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10 Questions Dale

(Header image provided by the Drifter)

Good morning Readers

Today we are debuting a new feature that yet has a name, but is part interview, part word association. I have presented Editor Dale Williams Barrigar with ten words (nine actually, the tenth is his choice). What follows are his replies. We hope that this might catch on and other lists will be given to other people in the future.

Leila

Ten Words

“The Drifter” (aka Dale Williams Barrigar, Doctor of Philosophy) has made these definitions as short as he could, knowing that brevity is the soul of wit.

Any statements he makes about “God” and so forth should be taken with a large grain of salt: because he’s not smart enough to pretend he knows what the Creator of the Universe is really up to – or why.

One: FEAR.

In many ways fear is the basis for everything in this world.

When we climbed down out of the trees, it was partly from fear (with a large mixture of curiosity).

And when we started running away over the ground trying to escape the Sabre-toothed Tiger, it was certainly from fear. (*See below.)

Hemingway called it “grace under pressure,” a paraphrase of which might be “not being a chickenshit.”

How one handles one’s fear/s is such a large part of “who you are” that it’s frightening.

ANXIETY, the much used modern word, is another term for fear.

Jesus nailed to the cross is such a universal image (even for “other people” on the other side of the world who aren’t “Christians”) because it’s based on fear (as well as compassion); and if you don’t know yet that we all get crucified in this life, one way or another, and usually many times, you’ve got a rude awakening in store. (Some of us know this as soon as we know anything.)

Fear of failure can be good, or bad, depending!!

(*The first time we escaped the Sabre-toothed Tiger on foot we realized we could escape, and almost felt free for the first time. And the first time we escaped must’ve had a large mixture of trickery involved, as well, since there’s no way we could’ve beaten the beast on speed alone, with only our feet. Call it: tricking the beast. And it’s just as important now as it ever was; usually, now, for different reasons.)

Two: HOPE.

Whales, wolves, and humans can all sing, but only birds can both sing, and fly. (I mean fly in reality, not in dreams or with mechanical assistance.) Perhaps some day “they” will create a drone that can both sing, and fly; but it will be an at least partially hideous thing; like Frankenstein with wings and tender vocal chords.

Emily Dickinson has forever made me think of a bird whenever I think of the word “hope” (“hope is the thing with feathers…that perches in the soul”) and without hope, the world wouldn’t be worth living in. Period.

Three: ART.

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (wildly, he always denied he was German and claimed to be Polish instead, which would be, in 2025, like an American denying he was American and claiming to be Mexican, instead, or Bob Dylan claiming to be an orphan cowboy from New Mexico instead of a comfortable Jewish kid from small-town Minnesota) said: “These earnest ones may be informed of my conviction that art is the highest task and the proper metaphysical activity of this life.” Another great German, Arthur Schopenhauer, agreed with him (before Nietzsche said so himself). So did Jim Morrison, one of Nietzsche’s most famous disciples.

We all know who “the earnest ones” are, if we think about it. They take themselves all too seriously, have CONSUMERISM as their religion, and are great at passing judgement on anyone just a little bit different from themselves; they appear in the White House, the halls of Congress, the pulpits of churches, the lecterns of all the colleges and universities, and even, or especially, in the book clubs and writing groups of all small, large, or midsized American cities.

REAL ART IS SOMETHING YOU HAVE TO BE WILLING TO DIE FOR. You don’t have to die for it; but you have to be willing to.

Four: LUCK.

“Luck” is all the good things that happen to us which we don’t deserve that help to turn us into better people – not monetarily richer, more fakely famous, or more “powerful” – but better. Often, with the best luck of all, we don’t even know about it until long after the fact. Maybe this means that we’re always lucky; or at least more lucky than we think we are, most of the time.

Five: FAITH.

Faith is the thing without which, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, said, he wouldn’t be able to eat his dinner. Because without faith, he wouldn’t have an appetite. He would be too full of fear, and it would make him not hungry. When I start losing faith in life, I know I’ve grown too tired again. For me, a lack of faith in life is the biggest sin there is.

It has nothing to do with believing we know just what God is up to. It has everything to do with believing there is always a reason to go on – even when we don’t know what it is. There is always someone watching you and cheering you on – even when you don’t know it. Don’t let them down. (If you don’t have a choice any more it’s a different story.)

Six: FUTURE.

The Future is everything. This is where, without doubt, all the most exciting things happen. Sometimes we forget that the Creator of the Universe has a plan, and it involves US. Our best moments in the present are lived in the future, if we’re doing it correctly. It’s not about escaping the present, it’s about intensifying it.

Like everything else it touches, modern American (hedonistic, nihilistic) CONSUMERISM, the religion of the United States, which has also devoured large chunks of the (human) globe elsewhere, both East and West, bastardizes the concept of the future.

It has nothing to do with what they’re trying to sell us yet again.

It has everything to do with what Art itself (at the highest levels, which are everywhere, even under your sandals) is all about.

Without the future, there is no Art, because as you work at creation, you’re always anticipating one or many moments in the future, near or far. Or you are unaware of what you’re doing, which isn’t art.

Seven: TRUST.

There have been people in this life I’ve trusted the second I met them – and I continued to trust them, even after they left me for dead in the dust.

There has been one person I’ve trusted the moment I started reading her fiction and her online commentary – and still do and always will trust, and even would and do trust with my life’s work: even though I’ve never met her in person. She’s that good of a good writer. And to be a good writer, you have to be good. Not perfect (because none of us are), but good. Zero exceptions.

Trust you to take it seriously is just one form of trust.

Eight: FAMILY.

Not all family members are blood related, though they’ve probably spilled the same kind of blood – of their own, I mean (mostly).

Nine: OBSESSION.

Obsession can lead to a compulsive disorder, or to the perfection of the Mona Lisa, depending on what one does with it.

Sensual/sexual romantic obsession is, by far, best for the artist when it’s sublimated. Leonardo and Michelangelo spent zero time scrolling through dating app’s while remaining obsessed with romantic beauty.

Ten: CREATIVITY.

It’s Everything (all around us), and it’s everything (worth fighting for).

Your life has to be your first art, even when (or especially when) you pour everything else into your art.

And when we do this, we’re imitating (in a good way, and possibly without knowing it) the Creator of the Universe.

And Now For the Good News….by Michael Bloor

(We conclude this week’s run of tales by Michael Bloor on what happens to be his birthday. Anyone who has been reading knows why we hope to publish more of his work in the future. Happy Birthday Mick!)

Davie Millar paused in the middle of the Faery Bridge, leant on the rail and stared down at the Blackwater. Like a few other things in the town, the Faery Bridge was misnamed. When it was built, it was first called the Ferro-Concrete Bridge, but ferro-concrete had been an unfamiliar concept in the town a hundred years ago.

