My Published Short Stories
I tend to think of myself as a novelist; long-winded rather than to the point. However, something - some urge I can't ignore - makes me want to write short stories. It is a beautiful form, I think, and it's good self-discipline to say what you need to say with the minimum of words. In a way, it's easy to write a novel - in one way, I mean, not every way - easy to let it all flow and mount up. The short story has to be concise (I know, I know, not all of them are, and there are rules, which I'll go into another time, as they give me a headache, in general) and easy to digest; it's the haiku to the novel's epic poem, the brush and dustpan to its vacuum cleaner, etc etc etc.
...a touch of red eye without the aid of a camera...
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
Use the Find on Page button from the . . . menu, or Ctrl + F to jump to the titles.
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2022
The Songster and the Horses A Dream of the Eastern Roman Empire Dr Mukherjee's Magic Gas A Weekend in Aubervilliers The Place of the Dead Walls Full of Airbags The Most Foolish Thing of All Signs of the Catcher Gulf War Coffee Not out yet: Comedy in Everything has been accepted by The Exacting Clam A reprint of my story The Trio will appear in Fictional Café’s anthology. My spec tale Horse Sense has been accepted by Starward Shadows magazine. My capitalist wish-list yarn The German One will be published by Expanded Field. |
2021
The High Life From Rizokarpaso to Ttakkas Bay: a Refugee Tale Unforeseen Circumstances The Beetle's Mausoleum All Souls' Day from the Skies over Pennsylvania Wheel Perpetuity Post Unethical Use of a Frisbee A Man with a Lot of Explaining to Do 2020 The Trio Istanbul Song - The Blind Beggar's Daughter I Think of Ariadne when I Eat Hummus The House of the Siren |
2019
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 |
2018
All My Halloweens The Thief in the Sky Capital Story The Pitch Pavlov's Dogs The Token The Perils of Pilate (an Easter Tale) House of the Siren 2017 Traffic Just Looking Transaction - Polish version Dzemila Paris 1926: The Emigre Engineer A Memory from a Secret France Famine Fingers Post-It Mortem Worse Things Transaction Jerry's Last Word Bookselling Blues The Boy at the Bus Stop Monstrous Men Man Seeks Dog - Polish version The Last of the Lace - Polish version 2016 The Architect in Search of His Creations Pavlov's Dogs 2014 & earlier Andabatae End-User of Ordinance Fast in the Life Lane |
2022
The Songster and the Horses - a Hollywood Elegy with Cocaine
photo by Pietro Arubi
I'm excited to be at The Museum of Americana with my story The Songster and the Horses - a Hollywood Elegy with Cocaine.
‘That butler of Ebert’s, Arnold, brought Stephen oblivion in small packets and vials, making his days and nights difficult to punctuate. There were girls, but none of them were boyish Fiat Mackenzie with her Polaire hair—he had really been mad in love with that scandalously-bobbed creature now making a name in the movies. Fiat was on billboards out there. He was happy for her, except that he wasn't...He dared not look at those dashed billboards. The dream had captured the truth, meanly wouldn’t let it go: love in the first degree, a curse worthy of an upsided carter over a dead horse.’
See more of tunesmith Stephen and his butler-endowed bass-playing friend Ebert, and Stephen’s lost love Fiat in my tale. You can read it all at The Museum of Americana.
‘That butler of Ebert’s, Arnold, brought Stephen oblivion in small packets and vials, making his days and nights difficult to punctuate. There were girls, but none of them were boyish Fiat Mackenzie with her Polaire hair—he had really been mad in love with that scandalously-bobbed creature now making a name in the movies. Fiat was on billboards out there. He was happy for her, except that he wasn't...He dared not look at those dashed billboards. The dream had captured the truth, meanly wouldn’t let it go: love in the first degree, a curse worthy of an upsided carter over a dead horse.’
See more of tunesmith Stephen and his butler-endowed bass-playing friend Ebert, and Stephen’s lost love Fiat in my tale. You can read it all at The Museum of Americana.
Magic Pictures – a Dream of the Eastern Roman Empire
Constantinople, 1570s, by Melchior Lorck
Magic Pictures – a Dream of the Eastern Roman Empire
“Walk with me awhile and I’ll tell you my secret. Will you do that?”
“I have work to do.” Ayşenaz pulled impatiently at her sleeve. “And I’m in my work clothes.”
“That’s not important.”
“Well, where shall we walk?”
I don’t know where we walked. The streets were packed with the scum of the eastern empire, noisy and violent with commerce, busy with diseased camp-followers and drunken soldiers and smug priests about their business, all bushy beards, bulbous noses and red-rimmed eyes that stared at us for seconds as we passed.
Ayşenaz said, “Where?”
“There.” I pointed. I promised her I knew our road. Byzantium was a sprawling jumble of bricks set with muck, impossible structures that ultimately defined streets smelling of peelings and animal insides and urine. There was the grand road that led from the triumphal arch set in the walls to the great church, there were the fine forums marked by their free-standing columns fallen to ruin – it was no longer a time of columns – there were the streets full of artisans’ workshops, and of shops, the paths that led off to imperial palaces fast disappearing into the tenements. We went through the oldest quarters, stayed in backstreets made of mud, full of timber houses that would burn down or harbour foul diseases until they were ready to eat us away. “That’s why we have to live now,” we agreed, knew that there would be no other chance, not till we got to Heaven. Nobody knew how long that would be.
This is from chapter 84 of my unpublished novel Istanbul Song. It's a sort of romance set in Istanbul in the early 1990s when I lived there (but is not autobiographical). It's set against turbulent changes in Turkish society, and features some of the people I saw as my 'tribe' at the time, the somewhat aimless cast of westerners determined to be out there in the world but not always knowing why.* It's long and sprawling and full of flaws and needs a thorough rewrite, but it may come out one day intact.
This excerpt from it has been published in the Fiction International anthology #55 - the Dream issue, available here.
*See also Laikonik Express
Dr Mukherjee's Magic Gas
"What have you got to cure big hair?"
“Not Big Aztec,” Papa slurps through the peach he’s eating. Why does he take his teeth out soon as he comes back from the bookie and before he eats? The only time you need your teeth is when you’re eating. And why does he park them by the ashtray, all pink and disgusting and, gradually, covered in ash? And how the actual living fuck does he mangle those bookies’ pens, with no teeth? And, as he can barely read and write, why the fuck does he grab a handful of those stubby bookies’ pens each time he comes out of the bookie anyhow? Every drawer in the kitchen, and every ledge, is full of child-size bookies’ pens, some chewed, but most pristine. I suspect if I could ask, nobody would know. He finishes the peach, with some noise, and puts the hairy stone in the ashtray, and observes, “I didn’t like that. It was too… dry.” He pokes at it with his ciggie. “I can’t go to Big Aztec.”
A foul-mouthed baby takes advantage of his seeming invisibility while the adults around him try to decide where to go on a summer vacation. But where do you go if you're a hypochondriac, and you're competing with the other hypochondriacs?
My acidic little story Dr Mukherjee's Magic Gas has been a long time in the making - I think I first wrote a draft in 1999 - but it's now out there courtesy of the good people at Agapanthus Collective, in the company of talented writers of fiction and poetry. You can read it here and here on p16.
A foul-mouthed baby takes advantage of his seeming invisibility while the adults around him try to decide where to go on a summer vacation. But where do you go if you're a hypochondriac, and you're competing with the other hypochondriacs?
My acidic little story Dr Mukherjee's Magic Gas has been a long time in the making - I think I first wrote a draft in 1999 - but it's now out there courtesy of the good people at Agapanthus Collective, in the company of talented writers of fiction and poetry. You can read it here and here on p16.
A Weekend in Aubervilliers
"Aubervilliers? What's at Aubervilliers?" Paris, 1981
Sex, drugs, not much of either, and no rock n roll at all, I was 'slightly naughty' one night in Paris in the early 80s. Not very naughty, to be honest - and I was honest. Even so, the long-suffering Parisien police and the city's ever-patient justice system aided me in ruining my weekend. Read all about it in my shortish memoir piece A Weekend in Aubervilliers, out in Contrary magazine. It's all here.
The Place of the Dead
Senegalese dancers and finger-cymbalists in the Djma el Fnaa
One man, one woman, one throbbing city, and a very unwise decision. My Morocco-set story The Place of the Dead has been reprinted in the 'home for forgotten yarns', Defuncted. It's a bit of a comedy, as usual, and fairly swiftly told.
You can read it here.
