Archive

Monthly Archives: October 2010

New Fiction: ‘Dead But Dreaming’ by Dave Howden

October 26, 2010
New Fiction
Leave a Comment

 

Dead But Dreaming

Dave Howden

 

I’m standing in my living room. It is a large, plain room with magnolia walls. It is bright, filled with natural daylight that makes its ingress from the large window that occupies much of the large wall, one of the longer dimensions of the rectangle, to my the left. I guess I’m not quite with it, hungover more than likely. I just don’t feel particularly connected. Between space… my wife is beside me, at my left hand side. Our backs rest against the shorter wall and my right shoulder is close to the corner where the wall to my rear and the other longer wall, the one without the window, meet. It’s very warm, a dry heat. It must be summer. I’ve almost forgotten what summer is.

She seems to come from nowhere. It’s as though she’s entered through the wall, a silent entry, and completely unannounced. Of course, there’s a door, to my wife’s left, some distance from me, and it’s concealed, even if my view of it wasn’t obscured. We both know her, and although she doesn’t live with us, and only visits very occasionally, the surprise is only momentary. No-one speaks, and we watch as she walks straight past us, dressed in a Chinese dress, and places her palms against the wall, the longer wall without the window, at the far end of the room. Hot on her heels – her bare, shoeless heels – appear a couple of Indian men wearing turquoise robes. They stand in the middle of the room and converse with one another in Hindi and ignore us as they watch the girl as she continues to move strangely, her back to us and her hands on the blank magnolia wall, her palms to the flat surface, almost stroking it.

Abruptly, she stops. We all go outside. It’s been a long time since I have been outside. The world has changed significantly. How long has it been? Long enough to have forgotten that from my doorstep I can see the lives of dozens of other residents in the square unfolding in real-time through the large window elevations of their flats – large, plain magnolia expanses, just like the one I live in. I move back and step outside myself once more.

New Fiction: ‘Song’ by Michael Hann

October 14, 2010
New Fiction
Leave a Comment

Song

I pried the wooden boards away from the door, fumbling with my old set of keys to the pub. Wiping liquor sweat from my brow, I checked the dark streets. Empty. I picked up the two cans of gasoline and marched in.
As soon as I was through the door I could hear them, their many voices whispering in the shadows. I had almost missed them. My hands shook as I took a swig from the whiskey bottle in my pocket.
I slid past the stacked tables and chairs and stopped at the dust coated bar. I traced my hand in the surface dirt and remembered the many times I’d be pulling a pint at the bar and frozen, trying to hear the words, straining to decipher their song.
Once I was captured by their song, only my wife and daughter could break me out of my trance, with their screaming and fists. I would come to, and see the beer pouring over my hand onto the floor and a room full of eyes staring at me.
I unscrewed the stoppers from the gasoline cans. Their voices were rising, trying to snare me. I could feel their panic distorting their singing and I smiled. They knew I had come to silence them, for taking everything I loved away from me. To make them pay.
I poured the petrol around my feet. Their voices harmonised, growing louder. Their song was attacking me now, creating waves of hurt and nausea to stop me. The gasoline cans clattered to the floor.
My body began to shake with pain as I struck a match. Their shrieks cut through me with a terrible beauty. My hands automatically moved up to my ears to block out the song, which was useless, as the glorious noise was inside my head. Even now, as the taste of blood stung my mouth, I still wanted to know what they were singing.
I cried out as their din overpowered me, forcing me to my knees. I prayed that it would end, that their sublime screams would finally tear me apart.
Then, it became clear.
As the match fell from my hand, my mind was filled not with words, but images. Birth, love, pain, family, war, sex, grief, murder, end, joy.
I felt nothing as the flames engulfed my body. I was lost in their song.

 

About the Author

Michael Hann recently published a zine called I’m Afraid of Everyone, an edgy and dark collection of short stories. He regularly writes gig and album reviews and interviews for NARC, and one of his short stories will be featured in the literary magazine Kerouac’s Dog in January 2011. He is currently working on my first novel, whilst gathering and producing the content for vol. 2 of I’m Afraid…

http://www.facebook.com/?sk=2361831622#!/group.php?gid=114517125268779
http://www.imafraidofeveryonemh.blogspot.com

A Three-pronged Assault from Clinicality Press

October 12, 2010
News
Leave a Comment

It’s been all systems go at Clinicality today, with The Gimp by Christopher Nosnibor and Kicks by Vincent Clasper being unleashed simultaneously. Both are available to order from Clinicality as of now, and will be available through the usual on-line retail outlets in the coming weeks.

These publications are both intended to be sharp, short shocks, clocking in at under 50 pages apiece and graced with covers that aren’t intended to be particularly cuddly. We like it like that.

