Marc Nash's Blog, page 36

People Watching - Friday Flash

He tracked the men as they made their way down the thoroughfare. He continually kept one of them in his crosshairs and could determine the presence of the other by the way his subject kept turning to address him as they walked. They arrived at a café and pulled up chairs at an outside table. That was suspicious enough behaviour, who else in this benighted land took their beverages outside in the open? They may people watch from the boulevard cafés in Paris, but further north we didn’t really possess the weather for it.
Nevertheless, they might not be players after all. How covert could their conversation be if they were prepared to air it with the waitress bent over their table wiping it with a cloth? Both men were looking up away from each other and smiling. He trained on the pretty waitress’ face, on the pencil behind her ear, which somewhat counteracted the delicate elegance of the dangling drop earring swaying with the slight motion of her head as she talked. She removed it to take their order and then left. Rather than follow her, he picked up fixing on the two men once more. Neither was now saying anything as they both leaned back into their chair, as he ricocheted the barrel of the gun from one to the other. A wisp of smoke coiled into this sights. He swiped his lens to trail the wisp of smoke back to its source, only to see it was merely the steam rising from the mugs of tea the waitress was returning with. No, this gathering was an innocent party of three and he arced his scope elsewhere.
He jagged the spectral divining rod of his rifle so seamlessly from figure to figure that no empty space ever pervaded between them. It was if all these people were part of some human paper chain stitched from flesh and blood. From his aerial roost he cast his vitreous fish-eye on their mouths miming into mobile phones. On their cramming a hasty sandwich into their maws as they snatched lunch on the move. He trailed a woman moisturising her scaly and blistered lips with a chapstick. He drew a bead on a man wiping away a bead of sweat from his forehead. Sign of a guilty conscience? He pulled the focus in tighter and caught a cartoon character tattoo peeking out of the man’s coat collar. No serious threat to the state would bear such a stigmata of the frivolous. 
For they had been trained, seasoned until the callouses on their trigger fingers bled, on what signs to look for to determine hostile from non-combatant. Two dimensional anatomies with target roundels to measure your accuracy of shot, while whether they were wearing balaclava or headscarf graded your accuracy of reaction. Cardboard cutouts of innocents and the iniquitous. The telltale rictus mouth of the zealous ideologue, when their enemies were actually far more cunning and whispered from the corners of their mouths rather than betraying themselves with cartoon snarls. Each pastiche picked out in lurid green monochrome, which made them all appear like Martians. The cityscape in which he operated was familiar enough with the same road signs as back home, but all the populace here were alien to him. In this windy city, none wore balaclavas though all wore hoodies. And if they pulled a rictus smile, it was only when they stood over your corpse and you were beyond any ability to register it. 
When he was home on leave, he tried to realign himself as a civilian. However, these days he could only filter people through a glass scope, with finely calibrated gradations framing the dimensions of their humanity for him. At social gatherings while folk talked and laughed and regaled each other, or just snuck clandestine glances at members of the opposite sex across the room, he was forever searching for a roundel target across their chests or reticles upon their brow. When introduced to new people, he could not help but cock his head and squint one eye shut when regarding them.
He regathered himself and resumed people watching. Searching for concentric circles and rictus smiles. 

Songs About Cars

The wide open road, symbol of freedom and narratives just waiting to be written or sung. If you live in America that is. What could be more of a contradiction in terms than a british road movie? London to Manchester in just over two hours. To Glasgow adds just another four and a half hours. Endless vistas not of the ocean, but of oil seed rape fields and graffitied concrete bridges.

Still, I suppose rock band tour buses still have to make those journeys, so here's 10 of my fave songs about cars and the magic of the road. or not, seeing as I have never learned to drive and fail to see how there can be any attraction.

Start your engines...

1) The Clash - "Brand New Cadillac"
For a band who'd sung on their debut album "I'm So Bored With The USA" and also penned "London's Burning" opening with a whinge about the concrete flyover that dominates West London, here is a song that seems to repudiate both of these sentiments, plus Joe Strummer's voice is lilting over to embrace the American a tad. Soon enough after this album they hightailed it to live in the USA anyway.



