It has been a busy week, so I’m a little late with this week’s showcase, but here we go! We want to celebrate some more of the wonderful audio performances from Issue 1, with these authors:

• Keiron Higgins

• Martha Lane

• Jenny Hart

• JP Relph

In this week’s showcase from Frazzled Lit, we’re celebrating some of the wonderful audio performances from Issue 1, with these authors:

• Nuala O’Connor

• Dave Butler

• Jonathan Humble

• Mark Burrow

• Marie Little

• Chris Cottom

• Heather D Haigh

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In this week’s showcase from Frazzled Lit, Issue 1, the writers we’ve chosen reflect our support for the queer community, for inclusion, for freedom of identification and freedom of expression. We greatly admire these pieces, and are certain you will too!

This week, we’re highlighting work by:

• James Stedman

• Sugar de Santo

• Susanne Salehi

• Jackie Carpenter

It’s time for another weekly showcase of our contributors’ work from Frazzled Lit, Issue 1. This week, we’re focusing on flash fiction, and have chosen four stand-out pieces by:

• Theresa Ryder

• Gary Finnegan

• Derville Quigley

• Kerry Byrne

It’s time for another weekly showcase of our contributors’ work from Frazzled Lit, Issue 1. This week, with the US election just around the corner, we’ve chosen pieces by American authors.

In particular, we draw your attention to the poem ‘The Statue of Liberty bows her great head, September 2020 (A Reminder)’ by Cassie Smith-Christmas.

I’d never felt so much fear on a drop before, but this one was painful in more ways than one. Normally I would half-sleep my way through it, contemplating the danger and brushing it aside like the memory of a bad date, but this one meant too much.

No pressure then.

Although right now pressure is what I needed on the gash in my side that refused to stop bleeding, but I didn’t have time for that.

It felt like my heart was being pulled through my chest as I punched warp. Beads of blood flowed backwards from the wound. For a split second it felt almost therapeutic, watching droplets of my life slip away in slow-motion. The intense pain, the overwhelming exhaustion. I could have quite happily bought into what should inevitably follow.

Death right now would be peaceful.

No.

Death right now would be irresponsible.

Arrogant, I know, but when you’re the only person with information that individuals, with seemingly infinite knowledge have, and when that piece of information is so precious and painfully full of truth, then death right now isn't even an option.

‘Get a grip. Get. A. Fucking. Grip.’ I shouted into the ether with all the effort I could muster, then along with my body and the ship, I disintegrated through time.

It’s a difficult concept to understand or explain. One of those "you kinda need to do it" type things because I’ll be damned if I can put the experience into words. Maybe it really is like dying suddenly. One minute you’re there, then there’s a bright flash, then you’re floating up (or maybe down, let’s not kid ourselves) to your eternal resting place.

Sounds elegant actually. Respectful.

Which is totally not what traveling through time is like. I know this because when you end up where you programmed the console to take you there’s nothing but immense pain. Deposited at velocity onto what can only be described as ‘sandpaper terrain’.

We know where most stuff is back in time. We have huge databases of evidence. We’re designing future tech from future tech, for Christ's sake. We could literally program ourselves to land anywhere safe (and soft for that matter) with the resources we have, so why was I hauling myself up from gravel and dust?

"No amount of make-up is gonna cover that many lacerations." I smirk at my own humour, as I limp towards my destination.

At least I’m not dead.

The town I was in could only be described as quaint. Almost like it was stuck in time. A single shop, run down bar, few other essential amenities. The gash in my side thanked God there was a drug store though. I dressed the wound (badly but at least I'd stopped bleeding) before continuing on my way.

They used to say in the Wild West that if a town didn’t have a railroad it wouldn’t prosper. Well, you just had to look around to know this place didn’t have one, but it did have a school, which was good, because that’s exactly where I was heading.

The bell had just gone as I entered the building. The halls flooded with kids pushing, shoving, desperate to escape the daily monotony.

I watched in wonder at this moment. A pang of jealousy, maybe even a little anger, went through my chest, fluttered around in there for a few seconds, then exited along with half the kids onto the front lawn.

We don’t have schools in my time. Most stuff is learnt remotely or, depending on your age, with implants, so I couldn’t help but feel envious of this social interaction.

The timing was good though. The less people around the better. I knew exactly where I needed to go. Implants, you see. Information readily available in the blink of an eye. We remember everything.

Through the small glass window in the door, I watched a man in goggles clear the desks with gloved hands, careful not to spill chemicals. He then pulled off his overalls, throwing them into a yellow, plastic laundry bin before heading to an open laptop. A smile crossed my face as I watched him happily tap away on the keyboard. I wanted to savour this moment. I’d heard that he was eccentric and he didn’t disappoint.

Had he forgotten to remove the goggles or did he just like the comfort of them? Whatever it was, he looked ridiculous but even more annoyingly his face was obscured so I couldn’t get a clear read on his identity.

Scanning the room, I didn’t realise he’d noticed me. My gaze locked with his briefly before he waved me in.

With his attention immediately back on the laptop, goggles still on, the silence in the room, except for the tapping of his fingers on the keyboard, was awkward to say the least. Something was more interesting than my presence as he didn’t even look up from what he was doing when he asked, ‘You looking for me?’

Of course I was looking for him.

Of course he wouldn’t know that.

In fact he couldn’t know that. I just needed to do what I came to do and leave.

Easy.

It would have been if I actually had a plan. I’m generally a "fly by the seat of my pants" kinda girl. Like I said before, I normally take stuff in my stride but I needed to be very careful about what I did next.

As it turned out, racking my brains to come up with carefully chosen words was conveniently interrupted by him pulling his goggles onto his forehead. The encyclopaedic database that was my mind crackled through my ears and pulsated against my brain as I stared dumbfounded at him.

It wasn’t him.

My eyes blinked through information as I scanned his face.

Nothing. No data. No identity. This man was a ghost.

‘It surprises you every time Carla,’ he said with a smile, like I was meant to know what he was talking about. ‘Those scratches look worse this time too. Painful landing was it?’

I touched my face, traced a finger along the deepest scratch on my cheek. I could feel it beginning to scab over.

‘Who are you?’ A strange feeling permeated through my body like I hadn't needed to ask that question at all. I felt numb.

‘Just focus. We don’t have much time,' he replied as he led me to a store cupboard behind the white board. I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about or what I was doing following him around the room like a lost puppy, but suddenly I felt compelled to be in front of a cupboard door with this man. Taking a key from his pocket, he touched it to his lips, pausing for a moment in thought.

‘When you see him, don’t hesitate,' he muttered, then turned and handed me a knife. The carved handle was beautifully ornate. I rolled it in my hand, wondering what the hell I was supposed to do with it.

The key clicked in the lock. I gripped the knife tightly. He mouthed the count of three and yanked the door open.

I didn't know what I was expecting to see. A monster. An alien. Something indescribable, dark and desperate, but what I actually saw was a young man.

His hands were tied behind his back and he leant against the wall, eyes closed, tapping it softly, calmly, rhythmically with the back of his head. He wore a white overall and had goggles dangling around his neck. After a few slowing head knocks he opened his eyes and turned his gaze to me.

Instantly the information I’d expected scrolled in front of my eyes. That was the man I’d come to see. But what was with the replacement and why the hell was I standing there staring at a man on the floor as if I was frozen in time?

My brain was in overdrive, questioning everything. I didn’t hear the shouting from behind me.

‘CARLA!’

It felt like a distant echo and I soon realised just how delayed my reaction was to it as one minute I was looking at a man tied up sitting against a wall and the next I was feeling an immense pain in my side and I was looking into an empty room.

The knife I'd been holding was embedded deep. I couldn’t help but notice those delicately carved grooves in the handle were now acting as channels for my blood. I wrapped my hands around it and pulled it firmly, letting out a yell that unnaturally resonated through the room and out into the halls clattering every locker, ripping off every poster, reverberating off every wall.

And then there was silence and I was alone, on my knees, putting pressure onto the gash in my side, desperate to stop the bleeding.

A faint pinging permeated from the laptop on the desk. It was irritatingly regular, pitched just at that level of monotonous but somehow disturbing, like listening to a dripping tap then realising you’re undergoing water torture. The pain I was feeling was so overwhelming for a moment though, that the sound --that intensely annoying ping, ping-pinging-- was quite hypnotic, strangely comforting. It distracted me from the realisation of what a dire situation I was in.

I struggled to my feet and staggered towards it. I had to see what was on that screen. I didn't even think about approaching with caution. The pain, the need for help, the knowledge that I was more than likely dying seemed to brush aside any rational thought and instinct I'd normally have. This could be a trap. A literal ticking time bomb, but I didn't care. Deep down in what was left of my diminishing psyche I somehow knew this is what I needed to do.

I reached out my hand to turn the laptop round. Blood smeared across the screen. The pinging, still monotonous, still regular, was now accompanied by a flashing word: Reset. I blinked through the disorientation taking in that word. Reset? Reset what?

I'm not stupid. I know what reset means. I know what a reset button does. But what exactly was I resetting here? An hour? The day? My life? Everyone's lives? The monotonous noise seemed to increase in volume and pace, encroaching on my space, bringing claustrophobia and nausea with it. Or maybe the gash in my side was causing that.

The more I stared at this word on the screen, the quicker it seemed to flash. Like it was begging me, urging me to notice it. The word was getting impatient. I couldn't quite make it out and I'm sure it's because I was delirious from my injury but it was as if it was talking to me, screaming at me in fact. I swear to God I heard through the noise and delirium 'What the hell are you waiting for? Punch me already.'

And so I did.

What else was I supposed to do? Sit there and slowly bleed out alone? Or take a chance that this might be my salvation?

So, I slammed my hand onto that screen so hard it sent the laptop hurtling across the desk and heading to the floor. You'd expect a crash as it hit, but it didn't hit. It didn't even make it to the floor. It hung in the air, trapped in time, as did everything else around me, but my erratic breathing, my struggling movement, my grimacing in pain remained in real time.

I let out a long breath in the deafening silence. I could see it hanging in the air, which was freezing around me. Splinters of ice began to cover surfaces, crack over the windows. The wetness from the tears on my eyelashes began to crystallise. It was as if I was in another lifetime, another world. I briefly surveyed this surreal moment and then I was gone.

I don't know where I went. All I knew is that it was dark. Pitch black. Was this death? I wasn't convinced. I was still in immense pain. Surely ethereal powers would have some compassion and empathy for the plight of an injured dead person and not leave them writhing in agony? What an irony that would be that even in death you aren't at peace. I'm a cynic, don't get me wrong, but even I couldn't see this being the case, so, no, I didn't think this was death. I didn't know what the hell this was.

The pitch, the silence, was soon consumed with muffled whispers and dull flashing lights. Snippets of a story once told, like an old movie reel clicking and struggling to transmit, flickering into view. I could see myself. I could see the goggled man. We were talking. He handed me the knife. The key clicked in the lock...

And then I saw him. Not the man that had been tapping his head gently against the wall, the relatively calm tied up man that registered on my information database.

I saw him.

The real him.

His face was covered in a strange, chalky residue. His eyes, a piercing, intense blue, were desperately sad.

Heartbreakingly sad.

His image flickered and distorted in front of me.

He looked tired, exhausted in fact. What was odd though was that the information I was receiving about him as he started walking towards me was the exact same information I had received when I looked at him sitting on the floor in the cupboard. But how could that be?

This man was considerably older. His greying hair scruffy, his skin withered.

Not the young, clean-cut man I'd looked at before. My confusion shrouded my ability to move as I watched him slowly approach me through the sketchy transmission, through my dream-like, possibly close-to-death state.

The images jumped and then he was right in front of me. This was the man I'd come to see but the information was suddenly confused, struggling to relay in my mind. Something important was being concealed. I sensed it. I didn't know what it was, but I suddenly felt I was being lied to.

I could hear muffled shouts of my name from somewhere else in the room. Was I supposed to react? Stab him? Is that what the goggled-man had meant by 'when you see him, don't hesitate'? If that was the case, why hadn't he been clearer? Was I supposed to make that decision myself? Was I supposed to somehow know?

I stared at this man, pondering these questions.

I was hesitating.

His eyes burned through me, holding my stare, mesmerising me. Was he a threat?

I couldn't seem to look away. Was he putting me in a trance to then hurt me?

The shouts from behind were becoming more frantic and angry.

Then I felt it.

His hands on my shoulders.

Comforting. Patient.

And suddenly it felt like coming home. I dropped the knife. Not because of some sinister brain-washing act he was inflicting on me. I didn't want to resist this man. I didn't want to hurt him.

He smiled.

And that's when I lost it. It was that kind of smile. Only someone with pure love in their heart could smile that way. I sobbed.

His hands grasped me tighter. Splinters of ice began to cover surfaces, crack over the windows. The wetness from the tears on my eyelashes began to crystallise. That other lifetime I'd felt before, that other world was forming around me, dissolving away the lab, the chemicals in the cupboards, the whiteboard, the whole school.

My head jerked back. My eyes widened. It was as if he was performing an exorcism, casting out a demon that was possessing me.

