the lonely crowd / spring the lonely crowd
the lonely crowd new home of the short story
Edited and Designed by John Lavin Advisory Editor Michou Burckett St. Laurent Front & Back Cover Photos by Jo Mazelis Frontispiece from ‘The Greystone’ by Seamus Sullivan
Published by The Lonely Press, 2016 Printed in Wales by Gwasg Gomer Copyright The Lonely Crowd and its contributors, 2016
ISBN 978-0-9932368-3-9
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Please direct all other enquiries to [email protected] Visit our website for more new short fiction, poetry and photography www.thelonelycrowd.org
Contents
Liling's Escape Kate Hamer - 9
Three Poems Joe Dunthorne - 19
Woman Waiting at a Station Alan McMonagle - 22
Made You Look Valerie Sirr - 31
Three Poems Polly Atkin - 40
Crusades Marie Gethins - 46
Janet Norbury Charlie Hill - 62
Like the Dust Leila Segal - 65
Three Poems Zelda Chappel - 72
Undertaker Bethany W. Pope - 76
The Ukrainian Girl Catherine McNamara - 85
The Sparkle of River Through the Trees Neil Campbell - 96
Three Poems James Aust - 105
June 20: The Ratling Robert Minhinnick - 113
The Greystone Seamus Sullivan - 117
June 24: Razors Robert Minhinnick - 128
Point of Lay Siân Melangell Dafydd - 133
Two Poems Scarlett Sabet - 142
For You Are Julia C. G. Menon - 147
Looks Like Rain Susie Wild - 156
Two Poems Carol Lipszyc - 159
One and Only Girl Laura Windley - 169
Priest Giles Rees - 177
Three Poems Sarah James - 188
Villavicencio Iain Robinson - 192
Herr Munch Visits the Zoo Diana Powell - 206
Two Poems Katharine Stansfield - 214
The Last Minutes of BA Flight 465 Armel Dagorn - 217
Per Ardua Sergo Nigel Jarrett - 221
A Different River Pia Ghosh Roy - 230
Six Secrets of Ivy Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch - 239
About the Authors - 240
spring Three Poems Joe Dunthorne
New lessons
My thesis (self-funded) is: attractive people are happy. Men in balaclavas, their faces toasty warm. Young vandals in their pomp can really lift a neighbourhood. Not so much a tough crowd as a beach in winter. The hand of fate relegated to dispensing bad reception. You’re breaking up by which I mean we are by which I mean the universe will never stop expanding no matter how rudely we ask. Save us from our scientists. Save us some of the old diseases, those ones were amazing.
19 Woman Waiting at a Station Alan McMonagle
Past midnight and, surprise surprise, the train still hasn't showed. What will it be this time? The good-for-nothing engine. Some wild animals on the tracks. Another jumper. The skinheads drinking at the station bar aren't overly concerned. This is a place that will supply them long after they run out of money, spill from their high stools, let loose their anarchic blood. Meantime, two couples with backpacks are standing on the lip of the platform, looking back up the tracks for a good-omen sign. While at the table by the bar door, the man masquerading as a benevolent taxi driver is biding his time. He knows the train is always late. He knows he can keep at the crossword he is pretending to puzzle over, nonchalantly sip his Coke, puff stoically on his slender cigar. Within the hour he knows he can name his price and be hailed as a saviour. For this to happen he knows he needn't so much as budge. The young woman is by herself at a table further inside the bar; a narrow, meekly lit, patched-up ruin of a room, the kind of place not willingly sought out. She has no idea when the train is due but here she is anyway. All set to flee. Her case on the floor by her feet. What little money she has tucked deep inside a discreet pocket. A vending-machine coffee rests on the table. A sandwich
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Three Poems Polly Atkin
Sister Running
Hurricane came calling last night, singing warnings, and you, little sister, you’d let yourself out to howl at the swooping clouds till they split and spat pellets of stars. The trees would not dance as you wanted. The mountains kept forcing you back.
You screeched in each wheezing chimney, shrieked as each road sign whined in disharmony, thrumming your nails on slates
staccato
glissando
Nobody slept. Everyone dreamt.
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Your tears became blades in the earth, sprouting.
This morning a tree barred your door, mouthing lines you thought you’d shed: he is thin in his ends. The fells are in sun. Climb over the fallen, kick off, keep running.
