Jan Carson's Blog, page 17

Postcard Stories 2015: Week Forty Four

October 29th 2015 – Dundonald

Paul Bleakney

Yesterday, on the bus between Donegal Square and the Holywood Arches, I found a pawn ticket. I looked around for the owner but it was almost eleven and the bus was all but empty. The next day I took the ticket to the pawn shop. It seemed a shame to let a perfectly good, unclaimed something go to waste.

“What’s the ticket for?” I asked the young man who ran the shop. It felt a little like winning a raffle I had not entered.

“Oh,” said the young man, “I’m so glad you’ve come to claim this one, she’s eating us out of house and home.” He went off into the back of the shop and returned with a red-haired girl, approximately the same age as me.

“Here you go,” he said, “she’s all yours,” which would have been the perfect end to a love story if she’d been the kind of red-haired girl I could have fallen in love with, (I was, after all, very single). But, she wasn’t my type. Her hair was orange rather than true red and she had the sort of appetite which requires shovels over spoons.

“I’m sorry,” I said to the young man, “there seems to have been some mistake. I was under the impression that this ticket related to a pocket watch.”

“I’ll throw a watch in, if you take her off my hands,” he replied, but I was already halfway out the door.

October 30th 2015 – Ulster Hall, Belfast

Leslie Bachman

It was impossible to say precisely when he first became Spiderman. One moment he was just a boy in a Spiderman costume, (waiting for his sister, who was being one of the girls from Frozen again this year), the next moment he felt sure that he could shoot actual webs from the point where his hand met his wrist and, if given the opportunity, could swing like a circus monkey, from one high building to the next, suspended on his own fine threads.

“I’m Spiderman,” he told his dad.

His dad grinned like a kept pig and replied, “and I’m Buzz Lightyear,” (which wasn’t true for his dad didn’t even have a space helmet).

“I’m Spiderman,” he told his mum.

His mum patted him gently on the head and said, “look after your sister at the party, Spidey.” She gave him a tiny packet of Haribo from the bowl she was saving for the Trick or Treaters.

He didn’t eat it. He was way too cross to be placated with sweets. He was Spiderman. Later he would climb the tree in the back garden and swing from there, to the shed’s roof. They would all be able to see him clearly in the security lights and they would not be offering him Haribo then.

October 31st 2015 – Hyde Park, London

Joe Lines

There are thirty seven individual cartons of UHT milk stacked in three rows beside the kettle. There are only four individually packaged tea bags and four sachets of instant coffee; the possibility of eight hot drinks in total. Eight into thirty seven goes four and a half, almost five. You remember this from Primary School. You round up, call it five, which means the management have estimated that the person staying in this budget, hotel room, overlooking Paddington Station will require five small cartons of UHT milk for every hot beverage he or she consumes. This seems unlikely, as does the possibility that the management assumes some patrons will wish to drink UHT milk neat, like shots of chemical cream tipped straight from their plastic cups into the throat and the stomach below. It seems more likely that previous residents have created this surplus of UHT by drinking their tea black or drinking no tea at all. Now, these little, milkish bullets might never be drunk and this is sad to you, like old people with no place to go at Christmas.

November 1st 2015 – Tate Modern, London

Jean Bleakney

In 1975, the German-based conceptual artist, Rebecca Horn used elasticated bandages and novel-sized rectangles of mirrored glass to turn her entire body, (head withstanding), into a reflective surface. She did this for art. She had previously worn feathers, horns and other extra things, also for art.

Once attached to her arms, her legs and torso the mirrors formed the idea of armour. She could see everything that was coming at her, yet understood that there was no real protection in hiding behind a mirror. Even the smallest bullet or sword, swung correctly, would cause the entire suit to shatter into thousands of mean little shards. She might be killed.

Even without swords of guns she could not protect herself from her own hungry stare refracted, spliced, broken into one hundred separate judgments as it reflected off her limbs. She would not be an artist then. Neither would she be a woman nor man. She would be a kaleidoscope revealing both her best and worst side every time she glanced over her own mirrored shoulder.

November 2nd 2015 –London

Marc Mulholland

We are standing in the last carriage of an almost empty tube train, somewhere between Oxford Circus and Kings Cross. It is a newish train with no partitions between carriages. Looking from one down the body of the train is like looking down a particularly long corridor, (hospitals come to mind and also government offices), except for those twists in the tunnel which cause the farthest end of the train to disappear for a moment or two, reminding us that we are standing in a very long room and, while one end of this room has already arrived, the other end has yet to reach its destination. If dwelt upon for too long this thought is its own kind of endless tunnel. How, we wonder to each other, can one walled space be past and future tense and also simultaneously present?

November 3rd 2015 – King’s Cross, London

Susan Picken

“If your drink doesn’t make you happy we’ll make you another,” I read aloud, pointing to the sign above the barista’s head. It’s been there, right behind him, with the toastie machine and the coffee syrups for so long now that he’s forgotten all about it. Occasionally someone refers to the sign when their latte is not as hot as they’d like it to be, or their cappuccino is burnt, but most people are too polite to complain.

Not me! “I finished my coffee and it didn’t make me happy,” I tell the barista.

He asks if it was too hot, too cold, too weak, too strong?

I say, “no, no, no, there’s nothing wrong with this coffee. It just didn’t make me happy. I am still unhappy as I was before drinking this coffee.”

Then, I begin to cry and because the barista does not know what to do he gets the manager. The manager offers me another coffee and a muffin, (with the implication of a free Panini if I’ll just stop crying over the pastry counter). I take their muffin and their free coffee but it doesn’t make me happy. There are only so many free coffees a person can drink before admitting that a hot beverage cannot cure loneliness or grief or general melancholy.

November 4th 2015 – East Belfast

Roisin Eves

It might have been there for a week or more. Morgan doesn’t look at her hands too closely, especially the left. However, on the first frosty morning of the year, when she went to put her gloves on she discovered that there were six fingers on her left hand now. She knew for certain that the new digit was not her thumb or baby finger, but after this could not say with any certainty which of the remaining fingers was the new one. Morgan thought about making a doctor’s appointment but it was a busy week and an extra finger was hardly life threatening.

The next week there were six fingers on her right hand, then seven on her left and, by the following weekend, a matching seven on the right. She wore mittens and phoned the doctor for an appointment but still could not bring herself to call these four extra fingers an emergency. Emergencies were heart attacks and burst appendixes, severed arteries and the like. The extra fingers were just an inconvenience.

By the time she finally saw her doctor, Morgan had nine extra digits in total arranged across both hands.

“How long have you had these?” the doctor asked.

“A fortnight, maybe more,” she replied. She wanted him to say it was no big deal, no reason to panic; but he didn’t.

Postcard Stories 2015: Week Forty Three

October 22nd 2015 – East Belfast

Anthony and Helena Cummings

The Brontosaurus, it turns out, was never a real kind of dinosaur. The archaeologist who discovered the Brontosaurus found the skeleton of one already discovered dinosaur close to the skull of another and, putting two and two together, leapt to the conclusion that he had discovered, (or perhaps invented is a more accurate word), an entirely new breed of dinosaur. He called his creature Brontosaurus, the meaning of which is “thunder lizard,” in Greek.

By 1903 his fake dinosaur had been disproved and yet, by the time I reached Primary 4, in 1988, discovering dinosaurs en route to the Egyptians and those wily Romans, the Brontosaurus was still being taught alongside Triceratops, T-Rex and all their scaly friends. This was a conspiracy of self-delusion. People had grown fond of the Brontosaurus. They read into his lumbering limbs and whalish belly a sort of elderly gentleness, alien to the more spiky dinosaurs. He was soft to them, like rolling hills. They wanted to believe in the Brontosaurus’ existence like they believed in Santa Claus, and Jesus, and Elvis, still alive and singing. They were not prepared to let the facts get between them and a good, true thing.

October 23rd 2015 – Belmont Tower, East Belfast

Kate Bryan

Dear C.S. Lewis,

You will be disappointed to hear that while I climbed into my wardrobe and went feeling around for the portal to another world, I did not encounter Narnia, only the back of my wardrobe, (which is made of plywood), and some coat hangers jangling together like biscuit tin lids.

