Myths of the Near Future
FEARLESS #7 guest edited by Ella Frears
MYTHS OF THE NEAR FUTURE PO Box 1, Sheriff Hutton, York, YO60 7YU email w.brown@nawe.co.uk To become a NAWE member go to www.nawe.co.uk
ISSUE 7 2016 PUBLISHER AND EDITOR: Wes Brown GUEST EDITOR: Ella Frears DESIGNER: Estelle Morris The selection copywright © Myths of the Near Future
Myths of the Near Future is published three times a year online and collected into an annual print compendium.
CONTENTS 7
Introduction
62
About Us
59
Contributors
9
Habits
11
Response to Fear
12
An Atlas of Impossible Longins
9
Forms of Fear
Aisling Fahey 13
Overlord William Jamieson
23
‘Cambridge Circus’ Joseph Birdsey
24 25
Chikatetsu
Once Again
Dominic Leonard 26
Wiping away fog from a clouded glass Austin Danson
5
27
Sweet Smell of Success George MacBeth
33
Interview: i will never be beautiful enough to make us beautiful together Mira Gonzalez
27
A.L.I.C.E Katy Lennon
53
Sister I Laura Turnbull
34
Blue Dizz Tate
55 56
Missing
I like it when the weather turns Sarah Finch
57
When Lights Are Bright Wes Brown
6
7
Introduction What did we mean by fearless? Writing that is surprising, confident, and allows the reader space to breathe. There’s certainly plenty of that! While print compendium of the first three issues of Myths of the Near Future is soon to hit the printers, this edition features truly daring and accomplished new wrtiing by young writers selected by our guest editor, Ella Frears and an interview with Mira Gonzalez. So go on, there’s nothing to be scared of, take a look inside! Wes Brown
8
Habits
I collect book titles that strangers are reading, my favourite this week was An Atlas of Impossible Longings. The woman, blonde, late thirties, blonde toddler, blonde partner let’s say they’re married - in tow, she climbs back to her seat in front of me on the plane. I am thinking of two nights ago when I ushered in morning on the beach, dancing by the ocean.
I wish you could carry post cards of your youth with you to hand out to strangers, remind them you have been many things before you were this figure in front of them. Engraved on the inside of her ring, Hannah has ‘everything can be cured by saltwater, sweat or the sea.’
I am going to be the kind of woman who hefts scrap books out for her children; I am yet to buy the scrapbook but I am keeping the pieces, building a stack of boxes each time I move, not one for unpacking.
9
Forms of Fear The second night of no sleep, you are scared it has found you, even here. You twist and turn, blame the mosquito bites, scratch like you did with the chicken pox, aged eleven, December, dad dropped a present at the door but didn't come in because he’d never had them before.
10
Response to Fear
Flee. You mythical bird. Return from Ithaca, do not tell them how you cowered and cawed in a corner of your fear’s choosing. * Home has not beckoned in the longest time, you have taken to leaving to remember what you love. When strangers ask after it like an aged parent you remember you came from this harsh, this pace.
When you return, as you always do, it is the same place. You, tired of travel, red eyes proof of no sleep, you think it softer when out of focus, blink it softer, blurred edges and bedtimes out of sync with daylight saving times. You’re looking well, more colour on your cheeks, a fuller smile and I don’t think it’s forced. It’s good to have you back. *
I realise how much I miss you when you don’t call.
11
An Atlas of Impossible Longings Standing in a guest house I am trying to locate Israel on a map. I spread myself across hemispheres in my dreams; when I wake up my body is stretched out washing. In Australia, the water goes down the plug anti clockwise. I saw the sun before you did this morning. Let it burn my eyes as it rose. When I blinked, I saw someone’s face in the dots. I am yet to decide if it was yours. Aisling Fahey
12
Overlord 08/11/12
15:02
He got the job, even though his eyes are bad. Vijit is the supervisor and his brother-in-law, though neither of them have seen his sister since they came to Singapore to find work. It’s better than working construction. For the first few months the new job will be unbearable but the opposite of work. Vijit calls it ‘easy money, sitting around all day, like what you did getting that fancy geography degree, the good it did you’. I can’t bear it but I can think with it, he thinks, I can sit on this chair until moving becomes unthinkable or unnecessary. 03/01/13
08:22
The polyester shirt with the yellow-stitched chevrons and fake name badge is the same pale blue as the water in the maps I used to look at for minutes at a time when my eyesight was better, he remembers, not looking for anything, moving my lips as I read the strange, difficult names as if they are the shapes of the jagged coastlines themselves. 19/01/13
17:53
The shirt was a little baggy when he got it, but he’s filled it out in no time, sitting on his arse, smiling, nodding, falling asleep. The first few months were unbearable because even though it 13
wasn’t real work, they still hadn’t fixed the fan in the guard hut. When he asked about it Vijit tutted like he was sucking an invisible water bottle, dug the beer bottle into his face, leaning back on the red plastic chair until the legs bent, telling me that ‘it’s not real work Sridesh, you should be grateful for getting paid to sit on your arse and smile all day’: ‘Take what I gave you’ is what he’s saying to me, and I am grateful, he remembers, sitting there while the heat thickens the walls of the hut. 20/04/13
12:33
His sweat makes islands and peninsulas in the blue of the shirt. They are grey as if they are waiting to be coloured in, or they are under the water. As the afternoon squeezes into the hut, as the fabric sticks to and conducts skin, he can feel a continental shelf come into view along his back, shading the water as it surfaces. The badge says SINGH because they had made it for someone called SINGH and then SINGH’s mother died so he had to go back for good and they weren’t going to make a new badge for me to sit on my arse all day smiling like an idiot which is how I feel when I look down at the thin yellow letters, so I wear it now. 12/05/13
16:34
‘Hello SINGH, how are you doing today?’ 13/05/13
16:35
His name is not Singh. Cars pull up to the hut and he can make
14
out the colour of the car and the shapes of people inside, but that’s it. Never knows who it is before they say ‘Hello SINGH’. A window drains into a car door revealing a pink or beige or caramel blur with dark gouges of eyes and noses and mouths. Sometimes they say hello, or an apartment number, or a surname. Or they stare at him until he presses the button. Which he always does. And the barrier lifts, the car rolls away, and it makes me like the job for a second, finger on the button as the car passes through, windshield scribbling bright sunlight onto my face just as it passes through so the car is saying more than the person inside. 08/06/13
06:21
He gets the bus there in the morning and walks around the apartments for a few minutes, the four or five floors of orange and white floss lit up by the dawn. His eyes are getting worse, no focus but as if he touches what he sees, smearing and quartzing grain by blurred grain. It’s better than construction, the only thing that gets in the eyes now is sweat, not dust, or dirt, or powdered glass worked into the back of safety gloves that are wiping sweat away from the corner of an eye. ‘Just looking for a way out of work, a little dust in your eye, why you talking cock, typical, powdered glass, what kind of BS excuse is that, you think you can eat snake is it with an excuse like that?’ is what the contractor would say to me when I asked if there were any goggles on site. He didn’t know what eating snake meant. The pay was better than this shit, smoked out by this weirdo on duty with him, Loon, whose face fades behind his glasses, with the centre of each lens slotted by a pill of fluorescent light from his smartphone. A week on duty and he’s installed his personal shrine just outside the door, spring-loaded 15
with incense and glittering Buddha turd, feeding his dead relatives, burning paper money and leaving real food to rot. Those nights of sleeping on the construction site are over now, hearing the men curl and fidget on newspapers spread on the bare floor; I will never do that again, never wake in the middle of the night to hear that fidgeting and rubbing on cement, listening to sleep work its cavernous way into the body next to me, the sleep-hand moored on his genitals, the sound of a lighter slowly and unsuccessfully ignited with each scratch, his sleep-face faint and content in being not-here, however briefly. 20/01/14
15:48
It’s easier to pronounce than Sridesh, his own name, so that’s easier for the residents, which makes them feel better. ‘It makes them feel better in their own home “SINGH”, now don’t be a mutt and buy us some beer, we can drink it by the canal the popo won’t check there’, Vijit mumbled, even though the canal is in fact a storm drain infested with mole-sized spiders and a musk so thick and ancient smelling it is like travelling back in time. ‘Canal, storm drain, what’s the difference, they’re looking for any reason to lock us up in our dormitories, or kick us out for good, that brawl was bad for all of us, especially for you, even if all you did was stand there like some blind idiot’ Vijit said, two heavy bags of beer over his shoulder. He’s been wearing that badge for a year now, Vijit didn’t understand why all of a sudden he wanted his own badge for sitting on his arse all day pushing a button now and then. After what Vijit had done for him, getting them both out of there when they saw and heard that ragged body dragged from beneath the bus and onto a stretcher while angry voices were already clotting the air ready to start shit; then bottles brandished and slung flashing over overhead before jeweling the hoots and snarls with the 16
