Category: fiction

Raspberry canes

He is under the tumble of the raspberry canes and the torn felt roof tiles behind the old kiln. The kiln with the protection order and the draggle of bats and the adder that slumbers, mostly. He is forty-eight, forty-nine in October and he is exactly the right age to be hiding under raspberry canes. His cheeks are flushed with the pleasure of holding the grudge.

They’re basically my parents, she said, after that first tentative kiss outside her flat three years ago, they’re desperate to meet you. Later the four of them sat at a discrete table in a private club. Eric’s hand lingering too long on Lexy’s shoulder. Iris looking everywhere but Eric. Lexy bubbling and smiling and calling for more bread, more olive oil, more pomegranate molasses, more of everything delicious. ‘So, you’re in finance,’ Eric said to George, sweeping imaginary crumbs from the table. ‘George is the head of his department,’ Lexy said, heaping English mustard onto her bleeding steak. George had opened his mouth to correct her, had changed his mind.

It’s warm under the canes, comforting even. George lies on his back, blinking at the shafts of sun that strobe through the foliage, stroking his fingers through the jots that jig and shimmer in the small space above his head. ‘George!’Lexy shouts. ‘George!’

‘Iris and Eric are gifting me the cottage,’ Lexy announced, wiping soy sauce from her mouth in the noodle place across the road from Tesco. ‘We’ll spend the summers there. Eric has done up the studio.’ George had frowned. The cottage had it in for him. That baleful squint of a building with its festering Aga, its subterranean potholes, its bawdy sea holly, its wanton apple trees, its provocative gingham curtains and its awkward attic bedrooms. Lexy had a perfectly good studio three streets from their flat. They didn’t need a cottage full of summers.

Or insects.

Or heat rash.

Or the interminable land.

Or the rats that scattered the attic walls.

‘Let’s sell it,’ he said. ‘Realise the capital.’ He ran the numbers on his phone. But Lexy was scrolling cottage garden herb sites. Ordering a hand-stitched lavender bedspread from Etsy for the bed with the too short too soft mattress and the source, he swore, of the snoring habit Lexy no longer bothered to deny.

He pulls his knees closer into his chest and rubs at the nettle stings vexing his scalp. Dock leaves, the village postmaster said. Rub them over the sting. George didn’t ask what a dock leaf was, or what would happen if he used the wrong leaf. He bought antihistamine cream. The cream made the stings bluster and pus.

He misses his fish. Lexy wouldn’t let him bring his fish. Nessie the Neon Tetra. Gary the Green Cobra Guppy. Lorna-Mae the Clown Loach. ‘No, George,’ she said, ‘they won’t fit. The colours are all wrong.’ She carried them across the road to the neighbour’s kids and he punched the wall and wept.

He checks his phone. Three hours now, and she hasn’t called, he checks, keeps checking. She shouts but she doesn’t call his phone. He shuffles down on the hessian flour sacks he’d taken from the kiln, rests his head against his water bottle and his packet of ginger biscuits, and checks his phone again. ‘George,’ she shouts, her voice drifting on the easterly. ‘George!’

‘You’ll be able to write,’ she said, cupping his chin in her hands as they lay naked on the living room floor in amongst half-packed boxes. ‘You’ve always on about needing space to write.’ It was true George talked about writing. Stroked his eyebrows, brandished literary reviews, signed up for expensive courses led by authors with beard creams and pronouns. But things got in the way, she got in the way, he never attended the courses, never managed more than a few sentences of the epic insights he yearned to share.

Having the neighbours over for a bonfire on their first Saturday at the cottage was her idea. And, after they left, burning the vintage ship’s trunk they were using as a table was his. They sat and crouched, six of them, holding their hands out to the jumping flames, as Lexy expounded, explicated and aggrandised. Lexy and her ceramics, Lexy and the fertility of her creative visions, Lexy and the unleashing of her spiritual vibe, Lexy and her dawn duets with fairytale nightingales, Lexy and her three rescue hens plastered with love. When the half case of red was finally empty, she walked the neighbours down the dark lane to the gate, giggling and pointing to the moon. ‘Be a darling and tidy up, will you,’ she said as she linked arms with the two men. And so he cleared the trunk of glasses and bowls, then heaved it into the fire, surprised at how quickly it spattered and sparked and shrank into the night.

‘George,’ Lexy’s voice is softer now, tired, ‘I know you’re here somewhere.’ Above him, the crows that live in the veranda up their squabble with humanity. The crows have foiled every attempt by Eric to poison them. He mocks a silent victory sign, his fingers to his forehead.

He opens the packet of ginger biscuits. Scowls at the waft of cigarette smoke. She must be sitting down. She always smokes sitting down. Her right leg crossed over her left. Her eyes half closed. Each draw deeper, more salubrious than the last. He’s asked her to give up, cajoled, threatened, sulked. It makes me feel nauseous, he has to say to her at least three times a day. Why would you do that to your lover?

He launched his rebellion on their first day in the cottage and has maintained it ever since. Spends his mornings pitching too hard in the rocking chair in the scullery that squints out over the scrubby field with the bulls. Spends his Saturday afternoons visiting the local tip, a twenty-mile drive away. Spends his evenings rearranging his treasures in the long jumbled garden. Gnomic miscreants, twisted lobster pots, dried delphinium heads, a slot machine, a bleached merry-go-round horse, a rusted chicken hutch still full of vintage chicken shit.

