Colette Coen
Glasgow University and Faber Academy graduate, Colette Coen just published her first novel All the Places I’ve Ever Been, and two collections of her short stories are available as ebooks – The Chocolate Refuge and Five a Day. She won the Waterstones Crime in the City competition in 2013 and was shortlisted for the Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award. She has been a librarian and literacy lecturer, but now works in a supermarket to allow time and head-space for writing. She loves Muriel Spark, Margaret Atwood and INXS. She lives in Glasgow with her husband and three kids. Follow her blog for regular posts of new fiction, including those inspired by Creative Writing Ink prompts.

La Belle Maison

In five minutes her visitor will arrive, and Sandra will leave this place for good, but for the moment she soaks up memories for her long journey.

‘Hello, and welcome to my beautiful home.’ It was more than seven years since Sandra had stood at her front door welcoming her guests.
‘So that’s beautiful, as in…needs demolished and …?’ Craig said as he and Julie took in the view. Sandra wondered if they sensed as they drove through the labyrinth of quiet streets that this one was different. Not another money-spinning project, but a desirable property in a quiet residential area. Still, she had prepared for their gentle mockery.
‘God, Sandra. I’ve not seen Artex this thick since 1975.’
‘That’s brutal, Craig’, Julie said as she gave her husband a hard shove. ‘I’m sure you’ll work your magic on it in no time, and it’ll be, well, habitable.’
‘I just never thought I’d see you guys way out here. I don’t think I could survive so far from civilisation. All you need now is to name it – La Belle Maison,’ he said with a flourish.
‘Charming,’ Julie said, rolling her eyes. ‘There’s a lot to be said for gardens and good schools. Now shut up and let Sandra show off the rest of her palace.’
‘This is the lounge,’ Sandra said proudly gesturing around the cool, north-facing front room.
What her friends couldn’t see, as they raised their eyebrows at the mustard coloured wood-chip and the two-bar fire, and what she always could see, was the potential. They saw bricks and mortar, and tasteless decoration; she saw a new life stretching before them.
‘In five years this place will be perfect, it just need a bit of TLC.’
‘And a sledge hammer.’
‘Well, yes, and a sledge hammer.’ She joined in their laughter, but she was genuinely happy with thoughts of joiners and plasterers about the place, all taking Martin’s plans and making them real. Then she’d have free rein on the décor, and soon they would have the house they’d been working up to for years. The last house: their home.

While Lucy napped, she had painted with bravado; no more pandering to the resale market. In a bold statement of her intent to stay, she even forked out for hand-printed wallpaper for the lounge.
She could see the feature wall now, from her vantage point in the hall: the large retro print holding its own against the 40’ plasma.
‘The lounge, where I lounge,’ she thought. ‘Ha, bloody ha.’ She had imagined a peaceful room when she had chosen Inky Pool and Gentle Gold. It would be the perfect place to read in the afternoon, letting Classic FM gently infuse her soul. But it had quickly turned into a mini office for all the administration that went with children – the school consent forms to be returned promptly; the six month check-ups for teeth; the annual ones for eyes. Drop-offs, pick-ups, play dates with raucous children filled the time between washing loads. Her days slipped away. The only time she got to lounge was late at night when everyone was in bed. She would lie there for hours, watching celebrity gossip programmes, imagining a life like theirs, until the final drops of energy had seeped into the Ikea couch, and she could drift off to sleep.

Her vision blurs as she stares at the carefully arranged vases on the mantle, and a tear rolls down her cheek as she remembers how they shook with the banging door.
‘All I want is half an hour. Is that so much to ask for? Half a bloody hour!’
Jack was already half way up the stairs before her tirade stopped. She punched herself hard on the leg. ‘Shit’. She was stupid to even try. She knew, knows, that there would never any chance of peace until the kids were dealt with, but dealing with the kids was a task with no end. She took a deep breath and went to the foot of the stairs. ‘I’m sorry, Jack. Come down love. What is it?’ She felt his sulk travel through his door, down the stairs and into her guilty heart. Before she could pull herself back, she trudged up, and tapped gently on his door. ‘Can I come in?’
‘No, Mum, I just want half an hour then you can come in.’
She closed her eyes; tried not to explode. He had a point, the wee shit. ‘Please, Jack, I’m sorry. Let me come in.’
‘Don’t be so stupid, woman, it’s your house,’ a voice shouted, ‘of course you can go into his bedroom. And Jack,’ Martin said as he flung open the door, ‘do your own homework.’
‘Yes, Dad.’
‘Now will you all shut up – I’m trying to finish a proposal here.’
Sandra stood looking between her son and the slammed office door. ‘Do you need help?’ she asked quietly.
‘No, it’s ok Mum. I’m sorry.’ They exchanged a look that meant everything and nothing. The door next to Jack’s opened and Lucy thrust a My Little Pony into her hand.
‘Pleat her hair Mummy.’
‘Bath first.’
Sandra popped Lucy in the bath, and after her hair was washed, she retreated from the humidity, to sit on the toilet lid and pleat the Pony’s hair.
‘What does it say, Mummy?’ Lucy demanded, pointing at her cipher written in sponge letters.
‘b3dd9al’
‘No Mummy, it says Lucy.’
‘No Lucy, it doesn’t. That last letter there, no the other last letter, that’s an ‘l’, it starts your name, Lucy.’ Neither of them cared much. Lucy preferred the patterns she made to anything her mother told her was a real word. Sandra momentarily thought about googling ‘dyslexia’, but her mind was pulled to her kitchen bin, where it couldn’t quite focus on the test stick hidden at the bottom.
‘Wrap me up like a baby, Mummy.’
‘I want my Dora the Explorer nightie, Mummy.’
‘I want you to pleat my hair now.’

Sandra watches herself walk back down the stairs, and wonders whether even with all her resolve, she still has the strength to leave them.
She rotates slowly and looks into the dining room. The table is bare, the sideboard thick with dust. There was a time when it would be laid according to the latest trend with runners or chargers, ready at a moment’s notice to host the next dinner party, but her appetite has long gone.

Despite the place cards, Martin had ended up sitting opposite Amelia. Throughout the meal Sandra watched as his gaze flicked between her eyes and her erect nipples obviously worried that either should suddenly give their attention to someone else. ‘That fancy woman’, Sandra’s mother would have called her, and it was how Sandra thought of her. Always ‘that fancy woman’, never ‘his fancy woman’, in case thinking it would make it more real. And fancy she was, certainly fancier than Sandra could be bothered to be: what with monthly haircuts, weekly manicures and the best colourist in town. Amelia peppered her conversation with comments on grooming, as if they were essential, like the weekly shop. But no matter how casual the remarks sounded, there was always a nod to the gallery – maybe if Sandra cared more, then Martin wouldn’t have been so easy to steal.
‘Where do you get your botox done?’ Sandra had asked at the last ever dinner party, as she placed Jamie’s Linguine with pancetta, olive oil, chilli, clams and white wine before Amelia.
‘Darling,’ said Martin, trying to keep his voice in check, ‘that’s hardly polite conversation, is it?’
‘You don’t understand, Martin,’ she said mirroring his condescension, ‘botox is as normal as hair colour or make-up these days, isn’t it Amelia? Nothing to be ashamed about.’
Amelia spluttered, and finally had the good grace to look embarrassed at eating her food; drinking her wine; fucking her husband.
‘Maybe you should try some of it then, Sandra, if it’s so normal,’ Martin muttered.
‘Now, now Martin, Sandra’s looking beautiful tonight,’ Julie said as she kicked Sandra under the table and gave her a behave! look. Sandra wasn’t sure that she had the right to do that after she had reneged on their tacit agreement to move out here and finally start their business together. They had had plans, Sandra thought, plans she was relying on, but Julie now seemed content with her promotion and private schools for her son.
‘How are the drawings for the conservatory coming on, Martin?’ Julie asked. It had always been her duty to distract Martin when he got tetchy and she still knew the tricks. She listened with a fixed smile, nodding and gasping at appropriate times as he enthused about Pilkington K and Argon filled units. She knew that Sandra didn’t share his enthusiasm and would hate her for bringing it up, but it was difficult enough to engage Martin without avoiding all the taboos.
‘Can you imagine anything more twee than a conservatory?’ Sandra said, draining her glass. ‘It’s bad enough that he’s got me in a semi in the sticks, without another bloody room to keep tidy. What do you think Craig: could my life be any more of a stereotype?’
A couple of years ago Craig would have gone into a whole routine about the signs and symptoms of suburbanitis, but maybe he gauged that it would no longer raise a laugh. He played safe instead with outrageous tales from A & E, and gradually everyone relaxed.

‘It’s all in your head, you stupid woman.’ Martin had raged later when the guests were gone, ‘I’m not having an affair. When on earth would I have the time for an affair?’
‘So it’s just the time you’re lacking, not the inclination,’ she barked back. He did have the time; of course he had the time, thought Sandra, While I’m hanging about waiting for my life to happen, he’s got the time.

He was missing again last night. She was in her Magnet kitchen, shutting out the constant dialogue in her head with the noise of the running tap and the chopping knife. ‘Will you sit still and eat your dinner?’ It was the fourth time that night Sandra has said it, and maybe the hundredth time that month.
‘I don’t like carrots, mummy.’ Lucy whined.
‘You liked them last week.’
‘Yes, but round last week they were, and now they’re little sticks, and they’re hurting my mouth.’
‘Oh for God’s sake, just eat the damn things, and Jack if you don’t put that DS down, it’s going in the bin.’

I tried, I really tried, she thinks, as she waits for her friend to arrive, No one can say I didn’t try.

She had taken her own plate to the bin, emptying the remnants that had hardly registered on her taste buds. She hated Martin as the knife scraped across the plate. Hated him for not being there to support her on this battlefield; but also hated the fact that if he was here, he would only criticise.
‘Why can’t you get those kids to eat? It’s fairly fundamental, isn’t it? Mother feeds children. My God, Sandra, can you not even do that?’
‘I need you here at teatime. I spend so long cooking and when they won’t eat, it really gets to me. Please Martin, help.’
‘Just give them fish fingers and beans then. It never did me any harm.’
‘Jack won’t eat beans.’
‘Then he goes to bed hungry.’

They’ll be fine, she thinks as she begins to lose consciousness, better off even. There’s a timetable and a To Do list on the American style fridge to keep them right and a freezer full of food. At last Sandra feels that she has accomplished something.
The bell rings, and although Sandra is in no position to answer it, the door swings open. Her visitor is tall, handsome, swathed in black, and with his scythe, he cuts her down.

Emmie Readman

The stony weight of your words

you found whilst scouring the shore-

their worth you’re only just learning,

turning each one of them over,

heeding their shape and their hue

until, hesitantly content, you contemplate

daring to throw them into waves

-dreading the ripples, the

oscillating of a surface you wanted

to keep smooth, letting currents move

beneath, undetected.

In the strength of a turning tide

you consider anonymous depths,

wide-eyed and smiling at the new found

breadth of reach- the distance those

stony words, once weighted, can travel.

You stand at the strand line,

your sigh echoing the surf which

beckons your feet-

your arm lifts, your hand poised

to write ripples.

You throw.

A Reflection

M T Ingoldby

The older I become, the more I notice a tendency in myself to spin undue romance from the most ordinary memories. I’m sure this is commonplace: The brain’s faithful attempt to turn one’s past into personal mythology, drama into melodrama, and mistakes into meaningful lessons. And not only my childhood, which is the same haze of blissful inconsequence as described by my friends. Later and more serious events take on the scale of legends; some to be laughed at like the errors of old kings, others as bleak as the nightmares of childhood. One memory in particular – sadly mundane on the surface – has since acquired the aspect of a truly chilling horror story with inexplicable elements that time has done little to reconcile and much, I expect, to exaggerate. I hope now that time will dissolve the bias of a younger woman’s heart, and that writing will force a framework of sense onto what remains the most bizarre and painful episode of my life. I owe it to myself to succeed where my subconscious has failed in drawing meaning from my one encounter with the supernatural.

He came into my life preceded by a waft of cigarette smoke and a low, husky murmur:
“Excuse me. Is anyone sitting here, please?”
A bit of a cliche, I knew at the time, but in those days I was keenly attuned to pre-set romances of any kind. And there he stood; tall, not altogether handsome, and gentle in a fumbling, uncertain sort of way. I looked at him and thought, ‘God – he’s one of me!’
As he sat down to my obliging gesture I felt a spark of our potential crackle the air like static, and spent the following hour trying hard not to extinguish it. He talked and I listened – hapless money troubles mostly – then I talked and he listened and nodded and I kept going until every festering thought found life in fresh ears. I talked about my painting, my dreams of being an artist, even describing some of my work to his obvious interest. I talked about my sister – we weren’t speaking back then – and he laughed delightedly at my cruellest depictions of our childhood. He liked listening, not least because talking made him nervous, and I’m sure he too was aware of the delicate atmosphere about us, as fragile as silence, that thickened with every minute that passed without anxious incident. The wine certainly helped. We were like two clouds meeting and melding by an accident of weather.
In an hour or two we were both tipsy, and one of us – me, I’m fairly sure – invited him back to my flat. The taxi ride was swift; we kissed all the way from outside the bar to my bedroom door and what followed, common decency and the effect of alcohol upon memory prevent me from detailing here.
I do not wish to give the impression that I was in the habit of soliciting this kind of encounter so soon after meeting someone. But I didn’t feel cheapened, nor that a demeaning precedent had been set. It was simply an uncomplicated continuation of what had begun at the bar and within a fortnight it was as though he had never slept anywhere else.
Mark Portaz wasn’t like other men. For some, you have to drop hints with such a clang that you wince to recall them. But Mark was quick on the uptake: As if he really knew me, which was a welcome shock especially when I hadn’t felt a man’s gaze in over a year. I suppose I was in something of a nosedive, and Mark levelled me out.
He didn’t mind sharing my poky third-floor flat, which even in its best days could be said to have seen better days. The growing number of dents in the flaky plaster we covered with tasteful pictures and photographs of us grinning like teenagers next to unimpressive local landmarks. Our shared clumsiness – especially after a bottle of red in front of our book-sized TV – meant we decorated with insight rather than taste, but if home is where the hat is hung and heart resides, it gave us a glorious sense of belonging.
But soon an insidious falseness crept into our familiarity.

