1

Time for Trade
by Fariel Shafee

The shadow of a woman moved smoothly over the grass. She was a tall, slender figure, clad in snow white. Her rose colored lips moved only once and a whisper pervaded the air. It was a shrill and a soft whisper at once - gentle and yet powerful. It was enticing and also commanding.

John lay on the grass. The shadow moved about. It was a shadow that must have appeared from the kingdom of impossibility. She defied the rules of the universe. Her long and draped legs seemed not to have touched the earth; yet she moved gently. She appeared to be floating. She was unreal, yet she was existent.

John knew she actually was a figment of his mind. She was not a part of reality. She was a weakness he was afflicted with - an anomaly of his brain function.

He was indeed a rational man and had always been very practical. A few months ago when he had carefully unfolded the newspaper and had read about the bizarre customs of a tribe that dwelt in a far away island, he could hear himself laugh. These people believed in the existence of a demon that would engulf their souls in a world beneath the ground had they forsaken the ABSOLUTE rules.

The laws created by their god who had promised them a splendid future seemed impossible to prove. It was a future that was separated from them with a singularity of a lifetime, and no one had crossed that barrier while they were alive. Yet they believed in its existence and they sacrificed their present, living their lives in poverty and following rules that were ridiculous. Their deeds just made no sense!

John believed in logic. Hypothesis: A would yield B. Fifty people had done A and had always ended with B. Hence now that A leads to B is a FACT. And B brings optimum happiness. With B taking place all over the world, all people can eat, be happy and then they can tame nature to bring more prosperity to their lives. So all should practice A. That is all that mattered.

However, once in every blue moon, actually not quite that infrequently - say once every week, there appeared these groups of irrational people. They were probably created only to upset all the goodness that had so meticulously been done in the world. They would start preaching the clause C, and they would stubbornly practise C. They would go sauntering around the streets with stories that sound like this: If the world practices C, they would end in a state D. And although no one had ever seen this state D existing, some gullible and weak lunatics would start their ritual of C, shrinking the possibility of the world actually settling down happily in the B state - a state that all can agree with.

Sadly enough, the story rarely ended there. There would then be a group that would begin to preach E, and then F and then G. These were all actions that they related with some very unrealistic future or some future that obviously did not logically follow the action that they mentioned. There would also be some people who would opt for some state Q. And we all know that Q is not optimal.

There really was too much insanity in the world. This only made the world worse.

John wanted to correct the world.

He had decided that all that is wrong must actually be pointed out, and people should come to their senses. He would really not have cared much unless he was so hopelessly tied with these absolute and complete psychopaths in the very same world.  They had the rights to be totally insane. But they did not quite have the right to violate the world he was living in. They were infringing on HIS rights now, and only he could protest and bring them back to their senses.

John had then written down his agenda very neatly on a piece of paper.
Facts, his list read, life is real, so enjoy it. Only the present exists, so live it. There are rules in this nature; discover them. The more you gain knowledge the more sense life will make. Irrationality leads to nowhere. He then pasted his remarks on the internet in various forums and chat groups, and noticed with disdain that his efforts to help the confused were only creating more stubborn and equally confused reactions.  One person posted a counter notice saying John should be banned and another told John that he wanted to help him see God.  There was still time for his soul to be salvaged.

John, however, was left unmoved by the initial antagonism.  He had expected a bit of it.  Every effort of helping others in history had come with some sort of cost.

Then one day, John took out some money from of his bank and opened up a charitable organization.  He thought of recruiting people to go to that distant village mentioned in the paper and actually disseminate knowledge there.  The worshippers of demon were poor.  Irrationality came with poverty and the lack of access to knowledge.   Again, in this vicious cycle the poverty was a product of their irrational behavior. 

Unfortunately it was unlikely that they would just see the light.  They believed in all sorts of absurdities. 

They would, however, not be able to refuse the idea of a prosperous, joyful life, no matter how misled they were now.  John would take a mobile cinema project there, with a documentary created by him.  The poor and the illiterate would be given some monetary scholarship regardless of their merit to watch the movie and join his movement to abolish the demonic rituals.  If they wished afterwards, they could thank John for his deed.  He would have expected that much.

He then tried to locate workers to share his idea and vision.  People always follow a role model who they strive to become -- a person in which they see their dreams reachable.  The main reason for the deviation of many is that they have lost confidence in themselves.  In order to gain the confidence, they need to be shown a person who is sympathetic towards them and has also been able to touch what each of these broken spirits strive for. 

