UNPUBLISHED STORIES BY DF LEWIS FOLLOWED - AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS PAGE - WITH "NEMONYMOUS THREE" REVIEWS.
NIGHT GNAW
The opposite of spit is swallow. There’s an animal in the room that’s gnawing the legs of the bed.
Sandra woke with a start – with those two fleeting images all that remained of her dream. Indeed, she usually remembered nothing of what events her sleep surrounded. But tonight was different. The darkness glowed brighter than her luminous clock beside the bed. There was a lambency filling her eyes. She was unaccountably crying because the tears acted like tiny lenses – focussing the dull shimmer upon her retina and almost blowing the optic fuse. She felt sick. But not with food. More with an over-fill of her own saliva – welling up like clear syrup from ever corner of the body. Her pores seeped this fluid, too, like the slow-motion spitting of miniature volcanoes. Surely this was the dream and the animal-thing gnawing the legs of the bed was within real life: an event she’d left behind when falling asleep. But, in her real life, there should not be any animal in the whole house, let alone her bedroom But the real life she’d left behind – to fall asleep and enter this dream of increasing dull shimmer and regurgitating stuff from her body that wasn’t derived from earlier intakes of food and her pores becoming individual oil-wells – yes, that real waking life she’d left behind surely must have an animal gnawing at the legs of her bed.
Sandra must wake up. To face whatever it was. She called this animal (whatever it was) the Night Gnaw. But that was only because she called it this name from within a dream, the dream from which she was now trying to escape in order to cope with the danger represented by the Night Gnaw. She would no doubt call it something else in real waking life. To call it the Night Gnaw was decidedly a very dream-like thing to call it. So she must be dreaming to call it a Night Gnaw. Meanwhile, she was terrified that her sleeping body – the body that contained the mind that called it a Night Gnaw – was threatened by the thing in real life she currently called the Night Gnaw.
She was sweating. Her sleeping body felt slicked and slippery enough for the Night Gnaw to slowly – oh so slowly – swallow her whole, like a python with an ass. Then for it – even more slowly – to extrude her back out, covered in the thick curds of the Night Gnaw’s own bodily fluids – like a slow motion spit.
She must wake up before this happened. She needed to face the Night Gnaw that she did not dream about.
The bed suddenly collapsed. And the darkness lost its lambent glow. Sandra’s snores were no longer the dry gunning that they once were but more the rhythmic slurps of some animal with deep indigestion. Trying to choke up life itself.
BLUNDERPUSS
This is any old word that I could find – just to get started. The trouble is I really need to write something specific – something with a purpose. Spinning out of control is not conducive to being rational and I must muster my arguments logically. Loose cannons will only shake the balance and divert attention towards outlandish dreams. So, let’s be specific. Not any old word this. But a word that is targetted towards my goal, a goal that will prevent me blundering about like a demented unneutered tomcat looking for his home – lost and abandoned – trying to rediscover his own trail of smell from where he had set off on this random frenzied journey into the unknown … so that he can return to my loving arms. I am simply praying that my prayer (which this has become) will be strong enough, straight and true enough, for him to sense (with his heightened senses) the prayer’s backward channel to me. So, I send this my prayer forward like a guided missile or, rather, a sentient boomerang. I pray my prayer so hard, my brows knitting together with furrows, interstices that might eat a real groove for him in the wayward outside regions so that he can use it as an anchor – to release him from the maze he manufactured for himself by blundering off so foolhardily as if he thought (if he did think at all in such a frenzied state), yes, as if he thought he was a ‘homing pigeon’ (instead of my loving pussy) with the untold skills of aiming to home-in on its base target, its radar foxearth or lair or homebase. This specific word, then, the word I started with to target my prayer, to be the actual conception of my prayer, is about to quench the wild cavortings and haphazard hits at moving targets that this my prayer has since become. This isn’t, then, any old word. This is a word to re-call, like an answering echo, the plaintive miaow of my lost companion pussy. This word that will go out there like a message from God … a message from God Himself, a prayer of inbreeding, a word that is the same word but different, a word that turns in on itself rather than blundering about looking for lost meanings and empty emotions. Not cat litter bullshit, not a splatter shotgun – but a direct aim of good sense – a targetted prayer from God to Himself. The cat sits on the floor curled up like a rose. It is dead. This is an it now not a he. And the well-rifled gun is back on the wall. I am my own God, master of everything but master of none. A stray bullet had done its work, His work – and I lap up this milk and kindness that once were me.
MIDNIGHT – ON THE SEA SHORE
I thought The Sea Horse was a pub. Well, it had a sign outside swinging in the salt wind, indicating as much: a picture of a sea horse, silhouetted like a caterpillar against the picture of a beer pint-pot of the old school, more a pewter tankard than a glass vessel, judging by the artist’s attempts. And don’t talk to me about the joint’s interior – full of grim wave-scarred faces, by the look of them, scowling at me as I came in from the cold. Not exactly a warm welcome.
But was that the beginning of things? I suppose not. I had come to this (god)forsaken coastal resort with the best intentions in the world … and, yes, the best words I could muster. Not that I was brought up posh. But words tripped off my tongue, often with the cloak of sleek vocabularies and, indeed, my parents could not have guessed where I got them from. I was often clumsy in my delivery, but the words making up such clumsy constructions were, in themselves, top notch. I had been employed – so the letter of acceptance said – as interpreter in a town council which received many refugees. I didn’t know the lingoes involved, but I must have impressed the authorities with the adaptability of my own tongue. From rough to smooth and back again.
Judging by the locals in The Sea Horse, they had made a judgement that I was one of those very refugees or asylum seekers … which, in a sense, I was, because I had escaped some pretty awful repercussions in my home city, where I had lived for the whole of my previous life, or life previous to the new one I hoped to carve for myself here by the sea. Those repercussions I feared would follow me here, repercussions stemming from gang warfare and crazy drug deals back in the city. I hoped, however, I was clear of such repercussions, having carefully covered my tracks, especially choosing an off-timetable train trip from a different city to a coastal town, but not the correct coastal town where I was expected as interpreter and where I had now eventually turned up after a journey in an unlit and unnumbered coach … only to face the flat-capped uglies in The Sea Horse. From the frying-pan into the fire is something that springs to mind.
As I eventually found out, The Sea Horse was not a proper pub, but more a club, a drinking club, and I was expected to be signed in as a guest, short of joining as a member itself. One of the less grim of the clientele – but still with some bad grace – agreed to sign me in, seeing as I stood my ground, knowing there wasn’t a pub any closer, and my Bed & Breakfast would not be ready for at least two hours … and I hesitated for some while with the stub of a pencil hovered over the guest book debating on what to call my occupation in the occupation slot of the page. I discounted ‘Asylum Interpreter’. And, in the end, I plumped for ‘Vocabulary Consultant’. (I still carried my small vocabulary notebook that I had been given in junior school, to jot down any new words I might discover.) And then the least grim of the grim regulars appended his signature below mine. My name showed as Roy Kelp and his as Trevor Kelp. A coincidence, I’m sure.
The Sea Horse, being a club not a pub, entailed it staying open longer. In fact, I soon gained the impression that it was forced to stay open longer than pubs, even if there were no drinkers left to stay and drink. I assumed the place was expecting even later drinkers to arrive who would kick up a fracas if they found the doors shut. The barman told me a ship was due in around Midnight, full of grizzlers who were ignorant of our country’s drink licensing laws. Despite an afternoon’s and evening’s wall-to-wall boozing, Midnight still seemed a long way off.
“Will they need to be signed in, like me?” I asked innocently.
The barman frowned and looked towards the only regular left. The one who had signed me in.
“I’ll sign ‘em in, if need be,” the latter grunted, taking a swig from his Sea Horse tankard.
It seems as if anyone could be signed in as a guest in this place, I thought to myself. As if reading my mind, the barman said:
“We only have the guest-book to get round the law.”
I nodded knowingly. I had guessed as much.
The barman milked one of the optics for a gill measure of hard stuff and floated it along to me upon the wet mahogany bar.
After gulping the gill, I needed a breath of fresh air and wandered outside towards the churning sounds of the sea. Strange how time catches up when you’re not waiting. My Bed & Breakfast was probably still expecting me, but I was the sort who needed always to have a last drink for the road … and then another one for the road … and another… Surely, the B&B would keep the doors open for me. Still, I hadn’t yet introduced myself to them (thus establishing myself with a room to back to) – and my luggage still sort of accompanied me, left by my bar stool in The Sea Horse. Looking at my watch, I saw it was nearly midnight. I was cutting things a bit fine. If I didn’t look out, one of the new ship arrivals would take my booking at the Bed & Breakfast. I’d better shape up.
The sea shore was freighted with starlight aloft and silver fireflies skimming the waves below eye-level. Luminous jellyfish jewelled the very weft and woof of the tides, further stitched by radiated oyster-pearls in necklace-lines steeplechasing their own crimped shells.
When in the countryside, one could view the rolling landscape that reached out to the horizon of hills and one could be confident – short of an earthquake – that all that one viewed was static and at peace with itself. Here, however, the world’s surface which I viewed into the uncertain distance was as if disease-ridden, undulant with life, sown with shifting salt.
I saw the ship reach through the horizon, like a tapestry-worker’s paddle penetrating its loom: sprinkled with gems of light. It steamed towards the sea-shore where I stood. I couldn’t imagine such a huge liner docking on a tourist beach. There was a pier nearby but it was derelict. I cast a glance behind me where I spotted the last regular (the least grim one) leaving The Sea Horse, his neck be-seamed, as it were, with the droplets that had escaped his tankard. He waved. That must have taken a lot of friendliness to muster, I guessed. Friendliness was not a common commodity round here.
