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These little suckers I rhyme too much. Despite my best efforts, words bend over. Touch each other. Hold hands. One syllable slyly slides into another. Bumpy bits sticking. Fricking. Hell. I start out all aim-ful, side glances. Soft almosts. Whispery drones of meaningful bees. On their knees vomiting up. Abomin- ations. Transmogrification. Too much and too loud. No one wants this. By all means, open a vein. But don't be naïve. I started this year saying, I'd be more chill. I lasted all of ten minutes. I thought I might die. The second language washing over me is sunset The second language washing over me is sunset. I am out of sight of land. Undertowed and rip-tided. Amused by diving schools of conjugations. Drift net thready. Talk to me in shallow dolphin-tries. Slick eels and lion manes gleaming. Rough-hewn boats. Push off from port. Tickles now for passage. Everyone's frothing. Dropping sea glass offerings. Mouths beyond imagining. Oh my, my—o'er head eyes. Billionaire wide. Once more the revolution scuppered. Le Moustier's successors construction is done for today, hoarding fence precarious gravel tarps rustle under stoic boulders from the last ice age worker bees hulk buzz-less, barbs-up snow settling in every vinyl crevasse, dropped tool stillness awaits excavation urgent orange stalagmites take the hits a solitary garbage bag half-filled with shite opens and closes its cavernous mouth every gust a lonesome cry—au secours! il va faire bientôt nuit! pas prêt! pas prêt! Welcome to the half life Welcome to the half life. This point of inflection and subtraction. My instability is common knowledge. Now that you all know here are the questions. Discuss. This feels increasingly un-like my garden. Regardless, tomorrow I will pick up the hoe of displeasure, and till the soil of insubstantial posturings. I may still look the same on the outside. Even maintain the identical weight. But inside, my nuclei are shedding. I am a fragment of what I was. At 50%. That's not dust in the air. Soon. And sooner. I will be something else again. Ren Pike grew up in Newfoundland. Through sheer luck, she was born into a family who understood the exceptional value of a library card. When she is not writing, she wrangles technology and data in Calgary, Canada. http://rpike.mm.st/

Love Has Rules And you can’t change ‘em. I told this to Harley again and again. Been this way forever, I’d say. He’d ignore me, but still I tried. I’d sit him in his favorite chair, all fluffed-up pillows and doilies where the fabric quit. I’d say, Harley you gotta start bringing me flowers. Daisies are my favorite. And you can pick ‘em right out back. He’d start shiftin’ his shifty feet, big chunky boots just waitin’ to walk him back to Loretta. Who I knew all about, and the spell she cast on him. With her flingy hair, her hands as quick as bluebirds. Harley once told me that the first rule of love was to obey your heart and that’s what led him to Loretta. Well, I gave him that, but if he also wanted me, he was gonna have to act sorry. And sorry meant flowers. So I’d ask him on those after-Loretta mornings when he had snuck up into the room pretendin’ he’d been sleeping there all night. I’d say Harley, where the hell are my flowers. He’d just grunt and say, they are busy out back, and that they needed time to grow. Right then I’d remind him that the rules of love say that time has no meaning. How it seems too long when you’re not with the one you want. And that’s when he got up to leave me for the very last time. Days later, at his funeral, I strew his casket with daisies. Nice, big plump ones they sent from the store. I squeezed out a tear but no one believed it. Not Loretta, who is still angry about the stabbing, not the policeman in the corner waiting to take me back to jail, and certainly not the newspaper guy, who named me Crazy Daisy and shook his head when I said I was obeyin the rules of love, and when it’s clear that a love thing is over, you are entitled to a little closure.

