Archive for: Fiction

Susan Lloy
End of Rapture

The gold-painted angel fell today. His ceramic limbs splayed all around. She should feel saddened by this, as it was given to her in a time of love when she lived in the Dutch capital. Handed to her by her former lover who had ripped it off the exterior of an Italian villa when he was playing there in a travelling quartet.

It has made her bitter. Staring at it year after year for more than thirty. She has many objects from Amsterdam strategically placed in her flat. Often a guest will inquire, ‘Oh, how lovely, where did you get it?’ ‘Amsterdam,’ she replied.

 
For many years she had boasted that she had lived there feeling like she had an edge up for the experience. She kept her Dutch language books on deck ready to brush up before travelling back more than twenty times, rolling her G’s and toning her tongue to Nederland standards. She constantly thought of her former lovers who became good friends, but of late, had wandered far from her.

 
Tourists always irked the Dutch. When she had inhabited its tiny streets more than three decades ago, they had annoyed them then. Yet, she had been able to blend in like an Amsterdammer. She remembered travellers that came for smack holidays. Seeing many a folk retching on cobbled streets. One doesn’t witness this now. On her last visit it made her nervous. Crowds tightly packed like little fish in a can. Tourists are more loathed now. Pouring into the small cafés, cluttering the squares. Boisterous Brits on bachelor stags.

When she had lived among the locals she had tried to absorb their mirth. Listening to them sing while riding their bicycles along the canals. Now bikes are full of danger. With cyclists roaring along texting, not a single eye on the road.

 
She felt a pride that she had retained her Dutch. And for the most part, Amsterdammers are happy to spar with her broken words. Still, during her last trip, when she sat at a small theatre café and left a decent tip, she had overheard the bartender turn the name, tourist, around like it was a cancer.

She has many framed photographs of her former lovers, but it pains her to hang them on the walls. They sit, hidden, in an old armoire waiting to be dismantled. Yet, she can never bring herself to complete this task. She immortalized them in print during their shared time in Amsterdam, but they never stole a peek.

So, when she looks around at hints of her Dutch past it is as if a knife sears her heart. She can’t imagine strolling the streets, sitting on a sidewalk terrace, seeing the ghosts of her past. And besides, she would be just another tourist in Amsterdam. AQ

Samuel Prince
Amsterdam Winklepicker Moon

He was looking into the wheelhouse. It was a man – I was sure of that by his size and definition, although his back was turned as he stooped to peer in the window. The lights were off, we’d locked the door and there wouldn’t be much to see in that cramped upper compartment, fit for a small table between two rows of cushioned benches and the steep ladder descending to the living area. It had begun to hail – a slight peppering as the first ice pellets fell, but growing ever more percussive and intense. I stopped in front of the splendid Spinoza statue and continued to observe the man who’d adjusted to a different pane, but still bent, seemingly peering intent into the cabin.

This was our houseboat – our weekend rental – and this was the last night of the booking. Only I would be staying and sleeping here after Rob had left for his early flight home, but check out wasn’t until the morning. Who was he? The owner? That was a woman, Brigitte, with whom we’d corresponded when making the booking. Her partner? A friend? An opportunist snooper – or worse? Nobody was home – the dark interior testified to that – so why would he be so inquisitive? Brigitte had our numbers, too – she said she’d call or text if she needed to get hold of us. The houseboat was intact, dormant, sheathed in shadow, moored alongside two others on this stretch of the Amstel – both unoccupied, it being late winter, but both similarly quiet and idle.

I could see now that he was moving towards the terrace on the deck. He took another, penetrative look in the wheelhouse through the windows from that new vantage, and then sat down on the wooden bench, facing the towpath. He was waiting, as the pitch of the hail further increased and the chill sharpened in serration under the vivid winklepicker-toe moon.

