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The Vanity Papers Oxford Literary Review
Hilary Term 2022
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In the place where the dust meets the silence of the white page and the sounds of the black let’s sit at the table as one and share in our destiny the rabbits are twitching let’s meet in imagined spaces and unoccupied places
— Welcome To Space
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF: Rupa Wood
ASSOCIATE CREATIVE DIRECTOR: Georgie Carroll
CONTRIBUTORS:
Bastion Red has studied music and education at the University of Toronto and musicology at the University of Western Ontario. He is a student in the MSt in Creative Writing course at Oxford University and currently lives in Toronto.
Georgie Carroll is the author of Mouse (Animal), Reaktion Books, and has published short stories in the Asia Literary Review, Kyoto Journal, The Fortnightly Review, Coldnoon, and is working on a novel.
Iestyn Arwel is an actor and director and is currently reading on the MSt Creative Writing course. He really enjoys good old fashioned romance.
Jamie Cameron is a poet from the East Midlands based in London, currently studying a Masters in Creative Writing at the University of Oxford.
Jesse Woods studies Creative Writing at Somerville College. He likes staring at maps and keeping a basketball in the back seat of his car, just in case.
Joanne Malone studies Educational Assessment at Kellogg College. She really enjoys interesting conversations with friends when she isn't craving thousands of square kilometres of open space.
J. Mendoza-White is a bilingual writer, currently MSt of Creative Writing candidate at Oxford University. She sometimes wonders what life without writing would be like, but her mind goes blank.
Meesha Williams is studying Creative Writing at Oxford. You can read some of her other recent writing in The Isis Magazine and Mistake House Magazine.
Megan Chester is studying for an MSt in Creative Writing at Somerville College. She can usually be found reading a book, rowing a boat, riding a bike, or using too much alliteration.
Roland Fischer-Vousden lives and works between London and Oxford. He runs the arts organisation SET.
Rupa Wood is a multi-disciplinary artist exploring the philosophy of commonplace magic. She is published by The Oxford Magazine and The Oxford Review of Books.
Sylee Gore is studying new uses of photography in poetry. Her artist chapbook, Even Still, was published by Sampson Low of London in 2021.
Tina Juul Møller studies Creative Writing at Kellogg College. She is Copenhagen-based.
Tom Ralston is a student of the philosophy of language at Kellogg College, with a particular interest in Nothing and Not.
SPACE IN TIME: WHAT WE HEAR WHEN WE HEAR NOTHING
Tom Ralston
When we feel stressed or anxious in today’s overwhelming and chaotic world, a moment of silence can be therapeutic, helping us to feel calm and relaxed. Although the phenomenon of silence in social situations is complex—think of the disconcerting feeling of an awkward silence—as our lives fill up with alerts, pings and notifications, the welcome feeling of being free from auditory distraction has become more valuable even as it becomes more scarce. Silence is an essential part of many meditative and religious practices, so it should be no surprise that we seek it out when we feel distracted or anxious.
Silence plays an important role in audio-visual media such as film or television, as well as in music. It is often used as a dramatic tool to enhance the impact of a juxtaposed sound. Not only can a silence emphasise a sound, it is in fact essential to our ability to perceive sounds as separate: silence marks the boundary of a sound. If we were unable to perceive silence, Morse code would be indecipherable. In the most extreme circumstances, as in John Cage’s infamous 4’33”, silence can even be the primary object of attention. Though Cage was later quoted as saying that “there is no such thing as silence,” he was well aware of the subversive impact that the failure to produce sounds for his audience would have. Silence can be just as impactful as sound. But what do we mean when we say we hear silence?
We talk as though we hear silences, but how far should we trust our talk? The question of whether we hear silence, which on the face of it is an absence of sound, can be viewed as an instance of the ancient problem of non-being. Philosophers from Parmenides and Plato to Sartre and Heidegger to Russell and Quine have wrestled with the problem of the relationship between our words and the world: human language seems to admit negative representations (ways things aren’t) and non-existent objects (things which don’t exist), while the world itself does not. We seem to be able to represent the world in both positive and negative terms, even though common sense tells us that the world and reality are positive all the way through. Characters as diverse as the cyclops Polyphemus in Homer’s Odyssey and the King in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland have been deceived by our ability to use language to represent negativities in the world.
A natural condition to adopt for perceptual experiences is that they must have an object: when I see something, I see a thing, and when I hear something, I hear an actual thing. This is because there must be the right kind of causal link between our perceptual experiences and the actual world. Otherwise, how could we distinguish between cases of genuine perception and hallucination? When we believe that we have perceived something, but have in fact not, as in the case of a mirage in a desert, we say that this is a case of misperception, since the supposed object of perception does not actually exist and the causal chain is missing an essential link. Without an object which is the immediate physical cause of a genuine case of perception, there would be no way of making the distinction between perception and hallucination.
Which object is the cause of my perceptual experience of silence? If we are to avoid the problem of non-being, we won’t want to say that that object is just the absence of sound, since absences are negative, not positive. It might strike some as implausible, then, that we really do hear silence: if silence is the absence of sound and we can’t perceive absences, then we don’t hear silence. Against this, I want to present an account of hearing silence which reconceptualises silence as a positivity, shedding light on the important role that it does in our lives.
Philosophical theories are often guided by the principle that, where possible, they should respect the way that people ordinarily talk and explain why our common sense misleads us if it does. A good account of how we hear silence should therefore respect the way that we describe the world and explain how we successfully talk about perceiving absences.
An obvious way to achieve this is to simply admit that absences are part of reality. Stephen Mumford has argued in his recent book, Absence and Nothing: The Philosophy of What There Is Not (2021) that there is an emerging conventional wisdom in favour of the reality of absences and non-existent objects. One of the proponents of such a position is Roy Sorensen, a self-described “reluctant apostle of negative metaphysics” (2008: 16). He accepts the ordinary use of language at face value: silence is the absence of sound and we do perceive silence. In Seeing Dark Things: The Philosophy of Shadows (2008), Sorensen argues that “silence is successful perception of the absence of sound. It is not a failure to hear a sound” (267). This is a reminder that we need to be able to distinguish between the failure to hear anything and hearing silence, since there is a difference in our experience of the two. For example, we may not have any auditory sensations while we lie in bed drifting off to sleep, but this is a different experience from an athlete hearing silence as they attentively await the starting gun in a race.
Sorensen argues that we literally perceive an absence of sound when we hear silence. How can we square this with the requirement that genuine perception is perception of something? Quite simply, we cannot. If absences were to count as that ‘something’ (that they are ‘causally operative’, in the philosophers’ lexicon) we would need to be able to locate them in time and space, and to count them. How else could they figure as the causes of our perceptual experiences in a way which would enable us to distinguish between hearing silence and hearing nothing, hearing silence and hallucinating silence? The problem is in identifying one silence and distinguishing it from others. If we said that a certain silence is picked out by an object which could have emitted a sound but has not, there will be no principled way to separate different silences; we would be surrounded by uncountable silences on all sides, emanating from every object within earshot. Even worse, these could multiply if we admit that parts of objects, such as each individual string of a violin, can be the source of its own independent silence. And once we have accepted that absences emanate from objects, there is no reason not to do this. This is simply not plausible as an account of how we hear silences and leaves us in a metaphysical jumble.
