Some Books and Authors Mentioned in This Episode:

Madeleine Swann: Rainbows Suck / Taken Hard at the Magical Time Travel Sex Resort / The Filing Cabinet of Doom: 17 Bizarro Short Stories

Robert Aickman: Cold Hand in Mine / Dark Entries / The Wine-Dark Sea

Daphne du Maurier: Rebecca / Jamaica Inn / Frenchman’s Creek

Haruki Murakami: 1Q84 / Norwegian Wood / The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Franz Kafka: The Metamorphosis / The Trial / The Castle

William S. Burroughs: Naked Lunch / Junky / Queer

The C Word

I can see it in the newsagent’s face. He hands me the lighter like he doesn’t want his fingers to touch mine, like I’ll infect them. “50p, please,” he says. I return the polite smile and hand him fluff covered coins from my pocket. He doesn’t look up as I leave. Sod him. Sod all of them. They don’t know why I did what I did, all they see are my actions.

The morning is frosty and foggy which irritates me no end, one slip on that ground and I’d break a hip and no doubt they’d all be applauding. I can’t have that. So I shuffle carefully, creaking and swaying, to the other side of the main road. We call it that but there’s no more than four shops – the newsagents, the mini supermarket, the hairdresser’s and the Post Office. Everything else is food, bloody food, and pubs. I suppose I could have used the Post Office right in town, which is only a short bus ride away, but I didn’t want to. I wanted to use the one here, it’s more convenient for my knees.

There’s not much of a queue which is a blessing, however there’s a few people who get a good eyeful. I can’t stop them so I don’t bother. I’m not hiding my face, not after all I’ve been through. I wait and watch the cars outside soar past the glass doors. A shadow appears and the bell jangles. I turn to the wall, pretending to show interest in a poster about shipping costs. I hear the clomp of wellington boots and crunch of a plastic mac as she – I glance behind me – joins the queue. The man in front is taking his bloody time, chatting as if it’s a social club.

The breathing behind me isn’t too bad at first but after a while it meddles with my thoughts until I can’t hear anything else. I want to ask if she needs an inhaler but I don’t and she moves closer, her breath on the back of my neck. I don’t want to turn around. The breath is cold.

The nice black lady serves me, she speaks ever so nicely. She must not have heard about my troubles because she always treats me how a person ought to be treated, not like the sad dumpling who normally works here on a Monday does. I pass her my envelope and she stamps it – a condolence card for my sister and the sweets she likes. I do my duty by her even if she never bothers in return. That horrible breathing is still going and I’m glad to be out of there, though I can’t resist a little look. There’s nothing out of the ordinary; clear plastic raincoat, black shoes and a floral head scarf. Can’t see much of the face apart from a nose and that certainly doesn’t look odd.

The day is brighter now and more people are around. I feel them staring and one nudges another and nods towards me. His friend shakes his head and spits on the pavement. I carry on with my head up, their eyes prodding me like fingers. How dare you, I want to scream, you know nothing about me. They wouldn’t do it if they knew about my health. I’ve always been sickly. I was a sickly child.

When I get home I open the gin. I can’t help it. I’d seen on television that quitting smokers keep a pack in the house to remove anxiety so I tried the same, but it doesn’t seem to help. I’m not an alcoholic, I just don’t like worrying whether I can afford drink or if I’m running out so I just keep some in. After the last bout of stomach ache I’d decided enough was enough and put the remaining bottle in the cleaning cupboard and haven’t touched it for a week. I’ve had a shock today though, so I deserve it.

Its deliciously hot on my lips and throat. I spin on my heel, turn on the stereo and dance to a song I’ve never heard. All thoughts of that woman are gone and even the thing I did…no…don’t think about it….listen to the song, focus on the lyrics… I’m dancing and swirling and my drink is spilling…

The door knocks hard, making me think of TV police invasions. I wait to see if they burst in but the knocking pounds once more so I turn the latch and pull it open. Two youngsters in matching purple tabards speak before I can ask what they want, “We’re from Cancer Research. Did you know that just ten pounds a month can buy enough glass slides for a scientist to examine 300 tumour samples down a microscope?” The girl’s face is an open flower.

“Who told you to come here?”

“We’re canvassing this street,” says the boy, “looking for lovely people like yourself.” His eyes are wide and blue and I feel sorry for him because I know what’s coming and I can’t stop it.

“Why the fuck did you come to my house?”

“We’re sorry to bother you,” says the boy, turning to go. The girl wilts like she’s been stepped on.

“I know it’s not your fault,” I’m pointing, “but whichever one of those bastards,” I feel my face contort like an angry primate, “told you to come here you can tell them I don’t care anymore, it’s not getting to me.”

“Let’s go,” the boy tugs the girl’s jumper. They’re dismissing me as a mad woman and, though I can’t blame them, it sets my blood on fire.

“You don’t know what they’re like around here,” I hiss as they retreat from my doorstep, “they’ll never let it go. I have to live with it every day, with them,” the word is a firework in my mouth, “every day. Pamphlets through my door, gossip behind my back…”

“Madam, we’re leaving now,” the boy says as they hurry down the road. I can’t help it, I’m chasing after them.  

“You youngsters have no idea,” I’m wailing, I know I am, “just leave me in this place to rot, why don’t you, while others get all the help they need.” I need to stop now. The curtains are actually twitching. My neighbours’ eyes peek at me like a thousand rats in the dark. I turn to them, “that’s right, I’m talking about you, you sanctimonious cretins. I’ve done more with my life than you’ll ever do. I never sat on my arse and pushed out babies, I did something.” And then I ended up here, I don’t say, doing what I did. My tirade has pushed all life from my body. Suddenly I’m an old woman, standing on the pavement, shrieking at my neighbours. I hurry indoors and bolt myself in. I’d fall to my knees crying if I thought they could take it, so instead I go to the sofa where I try to sleep it off.

I’m woken by stone throwing. Is it stones? No, it’s footsteps. They sound larger than children’s feet and something crawls through me. It’s night and the lamps aren’t on. I creep to the window. A hunched figure in a plastic mac and head shawl is making her way down the road. I beg her to walk past my house but, of course, she turns to mine and lifts a hand quivering like an alien tentacle. “No,” I whisper as she knocks once, twice, three times. She’s surprisingly firm, there’s no chance I wouldn’t hear even from upstairs. I still don’t answer, slinking back from the window in case she peers in. She doesn’t, merely waiting a while before turning and wobbling back to wherever she came from.

