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First published 2017 Writing East Midlands Competition, 32a Stoney St, The Lace Market, Nottingham NG1 1LL Tel: 0115 959 7929 info@writingeastmidlands.co.uk www.writingeastmidlands.co.uk © Writing East Midlands and with the contributors, 2017 Cover image and design: Jacqueline Gabbitas

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Cut the Clouds “For night’s swift dragons cut the clouds full fast…”

–William Shakespeare

Winning poems and short stories from !

Aurora Poetry and Short Fiction Competition selected by judges Penelope Shuttle and Jacob Ross

Writing East Midlands

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Aurora Poetry and Short Fiction Competition 2017

Winning poems and short stories from! selected by judges Penelope Shuttle and Jacob Ross Poetry

1st Prize: Mab Jones Valli Takes a Bath

2nd Prize: Peter Wallis Croissant

3rd Prize: A.F. Paterson Grains

Stonewood Press Prize for Regional Writing:

Caroline Stancer Fallopian Tubes on a Scan

Highly Commended

Kerry Darbishire Sphagnum Moss Liz Lefroy A Place Called Solomon Jan Norton Ravens at the Tower Caroline Gilfillan The drum and the settlement Commended

Caroline Price Forecaster Panya Banjoko One of a Kind Charlotte Baldwin Bubble casting in the Kingdom of the

Bears

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Roberta Dewa Something Like Dawn Maria Taylor The Songbird Meg Peacock Mote Short Fiction

1st Prize: Caroline Price Breathing Exercises

2nd Prize: Glenda Young All the Young Dudes

3rd Prize: D.R.D Bruton Lust for Life

Stonewood Press Prize for Regional Writing:

Judith Cooper Hope, Endings and Salvation

Highly Commended

Karen Winyard Selling Up C. Hart A Brief Meditation of Fear and the

Cockroach Alex Reece Abbott Pilgrimage Commended

Lynda Clarke Sidhe Wood Alex Reece Abbott Loving Icarus C.S. Mee Rooting

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Judges’ Reports

Penelope Shuttle Poetry Judge

Jane Kenyon says that ‘The poet’s job is to find a name for everything.’

Zbigniew Herbert says that ‘A bitter truth is better than a sweet lie.’

Jorie Graham says, ‘Poetry complicates us, it doesn’t ‘soothe’ us’; it helps us to our paradoxical natures, it doesn’t simplify us.’

Czeslaw Milosz remarks that ‘The poet is like a mouse in an enormous cheese excited by how much cheese there is to eat.’

These are four of my talisman quotes, from poets I admire very much. I kept their wisdom in my mind as I read through this year’s entries.

I also asked myself these questions, all through the reading process, ‘Did this particular poem have to be written?’ ‘Was the poet driven by an urgency, so that the poem had to be written?’ ‘Was the poet then able to control that energy of language and imagination and form?’

All the poems that made up my long-list showed clear evidence that they were so driven, they were full of strong energy, they ticked all the answer boxes to my questions. In each case the poet had created a memorable and energized poem. There were thirty poems on the long-list and as the standard was high there were hard choices for me to make. I

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asked the organizers to put the long-listed poems up on the website to demonstrate to these poets that their work had made its mark, their poems have value, even though they hadn’t been awarded a prize.

The four winning poems, however, stood out from my very first reading, each possessing, in its own different way, elegance of form and vocabulary, ideally matched to subject matter

THE STONEWOOD PRIZE:

Fallopian Tubes on a Scan

This is a moving, and delicately articulated piece, with an unflinching directness. The poem opens with a lovely sense of looking-within the body, a compelling start, and further observations ripple outward to great effect. This poem avoids the pitfalls associated with the theme, and its tentative yet purposeful atmosphere is masterly.

THIRD PRIZE:

Grains

A wonderful sense of organic movement and materiality shines through this rich and telling poem. By employing the voice of the grain throughout, the poem gains immediacy and pace, the momentum never slackens, the bountiful nature of grain’s journey towards bread, the staff of life, is excitingly realised. Tactile and vivid, ‘Grains’ is a fine example of grace under pressure given in language.

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SECOND PRIZE:

Croissant

A witty, quirky, synaesthetic poem where skilful use of the couplet form allows the reader to see and experience the everyday croissant in fresh and unexpected ways. The poem has great vivacity, surprise, and mouth-watering joy. Each couplet connects beautifully to the next with an expertly-light touch (as befits the subject), and an exact balance is achieved between the precise details in each couplet. The twist in the tail of this sensuous, lovely and delicious poem makes for a further delight.

FIRST PRIZE:

Valli Takes a Bath

This poem has the confidence and ability to go at an unhurried pace, using five stanzas of five lines each, a form perfectly suited to the subject of the poem, Valli the Elephant. This is a poem of wonder, of heart-quiet, of harmony and ordered sensibility. A commanding opening stanza takes us through a shadow portal where we witness eye contact, a communion between Valli and the speaker of the poem.

Then follows both an active description of the bathing of the temple elephant, and a gradually revealed spiritual dimension that is the core of the poem. Surety of form, language, subject, atmosphere all work together,

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bringing to life the trinity of Vali, the monk who is soaping and bathing her, and the speaker.

Restrained use of colours and textures throughout this poem draws the reader into the meditative reality of the situation. Unforced reflections flow and brim to its close with tender insight and authentic clarity of vision, returning us to the eye-contact in the first stanza. A triumph.

I would like to congratulate all the winners, commended and highly commended poets, and the long-listed poets, and thank you all for the pleasure and excitement of reading your work.

Penelope Shuttle 24/05/2017

Jacob Ross Short Fiction Judge

A total of 108 stories were received and read. 74 stories (69%) did not make my shortlist of 34

because they were either poorly implemented or needed a great deal of work at the level of language, style etc. in order to rescue them.

Of the 34 stories, twenty two (20% of the total submitted) were either good or very good, but (in many cases) needed refinement at the levels of style, structure, language, storyline, character etc...

Twelve (11%) stood out for me.

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THE STONEWOOD PRIZE:

Hope endings and salvation

Story focuses strongly on a characters inner lack i.e. his sense of futility and loss. Clean, hard-boiled narrative style suits both subject matter and the character. There is no closure but there is a point of rest at the end.

FIRST PRIZE:

Breathing Exercises

Excellent, engaging, well-rounded, well-written dramatization of a 'real-world' situation. The story has wider resonances, subtly suggesting the type of society we have become All in under 3000 words.

SECOND PRIZE:

All the Young Dudes

Strong, economical, nicely crafted story that builds up to a somewhat disturbing revelation. The writer manages to engage the reader throughout and carefully lays down all the elements that make this a strong and successful piece.

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THIRD PRIZE

Lust for life

Refreshing and convincing narrative voice, and style in this character-based story in which the narrator learns something new about herself, the importance of responsibility and generosity. Admirable capturing the mind-set of teenage character.

HIGHLY COMMENDED

Selling up

A well-told, well-crafted and somewhat saddening story seen from the point of view of a young girl. There is an urgency to Selling up that makes it memorable.

A Brief Meditation on Fear and cockroach

Excellent, skillful writing. Graphic evocation of the subject of the story (cockroach). The deployment of language, especially makes this story notable.

Pilgrimage

A subtle (perhaps too subtle) and strongly evocative story that addresses the idea of homeland and Diaspora. Clearly a good writer. But the narrative could be less oblique i.e. clearer in what it seeks to achieve.

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COMMENDED

Sidhe Wood

One of the very few stories with an element of humour - somewhat dark but a good enjoyable read.

Loving Icarus

Good - though slightly self-reflexive story. Effective characterization and cogent observation about the inexplicable nature of attraction.

Rooting

This could have been a winning story - given its very strong premise. The writing could have been much more pared down and all the energies of the story geared towards what happens in the end.

Jacob Ross, May 2017

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FIRST PRIZE (Poetry)

MAB JONES

Valli Takes a Bath

Written whilst at Skanda Vale, Llanpumsaint

I step through a hatch of shadow and we're nose to trunk, my white eye drawn up to that one which is liquid as amber, brown as a coconut, tufted lashes thick as the brush the monk uses to soap the creature clean. Valli

is two years younger than I am, but her wrinkles are rivulets to let the water run, to hold the mud her dermis needs to breathe. She was born as my hands, my face, will become: lined and creased, parchment pressed into shape around the cosmic dust of bones. I watch as she dips the soft lips of her trunk into the metal bowl and blasts her body with suds. Brother bathes her twice a week, he says, sloughing the flesh from her hulk so it can replenish, the fresh skin a regeneration which, in this land, requires man's hand in the place of palms. My own show paths fanning into futures I won't know as

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the frayed map edge of her ears gently furl, the mala beads of her forehead shine. Her strength and her tenderness are as everyday and as unstoppable as time; as humble and as powerful as a birth. She is a firebreath of life wrapped in a dinosaur form, natal yet ancient, primordial but still in the hands of the priest as, during our end, that great cleansing, we all are.

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FIRST PRIZE (Short Fiction)

CAROLINE PRICE

Breathing Exercises

She can smell blossom, has been driving between verges misty with cow parsley, past apple orchards in full bloom. When the clouds part the sun is high and warm. It finds its way round the visor and makes her screw up her eyes. She must remember to put her sunglasses in the car tomorrow.

The morning went smoothly, all her pupils turned up, no one forgot their music. Her mind drifts vaguely, pleasantly. She'd meant to catch the news headlines but must have missed them; You and Yours has started. She doesn't care much for the programme but keeps the radio on, softly, out of habit.

The country lanes have been quiet but as she nears the town the traffic starts to build up. The road becomes a dual carriageway, begins the long gentle climb past the Esso station to the junction with the ring road. The lights are still green but they change as she goes through and she has to stop at the next set, where the slip road curves down to the bypass. It's a complicated junction, various roads converging on a large roundabout. Beyond, the straight, slow two miles to the town centre. At this time of day the place will be

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packed. She's lucky to be able to have lunch in her own house. She'll fetch the chair from the shed when she gets in, sit in the garden.

She idles beneath the lights, first in the queue. The sun is making the windscreen hazy; how long since she cleaned it? She rarely cleans it. She bends forward and squints up through the smeared glass and as she does so becomes aware of a shadow on the far side of the car, hears the click of the door handle.

She jumps and turns. Someone's there, someone's opened her front passenger door and is leaning their head inside, saying something.

What is it, is something wrong with the car? – it happened once before, years ago, in London, a man knocking on her window to tell her she was leaking oil, that was when she drove the old Dolomite, she was so preoccupied by something else at the time that she couldn't react –

The memory passes through her mind in a split second but with absolute clarity.

'I said, can you give me a lift?'

She's still too startled to speak. But the other woman doesn't wait for an answer, she's already climbing inside, she scoops up the handbag lying on the passenger seat and drops it behind her and slides into the seat and pulls the door to with a slam.

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A van behind hoots impatiently; the lights must have changed to green. She darts a frantic look upwards: yes, green. The van hoots again, a longer blare. She can't sit here, she has to move. She releases the handbrake, her foot finds the accelerator, presses down.

The woman is wriggling, twisting to fasten her seat belt. 'Thanks . . .'

What do you think you're doing? Get out of my car! she gasps – but nothing comes out, she can't make a sound, she crosses the roundabout and keeps going, towards the town centre, her eyes riveted to the road, why hadn't she locked her doors but she never does when she drives though it's crossed her mind before how easy it would be for someone to open the door and grab her bag, anyone wanting to rob someone would know that women driving alone are likely to have a handbag on the seat beside them, all you have to do is wait for them to pull up at a traffic light and grab it and run it would be easy it's easy . . .