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Crusades Marie Gethins
Kristina fishes another beet wafer out of the jar. She sucks sweet-sour marinade from furrows in its wavy top, then bites—each blood moon made into smaller and smaller crescents until the final ruby sliver disappears into her mouth. Juice seeps out of smile corners; it stains her lips, turns fingers reddish-purple. ‘Mama’s going to kill you,’ I say. ‘Only if I spill.’ ‘When did you start liking pickled beets anyway?’ ‘Just felt like them.’ Beige vinyl smacks a double kiss when Kristina lifts one thigh and then the other off Papa’s lounge chair. The marinade sloshes. I imagine a splatter— miniature dead body shape—in the centre of Papa’s seat. A crimson wave laps near the top of the jar, but doesn’t slop over. I hope she doesn’t notice my noisy out-breath. ‘Aren’t pickled beets too Polish for you?’ ‘For your information, beets evolved from a prehistoric north African vegetable.’ She smirks at me and heads towards the kitchen. I look down at my history book as she goes by, then I hear her bare feet slap lino. She screws a metal lid onto the beet jar, opens and closes the fridge.
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Like the Dust Leila Segal
It was a long time since I’d seen or heard from Siobhan. I had finally left my lover, and had that dry feeling you get when you look back over years of intimacy that have left no discernible mark upon your heart. I found myself longing to be with Siobhan again. With just my rucksack and the piece of paper with Siobhan’s address in hand, I boarded a last-minute flight to Santiago. I took a bus from the airport to the town whose name I had written down. It wasn’t far—an hour or more—but I found myself in a different world. The streets were broad and sandy, great empty boulevards bleary in midday sun alongside wide open sea. So it is here, I thought—here that she’s found peace. Her choice did not surprise me: this perfect silent place with only the brushing of shore and dead vines baking on a suntrap wall. Tall buildings drowned each wide boulevard, and they were empty. It was a town standing long unchanged, preserved by heat, built when girls stepped out in circle skirts with boys in flat-top hair, or when carriages drew up for señoritas with parasols and dainty waists.
Without a map of the place, nor any shop open where I could buy one, I wandered for a while, almost lost. Then,
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Three Poems Zelda Chappel
Bedding
On new days, I'm a hatchling shedding shell in favour of bone—poor light growing stark by the right window.
Pick me up, a lukewarm bird in your hand, and ask me to remember our lurch, our spasm; all reflex and electric.
I've been breaking up with light, forgetting all our rhythm, growing thin as a shout through a wire. The white graze
of our unmade bed—the folding, unfolding—is a scuffle like an aftermath. In these hours, there is no conclusion
nor would we want there to be. There are
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shadows of us left in the sheets, black as crows, discussing our griefs
and I want to be in on the conversation. I want to preserve our state of fledgling in this dust-clad room, stifle it,
put it under cloches to be gawped at later in our end days. But I need air. You look for wings. I tell you I have none.
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Undertaker Bethany W. Pope
Surfaces are so important. Joyce knows this better than anybody. She stands at her plywood, dorm-issue vanity, fluffs her carefully sprayed Farrah Fawcett cut, and applies the face that she thinks of as 'business professional'. It isn't her summer working face; the eyes are less dramatic, shadowed in more 'natural' shades. When she migrates north in the summer, to New York or Atlanta (wherever her agency decides to send her) she presents a very different façade. The runway shows like to hire girls with stark facial individuality whose bodies display an androgynous, flat chested beauty. For those jobs she shades her cheeks to emphasise her sharp bones and highlight the unmistakable length of her nose. When the job has something to do with a magazine or product the idea is to present a perfect, blank ideal, something to compliment the items on sale. Joyce smooths her features to a pure-skinned blank, pads her narrow boy-hips beneath her expensive designer audition-clothes, and lets her breasts out of their stifling ace-bandage prison. Joyce is very good at what she does. Her agency has asked her, repeatedly, to give up her college work and sign on full time. She smiles, her patented, placatory I'm-a-good-girl-don't-hold-it-against-me grin
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The Ukrainian Girl Catharine McNamara
When Louise came downstairs the next morning the Ukrainian girl was tying up rubbish bags with swift double knots. To anyone else Louise would have said there was no need, but she let the young woman shuffle outside with the two smeared bags. Louise even pointed to the bins by the gates of the small villa so that she might feel obliged, and checked out her pert bum screened by a pair of musk cotton pants. She couldn’t recall exactly what the girl had been wearing last night but it had been busty and sheeny, and she knew the males had groaned after her, holding their loaded crotches. Louise also had a gut feeling that the Ukrainian girl had ended up in her brother-in-law’s tent. How else to explain this act of contrition? Louise glanced at the kitchen counter, now freed of her husband Daniele’s stoned cooking efforts. A coffee percolator sat on a blue cushion of flames. Louise put on the kettle for some green tea. The Ukrainian girl’s name was Yulia. She was new to Verona and a friend of someone’s girlfriend, invited to help redress the gender imbalance. For Louise always provided far too many men at her annual summer party, single men who thunked to AC/DC when the couples had melded into the dark corners of the yard.