I slowly looked at him. I felt awake. I mean truly awake. As I stood in this weird half world flicking between a frozen wilderness and a mundane school, I knew.

'Dad?' I said, hesitantly. Not really believing it myself.

He squeezed my shoulders.

'Watch and remember, Carla. We don't have much time.'

His deep blue eyes drew me into that frozen world. I was suddenly armed, standing next to him, my skin chalky and white like his. Right then, at that moment, in that split-second in time, I knew.

I knew who he was. I knew who I was.

It was desperately cold. I looked at our surroundings. Everything around us burning or in ruins. My father drew his sword and pointed the blade towards a group of people slowly materialising from the smoky air in front of us.

'Stand behind me,' he said sternly pushing me back.

He stood firm, shielding me from the approaching ghostly silhouettes. They looked human, but their eyes were clearly not. They flickered and pulsed as if scanning information at a rapid speed. They were soulless. Dark. Dead.

As the smoke around them cleared, so everything about them became more human until there I was looking at the very man I'd just met in the school. The goggled-man.

'You're losing it old man. You're a dying breed and so is your world.' he said.

My father laughed hard. 'You can't harm me here. You know it. I know it. It drives you crazy knowing it.'

'Then we'll just have to face you away from here. Everyone has a weak spot.' The man stepped closer. 'And we have information now that tells us what yours is.' He drew his sword and aimed it towards me.

'Isn't that right, Carla?'

I looked at my father, confused. He He stood firm, staring at the goggled-man, but I could see there was now a sense of worry and doubt on his mind. He slowly turned to me.

'You're the only one that can destroy me. They will trick you. Program your mind. I can't protect you from this.'

He gripped my hand tightly.

'But a father-daughter bond is strong. I trust you. I love you. Resist it. Fight it. Find a way to reset it.'

My head jerked back again and I was there, in the classroom with my father gripping my shoulders, a tear rolling down my cheek as I stared into his desperate eyes.

He smiled, but this quickly turned to a look of pain. He inhaled sharply as the goggled-man drove the knife hard into his back, then, right before my eyes my father disintegrated into ash. Only burning embers floating in the breeze, settling slowly on my clothes and falling like feathers to the floor, were left behind.

I screamed out. Anger filled my whole being as I stared at the goggled-man, but before I could react he stepped forward and thrust the knife into my side.

'For fuck's sake, Carla. Why? Why can't you just do as you are told?'

His eyes pulsed and flickered. He paused, then seemed to calm, like it was necessary, like he'd resigned himself to do it, like he didn't have a choice.

'How many times are we gonna go round?'

I didn't have time to object, to speak up about what and who I'd just seen, to question, to even think as he pushed the blade in deeper.

I wrapped my hands around the handle, closed my eyes and pulled, registering my voice screaming through the halls and back into the room.

Then I dropped to my knees.

Alone.

Just a faint but irritating pinging for company.

You know the rest.

Laptop.

Reset.

Floating.

Trapped in time. But for how long?

Was this the reset my father had talked about? Or was I trapped in this perpetual circle of events forever?

Was it over?

Was it...

Was...

It felt like my heart was being pulled through my chest as I punched warp. Beads of blood flowed backwards from the wound.

Death now would be peaceful.

No.

Death now would be irresponsible.

I had to get where I was going, do what I had to do and get out as quickly as I came.

I shouted in determination into the ether. Then along with my body and the ship, I disintegrated through time...

So, when I said we remember everything, I lied. Well, I didn't.

They lied.

You have to wonder why they tell us these things knowing it's not true. I remembered everything they wanted me to remember.

Implants you see. Information readily available in the blink of an eye. Their implants. Their information. Their orders.

I had to kill my own father. They needed me to kill him to win a war, to take our world. That was his weakness.

I was his weakness.

It had to be me who did it. No one else.

Easy, right?

Well, I suppose that's what they thought as they hacked my mind.

But this time - this time it would be different. I worked it out, you see. So many times round. The little things get ingrained. That was their downfall. You can never eradicate everything. Not even on a reset.

I knew exactly what I had to do as I headed to that school, because my father was right. A father-daughter bond is stronger than any lie.

Jaime Bree's love of writing grew during her time at Cambridge University while studying a B.Ed in Drama. Whilst her day job sees her successfully writing and directing stage productions for children, at night, her other writing life concentrates on sci-fi, fantasy and some darker themes. She surprises herself sometimes where her characters take her and loves how deeply involved she can get in creating the visuals for new worlds.

Losing yourself is a must.

Sweden, mid-summer. The sprawling gardens of the Palace of Igelstad bathe in the late evening sun. Swans float leisurely on the calm waters of the Grand Canal, enjoying the cooling breeze that sweeps away the lingering heat of the day. Yet, under this tranquil surface, trouble brews.

Tomorrow Igelstad will host the Dressage Individual World Championship. Set over two days, involving three rounds of increasing technical difficulty, the event examines the control and mastery of both horse and rider, requiring a performance of specified movements in specified parts of an arena under the watchful eyes of seven judges. To some it is the highest expression of horse training, to others it is horses dancing like a drunk uncle, yet, whatever your personal view, all you need to know is this - despite a proud history of triumph the British Dressage team finds itself on the edge of the unthinkable, returning medal-less. These are desperate times, and desperate times have called for desperate ideas.  

“I’m not saying bite ‘em hard,” explained Tom Tickelsworth, Head Horse Trainer of the British team, picking up a stone and throwing it just over the heads of some passing swans. “More of a love bite really.”

“No,” replied Sebastian Wimford-Putty, recently appointed Director of British Dressage, furiously shaking his head. “You will not bite a horse, no matter how loving the bite may be. That is an order.”

The two men were on a lap of the cross-shaped lake at the heart of the Palace’s grounds, far from the Athletes’ Village and unwanted eavesdroppers.

“Fine,” said Tickelsworth, crossing his arms. “But on your head be it. ‘Cos there’ll be consequences. Brenda Balding will be bleedin’ furious. She’s always the first to give non-medal winners a piece of her mind after major championships. Might be the darlin’ of sports broadcasting in the eyes of the British public, but to the underperforming team she’s the devil with an ’ot poker.” He paused. “And our fundin’ will get cut.”

 “You don’t need to tell me about consequences,” said Wimford-Putty, running his hand through his wavy blonde hair. “I’m the one who came to you for ideas, remember. And as for Balding, you should have seen the look she gave me when I was Director of British Artistic Swimming and we returned from Tokyo empty handed. She came round to my house just to glare. For over an hour she stood scowling in the garden as me and the family ate dinner. It was terrifying. My son still makes me check under his bed for her each night.”

“I’ve heard she does that,” nodded Tickelsworth, throwing another stone and again only just missing the swans. “And I heard she were gobsmacked they chose you to replace your predecessor Hyacinth. Understandably mind, you know, given yer’ lack of horse knowledge. And success.”

Wimford-Putty stopped and turned towards Tickelsworth, narrowing his eyes as he examined the small grey-haired man with pointed, rat-like teeth. “There are many who would say that being available at short notice is just as valuable an asset as both knowledge and success.” He adjusted his tie and straightened the dancing horse pinned to his lapel. “Anyway, back to the matter at hand. The team event went terribly, the individual event is our final chance. How do we turn Penelope from sixth ranked rider to a medal winner?”

“I’ve already told you,” said Tickelsworth, hurling two more stones towards the swans. “We bite the other horses. Not all of ‘em. Just the best ones. It don’t hurt. Skins too thick. It just knocks them off their game. Not like using a whip or nothin’, more like putting itching powder down someone’s neck. No lasting damage, just a temporary inconvenience. I can slip into the stables and do it tonight. Best to do it in the dark. Horses are clever you see, in daylight they’ll spot what you’re planning and strike first. Take yer’ finger clean off if you’re not careful.”

“For the last time, no biting! Come on man, you must have other ideas.”

Tickelsworth spat on the floor and grinned menacingly. “You know what, I’ve just had an excellent one right this second.” He rubbed his hands together. “A very excellent one indeed.”

But, before he could reveal it, several swans swooped down in an orchestrated attack, pecking and flapping at the two men all the way back to their rooms.

The next day, under cloudy skies, the individual dressage competition began. Penelope Snothome, the British medal hope, along with her horse, Doctor Sausages, put in a strong performance that saw them finish second and qualify comfortably for the next round. However, Penelope’s better than expected display was not the main talking point. Instead the dressage world was rocked by the failure of four of the top five riders in the world to qualify. Sven Loo from Sweden, Ronda Freedom from America, Ruud Groot from the Netherlands, and Mads Asmus from Denmark had all looked uncharacteristically uncomfortable during their routines and finished bottom of the leaderboard. The competition was now wide open with reigning world champion, Germany’s Gertrude Gerstenburg, the only medal favourite making it through.  

That evening, hidden deep within the trees of the palace’s gardens, away from prying eyes and prowling swans, Tom Tickelsworth and Sebastian Wimford-Putty once again convened.

“Everyone’s blaming bed bugs,” Tickelsworth laughed as he picked his pointed nose. “I nearly fell off me seat when that Swede took both hands off the reigns to scratch his balls. Right in front of the Swedish king too.”

“And was it bed bugs?”

“Course it weren’t. Put itching powder in their costumes, didn’t I.” He beamed with pride. “Weren’t hard, just hung around the changing rooms until an opportunity presented itself.”

“Itching powder? That was your excellent idea?” Wimford-Putty threw his hands skywards. “We’re not savages for god’s sake. Don’t get me wrong, I want to win this thing as much as anyone, but there’s a right way of doing things.”

 “In the time I had sabotage was the only option,” protested Tickelsworth. “And it worked, didn’t it?”

“I suppose,” sighed Wimford-Putty. “But I’m not happy.” He glanced nervously around, bringing his voice down to a hush.  “Although why didn’t you do the German? She’s the best of the lot.”

“Course I did. Used two whole packs on her outfit.” Tickelsworth shook his head. “She’s somethin’ else she is. Must have felt like there were an army of fire ants chompin’ on her armpits yet smiled the whole way through.” He sighed. “Gold’s out the question with her around. ‘Specially with that horse of ‘ers, Autobahn. Never seen anything like it. A true colossus.” He plucked a particularly large piece of mucus from his nose before patting Wimford-Putty on the back. “Still, Penelope’s a shoe in for a medal now, probably a silver the way she’s riding. Not too shabby.”

Wimford-Putty swiped Tickelsworth’s hand away. “No. It has to be gold.”

“Come on, don’t get greedy. A medal’s a medal.”

 “It’s not me,” he said, clenching his fist so hard the blood vessels in his neck bulged. “It’s Balding. She called straight after the event earlier. Said not to bother coming home unless we win. Turns out she’s particularly fond of dressage and following the World Championship’s closely.”

“Damn her,” muttered Tickelsworth, baring his teeth. “Go on, let me bite Autobahn, that’s all it would take.”

“Absolutely not,” said Wimford-Putty defiantly. “Not even the wrath of Brenda Balding could make me sink that low.”

Early the following morning 25 riders took to the dressage arena knowing only 12 would progress to the final later that day. The Palace of Igelstad shone in radiant glory under a clear blue sky as each and every spectator marvelled at the splendour of the setting. What they did not marvel at however, was the quality of the dressage on show. With the exception of Gertrude Gerstenburg who performed with breathtaking levels of skill and delicacy, the performances of the other 24 riders, Penelope Snothome included, were met with groans and in many cases boos. Nearly every competitor failed to complete the specified routine, all of them showing ragged ill-discipline and none of the grace and poise expected at such a prestigious event. Yet, despite all that, the British rider still managed to scrape through to the final, pipping Bruce Aberdeen of Australia by the finest of margins.

Immediately afterwards Tom Tickelsworth and Sebastian Wimford-Putty took a walk along the Grand Canal, keeping a close eye out for swans.

“While I don’t condone the use of itching powder,” raged Wimford-Putty, his eyes bulging. “Gluing someone to a horse is completely different. It’s just not cricket. And it’s certainly not dressage. What if Penelope had fallen?”

“She couldn’t have,” shrugged Tickelsworth. “They had to cut her out the saddle to get her down.”

Wimford-Putty convulsed with fury. “Everyone knows it was the Germans. Clearly they didn’t believe the bed bugs explanation yesterday and wanted revenge. We must complain.”

Tickelsworth shook his head. “Organisers are sayin’ it were just tree sap and to get on with it. Last thing they want is a scandal, Lord knows the sport’s had enough of them recently. Anyway, just be grateful the Germans didn’t know the itchin’ powder were us. If they’d only put glue on Penelope’s reigns and saddle and not everyone’s she’d be packin’ her bags.”

There was a hissing noise as a bevy of swans appeared on the water nearby.

“What do you wanna do?” asked Tickelsworth glancing nervously at the approaching birds.

“Leave it to me,” growled Wimford-Putty. “An angry Brenda Balding is one thing, an angry Sebastian Wimford-Putty is something else altogether.”