The citizens of the Demon Land were detached from the outside world.  They could be misled easily, and they could also be brought to their senses by sending the correct information.  John decided to create an idol for these people and started shooting a video where he asked his adorable daughter to pose as a spirit of success and address to all the lost demon worshippers to come back to reality.  “Dear Fellow Citizen of Demon Land, our hearts cry for you,” said the speech, “I am Matilda, I come form the land of prosperity. I know that being in Demon Land has broken down the spirit and confidence in each of you, and I am here to show you that the unthinkable and unbelievable is possible.  Look, how I have trapped the light of the day inside a glass bottle.  It is possible to bring prosperity if we all join hands and work.  Please follow me and enlist in my work-force.  If you work day and night you can have your dreams become reality too. Listen to me, follow my instructions, and you can become me. We have sent recruiters for you to join our company, because we all love you and we all want you to become just like me.  YOU can become me.  YOU have the potential to become ME.   Just have some confidence.” 

In the video, simultaneously with the speech, Matilda held a light bulb and turned the switch on so that a dark room flooded with light and her beaming face appeared.  It was almost like magic! So surreal!  The idiots of Demon Land would have no idea that the bulb was actually invented quite some time ago.  That should not matter.  What should be the point of concern is that these people are being helped.  It takes a big heart to take up a project just like this.

The best bet was to find a former resident of the Demon Land and send him back to his own people to spread the word.  He would offer that person money besides the opportunity of being part of this cause.  John then went over directories, and every possible internet database to find any person who had once lived in Demon Land and could be reached by him.   It was a long and boring process and kept John busy for quite a few days.  In the end he was astounded to find two people in his own office who had hailed from the land of demons.  He was convinced that he could recruit them.

John's deed was left unfinished with workload increasing in his office. He had always been a scrupulous worker, dependable and very diligent. He had often spent more time at work than any of his other coworkers; he absolutely loved the challenge.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It was a quiet and dark midnight when John sat in his office chair with a fuming cup of coffee, now pondering about the issues again – the issues of helping the world.  He was feeling very happy. One step had been taken. He had done his own part. Now if the others as well followed in his footsteps, logic could be established.

John closed his eyes and dreamed for a while. He was almost in a trance.

A few hours must have passed, or maybe a few moments; he had lost track of time.

When he did wake up in the end, he was very much at a loss. His surrounding was an improbability if not quite so an impossibility. The earth must have split apart at places. The soil had sharp and deep creases. Disfigured bodies lay all about the rubbles. As he pulled himself together, and rose up from the seat, which had miraculously survived the quake along with all his own bones, he discovered people screaming for help.

He walked past the debris agape and with his eyes bulged, and suddenly felt a pull strengthening on his trousers. Soon the pull could simply not be ignored any more. As he looked back to locate the origin of the thrust, his own heart was almost about to stop. There was a long chain of people - all holding each other, looking horrified. The train ended in a schism, where part of it was disappearing as the split just became wider each and every moment. In order to lift the end from the gorge, more people were added as the frantic members made an attempt to cling to anything at all outside - anything - dead or living.

John was being pulled by a frantic living genius.  He had an IQ of 190. But Bob was about to die as the chain was disappearing fast. “Help,” screamed Bob as he tried to cling to John.

John stopped thinking. He could really think no more. He remembered the faces of his own daughter and wife waiting at home. He only hoped that they were alive and he craved to live for them.

"Leave me alone," John shouted. Quickly he grabbed a piece of log from that lay on the ground to hit Bob as hard as possible.

He needed to leave this living hell. And he needed to leave fast.

Behind him disappeared quickly his last ten years of work, saved carefully on a CD ROM.  Perhaps he could have gone back, but little did he care. He did not have time.

As he panicked across the broken gate, hoping that if he left the premises of this very wretched building, the world he used to know before would come within his reach a wall fell on his legs.

"Help me," John screamed. "Somebody please help."

There was not a soul that looked back. The living and the dead, all were vanishing behind.

In his last attempt to live, John grabbed the legs of Mrs. Milford who ran by. She was the janitor of the building. He had always thought her to be a borderline imbecile and a believer in magic. Often she would try to discuss how a saint had saved her son from death. She was a very loving soul -- loving, selfless and irrational.

