Cassandra Voices

Category: Culture

  • Westerlywind – A Short Story

    Worthless. Humiliated. Deeply uncomfortable. Skin crawling. Awful. Shitty shit shitty fucking horror shit shit cock horror. Hate. Disdain. Awful, awful. Sad. Afraid. Unwelcome. Outside. Other. Ugly. Repulsive. Grotesque. Agnes. She wondered how, every time she appeared to be enjoying her time in Greenpoint. How, when things seemed like they were generally ok, she ended up with this gut-wrenching awareness that she was a gorgon who smelled of menstrual blood and dirty clothes.

    Her old friend Derya is turning 25 and Agnes arrives at the apartment at the weird hour. The hour of semi-sobriety, of eyes open to who is coming and going at a party.

    She heads for the punch before she attempts to talk to anyone. Everyone is preoccupied and ambivalent. The initial vague panic sets in. Agnes moves from the punch and rejoins the group with whom she arrived. Her husband Jen and Jen’s buddy, Martin. They’ve been hanging out all day at this stage. They drove in together. They ate BBQ together. Their day has already happened. She feels shame for having fought with Jen in front of Martin twice and was looking forward to getting away from the two of them upon arrival. As they have all run out of ways of making jokes or poking fun or having any kind of laugh together, there are a lot of silences and looking around. They have been hanging out for eight hours. Five of which involved a drive. How could they be expected to like each other at this stage. Jen tells a terrible story about drinking insane amounts of Red Bull in college and burning a wooden deer in a parking lot. Martin laughs hard even though Jen has told this story one hundred times and Martin was there when the event occurred. Agnes widens her eyes in disbelief and decides to brave the party room, thinking, I married a total asshole. She slams back her punch and ventures out for more, pressing down the mounting fear that builds within her.

    There is a place Agnes revisits when a fissure appears in her emotional fabric. It’s buried deeply inside her heart. When she feels a certain way in a certain mood in a certain environment, it is back there she goes. It is a darkened cloak room in a Catholic school. St Pius X. It is a year after her father has died. She is 12 years old. She is confronted by a group of girls about her odour. She pretends to not understand that she does indeed stink. She pretends that her classmates are simply identifying her smell and trying to ‘help’ her in the same way that her condescending delusional mother tries to ‘help’ people on her case load as a social worker; only she knows these girls are meaner, because they are 12. They have not properly learned how to pretend to be kind just yet, or, they have not been properly trained in the art of transforming their dysfunction into judgement about other people’s pain. Professionally.

    Party. Panic attack worsens.

    The Dan Crowleys and Robert Roberges are plentiful in certain Brooklyn zip codes, at certain launches and parties. She is reminded of her station in life each time she visits this fucking place. Agnes epitomizes the very visible invisible. The wrong frame of mind and intrusive thoughts abound, corroding her ability to make the smallest conversational effort.

    “So, what else…” falls out of her mouth, an involuntary verbal spasm. Stopping her. Turning her to melting, pointless garbage. She is so easily embarrassed by herself. Her own words, or lack of words in this case, cause her very innards to burn. Her mouth, dry now, presses its lips to the glass in her hand. She is reminded of a high school assembly when an alcoholic and a drug addict came to speak to her 11th grade class. She is standing near the punch table yet again, as she is reminded of this. Then she thinks of what the alcoholic hilariously stated was her past self-abuse motto. Agnes decides this is a great way to break the ice with the man to her left fumbling with cracker crumbs on his shirt. She conjurs her best raspy Rhode Island accent to re-enact the remembered phrase to the stranger. POOR ME. POOR ME. POUR ME ANOTHER DRINK. She says as she smiles at him, directing her eyes toward her glass in a knowing manner. He moves swiftly away from her, pretending to have heard nothing. Hey, do you have the time? She yells after him in an attempt to recover from the obvious rejection. Just then the host of the birthday party appears. Fucking finally. DERYA!! Says Agnes. Agnes. Says Derya. They hug and kiss. Some party! Says Agnes. Derya has to go check the stove. The moment of affirmation ends abruptly.

    Astounding paranoia is the accomplice to this sorry state. Imagine someone walking through life wincing. That is an Agnes smile. That. All the time. Her husband, Jen, does not understand why she gets mad about things that are of no great importance. Why she feels affected by the slightest discomfort. Why her twinkle is infrequent. A callus formed over time. A hardness. A protective layer. And when a crack appears it reveals a heartache so great, no person could take it. She tries to keep it to herself. And sometimes at a gathering here or there her oddness takes hold. Her choking self-hatred rears its head, and she runs out of her external self. Her inner life surfaces, paralysing her. Reminding her of the collective experiences that have corroded her spirit. A lack of kindness can erode a person. Cause them to burn alive. Faces red from embarrassment. Faces red from too much wine. The tale is worn and it ages, as pain will. It wears through the skin. Hardship surfaces. It becomes apparent eventually.

    Smell.

    Agnes stands by the punchbowl and the peanuts and cheese and crackers, and reckons she is really quite okay with talking to nobody. Her inebriation is nearing wistfulness: in the company of old friends, she is forced to remember old friends. She remembers the cloakroom confrontation after prayer group with the Shultz family. George and his very religious mother, Ellen. She smells her sweater the entire way to the cloakroom. They all know she smells. So does she. She says goodbye and scurries away from them, and pretends she lives in the house next door to where she actually lives. The beat up old mansard hellhole. When they walk away, after she’s hidden in a backyard bush, and once the coast is clear, Agnes moves over to the apartment building she actually lives in. On the second floor. Where a dachshund named Boru has led the other creatures in a revolt involving copious amounts of waste on unread newspapers. The floor is regularly soaked with piss and shit, so much so that there is now no way of getting the smell out of the wood. Toxic and right outside her bedroom door. She climbs the apartment stairs, goes to the kitchen and toasts two bagels. She then smothers them with Philadelphia cream cheese and moves to the living room to sit down on the blue recliner purchased for her dying father and watch Gargoyles. A cartoon about gargoyles. Something stirs within Agnes. She gets up and goes into her older brother Stephen’s room. Has a look around. It smells like teenage boy. She goes to the kitchen and grabs a pile of papers. She re-enters Stephen’s room, places the Providence journal on the floor and pulls down her pants and takes a shit.

    This party is hilarious, Agnes slurs to Martin. Martin nods. He is a quiet person. Martin. Have you seen my purse? I just had it. Have you seen it? I just had it. I just had it. Where’s Jen? I want to put my new lipstick on. I want to. Oh Martin, let’s play that game where we look around at every appalling person at a party and decide if they would be a Nazi or a member of the Resistance. Where’s Jen, says Martin.

    Booze is a noose around our Agnes’ neck. A boring old piece of fraying rope that used to have a pleasant function. That rope was once integral to a tyre swing placed over a river. It wore down over time and has been left in a pile of leaves. To rot. Agnes picked it up. She made a knot. That ancient rope around her neck. Alcohol. A misused piece of rope. That once held a tyre and simple pleasure that is now a shabby lariat looking for a lighting fixture.

    Agnes has found herself a party stranger to talk to momentarily while Martin rubs Jen’s shoulders. Long drive my ass she thinks to herself. Oh me? I’m just down visiting. I’m here for Derya. You know? Quarter of a century the old gal…anyway. What do I? I work in a deli called Hudson St., we make grinders. That’s what we call sandwiches in Rhode Island. Have you ever had an Italian? GRINDER. Italian Grinder? Ahahaha. What is wrong with me? AHAHHAHA. It’s funny. You’re not laughing. An Italian grinder consists of provolone cheese, capicola (pronounced like this: gabeegole), oh you’ve seen The Sopranos? Well there are a lot of Calabrese and Sicilians in Providence. Ahem. So, what else… salami, boiled ham, lettuce, tomato, red onion, oil and balsamic on the bread and oh no go right ahead. I have to go to the bathroom, too. No you go first. You work in a magazine. I’m better at holding my pee in. AHAHAHAHAAHA!!!! You know. Well, lunch rush has taught me a thing. It was nice meeting…She is now standing alone trying to look unbothered by the fact that she thinks, where did I put my glass? It’s in my hand. More liquid. More liquid it is. I would drink toilet water if it had a splash of vodka in it. Look at me.

