Two days into lockdown, the children burst in, eyes shining, talking over each other.
“We found something, in the woods!”
“We rescued it. It would have DIED!”
“Shh! Don’t give it away!”
In unison: “Come and see!”
Giggling, they grab me with grubby hands and drag me into the garden. I follow, swept up in their commotion. Behind the greenhouse they squat around a grey bucket full of sludge and gaze up.
“Frogspawn!”
As spring melts into summer, we take small daily pilgrimages to our bucket pond, sometimes together, chattering, sometimes alone and silent. We peer into murky water, searching for life, for change, for hope.
We draw life cycle diagrams to show their teachers, with arrows and labels.
In real life, things happen slowly. Each day seems much like the day before, but somehow, as we watch but without us seeing, jelly blobs turn to black darting specks propelled by tiny tails. Then the specks grow fatter, skin mottling brown and green.
They’re the size of a fingernail now, bumps where limbs will be, and strong, fat tails. What marvels they’ve managed. But we know more is coming, that the great metamorphosis—from small, silent swimming thing to great ribbiting hopper, with arms, legs, eyes, lungs—still awaits us. We’re only two-thirds of the way around the circle. One more arrow to go.
Every day, they lurk in the bottom of the bucket, stopping my heart with their stillness. Then they dart up, break the surface, and I breathe again. Small hands clutch at my sleeve, wide eyes search for mine, to see their anticipation reflected, for reassurance that, if we wait patiently, in our own suspended animation, we’ll get to watch the great change we yearn for unfold, to see life win, to witness an ordinary miracle.
Saturday, 26 June 2021
'Suspended Animation' by Rachel Swabey
'Alternate Ending' by Kati Bumbera
1.
She slips out of the palace one night while the prince is asleep, dreaming of someone else.
It's a long walk to town and her feet hurt. But the night is warm and she can read the stars to find her way.
After all, it's not her first journey into the unknown.
2.
She finds a job as a hydrotherapist at a spa.
Her patients are stiff and graceless in the pool. It hurts them to move in the water, but they need it to ease a deeper pain. One that you feel at home, in your own element, until it chases you away.
She doesn't talk much, but her patients like her.
3.
At lunchtime, she sits on a bench.
Girls walk by, flicking their long hair and linking arms. She feels a pang of sadness.
But tears dry quickly in the heat. Summer lifts her up like rising tide. Tramway bells ring and flowers unfurl. She remembers being young, longing for all this from a distance.
She was told she needed love to grow a soul. It made sense then. But not here, not where everything grows just by living under the sun.
4.
"Your next patient's here", says the receptionist. "Oh, and this came."
A wedding invitation. Silver names glint on ivory paper, like a knife's blade catching light.
She tosses the card on her desk.
She hardly notices the breeze that lifts it up and carries it away, far from the city, out to the ocean, where it falls into the waves and dissolves into foam.
'From the Sound' by Audrey Niven
Seaweed lulls the posts of the pier, wafting this way and that with the tides. It strokes one side then the other as days turn to night, turns to day, paying no mind to the limpets’ cling. Boots tread above it, up and down the pier, bringing lobster creels and post-bags, boxes of toilet paper and tins from the mainland. Boats churn their engines spitting oil, stirring up silt and tiny fishes, chasing the peace away.
When the wind gets up and the full moon casts its power over the Sound, there are storms. Rain lashes the waves as they crest and crash, crest and crash, hurling themselves upwards, fragmenting in spray and falling back down to the deepening fury.
On a night such as that, boots ran through the streets, the copper bell, green with age, clanging its reveille.
Come save us! Come now!
Lifeboatmen and women braved its summons as they always do. They ran to their mission full knowing it would one day be their turn, or their son’s, or a stranger from a far shore in need.
When they brought back the bodies and laid them on the beach, the oldest lifeboatman wandered away – turning his back, the others thought. But he walked to the post on the pier where the old bell hung and rang it. He rang it and rang it until the whole village came, at sun-up, on the rising tide.
And they stood together before the newsmen came, before the headlines were written, before the outrage rose like a wave, achieving nothing, and keened for the dead as if they were their own.