With such a short turnaround before the final there was only just enough time to find Penelope Snothome a new saddle and reigns. As the worst performing rider from the previous round she was first out and, much to delight of the crowd, put on a performance of subtle brilliance that drew a standing ovation from all present. Tom Tickelsworth roared in delight from his seat in the stands although Sebastian Wimford-Putty was nowhere to be seen. Nor was there any sign of him as the competition progressed and rider after rider tried, and failed, to dislodge Penelope and Doctor Sausages from the top of the leaderboard. Even by the time the final performers, Gertrude Gerstenburg and Autobahn, took to the arena he had failed to appear.

“Bet he’s too nervous to watch,” said Tom Tickelsworth to the rest of the British team as they sat watching.

In hushed silence the German rider began. Looking calm and relaxed she quickly found her rhythm, drawing rapturous applause for a delightful ‘leg yield’ and ‘traverse’.

“She’ll stuff up the next move,” announced Tickelsworth loudly. “Just you wait. The gold’s as good as ours.”

But she didn’t stuff it up. Gertrude’s ‘piaffe’ was perfect.

“I meant the next one,” he corrected himself.

But again he was wrong, her ‘canter pirouette’ was nothing short of magical.

In fact every prediction of doom made by Tom Tickelsworth throughout the performance, and there were many, turned out to be incorrect. And, when Gertrude completed her routine with a quite glorious ‘canter half circle with quarters in’, he found himself reluctantly rising to his feet to join in with the rapturous applause.

“Do you still think the gold’s ours?” asked Penelope Snothome, doing her best to sound hopeful.

Tickelsworth slowly shook his head. “Not unless you believe in miracles,” he muttered through gritted teeth.

Suddenly there came a noise from the centre of the arena. Everyone, including the judges who were in the process of finalising their scores, looked out to where Autobahn was reared up on his hind legs, throwing his neck from side-to-side as he bucked wildly. Gertude clung onto the creature with all her might, seemingly unable to control him. The calmness and tranquillity that had ordained the German rider’s face throughout her performance had now turned to sheer horror.

Then, without warning, the great horse opened his mouth and proceeded to cough up a human finger, severed cleanly below the knuckle. There was a collective gasp followed by what felt like eternal silence.

“Do you lose points for that?” One of the British contingent asked eventually.

 Tom Tickelsworth didn’t reply. Instead he pointed down towards the judges where two of them were vomiting on their scorecards. He grinned, a particularly ratty grin indeed.

To this day Sebastian Wimford-Putty holds no grudge against Autobahn for biting off his finger. It was, he says, worth it for the handshake and beaming smile Brenda Balding gave him when she visited his house to congratulate him on the gold medal. And besides, he’s very aware that it was partly his fault. After all, he did try to bite the horse first.

Jonathan Sellars writes for all people of all ages. He looks for the ridiculous in the world, the humorous events that usually don't happen, rather than the tragic events that usually do. He rode a horse once, it did not go well.

Listen to a reading of Life As Mask, Mask As Life by Nuala O’Connor:

I’ve never been for a mani-pedi-highlights-tan-dye-massage-wax-lash-thread-peel-sunbed-spa-steam. None of it. I’ve always plucked my own eyebrows and shaved my own legs and pits. I stopped going to the hairdresser post-pandemic in favour of cutting my own hair. All my life I have had to – over months – work up the courage to go to hair salons, my split ends getting splittier, my hair frizzier and poofier. The centre-of-attention-ness of it all is anathema to me, and just being in a hairdresser’s is a sensory nightmare: the scalding water and scalp-probing; the chit-chat and combing; the burny styling tools and layers of sweet-smelling product. Nowadays I just whip out my hair-scissors and trim my hair in the safety of my bedroom, my own private salon; I can happily do without the rest of it.

When in female company, I usually keep quiet about this lack of interest in hairstyling, beauty treatments, and pamper sessions, because I know other people love them, and that’s fine. But my silence is a form of masking, something I discovered when I was diagnosed as autistic at fifty-two years of age. So, I nod along when people discuss, say, balayage or microdermabrasion, and it is presumed that I too don’t mind being pummelled or prinked by a stranger when, in fact, it’s my idea of hell. If the company I’m in feels ‘safe’ to me, I might mention my aversion to treatments; one person may warmly agree, the rest will insist I must try a massage, or whatever, because I will ‘love it’. But, no, I absolutely won’t; I know myself, and I don’t like non-intimates touching me, and I abhor small talk.

Autistic women often mask well and are good at observing and attempting to fit into neurotypical norms. As a result of gender-pressures to be good, well-behaved etcetera, we learn social codes by watching, listening, and adopting what we observe. We figure out when our thoughts or tastes might be at variance with others’, so we don’t share them. We try to still our fidgety bodies and blurting tendencies. Autistic people rarely want to be the centre of attention; even the tiny spotlight of a tiny group – or a lone hairdresser – can feel like a threat, so staying quiet feels safest, often.

As part of masking, autistic women might copy the way people dress in order to blend in, and start to wear things that don’t feel fully ‘us.’ Conversely autistics may, from a young age, dress in whatever pleases us the most. For me, as a teenager in the eighties, that was an Annie Lennox-esque uniform of men’s jackets, ties, and big shirts. That or the Cure-head uniform of all black, with splashes of purple for variety.

During one of my autism assessment sessions, I mentioned a quirk of mine to the psychologist that had given me pause over the years. I told her that I have long had a propensity for dressing to suit different friend groups: I’m make-uppy with the more glam girls; I wear my hippy dresses with my veg-growing, home-schooler friends; I went from all black to jeans and ganseys with my college Gaeilgeoir friends, and so on.

‘Almost like putting on a costume,’ I said.

‘That’s masking,’ the psychologist replied.

‘I suppose it is,’ I said, absorbing another revelation in my journey to autism diagnosis.

As I said, my style before my twenties leaned towards androgyny, and that included short, spiky hair. Maybe that’s why I was drawn to the cross-dressing activities of the subject of my latest novel, eighteenth century pirate Anne Bonny. A witness at her trial said Anne and another woman pirate ‘wore men’s jackets and long trousers and handkerchiefs tied about their heads’, but the witness knew they were women ‘by the largeness of their breasts’. Anne wore men’s clothes for comfort and ease while sailing and perhaps, also, because she wanted to be a man, with a man’s freedoms. Maybe it was the same for me – I valued, and still like, comfort in clothing. And as a girl I was a confirmed tomboy – I dressed like a boy, the easier to do ‘boy’s’ things. Gender non-conformity is high among the neurodivergent population. For me, my girly side won out though, to this day, I mostly prefer trousers to skirts, and my public event ‘uniform’ consists of blazers and shirts, but I also occasionally love the glamour of make-up and a fancy dress.

Until my autism diagnosis, I lived my life acknowledging myself as a hypersensitive introvert, so I was used to using masks, and I knew I mostly covered up my true feelings or thoughts when I was with others. I had a distinct feeling of disconnection from most people I knew, but at least in my own home, and with extended family, I could be (mostly) myself. I didn’t understand, though, how much I masked and the damage I was doing to myself by concealing my true nature and letting on to be calm, serene, and at one with the group. By staying quiet, tamping my true self, I didn’t draw attention to myself, but inside I was cripplingly lonely and anxious, wary about when to speak or not, trapping my body into a stillness it wanted to shake off. All that suppression of self is unhealthy.

Pre-diagnosis, I mentioned my ever-present anxiety to a psychotherapist friend and she was doubtful.

‘You, anxious?’ she said. ‘Really?

‘Yup, I’m pretty much a morass of raw nerves all the time.’

‘You hide it well.’

I replied with a rueful, ‘I know.’

For so long, I had no idea how to help myself, or what would help me. As a life-long masker, I was slipping between personalities so much that the real me was a little unknowable, even to those closest to me. All the layering and concealment had made me blurry, even to myself. Who was I really? Was the gregarious, public, working me real? Or was the quiet, self-contained, solitary me the authentic one?

It’s a strange feeling to be very aware of a behaviour – masking – but unaware of the whys behind it, in my case, the neural impetus to mould myself to a situation in order to ‘pass’, to hide my true, autistic self. I knew I was dressing/speaking/staying silent to blend in, but I didn’t know why I was doing it so consistently. These efforts were, I see now, self-soothing – if I look and sound like I fit maybe, somehow, I will. I may have passed, but inside me – always – there was that maelstrom of unease, a definite feeling of unbelonging. That has not changed but at least, now, I understand that my brain controls those feelings and by fully accepting that autism does make me different, I can travel through life on my own terms. This insight makes me much more forgiving of my own awkwardness, though I am still – as always – a work in progress.

I often wonder how and why I ended up with so much shame about the collection of idiosyncrasies that make me me. I guess the accusations of ‘You’re so sensitive/emotional/quiet/blunt/weird/snobby/aloof’ had gotten to me. Ditto the comments about my weird outfits, as I threw off one look for another: androgyny for head-to-toe black; black for homemade jumpers and denim; alternating that with Indian dresses and love-beads.

I was shamed into concealment, too, by comments on my hair-twirling and/or sucking, my scalp-poking, body-twirling, and ever fidgety fingers that I now recognise as stimming behaviours. I would be ordered to stop doing what I was doing though it hurt me to stop, but then I would sit on my hands, and internalise yet another thing that made me weird.

It baffles me still that no counsellor, GP, or specialist I visited for help ever noticed that I had traits that hung together that clearly spelt A-U-T-I-S-T-I-C. One can only guess that many medical professionals know as little about how autism presents in girls and women as the rest of the population.

Having long felt fragmented, while others seem so very whole, I’ve tended to obsess about my larger-than-normal propensity for perplexing discomfort in most aspects of life, one of them being that I simply don’t seem to enjoy things others enjoy – beauty treatments, being one example. I craved revealing myself to an understanding someone but, mostly, I preferred silent collusion with the majority. The dichotomy was that I was envious of ‘normal’ people, while not wanting to be like them at all.

This still happens sometimes – I think how great it would be if I had the mental and physical energy for a nine to five job (financial security); if I loved rooms full of people and chit-chat (more friendships); if I didn’t prefer to spend all my time writing/reading/researching/collaging, therefore alone (less lonely); if I didn’t prefer old, crumbly houses to new ones (heat! lack of maintenance!); if I liked off-the-peg clothing instead of wanting unique items (ease of purchase; no weird smells/stains to eliminate); if I enjoyed regular pastimes like sport or watching Star Wars, instead of hunting down obscure books and charity shop rummaging (conversational ease); if I didn’t love collecting things like blue glass and old pottery (tidy, uncluttered rooms). Conversely, I love all these things about myself. I like my dusty collections, alone time, wonky house, and particular passions – they are all joy-bringers.

My work now is on acceptance, something I’ve always struggled with because I tend to have a rigid view of what is right or wrong, proper or skewy, and I don’t like changing the ways that things are. But this acceptance is about growth, while acknowledging my idiosyncrasies and struggles as inherent, and working with, instead of against, them. In short, accepting the truth of my autistic self, unmasking when it feels safe, and being as compassionate towards myself as I can be towards other people. It is an act of unlearning but one that, so far, has opened me up to fresh hope, and new happiness, and I’m more than grateful for that.

Nuala O’Connor lives in Galway, Ireland. Her sixth novel SEABORNE, about Irish-born pirate Anne Bonny, was published in April 2024 by New Island. Her novel NORA (New Island), about Nora Barnacle and James Joyce, was a Top 10 historical novel in the New York Times. She won Irish Short Story of the Year at the 2022 Irish Book Awards and is editor at flash e-journal Splonk. You can find out more about Nuala at www.nualaoconnor.com

Listen to a reading of Ashes to Ashes by Christine:

Guilt tackles me the day after our house burns down.

This is not a written confession, don’t worry.

When my father comes into the room to tell me, in a voice sharp and harsh with fear, that there’s smoke coming from the bar down the block, I don’t think much of it.

There are only three buildings on our block, and they all share a wall with their neighbor.

Even with that knowledge, I never consider the possibility that the fire department will not be able to contain the blaze.

This is what I take with me into the February night: my cellphone, my wallet, my snow boots, one hat, one bra, one pair of underwear, and my winter coat.

I never re-enter my home.

Three separate insurance investigators pick their way through the collapsed, abandoned remains of my family’s home and our quilt shop, the Chinese restaurant next door, and the Vault—the bar I had been working at for six months, trying to save up enough to escape the orbit of our tiny South Dakotan town—and all three put the same thing on their forms.

An accident. An electrical fire. No human casualties. Millions in damages.

Now my father, having practiced insurance law for nearly forty years, went out of his way to make sure our home was well-protected, so when the insurance check hits, we know we have nothing to worry about. We can replace everything. There’s no reason to be sad.

My family doesn’t grieve, in general. Within a day or two the jokes start. The shell of the house becomes “The Hole”, a black pit from which there is no return, and we take turns asking “where’s the TV?” or “where’s my toothbrush?” in order to laugh at the response and numb our pain. It doesn’t matter what you’re looking for, the answer is the same:

“It’s in The Hole.”

I keep coming back to what I took with me. My cellphone. My wallet. The clothes on my back.

The rest of it I abandoned. I didn’t even think about it. My brother Tom was out of the house that night. He didn’t get back until it was halfway over. I knew he wasn’t there. I knew he had things he’d want to save. I didn’t even think about it.

