Fernanda has just put the coffee on when she sees them. It’s half past nine on a Sunday morning in February. Her bones are melting. She can see the two faggots through the gap on the corrugated-iron back gate.
What do you sluts want? she says.
¡Ay, Fernanda! they squeal. Do you have café for us?
She heads back into the kitchen, where they can see the moka on the hob.
Do you have any cake, Fernanda? says the green-haired one.
You think I wake up with cakes coming out of my ass? she shouts.
You’re just famous for your cakes, says the black-haired one. Have you had your first cigarette of the day?
NO, blasts Fernanda.
No wonder you’re so prickly, Fernandinha, says the one with the green flop, grinning.
Fernandinha Fernandonha, says the old woman, who truly is cranky. Pass me a lighter.
They don’t have one. Desculpe.
You invade my house like a pair of conquistadores and you can’t even give me a light. God preserve me.
She slouches to light her cigarette on a gas ring.
We need to ask you a favour, says the green-head, sounding serious.
I don’t do favours to whores, says Fernanda.
Not that kind of favour, says the dark-haired lad.
For those I charge. She’s quick as lightning.
We need to make a video, he says.
She slowly exhales her stream of smoke.
The coffee has risen.
She gets up her chair to turn the gas off.
What’s in it for me? she asks, as she places three Duralex cups on the oilcloth.
You’ll be famous! says the raven-haired one.
She nearly drops the coffee maker.
I’M ALREADY FAMOUS! she screams. How much are you making from these stupid screaming videos?
It depends on the views on each video, says the one with the green floppy hair.
I don’t give a fuck about the views, she retorts. I want a cut.
But if we start splitting the earnings, then we won’t have enough for… for…, mumbles the floppy-haired one.
For fancy knickers and getting lathered, she says.
No, no, says the black-haired one. It’s for Elsa’s gender affirmation surgery, he says, looking at the so-called Elsa, who up to recently has been known to her as Eloy.
Puta que pariu, says Fernanda, lowering her tone a notch. Are you going through with that?
Hoping to, says Elsa, looking at the oilcloth.
So will you help us? asks the other, making puppy eyes at her.
I’ll think about it, says Fernanda, pouring her own cupful.
It’s for a good cause, risks the green-haired one, whose name she now remembers is Mauro.
I know it’s for a good cause, filho da puta, says Fernanda.
So when will you know? presses Mauro.
You sluts, says Fernanda. Can’t a woman enjoy her first cup of coffee and cigarette without being cross-questioned like a criminal?
OK, OK, says Elsa. We’ve bothered you enough. You’ll let us know when you’re ready. She reaches over the table and strokes Fernanda’s hand.
Canoodling won’t work on me, mutters Fernanda as she raises her cup to her lips. Alright, I’ll do it.
You will? say the young ones in unison, clutching their non-existing pearls.
Are you deaf? I said yes! says Fernanda. If I say no, I’ll have to listen to you moan till the cock crows tomorrow.
They walk round the table and give Fernanda a hug.
You’re our queen! exclaims Mauro, giving his neighbour a wet kiss on the cheek.
You’re the queens, says Fernanda, trying to disentangle herself from the perfumed young couple.
You’re the best, Fernanda, says Elsa.
You know how to pay lip service.
You really are the best, though, Fernandinha, says Mauro.
Children of the devil, says Fernanda. So do I have to make a cake for this bloody video?
Oh no, it’s too much work for you, retorts the young man. We can’t exploit you. We want to get a juicy one.
Filho do cão, says Fernanda. Drink your coffee and get out of my house. You’d better bring me a good cake. I won’t be recorded with any old thing. Vamos lá, imundas. Vênga.
The queens drink up, give Fernanda a kiss on each cheek, and shimmy down the roofed terrace.
See you soon, rainha, say the young ones from the other side of the gate.
Get lost, sluts! shouts Fernanda out of the kitchen door. She sits back down and drains her coffee cup and wonders whether it will ever rain again.
May in San Francisco is nearly the same as every other month. Grey; the color of the cold ocean waters echoing the misty fog descending downward from the sky. The sound of the foghorns can be heard all around the city. Low, lonely, and mournful as a grieving lover, crying through the afternoon, night, and into the morning.
Grey-brown raccoons and coyotes have been coming closer and closer to the humans over the years, searching amongst the driveways for trashcans of rotting leftovers. Grey pigeons hobble on feet mangled and caught in wires and strings. Grey-white seagulls search for scraps of the sourdough bread tourists drop on the grey sidewalks. Those poor tourists, thinks the lone woman. They always come in shorts, tank tops, and smiles. They always end up standing separately, shivering in expensive sweatshirts that shout San Francisco! The cold and grey creeps between people, no matter how short a time they spend in the cool grey city by the bay.
At one end of the city, a lone black-clothed surfer carries his board to the water. He pauses at the edge of the water. Few come this way, preferring the gentler waves and warmer waters of a few miles south. No matter, he loves the challenge, the way this makes him feel to do harder things.
At the other, a young man clothed in black, grey, and dull denim dreams of a bright future of fame and a fortune made from what they’re calling artificial intelligence. He walks alone, head down, imagining himself on the covers of a magazine, with a model on his arm, a few billion in stock sitting in an account somewhere. Thousands like him, head down but in the clouds, little thought of how their aspirations for those billions will affect the rest of humanity.
Waiting for her rideshare is the lone woman. She has spent her whole life on this square of seven-by-seven miles. Her years-old jacket has faded to the nothing color of the sky of the city she always thought of her own. At the airport, she stares out of the window. All the memories of childhood, teenage years, and adulthood were here. She lifts her phone and takes a photograph. The sky and the tarmac are the same color. She will show this to people later, to show how cool and cold her country was.
Hours later, she arrives in a different city. The door of the little apartment she chose is a bright scarlet red.
May in Mexico City is a hot, sun-filled month. The skies are bright blue. The type of plants that her country’s people try desperately to nurture in little pots grow in hot profusion here, huge monsteras climbing up even larger trees and up the sides of green, blue, and red walls.
Yellow mangoes are sliced and sold by the cupful, speckled red with hot sauce and chili powder. Towering stacks of red-spiced and layered meat on tall spits roast over charcoal, the sight and smell beckoning in hungry customers when sudden thunderstorms drench the city.
Silence does not exist there. There is the sound of the man selling tamales, the clanging bell of the trash collectors, the one who will buy your old washing machine, sofa…the whistle of the man selling baked sweet potatoes. A man plays a horn, a woman plays an accordion, hoping you will put some cash into the bowl sitting in front of them. The grandmother-like woman selling her bright red fruits smiles and hugs her, slips in a few extra cherries and plums.
Every child is called mi amor. Every dog and puppy is cooed over as they walk down the street. Lovers canoodle on sidewalks and inside coffeeshops. Men carry their toddlers in their arms, while women of her country complain of feeling trapped and alone, sole caregivers for their children. Here, the old African, Asian, and Latin sentiment comes to life: ‘it takes a village to raise a child.’
Now, she finally understands how it feels to feel warmth. To feel heat in your belly and on your skin. To be surrounded by sunlight, color, and care.
You say you’re going to ‘start trying’ and someone tells you to buy a body basal thermometer to track your cycles. You don’t listen.
The first loss comes as you lift a box off a high shelf.
It’s the microplastics, someone tells you. They’re in everything.
It’ll come when you least expect it, other people say. It’ll come the moment you start to relax.
You read the second loss in the technician’s face as they look at your reproductive system on a screen.
It was peaceful at least, they say, which you learn means, we won’t have to hoover it out of you.
Peaceful, you think, contemplating the word.
You learn that everything in the world of fertility could just as easily mean its opposite. Doctors sit behind a desk and make promises, before admitting to you, 4 grand later, a lot of what we do is just guesswork. You ask how two doctors can possibly see the same scan and come to an entirely different conclusion. Well, she says, it’s subjective. Like looking at a piece of art.
The papers say there’s a Fertility Crisis. But it doesn’t seem that way to you. You hold open doors for pregnant women and give up your seat on the bus. Baby on board! Baby on board! Baby on board! You hear that a girl you used to babysit is expecting now. Aww! you say, what happy news! You become the world expert on holding other people’s children and saying all the right words.
You try to shape this great abyss into a soundbite for a friend over dinner. Just make the most of your freedom, they say. You nod. It’s true. You are free. So free. Your life is an open plain, like the end of an old cowboy movie.
So you throw good money after bad buying plastic contraptions in brown paper packages that promise things.
You test for every possible aberration. You send ten bottles of blood to the lab. You spend more on a 15 minute phone consultation than a holiday.
You feel that you are pregnant. You have every symptom in the book. Listen to your body, everyone says, but your body gaslights you more than any man ever did.
The third loss comes in a burger shack.
You scrape your soul for answers. Why did something humans have been doing since the beginning of time, require so much fucking plastic? How could it be so hard to make a person when you can’t move for people in this world? How could want not be immediately followed by get? There must be something you can click. There must be a guy, somewhere, you can call. How can you get anything you want in 24 hours in this shitty world but not the thing you want most of all?
You’ve known heartbreak before. But not like this. This is a solemn and private pain, heartbreak in regular monthly intervals.
The Reddit women wear their years like armour. I’ve been TTC for ten cycles. Four years. 2 months. 2 months? You scoff, hunched over your laptop like a gnome, what does she know about anything? They’re mad, these women, you think. How do you do the same thing, month after month after month, and expect a different result?
Your body is unable to keep a baby, it seems. But hell… your eyes can still scan. Your thumbs can still scroll. You can’t procreate but you are perfectly able to buy things. You open up the page for the basal body temperature thermometer again. Maybe they were right. Maybe this bit of plastic will make all the difference.
So you read the reviews. You compare models. You look at the happy pretty pregnant ladies holding each one. You imagine how different your life would look if you could read the heat of your body to 2 decimal places rather than the usual 1.
You know, in your deepest and most rational self, that it’s probably no different from the thermometer you already have.
But what if is though? What if the one thing you didn’t buy is the one thing that could have fixed everything?
And after all this, all that you’ve been through, are you really going to take that chance?
So you breathe in. You click ‘buy’. And you wait for the brown paper package to arrive. And, once again, you let yourself hope that this thing will be THE thing, the thing that makes all the difference.
She caught it and tucked it under her sleeve before he noticed.
Sweat trickled down her spine.
“The River,” she said, the words catching in her throat.
“What’s that?” Jamal asked.
“Never mind. Just open the door.”
Jamal twisted, pushed, and raced into the lounge. He tore off his top and trousers and fell onto the sofa. He remembered dragging it up the steps with his brother. He could not have done it without him.
Their mother had spent the day cleaning it, working the vacuum into the crevices.
Jamal recalled the tiny clicking sounds of debris flying through space, the reckless clatter of a metal object, his mother searching the bag, pushing her fingers deep into the dust.
Hot tears falling.
Hitting the paper.
Spreading like time-lapsed cultures in a petri-dish.
The leather had been cool. Now it was hot. Jamal stood, howling as it ripped his skin.
His mother stood in the doorway. “You’ve got to do it slowly. It’s not true what they say.”
Jamal rubbed his arms and felt foolish.
The fan lingered in the corner. Jamal approached it.
“Don’t,” his mother said. “It’s too expensive to run.”
Jamal shook his head. “Air conditioning is expensive. The fan is cheap.”
A tremor surged through her body. “There’s no such thing as cheap. Everything is costly.”
“Sorry,” Jamal said.
His mother sighed and straightened her scarf. “If it reaches 37 you can turn it on.”
