Saragun

Commuting in Warsaw by Michael Bloor

(first published in The Flash Fiction Press, May 5th 2017)

Jenny Birkett was sitting in the bar with five fellow psychiatrists at an academic conference. A quiet middle-aged woman with quiet clothes and a gentle manner, it wasn’t unusual for her to take little part in professional chitchat. The discussion was about some remarks that the opening conference speaker had made in his plenary address. He had referred to a famous paper that the great Swiss psychotherapist, Carl Jung, delivered to the annual meeting of the British Medical Association in the summer of 1914, ‘The Importance of the Unconscious in Psychopathology’. At the time, Jung secretly feared that he himself was suffering from schizophrenia. Two days after he delivered his paper, the First World War broke out. In the middle of that collective European madness, Jung’s recovery was slow and painful: he later interpreted his initial disturbance as a precognition of the European slaughter.

The conference speaker had suggested that personal experience of mental illness could be valuable to psychiatrists in caring for their patients. The suggestion had sharply divided the group in the bar. Old Danny McCafferty, who knew Jenny better than most, noticed not just her quietness, but a clouded, troubled expression. Hesitantly, he asked her if she had an opinion. Jenny spoke so gently that they had to strain to hear her above the hubbub of the bar: ‘I don’t say that personal experience of psychiatric illness is going to be helpful to us in diagnosis or treatment. But there was an occasion when I felt sure that I was going mad and I’ll never forget the sheer anguish that I felt then. It’s got to be valuable for us to understand – to know from our own experience – the awfulness that our patients are living through. I hope it’s helped me to bring more compassion to my patients.’

There was a pause. Jenny reached for, and swigged, her dry white wine. She ran her finger over the wet ring her glass had left on the table. ‘I suppose, after a declaration like that, I owe it to you all to tell you what happened…

‘Nearly twenty years ago, I went to Poland on an EU exchange scheme. I learnt the language at my mother’s knee: she had fled Poland during the war. I spent six months in an academic psychiatric department in Warsaw and a Polish colleague, Darek, came to my unit in Edinburgh. I had his flat in Warsaw and he stayed in my cottage in Roslyn. You probably know that the ancient centre of Warsaw was painstakingly recreated after the destruction of the war. But most of the city’s population don’t stay in the chocolate-box city centre: they live in the countless high-rise flats in the suburbs. Like everyone else, I used to travel in and out to work on the bus, down long, long avenues of these post-war workers’ flats. A dreary journey.

‘One autumn evening of murk and rain, I was absorbed in an article I was reading and almost missed my stop. I scurried into the downstairs lobby of the flats and into the battered lift. Darek’s flat was on the eighth floor. There was no light on the landing and it was always a titanic struggle to locate and operate Darek’s battered door-lock. So it was a relief when, finally, the lock yielded. But once inside the flat, it always used to feel homely. The living room used to be lined with books in Polish and English – literature and philosophy, as well as medicine. Darek was evidently a polymath whose learning put me to shame.

‘But that night, when I switched on the light, I got a stupefying shock. The books and the book shelves were gone. So were the warm Afghan rugs and the rich red curtains.

‘I dropped my briefcase and almost collapsed myself. I sat down abruptly on a battered dining room chair (never previously seen) and, not daring to lift my eyes, stared at the unfamiliar scuffed lino at my feet. The lino was patterned with entwined pink roses on a green background: the thorns on the roses seemed unnaturally large. I struggled against the panic, tried to control my rasping breathing, and sought desperately for some rational explanation of the changes. Sought and failed: how could somebody (a relative of Dareks? a housing official?? the security police???) have entered the flat and, in a few short hours, completely refurnished it with this old tatt – this scuffed lino? In truth, I knew that nothing could explain the transformation of the flat. There had to be something wrong with my perception: I, a psychiatrist, was delusional. My eyes filled with tears; I have never known such pain.

‘I thought back to patients I had known, trying and failing to recall similar cases. And then I was mistrusting my recall, as I had already mistrusted my perceptions. Inexpressible wretchedness. My breathing was now quite out of control, my heart was banging like a gong. I felt faint and I got up to open the living room window, to breathe some cold air. As I stood at the window, struggling with the catch, I glanced out to the evening street below…

‘It was a different street.