I switch on the lamp and return to myself. “Bloody cheek,” I mutter. Coming round someone’s house at this time? At our age? I might look like a glamour girl but those days are over. I eye the bottle of gin before putting it back in the cupboard.

When I wake the next morning I think everything’s fine, that I’m waking to a full and happy life. Instead I’m in that room and my breath tastes of gin. I look in the mirror and pull the skin on my face back hard, seeing the grotesque result of a facelift instead of younger features. I sigh and my hands flop to my sides, letting everything go baggy again.

I plan what to do with my day and the door knocks again. I freeze – what does that woman want? I shuffle downstairs and peer through the window, crouching as much as my body allows. When I see who it is I rush to let my sister Claire in, “Heavens, I didn’t know you were coming. I’ve got nothing in.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” her face crinkles. She’s in her fifties and barely molested by age. I hug her tightly, surprised to feel tears falling from both our cheeks. “I just…needed to see you. To do something.”

“Of course you did,” I say. I break away, hopping like a child to the cupboard I’d closed so firmly last night.

“Isn’t it a bit early for that?”

“Yes,” I say, unscrewing the cap, “that’s why we ought to do it. Come on,” I say to her pursed lips, “it’s not like it’s all the time.” Laughing, she gives in, and I splash the clear liquid into two glasses and mix with tonic water, “you have to live a little.”

After she puts her things upstairs we stick to safe topics of the past; old school friends, who turned out well and who ballooned or never married, funny things mum said. Now, though, we also talk about who died. I shiver and pour us another. “Oh, not for me,” says Claire, and I don’t reply, simply pour myself one. I haven’t seen her for so long I can’t lose my temper now. Memories of past disapprovals flash through my mind but I blink them away. We sit together on the sofa.

“Remember when mum had her hair curled and cried because you told her she looked like a microphone?”

“Oh God,” Claire snorts, “poor woman, I can’t believe I said that.” We laugh so much I check my lap for accidents. Nostalgia pools in Claire’s eyes.

“It’s for the best,” I say, “he was in so much pain.”

“Yes.” She pauses, “actually I was thinking about mum and dad.”

“They didn’t get on,” I say, “these things happen.”

“Hmm?”

“Mum and dad separating, it happens to lots of people.”

“Yes, I know.” She eyes my drink as though she’s just noticed it. I have to stop after this one, I can’t let it get too far. I get up so quickly my knee cracks.

“I’ll make you up a bed.”

The spare room hasn’t been dusted for so long I wonder if she’ll get lung disease, then I imagine her funeral and me giving a speech and crying and everyone telling me how brave I am. I quite enjoy it and have to tell myself not to be so horrid. I take out clean sheets from the airing cupboard and stretch them over the mattress.

Downstairs I make a joke about the love heart pattern wallpaper we had as children. “Oh gosh,” Claire says, “your screaming terrified me that first night. I woke up and all I could hear was mum trying to calm you down while you said, over and over, that the walls were full of holes.”

“I remember thinking something was going to crawl out of them,” I laughed, still uneasy even now. “Did you want to do anything today, pop into town maybe?”

“No,” she wrinkles her nose, “I’ve had a long journey. Could we just stay here?” I tell her I’d be delighted to and we watch daytime TV feeling as if we’re being naughty and playing truant, even though we’re Pensioners and it’s allowed.

The next morning the sun begs us to go outside. I dress quickly and wait for Claire, remembering now that she was always a late riser. I go to the kitchen to make tea, trying to be quiet but I’m all fingers and thumbs, slamming cupboards and dropping the kettle on the way to the sink. Unsurprisingly I hear footsteps going to the bathroom and coming downstairs, and Claire’s in the kitchen all blinky and grumpy. “Cuppa?” I put the already full cup on the table. She drinks while I rabbit on about our plans for today and how nice it is to have someone to talk to. She says nothing and I enjoy our comfortable old routine.

“I’ll get washed and dressed,” she mumbles halfway through my story about a lost cat. I don’t take it personally, she’s always been the same.

The spring day is like a long awaited kiss. I barely feel my knee trouble as we walk into town. “Let’s have a wander round the shops,” says Claire, and of course goes straight to the Cancer Research charity shop. I have no choice but to follow. The plump girl behind the counter looks up, eyes widening when she sees me, watching me follow Claire to the hats. I turn to the wall as much as I can but the girl keeps staring. “What do you think of this one?” Claire asks, checking her reflection in the mirror.

“Oh, good.”

“You don’t sound sure.”

“Yes, you know you suit hats anyway.” I must have sounded cross because she rolls her eyes and puts it back. Two women at the book shelves turn and I recognise one of them. The sight of Beth, my best friend only a few short weeks ago, tears my stomach, and of course Claire decides now is the moment to wander in that direction. I feel like I’m fighting through a deadly jungle and hang onto a clothes rack, doubling over. Beth’s face is pink with horror when she sees mine. I’m falling.

“Margie,” my sister’s holding me up, “come on, let’s go back.” She’s all softness and concern as she leads me home, I could curl up and sleep in it. However,once we’re indoors, she hardens, “what happened?”

“The people around here are just so…small minded.” She raises her eyebrows. “I tried to make friends when I moved here, I really did, but there’s only so much a person can do when others won’t make the effort.” She sighs and I’m sure she feels bad for me again. I want to hug myself, it’s such a nice feeling. “That woman in the shop, she was the worst. Friends for quite a few weeks, we were, since shortly after I moved here. Then one day she made a new friend and…that was that.” I wait for her to reassure me, to put her hand on mine, anything. Instead she looks away. How often can a person be rejected and stay sane?

“She just stopped talking to you for no reason?” She sounds sceptical.

“Yes.”

“Didn’t you notice her trying to say hello? You’d turned away. She seemed nice enough to me.” I can’t believe what I’m hearing. I want to tell her the whole story but my mouth doesn’t open. She’s my sister, she should be on my side no matter what. “It was the same with Helen, and what’s her name before that, thick and thieves and suddenly…”

“I don’t know why you’d bring up Helen,” I fume, “you know how much she upset me.”

