The stories that write themselves

Here was the thing: he wrote a slew of very short stories but, sooner or later, he discovered that they conformed to a structure that he found easy to repeat. There would be two people: a man and a woman. They would be in love, but then fall out of love somewhere between the third and fourth paragraphs of his very short story. It would be moving, he thought at first, but the more he thought about it the less moving he felt it to be.

The overwhelming feeling he got, looking back at his collected works from the last few months, was of a writer wrestling with demons of his own creation; his stories had become a place to act out scenes which had never occurred in his actual life. Some of the characters slightly resembled people he had once known: they had the same shoes, or the same haircuts, or similar eyes. He imagined people resembling people in situations that had never happened. He wasn’t crazy, just creative. It’s all material, after all.

This was the cloth he cut his stories from, but, no matter how different the cloth was in terms of texture and colour, it always looked the same in the engulfing gloom of the cut of his story.

He wrote a story about a narrator and his girlfriend fighting. He focused on the items she had just bought, and rammed these items home as some sort of vague metaphor for loss. There was a touch of irony too, a wry humour to it. It pleased him.

He started to live again and write less. Instead of writing about sadness he started to feel it. It was different from how he had imagined it on paper. He vowed to go back and write stories that more accurately reflected these feelings felt in real lived life.

What happened, though, was this: his life started to be lived as if he was a character in one of his stories. There were fights with girlfriends; there were disagreements about actors from television; he quite accurately played the solitary writer sitting writing observations in cafés.

Sadness became part of his life to such a degree that he could no longer scalpel it out and leave it sitting, carefully carved into a pleasing shape, on the previously blank page. It had not only become part of his life, it had become part of him, and no matter how hard he tried he could not get rid of it. At first sadness clung to him like a leech, then it grew inside him like a cancer; there was nothing he could do.

The sadder he got, the happier his stories got. He sold millions of books, and became famous as a feel-good author. His views were sought on vital issues of the day by daytime television programmes, where he sat in a neat suit and nodded when required to do so. A smile was uniformly plastered on his face; his skin was tanned orange and powdered to stop the glare; his teeth had been expertly engineered into the perfect smile. Now he was successful, he looked incredibly – irredeemably – happy.

In the Graveyard, the monument moved in the morning by Joe Kennedy

You have to become a creature of routines I hear myself saying as her foot kicks over the coffee that she didn’t drink last night making my fist ball up as though it were around some object not to be lost. Morning, her face is all swollen up like she’s got an allergy, well, I suppose she does have an allergy but it’s not affecting her right now. Christ I am a routine only on different arterial roads in the west of the city, a routine of nailbiting (better to have a nailbiting routine, eh?) on the Unthank, the Dereham, the Earlham. People in this city talk about the arterial roads like people in proper cities talk about metro lines. At this precise moment in time I glance at the computer and remember the story saved in a sub/sub/sub directory about a flaneur sort of guy riding an invented underground in this city, “The Eastern Underground”, one I wrote when younger and overexcited by what the old lecturers had to say about excluded middles postmodern geographies and all that shit. Must I say I didn’t complete the story, I was ambitious then and couldn’t knock out a piece in ten minutes ‘cos I was always thinking of novels with black&white photos on the cover maybe of girls applying lipstick and powerstations in the twilight, it doesn’t pain me that I didn’t finish that particular work or the one about an island overrun with hotels or the Italian porno or the magical realist (hahahaha) one, only that I didn’t finish something, which is a chronic pain in the arse.

So, I have though about all of these things and she still hasn’t replied, so I say I was only joking about the routines.

Coffee’ll never come out of this fucking carpet, the fuck. Best to leave it because I decided that we had to go for a walk in the morning, another brilliant displacement activity, brilliant. You even get fit (6 years later). (tell a secret, I’m a hypocrite about the routines, real shit.)

But really I want to go for a walk ‘cos I want to see the monument again, in the graveyard inbetween the arterials I mentioned, I only saw it the once and it was on one of those brooding summer mornings where it’ll piss it down all day but you might get a reprieve if you get to work on time. It was a bold old thing, facing outwards, towering, classical not Christian.

So we take a walk up there and walk down the path which is completely covered in mud and leaves and dogshit.

There’s the monument, it’s facing inwards.