I wrote a piece about the background to the story for its initial publication in Blackwitch Press' Exiles Anthology, which you can read here, should you wish to get the meta-view.
You can read it here.
I wrote a piece about the background to the story for its initial publication in Blackwitch Press' Exiles Anthology, which you can read here, should you wish to get the meta-view.
Walls Full of Airbags
Neela, the beautiful artwork for the story by Suman Mukherjee
‘I knew we’d talk. I knew too – I don’t know how – that we’d go out together. I knew we’d fall in love without realising and that we’d both cry when it came time for me to head back to Germany. I knew she’d visit me there and that we’d get married and have babies and Christmases and this period, special for us, just after it.’
A chance meeting in a post-Christmas London café is destined for great things until life gets in the way via literature and art. My short and rocky romance tale is out in the wonderful Third Lane Magazine.
A chance meeting in a post-Christmas London café is destined for great things until life gets in the way via literature and art. My short and rocky romance tale is out in the wonderful Third Lane Magazine.
The Most Foolish Thing of All
"I got the t-shirt..."
‘The day These Foolish Things was released, I left the office at lunchtime and walked a mile over Southwark Bridge to get it. The display that had grabbed my fan’s attention, heart and cash was a giant version of the album cover photo, a three-times-life-size cut-out of the head-and-shoulders cover shot of Mr Ferry. I asked the guy in the store if I could have it when he was finished with it. He said I could have it there and then. No… Great. It made my day. Or so I thought.’
The day I bonded with a giant-size Bryan Ferry, and became an object of envy and amusement… but, to be honesty, mostly amusement. A careful-what-you-wish-for memoir from my foolish teens, published by the good folk at The Bookends Review. You can read it in all its LOLful glory here.
The day I bonded with a giant-size Bryan Ferry, and became an object of envy and amusement… but, to be honesty, mostly amusement. A careful-what-you-wish-for memoir from my foolish teens, published by the good folk at The Bookends Review. You can read it in all its LOLful glory here.
Signs of the Catcher
Caught ya...
A pub near me in North London was called The Catcher in the Rye. Its sign featured a horse-riding guy in a sort of Hollywood Dark Ages livery. Salinger’s book title comes from when anti-hero Holden tells his little sister Phoebe that all he’d really like to be is the catcher in the rye, saving kids from falling off a cliff. It’s a warm ambition from an age of innocence, and it’s almost totally at odds with the world full of phonies that Holden sees.
Well, it’s only a pub sign. Nobody goes to a pub because they like the sign, and nobody avoids one because they see the absurdity in it. Except me.
Signs are important, though. Signs are life. They are ignored at your peril.
My first sign around that time was one I ignored. It was a red traffic light. I carried on across a busy intersection on my bicycle. A guy in a car had a similar idea, except that he wanted to turn left. We two sign-ignorers were brought sharply together. I sprained my front forks and my wrist.
But then if that hadn’t happened I wouldn’t have been on an underground train to see the second sign.
My short story of a legend brought my millennium to a close (a year early), what seems like a very long time ago now. It was finally published in The Academy of the Heart and Mind. You can read it here.
Well, it’s only a pub sign. Nobody goes to a pub because they like the sign, and nobody avoids one because they see the absurdity in it. Except me.
Signs are important, though. Signs are life. They are ignored at your peril.
My first sign around that time was one I ignored. It was a red traffic light. I carried on across a busy intersection on my bicycle. A guy in a car had a similar idea, except that he wanted to turn left. We two sign-ignorers were brought sharply together. I sprained my front forks and my wrist.
But then if that hadn’t happened I wouldn’t have been on an underground train to see the second sign.
My short story of a legend brought my millennium to a close (a year early), what seems like a very long time ago now. It was finally published in The Academy of the Heart and Mind. You can read it here.
Gulf War Coffee
"Coffee - I need coffee... now."
'The day the first Gulf War started, in January 1991, I may have got the odd look on the bus into Istanbul – but no more than the usual curiosity sometimes offered to foreigners, usually courteous if a bit unnerving at times. There were no demonstrating mobs in Taksim, where the police would have cracked heads first and asked questions later. I did our banking business with a charming manager who kept me there as he practised his elegant English and kindly bade a minion bring me some horrible apple tea, a powdered just-add-water concoction I usually avoided. The clock told me that if I jumped in a cab I could have got into work and caught the fourth lesson, the last before lunchtime. I told the clock fuck it – why break my neck. I was also in dire need of a coffee.'
One war - the first of many, though I wasn't to know - one teacher wagging off school, and one coffee - just one. Not too much to ask, eh?
There must be some things in life more important than coffee, but I can never think what they are. The appropriately-named Cafe Lit magazine has published my very short memoir, Gulf War Coffee, and of course you can read it all in its entirety by clicking in a caffeinated manner on these very words.
One war - the first of many, though I wasn't to know - one teacher wagging off school, and one coffee - just one. Not too much to ask, eh?
There must be some things in life more important than coffee, but I can never think what they are. The appropriately-named Cafe Lit magazine has published my very short memoir, Gulf War Coffee, and of course you can read it all in its entirety by clicking in a caffeinated manner on these very words.
2021
The High Life
The cover of the Love issue of Wordrunner, where The High Life appeared
I knew it was serious when Dav killed the sound on the TV and declared, “Faria’s mother will marry her off.”
“Who to?” I wondered if he’d watched a run of Jane Austens on TV.
“Ah, Shakespeare. You think it’s all happy endings.” Dav ranted with such enjoyment that I questioned his actual annoyance. “All Romeo and Juliet. Nah. That woman has a different ending planned for Faria.”
He said Faria’s mother was from Zahidan, in Iran. Their marriage had been part of an alliance between Parsi families there and in India. I’d never heard of Parsis, and knew next to nothing about either Iran or India. Dav rolled out a tale of trading dynasties, business and family friendships, feuds and factions, agreements made and broken, and vanishing money. Dav and his wife had been separated for some years, for reasons to do with any combination of what he called the ‘troubles’. The qualities he’d attributed to her couldn’t have helped.
The essence of it was that Dav’s wife’s family was mortally in need of cash. Her only recourse was to persuade Faria to marry somebody from a rich family. “And she’ll do it.” Dav worked those eyes. “She is a wilful, evil… jinx of a woman, Shakespeare – prostitute her daughter to some uppish… clown – unless you make a proposal, and keep Faria here.”
“You have to be kidding, Dav,” I said. “Dav?”
I followed his gaze. The TV showed a re-run of some old show. I saw a middle-aged couple in comic thrall to a man who, despite being in a hospital bed, was wearing a leather jacket. Dav turned, and explained, “I like Fonzie.”
I’d been mesmerised by Dav’s tale. It was plausible, I guessed, but Faria didn’t fit the profile of those girls who surfaced in the press, wide-eyed and victimised, manipulated into arranged marriages.
Her feet sounded less than dainty as they propelled her up the stairs. She burst into the apartment, weighed down with bags, saying, “I will swing for you.” She walked over to Dav and scattered receipts in his lap with as much violence as the throwing of paper allowed. “Three-month grocery store bill,” she recited. “Liquor store eighty five dollars. Twenty at the newsstand. And as none of them take cards in this grubby little tax-dodge economy, and because there are no banks in this sink-hole, I had to walk a mile to an ATM.” She set a chair wobbling when she grabbed her coat. She beckoned me into mine. “We’d stay for dinner, Dad,” she called back into the room. “Only, you can’t afford it.”
Dollar-store goods, cheap beer, family feuds, dastardly dynastic doings, and a wobbly romance in my story The High Life.
Based on a true story, and a now fleeting relationship I had in 1999-2000, The High Life has long been one of my favourite stories of mine. I sent it to various competitions, but it was always a no-show. I still wanted to find a suitable home for it, and found on in Wordrunner's collection Love.
I’m proud to be in such good company. You may read all of LOVE online here. Or download a pdf of the entire chapbook here.
I'm also happy to say that Wordrunner nominated The High Life for the 2022 Pushcart Prize. Watch this space...
“Who to?” I wondered if he’d watched a run of Jane Austens on TV.
“Ah, Shakespeare. You think it’s all happy endings.” Dav ranted with such enjoyment that I questioned his actual annoyance. “All Romeo and Juliet. Nah. That woman has a different ending planned for Faria.”