“Margie,” Claire puts her hands on my shoulders, “I’m just trying to talk, to have a conversation. You know,” she speaks carefully, as if to a terminal patient, “Helen asks about you. I saw her last Thursday…”

“I don’t care.” I go to the cupboard and pour a drink, not even bothering to make it a small one.

“I need you to listen,” Claire’s raising her voice now, “Helen said all she wanted was a break from you, time to see her own family.”

“What sort of friend leaves a person when they’re desperately ill?” The pain of it, the rejection, boils my stomach.

“Your illnesses, it’s always about your illnesses,” she growls like something feral. “Dad left because he knew there was nothing wrong. All those years mum spent with you in the hospital, all those wasted years.” It’s vicious. It’s vile. She’s a harpy. I weep, I cover my ears with my hands. Claire rushes to me and pulls them away. Why is she doing this? “Margie,” she says, “for God’s sake, my husband just died.” I can’t believe it, she wants sympathy now? I turn away and stare at the wall. “I think we’ve said everything,” she says quietly, letting go of me, “this visit was a mistake.”

“Too true,” I slump down in my chair and listen to her pack upstairs. She’s gone when I wake in the morning.

I switch channels again and again, settling on one thing before turning to another. The house is silent. My knees ache horribly and I drink to soothe them. I watch the day fade. I see Beth’s face, picture her lips gleefully whispering my secret into ear after ear. I’m furious and I decide it’s time. I dial her number, dry heaving with fear. “Hello?” her voice is as cracked as an old record.

“It’s Margie.”

“Oh.” The silence is so deep I could fall down it.

“Beth, I…I saw you in the charity shop yesterday.”

“Oh yes. How are you?” It’s a ridiculous question, considering.

“I’m OK. Beth,” I know now what it feels like to have a heart attack. I imagine the paramedics carrying me out and the neighbours watching, concern and regret on their faces, “I know it’s been a long time since we spoke, but I need you to tell everyone that you lied about…what happened when we last saw each other.”

“What? Tell everyone I… I have never breathed a word of it to anyone. Even if I had decided to, it would not have been a lie.”

“But…the whole town knows.” Every disgusted look I’ve received, every rude word and every whisper passes my eyes like a dirty film reel.

“Well it didn’t come from me. Breast Cancer, you said, those were the exact words you used at Christmas. Six weeks I looked after you. Six weeks.” I remember those six wonderful weeks. She’d read to me and I was a child with my mother again.

“No,” I say, “it was a lump but it wasn’t Cancer, I hadn’t had the results.”

“You’re still doing it! You…said…Cancer, before you changed your story I don’t know how many times. Your hair…it was shaved. It hadn’t fallen out, it was shaved.”

I remember that afternoon, her lilac jacket on the back of the tea shop chair, the way she looked at me as if she were pretending to be a detective. It was so calculated the way she’d organised a meeting just to bamboozle and accuse me. “How could you?” she’d said. Her voice had been low, she hadn’t wanted to make a scene. I hang up now, my thoughts spiraling. She hadn’t told anyone, nobody knows what I did. Each stare, each whisper, no longer seems so clear.

It’s dark outside. I hear the footsteps and then she knocks. I don’t want to go at first but I know now she won’t leave me alone. I move slowly but she’s still waiting, head down, plastic mac wrapped tightly around her. She looks up with a face I see every day and I feel sick, but not as much as when she opens her jacket. She cradles the tumour on her belly like a baby. I want to run but I don’t, instead allowing her to take my hand. I follow.

**

Madeleine Swann’s novella, Rainbows Suck, was published by Eraserhead Press and her first collection by Burning Bulb. Her short stories have appeared on The Wicked Library podcast and in various anthologies. Find out more at her website or follow her on Twitter.

Image: Wellcome Images

By Anne Raeff: The Jungle Around Us: Stories / What I Didn’t Know: True Stories About Becoming a Teacher

The Doctors’ Daughter

“Don’t forget to feed the chickens,” Pepa’s parents told her when they left for the jungle to take care of the yellow fever victims. As if she could forget such a thing. Wasn’t she the one who took care of them, who collected the eggs, swept up the droppings, slit their throats with the scalpel her father had given her for this very purpose? If she had forgotten to feed the chickens, they would have come pecking at the back door, would have jumped onto the kitchen windowsill and poked their beaks between the louvers. How could she possibly forget to feed the chickens?

The chickens had been Pepa’s idea, after all. Her parents had not approved at first. “What do we know about keeping chickens?” they said.  But they seemed to forget that in the beginning they had not known any of it. They had not known how to cook beans, had not known the taste of fried bananas or the Spanish word for rice, had not known how to hang mosquito netting or the sound of monkeys screaming in the night or that you had to bribe the health inspectors as well as hide the water cistern when they came around every so often looking for what they called “standing water.”  

“What do they expect us to do, live without water?” her father had asked when the inspectors threatened to turn the cistern upside down.

Pepa smiled and spoke to the inspectors, using the few words of Spanish that she knew. “Please,” she said, “can I offer you some coffee?” When she served them the coffee in the porcelain cups that they had brought with them from Vienna, she set a few

coins in each saucer. The inspectors thanked her profusely for the coffee, which they said was the best they had ever had. They even bowed as they left, and Pepa’s father smiled and bowed, also. After that, the inspectors were her responsibility too, like the chickens.

“I will learn how to take care of chickens,” Pepa told them, and she did. She bargained hard for them at the market, and she and her brother Kurt carried them home upside down by their legs the way the market woman had shown them.

When her parents left for the jungle to care for the victims of the yellow fever epidemic, they did not know how long they would be gone. Their friend the pharmacist had offered to take Pepa and Kurt while they were away, but they did not accept his offer. At fourteen Pepa was old enough to handle the house, to watch after her brother.

“But won’t they be afraid to stay in the house alone?” the pharmacist had asked. It was Sunday afternoon and, as they did every Sunday, they were dining with the pharmacist.

“They will not be afraid,” Pepa’s father had said very sternly. “We will not be afraid again,” he added. “Right?” he asked, turning to Pepa.”

“I am not afraid,” she replied.

“If they need anything, anything at all, I am here,” the pharmacist said.

