I’m standing in the doorway where you last stood before you got up on a chair, slipped the belt around your throat like a necktie, and kicked the chair out from under you.
I imagine for the hundredth time how you expired, gasping like a fish in the air. Shitting yourself. Pissing yourself. Twisting like a windchime in a gale.
Two months have passed, and I still cannot entirely scrub the stains from the floor. (Continue Reading…)
Don’t collect gifts from strangers.
Don’t pick up money on the streets.
Don’t take food in your dream.
The spicy fried exterior of the akara melts over my tongue, and the soft baked beans within seep into my taste buds. The flavour ripples into my teeth and tickles my ears and waters my nose. I stuff my mouth full with three buns before the particles go the wrong way and the coughing begins. The pepper enters my eyes and I rub at them with the heel of my hand.
My eyes scan the wooden table. It’s no bigger than the desks in the orphanage’s classroom where we learned arithmetic and English. A silk tablecloth is draped over its surface, laden with a large ornamental bowl filled with aromatic akara. To my left, a loaf of bread sits on a flat plate, radiating waves of warm goodness. To my right, the steam from a bowl of pap condenses over its transparent cover. There’s a tin of Peak milk and Milo beside it, alongside a large unopened sachet of Dangote sugar.
A jug of kunu occupies the opposite end of the table. I’m not interested in that one right now. It’s the clear pitcher of water that I need.
It’s too far, yet when I reach for it, the distance shrinks and my fingers close around the handle. I drain the water without even a cup, and there’s a soothing calm as the water rolls down my throat.
Do I know that this is a dream already? Yes. Do I keep eating?
Yes. (Continue Reading…)
Hushed were the streets of many-peopled Thebes. Those few who passed through them moved with the shadowy fleetness of bats near dawn, and bent their faces from the sky as if fearful of seeing what in their fancies might be hovering there. Weird, high-noted incantations of a wailing sound were audible through the barred doors. On corners groups of naked and bleeding priests cast themselves repeatedly and with loud cries upon the rough stones of the walks. Even dogs and cats and oxen seemed impressed by some strange menace and foreboding and cowered and slunk dejectedly. All Thebes was in dread. And indeed there was cause for their dread and for their wails of lamentation. A terrible sacrilege had been committed. In all the annals of Egypt none more monstrous was recorded.
Five days had the altar fires of the god of gods, Osiris, been left unburning. Even for one moment to allow darkness upon the altars of the god was considered by the priests to be a great offense against him. Whole years of famine had been known to result from such an offense. But now the altar fires had been deliberately extinguished, and left extinguished for five days. It was an unspeakable sacrilege. (Continue Reading…)
I was climbing through the window of a ruined castle the only time the police ever caught me. I turned out my bag to show them everything I carried: a torch, pencils, notebooks. I flipped through one book, holding up sketches: the Convolvulus Hawk-moth, the Swallow-tailed moth, the Light Grey Tortrix – Cnephasia incertana, you know, just look at the cross-bands on the forewings…
The police sniggered, and let me go with a warning not to trespass again. I am white, and educated, and well-spoken; I hated myself even as I played up the accent. But they let me go.
I was patient, and polite; it was just a matter of waiting until they grew bored with questioning me. I was used to waiting. (Continue Reading…)
Nice
“You, sir, should unmask. Indeed it’s time. We all have laid aside disguise but you.”
“You were his friend, right?”
His granddaughter’s voice on the other end of the phone, her words clear and free from static. I wait to answer, don’t want to, because how do I say, “I don’t know?” For months now, he has been coming over to my house to play xiangqi two or three nights a week while we drink hard cider and talk about bullshit. Does that make us friends, or just two lonely old guys with nobody else to talk to?
Whatever I feel in my heart, what comes out of my mouth is bound to be an affirmative, because what else can I say? And besides, she is so far away—London, of all places, with children of her own that I can hear in the background—while I am so close—his own townhouse just two doors down from mine, only empty spaces between us, because this neighborhood is dying, just as he was dying, just as we all are dying. One uncomfortable phone call at a time.
She hasn’t said the words, but the implication is clear in her voice. If I don’t do it, men will come. Strangers. Impersonal men who will throw it all into boxes and, from there, who knows? The Goodwill? The landfill? No place where it matters. No place where it will be appreciated.
Am I the old man’s friend? I don’t think so. Do I want to do it? No. So why do I say yes into the receiver, my voice bounced across thousands of miles to his granddaughter in London?
The answer is guilt. No more noble a motive than that. (Continue Reading…)
We are silently going mad, the boy and I.
The first sign was when he brought me the red silk handkerchief. It was folded and tied like the most perfect furoshiki-cloth wrapping, as if he meant to give me something precious, something with meaning.
Here is what I found instead. Seven pieces of a broken denture, fragments of palate glistening pink as freshly chewed bubble gum, and wire that still shone gold, cradling teeth as jagged and yellow as fossilised popcorn.
With a wordless cry, I crushed them under my boot, grinding the molars to ochre pebbles and chalk. He did not seem to mind, and returned to picking his way carefully through the ruins of the supermarket. (Continue Reading…)
Four massive ribs held the hut together, two forming a thick arch near the front door. The bones were pockmarked and yellow, no doubt leftovers from the town’s glory days during the height of the whaling industry.
Jamie’s heart sank as he stared at the bones. They had once belonged to a beautiful creature, needled to death by harpoons and stripped of its skin. As he passed under the arch, he found himself wondering what that whale had seen all those years ago, swimming through depths he would never reach. Whatever it had seen or thought or felt, it was all gone now, stripped away with its flesh. Reduced to bone. The knot in his belly tightened at the thought. For the umpteenth time, Jamie wondered why he’d come here, what had drawn him back to this place. Everyone in his life was gone and, in a moment of desperate loneliness, he’d thought of this hut. Of Maggie. (Continue Reading…)
Heathen
They’re on holiday when he sees the cottage. Julie and Nico are bickering in the back seat, Maggie searching through the glovebox for something – anything – that might shut them up for five minutes. He rubbernecks as they pass it at speed, pulls into a lane half a mile up the road.
“What are you stopping for?” Maggie asks, feeding an audiobook into the stereo.
“Nothing. Just want to check something out,” Rob replies.
He almost misses the cottage again, but the For Sale sign peeks above the dry-stone wall just in time, alerting him to hit the brakes. There’s a gravel layby for parking, so he pulls into it and kills the engine. The building is only small, walls of piled stone, a thatched roof that looks mouldy in places, sticking up in tufts like a hairstyle gone wrong. The front door is painted white, worn away to the bare wood in patches. There’s a large garden at the rear, sweeping away from the road and partway up the hill behind it. He thinks he sees a path and a gate. A trail leads up the slope. (Continue Reading…)