He said Faria’s mother was from Zahidan, in Iran. Their marriage had been part of an alliance between Parsi families there and in India. I’d never heard of Parsis, and knew next to nothing about either Iran or India. Dav rolled out a tale of trading dynasties, business and family friendships, feuds and factions, agreements made and broken, and vanishing money. Dav and his wife had been separated for some years, for reasons to do with any combination of what he called the ‘troubles’. The qualities he’d attributed to her couldn’t have helped.
The essence of it was that Dav’s wife’s family was mortally in need of cash. Her only recourse was to persuade Faria to marry somebody from a rich family. “And she’ll do it.” Dav worked those eyes. “She is a wilful, evil… jinx of a woman, Shakespeare – prostitute her daughter to some uppish… clown – unless you make a proposal, and keep Faria here.”
“You have to be kidding, Dav,” I said. “Dav?”
I followed his gaze. The TV showed a re-run of some old show. I saw a middle-aged couple in comic thrall to a man who, despite being in a hospital bed, was wearing a leather jacket. Dav turned, and explained, “I like Fonzie.”
I’d been mesmerised by Dav’s tale. It was plausible, I guessed, but Faria didn’t fit the profile of those girls who surfaced in the press, wide-eyed and victimised, manipulated into arranged marriages.
Her feet sounded less than dainty as they propelled her up the stairs. She burst into the apartment, weighed down with bags, saying, “I will swing for you.” She walked over to Dav and scattered receipts in his lap with as much violence as the throwing of paper allowed. “Three-month grocery store bill,” she recited. “Liquor store eighty five dollars. Twenty at the newsstand. And as none of them take cards in this grubby little tax-dodge economy, and because there are no banks in this sink-hole, I had to walk a mile to an ATM.” She set a chair wobbling when she grabbed her coat. She beckoned me into mine. “We’d stay for dinner, Dad,” she called back into the room. “Only, you can’t afford it.”
Dollar-store goods, cheap beer, family feuds, dastardly dynastic doings, and a wobbly romance in my story The High Life.
Based on a true story, and a now fleeting relationship I had in 1999-2000, The High Life has long been one of my favourite stories of mine. I sent it to various competitions, but it was always a no-show. I still wanted to find a suitable home for it, and found on in Wordrunner's collection Love.
I’m proud to be in such good company. You may read all of LOVE online here. Or download a pdf of the entire chapbook here.
I'm also happy to say that Wordrunner nominated The High Life for the 2022 Pushcart Prize. Watch this space...
From Rizokarpaso to Ttakkas Bay: a Refugee Tale
The sign on the Polis road - now sadly gone (2022)
"Refugee from Rizokarpaso, advertising in Sunday Times..."
I'm really pleased to finally get my short memoir about an enigmatic sign we passed on the road in Cyprus, and then investigated to uncover some of the story it told. I haven't solved the whole mystery of Mr Ttakkas of Ttakkas Bay, but I think it's fine that some of it stays hidden.
A massive thank you to #Egophobia for hosting this tiny sliver of my memories. You can read it all here.
I'm really pleased to finally get my short memoir about an enigmatic sign we passed on the road in Cyprus, and then investigated to uncover some of the story it told. I haven't solved the whole mystery of Mr Ttakkas of Ttakkas Bay, but I think it's fine that some of it stays hidden.
A massive thank you to #Egophobia for hosting this tiny sliver of my memories. You can read it all here.
Unforeseen Circumstances
The virus was NOT going to come to my house. It wouldn't dare, with Hugh there, and his sad but fearsome smoking habit. Who reads the accommodation wanted columns when they already have a home? My tale of domestic intrigue, with nicotine is now out at long last: flash but not flashy fiction from me, a three-minute read courtesy of the good people at Plato's Caves Online.
Read it here and now and weep... or laugh!
Read it here and now and weep... or laugh!
The Beetle's Mausoleum
'They pondered the beetle's miserable existence, day after day, year on year, its calls answered by neither mate nor friend nor enemy nor exterminator. James thought the bureau would eventually dry out, and collapse suddenly and apocalyptically, revealing a bitter but resigned creature sitting blinking grumpily in the dust.'
The Beetle's Mausoleum is (sort of) a first for me - one of my stories recorded and read out in a podcast by the lovely people at Short Story Hunters via Litopia. (I have had the odd story recorded before, but have never got to hear it, for various tedious reasons.)
The story is a 270-word excerpt from a 12000-word tale of village intrigue and dog-owners, and it centres on a village interloper from the big town, a widower called James, and his run-in with a local over a fatal difference of opinion. It's called Blue Dog Murder. It is unpublished, but this stand-alone snippet from it will hopefully augur its acceptance by somebody at some magazine, somewhere.
You can hear it, read in Jonny's dulcet Northern Irish tones, around 5 mins 30 secs in.
The Beetle's Mausoleum is (sort of) a first for me - one of my stories recorded and read out in a podcast by the lovely people at Short Story Hunters via Litopia. (I have had the odd story recorded before, but have never got to hear it, for various tedious reasons.)
The story is a 270-word excerpt from a 12000-word tale of village intrigue and dog-owners, and it centres on a village interloper from the big town, a widower called James, and his run-in with a local over a fatal difference of opinion. It's called Blue Dog Murder. It is unpublished, but this stand-alone snippet from it will hopefully augur its acceptance by somebody at some magazine, somewhere.
You can hear it, read in Jonny's dulcet Northern Irish tones, around 5 mins 30 secs in.
All Souls' Day from the Skies over Pennsylvania
None of the kids we grew up with in our little Penn town of Balz could fathom what Michael Sheltz ever saw. There was no authority to the common agreement that he was not right in the head, whatever that could mean, and yet only strangers assumed that there was nothing behind his eyes. We knew he saw something, and we knew it filled his head with sheer, explosive joy; we just didn’t know what it was, and, shame on us, we only occasionally wondered, and then only when we coveted that joy for ourselves. While he was still young enough, just about, to draw the kind of empathy that stopped short of indifference, he saw the angels of Balz the All Souls’ Day Milo Galitzki took him flying.
Milo had learned to fly out of wanting to know how a plane was engineered into its magic, but it was more than that, incorporating his unhappiness with the confines of gravity. He was twelve when he first accompanied old farmer Shilnikov in his shuddering crop duster, and fourteen the day he debuted alone in one of the airstrip’s Pipers. On his way out, his sister Mila had held his arm and urged him to stay home, safe on terra firma, but he’d unfastened her fingers, and with some difficulty, too, and headed for the skies.
This is an excerpt from a longer work called The Last Thing the Angel Said, which has been a long time in the making. It was published by Press Pause magazine, and all of it can be read here.
Milo had learned to fly out of wanting to know how a plane was engineered into its magic, but it was more than that, incorporating his unhappiness with the confines of gravity. He was twelve when he first accompanied old farmer Shilnikov in his shuddering crop duster, and fourteen the day he debuted alone in one of the airstrip’s Pipers. On his way out, his sister Mila had held his arm and urged him to stay home, safe on terra firma, but he’d unfastened her fingers, and with some difficulty, too, and headed for the skies.
This is an excerpt from a longer work called The Last Thing the Angel Said, which has been a long time in the making. It was published by Press Pause magazine, and all of it can be read here.
Wheel
Station somewhere between Gliwice and Krakow
My short tale Wheel was originally published in Ambit in 1999. It was republished in 2021 in the magazine Good Works Review, but the for the life of me even I can't access it online, so here it is, below.
It features in the Good Works Review 2020 anthology, in print and Kindle for $3.99, in company, of course, with a lot of other decent proseists and poets.
The flowers of the counter-revolution all dead, their scent fading with each new moon, I hear fortune at a distance, spinning its wheel. I walk through the streets of the new age among people blinded by things that glitter, afraid to think that one day the gold at the heart of the light won’t come to them.
My grandfather found a pebble of amber in the sand at Łeba, and sat on the dune cliffs looking at the Baltic Sea. He thought of the Prussian knights owning it and all that lay in it, owning the land, the labour of its people, even owning the glare that came in from the horizon.
He turned to the girl next to him, his sweetheart, my grandmother, neither of them knowing about the shabby dynasty they’d create, said, “Much good it did them, in the end.” The knights came again, of course, brought fire and misery, left ruins and ghosts. They didn’t know about that, either, though I once heard grandfather say he’d had a dread feeling all along that the Prussians would be back for their pebble. It sat hidden in plain pride of place in one of those pointless glass cabinets people go in for here. Throughout the Second World War, it was secreted in a cistern, then about grandfather’s person. From the Oświęcim death camp he walked a widower’s walk through the scarred and smoking country back to Warsaw, a city of broken stones, his pebble intact in his pocket.
