My Published Short Stories
THIS PAGE IS A WORK-IN-PROGRESS AT THE MOMENT... BUT STILL (MOSTLY) COHERENT... I HOPE.
What follows won't be an exhaustive list, and it's split into years of publication as that's as good a division as any. My short stories are recognisably all mine, I think, but have no more obvious linking in terms of subject and treatment.
They are long, short, first-person, third-person, male or female point-of-view, diverse in subject-matter, etc. Some are extracts from longer works, and though I've tried to make them stand-alone, as publishers nearly always require, it may be obvious that there is a large chunk of story missing at either end.
They will be in the form of links, or of the entire text, or both, sometimes.
They are long, short, first-person, third-person, male or female point-of-view, diverse in subject-matter, etc. Some are extracts from longer works, and though I've tried to make them stand-alone, as publishers nearly always require, it may be obvious that there is a large chunk of story missing at either end.
They will be in the form of links, or of the entire text, or both, sometimes.
Contents
The Trio
Istanbul Song - The Blind Beggar's Daughter
I Think of Ariadne when I Eat Hummus
The House of the Siren
The Architect Interrupted by His Creations
The Turkish Moon
A Song as Old as the World
In Herzegovina near the Town of Gorjad
Twenty Two Seconds
Never Forget Me
The Only True Outsider
Extraordinary Rendition
A Blossom from Bosnia
The Automatic Writers' Group
The Escape
Sightings of an English Band in Poland, 1993
A Childhood Tainted by Wisdom and Flames
The Solution to the Rooks' Rider
The Stone
Fast in the Life Lane
The Last of the Lace/Ostatnie Koronki
The Strobe
All My Halloweens
The Thief in the Sky
Capital Story
The Pitch
Pavlov's Dogs
The Token
The Perils of Pilate (an Easter Tale)
Istanbul Song - The Blind Beggar's Daughter
I Think of Ariadne when I Eat Hummus
The House of the Siren
The Architect Interrupted by His Creations
The Turkish Moon
A Song as Old as the World
In Herzegovina near the Town of Gorjad
Twenty Two Seconds
Never Forget Me
The Only True Outsider
Extraordinary Rendition
A Blossom from Bosnia
The Automatic Writers' Group
The Escape
Sightings of an English Band in Poland, 1993
A Childhood Tainted by Wisdom and Flames
The Solution to the Rooks' Rider
The Stone
Fast in the Life Lane
The Last of the Lace/Ostatnie Koronki
The Strobe
All My Halloweens
The Thief in the Sky
Capital Story
The Pitch
Pavlov's Dogs
The Token
The Perils of Pilate (an Easter Tale)
2020
The Trio
Toothpickers - beware!
'I watched them openly now from the cash register, because they were too absorbed at this stage of their meal to be aware of anything else. Dad’s and Nino’s faces filled the hatch, Dad’s lips slightly wet, Nino maintaining the even line of the grim Soviet smile that hid her metal false teeth.'
Can we all agree that it's very bad form to go to a diner, even if it fancies itself as a restaurant, and pick your teeth at the table? Three men get a terrifying lesson in manners in my story The Trio, out now in The Fictional Café.
Eaters of offal, toothpicks, two sets of identical twins - and more toothpicks, all in The Trio, which can be read in its terrible entirety right here.
Can we all agree that it's very bad form to go to a diner, even if it fancies itself as a restaurant, and pick your teeth at the table? Three men get a terrifying lesson in manners in my story The Trio, out now in The Fictional Café.
Eaters of offal, toothpicks, two sets of identical twins - and more toothpicks, all in The Trio, which can be read in its terrible entirety right here.
Istanbul Song - the opening of my unpublished Istanbul novel
A bit of Turkish-style Art Deco on Istiklal Caddesi, the main drag through the old 'European Quarter' of Istanbul.
One: The Blind Beggar’s Daughter
I knew the rain would never stop, that second winter in İstanbul, knew I’d be stuck in it till the summer, when I could bake myself dry in the sun. By then, all the colour would be washed out of me, and perhaps that’s the lot of the Englishman abroad, to lose himself bit-by-bit to the elements. I love that city of polyglots and performers here in my head, but hated it that first week of November as I claimed a doorway on İstiklal, that is, Independence Avenue, and stood there giving it five minutes more.
Standing in that doorway, doing nothing except keep out of the rain, I realised that, as long as I stayed there, my life could seem less complicated. All my conflicts and problems were out there, under sheets of water, and they couldn’t reach me.
The blind man who begged outside the shops with his daughter wasn’t there, and I missed him, didn’t know why, wondered how he’d ever make a penny in all that foul weather. The daughter caught my eye once, and I tried to make out it wasn’t touching me, this moment of scrutiny. I had a dream about her soon after, and in it she’d come out of the rain and said it didn’t matter that she’d seen the face I’d put on, that not many people were cut out for deception. I turned my face up into the water falling down into my dream, and she called after me, “Wash your sins, not only your face.” Everything is blurred in the rain, and deception is easy, though the blind man’s daughter would tell me the weather makes no difference, that all acts like that are played out in the head.
This is the introduction to my 'long lost' novel set in Istanbul, where I lived from 1990-1992, and in Eastern Turkey. It's a perhaps familiar story of 'the Englishman abroad trying to make sense of everything.' In real life, I stopped trying to do that not too long after landing in Istanbul, a city I love and miss to this day.
Maybe it deserves to be long lost - it's certainly long enough to have got more or less instant rejections all its life. All the same, chapters 1 and 2 have been published in the appropriately-named Rejected Manuscripts magazine. You can read them here.
I knew the rain would never stop, that second winter in İstanbul, knew I’d be stuck in it till the summer, when I could bake myself dry in the sun. By then, all the colour would be washed out of me, and perhaps that’s the lot of the Englishman abroad, to lose himself bit-by-bit to the elements. I love that city of polyglots and performers here in my head, but hated it that first week of November as I claimed a doorway on İstiklal, that is, Independence Avenue, and stood there giving it five minutes more.
Standing in that doorway, doing nothing except keep out of the rain, I realised that, as long as I stayed there, my life could seem less complicated. All my conflicts and problems were out there, under sheets of water, and they couldn’t reach me.
The blind man who begged outside the shops with his daughter wasn’t there, and I missed him, didn’t know why, wondered how he’d ever make a penny in all that foul weather. The daughter caught my eye once, and I tried to make out it wasn’t touching me, this moment of scrutiny. I had a dream about her soon after, and in it she’d come out of the rain and said it didn’t matter that she’d seen the face I’d put on, that not many people were cut out for deception. I turned my face up into the water falling down into my dream, and she called after me, “Wash your sins, not only your face.” Everything is blurred in the rain, and deception is easy, though the blind man’s daughter would tell me the weather makes no difference, that all acts like that are played out in the head.
This is the introduction to my 'long lost' novel set in Istanbul, where I lived from 1990-1992, and in Eastern Turkey. It's a perhaps familiar story of 'the Englishman abroad trying to make sense of everything.' In real life, I stopped trying to do that not too long after landing in Istanbul, a city I love and miss to this day.
Maybe it deserves to be long lost - it's certainly long enough to have got more or less instant rejections all its life. All the same, chapters 1 and 2 have been published in the appropriately-named Rejected Manuscripts magazine. You can read them here.
I Think of Ariadne when I Eat Hummus
'I think of Ariadne when I eat hummus, and specifically the time I made it and she tasted it and said You forgot the garlic. I’d made it for what passed for a party in Lefkimmi among a certain type of person – her friends, of course, people like us, I guess, into gentle snacking and not big blow-outs. Some of them had already arrived, and had one ear on the conversation and the other on the sound of food being brought out.'
Lefkimmi is not a particularly good-looking or remarkable town, though it's Corfu's second city. I only spent an afternoon there (our trusty car did NOT break down), and that was in 2003, but it left enough of an impression on me to want to set this very short story there.
It's out now in the Who Are We? anthology, which looks at race, place and nationality, alongside other winners of Willowdown Books' Cunningham Prize. Available for £11.99 from Amazon UK and Amazon USA for $14.99.
The House of the Siren
My flash tale The House of the Siren, was reprinted and reissued in The Stray Branch, all 250 careful words of it... so I won't give any of them away here, for now. They're now available to read here.
2019
The Architect Interrupted by His Creations
A boy in a doorway, illustration by Astrid Chesney for Ambit Magazine
‘I liked the diva’s hands on my shoulders. I screwed her in a hallway to the twee sound of Mozart, made her sing just for me. I told her how the only way Mozart could be improved would be to add a hundred roaring motorbikes to his toodlings. I felt a current between us. In this way I forgot about the Duce and how he had worked the impossible with the force of his petulant, child’s will, worked his wishes on the world. And on my opera house. The shadow of my jealousy came back to me next morning like a hangover, and I remembered the diva telling me that the Duce had screwed her first, and had screwed her quicker – not a man who liked to hang around – and better.’
The Architect Interrupted by His Creations is my story incorporating Futurism, that art form that, paradoxically, had no future. It has had a second reprint, in The Quail Bell, and you can read it here.
The Turkish Moon
The very edge of Turkey - well, one of them - from Samos
‘They kept their heads down as Georgians and Armenians and Turkish nationalists shot things out between them, looked up at the moon, the one that had guided them from the great plains of central Asia, and years later, when it became law to take a surname, had remembered it, and had called themselves, Türkay, the Turkish Moon. Only many years after that did some of them move to the place they called Scutari, despite its having long been known as Üsküdar.’
My 500-word story The Turkish Moon is online here at the excellent Page and Spine magazine, and recounts the story of a journey that went beyond the movement from A to B.
My 500-word story The Turkish Moon is online here at the excellent Page and Spine magazine, and recounts the story of a journey that went beyond the movement from A to B.
A Song as Old as the World
Plac Zamkowy/Castle Square, Warsaw
'Women with long thin faces like Kathy’s, with large eyes, big noses, they had dark times as childhood’s ugly sisters, but when they got to their twenties they highlighted those eyes and made their lips bright red and framed it all in a symmetrical bob, looked like the women who did well in the Weimar Republic, strong and wilful and with a frightening beauty all their own; then they were eyed with a different kind of censure. “I’m sure she’s a nice girl,” Marek’s mother had said, “but what a face! I’m sure you can do better than that, dear.” Marek hadn’t needed to tell her that.'
