Monthly Archives: April 2023

The location is lost now, but I map it in clouds, sky, green smells. Imprint of grass stalks on fingers and knees. Trophy bluebells bundled in posies, stems ripped out squeaking, bleeding milky sap. May-scented wisps of wild hyacinth, harvested with the thoughtless delight of childhood.

In the photograph, we girls wear sleeveless home-made dresses. Garlanded sprigs of pastel-print cotton, under hand-knitted cardigans. White socks, Mary-Jane sandals, wet with dew, specked with torn leaves. 

Propped on elbows, deep in a cluster of clover. Ladybird wings, cricket chirps, smell of sheep. Bright cowpat-flies hovering, singing, settling. Chatter of sparrows, a rustle, a flutter. Cowslips and meadowsweet. Single car passing, radio blurred. Eyes closed to drowsy red, skin nagged by endless small pricklings. Smell of hot sunlight, sharp bite of nettle leaves, bumble bees browsing, anointed with nectar.

Dad still clean-shaven, absorbed with a camera. Mum’s pink-winged spectacles, reflecting shifts of light in blue-green eyes, yet to be haunted by spectres of Stanley Royd. Hide-and-seek afternoon, giggling, crouching. I draw a snake on the hooligan’s back. One-two-three, one two three, you’re it, you’re it!

Picnic rug, beakers, two cups from the thermos-top, half-filled with over-steeped, sweetened tea. Tupperware, salmon-paste, potted-meat, Mother’s Pride. Hey Brothers’ Lemonade, marshmallow teacakes, ice-cream brick sandwiches, melting through wafers to dribble our fingers.

How time was counted then – drifting fluff, second hands, children’s tales, songs that lasted three minutes. Small, unimportant worlds, teeming with adventures, puddle-lake duckponds, thumbnail-slotted daisy chains, two-acre forests. We were low-centred, allied with small life, gravity – reality – unexplained and intermittent.

We were there only once. Fifty years feels too long to immortalise it. One fuzzy photograph – girl in a bluebell-wood, printed from slippery strips of negatives. Raincoats, long coils of bus ticket, barley sugar wrappers, lidless containers, pocket diaries, hand-me-down books, brown leather cases for defunct binoculars. Drawerfuls of faces in over-thumbed albums. Smiles gone to Kodachrome, lives into history, children to motherhood, woodland to industry. 

These unreliable scatters of sense remain. Questions whose answers are inconsequential. These scraps and remnants of days did not change the world. But, still, they changed our lives. That was enough.

Meet the Author!

Su Ryder lives in Leeds, West Yorkshire. ‘Ackton Woods’ won 2^nd prize in the 2023 Leeds Writers Circle Flash Fiction competition.  Su’s poem ‘Behind the Pond, Meanwoodside’ won 1st prize at the 2021 Leeds Poetry Festival. Su has also been published in the Saboteur Award winning ‘Bloody Amazing’ (Dragon Yaffle), and sequel ‘Up the Duff’, also ‘And the Stones Fell Open’ (Yaffle), and on Visual Verse. Short fiction credits include Neon Magazine and Dark Lane Anthologies. Su is currently working on a first poetry pamphlet.

Where I’d finally moved to, I knew nobody. I’d been homeless for quite a while and ended up somewhere not many people wanted to be. But the quiet suited me after all that exposed street life. 

I got the internet hooked up and went back to my old ways, drinking during the day (and night), usually wine and orange juice, and spending all my time on social media and YouTube – sort of pretending I was doing valuable research. Exposing the New World Order and taking back control.

Having spent a lot of time in Glastonbury during my homeless days, I tried to convince myself I was breaking through to a fourth dimensional awareness and was in receipt of a higher vibrational download. This was the time of the Great Awakening, after all. You had to become the quiet, still centre. 

I was up most of the night – usually going to sleep on the futon on a bare concrete floor around 4 or 5am. Carpets were not a thing here yet, nor were curtains. I had Christmas paper up instead. No furniture to speak of, no fridge, cooker or washing machine. Maybe that was fine for now – it was certainly simple. But could it be sustained? I doubted it. Madness came to knock once or twice – the old dark thought patterns, the cycles of hate and venom. The comfort of aloneness, the quiet, and not being constantly observed (as I was while on the streets), had its own threat of a chosen imprisonment. The outside world grew incrementally dangerous. As soon as I put my head outdoors, I needed to be back with my wine mug and stained mouth, true crime on loop, and writing endless oversharing shit on my pages, which I’d invariably delete the next day. 