“A symbol for him of the land,” I asked my father once.
He said, “What?”
“Or of the sea?”
“Eh?”
“Of the nation, the people?”
He said, “How should I know?” He swept a harried hand across his brow. “I can’t even finish the crossword.”
All the same, when he gave me the stone to keep, he said, “Promise you’ll take care of it?” I promised, and he read my mind, and said, “I don’t know why, but you must never lose it.” He had other preoccupations by then, was about to do that widower’s walk to the hospital to pester his last nurse. I held the stone, imagined it as the hard yellow stuff gripping his vital organs, killing him with its riches.
***
I have no riches, no money in the bank. “And I don’t believe capitalism will save us all,” I say to anybody who asks me. I have not much hair and old clothes and a chipped front tooth, a smile that will stay with me like grandfather’s amber. I have a face from before, young people tell me, made to last in these corner-cutting times.
I was a curious child thrown up by times of darkness and the grim mirth of those who sought to better themselves in a system in which all were meant to be equal. I got a life sentence; I will never forget the rituals that made me, church and school and party in a country that didn’t know what it wanted to be.
Out train windows I see that country, mountains, valleys, rivers, cities, towns, the midget houses built over allotments of fertile land on which nothing grows except the ugliest of vegetables, all fixed in time. I see a lit-up Christ over the engine-turning yards at Katowice, His fingers pointing out cattle-trucks slinking by in painful memory. Near Mława I see a line of trees upended, whose topmost branches will grow into the ground in a parody of roots. Giant churches rise out of the land as if rooted there in imitation of the factories and their cooling towers, their gas-burners that light the traveller’s night.
I met the only woman I ever knew on a train-ride made everlasting by the unfathomable logic of communism applied to railways. It was Gliwice to Lublin; she was thin and sickly with a face so pale the light seemed to pause inside it, she was headscarved, in a dowdy coat, and battered shoes, looking for something to eat, somebody to love. In Lublin we bought bruised apples and ate them as we walked, made jokes, laughed and choked. Lublin’s market streets were muddy underfoot and ruined, spoiled fruit stamped into them, wooden slats from broken boxes, an ugly wind blowing us the stench of dead flowers.
We sat on steps, knowing we’d live together and marry, buy a glass-fronted cabinet, and have babies. Life stretched ahead of us, some of its spaces filled in. I thought I ought to warn her that in my family the women we married died young. Instead I asked her name, which turned out to be Iza: Izabela, Catholic name, Gypsy name.
Just as Iza was a sweetheart going begging, Roma children make historic supplicating gestures, offer the sight of borrowed babies; the new era doesn’t seem to be doing them much good. The Roma know that democracy suits them no more than communism ever did, and that persecuted people are just as persecuted under climates of smiley liberalism. People say they have shoes really, that they get them back when they bring home gleaming coins.
The children see my smile, and try to soft-touch me. “You have no heart,” one of them said to me once.
I said to her, “I have plenty of heart, but no money.”
There are easy livings to be made, I know, but somehow when the free market came to me, I didn’t know how to rise to the occasion and make one. Others get rich overnight, if they don’t get caught first. “They must have a secret,” people say, but the simple matter is that they’re dark in the heart with ambition minus talent. I ride the length of this country of ours, see them scattering the new currency behind them, happy to watch, that smile on my face. “I have no gold,” I tell the other rail-riders I meet, young Antipodeans, fresh-faced Scandinavians, haughty Latin girls with matchstick bodies, and at the time in their lives in which our paths cross they’re impressed by this, don’t know that they will one day turn into their parents and have babies and buy cars and glass-fronted cabinets. “Let the others have the gold,” I say, and they back up their agreement with fists punched in the air.
***
The Prussians got the gold, but they didn’t find every piece of it. Heading for Łeba and the sea, I walk my widower’s walk to the station, and am reassured by the glow in the sky of the north. Tomorrow’s a prospect like any other, I remind myself, pregnant with disasters, so I take precautions, pull out grandfather’s pebble and, slowly, carefully, hold it up to the light.
Very obviously influenced by my 4 years in the Poland of the 1990s, Wheel takes an ambitious look at some of its history and modern realities - the amber trade run by the Prussian knights' medieval mafia, the aftermath of the both the Second World War and communism, told through the eyes of an old traveller. All slotted in to about 1100 words...
In the 1990s, old people were given a free rail pass, and, it was said, may used to just get the train for the hell of it and travel the length of the country simply because they could. I met a few of them, and accosted others who, it turned out, had more or less legitimate but mundane business to be rail-riding - all were interesting to exchange a few words with, or a cigarette or, once, a large sandwich. I am now older than some of the old fellows I had in mind when I wrote this, back in Poland in 1995.
It features in the Good Works Review 2020 anthology, in print and Kindle for $3.99, in company, of course, with a lot of other decent proseists and poets.
The flowers of the counter-revolution all dead, their scent fading with each new moon, I hear fortune at a distance, spinning its wheel. I walk through the streets of the new age among people blinded by things that glitter, afraid to think that one day the gold at the heart of the light won’t come to them.
My grandfather found a pebble of amber in the sand at Łeba, and sat on the dune cliffs looking at the Baltic Sea. He thought of the Prussian knights owning it and all that lay in it, owning the land, the labour of its people, even owning the glare that came in from the horizon.
He turned to the girl next to him, his sweetheart, my grandmother, neither of them knowing about the shabby dynasty they’d create, said, “Much good it did them, in the end.” The knights came again, of course, brought fire and misery, left ruins and ghosts. They didn’t know about that, either, though I once heard grandfather say he’d had a dread feeling all along that the Prussians would be back for their pebble. It sat hidden in plain pride of place in one of those pointless glass cabinets people go in for here. Throughout the Second World War, it was secreted in a cistern, then about grandfather’s person. From the Oświęcim death camp he walked a widower’s walk through the scarred and smoking country back to Warsaw, a city of broken stones, his pebble intact in his pocket.
“A symbol for him of the land,” I asked my father once.
He said, “What?”
“Or of the sea?”
“Eh?”
“Of the nation, the people?”
He said, “How should I know?” He swept a harried hand across his brow. “I can’t even finish the crossword.”
All the same, when he gave me the stone to keep, he said, “Promise you’ll take care of it?” I promised, and he read my mind, and said, “I don’t know why, but you must never lose it.” He had other preoccupations by then, was about to do that widower’s walk to the hospital to pester his last nurse. I held the stone, imagined it as the hard yellow stuff gripping his vital organs, killing him with its riches.
***
I have no riches, no money in the bank. “And I don’t believe capitalism will save us all,” I say to anybody who asks me. I have not much hair and old clothes and a chipped front tooth, a smile that will stay with me like grandfather’s amber. I have a face from before, young people tell me, made to last in these corner-cutting times.
I was a curious child thrown up by times of darkness and the grim mirth of those who sought to better themselves in a system in which all were meant to be equal. I got a life sentence; I will never forget the rituals that made me, church and school and party in a country that didn’t know what it wanted to be.
Out train windows I see that country, mountains, valleys, rivers, cities, towns, the midget houses built over allotments of fertile land on which nothing grows except the ugliest of vegetables, all fixed in time. I see a lit-up Christ over the engine-turning yards at Katowice, His fingers pointing out cattle-trucks slinking by in painful memory. Near Mława I see a line of trees upended, whose topmost branches will grow into the ground in a parody of roots. Giant churches rise out of the land as if rooted there in imitation of the factories and their cooling towers, their gas-burners that light the traveller’s night.
I met the only woman I ever knew on a train-ride made everlasting by the unfathomable logic of communism applied to railways. It was Gliwice to Lublin; she was thin and sickly with a face so pale the light seemed to pause inside it, she was headscarved, in a dowdy coat, and battered shoes, looking for something to eat, somebody to love. In Lublin we bought bruised apples and ate them as we walked, made jokes, laughed and choked. Lublin’s market streets were muddy underfoot and ruined, spoiled fruit stamped into them, wooden slats from broken boxes, an ugly wind blowing us the stench of dead flowers.
We sat on steps, knowing we’d live together and marry, buy a glass-fronted cabinet, and have babies. Life stretched ahead of us, some of its spaces filled in. I thought I ought to warn her that in my family the women we married died young. Instead I asked her name, which turned out to be Iza: Izabela, Catholic name, Gypsy name.
Just as Iza was a sweetheart going begging, Roma children make historic supplicating gestures, offer the sight of borrowed babies; the new era doesn’t seem to be doing them much good. The Roma know that democracy suits them no more than communism ever did, and that persecuted people are just as persecuted under climates of smiley liberalism. People say they have shoes really, that they get them back when they bring home gleaming coins.