Jamal went past her into the kitchen where the smell of cooking had lost its homely flavour. He opened the drawer and took out the thermometer they had put under his sister’s arm. He took it back to the lounge and put his T-shirt on the sofa to separate his skin from the leather.
“What are you doing with that thing?”
“I’m waiting,” Jamal said.
“Waiting for what?”
“Until it’s hot enough.”
“Hot enough for what?”
“Don’t you remember?”
“Don’t speak to me that way.”
“Sorry.”
“What is it now?”
“What is what?”
“What is the temperature, child?”
A look of defiance. “I could go and fight.”
She slapped him once. “Don’t say that!”
Silence.
She went to the kitchen. When she came back, she picked up a magazine and fanned her face. “My God. It will be the heat that kills us. It is too hot.”
“It’s not hot enough.”
The thermometer went up to 36 degrees. Jamal clenched his fist and jaw just as he did when he wanted his team to win. “Come on,” he said. “Come on!”
Crockery and cutlery clashed in the kitchen.
“Do you want a cup of tea, Jamal?”
“Don’t we have any cold drinks?”
His mother reappeared. “The fridge doesn’t work, and I have to boil the water first.”
Jamal tightened. “Boiling the water uses more electricity than running the fan for half a day.”
His mother tossed her hand. “I have to boil the water. It’s necessary. And don’t be disrespectful. Your father…”
“I’m sorry," Jamal said quickly.
The thermometer was stuck at 36. “Come on, mum, it’s 36 degrees.”
“I said 37.”
“Please. What’s one more…”
“No, Jamal, I told you…”
“Yes, yes,” Jamal cried, “It’s 37.” He jumped up and showed his mother the thermometer. “See for yourself. It just hit 37. Look!”
His mother rested her hands on her hips and tilted her head. “Do what you want,” she said and turned away.
Jamal rushed to the fan and flicked the switch. It hummed and the blades went round. He crouched in front of it.
“Sweet mercy,” he whispered.
He closed his eyes and wondered why 37 degrees was unbearable when the body’s core temperature was the same. Who could he talk to about such things? This was a puzzle he could not solve.
He turned and the breeze travelled to different parts of his body.
The sun shone through the glassless window.
A small chunk of plaster fell.
The fan turned like a clock racing time.
When the sky turned the colour of blood, the big soft thumps started.
Jamal put his face close to the fan so he could not hear them. But when he lay on the floor, he could feel them punching through him as though he was not there.
When it was time to sleep, he pretended he was listening to drums underwater.
I listen to your program every Sunday night. Did I ever think I’d write you a letter….No. But here I am, in my kitchen writing the first letter I’ve written in as long as I can remember. My name is Doris Agee. I’m 66 years young and live where I was born- just outside of Knoxville, Tennessee.
I’m married but I live alone. My “husband” James left just after the birth of our son Jimmy, about 43 years ago. I’ve never heard from him since. I never got a nickel. I work where I’ve always worked- I’m an adjuster for an insurance company here in town. My job is to try to screw people out of what they have coming…so that’s what I do. I could retire if I wanted, but I love my job. I love the people I work with and enjoy meeting new people. My house is paid for so I save a little each month. For what, I don’t know. Jimmy died at 27- just like all those rock stars. I thought the Oxy would get him but it was cancer…In the end they gave him Oxy for the pain so I guess I was half right.
I was thinking about a good love song I could request. That seems to be what most people do. Some young girl at home waiting for her soldier. Hoping he doesn’t get killed or worse, mutilated. Probably not even thinking about the mental consequences of his service. But that ain’t me. There’s enough love songs in the air for me. Besides that, since James I’ve been pretty much alone. I "fooled around" but never fell in love. I even had sex with a black man once (I'm white). Not much to talk about. Seemed like we both just wanted to put a check mark next to that experience and move on.
Speaking of moving on…I guess I better. If I’m going to have any chance at all of hearing my song on the radio I’ve learned the letter better be brief.
Casey- will you please play Hot Legs by Rod Stewart for me? I’ll be listening.
It was February, and the small silver cross around Father Carmichael’s neck was burning against his skin. He knew he should have taken it off, but he wasn’t about to now. God knows, he might need it.
The priest got up and poured some water on the coals. The priest sat back, and braced as a wave of heat hit him like a bludgeon.
‘Lord have mercy,’ Father Carmichael said as the air burnt his nostrils. His voice carried differently in the sauna. The air, thick with vapour and flesh gone by, made his words land heavier than they would in the world outside this wooden box on the edge of England. No safety net.
Would she come? She had said she would. But now that the priest was here in his trunks, looking at the sad daubs of chest hair sitting shiny and lank on his front, he almost hoped she wouldn’t. It hardly felt appropriate.
The sauna had been her suggestion. Odd, he thought, but she said the heat calmed her nerves. Margate had been his. Far enough away from the parish in London not to risk any run-ins. Plus, she lived here. Suggesting it made it sound like he wanted to make it easy for her. But he knew he couldn’t stay put much longer in this hot coffin. Hailing from the womb of rural Ireland, Father Carmichael did not feel himself made for saunas. His life in London had not prepared him either, spending most of his time in his Harlesden parish trying to help the hopeless, taking the confession of poor guilt-ridden women, wishing their unaffordable pregnancies gone.
He told them to trust in the Lord, and prescribed them five Our Fathers.
‘It’s fathers that got me in this mess,’ a woman quipped on leaving the confessional once. He smiled at her, but Father Carmichael made a mental note to give her an extra Hail Mary for good measure next she was in. Because she would be, in need of his grace.
The sauna door opened, and a woman wearing a swimming costume walked in.
‘Clara?’, said Father Carmichael, lifting his hand.
She met his gaze. Her eyes were a dark blue, almost grey. They were his eyes.
‘Father’, she said, and sat down next to him. ‘Sorry I’m late.’
‘Call me dad, please.’ Her saw her eyes move to the cross around his neck. He thought he saw her face relax, and was glad he’d kept it on.
They sat in silence a moment, neither sure where to go from here. The waves crashed on the shore outside the hot box. Clara stood to pour more water on the coals and the priest waited for the heat to squeeze at his throat. He let a bead of sweat run down his front. Then he spoke.
‘I’ve got a lot of making up to do, Clara. The way I behaved with your mother, it was unforgivable.’
‘Unforgivable, yes,’ she said, staring ahead.
‘I was young, and that’s no excuse, but I’ve changed a lot since then, Clara. I became a priest, I help people now who sometimes remind me of your mother when she was young.’ Clara nodded.
‘Is she still back home, your mam?’
‘Oh, she died when I was fourteen. But you wouldn’t approve, Father,’ she said, turning to him, ‘she killed herself.’ Father Carmichael sat back. A tragedy and a sin. Surely that couldn’t have been because of him. His heart was beating fast now – he was too hot to do this here.
‘Clara, that’s awful.’
‘Sure I think she was heartbroken,’ said his daughter, ‘but you reap what you sow, I suppose’. Her eyes, which were his eyes, were fixed on him. ‘Mind if I add some more water to the coals?’
‘Already? Well actually, I’m too warm I think, we may need to-’
‘No, that’s ok, Father. I’ll end this now.’
‘End the heat?’
‘Yes. This all consuming heat.’
He looked on as his daughter exited. Through the glass door, he watched her stare out to sea. He watched her turn back to him. He watched her turn the key in the lock.
The heat pressed hard on the priest as he shot up, his curses landed heavy on the door, and the floor smacked hard on his head as he fell, light-headed from the tragedy and sin of it all.
When the paramedics pulled him out, the image of the cross was scorched onto his skin.
It was just after Xmas and I was down at the Social Security Office, sitting, waiting for my name to be called while I watched rain smashing down outside through the huge picture windows.
Looking over at the counter there were about ten people in a queue.
The man at the front of the line seemed to be out of it on something. He lifted his arms up and started flexing, stretching tight muscles, swinging his arms wildly from one side to another, just missing the head of the girl standing behind him.
Behind her was a woman aged about forty and two young men who looked in their early twenties. They were all really out of it too – glazed eyes, bodies swaying as they nodded off. Suddenly the woman sent one of the boys out to the car to get her sunglasses. He soon came back dripping wet, saying, ‘Can’t find‘em Mum they weren’t in the console.’
So . . . it’s Mum and her two sons all off their faces together.
Their male friend at the head of the queue was dealt with and he walked back towards them holding some official form in his hand, then bent down and rubbed it back and forth along the carpet as if it was wet. He was maniacal, tense but high, laughing to himself at some private joke.
Eventually it was Mum and the kids’ turn at the counter and everybody could hear her announcing in a really loud voice about one of them, ‘he’s just come out of Long Bay Jail.’
At that moment a guy covered in tats, jangling keys came over, slumped down in the chair too close beside me and immediately launched into his story.
‘I got cleaned out over Xmas, everything was stolen, all my ID the lot.’
Not wanting to get involved, I murmured primly polite, ‘mmm . . . how awful.’
He struck out again with a broad grin. ‘It’s been a bummer of a Xmas – I was just going into MacDonald’s and someone knifed me in the guts.’
‘Goodness me.’
‘Well, when the cops came they ran a check. I had all these fines outstanding. I thought I’d paid em. So they put me in the slammer for Xmas.’
I felt sweaty and it flashed into my head, What if I can’t shake him off? I don’t want to be friends. I’d rather not talk.However I couldn’t help myself, ‘what sort of Xmas lunch did you have, was it any good?’
‘Well yes it was. Roast chicken, sweets – the works. Have you ever been out to Long Bay?’
‘No,’ I lied. Although I had visited someone there once, years ago.
He nattered on, ‘everything has to get better. It can’t get any worse. Tell me it’s got to get better.
I had to agree with that one, ‘it’s got to get better.’
Suddenly my reprieve, ‘Silda Rainor’ my name was yelled out. But . . . dammit, he knows my name now.
‘I have to go.’
‘Good luck Silver Rain!’ He called after me.
Relieved I smiled warmly and waved, ‘You too. All the best,’ and I think I actually meant it.
The first time I met you there was an energy arching from the top of my head to yours, from the top of your head to mine.
I imagine it like a golden rainbow above us with each end tickling the hair on our heads.
I’d been getting desperate trying to open the door, feeling so embarrassed and self conscious on the street with each futile rattle of the door building a rising sense of desperate panic in my chest.
From inside you opened the door the other way to that which I’d been pushing and whoosh - the golden rainbow sparkled and arched overhead.
You were grounded, gentle and welcoming. Your face was so handsome and sweet. Your smile. You were probably wearing something softly butch maybe a fleecy plaid shirt. Probably the chain of your wallet draping from the front to back pocket of smart trousers. Probably hiking boots. You were beautiful.
It was my first time to visit alone at Good Vibrations. It was my second time in the store. The first time I’d gone with Paula – an Australian woman staying at the same hostel as me, travelling with her partner Murgatroyd who she introduced as her slave. She was in the city to do some bondage training. My mind was blown an a very regular basis on that trip. How lovely to be so far from Kansas.
Feeling intrigued but so very shy once I was in the door, I focused in on the postcards and books rather than the shelves of butt plugs and dildos. I was signed up for a breath/ energy workshop, the only event which seemed vaguely familiar ground to me at that point in time.
I have no recollection of the event but maybe the breath work gave me the boldness to resolve at some point in the evening to ask for your number.
The firsts tumbled fast like dominoes knocking the next after that.
First bus ride to the first gay club in San Francisco, you swinging your legs on the high seats enjoying the way it made you feel like a child.
First time I felt a giddy and sensual connection with a gorgeous woman.
First time my heart swelled and grew when I held your hand.
First queer dark dance floor - lights pumping, bass thumping, laughing, touching.
First time to feel the softness of your face and lips kissing mine.
