He stood in the lobby at the elevator doors, as he had on so many countless occasions before, Watching impatiently as the flashing numbers showed its rate of descent and cursing silently each time a solid light indicated that it was stopping at another floor. The fact that such a small hindrance stressed him so much was another source of annoyance. A further example of the human condition colliding with the modern world and making life more difficult than it needed to be. There was nothing natural about it. Primitive man had never spent time stressed out over the speed of an elevator. He absentmindedly stroked the long knot of scar tissue that ran down the from beneath his left eye to his chin. Five. It was stuck on five again. The front door of the building opened behind him and the pretty girl from Fairbanks Incorporated on floor ten entered. Most people kept a wary distance when they caught sight of his scar. Strangers were often reticent to share an elevator with him if they were on their own. The Fairbanks girl included. The first time he clapped eyes on her he observed how she slowed her pace upon seeing him standing in the elevator. A barely perceptible moment where she had considered turning on her heel and walking away. But his best gregarious smile and the fact that he held one hand between the doors to keep them open had persuaded her to climb on in. Reluctantly. It suited him that way. People made assumptions about his scar. He had worn it for so long now that he had become accustomed to the stares. They didn’t bother him in the least. In fact, if he searched the facial features of people when they first noticed him he could almost tell what they were thinking. Someone must have tried to kill him with a shank in prison. I’ll bet that he got it in a gang fight. Probably some kind of motorcycle accident. Riding without a helmet. He looked like the type that could be that reckless. It couldn’t possibly be anything to do with surgery. People only had surgery on their face to make themselves younger looking. Prettier. Never to make themselves look meaner. Sometimes they stared at him as if only the scar existed and not its owner. Recently while riding the subway to Union Square a kid sitting on its mother’s lap had pointed at him.
Ivy Moon By Sophie McNaughton
I clumsily stumbled off the train into the frosty, crispy air of Glasgow Central Station after my gruelling nightshift. My feet ached, my eyes were stinging and I was yawing with practically every breath. I couldn’t wait to cut through Thomson Street alley, to avoid the Christmas shopping hysteria in the city centre, get back to my flat, make some hot chocolate and climb into my lumpy old bed.
After buying a black coffee and a new pack of cigarettes, I eventually managed to squirm out of the crowded buzzing station and took the shortcut home. Thomson Street alley was quite wide and cobbled with a few charity shops and a crumbling old café that was in dire need of a facelift. I pulled on my woolly gloves and hugged my arms to my shivering body as I paced down the alley with fresh snow crunching under my warm boots. As I turned at the bend later in the alley, I stopped short to see a brand new shop. I had walked through the winding path only the day before and in the spot where the new shop now stood, there was merely a brick wall. I couldn’t understand how an entire shop could have been built and ready for business overnight. Had I just never noticed it before?
It was a small bookshop, decorated with pale blue paint that was peeling around the edges of the roughcast walls. Vines of flowers crawled up the structure into the guttering, strangling the little cottage. A sign above the glass door in an Old English script read: Ivy Moon Bookshop.
Will Tree Roots Damage My House? By Natalie Bowers
As Daniel sits and opens his laptop, Ruth takes a sip from her well-earned glass of white and looks at the little oak tree that has planted itself in the flowerbed at the bottom of the garden. Against the darkening sky, its leaves look almost black. From where they’re seated on the patio, the swaying of its branches makes the stars behind them seem as if they’re really twinkling.
‘It says here that some species of oak tree can grow up to two-and-a-half feet in a year.’ His eyes still on the screen, Daniel reaches for his beer, but before he can knock it over, Ruth slides it across the table and into his grasp. His lips quirk acknowledgement, and after taking a long draught, he peers over the top of his glasses at the tree. ‘What is it now … eight feet tall?’