‘And then, in a flash, I knew. This was a different street: it wasn’t Darek’s street and this was not Darek’s flat. Unknowingly, I had got off the bus at the wrong stop. Unknowingly, I had run through the rain into the wrong block of flats. Unknowingly, I had contrived with Darek’s key to open the shoddy lock to the wrong flat.

‘Such relief. But my understanding of my patients was changed utterly.’

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 Visionary Librarian by Michael Bloor

(first published in The Copperfield Review, February 6th 2018)

January 1st, 1781. I do not fully know my reasons for setting down this record of past events. I have studied the works my great contemporary, David Hume, and I therefore no longer cleave to the kirk and to the faith of my fathers. Yet the purging of what others call my soul, penitence, and the striving for a moral life, they all remain a habit with me. Furthermore, I have a strong presentiment that I shall not live out this winter. These days of bitter chill may be my last opportunity to reveal my hidden crime and to state my case, not to the Maker in whom I no longer believe, but perhaps to my better self – the self who always seeks but never finds, who can carefully shape a principle but cannot always live by it. If others should find this manuscript after I am dust, may they read it and know that even a puir body can try to do his duty.

I have taught the school in the parish of Inverallan for thirty seven years and I trust I have discharged that duty honourably, though no Inverallan weaver’s or ploughman’s bairn has joined the ranks of David Hume, Adam Smith, William Robertson, and William Fergusson – the Philosopher-Kings of Edinburgh and all Europe. However, the Inverallan dominie has a further duty yet – a duty greater, I believe, than that of schooling the Inverallan bairns – I refer to my duty as Keeper of the Books. A hundred years since, the Inverallan laird bequeathed his library of two hundred volumes (together with a respectable sum for their upkeep) as a free library to all men and women who wished to borrow them. When the old minister, Mr MacKellar, informed me of my appointment and showed me the library that was to be in my charge, I could conceive of no duty under the sun that could be more pleasurable. I was not to ken then the rue that would come to me.

In the early years of my charge, Inverallan and the surrounding parishes were in a sorry state. The laird had declared for Prince Charles Stuart, and when the laird is for a cause then the tenants have little choice but to follow. Two score of men had marched off with the laird, my elder brother Alexander among them. Only three lads limped home. At first, we had good news of Alexander. It seemed that he had distinguished himself in the field at Preston Pans and, when the laird fell ill and was left behind in Edinburgh, Alexander took charge of the laird’s men on the march into England. On the retreat from Derby, Alexander was detailed to be part of the garrison the Prince left in Carlisle. After that we heard nothing. Cumberland’s army marched through our parish on their way to Culloden: they fired the laird’s castle and drove off all our cattle and our remaining horses.

It was in February 1752, a time of want and bitter cold, that I had more news. In the late evening there was a tapping at my window, but the pane was so frosted over that I could not see out. I took up my lantern and opened the door. A tall figure, muffled in a cloak stood before me. There was a bright moon, but his face was shadowed by his hat.

‘They tell me our parents are both dead.’ It was Alexander. I dropped the lantern; we embraced.

I fed him some porridge and spirits and studied him as he ate and drank. To my surprise, he seemed hardly changed, for all his seven-year absence. Only his rich, travel-stained clothes spoke of a difference. He told me bits and pieces of his story: it seemed that in the ’45 several men had died at his hands; more recently, he been in France in the service of the Stuarts, but Scots were no longer welcome there; he had used the last of his money to pay the ‘freetraders’ (as the smugglers are commonly called) to land him near Kirkcaldy; he had travelled to Inverallan only by night, there being a price on his head. But rather than talk over-much about himself, he had the charming ability to draw out the talk of others:

‘Well, Jamie lad, you’re quite the scholar now. I see on the table that “Lock’s Works” is your present study eh?’

‘Philosophy is only one of the subjects to be found in The Free Library, Sandy. There are books on geography, history, theology, and mathematics, translations of Ovid and Virgil, maps, collections of sermons…’

‘Yon is a strange conceit, is it not? to make a pile of your books, some of them doubtless worth a year of our faither’s labour. And then offer them up to any passin’ ploughboy that has a fancy for them?’

