Laila was a bush pilot, crocodile hunter, face climber, BASE jumper and, more recently, wingsuit flyer. She was also asthmatic, arthritic, and anaemic. According to her doctor, she also suffered from tinnitus – a diagnosis that she had a hard time accepting. Initially, the doctor thought that her condition was caused by damage to auditory cells. When tests showed no damage, he termed it ‘perceived’ tinnitus. What she heard, on occasion, is a muffled clicking sound that seemed to come from a deep well. The clicking had a pattern although she couldn’t quite map it. She sure as hell knew it was not ‘perceived’ or ‘subjective’.
When billionaire Carlos’s New Horizons Corp announced it was seeking astronaut candidates to work on a Mars-orbiting space station, Laila jumped at the opportunity. Although she did not have a degree in science or engineering, her pilot experience and her notoriety helped her leapfrog to the front of the line. The notoriety was a good bet. One of the cable networks dug up a photo of a naked Laila with a python around her neck. When a reporter asked her if there was any truth to the story that she slept with the entire football team in college, she corrected him saying, “the basketball teams – men and women.” All of this brought tons of attention to the mission and the company’s stock went up which, in turn, helped the company raise more capital. Carlos couldn’t be happier.
During the two years of training, Laila noticed that the clicking sound got clearer and more distinct every time she performed zero-g manoeuvres. But then parabolic flight does all sorts of shit to the body, so she filed it under the ‘who the fuck knows’ bucket and forgot all about it. During launch, she was all nervous energy and during different stages of ignition, she was too excited about the prospect of leaving Earth’s orbit to focus on anything about herself. It was the same thrill she felt BASE jumping or wingsuit flying: Rush, Rush, Rush.
The clicking returned several months later during her first spacewalk. This time, the sound was more pronounced and had the structure of an algorithm. She found the experience quite unnerving. She kept telling herself, “This isn’t happening. Sound waves can’t travel through space.” In the following days, as she worked with the crew on the building blocks of the space station, she trained her mind to shut out the sound. Once phase I of the project was complete, she called ground control and asked to speak to Dr. Allen, the chief astrophysicist. Dr. Allen didn’t have an answer for her, but she asked Laila to document, as much as possible, her auditory experience. Laila was sure Dr. Allen meant auditory hallucination.
Back on earth, Laila noticed that her vision had gotten blurry and the clicking had returned, only this time it was no longer faint. She underwent a battery of tests and it was determined that weightlessness in space had reshaped the structure of her eyes. Neurobiologists called it neuro-ocular syndrome. The tests, however, found nothing wrong with her hearing. There was a lot of babble about auditory cortex and neural responses, but the simple conclusion Laila came to was that her hearing had gotten more acute to compensate for the vision loss.
There it rested until she got a call, one morning, from Dr. Chandra, an acoustic scientist at UK’s Centre of Astrophysics. They wanted to record the signals Laila’s auditory nerves were sending her brain. They wanted to compare them to the gravitational waves from solar flares, supernovae and other cosmic happenings that the Centre had been recording for years. Laila thought the whole idea was bizarre but agreed to participate in the study.
Two years later came the answer: The clicking sound Laila had been hearing came from a black hole 1.5 billion light years away. Soon they were finding ‘hearers’ all over the world – a farmer in Uzbekistan, a monk in Bhutan, a 24-week-old foetus inside a pregnant woman in Romania. The foetus could hear the clicking that the mother couldn’t. In the traditional and social media, the headline was the predictable ‘Is anybody out there?’ For Laila, the question was ‘how can I get there?’
Balu Swami lives in the US. His works have appeared in Ink Pantry, Adelaide Literary Magazine, Flash Fiction North, Short Kid Stories, Twist and Twain, and Literary Veganism.
You can find more of Balu’s work here on Ink Panty.
On the first night it snows, she finally discovers who’s leaving the trash bags outside her apartment. Luna follows the bag’s track to an unassuming rowhome one block south of hers. The air smells of car exhaust and a yellow glow shines above the porch in the upstairs window. From the front door, a thin hand appears, gripping another black bag’s top knot like a marionette. Then the vestibule light flicks off. A porch light blinks on.
“Can I help you?” the woman calls.
“No!” says Luna, standing in an empty parking space. “You weren’t going to bring that trash to the house on the corner down on Rodman, were you?”