'The Year of Presto Chang-o' by Lynn Mundell
After a hot soak in the tub, her head evaporates in the bathroom mirror. Wiping her hand across the surface, there’s her face, small as her Benjamin Bunny dinner plate. Poof. Gone again. Coins are pulled from her ears and vanish in her brother’s hand. He swallows Mother’s silky scarves, all nine of them! It’s easy to make things go away, but harder to get them back, he tells her. Their turtle, Daltry, is placed under the top hat, which then slowly moves across the kitchen floor. Her brother curses. During a car ride to the beach, a cloud looks exactly like a giant moth—before the sky rearranges and it’s just a cloud again. In the back seat they sleep as the station wagon swerves. When she awakens days later, there is only one of them where an instant ago, surely, there had been two.
'1967' by Jayne Martin
The bank had taken our land, but my grandpa swore they would not take our house. It was near dawn when they hitched it up and we hit the road. Cows bellowed their good-byes. We took the back roads, me and grandpa sitting up front with the truck driver. Me waving at the people bending their heads near all the way ‘round at the sight of the old house groaning past. I could tell we were out of Kansas when the smell of freshly tilled soil vanished and the air turned brown from factory smoke. There didn’t seem to be any place to put our house and I wondered how well Grandpa had thought this out. He said we were taking it to Graceland, that Elvis would let us put it on his place, that they’d been friends in the Army. He’d called Elvis “son.” A fly buzzed around our heads in the cab. I opened the window and it flew back toward Kansas.
'The Three Porta-migos' by Sonora Hills
You can see them from a mile away, abandoned on the side of the main road into town.
They look like three, expectant children waiting for their mamas to come get them.
Three months, and not a word’s been said about when they’ll be picked up again. Da says they’re an eyesore—a mark of humanity in a long stretch of road where there’s always been nothing. “Who the hell wants three porta potties starin’ at them on their way to work every morning? Somebody should do somethin’.”
Jamie from across the road says he took a piss in one once. I dunno whether to believe him. He has the guts, yeah, but it must’ve took some commitment to hike out two miles just to pee in a yellow box.
“Which one,” I asked, though—too curious to stay quiet.
His grey eyes twinkled under his shock of ginger hair. “The middle un,” he said.
Da says it was an accident—man who drives them around got mixed up and put them there instead of the county fairground. Just never came back to fix his mistake.
Jamie says they got left because the truck driver died—truck flipped over and the potties spiralled through the air to land perfectly intact, right-way up. When they cleaned the truck away they left the potties like a gravestone.
However they got there, they look real fancy. Not just any old plastic porta potties—they look metal, the kind that have little sinks inside so you can wash your hands after, instead of walking around with sticky fingers.
I wonder if they’ll ever get taken away, or if they’ll just sit there, marking the half-way point to town, until the rain makes them bleed rust and they fall apart into nothing.
'Lights' by Susan Borgersen
Green
She couldn’t wear green, not even the darkest forest green. “Not allowed. Our religion,” her mother always said
Settling for blue for the dance was exactly that—settling. Georgia knew blue gave her a moustache; she’d had her ‘colours’ done at a party where they drape coloured scarves under your chin and everyone says what they thought. Green came up tops.
Sighing, she slipped on the blue dress, knowing no-one would look at a girl with a moustache, knowing she’d be invisible when the lights dimmed and pairings happened. But someone did notice.
Red
Sasha saw red every time she heard the upset at Georgia’s next door. Furniture crashing. Cries for help. Sasha felt helpless. The guy was a brute. Sasha watched him on Sundays washing his pickup—radio blaring—singing along out of tune—hairy belly hanging over his belt. The morning after the worst night of screaming broke with a plum red sky. Sasha recalled the old rhyme: red sky in the morning sailors warning, and knew she should do something. So she called Kenny.
Amber
Kenny’s the guy who danced with Sasha back when. He’d remarked on Sasha’s gentleness, told her he’d always be there for her. It was her amber light, her ‘go with caution’ signal. Kenny—one of the good guys.
Kenny came. Parked his white van across Georgia’s driveway, blocking the brute’s pickup. Sasha knew it was dodgy but loved him for it while she dialled 911.
Sasha and Kenny visited Georgia in hospital. They took her golden yellow roses tied with a scarlet ribbon. She wore mint green pyjamas in watered silk. Kenny said. “They make your eyes look turquoise.” Sasha said, “They give you a lovely peaches and cream complexion.”