‘Each ploughboy, as you put it, must sign for each volume that he borrows. But Sandy, I don’t think you’ve grasped the wonder of the thing. They come here from their fermtouns and weavers’ cottages, limbs stiff after a hard day’s labour, walking miles through the sleet and the glaur. They carry back with them Shakespeare’s Sonnets to read by the ill light of their cruisie lamps. And that is their taste of Rhenish wine and honey cakes, their bed of goose down, their transport to Samarkand. With a book in his chapped hand, every ploughboy is an equal of the Duke of Argyll and the Marquis of Breadalbane. This free library is a growing light in a dark world, Sandy.’

‘Pish, Jamie. Your ploughboy is a duke’s equal (mention not that damned Argyll to me) in the alehouse, wi’ a tankard in his hand and a maid on his knee. What need of books, when you’ve left the schoolroom?’

In my eagerness to convince Alexander, I fetched the Borrower’s Register to show him. As he turned the pages, he murmured: ‘Well, well, Andra Comrie borrows Abercrombie’s Sermons. I thought him dead on the field at Falkirk.’ He turned to me: ‘Jamie, I have need to borrow a pile of your books… Indefinitely.’ I stared. ‘There’s a bounty on my head. I know of a vessel at the Broomielaw in Glasgow that will carry me to a new life in the Carolinas. For a price. Your books are as good as ready currency.’

My elder brother faded before my eyes and a simulacrum took his place. The brawling spirited lad I had idolised and run after was vanished like snow off a dyke. Now before me was the callous gallant who had left his parents to fret and go to their graves thinking him dead on a battlefield, who had fawned and intrigued for place and favour in foreign courts, and who had only returned briefly to his native Scotland to profit from, and ruin, his brother’s position of trust. Worst yet, he would pillage the free library – the library that is, and should remain, a hope and consolation in a wretched world.

Every schoolroom is a stage for the dominie to strut and strike a pose. It was now my turn to dissemble and fall in with Alexander’s plans. We made up his bed, despite his faint protestations (‘I’m an old campaigner, Jamie – the heather has oft times been bed enough for me’) and fixed that he would stay hidden with me the next day, departing in the dusk with his booty of sixteen books (more than he needed for his fare, I’ll warrant).

That next day, I watched him take the less-frequented moorland road. I marvelled at how he hardly bent his back, shouldering the coarse linen sack of books. When he was past the castle ruins, I grabbed my hat and walked over to the manse, to beg the loan of the minister’s mare (I was still a communicant in those days and a member of the kirk session). I then took the military road to Stirling. I had slow progress over the half-frozen snow and dawn was breaking when I reached Stirling Brig. Mares’ tails of mist were twisting over the River Forth, which Alexander had to cross to gain the Glasgow road. I had the Brig sentry call up the Sheriff’s Officer, an old pupil of mine, to whom (in confidence) I told my tale.

After resting the horse, I turned for home and only heard the end of the story a week later. Samuel Haldane, the Sheriff’s Officer, came by to return the linen bag of books. I sat him down at the fireside and poured him a glass. He told me that Alexander, as he’d surmised, had been too canny to try to cross the brig: Haldane had put a concealed watch on the upstream ford and his men had taken Alexander there by surprise. However, as the party were marching back to Stirling, Alexander had slashed at one man with a concealed dirk, broken away and ran for the river. Whether the pursuers’ musketry had been successful, or the cold of the river had overcome Alexander, Haldane was unable to say, but Alexander’s body was seen to be borne away by the current, down to the sea.

Haldane could see that his news had pierced me. He rose and laid a hand on my shoulder: ‘Mr Robertson, your brother Alexander was well-kent in all this countryside from Stirling to Crieff, even before The Rebellion. He was too wild a man for these New Times.’

Though Haldane’s words were some comfort to me, mine is nevertheless the sin of Cain. But I did not commit fratricide merely to repossess a bag of books. Rather, I would claim that I sinned for a great principle, the principle of free knowledge. I have served that principle (not always constantly, but as best I can) for thirty seven years. And, if I could still pray, I would pray that the light of Inverallan library would shine out across all Scotland and the whole wide world.

