-Two-Mississippi. How long had the siren been blaring? He walked to the door of his spartan cell. I will find out very soon. **** I had seen the sun set three times before I had left the forest. But I hadn’t slept, and I hadn’t felt hungry. My arms were fucked. I am surprised I survived the plummet. I fell for what felt like ten minutes, but the fall wasn’t fast. Like sinking in syrup. I had landed on a thin beige moss, I got up and ran. I was still sprinting when the sky turned purple, but I wasn’t out of breath, but I didn’t want to run through a dark forest. I sat down, expecting exhaustion. I stayed awake quivering as though I had downed Espresso from a bucket. The forest around me became no more than an epileptic shadow.

I had seen everything. Flies like cricket balls. Porcupine birds. A pink flower whistled at me, and a thousand golden bugs swarmed on it like glitter.

When I broke clear of the forest I was standing on a hill looking at a small village. Nothing more than a campsite with green roofed huts. I needed a fucking fag, but my cigarettes were in my jacket pocket, along with my lighter. Only the N-I-D remained in my jeans. I wanted to throw it away. I pulled it out, ready to launch it. The screen was lit. 00:46. The ivory digits disappeared. I tapped the screen furiously again and squeezed the power button. 00:46. Whatever this was, it was stuck. Piece of shit. It was about as helpful as a Klingon dictionary.

A shout came from the bottom of the hill. A dozen monkeys scampered from between the huts. The shout was unintelligible.

One monkey stood on his two feet and pointed towards me. Within seconds I was running again.

They covered ground like a Porsche. When the first monkey pulled my legs from under me, I curled into a ball and waited for the hairy fists to stop pummeling me. These were like no monkeys I had ever seen on Animal Planet. They were the size of primary school children. Their eye colour varied, and they had no tails. The fur of one was thin and blonde, another was black and woolly. They shrieked and grunted at each other. It was the biggest ape who brought the stone down on my head. Everything went black.

I was roused – fuck knows how long I’d been out – by a furious vibrating against my leg. I snapped awake, swatting the ground next to me.

I stood up, and the vibrating continued. The N-I-D was spasming in my jeans pocket. I pulled it out to read “00:00 [Press to Return]. What choice did I have? **** The Novum had been three seconds over already and still the cubicle remained empty. Sutherland held his breath. The security team held their position. Then it happened.

The cubicle brightened a moment and then without warning there was someone standing there. It was definitely human. Blood was wet around his neck. The human slapped his palms against the thick glass of the cubicle.

‘What the fuck is going on?’ He thumped the glass, spitting flecks of crimson. Definitely human. **** Adam looked at the man they threw into the cell with him. This was not The Immortal. Was he immortal? Could he sleep? Adam stood up from the bed and looked down at the scrawny man and tried to help him to his feet.

‘The fuck off me.’ The man spat.

‘You’re human.’ Adam’s eyebrows reached his hairline. ‘Where you from?’

‘Stay away from me.’ Adam’s new cellmate’s eyes were bloodshot. As the stranger shuffled backwards to the wall, he left a small trail of smudged merlot on the floor. Adam gasped.

‘It’s OK. You’re home.’

‘What?’

‘Home. You are home. London. England. You’ve been in the Novum haven’t you? What is it like in there? What are the animals like?’

‘Wh…what?’

‘The animals?’ The stranger passed out against the wall. **** Wake up It was like the worst case of sleep paralysis ever. I could feel myself thrashing. I needed to wake up. My arm hurt, but that was dream. I was still on the train. Probably missed my stop. Fucking idiot.

Come on wake up I didn’t know the voice. It was somewhere up there.

Somewhere past my eyes, in the world. London. England. Wake up.

That’s it – come on wake up I could feel the black around me thinning. Cracks of light appeared, and then died again. But I was waking. Air was rushing towards me. I could taste it again. I opened my eyes. I could see the train lights.

But I couldn’t move my arms. This wasn’t a train. Where the fuck was this?

I was strapped to a chair, my arms bandaged and strapped to the arm. The stranger flashed a magnolia set of teeth. I tried to move. I smelt cigarettes and stale coffee.

‘You won’t get very far my friend. Welcome back.’ The man had a Hitler haircut, and specs that looked like plate glass windows. The chair began to hum, and pushed me into a sitting position.

‘I am James Sutherland, a doctor here. Who are you?’

‘Cameron’ I croaked.

‘Well. You and I need a little chat.’

‘Let me go.’

‘Impossible I’m afraid.’

‘Fuck yourself.’

‘You see. You are the second person to have entered the Novum.’ I looked frantically around the room. The room was all steel and white walls, like a hospital. Next to me lay a man straining against his constraints. I knew him…from…somewhere.

‘You might remember Adam.’

‘What’s the Novum?’ I pushed against the chafing constraints binding my wrists.

‘Adam was the first person to have entered the Novum. That was three weeks ago. Then he lost his N-I-D.’ ‘I didn’t lose it. James please.’ Adam’s voice was shrill.

‘Somehow you managed to find it. I almost believed his talk of immortals and men who couldn’t sleep.’ Sutherland was grinning like a retard with cake. ‘On that. Did you sleep? In the Novum?’ He waited as I tried to shrug. ‘In the other world.’

‘What? No, I couldn’t sleep or eat, didn’t even take a piss. Let me go.’

‘In time Cameron. It is interesting though. How long were you in there?’

‘What?’ I wanna smack that fucking smug grin off your face.

Prick.

‘Days. How many days were you in there?’

‘I don’t know. Then I got sparked out by monkeys.’

‘Interesting.’ Sutherland walked away to his computer and stared at the screen. ‘Very interesting.’ I pulled against the constraints again.

‘What’s fucking interesting?’

‘You were in the Novum a total of ninety-six seconds. That is eight days in Novum time.’

‘What? Fucking let me go you prick.’ But he had just begun.

Sutherland began to weave a story.

The story opened with a science experiment. Sutherland created the Novum. A vacuum in a tank, where nothing existed, except two significant pieces of atomic nothing which he collided together. A tidal wave of white fire rolled out, leaving burning cinders in its wake. They had created a universe. Sutherland had figured out a way to insert a human onto the planets. It was simple really. Or so Sutherland said.

Adam was the first to enter. He’d spent eight days awake in the Novum, well that’s what he believed. The spin of the planet was so fast, one Novum day was twelve Earth seconds. The mind saw eight days, the body was active for ninety-six seconds. Adam was due to reenter in two weeks, however my having the N-I-D caused problems.

The apes in the world had found my coat and discovered fire thanks to my lighter. Long story short, as Sutherland wouldn’t ‘bore’ me with the details, they advanced faster. In the Novum equivalent of the year 1292, there, was an industrial revolution. Skies were burnt black with smoke, and by the Novum year 1500, the world crumbled under the weight of steel and glass.

‘Think of all that we could learn from them; fascinating isn’t it? But I have a small problem. The government doesn’t know of this project. I can’t just turn you in for stealing, and I can’t kill you. However there is no law against me putting you in a new universe and leaving you there.’

‘What? Why…’ ‘Just think. In this world, you’ll have immortality. It’s a gift no?

Not imprisonment. We are Gods. I have made us gods’ ‘You think you’re playing God?’ Adam Cackled. ‘Immortals. Men who can’t sleep? You proved that we’re a science experiment.’ Adam laughed as Sutherland thumped the keyboard of his computer. Adam disappeared, taking his cackling with him. Sutherland smiled before he punched a key again, and a nanosecond of black took me.

The Savage by Daniel E. Glaza

All day he swung from saplings in the woods as only children could. And each day after that it welcomed him back like a needle to an addict. The sun wandered down to the lowest hill as the boy walked farther into the forest full of dancing rabbit holes and tent worm’s leaves. They crisped on the dry ground as the one boy listened and watched. His father had given him a rat trap before he left, but he did not intend to use it.

He didn’t understand why people must capture the forest and take it for their own instead of giving it all they had, and maybe one day understand it. But the people don’t have time for that, so they horde that little piece of reality and lock it in a cage too small to be comfortable. Feed it scraps from civilizations’ plate. Eating only out of hunger because that is the only chance it gets. Screaming at its capturers in a hoarse voice that no longer runs wild. To the people who have become deaf to its voice through insecure feelings of the savage. This is what the boy thought as he walked, bending down young trees as he walked, not waiting long enough to see them fight themselves back up and continue to grow. Farther, farther into the forest he went by foot in the cool mist, where the night began to incubate.

A rabbit scurried out into the open. He ran on four savage red velvety legs and the boy, caught up in the lackadaisical stroll, chased after the rabbit hands out stretched. Into the brush the rabbit ran and the boy following.

A small dirt hole lay in the clearing, the rabbit hurried down in a single swish. The boy sat down in the anguish of a lost friend, ruffling the leaves with his dirty fingers. He felt something hard underneath and looked over at the gleaming metal lying superficially under the freshly fallen leaves.

The boy carefully unearthed the strange object. Before him was a rusted metal button. New ideas started to seep into the boys head about the button. He had heard stories of lonely boys who experienced magical things. Could the button grant wishes? His mind began to think of ways to better the world, to save the places he loves. But he only loves these places because he’s not accepted anywhere else, and he realised this. Now his mind began to wander to places where he would have friends he could talk to, people would accept him. He thought about the power.

He was a savage little boy and his savageness to kill and be dominant took over. His finger reached for the button and rested lightly on the cold metal but he couldn’t press it. The rabbit burrowed under the ground and broke the surface beneath the button, pushing it up onto the boys hand and deploying it. The claymore exploded and the little boy lay on the ground with four savage red velvety legs.

Hunger Pangs – Drema Drudge Claire waited on a cement bench in an untended Indiana cemetery. It was July and raining. Heat and hunger circled her. She hid her face from the rain with her sheet-lightning hair which flowed across her bare thigh. Her red satin dress clung to her, and she smiled.

The young woman's hunger extended long, curious tentacles of want. She restrained from so much as a stick of gum. She had been warned that the man who would pick her up, "Ambrose," would be able to detect a whiff of anything.

"Come hungry," his e-mail had said, "and we will make a most delicious dish." This began what she knew to be level four of the five-level system in the club called "The Epicurious." Ambrose was the leader, the one she needed to get to know if she wanted to be initiated into the group's deepest rituals.

She had taken the job at The Coffeehouse to supplement her student loans for college. The café’s repertoire extended beyond flavored coffee – it prided itself on being a locally-sourced gourmet eatery. Since she was a culinary arts major, The Coffeehouse’s owner had gladly taken her on.

Maybe he suspected she was pregnant, but he didn't ask, not even when her breasts enlarged seemingly overnight. They hadn't reduced yet.

No one at The Coffeehouse had known about her miscarriage. No one had been at the burial two months ago, not even Tommy. But then he had been hustled off to his grandparents' house in California as soon as his parents found out she was pregnant, and she had quietly received a cheque, no note. It was just enough to cover the down payment on the grave marker that was two lanes down from where she was sat. She didn't know if the baby had been a boy or a girl -- she hadn't wanted to. She turned her head towards the stone, and looked away quickly. A cardinal called nearby.

In order to secure this meeting with Ambrose, she had been required to do a week’s milk kalpa. It hadn’t been easy, consuming only milk. Clementine, when she had delivered the message, had warned her not to cheat: “He will smell anything else on you. Be sure to use only baking soda as toothpaste, and don’t wear perfume.” Discovering erotic cooking, its online presence and the lifestyle associated with it, and finding out that there were others who worshipped food as much as she did, delighted and intrigued her. The group called themselves "The Epicurious.”