Then I saw the tweet. I didn’t recognise the name – not the whole name anyway. But the face, it was an older photograph, obviously – something about the tints, the colour palette. A real photograph. That hair style, that slightly wonky smile. It was her. Deffo. From the very early 90s. Someone I once went out with – her tweet having been randomly liked by someone I’d randomly followed for some random reason. 

I wish I could go back to 1990. I missed my chance then. Happiness. You only get one or two chances of it if you’re lucky. So don’t blow it like I did. xx

That’s what the tweet said, and it’d got a fair few likes and retweets. I was using only my first name on the Twitter, and a picture of some Van Gogh flowers on my profile, so I thought I’d nothing to lose by giving her a follow. Emma. Yes, it had to be her. We’d gone out two or three times. Went to see Dances with Wolves at the then new cinema in my old hometown. During the end credits, I’d clumsily tried to kiss her, and she’d rebuffed me. I took it badly and didn’t want to see her again, despite her trying a few times to call me – suggesting other meetups. She’d told me prior to our cinema date that she’d been hurt and was getting over a bad break up, and that anyone would need to be very patient with her. Patient I wasn’t. I was greedy, childish, grasping. I’d messed it up. Trashed it. But here was she, some thirty years later, saying she wanted to go back to 1990 – that she’d passed up on one of those rare chances of happiness in life. Did she mean us? Did she mean me? Or was I looking through wine goggles at some impossible chink of lost light?

I snapped down the lid of the laptop and crawled under my less than fresh duvet. Sleep came as it always eventually did. The futon had lost its springiness and I could feel the concrete harsh beneath my hips. She won’t follow back even, was my last thought before the thoughts stopped. 

I was wrong. Next day, around 3pm, after a milky coffee and some apricot wheaties, I fired up the ‘puter, and saw I had a few notifications on the twatter, as some people call it. One was her follow, amazingly enough. I saw I also had a DM. I checked it and saw her profile picture, then read the message. FFS, don’t be some porn bot, I thought. 

Thanks for the follow, David ( I knew a David once, very decent guy). I love Van Gogh. He suffered so much, but he still turned that suffering into art. You have to admire that. XX  Have a lovely day!

What to do?

I poured a half mug of wine and mulled over my next move. I decided to play it canny and get a sense of where Emma was in her life. I’d scanned her posts, and it was the usual stuff about loving yourself and being kind mixed with the obligatory cat and puppy videos. Now and again, she’d be revealing. 

I messaged her back:  Definitely. I’ve always like the impressionists. Mike Yarwood was probably the best, though. xx. 

Would the joke annoy her? Were two kisses one too many, or two too many? I didn’t hear anything for a couple of days, and almost deleted my account. Then I got a reply.

LOL. That made me smile, that did. And I really needed it after the day I’d had. So, don’t you have a picture? Or are you really a vase of flowers? Don’t be bashful. xx

That was more than I could’ve hoped for. I wasn’t ready to let her know what I looked like now. Would she even recognise me after all these years? I’d put on a few stone, lost some hair, but then who hadn’t? After a bottle and a half of Merlot, I thought, sod it – go for it. 

Emma. The truth is, I remember you. I recognised your photograph. Don’t worry, I’m not a stalker or anything. I just saw your picture and it was how you looked when we knew each other. I’m that David. That David from 1990. Remember Dances with Wolves? Howl! I know I was a klutz back then, but I’ve definitely improved – ask my probation officer! #joke!! I’ll DM you my pic. Here it is. Don’t be too harsh on me – plse. xx

It was about 8pm when I wrote the above and expected her either to block me or write something back pretty sharpish. Maybe she was in a relationship, or she’d started batting for the other side, no offence. Or maybe she just wouldn’t fancy me now – like she probably didn’t then. But what about that tweet – the one about missing her chance of happiness – what about that?  I started on the port as the hours wore on. Nothing, nada. Not a squeak. Even the porn bots were ignoring me. I crawled into my pit and eventually drifted into nothingness.

Same the next day, then the next. No response from Emma. That’s it, I thought, how dumb was I to think she’d be interested after all this time – some random dweeb from thirty years ago. Two or three dates, the last one probably amounting to a #metoo moment. I really did need to delete the account, or block her; if anything, I could be in trouble – even after all this time. It was only a fumbled kiss, though, and I backed off straight away. Just got the signs wrong, didn’t I? Is that such a crime? 

My finger was hovering over the red deactivate account button when the notification came in. It won’t be her, I thought. Probably somebody from Ghana asking me how my day’s going, telling me they’re honest and a Christian. Yeah, right. 

I nearly pressed deactivate, so very nearly. Why not look, though? So, I did. 