However, as John tried to hold the legs, he could only cower in pain. She must have struck him with her high heels. They were a pair of shoes that were designed to cause the greatest discomfort to a being in order to make her appearance acceptable to a certain group; but now that horrible pair had certainly come to the use of saving her own life at the cost of one that had only been entertained by their existence so long.

"If I could only have some more time," John thought, "Just a little more time." He wished that Mrs. Milford would swap her time with his, especially when she did not even believe that this world was all. She would have traveled to another world by giving John back his life, his world and his reality. But little did she seem to care to behave the irrational way she had been all her life as she quickly disappeared in John's last moments in reality.

Soon the shadow appeared. She was a long and slender figure. It was a figment of his mind, John knew. But then what exactly was his mind, and what exactly was reality? There would be no reality soon, and the shadow might as well be reality. This was the moment John had, and the moment had in it the angel. The rest of the world obviously would not agree with him regarding his views. He was delusional before he died. He had a sweet dream. A very nice angel had come to him silently and had whispered next to his ears that actually she was real and that he too was real, and that every moment was real. What existed after this moment, he did not know. Whether the life he had lived all his life was real or whether that was a dream, and he was just waking up, he could not assert either.

The angel would probably whisper to him what he should do next. And he obviously was very prepared to listen to the angel to buy one extra moment; no matter how irrational she sounded.

She was all that was left of reality, and she was now the world.

2

The Colleens
by Jac Jemc

The Colleens, a band of street girls, cruise their shadows again along the windowsills, discriminately in the nightshade alone: they peek in. The Colleens, though? You won’t see them back. They deviate from any usable light. Their straight golden hair, stretched artfully over one eye, is like an invisibility cloak. A band of pretty girls, unnaturally menacing, becomes unnoticeable. Their fingers spin at their waists like Turing machines. The equation is never solved; the digital dervishes gain speed.

Piloting these Colleens is a gentle North Light, dispatching them like the couriers of some repeatable secret message. Again and again, they meet the approach of the night, but never recognize the falling of the watery darkness as a stop sign. The calm and legible way the Colleens ride their feet through the evening present them with the immense time hidden in sleep. Good hour after hour take them on mental journeys. Every bit of their interiors has been raided, and so they wander like the Burghers of Calais, willing yet not wanting to give themselves for the good of the people. The Colleens want, without pursuing their desire, to wear the hats of others, but proceed, not able to recognize anything beyond the pattern of steps they take.

The Colleens shepherd the night into each small town, and when it is safe, when a sufficient amount of time has passed, the light will brutalize familiar streets again.

3

Dress
by Obelia Modjeska

“Here, listen” she said, passing me the phone and dragging on her cigarette, and swaying there in the doorway in her tiny red dress which was more like a kid’s sock with the toes cut off, or maybe even a belt. I liked the way she looked in that dress and I kept watching her as I put the phone to my ear and started listening to the message.

The voice that spoke was a girl’s and it sounded breathy and excited and, the longer I listened, nervous. There was a sound of cars passing in the background and girls laughing and making confused but enthusiastic conversation, and the voice announced that it belonged to someone called, I think, Vira – not Vera with an “e”, for it had an “i” sound, like “viral”. That sounded like the name of someone sophisticated, maybe even menacing, yet based on the voice I imagined Vira to be well-intentioned and even naïve, the soul as yet relatively unmarked; she spoke sweetly yet with that certain assumed toughness of contemporary children-in-adult-bodies, with the staccato sharp directness of abbreviated ungrammatical text speak allowing for no nuance. I imagined her standing on the street and laughing and smiling with her equally nubile friends, their breasts artificially inflated by the consumption of hormone-saturated chicken, everything hanging out everywhere with casual deliberateness, typing into their phones, and this dream pleased me but at the same time left me feeling empty and soiled. Young women were an alien species to me really, but her name combined with everything else led me to speculate that Vira was part of some kind of scene, or maybe was a minor celebrity somewhere or perhaps just in her own head.

And Vira was saying “hey honey, well I know it’s been ages and I haven’t heard from you but it’s understandable, it’s totally okay and I just wanted to say that…I’ve been thinking about you and I hope you’re happy, hope you’re smiling and taking care of you. And, you know… I’m sorry about everything but…” and here she exhaled a little, “call me sometime babe, if you ever think of it, if you ever think of me, I’d love to hear your voice again…and” she trailed off before recovering, “well, you do whatever you need to do hun, but…remember that I love ya…take care.”