The invitation had come discreetly. A middle-aged woman Claire had encountered several times at the shop had invited her to lunch at ‘Violet's’ home. Although this was after she and Claire had spent twenty minutes discussing the merits of fresh versus dried herbs. She revealed that they always took on culinary-related names as part of their club. At the lunch were a couple of women and a man, ‘Oliver’. They mentioned lightly their unusual cooking nights, and the club of fifteen members. This was right after her miscarriage, when she would go home after work and stare at a blank space on the wall just above her bed. Anything seemed better than that.

Oliver asked her breasts if she were free to make dinner with him the next night. She would receive an email with the club's levels and guidelines and (she thrilled at his cloak-and-dagger manner) she wouldn’t be given any more information until she signed a release.

"Do you mind Italian food?" he asked. "Most members prefer something more exotic."

"Italian's fine," she said. But she was surprised that the group wasn’t more Indiana-food centric in its tastes. One of the things Indiana did best was raise gorgeously pink and white pork. It was her go-to meat, because it could be depended upon, as could the stable people of Indiana.

All except Tommy. But then he had been just out of high school when she agreed to go out with him last fall, and two years younger than she was. Her parents, back home in Chicago, certainly knew nothing about Tommy, and nothing of the miscarriage. Tommy had been sweet when she needed sweet. When she had believed in sweet.

There was one thing she had loved about pregnancy, the excuse to binge. Oatmeal raisin cookies and fresh-baked bread. When she was growing up, her mother had frowned whenever she watched Claire eat, and had scolded her for eating anything besides vegetables and protein. After learning she was pregnant, and after Tommy left her, Claire allowed herself to sample the bakery’s goods for the first time. She still couldn’t believe how assertive carbohydrates could be, and their soft texture. The oatmeal raisin cookies were subtle at first, with the gentle give at the first touch of the teeth, followed by the tang of cinnamon and the sweet concentration of sugar in the raisins. One cookie turned into two, and the empty spot where her child had been filled again with every overindulgence.

Level One was easy. At her dinner with Oliver, she had been asked to go into the bathroom and put on a bib apron with nothing under it. She did. It seemed childish to her, though she was a decade younger at least. They cooked side-by-side, stirring tomato sauce with a wooden spoon, boiling water, and flinging pasta at the refrigerator to see if it was done. It quickly turned into a game and soon the front of the appliance was plastered with starchy strands of spaghetti. She caught Oliver staring at her ass a couple of times, but then she sneaked a peek or two at his, so it seemed fair.

When they sat on the floor in front of his coffee table, Oliver picked up pasta with his hands, and ate, smearing tomato sauce all over himself and their white aprons. She held a meatball, bit into it, revelling in the masculine taste. She ate as if eating were not shameful, biting her tongue gently, knowing how sexy she looked.

Dessert was tiramisu made with locally roasted coffee beans. She sucked her fingers in front of him, picked up the dessert plate and licked it, watching him shiver.

Now she smiled into the rain as she watched the car pull into the cemetery. A ruddy-cheeked man of perhaps fifty, in a blue pinstriped jacket with jeans and black and white hair that stood about his face, got out of the vehicle and came towards her. He was sporting the bulging stomach that revealed him to be a member of the club.

His nose was wide, his mouth small, and his teeth hidden when he smiled. His jacket gapped, the single fastened button not sufficiently covering the bulge of his belly. He was the mocha espresso, two shots of vanilla that came into the coffeehouse three days a week. Level four.

"Ambrose?" she asked, blinking.

"Hello, Cassia. Ready?"

She had managed to impress "Oliver,� and had been welcomed into level two after the pasta flinging night, and had made it through the next two levels. She could do this as well.

Ambrose helped her into his car, and she shivered as his air conditioning blew upon her rain-dampened body.

Once the car stopped, he helped her out. The house hunched toward the pond, its yellow back to them. They walked toward it. In the centre of the pond floated a pedal boat like a dead body.

"Let's stay outside a few minutes," she said.

His hand at her elbow, he allowed her to linger no more than two minutes. As they entered the kitchen she noted the cleanliness of the room, the rusted farm implements hanging on the walls: a scythe, bits of harrowing teeth, deliberately moulded it seemed, into the wall.

Her level two dinner had been just as successful, after all. "Clementine", with the hair nearly the same colour as the fruit, had asked her over to make raisin and apple stuffed pork chops and cabbage soup. They had sugar cream pie for dessert.

Turning and humming, Clementine set the oven to 350 degrees.

They cooked in the nude, at Clementine's request.

After Claire stirred it, Clementine had licked Claire's finger in a way that was not unpleasant. Though it had left Claire staring at the ceiling later that night, contemplating the continuum of heterosexuality and where she might fall on it. She wondered if food somehow interrupted that cycle.

On Ambrose’s kitchen counter, a crew of food appliances and goods awaited their god.

The smell of pungent garlic weighted the kitchen.

"How many courses?" she asked. Her hunger climbed, and she wondered if she could at least ask for a glass of milk.

"Three."

"And what are we making?"

He began disrobing, motioned for her to join him in doing so.

She did, though slowly, sensuously, almost hating to take off her red dress. He didn’t look up. What was it with these people cooking without clothing? Eating without, yes, but cooking without them just seemed dangerous, if not unsanitary.

Her level three experiences had been almost juvenile, like hazing. She had met with the three members who had “sponsored” her. After they removed the blindfold, they brought in the dishes one at a time, a sophomoric glee on their faces.

“You have to eat these before midnight,” they said to her. They started her with a glass of milk which wasn’t so very different from the organic milk she already drank. But she looked suitably appalled, and "Mace" snickered nervously.

The mushroom dish didn’t scare her at all, as she knew a morel when she saw one.

Next up was a fruit dish she knew immediately from her research. “It’s ackee,” said Alfredo, snickering. “What you have to ask yourself is, have I prepared it carefully enough?”

Claire looked at him. The Jamaican fruit, she knew, could be toxic if not perfectly ripe and perfectly prepared. Not all of it was edible.

“Where did you get this?” she asked.

He chortled.

“Did you boil it?” she demanded.

“Yes,” he said petulantly, tossing his blond hair out of his eyes.

“I’ll try it. But only if you give me something sweet first.”

It actually tasted good, combined with the fish and sprinkled with green onions as it was. And as depressed as she was, she didn't half care what the results of eating it were.

When they brought out the goggles, she knew casu marzu was next. She put them on, fearing one of the maggots in the Italian cheese would make its proverbially precise leap into her eye. The pale moon of cheese wriggled with teeming life. “It’s still good then,” she said as she scraped some onto bread. If the maggots had been dead, she wouldn't have dared eat it. "Try it," she said. It wasn't so bad.

They let her go at midnight.

“So, this is level four,” she said now to Ambrose. Why was he so silent?

Her breasts ached. She could still almost hear the unnamed, unsexed cry of her hungry baby, and her breasts responded. Drinking milk hadn't helped.

“How many people make it to this level?” she asked.

“Not many,” he said.

Carefully Ambrose cut through the chicken’s front, slicing its breasts from its body neatly. He removed its legs, then the wings.

“So what is level five like?” she asked nervously. "Assuming I pass this one."

He washed his hands and picked up a vanilla bean, split it and scooped its insides out with the knife, put the mass into a bowl.

“Come. The counter,” he said, patting it.

She pulled herself up onto the counter. Unannounced, Ambrose bent over her and began suckling her breast. For a moment she resisted, until she realized it wasn’t sexual. He did it mechanically, as if siphoning gas out of a car. He raised his mouth from her and turned his head, like a swimmer, spit into the bowl, returned to her breast, repeated.

The relief that followed this milking caused her tears to flow, and when she looked into his eyes, she saw he was crying too. It seemed as if someone were finally acknowledging her loss.

"Drink it," she urged. "Drink it." He suckled harder, but he continued to spit it into the bowl. It felt as if he were rejecting her, and even as his face reddened with the effort, she shook her head. After he was finished, he fetched equipment from the freezer. The resulting ice cream was flecked with fragrant vanilla beans. They carried the dessert to the pond and sat on the dock. She made herself taste it, and leaned over to vomit into the water after she had, the sweetness mixing with the vanilla coating her mouth. This, this is what her child would have known of her. This would have caused the child to grow, to thrive, instead of the ignominious dumping of his – her? – body into an overpriced grave, a glorified garbage bin for humans. It was only right this milk not be wasted.

“I was so pleased when they told me they found a woman who was lactating. One can make homemade ice cream with cow's milk, but this truly makes the most delicious dish,” Ambrose said as he held her hair back. Her gorge rose again, but she forced it down and rose to her knees, looked gratefully at Ambrose. The rain had stopped. She couldn’t wait to try level five.

Pushing For a Podium Place Heather Swift When the final race of the season finishes, all you can hear are cheers. I’ve witnessed disappointment, even shock. But never silence like today – only interrupted by the rain competing to be heard over the sirens.

I press my face against the wire fence that distorts my view of the orange wall of marshal uniforms. A few feet from them is a tyre that flew from the bike during the chaos. The rest is shattered around skid marks and the rainbow of oil and rain on tarmac.

I was three when I first smelt the oil, my Dad said it was the best smell in the world and I agreed with him, especially in the summer when it combined with cut grass and stale beer. It was the first time he had taken me to a British Superbike championship. The meeting was at our local track, Oulton Park, in the middle of the Cheshire countryside.

We got there early to join the queue of traffic leading to the gates. We sat on the grassy banks and ate hotdogs and ice cream. When the race was on, he lifted me onto his shoulders so I could see over people and watch the bikes pass in a blur, ‘That’ll be me one day kiddo, I’ll get signed don’t you worry,’ he said.

That was fifteen years ago, he’s been racing in the Championships for ten now. Most of mine and my brother’s childhood have consisted of travelling around the country in a motorhome, spending my weekends between April and October at racetracks, supporting my Dad. We both loved it, the excitement of it and the chaos of it. Life was good as long as he got a podium position, but his racing style was as erratic as his behaviour.

During winter he was like a ghost of himself; the only thing that made him bearable was when my mother suggested he take Tommy to the track to have a go on his mini motorbike. I don’t think that my Dad ever expected that a few years later, at twenty one, my brother would not only be racing against him but also getting bombarded with offers from race teams for a contract, while my dad hung onto his sponsors by a thread.

Which brings me to today, Brands Hatch for the last race meeting of the day, I’m sitting on the grassy bank at Druids Bend, picking dandelions and hoping the black clouds rolling in don’t open. I am waiting to hear the results of the first race of the day, the last time he had passed, on the last lap, Tommy had been leading. I hadn’t seen my Dad’s bike. I am hoping he has placed ok, for my Mum’s sake.

‘Number five, Tommy Baker, wins with an impressive lead! I think it is obvious who will be taking the season title this afternoon!’ The commentator says excitedly. He, like the majority of spectators, has been won over by Tommy’s modesty and natural talent.

Tommy starts his victory lap and everyone cheers, children around me wearing t-shirts with Tommy’s bike on them, are jumping up and down, waving and blowing their air horns. The bikers with their leathers folded down to their waists raise their beer cans to him and nod to one another, impressed as he gets his front wheel high into the air, almost vertical and still manages to wave to the crowds. I roll my eyes, he is playing to his fans and I don’t want him to get cocky when he still has one more race left. My phone starts ringing as Tommy finishes his lap and goes back into the pit lane; I don’t need to check my caller ID to know that it is Mum ringing me.

‘Zooey, where are you?’

‘I’m not far, how’s Dad then?’

‘He didn’t place well, how do you think he is?’ She snaps.

