Truth, Lies, Dreams
We sat at the top of a brownstone, a windowless attic given over to one of the weekly meetups for writing. The room had rows of brown varnished stiff-backed chairs that faced the lectern at the front. And the lectern was mostly used by the organizers so I didn’t read that night but some others did.
Read moreThe audience, as well as the readings, were very gay. At the end, the main man whose eyes leaked with yellow pus explained that Amazon had a scheme where you could get a publication done for free. I thought it might apply only to the audience who was there.
Once the crowd had gotten up from their chairs and dispersed, I asked him again what he meant, as I hadn’t properly understood it the first time. I stood at the top of the bannister listening to him while Siobhan continued on down the spiral staircase.
He looked up at me while his one eye leaked. The eye was a little crusty from the pus.
The man opened a book bought from Amazon and he dog-eared the page that had his sample LGBTQ stories on them.
“Thanks,” I said and then, with the book, I chased Siobhan down the stairs and out into the street.
Outside it was a black night and getting back home wasn’t easy.
We’d missed the train and so instead Siobhan and I walked along the tracks until we had to step away to let a cargo train pass by. We walked through an alley with orange brick walls and a piece of brick fell towards me from the top of the alley wall. I caught the brick as it fell and I held onto it. It might be useful, I thought.
Then we crossed a disused yard, stepping over some mesh wire fencing and some rubbish strewn on the ground until we reached the next yard. Joan shrieked as a large grey rat came near her.
I yelled at the rat and the rat scurried away, but then another smaller rat with a thin nose and long whispers scurried closer to her foot. I kicked at that one too but it refused to leave. Instead, one of the talons of its claws stuck in the toe of my shoe when I kicked at it again.
Photo by Julius Massius via WikiMedia Commons.
All the other mini-creatures had been killed and only two remained.
They had to be taken out of the freezer and once they had thawed the mammoth was quite easy to kill but the lion was a different story.
Read moreI sat in the back garden, the other side of the walled-in patio and I held the lion within a large Manila envelope that I folded in the middle. His wings were tucked into the pocket either side, and to stop him from biting me I pinched his body to stop him from wriggling away.
The lion could be quite vicious. As he thawed, he expanded and he would nip your fingers right off if he could get to you. I had to tear off his wings but even I sliced the envelope down the left side with my knife he tried to snap and paw – before his left wing was torn right off.
He was still trying to get at me when it was explained that I’d have to do the other side as well, but it was only on my third attempt that I succeeded to tear off his other wing. The lion was then like an insect without its wings held in the remains of the envelope, his head poking out with his lion’s mane and teeth still bared.
I am navigating the antique and tchotchke store after the graduation event.
I couldn’t find a place to lie down so I had gone into the store instead and was wandering around.
Charlie James is there, being berated by a woman because he’s not following her, even though there are goods for sale in his way. I thought she was his wife at first.
And just like Charlie, I too am unable to move. Two tables, both with yellow glass trays, are positioned next to the wall and they are pressed close together in front of me. Every time I try to separate the two tables to get between them, little glass figurines or vases on the trays tinkle like they are about to fall over. So I have to stop.
I look back at the woman and she returns my stare before stepping out of the shop. She looks familiar, like Kim Spencer perhaps, only she has brown eyes.
And through the shop window, a reflection in a mirror for sale, I see Charlie follow the woman out, they are walking along the sidewalk. Charlie follows her on tip toe like a cat burglar, his arms cartoon-raised, two threatening silhouetted arcs, over her head.
The woman wears a delicate white dress that Kim wouldn’t normally wear.
Then I push past the tables into a new space.
Danny Fiere is there. “I heard you retired. I can’t believe you do nothing, but we’ve got something for you if you want,” he says.
I look back at Ned for support but Danny continues, “It’s programming.”
“Programming.” I reply. “It’s the one thing I loved. That could possibly persuade me, part time anyway, out of retirement”.
Photo by Downtown Gal via Wikimedia Commons.
After dozing off again, I find one of the frogs back with me in the hotel room. I have to let him lie in a small container of cold water for a while, to let him recuperate.
Read moreI put him in a long rectangular Tupperware, and put a lid on it so he cannot escape, but every time I put down the container, he starts hitting the lid with his head, almost knocks it off.
So then I fill the bathtub in the room, it is filled quite high, and I let the Tupperware float in it so that this time, if he escapes, he will only escape into more water.
The bathtub is only filled with water from the tap and is not the boiled, sterilizer water I used for him but I’m sure it will be OK for the time that he needs to get better.
Then I leave the room.
And it is only when I get back that I see the horror.
Artie is floating under the water of the bathtub his small body rotating slowly under the surface, the frog paddling around him, the Tupperware up-ended.
Artie must be dead, I think, as I pull him out. A bit of claw catches my hand and comes away from his paw, lodges with a piece of fur at the soft base of my thumb.
I lie Artie’s limp body, belly down, across the lip of the bathtub. I stroke his back, and press hard, up from his hind legs with both thumbs, push his fur up towards his throat until the water ejects from his mouth into the bathtub. And I repeat it again and again until the water spurts out, until after the third or fourth time he splutters into life, and rolls out of my grip onto the floor.
“Oh Artie,” I cry as he walk away.
He no longer has his buff coat but looks more tabby and smaller than he was before; when he was chasing the frogs.
I leave him to return downstairs where they have the constructors out on the patio. They are mending the tiles, resurfacing them with white squares in a diamond shape, white to match the balcony wall which surrounds the patio. And I want to see how the construction is going.
When I get there I’m surprised to see Artie once more. This time he is lying on his back, his body splayed across the balcony wall. A small but deep gash is visible across the white fur of his belly, bleeding,
“Artie,” I cry out once more as I rush towards the wall.
