Dear Octopus

Becca Miles

I think I want to learn to take your shape. I wanted to ask before I did.

My limbs are lonely, my bones are iron bars, my organs trapped in this tetrapodic prison. I long to squeeze into small spaces but I don’t want to presume.

Octopus, do you guard your plasticity, or will you share it? I promise on the inside, I am just as alien as you.

Eva Hagavik

Dear Hannah, I am sorry.

No. That was not it.

Hannah,

I think about your mother a lot. She would always be tidying and cleaning in my workshop. I told her I had a system. ‘A mess is what it is,’ she would say. She insisted she hated messes. She didn’t. She loved cleaning, and without messes, there would be nothing to clean.

No. That was not it either.

Mr Watson had never been good with words. He would feel things and think things, but expressing them? It had never been a talent of his.

Annoyed at himself, he crumpled the attempt of a letter into a ball.

‘Some more paper, sir?’ asked the bartender, his voice carrying a thick French accent.

‘Umm…’ said Mr Watson.

The bartender handed him another sheet.

It was dark and gloomy inside the bar. The walls were covered with old photos of the building’s exterior and its previous owners. ‘(Now and Then There’s) A Fool Such as I’ sung by the King himself played from a jukebox in the background. There weren’t many people present that night. Mr Watson liked it that way.

To my daughter Hannah,

How is Timmy? He just turned eight, did he not? He is probably too big now for that rocking horse I made him.

Mr Watson crumpled up that piece of paper too. He then put the cap back on his pen and threw it into his satchel. His hand dragged through his thin grey hair.

‘Is everything all right, sir?’ asked the bartender.

Mr Watson rose from his stool, pulled on his coat, and started awkwardly counting his francs.

‘Yes, yes, everything is fine,’ he finally muttered. His hand trembled as it had been doing for years now – it came with age, his doctor had told him – as he placed a few coins on the counter.

He made his way outside where cold wind and dull moonlight caressed him awkwardly, as if they were strangers. He leaned against the wall on the corner and lit a cigarette, listening to the youthful noise of Lyon past sunset. Why am I still here, he wondered. Smoke made its way through the wind as he exhaled. He could almost hear his late wife’s voice whispering in his ear: Go home, Jacob.

*

To Hannah,

I am not sure if you want me to – I would not blame you if you didn’t, for it has been five years and that is far too long – but I am coming home.

It was very loud inside the train station. Mr Watson was used to this by now. No matter the country, the train stations were all quite alike. The rush of people was the same, although the languages spoken would vary. The works and systems were the same: the whistles of old steam engines; the feeling of the paper tickets between one’s fingers. This train station was no exception. Yet, everything was different.

Mr Watson walked down the platform, dodging the many shadows of people hurtling by. He looked at the ticket in his hands. It felt smooth against his rough wrinkled skin. He stared at the coach number for a second, then put it back into his pocket. His hand found an unlit cigarette to fidget with instead. His other hand was dragging a heavy old suitcase.

First stop is Paris. Then the ferry over to London. I believe I will make it to Glasgow before my letter, resulting in my arrival being a surprise. Apologies. I am aware that it may be an inconvenience.

‘En voiture!’ shouted the conductor as he walked along the steaming train.

At once, a dozen people withdrew from their families and friends on the platform and hurried to the train doors with their luggage. ‘Au revoir!’ they said.

Mr Watson reached his coach and entered. A whistle blew behind him as he lifted his luggage onto the racks and settled in an empty window seat.

The train jolted into motion. Mr Watson moved his hand into his satchel and took up his leather wallet. It was old and tattered by now, but it was still in one piece. He opened it carefully and found a photograph that had been tucked inside amongst francs, German coins, a Las Vegas die, and a folded postcard depicting the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

The photograph was full of creases; its corners had gone soft. It was black and white like most pictures. It showed a small boy, only a toddler, sitting on a rocking horse with his young mother kneeling beside him, and behind her, the boy’s grandmother. They were smiling at the camera.

It had been Mr Watson who took the photograph, and now his eyes lingered on the face of his wife. He imagined that, in another world, she was sitting in the seat next to him at this very moment, leaning her head against his shoulder, her hand in his. She would have found the French landscape soon surrounding him to be quite beautiful.

Mr Watson’s coat was soaking wet as he walked the path up to a small brick house. The lights inside were on. He could hear voices behind the kitchen window and stretched his neck to see the people, but his view was blocked by drawn curtains. Mr Watson wondered, for a second, if they had done any renovations to the kitchen as they had once talked about, and in that case, what it looked like now. Guilt suddenly crashed over him. He could have been there to help with the carpentry.

