Flashfic

The Code is This (Expanded)

Andrew Leave a comment

I’ve gotten my back in knots of fucking sadness trying to find something inspiring to write today, so I’m getting out the expanded version of an old favourite. You can read the ‘first part’ at https://andy-luke.com/2013/07/18/the-code-is-this/

“Aeroplanes aren’t yellow granny. That’s an old tree, and I love old, old trees.”

There is breeze.

As I sit and write this to you, another kid plays among the small birds on land. A goose is staring at me. He has been staring through the railings with another who only has one eye fixed on me. Standing like monarchs. I turn my gaze to  a fuzzy little duckling, a yellow child.  Suddenly, the kid gets too near it and the geese turn their heads from him and hiss. The kid cries and runs off and away, happier and his mother feeds them all from a bag of bread. Several of the shit-heads find their way out and it only takes one four claps to send them all away, but later they return to the mother with the bread bag: the monarch geese, the mallards and  self-respecting lapwings.

The birds trust me now: the little grey and white flecked lapwings looks like a pigeons  with manners and self-respect. There is another bag of bread. She has gone to. That was GEC08 just disappearing over the bird island.

This is all on your phone as you walk and walk to who knows where. It started with happy solitude at the bank were a fish-like bird dived and you followed the trail. Into green green paths through trees, cool serene airing until you were wrapped in them and their oxygens got inside you and your knots are snapped. This is the time you escaped to England, this is the time you escaped to Wales, this is Northern Ireland, this is patriotism. This is a song and a flag and worth getting the skin out for your chums. This is the best thing about religion and people looking at one another, and strangers. The code is this.

The Pub That Richard Forgot

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“I think Andrew dreamt it”, said Stephen. Ten times we’d talked it to the dead end and my claws screamed at the blanked memories. Sure it was dark, it was a pub, its light darkened by lodge brown venetian blins. The tables and the bar were a deep hue. It was Richard took me there: another pint with Adam, here’s to sloshed Lee. Someone’s away for agess: with a girl, a cigarette machine that spun off into a mini-series? Or the bar? The only other area lit.

Richard looks at me and I wonder do these memories even provide these lights. It’s been washed off the map in a flash flood of lager.

“I’m not imagining it!” I plead. “It’s up the Crescent or Botanic…Yeah, I was talking to Dawn and she knew where I meant. The Courtyard or The Vineyard or something.”
Richard integrates the new data, searching, acquiring…”Hmm, I wonder.” In my opinion, he’s getting nowhere.
“Look!” I claim the pen.
“On the outside, it’s a small building..” I scrawl a rectangle for a cottage and the trees on each side. Then a wall in front. The gap for the path is very small, only one to two persons can get through at a time.
“AND IT’S INDEPENDENTLY OWNED TOO!” I assure.
“I can’t say I recall”, says he who has clearly been there four times. “It’s not Garfields is it?”, and in writing I think he knows now were I mean. Garfield’s was a public toilet.
“I think he means a place inside his head. If we were miniaturised and piloted a capsule in there we’d find it.”
“Right! I say we got up to Botanic now!” I have raised my voice. “I can get us there”
“I don’t know that we’d have time.”
All the way across the Corn Market cascade, with the people that zip and shuffle and line shop fronts, the kettled cattle. The cars of Chichester Street, Royal Avenue, traffic lights in front of crossings. There are Cafe Neros and Starbucks in this city. Its a grid, no diagonal cuts: grid, grid, grid between us and the bus station that is only halfway to Botanic’s maybe place.

“We’ll do it another day” we agree and Stephen remains with the book, Richard is out the door, and I’m looking at you.

Red Eyes

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“Be!” sounded the cry of The Shadow Men, stood in grid formation.

“All that you can be!” They raised their rifles over their shoulders and waved them in the air.

“In the arm-eee!”

It was a decidedly undisciplined show of loyalty, perhaps more proscribed to children at a water park. There were cheers, and a few shots went off. The Man in The Mask turned his head around, as if addressing The Steel Hyena. There were hundreds of men below him, but enough realised the next few seconds of their bosses whims were crucial and they made a show of marching to the craft. Each ship took a fourteen man crew, weighing towards the forward guns. It was not really strange to their leaders or his soldiers were in the shape of his heads. Yes, forty or fifty foot square heads. Inside eyeholes pilots sat, framed by blast shutters mimicking eyelids were the occasion called for it. This at least had a function. The nose was fairly superfluous. The grinning incisors were particularly ornate and served to intimidate their enemies.