++++++++++
My watch, as if it had woken me with a loud ticking, pointed exactly to Night’s Noon, precisely Moon … but the real moon – now escaping the star cover to warrant a new name, a new pointer towards its sister the Sun – indicated it was no longer night at all. I had drifted off to the sound of relentless churning, that may not have been just the sea.
Dawn had swivelled into place overnight. I had slept on the beach, it seemed, surrounded by new found friends. Still half asleep, I wanted to open my vocabulary book and ask them to sign it.
Meanwhile, the Sea Horse barman must have thrown my luggage from on to the beach, because the vocabulary book was found tucked away amid my smalls. I promised to find them Bed & Breakfast’s before the next nightfall, something I managed to explain in pidgin words, the linguistic basis of which I am still unsure. They had webbed fingers, perforations of gills in their necks and fins in strange random places on their bodies. One of them asked me where the local betting-shop was. I shrugged and told him I was a new arrival, too. I nodded towards The Sea Horse as if such information could be gained there.
Frightening.
One of them even called me Roy. Bowing as he did.
I was told, in no uncertain, terms that they expected me to ask about the betting-shop on their behalf and to sign them on and give them jobs to do. I seemed to speak for them. My mouth opening and shutting, opening and shutting, in tune to what they wanted to express.
I looked wistfully towards the now nearer horizon where I saw – in the uncertain light of what had turned out to be a false dawn – all methods of transport in a shimmery mirage of passage: all the beasts of land, air and sea (made from metal or flesh or both), their own mouths opening and shutting, opening and shutting, pistons hissing, churning towards the shore through seaweed that was thicker than any sargasso dream.
I scarcely escaped towards the sanctuary of the Bed & Breakfast joint I had assumed to be the one I had previously booked by phone (en route between train and coach) … closely pursued by my left luggage.
THROUGH THE WINDOW
“Come on … look through the window.”
Charlie’s Mother pointed vigorously with her newspaper which she had suddenly wrapped up like an old-fashioned hearing-trumpet. Charlie trusted Mother. After all, he was only very young and, at his age, who could you trust if you couldn’t trust Mother?
“Charlie! Look up and see…”
Charlie studiously kept his nose in his favourite pop-up book that had been given him for Christmas only the week before.
“…through the window…”
Despite the trust he felt, Charlie was strangely reluctant to follow the direction of Mother’s instrument of pointing. It was as if she had suddenly taken on the air of an enemy who was trying to make him do things that would harm him, see things that would make him wish he had not seen them.
“…on the other side of the road…”
Even though, he couldn’t see Mother with his neck arched, he knew she was unchanged, smiling as sweetly as ever, with that welcoming lap where he often sat, beneath her warm bosom, listening to her intone nursery rhymes or lullabies. Yet today he found it hard to imagine the look in her eyes. The look in her eyes was double-crosssed, he guessed.
“…in front of Mrs Cartwright’s front door…”
That was funny. Mrs Cartwright’s house was at an angle across the road and you had to get up and stand by the window to see Mrs Cartwright’s front door and, even then, you could only see a bit of it. Mother, by all accounts, was still seated in her favourite armchair, judging by the direction of her voice and the lack of noises - noises like her slippers shuffling towards the window or her sharp gasps as she tried to get the better of her asthma…
“…you’ll never guess … quick, Charlie, I beg you … before it is too late.”
Her voice remained familiar enough, but the turns of phrase were decidedly off key. I-beg-you was not an expression he recalled Mother using in the past.
Should he look up?
Should he even ask the question?
He lifted his chin slightly throwing the bookprint slightly out of focus. The stood image of the cat and the fiddle wavered before his eyes as if the paper wilted. The stiff spine was loosening up, he sensed, as he tried to hold the book more steadily in the V-frame of his fanned out fingers. More his imagination than anything to do with an unexpected fear of his Mother’s pointing…
He looked up as suddenly as he could, trying to take the surprise out of the late afternoon. He was wrong about the rolled newspaper. It was a real hearing-trumpet, winking in the day’s last glimpse or glint of light. Mother’s face was a picture.
“Look, Charlie, through the window…”
The voice was made of its own harsh breath articulated upon newer, strangers breaths. Yet he managed to tear his eyes away towards a darkish oblong through which the light was evidently escaping piecemeal. The log firelight was unable to stem its flow. Who lit the logs was not even a consideration. Pink logs. Toppled on top of each other like a fat pick-a-stix game.
His heart stopped. The window framed itself. A second window made from flaking wood -- with old fashioned sash-cords -- was set within the modern PVC struts that the house’s bay windows had boasted since the eighties. A picture window.
He wondered where the curtains were or, if they were there, whether they could be drawn.
Charlie got up to open the smaller window. Then he’d be able to see through it properly. The cords rasped within the corrupt channels cut through the wood which they threaded.
“Look, Charlie, through the window … look before it is too late.”
The voice belonged above a raised lap. It took him by the throat before the tussling with the harshly stuck cords were complete. Upon opening his own fan-nerved covers, he felt a bloom of growing pains and he saw someone he once knew as Mrs Cartwright clip-clopping on high heels towards her house further down the road.
“Mummy!” he croaked. “Look through the window.”
But she proceeded in evident gasps of shortening bread -- oblivious of the broken-voiced baying.
NEVER LIVED TO LEAVE
He knew it was in the cupboard, because that was the obvious place, the safest place for it. Under lock and key. In fact, he knew it was there, since he had personally put it there – folding it flat, easier to put down than put up, its wooden leg-frame often getting tangled and then, when untangled, too thin-edged for the soft sand on the beach to bear … and where one intended to erect it, the whole thing sank an inch or two, worming itself towards hotter climes in the Antipodes, no doubt! It sank even further when he sat in it! Then sinking even more the longer he sat in it – neither lying down nor sitting up, but at an angle that meant his body was both lying down and sitting up … but, as time went by, he was relatively more lying down than sitting up.
Inexplicably shamefaced, he’d manage to extricate himself and, when managing to straighten up upon his hind legs, he would ruefully stare back at it. The insipid sun in England was merely the reason for being there or, rather, despite the insipid sun (which he actually found far too hot). His body had indeed been laid upon the stretched-out curve of striped canvas (upon and along it), his long limbs and torso being supported more for the simple sake of such support than for any benefit of relaxing beneath what he felt to be the smouldering sunshine … all remarkably humiliating: a humiliation that eventually lent itself to the thing itself of wooden frame and striped canvas.
But, then, he had no need to be hung up on sun-bathing. This obsession was now locked up in the broom cupboard under the stairs along with the thing that had caused the obsession – and he had no intention of releasing it. He often imagined the thing creaking within, pitifully trying to release its wooden bones, followed by a faint shuffling or rustling… perhaps the odd sound of a breezy wave upon pretending it had found its own shoreline within the darkness.
Then, one day, he found sun-worshipping Susan. Or, rather, she found him. He had never had a girl friend before – let alone a partner with which to share a life. He realised that he should have no secrets from her and when she asked about what was in the broom cupboard (as she was bound to do) – well, what could he say?
She had agreed to live with him – bearing in mind that his house had a long garden with plenty of its own fresh air, although she would never have admitted this as the reason. She convinced herself that he was potential love material and already even just the prospect of him being her soulmate had out-lasted several earlier models because this one – with the long garden – was a good proposition, not short of a bob or two. Not great-looking, not of breath-taking film star quality, but certainly not bad looking. A bit set in his ways, but he did come complete with property and he would probably bend over backwards to please her – and, today, she was inspecting that very property prior to moving in with him.
“Nothing in there really, just a few bits and bobs. And some old paintings I’ve got no room to hang.”
“Anything to sit out in the garden on? It’s a bit bare out there. Not even a shed or any shade, not that I want much shade – as I love sitting out in the sun.”
“Not really. I’ve lost the key anyway.”
“Well, we can force the cupboard door open – or get a locksmith.”
“No point. There are only duplicates of things in there. And some old paintings.”
“Duplicates? What do you mean?”
“Duplicates. You know. Things that double up elsewhere.”
“Not seen anything round here that would fit in that cupboard.” She stared at the slanted cupboard door. “All your furniture is too big to get through … unless you mean knick-knacks or ornaments … or bigger things that would fold away in such a space?”
“Yes, that’s it, duplicates that fold away. Not worth the trouble of opening just for them. Next time I have a skip, I’ll force it open then, and get rid of what’s inside.”
Susan glanced over through the dining-room door at the table, wondering if it was duplicated within the cupboard. A duplicate sofa couldn’t possibly be in there, could it? Not many chairs to speak of. A single arm-chair and a couple of dining ones. Surely, if he had duplicates of them, he’d have them on show and not in the broom cupboard. She shrugged. Why bother about such things? She was a jolly person at heart and jolly she would be. She was slim enough to get into the broom cupboard herself. Instead of shrugging, she laughed out loud.
Well, although they did not live happily ever after – who does? – they struck up a passable living arrangement where – between sun-bathing binges – she did most of the household chores – and she never really questioned the contents of the broom-cupboard and simply used her own body with which to sit or lie out in the garden without any artificial aids. She subconsciously accepted, in other words, his unspoken phobia of the type of seating that he could not even name without blushing – or of even ordinary house chairs taking their place in a makeshift transfer from the dining-room to the garden and back again after dusk. She resided on pillows and lilos – acceptable replacements because they weren’t used upright and didn’t have to be erected or have shiny striped skin-sticking canvas … like the thing in the broom cupboard he now literally began to hate.