Do you suppose my wardrobe is to fault C.S.? It’s only a flat pack one from IKEA. It’s not even that big. Or, was it the absence of fur coats which made all the difference? I keep summer dresses in my wardrobe, cardigans skirts, and the kind of blouses which can’t be folded for fear of wrinkling. These items, when pressed upon, do not part with the same soft, animal shrug. They do not smell like old ladies at the theatre. But no one owns a fur coat for real these days Mr. Lewis. Everyone considers such items, cruel; even the people who can actually afford to buy them.

Besides C.S. Lewis, we both know it wasn’t the wardrobe or the clothes which kept me out of Narnia. I simply did not believe enough.

October 24th 2015 – Ballymena

Miriam Crozier

In the food court of the Tower Centre, (a medium-sized shopping mall built in the town of Ballymena around the beginning of the 1980s), I spot a child of around seven wearing fake tan. It is a female child. I assume this because it has long hair, painted fingernails and flower-shaped earrings hanging from either ear though it is also wearing a grey marl tracksuit equally suitable for both boys and girls. Its mother is also wearing fake tan. I assume that this woman is the child’s mother because she is holding its hand and talking sharply to the child as she marches it past Primark. But, it could just as easily be an abductor of small children. I am shocked to see a seven year old wearing fake tan. I try to tell myself that it is almost Halloween. Perhaps this child is in some kind of fancy dress, (an Oompa Loompa, or one of the characters from The Only Way is Essex). Then I remember that this is the Tower Centre and once I saw a baby here, in a buggy, by the children’s play area, drinking Lucozade from a baby’s bottle.

October 25th 2015 – East Belfast

Marina Graham

This morning we have been given an extra hour in bed. Sarah wakes at the normal time. She is not good with change of any kind. She lies in bed, looking at the ceiling and wondering who got to make the decision about this extra hour; possibly the Queen or the Prime Minister; more likely God, who invented time and can therefore give and take extra hours as he sees fit. But the extra hour thing is not in the Bible and so Sarah wonders how people know they have been given this gift hour to lie in bed, or read, or squander on coffee and fancy breakfast. She spends so much time staring at her ceiling and wondering where this extra hour has come from that she does not feel it slipping away from her. When she looks at the clock and sees it is now the time to get up and face last night’s dishes Sarah feels disappointed, as if something has been taken from her, without her consent, which is silly really because it was only ever imaginary time to begin with.

October 26th 2015 – Belfast

Ryan Crown

At first it was just a smell: a gaseous thing which could be passed through and left behind like the memory of an awkward conversation or a Christmas movie forgotten from one year to the next, recollecting itself gleefully as soon as the opening credits begin. Later, it became a wall, of a brick, of a very solid thing. It punched every time it was approached. It won over other stronger smells, (including air freshener, bleach and the musk, thick fug of old men’s cologne), and held its forms, exactly the shape and space of the North corridor. It left its warm piss stench on everyone attempting to pass from front of house to back.

“It smells like someone died in there,” said the concert goers, and crossed their legs all through the interval and second half, holding their wee for their own home toilets which did not smell of unwashed gutter. Customers and staff began to avoid the North corridor, taking the South from front to back instead, and with this, a little bit of the building died. This was a small taste, or rather smell, of things to come.

October 27th 2015 – Dundonald

Teresa Hill

The church does not want its children to feel left out but it cannot possibly condone a Halloween party. It considers hosting a harvest party, but this is not America and there is only so much enthusiasm for pumpkin-based products in East Belfast. Eventually the church decides to organize a fancy dress party where every child will come dressed as a Bible character. There will be diluting juice in polystyrene cups, Wotsits in a bowl and, when things really get going, musical chairs. Four boys come as Joseph in stripy bathrobes. There are two Marys, a Samson in his grandmother’s wig, Moses, Solomon and a handful of Wise Men in cardboard crowns.

One child comes as Satan. “He’s definitely in the Bible,” she argues at the door. She is wearing a red jumpsuit, horns and a tail. She is going on to another, proper party after the church party. She does not understand why the minister will not let her take her anorak off.

October 28th 2015 – East Belfast

Bobby Alexander

Home at twenty seven (or older):

I am the striped school ties, hanging in the wardrobe, (both Primary and Secondary).
I am vegetable soup and crusty bread on a Wednesday night, (the last supper before the weekly Tesco run).
I am Casualty on a Saturday, Holby on a Tuesday, and all the conversations we’ll hook on to one or the other or, on a good week, both.
I am sixteen kinds of awkward in the same bed I slept in at twelve.
I am the empty bottle of red wine buried at the bottom of the recycling bin in a house which still, even after all this time, cannot stomach strong drink.

Postcard Stories 2015: Week Forty Two

October 15th 2015 – Ulster Hall, Belfast

Clodagh O’Brien

At first there were no marks. Toby was just a little fussier than usual. Then the red blisters began to bloom around his belly and the base of his spine. Laura looked it up on the Internet, diagnosed chicken pox, and began dosing the child with Calpol. She was secretly pleased. Chicken pox at two was ten times easier to deal with than chicken pox at four or five, or, heaven forbid, at forty, which was when her father had developed it, catching the virus from her just born brother, and blistering so bad he couldn’t shave for months.

Laura called all her friends with toddlers not yet infected and they were only too glad to bring their children round for an hour of exposure to Toby who was, by this stage, itching himself raw, so Laura had begun to fear permanent scarring. They threw all the children together in a small room with toys, closed the doors and hoped they would naturally gravitate towards Toby, howling in the corner. The mothers whispered to their children, through the keyhole, “give Toby a wee kiss,” and, “poor Toby looks like he needs a hug.” But the children were afraid of him and his loud tears and blotchy skin. They kept tightly to their own corner. None of them developed chicken pox.

The mothers were disappointed. Afterwards they were colder with Laura than they’d previously been, as if she’d told them a kind of lie.

October 16th 2015 – East Belfast

Andrew Ooms

Of course, it’s impossible to tell from the picture on the box exactly what shade a dye will turn out once applied to your hair. This is why the instructions urge all users to complete a strand test at least twenty four hours in advance of application; this, and severe allergic reactions. However, the picture on the box is almost always no more than one or two shades from reality.

Imagine then, my surprise, when a box of light ash blonde dye, (L’Oreal brand), turned my hair the colour of the future.

The colour of the future is very hard to describe. It cannot be compared or contrasted with existing colours. The closest thing comparable might be mirror. Looking at the colour of the future as it flowed over my forehead and down my neck, strangers paled, good friends stared, as if hypnotized by things to come, things previously unimaginable. One man dropped dead in the street. Having feared the future for so many years he found it overwhelmingly beautiful riding high on the dome of my head like a kind of top knot, like a decorative flourish on a medieval cathedral. I watched him die, smiling and wished I’d done the strand test the night before.

I hadn’t planned on dying my hair the colour of the future. It was too heavy for me to carry off and, even with make-up, I looked corpse pale. I wore a hat for six weeks as advised, dyed my hair mouse brown and was ordinary again.

October 17th 2015 – East Belfast

Nathan Marion

It was October, almost November and all those present knew that this would be the last outdoor fire of the year. Soon the rain would come and there would be shower after pelting shower, with the possibility of snow punctuating the damp. This would continue until April or most likely May. No fire would catch outside in the rain, even cigarettes could not be relied upon as they were during the summer months.

Tonight they sat around the firepit on deckchairs and upturned crates, turning their faces towards the flames so they glowed like old gods in the flickering light. They did not, for a moment, worry about the next day smell of smoke and charcoal settling into their hair and their wool mix coats. In the morning they would wake to this smell, stale on their pillows, and wonder how long they could go without washing it away. They would hold this fire smell against the months to come like lovers sniffing for the perfume of the recently departed.