Perhaps, then, we do not really hear silence, but only that it is silent. This would mean that we do not directly perceive silence as an absence, but that we make inferences from a lack of auditory stimulation to the conclusion that it is silent. This approach sidesteps the difficulties of the problem of identifying individual absences, but does not appear to be faithful to the evidence of our senses. To begin with, this would rule out any creatures which do not have the mental faculties required to have propositional beliefs from hearing silence. This category plausibly includes human babies and many animals, both of which appear perfectly capable of perceiving the silence and acting on it (think of a baby listening out for its mother and crying loudly in response to the silence). Second, there is a feeling or experience, sometimes awkward, sometimes therapeutic, of hearing silence, which does not fit with the idea that hearing silence is just knowing that there is an absence of sound. Hearing silence feels like a sensory experience, not like drawing a cognitive conclusion on the basis of the available perceptual evidence. A sufferer of tinnitus wants to hear silence, not just to infer that it is silent from the absence of a ringing in their ears.
So we reach the conclusion that we really do hear silence in a direct and literal sense, but that silence is not merely an absence of sound. How could that be?
First, consider your field of vision. That field has a spatial structure, which is filled by various objects, as well as spaces between them. As you turn your head, you can see the boundaries of this field move and the positions of objects relative to the boundaries also change in a structured and predictable way. The presence of that spatial structure, which is potentially fillable with objects, is what allows us to perceive the spaces between objects. When we see a Polo mint, we can perceive the hole in the centre as an area which is not filled but is potentially fillable. This, according to Michael Martin, is what allows us to distinguish between the appearance of a ring and a circle (“Sight and Touch,” 1992). Our perception of the hole in the centre is the perception of a potentially fillable area in the spatial field of vision.
Hearing does not have an analogous spatial field, of course. Our ability to perceive the location of sounds is significantly less developed than our ability to perceive the location of objects within our field of vision. But, as Matthew Soteriou has urged in his essay “The Perception of Absence, Space and Time” (2011), hearing does have an analogous temporal field: we hear sounds as extended in time and silence is the empty but potentially fillable space (or time, as we should say) within that field. This account of hearing in general and hearing silence in particular is appealing because our auditory experiences are necessarily extended in time. We can attend to the emptiness of the temporal field but our perception is of positivity through and through. Silence therefore has the causal efficacy that we were after, without having to resort to identifying individual absences as causes of our perceptual experience. And it does not require those experiencing silence to perform deductive inferences to hear that it is silent, allowing young children and non-human animals to hear silence in the same way as you and I.
This account of silence requires us to focus on its temporal characteristics. A silence can be filled by a sound and a certain silence might be related to a certain object. If we expect a period of time to be filled with a specific sound (the noise of traffic near the Oxford ring-road, for example), then the absence of that sound will be associated with the silence that we hear at that moment. Our expectations determine how we perceive silences. When I stand in a silent music practice room, surrounded by instruments, I experience only one silence, but I can be aware of the various potential sources of sounds that might have broken the silence.
Pushing the analogy of the spatial and temporal fields even further, it becomes clear that darkness is not the visual equivalent of silence. Darkness is not the perception of an empty spatial field of vision. It is more akin to a spatial field uniformly coloured black. Darkness has a visual characteristic (colour), while silence has no auditory characteristics (e.g., amplitude or frequency). There is a sense, though only a metaphorical one, in which silence is a more profound absence than darkness, since silence is an emptiness with no perceptual characteristics, whereas darkness is, well, dark.
Silence is empty space in time. This conclusion respects our everyday talk about silence, without taking on the suspect metaphysical commitments of an account of silence as merely the absence of sound. In a sense, when we crave silence, what we really crave is time, empty of noises and distractions.
This will certainly resonate with anyone familiar with the demanding and disruptive nature of the modern world. It is no wonder that our feeling that our lives have become dominated by distractions is related to both a lack of time and a lack of silence, since the two are intimately and inescapably connected.
THE BULLFIGHTER’S DAUGHTER, OR, ARIADNE’S ALCHEMY
GEORGIE CARROLL
I’m not proud of what I do, go to Blanca’s room every night, sit on the edge of the bed, but that’s all I do. She’s plump and white as a scallop, except her hair, urchin black and everywhere, knotted in the silver threads of the pillow. I’m not proud, but I don’t do it with a conscious mind. I’m a somnambulist, though people won’t take that for an excuse. You know he never gave that paper in the end, Freud, “Dreams and Telepathy” (1922), probably because he didn’t know what to believe one way or the other, but he considered it possible that the sleeping milieu had special properties for telepathy, which I aim to show in my work, it does.
To step out of the night for a moment. This morning I went to El Minotaurio. Sat in my usual table in the corner where there’s more space for me to spread out with my books and articles. I come here on sabbatical every seven years to research my own project into the unconscious mind at the University libraries. I say good morning to the waiter when he brings me one of those horns stuffed with cream, and he never replies. I’ve usually been half-awake all night so the mornings are still weird and shapeless. The August air is so fraught here it makes you want to do something to break out of it. Something bad. Anything.
I leave the bar and walk along the dark wrinkle of the Darro River, across a small bridge and go up, to where you’re trapped in the emerald breaths of trees and the palace water flows on either side of you in gutters, cool and clean as silver rings. It’s difficult to be sure of reality. The city is so beautiful it makes you nauseous. Once, after looking up at the palace for too long, I threw up in one of the fountains in a square. The Alhambra, “The Red One,” haunts you even when she is, as she is rarely, out of sight, her forest green skirts, her labyrinths above and below, the garden maze and subterranean cells. I find it tiring that I can’t see all of her at once, that it’s impossible to take her in. I sit up there, with the bronze verdigris lions and spewing green men in the walls, and draw. The same things usually come out, devils and lots of strange symbols whose meaning one day I’ll look into.
She’s strikingly changed now in every way, Blanca, except for how she studies me sometimes, skeptically, with lizard-green eyes. She has taken to sleeping a lot, to pushing expensive cuts of meat around her plate. Often, in the daytimes, she is made to suffer the infernal heat of the bullring in a mantilla of white pom poms like eggs spread over her head, with all of the other girls, Candelaria, Asunción, Inmaculada, in their black lace dresses, black gloves, black eyeliner. In the evenings, now she is older, we smoke cigarettes together. The smoke rises and joins that heavy, white summer sky, mixes with the white houses in the Jewish quarter, the whitewashed caves, the white villages in the distant mountains. As it gets dark, our smoke joins the coal smoke from the streets, the sugary stars, the sickle moon. She eats black pudding on charred bread and tells me things, in her teenage, saturnine way, as if she’s purging herself of them, such as, as I take a piece of the burnt bread from her, how she wants to hold a rifle like her brother, wear his black boots; how she collects dead spiders in a glass jar because it is the only way she can punish her mother for frightening her by being unhappy. She tells me, for example, how she sometimes sees her mother pick the flowers off of the three trees on the terrace, after being in a particularly black mood, and how, the next time she goes down to the street, throws the white petals into the gutter, comes back and the colour is restored in her face. She either trusts me or forgets that I’m there. One evening she talked about Javi who asked her what she liked, attacking her frantically behind the right ear with his aniseed breath, and how it’d felt like a trick question: You, she’d said.