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June 20: The Ratling Robert Minhinnick
Alpheratz, please. Made of mercury, made of manganese. Alpheratz, please…
But the girl was awake. She felt she’d been awake all night. Yet she knew she had slept. Maybe two hours. Now she listened. Breathing from the other cubicles. Or the cubes’ as Cai called them. That girl, Sparkle, with her baby had risen in the night but both were quiet now. Leah was the infant’s name. Daughter-in-law of Noah, someone had said. Whatever, whatever… So, Leah, or Lee they all called the child. Christ, a hippychick getting biblical. But no-one had ever asked why? Or why not? Sparkle had said she’d seen it on a gravestone. And liked it…So, sins of the mothers…. She thought someone had lit a candle in one of the cubes. That was against the rules. Ffrez would remind the fool later. Also, whoever had been last in had not set the padlock. Why did she bother? Trying to keep these people alive was…impossible. 3 o clock it said. So did her bodyclock. She slipped outside. Darkness. But darkness when it first
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The Greystone Seamus Sullivan
I made just two visits to the Greystone Inn before it changed forever. One as a newlywed son-in-law in August 2008. The second in August 2014 to introduce our 5-year-old son to his grandparents. It seemed to me even then; to be a place whose time was passing. The Greystone is located in Mayfield NY. The building is roughly 150 years old and started out as a rest stop for passing stage coaches. That part of New York state lays within the Adirondack National Park - 6
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million acres of mostly wilderness. Approximately 50 per cent of the park is privately owned. 20 acres of dense pine forest including The Greystone Inn, are owned by my wife's parents, Gene and June Wood, who moved up there in the late 1980's after their children left home. The national park attracts a particular type of person to live in it. There is still a feeling of the American frontier and this is reflected in the attitudes of it's inhabitants. Gun culture is ubiquitous and normalised in a way that is alien to my own experience. It is also exotic and interesting to me having been brought up in the west of Ireland playing cowboys and Indians and watching Western movies and American TV shows. While firearms are commonplace, ammunition costs money. Brass casings are collected and refilled and so shooting is less of an everyday pastime than one might expect. In my case it was something they did to entertain the visitor and this is why the only photograph of someone holding a gun is a self-portrait, having what was laughingly called my 'red-neck moment'. By the time of our last visit in August 2014, the business of running the Greystone Inn was becoming too much for Gene and June. They were both in their mid 70's and there was talk of selling up and retiring. The photographs you see here are a conscious attempt by me to document the people and the place for my son before it disappeared into posterity. This photo essay was culled from a larger body of work in order to convey a particular narrative and to
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work within the constraints of this publication. What it represents is a personal impression not necessarily true to the lived experience of my wife's family. While none of the situations in the photographs were contrived, it should not necessarily be considered strictly documentary. The effect is not meant to be factual, but true to how the place seemed to me at the time. Photographs are by their nature elegiac – that is to say, they exist in the past. The instant the shutter clicks the moment is gone and only the image remains. Not long after we returned home my wife's parents retired and leased their business. The interior was remodeled and The Greystone that had captured my imagination was consigned to the past. Then in December 2015 Gene Wood, my wife's father, died after a long illness.
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For You Are Julia C. G. Menon
By noon, I’m polishing the phone. The front room and I have been tidied, with all our little messes carefully swept away. My rubber gloves are dancing above the sunlit emerald carpet, and God's in his heaven and all's right with the world. But then the phone gives a little shrill of complaint, to say that unlike everything else in here it needs something more than hot yellow sunshine and Pledge. “Julia?” I don’t recognise the voice. “It’s Tom here.” And then he stops, and I do recognise the silence. From next to the phone I can see a stain on the carpet I never noticed before. A big splotch under the sideboard where something’s leaked, ragged as an ink- blot. “It’s me," I say. "I mean, it's Julia.” I can almost hear him smile. “Then I’ve found you at last! I’m having some home-coming drinks tomorrow in the Orchard. Why don’t you come? Edward too, of course.” This is a bad idea; an ink-blot idea. The worst idea, in fact, since Tom once asked me to marry him. Or perhaps only the worst since I refused.
