The Templeman Review Issue Three

THE TEMPLEMAN REVIEW

Issue Number 3, Summer Term 2021

Letter from the Editor

We hope this issue of The Templeman Review finds you well.
Another academic year has come to a close and the future of this
paper looks uncertain. We have graduated (first class!), moved back
home and taken up a new job; hence the delay in the publication of
this issue. The domain is still registered until September so hopefully
we will be able to put out at least one issue next year.

As always, please continue to send your stories, poems and
essays to our inbox.

Also, if anyone has any idea how to embed a platform for
uploading submissions directly into our website then please email us.
Taking a degree in English doesn’t lend well to coding in HTML!



Poems

Composting with Postcolonial Jesus

You find your way into & out of my poems, the way the sun dapples
the basil-mint leaves & the thyme reaches towards the sun in
smileworn mutualism,
complines the kitchen garden, composts repottings & repots
belongings of
burntout oregano, suicidal chili padi, all of our threaded sicknesses in
one body.

You pour out the morning as a deluge of skylight shimmying
over my rooftiles, alongside the squirrel syndicates & the redwing
arrowsquadrons spilling through my unclasped windows &
over my rosemary-saffron stevedores & spiderwebbing foolscap
deckhands. You dwell for a moment in lavender-sage parlours &
coffee graveyards, & there you conjure the lyred notes of leaves so
dense that the light cannot glint through. How my plucky apostles
put the oak trees peopling Parker’s Piece & Jesus Green to
glimmering autumnal shame, far be it for the gnarled knots of
sized soldiers flanking the Common to cut up the sky so that all
rheumatic fingers can try is scratch & scrape the primaryschooler’s
azure
blue into confetti, flagparts of a dozen defeated countries blending
into one resin mould of blue, drilled through with neoliberal hook.

You, as in the sky you paint & the sky that paints you.
You, as in the Brontë sister scaffolds treepopulating the browning
mudflats of Grantchester Meadows, the narrowness of the same
potholed roadwounds that build their sandcastles next door to you.
You, as in your body’s grace, as in the pounding that courses through
my arterial imaginings, as in the darkening of my wings with a
Hebrew man’s blood,
& the zinc roofs on which I end up breaking, & railing, &
dashboarding my
labouring grandmother’s dreams into sawdust. My bravery ends here,
so I
can only wrestle my hand into its birthpose & rail it fistwide at the sky

awry, by proxy telling you your roadmap to rebirth in a lover’s
proxemics,
all at once, without the cuteness. How the wobble starts at the sides
&
careens toward the centre; how it does not hold without much more
so
the ballerina glasses lined like trophies topple in quick swandive
succession, almost a
philharmonic wave transliterating into Yuhua market creole
symphonies
brasshoovering all the silt & slag & broken Sainsbury’s rum bottles in
the Cam’s wake as it sweeps professorially into Arbury. You, as in all,
as in none.
You, as in soil, as in rum; as in brown, as in green, as in newspaper,
as in coffee, as in all of this, gathering, dustsettled, together
brokensmiling.

Christian Yeo, unmatriculated

Water Aid

In the fire-
making symphonies of sunrise
watch the grasslands cower under the cover
of dew.

Joel Schueler, unmatriculated

Hibernation

Ten years I've been in hibernation.
I've made friends with ground-
squirrels and prairie dogs, bats

and bumble-bees. I learnt to
fire-dance, feel safe treading
on a hedgehog's prickles, doze

in a brown bear's paws; I immunized
my fear. My relatives are concerned
they try to rouse me tempting

me with Caviar and truffles, a vintage
claret, champagne. They say the
earth is fine. I don't believe a word.

Chris Johnson, unmatriculated

Morning Sunshine

The sip of golden warmth resting on my tongue,
That first mouthful of tea makes all the difference
Like the silver of welcoming sunshine slipping under the blind
The touch of your fingertips, spots of gold
Hold my face in the morning, light love on my lips.
A constant need, drip feed my addiction
That first kiss makes all the difference
To my joyful day, filled with glorious rays
Caught in Auburn strands, pockets full of secrets and flowerheads.
Captured for a moment, an hour or two
A reminder of the sunrise splitting the dawn clouds
Peach, apricot, tangerine.
A surprise for my taste buds and my eyes
This morning, looking out across the dunes
Your face by my side, hand in my hand.

Huzaim Sulaiman, unmatriculated

Short
Stories

Throat Music

Driving to work, the deejays on the radio are talking about the
absurdity of Tibetan throat music. They play samples. The long
string of rattles, deep from within the larynx. It is not music, the
deejays say and repeat. They laugh, they mock, they imitate. The
woman deejay has a voice that suggests beauty. You Google her.
She’s pretty. Not smoking, but attractive, though the man deejay
looks like a pig. No shave, concert shirt, circa 1982. Cheap Trick. The
deejays talk of the long lost super bands in the present tense. They
talk like Joe Walsh just joined the Eagles. They talk like Sammy
Hagar ain’t almost eighty. The car behind me blares a horn. Green
light. One caller says the deejays have it all wrong. Chant music is all
about sustaining the pitch and changing the timbre with your mouth.
It is a prayer, not something you listen to for fun. The deejay
responds, ‘I’m sorry, you can change the timbre all you damn want,
but a song is a song, and this is not a song, unless crap is a song, and
then this is a song.’

Timothy Fitts, unmatriculated

The Seer

What's my first memory? Rosa asks me as we cruise along the
road from the hospital through the dawn. In my mind, the snapshot:
I recall charting the looping infinities drawn in the air by a careless
fly and jumping in surprise at the falling of the dead, autumn leaves
around me. I must have been two or three. After that, long blanks in
consciousness: the sound of an empty watering can, sadness (though
not my own), a nebulous dentist. The true beginning, the start of the
unbroken chain of remembrances that lead me to this moment, was
my awakening from a fit when I was seven. For perhaps a month,
doctors set to an examination of my brain in a clean, white building.
They asked me questions, were very kind, and assured my father that
the tests were yielding significant results. Barring two over-active
parietal lobes, I was deemed perfectly healthy, but the fits continued,
always at night, and always when I was outside. Eventually, I simply
avoided going out after dark, begrudgingly accepting that I would
have to stay indoors whenever the sun had set. Regardless, by that
time, I had come to discover the symbols and started implementing a
system by which I could comprehend them.

You must understand, everything in this world was designed,
specifically, to confound and obliterate me. I know this, intuitively,
but I have learnt to read the clues and messages left by the wide
universe and my secretive subconscious, to guide me to the avoidance
of great, unknowable calamities. It would be remiss to call myself
‘superstitious’, I am neither religious, nor prone to bouts of mystical
fancy, yet I can see the day encapsulated in the angle of a leaning
umbrella, the splaying of a collection of spilt pencils, in the music
playing softly from some lonely window. All are a tangled complexity
of signs, ciphers, and signals; all mean something monstrous,
unspeakable, or metaphoric; and all are connected, either to one
another, or, inextricably, to me. My life has been a succession of
attempts to formulate these portents into some sort of order, but, of
course, every day is its own maze, every omen informs the next one
and the one preceding it, so that all that remains to do is continue this

indefinite vigil, this scrutiny of the minutiae, so that I might protect
myself against the racing chaos of the day to day.