A perfect night to fall out of love, go drinking with the girls, and then riding in a Škoda to nowhere in particular. A Song as Old as the World features an Englishwoman abroad, showing how it's done.
It's out the the fantastic Forge Literary Magazine, and you can read it right here.
A perfect night to fall out of love, go drinking with the girls, and then riding in a Škoda to nowhere in particular. A Song as Old as the World features an Englishwoman abroad, showing how it's done.
It's out the the fantastic Forge Literary Magazine, and you can read it right here.
In Herzegovina, near the Town of Gorjad
Balkan Ballet, by Kevin Weaver
“Wars come and go,” I said to Dzanka. “Governments rise and fall. Borders change. Olive groves get… burned.” Dzanka looked at me closely. Did she see a fire in my eyes? Maybe she did. “Whole peoples get rubbed out.” I recovered my thread. “But DJs, their haircuts stay the same.” Dzanka smiled despite herself, and coughed out a laugh.
The picturesque and the appalling come together in my latest story, In Herzegovina, near the Town of Gorjad, out in Jerry Jazz Musician now. Read it here.
The remarkable paintings here are by Kevin Weaver, who kindly allowed me to use them as an aid in promoting this story. He is a former photojournalist who worked freelance for UK broadsheets, magazines and BBC Radio. He covered conflicts and revolutions in Europe and wars in Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo and Rwanda. He now brings his experience and expertise to sculptures and paintings in oil. The resulting body of work is one of catharsis, but also an essential record of events we shy away from looking at. Now based in Cumbria, Kevin responds to the local landscape with bold, bright and energetic paintings in oil. See more of his painting and photographs at his site here.
“Wars come and go,” I said to Dzanka. “Governments rise and fall. Borders change. Olive groves get… burned.” Dzanka looked at me closely. Did she see a fire in my eyes? Maybe she did. “Whole peoples get rubbed out.” I recovered my thread. “But DJs, their haircuts stay the same.” Dzanka smiled despite herself, and coughed out a laugh.
The picturesque and the appalling come together in my latest story, In Herzegovina, near the Town of Gorjad, out in Jerry Jazz Musician now. Read it here.
The remarkable paintings here are by Kevin Weaver, who kindly allowed me to use them as an aid in promoting this story. He is a former photojournalist who worked freelance for UK broadsheets, magazines and BBC Radio. He covered conflicts and revolutions in Europe and wars in Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo and Rwanda. He now brings his experience and expertise to sculptures and paintings in oil. The resulting body of work is one of catharsis, but also an essential record of events we shy away from looking at. Now based in Cumbria, Kevin responds to the local landscape with bold, bright and energetic paintings in oil. See more of his painting and photographs at his site here.
Sarajevo Rose, by Kevin Weaver
Twenty Two Seconds
Whooz shooz... one missing woman's...
Somebody fired a missile at the Houses of Parliament – bad mistake. Under an onion dome, a man in a suit showed teeth and grinned, his eyes glowing red. Why red, Piotr wondered, when he saw the final thing. Why an onion dome – as if the evil Russians spent all their time in church. The Russians Piotr had known never set foot in a fucking church.
The music blared. It saved the world – of course it did. United by that music, and cued by young men with clipboards, people took to the fields – why, just…why? – and punched the air with exuberance.
That was still what happened in pop videos, even in an age of cynicism and insincere world-weariness. If we were really that world-weary, we’d hate the music, Piotr thought, and love the launching of the missiles.
A faded star and his mysterious assistant, a diva director, a failing farmer, a video in stasis. All culminating in tantrums, sex and murder. OF COURSE it's another of my short stories. Twenty Two Seconds, in the #sweettreereview, and you can read it all here.
The music blared. It saved the world – of course it did. United by that music, and cued by young men with clipboards, people took to the fields – why, just…why? – and punched the air with exuberance.
That was still what happened in pop videos, even in an age of cynicism and insincere world-weariness. If we were really that world-weary, we’d hate the music, Piotr thought, and love the launching of the missiles.
A faded star and his mysterious assistant, a diva director, a failing farmer, a video in stasis. All culminating in tantrums, sex and murder. OF COURSE it's another of my short stories. Twenty Two Seconds, in the #sweettreereview, and you can read it all here.
Never Forget Me
'Every school day my feet made echoes on stones where a hundred years before were put the same timid steps, and I looked up at ancient portals, and framed in them faces blurred in traditions, their moods turning blue with the melancholy of their days. Still I envied them, these ghosts, their traces behind them.'
My slightly spooky schooldays story Never Forget Me is out now with Ariel Chart magazine, and can be read here.
My slightly spooky schooldays story Never Forget Me is out now with Ariel Chart magazine, and can be read here.
The Only True Outsider
Auschwitz, one of its misused goods trains in the foreground
Mixed feelings and sandwiches on a minibus trip from hell to Hell itself - a visit to Auschwitz concentration camp in southern Poland. Should you be visiting such a place - and, if you do, should you bring your own sandwiches?
My story The Only True Outsider never quite gets to answer these questions, just examines them, lets them go, but leaves them in mind all the same.
It's out now in Burningword Literary Journal #91, and the magazine can be found here should you wish to order it. The story is in full below:
Miriam, sandwich? The man waves one. You want?
She doesn’t. Miriam expects him to see that she is busy, and doesn’t want. She is talking to my wife. My wife is looking out the window. I know the look on her face, having to be polite.
We are polite on holiday. We don’t take drugs, on holiday. It’s like we want time out from our bad habits, but the reason is that we don’t risk bringing drugs with us on cross-border trains – only in our heads, a last glorious ingestion in the station toilets. We also don’t risk buying drugs on holiday. Our experience of this has led to a crushing disappointment in our fellow men, loss of money, and, once, loss of blood (mine). I’m not a fighter, and in any case we are too old to squabble with strangers over the price or the alleged purity, or lack of it, of various powders. So we are more polite to strangers, but more edgy if they overstep the boundaries.
It’s us and them in the minibus. As it was early in the morning, and we were bleary-eyed, that wasn’t apparent when we boarded. It was only on the road that they revealed themselves as a group, and, as collateral, us as outsiders.
Gradually, they shout merrily at one another. It is a small minibus. They extract sandwiches from Tupperware, examine them, and pass them around. It is a confined space. We are hungover. The sandwiches contain salami with a discernible garlic content. There is coleslaw. I know because, in the act of being passed, some of it, reverting to liquid in the heat, drops on my bare knee. I examine it. My instinct is mean, to wipe it on the nearest garment belonging to one of the group, but instead I use the underside of the seat.
Miriam talks to my wife about where we are going on our sightseeing mission. She finally refuses the sandwich, which stops the man we suppose is her husband from offering it. Instead, he says, well don’t ask me later for one, and adds endless variations of this warning.
Miriam’s older relatives, and those of the whole group, and those of my wife, went to where we are going, some of them leaving it, luckily, to tell the world about it. This leaves me as the only true outsider. The minibus driver delivers us to Auschwitz, the museum on the site of the notorious Nazi death camp. In the snack bar there, Miriam buys a Snickers, with me behind her in the line, dehydrated and in search of fizzy water. I say to her, you should have had the sandwich, and she snorts and nods and grimaces and says, yah – who knew, right? She rejoins the group, my wife holding on to my sleeve to make sure we let them get far enough away to be out of earshot, to be miserable on our own terms, and in our own silence.
My story The Only True Outsider never quite gets to answer these questions, just examines them, lets them go, but leaves them in mind all the same.
It's out now in Burningword Literary Journal #91, and the magazine can be found here should you wish to order it. The story is in full below:
Miriam, sandwich? The man waves one. You want?
She doesn’t. Miriam expects him to see that she is busy, and doesn’t want. She is talking to my wife. My wife is looking out the window. I know the look on her face, having to be polite.
We are polite on holiday. We don’t take drugs, on holiday. It’s like we want time out from our bad habits, but the reason is that we don’t risk bringing drugs with us on cross-border trains – only in our heads, a last glorious ingestion in the station toilets. We also don’t risk buying drugs on holiday. Our experience of this has led to a crushing disappointment in our fellow men, loss of money, and, once, loss of blood (mine). I’m not a fighter, and in any case we are too old to squabble with strangers over the price or the alleged purity, or lack of it, of various powders. So we are more polite to strangers, but more edgy if they overstep the boundaries.
It’s us and them in the minibus. As it was early in the morning, and we were bleary-eyed, that wasn’t apparent when we boarded. It was only on the road that they revealed themselves as a group, and, as collateral, us as outsiders.
Gradually, they shout merrily at one another. It is a small minibus. They extract sandwiches from Tupperware, examine them, and pass them around. It is a confined space. We are hungover. The sandwiches contain salami with a discernible garlic content. There is coleslaw. I know because, in the act of being passed, some of it, reverting to liquid in the heat, drops on my bare knee. I examine it. My instinct is mean, to wipe it on the nearest garment belonging to one of the group, but instead I use the underside of the seat.
Miriam talks to my wife about where we are going on our sightseeing mission. She finally refuses the sandwich, which stops the man we suppose is her husband from offering it. Instead, he says, well don’t ask me later for one, and adds endless variations of this warning.
Miriam’s older relatives, and those of the whole group, and those of my wife, went to where we are going, some of them leaving it, luckily, to tell the world about it. This leaves me as the only true outsider. The minibus driver delivers us to Auschwitz, the museum on the site of the notorious Nazi death camp. In the snack bar there, Miriam buys a Snickers, with me behind her in the line, dehydrated and in search of fizzy water. I say to her, you should have had the sandwich, and she snorts and nods and grimaces and says, yah – who knew, right? She rejoins the group, my wife holding on to my sleeve to make sure we let them get far enough away to be out of earshot, to be miserable on our own terms, and in our own silence.
Extraordinary Rendition
Makeover in a box...
'Something gave my neighbor the idea that she’d be on TV for her free makeover, but that ordeal was not part of the prize. All the same, in case it was, and they were just telling her that, and might spring it on her as a last-minute surprise, she dressed up in clothes that were… nice – don’t get me wrong, they were nice – but either deliberately retro, or just simply current a decade before. She also had her hair done as retro/frump, and while she was at it had eyebrows kind of glued on, and trowelled on a tonne of make up before going. It was a bit like cleaning before the cleaner arrived... which she also did, because I’d seen her many a time through her living room windows, up on chairs, dusting, before her Latina treasure strode sternly along the sidewalk and up the path.'