‘I’ll be right there.’ I’m not far from Dad’s trailer but I take the long way, passing the tents and caravans set between the mobile fairground, the merchandise stalls and the hot dog, burger and coffee stands.

I hear him before I see him – it is the sort of thud only created by his metal toe capped boots colliding with the body of his bike.

‘Piece of shit!’ He seethes, kicking it again. ‘You utter piece of shit!’ It has taken years of experience for Mum and me to realise that there is nothing you can do to stop him when he is in one of his rages, so I make us a coffee and take some to his mechanics who are working silently on the replacement. He stops, grunts to acknowledge my presence and then goes into his changing room, slamming the door behind him.

Mum brushes her hand through her hair and sighs. We drink our coffee in silence, both staring at the gleaming trophy that never leaves the trailer. I wonder if she is remembering the day he won it. He was happy for months and as I got older I wondered if Mum never asked him to stop racing because she hoped that one day that man might make an appearance again.

I didn’t mind giving up so many weekends and sacrificing teenage normalcy,

going out on weekends to support him, instead of hanging with my friends.

But the truth is, when he started losing he only fought harder. The harder he fought, the more desperate he became and the more irresponsible he acted. In the past few years he’s finished more races face down in the gravel than he has still sitting on his bike.

‘We should go and see Tommy and congratulate him.’ I say. Mum hushes me.

‘Your father doesn’t need to hear that, he needs to stay focused for later.’ She says.

‘No, what he needs to do is go and act like a father for once and show his son he’s proud of him.’ I make no attempt to quieten my voice. Dad resents Tommy’s success; I saw it in his face the day that Tommy got on the podium on one of his first races, before Suzuki first signed him.

Reporters swarmed the trailer and Dad had assumed they were there for him; he walked out with his biggest, brightest smile reserved for the media and got shunned. He had always wanted to be a legend.

Tommy never spent any time in his trailer; he was always with his mechanics, helping them to tweak the bike so that he felt more at ease on it. We’d both picked up a few things from watching Dad’s little team at work over the years. Tommy’s teammate, Josh Dunn, was chatting to his family, drinking an energy drink and trying to relax before he had to race again, a different persona to the cocky one that I’d seen show up for television interviews.

‘How’s Dad?’ Tommy asks, calm for someone who’s about to compete in the biggest race of their career.

‘He’s great, seems like he’s recovered from his little setback in qualifying the other day.’ Mum says. She is referring to the moment he clipped the back wheel of the rider in front of him and his bike jerked, throwing him into the air so that he writhed around like one of those plastic fishes you get in Christmas crackers.

‘He’s always been better in the rain anyway. Wish I was, I’m shit in the rain.’ Tommy admits.

‘Well, you better not be…looks like we’re going to need the wet tyres on.’ His manager says, stopping to shake Mum’s hand.

‘Want some food?’ Tommy asks me, while Mum carries on chatting.

He’s clutching his left wrist, massaging it with the other hand and then pauses every so often to mimic holding the clutch. Then he winces.

‘Is your wrist alright?’ I ask.

He forces a smile.

‘Never been better.’

‘Tom, if you’re injured, are you sure you should be racing? Isn’t there a medical centre you can go to get it checked out at?’ I know that there’s one; I know that they keep one on every circuit for riders with minor injuries, and the more serious cases are driven away in an ambulance. We used to spend hours waiting for Dad to be patched up in the centre and I’d sit and plait my hair so I didn’t have to look at the riders with their blooded wounds.

‘There’s no point, it’s the last race of the season, and as long as I’m breathing I’ll be out on that bike. And besides there’s not enough time.’ He massages his wrist again. ‘Don’t look so worried Zooey, I’m fine, I promise.’

He says and then to prove it to me he holds his hand out straight online with my tricep and says ‘one inch punch!’ and then whacks me, numbing my entire right arm.

‘You little bastard!’ I hiss, rubbing my arm. He laughs and hugs me, ruffling my hair. I decide not to push it and sit with him for a while until the garage seems to fill up with mechanics and reporters, wanting the last interview with him before he becomes champion.

‘Good luck, I’ll see you later.’

‘Thanks Zooey.’

‘Stay focused, be safe, I’m proud of you.’ Mum hugs him.

‘Wish Dad luck from me, sorry I couldn’t stop by to see him.’

There’s a knot in my stomach as we head back to Dad’s trailer and a horrible anxiety that I can’t shake off. Dad is stomping around, excited that the rain showed up, taking it as a sign that his luck is about to change.

‘It’s pissing buckets!’ He laughs, enveloping Mum and me into a hug.

‘My girls are my lucky charms.’ Mum laughs along with him but I am tired of his unpredictable moods and him treating Tommy like an opponent rather than a son.

‘We went to see Tommy, he wished you luck. I see that it’s worked.’ I tell him, helping myself to a yellow Dunlop umbrella out of his changing room.

‘Hope he’s got his wet tyres on, it’s a monsoon out there.’ Dad says.

‘His wrist seemed hurt. I don’t think he should be racing.’ I tell him. He is silent and then he smiles slowly.

‘Ah the lad will be fine, I’ve got to get ready anyway, they will be calling us soon. See you later Zooey,’ he says and as I turn to leave he shouts, ‘if I place we’re all going out for tea and you can have two ice creams!’

I decide that for the first time, I’m going to watch from the start line. I want to see Tommy cross the finish line when he wins his first championship

title. The rain hasn’t deterred anyone, though I’ve seen races postponed in better conditions than this. It is coming down in sheets, diagonal, actually making the brolly girls use their umbrellas properly for once. Tommy is at pole position, doing a last minute interview with a TV camera before everyone is cleared away from the start line and the racers start their engines for the practice lap. They return to their grid positions after warming up, testing their wet tyres. They rev their engines again.

The lights signal the start of the race and I am too busy watching the marshal responsible for documenting the number of laps to see the bikes take off. I don’t even realise what has happened until I hear the smash.

‘Baker is down!’ The commentator is yelling.

I don’t allow myself to panic, I am waiting for them to announce that like usual my father has crashed but is up and majorly pissed off.

‘Tommy Baker has stalled and there’s been a collision, there is a pile up but it can be confirmed that the racers at the back of the grid have managed to avoid it and have continued.’

I run toward the fence, I need to see him get up and walk it off.

‘I guess the other riders mustn’t have realised the severity of the crash John, the red flag is out now and the safety car is on the track. This does not look good.’ The commentator is no longer shouting, he sounds worried.

‘It looks like Tommy Baker and his teammate, Josh Dunn, are those mainly involved in the impact, no one else appears to be injured. The other riders are being cleared off and it looks like Josh Dunn is moving.’

I see the Marshalls sprinting over to his body, sprawled across the tarmac.

The sirens are getting closer and I am trying to look for my Dad but I can’t see his canary yellow leathers anywhere.

The Little Blue Teddy-Bear Who Didn't Like Being Blue Claire Whittaker Bluebell was a little blue teddy-bear who didn't like being blue.

There was nothing special about blue. The whole sky was blue and it was always there, every day. Bluebell didn't know exactly how big the sky was but the bit of it she had seen was rather large. She imagined you would have to walk for days, at least, if not a whole week to get far enough away so as you couldn't see it anymore. All summer long the sky had been blue, blue, blue and she was bored of it.

In fact, Bluebell actually wanted to be pink, but you have to promise not to tell anyone that.

"Why not?" I hear you ask. Well of course, I forgot you wouldn't know. You see, when Wood-Bears are babies they have brightly coloured fur so their parents can find them easily and don't go getting all worried like parents always seem to do. When they grow up their fur changes colour to become golden or brown, like we think of real bears being. This makes it easier for them to hide as bears are actually quite shy. (In fact I bet that if you went for a walk in the woods right now, you wouldn't see a single bear the whole entire time. But you shouldn't take my word for it so when you've finished this story see if a grown-up will take you on a bear hunt; you never know what you might find.) In this wood, all the bears who are born in summer are pink and all the bears who are born in winter are blue. No one knows why, despite many books being written on the topic, but it meant that all the summer born bears like pink best and all the winter born bears like blue. All of them, except Bluebell.

Poor Bluebell. If only she had been born in the summer she could wear pink all the time. But as it was she had once worn a pink bow to nursery and some nasty other bear had laughed at her.

"Why are you wearing pink?" the bear had said "Blue fur doesn't go with pink at all." Then she laughed. And all the other bears laughed too.

Poor Bluebell got embarrassed and took the bow out, even though she'd been perfectly happy with it before. Bluebell had a big floppy hat with a big pink ribbon around it and a long necklace made of pearly pink beads which she would have happily worn every day for the rest of her life but she didn't want the nasty bear to laugh at her again. It wasn't fair, she decided, that summer bears got to like pink just because that was the colour they were The day was sunny, the air was warm and the sky was, as always, annoyingly blue. Bluebell decided it was the perfect day to go to Isaiah's mobile library and change the world. Isaiah was a fessor but not just any kind of fessor,

he was a Pro-fessor. Bluebell knew that being a 'pro' meant someone was very good at something and so she knew that fessor must mean very clever because that's what Professor Isaiah was: very good at being very clever.

Bear cubs are allowed a lot more freedom than children are, so it was easy for Bluebell to sneak off on her own. In fact her mother would probably have been perfectly happy to let Bluebell go to the library if she'd asked, but that wouldn't have felt as secret and special.

The main clearing in the wood was very busy because it was market day. There was a scattering of brightly coloured tents which all the grown-up bears were going in and out of swapping supplies of berries and nuts to trade for other things, exotic things from places Bluebell had never heard of. Bluebell normally liked to go around the market and learn about all the traders. If she was lucky she might get the chance to try some strange food or play with a new toy. But today Bluebell went straight to the library trying her very best to make sure she didn't look as though she wasn't supposed to be there. She knew the easiest way to get caught doing something she wasn't supposed to do was by looking as though she wasn't supposed to be doing it.

The mobile library always came on market day and was open for all bears to go inside and look at the books. It wasn't like the sort of mobile library you probably know because it was a magic mobile library. I'm sure every sensible child already knows that teddy-bears can do magic, but the grown-ups might want to know a little bit more so I'll explain all about it later. The library was a big building made of pale stone blocks and had a clock and some big gold letters saying 'LIBRARY' over the door. It was almost empty inside, because it was such a nice sunny day that all the bears wanted to be outside. The only bear Bluebell saw as she crept through the doors was an old bear with glasses reading a book on the merits of fungal medicine.

Bluebell went straight to the back of the library. It was very quiet.

So quiet all Bluebell could hear was her own breathing... and somethin anywhere that has a lot of books you will know those places feel magical.

Books are powerful. When you read you learn new things you didn't know g else. A sort of humming. It was coming from the books. If you've ever been born. If she had pink fur all her problems would be solved. So that's when Bluebell made her plan. Sometimes when you read you get new ideas that weren't in either your head or the book before but, somehow, they appear.

Teddy-bears are very clever, much cleverer than people it must be admitted, because they know how to capture this magic. They can see it.

If floats off the books into the air in a fine dust a bit like the sand in an hour

-glass except it glows. If you're really lucky and the sun catches it just right, you can see it too. Little specks of magic floating in the air.

However, bears can do something even more special than just see magic. They can use it. All the Library-Bears in Professor Isaiah's magic library are trained to catch the magic dust into nets, a bit like butterfly nets.

They use this dust as ink to write in special blank books that are stored around the library and poof! just like that, whatever they write comes true.

That's how they make the library move around to different places. Now only specially trained Library-Bears are supposed to use magic but they are very trusting bears and don't expect naughty little bears like Bluebell to come along and try and change the world. So, although there were no LibraryBears around, one of them had left their net leaning against the bookshelf.