It wasn’t lipstick on his collar, or a strange scent on his clothes, or even dubious late-night commitments explained in suspicious detail. It wasn’t anything so specific, but there were clues. There usually are. Something veiled by those over-inflated compliments, like:
“I think this is actually the best painting I’ve ever seen.”
“I’m so lucky, babe. You’re one in a million, I swear. .”
“You look so damn sexy in that chair.”
And soon enough I found this text on his phone: ‘Sounds great!!! See you tonite xox’
No, I shouldn’t have looked. Marriage is built on trust, they say. But we weren’t married. We were together five months. I don’t know what made me think of that. Well, I do of course, but even after all these years it pains me to confess it.
But the worst thing, worse than the certainty that something pure is irrevocably soured, was the name of the contact saved into the phone: Sadie Baschurch. My name.
Like a punch to the gut I felt instantly sickened and weak. I felt an unjustifiable respect for all those husbands who through decency strive to separate their mistresses from their lives completely. This was a kind of betrayal I’d never heard about, let alone expected. But, poor insecure creature that I was, I bottled it and let it ferment into silent spite. The explanation should come of his own accord – prompting it would only be further humiliation. Maybe – though I wasn’t at this moment inclined to be charitable – maybe it is a simple misunderstanding: Crossed wires, something to laugh about in a few years when securely attached by family and mortgage. Whoever this imposter was, Mark was more than happy with the real thing. I had proof of this. Meanwhile I would outwardly pretend nothing had changed, and shadow them later to their glamorous rendezvous like a vengeful ghost.

And so, when Mark kissed me goodbye with apparent reluctance on Wednesday night, bound, I remember him saying, for drinks with an old friend who would bore me rigid with tales from back in the day, I was already worked into an eager frenzy of discovery, fuelled by imaginings of bold recriminations and scene-stealing accusations, part Joan of Arc, part soap opera. Proving my suspicions would ally their strength with mine: Right then my doubt was a greater threat to my well-being than my presumed rival. And I had no other plans – sadly, I hadn’t seen my own friends in months.
I pulled on a mountainous overcoat which both disguised my appearance and fit my romantic image of a hard-boiled detective. I followed him on foot from a furtive distance, though with his head lowered and engrossed in private thoughts I could have caught his heel and he wouldn’t have turned.
I began to suspect where he was headed, and it was with grim satisfaction that the harsh candle-light and red tables of Paula’s Bistro grew towards us like a lurid mirage. I had come this way before with Mark and remembered suggesting we head there one evening, but we never did and it hadn’t come up since. If he’d been keen, he’d have said. Or did he log it, my suggestion, for future use with a better fit? I sidestepped into a doorway sliced with shadow and watched him stride through the entrance, turn and approach with a smile someone whose legs uncrossed in greeting while the rest of her was obscured by a pillar. Her tights were black, her shoes were fun, colourful flats. Mark’s face flushed with the heat inside. He jumped his chair closer for what soon became the most interesting and entertaining conversation of his life. I’d never seen so many emotions animate his face in one sitting. His eyes glowed with an eager tenderness.
I fused with the darkness of the doorway. Several times I considered crossing the street and bursting through the door like a demon, spitting curses. My foot even cleared the shadow. But the longer I waited the more my confidence ebbed away, and confrontation seemed not just impossible, but unjustifiable. Here I was skulking in the dark like a criminal, and there they were, inside, faces lit by that spark of connection and enjoyment shared. Before long the whole restaurant seems complicit in their affair, and my lonely resentment was their enemy; cold and only capable of causing pain. All I could hear were the clatters of cutlery and laughing police sirens on the lookout for malicious loiterers. Frustrated, I decided to circle the block and when I arrived back both chairs sat empty. I ruled at last to go inside and see if any information could at least be gained from the waiters.

The staff were disconcertingly blonde and surly to a man, and left me on threshold long enough to substantially weaken my resolve before I was acknowledged.
“Ah,” he said when he reached me, then turned smartly and disappeared again. He returned with a folded receipt – only then did he meet my eye. I saw myself as he did: Dressed in dirty black but for my shoes, in a shapeless overcoat, shivering after two hours outside on a cloudless night. “£37.88,” he recited.
“No, I’m not hungry. I wanted to ask about the table by the window. Did the-”
“Yes.” He was unmoved, uninterested, and made a great show of rereading the receipt. “£37.88.”
“No, but do you know the names of who was sitting there?”
Like a tired parent indulging an infant’s games, he grudgingly informed me: “Booking under the name Portaz for eight-thirty. You are Mrs Portaz?”
“I- Yes.” Possessiveness giving voice to presumption.
“£37.88.”
Now his stern manner made sense. Mark and his mistress had fled laughing into the night, leaving me (unwittingly – perhaps) to foot the bill.
“Oh… I see.” I replied. I was suddenly gripped by the character of a noble victim; stiff and stoically sensible. The weary martyr extracted my credit card from a battered purse and fed it into the proffered slot. The machine beeped, satisfied, and I was forgotten again. Sloping off unobserved, I retraced my path to the flat in slow steps, all the time deeply immersed in a vat of silent victimhood.

To my surprise when I trudged through the front door Mark was sitting there waiting, smiling at me like a physical assault. As well as scaring the strength out of me, it meant I had no time to prepare a course of action and a few choice remarks in the safety of an empty room, as I had intended.
“Where have you been?” he asked brightly, before I could remove my ugly disguise. He smiled with the warmth of the restaurant. I coughed out a laugh in response.
“Me? Where have you been?”
“Just sitting here.” He grinned at me.
“All this time?”
“Since getting back.” His arms now became wings over the backrest.
“Right,” I said, deliberating on a suitable spot to deposit the coat, and postponing eye-contact for which I hadn’t the courage. “How was it?”
“Good, yeah. I had a good time.” He folded his hands behind his head contentedly. “Did you?”
I dumped the coat. “Fine,” I said curtly. I still didn’t face him. “I need a cup of tea. Do you want tea?”
Diving into the kitchen I flicked on the kettle. He followed after a second and stared at me, leaning on the doorframe. “Well?” he prompted.
“Really. No.” I quietly replied, sweeping crumbs off the counter. Not an answer as such, but an expression of the sudden defensiveness that armoured me then like spikes on a blowfish.
He sighed violently. “Oh, not this damn…” He swung around for an audience to share his exasperation. “What? Just tell me.”
I couldn’t say anything. I was drying the sink with kitchen towel.
“For god’s sake. Can’t you even get properly angry? Why can’t you even…” – he mimed thrusting something large through a small gap – “…push back ever?”
“Push what back?” I was being facetious, but it was easier than forming a point which he wouldn’t hear anyway.
“Just say. What are you so damn scared of? Where’s that- Where’s that passion that you… Sometimes I see it. Then I think, ‘is she just putting it on to be cute?’”
I didn’t say anything, just wiped with renewed vigour.
God’s sake, Sadie!” Without warning he sunk his fist into the soft flesh of the plaster, leaving another dent for me to cover. He blew flakes from his knuckles like gun-smoke. The momentum of his violence carried to his voice:
“Like this loan. You don’t say no, you say you don’t have it yet and walk off, then I come home and there’s another damn photo in a gold frame like, where did that come from?” His hand became caught in a loose loop of curtain thread: There was a horribly comic struggle – “Fuck sake!” – and the curtain was torn away on ragged strings, exposing the dark glare of the warped glass and our own shadowy reflections. I could hear nothing but blood.
“I know, Mark,” I managed.
“Oh you know? What? What do you bloody know?”
Details choked me. “About her.”
“About…” He blasted a breath between his teeth. “Oh. Jesus, I get it.”
“I know she’s-”
“No. Don’t pin this on me. You did this, Sadie.”
His reflection grabbed the coat from the chair and charged from the flat, re-appearing outside as a dim figure hurrying away through flashes of shrinking fluorescent cones.
A minute slithered by. Dull ticking sounds rose to my ears from somewhere close; and the endless breath of traffic from the distant road. I stood there, frozen. The woman in the window stared back through blackened hair: A heavy, pathetic figure with trembling shoulders and weak, half-buckled knees.
Suddenly and violently I was again gripped by a second, overwhelming strength: A role that had lain dormant in instinct until then swept over and quite without thinking my hand reached for something heavy and in a single, swift motion launched it at the glass. It exploded frame to frame in a shower of lethal fragments. I remember it in excruciating slowness, like the disintegration of an ice floe in summer currents; each second faithfully suspended for future scrutiny. Shards of all sizes fell with a crystal clatter onto the patio. And there, where the glass had been…
…yes, memory tends to edit and embellish with a preference for the camp. Ghosts may be interpreted as mere manifestations of a guilty conscience, or of intense feelings undisclosed in life; and yet they are ghosts nonetheless. Memory often reveals a subtle truth to us in other ways when facts alone will not suffice. All I know is what I remember seeing…
…there, where the glass had been, my reflection remained, floating above the road. But she was not me, for she tilted her head into the streetlight and grinned with such open cruelty that I almost recoiled. She balanced on empty air with terrible grace, in defiance of all known laws and limitless in capability. A pitiless wave of contempt broke over me. She threw back her head and laughed in silent scorn, fixed me once more with glinting black eyes and, apparently of her own free will and not a conscious resurgence of reality, she vanished. I knew then I would not see her again.
Then a cold, extinguishing wind rushed through the empty window and followed me upstairs to bed.

Shortly thereafter I met Gregory, and we soon resigned ourselves to each other’s company for a good long while – three children, a nice house in the Midlands, cheerful comfort in cold winters and temperate summers. I have my own small studio where I paint ripe fields and reed-cloaked streams from memory. One I particularly like – I’m looking at it now. A stretch of river runs into the foreground, twisting and drawing the eye upstream to a near-flat horizon, save for the silhouette of a lightning-struck tree and the suggestion of storm clouds in the distance, top-right. It is painted hurriedly and with no great skill, but what makes it unique among the frames hanging on my wall is that I have not been able to find that spot, nor even that fast-flowing river ever since.

Mercy for Night-Birds
(Or, A Dove’s Nightmare)