Exclusive Member Story: Thalia By Patrick Sagaram
The muse comes to me on a Saturday morning, while I am in bed, tucked underneath the covers, luxuriating in waves of sleep. She tries descending on me in a dream, but since her attempts at poking through my unconsciousness are unsuccessful, she glares at me through slivers of sunshine, rousing me awake.
I’m ready for you to write me, she says.
But it’s still early, I tell her drowsily. Not now. You better come back later. So she did. About forty-five minutes later that morning when I’d finally gotten out of bed, washed up and peered into the fridge, looking for milk and eggs only to find what looked like two cloves of wrinkled garlic.
I’m ready now, she says. Write. Now.
The Weight of a Feather By C. Joseph Greaves
1.
When they quit the highway at Variadero, the countryside opened and the old Ford yawed on the graded washboard, sending ravens flapping and squawking before their rattling dustcloud.
A half-hour later, their progress metered by stunted cedars and silted arroyos, by chollas and cattleguards and glimpses of the distant river, they reached a gate.
“Bell Ranch,” the driver explained, mopping his face with a shirtsleeve.
He turned to the Indian, impassive in his tweed coat and polished brogans.
“I’ll get it.”
Beyond the gate, the ranch road straightened, parting a low, rolling landscape of blanched hardpan and telescopic mesas. They passed the remnants of a cattle chute, shipwrecked and listing, and a creaking windmill in whose shadow cows had gathered to loll in flickering somnolence.
When they topped the next rise, the driver braked the car and leaned and spat through the settling dust.
“There she is.”
The Indian straightened. Below them lay a canyon. A jagged suture of cottonwoods. New buildings, clustered in a clearing.
“What do you think about all of this?” he asked the driver.
“What, the feather?”
“No, not the feather. The dam.”
The driver was a young cowhand with sharp sideburns. He thumbed his hatbrim, scratching absently at his scalp.
“Well sir, I don’t rightly know. Jobs is jobs, I reckon. And Lord knows, we need the jobs.”
No Choice, But Chosen By Ayalla Buchanan
My name is Annabell. Like my mother, and her mother before that. Generations of Annabells, stretching behind me. The year is 2125, and the outside world is in ruins. Next week will mark my sixteenth year, and so tomorrow I will report for genetic placement. They say it is designed to ensure happiness, but all it really seems to ensure is limitations.
My door slides open. The hydraulics no longer squeal. It reminds me to wonder what will happen to my room after I’m gone. It reminds me to think of the brother I lost, who was transferred to the Maintenance Sector, and whose features I share. My mother stands in the doorway in her purple Domestic Sector dress. She is holding the gown I must wear to be placed. Its rainbow of colours is supposed to represent possibility, but all I see is empty promises.
“I wore this when I was tested,” she says. And I know it’s coming. The speech. I roll my eyes. “There used to be disharmony. The people were in disarray, before The Authority created this haven from the outside. The Authority is always present. They know what is best—“
“Do they?”
“Don’t interrupt me. Tomorrow you are to go to Corridor Delta Nine in the Authority Sector, and from there you will be tested. Do you have any questions?”
I take my chance. It might be the last time I see my mother. “What’s outside?”
“You know what’s outside.”
“I know what they’ve told us is outside. What do you think is outside?”
Fragment of a love story, recovered By Kevin Connelly
No more than the following fragments were ever found, as if a tiny piece of pottery must needs reveal to us the whole.
…so they would be safe. However, as we think it will be is not always how it transpires. More was expected of him, being older. Strange then that such foolishness came from him, not from her.
She could see all the dangers, the perils behind them illuminated for her the dangers in the ways forward. The whirlpool of passionate love swallowed her in deep. Such reason as she at first tried to apply was soon swept away. Together they would go wherever, do whatever, escape however. Together they would be, forever.
In their time of troubles, in the making of them, she was not entirely innocent. Jealous gossips later said it was pride in her own great beauty drove her to such extremes. No woman they said, could be so unaware of her own beauty as to be senseless of it’s effects on others, no woman…