The children see my smile, and try to soft-touch me. “You have no heart,” one of them said to me once.
I said to her, “I have plenty of heart, but no money.”
There are easy livings to be made, I know, but somehow when the free market came to me, I didn’t know how to rise to the occasion and make one. Others get rich overnight, if they don’t get caught first. “They must have a secret,” people say, but the simple matter is that they’re dark in the heart with ambition minus talent. I ride the length of this country of ours, see them scattering the new currency behind them, happy to watch, that smile on my face. “I have no gold,” I tell the other rail-riders I meet, young Antipodeans, fresh-faced Scandinavians, haughty Latin girls with matchstick bodies, and at the time in their lives in which our paths cross they’re impressed by this, don’t know that they will one day turn into their parents and have babies and buy cars and glass-fronted cabinets. “Let the others have the gold,” I say, and they back up their agreement with fists punched in the air.
***
The Prussians got the gold, but they didn’t find every piece of it. Heading for Łeba and the sea, I walk my widower’s walk to the station, and am reassured by the glow in the sky of the north. Tomorrow’s a prospect like any other, I remind myself, pregnant with disasters, so I take precautions, pull out grandfather’s pebble and, slowly, carefully, hold it up to the light.
Very obviously influenced by my 4 years in the Poland of the 1990s, Wheel takes an ambitious look at some of its history and modern realities - the amber trade run by the Prussian knights' medieval mafia, the aftermath of the both the Second World War and communism, told through the eyes of an old traveller. All slotted in to about 1100 words...
In the 1990s, old people were given a free rail pass, and, it was said, may used to just get the train for the hell of it and travel the length of the country simply because they could. I met a few of them, and accosted others who, it turned out, had more or less legitimate but mundane business to be rail-riding - all were interesting to exchange a few words with, or a cigarette or, once, a large sandwich. I am now older than some of the old fellows I had in mind when I wrote this, back in Poland in 1995.
Perpetuity Post
Westerplatte, Gdansk
If the enemy has set the post office on fire, that's bad; aside from the death and ruins, how do you post a letter?
My very short story Perpetuity Post came out with the wonderful Toho Journal. It's so short that if I told you anything much about it, it'd give it all away, but as ever it's my take on a time in history most people would prefer to forget.
There is a lovely illustration with it by artist Janice Merendino.
The story doesn't seem to be online anymore, so here it is:
The world went to war soon after Britain’s Mr Chamberlain, idealistic, optimistic, but deluded, waved his paper of peace. He shouldn’t have done that. He should have fought. There would have been honour in it, or so I thought, but there was no honour till long afterwards, only dust and fire and noise, and premonitions of destruction, mass murder in forests, streets, ghettos, and camps all over our country.
What about love, though? There is always love, in perpetuity. Two days before the war began, I had a love letter in my hand. It took a day to write it, to a pretty girl who lived across Pomerania, the so-called Corridor. It said the trite and tested things lovers have said for centuries, in books, and movies, yet there I sat in my room in what is now and was always Gdańsk, conjuring the clichés out of the air, scribing them, crossing them out, writing them again, but better. There was one suggestion only in that letter: to go out sometime – out walking, that was the usual phrase, but it suggested a longer walk, to church, and to eternity.
Her name was… Anja. Well, it might have been Ola. Or Kasia. I think she was pretty – she must have been pretty. I remember the letter better than its intended recipient. That’s disloyal, in some way, but, unlike her, the letter was destined to stay with me always.
The enemy attacked from the sea – two days before the start of the war. How did they manage that, to be there before the war, starting it? A slip in time. They attacked from the land, too, and were joined from the eastern side by the Soviets. It was to be the beginning of their end, all of them, though they were too well-armed to tell that to at the time, too enthused to see that destruction consumes everything around it, including its perpetrators and acolytes. The lucky ones outside the circle will examine it, pass judgment, poke holes, make fun, eventually, and say, What were they thinking of when they started that war?
Just as honour is a retrospective bonus, history is unkind to the brash, but only eventually. That was no help to me, two days before the war. I had a stamp to buy and a letter to post, and what did the enemy do but burn the Danzig post office to the ground, postponing its normal business for the flaming future. I ran for my life, and for the sea, but finally took to the air to fight another day.
I left my letter behind, or so I thought, but it’s with me. I will one day conjure it up again. I will check its vocabulary and spelling, and iron out its creases with the flat of my hand. It will achieve perfection, and I will go to the post office in what was Danzig but is forever Gdańsk, buy that stamp, and post it into perpetuity, to take its rightful place.
Janice Merendino's wonderful Baby Shoes
Unethical Use of a Frisbee
Tongues of Pentecostal Fire - a real health and safety risk...
'I missed my lunchtime visits to the church of St John the Baptist near work. I believed the legend that St John’s skull had found its way around the world to be secreted in the church’s walls. One priest tried to bar me from tapping them, but another said that if it was I who was destined to find it, then nobody should stand in my way. Patronizing dick. But it wasn’t like, if the walls sounded different, I’d be there next day with a wrecking ball. I know I told the nasty priest that, but I was joking, mostly. My enquiries had already shown me that hiring the ball and vehicle and mandatory two-man team was going to be prohibitively expensive.'
When she gets chucked out of her job, a woman copes with her downtime in various creative ways. Why shouldn't she look for John the Baptist's head? Her little town was as good a place as any for it to have ended up.
In the park, aged punks sulkily refuse to show their colors, unlike the dog-walking men, eyes out for the chance of preening. The Frisbee Man seems to be aimlessly amiable, but is there more to his disc-chucking than meets the eye?
Unethical Use of a Frisbee is one of my favourites of my own stories, and I'm so glad it was able to find a good home with the kind people of The Blue Nib. You can read it all here.
When she gets chucked out of her job, a woman copes with her downtime in various creative ways. Why shouldn't she look for John the Baptist's head? Her little town was as good a place as any for it to have ended up.
In the park, aged punks sulkily refuse to show their colors, unlike the dog-walking men, eyes out for the chance of preening. The Frisbee Man seems to be aimlessly amiable, but is there more to his disc-chucking than meets the eye?
Unethical Use of a Frisbee is one of my favourites of my own stories, and I'm so glad it was able to find a good home with the kind people of The Blue Nib. You can read it all here.
A Man with a Lot of Explaining to Do
...best to have two...
'She understood that her great grand uncle Emmett liked acquiring things. She understood too that he had a fondness for telling stories. In another few years, it became clear that what Emmett Dorn liked most was observing people, messing with them, and then killing them.'
A little history of a big man reveals an unpleasant family trait to a young girl with an investigative nature. Litbreak Magazine kindly published a very short excerpt from my novel-in-progress/stasis The Fortune Teller’s Factotum.
You can read it here.
A little history of a big man reveals an unpleasant family trait to a young girl with an investigative nature. Litbreak Magazine kindly published a very short excerpt from my novel-in-progress/stasis The Fortune Teller’s Factotum.
You can read it here.
The cover of the forthcoming novel, by the designers at Hear Our Voice LLC
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 I could bake myself dry in the summer 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. Here in my head, I love that city of polyglots and performers, but almost 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.
With nothing to occupy me except keeping out of the wet, I realised that, as long as I stayed put, my life could seem less tangled. All my worries were out there, behind 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, 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 came 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. She called after me, “Wash your sins, not only your face.” Everything is blurred in the rain, and deception seems 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.
I have no such preoccupations now, after learning pragmatism from Turkish mothers, who waddle in and out of the dreams I see. Hung with gold and jewels and sumptuously big-haired, or humbly headscarved, they pass through crowds of men who disdain the west we made, or covet it obsessively. I move in the crowds without blending in, avoid the eyes of wise children, run into Americans who drink too much and into deceived men whose expressions reveal what time and imagination did to them. Citizens of countries beyond the pale speak in my ear, make me picture their homelands with them. In the crowd I find a gift of tongues, make connections and say things I can’t say in the most important language in the world.
A man sells leeches down by the New Mosque at Eminönü, a gold-toothed woman grabs hands and scams the future out of their lines, children sing and beg, and men with the faces of junkies nod heads as a boy steps over and shows me a bullet on which is inscribed a name that rings a bell. I push him aside and think instead of kisses.
