Monthly Archive for November, 2008

Cloaca

Julie O'Brien
published in Essays
on November 11, 2008
.

I buy books from the website of the Strand Bookstore in New York, and get them delivered to my office. When the box arrives, I like to luxuriate in the experience. I slide one side of the scissors through the sellotape and take the books out of their tissue paper wrapping. I can feel the coldness of warehouses off them. I remove the price sticker until there’s absolutely no bitty pieces left on the cover. This is my adoption ritual. Then I read the back, the preface, the introduction, the dedications, and the list of other works by the author. I leave the pile of two or three books on my desk, so that when they catch my eye, my numbers and spreadsheets fade to a dark blur and the other side of my brain flickers like old-fashioned strip lighting, never quite turning on fully. Sometimes the woman, who sits beside me in work, picks the books up, flicks through them, reads the back cover and then puts them back down as quietly and unobtrusively as possible, so that she won’t have to comment. Anais Nin’s diary, with the often repeated blurb “a woman’s journey of erotic discovery” received a notably uncomfortable reaction.

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The mulatto

John McAuley
published in Stories
on November 11, 2008
.

The porch was a suntrap. The sun used to swoop in there and get all caught up in the trees and the grass, bouncing around the walls and back to the grass again. It was eternally warm, and during those long summer nights when the moon was high and the clouds away, the family, the whole lot of them, would sit on the porch and talk about everything.

When it got late, one of them, usually Jerry, would stand up and yawn, saying, I’m going to bed. And then all of a sudden, they’d all clamber to their feet and stumble to their rooms.

“Good night,” they’d say, as if in a tearoom at the Ritz Carlton.

Jerry, the strong son, slept with his wife, a mulatto who maintained she came from Monsterboice, and late at night, when everyone was sleeping or at least pretending at sleeping, you could hear the creak and strain of the iron bed as they consummated their marriage, over and over.

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Fingers

Alicia Kearney
published in Stories
on November 10, 2008
.

I distinctly remember that weekend. I had a toothache that had escalated into a migraine pain of blinding severity, flashing lights, and cartoon stars, five pointed, twirling around my head. On my way to the dentist I passed a newspaper stand.

“Fingers!” the headline shouted at me, bold-lettering nonsense that made you smile. Intrigued, I bought the tabloid with its page-three fake-breasted blonde and the XXX hotlines, ksssssssss! What I wasn’t prepared for was the news it carried with its tat and sleaze.

Fingers had been found, or digits, as they liked to educatedly call them, scattered along the ground outside one of the city’s green spaces. A popular thoroughfare, it said, though I couldn’t imagine what else a thoroughfare could be. The digits were scattered randomly on the ground, in no shape or organisation – two thumbs and six fingers. There had been no blood on the ground, no sign of a crime. It was as if the fingers were dropped from the sky. The fingers themselves were long with nails bitten to the skin. They were slight of hair beneath the knuckle and certainly those of a man, or a very masculine lady.

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Man afraid of tongue

Justin Kidd
published in Stories
on November 10, 2008
.

It’s a mandatory thing. I was doing a two-week placement at a GP’s surgery. I liked the idea of being a GP, a pillar of the community. A big leather chair, a secretary, et cetera. I arranged it with a doctor from my home town. I hadn’t lived there for years, but I thought it would be more laid back than a placement in the city.

By lunchtime on the first day I was dismayed. I disliked the doctor; he stank of unwashed clothes, damp flesh and iodine. He wasn’t a bad doctor, but was slow to sympathise and quick to diagnose. I hated the patients. Miserable dying heaps with only the vaguest will to live – people who couldn’t be told what was wrong with them, never mind how to make it better. They all thought they were dying – they just wanted it confirmed.

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Drugstore stalker

Allyson Dowling
published in Essays
on November 9, 2008
.

I was on my way home on the U-Bahn. It was a hot afternoon. I wore a bright pink skirt with a matching top that came to just above my belly button. I was standing on the escalator, looking up towards the sun, when I felt a warm soft hand slide across my belly. I turned around and saw a young guy behind me. He was blonde and thin, dressed in white runners, baggy jeans and a t-shirt. There were large dark circles under his eyes, bizarre in such a young, fine face.

I stared at him. He took his hand away and excused himself. I stepped off and headed down the street, feeling a little stupid in the top – it was too short, I shouldn’t have worn it. I tugged it down to meet the waistband of my skirt. Halfway down the street, I turned around. He was walking steadily behind me, not too close but close enough. I quickened my pace and he quickened his. He kept up with me all the way to the drugstore at the corner. I stopped and swung around. He stopped and looked straight at me. This is ridiculous, I thought, he’s the same age as me. He’s harmless, probably on drugs, just roaming about, likes pink a lot.

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Fair day

Padraig Conaty
published in Stories
on November 7, 2008
.