One day – a rainy one – Susan was in the kitchen pouring milk from a pink jug into a bowl – and, although rainy, there was sufficient light from the garden to be the only illumination of the old-fashioned kitchen – slanting from the window upon the now portly shape of the upper half of her body clad in a yellow mock-peasant blouse. These days (towards the end of their relationship) she usually wore a floppy white hat to complete the picture of ancient domesticity. Her skin was decidedly pale, despite the sun-bathing. Maybe, in fact, she had already given up sun-bathing at this stage in her life. It was as if she had suddenly become an image quite out of keeping with the image she had of herself. She put down the jug with a puff of irritation. And, just as abruptly, she heard – from the hall – a sound she hadn’t heard before. Someone unlocking the broom cupboard, perhaps. The one under the stairs. And it wasn’t him. She hadn’t heard him come downstairs from the bedroom where he usually stayed these days. Sounded like a lighter breathing …. A lighter touch, a flicker of lighter …. And the crackle of smoke. She’d evidently fallen asleep upon the kitchen trestle and dreamed of the parching sun …
The canvas stick-insect bent upwards with the slow-motion yawn of a B-Movie monster. Trying to replicate itself. Then, when failing to do so, trying to rub its limbs together to spark a flame… and its dream of grassy ground moved beneath the mock pillows … wooden fingers trapped between their own pincers.
The man was a chair himself, one that captured spider-women in its hardwood cobweb vice. And she duplicated the painting in the broom cupboard – the peasant in yellow top and white cap pouring milk from the dripping blow-lamp of paint. She’d become the stretched-out canvas he sat on. The broom cupboard clicked doubly shut and all was dusk. Nobody to repaint the light from the invisible ancient window. All of us end up, one day, in our own antipodes of dark unconscious pain. Even (or especially) sun-worshippers.
Thus, she never lived to leave him.
THE BUST
There was a time when fossils lived. Charles and the girl gazed at their grandfather – his stony face giving the decided impression of near death. Memories were in the air like moths hovering. Their parents were arguing in one of the back rooms – a fact which was unclear from the assonance: words that meant more than themselves, given the answering of the house’s echoes.
The voices spoke of history, of how Europe was changing even as they stared at the map. Countries merging, borders blending, frontiers in free-wheel, moving, slicing around rivers towards bays and estuaries that had only existed once, if at all, in legend or serious University essays. The Earth was a giant fossil, otherwise, without being fused by such doubtful dynamics.
“He’s dying, you know,” said Charlie.
The girl nodded. Neither child had known sadness before or – at least – they had never recognised it as such. Their grandfather had been more of a friend than the squeaky pipe in the chimney-corner with whistly breath, given their parents’ continued absence in far-off reaches of the house since anyone could remember. These parents were Grandfather’s daughter and her spouse.
The girl had a skipping-rope. As she swung it in barely visible loops between feet and floor, head and ceiling, she watched the eyes in the stone face try to follow the movement. Charlie blinked, imagining modern strobe lighting. The future was a wistful trove of novelties masquerading as inherited nostalgia of wonder, the past (their present) being mundane, lacklustre…
Everybody’s past is painted with fake colours of wishfulness.
“I wish, I wish … we were rich,” Charlie said, during a sudden lull in the girl’s skipping.
Grandfather creaked his pipe between the teeth. His head became a globe twirling to a standstill after the unexpected consciousness of movement outside itself. “Your mother was beautiful,” he said. His daughter, thus referenced to his granddaughter. The globe faced forward, the British Empire of his complexion settling around the King Solomon’s Mines of his eyes.
Noises off-stage. Arguments. The girl’s eyes filled with tears. Wars of the Roses. Her cheeks took blush from the dying afternoon sun.
Charlie was called away to a back room. The girl was unsure which one. She applied rouge to the old man’s cheeks and kissed his cold forehead. She knew there was a fingerprint embossed inside every bust. One day, she guessed, there would be several inside her own bust, given the ability to crack it. She wept, whilst she was still able to cut tears. She needed the hinterland of a real family rather than standing stones…
She skipped through the gloomy moths of dusk towards her own special back room.
INDEPENDENT IMAGE
The doll was an independent image. The dollmaker left the room. His name was George, though he rather fancied himself as an Italian. Wasn’t it an Italian who invented Pinocchio the Wooden Boy? Or manufactured him? Who invented the Italian puppet-maker himself? Probably some writer, with the help of Walt Disney, or vice versa. George was proud of the doll he’d made. He assumed – rather playfully – that whenever he left the room, she came to life and, like Andy Pandy’s Loopy Loo, danced across the floor to the jolting tunes of invisible rhymes. George would have to get her a Teddy with whom to waltz the afternoons away. Only fair.
The doll was made from lots of cast-offs and from older dolls that his daughters had thrown away before they left home with their sweethearts. He felt – this time – he had truly made the optimum doll. Nothing is perfect - and therefore, logically, perfection itself is imperfect, he thought. If she came to life, that was as near to perfection his ambition could reach. Giorgio chuckled to himself both at the change of name with which he’d just miraculously found himself christened and the idea that had simultaneously struck him. He’d look through the keyhole and maybe he’d catch a glimpse of the doll mid-dance. He still rather regretted her lack of a partner, but, even in these early days, independent images needed to reach fruition as conscious beings before having their independence prematurely removed. He sensed this doll – being an optimum version of some ideal doll to which she aspired – would already be pining after a sweetheart of her own. But first the dance. He must witness her dance – or at least some vestige of movement that could be interpreted as dance.
He needed the jaw-key. He shook his head. His own words were coming out all skewed and warped. Not the jaw-key. But door-key. That was it. George, not Giorgio. That was equally it. The key-hole to the doll’s room was blocked with the door-key and it was on the doll’s side of the door, not George’s side of the door. He’d need to slide his hand round the frame of the door – after edging it ajar sufficiently for this feat to be accomplished – and take the door-key from the key-hole. Then he would be able to cool his eye at the key-hole, having repositioned the door fully in its frame, and watch the surreptitious dancing of his own creation.
There was silence. Precocious darkness had dropped its curtain upon the scene. Then gasping, scrabbling noises like many mice running across the floorboards, creaking, coughing, - then, the sound of tumblers falling …
And dawn seeped into the blackness piecemeal and imperceptibly … until, suddenly, as it were, Giorgio could be seen slumped to the ground, between the door’s edge and the door’s frame, a bodysack of earlier memories and ideals.
The doll was sitting in her chair – a smirk upon her fair chops – a book splayed in her lap, apparently a volume treating the life of Cyrano de Bergerac … but it is hard to tell from this distance. She holds a key in her mouth like a cigarette in a cigarette holder, puffing her china cheeks in and out with each turn of a riffling page. There is a glint in her eye, an icy spark … as she carelessly turns to view George’s crumpen form in the door wedge.
An independent image. A strewn tableau of a life become a lie. A frozen dance now become a jagged shadow on the floor: an irregular loop of existence escaped from a choreography of cast-offs. His name had become Teddy, not George. One bare of fur.
PERFORMER’S NERVES
Solomon was a trapezist by training, a high-wire act by aptitude, an acrobat by synaptic antic, a serious contender for the delicate devilmaycare interstice of bravery between life and death…
He travelled from circus to circus, improving his daredevil skills amid the airy heights of each big-top, glancing downward at the various failsafe, foolproof methods for inopportune falling … with giant safety-nets and unwholesomely overnourished spiders lurking in their trammels.
Solomon never needed such fall-backs because he was so unfoolhardily surefooted on the tightrope, so stronggripped on the thin swing. Except, one day – his partner was a new one – the air-artiste who was due to grab Solomon’s wrist’s (or was it vice versa?) as he left one swing for another. The handhold of these swings is called an aglet … or that was what Solomon once heard them called, except he was half deaf half the time and often misheard the calls of fellow swingers in the dizzying upper depths … and Solomon’s fingers sweated as he pendulummed back and forth in the spotlit crisscrosses of the tented heavens – nearer and nearer to the other’s swinging half-blinded shape or shadow. Then Solomon saw what he thought was the other aglet snap – and then Solomon’s partner of the wartorn skies slipped slowly toward the engulfing net below, only to be swallowed whole by a spider before falling finally through a gaping hole in the net towards the safety of the sawdust in the circus ring below. Already, before the slightest blink, Solomon was skimming the thermals, gliding painfully near-motionlessly, if not emotionlessly, towards the same snapped aglet…
His nerves stretched to the untutored tautness of a high wire, until the big-top’s supports were dislodged by mass hysteria and pulled apart till his nerves tugged upon a breaking-point … and he self-possessedly performed a somersault, followed in close order by a nip & tuck, like a high-diver as he, too, careered towards the swirling ring … beyond the chirruping jaws of the safety-net spider – but just before he hit the swaying grounddeck, he sloped upwards a last minute look and, with relief, saw that his own ganglia of interstitial nerves had thankfully broken his fall.
THE OLD FAMILIAR PLACES
It was like drowning in memories. Not those words about the whole of ones’ life flashing by before your eyes as you suffer death by drowning. Because I could never swim in any event. Equally, I could rarely remember much about my life – but like most people, memories of things reside on some back burner waiting for their turn to take a curtain call. Except mine were fast asleep dreaming of things not themselves. Memories with memories of their own. False memories. My real memories having unreal memories as dreams. A concept I could hardly grasp. I’d rather depend on the old familiar places rather than places that never ever existed other than in the pipe dreams of those very familiar places hatching up unfamilar places for themselves. Unfamiliar places disguised as familiar ones. Unfamiliar, I claim, because, thet never existed. Until now.