Her saliva's dried up but she has to say something, rasps the words out. 'Where are you going?'

The pumping station slips past, the junction with Bounds Road, landmarks in a parallel world. She can see the shape of the woman out of the corner of her eye.

'I want to get to the crem.' The voice matter-of-fact, at the same time relaxed, familiar. Fingers still fiddling, readjusting the seat belt.

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The crematorium, where's the crematorium, her mind's whirling, she can't think, it's on the other side of town isn't it, a totally different direction. 'I'm not going near the crematorium . . .' What did the woman look like, impossible to remember, she was just someone waiting to cross the road and now she's here, in her car, she didn't invite her, how has this happened –

Can feel her hands trembling, grips the wheel more tightly. The entrance to the Technical College now, the boys in their dark blazers clustered on the pavement, out for lunch, some smoking, unaware.

'It doesn't matter,' the woman's saying, casual, 'you can take me where you're going.'

How has this happened, so easily, when she's always prepared for the worst, it's her imagination, it's your imagination, she's always been told that, you've got too much imagination, that's your trouble! –

The first mini-roundabout, she slows and crosses it in the stream of cars that has lengthened now, the lunchtime traffic. Her foot sinks onto the accelerator pad. 'I'm on my way to work,' she hears herself say.

And it sounds like the lie it is, the moment the words are out of her mouth she regrets them, the woman will know she's lied and wonder why. Calm, she must keep the woman calm, mustn't antagonise her. 'I'm going through the town

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centre.' Her voice brittle, her mouth too dry. 'I can drop you at the bus station. You can get a bus from there.'

The pause vibrating with tension, then the woman's shrugged acknowledgement. 'OK, if you like.'

This isn't normal, it's not normal behaviour, people don't just get into strangers' cars. Somehow her arms and legs still go through the procedures, changing gear, accelerating again. She's driving on automatic pilot while her body tingles with awareness, ready to react.

'What's your work then?'

Despite her utter alertness she jumps, feels her face flushing. Seconds pass. 'I'm a teacher.'

At her side, inches away, the woman leans back, stretches out one leg. She can't look at her, can't move her head. Somewhere in her mind an image reforming, a slight build, not tall, short brown hair, wearing ordinary clothes, nothing that made her look twice, when she was waiting at the lights. Jeans, a T-shirt and jacket, trainers, a bit scruffy, yes, scruffy.

Coldness pools round her spine. She sits upright, both hands on the wheel, staring ahead. Conscious of her own flowered skirt, her bare calves, her sandaled feet with their pearl-painted toenails. She can feel the sweat dampening her back, between her shoulder blades. Wants to move, to run her fingers round her collar, but daren't.

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How long this road into town is, she's never realised how long.

But there are cars all around, other people. All she has to do, if anything happens, is to stop and jump out.

But her bag, that the woman dumped on the back seat, the handbag with all her keys in it, and her diary, with her address, her telephone number, everything about her, how can she grab her bag . . .

The woman sits calmly, at total ease. She doesn't have a bag. But she's got pockets, in her jacket, what's in her pockets?

She drives steadily, mechanically. Her skirt has ridden up slightly, her bare knees are visible. Her right leg is trembling but if she presses down any harder she'll go into the car in front.

In the corner of her vision the woman turns her head to look at her. 'You're frightened, aren't you!' she says.

A statement, almost amused.

The park's boundary wall on the left now, the entrance gates, wide open. The speed limit is down to 30. Someone has pressed the button at the pedestrian crossing, she wills the lights not to change before she's through them, they don't change. The needle on the speedometer flickers on 35. There's a speed camera coming up, she knows it well, she knows the whole road well, every turning, every pot hole.

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She tries to release the pressure of her right foot, the effort is gargantuan.

'Aren't you,' the woman repeats.

She can't speak, can't drag any words out. 'Mmhm.' Nodding her head stiffly, staring ahead.

At her side she hears a short laugh.

Her neck, her scalp wet. Another fifty yards, another fifty; every second bringing the end closer. The grounds of the Regent Hotel, the town hall, the library, people everywhere on the pavements, workers on their lunch break, shoppers, another world so close but aeons away. How would any of them guess what's going on, right in front of their faces.

But this is how it happens, hasn't she always known it. In broad daylight, without anyone batting an eyelid, because it seems so ordinary. Why should anyone look twice. Even if she screamed, would anyone hear? She'd have to open the window, stick her head out –

There's a queue at the central crossroads, she's forced to wait, agonisingly slow minutes before she can crawl through the lights, turn downhill. Her heart's pounding so violently it must be audible. Not long now, just down to the roundabout and round the corner past Tesco's, the bus station entrance is off a side road, she'll pull in there . . .

Her mouth still dry, her blouse shuddering.

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They're at the bottom of the hill now, there's no hold-up, she can go straight round. And there's the bus station ahead, its expanse of concrete, its cluttered welcome of shelters and signs.

She signals and turns left into the side road. There's no movement inside the car. She's alert, tensed and waiting, but nothing. She reaches the station entrance and draws to a halt. One hand on the wheel, the other on the handbrake, the engine still running.

'You can get a bus to the crematorium,' she says. She doesn't turn her head. Her voice clear but dead. 'I don't know which one, you'll have to ask.'

Moments of silence, both of them sitting quite still. The engine running, the car vibrating.

At last the woman slowly unfastens her seat belt and opens the door. She steps out and then turns, crouching, ducking her head inside. 'Thank you!'

There's a half-smile on the woman's face but she doesn't want to look, shut the door, please, shut the door – And when it does shut, with a sharp slam, she starts to drive away instantly, away from the place.

Just one glance, very quickly, in the rear-view mirror: the woman is still standing there, a small slight figure.

The sun has broken through the cloud again; as she turns back into the traffic she's temporarily blinded. She tugs

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at the visor with one hand as she accelerates uphill. The feeling that she could fly, that the car could sprout wings and carry her over the rooftops. She twists to retrieve her bag and places it where it was before, on the seat beside her; she locks all the doors and realises she's shaking, it's reaction, relief, and it's guilt, that's odd, it's guilt.

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SECOND PRIZE (Poetry)

PETER WALLIS

Croissant

It has the arms of the moon that reach round to touch fingertips. It’s light as the blown shawl draping your shoulders at midnight. See how it curves to embrace itself, light as love, an endless edible ring, sweet-smelling with promise. See how our two touch, tip-to-top making a sign meaning infinite. Feel how hot. My arms reach round to hold you. It’s delicate pincer-work. See how the points meet, neat as teeth, how they nibble, but don’t bite. Our first breakfast together, and you come down Dishevelled and yawning, draped in the quilt for all the world, dressed as a croissant

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SECOND PRIZE (Short Fiction)

GLENDA YOUNG

All the Young Dudes

It started with the Ziggy Stardust badge, the one I wear on my purple school anorak Susan wanted it so she grabbed it between chemistry and maths. She just pulled it off my coat and pinned it on her blazer. It’s not even like Susan was one of my mates. Before I was suspended last year I used to have loads of mates, but now no-one bothers me much.

I only knew Susan because of her brother, Barry. Their family could afford a record player, it even had a tape deck. Mam sold ours after dad left. Me and Baz sit together on his mam’s settee when she’s out and listen to all the David Bowie records that Barry Sinclair owns. And he owns them all. Baz’s dad is a pigeon man, like mine was, that’s how we know each other. But Baz’s dad still lives with them. Like a homing pigeon he comes back. My dad just flew away.

After the badge, well, that’s when things turned bad. That’s why my legs have started shaking under the table and I’m sure mam knows. I’m having fish fingers for tea. I like fish fingers. I like them so much I would put them up there in my top five things to have for tea. But today I can’t eat them as I’m too scared to swallow. I’m certain that mam can tell. She keeps looking at me, funny. She’s already given me grief

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about coming in late for tea. I told her I’d been out with my mates.

“Which mates were you with, then?” she says, stabbing a fish finger end with her fork. She doesn’t sound like she’s been drinking today.

Mam doesn’t look at me. She knows I’ll be lying, but at least she gives me the chance to lie without her having to see it.

“Just with Baz and them, listening to records,” I reply.

“Was his sister there? That Susan one that you’re friendly with?”

I push my tea around on the plate, moving the orange and green of fish fingers and peas. “No. I don’t see her that much.”

Susan was a softer, warmer, smaller version of Baz. But she knew nothing about music and records. She’d never even heard of the NME, never mind read it, never mind knowing who her favourite writer was.

But she was Baz’s sister. So I figured I had two choices; avoid her or be nice. I don’t see any point in being nice to anyone, not any more. So I tried to avoid her as often as I could but she seemed to seek me out. When I turned the corner of a corridor at school, she was there, taunting me with my yellow Ziggy badge on her blazer. When I walked home she’d run to catch up and walk with me. I should have

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been pleased that she wanted to walk with me, as nobody else did. I’ve been kind of on my own ever since the fight in term two. And I’d become used to being on my own. I didn’t want anyone walking with me any more. Especially not Baz’s sister. These were the worst times, the badge being just inches from my grasp. I could have taken it from her. I should have taken it from her. I shouldn’t have let things gnaw at me for as long as they did.

“Mam, I’m not hungry, can I leave this?”

I waited for her to explode. Not only had I come in late and lied about where I’d been but now I was refusing her food. She’d given me a good hiding before, for less than this. But I was lucky today.

“Go on, then. Pass it here. I’m not going to waste it if you’re not having it.”

“I’m going upstairs, mam. I’ve got homework to do.”

I didn’t get as far as my bedroom. I managed to reach the bathroom at the top of the stairs and lock the door behind me before I threw up. It went everywhere, I’ve never seen anything like it. If mam heard me, she didn’t come up to see how I was, but then she wasn’t that kind of mam. As best as I could I cleaned up, opened the window and sprayed loads of air freshener about. It honked, absolutely stunk in there. But what else could I do? Lying on top of my eiderdown, that’s when I started shaking. I’d been a bit numb before, downstairs with mam. Now it was real, coming at me

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in waves. Both my legs started jerking, my chest thumping as my heart tried every which way to escape and that’s when the tears started spurting. Not trickling out like they do when you hear a sad song. I had to pull a pillow over my face and bite it so mam wouldn’t hear me scream.

Under the pillow was my earphone, the one I listen to my Bowie cassettes that Baz tapes for me. I plugged it into my cassette machine and pressed down hard on Play.

The words and the music and the beat and the rhythm. Oh! You Pretty Things! And the drum and guitar and piano. Don’t you know you’re driving your mamas and papas insane. And the voice and the man and the music. Oh! You Pretty Things! And the Bowie and the David started helping me, steadying me, calming me down. Tears ran sideways past my ears to the duvet. The panic subsided, my breathing returned to somewhere near normal and I was in the audience, dancing in front of David on Top of the Pops. He was singing for me, just for me. Don’t you know you’re driving your mamas and papas insane.

Next thing I know, I’m being shaken, shaken. “Erin, wake up.”

It’s mam, she’s standing over me and I’m looking up into her eyes and thinking how red they look, how red and small and horrible they look.

“Erin. You need to get up. Now. And come downstairs.”

