'Death Penalty' by Stephan Burn

Death really isn’t as bad as people make out. 

Sure, there’s all manner of legal complications - inheritance and property ownership and the like - but mostly life just goes on. 

I’m lucky, really. I’m not the only one in this position, not in this community. Nobody quite knows why Regal Island is special in this way, but we’ve embraced it: the community has embraced me, and my buddies at the police department are just happy that the accident doesn’t stop me coming along to bowling nights. It’s a shame I can’t pick up a bowling ball or down a pitcher of beer, but I guess you’ve got to make some kind of sacrifice for a miracle, right?

It’s my wife who’s having the most trouble adapting. She did her grieving and her mourning, but here I still am. I can’t help out with dinner – or eat, for that matter – mow the lawn, pick up the shopping, or do any of those small repairs I’d been putting off for months. 

Worst of all, she always wanted kids. Now she never can. Not with me, anyhow. 

Sure, the ‘til death do us part’ business technically means she could move on - but how can she? Here I still am, every morning and evening, in her house, in her life, while she contends with being a widow – and having a husband at the same time.

The other problem is that it’s not just the good guys who carry on past their expiry date. Regal Island never had a lot of crime, but enough, and some of those guys have become pretty brazen now that they’re seemingly immortal. Sure, we can restrain them in circles of salt; but they can plan, and they can wait. After all, time is on their side.

But we’ll keep finding them, keep locking them up. It’s not like they can leave town; we keep a salt circle intact around the entire community and police it religiously. It makes some of the citizens feel like they’re locked up with the criminals. Criminals who seem to be coming here from all over the country to die - and live forever. 

But hey, it’s all in a day’s work for the Regal Island Police Department. 

Some say we’re cursed. But I say God bless the RIPD.

'Frankincense and cigarettes' by Charlotte Buchanan

April now and you still can’t dashed well smell anything. That marvellous, evocative dimension that takes you by surprise in springtime with new grass and a stranger’s aftershave, on through a jasmine summer and a student overcoat autumn;  it slips off for the winter without so much as a goodbye and hoboes its way through the southern hemisphere, returning at budbreak to lead me on another year’s dance .

But this year, something’s gone wrong. It’s still cold and there’s nothing to smell, nothing to open my mind to memories and experiences good and bad and the richness of magic and madness that throw me into delicious confusion.

But wait. I could use all the sweetness of adversity.  If my mind’s not going to open, this could be a perfect opportunity to see him one more time, get some precious books back, inquire after some beads and a t-shirt. What a relief to do it without all the emotion, without questioning the decisions made years ago; just the earthly neutrality of the visual, the cold scentlessness precluding the upsurge of any all-consuming memories.

So we meet in Hyde Park under a leaden sky. He’s brought what stuff of mine he still has and he is fine, he tells me, just sick of the weather. I hate small talk but never him and I’m agreeing out of what-is-it when suddenly the sun becomes warm – the clouds have broken up to spite me. Resist, resist, even though the warmth is bringing scents to life all around me: crocuses, hyacinths, tramps, fast food, car exhausts, perfume, the Underground.

Here comes the tension, cracking my mind open in the excitement and recalling Italian food and lemonade and black-covered Penguin books that are really our parents’, all with their fleeting scents on the tip of my subconscious. Come here, you. Shoulders, the same as they felt in photographs, hair and neck, and above all the smell, frankincense and cigarettes masking soap and toast. Where am I? Newcastle? Edinburgh? London. If I took off my wedding ring and dropped it now I’d remember the sound forever. But he’s pushing me away - not nastily because he could never be nasty - and I’m not at all prepared for what he says to me:  

“No, no, you smell different now.“

'Nothing to Fear' by Simon Lavery

When I was about fifteen my sister, Rose, who is two years older than me, had a girlfriend who used to come round to our house quite often.  I liked her, and she was very pretty.  Her name was Felicity.  She wore very short skirts and long socks, a passing fashion in those days; I expended much effort trying to stare at her thighs without seeming to.

Then she stopped visiting.  Rose said that Felicity had developed a phobia.

‘About what?’ I asked.

‘You!’ said Rose, spitefully.

‘Idiot’, I said, putting down my games console.  ‘What’s the real reason?’

‘She’s become afraid to go out now anywhere in case it rains.’  Rose looked critically at the console.

‘She’s phobic about getting wet?’

‘No, it’s weirder than that’, said Rose, flopping into an armchair and turning on the television.  ‘She says she’s afraid she’ll dissolve’.

This revelation perturbed me for some time.  A short while later one of the boys in my class at school stopped attending.  Rumours abounded, then his former best friend told me on the bus taking us to a cricket fixture.  He’d become my best friend by this time.

‘Want to know why Gurky stopped coming to school?’ he said, leaning towards me and lowering his voice conspiratorially.  I nodded.  ‘He thinks he’s made of glass!’

‘What!’

‘Ssh.  Keep your voice down.  His family don’t want people to know in case they think he’s bonkers’.

‘But thinking you’re made of glass is pretty bonkers’, I said.

Tom gave me a look that indicated he thought I was being pretty insensitive.  I tried redeeming myself by pretending to take psychological interest.