'Whiskers' by Timothy Boudreau
A Norelco electric razor, black plastic, with three floating silver heads. Jacob’s dad disassembled it, set the three heads on a paper towel, lifted each between forefinger and thumb to sweep out the leftover beard trimmings with a tiny brush, gently, lovingly, giving each silver head a final inspection, turning it toward the light, a puff of breath, before restoring them in the razor.
“Can I try it Dad, please?”
“You don’t have any whiskers yet Jacob.”
When Jacob’s mother bought his father a new razor for Christmas—this one had an attachment for nose and ear hair—his dad gave Jacob the old one. “Here, you can save it until you need it,” giving him a look, “shouldn’t be more than a couple years.”
Jacob was nearly eighteen when the first random wispy strands of black sprouted out of his baby-smooth face. When his mom and stepdad were out, he sneaked the Norelco into the bathroom and plugged it in. Its buzz was louder than he expected, but as he passed it from chin to throat to cheek in slow circles the sensation was warm, a comfort. It still smelled like his dad—a combination of soap and aftershave, his dad’s pheromones. Jacob brought it back to his bedroom, and there before his mom and stepdad got home he cleaned it, sitting on his bed with paper towels and the little brush, zipping the razor back in its case before he heard the door swing open and the sickening sound of his stepdad calling to him up the stairs, “Hey Jake I brought your mother back safe and sound!” acting like he owned the place.
'Better Like That' by Alva Holland
‘Better like this? Or like this? Or are they the same?’
The doctor repeats this question so many times, my ears hurt more than my eyes. The model human eyeball perched on a rotating metal plinth in the corner of the examination room glares at me with each gyration. I blink and replace the stare with a disco ball – that suspended rotating glitter ball reflecting our pitiful efforts to dance to The Bay City Rollers’ ‘Bye-Bye Baby.’
The memories come flooding in.
You wore a pink halter-neck top over purple bell-bottoms. You told me your friend was more attractive, but it was only ever you. With multi-coloured beams catapulting across your face, I could tell your eyes were blue, the same blue you passed on to four of our six children.
Ben’s favourite colour was blue. His only request for Christmas four years running was a blue plasma ball lamp which you still switch on in his room, lying empty, preserved in his memory – the blue room with four lamps.
‘Better like this? Or like this? Or are they the same?’
It was better like that. Better when we were young when the music switched to a slow number and you stayed. Better when you accepted my ring, when we danced again under a disco ball I hooked up in the living room a month after Ben was born. Better when I could see your smile. Better when blue was a happy colour.
You sit quietly in your chair while the doctor explains.
‘To be honest, macular degeneration is such a slow-moving disease, I doubt he will go blind before…well, you know, before…taking his age into account.’
Doc faltered. I felt your hand squeeze mine.
‘Let’s go,’ you say. ‘There’s a disco ball waiting.’
Better like that.
---
First published by ZeroFlash in 2017.
'Freewriting à la Tesco' by Teika Marija Smits
It’s like when a nurse, needle in hand, instructs you not to tense. You can’t help it. You tense. Or if someone tells you to not think about a baby. There it is – whoosh! – peaches-heavy in your arms, its marvelling eyes begging you to really, properly conjure it into existence.
“Just write what you want,” says the creative writing tutor, her voice like a promise. “Write… naturally.”
I can’t do it. I tense. My mind flits from Salman Rushdie to Jane Austen; Octavia Butler to Dr. Seuss.
As the teacher drifts by me and notes my stubbornly blank page, the constipated look on my face, she suggests I try freewriting. “You know, anything, dear, anything.”
I wince. Anything is a pigeon pecking at a keyboard, hoping for the seed of a haiku. Anything is a slick of grass vomited up by my cat; green runes glued to sheets of A4. I go home, disappointed. Wonder what else I could’ve spent my £25 on.
It’s only when I’m writing the shopping list (you know, not tense) that I find my voice. Oranges are fat as Jupiter; Marmite, bottled grief. Eggs are crushed dreams masquerading as symbols of life. Milk – tears shed by breasts which will never be suckled.
