The Day

“Oh what to wear, what should I wear?”

She hadn’t seen him in six weeks – the longest they had ever been apart since marriage. She wanted to look good, especially good, when she picked him up at the airport with young Billy and Cindy -.the longest the kids had ever been separated from their father as well.

She didn’t like these overseas trips Kodak made him take though….he always returned somewhat distant, different, despite the jewelry for her and toys for the kids.

The black and white polka dot skirt. Yes. She had lost weight and this was new. Something fresh, something bright, something appealing. That with the white embroidered blouse. And black heels.

Yikes, look at the time! Must get ready and gather the kids. Where were they anyway?

She peered out the living room window. There was Billy riding his bike. Good. Cindy….? Oh that’s right, down the road at a friend’s house.

Her thoughts were interrupted by the phone.

“Hello, Doris?”

“Yes…”

“Hi it’s Joan. Cindy’s been bitten by our dog. Shall I drive her home?”

“Bitten? Drive? Uh, OK…. I guess so…..”

What was THAT about, she wondered as she hung up, but she went on cleaning the kitchen.

In a few minutes a car pulled into the driveway and she walked to the front door with dish towel in hand.

Standing at the front door, she released the dish towel upon seeing Cindy in the front seat with a blood soaked towel to her mouth. 

Raw hamburger is how she would later describe it.

She could barely dial the phone.

“Dad – can you pick Bill up from the airport this afternoon? I’m not coming. Cindy’s been bitten by a dog and I’m taking her to the emergency room.” 

They waited for two hours in the emergency room for the doctor to finish dinner, but when he did come, he asked Cindy if she could talk. She was so scared she pushed past the pain and said past the swelling of the raw hamburger that was now her lips, “Ye…I ca….taw….”

“Mrs Webb, the swelling is so bad I can’t see the damage here. We’re going to have to wait until it subsides before we know what to do. In the meantime, I’ll put a bandaid on it.”

 

They walked out of the emergency room to see her husband and her father and young son Billy, all in the waiting room. Cindy ran into her father’s arms as he pulled out a pair of huge fuzzy white llama fur slippers she would later keep until they were shreds.

“You came!” she cried. 

Jasmin Webb

Dadu

The greenish black of the bush closes in, autumn brightness left far behind at the turnoff.  Aamir cuts the engine and opens the car door. An alarm chirps and he removes the key from the ignition. Nearby, water gurgles over rocks. A tui’s bell-like call ends with a jarring rasp.

“This is it.” Aamir steps out.

“I don’t … it’s not right … I’m not coming.”

“Please, Santosh.” No response. “I can’t put it together. Please.”

The passenger door creaks.

“We used to come here. Dadu and me.  It was our place.”  Aamir reaches for the blue canvas bag on the back seat.  “You bring the shovel.”

The Kalka Mail arrives at Howrah station. A tide of scabby, stinking children, aged four to pubescent, surge towards the passengers alighting on Platform Eight. The boy pushes through, fingers moving deftly into pockets, finding a coin, the occasional note. He swoops on a dropped newspaper, worth a few pence. Enough for a portion of rice from the darbar.

Aamir protects the bag, trying not to let it bump against his leg.  He slips and steadies himself on the trunk of a young miro. The contents of the bag shift with a dull rattle.

“Just around this corner,” Aamir calls over his shoulder. “There’s a clearing.”

It’s eight years since he was last here with Dadu, walking the track, identifying trees. Eating meethi matri in the clearing, listening to Dadu’s stories of Calcutta, of Manchester, then travel to New Zealand.

Aamir stops and waits for Santosh. “This is the place.”

They alternate, digging or resting on a matai stump. Angled rays of sunlight filter through the canopy to dance in the clearing.

The boy lies in the shadows near the ticket counter. He tucks the aching stump of his hand between his legs. Today he had no energy to push past the others. Without that, he doesn’t eat. Across the platform, the collectors nudge sleeping forms with their boots. He’s seen them pick up bodies, the weak, the dead.  Soon, it will be him.

Aamir unzips the bag, exposing the chalky jumble within. Santosh gently lifts the skull.

“The place to start.”

Aamir watches as his friend removes each grey-white length.  Santosh considers and places, until there is a recognisable form lying before them. It’s smaller than Aamir imagined, not an adult. The bag is littered with fragments and delicate pieces.

“I can’t tell what’s here,” said Santosh. “Phalanges, carpals, cuneiforms.”

Santosh lifts them in handfuls, laying them as hands and feet. “This will confuse whoever finds him. Or her. Who was it?”

 “No idea. Indian medical students had to buy a skeleton.” Aamir selects a lancewood sapling.  “Dadu’s gone. Dida wants it gone too.”

He settles the tree on top of the bones while Santosh fills the hole with soil. Together, they firm the earth and scatter humus and leaves around it. A tui sounds a blessing.

Aamir picks up the empty bag and they walk back to the car.