I've looked into the practices of divination. I wanted to discover
if I was simply projecting a new age ‘sensitivity’, or if something more
standardised, more significant, was at work in my head, allowing me
to catch these auguries and allusions. I've shuffled towers of tarot
cards until all the meanings dissolved, read wine dark, steaming goat
entrails in abandoned car parks by torchlight, I've stared at the
skittering movements of crabs in bowls like the brown skinned magi
of Cameroon. I've read palms and charts, thrown bones and seeds,
scanned thunder claps and flowering fractals in the hope of piecing
together the moves of the agents out to ruin me. Not a single thing
that I can't explain away as circumstance, cold reading, or hindsight
association in any of these practices. They're all so specific, so concise,
so maddeningly compartmental that I find myself returning to my
own methods of divination filled with spite. It has never worked that
way for me. Fate does not wait for me to ask it a question, it screams
and whispers at me every second.

By the time Rosa and I have ditched the car, commandeered
some civilian clothes from an unguarded clothes line, and reached a
hotel, the mid-day sun is beginning to wane. I slept on the way, since
I can’t be awake out in the night, so I go to clean myself up. I look into
the mirror. It's a torture to gaze into my face, but necessary, since my
skin is riddled with clues. Blemishes, today, in a crescent around my
hard jawline- possibly related to cloud patterns, or a cyclical change-
too early to tell, but noted; my brows are off until I fix them- I'll have
to sort something minor or it'll have knock on effects; I brush my
teeth and my gums bleed in small blurring shapes that swirl with my
spittle in the sink- circle, elephant, car, raspberry in the whirlpool tap
water.

I set the kettle to make a tea, and, frankly, the less said about tea
leaf divination, the better, but I drop my spoon, the tinkle on the floor
rings four times in my ears as I stare at the alabaster clouds outside,
and I know, I feel it clear through me, that something horrific will
happen today. This is no rarity. Horrific things happen every day and
I've become adept at staying safe- avoiding any cliff edges and plant

pots on high windowsills, but my life has been too dangerous recently,
it had to catch up sometime.

At first, I would barricade myself indoors with the intention of
riding out whatever chance encounter would crush me that day, but I
soon found this ineffective, that only direct, active, opposing actions
can counteract an impending disaster. For the most part, fate is
inflexible. I, myself, exist because I was always going to do so. My
mother's death was unavoidable, the sea is grey around my country's
coasts, and the trees are bare in winter. Yet, in the omens I have seen
within the clarity of birds against a shining white sky, or the creak of
a door coincidental with the chiming of a baritone clock, I have noted
and prevented disaster, facilitated silent glories, and outfoxed doom.
You must believe me; scientific rigour has always been ever present
in my studies. I have allowed for controls, sampled every day, tried to
fail on purpose when possible, to make it clear to myself that my
interjections are significant, but the nature of the signs is ever vague.
They are without moral standing, transient, and obscure to the point
of madness; just on the periphery of my perception, but always,
always there.

A word about Rosa, my currently snoring co-conspirator and
fellow escapee from the ward. I came to meet Rosa when I was staying
in the hospital after she'd punched one of the orderlies. Everyone's
movements were too big, too chunky and imprecise for her, I could
see why she was angry. I stopped her from screeching in her room
and held her cut, red wrists until she'd calmed down and the doctors
could treat her. Since then, she didn't seem to want to leave my side.
She was abounding with symbolism for me to interpret: the order in
which she'd chew her flaky fingernails at lunch or how she'd pull her
hands through her greasy hair in time with the mid-day music. The
thing with Rosa, though, whilst I can read her changing moods and
anxieties pretty easily, she seems to have some sort of immunity to
the machinations of destiny that I see. At first, I thought that I had
made mistakes (they happen, there are so many things to keep track
of), but again and again, she'd suddenly leap to her feet to dance and
cry, or giggle with her head leaning against a rain-drenched
windowpane, completely in opposition to my prophecies. These
actions appear minor, but they would inevitably alter the flow of

reactions on the ward. I would have to re-evaluate all prior
prognostications because of this inexplicable anomaly of a person. I'd
disagreed with her plan to flee the ward after lights out, but she was
a mystery that I couldn't lose. There had to be some reason why she
could go against all the portents on a consistent basis. She lifted some
keys, and I helped her jump start a car in the unguarded employee
garage, more so to prove to myself that we couldn't pull it off than to
actually escape, and yet, here we are.

I leave Rosa sleeping and drooling saliva ‘O’s’ onto the cotton
pillows. She's driven all night and we need food before moving on. It
seems that I am unaccustomed to enjoying myself. Unless it's earned
in some way, happiness rests upon my conscience like a squat bird. I
know that any elation on my part draws the ire of the forces against
me, but escaping from the hospital, stealing a car with Rosa and
blagging my way into a country hotel with the change in the glove
compartment? I've got to admit that I like it. Joy is such a delicate
terror. I take the lift down the 4 floors to the dim hotel lobby to see
what I can steal.

Theft is quite simple when you know the potential for success or
failure. Ian Dury’s ‘Razzle In My Pocket’ was playing in the lift, so, I’m
tentatively confident about this, despite not having a plan. I try to
make a point of not using my interpretations of the future to commit
crime, but these are, after all, extenuating circumstances.

There's a creaky bar adjoining the hotel lobby and I'm drawn
there by a large tip jar on the counter. I’m actually not certain just
how dishevelled and recently-escape-from-a-mental-hospital I
appear, but the barman gives me a smile as I take a seat, so I think
I’m passable. I read the symbols around me and they’re quite
simplistic this time: two Heinekens and a bizarre Ouzo chaser taken
from the bar by a grim, moustachioed patron. Two ‘H’s’ and an ‘O’.
Sometimes, the signs have a childish sense of humour about the way
they operate so I ask for water and the polite barman excuses himself
to fetch some from the back. There’s time enough to take everything
from the tip jar, but I stick to taking just a few coins (all I’ll need for
a sandwich) and, on an unprecedented whim that I can’t rationalise,
a bottle of whiskey from behind the bar. When the barman returns

with a pitcher of water, I down the whole thing so as not to appear
suspiciously un-thirsty and I pay for a hot sandwich for sleepy Rosa.

I am elated by this effortless success but there is something
scratching at my brain, murmuring in my ear in a sinister undertone.
There are beacons and suggestions of doom in this hotel: the clatter
of far-off crockery after I hear the word ‘happy’ from a passing child,
the lights dimming in the lobby as I pass a saccharine painting of
cherubim. The air, the walls, the insane carpet all seem hostile as I
rush back upstairs, and I’m nervous beyond belief by the time I reach
my room.

When I get back, Rosa's woken up and is sat on the windowsill
staring intently at the far-off carpark below. She gives me a deliberate
yawn when I offer her the sandwich but snatches it from my
outstretched hand after a second and wolfs it down with relish. As
she's eating, I ask her what the plan is from here, and warn her about
the symbols I've seen whilst I was downstairs. Every cell in my body
tells me that we have to leave today, every scuff on the wallpaper and
oddity in the tessellation of the wall tiles of the paltry bathroom is
bellowing at me about some imminent danger.

‘The tiles in the bathroom, Lucien? You're a loony, you do know
that, right? Just what is it that's going to happen to us if we stay here
for a day?’

She was playing with a lamp. I just could not tell if she was
brilliant or simple.

‘Well, for one, the hospital probably has people out looking for
us. Frankly I wouldn’t mind going back, it’s so much safer there. Rosa,
I don’t think that I can impart this strongly enough: someone, or
something horrible and wicked is coming here, to this room, with the
express purpose of destroying us, just you and me, dashing us to
ruins, somehow.’

‘Oh, really? And why would someone do a thing like that? Do
you think that we’re important enough for anyone or anything to even
bother?’

She’d stopped with the lamp and was reaching her hands to the
ceiling.

‘Veeeeeeeeery stretchy!’ she exclaims, smiling.