             *

I didn’t know as much about Spinoza as I’d have liked – but then, who couldn’t I confess that about? I’d once included his name in a list of writers and thinkers I meant to sample, to flaunt at least a cursory knowledge. However, this became another casualty of questing, adolescent ambition conflicting with my innate laziness and slack attention span. Gramsci and Breton were fellow fatalities, I remembered this – how I’d written those names and a ream of related books and titles in a bid to impress, but as to who, well, I wasn’t sure then, or now. That was, that is, the rueful truth of my life: the things I’d done as if somebody was constantly looking over my shoulder. A somebody I’d always be looking back to check they were still there, still watching. But there was nobody there. There never is.

             *

Rob had caught his taxi to Schiphol from the Green House Namaste Coffeeshop on Waterlooplein. Sunday evening, it had been mostly empty beyond the guy working the counter, who sold us a gram of pineapple kush and two wan lattes. He was sinewy and pallid in complexion, beneath his baseball cap, in a too-tight t-shirt and paint-flecked baggy jeans. The décor was a mishmash – some loose hung throws on the walls depicting mystical symbols, Western saloon-style doors for the bathrooms, a muted flat screen TV showing a compilation of snowboarding feats and mid-volume house music seeping from the speakers stacked in the corners.

We sat on one of the large, low slung, tan pleather couches and Rob prepared the joint while I sipped coffee. This had been our third long weekend away together in Amsterdam – it had become an annual fixture. Four nights on a houseboat and an itinerary of walking, talking, light drinking and heavy sinking into the brain-braised and blazed fug of the occasional hour or two in Coffeeshops. That morning Rob had received word that some unmovable meeting on Tuesday afternoon, the day after our flight back, had, in fact, been moved forward to Monday. He’d hastily rebooked his travel plans while we crossed on the ferry from Centrum to Amsterdam-Noord. This had meant I’d be spending the final night of our stay on the houseboat alone.

By the time we were mouldering in the Green House, Rob with his weekend bag at his feet, me in my fully-zipped anorak and slouch beanie, we were in a conversational holding pattern over the banalities you tick-off when a parting of the ways is imminent. Plans for and a recap on what our jobs held for the week ahead; coming football fixtures; a last sombre sweep of news on mutual or former friends. We were in the desultory drift and dredge of the kush and its effects – monosyllabic, deliberate of movement and sluggish in thought, semi-transfixed by the TV images of snowboarders shredding and searing down the Aspen slopes. I dwelt on the contrast of their speed and vim, the luculent mountain air and fabulous blue skies with my lassitude, smoke-tangled lungs and arid eyes.

             *

I couldn’t linger and pretend to be absorbed by Spinoza unduly. Not as the hail poured and ricocheted all around and over me. He didn’t seem perturbed by this as he sat in position in his mysterious vigil, hood-up, on the deck, but that only served to heighten my increasing concern. I wasn’t going to stand from this distance and stare back – what he wanted or represented, I didn’t know, and if he was looking for me, or Rob or both, I didn’t know either. The Amstel as far as I could see was deserted of cruise or passenger boats and the Amstelhoeck bar behind me was closed, so even if I wanted to slip in, find a table with a view of the houseboat and surreptitiously observe the watcher, I couldn’t. Besides, that wasn’t me. I wasn’t a man given to stealth or discretion and I feared I’d crack; that I’d wilt in such a stand-off, burst out of there and demand he reveal himself and his intentions. I had coward blood. I resolved to walk on, to walk by the houseboat, continue along the Amstel, past the Opera House, turn left on Waterlooplein and circuit back, but slowly, slowly, to check whether he was still there and if he was…? I’d rethink then, again in front of Spinoza.

             *

Rob and I had said our goodbyes and made an imprecise pact to meet up again in London soon. He heaved his bag over his shoulder, more elaborately, almost slow motion thanks to the kush we’d shared and the accumulative impact of all the others over the weekend. With a thumbs-up salute to the guy behind the counter, who raised his head from looking at his phone to acknowledge, he left to meet the driver who was less than a minute away.

