Out in 2019
The Escape
'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... who the fuck is Alan...
At Warsaw Airport, a band disembarked from my flight. I hadn’t noticed its members on the plane. I knew they were a band because they had band hair, from not just one decade earlier, but two: all feather cuts with highlights, and shoulder length. They wore unfeasibly tight jeans, the likes of which I’d not seen for many years, plus boxing boots and All Stars. They wore satin bomber jackets, for fuck’s sake, with the sleeves rolled up. For fuck’s sake. Who did that, in 1993? Well, bands did that, in 1993, living the dream, even fresh off the plane, and ready to rock. As I’d not noticed them on the journey, they’d obviously not been acting very rock n roll: no groping stewardesses, or stewards, or chucking TV sets out the windows into the swimming pool. Well, there were neither on a plane. Just as well.
A band in transit at Warsaw Airport, and I'd see them again in Poland, during the snowy winter of 1993. I assumed they'd be on the road forever, and I guess they would have been if chance hadn't intervened in its usual, tedious way.
My piece Sightings of an English Band in Poland, 1993 is out now in the wonderful Talking Soup magazine, which is devoted to non-fiction - which can be almost anything, from the deepest recesses of people's minds, in all of its wonderful forms. You can read it here.
A Childhood Tainted by Wisdom and Flames
'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.'
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 is out now in the wonderful Tiny Flames Press Spring Edition, and can be read here.
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 is out now in the wonderful Tiny Flames Press Spring Edition, and can be read here.
The Solution to the Rooks' Rider
'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 is out now with Platform for Prose, and you can read it here.
The Stone
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.
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
Istanbul Skyline, photo by Ben Morlok - Wikipedia Commons
“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 it'll be out for the first time soon in English, with 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 it'll be out for the first time soon in English, with 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 is out now in New Reader Magazine.
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 is out now in New Reader Magazine.
