Here and Now, There and Then

Evelyn had taken the subway to the Empire State building and ridden an elevator all the way to the observation desk, a famous tourist destination for the millions of visitors to New York each year.  It had been a tough year, one thing happened after another, sometimes several at once.    She can’t even remember what the first real thing was that started the whole cascade; maybe it was Bradley walking out, the realisation she was pregnant and having to face a termination on her own.  Seeing him with someone else just added to the despair.  When her car wouldn’t start and her dog died in the same week, it was a bridge too far.  The winds of change had blown upon her and now there was no grief, no tears left to give.  Evelyn felt renewed, she felt like she had taken back the power she had lost. 

Earth Wind and Fire belted out ‘After the Love Has Gone’ in the lift in some cruel send-off ballad as it sped towards the viewing platform.  She stepped out of the confined box into a swirling breeze that whipped up chocolate wrappers and plastic in all directions. The small group already present on the deck were engaged in photo taking and peering through binoculars. Nobody noticed the dark-haired twenty-something woman exit the elevator and make towards the opposite side of the deck, that side of the building now coated with shades of grey from the failing late afternoon sun.  Evelyn took a moment to look at the ground far below, unintelligible black dots appearing to follow some predetermined route moving like a colony of ants. 

Without the fear or hesitation she expected to feel, she gripped the fence and hoisted herself up with just enough strength in her nimble fingers to reach the top and clamber over the barrier, her fingers savaged by the sharp metal fragments.  She placed herself on the ledge, eyes closed.  And jumped.  The sound of a scream remained on the one hundred and second floor and for a moment she was on the back of Bradley’s Honda as it sped down the freeway, hair lashing her face and the wind screaming in her ears. 

Evelyn awoke .  Through one blurry eye she could see security personnel, paramedics and firefighters and an elderly couple who looked distraught. The pain in her right hip stung like a bitch and she dared not move.   Snippets of radio chatter faded in and out like shortwave radio and it made about as much sense.

“a stretcher…86^th floor... suspected hip frac..”, the firefighter said in to his handpiece.  

 “Someone’s lookin’ after ya”, said the paramedic tending to her, “a cross-wind is the only explanation I have for what happened”, she continued, almost as shocked as Evelyn. 

From the bottom of the tower she looked up before she was placed in the ambulance.  The top looked no bigger than a fingernail.  There was no wind.

Andrew Hawkey

*based on an actual event in 1979

Sorting day

After the funeral, they agreed on a sorting day, when what remained of Dorothea’s life would be packed, distributed, repurposed, dumped.

Ruth was late. Sorry, traffic, she said by way of explanation to her grieving step-sisters. Carol nodded, lips thinning, her eyes flicking towards the clock above the sink.  Balanced on kitchen steps, Judy paused momentarily before resuming her red-eyed exhumation of unused tea sets and preserving jars.

Ruth did as she was bid, aware that even after all these years of trying to be family, the fractures were heightened in death.  Her step-sisters drew together, consulted in whispers over items deemed worth keeping.  Occasionally there was an exclamation, or a story from childhood days that Ruth had not shared. Otherwise, they worked in silence, doggedly sorting, allocating, wrapping in tissue or adding to the growing collection of oddments that nobody wanted.

“I’ll take these bags outside,” Ruth offered.

“Thanks, there’s a pile of rubbish in the garage.”

Ruth welcomed the fresh air, the soundtrack of normal life. The bus to town grinding up the hill, a distant lawnmower, children shrieking in the school yard a block away.

She dropped the bags with the heap inside the door, and as she paused to enjoy the cool earthy basement air, she saw it. The marquetry table, folded and on its side tucked between two cardboard boxes. She tugged at it and lay it on the ground. The top was marked with dirty circles, water stains and dried remnants of maidenhair fern.

“What’s this one?” she had asked her father.  

“That’s boxwood.” His eyes were intent on the pattern as he bent over the baseboard.

“Which one do you like the best?”

He had smiled. “Which one do you like, Babe Ruth?”

Her nine year old brow furrowed while she examined the bands of veneer. “I like this one because it’s red like Mummy’s hair.”