A squeak and a drag of plastic and metal across wood. She must be sitting down on the plastic car seat he’d picked up at the dump. Dragged it out of Eric’s Land Rover with a flourish of dust. ‘Look, darling,’ he called to her. ‘A throne fit for a princess.’ Lexy came out of the cottage, her hands plaster ghosts, stared at him, and ground her heel into one of Eric’s rare petunias. ‘Take it back,’ she said, pointing at his treasure. He pushed past her, arranged the car seat on the sunniest aspect of the veranda and strode down the gravel path to the middle of the garden. Sat on the pile of red bricks that Iris insisted he, George, should use to build a barbecue. He watched the mass of raspberry canes shiver and shake, burst open and disgorge a rescue hen. The hen shook herself, pecked at the loose earth around his feet, and wandered into the kiln. He peered through the hen-sized tunnel, glimpsed the snug nest of covert eggs.

He is a dormouse taking umbrage. A man in his prime forsaken by a privileged hipster twenty years his junior with no imagination and no eye for the perfect reuse of modern urban decay.

He hadn’t planned to kill the chickens. Iris had driven him to it. Preening and petting them, gathering them in her arms like babes. All the time peering at him over their stupid little heads with her narrow eyes and porcelain teeth. Staring at his groin. Pointing at toddlers when the four of them were out in the village. He hadn’t planned to leave them bloody, headless, on the veranda either. But there they were, matted and mutilated, him swinging back and forward in the plastic car seat with a beer in his hand, when Lexy came back from the gallery.

The cigarette smoke is closer. A waft of Rive Gauche. A flashy crunch on the gravel beside him – her immaculate white trainers. He tightens his abs, throws his head towards his belly. The nettle stings rip and shingle. The click of her lighter. The faintest smell of petrol. Something wet, sprinkling on his shoulder. Raining? But the sun? A crackle, sparks, the snap snap of flame curling wood. The dark spoor of burning rubber. Hot then heat.

No, Christ, no. He is a dormouse taking umbrage. A record-breaking grudge. He can’t come out. He mustn’t come out. His hair on fire. His flaming linen suit.

fiction Flash fiction

Poppies

He pins it to her. A white poppy made of old tissue paper. Its thin stem wooden green. A nappy safety pin to hold it to her breast.

He stands back. Regards her. Look at you, he says, ruffling her hair loose from its black band, touching her lower lip with a finger.

She blinks, steps past him, looks at herself in the wall mirror. They are in a large crimson anteroom on the second floor of the theatre. Her long black dress, sleeveless and backless, is too loose around her hips. She has diminished, she thinks, in the last few weeks.

His poppy, purple paper with a daube of gold glitter in the centre, is tucked into the ribbon of his top hat. Jazzy, he says, pointing at it and twirling around her. He clicks his heels, bows.

They are alone in the anteroom. Alone in the theatre. Apart from the marmalade cat, all ribs and balding, that dumps half eaten rats under the grand piano that still hovers the stage. The piano’s black keys have been obliterated, its velvet cushioned stool long since burnt for heat or comfort or just for something to do.

Let’s dance, he says, taking her hands in his. She frowns, pulls her fingers away. His touch is sticky awkward on her skin. I don’t remember how, she says.

She steps back, he steps forward.

We used to know, he says. His voice is light, neutral. She can’t meet his eyes. Outside a siren blares, passes, fades. The walls shudder. Wind pushes in through the broken windows. It’s dark out, a shade beyond grey.

He steps forward, she steps back.

See, he says, we’re dancing. She shifts her weight from one leg to the other. Stretches her hips. Shakes the old silk around her bare legs. Black is a colour she’d never worn.

Until this.

She touches her tissue flower. Where? she asks. Where has he been, where did he get it, did he go further than he should?

Here, he says. I was just here. He sweeps his arm around the room. A great wide flourish. Clacks his heels on the parquet floor, bends his knees, lifts his top hat in the air, and dances. Off he goes, languid and febrile, glib and gauche. Round her, and round her, in ever increasing circles. Clacking through the shards of glass, leaping the collapsed beam, kicking up the dust into dull dove clouds.

He reaches the far corner of the room by the door to the stairwell. The corner with the white spangled tulle dress splayed out in a foolish soft pile. Where a woman might have stood. Fluting champagne, smoking Silk Cut through jade or ivory. Holding a wrist out for a curtsy or a kiss. He stops.

Another siren. The room blinks blue red blue and back to bare.

She lifts her arms, points a toe, follows him to the corner, clomping through the glitter in her hiking boots. He looks down at the white dress, moves off towards the window. A little skip a little jump. A snap of fingers from each grubby raised hand.

She puts her hands on her hips, lifts her skirt. Furls and unfurls. Lunges and lifts. Tango without his frame. They dance and tap and spin around the room, out of synch, in breathy ravaged silence across the shards. Passing the white dress again and again.

She stops first. Her boots inches from the embroidered frock. They look at each other. They look at the dress. He picks it up with both arms. Cradling it. Rocking it. To and fro. She leans in. Resting on him. Drops her face. Breathes in the milky breath. The talcum powder. The coddling.

Look at you, she says. Look at you two.

fiction Flash fiction

The prayer book

If there was red to see, she saw it. Red in the flames flickering out of the peat. Red in the curling cable of Mrs White’s Bakealite phone. Red in the poppy curtains in the wash house in Dunston Street. Red in the tweed at the bottom of her dead sister’s bed. She saw red in the rouge of bossier women’s cheeks. She saw red in the second note of the starling’s song. She saw a red bus, a red anorak, a red rag, a red bull and a redshank.

