One dollar bill

The rupee weakened on Monday because of increased import payments especially for oil, and dealers said the local unit is likely to come under further pressure in the medium term because of a bleak outlook for the country’s economy.

The rupee ended at 89.10/15 to the dollar, compared with Friday’s close of 89.00/10. It dropped to a record low of 89.45 on Wednesday.

“The rupee’s weakest traded level was 89.18 today and there were payments of about $80 million,” said a bank dealer.

by Amanda

Forbidden Forest

“Mom! Johnny’s not helping me get ready for dinner!” exclaimed my sister at the top of her puny but blatant lungs.

“Yes, I am.” I called upstairs to the room where my mother lay in a soundless slumber. “Would you shut-up! She’s resting, you know. She is exhausted!” I tried to whisper to my sister, Emily.

My mother worked two jobs to keep us alive. Six years had passed since the day my father died. Nobody really know how he died, but from what my mom told me, Emily the curious little girl that she was, and still is, walked into the terrifying, damp forest across the condensed street. Nobody had ever gone in there before. She walked inside and fell down a precipitous hill, luckily my dad saved her and they came out perfectly fine. However, after a week or so, he started acting weird, from what I remember. Then, a month later he just left us. I don’t know if he is deceased or still alive. Really, I prefer him dead.

As I helped Emily with dinner, she was telling me about her childish day. I love her, I really do, but I just wasn’t in a qualified mood.

“Would you shut-up! I don’t want to hear about you stupid day!” I shrieked and startled her tiny mind. That shut her up, I thought.

“What’s all that noise?” My overworked mother murmured as she came down from her slothful bed.

“Uh, nothing”, Emily pronounced. I have to admit she is a cute ten-year-old. She has blonde hair, pale skin and dark ocean blue eyes.

The phone sang a customary tune. Emily and I raced for it. Of course, I got there first and knocked her over. She started crying yet stopped because she knew I would get in trouble. I didn’t look down at her nor did I care. It was my friend on the line. Without saying a word, I left her to finish the work in the kitchen.

The next day we had this extensive argument, like we usually do. However, somehow this discussion seemed divergent. Generally, she doesn’t talk much, but now it was like she was revealing to me all of her life’s problems, and connecting them with dad. It was so uncanny. I shrugged it off and went out.

That night my mother had to go to a funeral and left Emily and I alone. An inquisitive child, Emily came up to me and questioned, “What happened to daddy, John?”

“Daddy left, he’s dead. I don’t ever wanna see him again! He is gone! ” I managed to wail out.

“Why?” she ventured to ask me.

“Because he hated us!”

“Your friend told me he went away in a forest or something. What?” Emily dared to ask me.

“You talk to my friends? Daddy ran after you, he saved you and I don’t know why he left. Now he is dead!” I screeched with my last breath.

“Daddy’s dead? How do you know?” She inquired.

“He just is.” I said, but I really didn’t know. I just wanted him to be dead.

It was the first time I ever saw her face so aghast and full of knowledgeable questions. She then ran out of the house into the mid-fall chill.

“Where are you going?” I shouted out to the relentless winds, but she just kept running. “Fine go look for him, then.” I said. I didn’t care. I just slammed the door and turned on the television and watched a movie.

She looked fine, her face was still pale like it always has been, ever since she was born. Nevertheless, she did not have that ‘I know you’re lying to me’ face on. She just appeared with no abnormal bodily conditions.

Emily walked inside the door, out of the crispness, without a single word. I was just going to start screaming at her like a mother at her teenager who stayed out too late, when she spoke first.

“You’re right daddy is dead. Well, partially. He gave me a hug and a kiss. Daddy’s name is Diabolus,” she finished . My brain was lost, I had too much anger to get out.

“Daddy is still-” I commenced, but she interrupted me.

“I got to go to bed now. goodnight.” Then she went upstairs, so swiftly and unostentatiously. I was so dazed that I did not elucidate, I just went to watch another movie, until my mother came home. When she did come home I did not tell her what had occurred earlier that unprecedented night.

About two weeks later, Emily and I both forgot about our sibling contention and Emily’s walk out. Everything was back to normal, well sort of, her eating inclinations reverted. Her daily visits for dinner were cut short. Emily would stay in her room for long periods of time. Her innocent girlish talks promptly ended. Basically things had commutated. Emily’s skin tone was becoming cadaverous and bloodless. Her eyes were becoming nebulous. Her overall attitude on life, friends and family began to transubstantiate. Everything seemed so negative to Emily. I noticed these alterations but frankly I did not care. I was watching Emily one morning, she ordinarily woke up bright and early to the gleaming sun and unlocked her blinds that covered a resplendent morning sky. In contrast, that daybreak and ever since, she seemed vulnerable to the burning rays of the sunlight.

Nearly two months following, I was in my room doing my wearisome homework when somebody walked into my sterile room and tapped on my shoulder. I rotated my body to see Emily with eyes black as a stormy night above, and gruesome bloodsucking teeth. She hissed and her vampire teeth elongated.

“Ahhhh,” I screamed fearfully.

“Shh, Johnny. Come with me to see daddy”, she said, as she breathed in my face. Her breath filled my nostrils. It left a stench of crimson blood and raw meat in my mouth.

“Daddy’s dead! I told you that!” I said trying to disregard her appearance.

“No, he is not dead. Dad come in.” Emily commanded, as a man that appeared familiar but he had Emily’s fangs and complexion as she looked at him when he came into the room.

“Hi, John. It’s me, Diabolus daddy,” the man said to me.

I was so startled that I nearly fainted. I did well at least I think I did. I woke up lying on damp, musky grass. I was in a condensed environment surrounded by trees and greenery. I was tired oh so ver tired. I felt like all the nutrients were all drained out from my body. I attempted to open my eyes but only saw a pitch-black blur.

“John, Johnny, wake up you’ve got to wake up.” I heard a faint voice that seemed to be Emily. I missed her so much. Why did I argue with her? I thought.

“No, John, I didn’t leave because you were mean to me. I left because I heard daddy call me.” Emily responded to my thoughts. I know for sure that I did not say that out loud. She must of read my aura, I thought.

“You humans are so weak, so woundable, so helpless.” Diabolus said with a grin on his anemic face.

“I am staying with daddy, John. Please tell mom I love her and that I am safe with daddy. We have to move. We are not safe around humans and you’re not safe around us.” Emily said.

“What? Why?” I started.

“Your old man is an one hundred year old vampire. At birth Emily got my genetics and you didn’t. For a few days you may have cravings to either cut yourself and/or to drink blood. Try your best to stop. Your mother knows what I am that’s why I left because I didn’t want to hurt you guys. I never knew that Emily had a part of me until now. We’ve got to go.” Diabolus informed me. The group turned and left with my little sister, Emily.

I walked out of the vexed forest to my home and up to my room. As I entered my room, I found a note on my bed. I opened it and it read:

My dear Big Brother,

Don’t be afraid to not be cool. Tell mommy that I love her

and that I went with dad. I’m one of him. Help mom for me, please. I have to go. Always remember to love kids, because you are one too.

Love Always,

Emily

P.S. don’t tell anyone but mom is having a baby! Shh

I truly lover my sister. I should have showed her that and I regret that I didn’t. The fact that she was a vampire terrified me, I had been living with a vampire for ten years and did not know anything about it.

As girls stood side by side with the boys, they also enjoy shisha smoking in gatherings. Here we can see girls smoking shisha and having fun.

A hookah or shisha (Arabic: ?????) is a single or multi-stemmed (often glass-based) water pipe for smoking. Originally from India, hookah has gained immense popularity, especially in the Middle East and is gaining popularity in the USA, UK, Canada, and elsewhere. Today, some of the highest quality and most extravagant hookah pipes come from Egypt, Iran and Turkey. The hookah operates by water filtration and indirect heat. It is used for smoking herbal fruits and tobacco, and is often considered to be healthier than smoking cigarettes, although recent studies have shown that it is just as detrimental to a person’s health.

broaded window

In 1830, only a few miles away from what is now the great city of Cincinnati, lay an immense and almost unbroken forest. The whole region was sparsely settled by people of the frontier – restless souls who no sooner had hewn fairly habitable homes out of the wilderness and attained to that degree of prosperity which today we should call indigence, than, impelled by some mysterious impulse of their nature, they abandoned all and pushed farther westward, to encounter new perils and privations in the effort to regain the meagre comforts which they had voluntarily renounced. Many of them had already forsaken that region for the remoter settlements, but among those remaining was one who had been of those first arriving. He lived alone in a house of logs surrounded on all sides by the great forest, of whose gloom and silence he seemed a part, for no one had ever known him to smile nor speak a needless word. His simple wants were supplied by the sale or barter of skins of wild animals in the river town, for not a thing did he grow upon the land which, if needful, he might have claimed by right of undisturbed possession.

There were evidences of “improvement” – a few acres of ground immediately about the house had once been cleared of its trees, the decayed stumps of which were half concealed by the new growth that had been suffered to repair the ravage wrought by the axe. Apparently the man’s zeal for agriculture had burned with a failing flame, expiring in penitential ashes.
The little log house, with its chimney of sticks, its roof of warping clapboards weighted with traversing poles and its “chinking” of clay, had a single door and, directly opposite, a window. The latter, however, was boarded up – nobody could remember a time when it was not. And none knew why it was so closed; certainly not because of the occupant’s dislike of light and air, for on those rare occasions when a hunter had passed that lonely spot the recluse had commonly been seen sunning himself on his doorstep if heaven had provided sunshine for his need. I fancy there are few persons living today who ever knew the secret of that window, but I am one, as you shall see.
The man’s name was said to be Murlock. He was apparently seventy years old, actually about fifty. Something besides years had had a hand in his ageing. His hair and long, full beard were white, his grey, lustreless eyes sunken, his face singularly seamed with wrinkles which appeared to belong to two intersecting systems. In figure he was tall and spare, with a stoop of the shoulders – a burden bearer. I never saw him; these particulars I learned from my grandfather, from whom also I got the man’s story when I was a lad. He had known him when living near by in that early day.
One day Murlock was found in his cabin, dead. It was not a time and place for coroners and newspapers, and I suppose it was agreed that he had died from natural causes or I should have been told, and should remember. I know only that with what was probably a sense of the fitness of things the body was buried near the cabin, alongside the grave of his wife, who had preceded him by so many years that local tradition had retained hardly a hint of her existence. That closes the final chapter of this true story – excepting, indeed, the circumstance that many years afterward, in company with an equally intrepid spirit, I penetrated to the place and ventured near enough to the ruined cabin to throw a stone against it, and ran away to avoid the ghost which every well-informed boy thereabout knew haunted the spot. But there is an earlier chapter – that supplied by my grandfather.
When Murlock built his cabin and began laying sturdily about with his axe to hew out a farm – the rifle, meanwhile, his means of support – he was young, strong and full of hope. In that eastern country whence he came he had married, as was the fashion, a young woman in all ways worthy of his honest devotion, who shared the dangers and privations of his lot with a willing spirit and light heart. There is no known record of her name; of her charms of mind and person tradition is silent and the doubter is at liberty to entertain his doubt; but God forbid that I should share it! Of their affection and happiness there is abundant assurance in every added day of the man’s widowed life; for what but the magnetism of a blessed memory could have chained that venturesome spirit to a lot like that?
One day Murlock returned from gunning in a distant part of the forest to find his wife prostrate with fever, and delirious. There was no physician within miles, no neighbour; nor was she in a condition to be left, to summon help. So he set about the task of nursing her back to health, but at the end of the third day she fell into unconsciousness arid so passed away, apparently, with never a gleam of returning reason.
From what we know of a nature like his we may venture to sketch in some of the details of the outline picture drawn by my grandfather. When convinced that she was dead, Murlock had sense enough to remember that the dead must be prepared for burial. In performance of this sacred duty he blundered now and again, did certain things incorrectly, and others which he did correctly were done over and over. His occasional failures to accomplish some simple and ordinary act filled him with astonishment, like that of a drunken man who wonders at the suspension of familiar natural laws. He was surprised, too, that he did not weep – surprised and a little ashamed; surely it is unkind not to weep for the dead. “Tomorrow,” he said aloud, “I shall have to make the coffin arid dig the grave; and then I shall miss her, when she is no longer in sight; but now – she is dead, of course, but it is all right – it must be all right, somehow. Things cannot be so bad as they seem.”