Today also sees Bill Thunder’s ultra-hard-boiled detective novel, The Bastardizer go global. Unfortunately, we’ve had to up the price to cover the distribution pricing arrangements, but the trade-off is that it will soon be showing up on searches and available through Amazon and all the rest. One other plus point is that we’ve managed to retain the ‘pocket’ format for the trade paperback edition, meaning it’s still the compact 4.25” x 6.9” we’d always wanted it to be. We’ve also made it available as a download at a very reasonable £1.99 as of now, and hope to run some special promotions in the near future.

Hop on over to the website for more info and to order all Clinicality Press publications, and keep watching this space for more exciting new fiction on-line.

http://clinicalitypress.co.uk

New Fiction: ‘Drinking Games’ by Christopher Nosnibor

October 10, 2010
New Fiction
Leave a Comment

   “So you think you’re quite the man, do you?”
    James winced. He’d only known Debbie a few weeks having met her through a friend at a night out with some of his course companions. Studying chemistry, he didn’t get to see many girls in the lab or in the lectures, but he always tried to address this when out socially. And he had quickly learned that Debbie was a bugger after a few drinks. What’s more, he’d got to recognise that tone of voice she had taken, and her mannerisms. They said something was afoot and it was likely to be trouble. He was keen to avoid trouble, and so he played it safe.
    “Well, I am a man…” he began cautiously.
    This was met with snorts of derision from his mates Andy and Joe, and a tuneless rendition of the line ‘I’m a man not a boy’ as performed by the long-forgotten teen band North and South who had featured in the BBC television series ‘No Sweat’ in an attempt to replicate the success of S Club 7, from Stu. The fool.
    “Prove it,” Debbie taunted flirtatiously.
    “What?” James couldn’t hide his surprise.
    “A drinking contest, silly!” she laughed.
    James flushed, especially when he noticed that Sarah and Jenny were laughing too. He knew he’d sounded excessively indignant and defensive.
    “Oh!” he exclaimed, relieved. He had reasons to be wary after some of the stories he’d heard of Debbie, and that she had herself recounted.
    “What did you expect?” cackled Sarah.
    Jim shrugged, and before he could speak, found himself being presented with a shot of tequila that seemed to come from nowhere and his thoughts buried beneath a chant of “Drink! Drink! Drink!” from all of his companions.
    He picked up the little glass and put it to his lips, keeping one eye on Debbie all the while. Then… Bam! He sank it. Debbie did the same, in unison. More followed in rapid succession and James soon began to feel woozy.
    “Think I need some fresh air,” he said as his vision began to blur.
    He made a sharp exit, and the cool night air hit him like an adrenaline shock. He still felt disorientated – tequila always ruined him, and fast – and sweat was beading on his brow, but he no longer felt like he would die and simply felt drunk enough for more antics. And more antics he would get.
    The rest of the gang quickly gathered around him. It was time to move on. Another bar, and en route Debbie insisted she make a brief call at her house – she’d left some cash there, and made a quick-change of her top while she was making the collection. Before long, they were on their way. Debbie lived in the heart of town, and so the next bar – a horrible, loud place that played pulsating dance music but did two-for-one student offers on certain nights – was only a couple of minutes away. James was glad he was utterly trashed: it was the only way he could ever find places like this remotely tolerable.
    Despite her enormous capacity for booze, even Debbie was beginning to show the signs of her consumption, and everyone else was utterly legless – as gashed as James, or so he assumed: it was hard for him to judge. But she hadn’t forgotten her evening’s objective, to challenge James to prove himself at every opportunity. And he was drunk enough to go along with whatever she put his way. So chatting up some alcopop-guzzling teenage floozy in an impossibly short skirt might have resulted in a truly humiliating rejection, but won the approval of his peers, not least of all the truly fearsome Debbie. Dancing shirtless on a table? No problem. It might’ve got them kicked out of that particular bar, but that was half the fun.
    Once ejected, they regrouped outside. Debbie guided them all into an alleyway and broke out her wallet, removing a piece of paper, the likes of which James had never seen before.
    “Acid,” she explained, an evil conspiratory leer on her face.
    “Oh no,” James said. He meant it.
    But a little coercion goes a long way, and before long, he and Debbie and three or four others had dropped tabs and the rest of the group – minus Stuart, who claimed he had to work the following morning – made their way to the next venue. After that, the acid was beginning to kick in, but despite the onset of some mildly disconcerting hallucinations, James accepted the challenge of skinnydipping in the river that ran through the town centre. He scraped his leg on a submerged shopping trolley, but it was worth it: after all, it was a laugh, he got to maintain his credibility in the eyes of the great arbiter, Debbie, and he got to see her without any clothes. She was a good sport, and would never set a challenge she wouldn’t perform herself.
    The evening began to blur, perhaps there were more bars, even a club. The group was reducing in size now: only James, Debbie, Jenny and Andy remained. Jen and Andy were flagging and starting to weird out, but James was on fire and managing to keep up with Debbie. More drinks purchased from an off-license or somewhere topped up those already imbibed and blended with the LSD. It was quite a trip.
    Somehow, they ended up on a building site. James wasn’t sure about this. He was being coerced to climb the crane tower. It was a good hundred feet tall, and was fuzzy and bending out of shape. He was scared of heights, and right now his balance and co-ordination were fucked. However mashed he was, he knew it was impossible. He didn’t want to die. But Debbie wasn’t taking no for an answer. Then, from nowhere, she pulled a pistol from her bag. She pointed at her friend. She cocked the mechanism with terrifying steadiness and certainty.
    “Climb,” she ordered
    James knew he had no choice.