“No,” the woman says. She heaves the misshapen bag down the eight steps and onto the sidewalk it thumps. Snow culls in its ridges. Then, from the bag, an entire doghouse, with a shingled, rust-red roof, tumbles off the curb and flips into the street. Its inner walls are painted glittering green. Luna says, “Last week it was…plates. All made up like dimes…and…the week before that, laundry bags with dollar signs on them? I’m not angry,” Luna says. “Are you a set designer?”
“A what?” says the woman.
“A set designer. Do you make props for a stage, a movie set? A movie about money? About Wall Street?”
“Oh, no.”
The woman gives a little shout – Luna is ascending her steps. “You owe me a confession,” she says.
“Listen. There’s someone I’m taking care of right now. This is all him.” Then the woman pouts. “My name’s Amara. I can tell you more about him – more about Mr. O’Hanlon, if you want to come inside. There’s coffee. That’s your house on the corner there, right?”
Luna nods. “A coffee.” She cozies up with the thought of a drink with a new person who is not a man. “That would be,” Luna feels the need to pause during a passing car’s rumble, “nice. Do you mean now? Who’s Mr. O’Hanlon?”
“Mastermind behind all this. I guess he’d like that,” says Amara, rolling her eyes. “I usually don’t. Look, maybe we can stay on the porch?”
“No, it’s freezing out! And I…want an explanation.”
The door opens a crack and a line of light stripes the floor.
A week ago, a bag full of dark dinner plates greeted her. On the plate’s surface someone had etched perfect profiles, in silver marker, of Roosevelt. And the week before that, she’d pulled a bag open, the bag lightening around its edges, to reveal deflated basketballs. Each ball featured the same jumble of black lines. She pulled one out and it flopped onto the curb. The lines formed a familiar face in profile: Lincoln. They were admirable renditions, with varied dates.
Luna follows Amara into the living room. Gardening tools, two dull junk flamingos, a grungy beach umbrella and green skis clutter one of the enclosed porch’s corners.
“You want a glass of wine, or water? He has some Jameson left, probably, if you want something stronger.”
Luna cowers in the moss-smelling living room. The wood panels dim the room. “Oh, wine would be great, thanks.” She pulls the bottom of her jacket over her hips. She wants to stay frozen but she’s made it this far. She creeps to an end table next to a boxy beige couch. There’s a stack of photographs on top of six shoeboxes ranging in colour from grey to brown point, and a picture of an attractive white man with a moustache and a bomber jacket stares at Luna – he’s holding a giant prize check in the foreground; in the background, a woman cheers from a doorway. Amara strides into the room with a bottle tucked under her arm and two glasses of red wine quivering.
“Thank you,” says Luna. The wine tastes like cloves and sickly-sweet cherry.
Luna lowers herself in front of a coffee table. “I do home care,” says Amara. “My, Mr. O’Han-Paddy. If I left that trash here, he’d take it, rip up the bags, bring all his crap back inside.”
“Oh,” says Luna. “The one in the pictures?”
“That’s him,” says Amara, pointing to the man with the prize check. “He used to work for a sweepstakes company. Brought those big ass checks to people’s houses. So now, I know it’s crazy but he keeps trying to make that happen again. Make stuff he thinks he’s gonna give someone. And it’ll change their lives.”
“I – there’s nowhere else to put these bags besides my house? It’s rude.”
“He gets out here and tries to find where I’ve put them on the block. Tears up other bags. He recognizes the white CVS ones with the red. I had to change out the bags. Hasn’t found where I’ve been putting them on your sidewalk yet.”
“What does he do when he finds them?”
“Stops people on the street. Tries to push frisbees, treadmill belts he says are dollarbills on them. I caught him with a stack of pancakes in February. Or brings everything back and pushes everything around. Throws it over the lamps. On the stairs. Says I’m censoring him. Says I’m getting in the way of changing lives, people winning.”
A creak echoes from where Luna assumes is the kitchen and then a heavy step resounds. Amara’s cheek flashes in profile. “Sir!” she says. “Mr. O’Hanlon?” An empty can hits the floor and rings. Then something slides toward Luna. Amara snatches it off the floor and stands, holding a small, stuffed, turquoise sack. It resembles the kind of sleeping bag Luna once took to with her ex to the Poconos.
“Let’s…see what’s inside,” says Luna.
“You don’t want that,” says Amara.