Sometimes I give her one of my cigarettes, which I make with the oleander plant, actually, which has a flower like a rose, and the root is red and fat. The cigarettes give off the smell of wine. It makes the mood more cheerful, as well as making dreams more pronounced.
I know what she dreams, and you’ll have to take my word for that.
She’s always so gloomy that it brings out that feeling in me too. (I’m prone to dark moods, much darker than hers.) I’ve tried to cheer her up by showing her the asterisms, telling her about stars as a form of handwriting, star names and the astronomers of Al-Andalus, showing her pictures of their celestial maps and quadrants; told her how the Greco-Roman gods were reduced to demons in the post-classical age, to stars and metals. One night I even revealed an original medieval book of fixed stars I stole that is now considered lost forever (one of my finest achievements), but even that didn’t brighten her. After a while she goes off to bed, and so do I, and then I go to her, I suppose. It’s only a short walk down the hill from Sacromonte, the gitano quarter where I’ve been staying (since the “incident”) but it’s a miracle I make it there every night along the dark, snaking road, through the gate, in through the kitchen, up the stairs, all the time asleep.
A few days ago, I came back from my walk at four, or thereabouts, having made some excuse to go to the house rather than to my place where I usually have a nap around that time. I’d decided I’d say something about wanting to borrow One Thousand and One Nights translated into Spanish by Navarro Pardo (I’ve always been more interested in the idea of The Nights than the stories themselves, but it was the first thing that popped into my head). By some incredible luck, Blanca was in the dim of the family ‘library’ (generous if you ask me), the soft undersides of her feet propped up pink and succulent. She was fast asleep in an armchair under the staircase, in squarish black clothes, her arms and the tops of her legs smooth and creamy as chess pieces.
I can’t say Blanca hasn’t influenced my last two visits to Granada. There’s something that fascinates me about the dreams of young women. They are a matter of social importance, though there isn’t space to go into all of that, and anyway, my concern is with the psychological and philosophical questions.
I found myself spellbound by a taurine dream of Blanca’s from when she was a child, that, over the last seven years, has somehow infected my own unconscious mind. Ever since I encountered the white bull in her dreams there’s been a whiteness that’s run through my own, as if a glass of milk has been spilt inside my mind. Every now and then I’ll dream of the bull, and somehow know it’s because she is dreaming of him, too.
It’s funny, the way you experience someone else’s dream because you orbit it and yet you feel it, as if you were the original dreamer. She never experienced any fear of the bull at all. In fact, it was only when the bull came in, snorting and scraping its hooves in the dark, and sat at the foot of the bed (like the moon) that she would drift off to sleep within the dream, into what is considered by dream scholars to be the darkest, most delphic dreamscape, a pocket within a pocket of the unconscious, if you like. That part of a dream, by the way, is almost impossible for anyone else to access. I was introduced to a man at a sleep and dreaming convention in Venice, who’d been working on the deep dream state, had entered it and become ‘trapped’. He was a youngish man, in a wheelchair, who dribbled long diamond strands of what he thought were words into medieval books of dreams. He tried to point at things but, not being able to make himself understood, got frustrated, and launched himself screaming out of the chair. I’ve been deeply affected by that image, both afraid and fascinated. It’s partly the reason I’ve come back.
And so there I was, that afternoon watching her sleep, Volume IV of The Nights on my lap, so I could account for my presence if I had to, fingering the shining peacock on the cover. You have to take every opportunity. Leafing through the contents I had already seen there was one story I wanted to read, “The Ruined Man Who Became Rich Again Through a Dream.” She was fast asleep, her head resting on the cinnabar pink of her warm chest. I remembered her face, the last time, ten I suppose she must have been, seven whole years ago, a different creature. She was silvery pink then, like ice-cream, and though she was called Blanca I told her that she could be all of the colours, like a unicorn, if we called her Rita, which means pearl. It happens to have been my mother’s name. We made daisy chains too, and I taught her dirty words. She liked the dirty words best, and she’d laugh and laugh and then suddenly stop, as if she could hear a storm far off in the distance, and go inside. It was surprisingly easy to get into her dreams then, because the edges of a child’s sleep state, of females of any age, are especially soft. The best analogy I can give you is poached egg-white.
As I sat watching Blanca sleep, sculpture-perfect, I closed my eyes, fell into a microsleep, and was able to see into her dreams... dots and lines running into absurd shapes, like silvery jelly. I sat there a while, watching these shapes, until they formed the head of a bull, a white bull, close, sad, almost kind. Behind the bull were a series of concentric rings that orbited the two of them, girl and bull. I realised then that we, or they, were inside a bullring, a dark, silent one; but it didn’t look like a bullring exactly because you couldn’t see the structure: the rings multiplied and multiplied, into nothingness. Is it a funny thing to say that I recognised him; that he seemed to have the same... what am I saying, personality? I don’t know what you’d call it, maybe spirit? I knew it was him because of the smell, which maybe I haven’t mentioned but it accompanies the bull dreams and is what I now know to be the perfume of a moonflower. The flowers themselves are like miniature twisted bedsheets, if you don’t know, and at night they smell a bit like orange blossom. She dangled a hand over his eyeball then, and watched it disappear into his breath. You can dream in me, she said, in the dream. And then, something strange happens: I am shut out, in the way I used to be when she went to sleep inside the dream, as if the dark, impenetrable part of the dreamscape had spread, and I was only able to teeter on the edge of the abyss. That was disappointing. I was thinking about the potential and limitations of her being able to ‘lock me out’, as I stared again into black, aware only of the sound of her breath, staccato, and of a strange feeling of pleasure that became more intense, a bruised blue piquant storm. I had sometimes experienced this pleasure, over the past couple of years, and was confused by it, knowing it not to be my own, in the syrupy tipping point between being sleep and awake that I know all too well. But then a voice sliced through this pleasurable feeling, and everything stopped.
Blanca was still asleep, dribbling a word that sounded like “Izar” (?) (I’ll look it up), in a stream like a white bull’s tail. Her mother was calling to say sugared oil cakes were going to be had with coffee. I hoped they would be the orange-flavoured ones, a smell I still associate with the pleasure of the dream. I sloped off in the direction of the kitchen, book in hand, while Blanca was waking up. She was so innocent-looking in that moment, that if someone had grazed her with their tongue she’d have tasted like pure sugar.
The same thing happened again and again. Other times, something would be different, like, the sand in the bullring would be waist-high. But the formula, the same: Bull and girl, face to face, the invitation to dream in her and then, bang! The door shuts in my face.
I tried to tell myself that her dreams were her own private business. But I do feel I have a certain responsibility to the psychological world to know what those dreams are, because, in theory (a theory yet to be developed), I can. I had suspicions that as she’d grown older something was going on between her and the bull that was possibly taboo. Since then, I’ve become obsessed with what she dreams in the darkest part of her mind, whether it’s possible for a relationship to be sustained between dreamer and dreamt of across time, the extent to which it could be considered ‘physical’?