She spread red jam on teacakes, stewed red apples for strudels, washed red pants with white sheets. Shite.

She saw red where there was no red. She did that for spite. Spite was her thing. Like spit and flight and poor eyesight. She banged on about red. To the postman, the fireman and the fish man. To the lollipop lady and the men that dug up the streets, put them back together, and dug them up again.

The village called her Better Red Than Dead, or that old bat, depending on who was listening. Walls have ears. Even the red ones.

It’s not right, the village said, that she killed her husband with the red book and got away with murder. The vicar demurred. After all, it was his red book. What else could he do? She’d lifted it from his bedside table when she’d been in to ask advice about the neighbour’s sons slicing down her red hot pokers.

The local red top had her all over the front pages.

PENSIONER SEES RED IN PRAYER BOOK RAMPAGE

The village was agog, aghast, agate. The village removed as much red as possible. Bunting. Road signs. Red tiled roofs. Red cars and red socks and even the vicar’s moccasins.

Who’ll be next, they whispered at the bridge club. We should burn the diamonds and hearts said the women who’d taken to wearing blue.

She bought herself a red cape. Velvet with white rabbit fur trim. Took her walks late into the night. Gliding down the cobbled lanes looking for scarlet, pillarbox, cherry, strawberry, rowan, crimson, penny red. Looking in windows. The village windows. At the flickering red flames. Children’s pyjamas. Husbands’ smoking jackets. A cashmere throw. A satin cushion. A prayer book hidden behind a chair.

Poor Jim, the vicar preached, our dearly beloved Red Baron not even ninety-five. Taken before his time by a woman gone mad for a colouring crime, god rest his soul.

The day the last red car left the village was the last day. A pale face staring from the rear window, a red lips kiss on the misted pane.

This was a writing exercise using the prompt ‘red’.

Tags red

fiction Flash fiction

Lang Willie

Aye, lang may the willie keep us warm, Morag, Arthur says.

Are you taking the mickey, Arthur?

Morag and Arthur are sitting on two worn faux-leather arm chairs in front of a two-bar electric heater. They hold their stocking-soled feet out to catch the warmth. They both have a blanket around their shoulders. His is moss green, hers is a red and yellow tartan.

Morag is wearing a black woollen hat with a scarlet pompom and a matching coat. She has not unbuttoned the coat. A soft grey scarf in a silky material sits up around her chin, hiding her neck. Arthur is wearing a pale brown v-neck sweater over a shirt of a similar colour. His trousers have a neat pressed line down the centre of each leg. One of his socks is black, the other navy blue.

The net curtain over the one small window shivers. It is dark out, four in the afternoon in the far north of the country. The radio on the sideboard is almost inaudible. It’s probably cricket commentary. It was always cricket commentary. Behind the pair, stretched along the bottom of the front door, is a black velour lang willie, its pink eye fixed on Morag.

Just making conversation, Arthur says.

Aye, Morag replies. She fiddles in the leather tote bag on her lap, takes out a toffee, unwraps it and rolls it into her mouth. She sucks on the sweet and wriggles her toes. Her left cheek bulges. She looks at the faded floral wallpaper, the chipped table legs, the sideboard with nothing on it but the radio and a white candle in a beer bottle.

Fifty years, Morag, he says. To the day. He pulls his blanket tighter around his shoulders. Looks into the heater. Not even a postcard, he says. Not even.

I was never big on postcards, she says. She takes the toffee out of her mouth, wraps it in a tissue and puts in her bag. Pulls her scarf higher up her neck.

I thought you were, you know… Arthur shifts in the chair, crosses his legs, uncrosses them.

What’s that, Arthur?

Dead. I thought you were dead.

Why would I be dead? Morag’s tone is neutral. She looks at Arthur for the first time since they’ve sat down. Outside, the rain starts and the wind picks up. The light in the small room flickers, fades and resets.

Arthur takes a moment to reply. That’s what the papers said, he says. And the postmaster.

That Eric wouldn’t know nothing, Morag says. Her voice has risen an octave.

He was your boss, love.

Love? You’ve picked up an odd way of speaking, Arthur.

Arthur crosses his legs again. His eyes fix on the upper bar in the heater. The heater gives their faces the faintest of orange glows.

Morag looks at Arthur’s hands. The ring is still there. The flat wide gold band. Her lips tremble. She reaches for the toffee.

Arthur pushes his hands under his blanket. Strokes his knees. Morag wonders whether there’s a cat under there. Or worse.

Where did you get that lang willie, Arthur?

Mrs Hawthorne made it for me. After the double pneumonia.

Pneumonia you say? That’ll be the smoking.

I’d given up, he says. The night you went. Promised myself. Promised you.

Oh, she says. They that dance must pay the fiddler.

Arthur coughs, pushes his blanket off and gets up from the chair. He walks to the window. Stands there with his back to her.

And who is Mrs Hawthorne, anyway? Morag continues.

Arthur pulls aside the net curtain and looks out into the glen. Watches the rain filling the potholes in the gravel track. Watches the rain sliding over Morag’s small red Mini.

What are you doing here, Morag? he says to the window.