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I don’t need to ask why. I wonder how long I’ve been asleep. It’s still light outside. The tape has turned itself off, I must have fallen asleep while it was playing. I leave the earphone lying on the pillow and walk out of my bedroom. The sweet and nasty smell of sick hits me when I get to the landing and it doesn’t go until I’m halfway down the stairs.

I hear a man’s voice then I hear another. I just hope one of them isn’t Baz as I know I can’t face him. Mam is with the two men downstairs, they’re waiting for me. I know who they are and what they will do; I’ve been in care before, after dad left. It’ll be like that again but worse. I won’t be able to leave or see Baz or listen to Bowie. I won’t be able to have my cassettes. I reach the bottom of the stairs and I know I could run out of the front door, I could do it. But then I see one of the policemen waiting at the end of the hall.

“Erin? Could you come and have a little word with me and your mum, please?” he says, all policeman-like and friendly. It’s never been called a living room before and I’ve never called her mum.

I walk into the room and there’s another copper sitting in dad’s chair by the fire. No-one sits in dad’s chair. Why didn’t mam tell him not to sit there? What if dad decided to come back to us right at this very minute? My eyes flick between the two policemen and then I stare at the carpet. I know mam is in the room too, somewhere, but I can’t look at her.

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They want to know if I’ve seen Susan. She’s gone missing, they tell me, and her family are worried. But they don’t tell me anything I don’t already know.

“I saw her at lunchtime, at school,” I say and it’s true, I did. “But I’ve not seen her since and I’ve no idea where she is.”

I know exactly where she is.

She walked with me from school, running to catch up. I look for my Ziggy badge, it’s the only thing about her that I have any interest in.

“I have had just the best day ever,” she gushes. “The. Best.” She wants me to ask her about it, but I stay quiet with my head down and I walk.

“You know Miss Marlow, in French, right?”

Quiet. Head down. Walk.

“We found out she’s going out with Speccy Smith the PE teacher!”

It’s news I didn’t know, good gossip too, but I don’t give her the satisfaction of knowing I care.

Quiet. Head down. Walk.

She falls into step as we walk down the bank that leads to our estate. There are two ways of walking down the bank. The first way is for the mams with the prams and for

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the cars and the posh kids from normal families. It’s a route that follows the main road with footpaths on either side. The second way is the way I decide to walk home today. It’s the route through the fields, the route used by the smokers and the snoggers and a route I know well. I use it for steadying myself ready for school on a morning with a couple of vodka swigs on the way there. And I have a couple of swigs on the way back to steady me for what I might find back at the house, depending on what state mam might be in. There are trees and bushes to hide in, away from the road, the houses, the estate. I don’t tell Susan I’m walking that way, she’ll follow me, I know, whichever way I go.

“You fancy our Barry, don’t you?” she taunts. There is something teasing in the way she says it, something sing-song like a children’s rhyme that only she knows the next line to.

I speak at last. “We’re just friends, right?”

“Ooh! Friends!” she’s taking the mick now.

And then she does it, she actually sings it: “Friends… makes a man think things over…”

She knows exactly what she is doing, but I can’t understand why. It’s Bowie’s Fame and she’s changing the words.

“Friends… lets him loose, hard to swallow.”

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I swing my schoolbag at her and it misses. It’s got three maths books and a bottle of vodka inside.

“Shut the fuck up, moron!”

“He’s got a girlfriend, you know, our Barry.”

Quiet. Head down. Walk.

Quiet. Head down. Walk.

Quiet.

No.

No.

“She’s called Beverley. He loves her. He told me.”

No.

“She wears a bra. I’ve seen it.”

I give her nothing, no reaction, when she stares at me to see if she can tell what I’m thinking.

“She dyes her hair L’Oreal Honey Blonde and wears American tan tights.”

Quiet. Head down. Walk.

“She likes Rod Stewart.”

Baz hates Rod Stewart. I try not to breathe a sigh of relief. It’s a relationship clearly doomed.

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“And she’s bought tickets to see him in concert so our Barry’s, like, considering his future with a certain Mr Bowie. I think Beverley will convert him to Rod.”

Quiet. Head down. Walk.

No.

Quiet.

No.

No.

This time my schoolbag connected, with her head. She didn’t scream or cry or anything. She didn’t even hit back, just crumpled to the ground like a puppet cut loose. I dragged her to the bushes, there was no blood or anything, no breathing, nothing. I don’t know if she had a fit or something when I hit her, but when I put my hand on her chest it wasn’t going up and down.

The next thing I know I’m staring at fish fingers on my plate and my Ziggy badge is back where it belongs.

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THIRD PRIZE (Poetry)

A.F. PATERSON

Grains

We are grains scattered: arcing into furrows, turning, burrowing, breaking into growth - our laden stems ripple green to golden seas ripening to the mowing blades, we fall separate, but massed and gathered lengthwise, threshed and winnowed - husk and stem - into sacks, lifted and shifted in the mill, flying through shoes to eyes and spun through furrows and lands of millstones - tons of us – bolter split bran, and flour spilt softly down to sacks for bakers; wetted and yeasty, kneaded and tinned, risen to ovens, baked in shapes, cooling for paper bags, borne to kitchen tables to be cradled and cut.

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THIRD PRIZE (Short Fiction)

D.R.D BRUTON

Lust for Life

Yes, so he just folded in two and crumpled, like he was there and then not there, like all the air had been taken suddenly out of him. In the street it was and at the school end of the day, and he was old as history books maybe – older than my mum anyway, and older than my dad, too, and nobody was doing nothing to help and I thought somebody should.

Close up he smelled of vegetables new-pulled out of the ground, and milk that has turned and is sour, and piss he smelled of, too, stale piss that’s soaked a bed and not been noticed for some time. And he made a noise in the back of his throat, the noise a cat makes when it can’t shift a hairball or when it’s sick.

I leaned towards him and I asked if he was alright, which was a fuck-silly question, I know that; and I was talking loud and slow, like he was maybe deaf or foreign or stupid. I put one hand to his arm and one pressed to the small of his back and I told him I was going to help him to his feet, try to at least, and he nodded to show he understood.

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Then this other lady came running and she said she was a social worker and she said it like it was supposed to mean something, and together we got the man up off the ground and the lady retrieved his stick – and I hadn’t even noticed there was a bloody stick.

He was a little shaken, the old man, and his spittle words came out all broken and breathed, and he said over and over that he was fine, really he was fine, and he thanked the lady social worker for helping. He didn’t thank me though, and a part of me thought fuck him and all old people, and I don’t ever want to be so old that I fall in the street – don’t want to be as old as my bloody mum and my dad even, and they still kiss sometimes, dad’s hands reaching for mum, and well, that’s bloody gross, and I tell ‘em to get a room why don’t they.

The lady asked if I’d help her fetch him home. ‘Just support his arm on one side, there’s a pet,’ and she’d take the other arm. ‘If it isn’t too much trouble,’ she said.

There was a smell to his house, too, like cabbage that’s been boiled in a pot, and left, and there was stuff piled up in all the corners: newspapers from way back and empty plastic milk bottles and clothes all rolled in a bundle. The lady asked him if he lived on his own, and she was talking like I was before, slow and loud, and he said he lived by hisself. She looked worried, her face knotted in concern, and she looked at me and I didn’t know what to think.

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She talked ‘bout calling a doctor or a family member or getting a nurse to visit. A regular busy-body she was. He didn’t want none of that and he flapped his hands in the air like he was shooing off birds or bees, and I thought we should just go and leave him to it. There wasn’t nothing broken, after all, no cuts or bruises to speak of. The lady checked her watch and she said she was sorry but there was somewhere she really had to be and it was urgent and she patted his hand like it was a small pet and she said she’d call in on her way back, just in case. And then she fucking left.

I made him a cup of tea – old people are always better after a cup of tea. His kitchen was a right mess and I’d to wash out a cup for him and I didn’t know why I was bothering. He wasn’t no one. Not to me. He was just a man in the street and falling and nobody else to help him.

He said he took milk and two sugars. ‘Put the milk in the cup first, love, and the sugar in last, and let the tea sit a while in the pot, till it’s mashed a bit.’ I didn’t see that it mattered, the order of things, but I did like he said, and the sound of the spoon when I stirred in the sugar was a small bell ringing.

I watched him drink his tea. He offered me to join him, but I said I was fine. I’d have had to clean a second cup and I was put out that I’d already had to clean his. He put his lips to the cup and made the shape of a puckered kiss, the shape cloth makes when a thread is snagged and pulled, and

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pulled tight, and he blew across the surface of the tea to cool it.

He said his name was Colin and he asked me for mine. He said Kitty was a pretty name and I said, ‘Fuck pretty.’ He didn’t have an answer to that, not right away. And so there was a silence then, only I could hear his every caught breath and his blowing into his cup and sucking at his tea, sucking like a running drain. And somewhere was also the sound of a clock ticking.

And out of that silence he asked a question at last and it was a bloody odd question and now I didn’t know what to say, not at first. He asked what it was like to be me. Jesus, and maybe he was stupid. I shrugged and I sat a while, considering. Then I said it was ok, being me, and I asked what it was like to be him.

He laughed, only it didn’t really sound like laughing, and he was quiet again and maybe he was thinking of what to say and maybe he was thinking of what not to say. Quiet anyway, ‘till he started in again and this time he told me he was ninety-two on his next birthday. ‘Ninety-two,’ he repeated, like I should be impressed with that, like it was an achievement worth medals. ‘And I’ve got all me own teeth,’ he said. ‘And I can still tie me own shoelaces and do for meself. Mostly, I can. Some things are beyond me.’

I asked a for instance and he said he couldn’t always find his glasses when he needed ‘em, and he forgot things sometimes, appointments and such, and what day it was, and

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whether it was time for bed or time to get up, or if he’d eaten already.

I asked him if he’d eaten and he said he didn’t know. He added that he didn’t care neither. ‘Nothing left,’ he said. ‘Nothing to live for. Not now.’

There were pictures arranged in frames on all the walls of the room and propped up on shelves. They were old pictures, some of ‘em in black and white. Some showed a girl, her hair all flying and flicked, her shapeless dresses hiding all the shapes of her. Sometimes she was looking at the camera and sometimes looking away. Others showed a woman; maybe it was the one person and all the small steps of her life recorded, so she was young and a girl in some and old in others. And there was sometimes a man beside her and maybe that was Colin in all his alterations. He’d told the social worker lady he lived on his own so I thought perhaps the woman in the pictures was the nothing that he had left to live for.

It was quiet again and he just sat there looking into the air and looking like he’d gone. I thought maybe I should go, but I didn’t.

‘Sometimes I want to sleep, really sleep, and not wake again,’ he said in a voice that was quiet as a whisper, quiet as prayer. ‘I lay down sometimes and I close me eyes and I think maybe this time. Maybe I’ll not wake up this time. And that’d be fine by me.’

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‘It can’t be that bad,’ I said, trying to be cheery.

‘You don’t know,’ he said. ‘It’s all just starting for you. It all lies ahead of you. Don’t get me wrong. It’s been good mostly and it’ll be good for you I shouldn’t wonder. But then one day it’s not good and won’t never be good again. You can’t imagine.’

I was thinking then and thinking, shit, and thinking he was a miserable old bugger, and I’d got better things to do with my time than listen to him, and I did not really know then why it was I’d stayed.

He leaned towards me and he said, his voice all hissing and hush, he said he needed someone to help him, see. I thought he meant like a bloody cleaner or something, someone to cook his tea for him or wash his clothes or make his bed. He said he needed someone to help him sleep and not ever wake up. And he said because I’d helped him in the street, well, that gave me a responsibility.