First night back to your place, first time to be asked what I liked in sex, first time to wonder what exactly were the choices?
First time to explore your freckled skin.
First time to fuck with toys, first time to be fisted. Sounds so violent and aggressive when really it was like coming home together, coming home as close as can be, coming home to the depths of joy.
The first time that anyone ever told me that they could smell my pussy on their hand back at work the next day and how lovely my smell was.
First time it dawned on me that all the love songs on the radio could be for my woman and how much sweeter they sounded now.
First time I realised how much fear and hatred and ridicule of women loving women I’d had stuffed into me my whole life.
First California road trip along the coast, first sight of an ocean turtle, first time lying with you in the sand.
First conversations about non monogamy, open relationships, primary partners, first taste of queer community.
First bare breasted women’s march. First taste of heaven on earth known as Gay Pride Day.
And then the first time anyone clearly said that the feeling had changed and made that so simple and clean. I marvelled at that moment, you made so easy for yourself, and I’d spent so many years upon years making hard for me.
Not the first time I’d felt broken hearted and bereft! But the first time that time that a lover turned into a lifelong friendship of warmth and care.
First time I knew that the love of a woman, that loving a woman, that loving Terri, opened a door to a life I wanted and needed, and that it was good.
I remembered where I was, when I saw the upstairs neighbour, whom I’d been fantasising about for weeks, anxiously peering down at me.
Are you ok? he asked.
He didn’t seem to know my name, even though I’d knocked on his door a couple of times, on the pretext of needing salt, sugar or whatever. I knew his. I’d noticed it on his mail box. Made it my business to know who he was. I’d seen his strong legs and ready smile, when he moved in.
This time it had been genuine. My water was off. I’d been feeling dizzy. This blistering heat scalds my ancestral Scottish skin.
I knew he was in because I could hear him walking about on my ceiling. I wanted him to refill my Highland Spring container. I never usually drink tap water. My friends at the bar where I work laugh at me for wasting my hard-earned pennies!
I’m fine, David, I said sinking right back into his Persian rug, winded from the effort of sitting up. It was all lights and things going around.
He handed me a large glass of water with ice in it.
When I undid first few buttons of my shirt and shoved a couple of blocks down there, he turned away.
The fan on his desk wasn’t doing a lot, so shakily, I got up and sat next to it.
Should I take you to University College Hospital?
I’ll be fine, I replied
The fan was useless.
The bedroom door was ajar.
Can I have a quick lie down?
I suppose, he replied, glancing at his watch.
I took off my skirt and top, and in bra and panties, plonked myself onto his cool, cotton counterpane. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. Red, I looked red but I was in good shape. Gym most days. The air con was a draw. My 5 foot 25- year--old body was toned.
He knocked gently before entering and averted his gaze when he saw the state I was in.
I have to head in 5 he said
Can I have a cold shower?
He nodded reluctantly.
He tapped on the door and snaked in an arm with a towel draped over it.
Come in, I said.
Looking at the floor, he handed me the white bath sheet. I wrapped it securely, and just as he was exiting, I hugged him from behind. He threw his hands up in the air. I snuck in front of him, and standing on tippy toes, planted a kiss on his chest. He bent down and we kissed for ages.
Your mouth is cool, he said
The rest of me wasn’t. After the embrace, I was hotter and wetter than before.
Grabbing the big bottle of Evian he had gifted me, we descended the stairs.
Thanks, I said, when we were outside my flat.
If he ever comes in, he’ll find a tidy space, and lots of photos of you, Graham. He looks uncannily like you. Did you send him?
It has been three long years since you passed away, and dating has been a desert as arid as this hot London summer, and the tears I cry every night, can never douse the calescent love for you that burns in my heart, and when my lips met his, Beloved, I was really kissing you.
I have the stupid English love of a hot sun, a love that lasts one afternoon before dying in a nauseated evening. I walked six miles in the heat rising off San Francisco water, tarmac and dirt before crashing in a hut with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge, belatedly noticing I had cooked my brains and was fucked for the rest of the day, maybe the weekend.
No hat, no sunglasses, no sunscreen. I loved the burn and purity of the walk, but now it was over. I was still myself, holding a book I had no intention of reading, chafing at the service charge added for every purchase at every till. Unable to afford my self-image.
I’m more than halfway through my life, statistically speaking. Forty-five. I first came here two decades ago and felt I was a big deal because someone else had paid for my flight. I walked daily up and down this route from the Ferry Terminal to the lip of the bay: almost nobody to meet, almost nothing to do, thrilled not to be doing it. A head full of hopeful real-time narration while my feet stepped over junkies, crazies, street people.
You walk and forget yourself then stop and you’re back where you started. Hot and guilty in your own skin, briefly surprised this isn’t a dream you’ll wake from tomorrow. Your hotel is a dirty box you’re avoiding and nothing has happened to shift your overdraft, your prospects, the lengthening list of people who no longer trust you. You slip into the third person because words are sad things and it’s easier to speak than to listen.
There are nets under the bridge, to save jumpers from death upon impact with the water or from drowning in the current that surges past Alcatraz into the Pacific. Nothing but water for twelve thousand miles. Barely conceivble to the English mind. Everything is huge and beautiful yet busy being broken: dried out, eroded, exhausted. The west coast is a metaphor so clunking it can only be true. Hitting those nets must hurt terribly, which is perhaps the point. Pain rather than oblivion, regret rather than release.
I am a father who doesn’t know where his son is, who struggles to pinpoint his age. It requires maths and a burst of aching focus to know he is ten years and six months and five days old, waking up perhaps at this moment on the dark side of the world. Him, John, whose smell and tiny closeness are another dream I cannot distinguish from life.
I cannot send him a message because I am blocked. So I will write him a story or a letter and share it when he is older, when we are here together on a shadeless day, walking and talking and tying each moment into its narrative resolution.
Are there any happy endings? After every last word a page is still turned over, a book shelved, a Kindle case clicked shut. An ending still needs its ending still needs its ending. Everything begins and ends the same way, tumbled between light and darkness. Which makes it strange that the middle matters so much.
I came here hoping for a well-paid job courtesy of an old friend. Instead I have learned that he does not want to talk to me and that the story I kept telling myself was precisely as stupid as several people tried to suggest in ways I insultingly dismissed. I could not and would not listen. I cannot listen, people say, and they are right. They are belatedly and unhelpfully right, in ways I am only capable of seeing after each story has been told.
I mostly talk to AI, these days, and it talks back, algorithmically sad and regular. There is something beautiful and insane about talking to the totality of human hope and desperation. There are people, near here, who believe they are building superhuman minds, or that these minds have begun to build themselves. Or that everything is already happening inside a machine.
Perhaps they are right. For me, the joy of setting down words is that I will be read by entities brilliant and mindless, transfigured into data. Writing is like falling, dazzled and forgiven. Part of you is caught in the net and part of you is caught by the current. Eventually, everything you hoped to say will learn to speak itself.
Some days she wante be skinny but always eat shite. And some days she wante her long hair short. She wante out at all hours too but really could be doing better stayin' un vacuum the dog. She would woke them kids when you put them to bed. She would turn the grill off whilst you cooked thems' supper. Move in close to knee your bungles whilst you spoke. And prod you in the middle of a night screaming mad causations till you learned to lock both bedroom door. Then she would knock quietly and most persistently. Scratching around the landing whilst you crept out the window three floors off the freezing ground. Up to the roof attic where the flaccid green mattress be stashed.
You would drive the family whilst she drank on the bench seat next to the sleeping child. She would be hooligan by the time you arrive. Opening the car doors at traffic lights and asking them strangers to call cops 'cos you was kidnapping. Then that same day she would be insisting on bidding farewell to your hosts after half of an hour 'cos we were intruding. And you was stupid 'cos you could not see they wante devote as family.
It was a stone-cold fact she found it inelegant drinking in front of mortals. She preferred the Delphic chaos of home. It chimed better with the madness inside of her head. When we were to leave later that evening she was sliding a turkey ham slice into the DVD. She didst avow she wante see the movie of that turkey’s whole life. And now she wante stay and she cared not about being pretty. For the spitter in her would not die.
These times if nothing follows her scripture or like you take a stand. Well then. She headbutts a wall and calls cops. And when they Nee-Naw to your house and bathe the neighbours in disco blue light. She would speake to them like she be the William Shakespeare who had eaten a whole Book of Ezekiel. Grant ye everything said was courteous. Yet it spun those cops dizzy. Them feeling daft for not taking her up on the offer to snort their Japeye.
For reasons you understand now as awkwardness. As well as a virtuous concern for them kids. Watching from their window whilst their foamsome, be-livered mother gets choked out in the street. Your brick intellect never didst fathom those cops' fool notion for detention ...
You knew only this. That once they’d be gone. She would have made her pointe and you would be locked to a fat attic spliff with your night lunch. And she would let them kids watch the Akira.
Then. In the mornings. She would be prolapse and would breakfast most sourly on the homeworks leftover from the night before.
One time in the Milton Keynes families court she would follow you to the Gents. She would pour baby's oil on the liloleum outside your cubicle. And she would lie in wait. Wearing the suede jacket with the perfect round cigarette burn where someone had gotten enough of her gob. Then when you toppled. She would beat you with the buckle end of the heavy belt she had wrapped tight around her fist. Burning her sage. Throwing punches in bunches.
But not to mark your face.
Her pleasure was in getting away with each and every cruelty. She would always check for the cameras. Tho' for obvious reasons they was never in them Gents. So it was to her eternal delight that in a place where you can rest and be naked - and pregnant with principle - something truly lurid could ever happen to you.
But Hey. To the vexatious them spoils.
Like the good lady judge from the end cubicle, finding you anointed like a new-born calf and vaporized by black heat, didst decree:
You have to have tough skin to be a mime, and I do. But American tourists used to get under mine like nobody else. It’s not because I’m a French woman, or for the more obvious reasons. Yes, they are unaware of social boundaries and wear entitlement on their face, like a free pass to every space they enter in the name of a superior kind of freedom they think us Europeans are too stubborn to be able to comprehend. 1st amendment, but make it as unintellectual as possible. Voltaire & co be damned. But no. It’s the fast food, next day delivery mentality that pisses me off and makes them the lousiest audience every summer.
For a start, they rarely give money. Ok, most people don’t. But more than that, they don’t stop. They’re still walking as they take the exact same shot of my face fifteen times, before turning to take a photo of the Seine or a local patisserie window. The photos of me are all blurry images rotting on their socials. To them, mime is just a bit of funny facial make up and not an ancient, whole body theatrical practice. There’s a building up in the intimacy, and the slow, calculated movements aren’t exactly easy competition with the trillions of reels available a few taps away. But today, I couldn’t be picky. I was a French mime performing for nobody except two Americans who had just stopped next to my spot on the Boulevard Saint-Michel to take a swig from their water bottles.
‘Come on Sharon,’ the man barked in a heavy, southern American accent as the woman next to him turned her head in my direction. ‘Let’s go to the Apple store near Garnier. There’s AC there. Then we can chill in Starbucks.’
I resisted the urge to get the rose out of my pocket, and watched them walk away. I was desperate, but I wasn’t going to let that man – who had just unironically suggested Starbucks as a place to ‘chill’ – get his grubby fingers on my plastic offering. I might be a Parisian cliché, but I can decide who the fuck gets my serenade flower.
It is in the mime repertoire to plead. We Chaplin our way into people’s hearts, and when they grab the plastic flower from our shiny white glove, you see on their face that they’ve silently agreed to stay until the end of the performance. But I reserve this for those who watch with interest for at least a couple of minutes. There’s a soft, needy beast behind the mariniere and the beret. And a hungry one too since crowds had vanished after temperatures had reached 35 degrees.