I don’t know, love, she says. I don’t know.

exercise fiction Flash fiction

Arch

She’d said he was arch. What did she mean? He wasn’t familiar with the word used like that. Was she referring to his eyebrow? The struggling dense heft of it? But it is straight, more or less, just the hint of a curve, with a blind summit that whips over the bridge of his nose.

He is sitting on the faux leather pouffe by the bay window in his dead mother’s otherwise empty house, turning and twisting arch in his damp hands.

Perhaps she meant his feet. She’d seen them naked when he’d leant against the bus shelter and stepped out of his sandals that first afternoon in Zadar. Rested the swell and pink of them on the cool of the veined marble. Wiped his brow with his handkerchief. That’s better, he’d said, spreading his toes.

She’d been sitting at the other end of the seat in the shelter, thumbing through a guide book. She’d put the book down and studied him, her eyes tracking his rough toenails, the tight skin pulled up hard under his fleshy soles, the bunion on his right foot, a gift from his grandmother. He’d flattened his feet on the stone, allowing the cold to travel up his ankles, up the back of his calves, willed the flow of cool in behind his sweating knees.

He’d put a hand to his face, peered at her over his thumb. Watched her lean over the hem of her yellow cotton dress, push her white ankle socks down, undo her heavy brown lace-up walking shoes, remove them, and rest her stocking feet on the ivory stone. You’re right, she said. It works.

She called him arch on their second date in a taverna near his hotel and he is still mulling over it three months later. It’s not like him to dwell. He’s never known a dwelling like it. But he can’t dwell on her. Not now.

Arch. Did it have a capital A? Would that have made a difference? Her hand was on his when she said it, her brown eyes skewed and her breath olive brine. There was a tension in her fingers but not the one he wanted. Not a ‘she held my hand in hers’ tension. No, a pressing, a forcing even. Was she building an arch? Between them? Over him?

There’s a dead pigeon in the middle of the street. It is flat, apart from one wing that sticks up, sail like, and flaps back and forward in the wind. Three crows circle the bird, hopping towards it in what is surely a choreographed dance. Purposeful. Uppity. A taxi draws up, the driver brakes hard, and the corvids scatter. But only far enough to avoid the vehicle. They are back as soon as the wheels have passed safely over either side of the corpse.

Arch has no points to fix on. Arch is gallery and ecclesiastical and sandstone red. Arch is a nun’s habit and a choral hymn and night clubs and knock your head off if you stand up too quick in the dead end of the cave they still call Acheron. You’re arch, Peter, she said, pressing her fingers into his knuckles and forcing her teeth into his wrist. He had jumped and his free hand was sudden fist and clench and flying towards her.

I didn’t mean that, he said to her as they stepped out into the night. She didn’t reply.

Vampish, his brother George said, as they looked through Peter’s holiday photos on his phone in the airport carpark. There she was in her yellow dress and clackety shoes and teeth that had just too much point. George is a man of the world, has an Alexa, and bought him, Peter, the latest iPhone and one square metre of the moon for his fortieth birthday.

He rearranges the letters on his palms. Char. Char for charcoal. Charlady. At a pinch, churlish. She shouldn’t have bitten. She left a mark. He doesn’t do marks, indentures, fault lines. His was a life unblemished. Climate controlled. He was pure and she had soiled him. Did he dwell on the nip and tuck of her too white teeth? Only for a day.

It took twenty-two hours to decide.

Arch. Rach. Ratchet. Yes, he’d ratcheted up. Not with intemperate emotion. No. He took his time. Now he sits in his dead mother’s house and retraces every step in the dust on the bare boards around his naked feet.

The crows are sharing their spoils. There is enough to go round. They do it, he is sure, with good grace. They take it in turns to eye and peck and flutter and swallow and fly and return to eye. They would have done the same to his mother if they had found her first. He wouldn’t have begrudged them. Crows have a natural order of things. In an impudent, saucy way.

Maybe she meant saucy, when she said arch. Maybe she had a lazy eye and she was nervous and she meant saucy and she’d meant to kiss but had bitten instead.

Anyway. She is buried now. Under the arch with its scopophiliac view of the Katedrala Svetog Jakova. It was what she wanted. He had been sure of that at the time. Why use the word otherwise?

I wrote this piece off the back of the prompt ‘arch’ in the National Portrait Gallery cafe in a writing session with friends.

exercise fiction writing

Raspberry Origami

Aye, he can do it alright. Practicing hour after hour in his mother’s bedroom mirror. The vanity mirror above the scrawl of lipsticks and powderpuffs and rusting rings and the jingling bangles tied together with a baby blue plastic crucifix.

He sits on the velveteen stool with its bandy legs, hunched forward, his face dead centre, steaming the mirror, lips pursed, a pout, a scrunch of his forehead, a deep inbreath, jaws tight, hands on hips, a further lean in, and brrrrrrrrrr. Blows the perfect potted raspberry. Again and again. Two minutes between each one. The two minutes break is important although he no longer remembers why.

He doesn’t tell the rest of them. The gang. Jesus they would kill him, not for the raspberries, they love the bloody raspberries, heh Kent, go on, look at the copper, rasp him, mate, rasp him! No they’d crucify him for the practising, the urging on of his facial facias, the vanity mirror, his thin boned hands on his thin boned hips.

‘What are you doing up there, Kent?’ His mother’s voice hovers up the stairwell, drifts into the bedroom. The words barely make it; his mother is tired.