“She did have pretty hair.  Almost as pretty as yours.”

It had taken him a year to make the table, to build the sunburst pattern one piece at a time.  Sometimes they talked; mostly she just watched as he skillfully united the fragments of veneer: aspen, chestnut and cherry, grained and smooth. In hindsight, perhaps it was no surprise that when the table was finished, he took her to meet Dorothea and her teenage daughters.

“She’s not your new Mummy, Babe Ruth. She’s a friend for me and for you. And I hope you’ll like the girls.  I’m sure we’ll all get along.

Ruth found a rag and wet it under the outside tap. She wiped the dirt and foliage from the table top. The stains were indelible, from a lifetime of use and wear. Not everything gets the respect it deserves.

Ruth carried the table down to her car and turned back to the house.  Carol and Judy were standing at the kitchen window. Carol raised a mug and beckoned her in.  Ruth took a deep breath, and went to join them.

Rosemary McBryde

Here and Now

Drip. Drop. Drip drip drip.

God, he was going to have to turn on his windshield wipers, though his battery was already dangerously low, sitting there in the parking lot, waiting.

For the beginning or the end.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, we have results….” The voice crackled over the radio as the rain began to wash over the windshield. He remembered she had told him that when her president had finally been elected that fateful day, the skies blackened and there was such a fierce thunderstorm her students had aptly asked, “is this the end of the world?”

He prayed the rain did not presage similar results for his country. They had fought to preserve and protect and make their voices heard – SHE, the one he was waiting for and had long followed (how he had envied his brother that picture with her!) -  SHE was one of them and had fought along with them and he knew in his heart, she was the one who could turn things around and return his country to its original greatness.

Though he loved it now, make no mistake – he would not live anywhere else – (she sometimes tired of reading how great his country was when she lived in the most powerful one, but she had to admit she loved his country too) - but this one, this one that captivated him, she knew what was needed, what to preserve and protect, what to genuinely fight for and what to back away from or stand up against.

The dashboard lights began to blink. Reluctantly he turned on the car engine, hoping no one would notice he had been sitting there for an hour, but it was the only radio he had and he wasn’t leaving until he knew.

Finally – thank you George!  – it was announced. He sent the text though he knew she’d be sleeping, and shouted a great woop from the confines of his Honda Fit, before driving into the here and now, rain be damned. 

Jasmin Webb

The Golden Takin

When Han-shan returned to this world, the first thing that he recalled was that today was water day. That was why he was lying on the ground halfway down the mountain with his water barrel beside him.

On water day, it usually took Han-shan most of the morning, after his dawn devotions, to scramble down from the hermitage to the spring with his small barrel – sometimes lugging it, sometimes chasing it as it careened out of control, sometimes hunting for it in a bamboo grove into which it had cannoned.

The return journey was considerably more strenuous – scrabbling over rough terrain, practically vertical in places, pushing or carrying, grappling the heavy container in incremental steps uphill. The effort left him quaking with exhaustion but he needed water and his little stone hermitage was not near a water source.

Han-shan had been just beginning his laboured ascent. The rising Sun painted the landscape. He paused. All was silent and still, the matutinal calm draped softly over everything. The dew shone like jewels on the bamboo.

A range of animals shared the mountain with him, unafraid of his quiet presence among them. Sometimes herds of golden takin would move with surprising silence around his hermitage. They were large and muscular goat-antelopes with shaggy coats of long fine golden hair and with long smiling faces topped with a crown of horns. It made him smile to see them.

Through the bamboo, Han-shan saw a single takin cross a rocky space above him. Its golden coat shone, its neat hoofs clicked on the rocks. At its side was its tiny child – a calf, tiny and dark brown, as takin children are, like a little wooly sheep by its dam’s side.

The takin paused and turned its patrician nose down to touch the calf with the infinite tenderness of bovine motherhood.

It was at that instant that Han-shan fell.

The Sun, the pelage of the takin, transformed into an overwhelming light, a tunnel of fire, light calling to light, expansion, speed, and space, space, it was not Earth it was a high place and it was beautiful, everythingness, totality, the absolute, nothingness, void, only the observer, doing nothing but everything was done, eternity’s child in the garden of infinity.