There isn’t much for it, so I open the whiskey and pour us both
a glass. Rosa scoffs at how early it is for a ‘night cap’ but takes the
glass and insists on a straw. She wants to learn poker, so we sit cross-
legged on the bed and I fish out a clean pack of cards from a nearby
drawer. I need to drown out the symbols somehow. Just about
everything in the room: from the hairline crack along the centre of the
cheap, veneered, coffee table, to the slightly damaged, cookie-cutter
paintings of ominous lilies and elephants on the walls, is blaring to
me that this place is unsafe. I want to not care about this. I drink my
whiskey quickly.

‘Now, don’t you be cheating and prophesising my cards from the
constellations of spots on my forehead, or whatever the hell it is you
do.’ She says, getting comfortable.

‘That isn’t quite how things work, Rosa. It’s more like
foreshadowing in movies and books, little hints that only make sense
if you’re looking properly. I’m actually quite abysmal at poker, I
promise.’

‘Sounds a bit like bluffing to me, you inveterate charlatan.’ And
her eyes squint in what I hope is mock suspicion.

We play all day for matchsticks and then, somehow, for drinks
of whiskey. Rosa picks up the game easily and bluffs just about every
hand. We both appear to get quite inebriated and soon hit that nice
level of drunk in which one feels that prying questions aren’t quite so
rude to ask anymore. She asks me if I’ve ever been in love, and if I can
spell ‘narcissism’ (of course I can). She asks me why on Earth I would
have willingly institutionalised myself like I did, and just what it was
that I was trying to get protection from. I ask her how many times
she’s attempted suicide and about why she was at the hospital. I know
that she’s been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, (though she prefers
to call it manic depression), but I’ve always wanted to know what it
feels like, so I ask her that, as well.

‘I don’t think you’d care, Lucien. It’s all pretty boring stuff,
honestly. I just get blue every now and then, you know? I turn into a
real drag. It’s probably why I don’t have any friends these days.’

She gives a high, thin laugh that I feel obliged to join in with.

‘It goes away when I’m properly mad and loopy. Everything’s so
bright and then all of a sudden it isn’t anymore. Any mood I have is
meaningless, anyway, so, no big deal, eh?’

She gives another laugh which seems like something measured
and hollow as she lays down three of a kind- fours.

‘Read them and drink, you big idiot.’

I do, and I do, big idiot that I am, and suddenly feel a
tremendous urge to vomit. Rosa rubs my back and laughs at me, I
think good naturedly, as I do so in the toilet. Eventually, she picks me
from the floor and puts me into the double bed. I am overwhelmingly
tired, and I fall into a deep, blue sleep.

I stand upon a beach with clear skies and calm waters ahead of
me. There are facsimiles of smiling people around me. They are all
happy to be here on the shore, in the sunshine. I see Rosa by the
water’s edge, and I walk to her, excitedly, but there is a change as the
clouds block the sun. On the horizon, I see a great, black wave
towering into the sky and plunging towards the shoreline. Rosa and
the others continue playing upon the beach as it gets closer. I shout
and scream to let people know about the wave, how we will all be
crushed if we don’t run right now, but everyone keeps on smiling until
the swell is right above us, hurtling down in a streaming, gushing
flood that falls and obliterates us all against the sand.

I wake and open my eyes to the sound of a car alarm down on
the street below. It’s dark and the clock reads 11:43, but the windows
are open, and the cool wind is billowing the drapes into the room. I
rise, unsteadily, from the bed (I think I was tucked in) and go to close
the window to stop the chill and see where the noise is coming from.
I look down into the carpark. Rosa looks up at me from the car that
she landed on, four floors below. There is a halo of glass shards
around the car from her impact, and the splotch of a pool of blood
forming by her broken little head. I didn’t even hear her jump. I have
to leave this room; I have to get out of this place.

I take the lift down in a numb trance as screams and carpeted
footsteps echo on the hotel floors. Some of the other guests have

noticed Rosa, too. I feel my pulse throbbing in my skull and the
alcohol still making me bleary and weak. There’s a crowd of half-
awake, dressing-gowned patrons in the lobby that I have to stride
past, but then I’m out into the sharp night air with the sound of an
ambulance in the distance and the chill in my lungs. I sprint groggily
to Rosa and there’s no one else there. She isn’t moving at all; her
joints are bent at impossible angles, there is a punnet of undamaged
raspberries on the passenger seat of the car. She’s gone.

I hear people coming from the hotel and see the blue flash of the
ambulance lights heading my way. I bolt and scrabble over the
carpark wall, out into a nearby field of tall grass. I’m breathing hard
as I run but I have to get away from this horrific place. I trip and land
on my back to finally see the night sky, burst wide open with the
crescent moon, and ablaze with glimmering stars above me for the
first time since I was a child. The infinite symbolism of far-off, white
suns, compounding upon one another in geometric patterns.
Complexity upon complexity coalescing until each breath, each
moulded second, could be read beforehand if one could just untangle
the dimensions, fit the cosmological puzzle pieces into place. There is
so much information, so many allusions and suggestions and
possibilities in these white dots that I can’t even begin to understand
the slightest permutation of what it all means. I try, I read, I think and
my brain races but it’s too much. My heart leaps and bounds within
my chest and the blood rushes up to fizz at the base of my skull. My
eyes grow dim as my consciousness wanes. It’s the impossible,
infinite, unspeakable labyrinth of fate.

Theo Beecroft, unmatriculated

La Esplendor

You believe the night is the most unbearable. In the dark hall of the
Metropolitan Museum, you could not resist the horror, the dark
solitude that sleeps with you, reminding you that despite the
ingeniousness you have crystallised as an artistic splendor, you are
doomed to be the work of a man. I suppose if a man knows your story
today, he will think of it as a whimsical joke; if he is gifted to be artistic
and sensitive, he might sense a tinge of tragedy, but still a tragic joke.
You might disagree and protest that if he comes again and again to
look at you, he might know enough about you. You must think like
that. But I don’t blame him.

Because you made jokes for yourself out of boredom first. The
day was not so fun for you as well, so when the museum was open,
you indulged in your penchant– going over fantasies in your mind.
They might be about a contemporary Arsène Lupin staging a theft or
a lunatic visitor whirling a baseball toward your frame. So abundant
the time was for you, that you could devise some plots for them–
Lupin brought you to Tokyo and hid you in the sewage system; the
lunatic visitor broke your frame, tore your apart, and left only one
piece of your canvas presentable, and afterward, every visitor had to
guess what you should look like.

At length you had a collection of stories in mind. But you still
loved the story about the lunatic the most. Although it wasn’t as
complicated as other stories that amused you, which you revisited at
night, you pondered the lunatic visitor over and over. In the fantasy
you were together with the visitors coming to the museum after the
crime, who mused upon your debris and romanced your image had
the accident not happened. They would think, almost as long as you
thought, about the same question: what did you yourself look like?

You thought about it all the time. As a painting, it had been too
many years since a mirror was in front of you. It was your faith to
outlast each night– what other mysteries could be waiting for you in
this humdrum world? Painters produced either beautiful faces or ugly
faces. There was no negotiation to be in-between. You knew to which

type you belonged but had forgotten. Maybe the long passage of time
was too powerful. Maybe you deliberately forgot, so as to think about
it, making it a weapon to counter the night.

Of course, there were paintings who didn’t have such a thought
from which to seek power. They were the corrupted ones. Humans
didn’t have this term because they didn’t know how time degenerated
the splendor. Paintings like you never lacked adherents; though bare
eyes, eyes with spectacles, and eyes behind cameras hovered over us
in decades, none could tell if a depraved artwork ever faded a shade
or lost a touch of ink within veins and grains. But you and I could tell
the difference by looking over the paintings in this hall days and
nights. Across from you hung the corrupted Still Life with Water Jug.
Though it did not make any mischief by the measure of human eyes,
its vase was a stupid, dull color of dead dough, which was wrongly
interpreted as aesthetic pallor by visitors; its apples were all wrong,
an utter wrongness running counter to the genius of Cezanne, worse
than a drop of blood on an ancient Byzantine rug or a worn wound on
the sword of Henry IV.