Off the coast of Bermuda, U.S. Captain John Crenshaw engaged the red skull in his F-15 fighter jet. He and the co-pilot Mac called the crew up to see. The men laughed so hard that they slipped upon the controls and the plane ended up in the sea.

“Another successful mission for Count Cameron and the Agents of F.R.E.A.K.” the speakers boomed. The crowds eyes lit up red and they exploded into self-congratulatory cheering.

The Code Is This

Andrew 1 Comment

Hot brick shit-head hemmed tight smash and murder familiar with a live feed. Game children scream it. I have no cash, love, and plastic man on those walls. The code is this: 30 minutes walk, tops, in shade to work, or by the water (relaxation and other writing). Google Maps for me means Victoria Park, where Linda took me for recommends.

More directions on an alternate route. I tell her when we get there, “I haven’t been here since I was their size.”

Slowly, slabs inside canal, it’s mass, a special dirt through rails on this green path. It’s a fragment dream or memory on this day. A canal, stinking, maybe it goes back to the road. My first familiar is a club (a bowling club) but later new houses. On the other side, the empty canal shows up more  concrete slabs: illuminated grey topology rising to the railings and the old factories on the other side.

There’s an old grey bridge on the road like a tank.

By me, a thick forest hole I might have hid in. Did my grandfather take me here, my mother? There’s something…it’s like we lived around here.  This feeling lasts another five minutes and it’s all green and sun and it’s quiet. Everywhere it’s quiet, but for three harmless bugs that move like hornets. I remember, and not much has changed, besides the aeroplanes. They fly low over-head when they do. I saw the under-belly and the rotors and the whirls like primal wind-mills.

At the end of the path is love. As if several miles of walking among trees which walk shadows around the lake of the same length. Swans looking respectful, ducks and forty bobbing white little grey ones (pigeons), Larger birds line a branch which sticks it’s feet up over the cool ripples. Away there, It’s an island. There are five six of these, as big as my street.

A strong river over the bridge could take vehicles, but says none on this point. A memorial grey black tells it’s reach. The trees are thick and heavy, fifty, sixty foot. Oh, it’s love. The curl around the lake and out to a gap were a red concrete building, post-modern cabin sits by perfectly mowed grass. I’m noticing on the bridge there is a bench space and I sit and watch. There are small groups – mothers and kids, no screams. By me, a child plays around a tree.

“Aeroplanes aren’t yellow granny. That’s an old tree, and I love old, old trees.”

There is breeze.

159: Blog / Short story: No Evidence

Andrew Leave a comment

I didn’t blog here yesterday, first no-show in over three weeks. Of course, if the dole found out I had taken a day off advertising my creative talents, well now, unemployed people are not legally allowed holidays. Still, as long as I’m showing records of three applications a week I’m justifying my subsistence.

I was out tonight to hear comrade Patrick Brown perform musical voicery. I’ve known Paddy on and off for quite a while but hearing him rip out ‘My Girl’ was a bit Who, WTF, Another Person! Sadly, I’ve no tech captures, but it was a pleasure hearing Paddy get the guitar out for ‘My Lagan Love’ and his Rat Pack duet with matching hat wearer Gary in ‘Me and My Shadow’ was immense fun. Actually, the whole programme was distinctive and muscular, less associated with people graduating a singing class (that it was), than some stunning top-league singers. There was a lot of theatrical acting too, expressionism, performance: a very shapely singer named Geraldine even sat her bum on Paddy’s back while he was bent over on all fours on the stage.

Hey, you gotta have a hobby.

At the urging of Tim Pilcher, I’m coming off Facebook and Twitter for a week in protest at the NSA’s Operation Prism. (Clue: You can read about it in the news and millions of people are talking about it) Of course, my abstinence won’t make a jot in the same way yoga isn’t really exercise, but it is good for you.  It’s the practice and the principle. You’re here reading this, so you know exactly what I mean.  My contact details are here.

Okay, short story time.

No Evidence

It was the first snowfall of the year. Eliza watched from the bay window as her bikini she held tight in a ball. You can’t see this, shedding fir, sent from a whiter place. The snow gave no evidence but the sound, it was far away at first: crispier as it would have got closer but behind the double-glazing and reptilian central heating, Eliza heard nothng. There would be no lazy day applying creams in the elements, no commune with the space around her small but rich haven. It was not until, while focussing on the white-lands of the space were her drive-way lay that she saw Bob. Screaming, she dropped the dress, but remained rooted to the spot. China’s most expensive A.I. would be destroyed in that weather.
“My tin man, My tin man, My beloved tin man my tin man!”