Luna takes it from her anyway. She opens the bag. Wrapping paper? The insides of a frog costume? She plucks out a tissue hodgepodge. It feels crisp and dry. The tissue is all green-marked – the same green as the doghouse.
“Well, he made you a wallet,” Amara mocks. Black dollar signs mark each leaf of paper. “Full of money. You’re rich now. You won the shit lottery.”
Luna laughs; the curtains waver in her vision.
But Amara says, “No! This is what I deal with. This right here is why I hide his trash.”
“He made it for me. It’s kind of sweet.”
“Maybe it used to be. Years ago. I tried to get used to it. Tried to appreciate his-”
“Well, there’s something special here.”
Amara shakes her head. “No. I talk to him about it. At least twice a month. For two years I’ve dealt with this.” Amara finishes her wine. “I tried to channel this mess into something regular. Something useful. Took him to the library Tuesdays. See if he wants to volunteer at that church on Rittenhouse. At the soup kitchen. Fool kept talking about how he – how he wanted to contribute. OK, I said, let’s contribute. We go to the soup kitchen for three days and then he yells at a man about – personal responsibility. They made us leave! But Paddy loved showing up at people’s doors with those big checks.
“When I can’t find him now, I know I’ll catch him at the dollar store. Stack of bodyboards under his arm.” Amara laughs a little. “He’ll carve into them with a bread knife. Write one out like one of those prize checks.” And she feigns carving, shutting an eye and sticking out her tongue. “And then I find three or four of them shoved under his bed. He’d address them to people. Neighbours. You never got one?”
“No.”
“Well, I guess he’s moved on. You got that now.”
“It’s…charming. He made it for me.”
“Nuh-uh.” Amarah thrusts her hand out and curls-in her fingers. “Give it.”
“Why?”
“I can’t keep encouraging him. He stops people on the street. Tells them they’ve won some vacation to Brazil!”
“It’s mine,” says Luna.
“Don’t make me get angry,” says Amara.
A deep voice behind them booms: “It belongs to her!”
Amara rolls her eyes. “Stop. Giving. Her your crap, Paddy.” She tugs the bag from Luna’s hands.
In the light, his pale skin and white hair shines. A crumpled yellow oxford appears draped over a round body; he looks like an egg in a carton. Wrinkles crisscross his cheeks and lips. His pants have, dotting down each leg, bunches of mouse-sized holes. He glares at Amara. His scent is peppery, leathery. In a rough voice he says, “I know she’ll take them away. And so I must make more.”
“What?” says Luna.
Amara says, “Listen to him.”
Paddy nods. He puts his finger to his lips and disappears down a hallway. Shakily, Luna pours more wine into her glass. Then a scuffing makes her turn. Paddy is scraping a blue and orange bodyboard down the hallway. The bottom of it rubs against the wall; he has to carry it sideways.
He displays it to her, grinning with very white teeth. The print is a fine, professional font featuring decorative flourishes outlined in blue. Luna Vesna, 5501 Rodman Street, Philadelphia PA 19143. The cheque is for $500,000,000.
“Lord,” she says. “You know where I live.”
He drops the cheque and it thumps against the couch. Amara clutches green tissue paper. “He wants to make me happy. You’re keeping him from that.”
“Oh, you want him to make you happy?” She drops the tissue on the parquet floor.
“I don’t know why you’re being so rude,” says Luna. “Aren’t you supposed to help people?”
“You try keeping up with him.” Amara presses her finger to her lips. “Paddy,” she says, but he turns to the hallway. Then to Luna she says, “Tell Mr. O’Hanlon why you’re here.”
“What?” Luna tips her wine glass.
“Tell him what you came here tonight to say.”
“I’m…here because you invited me for a glass of wine out of the blue.”
“Nah-uh. At the very least, tell him, tell me to stop bringing his trash to your house. Go ahead.”
Luna bites her lip. “I can’t.”
Amara says, “Can’t or don’t wanna?”
Luna shoots the rest of the wine into her mouth – it burns. ”Yes, it’s – at least it was true. Before I knew what you were trying to give me.” She looks at the cheque. “It’s very nice.”
Paddy’s lips soften and seem to melt to a frown. He whimpers. Amara says, “Oh, you’re not happy? Tell her what’s keeping you from paradise. Because I bet it’s not me having to confiscate your bags of newspapers. Treadmill parts. Beach towels, plates.” She turns to Luna. “It’s when his fantasy steps all over people. That’s when it irks me. It really irks me. I mean, lest we forget, the reason you marched over here was to tell me about it!”