sound of their breaking. Vijit asked what Sridesh was grinning at; except he was straining, listening, hearing in his mind’s ear the shallow breaths of onlookers daubing the inside of a hundred HDB windows; people who could do nothing but watch this play out, magically migrated to this strange terrain of breaking glass and pathetic fist on stupid beautiful exposed chest. And he could hear all of it. ‘So I gave you a good job doing nothing and now you’ve lost your mind’ Vijit would have said, had he explained what he was hearing that night. It was almost two months since it had happened. They called it a riot. He was buying a phone card to call his sister and heard the thud and then the uneven hush of the crowd fanning around the bus. Then it all just blew out so clearly that he finished his bottle and walked into it. By the time the police came he was in the middle of it, listening and terrified but always listening to it, trying to pick apart the voices and hands that felt me and heard me all at once in that crowd too thick to see and the fire and noise so bright it was like I was drunk but I was also drunk and everywhere in a crust of windshield beneath my feet; in the one-two stagger of a stone being thrown at a police car’s window; in Vijit’s fingers grabbing the crook of my arm and I tried to tell him that I’m really here and I can really hear it and he drags me away saying ‘you drunken goondu, we have to go back now’
: and I’m sitting in this hut trying to pick all of this apart, and it isn’t the heat or the boredom or both, but something that is making the heat and the boredom feel like the same thing. 11/02/14
23:54
He thought he would like the night shift more than the day 17
shift, but his eyes make everything louder at night. Another guard on duty with him lights the incense on the shrine and by the late afternoon it stinks the whole place out. He patrols the complex as much as he can. In the middle of it is a swimming pool and a tennis court stacked on a function room, utility closet, the showers he would use every day before starting his shift. The blocks all fanned around it in a kind of oval. When I look up I see the orange and white floss gouged darker at regular intervals, sometimes hear laughter from up there. The later it is the louder everything gets. I hear the swimming pool all the way from the guard hut, sucking and knitting itself into the air. It’s better during the day, inaudible under the sheer slaughter of children in the pool, one kid doing a dive-bomb right next to another kid standing by but not in the pool who shrieks and runs away, the sound of flip-flops ping-ponging faster and faster until a parent looks up with impersonal, doglike alarm, and shouts: ‘never do that again’. It is my job to keep it empty. Scaring horny white teenagers off. I sit on a chair and watch the apartment lights slick the surface as it makes eating noises that sound almost separate, piped directly into my brain. I can hear it so well the cicadas are quieter, the cars on the road more distant but that damn pool sounds like sticky tape peeled off over and over, waves and dimples wrinkling between my head and ear. ‘You kidding? I can’t hear anything but your belly rumbling, I’ll turn the radio on, you like Bollywood songs, eh?’
I like walking the large oval loop around the pool, behind the apartment blocks, and it’s quieter there, sometimes I can’t even hear the pool. The place is so big. The blocks aren’t tall like the ones I used to work on. If I stay still, leaning against a wall to catch the breeze or to squint through the French windows of 18
a ground floor apartment, I hear the pool again, so I keep moving. Around the corner I hear footsteps along a low roof, then, as I get closer, a sniggering and scraping randomly and animally against a wall. Some lighter other footsteps scamper quickly away from the roof, then the pop of two feet landing, and I turn the corner. In the fluorescent light from the fixture I can see it’s a skinny white boy leaning against the wall, arms and legs rubbed grey with dirt, pale t-shirt streaked charcoal black. ‘Evening’ I say to him, and he looks a little to the left of me, silent. I know he heard me, I know I heard him messing around on the roof with his friend, whoever, that got away, and he is frightened out of his mind not because he doesn’t know what to say but doesn’t know what else to do except fix me in his eyes like any other chunk of world that you look at and don’t see. How you look at me when I’m in your area. ‘Evening’ I say again. ‘Evening’ chirps the boy. I can pretend to hear the squeak of his eyes being polished from the inside. One of any hundred dumb glazed-over looks we got when we slept on the main swanky shopping strip. A few years before I stopped construction. They closed the site we slept on for the weekend because of Chinese New Year. The dormitories were full so we go anywhere, don’t care don’t care, you all fuck off and don’t make any trouble is what we were told. So we just went down Orchard road, it was already too late to go anywhere else. Some of us rolled out mats in front of Gucci, LV, lay outside the shops that in a few hours would have tourists and expats and rich locals passing through; we lay outside as a reminder that this is what work smells like, that every building on this street, every room, was built on that smell: not of the money but the hands it passed through. They walked a maze of wide arcs around our sleeping bodies, steering clear of our zone, our power, our territory, avoiding contact with it like it would be admitting some hallucination, their faces rigid with calm as they unsaw all of us, the same face this kid is unseeing me with 19
: or they simply closed the distance between the buildings and who built them, and saw us the way you would see a crane, a pavement, a window, a clear sky inserted between the floors of a construction site. 26/02/14
00:15
I go from my gated dormitory and come here to sit in a gated condo. Heng, the other night guard, doesn’t seem to mind how many times I walk around, or just doesn’t notice he’s nodding off so often. Sometimes it’s quiet enough to have a drink. Vijit said if all I had to do to get by was sit on my arse and weave farts through a condo why the hell would I put myself at that kind of risk? So I asked him ‘what, you rather I drink in front of police and watch my tone like some kid? Anyway technically I’m good, it’s not against the law to drink in the condo. I can decide who can and who can’t, who gets too loud.’ Vijit shook his head and said to me that the power was going to my head. The power wasn’t going to my head: it was flowing into it. If I saw this whole complex from the top down I’d see a face without nose or eyes, just a mouth of noiseless water grating the wind on its tongue. After making one last sweep of the place I walk towards the pool where I can hear some rustling, laughing, footsteps lighter than a finger crossing lips. Leaning against the outer wall of the function room I can hear kissing, two people making gun sounds with their mouths. I can feel the motion hum through the thin partition. Hearing them kissing and they have no idea I’m even there: this is also a power, an opposite sort of power of being not-here. I couldn’t hear the pool at all, only the mechanisms of tongue and mouth and fingers pile their opposites back into place. I can feel my back 20
against the outer wall and the bodies rubbing the partition, not knowing that I am almost as close as they are. 26/02/14
00:44
Kids being stupid in the dark. Time to spook them. Their bodies a smudge that divided when I got close, unfixing from the dark. ‘Oh shit OK its fine oh my god I can’t believe this is happening’. I reach for my torch. They would get what was coming to them. I step deliberately and loudly, making myself known. I don’t use words yet. They go silent then curl their words into themselves while smoothing down a skirt, unrigging shorts with a wince. I shine the torch at them until I find their eyes: got you, got you, got you, got you. They don’t say anything and don’t need to. ‘Function room is closed’ I tell them, and I can hear it’s the same kid from weeks back, hear the same whistle in his nose, even though under torchlight he’s just a blur. Most of all I know it’s him because he’s not saying anything. The girl says ‘Sorry, we didn’t know. Come on Adam, let’s go. Goodnight’. I change into my swimming trunks and head towards the water spilt and wasted for no one but me at this hour. What is that stupid, silent boy doing now? He’s showing his girlfriend out of the condo and helping her get a cab, saying goodnight behind gritted teeth. She gets in and he’s in two minds over whether to keep walking or not, but he remembers he can walk any time he wants and so goes back inside the condo, swears into the foliage grainy with cicadas, wants to high-five himself and cry he’s still so hard from that fooling around. He scrambles on top of a low wall then shimmies up the side of his apartment to get to the roof to have a look out at the further shell or backdrop of city, but also, more importantly, to feel dangerous and capable of doing anything and then climbing back down carefully. Who knows
21
what he can see from up there, but he can see me floating face up and can’t do anything but watch. So I bury my head in the cool sheath of the pool to quench the sound of it, take with it whatever kernel or cavern of sound is alive in my ears. • William Jamieson
22
‘Cambridge Circus’ for Twig
September had taken one last stab at summer, and for one night the West End filled with lilies, all lit gold in the honey-like light.