Next to him sits a contractor and, at the far side of the patio, two more. They wear grey hard hats and are eating sandwiches, it’s their lunch break. And they stare back nonchalantly at my commotion.
Then a second cat bounds out from the French doors of the hotel, across the patio and up onto the wall to my dead cat. Only it’s Artie who ran out of the hotel and the dead cat is not Artie after all, although he shares the same tabby markings and size.
Artie sniffs at the dead cat briefly before leaping towards the two contractors at the end of the patio. He ducks between them as they slouch and chew their sandwiches.
“Catch him!” I yell before he disappears under their legs.
Photo by Eu_eugen via Pixabay
I’m in Indonesia and we’ll eat over in the restaurant district. But before I leave my small single room for the restaurant, I notice that I have a cut on my belly. It is on my right side, just above the joint of my hip but I won’t have any time to do something about it.
Read moreWe have arranged to meet at a small restaurant, the near side of the pedestrian zone, the one with the large inviting red trestle table outside.
As we finish our drinks, we notice on the other side of the street, on the second floor, there is an unlit neon sign for another eatery, two lowercase letters either side of three larger Kanji. We are trying to decipher it before we move on to get food. Only it’s already night, and late, and maybe we should just eat here after all.
We go inside and up some stairs to a small room with two bare Formica tables hastily pushed together. The waiters first cover them with white tablecloths, and butt the tables up against one wall; but there is not enough room until we shift the tables back away from the wall and open up the head of the table.
“Reed or Cameron can squeeze in then,” I suggest.
Elaine is already sat down as well as Mum, and Siobhan. And I sit on one side with two others there but I am complaining that I should be opposite.
“It won’t make a difference,” says Elaine from the head of the table.
“But our elbows will knock,” I reply, spreading out my arms to illustrate the point.
There’s an ache in my stomach that I brush off. Then I get up to squeeze into the space on the other side of the table. I can sit the other side of Mum as well, I point out.
As I sit down a group of Scottish dancers come into the room. They are prancing in a highland fling, legs with heavy stockinged plaid socks swirling, arms high. They troupe into the room as part of the entertainment. I can join them, I suggest, but I stay sat while the sound of bagpipes from the other room urges the dancers in.
A Chinese girl sat behind us on a chair flat against the walls, knees pressed together, is talking to a boy in the chair next to her.
“Shhhht,” and I motion to her, forefingers snapped across my mouth, Zip It, before pressing an index finger to my lips. My gesture feels unintentionally harsh.
And when dinner is done, and I return to my room and close the door for the night I return to my cut and notice how the vein underneath now traverses my belly and down to my groin where, on the right side, there is another cut. My groin bleeds slightly, a bright red star.
Then I pull up my shirt and the vein continues in the opposite direction, up from the cut on my belly, across and over towards the left side of my chest. It throbs purple and I daren’t pull my shirt up further to see where the engorged vein ends.
I pick up a glass that I left lying in the small sink by the side of my bedroom door and think to drink the water left in it, but there is a frog is in the glass partially hidden in its purple liquid. There are flecks of white mould as well, and I am about to put a lid on the glass to stop the frog bouncing out but I am too late. The frog jumps from the glass and splashes, a soft rubbery shape onto the linoleum.
“Damnit!” Then I begin to pour out the liquid from the glass, into the sink. But the liquid is already congealed into a messy white shape, another frog just in the nascent stage of growth. It’s a patchy white congealing shape, legs, torso and head barely discernible from the primordial goo, and it too splashes out onto the floor.
Quickly I open the hotel room door to get the frogs outside and kick them with a little poke from my foot until they hop into the hallway.
Of course, Artie is sitting waiting outside. In he comes at first until he notices the frogs crossing his path. And he is about to slip out again when I block him with my leg.
I shut the door, the frogs still outside, Artie inside, but he’s sniffing under the crack in the door, pawing underneath to get to the frogs on the other side.
Image created using Midjourney AI on Discord
After a brief rain shower, I am cycling around New York City, gleaming cobbled streets on a bright sun filled afternoon.
Here to visit mum, I left my stuff with her in lower Manhattan before I set off with the racer. I have to be careful with its thin tires but nevertheless I am pulling the bike expertly up hills to discover new side streets, while still dodging large pothole puddles.
Read moreI turn off the main road and slope down into a narrow mews with cute white row houses before returning, then ducking down into another mews, over more large cobbles and deserted lanes.
A woman passes by in the opposite direction on her own bike and I turn into where she came from to see what is there.
And the road has two paths either side of a grassy bern that leads down to the river. The paths are muddied by the foot traffic and I see people, bathers by the waters edge, so I take my bike down the right hand path until I near the shore.
An old woman comes out of the water. She is naked, her large pendulous breasts swaying with each step are shapeless bulbous cones. It’s too cold for me, I think, for bathing. And then her husband too, comes out of the water. He too, is naked, his blanched white skin contrasted against the grey waters of the river behind him. And his penis is small with a red tip and shriveled by the cold.
As I pass him and cross to the other side of the bern, down at the waters edge, I see that he has a piece of fern like moss attached to his right foot. He bends down to pull it off, just as I pull my bike over to the left hand path.
And as I walk the bike further away from the bathers and up the opposite bank, my back to the old man, I feel an arm on my shoulder. It feels soft and goey, a heavy weight flopped across my back.
“Eww, what is that?”
As I twist around I feel more arms heavy around my shoulders and neck, and I twist around further and swipe out at the load.
On the path an octopus falls to the sandy floor, its thick dark grey limbs slimy and flecked with white dots.
Photo by Rennings via Flickr
