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by J.N. Mulcahy-King of Wales

The Embarrassment of Loneliness

Father Mackenzie doesn’t look back as the smell of turned earth fills his nostrils and the stone soldiers pass.

This is your future.

After weddings she’d gather the rice from outside the oak doors,

“So the poor birds don’t eat it.”

He’d smile at her lie, for he understood the embarrassment of loneliness.

The lead in his stomach reminds him, only today did he learn her name.

by Catherine Hoyle of Cardiff

The Other Clowns Smell of Whiskey and Shame

The carnival is torpid and drawn-in like lemon puckered lips and tightened sphincters, patched canvas overhangs protecting from rain but opened to the inescapable smells of manure and sickness. More puckered lips. The clowns circle me in a packed ring and one reaches out a smudged white hand with purple veins snaking across the powder. His blue strings of hair create veins that cover his face in a bloodless mask.

by Danica Green of Newtown

Left

There was sweet mango dripping from your chin. I wanted to lick it. I knew the precise colours of the bruise beneath, could feel the shades of your pain and how they were dulled by that sticky warmth. I wanted to scream and bang my fists on the glass of the restaurant window, but I had no stomach for the consequences.

You looked in my direction as you wiped your chin. But I was too far gone for you to see. Wiped out.

by Cath Barton of Abergavenny

Birdsong

We stood on the ferry crossing the Mersey and I pointed out the Liver birds. Majestic, but chained down, like we both were. “You were only waiting for this moment to arise,” you sang, badly, out of tune. You said it was a Stones’ lyric, but there was no point in correcting you. What did you know about our Fab Four? You weren’t from round here.

And you didn’t know those birds would flap their wings for an honest man.

by Cath Barton of Abergavenny

Alice Revisited

The white rabbit spiraled out of sight in the sinister plume of the tornado.

‘Curiouser and Curiouser,’ cried Alice. Quite how she had arrived in the Midwest she could not tell, though she had heard that the worldwide web could take you anywhere.

Where was Dinah? And the dormouse? Were they going to meet Dorothy or the Tin Man?
 
Alice, quite alone, longed for the certainty of the rabbit hole and the lobster quadrille.
 
by Cath Barton of Abergavenny

*Italicized words found in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Totem

There’s something going on with hedgehogs. Jumping through windows, spines shining silver-mauve. Or wheeling broccoli florets down a dark path. Quite smoothly.
 
I do believe they’re my armoured protection. For my soft underbelly. I need their spikes, just in case.
 
We can come out dancing now, you and me. Wheeling in the moonlight to the strains of a military band. A little distant and, of course, marching away from us.
 
by Cath Barton of Abergavenny

Kathmandu Nights

At the club on Freak Street a tall, stooped guy bought me a sickly-sweet green drink, strummed his guitar and sang old songs. Mum’s memories came alive for me in the smoke-swirled room.
 
I went through the photos in the chocolate box. There they were. Both long-haired, wearing kaftans. Him stooping even then.
 
The barman remembered me. By myself.
 
"Anyway," he said, "I don’t allow guitars. Can’t stand the sound of them."

 
by Cath Barton of Abergavenny

The Edible Woman in the Cinema Box-Office

Gran told me not to stare. I stared.
 
The woman’s liquid-chocolate eyes fixed on mine. As her marzipan hand passed the tickets to Gran she sneezed sherbet. It sprayed and stung me and I reached out to grab one of her shiny black liquorice curls. She nearly got to me first with her candy-pink finger nails, but I snapped one off clean. Then another, for Gran.
 
We sucked on them during the film. So much nicer than popcorn.

 
by Cath Barton of Abergavenny

A Short Film About a Great Artist

Location: A red room, floor included.

Dramatis personae: The artist (as a young man) and the wild child (you).

Action: The artist draws. Rounded hedges, Grecian statuary. You want out. He draws you, leaving.

Flash forward to: The same room, but white now (you got a professional to do it). The mourners are respectful as you point out the red wine stains on the pictures which line the walls.

Fade to: Your laughter.

 
by Cath Barton of Abergavenny, Wales