I look out from inside my head away from these thoughts on paper. And wonder if I am the same person who wrote them down. I look down again to read them – and the print has changed in the meantime. The words now say different things from what I originally intended. Except they seem to be the same words. But words with different meanings – and when they are linked together in what I can only describe as sense-patterns, they keep flashing from one narrative sense to another, like a pulse. Or a strobe. Memories strobing. Faster and faster. Could I really be drowning in memories? The words seem to indicate that I am so doing. Slowly enough to record the process. But too quick to understand what is going on. People’s faces flashing by. Loves and hates interchanging. Various stages of myself stripped out in separate essences of self, none connected between. The only consistency is the ladder or tear in the very texture of the words as laid out in the page. They seem to be dividing like a Red Sea to leave an emptiness among the sense-patterns. A false syntax. A gap-strewn paragraph of thoughts and misthoughts. Memories taking over my mind with a force my mind can’t withstand even though it is the same mind that is creating this strange onslaught on itself.
One of the faces flashing by in the stream of consciousness I drown in is you.
Simply that. The whirling onslaught slows to a silent last gasp of meaning. A face I recognise. It starts out, however, as a face without a feature. A white empty plate or recently emptied bowl. Then gradually a couple of eyes prick out. Wide rolling eyeballs that radiate an expression of knowing. Knowing me, if not itself. I say ‘it’ because there is no other word for a gradually emerging ghost of a person. Once it’s fleshed out by the ever-building flashes of identity that become stuck to it then I can begin to decide on he or she or me. I suggest me because I’m not yet convinced it’s no a mirror I see flashing into a steady state of existence. Rather than an explosion or implosion of a big bang.
I look down at the words again. I leave the slowly emerging features to thicken and define themselves. I feel the words may give me some clue as to the true resemblance of the face to whom or to what. The face itself is deceiving me as well as itself. Only the words can tell. The words will tell me who it is. And I notice that the crack in their texture has widened as if the tectonic plates of the sense-patterns are ever shifting to reveal a more meaningful pattern that is a white shape rather than a set of words describing a shape. A real shape rather than a shape imagined by the words I write. The whitening crack discards letters as if they are dead insects as it lays the paragraph into a flatland of nothingness. Alphabets fall off the edge of the paper like dead lemmings in full zombie flight. I shriek inwardly with fear. I seem to be heading towards some old familiar places that I once inhabited but had long since put out of my mind’s memory for fear of returning to them in the full flood of true present memory. Memories that are forming as new memories even as I think them. When does a memory become a memory? What is the time lapse needed to make a present event into a memory. A new unfamiliar place into an old familiar place. Place or face. Because a face is a sort of place. It has its own geography, its own secret alleys and hidden corners. Its own inhabitants sitting behind the eyes as if they eyes are windows to some apartments in a city’s high rise property. These little people look from the two eyeballs in the face, their own eyeballs rolling in their heads as they see some old familiar places for the first time. One hangs a huge rubbery nose between the two eyes as if hanging out a flag for a jubilee or something like a jubilee. A Mardi Gras. Or a fancy-dress festival that the city holds every year. The city is a strange one to them. It’s certainly not one of their pet old familiar places. Faces that find themselves in a foreign place.
I have taken my eye off the ball. The words have escaped my pen into new uncontrolled configurations of syntax and non-syntax, with that ever widening gap or crack that forces me to believe the meaning cannot bridge such an hiatus. And I have raised the head where I live in despair at controlling the words, raise it towards the ceiling, rising not with mere sight to see the rivers of geography in its cracked white plaster surface (otherwise blank). But the head actually rising in the air along with the sight itself to see it close up. Either my neck has elongated like a giraffe’s or the head has actually separated itself to float up towards the ceiling.
One particular crack in the ceiling is so deep I can see daylight through it. And my sight or the head that carries the sight escapes through it into the open air – and I am a mere speck of consciousness being wafted by the wind. At least I am safe from those words now. And from the old familiar places of meaning that each word familiarly contains, despite the horror that they would otherwise convey with the unfamiliar meanings that they felt themselves dutibound to convey to the unwary such as I who releases them on to the page. Each dot, each pixel of the marks being just another me. Just another beginning of a face. Drowning in memories, in anarchic thoughts and in the forgotten white airinesses of space where familiarity breeds contempt for any steady state or big bang. Because neither is right. The old peculiar place of dreams dreaming dreams that is our Existence, yours and mine. The place that launched a thousand … no, an infinite number of familiar faces towards their inevitable sinking and drowning in the white water frenzy of words.
ERASED
The vampire licked his lips – the only way to show what he really was. Sam Goldleigh watched him out of the corner of her eyes, losing contact, in the meantime, with her husband and daughter in the crowd. Sprees these days – and the days were still grim and brown-coloured ever since the end of rationing – were just a few vital oddments gathered on errand runs rather than huge decorated packages humped from shop to car, as Sam’s daughter would one day hump them from shop to car when she was eventually married and with her own daughter who she’d name Sam after her mother as Sam herself had named her Robyn after her own mother in turn. Time no longer flowed forward, it seemed, but in a confused ebb and flow. Generations failed to stick to the direct lines of antecedence and posterity. Sam and her family were worse than most – just as her daughter turned round and scolded her father (Sam’s husband) about dragging his feet, telling him she’d put him to bed early if he didn’t buck up.
The vampire watched the family (Sam and Sam’s husband and daughter) from a distance, shadowing them between street corners, using some other families as subterfuge for speaking out loud, attaching himself sometimes to this or that group in an attempt to seem naturally in that precise place at that precise time; whilst – amazingly – convincing strangers that he was related to them by blood as well as by chance encounter: a skill learned during the war when everyone grew closer in face of a common enemy.
Even vampires could summon homely loyalties from bombed wasteground and blank frightened faces. He wanted to share sprees and today he’d homed in on Sam because she was still pretty despite having to give birth and endure a whole war with a child under seven and a husband who she had to hide in the cupboard because he was scared of fighting. Alien invasion was better than the anger of friends once stoked to breaking point - and the latest war was indeed one between friendly peoples. The cut-&-thrust and the sword-edges were stained with the brightest possible bloodstains since blood brightened under the strain of anger remained bright whilst blood shed in sorrow or in mere tiredness faded to a dirty brown archipelago upon whatever surface it had mapped out the story of its spillage.
“We need some soap,” said Robyn Goldleigh to her mother, then giving a frown of annoyance because Sam, too, was dragging her feet along with her husband (Robyn’s father). “Buck up, you two, you don’t know when they’ll run out.”
The husband made faces at his daughter. Dirty ones. Sam simply leered with a mindless wafting motion with her arm. Shopping was intended to be a pleasure, especially shopping as a family on a trip up to the city. They could afford slightly more than just window shopping. They stared together through the glass at the various cakes of soap, in a choice of pastel colours, yet clumsily carved from the mother soap: a huge haystack of it they could just see at the back of the shop where other customers darkly bartered for the best cuts. Sam failed to see the reflection of the vampire stood just behind her.
Several folk ran out of the shop doorway clutching the best sawn bars, imagining they had heard a siren in the sky: the habits of war are reluctant to be shrugged off. Everyone were rabbit scared. The slightest noise would send them scuttling from every exit into the street and gaze up into the heavens for signs of invasion. Friends often disguised themselves as aliens. And planes built in local hangars were often seen masquerading as flying saucers or rocketships. Not that anyone really believed it wasn’t their own imagination transmogrifying everything into a dream.
Robyn took Sam by the hand – beckoning to her father to follow in their wake – and led them towards the underground entrance; serviceable as a raid shelter during the war, now used as a makeshift one for imaginary raids; though shelter from imaginary raids was harder to find because shelter itself couldn’t pierce the armour of imagination whilst the raids could always break the rhythm with their random shards of invisible shrapnel. Imagination could be harmed by imagination.
The vampire followed in their wake. He had no wife and daughter of his own. The girl called Robyn kept looking in his direction as if ensuring he was still there. The woman called Sam pointedly ignored him, hoping against hope that he wasn’t there at all. The soap would have come in handy to wash the bright warpaint from his face; pity the family hadn’t managed to buy any yet. Shopping sprees were notorious for missing the wood for the trees. Useless luxuries masquerading as necessities and vice versa. He licked his lips. He chewed on nothing. He needed loose slime at the very densest to quench his hunger. A line of lorries slowly moved along beside them, clearing the sluices of the city.
In the sky, stray objects ricocheted from horizon to zenith in displays of imagination feeding upon imagination to produce ill-carved realities raised up to hurt you because you were imagination, too. Things became harder the more you thought about them. Tears welled in the vampire’s eyes as he watched his two loved ones vanish into the earth like frightened rabbits to their burrows; corpses dead set on concealment from their only friend.
The vampire rubbed hard at himself with an ill-cut cake of unblended rubber. He raised himself toward the imagined sky where God in his Heaven was busy setting off false alarms.
THE LAST BUS HOME
He stopped to buy a packet of blue Rizla and an ounce of Three Castles at a local tobacconist. He thought, did Alfred, that he had plenty of time before his last bus arrived. However, upon entering the welcome shelter – from the driving weather outside – he saw that he had not predicted the unusual length of the queue … especially bearing in mind such a late hour. The shopkeeper himself – Mr Hubbins – looked impatient at so many customers; he was eager to push back his awning into the roof’s slot and rattle down his metal shutters (a rough area this, and not just the weather) and looked askance at the unseasonable crowd of folk all evidently out last thing at night to buy a packet of blue Rizla and an ounce of Three Castles. All bearded men in macs and, no doubt, masks indecipherable from faces or vice versa given the clarity of this safe haven…
Alfred was at the rear of this irregular queue of look-a-likes, bouncing from foot to foot, upon imagining his last bus home arriving at the stop around the corner and then leaving without him. Ting Ting! As the conductor spooled out ribbons of ticket to any unsuspecting passenger who was out last thing at night. The silver platform bar glinted in some moonlight – except the moon wasn’t out, so it must have been something else that made it glint: a power that permeated from within solid metal? The engine’s throaty, stuttering roar made the gears teeter upon stalling. The young lady in tight jeans swayed beside the huge arc of steering-wheel – flirting with the dark shape that twirled it in gloved hands, flirting at high octane horse-power as all such bus driver groupies seemed regularly to do for unfathomable reasons. Unfathomable, at least, to dyed-in-the-wool Alfred.
