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It is because I am the dog

Waiting at your door

Dark eyes, darker while I beg

You for more.

Glistening teardrops run down

The frosted window of a packed train carriage.

Two more hours of standing, stagnant 

If we were referring to an 

autobiography

        which perhaps we are

then also we are referring 

to a name.

considered the thief of joy;

that which provides the ultimatum

in constraint between stimuli and response.

A light filled room

Linen sheets on a single bed

Oak tree coming into leaf

For the year I’ve been back

It has sat alone at the fireplace

Early noughties: flip screen, numbers reading ABC

Raw, bitter, gnarled roots

A well run dry

An amber brazier burnt to the wick

Death did not come suddenly for you,

he bloomed like a poisonous flower in your body.

Under ribs of chestnut brown,

a swallow plucks the ancient sound

from an artist’s lips.

Homecoming is an elusive feeling, and airports are curious borderlands.

Socialism is good and capitalism is bad -  

A truth universally acknowledged,

I’d ask you if I could.

You’d answer if you could.

I’m not broken,

I’m bruised, 

Oh, Mother, do you remember

that tiny red projector,

decades old, that you still treasure so greatly?

I was the last within my class to stop believing in God 

Which is, in many ways, entirely odd

Time / spreads out / and space

so that all the / constituent parts of existence

Indulge me; hear my faint, fading whisper.

I will tell you of the dying seconds.

“Don’t turn down that street,

don’t turn down that street,”

I pray to God.

I

Has he seen azaleas before?

II

They’re different shades of pink, just like the flowers he gave me

through the phone when we were long distance.

It struck me one day, one quiet day. It appeared on the right side of the path, though I cannot be certain whether it had always been there. I have only been alive for twenty-two years, and it looked as though it had been standing there since the very first day of life itself.

The weak spot in the ceiling wasn’t there when I moved in. Believe me, I would’ve noticed it.  It just appeared, with little parade, benignly, just to the side of my bed, after about three  months of living in that apartment. It wasn’t particularly big. I measured it, one day,  wobbling on top of my rotating office chair to reach, wielding a ruler. Diameter: around  seven centimetres.

The kid unfurls the flag and wears it, cape-like. He jumps and spins, looking over his shoulder at the tail of the flourish.

‘Get it off. This is serious.’

The single yellow light that dangled from the ceiling overhead began to flicker, disrupting the peace I had finally found. But what else could I expect from an old light in an old storage room that had become musty from decades of disuse?

I concentrated on the pulsing light. Stop flickering, I willed it. Unsurprisingly, no magic emanated from within me. The light’s pattern did not change.

But at night, I began to hear them. The sounds seemed distant yet many-faced, resounding into the fields’ black expanse. A thousandfold chorus of owls; an oscillating parade of owls. Their voices produced words in my head that I had never learned before; they took palimpsest in my mind.

I first saw you on a rainy Thursday afternoon in February. I had been rushing to the restaurant — not because I was in danger of being late, but because I did not like to dawdle. I liked to be in the habit of moving quickly — you cannot take your time in a kitchen.

The mirror does not reflect my father’s features.

I cannot see his dark brown eyes, his rounded nose or fixed furrowed brow. I cannot hear his dulcet tone or gentle humming nor the scuffle of his shoes on wooden floors nor the dependable click of his pocket watch going… Tick. Tick. Tick.

I think her hair would fall in ringlets around her face, when she had taken the time to style it. I can’t quite discern the colour of her eyes in my mind, though. They might be grey or blue or brown. I trace the patterns of nebulas and star signs on her back, but only with my eyes. I don’t touch.

For the first time, I didn’t feel constantly tired. Instead, I had lost track of time; I was so wrapped up in the feeling of her arms around me that I could barely navigate, much less think or do anything. 

“Ter?” Ever said. Her voice was uncertain and shaky. “It might be time to stop for the night.”

I remember spending summer at my grandmother’s house, swinging back and forth in her hammock, the breeze flying through my long hair. Back then there were no doubts, problems or melancholy threatening to cut it short.

He’s twenty-nine now, but you wouldn’t know it. His eyes are sunken and hollow, lines etched into his skin by the afternoon sun. The 95’ Camry rumbles as the key turns in the ignition, its seats scratched by age and weather and too many nights spent asleep in the backseat. Up the driveway, right, then left, onto the I-6 towards Lincoln, where he is just another pair of hands used to put up the new developments.