It was the autumn, and the total official number of UK Covid deaths (including Davie’s granny) had exceeded the Hiroshima bomb fatalities. But that wasn’t why Davie was so woeful: he was sorrowing because he was on his way to meet Big Andy McBride, the town loan shark. Big Andy was barred by the betting companies (Davie could guess why), so it was natural for Big Andy to ask Davie to put a bet on for him. Fifty quid at 25 to 1. Davie, of course, hadn’t been in a position to refuse. Big Andy’s piggy-pink eyes had narrowed slightly as he handed over the fifty quid. ‘Dinna mess wi’ me now, Davie. The last guy that did that wis left tryin’ to pick-up his broken teeth wi’ a broken arm.’

‘Nae worries, Mr McBride.’

It was Davie that was worried. Last night, he’d had just enough cash to take Melanie to the Bond film, but when she’d wanted a (ridiculously big) bag of popcorn, he’d had to break into Big Andy’s winnings. And once that terrifying Rubicon had been crossed, it had seemed a minor matter to blow quite a lot more of Big Andy’s winnings on a couple of rounds of drinks at the King of Prussia and a taxi home. Considering the risk that the events of last night were now posing to Davie’s life and limb, Melanie had proved disappointingly lukewarm. He had to face up to the likelihood that, compared to Seb, the lead guitarist in the regular band at the Abercrombie Hotel, Davie was running a poor second in Melanie’s affections..

Watching a couple of ducks fossicking about in the Blackwater shallows, half a dozen lame excuses of the dog-ate-my-homework variety ran through Davie’s head. He sighed, turned away from the rail and headed across the bridge towards the old mill. His granny had worked at the mill til it closed, like some much else, in the 1980s. Now the building had been converted into bijou flats. The closure and conversion had happened before he was born and he suddenly realised that he had no idea what the mill had produced before it produced Edinburgh commuters. All he could recall being told was that it used to produce a lot of dust, which had eventually killed his grandad. The recollection didn’t improve his mood.

His pace slowed as he headed up the hill to the council houses. He was surprised to see an ambulance parked beside Big Andy’s BMW. He stopped fifty yards away and watched as two ambulance men manoeuvred a stretcher into the back of their vehicle. Davie turned to a nearby neighbour: ‘Is that Big Andy on the stretcher?’

‘Aye, Covid. Serve the bugger right: never wears a bloody mask in the Co-op.’

As the ambulance lights dwindled in the distance, Davie turned back towards the Blackwater. By the time he’d returned to the Faery Bridge, he’d realised that the remainder of Big Andy’s winnings would be more than enough to buy that elderly Alfa Romeo saloon on the forecourt at Macrae’s Car Sales (the unique noise from the Alfa Romeo engine block was one of the sweetest sounds on Earth). Apparently, when Seb The Guitarist needed a car, he had to borrow his mummy’s Ford Fiesta.

And he could maybe make a few quid delivering for the Chinese take-away. The two ducks were now battling gamely upstream.

Biography:

Michael Bloor lives in Dunblane, Scotland, where he has discovered the exhilaration of short fiction, with more than a hundred pieces published in Literally Stories, Everyday Fiction, The Copperfield Review, Litro Online, Firewords, The Drabble, The Cabinet of Heed, Moonpark Review and elsewhere (see https://michaelbloor.com).

The Unsung Freedom Fighter by Michael Bloor

It was a shock when old Andy Baranov died. Sudden deaths are always a shock: it was a car crash – brake failure on the steep, winding descent of the Braeport, near his house in Dunblane. As well as a good neighbour, he was my favourite opponent at the chess club. Although over-the-board chatter is frowned upon, the club is a friendly place and we had become firm friends, continuing to play at each other’s houses during the summer months, when the chess club was closed. Naturally, I went to his funeral at the crematorium.

Gordon, the chess club president, was also at the crematorium; we sat together. Gordon was surprised that the service wasn’t at the Orthodox Church. I explained that, although Andy was the grandson of Russian refugees from the Bolshevik Revolution, the family weren’t members of the Orthodox Church. They had fled the revolution because they were social democrats, opponents of both the bolsheviks and the church-and-state czarist regime…

Gordon muttered, ‘OK, gimme the history lesson later.’

The service was pretty grim. Afterwards, Gordon and I felt obliged to accept the family’s invitation to the Drummond Arms for afternoon tea. I have a weak bladder (age-related) and was fiddling with my half-empty tea cup, wondering when I could decently leave, when Andy’s daughter, Sophie, came up to have a word. Gordon and I were giving her our condolences, but she cut us short. Addressing me, she said, ‘It’s Frank, isn’t it? I was hoping to catch you here, I have to travel back to London tonight. Dad wanted you to have this…’

She fished a book out of her capacious shoulder bag, handed it over, and moved on. The book was Harry Golombek’s account of the World Chess Championship, between V. Smyslov and M. M. Botvinnik held in Moscow in 1957*. Gordon and I stared at the book, rather underwhelmed. A hardback, with its original, but torn, paper cover. I turned a page or two: Andy hadn’t written anything on the inside of the front cover. The book recorded all those 1957 world championship games in the old descriptive notation. A simpler algebraic notation had been universally adopted in 1981: for example, a pawn move to the fourth square on the king file changed from ‘P-K4’ to the simpler ‘e4.’ Only a few old-timers like me were still familiar with the old notation. So the book had little intrinsic interest or value. Gordon shrugged and muttered, ‘Well, at least it’s a memento of Andy.’ I nodded, slipped the book in my jacket pocket and asked Gordon if he thought we might leave.

When I got home, I changed out of my suit because I was planning to go down to the allotments and and sow some peas. As I was hanging up my suit in the wardrobe, the jacket slipped off the hanger and fell on the floor. When I picked it up, Andy’s book (already forgotten) fell out of the pocket and landed, spread open, on the bedroom floor. I picked it up and noticed what I perhaps should have noticed before, namely that a folded piece of paper had been sellotaped to the inside of the spilled paper cover. I separated the folded paper from the cover and spread it out. It read as follows:

Dear Frank,

I write this in haste. If you receive this book from my daughter, it will be because I have died suddenly, possibly violently.

I know you are a supporter of Russian freedom (even though you are a misguided follower of Kropotkin, rather than Kerensky). I have left a memory stick, hidden in an old spectacle case, at the back of the chess club cupboard at the kirk hall. Please take the memory stick and catch the 10.10 to Glasgow from Dunblane on May 1st. Board the second carriage at the door nearest the engine and take the second seat on the left. Push the memory stick into the seat upholstery. Leave the train at Stirling. A friend will recover the stick and pass it on to those who can make most use of it. Please do this in the cause of Russian freedom and as a token of our long friendship.