‘You in my room again.’ It’s not a question.

‘I’m not, Mum.’ Kent stands up, shakes his head, and turns for the door. Takes a last look at the mirror and pulls his lips in over his teeth. Two new freckles above his lip. He searches for something to blot them out, finds a dried-up concealer stick and rubs it across his skin. Now he looks like he’s diseased. No tissues anywhere. He rubs at it with his sweater sleeve. Jumps down the stairs three at a time. Blows a raspberry at his school photo that’s pinned to the hall wall at a jaunty angle with a red tack.

Kent is fourteen. He has facial fluff and growing pains and feet that are too big for his legs and cheek bones born of angels. Kent is an only child of an only parent in the only house without a hedge in the only street without street lights in the only suburb without a bus or a train or even any hint of a promise of a levelling-up.

Other kids do fags like Kent does only. He picks up only and rolls it between his fingers, holds it up to his mouth, sucks, breathes in deep and coughs and splutters.

When Kent’s only mother is at work in the club she tells men to fuck off and tells women to keep their titties in their blouses there’ll be none of that round here. There’s no voice-hovering with these exhaltations. Titties and fuck offs are forbidden in the only house without a hedge, though, and Kent whines that it’s unfair and his mother says there’s nothing fair about this world now eat the bran flakes to keep your ‘tines rigorous.

Kent learnt the raspberries off his mother and his mother learnt origami off Youtube. The only street without buses is also the only street without the drone drops. Does his mother steal the coloured card that comes in packs of a hundred, ten sheets each of ten rainbow colours? There’s no money for meat so how come there’s money for origami paper and how does it arrive without the drones?

As it’s Sunday, and his mother isn’t working, they sit together in the room with the table, folding the thick clean-smelling card. Out in the street, there’s a drive-by shooting. The walls shiver and they turn their heads briefly to look through the lined shadows of the window security bars, then return to the folding, eyes down, nails carefully scrubbed and trimmed. You have to respect the paper, his mother always says. Clean hands make mean origami.

Pink flapping cranes pop out of Kent’s hands and stalk across the broken television and step down the piles of old music magazines. The cranes do not have eyes but they see, Kent is sure of it.

Bethany, Kent’s mother, sits on the floor, her legs long, her eyes crossed, her fingers deft and magic. She twists orange dragons and green wizards and glorious bulbous crimson toads. She uses the wrong coloured card for the right kind of mystery and blows a raspberry at Kent for every finished creature.

Kent folds a kitten out of brown card that will lie on his hard pillow behind his head at night and purr and purr and purr as Kent hides his heart from the livid bloody blasts that rampage across the night city.

The tap tap tap at the window is all yellow beak and irridescent feathers. Small. Persistent. Bethany looks up at the bird and back to the dove taking shape in her hands. She hasn’t seen a live bird in months. Not since Kent’s birthday. Even then, she’d only caught the shadow, and afterwards, had doubted she’d seen anything live at all.

‘Look, love,’ she says to Kent. ‘The poor wee thing is blowing raspberries.’

This piece was from a two word prompt exercise: raspberries and origami.

exercise fiction writing

Perspective

This writing exercise is based on an exhibition by Lea Gulditte Hestelund at Overgaden in 2018, and the Olga Ravn’s subsequent novel, The Employees.

The Cleaner

I overheard someone calling it a Minion. I see it now. It’s the colour and shape, the oval of the omeprazole capsules that Hamid takes for his irritated belly. I think it’s more like a halter. A donkey’s halter, in pale yellow, slipper soft leather. It’s for a human head, not a donkey’s, and that’s creepy. We don’t know it’s for a human head but that’s my best guess. It isn’t fitted over a head, just a clear perspex dome. I don’t like it, especially at five in the morning when there’s nobody about. The lower straps would cover a person’s mouth. Even a donkey’s mouth is let free. Minions are creepy too, the way they get about all together dressed the same with their deranged eyes and their tilted mocking laughs. I overheard the shift manager calling us minions in the tearoom. He thought I wouldn’t understand. Or maybe he knew exactly. He was picking his nose when he said it. I was emptying the coffee machine. Pushing the damp dark grains into the food compost bin and breathing in the thick woody scent. He flicked the snot onto the floor. The artist came in one day. A string of people followed her in white gloves. She asked me about cleaning her object. Did I use the little brush I’d been provided with? She blinked a lot when she spoke and looked over my shoulder. Then she thanked me for my work and gave me a paper bag of croissants on her way out. One of them’s half eaten, she said, you can throw it away if you like, I won’t be offended.

The Security Guard

They don’t know how long to stand in front of it without moving on to the next one. They look about to see who’s looking. But they all stand longer in front of this one than the others. Especially the women. They frown when they look at it and they touch their lips with their sparkling painted nails. One of them actually started crying. Dabbed her eyes with a tissue she pulled out of her handbag then tried to hand it to me to put in the bin. There’s no bins in here, she said, sweeping the tissue around the curve of the gallery with a tanned bare arm. So where I am supposed to find one then, I didn’t say. Actually, it’s my favourite piece in the exhibition. It doesn’t have a name none of them do. It’s definitely for prisoners, for women likely given the colour. They would use black on men. Or grey. Must be to gag them. Some of them need gagged right enough. But not like that. Women are right to stick up for their rights. Reckon its something to do with that cancel culture. Everything is these days. No one out protesting yet but they’ll be here sure as day turns to night and night to day. Last exhibition they were all out screaming and chanting and throwing coloured flour about the place. Half of them with purple hair. Or green. Rings in their noses. The other half older men in suits with pink frothing faces and jowls laddering down their necks. Even got my picture in the news trying to keep them apart. My mother cut the piece out of the newspaper and pressed it between two old magazines. The headline said Choreographed Cancel Culture. What does it mean? my mother asked. She’s proud of me, my mother.

