Inside the café was dimly lit, but not in an uninviting run-down way, more of a dusty, characterful way, which was accentuated by the smell of the air: a faint lavender mixed with the woody aroma of espresso. Against one wall was a large blackboard with the day’s specials written in Norwegian in thick white letters. In smaller letters underneath the dishes all had translations into English. For several of the dishes, such as ‘hamburger’ or the Italian pastas and pizzas, the translations were exactly the same as the original. Whoever wrote the menu might have been accused of redundancy, but with the general atmosphere of the place it came across more as a gentle sarcasm, particularly with this café being atypically situated on the dockside amongst the touristy restaurants and of the kind Aria seemed to have a knack for finding.

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Motionless the Silhouettes

It is easy to forget, sometimes, that these are the cities of humans, that there is not one square inch of these vast areas untouched my human hands, or untrodden by human feet. There used to be grass here. Silence and desolation too. When sunlight strikes obliquely the uppermost walls of buildings, and we look up to see the golden rays cast over the rough surface, creating microshadows in the tiny divots and at an angle to the minuscule lichens, far above the tired hum of the city below, we are reminded of this time. So too are we reminded of this time in the transitory minutes between the light and the dark, the dark and the light: for when dawn blotches pink or dusk washes orange across our sky, and we see motionless the silhouettes of chimneyed buildings across the horizon, we forget the people contained within and think only of the unceasing passage of time. We know in those twilights that the world turned before we were legion, and will continue to do so long after we are gone. Perhaps for some, looking up at those sunlit buildings, a small uneasy fear is born and passes over them like a shadow across a field, to be carried away a moment later on the hot fumy air.

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10

“Mum,”

“Mark, hi, how are things?”

“Uh, not too bad, I guess,”

“How are the girls?”

“They’re fine. Look, I have a big favour to ask, I mean, I don’t want to put upon you, but could you maybe look after the girls for a few days, three or four? I’ve, uh, I’ve got to go on a business trip thing.”

“When?”

“The day after tomorrow. I know it’s short notice, and I really don’t like to put upon you, but it’s important.” I felt bad about lying to my mother. Well, it was important, but the business trip bit was a lie.

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hospital lights

Molly

What was faceless is now historic,
with no ones name to carve into soft metal portraits,
that time and rain will soon bend into a reaction,
(they mean the world to people who know nothing.)
Blame it on me.
For we are all the pennies in the world,
and with them we can build a home bound with inks,
to shade the chasing sunlight from our eyes.

Okay. Firstly, something I’ve wanted to do for a while is post other people’s work on my site alongside my own, for the sake of variety and extra traffic. The first of these I’m going to put up after this post.

So this that I’m going to post by another writer is from a girl I added on Myspace, Molly, who writes some pretty superlative poetry. At least, I think so. It might just be the use of words like ‘skitter’ and ‘colloquial’, and some interesting images, but I think the voice is quite unlike a lot of poems that I’ve read. Anyway, I like them.

Next, at some point in the next few months I want to make this site ‘better’. Not sure exactly how it will improve much, but I want to vary the content some more, and write some more personal pieces, like I did at the start, so it’s more like a blog, than just a collection of short stories one after the other.

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This is a short piece I wrote over summer, also on the theme of puzzles. I thought I’d already posted it. Apparently I hadn’t.

Puzzle

It was a handful of weeks into the summer break. Already _ had become apathetic. Joblessness was perhaps his problem, or maybe only a part of it. Without somewhere to go, something to get up for, he had become, over the recurrent days, acutely aware of the myriad minute sensations that pervade everyday lives. No longer was anything just that which it had once been. No longer was paint around a light switch just paint around a light switch, or a calender unchanged since February just a calender. Now everything was a part of some grandiose puzzle, a puzzle so complex and incongruous that even its final objective was unknown, let alone the steps to its solution.

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This is just a quick experimental piece. Let me know what you think:

Jigsaw Puzzle

Do you want to do a jigsaw?

What?

I want to do a jigsaw. I brought one. Do you want to do it?

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9

My bed that night, the same I had once shared with Rachel, felt empty. Particularly now, after I had been turned on and disappointed by Angela. If I closed my eyes, and thought hard, I could imagine Angela naked and warm on top of me in the darkness. But the image was blurry, and kept fading into nothingness as I realised that I may just as well image Rachel as imagine Angela, for neither of them were here.

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8

I watched Angela take another bite of the pasta she was eating. Her lips were thinner than Rachel’s, and she wore a paler shade of lipstick, but I still found it a little seductive the way her tongue slipped out between her lips, and slid over her bottom one, collecting a lingering drop of the red pasta sauce. I wondered if she had done that deliberately because she knew I was watching.

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7

It was Sunday night. I was lying in bed and something had awoken me; a scream. I thought I had dreamt it until I heard another one. It was Lucy. She must have had a nightmare. I rolled over, half asleep and switched on my bedside lamp. The little clock underneath it had been knocked over by my book, so I picked it up and studied it through my still-adjusting eyes. It told me it was quarter past two in the morning. Behind me the Venetian blind tapped gently against the window frame, swaying in the breeze from the slightly open window. I sighed and slid out of bed to put on my slippers and dressing gown.

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