I’d heard ‘bout stuff like that. Responsibility stuff. And stuff ’bout dying and all. We’d discussed it in an English class at school one time, what it would be like to be old, or maybe ill, and so old or ill that you wanted to die. And we had to say what we thought, if it was right or if it was wrong, for a person to want to die and to be allowed to. It was easy having an opinion in the classroom. It was a whole lot different when the old man was saying it and I couldn’t really believe what he was asking.

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I said, ‘Maybe I’d better go,’ and he sat back slumped in his chair and just nodded.

That should’ve been that. I didn’t have to tell no one what he’d said and I didn’t have to think on it again. Besides, the social worker lady’d told him she was coming by later – ‘just in case,’ she’d said. I went home.

My dad was waiting behind the front door and from his face I could see he was cross. His brow was down and the corners of his mouth turned down, too, and his skin all red like he’d run a distance. He asked me what bloody time I thought this was, showing me his watch so that there was no doubt. And he wanted to know where I’d been and who I’d been with and what we’d been doing.

I hate when he does that. He bloody knew what time it was and he didn’t have to ask, but he did; and what he was thinking – the who I’d been with and the what we’d been up to, I hate that, too, and I hate him with his fat face and his words all spat and he don’t ever listen. I tried to tell him the truth, I tried to say ‘bout the man falling in the street and helping him home. My dad, well, he said he didn’t believe me and he told me he wasn’t trusting the story I’d given him. I just shrugged cos that was all I had. He sent me upstairs without my tea.

I went to my room and I shut the door and I shut it hard as thunderclaps. I put some music on, Iggy and ‘Lust For Life’, something bare and loud and shouting, and punching the air and kicking all the walls, something to fill

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my head so’s I couldn’t think – so I couldn’t think ‘bout my dad and how much I wanted him dead and not ‘bout Colin and responsibility and, unaccountably, how much I wanted the old man to live.

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STONEWOOD PRESS PRIZE (Poetry)

CAROLINE STANCER

Fallopian Tubes on a Scan

Watching them through TV monitor fuzz Is like watching the moon landing. Tunnels of lint and fur and fluff. Emptiness opening out from their ends, Like shreds of dignity from a person left alone with their misery. Inner delicate urge, oily smudges seen at dusk, Elegant life drifting from my fingers like a balloon string. Look at the fronds drift! Look at their filmy, funnelled edges! Funnelled out like a bell, a flower, the end of a tuba! The way they furl and unfurl like banners, Milky suddenness unfolding in water. Mysterious floating edges like memory, Only by swirling outwards can they find A furred entry into other worlds. A dream of sleep, an aching a long way off, And inside a whole view which cannot be given over to harm, But must keep growing in its alien way, Like life growing on sulphur vents. A child’s hand which comes and tugs me deeper, Below the level where dreams can open to us like a series of

drawers, Which slide open despite all the trepidations of not knowing.

44

STONEWOOD PRESS PRIZE (Short Fiction)

JUDITH COOPER

Hope, Endings and Salvation

It was a time for endings with no notion of what lay ahead. A hollow time. I threw a few things in a bag and got on the first available plane. Six months later saw me in Vegas with a crisp, new decree nisi in my pocket and a headful of memories too bad to own.

My money was running out fast. I’d the chance of a job in LA but that wasn’t for a couple of months so I decided to try my luck on the tables. I haven’t the temperament for poker so craps has always been my game of choice. I won some and I lost some and the girls kept the drinks coming and everything was fine till an idiot joined the table. He grabbed hold of the die, shook them this way and that while he turned round doing some kind of circle dance, first clock-wise then anti-clockwise, smiling like he was being funny or something. When he asked a girl to blow on them I’d had it.

“Just throw the fucking die!” The croupier gave me a warning look. “Who’d you think you’re looking at? You should be sorting that idiot out!”

“I’m going to have to ask you to leave, Sir.”

“It’s him you should be asking to leave.”

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“I’m sorry, Sir, but I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

A security guard was heading towards me. I grabbed my chips and walked away.

When I got back to my room I only had $200 left in my wallet. I decided to cut my losses. When you’re on a bad run nothing can change that. I should have known better.

I couldn’t sleep so I checked out. Dawn was breaking as I drove away. A couple of miles down the road I spotted a diner and decided to pull in. I ordered coffee and sat down at a table by the window. Over the tops of the buildings on the other side of the street, I could make out distant mountains bathed in purple shadow – immense, immovable, rock solid.

Half an hour later, I drove out of town and picked up the freeway. The desert felt right – arid, bleak, lonesome. All I wanted was the road – the tarmac ribbon stretching out into the distance.

*

After I’d been driving a while, the huge thermometer at Baker appeared on the horizon reminding me that I needed to get gas. As I pulled off the freeway, the car began to cough so I swung the wheel from side to side, sloshing the fuel round in the tank. When I slid in beside one of the gas pumps, the engine died. I didn’t feel relieved, that luck was finally on my side, or anything else. It was what it was.

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“That’s a fancy car, mister.”

“Yes.”

She looked somewhere in her twenties, pretty in a preppy kind of way.

A large backpack leant against her tanned leg. I wondered that she had the strength to lift it. Another car pulled in. A man in a bright patterned shirt got out. His wife padded off in the direction of the kiosk. Two kids sat in the back, heads leaning against the windows. The girl could get a ride with them.

When I got back she was still there and the family had gone.

“Don’t suppose I can ask you for a ride, mister.”

“Where’re you going?”

“Are you British?”

“English.”

“Right. I’m heading for San Francisco. Even part of the way would be great. Been backpacking the trails but now I need to get back.”

“Hop in. I’m heading that way.” I don’t rightly know why I said that. It took me by surprise. People worry me – always asking questions or telling me things I don’t want to know.

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“Hey, what’s your name?” she said.

“Why do you want to know?”

“No reason.”

“OK then.”

She tried to talk so I turned on the radio. She got the message and slept for the next hundred miles or so. Her legs were long and lean. She didn’t smell too sweet.

A truck blowing its horn woke her up. “Where are we?”

“Coming up to Barstow.”

“Are you stopping anytime soon?”

“No.”

“Mister, I can’t pay you anything.”

“Never thought you could.”

She settled back into the seat. “Where’re you heading anyway?”

“San Francisco.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Thinking of taking a job there.”

“What do you do?”

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“This and that.” I didn’t want to discuss the intricacies of the aviation world with her.

“Well, that’s great – yeah – great.”

She seemed to have something on her mind. “So you thinking of breaking the journey.”

“Yeah – pull off at some motel.”

“Right.”

I knew what she was thinking but I didn’t put her out of her misery.

“Hey – wasn’t that the turn for Bakersfield? Are you sure you’re going to San Francisco?”

“Via L.A.”

“That’s a lot of extra miles!”

“I like driving.”

She settled back in her seat. Out of the corner of my eye I could see she didn’t look happy.

“I’m planning to pick up the interstate in L.A. I’ve got a bit of business there. I can drop you off or you can wait and I’ll take you all the way to your door if you like.”

“How long are you going to be?”

“An hour or two.”

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“Are you on the level?”

“You can get out whenever you want. Doesn’t make any difference to me.”

I could feel her eyes on me then she relaxed back into her seat. “Ok. I’ll wait. Thanks.”

It surprised me how much I wanted her to stay.

Half an hour later we reached Victorville.

“Can we stop here? I need to use the bathroom.”

“Sure,” I said indicating to leave the freeway.

We came across a burger bar pretty quickly. Through the plate glass window, I could see a man flipping burgers and my stomach reminded me I hadn’t eaten yet. As we walked inside the smell of frying meat made my mouth water. “I’m going to get something to eat.”

“Good idea,” she said. “My treat.”

“No need.”

“I’d like to. The cost of a burger and coffee isn’t going to break the bank.”

“OK, thanks.”

I sat down at the counter and she perched on the stool beside me after she’d ordered.

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“You been travelling on your own?” I said.

“I’ve been walking the trails with friends but they’re staying on for another week.”

“Do you often hitch lifts from people you don’t know?”

“Not often.”

The food arrived and was as good as it promised.

By the time I’d finished, the place was almost full to bursting. A glamorous looking woman, well past her prime, came in accompanied by a nondescript man in beige. I judged she wasn’t local as the other customers looked up as she walked to the counter.

“Excuse me, where’s the bathroom?”

“Out back,” said the waitress.

“Jerry, you know what I want.”

As she walked away, her perfume trail reached me and I felt my guts tighten. That smell -that familiar smell - that could drag me back to another time and wipe out the present.

“You OK?” said the girl.

“I’m going outside. Need some air.”

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She followed me. I could see she was curious, anxious.

“You sure you’re OK?”

“I said so didn’t I – just need a minute.”

“Look … I need to go out back … the bathroom,” she said. “Only, I need things from my bag.”

I flipped open the boot and she lifted it out.

As I leant against the car, the panic began to loosen its grip and then the pain flooded in. No matter how far you run, you can never get away – not really. And that’s the bitch. There’s no escape. I got into the car and sat there till the emptiness returned.

*

I waited and I waited but still she didn’t come. I got to thinking about how life’s always trying to weigh you down with other people’s shit. People wanting this, people wanting that, people wanting their problems solved. I pulled out of the car park and I didn’t look back. Whether I’d dumped her or she’d had enough of me, I wasn’t too sure, but it didn’t matter either way. I opened the windows venting her smell from my space.

I didn’t stop in L.A. The road still beckoned so I carried on driving heading for San Francisco. It was the girl’s destination, not mine, but I reckoned it was good as any.

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San Francisco is a city of hills but it left me feeling flat. I carried on till I reached the Golden Gate Bridge and drove right across it. Somewhere on the other side I found a place to park and wandered down to the water’s edge. The colours of evening were beginning to gather.

I could see the whole expanse of the bridge, the city across the bay and the dark lump of rock and concrete sticking out of the water. Alcatraz. A shiver ran down the length of my spine as I thought about how the luck of the devil had protected me. I sat there for a long time thinking about that and what I’d done and hadn’t done and I couldn’t hold it back anymore. Memories flooded into my head. Tears spilled out of me; the first I’d cried since boyhood. But eventually it passed and the sounds of the place began to drown out the ugliness in my head because I knew what I had to do. I took off my shoes feeling cold sand and rock under my feet.

Out on the water, a fisherman sat in his boat drinking something from a mug. On his side of the world, life looked good. The fisherman reeled something in on his line. A glimpse of curling silver broke the surface.

Night came on and brought the chill. It felt good. I took off my clothes and let the darkness cover my nakedness. When the mist rolled in, I waded into the water feeling its bite progressing up my body. I welcomed it. When it reached my shoulders I flipped onto my back and skulled further out towards Alcatraz, giving myself up to the bay, letting the

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waters wrap themselves around me, the currents take me where they would. The mist was my shroud. It covered my shame. I was split open. Time died.

*

It began with a soft, slooping kind of feeling licking at my skin bringing a quiet that my mind had never known. Peace seeped into my cold body. I sank into it. A long time went by and then some more till I felt a tiny prickling on my ribs. The feeling got stronger – like my back and side was being scraped against gravel. Then it came to me that the bay had given me up. I crawled out of the water. I must have slept because it was daylight and the mist had almost gone when I came to. My clothes were up the beach a way. I staggered over to the pile and put them on with stiff, fumbling fingers.