Let us go back to what happened today and forgive me for
producing so much verbiage because this day was like every other day
save a little incident. You were scrutinizing the faces of the throng
that loitered in the hall, seeking the source of your next creative
fantasy. Sunshine crept across the rug, precisely outlined the shadows
of visitors, and tossed its last momentum on the corner of your frame,
a plausible peek.

Of course, the sun was boring too. You asked for thrills, asked to be
broken by a maniac, and wanted to see something novel that would
make you feel like hitting water when you were dead of heat and
anxious and irritated from chasing your dog in the summer bush–the
icy water that would submerge all your troubles and meanings in its
sudden depths. (I discovered this description by overhearing
conversations or stealing a glance from others’ cell phone texts– I
cannot remember the details). And so it came– about twenty minutes
before the museum closed, two men sallied into the hall as if in quest
of adventure, approaching you until you could detect their faint

breaths, a little nearer to you than most visitors were. And they
talked–

‘You wanna ask Emma for dinner I am not sure I don’t need to
Normally girls will have dinner with you when going somewhere a
little far but I am not all sure She is a bit quiet I can see they don’t talk
much since we came in Where are they now I don’t know probably on
the same floor Where do you want to eat later Thinking now I am near
broken better get a meal from somewhere reasonable At Fordham
you’ve got to swallow everything as the first year it’s like a damned
prep school Wanna eat out get ready for spending two hundreds each
week What line do you throw’em I’ve tried everything and the mad
wags don’t even pay attention to me What do you mean Emma likes
you in many ways I can tell so does Caroline Well I kind of like Emma
but not Caroline She is just somebody Emma has to be with Wait does
this painting remind you of somebody’

‘This painting? Serious?’

‘Yes, all of sudden it looks just like someone.’

‘Someone we know?’

‘I am talking about Emma.’

The boy gaped. He stood on your right, wearing moccasins that were
originally yellow, but after many applications of oil assumed their
mature color, a dirty greenish brown; a grape plaid coat loosely
shrouded him. “what is the angle?” He questioned, frowning.

Facing him, arms crossed on the chest, the other boy chuckled with
an excited, red face. His dark green trench coat could not conceal his
shape, rugged and vigorous, which braced the garment as football
shoulder pads would do. He chuckled, not talking.

‘Damn, you make the hair blonde, that is her.’

‘Sure, I’ll go tell her about this. She would love it and then we could
go for dinner.’

They swirled away from you, snickering, shoulder lines ecstatically
trembling. Both of them moved, thickly, with clumsy movements, in

a single figure more alike than actual brotherhood could have made
them.

The hall returned to reticence, filled with a bizarre air with dirt
glowing in the lights. The interlude passed quickly, but it stayed with
you because of the human desire, bare and unchanged like Adam and
Eve. They had never changed because they were made incessantly
curious and blunt to this world, this special, transient place for
humans. Watching those hot and honest souls, you were the reminder
of all those great things that had been done by them since the Fall.
Remembering their forgotten wonders, you saw them breathing and
falling in love. It seemed as if the red face was still in the hall, their
voices still rising and falling all together with the dirt that collided
and parted in the air. They left a room full of satirical air to us.

After their departure, you thought that the room was all wrong
(paintings and chairs and rugs all seemed strange to you now). You
never anticipated that they would reappear; you did not even know
what was wrong, why you felt weak but also peaceful. Time elapsed,
but it seemed to you that if you eyed the hall again you would still see
two of them snickering or by the entrance the identification of their
twin profiles. It was the first time you ever felt sleepy; everything
became unsubstantial but undertook some qualities that moved,
talked, fretted without us being sentient.

They would shut the hall soon. It was the staff toiling up and down
the stairs (my frame is just located by the stairs), just some faint
shadows falling upon the wall, but you weren’t aware if any had come.
Nor would you know if night had fallen and if any remnants of sun
mingled with the artificial light which they were about to turn off.

The boys once came in the afternoon with swaggering motions, and
now as it was almost dark, they came in a party of four with discreet
steps. You were enclosed by a terrible haste, some eyes groping, some
men breathing. You by no means could see them. They were only like
several glints by the dark horizons enclosing you. But given the angle
from my place, I could see them from the light of the janitor’s room.

What the hell is this Amory Well you asked for it now you see it for
yourself Emma is a lovely girl Her hands fumbled What do you mean

Amory She flushed almost as much as the boys did a while ago He
now just smiled with gentle eyes not talking The night was chill and
vibrant with tension A temperament ecstatic yet ugly suffused the hall
I don’t like girls in daytime but I like you You are unreal like this
drawing of Dürer I start to see you in everything So much sweet
darkness in the air so much lazy sweetness in my heart He now has
captured Emma’s face in his young heart Emma had to capitulate the
moment was too appropriate Their lips grazed like young flowers in
the night wind

Moonlight shone bright

Reward me a night like that

A song infinitely remorseful A song infinitely romantic yet pleading
nor for love but for the limited life span of humankind as though their
promising death was going to be the reward The other boy and the
other girl observed enviously They frowned and then smiled Emma
dropped her head on his shoulder Their image was like the foretaste
of their wonders in the future Have we stayed longer than we are
supposed to Yes they have shut the hall We’d better get out of here
before they lock it It’s quite horrible here Yeah so quiet that would
drive you mad Get out of here before it is too late I don’t want to sleep
with some pharaoh They had darkened to ghosts They briskly
sauntered out of the hall They would be back again You knew it too
though they might not find the mood as they had now but they would
come and go like Dürer drawing you brush by brush nights by days.

I know you are doleful. You even have the right to be angry. Your
face, which matters the most to you, Dürer, and all guests here, has
become a joke for Emma. I know what you feel, and therefore I have
to let you know I am sadder than you. I have to let you know that
despite cruel and infinite time you are the most beautiful woman and
have become my resort to live out the night. But I have to tell you by
a tongue that doesn’t exist as well as in a language that is spurious. It
is a joke as good as the one they told Emma. It has to be good, I reckon
that is how much it costs to be in love with you. My consciousness
now has returned to my niche, a hollow to hide in until the end of
time, remembering you and many other things, as I have imagined

your life, imagining more people are going to see you tomorrow, that
some better people are going to see you.

Leslie Lin, unmatriculated

Cornish Pastry

Long ago, deep in the valley of my misspent youth, a pub in
Oxford where I worked had customers who would tease me by asking
how much their drink would have cost in the old money. Decimal
money was so new that they couldn’t see it was easier than the system
they’d known their whole lives. They expected me not to know how to
convert. But I had a head for numbers and I did it instantly. Then they
might ask, joking, ‘And how much in dollars?’ I sometimes went to
a different pub to eat. This place did a brisk lunchtime trade. The
same two barmaids always handled food orders while barmen served
drinks. I would tell one barmaid that I wanted a Cornish pastry and
get a smirk in return. She would report my order to the other one,
imitating my accent, and the other would give the same smirk. I didn’t
mind good natured imitations of my accent. But this wasn’t good-
natured.

Maybe the third or fourth time it happened I said something,
but not to the barmaids. I spoke out of the side of my mouth to a
young woman seated on the barstool next to me. What I said included
an obscenity, so I turned to her to apologize. I saw that she would
have caught my notice under most circumstances. I hadn’t taken
much notice until then because I’d been thinking about the mockery
of the barmaids.