It was Emma. She’d changed her photograph, now showing the mid-fifties woman she obviously was. I could still see the younger her in that face, and it was a nice face, both softened and hardened by life. The eyes weren’t cruel though, and they twinkled. I saw those lips I once tried to kiss, those decades ago – less plump – but still attractive. I was no oil painting either. I wasn’t even a scribble in charcoal. 

Her message. As I read, my heart went into my throat. 

Dearest David, Your message has blown my mind, tbh. I’ve thought about you so many times through the years. I was silly then, just hung up on some bad boy I couldn’t have – I was stuck on self-destructive men, drunks, druggies, bikers, all that nonsense. You were a bit …square, that’s what I thought then, but you were really what I needed, and I messed that up. I’m so sorry. 

I see we’re not that far from each other, are we? Fancy a coffee sometime?  My treat. 

Meet the Author!

Mark enjoys writing stories, poems, and songs, and is a keen reader of both fiction and non-fiction. He lives in deepest Somerset with his cat, Haslett. Other hobbies include model railways, growing vegetables, and board games. 

We live in a consumer society. That means if you’ve got the money you can buy what you like, right? Well, my brother Abe always wanted a crocodile. When he was little, like so many children do, he got obsessed with reptiles. You know the sort of thing: dinosaur pyjamas, dinosaur duvets and all that.  Only, in Abe’s case, it turned out to be more than a passing phase. I don’t think my parents were that worried about it at first. I remember my mum saying that, perhaps, if he turned out to be good at science at school, he might go on to study zoology, or something like that. He seemed to be developing a healthy interest, or so they thought back then.

He was only a year older than me and, our parents’ house only having two bedrooms, we had to share one. You could immediately tell which side of the room was his: it was the one where all the reptile stuff lived. As the years went by, he ditched the pyjamas and the duvet cover in favour of models, posters and books. He was obsessed. Sometimes, when we were small (I don’t know how old we were – I guess we’d both started school by then) I’d catch him sitting very still by the window, trying to catch flies on the glass with the tip of his tongue. Fortunately, he never succeeded. His tongue was too short and the flies were too quick for him. After a few minutes, he’d give up, with a shrug and a ‘better luck next time’ look.

It was like he believed he’d been born in the wrong body, that he should’ve been a reptile himself. Perhaps the fact that he couldn’t become one was why he wanted one so much. And what he wanted most of all was a crocodile. Mum and dad, obviously, said no, definitely not, not over their dead bodies. When he went on and on about it they decided to meet him half-way. They suggested he get a lizard. He immediately said yes. He told them he wanted a bearded dragon. They bought him one, along with a vivarium and all the other stuff he needed to look after it. Like a lot of parents faced with children demanding pets, I think they were worried he’d quickly lose interest in a real animal that need feeding and cleaning out and that they would be left doing all the work but no, Abe cared diligently for it till the end of its days.

We were well into secondary school when George – as he called it – died. We’d been on a family holiday and left some local friends of my parents in charge, with strict instructions as to how to care for George in our absence, but when we came back, George was dead. My parents’ friends obviously felt awful and swore blind they’d followed the instructions to the letter. My parents said they were sure they had and not to to worry, but Abe was beside himself. He went round to their house and smashed a window. Well, I say that, but strictly speaking, a window got smashed, and everyone thought it was Abe. He denied it but nobody believed him. I remember dad shouting at him and mum crying. It wasn’t just that he’d broken the window and lied about it: they were upset, too, that they’d lost their friends. Then Abe asked if he could have a new lizard. That was when dad really blew his top. Looking back, I think the whole business was a defining moment: mum and dad finally realised there was something wrong with Abe. I know I did. I’d always felt a bit wary of my older brother, for reasons I couldn’t quite explain. Now, all of a sudden, I could put those reasons into words. Not only did he live in a world of his own (which I knew), but also he’d lash out at anyone who interfered with it. Fortunately, he seemed to quite like me. 

My parents may have realised something was the matter, but the trouble was they didn’t have the faintest idea what to do about it. Abe, after a brief ceremony, buried George in a shoebox in the garden and then, as people do after such crises, everyone had to just get on with life, Abe without George and my parents without their friends. As for me, I felt pretty claustrophobic, squeezed in as I was between by brother with his reptile fixation and my increasingly-anxious parents. I resolved to just try and get on with everybody and leave home at the first sensible opportunity I had. It crossed my mind, too, that perhaps I was making too much of it all. Everyone’s weird and perhaps, as you grow up and get to know the people around you better and get to see the way their lives unfold, it just becomes increasingly obvious quite how weird they are. These were my thoughts at the time.