The first guitar he ever made cracked apart in his hands when he dug it out of the ruins of the house.

Every quilt my mother stitched together with love and care, thousands of hours of labor turned to ashes in her hands.

My father’s entire collection of musical albums, carefully curated over a lifetime of listening and re-listening—out of print albums, first pressings, foreign exclusives—cracked and shattered by heat and falling beams.

A decade of my sketchbooks and journals warped and bloated with water and soot, left to rot under the wreckage of my home and eventually scraped away by a bulldozer, carted off to the landfill and leaving an empty lot in the middle of downtown.

The guilt comes in waves. There was so much we could have saved. It took hours for the fire to reach our home, hours for the smoke to fill our rooms, and during all that time, right up until I saw the first flame catch on the first bolt of fabric, glowing white hot behind the glass of our family’s store, I assumed that I’d be sleeping in my bed that night, with the quilt my mother made for me to celebrate my college graduation and my childhood teddy bear tucked in my arms.

There’d been so much time.

Albums of childhood photos, the record of me and my siblings growing up, the home videos of our first steps, our first birthdays, our first Christmases; Tom’s tools, Jesse’s windchimes, Sam’s books; my computer with all of my digital art, my flash drive with the first novel I ever wrote, the baby blanket my grandma made for me.

There’d been no time at all.

Later I learn that the only reason we were warned was because the owner of the bar remembered we lived above our store. There is a world where my family dies in our sleep, suffocated by carbon monoxide, buried together in a tomb filled with the trappings of our lives, and two of my brothers survive by sheer virtue of not being there.

There is a world where we are abandoned.

I try not to think about that.

It takes me five minutes to abandon my home. It takes a year to abandon everything else.

Our home burns down in February of 2020, and I feel another pang of guilt when my parents remark how easy it will be for me to leave now. This is not new information. They know I’ve been saving up, that I need to try to get to Broadway, if only so I won’t regret never trying, and the biggest obstacle is and always has been money.

Now, unburdened by the detritus of a life, with a check reimbursing me for a year’s worth of wages, I finally have enough to reach terminal velocity and leave this crummy little town behind.

Except for the fact that a month after the fire, three days before my flight takes off, the world goes into lockdown. I can’t leave even if I want to. So for the next eleven months I, like the bones of my home, rot in the stagnant mire of our town, choking under the oppression of my family’s expectations.

It is an unkind thought to have about the town. It is an unkind thought to have about my family. But somehow, with so much of our lives destroyed, there is a desperation to have what remains stay exactly as it once was.

In my family’s eyes, I am perpetually fifteen, angry at the world, but never allowed to turn that anger outward, and so all of its destruction rampages and rails inward at the one person who will never tell anyone of my cruelty. They expect malice in my words, even when I take great pains to rid all emotion from my voice. They expect me to be an unchanging teenager but demand that I grow up. They tell me they love me but my mother continually mourns the daughter she thought she was going to have.

I come close to ending it, in those eleven months, even if I never admit it to myself, not because I want to stop living but because a life in a trap is no life at all. It comes to a head one night after an argument with my mother and she says she wants me out.

So I gnaw off my own foot and limp, bleeding and weak, to Minneapolis, with what I can cram into my ancient electric blue Jeep.

This is what I take with me into the January morning: my cellphone, my wallet, my snow boots, one hat, one bra, one pair of underwear, and my winter coat. None of the replacements feel like mine yet, but I bring them too. A laptop. My clothes. Blank journals. A guitar.

I don’t even think about everything I leave behind.

Christine Powers turned her love of playing pretend into a BA in Theater. She lives in Minneapolis where she spends her time playing Dungeons and Dragons, convincing the husky not to eat plastic, and working in local government. 

Continent

Our background noise lacks the variety
of nature and the monotony of motors;
you get used to it. Peculiarly
but neatly, the landscape contorts itself
to show you what it has: yes, there are mountains,
some with snow and bears, some
inviting romantic or Nietzschean moods.
Here are our major odorless cities,
flotsamless rivers, the policed and healthy sea.
If you ask the million or so people
inhabiting this landmass whether
they’re satisfied, they’ll reply uncoerced
that they’re happy enough …
We’ve considered allowing more childbirths.
And as you can see there are waste areas
between the agricultural, or vice versa.
Those regions weren’t always waste.
Now they are mostly trodden
by masters of our characteristic discipline,
listening to the layers of voices,
rhetorical or private, that can be
scraped from ruined walls, charred areas,
traces of streetcorners ... From this material,
painstakingly archived, will emerge
a definitive picture of the past and emotions.
We hope to encounter you there.

Pretend I’m Not Here

They say of such evenings you could cut
the atmosphere with a knife, but isn’t what
you sense the chance that the flesh of one
or the other might bleed? I got as
far as the table, a sip of their decent 
wine, the scent of the burnt
dinner. What was it: adultery, money,
the critical mass of years? They were beyond
pretending, she beyond shouting, he,
psychologizing, “I-statements,”
the stuff one learns; they had recaptured
the vitality of an earlier culture,
but couldn’t bring themselves to tell me 
this was a bad time. I could have

said it myself and left. Instead I
poured more wine, buttered a roll, 
and asked if I could sit there while
they fought. I’d eat whatever was in the oven,
not say or repeat a word, but it
would be invaluable for me. “Why?”
she asked, voice bare of tremors. 
“You’re a poet, not a novelist, not always
looking for details.” “Well,” I said,
“we need some details – ” He interrupted:
“It’s probably about how it makes him feel.”

Frederick Pollack is the author of two book-length narrative poems, The Adventure (Story Line Press, 1986; reissued April 2022 by Red Hen Press) and Happiness (Story Line Press, 1998), and three collections, A Poverty of Words (Prolific Press, 2015), Landscape with Mutant (Smokestack Books, UK, 2018), and The Beautiful Losses (Better Than Starbucks Books, 2023). In print, Pollack’s work has appeared in Hudson Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, Manhattan Review, Skidrow Penthouse, Main Street Rag, Miramar, Chicago Quarterly Review, The Fish Anthology (Ireland), Poetry Quarterly Review, Magma (UK), Neon (UK), Orbis (UK), Armarolla, December, and elsewhere. Online, his poems have appeared in Big Bridge, Diagram, BlazeVox, Mudlark, Occupoetry, Faircloth Review, Triggerfish, Big Pond Rumours (Canada), Misfit, OffCourse and elsewhere. Website: www.frederickpollack.com.

Stitch and Tooth

Objects manifest in snow.
A car parks in a corner
of my eye. A bear crosses
the road, chuckling and snorting.
You emerge from the forest
with stich and tooth accomplished.
I constructed you from the bones
of a hundred nightmare lovers.
Your revenge is to live poorly
with ideas of Paris and Rome
simplified and pooled around you.
No sound can baffle the snowfall,
not even the whisper of marsh
parsing its spring manifesto.
Even the bear hardly registers
on the scale of cosmic frequencies.
The parked car’s cooling engine ticks,
in the calm of a lost dimension.
Once upon a time we lived there
with the winter stars dancing
in a slur of winks and expressions
basic to everything’s health.

A Lifetime of Grace

Forgive me for kissing you
while your niece was being baptized
in St. Mary Woolnoth, perched
in the grayest part of the City.
The motorcyclist roaring through
the nave to spit on the altar
distracted me. I turned to you
as if to sunlight. You tasted like
breakfast, your tongue entangled
in mine. You exhaled a whiff
of wintry Essex marshland.
while the priest wielded his Book
of Common Prayer to ensure
a lifetime of grace for the child.
 

A Warp in Time

A man asks me to direct him
to London in 1940.
He wants to suffer the Blitz—
the crash of thousand-pound bombs,
sizzle of incendiaries, screams
of people trapped in the rubble.
He wants to be a fire warden,
a civilian hero, and meet the king
on common ground. I explain
that he needs a warp in time,
a leathery fold in the dark.
He will have to enter naked
and trust strangers to clothe him
when he emerges in a street
of broken facades. He wanders off
to muddle himself in visions
while I with my tattered eyesight
try to keep both feet on the path.

William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire. He has taught at several colleges and universities. His most recent book of poetry is Cloud Mountain (2024).  His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in various journals.

I’ve never wanted you to know that your DNA is almost certainly the reason you were abandoned at two months old; in China  it’s neither legal to surrender a baby nor feasible to keep one with your 47 chromosomes. You would have been a stigma, an insurmountable financial burden, an outcast. I’ve spun a bedtime story about a gentle world that granted you safe passage into my arms when the time was exactly right ten years ago. Would I want now, imagining a mother’s anguish, to chart that same DNA and follow where it leads?

The whole thing, the sky breaking into pieces directly above you, the moment the languageless past unfurls, will strike you as just another Tuesday and I’ll wonder why I did the testing for  the Chinese databases, why I stored away the possibility until you knew how to spit, why I wrote the email, why I conjured her from the darkness of prehistory, just to know that I cannot translate the most important experience of your life, cannot graft this prelude onto your story.

And by the time the word “Mother” cracks in two, refracts at crazy angles, shakes the ground beneath our feet, I’ll have known for decades that your language is that of immediacy. I ask you if you had fun today and you answer on the basis of whether you’re having fun right now. I’ll ask you about the lady: did you like her? You won’t really grasp that you were once a baby in someone’s tummy. If I say that tummy wasn’t mine, I’ll be speaking in tongues. The woman in front of you, her tears alone answering volumes of questions about your prehistory, will just be a lady who is crying. “Sad,” you’ll comment, and I’ll want to apologize for your limitations but will realize that I, too, lack language or schema to name her tears.

She’ll have your brown eyes, your dimples, your elfin chin, and I’m afraid that in the face of those things the story we’ve built together, the fabric of our connected lives, will unravel, a little, but a lot. And here’s the thing: you won’t have a clue. YOU WILL NOT HAVE A CLUE that I’ve been telling you your story since before I met you, that I wrote it on airplanes and whispered it as you drank your nighttime bottles, but it always began with the unknowable. How was our world created, and what was there before there was me, and now the formless void will be  given light and substance, and this part of your story will  not be mine to tell.

I’ll absorb the momentousness that you cannot, even though it will threaten to drown me. I’ll hold your hand; your hand in mine is the deepest thing I know, but maybe when she touches you she’ll hear the music of the spheres. She last saw you in a basket, a scrap of paper bearing your birthdate as her very last gift to you, and maybe I’ll feel the peace of knowing, and maybe I’ll feel the disquiet. I’ll never uncomplicate my name, Mom, or Mama when you really need me. Months, an eternity, your genesis, will have been added to the dawn of your life, and it will be Tuesday, and you’ll note her tears, and you’ll ask for chicken for dinner.

Jennifer Zeuli is a single mom and high-school English teacher who writes between classes and while her children are watching way too much bad TV. She is beginning an MFA program in creative writing at Emerson College despite currently having absolutely no free time. Her work can be found in Oddball Magazine, and forthcoming in Porcupine Literary Journal. 

It’s Sunday, 1 PM, and the British Grand Prix is about to start. I’ve been a Guardian-reading, tofu-eating vegetarian since I was sixteen, so I fully understand the stupid cost and environmental damage of the sport. I ride a bicycle, and petrolheads love nothing more than cutting me up and forcing me into potholes. I’ve no idea how I got into this sport or how Megan, my youngest, fell into watching it with me, but it’s become our thing. My other daughter, Emily, isn’t bothered. She usually sits with us, barely lifting her eyes from her phone, but she’s away this weekend. The summer rain is belting down. We watch it through the patio doors. It makes us glad to be in, but seventy miles south of Derby, the track at Silverstone is bone dry. Rain makes any race more interesting. Sharon has a loaded basket of ironing ready, the board pitched, and the iron heating to a steam. We’ve got our snacks out, chocolate and satsumas, and I have promised to make a brew once the first round of pit stops are done. Since Lewis Hamilton won the World Championship three years ago, it’s all been about Sebastian Vettel and nobody else. Fleetwood Mac’s The Chain plays on the TV, their finest moment (and that’s a hill I will die on). If Hamilton can hold pole position he may yet manage a title challenge. One hundred and twenty thousand people are in the stands, and millions more are watching on global TV. The cars complete the warm-up lap, their tyres are now track temperature, and the V8 engines are revving. It’s five, four, three, two, one, the lights blink red to blue, and it’s go, go, go!

The V8’s shriek as they are unleashed. The sound is of burning fossil fuels; you can almost smell the climate damage from here. Hamilton enters Abbey Corner with Vettel hot on his tail after moving up from third. Webber and Grosjean make contact behind them, they spin, and it’s all a beautiful bedlam. This is the race we want.

Then someone knocks at our front door.

‘What the feck!’ Megan and I share a quick glance and agree to ignore it.

‘I’ll go, shall I?’ Sharon holsters her iron and stomps off to see who it is.

‘Whoever it is, tell them to feck off!’ Megan’s silence confirms she agrees with me. We hear the door open but stay glued to the screen. Sharon raises her voice, ‘Hello,’ she bellows, all surprised, ‘Dan.’

‘What’s he doing here?’ I ask and Megan shrugs as she doesn’t know.

