The Story

The story is mottled—unclear, like a rain-stained window pane or the smudged colours of a ripening apple. There are pieces of it, fragments—a book with pages missing and torn corners; incomplete—as it should be, really, or as it inevitably always will be; as a story can never be told in totality: there is always more detail possible to add and parts omitted.
Memory is never the best testimony anyways—now you see it, now you don’t—and possibly never will again. Experience gets lived and lost in a maelstrom of brainstorm, buried in piles of stones like sea-glass pebbles broken and strewn. Sometimes hidden—like a bottle within a paper bag; or hermetically sealed, never again to be revealed. At times, memories glint up from within—glass prisms of broken glass, barely perceptible, but a reminder they are there—were there—and have a story to tell.

The copyright of this post belongs to Monica Jenkins

Responsibility

We are born into a world of life. We breathe living air, stride upon living soil, swim in a living sea. The earth yields plants that grow and nourish its inhabitants.
But we don’t perpetuate life. Like sparks on a leafy forest floor, we ignite and consume; fell trees and smoke the air.
We create death.
We sculpt elephants whilst the real ones are being slaughtered and decimated. We form inanimate objects that don’t require living water to keep cool or clean air to breathe.
The sculptor tips the scales with his artistic thumb and upsets the balance.
We cannot change what is past, regenerate what has perished, or return an accumulated mass to its former state of being.
If we do not govern the Earth, we will be left to guard dead men and sunken treasure.

The copyright of this post belongs to Monica Jenkins

Love

What I invented for myself is our love. You were just you— yet another man on the same earth—another face in a sea of faces—the crowd of skin and eyes and hair—blurred and nondescript, melded together and indistinct.
I heard your voice, and your words enticed. I gambled a seed on you—and within your willing embrace, it sprouted. The bud that grew whispered a promise: I would never be alone- never anonymous. Face recognition would yield identity.
Now we water and fertilize this love with horse manure and bull shit. You offer it as a bursary to subsidize my initial loan. Can we persist in our invented bucolic bliss? I want to know the truth, but I’m scared of it.

The copyright of this post belongs to Monica Jenkins

Grief

       Hello darkness my old friend, I did not hear you over the sound of our child practicing her scales on the piano. You always arrive unannounced, just when I think I am protected,cocooned. I sink beneath a chant of plainsong and feel it will protect me. Or Tibetan isolation; prayer wheels spinning in my head, a rush of white noise, a roar, a talisman against your clawing, gnawing, never-letting-go thinking I will be untouchable there. But you find me and weave your fingers through the white noise closing your cold grip, insistent and serpentine.  Can I ever be free?
       I am transposed into another place, remembering the echo of raindrops on the drum of my umbrella, the syncopated beats of blood and hymns and prayers. I never heard an apology as I laid the Lily on your grave. There was no goodbye. The chaos of my apocalyptic cosmos consumed me, a noise like animals crying and cursing in anger. I yell my silent anger and fears to your inert form, maintaining social poise lest anyone should be made awkward by emotion. How could you leave me alone? Everyone is polite, caring, fearful, their kid glove love is like feather-touch: don't rock the boat. I am left to stand in the sound of my own silence.
     Weeks have passed, months.  And I remain at your mercy. I will carry on, put on the face the world wants to see but I know I will not hear a tree fall in the silence of the forest today, or see the infinity rings spread on the water as the children skip stones across the river. I will not hear the cave mouth swallow and hold its breath as we draw near or see new life sprouting from mossy banks. I am devoid of all but my grief.
Please, let me find a path. Let me breathe again.

The copyright of this post belongs to Holly Khan

The Trader's Wife

I had been baking the plain flat breads since dawn so when the chance came I was out of the door like a spark from the range. The versatility of the cook was being pushed for the meeting of the guild elders this evening and she was too harassed to tear herself away from the preparation of lamb with pumpkin and lentil stuffing, sugar coated biscuits and marchpane to bother with the market today so she gave her blessing for me to go in her place. I was to be trusted. My goal was a rope of whole roasted garlics and more capsicum for the trout mouse, but I desired nothing more than freedom from the chaos of that frenetic steaming world of chopping, cubing, dicing mincing and grinding. I was to be free, for now at least.
As I run to the market I taste the iron tang of the butchers work in the air along with all the fruit and spice and marsh salt on the breeze. I feel the kiss of it on my skin, feel the honey-warm cocoon of the sun and her tracery of light on the Estuary waters. I lean on the warmed oak posts of the covered market, my face in the shade, drinking in the strangeness of it all. I take my time finding my bearings, watching the division of players and audience, all rehearsing their parts on the stage in front of me: aproned butchers men sharpening knives, the barber surgeon equally bloodied, grain merchants checking their scales and bakers knocking excess flour from the base of their loaves while dumpling shaped matrons and gnarled old men stand waiting for their cue along side beribboned maidens with lace hankies hoping to hear their spring-mincing Beau's spout poetry and perfumed words to make their hearts and fans flutter.The cumulus of people flow around the market in a worn groove of harmonies and misunderstandings, a sea of emotion. The independent sellers, versatile in their patter, adjust their prices up and down, negotiating the play of satisfactory deals depending on their audience.
I see her then, the trader's wife, pretty as a peach. She alone is the reason all women are referred to as the fairer sex. She is sacrificing blood oranges with a blunt knife. This is a far better end for the spoiled fruit, than having it go to the pigs. Gelatine and sugar will be added to the liquor and boiled down to make the finest delicacy, crystalised rose adding its gentle suggestion to the jelly at the last moment, food to touch the lips of gods and lovers.
She raises the cloudy pulp in a muslin bag allowing crystal dew drips to be released. The sun shows her silhouette to great advantage and my pulse runs in anticipation of tasting such a delicacy. The scent of the heady citrus is bringing her to the brink of intense happiness and for a moment I am lost in the dimple forming and reforming on the edge of her smile as she sucks the spilled juice from her finger. If I could make a wish I would be the orange in her hand to bring her such pleasure. I would be the oil on her skin so she would have need to kiss me away again and again. She would be my moon's compass. I could catapult to the night sky on the Cupid bow of her lips and bring her a blanket of stars. I would write her sweet poetry of flowering fruit and blue elephants under the moonlight and touch the cordial notes between us. The melted chocolate on our tongues as we kiss would be the only bitterness between us. Together we would understand all the divine secret truths of love.