At last, the said Alfred reached Mr Hubbins’ counter. The other customers had all retreated into the darkness beyond the shop window’s catchment area of light – no doubt intent upon their own particular last buses home. He quickly snatched the packet of blue Rizla and ounce of Three Castles from Mr Hubbins' hand, after throwing loose change upon the formica top in the hope that he was not paying too little and certainly not paying too much. He then rushed through the shop door eager to see the welcoming headboard of his last bus: 6A for Old Heath Post Office. Behind him he heard the rattling of metal shutters and the slowly withdrawing wooden stanchions of Mr Hubbins’ awning. Instead of the headboard, though, he spotted the back of the bus vanishing between the wide hips of night – the top deck (for smokers and spitters) full of dark shapes slowly settling into single-minded silhouettes with choking clouds of something not unlike shadow above the rims of their heads.
He felt resigned. He felt philosophical. No point in worrying. He took out his purchase from a pocket. He shrugged. Not even the right tobacco nor any ciggie paper but still he didn’t need to roll any amid the gathering swerves of weather; the tobacco was already packeted as neat thin smokes. Looming shadows of other strollers would only be able to see the single tip of red and they’d pass it off as a one-eyed critter. The packet was ten Strand. He wasn’t alone. He smiled as he recalled the advert. Sadly, Mr Hubbins hadn’t given him any matches. He shrugged again, like a shape flinching in and out of existence. What you don’t ask for, you don’t get. Except, last thing at night. The wind stuttered and fell to a whine of rubber on rind.
HOW SENTIMENTAL CAN YOU GET?
I am often moved to tears at the slightest hint of the past. Call it nostalgia. Call it just plain common sense, since the way we did things yesterday is always better than the way we do things today. Harold was my husband and now he is dead. I cry when I see things associated with him; so, really, I do nothing but cry. I still hear his fingers tripping the light fantastic on the piano keys; tinkling that almost seems less ghostly today than it did in that unreachable past when it was truly being played by Harold, his shiny bald head bent over the music-making, a smile on his lips, me listening as I knitted endless coloured squares for a quilt that never saw the light of day. In those days, the piano sounded as if I were listening to it in the future – like today – and thus was then, at that time, ghostly and strangely unreal.
I get mixed up with things these days. The present and the past, mixed up, yet when I look at the photo albums, I have no doubt. Our married life in a series of black and white snapshots, our children as babies, our children as children, our children as grown men and women. Only Percy comes round these days. Poor old Percy stuck with visiting his old Mum when his brothers and sister are off living in modern countries with modern careers. I don’t really miss them. I’m just glad they have done well and are happy. I am pleased to get the odd card; and one day I’ve heard I’ll be able to get those new-fangled things people call emails or something. Percy might get me it one day, he says. Poor old Percy, stuck with his poor sentimental old Mum.
“How sentimental can you get!” he’d say, when he catches me poring over old photos.
I’d nod. I’m on the umpteenth quilt square, but they go more slowly these days. These days. Those days. I seem to be caught in some puzzle where I can’t get out of. A pencil and paper maze games we used to play as children. I suppose I’m modern in the sense that I am very green.
“Mum,” says Percy, “you’re so green, I’m sure you’d recycle all the wastepaper back into trees if it were possible!”
Percy’s silly little laugh always sounds like an effeminate giggle when he tries to make a joke. Poor old Percy. At least his sentimental old Mum loves him. I cook him dinners when me leg isn’t give me gyp.
Percy can – for all his faults – play a mean tune on the piano, just like his Dad. When the mood is right, I get him to jangle a few notes. Yes, we have no bananas, that’s our favourite tune. And Oh what a lovely bunch of coconuts, see them all in a row, a penny a pitch. And, oh yes, What shall we do with the drunken sailor? These days the piano hasn’t seen so much use since those days. She’ll be coming round the mountain, when she comes. And that song about a funicular railway. All best shots in the pop parade. I laugh. He laughs, too. We get on quite well, despite our differences.
Recently, Percy has stopped coming. I now only see him last thing at night – if then. Perhaps it’s a dream. Or perhaps he’s really there. Perhaps he’s really here in spirit, whilst before I imagined him being there bodily, as it were. He reminds me so much, now, of Harold, his dad. My other children come in to see me now and again, looking clumsy in grown-up bodies. They look a bit stiff, as if they feel guilty they haven’t made the journey from those modern countries where they now live, travelling back into the past to see some stranger they once called Mum. Stiff like cardboard or snapshots.
The tunes are more plaintive tonight. Sing something Simple. A ghost at the piano, it must be, because there is nobody sitting at the keyboard. Keyboards, they say, are central to modern talk. I’ll believe it when I see it. Meanwhile, I plump all the photos into the washing-up bowl, soddening into what we used to call papier mâché at junior school. I want to recycle the memories. How sentimental can I get? How green is my valley?
PREMATURITY
There’s more to life than a Stoker. Stiff keys, for example.
Charles – a sad case of someone who believed the past actually existed as portrayed by History – saw fit to employ several time-serving servants: some of whom were actually men and women crawling along Charles’ back passages; stoking the coal fires from the rear of such seats of combustible power.
Clank! As a chimney-wall slid aside and a tentative poker prodded forth to stick air pockets into the back-doubles of black cobbled mounds for fire to breathe easily … and crisp and crackle in the heart-warming warmth of Charles’ living spaces. Clank was more a creak or croak of rust-corroded metal than clank – as light was pushed into slots of age-old, mould-kissed sidearms of the house’s dilapidations.
“Hey, I can’t open the back entrance,” suddenly announced – in entrancing vowels of speakeasy back-scratching – a servant of some standing called Clive. Clive was a servant who was not expected to stoke or poke, but actually oil the tumblers of life’s strange reality. He was respected as a house-mover. The clock-maker that started time ticking. The First Mover, in fact. Clive was nothing, though, without Charles to serve. Charles was Clive’s Creation. Every Creator needed a Creation to boast of.
“Have you tried every bunch?” asked another servant of more downward tendencies. A bog-borer, of hirsute face and threadable torso. Charles, however – with fellow servants at every quarter – needed not even to speak in answer. Charles employed servants to talk among themselves, debating unissued orders and extrapolated duties.
A bunch of keys was a bunch of keys. They were identical. The downward servant – of nameless mien – knew this fact at the deepest unstokeable parts of his soul. If there were more than one bunch, any loss would be worse than misunderstanding. And the worst fate of any community – be it the servile or masterful area of jurisdiction – was misunderstanding. A loss for words is like not being able to unlock truth itself. Negatives cancelled each other out rather than preen and roost upon false beams of logic.
Clive shrugged, so that Charles did not need to.
Even verbs were servants’ business. Stoking the story till it goes out – prematurely? The key to its mystery missing.
THE WAR YEARS
Prologue. The War Years were weeks on end of challenge and response. Civilisation ever progresses through such series of challenges and responses. Many feel they want to forget those weeks on end, leading to months slipping into months, years fighting back the years … until we or they or you could gather in the harvest of the present . . . as days topple into the future, we hope, interminably. Death is the only battle the years cannot join. But between who and who?
***
“Hey!” shouts Tom, in one such challenge to the day.
The day did not respond. The day was fighting back the tears.
Silence stared cruelly from the mirror straight into his cold eyes. Tom was 80 odd. An even number, a round number. Years that had come full circle and met head on. He suddenly saw the warmth of the child in the eyes looking back at him. Rita had left him at the age of 70, his age of 70. Her round of years had misjudged the pitch and she had never reached last base, after swinging the bat at a seemingly empty ball. The true ball had indeed made a ricochet with a tree and ended up in the nettles, full solid foul. The flowers the nettles hid were its nest for a million nights to come, or were they the ghosts of flowers re-seeding the past with mulch? Meantime the future grew drier and drier. Arid shades that shifted above the grave that Tom never visited.
“What’s up?” Tom rejoined the battle with silence. He recalled the war years, the blitz bombers and the wayward doodlebugs. He’d been a child then, one eager to tap the novelty of Air Raids and Rations. His own grandfather was the mirror image of Tom today. Tom today. That was a name to conjure with. Tom Then was just a thumbprint on a window pane soon to be shattered by shrapnel, as Tom and his cousins used the Andersen Shelter as a focal point in their games of hide and seek. Tom Will Be melted in the heat of sunspots that rained down instead of bombs. The years were struggling against the global warming of newer, brasher years; scorched acres of time that relished the sandstorms which engendered them. Those pepperings of stingbombs from air’s last base.
Meantime, Tom listened out for Rita’s response. Greenless mean time.
Tom’s pasty yellow face was plastered to the glass like a poster advertising illness as a way of avoiding conscription. He pointed his finger. Tom Today was again Tom Then. The future needs you.