'The Anthropology Major' by Rashi Rohatgi
The ice on Sita’s gloved palms achieved an unexpected friction with the ice on the street as she fell, and Sita thought about that: unexpected friction. When she’d come back from her semester abroad, she’d moved into the rented room of a girl off to Senegal for the spring, and though her housemates were perfectly civil — nursing students she hoped were now being feted by their hometowns — she had not forged ties. It was the perfect time, she’d imagined, to bring back men without pause. Sita found that the easiest time to do so was when the men were already in her living room: the health sciences students were constantly in her living room, drinking their way through the weekend, bopping to music even she understood wouldn’t be cool after graduation, trying to score a pretty nurse but, failing that, a pretty nurse’s housemate. The problem with pre-meds — and they were always pre-meds, the boys who had the confidence to flirt with a stranger – was that they always knew someone else Indian. How could they compliment her when that other girl, the one with hair just as long and silken, eyes just as deep, lips just as luscious, was a curve-wrecking thorn in their side? An anthro major, they’d repeat, your parents must be cool. One, a redhead named Micah: or else ashamed.
“Yes, but —” she realized she couldn’t quite bear to say what she wanted to say, that though she was sleeping with strangers in an attempt to wholly inhabit the present, she knew she would never be here now in the way he’d desire, for she was always also that other Indian girl, who also inhabited the now, and whose experience of shame seemed to require her. They’d fallen into bed together. She’d never felt smooth since.
'Preparedness' by Janet Olearski
If she had not prepared for the storm, the consequences would have been disastrous… deckchairs blown into nearby fields, tiles swept from the porch roof, garden furniture splintered into pieces of wood ready for the next bonfire, plant pots smashed, flowers butchered. Her life disrupted. A loss of order.
So, she did prepare for the storm, folding the deckchairs, securing tiles, shifting and stacking garden furniture, putting pots and flowers in places of safety.
But, since the storm never came, she moved everything back. Though for the life of her, where it all originally went, she could scarce remember.
'Cello on the Bus' by Lucy C Hooft
I take my cello on the bus. The case smacks my shin. I flap her up the step, clattering the floor and crash my cello on the bus.
Eyes roll, heads swerve. Why are you carrying that around? Why are you laden down with something so cumbersome, in public?
Why are you taking up space meant for another?
The bus fills with people, bodies push, bruise, more mouths breathing, more people taking up space meant for another.
I lie her down, flattening her fluted back to the trembling floor. I prise her open, grasping the catches, identifying cracks, fractures, flares, exposing the fragile pulse within.
Do we have to listen? Do you have to intrude on our world with your hurt and your turbulent heart?
I spike the floor, her body fits mine like a single piece. Her curved waist, her pointed hips and shoulders, her slender neck peers across my shoulder.
I play my cello on the bus.
Metallic strings - taut like that moment - mark the flesh of my fingertips. Stretched-out sinews resound through vermiculated wood.
I play her melody, curling thoughts into feelings, released. My pull of bow on strings sends vibrations soaring into every crowded ear, ringing chords in every heart and giving life to her loss. A whisper, a quiet weeping swells to full-throated chorus, her voice breaks through in plucky, striking, quivering vibrato.
I bear my loss, in public.
I catch a smile, a heart lifted out of the hurry to work, the ear-buds, phone-bowed necks and now - here. Here in the bus, hearing her song.
I fill the missing space meant for another. And I am the one she always knew I could be. The one who plays her cello on the bus.
'Reasons I can never go back to your parents’ house after you’ve gone' by Madeline Anthes
- Your sister. She’s nice, but sometimes too nice, and asks me lots of questions. Like, inappropriate ones about joints and diseases and things a 12-year-old shouldn’t ask about. She listens to that loud clashing music and sits with her door cracked so she can watch me walk by and trap me in the hallways.
- Your parents. They’re quiet and make me feel itchy and unsettled. They watch TV and laugh at the corny jokes. They never change the channel. They package leftovers for me in a Tupperware container and tell me not to bother bringing it back and thank me profusely when I do. They treat me like they’ve known me forever. Like I’m part of the family.
- The smell. It smells like dinner. Like roasted chicken and steamed broccoli. It smells like your mom’s candles and your dad’s bourbon and your sister’s roll-on glitter stick. It smells like the dog was out in a puddle and there’s Febreze on the couch. It smells nothing like you.