2) Tubeway Army - "Cars"
Ah dear old human android Gary Numan with his second smash hit song that aped Ballard and all things dehumanising about technology. An effect utterly subverted by his twee shaking of a tambourine. maybe he should have blown into a melodica or something.



3) Janis Joplin - "Mercedes Benz"
A song protesting the consumerism of America, subsequently reappropriated by the brand to advertise their wares. No wonder she drank herself to death she could see what was ahead.



4) Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers - "Roadrunner"
If there's a voice you want to suggest a certain ennui and distaste behind the thrust of what the lyrics purport to be saying, then it would be our Jonathan. This is a cover of a Bo Diddley song, the man who also wrote a paean to Cadillacs.



5) Ministry - "Jesus Built My Hot Rod"
And now for a complete change of gear... This quotes lines from the very offbeat road movie "Wiseblood".



6) Buzzcocks - "Fast Cars"
See we in the UK can crank it up to well over a ton too, but the power of the engine sounds a whole lot reedier than American models. And anyway, Pete Shelley is singing his disapprobation for going over the speeding limit.



7) Dead Milkmen - "Bitchin' Camaro"
Oh my aching sides, this is cabaret rock. An ex-girlfriend of mine put this on a mix tape for me. not quite sure what it says about me. I dunno, must have seemed funny under the influence of sensi...



8) Adam & The Ants - "Car Trouble"
see now somebody had to keep it real and this song talks about the downside of motoring when the machine goes wrong. Well keeping it as real as anyone from England dressed as a Native American with warpaint and feathers while brandishing an electric guitar can...



9) Tom Robinson Band - "2,4,6,8 Motorway"
This anthemic song almost made we want to learn to drive. There's something about its appeal I can't quite put my finger on, but there you go. I sued to hate motorway journeys up to visit my grandparents in Manchester. They were so boring and predictably none of the music for the journey included top tunes like this. Yeah I know it's a trucking song not a car song, but they're all the same to me anyway. Killing machines of steel. Or sumptin'. I used to wear badges like theirs back in the day. It's what punk was all about. That and sugar soap to make your hair spiky.



10) Billy Bragg - "A13"
You might have detected I'm losing a bit of interest in the subject matter, but this song spoofing the US song "Route 66" always puts a smile back on my face. Nicely done Billy, even if you are patronising the German audience with your English as a second language patter.

Echoes - Friday Flash

The sure handed technician swished the probe across my abdomen like an air hockey disc. She was sketching my child for me, drawing her from noiseless sound waves and silent rebounds. Bouncing sonar off her budding tissue, having the echoes pulse back through the swell of me and into the machine’s imaging stick. Pixels of my little pixie as her head is fully rendered. The outline of her arms expertly plotted by passage through the shallow fathoms. Even her fingers floating like sargassum in the void are charted through the sink and swim of the sonic undulations. The topography of my daughter. That slowly burgeoning coral reef cropping out from my amniotic sea bed.
The minute motions of her heart are as yet too tiny to be picked out in electrical motes. This being only the first draft for the overlay of more detailed pentimento compositions to come. But even without a monitor I could see, feel and most significantly, hear, my own heartstrings go ping as her image became limned in light emerging from the shadows of me. The technician squeezes some more jelly on my belly. It felt similar to when you used to pull out of me on to my stomach, terrified that we might launch new life. But her reproduction up there on screen suggests you got your timing wrong. That we were arrhythmic, out of step with one another. And when I relayed my suspicions of generation within me, you were off like a torpedo. There were no returning echoes from my plaintive pleas launched in the direction of your retreating back. Even though you were a complete dog, my entreaties appeared to be shrill beyond any audible frequency. But that’s okay, I have someone real close now who is held rapt by the softly lapping waves of my body and the song they make. Our call and response established here will be for all time. 
It was the same sonographer, but this time her piloting seemed less assured. There was a sense of choppy urgency to her sweeping over my distended stomach. And I scoped on the monitor that some of the pulses were not receiving the requisite echoes back.  Her rudimentary tissues were too weak to bat them gently round. The heart was now visible, but barely fluttering. They took me from lying prone under the ultrasound and folded me in half in front of a consultant. He was speaking to me, but I couldn’t hear his words. Wrong frequency for my brain to hold I guess. A siren only I could hear was reverberating in my head. 
They depth charged her with medical bombs. And when those didn’t find their target, they brought in an abominable bombardier with a suction duct to scuttle her little half-built vessel while she was still in harbour. And everyday now I rub my hand over my belly, the trenches and the depressions. Yet the seabed there is still. No echoes are ever returned  to me. 