Luna says, “Stop! You’re what’s keeping him from happiness! You’re slapping the ball from his hand every chance you get.”
“So, what?”
“I want you to stop. Stop getting in his way.”
“Leaving his crap everywhere? It disturbs people, you know. I’m not doing that.”
Luna turns to Paddy. “I’m sorry.” She bends for his cheque against the couch. Paddy’s stare bores into her. The cheque is bristly against her fingers. Amara says, “Get out of here before he tries to kiss you.” Paddy stares at his boots.
—
Back home, Luna turns on a Netflix movie she saved years ago. But she eats the rest of a box of Cheez-Its and passes out.
—
When she moves into her next apartment she brings the cheque.
The next man she dates is a bass player in Roxborough, David. The first night David will sleep over, he spies the cheque under her futon. He asks what the hell it is. “An art project?”
“From an interlude in my life,” she says.
The next trash night she leans it against a stop sign.
Perry Genovesi works as a librarian in Philadelphia, USA. He serves his fellow workers in AFSCME District Council 47 and plays in the empty arena rock band, Canid. You can read his published fiction in the Santa Monica Review, Maudlin House, Heavy Feature Review, and collected here. He’s come to the realization that most ‘conversations’ between two people are just subtle battles to see who has to send the first email.
Sounds, ship and sea-formed, rigging’s creaks and groans, the rush of bow-split water a hiss of displeasure, they pursue fate, jettisoned provisions a sore loss. After Tenerife, starless but dry, no rainfall since approaching the equator when the cursed pumpkins began to spoil, a threat lurks, something in the air other than ozone. Churchill, always seeking eminence, nurses a scalded hand, the cook, broken ribs. James Morrison’s arm is infected.
A Scot, an educated man good at judging heights and distances at sea, Morrison runs his mind over how these tars have been spoiling in the wake of the aforesaid pumpkins amid the galley’s enveloping smoke because of Bligh’s schemes. Surely their vituperative profiteering captain won’t be taken for a god à la Cook? Constant gales prevent their navigation of Cape Horn.
On midnight watch, Morrison discerns the sails’ dim outlines. Cocooned by night’s cloak he can’t stop thinking about the bird, eight-foot span wingtips stretched, killed and eaten earlier that day. Sailing the panic of wind off Patagonia’s coast riding tunnels of air like a heavenly messenger, its grace, soaring freedom, aroused optimism. He knows they rest at Tristan da Cunha, endure long arduous journeys.
Young James Ballantyne misses historical drama’s denouement, no crowd scene role treading the boards of that deck in the future’s final act. His corpse sinks, slowly rotating, free-falling in a chance choreography through the ever-darkening ocean, fish twitching away from his shroud, ropes holding firm so far. Solemn shipmates wrench their thoughts from this, the first death, strain towards their sweet theatre of dreams, the idea of Otaheite’s sun-blazed volcanic mountains illustrating an otherwise monotony of horizon.
Bligh’s frustration washes over pustular Surgeon Huggan. Still abed, obese, pickled, his foetid days now acutely numbered, Bounty’s doctor, cabin a congeries of spillage, wine and sweat, drools vomit to his rattling chest. Several ships have been sighted but they have spoken to none. The boy sailor’s remains borne by gravity away from shillings of light dappling the sea’s surface, grief hovering in abeyance for his people in Blighty, the wind has freshened since Van Diemen’s Land, its airy questing urging them each to his particular end.
Ian C Smith’s work has been published in BBC Radio 4 Sounds,The Dalhousie Review, Gargoyle, Ginosko Literary Journal, Griffith Review, Southword, The Stony Thursday Book, & Two Thirds North. His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide). He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island.
You can find more of Ian’s work here on Ink Pantry.
Brighton-based poet and playwright, Claire Booker’s debut pamphlet of poems, ‘Later There Will Be Postcards’ was published by Green Bottle Press. A further pamphlet, ‘The Bone That Sang’ was published by Indigo Dreams. She was a recipient of a Kathak International Literary Award in 2019 and, in the same year, travelled to Bangladesh as a guest poet at the Dhaka International Writers’ Festival. Her stage plays have been performed in Europe, Australia, America and the UK. She is a member of the Brighton Stanza Group.