Dan is Emily’s first proper boyfriend, and it’s the full teenage experience. There’s a lot of hand-holding as they take long walks around the local roads. If I spot them, I slow down and start chatting. They part hands and utter single-word responses until I ride on. Sharon has told me to stop it, but I can’t, and I know it amuses her too. Megan thinks it’s hilarious, but she’ll see things differently when she begins courting and I do the same to her.

An appropriate word to describe Dan is gormless, and there’s nothing attractive about the lad. He’s beanpole tall, sickly thin, with turkey legs, but he is always unfailingly polite. His acne has subsided, but he retains the sallow skin. He lacks charm, wit and intelligence and isn’t into movies like our Em is, so we can’t figure out what they talk about. He’s not into music, so I struggle to connect with him. As far as I can see he’s not into anything, and that makes him the simplest kind of life form. He just exists. All this, of course, is another way of saying the thing all Dads think when their daughters bring home a specimen scrotum — he’s not good enough for my girl — but I’m not allowed to protest, rail against him or share my conclusion aloud.

Sharon tells me it’s adolescent love; I shouldn’t be so quick to judge. But I know that she knows, so we both know (and Megan knows best of all) our Em can do a lot better than him. The thought of this lad being what she settles for turns my stomach. I’ve been warned, so I won’t interfere, but I can’t quite bring myself to welcome him. I have even been known to sometimes be rude.

‘Oh, you’re all soaked. You must come in and dry off.’ Sharon’s voice rises to an even higher pitch. Megan and I are aghast. What do you mean, come in? Feck off. Deal with the ballbag at the door. We’re watching the Grand Prix here. Hamilton is still ahead starting the second lap, and there’s sixty more laps to go. It gets worse; he says, ‘Yes.’

I know the rules, we’ve got company, I drop the volume using the remote, but I refuse to turn it down completely. In he slides, the slithering fool. Sharon’s hanging his coat up, and he’s oblivious to the lack of welcome. Megan and I share the sofa, the ironing board blocks off the other one, so he stands. ‘Sit, Dan, sit. These two can move up and make room.’

Dan walks in front of us as we shuffle along until he squeezes in at the far end of the sofa beside the TV. We both Gruffalo a ‘Hello’. The dork doesn’t hear just how much we don’t mean it. He looks at the television and sees it’s on, so surely he must understand this means we’re watching it. It means nothing to him. I mean, seriously, it means nothing to him. ‘Do you watch Formula One?’ I ask.

He shakes his dandruff and mumbles, ‘No.’ There’s an air about him, he’s even more uneasy than normal; he wants something. He perches on the cushion edge, blocking our TV view.

Sharon takes him through the small talk, and we must patiently wait. ‘How are you? How is your mum? You haven’t forgotten Emily’s away for the weekend. Would you like a cup of tea?’

To the offer of tea, he says, ‘Yes, please.’ But answers nothing else.

Megan springs to her feet. ‘I’ll make it,’ and runs, the coward, to the kitchen. I hear her fill the kettle, click it on and then see how she hovers by the door where she can see the TV, monitor the kettle and still take in proceedings with laddie here.

Dan tries to engage me. ‘Are you well, Michael?’

Feckin’ Michael he calls me now. I don’t remember telling him he could do that. I know I terrify him, as I should, it’s what fathers of girlfriends are for. We’ve all been there: it’s a ritual every boy must endure. Being the father of two daughters I can say and do anything, be as blunt as I like, and no boy who wants to return can snipe back. The power could go to my head, but I try not to let it. I’m learning how to maximise the joy of it.

Sharon answers for me. ‘Michael’s fine.’ But she too is keen to move things on. ‘So, Dan, what can we do you for?’

Dan slowly rubs his palms together and keeps his focus upon them.

I wish he’d sit back; I can’t see what’s happening in the race. It could be lap three, maybe four, and Hamilton still has the lead, but with the great, useless lump sitting there, nothing’s certain other than Vettel not being able to find a way through. I pick up the remote, click the subtitles on, and the words scroll across the bottom of the screen, but I see only an occasional word. Good lad Lewis, nice and steady, nothing rash, he tends to try and over-impress, can cut a corner too close, and rip the rubber from his tyres.

‘Do you want tea, Mum, Dad?’ Megan says from the doorway. She throws a grin at me, but I can’t forgive her for abandoning me.

 ‘Yes, please, Munchkin,’ Sharon confirms.

‘Might as well,’ I scratch my arse and then remember we have company.

Dan is rubbing his palms together like he’s trying to start a fire.

‘Dan?’ Sharon attempts to prise an answer out of a clam.

‘Tea, er, yes. Please.’

That wasn’t what she was asking. ‘You’ve popped around for a reason?’

I see a lump move up and down in Dan’s throat, and then he speaks, falters, and tries again until finally, his reedy voice rises from him. I hear the nerves. ‘As you know, Emily and I have been dating for some time.’ On hearing this, Megan reappears in the doorway. I briefly look at Sharon, whose face has frozen. We share a fear of what he may say next. ‘I have very strong feelings for her.’ Dan takes a moment. I need a moment. Sharon makes a kind of ‘uh-huh’ noise to encourage him. I’m not sure I want to hear more. The iron is in her hand, and I wonder if she’s aware it’s there or maybe she has it ready to use on him. ‘I can reassure you both that I treat her with the respect she deserves.’ I feel like my ears have popped, and I wish I could burn them. Megan’s eyes have fallen out of their sockets, and Sharon remembers the iron; she places it on its resting station where it stands at full attention. Dan continues: ‘The utmost respect,’ pauses, ‘I’m here to ask you,’ he takes a breath, I’m holding mine, ‘I feel a duty to do so,’ he pauses again — will the fecker just get on with it. ‘To ask you both for your permission…’ Jeezus! Megan has stepped back as if an explosive blast has erupted in the room. ‘For your permission to take her away for a weekend to celebrate her upcoming birthday. I hope it’s okay for me to ask. I mean no disrespect.’

Finally, he has said what he’s come to say, but it’s not what we thought — thank feck for that. Dan sits an inch or two back, stops rubbing his hands and puts them together in prayer. I can see the TV screen, the cars are doing their thing, but I’m too stunned to assess what the image means. This is for Sharon to lead, I’m happy to be a passenger. The kettle whistles to Megan, she bolts to answer it’s call.

Wait, is that the safety car out? I lean a little further forward. Dan half turns, positions himself to face us both. In doing so, he reblocks the feckin TV from me.

‘Michael, will you turn that TV off?’ Sharon snaps at me.

It’s the kind of snap I cannot ignore. I zap the remote, and decide it’s gloves-off time. If this fecker thinks he can come round here and wind me up, he’s right, but I determine to abandon the pretence and go, go, go for it. My voice is calm and manipulative as if I’m only messing. ‘So, Dan, let me just clarify what you’re asking. You want our blessing to take our daughter away for a weekend. The two of you. Alone. Would this be to a hotel?’

‘Yes, yes, no,’ he blathers. ‘Sorry, not a hotel, a B&B, a nice one. I’ve reserved the room already, but don’t have to pay until we stay.’

‘Oh, you’ve gone ahead already …’ I hang the sentence on a hook and say nothing more for now. Sharon throws me a warning glance.

‘No, no, yes. I mean, I’ve reserved it pending your blessing.’

 ‘Oh, okay. Our blessing is needed.’ I drop my head and roll my eyes to capture his. ‘A B&B, you say. Would that be one bedroom then?’

At this point, Sharon intervenes, ‘Where are you thinking of going?’

Dan is inspired by her interest and drones on — this boy can drone on a lot. I don’t listen, I was enjoying my moment until Sharon rescued him. I stare the boy down, see if I can melt him under my glare. Sharon decides upon a distraction.

‘Chocolate, Dan?’

‘Or take a satsuma if you prefer?’ I say as I watch him pick up the bar.

‘A weekend away sounds lovely. You’re so considerate. I’m sure Emily will love that. How thoughtful of you to come and ask our permission. You have such good manners.’

‘It seemed the right thing to do,’ Dan says, and he couldn’t be more dork-like and self-satisfied if he tried. He breaks the seal on the chocolate and works to extract a chunk. I try to count the squares. Was that four? Two is acceptable, but four is pushing the bounds.

‘Very considerate.’ Sharon says to him and then hollers, ‘Megan, where are you with those teas?’ The kettle clicked ages ago, and Megan went but the sounds of Megan actually making the tea haven’t followed. I’d say she’s listening to all this like a drama on the radio. What about the race, Megan? That’s still going on, you know. The sooner we end this farce, the sooner we can get back to that. Get your skates on girl, you’re needed here, help me get rid of this bothersome pestilence.

‘We’ve something arranged for the weekend of her birthday. When were you thinking of going?’

Have we arranged something? I can’t recall the details, or maybe I haven’t been involved. Dan witters on; blah blah blah, until Sharon is satisfied the plans don’t cross. Dan bites into the chocolate chunks. It’s Sharon’s turn to be wittering as a clearly more relaxed Dan has named a place where we’ve been, but I missed it. I’m considering how I may restore the lad’s more unsettled state. He’s come here to ask to take our precious older daughter away for a dirty weekend. That’s what he’s done. I mean, with all civility, I should, by rights, be chasing him down the road, but no, Sharon is giving him chocolate, and I’m expected to behave. Oh, we are not allowed to call a spade a spade in this house; we have to call it a shovel. The boy is a letch, a usurper, and worse, a dullard. I can’t sit here doing nothing, watching him eat my sweets. I act. ‘I’ll go chase up those teas.’ I jump up and join Megan in the kitchen.

In the kitchen, I jiggle about with indecision and frustration. Megan fails to be my ally. She’s bent over, coiled tight in smothered laughter. As she spoons sugar into mugs, her hand shakes so much that sprinkles spill onto the Formica worktop.

‘Yours, mine,’ she says, indicating two mugs and expecting me to follow her into the living room where the drama has ended, and everything is now cordial. She gives Dan his mug first. Sharon takes hers. I hand Megan hers. We sit down and look at Dan and then the chocolate left on the table. Eight chunks of chocolate are gone. The greedy bastard — for this act alone, the boy can never be forgiven. I hope he doesn’t think he’ll be getting biscuits with his tea. I sit back, hold my mug, and bite my tongue. Eight chunks gone, he has no idea who he’s messing with.

‘So, we’re good then, are we, Michael?’ Sharon says with a tone to her voice that I’m familiar with.

 Yes, Dan, yes. Take Emily away. Have some more chocolate and take a satsuma. Somehow, I find myself saying, ‘And are you taking precautions?’

A relaxed Sharon is letting the clothes see the iron again but has to stop, stunned by my indiscretion. She recovers herself and takes back control. ‘Ignore him, Dan, we know you’ll drive carefully. How is the driving going? Still using your Mum’s car? You did so well to pass your test.’

I smile at Dan; he knows that isn’t what I meant. I sip my hot tea and sit quietly, like a good man. I stare past the irritant and look beyond the TV, adopting a passive expression; I’ve had my run of fun.

Sharon and Dan go on and on about nothing. The weather, his walking here in it, and all that. She shares her mobile number so he can call if he ever needs to. I’m not giving the boy mine. This goes on and on, eternally. I look at Megan, and she looks at me. We are both wondering how Hamilton is getting on in the race. I know I said I was done, and I am, but I could try something else. I sip my tea, turn to Dan, give him a generous smile, and say, ‘So, Dan, don’t you like the Grand Prix at all?’ Dan is taken by surprise by my attempts to engage. He shakes his head, so I try again, ‘It’s an exciting race today. Hamilton secured the pole…’

‘It’s British Grand Prix Day,’ Megan joins with me, ‘The biggest event in motor racing in the UK each year.’

Sharon cuts us short. ‘Dan’s not interested in Hamilton’s pole.’

No, I want to say, the only pole he’s interested in is his own.

‘These two, Dan,’ she gives a click to her tongue and attacks my shirt with the iron. ‘The pain I endure watching the blooming racing every week.’

‘It’s every two weeks,’ Megan corrects her, but is ignored.

Sharon and Dan continue their wittering, and whatever is happening in the Grand Prix continues to be a mystery. Even when the boy has drank his tea, they still carry on. Megan and I can only sip our tea, eat a chunk or two of chocolate and look at our feet. At one point, Megan gathers the empty mugs and takes them to the kitchen.

That was a hint, Dan, but the boy’s so thick he fails to heed it.

Megan can be heard loading up the dishwasher, then we hear nothing, she’s in there doing nothing. Looking through the patio doors, I speak, ‘I think that rain has eased off. You’ll be dryer walking home.’ Dan and Sharon look as well. It hasn’t technically stopped raining, but it might at some point.

‘You wouldn’t send a dog out in that,’ Sharon says dismissively.

No, I wouldn’t, but I would send Dan out in it. I turn back to continue staring the boy out, hoping to mind-melt him into taking the hint and feckin’ leaving. Dear God, make him go. I promise I’ll be nicer to him in the future but let me get back to my Grand Prix. Awkward moments follow as even Sharon runs out of inanities, and irons in silence. Dan stares at the rain. I scramble my brain for an emergency strategy, a plan, a way to end this.

