One Absorbent Parasite Per Song by Andrew McCallum Crawford

He picked up the phone. ‘Neh?’ he said.

‘Cut the crap, Dave,’ said the voice on the other end. ‘Speak English.’

This was all he needed. He looked nervously round the room. That hunted feeling. The shutters were closed. ‘How’s it going, Joyce?’ he said.

‘Not good,’ she said. What a surprise. ‘You going down the Astoria?’

‘Don’t think so,’ he said. It was a quick decision.

‘Could you lend me a thousand?’ she said. ‘Just so I can get a Guardian and a coffee.’

Yeah, right. He barely had enough for the rent and she was asking him for a loan? She still owed him from the last time. She was into him for a lot more than a thousand drachmas.

‘Love to help you out, Joyce,’ he said. ‘But like I say, I won’t be in the Astoria.’

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Another git cramps my lifestyle.’

 

This story has just been published in the March edition of the Scottish literary arts and culture journal, New Linear Perspectives. To read it in its entirety, click here.

Mr Johnson

It was just off Byres Road, a cocktail bar. Popular with would-be pop stars and television presenters. Beautiful people. John, balding, in bottle-end specs and with a jumper tied round his waist, threaded his way through the crowd. Sniggers from the patrons. They didn't know John, not like we did. They didn't know he was the coolest man in the room. If they had, they'd have been all over him like flies.

Dirty Little Secret

The first time is the worst, as if you have demolished something that took years to build. You are consumed with guilt. But nothing has fallen down. The guilt is still there, though. You do it again; there is a rationale. Mathematics - percentages, fractions. A problem halved, but you can never share it. It becomes a habit. The incidence increases while the fractions become smaller. You get to the point where you look forward to it, you enjoy it. You realise you are hooked. There is no going back now. Why should there be? You consider it your due. As for the guilt, that has tended to zero.

Grangemouth Dialectic

Ah leaned back, ready tae pit the bit in if ae tried anythin. Ae didnae. Ae ran oot the door, greetin, tryin tae choke it back, tae keep it quiet. Ae's jaikit wis hingin oaf ae's shoodirs.

Edinburgh Departures

They were dressed in black. Corporate Bohemian. They could have been mistaken for a couple. She talked incessantly, her coffee cup at her lips. She was being herself, he guessed. He had spent the day trying desperately to be something other than what he was, trying to be something she might want, something more Corporate than Bohemian. Her lips were moving, but he couldn't hear. His own voice was loud in his head. Don't leave. Not yet. Please. She placed the cup on its saucer. 'I'd better go through,' she said. He embraced her. It wasn't like the last time, twenty years before, when he was the one who was leaving, when she had begged him to stay as he wiped tears from her eyes. 'I wish I'd had kids with you,' he said, but it was too late. She was gone, turning the corner into Security, the place where they check for things you shouldn't be carrying.

The Next Stop Is Croy and other stories - Andrew McCallum Crawford

A series of six short stories about the complex relationship between a son and his father.

AUTHOR'S FOREWORD

The stories in this collection were not written in the order in which they appear here; they certainly were not conceived as part of a continuous narrative. However, I have decided to bring them together because of the chronology and themes which, it turns out, run through them. Please bear in mind that this is in no way a novella or novelette. It is a collection of short stories, and each story stands or falls on its own, as short stories must.

REVIEWS

 A beautifully written portrayal of things felt but not said. - Carol McKay

Andrew's new collection is like finding a flower sprouting out of cracked concrete - it's unexpected and he's yet little known.......eminently readable. - Steve Alker

There are no great tragic outpourings; tragedy is a very personal experience, marked by memories of seemingly trivial things......But, when recollected, they have the resonance of major life events, signifying much more than their surface suggests. The stories convey the fragmentation of life, its refusal to cohere into a constant flow, the power of memories and the helplessness we feel before them. - Bill Kirton

I've had the honour of publishing other works by Andrew McCallum Crawford and I hope that you seize the opportunity to read this moving collection of stories. - Amy Burns

The book is available for purchase here and here.

The Lovers on Wee Fictions - Brian Hill

Welcome to My Life, Tattoo

In the wide mirror I sat, a chain around my wrist, as blue as the sky, on my arm, a net, running up the skin, reticulated. Over time, my eyes had become watery and ill-defined, just as the tattooed skin had blurred, decade by decade. So, too, the memories they stood for, feathered at the edges, merging. Tattoos: moments scratched beneath the surface. As if memory alone was not enough.

I put my shirt back on, covered up my illustrated past. Most days I lived without it bothering me. But today was St Valentine’s and I remembered. The first cut is the deepest. Like the song.

