Zine

4 beds// 5 Crossing// 6 They are felt// 7 The Origins of Trouble// 9 Dead Right// 10 The Cottage// 13 Work in Progress// 14 Thursday// 16 “An Old Woman Suffused With—”// 18 Have your cake and don’t eat it// 19 Under the Apple Tree// 20 Small// 22 Strong// 25 Edible Voices// 26 For the kid//

Edited by Dulcie Few, Sarah Kelly and Louisa Wright Illustrations by Lands Horses

beds

Where the entrance had been there is now a space. We stand at the threshold. Behind, the motorway continues. They had taken away the bricks and old concrete but not the furniture. Across the site are beds, a hundred or so, well made. We sit. There are a couple of women there, checking the beds are neat. One approaches and says something. I locate an accent, suppressed but there – part of her make-up. She leaves us, tucking a corner of our sheet. The sky is indistinct. Trace of foundation contains the beds. They are ordered, precisely lain. There is no stillness here, you say, quietly. It is honest, for you. You stand up. You leave dents in the sheets, I smooth them. A woman, a bit away, tics annoyance. Someone runs through, her breasts flapping in the breeze. Is mostly ignored. You are bored. You run your thumb over a laundry label, stitched text. Then you walk out. I try to find the line between the sky and the site.

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Louisa Wright

Crossing A man waits in a queue as it snakes uncertainly towards two white-washed huts at the top of the hill. He can see ten guards, maybe more, standing in shade cast by the walls, upturned rifles propped like third legs at their sides. Overhead the sun melts liquid into the sky, the heat so intense the man half expects it to burn out. There is too much light. From this distance the huts dazzle like Greek villas, the guards become the brittle silhouettes of oversized toy soldiers. Even though it has been more than ten years since he last stood like this, white shirt disappearing as sweat turns to glue on his back, he struggles to recall with any clarity anything that has happened in between. Marrying Clara, and all the other photographs that followed, feels remote and unusual, bleached in his memory like this landscape. He realises that when he thinks of Clara now he has to follow a description to find her, the impossibly vague details of a missing person. He looks around at the line of people that seems to stretch out of him in both directions and wishes, not for the first time that he could see more than the endlessly repeated image of the same person. The jumble of legs bird-thin and dusty except maybe for a single thirsty trickle, stare at him like faces. The air is thick with locked sounds and in his right hand the man fingers the curled edges of his passport. More from habit than anything else he wonders how Clara would feel in this place but finds that he can’t bring her into focus. He can still remember the time when he had been so heavy with things to say to her that he would script entire conversations in his head, perfect scenes that existed in parallel to their real life. He used to be able to slip effortlessly into her voice so that together they could narrate what happened during each day. He cannot remember exactly when he stopped imagining these plays or when it was that he forgot to invite her when he was alone. With his foot he grinds circles into the dust until the lower part of his leg is obscured in clouds of silty redness. Chalky deposits climb the rounded toe of his shoes reminding him of the way excess milk leaks onto a child’s upper lip. Every now and then he lifts his passport, holding it close like a novel to read again the smudged stamps that fill its pages, the official memory of his passing through. Ali Lacey

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They are felt Stirrings, soft and feathered, in the cellar. Sometimes I feel with the soles of my feet. A jerk of napes, a confusion of quills. Other times I sense with the cells of my skin. A quirk of crowns. A distinction of bills.

Luigi Marchini

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The Origins of Trouble

I might as well start at the beginning. With my beginning. Although this is not a story about me, to be precise. Nonetheless, you have to start somewhere. And it is not really fair to take a couple of facts I know about him, embellish them and make up a nice little story. Maybe he doesn’t want me to. (It’s not like I could ask him). If I reveal anything about him, I should reveal everything about myself. The story of my birth has a threefold myth attached to it. It began with a stork that was seen on the roof of my parents’ house, a few days before I was born. My mother or my father took a picture of it; it is stuck on the first page of my first photo album. It leads me to believe that my parents must have been excited by my birth to some degree. In my imagination, it is my mother who sees the stork, whilst putting up washing on the line in the backyard. She calls up to my dad, who is on the balcony on this sunny, May afternoon, he fetches the camera and comes downstairs. They giggle, perhaps, and remark upon this coincidence. Maybe I kick against the inside of my mum’s belly at that moment in time - as the only means of expression due to the limitations put upon me as a foetus - that this is not a coincidence, but a foreshadowing of my future. The second remarkable thing about my birth is not so much a myth, but a scientific fact. Nonetheless, it bestowed me with another destiny: fame. My mother was the first person in that hospital in that town, who consented to an experiment that allowed her to walk around the hospital corridors almost exactly till the moment of my birth. An apparatus was attached to her pregnant belly that measured my vitals and would signal my decision to leave the womb. I am not sure how this apparatus worked, and I have not heard of it since. The local newspaper reported on it, and the clipping, which is also in the aforementioned photo album, shows a black and white photo of a new born me and my presumably proud parents.

