Monthly Archives: October 2020

Our garden, which was not wide or extensive, could be reached via either of two doors at the rear of my parents’ house. It is only now, thinking back, that it occurs to me the garden was several feet lower than the house itself. I realise this because in remembering it I visualise the succession of broad, fraying concrete steps that separated the garden from the house. These steps were set on either side of a brick protrusion that might once have been a scullery or kitchenette, although as far as I can recall it never achieved any obvious purpose. Tacked onto this were the remnants of a shed-like object, which I believe had originally been built to store coal. The actual garden, when you reached it, consisted of an uneven and weed-ridden lawn, with what might in other circumstances have been flower beds on either side, and a concrete path to the left beyond which, and margined by a high, plain fence, lay a small, muddy wilderness whereon my father might once have attempted to build a rockery.
Throughout the eighteen years I lived in my parents’ home none of this changed – somehow it would have been unthinkable to change it. Things were as they were, immune to aesthetic uplift or any other form of improvement. I have only to close my eyes to see everything I have described clearly.
The result of this, I realise, is a tendency to leave things as they are, benign inertia that leads me to accept my physical environment, with all its attendant factors, as they first manifest.
So it follows that the house in which I now live, low-roofed, single storey, just back from a plain beach looking out at the north sea, is much as I found it when I moved in, still subject to the various neglects of the previous owner, almost a remnant of someone else’s life.
My only neighbour is Annie. She lives two-hundred metres up the steep climb that leads to a small, unamiable village, from which neither of us have managed to gain acceptance. She knocked on my door shortly after I’d moved in to explain that she’d been in the habit of foraging the herbs that grew wild in my garden. She was holding some well-used pruning shears and a bucket.
‘Take whatever you want,’ I said. ‘I’ve just made a pot of tea if you fancy some.’
We sat in my small living room, with its rotting sash window and view down to the sea. Annie cast a severe glance along the row of paintings I’d just unpacked and which I’d leant against one of the unevenly plastered walls.
‘Did you do these?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Over time.’
‘Why so many self-portraits?’
‘Because they remind me who I am when I’m in danger of forgetting.’ It was something I’d said before – a joke with a certain amount of truth in it. Annie continued to frown at them then turned her scrutiny to me.
‘It’s so introspective. Wouldn’t it be more freeing to look beyond yourself?’
‘I paint other things too.’ I pointed to a stack of cardboard boxes. ‘I just haven’t got them out yet.’
She nodded in a way that suggested she was willing to suspend judgement.
‘I’m an artist too. Come up and have a look once you’ve sorted yourself out.’
Thus things began.
If I visit Annie in the morning I will find her in her shed, which is a miracle of tidiness and functionality. Inside it, she fashions organically shaped mirrors decorated with pieces of recycled glass, carves slender figurines from planks of driftwood, and writes the odd poem inspired by the seascape. She advertises her mirrors and carvings online and people buy them. Her poems get published in small, tastefully crafted journals.
‘You can’t live here and be passive,’ she explained, early on.
It would be clear to anyone that Annie is a creative person, orderly in her habits, and pro-active rather than passive. If I visit her in the afternoon I will find her in her strictly regulated garden, which somehow manages to both blend in and stand out from the coarse, encroaching vegetation that grows on the hill around her cottage.
‘People in big cities drift along – there’s no way that will work here,’ she felt the need to point out when I’d failed to complete my unpacking, perhaps six weeks after I’d moved in.
In fact, I have rarely lived in a big city. And the default habit of accepting any new circumstance in which I find myself has made me, in my opinion, a good adapter. Annie, I soon understood, is inclined to view this as a moral failing.
‘I worked in San Francisco for five years. I practised as a canine psychological interventionist. That was how I managed to buy this place outright.’ Annie says this matter-of-factly, although her fingers dance as she indicates the singular, bijou home she has conjured around her. ‘I specialised in anger management for terriers. There was quite a market at the time.’
‘Christ, Annie,’ I’m aware of the admiration in my voice. ‘However, do you go about doing something like that?’ To set oneself up as a Californian dog guru must require a staggering degree of personal organisation, I think.
‘Everywhere you go has a niche, you just have to work out what it is.’ Annie explains this kindly as if she has realised that even the most commonly accepted truism has somehow eluded me.
Our conversation makes me think, and when I go home I start a self-portrait. The version of me that begins to appear is my thirty-year-old self, a heavily-Fairisled warden in a llama sanctuary, holed up, not unhappily, in a croft on the far north coast of Scotland. I am bearded and my eyes seem wider apart than usual, either from exposure to the hypnotic gaze of the creatures I care for, or from hours spent mesmerised by the vastness of the North Atlantic.
‘You’re like a piece of human litmus.’
It’s a few days later and Annie is looking at the painting from behind my shoulder.
‘You’re someone who becomes your surroundings.’
Before Annie applied herself to the canine psyche she worked as a therapist with humans. She still seems keen to share her insights. I’m beginning to realise this is also her way of building friendship.
‘I could paint you,’ I suggest.
The following week Annie sits before me. I ask her to focus on the ukulele that hangs on the wall behind and above me. I look at her intently. She has pulled her tapering auburn pigtail forward across her left shoulder. There’s something about its thickness and rope-like quality that in itself speaks of vitality. It doesn’t surprise me that we can only work in fifteen-minute episodes because that’s as long as she can remain still.