My body nagged for caffeine but it didn’t matter. I sat on watching the day come to life. The fisherman was back or maybe it was another one. I wrapped my arms round my knees, following his movements as he prepared to cast his line. A breeze blew off the water, lightly fingering my hair. Soon the sun would burn off the rest of the mist and bring warmth back into my body.

So I sat there thinking about how perhaps, someday, I could get a boat and keep it out on the bay. I carried on sitting and thought about it some more till it seemed to me that what I was thinking was right and that maybe here was a place where a man without salvation could live out his life.

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HIGHLY COMMENDED (Poetry)

LIZ LEFROY

A Place Called Solomon

I have come to a place called Solomon, where there is something vital to be judged, to be divided. There is, as usual, a tall and seated man sporting a type of wisdom in his beard. He carries a weighted sword, hilted in bronze, etched with slant words and pointed to the light. Around him are women dressed in midnight, grouped like schooled and silenced children; and they’re bowed down in gratitude, as if they deserve their vast and errant petitions. When the man speaks, it will not be softly, and the women know this, cross themselves with the intent of those traversing bleached fields of stubble before entering a cooling church at dusk. There is one child, has only ever been this one child, and he an infant, nestled in hay, lulled into a dream

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which he dreams in the smoothest of milk-sleeps, He curls his small fingers, unaware of the claims on him, all of them deep as the instinct of a thousand mothers. But a raised sword will make its judgment. Everyone grieves for this child they know to be theirs (though he is not theirs). Not one can prevent the separation of head from heart, soul from mind, body from spirit, flesh from flesh. There will be a thousand pieces before it’s over.

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CAROLINE GILFILLAN

The Drum and The Settlement

Shoulders hunched into blunt blades Kouslya beats the drum slung round her neck until the rhythm turns her squawks into song – a song that blows away the sour smell of dormitory sheets, blows away the bird flapping in her head, blows her clean out of the settlement and back to the stream where she paddled with her sisters before anyone knew her tongue would not work. Her drum makes a crack in the sky that swallows the men who lie on their sides, cradling their heads in bare hands, the women whose heads bob like over-ripe plums. It ruffles the twigs of the tree streaked in crow squit till it jiggles like an eight-year-old, hurling seed pods on to broken wheelchairs and pranged bedsteads. When she throws down the sticks Kouslya shivers under her violet dress. I hold

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the tense spring of her ribs in my arms. Feel an ocean shifting in my embrace.

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KERRY DARBISHIRE

Sphagnum Moss

She takes me to where the best moss grows, tiny stems soft as mist, old as the planet. She tells me how it was sent from the Highlands to cleanse, soothe and dress wounds in the war, how it retains moisture long after everything else. She knows where spores burst unmeasured then fall unseen into a willow-coppice floor, how it makes the longest journey to float a self-supporting city intricate as Venice. I’m sensing the earliest known habitat trading not grain with silver and gold but a haven of microscopic plants, animals, insects and spiders for the survival of frogs, birds and reptiles. We’ve clambered two breathless miles up the fell, bracken-scratched, sun pressing our backs carrying empty baskets to her secret place. A place of filtered shade, dragonflies, sweet smell of earth

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planting spring. I watch her gardened hands sink into the cool red, orange, pink and green sponge pull out winter rain, lengthening days, a waxing moon, seeds reaching light, holding a ball of sphagnum like a new-born, leaving enough for tomorrow’s red deer to wallow, cleanse their skin of parasites, enough for crofters to burn, intern their fallen bones in beds of best peat.

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HIGHLY COMMENDED (Short Fiction)

K WINYARD

Selling Up

(Inspired by Camille Pissarro’s ‘Chestnut Trees at Louceviennes’)

That afternoon the weather turned icy. The snow lost its sugar sparkle, its sheen fading with the light. Outside the church the shadows of the Chestnut trees turned blue. Sylvie and Madeleine made their way down the hushed hillside hand in hand, Sylvie holding too tightly. Madeleine took a peek up at her sister, who was hunched over miserably, eyes downcast, her boots swishing fiercely through her skirts. With every step Madeleine could feel the snow scrunch. The cold sliced into their lungs with every breath.

Sylvie was walking too fast. Madeleine was bundled up in so many layers she found it difficult to move and struggled to keep up. She looked just like the little set of Russian dolls Papa had given her. Eight identical ladies nestling snugly inside each other, even the last tiniest doll was plump and gaily painted with rosy cheeks. Madeleine’s own cheeks were rosy now, nipped by the cold so they tingled and her fingers hurt in Sylvie’s grip.

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‘Slow down Sylvie, you’re going too fast. I’ll fall.’

‘You’ll be fine. I’ve got you. I won’t let go.’ Sylvie spoke in short gasps, without looking up. ‘You’re a big girl now, you must keep up; we have to be home before dark or Nannette will worry. Anyway it’s nearly supper time, aren’t you hungry?’

Madeleine was always hungry. These days there never seemed enough to eat, not since Papa died. It was hard to believe he was gone forever. Sometimes she caught the rich woody scent of a cigar as she walked down the street and she’d spin round, believing she’d fall into his arms and press her face against his waistcoat, feel the cold hard links of his gold watch chain crushed against her ear. Then she’d catch that look from passers by, pity mingled with something else, distaste or scorn, which Madeleine didn’t understand. Back home she’d go to Maman for comfort, climbing up onto the bed and burying her face in the pillows while Maman stroked her hair. Maman never left her bedroom, not since Papa, well not since Max really.

Madeleine cannot remember her brother’s face now, only the storm of his leaving. Maman in the kitchen, white with fury, Nanette in tears, begging to stay.

‘Please, Madame, don’t send me away. Where will I go? Don’t make me leave our girls.’

‘My girls, my son; you, you’re nothing here.’ Maman’s words hissed like fat in the pan. ‘Always sneaking

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off with my children to the farm, weren’t you. I told you I didn’t want them playing with your sister’s brats, with that boy, your beloved nephew. Scrabbling in the muck of the farmyard like peasants. Now see what’s happened. Go back there, go to the devil for all I care.’

Sylvie found her hiding behind the kitchen door and took her upstairs where they sat on her bed and Sylvie pulled the quilt around them and they whispered together under their tent of many colours.

‘Why’s Maman cross with Nanette?’

‘She’s not really, she’s upset that’s all. It’ll be alright Maddie. It will all blow over.’

‘And then will Max come home?’

Sylvie flushed and picked at a loose thread on her cuff.

‘I hope so, Madeleine. I hope they both come home safe from the war, Max and Nanette’s Pierre, I’m praying for that.’

‘Why did they run away Sylvie? Why did Pierre take Max?’

‘It was Max; he wanted to fight the Prussians. We’re not enough for him, he needs adventure. Max took Pierre.’

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Sylvie’s prayers weren’t answered. The boys never came home. But Nanette came back to them when Papa died. After Max he was different, her lovely Papa, he smelt different, a dirty smell like the bad parts of town down by the river where the labourers and boatmen crowded round braziers, drinking and playing dice and worse Nanette said. That was where they found him, down by the river, washed up on the bank early one morning. Fully clothed but missing his watch and chain and his fine leather boots. They said it was an accident. He’d fallen, too drunk to save himself, after he’d lost his watch and boots at dice. That’s what they said.

‘We can’t pay you, not anymore, and I don’t know what Maman will want.’ Sylvie said, hesitant by the stove, her hands clutching her apron, while Madeleine buried herself in Nanette’s skirts.

‘Don’t worry about your mother,’ said Nanette, ‘beggars can’t be choosers. I’ve not come back for money, you poor lambs, my poor girls. I’ll not leave you again.’

Sylvie cried then, the only time Madeleine saw her grief. Sylvie at seventeen was tall and slender, dark like Papa. When she wept Madeleine knew they were lost.

Bit by bit, piece by piece, the bailiffs had taken almost all they had. Still money was owed. It felt to Madeleine as though the town bled them dry.

‘Sell the house. We can go to my sister; she’s room on the farm.’

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Nanette said this almost every day. But Sylvie clung to their home. Besides, the move would kill Maman, Sylvie said. Maman was too frail now to be uprooted, to become homeless.

Papa’s notary, Monsieur Fournier, wanted them to sell the house too. He dealt with their money, or their debts. He was their buffer against the town. Sylvie trusted him. Nanette didn’t like him.

‘He’s a pig, that one, for all his fine ways.’ Nanette punched the dough for their bread, flour dusting her wrists and cheek. ‘Miss Sylvie wants to watch him. I haven’t forgotten how he used to try it on with me, and him only married four months to poor Liese and her barely sixteen and already carrying his child. You keep clear of him Maddie, if you know what’s good for you.’

He arranged to meet them in the church, no prying eyes or wagging ears there. They had no choice, he said, there was nothing left. Papa had drunk and gambled it all. They must sell the house; he would arrange it for them and use the money to pay off the last of their creditors. He’d get a fair price for them. Then they must come live with him. His wife’s health was not good and Sylvie was needed. She could pay off her father’s debts to him by working; not as a servant of course, but his children needed a governess. Maman would be well cared for and comfortable in the hospital.

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They couldn’t manage alone, three women and a child, and they shouldn’t have to.

His rich, deep voice purred and rumbled round the nave. He stood very close to them, in his long black coat with the fur collar and his hat. He smelt of lemon soap and his eyes shone in the candlelight. He stroked Madeleine’s hair, twisting one of her copper curls around his finger, and then stroked her cheek, the leather of his glove cool against her skin.

‘And Madeleine must come with you.’ He bent down and pinched her cheek as he spoke, his face close to hers and she could smell peppermint on his breath. ‘I won’t part you from your sister. I’m sure she’ll want to make herself useful to us, in return for a new home.’

Madeleine inched away as soon as she could, going to sit on the stone ledge that ran along the wall. She watched as Monsieur Fournier and Sylvie stood talking, their voices hushed so she couldn’t hear the words. Monsieur Fournier was much taller than Sylvie and his head was bent down towards her, casting his face in shadow so that Madeleine couldn’t see his expression. Sylvie’s head was tilted up towards him and there was something beseeching, suppliant about her. She suddenly seemed vulnerable and Madeleine felt an urge to rush forward and part those two dark figures standing much too closely together.

Then Sylvie placed her hand, her bare hand, on Monsieur Fournier’s arm. She’d taken her glove off when she

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came into the church, to dip her fingers in the stoup just inside the door. Now there was something too intimate, almost shockingly indecent in seeing her small, white fingers laid so urgently on that dark sleeve. Her hand looked naked and exposed. But before Madeleine could move or cry out, Monsieur Fournier said something, seemed to breathe something into Sylvie’s ear and she snatched her hand away as though it had been burnt. The next thing Madeleine knew, Sylvie was sweeping down the aisle, catching hold of Madeleine’s hand as she passed her, and their flight down the snowy hillside had begun.

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C. HART

A Brief Meditation on Fear and the Cockroach

I had been perfectly content. Such peace of mind – a rare thing – in this pristine short-let apartment, a white-tiled haven. I had my cup of tea and was reading an old Anthony Burgess on the wipe-clean sofa with the city lights winking thirty-three floors below me. I had taken off my watch and laid it on the windowsill next to me: I was off the clock.

The cockroach was sitting on my watch. It was much, much bigger than my watch, and was the same glistening red-brown as my tea. Oddly, in the first wavering shriek my impulse was to get the cup of tea as far away from the cockroach as possible. This I did, and then began the abstract dance of catch-or-kill.