If you have a makeover, is the before or after the real you? My story Extraordinary Rendition tries to fathom it out. A note to the narrator: when you hold a lens up to people, make sure it isn't also a mirror.
It's out in the excellent Corvus Review, a 'literary journal dedicated to the strange, wonderful, and downright weird'. A very good-looking magazine indeed, and I'm glad to be there. Here's a link to the published magazine, and I'm on p6.
If you have a makeover, is the before or after the real you? My story Extraordinary Rendition tries to fathom it out. A note to the narrator: when you hold a lens up to people, make sure it isn't also a mirror.
It's out in the excellent Corvus Review, a 'literary journal dedicated to the strange, wonderful, and downright weird'. A very good-looking magazine indeed, and I'm glad to be there. Here's a link to the published magazine, and I'm on p6.
A Blossom from Bosnia
A shop on rue des Batignolles, Paris
‘She saw her dusty classroom, a little bust of Marshall Tito sitting high on a shelf, ignored. They had an empire here, she reminded herself, and let herself frown, knowing that empires ended foolishly, with rooms full of empire junk in cities under siege.’
My story A Blossom from Bosnia is out now in Bewildering Stories magazine. It's a dreamlike wander from city to city, against the backdrop of the Siege of #Sarajevo in the early 90s, and it’s a reprint of the first story I had published.
You can read it here.
My story A Blossom from Bosnia is out now in Bewildering Stories magazine. It's a dreamlike wander from city to city, against the backdrop of the Siege of #Sarajevo in the early 90s, and it’s a reprint of the first story I had published.
You can read it here.
The story was first published in Defying Gravity magazine in 1998. I did the illustration on the left - I don't know who did the others, but they are excellent.
The Automatic Writers' Group
Can you write without knowing what you're writing? Pastor Eisenthal (who looks a bit like Rasputin) thinks you can. The narrator's dad thinks it's nonsense, and yet he wrote automatically all the time. Attending the Automatic Writers' Group could just be a ruse to get out of the house, of course. My quirky little tale of guided pens is out in Avatar Review, and can be read here.
The Escape
The Soviet Union would be friends to all life forms...
'Klara had been pushed out of buildings, and caught in nets, had fallen out of aeroplanes blindfolded so as to simulate the dark world beyond the known one, and, g-forces in and out of every cell in her body, was one of the few human beings on the planet who had been pressurised and depressurised so many times her brain had shrunk in earthly terms but expanded in ways nobody had ever been able to catalogue. She had been too afraid to impart the terrible truths left in it to the scientists and researchers. One day, they’d invent some infernal machine that could allow them to see in there, but in the meantime she allowed them to drive themselves mad with a concept of deepest infinity known only to her and those like her.'
The Belamor Canal, wonderful or terrifying, depending on who was talking about it. In the Soviet Union, it was sometimes hard to work out the difference between the wonderful and the terrifying.
Aleksi has been sent out to the sticks through no fault of his own - orphaned, and in the care of his aunt Klara, who really can't work out what to do with him. Klara has problems of her own, her brain gone to carbon that gleamed and beeped and glowed from all the space missions she flew. She is a hero of the Union, exiled despite her hard work, her visions, the changes in her molecules.
The Escape, my tale of canals and cosmodromes, and electricity employed in the service of gratuitous blue murder, is out now in the excellent Squawkback magazine, and you can read it all here.
The Belamor Canal, wonderful or terrifying, depending on who was talking about it. In the Soviet Union, it was sometimes hard to work out the difference between the wonderful and the terrifying.
Aleksi has been sent out to the sticks through no fault of his own - orphaned, and in the care of his aunt Klara, who really can't work out what to do with him. Klara has problems of her own, her brain gone to carbon that gleamed and beeped and glowed from all the space missions she flew. She is a hero of the Union, exiled despite her hard work, her visions, the changes in her molecules.
The Escape, my tale of canals and cosmodromes, and electricity employed in the service of gratuitous blue murder, is out now in the excellent Squawkback magazine, and you can read it all here.
Sightings of an English Band in Poland, 1993
Alan Barton, RIP
January 1993, and on my way to Poland to work there for the first time, and the hassle of travel was relieved for a few minutes by the sight of a band waiting at the Warsaw Airport carousel for their luggage, just like the rest of us. What could it be? Surely one piece of luggage was going to be a groupie in a suitcase. Another would surely be a suitcase full of grass… or speed. As it happened, much of it was rock band luggage: guitars in flight cases. Backpacks full of more tight jeans, I supposed, tight teeshirts, spandex, condoms. They weren’t being all big-I-am-I’m-in-a-band. They just grinned at one another, putting up with it in good humour, the dreary waiting-for-luggage experience, for the thousandth time. It was not to be the last time I saw them in Poland.
One of them looked familiar. I didn’t know why.
A rare piece of non-fiction from me, my memory of a band on the road was published in 2019 by the wonderful Talking Soup magazine, and you can read it all here.
A Childhood Tainted by Wisdom and Flames
A Childhood Tainted by Wisdom and Flames is an excerpt from a longer, unpublished (and maybe unpublishable) work with the working title They Still Believed in Angels. It is set in a small town in the Delaware Bay region of the US in the late 1940s among a community of eastern European immigrants and refugees from the Soviet Bloc. It maintains this theme of escape, with the additional question: the first generation escaped, so what does the second, born in the land of freedom, do?
It came out in the wonderful Tiny Flames Press Spring Edition, which now seems to be defunct, unfortunately.
Here it is, in full:
It’s me borrowing the eyes of God and putting this tale into its frame, so you need to know about me. I started out as a compact child with hair plaited painfully and, it seems to me now, who was dressed younger than my years my whole life. I had a miserable face on account of my stick-out teeth. I had an overbite, Mrs Chomska the school dentist told me, which didn’t sound so bad, except when I said that to kids they said, “Yeah, like an alligator, maybe.” I guarded those teeth under a pout that made me look like an argument that had happened. Later I wore wire correction braces on them, then had them fixed up to hooks and blocks, a miracle of engineering that gave me the smile of a tin can robot. I wore my pout to cover them up, and couldn’t get rid of it after. I damned the slanty eyes I got from my great granny. I had skin that wanted to be brown, but just had a yellow tint, and didn’t look like I had a right to hair so blond it was almost white, but that’s what I had.
I had no sisters, had a brother name of Calloway who lay in his crib and turned the deepest blue and died six days after he was born. His remains were put in the graveyard behind our local little black church of the Holy Virgin under a stone that puns Little Calloway Called Away. Like most babies in our little Penn town of Balz, Calloway wore a red thread around his wrist, supposed to protect him from the evil eye till he got baptized, but it didn’t do him any good. I swore he’d be the last baby came out of our family to wear a thread.
When my dad’s noisy friends stopped by in their shiny suits and their twinsets, Dad jumped me through hoops to show what a clever girl I was. My teachers at Christ the Almighty Elementary School didn’t see me that way, flashed me indulgent smiles as they told dad I was a little slow, maybe. The gaze he rested on them said something like if they wanted him to arrange for the new heating system to be put in at cost, then I’d still pass all my tests, wouldn’t I, slow or fast?
I had friends who didn’t think I was slow. For a time I assumed this was out of loyalty, but it was mainly because they were even slower. I hung out with the rich set from the Cliff Crest quarter, where we lived. They were my own kind, or so I was led to believe, and I believed that for a long time.
Dad’s money came from his being a hotshot building inspector. He was a regular john building inspector till he blundered into a contract with a client by the name of Theodore House. Dad traveled all over for Mister House, and attested that perfectly safe buildings were about to fall down, for some reason. Sometimes, he attested to the perfect safety of buildings that were really about to fall down. Somehow, Theodore House made money on the deals, and so did dad. He got behind the worsted shoulders of financiers and put his money into savings and medical and pension plans, wrapped up in this clause and that for this eventuality on the markets or that.
“Where does it all come from?” By the time I was at the age when that question popped up in my head, Dad answered with things like, “My princess doesn’t want to know that.” I had to ask Mom. She told me, “I just spend it, honey.” I ha-hahed my way through this invitation into her women’s conspiracy, but I had an instinct that there was more to money than that. I don’t know how I knew that when nobody else around me seemed to. Maybe I wasn’t so goddam slow. The silver we had, the china, the cut glass, the knick-knacks and chatchkas on shelves, the garish oils on the walls, I just sensed one day that it was no earthly use to a soul.
I said we could easily give some money away to people who needed it someplace, I didn’t know who or where. Mom said the details of Dad’s money would get passed on to my husband when Dad got old. I thought, ‘Husband?’ I caught a flickered scene of some leering fat boy who slapped my ass in greeting every time he came home demanding his dinner. I blinked it to a close, said, “Then I can start giving it away?”
“My money is like an agreement, honey.” Dad winked. “Between gentlemen.”
“That includes me out,” I declared. “Because I’m no gentleman.”
Gentlemen or not, what would they be able to do once I’d given the money away to feed starving Indians, or whoever?
“Hey, us gentlemen would be mad as hell if my princess turned into a goddam pinko.”
“No doubt. What’s that?”
Dad didn’t let me raise the subject of money with him again. He didn’t get old, either. Instead, the summer I graduated, he shot into a canyon on the way back from a trip when the brakes gave out in the new Packard he was driving. It dawned on me that Mister House and his friends did it for some unfathomable reason. I knew by then that gentlemen like that had a logic all their own.
I also thought I knew what happened to people who got caught in the orbit of that particular kind of gentleman. I kept my face from Mom, didn’t want her to see the knowledge there. In her widow’s weeds she had to swear an affidavit to say she held ownership of a roll call of phony companies, and got a deal that left her comfortable, but beefing just the same.
Once that was done, one of the swells in the shiny suits came by around ten one night. He assured Mom that he wasn’t going to let no family of no friend of his go to no wall, and could she just sign these papers, please? He came up the stairs and into my room to tell me the same thing. “Anything I can do for you.” He wet my ear with his breath. “You tell me.” I said there was one little thing. “That’s what, sweetheart?” He thumped his chest. “You tell, I do.” I said he could certainly take his hand off my knee. He looked at me a long time, then got up, said, “Hey, I can tell you and me are going to be friends.” I fretted about this, and about the papers Mom signed, till maybe six weeks later when a whole circus troupe of guys in more somber suits swarmed over the house. They carried Internal Revenue and Customs Department ID cards, then carried out shedloads of documents from dad’s study, and put an end to the whole thing.