M T Ingoldby

The crowd comes on at a relentless diagonal and she is sluiced into the gutter like rain. Her face is like sodden and crumpled handwriting. She is mute though whether by choice or misfortune is unknown, even to her. The tail-feathers of her cloak droop into the ripples and darken and she does not notice, for in time they always dry out.
She waits an age for the stream of people to slacken and darts between drips into the bakery. It is empty but for the beautiful smell of newborn bread which conceals her own damp fumes. The baker in his ghosted frock smacks flour from his gloves like visible sound and without a word of acknowledgement offers her fresh rolls from a warm tray. She waits: He holds one out over the counter. Frowning then feeling she returns it to the man: It is too nice. The baker has run through this routine too often to be anything but non-plussed as he brings her another; grey-crusted, stale. She sniffs and nods and bears it out into the street and towards the park, gripped hard in brittle fingers.
In the park is a bench beneath a crone-bent willow. The pigeons already gathered around grow louder and swell at her approach. In this spot she sits and begins to crush life from the stone: Crumbs fall to her lap. Heads cock, impatient flutters disrupt the mass. Then she scatters the powder in a jagged swing, and the squawking deafens. She watches them feast; scaling each other with sharp red claws all clamouring for their share. Some affect disinterest then circle back to the fray, flinging broad their wings and jabbing, frenzied, mad with savage greed.
Then just as swiftly they disperse, in fits and flaps. Crumbs remain but the orgy is over, and she can walk again. With brushes of her cloak she loosely gathers the feathers they have left behind and pokes the white tips through the cloak’s fabric and breaks their bones to secure them.
Lord, what a beautiful cloak! How many delicate hues crest and shimmer with the wind’s merest caress! Storm-shades undulate across its surface and shaken flare like light from creased foil, seething and broiling then vanished once more into shadow. It hides her shape: The skin beneath is hollow and taut with bone. She has not eaten in almost two weeks and under the prickling cloak her skin is pecked raw. Yet she is glad. The pigeons though numerous are weak, and only when she is feather-light will they be able to lift her in a rough cloud and carry her off to those high, unseen place where pigeons congregate at night. Until then, so subtly is the cloak woven that while night’s wing soars between concrete horizons she may crouch in a corner of the pavement seamless as shadows and remain furled and unnoticed til daybreak.
At dawn she moves. The sun gapes through torn traces of cloud that frustrate the eye like unerased chalk. The light is like liquid: A warm, currentless sea which buoys her above the drab shape stumbling beneath in a deep daze.
Here again is the bakery. Above, the sun looms and makes vivid the face of the shop like a falling mourner’s veil. Dough is unloaded on pallets from a van of blinding white and stacked up by the door. The baker himself bears them inside five at a time, his ungloved hands full of grip. He whistles harmonies to the rich hum of his ovens. Today is a good day, and the dough sings.
Swaying like dreaming reeds she follows him in, feeding the heavy cloak in which she hangs like a bell’s clapper through the open door. Her own form is numb to her. The baker smiles kindly and presents her at once with a roll from his oven. She returns it; but today the baker refuses, insistent – smiling, thrusting; this is yours: Take it. The boulder drops into her frail hand. Her gaze is unsure but how tightly she grips it and already the baker has engaged fresh customers. He will ignore her until she is gone.
All down the street the roll drags at her: She lists to one side like a bird with a broken wing. The kingdom of the park waits with iron gates thrown inwards to welcome her, and seeing her the birds convene from every tree like an explosion in reverse.
The sun has cleared the roofs and the last clouds scatter. As she sits the cooing crescendos but she will not listen. The hot smell of the bread intoxicates…
She bites.
Her dry teeth crumble the dough fruit to dust. It is tough and sweet. The pigeons bounce and flare, outraged. Their right to bread is Law, sanctified by ceremony. Beaks begin to pierce her cloak, stab at her ankles. Some thrash to the seat beside her, talons raking her lap. The holy idol is false: A liar.
As one they swarm up the slope of their own forgotten feathers in a unified frenzy not diffuse amongst them but directed to some external purposed. They dive at her hair, become caught and scrabble viciously. Beady, jutting eyes rise to her throat, finding purchase in the skin of her empty breasts. The rising surge lifts her skyward, but their hooks and mass tether her and the first to ascend thrusts its head inside her mouth and pecks at the white soot on her tongue. Claws tear at her lips and cheeks to widen her smile so that more may force their way in and soon they pour down her throat and fill her skin. The loose cloak swells with her body like a writhing sack of rats until she abruptly bursts, erupting grey and white and red feathers reeling in shrill rainbows of gore. They soar outwards, dive and disappear leaving nothing but a grey shroud whose ragged wounds lie empty. The white hole of the sun burns away every feather before they touch the ground.

A Spin Out On The Bay

Ann Brehony

Joe felt the first limp dribbles of light filter through his faded curtains like a low, torch beam bending through thick fog. The season was on the turn and the dawns were getting later. Another good night’s sleep was a blessing and with diminishing days he was spared the summer chore of filling a twelve-hour yawning gap of daylight. Monday. Late October. He could cling to the driftwood of his routine; keep himself from going under by repeating the same tasks in the same order. He lifted his stiff joints from the lumpy bed. Rose to face the dull day ahead. Time for tea. Joe filled his lime-scaled kettle from the coughing tap in the kitchen then plugged it into the damaged socket on the wall and waited for the rising bubbles to announce their readiness.

His favourite cup, the one with the blue stripe, chipped around the rim, sat waiting on the kitchen counter. Two tea bags, he liked his tea strong, two sugars and a good dash of cold milk. Let it settle and then sip slowly while the tang of the tannins cleared his misty head. Monday. No changes planned to the routine today. No rush, there was time for toast. Joe stood guard by the grill; the bread could turn from gold to charcoal in a blink if you took your eye off it. A good skelp of butter and the last of the bargain jam. He liked the comforting crunch of the crispy crusts. Time to get dressed.

He’d often spent long spells alone but had seldom endured this dull ache of loneliness. Born in 1946, Joseph Ryan desperate to escape the confines of small-town Ireland broke his mother’s heart when he ran off to become an officer in the merchant navy. A jovial rogue in his youth, but cheap Aldi vodka had long since dulled the glint in his eye. In his opinion he had pretty much made a hames of his life, he’d heeded things that weren’t worth the effort and had lacked the confidence to put the effort into things that needed heeding. He could see that now but what use was it to him at his stage, things had gone too far, the frailty of age and the curse of a life badly-lived cut the words off in his throat. The impotence of age was a pure fright, what was the point of it all? The years spent living, the lessons learnt and for what?

Joe drained his tea and then readied himself for his morning stroll around the pier. He liked to keep a connection with the sea, check on the boats, and chat with the fishermen. Sometimes they’d take him out for a jaunt around the bay. He often helped lift the lobster pots, the roll of the keel and the pull of the rope made him feel safe. He had never managed to feel this same sense of security on dry land. Land was too static for Joe. He missed the swell of the ocean beneath his feet. He needed that comforting rise and fall to make sense of his thoughts, it was as if the water lulled him into consciousness. The smell of the salt and sting of the spray filled his pores with plans and his heart with possibilities that he could never realise on terra firma.

Joe made his way down the quiet street towards the pier, his round shoulders and bandy legs rocking from side to side as he walked, as if he was trying to balance himself on a listing ship. It was a classic sailor’s walk. The trip to the pier was the highlight of his day and he tried to make it last, to savour every scent and sensation. The gulls circled the quay wall, their racking cackle settled Joe’s soul. During his years at sea the appearance of the gulls signalled the imminent rise of the port along the horizon. Their greedy squawks reminded Joe of the anticipation of land after weeks spent at sea. As soon as these harbingers of the harbour were sighted dipping and swooping along the bow, his shipmates would competitively brag of their planned exploits around the port. Itching to descend the gangplank to reintegrate into the world. But the pleasure of shore was always short-lived and usually costly. Wages drank or gambled, often with fines for late return to the ship or a bailout from some clink after a barroom brawl. When he would finally roll back down the quayside his body could relax in peaceful resignation. Shore leave was once again bookended by a descent into the Hades of the harbour and a rise back up the gangplank to the salvation of the sea.

Joe missed the rhythm of dry weeks at sea followed by the flood on shore; he liked having his rations planned with pleasures measured in times of scarcity. Land with all its excesses was too much for a man who couldn’t deny himself in the face of plenty. Not for him the smug comforts of self-regulation, Joe needed his indulgences to be controlled by outside forces. He missed the rigidity and regimental rule of a purser doling out his rations in daily doses. This struggle with plenty was a shock to Joe. When his time ashore had a deadline he just spent money till it ran out, now with days stretching out in front of him like a vast ocean without horizon, he felt more lost than if he had been adrift in the doldrums without a compass. Life on land moved independently without the need to constantly tinker with the engine, check gauges or flush pumps with the repetition of four-hour watches. It would not bend to the tides. It would not run aground if you fell asleep at the wheel. All the jeopardy and danger came from inside his head while the force of the elements was kept at bay by concrete and stasis.

He continued to fight against a creeping resignation. It’s not that he was afraid of death and there was no kidding himself because at his age, he was already in the departure lounge. He just wanted to postpone it. He wanted one last chance to make good his wasted life or to see if he was capable of living like a normal person. Routine meant structure, a scaffold to hold up his days. Monday was set aside for recycling with a trip to the bottle bank at the top of the pier. On Tuesdays he did his laundry. Wednesdays he’d sometimes get the bus into town, he’d often have an appointment with the GP or the chiropodist or he’d just walk around until he could respectably have a pint down at the docks with some of the old crew. There were very few of them left now, salty old sea dogs don’t age well on land. Thursday was pension day, when he would stock up on provisions, according to the list that Colette from Age Action helped him make. Experienced in the art of eating on a restricted budget, she made him meal plans with shopping lists. It was hard not to eat it all in one blowout or just to substitute food for a stock of vodka. Friday was library day; Joe was an avid reader, it was a necessary skill to fill the long, quiet hours at sea. He had a taste for thrillers and was currently re-reading a whole slew of Le Carré’s. The weekends were hardest. He fought the loneliness in a grim stand off that lasted from Saturday morning to Sunday tea with Colette. Winter weekends were the worst. He felt the loneliness filling up, like a worm eating him from the inside out.

Rolling along the quay wall, he dragged his light wheelie shopping trolley behind him as the empties clinked their goodbyes on their final journey to the bottle bank. Frank took an almost puritanical pride in the fact that today’s cache contained more empty food jars than booze bottles. It had been a good week. He’d kept the drinking in check despite another lonely weekend. This was progress. He stopped alongside the large, ugly recycling containers, their primary colours taking on the moralistic air of symbols of respectable, responsible living. As if by reducing, reusing and recycling he could somehow find redemption.

Joe sorted his stock and deposited a clear, empty jam jar, into the large white plastic bank. He wasn’t sure he’d get that jam again, one of those bargain versions, lots of little pips that got stuck in his teeth. Still he was glad he’d tried it because at least, now he knew. He followed this with an empty beetroot jar, two bargain-brand pasta sauces and a small jar of expensive mayonnaise: his one food extravagance. He’d tried the own-brand versions but they just didn’t have that creamy texture that he loved. With every jar he made a mental note of possible improvements to his shopping list, which momentarily made him feel good about himself. This fleeting moment was dashed by the appearance of an empty bottle of cheap vodka. He quickly slipped it down the white chute as if trying to conceal a sin. He moved on to the tins and cans, fighting back his guilt as he deposited a crushed six-pack of Dutch Gold. But he regained his self-worth with two empty tins of tomatoes followed by three small tins of tuna in brine. It was the same every Monday, a refuse analysis that served as the ledger of his week. It was important not to get too depressed by a bad recycling stash, he told himself regularly. It was just as dangerous to lose the run of yourself with a good one though. Joe was working hard at pacing himself, but this late in life it was a tough task. He wasn’t sure he was cut out for land life.

He brushed the dust off his hands and wedged the trolley in behind the bottle bank. Head up, he turned to walk the pier unencumbered by the trappings of age and poverty. This was his domain, he knew every stone, every rope and float. He kept a check of what boats were moored what ones were out. The pleasure craft held little fascination for him. He was more interested in the working boats, the trawlers and the small summer ferries that took tourists out to the islands. He spotted Josie cleaning the deck of his lobster boat.

‘Howya, Josie, not a bad old day all the same apart from the grey doom of it, at least there’s no wind. Are you going out later?’ He shouted hand cupped around his mouth to amplify his greeting.

‘Howya Joe, ‘tis thank God, sure we’re blessed so far with the month no big winds yet,’ Josie called back. ‘If there’s no big wind tonight I’m thinking of lifting the last of the pots tomorrow if you want to join me, I’ll be leaving with the tide around noon.’

‘Sound job, Josie, I’d love a spin alright – need some brine in my bloodstream,’ he joked. ‘I’ll see you then and I’ll bring the flask of tea this time it’s my shout!’

The excitement was rising in Joe’s stomach. He hadn’t expected to land an offer so late in the season. A trip like that would set him up for the dark weeks ahead. He moved closer to the boat to pass a few extra pleasantries with Josie before continuing on his patrol of the pier.

His stroll finished in Maureen’s Café on the Harbour Road. His usual lunch, vegetable soup and a ham sandwich, was punctuated with nods and waves to the other equally regimented regulars. He kept an eye on the weather rolling in; for a seaman, the fear of wind is hard to shake, another worry to add to his day. With the paper and a second cup of tea he could stretch the lunch till nearly three o’clock then back to the pier for a final check and pick up the wheelie trolley. He’d take the long way home, stop off in Centra for some firelighters and maybe have a chat about football with Micko. He’d knock another hour out of that at least and then he could read for a while before dinner. Monday, always a grilled pork chop, Batchelor’s beans (not that Aldi shite) and two spuds. He liked Monday’s dinner; the sauce on the beans could soften even the toughest chop and if the spuds weren’t floury it would help soak up the wax. The week had started well, a fair recycling stash, no big winds and now a spin out on the bay to take the sting out of Tuesday. Joe turned off the telly just after the nine-o-clock news. The damp air was beginning to claw at his legs. He’d go to bed now rather than waste another two briquettes. He settled in under the duvet.

The wind and rain lashing against the single glaze of his old windows woke him at around four. Out in the bay pots full of lobsters rose slowly on the swell. The wind-whipped waves crashed onto battened hatches of moored boats. Joe turned in his safe, stable bed while a single, salty tear slowly slid down the rugged cove of his cheek.

SUN AND RAIN By A.L. Clarke

‘Flowers,’ was the first thing he said when he had entered the room. Stupid really.

He held them up, lamely, to show her. She didn’t look.

‘They’re nothing fancy.’ Clashing pink and yellow hyacinths to be precise. But that was the point, he wanted to say. ‘From the Esso.’ He chanced a look at her. ‘Thought that might piss you off. Make you laugh.’

Rose said nothing.

‘I’ll just…’ He set them down at her bedside and glanced around. ‘Weather’s nice, isn’t it?’

Silence.

‘Well, I mean, better than last week. Remember all those storms we –?’ He stopped himself.

Of course she remembered.

He cleared his throat. ‘I just mean, well, it’s… nice, isn’t it? You know, come October you don’t expect to see the sun anymore. Nice to … see it again.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘W-what’s happened to England, am I right?’ But he silenced himself quickly. Too jovial. He needed to stop sounding like some failed comedian.

‘I like the weather in this country,’ said Rose, unexpectedly.