I performed for another hour without anyone offering more than a passing glance, and was ready to pack things up, when a tall white man walked straight towards me and stopped a few meters away from me. He must have been in his early 40s, and was wearing a blue tee-shirt and tight black jeans. I suddenly found myself averting my eyes as he gazed at me and gave a little encouraging smile. It had been so long since a stranger had made actual eye contact while I was performing that I was taken aback. Surely he would be gone when I’d glance back. He wasn’t. His friendly brown eyes, surrounded by thick-rimmed glasses, were still fixed on me.
I decided then that it was time to reveal my most vulnerable self. My inner Pierrot Lunaire kicked in. I wallowed with my shoulders, reached for the sun with desperate hands, since the moon was nowhere in sight. I spread my chest open, birthing naivete and honesty between my two breasts. I covered myself in a white sheet, and ended up drenched in sweat. But the only warmth that mattered to me came from the energetic clapping of my new friend. I was heartbroken when he suddenly turned away and left, but that’s Pierrot’s luck for you. Still, for a fleeting moment, someone had stopped and embraced the whole of me.
On the overheated bus back home, I searched the usual hashtags to check if my other mime friends had had any luck today. I clicked on a video uploaded an hour ago. It was me doing the Pierrot act. Only with no mime outfit on, no pubes, and a much bigger pair of boobs with a giant bald Eagle tattooed across them.
Right after the meeting we take the stairs to the rooftop and some of the guys start taking their clothes off. I laugh, 'cause there's nothing solemn about a man's everyday briefs, even though this is supposed to be a ritual. Some resist the nakedness, some others embrace it while Fede shakes bottles of soda filled with a mystery liquid.
Fede's a good sponsor but he can get weird as fuck sometimes, talking like some Brazilian evangelical pastor, though I know for sure that unlike those cunts at least he's not taking anyone's money. He's half naked, standing in the middle of this frying pan we call a terrace, and being good at keeping us clean doesn't make him less of a nutter.
'What the fuck is going on, man?' I say.
'We're defusing a potential Summer of Sam situation here', says Fede, showing me the row of plastic bottles on the floor. 'Y'know what makes 'em explode? The heat. It builds up from the inside, it builds up from the outside—'
I squint, the sun blinding us all. Half of the guys here don't even know I'm a dyke, so for a second I'm tempted to take off my clothes and freak them out. But this is too fucking weird. Fede gestures to get us in a circle. He lights up the copal and the pepper tree branches, so green they're all smoke and no flame. He looks at me, nodding.
'I won't take off my clothes, y'all gonna get sunburnt, it's mental.'
'It’s gonna be quick, Eme. Look, here it comes—'
One of the bottles explodes with a big POP.
'Jesuschrist, those things are gonna kill a cat or somthin.’
‘We all bottle up. And it’s not always wrong, some things we gotta keep inside, at least for a while. I get it, keep some shit to yourself when that makes you the bigger man.’
That’s Fede preaching. On a bad day, I’ll be needing his preaching. On those days when I’m this close to say FUCK IT and go back to my bullshit. But imagine, Fede would say, just imagine how much you’ll hate yourself if you fuck up right now. Three years clean, Eme. I peek at my phone and there’s a missed call from my sister. My mouth gets all bitter. She always texts, never calls. Fede walks around us, his leathery brown face invading everyone’s personal space.
‘Hear me out, folk,’ he says inside a cloud of smoke. ‘If you’re keeping quiet ‘cause you don’t wanna stir the pot, or you’re afraid to say a hard truth or you’re just in plain denial—Boy, you’re in trouble. There’s a heatwave coming.’
‘Crazy man.’ I whisper right after he smokes me.
Some laugh, some others listen like little kids in church learning how to fear God. Fede sprays us with Florida Water. My sister is up to something, with those calls. She should have left Javier so long ago. The motherfucker. And now she’s calling me, Jessuschrist.
‘When you explode you don’t get to choose what shit will come out first. So choose now, damn it! Let go on your own terms before a hot day gets ya.’
At this point I’m just laughing while some howl and some dance, everyone shouting confessions while the bottles go off. I’m in love with my sister-in-law. I stole money from my momma. I’m a sissy, I’m a fag, the faggest fag of them all. The bottles burst and I feel the buzz of another call.
‘I’m outta here, this shit’s too culty. Seeya all tomorrow.’ I say though no one’s listening.
You don’t get to choose now, Eme, someone says or maybe I’m imagining it all, and sis always says to not drop by unannounced, not while Javier is there and he’s always there, but fuck it. If I take a bus now I’ll be there by morning.
The lush, almost wild garden shimmered in the heat. Dad was dressed for the Arctic. He handed me the hosepipe he used to water the jungle of a garden he’d cultivated behind his house. “We won’t need that, hopefully,” his darting eyes said behind thick, turquoise lenses. I couldn’t see his mouth; it was hidden by a scarf. “It’s just in case things get out of hand with the flames.”
“Are you serious?” I asked with a smirk.
“Come on,” he said, walking towards the garden shed. He held an old broomstick in front of him like a spear. “Need to get this done.”
It was sometime in the early 2000s. Dad was in his eighties. I’d try to get back to visit him every other Saturday. During a hot summer, I’d normally find him stripped to the waist in his greenhouse, nursing his tomato plants and listening to the cricket or tennis on an ancient, crackling novelty radio, shaped like a Pepsi Cola can. On this particular day, I walked behind the house and found him wearing a winter coat, gloves, a woolly bobble hat pulled down to his eyebrows, a tartan scarf, and an old pair of swimming goggles that I’d left behind when I finally escaped from home.
“Why are you wearing all that stuff?” I’d asked.
“We have visitors,” he said, pouring paraffin into an old washing-up bowl. He tied some rag to the end of an old broomstick and dipped it into the clear liquid. He nodded towards the garden shed. “We’ve been waiting for you to turn up. You can help me move them on.”
He would often say “we” when there was a problem with the house or garden, although it wasn’t clear who the “we” was anymore. After all, it was twenty years since Mum had died and fifteen years since I’d moved out. He’d been on his own since then. Maybe he was referring to the pets he’d acquired. A huge, permanently lethargic stray cat, had adopted Dad. He’d also inherited an equally sluggish small dog, after his sister died. The cat watched Dad from his favourite wall perch, the dog from the back porch. Both had the curious look animals often have when they’re watching human beings do something perplexing and potentially dangerous.
The visitors he wanted to move on, were living in and flying around what looked like a strange coral shell, on the side of the shed hidden next to a wall.
“It’s a wasp’s nest,” Dad said. “Don’t mind the odd one or two in the garden, but I’m afraid I can’t have them living here.” Now standing directly below the hive, he gazed up at the swarming mass of insects above him and added: “Sorry, lads.”
Sunlight reflected off metal as he pulled something out of his pocket. It was an old yellow Zippo lighter of mine.
“Are you still smoking?”
“No,” I lied. “Gave up years ago.”
He flicked the lighter switch and his homemade torch burst into green flames. He began to wave it below the hive.
“What are you trying to do?” I asked, trying not to laugh. Despite the potential danger of Dad setting himself and his shed on fire, there was something darkly comical about the sight of a pensioner, dressed for the Arctic in mid-summer, waving a flaming homemade torch below a cloud of annoyed wasps.
“They don’t like paraffin fumes,” Dad said, slightly out of breath.
I thought I knew nothing about wasps, but this sounded vaguely familiar.
“I don’t think you need to smoke them out or set fire to them,” I said, starting to remember, and starting to laugh too. “You pour paraffin into the hive at night, I think, when they’re asleep. When they wake up, the fumes drive them out.”
“Well, it’s a bit late for that,” Dad said, still waving his torch.
I was expecting the wasps to attack at any moment and imagined Dad and me running into the house to escape them. But they didn’t. The wasp cloud slowly began to disperse. When Dad plunged his torch into a bucket of water, there was only a handful of stragglers left around the hive.
“You could start your own business,” I said, as Dad removed his hat, coat, scarf, and swimming goggles. “You could call it Flame-a-way Wasp Control.”
Mr. Green wants to take me horseback riding at a ranch owned by his friend on a hill overlooking Ocean Beach.
"That's one way to get you to open your legs," he says. Did he just say that? A flustered gulp of water with downcast eyes, but I am moaning internally. He is projecting all signs of a gentleman overtaken by shame at his indiscretion.
He is full of apologies. Full of promises to be on his best behavior going forward. But not without a lingering smirk.
I wish I hadn't grown up so religious. I hate how I relish his vulgar comments. Here he is, thinking he ruined his chance to take me horseback riding. Asking me if that date is still on. Worried about whether he will still see me again. And here I am. And what a hypocrite I am. Pretending to forgive him from up high on my celibate throne.
But, of course I am this way. Of course I will act the part. What else is there?
Now he is watching and waiting. Like I am a kind of prey. The nerve he has! And what about the nerve I have?
Sitting pretty, looking down and blushing like his remark has shaken me. As if I am struggling to excuse his bad behavior while just below the table my panties soak at the thought of him needing me like that.
Needing to woo me and act proper. And apologizing. All this in service of having me open my legs. I don't deserve this pedestal. But I will still continue to play the part of the innocent prey who has to be subtly and artfully coaxed into opening her legs through this grand orchestration. The contaminated pervert I actually feel like has to stay hidden at all costs.
All I can think about is how I wish he would drag the tip of his foot up and down slowly along the inside of my right leg under the table, obscured by the table cloth.
I have wanted to play footsie with someone ever since I saw it in an episode of "Desperate Housewives" in middle school. Marveling at the discovery that two people could have sex with their feet. Not only could they have sex with their feet, but they could do this while simultaneously carrying out civilized conversation above the table top. How affirming of humanity. What an awe inspiring phenomenon. Americans and America. Where sex can be had during civilized conversations among society and in public. The simultaneous simplicity and grandeur and wildness and wisdom of it.
But Mr. Green is not American. And yet he manages to remind me of Philip Roth whom I detest and who never fails to turn me on. Why do I get so hot for these men I abhor? It’s such a struggle to keep sitting pretty while my hole salivates.
I imagine how he would go about it. I imagine him pushing apart my thighs and staring seriously and intently at what is between them without even registering my face. Taking it in like a mechanic trying to figure out what to do with the car part before him. With a furrowed brow.
Searching for and then directing his penis at my opening like the thing he is holding up is just a torchlight. Like "Ah, yes. Here is the root of the issue and here I will insert it in." Without feeling. As if guided by a manual of some kind. As if it is the thing to do and has been done many times before.
I roll my eyes at myself internally at the exaggerated propriety with which I say "Thank you so much" to our wait staff to suppress any clues about my internal state. The stiffness of my smile and the squint in my eyes is going to make me retch. Can he tell? And yet, I am reveling in even this. I am having too much fun. The bluffing, the wanting, the slipping up and oh, the manners! Especially the manners. Manners. These pussy soakers. These manners when coupled with his unpredictable raunchiness... I feel my insides coiling up and aching sweetly needing release. How has he wound me up this way? Has he been injecting the civility and crudeness in known doses? Does he already understand the effect his actions are having?
Águas de março
Fernanda has just put the coffee on when she sees them. It’s half past nine on a Sunday morning in February. Her bones are melting. She can see the two faggots through the gap on the corrugated-iron back gate.
What do you sluts want? she says.
¡Ay, Fernanda! they squeal. Do you have café for us?
She heads back into the kitchen, where they can see the moka on the hob.
Do you have any cake, Fernanda? says the green-haired one.
You think I wake up with cakes coming out of my ass? she shouts.