    There were these games. These games that they would play at St. Pius the X. The 12 year olds. These old games that they were too old to play imbued with new meaning. She understands them. Too old was she. There were no playmates any longer. Games meant so much more when you understood that you were a fat girl with braces and a wen on your nose. Games were meant to humiliate if you were not a pretty little figure. BUT HOPE. SWEET HOPE. Laughter. Kinship. Joy. She jumps in. Red rover, red rover let Agnes come over. RED ROVER RED ROVE’R LET AGNES COME OVER.

    There are seven of her classmates in a row. Holding hands. Creating a chain. She runs right for the hot spot, at the boys she hopes to astonish with her comedic genius thus winning friendship from them and respect from the rest of the class. Ryan Roberge and Daniel Crowley. She runs in SLOW MOTION screaming HEEEERE IIII COOOMMME. She should of added YOUUU STUPID MOTHHHHERFUCKERRRS. That was one of those verbal expressions of frustration that came later in life accompanied by the finger when someone overtook her on the highway. But alas she was a reasonably good-natured 12. In the absence of resolution to childhood trauma the world is a rage canvas. Oh you stupid motherfuckers. Agnes runs in slow motion and she slowly breaks through with everyone laughing. Victory!! Victory, she thinks, until she realises that Crowley and Roberge pretend to have broken arms almost before she gets to them. As she pierces through their false union with all her husky hope that crushing feeling envelops her. She is the joke. The joke on TOP of her fucking joke. Extra funny. The game is for the other children soon to be teenagers gaping at one another. That game of breaking the flesh gate is for them at that moment. They get to play a child’s game all but for the chance to touch in front of the lay teachers.

    There is an extra benefit to humiliating one tubby fool. The moment keeps recreating itself for the entertainment of the other children. They played that game of Agnes breaking arms for 30 minutes that day, and 30 minutes the next. And the next. And the next. It was just so funny, and then the joke got old. She was the rerun of a live sitcom for the week. Agnes didn’t stand up in frustrated defiance against her peers. She just let the pain of every recess wash over her, and then it stopped one day. Something else replaced it.

    No such thing as victory. Life’s beauty is reserved for the beautiful. Is it possible to be that child and then become a proper, fully-formed adult? She feels more kinship with pigeons than she does her fellow man. That’s why she has found herself outside Derya’s birthday party. On the fire escape, watching from above as some hammered suit flings change at cabs. Agnes glasses him.

    Moira Brady Averill (1983–2016) was a writer, comedian, and self-described “career waitress” from Providence, Rhode Island. She married a Dubliner, the composer Gareth Averill, and became a central figure on the offbeat fringes of Ireland’s comedy and theatre scene. For the Tiger Dublin Fringe festival she co-wrote and performed the shows Very Rich Hours and Flemish Proverbs, which won the award for Best Design in 2015. She created and MCed the script-tearing variety night Meat Scandal, and through the collective Change of Address she collaborated with artists in direct provision. Alongside her comedic work, Moira left behind many pieces of short fiction of a more serious tone, in varying states of completion. ‘Westerlywind’, in which her recurring semi-autobiographical anti-heroine Agnes goes to a birthday party in Brooklyn, is one such piece.

  • Could Torture Ever be ‘Right’?

    The recent appointment of Gina Haspel as CIA Director is a sign of a growing official approval for the use of torture, despite its illegality under international and US domestic law. It is widely known that she previously helped cover up US government torture.

    FRONTLINE reported recently that ‘Haspel ran one of the first black sites – secret CIA prisons where the agency held perceived high-level terrorism suspects. She also participated in the controversial decision to destroy evidence of interrogation sessions in which detainees were subjected to waterboarding.’

    President Trump repeatedly praised torture techniques, too, announcing during his campaign that, ‘Torture works. Ok, folks? You know, I have these guys – ‘torture doesn’t work!’ – believe me, it works.’

    This idea that ‘torture works’ is often taken as moral justification for its use. Furthermore, while explicit moral argument in favour of torture is unusual, it is implicit in the characterisation of ‘terrorists’ as ‘baddies’. Even if an act of torture is regarded as unsavoury, it may still be deemed worthwhile if lives can be saved by using it. These arguments, however, are deeply flawed, as I will explain.

    In the absence of an internationally-agreed definition of terrorism I use this one adopted by the UN Security Council in 2004:

    … Criminal acts, including against civilians, committed with the intent to cause death or serious bodily harm, or taking of hostages, with the purpose to provoke a state of terror in the general public or in a group of persons or particular persons, intimidate a population or compel a government or an international organization to do or to abstain from doing any act, which constitute offences within the scope of and as defined in the international conventions and protocols relating to terrorism.
    (UN Security Council Res. 1566, 2004, para. 3)

    “Terrorists”, therefore, are defined as individuals who commit criminal offences, such as those detailed above, for the purpose of creating “a state of terror in the general republic”.

    Terrorism is also a crime under specific domestic codes, including the UK’s Terrorism Act 2000. Specific offences include: ‘Membership of proscribed organizations, fund-raising for terrorism, directing a terrorist organization, and incitement of terrorism overseas.’ A person can be described as a terrorist, and prosecuted for criminal acts under domestic and international law as terrorist, for a wide range of deeds, ranging from simply being a member of a terrorist organization, to hijacking a plane.

    Let us assume for the purpose of this piece that any terrorists who is about to be tortured has already been found guilty of one of the criminal offences detailed above, rather than being merely suspected. So I will be talking about people who are guilty of offences that contribute to terrorism.

    My focus is on the state as a moral actor, rather than individuals working for the state; though there are interesting dilemmas in terms of individual responsibility.

    In 1984 the UN defined torture as:

    Any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.(United Nations Torture Convention of 1984)

    This definition does not include, however, ‘pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions’ as The Telegraph put it in 2005, such as the death penalty.

    We may assume that Fyodor Dostoyevsky‘s description of the plight of a person sentenced to death by the state in The Idiot is biographical, considering his own experience of narrowly avoiding a Czarist firing squad, allegedly for taking part in anti-governmental activities. By comparison with the fate of a person assailed and killed by brigands he says: ‘the whole terrible agony lies in the fact that you will most certainly not escape, and there is no greater agony than that’. He asks: ‘Who says that human nature is capable of bearing this without madness?’

    This effect of lawful actions is important when it comes to deciding what form of torture, if any, could be permissible, as it implies that exceptions can be made, and in general there is ambiguity around what is generally understood as torture, and that which is actually illegal.

    As exposed by the water-boarding controversy, there are certain actions that are widely believed to constitute torture, but which can be defended as legal on technical grounds. In other words, if some actions generally considered torturous, are permitted, then there is the possibility that some actions are ‘torture’, without being illegal (domestically and internationally).

    That leaves the potential for certain torture techniques to be, not only legal, but seen as ‘right’ as in accordance with the law. It is precisely this loop-hole and the ambiguity in understanding of what is legal, and what is ‘right’, which opens the doors to the possibility of legally-sanctioned ‘torture warrants’.

    Which, if any, torture, could be considered ‘right’, then? Is something always ‘right’ because it is ‘legal’? Is it ever ‘right’ to legalise actions, such as those in self-defence, that are otherwise wrong? Could torture be one of those exceptions?