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).

Fermain Bay by Michael Bloor

(first published in The Flash Fiction Press, January 5th, 2017)

(Ed note–We are ecstatic to welcome Mick Bloor back for another week; come back through this Saturday and we believe that you will like him as much!–LA)

A routine visit to the town library with my daughter. My pedagogic overtures rejected, I drift over to a display of new books. A shock: the photo on the dust-jacket of a book about the Channel Islands. It’s Fermain Bay, Guernsey. For years, I carried in my wallet just such a photo, taken from among the headland pines on a day of luminous light, looking down into the narrow sandy bay. On the dust-jacket, I can just make out tiny, scattered deck-chairs, once my summer-long responsibility.

The things you forget. The great Martello Tower, built to dominate the beach and deter Napoleon – forgotten. A mere stone obstacle to be skirted on journeys between my deck-chair store and Ginny’s beach café. An historic monument rubbed out and Ginny’s brown eyes and deft movements given Conservation Area status. The things you remember: our first kiss, when I couldn’t stop my knees trembling; how the smell of the pines gradually gave way to the smell of the sea on morning walks to work; the taste of fresh Guernsey milk. And there’s the bad stuff too: the café break-in when all the fags were stolen and the owner blamed me; my night at the police station – a brief episode, but a lasting after-taste of how it is to be the bewildered outsider, the stranger deemed suddenly to be the enemy. That summer was my passage into adulthood, backlit by the ‘vision splendid’ of childhood, but treading step-by-step into Man’s Estate.

Thirty-odd years have passed since that library visit, just as twenty-odd years had stretched between my Guernsey days and my discovery of the dust-jacket. A strange exercise, to sit and recall the time when the memory of Fermain Bay engulfed me like an incoming tide – the memory of a memory.

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).

From The Saragun Gazette: Dear Daisy

(Ed. Note–Today, from the Saragun Gazette, I present the most popular feature, Dear Daisy. Daisy Kloverleaf is somewhat no nonsense with her beseechers. In fact, from observation, I must conclude that every one of her missives ends with the same advice. Still, again from observation, I conclude it to be sound advice–LA)

Q: Dear Daisy,

I am sad because I am a lovelorn and lonesome lost soul. My friends tell me that there is someone for everyone, and being that I possess a wonderful personality, it might take a little more time for God to send me that perfect love match. People also tell me to turn that frown upside down, be a citizen of SaraCAN Springs and not to accept wood coins in matters of commerce.

Do you, wise Daisy, have further advice? It seems that God is taking a very long time to answer my prayer.

Yours truly, Desperate Doolie.

A: Dear Desperate

It sounds like you are bankingly banking on your “wonderful personality” to bringly bring true love. And I will wager that where looks are concerned your best feature is your “wonderful personality.” Money can erase a lot of problems here, but rich people do not send letters that arrive with postage due, so I guess we can rule that out. The good news is you will not have to sift through the shallow element but there won’t be much “Plan B” either.

Regardless, since you let the cliches of others direct your life to the pointly point you must ask a ten pound herbivore for advice, I think it is for the best that you should fail to reproduce. Consider it as givingly giving back.

Dame Daisy

(Ed. Note–I forgot to mention that Daisy is an adverb junkie. But I guess you have probably figuredly figured it out by now–LA)

The Photography of Christopher J Ananias Part One

Earlier this week, Christopher published three stories on the Springs, which included his own photography. Christopher has generously provided this site with many of his pictures, which we will share five at a time, one per month, because, as the cliche goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. On some servers the pictures might touch. If I knew what to do about that you wouldn’t be reading this sentence, now would you?–LA


Bedpan by Christopher J. Ananias

(Wonderful image provided by the author)

Little Marco stood by his mother and they looked at the old man in the bed. Marco wished he would die already, but he refused. His grandfather gurgled and farted, reaching out with an age-spotted claw, “Grr-Grrrr.”

“Oh, geez.” His mother’s mouth went thin and white. Marco stepped back and didn’t want to be in the room, but Marco was in training.