‘You always have, though I can never understand why.’

She was smiling, too, but it didn’t quite reach her eyes, which remained nothing but stormy. ‘It’s just always there, changing, sure, but always there, wouldn’t you say?’

Lawrence licked his lips, dry as baked tarmac.

‘Rose… I…’

‘But I’ve always preferred the rain.’ She spoke louder, as though he too was outside, with the sun. ‘It’s more England, more… us. It’s not like the borrowed time of the sun, which just – just seems to disappear as we start to rely on it.’

Lawrence looked at her; a small frame tucked beneath clinical sheets, living to the beepbeepbeep of her bedside. Though she glared resolutely ahead, he couldn’t help but smile a little. She had always been stubborn.

Ignoring the visitor’s chair, he sat on the floor, cross-legged like a child.

‘Look, I know you don’t like me right now. I know you’re angry, and worst of all I know you have a right to be.’ He said the words quietly, as though he didn’t want her to even hear them. ‘But I’m sorry, Rose. Really sorry. You have to know that.’

She turned to him and he saw the fire still blazing across the side of her face. Lawrence saw a tear collect, then burst. It screamed down her cheek until silenced in the heat of her burns.

‘Tell it to Ben.’

*

The sun had stopped lashing down when he left the hospital. It rested instead atop the nearby buildings, trickling down to warm the concrete that carved the city. This was one of those rare moments of pause Lawrence’s father had always spoken of.

More out of habit than anything, he reached in his pocket and pulled out his last cigarette, rolling it between finger and thumb without really looking at it. He had been saving it for one-hundred and sixty-six days. But what for, he didn’t really know. A time like this, probably.

He struck down on the lighter three times – always three times – and took a long drag. The almost forgotten sensation wiped his entire body, so that muscles he didn’t even know he had unravelled around him. When he exhaled, he opened his eyes to see the smoke fall and then rise, as though picking itself up, drifting so close to his skin he felt coated in it.

He dropped the cigarette suddenly, as though it had surprised him. It hit the pavement and scattered sparks that died instantly. He stamped on it, harder than was necessary.

Breathing fast, he turned and kicked a dustbin nearby. He regretted it immediately, cursing the pain in his foot.

What had he expected? That a quick smile, an old joke and a stumbled ‘sorry’ was enough? He tried to think this sarcastically, but was unsuccessful, even to himself, and sank onto the steps. He had thought it was enough.

‘Excuse me, boy, but you can’t sit here.’ The voice came from behind him, cool and crisp with the weariness of someone just starting a long shift. ‘Patients come out here for fresh air, smokers are not welcome.’

‘But I’m not a smoker.’ He said automatically.

The woman looked, pointedly, from Lawrence to the abandoned cigarette, still glowing on the pavement. ‘Of course not. But if you have no business at the hospital then I must ask you to move on, or I shall have to call security.’

He got to his feet, and heard the door slide closed behind her. He knew she was right – he had no business there anymore – but it didn’t stop his anger. As he walked past, he noticed a small dent in the side of the bin. He chuckled to himself.

He took a few steps away from the hospital, but hesitated. Without really knowing why, he bent down and picked up the flattened stub of the cigarette. It was still warm; a beating heart in the cold autumn air. It was Ben who had gotten him to give up smoking in the first place. Ironic, really.

He put it back in his coat pocket, and felt it fall to its place between the old Christmas-cracker yoyo and the ripped ticket to see Tottenham. He had always carried them with him, for as long as he could remember. ‘Random crap’, the others had called it. He supposed it was, really.

The sun sank slowly, lower and lower, until soon it was rendered obsolete by the thousand artificial suns that spiderwebbed across London’s streets each night. Blocking out the stars.

Lawrence was still thinking about the same things – always the same things, these days. But as he looked around, he saw that his feet had taken him to old haunts. He had arrived at a park from long ago, only about three blocks from his own house. He didn’t dare call it ‘home’, especially not to himself.

The park was old, and not in the charming, classical way like art or fine wine, but in an outdated, run-down way that was frankly overrated in nostalgia. But he walked through it anyway. You know, for old times’ sake.

He wondered if they had ever bothered to repair the shattered swing, or if his trainer was still astray in the river. He didn’t look. He didn’t want to find out.

He noticed a small bicycle half concealed in a bush nearby. It had a bike-lock trailing from its back wheel, cut so roughly it would rattle when ridden. He pulled it out of the furrowed branches. It was a girl’s bike – that much was obvious. It wasn’t pink or Barbie, but green camouflage, with a male seat and every inch suffocated in a mish-mash of stickers; from animals to flowers to those little supermarket stickers you found on bananas.

It was the kind of bike that someone stubbornly too small would ride anyway, the kind of girl who would ride downhill with the brakes on. It reminded him of another bike he had known.

On the back was the largest sticker of all, white with typed black print; ‘Property of Nancy Whitman’. The address beneath was just three blocks away. Lawrence untangled the chain from the back wheel and, without really thinking about it, he got on the bike. It was comically too small for him, but no one was around to see.

He experimented with a couple of laps of the park. The brakes were squeaky and pulled the bike to the left. Really, it would have been easier to push it. But it seemed important to ride the bike to its home. A worthwhile distraction.

He cycled towards the streets; busy with footstep-less silence and forgotten wanderings. The bike gave the faint tick-tick-tick of a half-formed clock as Lawrence raced it over cracked pavements and through dark alleyways.

When he was only a street away from Nancy Whitman’s house, he stopped. This was a place he knew, but a place he had avoided for a long time. He looked across the street to the house opposite. Though it was long past midnight, the curtains of the front room remained wide open. Scratching onto his very tip-toe, he peeked over the fence, peering into the screen-like window to see the two people sat inside. The man had his arm around his wife, and they were looking down at something.

Lawrence moved to the gate, resting his hand on the. But he knew he would not go inside; Ben’s hockey stick was still flung across the wall and his running shoes still arranged in artistic disarray. Glancing at the window again, Lawrence could see that the man was crying. They were silent, almost hushed tears, as though he didn’t want to make a scene. Ben’s mother looked beyond such displays of grief. She said something to her husband and they both laughed, but it was a sad laugh. Lawrence didn’t bother wondering why they hadn’t tidied Ben’s things away; he liked that they hadn’t.

He wanted to go in, to say something – to say sorry. So much had been promised in that word, in those five letters.

It was all so quiet. There was no anger, no resistance. Just quiet. He had no right to this moment of theirs, no place in their grief.

He rode on.

He was beginning to understand why Rose didn’t like the sun as much – it was overrated. The night’s darkness was only cracked by nearby lamps, sputtering in and out of life, so that Lawrence could only see a step or two in front. He liked it that way.

Nancy Whitman’s house looked just like the rest, but oddly bare. He walked up the path, pausing a moment by the front door. He realised the lateness of the hour, as well as his position as a teenage boy with a stolen girl’s bike. It probably wouldn’t make the best impression. But he needed to see this through to the end.

He propped the bike neatly against the frame of the door and rang the doorbell, before turning and walking away. Pausing around the corner, he waited. He heard the soft click of a door latch and the sigh of warm, indoor air. He chanced a look. A man stood in the doorway with Nancy Whitman standing behind him, holding the sleeve of her father’s pyjamas rather than his hand.

‘My bike!’ she ran out and, of all things, hugged it.

Lawrence walked away, and as he did so, he heard a cry of ‘Thank you Mr Bike-Finder!’ in the night air. He told himself he had imagined it.

At the end of the road he paused. He looked down the street that led to Ben’s house, and further to his own. His fingers were in his pockets, rolling over and over the burnt cigarette. The cold night air had long extinguished its warmth, but he liked to think he could feel it still beating between his fingers.

He felt something brush his shoulder, like a small breath. He looked up, and smiled. It was a smile just for himself.

He turned and walked back towards the hospital.

Rain was falling.

Ad patres

Roisin Browne

Take a pair of hazel eyes
Melting moss and amber chips
Shine them in the sunlight.

Take a wiry smile
Crooked on the knobbled tooth
And glean across horizons wide.

Take determined gentle beats
And pulse them wild
On salty tides.

Take limbed branches,
of arms,
and legs,
and hands
and feet,
Grow them into feathered beams
And gather.

Buffet, soar, glide
through Elysian grasses
Feather tip -
Breath
To salt rimmed eyes

Tilting
on the edge of silence

Poised.

Snow Globe

Sheila Jacob

‘Look, look’ I call to you,
come and look through the window.’

You’re there in seconds,
help me pull back
the bedroom curtain.

It’s snowing
softly
swiftly
unexpectedly

a cloud-fall of crystals
meshing together,

balancing
their own weight,

feathering brick walls,
blossoming on kerbsides,
embroidering wheelie bins
with bridal lace.

We clasp hands,
watch open-mouthed.

One shake of the sky
and we’re outside looking in,

our breath misting the glass.

Day or Night
By Cheryl A. Van Beek

On the barn’s weathered wood
lichen glows
in the confusing haze
of night
or day.
Early
or late,
the stars
whisper light.
Above the barn’s arrow peak
fine-tipped branches tint the sky.
Clouds of orange sherbet
melt over night’s
blackberry dreams.
Strokes of blue hope
watercolor the horizon.
The sun’s sidelong glances
cross-hatch shadows
over the grass,
shroud the hills
in the future
or past.

Day or Night
By Cheryl A. Van Beek

On the barn’s weathered wood
lichen glows
in the confusing haze
of night
or day.
Early
or late,
the stars
whisper light.
Above the barn’s arrow peak
fine-tipped branches tint the sky.
Clouds of orange sherbet
melt over night’s
blackberry dreams.
Strokes of blue hope
watercolor the horizon.
The sun’s sidelong glances
cross-hatch shadows
over the grass,
shroud the hills
in the future
or past.

LADIES’ MAN

by

Joanne Weck

We’re standing in a cold autumn rain at my daddy’s gravesite—-just me, Nana, and Olive, the three women who loved him and stuck by him. Well, there’s also the minister from Nana’s church–another woman, short, squat, with a butch haircut and Roman collar, who’s saying a few prayers before they start tossing the dirt onto his coffin.

There weren’t many people at the service in the little chapel, either. A few of the guys who’d played in Daddy’s band—-I noticed Sal, the drummer, and some other friends from The Last Resort huddled together in the back pews, already drunk or high at 10 a.m.

Uncle Bertram, Daddy’s older brother, rushed in at the last second to stand just inside the doorway, sneaking glances at his Rolex.

Aunt Tatum didn’t show up at all, even though she’s Daddy’s baby sister. They had some disagreement about a friend she’d hooked him up with who somehow ended up in the emergency ward after their big date.

Some measly flower arrangements–lilies, roses, carnations–were bunched together around the coffin, trying to look plentiful. The sickly smell they gave off made my allergies act up. Along with the sobs I couldn’t quite choke back, my eyes were streaming and I was sniffling from the pollen.

They’d done a pretty good job on Daddy’s face. He looked tan and rested, like he’d just spent a week in Miami. The dark suit pretty much hid the weight he’d put on over the last three years and his thick dark hair curled around his handsome face.

The funeral director, a tall man with a face speckled like a half-rotten melon, peered around the chapel, hoping for more of a crowd, I guess, before he finally gave Reverend Tisdale the nod.

Where were all the ladies who’d spent time at our little backwoods cabin? For that matter, where was my mother? I’d hung onto a tiny, secret hope that the news of his death would have somehow reached her, and she would put in a way-overdue appearance.

I caught myself sneaking glances around the chapel, half-expecting a mysterious figure, all in black with one of those spider web veils hiding her beautiful face to turn up, just like a scene from an old movie.

But there was no mysterious lady, and his buddies drifted off, probably to the nearest bar, even before we got to the part where they lowered the coffin. My heart was breaking for him, thinking how embarrassed he’d be at such a miserable turnout.

So we’re the only ones left to see Daddy put down into the grave–his mother, Nana Carlson, his wife Olive Mae Carlson (now his widow, after a three-year marriage), and me, his daughter, Madeline Bently Carlson, an orphan at fifteen.

I’m his only child, or at least the only one he ever admitted to. There were some nasty rumors, one of his exes claimed he was the father of her Down syndrome son, but Daddy got some tests to prove that it was all a con.

Naturally it’s raining. At least the black umbrella lent out by the Spalding Funeral Home hides the tears spilling down my cheeks. I wipe my face and whisper for about the gazillionth time, “I’m sorry, Daddy.”
By this time I’m feeling too sad and guilty to even try to hold back my tears, and I let the sobs rip, too. I steal a glance at Olive and Nana to see if they are feeling as bad as I am.

No one was more shocked than me when death struck Daddy down at forty-three. He deserved a longer life and a better end. Not to mention a better daughter. I’m thinking about the tantrums I threw when he wouldn’t buy me the motorbike I wanted, and how I could have broke down and told him I loved him now and then. I knew he loved me even if he never came right out and said so.

Sure, he was a bit clueless in the father department, but he did his best, and we were a team. He was real patient when he taught me to play guitar, and he never once hit me.

He had lots of pet names for me: Muffin, Dumpling, Pork Pie. It was great when we were home on a Tuesday night, cooking the one meal we’d gotten down perfect–baked beans on rye toast with a big pitcher of Bloody Marys. (Straight tomato juice for me. He said I couldn’t drink till I was sixteen, but I could always snarf enough to work up a real nice buzz from the glasses he and his posse left around.)