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I doubt this apparatus was extremely precise, because the third story, which my mother used to relay quite a lot, speaks of my somewhat untimely arrival. On the afternoon of my birth, thick grey clouds were covering the sky. With a sense of foreboding dread, my mother was lying in the hospital bed. I had almost struggled out of the narrow birth canal, pressing my skull against the inside of my mum’s vagina. A bolt of lightning struck outside, but I did not quite make it in time for that. A few seconds later, my mother’s final push delivered me into this world. But her loud scream was drowned out by a mighty rolling brontide thunder. As heavy drops fell from the sky and from my mother’s lachrymal glands, it was clear – at least to my mother – that trouble lay ahead. Trouble lay ahead, indeed. I guess it is easier to blame some kind of outside force, destiny, or what-have-you. Easier than blaming oneself. And easier than blaming him. Because I don’t want to entertain the idea that it is something he planted inside me. Something that is inherent in our genes, in our blood. And it’s not really fair to take my blood and compare it to his. (It’s not like he has any blood left.) But if I am honest with myself, and honest about him, whether it is fair or not, I have to say it: Trouble had lain. Way back.

Antje Papenburg 8

Dead Right The classiest way to go, of course, is the National Portrait Gallery: sweaty clusters of tourists flocking to stand and rattle packets at your feet, exclaiming mundanities at your corpse, pickled in paint. Dead eyes, see and be seen – enviable you. Or to be ventriloquised in long elaborate passages in small print with indents and single-line spacing, to be read and pondered by long elaborate professors who speak solely in small print with indents and single-line spacing. “Quoted”. Obituary in The Times? A page of printed praise – this is your life, potted in terracotta journalese? How about an ornate gravestone in Highgate, carved in marble with superlative grace? Kiss the arse and grease up the pole lose lovers and leases, gain worry lines and weight. By no means lose faith in this nothing you are clambering up and maybe one day you will find yourself hung, alone, in the National Portrait Gallery, rich as a saint, dead as Judas. Amber Davies 9

The Cottage She kicked the sand off her boots against the doorframe and fought against the wind to open the front-door. Folly ran in ahead of her and shook the salt-water from his coat all over the front-room rug. Her hands had gone numb. She stood in the hall and watched them fingering the buttons of her coat, directing them by sight rather than touch, as though they were someone else’s. It was Spring, but you would not know it. As she had walked Folly along the beach, the edges of the sea had begun to freeze, a spider’s-web of ice dancing the dying light across the sand as the water made a fast retreat from the shore. The windtears froze in hard lines down her face and her eyelashes brittled. She pulled up her hood and turned away towards the line of the land whilst Folly chased the tide: the dunes in the breach; the small, hollow look-out tower at the side of the cottage; the trees, growing slanted, their branches forced into strange, horizontal gestures of longing by the wind; and behind them all, the heavy Cheviots, huge as the sky. No one else came here this time of year, put off by the wind and yellow hazard signs at the edge of the dunes: “WARNING: Localised quicksand. Do not touch metal objects. They may explode and kill you.” In the summer, there was a campsite close-by that sometimes cast brave folk up onto the beach. Couples and young families on a shoe-string and, occasionally, lone, bearded young men who looked like they might play jazz trumpet. She’d nod to them as she walked on the dunes. Let the children pet Folly and tell them stories about the look-out tower: how it was built when they practised the D-day landings here many, many years ago, the beach all churned-up with mines so that even now there were still pockets of gloopy quicksand, the present half giving-way, and dangerous, unpredictable patterns to the way the tide rushed in. She’d tell the parents the best way to drive to Edinburgh and the young men the paths to take to Holy Island to avoid getting cut-off by the sudden caprices of the sea. She’d leave the couples be.