And then – silence, the takin moved on, the fallen barrel.

Han-shan righted the barrel and heaved it a little further up the slope.

The Cold Mountain trail goes on and on:
The long gorge choked with scree and boulders,
The wide creek, the mist blurred grass.
The moss is slippery, though there’s been no rain
The pine sings, but there’s no wind.
Who can leap the world’s ties
And sit with me among the white clouds?

Dhiraja

On the train

It was Grossmueti Rust who suggested that they travel separately. She left two days before him – it seemed safer but Grossvati Rust felt sick with apprehension.

The train was long, the carriages old and rusted and shabby.

It was uncomfortable for Grossvati Rust to share the compartment with two unknown women. He was a friendly person but these were not the days for openness and candour. A stilted introduction – they were Shelly-Marie Palmer and Kana Yamaguchi – set the tone. He would have clung to either of them and sobbed till he could cry no longer, told her his fears, shared with her all the pain that crushed his heart. Instead the three of them politely discussed the exigencies of this rail journey and shared partial and heavily redacted and essentially dishonest accounts of their lives and purposes for travel.

The grime blew in the open window from the hot, dusty landscape through which they travelled.

At night Grossvati Rust took an upper bunk and pretended to read as the women made their furtive preparations for bed.

By the third day they were all tired and dirty but somehow resigned to this strange here and now being the whole of existence.

When the soldiers had come to the museum with their list of how things would be from now on and what was acceptable and, more importantly, what was not acceptable, Director Rust had been scrupulously polite, had offered them tea and discussed their requirements as if he intended to fulfil them.

Instead, two days later he was boarding this shabby train with a small suitcase – from now the extent of his possessions, each object freighted with terminal significance as representatives of his old life.

He prayed that Grossmueti Rust would be waiting for him at the station when he arrived – if this hypnotic journey ever ended.

Barnaby McBryde

Here and Now

I have to go, I thought. I have to go.

But there he was. The one I finally realised, in my 17 years of existence, was indeed, irreplaceable. Here he was, in all his glory, late. I had waited two hours for him, and he arrived without uttering a single word. Instead, he took the seat in front of me, as if he were without sin.

“I need to go,” I stood up, gazing at him. His face was emotionless, as it always was, his eyes fixed on the menu he had picked up.

“Promised your boyfriend a date?” His words were playful, a smirk dancing on his lips. “Don’t you usually break all of your promises?”

“I’m not you,” I spat back. Finally, he looked up at me with a gleam in his eyes, his pearly white teeth on full display. “I’m leaving.”

He called the waiter over.

“I’m not joking with you, I’m leaving.”

“Stay,” He ordered, pointing at my seat. “One cappuccino please, skim.”

“I have to go!” I shook my head, my voice raised so much louder that even I was taken aback. He gazed at me.

“It doesn’t matter, stay here with me.” He dismissed the waiter, flinging the menu to the floor. He took out his phone and started to text someone.

“I hate you.”

He cocked an eyebrow, turning his head to the side, his eyes refusing to meet mine.

“I figured you wouldn’t care. I’m outta here.”

“Fine. If you really want to go, leave.”

I furrow my eyebrows at him, holding back tears.  He glances for a moment before returning to his message, humming a barely audible tune, but loud enough for both of us to hear. He thinks I’m going to fall for him, like I have always done.

But not today.

“Goodbye,” I mutter under my breath, grabbing my jacket and heading for the exit.

In an instant, he leapt out of the chair and grabbed my arm with such force I thought it would break. Spinning me around, he pulled me down towards him, engulfing me in his arms like a snake, his hot breath on my face, melting me.

He held me there, his chocolate eyes thirsting for mine. He leaned in, just far enough for his lips to meet mine.

Yet again he had proved he loved her. Yet again, he kept her in the here and now.


Katya Tjahaja 

October

Choosing a theme is quite stressful for the Artistic Director, especially as occasionally the suggestion is rejected as being just too obscure.  For October, see what you can do with 'Here and Now'.

Stories (300 - 500 words) to rosemary.mcbryde@gmail.com by 31 October, and submissions from new player are always welcome.  Happy writing.