‘They’re not laughing because you’re a Yank,’ she said. ‘They
wonder if you can read.’ The food menu, written in chalk on a slate
the size of a dinner tray, stood propped against a beer pitcher in front
of us. She pointed.

‘There’s no “r,” luv. It’s “pasty,” not “pastry.”’

‘They might have told me,’ I said. ‘Instead of letting me look
stupid every time.’ She shrugged.

‘It’s important to have someone look stupid for you,’ she said.
‘Cass.’ I said, ‘Neil,’ and she said, ‘Tourist?’

Her wine glass was empty.

‘Get you a drink?’ I said.

She nodded and repeated her question. I said I’d overstayed my
tourist visa and was working illegally.

‘Trust me not to turn you in?’ she smiled. ‘Working where?’

I poured out my story: working in another pub, a street away,
and enjoying it more than I had the university back in California,
where I’d wasted two years. I said I loved England and wanted to stay
forever. I think the truth is that I loved drinking, but I didn’t
understand that yet. Because I was short of money, begging to be paid
to collect glasses from the tables and then moving behind the bar—
after an hour’s work, when a scheduled barman failed to appear—had
seemed as much a part of ‘exploring English culture’ as my
immediately preceding look around Oxford University, and before
that Stratford-upon-Avon and before that Coventry Cathedral. After
all the high-minded business, I had needed something low down like
working in a pub. I’d found my level with that.

I told Cass I had hoped to marry a girl named Sally so I could
stay in England. I said that Sally was a freckled redhead who had
talked endlessly about her A levels in a musical voice that supplied a
beauty missing from her looks. I had finally asked what A levels were
but I didn’t listen to her explanation. Sally saw that and cut it short to
invite me to tea to meet her parents. ‘They’ll like it that you’ve been
to university,’ she said, and I hoped she was right. I wouldn’t
understand how much Sally liked me until years later, when I recalled
that she’d let the following conversation pass without correcting me.

One A level would be in English Literature, so she was ‘swotting
up on George Eliot.’ ‘T.S.,’ I said. ‘You mean T.S. Eliot. But I haven’t
read him. I like novels.’ Sally kept secrets from her father and her
rose-growing mother. She always had a cigarette in her hand when
she was with me. They gave her a cough. She carried a spray bottle of
a citrusy perfume to camouflage the smell. She also carried a darker
secret.

‘Just had an abortion,’ she said after we’d been together for a
few days. She tilted her head toward her chest.

‘But the good I got out of it was these are much yummier now.’

Her father, who wore a tie to the table, had noticed the rip in
my trouser knee. ‘Slipped and fell coming out of his flat but didn’t
want to make us late by changing,’ Sally had said, covering for me and
also covering her mouth as she coughed.

‘Jack may need a plaster, dear,’ her father told his wife. ‘And
Sally a lozenge.’

I didn’t know how I’d torn my trousers. I was staying for free in
a house that was being prepared for remodelling. The ground floor
was torn up and there was no plumbing. I was upstairs, and only there
at night. To make up for the lack of plumbing, I would open a window.
The bank that Sally’s father managed had lent the money for the
remodel. He said the owners appreciated my ‘caretaking.’ His
invitation to ‘Call me Walter’ put me at ease even though he spoke in
a voice hedged with thorns that would never have accommodated a
lilt like the one in his daughter’s voice.

I fell out of ease when he began asking pointed questions about
when I would resume my studies. The next day Sally told me her
parents had concerns about the stability of my situation. But the
house in the country with the rose garden had impressed me. It
agreed with a certain idea I had of England that had nothing to do
with how I was living. I had probably gotten the idea out of books.

‘This just happen?’ Cass said. ‘The catastrophic meeting with
the parents?’ ‘Last week.’

‘And plain Sally: you loved her?’

She gave me no time to think. I suppose if I had loved Sally, I
wouldn’t have needed time. ‘That would be a bloody stupid reason
to get married,’ she said. ‘People expect a marriage to last, but love
can’t last because it’s really only the physical attraction of one animal
to another. Since we’re all animals, why should that physical
attraction be exclusive? Every reason in the world to cast your eyes
about, have them fall on some new chap, and think ‘I want that.’’ She
ran her finger around the rim of my empty pint mug.

‘My turn to buy,’ she said, and when I objected said, ‘I’ll get it
back when you pay me a hundred quid to marry me.’

That left me speechless.

‘Marriage is a farce,’ she said. ‘But I’m happy to take part for the
right price. Which would only be fifty quid if you were yummier.’

One of the barmaids brought my pasty. I realized that the
preparation had taken a long time. ‘Cow put up a fight when you
killed it?’ Cass said to her.

‘Sorry,’ the barmaid said. ‘Bit of chaos in the kitchen.’

‘Chaos of two cows going at each other,’ Cass said. ‘Should have
sold tickets.’ The barmaid glared at Cass. Then she eyed me.

‘He with you?’ she said to Cass. ‘Couldn’t pay me to watch.’

Laughing as the barmaid moved away, Cass touched my hand.

‘I’d pay less if you fancied me? So, you talking about a real
marriage?’ ‘Strictly business, luv,’ she said with a shake of her head.
‘Won’t be any conjugal bed.’ ‘Then why—’

‘Reputation, darling. Damaging to have it known that I’d
married an ugly bloke.’ She squeezed my hand.

‘Joking,’ she said. ‘You’re not bad, but I’d rather have a hundred
quid than fifty.’ I pulled my hand away. I stabbed the pasty to give it
a chance to cool off. ‘Hundred quid’s a couple of months’ wages.’

‘Work the till at your pub, don’t you?’ Cass said. ‘Handle money
all night long?’ I blew on the pasty.

‘Then you’ve got the keys to the kingdom,’ she said.

I looked up at her. She was studying the pasty.

She wrinkled her nose and said, ‘Light on the beef, heavy on the
onion.’

I won’t pretend that my guilt is mitigated by the fact that I’d
never stolen from the till before Cass put the idea in my head. She put
the idea there, but I didn’t have to let it grow. I chose to let it to take
root in the fertile soil of my brain and to water it regularly. I watered
it with every shift, and because my success during every shift made it
plain that there was nothing to it, with every shift I watered a little
more. There was nothing to it because the pub where I worked was

popular, with as many as half a dozen of us needed behind the bar on
the busiest evenings. If I’d been handed a ten-pound note at the far
end of the bar from the till, it was the easiest thing in the world to ring
up one pound when the order ought to have cost five. The customer
would get his five quid in change, but four of the five quid meant for
the till would slip into my pocket. Cass and I had arranged to meet
again in the pub with the oniony pasties a week after our first meeting.
Our idea had been to check in so she could see how I was doing with
the fiddling. But the day before that scheduled second meeting, she
left a note with my boss. She would be out of town for a few days, so
could we meet the following week?

I was excited rather than disappointed. I would be able to tell
her that accumulating her hundred quid had been no problem. I had
sailed well over. Not that I was planning to say you can have two
hundred if you want it, just ask. She had said one hundred and a deal
was a deal. But I was proud of myself and I wouldn’t have felt safe
telling that to anyone else. #

She was sitting on the same stool as when I’d met her. Before I
could speak, one of the barmaids caught my eye.

‘Cornish pastry?’ she sneered.

‘Cornish pastry,’ I sneered back, trying to sound Texan.

Cass reacted matter-of-factly to my mastery of theft.

‘Nice for you to have a few hundred quid on hand,’ she said. ‘But
we agreed to a hundred.’ She sipped the cloudy yellow liquid in her
glass.