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People thought she was mad to retire up here by herself. Especially the children. Kate had helped her move. When they’d finished unpacking, they sat together on the old sofa eating shepherd’s pie from plates perched on their knees. “Mum,” Kate had looked hard straight-ahead into the blackened socket of the fireplace, concentrating on saying the words fast, “I’m worried about you living here by yourself. You’re such a long way away from us all. And you bought this place together… I’m worried you won’t meet people here. You know.” Folly whimpered in his sleep. “You’re not an old woman yet.” It was kind, she knew, of Kate to think these things. Now that Folly had finished his shakedown, she let him wander in circles round the house, head low for a few minutes as he mourned the end of his walk. She went through to the kitchen and twisted pound coins noisily into the meter so that she could start on the washing-up. The wind shrieked desperately to get in through the gaps in the windows. She looked out at the watchtower and the icy blue of the March evening sky around Holy Island. She listened to the whoosh of garbled shanties whipping-off the sea as she washed the white waxy fat from this morning’s bacon off of the frying pan; and off of the plate; and off of the knife; and off of the fork. She stopped. She watched the foam bubbles slide back from the draining board down the sides of the sink and let the cold hold her there for a moment, mushroom-kiss the back of her neck and reach, big and unstoppable, around her. Soon it would be dark. There were no soft domes of light on this horizon, promising the relief of a town close-by. It was the deepest kind of dark here, making the shape of your hand in front of your own face an unknowable guess. The earth would turn black. The new lambs, sticky with blood, would turn black. The dunes and the sea and the sleeping gulls with heads under wings, all indistinguishable black. And she would turn her black face to the sky, fixed by the sparkle from that long-dead star, twisting back through the infinite blind-blue.

Naomi Booth 11

Work in Progress Playing where will you be in ten, thoughts of us crackled and hummed with flint marbles as our two year stint grinds on, tracing over smooth taxed cobbles; hearts still jumpy when swollen wheels to ditch, and reins to corners. Tracking messages sent and received, that image of boxes and packing and crawling on back made some gesticular sense, but none much more than a tailored cavernous greed – borne of father, learnt of mother - a testicular throb and old ships to sunder. Living with and living without, the lifestyle of love all fox-mangled and star-spangled; the element now has changed, though its juxtaposed sultry pose still seers our juice in rum-caked, coke-flaked mosey-on-down lows; perfect floorboards that creak and moan.

Tom Whitehead 13

Thursday muted but better might ink out of cloud weather to toward an edge shook and waved will leaden will surface ahead of and heave hearting hoods stirred to meet minded of lost to thought seeds see seething cut cover tied threads to shut shutters and over this moans match to maim anticipation originating some shadowed same water down for fight

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follow us and I will see sight I will wither in sallow shorn and salute we choose to use yet over in stares out the coupled cornered under all shallows sworn if I could shiver I’d need not to with her watering in guise of glares shone by limbering by together let letter some made new measure me that might would rock tether ground in a one to a two Sarah Kelly

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“An Old Woman Suffused With—” On a bench, beneath the shade cast by the sun from a tree on a small hill, is where I imagine she first felt it.  I had first thought it would be a public experience— the first instance of a soon to debilitate mental disease, undeniably embarrassing, such as forgetting the name of a hairdresser visited every other week for seventeen years— but ‘suffused’ is my verb, and everything hangs on it.   It presents a period of action, demarcates a start and an end.  ‘It is one thing that a life is over and another thing that a life is finished by reaching a conclusion,’ and a story can make the latter possible.   But why private, now?  Will that not deny the finish? Suffusion calls forth a pourer, something poured, and something poured onto; that is, a relationship, not isolation.  Yet she nevertheless feels it pour over her with nary another eye in sight.  The morning joggers have jogged, the dogs have been walked, the children are in school, and the adults are working...And a few seconds after noon a major organ shuts down.  It will be quick, a merciful death.  Her life does not flash before her eyes; it does not shockingly reveal in a moment of horror some nether region bordered with regret.  No, in her last moments— for she is aware of what is happening, has felt something cease— she willingly reflects on her life.  Her resolve is something she has always been proud of, the ability to discover the necessary action, in a mere moment, and carry it through.  For instance, it allows you to know you are about to die, yet remain calmly beneath a shade tree, without attempting to make a death-bench confession on the phone in your purse or summon an ambulance which may arrive in time to revive you from a death-dream.  It inspires the confidence to sit and ask, honestly, what has been missing, about which I can do something in these next few minutes, and know an answer will be found.  And for the first time, with the perspicacity which the imminence of an irreversible change sometimes brings,

