'...who cares what picture we see?'

No smoker’s breath passes up across the projector lens, is carried down the tiered rows to ghostdance on the silver screen. No fan rattle invades the ears of those in the back row.

Dust motes – no longer hand-drawn animated fairies, demons, pixies – swim up through the light-stream in silence.

A cough, perhaps.

A sneeze.

A stifled belch, and the crunching, grinding, swallowing of popcorn or cheese-soggy nachos.

Adverts. People making use of the time allotted to such shitty salesmanship to have a last-gasp dick around on their mobile phones before the feature starts. Texting someone or other. Updating a status, a location, mapping their whereabouts and whispering, affectless, look where I am.

Smartphones going to blackout, mostly, like fireflies or dry lightning dying. Caught splat against the windscreen of a car as it races into that wide-open vagueness direct after dusk. No particular destination in mind.

Waiting for the trailers. Rattling by on the highway beside them. Haulage company names on the side. Sloganeering for this or that way of life. Fitting so carefully into one lane or another.

Occasional voices.

Nobody really paying attention.

This, the point between awake and sleeping, hasn’t really altered. Not anything like as important as the dream will be, when it comes.

And, when it comes, it unfolds in such a way as to keep all eyes fixated, flitting, open. Not necessarily entertained, or enlightened, but diverted from anything else they might not want to see.

Light does still come out through that little square hole near the ceiling, and does still make its way to the screen. But that screen seems more and more like the inside of a blindfold, less and less like a canvas rigged and tricked-out to do magic, show motion, make art.  

A lot of these hi-def dreams, they don’t seem to have morals or meanings. No real interpretation is required or rewarded. Eyes watch, but what they see seldom makes it back to the critical faculties. If it did, maybe the eyes would go into lockdown.

A lot of these hi-def dreams are things that can’t be fully recalled or described after waking. The house lights go on, and that lone, muted torchbeam is consumed, garbled within them.

Some people rush faster for the exit than others.

They can smoke outside.

And, besides, there’s always somewhere else to be. Maybe some workplace to visit, succumb to.

And a TV back home. Or a laptop, or a tablet PC, or their phone. Watching videos on the train with no headphones. Fellow passengers get tinny sound but no pictures.

Nobody focuses much through the windows. Blur-blend of grey into green and back again. More trailers.

Some people simply sit tight til the end of the credits.

Not reading the names, they just don’t want to leave.  

Chain

The child who played football out on home street. Child who I was. Whatever the weather, always out there. Kick-ups. Trick shots. Dribbling to the top of the road and then back down to the bottom. Dimples of tarmac felt through his shoes. Felt through his trousers at knee-caps post-tumbling; body-checked by unseen ghosts of mistakes. Demons leeching off our trying and our trials. Was always fuzzy on religion, that child. Despite or perhaps because of C of E education, singing hymns in church and trying not to kick the pew in front. Got up and didn’t cry off, not at that age, and kept on kicking the football. Would dedicate an hour or two as afternoon sank into evening, attempting to perfect the Cruyff turn, the Maradona turn, rainbow-flicking the ball up and catching it between shoulder blades and back of neck. Flicking it up again and trapping it between concrete and sole. Child wore, most practice sessions, a thin gold chain, affixed to which was a small gold football boot. Would take that ten-carat talisman between his hands, upon a string of failed attempts, and turn eyes skywards, whispering. Exact words that child said are lost now, but strong feeling they amounted to ‘Please’. Praying more to what he believed findable within him than to what he wasn’t sure was findable without. Tucking chain back inside T-shirt and, whatever the weather, carrying on.

Looking out the window lately, I do not witness football practice.

Worse still, I do not see myself.    

One Good Tern

One seabird notices another seabird looking lonely. It approaches, asks the other if it is OK. The other responds that no, it isn't, but thanks for asking.

I need someone to come fishing with me, says the first seabird, because I don't do very well by myself. Would you like to come?

OK, says the other.

After an hour fishing, the first is becoming despondent, having caught little more than a few specks of plankton, and some algae that tasted a bit off.

The second, on the other hand, appears to be capable of catching anything that moves. It stops its hunt, however, when it notices the first seabird hovering hungrily over the water.

The second seabird makes one final dive, rises from the surf with a fish nearly the size of its wingspan, and makes its way over to the first.

Here, the second seabird says, I'd like you to have this.

The first seabird doesn't smile, but only because beaks aren't really set up for that sort of thing.

But thank you, the seabird says.

Once their fishing trip is done with, the pair of them fly back towards the shore; wingtips nearly touching, forms swaying the same way in the breeze. 

The Wasted Present

There’s the big present. He can see it, leaning against the far side of the sofa, looking decidedly streamlined and sledge-like in shape.