On the evening of the first day of her parents’ absence, the pharmacist knocked on the door. She and Kurt were doing their lessons, their books spread out on the dining room table. Pepa prepared coffee and brought it to the table.

“Your parents are very brave to go to the jungle,” the pharmacist said.

“It is their duty as doctors to help people,” Pepa told him.

“But it is very dangerous,” the pharmacist said.

“Life is dangerous,” Pepa replied.

“I suppose it is,” the pharmacist said laughing. “Well, promise you will let me know if you need something.”

“I promise,” Pepa said, but she could not imagine what she could possibly need that the pharmacist had.

For two weeks her parents were gone, and during this time Pepa took care of her brother as she did when they were not in the jungle. She prepared meals. She went to the market and mopped the floors and fed the chickens, of course. She made sure that Kurt took a bath every day and helped him with his lessons. When her parents returned from the jungle, their clothes caked in red mud, their breaths smelling of hunger, Pepa washed their clothes, stomping and rinsing them over and over, the water flowing red like blood. Then she made them a twelve-egg omelet, for the protein, and fed them mounds of rice and fried bananas. After the meal, which they ate dutifully and in silence, they slept for twenty-four hours straight.  

It was after they returned from the yellow fever epidemic that her parents began sleeping in the clinic. Their clinic was on the other side of the patio—two small rooms that smelled of rubbing alcohol and bleach that they had painted a soothing blue like the eyes of an Alaskan husky, like winter.  The house, they said, had a strange odor, something sweet that kept them up at night, gave them headaches. Pepa understood, however, that it was not about the smell. Rather, at night, when there was time to think, to remember their careers at the best hospital in Vienna, they needed not a soft mattress to lie upon or the sound of their children breathing in the next room but the certainty of steel instruments and the clean smell of alcohol. “We are just on the other side of the patio if you need us,” her father said every night before they retired to the clinic.

“I am not afraid,” Pepa said.

In fact, she could not imagine what could happen to Kurt and her as they slept. They were far from the dangers of Europe now, as far as one could be. At night they kept the louvers open just a crack, just enough to let the breeze in and keep the monkeys out. The monkeys were the only danger. They could destroy the house in a few minutes—pull all the dishes from the shelves, smash them on the cool tile floor, rip the sheets from the bed, urinate on the walls.

In the market, the cabbage woman did not even know there was a war on. “What are they fighting about?” she asked Pepa, and Pepa did not know how to answer her.

“They are fighting over Europe,” she said, and the woman smiled.

“They will regret it in the end,” the woman said. “They always do.”  

At night, after Kurt had gone to sleep, she lay in her dark room listening to the sounds of the night, to the insects, the monkeys, the rain. She imagined her parents lying on the jungle floor burning up with fever, clutching at the red earth, gasping for breath. She made herself look into their wide-open dead eyes. She lay there perfectly still, arms at her side, palms up, her heart beating slowly as if she were asleep. She would never be afraid again. That was what she learned when her parents went to where the yellow fever was.

After her parents’ return from the jungle, Pepa began going out at night. She walked all the way to the edge of town to where the jungle began. She walked into the jungle, pulling the branches apart as she went. Each time she went farther and farther, but always she found her way out. She could sense the path, sense which branches she had touched before and, always, she found herself back out on the dirt path that led to the town, to the whitewashed houses, to the plaza, the church. When she had mastered the jungle and no longer thought about the possibility of getting lost in its rubbery shadows, she began spending her evenings, after she had finished her lessons, on the church steps. On Friday and Saturday nights there was a banda and people danced, and Pepa watched, counting the steps, counting the beats. Gradually she moved from her position on the steps closer and closer to the dancers. Every night she came a little closer until she stood among the young women who were waiting to be asked to dance, and on the second night, a somber young man approached her. “I am Guillermo and you are the doctors’ daughter, no?”

“Yes,” she said, and he led her to where the people were dancing.

That first night they did not speak again until after the banda stopped playing.  Pepa concentrated on the music and on Guillermo’s hand pressed against her back. When the members of the banda had put away their instruments and the dancers had dispersed, Guillermo wanted to walk her home, but Pepa said that she liked walking by herself.

“You are not afraid?” he asked.

“Are you afraid?” she asked.

“No, of course not,” he said.

“You see, there is nothing to be afraid of,” she said and began walking across the plaza towards her house. That is how it started with Guillermo.

The next night Guillermo was waiting for her. “I thought you wouldn’t come tonight,” he said.

“Why did you think that?” she asked.

“I thought you were angry because I said that you might be afraid,” he explained.

“That is no reason to be angry,” Pepa said, and the music started, and Pepa took his hand and led him to where the other dancers were, and after the dancing was over they walked to the edge of the town, to where the jungle started, and Pepa led him into the thickness of the jungle.  “Close your eyes,” she said. “It is better to feel the way than to try to see,” so he closed his eyes and took her hand. Around them was the sound of millions of insects. After a while they stopped and the sound of the insects grew louder like applause or water plunging onto rock. Guillermo kissed her and she was not afraid of his tongue and his hands on her body, and she wanted to stay with him all night, wanted to lie down on the wet earth, but he turned around and began walking back, pulling her behind him, and soon they were out on the road and the sound of the insects

grew distant, and the trees no longer protected them from the stars. “Don’t look up. The stars will blind you,” Pepa said and Guillermo laughed, but he did not look up.

Pepa’s parents did not notice a change in her. They tended to their patients and ate the food that Pepa cooked for them with their usual lack of gusto. They did not notice that Pepa swayed gently back and forth while she washed the dishes because they were too focused on the end of the war. Their visas would be going through, and soon they would be able to leave. They practiced the few English words they knew. “Hello, how are you?” they were always saying. “I am fine, thank you, and you?” During dinner they practiced their numbers, chanting them as if they were a victory cheer. Pepa tried to close her ears to all of it and concentrated instead on Guillermo’s hands on the soft insides of her thighs.

It was only after their visas arrived that she told her parents that she and Guillermo were expecting a child. Her parents did not say a word. They looked her in the eyes and shook their heads, and Pepa ran to her room and flung herself on the bed, but she did not cry. They did not come to her. She heard them talking softly, still sitting at the table where she had left them. All night she waited for them to get up from the table, to go out to the clinic so she could go to Guillermo. He would know what to do. They could work on the coffee plantations. But always when she awoke, she could hear her parents at the table, talking softly, and their talking worked liked hypnosis, lulling her back to sleep.