I sat back down on the couch and contemplated the remainder of the joint perched like a fishing rod over the ashtray. I could finish it, descend ever deeper into the dappled daze, wallow in front of the snowboarding supremos, then perhaps roll a new one, all for myself, and see out the evening in a zoned-out bliss. But I was done with weed. My chest was crinkling with every in-breath, it was significantly less fun solo and, more pitifully, I’d never been able to roll a joint with any structural integrity. I left the remainder of the gram in its seal bag on my saucer and made to leave. I resolved to head back to the houseboat, hydrate, recalibrate and get an early night before flying back tomorrow. The temperature had plummeted and the forecast told of hailstorms – at least it would be atmospheric and dramatic on board. I could watch the moonlit river being assailed by the weather and make a memory of the moment.

             *

I affected a gait and stride that I thought best conjured cold and bothered but purposeful, with somewhere to go which categorically isn’t the houseboat this eerie figure is sitting on… I put my hands in my pockets and kept my hatted head bowed forward and made towards the mooring dock. Closer to the houseboat I raised my eyes and clocked the watcher, as he clarified from hail-obscured shadow to something more monochrome, but better defined in the glare from the lampposts. The snapshot glance I took told me he was wearing a long dark overcoat with a hood which shrouded his face and features, but he was gazing square in my direction as the only other player on the scene. The hail, as all hail must, had switched from sustained bombardment to a slighter strafing and some drizzle had now joined the downpour, but despite this he was prayerfully still and composed – a squat counterpart to Spinoza, who oversaw all.

The temptation flashed through me to confront, challenge, contest who he was and what he was doing sitting on my houseboat? Sheer fear has a way of rumbling to a boiling point of hot anger, but I’d never mastered the elusive cocktail of stern tone, authority and firm words when trying to be assertive, and this truth froze my tongue. Instead, I veered left, as planned, and quickened my pace, as if a fleeting look at a hooded stranger sitting on a houseboat in foul conditions was wholly typical.

             *

My first visit to Amsterdam was with my Dad in 2005. We’d never been on holiday together previous to that, and we’ve never repeated it since. It was an anomaly – a perfectly pleasurable anomaly, but an anomaly all the same.

I have a cachet of photos from that trip, somewhere in a box file with several others which survive the periodic purges of possessions I pursue to maximise space in my tiny London flat. These photos, they serve only to prove my relative youth – the glint and sheen of my early twenties – and my Dad before his hair turned a shade of ashpan and he still wore heeled shoes. There’s one of me in a duffel coat in front of a bicycle stand outside Centraal and one of Dad beaming on Nieuwmarkt with The Waag in the background. We had stroopwafel and oliebollen and bought little cigarillos which we smoked by one of the canalside bars. Tourists always feel obliged, compelled to visit national museums and landmarks. As if you can’t satisfactorily claim to have done a place until you’ve communed with and paid heed to its past. We got lost on our way to The Resistance Museum, which proved worth the confusion when we did eventually find it, while the Rijksmuseum, undergoing renovation, was overwhelmingly busy and neither of us knew how to appreciate Art. I remember queuing interminably on a staircase and suggesting to my Dad we could leave, and go to Vondelpark, if he wanted to, or the pub, which I knew he would and willed him to choose.

As I walked away from the houseboat, I thought of Dad, that weekend and how he might have reacted to the watcher. My Dad was mild-mannered, decent and unassuming. He barely had a temper or proclivity for indignation beyond the odd sarcastic retort to news readers on the radio, but there was also a deep-rooted hardiness and resolve, albeit I only saw simmer to the surface the once, when I was about 12.

We were waiting by a bus stop outside the back of one of the large department stores in our local town centre when a motorbike purred out from an alley next to the store loading bay, but instead of turning onto the road, mounted the pavement as a shortcut and accelerated towards, but then swerved by us with reckless abandon. I felt the sensation and airflow of him building speed as he cut past. I noted his khaki cargo pants tucked into large black boots, the crimson streak of racing stripes on his leather jacket and the chrome helmet, lustrous as a clairvoyant’s ball. Dad didn’t hesitate, as if something ignited within him. He leapt to his feet and yelled, but it wasn’t in protest, it wasn’t plaintive or pleading, appealing for reason or awareness – it was something guttural and splenetic that carried weight and righteous might.