He stood over the body in the fading light, adjusting the hair and putting the finishing touches to the simple toilet, doing all mechanically, with soulless care. And still through his consciousness ran an undersense of conviction that all was right – that he should have her again as before, and everything explained. He had had no experience in grief; his capacity had not been enlarged by use. His heart could not contain it all, nor his imagination rightly conceive it. He did not know he was so hard struck; that knowledge would come later, and never go. Grief is an artist of powers as various as the instruments upon which he plays his dirges for the dead, evoking from some the sharpest, shrillest notes, from others the low, grave chords that throb recurrent like the slow beating of a distant drum. Some natures it startles; some it stupefies. To one it comes like the stroke of an arrow, stinging all the sensibilities to a keener life; to another as the blow of a bludgeon, which in crushing benumbs. We may conceive Murlock to have been that way affected, for (and here we are upon surer ground than that of conjecture) no sooner had he finished his pious work than, sinking into a chair by the side of the table upon which the body lay, and noting how white the profile showed in the deepening gloom, he laid his arms upon the table’s edge, and dropped his face into them, tearless yet and unutterably weary. At that moment came in through the open window a long, wailing sound like the cry of a lost child in the far deeps of the darkening woods! But the man did not move. Again, and nearer than before, sounded that unearthly cry upon his failing sense.

Perhaps it was a wild beast; perhaps it was a dream. For Murlock was asleep.
Some hours later, as it afterward appeared, this unfaithful watcher awoke and lifting his head from his arms intently listened – he knew not why. There in the black darkness by the side of the dead, recalling all without a shock, he strained his eyes to see – he knew not what. His senses were all alert, his breath was suspended, his blood had stilled its tides as if to assist the silence. Who – what had waked him, and where was it?
Suddenly the table shook beneath his arms, and at the same moment he heard, or fancied that he heard, a light, soft step – another – sounds as of bare feet upon the floor!
He was terrified beyond the power to cry out or move. Perforce he waited – waited there in the darkness through seeming centuries of such dread as one may know, yet live to tell. He tried vainly to speak the dead woman’s name, vainly to stretch forth his hand across the table to learn if she were there. His throat was powerless, his arms and hands were like lead. Then occurred something most frightful. Some heavy body seemed hurled against the table with an impetus that pushed it against his breast so sharply as nearly to overthrow him, and at the same instant he heard and felt the fall of something upon the floor with so violent a thump that the whole house was shaken by the impact. A scuffling ensued, and a confusion of sounds impossible to describe. Murlock had risen to his feet. Fear had by excess forfeited control of his faculties. He flung his hands upon the table. Nothing was there!
There is a point at which terror may turn to madness; and madness incites to action. With no definite intent, from no motive but the wayward impulse of a madman, Murlock sprang to the wall, with a little groping seized his loaded rifle, and without aim discharged it. By the flash which lit up the room with a vivid illumination, he saw an enormous panther dragging the dead woman toward the window, its teeth fixed in her throat! Then there were darkness blacker than before, and silence; and when he returned to consciousness the sun was high and the wood vocal with songs of birds.
The body lay near the window, where the beast had left it when frightened away by the flash and report of the rifle. The clothing was deranged, the long hair in disorder, the limbs lay anyhow. From the throat, dreadfully lacerated, had issued a pool of blood not yet entirely coagulated. The ribbon with which he had bound the wrists was broken; the hands were tightly clenched. Between the teeth was a fragment of the animal’s ear.

The Nicht Afore Christmas - Jamie Cameron

The Christmas party had been sillier than usual, and I felt some satisfaction that it would be my last. In September Joe and I’d come to the parting of the ways, at least temporarily, as he strode off with all the confidence in the world to the school on the hill.
You could see Ancrum Road Primary School if you stood on the wall outside St Mary’s Catholic Church where the High Street became the Lochee Road. I had no idea what Alcatraz was then, but if I had, I would certainly have named that institution of junior learning ‘Alcatraz on the Hill’.
Party hats, home-made, crackers, home-made, and lumpy jelly, home-made, whistles, clackers, rattles, xylophones, tin drums, and abortive attempts at carol singing accompanied by the up-right, out-of-tune piano produced scenes of frenzied, frantic mayhem across the main hall of the nursery. Snowballs sneaked in under pinafores had reduced the wooden floor to a soggy, slippery mess, unimproved by the urine of several little girls taken short by the excitement of it all. The tree tipped over at an unlikely angle, bulbs exploding at the rate of one every five minutes, chocolate novelties long since ripped off, and the fairy looking as bedraggled as the nurses who fought half-heartedly for control of their pinafored charges.
All other doors were locked against us, including, outrageously, the door to the Quiet Room where I could have found solace in a Wizard or Hotspur, or even in these desperate circumstances a Dandy or Beano though my contempt for Dennis the Menace and Desperate Dan were legendary. Little surprise then that my participation in the Hokey Cokey ended after I’d three times put the boot, or at least the sandal into three toddlers who had the temerity to shake their limbs at me. Thrown across the room, I slid arse-first into the Christmas tree and was rewarded by the sound of three bulbs exploding simultaneously and the fairy falling into my lap. I would have left there and then, but the presents were still to come.
“Ho ho ho!”
If the voice hadn’t given it away, the streaky moustache and the gin-tainted breath did. Santa was Matron. Santa was always Matron, I hadn’t needed Joe to tell me that. But was I the only one who recognised her? The others, even my fellow five-year-olds screeched in delight and were only hindered from mauling Santa by the serried ranks of nurses who secured her path to the Christmas tree where Santa, as God is my witness, kicked me out of her way.

Santa’s armchair was hauled into place. She dropped her Christmas sack with a thud and dropped herself into the chair which sagged beneath her not inconsiderable bulk, none of which was made up of pillows.
“Line up. Sparrows first. Then seagulls. Now you blackbirds, and then the tits.” Nurses smiled, screamed and herded us into some semblance of order. I was four years old and therefore a tit. At the time I did not understood why mum laughed when I told her.
In the prescribed order infants, toddlers and juniors mounted Matron, were breathed upon, exchanged whispers, and given their Christmas present. They scrambled down and were led away by nurses who then man-handled the presents from them and piled them on a table near the door. As usual we were not to be allowed to open our presents until going-home time; previous experiments at letting the children open their presents had led to jealousy, bickering, arguments, fighting and worse. All of the infants, most of the toddlers and several of the juniors burst into inconsolable tears, not that anyone tried to console them, the piano just got louder.
My turn came. I looked up into Matron’s eyes. Little black raisins embedded in a purple pudding. I wanted to put a match to her. Did gin burn like brandy? Never mind. That ratty beard would do.
“Get up here, Paul.”
“My mother says you have to call me Jean-Paul.”
“Get up here, Jean-Paul.” I could feel the hostility, the gin must be wearing off.
“I don’t answer to Jean-Paul.”
“Get up here, you.”
Immovable object met irresistible force.
“Here, take it.” She thrust a small parcel into my chest.
“What about my Christmas wish?”
She snorted like the walrus in the nature film we’d watched the day before and stuck her ear into my face. I whispered my Christmas wish.
“No.”
“What do you mean ‘no’?”
“I mean ‘no’. Now go and play.”
I stood my ground until I was hauled away by a nurse. I hardly felt my present slip out of my arms. I was in a state of shock and did not come to until I found myself in a conga that twisted, turned and staggered its away around the hall, children slipping, sliding and falling on the treacherous linoleum. I disengaged myself from this travesty and returned to the tree. Santa had gone. I scrambled onto the armchair, slung my legs over the side and looked up into the tattered branches. I had some thinking to do. Above my head another bulb exploded.

At five o’clock I stood at the entrance to the nursery waiting for my grandmother to take my home. Light snow was falling. It spun and swirled through the lamplight. Although I was not cold, I shivered and pulled the canvas bag that held the history of my three nursery years closer to me.
Gran came zigzagging down Flight’s Lane in that curiously distracted way that suggested her mind was not entirely at one with her body. She began several possible conversations before hitting upon one that continued long enough to make some sense. I thrust one rope handle of the bag towards her, kept a tight grip on the other and dragged her up the lane.
“Dae you no want tae say cheerio tae the nurses?”
“No, come on.”
“Did you ha’e a guid perty?”
“No.”
Disappointment flitted across her ruddy cheeks, but Gran could never be unhappy for more than a moment. A lady of the old school, she was born to serve and please others, especially menfolk. Her misery melted like an ice cream cone at the Ferry in August.
“We’d better get hame quick. It’s Christmas eve, ye ken, an’ yer ma’s probably goin’ oot fur some last minute shoppin’. We’d better no be late.” My mother was not of the old school, and my grandmother was terrified of her. She pulled on the canvas bag and almost dragged me under a tramcar. I doubt she even saw it. We passed one of my grandfather’s public houses. The stink was intoxicating. Gran shuddered and pulled me past its seductive double swing doors.
Joe’d been home for an hour. The room was snug and cosy. Gran attempted fitful conversation. She’d no takers and left with a promise to visit on Christmas Day. We made no move and she did not kiss us good-bye. There were conventions in the family we did not understand, but which we respected. I got on with my reading and Joe continued to build his version of a better mousetrap. We’d already got mum’s present, wrapped it and hidden it in the bedpan. Our Christmas preparations were done.
Just after six mum came home and collapsed into the armchair hacking like a tubercular cat. My mother suffered from pleurisy. Neither Joe nor I had any idea what pleurisy was, but we recognised its painful symphony and hated it. Mum sat in the chair, bent double, fighting for breath. Joe sat on an arm of the chair, leaning over, her massaging her back, digging deep with his thumbs. When his thumbs were aching, I took over, not nearly so effectively, but I was learning.