‘It must be strange having had just the one childhood home.’ she says, maintaining her pose but lifting her eyebrows.
‘Not really.’ There’s a quality of zeal I’m trying to capture in her eyes. ‘Back then and round our way it was normal.’
She purses her lips and nods to the ukulele.
‘My mum and dad were always shunting us about. I’d been to five different schools by the time I was sixteen.’
It’s my turn to nod.
‘Lots of change,’ I say. ‘What about now?’
‘I went out looking for things when I was younger, but these days I prefer to be in one place. I’m settled here for the duration.’
‘For the rest of your life?’ Annie is one of those people who could be any age within a twenty-year span, but from the things she’s told me I guess she’s about forty, in which case, as I wasn’t thinking of going anywhere either, it looks like we’ll be around each other for a significant chunk of time.
‘Show me somewhere better,’ she says. ‘Can we stop for a cup of tea?’
I make tea but still observe her. Once I’ve started a portrait my subject continues to occupy my mind until it’s completed. This also goes for self-portraits.
Annie’s appearance, I think, is self-descriptive. Her sweater is evidently hand-knitted, her espadrilles home-made. Her physique is slender, and for a practical person, her hands are surprisingly delicate. But even in repose, she radiates energy and a conviction which seems to imply that, with the right effort, the immediate world can always be put in order.
‘How long have you been single?’ she asks. The question doesn’t surprise me: curiosity is an inevitable by-product of portrait painting.
‘Technically never.’ For some reason, at this moment, it occurs to me that Annie might be teasable. ‘I’ve always been several people in a single body.’
‘Very clever. When did you last have a partner then?’
‘Pretty much until I came here. We were together for nearly ten years.’
Annie considers this.
‘I would have thought you’d be someone to settle down for life.’
‘Part of me would have liked to.’
To my surprise, she ceases to probe. Instead, she puts down her mug and stretches.
‘I’m ready to start again.’
Annie resumes her seat. I peer and dab. I become increasingly aware of the candour that inhabits her features. With Annie, what you see is what you get, though there’s a lot to see and hence a lot to get.
‘You won’t need to sit any more after this,’ I tell her at the end of the session. ‘I’ll do some bits of finishing during the week and then it’s yours.’
‘What will I owe you?’ Her expression suggests she’s ready to haggle.
‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘I offered to do it.’
Annie stands, grips my shoulders and presses a kiss on my cheek. She looks at me, very intently.
‘I’m going to become your agent,’ she says.
Each morning Annie bathes in the sea. She continues to do this even when October mists lie thick across the shoreline. At a certain point, I start looking out for her return and begin a ritual of taking her a hot drink which I hold for her to sip as she towels herself. As I watch her I sometimes imagine a future in which things happen just as they do now.
‘You’ll notice the difference straight away.’
A still morning and Annie has come with a singing bowl and a cluster of sage. As she warned me, she is going to clear the energy in my house. She lights the sage with a match and sets it down on the stone hearth, then forms three fingers of her left hand into a tripod on which she balances the bowl. Next, she moves purposefully round each room striking the bowl with a turned hardwood mallet. She continues to do this for several minutes then opens the front and rear doors and all the windows. At this point, I feel as if something is flying out through the top of my head. Annie looks at me knowingly.
‘This is your house now,’ she explains. ‘You’ll find it shapes itself around you and you can begin to let things go.’
For the next several weeks I feel a disconcerting sense of absence in the simple domestic space I was beginning to call home.
Autumn shortens the days. One afternoon, when the sea is quiet and the weather overcast, something moves me to paint the garden of my childhood. It seems strange that I’ve never done this before. As I visualise it, it is as large as it would be to a ten-year-old, and still full of casual neglect. My parents’ dachshund runs down the path as if he is still alive. I am sitting on one of the broken steps trying to read a book I’m too young for. I look up from its pages and notice that to my right, against the fence and halfway down the lawn is a lilac tree, in full blossom. It sways in the light breeze. I clench my brow and scrutinise my memory. I could swear I have never seen a lilac tree there before.
I explain this to Annie.
‘It’s because you’re creative,’ she says. ‘Creative people are less likely to see what’s actually in front of them. Creativity is like a lens that distorts things.’
‘Perhaps I just took the tree for granted,’ I suggest, ‘like I never really registered that the garden was lower than the house, even when it was completely obvious.’
‘Memory can add things as well as take them away.’ Annie says this gently, and for a moment her face is transformed by kindness.
One moonless evening as I sit reading I notice an amber light flickering somewhere beyond the window of my living room. I get up and, looking down to the beach, see what might be a small pyre floating out on the tide. I go to my front door, open it, and stand just outside, silently. As my eyes grow accustomed to the mix of glare and darkness I realise the object is a figure, perhaps an effigy, ablaze upon a raft of branches. Then, in the nimbus of light it casts, I pick out Annie, standing upright and trancelike as it washes slowly away from the shore. For a moment I wonder if the figure has been formed from the reeds I have seen drying in her shed, then that thought melts as both figure and raft merge into a single conflagration, smouldering, hissing and crackling as it gradually dissolves into the sea. When eventually the last flames die, the night reverts to blackness, with the ebb and flow of the tide the only sound, and I tiptoe back indoors, leaving Annie to the cooling air, and whatever private moments she has chosen to set adrift, then extinguish.