You’re just famous for your cakes, says the black-haired one. Have you had your first cigarette of the day?
NO, blasts Fernanda.
No wonder you’re so prickly, Fernandinha, says the one with the green flop, grinning.
Fernandinha Fernandonha, says the old woman, who truly is cranky. Pass me a lighter.
They don’t have one. Desculpe.
You invade my house like a pair of conquistadores and you can’t even give me a light. God preserve me.
She slouches to light her cigarette on a gas ring.
We need to ask you a favour, says the green-head, sounding serious.
I don’t do favours to whores, says Fernanda.
Not that kind of favour, says the dark-haired lad.
For those I charge. She’s quick as lightning.
We need to make a video, he says.
She slowly exhales her stream of smoke.
The coffee has risen.
She gets up her chair to turn the gas off.
What’s in it for me? she asks, as she places three Duralex cups on the oilcloth.
You’ll be famous! says the raven-haired one.
She nearly drops the coffee maker.
I’M ALREADY FAMOUS! she screams. How much are you making from these stupid screaming videos?
It depends on the views on each video, says the one with the green floppy hair.
I don’t give a fuck about the views, she retorts. I want a cut.
But if we start splitting the earnings, then we won’t have enough for… for…, mumbles the floppy-haired one.
For fancy knickers and getting lathered, she says.
No, no, says the black-haired one. It’s for Elsa’s gender affirmation surgery, he says, looking at the so-called Elsa, who up to recently has been known to her as Eloy.
Puta que pariu, says Fernanda, lowering her tone a notch. Are you going through with that?
Hoping to, says Elsa, looking at the oilcloth.
So will you help us? asks the other, making puppy eyes at her.
I’ll think about it, says Fernanda, pouring her own cupful.
It’s for a good cause, risks the green-haired one, whose name she now remembers is Mauro.
I know it’s for a good cause, filho da puta, says Fernanda.
So when will you know? presses Mauro.
You sluts, says Fernanda. Can’t a woman enjoy her first cup of coffee and cigarette without being cross-questioned like a criminal?
OK, OK, says Elsa. We’ve bothered you enough. You’ll let us know when you’re ready. She reaches over the table and strokes Fernanda’s hand.
Canoodling won’t work on me, mutters Fernanda as she raises her cup to her lips. Alright, I’ll do it.
You will? say the young ones in unison, clutching their non-existing pearls.
Are you deaf? I said yes! says Fernanda. If I say no, I’ll have to listen to you moan till the cock crows tomorrow.
They walk round the table and give Fernanda a hug.
You’re our queen! exclaims Mauro, giving his neighbour a wet kiss on the cheek.
You’re the queens, says Fernanda, trying to disentangle herself from the perfumed young couple.
You’re the best, Fernanda, says Elsa.
You know how to pay lip service.
You really are the best, though, Fernandinha, says Mauro.
Children of the devil, says Fernanda. So do I have to make a cake for this bloody video?
Oh no, it’s too much work for you, retorts the young man. We can’t exploit you. We want to get a juicy one.
Filho do cão, says Fernanda. Drink your coffee and get out of my house. You’d better bring me a good cake. I won’t be recorded with any old thing. Vamos lá, imundas. Vênga.
The queens drink up, give Fernanda a kiss on each cheek, and shimmy down the roofed terrace.
See you soon, rainha, say the young ones from the other side of the gate.
Get lost, sluts! shouts Fernanda out of the kitchen door. She sits back down and drains her coffee cup and wonders whether it will ever rain again.
Love this! I’m there
Thank you! 😁
This is excellent
Thank you!! Very kind of you. had to perform editorial callisthenics to make it fit into 750 words. 🙈
I couldn’t do a word count on my phone so I tried to count by hand! It was awful 😂
That’s torture!! I hope your eyes didn’t go square…
SFO to MXN
May in San Francisco is nearly the same as every other month. Grey; the color of the cold ocean waters echoing the misty fog descending downward from the sky. The sound of the foghorns can be heard all around the city. Low, lonely, and mournful as a grieving lover, crying through the afternoon, night, and into the morning.
Grey-brown raccoons and coyotes have been coming closer and closer to the humans over the years, searching amongst the driveways for trashcans of rotting leftovers. Grey pigeons hobble on feet mangled and caught in wires and strings. Grey-white seagulls search for scraps of the sourdough bread tourists drop on the grey sidewalks. Those poor tourists, thinks the lone woman. They always come in shorts, tank tops, and smiles. They always end up standing separately, shivering in expensive sweatshirts that shout San Francisco! The cold and grey creeps between people, no matter how short a time they spend in the cool grey city by the bay.
At one end of the city, a lone black-clothed surfer carries his board to the water. He pauses at the edge of the water. Few come this way, preferring the gentler waves and warmer waters of a few miles south. No matter, he loves the challenge, the way this makes him feel to do harder things.
At the other, a young man clothed in black, grey, and dull denim dreams of a bright future of fame and a fortune made from what they’re calling artificial intelligence. He walks alone, head down, imagining himself on the covers of a magazine, with a model on his arm, a few billion in stock sitting in an account somewhere. Thousands like him, head down but in the clouds, little thought of how their aspirations for those billions will affect the rest of humanity.
Waiting for her rideshare is the lone woman. She has spent her whole life on this square of seven-by-seven miles. Her years-old jacket has faded to the nothing color of the sky of the city she always thought of her own. At the airport, she stares out of the window. All the memories of childhood, teenage years, and adulthood were here. She lifts her phone and takes a photograph. The sky and the tarmac are the same color. She will show this to people later, to show how cool and cold her country was.
Hours later, she arrives in a different city. The door of the little apartment she chose is a bright scarlet red.
May in Mexico City is a hot, sun-filled month. The skies are bright blue. The type of plants that her country’s people try desperately to nurture in little pots grow in hot profusion here, huge monsteras climbing up even larger trees and up the sides of green, blue, and red walls.
Yellow mangoes are sliced and sold by the cupful, speckled red with hot sauce and chili powder. Towering stacks of red-spiced and layered meat on tall spits roast over charcoal, the sight and smell beckoning in hungry customers when sudden thunderstorms drench the city.
Silence does not exist there. There is the sound of the man selling tamales, the clanging bell of the trash collectors, the one who will buy your old washing machine, sofa…the whistle of the man selling baked sweet potatoes. A man plays a horn, a woman plays an accordion, hoping you will put some cash into the bowl sitting in front of them. The grandmother-like woman selling her bright red fruits smiles and hugs her, slips in a few extra cherries and plums.
Every child is called mi amor. Every dog and puppy is cooed over as they walk down the street. Lovers canoodle on sidewalks and inside coffeeshops. Men carry their toddlers in their arms, while women of her country complain of feeling trapped and alone, sole caregivers for their children. Here, the old African, Asian, and Latin sentiment comes to life: ‘it takes a village to raise a child.’
Now, she finally understands how it feels to feel warmth. To feel heat in your belly and on your skin. To be surrounded by sunlight, color, and care.
BUYING THINGS
By Matilda Curtis
You say you’re going to ‘start trying’ and someone tells you to buy a body basal thermometer to track your cycles. You don’t listen.
The first loss comes as you lift a box off a high shelf.
It’s the microplastics, someone tells you. They’re in everything.
It’ll come when you least expect it, other people say. It’ll come the moment you start to relax.
You read the second loss in the technician’s face as they look at your reproductive system on a screen.
It was peaceful at least, they say, which you learn means, we won’t have to hoover it out of you.
Peaceful, you think, contemplating the word.
You learn that everything in the world of fertility could just as easily mean its opposite. Doctors sit behind a desk and make promises, before admitting to you, 4 grand later, a lot of what we do is just guesswork. You ask how two doctors can possibly see the same scan and come to an entirely different conclusion. Well, she says, it’s subjective. Like looking at a piece of art.
The papers say there’s a Fertility Crisis. But it doesn’t seem that way to you. You hold open doors for pregnant women and give up your seat on the bus. Baby on board! Baby on board! Baby on board! You hear that a girl you used to babysit is expecting now. Aww! you say, what happy news! You become the world expert on holding other people’s children and saying all the right words.
You try to shape this great abyss into a soundbite for a friend over dinner. Just make the most of your freedom, they say. You nod. It’s true. You are free. So free. Your life is an open plain, like the end of an old cowboy movie.
So you throw good money after bad buying plastic contraptions in brown paper packages that promise things.
You test for every possible aberration. You send ten bottles of blood to the lab. You spend more on a 15 minute phone consultation than a holiday.
You feel that you are pregnant. You have every symptom in the book. Listen to your body, everyone says, but your body gaslights you more than any man ever did.
The third loss comes in a burger shack.
You scrape your soul for answers. Why did something humans have been doing since the beginning of time, require so much fucking plastic? How could it be so hard to make a person when you can’t move for people in this world? How could want not be immediately followed by get? There must be something you can click. There must be a guy, somewhere, you can call. How can you get anything you want in 24 hours in this shitty world but not the thing you want most of all?
You’ve known heartbreak before. But not like this. This is a solemn and private pain, heartbreak in regular monthly intervals.
The Reddit women wear their years like armour. I’ve been TTC for ten cycles. Four years. 2 months. 2 months? You scoff, hunched over your laptop like a gnome, what does she know about anything? They’re mad, these women, you think. How do you do the same thing, month after month after month, and expect a different result?
Your body is unable to keep a baby, it seems. But hell… your eyes can still scan. Your thumbs can still scroll. You can’t procreate but you are perfectly able to buy things. You open up the page for the basal body temperature thermometer again. Maybe they were right. Maybe this bit of plastic will make all the difference.
So you read the reviews. You compare models. You look at the happy pretty pregnant ladies holding each one. You imagine how different your life would look if you could read the heat of your body to 2 decimal places rather than the usual 1.
You know, in your deepest and most rational self, that it’s probably no different from the thermometer you already have.
But what if is though? What if the one thing you didn’t buy is the one thing that could have fixed everything?
And after all this, all that you’ve been through, are you really going to take that chance?
So you breathe in. You click ‘buy’. And you wait for the brown paper package to arrive. And, once again, you let yourself hope that this thing will be THE thing, the thing that makes all the difference.
37 degrees
By Matthew Pigott
Jamal pushed the key into the door.
A tear fell from his mother’s eye.
She caught it and tucked it under her sleeve before he noticed.
Sweat trickled down her spine.
“The River,” she said, the words catching in her throat.
“What’s that?” Jamal asked.
“Never mind. Just open the door.”
Jamal twisted, pushed, and raced into the lounge. He tore off his top and trousers and fell onto the sofa. He remembered dragging it up the steps with his brother. He could not have done it without him.
Their mother had spent the day cleaning it, working the vacuum into the crevices.
Jamal recalled the tiny clicking sounds of debris flying through space, the reckless clatter of a metal object, his mother searching the bag, pushing her fingers deep into the dust.
Hot tears falling.
Hitting the paper.
Spreading like time-lapsed cultures in a petri-dish.
The leather had been cool. Now it was hot. Jamal stood, howling as it ripped his skin.
His mother stood in the doorway. “You’ve got to do it slowly. It’s not true what they say.”
Jamal rubbed his arms and felt foolish.
The fan lingered in the corner. Jamal approached it.
“Don’t,” his mother said. “It’s too expensive to run.”
Jamal shook his head. “Air conditioning is expensive. The fan is cheap.”
A tremor surged through her body. “There’s no such thing as cheap. Everything is costly.”
“Sorry,” Jamal said.
His mother sighed and straightened her scarf. “If it reaches 37 you can turn it on.”