‘Drinking Games’ appears in The Gimp, out on Clinicality Press on 11th October 2010.

New Fiction: ‘The Persistence of Memory’ by Pete Miller

October 9, 2010
New Fiction
6 Comments

Clinicality Press publish and promote new works of fiction and beyond. We’re just starting out in putting out new works on-line in a blog/zine. This is the third posting, and there are lots more exiting pieces on the way. In time, there may be a second anthology, but these things take time and money, and we’re short on both. For now, we’re doing the digital thing.

 

The Persistence of Memory

Pete Miller

Ever wish you’d done something different? Ever wish you’d done some things differently? Obviously it’s too late for regret, as it won’t change anything and is simply a needless expenditure of energy and there’s less to spare as each year passes but do you? Do you have regrets? A yearning to go back and change things? Or would you play out the mistakes the same anyway: after all, we learn from our mistakes and know not to make them again. Even so, there’s always that small wish to go back, retrace the steps taken in blindness and rectify some of those darker moments those moments, however fleeting, of the most acute embarrassment…  isn’t there? Or is it just me?

I don’t wish to change who I am, or what I’ve ‘become’ – I probably couldn’t anyway, there seems to be an inevitability about the path we tread, and fight circumstance as hard as me might, it feels like a losing battle. People do us over, finance and situations of employment, family, all unwittingly contrive to bring us to the present whatever we do. But don’t you sometimes think ‘what if?’

What if you’d gone what that guy or that girl what if you’d been less spineless in relenting to that push or that, what if you’d not given in so easily when told ‘no’ to that, what if you had applied for this job, that job and the other job? If you’d not given up after the fifteenth knock-back on one career or another, had held on to and fought harder to cling to one dream or another?

Or when you discover that you’re finally able to make progress of sorts? Don’t you wish that you’d been the person you are now a decade ago? Or even fifteen years ago? What would you change? What would you have done differently? What were your dreams? Do you still have any of them now?

And how about the way you look? What would you change? Anything? Nothing? How do you feel about the ageing process? How do you feel now about your childhood? How much of it can you actually remember?

I find that I feel that while my memory is still as good as ever, some recollections are becoming somehow distorted. Or perhaps it’s that I struggle to reconcile them with my adult self.

I don’t miss the lack of responsibility of childhood. I was as repressed as a teenager as I am now. I wish I had evolved differently.  I wish I’d been the person I am now or feel I’m becoming then, ten, fifteen years ago. Don’t you ever wish that? How would you be with the people you knew then if you were how you are now? Were there missed opportunities? Did you not speak when you should have done? Did you say things when you’d have been better not doing? Or simply say the wrong thing? How would you replay it?

I’d replay it all in slow motion and consider my moved for a start. And do it from my perspective now. But there’s no going back… is there?

from ‘Hack’ by James Wells

October 3, 2010
New Fiction
1 Comment

I’ve got some gigs to review: three nights in a row’s worth, no less. I’m struggling to remember the night before, and the other two had faded to a blur the moment I’d left the venue. I’m shit at taking notes, too. It’s pointless. When I do take notes, I struggle to read them the next morning. My room is littered with scraps of paper, torn, crumpled and beer-stained, with runs of dark ink smeared across them that are supposed to tell me who I’ve watched and what songs they’ve played. Sometimes I manage to bag set lists, but they’re often equally useless because bands usually use abbreviations or private codes when putting song titles down. Besides, if I don’t know whose set list it is, it’s no fucking use anyway, just one more piece of paper cluttering my manky hovel of a space. In a hovel of a bed / I will scream in vain / Oh please Miss Lane / Leave me with some pain…. Yes, song lyrics haunt me, permeate my thought processes. Songs and bands, good, bad and indifferent… I can’t tell the real from reflection. I can’t always remember the songs, let alone the bands. In my room, I keep the curtains drawn most of the time, and it probably stinks, but like I give a fuck. I’m busy, I like to keep it dark and, well, really, who cares? My girlfriend, Laura – she’s rabid in ecstasy – sometimes suggests opening the window when she comes round, but usually she’s content with me lighting some incense, and that’s cool with me.