In the morning, her parents came into her room, spoke to her from the doorway. “Pepa,” they called. How had she slept so long, so late? She always woke before dawn, when the roosters crowed. The chickens. She had forgotten the chickens. Her mother followed her out of the house onto the patio. “Where are you going?”

“To feed the chickens,” Pepa said.

“I already did it,” her mother said, putting her hand on her shoulder, leading her back into the house.

Again she thought about going to Guillermo. Her parents would not have run after her. It was not their way. But she hadn’t gone to him. She couldn’t, so she slept.

The talking continued. Sometimes their voices were loud and angry and at other times she thought she heard them crying, but she could not find the strength to get out of bed to open the door just a crack, to stand by the door and listen. How would they manage in New York without her, she wondered. Who would take care of Kurt? Who would make sure there was always a meal on the table? It did not occur to her that in New York there were no health inspectors to fool, no chickens to raise. In New York, she and her brother would go to school, and they would have to concentrate on their studies. Yes, she would rest, simply rest. There was still time, just a little time, to remember how she and Guillermo had danced like ships and lain down on the jungle floor.

In the clinic, her parents prepared the table, the instruments. When they came to get her they said, “Come,” and they both held out their hands and the three of them walked slowly to the clinic where her mother helped her up onto the examination table. She saw the instruments then, lined up like soldiers, and everything smelled so clean.

**

Reprinted with permission from The University of Georgia Press.

Anne Raeff’s stories and essays have appeared in New England Review, ZYZZYVA, and Guernica among other places. Her first novel CLARA MONDSCHEIN’S MELANCHOLIA was published in 2002 (MacAdam/Cage). Her short story collection, THE JUNGLE AROUND US won the 2015 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and was published in October 2016. She is proud to be a high school teacher and works primarily with recent immigrants. She too is a child of immigrants and much of her writing draws on her family’s history as refugees from war and the Holocaust. She lives in San Francisco with her wife and two cats.

Image: Sam Beebe

Books and authors mentioned in this episode:

Bryce Moore: Vodník / The Memory Thief

David Farland: The Sum of All Men / Brotherhood of the Wolf / Wizardborn

Louise Plummer: The Unlikely Romance of Kate Bjorkman / Finding Daddy

The Memory Thief

Candles illuminated the inside of the tent, which was much smaller than I thought it would be based on the outside. Cheap incense filled the room with a smell like pine trees coated in sweaty socks, with more than a hint of body odor. Then again, the BO might have been coming from the old man passed out at the table in the middle of the tent. Only the slight snores and the spreading puddle of drool by his mouth assured me he wasn’t dead. He wore a bulky suit that made his slight build look like a turtle that might go back in its shell at any moment. A plaid golf cap sat on

the table next to him.

Sam barged in, the tent flap whipping through the air and interrupting the peace of the tent. He almost ran into me. Sam glanced at the old guy, then tapped me on the shoulder. “You,” he whispered. “Outside. Now.”

“No,” I said back in a normal voice. He slugged me in the shoulder, and a jolt of pain shot down my whole arm. “Ow!” I shouted. How deaf was that old guy? Was it too much to hope he would wake up and save me? For once, I got lucky. The man bolted up.

“Customers!” he shouted. Sam and I took a step back in unison, surprised. The man stared each of us in the eye. “Sam. You were just leaving, weren’t you? And take those hoodlums outside my

door with you. I need to talk to Benjamin.”

I’d never seen this man before in my life, but he knew my name? Sam turned and left, a bewildered look on his face, like he was confused how he got there to begin with. The old man kept staring at me. His eyes seemed too big for his face, and he was even frailer than I’d thought at first, his teeth yellowed and his eyes cloudy. “Welcome to my tent!” he said, then tried to stand. He got about halfway up and couldn’t make it the rest of the way.

“Hey,” I said. “What just . . .” I glanced behind me at the flap.

“How can I help you, Benji?” the man asked.

I frowned. “Do I know you?”

He shook his head. “But I know you. Know you better than you know yourself, I’d wager. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Louis, Memory Artist extraordinaire.” He made a little flourish with his hand. “Please sit,” he said.

“Oh,” I said, taking the chair in front of the table and feeling like I was at the principal’s office. My pulse was slowing down, and I had caught my breath. Outside, an announcement blared over the loudspeaker, letting everyone know the Demolition Derby would begin in thirty minutes. “Thanks.

I’m . . . uh . . . Benji. Benjamin.” But he had known that already. How?

Louis straightened his red tie, clapped his hands together, and smiled. “Well, Benjamin. As I said, I am a Memory Artist. Dealer of Yesteryear. Borrower of the Past.” He hitched his pants up, despite the fact that they were already well on their way to his chest. They had a tendency to droop, even

when he was sitting.

“What does that mean?” I asked. “Do you, like . . . want me to tell you about stuff that’s happened to me?”

Louis shook his head. “Of course not, my boy. I take unwanted memories. Buy them, actually. Lift them right out of your head.” He snapped his fingers. Or tried to. “Just like that.”

I frowned again. “What?”

“You ever had a bad nightmare you wish you could forget? I can make you forget it. Nightmares, lost loves, failed dreams, embarrassing situations. I take ’em all. For cash. Those don’t get you much, of course. I pay more for better things. Memories you might like but aren’t using. Winning

the spelling bee. Your first steps. Things you don’t even know you’ve got stored up there, although maybe you’re still competing in spelling bees, yes?”

I sat back in my chair as far as I could go. Was he crazy?

“I’m not crazy,” he proclaimed, perhaps more loudly than he intended to.

“Can you read minds?” I blurted out.

He shrugged. “In a manner of speaking. I can read memories. I can’t tell what you’re thinking until after you’ve thought it.”

“But . . . how?”

Louis spread his arms. “I told you, my boy. I’m a Memory Artist.”

Whatever that was. “I haven’t seen you at the fair before.”

“I haven’t been here, but if I had, you wouldn’t remember me unless I wanted you to. I’m looking for someone, and I just got here today. Have you seen a woman with tattoos up and down her arms? Or a group of RVs all traveling together?”