I spent some time at the house, smoking cigars with her father, surrounded by his gold-framed portraits in the ring, as if the real him were an apparition summoned from them. Every now and then I’d pop out of the room to see if I could find Blanca sleeping, as she sometimes did during the day. But she was always out, with friends that her mother (on another occasion when I tried my luck in the morning) screwed up her beak-like nose at the mention of, and I then had to stay to listen about uncle so-and-so, or the famous singer’s ugly mother, or the bad ham that had been gifted lately, and what a shameful thing that was from such a wealthy family!
Once I walked into the bathroom that guests didn’t use, by accident, looking to see where else she might be. I startled her mother who was smoking by the peach-coloured bidet. I don’t smoke, she said. And then after a moment, Don’t say anything. She was looking out of the lace curtains towards the mountains. What are you doing in here? she asked, suddenly nudged out of her reverie, but before I could answer said, Do you ever feel that you’ve wasted it? Life, everything? She got embarrassed then and left me to use the bathroom, which I had to pretend to do. I found three boxes of cigarettes in the cupboards under the mirror, a plastic bottle of body lotion with a matching lid like a rose, some talc, and ammonia. I like to take things. It’s another condition I have. I was heading down the hall when she pulled at my sleeve. Talk to her, she said, will you? Tell her we’re her parents, we love her. Tell her, she can’t... I don’t know what you can say to her, but... and then she said, I’m starting to hate this.
One evening, a few days ago, I managed to catch Blanca for a smoke. I asked her how she was feeling, and she said there was no language to communicate it. I repeated to her more or less what her mother had asked me to say to her (which by the way was because of the stunt she and two of her friends had pulled in the bullring last week, the red paint). When she started to walk away from me, I asked her about her dreams. I managed to put the question fairly offhandedly. When she asked me cautiously what I thought a dream about a bull, for example, might mean, a dream you had all the time, it was clear I had patronised her by talking about the Minoans! The next day, she told me how the bull dream reduces to the number II, which she said was the number of magic. With a chipped black painted nail, she pushed Le Pape towards me from a deck of old French cards, reserving its opposite, and said something about Egypt.
I’d been invited to lunch at the house and all she did was stare down blackly into a rabbit stew. I was delighted when, having eaten nothing, she stormed out just after we’d finished the coffee, the natural time for me to leave. She’s a good girl, Fradegundia said as I went, as if, perhaps, I could believe it on her behalf. I remembered how only the other day, while dusting before the cleaner came with her silent, white-hot anger, her mother had shown me a photograph of Blanca as a very small girl: Look at her, look at her, look how sweet she is! she said.
I followed Blanca in the naive hope she might go to the plaza de toros, slip through the gates as it was turning dark, seek out a real, white bull... but found nothing more than a brief, dull meeting with Javier, that average boy, outside a doorway in the new part of town. They seemed to be arguing, and she stormed off in tears. This was followed by a lone trip to a stationer’s, of all places. Then she was home, slopping sulkily around the place, twizzling a compass on paper to make lots of lazy, overlapping circles pointlessly on a page, as if she were doing something profound.
The image made something click. I remembered something the bullfighters call the querencia, the space inside the ring in which the bull is almost undefeatable. What if there were an invisible, impenetrable circle inside the bullring in the dream that belonged to the two of them, the dark part of the dream that only the dreamer can access, which was at one with their relationship somehow? It was certainly getting wider, and I didn’t even entertain the thought that eventually I might be shut out altogether. I’d already been looking forward to watching this relationship unfold, seven years from now, seeing whether there really could be anything like a chronological oneiric narrative, a dream that is almost another life you live parallel to your own, for example, but now I would never know. This seemed to unsettle and yet provide new opportunity for a theory of the impenetrable dreamscape I have now formally termed the querencia. But it also deprived me of the very heart of a thing that, really, had come to belong to me too. I felt very much like a third wheel. Worse than that. I felt worthless, and it stirred up a lot of my old anguish.
After the incident with the red paint, the atmosphere in the house became hostile. It would be better, they’d said, if I found other accommodation. I would have happily suffered the slamming of doors and the fights. In a way, they fired me up. But I feel comfortable up in the caves. In the late afternoons, I sit outside and play cards and watch the children play with stones. Sometimes I walk up to where there’s no sound at all, and the cave houses are encrusted with blue painted plates like barnacles. The road curves up at a certain point, where the grass is the colour of liver, and then it’s all dust and monastery. At night the caves are gold and coldly perfumed like a whale’s belly. Sometimes I read books on other things apart from dreams, like Greek daimons. I smoke and draw symbols. Later, when I can’t sleep at all, I sit out, and this is where I really like to be, high up the hill with the silvery haunting, with the deep back-of-the-throat songs on the air, with all of the things you can imagine up here, all of the dreams you can have awake.
Blanca’s sulking seemed to turn over the next couple of days to a depression. She refused to eat or come out of her room during the day. After that, something changed in me too, probably brought on by a retrograde planet or accumulated lack of deep sleep. I fell into one of my depressions, sleep-filled mornings and sleepless nights that meant entering Blanca’s dreams became impossible. Even the dream herbs that bring on my microsleeps had no effect. So I asked her to write down her dreams in a black book that we’d keep hidden. I relied on the fact that young women, somehow sensing in their future an ancient oppression, considered dreams powerful. I talked about dreams as magic circles, which seemed to get her interest. I said I could interpret their meaning (remembering my copy of Ibn Umayl’s book on symbols) so she could gain a deeper understanding of herself. It seemed, after that, she began sleeping with even greater enthusiasm.
I kept asking her for the dream book, and she kept saying she’d give it to me tomorrow, every day, tomorrow, tomorrow. I had somehow begun to feel fooled by the querencia, even strung along. The days were getting hotter and I’ve never gone so long without sleep, never got that far down to the bone, never so rawly unknown to myself. She had done this, somehow, without even knowing it, put this spell on me. She had locked me out of her sleep, and now out of my own sleep too, leaving me pathetic.
Yesterday I went into town. The jewellery shops are expensive but down a little street beside the knife shop, there’s one where the prices are more reasonable. I couldn’t have been luckier. It was the first thing I saw. And touching it all the way along the Darro, through the amethyst shade of the Jewish streets, I went up, thinking how it would brighten her, how she would know then that I understood her, that there would be a physical symbol of whatever there was between us. But when I arrived she wasn’t there. I said I had a book for her, and could I leave it. Her bedroom was white as a wedding and full of all kinds of gorgeous crap. Frankincense sticks I took one of for myself, a black mask decorated with red glitter, a dreamcatcher made with peacock feathers. I put the little bag down, folded in its midnight envelope, the little silver bull inside with horns of moonstone, and opened a book to leave a note. It was a diary, which delighted me, until beneath a series of lines written about Javier’s style of lovemaking, which she seemed to be both thrilled and bored by, she had written: “lbn” is SUCH a creep.
It’s funny because I write my name that way in published material. Not quite the tetragrammaton I was aiming for but it’s more mysterious than boring old ‘Albano’. I was struck by that, as well as by the humiliation anyone would have felt in my shoes. Creep?