But he contains himself. Positions himself at a deliberate distance from it, and sits down to unwrap smaller gifts instead. Socks. Shower gel – both from lesser-seen relatives. Some action figures, and a racing car, both of which he’d have been thrilled to receive, probably, on any other day, but which right now can’t keep his attention. The car’s a Dodge Viper as well, his favourite. Candy apple red and with two white racing stripes down the centre.

Wonders what his sledge will look like.

Edges closer to it.

Restrains himself.

Opens another present. A board game. One he’s played before, but a decent one, nonetheless. Might play it in a few days, he supposes, if someone wants to.

Opens some big, extra-padded gloves next. And a scarf. From two separate but sellotaped-together packages.

Each successive bundle leading him closer to that far side of the sofa. Like Christmas cake crumbs. Like the thread of a Christmas stocking unravelled.

The next parcel holds another car – an AC Cobra, his second favourite. It’s even bigger than the Dodge, bigger even than his feet, and he won’t play with that so much, but it’ll look good on his bedside table, when he can be bothered to take it up.

Moving on quickly, he lifts the present placed just before the sofa’s furthest reaches. He squeezes the paper before ripping it open, and guesses before he sees it that it’s the item he put just beneath the sledge on his list. Some old-style fighter pilot goggles – synthetic, not leather – that will keep out the cold of the snow.

His parents are watching him nervously, which he might have noticed, had he been able to pull his eyes away from the big present, had he been able to keep his hands from tearing it open. Standing, gleeful, he sets, dervish-like, to the task. Scraps and ribbons of star-spangled wrapping paper cascade out as confetti around him. Redecorates a sizeable chunk of the room.

And, when it’s settled, he can see the big present more clearly, seeming bigger and better even than he’s imagined it, now that it’s open to the air in all its glory. Sky-blue and with a red stripe down each side.

Looks fast.

Looks aerodynamic – his new favourite word.

Looks racing class all over and all the way through.

He sets it out flat on the carpet and sits in it and takes hold of the thin rope that’s attached to the front lip like reins. Leans and masks his face in sporting concentration and makes noises like he thinks sledges should make upon thick, crispy snow.

His parents seem keen for him to play with some of his other new toys as well, though, and he makes a concessionary effort. Zooms the Viper on a few laps of the living room rug.

Already has his gloves on, whilst he does so. And his scarf, with both ends of it thrown back over his shoulder, the way he knows a racing man should.

The car in his hand begins to feel insubstantial, and, for the first time he can remember, his imagination cannot sustain the charade. He jumps up, suddenly, and takes his goggles from the sofa, and pulls the sledge behind him onto the cold linoleum of the kitchen floor.

His parents don’t react fast enough, and he finds the key, and turns it, and opens the door.

To find only wet paving stones and wet grass, and the dampness of late December fog.

And so, all afternoon, he sulks.

And barely touches the turkey that’s been carefully piled on his plate.

And pushes his sprouts into some cranberry sauce. Refuses to eat them on the grounds that cranberry sauce is Manky.

Why’d you put it on your plate, then?

His mum says.

He shrugs. Forks holes in his carrots, and slices florets of cauliflower into rough quarters. But doesn’t eat them.

His dad tries to get him to play the board game, and, for a few minutes, he acquiesces. Then knocks the pieces across the table, as soon as it seems likely he’ll lose.

After he’s made his way to bed – still sulking – his parents sit down – tired out – on the sofa. His dad rests against the chair arm. Begins to drum his fingers on it – slowly at first and then faster and louder.

Stop that. Please.

His mum says.

Sorry.

Says his dad.

They sit in silence, each resting more weight on the back of the sofa than they do on each other.

You know,

his mum says.

What?

Says his dad.

I was just thinking – perhaps we should get him a new games console next year.

Yeah, perhaps that would be best. 

A New Bohemia

Brighouse is the new Bohemia for writers. It’s ideal. You couldn’t ask for a place more suited to the work than this. There’s just so much artistic history buzzing around in the ether; so many stories, so many classic, lively, star-spangled anecdotes.

Like, remember the time when Mark Twain had a holiday cottage here? Well, not remember, exactly, but you must have heard about it, right?

Or when Sartre had a habit of visiting, took regular walks along the canal, before expounding existentialist dictums in one of those pubs by the bridge?

No?

How about something a bit more recent, then? Like, when Hunter S. Thompson stayed at the Holiday Inn, but got thrown out – so the paper said – due to ‘gun control issues’.

Or something even more famous, somebody even more entrenched in the canon. Dickens. Did you ever hear that he had another mistress, and that she lived around here? Was a pretty big scandal, in its day, or would have been, had he not paid a substantial sum of money to keep it under wraps. Accidentally founded a work house, I think.

Still nothing?

Really?

Because that was kind of a big deal.

Well, how about that time Woody Allen turned up to give a screenwriting seminar in the town hall, and then surprised everyone with an impromptu jazz concert? That was only a couple of years ago.