It was the end too for me and Mom of the whole business of Cliff Crest life, the parties and the friends and the noises they made that echoed through my childhood that, no matter what people said as they witnessed me dressed up as a child, got tainted by wisdom.
It came out in the wonderful Tiny Flames Press Spring Edition, which now seems to be defunct, unfortunately.
Here it is, in full:
It’s me borrowing the eyes of God and putting this tale into its frame, so you need to know about me. I started out as a compact child with hair plaited painfully and, it seems to me now, who was dressed younger than my years my whole life. I had a miserable face on account of my stick-out teeth. I had an overbite, Mrs Chomska the school dentist told me, which didn’t sound so bad, except when I said that to kids they said, “Yeah, like an alligator, maybe.” I guarded those teeth under a pout that made me look like an argument that had happened. Later I wore wire correction braces on them, then had them fixed up to hooks and blocks, a miracle of engineering that gave me the smile of a tin can robot. I wore my pout to cover them up, and couldn’t get rid of it after. I damned the slanty eyes I got from my great granny. I had skin that wanted to be brown, but just had a yellow tint, and didn’t look like I had a right to hair so blond it was almost white, but that’s what I had.
I had no sisters, had a brother name of Calloway who lay in his crib and turned the deepest blue and died six days after he was born. His remains were put in the graveyard behind our local little black church of the Holy Virgin under a stone that puns Little Calloway Called Away. Like most babies in our little Penn town of Balz, Calloway wore a red thread around his wrist, supposed to protect him from the evil eye till he got baptized, but it didn’t do him any good. I swore he’d be the last baby came out of our family to wear a thread.
When my dad’s noisy friends stopped by in their shiny suits and their twinsets, Dad jumped me through hoops to show what a clever girl I was. My teachers at Christ the Almighty Elementary School didn’t see me that way, flashed me indulgent smiles as they told dad I was a little slow, maybe. The gaze he rested on them said something like if they wanted him to arrange for the new heating system to be put in at cost, then I’d still pass all my tests, wouldn’t I, slow or fast?
I had friends who didn’t think I was slow. For a time I assumed this was out of loyalty, but it was mainly because they were even slower. I hung out with the rich set from the Cliff Crest quarter, where we lived. They were my own kind, or so I was led to believe, and I believed that for a long time.
Dad’s money came from his being a hotshot building inspector. He was a regular john building inspector till he blundered into a contract with a client by the name of Theodore House. Dad traveled all over for Mister House, and attested that perfectly safe buildings were about to fall down, for some reason. Sometimes, he attested to the perfect safety of buildings that were really about to fall down. Somehow, Theodore House made money on the deals, and so did dad. He got behind the worsted shoulders of financiers and put his money into savings and medical and pension plans, wrapped up in this clause and that for this eventuality on the markets or that.
“Where does it all come from?” By the time I was at the age when that question popped up in my head, Dad answered with things like, “My princess doesn’t want to know that.” I had to ask Mom. She told me, “I just spend it, honey.” I ha-hahed my way through this invitation into her women’s conspiracy, but I had an instinct that there was more to money than that. I don’t know how I knew that when nobody else around me seemed to. Maybe I wasn’t so goddam slow. The silver we had, the china, the cut glass, the knick-knacks and chatchkas on shelves, the garish oils on the walls, I just sensed one day that it was no earthly use to a soul.
I said we could easily give some money away to people who needed it someplace, I didn’t know who or where. Mom said the details of Dad’s money would get passed on to my husband when Dad got old. I thought, ‘Husband?’ I caught a flickered scene of some leering fat boy who slapped my ass in greeting every time he came home demanding his dinner. I blinked it to a close, said, “Then I can start giving it away?”
“My money is like an agreement, honey.” Dad winked. “Between gentlemen.”
“That includes me out,” I declared. “Because I’m no gentleman.”
Gentlemen or not, what would they be able to do once I’d given the money away to feed starving Indians, or whoever?
“Hey, us gentlemen would be mad as hell if my princess turned into a goddam pinko.”
“No doubt. What’s that?”
Dad didn’t let me raise the subject of money with him again. He didn’t get old, either. Instead, the summer I graduated, he shot into a canyon on the way back from a trip when the brakes gave out in the new Packard he was driving. It dawned on me that Mister House and his friends did it for some unfathomable reason. I knew by then that gentlemen like that had a logic all their own.
I also thought I knew what happened to people who got caught in the orbit of that particular kind of gentleman. I kept my face from Mom, didn’t want her to see the knowledge there. In her widow’s weeds she had to swear an affidavit to say she held ownership of a roll call of phony companies, and got a deal that left her comfortable, but beefing just the same.
Once that was done, one of the swells in the shiny suits came by around ten one night. He assured Mom that he wasn’t going to let no family of no friend of his go to no wall, and could she just sign these papers, please? He came up the stairs and into my room to tell me the same thing. “Anything I can do for you.” He wet my ear with his breath. “You tell me.” I said there was one little thing. “That’s what, sweetheart?” He thumped his chest. “You tell, I do.” I said he could certainly take his hand off my knee. He looked at me a long time, then got up, said, “Hey, I can tell you and me are going to be friends.” I fretted about this, and about the papers Mom signed, till maybe six weeks later when a whole circus troupe of guys in more somber suits swarmed over the house. They carried Internal Revenue and Customs Department ID cards, then carried out shedloads of documents from dad’s study, and put an end to the whole thing.
It was the end too for me and Mom of the whole business of Cliff Crest life, the parties and the friends and the noises they made that echoed through my childhood that, no matter what people said as they witnessed me dressed up as a child, got tainted by wisdom.
The Solution to the Rooks' Rider
The station hall, Yerevan, Armenia
'The server showed us the label on the wine bottle, and went into some spiel about the grape from which it was made, and the weather in the valley in which it flourished, and how the fermentation process differed from that of some other wine made from some other grape in some other valley, a more famous but, in his opinion, inferior variety. Outside work situations, I find it kind of annoying to have to nod politely at something I’m fundamentally not interested in. Maybe I look like the kind of shallow wannabe gourmet who’s interested in all that kind of thing. Maybe that’s worse than actually being interested... I want to drink it, I nearly told the server. Not bond with it and send it fucking Christmas cards. I thanked him, instead. The wine was bearable, despite looking like a concoction for children.'
A man and a woman have just been dumped by friends on the emptying concourse of a railway station. It would be absurd for them not to get together, surely? He bemoans the fact that a basic phone is now a pricey collectors' item, while she is still slightly disgruntled that her family was stripped of the aristrocratic von- in its name, its historic lands and town houses and the odd indentured servant, by communists. One thing it kept, though, was its chess problem. Can her new friend help?
The Solution to the Rooks' Rider was published by Platform for Prose, and you can read it here.
A man and a woman have just been dumped by friends on the emptying concourse of a railway station. It would be absurd for them not to get together, surely? He bemoans the fact that a basic phone is now a pricey collectors' item, while she is still slightly disgruntled that her family was stripped of the aristrocratic von- in its name, its historic lands and town houses and the odd indentured servant, by communists. One thing it kept, though, was its chess problem. Can her new friend help?
The Solution to the Rooks' Rider was published by Platform for Prose, and you can read it here.
The Stone
Forlorn graveyard, Siemiatycze, Eastern Poland
The library was closed, he knew. He would go home, then, lie on his bed, watch the bugs dance on his ceiling. He would eat at the Mission of the White Sisters, he supposed. He jingled coins in his pocket, thought he might buy a beer after eating. He realised that he was talking to himself, knew he shouldn’t do that; people would write him off as a no-good. ‘You are good,’ she had written in the letter that he had kept in his pocket for two days, words close to his heart. ‘You are kind, you are everything in the world to me, and I await your next letter with impatience and joy.’ Home, then, where he would think of those words and let them prompt him into his own; they would appear on his bare wall, and he would give them life on the pad he kept in his case. He would count the days by his letters, count them by hers, see them turn to years, would be assured, as he always was, of his ability to defy them with the trace of a smile on his face as he walked up the road to the post.
An epistolary post-war romance. The kindest nurse and the bravest soldier make peacetime plans, but there may be one terrible flaw in their optimism.
My story The Stone, published for the first time by Literary Yard. It's available to read here.
Fast in the Life Lane
Near the Yeni Cami, Istanbul
“You used to love those seamless, figure-hugging shorts,” my wife says, “and having an excuse to show off your legs.” I can make only a token effort to disagree. Alas, all of it, no more. If a cyclist is something you become having once cycled, then I’m a cyclist, but I haven’t been near a bike since I arrived in Istanbul, city of a billion cars. Istanbul people are good people, as big-city dwellers go, but once behind the wheel of a car they turn into Mad Max I, II and III.
A man foolishly accepts a ride in his friend's car, making a short jaunt around the outskirts of Istanbul into a high-speed adventure taking in sheep, potato-sellers and at least one Starsky-and-Hutch-style flying dustbin moment.
Fast in the Life Lane is published for the second time in its fragile life by Down in the Dirt Magazine, an outpost of Scars Publications. You can read it in full here.
A man foolishly accepts a ride in his friend's car, making a short jaunt around the outskirts of Istanbul into a high-speed adventure taking in sheep, potato-sellers and at least one Starsky-and-Hutch-style flying dustbin moment.
Fast in the Life Lane is published for the second time in its fragile life by Down in the Dirt Magazine, an outpost of Scars Publications. You can read it in full here.
The Last of the Lace
Just above their heads, there was a woman dressed in the brilliant reds and whites of the costume of the eastern provinces. She swung gently from a balcony railing, the loop of a thin rope buried in her neck. She twirled slowly, one of her hands slightly raised. Magda had worn the same costume in the Corpus Christi parade, and at school presentations, in dancing choruses; she too had raised hands, and twirled. She closed the vision out with a dip of her head, only to replace it with the sight of a child frozen in a doorway, a puzzled look in her wide, waxy eyes. Before she could be turned to stone in the child’s gaze, Magda hurried Alicja down the side streets that led to Saint Romualda’s. She paused at the church doors, wondered whether to go in.