About the Author:

Mike Fox’s stories have appeared in journals in Britain, Ireland, America, Australia and Singapore. His story Breath (Fictive Dream), and Blurred Edges (Lunate Fiction), gained Pushcart Prize nomination. His story The Homing Instinct (Confingo), was included in Best British Short Stories 2018 (Salt). His story The Fun Police (Fictive Dream) was listed in Best British and Irish Flash Fiction (BIFFY50) 2019-2020. His story, The Violet Eye, was published by Nightjar Press as a limited-edition chapbook. http://www.polyscribe.co.uk or @polyscribe2

Love. That singular point in the universe that is you, all alone in the world, surrounded by people passing by, your life in the figures of others. I remember these figures passing me by, the people in school, the people on the street, the constant loneliness at home with my family, and that I had nowhere else to go, but into my heart and my mind. This was the room I locked myself into. Love was enchantment from that singular point of view. Love was that January, I delivered a letter of love so to speak, a love letter. She had told me that she lived “down there”, pointing at the corner of the street. That January I almost broke my neck slipping on the steps, Saturday at four o’clock in the morning. The things we do for love. – She never gave me an answer to that letter, though, because she did not live in that house. By “down there”, I eventually found out, she meant around the corner, at the literal end of that street, not the house at which I had delivered the letter, strange as that may sound. I sighed, but did not say anything, when I found out. I was in love with her for no reason.