The rider looked back, some 20 metres away, then abruptly braked to a stop. He waddled off his bike and then marched back towards the bus stop and my Dad, stood up with his arms held out wide like a spirit-possessed Baptist, stepped forward to narrow the distance between them. Motorbike man was shouting and unfastening his helmet strap at the same time, and when it came loose and he took it off, I could see his face contorted, his mouth snarling and shooting back at Dad. He had a close shaved head, covered with a membrane of sweat. He was all threat, bile and stiff-moving menace. Dad maintained his position, stood his ground and returned verbal fire, until the biker was mere feet away, his right hand plunged into his helmet as though it was a big bauble-esque boxing glove. I sat on the bus stop bench and marvelled at the exhilarating choreography as they went nose-to-nose.

             *

It had been 15 minutes since I walked away. I’d reduced my pace to a shuffle on Waterlooplein, heading north. The further I’d retreated from the houseboat, the more unsettled I became. It struck me that I wasn’t even sure how to phone the Police in Amsterdam, and even then, what was I going to report or ask for? A tourist calling for Police assistance because someone was sitting on their rented houseboat – a tourist who’d been in the Green House Namaste Coffeeshop not more than an hour ago – didn’t sound credible or without reason for skepticism. I considered calling Rob, who must be at the airport now and explaining the situation, but again, I’d knew he’d laugh, tell me I was hallucinating, paranoid, but that the kush was as premium as promised.

There were only few people on the sodden streets. The rain wasn’t abating and I was beginning to sniffle and shiver. Even if I did return and find the watcher had vacated his perch, was no longer waiting, I doubted I’d be able to endure the long night on my own. The houseboat was riven with creaks, strains and jarring sounds – and that was without the potential menace of a trespasser skulking on the deck whose potential footsteps and padding would be indistinguishable from the rat-a-tat of the rain that was expected until dawn. I toyed with the prospect of walking around Amsterdam and deferring the showdown until sunrise, but in the wet bitterness of a Sunday in February, the city didn’t feel heady, happening or accommodating to that whim. There was nowhere I wanted to go, or could go, other than the place I was afraid to face.

             *

My full navigation of the square was almost finished – I’d turned onto Zwanenburgwal, next to the Rembrandt Corner café. It was just shutting up – a man in a white shirt and serving apron was bearing the elements and stacking chairs outside in columns of four. Two women, the last customers, were leaving. One of the women made an exaggerated teeth-chittering sound to register the shock of the chill. They linked arms, laughed in unison, swaddled in Puffa jackets, gloves and woollen scarves, and turned right on Jodenbreestraat.

I began walking down Zwanenburgwal, helplessly nearing judgment time. In a few more steps I’d have a beeline on Spinoza, and once I was at his feet, I’d be able to see whether the watcher was still there, eyeballing my approach, waiting for me to stop pretending and come home. And if he wasn’t there? I’d be no better for his absence, spending the rest of the night in dread suspension.

Earlier in the morning, Rob and I had strolled down this street and the market which lined it during the day. I’d abstractedly inspected the stalls selling tulip seeds, ceramic windmills and Jenever gin and bought a black and white postcard of a canal scene at night. It depicted a small bridge, a shimmery river, a silhouetted lamppost with a bicycle leant against it. As I held the postcard to pay, I noted how my thumb also obscured a thin moon – a silver circlet or archer’s bow – in the top right corner. It occurred to me then, and came back to me now as some hail seeds returned to spike the rain, how I’d wanted the picture, without seeing it complete. I’d wanted it without spotting the essential detail which made it what it was. AQ

Jo-Anne Rosen
Family Again

The last time I saw my father I was six. He had driven from Miami to Flatbush for Christmas and was sleeping on a mat near the flocked tree. Mama was sleeping with her second husband, Eduardo Aguilar or Daddy Ed, a wiry man who tolerated my mother’s mood swings and visiting ex-husband.

For years afterward I confused my father with Saint Nick. He was round and jolly with a thick blonde beard and suitcase full of gifts. And then he vanished like smoke. We relocated to a hippie commune in northern California. Daddy Ed and Mama had two more children. Eventually they divorced. But Ed raised me, so he’ll always be my real father.