Acquaintance - Friday Flash

The two former school friends bumped into one another on the street. They shook hands heartily, clumping each other on the shoulder. The commotion of their boisterous reunion broadcast a warning to those pedestrians forging towards them sightlessly with their heads bowed to consult the augury of their phones, so that they managed to swerve around them without disaster. Yet above all the bustle of the street, the two men couldn’t make themselves understood, even when they inclined in towards the mouth of the other to hear what he was saying. 
The pair decided on adjourning to a café to catch up on old times. They snaffled a table just as the waitress was clearing it of the leavings from the previous occupants and ordered two cups of tea. While they stirred sugar into their milky brew, the pair proceeded to fumble for the vectors of alignment of their recollections. Yet they engendered none of the call and response of familiarity. They failed to finish each other’s sentences with that curious intimacy born of shared experience. They recounted events with a similar hollowness that the other vaguely remembered but without any illumination. While they could both place themselves at the same occasions, there was none of the customary effervescence of a reciprocal memory that meant they could place each other there. 
This was because neither had been the protagonist in these recalled scenes. Both had been on the margins, stationed in the boostering chorus (men do not acknowledge any cheerleading role), while others took centre stage with prodigious drinking feats, bodily regurgitation of such feats, or the violence that inevitably ensued. To find such exploits truly memorable and recountable, you had to be there, which they were of course, but perhaps really only tangentially. You don’t allow for wallflowers outside of dancehalls and that usually applied to women, but both men had been let’s call them spear carriers for the main actors and this was dawning on them as they increasingly failed to depict themselves or the other as heroic in any single incident. They were not at the moral centre, because their timidity had determined the moral decision making process for them from the very outset.
They were barely listening to the other as their thoughts turned inward to process these revelations made through lacunae. This happy coincidence which should have prompted a reclamation of carefree youthful joy, had merely shown up their lack of dimension then as now. They couldn’t connect in any pleasing way. Neither cared what the other was currently engaged in and what he had made of his life. For he was reflecting that he himself had still achieved nothing noteworthy, had made very little of his own life in line with the unpromising, modest beginnings. 
The pauses elongated into silences. Though ill-aligned, now the urgency was to break away from their contiguity. Both gulped their tea and made sure to slurp the dregs as loudly as possible to signal an empty cup. One threw his empty sugar packet into the teacup, the other snapped his plastic stirrer in half and also set it in his cup as if a tombstone. The first wiped his mouth with the paper napkin, the other signalled for the bill. They each paid half, stood up and shook hands without any cupping of arms around the shoulder. As they rose to leave, the waitress scooped up their cups and gave a cursory swipe over the table with her cloth. 

And Baseball Created The Universe - Flash fiction

“Foul Ball”! And with that the black hole at the centre of the solar system was created.
“Big bang, big bang! That changeup ain’t coming back any time soon!” as the galaxy was propelled on its never ending way.
“Backdoor slider eh? I went yard on that” as Venus was launched into its orbit.
“Dial long distance! Curve ball duly deposited into the upper deck as Pluto took its place. The pitching angel was finding it hard to hurl orbs with his wings getting in the way. He spat out his chewing tobacco on the mound and thus was dark matter formed.
“Split two-seam fastball eh? I was sitting dead read on that one. Hit the hide off it!” as Saturn shuffled into position.
“Pop fly!” as the comets were established in their trajectories. 
“Ha moonshot!” as Jupiter’s many satellites were formed from the splitting of the ball crushed by God’s Louisville Slugger timber.
“Come on Cherub, that one is right in my wheelhouse!” as Neptune was crushed into the far reaches of the solar system.
“Line drive blast, that’s back to back to back” as Mars lined it out into the short porch of the solar system. 
“Sinker ball huh?” Tape-measure dinger into the bleachers for Uranus to assume its elliptical path.
“Ooops mind yourself there Cherub, atom-ball nearly got ya!” and thus was Mercury formed with a single feather snagged by the travelling sphere from the Cherub’s wing.
“Oh man broken bat blooped single, think my arm’s getting tired, let’s call it a day- the first day- here” as the Earth apologetically spilled out into the infield.
“Let there be light to see all my smoked balls”. God removed the bubble gum from his mouth and stuck it to the batting cage where it pulsed and radiated light.