    Without delving too deeply into moral philosophy, we can take two approaches. The first, that of moral realism, identifies an action as inherently and objectively wrong. The second approach is utilitarian: which advocates the course that benefits the most people, maximizing general happiness and minimizing total pain.

    Utilitarianism is a form of Consequentialism, which broadly states that an action’s ‘rightness’ depends on the consequences of that action. We need not focus the discussion too much on ‘increasing utility’ and happiness; instead, I think it makes sense to consider the subject of torture pragmatically, as well as consider the wider consequences of using torture. Consequentialism is the stance often used to justify the use of torture, so let us consider whether the end ever justifies the means.

    It is difficult to find a justification of torture adopting moral realism, although there are manifestations of moral realism – Christian just law theory for example – which leave room for retaliation, and might be used to defend torture that is punitive. Our main discussion of torture, however, concerns that which is used to interrogate terrorists to extract information, because it is that use which tends to be defended.

    When might the ends justify the means to torture terrorists? Three significant arguments are adduced: (a) The Ticking Time Bomb Argument; (b) Secret Torture; and (c) the Machiavellian Approach. I will argue that none of these approaches are persuasive from a practical, Consequentialist perspective, and explain why torture is ineffective, morally wrong, and should never be legalised. I will finish by arguing that the institutionalisation of ‘legal torture’ is a problem in itself, and reiterate the danger inherent in legalising actions that are widely regarded as torture, even if a state’s lawyers can find ways to avoid official acknowledgement.

    I will argue that a zero tolerance approach to torture is the only way to avoid not only grave human rights abuses, but also the undermining of the Rule of Law. ‘Borderline’ or ‘legal’ torture methods, such as water-boarding, as well as the ‘torture warrants’ proposed by Alan Dershowitz are never the ‘right’ option either, precisely because any legalisation risks terrible consequences that far outweigh any positive outcomes.

    (a) The Ticking Time Bomb

    Many torture-sympathisers are fond of the ‘Ticking Time Bomb’ argument, which is a Philosophical thought experiment designed to test the limits of a moral proposition. It defies the ethical intuition that it is morally wrong to ever torture somebody, by constructing a situation in which there appears to be moral justification for using it. It is said that if someone doesn’t torture Terrorist X a certain number of civilians will die, that Terrorist X is guilty, and definitely knows where the bomb is, and that this is the only avenue of investigation open to the police.

    I would argue, first of all, that if this is really the only line of enquiry then the authorities have already failed, because even if they do torture Terrorist X, they are unlikely to stop the bomb from going off. Terrorists are often trained to resist torture, and those with an Islamic Fundamentalist background may actually seek martyrdom. Neither death, however slow and painful, nor the threat of it, or just the pain, is likely to persuade them to divulge any useful information.

    If the bomb is ‘about to go off’ then Terrorist X will know that, and will therefore be aware that he will not have to endure the interrogation for very long (should he be a terrorist averse to pain, rather than one trying to embrace it, if anyone truly does that). Another practical point in response to this scenario is that under such pressure Terrorist X may simply lie about the bomb’s whereabouts, to stop the torture, which would be detrimental to any counter-terrorist operation, as such information would be a waste of time.

    There are other serious difficulties with the scenario. It is not meant to be ‘practical’, precisely because it is a thought experiment. It is what Bob Brecher calls ‘a fantasy’, in the sense that rarely, if ever, could such a scenario occur in real life. Basing legislation and even moral theory on a fantasy, is simply irresponsible. It is one thing for moral philosophers to test their intuitions; quite another for policy-makers and lawyers to base legislation on it.

    Thus torture is unlikely to help stop the bomb, so the consequences of using torture here are ineffective, of no benefit to society, the counter-terror operation (whose time may be wasted), or, obviously, Terrorist X. Moreover, even in the extremely unlikely scenario that Terrorist X speaks, and the bomb doesn’t go off, the wider repercussions of using torture are so dire that even then, it is not right to use it.

    Firstly, it undermines the authority and integrity of international law. If a state finds a loophole in it that permits torture, then principles of individual human rights are clearly breached. Further, should a state use torture without legal sanction, and gets away with it, then international law loses its authority, in that its laws are broken without any consequences, rendering the international legal system weak and ineffectual, in actuality and in reputation.

    Abu Ghraib, a stain on the reputation of the United States.

    A state’s reputation is also ruined if it permits torture, especially where it is known and admired for being a liberal democracy. It will be seen as hypocritical, and as acting in a way that undermines its own values. The use of torture by the United States at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prison, for example, has lowered many people’s estimation of the United States, which is now widely regarded as hypocritical and aggressive, rather than an inspiration to democrats and republicans worldwide.

    Reputational damage is problematic, furthermore, as it sets a bad example for other states, who may then use torture using the argument that, ‘If [America] can use torture, then why not us?’ Within a state, also, the legislation of even some ‘borderline’ kinds of torture may lead to a wider tolerance and use of worse torture, and might lead to it being used not just against terrorist, but other criminals and alleged criminals.

    In addition to these harmful consequences of even the limited use of torture, it may also prove to be not only ineffective for counter-terrorism (and even if it does ‘work’, the evidence collected under duress would be inadmissible in court), but also counter-productive. Torturing terrorists is likely to lead to retaliation and further terrorism, rather than diminish it.

    (b) Secret Torture

    One response to the negative consequences of the use of torture on terrorists outlined above, is that if it is hidden from public view, most of these repercussions could be mitigated. It is true that if it is kept under wraps, then the state in question could avoid undermining international law, superficially at least.

    If international law does not allow, or is not used to justify torture, then at least its integrity is kept intact, and in public its authority too. In keeping torture absolutely secret, furthermore, it avoids acquiring a bad reputation, which may also prevent the slippery slope of other states drawing legitimacy from the torturous state. Torture may also, if kept secret, not lead to retaliation.

    So if torture has few negative consequences, as outlined above, through being covered up, then perhaps it could be ‘right’ on some level? The first problem with this solution, however, is that keeping torture secret is almost impossible. Many states in recent history – the US and UK to name a couple – have failed in their efforts to do so, leading to all the negative consequences outlined already. Moreover, even if the secret is kept, it would be the height of hypocrisy for a liberal democracy to behave in this way, and completely undermines the Rule of Law.

    Another problem with this ‘solution’ is that even if kept secret, torture not only has damaging effects on the victim, but also on the torturer. Torture corrupts the perpetrator, and anyone who allows it. To allow, even to obligate, a person to torture another for the sake of his state, is destructive. It means that that person will possibly suffer horrendous guilt, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in some cases, having accepted a level of personal responsibility.

    When torture is carried out in secret, there will always be people who know that it has happened, who have been involved at an individual level, and are aware that a state has permitted actions entirely contrary to its supposed values. It is highly unlikely, anyway, that something as grave as torture would remain a secret forever, even if the state in question ‘gets away with it’ in the immediate sense of not being punished for violating international law.

    (c) Machiavellian Approach

    A cynical approach to the problem of torture and the modern state, is simply to dispense with the liberal democratic ideals that prevent (at least in theory) certain states from using it. Indeed torture could be the ‘right’ option for a state unconcerned by its reputation, either domestically or internationally. Its government may not mind undermining international legal structures, and have no problem with setting a bad example to other states, provoking retaliation, and losing a virtuous reputation.

    If a state is utterly Machiavellian, and wishes to instill fear in its enemies then the use of torture could seem attractive, and ‘right’ in the distorted sense that torture might lead to the acquisition of power and wealth.

    Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli 1469-1527.

