Issue 65: Each had their own way of mourning.
Contributors: Jaine N Eira, Bam Saengsri, Jeremy Johnson, Rafael S.W., Ruby Mahoney.
Artwork by Margot Rees.
Download: PDF (2.4MB)
The family response.
His mother baked cookies
for fourteen hours straight.
She gave them to charities,
stale, they tasted of wedlock
and cocoa. It made the news.His grandmother looked
at photos. Drank tea.
thought about soft things,
went to yoga class
with shaking hands.The family miscellaneous
floated like satellites
between gravesites.
The pets loped listlessly
and then forgotHis brother donated blood
in the key of Beethoven
and hot bath. They almost
couldn’t bear to save him,
didn’t speak to him for weeks.His father dug up all his plants
moved them in the back seat, boot,
drink holder of his car, to the cemetery
where he dumped them because
he couldn’t think where to dig.
A Thoroughly Modem Man
Ladies and gentlemen, babies and mental hens.
I am a man with a modem, a victim of time, a survivor of progress, an ignorer of crime.
Yeah, I don’t got no wi-fi wireless, I’m a dial-up for hire, mixing fire from my Limewire.
I got no iPhone, no iPod, no iPad, no i at all, just a flirty free wren sexting me on my Nokia 3310.
My PC’s not a Mac and I search on Yahoo, I use MySpace for the friend race and Minesweeper is my time keeper.
Yeah, I’m talking Powerpoint backing every speech, I’m talking Word Art heading every piece, I’m talking MS-DOS and floppy discs and games of Worm and refusing to learn.
No, I can’t tweet, can’t poke, can’t blog, can’t tube, but my Walkman is sweet and I don’t advertise my mood.
I’m a 90s kid caught far from my peers. I’m behind the curve, I’m one step back, I’m trapped in the past, I’m scared I won’t last through the masks of this fast harsh online farce.But whenever I connect there’s the music of wires, like some great spider is plucking the branches of the World Wide Web, for my screen alone. And the music is a symphony and to me it’s still a miracle.
Every kid’s got a camera phone now, but are any photographers?
How many realise that they’re writing with light?
Losing It
Afterwards, it was like they were two different people.
He drove – eyes fixed on the other side of the windshield – and took the long way home.
She said nothing.
She shifted in her seat, uncomfortable with the thick pad they had given her for the bleeding.
He said nothing.There wasn’t much anymore, just a few sad drops and a hollow ache where…
Where there had been so much more.
The tears fell only from her left eye, so he couldn’t see.
Her sadness seemed to anger him, as if she’d filled her quota already.
But he had cried too.She wondered if he blamed her.
He wondered the same thing.
The Crows
The murder circled the dead. Crows littered the road with twigs. The four directions met the crow’s funeral like a Celtic cross. The momentum of the care tyre had forced the bird from the pedestrian crossing to the centre of the road. He had no idea that the simple animal had gone down to fetch its lunch. The full-sized sedan was on its own route, he sped off in the northern direction.
The commuters didn’t stop driving. They crushed bones in rhythmic intervals whilst the murder watched from the four beams holding the lights that signalled green, amber, and sanguine scarlet. A wide-eyed boy on a vacation with his family marvelled at the amount of squawking and blackness. Feathers and beady eyes shared a wet glisten in the daylight.
A few crows chased after careless cars, flapping and beating their wings against the windows. The wide-eyed boy got a fright and cried. He begged his parents to take him home.
Gradually the traffic stood to a halt. The hearts of car engines hummed in their mechanical grind. Some people got out their phones to take videos and photos of the scene. Somewhere between fifty and a hundred crows surrounded one of the busiest intersections in town. They formed a ring around the scatter of pink and feathers skidding on the asphalt. A dimensional wonder flattened across tar. The birds laid twigs and leaves near their brother, skipping on their two feet and bowing their heads.
People perched on the sidewalk to film the funeral. They never shed a tear.
In the daylight everywhere feels like home.
In the daylight you are untouchable. You are walking with her hand in yours and her boots are knives on the sidewalk and I am the concrete, looking up her dress and saying goodbye to you again at the tram stop, goodbye. Her hair is dark like mine and her eyes are sky just like mine were sky and if your eyes squint just enough you can almost see me for just a moment, before she speaks in long words about glass and Gotye and you know again that she’s not me - her hair is too straight and her eyes are too dull in the winter. In the daylight everywhere feels like home but tonight like all nights I will come. I will be the ice on your sheets where you haven’t slept in months and the letters that no longer arrive in your mailbox and the tickets to Europe your father bought you, that you kept hidden in the pages of a notebook just in case. Just in case I stayed with you until winter. I will stay with you tonight and my tiny hands will tangle her hair and pull your skin from your bones until you become a cloak for all of the girls who will visit your bed and leave again for some place warmer. I will dig paths of love across your neck and I will tangle their hair until they become demon-women and you will long for my body. You will long to rot with me in consecrated ground, until we are pulled together towards the earth. It will be a silent discomposure, like your thrusts late at night and my hair left behind in tufts on the pillow. The way you stood at my funeral with the scent of my death still on your collar from our goodbye kiss, goodbye. We will become dust and fire and you may think you can live alone but you will breathe me in again somewhere. We will sit opposite each other on the tram and she will sit beside you, her head resting on your shoulder. She will hear your stories about angels and heartbreak and she will laugh and fall in love because she’s never heard your stories before. I will sit opposite you. I will be the stranger looking out the window. She will fall in love and the winter will never have been so cold.
You may have left me, but I have not yet left you.