She had seemed friendlier at our first meeting. Perhaps she’d
already had a couple of drinks when I met her. I remembered that our
arrangement was to be strictly business, as she’d said. ‘Then we just
get a marriage license and find a justice of the peace?’ I said. ‘That’s
it?’ She set her Pernod and water on the bar. She turned toward me.

‘More to it than that,’ she said. ‘Gets nasty, you want to stay.
Bloke in a room with the husband, another in a room with the wife.
Same sorts of questions for both of them. Wife might be asked does
the husband like his meat rare, what drawer does he keep his socks

in. . .’ I smiled at that. I owned one pair of socks. The house that was
due for a remodel—I’d started to think it would never happen—had
no dresser and no drawers. I’d been telling myself every morning that
I ought to buy another pair, but every afternoon I would forget. Before
going to bed I would drape the socks over the windowsill. By morning,
the air had freshened them up. ‘We’ll work out a script,’ she said.
‘Separated, but trying to reconcile.’ She leaned closer. I smelled the
anise on her breath.

‘Sell it by giving them more than they’ve bargained for.
Volunteer some intimate details.’ She tilted forward until our heads
almost touched.

‘Have to agree on the details, though,’ she whispered. ‘Will need
rehearsing.’ I sat up straight.

‘You saying you’ll sleep with me after all?’

The barmaid delivered my pasty at that moment, but I’d kept
my voice low. ‘Sleep if you like,’ Cass said. ‘Might interfere with my
plans, though.’

She glanced at the pasty.

‘Scarf that thing and you’ll breathe onion all over my bed. You
wouldn’t rather have steak and kidney pie? Ones here aren’t so
oniony.’

‘Can’t make myself eat internal organs,’ I said. ‘Although liver’s
worse than kidney.’ I moved my lips close to hers.

‘Your breath’s lovely,’ I said. ‘Think I’ll have Pernod too.’

I looked for a barman. Busy.

‘Can we go to your place? Like I told you, mine’s a bit rough.’

‘But your place is closer,’ she giggled. ‘And you think I can’t
handle rough?’ She nodded over my shoulder. I turned and saw that
one of the barmen was free. I called out, ‘Pernod here.’

‘You sure?’ Cass said. ‘Get you drunk in a hurry on an empty
stomach, that will.’ ‘Dead cert,’ I said.

I loved the drinking but I also loved the slang. I wanted to soak
up both the alcohol and the slang like a sponge. With a wife—a real
wife—I would have years ahead of me to do both.

When I woke up the next morning in my bed in my miserable
bare room in the house that was due for a remodel some time before
the end of the century, I was alone. Worse, I was fully dressed. I had
slept in my shoes. My fault, I thought: she’d warned me about the
Pernod. But she had said we would need to rehearse for the
immigration chaps, so there would be other chances. After a few
minutes I felt steady enough to stand up. The room took a couple of
spins but then stopped. My first thought was that I needed to get out
for a bite to eat and a proper loo. It was daylight, so an open window
wouldn’t do. I felt for money in my pockets, but they were empty.
Strange, I thought.

Then I had another thought. I lifted my mattress and saw that
there was nothing underneath.

I’d slept late, so the pub with the oniony pasties was open. One
of the barmaids was there. ‘You want your Cornish pastry now; it’ll
have to be cold.’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘You know how I might find the girl who was here
with me yesterday?’ ‘Tallish-shortish thing, darkish-lightish hair?
Smallish-smallish bristols?’ ‘You know what she looks like. You see
her, you’d remember.’

The barmaid sighed.

‘Not local. Here a few weeks for the scenery, perhaps, could be
gone with the wind now. You had a walk around the university, Yank?
Lovely old buildings there.’

Don Stoll, unmatriculated

White Pelican Migrations: Thoughts on Nature and the Movement
of Time

At first it was a rare occurrence, that a majestic white pelican
would deign to visit our shores in winter, providing weekend
photographers with a thrill. However, after a few seasons of
increasing numbers, we found ourselves with upwards of eight birds
each year, preening, fishing, and extending their massive wingspans
in the sunlight of January. The sight of them is always a joy, and no
small mystery, owing to our ideal Southern California climate. To my
mind, their arrival unfolds like a dream, a choreographed dance of
winter, which brings to mind the movements of time, as well as the
persistence of nature.

Interestingly, they breed in the interior regions of the continent,
before making their way to coastal enclaves for the winter. The
American white pelican (pelecanus erythrorhynchos) is a large
aquatic bird, recognizable by its black feathers (which are visible in
flight) and the massive beak with which it siphons water, obtaining
rich caches of fish and other organisms. We know them not only for
their graceful movements on the ocean, but also for the elegant
soaring that carries them, tracing their silhouetted formations across
the sky. They delight us with a sense of intrigue. Like the passing of
years—the way in which decades creep by nearly without notice—
these birds have multiplied for us, over a number of winter seasons,
only to disappear into the arrival of spring, as the mood strikes
them—there and gone, turning like the pages of history. However,
their existence with the human population can make this dance of
seasons a bit treacherous for them, even deadly at times.

Not long ago, distraught park visitors reported seeing a pelican
struggle as a fishing line—complete with a recently caught fish—
constricted the bird’s beak and throat, keeping it bound with little
hope of breaking free. In situations like this, expert bird rescue
services are the only option, as white pelicans are far too large for a
casual attempt at containment. Sadly, the pelican disappeared from
view before we could arrange for its capture. In light of this
unfortunate occasion, I began to reflect on the movements of nature
and their relationship to the passing events and seasons of each life.

It was around this time that I decided to research pictures of my
childhood home online.

I had sold the place to a developer some years earlier, a large
plot in an ideal location with a house desperately in need of repair, as
the years had not been kind to it. Built in the suburbs of Los Angeles
in 1957—for a newly prosperous post-war generation—the structure
was transformed into a gleaming example of architecture, an upscale
“dream house” nestled in the foothills, ready for the entrance of a
well-heeled new owner. After the developer performed his
remodelling task, and put the residence up for sale, it sold for nearly
a million dollars. Tragedy. Now, a modest California home is out of
reach for most families, creating a diminished standard of living in a
country still thought to be “wealthy.”

Back in 1969, when my parents purchased it, the place was an
ordinary residence for the hardworking upper-middle class, those
who had laboured to build the post-war economy and were thus able
to reap benefits. To my mind, the property was no more or less than
a modest example of the American Dream, as we once knew it. Little
did we realize that it was the twilight of a fascinating age, an era of
prosperity which would soon give way to strange times indeed, and a
period of decline. In some ways, the memory of those years, and their
departure, strikes me as resembling the discontinuity of a dream—
and its hazy interruptions of an otherwise uneventful sleep. These
images are interesting to ponder. However, this stroll down memory
lane has been rather jarring and bumpy and reminds me that it’s time
to return to work and the demands of the day. Yet, my curiosity
remains.

As pelicans glide across the lake, pausing to stretch their wings
across outcroppings of rock, I drive the adjacent dirt road and
wonder. As one of my colleagues once noted, the days often seem
to crawl slowly, in agonizing fashion, while the years sprint by to our
amazement.

Now that a standing invitation has been extended, and the white
pelicans arrive each year en-masse, I am reminded of the present
moment and its urgency. Maintaining their habitat and educating the
public about their needs is the priority of the day. If the past is sweet

to the nostalgic, the present and future are demanding. Although the
elegant birds seem a bit ethereal as they move before us, mimicking
choreographed dances of memory (my own and the collective
memory of the post post-war generation) the times ahead insist that
the dream must end, and give way to another form of awakening.