I was in love with her for no reason, because, in my view, there was no reason for anything in the first place. Love simply was the material from which movies were made, images of speechless intimacy, which, cut into sequence by an editor, simply occurred, spontaneously. In a world where there was no reason for anything really that spark lit me up and let my heart beat faster. It made me feel alive again in a world in which I had survived my own abortion. And since I had survived my own abortion, my mother only thought it proper that I do my choirs. She never really loved me anyway, but was in denial of it, because, as a mother, it was her duty to love me, a social obligation, a household choir. I wanted to get away from all that. I wanted to get far away from her, but when I opened the door and went outside the world hit me like a brick wall of singular rejection, because I did not fit in. There is no reason for any of it really. But when I saw Sara, I thought that, perhaps, I had finally found someone out there like me.

Singularly sarcastic, dressed in black with a studded collar around her neck, Sara had no high expectations of the future. The management sucked. There was too much control in society. There was too little communication. We never spoke on the school yard, only when we sat next to each other in class. She once passed a note to me in history: “I have ‘dirty’ written on my thong. Smells like a teen spirit?” The teacher caught me laughing. But I never knew, if Sara really liked me, because the only time we ever talked was in the afternoon on the way back home or on evenings at the local pub, where all of us aged and under-aged goth and punk teens in this town hung out, forsaken by our parents and the world for seeing how forsaken they were.

The only time we ever talked was when she was not hanging out with her clique on the school yard or when I joined her band of friends at the pub. Was this a form of rejection or was there a possibility of being caught up in a conversation with her? One evening, Lina, a loose friend of mine, contacted me, saying it was urgent, that she had run into trouble with a guy she had broken up with and needed protection. Getting up from my chair and heading out, it took some time for Sara to realize that I was trying to say goodbye. She was focused on another conversation.

He had threatened her, she told me. He had poked a dog’s eye out with a stick. She did not want to be alone anymore. She did not want to go back home. She did not feel safe in her apartment. She only felt safe with us. I stood there, while Kurt went into the shop. Lina was shaken and sick of what had occurred, of this guy that had started stalking her. Kurt came out with three beers, one for each, as we sat there on the street and stared out into the night. Who does such a thing to someone he supposedly loves? Who physically threatens a person, who says she does not want to see him anymore? What kind of a person does not understand that ‘No’ means ‘No’?  – “I’m through with that fucking psychopath.”, she said, finding some resolution in her words, thoughts turned into speech turned into action. – “Do you know where he lives?”, Kurt asked and outlined a plan, involving another friend of his, someone who could help him help her. I stared out into the empty street, feeling alone in all this, realizing that no one else but us was here. Did Sara even care about me?

She ignored me at school. She ignored me in class. It was the same as always, the same routine as the past five months since January, as I realized that night with Lina. And so I finally decided to write Sara another letter. Maybe I was projecting my love onto her like a screen. Maybe I was peddling a dream, riding by her place every day on my bike. Every movement that I made sparked up the dynamo of love, my yearning. But my crush on her was crushing me. I needed to know, if there was a chance… I remember the day I visited her house, when without an explanation she told me that she had already been taken, when she had told me that he was the hunter and she was the hunted and he had finally taken her as his prey. I remember that day, because I did not know what that meant, to be someone else’s prey. – “Now he has me.”, she said, wrapping her arms around her legs. But what did that mean? She had asked me, if I could wait outside for a moment, when she opened the door. She did not want me in her house.

That is how it ended that day. She would not clarify anything else, so when I arrived back home, I stared at the wall of my room, which answered me with as much silence as Sara had answered my letter. She had said her piece and yet said nothing at all with her words. Who in this world, after all, would let someone else treat them like cattle? It did not add up. So I continued staring at the wall, as if it were able to reciprocate my feelings, but the tapestry remained blank. There was nothing else to do. Lina was still staying with Kurt, still waiting for his friend to come back from Berlin next week, a big and muscular man, a boxer. He had a simple plan to solve her problem. He wanted to intimidate Lina’s stalker. It made me wonder, how she was doing, until I finally realized that Sara would probably never return my feelings.