Credit where credit is due: He’d managed to raise me (with some help from Nana Carlson and later from Olive), working at his miserable day jobs–handyman and carpenter for a couple of the big resort hotels.

He made a little money from his music, too, when he was playing regular, but that went into his partying–payback to the guys who scored the coke and booze. His music was never about money, anyway.

Everyone agreed on that–he was a damn fine musician, a local legend in fact, known for his mean guitar, his wild partying, and his lovely ladies. Maybe I should say he was all about the music, the nightlife, and the ladies.

Before Olive, that is. Nobody else thought she was his type, but from the first I was sure she was perfect for him. Obviously, I was right. But sometimes being right can be worse than being wrong. I feel guilty even thinking that, especially when I look over at Olive, but that thought keeps sneaking its way into the back of my mind.

Women could never resist his deep dark eyes, his rich voice and those sweet and tender lyrics, not even mentioning his dark, brooding image. I’d have to say his technique worked best during the early stage (what Nana refers to as “courting”), but it was pretty potent even after things started to go bad.

When he was coaxing a lady to come back after one of their fights–let’s say he drank a little too much and she just didn’t know when to shut up and pushed him a little too far.

It worked like this—-he’d send a dozen red roses, a romantic card, and a CD with a song written “just for her”. Actually it was one of his standard numbers–“Lorrie, I’m So Sorry” with the name of the current lady stuck in. Too bad stage three eventually followed it. That was when the lady packed up and (as Nana described it) “took a powder.”

The whole cycle from first sight to final breakup usually ran about six months. My mother must have been one tough chick, hanging in there for over a year. She sneaked out one night when I was just a couple of weeks old, dumping me on Nana (“just for the night” is what she told Nana) and not even leaving a photo of herself behind.

I have to admit, before Olive I was actually happiest when Daddy was between lady friends because that was the only time we spent whole weekends together–me, Daddy, and Nana Carlson.

During his dry spells we would practically move in with Nana. She would serve up her rich German cooking, help me with my homework, lay out fresh underwear and clean clothes for school–and the best part, Daddy was home every night.

Sure, he usually passed out in front of the TV after a hard day’s work and one of Nana’s dinners, but at least it seemed more like a normal family life until the next lady came along.

Fawne Delight was the first of his ladies that I remember clearly. I was nine and a half when she came into my life and only ten when she took off.

One Sunday afternoon when Daddy brought me back from Nana’s, there she was–a beautiful life-size Barbie doll, with long blonde hair, wide green eyes, and the kind of curves they call voluptuous.

“She’s adorable!” she said to Daddy. (I was definitely not the kind of kid people called “adorable.” More likely it was “Fatso,” “Four-eyes,” or “Miss Piggy.”) “What’s your name, honey?” she asked in a sugary-sweet voice.

“Madeline.”

“That’s so cute!” Her laugh rang out like the chiming of bells. “Do you know the story of Madeline at the Plaza? That was my favorite book when I was a little girl.”

I nodded, feeling kind of dumb but happy. For Christ’s sake, I was almost ten. On the other hand, most of Daddy’s ladies treated me like I was just some problem they got stuck with, like a wad of chewing gum on their shoe. Only Fawne genuinely liked me.

She worked as a dancer at Pocono Paradise, a ratty looking “gentlemen’s club” (ALL NUDE DANCERS BYOB, the big billboard screamed), so mostly she slept days, but when she was up and about she was always sweet to me.

When I asked Daddy if she was going to be my mommy, he sort of snickered and kept right on strumming his guitar.

During their early days together, Daddy and Fawne spent a lot of time at the cabin, bringing home pizza or Chinese take-out, laughing, talking, and drinking. On Sundays the band came over and hung out all day, playing hard and doing coke off the coffee table.

But then the trouble started. He suspected her of sneaking around with other guys and ordered her to give up her dancing. I hid in my room with the bedcovers pulled up over my head to shut out the screaming and smashing furniture. After the first 911 call I was back at Nana’s.

Anybody else could have guessed how it would end, but I was heartbroken the day he brought me back home and I found her gone. The only evidence that she’d been there at all was a few pieces of clothing and a small makeup bag she left behind.

I eased my grief by trying to paint her beauty onto my own chubby face. Daddy caught me smearing candy pink lipstick over my mouth, my face all decorated with powder, eye shadow, and blush trying to copy her glamour. I was wearing, over my tee shirt, one of her blue-spangled bras.

Instead of noticing how beautiful I looked, he turned as vicious as if he’d just come in from a night of carousing.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing? You look like a little slut!” His eyes were narrow slits and his looks turned ugly. “Go wash your face and take off that revolting thing!” he snarled. “I want you to take a good look at your Nana. That’s the kind of woman I want you to grow up to be.”

After Fawne’s exit, he fell into his typical end-of-the-romance funk. He tumbled down into a deep depression, canceled all of his gigs, and did his drinking in front of Nana’s TV.

After his day job, we’d head right over to her house for dinner. She’d hover over him, serving up his favorite meals–fried chicken with mashed potatoes, or pot roast. Wonderful desserts showed up at every meal–apple pie, chocolate cake, or one of her famous strudels. If anything sparked up his temper, she knew exactly how to calm him, patting his back and murmuring, “There, there, now, Scotty, it’s alright. I have some of those brownies left. Maybe a cup of coffee?”

After dinner he’d wallow on the worn lounge chair that had been Pop-Pop’s, nursing his beer. Over the months of his recovery, Daddy got soft and lazy, even growing a little paunch.

I knew the recovery stage had begun when the gleam came back into Daddy’s eyes, followed pretty quickly by the his sense of humor.

“Hi, Pork Pie!” he greeted me when he got home from work. “Looks like you’re getting a little chubby around the middle.”

“Time for us to start working out,” he announced.

And it was back to stage one of the Cycle of Romance.

He put in monster sessions at the gym and stuck to a diet of fruits, veggies, and whole grains until his rock-hard six-pack was back. He dug his guitar out of the closet and practiced late into the night. He updated his wardrobe, adding some cool new boots and sexy jeans.

Before long the band was hanging out and he was setting up gigs, right back in action–playing at The Last Resort and other spots, partying all night. When he delivered me to Nana’s on Friday afternoon, I never knew if he’d pick me up on Sunday evening or two weeks later.

Nana turned grim “You ought to come home at a decent hour,” she whined. “You’re too old to keep up all this womanizing! When are you going to find a nice young lady and settle down?”

“I’m still looking for a lady just like you, Mom.”

Nana pretended like she hadn’t heard, but I could tell she was tickled as we loaded my backpack and laptop into his trunk.

“Your daddy’s womanizing is gonna kill him and me, too,” she told me for the millionth time.

And just like that it hit me that I knew the perfect lady for Daddy. My plotting revved into high gear at that very second.

Olive Cranford was someone I already liked. Her house, where Nana took me once a week for piano lessons, was full of overstuffed furniture covered in floral patterns, and fragrant with the scent of chocolate and cinnamon.

Nana and Olive hit it right off, too. Although Olive was about thirty years younger, there was something sweetly similar about them.

The day of my first lesson Olive invited Nana in for a cup of tea and she hung around to share recipes and gossip. One afternoon, after I overheard Olive confiding about how much she missed her husband, Barry, who’d gotten crushed a few winters before by his own runaway snowplow, I suggested to Nana that Daddy could drive me to my next piano lesson.

Nana knew what I was up to. I caught a crafty little gleam in her eye when she agreed, so I was pretty sure we were on the same wavelength. Not that it was ever an outright conspiracy, you couldn’t say that.

One afternoon, he showed up after a lesson and Olive invited him in for a cup of tea. She served him her cinnamon coffee cake, and they sat drinking tea together and chatting.

Little by little, as I’d hoped, one thing led to another. Even if Nana dropped me off, he made it a point to be there when I was through.

The whole thing sort of sneaked up on him, I think. They started going places together, out to dinner or a movie, and then, as Nana said it, “he was wrapped up and sold.”

Soon he was spending an hour after every lesson telling Olive the story of his life while I watched TV in the den. She always served him homemade pecan pie or apple strudel and clucked with sympathy as he told her about his tough job. When he brought her around to meet the band, they couldn’t believe he was serious, she was just so far off his type.

He stopped hanging out, and the two of us spent the evenings at Olive’s place, where she served up dinners as good as any of Nana’s.

If something got under his skin and he raised his voice, Olive was there with her soft, soothing ways, asking, “What is it, darling?” sounding just like Nana.

She worked at home, teaching mostly kids and an occasional housewife, so he didn’t have to worry about her cheating like all those other women.

I broke down in tears the day she asked me to be maid of honor at their wedding, and Nana sobbed from the day he proposed until three days after the wedding.

Daddy and I moved into her cozy little house, and for the first time in my life I had a real girly-girl’s bedroom. Daddy finally gave up his music altogether and came home to dinner every night like a regular dad.
I’d never seen him so content. Sundays we had dinner at Nana’s, and she outdid herself cooking up all of the meals he favored. They competed to see who could please him most. If he mentioned that Olive had made his favorite lemon meringue pie, Nana would retaliate with her German chocolate cake.

It seemed that I had shaped the perfect life for all of us, with a little help from Nana. We were the perfect happy family I always dreamed about.

Until last Tuesday–when Daddy, in the middle of putting up shelves at the Manor Inn Coffee Shop, dropped stone dead of a heart attack. The doctors said, in the post mortem, that his cholesterol had gone right through the roof and the layers of fat around his heart had choked it. All those dinners of steak and potatoes, fried chicken and chocolate cake had done him in. So much for a happy home life and good cooking.

Nana Carlson, Olive, and I were alone in the long black limo that took us from the funeral parlor to the graveyard. I was still sniffling, Nana had tears running into the crevices of her wrinkled cheeks, and Olive broke the quiet with sudden outbursts of sobs.

Now, standing graveside, Olive has finally managed to get herself under control. Olive’s arm is tucked in Nana’s, and they look like two crows, both in dark hats and coats, sharing the black umbrella. They comfort one another while I toss the first shovel of dirt onto Daddy’s coffin.

