The Day Tony Got His Conk Box Cut Off

There were only five channels then, on terrestrial T.V, and most people couldn’t afford cable. The only satellite dish in the whole of the East End belonged to Tam Kaminsky who lived in the gable house on Garvel Road and he was renowned for being an especially unrelenting flash fuck. His wife ran away on Christmas Eve with a man who kept dovecotes and raced pigeons while Tam was out getting a designer haircut. I was seven in nineteen-ninety-seven when Tony Blair was elected Prime Minister of Great Britain and I was eight when he was beheaded on Channel Five by The Golden Path. We watched it live: my mother, my father, my brother and me. But it wasn’t just us. Everyone saw it. It was a shock at first. We were sitting with our dinner around the box watching the news when the picture went all static and spectral for a minute. It was like a strobe light malfunctioning until eventually it all levelled out and it was just Tony Blair with a jester’s hat on tied to a fucking barrel. I must admit, initially it was a welcome break from the habitual practised misery shovelled down our throats by the news anchor-Don McKray. ‘HII’MDONMCKRAYANDIN TODAY'SNEWS,MISERY’. My da said something about oh look at him out acting like a clown trying to get the disillusioned nihilists back voting again. If anything is worth anything it’s the sound of your own laughter. My ma said don’t be so daft, he's only just got in last year and they nihilists don’t care about the telly, it’s probably the revisionistshe’s trying to get on board. My brother said, he’s just trying to deflect cos he’s going to war in the Middle East –welcome to the Colosseum. I didn’t say anything. I had put my fork on my plate and was writing everything down. Then this guy walks in from screen left – a definite baddie of course. He pulls out this massive fucking sword and that’s when things got a bit sweaty in the old perineum for baby faced Tony. That’s when things got really real. Tony shat his pants. My maz jaw hit the nylon carpet and a whole chicken dipper fell out. Is this real? She guffawed or croaked or whispered. As real as that chicken dipper lying on the floor, ma da said. On reflection, the chicken dipper on the floor was real but the chicken in the chicken dipper was fifty-percent pork mix.

the Golden Path’s hand expanded across Europe surface modifications

MarcRooney

Topography

Sample the pierogi sur the Slovak ridge

Above your tongue how many lies to pretend, friend?

In a hideaway brasserie we heard Parisian whispers

Where is your charisma today forever on the mend friend?

In the mouth of the Amalfi coast pulling terracotta teeth

Ye on the Tyrrhenian Sea waiting for the knee to bend friend

Pendle Hill. The gale snaps through the witch’s trail

A proverbial tail between your head-for-the-hill’s legs, descend friend

Glasgow is a melting pot one part sun god without a pot to piss in One part heart landlocked, an inner chamber blend friend

Ahead of steam in a Newcastle cellar thinner than vapour

We all paid 5 pounds to watch you have a nervous breakdown, crescendo friendo

Marc with a soft C. In the dark say softly Cue the end, friend.

MarcRooney

Repetition is hell

Nora was scared of spiders. Nora always had been. It started when she was –very– young. When Nora awoke to find a single spider in her room, it was as though all of the spiders in the world had crawled into her bed. Despite not having much on her-hea–d, every - hair Nora– had on her arm perked up like a stray cat. She was distraught. Of course, we-coul–dn’t–kill–the– spiders either. She no like that. Nora already knew Death. She banged on-the-office–door and we took her into our room. She like. Stopcoddlingher.

Nora was scared of spiders. Even at the zoo the glass cages weren’t enough. We’d hoped that Nora would learn they weren’t that bad. We ended up cleaning her bed sheets for the rest of the week. I read that fear is inherent, butNora was petrified of spiders. I had a fear of clowns as a kid because I thought one lived–in-t–he-f or -est near my house. I used to imagine that he had a little tent that his oversized b–ody and ch ainsaw would emerge from. At leastherfearsarereal.His painted-leather face–an–d-spooky smile made me run home to my mummy. I learned to take the long way–round when–I–was coming home. I’mtakingthetent.

Nora was scared of spiders. Nora had been left alone for the day while I had errands to run. Nora was nervous to be left alone. -Nora had never been left alone before. She was watching TV-–and the walls. Alwa–ys–an–e-y-e on the walls. I hadn’t planned to be out for long. Nora knew my office was off lim–its. H ow–-man–ytimesdoesshehavetobetold?When I came home to find her curled up on -my seat, with -snotty tissues and a hurted tummy. It broke my heart. Rulesarerules.I enj oyed her c ompany for the next few months.