The Woman Visitor

I’ve been three times now and I can’t stop staring. I want to reach inside the case and touch it the way you’d check a lump on the back of your neck to see whether it’s growing or not. It’s leather, the colour of October oak leaves. If I say bondage would you think less of me? But bondage is wrong – it’s not dominatrix stuff. It’s a silencer. Allows her to see but not to speak. Allows her to sniff but not to yawn. Why do I think it’s for a woman? The artist is a woman. She’s telling us about women being silenced. Or she’s doing the silencing. One woman silencing another. Does she want to silence her, the artist? Of course. You only have to look at Twitter. Women rounding on each other like serpents. Trolling and wounding. The strap that goes up over the head that keeps the whole thing in place has long slim pockets. You could keep pencils in those pockets, coloured and sharp or blunt black, the harness comes with no explanation no instructions. What do they let her do, we wonder? What does she draw with the pencils that she cannot say out loud?

The Student

Look at that one over there. The amber one with studs. Studs have more than one meaning. Take your pick. That’s a head alright. Empty-headed. The straps must cover the mouth. Unless you turn it round. But what would be the point of that? How do they know if it’s on too tight? Hannibal Lechter didn’t state a preference for colour but if he had he would have picked scarlett November for the metal taste he left on her tongue. Behind, at the back of the head, there’s a thronged strap, pigtail length, fringed at the end, a grabber for the controller. How we scream at those old movies with the fringed leather jackets on the boys that strut their stuff puffed up preening themselves in car windows while wiping yellow shite off their shoes. The studs that keep the whole thing together are not neat, people are not neat, they are rowdy when pricked antagonised demonised anonymised why waste time with neat when you’re trying to buckle them up.

The Object

We are here for you to relate to our bodies in many different forms and positions – bodies that may seem strange to you. Through spatial staging, the artist enters the viewer’s own body, thereby adding an additional layer of experience to the exhibition’s theme. We hold our secrets behind the tamped skins of pigs and spit inward the moment you move on.

Tags art, gallieries, objects, perspectives

fiction Flash fiction

12:21

Man alive, Stoat has stuffed that Secretary of State good and proper, stitched her up, hemmed her in, eyes of rubies, teeth of pearls, leant her stiff against a swanky oak lectern, her calves bulging American Tan, his best window display yet.

Flock to see her and the rest of his exhibits, they do, gawping at his art, his science, his flair, the intricacies of his cross-stitch, the way he nips and tucks.

Two gold coins they pay to get in, with one return visit included, although some do not get the full value, the ones with the marble smooth chests or the smooching chocolate eyelashes, the ones with the furling curling fingers, or the ones with only nine delicate silver-ringed toes.

Owl and Hare, they’re part of the squad, claws primed and ears pricked, impervious to the dismal pierce of an underground scream, the serrated garotte of a belly-slitting blade, they stay schtoom oh yes wouldn’t you. All those tourists flocking, filming, praising, spending, offerings of fridge-cooled diced carrots, an open tin of sardines in brine, a jumping matchbox of fed-up crickets, a basket of steaming greasing chicken nuggets fresh from Grab and Dine.

Owl supervises the queues, eyes brimming, head spinning, do-not-touch-my-feathers gliding, swooping this way and that, that way and this, keeping them all in line. First Saturday of the month, change over day, at least five hundred or more, snaking past the butchery, hipping the conga through the bakery, backs slid down kegs behind the brewery, a spiked peck is all it takes to tame the coiling queue.

Who is this?

Trumpets blazing, fawns a dancing, crowds cooing and booing and pushing and craning. The smooth roll in of a blacked-out limo, a president no less, his ligatures of gold, his gloves of foetal calfskin. his wedge of silk green acolytes. Owl ushering him out of the car, Hare handling the security, no exemptions, patting him down, poking his holes, rifling his bag, sequestering investigating penetrating validating, boxing his ears before sending him through.

Welcome, welcome, Your Excellency, step right in, Stoat on his tippy toes, bouncing on the glass cabinet containing the once crooked Ambassador to Azerbaijan stretched over an oil barrel, arse up in an elegant pose.

I’m sure you’re dying to see, Your Excellency, the private collection through the back, just for our VIPs. Stoat trotting in front, leading him on, pointing, explaining, pontificating.

Past the Tobacco Magnate, propped up in bed, his jellied lungs all a quiver on a silver platter on his bilious crimson quilt.

Past the Queen of Payday Loans, locked in a pillory, naked but for her coffee-stained paper bikini of red-letter final notice demands.

Two presidential eyes roving crossing, blinking popping, following the black-tipped brush of an upright tail. Stoat urging him on, nearly there, mind your head in the next bit, the ceiling’s low never got round to raising the roof just the dead ha ha ha.

Past the Chairman of SUVs, flat out and flattened, a black tyre print indented across what’s left of the horizontal flush of his bare and hairy belly.

Past the Pastiche of Media Barons, their brazen venalities tattooed orange on the mottled purple of their lumpen inner thighs.

