Issue #37
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This compilation copyright © Neon Literary Magazine (2014).
Do not copy or redistribute without permission.
All content copyright © respective authors (2014).
Authors may be contacted through the publisher.
Cover image copyright © Timur Cetintas.
ISSN 1758-1419 [Print]
ISSN 1758-1427 [Online]
Edited by Krishan Coupland.
Published winter 2014.
Subscriptions and back issues available from the website.
Contents
Paul Bavister
Assessment Day
Larks
A33 Ghost
Shanalee Smith
Postpartum
Menses
Playing With Guns
Noel Williams
Sanatorium
1984 In 1968
Under The Floor
Christopher Owen
I'm Dying, Egypt
Facebook Friend
Tracey S Rosenberg
Clutch
Marrying A Widower
Roommate
Erric Emerson
Red Limbs
A Suspicious Cigarette
Aureole
Meg Eden
Bollystar
Roulette Chat
Twelve Little Indians
Joe Evans
An Instance Of The Scientific Method
New Skin
Black Ghost Knife Fish
Contributors
Paul Bavister
Image by Jac Rye
Assessment Day
Sometimes I look from the classroom
to the low grey building by the car park
and remember I have photocopying
to do so run down then run back
before the class starts. Last week
I got locked in the copier room.
I rang security but no one answered.
I could see the students gathering
for the last class of the day in the room
on the first floor. I banged the glass.
They waited for half an hour then left.
I couldn’t get an outside line on the phone.
I slept on a couple of bin bags stuffed
with shredded paper. In the morning
I checked the door, still locked.
One of my colleagues walked past
carrying a clipboard. It was the day
of my assessment. I banged the glass.
I’m sure he heard me, his waxy lips
trembled slightly. The students arrived.
I could see him asking questions then
tapping on his laptop. After half an hour
the classroom was empty. The door
had been silently unlocked.
*
Larks
After three weeks at the chicken farm
I was in with the owner’s sons –
they invited me back to their caravan
for a lunchtime smoke.
I wiped the windows and looked across mounds of ash,
the field covered with the burnt remains
of the chickens that died of tumours.
Gaz put on the first Black Sabbath album
and nodded. He pinched my arm and told me
not to suck up to their dad.
He’d seen me being shown round the light room
where the eggs were checked for freshness –
he called me a creep and I felt like one.
I wiped again and looked to the deserted downs –
freezing rain blew horizontal. I saw a scatter of birds
far away, jerking, struggling in a fine net.
When I asked what was going on Gaz told me
to keep my mouth shut, it was their dad’s set up
a family tradition. He went to the fridge
and brought out a pot and opened the lid.
Inside were nine tiny birds lying in a line
set in solid fat and gravy. The eldest brother
lifted one out and the others followed.
When it was my turn the record got stuck on
Satan’s sitting there he’s smiling
and we all got excited about a possible visitation
and the dead eyes of the lark with my name on it
watched me as the lid went on the pot
and the pot went back in the fridge.
*
A33 Ghost
I live in a seventies bungalow in the woods.
Back in the nineties property developers
thought they could profit from the place –
estate agents piled leaflets on the mat.
Back then it was worth the trip.
Now the postman comes once a week
with a bundle of leaflets. For ten years
I’ve walked into town every Friday.
It’s a long walk but the path is good.
Sometimes I walk with my thumb out
and very occasionally a car or van will stop
and I’ll sit silently. I find it hard to make
small talk after so many years in that
tumble-down bungalow. Sometimes
I can’t even answer their questions
about where I want to go so they drop
me off on the one-way system at the edge
of town. Sometimes the social pressure
of it all gets too much and I hop
out suddenly at the traffic lights.
If you look in the mirror as you drive off
you won’t see me. I’ll have nipped down
the footpath down behind the new estate.
Don’t worry about me, I get by.
Shanalee Smith
Image by Eric Chegwin
Postpartum
I sit at the kitchen table,
stare absently at my left forearm,
watch the kitchen knife
wedge its way in.
In the middle, through the thickest
section of meat. It’s like the first
slice of honeydew, difficult
to penetrate without pressure
and a little back and forth.
I look at the knife block
reassure myself that everything
is where it should be.
I have trouble distinguishing.
You are making your lunch.
Soon, you will leave me.
Alone.
With our son.
I say – softly so that you
will have to come closer –
“I think
I need help.”