But talking of jazz, how about that F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, gracing the library with their presence, back at the tail-end of the Twenties. Closing Commercial Street down for an evening to throw a sensational outdoor party.

What?

No, I don’t have photographs.

There might be some in the town archives, I suppose.  

Look, do your own research. Check the local history section of the newspaper, or something.

Yes, I’m sure that’s what I did.

What are you trying to say?

I am a serious writer, and I resent such accusations.

Yes, I write what I know. I write what I see. I write the truth, plain and simple. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Oh, ok.

So, that’s that?

You really don’t want to publish it?

Well, that’s fine, if you don’t want to get in on the ground floor. It might have been quiet for a few years around here, but, I’m telling you, this whole writing scene’s gonna be massive, any day now. It’ll be like printing money. There’ll be book-signings and readings and all kinds of marketing opportunities.

And you’re absolutely sure you don’t want a share?

Because even Hemingw-

Hello?

Hello?

Are you still there? 

Nature's Own

I understood the whys for lightning coming. Well, most of them. From science books and from those How it All Happens shows on that thing my grandfather calls the idiot box. Called it. Whenever he used that term, it made me doubt the things it taught me, and so maybe I wasn't really too sure about lightning, not until I stood and watched it, outside. Not just measuring its closeness to the house by the brightness of the flash through drawn curtains, by the speed and loudness of the thunder that followed it around.

The thunder, I thought I understood that as well. When I was even younger, it was the sound of clouds exploding as the lightning split right through. A little older, and I just understood it as the sound of the lightning fizzing, crackling in the air.

But never as the sound of a thousand bulbs - a long string, a chain of them, like snow-white Christmas lights - all shattering in sequence. Not until I found myself between a tree's branches in the middle of a storm. I wasn't supposed to be there, I know. They're nature's own lightning rods. Another thing my grandfather said.

I had to climb those branches, though, as soon as the bulb-smashing sounds started. Because there was no rain. I hadn't heard of dry lightning then, and had known those flashes and those bangs only when accompanied by the kind of rainfall that leads to flooding if it carries on for long enough. The rare-times I watched those split-second glare parades with curtains open, I used to get distracted by the movement of the raindrops on the glass.

No glass outside, though, and no raindrops that day either, and so I slowly came to see the lightning for exactly what it was. And, because it started so high up with all the clouds, I felt I must get higher too. And the highest things around were trees. Oaks and sycamores and elms, and ash, I think. And a clump, a ragged little copse of silver birches, with bark that brought to mind dalmatian spots.

It was an oak I climbed. It was spring, and I remember acorns snapping off beneath my scared but hungry fingergrasps and rubber soles. Some of the branches further up were close to rotten, and gave off dry wheezes, short phlegmless coughs, as I used them as handholds then footholds to reach ever airier places. If I'd have been considering that, and paid attention to my grandfather's words, I'd have known that I was scaling nothing but a hefty chunk of kindling, but, as it was, I just sat there, three branches down from the top of that tall oak and let the lightning leave those temporary greenblack slashes down my vision. Let the shattering noise come at me and rattle hard against my jaw. Like the punches that Bruce Lee threw in kung-fu films, and I took in schoolyards during fights. Took from softer lads than me, it turned out.

None of them were outside, treeclimbing as something tripped the fuses and blew a thousand lightbulbs all at once. None of them were swaying in the canopy, closing their eyes and absorbing the storm as a series of inky blue sparks. None of them chased me up there. 

When the storm stopped, the air filled, faintly, with the memory of fire. I don't remember if my grandfather had said it would or not. It was quiet, and the wind was calmer. I kept my eyes closed until the patterns scratched across them faded. Trod tenderly on my way back down, going slowly; fearful, so I told myself, that I might fall if a branch were to break. 

Scent of the Pine

Everything in the world is guitar strings and the scent of the pine-based bleach they used to clean his hotel room that morning, after the maid came in to find him vomit-stricken on the floor. Face down and so strangely-shaped she got to thinking straight away that he was dead. Started screaming, weeping off at stumbling pace down along the corridor. Lots of complaints from other guests later, about being disturbed, not only by her, but by him during the night. Him and his guitar. Open E string played so heavy and bent so deep, so often, that it wouldn’t let them take a wink of sleep.

Yet, when asked why they didn’t complain to him in person at the time, a few of them, the men especially, shrugged, said that they liked the sound of it, after all. Even at three thirty-five in the AM, or whatever the hell time it was that the music started.

The music and the drink. The couple next door, the least lenient in their reaction to his racket-making, claimed that they could hear the bottles rattle, and the glassy thud of his tumbler being placed back on the bedside table, time after time after time. Again and again with the shots of bourbon – Kentucky’s finest – and the empty tumbler banging on down. Almost in-beat with the riffs and rhythm the man put out. Hearing this, a couple of the bellhops looking at each other, trying to figure out if that meant the man’d been playing it one handed, open, whilst he drank. Looking at each other with repetitious admiration in the eyes, and in the smiles they tried to stifle, out of the expected sense of quiet calm in the wake of such a mess.