“When the old bastard makes that noise and farts, especially when he farts. Get the bedpan and put it under his ass.” His mother grabbed the pot. She pulled down the blanket. He was naked from the waist down. Marco looked away. “Watch!” She lifted one flabby leg and bent the knee then the other, and slid the cold bedpan under his ass. The old man’s penis started twitching and rising in a bush of yellowed white pubic hair. “Just ignore his thing and make sure he doesn’t push the bedpan out and shits the bed. That’s what he wants to do. He wants to make everything as hard as he can on us.” The old man smiled showing his toothless gums and looked evilly conscious for a moment. His eyelids fluttered in pleasure over washed-out blue eyes. Dead fish eyes. Then the smell hit Marco, and he ran out of the room.

“Why do I have to do this? I don’t want to do this?” He wiped at the tears on his face. She stormed out and slammed the bedpan on the kitchen counter, splashing urine, roiling the turd.

“Dump that into the toilet.” His mother towered over him. Marco was only a small seven. He reached up and took it with unsteady hands holding the sloshing stinking metal away from him and walked toward the bathroom. When he got back. His mother was getting all painted up for a night at BIG DADDY’S. She wore her stripper clothes under a blue and white Adidas striped sweatsuit, like some kind of basketball star.

When she left, Marco got hungry and went to the kitchen and put a pan of hamburger stew on the gas stove. He turned it on, but it only clicked after he turned it on high. Gas stunk up the kitchen. Then he remembered to put it on IGNITE. Whoosh, the flame lit. Marco studied the flame and had an epiphany. He got the Red Devil barbecue grill lighter and switched off the child-proof button. He lit every curtain in the tiny house. The flames climbed quickly. He held his nose and lit the piss-stained sheet hanging under the comatose old man. His mother had smashed Oxycontin pills into his gruel of Cream of Wheat and Gerber baby carrots. Marco almost got trapped but ran out the door when the flames caught the couch, chairs, plants—everything. Whoosh! The scorching heat pushed him like a giant gas stove burner. WHOOSH!

Marco stood outside, telling the big fireman how his mother left the stove burner going and he was home alone with his beloved grandfather. He hoped Grandad was OK. His eyes were like big sad brown saucers. Now he could go live with his Dad.

#

Everything looked wonderful. All the things Marco the fledgling firebug, murderer, and traumatized boy could ever want. His mother’s prison was way down in Rockville, Indiana, so he wouldn’t see her again, which made him sad in a way that baffled him.

His dad was a big guy who wore flannel shirts like Paul Bunyan. Marco wasn’t sure about him…His father’s voice was very strong and Marco thought he might get mean like some of his mother’s guests from “BIG DADDY’S.”

He showed Marco around the house. They went to the top of the stairs. “This is your room.” It had everything. A bed that looked like Captain Hook’s ship. A night light with Micheal Jordan slamming a basketball into a hoop. He had video games and even a Daisy “Red Ryder” BB-gun sitting in the corner which fascinated him to no end. EVERYTHING.

They left the room but didn’t go downstairs. They walked down a long dark hall that smelled like medicine. His father said, “I want you to meet someone.” A terrible dread came over Marco. “Say hello to Grandma, Marco.” The voice sounded stern like Marco’s Mother’s.

Marco said in a sour voice, “Hello, Grandma.” The room smelled like the blue porta potty at the park. The old woman was smiling like she had a big toothless surprise for Marco. He saw the same faded dead fish eyes of his Grandfather’s, that didn’t see, but did. The old woman let out a long complicated and terrible smelling fart that sounded like a baby elephant, lost in the tall grass, trumpeting for its mother. The smell rose like a brown fog.

Marco’s father pulled down the sheet, and she was naked from the waist down. Her bony legs sprang wide open like she was ready for the business.

“I’ve got a little job for you Marco. Grab the bedpan.”

THE END

Matchboxes, a Bomb, and Bleeders by Christopher Ananias

(Image provided by Christopher Ananias, a fine fine Hawk)

The explosion happened around the time Danny and his long-haired buddy Jay Michaels turned my stingray bike into a chopper. They added aluminum tubes to the front forks. I was pretty cool, peddling the town, kicked back like Peter Fonda in “Easy Rider.” I don’t know if Dad still lived at home or not? It was so long ago.