I was a smart-ass boy who rarely sat still. Mama would say I was going to wind up in the nut house like Daddy Jack. ‘He checked into Bellevue for six months,’ she’d say. ‘Watch your step, buster.’

‘Where’s he at now?’ I’d ask.

‘I have no idea. On the moon for all I care.’

Thirty-five years after that Christmas in Flatbush up pops an email from Jack Nelson. Subject: Family Reunion? He’s tracked me through the Internet. My grandmother has left a small bequest for me. (What grandmother? I was told she’d died before I was born.) He’s living in Oakland and would like to drive up to Red Bluff to see me. I reply that he might also like to see his two granddaughters. His next email is signed “Grandpa Jack.”

I phone my mother. She isn’t interested.

‘I’m a little curious,” I say. “Aren’t you?’

‘The SOB thinks he can buy his way back into your life,’ she says in that flat voice that means end of story.

My wife is more excited than I am.

‘I’m not going to work up a lather over this, Anita,’ I tell her.

‘But he’s your natural father!’

I shrug. ‘He abandoned us, remember?’

‘Blood is blood,’ she says.
 
Jack pulls up on schedule in a beat-up VW bug, its back seat piled high with bags and tools. He extracts himself slowly. He has gotten quite fat, his beard and hair white, his cheeks red-veined. He is wearing black pants, a black sweater and beret, and he walks with a cane. The two girls and Anita hang back shyly while we shake hands and eye each other.

I do resemble him physically. I see the ghost of Christmas future, my own belly billowing hugely. He doesn’t seem to be a lunatic though. In fact, he is a genial, witty fellow. There are gifts in one of the bags for the children, who warm up to Grandpa Jack quickly. He watches them through bifocals with a bemused expression. They are thin and dark like their mother.

Anita brings out dish after dish, and our guest eats it all with relish. We learn that he never remarried but has lived with several women and traveled widely.

‘I’m a jack of all trades and master of none,’ he says cheerily.

We stay up late drinking the bottle of cab he brought us and reviewing the past three decades, then on to film, books, politics, art. Our tastes are eerily similar. He likes Italian and French films, Tony Hillerman mysteries. We both have dabbled with painting and sculpture. He plays mouth harp, and I noodle around on a guitar. Even our voices sound alike.

When we are alone, Anita says, ‘So what about that diet, Andrew?’

I’m up early the next morning as usual. Jack is already in the kitchen drinking coffee, his imposing bulk still swathed in black; hair and beard damp, smelling of soap. He’s brought in the newspaper and filled in my crossword puzzle completely, in ink. Everyone else is asleep.

We regard each other cautiously across the table.

‘I should have tried to find you sooner,’ he says. ‘I did try once years ago, but your mother and Eduardo hid their tracks too well.’

‘I could have tried, too. But I assumed you weren’t interested.’

We are quiet, considering our next moves.

‘Were you ever really interested?’ I ask finally.

He looks at me intently. ‘See, I thought you’d be pissed at me.’

‘I never gave it much thought,’ I say.

‘Well, I’m glad I came,” he beams. “We can start fresh.’

I don’t reply.

‘So, you are pissed.’

‘Alright, I’m pissed.’

He chews on that for a while. Then: ‘Don’t you want to know about your grandmother? Do you even know her name?’

I shrug.

‘Louise. I wish you could have met her. She was a marvellous woman, and she never stopped asking about you. You had a grandfather, too, of course. He died when I was 16. You have an aunt and uncle, cousins.’

Upstairs a muted shout, the sounds of my family awakening.

‘The girls will want to know about their family someday,’ he persists.

I stare at him. Maybe there’s no getting away from him now. Or maybe he’ll vanish again, this time forever. Meanwhile, here he is, fat and sassy and in my face, and he’s ruined my Sunday crossword.

‘I was too messed up to be a father,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry it happened that way.’

‘Sorry?’ I repeat. ‘Really? Since when?’

‘Since now. I can’t undo what’s done. It was my bad luck, not yours. You turned out fine, as far as I can tell.’

No thanks to you, I almost say, but he seems so bewildered and downcast, I relent.