Rosemary McBryde

0110100110010110

‘Dude!’ Dr Cooper typed, with what he hoped was the right balance between the peevish and the cheery, ‘what do you mean you don’t think ethical non-monogamy is a good idea? It has the word “ethical” in it!’

Perhaps email was not the best way to be conducting this conversation. And perhaps he should stop sending personal emails and get on with preparing for his undergraduates’ tutorial. But the students were so unimaginative – seeing mathematics merely as a requisite for science or engineering and not as a creative art. Where was their interest in accelerated iterative blind deconvolution or the plurisubharmonic functions of logarithmic growth?

Jocelyn had agreed to go with him to Ibiza. Music was mathematics in sensual form. They would sit and watch the Sun sink into the ocean while Blank and Jones or Troels Hammer or the Redlounge Orchestra chilled the evening with soundscape beats.

He had talked to her about the Thue-Morse Sequence – how it conveyed his idea: the binary sequence obtained by successively appending the Boolean complement of the sequence obtained thus far, and about how Bram and Taylor had showed how it provides a fair outcome for discrete events – a sequence a, b, b, a, b, a, a, b, b, a, a, b, a, b, b, a …

‘The perfect illustration,’ he had told her, ‘is the song by Blur:

… following the herd
down to Greece
on holiday.
Love in the ’90s
is paranoid
on sunny beaches
take your chances
looking for
girls who want boys
who like boys to be girls
who do boys like they’re girls
who do girls like they’re boys.
Always should be someone you really love.’

 She had agreed to come with him. And now she replies to his last email with just three words – I’m not coming, then silence.

Would she even pick up the kids from swimming this afternoon?

Dhiraja

Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims

A golf course may appear to be nature, but only to the unconsidering eye. It is what Masanobu Fukuoka would call ‘imitation green’, it is nature oppressed, bent to the will of man. And not – thank God – the will of lumpen peasants raising Brussels sprouts and knobbly root vegetables, but to the will of old, rich, white, powerful men. O, how firm one feels surveying a golf course. All disorder, death, decay is banished; each tree, each smooth expanse of sward, the very contours placed and tended and controlled purely for one’s gratification.

And, O, if you own the golf course … and, O, if they call you the most powerful man in the world!

*

The Prince of effing Peace may have mumbled on about love but there are those that one inevitably hates, those one hopes the worst may befall – the undeserving and self-obsessed; privileged, arrogant and unconcerned by the situation of others; convinced that the world owes them a living and that everyone else should bow and bend to their indulgent whims; born on third base and thinking they hit a triple; life served up to them on a silver plate; a silver spoon in their mouth … people like … Afghan schoolgirls. Whiney, self-indulgent little pigs!

*

Andisha Dawlatzai climbed the slope behind the house in the dark. The hill was rough and seemed made all of sharp-edged rocks but her father would not countenance the wasting of kerosene by taking the lamp on a purposeless walk.

To the east, the sky was just beginning to lighten – the tones of hope rose slowly from the dark horizon promising a new day. The light caught Andisha’s desolate face. She whispered to the sky, ‘Huddu yaem tashreef-rawrhal’ – ‘I am not coming.’

*

‘The Young Robot-Builders of Afghanistan

Six teenage girls from Herat, ranging in age from 14 to 16, have been denied entry to the US to attend FIRST Global Challenge, a robotics competition in Washington to present robots designed to clean contaminated water …’

Barnaby McBryde

She

“You’re waiting for a miracle.”
“I’m waiting for you.”
“I’m not coming.”

I replayed the scene in my head. She bid farewell to me as if the thought suddenly popped into her head. She spoke, words falling from her lips softly, and I swear I heard them thud on the ground with full force. They scratched through my skin and clawed at my heart. These were short, but not sweet words. They left a bitter feeling and a permanent stamp.

Yet I had hoped, I hoped with all my might that the blazing sun above us would stop melting the creatures we called ours, that the waters would stop drowning everything we had. That the flames would stop burning. That the Earth would stop swallowing us in hatred and agony.

But she wouldn’t. She refused to hope, she refused to believe.

Instead, she would just laugh at me, at my hope. I told her we would make it. I told her that we would be fine, we could make it out alive. I told her we could survive this madness, and she replied with the roll of her hazel eyes. I spoke to her words, yet mine were never heard.

If only she had listened, she would be here with me now. Instead of being engulfed in the flames below me, she would be beside me. She would be here, with me right now, and we would watch the world burn. She would be here, she would be safe.

And, in the most absurd way, I can hear her tell me that I was right. I can hear her call for me. I can hear her asking me to save her, to come back for her. To take her with me.

But I’m not coming.

Katya Tjahaja 

July

Congratulation, seven stories last month is a record for this project, dear writers. They are all delightfully different once again.  This month, see what you can do with "I'm not coming".

Stories to rosemary.mcbryde@gmail.com by 31 July. Happy writing!