October 18th 2015 – Dundonald

Sarah Majury-Harris

After she turned into a spider Marilyn was only one centimeter tall. She could not reach the door handle and so it was impossible to return to her house. She found a new home in the wing mirror of a parked car. It was a Corsa; two doors and pillarbox red. Each day she hid behind the mirror and at night crawled out to spin fine webs across the car’s windscreen. These were not for catching flies. Marilyn had not stomach for insects. Instead she wove words into her webs. She’d remembered the children’s movie, “Charlotte’s Web,” and, under the circumstances couldn’t think of anything else to do.

Everyday she wrote the word “HELP” in block capital letters though she wasn’t exactly sure how the car’s driver could help her in her present situation, unless of course, he had magic powers. When the car was driven the fine lines of Marilyn’s webs went flying off in the wind. The next evening she’d have to start again, one letter at a time, all the time wondering why she was even bothering.

October 19th 2015 – East Belfast

Matthew O’Neill

The houses in our neighbourhood have only recently been given recycling bins. This is probably because we do not live in a city and the Council have made certain assumptions about our ability to engage with environmental issues such as polar ice caps, carbon footprints and sticking our potato peelings in the green, food bin. We are proving the Council very, very wrong.

We are placing our cardboard in one bin, our paper in the other. We are separating glass bottles from those made of plastic. We are faithfully placing our bins out for collection every second Tuesday, on the pavement. And, if we sometimes slip the odd non-traditional item into the recycling bin –secrets, dirty jokes, ex-wives, unwanted pets- it is only because we truly believe that somewhere, in a city or small town, much like ours, someone else will see the greater good in these items; will get more out of them than we ever could. This is how we’ve come to define recycling.

October 20th 2015 – Ulster Hall, Belfast

Seonaid Murray

When the music starts they leave their tables and the decimated remains of their lunch. They do not look back. Pushing their chairs aside they stand on orthopaedic shoes and make for the dance floor. This is not a rapid movement, neither is it without momentum. The phrase which comes to mind is “gently shuffling.” They move like boats or other drifting things caught in a forward flowing tide.

When they reach the dance floor they pair off: woman with woman, never man with man, woman with man, (where men are willing and available). They make arches with their arms. Their backs are no longer bowed. They carry themselves like condiment dispensers now; salt and pepper swirling across the solid oak boards. They do not collide. They have long since learnt how to circle and turn and spin on a large, circling axis like planets never once brushing against the sleeve of another planet. They are a kind of solar system waltzing to the hits. Their faces, caught in the trailing spots, are pink, then orange, then baby blonde; younger by years than they were an hour ago.

October 21st 2015 – Ulster Hall, Belfast

Rebecca Slater

Pete has become a mower of lawns because his father is a mower of lawns. Pete is an only child. There is not even a sister to fight him for rights to the family business. Pete’s father is a reasonably forward thinking man and has, in principle, no objections to a female mower of lawns. He simply hasn’t had the chance to employ one. Pete does not want to be a mower of lawns though he can’t say exactly what he wants to be instead: a ballerina perhaps, or a tightrope walker, for he is exceptionally well-balanced and specializes in the mowing of grassy verges and hills, often driving his sit-on up a bank at a 45 degree angle. Retaining his balance at such a demanding pitch requires tremendously strong stomach muscles. After a long day’s mowing Pete often feels as if he has been doing sit-ups –hundreds of them consecutively- or stomach crunches at the gym. Sometimes as he drives the sit-on up a hill or down he thinks about throwing the throttle open, gunning the accelerator and making for other well-grassed horizons; leaving a wide, lime strip behind him like the ghost trails of a summer jet.

Postcard Stories 2015: Week Forty One

October 8th 2015 –Shaftesbury Square, Belfast

Daniel Greene

There are at least six million people gathered in Shaftesbury Square tonight. This is approximate four times the population of the entire country, but no one is worrying about details tonight. Not tonight! It is balmy tonight like an early Spring evening, though it is October, and already gone ten. The crowds are out in their t-shirts. Almost all the t-shirts are green because we have won a football match, not just managed to not lose, but actually won, with three proper goals. We are now permitted to travel to another place and play further games of football. Six million people have taken this unforeseen victory as an opportunity to go clean, buck mad. They are swinging from the lampposts. They are drinking tinned bear in the street. They are yahooing and getting on like uncaged gorillas. The roar of them can be heard from Iceland. They are staring at the poets emerging from their poetry reading in woolen blazers, with conversation, and quiet cigarettes, as if they are the strange breed and it is entirely normal to run up and down the road, shirtless on a weeknight.

October 9th 2015 –Ulster Hall, Belfast

Shari Shoman

This morning I found one of your pictures tucked into the back of an old notebook. It was a drawing of a castle with parachuting sheep, rendered in biro on the back of a restaurant menu. On top of the castle you’ve drawn a flag; a Union Jack in all its red, white and bluish glory. You are too young to know that flags mean things around here and this one is particularly significant. You did this drawing months ago in the space between ordering and eating. It was the same night you informed us that you knew a magic trick and then made the biro disappear from your hand with one deft flick of the wrist so it went sailing across the restaurant and landed in a stranger’s dinner. The sound of our laughing filled the space between eating and desert. Without a biro you could not finish your castle and so here it is now, pinned to my office wall, without a moat or drawbridge, without a King or Queen, or anyone sensible to run the show. Only the sheep who are leaping free of the battlements, unfurling their parachutes like close-capped mushrooms as they descend.

October 10th 2015 –Ulster Hall, Belfast

Geraldine O’Kane

In this version the Beast is not a lion or a large, hairy creature of any kind. The Beast is a crocodile. Or is he an alligator? Beauty is not sure how to tell the difference and she is determined not to stare. If she stares she will see herself reflected in the black balls of his eyes and recognize her own pale face, grimacing. Then she will not be able to sit outside her own skin like the ghost of a girl who passed through this place years ago and is now happy, somewhere else. The Beast in this version is a green thing with jaws and small hands, held close to his body, without arms. He is at least one third tail. This makes things difficult for Beauty who knows she is expected to read virtue into the way he carries himself; to see the human walking, talking and hiding, ever so discretely behind the Beast. It is almost impossible to fall in love with a thing that slithers. They can never stand next to each other like two equal creatures. The Beast is miles below her, dragging his belly across the floor. When he speaks Beauty cannot distinguish words from noise. She can only hear his teeth click, click, clicking like struck spoons. She cannot stop thinking that her whole head could fit easily inside those wide, green jaws.

October 11th 2015 –Dundonald

Lorraine Calderwood

The park was empty. It was almost eleven and a weeknight. All the children were in bed. They sat on the roundabout, four of them back to back: boy, girl, boy, girl; their legs sticking out in front of them like a spider, like an octopus, like an eight-legged creature with trainers for feet. They spun a little, smoked a little, drunk liberally from the same green bottle of cheap wine, passing it hand to hand round the circle. When they stood up they could not tell the difference between drunk and dizzy. Emma found a child’s soft toy tucked down the side of a climbing frame and, for a few minutes, they amused themselves throwing it backwards and forwards across the park. They sang a song which was currently all over the radio. When the cold air took the edge off their buzz they sat on the swings: boy, girl, boy, girl, like pistons pumping in some strange machine. Emma held the toy like a baby in her lap. It was a bear, with clothes and she knew there was a child somewhere, missing it. She did not feel kind then, only jealous of this child with all her swings and slides still to come. There was a smell off the bear like clean sheets and long weekends outside. Emma had not smelt this smell in many years. She stuffed the bear into her handbag and took it home.

October 12th 2015 –Ulster Hall, Belfast

Colin Dardis

The man who lives in the apartment directly above ours has recently taken up drumming. He only practices during daylight hours. He is a reasonably considerate kind of man. I think his name is Bill. The sound of his drums stamping and settling against our roof is like thunder or something more precise. Claire says it is like dancing but I have passed this man in the corridor en route to the recycling bins or the communal postbox and the simile will not stick. He is no dancer. He is not even an elegant walker.

I say, “the sound of his drums is like Morse code muttering through the ceiling tiles,” and Claire like the idea of this.