Abe cleaned out his vivarium but didn’t get rid of it. It just sat there, dark and empty. Gradually, schoolbooks and papers got piled up on top of it. He had loads of exams coming up. He was working hard and didn’t let George’s death and all the fuss that surrounded it get in the way. His grades turned out to be excellent. I wondered how he managed to do this but, looking back, he was motivated by the fact that he had a plan. Although he never actually said it, it was becoming obvious he didn’t want to leave home. He wanted to do a computer science degree and he wanted to get in to his first-choice university, which was – purely on account of its location – the one in our town. With luck, when he finished, he’d be able to get a job locally.

He got his university place and, a year later, so did I. I went off to study civil engineering at York. One of the best things about it was that I actually, for the first time ever, had a room to myself. I spent a year in a hall of residence, then found a room in a shared house. I only came home in the holidays and – since it involved going back to sharing a room – only when I absolutely had to.

At the end of my second year, I had to spend all summer at home, as I was temporarily without digs. Abe, at that time, had finished at uni and had just started a job he’d had lined up at a Building Society in town. It was strange to see him, every morning, shaving and putting on a suit.

Back when Abe first got George I’d thought the crocodile thing had been a bargaining ploy and a pretty cunning one at that. And after the business of the broken window had died down, he hardly ever mentioned reptiles at all. As I said, though, he kept the vivarium. It came as a complete surprise – and to mum and dad, a nasty surprise – when, when he got his first pay-cheque, the first thing Abe did was go and get himself a baby crocodile. Don’t ask me where he got it from. All I know is there are all kinds of regulations about keeping crocs and Abe – with help, probably, from other online croc-lovers – had obviously found a way round them. It was a Saturday afternoon. I was just coming in – I think I’d been to the library – and I could hear mum and dad both shouting at Abe. The voices were coming from our room. They were all stood round the vivarium. It was lit up again for the first time in years and inside it, getting used to his new surroundings, was Horace.

Mum and dad were livid.  It wasn’t just the crocodile thing: they said he had to be responsible, that he had to help pay for the bills. He’d just blown most of his first pay-cheque on Horace. Did he expect them to keep feeding him for nothing? Abe – cunning as ever – wasn’t rising to the bait. He was trying to apologise. He said he was sorry and he should’ve thought of that and of course he’d pay his share: he’d be happy to pay double next month.

It’s bad enough having to put up with your brother’s farts and dirty laundry, but now our room began to stink of fish and rotting meat, too. The smell began to seep through the house. Dad insisted we keep the window open and the door closed, but it didn’t make much difference. 

That summer was the last time I stayed at home for any length of time. I went home for a few days the following Christmas, but that was about it. Before I knew it, the third year was over. My girlfriend Tina and I were both lucky enough to land ourselves jobs. We decided to move in together. Tina could drive – her parents were better-off than mine and had even bought her a car – so we used to go over and see my parents from time to time. I even used to look forward to it, knowing it was only for the day and that my days of sharing a smelly room with my brother were over.

Abe was clever. He knew that as time went by, Horace would outgrow his tank. He started doing overtime whenever he could, saving up money for something more substantial. He told mum and dad he understood how the smell that hung round the house drove them crazy and that he wanted to buy a shed to put in the garden for Horace to live in. It would be expensive. It would need heating. They’d have to run a power line out to it. Mum and dad jumped at the chance to get Horace out of the house and even offered to match whatever Abe managed to save towards his new quarters. 

No-one – except Abe, perhaps – was really thinking ahead at this point. Mum and dad had put a lot of work into the garden over the years. There were lawns, flower beds, a rockery – even a pond, with a water feature, overhung by a willow tree. Once they’d bought the shed and all the new gear for Horace, I went over for a few days so I could help dad and Abe get it all built and set up (I stayed in a local B&B). We created a bit of an enclosure for him, too: he needed water and shade, so we incorporated the pond and the willow tree into it. I have happy memories of that week: me, my dad and my brother all working on something together. 

Not long after that though, dad had his stroke. I remember mum ringing me to tell me and us all going to see him in hospital. Dad needed physiotherapy and speech therapy, but he responded well and was soon able to go home. He needed a walking frame and could only move around slowly, but otherwise he was okay. All of a sudden, he and mum really needed Abe to be there for them and, to be fair to Abe, he rose to the occasion. He saw to everything that needed seeing to. Someone had to help dad out of bed in the morning. Mum was too frail, so Abe did it. He sorted out dad’s medication, the shopping, you name it. He was a model son and in many ways made up for all the years of grief he’d caused them. He always turned down my offers of help: it was like he wanted to do everything. It was as if – if I were less generous – he wanted to be in control. And he was in a position to be. They seemed to think highly of him at the Building Society. He was the IT-wizard, the Mr Fix-It. They’d given him a raise, so he now had plenty of money coming in. They let him do some of his work at home, too, so he could be there in case mum and dad needed him.