Sometimes I would hold her shoulders and rub my face into her back. It probably didn’t help her, but it helped me. Later mother would make a kaolin poultice of hot china clay smeared on a thick bandage. We would tenderly apply the hot sludge to her bare back and freckled shoulders, swapping stories about our day.
Many of my stories were embroidered, exaggerated or wholly invented. I loved to make mum laugh though laughter had its price in further fits of coughing and pain. A dig in the ribs from my puritanical brother told me when I was going too far. That night the laugh was on me.
A sharp series of knocks rattled the door in its frame. Joe answered the call, his high but even voice counter-pointing a deep rumble like thunder over Balgay Hill. He came back and spoke to mum, a quizzical look running across his thin frenchified features.
“The polis is at the door. I think he’s looking for Paul.”
I started like a guilty thing. My mother pinned me to the wall with a look. Was my hair standing on end? I resisted the urge to turn and look in the wardrobe mirror. Lucky arched her back and hissed in sympathy.
“You, wait there,” she said, adding superfluously, “don’t move.”
Thunder rumbled behind the door again. The words made no sense. My mother had pronounced a sentence of immobility upon my brain as well as my body. Her words came to me in fragments.
“Good idea not to come in… terrified of men… scream his head off… always been like that… the doctor says…”
I risked a glance at Joe. He was still working on his mousetrap. He was smiling, but it was a smile I did not like, it was the smile he wore when he caught a mouse in one his traps. I’d seen one before, its wee heid snapped clean from its body, its incisors embedded in the cheddar that had lured it to its doom. I’d like to see his head… No, mustn’t think like that. God’s listening, God’s watching, God sees all. Doesn’t He ever take time off or is He too busy keeping an eye on the mousetraps He has built for all of us?
“Jean-Paul Bosquet.”
I was startled to hear my name pronounced in full. My mother might as well have worn a piece of black cloth on the top of her Christmas perm.

“Jean-Paul Bosquet. Hand them over.”
For an instant I was tempted to play dumb, tempted to commit instant suicide. I resisted the temptation and lived.
Scrambling under the bed, I hauled out the bulging canvas bag and dragged it to my mother’s feet. I knelt down and pulled out one wrapped gift at a time handing them up to my mother who placed each one ceremoniously on the table. “four… five… six…” Would these poisonous parcels never end? “eight… nine… ten…” The final parcel tugged at my heartstrings. I gave my mother a look that would melt an iceberg. She must have known it was mine. She was implacable, taking my parcel between finger and thumb – green holly paper, red berries, laughing snowmen – she dropped it like a dog turd onto the pile.
A policeman stepped into the room. My heart or some other organ leapt into my mouth. I could not make a sound. I froze. I could feel my tiny scrotum tighten. I tried to fix my gaze on the floor. My eyes betrayed me. I looked up. It was a man, a very big man, with big yellow teeth, a moustache thicker even than matron’s, and a flat policeman’s cap supported by big ears on either side of his big head. My eyes widened. My chest began to heave. A strangled sob forced its way past my constricted throat muscles. A cold chill blew in through the open door annihilating Christmas.
The man swept all the parcels up into his big arms, nodded a cheery “Merry Christmas” to my mother and disappeared into the night. I could see him striding across the wasteland to the Lochee Road towards the railway bridge at Muirton Road. My imagination pulled down the shutters. I knew the Lochee Road led to Dundee, the big city. As far as I knew, I’d never been there. But it was obvious. The big city was where the big men lived, and I wanted nothing to do with that or them.
“Take three big breaths. Remember how Dr Heinreich showed you.”
I took the breaths, the biggest and deepest I could manage. They almost blew my head off.
“Come here.”
I came there. Mum sitting in the armchair. Me standing in front of her. Joe sitting on the rug in front of the fire. Lucky stretched out on the bed.

“Why did you take the presents?”
Another deep breath.
“It was Matron’s fault.”
“Why did you take the presents?”
“She widnae give me one for Joe.”
“Go on.”
“You said me and Joe had to be the same.”
“Go on.”
I was annoyed now. I could feel my neck redden. It was not my fault.
“I asked her… for a present… for Joe. I asked nicely, honest, mum. She said no, not nicely. So I put them in the bag when everybody was changing. And Gran helped me carry them up the road. They were really heavy, and a tram nearly…”
“That was wrong. The presents didn’t belong to you, so you had no right to take them. What you did was wrong.”
The room went silent. Joe sat still. The fire ceased to spit shale. Lucky stopped purring. I was drowning in the silence, thick heavy fluid clogging my nose and my brain, running down my back, pouring down my legs into my grey nursery socks. Mum had said the word we never wanted to hear: wrong. It rang like a huge gong banging relentlessly into the silence. Anything but that word. That word put distance between us and this woman, that word sliced into the umbilical cord that nourished us, that word made her turn her face away from us, that word cost us her love, and without that love we could not survive.
“You did the wrong thing for the right reason. Now what are you going to do about it?”
Never ask a four year old that question. It isn’t fair. It’s too harsh. Because a four year old will always come up with the right answer, and the answer will hurt.
I racked by brains for a way out. I looked at Joe. He shrugged at me with his lips. He knew the answer, too. And he knew there was no way out.
“Bed.”
“When?”
“Now.”
“How long?”
“Morning.”
“Comics?”
“No comics.”
“Good night, son.”
My mind chased a little tail in circles. There had to be something. There was. But play it carefully. I looked mum full in the face.
“Eh hivnae had meh tea.”
“What?”
“Eh hivnae had meh tea. Eh’m sterving.”
Even Lucky held her breath. Fire danced in my mother’s eyes.
“It’s Christmas Eve, and eh hivnae had eny tea.”

Something like contempt flickered in my mother’s smile.
“Right, boys, what’ll we have for tea tonight?”
“Macaroni on toast.”
“No, we had that last night.”
“Scrambled eggs on toast.”
“No, that’s for breakfast.”
“What day is it, mum?”
“It’s Thursday.”
“Bread and chips. Right?”
“Right.”
Paul recognises the note of despondency in Joe’s voice. He cannot understand why his brother fails to appreciate the joys of bread and chips, teeth sinking into the fleshy fried potato, greasy margarine sliding down the throat, lips worth licking again and again, and hot sweet tea washing down the whole sloppy mess.
On good nights you can have as much bread as you want, including the ends of the sliced white loaf, the ‘heelies’, which are always reserved for Paul since nobody else wants them. You can curl up on the big double bed that dominates the single room, chew on the crusts and get lost in the Rover, the Hotspur, the Wizard for hour after hour.
How can Joe sound so despondent every Thursday night about such prospects as these? Even Kathleen, the new baby, lies gurgling happily, but then Kathleen lies gurgling happily most of the time, kicking her feet against the sides of the tin bath that serves as her crib.
“Who wants to put the kettle on?”
“Eh’ll dae it.”
“Joseph, speak properly when you’re in this house. Put the kettle on. Jean-Paul will go for the chips. Get your coat on and your wellies. You’re not going out in sandshoes on a night like this. And come straight back. No wandering.”
Paul clambers into a heavy bottle-green overcoat and ties the belt around his middle, the buckle is long gone. Reluctantly he pulls on the heavy Wellington boots. He stands beside mum’s armchair. She is absorbed in the Evening Telegraph, smoke curls up from her cigarette. Paul stands and waits. She turns her head to him, blue-grey eyes meet. She has that far away look. Paul knows she hasn’t been reading the newspaper, only looking at the words.
“Money, mum. For the chippie. I’m ready.”
She reaches for her purse. She takes out a sixpenny piece and presses it into his warm little palm closing her fingers over the money, her fingers over his. He swells with pride. He is a knight-errant setting out on a perilous mission. He knows he may meet dragons, monsters, wizards and bogeymen out there, but he will overcome them all, he will wade knee-deep through blood, guts and slaughter, but he will get there, and he will return with the holy grail, the sixpence worth of hot steaming chips to lay at her feet or at least on the stove until the bread is margarined.

Outside it is dark, cold and bitter, and the boy is not so sure. There is neither wind nor cloud. Winter stars sparkle overhead. Frost and rime sparkle below his feet. The gas lamps hiss and sputter. Shadows are blackly frozen. Paul remembers he is only four, nearly five, but by the calendar still only four.
He will gallop and sing his way to Delanzo’s. It is not far, only half a mile. The boy hasn’t the faintest idea what half a mile is, but it doesn’t sound too far. Across the ‘Greenie’, singing and galloping he will go. What to sing? That new one they learned in school at Christmas. He has only the vaguest idea what the words might mean. Something about the last time good King Wences looked out, looking for Stephen or someone like that, and Stephen arrived but he was only a kid, but the king decided to take him anyway. Get on with it.
His high treble rises into the frozen night air. “Good King Wences last looked out, he was looking for Stephen, when the snow lay round about, deep and crisp and even.” He likes the sound of that, deep and crisp and even, as he slides and slithers across the freezing mush, slush and mud of the ‘green’. He’s got quite a good gallop going now. He can make out the Cally fence. Can’t be too far now.
The boy is gripped by the windpipe. His voice cut off in mid note. There is a searing pain across his throat. He is thrown backwards, his arms fly up, hands extended like a child crucified. He lands on his back with a thud even the slush cannot muffle. He lies there, arms and legs akimbo, too stunned to move, to think, to cry. He waits for another blow. It does not come. He feels the pain now, the hot searing pain across his windpipe.
He feels the pain and he is glad he can feel the pain. It allows him to move, to think, to cry. But he won’t cry yet. He rolls onto his front. If another blow is to come, he does not want it in the face or in the stomach. He knows that would really hurt. He can take it across the back or across the backside, but not across his front. So get on with it. If there’s to be more pain, get on with it.