“What’s he saying?” she asks. “Is it a cry for help?”

Because she is prettier by half when she smiles I humour her and reply, “oh no, it’s not a cry for help. It’s the start of a really great conversation.”

Then we lift brooms and tennis racquets and golf umbrellas and tap our pretend Morse into the ceiling. “Thump. Tadump. Thump.” Which, when translated means, “hey, Bill, hope you’re as happy as we are.”

October 13th 2015 – East Belfast

Anthony Toner

In spite of everything the experts said Miriam was convinced that the penguins in her care were intelligent creatures, capable of mastering simple acts of reason and dexterity. She selected two particular penguins –Jeeves and Cliff- because they looked up at her with a kind of rapt attention every time she approached their enclosure, fish bucket in hand and asked, “who’s for lunch then?” Miriam was certain they understood her, and if this was the case, they might be trained to complete simple tasks or even communicate in a semi-sophisticated manner. She began with those activities which her mind readily associated with penguins: ballroom dancing, top hat wearing and the smoking of expensive cigarettes in long holders. None of these took. Miriam would not admit defeat. She informed the head zookeeper that the two penguins in question had decidedly proletarian tastes and ploughed on with her research. Eventually she discovered Cliff and Jeeves to be reasonably adept at synchronized swimming. The cynic in Miriam knew this was nature rather than nurture but she ignored her own instinct, bought them floral bathing caps and pronounced her penguins smarter than apes and dolphins combined.

October 14th 2015 – East Belfast

Angela Warren

A friend of mine once walked into a McDonalds restaurant in East Belfast and paid for his McChicken sandwich mean in one and two pence pieces. He’d counted them out beforehand and carried them to dinner in a plastic bag. The weight of all those two and one pence pieces was roughly equivalent to a melon or a bag of granulated sugar, which is to say, it was solid in his hands, heavy even. For the first time in his life my friend knew the real weight of money. For this reason he was suddenly taken with the notion that his three pounds something of coppers was worth much more than the same amount carefully measured out in pounds and tens and silvery little fives.

When he got to the counter my friend asked for, “a McChicken sandwich meal, please,” and turned the plastic bag upside down over the topmost tray in the stack. Coppers went avalanching over the till, across the floor and under the fryers. The manager was called for. The manager though my friend was taking the piss and barred him from this particular McDonalds restaurant. My friend did not know how to take the piss. He was one of those strange quiet boys in Velcro shoes, who do not notice they are different from everyone else.

Postcard Stories 2015 : Week Forty

October 1st 2015 –Lisnaskea

Ben Thomas

Tim had been driving round the lake for almost an hour when he came across a small, secluded spot with a slim, sandy beach and rushes concealing it on either side. He parked his car on the hard shoulder, removed his book and picnic things from the boot and settled down for a quiet afternoon.

Half an hour later a young couple arrived on bicycles. “Look,” cried the girl, not noticing Tim, “it’s perfect. Let’s stop and picnic here.”

With hindsight he should have waved, made his presence known at this point, but he felt this might not be proper. After all, the beach did not belong to him anymore than these youngsters. They leant their bikes against a tree and clambered down on to the beach, only noticing Tim as they unfurled their picnic blanket. All three raised their hands at once in greeting, then smiled awkwardly and remained there, awkwardly eating their individual picnics in a space no bigger than a dining room table.

Tim left first for he could not relax in their presence. He made it seem as if he needed to rush away to another appointment. He did not want to make the young couple feel bad though they were strangers to him and would remain so.

October 2nd 2015 –Lisnaskea

Paul Jeffcutt

Two nights in a row Elizabeth’s mobile has gone off at 3am. She has it set to silent on the bedside table so it doesn’t wake her though the buzz of it goes singing into her sleep and she finds herself dreaming of wasps and humming, kitchen freezers. In the morning she wakes to a missed call from home, which is still the home of her childhood, never quite replaced by the home she now lives in with her own husband and children. This can’t be right, thinks Elizabeth, her parents are in Portugal for the week. There is no one to call her from the home telephone. She imagines a burglar finding her phone number at the top of the list which her mother keeps, pinned above the telephone table. She imagines this same burglar filling her inbox with threats and vulgar talk. But when Elizabeth listens to her voicemails there are no threats or angry voices, only the familiar sound of pipes and woodwork settling, the old house groaning as if lonely for its former occupants.

October 3rd 2015 –Enniskillen

Clark and Cathy Blakeman

It’s Saturday afternoon in the shopping centre though no one would know if it wasn’t. There are no windows here. One door in and one door out, which was probably a safety thing in the 80s when this shopping centre was built and people were still leaving incendiary devices, like dropped parcels, beneath the coat racks in Marks and Spencer’s. The boy in the line for coffee works in River Island. A tag dangles round his neck reminding him where to go when his break ends. He is wearing skinny jeans and a checked shirt which is not a uniform, though it may as well be. He is flirting with the girl behind the coffee bar in that clumsy push and pull and talk at the same time way which teenagers do. She is wearing a uniform but has accessorized it with a pink bow, worn high in her hair, which is like a cloud or something Amy Winehouse might have rocked before she died. She has probably worn this bow, specially for the boy. They are taking a solid age to buy and sell a single coffee. You don’t mind waiting. You remember working in a shopping centre on a Saturday afternoon. You remember being young and awkward. You don’t have anywhere particular to go.

October 4th 2015 –Maguiresbridge

Tim McIntosh

There were two of them trying to get to Enniskillen town. The more decent of the two stood on the hard shoulder, thumb aloft with a cardboard sign. The other, who was straggly looking with a ghost of a beard graying down his shirt front, had opted to hide in the hedge with their bags, which was good thinking on his part, for everyone knows that a single hitchhiker, sparsely-bagged, has better odds than a pair with suitcases. Not that these two were going anywhere, this being suburban Northern Ireland in 2015, they being eighty, if they were a day, and very possibly escaped from some sort of containment facility for the elderly, which reminds me, of course, of the two auld lads I once saw, ‘speeding’ away from Royal Portrush on a stolen golf cart, pushing fifteen on the Main Street as they waved their walking sticks lewdly at every passing lady.

October 5th 2015 –Ulster Hall

Laura Conlon

Myra has lost her teeth. She had then this morning in a glass beside her bed. Then, later on the bus into town they were in her mouth, and on a plate beside her soup bowl at lunch. Then, back into her mouth, though, opening and closing her mouth now, Myra finds they are no longer there. There is nothing with which to hold the walls of her mouth up and her cheeks are falling in like paper bags crumpling against their own emptiness. Myra has lost her teeth. She has also lost the word for teeth and so she points, and points again, at her open mouth, all the time looking like a woman who has lost a very vital thing. Her friends understand. They turn the place upside down looking for Myra’s lost teeth. They are not in her handbag. They are not in the ladies’ toilets. They are not on the coffee table with the scones and the side plates.

“Myra,” they say, smiling, smiling, smiling like warm blankets or scarves, “are you sure you didn’t leave your teeth at home?”

And Myra suddenly has a picture in her head of teeth bubbling in a water glass but she cannot remember if this picture is today, yesterday, or something from a film she once saw on television.

October 6th 2015 –East Belfast

Orla McAlinden

On the way from the car to her front door Lois almost steps on a frog. It’s dark out and she is carrying several bags of groceries. She does not expect to encounter a frog. They are miles from the nearest river and there isn’t even a decent-sized puddle on her street. She is scared that someone will step on the frog or run over it in a large car. She rushes into her house and returns with a saucepan; the only scooping implement she could find with a lid. The frog slips in without complaining. Lois places the lid back on her saucepan firmly. It is made of glass and she can see the frog sitting right in the middle of the saucepan where the non-stick has peeled off. She thinks about taking the saucepan inside and cooking the frog slowly with butter and garlic. This is what she would do if she was French and Lois has always wanted to be French. But, it is almost midnight now and she can’t be bothered with heat and stirring, and afterwards, the dishes. She tips the frog into her neighbour’s garden and goes to bed hungry. The next morning she forgets to wash the saucepan and it is many meals later before she remembers the frog and gags into her mushroom soup.