‘Do you play chess, Jack?’ I ask, instead.

‘Sure do.’ His face lights up.

I haul out my set. He picks up the ceramic pieces one by one, fingers them.

‘You made these?’

I nod. It’s from my cubist phase. The pieces have sudden sharp angles, clashing colors, weirdly juxtaposed body parts. The one-eyed bishop is a terror.
 
‘Nice work,’ he says. Jack anticipates my every move and vice-versa.

‘Damn,’ he says, looking surprised. ‘I’m sure I taught you how to play.’

‘What’s this, a recovered memory?’

‘I do remember playing chess with you, and by candlelight. A storm knocked out the power. I made all the pieces from wine corks and wire, I swear that’s true. Ask your mother. You were three or four, whip smart.’

‘Uh uh.’ I shake my head. ‘Daddy Ed taught me to play chess.’

‘Maybe he did,’ he says. ‘The second time.’

He stays with us three days. We play several games of chess, without talking much, unless chess is a kind of language. By the time he leaves I’m one game ahead, which seems to please him. Then the bags go back in the VW, despite Anita’s coaxing.

‘After all this time, you could stay a little longer,’ she says. She hugs him, and so do the girls, giggling because they can’t get their arms around his girth.

I offer my hand.

‘Let’s stay in touch,’ he says, pumping my hand, and then hugging me. ‘We’re family again, right?’

I want to believe him. But when I step back, a little dazed from the bear hug, his eyes are focused elsewhere, as if he’s already moving on down the road again and we are fading into memory. So I don’t believe him.

‘Bon voyage’ is all I say.

After he leaves, Anita begs me to stay in touch with him for the sake of the children.

‘Don’t keep them from their grandfather,’ she says, ‘just because your mom kept you from yours.’

I tell her Mom was wrong about a lot of things, but not about Jack. ‘He doesn’t really want a family. He wants another feel-good moment.’

‘How do you know that?’ she demands. ‘You’re not always right, either.’

‘Nor are you.’

She glares at me and stomps out of the room, muttering something about a stubborn asshole.

‘Alright!’ I shout after her. ‘If Jack stays in touch with me, I’ll stay in touch with him.’

I’ll bet that never happens. AQ

Amina Imzine
Zemestan 1836
A Work in progress from the Shahrarah Garden Chronicles
 
Rumours of war have slowed down as the cold and bitter winter has wrapped Kabul in a thick coat of snow. Katsumi looks up to the pale orange light that flames from the Asmai Lighthouse and feels relieved that the makeshift dispensary there is provided with Aleppo soap, eucalyptus, balsam and Chinese green tea so the guards, mainly Kashmiri Lancers, can safely rest until the next shift. “Welcome in the Zemestan season” would joke Javaad Khan, his friend, born in some remote Srinagar valley and pleased enough with his position, assigned to the Bibi-Mahroo Garrison, where two lighthouses stand above Kabul city.
 
 
Sirius heads between the Asmai Height and the Pushta Lighthouse. Curfew will soon start. Katsumi steps down with his snowshoes and quietly treks through the icy Shahrarah Lane. How long lasts friendship when our world is devastated by cholera or plague epidemics, and grief? Lady Alexandrina, whom he’d met in Tehran, passed away as soon as she returned home to St. Petersburg, for her nineteenth birthday celebration. She was his first English teacher, taught him Latin and both shared a passion for Central Asian Herbarium books — dried plants and seeds they collected from Tashkent and Balkh when landslides or sand dunes have not yet fully submerged the fields, orchards and gardens — Katsumi recalls as he tries to cope with the fresh snow that caps his Bactrian camel wool shield.

The rum is warming up his mood. Katsumi couldn’t forget her pale sapphire eyes that brightened up her delicate face, her vivid passion for collecting and editing war veterans’ reports – “I will not teach you French!” she proudly said. At the Shahrarah literary lounge, she loved reading light verse poetry, the modern tales of Alexander Pushkin — and such strong beauty in her calligraphy strokes, first in Russian then in English: As long as there is one heart on Earth where I still live, my memory will not die he received as her farewell gift.
 