Nothing. Only the hot slash across his windpipe. He staggers to his feet, slipping and sliding in the slush, he is breathing heavily, fighting for breath at times. The six times table helps a lot. He might even try the seven but he has trouble with seven times six. He turns to face his assailant.
Nothing. There is nothing there. Except a washing line. Hanging low. Swinging gently. If the seven times table presents problems, the answer to two and two is immediate. He has galloped into the washing line. It has caught him round the neck and thrown him into the sludge. Paul’s cheeks blaze and burn, and not only from the bitter chill. He is embarrassed, and the embarrassment sears him worse then the rope burn across his neck. Tears spring to his eyes at last. Never mind. Get on with it. He’s late enough.
He brushes the muddy slush from his hands. They have been grazed by the gravel beneath the snow. His overcoat has saved his knees. His fingers tingle but he cannot tell if they are burning or freezing. He opens his left palm, then his right. He jams his right hand into his coat pocket, then his left into the left. He fumbles in the pockets of his corduroy shorts. He is fighting for breath again, his chest heaving in great gulps. He drops to his knees, the slush splashes around him. He scrabbles wildly in the snow, in the mud, careless of his corduroys. His fingers are frozen, he cannot feel his knees, slush turns to icy water in his wellies.
“Our Father which art in heaven where’s mum’s money?” What can he promise this God who remains so stubbornly silent? I’ll never steal presents again, just let me find the money. It’s Christmas tomorrow, you’d think He’d be listening.
The tears are running down his face, the snot down his nose, water into his wellies. His scrabbling has grown more frantic. He has covered a wide circle. How far can a silver sixpence roll in snow? Should he scrabble backwards towards the house? What did the wise men bring to the baby Jesus – gold, frankincense and mirth? What is mirth anyway? Must remember to ask mum. Please God, I’ll do anything, anything.
“What are you doin’ doon there, you wee shite?”

Paul looks up. Tears and snot run into his mouth. He gathers them in with his tongue. He blinks to clear his eyes. It’s Joe. God couldn’t make it, so He sent His representative on earth. Lochee’s answer to Herod.
“Ah drapped the sixpence, Joe. Ah didnae mean it. Honest. Ah ran intae the washing line. Sumbody’s left it hinging afae low. Help is, Joe, go on, help is find it.”
“Stop bubblin’. Gie’s yer hand. We’re no gonna find it the nicht.”
Joe reaches for Paul’s hand and pulls him to his feet. Using the back of his hand, he wipes the teary snot away from his little brother’s face as best he can, then wipes his hand in the snow. He pulls the overcoat tight around the smaller boy and still holding his hand leads him back to the house. On the stairs leading to the attic, he gently eases off the overcoat and hangs it up on a wooden peg. Then he helps Paul off with his Wellington boots and wet socks. He dumps them on the stairs.
“Wait there.”
Joe slips into the attic room. Paul stand and waits, cheeks ablaze, teeth chattering, wet corduroys clinging, the dirty tears stain his face. The door opens.
“Come in.”
Paul steps into the room. His mother is standing by the open fire. He can hardly raise his head to look at her. When he does, the familiar blue-grey eyes meet. His mother is smiling. Then she is laughing. “C’mere, son.”
He runs to her and throws himself into those strong familiar arms. He is crying again, sobbing and heaving against her stomach, drowning himself in that familiar warmth, that familiar smell.
“You know what this means,” he hears her say. “It’s toast and dripping tonight. We haven’t had that for ages. Now come on, get these things off, you’re soaked through. It looks like the Steamie on Saturday.”
“Tea’s nearly ready, mum. Will I start on the toast?”
“Let me get this boy’s backside warmed up first. Then we’ll all make the toast together. Save the heelies for Jean-Paul.”
In the grate the fire hisses and spits out tiny pieces of shale. The kettle whistles, the gas lamp flickers, the woman hums and towels the boy vigorously.
In her tin basin the baby lies gurgling happily as she watches the shadows dance on the ceiling.

Three Christmas Trees by Juliana Horatia Ewing

This is a story of Three Christmas Trees. The first was a real one, but the child we are to speak of did not see it. He saw the other two, but they were not real; they only existed in his fancy. The plot of the story is very simple; and, as it has been described so early, it is easy for those who think it stupid to lay the book down in good time.

Probably every child who reads this has seen one Christmas tree or more; but in the small town of a distant colony with which we have to do, this could not at one time have been said. Christmas-trees were then by no means so universal, even in England, as they now are, and in this little colonial town they were unknown. Unknown, that is, till the Governor’s wife gave her great children’s party. At which point we will begin the story.

The Governor had given a great many parties in his time. He had entertained big wigs and little wigs, the passing military, and the local grandees. Everybody who had the remotest claim to attention had been attended to: the ladies had had their full share of balls and pleasure parties: only one class of the population had any complaint to prefer against his hospitality; but the class was a large one–it was the children. However, he, was a bachelor, and knew little or nothing about little boys and girls: let us pity rather than blame him. At last he took to himself a wife; and among the many advantages of this important step, was a due recognition of the claims of these young citizens. It was towards happy Christmas-tide that “the Governor’s amiable and admired lady” (as she was styled in the local newspaper) sent out notes for her first children’s party. At the top of the note-paper was a very red robin, who carried a blue Christmas greeting in his mouth, and at the bottom–written with A.D.C.’s best flourish–were the magic words, A Christmas Tree. In spite of the flourishes–partly perhaps because of them–the A.D.C.’s handwriting, though handsome, was rather illegible. But for all this, most of the children invited contrived to read these words, and those who could not do so were not slow to learn the news by hearsay. There was to be a Christmas Tree! It would be like a birthday party, with this above ordinary birthdays, that there were to be presents for every one. One of the children invited lived in a little white house, with a spruce fir-tree before the door. The spruce fir did this good service to the little house, that it helped people to find their way to it; and it was by no means easy for a stranger to find his way to any given house in this little town, especially if the house were small and white, and stood in one of the back streets. For most of the houses were small, and most of them were painted white, and back streets ran parallel with each other, and had no names, and were all so much alike that it was very confusing. For instance, if you had asked the way to Mr. So-and-So’s, it is very probable that some friend would have directed you as follows: “Go straight forward and take the first turning to your left, and you will find that there are four streets, which run at right angles to the one you are in, and parallel with each other. Each of them has got a big pine in it–one of the old forest trees. Take the last street but one, and the fifth white house you come to is Mr. So-and-So’s. He has green blinds and a coloured servant.” You would not always have got such clear directions as these, but with them you would probably have found the house at last, partly by accident, partly by the blinds and coloured servant. Some of the neighbours affirmed that the little white house had a name; that all the houses and streets had names, only they were traditional and not recorded anywhere; that very few people knew them, and nobody made any use of them. The name of the little white house was said to be Trafalgar Villa, which seemed so inappropriate to the modest peaceful little home, that the man who lived in it tried to find out why it had been so called. He thought that his predecessor must have been in the navy, until he found that he had been the owner of what is called a “dry-goods store,” which seems to mean a shop where things are sold which are not good to eat or drink–such as drapery. At last somebody said, that as there was a public-house called the “Duke of Wellington” at the corner of the street, there probably had been a nearer one called “The Nelson,” which had been burnt down, and that the man who built “The Nelson” had built the house with the spruce fir before it, and that so the name had arisen. An explanation which was just so far probable, that public-houses and fires were of frequent occurrence in those parts.

But this has nothing to do with the story. Only we must say, as we said before, and as we should have said had we been living there then, the child we speak of lived in the little white house with one spruce fir just in front of it.

Of all the children who looked forward to the Christmas tree, he looked forward to it the most intensely. He was an imaginative child, of a simple, happy nature, easy to please. His father was an Englishman, and in the long winter evenings he would tell the child tales of the old country, to which his mother would listen also. Perhaps the parents enjoyed these stories the most. To the boy they were new, and consequently delightful, but to the parents they were old; and as regards some stories, that is better still.

“What kind of a bird is this on my letter?” asked the boy on the day which brought the Governor’s lady’s note of invitation. “And oh! what is a Christmas tree?”

“The bird is an English robin,” said his father. “It is quite another bird to that which is called a robin here: it is smaller and rounder, and has a redder breast and bright dark eyes, and lives and sings at home through the winter. A Christmas tree is a fir-tree–just such a one as that outside the door–brought into the house and covered with lights and presents. Picture to yourself our fir-tree lighted up with tapers on all the branches, with dolls, and trumpets, and bon-bons, and drums, and toys of all kinds hanging from it like fir-cones, and on the tip-top shoot a figure of a Christmas Angel in white, with a star upon its head.”

“Fancy!” said the boy.

And fancy he did. Every day he looked at the spruce fir, and tried to imagine it laden with presents, and brilliant with tapers, and thought how wonderful must be that “old country”–Home, as it was called, even by those who had never seen it–where the robins were so very red, and where at Christmas the fir-trees were hung with toys instead of cones.

It was certainly a pity that, two days before the party, an original idea on the subject of snowmen struck one of the children who used to play together, with their sleds and snow shoes, in the back streets. The idea was this: That instead of having a commonplace snowman, whose legs were obliged to be mere stumps, for fear he should be top-heavy, and who could not walk, even with them; who, in fact, could do nothing but stand at the corner of the street, holding his impotent stick, and staring with his pebble eyes, till he was broken to pieces or ignominiously carried away by a thaw,–that, instead of this, they should have a real, live snowman, who should walk on competent legs, to the astonishment, and (happy thought!) perhaps to the alarm of the passers-by. This delightful novelty was to be accomplished by covering one of the boys of the party with snow till he looked as like a real snowman as circumstances would admit. At first everybody wanted to be the snowman, but, when it came to the point, it was found to be so much duller to stand still and be covered up than to run about and work, that no one was willing to act the part. At last it was undertaken by the little boy from the Fir House. He was somewhat small, but then he was so good-natured he would always do as he was asked. So he stood manfully still, with his arms folded over a walking-stick upon his breast, whilst the others heaped the snow upon him. The plan was not so successful as they had hoped. The snow would not stick anywhere except on his shoulders, and when it got into his neck he cried with the cold; but they were so anxious to carry out their project, that they begged him to bear it “just a little longer”; and the urchin who had devised the original idea wiped the child’s eyes with his handkerchief, and (with that hopefulness which is so easy over other people’s matters) “dared say that when all the snow was on, he wouldn’t feel it.” However, he did feel it, and that so severely that the children were obliged to give up the game, and, taking the stick out of his stiff little arms, to lead him home.

It appears that it is with snowmen as with some other men in conspicuous positions. It is easier to find fault with them than to fill their place.

The end of this was a feverish cold, and, when the day of the party came, the ex-snowman was still in bed. It is due to the other children to say that they felt the disappointment as keenly as he did, and that it greatly damped the pleasure of the party for them to think that they had prevented his sharing in the treat. The most penitent of all was the deviser of the original idea. He had generously offered to stay at home with the little patient, which was as generously refused; but the next evening he was allowed to come and sit on his bed, and describe it all for the amusement of his friend. He was a quaint boy, this urchin, with a face as broad as an American Indian’s, eyes as bright as a squirrel’s, and all the mischief in life lurking about him, till you could see roguishness in the very folds of his hooded Indian winter coat of blue and scarlet. In his hand he brought the sick child’s present: a dray with two white horses, and little barrels that took off and on, and a driver, with wooden joints, a cloth coat, and everything, in fact, that was suitable to the driver of a brewer’s dray, except that he had blue boots and earrings, and that his hair was painted in braids like a lady’s, which is clearly the fault of the doll manufacturers, who will persist in making them all of the weaker sex.

“And what was the Christmas tree like?” asked the invalid.