Mr Watson now stood in front of the slim front door, his hand hovering. His eyes had landed on a red children’s bicycle that was leaning against the wall next to him.

A sudden cold breeze drew his attention back to the door, but his hand still hovered, trembling more than it had in years.

Just knock, he thought. But what do I say? Afternoon? Hello?

The door opened in front of him. Mr Watson stepped back to see his daughter in the doorway pulling a coat on hastily. She looked just as he remembered and the resemblance to her mother was as strong as ever. Next to her was a young boy, taller than Mr Watson’s memories insisted he was, but who he still recognised with ease.

The woman was looking behind her. ‘We’ll be back by tea!’ she called. A man inside the house answered with a mumble.

Then, finally, she turned. Her jaw fell, but the rest of her face was expressionless. The moment seemed to freeze for Mr Watson, whose heart was pounding hard against his chest in anticipation for her to speak.

‘Dad,’ she finally croaked.

‘Umm… I- I can come back later if you’re going out.’

The woman gave a sudden sob as she threw her arms around him and squeezed him tight. Tears began falling down her cheeks.

‘Don’t be silly,’ she muttered.

I hope you can forgive me for everything. Love, Dad

Tom Moody

thinks I’m lazy. I’d tell her I’m not –but I can’t be arsed.

When I’m in the room she likes to speak to you in French. ‘Tom est un imbécile.’

Your mum does not like Brits –she does not understand our love of binge drinking. I explain she has not put her thumb on the table and must now drink.

‘Tu aurais pu trouver beaucoup mieux que lui.’

I have no idea what this means –but your mum is probably right.

The Holidays

Molly Penney

My fruit cake is peeled and sits half eaten on my red plastic plate, the icing is too sweet and thick and stale, my sisters have barely touched theirs and my brothers are not here. Our parents are happy on the wall; they are so glad that everyone could make it this year. The dog is outside and in the bin, we do not have a cat. We have a fire in the fireplace, large, coloured bulbs on the walls and candles on the mantel from previous years, no tinsel and no tree.

We do not mind when the children cry or scream, we keep up conversation. Our records jump and crack, but we do not notice, we are not listening to the words, we already know them, we do not care, it is noise. The silence gathers outside but we do not let it in. We wait for the snow to lay and stick and wish for it to bury us alive.

Robyn O’Mahony

The room is small, boasts that uninspired colour of shared flats everywhere: magnolia. The air inside is stale, the walls damp with condensation. Patches of mould grow along the windowsill. The alarm sounds and signals the start of the day. Your routine begins.

You snooze for a little while, annoying your housemates still in a state of half-sleep, that continual alarm sound upsetting the ears of everyone in the flat. This place, this space between the sleeping world and the waking one, it’s your favourite time of day and you are not yet willing to give it up. It is your only place of peace, while awake, before it evaporates, and your brain begins to tap tap tap away at you. Before you take a shower, you boil the kettle. Once it’s ready you carefully pour the water all over the head of the brush, sploshing some around the bathroom as you do, catching your little toe just a bit, sucking in the pain between your teeth with a woosh sound. You set the kettle back into the kitchen and clean your teeth. You wash your hands before and after. In the shower, you try not to touch your face much which, you admit, is a little difficult when trying to achieve optimal cleanliness. You turn the shower off and try to dodge the curtain which is encrusted with mould. You wash your hands when you get out of the shower. When you get back to your bedroom – which sits at the end of the hall, at the front of the flat – you apply hand sanitiser.

The email arrived as nonchalantly as emails do – silently and without ceremony. You intentionally don’t have your phone on loud, or email notifications on, so you didn’t even realise there was an email until much later in the day. It was not written with kindness; this you knew, from years crafting passive-aggressive emails to colleagues. It was deliberately unkind, you thought. A little cruel. You wanted to punch the laptop. You wanted to punch her. You kind of wanted to punch yourself.

Instead, you washed your hands. Again.

The timing of the email was pretty shitty, you thought. Then you reasoned she probably didn’t deliberately choose for it to arrive at this moment, or at all. The following week, you moved to London. You had been excited, still kind of were. But the email lingered.