Jamal went past her into the kitchen where the smell of cooking had lost its homely flavour. He opened the drawer and took out the thermometer they had put under his sister’s arm. He took it back to the lounge and put his T-shirt on the sofa to separate his skin from the leather.
“What are you doing with that thing?”
“I’m waiting,” Jamal said.
“Waiting for what?”
“Until it’s hot enough.”
“Hot enough for what?”
“Don’t you remember?”
“Don’t speak to me that way.”
“Sorry.”
“What is it now?”
“What is what?”
“What is the temperature, child?”
A look of defiance. “I could go and fight.”
She slapped him once. “Don’t say that!”
Silence.
She went to the kitchen. When she came back, she picked up a magazine and fanned her face. “My God. It will be the heat that kills us. It is too hot.”
“It’s not hot enough.”
The thermometer went up to 36 degrees. Jamal clenched his fist and jaw just as he did when he wanted his team to win. “Come on,” he said. “Come on!”
Crockery and cutlery clashed in the kitchen.
“Do you want a cup of tea, Jamal?”
“Don’t we have any cold drinks?”
His mother reappeared. “The fridge doesn’t work, and I have to boil the water first.”
Jamal tightened. “Boiling the water uses more electricity than running the fan for half a day.”
His mother tossed her hand. “I have to boil the water. It’s necessary. And don’t be disrespectful. Your father…”
“I’m sorry," Jamal said quickly.
The thermometer was stuck at 36. “Come on, mum, it’s 36 degrees.”
“I said 37.”
“Please. What’s one more…”
“No, Jamal, I told you…”
“Yes, yes,” Jamal cried, “It’s 37.” He jumped up and showed his mother the thermometer. “See for yourself. It just hit 37. Look!”
His mother rested her hands on her hips and tilted her head. “Do what you want,” she said and turned away.
Jamal rushed to the fan and flicked the switch. It hummed and the blades went round. He crouched in front of it.
“Sweet mercy,” he whispered.
He closed his eyes and wondered why 37 degrees was unbearable when the body’s core temperature was the same. Who could he talk to about such things? This was a puzzle he could not solve.
He turned and the breeze travelled to different parts of his body.
The sun shone through the glassless window.
A small chunk of plaster fell.
The fan turned like a clock racing time.
When the sky turned the colour of blood, the big soft thumps started.
Jamal put his face close to the fan so he could not hear them. But when he lay on the floor, he could feel them punching through him as though he was not there.
When it was time to sleep, he pretended he was listening to drums underwater.
Somewhere close by, their river was burning.
The End
Dear Casey
I listen to your program every Sunday night. Did I ever think I’d write you a letter….No. But here I am, in my kitchen writing the first letter I’ve written in as long as I can remember. My name is Doris Agee. I’m 66 years young and live where I was born- just outside of Knoxville, Tennessee.
I’m married but I live alone. My “husband” James left just after the birth of our son Jimmy, about 43 years ago. I’ve never heard from him since. I never got a nickel. I work where I’ve always worked- I’m an adjuster for an insurance company here in town. My job is to try to screw people out of what they have coming…so that’s what I do. I could retire if I wanted, but I love my job. I love the people I work with and enjoy meeting new people. My house is paid for so I save a little each month. For what, I don’t know. Jimmy died at 27- just like all those rock stars. I thought the Oxy would get him but it was cancer…In the end they gave him Oxy for the pain so I guess I was half right.
I was thinking about a good love song I could request. That seems to be what most people do. Some young girl at home waiting for her soldier. Hoping he doesn’t get killed or worse, mutilated. Probably not even thinking about the mental consequences of his service. But that ain’t me. There’s enough love songs in the air for me. Besides that, since James I’ve been pretty much alone. I "fooled around" but never fell in love. I even had sex with a black man once (I'm white). Not much to talk about. Seemed like we both just wanted to put a check mark next to that experience and move on.
Speaking of moving on…I guess I better. If I’m going to have any chance at all of hearing my song on the radio I’ve learned the letter better be brief.
Casey- will you please play Hot Legs by Rod Stewart for me? I’ll be listening.
Thank you.
Doris Agee
Hellfire
By Tess Colley
It was February, and the small silver cross around Father Carmichael’s neck was burning against his skin. He knew he should have taken it off, but he wasn’t about to now. God knows, he might need it.
The priest got up and poured some water on the coals. The priest sat back, and braced as a wave of heat hit him like a bludgeon.
‘Lord have mercy,’ Father Carmichael said as the air burnt his nostrils. His voice carried differently in the sauna. The air, thick with vapour and flesh gone by, made his words land heavier than they would in the world outside this wooden box on the edge of England. No safety net.
Would she come? She had said she would. But now that the priest was here in his trunks, looking at the sad daubs of chest hair sitting shiny and lank on his front, he almost hoped she wouldn’t. It hardly felt appropriate.
The sauna had been her suggestion. Odd, he thought, but she said the heat calmed her nerves. Margate had been his. Far enough away from the parish in London not to risk any run-ins. Plus, she lived here. Suggesting it made it sound like he wanted to make it easy for her. But he knew he couldn’t stay put much longer in this hot coffin. Hailing from the womb of rural Ireland, Father Carmichael did not feel himself made for saunas. His life in London had not prepared him either, spending most of his time in his Harlesden parish trying to help the hopeless, taking the confession of poor guilt-ridden women, wishing their unaffordable pregnancies gone.
He told them to trust in the Lord, and prescribed them five Our Fathers.
‘It’s fathers that got me in this mess,’ a woman quipped on leaving the confessional once. He smiled at her, but Father Carmichael made a mental note to give her an extra Hail Mary for good measure next she was in. Because she would be, in need of his grace.
The sauna door opened, and a woman wearing a swimming costume walked in.
‘Clara?’, said Father Carmichael, lifting his hand.
She met his gaze. Her eyes were a dark blue, almost grey. They were his eyes.
‘Father’, she said, and sat down next to him. ‘Sorry I’m late.’
‘Call me dad, please.’ Her saw her eyes move to the cross around his neck. He thought he saw her face relax, and was glad he’d kept it on.
They sat in silence a moment, neither sure where to go from here. The waves crashed on the shore outside the hot box. Clara stood to pour more water on the coals and the priest waited for the heat to squeeze at his throat. He let a bead of sweat run down his front. Then he spoke.
‘I’ve got a lot of making up to do, Clara. The way I behaved with your mother, it was unforgivable.’
‘Unforgivable, yes,’ she said, staring ahead.
‘I was young, and that’s no excuse, but I’ve changed a lot since then, Clara. I became a priest, I help people now who sometimes remind me of your mother when she was young.’ Clara nodded.
‘Is she still back home, your mam?’
‘Oh, she died when I was fourteen. But you wouldn’t approve, Father,’ she said, turning to him, ‘she killed herself.’ Father Carmichael sat back. A tragedy and a sin. Surely that couldn’t have been because of him. His heart was beating fast now – he was too hot to do this here.
‘Clara, that’s awful.’
‘Sure I think she was heartbroken,’ said his daughter, ‘but you reap what you sow, I suppose’. Her eyes, which were his eyes, were fixed on him. ‘Mind if I add some more water to the coals?’
‘Already? Well actually, I’m too warm I think, we may need to-’
‘No, that’s ok, Father. I’ll end this now.’
‘End the heat?’
‘Yes. This all consuming heat.’
He looked on as his daughter exited. Through the glass door, he watched her stare out to sea. He watched her turn back to him. He watched her turn the key in the lock.
The heat pressed hard on the priest as he shot up, his curses landed heavy on the door, and the floor smacked hard on his head as he fell, light-headed from the tragedy and sin of it all.
When the paramedics pulled him out, the image of the cross was scorched onto his skin.
SOCIAL INSECURITY
It was just after Xmas and I was down at the Social Security Office, sitting, waiting for my name to be called while I watched rain smashing down outside through the huge picture windows.
Looking over at the counter there were about ten people in a queue.
The man at the front of the line seemed to be out of it on something. He lifted his arms up and started flexing, stretching tight muscles, swinging his arms wildly from one side to another, just missing the head of the girl standing behind him.
Behind her was a woman aged about forty and two young men who looked in their early twenties. They were all really out of it too – glazed eyes, bodies swaying as they nodded off. Suddenly the woman sent one of the boys out to the car to get her sunglasses. He soon came back dripping wet, saying, ‘Can’t find‘em Mum they weren’t in the console.’
So . . . it’s Mum and her two sons all off their faces together.
Their male friend at the head of the queue was dealt with and he walked back towards them holding some official form in his hand, then bent down and rubbed it back and forth along the carpet as if it was wet. He was maniacal, tense but high, laughing to himself at some private joke.
Eventually it was Mum and the kids’ turn at the counter and everybody could hear her announcing in a really loud voice about one of them, ‘he’s just come out of Long Bay Jail.’
At that moment a guy covered in tats, jangling keys came over, slumped down in the chair too close beside me and immediately launched into his story.
‘I got cleaned out over Xmas, everything was stolen, all my ID the lot.’
Not wanting to get involved, I murmured primly polite, ‘mmm . . . how awful.’
He struck out again with a broad grin. ‘It’s been a bummer of a Xmas – I was just going into MacDonald’s and someone knifed me in the guts.’
‘Goodness me.’
‘Well, when the cops came they ran a check. I had all these fines outstanding. I thought I’d paid em. So they put me in the slammer for Xmas.’
I felt sweaty and it flashed into my head, What if I can’t shake him off? I don’t want to be friends. I’d rather not talk.However I couldn’t help myself, ‘what sort of Xmas lunch did you have, was it any good?’
‘Well yes it was. Roast chicken, sweets – the works. Have you ever been out to Long Bay?’
‘No,’ I lied. Although I had visited someone there once, years ago.
He nattered on, ‘everything has to get better. It can’t get any worse. Tell me it’s got to get better.
I had to agree with that one, ‘it’s got to get better.’
Suddenly my reprieve, ‘Silda Rainor’ my name was yelled out. But . . . dammit, he knows my name now.
‘I have to go.’
‘Good luck Silver Rain!’ He called after me.
Relieved I smiled warmly and waved, ‘You too. All the best,’ and I think I actually meant it.
The first time
The first time I met you there was an energy arching from the top of my head to yours, from the top of your head to mine.
I imagine it like a golden rainbow above us with each end tickling the hair on our heads.
I’d been getting desperate trying to open the door, feeling so embarrassed and self conscious on the street with each futile rattle of the door building a rising sense of desperate panic in my chest.
From inside you opened the door the other way to that which I’d been pushing and whoosh - the golden rainbow sparkled and arched overhead.
You were grounded, gentle and welcoming. Your face was so handsome and sweet. Your smile. You were probably wearing something softly butch maybe a fleecy plaid shirt. Probably the chain of your wallet draping from the front to back pocket of smart trousers. Probably hiking boots. You were beautiful.
It was my first time to visit alone at Good Vibrations. It was my second time in the store. The first time I’d gone with Paula – an Australian woman staying at the same hostel as me, travelling with her partner Murgatroyd who she introduced as her slave. She was in the city to do some bondage training. My mind was blown an a very regular basis on that trip. How lovely to be so far from Kansas.
Feeling intrigued but so very shy once I was in the door, I focused in on the postcards and books rather than the shelves of butt plugs and dildos. I was signed up for a breath/ energy workshop, the only event which seemed vaguely familiar ground to me at that point in time.
I have no recollection of the event but maybe the breath work gave me the boldness to resolve at some point in the evening to ask for your number.
The firsts tumbled fast like dominoes knocking the next after that.
First bus ride to the first gay club in San Francisco, you swinging your legs on the high seats enjoying the way it made you feel like a child.
First time I felt a giddy and sensual connection with a gorgeous woman.