“Exactly like the fir outside your door,” was the reply. “Just about that size, and planted in a pot covered with red cloth. It was kept in another room till after tea, and then when the door was opened it was like a street fire in the town at night–such a blaze of light–candles everywhere! And on all the branches the most beautiful presents. I got a drum and a penwiper.”

“Was there an angel?” the child asked.

“Oh, yes!” the boy answered. “It was on the tip-top branch, and it was given to me, and I brought it for you, if you would like it; for, you know, I am so very, very sorry I thought of a snowman and made you ill, and I do love you, and beg you to forgive me.”

And the roguish face stooped over the pillow to be kissed; and out of a pocket in the hooded coat came forth the Christmas Angel. In the face it bore a strong family likeness to the drayman, but its feet were hidden in folds of snowy muslin, and on its head glittered a tinsel star.

“How lovely!” said the child. “Father told me about this. I like it best of all. And it is very kind of you, for it is not your fault that I caught cold. I should have liked it if we could have done it, but I think to enjoy being a snowman, one should be snow all through.”

They had tea together, and then the invalid was tucked up for the night. The dray was put away in the cupboard, but he took the angel to bed with him.

And so ended the first of the Three Christmas Trees.

* * * * *
Except for a warm glow from the wood fire in the stove, the room was dark; but about midnight it seemed to the child that a sudden blaze of light filled the chamber. At the same moment the window curtains were drawn aside, and he saw that the spruce fir had come close up to the panes and was peeping in. Ah! how beautiful it looked! It had become a Christmas tree. Lighted tapers shone from every familiar branch, toys of the most fascinating appearance hung like fruit, and on the tip-top shoot there stood the Christmas Angel. He tried to count the candles, but somehow it was impossible. When he looked at them they seemed to change places–to move–to become like the angel, and then to be candles again, whilst the flames nodded to each other and repeated the blue greeting of the robin, “A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!” Then he tried to distinguish the presents, but, beautiful as the toys looked, he could not exactly discover what any of them were, or choose which he would like best. Only the Angel he could see clearly–so clearly! It was more beautiful than the doll under his pillow; it had a lovely face like his own mother’s, he thought, and on its head gleamed a star far brighter than tinsel. Its white robes waved with the flames of the tapers, and it stretched its arms towards him with a smile.

“I am to go and choose my present,” thought the child; and he called “Mother! Mother dear! please open the window.”

But his mother did not answer. So he thought he must get up himself, and with an effort he struggled out of bed.

But when he was on his feet, everything seemed changed! Only the firelight shone upon the walls, and the curtains were once more firmly closed before the window. It had been a dream, but so vivid that in his feverish state he still thought it must be true, and dragged the curtains back to let in the glorious sight again. The firelight shone upon a thick coating of frost upon the panes, but no further could he see, so with all his strength he pushed the window open and leaned out into the night.

The spruce fir stood in its old place; but it looked very beautiful in its Christmas dress. Beneath it lay a carpet of pure white. The snow was clustered in exquisite shapes upon its plumy branches; wrapping the tree top with its little cross shoots, as a white robe might wrap a figure with outstretched arms.

There were no tapers to be seen, but northern lights shot up into the dark blue sky, and just over the fir-tree shone a bright, bright star.

“Jupiter looks well to-night,” said the old Professor in the town observatory, as he fixed his telescope; but to the child it seemed as the star of the Christmas Angel.

His mother had really heard him call, and now came and put him back to bed again. And so ended the second of the Three Christmas Trees.

* * * * *
It was enough to have killed him, all his friends said; but it did not. He lived to be a man, and–what is rarer–to keep the faith, the simplicity, the tender-heartedness, the vivid fancy of his childhood. He lived to see many Christmas trees “at home,” in that old country where the robins are redbreasts, and sing in winter. There a heart as good and gentle as his own became one with his; and once he brought his young wife across the sea to visit the place where he was born. They stood near the little white house, and he told her the story of the Christmas trees.

“This was when I was a child,” he added.

“But that you are still,” said she; and she plucked a bit of the fir-tree and kissed it, and carried it away.

He lived to tell the story to his children, and even to his grandchildren; but he never was able to decide which of the two was the more beautiful–the Christmas Tree of his dream, or the Spruce Fir as it stood in the loveliness of that winter night.

This is told, not that it has anything to do with any of the Three Christmas Trees, but to show that the story is a happy one, as is right and proper; that the hero lived, and married, and had children, and was as prosperous as good people, in books, should always be.

Of course he died at last. The best and happiest of men must die; and it is only because some stories stop short in their history, that every hero is not duly buried before we lay down the book.

When death came for our hero he was an old man. The beloved wife, some of his children, and many of his friends had died before him, and of those whom he had loved there were fewer to leave than to rejoin. He had had a short illness, with little pain, and was now lying on his deathbed in one of the big towns in the North of England. His youngest son, a clergy-man, was with him, and one or two others of his children, and by the fire sat the doctor.

The doctor had been sitting by the patient, but now that he could do no more for him he had moved to the fire; and they had taken the ghastly, half-emptied medicine bottles from the table by the bedside, and had spread it with a fair linen cloth, and had set out the silver vessels of the Supper of the Lord. The old man had been “wandering” somewhat during the day. He had talked much of going home to the old country, and with the wide range of dying thoughts he had seemed to mingle memories of childhood with his hopes of Paradise. At intervals he was clear and collected–one of those moments had been chosen for his last sacrament–and he had fallen asleep with the blessing in his ears.

He slept so long and so peacefully that the son almost began to hope that there might be a change, and looked towards the doctor, who still sat by the fire with his right leg crossed over his left. The doctor’s eyes were also on the bed, but at that moment he drew out his watch and looked at it with an air of professional conviction, which said, “It’s only a question of time.” Then he crossed his left leg over his right, and turned to the fire again. Before the right leg should be tired, all would be over. The son saw it as clearly as if it had been spoken, and he too turned away and sighed.

As they sat, the bells of a church in the town began to chime for midnight service, for it was Christmas Eve, but they did not wake the dying man. He slept on and on.

The doctor dozed. The son read in the Prayer Book on the table, and one of his sisters read with him. Another, from grief and weariness, slept with her head upon his shoulder. Except for a warm glow from the fire, the room was dark. Suddenly the old man sat up in bed, and, in a strong voice, cried with inexpressible enthusiasm,

“How beautiful!”

The son held back his sisters, and asked quietly,

“What, my dear Father?”

“The Christmas Tree!” he said in a low, eager voice. “Draw back the curtains.”

They were drawn back; but nothing could be seen, and still the old man gazed as if in ecstasy.

“Light!” he murmured. “The Angel! the Star!”

Again there was silence; and then he stretched forth his hands, and cried passionately,

“The Angel is beckoning to me! Mother! Mother dear! Please open the window.”

The sash was thrown open, and all eyes turned involuntarily where those of the dying man were gazing. There was no Christmas tree–no tree at all. But over the house-tops the morning star looked pure and pale in the dawn of Christmas Day. For the night was past, and above the distant hum of the streets the clear voices of some waits made the words of an old carol heard–words dearer for their association than their poetry:

“While shepherds watched their flocks by night,
All seated on the ground,
The Angel of the Lord came down,
And glory shone around.”
When the window was opened, the soul passed; and when they looked back to the bed the old man had lain down again, and, like a child, was smiling in his sleep–his last sleep.

And this was the Third Christmas Tree.

The Heebie-Jeebies by Alan Beard

Barry took the tab at breakfast with his coffee. He skimmed through the mail: now he was fifty he could have £100 off his next car insurance and might win a trip around the world. He didn’t drive. He had timed everything perfectly but the delivery – expected at 9 – was late. The drug was already kicking in and he was beginning to feel light and strange in his own room as the man with the large ears and little nose unpacked boxes and complained about yesterday’s customers.

‘Not a jot on the floor, naked kids running about and the latest wide screen and all the works.’ Barry tried to keep up with the man’s dark eyes, which shifted around too quickly in their sockets. ‘Have you got sweets in?’ Barry thought he heard and when he shrugged was told, ‘for the kids tonight. Little beggars won’t leave you alone.’

Barry said there was no need to set it up, he worked in an electrical shop and could manage but by then the man was on all fours laying cable and squatting to demonstrate the various sound options.

‘Hall. Live. Rock. You name it. Orchestral.’ He waved the remote like a baton. He talked as if he lived here and Barry was the visitor.

Wasn’t it good now though to hear Hendrix as he’d never heard him, from five speakers. The lazy guitar of Hey Joe. He lay back on the sofa and dropped through to other sofas and rooms he’d lain in and been at ease. Way back on the green settee with Nina, his girlfriend for two months, when her parents were out. Parties where everybody reclined on scatter cushions, conversation limited by the bass heavy reggae and not much dancing either, you had to be cool, only getting up to kneel over the huge bong when it came round. At weekends there was sometimes dancing, after acid or mescaline in pills or on blotting paper. He remembered tripping on the flare of his loons (which had to touch the floor) and making it into a dance move. Girls had whirled skirt and hair out in circles to Zep or Cream or Caravan; and later under stairs or in bathrooms he got handfuls of tit and tastes of them.

The re-grouping in pubs and cafes the following weekend, pubs closed at 2pm, to discuss what happened after, how they got home in such a state, breathless and dodging skinheads. How they had outwitted drunken lungers, and negotiated dangerous roads where cars were out to eat you. How this one spent the night in the brand new toilets of the motorway service station – ‘excellent facilities’, and that one was nearly fucked by a donkey when he slept in a barn; how all somehow had seen the sun rise from the side of a road or under a hedge, the fields and back lanes, the edge of town of his youth.

When Barry and Maxine moved in together, they tried to get more sophisticated: instead of getting out of their heads immediately they would have dinner parties with candles, meals of nut roast and sweet potatoes and play Dylan and Roxy Music until they finished the Viennetta and got out the big rizlas and put on Peter Tosh or Burning Spear.

He remembered Maxine’s fads, how she grew out of fringed leather jackets and boots quickly, on to the multicoloured waistcoats. When she only wore that. How she got into Greek food when the restaurant opened in town; the stray cats she fed out the back; her languor on Sundays lying the length of the sofa, like him now, bringing her chocolates and drinks and rewarded with sex.

He tried to read the free paper pushed through the door but the headlines merged: Queen Eats Ambassador’s Son; Freed Man Topples Bridge, and little wavering flames flared up from between the lines of print to print him with burns.

He lay on turf with dripping water nearby and a hidden but throbbing power station, the leaning tower of Nina helped him with his tea.

The doorbell rang a second time and it was Tom. ‘Howdy pardner.’ He was panting from the bike ride across town and pushed his vehicle in straight through to the kitchen.

‘Didn’t know if you’d be in.’

‘Coffee? Bong? Pills?’