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this confidence is noticed, and questioned.  Another organ shuts down.  From the promontory of imminent death, she wonders if some hesitation might not have been the worst thing.  What she accomplished with that faith was nothing small, and were it not for the strength to keep with the faith in her decisions, to maintain, unquestioningly, the practice of this personal tradition, she would, for instance, not be here to question it.  She would be somewhere on a footpath, breathing in the dirt that her suddenly malfunctioning somatic nervous system prevented her from walking over, because she is beginning to slump, her bodyweight pulling to one side, and the stolidity of her confidence becomes palpable to her, a great dam which she used to turn a river of self-doubt into the energy for her perseverance.  But, she does not need to persevere anymore, she thinks, as her shoulder comes to rest on the arm of the bench and her head flops limply over the side; she has fallen to the left and sees the earth and the sky in her peripheral vision, but her eyes rest on the great vertical crack of the horizon across the field. No need to persevere. Her vision fading, with a last sigh she affirms, yes, a little hesitation may not have been so bad after all, and this time it is her relief that becomes palpable as the hesitation breaks over her (and a slight twitch evinces a recoil from death, from this confidence), becoming something else entirely which sweeps along everything in its path and works its way over and down the upward slope which her confidence made possible, as water permeates every empty space it encounters, something which she feels flood every absence in the history she has just encompassed in reflection, something which she feels, with a hint of satisfied pride, for the first time, yet all the more distinctly because it is for the first time, never having allowed it to be felt before, until now, here at death: shame.

Stephen Fisk 17

Have your cake and don’t eat it We went to the Forum, which, unlike the sterling bitten name was all right, light enough. They cramp us into light coloured chairs, dunce chairs that rise awkwardly into the air so you can Sit Right There And Think About What You’ve Done. There are no walls; just windows with spent out shoppers drippingly suctioned to the glass by the press of people. We try not to look at them. They can’t afford the coffee, but we are now trapped in here with a hunk of fridge cake the size of a bowling ball. The owner watches us from a corner while she wipes half heartedly at a table. She probably hand crafted these cakes. If only I’d bought something to read: I could wrap the cake up in newspaper pages and smuggle it out. Unfortunately you made the same mistake and ordered it, so I can’t fob it off on you. This is not cake; this is revenge for something, and it sinks through me like a lead garden ornament. “How is it?” I ask. You may want more. “Delicious” you smile falsely. “Almost too good” you hold your stomach, and glance quickly across the cafe. “So good I may not be able to finish it.” The woman cleaning the table darkens. Her face colour couples with her hair to melt her completely into the walls, which are a dark Mexican red. If we don’t eat this woman’s cake, she may very well go out the back and finish it right now. “I think you’d better…give it a go,” I say. “It being so good.” “Yes” you say so hopelessly I can’t help but take your hand and pat it gently. “You can do it,” I say “we can get through it together.” Outside a waitress scrapes pedestrians off the windows.

Amy Strike

Under the Apple Tree Above your perfect head, Filmy bubbles drift In the late June breeze And your cackles of delight Bewitch the air. Your eyes, mesmerised, Track one until suddenly It pops. You turn, scanning The leaf-green space under The apple tree. Another swirling globe Spirals past your face But the wind spins it Gently just beyond your Dimpled hands. Unsteady, you stretch higher, Squawking with excitement, And a button pings From the cardigan Granny Knitted in spring. The sunlight sparkles on the Small, pearl-green heart As it skitters away; On the bubble, rising; On you, too – Trying still to catch The disappearing magic – While the bubbles burst And softly shine About you.

