Category: Webzine

Jan Howcroft

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I’m round the back at Earlham Road, throwing a tennis ball against the brickwork on the wall that has no windows, reciting names of vegetables. Mum’s just bought elastic off the market so I’d be in the wash house Chinese-skipping, if I could, but she’s scrubbing the wash house floor and doesn’t want me trailing muck. I need to wee.

By the outside toilet there’s a white hydrangea that’s taller than me; it rained last night so when I lift the latch and push the door, water trickles down my neck. I leave the door ajar.

The walls have been distempered but the damp’s come through and there are things you just don’t want to see like spiders in the corners and the empty husks of houseflies in the webs. Grey light enters through a tiny window level with the garden, high up on the right. Outside, you can see it just above the ground.

While I sit there on the wooden seat, I hear my father digging, his sharp blade cutting into the earth. He’s going to put potatoes in. The Izal roll is damp. When I’m done, I pull the metal chain and run.  

I go to see how many spuds my dad’s put in and if he needs my help. The forsythia’s out. There’s a robin on the handle of his spade, waiting for worms. Dad’s buried the potatoes and is making furrows with a stick for beans.

‘Ugh! What’s that,’ I say, pointing at a long brown object on the earth, about the size of my little finger.

‘Don’t know,’ he says. He picks it up and turns it over in his hand. It sticks to his skin. He drops it on the concrete slab and grinds it underfoot.

‘Don’t touch it,’ he says.

For a while I practise handstands on the grey-green garage door, but I can’t stay up for long so instead I balance on the wall outside the greenhouse. Inside are dad’s geranium cuttings. If Diana was here, we’d be running our obstacle course – flicking cardboard off a jam-jar to let the sixpence fall inside, or double-skipping on the driveway – but she’s in France. I’m going to see if I can climb the apple tree.

It’s getting cold but I’m hanging on till Dad’s gone in because I want to know what the weird thing is. I can see it from my tree branch lying in its slimy stain beside the gooseberry bush.

I don’t want to touch it so I get two twigs to prise the thing apart. It’s not easy because what was round is now flat but eventually, I succeed. Then I wish I hadn’t, because you can’t un-see a thing: that the wings are bruised and shredded; that someday soon it would have been a butterfly.

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Jan Howcroft lives in Essex. She started writing when she retired. Since then, she has produced a wide variety of short stories and flash fiction and her work has been shortlisted in several national writing competitions.

Daevid Glass

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One twilit morning late in August, mere weeks after the Curiosity rover landed on Mars to look for evidence of alien life, alien life landed on Earth for the only time in the planet’s history.

It plopped onto a pavement in residential north Oxford, plunging to its demise from the skies.

It had the texture of a starfish with the plumpness of an overripe mango and was curled in on itself like a human foetus. It went unnoticed until a lurcher sniffed it during a morning walk. The dog found it uninteresting and moved on to a musky lamppost.

Half an hour afterwards a sparrow had a go at it, nibbling off a morsel here and there, but the bird soon gave up and sat squat and puffed up beneath a sickly elm.

Later, a passing child kicked it rolling into the unseen shade beneath a hedgerow. By sunset the flies had seen it off.

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Daevid Glass reverse-engineers morsels of reality and extracts their meaning, injecting this concentrate into carefully assembled words and hoping for a positive outcome. This process began when, as a child in Essex, a school teacher asked him to write a poem about a rocket launch. He hasn’t stopped writing since. He lives in Oxfordshire and is working on his novel, Resuscitating God. Find out more here.

Shirley Hilton

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Her mother asked, “What do you plan to do now?”

“Take up lots of space,” she replied.

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Shirley Hilton writes in multiple genres, never knowing which she is creating until the words appear on the page, and at times not even then. She is also an accidental lyricist for award-winning Jazz musician Ryan Middagh. Her writing has most recently appeared in Backchannels, Cedar Valley Divide, and Lyrical Iowa.

Eleanor Silk

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When Hob the baker’s son whispers that the cows speak to him, I tell him to stay far away from Madam Thistle and that bloody tavern of hers. It’s not right. 

He’s not been right for days. It’s to be expected; his wife’s having their third and it’s not been smooth sailing according to him. I tell him to pray, but mostly because I don’t want to broach the subject any more than he does. Me and Maggie are expecting our first, and the last thing we want is any bad luck. 

“A stone, Mik,” he gasps, “a stone… red as anythin’, right there in the middle of the milk pail…” 

Can’t understand the man. Too much mead and too many humours, I decide. I offer him some leeches, you know, draw the bad blood out. He shakes his head and says they tell him they’re suffocating. 

I avoid him for a bit, but a few days later I’m out in the field and every man and his wife are running down into the square. Curious, I follow, and Hob’s there, writhing. Everyone’s gathered around him, and there’s some kids hovering, pebbles in hand.