‘What are you up to for the rest of the day, Dan, now you’ve visited us?’ Even Sharon wants him gone. I groan as Dan answers with unnecessary detail. I take none of it in. I hear Megan run up the stairs and enter her bedroom. I know what she’s doing, putting on BBC Radio 5 Live for the race commentary. I wonder how I can escape to join her. I itch to move but stay still.

‘Well, it’s been lovely to see you.’ Sharon tries, ‘Thank you for visiting.’ She holsters her iron and gently places the last of the pressed clothes upon the top of the to-be-put-away pile.

Finally, the boy stands as if he’s a man.

 ‘I’ll see you out,’ I say, jumping up. Sharon falls in behind me. I kindly rush forward and open the front door for Dan, but he stands there, looking out at the weather. ‘See, it’s easing off, you’ll be grand.’

Sharon helps Dan with his coat, and I give him a little shove but then she waivers, ‘You can’t walk home in this, Dan.’

He can, he can. ‘Can we lend you an umbrella?’ I smile, offer him a hand to help him over the threshold.

‘No, you’re alright,’ he knocks my hand back, pulls his collar up and looks scornfully at the moody sky.

‘Michael, grab your keys and give Dan a lift. I can’t let him walk home in this.’

Seriously? Let the drip drown for all I care, coming round here, asking to shag our daughter, and wasting my time when the Grand Prix is on. Sharon retrieves the car keys for me and then pushes me out of the door. Dan follows only after I’ve got in and started the engine, and then takes an age saying goodbye, and Sharon indulges him.

Even as I drive, he witters on. It’s a ten-minute journey but a lifetime passes.

I’ve turned the radio coverage on. All I can make out is the sounds of engines being pushed to their limit, brakes squealing, increasing and decreasing speed and commentators going ballistic. No one is offering clarity on where Hamilton is, and Dan’s ponderous drone overlays everything. What is happening?

I pull up outside his mother’s house. He thanks me; the boy has manners, I’ll give him that. He asks again if he did the right thing by coming around, and I assure him that Sharon appreciates his efforts. He finally walks to the door, wet rain drips from him, he’s a murky puddle that blends with the dreary weather.

I three-point turn, pump the radio up and head home. I drive slowly, delay getting back, determined to know where we are in the race. Feck me, Hamilton’s out. He had a tyre failure on lap eight. Vettel then took the lead and has held onto it ever since. I might as well catch the last ten minutes back at home, but Vettel winning again, it turned out to be a donkey race.

As soon I’m in the door, before I can put the TV on, I get the treatment I expect. Apparently, I was rude and Megan only slightly less so. ‘She ran away,’ I exclaim. That may be true, comes the reply. She has been spoken to, and it’s not a defence for my behaviour. Finally, the dressing down done, Sharon returns to putting the freshly ironed clothes away and I can turn the TV on. The race is over, and the endless panel discussion has begun. Vettel didn’t win. A gearbox went on him, and I missed it all.

Dan came to our wedding when Sharon and I finally married the following year. He was Emily’s guest, not mine. In the photographs, he’s on the edge of the family line-up; Sharon insisted he be included. Hamilton went on to win the F1 Championship a number of times, but his best driving days are now behind him. Where once we had to endure Sebastian Vettel, now we have the tedium of Max Verstappen, Formula One is back to being blisteringly boring and I’ve stopped watching it, as has Megan. My latest phone upgrade has an app that erases unwanted items in a picture, and it’s one of the joys of my mature life that I can finally delete Dan as if he never existed. Emily moved on and proved herself brutal in cutting him out of her life. He married some other victim. She lives with Tom, a movie buff, who knows better than to interrupt us when we’re busy. I quite like him. Recently, at a fancy wedding, he asked if he could marry my daughter. I said he could marry both of them. He appreciates my wit, replying, ‘No, thanks, Emily’s enough for me.’

Emily’s now his. Which just leaves Megan. She has this jack-the-lad travelling companion. She pops home every now and then, but comes alone, leaves him at a baggage drop to pick up later. I’m looking forward to meeting him.

Mike Murray was a winner of the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair in 2022. His work is published in Envoi, The Honest Ulsterman, The Cabinet of Heed and Here Comes Everyone. He was the winner or placed in competitions run by IHG, Curtis Brown, Exeter Literary Festival, Parracombe Prize, Fish Memoir and Writing East Midlands. He lives in South West England, but is London/Irish born.

Listen to a reading of No Thief by Mark Burrow:

The Old Lady sits on a wooden chair in the doorway of her ground floor flat, shoutin at the scummers who take their staffies an pit bulls for poos an wees on the patch of grass opposite where the sign ses, No Dogs Allowed.

Boy, she ses. Come here, boy.  

She drinks budget gin an smokes fags. I know she’s only callin cos she wants me to go to the shops.

Her arms an legs are skinnier than French Fries.

Can you get a couple of bits for me? she ses.

It’s near dark an there’ll be idiots hangin outside the shop an offie, the ones who think it’s funny to call me a soap-dodger, makin fun of my mum an if I shout at them to shut their big mouths I’ll be stabbed the same as that kid in the park.

The Old Lady usually gives me cash money, though, so I go, Alright, what do you want?

She pulls her white leather purse from under her mangy jumper with the ash burns. The leather is flakin off the purse like eczema. Don’t you ever go to school? she ses.

Yeah.

You been wandering about all day. I’ve been watching you.

There’s no school.

And the rest.

It’s true. It’s incest day.

I doubt that. Inset’s what you mean. They wouldn’t be having those now in the term.

Are you a teacher?

In another life, she ses, pullin a couple of fat notes from her purse an she goes, Now, I want my change.

I reach for the money.

You deaf?

I’m not gunna steal it, am I?

That’s what I’m asking.

Nah nah, I’m no thief.

She tells me all the alcohol an fags she wants like she’s stockin up for a birthday party on New Years Eve an she goes, Can you remember all that?

Yeah. I’m not dumb.

I’m not suggesting you are.

She eyeballs me.

What?

Go on—tell me what I want.

Fucken teachers an their tests. Exams 24-7. I feel the pressure of rememberin. Brain cells stressin XL-style.

I speak an she ses, Try again.

So I take a deep breath an have a second crack an she nods, handin me the notes.

Correct, she ses. Now hurry up and I’ll let you have some of the change.

I bounce off, touchin the money in my pocket. I pass the row of two-storey flats where the disabled an special needs live with their walkin frames an wheelchairs an ramps. I take my chances an use the alleyway to reach the main road, lookin at the blocks of flats an the maze of walkways above that connect the balconies. If I ever get chased, I can escape easy once I’m up in the flats, losin anyone tryin to hunt me, cos no one knows the turns an hidin places like I do. I peer round a wall at the shops an offie an see two psychos, Robert an Junior, sittin on steps chattin shit to Tracey Clarke. There ain’t no chance of me gettin into the shop with them out front as I know they’ll start on me for sure, wantin to flex in front of her. I didn’t realise Robert was out after bein arrested for shootin a boy in the face with his air pistol. Robert’s the worst. Seriously twisted. Don’t get me started.

There’s another set of shops. It’s a longer walk but it should be safer. I can’t believe I have the money in my pocket an I think about goin to Maccy D’s an orderin the lot. Big Mac. Nuggets. A full on feast.

I’d buy food for Tracey Clarke too. What is she doin with those two losers?

It don’t make no sense.

The bell tings as I enter the shop. A woman is behind the counter an I’m surprised as usually it’s a man. She has a bindi an a bright coloured sari. There’s a smell of spices an the radio is playin music where the drums beat mega fast an a lady sings in a high pitched voice in Hindi or Bengali. I look at the woman an she is shiny an sparkly an it makes me realise how dirty I am in my clothes.

I put the bottles on the counter, yankin my hands back quick so she don’t see my black fingernails. I ask her for the fags.

She laughs an ses, I can’t serve you.

Eh? 

You’re underage.

It’s not for me, I swear. I’m helpin an old lady who can’t walk.

Where’s your ID?

Nah Nah.

The bloke who runs the shop comes out. He wears a long striped shirt that is tight over his pot belly.

Seein me, he ses, Ah, Jay.

The woman shakes her head an ses, He wants to buy alcohol and cigarettes.

It’s for an old lady, I tell them, pullin out the wad. Look, how would I have this for myself?

The man nods at the woman.

You’re going to serve him? she ses.

He don’t speak an she huffs an disappears through the red, white, blue an yellow strips of the fly screen in the doorway to the side of the counter. 

What do you want? ses the man.

I ask for the fags an add onto the counter my tax of a couple of chocolate bars an Dr Peppers.

Anything else? asks the man, usin a black bag of the thinnest plastic to put the booze an fags in. How is your mum doing? he ses.

Yeah, fine, I go.

I hate it when fools ask about mum. All they really want to know is how crazy she is from drinkin an if I should be put in Care. 

He gives me change, plus an extra bag of crisps for free, holdin his finger to shoosh me so the woman don’t know. We bump fists an he laughs, tellin me to take care. I walk out of the shop an stand on the street. I’m not a thief like the others so I ain’t stealin the Old Lady’s money. I walk along the road, seein the buses an bikes an cars go by. I head to the park. The bag’s cheap plastic is strainin from the weight of the bottles like it’s gunna split. It’ll be dark soon but I go an chill on the grass. I check around me, touchin the change in my pocket, lookin at the orangeade sky and openin a Dr Pepper. A man by the trees starts playing a saxophone. I guess he can’t practice in his flat without annoyin fools. Everyone’s always arguin an stressin about noises in the flats. Their ears can’t handle the TV an the bass an the beats. I stretch out on the grass, concentratin to cut out the sound of traffic an the homeless hangin by the public toilets, shoutin an screamin on Special Brew an Tenants an drugs. I listen to the man blowin into the sax, thinkin how mental it is when noise turns into music. There’s a sadness I can touch for sure. A kinda feelin like when I decide not to go to school in the mornin, cept I don’t want to stay indoors either, neither, or go an do my wanderin on the estate cos it might be cold an pissin with rain an fools wantin to hunt me.

Everythin turned grim after my bro, Mike, was sent to young offenders.

I have that twisty feelin. It’s almost nice to let myself be dirge. I don’t know, the sound of the sax with my eyes shut tight an the last rays of heat from the sleepy sun on my face an the grass underneath me, somehow it makes my head an heart go peaceful like the cuddle me an mum had after dad walked out on us.

I’ll take the Old Lady her cigarettes, booze an money tomorrow.

I’m no thief.

Jason Smith ain’t like everybody else. 

Mad how a boy was stabbed in this park an is dead.  

Mark Burrow has published a novella, Coo, which is about an alcoholic turning into a pigeon in a world where people are turning into birds (Alien Buddha Press). His short stories have appeared in a range of titles, such as Literally Stories, Cerasus, Flight of the Dragonfly, Punk Noir Magazine and Hunger, an anthology of stories published by Urban Pigs Press. He lives in Brighton in the UK and can be found on social at @markburrow20

Listen to a reading of this story by Matthew:

I lick my mother’s cremains off the sunbaked highway, meticulously, my muddy tongue flickering across the smooth double yellow line, sucking cremains from soggy cigarette butts, kissing kaleidoscopic clumps of muck. Sweaty paramedics scoop me toward their ambulance with the majesty of rainbow sherbet ice-cream into a waffle cone.

My mother lit my head on fire cooking blueberry pancakes when I was seven. Whenever I eat at an IHOP, I inhale singed eyelashes and scorched eyebrows. My husband lost his face in Afghanistan. A humongous roadside bomb ripped through Adam’s blast-proof truck. I stood frozen on fire as my mother smothered the flames and rolled me across the cold linoleum with the frenzied reckoning of a suicide bomber.

Freddy Krueger sleeps in my bed, our children catapulted into conniptions, Adam rarely leaves the house. Reality is creepy enough without seeing a monster in Taco Bell. I whisper lullabies into the deformed hole where Adam’s ear melted off.

“I hit the median. Mom’s urn careened out the sunroof.”

“Why lick her cremains?”

“I always wanted to ride in the back of an ambulance,” I say.

“I’m just happy you’re alive,” Adam says.

Adam’s vision is perfect. Jesus spared his eyeballs. Sometimes, I wish Adam’s eyeballs were burned to dust instead of his gorgeous face. Our boys are passed out in the backseat. They’re old now. Adam no longer petrifies them. They’re monsters. They terrify us. We keep them close to make sure they don’t overdose. Both boys moved back into our basement last winter. Adam says that politicians send teenagers to die in foreign deserts because it makes them feel alive.

“Presidents can’t be shot,” Adam says, “they’re too delicate.”

“This generation is so lazy—nobody assassinates presidents anymore,” I say.

Adam laughs. At least, I think he does. It’s impossible to tell. Adam’s wrong though—presidents can be assassinated. I drill a hole in the trunk of my Kia Telluride and sculpt a sniper’s nest out of sleeping bags and urinate into Gatorade bottles, waiting all weekend in the Walmart parking lot for the president’s limousine. I neither ambush nor fire at the Beast, but I would have failed. Hornet ammunition from Adam’s bolt-fire rifle is a carnival of chicken eggs. The president’s heavily armored vehicle is bulletproof, blast-resistant, sealed to withstand biochemical attacks.