Nora was scared of sp iders. When she came back from her weekend visits, I used to make her bedroom up nicely–.W–henever Nora would come home, she would ask me to look for any spiders in her room. Having already looked, I looked again. After a short while of this, Nora began to join in and helped me look for the spiders. Ifeelleftout.She would use her magnifying glass like a tiny detective. She no like lookin under da bed. Dad looks under da bed.

Nora was scared of spiders. She liked her new room. It was on a high floor, and was incredibly sterile. There were no eight armed bandits to contend with in this room. WellI’mherenow,thathastocountforsomething.

“Why it do the beep dad?” she would ask.

I told her it was because it meant things were okay. She got used to the beep. When I took her home, her room wasn’t made up. We’rebothtired,it’sokay. We had been gone for a long time, but I didn’t think we’d ever have to leave again. I-told her she’d been so strong, and that we had won. This would be her room for as long as she liked. She felt lonely. She found a ball of dust in the corner, which made her cry. She thought it was a spid er nest. I disposed of it, and cleaned her room four times. It didn’t matter. Shedoesn’twa ntto sleepalone.She wanted to stay with the other kids again, and she said she missed da be-epin.

“Daddy can you play the beepin,” she whispered. Of course I obliged.

“I love you daddy. Will mummy ever come home?” she said before falling asleep.

I didn’t sleep for the next month.

Nora was scared of spiders. But she wasn’t scared of dying. She didn’t understand what was happening to her. Whatishappeningtoher?Why?Whyus?I didn’t know why we had to suffer. I couldn’t understand why God had done this to her. In the following weeks someone said to me

“God wanted his angel back.” The only reply we could think of was “Sodowe.”

PeterCameron

AHHHHHH MY BRAIN HURTS!

Focus

Focus

Fauxkis

Fauxkiss

FolkUs

FolkUs

FeauKes

FeauKes

Fohcas

Fohcas

Foucaus

Foucaus

Fuckus

Fuckus

Phockus

Phockus

Hocus

Focus

FwoahKys

Pocus

VoGus

VoGus

VogueKys

VogueKys

FoughCask

FoughCask

Locust

Locust

Repeat that

My Ladybird

Ruby Bryant

There is no real time or place I can prescribe to this memory other than what I have patched together, for this is my first memory. I presume myself to be two or three years old; a tiny toddler with golden ringlets bouncing everywhere and eyes far too big for my face. I am in Wales (my mother tells me) staying in a retreat owned by the Metropolitan Police to support their officers. We were sent here for respite after my Uncle’s cancer diagnosis. I’m here because I’m currently the closest thing my Aunt and Uncle have to a child. My mum, dad, uncle, aunt, and grandparents are with me. My brother may or may not have been there as well, though if he was he was far too young to be anywhere but in someone's arms.

The sun is shining, and a lazy heat has settled for the afternoon. I am playing alone on the grass. It’s tall and wild, littered with dandelion seeds and buttercups. Towering over the garden is a colony of scots pine trees swathed with pear-coloured leaves. It has been so hot that the grass is scorched to sage green and sways stiffly in the fleeting breeze. A dusty gravel path takes me by the wildflower beds filled with purple and yellow blooms. The trail dips up and down along the uneven garden, my small buckled shoes kicking up the dirt behind me. It becomes a game; to allow the momentum of running down into the small dips to get me to the top of the next one.

I am in a white summer dress with scalloped edges and embroidered holes along the hem. I can still remember the texture. Dry, and oddly crinkly, like it had been air-dried. The sun on my shoulders feels like the heat in my consciousness. Even in that moment, I knew that I was doing something important. The sense of duty that came with the outward performance of being the lonesome golden child of the family. Like a role I knew I needed to perform, but I didn’t know for who. This strange, mature knowledge secretly urged me to misbehave. Like a call to do what other kids my age would do. This, obviously, was strange as I wasn’t an outsider to children my age, I just felt like I was missing out on misbehaviour.