    Even if a state adopts this attitude, however, it is nevertheless in breach of international law, which has consequences, whether that state respects it or not. Although international legal structures are often criticised for being slow and ineffectual, they are still a force to be reckoned with. Twinned with the reputational damage, (whether the state in question cares about its reputation or not), it is unlikely that a ruthlessly Machiavellian, torture-happy state would escape sanctions from other countries and international legal structures.

    Even the most secretive, Macchiavellian state would likely run into trouble at some point. If the entire world became cynical and Machiavellian, then perhaps one such state could avoid punishment – as Nazi Germany sought for instance – but in such a situation internal opposition would surely emerge eventually, and certainly result in retaliation in some shape. Endemic violence, whether within state borders or otherwise, is never a favourable outcome, and certainly never ‘right’.

    Torturing a terrorist is never the ‘right’ thing to do, even in a hypothetical scenario of someone knowing where a ticking time bomb is located; even if it is kept under wraps, even if a state’s lawyers find a loophole in international law, and even if a state is utterly Machiavellian in its disregard for human rights, international law, and reputational damage.

    It is never right, even on a practical level, because the negative consequences outweigh whatever benefits there may seem to be. It risks retaliation, international opprobrium and possibly intervention (through the application of international law or otherwise); it damages state employees as well as those tortured; and imperils the integrity of its founding ideals (assuming the state is not Macchiavellian): these risks are simply not worth any short-term benefits one could possibly gain through torture.

    For a liberal democracy to permit the torture of terrorists, in the hope of gaining more power over them, ultimately reduces that state to the level of the terrorist, if not becoming a ‘terrorist’ in the conventional sense, then ‘terrorist’ in it wider meaning. There is too much of a family resemblance between he who terrorizes and he who tortures to take seriously the idea that someone who tortures a terrorist is really any better than him, really any more ‘right’. Torture lowers the perpetrator to the level of the terrrorist, embracing her own moral demise.

    Christiana Spens is a writer and academic, currently based in Scotland. Having read Philosophy at Cambridge, she then completed a Masters and PhD in Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St. Andrews. She has written several books, most recently Shooting Hipsters: Rethinking Dissent in the Age of PR (Repeater Books, 2016) and The Portrayal and Punishment of Terrorists in Western Media  (forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). She writes regularly for Prospect, Studio Internationaland White Noise, on art, politics and literature. 

  • At the Timber – A Short Story

    George waits in the parked van. His mind is somewhere between sleep and the wood and the few hours that have passed since he tried to tell her it was over. Somehow he couldn’t pluck the words. The diesel cab reeks fags. The fan heater lifts condensation from the cracked windscreen. Usually these matters fizzle out of their own accord. They slip back due to various pressures. Time passes, wounds heal, George moves on.

    Dandy lives three houses in. The estate has no name. Merely: ‘The Houses’. Dandy still has the box room, filled with the same comics and football posters, a childhood he hasn’t quite moved on from. George beeps the horn and the light goes on. Dandy is idle to the bone. Always has been, though he’s a way with the horse and without the horse George has no means of drawing timber off Mucklagh ridge. Dandy’s mother has him spoiled: the flask and lunch bag ready, heels cut from the sambos.

    George puts his hands to the fan and surveys the sorry row of houses: cracked cement and blocked gutters, slipping tiles and rusted cars and the half-cut green filled with burst footballs and broken prams and speckled with every brand of rubbish. She lives fifth house in, two houses on from Dandy, and the light is on. She’ll be flicking channels for the young one, brewing tea, trying to get up and out before the husband wakes.

    “Morning, George.”

    “Morning.”

    “Bite to the air, George.”

    “It’d cut you.”

    The road meanders up and out of the village with the contours of the river. First grunted pleasantries exchanged, Dandy leans into the passenger window and feigns a few precious moments of sleep.

    Next pick up is the ‘Trap Byrne’ or ‘Trapper’ as he’s known. Trapper’s homeplace is an asbestos slate cottage on a bend three miles out. Trapper keeps a handful of heifers on the couple of reed-strewn bog acres below the road. They cost more to keep than he’d ever hope to earn out of them: but he lives for the beasts. They give meaning to his little world, keep him in touch with the land. The Trapper works dog-hard on the Husqvarna, the saw-like an extension of his arm. Though you’d be wary enough of him. Just last week George had to have words. Trapper has a fondness for the young ones. Only these are his cousins, and they live in the adjacent cottage. It was the Dandy whispered it to George down by the stream out of earshot.

    “You might put a stop to it, George, or there’ll be trouble, so there will.”

    George caught up with Trapper refuelling the saw and he took the words to heart. At least he said he did.

    “Won’t do it again. You’re right. It was only talking anyways.”

    Trapper didn’t question how George might have heard or seen him, just nodded. Trapper needed a tight leash and as his employer George reckons himself the man to do it. Trapper listens to George. The trouble is, he doesn’t drive and seldom gets into town; but for Paddy’s of a Friday evening, he has little touch with a world beyond the cottages and the few bog acres.

    Trapper waits at the gate and jumps in, pushing Dandy to the middle.

    “Morning, Trap.”

    “Morning, lads.”

    “Bite to the air,” Dandy grunts.

    The cab goes silent as the van pulls out and moves up the last few miles to the wood. The lads have taken George’s mind off of her and the husband and having to tell her it’s over and he thinks timber.

    Harvesting machines, the size of small houses, rule the hills round here. There was a time when it was only men and horses and lorries but now the tree-swallowing harvesters are more economical. George has one of the last bands of men and they’re used for cutting the slopes and cliff faces too steep for the machines to travel. He has four men and a horse, a piebald cob called Trigger, ox strong and good to go from dawn till dusk. Sure as the lorries come, Trigger has the stacks ready.

    They leave the lane at Mucklagh and Trapper jumps down to unlock the yellow bar. The van groans under the weight of men and saws and fuel cans and a big bag of oats for the horse. They pull in at the top where the lorries load, light three fags in unison, wait for Jack and Chiseler to arrive.

    Jack is quiet and steady, did a spell in the army, though he gave it up, missed home. He’s a decent fellow, Jack, though he’d take any old word as gospel. The lads have him wound up to ninety. Tell him George’s hasn’t him registered, that any day now the suits will be up looking for his stamps. George has to watch what Jack’s cutting, make sure every last tree is marked, save he doesn’t venture over into the Douglas or the Larch.

    Two fags later the car pulls up behind them. Jack jumps out with a smile and a nod and helps Trapper lift the saws and fuel cans from the back of the van. Dandy goes into the wood to untether the horse with a bucket of soaked oats and George is left, face to face with Chiseler.

    “George.”

    “Chiseler.”

    “Heard you were out late, George?” His voice is high-pitched and nasty and he lifts himself from the car with a rat-like slither.

    “None of your business.”

    “None of my business? Isn’t she my family?”

    “That’ll do, Chiseler. Leave it at that, we’ve work to do.”

    “Only she’s married, to my nephew, did you think of that before you got to work on her?”

    “I said that’ll do. Now you can get up into that wood or you can turn round and go home. I’m paying the wages here and my word is the last word.”

    The Chiseler lights a fag and opens the boot of his car. He’s short and wiry, pock-marked skin and weasel-tongued though he can work a saw quick as any and he’s light on the steep ground.

    “There’ll be trouble, George. He’ll fucking lynch you.”

    The threat is spat from a distance. A weasel taunt, though Chiseler knows George won’t rise. Knows as long he gets up quick sticks and starts felling, George won’t go near him. When the saws start nothing is heard anyways and George walks on. It is to be expected, he tells himself. Chiseler is only doing his duty. Only marking his gob-hacked ground. Letting him know where he stands. Firing the warning shot across the bow. George pulls the saw and lets the angry oil-glistened bar bite into the first spruce. Two quick incisions into the foot-deep trunk leave hinge enough and he turns to the back to finish it. There is no need to shout, the sound of the saw caution enough. The trunk tips on the hinge and the spruce rustles free from the plantation and lands with one loud crack.