It’s not that big.

So to cut a long story short the monument in the graveyard moved, except it probably didn’t, and everything else I’ve mentioned is utterly superfluous. Maybe I should finish off those novels one day no fuck it you can do them.

Margaret by Ernesto Priego

Margaret sat in the stairs of the square. A concrete sky looked down upon her with a little bit of pity, so there was not a single drop of rain to spoil her evening. She just looked beyond, into the distance, as if waiting for another albatross to pass her way.

Margaret wore a pair of worn low-rise jeans and a skinny white t-shirt that allowed her belly button to be seen. Her skin was the color of milk and her hair the color of Italian espresso, as black as the shiny pair of Doc Martens boots she always wore. She would sit there and stare at the yellow stitching of the plastic soles and caress the soft surface of the shoes. She liked to imagine she would take those same boots somewhere else, make them step on something else than this same ground she now stepped on. She liked to fantasize about walking distances, taking planes, riding a motorcycle, driving a Mini with the union jack painted on the top across the country, maybe all the way through the tunnel, into different countries where other languages were spoken, different currencies were spent and people looked the other way to cross the street. Margaret scratched her head with her left hand, laughing a little because she imagined herself to look like a monkey. The thing is, no one seemed to be looking at her.

Her hair, not-so-short but not-so-long, looked spikey and uncared for, even if in a thoughtful and premeditated way. Her eyes were big and sort of sad, the color of honey. Even though she did not like to wear a lot of make-up -as her so-called mates from school-, a thin line of black shadow emphasized the shape and color of her eyes. And so Margaret sat, in the stairs of the square, sheltered by a black blanket of a sky full of little light holes that were the stars this time of the year.

Margaret felt lonely, as usual, but was not sad. She was simply expectant. The trouble was, so she thought, she had no clue what she was waiting for. What she did know indeed was that she was supposed to be waiting for something to happen in her life. Margaret looked fixedly at the screen of her mobile phone, playing with the keys, writing nonsensical phrases that never quite got to compose a txt message that would get actually sent. She just sat there, then, and played around with her mobile. The rest was silence, she thought, as she realized there was no one she could actually call or txt, even though she had lots of names and numbers saved in her mobile's address book. She sighed, not really knowing why. She just stared into the distant landscape, a flat scene of houses that looked just like each other, windows opened into places she had never been to, pieces of strange lives she would never get to live.

Margaret sat in the stairs and looked at her watch. Two hours had passed since she had left her mates at the pub. It was summer, after all, and she had had a couple of gin and tonics, even though she knew she could not afford them. What the hell, she had thought, and went on to have a couple. She had played darts but had lost as usual, since Katrina, the cunt, would always have such perfect shots. She had got bored and out of money, so she left them there, drinking and jiggling and looking at the local boys discussing football and wearing those stupid Rugby jerseys with false numbers on their backs. She had felt incredibly lonely there, 9pm at the local, drinking her second gin and listening to some song about roads winding and lights blinding behind the noise of drunken voices. She decided she was better off on her own, and left for the square, where she sat now.

It was late for the albatrosses to be flying around. Still, Margaret sat there and wondered what her life could have been like had she left the town for the uni. She had been sick of school, anyways, and no one she actually cared for was going after all. She had not found a job yet, and her savings from the summer camp thing were running out. And here she was, she thought, sitting at the local Uni's campus square, trying to figure out why she had left her mates drinking at the pub and had decided to come here on her own instead. The sky stopped being friendly as she thought this and some drops of rain took her out from her daydreaming. She cursed in silence as she doubted about standing up or just staying there, what the hell, and get drenched with some harmless English summer rain.

¨We are going to the town¨, she thought, and stood up. She began walking to the bus stop, then she ran, and as soon as she got to the transparent protection of the shelter the whole sky broke down in violent and unexpected rain. The bus would take some ten minutes to come, if it was on time, which was kind of unlikely. There did not seem to be anyone around. Margaret sat and closed her eyes, listening to the rain hit the plastic. For a moment, there was nothing on earth but her and the drops of rain, and the sound of solitude. She thought of water, and clouds, and cold, and vast skies. The loud roaring of the bus brought her back to reality. She put her coins on the tray, murmured "City center" to the driver and rushed to the back of the bus.