More years went by. Mum, dad and Abe settled into a routine. All this time, Horace, of course, went on getting bigger. The time came when the enclosure we’d built for him just wasn’t big enough. He started trying to knock down the fence posts and almost got out on a couple of occasions. Abe told mum and dad that the only thing for it was to give Horace the run of the garden. They were in no position to argue with him. This time, he hired contractors and got them to erect a sturdy fence around the whole garden boundary. He got them to enlarge the pool, too. Giving Horace the run of the garden meant it soon fell into disrepair, as it was no longer safe to go out to weed or mow the lawn. In no time, it turned into a churned up, overgrown jungle. I have a vivid memory of visiting mum and dad around then, and seeing a look somewhere between horror and resignation on my mother’s face as she sat looking out of the window.

Then it happened. Early one Saturday morning I got a call from mum. She said Abe had gone out that morning to feed Horace but hadn’t come back. She said I must come round at once, to see what had become of him and to help dad off his commode. 

When I got there, I saw dad then looked out of the window into the garden, to see if I could see any sign of Abe. He was nowhere to be seen. All I could see was Horace, floating like a log in the lake that had once been a pond.

Meet the Author!

Dominic Rivron writes mainly short stories and poetry. His work has been published in a number of journals including The Milk House, The Fib Review and SETU Magazine. He lives in the North of England. His blog can be found at asithappens55.blogspot.com

Mud pies and whole lives lived under a branch of a tree – anywhere is a home that you’ve made. In the crevice of a rock, a clearing in the woods, bottom shelves of bookcases and the lines of a web in your windowsill. In these things you are whole: wife, mother, virgin, keeper. 

At the bottom of the garden you and the boy divide your kingdoms. When you were smaller you used to catch butterflies in the cup of your hands, crush spiders with sticks, turn them all to stew in empty flower pots. One time you’d chased a spider through the backdoor right into the kitchen. The boy said he didn’t mind the ones with the long legs, they seemed too fragile. But that day she’d come too close, and you’d minded it then. Her egg sac spilled onto your mother’s linoleum when you’d poked at it. After, you retreated to the embrace of the woods, where the hum of the motorway spilled over the borders. Curled into the undergrowth you felt them creeping through the forest decay beneath you, vengeful Furies of the kitchen massacre. 

You knew you were cursed then, the rot had seeped into your palms and you never bothered to wash it out. Twigs snap beneath his wellies and all panic is lost in a single frosty exhale. Your father takes your hand and leads you back to the house. He tells you of when he was your age, somewhere much warmer, of scorpions crawling into children’s ears as they slept in olive groves. You tell him of the boy and your kingdoms, he tells you to draw out a map. Your mother never mentioned the spider eggs scattered across her kitchen floor. 

But you think of it now. Long after back garden borders crumbled, and homes became four walls above high street shops. You think of it now that you stand before the paper bag that holds his ashes. Through the streets of the city you carried your father, morgue to home. The city turned to flatlands and barren winter fields and he sat there beside you on the passenger seat in the woven basket you picked up from the charity shop. 

He’s in your arms as you walk him through the house, past the kitchen where the linoleum curls up at the skirting boards. You pause at the door frame, clutch the handles of his basket a little tighter.

They see you now you’ve come home. 

Out through the back, summer had been long trampled into what remained of the grass. The season’s decay so mottled with the living the two become indistinguishable. You keep on, all the way to the very end where the lines in the map you never drew began. There, the woods awaited your homecoming with that same embrace, you pulled him into it with you. Curled into the alcove of a tree trunk, you set him down beside you in the undergrowth. All the lives you wove beneath this tree, all the things that made you feel like you could be whole. You are none of these now. 

Beyond the wood’s edge the motorway works itself up into a rhythm as workers return from their city hives. You thrust your hands deep into the undergrowth and feel the rot once again reach up for you too. These vengeful spirits whisper to you the things you ache to claw back. 

Daughter, keeper. 

Turn them all to stew in the cracked remnants of flower pots. 

Meet the Author!

Letitia Payne is a short fiction writer from Norwich, UK. Due to her background in theatre she often intertwines classical themes within her writing. She has published two prior works: The Lights You Leave On (Kalopsia Literary Journal, 2021) and Bury the Box (Bandit Fiction, 2020). You can also find her giving much shorter takes on twitter: @letitiarpayne.