I keep running up and down the small hills. Up, and down. Up, and down. Up, and on to a straight run. Toddling along, my eyes on my unpracticed feet, I spy a ladybird in my path. She looks giant to me; with her shining eyes and seven black spots on her glossy red back. Completely still and unassuming as I stare down at her. My heart races. It feels like dread and catharsis and all those other words I won’t learn until much later in life. Standonher. Something rotten inside me yearns. I have enough of a grasp of morals to know that killing is wrong, but I still urge myself to do it. It is one of the moments I am most ashamed of, which is probably why it stuck with me. For the longest time, I couldn’t understand why I would do it, other than some profound lack of object permanence. Now, I know it was the start of a lengthy battle with intrusive thoughts, and this was just the first time they won. It would be okay, wouldn’t it, if I had been running and didn’t see her and stepped on her by accident? It wouldbeanaccident, I told myself. Theycan’tseeme. Her bright red form stands out starkly from the brightening path in the blinding sun.

I did stand on her. With my right foot. It felt like nothing. To kill her did not feel like anything when I put my foot down. Though I do not think it would have been any better if I could have felt the crunch of her shell.

Stepping back, I peer over the toe of my shoes, heart in my mouth. A tiny orange smear clumps to the dust and dirt. The same orange as a clementine, or a dried peach. All the guilt hits me as I rehearse how it was an accident. I had been running and I didn’t see her. It feels like a swelling in my neck.

Standing straight, with my head held high, I look away and hope for it to disappear. How strange for a thing that felt like nothing to feel like everything. I run off again, back to the adults and away from the regret chasing me. It was an accident. I wasn’t the sort of toddler to be harsh and hurtful and brutish like that.

It still sticks with me; even now I see that ladybird crushed under my foot. It is also strange how that of all things, this is the earliest memory I have. There must be some irony, beyond my grasp, about how taking a life makes me aware of my own. It feels like an irony that I do not have the perspective to see from within myself. This ordeal brought with it that beautifully gut-wrenching twist of my stomach that haunts everything I have done since. Every moment of my childhood that ensured disaster and destruction on my part produced that same sickly feeling that still clings to me now. The feeling is so synonymous with my upbringing that my own mortal dread is nostalgic.

(memoir)

Warning! Danger! Alien spacecraft approaching! Stacey Beaver

“Seriously, dude, a chicken truck”.

Not exactly W.H. Auden’s FuneralBluesor anything close to an expected eulogy, and yet this is somehow perfect. Ruth Ozeki’s 2022 Women’s Fiction Prize winning novel, TheBookofFormandEmptiness, skirts the edges of what is expected in a dazzling display of fourth-wall-breaking, genre-defying writing Ozeki’s novel is unafraid to stare huge issues, and more, in the face. She tackles teenagers coming of age, natural disasters, capitalism and consumerism, and mental health with grief, and manages to do all of this with a level of seriousness and humour that allows the reader to truly understand and connect with the characters.

We are introduced by ‘The Book’ to the fourteen-year-old Benny Oh, who, following the tragic loss of his father, begins to hear the ‘voices’ of everyday objects gathering around him. His mother, Annabelle, suffering her own grief, has found comfort in hoarding, and in a different way the objects she collects also ‘speak’ to her. Facing the challenges of being a newly widowed, single mum, and fighting for her job as a news archivist, Annabelle has allowed their home to become infested by accumulating newspapers, leaving herself and Benny overwhelmed by the barrage of news and debris which builds physical walls between them while they simultaneously struggle with emotional barriers. Through her sometimes very poignant and yet still playful book, Ozeki does occasionally overcomplicate her narrative with Walter Benjamin quotes and ‘The Book’ telling the tale of a multitude of characters and their interactions, often interjected by Benny It can be difficult to keep up with the story and its action. However, if you are willing to put in the time and concentration, the reward is the enjoyment of a surprisingly beautiful dive into grief and its complexities, with the Chair of the Women’s Prize panel describing it as “a complete joy”. The powerful yet strained relationship between a mother and her son is playfully and unabashedly told here in all its truth with everything expected of a normal day-to-day life of forgetting milk, having an untidy kitchen, and trying to impress a teen who thinks his mum is the most uncool person in the world, despite rocking her beloved sea turtle jumper.

This is entwined with the added pressure of the surrounding trauma, which mentally, metaphorically, and literally provides a real sense of the tension felt by the pair and it is beautifully articulated. Through the incapacity of Annabelle and Benny to appreciate each other’s profound loss while battling with their mental health, Ozeki manages to highlight the love and caring intentions of the pair, made clear by the end and the ‘tidy up’ saying: “This is the terminus of your mother’s dreams and all her good intentions, and you are standing on top of it”.