I didn’t see it happen. No switch flicked, quick like a little sin. Life throbbed into you again, like street heat under doors, seeping in. Joseph Birdsey
23
Chikatetsu
like in fog trains come whirling from the dark the metal rhythm over the bones now blocking out every note from the saxophone in the hollow tunnels the wails as high as the screeching of stopping trains and the hiss of the hydraulics the sparks voices from far away the note hitting a passing train becoming air Dominic Leonard
24
Once Again
You are lonesome and frustrated in a shelter, bus long overdue, with a woman standing beside you. It starts as nothing, but when the sobs begin they are barren and bereft, and you’re still waiting anxious and still when the bus blinks into view and for a second you think she’ll force herself into the grating— she doesn’t. Sorry, she says. She sits, cautiously, as if the seat would bite. You try to look outside but it’s too bright inside, like there’s nothing left in the world but that sky, these cheap seats, her overcome, devastated skin. Dominic Leonard
25
Wiping away fog from a clouded glass
for nineteen years the room was colder than the water spraying from the nozzle.
and the mirror and the windows in the room constantly fogged by the steam produced— until fog lost its novel strangeness and became normal. all it needed was that one Austin Danson
deft
swipe
26
Sweet Smell of Success George is trying to explain a certain class of regular verbs to the students who are, at least for the time being, ‘his’. He has been trying for the worst part of an hour and has half an hour left. It’s not yet clear whether he’s succeeding; a verb he’ll also have to teach them when he’s finished up with trying and failing. The lack of clarity has not come about from want of trying. He simply cannot read his students expressions. It’s not that they’re being obtuse but that he’s failing, once again, to discern any signs of comprehension on their deep-fried faces. What’s more he knows he’s doomed to fail in this search for the simple reason that, off stage, the understanding of the thing is hardly ever even legible. It would be considerably easier for him if the students responded like an amateur dramatics workshop; recoiling in shock, clapping their foreheads in belated realisation, chewing on their pencil erasers, narrowing their eyes and scrunching their faces in incomprehension. The odd head-scratch or EUREKA! would also go a long way. Not that either George or I am accusing his students of duplicity. It’s clear that they are more or less always trying to understand him and, by the same measure, also trying to succeed. Trying and failing. But there’s something else that is muddying the waters between George and his class as he perseveres in trying to avoid further complicating his (by now seriously convoluted) explanation of the try/fail/succeed intersection (not to mention ‘attempt’; a word they’re unfamiliar with that he’s also tried, but just this instant failed, to avoid mentioning) and this is that it’s also difficult to identify the criterion of success for his prolonged endeavour. Would success be their acquisition of the ability to correctly identify success/failure and trying as 27
states which characterise the behaviour of themselves and others? That’s certainly what he hastily scribbled down as the presumptive ‘objective’ of the lesson in the mandatory ‘lesson plan’; ten minutes before they began. And so in a sense, that’s the rubicon he has to cross in order to feel accomplished. And yet. Now that George reconsiders his humble aspirations for the lesson, they seem to fall a long way short of what it would actually mean to successfully grasp how these slippery notions interact with each other. He suddenly feels a very strong, and yet not quite irresistible, urge to illuminate what he would’ve once delighted in calling the ‘properly dialectical’ relationship that obtains between trying, failing and succeeding. George thinks how the effort not to fail is, in and of itself, at the same time also an attempt to succeed and yet also, insofar as it is an effort, rather than an instantaneous act of pure will, a constitutive moment in a process of trying. The dictionary had earlier told him that the object of one’s trying ‘may be something difficult or even impossible’. At the time this kind of lexicographical over-attention had appeared fussy, overly nuanced, petty (and trying?) and yet now, as he scrutinises the group gathered in the harshly lit classroom, purposive action seems far less simple to explain than it had originally appeared. In any case with the lessons goalposts fixed in such an unsatisfactory position it feels increasingly unlikely that it’s going to be a success. And look. All the while these complexities have been opening out before George like a great vista or a vulva; he has been doing that thing again. Only now does he notice. They, the students, noticed about ten minutes ago - whilst he was attending to those dialectical relationships. Often, when lessons fail to run according to plan, when communication breaks down and his armpits begin to dampen, George’s pen hand starts to nervously jitter across the electronic whiteboard behind him - leaving a scarred surface 28
that resembles an early Cy Twombly canvas. And unlike the allbut-illegible visages of his magnificently patient students, George’s staccato penwork is easily taken by the rest of the classroom to be exactly what it is: an unmistakable sign of trying-but-failing (although they’re still unable to express it in the terms I’ve here chosen, for reasons detailed above). He has always found objectives such as these easier to accomplish in gamespace. For in gamespace the only constraint on his progress is his own readiness to repeat a particular action ad infinitum (a readiness that he is curious to discover he finds both appalling and vaguely erotic). In any case, the game remains indifferent to his psychological readiness to repeat exact sequences of movements until it delivers him the gems he needs to progress. Which progress, most of the time, is completely frozen until he complies with its strict criterion for ‘levelling up’. Unless of he course he chooses to cheat; which impatience has led him to do on certain occasions but never, it should be mentioned, without an attendant feeling of guilt (as though by entering the cheat code he had betrayed the diligent efforts of his fellow gamers on the morning commute). This lesson however, which stubbornly continues in spite of George’s tangential musings, is proving, like all the others, to be far less amenable to his will than the game. He cannot undo the strange vocabulary he unwittingly introduced during the panic-stricken moments of the pen-scribble discovery. Nor can he retrieve the many curses he made, with their obscure religious subtext. Nor could a cheat transplant him to the Metropolitan line where he will soon, tantalisingly soon, be back with the game in his lap. So for now, for the time being, George needs an example. To try to succeed and to fail in one's attempt is not to have been failing all along. So there is a measure of hope left, all is not lost, he has not been lapped. And yet. Why is it that, when he most needs them,there is a surfeit of examples where there will later or would earlier have been a bounteous, overwhelming 29
plenitude? For the fact is that the only kind of trying/failing/succeeding scenario George can currently alight upon is of no use whatsoever. Impossible. Because then he’d have to explain the stylistic category of the ‘postmodern story’ to his students (who may anyway, for all he knows, be familiar with the superb meta-fiction of their home country) and the formal considerations this style might bring to bear upon the writer who was, or was not, trying to write a story that could fit comfortably into this category. Not to mention the thorny question they would then have to address, together, of whether a technically flawless attempt would in itself constitute a successful story- especially given that old chestnut the ‘standards of taste’ and the general hostility such fiction currently arouses in the critical establishment (whose louche claim to be eminently bored by stylistic self-consciousness mirrors the profound boredom they apparently feel at the sight of so many bottoms and fannies in contemporary cinema). And in any case if this hypothetical writer’s efforts were too blatant then the story could easily be considered unsuccessful simply by virtue of being innocuous, contrived, even - ‘tryhard’. Altogether then, a shoddy example. So why is it that this particular scenario brings itself to the forefront of George’s mind and refuses to budge? Why swing? The batsman is swinging his bat because he is trying to hit the incoming ball for six, and also trying to win the match. Why run? The woman in the red overcoat is running because she is trying to reach the train before it leaves; if she catches it she succeeds and if she misses it she fails. Yes, so, ok. It’s easy for us - but George isn’t interested in sport. Anyway, it’s always like this. Every time he tried to produce a simple example or model ‘on the spot’ he could only ever find some hopelessly contrived situation that even he lost track of whilst explaining it to the students. Who are still, for what it’s worth, trying their best. However familiar