I actually claimed the Who inspired my first tattoo, from their song of the same name. It was almost a complete lie. No, I did it for love. Unrequited, as it turned out. Unacknowledged. I pulled up the sleeve on my left arm. On the inside, just above the elbow, where I could keep it hidden: tattoo, my secret love.

Going on seventeen to my eighteen, she was pretty, fair, and I was, what, still a boy? I longed for her at a distance. I decided to have her name embroidered on my flesh, in a heart, with a crude lighting bolt, my indelible love, just out of sight, just short of painful.

It would have remained secret, but for a word from someone else. She confided, ‘Anne really likes you. She’s just shy, that’s all…’ Encouraged, I walked on air and my tattoo throbbed with the memory of its bloody making.

Valentine’s Day came. I had a card. Just the one. In the café that evening, Baz, Anne’s brother sat across from me. Pure chance. Out of the blue, he said, ‘I’m heading back to the house. Anne’ll be there… You don’t mind?’ On the way, he added, ‘I’ll drop you off, then I’ve to get Lynn. Catch you later.’

Alone with Anne, conversation circled the unsaid. Courage was hard to find. But I found it. I got the words out. ‘Did you send me a Valentine card?’
‘No’ she replied.

All the things I could have said, all the things I could think of now, escaped my stupid tongue. Where was, ‘I think you did…’? Where, the lie, ‘I sent you one…’? Where, even, ‘I wish you had.’? No, ‘I love you’. No, ‘See me, feel me, touch me… heal me’. ‘Oh’ I said.

Baz and his girlfriend came back to find us sitting in unimaginable silence. Quizzical glances, shrugs. Love was history so I had to leave. In time, ‘Anne’ became ‘Mary-Anne’ across the tattooed heart. 'Mary-Anne with the Shaky Hand', another song by the Who. Another lie.

In the mirror after so long, I remembered it. I remembered all the tattoos that followed and the life they led me. In the blue glass, the bluer haze of my skin was a mist, like the past. I buttoned my shirt up to cover everything. My own hands were shaking.

*     *     *

Brian Hill is designer and filmmaker living in the wilds of Moray. He was, and still is, a founder member of Brian and the Brains and has also been known as the rhyme-slinger, Hilly cunctator, the cartoon cowboy, and latterly the planetarium poet. In between he has teased a living in the voluntary sector, designed for money and made tiny movies. He did have something published once and has written (and performed) many poems on astronomy, the cosmos and our heathen past, usually in complete darkness. His last public work was a voice over and short poem for Gill Russell’s Long Wave installation at the Clan Donald Centre in Skye, late 2010.

The Lovers on Wee Fictions - Jim Murdoch

The Linguist

(For B.)

Though she could converse in French

and German

you could see she was not a native:

She couldn’t think in French

or feel it,

nor could she understand me:

O, she knew all about the language

of love

but so much is lost in its translation.

The Lovers on Wee Fictions - Jay Passer

ROCK AND ROLL

He didn’t want to cover Big Railroad Blues because his favorite porno featured the song while two women did the deed.  He complained that I never had enough toilet paper in my bathroom.  When we’d take a break to smoke and drink, he’d sit on the edge of his stand-up bass, a French model over a hundred years old, which he paid 15 grand for.  The seams started to split, and that was it, repair was necessary.  We went out drinking, full of vanity and lies, imagining our band ruling the world.  It was more about liquor and drugs and fantasy.  Rock and roll is like that, though we were, in actuality, a folk-blues project.  He insisted on a female accompaniment – some chick bartender he had the hots for.  She told me she loved my songs.  Held my arm traversing the street after practice.  The guy, he didn’t dig that.  Drank too much, blathered foolishly, insulted our server at the bistro before refusing to tip.  All the while pawing at our new singer like a ravenous dog.  When he went to relieve himself she confided to me that at her bar, he was a sort of fool that the clientele considered the equivalent of a town drunk.  But boy could he play the stand-up bass, a saving grace (till I heard it on tape).    

*     *     *

Jay Passer's work has appeared in print and online since the 1980's.  He makes a living as a cook.  Two chapbooks of his poetry are due out in 2012.

The Lovers on Wee Fictions - Gordon Urquhart

Lost the plot

Heard you laughing,
Climbing the stairwell with Ewan
West Maitland St. on a sunny afternoon
Your freckled shoulder
White banded, I would rest my head there for 20 years
And counting…

But now I think you’ve lost the plot
we should get shot of these kids and live in a barge in the Midi or

something.

*     *     *

Gordon Urquhart is a Scoattish Heelander living in Zambia, where his short attention span attracts less attention. He likes making wee films about animals, portmanteau electronic music, his children, Inverness Caley Thistle, history and the bittersweet prospect of the death of capitalism. Though she gets irritated by his sarcasm, he loves his wife. He thinks he isn't nearly sarcastic enough.