I turn on the PC. I roll and light a cigarette while it boots up. I usually try to intersperse ‘real’ cigarettes with rollies for economy’s sake. Have another cigarette and have another cigarette, in a room where lovers go, talking on the telephone… Music is my life. I’m not as much lost in music, as made of music. It flows through me. I like a lot of old stuff. Punk, new wave. I’m loathe to say indie, but then indie means different things to different people. To me, it’s not a genre of 90s shit as represented by Blur, Oasis and myriad nameless generic tossbag bands who’ve nicked bits of The Smiths, The Stone Roses and whatnot to create some mediocre, jangly wank that’s brought us to Razorlight and The Wombats and Hard-Fi and Elliot Minor and One Night Only, The Cribs, The Bees, The Definite Article Followed by Forgettable Plural Noun Ad Nauseaum Bag of Spunk in Skinny Jeans and Top Man T-Shirt Playing Flaccid, Poppy Bilge That I Can’t Believe Anyone Gives a Flying Fuck About Given That I’ve Forgotten the Song Before The Second Chorus… the list is as endless as it is forgettable, and would be longer if the bands weren’t all so completely anonymous and generic that their names can’t only escape my recollection.

I sit down, ready to work, but before I can even open a window, there’s a gurgling in my guts and I have to peg it to the bathroom, kicking CDs across the floor on the way. Thankfully, it’s unoccupied. I expel a massive runny beery shit into the pan before my cheeks even hit the seat. Holy fuck! It was a close call. My ring stings like fuck and that’s what I get for having a curry for tea and ten pints on top of it. I wipe, flush and make a hasty exit: I’ve stunk the place out bigstyle, to the extent that the honk makes me want to hurl.
 

I manage to keep my toast and coffee down and return to my room. I bung a CD picked up off the floor at random  into the player and stare blankly into space. I should find this easy. I’ve been doing it for years, and it’s the job I always dreamed of doing ever since I was a teenager reading Melody Maker and Sounds. But if anything, it gets harder. Harder to write something original, harder to discern the good from the bad from the indifferent, harder not to become so jaded that the whole thing gets depressing, harder to simply keep going. The late nights and long hours take their toll.

Another knock at the door. Dan again.

‘Thought you’d gone out,’ I said.

‘Forgot my baccy,’ he replies. ‘And my wallet. Been cracking one off?’

‘Moron,’ I josh. ‘I was taking a shit. You’d probably….’

‘Yeah, yeah, I’d forget my cock if it wasn’t attached,’ he says, rolling his eyes.

‘I know, it comes in handy a lot of the time,’ I reply. ‘You can leave it home when you think it’s gonna get you in trouble, or you can rent it out, when you don’t need it. But now and then you go to a party, get drunk, and the next morning you can’t for the life of you remember what you did with it. And you really don’t like being without your penis for too long. It makes you feel like less of a man, and you really hate having to sit down every time I take a leak.’

‘Are you finished? Fucking lunatic,’ Dan grizzled. I’ve probably played him King Missile’s Happy Hour album more times than he can remember, and more times than he wants to. But it’s a great album and so I make no apology for it.

I don’t get it with you, Dan had said recently. You’re a reviewer, you should be playing me “important” albums and being superior about it. Y’know, “classic” stuff like Beatles and Bowie or the Beach Boys, or landmark alternative releases, underground classics like Suicide and that sort of thing. But instead you just play endless weird obscure shit like it’s the coolest, most important fucking album on the planet. It is to me, I’d told him. Fuck stereotypes. There’s music for everyone, and I stake my slender reputation on not towing the Q, Mojo, NME line. Which probably explains why I’m still scraping away at the bottom of the ladder, but hey, at least I’m sincere and true to myself and the music. And no, not the band The Music. They’re gash.

‘Yeah, go on,’ I say.

‘Anyway, I was going to say, Amy’s coming round later on, she might be here before I get back. Can you let her in?’

‘Nope, I’m going to leave her on the doorstep, even if it’s pissing it down with rain. I don’t like your girlfriend, I think she’s a slag and I don’t like her in my house.’ He knows I’m kidding: Amy and I get on really well. What he doesn’t know is that I have a bit of a crush on her, which isn’t something I let on to anyone. No good could come of it, and since I can’t do anything about it and as far as I know it’s not reciprocal, there’s no point.

‘I just meant to listen out for the door. I know you can’t always hear the doorbell when you’ve got music on.’

‘Doorbell’s bust,’ I remind him.

‘Oh yeah. Shit.’

He leaves once more and I resume staring into space. I can’t tell if it’s writer’s block, a lack of inspiring subject matter or fatigue. I have a headache and my eyes are so weary I can barely focus on the screen. I light another cigarette and cruise for porn. Inspiration will come in its own sweet time.

 

 

Hack is scheduled for publication by Clinicality Press in December

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.