Cathy Savage

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Small

The promotional material had promised breadth, room to breathe. Grace. “Not very wide, is it?” “No, not wide,” “Or generous,” “No.” She was backlit, looming. She turned to him, “Are you sure there’s not been some mistake? Perhaps this isn’t it. It’s just…I don’t think everything will fit.” He twitched his head around, taking in side to side, up and down, across, “This is what is available.” We looked. “Additional space can be found here.” He spread his hands. We hadn’t moved. He went on, “All space is included, including inbetween.” A further spread of fingers and palms, adding, “There is rarely anything we haven’t thought of.” She narrowed her eyes. I smiled politely, “Excuse us please.” “But of course.” He pivoted. “Well, the back space is tiny,” she said, peering round it. “I could hardly get anything in there.” “Well, at least agree it’s an option. I think we could make it work.” “But it would take so much. I don’t know.” She glanced back at him, his now casual

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palms. “And how can they measure inclusions before they know what’s coming in?” “Ignore him. It’s not for him, is it?” “Oh,” she gasped, “but it’s beautiful! Look.” She had nipped ahead, filling my vision. “It’s so high.” “You think it’s too tall?” “It’s stunning!” She was moving fast now. “Perhaps it’s too much...” I had slipped, fractionally, looking back. “I don’t think we could fill it properly, not really… I mean, it’s far too big, isn’t it? I can’t see how…” “But in-betweens are included!” By then she was running, already distant in precise degrees of physiological process. I turn as if to ask him instead and am inexpert, naïve, and although I can’t see him, I hear him, clapping, stamping the insides of those fists together in that broad, evaluative hand-span. And as those palms echo her rhythm, crying out for an encore, it is suddenly no less about those tiny collisions than the width of their openings, no more about the slapping of feet than their gentle arc of elevation. Leaving me in this, abandoned auditorium, stripped bare, spot lit, still.

Katie Reid 21

The Strong Two heads drew together. One blonde, fragile on its stem rising out of a rough jersey. A buttoned placket had been fashioned, allowing the remarkable cranium an easier passage. A manly fringe slanted high across a huge forehead. The other head gave off a pinkish glow from a bowl-cut of that hue politely called strawberry blonde. Its owner, though, frowning beneath her heavy fringe knew it with precocious social anxiety to be ginger, whatever the euphemism. Both heads met at a low level in front of their plates: a perspective that spread the tea things in a small townscape across a cream and blue afternoon cloth. The paper lampshade hung low like the evening sun. The girl fiddled with her knife, trying to make Pegasus fly, but it was too late in the day for the dancing reflection to spring off onto the ceiling and divert her conkerhaired sister enthroned, robed in a Harrington square and peevishly grizzling at the end of the table. 22

Mummy was clattering in the kitchen; the Welsh Rarebit finishing off under the grill while she had a cig and ran water into the cheesy saucepan. The boy squirmed onto his knees and reached across the table for a sticky green and gold tin. “Not yet,” said the girl, deputising. But they looked at the tin together, turning it around for the unfathomable image to show itself. “Why’s there bees?” “There are bees coming out because it’s dead,” she said, knowledgeably. “Why is it dead? Did the bees kill it?” “It just died,” said the girl, privately processing a more adult narrative of massacre by larger beasts – or perhaps by angry Uncle Walter, trophy-hunting with his gun. “Read what it says.” “Out of the Strong came forth Sweetness”. “What’s a Strong?” “Well, this is a Strong, isn’t it?” “No, it isn’t, it’s a lion!” “I know it was a lion when it was alive, but it says here it’s a ‘Strong’...” “...Is it because it’s gone smelly?” Now both heads pull back sharply at the thought; a visceral flinching from the rank, metallic dead-animal smell that their life in the undergrowth of hedge and ditch has already made familiar. “The bees went to live in that hole in the lion’s chest. They put some honey in and made it nice and sweet.” “They made some treacle too.” “It’s not treacle, it’s Golden Syrup.” “Like honey.” “Yes, and much nicer than honey. P’raps they made it stronger to cover the smell of the dead lion.” “It’s a Strong, you said.” “Yes, the Strong I mean.” 23

Hot and blackly blistered Welsh Rarebit is slid onto plates, cut into fingers and blown on for the impatient youngest. This flushed royal infant is mollified into mumbling and fumbling. The other two draw apart and disappear below table level. “Euck! It smells. I don’t like welsh rabbit. It smells of cheese. Rabbits smell of fur. Can’t I have some treacle?” A sigh gusts across the tea table in their direction. “Eat it all up, both of you, then you can have some Golden Syrup.” “Mummy, why is this lion lying down? Why is it on the treacle tin? Can I lick the spoon? Did the bees kill the lion? Did the bees make the treacle? Did they eat the smelly lion? ” “The Strong,’” corrects the girl to herself, adding the hollow, dark and massively stinking word to her private hoard. “Just eat up, both of you - do,” sighs their mother again, subsiding weakly into her chair; half-dead herself at sunset.