Foreword — This short story is based on the radio episode ‘Conscientious Objector’ in the Radio Three series ‘Our Fathers’ War’ written and performed by Michael Goldfarb about his professor Meredith Dallas. The scene which makes up most of this story and information about his professor all come from that episode and I borrow a few phrases from it as well. So if you enjoy this, give it a listen!

I’ve been burdened with a terrible secret, and someone must know. 

I was with her again last night, getting drinks, discussing Mary Queen of Scots. I guess I didn’t notice how many drinks she’d had, until she leaned over and grabbed my shoulders, and began whispering in my ear. “I have a secret.” 

I steadied her and laughed, sure she was about to admit to sympathising with Henry Stuart, when she began the tale which now utterly haunts me. 

Arpita thought she saw some fishing boats in the distance where the seawater met the gulls and breeze. The boats didn’t wander off, staying at the same speed. She thought of her friends she had known from way back. They would want to see her again, had told her, even in dream-messages. The winds crackled between the palm-fronds and the gulls squawked a fiery message, not on deaf ears. Arpita was on the whitest sands of the long beaches, stuck in a trance made by her brain's galloping thoughts.

The man is sitting down. He leans against the doorway of a shop long gone. He wears all his clothes, clothes that have not been washed since the person before him. The clothes are growing too big for him, they are falling off his bones.

The Lords of Doom mobilise their first rank, but they haven’t lined up the next ones – it’s like they know they’ve already won.

“Hug?” Maisie held out her arms. Manrika accepted the hug and asked if I did hugs as well, to which I quivered a ‘yes’. When she hugged me, it was like a rush of euphoria to the head - and other places which I will spare the details of. Emulsify me, please. Let me rest in your scent and just aimlessly melt. God, her scent. Is she even aware of how nice she smells? Then my mind snapped out of it and I convinced myself of the possibility she might just like men. Seeing the drabness of some of the guys in the nightclub, Fever, I can’t sympathize with people who get the appeal of them.

“Look, I get that you appreciate her very much and she’s a lovely girl,” Nick reasoned, again trying to accuse me of crushing on her, “You just need to let yourself feel.”

“What? The last time I let myself feel I ended up caring so much for a piece of shit,” I riposted before melting into a smile, “She’s really pretty, isn’t she?”

“Yeah, she’s pretty, but are you sure you’re straight?”

He examined the ash trees, inspecting for withered and sickly leaves, and came away satisfied to find none. He checked for broken sticks and impressions of boot prints in the mud but only the usual residents presided there, the snails and ants navigating through their miniature dwellings.

I fell on one of the final days of the third month. It didn’t hurt, no one said anything, not even the trees. I wasn’t expecting them to. I was a bit sad but not scared. I could be part of the trees now, of the soil and the earth. But I would miss my friends regardless.

To say Graham was elated not to be a father was an understatement. Sure, it was a solitary life, living alone at his age, but he figured some men weren’t built for fatherhood. He was one of them. He’d have frustrated his kid too much, and vice versa. His house would’ve been filled with slamming doors and stomping footsteps, like his own childhood home had been.

​Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite as romantic as we’d intended. The wind was sharp, and we weren’t dressed for the weather. We shut your car’s doors with overenthusiastic thuds and stretched our aching legs, only to find our breath coming out in bursts of mist. It wasn’t long until we started shivering. 

The last time I saw Cole was September 11th 2001. A date which would become one of the most infamous in American history, synonymous with people falling from the sky like the announcement of the end of days.

Rain rejects the scorched soil below, desperately reaching toward the merciless clouds above. I wonder what those unfortunate droplets did to be exiled from the barracks. Perhaps they were deserters, parachuting down with silent grace, like those dancer girls in the pictures.  Did they fall upon the abrasive farmland and have second thoughts? Could they ever find their way back to the heavens?

A perverse camaraderie manifests in the courtyard outside the church. Timid murders of friends congregate ashamedly, forming shallow alliances under the mist of cigarette smoke. An unforgiving wind sets this June afternoon apart, polluting the sun's light.

Darkness was simple and predictable and, though I didn’t know it then, allowing darkness to dominate my peripheral vision would be the last time I ever felt in control.

The four of us were playing, rushing down the street on our bicycles. We moved from side to side, competing in a game of chicken with the cars.