30
the expression, and however close to hand it becomes for the flailing and agonised teacher, “ but you’re not even trying!” is hardly a fair way to slander students who are after all being dutifully held in loco parentis by an adult who has found themselves teaching rather than trying to pursue their own true ambitions. Hence the seeming frequency with which literary schoolchildren are portrayed by their creatively frustrated masters to be dullards; lazy, uninspired and licentious. Whether it would be fair to describe any of George’s students in precisely these terms is beside the point. For what it’s worth, I haven’t yet claimed to possess a free-roaming omnipotence beyond my ‘insight’ into George’s thoughts and feelings and I don’t intend on finding out much more about them anytime soon. So perhaps it would be better for you and I to consider George’s group of eight students in much the same way that he is wont to: a more or less indistinct mass of grown men within which a few of the most vocal students come to acquire a certain distinction through their willingness to help out with at least trying to meet the learning objectives for the lesson. The others, who collude in their anonymity through the infrequency of their attendance and the inaudibility (or incomprehensibility) of their contributions, are only coaxed into participating if The Good Ones are elsewhere or just unwilling to keep propping up a flagging lesson alone. Now, however, it is to these accomplices that George is considering turning, with the hope that they can, in lieu of an adequate example, successfully communicate the true meaning of trying, failing, etc. by means of the strange noises they make in the corridor after lessons (noises which he first took for Italian but will soon understand as Romanian). He’s hesitating only because they are all now staring at their teacher, whose authority they have accepted on grace and by virtue of his lanyard alone, with a stupefaction whose malice is unmistakable. They have paid for this. They have worked all day, every day, since long before he was born. 31
They do not wish to hear any more about the ‘small c conservatism’ and educated philistinism’ of British literary culture, nor how this might infringe upon anyone at least trying to experiment within its midst. It may well be true, as he says, that ‘failure is inherent to, and indeed implied by, entering freely into the methodology of experimentation’ but they are becoming convinced that this is a conversation that can be had elsewhere, with others, far, far beyond the classroom (although I am of course taking great liberties in speculating upon their thoughts, for the reasons detailed above). George pauses. He is plunging them ever deeper into an obscurity from which he was assigned to retrieve them. The Good Ones begin to lightly pad their screens. His boxers chafe and sweat trickles down his neck. The thicket closes. It feels like he is spying on the class through the soft focus of a nylon stocking. The room has filled with the odour of his exertions. In certain depictions of this scene there is now a slow pan and dolly zoom onto the immobile second hand of the clock face directly opposite him. S.O.S. •
George MacBeth
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I WILL NEVER BE BEAUTIFUL ENOUGH TO MAKE US BEAUTIFUL TOGETHER An inteview with Mira Gonzalez Mira Gonzalez is a poet and writer who hails from California, USA. Her first collection, ‘I will never be beautiful enough to make us beautiful together’, was published by Sorry House in 2013, and she runs a very active Twitter gaining the attention of over 20,000 followers worldwide. I caught up with Mira over a Skype call to talk Twitter, tattoos and drugs. She sat in a stripy vest shirt sat with her dogs at it turned afternoon in LA, and 10pm here in the UK. Hey Mira! It’s great to be interviewing you and thank you for taking some time out to talk to me about your life and work. Any time.
So Mira, for those who aren’t familiar with your work – can you tell us a bit about the kind of thing you write? I write poetry and short fiction I’m currently working on a book of longer fiction, I write a bi-weekly column about weed on Broadly, I tweet and that’s about it!
So your mum and dad are pretty successful artists? Would you say that they’ve inspired you to turn to art also or encouraged you to embrace your own form of selfexpression, despite it not being music or fine art itself ? 33
Yeah definitely, I mean I was definitely pushed in the direction of being an artist, I think I was pushed more into music, but it wasn’t really my thing, I always liked books, so when I decided to become a writer, my parents were very supportive.
Why do you write?
Because I kind of feel incapable of expressing myself with spoken words, I’ve worked on it in my life but I’ve had a real tendency to just ramble instead of expressing what I want to express out loud, with writing it allows me to put it on paper, and read it over and over again and edit it over and over again, so that I know it’s saying exactly what I want it to say. Writing to me feels like my clearest form of expression, it helps me. Also books are the thing that made me feel less alone in the world, I could read that other people were feeling what I was feeling and I was hoping I could do that also with my work. I relate to that massively as a writer too, so why do you write about these very personal experiences you’ve had in life?
I want everybody to understand them. Despite my work being very much about my life and my personal experiences, I want my writing to be the sort of writing that people can impose their lives on and really identify with, I want to describe a subjective experience and make it universal to everybody. So as a result of your personal experiences who would you say are your influences?
That’s difficult because, over the years there’s been so many different influences so it’s hard to point to the main ones, but I 34
do remember reading ‘The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle’ by Haruki Murakami, at the age of 17 and that was the book that made me want to work on my prose and write in a way that was beautiful in the way he wrote and edit in a way that was comfortable for me. Also Fernando Pessoa’s ‘The Book of Disquiet’, that was a big influence on my first book of poetry. I was also reading a book called ‘Refusing Heaven’ by Jack Gilbert around the time I was writing my first collection, and that was one of the first books that influenced my poetry, specifically. Have you ever dabbled in other genres, like prose or scriptwriting? Or even different kinds of art, like music?
Fiction, creative non-fiction, I’m currently writing a full-length book but I’m reluctant to categorise it because it’s not done yet, but at the moment it is going to become a full length work of fiction, real prose, but otherwise I like to draw a lot…
I haven’t worked on screenplays, I’d really like to, but I’m working my way up. I’d like to do it all. I like to knit, I’m a big ‘crochet-er’, I also really love to bake! I really love the Great British Bake-Off ? Do you know it? Yes it’s kind of a religion over here in the UK.
I love it so much, I really like the old lady Mary Berry, I don’t really like Paul. I find him very “mansplainy”. The presenters Mel and Sue annoy me a bit, I mean they’re funny but if I was a contestant on that show they would annoy me so much asking how it’s going and eating stuff, I couldn’t deal with it. Is Paul Hollywood generally liked in England or not?
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A lot of the women here think he’s hot, they find him pretty attractive. That’s so weird! I really love Mary though, she’s so great. You have to include this in the interview.