 
He shakes his head as to remove the fresh flakes that stick to his white silk face mask. Would poetry bring us some kind of relief? He learned a lot with Lady Alexandra too, when she lived in Kabul. She became his second, friendly English teacher, even if she had soon forgotten her cousin Alexandrina. Like the white, petrified Shahrarah trees lane, there is a silence that doesn’t need to be awoken, so Katsumi treks quietly.

The rum will lift up his mind, as Charles Masson promised. Was he too safely back in London? For the nine-month journey is full of unpleasant surprises, as Katsumi recalls Lady Alexandra that pointed out. Far from his British friends and the Thames he would never visit, Katsumi feels safe here in the upper valley of the Kabul River, safer than in any of the European cities. He looks to the bright sky, and silently thanks the tough quarantine that he and the Afghan doctors-in-chief teams have set up. Aldebaran is going to cross the Pushta Height. Katsumi then notices a snowy, soft blanket that wraps the foothills, the crowded worker dormitories and the tent shelters for shepherd communities. How many will be alive tomorrow?
 

***

Snow showers keep burying Kabul in a bitter silence, while the pervasive fragrance of balsam floods the Hanzalah sanatorium. Katsumi quietly moves in and out of rooms, patients are sleeping. “Kurimoto-jan, tea is served”, whispers the nurse-in-chief. Katsumi frowns his delicate eyebrows, smoothly shakes his long blue cotton dress and heads towards the study.

Carefully, he removes his grey latex face mask, the grey latex gloves, and then washes his large and pale hands with the Aleppo soap. The nurse brings the china cup of qehwa but Katsumi’s face doesn’t smile — by the way no one has ever seen him smile, except perhaps Lady Alexandrina. The nurse is one of the few who copes with his dead, calm, beardless face.

Katsumi’s skilled hands return empty the warm cup. It’s time for the monthly report, in English, as requested by the Colony Police station. Katsumi picks up his favourite slim brush and unrolls a blank, silky sheet of paper. As he writes, his brown eyebrows turn into thin moon bows:
December 1836.

Two hundred casualties of pneumonia — 30 from Bibi-Mahroo foothills, 80 from the Shahrarah Women hospital, including 50 infants, 30 from the Pushta Workers Dormitory… Silently the nurse leaves the quiet coroner alone in the fragrance of balsam now mixed with cardamom.
 
 

***

Martin Shaw
Buddy Blue

In my life, machines have amassed by forklift, dressed in pig iron skirts of racing green, precision welded for keener corners. Oil pools, like hot butter reflecting yellow sodium bulbs, while metal elbows pump fists that churn rotunda bellies, moulding fridge doors and cheap tin trays for the Christmas countdown….

With paper underarm, a machine minder, Buddy Blue, sits down on his plastic chair facing the lights and dials. He’s on a ten-till-six-shift, his face as pallid as the paper readouts from the metal encased computer at his side.

Deep into the night, Buddy’s head drops to his chest. The workshop manager notices. He looks stern as he strides over to wake him, then quickly calls the stretcher bearers, the appointed first aiders. Upon seeing Buddy’s lips as dark as his last name, they try to resuscitate him before finding a whiz-bang defibrillator for a jumpstart. However, with blood coagulated after years of working on tectonic concrete floors, Buddy’s body is zombified with thrombosis—and, in fact, he’s now dead as the proverbial door nail.

Buddy’s unmanned machine flashes intermittent red lights in sympathy, and even the computer readout is jammed, the paper concertinaed, labouring, like an accordion out of air and tune. The whole factory is shut down for ten minutes as the production graphs in the office fall from the top of an ink-drawn Mont Blanc, to the marker dots at the foot of the page.

All of us workers can now hear a radio playing from above, before realizing it hasn’t been switched off for years. A game of musical chairs begins – the guy who replaces me being set free from his incarceration of assistant store clerk. However, he’s shackled-down again by compulsory overtime on the factory floor. After a pay rise, it is I who replaces Buddy Blue. His work life passes in the flash of neon lights before me, while my existence is now mapped on a graph, climbing to the top of K2. AQ