On the train you applied hand sanitiser six times. The journey was one hour and ten minutes. *

As things so often do, autumn happens all at once. You have been in London for four months. You like your job – the duties, the clients, the people. You like that you can take the Northern Line all the way to the office. You like the people you see on the Tube; still marvel at the faces and glimpses of lives you get to catch while you travel. You like to pick up Metro and read the segment that features people appealing to those they have seen on the Tube; sometimes wonder if someone might be talking about you. You like Long Acre – where your office is – and the expensive shops that line the street. Life is normal. The office is a three-storey conversion with wooden beams and slanting ceilings. The carpets are cream, there is a preposterous number of real plants. It is infinitely nicer than your flat and you spend the weekends waiting for Monday, for the moment when you can step outside the reality of your life and into the imaginary world of your job: the little dramas that don’t actually matter but seem impossible, the small catastrophes of what the Friday treat will be because the pizza van isn’t available anymore. These things don’t matter, and it is a pleasant life to reside in, one that provides a comforting veneer for your social media feed. Outside, in the flat, things do matter. Too much. Like the fact that you are behind on the council tax by three months, so the bill is beyond comprehension and your housemates, whose salaries are much larger than yours, refuse to divvy up the cost fairly. Like the fact that even though you’re familiar with the phrase don’t shit where you eat you still fucked your housemate – in his double – and then went to sleep in your single. Your room is collecting dust because you can’t bear to move things around and put them back in their exact place, so it’s a little filthy. The blinds in your bedroom aren’t white anymore because the mould has claimed them as its own. The windows are almost always wet on the inside. But your hands are clean.

One day, at work, a colleague asks, why are your hands so red?

You look down at your hands, nestled together in your lap, and say, they just get like this in the cold weather.

And then you excuse yourself to the bathroom.

At group therapy they said, imagine you are afraid of dogs. Now, how might you, step by step, overcome that fear?

This analogy didn’t feel relevant to you given that washing your hands is an essential aspect of life. But you didn’t say that. You just raised your hand – keen to be seen as someone who was taking it seriously – and said, visiting a park where there might be dogs?

After Christmas, when you’ve been home and then returned to the city, another email arrives. It says:

He’s gone. Don’t come to the funeral, it will only upset the kids.

You press x on the browser, you shut down the laptop. You wait until the engine stops whirring and then close the lid. Even though you want not to bother with this shit you can’t. You want to be able to be normal, to respond normally. To slam the lid of the laptop down. To slide it off the bed until it crashes onto the floor. But you have to do it as it has to be done otherwise who knows what might happen. You walk to the bathroom and wash your hands. You move the soap dish a little to the left, to the exact place where you know it should be. Your mind says a thousand and one things about the dish and the fact it was in the wrong place and how the wrongness of that one thing has been contaminating everything else and how you didn’t notice and maybe that’s what caused this. Maybe that’s why he’s dead. Maybe it’s stupid fucking meaningless shit like this that meant you didn’t see him for fifteen years. Meant he got a new life, forgot your birthday, didn’t visit when you nearly died from a ruptured appendix.

You think: this bathroom is filthy. Dusty and wet at the same time, an ecosystem of its own. You wipe the top of the cistern with your fingers and watch the dust disappear. You turn your palm over and examine the particles on your fingers. You wash your hands in the basin. You rub the wet mould away from the shower curtain with those same fingers. You wash your hands again.

Red Rabbit Traps

Isabella Goddard

All blood and all bones, all fine China skin, Cherry red rabbit atop mattress springs.

The milk carton children spin hair into harps, A half-broken skull to a whole-broken heart.

Pull her to pieces, there’s sugar inside; All sweethearts, all violets, all pink suicides.

Now cracked down the middle, that curlicue head, All glitter, all worms-meat, all motel swan beds.

Cabbage patch cheeks, two flowering ferns, Drinking the Kool-Aid and kissing rope burns,

Pushing and pushing till old farmer snaps, All blood and all bones, all red rabbit traps.

Nostalgia Is One Hell Of A Drug

Ellen Page

i’ll worship you if you just let me soak it all up.

i can’t go back to it, so i’ll take it with me, and every so often i’ll take a sip.

i can’t stop myself, even if i wanted to, it tastes too sweet – scratch that, i’ll never stop. when july rules over me, it will forever be a wet october afternoon / a snowy january morning / a cold december night all at once and also not at all, because time isn’t so kind anymore. slow down for a minute, and let me catch my breath before it starts again and this becomes a memory, too. my head is starting to hurt, and i’m forgetting the curve of her jaw. one more taste, please. just one more.