Past the Triplet of Fornicating Free Traders, each with a pond net pulled tight over their head, secured at the neck with the most intricate of violet feather flies.

Past the Laird and Gamekeeper in their bloody snared embrace.

Four weeks later. 12.21 on the Saturday afternoon, everyone checking watches even those without, bending peering, wrists fobs lockets, shaking and shining and winding, ready now, look away look away look away, shut your eyes, keep them shut, keep them shut… and now!

Owl crashing cymbals. Hare drum roll beat.

rat a tat tat

rat a tat rat a tat

rat a tat tat

Swish back the curtains, all the window a stage, out with the Secretary of State, in with the preserved for posterity President sat proud on a plastic blow up planet, necklace of fingernails, buttons of toes, a truly lustrous enamel gilt stare, and look at the calf, live no less, laying sweet at his feet, chewing a bale of sun-blessed hay.

They surge they gasp they press their noses to the glass, they stare, they tremor, they blow for air, not a cut they say, not even a gash they say, what a talent they say, Stoat for President they cry as they shoogle and shuffle their turn to examine every specimen in its neatly labelled glass case.

Stoat skipping and leaping and glaring and lairing from his fresh grass nest on the granite shelf behind the pinging till.

Ooh and ahh and wow and goodness and see that, the wee thing doesn’t even have hands just claws how on earth does he do it incredible isn’t it just incredible just as well we’re ordinary we’re normal, normal people, local people, no chance of us ending up like that.

Stoat taking a bow, Stoat winking a black forest eye, Stoat puffing an elegant so-white-it-must-be-bleached perfect down bib.

What’s all this then? Two proud officers of the law with their fly-blown bellies and their clack clack shoes, their caps that sweat their pustulant brows, their ties that torque their larding necks, their nylon holsters that chafe and slide and give them a splint of a swagger.

Welcome, welcome, Officers, step right in.

Man alive, that stoaty laugh chortling out of the gallery, giggling down the alleyways, snickering across the cobbles pop goes the weasel kill the stoat said no one ever in this once proud industrial town now squeezed between the unspeakables, the undeniables, the unforgivables, where Owl counts them in and counts them out and is very good at his minuses.

Tags animalrights, COP26, environment, nature

fiction Flash fiction

Innocent

She’s never regarded herself as innocent. The judge had been clear, though. Patting her arm with his gaze as she left the court. An innocent victim, he said. Rina hadn’t met his eyes. Seamy eyes under a thick black eyebrow that hung across his forehead like a slain lampost.

She’d dodged the reporters and the rubber-neckers on the way out, pulling her scarf up over her head, leaving the lawyer to make the statement on the steps. You do it, she said, say whatever needs to be said, she said, declining the hugs, the victorious raised fists.

She hurries down the street and ducks into the first close on the left. What does he know about innocence, the jumped up tosser? In the close, in amongst the mouldering, the light declined, the broiled piss and the previous night’s chips and gobshite, she trips her fingers behind the grill above her on the wall and finds the half-smoked joint. She lights up and takes a long deep breath. What do they know in their trumped up gowns, their lacquered hair, their plump pecunious lips?

Above her, a small cat slides out through the only window in the close. Orange and white, pock-marked and scabbed, it jumps down and scrolls about her feet. She puts her free hand down and the cat teeters up on its hind legs, rubbing its head against the rough warmth of her palm. Its left eye weeps pus. She feels about her pockets. Nothing to offer it but a tightly rolled bus ticket.

Innocent victim. She takes another long slow toke. She almost believes it herself. That’s what happens, her mother used to say, if you tell a sorry often enough. Her screwed up mother and her screwed up sayings.

Never hold your wheesht.

The nights are fair drawing pastels.

The early bird is tired and wanton.

If pigs could fry.

She would chuckle when she spoke, her mother. Could barely string a sentence together what with all of that chuckling. A happy drunk.

Don’t judge a book by its lover.

Once bitten twice sighed.

The cat is climbing up her black polyester slacks, digging its claws into her right knee. She’d bought the trousers in a charity shop the day she’d got her mother out of care. Every day she’d worn them in court. Every one of seven days.

She shakes the cat off the trousers. Places the remains of the joint back behind the grill. Leans against the smooth damp drear of the wall to get her balance. Pulls her boots off, the stone slabs shocking her bare feet. Then she takes the trousers off, bundles them, and throws them into the corner with the chips and the piss and the half-hearted crimson leaf that’s blown autumn into the always winter close.

She pulls her boots back on. Her mother still chuckling almost to the end. The sudden tight surprise of the what? mouth. Mottling skin and spittle. The cat jumps back up onto the window ledge. Mewling. She relights the joint. Finishes it. Rolls the sleeves of her blazer up to reveal the blue cotton cuffs of her old school shirt. Pats down her sensible flesh coloured hipster knickers. Stoops under the entrance to the close and walks back out into the high street.

A group of tourists all in the same cheap saltire rain capes turn and stare. Aim their camera phones at her. Click click click. She taps an impression of an Irish jig. Then gives them the finger. They laugh and look again at her legs and herd on, following a wet cardboard sign on a stick. She rolls spit in her mouth. Changes her mind. Doesn’t spit.

She studies herself in the window of a cashmere and tartan tat shop. Does a little dance. Kicks up her bare legs. Spins. Around and around and around. Arms out, head wild. Wide-mouthed scarlet-lipped howl. Hair asunder, twirling whirling tripping ripping pulling her jacket off Fred Astaire. Ginger Fucking Rogers.