Her father called down the hall for me to come for a whiskey, so it was a split decision, leaving it there with a brief note to say it was from me, that I hoped it cheered her up, but as I walked away I knew I had left it less as a gift than a warning.
Walking back along the narrow hilltop roads, I remember looking at a tuberose escaping over a high white wall, and hating this city for the first time. All of these walls are so high that you can’t see the Alhambra, high and closed, with their black gates, their hidden gardens, all the way along, an obsession with boundaries, and it made me sick. White, everything fucking white. I remembered the story of the gitano I’d heard in an absinthe bar once, who, when he finally tracked down the bull that had killed his brother years before, had plucked out the animal’s eyeball and eaten it.
I saw Zujenia on my way up the hill, and we fucked against the steep hillside that’s sharp with agave. She’s one of the prettier ones, and I usually get away from her quick, go back the long way, and for a few days take the other route, up and around. When I got into my cave, I lit the stove, lay down, and longed to enter Blanca’s dreams, longed for that strange sensation of pleasure that had become my own, and for the smell of oranges. It maddened me that while I was awake, she would be asleep, with him, Izar!, doing whatever they did together.
I toyed with the idea of mixing a stronger dose, for us both, going back and... but it was no good, I’d taken all of the drugs I had left and even those, even those hadn’t knocked me out.
I’m not about to be dramatic, but I have started to feel afraid... of what I can’t say. It’s a creeping feeling and it comes over me in spells. On the white roads a darkness would appear, a horned darkness, a shadow, that would pass and disappear, as if following me. I stopped going out in the daytime after that. Except one afternoon when I received a sign to go to her, and there she was, at the entrance to the house, by the wall I had stuck to, closely, keeping my head down, so as not to see the shadow. It was just right, the two of us on the road. I said: did you get the necklace?, already the blood hot in my face because I could see she was scared. I touched her, only lightly, on the arm, and pulled her towards my face. She was wearing a ring through her nose, and a top that showed off her shoulders. I was disappointed that she smelt ordinary, the way whores do, and that she spat on me. I held onto her on that white road, under the petticoat blue sky. Would you like me better, if I was a white bull? I said, and she managed to wriggle away and go inside the gate.
I had occasion to rough him up a bit, the boy she goes out with, Javier. Only, though, because he had come looking for me. I was washing up a plate, and smoking when he appeared. I had answered the door, all bubbles, a tea towel strewn over my arm, and there he was. I recognised him from the bullfighting poster (her father had pointed him out: He’s no miracle, he said, but he should survive the summer.)
Without his sword the boy looked silly. He was also pink, even in the night, which was black as a horseshoe, and his eyeballs were pink too. I was tempted to make my fingers into two horns and charge at him playfully as a welcome or something else, but I was snapped out of my sudden, lightish mood by a blow to the head. The plate had smashed into a few big horrible pieces on the black stone, one of which I cut my face on as I went down, so all in all it was quite an attack. Fortunately, I had the thought to pick up one of these pieces, sharper than you’d think, and bring it right up to the boy’s eyeball. He was really not very strong at all, just brought up to think he was. I shit on all of your dead! he said to me, which only made me laugh at him, because his face was squashed against the wall and he sounded fat. I’ll fuck your girlfriend, I said to him, and then wondered where those words had come from, why I had put on a deeper voice, like God’s. And then all kinds of obscenities slipped from him, and then he burst into fits of tears which made me hate him where before I had only found him irritating.
I wasn’t going to mention it but I carved a symbol into his palm with a short vegetable knife. It was one of the symbols I’d drawn in my book and I had decided it was a bad one.
They called this morning. Fortunately Blanca isn’t talking to her parents, and anyway wouldn’t tell them a thing even if she were. They said for me to be at the bullring at four: the boy, Javier, was fighting, all of the family were going to watch. This I needed to see! I put on my lucky suit. I couldn’t see Blanca among the bodies piling into the ring. I was looking out for a mantilla with her pretty head beneath it. I would barely have recognised her had it not been for the fact that her image has become one with my very consciousness these last few days, that every bone in her face I felt I knew more intimately than my own, the essence of her written into me like the symbol I carved into that imbecile’s hand. She didn’t see me. She was wearing all black, a pair of black boots, and her head was completely shaved, which made her frighteningly more beautiful and at the same time like a kind of mistake. She was turning, talking to someone dressed the same as her. I looked forward, shuffling with the crowd, noticing a guardia civil by the contorted, sharp gates. I put my hand in my pocket and felt its sweet edge, the skin and blood of the boy still on it. I had only brought it, really, as a charm of sorts. But also for another reason I hadn’t decided on.
I stopped, just as we got through the gates, drenched in sweat and the smell of the animals and a storm of colognes, the rapture of the people who’d come in their finery to taste the ecstasy of near-death, the pomp of the pasodoble, and just then she walked past me, as laughter and cooing erupted somewhere nearby, and looked straight into my eyes. I got hold of her wrist. She opened her jacket and something metallic gleamed out, twice the size as the knife in my pocket. She pulled her hand free, hard, and glared at me for what felt like a long time, the ring through her nose catching the afternoon sun. She turned and walked through the arch into the ring, and I had to laugh, which afterwards turned into a half-cry I’m still swallowing down as we wait, because in the centre of the back of her white bald head she’d had shaven the black tail of a bull.
THE HONEYEATER MEESHA WILLIAMS Perched in a display at The Natural History Museum a Graceful honeyeater, (although I read it as Grateful, maybe because of the way it lowers its head) is stiller than a star, black eyes absorbing nothing, feathers twisting reflected light from red to green: a reminder for those who have walked past.
EXAMPLES INCLUDE A TERMINALLY ILL ADOLESCENT POSTING ‘GAME OVER’ AS THEIR STATUS ON FACEBOOK ROLAND FISCHER-VOUSDEN Check this game out: it’s a 3D Sandbox game, RPG, and the protagonist, in the sense that there is a protagonist, invents their own gameplay. New players have a randomly selected default character which you can amend, but no matter how much you do, it always feels like you. It’s first-person view with traditional head-bobbing. You can play in different modes: Survival, Creative, Adventure, Spectator. Each player enters at a different point in the game-world, epistemically limited, with varying hard and soft statistics. The protagonist soon gains some preternatural understanding of the endgame. Though this knowledge should be an advantage, it can seemingly enervate, rendering them unable to fully involve themselves in the procedures of the game. Thus, the protagonist and their class, can be considered ‘gimped’: underpowered in the context of the game, for example, a close-range warrior equipped with a full healing boosting armour set, despite having no healing abilities.1 This final couplet is a quote from a definition of gimp characters on Wikipedia:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ 1 Game_balance#Gimp
I WILL WAIT FOR YOU AT THE TROPICAL TIGER, BUT BY NOW I COULD BE GONE
RUPA WOOD
The Tropical Tiger Casino at the boundary of Fitzrovia and Marylebone was the first building I’d ever thought about burning down. The front was tinted windows with palm trees and lotus flowers etched in gold, a maze of fire heaters and tall standing bronze ashtrays. Not many customers used the patio. Inside the Tiger they fed stronger addictions.