And while I was listening to the message I watched her watching me and she raised her eyebrows and pulled the right corner of her flame-painted mouth up as if to say, “fucked up or what? She was searching me for a reaction that would betray my thoughts about all this while I continued to diligently do as she asked, and at this time I became aware of my own face, that perhaps I should have been squinting or something, but I wasn’t because what she didn’t know was that I was less interested in the message than in her, in the look of her swaying in the doorway in that pathetically tiny dress, making love to that cigarette.

I gave the phone back to her and she was saying: “it’s got me screwed. What do you think? I mean by the sound of her, even though I don’t know her, she certainly knows me,” and I agreed with this while she kept moving around to the shitty cover-band that was floating in from the bar, I could almost see her knickers and I couldn’t help wondering what colour they were and whether they smelled sweet like she did, or of something more oblique and complex. She went on, “It’s funny, I got that message and it was way early in the morning and I was hungover and alone and my head was all screwed up after Johnny ditched me at the station, I felt, you know…desolate and at that moment I really wanted to call her back, I mean she sounded like someone who really cared about me, more than anyone else has lately, but she didn’t leave her number. Well, why would she, I mean, obviously she thinks I have it, hahahaha.’

I had my theories about Vira, so to make her happy I said “I think you hooked up with this girl one night when you were under the influence and you misled her that it was the beginning of some serious love affair, but in addition, maybe she’s a bit unstable, she’s young after all, she could have all sort of ideas in her head, but anyway, I think she’s been holding on all this time trying to decide whether to call you or not…she thinks so highly of you that she believes she did something wrong, to make you run away…so finally she got the courage to do it one night out drinking with friends, and you, you don’t even remember her or have any idea who she is…I mean that’s tragic really. The poor girl. Now you won’t call her back and she is going to be devastated. I mean that’s just really sad…the mismatch of her hopes with the reality…” I said this in a mock-serious tone and I was stern with her as a father would be, as someone who knew or cared what it was all about, and I was silently thinking how it was funny that I lived in this world where I had to employ mock-seriousness to say what I really felt without sounding like a total loser. She laughed and called me an arsehole, which I was and am but not for the reasons she believed, then she said, twirling her bleached hair through her chipped fingernails, “buy me a Mojito.”

I followed her inside thinking she was the kind of girl I liked, but I could see the future already, I was just some old guy who pretended to be in advertising when in reality I drove a bus to perpetuate my existence while I wrote apparently unmarketable short play scripts, all of that so she would stand in a doorway with me and show me her body in that dress and I didn’t even care, and she would make me fall in love with her and then I would be that girl on the phone, I would be calling her in the middle of the night making a fool of myself and she wouldn’t even know who I was or remember my name, having deleted my number and my existence from her life months ago.

Yeah, I might buy her a drink, but tonight once again I would be going home to jerk off alone.

4


In Stitches
by Eric Suhem

Edsel Skylark looked back on his sewing accomplishments and beamed. Blue ribbon at the county fair, honorary member of the committee to include sewing as an Olympic event. As always, he was sitting at the sewing machine in the back of the pickup truck, when suddenly the sewing machine was on fire. Edsel was part of a traveling road show, which included sewing as one of its surprisingly popular attractions. People would come from miles around to throw all types of garments to him in the pickup truck, garments demanding seemingly impossible surgery. Yet he would always triumph, performing a dazzling operation, every seam in place, the garment newly intact. And always at the end of the performance, a spark of light, a crackling flame, and a bright yellow-orange 'S' flew into the sky. There was major debate in various sewing circles as to whether the 'S' stood for 'Sewing', 'Skylark', 'Singer' (manufacturer of his sewing machine), or 'Something else'. But this time, something was amiss, and the sewing machine had caught on fire. The whirr of the Singer continued as the flames leapt around him. He didn't stop, hunched over, beads of sweat dripping on threads of a tunic that he pressed into the maw of the machine, an apocalyptic hemsman, a burning seamster. Then everything blacked out.