October 7th 2015 –East Belfast

Suzanne Crooks

You were born with a bird’s egg grasped firmly in your right hand. It wasn’t big enough to be a chicken’s. It was pale blue with freckles like the eggs you sometimes come across in woodland nests. You don’t remember being born with a bird’s egg in your fist or how it got there, or why is had not cracked under the pressure of your fingers and the force of being born. It is a mystery to you, like breathing or knowing a thing you have not been told.

After you were born they took the bird’s egg out of your hand and kept it for days under a heat lamp but it did not hatch. Eventually they opened it, cracked its thin shell against a spoon and tipped it –yoke and all- into a teacup. There was a little dot, like the red of an eye in photographs. It was swimming in the yoke. It looked up at them and did not blink. Why would it?

So there you newly were, with an egg in your hand, with an eye in this egg, like a set of Russian dolls or how we all are, secretly, inside.

How to Disappear

Tomorrow I commence reintegration into the real world. I’ve been holed up in a little cottage outside Lisnaskea, Fermanagh for the last week taking a much-needed break from the rat race. I’ve done writer’s retreats before, (most notably last January in a historical tower, with no heat and very few creature comforts). Some have been positive experiences, some have been deeply frustrating and not very productive. This last week has been amazing, not least because I managed to make my retreat coincide with the only week of good weather we’ve had all year and booked to stay in just about the most beautiful little spot in Northern Ireland. As the week comes to an end and I, very reluctantly, go back to work, here are a few tips for other writers thinking of dropping out of civilisation for a few days. They’re not rocket science, but maybe they’ll help you ensure your precious time out doesn’t end up leaving you more stressed than you were before.

Be present – Whatever you’re stressed about or currently preoccupied with at home, leave it there. I am terrible at this. I always end up answering work emails on holidays and as a result never actually relaxing properly. This trip I didn’t. I didn’t answer anything but nice, ‘how are you getting on on your retreat?’ type emails and consequently I think I might actually have forgotten what it is I do outside of writing books, (mission accomplished! Though I’ll have to remember before I head back to work on Monday).
Prep– I stopped on the way to Fermanagh and bought enough food and wine to stock the fridge for a whole week. It seemed a bit excessive at the time but as I had absolutely no desire to take my pyjamas off, stop writing and leave the cottage for nearly 48 hours after I arrived I was really glad I didn’t have to  to run out for milk or bread.
Structure your time – A week sounds like an excessively long time -especially when you have the kind of life where all your writing is squeezed into the margins- but if you don’t get at least a little bit of a routine going, you’ll find yourself twittering away your time and achieving nothing. I had a loose routine of reading for an hour each morning, then working on the new novel, taking a walk, having a nap, editing short stories and then watching some mindless TV before bed. This worked for me and ensured I didn’t sicken myself working excessively on the one project. Find whatever system works for you and roughly stick to it. Try not to sleep in too long in the morning or you’ll feel like you’ve wasted your whole day and achieved nothing.
Give yourself a break – Don’t be afraid to break from your routine if you need to. I found that I was much more tired than I expected to be and often ended up heading back to bed for a sneaky afternoon nap. Remember you’re on a retreat, not a hardcore working week. Be kind to yourself in the midst of your productivity, (good coffee, wine, chocolate and a spot of mindless television may also be part of this process).
Walk – I’m a great believer in walking out your ideas. If I get stuck writing a story I quite often pound the streets of East Belfast until I unstick. Being on retreat was a great opportunity to walk out my ideas in a different, (and dare I say it?), more striking environment than East Belfast. Nine times out of ten the writing comes out a little more fleetly once you’ve had a spot of fresh air.
Read – I brought an entire suitcase of books with me and only really made it through two Marilynne Robinsons and an A.S.Byatt. I’m not complaining about this. I usually devour books at a break neck speed and it was a luxury, (and definitely an inspiration), to take my time, savouring such amazing writers over several long pots of coffee.
Turn off your phone – I didn’t actually have a choice here. There’s no mobile reception in Lisnaskea but it was like having one less thing to think about knowing that I wasn’t tied to whatever was going on in the real world. After the second day I didn’t even miss my phone.
Have targets – I came on this retreat hoping to write one short story, two chapters of my book and get my short story collection edited and off to the the publisher. I’d purposefully made these targets to give myself an excuse to book some time off work as it’s not easy to get a week of leave and I needed to give myself a legitimate reason for not using it on an actual, ‘going away somewhere’ holiday. Targets are great for keeping you motivated.
Expect to feel guilty when you don’t meet your targets – A week isn’t as long as you think it is. You won’t achieve everything you thought you would because you are not a machine and you will inevitable be distracted by Woody Allen movies and lakeside walks and afternoon naps. I got a chapter and a half of the novel written and my short story manuscript edited. This is little more than I would have written during a normal work week and at first I felt terribly guilty about time wasted. Then I realised that I’d been writing and editing fully present and not-exhausted and the work was a lot more consistent than it usual is. I decided to stop feeling guilty and enjoy the feeling of writing without pressure. I wish I could write like this every day.
Reintegrate slowly -Today I left the cottage and went for coffee in Enniskillen. It was possibly the first time I’d heard my own voice in a week. It made my head feel a bit funny and I only managed two hours in the real world before I scuttled back to the cottage. I’m hoping tomorrow goes a little better.

Postcard Stories 2015: Week Thirty Nine

September 24th 2015 –Ulster Hall, Belfast

Jen and Paul McClean

In the backseat of my car there is a horse and a tunnel. The horse is not a real horse. It is only a child’s horse for rocking. The tunnel is very real. It is currently bound tightly with strings but when these strings are released it will immediately unfold and reveal itself to be almost two metres in length. It is all the colours of the primary rainbow. At one end of the tunnel is the future and, at the other end, the past.

The horse has not yet ventured into the tunnel, but it might. The horse is not afraid of confronting its past, neither, its future or the futuristic things such as robot horse or wings which it might encounter in the future. It is only afraid of becoming lodged in the tunnel and remaining there, like an awkward lump in the throat, stuck between the future and the past, which is another name for the present. The present being a darkish place that does not permit looking forwards or back.

September 25th 2015 –Ulster Hall, Belfast

Lenny Bennett

If I am ever rich enough or famous enough to indulge myself in a three month adventure I will spend the time travelling through the states of America in an ordinary car, much like the one I currently drive, visiting, photographing and writing about every place which has the word Carson in the title, (Carson City, Carson Heights, plain, old Carson, Washington). This is not an original idea. I stole it from a piece of artwork I once saw, displayed at the Tate Modern. The artist had painted a map of America which only contained place names which had lost in the title, (Lost Highway, Lost Canyon, Lost Lake). My project would be like a live translation of this painting. Scratch that, my project would be the absolute opposite of an America where everything is lost. My America would become a series of towns, villages and mid-sized cities where everyone knew my name.

September 26th 2015 –Forestside, Belfast

Rick and Jeanne McKinley

This afternoon I am introducing my five year old niece to the work of David Bowie. For the purpose of this experiment I am using a car, a sunny day and a copy of Bowie’s Greatest Hits, on CD.

“Listen to this,” I am saying, “isn’t it brilliant?” The song is ‘Rebel Rebel,’ which is particularly appropriate as I have just bought her a black, leather jacket and a leopard print dress.

“It’s ok,” she says, “but I like this song from Sunday School better.”

Then she starts to sing Jesus choruses over the top of David Bowie and does not even stop for ‘Space Oddity.’ The effect is a little disconcerting, like small girls wearing lipstick or other things which do not seem natural together. I turn David Bowie off and my five year old niece instantly stops singing choruses.

The point is made; no need for triumphalism. Jesus has won again.

September 27th 2015 –Linenhall Street, Belfast

Ben Maier

At some point during the night the left part of his brain flipped over and became the right. The next morning he woke confused and unsure which arm he wore his wrist watch on. His face, in the mirror, looked somewhat lopsided as if, for the first time ever, he was seeing himself without inversion, as he might actually appear to people in the street.