‘Is he afraid then that if he comes to school he’ll shatter?’ I said.

‘Not just to school: anywhere’, said Tom.  ‘He doesn’t go out anywhere any more’.

This news took me aback.  First Felicity and rain; now the glass boy.  What was happening?

In Biology soon after this disclosure we were told by Wiggy, our bald teacher, about insect stings and anaphylactic shocks.  Some people, he told us with what I considered excessive zeal, are so afraid of being stung by a wasp that they stay indoors all summer and keep all their windows and doors closed.  For once we refrained from throwing scalpels at him.

The world, I was discovering, is a dangerous place.  But at least wasps were real; fear of wasps was less delusional than that of my Uncle Charles, who refused to sit in his lovely garden on warm sunny days.  ‘What’, he would say, when asked why he insisted on sitting in his dusty study when the sun shone gloriously on his lush lawn outside: ‘and get squashed by a meteorite?’

'Late Bloom' by Kristina England

The crocuses refused to bloom no matter what Dylan tried – water, food, artificial sunlight.   He had even sung to them, though his mother insisted he had a bad singing voice.

"Stop that racket. You'll scare them to death," said Florence from the safety of the alcove.  

Dylan glanced up at his mother in the metal wheelchair he had brought home only a week ago. He could envision the chair in a few months - empty, folded, leaning against a wall.  The wall in question didn't matter as any wall would look bare without her.

"I'll get the crocuses to bloom mother. I swear I will."

"It's not the end of the world, dear. "

Dylan nodded at her, then at the house. 

He had never lived alone.

'The Waterloo Button' by Debra Sabri

Hunting through the treasure Sandy searched for the golden button that had belonged to her ancestor. “This button,” her grandmother had said, “was at Waterloo. My great great grandfather cut it off his uniform and gave it to his daughter when he went to fight Napoleon Bonaparte.”

Sandy started to panic.  There was no sign of the button.  “Trust you my girl!” Grandma would have said, “The one valuable thing I leave and you go and lose it”. 

Sandy remembered the hours spent playing with Grandma’s button tin.  All shapes, sizes and colours.  There were tiny white buttons from her own baby cardigan, blue school shirt buttons and one big red button from Mum’s favourite coat, the coat she wore that day.  Sandy remembered the coat draped over a plastic chair beside her mother’s bed, she remembered the hospital smell stinging the back of her throat.  She’d expected to see her mum sitting up in bed reading her magazine, but she was flat on her back, wires and tubes everywhere.  She was surprised that her search for a button should bring back that memory so clearly.

“There it is!”  She almost shouted to the empty room.  At the bottom of the tin in a corner, in a heap of dust, was the Waterloo button.  Sandy picked it up, polished it on her skirt and, with her fingertips, she felt the crest of lions and crown embossed on the front.  Then, turning it over, she noticed, for the first time, the words, ‘British Rail’ stamped faintly on the back.

'Waiting' by Cathy White

A man in a grey suit stands near the edge of the platform. He is alone until a girl wearing a red polka dot dress runs up the stairs. Panting, she stops and listens to the tannoy announcement.

‘We apologise for the late arrival of the twenty-one thirty-seven to Brighton which should be arriving at platform one in approximately five minutes.’

She turns to the man in the grey suit.

‘Thank God it’s running late, I thought I’d missed it,’ she says.

He says nothing.

She speaks again. ‘I hope it arrives soon though, I have to get to the hospital.’

The man looks up.

            ‘Are you a nurse?’ he says.

            ‘No, my mum’s in hospital. She’s got cancer.’

            ‘I’m sorry to hear that. I hope she gets better soon.’

            ‘Not much chance of that, I’m afraid. They’re moving her into a hospice in a couple of days.’

            ‘I’m so sorry.’

            ‘She’s coping brilliantly. I think I would have given up by now.’

            ‘You don’t seem to be coping too badly yourself.’

            ‘Well, what’s the point in dwelling on things? There’s always someone worse off than you, isn’t there? Oh, here’s the train, at last.’

            The man moves closer to the platform.

            The train rumbles down the track and stops. The man steps away from the platform and turns towards the exit.

            ‘You not getting on?’ she says.

            He shakes his head, crumples up the note in his pocket addressed to his wife and throws it onto the tracks.

'Local' by Rob Walton

“You’re not from round here, are you?”

That’s what I thought she said.  There were words coming out of her mouth and they didn’t sound like the words from my mouth.  But it didn’t bother me.

Our skin was of a similar shade, but her eyes were other-wordly.  Something going on here.  Did it appeal?

The clothes too.  Slightly over-dressed for a sauna, even this sauna in an international hotel where you didn’t know who you were going to meet, and you didn’t want to offend sensibilities.  You were after a bed for the night, possibly with extras, but you didn’t want scenes.

“Your first time here, is it?”

That’s what I thought she said.  I could be wrong.  There were sounds coming out of her mouth and they didn’t sound like the sounds from my mouth.  It was starting to bother me.

“Shall we kiss?”

As clear as a bell: heard; understood.

“No.  No, thank you.  I’m here for the – for the perspiration.”

She fastened her jacket, pulled her hat down and turned on her side.

“I knew you weren’t from round here.”