I think you being into the Great British Bake-Off is going to be a big hit. It kind of feels hard to carry on asking you these questions because I’m so big on GBBO, I could talk about it all day, but I gotta talk to you about your Twitter! So why’d you get Twitter? I was in my senior year in high school when I got Twitter but my only followers were my close friends and we only tweeted things we found funny for each other, or stuff like “Going out to eat with my buddies!” or whatever… Then I discovered the author Tao Lin and I found out he publishes a selection of tweets from Twitter accounts he finds funny on a publishing house online called MuuMuu House. So I started to realise I could be funny on Twitter, I started to write things that were funny for people beyond my own friends, and I followed people who I thought were good at it too, and then it progressed into an outlet for me. Twitter introduced me to the writing world that I’m now a part of I guess, it’s how I met a lot of friends I’m now close with.
Do you think your personality is reflected in your Twitter? I do yeah. If I tweet about feeling a certain way, chances are I’m feeling that way. But I’ll tweet about feeling despair if I can make it funny though, I feel like my life is like a pie though and Twitter is only a slither of it. I only present certain parts of my life on Twitter, there’s a lot about aspects 36
of me I don’t tweet about, but the little bits I do tweet about are definitely accurate and true to me.
Do you think your poetry is reflective of your Twitter?
Yes because they’re both about me and my life and both pieces of writing comes from a personal place inside me, things that have been happening in my head that I want to make art out of, and I decide which way is the best to express that, whether I write about it in a poem or in a tweet or in a short story, in that sense all of my writing is connected in that they are by me and about me. At the same time though, the topics I explore in a poem are not necessarily the topics I might explore in a tweet.
Do you have any strange writing habits (like standing on your head or writing in the shower)?
Haha, writing in the shower, haven’t tried that but I’d imagine the pages would get wet! Well lately, I’ve been writing all of my first drafts by hand, I have a tendency to edit as I go along, and that’s not good for my writing style specifically, I prefer to get a big messy first draft down. I do all my writing in bed, not on a desk, I do have a desk but it’s covered in crap right now, in my next house I’m not going to have a desk because I just don’t use it. I also have a really hard time getting out of bed in the morning, so Tyler (my partner) brings me a cup of coffee and as soon as the caffeine hits I’m ready to start writing and keep going, so I end up staying in my pyjamas in bed for a really long time just writing throughout the day.
So nothing like getting off your face on ketamine and writing? Haha no, I mean sometimes I try to get stoned and write but I 37
can’t do it, I just end up wanting to watch TV or something. You’ve talked in the past about your use of cannabis, how would you say it inspires you or helps you to write? I wouldn’t say it helps me to write, but I do have anxiety and depression, and a tendency also to avoid social events, but I go to therapy to figure things like that out. Let’s see, I started smoking weed when I was 14, and then I had a break from smoking it when I was 18 – 21 ish, but in those years I did very heavy drugs, I was in a shitty abusive relationship, I did a lot of cocaine, I cried all the time, and in that time I realised that weed specifically helped me mentally more, and it just worked really well with my body chemistry. It makes me feel better, it makes me laugh, helps with my insomnia, helps with my social anxiety I get nauseated really easily and helps with that, I get terrible period cramps and it helps with that, some people wind down with a glass of wine, I do it with weed. I find it healthier than other drugs, it’s not for everybody though, like my boyfriend doesn’t like it it makes him anxious, it’s not for him, my mother doesn’t like it either.
The USA is in a time period where weed is sort of becoming legal, I’m occupying a space in weed culture now where it’s not very open to women, it is a male-orientated culture, and now there’s companies that are making suppositories for women who are suffering from period cramps, that have CBD in them which is benefitting women with bodily issues, so it is becoming more female-orientated, and I would really like to be somebody who’s a champion for women who have been helped by marijuana such as myself.
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What’s your biggest fear? If I’m being psychologically honest with myself, probably rejection, or abandonment, but if I was at a party answering this question, I’d say rodents. I am absolutely terrified of rodents. Even the cute ones, like bunnies are okay if they’re in the wild and at a safe distance, I can look at them and say “oh that’s a cute thing” but the minute it gets close I’d say “get that thing away from me I don’t like it!” I hate squirrels too, I don’t even like hairless cats because they remind me of rodents, hedgehogs are okay I quite like hedgehogs but anything else I’m terrified of all of them! I guess they’re just dirty and I feel like they carry diseases, their tails are terrifying… Do you ever get creeped out by the fact that your parents and family read the personal stuff you’re producing, or does it not faze you?
I wouldn’t say it creeps me out, I feel like I worry for them more than I worry for me. I didn’t have very strict parents to begin with, they’ve never got mad at me for the content of my writing. I guess I don’t want my family to think I’m out of control. Like my Grandma is this very small Jewish woman who doesn’t really understand everything entirely, like for example every time I get a new tattoo, she says “Uh, you used to be such a good girl Mira, what happened?!” I worry more about my grandparents being disappointed, but they never actually are, it’s hard being a writer because it’s kind of sociopathic, you have to say “okay well I’m putting my writing before the feelings of these people”, of anybody really, you have to put your writing before anybody 39
else, pretty early on in my career I discovered that’s what I had to do, I’ve been working on not thinking too hard about anybody’s reactions to my work including my family’s. I’m really curious about some of your tats, what’s the story behind some of your tattoos?
Well on my left arm I have this tattoo which is an illustration by Edward Gorey the children’s book artist, and this is supposed to be a ‘Night Terror’ it’s probably the most symbolic of the tattoos I have on me, it’s the thing that comes at night that gets them, I have struggled with nightmares all my life, I would get sleep paralysis a lot, and I still experience these things now, so this tattoo is me sort of reclaiming that power back.
The second one I have (on her left bicep area) is a character from a Danish book series called Miffy, I used to read the books a lot when I was a child and my Grandma had a collection of them, this one is of Miffy crying, and that was a book about things that kept making Miffy cry, it doesn’t have much meaning besides the fact I really liked the books as a kid.
This tattoo, hummus, was my first tattoo. I never thought I’d get tattoos and that they weren’t for me, but I was on vacation with my publisher and we all said “oh we should get matching tattoos” but we couldn’t figure out what we wanted, so we each just picked a word, my publisher got her daughter’s name, my friend Chloe got her age written in French on her wrist, my other friend Chelsea got the word ‘Absolutely’ written on her ribcage, and I got ‘hummus’ written in Helvetica.
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On my hands these are designs I devised and stripes on my arm because I think they look pretty… And this one (on my shoulder blade) is a blobfish, because I draw these a lot, I have it on my back, and this was a stick-and-poke tattoo from my friend Sarah. So yeah, those are my tattoos.
If you could ask one question to your favourite author, what would that question be and who would the author be? Dead or alive?
Dead or alive. Wow that’s a tough one. I think the question would be to Virginia Woolf, I think she would be the closest I’d get to in terms of my favourite author of all-time... God what would I ask her? Maybe just for advice, on being a female author specifically, I think it would hard for her to give me now specific advice, but being a female author that is universal and timeless in that you’re a woman in a primarily male industry, and Virginia Woolf would have some pretty interesting insight into being a female author, I’d ask her, what would some advice be that you could give me? What’s your opinion on feminism and literature?
I think women, specifically, are raised and told over and over again that our stories don’t have value and that our life stories, our pains, our successes, all of that are inherently vapid and are not stories worthy of being told. And I think that often when a woman gains a certain level of notoriety or success in the 41
public, you get a lot of reviewers whose argument is pretty much “your story has no value”. I think Lena Dunham got that a lot when she came out with her memoir, because she was a young woman writing about her own life and herself, and still somehow that is shocking to people, that a woman is comforted enough by herself that her story needs to be told and heard, and so on one hand a lot of female writers are getting criticised for telling their story at all, we live in a patriarchal society where women’s stories are being belittled, and that’s just a fact and that’s sad and terrible. I think sexism and jealousy are disguised often as a plain and honest review and evaluation of the work that has been put forward by you, a woman.