When Magda can't contact her husband or child, she makes her way home to her town, even though there are rumours of an awful cataclysm there. Apart from having to shoot some unfortunate soldiers in NCB suits, she gets into the town without difficulty, and is stuck with one last job to do before she can take a breath and a rest.
The Last of the Lace has been published in Polish as Ostatnie Koronki, in the magazines Prze Tłumacze and Polski Noir, but finally came out in English, in the well-established Selene Quarterly magazine.
When Magda can't contact her husband or child, she makes her way home to her town, even though there are rumours of an awful cataclysm there. Apart from having to shoot some unfortunate soldiers in NCB suits, she gets into the town without difficulty, and is stuck with one last job to do before she can take a breath and a rest.
The Last of the Lace has been published in Polish as Ostatnie Koronki, in the magazines Prze Tłumacze and Polski Noir, but finally came out in English, in the well-established Selene Quarterly magazine.
The Strobe
The first splash Eurydice made came one day at the end of our first summer at junior high. School was out for the year, the sun was blazing, and there was a liberated feel in the air, kids dawdling to savor it, and not heading home. Bored, maybe, maybe tired of being ignored for a whole minute, Eurydice walked over to Milo’s featherweight bike and got on it, and pedaled a few yards. She looked back to see if Milo was either admiring or alarmed, but he was neither, was in conversation with friends. It was Mila who noticed Eurydice’s getaway, and she nudged her brother. Milo wasn’t perturbed. Eurydice was about to hit the hill up from school. Even he found it tough to negotiate, so he knew she’d soon be rolling back.
A frivolous bike ride turns sour, and leads to a radical change in a woman's life, and how she will see the world after. The Strobe was published in the fifth issue of New Reader Magazine and can be downloaded here.
A frivolous bike ride turns sour, and leads to a radical change in a woman's life, and how she will see the world after. The Strobe was published in the fifth issue of New Reader Magazine and can be downloaded here.
2018
All My Halloweens
Beware the Bat Boy...
‘There were five kids gathered, somewhat awkwardly, on our top step. Out on the pavement near our gate stood a gaggle of parents. Not being into Halloween, and not being the kind of household that keeps things like crisps, biscuits, cakes or stuff like that (they have a short, doomed existence in our house) I had nothing to offer. I didn’t think they’d have liked a slice of Ryvita crispbread, some leftover pasta or a pickled walnut. Fortunately for all of us, the poor little mites didn’t seem to know how to trick: they came expecting treats only, with no contingency plan. I sometimes think all middle-ish-class kids these days expect to be treated, all the time, without having to do anything for it. It was a forlorn sight: kids, supposedly out to have some fun, dressed in costumes from the pound shop, mouthing words they didn’t understand at puzzled strangers, and their mums and dads a few yards away holding a health-and-safety committee. Really, where IS the fun in that?’
Please have a read of All My Halloweens, a reminiscence and a reflection of my only childhood Halloween, in that land of Catholic plotters, 1960s Ireland, and my Halloween update in more modern times.
Published by Soft Cartel, but as the magazine seems to have been out-cartelled and put to sleep, here it is to read here, at the other end of this site, my underused, under-read blog.
Please have a read of All My Halloweens, a reminiscence and a reflection of my only childhood Halloween, in that land of Catholic plotters, 1960s Ireland, and my Halloween update in more modern times.
Published by Soft Cartel, but as the magazine seems to have been out-cartelled and put to sleep, here it is to read here, at the other end of this site, my underused, under-read blog.
The Thief in the Sky
“The sky has always fascinated me. The more I learn, the more questions I seem to have. Free radicals, refracting light, the knowledge that, if you travel high enough, everything will eventually give way to the blackness of space - each fact makes me more and more curious about what might be going on up there. There are stories wrapped up in this knowledge, plenty of stories…”
Gypsum Sound Tales’ The Sky's the Limit, contains twelve stories of the sky and includes my very short tale The Thief in the Sky. It's a rare step out of the 20th century for me, with its setting in an ancient China of emperors, experimentation, and science applied to crime and punishment. It's quite old - 20 years old, at least - and I have an idea it was influenced by Alisdair Gray. It’s about a man who avoids the bone orchard prepared for him and takes what seems like one last opportunity to free himself. The story is here:
“You understand nothing of your place in the civilisation we are making here.” The judge spoke with a neutral tone, but there was no mistaking the gravity of such a charge.
If there had anybody there to argue Chang’s case for him, they would have been forced to agree that the evidence on offer was scant, but to the point. Chang, a slight, shabby figure among the silks and brocades, and the lacquer and gold of the courtroom, bowed his head. His chin reached his chest. A court official, employed specifically for the purpose, raised an ornate staff, and prodded Chang’s chin back to the orientation deemed correct for the proceedings.
“You understand only about the filling of your pockets with other people’s goods,” the judge continued. In the hush, Chang could hear the court recorder’s pen scratching to set the words down. “Isn’t that so?”
The official’s staff came up again, bringing with it the command, “Answer!”
“Yes, Lord.” It was forbidden to look upon the judge’s face, but Chang thought he would lose no friends if he sneaked a glance anyway. From the tiny feet to the sleek head, what he saw did not impress him.
The judge said, “Accordingly, you will be taken to a place of execution for your crimes.” After an almost silent consultation with an aide, he added, “Seven days from now.”
Chang took a last look at the splendour of his surroundings. He fixed them in his mind, took them to the dungeon, and let them come back to him in his troubled dreams. He set about contemplating what remained of his life.
More than seven days had passed, he thought, when he ascended steps to the top of a tower on the city walls. His wrists bound, he feared for his balance on the worn stone, then remembered that he ought to have other preoccupations. He almost laughed. He emerged into the howling wind. He looked at the small crowd there. These were not the court’s executioners; they wore the clothes of scholars, and spoke thus to one another, unrolled charts and pointed at them, craned their necks to gather around them. He had no idea why he knew, nor how he had learned, but Chang recognised the men’s jargon as that of engineers. He was arrested by the sight of another crowd on a rampart below, of lords and ladies from the court, ranked in order of importance, in court finery covered by furs. On a modest throne sat a splendid figure he knew could only be the emperor.
“I don’t understand,” he said to the nearest man.
“You don’t need to.” The man smiled. “When did you last eat?”
“I don’t know,” Chang replied.
“And yet you feel healthy in yourself?”
Chang was about to point out the absurdity of the question when he was going to be cast into the next world without having made a full confession, nor expressed regrets that were sincere, to the gods that roamed his head. Instead, he said, “Well enough.”
“Good,” said the man. “For you are about to further the cause of the conquest of the elements. What do you say to that?”
“I know nothing of that.” Chang felt he ought to explain, “I am only a thief.”
His bonds were unfastened. He stretched his arms wide, and luxuriated in his new-found circulation. He was shocked when the chief engineer kept his arms up with a rod, saying, “Good, good,” as a minion measured them.
Chang reflected that he had never stood in so high a place. He wondered if it was high enough; would he hit the rock, and lie there, every bone broken, and yet his vital organs unharmed, and rot away for days in agony? It did not bear thinking about, and yet there he was, unable to think of anything else.
Gates set in the top of the wall were thrown open to reveal the figure of a fantastic bird that made Chang cringe. It had a long, graceful head, a wingspan the width of a small house, and many legs that turned out, when one of the wings obscured the sun shining in Chang’s eyes, to belong to the flunkies who held it aloft. It was also revealed to be not creature, but contraption, fashioned from sailcloth, he thought, bamboo and rope.
Caught by the magnificence of the sight, Chang stumbled. He was saved in the strong arms of the chief engineer, who said jovially, “This is your chance, my friend – and it’s glorious – to serve some purpose in your life.” He nodded to the men behind him, who led Chang to the bird and strapped him into it, as around him the engineers got to work with charts, and instruments that captured the wind and measured it.
As Chang stood at the edge of the precipice, he suffered no illusions about his fate; far below, the black rocks were strewn with the remains of the engineers’ previous experiments: bleached bones tangled up with prison robes, bamboo and canvas. Impassively, he offered up a prayer as he was mounted on a system of rollers and wheeled back along a path that seemed to him to have been created from the darkest glass. The smell of oil rose to his nostrils. He took a look down at the flunkies ranged on either side of him. He did not want them, his rival felons, to be his final view, and raised his eyes to the wind-torn sky. Then he was moving forward, at first almost imperceptibly and then, as the force was gathered, faster, he knew, than any man had ever moved. He opened his mouth, and screamed.
Chang set off into the white expanse of sky. He hung for a second, then felt the force of a thermal. He was buoyant, his head up. He was dreaming of cities in faraway places and the sights he would see, and the things he would steal. He let out the screech of a giant bird, full of air, full of freedom, the chief engineer’s golden chain of office clutched in his hand, and catching the full light of the sun.
Capital Story
Illustration by Charles Shearer for Capital Story's original publication in Ambit magazine
‘It was unusual to meet an Albanian in Warsaw. Romanians we had by the score. We had plenty of Russians, and if they weren’t Russians they were Ukrainians and Lithuanians, Belorussians and central Asians, which was close enough. There were all manner of English speakers, too, Americans and Canadians, and the loud-voiced English themselves – what were they doing in Warsaw, of all places? Nevertheless, we had them, getting hot under the collar on buses about their peculiar team sports. It was indeed unusual, though, to meet an Albanian.’
Warsaw in the 90s, and capital is all the rage, even in some of the city's less salubrious venues. Two con-men go head-to-head in my humble attempt at a cross between David Mamet and Arthur Schnitzler. Where will the balance of payments hang by the end of the story? Capitalism is not so simple: a little bit of an advantage ALWAYS helps, even in the unlikely shape of the cloakroom babushka...
Capital Story came out as a reprint in Retreats from Oblivion, and you can read it here.
It was my first publication in Ambit magazine, in 1997, and was written when I was still living in Warsaw. I was very happy to see it revived in Retreats from Oblivion, and grateful to Cullen and the staff at #oblivion_noir for the brilliant presentation.