You lean against the counter,
ask me, why?
I tell you: suspension.
The scrape of raw cotton
against my mind.
Anaesthesia.
The longing for wounds I can inflict,
touch and milk.
You ask just one more question:
Do you ever want to hurt the baby?
I say, “No,” and “never.”
You make your lunch.
You leave.
Again I look at the black and
expectantly from the block.
I get up and wake the baby.
*
Menses
My exquisite wound rushes
viscous death
renders me intouchable.
The throbbing instinctual
as violence, visceral
as the foetal position.
Rot is heavy in the air, heavy
between my legs. Lover,
lead the way.
*
Playing With Guns
I could never remember
what had riled us up
like a nest of snakes
shaking our rattles and
sinking venom into tissue.
Just the intense
sensation of my own
blood, jackhammering
through my pulse points.
We were born and bred
for malice, tossed to
the familial oubliette,
taught to eagerly eradicate
softness or axiom.
Unexpectedly, you bolted
abandoning our altercation
in favour of the dark
chambers offering shelter
and sturdy doors.
I was too incensed
to permit your escape,
gave chase to the usually locked
recess of our mother’s room.
You were lying in wait for me.
Her room was cavernous –
the only window blacked out
decades ago.
I couldn’t see
the nine millimetre
until you raised it, level with
my brow. I stared at the
small hole, blacker than
the black gun or the dark
room.
Did Mom see this coming?
When she put that gun
in her nightstand,
brought us here collectively,
showed us where she’d stashed
the full clip of two-toned
bullets, did she know what
it would lead to?
I had no doubt
about your next move.
Daily, you dug knuckles
into the plastron of my ribs
and soft balloon solar plexus,
drove your Nikes into my shins or
spine. More than once, you
had introduced me
to the business end
of a butcher knife.
I was oddly resigned
to this inevitable outcome.
You hesitated. It was the only
thing that had the power
to shock me. I saw
a shadow of humanity
clutch at your face. I
couldn’t make anything
of it.
There is a finite number
of milliseconds that one
can lock eyes with the muzzle
of a gun before their sanity
leaks out
like so much water.
“Pull the trigger or put
it down.”
I would not give you
my back for target
practice. I would not
permit you the justification:
it just went off.
There would be
no struggle but
your own.
The malignant snap
of the trigger,
resonant as the gunshot
would have been
had the safety
not been on.
Noel Williams
Image by Sofia Henriques
Sanatorium
They say you get used to anything.
I swill eighty-gallon bins
with a garden hose in the yard behind the wards
crawling into cabbage leaves, soup, the savour of sick,
occasional needles. I lock
the mortuary door, killing
the careless lights beside a cabinet of strangers
breathless in the hermetic dark.
I’ve done it for months.
Now they walk with me.
Each corpse is sweet as melting wax.
stinks of compost and gob,
rust, unwatered dahlias, slurry.
They speak with the fizz of machine tools,
of flies busy under glass, tell me:
you can get used to anything.
Soon, they’re checking the gates,
strolling ahead when my torch clogs in darkness.
They stumble through the wheelchair park,
okay locks and chains with amusing moans,
goose the sleepwalkers, drool in breakfast trays.
They’ve completed my crosswords, and badly –
“aspiration” – retribution,
“raison d’etre” (5,4) – blood lust.
Now they’re racing stretchers in the car-park,
holding parties to welcome
gangrened feet lopped for the fridge.
I'm searching the Help Wanted ads.
*
1984 In 1968
then Animal Farm all in one raw harvest,
not sleeping. Reeling and weeping for a night
over Boxer, the glue factory,
sweeping toys under the bed.
I understand the farm. I understand
I can’t change anything: on the playing fields,
in soft-carpeted corridors,
in my mother’s bedroom, on any page
but this.
*
Under The Floor
Our house
becomes the basement.
At night we watch precise spiders
join the joists of our sky
above our candle-moon.
Smoke wires through the coal-grate.
We stuff cracks with rag.
We hear
in the stamping of bomb on bomb
earth’s apprehending.
We guess which streets unravel,
webs in a candleflame.
Our past burns away
as we choose stories for our future.
Blind glass. Fumbling brick.
Spiders shrivel like matchheads.