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Looks Like Rain Susie Wild
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The woman walks down the street with her umbrella open and held aloft. It is not raining and some people look at her strangely. They think that she is strange. They look at her not just in the way they would when the sky pours but then stops and the woman simply does not notice, but in the way they would when they think someone is unhinged and about to flap about. Or they look at her and wonder if perhaps it is they who have missed something, that maybe the woman knows something that they do not. They scrutinise the sky and try to decide if it looks like rain. The woman always mistrusts the TV weather report and finds other people, despite their obvious relish for discussing the topic at every possible occasion, incredibly inept at telling when the atmospheric conditions will change. The woman is developing a stoop; she is starting to curve in upon herself like a cloud. Rain or shine, she cannot leave the house without at least two bags. Her neck and right shoulder perpetually ache because of this lugging a life around, this need to be ready to face anything the sky throws at her – carting gloves, sunscreen, flip-flops, waterproofs and wellies everywhere she goes.
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One and Only Girl Laura Windley
Frank peered out of the bedsit window, which was grimy from old rain and the dirt from the trains. He saw the silver-black railway lines snaked just behind the dilapidated buildings; close, he thought, far too close for comfort. But no, there was nobody outside. He could feel Michelle still there, in the same place behind him, at the chair’s foot, sat with her knees drawn up, those bony arms resting on top. She was all elbows, that girl, just like her mother. She knew not to move, knew not to speak this time. “I’ll Dad you,” he’d told her. “You keep that mouth of yours shut.” And she had – for now. He turned. She was looking straight at him, her blue eyes clear despite the puffiness, her jaw set hard in defiance. For fifteen she looked young, he still thought of her as twelve; still boyish in some ways, no hips. In a vest top and jeans, her hair scraggy and fine and falling like pale straw onto her shoulders. She was not the dead spit, not a chip off the old block. He was soft at heart; they all laughed at him because of it, his brothers, their wives. Cackling together like banshees as they sipped their Bacardi and cokes. And he did love her, whatever they said. What man didn’t love his own daughter, deep down? Frank’s eyes welled. His one and only girl. You
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Priest Giles Rees
The track seemed different: darker and more secret than I remembered. When I reached the bottom Stiva’s kids, little Stiva and Alona, were shrieking and running around a blow-up paddling pool whose bright blue and yellow plastic unsettled me, for a moment, after the cool uniformity of the pine forest. The children were naked. When they saw my car they stopped running. They stood by the pool with their arms by their sides and they stared at me. Stiva came from around the back of the house. He was carrying some logs. He set them down in a shelter at the side of the house then he came over and we shook hands. Lena came out from the house and said ‘Mikey’ and hugged me. She said that I had lost weight, then her eyes looked away for a second as if she felt awkward at what she had said. She told the children to dry themselves and put on some clothes. They turned their heads after us as we walked up the steps to the house and went inside. In the kitchen Lena poured iced tea into glasses and we stood around the kitchen table that had flowers on it in a jug. Lena and Stiva asked me questions about Moscow, where they hadn’t been for a while, and when I answered they said things like ‘No!’ and ‘Really?’ and ‘You’re kidding!’ as if my replies were interesting when
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Three Poems Sarah James
Seed through the eye
Twilling the soil with her sewing hands, Mum pulls Dad’s allotment into neat rucks; leaves him to tuck in his seeds.
Courgettes plump from frilled skirts. Refusing to straighten, runner beans pout; slugs feast on their flowers’ swollen lips.
When I ask Mum to hem my dress higher, she rakes even longer grey pleats. Dad shrugs – Raising a child is like threading seed through the eye of a needle. When awkward leaves grow ragged, bitten, he drowns the bugs with beer traps and honeyed water.