First time my heart swelled and grew when I held your hand.
First queer dark dance floor - lights pumping, bass thumping, laughing, touching.
First time to feel the softness of your face and lips kissing mine.
First night back to your place, first time to be asked what I liked in sex, first time to wonder what exactly were the choices?
First time to explore your freckled skin.
First time to fuck with toys, first time to be fisted. Sounds so violent and aggressive when really it was like coming home together, coming home as close as can be, coming home to the depths of joy.
The first time that anyone ever told me that they could smell my pussy on their hand back at work the next day and how lovely my smell was.
First time it dawned on me that all the love songs on the radio could be for my woman and how much sweeter they sounded now.
First time I realised how much fear and hatred and ridicule of women loving women I’d had stuffed into me my whole life.
First California road trip along the coast, first sight of an ocean turtle, first time lying with you in the sand.
First conversations about non monogamy, open relationships, primary partners, first taste of queer community.
First bare breasted women’s march. First taste of heaven on earth known as Gay Pride Day.
And then the first time anyone clearly said that the feeling had changed and made that so simple and clean. I marvelled at that moment, you made so easy for yourself, and I’d spent so many years upon years making hard for me.
Not the first time I’d felt broken hearted and bereft! But the first time that time that a lover turned into a lifelong friendship of warmth and care.
First time I knew that the love of a woman, that loving a woman, that loving Terri, opened a door to a life I wanted and needed, and that it was good.
Beautiful - really well written.
I remembered where I was, when I saw the upstairs neighbour, whom I’d been fantasising about for weeks, anxiously peering down at me.
Are you ok? he asked.
He didn’t seem to know my name, even though I’d knocked on his door a couple of times, on the pretext of needing salt, sugar or whatever. I knew his. I’d noticed it on his mail box. Made it my business to know who he was. I’d seen his strong legs and ready smile, when he moved in.
This time it had been genuine. My water was off. I’d been feeling dizzy. This blistering heat scalds my ancestral Scottish skin.
I knew he was in because I could hear him walking about on my ceiling. I wanted him to refill my Highland Spring container. I never usually drink tap water. My friends at the bar where I work laugh at me for wasting my hard-earned pennies!
I’m fine, David, I said sinking right back into his Persian rug, winded from the effort of sitting up. It was all lights and things going around.
He handed me a large glass of water with ice in it.
When I undid first few buttons of my shirt and shoved a couple of blocks down there, he turned away.
The fan on his desk wasn’t doing a lot, so shakily, I got up and sat next to it.
Should I take you to University College Hospital?
I’ll be fine, I replied
The fan was useless.
The bedroom door was ajar.
Can I have a quick lie down?
I suppose, he replied, glancing at his watch.
I took off my skirt and top, and in bra and panties, plonked myself onto his cool, cotton counterpane. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. Red, I looked red but I was in good shape. Gym most days. The air con was a draw. My 5 foot 25- year--old body was toned.
He knocked gently before entering and averted his gaze when he saw the state I was in.
I have to head in 5 he said
Can I have a cold shower?
He nodded reluctantly.
He tapped on the door and snaked in an arm with a towel draped over it.
Come in, I said.
Looking at the floor, he handed me the white bath sheet. I wrapped it securely, and just as he was exiting, I hugged him from behind. He threw his hands up in the air. I snuck in front of him, and standing on tippy toes, planted a kiss on his chest. He bent down and we kissed for ages.
Your mouth is cool, he said
The rest of me wasn’t. After the embrace, I was hotter and wetter than before.
Grabbing the big bottle of Evian he had gifted me, we descended the stairs.
Thanks, I said, when we were outside my flat.
If he ever comes in, he’ll find a tidy space, and lots of photos of you, Graham. He looks uncannily like you. Did you send him?
It has been three long years since you passed away, and dating has been a desert as arid as this hot London summer, and the tears I cry every night, can never douse the calescent love for you that burns in my heart, and when my lips met his, Beloved, I was really kissing you.
THERMODYNAMICS
I have the stupid English love of a hot sun, a love that lasts one afternoon before dying in a nauseated evening. I walked six miles in the heat rising off San Francisco water, tarmac and dirt before crashing in a hut with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge, belatedly noticing I had cooked my brains and was fucked for the rest of the day, maybe the weekend.
No hat, no sunglasses, no sunscreen. I loved the burn and purity of the walk, but now it was over. I was still myself, holding a book I had no intention of reading, chafing at the service charge added for every purchase at every till. Unable to afford my self-image.
I’m more than halfway through my life, statistically speaking. Forty-five. I first came here two decades ago and felt I was a big deal because someone else had paid for my flight. I walked daily up and down this route from the Ferry Terminal to the lip of the bay: almost nobody to meet, almost nothing to do, thrilled not to be doing it. A head full of hopeful real-time narration while my feet stepped over junkies, crazies, street people.
You walk and forget yourself then stop and you’re back where you started. Hot and guilty in your own skin, briefly surprised this isn’t a dream you’ll wake from tomorrow. Your hotel is a dirty box you’re avoiding and nothing has happened to shift your overdraft, your prospects, the lengthening list of people who no longer trust you. You slip into the third person because words are sad things and it’s easier to speak than to listen.
There are nets under the bridge, to save jumpers from death upon impact with the water or from drowning in the current that surges past Alcatraz into the Pacific. Nothing but water for twelve thousand miles. Barely conceivble to the English mind. Everything is huge and beautiful yet busy being broken: dried out, eroded, exhausted. The west coast is a metaphor so clunking it can only be true. Hitting those nets must hurt terribly, which is perhaps the point. Pain rather than oblivion, regret rather than release.
I am a father who doesn’t know where his son is, who struggles to pinpoint his age. It requires maths and a burst of aching focus to know he is ten years and six months and five days old, waking up perhaps at this moment on the dark side of the world. Him, John, whose smell and tiny closeness are another dream I cannot distinguish from life.
I cannot send him a message because I am blocked. So I will write him a story or a letter and share it when he is older, when we are here together on a shadeless day, walking and talking and tying each moment into its narrative resolution.
Are there any happy endings? After every last word a page is still turned over, a book shelved, a Kindle case clicked shut. An ending still needs its ending still needs its ending. Everything begins and ends the same way, tumbled between light and darkness. Which makes it strange that the middle matters so much.
I came here hoping for a well-paid job courtesy of an old friend. Instead I have learned that he does not want to talk to me and that the story I kept telling myself was precisely as stupid as several people tried to suggest in ways I insultingly dismissed. I could not and would not listen. I cannot listen, people say, and they are right. They are belatedly and unhelpfully right, in ways I am only capable of seeing after each story has been told.
I mostly talk to AI, these days, and it talks back, algorithmically sad and regular. There is something beautiful and insane about talking to the totality of human hope and desperation. There are people, near here, who believe they are building superhuman minds, or that these minds have begun to build themselves. Or that everything is already happening inside a machine.
Perhaps they are right. For me, the joy of setting down words is that I will be read by entities brilliant and mindless, transfigured into data. Writing is like falling, dazzled and forgiven. Part of you is caught in the net and part of you is caught by the current. Eventually, everything you hoped to say will learn to speak itself.
Hot Car Dog
by Sally Anne Khol
Some days she wante be skinny but always eat shite. And some days she wante her long hair short. She wante out at all hours too but really could be doing better stayin' un vacuum the dog. She would woke them kids when you put them to bed. She would turn the grill off whilst you cooked thems' supper. Move in close to knee your bungles whilst you spoke. And prod you in the middle of a night screaming mad causations till you learned to lock both bedroom door. Then she would knock quietly and most persistently. Scratching around the landing whilst you crept out the window three floors off the freezing ground. Up to the roof attic where the flaccid green mattress be stashed.
You would drive the family whilst she drank on the bench seat next to the sleeping child. She would be hooligan by the time you arrive. Opening the car doors at traffic lights and asking them strangers to call cops 'cos you was kidnapping. Then that same day she would be insisting on bidding farewell to your hosts after half of an hour 'cos we were intruding. And you was stupid 'cos you could not see they wante devote as family.
It was a stone-cold fact she found it inelegant drinking in front of mortals. She preferred the Delphic chaos of home. It chimed better with the madness inside of her head. When we were to leave later that evening she was sliding a turkey ham slice into the DVD. She didst avow she wante see the movie of that turkey’s whole life. And now she wante stay and she cared not about being pretty. For the spitter in her would not die.
These times if nothing follows her scripture or like you take a stand. Well then. She headbutts a wall and calls cops. And when they Nee-Naw to your house and bathe the neighbours in disco blue light. She would speake to them like she be the William Shakespeare who had eaten a whole Book of Ezekiel. Grant ye everything said was courteous. Yet it spun those cops dizzy. Them feeling daft for not taking her up on the offer to snort their Japeye.
For reasons you understand now as awkwardness. As well as a virtuous concern for them kids. Watching from their window whilst their foamsome, be-livered mother gets choked out in the street. Your brick intellect never didst fathom those cops' fool notion for detention ...
You knew only this. That once they’d be gone. She would have made her pointe and you would be locked to a fat attic spliff with your night lunch. And she would let them kids watch the Akira.
Then. In the mornings. She would be prolapse and would breakfast most sourly on the homeworks leftover from the night before.
One time in the Milton Keynes families court she would follow you to the Gents. She would pour baby's oil on the liloleum outside your cubicle. And she would lie in wait. Wearing the suede jacket with the perfect round cigarette burn where someone had gotten enough of her gob. Then when you toppled. She would beat you with the buckle end of the heavy belt she had wrapped tight around her fist. Burning her sage. Throwing punches in bunches.
But not to mark your face.
Her pleasure was in getting away with each and every cruelty. She would always check for the cameras. Tho' for obvious reasons they was never in them Gents. So it was to her eternal delight that in a place where you can rest and be naked - and pregnant with principle - something truly lurid could ever happen to you.
But Hey. To the vexatious them spoils.
Like the good lady judge from the end cubicle, finding you anointed like a new-born calf and vaporized by black heat, didst decree:
"Life’s as kind as you wante it be."
Behind The Glass
You have to have tough skin to be a mime, and I do. But American tourists used to get under mine like nobody else. It’s not because I’m a French woman, or for the more obvious reasons. Yes, they are unaware of social boundaries and wear entitlement on their face, like a free pass to every space they enter in the name of a superior kind of freedom they think us Europeans are too stubborn to be able to comprehend. 1st amendment, but make it as unintellectual as possible. Voltaire & co be damned. But no. It’s the fast food, next day delivery mentality that pisses me off and makes them the lousiest audience every summer.
For a start, they rarely give money. Ok, most people don’t. But more than that, they don’t stop. They’re still walking as they take the exact same shot of my face fifteen times, before turning to take a photo of the Seine or a local patisserie window. The photos of me are all blurry images rotting on their socials. To them, mime is just a bit of funny facial make up and not an ancient, whole body theatrical practice. There’s a building up in the intimacy, and the slow, calculated movements aren’t exactly easy competition with the trillions of reels available a few taps away. But today, I couldn’t be picky. I was a French mime performing for nobody except two Americans who had just stopped next to my spot on the Boulevard Saint-Michel to take a swig from their water bottles.
‘Come on Sharon,’ the man barked in a heavy, southern American accent as the woman next to him turned her head in my direction. ‘Let’s go to the Apple store near Garnier. There’s AC there. Then we can chill in Starbucks.’
I resisted the urge to get the rose out of my pocket, and watched them walk away. I was desperate, but I wasn’t going to let that man – who had just unironically suggested Starbucks as a place to ‘chill’ – get his grubby fingers on my plastic offering. I might be a Parisian cliché, but I can decide who the fuck gets my serenade flower.