With every good wish,

Andrei Baranov

Shit!

I was shivering, and not just because I was in my socks and underpants. ‘… a supporter of Russian freedom… a misguided follower of Kropotkin’?? As an undergraduate botany student sixty years ago, I’d read Kropotkin’s book, ‘Mutual Aid,’ a Pelican paperback, a scholarly corrective to the popular view of Darwinist evolutionary theory: Kroptokin had pointed out that evolution was not just a competitive struggle of all against all, there were plenty of examples of the importance for survival of co-operation both within and between species. I’d enthused about the book to Andy one night in the pub, after the club had closed. And I’d then been surprised when Andy told me that Kropotkin had been an anarchist revolutionary who’d escaped from the Fortress of St Peter and St Paul in Czarist St Petersburg, and had written ‘Mutual Aid’ in exile in a London suburb.

I didn’t think that having read Kroptkin’s book made me an anarchist. Similarly, I wasn’t a fan of President Putin (who is?), but to describe me as a devotee of Russian freedom was quite a stretch.

Why me, Andy? Why the hell pick on me?? OK, Andy and I were the only key-holders to the chess club cupboard. But as a 75 year-old retired botany lecturer, I was hardly a match for the Russian security services.

I struggled to think clearly. I poured out and drank the last of the bottle of Highland Park, left over from my birthday. Then I realised I was still in my underpants and put some more clothes on. May 1st was tomorrow. Logically, the first thing to do was to find the memory stick. When I stepped out the front door, I couldn’t help looking cautiously up and down the street. As I walked off to the kirk hall, a builder’s van suddenly pulled away from no.22. I spun around like a whirling dervish, but it simply drove past me, down to the Perth road. Truth to tell, I then went back home to change clothes, as I’d wet myself.

Pulling on another pair of jeans, I wondered if I shouldn’t try and pass this whole thing over to Andy’s daughter, Sophie. But she would be already on the train back to London, I didn’t have any contact details for her, and I knew from chats with Andy that his only child didn’t share his interest in family history and politics. The obvious people to deal with this were the British security services (not that popular opinion viewed them as a match for the Russian security services), but I imagined I could only contact them via the local police. And I knew I’d have a better case once I’d found the memory stick. I set out again for the kirk hall.

I got there just after five o’clock. The door was locked. I pressed the bell – no response. I pressed the bell again, for several seconds. A large, elderly lady appeared and wanted to know my business. I explained I needed to retrieve something from the chess club cupboard. As I said it, I could see that I ought to have dreamed up a story which implied an urgent and important errand. Did I mean the cupboard in the large meeting room? Yes, I did. The Kirk Presbytery were currently meeting in there to discuss the accounts: I would need to come back later. This was said in a tone that brooked no dissent. I went round the corner for a pint in The King of Prussia.

Fortified by the pint, another whisky, and a plausible cover story, I returned to the kirk hall half an hour later. I rang the bell and I rang it again. Then I realised there were no lights on. Damn it, of course, they’d all gone home. Befuddled, I stood for a minute outside the kirk hall.

A helmeted and black-leathered motor-cyclist rode slowly down the street, stopped and parked the bike twenty yards away, and started fiddling with some straps. I panicked and walked quickly away. I thought about heading for the police station, despite lacking the memory stick. But home was nearer. And in my panicky, befuddled state, home seemed safer.

Jeez, what a pig’s breakfast I was making of everything. I set the alarm, though I was sure I wouldn’t sleep a wink. But of course, as an exhausted 75 year-old, I slept like a baby til I woke up bursting for a pee, had a pee, and then slept like a baby again.

I was at the kirk hall at eight o’clock the next morning – I thought there might be a cleaner there. But the door wasn’t unlocked til just after nine, by the beadle. I explained I needed something from the chess club cupboard. He followed me to the meeting room, but seemed satisfied once I produced my key to the cupboard. There was a lot of stuff in there – chess sets, chess boards, chess clocks, score sheets, old minute books, old photos – but I found the spectacle case eventually. I put everything back, locked up, shouted my thanks to the beadle, and headed for the station.

Dunblane is a terminus for Glasgow commuter services. So the 10.10 train was empty when it drew up at the platform. I was the first person into the second carriage and bagged the second seat on the left. Four other people entered the carriage and I found myself scrutinising them as they entered and walked past me. I discounted a mother with a toddler, and an elderly lady with a walking stick, but I fancied that a powerfully built middle-aged man with a shaved head gave me an apprising look as he walked past. I was uncomfortable that he was sitting behind me, where I couldn’t see him, but I didn’t dare quit the designated seat.

As the train drew out of the station, I laid my raincoat beside me and, under the cover of the coat, pushed the memory stick into the gap in the upholstery. The ticket-collector arrived; he didn’t even look at me or my raincoat, just at my ticket. Then I got a shock: I’d completely forgotten the train stopped at Bridge of Allan before it got to Stirling. Several girl students came into the carriage and one of them came and sat opposite me. I felt sick, my mouth was dry and I couldn’t swallow.

She ignored me and sat swiping her phone.

The train pulled into Stirling station, where there were a score or more passengers waiting to board. I got up, picked up my raincoat, and noted that the memory stick was invisible, nestled in the gap in the upholstery. The shaved-headed guy also got off the train. I didn’t linger at the station for a return train to Dunblane, I headed straight for the taxi rank – an extravagance, but I would’ve given half my pension pot for a quick getaway. To my shame, halfway home, I had to ask the taxi driver to stop so that I could pee into a hedge.

A year’s gone by. I haven’t been on a bloody train since.

*H. Golombek, ‘World Chess Championship 1957,’ London: Macgibbon & Kee, 1957.

Biography:

Michael Bloor lives in Dunblane, Scotland, where he has discovered the exhilaration of short fiction, with more than a hundred pieces published in Literally Stories, Everyday Fiction, The Copperfield Review, Litro Online, Firewords, The Drabble, The Cabinet of Heed, Moonpark Review and elsewhere (see https://michaelbloor.com).

The Second Letter by Michael Bloor

Charlie Robertson had spent his entire working life on the Kilblane estate. When he’d retired as head gamekeeper back in 2015, Sir Ewan had presented him with a silver watch and made a rambling but heart-felt speech about Andy’s knowledge of, and love for, the wild places. So it had been a shock after Sir Ewan died, when Charlie got a letter from the new estate factor, telling him that he’d have to quit his cottage. The estate was putting the cottage up for sale: someone from Edinburgh or London would likely buy it as a holiday home.