Elisabeth stood within the bounds of the cupola and looked out to sea. The storm was beginning to rage full-tilt now, abusive and wretched, making division between the coast and areas inland such that the coast would have mostly water and frozen rain, or at the very least melting snow in abundance, whereas the mountains and plains would bear a resemblance to a solid white counterpane heaped up over numerous indistinct bodies, their purpose in lying so still to be covered not certain, if not rooted in death itself. She’d wished to go with John, she’d asked repeatedly to be taken along on the small, refitted trawler, but he had protested that as he himself knew very little about sailing, he didn’t wish to take her along too and endanger her life as well. It had been clear to all of them, to him and his five brothers, that they had to get out even if a storm was on the way, even if a trawler wasn’t the ideal vehicle for it, and search for the treasure before the McPherson sisters got to it. Elisabeth, in her heart of hearts, had some sympathy for the sisters, Rosalee and Winnie. They were very close in age, in their forties, and knew what they were about, though little it was they shared the tricks of the trade. They were treasure seekers, and what’s more had made a good living at it for about twenty years, give or take. They’d even gone along with a couple of scientific expeditions to recover gold from sunken Spanish ships out in the broad ocean once upon a time, though now they stuck closer in, even sometimes just taking fishing expeditions out for variety. She admired their strength, since she felt she had so little, and somehow for six men to be out on the ocean doing their best to do two middle-aged women out of what they seemed to have more of a traditional right to didn’t sit comfortably with her. But John had researched the matter, had thought he’d located the general area where the Belle Handsome went down fifty years ago, all hands on deck carrying a shipment of illegally acquired gold bullion from Mexico to Venezuela. Since the remains had drifted or been carried by storms just like today’s and, by his earnest calculation, were now in full international waters, anyone could look. The six brothers were determined that legal or illegal, it was theirs for the taking if they could raise it. Only three of John’s brothers were what you might call seaworthy vessels, though John himself was healthy enough at fifty for two men. His two youngest brothers were sickly and spindly in her eyes, and furthermore John and his eldest brother were not sea-going men. They’d been in other people’s speed boats on rivers and lakes, had even taken a turn at steering, but all in all, Elisabeth considered the whole venture at best a waste of time, and at worst a threat to life and limb. She’d wanted to go with John in good weather, but when it was clear that they were planning to ship in the middle of such a hell broth, she desisted from persuasion, and let John talk her into staying home instead. Elisabeth squinted and peered, finally holding the binoculars up to her eyes, as the spy-glass on the cupola of the small period house she and John had bought was busted right out and they had never repaired it. She saw something bumping furiously up and down on the waves in the distance over to the left, but it didn’t look as large as even the small trawler had on going out. The sleet and snow were making it hard for her to see, but yes, there was something dark on the waves, getting short shrift from the pounding of the sea and the relentless pissing down of precipitation. Heaven wasn’t a word for it when it released such evil torrents of white death. Yes, it was a small raft, or a side of ship waste, and as it drew closer, she saw that there were three indistinct figures clinging to it, anyhow clinging, alive enough to know that they were desperately near to death, but not able to strike a bargain with the elements, instead just riding it out. Should she wait, or go down to the shore? The ocean billowed up once in a huge wave as they drew nearer, and they went under. Finally awakened to the reality of it all, she gasped like a baby just spanked for the first time into awareness, and turned and raced down the steps and out of the house, in her haste leaving the door open behind her. It hardly even mattered who they were, they might be people, still alive. Elisabeth strode as far as she could get into the surf without getting washed away, and after a scene of desolate, empty ocean, the tiny scrap of metal and plastic bobbed up into view again, the three yet holding on. They were nearer to her now, and she called to them, not even knowing what she said, perhaps “Halloo, halloo!” to let them know if they could but paddle a little, she with even her small strength might be able to help retrieve them. The rest was phantasmagoric, but when they drew nearly abreast and she pulled as well as she could to drag them towards shore, avoiding the jagged edges of the non-wooden fragment they floated on, she saw it was John and the two sisters. The three women struggled and managed to pull themselves towards where the pale sand lay covered with white. At the last minute, John’s left wrist, tied to something under the slab of material, started to tug the other way, into the water, nearly rolling him off. Elisabeth, using all her might, grabbed at it and unwound it from his arm; it was a wet