It’s true that certain interludes pass quickly, often without
notice, like the afternoon hours our pelicans enjoy on the water. Other
expressions of time, however, fall like a blade, severing a long
continuum of years in one blow. How strange that so many seasons
of life spent in a single location—perhaps a family home or an old,
familiar neighbourhood—plod on interminably, only to end with a
stroke of the pen when the sale is finalised, and one drives away for
the last time. In an instant, the old family home is gone. It’s odd and
somewhat comforting, how the years begin and end with their own
elegance, much like the movements of nature embrace our memories.

Allison Palmer, unmatriculated

My Son is Sometimes Wise

I guess that during our absence in February, whilst engaged half-
heartedly in Peace Corp endeavours to eradicate malaria in Manilla –
it was, after all, like a free holiday –America had moved out of
Vermont, as it had most states.

The idea of the place, I mean; its thingness.

My husband at the time announced during our road trip to find it,
that he might have caught a glimpse of America hidden behind a
bandana in a box canyon in Utah, busy spewing bullshit and wearing
a MAGA hat. It was more likely to be drinking herbal tea in Maine,
our son suggested, or wearing a PETA tee, worried for the future. I
thought it might be found in an empty factory, or in a busy bland
church, or in a diabetes clinic. In unaccountable corporate
headquarters, my then husband whispered. He called the suits,
‘Fascist fuckers.’ (He had a way with words.) A pharmaceutical plant,
my son wondered, might offer traces.

My husband at the time suggested we might catch its fragmented eye
if we simply looked the other fragile way, which is when he saw from
the corner of his eye our son steal the gun from a bound police officer
in Key West. On a whim. What can you do? Truth be told, his father
had become a liability, too scared to follow through. As he lectured
our son in a coffee shop in Austin about the stealing of guns, and I
saw our boy look blank, ask what was for dinner, I knew I’d have to
clip the old man sooner rather than later. He was cramping our son’s
stupidity and ambition. When your partner begins to speak of ethics
through broken teeth, you’re headed to misery, and who wants a
sourpuss in bed?

Anyhow, in April, a day or so after his father disappeared, before my
son and his widowed mother decided to move into what you might
loosely term the banking business, we set off, he with the pox and
pills, me with the keys and bills, he full of legends, me with a love of
bugs, and we drove around the whole country in a hire car we forgot
to pay for, fake plates and new wheels, stolen credit cards (‘Ms
Martinez?’ ‘Yes, ma’am, that is I.’ ‘It’s declined.’ ‘Try this one!’ ‘Mr

Cohen?’ ‘Pleased to meet ya!’) and no matter how hard we couldn’t be
bothered to search, we were unable, though my son said we were
more unwilling, to find the damned country anyplace we barely cared
to look. Maybe his father had been right, which would have been a
shame, though more likely he was wrong, which is how I’d prefer to
think of him, but either way it was too late to tell him.

A bullet is a blessing, pleasing as pilgrimage.

*

We’re a game got out of hand.

In early July, in a place that smelled German, the last day I can swear
with any certainty to have been wholly sober, I told the limping
investigative journalist with the toupee how my son is sometimes
wise, though every indication suggests otherwise. I should try at least,
I told his recorder, to remember that when my son suggests we scurry
home, there to stay uninfected by a perplexing world, he’s probably
talking a lot of sense.

‘Won’t you be arrested back in America?’ the journalist asked. I
explained how a lot had happened since we fled the place we could
not find, but it was conceivable being detained by people burdened
by ideas above their station was just another of those things doomed
to happen.

‘You mean you’ve no free will? You sound positively European!’ he
sneered.

For an instant I thought about bottling him for pretensions of
radicalism – you don’t wear a revolutionary tee if you’ve any
authenticity – and maybe that’s why he produced a bottle of whiskey.
To feel edgy or to arm me, I couldn’t care less.

‘He’s trying to distract you, Mom,’ my son said, bored on the bed,
locked to his phone as ever. ‘It’s not a peace offering.’

‘I’ll drink the booze then bottle him,’ I said.

The journalist being the only one who laughed.

My son took a picture.

‘Don’t hashtag the fuck out of this,’ I told him, while the German came
in his pants. ‘I ain’t Bonnie. The kid ain’t Clyde,’ I reminded the
journalist.

‘What does your work mean?’ he asked.

‘Mean?’ I asked.

‘This interview is over!’ my son shouted, and began to juggle the
pistol.

During that owlish episode, holed up in Düsseldorf, my son caught up
with me one evening as I was busy smoking a journalist’s fat cigar on
a metal fire escape in a hotel and planning a solo side trip to Slovakia,
because the name sounded strange, like honeycomb tempura. Said
he’d had a thought about the calamitous event that led us to that
hotel, and the not very radical journalist (owning a keffiyeh doesn’t
make you a liberator). How the disappearance of his father obligated
us to learn a new trade by dint of that bank robbery, which in turn
drove us to Vegas, and how the heist at the casino led to a first-class
trip to Africa and a city whose name we found appealing. Winning the
Kenyan lottery doesn’t change you, it’s the hangers-on that tip you
over edges, he said. Leaving Africa to fly to Europe under false names,
stealing a French taxi, concussing a concierge and robbing a
restaurant of its langoustines, blowing up a brewery in Belgium, well,
just because, we grew a social media following. And along with
wanted posters and all the Interpol interest, we were offered lucrative
endorsement deals. We were invited to a party in Liechtenstein, and
a modelling shoot in Andorra. Given we managed to offend nobody
that mattered, having only murdered three IG influencers (and let me
tell you, it was hard to find a brain between them in which to place a
bullet), I guess we were famous, which is how in the first place that
journalist recognised us during the liberation of llamas from the
abusive farm in Austria. We took the one animal too dumb to run
away.

‘I really admire you work,’ the journalist said chasing after us. As if
we were an art project. When he spoke, I was reminded of grit and
hot formaldehyde.

‘What is he talking about?’ I asked my son as he sat on the llama.

‘He’s a fan.’

‘Here’s the address of a hotel,’ the journalist said as we paused at a
crossroads, ‘I’ll meet you there in five days. Bring the llama.’

We stole a van tall enough for the llama and drove to Germany,
stowed both in nearby woods.

On the fire escape at the hotel, my son said, ‘I want to go home, where
there are no langoustines or llamas,’ and I hadn’t the heart to tell him
the word was full of such creatures. To encourage my son to shut up,
I explained how the longest beetle in the world is over six inches long.

Well, you can imagine.

Later that evening, once the police had left to search the woods next
to Gut Dyckhof, a silence settled over my son, and his homesickness
stung my eyelids. In our room, we ate smuggled-in shrimp burritos.
We did our best, I’d guess, to moisten the hush with chew. After one
bite, and despite not eating all day, the pappy food repelled me.
Germany is not famous for burritos. I went to pour a glass of water
from the supply in the refrigerator in the next room, and given out of
sight is out of his mind, my son assumed, as he always does, that what
he saw was his. When I returned still thirsty, he had taken possession
of the leftover food. It’s never about hunger with him, just the having.
You don’t reach 285lbs without a degree of trepidation at
encountering the merit of ownership before dismissing it out of my
hand.

‘The beetle?’ he prompted. I handed him fresh towels and pillows not
damp from a son’s snoot, a wallet, too, quite a nice one, and odd
socks, a SLR camera, and a pair of basketball shoes which seemed
about his size, all of which I discovered in the next room. I tossed him
some complimentary biscuits and the content of the fridge bar. I
couldn’t make myself heard above his appetite.