“How was your weekend?” Adam asks.

“Great. Aunt Abigail stopped smoking Marlboro’s out of her tracheotomy hole.”

Adam nods. I smell rancid and alive.

“That’s great, baby.”

Adam emboldens my extramarital affairs. Making love to a burn victim is like struggling to swallow a sparkle of fireflies.   

Mucus oozes down the half-empty urn, beachballs bounce with each fat pothole, the plastic beach toys scratch my mosquito bitten ankles; an elderly surfer flicks an ash from a canoeing spliff.

“Nothing worse than sunburns,” a mother warns her toddler.

“Asinine,” Adam says when the woman and little girl vanish out of earshot.

I spray Adam’s face with the Banana Boat 360 Sunscreen Mist ’til it oozes down the craters on the dark side of his cheeks into the scarred bunkers of Jalalabad under his Adam’s Apple.

“Think the kids will be safe?”

“It’s only one afternoon.”

Adam lost his face faster than my virginity in the Burger King parking lot.

“They’ll be fine.”

We build a sandcastle and puncture its moat into the Atlantic Ocean. Juvenile delinquents venture closer to inspect our kingdom—glimpses of Adam daze the younger children and an elderly lady shrinks as if under the energy of a Shia bomb. Adam rolls a spliff and sprinkles Mom’s cremains into a gutted cigar crammed with Granddaddy Purple. I drizzle cremains into a labyrinth of turrets and parapets.

We hold hands, alive, courageous, fearless of whatever combat awaits us in the spacious living room of our house donated by the Wounded Warrior Project. The television spills lies onto our front lawn as Adam pulls my Kia Telluride into the garage. Our children slouch, drooling into their La-Z-Boys.  

“They’re still breathing—bring the Narcan!”

We crack our swollen knuckles hard ’til dawn, crying to a bulbous moon washing my mother’s cremains into the ocean. Old America gone forever. I feel its funeral in my bones. A naked America bubbles before bloodshot eyeballs in a carnival of fireflies. 

Matthew Dexter lives and breathes in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. His fiction has been published in hundreds of literary journals and dozens of anthologies. Best known for eating shrimp tacos and drinking enough Pacifico to kill six blue marlins, he’s the Lil Wayne of literature. Matthew is the author of the novel The Ritalin Orgy and the story collection, Slumber Party Suicide Pact.

Listen to Judy Darley reading Tall Girl & Lazlo The Terrible

They stand in a row, silhouetted by the sunlight falling through my doorway. I see at once they’ll be trouble.

“Only one St Anne’s student allowed at a time.” I tap the sign by the cash register.

The trio loiter by the menstrual products, and then the tallest shoves the smallest, making him stumble. “Esti’s epileptic. I’m his designated carer.”

Before I can bark at them to leave, they shuffle deeper in. The middle one grabs a Snickers bar.

I roar: “Put that down!”

The tall girl blinks thickly-inked lashes. “Dav’s diabetic. Needs sugar in case his glucose levels drop. Don’t want him collapsing on your floor, do ya?”

I hold out my hand. “£1.50.”

She sniffs. “Wanna see a magic trick?”

I pause too long and she snatches the chocolate from her pal, whips the wrapper off and chomps the whole thing down. “Tadaaah! Made it disappear.” Only caramel and peanuts muffle her triumph.

Tall Girl’s bravado brings you to mind, my Lazlo and your infallible charm. Your easy smile made the violence all the more bewildering.

She reminds me of myself too, thirty years ago when butter wouldn’t melt and insults never stuck. Took me years to understand the insults didn’t bounce off but burrowed in: parasites feasting on my self-worth.

My hand’s still outstretched. I twitch the fingers. “£1.80.”

“Hey!” Her outrage is comical. “Why’s it gone up?”

I shrug. “Your performance bored me. I’m owed compensation.”

“Haven’t got any cash. Could work it off, if you like.”

“You want a job?” I look at her sceptically. She stares back, unfazed. Cutting scars show pink through the thin sleeves of her once-white shirt. “You can start tomorrow, delivering newspapers. Be here at 6 a.m. Should be done by 8.”

Plenty of time to get to school, if that matters.

She gawps. “Who needs papers that early? Who needs papers at all? My mum gets her news online.”

“Be here on time or the job disappears faster than that Snickers.” I keep my eyes on hers. “Four days a week, Tuesday to Friday. One week trial.”

“Oh, trial is it?” She beams, finding a story to latch onto. “My dad’s on trial. He’s a bad man.”

I offer a curt nod. “My son too.” I lean on the counter, watching for a reaction.

She side-eyes me. “That true?”

I think of you, my Lazlo, when you were small, and the stories I let you believe. After we left your dad, we’d go to Nightingale Valley on weekends, pockets heavy with sour apples for the goat in the field. Signposts at the edge of Nightingale Valley confessed no nightingales had sung there in your lifetime, or mine.

The goat’s name was Curry, which made you giggle. “Here, Curry, eat the apples so you’re tasty for our tea!” You hunched your body and I knew from your grimace you were playing at being the witch in Hansel and Gretel. “I’ll fatten you up, then we’ll gobble you up!”

You tilted your head. “Listen! Goblins.”

The screeches were squirrels spatting overhead, but I nodded. “Definitely goblins.”

Where branches hung low above last autumn’s leaves, you wriggled in. “Let’s cover ourselves like the Babes in the Wood.”

But the Babes died in that wood and I shook my head. “No, let’s eat our sandwiches instead.”

Clouds rushed into your expression, banishing the sun, and my pulse leapt. Before I could grab, you were running faster than your short legs should have allowed.

My feet slid through mud as panic shivered through me. Treetops crowded out sunlight. “Where are you? Will I have to eat your lunch too? Even the chocolate?”

My shout prompted an explosion of pigeons bursting skywards like shrapnel grenades.

I rushed in the direction you’d gone, skirting steep drops down to the rocky stream where submerged branches feigned at being drowned children.

Everything’s fine. I’d already become good at telling myself fairytales, as well as you. Looking at myself in the hostel mirror, tracking my black eyes shifting from purple to sunrise-orange. Everything’s going to be just fine.

Then I saw you ahead on the bank, sunshine and smiles restored as you pointed to a pied wagtail. “Look, a nightingale!”

“Yes,” I agreed. “Well spotted.”

“Has Dad ever been here?”

I thought of lying, but shook my head. “No. Maybe you can bring him one day.”

Your gaze was steadier than my heartbeat. “Promise?”

“Promise.” I resisted the urge to cross my fingers, and held your gaze.

I remember being Tall Girl’s age not long before you were born, feeling fierce, hungry, perpetually on edge. My fairytale to her about you is a double bluff that crows, she believes my sweet Lazlo’s frightening.

I press my palm to my spine’s ache, shushing PTSD tremors.

At your trial they showed photos of the woman unlucky enough to be on duty in the corner shop you robbed. Dark hair patched with white like mine; eyes swollen shut; boot-prints smudging her pelvis purple.

Despite what other folks might say, I don’t believe you’re a terrible person. Maybe just a bit damaged, but aren’t we all? A broken vase can be glued back together, even if the cracks always show.

“My boy’s out soon,” I say. “Maybe you’ll get to meet him.”

Tall Girl wears her grin like I once wore smoky eyeshadow and scowls. “Can’t wait. See you tomorrow at the crack of dawn.” She shudders extravagantly. “C’mon, lads, lunch hour’s nearly dead.”

Trailed by her posse, she whisks from the shop. I watch her go, seeing how she flicks her hair, short skirt swinging.

I perfected that dance at her age and kept it up until I was heavy with my Lazlo.

I think of the tampons I watched her pocket and hope she needs them for longer than I did.

Judy Darley is a British author, journalist and creative workshop leader. She is passionate about walking in nature and endlessly intrigued by the complexities of the human mind. Judy is the author of short fiction collections The Stairs are a Snowcapped Mountain (Reflex Press), Sky Light Rain (Valley Press) and Remember Me to the Bees (Tangent Books). Her words have been shared on BBC radio, aboard boats and on coastal paths, as well as in museums, caves, a disused church and artists’ studios. She’s been artificially alive since 1985. Find Judy at http://www.skylightrain.com and https://x.com/JudyDarley

Listen to a reading of Between Silences by Dave Butler:

She lay shivering on the rough boards. Burnt smell of sawn wood. Sun-warmed creosote. Somewhere amongst the reeds, the glissade of landing waterfowl. A rapid squabble.

She squinted upward. The self-same cloud backlit and ponderous that had snagged the sun still hoarded it, a coin in a miser’s pocket. Across the lake brindled cows looked on, impassive

Twice a day in flip-flops and beach-robe she made the descent, regardless of the sky. To push a slow breaststroke into sunlit wavelets; or when wind chased puckered shadows; or while the surface bristled with susurrate rain. She shut her eyes, watched scribbles drift latterly. To lose track of clock and calendar, here, between yawning silences. Weeks eliding into months. She’d got here with the gorse bright as egg-yolk. Now the wild fuchsia spilling over dry-stone walls were festooned with enamel pendants. Back up at the guesthouse, the hydrangea were a startling baby-blue that brought back childhood visits. Their globes, when she’d arrived, were washed-out teabags she’d deadheaded with a secateurs she found atop a mummified gardening-glove. A grand-aunt’s hand.

Torrid, was Auntie Maudie’s pronouncement. An old woman in yellow bed-jacket, shrunk into a bedside chair in a Nursing Home. Live-eyed yet. Poor Alice, you’ve had a torrid time of it. For months on end, that was the very word Alice had lived there. Opprobrium, brooding like a teenager. Whispers. The clipped accent. She hadn’t belonged, never would have. In the interrogation room, that same clipped accent. Sux. Tin. At one time Murray would smile when she’d tease him over it. The pair of inquisitors like one of those couples-not-couples who host TV breakfast shows. The policewoman taking the initiative, unsmiling.

A shiver overtook her. The headlong, insomniac flight home the very day her passport was returned. What she hadn’t been prepared for was the media scrum in Arrivals. At first she’d failed to connect the barrage of cameras with her homecoming, was bemused to hear her first-name bandied about: Alice, over here, Alice! The sucker-punch wasn’t long coming. It hurried her through them, eyes to the floor.

So it had made the papers here, too. She’d been naïve to imagine otherwise. Murray had been an All Black before she’d met him, before torn ligaments put a stop to his gallop. Over there that was royalty. Throughout the North Island trial by media was inevitable. Once he’d gone public. But what, precisely, had he…? How she’d pleaded, Christ’s sake Murray don’t leave me alone with…? A deeper spasm seized her. She didn’t want to think. Mustn’t. She pivoted onto elbows. Eyes dazzled, narrowed. Now the barest hem of cloud held the sun captive. The lake, tannin-opaque, sheened as though newly polished.

She levered herself fully upright. Hands on hips she stretched once to either side, gripped her ankles, straightened. Then she took three rapid strides and plunged.

Before she saw it instinct halted her. Perhaps she’d heard the slow rumble over the gravel drive. Momentarily, she imagined the black SUV portended the impossible - Murray Graham had somehow traversed the twelve thousand miles. Tracked her, even to the wilds of Mayo. It was absurd, but that didn’t prevent the gut-wrench, the drying saliva. She’d fallen out of practice with people, long before the present choreography in surgical-masks.

Like as not it was a stray guest. Though that made not the blindest sense with the whole country in suspended animation. Cautiously, fretfully she advanced, stopped once she’d laid a palm against the ancient yew. From under here she could see there was no-one in the driver’s seat. Yellow reg. Northern. But neither was there anyone around the front of the guesthouse. She wished now she’d hit upon a better stratagem than to conceal the keys beneath the hydrangea whenever she’d go down to the lake. Hallo! she called, swallowing sandpaper. Anybody there? With the main road empty, there was no longer its incessant tinnitus to muffle sound. A tic, tic from the vehicle. A swallow’s psychotic shriek as it careened under the eaves. The distant derision of crows. The French windows glared.

If it was a passer-by, where were they? In all the weeks she’d been here there hadn’t been a single caller. Not even the postman. Her grand-aunt had been in the Nursing Home for going on two years by all accounts. She tried to bring to focus a glint stabbing from under the blue hydrangea. The keys with their bottle-opener fob? If so, the building was sanctuary still. She looked about her, hesitant to abandon the dark yew, though out of the sun her swimsuit clung cold. Was anyone waiting? Watching. Tic, tic, went the cooling engine.

You’re being fucking stupid Alice. She scarcely voiced the words. Resolute, she set out nimbly for the front steps. The moment the glitter resolved itself into the key-fob she swept it up, opened the hall-door, pushed it shut behind; the slide and click, the flap’s slap and drag over flag and step. Leaning back into its heft, she allowed the keys spill onto the glass coffee-table. She closed her eyes, inhaled methodically.

A thump startled her eyes open. From the storeroom? The kitchen?

Something had altered. Some quality of the light. There was a strangeness, nothing quite matching the dimensions of memory. You’re being fucking stupid today she whispered, or thought - she still hadn’t let out the breath. A kettle’s rumble ruptured the silence. The abrupt slide of a drawer. Cutlery being rifled, no attempt to conceal the clamour. Across the frosted glass of the kitchen door, a shadow rippled.