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Villavicencio Iain Robinson
Florencia unhinged the shutters and stepped out onto the balcony. It was disappointing that the swimming pool had already been drained. The autumn had barely begun and the sun felt warm against her face and neck. She looked back at Michael who was stooping over the suitcase as he folded clothes into the bedside drawers. ‘Come and see,’ she called. Flor watched him look up with a frown, waiting for the broad smile before she returned her gaze to the pool. She felt his arm coil around her waist. ‘It would have been nice to have gone for a swim, after the flight,’ she said. He didn’t reply, but seemed to be taking in the gardens. The lawns extended some way beyond the poolside, and were bounded by poplars, birches, and pines. Flor savoured the sweet scent of the resins. There were vines growing over a veranda. Pale green parakeets flew from tree to tree, screeching noisily. ‘Look.’ Michael waved his hand in the direction of the birds. ‘You don’t get that in Nuneaton.’ She forced a short laugh. He had this way of relating every new experience back to the narrow frame of his own upbringing. Couldn’t he let that go, for a moment? It amazed her that he travelled as much as he
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Herr Munch Visits the Zoo Diana Powell
Tiger chases him down the street. Death and sinew, wrapped in fur. Together, they weave in and out of the serried lime trees. From the branches, the monkeys throw peanuts at him, while parakeets screech and whistle. Then ragamuffin Bear lumbers around the corner, ahead of him. He is trapped, he stumbles. Two giant shadows rear above his fallen body. Tiger offers him a splayed fan of daggers. Which one shall finish him? Now, all the other animals – sea lions, goats, zebra, even the gentle deer - gather around, baying and gibing, at Pig’s command. The sharpest blade is chosen, and etches a fine line beneath his heart. Behind, in the window of the last house, he sees the woman watching. “Help me,” he cries. She smiles and turns away.
He opened his eyes to an Angel hovering above him, in a shaft of white light. “Wake up, Herr Munch, you’ve been dreaming! Too much excitement yesterday, perhaps. Hushed, now, we do not want your cries waking the others, do we?” Holm, in the next room, never slept, pacing the floor, hour after hour. The fellow on the other side cried all night long. The chloral was not always effective. Who, in this place, would be bothered by his
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The Last Minutes of BA Flight 465 Armel Dagorn
Here are, made public for the first time, the full facts behind the crash of British Airways flight 465. All the available information on the event was collected from the plane's black box, phone companies' records and amateur videos salvaged from some of the victims' phones. It is as yet unclear who the three terrorists were, what (if any) organisation they were members of, and what their potential message was. No one has claimed responsibility for the attack, and at this time it is not unreasonable to speculate that they might have been free agents, in which case the reason behind the attack might never be discovered. The men had planned to provoke an intense use of mobile phones to cause the plane's navigational equipment to malfunction. This plan was obviously based on the common misconception that phones can disrupt a plane's flight – which is of course not the case. The customary appeal to passengers not to use their electronic devices on board only became widespread as pilots, well-known for their ever on-going quest for new distractions to pass the hours of auto-pilot boredom, took to using mobile phones. They soon realised that reception up at 30,000 feet was poor at best, and that their only chance to be able to sustain phone calls of a
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Per Ardua Sergo Nigel Jarrett
perrer, peara, appel, aple pearer, apple, apple, apple, parerer, parer, apple parer, apple parer. Paring an aple, paring an apple, paring an aple, paring an apple Mr Gant come to day an Her Majusty tikt me of for gone to see im an me only takin the time I was entitld too. I was standed by the stabell door becuase I could'nt see Mr Gant from the kitchin window and he was hear to currycome Major as he explined it to me for I had nevver see any persn currycoming a horse as big as Major before and as I'am standing there by the stabell door and pearin in he is puffn and gruntn an tellin me as what currycoming does and it's like this you take a currycome and curry him all over his body, an that is too raise the dust, beginnin first at the neck, holding the left cheek, of the headstall in the left hand an curry him from the setting-on of his head all over the body to the buttuks down to the point of the hock, an then change your hands, and currycome him before, on his breast, and, laying you’re right arm over his back, join you’re right side to his left, an curry him all under the belly near the fourbowls, an so all over from the knees and back upwards after that, go to the far side and do that agin likwise. If he did bless me Majors thing began to grow down longer and it was pink like a pigskin but
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A Different River Pia Ghosh Roy
I was telling Daniel about cat-ladies. We were standing on the pavement, then walking on top of the half-wall, then standing on the pavement. Daniel was slapping his ball at the wet ground, thwat thwat thwat. It made a sad sound, like that frog Chippy-Charlie had tied to the end of a string and walked around the neighbourhood. He's not sharp like the other lads, Daniel; he has to be told the simplest things. Like about old cat-ladies. Old ladies who have just one cat, they're alright. But, if you see one old lady with three four five cats, Daniel, stay clear. Don’t have your ball go rolling into her garden, that’s all I’m saying. They keep the balls, and poke you with their walking sticks. Their houses have a room filled with weeks and months and years of lost balls. The hard orange ones, the soft cloth ones, the ones that you get for free with stuff printed on them, like Stay Active Fitness Centre. When they roll into a cat-lady’s garden, they disappear forever. "Phfoo, gone," I said. "You know, like how planets get sucked into black holes." Thwat thwat thwat, said Daniel's ball. "Balls - planets - get it?"
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