Out in 2019
In Herzegovina, near the Town of Gorjad
“Wars come and go,” I said to Dzanka. “Governments rise and fall. Borders change. Olive groves get… burned.” Dzanka looked at me closely. Did she see a fire in my eyes? Maybe she did. “Whole peoples get rubbed out.” I recovered my thread. “But DJs, their haircuts stay the same.” Dzanka smiled despite herself, and coughed out a laugh.
The picturesque and the appalling come together in my latest story, In Herzegovina, near the Town of Gorjad, out in Jerry Jazz Musician now. Read it here.
The picturesque and the appalling come together in my latest story, In Herzegovina, near the Town of Gorjad, out in Jerry Jazz Musician now. Read it here.
The remarkable paintings here are by Kevin Weaver, who kindly allowed me to use them as an aid in promoting this story. He is a former photojournalist who worked freelance for UK broadsheets, magazines and BBC Radio. He covered conflicts and revolutions in Europe and wars in Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo and Rwanda. He now brings his experience and expertise to sculptures and paintings in oil. The resulting body of work is one of catharsis, but also an essential record of events we shy away from looking at. Now based in Cumbria, Kevin responds to the local landscape with bold, bright and energetic paintings in oil. See more of his painting and photographs at his site here.
Twenty Two Seconds
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
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 can be found here.
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 can be found here.
Extraordinary Rendition
'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
‘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 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 Automatic Writers' Group
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
My banger needs a lick of paint or two...
“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.