Buy One Get One Free!

"28 Far Cries" is my fourth published collection of flash fiction which came out last month.

Together with my other 3 collections, that makes 128 flash fiction stories, of many styles, themes and literary forms.

Perhaps 28 stories is not fully representative of the range of my work, so to remedy that I'm offering the chance to scale that up to 60 of my stories.

If you buy a copy of "28 Far Cries" before August 31st I'll send you a free e-reader version of my third collection "Long Stories Short"


All you have to do is buy "28 Far Cries" from Amazon and use their "I just bought" function at the end of the purchase to tweet it directly to me @21stCscribe

Remember to add the @21stCscribe so I'll see it. I'll tweet you back confirming it and then just email me to sewell(dot)d(at)googlemail(dot)com and I'll send you a copy by return.

If you miss the opportunity, you can still tweet me a photo of you holding the book once it arrives, though this obviously only applies to a print copy.

From reviews of "Long Stories Short"

"His is a truly original voice and Long Stories Short is a master class in writing as a higher art form".

"adept at looking at situations from a different angle, making the mundane into something strange and exciting, or treating the extra-ordinary as an everyday occurrence"

Stories of Royal Street Parties, safe houses, arthritic stand up comics, stolen ancient artefacts, crime scene re-enaction actors, neon cowboy hoardings, marionettes, dump sites, geishas...

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Five Sunsets Over The Ramparts - 500 word story

The Sun swatted its interrogatory disc from the face of the earth and gave a clipped nod. As Night stepped forward, the wrinkled penumbral clouds of its rolled up sleeves exposed the warrant of its dark intent.

The Sun had completed its final round and was coming off shift. As it dipped down into the trench of the horizon, it paused to lay a ribboned shaft across the arm of Night arriving in relief. ‘All quiet today, but it’s all going to come down on your watch, it’s palpable in the air’. Night nodded curtly and grimaced as he started his vigil. 

As the Sun sags and droops at the end of the day, it no longer has the power to illuminate the sky with its glow and drags its fading light like a soiled wedding trail through the dust. It feels guilty that the sky is leached of its cerulean and azure, to be but briefly replaced by reds and oranges and bruised purples. A similar purging of certain colours as was happening down on the ground too, as flags of one colour effaced flags of another, until Night descended rapidly to shroud it all unseen beneath its black cloak. 

The Sun gazed upon the shoulders and torso of the blue sky which cradled it. All day the blue had been permeated by smoke trails launched into it, profaning its unbroken blue plane. They looked like trails of tears. But as the sky gyrated and sloughed the Sun off like a robe to step out of its raiment, the Sun no longer cared since it would pass over to become Night’s concern now. Though as the clouds pressed themselves hard up against Night’s bosom so as to become sheer, so the smoke trails too failed to scar his dusky countenance. The pent up perturbations were far worse when they finally fell from his tenebrous countenance and fell to earth, since the whole sky lit up with coruscations. As if in fierce tribute to himself, mocking the radiance he brought during the day with brief fulgurations, before they were enclosed and eclipsed by the darkness once again. 


As the Sun set on another day, it shook its head sadly in the knowledge that when it rose the next morning, there would be nothing left for it to kindle and shine upon to light the way in this place. Night had triumphed over it yet again with its perpetual extinguishing of life. 