*

‘”I’m from the National Blonde Service,” she said to me,’ Tom said to him leaning back on his chair and stretching out long legs. Barry could hear the faint pops and cracks of sinews and gristle and saw how they coloured the air around Tom. His friend’s head went back when he exhaled as if pushed back by the smoke, an elephant’s trunk of it, he still had hanks of hair hanging either side of his head, left from the days when it was abundant and flowing.

‘People on top of the world,’ said Tom, ‘how do they keep their balance?’ Then he stopped to lift and blow into an imaginary saxophone as Mirror in the Bathroom broke out; nodding in praise of the new system.

They tried to make packet soup but ended up eating rubble with gulps of warm water. Luckily there was a lot of chocolate.

‘You prepared well, captain,’ said Tom, eyeing bars in the fridge, and turned to salute him.

‘Danke-shun, mein heir.’ He didn’t know why he’d turned German.

They bumped into each other on the stairs. They talked as if they’d met in the countryside, on the stairs there, as if wind was ruffling their hair and they had ruddy complexions.

Finally Barry bundled him out, bike and all, both vowing they would grow up soon, glancing up and down a street that seemed to come out of fog and concertina in and out around him, for the next interruption. The second phase of the drug was settling in, one that went right to his extremities, and he wanted to wank, wank longly over Maxine and Nina both. Maxina. Mixed up together for him and with only his pleasure in mind. But he’d only got to the first imaginings, Maxine with Nina’s legs, when the doorbell rang again.

*

Maxine. She walked in as if out of a cubist painting both eyes on the same side of her angular face, which was wrong because if Maxine was known for anything it was the roundness of her face. He couldn’t be sure it was her who he’d been picturing so recently. A voice came from her that was the same, similar, but he couldn’t place the tone or manner, even the accent.

‘OK, OK,’ he heard himself say to himself and turned away from her dark maroon patterned clothes with yellow buttons like beams of light, torches into his room. First time he’d seen her she was in a yellow top, blouse with wide cuffs, some kind of matching hair band too, in the days when those things were worn.

He sat opposite her and momentarily his back slipped into place so that the pain he’d been experiencing, even through the drugs, seemed turned off. The room stopped tilting. Maxine’s presence seemed to tighten the paintings above her, colours began to brim, the carpet seemed to breathe too, beneath its crust of dust, as if someone had finally cleaned it properly now she ran her eyes over it and around the crowded, smoky room. Each object she looked at sprang to attention.

‘Good sound system.’

‘Came today.’

She had long curtains of hair then, everyone did, John Lennon style. He could see her coming through a crowd. Her large pink mouth, slight Elvis curl to it, her little blue eyes, magnified by glasses, too little she said but he liked them, cheekiness there and something else besides, held back in them. Now her hair is a bob, shortish but still thick, grey dyed out, curling at the ends. Her glasses almost invisible. Her mouth pursed, thinner of course, but not as thin as his, like lines drawn he’d been told.

The I’m fine thank yous put out into the room, the settling down of each, the drawing of herself upright as if drawing a line for him to look at, slumped, unshaven and drugged across from her.

Of course after awkwardness they got deep into everyone they mutually knew and how they were doing and who had died, heart attack, lung cancer, overdose, starting with their inner families and working outwards. When he talked back to her he kept tonguing the inside of his front teeth, the curve of the gum, that’s where the taste was. They laughed about his mother, still singing Shirley Bassey songs off key and scowling at the clatter of the letterbox, the ring of the doorbell. I do that, he said, did it when you called, must be hereditary. They went through friends, married and divorced, rich, relatively, and poor. Did she still see Stephen and Alice? She didn’t.

She’d cut herself off, self-employed, when her new husband and then her lover left. Craft job, did some teaching at an FE college. Teaches the poor darlings to bury treasure he thought he heard her say. He said he was doing the same as when she left which was almost true. Same job, slight promotion, different shop.

Next was books and films they’d watched and read and snapped fingers over the same things like Alice Sebold and Goodfellas, even Blade Runner – had you left by then? He asked incredulously. Aaa-ceed! Chemical Brothers – they both put their hands in the air. She didn’t get on with Britpop though, Oasis, turned her nose up.

To make her wrinkle it again he said he liked jazz but he only had one compilation, ‘Music For Pleasure’ at that, and he laughed at her reaction and confessed straight away that he didn’t, but got out Sufjan Stevens and Sparklehorse CDs to show he’d kept up. He played Chicago, but said he should play something from then, maybe the group Chicago (postcard of Chicago he’d had, Sears tower in his head), something you could think of as their song, something off After The Goldrush, but he couldn’t find it, and she said anyway their song had to be Slade, C’Mon Feel The Noize because that’s the first song they’d danced to.

‘At the Y.M. disco?’

‘At the Y.M. disco.’

She accepted a joint from him confessing it had been a while as their fingers touched, thumbs and indexes. She had come, she didn’t tell him, to hear him play music again, smell and see him across a room, to put a box around a past that was coming up from pavements and found around corners, how pictures were forming of him and them all the time.

There was a sweet oil in the room she must have brought with her. Perfume maybe. There were bright two-foot beings sat either side of her bathing the room in light from their smiles. He could see the shape of her silhouetted in the light. Her shin the same, the one visible, and her knees, just showing below her dress. The calves too looked familiar, behind the shin and the knee never changing.

He put on Setting Sun to ‘change her mind about Noel Gallagher’ and the room was full of the sweeping music. He had to blur his fingers and wave his arms and she laughed and got up to join him. They danced in slow motion/fast motion like the crazed cops on the video, falling into one another at the end.

When she sat down he put on Curved Air’s Back Street Luv, which he’d found again recently and downloaded. ‘Wow!’ she said and when he put on Gregory Isaac’s Loving Pauper and the voice started up she said, ‘you bastard.’

*

When he got up to shuffle to the kitchen he moved as if Rebel Rebel was still playing even though the music had stopped and she followed to the room where little sunlight penetrated but which seemed sun-filled now. It had leaked in from the angels who were dissolving away in the other room. She tapped his shoulder and touched his side, was to the front of him, to the side of him, helping him with cups and kettle and turning on taps, tutting at his fridge, moving with jar and spoon as if she’d often done that here. As if he’d opened his eyes in a place where things persisted.

They ate toast in there and recalled their cat, not the strays, the one that stayed with its fat stripy tail like a racoon’s. At the door at night they’d call ‘here, child substitute, here subby, subby.’ He remembered it wasn’t long after its flattened death on the road that she left, some guy had been parked up around the corner for months, some guy she went to meet in a lounge bar of a near-empty pub on the newly built ring road.

The taste of it like soap and salt came back to him and he turned away, pretending to cough, particles of Marmite and crust spat into his hand. Then he started back and collapsed, shaking. The floor tiles where so many things had smashed cooled the length of him. He shuffled up, back against the wall and drew his knees up.

She leant to him. ‘You OK, Bas? Bas, speak to me.’

‘It’s OK, OK,’ he said, his body had shuddered at her touch but now calmed. ‘I’m OK. It’s the drugs. I’ll be there in a minute.’

*

When they got back in the front room and put down drinks and food, she sat on the sofa and asked if she could take off her shoes which he helped her do and felt again the slopes of her feet and the knobs of her toes and the curl under them.

The light had diminished, fog-rain at the window, the house swaddled in cloud. He felt for her leg then and she let him.

His fingertips were alive with this new Maxine, the same Maxine, the same stretch of moles and freckles along the inside of her thigh to the centre of her. She moved to let him try things, to move her back and undo and sit back to take her in, what was the same, what was different, nipples grown and spread the same pink as her lips, her skin generally darker though and the belly protruding, nicks and bumps acquired without him, marking her up but under it the same Maxine that he put his fully clothed arms around and felt contact with along the length of him, the same Maxine he clung to back in days more raw and fresh.

*

They moved upstairs, why had he taken her to the box room that smelt of damp and had crumbled or coming apart books on the windowsill and ledge, posters stacked in cracked frames in a corner, ash and dust laden, the bed cold and resisting as they tried to get in but lay on top of instead, shivery and laughing while she leant to undress him finally.

Would she keep from laughing when she saw his uncut toenails, his patch of grey pubic hair? Maybe his beer belly will hide it, that new fixture he’d built on himself since she’d been gone. He hadn’t flossed since 1992. Only now did he worry about the toilet she would use, the spider in the bath, the ring of dirt, the odour from the towel, the soap she would have to tug free of its recess.

He moved into her embrace, her breasts so much bigger now burgeoning under his ribs, he’d forgotten just how small she was. He looked down at her eyes clear as ever but with that depth, looking up at him through blackened lashes, the subtle pinkish eye shadow on the creases of her lids when she blinked.

He remembered fucking her how she joined in his conceits pretending to be his secretary – very bourgeois, they’d laughed – or strangers meeting in a pub, maybe that planted the seed, the boots and lingerie she wore for him, but now was nothing like that, it was her wrapped around him strongly, pulling him deep as she could. It was a feeling out beyond the drugs but taking those with it, pushing him deep and flat out, everything in him. Their bones bumped, their flesh stuck together; smells of him and her, seaweed and baked bread, sweet sweat, deodorant entered the sterile unadorned room and made it different. Every time he came into this room, he was thinking, as he felt her all over him, her grasp and thoughts and flesh around him, she would be there.

He didn’t want to collapse on her, but felt like it after climax like a flare gun going off in him, ripped him up, and he managed to fall back away from her. Everything in him was suddenly mute, gone, and he woke up to find his ex-wife and recent lover slapping him gently. ‘You blacked out,’ she said, and for the second time, ‘You OK?’

They lay back then side by side, eventually covering up their aged and pushed out, mottled and dented body and flesh, half covering up: he could still see and touch her grown, flopping breasts. How the bulb light curved around her face, that cheek-and-nose shape, the tiny point of the nose like an apple pip in sight again.

‘I remember when you got the heebie-jeebies,’ she said, ‘you wouldn’t let anyone talk to you, not even me.’ He nodded at it, but they didn’t pursue any obvious trails of mutual memory, meeting, special signals, parting, not past one or two sentences about a place and a time.

It had puzzled her this insistence on him she’d thought she’d left behind, but in the clinch she couldn’t kill it. She had shaken him because she couldn’t, he must have noticed the change in her, she thought, but she saw how he was oblivious, high and away from her. She hadn’t got what she’d come for, and couldn’t name it anyway and now felt content to have him coming down beside her, his speech and movement slowing down.

‘Thought of you on your 50th,’ she did tell him, ‘was out of the country but you know can’t forget the date.’