Writing was problematic, as was cutlery, which surprised him, for he couldn’t understand why it mattered much which hand he held his cereal spoon in. When driving he told himself that this was not home, but another place, such as America, where the driver sat on the wrong side of the car, and this excused the steering wheel, but could not quite explain the other cars coming at him, hard and fast from the wrong side of the road.

September 28th 2015 –Lisnaskea

Vandoren Wheeler

There is a writers’ group in Illinois who, lacking confidence in their own ability to write, are making their way through the great works of 20th century fiction, (Joyce, Hemingway, Doestoevsky et al), painstakingly transcribing each word in order to evoke the feeling of writing an exceptional piece of literature. They have yet to translate this experience from second hand to first. Nothing new has been created in the process which reminds me of the term our RE teacher went to Oxford, (or was it Cambridge?) and left our A Level class writing the entire Pentateuch out by hand on file paper. I, being a particularly quick writer, had finished Deuteronomy and powered on through the Old Testament, to Daniel before we were discovered by a more responsible member of the RE faculty. I had, at no point in this exercise, felt the creative hand of God resting in mine, unless of course this can be experienced as a righteous dose of cramp.

September 29th 2015 –Lisnaskea

Stu and Emma Bothwell

Tonight I am, for the purpose of research, listening to the music of the Canadian-born songstress, Celine Dion. I am also drinking wine and wondering how my life might have been different if, at the point when I stood in the popular music section of Wollworth’s, Ballymena holding in one hand a copy of the Blur album, ‘Parklife’ on cassette and, in the other, Ms. Dion, also on cassette, I’d gone for power ballad over indie rock. Would I still have cut my hair like a mushroom? Would I have spent all my pocket money on vintage Adidas tops? Fallen out with those foolish friends who claimed Oasis the better band by miles? Would I have written, travelled, ended up working one thousand hours per week in a music venue with beer-sticky floors? Or, would I have instead become fluent in Canadian French, polished my fingernails and married a nice, older man? Was this, in the end, the most obvious road not taken, or were there others wider and more significant?

September 30th 2015 –Crom Estate, Fermanagh

Tony Kennedy

On a morning when your first waking thought is a line from the Robert Frost poem, “An Old Man’s Winter Night,” you find yourself stomping round the edge of an enormous field wearing precisely the wrong kind of shoes, (one of which you lose in a muddy puddle so you find yourself squelching all the way back to the car, fogging up its insides with the muck-thick stench of rugby fields in winter).

And, there you are, on the edge of this wide green face to face with three deers, just looking as Robert Frost described in another of his poems, only there’s just one of you, and three of them so the odds are stacked against you and you feel like saying, “can one of you come over to my side of the field so it’s two looking at two, like in the Robert Frost poem?” But you don’t because any noise, even the slightest shuffle, would be too much for a moment like to bear.

Postcard Stories 2015: Week Thirty Eight

September 17th 2015 –Derry

Cristin Newhall

This afternoon in a fit of stress-induced panic I purchased a pair of leopard-print trousers. The phrase, “leopard-print trousers” when said confidently, (ideally with a glass of wine in hand), is a believable enough sentence. Depending upon your age and listening habits it may even bring to mind a snippet of the Bob Dylan song, “Leopard-Print Pillbox Hat,” and an image of Edie Sedgwick at her hippest. Unfortunately the reality of a leopard-print trouser is somewhat less chic. They are unforgiving in both cut and pattern. They are the last, cheap fling of those ladies who knew their youth in the 1970s. They are like nothing so much as pyjamas or beach pants you might pull on over a bathing suit when leaving the poolside for the terrace bar. In short, leopard-print trousers are sort of thing you purchase in haste, (having had your notion self knocked senseless by a particularly stressful morning). You would then regret this purchase at leisure; the leopard-print trousers making perfect leisure wear.

September 18th 2015 –Ulster Hall, Belfast

Elizabeth Donaldson

The concept was simple enough: professional musicians learn three hours worth of floor-filling favourites, (Footloose, Elvis, a spot of Springsteen for the lads), turn up at weddings dressing in Rat Pack blacks, become the wedding band. They may never have met before but it is essential that they give the impression of being a well-established band. No bride or groom will want to know they’ve inadvertently booked a bunch of strangers playing popular standards.

All is well and reasonably good until the bass player arrives in a hotel outside Monaghan, knowing none of his fellow band mates and, spotting a youngish man in a black suit and skinny, black tie, accidentally asks the groom whether he is the drums or the keys in tonight’s outfit. The groom, despite the fact that this is the best day of his life, does not see the funny side of this.

September 19th 2015 –Killyhevlin Forest Park, Newtownards

Michael Speigle

There are children walking round Killyhevlin forest by themselves. One is definitely a boy. The other may be a girl as she is wearing flowery leggings but because she has the hood of her sweater drawn all the way over her face and head it is almost impossible to be sure. The boy is giving the second child instructions: left two steps, up, down, turn sideways. No one is supervising these children. They belong to no one but themselves. It is possible that they live here amongst the trees and the fleet-footed, free-dwelling squirrels. There are blackberries for eating and edible mushrooms clustered beneath the fallen logs. They are practicing now, with their hoods drawn over their faces, for night, when the deep forest dark will leave them, edging their way round their own homely kingdom, like blind creatures or newborns.

September 20th 2015 –Cathedral Quarter, Belfast

Paddy Brown

Last night we met a Spanish penguin floating round the Cornmarket. It was raining, as it almost always is in Belfast and he didn’t have an umbrella.

“I am looking for a traditional music session,” he said in broken English. He was on a mini-break from Madrid.

We took the penguin to the Duke of York. There are usually Trad sessions there on a Sunday afternoon. It took almost half an hour to walk across town on account of his very short legs. When we arrived at the Duke, the Bouncer told us, quite firmly, that penguins weren’t permitted on the premises.

And we said, “he’s on a mini-break and isn’t this city supposed to welcome visitors now?”

“Ah,” said the Bouncer, “I’m sorry. I thought you were a local penguin. We make an exception here for tourist penguins. Come on, on in. You’ll be wanting a Guinness, I presume?”

The Spanish penguin had a pint of Guinness, and then a second pint. By the third it was clear that penguins cannot hold their drink for he was on the table doing his own penguin version of the Flamenco and taking photos for Facebook.

September 21st 2015 –Ulster Hall, Belfast

Ray Givans

One thing led to another and before too long we were all in a circle singing Elvis songs, which would have been great if we’d known the words, but as it was we started lustily enough, like teenagers embarking upon a two hour hike. Straight in we went, bullets on the first and second lines, petering out on the third and, by the fourth, lost completely. Then, finding our lungs on the chorus, for this was the bit we remembered from the radio and it was easy enough to bellow these words with voices like young bulls in heat. When the second verse slid between us it was a third cousin, it was a childhood friend, only vaguely familiar. We kept the tune, tonguing it against our teeth, but had no time for the words. This was like a joke we all knew without being told. Our eyes, catching across the circle, had smiles in them. We held on for the chorus because we were not lonely when we sang Elvis songs like this, strongly, in a circle.

September 22nd 2015 –Botanic Avenue, Belfast

Nish Weiseth

Last night I went to the cash machine in the dark and accidentally mistook my Costa coffee loyalty card for my bank card. Imagine my surprise when the ATM spat hot coffee out at me instead of cash. I just about managed to jump back in time, avoiding a good scalding, but my shoes were ruined and the cuffs of my jeans were splattered with tiny, brown stains, like dirty tears. The next day I went back to the same cash machine with a variety of different cards. My library card gave me freshly pressed books and the loyalty card from Tesco, a whole variety of thin foods such as crackers, cooked ham, and cheese slices, all of which were able to slip easily through the slot for dispensing cash. The staff card which I use for swiping in and out of work gave me three extra hours of time, which, with hindsight, I realized was more precious that money or any kind of edible product. I did not tell anyone the trick with the ATM. I was scare there might not be enough miracle to go round.