Charlotte Amazon 24

Edible Voices I live on my own little planet. It’s not blue or green. It’s not red or white. It doesn’t have a sky and it never, ever rains. No, there is no snow and the buildings are made of jelly. I live in a grape igloo where I blow bubbles of rice and play with stern sugar mice. My only companions are pink unicorns with edible voices. Some are crunchy like apples and others soft like overripe bananas. We sing every night under the stars that turn to butterscotch when they fall from the sky. The music we make melts in our mouths and sustains us. Even though we don’t sleep, we wash our faces with toothpaste every night before bathing in rivers of milk and drying off in the cotton candy mountains. Sometimes my mother comes to visit. She plants kittens in concentric circles around the fireplace. A few months later, we release them into the jungle where a wise ant teaches them how to fly. Tinkerbell takes them away. When the fairies come, they don’t want to leave. They build warehouses and store teeth in them. I deport them because the jinns follow them and try to steal their dust. The jinns are hot; they are made of fire. Their footsteps make the chocolate earth melt. They are not welcome and my unicorns have to chase them away by singing in icy voices. On holy days, we watch the godly with great joy. They all wake up early and dress in white. They spread white sheets in the gardens and sniff each other’s butts. I tolerate them and let them stay as long as they don’t sacrifice my unicorns or steal my butterscotch. They realise that my planet is not a democracy.

Nabiha Meher Shaikh 25

For the kid I take you out there, to the end of the jetty, which is not well made but does not give us splinters, that is more salt than wood; it takes our weight quietly, like a hush. When the tide is low the jetty seems to go on for miles, bending to make way for invisible landmarks that sit there under the water, basking in holy green before the sun gets fed up and goes home. “The sun is my mum,” you said one time, trying to make up for the fact that you didn’t have a clue where you came from. Even if you are a liar, at least you’re ambitious. So we take the long walk down the jetty and I give you an apple. It is not shiny. To tell the truth it looks a bit gross. One side in particular has risen up in welts and just next to that part apple-molluscs have grown all over making the skin rough and brown and pitiful. There’s a streak of red on the good side. I hope you see that and let it make up for the unsightly mounds. But then the most beautiful apple I ever saw shone like a new-born planet and tasted of nothing but plastic and sponge. That’s how it is these days, the monsters are straight with you, nothing to be afraid of, look scary but taste sweet. It’s those highfalutin beauties you’ve got to watch out for, rotten at the core. So we eat our ugly apples as we make our way. By the time we get there the bottoms of our feet are made of white dust. That’s how we know we live here; we can feel it on the bottom of our feet. Our soles are clean, cleaner than real life, clean like the ugly apple. You can’t see it but you can taste it on your skin. Both of us know to leave the core a little fleshy, least of all to throw it over the side and let it bob on the water. I’ve borrowed a couple of reels from the guy that runs the ship yard and our hooks are in my pocket, like always, punctured through card and wrapped in cloth. We sit and push the cores through the hooks. Then we fill glass bottles with salt water, lying on our bellies and slopping them over the edge. We tie them to the end of the line to act as weights and then we hurl them overboard.

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Under the water is a golden fish who grants all the wishes of the kids of the sun. She loves the fruit of the earth, most of all, the apple, but if by chance she eats a pip, it will grow in her body like a raging man and tear apart her golden flesh. The branches thunder toward the surface and the roots burrow into the sand. Oftentimes our cores fall off and the hooks come up empty. I know that for a few days after, you will wake up early and pull apart your curtains, halfdreaming. Out there, you want to see it: the tree growing out of the water, the golden flesh still upon it and apples gold for the kid of the sun. They won’t taste good, I tell you, and then I wish myself mute. Dulcie Few

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