Out in 2021
The High Life
Image from the cover of Wordrunner, in which The High Life featured
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
"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.
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!
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
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, which bore the brunt of the first direct attacks of the Second World War, from German warships
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 is now online 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 Janice Merendino.
The story is here.
My very short story Perpetuity Post is now online 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 Janice Merendino.
The story is here.
Unethical Use of a Frisbee
Will the flames of Pentecost settle on your head?
'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
Cafe Factotum, Gdansk, Poland, September 2018
'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.