Wanting more than anything to break from the police investigation, shift themselves from the lobby chairs in which they’d been – less-than-politely – asked to wait, and request he play that way for them, demonstrate the technique, the tone. Wanting more than anything to step outside for a cigarette and watch him, or somehow travel back in time to last night, and wake up from where they’d been sleeping – far side of the motel from his room, out of earshot – to come and listen at his door. Maybe muffled knock and sneak inside and share his drink and sit crossed-legged and listen from right there with their backs rested against the wall or against the foot of the bed.

Wanting, as was in their nature – so their mothers always told them –, something they couldn’t have.

When the police arrived this morning, first thing that they did was drag him out of his room. That is, they woke him first, then slapped him – it sounded like – to help him sober up, then led him out through his doorway with his feet dragging and his knees almost low enough to reach the carpet too. Got him out through crowded lobby – people all told to back off, leave them be, nothing to see here – and into the bracing blueness of the 10 O’clock air. Only to have him turn back and run to his room for his guitar, chased all the way by the two officers, and half of the gathered crowd. Those officers then pulling him back down the corridor whilst trying to steal the guitar – acoustic, sweat-worn at the varnish but still brown and still lovely – from his playing hands, from his drinking hands. Finally wrenching it loose and taking the neck clean from the body with one smack against the outside-the-motel-door wall. Nearly clean. A few guitar strings still not broke and binding the two frayed and busted sections. Some witnesses suggested that he was crying as they put him in the back of the cruiser, after lifting the dregs of guitar-wood into a bin. None of the bellhops saw that part, though.

None of them saw anything they wanted to see, or heard it.

In the lull between questioning, though, one of them snuck out onto the forecourt, came back with three coils of wire, different lengths and thicknesses. Handed them to his fellow workers all secretive and holy, like dope, or like the bits of bread they broke in his father’s church. They sat there then, each of them rubbing the wire between their fingertips, holding it safe like butterflies in the midst of their cupped and sealed palms. Rubbing the grease and the dust from it. Checking, when they weren’t being watched, the string-bits more closely, for rust and other signs of age. Attempting to guess how long they’d been in use. Thinking on all the stages they might have played.

Thinking on seeing him, when he got out of jail.

Hound

He wags his tail as he waits for the train doors to open. Subway lights bring out bronze streaks amongst the unkempt dark brown of his fur. Large pupils in eyes stare at the metal, expectant.

In deference to tall two-legs all ‘round and about him, he stifles the urge building inside him to bark. You don’t make noise on these trains, he’s learnt. Don’t look at faces unless they look at you first. Doesn’t know the moral framework behind all such manners, but has picked up what they are, how they work. Not etiquette in some quaint Mrs Beeton sense, but derived from discovering that it’s best to seem normal as fast as you can. If he – if dogs – quoted Shakespeare, he might huskily recite: ‘To beguile the time, look like the time’ but dogs don’t and he doesn’t, and so instead he stays shtum and pads into the carriage within seconds of the drawing-apart whoosh of the doors. Perhaps the sound reminds him of panting. Maybe that’s how he’s worked out that this thing is tired and will be at rest here for a while.

Who knows?

Only him, and he isn’t telling.

First time, some doggy-mix memory reminds him, he came on board one of these trains because of a need to explore. Extension of every other action in his life, slinking down streets and bedding down in car parks and out the back of large buildings and under a bridge by a cold rush of water that both scares and excites him, in near the same way that some bitches do. Been ownerless since he was six months-old – still a pup – and so doesn’t feel the need to hunt after affection from the tall two-legged things now. Bald dogs, he thinks. Strange. Unattractive, so overall pretty useless to him. He brushes their shins only by accident, on his way to an empty bench-seat on which to lie down.

Front paws on the fabric of such a seat, he sniffs at it before climbing, checking for the recent scent of anyone he knows. Checking if any of the other hounds have come this way today, looking for her – rogue German shepherdess – whose signs all set him off like the river.

Founded less upon jealousy than longing, this practice. He revels and rolls around in the freedom of streetlife, growls from the love of it, the scuzz-joy of scrapping for food and for warm places to sleep. But, increasingly, there’s a nagging, fuzzy feeling stretched throughout his hunger-stung torso, shooting from time to time up and down lithe, muscle-taut springs of hind legs. She eases that feeling, this shepherdess bitch, and so that’s what he longs for. That calming of tension that roils in his gut.

The way this train shudders isn’t helping that now. Over past months, though, he felt he was getting used to it. To the shudder and to the three stops for breath that this train-thing takes before he can dismount, disembark in that cave that opens out onto street where she lives.