- You. The way your parents look at me and see you and it’s always a little wistful, like if they just asked nicely I could conjure you. The way your baby pictures and scribble-nonsense child drawings and communion photos and band posters are still all over the walls. The way you’re splattered everywhere but the house is completely void of you at the same time, and the fullness and emptiness confuses me and leaves me searching for a shred of you somewhere, anywhere, so that it can just make sense. The way I inhale in a breath in your parents’ house and it feels like I’m stealing a bit of air that may have once touched you. I want to deserve your air. I don’t know if I do.
'Colour within Memories and Souvenirs' by Stephanie Percival
Thirty...thirty-one...
You learnt a lot from your mother. How to be clean...how to conform...keep things hidden. You’re kneeling on the floor sorting through the bottom drawer of the final chest. Her house is empty, except for sharp echoes, whispering through clean, cold air... ‘pick that up, you’re so messy.’
Forty... Folded squares of white linen rough against your fingers. Tea towels collected over years. You weren’t sure where she’d stashed them. There’s a hint of polish from the wood surface and it’s still shiny as if no dust would dare linger in your mother’s house.
She hated mess. You can’t imagine the clammy business of your mother having sex with your dad. He’d left when you were tiny. His voice is what you remember. A deep dark voice which sparked with anger as he shouted. Your mother hadn’t talked about him. You presumed he’d taken up too much space, cluttering the house with his big shoes and garage working overalls. Leaving rainbow petrol smears on mother’s skin.
Then it was just you and her. You were not a tidy child; limbs gangling, knocking against things. Hair; cork screw curls, untameable.
You unfold one of the tea towels. A crackle of static as it reveals a picture of Scarborough. You couldn’t go on the beach; ‘Sand gets everywhere.’ Instead, you walked the prom, watched the donkeys and other kids flying kites.
Every year a souvenir was purchased. Then hidden away. Enclosing the happy brightness of the day within their pictures. Folding them secretly inside.
As more cloths unfurl, primary colours dance in the still air, like butterflies unshackled from cocoons.
Crying is a messy emotion, not to be encouraged. But you can’t stop your tears.
These tea towels won’t go to the charity shop. You’ll take them home and use them.
Debut Flash: 'Three Perceptions of the Winter Soup Kitchen at the Olde Church on the Hill' by Sarah Barnett
Mrs Cadaver-Jones edges towards the Church; it looms large and imposing. She isn’t fooled by its promise of sanctuary. ‘Pah!’ she spits the word into her woollen jumper; it reverberates through the moth holes, sour breath brushing her skin. A growl in her stomach reminds her hot soup beckons. The do-gooder will serve her, try to lure her into the flock with his smiles. He’ll fail. She will accept the bed on such a bitter night while watching her brittle back. Creak left, creak right, as fractured dreams come.
Gabriel Hope approaches the Church – a haven of promise, safety, warmth. A holy embrace to ward off fear. A hot meal, a warm bed, away from the piercing icicle of winter. His eyes are warm with gratitude as the angel serves him his broth. This night, sleep will come without fear; or dread of thieves in the dark; or a kick from a privileged soul spouting cruel, venomous drivel. Cocooned in the blanket, he will dream of his salvation, knowing it will come as his prayers grow in strength.
Morticia North assesses the spire, which stabs a blackened sky. The old church beckons her into its cold vaults, where spirits whisper through the creaking eaves. Dusty, faded cushions offer no comfort on the pews. The man stirs the cauldron, slops the witches’ brew into the plastic bowl. She clutches it like a Dickensian orphan, drinks deep. The potion works its spell, almost enough to quell the fear. She edges to the makeshift bed and hopes the blanket protects from the apparitions that haunt the crevices. Yet the ghouls creep under the hessian and infiltrate her dreams.
In the chill morning, the three emerge; they see the crocuses have broken through the ice. Soon Spring will cast them out again.
'Fidelity' by Jacqui Pack
We scattered Jasper’s ashes at the top of Butser Hill. Two handfuls each. The wind took him. Four clouds of grief spread out across an otherwise empty sky and drifted over the A3. We cried – for what we’d lost as well as in thanks for the years that we’d shared – then returned to the car that still had his bed in the back.