I met a woman from France in the crowd, kidded her into loving me for what she wanted me to be, and I remember her eyes and the way I made them appear under the sun in the Aegean, and I imagine them colouring my own. I met another woman, born under a Turkish moon, and we made a triangle, or so I thought for a time.
Leaving the crowd, I follow in the footsteps of scholars and listen to the words of learned men, their voices echoing in the domes of forgotten buildings.
The things I did in İstanbul weave in and out of the chaos of the place, too big to see, too noisy to hear, too sharp to feel till it’s there inside you. Still I’m at home there, here in my head, always on the point of leaving and yet staying and doing those same things, walking from the Taksim bus station across the square and down İstiklal, just to see what’s there.
Two: The Boy from the Holy Mountain
A shoeshine boy invaded my doorway and pulled on my sleeve. I was about to show him a thumb when I recognised him, a kid called Naim. He was thirteenish, with the determined air of a spiv. He gave my hand a shake. Things were all goodness and health with him, he said, even though he was stricken with a raw cough. I told him, when asked, that I was going to the library, and he feigned admiration for people who did things with books. “School is good?” he asked me, and I told him it was all right. I didn’t want to talk about school to somebody whose childhood had been sacrificed to graft and Oriental capitalism. And anyway, I never wanted to talk about school at all, nor even think about it.
I met Naim when I was standing in Taksim Square back at the start of that autumn, about to embark on my first date with a woman whose name, Ayşenaz, was inscribed through me by then like in a stick of seaside rock.
Ayşenaz and I had got talking at a seminar at the British Council a couple of weeks before. I’d been sent, under protest, to represent the English department at my school. The only distraction in the whole two hours was the dark-haired woman sitting almost opposite me. I hadn’t stared, but had looked over often enough. I thought the moment we connected came when one of the speakers said something unintentionally hilarious. It’s often the best kind of humour, and I’d looked up with a grin and had immediately sought out her face, and had caught her smiling and, I thought, seeking mine.
Afterwards, with the ghost of that smile as a preamble, Ayşenaz had demanded of me, “The most important language in the world, huh?” I’d said it depended how desperate you were for an ice cream, and what language the vendor spoke. Just smart-aleck off the top of my head, but what hit the spot with Ayşenaz was that I’d said it in Turkish.
I saw dark hair, slightly crinkled and clipped back from a face that struck me, first off, as a bit prim-and-proper, that of a swotty sixth-former. It was possibly the challenge presented by that face that really got me intent on nailing her.
“You know my language.” I was disappointed when she said that, expecting the usual, rather tiresome, compliments, till I noticed that she’d ignored the modern word in Turkish for the more archaic word for tongue. She added, “Why?”
“I want to get to know your… tongue better.” I remembered only later how much I’d faltered over the word. “So why not?”
“Very clever answer,” she said in English.
“I’m a very clever boy.”
“Boy?” She looked puzzled, then regained her stride with the jibe, “Not a man?”
“Man enough.” The claim sounded absurd, even to me.
“Oh yes?” She laughed, a little tensely and, with the barest movement, looked me up and down. “And you can prove that?”
I’d said, “If you’ll allow me.” As long as she didn’t want me to fight a duel for her, or anything like that. “So will you?”
“I may.”
“Oh yeah? When?”
She’d made her displeasure clear when our flirt was interrupted by some crusty academic butting in to enthuse about the dreary seminar blah. She set to scribbling something on her pad, and sent a silent raspberry to the back of his head. It was an extraordinarily lewd gesture, her tongue out just a second too long to be childlike. I knew the man vaguely. I felt slightly sorry for him, as his pen had leaked into the pocket of his white shirt, and he was trying to hide it by holding up his glass of tea. I offered some non-committal noises to be polite. Ayşenaz made a token nod or two just to get back into the conversation, then blanked him and turned to me. “Do you want this?” She was holding out her agenda. I’d been about to say I had one when I saw that she’d pinned her name badge across the top of it, and a repeat of that tongue out, in a doodle. I’d left my badge down somewhere, so I wrote my name and phone number on my agenda, and we swapped. I saw then, and with some alarm, that she had her jacket over her arm. Mine was still in the cloakroom. She’d taken a long look at me, smiled and said only, “Well.” Mister Inkstain babbled on, defensively, almost, and I was trapped, watching Ayşenaz heading for the door.
My phone trilled one evening a few days later, and it was her voice at the other end. It seemed to me that I’d done little but think about her. Without introducing herself, she’d demanded to know why I’d given her my number. What sort of person did I think she was? “The sort who calls numbers?” I’d ventured, which had, after a pause that could have held a pout, made her giggle. We’d kept the flirting to a minimum – I thought of it as a necessary drag – and seamlessly got on to some of the things we thought we might have in common, and then had made an arrangement to meet the next week. Her last question to me, and this was in the faff between saying goodnight and putting down the phone, had been, “Have you been dreaming of kissing me?” And only then was it goodnight, before I could make a fool of myself with any answer I could think of.
The truth was that I had – well, daydreaming, at least – but it was underlaid by another truth, one that had eluded me for thirty years: she was the woman who would discover my soul and save it. This may sound weird, but I wasn’t entirely pleased at the idea, and was much happier with the certain answer to the last question she asked. I’d been dreaming of kissing her all over her body till she wriggled and screamed. It was probably just as well I didn’t get this in before the click of the phone.
My pre-first-date-with-the-woman-of-my-future thoughts had been troubled then, as well as pleasurable, so the last thing I’d needed was to be hassled by a bald-headed kid. I’d shown a dismissing grimace at the preliminaries of the shoeshine ordeal, he’d persisted, then we’d embarked on a half-hearted argument. He had stopped mid-monologue with the amused realisation that we were failing this transaction in not-so-good Turkish, and this had intrigued him into a frown, his head on one side.
He was from Ağrı, a thousand miles away in Turkish Asia about as far as you can get; cough too vigorously in Ağrı, and you end up in Iran. “Tell me about Ağrı,” I’d said to him, perhaps the second time we met, and he’d insisted there was nothing to tell.
I’d heard that Ağrı’s shoeshine boys had strong-armed their hold on Taksim and monopolised it for their trade, one of İstanbul’s most lucrative spots. I’d never been able to suss out the true story behind it.
“Was there a shoeshine war?” I’d asked, meaning in the manner of the ice cream van and minicab wars they held in British cities from time-to-time.
“War.” Naim had laughed the word away, I thought later, just as it was about to come back onto everybody’s lips.
Most of the shoeshiners headed back east for the winter, lived in mud buildings masted with TV aerials, with sheep within catching distance, but Naim had decided to become an İstanbullu. Nobody was sure what that entailed anymore but, as a Londoner, I appreciated that if you fancied yourself as one then that was enough, and cheered him with that whenever he doubted his status. Some days he felt like a citizen of İstanbul through and through, and some days his soul belonged completely to Ağrı, and the rough country at the foot of Ağrı Dağı, which is the Turkish name for what we call Mount Ararat.
“Aidan.” The way Naim said my name wasn’t quite right, but was close enough. “How much?”
I took a twist of soggy Deutschmarks from him and counted them, told him, “About thirty thousand lira. So, what – some clown gave you that for a shoeshine?” He told a familiar tale about some out-of-season German. I said, “Good for you.” I thought of the pursuit of the notes crushed in his hand, in his pockets, and the ones he kept in other places against confiscation by parties interested in the same venture. I was depressed that it should send him out into the rain.
“Aidan.” He put fingers to his mouth. “What about a cigarette?” I told him no. I meant, did he want to be four foot five forever, or what? Then we stood and smoked in silence, with me turning into the Englishman abroad, doomed to think about the weather, talk about it, write about it in letters home.
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 were published in the appropriately-named Rejected Manuscripts magazine, now offline, for some reason, so I've put them in above.
If it ever sees the light of day, you can read all 110 chapters. (Yes, it's unfeasibly large...)
I knew the rain would never stop, that second winter in İstanbul, knew I’d be stuck in it till I could bake myself dry in the summer 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. Here in my head, I love that city of polyglots and performers, but almost 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.
With nothing to occupy me except keeping out of the wet, I realised that, as long as I stayed put, my life could seem less tangled. All my worries were out there, behind 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, 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 came 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. She called after me, “Wash your sins, not only your face.” Everything is blurred in the rain, and deception seems 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.