The copyright of this post belongs to Holly Khan

Ripe

  I set off alarms. I am frisked by complete strangers. Intimate pat-downs. I hold out my arms like a crucifixion and I think how much I want to be frisked by you. In private. I would become brazen and hide my wrinkled nakedness beneath a black burqua. Even my face has a veil. My kohl-rimmed eyes are watching you. Waiting. Your hands blaze with heat. Your touch brands me as you begin to map my skin. Inside my dark curtain I do not worry what you will see in my country. Your fingers linger upon borders long since closed. I recognize my name as you spell each letter down my spine. You lift my tiny veil and sing into my mouth like a mythical troubadour. You leave a romantic inscription with your tongue. I become your orchestra and you conduct unlike long lost fragments of an erotic motet. I had dreamed of wild boys who would write poetry; fluttering, tormented words to break my heart. I wanted to sail down the ocean strait with you as the pilot, plotting the cold stars to set our future. But I am black and blue from your cruelty, bruised by your pummelling lies. You sailed without me. Once, your home was a shabby hotel room. I sat on the bed. You made an art out of unbuckling my high-heel shoes, your hand sliding up my nyloned leg. You said, "I wrote a song for you." You picked up your guitar. You serenaded me. "Traffic lights are full of snow. I love you I know I know. Sitting in my easy chair. Thinking about your crazy hair." Crazy hair. A permanent wave gone wrong. Hair like an abandoned bird's nest. Remember your fingers threaded through those frizzy curls as you pressed me against the wall of the cinema's projection booth. The flickering Hindi film running noisily, the Bengali audience chattering and laughing. The foreign dialogue blocked my ears as you kissed me hard,  only breaking away to change the reel.. left you then to walk through snow drifts. When I am very old I''ll wear a purple dress made of ripe figs. They will hang like exquisite purple breasts. Oh, how I could nourish you.

The copyright of this post belongs to Claudia Anne

Perspective

I spiral through the lens to a world at the other side; Alice down a rabbit hole. Do the turgid grasping roots of fungus squeeze new life from the decaying blooms when they land in the compost,I wonder, as I sink down through the humus layer in a bubble of thought? I have no time to gather my wits, let alone the items that have fallen from my fruit baskets. I pass a lowly worm who gives me a drunken stare through his monocled eye and I return a slow wink. He looks outraged at my presence but I feel I should remind him it is him burrowing in my garden, well my Uncle's garden really, not the other way round. But all of a sudden I am not so sure.
I spiral through time and underground space assaulted as much by mushroom smells as flashes of sky as I tumble further from the garden. Surreal scenes flash past me: a mole postman on a penny farthing bicycle, belly dancing grubs, a tight-rope walker with a huge head and sequinned tights, a toy horse with a coronet of feathers cantering round and around like a motorbike on the wall of death, all defying the gravity that pulls me down and down. I was looking for answers in the compost, like reading tea leaves, truth, a different reality, a view to the horizon and beyond, a way out from narrow perspectives, but as I spiral through this strange new world I wonder if my perspective is not shrinking further. There is no horizon here, no sky even any more. All is shades of brown and strangeness.
The tunnel narrows and I fear I will be wedged but then realise the narrowing is due in part to a spiral of ants and beetles on the tunnel sides. My legs and arms bite into the thread of them and I spin more slowly, slowing, tighter, tight, stopping with my feet on stone steps. The insects melt away through the damp of ages, scratching through the agony of mortar. I look around at endless arches and staircases reaching and joining one another in a dance of right angles, sideways, inverted, until I spot a door. I find I am terrified. Now I have new horizons to explore, new possibilities, I am not brave enough to explore this new world now I have found it. Wishing only to find my way back to the comfort of familiar thoughts and expectations I can think of nothing but escape. I run the maze of stairs, pausing at the top of each flight, the bottom of the next, often finding they are one and the same, to consider my progress. Am I getting any closer to my goal? It is all a cruel joke, the stairs are mirrors and perspectives and for all my efforts I am getting nowhere. Eventually I sink to the floor on a half landing exhausted, and curl like a hedgehog with my head to my knees feeling keenly the absence of prickles to protect me. I am a jellyfish to be squashed and moulded by other forces. I drift into sleep, oblivion, relief.
When I wake the sun has sunk lower in the sky and I can feel the fabric imprint of my skirt and the grass on my cheek. I am stiff with the exertions of my adventure (or is it the damp from the earth?) and I unclench my body from its ball, spiralling up from the ground like a new sprout released from a corm, arms outstretched. The sun glints off my Uncles binoculars where he stands on the balcony and I know I will always be observed, inspected. I clean the dirt from beneath my nails, already longing to have been braver.

The copyright of this post belongs to Holly Khan