The novel is very personal to Ozeki, a practicing Buddhist monk, and was inspired by a Zen parable, and it took eight years to write – with its roots stretching back to the death of her own father in 1998. Following her loss, Ozeki would hear him while doing chores explaining she would be “folding laundry or whatever, and would hear him clear his throat and then he would say my name. I would turn around and there was nobody there.” Following this, on clearing out her parent’s loft, Ozeki found hidden objects, gifts, an empty box labelled “Empty Box”, and polished pebbles from her grandfather’s time in an internment camp in New Mexico. Ozeki discussed the frustration she felt at knowing these objects had stories but “didn’t know what the stories were”, which she found upsetting.

Wondering if everything has a story to tell, Ozeki delved into her fourth novel, exploring “voice hearing on a spectrum”. Many people have an internal monologue, some hear it as a voice running through life’s activities in the background and find it useful, while some can find it troublesome with intrusive thoughts and the sarcastic ‘you’re not good enough’ voice we all know and hate, and if lucky learn to love to hate.

But what happens when the internal monologue is externalised? Or more disturbingly what happens when the voice leads you to a group of boys who beat you for being different, or to a pair of scissors, which, in this case, tells Benny to stab himself. In this woeful situation, Benny is wrongly diagnosed with a schizoaffective disorder when he is not heard by his psychiatrist. In doing this Ozeki asks “Why is it that some voices are pathologised, some are normal, and some are lionised?”

Equally, I have to ask, why are some ignored? Doesn’t everyone talk or shout at a computer that has stopped working or mutter expletives through our teeth at a pen with no ink while furiously scribbling around a page? Are we not all, therefore, talking to objects in a perfectly acceptable way in everyday life?

Through Ozeki’s character construction, we are permitted to explore just this and see how fine the line is between sanity and insanity and all the subtleties in-between. Indeed, grief is a powerful emotion which provokes multiple reactions in people. Ozeki herself turned to Buddhism after losing her parents and realising she was “kind of falling apart” stating “Sickness, old age and death, woke the Buddha up”.

Families fight over objects of sentimental significance or even Tupperware. This can be because of the link felt to the person who is gone or wanting part of them around and whether random or not, the feeling of belonging to something larger can offer real comfort in those difficult moments. Ozeki too suffered from mental health issues in her youth, spending some time in a psychiatric facility Understanding and portraying that everything is funny and sad, full of love and harm, caring and damaging, and we are all just walking a fine line between our individual normality which this book tells is just fine. So, go. Be your unapologetic self and read, read lots, but start with The BookofFormandEmptiness!

(Bookreview)

Ripe

Patrycja Lojas

A pool of blood in between my scarred legs. My white satin bed sheets ruined. He will awake soon, disgusted with me. Leaving me like he always does. Before anyone finds him. Relief sweeping over my not-so-holy temple. But today is different. He doesn’t like them grown. At once ripe and impure It’s why he finds comfort in me. The treasure chest between my legs Small. Delicate. Not fully grown. I’ve still got a few minutes, five, or maybe more before his gigantic hands ruin me whole. Again. I take this time to remember my surroundings, in detail, a moment I will cherish for life. The sun is only just starting to rise. Pink sunlight is seeping in through the cracks in the blinds. Birds chirping outside of my window. Cars are wheezing past. The almost silent rustling of leaves makes me feel alive. They’re dying, for me, whilst I am being reborn. A whole new me. But for now, I stay still. A statue. Made of rock. Cold as stone. Dark as the night when he started it all.

The world is waking up. Him included. Slowly, he turns to face me. Eyes still closed. Lips slightly parted. Alcohol on his breath His hand makes its way to my waist, appreciating the familiarity of my protruding hip bone. Drawing circles with his rough hands, taking his time before continuing to explore the region south below my belly button. And then he stops. Eyes spring open. His body tenses. He pushes me away while refusing to meet my gaze and quickly steps out of bed I stare out of the window at the yellowing leaves rustling in the wind while he puts himself together I don’t want to face him. Not right now, today, or ever. But I don’t feel shame, disgust, out of control. A wildfire erupts inside of me when he closes the door behind him. Something he never did. I start crying. A smile appears on my sullen face.

Dad, you make me wish I was dead.