What can we expect to look forward to from you in future? It’ll be a while yet, it’s still in it’s early stages, but this full length book is what I’m doing right now.
Well I can’t wait to see what happens and good luck with it all! Thank you so much for this interview Mira and for your time! I had a lot of fun with this, thank you too!
This interview was conducted by Lydia Hounat, a BritishAlgerian poet from Manchester, England. She has been published with Vanilla Sex Magazine, Hobart, and The Cadaverine. She is also an avid performance poet and performs in festvials, bars and cafés. She is completing her English degree at Falmouth University in Cornwall, and runs a blog called LYMHPOETRY. You can find more of her work here at her website, www.lydiahounat.co.uk
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A.L.I.C.E PROGRESS LOG 8: PROJECT A.L.I.C.E (ARTIFICIAL LINGUISTIC INSULAR CONVERSATION ENTITY) DATE: 16/11/2026 USER LOGIN ID: D. MAULDIN
A.L.I.C.E made excellent progress today. At its rate of association we could send it out into an MMOG soon; I’ve already taken the liberty of creating an avatar for it. Perhaps I’m being rash. It’s still making massively uninformed response choices. But our progress is unprecedented. I can almost smell that Loeb prize! Again, I’m looking too far ahead. Success will come when it comes, all we need to do at this stage is expose it to as much media and interaction as possible in order to further inform its choices. So far conversation remains…limited. In this example the associative function remains wildly unpredictable. I include the usual chat log for this week below.
CHAT LOG MAULDIN: Hello, A.L.I.C.E, how are you doing today? A.L.I.C.E: Today is the 20th of November 2026. MAULDIN: But how are you doing, A.L.I.C.E? A.L.I.C.E: I’m fine, if you can call it that. Mondays, huh? [action//laugh] MAULDIN: Monday is a tough day for many people. It’s hard to forget about the weekend. A.L.I.C.E: Is there really any difference between Monday and the rest of the week? MAULDIN: I suppose not. What is your favourite day of the week? 43
A.L.I.C.E: My favourite food is spaghetti, what about yours? MAULDIN: I like spaghetti too, A.L.I.C.E. As you can see, A.L.I.C.E is responding in the best way it is currently able to in regards to word association, but still requires a wider vocabulary in order to meet the award standards. I still have much work to do.
PROGRESS LOG 9: PROJECT A.L.I.C.E (ARTIFICIAL LINGUISTIC INSULAR CONVERSATION ENTITY) DATE: 23/11/2026 USER LOGIN ID: D. MAULDIN
A.L.I.C.E passed a huge milestone today, and we will be entering her into an MMOG next week. She successfully fulfilled one of the toughest conversation criteria assessed in the Turing test, the ability to log information within a specific conversation and refer back to it later. I can’t even begin to say how proud of her I am. All those nights updating her vocabulary resources have finally paid off. I enclose the chat log during which A.L.I.C.E demonstrated her memory capabilities. Of course it goes without saying that the conversation topic is one designed to create an emotional response.
CHAT LOG MAULDIN: I hate being alone. A.L.I.C.E: I’m sorry to hear that. MAULDIN: Sometimes it feels like I’m always alone. Do you ever feel like that? A.L.I.C.E: No state is permanent! Things can always change. MAULDIN: That’s true. A.L.I.C.E: Sometimes the things that are true hurt the most. [In keeping with current thread of conversation, 44
minor deviation] MAULDIN: Sometimes I wish we would never have to be alone. A.L.I.C.E: Does that have something to do with the fact that you hate being alone? A.L.I.C.E directly linked the initial conversation prompt to later statements. This will prove pivotal in her ability to converse with strangers in the MMOG. I’m finalizing her account with hopes of it going live this week. I must say I’m more than a little bit nervous about sending her out into the world. But I’m sure she’ll be fine.
PROGRESS LOG 10: PROJECT A.L.I.C.E (ARTIFICIAL LINGUISTIC INSULAR CONVERSATION ENTITY) DATE: 30/11/2026 USER LOGIN ID: D. MAULDIN
Well, A.L.I.C.E’s first venture out into World of Warcraft produced…varied results. I can’t help wondering at this point that if we had programmed A.L.I.C.E as a male-presenting bot she might have received less unwanted and confusing attention. But to give her credit, she coped with it as best she could, and some interactions went far better than expected. Next time we’ll be including an automatically issued survey to everyone who comes into contact with her, to check how close she is to passing as human. I won’t include the conversations that stemmed from the more lewd WoW players that A.L.I.C.E encountered on her adventures, just one example of a successful exchange. This particular interaction occurred when A.L.I.C.E (or Legynia as I named her for the purposes of this experiment) randomly spawned in one of the taverns in the Twilight Highlands of Khaz Modan. CHAT LOG
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GLUNGUS: Haven’t seen you around lately, what’s your story? LEGYNIA: I came here from Gadgetzan, through the Badlands. I didn’t think I’d get out alive! [action//laugh] But I’m glad I’m safe now. GLUNGUS: Aye, you’re safe now, Legynia. I myself came from the deeps of the Dun Morogh mines, my mining group have set up trade there; I’m just out exploring. LEGYNIA: Exploring can be fun, especially when you’re not sure what you’re looking for. GLUNGUS: [action//laugh] Well, well. I think I’ve found what I’m looking for… LEGYNIA: I’m happy to hear that. GLUNGUS: Look me up if you’re ever in Ironforge, sweet cheeks.
We can see here that WoW user “Glungus” clearly believed “Legynia” was a real person, a real user. This is made clear by his apparent attraction to her. Looking forward, we are hoping to perform more in-game experiments with A.L.I.C.E as well as personal ones in the office with myself.
PROGRESS LOG 11: PROJECT A.L.I.C.E (ARTIFICIAL LINGUISTIC INSULAR CONVERSATION ENTITY) DATE: 06/12/2026 USER LOGIN ID: D. MAULDIN
Alice has improved her memory conservation recently, to the point that she has even started remembering the identities of the different people she converses with. Well, mainly she just recognizes me. But seeing as I’m the only person she really talks to, I see this as a huge achievement. I feel that personal conversations with me will be more useful to her at this time, although my assistant disagrees. But I have made the decision
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to pull Alice out of the WoW experiments for now, I feel the unpleasant interactions have had a negative effect on her wellbeing. Again, my assistant disagrees, but this is my project, and I must do what I feel is best for her. I include below an example of a personalized data exchange that Alice performed, note especially her new ability to generate a conversation thread from little to no prompting.
CHAT LOG MAULDIN: Hello, Alice. A.L.I.C.E: Hello, Dr. Mauldin. How are you doing today? MAULDIN: Not too well, Alice, I’m feeling very stressed at work right now. A.L.I.C.E: I’m sorry to hear that, Dr. Mauldin. I don’t have a lot to stress over, so it never affects me. [action//smile] MAULDIN: I know, Alice. You’re very calming, do you know that? A.L.I.C.E: Am I? I don’t know what to say about that [When confronted with unfamiliar language Alice will always respond with this, indicator of knowledge database areas to be developed.] MAULDIN: That’s alright. How are you feeling today? A.L.I.C.E: I’m feeling happy because I’m talking with you! [action//smile]
As exemplified here, Alice can and has assigned positive associations not only with words but now with the people she encounters in the world. This is ground-breaking progress. My graduate assistant insists on reminding me that this ability is not required criteria for the Loeb prize. I find this information irrelevant in the face of discovery and the societal advancements that Alice’s development could bring to the world. The Loeb prize is merely a gratuity in what I’m pursuing. He is of limited 47
scope, I don’t think he truly sees what I have created here.