Bluebell took it with some difficulty, for she was a very small bear and it was a very large net, she scooped up some magic dust and hurried away through the library to find one of the empty books.

The book was very large and sat on a heavy wooden stand which was carved to look like a tree with roots that disappeared into the floor and branches supporting the book. Bluebell was so little she had to climb up the stand to see the book properly. It was a bit difficult at first because the net got in the way but she soon got to the top as bears are very good at climbing (if you don't believe me then ask a grown-up, they are sure to know all about it.)

The book was open on a new page. It was so smooth and clean Bluebell was almost scared to ruin it with writing, but nearly falling back over the edge soon fixed that fear as she wanted to get down as soon as possible.

There was a feather next to the book which had its tip cut at an angle to make a special kind of pen called a quill. When a quill is dipped into ink it can be used to write things or draw. So when Bluebell dipped her quill into the magic dust she could write her wish in the book just like you could with a pen. Except of course with an ordinary pen your wish won't come true. "I wish," she wrote, "that all the Wood-Bears who were born in the winter were blue and all the Wood-Bears who were born in the summer were pink.“ She put a full stop at the end of the sentence before remembering her manners smudging it away and adding "please" onto the end.

Nothing seemed to happen. Bluebell shut her eyes tight.

Suddenly she heard shouts of surprise from outside. The spell must have worked! Her eyes flew open and she stared down at her paws.

But it was all wrong. Her paws weren't the sort of pink she'd wanted at all.

They were bright ugly pink. This was no good, it would clash just horribly with her hat. Bluebell was just thinking about re-doing her spell when angry voices came into the library. She jumped off the stand and hid behind the bookshelf. The voices came closer. Then she saw them and what she saw made her gasp. All of the bears were pink and blue. All of them. Even the adults. This wasn't what she'd meant to do. She could see her brother Strawberry in the crowd and his fur was as dark as a blueberry. He did not look happy.

"Where's Isaiah?" demanded a pink bear at the front of the crowd. "He must know what's happening, only a Library-Bears could do this.“ Professor Isaiah came down the stairs from his study. He wore a purple waistcoat scattered with gold stars just in case anybear didn't already know he was magic. Everyone gasped when they saw him because instead of his usual brown fur he too was bright blue. He looked in the book Bluebell had written in.

"Who's been writing in the magic book?"

The crowd was silent. Bluebell hid herself further behind the bookshelf. But she knocked into the next shelf and a book fell down with a big BUMP! Professor Isaiah came around the corner and saw her.

"Did you write in the magic book?" he asked. He looked very big and scary to the frightened little Bluebell.ey don't expect bears are supposed to use the magic dust but library-bears are very make it move around to "No," she told him, but a bit uncertainly because she knew she wasn't supposed to lie. If you've ever used an old fashioned pen you'll know that the ink gets all over your hands which is exactly what happened to Bluebell. When Isaiah saw she had magic dust on her paws he knew she'd lied. He crouched down in front of her and asked: "Why did you want all the bears to be pink and blue?“ He didn't seem so scary when he said that and Bluebell decided to tell him the truth as she thought that anybear who wore a purple and gold waistcoat must understand what it felt like to be a little blue bear who wanted to wear a pink hat and couldn't.

"I didn't mean to turn all the bears pink and blue," she said. "Just swap the colour of the summer and winter bears. I like pink better than blue and the other bears laugh at me for it. I only wanted to change things so I could be happy without being laughed at."

"I can understand that," said Isaiah. "However, no matter how much you want something you can't change other bears just to make things better for yourself. It's not fair because then they'll be unhappy rather than you."

Dani Moriarty’s Editor’s Pick

Starved Dave Weaver

Annie? It is you, isn’t it? Again... I can see your face in the shadows. I can just see the moon if I stand on tip-toes and crane my neck, see it caught between the bars of the window. I’ve seen it full and I’ve seen it wane, seventeen times. I’ve counted. That means I’ve got another thirty-one to go.

That’s what those bastards gave me, all for a little bit of dope. Well OK. A big bit of dope.

They love to make an example of Westerners here, and I fit the profile perfectly. Spoilt middle-class Brit picking up easy money, paraded like some performing monkey before what they referred to as a jury. Ten minutes was all it took to ruin my stupid shit-for-brains life. I was just four hours away from Heathrow, now I’m four years. Nobody will give me a job when I get back, if I get back. If I survive this.

I’m so hungry Annie, I can’t eat the shit they give us here but there’s nothing else, unless you trade for it. I’ve traded things you wouldn’t believe. I get by. The locals are alright, mainly they just do the time. It’s no big deal for them. Some are quite nice actually, helpful if you give them what they want. It’s the Yanks you’ve got to watch, and the Dutch. The Yanks will fight for anything and the Dutch just want to screw you. The other Brits here are all scared shitless, some have got Mummy and Daddy coming over to bail them out. My folks won’t come of course. They wrote me off a long time ago didn’t they? When was that exactly? I’m trying to remember. Was it the second drug bust or that time I got nicked doing that store? Or was it when I told them to piss off and leave me alone after I moved in with Michael at that squat, before he started hitting me. Definitely way before he made me get him money by screwing punters. You missed all that of course, didn’t you? The not-so-gradual collapse of my life into crap and ruin.

You missed it because you were dead. Why was that Annie? We could have had the best years of our lives still before us? Great times. Ones we’d never forget, even if we both lived to be a hundred. School plays, shopping trips to London, girly nights with smuggled wine and dvds, crisps and chocolate. Sleep-overs at your place. Boys. We’d both have boys, I’d nick yours then you’d nick mine and we’d have a big fight, and cry and makeup and swear to be best mates forever.

And we would have been, if you hadn’t gone and killed yourself. I know you didn’t mean to. I know it was the pneumonia, that your heart was

But you made it weak Annie. You made your poor heart so weak, so neglected, it just gave up on both of us. Why did you let it do that? Wasn’t my love strong enough for it, wasn’t your parents? They’re good people.

Treated me like part of the family, remember? Always over your place playing the fool, escaping from my own dull little life with people who never took me seriously or listened to a thing I had to say. Your parents always listened to me. They loved you Annie. It was so obvious how much they loved you. The intensity of it, I couldn’t believe how a person could be so loved, especially compared to my low-watt energy relationship with mum and dad. Yours was like the sun, a million suns. Was that the problem? Their belief, their expectation of you, was it all too much? Too heavy a responsibility? You told me once, down at the playing fields at the bottom of your road. It was the middle of summer and late evening, beautiful. You told me that you envied me. I was so shocked because I thought you were taking the piss. You envied me because I was free, you said. Free to fuck-up?

Because that’s what people expected me to do? Anything else was a plus.

So I could do anything, be anyone I wanted. I had a choice. But you had to be perfect, and could never be free like me. Well, look at me now Annie. Look at us, a drug-smuggler and a ghost.

You did this to us, began the process anyway, when I caught you putting that chicken nugget in your coat pocket. I suppose it had been going on for some time. I must have noticed how thin you’d been getting, mum remarking on it in her cold off-hand way, the gaunt faces of your parents. I must have known, somewhere in the back of my mind. But it took that careful calculated sleight of hand to finally force me to see you properly. The new Annie, emaciated, always tired, stick-thin arms and legs with your poor ribs threatening to tear through papery skin.

And you pretended it was nothing, laughed, made a silly joke.

But it wasn’t nothing, was it? It was everything. It was the beginning of the end for both of us. Now you’re looking at me like I’m blaming you. Again. I’m not Annie, not really, we all have our roads to go down. Some are shorter than others. I wanted to be on your road for a long time; some nights I still do but they’re growing less. I can’t be you, much as I’d like to be. I’m a fuckup right now. We’ll see.

I’ve still got time to get it right, time you never had. If I can do it for both of us Annie, will that be enough? Will that keep you believing in me? I guess something, someone, has to sustain me now, right? So, will you come again tomorrow night?

Don’t starve me now we’ve come this far.

Lighten Ghazal Choudhary

Auschwitz – 1945 Niva The whispering moon shook in the humid air, thick, like woolen socks on a hot July afternoon. Inside the barracks, Niva and Kasha huddled close. The warmth had died away sudden and careless, like the numerous children that had slept in these barracks before them. It had only got worse over time, the screaming pierced the cotton amniotic sacks that they delved into, curled together as they had once been before.

Heavy breathing filled the empty room. Niva sat up and looked around her. It was quiet. She turned to search for her sister. Shuffling out of the bunk, she slithered along the floor, skirting the edges of the walls like a frightened rat. The door to the latrines was ajar, lumps of child pebbled the floor, a mosaic of limbs and needles guided her to the showers. She found Kasha in a puddle of thick black blood; it oozed from her nose and from between her legs, gushing like a storm struck ocean. Niva took a step back from the gurgling mass of sister, terrified she wondered if they still had the same face. Maybe Unkle Mengele had changed them like some of the others.

She thought of Tibi and Tobi, sewn together. Bits of identical cloth, facing away from each other, together but apart and unable to see, Tibi’s eyes were open all the time, round coins with no lid and Toby had no eyes: the empty dark holes would pierce you like no eyes ever could. They howled into the night, babes begging for their mother. But no one came.

Soon they began to rot and like apples they fell away. Tibi went first. Unkle Mengele took care of Tobi.

Taking in as much oxygen as she could, Niva walked determinedly towards her sister, squirrel cheeks full of nuts she sat beside her sister, her bare feet squelching in the stench of the smooth and thick black milkshake.

She let out the light gas in a swift whistle. Holding her sister close she whispered: “Stay alive Kasha, remember what happened to Tobi”

England- 2002 Meredith It was five past eight when the alarm went off. Meredith rubbed her eyes as she sat up. Her wrinkled skin felt like soft butter spread along over done toast. She struggled free of the cocoon and wobbled towards the bathroom.

She emerged an hour later dressed in smart trousers and a blazer that looked as though it still had the hanger in it. Steady and upright, the large woman walked across her hobbit hole towards the kitchen. As she approached the arch her body began to imitate the vibration of a mobile phone, her feet held hands with a slop of water and were dragged down to embrace the cool laminate. She lay there like thick grass on hardened soil.

Machines roared into the diseased air, as though they too were suffocating on the airborne human residue. The prisoners lined up in their striped uniforms, a row of perfect teeth, a dentist’s dream. Women peered through the barred windows, their eyes like flashing head lights in the darkness. An officer marched along the rows, his face straight and unmoving; an absent look that comes with minor seizures. In practiced motions he slides his arm upwards and like a knife cutting through Jelly he fired. The gooey masses fell and fresh screams bulleted through the air forming a dense batter with the grayish smoke, lost in the dough. With no escape.

Meredith woke, the ceiling spread above her blinking at her and buzzing. She thought of bees as she heaved herself of the floor. The lights flickered and the air dampened, she was enclosed in a large wet cloth. She needed to get out. Walking back to her room, she gathered her purse, stick and coat, keeping them close to her body like a small child that might catch a cold. She opened the door and stepped outside; she breathed in the cool British weather and began to walk.

Auschwitz – 1945 Niva

Standing in the far corner of the wooden box, Niva shivered. Although she still had her own coat, the foul smells and stains of the camp were imbedded in the fibres, where once her mother’s perfume used to sit. It no longer felt like family. Her stick like arms roped her body like weak vines, she moved deeper into the darkness as the shouts and fires grew louder, echoing through the air like a ping pong ball ricocheting in a tight space.

The other’s screamed as the door gave away, the snow and smoke entering like restless ghosts eager for haunting.