Charlie mentioned it to Willie Forbes, the postie, when Charlie asked Willie into the cottage to stand on a chair and change a light bulb for him. And then Willie mentioned it to the minister in the village. The minister was a nervous young man who’d previously served in the Castlemilk housing scheme in Glasgow: he explained to Willie that, once Charlie had actually been evicted, he’d then qualify for a council flat. The minister and Willie both knew what Charlie’s life would be like in a council flat in the town; Willie reckoned he’d be ‘like an auld lion in a circus.’ They agreed it was a bad business: Charlie would be much better off staying with a member of his family, but he’d never married and had no close relatives.

And that was how matters stood, on a warm spring day, when Charlie took a stroll up the glen, to see the primroses in full yellow bloom beside the burn as it tumbles and splatters over the boulders. Buoyed in spirit, on his return to the cottage he decided to open yet another official-looking letter that Willie had delivered two days previously. It was from a London solicitor and its contents took Charlie back fifty-odd years…

#

As the estate’s under-keeper back then, young Charlie had been despatched to look for the ponies that would be needed for the next day’s shoot. The head keeper had predicted (wrongly) that they would’ve taken shelter in Glen Ducheron (aka Gleann an Dubh Choirein, the Glen of the Black Corries). Charlie had wasted the whole afternoon walking the length of the glen without seeing so much as a hoof print. It was dusk as he returned to the mouth of the glen, and the track back to the shooting lodge. That was when he heard frantic shouting, but could see no-one. Then he spotted an arm waving above the dead bracken on the bankside of the Ducheron Burn. It was a woman, unable to stand: she had smashed her left knee when she’d slipped on a rock, trying to cross the burn. She was wet through and shivering.

Charlie took off his coat, wrapped it round her, and told her he’d hurry off to the lodge where there was a phone. She begged him not to leave her. Was it the hours of loneliness she’d already endured, the throbbing pain, or the sinister bellowing of the rutting stags that had drummed through the glen all afternoon? Maybe all three: at any rate, she was insistent and Charlie complied.

A few yards away downstream was a mature spruce plantation; Charlie quickly gathered two branches for a leg splint and a stouter branch for a crutch. In the early evening dark, huddled together for support, they set out on the two-mile walk to the lodge. The path, at first, was uphill, but at least it wasn’t uneven or stepped. Charlie’s auntie was the local midwife and so he knew about the soothing importance of distracting questions and chatter. He learned that her name was Millie and that she was a postgraduate archaeology student.

They paused for a breather. ‘And what were ye doin’, out on the estate in the middle o’ November?’

‘Well, there was once a Roman camp down at Callander…’

‘Ah, ye were lookin’ for the Roman ford?’

Surprised out of her pain and exhaustion, she looked up at him. ‘Yes, that’s right! How..?’

‘Well, yer no’ the first tae come lookin’. Robbie, the head gamekeeper, told me that a couple o’ Edinburgh professors were here afore the war, lookin’. The Romans made a cuttin’ in that steep bank beside the burn and lined the cuttin’ wi’ stanes. There’s a lot o’ history in these glens, if ye ken where tae look.’

The moon was now up and he saw her smile and give a vigorous triple nod. They set off again.

When they reached the lodge, the housekeeper phoned for an ambulance, put them in front of the kitchen range and fed them warm milk and oatcakes with loganberry jam. Away from the moonlight, Charlie could see that Millie’s eyes were brown.

A few days later, he received a letter from Millie (sent care of Mrs Laing, the housekeeper), with her repeated thanks and apologies, plus two pounds to pay for dry-cleaning Charlie’s coat. He kept her letter and wrote a letter in return, but got no further reply.

#

And, as Willie the postie told his audience in the public bar of The Drummond Arms Hotel, that was that.

[dramatic pause]

Until Charlie got the letter from the solicitor telling him that the Archaeology Professor had died and left Charlie her wee house in London, which the solicitor had valued at in excess of nine hundred thousand pounds.

So, that was why Charlie was buying his cottage off the estate. Willie had got a lot of quiet enjoyment out of telling the story to the new factor’s wife, when he’d delivered a parcel to the factor’s house that morning.

Biography:

Michael Bloor lives in Dunblane, Scotland, where he has discovered the exhilaration of short fiction, with more than a hundred pieces published in Literally Stories, Everyday Fiction, The Copperfield Review, Litro Online, Firewords, The Drabble, The Cabinet of Heed, Moonpark Review and elsewhere (see https://michaelbloor.com).

The Forensic Psychiatrist’s Tale by Michael Bloor

Bob Duncan, like a lot of ex-policemen, is of a philosophical turn-of-mind. He reckons that the Inverallan Allotments are a bit like the army in the days of the old National Service, where all sorts of people had to learn to mix in together. Misunderstandings might occur across the class barriers, disputes might flare up from time to time, but we all learn to jog along together in the common struggle against Mother Nature and the bloody weather. He was enlarging on this to Willie Brown and myself as we all took shelter from a sudden, vicious shower in the old allotment summerhouse.

Willie laughed: ‘All sorts, Bob? Well, I havena’ seen that Beyoncé on a plot yet. Nor the Duke o’ Buccleuch… Unless he’s that new fella in the blue floppy hat that’s got old Ellen’s plot, over beside the railway.’

‘Talk of the Devil,’ I nodded towards a man in a blue floppy hat hurrying through the downpour to the summerhouse.

He shook himself and gasped out a greeting as he came in the door. I shifted an old seed catalogue off the bench to make way for him. He introduced himself as Andrew MacSorley – a large man with a florid complexion. To be sociable, I asked him how long he’d been on the waiting list before he’d got a plot.

‘Two and a half years. I’m pleased with the plot, though. Especially the fruit bushes.’ He spoke with the long drawn-out vowels of the Scottish boarding schools. ‘And I was lucky, because I got the plot in October, just a month before I retired.’ This struck a chord and we all then spent a few minutes in a collective hymn of praise to Retirement. Then Willie asked him what he’s done before he’d retired. He replied that he’d been a forensic psychiatrist.

There was a moment of stunned silence and then I, rather lamely, said: ‘Wow. Interesting job!’

He stretched out his legs from the bench: ‘Terrible job. Before you ask me why, I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you what was the final straw…

‘You’ll maybe know that an important part of a forensic psychiatrist’s job is that of assessing for the courts whether or not arrested persons are fit to plead. Well, this case I’m going to tell you about wasn’t all that untypical, but it was just one case too many as far as I was concerned.