September 23rd 2015 –Ulster Hall, Belfast

The McConaghies

There was a swan sitting in the door of the Super-Valu, just sitting, it’s arched neck coiled like the first deft strokes of a fountain pen. The automatic doors rushed to close upon the swan and, sensing its presence, came only so far before scuttling back into themselves. This could be compared to the nervous progress of the tide, or the very earliest stages of love. On one side of the swan people waited to enter the Super-Valu and, on the other side, different people waited to exit, their arms full of milk and bread and packaged biscuits. No one made a move to kick the swan or come at it with any urgency for they knew that swans are violent birds, capable of breaking a man’s arm, (or so they’d been told as children).

“Can we step over it?” asked one of the inside men.

And an outside man shouted back, “I wouldn’t chance it, Mate!”

No one thought to ask where the swan had come from. There was no significant body of water in miles. Soon the outside people drifted off home, or to the little Tesco at the top of the road. The inside people could not follow them. They opened a bag of Maltesers and passed the sweets round, chatting with each other, and did not even notice that the swan had sauntered off.

Culture Night Belfast 2015 : Postcard Stories

Last night, for Culture Night 2015, I wrote postcard stories all evening inspired by a word or phrase which strangers gave me. I managed to write sixteen in three and a half hours. Then my hand fell off and my brain broke. As an extra added bonus the amazing Sarah Majury sat beside me all night illustrating each of the individual postcard stories. We’ll be popping them in the post this week and sending them out to sixteen of you. Hope they get your day off to a good start. Here are the sixteen new postcard stories written at speed with the word which inspired each of them:

One 

Word: Giraffe

The third of the baby giraffes came out wrong. Where his brother and sister were blessed with the long and skinny necks atypical of all giraffes, Simon had a short, stumpy neck and legs like a pink flamingo. He struggled to find socks long enough to keep the cold out, found it impossible to stand for more than a minute at a time and could not catch his balance on stairs and moving escalators. However, the unseemly length of Simon’s legs was a small shame in comparison to the inadequacy he felt every time he stood neck to neck with his siblings and, with his squat throat stretched to breaking point, could not reach even the lowest leaves and had to eat his dinner off the ground like a common sheep.

Two

Word: Penguins

 “There’s something we need to talk about,” you said.

“Does it have to be now?” I asked, “right here, in your parents’ living room with the cats and the potted plants listening in? Couldn’t it wait ‘til later?”

But it couldn’t wait ‘til later. You had to tell me now. When you stopped talking it was almost dark and there was no way to take the afternoon back. We would never be the same kind of together again. The tea had gone cold in my cup and when I went to stir it the spoon caught on the soggy half of my Penguin, drowned from anxious over-dipping. I hadn’t even noticed the loss of it.

Three

Word: Moon

In the beginning the planets, the stars and all those various floating entitieswhich make up the universe were given the opportunity to select, for themselves, a particular shape. All the planets were quick to pick circles. They were as practical as a heavenly body can be and understood the way a round thing will spin easier than, for example, a square. The stars looked up to the planets and therefore settled upon circles too, only later appearing as intertwined triangles in the scribbled drawings of human children. The moon was a rebel thing. She wished to be a diamond and was for a time before succumbing to peer pressure. From time to time when the moon recalls the confident days of her youth she draws breath and tries to be a diamond again. From a distance this may look like a crescent, like a sliver, like a wistful smile, inverted.

Four

Word: Birds

She kept birds in her fridge. This was not as cruel as it sounds. There was a hole in the door where the air could get in and every morning she fed them baby worms and peanuts on a china saucer. She talked to the birds at night, singing to them as if they were small children and could not sleep. She engineered it so the white light never went off, even when the fridge door was closed. She thought the birds were happy. She thought they would never leave her until, one morning, she went in for the milk and found the word, “sky” scratched into the surface of the margarine. Then she knew she could not keep the door closed on them any longer.

Five

Word: Minimalism

The world was big to Margaret and very scary. She was not a particularly little person just much afraid. Leaving her house each morning the trees were tall and the mountains were monstrous and even the road, snaking into the village seemed wide as a wide, wide world. Soon Margaret was too scared to leave the house. She stayed in her kitchen, eating her meals with teaspoons because they were tinier than regular spoons.

Then, her friend Patrick gave her an idea. “It’s all about how you see things, Margaret,” he said.

He gave her a pair of binoculars and she turned them backwards and wore them at all times, pressed to her eyes.

“This is minimalism,” he said, “or shrinking the world to a more manageable size.”

Six

Word: September

September came and the wheels fell off the car. We had only got as far as the border. We’d been planning to go so much farther. But the border was not the worst place to come adrift: one foot in one place, the other in the next.

“What should we do now?” you asked and I didn’t know.

So we slept on it and rising the next day decided to pitch a tent and call this home. We live here now, neither here nor there in a place we had not planned to live but have grown to love which is often what happens when the wheels come off.

Seven

Word: “Them’s the brakes”

“Them’s the brakes,” he said, “don’t be afraid to use them.”

She heard this with her ears but her feet weren’t listening. When they came to the bend with the evil twist her feet went feeling around in the dark of the car and, thinking they’d found the brakes, pressed hard on what turned out to be the accelerator. Which was how they came to find themselves upside down in a field with the cows staring in at them through the shattered windscreen and her feet still stretching frantically for the brakes.

Eight

Word: “waste not want not”

I no longer believe in wasting not and wanting not. I often find myself wasting things wit reckless abandonment. I squeeze whole tubes of toothpaste down the plughole and afterwards buy more toothpaste from the little Tesco’s at the top of the road. I spoil the milk just for the pleasure of seeing white islands form on the surface of it and let my bread turn solid on the board. I burn magazines, unread. Sometimes the flame from the magazines are green at the tip. This is beautiful to me like a sunset of a sad song on the radio. Afterwards I buy more things just to purposefully waste them. This is why we have shops. This is why we have money.

Nine

Word: “Horse with wings”

That one day when it was your birthday and you got to be God you used all your special powers in one go and invented a horse with wings. This horse was immediately lonely and so you invented a second horse with wings. You called these creatures John and Patricia after your parents who had only recently died. You thought you might keep them in the back garden with the chickens. You thought we could walk them on leads down the road, to the primary school where the children would gather at the window to stare. You shouldn’t have invented them wings. They stayed an afternoon, nibbling on the strawberry plants then flew off. It was no longer your birthday. You were no longer God. You couldn’t invent anything else for a year at least.

Ten

Word: Adventure

We had not come out looking for adventure. We had only come to buy milk and cheese and something tasty for Saturday night’s dinner. But the supermarket was doing a two for one offer on genuine adventures and this was too good a deal to miss. We bought four, which equated to eight whole adventures in total, enough to last a week. You called in sick at work and I wrote the kids a note, excusing them from regular school. We felt like teenagers or newlyweds. For seven days straight we ran and swam and chased our tails on beaches and foresty glens. We laughed hard and the sound of our laughter was something to wear against the colder months to come.

Eleven

Word: “Amazing, amazing grace.”

When we were younger and every Sunday forced to church two times at least, my brother and I would make it through the services by taking part in the sort of secret games adults could not see, even adults in the pulpit. We twitched on purpose each time the word Jesus was spoken and, undercover of the pews, made origami butterflies from the orders of service. We snuck extra words into the hymns like old men stuttering over the old, old stories. “Amazing, amazing grace,” we sang, and, “rugged, rugged cross,” and, “thine be the glory, glory,” as if there was more power in saying a true thing twice. As if we might actually believe ourselves then.

Twelve

Word: “Morning Glory”

The day that Oasis’ second album, “(What’s the Story), Morning Glory?” was released I queued outside Woolworths to buy a copy on cassette. After this I went to Boots and bought my first box of hair dye, a rather tame reddish brown which would lead to blonde, and then pink, and a brief flirtation with lime green, (instantly regretted). This was almost twenty years ago and while I have long since grown out of Oasis, I have yet to grow out of home-dyed hair and am even now wondering about the possibility of purple.

