When the baby inside me was no bigger than a bean, deer began eating out of my hand. Well, only one deer and it was a carrot I stored in my jean pocket before I set out on my daily hike. Actually, there were two deer. Only one ate out of my hand. The other watched. I sensed the watcher might have been in charge. Or had more self-control. When I found out I was pregnant, it wasn’t a shock. You hadn’t pulled out, the way we’ve played it since college, and then you went UH OH. You’ve only said that twice before. And I said: ‘REALLY, I’m too old. I just got grooving in my career and we don’t need another baby. The ones we have can finally fend for themselves. Get their own juice, put themselves to bed. Stuff like that.’ You shrugged; your naked-self sprawled on our pillow. You curled yourself around me. ‘Don’t worry. I’ve got your back,’ you said. When I found out I was pregnant, I pretended not to notice that you began staying up later than me, drinking Wild Turkey while watching YouTube videos. Emptying one bottle a week and then one bottle every three days. It wasn’t a total surprise. ‘MAGNIFICENT!’ I said, as they cracked when I threw them in the recycling. The deer never came up to me before the pregnancy. I’d seen them many times of course. That’s why I sprayed myself with DEET. You know. Ticks. But you didn’t pull out and now their white tails aren’t bouncing away; they stop and stare at me as if they have something to say. Why did you do this now? At this time in your life? Why did you get yourself knocked up? Who says knocked up anymore? The deer who likes to watch, maybe is the one in control, and says this to the other one. I’m kind of surprised how judgmental deer can be. Maybe they’ve been together a long time and now bring out the worst in each other.  I suspect they know I’m no longer making healthy kale smoothies. Instead, I’m eating toast with butter. It’s the only thing I can keep down. (Well, the wine.)  Gluten and dairy. Can’t be good, the deer says, but after he takes the carrot in his long teeth. I Imagine the fetus as big as a bean curled with unformed fists resting under his own cheek. I imagine the fetus has teeth and wiry dark hairs like the bucks. I know this is not feasible. 

I started drinking again, not in a problematic way. A glass of chardonnay with dinner. Maybe a glass and a half. My mother’s mouth was smug when she said, ‘You are the only person I know who starts drinking in the first trimester. Don’t think I’ll help out as much with this one. I’m not as young as I used to be.’ I hadn’t smoked since my early twenties, but then and there I wanted an after-dinner cigarette. Maybe this was taking things too far. 

My hikes began by walking up a hill. Some say the hill is too steep to start from. Take another path. My blood grew hot, and the volume felt like it swelled too big to be contained by my veins. Blood is blue until it hits air, then it is corpuscular red. Last time you were watching a YouTube video, you were straight-faced and whisky breathed when you told me not to hike in the woods alone anymore. You said you saw this video where a hunter got attacked by two deer. ‘HONESTLY!’ I said. I put a hand over my mouth. Another on my belly. I could barely stifle my giggle.

The next day, as I puffed up the hill, I could barely wait to tell the deer about how silly you are. Thinking they would harm me. Maybe if I doused myself in deer pee like the guy who made the video. I had to look it up and show you it was staged. Maybe you are losing it? I hear shots in the distance. One and then another. Hunters I suspect. Like the one who covered himself in deer pee so they would fight him. The leaves are falling at a fast rate. They are at the stage where they are bright yellows and reds, coating the ground. I see their hearty veins rise from soft matter. Weeks away from breaking down into brown organic ground cover. When the abdominal cramping begins, I know immediately what’s happening. I grab my belly. I say out loud ‘OH NO!’ I lose my footing on some rocks and catch myself with one arm. Standing back up, I want to peel down my pants right there and then and see for myself if there’s any blood. I don’t want there to be any blood. It is right then that I hear one of the deer snort. A warning. I turn myself and face the two of them. The shy one in the back. They both stare me down. There are no other sounds except for the wind. The one in front stamps his front hoof as if to tell me something important. As if to wake me from a dream. I want to tell you something important. I’m scared. 

This story parallels the observance of deer with the anxious possibility of parenthood. This device is used to play with our perspective. The author is asking for close observance of nature but also the way our human nature is tested when a woman has to consider the way their life will change after the birth of a newborn. There are poetic lines that can be attributed to both the speaker and the observance of deer. Such as: “Some say the hill is too steep to start from.” These delicate insights are scattered across the text and help us understand the internal world of our protagonist while fully embedded in reality.