‘He was a lad in his late teens. He’d gone into the toilets in the square in Crieff, the ones where you pay the attendant 30p. When he went into the Gents, the attendant noticed that he had a chisel sticking out of his back pocket. Well, there’d been a rash of graffiti and minor vandalism in the toilets, and the attendant got suspicious when this lad was a while in the cubicle and not coming out. There were a couple of cops on foot patrol in the square, so she called ‘em over to investigate.

‘Apparently, he took a bit of coaxing to get out of the cubicle and when he came out he still had the chisel. Now, there was no damage to the cubicle, but when the cops asked him what he was doing with the chisel, he said it was to protect himself from man-eating spiders. If he’d said he was an apprentice cabinet-maker – no problem. But to ward off man-eating spiders?? So…

‘They booked him – possession of an offensive weapon. When I saw him he’d already been in the jail for a fortnight, on remand. Was he in a good state of health? Emphatically, he was not. In his terms, he was caught in a giant spider’s web.’*

He paused. ‘Ah, the rain’s almost off, I see. Nice to meet you lads!’

Bob and Willie and I watched him go. Thoughts of jogging along with his fellow-allotmenteers seemingly suspended, Bob turned to me: ‘So whit wiz the polis supposed tae dae? Help the lad fight off they man-eating spiders?? Forbye, that’s nae the reason he’s nae longer working. Ma niece cleans his flat: he wis suspended cos he turned up fo’ work pished…’

*I heard the radical psychiatrist, R.D. Laing, tell the story about the man-eating spiders at a meeting in Cambridge in 1968. It’s stayed with me me ever since.

Biography:

Michael Bloor lives in Dunblane, Scotland, where he has discovered the exhilaration of short fiction, with more than a hundred pieces published in Literally Stories, Everyday Fiction, The Copperfield Review, Litro Online, Firewords, The Drabble, The Cabinet of Heed, Moonpark Review and elsewhere (see https://michaelbloor.com).

Allegra by Michael Bloor

(Our longtime friend in writing and fine gentleman, Michael Bloor, pictured, is our guest writer for July. This week we present five by Mick. Please see his bio at the bottom of this page–Leila)

Allegra

When John started his apprenticeship at Sowter & Son, Allegra was already working in Old Man Sowter’s office as typist/receptionist/assistant book-keeper. John would see her every morning as she made her way through the workshop to the rear office: Allegra kept office hours, whereas John had to clock-on an hour earlier, at eight o’clock. Back then, in the 1960s, any woman walking through an engineering workshop could expect a cacophony of whistles and cat-calls from the machinists and the fitters. John was struck by the anomaly that Allegra’s progress through the workshop was accompanied by no more noise than the usual screeches, bangs and clatterings of a metal-working shop. In fact, Old Man Sowter had previously told Big Arthur, the foreman, that any man found to be disrespectful of his niece, Allegra, would be on a warning of future dismissal. Newcomer John, however, assumed that the muteness of his fellow workers was a tribute to Allegra’s ethereal beauty. For himself, at any rate, an awed silence seemed the only immediately appropriate response.

John subsequently gathered that, although she was The Old Man’s niece, her surname wasn’t Sowter: she was ‘Allegra Heron.’ Such an appropriate name. John was a hill-walker: every Sunday morning that the weather allowed, he’d catch The Ramblers’ Special from the town’s railway station into the Derbyshire Dales. He loved the swift-running, pebbly rivers and brooks of the dales. Often, he’d stop for minutes at a time to watch the progress of a heron through the waters. The heron seemed an exotic bird to be dwelling in the quiet, domesticated English countryside: head held high and rigid, a long-legged, purposeful, solitary walk, somehow both remote and yet vividly aware of her surroundings. By his machine, John would feign activity while secretly watching Allegra Heron’s similarly exotic progress across the dingy shop-floor in her swinging, open, Afghan coat, her pale suede boots, short, flared, red skirt and skinny top.

As the apprentice, John was the workshop dogsbody and so would be dispatched to the office on errands for the foreman. Naïve, but not wholly inexperienced thanks to past youth club discos, John was able to make use of these occasional office visits to strike up an acquaintanceship with ethereal Allegra. After a few weeks, John felt they’d bonded over a common preference for ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ over ‘Yesterday.’ So he suggested a Saturday date at the Rams Head pub, where Long John Baldry and The Steampacket would be playing in the big upstairs room.

She agreed! He was to pick her up from the house at seven o’clock.

Apprentice wages were only eleven quid a week, but he felt well turned-out in his black cord jacket and Ben Sherman shirt. He arrived ten minutes late and a bit out of breath, her parents’ house being out in the suburbs and some distance from the bus stop. She answered the door, already booted and coated, with a warm smile. She stepped onto the gravel drive and stopped:

‘Where the Hell’s your bloody car?’

Biography:

Michael Bloor lives in Dunblane, Scotland, where he has discovered the exhilaration of short fiction, with more than a hundred pieces published in Literally Stories, Everyday Fiction, The Copperfield Review, Litro Online, Firewords, The Drabble, The Cabinet of Heed, Moonpark Review and elsewhere (see https://michaelbloor.com).

Saragun Springs Presents: The Drifter

(Header image “Mary” by the Drifter and “Drifter” by the Drifter)

Thinkings Upon Hermione, Shakespeare’s Queen; Or

A Phantom of Delight

“She was a phantom of delight / When first she gleamed

upon my sight; / A lovely apparition, sent / To be a moment’s

ornament…” – William Wordsworth

This week The Drifter offers thoughts upon one of Shakespeare’s heroines in honor of Leila Allison, a poet who keeps a large picture of Shakespeare in a prominent spot in her workspace, and sometimes can feel The Bard’s eyes following her around the room as she creates.

Such a fact is not paranoia nor hubris; it is a full-on engagement with The Bard that is a rare thing these days, despite The Bard’s continuing presence seemingly everywhere. Despite the fact that he is “everywhere” as the Western World’s preeminent writer, there are few creative writers these days who have the courage, the ability, or the dedication to engage with The Bard in the way Leila Allison has, and does.

The following reflections concern one of Shakespeare’s lesser known major characters (overshadowed by Cleopatra and Juliet, among others) who would have won her author immortal literary fame of a certain species all on her own, even if Will had never written a line about Juliet, or Cleopatra.

Now bring on the Queen.

Specifically, Queen Hermione.

Shakespeare’s Hermione is a beautiful queen, and a beauty

queen, filled with virtue (overflowing goodness), steady and true (and pregnant).

But her goodness makes her vulnerable to other, less good, people.

She becomes a total victim of her husband’s crazed jealousy.

She does him a favor. Talks his friend into staying over, like he asked her to.

Next, because he got his wish, the king gets paranoid.