*

I wanted to write something to express my disgust with the international just standing by while innocents die in gaze in utterly unjustifiable numbers. I was trying to go for something on a global scale and decided to plump for the sun and the darkness of night, with all the associations of light/dark these bring. Our words Orient and Occident stem from the Latin for sunrise & sunset, while the term 'Levant" comes from the French also referring to the rising sun. Additionally the terms Middle and Far East show represent the vestiges of colonialism that these parts of the realm were only defined by their proximity or otherwise to the powerful empires of Britain & France. These imperial powers caused the long embittered entrenchments of communities in the Middle East and now they sit on their hands unwilling to try and seek both immediate and long term solutions. I blogged on the root cause problems behind the situation in Palestine back in 2012 and nothing has changed only worsened. If they manage to sort out a cease fire, unless they deal with these deep-rooted problems the region will go through all this again in a short while, just as I said it would back in 2012. 

E.T Phoneme Home - Friday Flash

It certainly wasn’t my intention to overhear what the two men at the table next to me were saying. They’d been there for an age jawing away without me picking up on anything. But when I sneezed it hurtled me into their conversation. Or rather it thrust their conversation into me.
I guess my head was propelled towards them by my whole body spasm into the expulsion and that put me within range of clearer articulation. But the crescendo and uneven modulation of the assault of my sneeze upon my own ears, meant that I only grasped the merest snatch of their exchange. Just two words that emerged somewhere between my head jagging forward and the fluctuating percussion of the sneeze, which thereby rendered the words random. Certainly ripped from their context placed within the rest of the sentence.
The two words were “rude” and “ire”. I say words, but I far more credit them to have been syllables. I mean who uses “ire” in everyday speech these days? And by the same logic, I have to hope and trust the same applies to “rude”, otherwise I fear they were discussing me and labelling me thus. Wholly without justification, since despite the ambush of the snout salvo, my reflexes were such that I managed to whip out my handkerchief and safely snaffle the discharge.
Even though I was averse to, my mind involuntarily begun trying to surmise what the full words might had been. It fixed on the “ire”, perhaps because that was indisputably a snapped off longer form, or maybe it didn’t want to dwell on the possibility that “rude” was delivered as it was meant. “Fire”, “hire”, “retire”, “acquire”, “conspire”, it could conceivably have been any of these. It might not even have been a word containing the lexeme “ire”, but as a homophone could very easily have been “liar”, “flier”, "pyre", “briar”, “supplier”, “buyer”, “prior”, “friar”, although I think that last one is likely to be an outlier. Normally one would have the added cue of the speaker’s face, but at that moment of course I had been confronted solely with the tabula rasa of my handkerchief (now imprinted with a mucal Rorschach of greens and yellows no artist’s palette could replicate), while at the moment of eruption my eyes were reflexively lidded and seeing of nothing. 
My mind would not rest however, resolved to determine whether I had been castigated and insulted by the other table for “intruding” in their chit chat. For being somehow crude when dabbing prudently to snag any snot extruding from my nostril. How else could the word “rude” be construed? They were unlikely to be pontificating on the morals of any woman called “Gertrude”, since who these days is bestowed with such a name? Whether such a woman was a “prude”, with or without a “brood”. Hang on a tick, it is just possible that it wasn’t the prefix which was overlain and sawn off by my nasal detonation. It could have been a suffix, as in “rudimentary”, or a bloke called “Rudolph”. Gertrude and Rudolph, who would have thought it? “Desire” that’s another “ire” word. How could I have possibly missed that one? I bet they had been parleying nothing more than a good bit of lewd prurience. A rudimentary desire to… 
There was only one way to determine this definitively, well one way apart from asking them directly which would be intrusive and rude. I would see if I could pick up any clues by observing the rest of their conversation. I stared at them surreptitiously, but they were no longer engaged in colloquy. Instead each was cutting their meat, stabbing it on the end of their fork, hoisting it into their mouths and silently chewing. That augured to a certain level of etiquette, which naturally could have proved the case either way. That these two were relatively effete and therefore quick to take offence at the perceived rudeness of others. Or that they hadn’t registered anything of my unfortunate sonic interposition earlier and remained oblivious to my very existence next to them. 
There was only a single action remaining to settle this for good. I removed my handkerchief from my pocket, opened it and began to counterfeit inspecting it, all the time peeking just above its edge for their reaction. 