One cousin they had never found. Counted to one million, and then the others scattered off to search in tree and town and country and sea. Perhaps the cousin had never existed in the first place. A shade herself scuttling to hide in whatever shelter could be provided against time’s stuttering bombardment. Counted to one million years. “I’m coming, I’m coming, ready or not…”
Rita hid, she thought, in the undergrowth. But it was only thought, after all. She was merely a stitched globe with porous stuffing. The game was over. No mirrors are spherical on the outside. But if a mirror is spherical on the inside, the reflected image it throws can ricochet for a tandem of eternities.
“Let me catch you up!” screamed Tom Today.
But he never could. Tom Then ever heading towards last base, blindfold’s last run. Pin the tail on the Donkey’s Years…
***
Epilogue. Sadly there is none.
THE EGG-TAMER OF JULLIPBAR
Jullipbar wasn’t an alien planet as such, because it was where we lived. We called it home. Everywhere else was alien to us. All the sparkling specks or unidinentified flying pods were potentially where you or your kind lived – or possibly lived, because you couldn’t live everywhere.
Jullipbar could almost be called a terrain of unrelieved sameness, interspersed with lakes and sea. An archipelago with blueness silting into every corner. A beautiful feathery light shafting at all angles from a single source above. An outdoor cathedral of some quite stunning picture postcard over-the-top lack of distinction. Except, of course, when the weather was bad. But we tend to forget about those things. We enjoy sameness. And, thankfully, our memories are short. We live for the moment.
Today I’m an egg-tamer. Just to fill in a brief background, I am of an untidy gender. I go without being seen. I come with as little fuss as possible. I enjoy picking fights with challenges, because that gives contours to the day. You, being a visitor, are one such challenge: a visitor who, although merely arrived in spirit instead of in a bodily state, surely represents a circumstance which, of course, stems from your chicken-livered soul being reluctant to embark upon the risk of vehicular travel, bearing in mind the troubled times that beset us all, alien or otherwise.
My story, sadly, is briefer even than that background. Well, we have no time for stories in Jullipbar. Real life takes us so much time, all of it in fact. We don’t really know what stories are, their concept or their wherewithal: we fail to find fiction anywhere; or drama; or spectacle; or even sound adventures masquerading as music. So let’s finish there. Hope you enjoyed your trip. You can go back now along the psychic funnel you smoked out with your mind power; back home to that alien home that you call normality.
Hope you enjoyed a glimpse of my current occupation. Egg-taming. Here is a chicken with all its breasty members complete, tousled feathers ripe for the plucking, in a state that you would call dead; dead still; blind poultry; eyelids scaled over with yellow scum; wrinkled skin slowly … ever so slowly … hardening, crystallisng as you watch … even more slowly curving out into surfaces its previous nodular form could not possibly have predisposed; limbs cracking back into the smooth mounds of grit; the wishbone sinking into a mucus centre where the yellow scum has setled; and at this stage the new form begins to move, ever so slightly at first, each twitch of the crisp sheen becoming more and more violent…
And, yes, I take my top whip and lay into its blantantly aggressive manoeuvres towards me … as if it seeks to smash me in the eye; my eye being the nearest state to its now own chickenless state… making me an egg-tamer … an egg-tamer of Jullipbar.
But you’d gone before you saw all this, if you were ever here at all. Even mind travel can be dangerous. Hope you made it back, without too much synaptic wastage. Home sweet home for at least someone. The blue archipelago of Jullipbar as ever threatened with alien pods, worse than any weather. Hatching plots forever. Breakfast seems too far away to matter…
WHAT HAPPENED IN VIENNA (1920)
Nobody knows what happened in Vienna in 1920, even those who lived there at the time, because they’re dead and didn’t write anything down. Those who did write something down, however, often got everything wrong – perhaps intentionally, to trick posterity. The truth is: absolutely nothing happened in Vienna in 1920. On the other hand, everything happened. Each minute of each day, everything happens, the wide world over. And, equally, nothing happens. Only at rare moments do historic, memorable, recordable things happen.
There was a child in Vienna in 1920 who saw Sigmund Freud in the street but, to the child, the person he or she saw was an ordinary person who walked the streets; only one head, only two legs, one nose, eyes that looked at the child then looked away, about to forge on towards some unimportant errand. Except this was the Sigmund Freud who probably did more to change the world than anyone else. You see, he suffocated Adolf Hitler. If the child had not mischievously tripped up that ordinary gent, who was upon an unimportant errand that 1920 day in Vienna, then that gent couldn’t have later suffocated Adolf Hitler, because he (Sigmund Freud) would have been in a different place at a different time, by the strange laws of chaos theory. Or was it some skewed law of averages that simply allowed people like Sigmund Freud and Adolf Hitler to meet at odd anachronistic moments during impossible cross-sections of their two respective lives?
The child – oblivious of such concerns – was scolded by his parents for tripping up that bearded gent who was otherwise minding his own business walking the streets of Vienna that special day in 1920. A special day among an infinite number of other special days. The child repeated his parents’ scolding words back at them in a sneering tone:
“That was very rude!”
A clip round the ear ensued, as the father (a man of some standing in Viennese society) applied a fitting punishment for such backchat. I have translated what was said into English, for the benefit of my English readers, and I shall continue to do so. Many things were said, and I haven’t bothered to translate everything.
The child started bawling – in Austrian, no doubt. But there were secret messages between the words, signs and symbols that indicated he was more than just a child. It was a commentary in code upon the clandestine forces at work during inter-war Europe. Warning of this and that, and the onset of an even bigger war than the one just finished. Wars were often warnings in themselves, hence their names.
In any event, an observer in the street noticed this and recognised the signs. This observer was one of those known as a History seeker, one who was hiding in a doorway: a single example of the many History seekers masquerading as ordinary Austrians of the day. Indeed, peppered throughout the population of Vienna in 1920 were at least one hundred thousand History seekers from other times, although most of them thought they were ordinary Austrians. Despite being History seekers, their minds were planted with an ordinary life in 1920 Vienna. Only their dreams hinted at something beyond their normal day-to-day concerns. Dreams that seemed inexplicable, even surreal, on the surface. The stuff of art movements.
The parents with their child wandered off into the crowds, to be lost forever from the keen observation of most History seekers, knowing and unknowing alike. I managed to follow the family, however, as I had been primed to do. My own history antenna was sufficiently sensitive to sense the sensitivities of other antennae a mile off, even with the interference from the heightened life-and-death concerns of ordinary Austrians running amok between us. The dark survival of the Mittel-European masses was a force that did blur our keen machinations to change the course of history. Had they but known, these common folk would have stepped aside, scuttled off to their dark steamy kitchens where their interference would be less apparent. After all, we History seekers were a definite force for good, desperately trying to divert the rivers of blood into other less dangerous sluices of Time, where minimal harm would be done to the ordinary populace.
The family arrived back at their own dark steamy kitchen, with their love for each other still intact, despite the scolding words that echoed between. The child – the one who had tripped up Sigmund Freud – was now rather more mature (even if still small in stature), as if he had grown up rather suddenly, during the hike home through the Viennese streets. The conversation had become muted, as if they actually now suspected they were being observed.
I wasn’t the only one. I had spotted several dark shapes and shadows being towed along by this family behind them. I could also hear Strauss waltzes, interspersed with what I considered to be a very strange section of music, a more modernistic sounding anthem that intoned the name of Vienna in English, with an outlandish wireless beat prefiguring scientific inventions that had no place in 1920. The child sang along with this version of Vienna, a sound system that blotted out the more familiar orchestral music of Mahler and Strauss. Where the music was coming from was quite a mystery. There was no sign of baton or criss-crossing bows in the nearby bandstand in the park. Indeed, the music sounded far too streamlined and rehearsed – quite beyond the abilities of our usual bandstand buskers. The modernistic anthem of Vienna was quite disturbing. It made me feel the band was alive, yet invisible. The vocalist was wildly unoperatic. Ultra weird. Beyond the scope of any song that I had ever experienced: with English vowels quite out of the reach of the normal Viennese warbler of 1920. Yet vaguely amateurish and unrefined.
“Can I watch…?” asked the child, as the mother increased the steam in the kitchen with her attempts at infusing tea in a samovar. The father remained quietly stern, staring into the blue flames of some hissing jets with some faraway tune imperceptibly bubbling at the fat parts of his lips.
“Can you watch what?” the Mother asked, her tone of voice evidently conveying her annoyance at the child’s behaviour whilst outside in the street.
The child pointed at a black and white framed photograph leaning against the wall from where its edge rested on the draining board. Looking at something that was entirely static did not seem worthy of the word ‘watch’, but he insisted upon staring at it, his eyes following some hidden action of the frozen figures therein. It was a scene of bedraggled people being pushed and shoved towards wagons and loaded for conveyance elsewhere. Frozen in time. Not a single History seeker in sight. Or none that made themselves obvious. There were a few bystanders but they seemed to be laughing. A real-life History seeker – and I should know – would never laugh at such evil goings-on. History seekers would never laugh especially while observing the dire straits of those poor people making History itself by being herded on to wagons. History seekers were true to their beliefs, even if it meant being exposed and left in the open amid the most barbaric scenes of History. Some History seekers were probably loaded in the wagons and became History themselves.
There was a knock on the door.
“I bet it’s that gentleman you tripped over come to complain,” said the Mother. I could tell she had been beautiful once. She still looked quite young under all the careworn wrinkles. I could easily visualise her being a teenager. She had that look of youth in her eyes and around the mouth. Unlike her husband – the child’s father – because his own careworn features were disguised by an unphotogenic horror movie mask paradoxically masquerading as the face of a Viennese man in 1920. He wasn’t being cruel to the child but I could imagine him being cruel when out of my observation.