Thirteen

Word: Pheasants.

The main differences between pheasants and peasants:

The peasants we will always have with us
Pheasants are regularly found in the kitchens and dining rooms of the ruling classes.
Peasants will run quite fast when threatened with a shotgun or firearm of any kind. Pheasants will fly.
Pheasants are pleasantly feathered.
Peasants eat cheese. Pheasants as a rule, do not.
A single flaccid H.

Fourteen

Word: Risk

I woke up this morning with the lyrics of an old song stuck in my head. “Let’s play Twister, let’s play Risk;” six words which would not shift and would not link to anything else so I hummed them over and over in the hope that they would eventually catch on to a full memory. When they didn’t I fed them into Google and even before the answer came up, remembered they belonged to REM though this was not the memory I was after. I was trying to catch the picture of you and me, singing in the front seat of the car, somewhere between one Port and the other, with the whole of our lives, lying open in front of us. “Let’s play Twister, let’s play Risk,” which was in a way, the shape of things to come.

Fifteen

Word: “Courgette”

One must take care when cutting a courgette. While the skin is reasonably tough like the outer skin of a pepper or Granny Smith apple, the inner part is soft and slightly spongey, best compared perhaps to the soft flesh of a mushroom. When cutting a courgette one should not apply too much pressure. One should hold the end firmly and progress slowly forwards, moving the knife in semi-circular movements. The only time I have amputated my own finger was whilst cutting courgettes, recklessly with a too sharp knife. The blood got everywhere and the stew was impossible to save.

Sixteen

Word: “Lemon Chiffon”

In other places -Nashville, Tennessee for example- lemon chiffon is a frock worn by a young girl to a debutante ball, or a kind of bridesmaid’s dress, perhaps. In Ballymena, County Antrim, lemon chiffon is a fancy desert served in small trifle dishes with a dollop of cream sitting on top like a single, squat nipple. It is the sort of thing you roll out for pudding, when the minister and his wife come round for Sunday lunch. You would serve the lemon chiffon up in Waterford crystal bowls, which you received as a wedding present some twenty five years ago. You would hope your neighbor who had the minister and his wife round last week didn’t do the same desert or, worse still, made lemon chiffon better than yours.

 

 

Postcard Stories 2015: Week Thirty Seven

September 10th 2015 –East Belfast

Tiffany Stubbert

It is Thursday. It has felt like Thursday for almost a week now. One the news they are saying that Stormont might implode before the weekend. In a country where things have a long-established tendency to explode it is significant that the Northern Irish Assembly is once again on the verge of imploding. Which is to say it may collapse inward violently or, if the second dictionary definition rings truer, it will undergo a catastrophic failure. (It is, of course, possible for one word to embody two dictionary definitions simultaneously). The image evoked is of a building, (Stormont for example), collapsing in upon itself like a block of flats carefully prepared for demolition. The implosion of such a building would have little or no impact on the surrounding areas. What works for building might also hold true for power-sharing collectives. The newscasters are taking no risks though. They have positioned their cameras at some distance. It is, after all, impossible to tell the difference between an implosion and an explosion ‘til the pillars start falling.

September 11th 2015 –Ulster Hall, Belfast

Adam Brault

Outside the stage door a man, aged approximately sixty, is sitting in the street. It is raining and the asphalt is damp beneath his legs. He is staring at a parked car, or possibly the wall behind it. People have stopped to see if the man is ok. They are not even being nosy. They are properly concerned.

“Are you ill?” they ask. “Is this some kind of protest.” (Perhaps they are thinking of that old Radiohead video where everyone lies down in the street and it is terribly profound).

But the man is not ill and this is not some kind of protest. He is simply too tired to go any further.

The people are very concerned. They bring the man blankets and coffee in a disposable cup. They arrange traffic cones around him in a circle so passing cars will not drive over his legs. After a few days they stop bringing the man coffee and the no longer stop to ask if he’s feeling any better today. They had not expected the man to go on for so long with his sitting. When, one morning, he is no longer there, they do not even remember to miss him.

September 12th 2015 –East Belfast

Sarah Hesketh

I was already thinking when I woke this morning. The thought was a very simple one. Today I must re-read Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own.” I did. It was just the ticket.

This was not the first time that art has forced itself upon me. Once I had a vision of God and God said I should buy the Beach Boys’ record, “Pet Sounds,” which I duly did. There is nothing to be gained from ignoring the direct commands of God. (Nb. Noah, Abraham and Cain of Cain and Abel fame). I was around nineteen years of age at the time.

In a Baltimore bookstore, last October, a copy of Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking,” leapt from the shelf to land at my feet. I felt compelled to read the book immediately and did, in one sitting. Afterwards, I was sure this incident would prove to be in some way prophetic. Perhaps, my family would die and I alone would be left, clinging to the truths outlined in this book as a kind of anchor against the storm. No one died. I didn’t much like the book. Perhaps it had mistaken me for another, more troubled, individual when it leapt from the shelf in Borders.

September 13th 2015 –Ulster Hall, Belfast

Danielle Noble

The world’s smallest library only stocks one book. This is not due to lack of resources or even censorship. The staff in the world’s smallest library are just extremely discerning when it comes to literature. They believe that there is currently only one book in the world worth reading, although they remain hopeful that, any day now, another might be written.

There is a waiting list of some two thousand men, women and children currently hoping to borrow a book from the world’s smallest library. They pop in periodically and ask politely if the previous sender has returned the book yet. “Unfortunately not,” replies the librarian. This particular lender has been so enamoured with the book that he has amassed over five hundred pounds in overdue book fees. The staff at the world’s smallest library understand why he has done this. It is, after all, a very good book. But they cannot condone his behaviour publicly. They are thinking of ordering in a second copy of their book.

September 14th 2015 –Hillsborough Castle

Matt Faris

There are one thousand eight hundred fully grown adults at the Hillsborough Castle Garden Party. This is exactly the same number of fully grown adults who can be admitted to the Ulster Hall for a standing gig, (The Stiff Little Fingers for example, or Train). Though it is raining quite heavily and most of the attendees are huddled together in open-fronted marquees, there appear to be an awful lot more people at the garden party, having a rather dull time. This is not an optical illusion. The garden party goers are not, on average, larger than the gig-goers, neither are they more evenly spread. There appear to be more people at the Hillsborough Castle Garden Party this afternoon because approximately fifty percent of these people are wearing enormous hats, like flying saucers circling for a good place to land.

September 15th 2015 –Ulster Hall, Belfast

Lynne McMordie

When I came back from the shops you were in the garden listening to the trees. When I say you were listening to the trees, I mean you were actually listening to them, resting an upturned whiskey glass against the Sycamore’s trunk like an old school detective eavesdropping through the bedroom wall.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Listening to the trees,” you said.

“What are the trees saying?” I asked.

You shrugged your shoulders sharply and said, “how should I know? I don’t speak tree.”

“What’s the point in listening to them then?”

“It makes the trees feel good to know there’s someone prepared to listen,” you said, “even if that person doesn’t understand them.”

I didn’t have the words to say I know how those tree feel, which wasn’t quite true, because it has been months since you last listened to me, even through a glass.

September 16th 2015 –East Belfast

Claire Pierson

Yesterday my brother asked me to take some coffee from Belfast to Derry on the train. I was going anyway and it would save him the drive. He left the coffee in a bin on my doorstep. It was waiting for me when I returned home from work. I could smell the burnt soil grind of it from the far end of the street. There was more coffee that I’d been led to believe; a small suitcase worth, stuffed inside carrier bags. I brought it into my house. I invited it in as silly women in books and horror movies will occasionally open their door to Dracula. Overnight the stench of it sunk its teeth into everything: the coffee, the sofa, my hair, your cheese sweating on the counter, the pump-action soap on the bathroom shelf. Everything stunk of coffee. I had no thirst left for it. I wanted the old smells back. I took my brother’s coffee to Derry on the train and as we passed through Bellarina and Castlerock I thought about opening the window and pitching it into the sea. I feared for the ocean though, and its sharp, brine taste.