sack, with something very dense and heavy in it. Elisabeth looked at her husband’s face, as pale as she had ever seen it, his hair stringing wild as seaweed over his face and collar. Her eyes happened to meet Winnie’s eyes, which rested on the bag. With a sudden intuition of what was in it, she grabbed it, waded backwards towards the shore, and slung the one bar of gold they’d managed to retrieve angrily and full force against the wind and the ocean’s depredations. John’s eyes were closed; he was alive, but so barely that he had not only not missed the bag, but he hadn’t seen her throw it. Catching Winnie’s eye again, and then Rosalee’s, she gestured freely towards the bounty of the shoreline, where the bag had hit a huge boulder and fallen, harmlessly wedged into a crack in the breakwater. “Are you sure?” asked Winnie, as the two women helped her pull the wrecked fragment with John still half-conscious on it onto the soft and treacherous safety of land. “You saved him, didn’t you? Could I do less for him, for you?” she answered furiously, knowing that if John had sought some form of dry-land treasure, done something more productive with his time than going into an ocean and coming out without his brothers, that she too might’ve had money to burn. “That we did,” confirmed Rosalee, pinching her nostrils to with her finger and thumb, and blowing snot and effluvia out, then stooping to rinse her hand in the tide. “Well, then, we’ll retrieve that and be on our way. Unless you need help getting him inside, that is.” Elisabeth gave a firm shake to her head, turning now to the near-corpse of her husband. He was bleary-eyed and reminded her of a dead jellyfish that had washed up on shore, his arms and legs like tentacles extended outward in different directions, his clothes forming wet panels between them. The two sisters were up the beach and gone with their booty before John really stirred. It was then that he saw Elisabeth looking down at him, showed some kind of cognizance, gave a quick glance all around him, then glared up at her, a strange surmise in his eyes. “Did you see anything tied to my arm? A sort of bag? Quick, before it sinks and gets away again. It’s got a gold bar in it.” “No, there was nothing. Just a heavy iron weight, tied to a rope, that had gotten wrapped around your arm and was weighing you down. No gold.” “But I know I had gold! One bar, at least.” “You must have imagined it. You’re lucky to have survived. Your brothers don’t appear to have been so lucky.” “No?” he said, as if indifferent. But the next minute, or perhaps after several minutes, or maybe in the hours after they returned to their small house, their lonely kitchen, their cold fireplace in the front room, where they had to sit with the chill because neither of them felt up to building up the flames, with the electricity off and the storm still endlessly roaring around them in their small shell, he felt something more. And Elisabeth watched him as he put his head in his arms and wept, her own eyes dry from her exhausted strength, as much as she had ever expended at one time for any human being other than herself. Victoria Leigh Bennett. (she/her). Born WV. Lives in Greater Boston area. B.A., Cornell University, M.A. & Ph.D., University of Toronto. Degrees: English & Theater. Since 2012, website creative-shadows.com, articles/reviews mostly on literature. August 2021, "Poems from the Northeast," 334 pp. September 2021, @winningwriters.com. January 2022, @press_roi, x 2. January 2022, @cultofclio. Has written 8 novels & 1 collection short stories, all in search of publisher. Current WIPs, 9th novel, new fiction, CNFs, poetry. Regularly on Twitter @vicklbennett, occasionally on Facebook Victoria Leigh Bennett. Victoria is a member of the disabled community.

Gaffes Will Be The Glory To err is human, to something is divine. I could Google it. But I have a problem with the whole setup. Pit human against divine, it’s obvious: humans lose every time. But where it goes from there—I’ve had enough. The planet would be better without us. Machines can do everything better than humans. Humans are only special in how much we suck. What happened? Why do so many of us hate us enough to believe the world would be better human free? Is being human not enough to console us in our relentless flaws? To err is human? More like to self-loathe is human. Can I plead for healing without accusations of centering humanness, species ranking and whatever else? It’s no wonder we are marching dead on into division, destruction, dystopia. Do we really see no flaws in our plot to mechanize all the things? It’s a plan humans came up with, after all. But mistakes are not gnats to be blotted out. They keep it real. They mean we’re not machines. They give us so many chances to forgive ourselves. To try again. For a species not so contorted with distress, that would be balm. And You Are Free You are not on the runway to the alien faux-oasis architected by dispassionate forces that see the humanity of humanity as the final obstacle. But show your smile to the stranger, offer your hand to a human dying alone, round your arms around one you love, squeeze and you are free. You are not reducible to anything monetizable, you are not shedding data like dandruff. Get close to your fellow humans and you are free. Breathe with no barriers and you are free. It is not (yet) as they say: you are free. When We Have To Calculate Age Age is