At the third of these stops, he maybe gets too excited, tail wagging again and making thud-thud-thud sound against back-of-seat. When a bald dog looks at him, he hears this noise himself, looks back with wide darkness of eyes and – not quite in contrition – lowers his head. The edge to his watcher’s gaze eases, and, first time, he notices a smaller two-legged creature beside. This small two-legs is looking at him as well. Showing his teeth, though not, he senses, by way of a threat. If it had a tail, he thinks, then that tail might be wagging too.

He can’t be sure, of course, and the thought doesn’t linger too long. Though he’s acquainted now with some parts of their habits – at least when on trains – the two-legs – small and tall – confuse him. Perhaps especially the small. They, for instance, don’t seem to have worked out quite yet the rule these spaces have about quietness. Or the one about eye-contact and staring too long.

He turns from that stare, glances down the carriage to the place he came in. The buzzing in his hind legs is growing, and smells he remembers are gathering mass. They are getting near to another resting point now, the one that he wants, and he finds he can’t wait.

Padding down off the seat, he brushes shins again on his way to the door, before assuming a wide-legged stance in front of that gateway – having learnt also from stumbling and hitting train-walls and two-legs when the jolt of the stop comes. Free of noise-making seat-back, he wags tail again, letting scent-picture of the shepherdess grow in his mind. He pants now with the excitement of this, hoping for the train to one more time begin doing the same.

When it does, he will run.

He will run because patience simply isn’t within him.

He will run because there are railings that need jumping before he reaches the night.

Been out jumpin' fences

The wind shuttled through the long grass behind him like footsteps, and each time it did he looked back over his shoulder, content but still sort of saddened to remain on his own.

For maybe five days every April he brought his old deckchair - faded green and mucky white stripes - out here, the days when the showers didn't come because the clouds were all just the light, cotton-wool kind. He climbed over the fence that marked the boundaries of his garden, paved and without flowers save for a few slinking daffodils and tulips at the edges, and hoisted the deckchair over the fence after him. Every time when he thought he was going to bring it over cleanly, the low ends of the back legs clipped the top beam of the fence, sounding out like a slow ball upon a cricket bat. He looked back at the slabs that now covered that space that had gone bare in the midst of the turf, when his children had still lived at home, still played games out here.

Beyond his garden was a field, belonging to a neighbouring farmer, which was, unlike most other nearby fields at this time of year, untrimmed and without cattle. The chair never clipped the barbed wire when he lifted it over, though his often caught some part or other of his jeans when he followed it. His back didn't bend so well these days and so he couldn't duck and climb between the top wire and the middle one like his kids had used to. Like other neighbourhood kids still did. Instead, he had to wander the line until he found a section where the top wire had sunk in the middle, either with coming loose from one of the hooks that pinned it to the wooden posts, or with one of those posts gradually sagging inwards and off-upright with the shifting of the mud.

When the trespass was commenced, though, he moved without trouble amongst the long grass, which rose to just above his waist, and went to a spot at one side of a small hillock. The spot was west-facing, and the hillock shielded him from the view of the farmhouse, so he could spend a whole afternoon into evening slowly pinkening then reddening then burning in the sun.

Sometimes, when the wind made its false footstep noises in the grass, he thought about how he could probably get fined for such trespassing, but then he thought of how many days there were in a year, and didn't think that five was too many to ask. To sit in his old deckchair and watch the yellow-white jack-ball of the sun lope down behind the beeches and throw fresh-leafed shadows out over the field.

If he sat nearer, he thought, those shadows would reach him and cool his already-peeling skin.

Man, Hole

There is a hole burrowed in the earth at his feet. If he hadn’t have been watching for dog shit – which walkers in these woods do not seem so eager to pick up, or to at least instruct their canine charges to deposit in less foot-friendly places – he wouldn’t have noticed it. Now, though, now he can’t stop looking at it. It perplexes him, has triggered something too-long latent in his mind. The desire to investigate. The desire to know.

It is less than a centimetre wide, this hole, and it has crumbs of dry dirt littered evenly around its circumference. His first thought is that it looks exactly like it has been drilled. The dirt crumbs are like the fine spatterings of sawdust that gather around the edges of a drillhole made in a doorframe. But that doesn’t make much sense. Why would it be drilled? Who would drill it? Why here?

Looking around himself, backwards and forwards along the path, down the slope beside the path towards the park where other, hopefully more conscientious dog-walkers tread, he decides it is safe to crouch down for a closer look. He does so, sitting back on his haunches until the tops of his calves start to hurt. He peers at the hole, but it is so dark, like a dot drawn on with a thick-tipped marker, that he cannot make out the thread-pattern of a drill-tip, or of anything else. Reaching out towards the hole, he contemplates tearing a bit of the topsoil away, to see if the structure is rendered more accessible and understandable by that action. However, he is fearful that, with the hole being so small, and, in an odd way, delicate looking, such a movement might collapse it, ruining all hope of uncovering its secrets. And he does not want to disturb that curiously symmetrical ring of crumbled-up dirt.

