Published in 2017
Traffic, in Unthank Books' Unthology no 9
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. 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.
My creepy tale of high-rise peeping, Just Looking, came out in the current Mystery Weekly.
My creepy tale of high-rise peeping, Just Looking, came out in the current Mystery Weekly.
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, unpublished (possibly unpublishable) work 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 The Émigré Engineer is on pp82-87
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, unpublished (possibly unpublishable) work 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 The Émigré Engineer is on pp82-87
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.
Post-It Mortem
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.
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, soon available from Lulu for £8.
Worse Things
Photo courtesy of Red Fez
“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.
Just Looking
Ready for a night's... looking... just looking.
Alex doesn't like his wife Elena wandering around the flat half naked after her shower. Though they live up high in the sky, there's a man out there, looking. Or so Alex says. And one night he may do more than just look - or so he says.
My tale of high-rise living and peeping gets a second outing in good company in Longshot Island magazine, and you can read it here.
My tale of high-rise living and peeping gets a second outing in good company in Longshot Island magazine, and you can read it here.
Transaction
A handbag? Good or bad night out? Warsaw, summer 2015.
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, Transakcja becomes 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 right here.
My story Bookselling Blues, an everyday tale of North London people, out now in #LiterallyStories and available to read right here.
The Boy at the Bus Stop
Belgrade, January 2010
“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.
“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, Sacre Couer, 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.
Zaginął Pies - Man Seeks Dog
The Church of the Visitation, Krakowskie Przedmieście, 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, 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.
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, 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
Got the tee-shirt...
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.
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.