He starts thinking the two of them (best friend and wife) must be up to

something together, if the friend agreed that fast.

The king’s paranoia undergoes the snowball effect.

Her odor and her very beauty begin to scream inside him; soon he even starts believing that his friend is the father of his own child; which may be as twisted as it gets on that level.

This king’s self-centered, power-hungry delusions (believing things that

aren’t true) lead him to the basest cruelty.

To wanting to crush whoever won’t do what he says. And so he does all kinds of nasty things to Queen Hermione. Up to and including putting her in chains, throwing her in prison, killing her son, and taking away her daughter right after she’s born. The Queen dies from grief.

But at the end of the play, William Shakespeare gives his good queen her due, as if he couldn’t let her go just yet.

Some of her fans and followers have constructed a statue of her. She rises from this statue of herself, in front of everyone: resurrected, which means brought back from the dead.

Brought back to life.

This is how she said goodbye to the King when he sent her to prison:

Adieu, my Lord:

I never wished to see you sorry; now

I trust I shall.

Anyone who can remain that calm when falsely accused and sent to prison for it has got style in Bukowski’s sense of the term; and can stand out; is one of the best.

We all get falsely accused at times (maybe not sent to prison for it; maybe so).

Someone like Queen Hermione can show you how to act when “they”

are coming down on you.

This is one thing Jesus meant when he said to turn the other cheek.

When they’ve got you, whether you did it or not, your best bet is to play it cool.

Both inside yourself AND with them.

Shakespeare is also saying there are resurrections that happen to us WHILE WE ARE STILL ALIVE, IN THIS WORLD, LIVING OUR NORMAL LIFE.

We get reborn every single day (we have another chance tomorrow) or even every second that ticks by in some cases.

(Sometimes time speeds up; other times, it goes way more slowly…but who here has ever seen it stop…)

And the gentle Bard surely seems to be implying there will likely be another,

very different, resurrection at the end of our own earthly lives.

Crucial END NOTE from The Drifter: This bare bones retelling of Queen Hermione’s life was written from memory; as such, The Drifter takes no responsibility for any minor (and likely meaningless) little things he may have gotten wrong in briefly recounting this narrative.

The Drifter first read THE WINTER’S TALE, by The Bard, well over thirty years ago, when he was a student at Columbia College Chicago, in a class conducted by the great Shakespeare scholar Peter Christensen.

Thirty years later almost to the day, The Drifter espied Professor Christensen, an old man now, sitting alone in a coffee shop in a northside Chicago neighborhood not far from the lake, intensely engaged in the reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. (The Drifter waited around until he could see what the book was, without ever approaching the professor.)

Since The Drifter read the play over thirty years ago (twice) and hasn’t looked at it since, he takes no responsibility for the tiny meaningless things he may have gotten wrong, but he does thank Professor Christensen, for reading The Sonnets alone in a coffee shop as an old man; and for his dramatic readings from Shakespeare’s HAMLET, THE MERCHANT OF VENICE and THE WINTER’S TALE well over thirty years ago, in a seventh-story, industrial-looking classroom on Columbia College Chicago’s downtown campus.

I don’t know if you are still here with us; but I remember looking out the high windows, watching the blues of Lake Michigan, and listening to your voice bringing Shakespeare alive.

Saragun Verse

i

A field is a magic world

Timeless in sun and storm;

Yet when gold grubs push the worm

The field is killed and torn

ii

Ghosts haunt the other side serene

Of unsettled losses and fields plundered;

The gold grubs cannot turn a dream

They are blind to the wonder

iii

Yet it all moves along

In stumbles and dances;

We do not have to be dead alone

Even gold grubs get second chances

Suicide Spoon: Conclusion

(Dedicated to the late Hunter S. Thompson, on his 88th birthday)

29 May 1975

Nora had a thing about trains. Sometimes she’d have me and Tess walk with her to where we could see the freighters enter and leave the shipyard. Often she would go alone. Mom never went with her on these trips, even though they did most everything together.

“The Choctaw had a saying,” Nora told me. It was just her and me at the train watching spot. “‘Then the railroad came.’”

“What does it mean?”

“Meaning goes two ways, like those trains. For the Indians, it meant whitey was coming to take everything. But it also meant that you could go away too—at least that’s what I thought threshing in the field, when I heard a whistle blow.”

That has stuck with me through the years. Then the railroad came. For the Natives, it brought smallpox, alcoholism, law, jail, and reservations. But even after the tribes had been wiped out, the railroad never stopped coming. It comes to this very day, obliterating current old ways and bringing back other old ways. In the larger sense, the railroad never brings anything new.

The railroad came for Nora late in 1974.

Mom seldom spoke directly to me when I was a teen. That began when I was twelve or so. But none of that mattered when Nora got sick. For a while, a truce was in order.

Tess and I were in the kitchen playing hearts. Mom was at the hospital. We were waiting for a call. We played a lot of cards during the death watch. Mom didn’t want us hanging around the hospital; we tended to get on her nerves.

The phone finally rang. It was Mom. Nora had named death Roy and she had told Mom that Roy was coming soon. She wanted all of us to be together one last time.

The hospital was about a mile and a half across town. The bus system was a joke, and we would have walked if it hadn’t been raining. Nora wanted rain on the day she died, she got that much. The dope that made her uterine cancer bearable often caused her to share such things. We decided to get fancy and use three of my vast fortune of eight bucks on a cab.

I’ve come to an understanding with hospitals and rehab centers and hospices. I quit being artificially cheerful while in them, and they no longer close in on me like one of those squishing rooms used by silly-assed villains on Batman or The Man From Uncle. Still, their ceilings remain too close to my head.

At sixteen, I’d yet to make the deal, and I felt like I was suffocating. Tess was drawn to places of pain because of that fucking dreampurple light; in her mind, faces that absorbed suffering and kept coming back for more were the only beautiful things.

I never experienced dreampurple. Tried once. Tess gave me a swallow of methadone, which tasted like poison. And for a glittering moment, I felt lifted and expanded. Everything I so worried over meant nothing, and there was a sense of well-being utterly alien to me. Then I got sick, everywhere, and for long enough that a trip to the hospital was looking to be in order. It was like a door had shut in my face. When reality came slinking back, I met it with scorn. I couldn’t believe that the physical universe could be so easily swept aside by a teaspoon of a substance that tastes like cherry-flavored Clorox.

At fourteen, Tess was nearing the end of her free-range dreampurple experience. When we arrived at the hospital, it was on her. She was excited, and her pupils were blasted open despite the harsh lighting. She was connected to every atom of electricity. Only I noticed. She was otherworldly and utterly amoral; something in her sought the dreampurple beauty in dying. I wanted to slap it out of her. It was Nora’s hour and not something to be greedily sucked up.