One hand instinctively went to her throat to clutch the beach-robe. Behind her, the other groped, blind, for the door-knob. Her eyes darted about the flagged interior for anything that might serve for a weapon. By the hat-stand a golf umbrella. A bamboo walking-cane. As her hand eased the door-knob around she felt the absurdity of being in flip-flops. Then, impossibly, the knob was turning with a will of its own. There was a mechanical clunk, just before the door slammed into her back. The impetus bundled her forwards. She stumbled, a flip-flop sliding on the flags. As she struggled to right herself, a figure emerged from the kitchen.

She huddled to one corner of the sofa. The older man, fists in pockets, continued to stare out the French windows. The other stared down at her. Inquisitive more than aggressive. From where she sat he might have been seven feet tall. She was conscious her fingers were still agitating the neck of the beach-robe. Of one flip-flop dangling. Her other foot was cradled naked beneath her thigh. Her swimsuit was dank now, reptilian. I simply don’t see how that can be true, Alice. A smile that wasn’t a smile. That had no mirth in it.

Maybe a week before lockdown? she tried once more. Maudie explained to me how she was hoping to open the place up again. In time for the new season, like.

No, he shook his head, disappointed, a gesture he attempted to share with the man by the window. Stockier, silent. She’d noticed him taking in the blister-pack of anti-depressants. I don’t see how that can be true, either. Why not? Because this place is tied up in a government Fair Deal scheme is why not. That’s what pays her bills there, Alice. See, it can’t be a going concern, it’s against the rules.

She considered this. And yet the old woman had asked her to put the guesthouse in order. Bit by bit. At her own pace. And that was the phrase that had unlocked it, made the whole thing possible. Small tasks. Achievable tasks. Like deadheading the hydrangea. Anything more might loom large as a cliff-face paralysing the will. Maudie had never been married, nor shown any interest by all accounts. Brusque. Childless. The maiden-aunt, Alice’s father dubbed her with his corrosive flippancy. All the same she’d understood.

You don’t believe me, why don’t you ask her yourself? This time the men exchanged a significant glance, though Alice couldn’t ascertain quite what it meant.

Without turning, the other angled his pate toward her. Oiled hair receding above a forehead of chevrons. Tell us this, how long is it you were stuck in Limbo away over in Auckland? Nordy accent. Her answer was unmediated, as though to hesitate would imply she were fabricating. Five months. While a file was prepared for the Crown Prosecutor. Then, too, we had to wait for the Coroner’s report. Which, trumped the shorter man, was inconclusive. She swallowed. She had to remain calmly factual. After which they returned the passport. Even as she spoke her mind was running the treadmill. Don’t leave me on my own with Amy. Please, Murray! Not that she’d imagined for a minute she could actually harm the child. But for months beforehand she’d been buffeted by emotions. The static of anxiety. Whelming sadness. Then, after the caesarean, it was as though someone had kicked the plug. All energy, sapped. All confidence. Every task monstrous. A lack of any feeling beyond dull exasperation at the interloper. Its insatiable neediness.

They were waiting for her to go on. The case was dropped, she shrugged. Insufficient evidence to proceed to court. For those five months, smiled the taller man, you abandoned your job at the hospital. Why was that? She saw again the stares and whispers once Murray had gone public. How much of it had been in her head? I was only ever an agency nurse.

And here? interpolated the Ulsterman. I’m sorry? And, he pronounced, here?

Look, I don’t know what you guys want. She made to rise, her hand tightening the neck of the beach-robe. I don’t know what the fuck you’re doing here. The tall man’s face blossomed into surprise. Aware of her bare foot she furiously kicked away the remaining flip-flop which slapped pathetically against the mantelpiece and dropped. If you’ve any problem, go ask my Auntie Maudie. And how can we do that, Alice? Aye, concurred the balding man, who was examining minutely a porcelain cat, how do we go about that, he looked at her, if you don’t mind me asking? She stared into the empty maw of the fireplace. Nursing Homes had become No-Go areas, even to closest relatives. You could phone them?

We could, nodded the tall man, only what would be the point? Maud Conlon died a week Tuesday. She scrutinised him, to read what was behind the mask of his smile. No public funeral of course, he added, if that’s what’s bothering you.

She stood at the French windows, forehead pressed to the glass, to its haptic cooling. The garden filling with dusk. Flowers leached to greyscale. A solitary blackbird erupted through the shrubbery threading bubbles of alarm. And an old house is never entirely quiet. It constantly recalibrates. It was as well, because she dreaded the absence of sound. The baby-monitor’s accusatory static. By the time she’d roused herself and gone to the nursery, the infant had been blue-lipped, waxen to the touch.

Dusk was inhabiting the interior, too. But she’d no wish to turn on a light. Sometimes it was enough to live. Over fifteen months she’d come to understand the enclosed orders, their vows of silence. If it weren’t for the erratic anguish. The voices.

Alice was so unused to speaking aloud that the mobile intimidated like a dangerous animal. She’d practiced her query beforehand, tentative as an immigrant using a foreign language. No, Maud Conlon hadn’t passed, why did she imagine…? Who is this, please? I see. Your aunt has had shortness of breath, but that might be any number of things. Yes of course you’ll be informed, if.

This wouldn’t last. At any time, the pandemic might come to an end. A vaccine be found. The virus infiltrate the Nursing Home. Probate would run its course. Was she ready to go back into the world? To face the big tasks?

There was sore need of agency nurses.

She looked across to the grey tent of the yew where earlier she’d stood. Gazing on vacancy. The gravel was undisturbed. The SUV might never have been there.

Dave Butler is an Irish novelist, short story writer, playwright, poet and actor. He is the author of five novels, two volumes of collected prose, four volumes of poetry and two works of non-fiction. Jabberwock, his latest novel, published under pen-name Dara Kavanagh, is available from Dedalus Books.

To learn more about David and his work, visit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Butler_(author)

St. Ita’s advice to her fosterling, Brendan the Navigator

Listen to a reading of this poem by Cassie:

Suck the salt-tipped stones 
dry of their callouses; 
mould their bellies round like
the body of the whale  
you will ride,

your island home:
permeable 
ephemeral,

the glut of gulls
your guide.

Burst through pillars of salt—
you are no Lot’s wife.

Listen to the birds,
for they hold wisdom
like periwinkles in their mouths.

And when you find that Promised Land,
lie down, kiss the earth
as you would our Saviour’s feet.
Delight in the moss 
beneath your lips.

But always remember to 
love the sea,
for without love, 
we are all adrift. 

Only in the US

Listen to a reading of this poem by Cassie:

It’s the third night you won’t sleep. 
Headlights, an ambulance, a car door
the moon even—
all these things send your tiny hands fluttering,

pummelling polka dots like 
a legion of butterflies trapped in glass. 
You whimper. 
I groan and pick you up for the umpteenth time.

Tonight even the white noise machine 
has lost its clout. 
I ache for sleep I yearn for sleep what I wouldn’t do 
for an hour, for twenty minutes 
if you’d let me but you won’t.

So I scroll on my phone.
There’s been a school shooting, this time in Tennessee,
who knows where it’ll be next month or next week 

or tomorrow, perhaps. 

I hold you close: 
cheek to cheek, chest to chest, breath to breath.

Your grandma once asked would I return for good

I said no.  

I never want to watch the school bus pull away 
and think you may not come home. 

The Statue of Liberty bows her great head, September 2020 (A Reminder)

Listen to a reading of this poem by Cassie:

Greed was the granite: to give 
was to fail and the cult of me
ascended above your tired
head like Icarus and his lusty wings. Your poor 
are left to die. Your 
children lie huddled 
in ice-cold cages. Your dead are flung in masses
as the virus rages, while those yearning to 
keep your fragile head aloft can’t breathe.
This is the land of the free, 
where the screams of the wretched
go unheard and refuse
piles in plastic shrines to the god of 
more.  Your 
rich grow richer, their pockets teeming
with hoards stored on some foreign shore.
Here, right no longer matters.  They will send
in their goons and their tear gas, these 
bald-faced buffoons and the
Jim Jones at their helm, their morality homeless,
abandoned, cut adrift on some tempest-tost
sea. To question is to 
betray: ‘The state is me,’
he growls, ‘I 
am the state.’ (Ecstasy as they witness him lift
a glass of water using only one hand).  ‘My 
wish is your command.’ And they fawn like blood-sick gnats to a glowing lamp,
standing with pistols held high beside 
every bleach-laced lie and every razed mailbox, exulting the
sun king on his golden 
throne.  Democracy has been shown the door.   

Author’s Note: This is a found poem and the last word (or two) of each line is from Emma Lazarus’ ‘The New Colossus’, cast on the Statue of Liberty.  The line containing ‘can’t breathe’ is a deliberate use of the Black Lives Matter slogan ‘I can’t breathe’ and ‘Here, right no longer matters’ references Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman’s poignant statement ‘Here, right matters.’

Cassie Smith-Christmas is originally from Virginia, USA and lives in Galway, Ireland. Her novel The Huguenot’s Chest was a winner in the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair 2023. She holds a PhD in Celtic and Gàidhlig from the University of Glasgow and her writing has appeared in Southword, Aimsir, Crannóg; Causeway/Cabhsair; Gutter; Tangled Locks; The Milk House; The Wild Word; Poets’ Republic; and Washing Windows IV: 100 Irish Women Write Poetry. She has also been shortlisted in competitions such the Highland Literary Salon’s Northwords competition; the Frances Browne Multilingual Poetry Competition; and The Best in Rural Writing 2023.

My Hungry Lover

That summer I was an adulteress
and it exhausted me. I whispered lies 
to my family and saw them flinch. 

In a room dark with vacancy
I met my lover. Day and night, 
we lay entwined and bit by bit 

she ate me into a perfect shape, peeling
the flesh from my bones; sculpting hollows, 
she trimmed me like a butcher.

My lover was ravenous, and I embraced her - 
‘eat me, eat me’, I whispered, and she devoured me 
with her rituals as I sunk into her efforts.

My heart burned as together we purged
old habits, until one day, my family saw 
how brittle I was and easily broken.

They stormed my lies with ultimatums,
but I could not let my lover go.
She’s not real they screamed. 

I nearly believed it until I spotted her image 
on the back of a spoon and knew then 
how nothing would never be enough. 

Val Harris is a poet/author from Surrey. She has been writing poetry for ever, but over the past few years her adult writing was set aside in favour of writing poetry for children (which she still does).

Her adult poetry has been published in various magazines. In the early part of this century, she ran a local Poetry Society Stanza group.

She won, and had poems commended, in the now defunct Writers Forum Magazine, as well as an article on the merits of Book Signing events. Val once lived and worked in the Middle East, and ran creative writing classes.

Exhale

Listen to a reading of Exhale by James Stedman:

I put on my rainbow necklace and paint my nails
Breathe deep, supplicate to my talismans of protection
Until the day finally comes when I can exhale

You smile at me, a welcoming friend, what witty tales
Will I have, will we make, to add to your collection
Since I put on my rainbow necklace and painted my nails

Tolerance. But peek beneath the surface, lift society's veil
Of decency and every moment harbours potential rejection
Until the day finally comes when I can exhale

What everyday task might endanger me - if I were to hail
A taxi or bus, or speak out of turn, in the wrong direction
When I put on my rainbow necklace and paint my nails?

Not so far removed in time or place, they'd throw me in jail
Or worse and everything could change again at the next election
Bring on the day finally when I can exhale

Always itching at the back of my mind that I will fail
To meet society's standards and be exterminated as an infection
But still I put on my rainbow necklace and paint my nails
The day will finally come when we can all exhale.

Born and raised

Listen to a reading of Born and raised by James Stedman:

‘It was Philadelphia born and raised’ was the phrase
on all the 10-year-old white boys lips, 
sipping their strawberry Nesquik
at home in Frome, 
a back water Somerset town 
so far removed
from the smooth Fresh Prince
as to be invisible.

Latchkey kids, revelling in our independence
these sentences emblazoned on our tongues
as rebellious maturity, 
microwaving tiny 8-inch frozen pizzas 
just a limp circle of dough, a smear of ketchup
and a couple of cubes of cheese,
easily washed down by the weakest-ass instant coffee 
you can imagine.

We never dreamed this would be how we grew up,
because we thought we were already grown.
If we’d have only known…

Ah, we’d have probably still done the same,
cos even if we now think how lame it was,
the joy we felt as those boys,
the certainty, the security 

is worth a thousand thrones.

James Stedman is a Leith-based poet and theatre-maker who has been creating heartfelt work with a gently comic queer edge for over 10 years. He enjoys juggling the rhythm and fairytale of the everyday and refracting wider social issues through that prism.

His critically acclaimed solo show Joyfully Grimm: Reimagining a Queer Adolescence debuted at the Scottish International Storytelling Festival and had a highly successful run at this year's Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Performing regularly on the Edinburgh spoken word scene, James has featured in a number of showcases including Loud Poets, Poets of the Night and Hame-ish.