It was soon to become a difficult period in the story to describe. History seekers are supposed to be adept with words, to depict the logic of happenings and the consecutive events of History as they panned out or fanned out in a multitude of possibilities feeding off other possibilities ad infinitum and ad absurdum. So imagine my disappointment when events became out of control and too sudden for me to give due credit to their passing.
The gentleman had already been invited into the kitchen, even before I could blink … and the child was being made to apologise.
“Go on, say sorry,” shrieked the mother.
The man with the pointed beard and the look of learning was decidedly placid, like a plate of just tenderised beefsteak. His eyes followed every movement of these kitchen dwellers. The child’s father had faded into the background like a forgotten or ownerless shadow. The child’s mother kept repeating her refrain: “Go on, say sorry, go on say sorry, go on say sorry….”, this time mumbling rather than shrieking, as if giving up some ghost with each breath. Despair writ large in her eyes.
The gentleman who I assumed to be Sigmund Freud suddenly smiled, creasing the dead meat of his face above the pork bristles of his chin … and said: “No need to say sorry, young ‘un. It was an accident, I’m pretty sure.”
As to being sure, I’m actually unsure of the correct translation but that is as near as possible. Like events in 1920 in Vienna, who knows what happened for sure? None of us were really there. I like to think I was there. I know I must have dreamed of some of the events: the riots, the ceremonies celebrating the Anschluss, the other History seekers I sought for comradely mutual support (but found none), the empty eyes of many real inhabitants, the monotonous beat of a modernistic anthem echoing on tannoys from street-corner to street-corner, the grey buildings scarred by warfare, worn by heavy weather, air raid warnings blotting out the music, and that dark steamy kitchen where, by now, even as I tell you these things, the mother as well as the father have already retreated, both of them dropping back as shadows into shadows, as if sinking below or should I say behind the vertical surface of what little shimmering light still remained…
Even I found it difficult to keep my eyes open, as I witnessed the residual human shapes in the kitchen, the larger one taking final purchase upon the smaller . The Child is Father of the Man, a poet once said, during Intimations of Immortality.
I couldn’t keep my eyes open on the monochrome scene that was now enacted between the margins of History’s frame … as the two shapes merged, either by murder or suicide, one killing the other by becoming the other. More effective than suffocation. No, indeed, I couldn’t keep my eyes open, as they filled with tears as well as blackness behind the lids.
THE INSIDE OF THE INSIDE
The argument was conducted under wraps, under roofs, under cover of town and country, time and place – mainly by email, but often by clandestine exchange of notes between members of the audience at the weekly ‘Friday Night Is Music Night’ recording for the BBC Light Programme.
Indeed, the argument had been going on for many years, spanning all manner of communication systems, such as Morse Code, Semaphore, via the gossiping of folks on the blower or press-button-A/press-button-B kiosks (whilst letting drop important sounding words or noises between the gossip, all of which spelt out the intrinsic message), envelopes taken on horseback as well as by the more normal Royal Mail vans, telegrams, telex, smoke signals learned parrot fashion from the Sioux Indian, sign language, uncouth gestures in public gatherings such as football matches or pop music gigs, tell-tale coughs and splutters picked up by the Radio Three microphones between movements at classical music concerts, children surreptitiously passing ink-blotted notes between desks whilst the teacher turned a blind eye to their mischievous faces fully giving the game away, tin canisters zipping along high wires in department stores between counters and cash desks bearing handwritten messages as well as invoices and coins, sweethearts exchanging billets doux with strange words out of context amid their amorous ravings … and, then, of course, messages could be passed without even the people involved knowing they were messages: like the hidden patterns in the movement of crowds, windows opening, windows shutting, chimneys giving off smoke from nursery fires where the children watched armies of red sparks marching up the sooty backdrop of their world, traffic stalling, traffic backfiring, traffic policemen waving arms to direct the snarling vehicles of the town as they crisscrossed the gridworks of routes in telling, remorselessly random patterns of journey…
No end to the various means of conducting the argument, therefore. But what was the argument – constituted of all these messages through time and place – and who was arguing with whom? The crowd was slowly, methodically, patiently queuing up for the BBC’s ‘Friday Night Is Music Night’ in the Golder’s Green Empire. I forget if the theatre was called the Empire, because time often interposes obstacles to memory now and again, because a message delivered too easily is often not a message at all. Each message was equivalent to a word in a sentence, though these messages often contained more or less than simply a word. Often just a letter. Sometimes a string of meanings that, together, had very little meaning … unless joined luckily with another message that gave it a context of new and crystal clear meaning. Two messages together made sense, then, whilst each on its own was complete nonsense.
The queue of people snaked round the streets of North London as a gold and purple sunset crusted the rooftops and chimneys and TV aerials with a ghostliness that few of the people in the queue would ever forget, even though they did not even try to remember it, because by being ordinary people, they did not have the worry of noticing the beauty around them. They rarely looked up from their feet.
So the question remained. What was the argument? Who were the insiders that realised that it was being argued out at all amid the apparently haphazard footprints of the queue as they slowly vanished inside the theatre via the rusty turnstile of the inscrutable ticket-keeper? And were there insiders within the insiders? And inside of the inside: those who knew that time and place were huge signifiers at the core of the argument being conducted by the message and the messenger?
I was in that queue. I knew I had to be there so that I could seek out the inside of its winding crocodile of pink and black humanity. A line of people could have a centre of gravity just as much as a mass or crowd of people gathering into the shape of an audience that was once a queue. They do say proverbially an audience was always once a queue. I stared at my neighbour behind me in the queue. A father with his daughter? I then turned to watch my other neighbour in front. This was a professional queue maker by the look of him. A one-man band of facilities: chemical toilet, blanket tent, thermos and comestibles. He smiled. But I knew he was not on the true inside of the queue, not the pukka core of the queue. The way he looked at me – quizzically – made me wonder if he thought *I* was the ultimate queue maker. The insider that all bogus insiders yearned to become.
Meanwhile, the queue continued its lethargic course, because nobody was heated enough to fasten the pace of its argument. Nobody was there, I felt, to hear the concert of Light Music waiting to tinkle out its notes inside. They were simply there to form the queue. Their eventual emergence as a full-blooded audience was merely secondary.
I then abruptly noticed a sad-faced woman on the other side of the one-man band. Someone who stared past this one-man band – in fact she ignored the strident busker that the one-man band had suddenly become so as to entertain the queue with his music, entertaining the queue from *within* the queue. She not only stared past the one-man band’s flashing tambourine, but also past my own unfamiliar face … towards the man with the little girl. All three, the man with the little girl, the little girl herself and this woman had tears sparkling in their eyes, connecting them by a message far more meaningful than any language of words that arguers could possibly use to outflank each side of their argument.
We all vanished into the Empire … but not before noticing, in my case, that a few puffs of smoke from a nearby chimney veiled the darkening sunset. A few birds sat on a washing line like crotchets. It was Friday night.
THE INSIDE OF THE BOTTLE-OPENER
“Too many openers spoil the bottle,” claimed Charles.
Mag laughed, even though she really failed to understand the joke or the reference. Its beauty was that she didn’t need to understand because Charles was funny whatever he said. His face lent meaning or humour with every glance. The trouble was he said very little.
“Still waters run deep,” thought Mag.
Marley was staring through the kitchen window from outside. He was stood there after sweating in the sun – digging the potato patch or moving things about to clear the path for visitors.
“Hi, Marley,” said Mag. “How’s the water butt today? Mended?”
“Ok, I think,” said Marley, as ever speaking to Mag by looking straight at Charles, as if Charles were some sort of pivot that implied confidence. Charles knew, for example, that Marley had once been inside. Doing time. On His Majesty’s pleasure. As they say.
Charles had naturally never told Mag about the conversation he and Marley had once held in the early days, at that distant point of memory when Charles was willing actually to hold a conversation.
“You know how things are,” Marley had said. A strange way to start an old conversation. Years ago Charles knew exactly what he meant. What mattered it if a gardener – factotum, odd-job man – had been a resident of the ‘Bottle Opener’? The most notorious establishment of its kind, where inmates regularly populated the roofs – as if randomly demonstrating how free they really were. Shouting at visitors as their negotiated the obstacle course of shrubs and sheds that represented the Bottle Opener’s immediate grounds.
The sun was really working its heart out that day – glancing off Marley’s face and dancing not only with the fairies that many believed populated the air but also among the speech bubbles of conversation. Memories certainly gave a strange slant to the present, as well as changing themselves (the memories) in the process. But Charles could not recall whether he had that thought then or now. Days got mixed up as life itself seemed to lose its meaning with age.
Charles did remember Marley telling him that the Bottle Opener was called that because … well, that was a long drawn-out explanation. There had been a legendary inmate called Rudge (once merely a visitor from outside) and Rudge’s term indeed overlapped with that of Marley at the very beginning, but most inmates had only heard talk of Rudge rather than met him. On the outside, Rudge had been a wide-ranging tippler and womaniser, as sharp as a tinopener, too – but, whilst inside, apparently, he was Alcoholics Anonymous through and though – and as celibate as the bars ground into the lower and upper concrete of his cell window (as Rudge himself put it). But that was afterwards. Inside, he was bluntly a man of few words. According to Marley. And Charles reported it all differently somehow when talking to Mag about what Marley had said about Rudge to Charles.
Bottles were smuggled through the bars by befrienders who visited the establishment for forgiveness but Rudge had refused any share in such bottles. But bars sure continued to represent a word that conjured up a whole world for Rudge – when, on the outside, there was never an opening time or a closing time but simply a snake of time sucking grog through its own tail like a straw. Marley shrugged. His own words crudely misrepresented his own time at the Bottle Opener – and Rudge’s poetic turn of phrase when reporting it after his stint of service at His Majesty’s Pleasure were far beyond Marley’s range of thought. So Charles and Mag remained quite oblivious of the ‘snake of time’ phrase. Perhaps it had never been used by even Rudge himself. Only doing time would tell.