It was my mind that comprehended it, but my heart that was slow to understand, so I crafted a letter one third and final time, romantic and thankful for everything she given me (nothing), a goodbye letter so to speak, giving emphasis on what she meant to me (everything). Love, for me, was no stock exchange. It was a gift to receive and give. Nothing you could ask for in return. As impossible as it might be for a person like me to be loved, it is not impossible for me to love. At least that was what I felt that day. It was a Saturday in July, when I dropped that last letter at her doorstep, four O’clock in the morning. I wanted to leave some kind gesture, an appreciation of the beautiful person that she was, the beautiful person I sketched pictures of in class, when I thought she was not looking. And so I put a rose next to the envelope that I had left for her. This was my farewell.

Kurt told me that they were going to kick down his door. They were on their way now. The door rang. I opened. There was a woman in front of me with two large men behind her and the scent of roses surrounding her, Sara. She told me that her boyfriend had gotten jealous, because of the letter that I had left and that it had to stop, unless… she looked to her left side then to her right side, citing two muscular arguments standing behind her. She smelled of roses. She smelled as if she had plucked the flower that I had left her, squeezed and crushed its petals, and distilled perfume from it to wear on this specific day. – “It was a farewell letter.” I explained, just when she was about to speak. There was an expression of surprise upon her face, but also an expression of deep and calm relief. She nodded and, without a word, turned around, her two best friends following on her heels. Watching her leave, I could not help but wonder, what effect the visit Kurt was paying Lina’s ex would have on her situation.

Why Sara never told me in plain and simple words that she had no interest in me, remains an enigma. ‘No’ after all means ‘No.’ All that I know is that we graduated from this incident and went out our separate ways.

Two years later, a former schoolmate informed me that Kurt, who had helped Lina get rid of her ex-boyfriend, was stalking his girlfriend now. He was unable to bear that she had left him and could not accept that she had been very clear and blunt about the fact that she did not want to see him anymore. He wrote her an infinite number of letters, called her over and over again, tried to contact her at every turn, and frequently rang both at her door and the door of her boyfriend, who told me all of this. He entered the house, when the door opened, without asking. Instead of asking, he simply barged into the house not only with his physical body, but with all the pains and sorrows he carried inside his heart, as if he was the center of the world and all the world revolved around him, because he, of all people, had been forsaken. It almost was, as if he needed someone else to love him, in order for him to love himself. Pitiful. Ugly. Haunting. Who was this man he was telling me about? I did not recognize him. Funny, how, looking out the window, I, for one moment, caught a reflection of myself.

About the Author:

Daniel Schulz is a German-American writer and blue collar worker. 2015 he directed his play Humanity Incorporated for the 100° Festival at the Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin. 2016 he published a short story collection titled Schrei. In 2017, he undertook the inventory of the Kathy Acker Reading Room, i.e. the personal library of Kathy Acker at the University of Cologne, which he has curated since. In 2019 he co-organized the Kathy Acker in Seattle Symposium for the Goethe Institute and co-edited Gender Forum’s special edition “Kathy Acker: Portrait of an Eye/I”. His works have been published in Der Federkiel, Luftruinen, Die Novelle, The Transnational, Mirage #5, and the German anthology Tin Soldier. Forthcoming: Kathy Acker in Seattle.

I’m upstairs in Ben’s room counting the old plastic stars stuck to the ceiling when the phone rings. It’s past midnight, but not as late as it could’ve been, and when Ben speaks he doesn’t sound too drunk.

            ‘Hey, Dad. You’re still awake?’

            ‘Watching TV.’

            ‘Any chance of a lift?’

            ‘Just tell me where you are.’ This is a dad-shaped hole, and I slot into it, no square-pegging.

            ‘I’ve got someone with me,’ says Ben. ‘A girl.’

            I stop on the stairs, thinking of when Ben was born, how I worried his chin was too small, that he had no eyebrows. I think of standing in the hospital carpark, chaining menthol cigarettes, exhaling smoky paranoia.