The bomb exploded three houses up a grassy alley from our house. Sound travels in strange ways, especially in one’s memory. It bounced off the elementary school bordering Baker Street, like all the kids hung their pigtails and buzz cuts out the windows and shouted, “Boom!”

I don’t recall any sirens or groups of people with hands to their faces saying, “Oh my God!” Not even a teenager smiling, saying, “Fuck me.”

The day of the explosion was warm. I was outside, playing with Matchbox cars. Matchboxes were a big thing, bigger than marbles and jacks.

I remember in second grade whipping one of those chunks of steel at Mark on the shiny gym floor. The matchbox skipped off his hand and hit him in the mouth. I froze—all the fun—gone. He was a hemophiliac. The principal warned us to be careful around Mark. A big handlebar mustache said, “He’s a Bleeder.”

Mark grabbed his mouth, and nothing happened. Just like every other time he fell or got slammed into, everyone held their breath for the unstoppable river of blood that never came. Mark seemed unaware of his condition, hanging upside down on the monkey bars and tackling people.

The season of the explosion was during summer vacation. When Danny and his friends were building tree forts, turning bikes into choppers, and someone made a bomb.

The explosion came from the largest house of the richest people in town. This house had pointed green gables and a conical tower on one end, like some kind of Dutch architecture. Later, all grown up at ten, on my paper route, I stared at it from Jefferson Street. The stigma of death must have turned off the sunshine, because it always seemed gloomy.

There was a lot of speculation around town…

“The bomb bout rattled my windows out! I knew those boys were up to no good!” said old Mrs. Pearson. She spoke to Darrel at the Mobile gas station, beside the post office.

“Tom, did you hear how he looked?” shouted Ken from the sunny porch. Tom and Ken were best friends.

“No, did you?” Tom stood flat-footed on a yellow three-speed by the fire hydrant.

“I heard, it blew the top of his head-”

“-Be quiet about that, Kenneth!” interrupted his mother from the screen door, always catching him.

“Sorry Mom… Tom, you wanna skateboard at the bank parking lot?”

“Yeah, let’s go!”

It circulated that the richest boy in town made the bomb. Others said it was a disastrous chemistry set experiment. A chemistry set that says, 16 AND UP. I had two competing images in my mind. I thought he was a mad bomber, then a scientist in a white lab coat. The town Marshall, an old guy named Milt, who also drove a school bus, didn’t arrest anyone. Not even “Pop Bottle” Pete who lived down by the railroad tracks.

Life does what it does, and I graduated from the fifth grade to the big scary middle school on the hill. A new world populated by gargantuan eighth graders who wore leather motorcycle jackets and fucked.

On one little keynote… For a moment, in this shuffling middle school maze, I became a celebrated person. When, in gym class, a wild swing of the yellow wiffle ball bat connected, shooting the wiffle ball over the bleachers. I rounded the bases to home. The big boys cheered! Pete, the tall sandy-haired eighth grader clapped me on the back and said, “Good one you little shit.” He later became my dentist.

#

Mark was with us for a while. A gang of us drank, smoked dope, dropped acid, laughed our asses off, wrecked our parents’ cars and our motorcycles. One unfortunate upper classmate, drinking before, during, and after a warm high school football game took a header off a highway bridge doing 100 MPH—splitting his car in half. This reminded me again of the boy who accidentally blew himself up, years ago on that summer day. Death wasn’t just calling the old folks.

I never saw Mark bleed the whole time. Not even when he stuck up for me when I was drunk and he hit a guy square in the teeth. Mark was a brave dude—probably only weighed 130 pounds.

He spent time in the hospital for his hemophilia throughout school—and out of school in the 80s. “Where’s Mark?” Someone would say, answered with, “Back in the hospital.”