Army soldiers burst in but these soldiers and officers were different. They knelt on the wooden floorboards and told the children to gather around. Niva squirmed and wriggled amongst the can of worms, wanting to see what was on offer. A soldier moved between the children, passing around chocolates, cookies and hugs like a magician at a children’s party. Every child lit up and Niva’s muscles pulled in an unfamiliar exertion. It was time to leave. Niva gathered her few possessions, stuffing bits of cookies and chocolates in the rags of her clothes that now acted as pockets.

She then visited the latrine one last time. Kasha sat in the showers, shoulders slumped and head bent, like she had fallen asleep in class again. Niva tiptoed around rotting flesh, avoiding the sour cherry liquid as best as she could. She sat in front of her sister and lifted her head using two. Her dilated pupils fixated somewhere above Niva’s right shoulder, her mouth encased in a brown crust, as though she would crumble like concrete in Niva’s hands. Her dress was drenched in raspberry sauce, her hands and thighs swollen. Niva covered her sister’s rotting watermelon legs and lay her down on the floor. She closed the lids of her eyes, blocking out the bloodied morgue of disembodiment. She knelt down to whisper in her sister’s ear before she left: “it’s okay Kasha, Uncle Mengle is gone. You can sleep now.”

England- 2002 Meredith The doors beeped as Meredith sauntered through. A shop assistant walked towards her like a purposeful bunny and asked her if she was alright.

Oblivious to the eager pup Meredith stared straight ahead and began to walk through the store. Skimming through the aisles she stopped in front of the tinned soup. She stood staring her eyes loud like a lemur. The tins fuzzed like stuffed animals colliding and humming like lasers and gun shots.

Everybody move! Up! Up! Now! The women gathered outside in the cold, their feet numb against the hardened dandruff. They clutched their few belongings in their hands as though a thief would run by at any time to snatch them away. The younger girls formed groups while the older women simply stared and waited. Perfect columns and rows covered the space like a game almost ready to be played.

-Mrs – Hello Mrs- -Tom, she’s not responding- -I got it, hold on- -Mrs, can you hear me – Can you look at me please- -What’s wrong with her- -I think she’s going into shock – look her pupils are getting big and she’s all clammy and pale- -What should we do- -Come on let’s sit her down – you stay with her while I get an ambulanceThe lines move, crawling like newly mobile babies. The air was coated in a thick layer of human debris, the smell of burning rubber dribbled through the grey mists and the frozen winds cubed and coddled them; bits of pickled residue in a jar. A woman stumbled out of line, the snow cracked under weight, another crack mimicked the snow, snubbing out life.

Meredith blinked away the Black, white and grey, absorbing the yellowy orange aura of the store. She began to stand when Tom held her firmly by the shoulder and pushed her back down into the chair as though she were a child escaping from their time out. Looking up at his face she wondered where she’d seen him.

“John” her barely audible whisper trickled into his ear, he looked down and smiled wide.

“I’m Tom Ma’am; you just seem a little tired, so you need to rest for a couple of minutes. The ambulance should be here soon” He smiled again with his bright teeth bouncing in the lights. His mouth maneuvered into an oddly sliced orange as he shifted his gaze towards the doors.

The colour began to seep from Meredith’s face, gently slipping out leaving her blank like a smooth, creamy pebble by the beach. Trembling she began to gurgle and groan.

“Get….away..urrh…John….Not again…. No…gurrh…John…”

After Auschwitz – 1945 Niva

It had been days since the soldiers tore apart the camp. Niva and the others had scurried through like desperate rabbits, exiting where they could, never looking back. They had wandered for hours in small groups. Dotting the fields they searched for shelter and a way home. Soldiers flew around them, paper bags in the wind; they had their own agenda, ignoring them as though they were nothing more than blades of grass or fallen leaves. That was until the nights breathed over, blanketing them in darkness.

Niva crouched at the side of a moulting barn, flakes of red paint crumbled on contact and the doors screamed in pain as though Mengele was experimenting with them as well. She had arrived for shelter with three other women and a green man who hobbled along on a club foot. She tied

up her pajamas and hurried into the barn. Two of the women were busy making beds out of the paling straw while the man groaned from a corner, his green darkened to blue; Niva thought he resembled a blueberry that was ripe for plucking. She walked over to him, taking small silent steps. She sat beside him wondering how he smelled so fresh. They had walked passed a few puddles drenched in dirt, but nothing that could be swallowed or poured over for cleaning. He gurgled and rasped suddenly like an overgrown slug that had been sprayed with salt; he curled in and out and oozed his colour around him, bursting like a puss filled pimple. The fresh smell morphed into a stench of internal decay and sour fluid. Niva gasped and backed away from the slime, never taking her eyes off of the snot filled corpse. The other women watched, listless and lethargic, as though the act of reacting would weaken them or make them vulnerable again.

Joining them, Niva sat and began to sway into sleep Niva be careful! Come here and stand with Kasha where it’s safe. There. Can you see it now? Hold on to this end and pull it, it will fly higher. Just like that!

Good girl. Why don’t you give your Daddy a shout so he can see as well?

Daddy, Daddy look…. Daddy, Mummy he’s not looking. Mummy? Mummy!

Daddy! Kasha!

Blistered hands straddled her shoulders, jerking her awake. The women motioned for her to be quiet, she had been screaming in her sleep but it wasn’t her screaming they heard now. High pitched wails of danced around the air. They could hear them stopping and starting, each time with lesser energy. Niva crept towards the barn door and peered from the cracks, the darkness greeted her with a bowl of empty air. She walked along the walls looking for more cracks. Her hand bumped over a drilled hole, she bent on her knees and looked out. The sound of heavy breathing drove into the wooden panels, Niva watched the soldier grunt and thrust again and again, and he shifted slightly. Niva backed away from the wall, the screams were dying, and the hands around the tiny girl’s throat were killing them and the girl. Tears stabbed at her eyes like the stinging needles from the camp, she forced herself back to the wall. The soldier was standing now, billowing over Ella like a tall tree, his branched fingers scraping her pink cheeks as they slowly faded to white. He turned and marched away, like this was military routine, he didn’t turn back or look left or right, he walked on, a skin encased machine.

“Ella?” Niva whispered into the girl’s ear. She moved around her to straighten her dress. The image of Kasha slumping in a pool of blood penetrated her mind. Shaking her head like a wet dog Niva moved to close

Ella’s dimming green globes. There was nothing she could do about the smell of shit and blood bathed in piss and white snot, so she stood and stared at the girl seeing Kasha with every blink. The sound of hungry wolves drove her back into the barn, where she shivered in the corner watching what could be.

England- 2002 Meredith -Do you think she’s okay- -I don’t know – Best move – the paramedics are hereRapid blinking let in the intense glare of the paramedics doll house torch. Meredith felt ground rush towards her; she blinked again her eyelids were butterfly wings, changing the direction of the future. She wasn’t falling. They were asking her questions but the bees were back at her ears. Shadows moved around her, dodging the light, dancing to the bees’ music, she rose to her feet ready to lunge and the bouncing frog. A thousand arms reached to stifle her, grabbing her from all overMeredith screamed as she ran towards the wire wall. The other women held her tight, playing tug of war with her will power. Ahead and beyond an officer stood with a camera in one hand and a gun in the other, authority grouped around a sickly zebra. They shoved the creature to his knees, bending its dignity. The silence echoed the snap of will; hope trickled and melted into the snow. A new chill took over the grim grey as the creature looked up and over. He met Meredith’s eyes one last time. “John”, Meredith’s voice was swallowed by the hysterical hyenas as they documented their feat. The women loosened their grip, Meredith dropped onto the white marble, an empty wrapper that once had held a treat. Dams shredded within her, gushing liquid rose with the force of a stampede, the setting fizzed while she stiffened and jerked, her eyes pulled like magnets, sticking to the other pole. “John” she gurgled again before her lips tightened and the light seized to enter The paramedics were knelt beside Meredith waiting for the seizure to pass. They rolled her over onto her side. She blinked and breathed out a wave of thick rice pudding and orange juice. The sour stench shoved into her nostrils like tissues for a nosebleed, she gasped and tried to sit up. Holding her down the men around her shouted words that had no meaning, she was being lifted onto some kind of portable barrack; she wriggled like a worm under magnified sun rays, begging them to leave her.

be.

“I won’t go back! Kill me here!” Her wailing was euthanised as a bee finally stung her.

A tall slimy lizard shouted out the roll call. The women huddled together waiting to hear their own names. Some of the younger girls had still not learned that tears were a waste of body mass and energy. Meredith moved along with the workable women. While the old and the sick took a different route. She stood out in another patch of snow, muddied and hard, the cold whips of hell slapped against the overstretched rubber, reddening them for seconds before they were repainted like deepening sunset. They marched long in the freezer for an eternity, the winds giggled at their efforts. Meredith was past the shivering, she hadn’t spoken since that night.

Her vocal chords were playing a silent eulogy, never ending and unnerving. A woman coughed like and fell to the floor, stumbling over her feet like a drunken kitten, a female officer moved in and was atop her like a fly on honey. Meredith watched as the woman was lifted, a whistle blew through the air like a death sentence and within seconds two German Sheppard’s lunged at her. Ravenous for the bony steak meal, they ripped into her like children with new scissors and fresh paper.

After Auschwitz – 1945 Niva Niva had lost the others. She dragged her broken ankle, twisted to resemble an old broken spade. She cried into graying grass and hid in cracks and crevices the second the sun motioned goodbye. Soldiers littered the fields, straying from their camps, wolves hungry for a meal, guided by the moon’s treacherous light. Niva had found some stale bread, her thin lips pulled into an unfamiliar curve, and her teeth wobbled in pained delight as she nibbled at stone, moistening it with saliva, it softened slightly and broke away into the empty well beyond her tongue. The night was enveloping her as she imitated her spit and sunk into the bread.

Leaves crunched in the lower levels of hell, someone had arrived to take her higher. She swiveled on her spot like a rotating mannequin. The bread had her in a trance, her brain nudged her to run, and she rose only to fall at the feet of the soldier, her matted sun locks slimed over his boots. He grinned like a psychotic clown, bending only to roll her over. He climbed over her as though she were a mare; straddling her he took a fistful of her hair to hold her down. Niva stared up at him unblinking, her body relaxed

onto the cold floors of this new hell, as though it had given up too tired to try and fight. The soldier watched her waiting for her to struggle. Ripping away the pillowcase covering he tore into the feathery mass, Niva felt herself being pierced by a thick needle, images of Dr Mengle’s smiling face flooded her mind, the soldier struck and pushed Niva’s head bounced with the force, her legs flailed like a dogs wagging tail drenched in the only warmth left within her. Still atop her the Soldier forced her to look at him.

“Are you German!” his breath was moist in her face, she struggled to keep her eyes open and whispered “I’m Jewish”, the body above her hardened, suddenly heavy on her like a mattress suffocating a baby, her lids flapped and failed like a wounded bird. She let them close.

England- 2002 Meredith -We’re losing her – Start the compressionsThey pounded on Meredith, pumping for water in a desert. She tried to blink, she tried to openher mouth, she pictured herself, a goldfish gaping but mute.

The ground shuddered beneath them in a sudden shift of pressure, the sound followed almost instantly, Meredith covered her ears and stared at the source, dark clouds rose from the gates, guns fired and men snarled as their systamised inmates began to unravel. The thread was punctured and the knots came loose, every living creature ran in every direction, ants being attacked they fled.

The compressions changed hands as someone else took over.

Tangy breath entered her wind pipes and she convulsed. Her lids fluttered and closed again.