    “Timber,” shouts Trapper, coming up behind with a black-toothed grin.

    “I’ll start over here, George. Fell ’em down into the gap there.”

    “That’ll do,” though George’s mind is elsewhere. He’s thinking of the Chiseler’s nephew, a mean little low life. Sort of chap to catch you when you least expect: make it look like an accident. Usually George wouldn’t get too hung up on dropping a young one. Only this one is a tidy piece and she’s had a hard enough time of it. The Chiseler mightn’t know it but the nephew has been taking the back of the hand to her. She hides it well and the nephew’s measured enough to crack her where it won’t be seen. She knew what she was getting herself into when she married into them. We all make mistakes.

    Dandy tacks out Trigger by the van, bridle and chains and blinkers and the cob swooshes her tale at the horse-shit flies that hover round in one endless cloud. Trigger gave into them long ago and stands motionless in her infested misery as Dandy lathers himself with Deet. It is not an easy set, the rain has muddied the ground and the horse must pull each tree three hundred yards from the spruce clinging to the ridge, down through the stream where the diggers have cut a ford, and up to the lorry pull in. Trigger would pull eighty trees of a good day and is worth every bucket of oats. At night they leave her tethered in the larch where the fresh grass grows and the fresh wind keeps the flies at bay. George has had Trigger ten years now. He bought her off a tinker on the Gorey road. He’d been seeing one at the time who was into the horses and she put the tinker on to him. George heard later that the tinker was killed in a car crash, the bald tyre horsebox jack-knifed coming down off the gap. The one went back to her husband like everyone said she would and it is only Trigger that’s lasted from that summer of midnight car parks and hot flush horse yards.

    Ten o’clock tea is an institution. Thirsts, headaches and appetites are quenched and all little worlds crash together in one slag-drawn sorting shop symposium that riddles the measure of each of them.

    “How are the cattle, Trapper?”

    “Still rubbing their arses off of the new fence. How many times have I to drench the worm-riddled bitches? They’ve it near down and then it’ll be war when they get in on the nursery.”

    “Would you not get a strand of electric?” Chiseler taunts. “I’ve an old battery I’ll lend you.”

    “Good man, Chiseler, you and your old batteries, like the one you swiped from me car when I left it outside of Paddy’s.”

    “Didn’t I save you from the checkpoint? What? You can thank old Chiseler you didn’t go trousers down into that one, no tax or insurance, no license, drunk as a fiddler’s bitch. Besides, I’d say the walk home did you good. Saved your Mammy the trouble for once.”

    “Good man, Chiseler, an answer to everything what?” and Dandy pours his tea and looks out on the horse, munching its way through a second bucket of oats.

    “We’re making an impression now, George.”  Jack tokens, his head nodding toward the ridge.

    “Getting into it, all right,” George agrees.

    “Not the only thing you’re getting into, is it George?” Chiseler bites.

    “That’ll do from you.”

    There is a gentle under-snort all round. Usually it is open chat and George’s liaisons the underlying belly laugh of teatime banter: but this one is different. This young one is a little close to home and the boys know Chiseler isn’t happy. Knows he’s not going to let this one go.

    “I’d say there’s two more weeks in it,” Jack continues.

    “Two, handy,” Dandy agrees, eager to move on, nobody likes a fight, not at teatime. The small talk ebbs with fags and milky sugar-brimmed teas and the banter is soft deflections around Chiseler’s iceberg.

    They make quick work of the ridge and the light pours in on the quartz-glinting outcrop. There is no talk when they work, each man knows his place in the small band and the sound is the drone of saws, a file scouring a blunt chain, the crack of a falling tree, their thrill and deafening harmony. The horse has cut a mud hoof track up to the lorry pull in where the neat-stacked piles wait for the trucks and the potholed road to Aughrim. The lorry men are a different creed: overalls and humming engines and the long hydraulic arm lifting the timber into place.  They’re paid by the load and move with a wire-eyed efficiency, conceding little more than a back-handed wave from air con cabs.

    George has arranged to pick her up at eight tonight. She says the husband will have gone back to the garage by then and she’ll be able to slip out for an hour or two. Says she’ll meet him down by the river. She wouldn’t be George’s usual type. It happened at the back of Phelan’s lounge one drunken night a couple of weeks back.

    “I’ve had enough. Feck him!” slurred surrendering words.

    The husband worked late and it was just a few short hours of rough cat tumbling and long drawn-out sobs before she slipped back to her sister sitting in on the child. Though it is all too close to home. George has told her that. He’s worked with the Chiseler a lifetime and he isn’t out to rile him. Nobody ever liked the nephew. George didn’t imagine Chiseler did either: he was just making his point, drawing his line in the sand. That dirty little maggot with a bite like a terrier, and he was a lousy mechanic, and when George saw the bruises on her it made his blood boil. It would be easier just to leave it but the damage was done now. People knew, it was no secret: nothing ever is round here. There’d be no sympathy for her, not now. Usually George would ride it while the going’s good. It never lasts. They always go back in the end. In many ways they never leave.

    The day passes in a haze of sap and oil and the slope has tightened thighs and blistered toes and the midges have started. Trigger drags a last log up to the pull in and Dandy untacks her by the van. They gather by the stream for a final fag and debrief. The horse takes deep sups from the brown water lapping at their toes and the flies cling mercilessly to her raw harness-rubbed flesh.

    “I’ve to go, Jack,” Chiseler shouts from the car, as he changes from boots and sap-stained jeans to a pair of old slacks.

    “Coming, see ye in the morning, lads,” and they watch as Jack leaves his gear by the van. They wave as the car pulls past and Chiseler, fag lit in the passenger seat, points his index finger to George like a loaded gun. The boys stay quiet. There is nothing to be said.

    Dandy tethers Trigger in the fresh grass larch and Trapper helps George load the van. They have laid waste to another acre of spruce and all eyes settle on the branch-strewn wasteland of fag buts, thrown out lunch wraps and empty oil cans. They’re making progress. Another week the wood will be beaten to a corner.

    Dandy sits in the middle and fiddles with the tuner. Rare the radio finds a station but this evening he’s caught some daft pop song and he leans back, miming the words and eating a bar left over from his lunch box.

    “Where are we after this, George?” Trapper asks.

    “Ballycoog. There’s a ridge there they can’t get the machines on.”

    “Much in it?”

    “A week or two: I’m going this evening to take a look.”

    “I’d say you are,” Dandy interrupts with a snigger.

    “That’ll do from you,” and George jabs him in the ribs as they move round the bend.

    “Weren’t you seeing some young one out of Ballycoog. Last year was it?” Trapper is too far across to jab and George looks ahead.

    “One of Murphy’s was it? Do you remember? She came up to Phelan’s one night and got more than she bargained for. What happened her?”

    George looks ahead unflinching. It is the usual going-home banter and Dandy sniggers.

    “Course he remembers,” and he lets another groan as George jabs him in the ribs a second time.

    “Seriously, George, you’d want to leave Chiseler’s one alone. That nephew of his is a madman. He’s done time so he has. Bottled a lad out of Avoca one night over pool. You wouldn’t know what he’d do, he’s an angry little shite.”

    “That’s right, George, you won’t win favours going round with her.”

    A contemplative silence descends over the van and the pop song crackles out and fags are lit. They’ve had their say. Got it off their chests and they all stew in small familiar thoughts. It is a good little team up in the wood. No one wants the boat rocked. No one wants trouble.