The next day I opened the front door to find four small mounds of ash on the step. After drying my eyes, I swept the ashes into the urn and drove to the car park at Eastney. The beach was deserted. I said a short prayer under my breath and emptied the urn out over the sea. The foamy waves Jasper had so often waded through welcomed him back, drawing their old friend far into The Solent for one final swim.
It rained hard that night. In the morning, when I opened the blind, a thin circle of ash was lying over the top of the pond.
The third time we laid Jasper to rest we didn’t leave home. Alongside the hedge that borders our garden he basks in sunlight until mid-afternoon and, when the moon lights the sky, he’s content to remain in his favourite spot. Faithfully watching over us all as he sleeps.
---
First published by Fictive Dream, 10th February 2021.
'Nude Radish Harvest' by Patience Mackarness
People would ask why we were friends, you so out-there, me not. I’d say Yin and Yang; It sounded cool, and saved me thinking of a real answer.
You came to my house often when we were kids. I didn’t like visiting yours, a once-grand villa that had a soggy sofa in the garden, sprouting mould and fungus like an ecological art installation. Inside were cobwebs, stained carpets, bits of plaster that fell from the walls with a whump and a puff of dust. There was never much in the fridge, so we’d forage in cupboards; we found potted shrimps, and anchovies that made us gag. Your parents never told us off. When I asked my mum why, she said they were probably busy. My dad said, "They're bloody hippies, that's what they are."
I didn’t tell my parents I’d seen your dad through the smeared kitchen window, pulling up radishes with no clothes on. His bumcrack was full of ginger hairs. I didn't wait for him to turn round, though afterwards I sort of wished I had.
I envied you a little back then, because your parents let you stay out after dark and run around barefoot. Later, everything you did was something I wasn't allowed to do. Or had never thought of doing. Or wanted to, but lacked the nerve.
At a seventeenth birthday party, we all got drunk-stoned and played Truth Or Dare. You took our dares, mooning passers-by through the window, swigging from every bottle in the drinks cabinet while we counted down from sixty. But then you chose Truth, and someone asked if you ever wished you could just be normal. We laughed, assuming you'd go Fuck no! and belch or fart or spray out a mouthful of beer.
But you said, "Every day."
'Muscle Memory' by Sara Magdy Amin
Halfway through the sentence, he paused. A juvenile burn scorched his ears.
Your address, sir?
Ever since he came here his muscles have been training for their new life. His throat was adopting new hymns, ones that didn’t amplify boisterously over the wailing of street sellers and the blares of tuk-tuks through the alleyways of Muiz Street. No minarets called his eyes heavenward to a prosperity. His hands were learning new ways to be known. He rearranged the letters that made his name, uncurled their bodies, removed their embellishments, reincarnated himself as A-h-m-e-d on the dotted line.
His tongue would abandon its guttural memory, once thickened by maternal emulation and invocations of the divine.
274 Kingston Street
Here, his entire body would eventually learn to yield to its new milieu, but his lips would retain the memory of that day they were shaded under palm trees, saturated with dates and honey, and her hair cascaded over her shoulders for the first time. His lips would never again seal quite intensely at “buh”, puff gently at “ha” and draw infinitely at “kuh”, and he would learn to say “I love you” only in a quick and short-lived part of the lips.
'Because the World Always Turns and People Always Forget' by Catherine Ogston
The man they found by the highway was ordinary enough until they opened him up. Perhaps they thought his body would reveal answers, or his name running through him like the letters of a seaside town in a piece of rock. But his heart was a cabbage, a maze of ridges pressed inside cool layered leaves. His lungs were broccoli trees; miniatures of vibrant green, thick-trunked with slender branches. Where his kidneys should have been there were two tiny horses, like children’s toys, ready to gallop around his torso.
When they cut into his veins the sky went dark. Birds shrieked in confusion and people rushed out of their houses wondering if the end had come. I sat on the old swing under the apple tree and let the last of the blossom drift down onto my cheeks like ash from a burning volcano. I knew it was only temporary. Soon they would sew him up so he would look like an ordinary man again. The birds would quieten and the sunlight would swing back on its curve from the darkness. And by the time the last stitch was in place everyone would forget about the man with the pale green heart of folds upon folds, and those minute ponies which used to race up and down the track of his spine.