The rivers of blood came. I just never saw them. Sometimes the bleeding is on the inside. When I was nineteen, he started disappearing before my eyes. His Def Leppard and AC/DC shirts looked too big, like heavy metal gowns. He never said what was wrong. Mark had always been skinny, but this was something else…

The day of Mark’s funeral, I rode shotgun, in a strange bubble of isolation with my half-ass friends dressed the same way they always did. I watched the cut down cornfields clipping by, in a sort of fog, riding in Ken’s rusty blue Gran Torino. Drinking warm Budweiser and taking lackadaisical hits off the constant joint. A hand in the bag of Seyfert’s Potato Chips

Ken jumped the railroad tracks at the steep hill by the “Doll House.” Where they sold fishing equipment, bait, and big weird Dolls with human hair on their heads. My ass lifted off the seat! The car crashed like “The General Lee” in “The Dukes of Hazard.” We laughed hard like we used to, but our connections were already coming apart. I was coming apart.

We arrived late at the funeral home with beer on our breath, brushing potato chips off, and stinking of pot. People were upset with us. Mark’s best friends had a role to play.

We lined up by his casket, like deserters who came back to the battle, and walked him to his grave. Then we got back into the Torino and fucked away another day.

THE END

Christopher J. Ananias enjoys wildlife photography. He likes to walk along the railroad tracks, dodging the trains. His work has appeared in Flash Fiction Magazine, Grim and Gilded, Dead Mule of Southern Literature, Literally Stories UK and others.

The Solemn Rules by Christopher Ananias

(Image provided by Christopher Ananias)

(Editor’s note: Today and tomorrow and Wednesday we welcome Christopher Ananias, who is a first rate writer and photographer. Christopher takes a good look at the world and returns with honest first rate prose. His biography appears at the bottom of this post.–LA)

And the words, like a kind of conjuring, brought the ladies from the sheets of rain. Like they all rode together in the same car or dark cloud. One held the door for the other three, as they hurried inside, fine heels clacking, and the door shut. Their perfume and rain drops mingled together, and it was strong and pleasant, but it made Vanda dizzy, thinking of death. A death lay before her.

Vanda stood over Randall and the other three young women gave her a moment. She wore the dark shawl of a mourner. Her companions watched and observed the silent ritual, then they chatted. The conversation became louder, and for a raucous moment, it seemed they had forgotten the solemn rules.

Vanda imagined wearing a black veil. A veil that is reserved for widows, and not young ladies who fall into traps with older married men. She touched the glossy black casket. Her long white fingers looked starkly bright in contrast. The casket felt as though it had sat in a cold basement, instead of a carpeted funeral home with a furnace huffing in its bowels.

She looked at Randall. He looked very attractive to her, and the urge came on strong, and she wanted to climb on top of him. Make necrophiliac love. A moan slipped from her. Did her shopping companions, and confidants, who even accompanied her to the funeral of her adulterous lover, hear that lustful moan? I’m way out of line, thought Vanda. What right do I have to be here? And to think these sick thoughts!

What shoes did he wear? Were they his slick brown office shoes, doubling for—forever shoes? Her fingers pulled at the lower lid and it creaked. She glimpsed his bare white toes and dropped it with a thump! The jarring acrid taste of fear turned in her stomach. What am I doing?

Vanda looked over at the window and the water streamed down in cold beads. She could see the drab cars on the street. They were in a certain order, except for one. Her flashy red sports car, which they crowded into. It looked impossibly bright, and beautiful, somewhat like her own flashing beguiles of full lips, white teeth, and shapely aerodynamic curves. And wrong. It looked too fast, drop your pants without underwear fast, too ritzy, among the subdued and stoic Nissans and Toyota Camrys.

She could feel the fear of being outed, out of decency, out of my mind, you’re out-of-order, Miss! She watched the rain bead down the window, and in the gray light, her body became as still as the corpse in the casket. Who died, in a sudden cardiac arrest, riding a stationary bicycle with a blown heart to eternity. She thought again, what am I doing here?

Vanda had lived for two years in the shallow grave of discovery. Randall claimed his wife went on sniff and fluid patrols and dug through his clothes, and scanned his phone looking for traces of the other woman. Her.