    Trapper steps out at the asbestos slate cottage. His cousins are stood out on the lane, skirts and school bags, but the Trapper turns to the cattle shed.

    “Leaving them alone, Dandy?”

    “You nipped it in the bud there, George.”

    “He’s not a bad sort, Trapper. A few short, but not a bad sort. Sure what do you expect sitting up here, three miles out of nowhere, it’s a sorry little life.”

    George leaves Dandy at the bottom of the Houses. He can walk up. Do him good to stretch the legs, have a last fag before he gets in to the mother. George shuffles back in the seat and turns for his sister’s. He has a mobile home set up there behind the sheds. It does for now. It’s dry at least.

    He stops on the bridge and looks down at the debris caught in the buttress: branches, tyres, an old green mattress wedged by a fallen tree. The river is violent here, ripping down from the hills, plucking the banks and smashing against this, the last bridge before the big weir. It is a wonder it still stands and George’s mind drifts to Chiseler’s finger pointed like a gun. He will tell her this evening. It has to end.  Next week and there’ll be on to a new wood and a fresh start. He’ll tell her it is for the best. Somehow he will pluck the words.

    George gets it in his mind to look over the wood at Ballycoog before settling down for the evening. He’s only putting off the inevitable but the drive will do him good, sharpen his mind for telling her. The ridge at Ballycoog feels vertical on tired legs and he steps out the distance to the track. They’ll need a tractor and winch: even Trigger will struggle on this angle. Though George knows all this, he doesn’t need to look, the timber is merely a distraction.

    “Go home, George,” he says to himself. “Go home and tell her. She might slip back. They both might forget it. Life goes on. These things never last.”

    When George pulls up to the mobile home he finds Chiseler’s car parked outside. His stomach turns. This is unfamiliar ground. He jumps from the van, heckles up. This is his patch. The door is ajar and George pushes through.

    “Chiseler?”

    George steps back. Chiseler is stood by the sink, arms folded, and there’s herself sat on the couch, the little boy on her lap, and her face all bruised and battered and tears running down puffed red cheeks.

    “Well, George, you started this mess, you look after her,” and Chiseler lights a fag.

    “What? I’m not, I started nothing,” but Chiseler interrupts.

    “You’re not to worry now, George. That nephew of mine won’t go near you. I’ve him marked. But you listen to me, George. That women and that child are in your care. You watch them, or I’ll be marking you same as the nephew.”

    The evening has drawn in and the dark has mustarded the yard and blackened the bare glass. Chiseler’s car pulls out and the headlights shift across the torn linoleum floor. The stark beam catches all eyes before turning to the road and plunging them into the bleak uncertainty of the night.

    Rory MacArdle lives in the Wicklow hills, where he stores peculiar poems and fiction badly in need of editing and rejigging. He works in construction, likes gardening, heritage buildings and walking in quiet places.

  • In the Artist’s Words

    [Best_Wordpress_Gallery id=”11″ gal_title=”Magda”]

    Being self-taught, I am constantly seeking to reinvent what is familiar to me, and tap into the unknown through experimentation. This is my form of self-exploration and self-discovery. That said, I dabble in two distinct styles; I go back and forth between making portraits (but not strictly) that echo the old and rich textured abstracts. My attempt to bridge the past with the new, as these influences bind me inexplicably.

     

     

     

  • Visitations

    Come on in. Try our new Chicken Selects.
    Forget food. We should send them luggage.
    Watch this sexy star win in just five words.
    Do you like who your party elects?
    You could always reverse your mortgage.
    A better demographic is diehard nerds.
    We’ve never seen a storm like this before.
    Get cash: Sell us your diabetes strips.
    What’s worse than all is that the world won’t end.
    Buy “Flip This House” and be a millionaire.
    Call now to book amazing summer trips.
    You’ve typed up your break-up. Now hit send.
    Won’t you take a moment to show you care?
    We’ve never seen a storm like this before.
    Here’s one weird old trick to get rid of belly fat.
    Go on. Guess who just got a Guggenheim.
    It’s true. Everyone says you drink too much.
    A great run of growth has finally gone flat.
    It’s pointless in our time to use rhyme.
    You really are just entirely out of touch.
    We’ve never seen a storm like this before.
    A mob has formed outside the convention.
    We have no way of knowing what’s kept offshore.
    Please hang up now or choose an extension.
    We’ve never seen a storm like this before.

     

    Ernest Hilbert is the author of three collection of poetry, Sixty Sonnets, All of You on the Good Earth, and Caligulan, which was selected as winner of the 2017 Poets’ Prize. He lives in Philadelphia where he works as a rare book dealer, opera librettist, and book reviewer for The Washington Post. His poem “Mars Ultor” will appear in Best American Poetry 2018.

  • Artist of the Month – Giulia Canevari

    My paintings are inspired by the simplicity and perfection in Nature, revealing what our soil provides for us.

    I am moved by other botanical artists, portraying plants in a natural way, sometimes illustrating the features of each plant scientifically, or simply picturing their beauty without getting too methodical.

    Painting Nature is a way for me to connect with the constant motion of plant life, exhaling flowers and leaves. But often what we see is stillness.

    Thanks to botanical art and my background as an environmentalist I moved into Organic growing and horticulture.

    These experiences have brought a deeper respect for soil, and its capacity to create through my daily waste.

    I have always traced life to its origin in the ground, and how we effect other beings on Earth.

    Learning about horticulture has added more clarity to my art.

    Thanks to the NCAD community garden I have learnt how to build soil from wastestuffs: horse manure from stables; vegetable waste from the Smithfield market; coffee grinds from local baristas, wood chip from tree surgeons. Once you add these together, with the help of beautiful earthworms, compost is formed, which improves Soil.

    Every plant I draw is the expression of what the Soil provides for us as human beings. A beautiful gift from Mother Earth we meet every day, even in cities: amazing colours and different shades which come from this beautiful dark matter.

    If we connect with this energy and we work with Nature we build this connection, receiving gratitude in the vegetables and flowers that nourish and give us pleasure.

    I develop a close connection with plants while I paint them, appreciating their movements and importance to us. The Soil is the most important ingredient of life on Earth and we must respect it, knowing that it is not necessarily immutable, which may not be immediately apparent.

    We can respect, co-create and understand the circles of life which the Soil requires to regenerate and become fertile.

    The beauty of our flowers and plants cannot be taken for granted. There is danger whenever we neglect these patterns of creation, which form the fertile Earth around us.

    [Best_Wordpress_Gallery id=”32″ gal_title=”Giulia Canevari”]

  • Post-Modern Decrepitude

    If you are complaining about Climate Change, Brexit, Donald Trump, and all the cozening of late capitalism, I will not take you seriously if you have accepted, without very much thought, that there is only ever an arbitrary relationship between a signifier and what it signifies.

    I will say to you that you are closer than you realize to being an embodiment of the world’s problems, and I will ask: have you considered how our future shall have been changed if the divine is awakened in man through poetry?

    A widespread feeling of intellectual decrepitude among my generation is bound up with acceptance of the pseudo-philosophies that spread from France in the late 1960s. A dumbed-down account emerged in Terry Eagleton’s best-selling Literary Theory: An Introduction, now in its second edition.

    Each January I lecture on critical theory at Sarum College in Salisbury, and have grown increasingly frustrated outlining Jacques Derrida’s assumption of Ferdinand da Saussure’s argument that meaning in language is a simple matter of difference. In that lecture I explain – mostly to retired vicars or shamans, or both – that a sign is made up of a ‘signifier’ (like a written word) and a ‘signified’ (its meaning).

    Then I quote from Eagleton: ‘The relation between signifier and signified is an arbitrary one’: there is no reason why the three marks c – a – t should signify cat. He continues: ‘Each sign in the system has meaning only by virtue of its difference from the others … meaning is not mysteriously immanent in a sign but is functional, the result of its difference from other signs.’