Nick Makoha

I love the way this story invokes magical realism to tell a nuanced tale about a woman coming to terms with a pregnancy.  The more times I read it, the more the voice grew on me; through one short story, we shift through multiple moods and watch the character move into new territory, both physically and psychologically.

Ingrid Jendrzejewski

Anne Falkowski has had work published or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, Pithead Chapel, The Coachella Review, Entropy, Change-Seven, Hunger Magazine, and Quarter After Eight. Her work has been a finalist in Best of the Net, Solstice Literary Magazine, and Writer’s Digest. She was shortlisted for the 2023 Demott Prize. She graduated from Boston GrubStreets 2023 Memoir Incubator and is seeking agent representation for her memoir Ordinary Body. She can found on @AnneFalkowski

Gambar oleh Rinnie Deer dari Pixabay

97

You stay up all night, watching as Tory behemoths are slain one by one, waltzing around his living room in your underwear as he sings ‘The Internationale’. It’s safe to make babies now, he says, shaping your breasts as if they are clay. 

33

Cyprus Avenue. Friends scowl a little at your haste to cohabit. But it’s the same as the song, you say (you still believe in portents). He exposes floorboards while you resuscitate the garden. Parents pronounce you a triumph. You assemble all the ingredients for a life.

3

The number of children you want. They will squabble and scream and belly-laugh. Get sick and sleep furled into one another. Come home with blooded knees and tales of near misses and you’ll pretend to breathe. They will avoid abduction and ring each other when you’re eighty and had a fall.

5

The times he tells you to stop folding down pages of books before you lose your shit. He buys bookmarks, loiters them in every room. You dream of moving through a cavernous library, making small paper triangles wherever you chose. If you’re going to compromise, it’ll be on the big things.

4

You consider the lovers you had before him. How cruelly you treated them at the end. The marriage proposals you trampled on.

50

We have to limit guests, he says. It makes no sense to lavish all that free food and wine on a school friend you haven’t seen for a decade. No, you think, far better his moronic friends from golf attend. (You laugh with his younger socialist self at his new hobby.)

1

The number of breasts your mother exits the world with.

1,000,000

The number of Earths that can fit into the Sun. You think about this when you want to feel small. 

14

The times each week you check for a lump.

-3°

A honeymoon in Reykjavik. You are blue from the spa, skin shrunk taut, and it is back in the boutique shower with its rose head spray that you find one.

7

Days spent waiting for the test results. 

100

Bolts of lightning striking Earth each second. Yet she turns in spite of the onslaught.

8

The hours you’re not allowed food before the procedure. They remove both unhealthy and healthy tissue. You’re told you’ll receive a pathology report, detailing the characteristics of the mass. 

400

After the surgery, you learn to play chess on your laptop. It astonishes you, the possible positions on the board after just one move each. The moves are simple, yet the game seems infinite in its depth. One day you play an old Korean man, the next a girl in Brazil. Despite the pain and nausea, the games furnish you with the disembodiment you crave.

46

You ask him to stop, your body recoiling, but he continues, for long seconds, hoping the momentum crescendos, a tipping point reached where you’ll yield. When he does finally quit, there’s a scene and before you head to the spare room, he tells you how many days it’s been. 

6

The times he says he still loves you before you return the phrase, if only to fill the silence. Relief flares on his face like an acquittal.

9

To one. The odds of a new tumour appearing in the next ten years.

10

The days of a vipassana you attend in Nagpur, where time morphs and spins and clusters. They say many don’t make it to the end, the mind insane for stimulation. It is deep into a 6am meditation, facing the same mottled point on the ashram’s wall, that you decide to leave him.

0

The number of children you have. Who will ring around, you think, when you’ve had a fall?

93

Your mother’s mother, bowing out a nonagenarian, the curse skipping a generation, like a foxglove lying dormant for a season.

8

The agent hands you the keys. It’s a little damp, he says, but it has a courtyard, which you sit in once he’s left, removing your socks and shoes, the few fronds to penetrate the gravel bisecting your toes. The upstairs neighbours are in the foothills of an argument; laughter unspools from a nearby playground. You consider another cuspal period in your life, relish being ‘estranged’, remember that the light now warming your face left the sun eight minutes ago. Unpacking, you open a book, turn down a page’s corner.