Warsaw in the 90s, and capital is all the rage, even in some of the city's less salubrious venues. Two con-men go head-to-head in my humble attempt at a cross between David Mamet and Arthur Schnitzler. Where will the balance of payments hang by the end of the story? Capitalism is not so simple: a little bit of an advantage ALWAYS helps, even in the unlikely shape of the cloakroom babushka...
Capital Story came out as a reprint in Retreats from Oblivion, and you can read it here.
It was my first publication in Ambit magazine, in 1997, and was written when I was still living in Warsaw. I was very happy to see it revived in Retreats from Oblivion, and grateful to Cullen and the staff at #oblivion_noir for the brilliant presentation.
The Pitch
Illustration by Ken Cox for the first appearance of The Pitch, in Ambit Magazine in 2012
Gregor was about to laugh off the busker’s request, but there was a sense of urgent longing in the man’s expression. He found himself taking the offered guitar. He held it, looked it over, marvelled at its lightness of weight, and its polished spruce surface.
“Five minutes.” The man spread a hand, caught Gregor’s eyes in his own dark eyes for a mournful second, and was gone.
A man, a guitar, a sad song made happy, a happy song made sad, and a good deed gone terribly wrong.
This packs several of my obsessions into a few pages - music, and specifically Gypsy music, mystery and a strange atmosphere where there shouldn't be one - and is one of my favourites out of my own stories. It was originally published in Ambit in 2012. It came out again in Tigershark e-zine in the company of lots of talented people. You can find it at the following link - scroll down to p68.
Find me on p68 at the link:
https://tigersharkpublishing.files.wordpress.com/2018/06/tigershark-17.pdf
“Five minutes.” The man spread a hand, caught Gregor’s eyes in his own dark eyes for a mournful second, and was gone.
A man, a guitar, a sad song made happy, a happy song made sad, and a good deed gone terribly wrong.
This packs several of my obsessions into a few pages - music, and specifically Gypsy music, mystery and a strange atmosphere where there shouldn't be one - and is one of my favourites out of my own stories. It was originally published in Ambit in 2012. It came out again in Tigershark e-zine in the company of lots of talented people. You can find it at the following link - scroll down to p68.
Find me on p68 at the link:
https://tigersharkpublishing.files.wordpress.com/2018/06/tigershark-17.pdf
Pavlov's Dogs
Another illustration by the talented Ken Cox, for the story's first appearance, like the last one, in Ambit magazine in 2002
Outside the restaurant, two guys were leaning on the jeep. One of them had reached in through the busted side window to take Carrie’s Zippo from the dash. He had lit up, and was by then just playing, making it spark with a jive flip.
Carrie held her hand out for it as the guys greeted her. The one holding the lighter tried to catch her eye, perhaps to engage her in a boys’ game in which she would have to try to snatch it as he held it out of her reach. Her eyes roved instead over the dim interior of the jeep, checked the other windows, the doors: intact; the luggage: unmolested. The guy with the Zippo said something cocky to his mate, who shushed him.
The lighter was put into Carrie’s palm. She stowed it carefully in a pocket, and only then did she meet the guy’s gaze directly. What, she said.
Once more, no good deed goes unpunished, they say. A roadtrip already going sour takes a turn for the worst when two couples pick up two soldiers to give them a lift back to their barracks, in my story Pavlov's Dogs. Originally published in Ambit magazine (with the title Pavlov's Bitch) it came out again in Literally Stories. You can read it here.
Carrie held her hand out for it as the guys greeted her. The one holding the lighter tried to catch her eye, perhaps to engage her in a boys’ game in which she would have to try to snatch it as he held it out of her reach. Her eyes roved instead over the dim interior of the jeep, checked the other windows, the doors: intact; the luggage: unmolested. The guy with the Zippo said something cocky to his mate, who shushed him.
The lighter was put into Carrie’s palm. She stowed it carefully in a pocket, and only then did she meet the guy’s gaze directly. What, she said.
Once more, no good deed goes unpunished, they say. A roadtrip already going sour takes a turn for the worst when two couples pick up two soldiers to give them a lift back to their barracks, in my story Pavlov's Dogs. Originally published in Ambit magazine (with the title Pavlov's Bitch) it came out again in Literally Stories. You can read it here.
One of those stories that came up almost fully realised, here is the original draft of the first page.
The Token
“The token.” Gregor held his hand out.
“It’s mine.” Arkady also held his hand out.
When Sergei went to walk away, those hands restrained him. The warning cry he let out made them flinch, but only for a second. It seemed as if their resolve became stronger. Later, Sergei could not remember the moment it turned into a fight.
Three old friends meet in the centre of a tiny town, puzzled at the time and the distance it has made; they are puzzled too about the warning a man once gave them, crystallized in a single moment each remembered in his own way.
My short tale The Token came out in the brilliant #FictiveDream magazine, and you can read it here.
“It’s mine.” Arkady also held his hand out.
When Sergei went to walk away, those hands restrained him. The warning cry he let out made them flinch, but only for a second. It seemed as if their resolve became stronger. Later, Sergei could not remember the moment it turned into a fight.
Three old friends meet in the centre of a tiny town, puzzled at the time and the distance it has made; they are puzzled too about the warning a man once gave them, crystallized in a single moment each remembered in his own way.
My short tale The Token came out in the brilliant #FictiveDream magazine, and you can read it here.
The Perils of Pilate (an Easter Tale)
Pontius Pilate was sick of rebels. You brought the Pax Romana to these people, and they what? Forget the gods, the temples, the incense, the chanting, the followers of Mithras burying themselves and, ludicrously, pretending they’d been resurrected – forget all that: did these people not appreciate having a decent aqueduct to deliver their water? Pilate knew they rarely washed, but didn’t they drink the stuff? Weren’t they cool with roads – did they enjoy schlepping their chattels over ruts?
Pilate put the word out that if anybody was heard asking the question, what have the Romans ever done for us, he would hit them hard. “With what, minion?” he spot-checked with his staff, and they would have to reply, “Sir, the Shrift Romana, sir.”
“And, minion, how long is it?”
“Sir, it’s very short, sir,” their lives depended on saying. “It’s the shortest shrift in the Roman Empire.”
It's tough being the governor of a forgotten backwater of the Roman Empire. What could Pontius Pilate do to put the place on the map? Read the whole story here on the #Red_Fez site.
Pilate put the word out that if anybody was heard asking the question, what have the Romans ever done for us, he would hit them hard. “With what, minion?” he spot-checked with his staff, and they would have to reply, “Sir, the Shrift Romana, sir.”
“And, minion, how long is it?”
“Sir, it’s very short, sir,” their lives depended on saying. “It’s the shortest shrift in the Roman Empire.”
It's tough being the governor of a forgotten backwater of the Roman Empire. What could Pontius Pilate do to put the place on the map? Read the whole story here on the #Red_Fez site.
The House of the Siren
Del Barrett, of The Photo Republic of London, included me in a group of photographers and writers to be published in an anthology of flash fiction written in response to photograph prompts. The one chosen for me is above, taken by Thérèse Barry. I thought it was a more or less human-sized mermaid, outside a pair of doors such as those found on a garage or storeroom. It actually turned out to be a small-sized mermaid, on a windowsill, which seems sort of obvious now. It was also inland somewhere, and not by the sea, Thérèse told me. I wonder if I'd have written a different story if I'd known those things.
I lived in Warsaw for a few years in the 90s, so often think of mermaids by their Polish name syrenka, a translation of siren, of course. The syrenka is one of the symbols of the city, and can be seen everywhere there. I also associate sirens with those in The Odyssey, tempting Odysseus and his sailors away from their business of getting home, so an element of that crept into my story.
Here it is, all 250 words of it:
Mum’s usual route down to the seafront avoided the House of the Siren, but Dad took us past it if we were seeing him off when he shipped out. Mum looked the other way. Dad kept his eyes forward, on the mercantile sea that would claim him.
Only I stared into the siren’s painted eyes, caught the pucker of her gleaming lipsticked mouth.
I saw a sailor come out one morning, but usually the only daytime sign of life was the siren. She had once graced a funfair awning, older local boys said, winking, adding, “She’s more fun, now.”
I never saw Dad exit the House of the Siren. Mum said it was his first stop ashore, a man caught between the sea and the sirens, distracted only temporarily by the call of home.
It burned down. Its last sirens were those of the fire engines. Protection was mentioned, and money, the lack of one heralding the lack of the other.
I forgot about the siren – forgot all the sirens Dad knew – until Dad was buried in the cemetery halfway down the hill between the House of the Siren and the sea. Tattooed old men and faded women saw him off. Mum looked straight ahead. I avoided the sirens’ eyes, but sensed the pucker of their gleaming lips, and the memory of all those kisses they’d placed carefully on Dad, signalling with silence that I’d be seeing them soon, once I was back inland, distracted from home, divorced, diverted.
I lived in Warsaw for a few years in the 90s, so often think of mermaids by their Polish name syrenka, a translation of siren, of course. The syrenka is one of the symbols of the city, and can be seen everywhere there. I also associate sirens with those in The Odyssey, tempting Odysseus and his sailors away from their business of getting home, so an element of that crept into my story.
Here it is, all 250 words of it:
Mum’s usual route down to the seafront avoided the House of the Siren, but Dad took us past it if we were seeing him off when he shipped out. Mum looked the other way. Dad kept his eyes forward, on the mercantile sea that would claim him.
Only I stared into the siren’s painted eyes, caught the pucker of her gleaming lipsticked mouth.
I saw a sailor come out one morning, but usually the only daytime sign of life was the siren. She had once graced a funfair awning, older local boys said, winking, adding, “She’s more fun, now.”
I never saw Dad exit the House of the Siren. Mum said it was his first stop ashore, a man caught between the sea and the sirens, distracted only temporarily by the call of home.
It burned down. Its last sirens were those of the fire engines. Protection was mentioned, and money, the lack of one heralding the lack of the other.
I forgot about the siren – forgot all the sirens Dad knew – until Dad was buried in the cemetery halfway down the hill between the House of the Siren and the sea. Tattooed old men and faded women saw him off. Mum looked straight ahead. I avoided the sirens’ eyes, but sensed the pucker of their gleaming lips, and the memory of all those kisses they’d placed carefully on Dad, signalling with silence that I’d be seeing them soon, once I was back inland, distracted from home, divorced, diverted.