Dogs or Sad Wolves
The garden filled up with graves, and if he wasn’t careful about the passage of the years, then it would look like the little handmade crosses and small mis-dirt mounds would come in like a one-way tide. The windows were growing mould, which didn’t help. It wasn’t a great place for the animals to be for eternity. He tried to care about them, and after a while was surprised to find that yes, there was a single tear tentatively dripping down his cheek. But it was more like his body was sweating than anything else.
At night he could hear dogs outside, or maybe they were sad wolves. They were howling, and his dogs, the dead ones, were howling back. The damn things wouldn’t shut up in life and so he wasn’t surprised when a bit of dirt in their mouths didn’t stop them. He’d bought earplugs for just this reason, but he could still hear their complaining, the scrabbling of their feet on the tiles. He closed his windows against the noise, but it had crossed valleys to him and reached him in his dreams where it was like a wet nose in the hand of his unconsciousness.
He felt that dead dogs were a lot like child support. Most days now he thought about his family or his dogs until his coffee was cold, or it was getting too dark to see. Looking at the ocean of gravesticks he remembered how heaven, to the family, was a place cluttered with dogs. One of the graves shined with the light from a road reflector, the small red lights. He’d put it there as penance for the time he had watched the dog get run over and hadn’t been able to get there in time. The damn thing was always escaping. The freeway near their house must have looked like a river. He came home to the family (when they were a family) with arms open like the animal had just slipped through.
Contributors: Jessica Lewenda, Rafael S.W., Ruby Mahoney.
Cover by Rani S McDonald.
Download: PDF (2.4MB)
sticky red fruit
We stood in the orchard, surrounded by apple trees, their boughs weighed down by plump, heavy fruit. The smell was heady, and my head spun from the sweet aroma. It was the perfect day, the sun looking down at us from a clear sky—but it wouldn’t scald us as we worked. Perfect for the harvest. The basket on my back was light, empty. It waited to be filled with rich, red fruits.
My father called us to silence. Our excited chatter ceased, and we stared expectantly at him, waiting for his speech so that we could begin the harvest. ‘Spring calls to us,’ he shouted, arms raised high. He looked like a god, with the sun illuminating him, and the mighty trees swaying, as if they wanted to bow down to him. ‘With life comes death, and in turn, death to life. Spring is a cycle of rebirth.’
I took a deep breath. The smell of life around me, trees, fruit, and blood. I wanted to pick the fruit, bite my teeth into the white flesh and feel the juice, hot and sticky, drip down my chin. Mother saw my finger grab for the plump treasure, and slapped away my wriggling fingers. Her scowl didn’t deter me, but her words cut me. ‘If you don’t contain yourself, you won’t get to join in. You’ll go home with an empty basket.’ The thought of that brought a burning sea of bile to rise up my throat. I couldn’t go home empty-handed, I’d waited all year for this day. Harvest day was when I felt most alive, and felt at one with nature. Reluctantly, I pulled my fingers away, but still, they twitched by my sides.
‘With each fruit we harvest, we are closer to God,’ Father said. His voice was strong, and it sent shivers down my spine, all the way to my tingling, twitching fingers. Closer to God. I wanted to be closer to Him, to show my love and devotion to Him. ‘Red is His colour, drench yourselves in his life!’ With this, he lifted the knife in his hand, and brought it slashing down, into the chest of the woman slumped at his feet.
The woman, who had been quiet—she’d cried herself hoarse in the cellar where we’d kept her—during Father’s speech, gave a short, sharp cry. It cut off suddenly as Father’s knife dragged up, over her sternum, reaching her throat, then digging in to sever her vocal chords, collapsing her windpipe, and releasing her jugular from its fleshy prison.
The woman fell forward, a limp doll, drooling red from the gaping smile that spread across her neck. Her lifelessness was the signal, and in response, the knives in our hands—so natural, almost an extension of our bodies—rose in the air, a graceful movement, birds taking off.
I looked down at the offering at my feet, a boy of perhaps eight, who whimpered and stared up at me with a snotty face. His lips moved, but I didn’t hear his words. All I could hear was the orchestra of chokes as windpipes were sawed in two, of yowls cut off mid-scream. It was a beautiful sound, and I couldn’t help but lift my knife and wave it about, pretending to be a conductor.
Then, closing my eyes, I grabbed the boy’s hair with my free hand and lifted his head, baring his tender neck to the world. My knife flew down, a bird of prey diving for an innocent mouse, a flash of silver. The boy barely had time to squeak, the little mouse, and I couldn’t help but scowl. But there was nothing I could do now—his body had slumped forwards, forehead hitting the ground, rubies painting the grass.
I carved the boy up, until he no longer resembled a boy. With his chest cut open—breaking apart his ribs to reach his glistening, still-warm heart was hard work, and my arms ached at the effort—I gazed lovingly at the mess. The fruits sat there, waiting to be harvested, sticky with juice that covered my hands and face. So sweet, the nectar danced on my tongue, the elixir of life.
We harvested their organs, each hunk of meat carefully placed inside the baskets. Carcasses lay picked clean, bones stark white, and even they wouldn’t be wasted.
Nothing would go to waste.
I’d finished carving out the boy—there wasn’t much meat on the scrawny mouse—and set about licking my fingers clean. I wished I could reach into my basket and grab a red, red fruit, bite into it, and relish in the flavor. I didn’t want to wait until they were cooked or preserved in jars, I wanted the fresh fruit now. But Mother would notice a missing organ, and would scold me to high hell.
When I was old enough to live by myself, I could eat all the fruits I wanted.
I could harvest every day.