The use of numbers works on many levels first as a form but more importantly, it reveals the idiosyncrasies of the character. The numbers also act as a speed device moving us back and forth through time allowing us to fuse all these vignettes into one thought.

Nick Makoha

This piece approaches a common theme from a unique perspective, filtering a very personal story through the numbers and figures encountered by the main character on her journey.  I love the experiment with form, and I also love the way the use of the second person ‘you’ makes the story feel all the more urgent and personal.

Ingrid Jendrzejewski

Tom Vowler is the author of 3 novels and 2 story collections. His fiction has appeared on Radio 4 and been translated into multiple languages. He has a PhD in creative writing from Plymouth University, where he is an associate lecturer. More at www.tomvowler.co.uk  

1. When Mary leads the four-year-old child, wrapped in a shawl he singed the edges of when he started a fire in the kitchen, with a bracelet around one wrist printed in shaky letters the name Fergus, to the steps of the orphanage, kisses the small exposed brow and walks away without looking behind her, to what degree will the guilt eat up her insides? 
Multiply the number of pinches by the number of tantrums and subtract from her love. 

2. If each boy in the orphanage receives seven ounces of potatoes, and seven ounces of potatoes cannot fill Fergus’ belly, how many boys must Fergus beat up to grow to his father’s height of 179 centimetres? 

3. When Fergus steps out through the workhouse doors at sixteen and three months, subtract from his feeling of elation fourteen rainy nights spent on Dublin streets, when he tracks down his mother to a crumbling tenement on Dublin’s northside, and remaining in her cupboard are four teabags and one and a half biscuits, and she justifies giving him up with seven anecdotes of his difficult behaviour, as she bites her lip and tears spill between her fingers, till she admits she has not heard from his father, or where to find him, calculate the depths to which Fergus’ mood will sink. 

4. Take the number of nights spent in fields, moors and the back of carts staring up at the sky and multiply by the number of stars visible on a clear night in Tipperary to find out the degree of yearning of Fergus for his father. 

5. Take twelve rabbits, stolen, killed, boiled and eaten, twenty pickpocketed wallets and four dozen pilfered apples. 
How many wrongs must Fergus commit to fill his inner abyss, formed by the feeling that nobody loves him? 
5b. Calculate the square root to find the number of hearts he will break. 

6. If Fergus has eyes like moss on an oak on the north side of a glade in Kilkenny, freckles on his cheeks equivalent to the number of sunny days he spent slacking off from farmwork (subtracted from an average of 168 rainy days in county Leitrim), has a laugh two semitones higher than the pitch of his father, is able to fire off three self-deprecating jokes a minute, and plays the fiddle at over 320 beats per second, how quickly will the average shopgirl fall for him? 

7. If Fergus romances Brenda on the flowering cliffs of Howth, leads Molly into the grocer’s storeroom, catches Louise behind a haystack and Evelyn in an orchard, multiply by three and divide by two outraged fathers, armed with pitchforks, who succeed in chasing Fergus away, how many cousins will Fergus’ grandson discover in Galway?

8. If each child sired by Fergus grows up not knowing their father, three quarters of them are boys, and each boy starts a family of his own that he later abandons, how many pub fights can be traced back to Fergus? 

9. If, on a rainy night in County Roscommon, Fergus walks into a pub and hears a man, twice his age, boasting that he knew how to deal with troublemakers since he sent his own son to an orphanage, and Fergus, upon asking the age of the son and adding the moss of his eyes and the freckles on his creased, ruddy cheeks, understands he is facing his father, and his anger can be calculated as the cumulative effect of thirteen years confined behind stone walls plus five years and seven months of ranging down muddy tracks, sleeping in fields and living off goods bartered and stolen, compounded by the rage inherited from his father who grew up without knowing his own father, and multiplied by four pints of Guinness and two shots of Locke’s Special Edition, what is the likelihood that Fergus will punch his father in the face? 

Write your answers on the answer sheet provided. 

Answers left blank will be penalised. 

On the one hand, a unique structure can feel gimmicky and overwhelm the story. On the other hand, you get a story like this. Here, the hermit crab form and the white spaces are used to brilliant effect in this stonkingly good piece, which tells the colourful story of a young man called Fergus. This is an intimate, yet expansive piece that covers an entire lifetime (and more), and the prose is inventive, layered and full of heart. Bravo!  