After a few minutes he stands, begins to set off once again down the path, thinking that he probably shouldn’t risk being caught staring at the ground in such a manner. It didn’t do to act too weird in public, not in a small village like this, and certainly not without the influence of alcohol with which to excuse one’s behaviour.

But he cannot bring himself to forget the hole. Still toying with the drill theory, he considers the possibility that it marked the spot where some local student had come to take a soil sample. It looked like the work of some piece of technical equipment, and so that could well be the case. Though, he doesn't know why anyone would come here to take a soil sample.

Perhaps it was a worm burrowing for the surface, he thinks now, brain slightly disappointed at having come to so boring a possible conclusion as soil-sampling, edging off in different directions. That makes him think about the dirt itself, and how dry and tough it is, having gone without rain for over a week as it has. Makes him consider how strong a worm must have to be in order to burrow through it.

He has never really given much time to contemplating earthworms, he realises. To recognising their abilities, their strengths, their dirt-loving quirks. If he had, then maybe he would be able to tell for certain if that was the sort of hole they were liable to make when reaching the surface. The only thing about that was, surely an earthworm would have disturbed the ring of crumbs at the hole’s edge? Maybe not. Maybe the worm had been burrowing downwards, throwing the dust out behind and leaving it patterned just so on the surface.

It was definitely possible, he thinks, as the path began to wend amongst a more compacted copse of trees. Oaks. Oaks and the occasional Ash. With worms on his mind, though, he starts to get the jitters – only mild ones, he supposed, but jitters nonetheless – when he catches sight of protruding treeroots out the corners of his eyes. He skips over some of them, not looking down now.

He has begun to imagine earthworms blown up to a ginormous size, quite out of the blue, and is drawing pictures in his mind of the way they might be tunnelling throughout the hillside, hollowing it out, bit by bit. So prompted, he recalls a few sunken pockets of earth, probably six feet wide, that he and his friends used to play in, at the bottom of the slope, leading out onto the park. He laughs at himself for letting this odd fantasy take his brain so far, but the memory feels good. He turns to look down towards them, picking them out through newly-budding trees. What if? he thinks, allowing his mind to linger and swing around the question mark, before laughing at himself again, quietly. It was easier to know things for certain when he was younger, he thinks, and gets back to walking.

Silent Movie, Silent Night

He watches short silent movies every night before bed. Has to. They make him laugh exactly how he needs to laugh. They tire him out, he laughs so much. They make him dream in black & white. Dreams of pratfalling, and wearing shabby clothes, and hanging on clock-faces and washing lines, and running from dogs and from policemen and from unsatisfied employers and angry fathers.

And yet, he still dreams about getting the girl.

X is for No

He begs the clouds to rain. Really begs them. Pleads with them, as though each gathering of vapour is a newfound god.

The air is so thick and dry it's almost like glass being made. A thin glass mold, settling around him. Trying to set, but cracking minutely and quietly as he twists and wriggles in the dust.

He is trying to coat himself with that soil-powder, those flecked flakes of earth-flesh. To keep back the mosquitoes, the other bugs. To try and dull the burning of the sun. But there is no moisture there, and it does not seem to want to cling. It runs between the hairs that line his forearms in mussed-up waves, and then trickles out. He does not seem to have any liquid left inside to pass out as perspiration and make it stick.

He searched for saliva with his blistered tongue, but finds none. He has heard that sucking on pebbles can help draw it out, but the only stones around here are too large to fit in his mouth. Far too large. Like fingertips shorn off of giants and planted, petrified, in the overbaked clay.

He looks up again, through heat-wrinkled eyes, but the clouds have not and do not answer. He didn't listen and that's why he's here. They, the clouds, don't listen and that's why he'll die.

There are no diamonds, they said, and he hasn't seen anything glimmer.

There is no gold, they said, and he hasn't seen anything glow.

There are no animals, not fresh ones with meat on the bones. They said that, and he has sure enough not seen any, not roasted their remains over fire.

There are birds, of course, that he spies as thin streaks against the canvas of his smoky-hued deities. He knows they will be watching him back, and bite harder than the bugs the soil will not keep from off his skin.

But he won't feel them. And they will find him stringy, lacking in flavour. He will just rot away, inch by inch, and those who know his name and what he went here for will forget it soon and not come looking. They do not care for the men who come here looking for treasures they themselves will never find, not greed for, nor profit from. They do not care for the men who come here and do not listen when they tell them there is nothing in the wider desert but loneliness and heat.

Ritual

His eyes traced a wide arc across the ceiling. Took in lines and cobwebs. Took in cracks and flakes of paint. Counted all the seconds that gathered where it met the walls.

Dry skin crested his cheeks, darkened only slightly by wavering slants of tear-water. Most of which was drying too, but some of which was touching beneath his nose, and catching in those two places where his bottom lip met his top. The salt and sour rush of it kept drawing out his tongue to wipe it clear.