The Million Shilling Boy

James Gleeson

Daylight washed in like a slow tide and there was little movement in the camp. The boy woke and watched through a tear in the filthy plastic window-sheet as the camel was led past, rumbling and disgruntled. A Berber man squatted on his haunches nearby with the reins of a scrawny donkey looped round his wrist, watching while the cook and two soldiers brought the camel behind the bunkhouse. The desert suffers little waste, and the waiting man would carry off the hide as part of the bargain struck once the animal had been butchered. The cook nodded and jabbed the blade downwards, and the hoarse braying of the beast echoed against the bunkhouse wall as the boys hauled it to its knees. The man braced his legs either side of the camel’s neck like a man shearing sheep, hooked an arm under the jaw of the beast, and drew the blade quickly across the animal’s throat in a single smooth movement. At first, blood puffed quickly into the air like mist, then the skin drew fully open and a great wash of thick, dark liquid surged from the wound and pooled on the sand like oil. The watching man was very still, his eyes intent over the cloth wrapped round his face, and a pair of plastic bags hooked on the thorns of a stunted bush by his head fluttered in the breeze like trapped bats. The camel groaned once more and rolled onto its side, shuddering as the lungs wheezed like the last gasp of broken bellows. The boy drew his lips back over his teeth like a dog as he watched the cook hack at the carcass and fling bloody great parcels of flesh onto a canvas sheet. There would be food.
Later that morning the boy sat on the wooden steps outside the cookhouse block and closed his eyes in the sunshine. The rising heat of the day would soon drive him to find shade, but for now he listened to the wind and felt the warming glow of the sun behind his eyelids. Swallows dipped over the rooftops and the boy dreamed of flying away with them to some far- off place of safety where he wouldn’t feel the constant hunger that gripped his insides almost every waking hour or the fear that never left him, always tripping lightly across his nerves like fingers feathering across a piano keyboard. Two soldiers, little more than boys themselves, in baggy uniforms that flapped against their thin legs and boots that looked huge on their bony feet, sidled close like hyenas, hollow-cheeked with hunger, their eyes glazed by their daily smoke. A stone bounced off his knee and rattled down the wooden steps, the pain scalding his skin. He stood wearily, resigned to pain, and heard a double tap, as slow and solid as an undertaker’s knock, on the door frame behind. A shadow fell across his legs, and he turned his head and squinted up to where the cook stood in the doorway. A machete hung loosely from the man’s hand, the blade sticky with feathers and blood. The tall man was silent, but the flat, hard look in his eyes simply said that camels, chickens, men or boys, it was all the same. The boy soldiers muttered to each other and shuffled away scowling. They were bored and feral, and in this desolate place there was plenty of nothing but time. More opportunities to hurt would come again soon. It had been almost six weeks since the boy had tumbled from the truck with the rest of the prisoners in the sharp cold of a desert morning and the cook had chosen from the first to watch over him the way an old prisoner might gather a jailhouse mouse in the palm of his hand. The cook was a long-boned Ivorian called Yanni with ironwood arms and shoulder muscles that rolled like cannonballs under his skin. He’d been a boxer once, and spoke the English of one who had spent a few short years with family in New York, though for the most part the man cared little for conversation and carried himself with a solid, quiet gravity.
Trawling round the camp in the loneliness of those first frightening days, the boy had saved a handful of half-burnt books from the rubbish fire at one end of the compound camp and spent his evenings reading in the soft glow of a lamp hung from a wooden beam that ran the length of the kitchen, gnawing on bones or scraping burnt rice from pots with his fingers. A tiny radio hung on a nail by the sink, and the boy read while the cook scoured the huge metal plates of the cooker and nodded along to rhythms on the radio. Sometimes the music would fade and they heard instead the loud voices of passionate men, and the boy came to recognise that noise for what it was: the sound of an unguarded microphone in a lunatic asylum broadcasting the hollow words of politicians and generals forever calling on others to offer some great sacrifice. For the boy, they were the voice of nightmares, the same sounds he’d heard invading the airwaves before the chaos of shattered lives that had brought him to this desolate place. The music would sweep back then like a cleansing wave, with ranks of uplifted, joyous voices defying the poisoned call to arms as sunshine follows a storm. The music made the cook smile and mumble, the scars on his cheekbones catching the light like knife nicks in leather. Clattering wooden spoons like drumsticks against a huge steel pot hung on the wall like a shield, he ducked and shuffled round the kitchen like a man happy in his own skin. One quiet evening Yanni was slicing the carcass of a goat while the boy hunched over an old atlas. The goat’s head rested on a table to one side, watching the boy with dull eyes under delicate lashes, the tip of its tongue sticking between rows of tiny teeth as if the animal had something to say. The boy sat hunched over an old atlas, the spine of the book battered and the pages loose from years of use. He scowled at the goat’s head and thought sourly of all the countries in the world and how easily a thousand miles could be spanned by simply turning a page while his world entirely ended fifty feet away at a camp gate laced with barbed wire. Looking at the goat’s head drew his mind back and he saw again, like a dark mirage, men in ragged uniforms swarming from the hills at dawn and breaking on the seaside town like a wave. In a chaos of screams and gunfire and the drumbeat of pounding boots, everything was lost. His grandmother had died without waking in the first rattle of gunfire and lay as if resting on a low cot by the doorway, and on the earth outside the hut a goat stood paralysed with fear in a glow of flames. As first light fell upon the burning huts, the trucks were loaded with prisoners and heading into the western desert.
Yanni sat and looked across the table. “What is it you want, boy?” said the cook.
“I want home,” said the boy. “I just want to go home. ”
When the cook spoke again his tone was solemn but not unkind. He shook his head. “Home is gone. Now your home will be wherever you go to next. For now you have only this. “He waved his hand vaguely round the room with the long tables and benches lined along either side. “The war is coming closer. If you stay here they will feed you only to make you fight, and they will make you die. When the fighting is over, then maybe we will have some change. Everybody will be happy and rich. Maybe. To have a long life you must go to another home. “ He slid the boy’s book across the table and flipped the pages until the great map of Africa lay open before them. Yanni traced his finger across the pale yellow spread of desert, over the light blue of the Mediterranean Sea and beyond to Europe. “Go north. Follow the food. Here,” he stroked a fingernail across the borderlines of Europe, “you will always find food.”
The boy smiled at the idea of gnawing like a rat through some great, beautiful mountain of food. “Sometime this war will end. Read a thousand books. Come back with fine words in your mouth and a beautiful suit on your back. When you speak the people will hear poetry. Maybe they will make you the president.” Yanni sat and began winding strips of cloth round his hands, then slipped on a pair of battered leather gloves. “Why do you love to read so much?” he said.
“Books take me away” said the boy. He looked through the open door. A couple of soldiers huddled by the fence to share a smoke, the glow of the cigarette tip like a firefly in the gloom. “Somewhere good. “
Yanni seemed to uncoil as he rose from the stool. “A wise man once said that he who saves a life saves the world. You can stay here and die or we can save the world.”
“The boy frowned. ”What do you mean?”
The cook replied. “I’ve heard the soldiers talking about men in the city in the north who can send boys to Europe. They say the price is a million shillings. You must go to the city, and maybe God will send you a million shillings.”
“Come with me,” said the boy. “We can go together to a better place. We can follow the food.”
The cook shook his head. “I must stay here. I am the cook,” he said, as if that explained everything. “I must stay here, but sometimes I can go away too. Now read,“ he said. “We will talk later when you are finished reading, when you come back.“
“Will you teach me how to fight?“ asked the boy.
The cook smiled and shook his head. “First you need to learn to fight with this.” He tapped the side of the boy’s head with his fingertip, then held up his fist. “Then you learn to fight with this. “ Yanni stepped across the kitchen and into the freezer room, moving between hanging carcasses to hang his radio on a spare meat-hook, snorting and huffing through his mouth, shuffling as he moved and ducking his shoulders from side to side. His breath burst in great plumes in the chilled air and his hands became a blur as he hammered a tattoo on the great slabs of meat. Sweat rolled and steamed on his skin until his half-seen figure moved in a cloud like a desert djinn.
Two nights later Yanni and the boy crept in shadow like desert foxes to a corner of the camp where the cook had made a boy-sized hole in the fence. He shoved a sack of food and a blanket into the boy’s hands and held the fence back while the boy scrambled through. Yanni laid a hand on the boy’s shoulder and whispered in his ear as he passed, and by the time the boy had slithered as far as the nearest clump of straggly brush and looked back, the cook had vanished. The boy kept moving until he reached a spot within sight of the compound where a clump of spare bushes lined the edge of a small hollow in the earth. He burrowed into the sand like a heat-hungry lizard, but the night-time desert holds only the memories of warmth, and the air was brittle with cold. He lay looking up at the sky, cocooned in his blanket, and thought he recognised the North Star among a million more. Follow this star and move north to the city and beyond, to the lands of plenty, Yanni had said.
The sun rose in the morning like welcome news but soon pressed like a hammer upon his head, and that day melted into another while he lay in patches of meagre shade, watching tiny rodents skitter past and the slow stalk of a single scorpion. His mind seemed to slide between sleep and sensibility, and it felt like a fever as he heard the cook speak through the mouth of a dead goat. “We go south in two days. Wait until the camp is empty, then walk north until you reach the city. Move only in darkness. When you see people on the road, hide in the desert.” On the third morning, before the heat could build, the camp moved out. The soldiers were heading south towards rumours of war like wintering birds, and the sound of growling engines grew loud before fading again as the drivers changed into a lower gear to send the heavy trucks grinding up the long incline to the hill-top. The wind stole the engine noise as each truck reached the crest and sat silhouetted briefly like some great beetle before dropping out of sight. A metal lanyard clanked and shimmied against the empty flagpole with a sound like a broken bell as the boy stood and looked around. All that remained was the soft swish of wind like silk sheets drawn across the earth and the quiet hiss of blown sand scouring the narrow ribbon of road that ran to the horizon. The boy adjusted the straps of his pack until it hung more easily on his bony shoulders, and he could still hear the cook’s parting words. Goodbye, Mister President. He stepped onto the road and began to walk north, coming home, coming here.

Olive O’Brien is an author and publisher. Olive has published three children’s books, Perry the Playful Polar Bear, Perry the Polar Bear Goes Green and Eco Zico. She has also published a children’s book app for the iPad. She has a Masters in Journalism and previously worked as a features writer and news reporter at The Sunday Business Post and Mid-Day newspaper. Olive blogs for hellomagazine.com and provides critique and editorial services for editing.ie. She is also is the director of Creative Writing Ink and her eco-friendly book publishing company Silver Angel Publishing was shortlisted for the 2012 David Manley Emerging Entrepreneur Awards and for the Green Communications Award 2012.

Next available start date: 19th January 2015. Early Bird Offer up until the 29th of December 2014. Limited to 10 places. €75 instead of usual price of €95.

Our four week one-to-one Beginners Creative Writing Course is suitable for complete beginners. It’s also suitable if you haven’t written anything for a while and if you’d like to get back into a writing routine.

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The course will cover:

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Learning to grow young

Sheila Jacob

As for those other
bold brave hopeful words
they’re inked on paper kites
set free to follow the wind
and the seagulls’ cry.

I need new words
for a changing time
when seasons bow
like walking-sticks
towards a wintry sun.

Will they come
from this ageing woman
whose hands fold moth-like
over an empty page?

Her face is contoured
with sixty-something years,
her hair mostly white
beneath its salon-tinted brown,
her eyes so dry they weep.

Inside her heart
she has a song.

I watch, listen.

The moth-wings
catch the glow
of it,

open and dance
across a rustling page.

Asha Howard-Birt

Clouds like sheets hanging on a washing line;
Billowing as the wind whispers secret messages to the trees.
The canal is a sapphire ribbon;
Racing from yesterday to today and over the brink of tomorrow.
Plastic bag swans gliding across;
Knives scraping the water.
Boats like ants, crawling across the surface;
Unaffected by the world around them.
The canal is a serpent, playing tag with the horizon.
Passers-by watch, enchanted by the beauty of its smooth blanket of indigo silk.

Caitlin Nolan

Scott didn’t know how it had worked, or where it had come from, all he knew was that he could do it. One day, back when Scott had been a wildly reckless learning driver he hadn’t been concentrating. He failed to notice his foot getting heavy on the pedals and even managed to miss his car veering onto the other side of the road. Scott only took notice when a little red car smashed into him head on.
Coming to in the shattered remains of his Dad’s old Ford Fiesta he looked across at the bloody scene before him and threw up.
The other car was now splattered with crimson, like a sick abstract art piece. Shattered pieces of plastic and glass had been littered about and thick acrid clouds of smoke billowed out of the car bonnet. He could see a woman, her face slackened and bloody, bashed on the steering wheel opposite him.

***
That weekend, when Scott returned home, he told his parents everything. He ignored his mum’s pleas for him to eat and holed himself up in his room.
Scott didn’t cry; it didn’t occur to him that he should have been sad for the other woman, that she was someone’s daughter, mother, sister, wife, and that he had probably injured her beyond recovery.
Instead, he hoped that his denial would ease the reality of the crash and help him find some peace.
As he sat in his room, he noticed an old, plastic keyboard from his primary school days peeking out from under his bed. He remembered when his mum and dad had cried when he had managed to bang out an out of tune rendition of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.
He lifted up the keyboard and started to absentmindedly press the keys. Before he knew it, he was playing. He played like he had never done before, he didn’t have to think while his fingers danced across the grubby keys and the sounds of Beethoven, Bach and Chopin filled his room. After an hour he stopped and wondered what was happening to him; had the crash unlocked some musical skills in the back of his mind? Where had he learnt to do any of it? And how?

***
When he got up the next day he slouched downstairs.
“Shh, Walter shut up! He’s coming down, he’s – oh sweetie good morning!” His mum threw her arms around him as he entered the kitchen, smelling of fried breakfast. “I made your favourite bacon, scrambled eggs on a bagel!”
Ah, so she was trying to feed his apology for the crash out of him.
Rolling his eyes, he turned to watch his dad try, and fail to hastily shove a wadded up newspaper in the bin before the spring action lid flew open and flung the paper to Scott’s feet.
“TALENTED PIANIST DIES IN HEAD ON COLLISION!”
Ignoring his mum’s whimpers and his dad’s move to grab the paper, he picked it up and began to read:
“Eliza Hetherington, 32, died yesterday in Brookeswhich Hospital after being involved in a head on collision on the M82 with another car. The talented pianist performer and Doctor of Musical Arts was returning home from Vienna, where she was presented with an award at the annual European Young Musician Awards, for Best Young Pianist…”
Talented pianist. Doctorate in Musical Art. Shit.
Scott knew then what had happened.
He had killed that woman, he had somehow taken her talent for playing the piano, having stolen her life. He had to get out. Turning on his sobbing parents, ignoring their pleas that “It wasn’t his fault” and that he “wasn’t a murderer, their baby just wasn’t a murderer,” he had left.