Before my shift at the casino I’d walk to the middle of the park and lie down on the frozen grass to think. No one could see me there, bedsheet of mist hung up all around. I disappeared briefly, faking my own death, with only myself to know I was gone. The mist made me a secret from the rest of the world. Why do we need so many secrets?
The field was littered with things from the night before: a scattering of torn up Lotto tickets, a blue safety condom, a single leather glove. I threw down my bag and lay down. It was a ritual, like getting into bed; the frozen grass a nest of brittle cryogenic needles. Isn’t it strange, the relief hurt gives.
I put the hood of my jacket up and closed my eyes to tune into your thoughts. Sometimes there is nothing and I look out at a black ocean. But often there’s a glimmer, something with no proof other than the sense of it. It’s like the silver, gentle soundless hum of a TV on in the next room with the audio turned down. It sounds like the space when you’re waiting for someone to reply and your ear is tuned just so.
The time in the park is a short while to feel cold and clean. You can’t see through the windows at the casino. I don’t see the mist ebb away outside over the course of the morning, or the different world that swallows up the place I lie down with you. But I feel the absence of it.
Why do we need so many secrets? We need them for protection.
Do you remember the Bloomsbury flat, when you broke the window and we had to find the cat that ran out? None of the lights worked. We climbed up the fire escape by the doorway where the chefs stand around in their white jackets. They must have known what we’d done. You urinated on the floor. At the time it was unforgivable. But now I understand.
I left my bag there. I couldn’t bear to tell you that it could be all over, though of course you would have denied everything. Out of all the ways you seduce me, my favourite is the way you convince me out of the truth.
Do you remember when we were in that freezing pub? Frosted windows and gin on ice. Our shoes were wet. We sat in that booth. You recited that poem close to my ear about the bleakness and the solitude; your breath was the only source of heat. I wanted to climb into your mouth and be alone.
The Tropical Tiger opened at eight in the morning and kept going until four am. In the evenings it was all rented tuxes and black velvet. The morning crowd were an unshaven lot who kept their coats on. The mornings were espresso and carnations and car keys sniffed at the table.
The older of the two policemen that showed up to the casino had a salt and pepper moustache. I wondered what it would feel like on my face. The younger one asked me where I thought you might go. The older one looked suspiciously at the tray of cocktails I’d made on the counter.
My next-door neighbour had a regular weekend schedule; two nights of thumping bass followed by a come-down of shouting and throwing furniture around. I was scared he’d decide to just throw a match to the place one day and walk away.
On Sundays I signed up for the double shift, sleeping in the largest booth under my coat, eating the ham used for canapés. Mr Sadiqua was always in a bad mood so I never felt guilty. He’d gone to the bank and I was taking my fifteen on the back steps with a couple of Rothman Silvers a customer had left. A feeling came over me, like when the curtains in a bright room are closed quickly or when you hold a lighter to a sparkler and it catches and bursts. I closed my eyes and felt you lean in towards me, a golden rush of bonfire heat.
I wonder how you miss me. Do you stare into the distance as you boil the kettle and make tea. Do you take a bottle of milk from the fridge and drink me in big gulps. Do you rest a finger on your tongue and feel our bodies together, salted and dirty and hot in your mouth.
Mani, the only son of Mr Sadiqua’s who ever spoke to me, came outside to have a smoke. I hid my face in my hair. Mani frowned up at the buildings, looking at the last traces of mist twisting around the stone gargoyles.
“Deesha, you ever taken MDMA, LSD, PCP?” he asked like he was singing a strange song.
“What?” I said, trying to concentrate, to hold on to an edge of the gold feeling.
“What?” He imitated my voice, turning around with a grin on his face. “You know the government does testing on people, with that stuff, you know that don’t ya.” He nudged me and the vodka ran out of my coffee cup as it rolled down two steps and broke on the concrete floor.
“Smashing stuff now, I see.” He turned back to the buildings. “I heard stories about you, girl.”
I got up to get a broom. The kitchen floor was sticky with a grease that never lifted.
I made a secret pact with myself when I started that job. I’d spent all the money I’d made selling the Audi months earlier. I promised myself that if I landed the job at the Tropical Tiger I’d never want for anything more; I’d work this for the rest of my days and be thankful for what I had. But I saved up a stack of poker chips, and lately I’ve got it in my head to find you.
Mani found me sleeping at the casino once. He told me he wouldn’t say anything but he began hiding my jacket at the end of the day and making me drink with him.
In the inside pocket of my coat I kept a small green exercise book. On the ruled pages were sketches in biro; symbols which might be of use and field notes: location, co-ordinates, time, date, weather. Hovering diamonds, eleven-point stars, tessellating octagons. Sometimes the shapes come to me in dreams. I’m never sure of what holds meaning until later.
You were wearing that old cardigan and had your arm around me in the back of the taxi. I got out at the stables and you put your mouth on my cheek to say goodbye. There was this terrible ache in my chest, like the blues just latched onto my heart to drag me down to gas flame hell. You looked at me in that serious way that you do, like you’re not sure we’re making the right decisions.
There are no right decisions. I know that now. I can only wish I’d made more terrible choices.
When the taxi drove away I could feel the exact moment your eyes weren’t on me any longer. A crucial thread cut with scissors.
Sometimes you are here in the dark. I see you but not with my eyes and feel you but not with my skin. A warm silent crackle. The feeling is like having your eyes closed with sun in your face and the blood swirling brightly in your eyelids. It’s like seeing the night sky in the desert encrusted with stars and knowing what’s above is also inside you. But it’s a reciprocal and broken loop. As soon as you understand you’re part of something your thoughts break off again and tell you you’re alone.
If we could only trust the stories in our minds, we could have everything. Trust the enemy of secrets.
Mani re-buttoned his blazer as he headed up the steps. “You still got a key to this place?” he asked.
“Somewhere,” I mumbled, picking up my lighter.
“Who gave you that?” he asked, turning to me.
“This?” I asked, wondering if he meant the lighter. You gave it to me that night I was scared I wasn’t going to make it and threw up at the hotel.
“The key, you idiot.” He stumbled on the last step and tried to steady himself by grabbing the broom I’d left by the door. Jars of olives crashed down and rolled over the floor.
When I first started working here Mani got me to call up his ex-wife and pretend I was his girlfriend. “Just tell her about all the sex she’s missing out on. Tell her how hard I make you come.” We made the phone call; I thought Mani was harmless back then.
“You put a hex on me and there’s gonna be trouble.” Mani grabbed the counter and pulled himself up, laughing, kicking jars my way. “Pick this stuff up, Hermione.”
As he walked back into the foyer I took the aprons by the door and made a pile of them on top of the stove. I poured lighter fluid onto the heap and lit the gas burners, standing back as the cloth burst into an orange wall of light and heat.
The Tropical Tiger was the first building I’d ever burned down. It’s gone because of me, I did that all alone. Though I know that’s not really true.
I wonder what it will be like if you and I are together, if you don’t have to go back to jail. We’ll eat out of paper packages by the sea. We’ll bring the clock that stopped and smash it to pieces on the rocks. I don’t want to remember there’s such thing as time. Swear we’ll make no promises to each other; I don’t want anything to hold us together but the days. Cut my hair. Choose my clothes.