to object like river is to rock. Age is to time like face is to clock. Age is to goal like rubber is to road. Age is to knowledge like bow is to bowed. Age is to child like penny is to wish. Age is to adult like water is to fish. Age is to habit like lightning is to sand. Age is to perception like marching is to band. Age is to number like raindrop is to ocean. Age is to wisdom like gravity is to motion. Age is to pain like hurt is to rage. Age is to history like age is to age. Age is to dreams like burglar is to theft. Age is to dreams like weaver is to weft. Age is impossible to the very new like age is impossible to all it’s happening to. The Great Glass Party We all want to be surrounded by ravishing. But we are alive in the magic of this world, which is whenever the castle, however the hill. It is time to celebrate that everything is connected. Everything that is still here, everything that is not, whatever the marring, whichever the color, matter matters matter. Life used to be the kind of uncertain that made the alive curious. Paint is real, trees are real, lies are real, singing is real, assault is real, love is real, cats are real, the truth is real, rain is real, bombs are real, hope is, too. Everything was always glass. Time Never Tells The flame from the lavender candle I light for my evening prayers reflects on my window pane in the exact spot where the bare tree is and I get dizzy with awe? horror? panic? at this Moses moment (I get a Moses moment?), which reminds me of the time, a week after I fled thirteen hundred miles from my home state, when a fat-ass fog rolled in and I could see three inches in front of me and I thought it was the rapture and I had been left behind. We don’t have fog where I’m from. Also, I’ve been left out my whole life. Back to my burning-bush moment: I had been praying, praying, praying, praying, praying, praying, praying for a spouse, for good friends, for life purpose, for answers,--a life I could remain present for and then everything stopped--paused, they said--and I was told I had to do what my anxiety but not my soul wanted to do (stay the fuck home and away from everyone) and, for the last half hour, I’ve stared out my window at the tree that never bears leaves and is not actually semi on fire searching for the mute button--Zoom is different every login, right?-- so the construction at the elementary school where all the neighbor kids would be in the Time Before would stop triggering the tinnitus I got from coming up to fast from a wreck dive with my dad in Mexico yesterday, or, no, it was last year or, Jesus, it wasn’t even last decade but the decade before that, when things were definitely not perfect but I was still as-only-the-young-can-be certain that, one day, they would be. Megan Wildhood is a neurodiverse writer from Colorado who believes that freedom of expression is necessary for a society that is not only safe but flourishing. She helps her readers feel seen in her poetry chapbook Long Division (Finishing Line Press, 2017) as well as Yes! Magazine, Mad in America, The Sun and, increasingly, less captured media outlets. You can learn more at meganwildhood.com.

I watched you digging in the doorway piling sod at the rim of the hole until it sat like a small hill in the space between our bedroom and the corridor you turned and spoke across the distance but the pit swallowed your voice we hollowed the earth like this nightly at each of our thresholds bolstering our membranes with liquor and dressing our lips with mourning gowns so many hours spent kneeling beside it tossing our futures in like offerings (Grave, you swallowed them like spit) so bleak we were in your presence and indifference that we failed to see the blooming our gifts had made: the pungent green rising from the depths of our composted hopes. Had we only known the spectacular flame a billion burning dreams can be, or take into account the afterwards: a spring rain mixing with ash and turning to ink.

Bad romance Did she seduce me or did I use her it was hard to say in the throes of our romance to blame her would be unfair after all I picked her from the shelf {and not just once} but what did she expect whispering French words that tasted of long summer evenings beguiling me with foreign scents and full-bodied promises but I was no innocent it was all on my terms from my own amusement or worse in self-pity and so we’d continue around in senseless circles blaming each other Vino and I The pinch I sat on my bed eating toast and drinking tea like a Lord I scrolled freely and breathed deeply but there was a pinch – you might call it that thing that doesn’t allow you to be to relax you see we mothers need time to process recalibrate circle back on all our wrongdoings some call it self-care others survival but that pinch it stings and squeezes whispers “don’t leave us” {I almost wondered if they carried a voodoo doll of me to their grandmother’s and poked me so I couldn’t forget} that pinch is the price it is needing time to eat toast and drink tea but missing them sorely as soon as they leave An aspiring poet from Northern Ireland who dreams of being paid to write poetry from the comfort of her bed. Thankfully, though unpaid, she derives so much comfort from poetry that even if she is never published, she feels a little warmer inside. Mum of two, writing on a variety of subject matters and in a variety of forms, depending on the mood of the day.