Titles can be magical as well as memorable. Following in the footsteps of Agatha Christie’s detective novel, ‘A Pocketful of Rye’, Aisha Bushby’s novel ‘A Pocketful of Stars’ and Richard E Grant’s memoir ‘A Pocketful of Happiness’ we now have Booker’s first full-length collection ‘A Pocketful of Chalk’.
Of course, a ‘pocket’ can also be a seam, a cavity in a rock or stratum filled with ore or other material as opposed to a small patch of land or a space for carrying small articles in one’s clothing. In this collection, Booker digs deep beneath the surface to mine a rich vein of poetry from the chalk deposits of the South Downs. It is here where we see that Booker is very much a poet of place as she takes us over a range of coastal cliffs and hills such as Beachy Head, Folly Hill, and Beacon Hill to the inland grasslands and meadows of Sussex which are all very much a part of her landscape.
In an interview for The Poet Magazine, Booker says ‘I think words, for me, are often a way to delve into the unexplored, to fling my net and see what comes up.’ Nowhere is this more obvious than in her opening poem, ‘Breaking Out’, where space is used instead of punctuation to indicate the length of a pause. The full-stop (‘I’ve had it with full stops’) is not permitted to put in an appearance until the whole poem has ended, allowing nothing to hinder the full flight of her imagination, a dazzlement of constellations, butterflies, marigolds and dandelions. The lyrical drive inherent in this and many other poems in the collection comes from Booker’s love of English hymnody.
By contrast, full stops are very much in evidence in ‘Looking Towards Smock Hill’ where short sentences help to drive the poem forward, enabling it to cover a lot of ground, giving us a sense distance in the view out to sea.
In ‘Drone Boys’ technology meets sheep. The sound and sight of them scything the air with their blades is distressing to the sheep. Reading it put me in mind of the dangers birds face when confronted with the whirling blades of wind turbines. Booker handles the clash of forces between machinery and the natural world very convincingly here. We ignore the needs of the natural world at our peril.
‘Long Man Dreaming’ is central to this collection. This is the chalk giant, known as the Long Man of Wilmington that is carved into the Sussex Downs. The jury is still out as to whether it is a guardian, some kind of war-god or a fertility symbol and its origins are unclear. The narrator imagines the giant dreaming himself back into the past to the point where the landscape returns to the seabed. Even the car the narrator is sitting in becomes a part of the transformation: ‘Inside the carburettor petrol chatters /its abrasive dialect of long-dead foliage… We sink / into blue haze. A brook has begun to babble / through my head.’
Thinking of another pocketful, the nursery rhyme ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence / a pocketful of rye’ several poems bear reference to childhood such as ‘Hey Diddle Diddle…,’ ‘The Horse in my Bedroom,’ and ‘The Museum of Childhood’ where
…the little train clatters along N-gauge tracks, disappears into the papier-mâché tunnel.
A long heart-skip, before it emerges still guarding its secret: the dark curved space,
a pin prick of light dilating like an amazed pupil at the approaching world.
Even the name of the gardener in ‘Mr McGregor’s Seedlings’ is a distant echo from Beatrix Potter’s ‘The Tale of Peter Rabbit’.
In ‘Italian Hair’ Booker manages to convey a whole spectrum of moods ranging from envy to humour and pathos in five quatrains against a backdrop that swings between the romance of Italy to the reality of England, from Sophia Loren to the fictional character of Nora Batty.
‘Framed Woman’ is an ekphrastic poem based on a painting titled ‘Cape Cod Morning’ by the American realist painter Edward Hopper. In the actual painting, a woman is looking out of a bay window, her attention caught by something beyond the frame. She herself is framed by tall dark shutters and the shape of the oriel window. Booker focuses on the woman’s tense pose, the way her hands are ‘welded to a table’ and tells us her own take on the story of this woman and how she lives day by day in her own interior space.
‘News Flash’ reads like an intrusion into our settled lives. The violent headline haunts the narrator with endless repeats until the carefree girls playing on the beach become fully cognisant of it. The poem is the musical equivalent of the renegade snare drummer in Nielsen’s Fifth Symphony who is given the freedom to ‘improvise’ to the point of waging a war with the full forces of the rest of the orchestra.
Many of the poems in this collection are about nature but there are others which explore relationships with family and friends. Whether she is writing about a father mending nets, an osprey fledging or mirabelle plums, Booker dazzles us with her inventive vocabulary and keen observation. Highly recommended.