We’ll open a sandwich shop at the edge of the ocean and make tea in the name of God.
SYLEE GORE
DINÉ JESSE WOODS I drank what remained from the gold-labeled flask and, having no salt, licked the spot just below your palm. I left my tongue there longer than I needed to, on the place where the soft skin and hard skin meet, pressed in like the painted fingers that traced animals on these canyon walls. When it’s afternoon in the desert, time slows and sways, straddling an unspoken line like slack tide. Wings are motionless and there’s room for mulling questions like ‘what’s the Navajo word for Navajo?’ The dust hangs between the rock walls and there’s no difference in the temperatures of tongues and skins so that you can hardly feel one on the other. But we did feel something, your jaw gone limp as my tongue slid off. The horses on the canyon wall wavered and whinnied as if they might leap out into the space, the stillness between beginnings and ends.
JO MALONE
CHARLIE MACKESY AND THE ART OF MAKING SPACE
MEGAN CHESTER
Mackesy utilises negative graphic space—the blank page. Parchment’s costliness meant that margins were non-existent in early writings. Throughout the history of the book, space and illustrations were indicators of expense. Even today, books with more pages are more expensive to print.
Glyn Maxwell outlines ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’ as two materials of equal importance with which poets build.¹ The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse includes nine totally blank and twelve predominantly blank pages, which suggests that Mackesy is extremely aware of the equivalent materials in his cross-genre context. In The Boy, ‘whiteness’ features as another genre that is fused with images to allow the ‘blackness’ breathing space.
Space becomes time when manifested in an auditory medium. Blank pages become silences. Time was of the essence at the start of the audiobook’s relatively short history: Edison’s original phonograph, invented in 1877, could store only four minutes of audio on one cylinder.² Subsequently, Mackesy’s spacious, often silent work can be economically translated into this genre.
‘And so I’ll begin. ————— Snow has fallen...’³ Just as Mackesy starts, he stops. For nine seconds. This prepares the listener for the audiobook’s thoughtful pace: ‘The boy is thinking hard —— I wonder if there is a school of unlearning —————.’⁴ These four- and ten-second silences challenge the notion of audiobooks as shortcuts. Sven Birkerts believes that audiobooks threaten ‘deep reading’.⁵ As Rubery points out, however, there is no ‘speed listening’ equivalent to ‘speed reading’.⁶ Birkerts’ prejudice assumes that readers naturally read more slowly than an audiobook’s narrator.
In today’s fast-paced society, however, it is likelier that Mackesy slows his listener down when dictating his audiobook’s pace. Technology now affords this silence, and the fox, who ‘never really speaks’, shows that quietness is valuable and welcome: ‘it’s lovely he is with us.’⁷
References
¹ Glyn Maxwell, On Poetry (London: Oberon Books, 2012), 10, 42.
² Matthew Rubery, Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies (New York: Routledge, 2011), 3–8.
³ Mackesy, The Boy, audiobook, 06:27.
⁴ Mackesy, The Boy, audiobook, 13:02.
⁵ Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1994), 146.
⁶ Rubery, Audiobooks, 12.
⁷ Mackesy, The Boy, audiobook, 40:55.
AROUND A BLACK HOLE TIME STRETCHES IESTYN ARWEL If you jumped into a black hole like you jumped into the sea in Marseille feet first arms up gravity stronger at your feet than at your hands would pull you into a long thin string of a man thin like a straw but not hollow like a hair but not brittle like a nerve but not a string of atoms like graphene or a polite queue of stardust waiting to make life waiting billions of years in silence waiting to make countless single-celled organisms that do almost nothing waiting for osmosis waiting for reproduction waiting for life to find land to find their feet in life waiting to start again after the sky turned red waiting for spines to stand tall to walk to talk to work to love to collaborate to cohabitate to settle to learn to teach to thrive to prosper to fight to build to reproduce and reproduce and reproduce and nurture and hate and love and wait for you to look at me across a terrible terrible meal with nebulas in your words and promise in the hand that reaches for mine in a moment that stretches and stretches across aeons dimensions and planes into a whisp of a wonder that has snared me like a velvet noose. One I h a v e w a i t e d f o r
WHEN THE DEAD KEEP NO COMPANY
Bastion Red
Walking home meant I had to confront the cemetery again. Its presence loomed before me as I climbed the hill. The archway, its mouth agape, stood solemn. The black iron fence highlighted the emptiness within. Trees stood guard behind the fence, sheltering the dead like sentinels. But the graves were alone.
Despite this being a popular place for people to walk their dogs, no footsteps crossed the threshold, disturbed the grass. Headstones lined up row on row; those closest to the trees were slanted or toppled over from swollen roots. Some had coarse tops, others smooth, some arched like a bow, others pointed like an arrow. Walking by, I read names like “Reddick,” “Turner,” “Clark,” and “Morris,” all engraved into the stone, caressed by filigree and flourish, framed with flowers and crosses.
Many have rested here since the twentieth century, some since the nineteenth. They were to be remembered as loving mothers, daughters, husbands. It felt as though I was meeting them for the first time, as though the slow quiet of a vacant neighbourhood became a bridge between the world of the living and that of the dead. Flesh had given way to silent stone, that which braces against wind and rain and time.
The Toronto Reference Library, once my sacred stomping ground, stands plenty of storeys high, wearing a face of gridded glass flanked by orange walls, and all mortals outside bask in its grandeur.
Once inside and beyond the vestibule, the library becomes an open book—a larger world waits within, much like walking into a cathedral. If you stand in the center and stare straight up, you can see the fifth-floor ceiling. I entered the glass elevator and stared out. The floors above and the staircases connecting them coil and wind upward like Jörmungandr, the serpent that encircles the world.
Normally each ring-shaped floor rumbled with life, others on similar quests for knowledge and revelation and insight. I’d often get occupied with the other learners, students, readers, and relish the shared space and sense of unspoken community. But I had the elevator all to myself, and counted in my ascent only enough people to fill one hand.
I disembarked at the fifth floor, and the arts section greeted me as it always had. I scanned the spines until I found the texts I needed: Gaiman novels, Ruiz Zafón’s quartet The Cemetery of Forgotten Books. I carefully set down my things at a nearby desk and began reading. As I tried to focus on the first few pages of The Sandman vol.1, from amongst the squeaking wheels of pushed carts, the footsteps of the staff, came an angelic chirping and the beating of wings.
A sparrow had gotten into the library. Poor thing was flitting about, perching onto the pipes under the ceiling. It flew higher and higher still, fluttering between the composers and the photocopiers. I tried to rein in my eyes, my thoughts, on The Shadow of the Wind but with each pass the sparrow made from left to right and right to left, my concentration waned until it snapped like a twig. My priority became willing that bird to fly downward to the first floor and out through the doors.
But it didn’t.
Sometimes it landed by a window and stared out at the treetops, roofs, the outside world. The apparent apathy from the others in the library made it worse—it probably wasn’t the first bird to fly inside and it probably wouldn’t be the last. But it was as though the bird had already become invisible, was already dead, a ghost. And that was the sad truth—the sparrow was going to die in here. No food, no water; flying back and forth until it couldn’t anymore.