I picked at the edge of my chair. It was wood that had seen years of use. “I’ve seen a lot of women, and a lot of tattoos. I haven’t paid any attention to RVs. It’s fair week. They’re all

over the place.” What a strange question.

“She looks young. Well, younger than me, but who isn’t? Twenty years old. Short brown hair. And tattoos that are . . .singular.”

“No,” I said. “I haven’t seen her.”

“If you do, stay away! Come find me. Will you do that?”

I nodded.

He stared at me and then smiled. “I believe you will. You’re a good boy, Benjamin. And I’m sorry about your parents. They’ll get over it, though. It really comes down to money, not love.”

“Okay,” I said, having had enough. “That is too strange. Were you following me?”

Louis considered before continuing. “Maybe this would make more sense if I showed you something. I can give memories, too. The first one’s on me. Free of charge.” He smiled even wider, showing a mouth full of dentures, and held his hand out to me across the table. “Now,” he said. “Give me your hand?”

What did I have to lose? I reached to take his hand. When I was inches away, he drew back, staring at me with his eyes narrowed, as if he was considering something. He made up

his mind about whatever it was and shook my hand. His skin was leathery and rough.

I was in a plane, the roar of the engines drowning out everything else. This wasn’t a passenger plane. Seats lined the edges of the cabin, and a green light cast a shadowy glow on everything. Fifty other people—men—sat with me, dressed in olive-green cargo pants and jackets, round helmets with webbing on them, big brown boots, and parachutes on their backs. On my back, too.

The plane shook with turbulence and the buzz of the engines. This wasn’t like a movie. This was real. As real as the fair had been moments before. I could feel the texture of my uniform. The scratchiness around the collar. Smell the fuel oil, sweat, and exhaust. My body was bigger. Older.

More muscled. And I didn’t have any control over it. I was a spectator—watching and experiencing what it did but unable to influence it. Some of the other guys on the plane were praying, their

lips moving silently. From over the roar of the plane’s engines, I thought I heard the ratatat of machine gun fire. Then a loud explosion.

The plane hit a patch of rough air and dropped a hundred feet. My stomach flew up into my mouth, and I felt sick. An older man strode to a door and flung it open. The cabin filled with the swoosh of air. A red light started flashing, and we all stood and headed for the door, jumping out one by one. I wanted to stop. Head back to my seat. But of course my body didn’t listen. There were still five guys between me and leaping out into nothing. What would it be like? How had I

gotten here? Four guys. Three. It might not have been my body, but it was nervous. My palms were sweaty, and my mouth was dry as cotton. The guy in front of me hurled himself through the door without a pause, and then it was my turn.

I thought I’d stop. Refuse to jump. I was terrified, after all. My feet were inches from nothingness. It was dark out. The wind whipped through my hair, threatening to pull off my helmet, except it was strapped tight over my chin. There was no way anyone ever did something they were

this scared of. But my body didn’t pause. It practically lunged through the door. I wanted to scream. Clench my eyes closed. Throw up. My stomach did its best to run for it. I was falling, falling, falling. And then I was weightless. The falling sensation was the new normal.

I was flying.

And then I was back in the tent, facing a smiling Louis. I blinked and shook my head.

“You don’t need to see the rest.” He let go of my hand. He needed better air-conditioning in there. It reeked of vinyl and incense.

“Why not?” I asked, still gathering my thoughts. It had just been getting to the good part.

“It was a memory,” he said, sounding contemplative. “My memory. Just a bit of it. It’s how I celebrated my nineteenth birthday, though most people called it D-Day.”

“It was real?” I asked.

“Did you like it?”

Like it? It made the most incredible video game pale in

comparison. I stuck my hand out again. “Show me the rest.”

He smiled and shook his head. “It gets worse soon after that. I showed you the best part, believe me. It didn’t frighten you?”

I shrugged. “Jumping out of the plane was a bit scary, I guess.”

His grin widened. “I like you. I think you’d do well.”

I cocked my head. “Huh?”

“Would you like to see something else?”

No need to think about that twice. I thrust my hand out.

Louis laughed. “Yes. Hmm. Well. How to put this?” A pause. “Only one freebie per person, I’m afraid.”

My hand dipped back to my side. “You charge?”

“A man needs to eat.”

I dug in my pocket to see what I had left: three quarters and two dimes. Why had I blown it all on fair food? “What can I get for ninety-five cents?”

He gave me a wry grimace. “That would buy you a vision of what I ate for breakfast. It was a very nice omelet. Ham and cheese?”

Just my luck. My shoulders slumped. “It’s okay.”

He snapped his fingers, and I had the sense he might be playing with me. “We could barter!” he said.

“What?”

“We could trade,” Louis said. Those pants really needed some suspenders or a better belt. “I give you some memories—or loan them, sometimes—in return for some of your memories. But you’re twelve, and I’ll need parental consent first.”

Why did everything always require your mom or dad saying it was okay? It’s not like they were that much more responsible than I was. “Is there a form I need to have them sign?” Maybe he wouldn’t read it too carefully.

“What? So you can forge the signature? Nope. I need the parent here personally.”

Figured. “So if I bring my parents here, and they say I can, I can sell you some memories, and you’ll give me other ones?”

Louis tapped his temple with a finger. “Of course. I’ve got loads and loads stored up here, some of them dating back to the Middle Ages. You could know what it was like to be a knight of the Round Table. It wasn’t round, you know. More of an oval, but King Arthur and the Knights of the Oval

Table doesn’t sound as good, don’t you think?”

“I . . . guess?”

“I’ve also got some very nice recollections of Babe Ruth in some of his best games. Are you into baseball?”

I shook my head. “My dad might like those.” I thought about that scene from World War II again. It had been so vivid. “Do you have anything from the space race? Maybe someone walking on the moon?”

Louis smiled and nodded. “You have a taste for the good stuff, I see. I do happen to have a few of those, captured from some of the astronauts before they passed on. Not the easiest to come by, though, and buying them outright carries an astronomical price tag. Get it? Astronaut? Astronomical?” When I didn’t laugh, he cleared his throat and smoothed his hair back before setting his hat in place. “I can rent you those for a decent rate, though.”