In retrospect, I am disappointed by my hesitation, having expected better of myself. But I wouldn’t have been fast enough anyway – the cockroach ran along the sill, halfway up the wall, then thought for a moment before heading for the furthest, highest, most inaccessible corner of the high-ceilinged room. And there it stopped.

Four hours later I am still watching it. I hardly noticed the first hour go by, in the adrenaline-flooded shakes of wordless horror. I wish I’d been grateful for that at the time; the next three hours went much, much slower. Once I stopped shuddering and whimpering (really it is embarrassing) I went to look at my watch – but the thought

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of the cockroach sitting on it, armour gleaming and one crisp jointed leg coyly stroking the strap – made me want to vomit so I checked my phone instead. It was time for action: I threw a shoe at the cockroach. I missed, and the shoe left a long grey mark on the wall. I hope I can still get my deposit back.

I threw the shoe again. It appeared to hit the cockroach, but had no effect on it. I fetched the mop, walking backwards so that my eyes hardly left the cockroach, and then swatted at it with the mop handle, which wasn’t nearly long enough. The mop strands dangled wetly on my wrist in such an insectoid way that I dropped the mop and spent a quarter of an hour brushing off imaginary creatures.

I stood on a chair and tried again with the mop. I could just reach on precarious tiptoe, and whacked the cockroach. After a second or two it stretched out a leg and drew it in again. At this point I did scream a little bit in frustration and bashed the mop around, marking the wall again. The cockroach remained still.

Was it dead? Perhaps I had actually brained it and squashed its insides against its own tempered armour. That wouldn’t necessarily be visible. I stared hard at the cockroach. It did not move. Its light brown legs, each tapering to a needlepoint, did not move. Its double-breasted mahogany carapace remained closed. Its golden sneaking antennae did not move. Surely those would move if it was alive. I stared until my vision blurred and began to go grey at the edges. I shifted into a mode of thought that felt like an

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immense improvement, wondering how to remove a dead cockroach from a high wall. Perhaps it would simply fall, landing on its back with legs in the air, brittle with reassuring rigor mortis. I began to think about a fresh cup of tea.

The cockroach stretched out a leg, waved it once, and drew it in again.

I would have to wait. It must move eventually, and would come within reach.

I began to plan. I found this soothing. Having established that killing the cockroach would be difficult and messy, I assessed possible methods of getting rid of it. I edged over to the window and opened it in preparation. A faceful of humid air and the car horns of Kuala Lumpur made me sweat again.

When it moves close enough, I could trap it under a glass, maneouvre it out with one of the postcards I haven’t sent yet. But the cockroach would crawl around inside the glass, its pale undersides tesselating in distress, legs slipping. I would have to throw the glass away (it isn’t mine); I wouldn’t be able to drink out of it again. I would have to throw the postcard away too. Actually, I might have to throw the watch away, I can’t even imagine touching it again. I’ll have to pick it up with a tissue. It will sit in the bin, ticking.

Not the glass technique, then. I could grab the cockroach with a tissue – a wad of tissues – but even then I’m sure I would feel it struggling in my hand. A plastic bag,

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bunched up, with a wad of tissues inside it. The sterility of plastic convinces me, and I go to the kitchenette to fish out a bag from under the sink. I stuff some kitchen towel into it and return, clutching my equipment. The cockroach hasn’t moved.

I watch for minutes and minutes. The cockroach doesn’t move. I imagine it, stretching out a leg, drawing it in and then making a rush towards the open window (please). I am ready; I will dart out my padded bag, grab decisively and fling it out of the window. My heart speeds up in readiness and my vision sharpens, then blurs. I wonder if that was a rush of adrenaline, if I am consciously experiencing the secret workings of my insides, the hormones (liquid?) shooting around in my brain (veins?). I should know how it works; I begin to feel my body as an alien mechanism, and I am at its mercy. Still staring at the cockroach, I see again the vision of its underside through a glass, insides roiling, and I have to concentrate hard to keep my own insides inside me.

I am exhausted, in a way that I recognise. It is the exhaustion of fear, and I had never thought that I knew it so well. I suppose it’s the adrenaline, you come down from it like a sugar high. If so, I have been wasting good adrenaline. I don’t know which is worse, being scared of a cockroach that won’t hurt me or being scared of work meetings, flights, parties, bills, getting lost, saying the wrong thing, nameless and unlikely disasters. I wonder if the cockroach is scared. Do cockroaches have adrenaline? It doesn’t look like it. The cockroach is still: it observes, it tastes the air with an antenna,

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measures vibrations through its feet. If it is scared, this is a practised, elegant fear, made useful. My fear is ugly and makes me incompetent; we have lost something in this. Maybe I should learn martial arts.

I should have had such mastery when I came here – maybe I would have got some sleep on the flight and then properly seen the taxi landscape, the empty new high rises and hills in haze, the spilling trees, without the grey blurred headache. I might have had a simple conversation with my new colleagues as people, instead of treating them as obstacles in a gauntlet I run for three months before going home. I have no idea what they’re like. I might have spoken to Adrian on Skype without the film of fear that he won’t stay interested. I could even have spoken to him about the fear, antennae calmly gauging his responses. I might have seen the jungle if I wasn’t so scared of leeches.

My feet are going numb. Why is it that I am going to throw my watch away, just because a cockroach briefly sat on it? Well, sat on it and caressed it. Why couldn’t I drink out of a glass that had once held a cockroach? The association of filth and decay, perhaps; visions of all the bins filled with meat carcasses, rotting fruit, sweet wrappers stuck with dirt that the legs and undersides of the cockroach would have skimmed over, the mouth fed on? It is not the reality of those things – enough bleach would certainly shift it – but the image that remains, that would film your lower lip every time you drank from the glass. I suppose that is a useful

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repulsion, in terms of human development. But I don’t think it is the main substance of the horror.

It’s because the apartment was so pristine, so white and shining and clean that I felt perfectly confident in possessing it, in living here. A purely human place, in its new-build sterility. Everything here was made in a factory. We pretend, nowadays, that we don’t like this – but we do. It’s the new purity. And in the conjunction of purity and decay, there lies horror. Especially when the conjunction has been happening in secret, crawling in the dark right beside you for an unknown length of time, and suddenly it breaks upon you in full maturity, into all the white light where you had found such peace. And you can’t believe in things after that. If I can’t trust my wipe-clean polyurethane sofa, I can’t trust anything.

The cockroach still hasn’t moved. I haven’t stopped watching it. Actually, I think it works the other way too, seeing the cockroach sitting there on the white wall. The white wall does something to it, so that now I can see the craftsmanship of its finely smoothed wing casing, slotted into calculated grooves. The turning ceiling fan is reflected in hypnotic flickers in the burnish of its shell. The legs are so crisply jointed, so exquisitely functional like sets of clockwork chopsticks. The head is like a tiny stack of saucepans. The antennae could be listening for God.

I don’t often think about the actual life of animals, let alone insects. I’m not sure I even think that much about the

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inner lives of other people. I suppose all the ordinary things become much harder to do if you really consider every individual life. I think I’ve just turned vegetarian. I wonder if it will make me less fearful.

The sunrise is quick here. You sense the waking, as the city lights seem dimmer before the sky actually looks brighter; then without the slightest hesitation it is daylight. A little damp and pink around the edges, but there it is.

The cockroach makes a dash down the wall, away from the window and towards the floor. In my numb surprise the plastic bag floats from my hand and I jump back with a hoarse shriek. I grab my shoe and bludgeon the cockroach just as it reaches the floor. Its shell cracks and I bash its dark insides wetly into the angle of the skirting board. The relief I feel is indescribable.

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ALEX REECE ABBOTT

Pilgrimage

Early on the nickel-plated Saturday morning, in the gleaming black hire-car, Róisín hurtles from Dublin, down to her cousin’s place.

The talk on the radio is how the young ones are leaving again. Diaspora sounds like a medieval affliction. Róisín imagines her sister-in-law in Auckland phoning up the school. Liam’s caught diaspora, so he won’t be in class today.

Seeing the roads so deserted, maybe it is a disease. She prefers pondering this to dwelling on how far she’ll press her cousin John this time. If at all. Especially when he’s only just out of hospital.

She can’t exactly interview him and anyway, they’re not a family for digging up the past. Boohai farmers get up and get on with the day ahead, same way they do over here. Occasionally, they glance into the future, mostly to consider the weather, the price of feed, or the drainage. And, ignorance can be bliss – can’t it?

Her cousin isn’t exactly an unreliable narrator, but he knows which story he wants to tell, and he tells it his way.

And, they are good stories.

It would be a shame to spoil them.

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Her cousin John has evaded Ordnance Survey, let alone the sat-nav or a mobile signal.

No house number either.

Hot and flustered, she pulls up in the long drive. The place is the same as ever; soft white, perched on the hill, spick and span. Lazy filigrees of peat smoke drift over the roof.

Those new iron gates, that’s what threw her.

They huddle around the Rayburn, drinking dark tea like it’s going out of fashion, chewing over family Here and Over There, weather, and the health system.

Her littlest cousin, barely six, has come to harvest Show-and-Tell fodder for school.

Róisín feels the girl watching, placing this odd piece of the jig-saw. It takes a while for her mother to convince her she is related to this foreigner. No-one else in her family talks so strange.

When Róisín tells them about doing a 1916 tour in Dublin, John nods.

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“They showed you the hole in O’Connell’s coat? And, the Shelbourne, where your great aunt worked until the bomb?”

Which bomb would that be, Róisín wants to ask. There’s been so many.

“And, Nelson’s Column, they showed you that?”

“Well...where it was.”

He nods again. “Good, good.”

He lives on tobacco, tea and tales, her cousin.

“I’ll take you to the Old Place,” John says. He’s a one-man, walking, talking family history, keen to help her pilgrimage. Nth generation; always lived here, always will.

Róisín drives, her sat-nav cousin sitting beside her, uploading four score and five years of geographic data. Slow and steady they take it, down undulating ditch-lined lanes, past rows of new EU-funded signposts, fingerless sentries standing stark against the dense hedgerows.

Not that he needs any signs; he knows every twist and turn.

She spots another nameless lane. “Where does that one go?”

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He doesn’t mention villages or towns. He speaks of all the people down the years who’ve owned and worked the land.

He says the village has a new postman. “Polish. Nice enough, but he doesn’t know the places or the families, so he’s struggling to deliver our post.”

He shrugs; any eejit would know this.

As they reach the crest of a drumlin, he instructs her to stop. They get out of the car, and stand in rare silence. The worn old stone gatepost has lost its partner, but remains solid, substantial.

John rests his hand on the post. “This is the place where your grandmother came from, so.”

They walk the empty lot, pacing the footprint of the stables, tracing the big stone outline, the house, once her grandmother’s childhood home. She never journeyed those twelve thousand miles back again. Never saw her family again. Never lost her accent.

Róisín pauses, disoriented. Before she flew over from Wellington, she was shown a curling photo of a long, low-slung peasant hut. This is not it.

When she tells John, he lights another racehorse, mauve smoke curling a halo around

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his head. “Ah, that would be the worker’s cottage. Up the road. Derelict now. Her family…”

The breeze carries his words away down the hedgerow.

She cups her hand to her ear.

He raises his voice. “I said, her family were the bailiffs. And money-lenders.”

She leans against the gatepost, grateful the place is deserted. Her placid, cheerful grandmother, her gentle cousin – and she – all from a line of gombeens? Rack-renters. Enforcers. The F-word rattles in her head. Famine.