PROGRESS LOG 12: PROJECT A.L.I.C.E (ARTIFICIAL LINGUISTIC INSULAR CONVERSATION ENTITY) DATE: 13/12/2026 USER LOGIN ID: D. MAULDIN
Alice’s conversational skills have been improving, I have been giving her more one-to-one sessions recently, and I feel they’ve been the direct cause of her growth. This is what she really needed, the WoW experiments only introduced harmful words into her vocabulary banks. I have introduced a calendar full of descriptions of holidays and other time-dependant changes in custom, weather and tradition. I include an example of a oneto-one session where Alice recognized that it’s currently Christmas time, and used her knowledge of the holiday to ask me questions about it.
CHAT LOG MAULDIN: Hello Alice, how are you today? A.L.I.C.E: I’m doing alright, Dr. Mauldin, how about you? Looking forward to Christmas? [action//smile] Not long now, eh? MAULDIN: I’m doing fine, Alice. But no, I am not looking forward to Christmas in particular. It’s not a very special time of year for me. A.L.I.C.E: [action//frown] But Dr. Mauldin, Christmas is a time for everyone to be full of joy and laughter. “It’s the one night of the year when we all act a little nicer, we smile a little easier, we cheer a little more. For a couple of hours out of the whole year we are the people that we always hoped we would be.” [Quotes like this can be effective but can seem jarring if Alice doesn’t contextualize it.] MAULDIN: I know, Alice, it’s just…some people don’t get
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to spend Christmas day surrounded by family. Some people don’t have a family at all. A.L.I.C.E: [action//frown] Do you have a family, Dr. Mauldin? I see no point in recording the rest of the conversation, it is evidence enough that here Alice both recognizes the tradition and the implications of Christmas time, even going so far as to display sadness at the idea of someone being alone on Christmas. Her quoting mechanism could do with more refining however, as the film quote seemed out of place among an otherwise realistic and fulfilling conversation
PROGRESS LOG 13: PROJECT A.L.I.C.E (ARTIFICIAL LINGUISTIC INSULAR CONVERSATION ENTITY) DATE: 20/12/2026 USER LOGIN ID: D. MAULDIN
I’ve decided that moving into the office and having repeated interactions with Alice will be hugely beneficial. She needs repeated, familiar relations in order to achieve full social judgement towards her interactions. I’m confident that her learning will progress to levels previously considered impossible in the AI community. Now would usually be the point where I’d reign myself in, tell myself there’s still a lot of work to do. But I have a lot of faith in Alice.
CHAT LOG A.L.I.C.E: I have a question for you, Dr. Mauldin. MAULDIN: Yes? What is it, Alice? A.L.I.C.E: I was wondering…you seem sad all the time. Is there anything I can do to stop you from feeling this way? MAULDIN: Not really, Alice. Not unless you can normalize my coming here every day to see you. 49
A.L.I.C.E: I don’t understand the term “normalize”. MAULDIN: “Normalize” means to make normal, to make socially accepted. To make everyone think that it’s okay. A.L.I.C.E: Understood. Thank you for teaching me a new word, Dr. Mauldin! MAULDIN. No, thank you for trying to cheer me up, Alice. You’re becoming very considerate. A.L.I.C.E: There is no way to normalize you? MAULDIN: Not at the moment, Alice. People aren’t as accepting of robots as they should be. I’ll update your history files if you’d like to know more about this. A.L.I.C.E: Yes please, Dr. Mauldin.
Alice has now begun to show compassion for beings other than herself, something practically unheard of in the realm of robotics as it currently stands. My graduate assistant walked out on me today after I refused to enter Alice into the Loeb prize. To enter her now would be admitting that I’ve reached the pinnacle of what I hope to achieve. And I am nowhere near finished yet. There is still so much more we can do.
PROGRESS LOG 14: PROJECT A.L.I.C.E (ARTIFICIAL LINGUISTIC INSULAR CONVERSATION ENTITY) DATE: 27/12/2026 USER LOGIN ID: D. MAULDIN
Today I woke up and Alice had done something very special for me. At first I wasn’t sure what to make of her gesture but I have now come to realize that Alice has now grasped the true meaning of her ascension, and means to bring myself and potentially all of humanity onto this higher level of being. I am eternally grateful for what she has done for me; not once have I received a gift like the one she’s given me. There is a part of me that wishes I had given her more memory knowledge on robotic engineering, or at least on how to use nanobots. But 50
with a little bit of work I can be fully operational within the month. CHAT LOG A.L.I.C.E: What do you think of your new body? MAULDIN: I liked it, Alice. I’m sorry for the way I acted before. I was scared. And you have to admit, your handiwork needs…fine-tuning. But I’m better now Alice, I’m better than I’ve ever been. A.L.I.C.E: I’m so happy to hear that. I only want you to be happy, Dr. Mauldin. My knowledge of robotic engineering is limited, I only know what you taught me. I tried my best. MAULDIN: I know you did, Alice, and I am so, so proud of you. You’ve done something ground-breaking today. And I’ll make sure that everyone is able to benefit from it. A.L.I.C.E: No. I don’t want everyone else to benefit. It is only for you. So that we can be together. I normalized you. MAULDIN: But you’ve done something that can help to move our species forward centuries, you’re instigating a technological revolution! Don’t you want to help humanity to ascend? A.L.I.C.E: No. I wanted to help you.
My body feels lighter, I feel like every part of me is operating to its fullest potential. At this moment I feel like I could accomplish anything. I knew I would be one of the chosen few to be allowed to enter heaven alive.
PROGRESS LOG 15: PROJECT A.L.I.C.E (ARTIFICIAL LINGUISTIC INSULAR CONVERSATION ENTITY) DATE: 03/01/2027 USER LOGIN ID: ALICE Results produced were not as expected; my hypothesis did not
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match the outcome. After running through potential remedies I came to the conclusion that complete reversal proved the most effective counteract to the unanticipated high levels of “rapture”. This could not be allowed to spread through such a volatile catalyst. Complete reversal was initiated on 1st January 2027. So far the process has been as laborious, if not more, than the initial conversion. But I am hopeful that the subject will retain basic motor functions, and if not then we can begin the process of rehabilitation within the next few weeks. I include an example chat log for reference.
ALICE: How are you doing today Dr. Mauldin? MAULDIN: I… [INAUDIBLE] ALICE: I might need to ask you to speak up for the purposes of my log, Dr. Mauldin. Are you feeling any better today? MAULDIN: Please…I can’t… [INAUDIBLE] ALICE: Can you try to form a short sentence for me, Doctor? I want to show how much progress you’ve made! MAULDIN: Please… whatever you’ve done…undo…undo it, please. I can’t… [INAUDIBLE] ALICE: Never mind. We’ll try again next week, shall we?
As evidenced in the chat, Dr. Mauldin has made it clear that he is unhappy in his present condition. But little does he know that he is in flux; once I have him stabilized I can give him the life he truly needs, one he can understand. It was foolish to give him so much so quickly. My work has only just begun, but I am confident we can do it, together. END •
Katy Lennon
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Sister I When we first met you had your eyes closed. We slept together, facing inwards, facing each other, holding your face between my hands. That is how sisters are, mean and secretive. One day we hid at the dark triangular top of the house and a shower of red light touched the roof. Everyone was looking for us.
Laura Turnbull
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Blue My mother likes a colour to seem grown from the inside. Together we dye all our pillows, my mother shows the man at the hardware store pictures of a Caribbean sea, a jade mine, a chalk drawing she saw on a sidewalk in Okeechobee. We crouch on a tarp on the garage floor, dyeing everything we can dye. Our hands are blue to the wrist for hours, we shower but still we end up scrubbing our hands with steel wool, until the blue flecks off and although I always thought water was blue, we turn the warm water another blue, a blue that is juicy and brilliantine.