Two police officers. Men. Coming towards her, radios spattering, arms outstretched. Four male hands coming for her and she’s up on her tiptoes. Hula hooping past them. Jiving, surviving.

Innocent. Fucking innocent victim.

Liar liar pants on wire

fiction Flash fiction

Mistletoe Lane

He has told her to fossick in the hedgerow at the bottom of Mistletoe Lane behind the cemeteries. The new cemetery and the old one. That’s what they call them. New Cemetery and Old Cemetery. Helen doesn’t understand. They both look of the same vintage. The pleats and pleadings of the granite stones. The dustings of silver and amber lichen. The low shrubby birch trees that circle clusters of graves like a party game. Both cemeteries spill down the shallow slope below Hincombe Oakwood, separated only by a low drystone wall, three headless scarecrows flapping about in faded denim dungarees, and a rusting sculpture of what the village has agreed, after several years of indignant and family-rupturing debate, is surely a calf with three legs suckling its mother.

But they’re just the same, she says to Charles the shopkeeper as he hands her the grey metal bucket and the green cotton gloves. Aye, he says. But one’s old and one’s new. Which end of the lane has the best fruit, she asks. He winks. That’ll be for you to decide.

She opts for the longer walk, fossicking in the briars at the bottom of the lane behind Old Cemetery with her bucket on her left arm and her green cotton gloves pulled tight up her wrists and she plucks the fat brambles one by one, holding them up to her face, checking for worms, dropping the unsullied into the bucket, the pre-eaten into the grass wet about her feet.

I’ll cook what you gather, he says. She laughs. A pie, he says. You don’t know how, she says. Aye, he says, of course I do. All the men around here cook. Well at least scrub your nails first, she says. He puts his arms around her. Pulls her in. I should go, she says. Before it gets dark. He spins her round. Releases her with a flourish. You’ll need flour, she says. And butter for the pastry. The pantry’s bare.

She hums as she picks, a meditative hum, the cool damp of the wind on the back of her bare neck and the nettles rude about her calves. Plucking, examining, leaning in, scowling at the stings, stretching, leaning, plucking, examining.

The villagers that work in the fields are heading home. Carrying sticks and scythes and hoes and sacks. In twos and threes, they trickle down the outside of Old Cemetery and New Cemetery, none of them taking the central path past the scarecrows or the suckling calf. As they come closer, she waves. None of them wave back. She drops her hand, flushes. Refocuses her attention on the fruit.

You’ll love it there, he says, heaving her suitcase up the steps of the bus. The light. The fresh air. And the river. The kingfisher is practically tame. I’m sure he’ll bring me a fish one day. She waits for him to choose a seat, sits down beside him, allows him to take her hand. I’ve never been away before she says, never this far. She doesn’t ask about the kingfisher. And later, when he points out the first blue flash of the bird on the other side of the bank as he drops his wormed hook into the smooth dark of the pool, she’s disappointed. She’d expected something more. Something imperial.

The lane is rank. Rank with dog piss and rotting leaves and fetid mud and sprays of mouldering funeral wreaths and a great mound of pig manure by the wooden style into the graveyard. She tries not to breathe through her nose. Her belly curls. Just another twenty minutes and she’ll have enough.

She shares the lane with a long row of squat corrugated iron sheds in blue green grey. Each shed has a padlocked door, a trail of irascible dandelion flowers about its front edge, and black hand painted signs with names and dates. Harrison 1924. Garvald 1919. Morecombe 1923. The blue shed has a different sign. God is dead 1917.

Her bucket is nearly half full. Dusk is skidding down the two cemeteries, swallowing the graves set by set. She squints through the leaves. Spotting. Plucking. Inspecting. She moves slowly along the verge away, the sheds at her back, the dead on the other side of the wall behind the brambles, and behind her, the iron duct that runs the line of sheds at neck height pipes poison into a wide wooden cask barrel.

She hums as she picks, picks as she hums and the rain picks up, heavier now, splattering her bare head, her metal bucket and behind her the poison duct pouts and strains, gargles and stretches and she picks and hums psalms and a Viennese chorus, plucking a harp with her plum stain gloves, the poison duct pulsing and bubbling.

Bubbling. She stops, listens. Squeezes a handful of the red purple fruits between her gloved fingers. She feels it before she sees it. The subtle shift of the air. The smell of eggs. Sulphur. Sinister. Her eyes prick. She coughs, her lungs clogging. Turns to look.

The pipe is breathing. Great spumes of yellow breath spewing out and hunkering about the lane, shaping and shapeless, morphing and stacking, burying the corrugated iron sheds scrubbing out god is dead deleting Harrison dissolving Garvald.

She pulls her gloves off. Drops them in the bucket. She’s disorientated. Which way is the village? A new sound. Wheels in mud. A vehicle, then another, and another. In they come, nascent in the buttery smog, all of them long, low, glossed, black. Behind them a trail of villagers in dark suits and dresses, mud spatters about their legs, dismal hats, aloft their tattered black umbrellas.

Helen is not in the lane. Helen is not picking brambles. Helen is buried in New Cemetery. Helen has been entombed since 1927. What’s left of Helen silts and filters through the peaty soil below the granite with her carved angel and the clinging lichens and a petrified bunch of lavender.