Marley eventually told Charles that Rudge had befriended him when they shared a cell together – during the conversation that they held through the night when they had also christened the place the Bottle Opener. Now it seemed the place had always been called the Bottle Opener. Strange ways, strange times.
Each period of time held different conversations and overlapping events … and back, today, Mag and Charles seeing Marley through the kitchen window would become just one more undependable future memory for someone among them to toy with or merely fetch from the past and interpret or misinterpret accordingly. Usually the latter.
The sun always seemed to shine, from inside the Bottle-Opener. And, today, the sun was shining in the kitchen garden. The path was freshly weeded. The water butt fixed so that any leaks were yesterday’s leaks. The shed had been moved on its moveable plinth towards a part of the garden to give shade for anyone wanting to use the deck-chair. Marley shuffled his feet expecting a cup of tea to be passed through the window.
Mag, much later, that same day, or another day, stood by the kitchen window, alone, watching birds swooping in to feed off the pellets of food she’d left for them on various devices of bird-table or bird-house or bird-cage – except the bird-cage itself was where they nibbled at the food from outside, the food being inside the cylindrical hanging cage as a container. She almost wept as she remembered that climate changes were afoot and probably had been since Victorian times if anyone had the nous to recognise this fact. Human beings were at risk as well as birds. She had a dream last night when she watched three men digging the garden, back-breaking stuff – three of them, three blokes, three geezers, rough diamonds, rogues, wasters, rather tongue-tied individuals who helped round the grounds of the house, just for a few scraps of food she could spare and the bottles of drink she had stockpiled for just these occasions. Bottles were better than money, in these circumstances. The food was relatively unimportant and they laboured in the hot sun purely for what the bottles contained, indeed raising their respective thirsts so as to enjoy the drink that much better. The dream was not a dream at all but it didn’t matter. It seemed like a dream, that was what was imporatant – like most of Mag’s life had seemed like a dream, since her husband had gone way. Charles, Marley and Rudge saluted as the sun reached such a certain pitch that they needed to shade their eyes when they looked towards the kitchen window. They couldn’t see Mag because of the reflections.
Rudge looked through the bars of his cage. He had dreamed of Mag dreaming of him, although he didn’t know her name was Mag nor that the other two men he worked with in the garden were known to each other, let alone to her … or to him. Tears came to his eyes. He was so far down the pecking-order of self-knowledge, he wondered if he existed at all. Rudge rather envied Marley his strange ways and means of getting in and out of the cage as if it were a puzzle people had for Christmas, squeezing a shape through impossible gaps. He envied Charles even more than he did Marley. Charles had only tried to get into the cage from outside but had failed; failure and success having grey overlapping areas as most things did. But Charles always gave confidence that he was there, that he knew what he was doing: telling the truth.
Marley had a dream, too. He was in the shed surrounded by unopened bottles and he man-handled a hammer as if this were the only method to tackle their opening. But shards of glass would be one mixer too far, he assumed. The shed seemed to be moving under him – like a sedan chair – or like a feat of imagination that was beyond even the dream’s capacity to manage – and it soon ground to a halt. Once Mag had visited him here in the shed. Until the dream itself dissipated.
The final dream was Charles. Not a dream of Charles, not a dream by Charles. The dream was Charles. A dream that was a person, not a person dreaming a dream. A dream that masqueraded as a real person with a real name carrying a body round with it as if it was his. Like a vehicle or lift or big wheel. Charles suddenly recalled those ships in a bottle: scrimshaw vessels that were too big for the bottle that they seemed to be voyaging within. Sailors used to make them for their favourite nephews. Prison-ships. Charles used to live near the Essex marshes. He once knew Magwitch, before he was famous.
nemonymous three
2005/6 REVIEWS OF THIS 2003 ANTHOLOGY. Followed by some links to its previous reviews.
<<<>>>
Second review on this site
The most memorable review I have ever read crucified the author for several hundred words and concluded that “…on the basis of this work Mr X couldn’t write ‘shit’ on a wall”. I can assure you that this review will not be as memorable.
I have to admit that I wasn’t quite sure what, if any, difference would be made to me as a reader by not knowing the name of the authors of the short stories presented in Volume 3 of Nemonymous. I hadn’t come across the publication before but the concept certainly intrigued me. I think that the main beneficiary of this arrangement is, indeed, the reader. Authors can always be published under pseudonyms which would make it difficult for a reader to identify their work from a contents page. The added advantage to having no name is that the reader is simply faced with the text. No expectations and no preconceptions, just the experience of reading.
In this situation the format and style of the book becomes significantly more important. The format and design of Nemonymous is excellent throughout. You can choose to read stories at random or in any random order. Being a fairly conventional soul, I chose to read the volume from beginning to end and I found the editor’s grouping of the stories to be entertaining. It starts with two very short tales, goes on to a mixture of tales of various lengths and ends with another very short tale which neatly rounds off the collection. I have since dipped in and out, looking at the stories I enjoyed most and I feel even more strongly that not naming authors helps each story stand or fall on its own merits.
In general, all the stories were well written and merited their presence in the collection. I didn’t like them all but I didn’t expect to as all collections will contain works which don’t connect with individual readers. I personally preferred the longer stories in the collection over the ultra-short. For a very short story to work it has to have either a very original concept or twist that is succinctly expressed and the examples here didn’t quite achieve this. The first story the bluest of grey skies is certainly succinctly put but it tells an old, old tale. The second story, practice is also very short and works better. It comes across as a snapshot of a particular moment, a highly dramatic, closely described event which seems to be an extract from a longer tale.
The two other ultra-short stories in the collection, the ballerina and the place where lost things go are of very different forms. The story of the ballerina reads like and is presented as a piece of history. The final story on the collection the place where lost things go certainly has an interesting and fun idea but it is overdone.
Amongst the slightly longer stories, I was really struck by sleeping beauty. This is a great story which expresses anguish beautifully. It is wonderfully well written, paced to perfection and the more you read the more you feel for the characters.
There are two stories which deal with the issue of ageing and the first of these, scrounge adds a horror twist to the end which overcomplicates things. The more gentle story, twilight music seemed to me a much better expression of the longing for lost youth and other issues associated with ageing bodies and minds.
Two stories, the rest of larry and warp, are told with wry humour and are light examples of the horror genre. They are both very well written and contain interesting ideas which are well plotted. One other tale of this type, shark in a foggy sea is of equal standard and has a very well paced erotic storyline which is sustained throughout.
A few stories were irritating. Gerald and the soul doctor started out with an interesting idea about obsession and isolation but got lost along the way, wandering into a different story by the end. The idea behind digging for adults, where adults bury themselves to avoid dealing with children is very original but the story annoyed because it had a buried adult dug up only to choke on a piece of dirt. The characters in insanity over creamer’s field simply did not gain my sympathy nor was the central idea progressed as well as it might have been.
Any collection of stories must have a solid core of good work if it is to be successful and this is provided in this collection by the quality stories genie; otterwise; sirens; mobile phone; the small miracle and chemo. They are all enjoyable and stimulating and each contains either an excellent idea or memorable descriptions or phrases which demonstrate the quality of the writing.
The most enjoyable of the stories in the collection for me are two of the longest. The first, Lucia, deals with a tale of loss and belonging and is the story of a young orphan girl wandering in a city which she thinks she knows well. It is very well paced and the cityscape is described with a minimum of words. The girl finds a gold coin of which she is robbed and while fleeing she finds a new friend who awakens her to the wider world of reading.
The story which most appealed to me however, was in the steam room. It sets out a scenario where several people are gathered together in one place and each character then describes the others whilst giving the reader a glimpse of their own identity. The author builds a series of misconceptions and judgements from the initial character’s views on his companions which are revised as each character is given a voice to comment from their own perspective. It is a very simple device but works very well as each character is well written and entirely believable. By the end you imagine them leaving and generating their own life stories.
In his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig commented that “We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people’s lives”. Nemonymous is a collection that creates the moments when authors pass unkown through their reader’s lives but these are moments we can, and should, relive.
The idea behind the Nemonymous anthology is amazingly simple. Accept only anonymous submissions in order to eliminate any bias an author’s name creates. Work is judged by both the editor and readers on its own merits, not on an author’s reputation or lack there of. Not having been familiar with the anthology before reading Nemonymous 3, I was intrigued with the concept. A bit skeptical, I wondered if the book would live up to the hype. In this reviewer’s opinion, it absolutely does.
Editor Des Lewis has done a wonderful job weaving the sometimes weird, sometimes surreal stories together. All twenty-one stories can stand alone, but presented together they are much more of a gift to the reader. Although this anthology featured many wonderful stories, here are a few that stood out.
I have to start with “Genie,” a morose tale focused on those among us who are invisible. Can a person impact your life if you aren’t sure they were ever really there? Next, “Twilight Music” brought to light to the ever changing and always complicated dynamic of the mother-daughter relationship. How do you handle the role reversal that is inevitable with an aging mother? Can you ever bridge the distance between you? Do you really need to? Finally, “Chemo” shows how easily adoration and love can turn to apathy and hatred. Would you bring yourself to fight to save the one you have grown to loathe the most?
Nemonymous 3 incorporates wonderful prose, high quality materials, a well placed layout and beautiful artwork. If you have not had the Nemonymous experience, you are missing something special. We should all thank Mr. Lewis for taking a risk and thinking outside the box. Nemonymous 3 is a testament to pure creativity.