165: Spellcheck (Flashfic)

Andrew Leave a comment

One of the great practices awarded me by the Belfast Writers Group is that of having a go at flash fiction, 15 minute writing exercises. Last week I uploaded ‘Locked Doors’ which I will tell you nothing more about. No. Forbidden. I wrote this:

The boys rolled the wooden wheel twelve feet all of it speedier and somehow keeping pace another three in front carted grid pallettes: stacked half dozen. Another the same ahead of them. Muscled up and aged between eight and ten, some acted as guards, waving them along. Or maybe they were like startled pigeons or the car passengers which ran alongside.

And they’ll drop them off and get them in another factory and the adults will stack them tall in the field and then everything will burn. The lush green land of Antrim, burn! The blue skies of Down, burn, smoke and flame! Armagh, Fermanagh, Tyrone —

“IF YOU BURN IT, Will it grow again?”, I yelled.

The boy whirled to look at me, then pushed his wheel again. My distraction would not help it stop. The two teams of carters did the same and escaped narrowly their own wounding. An ox-man and four-boobs bleacher turned to look at me, her saggy plastic bag even, piercing the area with it’s haunting.

I selfishly expected not to make it home by desk.

That night, the freedom fighting guardians urinate: our country-men undressed to Scientologist pyjamas, Westboro Baptist night-gowns, number 20Q the woman-beater. As they slept or did not, I took my reprieve, and crept out into the darkness. Jay met me among the criss-cross of back alleys and the graffiti exhorting warfare. It hadn’t seen a spell-checker.

‘Cameron Go, Game of Thrones Style!’

Then the pair of us moved the brushes and sprays onto the next blank wall. There we painted a large iris overlooking a yellowed union flag underpants, that dripped down into a coffee cup on fire.

‘Radio 4 – For God and Ulster’

That was on the next street over already.

‘Daily Fail Wordsearch – Today: Indians’

We took our time there because Jo wanted to make it ‘Canadians’.

By 3am we’d become annoyed, so returned home to a flask. He wanted to expose the negligent junkie dad at 3 G.S.E, I thought it would be good for us to de-weed the bus stop.

“Yeah, we’ll be putting up a timetable next.”

Forty new pieces of cross-discipline graffiti went up that night and there was a spate of copycat acts later that month with old world maps re-created, and classical music notes on the Albertbridge. Inked hyperlinks adorned Knockbreda, a mosaic appeared one night on the Castlereagh Road. In Dee Street, a minimalist man, Chad Kilroy peered over a wall, and asked, “Where’s Banksy?”.

Only four of these were burned in the July 12th bonfires, painted on the walls by people’s homes. Within two years, literacy was up.

172: Locked Doors

Andrew 1 Comment

There were no electrics, just the feel for blood and fluffy spider’s homes, abandoned saucer, and a penny from another age. The echoes were gone, stopped after the door was sealed. A lopsided rotary telephone, pale green waste of the 1980s hung off the orange sponge. There was no room for ghosts, but the photo seeped in regardless, and the buttons, nuts, screws, washers and bolts. The key hung in the lock always then, black and thin, but it was enough. Too easy it turned. When us boys were of age the doorway saw it’s last influx – a surrealist inferno of snakes and ladders weeping through these Elysian fields. The Rubik cube chucked, Evil Kinevil came off his bike, the 1981 Sapphire and Steel annual was 2-D only.

The sports-men retirement didn’t seem so bad – twilight years reading editions of Valiant, and Lion. The Arsenal Subbuteo team counted among them a fatality, two cripples, and the comics attracted silverfish and held the damp. In time the dust fell upon Bond’s car clogging the engines, the plans of Thunderbirds International Rescue were of no use to anyone.

In happier times, I’d locked my brother in there.

I returned to the house to help them move but when I got to the cupboard, the key had been removed, just as it was when The Brother Wars were at their fiercest. It was locked. On the other side, Action Man and Buggy Boy, Streamline and Lego Tom Baker waited. In that keyhole chink of light they heard the compact digital that played only 80s music. It should have been a living hell but provided consistency and stability, like nursery rhymes. The glint of new neighbours illuminated the chequered red and white table-cloth, the shinier bits of the cutlery and the cleaner laminate. The curtains came off and the muddy old windows were exchanged for the 21st century. Children entered the house again. They regarded the keyhole with curious eyes. The middle class parents made them watch Blue Peter were sugar-drunk presenters raved about British Pathe, time capsules and the Wayback Machine.