The Disenchanted Forest - Friday Flash

The faerie ring formed from discarded cigarette butts.
The henge was composed from jagged bottles sawn off by practise bullets. Witches’ thimbles picked out in empty shell casings.
Wreaths woven not from acorns and oak leaves, but from silver foil and torn up aluminium can crack pipes.
A cromlech constructed of three abandoned shopping trollies.
Corn dollies festooned the bare ground, fabricated from condoms and tampons.
Hag stones cultivated from car tyres, corn circles of six-pack beer plastic.
A scarecrow only for want of a wooden spine, fashioned from a mound of clothes and rags.
A small maypole erected from a medical crutch planted in the soil and strips of bandages billowing from it.
The Devil’s footprints forged from pillboxes, twisted glue tubes and lighter fluid tins 

An outline like a chalk figure had been burned into the grass, where a prone man had been set on fire without bothering with a whicker cage.

60s Music - A barren decade

Until the dawn of the 21st century, the 1960s was my least favourite decade for music. I wasn't sure if I could even scrape together ten tunes to form one of my customary themed charts. And yet it was a highly political decade with youth at its head, so could have been more crucial musically than it turned out to be, although to be fair at least by the decade's end we no longer had to watch our beat combo groups performing on TV still wearing suits. Anyway, here are my top 10 tunes from the 60s.

1) The Doors - "Light My Fire"
To me Doors were the quintessential sound of the 60s. A bit political, a bit rebel, a bit hippy, a touch literary and a lot druggy. Having said that they along with Hendrix are perhaps the only two artists who would have more than a handful of songs in my collection. And Coppola's use of "The End" to bookend his movie "Apocalypse Now" is a perfect artistic synthesis.



2) MC5 -  "Kick Out The Jams"
Now here were a political group who brought a whole heap of trouble down on their heads because of their incendiary music. I met Fred Sonic Smith once, and he looked very burned out. that's what oppositional politics can do for you I guess.



3) Shangri-Las - "Leader Of The Pack"
Girl groups were a staple of the pop charts, but the Shangri-Las turned up to inject a touch of edge, cynicism and put the 'bad' into the bad boy they always seemed to yearn for.



4) Jimi Hendrix - Voodoo Child"
Never been bettered, nuff said. In my contemporary record collection there are bands with maybe two top guitar riffs at best. Hendrix had albums chockfull of them.



5) Creedance Clearwater Revival" - "Have You Ever Sen The Rain"
This is one of those bands I wouldn't have come across were they not referenced and covered heavily by bands I like such as Sonic Youth and Minutemen. But and this is a big but, as great as the songs they wrote were, there is the question, as with Neil Young, of whether you can stand John Fogerty's reedy and frankly weedy vocals. That is the limiting factor for me.



6) Julie London - "Cry Me A River"
There will always be a place for female crooners and this stands the test of time. Will Adele? We will have to wait and see.



7) The Guess Who - "American Woman"
Don't know any other of their songs and again I came to this via a modern cover version, but this is great.



8) Jefferson Starship - "White Rabbit"
Those of you who know me will recall that I am very anti-drug use. And yet in a demonstration of cognitive dissonance, I acknowledge there has been some great music (but probably not great literature) made while under the influence. This is the grand-daddy of them all, or maybe the grand-mommy since Grace Slick's vocal style takes this song beyond the stratosphere.



9) Don Drummond - "The Man In The Street"
At least the 60s brought us Studio One label and the opening up of Jamaican reggae. So it wasn't all bad as a decade then...



10) Pink Floyd - "Lucifer Sam"
The great unsolvable question, what would Pink Floyd have been like if Syd Barett hadn't destroyed his brain cells and been forced to hand the group over to Roger Waters that helped usher in the bloated supergroups of the 1970s like Floyd, Led Zep, Yes, Supertramp, Steeley Dan et al.