The animals were led into the ring individually. The first bullock entered, sniffed at the sawdust on the ground and walked around the whitewashed wall. He was startled by a loud bawl that came from the bullock in the rusty weighing pen behind him. Bannon stood high up in the seller’s box beside the auctioneer. He could see the bidders through a circular hole in the partition. Two dealers stood dangling their arms over the ring. Another stood up on the steps beside the weighing pen. One of the bottom two turned and nodded up to the other dealer. They wouldn’t bid each other up. The final price was low. The auctioneer turned to Bannon and placed his hand over the mike. “Well?” he enquired. Bannon shook his head. The animal was led out of the ring. This was repeated four more times. Later when he was loading the animals back onto the trailer, two dealers approached him. The taller of the dealers ran his fingers through the thick golden hair of the bullocks.

“Wintered outside?” he enquired.

“Quarry rock and good water,” replied Bannon.

Blood test

Neil Ward
published in Essays
on November 7, 2008
.

In the café on Fourth Street they drill holes in the spoons. “To stop the junkies stealing them to melt their fix,” said the waitress. When we arrived in Anchorage airport we were given a leaflet – “Friendly advice on how to stay safe.” It induced fear. “Always carry identification and telephone numbers for your next of kin; never trust anyone you just met; if staying in a hotel use the deadbolt lock and peephole – don’t answer the door to anyone.” It reminded me of the Moroccan who, in the taxi on the unmarked road out of Tangiers, told me that westerners were very welcome in his village, unless they start to get paranoid.

In the winter, Anchorage is awash with killers. In the summer these folk put on their Northern Exposure faces to greet the tourists, but out of season go back to basic survival techniques; deranged expressions to deter strangers. Darwin’s Theory is a bar on G Street; it reminded me that it’s not the strongest of the species that survives, nor is it the most intelligent; it’s the one most adaptable to change. The junkies leave their wilderness hideouts and make for the city to keep their supply lines open until the thaw. The temperature can drop to minus fifty. The FBI doesn’t bother to look for fugitives once they have crossed the final frontier into the biggest state in the USA. Visitors are earnestly told of the daily stabbings; the weekly fatal shooting; three rapes a day, two of them male. The gender imbalance is genuinely nine men to every woman. There is a magazine, Alaskan Men, where men advertise for wives; when women are looking for a man it is said “the odds are good – but the goods are odd.”

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Equinox

Louise McCaul
published in Essays
on November 7, 2008
.

I left home when I was eighteen. That was exactly eighteen years ago. I like the symmetry and balance of these numbers; my own personal equinox. Since then, I have been making the journey back home to Blackrock, Co. Louth on a regular basis and the only thing that has changed about it is my mode of transport. As a student I took the bus, for a short time I hitched, then later as a treat for working I travelled by train. Now, I drive.

I bought a car so that I could go home without consulting a timetable but I’ve noticed that if I visit on a Saturday, I leave Blackrock at exactly the same time – 8PM. I tune into a radio show which is broadcast from An Daingean – the most westerly radio station in Europe. Driving on the M1, I couldn’t be further away from An Daingean but somehow that sense of being on the edge of Europe facing out towards the dark Atlantic suits my transitory mood as the black road falls away behind the wheels of my car like a river under the oar. I don’t think I could listen to this show if I was sitting in one spot. I tried once but the intensity was gone. It was just a man in a small studio in Kerry playing tunes from his dusty folk collection.

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The cherries are rubies and the sugar is diamonds

Helen Chandler
published in Stories
on November 7, 2008
.

The cherries are rubies and the sugar is diamonds and the kitchen is scattered with rubies and diamonds. He’s a man covered in white, flour clinging to his pores and the pores of his clothes. It’s best when he forgets to be self-conscious, because then I’ll catch him at being himself, but then I ruin it by thinking it’s marvelous and he puts the guards back up. I’m just kind of holding my breath, waiting for him to realise, “I’m baking a cake with her on a Saturday.”

I look at the lines in the palms of my hands, deepened by the flour encrusted around them. We touch each other’s faces with our floury hands and we kiss dusty kisses. The powder thickens, streaks across the skin and then it’s pasty and starts to wipe off. Pink on white, blue on white. I trip over the potato bag of bitter apples as we tango around the kitchen, moving together as if we know how. I nearly swallow the moment when I panic thinking it’s ruined, but he ignores my blunder, secures his grip on my waist and licks the flour from my chin.

There’s something happening in my left eye line that I try to ignore. And then it’s happening on my right and above. The cracks in the walls are creeping around the kitchen, getting deeper and more severe, causing plaster to flake and fall, chunks of it now, falling around us. The walls are soaking up the cracks, welcoming them, they can’t get enough of this something that’s breaking them.

Reflections

Gabriela Ailenei
published in Essays
on November 7, 2008
.

The crushing humility and supreme arrogance of being myself. If only I could stay still for a while, lay siege to my thoughts. But I have no convictions, no calling, no faith. The simplest things are beyond my comprehension. Watching traffic hypnotises me. The spectacle of human travail, our endurance – it’s miraculous. Feats of engineering leave me spellbound – anything that shows order and sustained thought.

The world that populates my nightmares is apocalyptic and I fear…..no, I know how easily that can become reality. The society we build around us is a measure of our self-respect, and I’m in awe, I am, because I benefit from it. Yet I know nothing would be built if the world were only populated with people like me.

It’s okay. Maybe the questions that have answers are not meant for me.

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