Silver unthreatening 6:50 am. this was london. I was 22 – working 12 hour shifts out near chelsea, just down around this new estate by the river. I was there every morning by 6: 45, and the world had the cold tang of cheap apple juice from out of a fridge when you've just woken up and you're thirsty. the grass all as silver- unthreatening as spoons in a drying rack stacked by the sink. I love frosted mornings – loved them then and still love them: the silence of leaves and the eiderdown softness of breezes. one bird in a tree somewhere – a sparrow or some other golfball- sized feather of brown. a heartbeat of motion and shiny-eyed caution, core comfort in bare wood like bone. Bukowski look, I admit it's a weird one and agree he’s despicable – but that doesn't mean there's nothing in the poems and the form of poems. when I read them (which I still do, I can admit, occasionally) I think of nothing else and that is rare – in poetry – to not be reminded. each line means itself, like pencils on a notebook. no self-conscious artistry. no world in conversation. and I'm sorry – I know that it's not any longer fashionable, but that still has value, whatever else it does. and he wasn't a homophobe and wasn't a racist – in the 50s being only misogynist? fucking progressive. but even then – the line lands with such force. it did when I was 15 and it does now as well. the line the line the line. like a corner turned by a beach when the tide swings unexpectedly, turning sand- banks into pooling. With my girlfriend, driving to the Ballymount Asia Food Market, southside of Dublin and just at the N7 junction, two weeks before Chinese New Year from the roadmap, the roundabouts roll off the road, regular as buds on a hedge-stalk. and the road is all dry and all shut dusty offices. the stamped ends of cigarettes. glass that nobody picks up. it's one of those parts of all cities we're in – those that branch from the main roads to places that nobody visits. the occasional magpie – airports and generator stations. a dog going hungry someone drove out and left here. I've been here at some time in each city I've been to – roads ugly as knots from the trunk of a manicured oak. and we turn, see the light brightly red out of windows. and a series of paper lamps, statues of animals up as a called celebration. not to advertise; shoppers here know where it is – it's just what they come here expecting. I love coming toward all this colour from shadowish night-time – a bumblebee walks the inside of a flower. a flame crawls its way over coal. DS Maolalai has been nominated nine times for Best of the Net and seven times for the Pushcart Prize. He has released two collections, "Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden" (Encircle Press, 2016) and "Sad Havoc Among the Birds" (Turas Press, 2019). His third collection, "Noble Rot" is scheduled for release in April 2022.

The neighbour’s cat licks its lips, and mimics a human hello In our bottom of the bag road We are people who see, but are not seen Aerials create shadows, wingless birds, too high to focus on, now they are full stops, scavenging for sentence ends Last summer’s hanging baskets, Shed crisps of leafy dandruff in winter‘s breath, family pictures fade, And curl up on dusty sills Soon we will join them, to sit as pictures on sills And fade like sentence ends, Scavenging memories in the suns of spring spirits that lick forgotten lips, can only mimic a human hello Gavin Turner has been writing poetry and fiction in secret for several years. He lives and works in North West England with his family.

I I think the rooms in my books were amusing moments after I rang it to their ears that there is still a sea of words to stack to the available few spaces. I never fed it's hyena's belly about when I got sick, few months ago that always appear like I was just divorced from the beds that hosted me some few days after I chased life till death made a wink at me. I hung unto my neck what was dragged unto me, neglecting the joy in each day to pace along with time. My bright soul was the opposite of my log of a body, dead and boring couldn't fathom it anymore, I see it needed to get it freedom believing soaring for just a time to the skies is better than treading the path of my body that still lay in the pond of the dark. II I couldn't discern the dream, feeling I was in my pool of my slumber or blindfold that sheathed my eyes till a day, two, and three later when I couldn't carry my legs to call on the doctors for help. I could see my soul looming above my head as my armature body was moved around on a chair fixed on wheels. I was awakened by the fourth pierce of the needle fixed into my pale skin, I felt in me after hours of seeing it retire, the beautiful sunset with my eyes immersed in waters compounded by its lids, it perceives like I'm seeing the last of this red view, for the final time. III Each night I expended with moments then, accounts for 2020 days and more of my ex boring existence, I never believed I labeled best in the past diaries of my life. A pull to the future, I couldn't help but snip your tense line of rules alongside mine I already tore as I fell myself trapped by the walls of bliss, now and then, A decade and more. I find it amusing to see myself in an earth made of y'all peak, shattering heap streak of yours, again, again and again, till I can't await the sun dawn on tomorrow, to demolish the records I carved with my own hands, from my past, for myself, again and again. Oladejo Abdullah Feranmi is a Nigerian-based writer, poet, orator, and veterinary student University of Ibadan. He has been trying to pursue his passion for writing by writing multiple genres. He resides presently in Ibadan, Nigeria where He enjoys reading and writing indoors. He has his works published in magazines and issues outside Nigeria.