They moved together again, him stroking her, and promising to cook a curry later, a skill he hadn’t lost, when there were three rings on the bell downstairs. Maxine laughed when she realised it was trick-or-treaters and curled into him when he complained about Americanisation, and lay like grace had descended in a warmth remembered and different. Outside the fog thickened as groups of skeletons and monsters and vampires laid siege to the street. Barry and Maxine got closer, balled up in each other, intertwining rough old flesh as kids outside started egging the house, spraying it with paint and flour, and letting off early fireworks, jumping jacks and bangers.

paris at night by Sung J. Woo

Today was rice day, fifty-pound sacks of white rice in trucks bearing an elephant logo. The same happy elephant appeared on the bags, its head raised to the sky, the trunk curved like an S.
“Elephant,” Todd said.
He said it because a laborer was staring at it intently. Which meant he wasn’t working.
“That’s right,” the man said. “I couldn’t remember the word.”
He was the only other human at the loading dock this morning. The man didn’t have a name, just a number, like the rest of the robots.
“Let’s get back to it, 8831, okay?”
“Yessir,” the man said.
That could be me, Todd thought as he watched him work side by side with his silent mechanical counterparts, lifting, carrying, and dropping bags of rice from the back of the truck to the warehouse. A bad car accident, a bad fall from a ladder, and that could be me.
Or a bad memrip.

AT LUNCH, Todd thought of things he could sell. Everything he owned of any value, he could touch: his grandfather’s watch, his grandmother’s wedding ring, a gold necklace belonging to some forgotten relative. His car, too, but that was out of the question as he needed it to work.
He got up from his chair and scanned the floor below, the robots still working away, a sea of metallic shoulders rising and falling in unison, strangely beautiful in a way. Over by the forklift sat 8831, his eyes as blank as the piece of bread he was eating.
Two weeks from today was Todd’s thirtieth wedding anniversary, and even if he were to pawn the watch, the ring, and the necklace, he knew he wouldn’t even come close to having enough for Paris. That’s where Sue had wanted to go for as long as he could remember. They didn’t have the money to honeymoon there, but that was okay because back then, there had been plenty of time. They were young, both healthy and working, so they would save a little here and there and in a couple of years, they would be walking up to the Eiffel Tower at night arm in arm, find themselves underneath the arch and look up at the beacon that shined on this city of lights.
But then came two sons and three recessions and a second mortgage. A hysterectomy for her, a double bypass for him, and now here he was, nine years short of retirement, supervising a team of robots and a retarded man, thinking about folks who could sell things they couldn’t touch, like stocks and bonds and whatever else he couldn’t even fathom, people with money who would pay to experience another’s most cherished moments.
Silly. That would be Sue’s word for it if this were a story she’d overheard. For a trip, a goddamn trip, what a silly thing to do.
But it was more than a trip. It was their life together. There was life and there was death, and it seemed to Todd that if he waited any longer, there wouldn’t be a difference between the two.
He opened the filing cabinet and rifled through the folders. In all the years he’d been here, only a handful of human workers had come and gone. All of them were handicapped in some way; they came through the city welfare program, and 8831 was no exception.
Name: Lopez, Manny
Age: 46
Tax Status: Married
Disability: Neural Trauma

Neural Trauma. It was worth a shot.
Manny’s wife picked up on the second ring. Todd told her who he was, and after he assured her that her husband was not hurt, he was fine, he was a great worker, he asked her what he wanted to know. She listened without interrupting him, then there was a lengthy silence.
“Why?” she asked.
“Does it matter?”
“I can report you.”
“I know.”
More silence.
“He did it because he loved me. Loved,” she said, hardening. “Not loves.”
“I heard you.”
Then she hung up on him, and for the rest of the day, Todd replayed the conversation in his mind. Should he have lied to her, made up some story about a sick mother, a dying child? He wasn’t good at talking, especially on the phone. People thought he was unfriendly, hostile. A woman once told him his voice sounded like broken stones rattling in a cage.
The horn blared at five, time for the two humans to go home and the robots to be reconditioned and put in standby.
Todd was walking out to his car when Manny touched his shoulder.
“Boss,” he said, sounding uncertain. He held out his phone. “My wife, she wants to talk to you?”

THE HOUSE was quiet when he returned, and it seemed to Todd that he wanted to keep it that way. Take small, measured steps, like a thief. He carefully pulled the door shut, holding onto the doorknob and turning it by hand until it locked.
Above, the floorboards creaked, Sue’s footsteps as she walked from their bedroom to the bathroom. Then a flush, and the trill of water climbing up to refill the toilet tank. And now the muffled voice of the late-show host on TV, the encouraging laughter of the studio audience, the one-two punch repeating until they cut to commercial.
Todd sat at the dining table and peeked inside the microdome, at the plate Sue had made for him. Pork chops, a bunch of broccoli spears, a hill of mashed potatoes with a well of gravy. He touched the REHEAT button and watched his plate spin slowly, the inside of the dome steaming up.
One thing for sure, my clients never tire of wedding proposals.
The man Todd had met after work was funny, friendly, utterly normal. It didn’t seem possible that they were talking about something that could land both of them a minimum of two years in prison.
I’m not going to lie to you, Todd. There’s a risk to this. People do get hurt, like your friend Manny. But keep in mind that Manny didn’t follow our simple yet extremely important directions. We told him over and over again that he wasn’t to consume any alcoholic beverages twenty-four hours before the procedure. We even hired a Portuguese translator to make sure he understood what was required of him. See, this is why Mrs. Lopez still led you to us, because she knows we do good work. Her cousin’s a regular sourcer, comes in once a month, has been for years. We don’t mess up, Todd. It’s the sourcers who mess up. And I can see we’ll have a smooth ride, because you’re a smart guy.
Though he introduced himself as Richard Gibbons, he also immediately admitted that it was an alias.
In my opinion, Todd? In my opinion, I think it’s something the government should regulate. Because let’s face it, everybody’s doing it. But think how long it took for marijuana to become legalized. Hell, it’s still not legal in Alabama.
Todd opened the microdome and took out the plate. The pork had gotten a little tougher, but it still tasted wonderful, his wife’s signature flavors of mint and garlic in every bite.
The way I see it, you’re getting peak value for something that is going to eventually disappear. I’m not just talking about Alzheimer’s. Once you go past sixty, memories fade at an alarming clip. It’s what happens because the brain can only retain so much. Like all of our other organs, it’s about usage. When was the last time you thought about your honeymoon? Honestly? The less you use, the more you lose. It’s the foundation of how our bodies work. The health benefits of memripping, they’re not some urban legend. You’re cleaning house. You’re taking out the garbage and putting in out on the curb, but here’s the difference: you’re getting paid for that trash.
It was a painless, quick procedure. All you had to do was remember what you wanted to have ripped while the machine was plugged into you. The surgery was completely automated and technologically sound.
Memory is free. Not for our clients, of course, haha! But for you, Todd. Think of all the new memories you’ll create with the money you’ll have. Our government wants to equate our enterprise to organ trafficking, but nothing could be further from the truth. You grow memory like a crop, and when you want to, you harvest it. Are there people picketing against farmers every time they cut down a bushel of corn? Of course not. It’s natural. It’s life.
“Todd?”
Sue met him at the sink. She reached for the dish towel hanging off the hook, but Todd angled his body to block her.
“It’s just one dish,” he said. “You can let it dry.”
“You had a long day.”
Todd wiped his hands on the towel and turned around to face her. Even though she looked prettier with her makeup on, he also liked seeing his wife like this, right before they went to bed, because only he saw her like this. Nobody else in the world knew this Sue, only him.
Though it was possible that wouldn’t be true after the memrip. But was that a bad thing? Was it so terrible to share his love for his wife with someone else?
Todd waited to turn off the kitchen lights, for Sue to switch on the lamp at the landing of the staircase. It was their unspoken routine to retire to their bedroom. There were many other small routines like that one, and now, as he climbed the stairs with her, Todd thought how wonderful it was to know another person so well, that this was comfort, that this was home.

TRIANGULAR BOXES. That was the shipment that waited for him when he arrived at work the following morning. There were blue ones and red ones and yellow ones and green ones, and each contained a like-colored chair from a Korean designer. Todd couldn’t see how a box like that could hold a comfortable chair, so he opened one up and sat in it.
“Jesus Christ,” he said.
Four auto-adjusting palm-shaped prongs supported him in ways that seemed impossible: his lower back, his love handles, and his neck. If he had his way, he would sit here forever. But he couldn’t, as the whistle blew and the robots came to life.
He thought the oddly-shaped boxes might pose a challenge for them, but they didn’t miss a step. The robots saw the way the boxes were stacked inside the truck, right side up and upside down, staggered to maximize space, and they replicated the exact pattern in the warehouse.
Manny worked in perfect tandem with his mechanized brothers as the morning turned into afternoon. Like yesterday, he went back to the forklift to eat his lunch, and Todd wondered if perhaps he used to run one of those. He considered asking him but changed his mind. If Manny did so before, he certainly didn’t now, so what was there to talk about?
In his office, Todd dug into the brown paper bag of his own lunch and thought that today was very much like yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that. But tomorrow would be different because tonight would be different. If the memrip went according to plan – and he had no reason to believe it wouldn’t, because he hadn’t had a beer in the last twenty-four hours, hadn’t washed his hair this morning, followed everything Gibbons had told him – tomorrow he would call up that travel agent who advertised in the paper and tell her to book the platinum romantic getaway to Paris for two.
For a trip, a goddamn trip, what a silly thing to do.
He could almost hear her say it. But she would be telling him as they were flying over the Atlantic in first-class seats. They’d never sat in those large leather chairs, only walked past them on their way to the narrow discomforts of coach.
Sue had made him the perfect egg salad sandwich, just enough mayo to keep the egg bits and chopped slivers of celery together. As he ate, he took out his flexphoto to watch the twelve-picture slideshow from Uncle Patrick’s wedding. Gibbons had given him the paper-thin disposable device, which was programmed to turn on just once. According to Gibbons, the worst thing a sourcer could do was overprepare, try to remember too much and turn an emotional memory into an intellectual exercise.
My client has been waiting seven years for this, Todd.
Each picture only stayed on for five seconds, but it seemed much longer than that when the first one came up. How was it possible that they were both so thin, so young? Sue was in a blue sleeveless dress. She was in attendance because she was a friend of Uncle Patrick’s sister. She was nineteen years old, and Todd was twenty. In the picture, they were both in the frame, sitting down at adjacent tables as dinner was being served. They had yet to meet, and somehow that made the moment even more special.
Love at first sight. People say it, but they rarely mean it. My client has gone through sixteen memrips and still has yet to find a real one. That’s why he’s willing to pay big.
He and Sue dancing, his left hand clasping her right hand, his right arm around her waist, their youthful faces glowing like a pair of full moons.
I know the risk is more on your side, but you have to understand, the destinator also faces dangers. Emotional dangers. The disappointment can be so crushing that they often need to seek psychological and spiritual guidance. This client who’ll be installing your memrip, he’s got one therapist and two holistic advisors on permanent payroll. So needless to say, he’s counting on you.
Their first kiss, and the angle showed Sue’s surprise and delight. She was slightly drunk and so was he, but Todd remembered that moment more than any other, the warmth and wetness of her lips, the way they parted as the kiss transformed into a smile.
I know you’ll do your best. That’s all we ask.
The flexphoto blinked off, and lunch was over.

