Books And Fiction
Quick Reads
We all have aspirations by Brian Cruickshank
The tiger silently made its way through the tangled undergrowth and dense foliage of the jungle, intent on finding an unsuspecting prey. Keeping as close to the ground as possible, it somehow managed to bend its muscular body around the leaves and stems of the plants and bushes as it moved along.
Deeper and deeper into the jungle it went, seemingly knowing where it was heading. Approaching a clearing, it stopped to survey the area from behind an enormous leaf that trailed onto the jungle floor.
The tiger had happened upon this place before and luckily, as on the previous occasion, a small, unshaven man, obviously lost and desperate for food, sat there fishing at the pool.
There was no time to waste. The element of surprise was vital. The tiger readied itself, took one last look around and then leapt forth from its hiding place. The man had no warning, no time to react. The tiger was like a missile, launched and heading straight for him. Its extended claws lashed out at his body. He tried to protect himself with his fishing rod, but it was hopeless. The force behind the tiger's leap knocked him over, and the pair rolled around on the ground in the frenzied, one-sided attack.
Soon it was all over. The man's body lay motionless on its side covered from head to toe in deep scratches. His attacker looked down at the scene with satisfaction, but apparently unsure of what to do next. Then there was a noise, a call, distant at first, bur growing ever louder.
"Felix, where are you? Breakfast!" the woman called again. The cat jumped out from behind a bush at the back of the flowerbed and sped past the woman on its way to the open kitchen door.
That garden gnome could wait another day!
On the Doorstep by Liz Williamson
Lillian didn't see the slug on the doorstep. She stood on it. It squelched beneath her twenty one stones, all on the sole of her comfort loafer, as she swung her leg out from the rubbing flesh of her thighs and onto the flat plane of the porch.
Lillian sponged her face and arms in the downstairs loo and ran a facecloth under her armpits. The damp rings around the armholes of her black shift dress would dry to a hardened crackle of the day's perspiration. She would wash it and hang it, wet and gleaming, to dry overnight. She stroked the synthetic material stretched over her bust like a second skin.
It was later that she saw the traces on the hall tiles. Prone to hysteria and revelling in it when she could, Lillian screamed. Being alone, there was no point, so she stopped. With a huff she hunkered down and stared at the stain. She felt the bile rising in her throat. She swallowed. With a hand to the wall she prised herself upright and followed the tracks to the doorstep.
'Now I shall have to get a man in.'
Her first call was to Alan next door, but there was no answer.
Ben had made her welcome at the Centre for Lifestyle Change last week. Not all the staff had been so sympathetic.
'I'm so sorry to bother you, but it's just that they give me the heebie-jeebies!' Lillian giggled girlishly. 'Anything else I can cope with. I have to, you know, being on my own.'
Ben would find out over the coming months just how big a lie that was.
Alan, who already knew how little Lillian could cope with being on her own, kept the lights off for the rest of the afternoon. At dusk he slunk out of the back door in his wife's coat, which he dropped in the mud of the side passageway, a full house width away from Lillian's window, before loudly re-entering his home through the front door. He needn't have bothered.
Lillian wasn't looking through her nets for Alan. She was sitting on Ben's knee, her body moulding to the contours of him and the chair he perched on, twirling her fingers through what was left of his hair. She was pleased. She didn't like hairy men.
'I think I like slugs now,' she whispered, leading Ben along the still damp tiles to the bedroom. 'They have brought us together.' And she clamped the small man firmly to her chest.
In the months that followed Ben developed a phobia for slugs and other fat and fleshy creatures. Lillian distributed pellets around the garden and chuckled at her lover's new-found sensitivity.
In the end Ben had no choice but to grind up the slug pellets and bake them into Lillian's birthday cake. He left it on her doorstep in the morning as a surprise. Of course she ate it all herself. He knew she would.
Tyger by Morelle Smith
Tyger padded through my dreams, following its own path, not even glancing in my direction, clad in the glossy striped skin of its own freedom.
It did not fix its hunter's eyes on me, it did not even see me, it was following its freedom, yet I had this feeling that its freedom was on its way to me, I had the thought that it was looking for me, sniffing the bright January air that still has wisps of sky in it, from sunrise, all these late ribbons of sunrise colour, caught in the windy morning air, like ribbons on the empty trees.
The wild air and the cloud threads and the layers of pale colours, banked behind the trees like cloth bales on a shelf - yellow, pink, turquoise - they are all saying something, and the scent and touch and sound of this air in the trees with its traces of where it's been and its ragged journey on to wherever it is going, it is talking in its fierce language, its soothing language.
Within this rhythm we can listen to the wind, to birdsong, to the dips and circling tones of water, and we know what it is saying.
That's the way the tyger moved. He was listening to the rhythm. I stood apart from him, watching his movement, focussed on him, totally possessed by him. He was looking for me. Why else would he have walked through my door? This wild creature, with his rhythm and his path, and the scent of morning air, bringing him to me.
All this sleek and fluid movement, this autonomy of path, this freedom in rhythm, the muscles underneath the sleek and shiny skin, so different from the timid creature that I felt myself to be.
I watched the tyger's movement, tracking him He was not tracking me.
When I woke, I felt a rough-edged memory flick past me, fast as wind. A whiff of feeling, acrid as candle smoke. A desire for something sleek and powerful, yet so soft to touch. A desire for something other, something utterly itself, something not-me at all, yet, following its rhythm, was looking for me, looking for what drew it to my house.
How can I accommodate this wildness, or even take one step towards it? How can my breath become its breath? What gift does this seeking tyger bring? Its undomesticated rhythm? Its sleek freedom? He came into the petty tyrannies I call my life, but do I have the courage to seek out his rhythm, get to know the nature of him?
We come from different worlds and we have no common language. Not yet at least, not yet.
Current Issue
Click on the link below to see the current issue in PDF format.