He’s brick red and screaming, screaming as if he’s been set alight. There’s some crows circling, and I swear they’re laughing; their cries mingle with the kids’ braying as I prop Hob up and drag him off. There’s blood down his chest where he’s smashed his face into the ground.

I clean him up, and hand him over to the farthest inn I can find, one where the news hasn’t yet reached. God, I’ve never seen a grown man cry like that before. He kept looking at me, not really looking, because his eyes weren’t right. They were all funny, all dead-looking. He kept saying ‘red’ but it wasn’t really the word, more a long, agonising groan.

I’ll be taking him to the church-house tomorrow to speak to Father. Goodness knows where his wife’s got to. Or their little ones. He sobbed that they’ve left him, but I just can’t believe that. I give a bit more to the beggar outside the inn today as penance. Lord protect me from whatever’s rattling on inside his head. 

I eat my last meal quietly. The dog keeps giving me looks. Strange creatures they are; my old man reckons they know exactly what’s going on. I sleep soundly, waking up alone as I suppose Maggie’s gone to milk the cow. Don’t know why she won’t let me do it, it’s not long until the kid’ll be born and all that bending can’t be doing her any good. The dog licks my hand, reminds me gently that Maggie’ll be wanting eggs again for breakfast. I stumble into the chicken coop, and listen to them all chastise me for waking them. 

I feel my hand curl around the eggs, and jump back. Nestled among them is a warm red stone, red like the setting sun, red like old blood. 

“Not a good sign, that,” sighs a fat hen to my right.

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Eleanor Silk has previously been published in literary journal Strukturris, and is currently working on her first fantasy novel. Most days she can be found knitting, baking and blogging.

Annabel Banks

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She knows it will be a boy, because she eats blue fruit; blueberries, yes, but also plums, served with aubergine and dusty, dark grapes, while she soaks the stiff red cabbage and drinks the coloured broth. There are other foods, but no strawberries, or some pinkly perfect peach. While taking her meals, she activates her aggression in controlled circumstances, watching Hollywood movies about women who’ve had enough, feeling the swell of euphoria at each justified killing as they take their third-act revenge.

The blood looked like her cabbages. She licked her lips for more.

In the daytime, she reads articles from hunting magazines and angling periodicals, or the newsletters from sites about cars. She makes new social media accounts and follows large-breasted models, aggressive CEOs, hedge fund managers and tech billionaires, scrolling page after page of their thoughts, manoeuvres, and preoccupations — or at least the ones they allow to slip from their minds to the minds of people like her — eating lunches made of last night’s leftovers, checking the balances of accounts held with high street banks.

It’s not enough. She needs more, so fires a gun, shoots an arrow, harasses women online. Hoodied and heavy-footed, she follows teenaged girls through darkened streets, imagining she can smell the flood of their pheromones, the stink of fear, breathing deeply as she thinks of her body’s delivery system, tiny globules of hormones balancing her blood.

She gave birth. The baby’s passage from womb to world is long, with pain like a guillotine blade, like a punch, like pain from food poisoning or from a torturer being appraised.

Congratulations, they say, on your beautiful child. She looks just like you. Just like you.

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Annabel Banks‘s work can be found in such places as Granta, The Manchester Review, Litro, The Stockholm Review and 3:AM, and has been broadcast by the BBC. Her recent collection of short fiction, Exercises in Control, is available from Influx Press. She lives in London.

Mandira Pattnaik

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in a new normal, is a cauldron. Always boiling. Two souls, okay, two bodies, combined, and put in a two-room apartment next to mine. Conditioned in salt and pepper, between toil and tears. Throw in a spell without work for either, a wailing bundle just too soon. We’re placed on a slow burning stove. If you happen to be here, smell it burning. A recipe failed. The other day, I overheard — their dough just too gooey. They were trying to retrieve bits. Weather turned soon enough, pans and ladles flew; shout and screams echoing back from the walls. I’m mapping out ‘where else’ scenarios, because I need to finish the only project I have at hand. I’ll be thinking out rental budgets while I’m out for a smoke. I hope they know what’s ruined is ruined. Maybe they’ll be adding wine or love; but, I’m sure, the baby will wail still and the man will be shouting more. She’ll try crying; let the whole thing simmer. She’ll be checking for tips/shortcuts, realize there aren’t any. If you’re one of us, you’ll meet her and me at the snaking queue for employment registration at the JFK Library one of these mornings. We’ll all be trying to start all over again. Quickly realize it’s no use. It might not be the worst yet.

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Mandira Pattnaik writes short fiction and poetry. Recent publications include Splonk, Panoplyzine, CabinetofHeed, Lunate, BrilliantFlash and Spelk. Twitter: @MandiraPattnaik.