    Such a theory may be correct from a strict scientific or linguistic perspective, but from a poetic perspective it is a negation. For W.B. Yeats, as for any other great poet, meaning is immanent in a sign. To disagree places functional rationality above a divinely creative imagination: perpetuating the potentially lethal metaphysical imbalance at the heart of our society.

    In fact, Derrida can be a relatively exciting author, but I get the impression he is rarely read in the original, outside of France, and a simplified account of his work has become a dangerous dogma. It is now a political tool used in the academy to excuse people from teaching or studying the literary cannon: why would you bother with Shakespeare or Milton any longer? This is a New Age delinquency in desperate need of Reformation.

    Eagleton further claims: ‘Poetry is a sort of trick, whereby an awareness of the textures of signs puts us in mind of the textures of actual things. But the relation between the two remains quite as arbitrary as in any other use of language; it is just that some poetry tries to ‘iconicise’ that relation, to make it appear somehow inevitable.’

    I will counter Eagleton by quoting a more circumspect Romantic perspective than my own: that of the American poet Wallace Stevens who described the real as being constantly ‘engulfed in the unreal’. Poetry, he stated, ‘is an illumination of a surface, the movement of a self in the rock.’ Elaborating this belief, he knew:

    A force capable of bringing about fluctuations in reality in words free from mysticism is a force independent of one’s desire to elevate it. It needs no elevation. It has only to be presented as best one is able to present it.

    Great poetry makes you apprehend, more than cool reason ever comprehends, that there is a sacred bond between word and thing or word and idea, expressed in the very making of poetry, work which is, as Stevens imagined, ‘on the threshold of heaven’. A great poet should be capable of teaching a linguist to have faith in a ‘story’ that his discipline cannot fathom, so that it ‘grows’ in Shakespeare’s wise Hippolyta’s words ‘to something of great constancy; | But, howsoever, strange and admirable.’

    George Santayana had asked: ‘How, then, should there be any great heroes, saints, artists, philosophers, or legislators in an age when nobody trusts himself, or feels any confidence in reason, in an age when the word dogmatic is a term of reproach?’ Stevens knew: ‘It is poverty’s speech that seeks us out the most. | It is older than the oldest speech of Rome.’ Meditating on Santayana dying in Rome, the poet apprehended the philosopher almost literally at the end of his poem: ‘He stops upon this threshold, | As if the design of all his words takes form | And frame from thinking and is realized.’

    These works I have listed could be a kind of mirror. If you believe that the relationship between signifier and signified is an arbitrary one, you will see that you have a quasi-hipster beard and haircut, and that you are engaged to be married to an intellectual hippopotamus. The shepherd-king’s curse might stick:

    For the mouth of the wicked and the mouth of the deceitful are opened against me: they have spoken against me with a lying tongue. They compassed me about also with words of hatred; and fought against me without a cause. For my love they are my adversaries: but I give myself unto prayer. And they have rewarded me evil for good, and hatred for my love. Set thou a wicked man over him: and let Satan stand at his right hand.

    As René Guenon has warned: ‘The word ‘satanic’ can indeed be properly applied to all negation and reversal of order, such as is so incontestably in evidence in everything we now see around us: is the modern world really anything whatever but a direct denial of traditional truth?’ I am convinced that post-modern literary theory has Satan as its right hand man.

    Edward Clarke’s last book was the Vagabond Spirit of Poetry. He is the Poetry Editor of Cassandra Voices. His poem Psalm 41 appeared in the previous edition.

  • Blaze

    We say we are ready to be eaten by the music
    but have scant idea what that entails,

    what fire those geometric petals conceal.
    In need of advice, we turn to the dead:

    their eyes are forests, they cannot speak.
    This room begins to seem a temple

    raised to a pixellated god,
    to the warp and weft of that ultimate blaze.

    Did we never think that the light’s envoys
    would be our furnishings and our toys,

    that a wild grin of insect glee
    was waiting outside the dormitory?

    Phantoms are urging us to panic
    but the whole city’s a sounding bell,

    the mind’s ancient everglades
    flourishing at last.

     

    Ned Denny’s debut collection Unearthly Toys was published by Carcanet in February 2018.

  • Melon – A Short Story

    “What face?” I said again. I wanted to help. I wanted more wine.

    My flare-ups, real and imagined, may be related to all the drinking I do now.  I think I drink every day, which seems shocking, until I try to conceive of getting through a whole day without drinking, which seems unfeasable. I handed Rebecca a glass.

    “What face?” – for the fourth time.  She kicked out her legs and threw her eyes to the ceiling, as though channeling spirits.

    “The face you make when you go out,” she said.  “The face that says you’re open for business.  You were doing the face tonight.  You made the face at every hot little thing who looked at you.  You weren’t even discriminating.  And don’t think this is me being jealous of them.  I’m jealous of you.  I used to make the face.  But now I’m so fucking besotted and into you that I’m nothing.  You’ve stolen my fucking wind.  I don’t even exist anymore.  You exist, and I don’t, so why don’t you go and exist and I’ll stay here in the void.”

    The opera of it!

    “Don’t find me amusing,” she said.  “Just don’t.”

    I thought to myself, be grave … and giggled.  (Sometimes I giggle like a little girl.  As I get older and more ogre-like the disjunct is starting to reek.)  I took a breath, straightened my mouth to a slit.  “You’re not nothing,” I said.  Not in the way that the volume of wine in our glasses essentially counted as nothing.  Experience told me that we’d be awake for two to four hours before we achieved a resolution to Rebecca’s face problem, or to whatever problem lay beneath the face problem, the face problem surely being only one tiny tile in the rich mosaic of her current problems.  A bottle’s worth of problems. I wanted more wine.  Should I go to the Indian on the corner?  What was I saying?

    “There’s another bottle in the fridge,” said Rebecca.

    I subsided into the couch, my heart large with love.  The wine could wait!  I smothered Rebecca in kisses and endearments until she pushed me away.

    “But how do I know that you love me?” she said.  “I mean, where is it, this love?”  She looked behind a cushion, under her feet. “And if I can’t make the fucking face, why can you make the fucking face if you’re so fucking besotted with me?”

    She gets a potty mouth on her when she’s spoiling for a fight.

    “I don’t know how you know,” I said.  “When a relationship has lasted a while you just have to have faith that the love is there until you have proof that it isn’t.”

    Rebecca doubled over and pretended to gag on the the word “relationship”.  It occurred to me that I’d probably said that sentence before, possibly those exact words, and that she’d pretended to gag before as well.  A certain level of self-parody was inevitable at this advanced stage of courtship, I told myself.  Be sanguine.  Do not despair.  Have another drink.

    Now she was crying.  I stroked her between her shoulder blades.  She mumbled.  I asked her to repeat herself.  She mumbled again, but I still couldn’t catch it, so I said loudly, “Baby, I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re saying.”

    “I said I don’t know what’s wrong with me!” she screamed.

    Neither did I.  There were too many possibilities.  It could be work.  I don’t really know what her work day is like, even though that’s where she spends the largest portion of her waking life.  There’s a category in my brain for other people’s work lives, a purgatorial, limbo-like space into which they simply disappear for a set number of hours per day.  As far as I’m concerned nothing of real consequence happens in work limbo (because nothing of real consequence happens where I work, except for counting the falling sand grains).  Maybe she was being bullied in work?  Maybe she had no work friends, and felt terribly isolated?  Maybe it was the aggregate of stressors (and sand grains) that come with every job, beginning with getting out of bed in the morning?