Christopher Owen
Image by Camila Schnaibel
I'm Dying, Egypt
He was always making her laugh. He’d tell her a story. It didn’t matter how bad it was, the way he told it, the look on his face, it had her in stitches. They were in the kitchen. He put his arms about her shoulders and told her a joke, a useless joke, one about dying and which included the line from Anthony and Cleopatra “I’m dying Egypt”, which made her shake with laughter. “I�
��m dying,” he kept saying, and she laughed. “I’m dying,” he called out, and he began to slump down towards the floor, and she laughed, he was such a fool. “I’m dying,” he called as he reached the floor. And she laughed. “Okay, okay,” she said. “That’s enough. The Oscar winning performance is over,” she said to him as he lay there. “Pete,” she said. “Get up, get up, stop fooling around.” But he didn’t get up or respond. “Pete,” she said. “Pete,” she urged, as she knelt to him. “For Christ’s sake, Pete!” she cried out. But he did not reply. She shook him. But he did not reply.
*
Facebook Friend
It’s Jennifer’s birthday. Everyone, all her Facebook friends send their greetings. Hiya. Happy Birthday Jennifer, Merry posts happy birthday, Jenny. Have a lovely day! xxxx, Lalla posts. Then all the others, or so it seems, wishing her well. Pop a bottle of champers, Jenny dear! Happy birthday. Lol. xxx. Happy birthday, Jenny. What are you doing to celebrate? Have fun today Jenny, xxxxxxxxxxxx. They are waiting for her to reply. Jenny who is always there, loves to post, crazy lovely Jenny. Hey! Where are you? Naomi posts. Hope you had a fab birthday, Lalla posts. The enquiries are sent out, come in. All her Facebook friends, well, those who correspond regularly, where are you birthday girl? Where are you Jennifer? Each to each other, what’s happened to her? Has anyone heard from Jennifer? No. No. No one has. And it’s so unlike the chatty girl, the twice-daily poster. Now panic sets in. Steve doesn’t know where she’s got to. Merry’s very upset. Martin writes he’s as bemused as Steve. Who’s Martin? Merry wants to know. Martin? Does anyone know who Martin is? No one knows Martin. Well, someone must do. Is he new? A new Facebook friend? He’s a friend, Steve posts. Steve, Martin, they’re Facebook friends. Martin’s profile pic is a dog with his leg lifted up at a gatepost. Which Steve likes. Merry likes. Penelope thinks is crude but doesn’t say so, so says nothing, posts nothing. Ignores. Martin changes his profile pic to a bare behind, a man’s behind, which disgusts and brings remarks like: well, everyone to his own taste. Then a picture of Jennifer! Martin’s profile pic is of Jennifer! Consternation. Pretended forced hilarity. Mildred posts this is sick. This has got to stop Martin. But Martin doesn’t stop. And two days later he puts up another photo of Jennifer naked, full frontal naked. In memory of Jennifer, he posts. Who is this man? Steve. Steve. Who is this man? Steve doesn’t reply. Nothing. Steve, Steve. For God’s sake will you reply? No. Nothing. Martin posts: Steve has disappeared. Maybe he’s with Jennifer. I’m shocked, posts Penelope. I’m shocked, posts Mildred. Everyone is shocked. This is a very, very bad joke. This is an abuse of Facebook. It’s contrary to its whatever-the-word-is. I can’t think of the word, Jane posts. But whatever it is it’s contrary to it. To its intention, Mildred posts. That’s the word. It’s a bad joke, posts Penelope. I’m deleting Martin and Steve, posts Tammy. So am I. So am I. They do. Joshua wants to be Penelope’s Facebook friend. Who’s Joshua? Sounds nice. The more the merrier, posts Penelope. Joshua is everyone’s Facebook friend now. Well, welcome aboard. It’s good to have friends – Facebook friends. Joshua: Thanks all. Great to be friends I’ve changed my profile pic hope you like it. It’s of Jennifer with an ear missing. Where’s Steve, where’s Martin? Everyone is sending messages to Jennifer, for God’s sake Jennifer post something, just something.
Tracey S Rosenberg
Image by Nick Winchester
Clutch
Great-grandmother left spidery notes tucked
into the compartments of her jewel box. Her pearls
were a gift from a young man
who snapped the box open and babbled.
In their sole photograph, white knobs curl
down her throat, as though
he sent her his polished spine
when he drowned in blood at the Somme.
Grandmother wore them with her Wrens uniform.
She once whispered to me, tipsy on sherry,