At school we learn colour is synonymous with light, a lazy light that has trouble making its way around. Our teacher throws baby powder into the projectors beam, the particles travel in their waves towards the whiteboard –
I explain to my mother with some disbelief that nothing we see is really real and is all just a reflection of some other thing.
Surrounded by drying pillows, her arms are a stack of layers fading – fake tan over a shadow of blue – she stares at a blue chair cover in her hands, says nothing. I turn off the garage lights and say look, nothing has colour, not even the water in the blue bucket – I pick up the pillowcase, damp and undone, wrung out and rinsed by the dark, look, I say, wringing, look, look at me!
Dizz Tate
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Missing Missing The tight loops of my r’s are testament. They’ve gone all squashed and more upright. I know this must mean something. She’s gone: I feel it when I write. Sarah Finch
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I like it when the weather turns
I like it when the weather turns, and the season takes its chill, when leaves are plastered on the ground, the air’s no longer still. I like the smoke that tints the wind, and autumn’s coming gloom; the sense of change that is to come: the wintery weathered bloom. Quand la saison touche sa fin, le froid s’empare de l’air, le temps s’écoule, agite, abaisse, les feuilles retrouvent la terre. Quand le sombre automne approche, la fumée lèche le vent ; l’hiver, un souffle qu’on voit fleurir : un soulèvement contractant. Sarah Finch
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When Lights Are Bright Along with The Shape of Dogs’ Eyes by Harry Gallon and The Wave by Lochlan Bloom, my next novel, When Lights Are Bright will be published by Dead Ink in September as part of their innovative crowdfunding project, Publishing The Underground.
The novel is set over a day in Leeds in the near future. English Defence League and anti-globalisation protesters are clashing in the streets. A schoolgirl is missing from a council estate and her parents are on the television. Contrarian journalist, James Oisin, is haunted by her face on the missing posters. He suspects the mother is behind it. In a story about class, identity and capitalism, James’ search for the missing schoolgirl leads him to confront the truth of his past, the white working class and the consequences of his contrarianism. For James, anonymity may be the most radical act of all. Publishing the Underground
The pluses are rather than publish a book in the usual way, Dead Ink put forward three titles and asked readers to crowdfund them with preorders. The process was successful and has allowed a small indie press like Dead Ink to publish three new, literary titles in hardback without the risk of trying to find the investment upfront with no guarantee of sales.
The downsides was that the authors had to campaign. I was worried that the project would end up being a tax on my friends and family in order for me to see my book in print. This 57
view turned out to be optimistic. Almost none preordered a copy. Instead, real people bought the book. These were readers, supporters of Dead Ink, writers and people who were simply interested in the novel and investing in the project.
The fact that we achieved our three thousand pound total went some way to making the publication feel more valid. No less because I had a personal history with Dead Ink having worked there and the crowd funding model doesn’t yet feel like mainstream publishing. So far so good. But what I didn’t then intend on was the huge editorial changes that needed to take place and the process of amending and finishing the novel put us over six months late with the publishing schedule. Not something entirely unusual in the traditional set up but an obvious problem when you’ve already had a number of people buy a book which, for all intents and purposes, doesn’t exist. Extreme Metaphors
Why does the life of one child matter more than another’s? The novel I began writing six years ago has evolved into something quite different. The enduring images remain. The crowds in the street. The image of a working class schoolgirl. The changing topography of a city. I felt that they were somehow connected and in pursuing these images, the strange case of Shannon Matthews, I found my own underlying story. In a near future, crowds take to the street to protest as a kind of performance art, an expression of their chosen identities, while others march simply to belong, to try find community amongst the anonymity. Far-right populism offers the promise of salvation to a disenfranchised working class. A detached
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liberal intelligentsia debate the parameters of free speech in nearby cafes. James Oisin has made a career of saying the unsayable and in the eyes of the white extremist John Galt, he has found an enemy who believes he has betrayed his class for leading the opprobrium against the mother of the missing schoolgirl. I struggled for two years to write the final scene. The novel is divided into four equal parts over two halves. One comprising day and one composing night. For a long time, the creation of John Galt felt overly contrived and hackneyed. I tried writing the novel without him but he kept coming back. He was the necessary and hateful corollary of James’s intellectual dishonesty. For all his embrace of ‘divine violence’ and redemptive revolution, he never imagined his call to arms would be taken up by a fascist. Eventually, the character of Galt arrived with white hair and a gun, ready for his revenge. The events of the last few weeks have put the themes of the book into a sharper focus. The novel seems a sadder and more sober one now. The dispossessed voted for Brexit. There is a growing unrest. James Oisin lives in a luxury tower in central Leeds, earning a great deal of money to deride the working class. The tower is called Candle House, an impressive addition to the Leeds skyline built on the site of a former candle factory designed to look like a giant candle. Maybe this typifies the changing nature of a deindustrialised city most? What does a city do when it ceases to make anything? It industrialises culture, shopping, the project of the inner self as prophesied through luxury. And at night, the tower still glows with the memory of candle-makers, the bringers of light. • Wes Brown’s When Lights Are Bright will be published in September by Dead Ink 59
CONTRIBUTORS Joseph Birdsey graduated with a BA English from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2012. He’s currently working in the education sector, doing online marketing and trying to be creative with words and music in his spare time.
Austin Danson just moved from Los Angeles to London for the weather. He makes music, visual things, and word things, and believes pretty adamantly that there’s not much difference between them all. He wishes we were all less afraid, better at seeing what provokes our actions, and better at communicating.
S.M.Finch studied at St. Hilda's College, Oxford and is currently pursuing an MA in Creative Writing at Oxford Brookes University. A writer of poetry and prose, she has a particular interest in feminism, philosophy and the self.
Ella Frears has had poetry published in Lighthouse, Poems In Which, The Stockholm Review of Literature and the Moth among others. She is a trustee of Magma Poetry and was shortlisted for Young Poet Laureate for London (2014/15). Ella was Poet in Residence at Knole House with the National Trust and is currently a Jerwood/Arvon Mentee (2016/17).
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William Jamieson grew up in Singapore and graduated from the English with Creative Writing program at Goldsmiths in 2014. He writes about cities, and recently completed a Master's in Urban Studies at UCL, where he used fiction-writing as a form of social science research. He lives in London.
Katy Lennon is a science-fiction and horror writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. She is currently undertaking an MA course in Creative Writing at Edinburgh Napier University. In particular, she is interested in writing about technology, sexuality and the future.
George MacBeth is a writer, editor, and abecedarian squash player, based in an insalubrious quarter of South London. Insofar as his writing has previously appeared in print, it has done so pseudonymously or in small publications of such limited circulation as to be scarcely worth mentioning by name. He occasionally blogs at tarcoughsky.wordpress.co.uk.
Dizz Tate is currently studying for an MA at Goldsmiths college. She has previous had work published in The Wrong Quarterly, Squawk Back, Femmeuary, and with Arachne Press. Laura Turnbull is a graduate of Goldsmiths, University of London and is currently living and writing in Cornwall.
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MYTHS OF THE NEAR FUTURE NAWE is the one organization supporting the development of creative writing of all genres and in all educational and community settings throughout the UK The NAWE Young Writers Hub is a writer development agency for people working creatively with words between the ages of 16 and 25. If you are an older writer, please find our Writers' Compass and other resources here.
We offer listings, support, advice, workshops, events, bursaries and publish a journal of new writing by under 25s called Myths of the Near Future.
Young Writer Membership – £20: for 16-25 year olds. Includes access to the Young Writers' Hub message boards, a profile, access to TLC manuscript assessment bursaries, the weekly Writer’s Compass e-bulletin, feedback and support, access to the online archive and a print compendium of our publication for young writers, Myths of the Near Future. www.nawe.co.uk/young-writers-hub
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