It never felt possible, yet Nora was going away. I had hung onto false hope much longer than I should have. The last of it vanished when Tess and I entered her room. It seemed impossible that a person could still be alive in her condition. She had gone from one-twenty to under seventy pounds in less than six months. Uterine cancer. Mom was holding a cigarette for Nora, and when she saw us, I caught a glimpse of her shoving something that glinted into her purse with her other hand. Mom usually didn’t give a fuck about such things; and maybe I shouldn’t have, given the situation.

“Hi, Kid. Hey, Sister,” Nora whispered, with an underwater voice. Her skin was the color of old paper, and her eyes were yellow.

I mumbled something and smiled.

I wanted to smack Tess (a long running theme in my life). Her ravenous eyes were sopping up every detail. But that gave over to tears and she sat down and lay her head on Nora’s shoulder.

After a few moments of just standing there, Mom glared at me and nodded at Tess. Nora was increasingly in and out of it, and it was clear that Mom wanted the final moments to herself. So I peeled Tess off Nora. I didn’t know what to do. I kissed Nora on the cheek and hustled Tess out of the room. Without speaking, we left the hospital.

Tess and I walked home. The rain had backed off, which made a taxi unnecessary. Even if it was still raining, we would have walked. That’s the way, we tend to huddle away during the truly big bad times; nobody wants to make small talk with a cabbie after they have seen the face of death.

“Mom hid a spoon,” Tess said.

“A spoon?” I recalled the quick furtive gesture.

“You saw. Bet it had something in it; something for the pain.”

Tess was uncanny. She often had impossible insights when the dreampurple was in her; in her way she was holy.

“But we won’t talk about it,” she said, smiling.

“No, I don’t think we will.”

The world was in black and white that day. The fuzziness of the pollen season had been washed clean by the rain. It all lay in ruins, and yet even there, the railroad had yet to come.

I later dismissed the poison spoon theory. I poured specious logic all over it and locked it in the place I used to stick the things I did not want to think about. I convinced myself that Mom hadn’t helped Nora out the door, even though such potions have always been extremely easy to get in our neighborhood. Still, Nora was as good as gone, why hasten it by what—an hour—and risk a murder charge? (No one noticed anything untoward, it’s unlikely they explored Nora’s cause of death with much of a fine-toothed comb attitude; I doubt there was an autopsy.)

But that only made sense when placed against the ways of regular people. Lovers have their secret expressions, and maybe what had transpired between Mom and Nora was as much none of anybody’s goddamn business as a thing gets.

Tess died in May 2004, not long after her forty-third birthday. I was not in the room because her death was sudden (although never wholly unexpected), but I had been there every inch of the way. Heroin was not the direct cause; years of speedballs had reduced her heart’s ability to withstand stress. Could say she died of a chronic case of being Tess. Now, she was just as loaded as ever, but legally, on methadone, the authorized party plan. Tess had reached the point of gaining weekly carries on Saturdays. Naturally, she had chipped into the next day’s dose (which always meant that a relapse was coming soon), and her turbulent existence ended quietly in her sleep.

So, whenever I’m not quite depressed enough to suit me, I like to look through her things. And as I sat at home, tired of the hand poker game, I looked through her stuff and found the suicide spoon. I’d seen it a bunch of times but always ignored it because it represented the cheap, dirty side of dreampurple. Is the world such an awful place that a person needs to poison herself to find beauty in it, to coexist with it? Yes, yes it is. But this time I picked it up and examined it. I was pleased to see that there were no tell-tale scorch marks on it. She never tried to bail, no matter how bad things got. That made me proud.

It also gave me an idea that would make sense if our lives were a story that followed a plan of some sort. Still, although unlikely and insincere on most levels, the idea gave me something semi-positive to hold onto that particularly long night.

The End of the Mess, 2019

My mother, Kaaren Patricia Johnston Spahr, died at either the age of seventy-nine or eighty-one on 20 April 2019, a Saturday. In a state of delirium that the morphine drip finally brought peace to.

We were outside the evening before, and I went through the motion of lighting a cigarette, ostensibly for myself, but handing it to Mom. The doctors and admin would have gone crazy if they had seen us; but the CNAs, mostly Filipino nationals, the people who do the real work, the human work at hospitals, hospices, and long term care centers, know when to look the other way.

Mom was very high on morphine, and we had to bring her drip along; in America, we all get high in the end. But she was mostly coherent, and kept breathing and producing just enough urine to remain alive.

Mom didn’t say much toward the close. She appeared content, like a person awaiting a bus she knew would come by and by.

She used to love Friday night. And it was a Friday; I remember her and Nora getting ready to go out to the Sportsman or White Pig Tavern, the apartment reeking of hairspray and cigarette smoke, everyone talking at once. The radio on. The energy was exciting even though I was not in on it.

But the railroad came.

“I can do for you what you did for Nora, if you want,” I said. It would have been easy. And I would have done it if she wanted me to. I figured God might be watching again, maybe giving me a second chance in case I had blown the first.

Mom looked at me, skin the color of old paper, the whites of her eyes yellow, just like Nora’s. “I knew you knew … straight morphine … got it from some guy at the Pig,” she said with a feeble laugh. “It was all over Tessie’s face.”

“I can, if you want.” I knew where to get it, but I also knew her answer, which is why I hadn’t bothered. And I couldn’t shake the ridiculous notion that I’d made a polite offer of euthanasia, like offering coffee to a guest.

“No, Sarah,” she said, savoring the final drag off her last cigarette. “Hell ain’t big enough for the both of us.”

The End

Suicide Spoon: Part Two

May 1985

There comes a moment when God stops everything and shines the Big Light on you. You’re presented with a problem that has no solution, and doing nothing isn’t possible. When that first happened to me in 1985, I learned the truth: the closer you get to God, the further you are from your humanity. I have yet to decide if that’s sarcasm, irony, or the wages of being holy. But none of it mattered at that moment. It was up to me to select the least shitty course of action, and I had to choose now.

“Don’t use the suicide spoon,” Tess said.

“The what?”

“The big one.”

This was the first time I’d ever looked inside her kit. In it lay two spoons. Both faux gold. The smaller of the two was slightly mangled and heavy with scorch marks. The other was basically untouched. A soup spoon? I wondered, because I ask myself stupid questions when I get nervous. Who the fuck cares?

I showed her the smaller one. “This?”

She nodded.

“You shouldn’t cook coated stuff … causes brain damage.”

“Har-dee-har-har, Sar-duh—I’m dying and you make jokes.” She lay on my sofa, used up, dopesick, but knowing she’d be getting well within seconds had perked her up.