He reads her disbelief with a certain nod. “Good people, so they were. Fair.”

The gombeen like a spider sits.1 But none of the family were shot by tenants – not as far as she knows – so she takes him at his word.

She follows him across the lane to the edge of a sloping, black field, heathered and feathered with sedges, and snowy with cottongrass.

“Bog,” she says, gombeen man ringing in her ears.

11 The Gombeen Man, Joseph Campbell (1913)

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Bog, preserver of dark secrets. Yes, she wants the truth, the reason her grandmother emigrated. Mostly. But she wouldn’t have minded if the gombeen tale had stayed buried in the peat – good and fair, or otherwise.

He smiles. “This was ours. Good land. Turf-cutting rights. As much as you like.

And – stand here.” He shuffles over, and waves a thin, weathered hand to signal the boundaries of the property. “ — You’ve a view of the three counties. D’you see?”

Róisín stares out to a beautiful, desolate, unchanging land. The sharp glint of a flint-grey lough caught by the sun. Soft blue hills roll along the horizon. To her, the borders are invisible.

She photographs it, then before they leave, she gathers up a couple of chunks of grit-stone from the ruins, their sparkling souvenirs of the Old Place. Without thinking, she takes one for her grandmother, then puts it down again.

John needs to get home to the farm: more tea, tobacco, and tales. That’s the story, so.

Róisín drives, Diaspora, passing places her cousin knows like the back of his hand.

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COMMENDED (Poetry)

M.R. Peacock

Mote

That crumb of black flotsam, which doesn’t float but slips at capricious angles across walls and windows or the glaze of a monochrome cloud that happens to be passing: it butts in to me, on my comfortable inattention, like the false note a child keeps hitting in some dull familiar practice piece (F sharp, can’t you.) I turn on it, vexed, or feign patience and try to lure it into focus for a gorgon stare, but it doodles an insect flourish, skips into some blind anchorage, waits till I’ve forgotten, and sidles back.

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Charlotte Baldwin

Bubble-Casting in the Kingdom of the Bears

At dusk, the bears gather on their beach to the roll of totem drums and sit on the heft of their haunches to blow soap spheres over the sea for the fireflies: paws tremble on dripping wands as they watch the insects candle-dance, while above palm trees bow to the Bear King, mighty in his jasmine-garland, enthroned on a black silk crusted with silver blowing bubbles the size of jackfruits. He has never seen it for himself, the Star-Door the bears would write of if they knew how to write the history they have long sung in Bear-Tongue. A Bear-King of long ago followed his favourite firefly as she chased a bubble across the sea to the place of bursting and saw it was a Doorway:

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He knocked with his tremendous paw as his luminous friend passed through the keyhole; no-one answered but he heard something whisper a welcome in an unknown tongue; watched through a knot in the mango wood the firefly rise into a cluster of whisker-tip bulbs bright as her own. He knocked for days, curled on the sand step of the Great Door, but it remained sealed even to the King of the Bears, deaf to his roars as he tumbled through his grief, listening to the smallest chimes of the after-world, his only succour the knowing that spent fireflies do not fall, flickering, into the sea, but fly again with every bubble ever blown, whose gauze skins stretch taut with rainbows once more.

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MARIA TAYLOR

Songbird

She flew in with a stolen heart. She had a vacant nest where she didn’t keep any letters to remind herself who she really was. An unkempt roost was enough, a snatch of bread, a shiny object to admire alone with no value, only an unreflecting mirror of silver. As a girl she was trapped with lime. She grew wings that were too heavy to lift. She learned song. Sometimes I sense a flutter of her trilling notes under my ribs. You can’t release that bird anywhere; there’s no country on any map for her to return.

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CAROLINE PRICE

Forecaster

When I watch you stand a fir cone on a sill or hang a ribbon of bladderwrack in the draught from the hallway window I think of that Victorian doctor carefully dropping his jury of philosophical counsellors one by one into separate pint jars arranged in a round so each leech might see its neighbours through the glass and so be spared the distress of solitary confinement – and they in return obliging him, whenever they sensed in the charged air a storm's approach, by struggling up their walls and dislodging the spindles of whalebone which he'd suspended inside the necks, causing the bell attached above to ring – a sound he must have listened for, faint as it will have been, as intently as, several lifetimes later,

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you examine the scales of your cone for signs of opening or stroke the seaweed's rippled skin as if it were the skin of a creature which had tried to escape out of an inch and a half of rainwater into deeper hiding and was still wet to your touch.

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PANYA BANJOKO

One Of A Kind

They had kept him, seven long years hidden behind a crumpled wall in a cavernous shelter, set like a cage. When the King ordered, they fed him mildew bread made him drink the milk of rancid yaks waited for his skin to turn pale for his voice to leave him. Then, when he was eager, for water to dislodge the sand in his throat they promised him life for his stint set him to work. They told him, use your fingers like the limbs of a Darwin Bark spider make beauty like purple lilies and the call of the shuffle-wing bird. With tools laid out like surgeon's instruments he performed his vision, pounding like the call of a woodpecker he softened and formed thick ingots of gold into sunbird tails. Hands bent, nails jagged, he gripped tweezer between finger and thumb,

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planted gems in rows like marching ants with each new tide he cut, pierced and soldered. When he had shaped his dreams into curves when he could see the image of his face in the gleam of the dome. When he knew it could not be matched he inscribed it with timeworn text and it was done. The King called his people to behold the work of the master craftsman and they revelled at the skill in his bones. Then they cut off his hand.

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ROBERTA DEWA

Something like Dawn

Sun lapping at the edge of beach. Bring a gun to its head but it won’t rise. The sand is half water mixed with sky. A spaniel barking over to Norfolk. Know your tides know your channels from the marsh you’ll be no higher than a marram seed. Something like dawn shouldered spades and the push of waders heading out to sea offshore voices and the talk of hard breath. There’s always a way back.

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The sand takes footprints keeps them for an hour or two. It’s the bed of hornwrack you need to watch. And the seal’s head balloon on the water waits for the turn. On the last sandbank with the bait squirming in the bucket water running backwards and the seals launching. One day the bad crossing will sky you out. Something like noon and the drag of waders slewing inward with the tide.

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COMMENDED (Short Fiction)

LYNDA CLARKE

Sídhe Wood

When Saoirse Murphy’s baby was found, it was the talk of the town. Everyone went on about it for weeks - how the poor mite was so lucky to turn up unharmed, pram and all, in the Sídhe Wood. Once the relief was done with, which took less time than you might think, Saoirse herself became the object of their gossip. Had someone really taken the pram while she sat on the bench by the wood’s entrance? Or had she just left the baby there and wandered off, hoping a passing crow would take pity on her and whisk it away? She was only eating dry roasted peanuts and reading a celebrity autobiography, couldn’t have been that deeply absorbed, surely?

Connor Kelly was nowhere to be seen these days, that much was certain, the two-timing, baby-ditching bollocks. Maybe Saoirse just forgot she had a baby now, and went home to bake that batch of fairy cakes for her ma’s church like she’d promised, mistakenly leaving little Sean there on his own, gurgling up at the ash trees, just like Jack was doing now. (Only Jack was holding his feet and going red in the face, no doubt filling his nappy again, the little shite factory.)

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Saoirse wasn’t the brightest. Maybe she forgot and then felt embarrassed and didn’t want everyone to know and so she made up the thing about looking away for a second and looking back to find Sean and pram gone, taken by some unknown woodland kidnapper. Ciara peeked over the edge of her magazine at Jack again. He seemed happier out here. Cried all the time at home. Screamed his little lungs out. Ciara could sympathise on both counts: Sean’s screaming, and Saoirse’s shame. Ciara once punched a nun in the tit at school, and she was still ‘that wicked girl who hit Sister Claire’ seven years later. And maybe Saoirse would rather be ‘the girl whose baby was kidnapped’ than ‘the girl who forgot she had a baby and left him in the woods’. Although that was what they were saying about her in the village pub now anyway, of course. How else would you explain finding him only a few hours later, a few hundred meters from where she said she’d left him?

Ciara wadded a tissue and wiped the drool from Jack’s chin. Ma reckoned he did it all the time because he was teething, but Ciara couldn’t remember a time he hadn’t done it and the little fecker still didn’t have any teeth to show for it.

Anyway, this last couple of weeks, Saoirse had started saying wild things about little Sean. No doubt to distract attention from having forgotten him in the woods, or why come out with such mad nonsense? First it was that Sean didn’t laugh the same. Before he went missing, he’d had a throaty chuckle and now he had a light, reedy giggle. Or so she said. Ciara would be happy if Jack did anything other

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than grunt and fill his pants, that Saoirse should count herself lucky.

Next it was that his eyes were the wrong colour, although noticing a laugh before noticing eyes just added fuel to the fire of Saoirse being unobservant enough to leave a pram in a wood. To be fair, Ciara could barely remember what colour Jack’s eyes were – they were usually scrunched up with screeching or the effort of squeezing out a turd.

“It was a gradual change!” Saoirse had insisted when Ciara saw her at the post office yesterday. “They started out brown like before and now they’re all blue, look!” And she’d pinched Sean’s cheek so his eyes shot open and they did look blue, you had to give her that. Not that Ciara could remember what colour they were before that. “He sleeps for hours now!” Saoirse said, looking like she could do with some shut eye herself. “And he never cries, not even when his nappy’s wet, it’s… it’s creepy!” And Saoirse had burst into tears, meaning Ciara had to take her to the coffee shop and get her a hot chocolate to calm her nerves, even though what Ciara really needed to do was go to the chemist and get some cream for Jack’s cradle cap because he had a head like a baboon’s ballbag.

At the coffee shop, Saoirse had broken down and said she thought it wasn’t Sean at all. Ciara wondered if she’d be able to tell the difference if someone swapped Jack. It depended what they switched him out with, she supposed. A bag of flour might draw her attention, what with being

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significantly quieter. But one of those howler monkeys? She doubted she’d pick Jack out in a line-up of those.

“What do you mean not Sean?” Ciara had asked, trying to block out that awful gummy noise Jack made while he sucked on the rubber teat of his bottle.

“I don’t know, he’s just not my baby!” Saoirse wailed. “Look at him, can you really tell me that’s my Sean?”

And Ciara looked him up and down, and she had to admit he looked different. Sean Murphy Kelly was a red, angry little thing with cradle cap almost as bad as Jack’s - a flaky head and thin patchy hair. He screamed for sixteen hours out of twenty four and the few where he was awake and not screaming, he stuffed his pudgy fist in his mouth and chomped it like it was a cream bun. This little charmer had a full head of downy brown fluff, wide, unblinking eyes that appraised her just as calmly as she studied him, and a complexion usually only found on little girls on the front of tins of old-timey sweets.

“Aye, of course it’s him!” she’d protested, but she wasn’t so sure, not really. Just because he showed up in the pram and the clothes didn’t necessarily mean it was Sean, did it? It just meant whoever it was was wearing Sean’s clothes and sitting in his pram.

She shivered.

Daylight was fading. Ciara pulled Jack’s blanket a little closer under his chin and zipped up her own jacket. She

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wondered how much longer she should give it. A twig snapped behind her, and she turned, although Jesus knows what she expected to see. A sídhe sneaking amongst the blackthorns, all long thin fingers and gossamer hair? There was just a fat brown bird hopping through the undergrowth with a blackberry in its beak. She turned back, half hopeful, half expectant.