“READY?” Gibbons asked.
They were in a dentist’s office, and from the looks of it, not a very successful dentist. There was a leak in the corner of the ceiling, turning half of the tile brown, and the muzak that flowed out of the speakers was at times staticky.
Todd sat in the chair, his head tipped back and immobilized inside an octagonal metal cage. He couldn’t see the machine anymore, but he knew it was there, a black cylinder with a silver arm. At the end of the arm was a clear tube too thin for the naked eye to see, which would enter through his left ear, travel through the auditory nerve, and make its way to his brain.
“You’re not gonna feel a thing.”
“Okay,” Todd said, and soon there was a whirring in his left ear.
Indeed, he felt nothing as the tube burrowed inside. The pills Gibbons had given him were working, too, making his eyes a little dry but calming him.
“And we’re in,” Gibbons said.
Gibbons slid a flexphoto into a slot in front of the cage, filling Todd’s view with blackness. Then the slideshow started again, and this time Todd held nothing back. Uncle Patrick’s wedding, thirty-two years ago, meeting his future wife for the first time. Realizing he’ll never again remember this moment filled him with regret, and for a second he felt an intense desire to scream, that he didn’t want to do this, that his memory was his and no one else’s, but then the feeling passed.
Just buyer’s remorse, Todd thought, and went back to the task at hand, which was to remember.
At some point, Gibbons said, “The buffer’s getting full, so it’s going to scrape.”
Scrape.
Todd didn’t think there were words that could describe it. Clean? Was that what it was, that he felt clean? But it wasn’t like washing his hands or taking a shower. Suddenly there was a lightness in him, fresh, impossible pockets of air inside his mind. It wasn’t an unpleasant sensation because it wasn’t a sensation at all. That was it: whatever this was, it was the antithesis of something, but it wasn’t exactly nothing, because the concept of nothingness existed in relation to a somethingness before it. What the scrape did was more than just remove his personal history; it removed the concept of history itself.
This should hurt, Todd thought. Something like this should be painful.
The next photo came into his vision, he and Sue at the bar, waiting for their drinks, but what had he been thinking about just before?
“Don’t back up, just see forward, Todd,” Gibbons said. “Let it go.”
There were two more scrapings, and then they were done. The whirring in his ear stopped, and Gibbons unlatched the harness around his head. Todd rotated his neck left and right and back again, stiff from two hours of stillness.
On the top of the memrip machine was a round clear disc, a petri dish, with just a smidge of gray matter.

PARIS WAS stubborn. While other cities around the world were busy upgrading concrete with organic alloys and replacing old street lamps with compact photon bulbs, this city looked no different than the way it did a hundred years ago. The stone bricks, the gargoyles, the wrought-iron fences, they looked like they’d always been here.
“Are you sure we’re going the right way?” Sue asked.
Paris, at night. It was what she had always wanted, wasn’t it?
Wasn’t it?
These questions, these doubts. If only he could make them disappear.
“I think so,” Todd said, walking past signs he couldn’t read.
For a while things were fine, and then they weren’t. Gibbons found a neurologist who was willing to examine Todd without notifying the authorities. Just bad luck, the doctor had said. You can never tell how these things will go. That’s why it’s not legal.
Memory is like a million little houses. Taking one out is like lifting a house from a community. Not a big deal, because you can just build another in its place. The community remains unaffected.
But some memories are like skyscrapers. If you’re careful, you might be able to take away the first floor of a tall building and leave it standing, but never for long. Sooner than later, walls start to crack. Ceilings leak. It’s just a matter of time until the structure groans and loses integrity.
You still have lots of houses, though, Todd. A strong, stable community. That’s why you’re capable of doing everything else, like your job, like walking and eating and enjoying a movie. But your wife will remain problematic. Even new memories you form with her, they’re going to reference this skyscraper because the damage was so extensive.
I’m so sorry.
Just one more street, Todd thought. When he glanced at Sue, he saw the way she was favoring her left leg. Why was that?
He didn’t know.
If only they could find their way. How could they be lost, trying to find the tallest structure in the city? It was stupid. It was infuriating.
“Oh my,” Sue said, pointing.
And there it was, finally, having hidden behind a row of buildings on this side street. There was no buildup to their encounter: the tower was not there, not there, and then…just there, in its entirety, tall and strong and sharp.
And still far away. It would take another fifteen minutes for them to reach the Eiffel Tower, where Todd would stand with the woman he was supposed to love underneath the arch, holding her hand, and listen to the wind whipping through the girders.

a story by- Sung J. Woo

The Card by James Ross

The only thing I ever got off my old man was a birthday card when I was ten. He’d gone off when I was three and left me and mam and my sister to fend for ourselves. Mam never talks about him but my sister remembers him.

‘What was dad like?’ I ask.

She looks at me through dark, sleepy eyes, pushes her hair back from her eyes. Her arms are scabbed like she’s been shinning up a rusty drainpipe and accidentally slid back down and scraped herself. ‘Whu?’

‘I said, what was dad like?’

She smiles at me, and I suss that she’s still trippin’ and I should ask her later when she’s straight.

Anyhow, the only thing I ever got from him was a birthday card when I was ten. It said Happy Birthday Mickey! And then there was a verse inside the card that went:

Now you’re ten, and how you’ve grown

It really won’t be long

‘Til you’re a man, and fully grown

With arms both big and strong.

And on the front of the card was a picture, a cartoon, of a little boy wearing a hardhat and driving a tractor. But I mean, how would he know I’d grown? To be honest, I was surprised he knew where I was, we moved so often.

But the killer was, at the bottom of the card, below the rhyme, he’d added:

Remember, no one’s got your back

XX. Dad.

I’d studied this card on more than one occasion, trying to work out some depth to what he was telling me. ‘Laura, what was dad like?’

Three hours later and she’s washing up. The dutiful daughter. She looked up a little, thought about my question for a second or two. Then she said, ‘I love him. Still.’

‘Well I hate him. What was he like, though?’

And she said, ‘Stern.’

‘Stern, huh?’

‘I don’t mean strict; more like serious. Like you, a bit, but smarter, taller and better looking.’ Then she laughed and slapped me across the arm, ‘Dry the dishes,’ she said.

It’s funny, I learn a lot from my sister, mainly don’t do drugs, which I should have written in capital letters instead of italics, but never mind, the thing is, when she’s not high or shaking ‘cos she needs some stuff, she’s really smart and, truth be told, she’s the core of our family, the strength, believe it or not. Honest, she keeps us together. There’s me, fifteen, bright, got a future, they tell me, though I haven’t and I’ll tell you about that later, and then there’s my mam, as honest as, and working, and sensible (though not in her choice of boyfriends or anything) and all that stuff. And then there’s Laura. Nineteen, and a junkie, but she holds the family together. Cos mam’s a flake and useless, and I, basically, am at a loose end; financially, educationally, socially, morally… I won’t go on.

Laura has one thing going for her; she’s honest. And because she is honest she sees more than most, so she knows more than most, and she holds me and mam together.

Mam.

Hold on, I was told by my English teacher, Miss Wright, that I should show, not tell; ‘too much exposition,’ she’ll say to me (look it up). So maybe I should stop describing my life, start showing what happens instead, but I’ll get to that bit in a bit, so to speak.

Ok, so mam. My mother. She is thirty seven years old and she is a flake. A total dribble. Weak as. They should do a reality TV show on my mam – “How Not To …”

“How Not To bring up your children.”

“How Not To save for the future.”

“How Not To get a good job.”

“How Not To attract a nice boyfriend.”

She did once. Attract a nice boyfriend, that is. And I’ve read all the women’s magazines she buys and I knew from the off it wasn’t going to last. From the moment she said to me, ‘He’s kind, thoughtful, good looking. He’s got a good job, Pete, and a lovely car’ (a bloody good car, since you ask. You didn’t? But you would have. A Kompressor. Which means Supercharger. Which also means money. Cool. German. Cool. And much more). But anyway, as she’s telling me all this I’m thinking, Yeah, but mam, you’re going to fall for a skinheaded nightclub doorman or a carpet salesman called Wayne and you’re going to jack Pete in and tell me ‘there was no spark’ which translates as, you think that love equals pain, and affection means distress and you think that being nice is the equivalent of being invisible. Which it kind of is. So just be honest. Please. So, as predicted, Pete went the journey. Kompressor and all. And in moved Marc. Fifteen years younger than mam. What a tosspot.

What a racket.

It was embarrassing. It was the crime that no parent should inflict upon their children! Making those noises. I was twelve, which made Laura sixteen; she’d just failed her exams and was working in Safeway. Very content. Regular money, dreaming about her own flat. Boyfriend. And the last thing that Laura wanted was mam and Marc doing that upstairs halfway through a Sunday afternoon. Go on mam; be a mam, not a flake. Don’t be desperate, please. But no. And when Marc made a play for Laura one afternoon, just a suggestion you understand, she screamed the place down and mam came dashing downstairs half-dressed and slapped Laura to shut her up and then slapped her again when she heard what she was accusing Marc of doing.

I’m not tough, really, I’m not. And I’m not pretending to be not tough so you’ll think that really I secretly am tough either. I’m just not. So when mam took his side against Laura I couldn’t drop Marc with a right hook to the jaw or a knee in the family jewels, though I really, really wanted to, so I just went and sat on the front step and listened to them row.

It was one of those afternoons with dark and light grey clouds flying across the sky on the wind (scudding, as they say in really old novels). I sat on the step of our front door watching the seagulls wheel and fly and sail on the wind. I wished I could do that.

I have this theory that, to us the world is a flat thing we stand on, but to birds it is a cliff they cling to, a huge ball and they cling to the side and then fall off and fly and glide. I’m digressing here, but I can’t remember what else happened, except I know how it ended. The next morning I waited until Marc went out and then I used mam’s phone to call the police and grass Marc for the twenty grams of cocaine he had stashed in a haversack under the stairs.

Bingo.

Job done.

Like I say, I’m not tough. But I don’t need to be when there’s five polis and a German Shepherd dog breaking down the door and dragging Marc screaming down the path and into a van.

Anyhow, this card I got from my dad. It said, remember, no one’s got your back, like this was some piece of information I’d known but had forgotten, or like I already had asked someone to get my back and then discovered they hadn’t got it, or something. I mean, come on dad, I don’t know who you are, or where you are or what you do or anything, but come on, be a dad for a minute. For as long as it takes not to write that sentence.

I was ten years old for Chrissake.

Write I miss you or We’ll meet up when you’re older or Stick in at school. In fact, here’s an idea. Don’t send me a card.

Go on.

Unsend it.

But the funny thing is, daft, one-off card with a stupid picture and a deranged verse it might have been.

But he was right.

No one’s got your back.