I ain't never felt this way before. he said to himself. That old ritual. Maybe used to go through it 2 or 3 times a year, but recently once every two or three years seemed enough. It wasn't that age was slowing things, deadening his hunger. More that it was softening his shell.

He placed his thumb and forefinger upon his eyelids, massaged them, pressed slightly against the jelly-feel stuff underneath. Held them closed like they belonged to a brand-new corpse.

A few weeks more of crying. Of getting up and being angry and jerking himself off and then showering and crying again whilst he made breakfast. As he drank his coffee. A few more weeks of that and he wouldn't have to think of her no more, and he wouldn't have to worry that his hands might stray towards the phone some night and call her and say

I'm sorry. I was in a bad place. I need you. Come over.

He lifted his finger and his thumb, and the lessening in pressure caused the lids to buzz and throb. Patterns flashbulbed round in them like tangling wires, or like the mess of her.

He looked up at the ceiling again, and tried to smile at it like he would if it were an old friend. Tried to imagine what such a smile would be like.

Everything's gonna be OK as long as you don't flip and start being the floor.

Harvey’s Name is in The New York Times

‘Harvey Cotton Jnr, yeah that’s him,’ I say.

We’ve gotten hold of a copy of yesterday’s paper and I’m pointing at the black and white photograph next to the obituary. The article was in a few days back. Middle pages, nothing major. The trial was a quick one, very quick.

‘That’s him.’

His name, we always used to laugh about it, I always used to laugh about it, when he told us why he kept the Jnr on the end. I’m all for respecting your elders, especially if it’s your parents, because you respect them, you owe them everything, but Harvey, well, Harvey told me this one time that he kept it instead because it would sound better when he got his name in the national papers. That was his big dream, to make it to the national press, into the New York Times. He told me that he’d thought about calling himself Harvey Cotton II, but had stuck with Harvey Cotton Jnr. Made him sound more youthful. The Industry, as he called it, they liked youth. He sent a few articles in to them, but they never got published. Then he sent a letter in, on this topic he felt really strongly about, and he told us all, he said that it was such an individual issue as well that it was bound to get printed. A few days later another letter turned up, about pretty much the same thing, by another guy. Harvey was pretty torn up about it, but he was the kind of person who never really complained to your face. He didn’t ever give the impression of being dissatisfied, with anything, but he must have been. His wife was beautiful, she still is. I’m glad I wasn’t at the funeral to see her with the veil that widows tend to wear.

The obituary itself is short, glosses over certain facts, highlights others. It is a list of the good things that Harvey did. It is his sainted life pressed into a space smaller than my hand as I take the newspaper up in it, and begin to read it out to everybody gathered round.

‘He was a very popular man in the town, everybody knew him, and he knew everybody.’ It was a small town.

‘He regularly helped out at the church.’ He went around collecting hymn sheets after everybody else had left, to save the vicar’s wife the job.

‘He was a fine businessman, and the co-owner of the best store in town.’ It was the only store in town, unless you counted the diner, but that only sold Tacos and coffees to take-away, so it didn’t really count. Harvey was actually probably the only one who bought coffees from there, to take-away. He used to show up on days when I was fishing, towards the end, with a cup for me and a cup for him. ‘I just fancied a chat,’ he’d say.

‘He was the editor of his local paper, and contributed some of his salary to charity.’ He was the editor of the local paper, although it’s more of a weekly pamphlet. It was. It’s ended now, though, I think.

‘He is survived by his three children, Lucy, 10, Mena, 14, and Dolly, 15, and a wife, Sara. He was a loving husband, and will be missed.’ His children are good, kind kids. You don’t expect that so much anymore, even in a small town, but they were. I feel sorry for them, and for Sara. I do feel sorry for Sara. Sara in her widow’s veil.

But the bottom line is that Harvey Cotton Jnr was dissatisfied, clearly, maybe even pissed off with the way things were going, with his dream and everything. He was only thirty-eight, you know. I kept saying to him, ‘Harvey, you’re only thirty-eight, you’ve got plenty of time, another ten years maybe.’ I think it was two weeks before it happened that I last said that to him, when I was fishing, and he’d brought me another one of the coffees. I think maybe I should have wondered why earlier, why he was bringing coffees out to me and nobody else. We never really talked much before then. It should have given things away.

Harvey Cotton Jnr got so dissatisfied he took to fucking my wife instead of his.

The guard comes in, asks, ‘Where did you get that newspaper? You know you can’t have the newspapers in here. Is that the New York Times?’ We shrug our shoulders. We don’t know, we say. We weren’t reading it.

Wedding Cake

You can build a house of cards, you really can. I’m telling you, I saw a man do it once. I never used to believe you could, ‘cause I ain’t never done it then myself, and I never saw nobody else do it until then, but I seen a man do it once, build one up like a wedding cake.