A dream emerged…The purple slave runs into the Foucault skies, a microscope under his/her breast. An elevator delivered the illiterate eggplant onto the plateaus of deliverance. Soon a confused and angry hen deliberated, and pecked at the eggplant, yearning for nothing. There were 3000 empty days, followed by a 'ping' of the elevator, inhabited by an empty carton, delivered haphazardly by a temp Fed-Ex employee, looking forward to his luxurious lunch. He would be sitting on silken pillows, made from the carcasses of deviously amorous pheasants stuffed into the efficiently cavernous fabrics, sewn into a strict Dutch hyper-stitch. The remains of the Fed-Ex employee's lunch would empty into a local sewer, and he would later be frolicking in the cancer centers of the underground hospital…blips and bleeps, upward and downward trends displaying on the electronic charts.

Edsel awoke on an operating table in a stark white room. He could feel the flaps of skin being stitched. The doctor looked down upon him, eyes seeming like dark kaleidoscopes. Dangling from his surgical mask was a little tag that stated, 'Inspected by Number 57. Do not remove under penalty of death.' The doctor said, "We are using your sewing techniques to heal the epidermis, Mr. Skylark, you pioneer, you!" The anesthesiologist then quickly moved the mask back over Edsel's face. He awoke in a hospital bed, hours later. Although he had suffered severe burns, he felt rather pleasant. He examined the stitches and seams of his skin reparation. "What?!" he exclaimed in alarm. "This is a cross-stitch, when a Dutch hyper-stitch would have much better served the purpose! And this seam is very poorly done, flawed workmanship!" He stalked out of the hospital without settling the bill, but the accounting department already had his medical number and insurance information.

5


The Path of Reduction
by Joseph Cameron

That year of that summer he chose to reduce.  He had read somewhere that this was a gypsy’s curse, but he had always taken it upon himself to indulge in the rites of the transcendental one day. 

His path of reduction shined silver in the moonlight of south India.  There, paper and fliers from a political election blew in the breeze past cherry blossoms hanging over the rue walls.  He once sat in that still, warm night and listened to her voice over the phone.  Technology had allowed him to send lies to a good Christian girl in Maine.  A cell phone took the form of Maara’s fourth daughter.

Reduction comes at a price.  His was the last chance for a normal romantic life.  Gone.  No more would he ever be doomed to pay a mortgage and ask a woman how her day went. 

Maara’s fifth daughter, the one that succeeded, was named Chitra.  He met her on the beach, as he let his legs sun and the rest of him read a book about Tamil Language devotion under the shade of a polipot palm.  5,000 Rupees is a price no sane man would pay for sex.  But he evolved that night, in a stilted grass hut, to the sound of a slow buzzing ceiling fan.

Chitra had dark nipples.  They were black, like her hair.  Her eyes were like a deep, bottomless abyss.  He couldn’t see his reflection in those eyes.  She moaned when he bit her nipples, and she hid her mouth and averted her gaze like an innocent village girl.  In broken English she asked to return to America with him.  Did he lie to her in Tamil?  This we will never know, but we know he returned to us a thinner man.  Lifetimes of depression melted away and revealed a soul that longs for beauty.

Is simple beauty too much to ask for?  He still has fat clinging to his mind, but he sometimes stops in the city he lives in now, and he looks past the smoggy American skyline and wonders at the golden sun dancing through the glorious clouds.  Are those multitudes of angels singing? 

6


Everything is Literally Exactly the Same
by Katharine Psipsina

Each part into every part.
We are apart but somehow you just can’t get rid of it
Each part broken,
Every part mended then becoming whole again

Are these parts all part of the same part
Is everything literally exactly the same?
When we see our fears hiding on top of the high shelf
Should we look to seek them out
Should we look to hide ourselves deep within the parts that are never spoken

There is a visible rift
Between that which is real and otherwise

Let us not seek the unreal
Day to day it can become a trial

When we look around us to see that which is not there
Let us not become immersed in ourselves

Have reality and hold this like a sacred chalice
Have all that is true and real and not always good
Have the thought of terrible things
But not allow these thoughts to go unchecked

If you are my friend
I cannot tell a lie

This is the truth
From beginning to end
Each part into every part
In the full knowledge that the things we do today
May chase us 3-fold tomorrow

7


when they were living
by David McLean

when they were living they were children first
and only later became dead men, adults
and later corpses, even deader,
so meanings for them were flowers,
words, and absurdity - they were worlds
that were empty and answers i forgot already
falling thus from heaven, arms flailing
like a crane fly dying blind in the night,
like a child – when they were living
they were me, they were you,
they were lost in time