Randall, the handsome sandy-haired accountant with designer glasses had the exact answers to the balance sheet of adultery. He would stand in his underwear, his flat 41-year-old workout stomach with a hint of a six-pack on view. Vanda watched his rituals still nude from her fluffy and deeply comfortable bed. He rolled the lint remover over his office clothes. “Look Vanda, that’s a long one.” He showed her the roller. A long blond hair, matted against the sticky surface, doing two laps. “Penny would go apeshit if she found that one! She’s got her Dad’s old Walther Pistol too…”

Sometimes as they lay in the afternoon sun. His phone would chime, sending ice sickles up Vanda’s spine. WIFEY lit up in red letters on the large iPhone screen. It was an invasion of her inner sanctum. Her sanctum of them. She watched his cool fingers typing with the energy of a man that has his cake and has just got done with it too, and might have another piece.

Randall had a second phone for their relationship. A cheap burner like he was a drug dealer clocking out by the concrete blocks on South Street. The relationship revolved solely around his time schedule. Vanda knew her friends thought she was a fool, as she dialed each one after some broken plan.

The Colts game became one that got seared into her primal cortex. Vanda saw Randall and his family on TV in the stands! Randall’s arm is around his dark-shiny-haired wife, wearing a blue Colts jersey on her buxom chest. She looked strong and beautiful and Vanda was afraid of her. Afraid of her righteousness, and that gun. Randy Jr. sat basking in the light of his loving parents that was as real as her own misery. She got all of this from one little eye-popping pan of the TV camera that landed on Randall.

Randall’s little boy whom she heard about a million times, added a dark layer of guilt to this adulterous cake. Vanda felt like she was committing attempted murder against the fable of his happy family.

She looked out the window again in the foggy gloom ever so fitting for a funeral. The widow and little Randy Jr. came up the sidewalk, and Vanda slipped out a side door, where several shiny caskets waited on biers like boats for the river Styx. Her three friends got a group text. “Meet me outside.”

And the words conjured them into a downpour and into the red sports car with a cat emblem on the hood. Packed to the ceiling, with four beautiful babes, cascades of shiny wet hair, sleek young arms dripping on the door panels, and shiny shaved legs in skirts cocked up into the dash and bald knees pushed into the back of the seats. Their voices were full of exclamations and laughter like they came from the sunshine of good times instead of a rainy funeral parlor.

#

Later that evening Vanda laid on her sumptuous bed in her Randall-less boudoir, and dialed Randall’s widow, WIFEY. Unbeknownst to each other they were at that very moment each, smelling one of Randall’s dress shirts. The phone rang three times. Vanda thought, What am I doing? I don’t have any right to call her. I’m way out of line. Something rekindled inside her like the excitement of the affair.

“Hello,” WIFEY sounded perfect to Vanda. Like a strong, complete woman.

Vanda raised up, dropping the shirt on her naked waist, covered in Randall’s scent, and said, “I-I.”

“Who is this?”

“I found your dog, the uh, black Yorkie.” Vanda felt like she was reading a line from a terrible play, which she mostly forgot.

“We don’t have a dog.”

“I found little Randall’s dog. The black Yorkie. His name is…uh,” Vanda glanced around the room landing on the blank TV screen. “His name is Sanyo.”

“I told you we don’t have a dog.” Then the phone went silent. “Did you say my son’s name?”

“He’s a good little dog, Randall Junior will miss him.”

“It’s you isn’t it? The whore.”

“Sanyo wants to come home. Please let me bring him to you and Randall Junior.”

“I saw your little red sports car outside the funeral home.” Her voice rose. “How dare you? You have no boundaries. You filthy whore!”

“Sanyo loves little Randall, very-very much. Please.”

“Look I’m going to say this so you can understand. If you come near my house or Randall Junior. I will blow your fucking head off. I might anyway.” WIFEY dropped the phone and jammed Randall’s shirt into a trash sack lumped with his other clothes.

“But what about the reward?” said Vanda into the dead air. Then she masturbated.

THE END

Christopher J. Ananias enjoys wildlife photography. He likes to walk along the railroad tracks, dodging the trains. His work has appeared in Flash Fiction Magazine, Grim and Gilded, Dead Mule of Southern Literature, Literally Stories UK and others.

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).