2017
Traffic
Traffic is my short story set in contemporary Kiev, the capital city of a country beset by separatism, factionalism, schism and any other ism you can think of. In this scenario, is it right to bring up a baby? A young mother dreams of unburdening herself and leaving, and hits on a radical solution to help her on her way.
It came second in the 2015 V S Pritchett Short Story Award.
It has been published in Unthank Books' Unthology 9. Get a copy here.
There is a nice review of the stories in Unthology 9 on the TSS Publishing site. Reviewer Rupert Dastur said of Traffic:
'Svitlana and Yuri, a Ukrainian couple with a baby, fare little better in Nick Sweeney’s short story ‘Traffic’. Written in a deviously chirpy manner and with a plot twist that brings a wry (and appalled) smile, it’s easy to overlook the darkness within which this domestic scene is cradled: ‘Ukraine was imploding in the face of threats by outsiders, and by its own nationalists, gaping with shortages, hospitals no good, services gone to ruin, political life reduced to slogans shouted by stupid men with guns.’ It’s a world in which the word ‘traffic’ refers to people, not cars. It’s an excellent read and Sweeney conjures the two personalities of mother and father, expertly pitching them against one another.'
Thank you - I think I like 'deviously chirpy'!
Another nice review of Traffic, by Anna Lewis at Litro Magazine:
“Traffic” by Nick Sweeney is another tight, surprisingly moving piece of writing. Set in the Ukraine, it follows Svitlana, a young woman exhausted by motherhood, boredom, and a country “imploding in the face of threats by outsiders, and by its own nationalists, gaping with shortages, hospitals no good, services gone to ruin, political life reduced to slogans shouted by stupid men with guns.” Seeing no other way to pursue the life she feels she has been cheated of, Svitlana conceives a plan to begin again in Romania, a plan she will fund by selling her baby. The scheme is not brutal, Svitlana assures herself: her son will be adopted by a rich western couple, and so, “It was elegant because everybody ended up happy.” The story is a true page-turner, its suspense generated as much by moral discomfort as by action.
Thank you, Anna - so glad you enjoyed it.
I talk about Traffic, how I wrote it and aimed it at the V S Pritchett Award, and how it met the approval of the judges, in a guest post on Chris Fielden's blog about writing.
It came second in the 2015 V S Pritchett Short Story Award.
It has been published in Unthank Books' Unthology 9. Get a copy here.
There is a nice review of the stories in Unthology 9 on the TSS Publishing site. Reviewer Rupert Dastur said of Traffic:
'Svitlana and Yuri, a Ukrainian couple with a baby, fare little better in Nick Sweeney’s short story ‘Traffic’. Written in a deviously chirpy manner and with a plot twist that brings a wry (and appalled) smile, it’s easy to overlook the darkness within which this domestic scene is cradled: ‘Ukraine was imploding in the face of threats by outsiders, and by its own nationalists, gaping with shortages, hospitals no good, services gone to ruin, political life reduced to slogans shouted by stupid men with guns.’ It’s a world in which the word ‘traffic’ refers to people, not cars. It’s an excellent read and Sweeney conjures the two personalities of mother and father, expertly pitching them against one another.'
Thank you - I think I like 'deviously chirpy'!
Another nice review of Traffic, by Anna Lewis at Litro Magazine:
“Traffic” by Nick Sweeney is another tight, surprisingly moving piece of writing. Set in the Ukraine, it follows Svitlana, a young woman exhausted by motherhood, boredom, and a country “imploding in the face of threats by outsiders, and by its own nationalists, gaping with shortages, hospitals no good, services gone to ruin, political life reduced to slogans shouted by stupid men with guns.” Seeing no other way to pursue the life she feels she has been cheated of, Svitlana conceives a plan to begin again in Romania, a plan she will fund by selling her baby. The scheme is not brutal, Svitlana assures herself: her son will be adopted by a rich western couple, and so, “It was elegant because everybody ended up happy.” The story is a true page-turner, its suspense generated as much by moral discomfort as by action.
Thank you, Anna - so glad you enjoyed it.
I talk about Traffic, how I wrote it and aimed it at the V S Pritchett Award, and how it met the approval of the judges, in a guest post on Chris Fielden's blog about writing.
Just Looking
Alex doesn’t like his wife Elena walking round half-naked in the flat. Though they live up high in the sky, there’s a man out there, looking. So Alex says. But he’s more worried about what the peeper does when he stops looking. Or so he says. After all, one night he may do more than just look - or so Alex says.
My creepy tale of high-rise peeping, Just Looking, came out in the an edition of Mystery Weekly. It got a second outing in good company in Longshot Island magazine, and you can read it here.
My creepy tale of high-rise peeping, Just Looking, came out in the an edition of Mystery Weekly. It got a second outing in good company in Longshot Island magazine, and you can read it here.
Transaction, or, strictly speaking, Transakcja
My story Transaction is set in Białystok, eastern Poland, and looks at the relationship between legitimate and not-so-legitimate business. It tells a story-within-a-story of how one woman dealt with a modern form of slavery.
It's available in Polish - as Transakcja - on the sites Polski Noir and Prze Tłumacze. I'm grateful to Aleksandra Guzik for her excellent translation, and to Paul D Brazill and Marta Crickmar, for getting this into publication.
The English version was accepted by Stoneboat Literary Journal, and was published in its autumn issue - see below for details.
It's available in Polish - as Transakcja - on the sites Polski Noir and Prze Tłumacze. I'm grateful to Aleksandra Guzik for her excellent translation, and to Paul D Brazill and Marta Crickmar, for getting this into publication.
The English version was accepted by Stoneboat Literary Journal, and was published in its autumn issue - see below for details.
Dzemila
Dzemila is an excerpt from my work-in-progress Cleopatra's Script.
Dzemila is about ten years old. She and members of her extended Roma family have fled their home in what was Yugoslavia since the fighting began there, and live in Rome. Her sister Marika has found a job as a caretaker in a block of posh flats in the historic part of the city, and for a while it seemed that their troubles were over.
It came out with Lakeview International Journal of Literature and Arts, and in the meantime you can read some more from Cleopatra's Script here.
Dzemila is about ten years old. She and members of her extended Roma family have fled their home in what was Yugoslavia since the fighting began there, and live in Rome. Her sister Marika has found a job as a caretaker in a block of posh flats in the historic part of the city, and for a while it seemed that their troubles were over.
It came out with Lakeview International Journal of Literature and Arts, and in the meantime you can read some more from Cleopatra's Script here.
Paris, 1926: The Émigré Engineer
“They threw a party when Lenin died. “Things will change,” they roared, in a collective euphoric hysteria. In the silences in between, some warned, “No. Trotsky will take over. He’s a beast of a man.” Others said, “No. It will be Stalin. And he is worse even than Trotsky.” The Georgians among them begged to differ, violently. “Stalin is a Georgian,” they reminded everybody. “And we Georgians love life.” Stalin, they promised, would flood the Soviet Union with wine, song, cheese and cake. To a second of silence, followed quickly by thrown bottles, glasses, shoes and fists, the Georgians toasted the man with the mustache.”
I’m so happy to be in the July-September issue of the Sentinel Literary Quarterly, with my tale Paris 1926, the Émigré Engineer. It’s an extract from a longer book focusing on the fortunes of the people of various parts of Europe displaced by the First World War, the Russian Revolution and the ensuing civil war.
A young engineer finds himself in Paris, a reluctant part of the paranoid community of exiles and escapees from the burgeoning Soviet Union, feels ‘with them, but not of them’, and, spurred on by luck and murder, makes plans to distance himself from them for good.
The magazine is free to read here, and this excerpt from The Émigré Engineer is on pp82-87. That longer work I refer to above, with the same title, eventually came out as a novelette with Ploughshares in October 2021, but this is where it first saw the light of day.
I’m so happy to be in the July-September issue of the Sentinel Literary Quarterly, with my tale Paris 1926, the Émigré Engineer. It’s an extract from a longer book focusing on the fortunes of the people of various parts of Europe displaced by the First World War, the Russian Revolution and the ensuing civil war.
A young engineer finds himself in Paris, a reluctant part of the paranoid community of exiles and escapees from the burgeoning Soviet Union, feels ‘with them, but not of them’, and, spurred on by luck and murder, makes plans to distance himself from them for good.
The magazine is free to read here, and this excerpt from The Émigré Engineer is on pp82-87. That longer work I refer to above, with the same title, eventually came out as a novelette with Ploughshares in October 2021, but this is where it first saw the light of day.
A Memory from a Secret France
Ian Chung, editor of the splendid Eunoia Review, has published my story A Memory from a Secret France.
A bus dumps an old man into the square of a small French town. The rain drives him into a bar on the square, and he's soon in discussion with some of the town's elders. The town's history floats through their conversation - occupying Nazis, interloping lorry drivers and cow-burners - threatening to spill out into rancour at times, diffused, it seems, by the mention of the one time the town had a stage of the Tour de France, the country's famous bicycle race, when a Frenchman won the Tour - “Indeed,” one of the old men said. “I mean, what do we have these days, with Americans winning the Tour?” He puffed cheeks out in a gesture of outrage. “Spaniards. Irishmen, even.” Sport is universal, though paradoxically it also cleaves people apart and, sometimes, makes them very bitter.
With the 2017 race over, my Tour tale can be read in Eunoia Review, right here.
A bus dumps an old man into the square of a small French town. The rain drives him into a bar on the square, and he's soon in discussion with some of the town's elders. The town's history floats through their conversation - occupying Nazis, interloping lorry drivers and cow-burners - threatening to spill out into rancour at times, diffused, it seems, by the mention of the one time the town had a stage of the Tour de France, the country's famous bicycle race, when a Frenchman won the Tour - “Indeed,” one of the old men said. “I mean, what do we have these days, with Americans winning the Tour?” He puffed cheeks out in a gesture of outrage. “Spaniards. Irishmen, even.” Sport is universal, though paradoxically it also cleaves people apart and, sometimes, makes them very bitter.
With the 2017 race over, my Tour tale can be read in Eunoia Review, right here.
Famine Fingers
My short story Famine Fingers is now out in the great online, with quality magazine Literally Stories. You can read it here right now - before you reach for that cheeseburger.
A look at one young couple's skewed relationship with food, it first appeared in 2000, in an excellent but short-lived print-only magazine called Territories. I'm really glad it has seen the light of day again, and grateful to the editors at Literally Stories for accepting it.