I imagined what it would be like to walk on the moon. Low gravity. Seeing the earth hanging above you in the sky. “Why don’t you have more people in here?” The tent should have been overflowing. Outside, the muffled throngs headed toward the derby. No one so much as peeked in.

“Video games and movies,” Louis said. “People don’t believe me. They see the sign, they pass me by.”

“So go outside,” I said. “Make people see. Once they know what you can do—”

“Let me worry about that, son,” he said. I got the feeling he wasn’t too concerned with promoting himself. Or maybe he was too weak to really throw himself into the work. Messing around with memories . . . That could be a useful trick to have with some people.

I shifted my feet, trying not to sound too eager or interested. “Could you make someone forget they hate someone else?”

His face grew solemn. More lined. “Your parents aren’t going to be fixed by wiping their memories.” His voice was soft.

My mouth dropped open. It was too easy to forget what he could do.

“Besides,” Louis continued. “You don’t want to muck around in people’s memories. They don’t just disappear, you know. The memories have to go somewhere, unless the person holding them dies. Some memories are better left undisturbed.”

“But my parents—”

“You don’t steal core memories and emotions. Do you want your parents to change? Become different people? Your memories make you, Benji. Change you. You take those things away, and many people find they’re nothing more than a house of cards.”

Silence again. Louis stared at me, his face grave. I scowled back. What was the point in having the ability to take memories if you didn’t use it? But then again, I hadn’t even known this was possible a half hour ago. If Sam hadn’t chased me in here . . . I broke the stare with Louis.

“Okay,” I said. “And you’re here all week?”

“More or less. I might need to wander the grounds a bit now and then, but just wait around if I’m not here. I’ll show up eventually.”

I liked him, pants up to his armpits and all. He reminded me of my grandfather, back when he was alive. I waved goodbye and left the tent.

**

Copyright © 2016 Adaptive Books

Bryce Moore is the author of The Memory Thief, Vodnik, and Cavern of Babel. When he’s not authoring, he’s a librarian in Western Maine, where he’s also the current President of the Maine Library Association. He’s been happily married since 2001 and is doing his best to raise three new geeks of his very own, while simultaneously convincing his wife that sci-fi/fantasy is awesome. He uses his spare time to fix up his old 1841 farmhouse and shovel snow and pay ridiculous amounts of money feeding his Magic the Gathering addiction.

On Friday, October 21, The Other Stories visited The Oracle Club, a writing and art space run by Julian Tepper (episode 77). The Oracle Club hosted us, and we in turn hosted three of their members: Christopher Lee, David Goodwillie, and Hannah Lillith Assadi. Their bios follow, along with photos from the evening reading.

Christopher Lee is a physician, epidemiologist, and writer. His academic writing focuses on humanitarian policy, displacement, and homelessness. He is currently finishing his first novel, entitled Us, Then, which examines the relationship between agency and place in a postlapsarian world as viewed through the lens of one character’s experiences in an unlikely and failed relationship. Christopher trained at Harvard Medical School, the University of Oxford, and Johns Hopkins University. He lives in Brooklyn.

David Goodwillie is the author of the novel American Subversive, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and the memoir Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time, for which he was named one of the “Best New Writers of 2006” by members of the PEN American Center.  He also writes about books for the Times and Daily Beast, and has played professional baseball, worked as a private investigator, and been an expert at Sotheby’s auction house.

Hannah Lillith Assadi received her MFA in Fiction from the Columbia University School of the Arts.  She was raised in Arizona and lives in Brooklyn. Her first novel Sonora is forthcoming in the spring of 2017.

This story was originally published in Unsung Stories and can be found here. Below is an excerpt:

Build a Cat

‘Take me down through the Tangles, James,’ my Sarah said, before she went away forever. I was happy she asked. I took her hand, smiled down. Each time we touched I felt the power of the sickness in her. We walked slowly, wrapped up in each other against the cold.

To the Tangles: our name for where the city began to fray around its edges. In our first few weeks I had taken her a dozen times to deliver on-foot lectures on the topographic cut of our town, where it fell away to terraces, concrete-covered waterways and a deepening grey where foundations mingled.

There was a rise in the landscape first, where the roads tilted up toward the sky and the city loomed like a suburban cliff. A slight veer left and you’d fall off the route to where the centre of things is dressed in chrome and nothing echoes.

She liked it because it was an industrial relic. A dissolving relief: part carved-out and piled-up factory service land, part scrub playing host to ziggurats of mouldering pallets. She saw its levels, the sweep and the playful decay where invisible boundaries collided.

‘It’s a gift,’ she called back as we crunched through the broken glass of a rail shed. Brick arches supported the raised platform. ‘All things fashioned after life possess life,’ she added, repeating for my benefit her treatise: ‘If nature allows itself to be imitated, improved, then it allows itself to be replaced!’

I smiled at the consistency of her argument as she spiralled her arms through curtains of dislodged dust, scared away a dozen pigeons with her cat-calls. Even now I choose to think she saw because I showed her. I had not yet seen this world through her eyes.

You have visited this location eight times, my phone chimed as we began the shallow climb back. There we were on the map: a blue dot on a scrolling view. Like much of what was left here to rot, I knew this record of our passing served no future purpose.

**

Peter Haynes lives and writes in Birmingham UK. His work has appeared in Unsung Stories, Litro USA, Hypertext Magazine, Change Seven & Every Day Fiction, with work upcoming at Spelk fiction, the nature writing publication Reliquiae Journal and Here Comes Everyone magazine.

**

Image: Flickr / Amit Gupta

The story below was originally published in Be Wilder, an anthology from Word Portland.

The Happiest Place on Earth

I was dreaming of an empire of parasites under my skin when I woke up to a sound like chicken bones snapping between a quiet dog’s teeth. I was in the back bedroom of Ma’s new house, about as far from the front door as a body could get, and it was still dark out in the swampy St. Petersburg night. I lay there for a while feeling the strangeness of my dream slowly wash off of me—the bugs had built fleshy towers like distended, purple nipples along the insides of my thighs, which would tangle and rub uncomfortably as I walked along this cracked highway crowded with people but no cars—until gradually I wasn’t thinking about my dream anymore. I was thinking of the sound that’d woke me. Crackles and pops.