My Darling i woke up this forenoon as every thought of you walls around me i turn to the side of the bed in search the sweet wet bouquet of your essence to me, you are that first lotus flower the first that the creator behold and echoed; it is beautiful, the creation you saw the first sunrise of the earth the first night of creation you experienced and the colourless universe had seen it even the silence of the heart you existed my darling i woke up this forenoon the thought of has transcended the rooms the bedroom is echoing loneliness as i had hoped to be with you sooner you who has become like lettuce to me let these moments be memorable as i dance on this floor of echoing loneliness Perhaps Someday, I Will Find A Word To Mourn My Dead Ones' Death. That of my father's disappearance in my hometown like the widow's last coins lost. Maybe I should coin out a word, or I am yet to learn a metaphor with which I would mourn him better after the many years of his name that danced in the East-wind silently as a forgotten song. Or maybe, I should birth for him a lexicon from where his voice, that which went silent in the year 2013, will come back and retell the stories of his life as a father. It is just like what looks as outside his, but what it is, is that which is called brotherly hatred in the care-given undertone and my father walked into the obliviousness of the world; no return as what we used to know him for. Or should I forget about her, she whom I find comfort in her eyes, her voice and her love for an offspring echoes; Janet. She was love in everything she did till that fateful morning when the day became darkened, eyes red as it rained rivers as if, if I cry oceans, maybe the dead will be brought back to life again. She laid down on that bed, pointing to these pictures of Christ Jesus on the walls healing the sick, and she whispered to me; "Son, know thy God and creator, for it is as a duty even as you are becoming a father after your siblings". It was as with a voice muffled in pain in an emptied room she murmured those words to my ears; "Son, go to the school, get your result and return so we could discuss the future". But I came back meeting with a white casket, people gathered in tears and they all echoed in unison, here comes her son who will decide where his mother's remains shall be laid to rest out of this troubled world. This was how I lost my parents when they were yet to tell me about the future, of how to become a man. And the ocean emptied on the rooftop of my grandfather without a remnant. Perhaps, someday I would find a metaphor to carve out their space in the tablet of time and memory. John Chinaka Onyeche "Rememberajc" (he/his) is the author of; (Echoes Across The Atlantic), a husband, father and poet from Nigeria. He writes from the city of Port Harcourt Rivers State, Nigeria. He is currently a student of History and Diplomatic Studies at Ignatius Ajuru University Of Education Port Harcourt Rivers State. John Chinaka can be reached through the following means: Rememberajc.wordpress.com Facebook.com/jehovahisgood Twitter.com/apostlejohnchin Apostlejohnchinaka@gmail.com https://linktr.ee/Rememberajc

Pelvis I’m wiping Mrs. Carleton’s backside when she tells me she has a secret. ‘You won’t believe it,’ she says. I help her to stand, then flush the loo. Every part of Mrs. Carleton is failing. I imagine her bones – her hips and pelvis, all those joints that keep a person together – crumbling to nothing, and I suppose it won’t be long until she’s just that: nothing. I place her with care in her ergonomic armchair. Before I started this job, I thought only pens were ergonomic. Turns out lots of things are ergonomic. The walls of her living room are cream coloured. There are framed pictures of her family on the cabinet, and on the mantlepiece above the electric fire. I wonder how often they visit her; I’ve never seen them, but I suppose they know when I’m here, when to avoid me. I wouldn’t want to walk in on someone wiping Mum’s arse. ‘Sit down a minute,’ she says. ‘You don’t have to rush off straight away.’ I can hear the cistern filling up in the loo. I’m sure it’s faulty. I take a seat on the settee. ‘You’ve heard of Elvis?’ ‘Elvis Presley? Yeah, course.’ ‘He’s my baby daddy.’ I hadn’t expected a phrase like ‘baby daddy’ to come out of Mrs. Carlton’s mouth. A lively smile across her face. ‘My son Jeremy. Conceived, Las Vegas, Nevada.’ She breaks into one of her coughing fits. I’m up, trying to help her, but there’s not much I can do. I fetch a glass of water from the kitchen. She leaves it on the coffee table by her ergonomic armchair. ‘I’ve told him to come around tomorrow morning, about eight, so you can make up your mind.’ ‘Make up my mind?’ ‘About the resemblance,’ she says, her voice croaky. ‘He was very handsome.’ I take off my Sketchers and slump in front of the tele. I watch the regional news. More heatwave coverage, an item about our bid to be named the next city of culture, then sports. Popping holes into the lid of my microwavable lasagne, I wonder if I should say something to my manager about Mrs. Carleton. And say what? That she was pulling my leg? She got a bit confused and thought she’d laid Elvis? Brushing my teeth later on, her lively smile comes back to me. I imagine her laughing at me now, alone in her creamy living room, surrounded by pictures of family she rarely sees. Jeremy is there when I arrive. He stands when I come in. Jeremy is tall, dark, and - there’s no better word for it - handsome. I say good morning to mother and son, feeling terribly formal, old-fashioned, and stilted. I don’t look at her in case she’s smiling at me. In the back of my mind, I try to work out the age gap between Jeremy and me. ‘I’m the son.’ He shakes my hand. ‘Thanks for all this.’ ‘Oh, really,’ I say. ‘It’s nothing.’ ‘It is her job, don’t feel too sorry for her.’ We ignore her comment. I wonder if this eye contact between us – Jeremy and me – means anything. His suit is black. He’s an executive? Taking care of business. ‘I don’t know how you can wear something like that in this heat,’ I say. ‘Scorcher, isn’t it?’ When I say nothing else, Jeremy says he must be going, and before I know it, he’s out the door. ‘He stayed to see you. I told him you were very beautiful and I’m not sure he believed me, so I told him to see for himself this morning.’ ‘You’re right,’ I say, almost to myself, feeling heady. ‘He does have a look of Elvis.’ Tupelo There is Tupelo, Mississippi. But there is another Tupelo, somewhere in the Pacific ocean. On the second Tupelo, it’s Elvis’ sixty-fifth birthday. He lies back in his deck chair, on the beach, and buries his toes into the warm sand. This Tupelo sun sets, so does the sun over Tupelo, Mississippi. They’re red and round and have a pleasing curve to them, he thinks, as his mind wanders from the island to linger over the ocean. He shuts those tired eyes, lolls his head onto its side, so it touches the chair’s soft material, and he slowly brings to mind that teenage truck, which served him well on the interstate – which interstate? Decades gone. He feels well beaten, and now well rested. He gets up and crosses Tupelo. In the house on the west side of the island, he finds a white Gibson with a faux-marble scratchboard. He pulls the instrument down from the wall. It’s heavy. In a brief moment of panic, he wonders if he’ll remember the chords. The Unexploded Bomb Since the age of eleven, I have listened to Hancock’s Half Hour before bed. It’s reached the point where I can only sleep if I’ve listened to an episode. I have a playlist of the stories that send me to sleep the fastest. I have another playlist that seems to encourage dreaming. I see sometimes on social media that lucid dreaming, that sort of thing, is popular. I don’t go in for all that. If I find myself in Hancock’s flat, I stay perfectly still. I have no control over my movement, and I simply exist in his world for the night. The half-hour stretches to morning. I use ‘Sunday Afternoon at Home’ most often. This is the first episode I heard on cassette, aged eleven, just before Dad went away. It’s the one I return to on Sunday nights, when Monday looms. This is going through my head as we leave the taxi. I pay the driver, then follow Felicity to her front door. Felicity says she’ll send me the money for her half of the taxi, but I tell her don’t worry about it, just buy me a drink next time. ‘So, there’ll be a next time?’ She shows me into her home, a terrace house ten minutes from Market Street. ‘Drink?’ She boils the kettle. Her kitchen has just about enough room for said kettle, a fridge, and four hobs. She pours milk first, which is the way I make my tea at home. ‘Sugar?’ No, thanks. She hands me a TARDIS mug. It has an awkward novelty handle. We sit in the living room. The house is how I’d imagined it when she’d described it at the pub. We stay on the sofa a while, fumbling, breaking the tension that’s been building for the last two weeks. Felicity leads me upstairs to her bedroom, where the fumbling develops. Afterward, we’re lying next to each other in her box room. There’s barely enough space for the two of us. I tell her I’ve missed my bus. ‘Stay,’ she says. We talk but eventually it’s time for bed; Felicity has work in the morning, and so do I. ‘You’ve got to be up early for that bus.’ So, she turns off the bedside lamp and we try to sleep. I should be content; the pub was fun, the conversation flowed, she invited me back and gave me tea in a TARDIS mug. But, of course, I can’t sleep. I lie awake. My coat is downstairs in the hall – there’s no way I could creep out of the bedroom and get my earphones from my coat pocket, connect them to my phone, and listen to ‘Sunday Afternoon at Home’ or ‘The Unexploded Bomb’ without her noticing. I turn over and face the wall. It’s past midnight. I imagine the whole street asleep except me. ‘You awake?’ Her voice is startling, I thought she was dead to the world. Felicity turns. ‘There’s something you should know.’ My heart beats faster in anticipation. ‘I can trust you, can’t I?’ It’s such a direct question, I’m stunned. I want to say, of course, because I mean it, I do – and she can. Of course. ‘There’s something I do to get to sleep that’s a bit weird,’ she goes on, in darkness. ‘You know Dad’s Army?’ I make an affirmative hum. ‘I watch an episode before bed, have done since I was a kid. I’ve got them on my iPad. Even when I was a student, coming in after a night out, I’d put one on. Then, out like a light.’ There’s a pause. That’s not weird, I say. I’ve done something similar before to get to sleep. ‘Really? Can I turn on the light?’ I sit myself up against the headboard with Felicity. She gets her iPad from the bedside table, finds one of her favourite episodes to show me. We spend the next half-hour in bed with Captain Mainwaring, Pike, Frazer, Lance Corporal Jones, Wilson, and the rest. When it’s over, she puts the iPad back in its place, and switches off the light. Before I know it, sunlight is shining through the curtains and Felicity’s alarm is going off, waking us both. We have a quick breakfast. I spill milk over my top, the same top I wore last night, and she helps me clean myself, so I look acceptable for the bus. ‘Good as new,’ she says, smiling, hitting my chest with a damp tea towel. ‘Now, on your way. I’ll see you soon.’ When? ‘Whenever.’ And again, before I know it, I’m kneeling by my son’s bed, years later, telling him there’s nothing in his room to be scared of. Even with the landing light on, he feels uneasy and unable to sleep. Do you have to go? ‘I have to go to bed too, believe it or not,’ I say. But this won’t persuade him to sleep. His pale face is deadly serious. Talk to me. Tell me something. So, I cross my legs (my legs make a cracking sound) and think of a story to send him to sleep. ‘Here’s a story.’ I tell him about the vicar we had to tea, back when people had vicars round for tea, and how we went into the basement to find him a drink, because we had a basement when I was a child and kept bottles of wine there, and we found an unexploded bomb from the war. A bomb! I don’t know how, but I’m making him laugh with funny voices, gesticulations, and when the story’s up, he’s happy for me to leave him. I go downstairs. Felicity’s watching the news, which has just started, but she flicks off the TV when I come into the room, and we go to bed.

It was the brightness of it I saw first, red and yellow radiating stripes, forming and dissolving in front of my eyes as we galloped towards the sea. Always towards the push and the pull and the sparkle of the sea then. That was where Karol wanted to go, and where he wanted to go I went. Except that day. I pulled on his reins and we turned to the east, towards the colours and the billowing of the canvas and, as we got nearer, the sound of it. It was a kind of trumpeting that swelled and spiralled. I had never heard the like. We watched from two fields away but we saw no animals, just heard their calls as doors opened and closed in the ring of caravans that surrounded the Big Top and people in overalls moved back and forth, as purposeful and mysterious as the ants back home in the farmyard after rain. Karol lifted his nose, twitched his nostrils, snorted, his hot breath condensing in the cool of the morning. ‘Maybe there are horses in there too, boy,’ I said into the velvet of his ears. Maybe, I thought to myself, there are elephants and tigers too. Maybe there are painted clowns and men who can tie themselves in knots and featherweight women who can swing high in that Big Top. But I cast the maybes away, turned the big horse round and headed for home. I could smell the bacon from outside the house. Mother didn’t turn when I came in, just tightened her back. ‘Sorry, sorry,’ I said, though I wasn’t. ‘We saw the circus. In Mr. White’s field.’ She muttered something. Stupid girl, it sounded like, or maybe it was stupid man. ‘Eat,’ she said, waving her spatula at the bread. Focussed on the frying, for the men. I was supposed to have had my breakfast before they came in from the fields. To leave the space for them. ‘Please could I go to– ’ I started. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Just eat.’ I knew there was no point in asking again. I went to Mr. White’s field, on my own, on foot, after dark. I crouched under a tree and watched the people queuing at the gate. I watched them all go in. I listened as the Big Top swelled with a drum-roll and the roaring of the big cats and the cheering of the people. I listened till it was done and I kept on listening after that, my chest so full I thought I would burst. That night I dreamt of a circus parade coming through our town. I dreamt that I was in the parade, high on an elephant’s back, waving to the crowds, and that even my mother was there, smiling at me. Next morning as we rode out I told Karol, as I told him all my secrets. I told him we could turn and gallop to the east and join the circus. But he just whinnied and kept on track for the sea and I knew then that it was silly to think that a circus would take a cart-horse, never mind a farm girl like me. Cath Barton is an English writer living in Wales. She is the author of three novellas: The Plankton Collector (2018, New Welsh Review), Inthe Sweep of the Bay (2020, Louise Walters Books) shortlisted for Best Novella in the Saboteur Awards 2021, and Between the Virgin and the Sea (forthcoming, Novella Express, Leamington Books). Her short stories are published in The Lonely Crowd, Strix and a number of anthologies. Cath is also active in the online flash fiction community. https://cathbarton.com@CathBarton1