He came to stand behind me. ‘Did you hear?’ but I was remembering
how wise he was, and that he didn’t mean to shoot the journalist, and
the fellow, let’s assume, did not intend to be shot by a wise son
juggling a revolver. The German wanted our story, which is a kind of
stealing, and hardly radical. It’s just that things spiral. No one ever
means them. To be wise takes effort. Or as my son put it when we
escaped that amusing first robbery in Arkansas with half a million,
‘Now we can afford to be criminally inept, and never held to account.’
And when he ran over the dog as he drove away, he said we were living
the American dream, no matter would couldn’t pin it down.

‘Six inches,’ I reminded my son as we moved our bags into an
unoccupied room on a higher floor with a better view of the woods
and boasting an untouched fridge.

When the German police came back to ask us about the missing left-
wing journalist (I mean, how can an anarchist even claim to belong to
a political party?) they only thought to search our floor; why, we
might as well have vanished.

‘I’m hungry,’ he complained as we watched the police drive bluely
away. So I went to the kitchen in the basement and took cheese, some
knives, and crackers, some wine for him, beers for me, boots
belonging to a bellboy and a lascivious novel translated from the
Arabic. I liked the sordid pictures and the sadness in the man’s eyes.

You’d have to ask my son whether the burritos tasted good.

Good luck with that.

‘The longest fly? Two inches.’

Now that journalist, he shouldn’t have startled my son with a frantic
dance of pain. The scientific study of involuntary movements isn’t
new, but my son is not the studying type. It wasn’t the next shot that
did for the fellow, either, let me tell you, but it was probably the fifth.
I guess the word is riddled, but in German, who can be bothered to
know? They hadn’t found the journalist’s body by the time we left.
(‘Puff piece, indeed,’ my son had sighed.) No matter how many
trenches they dig, I do believe they will not discover anything, unless
they should happen to examine tree tops and crows. It is an old trick
we’d learned from his father. If you know what I mean.

‘Thrip? Half an inch,’ I told him as we collected the llama.

‘We should get out of Germany,’ he said, poking his belly, as if his
weight was my fault.

He didn’t work at being wise. In fact, a visitor selling cosmetics door
to door might assume him a moron. Wouldn’t be the first time.
There’s a long line of morons willing to claim him as their own. Maybe
there’s a fraternity.

‘We should head south,’ he announced, then asked me to never again
steal prawn burritos. They were too stricken and salty.

‘A female stonefly lays a thousand eggs–’ I began but the evening had
spiralled away like cream in coffee, filling the woods with played out
weariness. The van wouldn’t start. He handed me the binoculars.

‘Look,’ he told me. ‘They’re searching the wrong field.’

‘Let’s steal a Mercedes, we’re in Germany after all, then find a horse
box. Let’s go to Spain. Where the omelettes come from.’

‘Only if you promise to stop inventing insects.’

You see? He comes from a long line of morons, the finest in America.

*

My son stands knee deep in the Río Miño, facing an August ocean. I
hunch atop tawny Santa Tecla, looted binoculars hanging heavy. I
keep a low profile on top of the hill, take the opportunity of his
absence. He’s down there at my insistence to scout river and its sea
shore for a crossing. I know the name of the place a river bank
opening to the sea becomes a shore as well as I do the raising of a boy.

The Atlantic seems about as calm as it will ever be, its green and
white waves appealing on an arid day. Resinous pines make my nose
stuffy, at odds with the wind and cerulean sky. I taste salt and sand.
Like as not we’ll move a little upriver to mitigate the swirl of tide
pushing inland, the flow of water heading out. Crossing where its
shallow makes more sense than risking the river mouth. There are a

few buildings on the Portuguese side, woodlands, campsites, easy
pickings.

Through the binoculars I see him rub both ears as if holding in his
thoughts. My son is no doubt calculating the odds of surviving a direct
swim to the stone fort on the island off the coast. It likely has a name
but I choose not to know it. The fort will be easier to reach from the
silt and pine Portuguese side, rather than from where we wait in
Spain. The fort looks old but boasts good defensive positions.

When a police siren sounds from the north, I wipe my ass and grab
the llama, buckle up, then jog down the south side of the mountain to
join my son. It’s hot work, pulling a llama boasting only half a mind
of its own, and by the time we wrestle to the river, my son in his
dimmest wisdom has decide to set off from where he paddled. When
I spot him, he is half way across the wide river. I kick at his clothes
and shoes. Looking back at me, he waves.

‘What the fuck do I do with the llama?’ I shout.

I can see his broad brown-shoulder shrug before he turns and swims
away. I traipse upriver a few hundred metres. In the distance I see he
just about reaches the Spanish side, having almost been pulled into
the ocean. He clings to the last rock in the river. This is probably a
metaphor or perhaps just him. On the wind I hear faint falsetto traces
of his singing The Polyphonic Spree.

‘He gives flotsam the appearance of intelligence,’ I tell the llama, but
it ignores me, eats god knows what, its ears back to its head. Its whole
white body groans.

*

Your average llama is barely able to float.

Our borrowed beast is barely ordinary, being keen as my son to eat
every blasted thing. It bounces mindlessly into the river before my
weight around its neck alarms it, then it panics. It’s a dumb thing, and
tries to climb on my shoulders. It attempts to bite me but I nip it first.

Three quarters of the way across the river my son appears, long hair
lank, dark eyes reddened, and together we pull the llama behind us¬,
dragging it into Portugal before we’re asked unanswerable questions
by tourists. A traumatised llama isn’t particularly able to express its
appreciation, so we grab from its back what we can from our bags
before it flounces toward the river again, it being barely brighter than
my son. It shakes itself, loosens our luggage, which become like a
feedbag from which it consumes our stuff. We watch as it heads
upstream with our bags, chewing on things that used to be ours.

‘It ate our passports,’ my son says, raising then lowering his arms, as
if he’s about to fly.

‘Forta de Ínsua!’ I say, pointing at the fort. ‘That’s the fucker’s name.’

‘Do I have to swim back to fetch my clothes?’ he asks.

The river’s blue crepe paper, the sky agate. A boring paradise, full of
brown bodies, boats, and a pissed llama eating documentation and
several thousand dollars’ worth of weird European currencies.

‘It isn’t easy being a mother,’ I tell him, in all seriousness.

*

In the end, about sunset on that August day, the llama drops dead in
the Río Miño, although, given we had made it to Portugal, it should
by rights be called the Río Minho.

No good comes from a llama eating your belongings, including
pouching a handgun. I’m guessing its tongue spooned the trigger.
Boom! went the top of its head, and suddenly it’s llama-ness had
gone, bequeathing the river its carcass. An ignominious end. We had
come a long way, me, my son, the llama and gun, airport security in
those days being rare as the legendary Saint Helena earwig, which at
three inches long, you’d think would be as hard not to see as a Taurus
TCP 738 .380-calibre handgun hidden in counterfeit Gucci hand
luggage. But right there’s inadequacy for you.

‘The white witch moth has a wing-span of twelve inches,’ I say,
sculling across to Forta de Ínsua on a paddleboard.

‘Did the llama commit suicide?’ he wonders.

‘Let’s pardon ourselves. We’re all good. You’re old enough to know
about your father–’

‘I loved that gun,’ he moans, wiping his face of sea, leaving his heroic
history in our wake. ‘I think I know where America is.’

‘Shift your weight to the middle, else we’ll capsize.’

‘Maybe there’s a direct flight from Porto?’ he suggests. ‘I miss
American pizza.’

Anyway. I loved the llama. But that is how we came to agree we might,
after all, go settle in Milwaukie where it’s quietly familiar. In this life,
my son has taught me, we are all stowaways in search of new
passports with fake identities. As long as your wallet is full, he says,
the future is just a heap of eager.

Tony Osgood, SSPSSR