I have no such preoccupations now, after learning pragmatism from Turkish mothers, who waddle in and out of the dreams I see. Hung with gold and jewels and sumptuously big-haired, or humbly headscarved, they pass through crowds of men who disdain the west we made, or covet it obsessively. I move in the crowds without blending in, avoid the eyes of wise children, run into Americans who drink too much and into deceived men whose expressions reveal what time and imagination did to them. Citizens of countries beyond the pale speak in my ear, make me picture their homelands with them. In the crowd I find a gift of tongues, make connections and say things I can’t say in the most important language in the world.
A man sells leeches down by the New Mosque at Eminönü, a gold-toothed woman grabs hands and scams the future out of their lines, children sing and beg, and men with the faces of junkies nod heads as a boy steps over and shows me a bullet on which is inscribed a name that rings a bell. I push him aside and think instead of kisses.
I met a woman from France in the crowd, kidded her into loving me for what she wanted me to be, and I remember her eyes and the way I made them appear under the sun in the Aegean, and I imagine them colouring my own. I met another woman, born under a Turkish moon, and we made a triangle, or so I thought for a time.
Leaving the crowd, I follow in the footsteps of scholars and listen to the words of learned men, their voices echoing in the domes of forgotten buildings.
The things I did in İstanbul weave in and out of the chaos of the place, too big to see, too noisy to hear, too sharp to feel till it’s there inside you. Still I’m at home there, here in my head, always on the point of leaving and yet staying and doing those same things, walking from the Taksim bus station across the square and down İstiklal, just to see what’s there.
Two: The Boy from the Holy Mountain
A shoeshine boy invaded my doorway and pulled on my sleeve. I was about to show him a thumb when I recognised him, a kid called Naim. He was thirteenish, with the determined air of a spiv. He gave my hand a shake. Things were all goodness and health with him, he said, even though he was stricken with a raw cough. I told him, when asked, that I was going to the library, and he feigned admiration for people who did things with books. “School is good?” he asked me, and I told him it was all right. I didn’t want to talk about school to somebody whose childhood had been sacrificed to graft and Oriental capitalism. And anyway, I never wanted to talk about school at all, nor even think about it.
I met Naim when I was standing in Taksim Square back at the start of that autumn, about to embark on my first date with a woman whose name, Ayşenaz, was inscribed through me by then like in a stick of seaside rock.
Ayşenaz and I had got talking at a seminar at the British Council a couple of weeks before. I’d been sent, under protest, to represent the English department at my school. The only distraction in the whole two hours was the dark-haired woman sitting almost opposite me. I hadn’t stared, but had looked over often enough. I thought the moment we connected came when one of the speakers said something unintentionally hilarious. It’s often the best kind of humour, and I’d looked up with a grin and had immediately sought out her face, and had caught her smiling and, I thought, seeking mine.
Afterwards, with the ghost of that smile as a preamble, Ayşenaz had demanded of me, “The most important language in the world, huh?” I’d said it depended how desperate you were for an ice cream, and what language the vendor spoke. Just smart-aleck off the top of my head, but what hit the spot with Ayşenaz was that I’d said it in Turkish.
I saw dark hair, slightly crinkled and clipped back from a face that struck me, first off, as a bit prim-and-proper, that of a swotty sixth-former. It was possibly the challenge presented by that face that really got me intent on nailing her.
“You know my language.” I was disappointed when she said that, expecting the usual, rather tiresome, compliments, till I noticed that she’d ignored the modern word in Turkish for the more archaic word for tongue. She added, “Why?”
“I want to get to know your… tongue better.” I remembered only later how much I’d faltered over the word. “So why not?”
“Very clever answer,” she said in English.
“I’m a very clever boy.”
“Boy?” She looked puzzled, then regained her stride with the jibe, “Not a man?”
“Man enough.” The claim sounded absurd, even to me.
“Oh yes?” She laughed, a little tensely and, with the barest movement, looked me up and down. “And you can prove that?”
I’d said, “If you’ll allow me.” As long as she didn’t want me to fight a duel for her, or anything like that. “So will you?”
“I may.”
“Oh yeah? When?”
She’d made her displeasure clear when our flirt was interrupted by some crusty academic butting in to enthuse about the dreary seminar blah. She set to scribbling something on her pad, and sent a silent raspberry to the back of his head. It was an extraordinarily lewd gesture, her tongue out just a second too long to be childlike. I knew the man vaguely. I felt slightly sorry for him, as his pen had leaked into the pocket of his white shirt, and he was trying to hide it by holding up his glass of tea. I offered some non-committal noises to be polite. Ayşenaz made a token nod or two just to get back into the conversation, then blanked him and turned to me. “Do you want this?” She was holding out her agenda. I’d been about to say I had one when I saw that she’d pinned her name badge across the top of it, and a repeat of that tongue out, in a doodle. I’d left my badge down somewhere, so I wrote my name and phone number on my agenda, and we swapped. I saw then, and with some alarm, that she had her jacket over her arm. Mine was still in the cloakroom. She’d taken a long look at me, smiled and said only, “Well.” Mister Inkstain babbled on, defensively, almost, and I was trapped, watching Ayşenaz heading for the door.
My phone trilled one evening a few days later, and it was her voice at the other end. It seemed to me that I’d done little but think about her. Without introducing herself, she’d demanded to know why I’d given her my number. What sort of person did I think she was? “The sort who calls numbers?” I’d ventured, which had, after a pause that could have held a pout, made her giggle. We’d kept the flirting to a minimum – I thought of it as a necessary drag – and seamlessly got on to some of the things we thought we might have in common, and then had made an arrangement to meet the next week. Her last question to me, and this was in the faff between saying goodnight and putting down the phone, had been, “Have you been dreaming of kissing me?” And only then was it goodnight, before I could make a fool of myself with any answer I could think of.
The truth was that I had – well, daydreaming, at least – but it was underlaid by another truth, one that had eluded me for thirty years: she was the woman who would discover my soul and save it. This may sound weird, but I wasn’t entirely pleased at the idea, and was much happier with the certain answer to the last question she asked. I’d been dreaming of kissing her all over her body till she wriggled and screamed. It was probably just as well I didn’t get this in before the click of the phone.
My pre-first-date-with-the-woman-of-my-future thoughts had been troubled then, as well as pleasurable, so the last thing I’d needed was to be hassled by a bald-headed kid. I’d shown a dismissing grimace at the preliminaries of the shoeshine ordeal, he’d persisted, then we’d embarked on a half-hearted argument. He had stopped mid-monologue with the amused realisation that we were failing this transaction in not-so-good Turkish, and this had intrigued him into a frown, his head on one side.
He was from Ağrı, a thousand miles away in Turkish Asia about as far as you can get; cough too vigorously in Ağrı, and you end up in Iran. “Tell me about Ağrı,” I’d said to him, perhaps the second time we met, and he’d insisted there was nothing to tell.
I’d heard that Ağrı’s shoeshine boys had strong-armed their hold on Taksim and monopolised it for their trade, one of İstanbul’s most lucrative spots. I’d never been able to suss out the true story behind it.
“Was there a shoeshine war?” I’d asked, meaning in the manner of the ice cream van and minicab wars they held in British cities from time-to-time.
“War.” Naim had laughed the word away, I thought later, just as it was about to come back onto everybody’s lips.
Most of the shoeshiners headed back east for the winter, lived in mud buildings masted with TV aerials, with sheep within catching distance, but Naim had decided to become an İstanbullu. Nobody was sure what that entailed anymore but, as a Londoner, I appreciated that if you fancied yourself as one then that was enough, and cheered him with that whenever he doubted his status. Some days he felt like a citizen of İstanbul through and through, and some days his soul belonged completely to Ağrı, and the rough country at the foot of Ağrı Dağı, which is the Turkish name for what we call Mount Ararat.
“Aidan.” The way Naim said my name wasn’t quite right, but was close enough. “How much?”
I took a twist of soggy Deutschmarks from him and counted them, told him, “About thirty thousand lira. So, what – some clown gave you that for a shoeshine?” He told a familiar tale about some out-of-season German. I said, “Good for you.” I thought of the pursuit of the notes crushed in his hand, in his pockets, and the ones he kept in other places against confiscation by parties interested in the same venture. I was depressed that it should send him out into the rain.
“Aidan.” He put fingers to his mouth. “What about a cigarette?” I told him no. I meant, did he want to be four foot five forever, or what? Then we stood and smoked in silence, with me turning into the Englishman abroad, doomed to think about the weather, talk about it, write about it in letters home.
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 were published in the appropriately-named Rejected Manuscripts magazine, now offline, for some reason, so I've put them in above.
If it ever sees the light of day, you can read all 110 chapters. (Yes, it's unfeasibly large...)