It was in a saloon. I shouldn’t have been there, of course, not at my age. I was barely nineteen then, maybe still eighteen. But there was an older man worked down the undertakers who said he’d buy me a drink if I ever went there, to the saloon, said it would do me good, said it would help. He was the only man for miles around put velvet in the caskets, he said, and that meant he got paid good money, ‘cause people liked to know that they was passing away in what he called ‘luxury’. He had a funny way of saying it, I guess, like I ain’t never heard before. He kind of stretched it out some, and it was all in this higher-pitch he got when he was trying to impress, so it sounded like ‘looks-ewery’, like maybe an old woman from Texas would say it. He said ‘cause of people wanting luxury, he could afford to buy the whole room drinks some weeks, and he said that high-pitched too. In winter he was richest, he said, although this fall hadn’t been too bad neither, from his point of view.

Anyways, he bought me a drink, and then he said that I should watch this man playing with a pack of cards. He said that this man, he could do anything and everything with that deck of cards. So we sat right down at the table next to his, and we watched. He did a few card tricks first, like he told a lady to pick a card, and then guessed what it was, and it was the ace of hearts, and she just sat right down on his table next to him. She was real pretty, real pretty, but I didn’t think it would be right to look. Anyways, the man shuffled the cards all over, laid them all out flat and facedown on the table and made the seven of spades jump all over the place, like a fish come out the water. It went right round from one corner to the other, no lie. Every time he turned a card over, there it was, except right at the end, when it came up the seven of diamonds, and he just passed his hand right over it to turn it black. And then the undertaker, well, he says to the man that he should build a house of cards, ‘cause he doesn’t think it can be done. He told me later that he knew it could be done, ‘cause he’d seen this man do it, and that he was just goading the man on, because the man didn’t like that. The man had pride, you see. Didn’t like to be called no faker or no cheat. But I didn’t know that he could do it. Every other man I ever saw try to build a house of cards, it always fell down on them, sometimes near the start, sometimes right close to the end, but either way, I never saw them do it. But this man did it, this man really did it, no tricks and no folding cards or nothing. He built it all wide at the bottom, all these cards leaning against each other, with more cards laid flat on top, and it got thinner all the way up like a pyramid, like one of them they have in South America, over the border. I told the undertaker that’s what it looked like, and he said he didn’t know ‘bout them, but then he said that he was going to get enough money up, probably this next winter, and that he was going to go to Egypt to see the real pyramids he’d heard about, not the ones the Mexicans had that probably wasn’t really all that ancient as they said, and was saying all this is his high-pitch, and it was getting higher with every word. I tell you, I nearly laughed in spite of myself. Not that I didn’t believe him or nothing, ‘cause I’d seen the pictures and probably read the same books as him from the library, but it was just the way he talked. But he’d bought me a drink, so I held it in, the way you learn to do at school, when some other boy’s being whipped or something, and you know you’ll get whipped next for laughing. Anyway, this was all after it was built, and I still wasn’t sure at all what was going to happen when he came to holding the last two cards in his hands. The way he’d built it, all the other cards were facing inwards, and they had like, well, it was like wallpaper or something on their backs, like the wallpaper in fancy hotels maybe, but he put the last two cards facing outwards. They were the jokers, the one black and the other red, and they were sitting up there like the little figurines they put on wedding cakes sometimes, and the whole thing was sitting like one of them cakes anyway.

I didn’t think about it at the time, but I do now. I think about it often. She was wearing my ring that fall, a ring that cost most of what I earned since I got work when I was seventeen, and she’d been wearing it since spring. Nobody knew she had it until too late, and she was coughing in between the few words she could say. She’d always known that there were more words than I knew ever existed, she said that there were thousands. There were thousands of words, she said, and there were probably people using every one of them, at some time or another. I’d never thought about that being possible before, never thought about it at all, but I believed her. And then she got so bad with it all that she couldn’t say hardly two of those words. She reached out with my ring on her finger, and we never did get no wedding, like she wanted, but we was holding hands as she went. I told her it was like walking down the aisle, I said it’s like we’re going down the aisle and there’ll be God to be the priest that sees us wed. She knew I probably didn’t believe that, but she was smiling, when the coughing went away. She had enough faith for the both of us, she said, she always said that, so it made everything right. Her parents were kind enough to pay for the velvet in the casket, so as she could be sent off in the luxury she deserved. I got the ring back, because they didn’t think she should be sent off with it, us not having made it to the altar, and they thought maybe I might need it again, being as young as I was. I didn’t think so at the time, with her just newly cold and in the ground, but I guess now it’s been another age since then.

I bought a pack of cards last week some time, well, leastways I found it and there was nobody seemed to want it back. I’ve been practising with it most nights since, and even though I ain’t got nowhere yet, I reckon I’ll keep on goin’, ‘cause I seen it, and I know it can be done.