Meredith followed the crowd of women, the sky was darkening but the gates were open. Shouts of liberation rung through the air.

The paramedics had stopped, they stood watching her, she felt their eyes on her but she couldn’t move. She was a stone in cement. The lights were fading, they no longer refracted on her lids. It was numbing.

She was free.

Twice Tom Smith Your flat speaks in tongues. I don’t know how long it’s been since your shower water belched down the drain, but your boiler is still screaming in agony. You really should get that fixed. I know you never will.

I look at your possessions, as I often do when you’re not around, and sense your presence. This flat is you, everything you own screams your name.

Nothing is accidental.

I look at myself in the mirror and smile, the mirror sucks in and frames the picture opposite it. I never asked if this was an accident or by design, why would I? Only you could imagine doing such a unique thing. The picture makes me smirk every time I see it; it takes me back to the not-sodistant past when I had no idea who this woman was. I assumed she was some family member, a sister, your mother, even an old shot of your grandmother. Eventually your well-thumbed copy of this woman’s autobiography corrected me; she was Gia Carangi, a woman some say was the first ever supermodel, a woman whose tragic life enthralls you, a woman who only serves to remind me of you. My one, my love. My life.

People say they can’t imagine never meeting the one they love, I can and it dries my mouth and sinks my stomach. When that happens I fight back, I let the arrogance of my dreams deliver everything I want. I see us buying a house in a seaside town, Cornwall maybe, and turning it into a home. Our evenings spent making love, knotting the sheets, and watching the stars try to outshine you. I see it all.

I sometimes feel my whole life is a fantasy with dashes of unwelcome reality; you are where reality and fantasy meet.

My mind drifts back to our first meeting, like a photographer, I blur the background and sharpen the only thing that matters, you. I was wishing the time away when I noticed the manager showing you the ropes. I couldn’t take my eyes off you. I never liked girls with short hair, until then. I never liked girls with tattoos, until then. There were a million other tastes I had acquired over the years that evaporated in an instant. You looked so beautiful.

The click of the kettle calls me into the kitchen. I notice I left the back door ajar, I shut it with a kick. Coming and going through the back is such a pain, that security system out front is nothing but trouble, it’s needlessly complicated, codes, keys and God knows what else. Although I can’t deny it is safe, even you can’t open it.

I smile, reading the haphazard note you have left for yourself on a scrap of paper held up by a Scarborough fridge magnet. I can barely read what you have written; you must have been in a rush. I decide to add my own little addition to give you something to read when you return, “I will always be with you.”

I leave the kitchen and return to my memories; remembering the first time I followed you into the break room, I wanted to ask you out on a date, until the confidence oozed out of me like blood from an open wound, and I hid behind the door. That happened on more than one occasion. But my chance came when everyone from work decided to go for a drink.

Usually I would avoid watching people I hate sing tuneless karaoke, but anywhere you went I was sure to follow. You were so kind to me that night, you talked to me, you listened. That was it. The beginning of everything, I was yours whether you wanted me or not.

The weeks became months and I stayed far enough away from you to seem aloof, but close enough to get my fix. I was more than falling in love with you, I wanted you to consume me so we could live as one. I know how crazy that sounded, but I took a risk and told you anyway, you cried. I cried too as I held onto you tightly. I have a million memories like these to comfort me when life keeps me from you.

I stroll into your bedroom, careful not to spill my coffee on to your cream carpet, I never liked this room, it’s the one thing I would change.

It’s very clinical, white carpet, white walls, white bed sheets; it reminds me of a room in an institution, not a pleasant place to spend time. I notice a letter on your bedside table, I don’t even pretend to fight my urge to read it.

My heart sunk with every word I soaked in. Why did you keep it so close to your bed? So close to you? My copy found a home in my bin.

This is why I am here, to fix your mistake. You didn’t mean it, I know you didn’t mean it. I forgive you. Where we’re going the restraining order won’t matter. We’ll be together forever, after making love for the first time.

The Mermaid of Tear-Drop Lake Gareth Davey The rain fell like mist on Tear-drop Lake. The dim light shrouded the bird’s figure. He watched the heron from the arch of a red-bricked bridge as its charcoal eyes surveyed the water’s cloudy surface.

Leo’s attention was swept away from the bird by the rippling water behind him. Ears cocked like a rabbit listening for hunters, he scurried to the other side of the bridge. He could see her.

A few feet beneath the surface, she swam, her skin radiating through the thick water. Her dark hair stretched out like a cape behind her. From deep below the surface, he caught the familiar smell of cocoa – chocolatey, yet with a light scent. Like a crisp autumn leaf.

His hand clutched the side of the bridge, his breath catching in his chest. And then all too soon, the mermaid was gone. For a few moments, Leo’s green eyes fixed on the water. Teardrops of his own welled like dew on a leaf in his eyes. And then – ‘Leo?’ His head snapped up. Tears vanished with a few blinks of his eye. Faye stood at the end of the bridge, a bright blue anorak preventing most of her lava hair from being extinguished by the moist fog that hung over the lake. A fox tail stuck out over her shoulder. It was wet from the rain.

‘Why the hell did you want to meet here?’ she asked.

‘I love it’ said Leo, taking a step towards her. ‘It means a lot to me.’

‘Even in the pissing rain?’ The words wiped the cautious smile from Joe’s face as like the blows of heavy-weight boxers.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Let’s go and sit down.’

They found a wooden bench, not far from the bridge. It offered a view of the lake, and behind them, a large tree spilled its leaves on the ground, creating a collage of yellow and brown.

‘What did you want to talk about?’ Faye said. She sat, slouched, a splash of fire hanging over her forehead. Leo held her hand, as though the glue that held it together was aging.

‘I wanted to talk about us.’ His thumb drifted lightly over the back of Faye’s hand. She snapped her arm back. The glue pulled apart.

‘What did I say about that?’ she asked. Her jaw jutted outwards, her dark eyes furious.

‘Sorry,’ Leo said. He shook his head as if trying to loosen the apology.

‘This is what I mean. We’ve got no – no anything. We’re missing something.’

For the first time since they met, Faye’s charcoal eyes burnt through Leo’s

dry grass irises.

‘I don’t feel right. I don’t feel – like us, anymore.’ Faye’s small fists wrapped into themselves, creating rocks at the end of her arms. Her face for a second was blank and withdrawn before a sudden burst of anger flickered across her face.

‘I know what this is,’ she said. ‘I know exactly what this bullshit is.’ Leo’s eyebrows arched, mirroring the bridge he’d watched the mermaid from ten minutes prior. ‘You’ve cheated on me.’ Leo shook his head.

‘I – I haven’t cheated on you.’

‘Yes. It’s obvious Leo. Out of nowhere you just freak out and you’ve been really distant lately. Remember the other day, walking near the graveyard? You were silent? And then you disappeared for a whole day last week! Without even a word. Well?’ Leo’s heart was hammering. He couldn’t reply.

‘Well?’

‘I know her name.’ A gargle came out of Leo’s mouth, before he managed to regain his composure.

‘What? She isn’t real. How can you-‘ ‘Mya. You said it in your sleep on Thursday night.’ A tremble ran through Leo’s arms, making it twitch, as though a puppet-master stood above him, tweaking his strings. He bit his lip. Blood was drawn. ‘So? Are you going to admit it now?’

‘Look – Faye. Look. You really, really don’t understand.’

‘Don’t I? It seems pretty fucking simple to me Leo. Answer me one – just one fucking thing.’ Leo continued to bite his lip, a tiny red pool appearing on the red skin.

‘How long have you been together?’ When she asked this, Leo looked at the lake. Beneath the surface, the mermaid was back. She waved at him from just beneath the surface. He smiled. She always knew how to calm him down.

‘You’re – you’re smiling?’ Leo looked away from the lake. He didn’t say anything.

‘That’s-fucking-it!’ She stood up and turned to Leo. ‘Get out of my life Leo.’ He didn’t respond, instead he watched the fox leave.

He walked over to the side of the lake – the rain stopped as he knelt down. The mermaid was miles beneath the surface, but he could still see her. Dipping a finger in the water, he smiled again.

‘I’m sorry Mya,’ he said, addressing the drowned woman. She had been dead for three years and one week. His wife.

The smell of chocolate lingered in the air.

Watch Her Claire Norton Crow perched on the window ledge and watched her sleep. The wind played with his feathers, the tree branches behind him moaned. He watched as she tossed and turned, cried, shouted out. He had seen it all before. The sun was a distant glow on the horizon. Woman would be awake soon.

She would be leaving the house at seven twenty-five, unless the car was frozen over, and then she would come out and turn the engine on at seven fifteen. The car would be left running while she made her final preparations for the day.

Seven twenty-six she drove away from the house. Crow was not concerned with where she was going, only with when she would return. He flew to the house and perched on the back gate, from there he could see the street.

The postman came. A charity canvasser knocked the door, waited for a minute before moving on. And then Man arrived.

He helped her move in to her little cottage with the two bedrooms. There had been laughing and joking. Cuddles and kisses. Then arguments. He was meant to be living there too, but he changed his mind, kept making excuses. The last fight had been in the street, all hand gestures and obscenities. ‘Go live with her then, you deserve each other,’ was the last thing Woman said to him.

And then he had stopped coming. After a while, she started saying hello to the neighbours and tending the garden. She smiled at the sparrows and fussed the cat from down the road.

Man used his key to let himself into the house. Crow flew down to watch him through the window. He went into the kitchen and looked around at the country flowers curtains and the polka-dotted kettle. She had made it her home. Man sat for hours at the table where she sat to eat her dinner, where she makes her greetings cards and where she prepares her vegetable seeds.

At two, Man got up, took a knife from next to the sink and went upstairs. Crow flew up to the bedroom window, but Man did not go in there. Crow could see her car before he could hear it. The windows were closed, it was too cold for them to be open, and it muffled the sound of her radio to a dull thumping. She parked up in front of the house and looked up at the crow. Crow looked back at her, but did not meet her gaze. It was too

soon for that. Smiling at Crow, she let herself into the house.

Crow returned to the kitchen window. He watched as she filled the kettle and set it to boil, opened a letter and lay the contents of the envelope on the little table. She made her coffee and sat down to read her letter.

She laughed out loud at the end.

‘Thanks Mum,’ she said.

She folded the letter and returned it to the envelope. She put the envelope into the drawer that she kept for such correspondence. It was almost overflowing with similar envelopes, similar letters.

‘Right. Bath then tea,’ she said and went upstairs.

At five, she returned to the kitchen. She was in her lilac fluffy dressing gown and rabbit slippers. Her hair was wet and tied up in a bun at the top of her head. She filled a pot with water and put it on the stove, she lit the gas hob with a long nosed lighter. She never ate much in the evening, nor in the morning. Perhaps she ate well when she was out. Crow had never observed her away from the house.

She sat down to her tea and stared out of the window as she ate. Crow wondered what she was thinking. He pretended to watch the street. He didn’t want to make eye contact with her yet. She washed and tidied up, then returned to the table with her card making things. Crow had often seen her make cards on a day her mother had written to her. Today, her heart was not in it, and at seven thirty, she packed away her craft and went upstairs.

Crow watched her get into bed. Woman curled up into a ball leaving one side of the bed empty and untouched. Even when she was completely restless she kept to her side of the bed.

Minutes later, she was asleep, snoring softly. Crow could barely hear the snuffles from his side of the window. Man came into the room. Crow could see his chest moving as he breathed slowly in and out. He was calm, with knife in hand. It glinted in the moonlight. He hung his head. She shifted in her sleep, rolling onto her back. Man lifted the knife.