“You’re not dying.”

But she was and had been ever since dope became the love of her life. Tess was an artist. Even though she sold a few paintings, the money they brought didn’t legitimize her. You have to be born an artist. Whether it’s a gift or a defect is a matter of perspective. Some called her a genius, but they didn’t have to clean up after her. The clichés are true. Genius does consort with madness, and it also creates a single-minded ruthlessness that gives genius a license to shit on people, especially those closest to them. Regardless, Tess was mine and always would be.

It all began and ended with what Tess called the dreampurple light. The anxious expression on a welfare mother’s face waiting for the mail to come on the first was dreampurple. The old drunk she saw burst into tears at the little store because old Graydon had caught him boosting a bottle of wine was hell dreampurple; giving the fellow her lunch money, oddly, wasn’t. There was no set rule for the condition except nothing in the natural world, no matter how stunning or powerful, could ever be dreampurple. Tess was born with a dreampurple mind, but it began to fade in her late teens. That’s when she discovered the pills that led her to heroin. She swore that it gave her back the thing she loved and needed most.

It’s not my object to present a DIY on fixing. Let’s say it involves powder melted in a (in this case a smaller) spoon by using a (in this case a red cricket) lighter, then carefully drawing the stuff into a hypodermic needle without air bubbles. Everyone said the bubbles go to your heart and kill you. No one knew anyone that had happened to, but junkies are like anyone else when it comes to needing stupid shit to believe in.

I hesitated … it was my big moment, and I felt God’s Hot Light on the back of my neck.

“C’mon big sister, be a nice guy. Slide it in easy-like.”

“Say that again, and you’ll be picking up teeth,” I whispered as I shot her up. The effects were immediate, like what Oswald did to Kennedy’s head. Tess was a different breed of junkie. Smack usually turns the user into a useless drooling mess. Although that would happen to her later in the day, she was someone who became very happy, funny, witty, and alive when she was high. Both pupils enlarged like Bowie’s weird one. Tess was on top of the world, but I’d never felt lower: I just fixed my little sister, has it really come to this?

“That good? Not gonna die on me?”

“Nope.”

Tess couldn’t do it herself. She had a strange complex about not being able to shoot herself up after she’d been dry for a few days. But just the first one, she’d be fine after that. Some sort of mental hangup. Usually one of her tenth-rate boyfriends did it for her (all of whom she called “Earl”), but the last Earl had damned near killed her. I made her promise me in the hospital to come see me for that first dry hit in the future. She knew I wasn’t fucking with her, and I knew that she would turn up sooner than later.

“You mean it? No rehab? No speech? Just bring it and you’ll do it?”

I rose, went to the window, and peeked between the drawn drapes. Junkers do not like bright light. The world was going on in the 1985 fashion. It was the year of the power ballad and mall rats. A pastel, dayglo season that smelled vaguely of clove cigarettes and cinnamon. There was something hopeful about the mid-eighties that I could never lay a finger on. It was more than Michael Jackson moonwalking or power tie money, or the vast amount of teen girls imitating Madonna, painted lips as red as a chimpanzee’s vagina. There was a certain optimism that didn’t last. Alas, sometimes forever comes in 1989. Yet I was a bystander of that world. Even though I was only twenty-six, the era had already passed me by. I had but one purpose, I served the Saint of the Unknown Martyr. Anyway, I figured a world like that would keep moving along without my input, and that God would do the same after watching my big moment come and go. He has yet to tell me if I’m wiser; some things a person cannot judge herself.

“What’s the big spoon about?”

Tess seldom lied to me in the technical sense, but she had the irritating habit of releasing information a bit at a time, usually when it was too late to do anything about it. I really didn’t want to know, but since I’d taken responsibility for her, it was my duty to know as much as I could. She was a tremendous bundle of contradictions that somehow added up to the truth. That’s art, I guess.

“It’s my marilyn-monroeverdose,” as though that explained everything.

“Say that in dumb fucker.”

“Only if you tell me why you kept your promise.”

“Because I’m a dumb fucker,” I said.

“What a coincidence! That’s my reason too. Got anything to eat?”

Junkers crave sweets. You get used to watching them dump ten packets of sugar into a cup of hot chocolate. It usually brings them to dentures. By 1985, I’d been dealing with Tess’s habit for eight years. When she was on the nod, I avoided being in public with her. She’d be up and even charismatic, then all of the sudden, without warning, the smack in her system dropped into low gear, and the result was a half-awake blob of protoplasm. It was the same as hauling a drunk around. At least dope doesn’t stink.

I kept her limited food groups stocked in my apartment. Vanilla ice cream, Hershey’s syrup, Mountain Dew soda, Pop Tarts, and “Chocolo’s,” which was a fudge Twinkie-like thing that was only on the market for a couple of years; I figure it got the hook after spreading all the diabetes the FDA would allow from one item.

“How come I never see you eat anymore?” she asked.

I was like Mom and could survive on cigarettes and black coffee for days on end. Tess was the only non-smoking junker I knew. She considered the habit disgusting and even “bad for you;” I’ll let the irony lie where it is.

Do you know what you’re doing to me? was the big question I never asked Tess. The answer was sprinkled like ashes on our lives. Mom asked her that plenty. Her answers were the usual “defensive wound” sort of slogans that sound right, but actually deflect the guilt back to you.

Sometime between her two bowls of ice cream and syrup, she asked why I had fixed her.

“The same reason why you disappear into the bathroom with your kit, like I don’t see,” I said. “Some shit must happen—like there’s a law.”

She laughed. “You’re such a cunt, you know?”

“I am what I am,” I said. “Hey! Do you know how many times I’ve dragged you to rehab?”

Tess scrunched her face sarcastically, as though seriously pondering the question. It was a gesture from childhood that coasted on nostalgia, for without that I would have wanted to beat it out of her face.

“Dunno, six?”

I made a sound like the buzzer on game shows when the answer’s wrong. “Seventeen, not including jail. On average, every six months. I have finally got the picture. Everyone wants you off the shit but you.”

“The big spoon’s my ticket out,” she said mainly because she was quick to change that subject. “I figure a big-ass shot from it should do the job, should it need doing.”

And you wonder why I’m a cunt, I thought, putting out one smoke then lighting another. But what she said released an old memory from the dungeon. “Like what Mom did for Nora?”

Upon mention of Nora, the buffer of the smart-assed, unrepentant junker, which she habitually placed between us, vaporized. All her stories and aversions and justifications puffed off like summer fog after the sun leans into it. I liked seeing that, almost as satisfying as giving her a sharp slap in the face.