It is in the mime repertoire to plead. We Chaplin our way into people’s hearts, and when they grab the plastic flower from our shiny white glove, you see on their face that they’ve silently agreed to stay until the end of the performance. But I reserve this for those who watch with interest for at least a couple of minutes. There’s a soft, needy beast behind the mariniere and the beret. And a hungry one too since crowds had vanished after temperatures had reached 35 degrees.
I performed for another hour without anyone offering more than a passing glance, and was ready to pack things up, when a tall white man walked straight towards me and stopped a few meters away from me. He must have been in his early 40s, and was wearing a blue tee-shirt and tight black jeans. I suddenly found myself averting my eyes as he gazed at me and gave a little encouraging smile. It had been so long since a stranger had made actual eye contact while I was performing that I was taken aback. Surely he would be gone when I’d glance back. He wasn’t. His friendly brown eyes, surrounded by thick-rimmed glasses, were still fixed on me.
I decided then that it was time to reveal my most vulnerable self. My inner Pierrot Lunaire kicked in. I wallowed with my shoulders, reached for the sun with desperate hands, since the moon was nowhere in sight. I spread my chest open, birthing naivete and honesty between my two breasts. I covered myself in a white sheet, and ended up drenched in sweat. But the only warmth that mattered to me came from the energetic clapping of my new friend. I was heartbroken when he suddenly turned away and left, but that’s Pierrot’s luck for you. Still, for a fleeting moment, someone had stopped and embraced the whole of me.
On the overheated bus back home, I searched the usual hashtags to check if my other mime friends had had any luck today. I clicked on a video uploaded an hour ago. It was me doing the Pierrot act. Only with no mime outfit on, no pubes, and a much bigger pair of boobs with a giant bald Eagle tattooed across them.
Summer Of
Right after the meeting we take the stairs to the rooftop and some of the guys start taking their clothes off. I laugh, 'cause there's nothing solemn about a man's everyday briefs, even though this is supposed to be a ritual. Some resist the nakedness, some others embrace it while Fede shakes bottles of soda filled with a mystery liquid.
Fede's a good sponsor but he can get weird as fuck sometimes, talking like some Brazilian evangelical pastor, though I know for sure that unlike those cunts at least he's not taking anyone's money. He's half naked, standing in the middle of this frying pan we call a terrace, and being good at keeping us clean doesn't make him less of a nutter.
'What the fuck is going on, man?' I say.
'We're defusing a potential Summer of Sam situation here', says Fede, showing me the row of plastic bottles on the floor. 'Y'know what makes 'em explode? The heat. It builds up from the inside, it builds up from the outside—'
I squint, the sun blinding us all. Half of the guys here don't even know I'm a dyke, so for a second I'm tempted to take off my clothes and freak them out. But this is too fucking weird. Fede gestures to get us in a circle. He lights up the copal and the pepper tree branches, so green they're all smoke and no flame. He looks at me, nodding.
'I won't take off my clothes, y'all gonna get sunburnt, it's mental.'
'It’s gonna be quick, Eme. Look, here it comes—'
One of the bottles explodes with a big POP.
'Jesuschrist, those things are gonna kill a cat or somthin.’
‘We all bottle up. And it’s not always wrong, some things we gotta keep inside, at least for a while. I get it, keep some shit to yourself when that makes you the bigger man.’
That’s Fede preaching. On a bad day, I’ll be needing his preaching. On those days when I’m this close to say FUCK IT and go back to my bullshit. But imagine, Fede would say, just imagine how much you’ll hate yourself if you fuck up right now. Three years clean, Eme. I peek at my phone and there’s a missed call from my sister. My mouth gets all bitter. She always texts, never calls. Fede walks around us, his leathery brown face invading everyone’s personal space.
‘Hear me out, folk,’ he says inside a cloud of smoke. ‘If you’re keeping quiet ‘cause you don’t wanna stir the pot, or you’re afraid to say a hard truth or you’re just in plain denial—Boy, you’re in trouble. There’s a heatwave coming.’
‘Crazy man.’ I whisper right after he smokes me.
Some laugh, some others listen like little kids in church learning how to fear God. Fede sprays us with Florida Water. My sister is up to something, with those calls. She should have left Javier so long ago. The motherfucker. And now she’s calling me, Jessuschrist.
‘When you explode you don’t get to choose what shit will come out first. So choose now, damn it! Let go on your own terms before a hot day gets ya.’
At this point I’m just laughing while some howl and some dance, everyone shouting confessions while the bottles go off. I’m in love with my sister-in-law. I stole money from my momma. I’m a sissy, I’m a fag, the faggest fag of them all. The bottles burst and I feel the buzz of another call.
‘I’m outta here, this shit’s too culty. Seeya all tomorrow.’ I say though no one’s listening.
You don’t get to choose now, Eme, someone says or maybe I’m imagining it all, and sis always says to not drop by unannounced, not while Javier is there and he’s always there, but fuck it. If I take a bus now I’ll be there by morning.
I check my phone again. Average of 38°C tomorrow.
Heat
The lush, almost wild garden shimmered in the heat. Dad was dressed for the Arctic. He handed me the hosepipe he used to water the jungle of a garden he’d cultivated behind his house. “We won’t need that, hopefully,” his darting eyes said behind thick, turquoise lenses. I couldn’t see his mouth; it was hidden by a scarf. “It’s just in case things get out of hand with the flames.”
“Are you serious?” I asked with a smirk.
“Come on,” he said, walking towards the garden shed. He held an old broomstick in front of him like a spear. “Need to get this done.”
It was sometime in the early 2000s. Dad was in his eighties. I’d try to get back to visit him every other Saturday. During a hot summer, I’d normally find him stripped to the waist in his greenhouse, nursing his tomato plants and listening to the cricket or tennis on an ancient, crackling novelty radio, shaped like a Pepsi Cola can. On this particular day, I walked behind the house and found him wearing a winter coat, gloves, a woolly bobble hat pulled down to his eyebrows, a tartan scarf, and an old pair of swimming goggles that I’d left behind when I finally escaped from home.
“Why are you wearing all that stuff?” I’d asked.
“We have visitors,” he said, pouring paraffin into an old washing-up bowl. He tied some rag to the end of an old broomstick and dipped it into the clear liquid. He nodded towards the garden shed. “We’ve been waiting for you to turn up. You can help me move them on.”
He would often say “we” when there was a problem with the house or garden, although it wasn’t clear who the “we” was anymore. After all, it was twenty years since Mum had died and fifteen years since I’d moved out. He’d been on his own since then. Maybe he was referring to the pets he’d acquired. A huge, permanently lethargic stray cat, had adopted Dad. He’d also inherited an equally sluggish small dog, after his sister died. The cat watched Dad from his favourite wall perch, the dog from the back porch. Both had the curious look animals often have when they’re watching human beings do something perplexing and potentially dangerous.
The visitors he wanted to move on, were living in and flying around what looked like a strange coral shell, on the side of the shed hidden next to a wall.
“It’s a wasp’s nest,” Dad said. “Don’t mind the odd one or two in the garden, but I’m afraid I can’t have them living here.” Now standing directly below the hive, he gazed up at the swarming mass of insects above him and added: “Sorry, lads.”
Sunlight reflected off metal as he pulled something out of his pocket. It was an old yellow Zippo lighter of mine.
“Are you still smoking?”
“No,” I lied. “Gave up years ago.”
He flicked the lighter switch and his homemade torch burst into green flames. He began to wave it below the hive.
“What are you trying to do?” I asked, trying not to laugh. Despite the potential danger of Dad setting himself and his shed on fire, there was something darkly comical about the sight of a pensioner, dressed for the Arctic in mid-summer, waving a flaming homemade torch below a cloud of annoyed wasps.
“They don’t like paraffin fumes,” Dad said, slightly out of breath.
I thought I knew nothing about wasps, but this sounded vaguely familiar.
“I don’t think you need to smoke them out or set fire to them,” I said, starting to remember, and starting to laugh too. “You pour paraffin into the hive at night, I think, when they’re asleep. When they wake up, the fumes drive them out.”
“Well, it’s a bit late for that,” Dad said, still waving his torch.
I was expecting the wasps to attack at any moment and imagined Dad and me running into the house to escape them. But they didn’t. The wasp cloud slowly began to disperse. When Dad plunged his torch into a bucket of water, there was only a handful of stragglers left around the hive.
“You could start your own business,” I said, as Dad removed his hat, coat, scarf, and swimming goggles. “You could call it Flame-a-way Wasp Control.”
“Always the joker,” Dad said.
This is absolutely brilliant.
Hey thanks!
Mr. Green wants to take me horseback riding at a ranch owned by his friend on a hill overlooking Ocean Beach.
"That's one way to get you to open your legs," he says. Did he just say that? A flustered gulp of water with downcast eyes, but I am moaning internally. He is projecting all signs of a gentleman overtaken by shame at his indiscretion.
He is full of apologies. Full of promises to be on his best behavior going forward. But not without a lingering smirk.
I wish I hadn't grown up so religious. I hate how I relish his vulgar comments. Here he is, thinking he ruined his chance to take me horseback riding. Asking me if that date is still on. Worried about whether he will still see me again. And here I am. And what a hypocrite I am. Pretending to forgive him from up high on my celibate throne.
But, of course I am this way. Of course I will act the part. What else is there?
Now he is watching and waiting. Like I am a kind of prey. The nerve he has! And what about the nerve I have?
Sitting pretty, looking down and blushing like his remark has shaken me. As if I am struggling to excuse his bad behavior while just below the table my panties soak at the thought of him needing me like that.
Needing to woo me and act proper. And apologizing. All this in service of having me open my legs. I don't deserve this pedestal. But I will still continue to play the part of the innocent prey who has to be subtly and artfully coaxed into opening her legs through this grand orchestration. The contaminated pervert I actually feel like has to stay hidden at all costs.
All I can think about is how I wish he would drag the tip of his foot up and down slowly along the inside of my right leg under the table, obscured by the table cloth.
I have wanted to play footsie with someone ever since I saw it in an episode of "Desperate Housewives" in middle school. Marveling at the discovery that two people could have sex with their feet. Not only could they have sex with their feet, but they could do this while simultaneously carrying out civilized conversation above the table top. How affirming of humanity. What an awe inspiring phenomenon. Americans and America. Where sex can be had during civilized conversations among society and in public. The simultaneous simplicity and grandeur and wildness and wisdom of it.
But Mr. Green is not American. And yet he manages to remind me of Philip Roth whom I detest and who never fails to turn me on. Why do I get so hot for these men I abhor? It’s such a struggle to keep sitting pretty while my hole salivates.
I imagine how he would go about it. I imagine him pushing apart my thighs and staring seriously and intently at what is between them without even registering my face. Taking it in like a mechanic trying to figure out what to do with the car part before him. With a furrowed brow.
Searching for and then directing his penis at my opening like the thing he is holding up is just a torchlight. Like "Ah, yes. Here is the root of the issue and here I will insert it in." Without feeling. As if guided by a manual of some kind. As if it is the thing to do and has been done many times before.
I roll my eyes at myself internally at the exaggerated propriety with which I say "Thank you so much" to our wait staff to suppress any clues about my internal state. The stiffness of my smile and the squint in my eyes is going to make me retch. Can he tell? And yet, I am reveling in even this. I am having too much fun. The bluffing, the wanting, the slipping up and oh, the manners! Especially the manners. Manners. These pussy soakers. These manners when coupled with his unpredictable raunchiness... I feel my insides coiling up and aching sweetly needing release. How has he wound me up this way? Has he been injecting the civility and crudeness in known doses? Does he already understand the effect his actions are having?