Farhana Khalique

This clever and ingeniously-structured story fits in a novel’s worth of drama, and does so with wit and humour. The form lends itself to narrative traction, and to speed, but it’s beautifully-handled in the way the story moves between what ‘happens’ and its various emotional, social and generational ramifications. It’s funny and sad and above all done with lightness – the narrator has been sufficiently distanced by the choice of the form to leave the reader on their own in all the best ways. 

Patrick McGuinness

The wind blows straight in from the sea, stinging cold that makes my eyes run, but the chips are hot and salty, burning my fingers through the greasy paper. I search into every last corner, lick up each trace. Two dirty grey gulls watch from the railings running around the edge of the pier. One of them opens its beak wide and I can see the strangeness of the inside of its mouth.

Another gust rips the chip paper from my hands, whisks it out over the sea like a kite. The gulls fall on it, shrieking and tearing, a flurry of yellow eyes and beating, arm breaking wings. Mum and dad are still talking, away where I can’t hear them. Mum is pale, dad’s face is red. I know that up close he smells of Saturday night. I know they are fighting over me the way the seagulls are tearing the chip papers into greasy rags. Dad looks over, dares me to move. I look out,out,out and away to where the sea is silver and flickering.

Someone is watching us. The lady in the fortune teller’s booth. ‘Madame Leona knows all, sees all.’ Mum is so pleased that I can read the words. Dad says that all these old women are charlatans. I don’t know that word. I want to know but I don’t want to ask. My cheek still stings from the last answer Dad gave me, so I store it for later. Mum wants to get her cards read, but there’s no money left. She said well anyway, she can guess what was in the future, and sort of smiles but her eyes are shiny and bright,bright green.

When the lady sees me looking, she pulls down a paper blind and the lights go out. It is starting to get dark. An aeroplane flies out over the sea, leaving a white trail behind it. I watch it go higher and higher until I can’t see it any more, only where it has been. The sadness of it sits in my stomach, hard and lumpy, like old chewing gum.          

I lean against the Teddy Picker, place my hands on the plastic dome. In among the teddy bears, next to the single plastic ball with a ten pound note folded up tight inside it, there is a ring, and I think it might be a diamond. It changes colour as the lights on the pier swing in the wind. I think how pretty it would look on my mum’s finger, her nails painted and shiny. She doesn’t paint her nails now. They are bitten and sore and she thinks I don’t notice. Deep in my pockets there is a coin in a nest of old tissues and sweet wrappers. I press it into the slot, guide the claw with chip fat greasy fingers, closing it slowly,slowly around the ring, holding my breath as it rises from a sea of furry arms and legs. 

The key to this story is immediacy and freshness. The child’s-eye view of the world is a narrative perspective that has been done many times, but this short, sharp piece of fiction works because it matches detail to emotion, and never overstates or over-interprets. It’s all in letting the details and emotions speak for themselves – it’s moving precisely because it shows such restraint and gives the reader space. 

Patrick McGuinness

It’s hard to pull off a child’s POV, but this story about a tense day out at the seaside does it effortlessly. From the first words to the last, it’s so present and sensory. Subtle and gorgeous writing, that is also raw and incredibly emotive. From the stinging wind, to the shrieking gulls, to the fateful teddy picker, you can’t help but hold your breath at the end too.

Farhana Khalique

It was going to be about how I was thirty-something when I realised the colour of the sea is dependent on the colour of the sky and that some seas are not just grey and some others are not just brown and the ones we can’t afford to visit are not just cats-eye marble blue and ‘wine-dark’ was just the closest way to describe a colour the Greeks hadn’t yet named, but when the sky is sunless all the oceans fall to the same monochrome void.

My son says: You know there are probably people who lock themselves in their houses at night because they’rescared of getting engulfed in pure dark?

When a child asks what you’re scared of, you say things like crocodiles and clowns and the uncanny valley instead of the fact that you are terrified every time they cross a road, and what if one day they fall down the stairs or take a knife to their own skin and it’s all over in a wine-dark flood—dear God, flesh of my flesh, please be gentle with yourself—but there is time for all that and the uncanny valley is scary enough for now, so you explain how the human brain gets really freaked out about things that are almost but not quite; the might-just and the could-be. 