The wonderful illustrations are from its original publication in the print magazine Territories in 2000.
A look at one young couple's skewed relationship with food, it first appeared in 2000, in an excellent but short-lived print-only magazine called Territories. I'm really glad it has seen the light of day again, and grateful to the editors at Literally Stories for accepting it.
The wonderful illustrations are from its original publication in the print magazine Territories in 2000.
Any idea how difficult it is for a long-winded novelist like me to write a 100-word story? No? If you have an hour, I can tell you. Post-It Mortem is a piece of flash fiction about... well, it's a bit difficult to talk about a 100-word story without giving most of it away, so I won't, except to say that it's a domestic drama that doesn't end well for an impatient man.
The story is here:
She came home and found her husband hanging from a beam in the kitchen. Bewildered she searched for a note, and finally saw one clutched in his hand. She pulled it from his stiff fingers very carefully, unrolled it, and saw at once that it was the post-it she had written that morning. It read:
Darling I have left
She turned it over.
Had he bothered to do that, he would have seen that it continued:
your dinner in the oven. Back by 8PM.
She vowed to marry a more patient man next time, and to write in smaller letters.
It was shortlisted for the 2016 Rattle Tales Brighton Prize, and is out now in the competition's anthology, The Brighton Prize 2016, together with all the winning and shortlisted stories, available from Lulu for £8.
Worse Things
“It’s not so bad,” another remand woman called Melissa, a credit card fraudster, had told me. “I’ve missed a few Christmases, and all through shopping early.” When I told her what I’d done she’d giggled, without spite, and said, “Your liberty literally isn’t worth a dog’s.”
Animal rights and leather jackets, bolt cutters and fences, the pleasing whoosh of exploding formaldehyde, absurdly delicate policemen and old fellows in wigs, all in my story Worse Things, which draws a few pros and cons between Christmas on remand and New year with your own permanent number… There ARE worse things. Probably. Available now in Red Fez, a mag I’ve admired from afar for a long time, coinciding with my favourite historical hat. You can read it here.
Animal rights and leather jackets, bolt cutters and fences, the pleasing whoosh of exploding formaldehyde, absurdly delicate policemen and old fellows in wigs, all in my story Worse Things, which draws a few pros and cons between Christmas on remand and New year with your own permanent number… There ARE worse things. Probably. Available now in Red Fez, a mag I’ve admired from afar for a long time, coinciding with my favourite historical hat. You can read it here.
Transaction
A businessman with a mission, a tart with a tale to tell, and the question of reputation that dogs each of them in its own way. On a snowy night in Białystok, in eastern Poland near the Belarus border, a story unfolds of faded glamour, entrapment and anger, and explodes in a violence that leaves an uneasy calm behind. After its initial outing earlier in the year in Polish as Transakcja, it was reborn in its original language as Transaction, and is now out in Stoneboat Literary Journal.
Jerry's Last Word
Jer-ee, Jer-ee! I miss that call of Pam’s that used to echo round the yards in the evenings, I can’t think why. The repetition of his name was a sign of life, maybe, and of the assurance of a future. I miss too the sight of Jerry slopping his wet way across the road from the jetty, leaving the traces of the flat feet that would, I thought, keep him out of Vietnam – it seemed like it would go on forever at that time, August of seventy four.
My flash tale of a boy and his pet, Jerry’s Last Word, out now with Spelk Fiction, and available to read here.
My flash tale of a boy and his pet, Jerry’s Last Word, out now with Spelk Fiction, and available to read here.
Bookselling Blues
"Etruscans, darling, Etruscans."
“J’ai mal à tete,” she declared suddenly. That is what you learn to say when you have a headache in France. Because everybody will be so interested, and offer le sympathie and l’aspirin. And pourquoi pas? I think, had a French doctor been nearby, he’d have radioed for the Mal à Tete Sans Frontières helicopter to be waiting for her at her chosen Finchley tube stop.
My story Bookselling Blues, an everyday tale of North London people, out now in #LiterallyStories and available to read here.
The Boy at the Bus Stop
Transition - no country!
“The boy,” the woman remembered. “There was a boy here too.”
“Where is he, then?” the policeman demanded.
“Well.” The woman took a look up and down the street. “I don’t know.”
“Well, where did he go?”
“I didn’t see him,” the woman confessed. “But he mentioned him.” She jerked a thumb towards R’s legs. “Before he... you know.”
Beware of boys who bring messages, especially on the eve of All Souls' Day. Ghosts can't do you any harm... or can they? Read The Boy at the Bus Stop here, in the kind care of the wonderful Literally Stories magazine.
The Boy at the Bus Stop - the non-naming of names and places
I've written a few stories about the wars that took place in ex-Yugoslavia in the 1990s - I'm not sure why. I was living in Turkey and Poland for most of the time the war was going on, and I guess there was something odd to me about being within a train ride of the war that made me think about it a lot. At one time I had certain fixed ideas about the good guys and bad guys in that war, but it's all a bit blurred now in my memory, reading and research. And I don't think any side came out of that conflict with its reputation quite intact. That's why I've chosen to leave character and place names obscure, by using a technique I associate with 19th century writing, and just putting an initial in place of a name.
For the ultimate story of the wars in Bosnia, there are a range of books, but one that stands out for me is Anthony Lloyd's excellent My War Gone By, I Miss It So - you will never think about war in the same way once you've read it. See more about it here.
Monstrous Men
Children's band, Paris, summer 1980
Some stolen music, a vain musician reduced to teaching, a haughty artist, and, worst of all, a narcissistic president. In the middle of it, a children's band. Monstrous Men is a story of disappearances and delusion, hubris and revenge, not in the distant past, but in a totalitarian trap somewhere in the East of Europe in the last century.
It has been reprinted in the autumn issue of The Woven Tale Press, and you can read it here.
It has been reprinted in the autumn issue of The Woven Tale Press, and you can read it here.
Children's band, Paris, summer 1980
Zaginął Pies - Man Seeks Dog
The Church of the Visitation, Krakowskie PrzedmieĊcie, Warsaw
This is the Polish language version of my short crime caper Man Seeks Dog.
I wrote this story in the late 1990s, possibly while I was still living in Warsaw. One of the newspapers, Gazeta Wyborcza, had a column called Man Seeks Dog, either for people looking for lost dogs, or possibly, to adopt a dog. It was published in 1997 or 1998 in a small press magazine called Plume – long vanished, unfortunately, as with most print ventures of the time. It was republished online in 2014 in Jack Hardway’s Crime Magazine, but that seems to have disappeared, too.
I set Teodor’s flat in the block (across from one of Warsaw’s two Japanese restaurants, at the time) on ulica Dobra, the street in which I used to live, and had him going about his not-so-innocent dog-seeking business on nearby main street Krakowskie Przedmieście, and pondering his luck in the Nowy Świat Café. It was fun to bring them back to life in this story.
Thanks to Marta Crickmar and Paul D Brazill for moving and shaking to get this out – and to translator Anna Kuksinowicz for her hard work in rendering into a language that feels natural to it – Polish, of course.
Read it here in Prze Tlumacze, or here in Polski Noir.
The Last of the Lace, or Ostatnie Koronki
A woman goes on a journey to ensure that her family stays together, and finds her home town on its last legs, guarded by strangely-garbed spacemen. If they're not dead, she has a way of helping them achieve that unhappy state, and it's not by using the family heirloom of the title, but a more deadly one.
My story The Last of the Lace has been published, but it's only available in Polish at the moment. It's called Ostatnie Koronki, and is out in both Polski Noir and Prze Tłumacze - 'In Translation'.
Credits, and many thanks, to translator Aleksandra Guzik and movers and shakers Paul D Brazill and Marta Crickmar.
2016
The Architect Interrupted by His Creations
"There is a racing car spread out over my reception room. Its frame and parts are like those of some magnificent beast reduced to dissection. What kind of boy would look so pointedly at me, when he could be marvelling over an Amilcar from the future past – it is the very same Amilcar sports model whose wheel broke the neck of dancer Isadora Duncan when she caught her foolish scarf in its delicate spokes. I could point out to the boy that it was only then that she achieved the pure classical form she had sought all her life, and sometimes in the chrome I see her image as still and perfect as the Winged Nike from the island of Samothrace, and as broken."
An architect remembers the perfect things he built, while the less-than-perfect children he made will not let him forget them as much as he seems to want to. Isadora Duncan waves her scarf, briefly, and there are mad Medicis, and Mussolini in the plush of his opera house, 'not a man who liked to hang around', plus bapistries in Ravenna and balconies in Verona and secret passages in Salo, a cruel father, nasty servants, at least one revolver and a cake full of ground glass. The Architect Interrupted by His Creations is my playful take on Italian Futurism, that art form that, paradoxically, had no future. It came out in January's issue 6 of the fabulously-piloted In-flight Literary Magazine - read it here.
An architect remembers the perfect things he built, while the less-than-perfect children he made will not let him forget them as much as he seems to want to. Isadora Duncan waves her scarf, briefly, and there are mad Medicis, and Mussolini in the plush of his opera house, 'not a man who liked to hang around', plus bapistries in Ravenna and balconies in Verona and secret passages in Salo, a cruel father, nasty servants, at least one revolver and a cake full of ground glass. The Architect Interrupted by His Creations is my playful take on Italian Futurism, that art form that, paradoxically, had no future. It came out in January's issue 6 of the fabulously-piloted In-flight Literary Magazine - read it here.
Pavlov's Dogs
...the coast of a hot country full of rather bad-tempered people...
It's probably fair to say that Carrie's and Ivan's relationship will not be strengthened by the challenges they face on a slacker roadtrip along the coast of a hot country full of rather bad-tempered people. It very nearly ends in disaster when some off-duty soldiers throw themselves into the mix. And friends Ellie's and Jacob's vegetarianism may also suffer just a little. Pavlov's Dogs is now out in the December edition of Writing Raw magazine.
Costa Dystopia
If you like the beach photos I've used on this page, you may want to have a look at my small collection of photos called Costa Dystopia, published in the Fall issue of Riding Light Review.
If you like the beach photos I've used on this page, you may want to have a look at my small collection of photos called Costa Dystopia, published in the Fall issue of Riding Light Review.