Margaret rested her head against the window. She drew imaginary landscapes with her finger on the steamy and cold plastic, took her headphones out from her backpack and closed her eyes again. There was no one else on the bus either, but she did not seem to notice until the bus got into town. The rain had ceased but the roads still looked deserted. Shops were closed, but their signs outside remained on, glistening with a spooky spectral light that was reflected on the wet stones on the floor. Margaret got off the bus on the market stop. "At least I may be able to get some chips at this hour”, she thought.

A black bird flew very close to her head and descended into the fountain to drink some water. There was some strange buzz coming out of the McDonald's neon sign. There seemed to be no other sound, but she could not realize it because she still had her headphones on. Every shop in the market was closed. Margaret walked through the empty hallways like a lonely ghost, wandering without any sense of direction. She took her headphones on and stopped. She was grabbing her bag very tightly with her left hand and holding her head with the other. She looked up and down. She sighed, and left the market towards the town hall and the library. She began singing quietly, as in the lullabies her father used to sing to her, with louder volume at first, and then, gradually, turning into a very silent murmur. It was as if her voice could have been heard miles from there. Some other birds flew off some trees next to the Anglican Church. The gravestones were still there, Margaret thought, as quiet and still and muddy and forgotten as this town. She checked her watch. It was only eleven, so pubs would just be calling last orders. As she looked at the time, a strange and piercing shiver ran through her spine. She had never felt as lonely as then. She felt small, very small, as if she was the last person on earth, as if everyone had fled to another planet and she had been left behind.

Margaret sat in the stairs of the library, waiting for someone to pass by. But only minutes passed, and her stomach made funny noses, and she was getting cold with only that tee shirt on. She found herself there, all by herself, sitting on the steps and not going anywhere. She thought of herself as a ghost, as the last, abandoned specter in a cursed town. The sound of silence was all there was to hear. Even the trees stopped moving. Margaret sat there, holding herself tightly, with her arms crossed. The city center was full of lights but there was not a soul to be seen. Margaret looked at her hands fixedly, expecting them to get as transparent as air, but they did not. She pinched herself to see if she was dreaming, but it hurt, and she did not wake up.

Margaret sat in the stairs, which were still wet from the brief rain. It was England and it was summer. She did not have anywhere to go and waited for something she did not know. She felt alone and small, very small, like a particle of dust in the immeasurable universe. She felt like she had disappeared from the face of the earth, but on second thought she realized it was everyone else who had just vanished. She stood up and started walking back home, trying not to think much about it. In the distance, a lonely dog barked, and a full, round moon appeared behind the thick, gray clouds.

Them Is - By Joe Kennedy

He knew it was what they did, them, people grew beards and never bought lager again and dressed serious and gave up Marlboro lights for reds or roll-ups, and then they, them, pretended not to love it and complained. Never directly. Object of ire was always the younger ones, the happy looking girls dressed for hundreds of pounds and the stylish talented-looking young men. They were cunts, the lot of them. And they were all stupid.

Now he was losing track of he, I, them. Them were the young-ones (as he’d heard them described by a reputable man at a party weeks ago when he still felt like one, young-one that is), but weren’t them (or they?) a bunch of beards straggling into ales with old world names and crushing roll-ups under their old smart shoes that they’d hidden under a bed for years and only came out for weddings and agency interviews, if it was a good agency.

Reflects on his own lack of eloquence, waiting for a bus on the Earlham Road. Them (one of them) knew all the words there was to know. The other them were kind of uncauterized, enraptured, speaking in sex. Them said that them’s language had an “erotics”.

He still thinks “erotics” are those books you find under your dad’s bed.

Or when he was with them pretended it was French films with Distel or Fontaine on the soundtrack. How could you set the mood with them?

In eloquence, then, them and them are the same but different.

There was another them, out of all the above circles now, but they had an easy eloquence about them and used words culled from the pub and the pitch and the office. He used to be able to speak like them but he’d been back with them and observing them for too long, so he was starting to speak like a mix of them and them and them but never with the right them and he’d drink the wrong drink when he was with them and smoke the wrong cigarettes when he was with them and get bored when he was with them.

So that was them, and this is now, and them, them and them is now. Honestly, the only hope is a she.