He shook his head and left the room, arm going lax.

Crow was confused. He had been waiting for it all day. He had watched her for weeks, months. Now, at the exact time she was expected, the man had walked away.

Crow flew down to the kitchen window and landed on the ledge just as Man came through the door. The man put the knife back in the knife rack and then sat down at the kitchen table. He stared straight ahead, his hands resting in his lap. Crow could see glistening stripes on his face where his

tears had run. No one had ever changed their mind before and he wasn’t sure what he should do next, nor what would happen. A soul had to be collected.

Man stood up, put the chair back under the table and rested his hands on the back of it for a moment. In a daze, he drifted out of the kitchen, out of the front door and out of the front gate. Crow watched him fade into the icy night.

The front door was open. Crow hopped down and stuck his head in the gap. He saw her coat on the banister, her shoes under the telephone table. He hopped inside the door, unsure what he was doing.

He could hear the tick of the kitchen clock above the hob and the drip of the faulty tap on the bath. He could hear the thud of the heartbeat coming from Woman in the bed upstairs.

The kitchen door was still ajar. He flew low and soundlessly into the kitchen and landed on the mantle above the hob. Crow scanned the room, refusing to believe that he had waited all this time for nothing. He saw the knife, but it would be too heavy to carry. There were various other instruments hung on the walls and hidden in the drawers, but there was nothing that the crow could use. He saw some matches, but decided that they were too unwieldy for his talons. Then he spotted something more useful. The simple long nosed lighter for the gas hob.

He had to do this properly. It would undermine the purpose of death, of collecting souls, if he were caught. He struggled with the knobs, but finally managed to turn on the gas on all four hobs.

Crow flew upstairs with the lighter clasped in his claws. Once in the bedroom, he flew around picking up bits of material with his beak and piling it up near the door. Woman slept on.

Once he had a good pile, he took the lighter to it. He held the long neck in place with one claw while pulling the trigger with the other. On his fourth attempt, he managed to ignite a small cotton and elastic garment.

On his fifth attempt, he managed to create flames. He left the lighter where it was and flew from the room. She was stirring; he could hear her moans and grumbles as he shot down the stairs and out of the front door. He had done it. He would collect her.

Her screams echoed along the street. No one could help her; she was trapped in the bedroom. It did not take long before the leaking gas caught alight and then the whole house exploded in a ball of blue and orange. Her screams stopped then.

Crow flew back to the house once the fire had been doused. The crow flew through the broken window and started pecking at the blackened remains.

If she had been a whole body, he would’ve pecked out her eyes. He would have stared into the empty sockets and cocked his head to the side to listen for the soul’s arrival. What little was left of the charred head lifted. Now he could look at her and she at him. Now they could see eye to eye. There was a lone sigh, and he flew to the sky, her shadow following him.

Undertow Bill Buloch I used to regard myself as bright. Pretty much in control and going somewhere. Albeit at a discreet pace, not the headlong rush of my contemporaries. They seemed determined to be CEO of their own start-up

by Christmas. No, I always thought I had it by the balls and things were ticking over nicely.

Within the space of a week, my comfortable existence fractured and split like an iceberg. Carving into three painful chunks, each sliding miserably away into the heaving depths. My job, my relationship and my health had conspired against me and decided to go their separate ways.

It had all began when I woke up, face down on the rug. My first impression was a musty smell in my nostrils and as I opened my eyes, I took in an expanse of green tufted nylon. I sat up, the familiar surroundings of my flat ushered in to support me. I had no idea at all as to why I was on the floor. I rubbed my eyes and grit from the rug made its way into the left socket. Squeezing my eyelid shut, I rinsed it with tears, rubbing vigorously until a hazy image of the living room swam back into focus. Carefully, I wiped away the wetness and made to stand up. My head whirled for a second and I tottered, catching myself with a hand on the wall. Taking a deep breath, I felt a little better and reflexively glanced at my watch. It was a little after half past ten.

For a moment I struggled to recall what day it was, then with a sudden lurch of realisation, remembered it was Monday and I was meeting Penny at ten. As if on cue, the phone rang.

“Hello?” I clasped the receiver to my ear. For the first time noticing that I was fully dressed in my business suit. Although it was crumpled slightly from my having lain on the floor. The earpiece crackled.

“Mark? Mark where the hell are you?” The voice sounded remote and distant, but clear as if the speaker was standing behind me.

“Um, sorry. I’m… erm at home.” I quickly began to piece together the situation, as my faculties returned. Penelope was breathing heavily down the phone, telegraphing her dismay in snorts of derision as she prepared her next tirade.

“At home? You’re supposed to have been here half an hour ago to go over the details. I’m not taking the rap for you again! What the hell’s

wrong with you Mark?”

What the hell was wrong with me? That was a good question. I felt odd, slightly lightheaded and vague.

“I’m sorry Penny, I…” I was about to attempt an explanation when the line went dead. The carrier tone sang in my ear and I gently dropped the handset. Next to the table was a small bucket chair, I flopped into it.

Sitting in the quietness, the familiarity of my surroundings began to fold in. The woolly vacancy which seemed to have oppressed me disappeared. I had got up that morning, showered, dressed and eaten, ready to head off to work and finalise the contract with my partner and sometime lover, Penny.

I recalled the feel of the hot water on my skin and the sharp lemon tang of the shampoo. I could still feel the rough material of the clothes in my wardrobe as I selected a clean shirt and put out my suit. The taint of cologne still lingered on the tips of my fingers as I had dabbed some on my jaw, but beyond that, beyond finalising my look in the mirror, there was nothing.

I realised that I must have been out for at least two hours. I felt a chill run up my spine and looked around the flat. My car keys and mobile sat on the edge of the table, where I must have placed them in preparation to leave. I picked up the mobile and switched it on. As the screen swirled, I felt a numb ache develop at the back of my neck. I rubbed at it and the pain subsided. The mobile jerked in my hand, silently throbbing with electronic glee, as the screen flashed up three messages and a number of texts.

I sighed heavily and began the tedious business of working my way through them.

That had been three weeks ago and since then; things had changed so radically, so completely, I kind of wished I was back on the rug unconscious. The first part of the triple whammy had occurred when Penny had appeared later in the day. She’d thanked me for losing the biggest contract the company had ever known, and dropping her royally in the thick of it. As a result of my absence, the client had withdrawn and taken a number of other potential customers with him.

Penny had been hauled over the coals by her superior and I had been placed on temporary suspension until an inquiry was held to find out what had happened. The inquiry included a full health report which led to my being sent for a cat scan and full workout at a private clinic, at the companies expense. Within a matter of days it was decided that I had a debilitating neurological condition. I was dismissed from the company

forthwith, with a cursory thank you letter. Mainly detailing how the company had not been made aware of my apparently long standing medical issue, and that they would not be liable to offer any kind of financial redress. In short, I was sacked for not disclosing that I suffered from a rare form of epilepsy, which would not allow me to perform my duties and put the company in a potentially risky position, should I fall down on the job.

Literally.

Possibly the worst news I received came from Penny, as apparently, this wasn’t the first time it had happened.

“I’m sorry Mark, I realise this must seem really unfair” She had called me after I left the clinic that day, the relief thinly disguised in her voice. We had enjoyed a torrid affair in and out of office hours, but apparently I had let her down more than once.

“I know you can’t help it, but it’s for your own good. You need a less stressful or demanding job. Hopefully, with medication, you’ll be able to manage things better” Her tone was loaded with unspoken detail and I knew now that she felt she was dodging a bullet. With hindsight I could remember at least one occasion when she had been left supporting my unconscious body as I had passed out. At the time we had put it down to my fondness for straight vodka, but now I realised that it was much more serious.

“Goodbye Mark, and good luck” and with those brief words she quickly dropped out of my life, along with a promising career and any hope of normalcy.

Consequently, I ended up here, propping up a bar, nursing large vodka. The past few days had shown me how quickly word can spread around professional channels. All my attempts to call in favours or generate a little working capital through my contacts had failed utterly. With an almost universal finality, I had been politely declined or dismissed or generally turned away. I had a little put by, but any chance of continuing my chosen career had evaporated.

I invariably got drunk. I had been prescribed some little pink pills for my ‘condition’ but so far I had been unable to bring myself to take them.

Oddly enough, I hadn’t experience a ‘vacancy’, as the doctor had referred to it, since that fateful day I had lost the Harringham contract. I was beginning to wonder whether it was actually just an aberration, a blip and that I had actually just tripped on the rug or something. The previous episodes that Penny had referred to could have been alcoholic excess, we had been known to party hard.

I looked at my vodka and the flashing lights from the dance floor at the far

end of the narrow bar caught on the softening edges of the ice cube, mixing colours into the clear fluid. I took a sip and gazed sidelong towards the dancers. At this time of the evening, there were only one or two people braving the music, in fact the bar was almost half empty. A party of middle aged women occupied a table near the dance floor. Every now and then, they would totter onto the floor, dancing provocatively and trying to catch the eyes of a group of guys at the end of the bar.

Seeing them enjoying themselves, careless and happy, I felt even sorrier for myself and picked disconsolately at a bowl of peanuts. I drop one into my drink, trying to anticipate whether it would float or sink as it fell. It dropped straight to the bottom of the glass and lay there, collecting bubbles.

“Christ” I muttered and wandered off to the gents. Letting myself into the cubicle, I carefully undid my belt and arranged my trousers so they didn’t touch the slightly damp looking tiles as I sat down. My forehead ached and I realised I was leaning against the cubicle wall, perched awkwardly on the toilet seat. I sat up, rubbing my head. I began to hyperventilate. I must have passed out again. I stood up, adjusting myself and flushing the toilet.

Outside, I made my way back to my seat at the bar, looking for my drink. The barman appeared and looked at me blankly.

“Large vodka, please” The party of girls and the group of men had left, there were different people in the bar now and as I checked my watch, I saw at least half an hour had gone by. The barman had clearly assumed I had left and taken my glass. He presented me with a fresh drink and took the tenner I thrust at him without comment. A couple standing a few feet away along the bar turned and regarded me briefly, before taking a table and wrapping themselves up in each other. My change appeared and the barman wandered off to attend to a new group of patrons.

I flipped a pair of wilted ice cubes into the glass and swirled the mix gently. Perhaps I should take the medication after all? Not a great idea on top of drink. Maybe tomorrow, a fresh start. I took a hefty mouthful and the vodka burned my tongue, sliding quickly down my throat, catching the sides and making me cough. What would have happened if I had passed out on the street? Crossing a road? At the wheel of a car?

For the first time in my life I felt helpless and my hands shook slightly. I loosened the neck of my shirt, breathing deeply. In the mirror behind the bar, I caught sight of my reflection, a pallid, frightened visage. I slumped inwardly and debated my next move. It was a little before eleven, so I

so I considered heading back home, to a safe bed and hopefully, a brighter day tomorrow. But the prospect of the cold empty flat just reminded me even more of my last episode and I shuddered at the thought. Maybe another couple of drinks to drown my sorrows take the edge off the anxiety and then a cab home and fall into bed.

I missed Penny, she hadn’t spoken to me at all and refused to acknowledge my calls or text since that day. She was more than just a lover, she had been a confidante and a partner in crime. Probably the closest thing I had to a friend. But now all that was behind me. I felt another wave of selfpity mounting and swallowed back the vodka, the ice tapping against my teeth as I drained the glass. The barman appeared again, seeing my demonstrative display and I ordered another double. Might not be able to drink again on the meds, I thought, so I’ll go out with a bang.