My son says: You know it’s possible one day someone will live their whole life inside virtual reality and believe it’s real?

It’s possible that when you wake from a dream, you are actually still inside of it; that all of this is just synaptic serendipity folded in on itself and maybe you just imagined everything: your life, your body, your children, your fear; the way the ocean’s churn feels heavy as ancestral dread inside your guts and the way you perceive colour makes no earthly sense except that light is an ungodly thing; the way birdsong has evolved to mimic digital sound and how fucking sad that is—how ridiculous—or maybe it’s all just synthesis; and maybe we’d all be happier in a cuboid world contained completely within my son’s brain. 

My son says: Do you ever take so long telling a joke that by the time you get to the end everyone’s forgotten what itwas?

It was going to be about—something I don’t now recall. Something-something cause and effect, something-something ones and zeros.

Instead, we sit side by side and he talks at me with patient precision, explaining the properties of each imaginary pixelated cube as we dig dirt and chop wood and build ourselves a home beside a square-edged lake, beneath square-edged clouds, and when the square sun sets it turns everything—the water, the sky, the screen—some kind of pink I don’t even have words for.

A beautiful, braided piece about a parent-child relationship, communication, creativity, memory, and so much more. The syntax is lively and inventive, as is the use of colours, repetition and liminal spaces.

Farhana Khalique

This moving, insightful story has the feel of a prose poem, but it it also has narrative traction. It’s thoughtful and ambitious and very skillfully interweaves the everydayness of life with its darker and more unsettling currents. Here too the form, with the child’s voice acting almost as a refrain, helps tie the narrative together, stopping it floating off into abstraction, and keeping the reader grounded. 

Patrick McGuinness

—trying not to be one of those people constantly on their phone so I search things to do other than be on your phone and that’s how I end up on my phone. Do a puzzle, it suggests. Walk barefoot on wet grass. Start randomly screaming in public. Then I get a notification about a storm that is apparently on the way; people are saying the vibes are not good and it has big we’re going to die energy. Then I see a spoiler for a film that came out three hours ago, a sponsored ad for something that improves your memory, and a video of a dog with a crooked smile. When I look up, I notice I am in the queue for something. Then I’m sent a video about dissociating that will supposedly change my life and I reply sounds amazing!!! I’ll watch it later x already forgetting what I’m talking about before I’ve hit send. Then there’s someone saying another storm is approaching and someone else replying that’s the same storm you fucking idiot. Then the queue shuffles forward. Outside, the weather looks normal: a slow-motion montage of the two remaining seasons. Now there’s an account posting from the perspective of the storm and someone’s put I can’t believe how disrespectful this is like people could die and the account has replied glup glup glup. A live stream of the wreckage pops up and even though I’m watching it on mute, I can hear rainfall, sheets of consciousness melting away; like the time I used the torch on my phone to search my flat for the phone I was using; when I accidentally deleted a photo of my passport and panicked because I thought I had literally deleted the physical object; when I looked through old pictures and couldn’t remember any of them, so I held the screen closer to my eyes as if I could sear the images into my brain and retroactively create the memories I clearly didn’t form at the time. Then I realise the live stream I’m watching is actually the same five-second clip looping over and over so I close it and then I read a post from someone saying it’s their birthday but they haven’t spoken to anyone all day with thousands of comments underneath all wishing them happy birthday and then I read the storm account has been suspended for saying something racist so I quickly go back and unlike all of their posts and then I read that the storm is already here and when I get to the front of the queue and they ask for my name it takes me a minute.

This is a propulsively-written, yet expertly-controlled story, which I admired first of all for the clarity of its voice, despite the general messiness and interference of the consciousness it was caught up in, and for the way it was – in its brief span – full of acute social observation. It shows a really fine sense of how to convey the complex movements of a mind in mid-flow in language that doesn’t reduce that messiness but lets the reader ride it and – above all – recognise it in themselves. It’s psychologically very acute, too.

Patrick McGuinness

This story blew me away when I first read it, and it’s just as rewarding upon rereading. Using a breathless, stream-of-consciousness-like form, and dynamic and layered imagery, it says so much with so few words about the cacophony and anxiety that can exist in our everyday modern lives. It’s also hilarious.

Farhana Khalique