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 in the fantastic Forge Literary Magazine, and you can read it right here. There is a also a short interview with me about the story, writing in general and whatever else occurred to us at the time!
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 in the fantastic Forge Literary Magazine, and you can read it right here. There is a also a short interview with me about the story, writing in general and whatever else occurred to us at the time!
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. It's offline at the moment, which often means it's time to send it out as a reprint. I'll get to it!
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. It's offline at the moment, which often means it's time to send it out as a reprint. I'll get to it!
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
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.
2014
Andabatae
Grotesque fountain face, opposite Rome's Pantheon
'Anton felt heavy-lidded, but knew that if he closed his eyes terrible angels would scratch holes in the membranes at the back of them. He hurried across the estate, arrested by the thought of what had happened to the bright-eyed kid who came to Rome to study the city’s history and culture. He had a dim memory of that kid’s face, tried to place it, then was astonished to see it blinking gauntly at him for a second from the vitrine by the metro.'
What is a boy to do when his friends go to ruin and his mind compels him to follow them? Rome, sometime in the 1990s, and Anton sees new revelations in the ancient stones, ancient visions in crowded clubs and lonely bathrooms. No heroes, no heroines, just heroin.
Andabatae went online in Ian Chung's marvellous Eunoia Review in August 2014, and you can find it here.
What is a boy to do when his friends go to ruin and his mind compels him to follow them? Rome, sometime in the 1990s, and Anton sees new revelations in the ancient stones, ancient visions in crowded clubs and lonely bathrooms. No heroes, no heroines, just heroin.
Andabatae went online in Ian Chung's marvellous Eunoia Review in August 2014, and you can find it here.
End-User of Ordinance
A couple of years ago I was asked to write a piece for an exhibition of covers of Ambit magazine. The exhibition featured a selection of blown-up covers from the late 1950s to the present, and the idea was that Ambit writers would write something inspired by the pictures on the covers. Most of the writers contacted were poets, and I was the only prose writer asked. I chose two to work on, and this is one of them, a drawing by Carol Annand. I have no idea what its relation was to anything in that issue of the magazine, if it had one - Ambit publishes art as well as writing.
She told me she would escape from the second world war. I looked at her uniform. “Which regiment?” I asked her.
“The Andrews Sisters,” she claimed. “I was just not sweet enough to be a songstress. My high notes were raw euphoria and my low notes just a sign of come-down.”
“Bi-polar?” I wondered.
“I was disadvantaged by not being an actual sister by the name of Andrews. Just polar, by the way. Cold, they said I was. I watched this war start. I watched it peak. It hasn’t touched me.”
I took her hand, and sure enough felt a freeze in her veins.
“You ever been hot under the collar of a battledress tunic? Not a time to be getting excited. Sartorially, anyway. You got a light?” she asked, so I lit her up. “Symbol of my intentions,” she explained. “A sign that I have visited. Hey, this is me.” She whipped out crinkled photos. One showed a cross-legged child on a gymnasium floor. “I realised then that uniforms stop you having to think about what you’re going to wear.” The other showed an older woman. “Forty years from now,” she said. “I’ll be a brigadess, I imagine.”
“You’ll keep surviving, then.” I was relieved.
“Of course. But before the shoulder pips and the cigars, there are jungles to burn. I have a map of them here. Look.”
“Korea,” I read out loud. “Vietnam – where the hell is that?”
“You’re not a geographer?”
“Accountant,” I confessed.
“A counter.” She leaned over, her chin on her hand, looked as if she was about to extract from me the confession that I didn’t really want to account for the wars – I wanted to fight them, with her. We would see the world, Korea, Vietnam, wherever that was. And set it alight.
Our conversation got lost in shouts to clear the café, and people moving, including frantic waiters clutching bills. Outside, voices and the sound of boots, searchlights building towers in the sky. I lost her. I studied her map, wondered if she’d be lost without it. The war would find her, after all, her smoking gun and her bad vocal harmonies, and I would, too. I resolved to give up numbers in columns, and become an end-user of ordinance, and set off for the jungles.
Comment and Dicussion
Is this a 'proper' short story? One question that often comes up among writers is: what exactly is a short story? How long? How short? Should be simple enough... End-User of Ordinance definitely has a middle, but does it have a beginning and an end? Although it was printed on a pamphlet given out at the exhibition, I wrote it primarily to be read out loud, and I thought on that level it worked. I made a very literal interpretation of the pictures, as I had to write the piece* relatively quickly. I'd been reading a lot about war, for some reason - the world being full of it, perhaps - so perhaps this picture carried on themes that were turning over in my mind. See also my story The Boy at the Bus Stop on this site.
*I've noticed that, if they're not sure what kind of thing a piece of writing is, or are uncomfortable about describing it as a story, or a poem, some writers call it a 'piece'.
Ambit Magazine
I was first published by Ambit in 1998, and since then, led by its editor-in-chief Martin Bax and its prose editors, including novelist Geoff Nicholson, the magazine has been a great and very valued supporter of my work. It has been going since the late 1950s - very unusual for a small-press magazine - presenting stories, poetry and art by up-and-coming people, and also by some well-established ones. Have a look at its website and support it if you can by buying a copy or taking out a subscription.
She told me she would escape from the second world war. I looked at her uniform. “Which regiment?” I asked her.
“The Andrews Sisters,” she claimed. “I was just not sweet enough to be a songstress. My high notes were raw euphoria and my low notes just a sign of come-down.”
“Bi-polar?” I wondered.
“I was disadvantaged by not being an actual sister by the name of Andrews. Just polar, by the way. Cold, they said I was. I watched this war start. I watched it peak. It hasn’t touched me.”
I took her hand, and sure enough felt a freeze in her veins.
“You ever been hot under the collar of a battledress tunic? Not a time to be getting excited. Sartorially, anyway. You got a light?” she asked, so I lit her up. “Symbol of my intentions,” she explained. “A sign that I have visited. Hey, this is me.” She whipped out crinkled photos. One showed a cross-legged child on a gymnasium floor. “I realised then that uniforms stop you having to think about what you’re going to wear.” The other showed an older woman. “Forty years from now,” she said. “I’ll be a brigadess, I imagine.”
“You’ll keep surviving, then.” I was relieved.
“Of course. But before the shoulder pips and the cigars, there are jungles to burn. I have a map of them here. Look.”
“Korea,” I read out loud. “Vietnam – where the hell is that?”
“You’re not a geographer?”
“Accountant,” I confessed.
“A counter.” She leaned over, her chin on her hand, looked as if she was about to extract from me the confession that I didn’t really want to account for the wars – I wanted to fight them, with her. We would see the world, Korea, Vietnam, wherever that was. And set it alight.
Our conversation got lost in shouts to clear the café, and people moving, including frantic waiters clutching bills. Outside, voices and the sound of boots, searchlights building towers in the sky. I lost her. I studied her map, wondered if she’d be lost without it. The war would find her, after all, her smoking gun and her bad vocal harmonies, and I would, too. I resolved to give up numbers in columns, and become an end-user of ordinance, and set off for the jungles.
Comment and Dicussion
Is this a 'proper' short story? One question that often comes up among writers is: what exactly is a short story? How long? How short? Should be simple enough... End-User of Ordinance definitely has a middle, but does it have a beginning and an end? Although it was printed on a pamphlet given out at the exhibition, I wrote it primarily to be read out loud, and I thought on that level it worked. I made a very literal interpretation of the pictures, as I had to write the piece* relatively quickly. I'd been reading a lot about war, for some reason - the world being full of it, perhaps - so perhaps this picture carried on themes that were turning over in my mind. See also my story The Boy at the Bus Stop on this site.
*I've noticed that, if they're not sure what kind of thing a piece of writing is, or are uncomfortable about describing it as a story, or a poem, some writers call it a 'piece'.
Ambit Magazine
I was first published by Ambit in 1998, and since then, led by its editor-in-chief Martin Bax and its prose editors, including novelist Geoff Nicholson, the magazine has been a great and very valued supporter of my work. It has been going since the late 1950s - very unusual for a small-press magazine - presenting stories, poetry and art by up-and-coming people, and also by some well-established ones. Have a look at its website and support it if you can by buying a copy or taking out a subscription.
Fast in the Life Lane
Not really a short story, but a true vignette of what driving in Istanbul was often like in the mid-90s. If you think it's probably a weird and crazy thing to do, you're pretty much right. I'll post it soon - just need to find it, hidden somewhere on a hard drive - a good description of going anywhere in Istanbul in a car, as it so neatly happens...