    Or maybe it was sex.  Rebecca worries about sex all the time.  She worries we don’t have sex often enough, worries that she doesn’t masturbate enough, doesn’t watch porn enough, doesn’t discuss sex enough, hasn’t slept with enough people, hasn’t seen and felt and sucked enough cocks, doesn’t really understand how to make other women orgasm, isn’t attractive enough, isn’t attracted to enough.  She worries that her tits are falling.  She worries that men sometimes reduce her to a talking pair of tits, and she worries that they don’t do it as much as in the good old days.

    The temptation was to be chemically reductive and point out that we’d taken a variety of drugs for three days straight last weekend and had since been drinking even more heavily than usual to relieve the fear and the shakes and the vertigo.  It’s just the drugs, I was going to tell her.  And what if we are just the drugs and the drink?  If you’re chemically altered all the time then isn’t altered the authentic ground of your being?

    She had another problem now, because I resented her for involving me in her impossible sadness.  I pulled myself into the farthest corner of the sofa and imagined being alone and free.  Except I wasn’t alone in my imagination.  Women softened the edges.  There was a girl who’d been down at the festival with us during that three day binge, and there was another girl I kept seeing at the Shaw, a really sparky looking creature, probably a graphic designer or a photographer or something. She looked like she’d seriously consider a threesome.

    My imagination, in other words, is a lazy moron, and didn’t bother filling in the girls beyond a few physical incidentals, this one’s bum, that one’s smile, so really I was on my own in the fantasy.  Then I imagined life without Rebecca’s love. I would crawl through the limbo of a working day and then crawl home to a human rights violation of a one-bed flat, and I would drink endless cans of cheap beer instead of delicious relationship wine, and bunker down in a fortress of cans and porn and pizzas, and my remaining hair would succumb to scurvy,  and I would see the promise of salvation in every new half-pretty creature, and I would throw myself at them with a frenzied (exhausted) air of lust and lovelessness.

    “You should leave me,” said Rebecca.

    “What?”

    “I’m a nightmare.  You should go and be free.  You’d be happy if you were free.”

    “No, I wouldn’t.”

    “Yes, you would, you just never have been.”

    “Bollocks.  I’ve been free.”

    “No, you haven’t.  You’ve always had a girlfriend.  It’s pathetic.”

    “If I wanted to be alone I could be alone, I just don’t want –”

    “Why are you so angry with me?”

    “I’m not.”

    “You are.  You get so angry with me so quickly now.”

    “I’m not angry.”

    “I wish you’d stop being angry and just hit me.”

    “You don’t want me to hit you.”

    “I want to feel something!”

    The possibility of violence squatted between us like a crocodile.  Three feet of sofa cushion separated us, and I had to consciously engage all my muscles, a patient coming out of anaesthesia, to move across them and kneel above Rebecca.  We stared hard at each other.  Then I drew back my fist sharply, and she flinched and covered her face.

    “No you don’t,” I said, and got off the couch to refill my glass.

    I felt like I’d scored an important point with this demonstration, and tossed back my wine victoriously.  It caught in my throat and I coughed.  You can’t toss back wine.

    The fundamental problem was that nothing bad had ever happened to Rebecca.  Nothing bad could happen to people like us, in the world we lived in.  It was just the drugs, the alcohol, the emotional incontinence.  I was telling her this when a glass exploded beside my face.

    Rebecca had hoisted herself up on the arm of the couch, her eyes all white like Goya’s Saturn.  I felt a wet spot on my forehead and for a second thrilled to the notion that she had drawn blood. But it was just a splash of wine.

    “You missed,” I said.

    Rebecca launched herself from the couch with startling speed and landed a flurry of slaps and thumps on my shoulders and arms.  I swatted most of them away and asked her to calm down.  “You’ll only hurt yourself, baby, ” I said.  She took a step back, gathered all of her detestation of me into her knuckly right fist, and smashed it into the side of my head.  “Wow,” I said, cupping my ear.  My vision swam blackly.  She panted before me, her fingers still curled.

    “Fight back!” she said.  But I was so tired all of a sudden.  It was three in the morning.  The adrenaline of the fight was already souring.  I shook my ringing head, backed away from her, and climbed the stairs.

    What are you going to do about it, I asked myself as I took off my clothes.  What are you going to do about it, as I got under the covers and laid my head on the pillow.  What are you going to do about it, as I waited for the real girl to come up from the sitting room to terrorise me, and the nightmare girls to come up from my unconscious to smother me.

    The nightmares had enveloped me the previous three nights, decomposing girls who pulled me into dark rooms and wrapped their rotting arms around my face.  When I closed my eyes now they swam out of the blackness, and brought their rotting mouths towards mine to suck the air out of my lungs. My unconscious is a very literal spinner of symbols. He’s also a fucking charlatan. The girls didn’t look like Rebecca, or previous girlfriends, or my mother, or my manager, or anyone who might by usefully symbolized.  They were just debt-collecting heavies sent by the drug fairy.  I sank into the oily darkness and felt one of them at my back, tugging me.  But it was only my lover.

    “Forgive me.”

    “What?”

    “You have to forgive me.”

    I rolled away from her. She was poking me in the shoulder, and I don’t think any human touch has ever been so abhorrant.

    “Forgive me!” she said.

    “All right, yes, you’re forgiven.”

    “You have to mean it.”

    “Jesus fucking Christ, I mean it, you’re forgiven, let me sleep.”

    “You don’t mean it,” she whispered.

    “You’re forgiven, okay?  Now just let me go back to sleep.”

    “No, I want you to talk to me.”

    Roiling black fury swept away all higher mental processes like a hurricane through a hedge school.  I didn’t have to talk.  She poked me again and said, “Say something!” I threw the covers back and jumped out of bed.

    “What are you doing?” she said, as I pulled on my boxers.  “I’m leaving,” I said, spinning around the room looking for my jeans.  My eyeballs throbbed and my vision was streaked and spotted (it felt like geysers of blood spurting from my brain).  We grabbed my jeans off the floor at the same time, and as I tried to jab a foot through the waist she yanked on the legs.  I stumbled backwards out of the jeans, bounced off the bed to right myself, and then tried to push past her to get out of the room.

    “Don’t leave me!” she said, her voice high and hysterical.

    “I’m not leaving you,” I said (I shouted), “I’m just getting out of this house.”

    “Please don’t leave me,” she said (she cried).  She had my right arm clasped between her hands.  “Please, please don’t go,” she said, pulling my arm to her face, wetting my wrist with her tears.  “Why won’t you just hit me?” she said.

    I cradled her head in my hands like a coconut, or a melon, a beloved melon.  Her eyes were moist and achingly blue in the light cast by a heavy wrought iron lamp we bought (she bought) at an antiques market one Sunday morning.  One of those Sunday mornings.  I could split her skull right down the middle with the butt of this lamp.  I felt no scruples or squeamishness about the possibility of doing so.  But I already knew what was inside.  If I split it open no surprises would spill out.

    Simon Ashe-Browne is a writer and script editor.  His novel Nothing Human Left won the Dundee International Book Prize in 2011.  

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini

  • On Suicide

    What a beautiful day to be a nihilist. The sun
    shatters like a wine glass on the sheer ocean.

    Someone is stretching a canvas on the patio.
    Little blue flowers whose names I will never know

    sprout up in the grass, crickets trill,
    an empty crab shell contemplates existence on the window sill—

    the compost bin exudes its sweet
    ammoniac rot.

    Down in the surf,
    small children scream their heads off.

    Christopher Robinson is a novelist, poet, and futurist. He is the co-author, with Gavin Kovite, of War of the Encyclop aedists (Scribner, May 2015), which received glowing reviews in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. He lives in Seattle with his partner, Amanda Knox, who pushes him daily to be more empathic.