I contemplated stepping out onto the ledge and reaching out for the sparrow during one of its passes; it was absurd, obviously, and would only lead to my own death. Of course libraries house works of the living too but by and large it is often where the dead are collected and scattered, ready to speak with us if we are willing to listen. Records are pleas to not forget questions worth asking, questions about Love, Death, Dreams, what it means to be here on this planet—questions that survived lifetimes of being assailed by attempts to answer them; and to not be blind to observations that still ring true today.
Our kingdom is built on death. Tombstones are the foundations, words the mortar. As I sat in silence, I began to see the sheer size and scale of Death’s physical presence, the space She occupies in the world of the living. Before, Death had appeared so far away, so removed from everyday experience. She was always somewhere else, visiting someone else. But Death is not intangible, not birdsong dissipating into the aether; She’s closer than I had ever realized. She’s as solid as the tombstones in the graveyard, the books on the library shelves.
And it was strange because I had never really thought about the number of graves in a graveyard, or the number of books in a library, but it felt as though the dead were being forgotten or ignored.
In the end, I could close my eyes to the sparrow but my ears remained open to hear its lament. I placed the books on an empty cart, packed my things, and got into the elevator. After walking to the exit, I held the door open and looked back, with a sliver of hope that the sparrow would join me in returning to the world of the living.
STILL LIFE J. MENDOZA-WHITE The table was square That surprised me, somehow, more than lack of tears I’d always pictured a round table on which you’d eat, work, write and argue your point without restricting vertices You’d always defended limited space Wearing your freedom like a teenage t-shirt too tight around burdens Of extra flesh And middle-aged mistakes You avoided my eyes I guessed that lack of answers was not your first challenge that afternoon The window showed despair in threats of sunset light and premature endings. No one offered tea We sat in silence, though, as if staring at the bottom of phantom mugs and traces of tea leaves, embracing fortune-teller hopes of future numbness
SIGH JAMIE CAMERON Why should I not be glad to contemplate the air, all of sudden filled with snow, falling in the field behind my room? I can forget what I wanted to get from this and watch instead the flurry erase all the colours by degrees. The trees are like hieroglyphics. The sky is all one height. I see a hare pausing in the snow, as if to listen — I might have struck the frozen ground with my heel to hear it ring like a gunshot through our scene but in these acoustics every dull sound clings to me.
THE SPHERE
TINA JUUL MØLLER
A human female (Olga), a human male (Thorkild), a planet (Saturn) and a rabbit (Mimsy) are inside a golden sphere atop a cathedral spire in a mid-sized city in Jutland, Denmark, playing a game of cards. The game is made increasingly difficult by a series of disruptions among which is Mimsy’s explosive fertility. What seems to be Saturn’s allergic reaction to her offspring, however, turns out to be the crux of the crisis.
The first-person narrator is a tentacled plural entity of unknown origin.
“What’s going on with Saturn?” Thorkild arches his eyebrows, one at a time, then looks at Olga, a worried twinkle in his blue eyes.
Olga gently nudges another group of young rabbits with her left elbow and looks at Saturn for the first time since keeping back the flood of rabbits became a full-time pursuit. Outside of a low-frequency rumbling below the threshold of organic hearing, Saturn hovers unperturbed over its chair on the other side of the table.
“I... don’t know.” She squints. “Is it shrinking?”
“Shrinking?” Thorkild tilts his head. “Yes, I think you’re on to something, it’s definitely shrinking. And darkening too?” He sticks his right hand into the sea of rabbits and feels around for the beer crate.
“A bit to your right. Maybe you can reach it with your foot?”
“Ah, yes. There it is. You want one while I’m at it?”
“Yes, please. Thank you, darling.”
Thorkild inhales deeply and submerges his head and shoulders in the sea of rabbits. He comes back up with a triumphant look on his face and two beers in one hand. Something white and fluffy is caught in his moustache. Maybe the rabbits have started shedding? Our tentacles have been attracting similar fluff, making it challenging for us to adhere to the sphere membrane.
Thorkild goes to pick up a playing card but realises he can’t see the pile anymore. A thick layer of rabbits is covering the chequered oilcloth by now. Olga, arms held out to the sides at shoulder height, looks for a place to put down her cigarette, then gulps down the rest of her beer and inserts the butt in the bottle neck.
“I guess the game is over, then.”
“I suppose so. Bloody rabbits...”
After a beat, both humans turn their attention back to Saturn, shrunken to half its original size. Mimsy is sitting on her haunches, unperturbed, front paws on the table in front of her. The progeny flows effortlessly from her womb and disappears into the rabbit vortex under the table, before making its way to the surface once their eyes have opened. Every few minutes, new little white heads pop up out of the top layer to look around, eyes curious, ears alert.
“Christ Almighty, it’s like a popcorn pot in here!”
“Right.” Olga chuckles, then sighs deeply and pets the rabbits in front of her on the table. A new cigarette hangs orphaned from her lips, ash growing ever longer.
We have noticed a possible pattern in Saturn’s contractions. Whenever an ear, a nose, a tail from the rising tide touches the planet, further shrinkage occurs. The frequencies of the planet’s rumbling rise accordingly. Even the humans must be able to hear it now.
Due to the fluff predicament, we might accelerate the retrieval process, settle into pre-catapult mode while we are still able to hold the sphere gently enough with the tips of our deteriorating tentacles. As electrical signals bounce among us transmitting our elation at having found this diverse yet clearly defined exemplary specimen of typical Earth expression for the outer collection, we would prepare for launch. Core energy would build, we would adjust the directional rays to 3°34’ to eventually position the sphere in orbit around our principal luminary, right between the complimentary Mercurian and Martian culturetopes. Then we would whirl the sphere Sunward, boomerang with it around the star, and finally be flung out past the circling orbs of this system, enjoying, as always, their influences as we pass—rusty Martian rage, Jupiterian luminescence, Saturnian shade, Plutonian powers of destruction.
We have become privy to tales of pre-solid life forms gradually acquiring the energetic characteristics of the planets on their way in through the heliosphere before being born into fleshly shapes, and later returning these same characteristics on their way back out into open space. We are excited at the prospect of possibly witnessing this process of inner-outer energy balance maintenance as it happens. The odds are slim, but we sense a serendipitous shift in feeling tone compared to previous returns. Our tentacular fields would remain most acutely attuned.
For now, we stay in observation mode and hold on until the last possible beat.
The fluff situation has become untenable. We migrate through the membrane despite the loss of observational accuracy and position ourselves in the early morning dew on the outside of the sphere, ready to boomerang. Saturn’s rumble makes the sphere vibrate under us, distorting further what visual input we still receive, though we do sense the sphere content churning; rabbit ears and eyes and feet are squashed out of shape against the sphere membrane. The porcelain crustacean appears briefly. The king ♣, a flap of brown and orange checkered oilcloth, a human hand around a bottle neck.
Aural analyses reveal that Saturn, while maintaining its original mass, has shrunken to a point of no return. The noise is extraordinary. Even our superior aural resilience is tested.
And then: silence.
Our dark matter readers spike a picobeat before the sphere collapses into the newly minted black hole that was once Saturn, leaving only…