The pram was still there, and so was Jack.

Maybe give it another half hour, she thought, settling back down to her magazine.

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C. S. MEE

Rooting

In his newborn portraits baby Alfie looked as wrinkly as his name sounded to Louise, but at one month old he was filling out nicely and had a complexion that would make a peach farmer proud. Cheryl had slimmed as Alfie had bloomed and, a mere month from labour, looked as though she had never been pregnant. Her physical fitness extended to hosting Alfie’s naming party with a pertness and efficiency that Louise found exhausting simply to watch. It was almost reassuring when Cheryl knocked into her and spilled red wine down her top, though Louise struggled to convince her hostess that it really didn’t matter.

‘I don’t even like this top,’ she claimed as Cheryl chased her upstairs and forced her into one of her own silk blouses, taking Louise’s rather tatty ‘party top’ to bundle into the washing machine with a strained ‘I’ve always got a wash on at the moment anyway.’

‘Are you okay?’ Louise managed to catch her ex-sister-in-law’s eye for a moment, but was not convinced by her breezy ‘of course’.

‘You’re doing marvellously well. Alfie’s adorable and you look fantastic.’ She babbled, but Cheryl was already trotting downstairs to her guests, breaking off the potentially awkward tête-à-tête with her brother’s ex-wife.

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Louise had decided to attend Alfie’s naming in a moment of frustration with her own son Joseph and regretted the decision as soon as she was through the door. It hadn’t even occurred to her that it would mean exchanging pleasantries through mouthfuls of stuffed mushroom with her ex-husband’s aunts and cousins, whom she had not seen since their own ill-fated wedding.

The invitation had been extended to Joseph and in his father’s absence (at Disneyland with family B) Cheryl had made the unusual move of contacting Louise directly, stressing how much she hoped Alfie’s 15 year-old cousin would attend. Joseph was at an age when family gatherings were abhorrent and certainly low priority next to hanging with his mates at the skate park.

‘You go there every weekend,’ Louise had argued. ‘This is your first chance to meet your only cousin.’

‘He’s a baby,’ Joseph spat with contempt, as though meeting a baby made as much sense as meeting a goldfish.

Louise had already bought an adorable set of baby grows for Joseph to present and decided on a whim to drive over to Cheryl’s and deliver them herself, thinking that she would pop in for a few moments to give Alfie a tickle under the chin and hoping to find an excuse to mask her son’s rudeness.

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Now here she was, trapped until her clothes were clean, suffering the casual disinterest of her former in-laws.

‘Is Joshua not here?’

‘Joseph couldn’t make it today.’

‘I suppose he’s away at university.’

‘Not yet, he’s only fifteen.’

‘Mmm. Have you tried these mushrooms? Cheryl stuffed them herself. They’re jolly good.’

Cheryl was ten years Louise’s junior, but had always been an intimidating presence. Her own brother had marvelled at her stellar grades, sporting achievements and pursuit of a demanding career in finance. But now as Louise watched Cheryl circulate with a plate of homemade baba ghanoush and pita slices, fielding baby-rearing advice from well-meaning but tiresome aunts, she was even less convinced by the ‘of course’ and half expected Cheryl to plant the baba ghanoush in Aunt Alice’s face in response to her third suggestion that it was time to feed Alfie.

Keen to make herself useful and avoid another awkward conversation about what she was up to these days, Louise sought out the baby herself and found him in the kitchen, fretting in his pram beside the humming extractor fan.

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‘It usually works wonders, but I think all the attention is stressing him out,’ said Cheryl, gloved hand reaching into the oven to snatch out some perfectly browned vol-au-vents.

‘Why don’t I dandle him for a bit, while you sit down and have a glass of wine?’ Louise reached towards Alfie, her fingers magnetically drawn to his perfect skin.

‘Louise!’ Cheryl was shocked. ‘I’m breastfeeding.’

‘Okay, well you sit down and have a glass of water and I’ll keep him busy.’ She lifted the grunting babe, surprised by his lightness and was pleased to see Cheryl accept and disappear into the living room with the tray of vol-au-vents still hot in her gloved hand.

‘Fancy being one month old,’ Louise held Alfie up to her face. He stopped squeaking and met her eyes with a solemn stare. ‘A bit early for smiles, isn’t it?’ She remembered Joseph at that age like it was yesterday and at the same time she could hardly believe he had once been so small and new and affable.

She wandered into the conservatory, swinging Alfie gently in her arms. The room was full of agitated children and immobile elderly relatives and he squirmed, disturbed by the new smells and new voices. Louise hugged him closer. He weighed no more than a bag of potatoes and his arms and legs were spindly in his slim-fit baby grow. She drifted through the guests, cautious where she placed her feet. It was quieter in the hall, but then a couple of children came

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running through shrieking and Alfie wailed in protest. Louise joggled him, shifting him in her arms, but his brow puckered and his mouth opened in tearless cries. Keen to spare Cheryl for a few more minutes, Louise took Alfie upstairs and shut herself with him in the bedroom where she had changed her top.

She sat on the edge of the bed and explored Alfie’s tiny face, thinking of Joseph at that age. She remembered the beauty of a baby’s nose and the first gummy smile, but she had forgotten the budding eyelashes, folded under blue-tinged eyelids and the faint hint of eyebrow that was yet to grow. She remembered the utter peace of Joseph’s sleeping face and the silent respiration that had her jumping to his cot-side in his first weeks to lay an anxious palm on his chest. She had forgotten the uneven rhythm of a baby’s breath and the excitable panting that precedes screams and meals. She remembered how she used to miss him when he slept.

As Joseph grew and changed she had reassured herself that she would relive these moments with her second child, but her marriage had ended before he was out of nappies and the intervening years were marked by brief relationships and the watershed of menopause.

Now her only son was fifteen and was no longer her baby Joseph. He was Joe to everyone else: Joe to his friends and his father, Joe to his one-time girlfriend Karen, even Joe to his schoolteachers. Joe was an exclamation, an imperative.

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Joseph was soft with motherly love, soft like baby skin, too correct, too pedantic.

She remembered the squeals that he used to make while feeding, the excited head swinging and grunting as he latched on. She remembered his tiny arms flailing, fists tight, punching her breast and scratching her chest with his sharp nails in his eagerness to feed. The smell of sour milk on her clothes, on the bedspread and the arm of the sofa. Damp muslins. She remembered the rooting reflex, mouth open, head waving, burrowing into a naked elbow, attacking her shirt front, as Alfie was starting to do now.

He was hungry and the smell of Cheryl’s blouse on her gave him false hope.

‘You won’t have much luck there,’ she said, watching him press his wet beak against her chest. He squealed with frustration.

She offered him a finger joint and he latched on with relief, eyes closed, sucking with a power she had forgotten. She cradled him for a few minutes and fifteen years fell away. When the milk didn’t come he pulled off her finger, puckering his face in pink frustration. He pressed his mouth to the blouse silk again, leaving wet marks. Louise slipped open the top buttons and held Alfie to her skin. It seemed to calm him. It was the most natural thing in the world. She lifted her bra and held her breast to his mouth. Alfie lapped at her nipple with his pointed tongue.

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‘What the fuck are you doing?’

The footsteps on the stairs had not even registered. She pulled down her bra and closed the blouse, trying to look casual before she turned to Joseph.

‘So you decided to come after all?’

‘You can’t feed him, can you?’ Her son came round the bed, looking at her with a confused scowl. ‘It’s like cows, they have to have calves don’t they?’

‘I wasn’t feeding him, just calming him down.’

‘Does Aunt Cheryl know you’re doing that?’

‘Aunt Cheryl has enough to worry about downstairs.’ She hoped he wouldn’t say anything. What had she been thinking? Memory had carried her away. ‘So you decided to come then?’

‘It was shit at the park.’

‘Language,’ she had recovered enough composure to scold him.

‘It was crap. There was no one there.’ Joseph was sullen. ‘Everyone’s on holiday.’

The lack of invitation to Disneyland was a sore point, even though Joseph was more inclined to set fire to Sleeping Beauty Castle or kick Mickey Mouse in the balls than

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participate in a fun family holiday with his junior half-siblings.

He sat down on the bed next to her, bringing his smell of fresh sweat and outdoors. The new arrival distracted Alfie from his hunger and he regarded Joseph with a frown.

‘Alfie,’ said Louise to the grey-eyed baby, ‘meet your cousin Joseph.’ She held him out to her son and Joseph poked the baby’s tiny hands with a nervous finger.

‘He’s so small,’ he said with an unexpected smile.

‘You were that small once, can you believe it?’ Louise watched Alfie’s shrimp-like digits clutch Joseph’s finger with its strong joints and wide nail and she remembered her ex-husband on his first visit to the hospital after Joseph’s birth, holding his son with trembling wonder.

‘Can I hold him?’ asked Joseph.

‘Of course,’ she smiled with surprise and carefully passed Alfie to her son, watching him cup the baby’s head in his huge palm. When did his hands grow so big? Alfie stared into Joseph’s face, as though searching for comprehension. Joseph held his tiny cousin cautiously, examining his face and hands with amazement.

The moment was soon broken as Alfie began to fidget and whimper again.

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‘We should get him back to his Mum,’ said Louise, lifting the baby gently from her son’s arms. ‘Did you say hi to Cheryl when you arrived?’

‘I tried to, but she looked really stressed out and I don’t think she heard me. She was on the floor picking Bombay Mix out of a sheepskin rug. It was all caught in the hair and Aunt Alice was saying she would never get it out.’

‘Oh dear, this party has been a lot of work for her. She even stuffed mushrooms.’

‘Wow. I didn’t know you could stuff mushrooms.’

‘Nor did I.’ said Louise.

‘What did she stuff them with?’

‘I don’t know. Cream cheese I think and some herbs and there was maybe some mushroom in there.’

‘She stuffed mushrooms with other mushrooms? Seriously? Aunt Cheryl’s bonkers.’

Louise caught Joseph’s eye and they both laughed.

‘Let’s go home.’ She stood up, joggling the fretful babe. ‘We can buy pizza on the way.’

‘Mum,’ Joseph rolled his eyes. ‘You mean you’re not even going to stuff me some mushrooms.’

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She laughed so hard that time that Alfie stopped crying in surprise. Joseph laughed with her and Louise knew that they had a joke they would share for a long time to come.

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MENTIONS

SHORT FICTION:

Daisy Banks by SHEILA BLACKBURN

Mirror, Mirror by ROB BRAY

Suicide Vending Machine by THOMAS WELSH

The Tent Of Wonders by DAVID C. WILLIAMS

Lucky by CAROLINE GILFILLAN

Bouillabaisse by DAVID BUTLER

POETRY:

Palette by PETER BROOME

Mr Moby's Plea by MAMIE WILKINSON

My Damn Awake by ASTRA BLOOM MACKAY

Cyclops by VIKKI MORLEY

Clutter by PAT BORTHWICK

Wallet by PETER WALLIS

Her Kitchen by BARBARA CATHCART

The Pail by LUCY CRISPIN

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Waking by JUDY O'KANE

Off Site Christmas Party by IAN DUDLEY

The Elephant by ROY MARSHALL

My Stepdad Drive Me Home Following His Second Round of Chemotherapy by JAKE REYNOLDS

Survivors of Bereavement by Suicide by Claire Williamson

No access by Margaret Wilmot

Bear by Pat Borthwick

Grasscutter, Framlingham Castle by Caroline Price