It was a hot July night so the bedsheets were sticky from all of my sweat: I had to work to claw myself free. I don’t know how long I’d slept but it didn’t feel like nearly enough. My head ached with too many Pacificos with dinner. I felt whipped. It’d been a run of bad luck that had me all at once staying with Ma, but then again, it was likely some such bad luck that’d forced her down to Florida in the first place. Yet all in all, things weren’t so bad. A long clean house in the working-class end of a tight little suburb. There are people who work their whole lives to live here. So why’d it seem so cheap to me? In the hallway was a sliding door that opened out into Ma’s flower garden, which was small but nice enough with a stone patio and a couple scratched-up metal chairs she’d found on the sidewalk on trash day. I stopped and rested my forehead against the glass on account of its coolness—to be honest, I was still kind of rattled by my dream—and it was while I was standing there like that that I saw that some of Ma’s plants were burning. There was a tall stone wall between us and the neighbor’s and the vines on the wall were all flossy with flames and the azalea wore flames and some woven twiggy ornament like a wreath hanging from the eaves was already burnt and black with little cinders like cigarette cherries speckling around the ring.

“Huh.” I stood there blinking with the middle of my forehead suction-cupped to the glass. The cinders seemed to breathe. I wasn’t sure yet what about this wasn’t right.

It was around then I heard Ma open her bedroom door.

“Donny?” Her voice was a single high rising note of worry. It was almost pretty, the way she said my name. “Is everything okay?” Down the dark hall, I could only see the shape of her: low and thick in a way that meant post-menopausal. I stood there thinking about that—about Ma’s age and her shape—for a while before I spoke.

“I think the garden’s on fire.”

I remember, my words felt far away to me, but Ma’s voice sounded close.

“What!”

“I mean—yeah. Sorry. Your house is burning, Ma.”

“Well we should get out.”

I didn’t disagree. I went back to my room and put on some jeans while Ma found the cat under a pillow on the couch. Then we went out into the black sea-breezy night, and that’s when we saw that it wasn’t our house burning at all but the neighbor’s. Just a few flames had jumped the wall like vandals bent on ruining Ma’s flowers. No real danger. But still, it struck me as best that we’d gotten out. Some things aren’t wise to sleep through. The house next door was in a full rolling boil of flames but that wasn’t stopping anyone from having a party. I guess they’d been living it up inside the house before things started to burn. There were whooping drunk people everywhere and two men fighting in the grass and the first fire trucks were just arriving as Ma and I waded into the crowd. In her nightgown, clutching her fluffy white kitty, Ma looked panicked and strange and beautiful in the blue and red flash of lights. Like she was still asleep and caught up in a bad dream. I closed my eyes in a slow meditative blink and when I opened them again, the scene had changed into a circus—the lights and the bodies and sirens singing like calliope songs—and Ma was smiling her lopsided grin. The goofy way she smiled to hide her fucked-up upper teeth. She wasn’t afraid anymore. She was having fun. Isn’t that strange?

I guess I sometimes miss my mom. She was nice to me. I think people forget how far something like that can go.

Around the time the firemen first started hosing down the neighbor’s burning house, I heard a voice behind me say my name. I wasn’t sure whether to get excited or to run. It was like that in those days. There were men serving papers and there were friendly ghosts popping out of nowhere and you often couldn’t tell one from the other until it was too late. It was hard work finding any middle ground. So it was with a certain white-knuckled apprehension that I turned around and saw on the sidewalk a small dark-haired girl with big eyes made wider with recognition as she said my name again.

“Donny the fuck O’Malley, are you kidding me?” She was holding a red solo cup with a purple bendy straw tilting against its rim. She was maybe Hispanic or maybe a New Jersey Jew and was cute like Mila Kunis. I’d never seen her before in my life.

It’s this last detail that should’ve mattered most. But I must have a thing for women saying my name, because I smiled and said hi and lifted my arms in a wide, open gesture of general welcome or surprise or whatever. And this sweet little big-eyed thing, she dropped her solo cup right there in the grass and stepped into my open arms. Like she fit right there with her hands on my waist.

“I can’t believe you’re here.”

“Uh, neither can I?”

This kind of conversation? Almost impossible to get right.

“What even are you doing here? Where’ve you been?”

“Oh. Around.” I had zero intention of explaining about the wives or the charges I faced in Utah. In the driveway, the neighbor’s Camaro was turning from red to black. There were half-naked people all around, drinking from plastic cups and shouting and getting in the firemen’s way. The two fighting men were gone.

“Do you know who lives in this house?”

“No,” she said, then bringing me back, “How long’s it been?”

Again, I just smiled and shrugged.

She moved in closer until her face was nearly touching my chest. I still wasn’t wearing a shirt. Whatever she put on her skin or in her hair made her smell like a lemon drop. Her lips were kind of parted and her wide eyes shined like maybe they were wet. I was liking where this was going.

“Too long,” she said.

I think it bears repeating that I’d never been in this town or even this state before. And anyway, I’d just arrived here a few days ago, shaky and desperate. But already it seemed like things were falling into place for me. Mom. Fire. Girl. So I did not disagree:

“Too long.”

The diseases that girl would give me would make me wish I was lucky enough to have bugs under my skin, making rubbery towers and castles from what my dying body gave up. But I couldn’t know that then. I let her squeeze me and I squeezed her back, then we turned to watch the fire like the happiest two people on earth, and there was Ma in the neighbor’s yard with her kitty and her nightgown, standing in that green green grass before the fireball’s fury—right where the two men had earlier been fighting—and while the firemen’s hoses cast Biblical arches of white water all around her, Ma turned to me laughing—mouth open and crazy-looking—and pointed and sang “look!” and though I laughed back and nodded, I could not figure out what she wanted me to see.

**

Douglas W. Milliken is the author of the novel To Sleep as Animals and several chapbooks, most recently the collection Cream River and the forthcoming pocket-sized edition One Thousand Owls Behind Your Chest. His stories have been honored by the Maine Literary Awards, the Pushcart Prize anthology, and Glimmer Train Stories, and have been published in Slice, the Collagist, and the Believer, among others. 

Art by Madeline Fishburn, a watercolor painter from Baltimore, Maryland. She is very serious about tea, poetry, and trashy TV shows. You can check out more of her work at her website or email her at fishburnart@gmail.com.