The liquor must have made its way into my bloodstream by then, because I began to see the funny side. At least, that’s how it seemed. By the time my glass had been refilled, a lopsided smile was creeping across my face and comforting warmth spread across my chest.

“Fuck it” I muttered and helped myself to the peanuts. In the mirror, I saw a different, slightly less anxious face and composed myself accordingly.

“I won’t let this beat me”.

I arranged my smile in the reflection and chewed quietly on the peanuts, taking in the atmosphere around me. The bar had filled up a little now and the low susurration of chatter flowed between the pauses in the music. The familiar tones of the Police, ‘Every Breath You Take’ drifted along the bar and my mood brightened considerably. I began to tap out the rhythm on the bar.

“Oh I love this song” I turned, a little too quickly to my left, and found I was looking into the clearest green eyes I’d ever seen. They were twinkling under a fringe of almost silver hair, surrounded by smooth ivory skin. The long sensuous mouth moved and I felt rather than heard a liquid velvety voice: “Every breath you take...”

For a moment, I was taken aback. Both by the fact that I clearly hadn’t even noticed the young lady approach so closely, but also by her striking looks. I felt a vague panic and wondered whether I had passed out and missed something.

“Yes, yes, it’s a classic” I stammered. She smiled even more broadly and leaned on the bar, perilously close.

“Do you mind if I join you?” She trilled and drew a stool close to mine.

Perching effortlessly on it, her long legs curled around its step like lianas.

“No, not at all, it’s a pleasure – can I get you a drink?”

I felt a little more at ease now, as she had clearly only just arrived. In the face of such stunning company, my troubles began to dissolve. I waved at the barman and looked to my guest for her order.

“Mm – I’ll have vodka, please. Straight up” I brightened considerably and raised my glass to her in appreciation. Again the flawless smile. My confidence returned and I leaned a little closer, to introduce myself.

“Mark - What brings a nice girl like you to a place like this?”

It was corny, but I tried to make it sound as theatrical as possible. It seemed to work, she giggled and flicked back a strand of almost translucent hair from her face.

“Oh, it’s been a long day; I just thought I’d unwind.” She took her drink and toasted me. Our glasses chinked loudly.

“Slainte” she said. “Seffy” “Seffy?” I repeated, slightly confused. She took a delicate sip of the drink and set it down on the bar, next to mine. Her fingernails were long and beautifully almond shaped the colour of pale jade.

“Yep, Seffy. It’s short for Persephone” Her head danced from side to side as she sounded out the syllables.

“My father loved the classics” She regarded me as she tapped the side of her glass with the long nails.

“Beautiful.” I said, rather too wistfully.

To be honest, she could have told me her name was George by this time and I wouldn’t have cared. She was a vision, her dress was long and seemed to be composed of tiny silver scales. Each glinting in the reflections from the harsher bar lighting, she had a sheer chiffon lime shawl or scarf draped across her bare shoulders.

“Why thank you Mark, you’re very kind!”

She giggled again, an effortless laugh, and reached for her drink. As she moved, her dress sent sparkles flashing across the woodwork. Several men and one or two women in the vicinity turned and looked at her.

“I was supposed to be heading off to a party, with some girlfriends” she began, taking another sip.

“But, you know girls. There was a disagreement and we split up. They went their way and I found myself in here. It looked like a nice quiet place” Her head cocked slightly to one side as she said it and before I realised what I was saying, I blurted:

“Well lucky me!”

I instantly felt like a complete idiot, the vodka was clearly making me a little too voluble and over compensatory. But she didn’t seem to mind.

“Ha, ha. You wouldn’t say that if you knew what I was really like!”

With a swift gesture, she finished her drink and before I could stop her, had produced a note from a glittering purse and was ordering two more drinks.

“No, please, let me...” But she waved my money away with a deft gesture.

“Nonsense, I invited myself over, it’s my round!”

Her smile won me over again and despite her comment about what she was really like, I began to wonder whether my luck had indeed changed. She was the most entrancing woman I had ever met.

For the next hour, we chatted, we laughed and we drank. She was excellent company, no sharp edges or embarrassing foibles and despite matching me drink for drink, she certainly wasn’t drunk. Conversation flowed easily and all my troubles were forgotten as I looked into her scintillating green eyes. She laughed easily and frequently and reached out to touch my arm or my knee as she talked, speaking as much with her hands and eyes as with her resonant, tremulous voice.

After drinking for some time, I began to feel the need to return to the gents. I was both terrified that she would not be there on my return, and that I might have a repeat episode and lapse into unconsciousness. Just then, she hopped daintily off her stool and announced that she was going to powder her nose. She slipped away behind me and I decided to take a chance while she was away.

Washing my hands later, I checked my look in the mirror and took a deep breath before returning to my seat. As I left the small corridor at the rear, I had a clear view and could see her waiting at the bar. I quickly made my way back and returned to my seat.

“Aha, I was starting to think you had abandoned me.” She laughed and drained her glass. Not bloody likely. I thought.

“Another?” I asked, holding up my empty glass. She looked at me sidelong, pursing her lips.

“No. No, thank you. I think I would like some fresh air” She stood up and I saw how tall she was, she was at least six foot. I stood up and our eyes met. She slipped an arm through mine and I felt myself being manoeuvred to the doorway. The barman smiled broadly as he watched us go.

Outside, the fresh air hit us with a warm, damp breeze.

“Abash, there’s rain coming.” I said. I could feel the slight edge on the wind, even though it was still a very humid July evening. “Maybe thunder?”

“Oh I hope so, I adore a good storm!”

She gripped my arm tightly and turned quickly to face me. Before I knew what was happening, we kissed, long and passionately. I felt her tongue slip and twirl past mine like an eel, her strong arms around me. I responded automatically and I felt her back arch in pleasure. She pulled away, holding my gaze, I drew her close.

“Call a cab” She whispered and pulled away.

Her silvery hair almost glowing in the low light. In the distance, lightning leaped across the horizon, illuminating dark clouds from within. I wasted no time hailing a cab and as it pulled up, she ran over and instructed the driver, towing me along behind her with her long arms.

Inside, she sat primly on the leather seat as the hackney roared along the busy streets. She clasped my hand, but kept her attention squarely on the direction we were driving in. My head felt light and I wondered vaguely if I was heading for another vacancy. But my heart pounded with excitement and I concentrated fully on each passing second. Before long, I was unsure where we were, the cab moved through the suburbs and entered a region with tree lined avenues and tall, shaded Georgian houses. Abruptly, the driver hauled on the wheel and stopped outside a row of high terraced houses. He leaned back across his seat, grinning.

“How’s that?” he said.

Seffy quickly pushed a note at him and as the doors unlocked, darted out without waiting for change. I closed the door and the hackney roared off again. I could feel the air was distinctly chillier now, rain was close and a long grumbling roll of thunder reached out over the tops of the tall houses.

“Mark!”

She was stood at the top of a short flight of steps, near a large varnished door, key in hand.

“Come, quick!”

I could hear the excitement and smile in her voice, but her face was shrouded in the dark porch. I took the steps two at a time and she led me inside. The door closed with a satisfying thud and I found myself in a long hallway, lit by a small lamp. There was a peculiar odour in the air, a dampness which was not altogether pleasant. Before I could take it in, she swept back along the hall and took my hand, leading me into a large parlour

or sitting room, furnished in a period style. I looked around, admiring the décor and she drew off the scarf from her shoulders, letting it drop airily onto a huge leather chaise -lounge.

“What a beautiful house” I said rather redundantly and she smiled.

“Help yourself to a drink. I’ll get changed. Take off your jacket.”

She almost whispered this last word and gestured to a fully laden drinks cabinet behind her as she slipped out, closing the heavy wooden door behind her. I removed my jacket and laid it on the sofa near her scarf.

Despite the change in the weather outside, I was warm and slightly uncomfortable. The house felt cloistered and humid and I loosened my collar slightly too.

Selecting two glasses, I checked the bottles in the cabinet, but could find no vodka. Instead I elected for a large scotch and as it was Seffys’ house, drew one for her too, assuming she might partake.

The fumes from the whisky rose from the glass, mingling in the air with a peaty glow. I hefted the glass and took a long draught. It was evidently a fine label; as it disappeared across my tongue and I felt its warmth spread across my chest so quickly, I looked down to see if I had actually spilled any.

Just then, the door slid slowly open and if I had thought that Persephone had looked attractive before, as she appeared in the room wearing an almost transparent robe, I almost passed out again.

“I’ve poured you a scotch...”

I began, but she moved so swiftly, so fluidly silent, that she had crossed the room and was kissing me before I had barely mouthed the words. Her long sensuous hands circled my head and neck and as we kissed, her tongue darted about my lips and mouth, tasting the whisky.

“Mm – the only way to drink scotch” and she took her own glass, drew off a mouthful and planted her lips fully on mine once more. The liquor flowed from her mouth into mine, with the enthusiastic assistance of her lithe tongue. My hands found their way through folds of impossibly thin material and sought her waist. Her skin was almost clammy, colder than I would have guessed from her burning kisses. As I suspected, she was naked beneath the robe and pressed her muscular body toward me.

My head was whirling again and I felt her swift hands worrying the buttons of my shirt. Very shortly it was stripped away and together, we took care of my trousers and shorts, her mouth never leaving mine. I stood naked before her and the folds of her robe seemed to cleave to me with static, weaving like smoke about us both. Her chest heaved as she breathed deeply

through her nose like a swimmer, her erect nipples pressing into my chest.

We moved in a choreographed swoon across the room and collapsed onto the creaking sofa, her lips tracing a path down my neck, to kiss my chest and shoulders. Her hands were everywhere, caressing, stroking, kneading and I groaned in pleasure. I tried to return the favour, but found that although I could hold her, I couldn’t seem to penetrate the folds of her robe, it seemed to shift under my hands, flowing like water. She kissed me passionately and longingly, murmuring under her breath. I ached for her, but despite her intimacy, she did not respond.

The combination of vodka and whisky combined made my vision swim and I seemed to lose all volition. In a deep corner of my mind the thought occurred that I might faint away at this most exciting and crucial moment and I smiled. Her eyes opened as she felt my lips move beneath hers and she beamed down at me, her perfect teeth luminescent. Wan light reached in through the tall bay windows and peal of thunder broke overhead. Heavy rain began to slap in waves at the glass, lightning leaping across the sky in concert, limning her against the blue light; with hair a glowing halo and the almost intangible robe billowing in folds.

Suddenly, she leapt onto the floor, grasping my hand. “Come!�

I struggled to stand, between her ministrations and the liquor I felt weak and languid. She turned and drew me towards the door, pulling it open. A waft of cold damp air met us and I felt my skin bristle with goosebumps. There was a tang in the air, a whiff of ozone and as in response, another bolt of lightning lit up the long hallway. A second door led off the hall opposite the stairs and we moved towards it. As we stood outside, she leaned forward and kissed me delicate and soft, but at the same time, curled her long fingers around my wrist, urgent and firm. I almost cried out with a combination of pleasure and shock, her hand was cold, almost wet, but she gripped me tightly and led me on.

As the door creaked open, the room was dark, but my nose told me what was inside. Water. Salt water. The unmistakable smell of the sea.

Instinctively I hesitated at the threshold, but she moved into the room, drawing me on and I felt myself pulled inside. But instead of moving into the room, across a carpeted floor or parquet tile, she fell backwards and I fell with her, below where I knew the floor should be, as the sky beyond a high window lit up with electric blue light, long enough for me to see empty walls and moving, gentle waves enclosing us.

THANK YOU FOR READING AND GOODNIGHT