***
That had been two years ago and Scott was, well if Scott hadn’t been a murderer then, he certainly was now.
After he had walked out of his parents’ house a voice had spoken up in the back of his mind, a quiet voice that had whispered over the other screaming thoughts flying around his mind, standing out amongst the chaos.
What if when he took a life, he took their best quality?
Sickened by himself and the voice in his head, Scott ran away, aimlessly wandering, staying in hostels where he could hide, his backpack his only lasting companion.
As much as he tried to ignore that one thought, it kept coming back, pestering him to think about it.
One evening, Scott was playing piano in some bar, in some town, sipping his way through drink after drink until he walked in. A cricketer. Or was it a baseballer? Scott could hardly remember his own name let alone anyone else’s and in his alcohol addled state he let that little voice in his brain tell him to do it, to kill him.
So he sat and barely concentrated on playing the piano, instead watching out for his moment to strike and an hour into his meal that moment happened. Excusing himself after the man, Scott followed him out the back into the smoker’s courtyard, a bleak square patio with a few table umbrellas propped up and a couple of chairs lounging around. It was empty aside from the two of them.
Adrenaline pulsed through Scott. Aided by the booze in his system he grabbed one of the large umbrellas and ran at him. Before the other man could fully turn around Scott was swinging the umbrella back and hitting its mark with a sickening crunch.
Scott leant over him, tried and failed to feel a pulse, turned on his heels and walked back into the building, through the bar and out into the night.
The next day he went out and found himself a tennis ball in the park. Without waiting to see if he was being watched, he threw the ball, right up into the air, over practically the whole grassed area before it gunned into a tree catching an unsuspecting pigeon square in the head.
He was right after all, he could steal people’s abilities. The little voice in his head applauded him for finally accepting what it had already told him the day after that crash, and encouraged him to go do it again.
Instead of waiting, hoping someone would come walking into his life with an aptitude he wanted, he went looking for them. He scoured the internet, looking for news about happy people, talented people, people he could kill. He found himself envious of anyone with a talent, furious with people who had something he didn’t.
Scott wildly hunted his targets down, chasing them across the country just so he could feel the life ooze out of them and straight into him. He thrived on it.
For one kill he managed to pose as security for a twenty something, blonde-haired, blue-eyed pop singer as he escorted her from her hotel to the concert venue. Cornering her in the back seat of a car, Scott found himself on top of her, his hands around her throat squeezing and squeezing until the bright blue of her eyes faded and she was gone.
On another kill he accidentally bumped into a politician trying to go incognito in a department store. It wasn’t that hard to pull out a knife in the men’s changing rooms and quietly slash his throat before slipping out, unnoticed. Scott then assumed he would get the man’s good fortune with women, the MP’s affairs littered the covers of tabloids regularly, but he didn’t; the gift he had stolen from him was his manipulation of people, the ability to talk someone down and into what you wanted. It was just what Scott needed.
As time passed and his talents increased, he became more reckless, hungrier for bigger better gifts, his control all but a memory as he savagely followed the cycle of hunt, kill, run, hunt, kill, run.
Scott had a new target now though. A few days beforehand a new headline had caught his eye: “LUCKIEST WOMAN IN THE WORLD? ANNABELLE GRACE, 67, SURVIVES TWO BOUTS OF CANCER (NOW SUFFERING WITH A THIRD), BEING STRUCK WITH LIGHTNING, A PLANE CRASH AND NOW WINS £13 MILLION IN LOTTO SUCCESS.” Now that was something he could do with. Dropping the newspaper, Scott left the shop he was in and headed to the closest library, eager, ready and excited for this new hunt.

***
It had been eight months since Scott had walked out of his parent’s house, eight months since he had become a taboo in his own home.
The sun flitted through the cheerful yellow blind on the kitchen window, bathing the table in a warm, early morning blaze. His mum and dad were slumped in their chairs. A bowl of soggy cereal sat on the table as Scott’s dad flicked through the newspaper; his mum stared past the TV and out the window.
“Walter?”
“Yes honey?” he replied, without even glancing up.
“Do you think Scott will ever come home to us?”
Walter slowly folded the paper and placed it carefully on the table. “Cath, we’ve been over this, we don’t know where he is-” at this conclusion, Scott’s mother burst out into violent, shuddering sobs “-or what’s happened to him,” he tried to continue. “We’ve looked and no one can find him, we have to, we…we might have to accept that he’s never coming home.” Walter moved round the table to his now hysterical wife and pulled her to his chest, petting her hair.
The TV was still on behind them, the last part of an interview with a middle-aged woman was playing:
“So Anne, one last question, what would you say you owe all this to? What’s your best talent or gift?” a sprightly feminine voice asked from behind the camera.
“Oh, now I know this might sound strange to some but I owe my character, my life and everything I’ve ever achieved to my childhood illnesses, my cancer. Because I’ve got it again now, I’m dying now, I feel as though I’m drawing every possible good thing into my life. My greatest gift is my terminal illness,” the woman replied, a sad smile on her face.
The logo of the new channel interrupted the end and flashed across the screen followed by a solemnly faced reporter back in the studio.
“That was the last interview of the late Annabelle Grace, who was found brutally murdered in her five-bedroom house in the city in the early hours of the morning. Tributes are being paid to the inspirational woman who…”
Unnoticed, the article continued in the background while Scott’s mother sobbed on.

Dutch Elm

Peter Branson

This Autumn’s tardy, tree and hedge still decked
in party clothes, yet here’s an elm, its time
rung up, the corpus overlooked, as stark
as lightning tempered by a winter sky,
the others round removed by snarling blade,
teeth pulled with tractor power and chain, ploughed out.
Like antlers, top most rigging and the mast
bone white, some velvet bark clings on below.
The rutted trunk is compromised, dry rot
like honeycomb in ancient beam and board;
above, well spent, woodpecker holes like eyes
in skulls. Where mosses, lichen, fungi dine,
vast worlds of tiny creatures breed and thrive:
for ever, in the face of death, new life.

The Mermaid and the Fisherman

Wilson F. Engel, III

Once there was a fisherman whose ability to catch fish was so remarkable that both a profound critic of the sport and a relative said that the fisherman could catch fish where no fish existed. The fisherman’s mother-in-law had always said that if the fisherman decided to turn professional, he would soon become rich from the prizes he might win. Indeed, a very few fishermen survived as professionals, though those who did made their calling lucrative beyond normal expectations. The fisherman’s wife, knowing that her husband loved nothing better than fishing all day, encouraged the fisherman to try fishing as a profession.

So the fisherman quit his hated day job, formed a limited liability company, and began entering fishing competitions. Within two months, the fisherman was fishing all over the world, from the lakes and rivers of Scotland to the Congo and Amazon river basins, from offshore oceanic zones off Cabo in Baja California to the rip-tide environments off Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope. Everywhere the fisherman set his lines, he landed the biggest fish and the largest catch of any competitor. Within four months, his picture graced the cover of three top fishing magazines, and interviewers flocked to his home or to his latest contest site. He had a following on Twitter, pages on Linkedin, Xing and Facebook, and his own personal web site with blogs describing his equipment and methods.

Within nine months of his startup, he had to hire a young asssitant to do his back office work and help him write his blogs, an accountant to manage his winnings and accounts, and a publicist who made sure that the right messaging went out to the masses. In addition to making the rounds of the specialty fishing channel programs, the fisherman appeared on CNN and CNBC. He had broken all records for a single angler in the competitive fishing field. The fisherman’s mother-in-law and wife were simply astounded at his success. They took credit for having encouraged the fisherman to follow his true calling. They also bought extra freezer space to contain the trophy fish that were not going to be mounted for display.

The fisherman was now on the road almost continuously. He criss-crossed the globe and fished from pole to pole. He became a wonder, if not a freak because he began to catch very strange and marvelous fish. For example, the fisherman landed an 800-pound hake in the Bering Sea. Then off Cuba he caught the largest marlin on record at 750 pounds. In a competition focusing on the lakes of the Hebrides, he caught a sixty-inch button-lipped brown trout. Now he had the attention of the greatest living fishermen, and they were not at all pleased to see the neophyte taking all the trophies, cash awards, and prize fish. They went all in, pursuing his exploits with vengeance. They suspected he had tricks that provided him an unfair advantage. His luck was far too good to be merely human.

The fisherman felt the pressure of envy, jealousy and spite, so he scheduled programming in which he demonstrated the virtues of his method. He would stand on the end of a peer sticking out over a hideous mud flat with barely enough water cover to quell the stench. There he would make a cast or two, and he would reel in a monster fish that had never been seen in those waters or any other waters. He pulled in a channel catfish so large that it slided over the bottom all the way to the pier. After he landed that fish, he told how his ten-pound line could tackle fish that were well over a quarter of a ton in weight.

The fisherman asked his detractors to accompany him on expeditions and to use bait like his or their own bait. Now he fished in what were touted as the impossibles. No fish could be caught in waters boiling because of geothermal currents, or so everyone said. The fisherman pulled from waters in a crater of an active volcano a fish that broke the scales. The provenance and lineage of this fish, named Proteanensis Pescis after the fisherman, are still debated among academicians and scholars. The fisherman hooked a blue whale that might have weighed well over 150 tons near the Arctic ice cap, but he cut the line and let the behemoth swim back into the frigid depths rather than violate the spirit of his quest. Whenever he caught a fish whose size or identity proved challenging, he brought it close enough for the record, then released the fish again. The fisherman was now changing the rules of the competitive games. Catch and release became mandatory for certain classes and sizes of fish.

At home the fisherman’s mother-in-law and wife had rented an old Moose Lodge Hall to house the trophy fish. They had rented an entire suite of fish lockers at the local market to freeze the catch. Their eyes watered when they saw the accountant’s records of the fisherman’s quarterly earnings. The fisherman did not even bother to count his winnings anymore. His CDs and fishing paraphernalia were now being sold in Walmart and Kmart and on QVC. Women wore jeweled broaches and necklaces with images of the new fish he had landed. Grizzled old geezer fishermen and wrinkled granny fisherwomen all ran out to buy the fishing gear, boats and insect repellants that he had deigned to endorse. Apple named a fish finder after him. Shakespeare put out an entire line of poles and reels with the fisherman’s name in his own signature.

Everything was entirely too good to be true. Three investigative reporters now made it their missions in life to debunk and dethrone the fisherman. They were secretly funded by his competitors. No matter how closely they looked at the fisherman’s life, they could find no fault with the man or his methods. In fact, the more they looked and found nothing wrong, the more they became believers themselves. One of the most critical among them finally wrote the story that changed the game. It was titled “The Paul Bunyan of Fishermen,” and it placed the fisherman above mortals into the realm of American fables. The investigator-turned-adulator wrote of the John Henry of fishermen, and his follow-on article was entitled, “The Young Man and the Sea.” After that story, the reporter became the fisherman’s constant companion and caddy. He blogged constantly about the fisherman’s every move. His insights were the more startling because they were so dead-pan and factual. The reporter was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for his reportage on the fisherman.

The fisherman’s mother-in-law and wife were pleased but somewhat concerned because the fisherman was only rarely able to visit home. It is true that he skyped at least once a week, and the reporter’s accounts could be followed daily. Yet the fisherman’s wife was becoming lonely. The fisherman’s mother-in-law was concerned that her daughter was feeling blue on most days, even more than she had been when her husband had been working his hated 8-to-5 job as what she called “a drone in a morgue.” She had seen her dream fulfilled in her husband’s success, but she had, in effect, lost her husband. It helped that she had the money and the food that came from the fisherman’s exploits. If she wanted to see her husband, she only had to turn on the Direct TV. When she tried to telephone her husband, she discovered that the reporter had become her husband’s executive assistant. She had to work hard to get her husband on the phone. Often she was asked to leave a message. The fisherman responded by text message or in the next skype. It was a good thing that the fisherman’s children had all grown up to self-sufficiency.

The mother-in-law and wife had a conference one day. They decided they would confront the fisherman about their never seeing much of him anymore. They would make demands. He would have to make time for his wife, or she would leave him. The fisherman used the monthly skype as a mediation. Reasonably, he argued, if he should stop his momentum, he would lose everything he had gained. His wife had become accustomed to having the lifestyle that his earnings had afforded her. If his work stopped, all their debts would become due, and it would bring them back to where they were before. He said unequivocally that he would not return to work at the morgue. The women saw the wisdom of his continuing to do what his calling required. She sadly realized that she would probably see her husband only once a year, if that, for the rest of her life—or as long as his dramatic career lasted. After long discussions with her mother, the fisherman’s wife decided on separation, then divorce. She would take half of what her husband had made up to that point, and she and her mother would live on that. The fisherman could go wherever he liked and do what he liked. Let someone else find another Moose Lodge for his trophies. Let someone else find a freezer to stock his fish.

The fisherman, now freed of ties to his wife, redoubled his efforts at his business. His lawyer handled the divorce and settlement. Somehow the fisherman’s luck did not diminish. Instead, it grew into something no one could have anticipated. Where he had formerly fished in individual competitions, he branched out into commercial fishing. His prowess in landing the biggest fish now extended to reaping unbelievable catches of ground fish or bonita or shark or squid or octopus or lobster. He created whole new lines of fish products. His image transformed from the picture taken for the article “Young Man of the Sea” and became the image associated with Hemingway’s novel. He was seen by the masses as a lone fisherman braving the wild and relentless sea to harvest the catch that would feed multitudes.

His executive assistant continued to file blogs through all this mighty ascent. He was present when the fisherman and his representatives went to cut a thirty-year deal for fish products with the ministry of the Peoples Republic of China. He was present when the fisherman and his representatives made fish hatchery a priority among the Mercosur nations. He recorded the intricate agreements for aquatic exchanges between the Eurozone nations and the Russian Federation. The fisherman negotiated the fishery agreements for the Polar regions. The executive assistant recorded the fisherman’s first use of Jesus’ commandment, “Feed my sheep!” The fisherman alluded nearly every time he spoke to the New Testament parable of the loaves and fishes. For the record, the harvests caused by the fisherman were of such magnitude that all the statistics about the bounty of the seas had to be rewritten. Wherever the fisherman went, the waters simply boiled with fish or crab or squid. The Black Sea and Sea of Azov became the Tuna Seas. The Great Salt Lake became the Mullet Sea. The Chesapeake Bay became the Blue Crab Bay in a revival that stumped all the experts. Now the question was not whether fish could be found but whether the fisherman could be lured to find the fish that were surely there already.