‘No problem,’ I say. ‘We’ll give her a lift home too.’

#

It’s been raining — the roads slippery and beautiful like wet skin — and I’m driving over the bridge, thinking about the man who jumped last week. His photograph was in the paper: a thin face, eyes like a startled horse. He was, he said, happy to have a future, that he was a different man entirely to the one who jumped, that he was sorry.

            There’s a song on the radio about the end of the world, and I’m tapping the steering-wheel, singing along. The Saturday-night-Sunday-morning streets are full of people, couples joined together like paper dolls, bullish men in t-shirts with tattooed necks. I try to remember being seventeen, but it’s like I’ve been forty-three my whole life, a permanent state of exhaustion, uncertainty and the need to buy multipacks of coat-hangers from supermarkets.

            I turn into Dean Street, and there’s Ben, leaning against the wall of the club, hands in his pockets, a girl standing next to him holding a pair of red shoes, one in each hand. She’s in black jeans, a yellow t-shirt; Ben’s in a suit like he’s mourning a distant relative, like he’s serious about a whole lot of things.

            Ben holds up a hand. The girl smiles, points at the car, and I see that although she’s drunk, she’s almost certainly not drunk enough for me to have to carry her up to her parents’ front door wearing a sad and sorry expression. I finally understand that there is a benevolent God who loves me, and I pull into the curb.

#

‘So,’ I say into the rear-view mirror. ‘You don’t like taxis, Caitlin?’ The car smells of wine and cigarettes. Caitlin’s resting her head on Ben’s shoulder, his hand is on her thigh, and I’m thinking: This is my son, who is able now, somehow, to place his hand nonchalantly on the denimed leg of a beautiful girl.

            ‘Taxi drivers drive too fast,’ she says. ‘You know how in video games, when a fatal crash is an inconvenience at best?’ Her voice is high and a little desperate, like a red balloon drifting up into a blue sky.

            ‘Tell him about the star-sign thing,’ says Ben. ‘The serial killers.’

            She sits up straight, says, ‘Oh, everyone knows about that already.’

I see that the words on her T-shirt say ‘Heroes not heroin,’ and that it’s too big for her, like it’s her dad’s. ‘I don’t know a thing about serial killers,’ I say. ‘Or star-signs.’

            ‘This is totally true, right, Dad?’ says Ben. ‘But you won’t believe it. I know you won’t.’

‘Try me,’ I say, and I smile into the mirror like a chat-show host, like a fat uncle at a wedding.

‘Okay,’ says Caitlin. ‘What would you say if I told you the top twenty-five serial killers of all time had the same four star-signs?’ She cocks her head like a curious ostrich. ‘What on earth would you say to that?’

I laugh at her mock-gravitas, this girl in a yellow T-shirt with my son’s hand on her thigh; I laugh at the strangeness of living, of star signs, of violent death and coincidence.

In the back seat, Caitlin is counting on her fingers one-by-one: ‘Sagittarius. Virgo. Gemini. Pisces,’ she says. ‘There’s no arguing with the facts.’ She leans her head back onto Ben’s shoulder, and he smiles down at her, lifts his hand from her thigh, smooths her hair out of her face. Her eyes are closed tight, like a mole’s. Like a child, pretending.

‘Isn’t that ridiculous?’ says Ben.

‘Ridiculous,’ I say, smiling, because it really is.

We’re driving over the bridge. I want to turn to them, tell them there’s nothing other than dumb luck in this world that can save any of us, but I don’t say anything, I just drive, wondering how it’s possible that the stars on a kid’s bedroom ceiling can be even more beautiful than the real thing.

About the Author:

Jason Jackson’s prize-winning fiction appears regularly in print and online, most recently at Fractured Lit, Craft Literary and the charity anthology You Are Not Alone. Jason’s story Mess of Love was placed 3^rd in the 2020 Retreat West Short Story Competition and his flash In my dream I see my son features in Best Microfictions 2020. His prose/photography piece The Unit is published by A3 Press. Follow Jason on Twitter @jj_fiction