The fisherman’s competition all fell by the wayside. They could revert to their working small streams or deep lakes or river estuaries. They could compete among themselves. The fisherman had gone beyond them all to a greater calling. He was feeding the world. Now his competition were the gigantic fishing concerns, who all wanted to reap what he had sown, and the pork, chicken and beef combines. Before long, he was embroiled with the grain combines too. How much fish, the competition asked, did the world really need? Did we gain or lose by having seas and rivers, streams and creeks, stuffed with fish as they had once been when Westerners first came to the New World. The fisherman had brought back the bounty around the world. He had overcome a reversal that everyone hailed as irreversible. He had performed a miracle.

The environmentalists argued the urgent necessity to stop the fisherman. They raised the alarm about contaminants. Mercury, selenium, radionuclides—what horrors did the fish stocks NOT include? International and national regulators entered the fray to denounce fish as a food and to encourage the populace to eat every protein besides fish. The fisherman, with a broad smile, asked the experts to provide proofs for their claims. He took to global, multi-lingual broadcasts to challenge the regulators. He called for studies. He arranged, through his lawyers, for estoppels. He made countercharges that each of the protein substitutes had major problems that their advocates had buried but were far more harmful than those for fish. For example, hoof and mouth, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, and HN1. A worldwide panic about the protein stocks ensued. A warrant was issued by the ICC for the fisherman’s arrest. Then the fisherman simply disappeared. He disappeared not for a day or a week or a month.

The fisherman’s executive assistant was at first frantic, then resigned. The fisherman’s former wife and former mother-in-law were amazed, but they nodded to each other as if to say, we thought something like this would happen. International lawyers and national lawyers began their earnest work to call all the fisherman’s loans. The fisherman’s empire literally collapsed within two months. The fisherman was presumed to have died. How he died was not a pressing concern. In the feeding frenzy after the fisherman’s disappearance, the world tore apart every vestige of the fisherman’s presence. His name and logo disappeared from the public eye. All that remained was a story, which dimmed each day until it became as insubstantial as a dream.

The executive assistant had amassed enough money through his frugality during the gravy years to fund his final quest, which was to locate the fisherman and learn the story of his disappearance. But he never found the fisherman though he followed rumors of the fisherman’s appearance in Kazakhstan or Venezuela or Malaysia. Always a step ahead, the fisherman eluded him.

The fisherman’s wife and mother-in-law suffered the indignity of the Government’s seizure of all their wealth and possessions. Nothing is as vengeful as a Government whose policies have proven ineffectual. The women rued the day that they had suggested that the fisherman should follow his calling and his dream. A year after they had received word of eviction from their home, they received in the mail a box of frozen fish from a small seafood concern in Casco, Maine. They were very grateful for the gift, but they did not have any idea who had sent it. They called the sender, but he had no idea either. On the same day each year, they received another box of frozen fish from the same sender. No note was sent with any shipment. And finally, the shipments stopped altogether. The women reasoned that whoever sent the packages must have died.

The executive assistant, having interviewed the wife one last time, found out about the packages from Casco. He went to Maine to investigate. He followed the trail from the seafood concern to the source of the orders, which was a small company on the Maine coast. The company was called simply The Mermaid, Ocean Products. The proprietor was a woman in her early fifties, a stunner in her time, perhaps, and still beautiful with intelligent eyes. She seemed to recognize the executive assistant when he stepped through her door.

“I suppose you are looking for the man they call the Fisherman,” she said. “He stopped by here many years ago with hard cash and a request for me to send a package every year to an address he gave me. He said to take a small amount of cash for myself and then to use the rest of the money for the packages and shipping until the money ran out. Well, the money did run out. I fulfilled my end of the bargain, I reckon. Since nothing was ever written down, you would have to say that the gifts were mine alone. I have no idea where the Fisherman came from or where he went.”

The executive assistant saw on the peg board back of the cash register a small framed picture of a very young version of the fisherman. The fisherman was holding a fish only as long as your little finger. Under the picture in the fisherman’s own hand was scrawled, “No matter how small, you should be proud of any fish.” The woman smiled at the executive assistant and said, “That Fisherman had a way with words, did he not?”

Blue with White Daisies

Margaret Magee

The boys are getting angsty. I can hear the edge in Tom’s voice. His brother, Eamonn, will follow his lead – like a sheep wandering off a cliff. No gumption that fellow. Always was a frightful non-decider.
I hear you Rosie; let him be. You always liked his soft side and didn’t he come good in recent years, you will say. I remember the first time he brought Simon home; his partner. God between us and all harm. You told me that if I didn’t act civil, you would move out to the spare room. It was several weeks later before you admitted that you wouldn’t have kept it up. How else would you warm your cold feet?
Let them wait. They’re busy sifting through photographs in there. I’ve swiped our wedding album so that I can look at the most precious one, now nesting in my inside pocket. They won’t think of looking for me in the shed, and for good measure I’ll turn down my hearing aid.
The shed’s not the same these days. I’ve had to move everything up to the top shelf out of the youngsters’ way. I know I only trick around with the odd project now, but would you ask a surgeon to search through a box of scalpels before he starts cutting?
It’s raining, a downpour pinging on the tin roof. But it’s promising to be a beautiful day; a haymaking day, Rosie.
They’ll find me, but not for a while. I reach up for some old newspapers to cover my stool and keep the suit clean. You insisted I buy a new one for our fiftieth wedding anniversary. I’ve lost some weight since. I’m like the teenagers you complain about: trousers hanging off my hips and my Y fronts showing.
I sit and ease the trousers legs over my knees. Now I’m settled and can dip into my pocket and extract the photograph. Black and white, it’s curled up at the edges where you pasted it onto the page. There was a photographer in the hall that night and he snapped us. Remember Rosie? Our first photograph.
Perhaps not.

‘You’re beautiful,’ I tell you as we waltz around the dance floor. You have tiny feet that glide lightly out of the way of my brogues. Your hair is the colour of bleached straw. It smells of rainwater and it tickles my neck because you barely reach my shoulder. Your dress is blue with white daisies.
‘I’m here with my brother. Do you know Sean O’Grady?’
‘Do I know Sean O’Grady?’ I answer, ducking down and mock hiding behind you. ‘Sure everyone knows that Sean would lay me flat with a spade if I ever did you an unkindness. But that’s the last thing on my mind tonight, Rosie.’
I have ears the size of hubcaps, more obvious tonight because I got my crew cut for the Guards today. My nose was broken with the abandon of a hurley stick and now has a hook. But you see past that, don’t you Rosie?’
Your hand is lost in mine, but I can still feel the calluses at the base of your fingers. You have spent the day in the hay field same as myself, only you weren’t the eejit who stripped off his shirt in the heat. My back is scalded and I won’t be able to lie straight tonight.
‘Have you heard of Paddy Kavanagh? We went to the same national school,’ I deliver my chat up line.
You smile as if it’s Christmas morning. ‘Recite a few lines for me, Hubert.’
I glance around us. ‘The band is playing Waltzing Matilda and you want to hear poetry?’
You grin, dimples hollowing your cheeks like stones skimmed on a placid lake. ‘You’re quick, Hubert.’

My father played the melodeon
Outside at our gate;
There were stars in the morning east
And they danced to his music.

‘That’s lovely. I want to be married by the time I am twenty five and have two girls and two boys,’ you say just as the dance finishes.
It’s almost as if you are propositioning me. Still I put my arm around your lovely waist to claim you for another dance. ‘Will we call one Matilda,’ I joke.
‘Ah no. Too sad,’ you rejoinder, quick as a whippet. ‘Violet and Daisy,’ you pronounce. You’ve obviously thought this through.
‘And us girls will bring in the seasons every time we walk through the door,’ you whisper into my ear as the next dance starts.
We only leave the floor to quench our thirsts with bottles of lemonade. Your bottle fizzes and blows bubbles up your nose and you laugh. A laugh like a burst of sunshine after an April shower. Later we walk our bicycles home together. Sean follows at a distance whipping the heads off nettles with a sally stick. Whish, whish like a scythe. I steer my bike with one hand and keep the other hand in my pocket.
The shed door opens, the spell broken. I put the photo back in my inside pocket.
We never did have those flower girls, Rosie.

Tom’s youngest, Matty, is standing by the door. He looks as if he is encased in sunshine, just like that statue of Jesus you like with the spokes of light coming off him.
Because it’s Matty, I turn on my hearing aid.
‘Granddad they are looking for you everywhere,’ he says solemnly. No young lad should be that earnest. How are they bringing them up these days? His father ran out of the house in the morning and I didn’t see him again till suppertime; had the run of the neighbourhood and he came to no harm.
‘Tell them I fell down a rabbit hole, Matty,’ I grumble.
His lined forehead would break your heart. ‘Will I, Granddad? I don’t think Daddy will believe me.’
‘Do you want to play hide and seek with me then?’
Matty needs no further prompting. With a cursory glance over his shoulder, he reaches up behind him and pulls the door closed. The shed is dim again; the Perspex window grubby with spiders’ webs.
‘What’s that?’ he points at the album by my feet.
‘They’re pictures of me and your Granny, Rosie. Do you want to see them?’
You climb onto my lap and settle your bony frame hard against my ribcage. It’s times like this that I think I will manage.
I lift the album off the floor and turn to the second page. ‘There we are,’ I say. ‘Your Granny is wearing a white dress and a short veil. And look at me in my dapper grey suit and white carnation.’
The photographer told us to look at him but all I wanted to do was look at you, Rosie; to drink you in. And me a pioneer at the time!
Matty is beginning to wriggle, waiting out my silence.
‘Did she remember things then?’ he asks.
‘Your Granny can remember every promise I made and broke, Matty. She doesn’t need reminders singing on her phone or a grand diary.’ I tap his forehead gently. ‘She has no much information in her head that she has to close a few doors or all the facts and figures would leak into each other.’
‘Like chocolate sauce on my ice-cream, Granddad?’
Ah, Jesus, Rosie. How am I supposed to do this alone?
‘Will you leak too?’ Matty asks.
I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand. ‘Nah, I’ve only a smidgen of the knowledge that your Granny has, so there’s room in this noggin for lots more.’
I let him thumb through the album. His small fingers carefully lift the gauzy insert covering each photograph as if he is unveiling the past, moment by moment. The slow turning of each page brings me back to our first kitchen. A damp Barracks in Leitrim where we nested while you carried Tom. I bring home the newspaper and we sit together after supper. I point you to the articles I’ve already read and you stay my hand when something catches your attention.
‘Hold your whist,’ you protest.
Matty quickly shuts the album as the door is yanked open for a second time. It’s Tom crammed into a suit that hasn’t fitted him in years.
‘Matthew your mother is looking for you in the kitchen.’
Matty skedaddles.
‘For heaven’s sake, Dad, we have been calling you for ages and there’s a second search party looking for Matthew. I bet that bloody hearing aid is turned off again.’
‘The bloody hearing aid is turned on for your information. That has always been your trouble, Tom. You forget to look under your nose.’ I may be deaf, but I’m still compos mentis.
Tom takes a deep breath. I know he is trying to control his temper. He holds up a framed photograph. ‘Is this one all right for the top of the coffin?’ he asks. It’s a photograph of our 50th wedding anniversary.
I reach into my pocket. ‘No, I want this one,’ I hold out the black and white offering.
‘Dad, there’s no frame for that. We can’t just prop it up.’
‘The house is full of frames,’ I say evenly. Tom inherits his hot head from me but today I’m the master of my own destiny.
To be fair to our eldest, he wells up when he sees his Mammy grinning at the camera. ‘I’d forgotten about this,’ he says. ‘I’ll get a frame.’
‘No. I’ll do it in a minute.’ I pop the photograph back in my breast pocket.
Tom nods. ‘Are you coming?’ he holds the door open.
‘I’m grand here for another while. It’s strange that this is where I came to be alone and it’s where I feel closest to your Mammy. Call me when the funeral car arrives.’
I pick up the album and open it at the back. There we are on Grafton Street, Rosie; as well turned out as the bank manager and his wife. You are wearing the whole kit and caboodle; a feathered hat, tweed coat, leather bag, gloves and shoes, over a jacket and skirt. You’ve commandeered my carnation from the day before and it adorns your buttonhole now.
And I’m as well attired in my wedding suit and a tweed coat to boot. The ubiquitous cigarette is smouldering between my fingers.
The bloody shed door creaks again and I reluctantly lift my head. ‘Whoever you are, go away,’ I shout. ‘It’s not time yet.’
‘It’s Simon, Mr O’Farrell. ‘May I come in for a minute?’
He’s no bloody polite I grunt assent.
‘Is there anything I can do for you, Mr Farrell?’ he asks from the doorway. At least Tom made the effort to dress formally for the day. Simon – Eamonn too – ­is dressed in coloured corduroys and pullover as if he is taking a boat on the river.
Oh, there’s plenty, I would like to say to you, Simon. How about you stop playing with my son’s hair and running your fingers up and down his arm. And do you really need to hold his hand so much? And while I have the floor so to speak, please don’t update me on the stellar efforts you two are making to marry. Two men getting married! Whoever heard of anything so unnatural?
‘No, thank you,’ I manage to say.
‘I …I realise that this is an exceptionally hard time for you Mr O’ Farrell, but I wanted you to know that we are here for you.’
I grit my teeth. What do you bloody know? ‘Thanks, I’m fine. Close the door behind you.’
I stand up slowly and take the photograph out again. Looking at us again Rosie, I’m pondering if I really do remember that you wore a blue dress with white daisies for you are quite the expert at planting memories that I’ve come to think of as my own.