Guest Writer LAURA BESLEY

MOVING ON

Flash Fiction by Laura Besley

His scent carries on the warm evening air, floating towards me like a petal in the spring breeze. I haven’t seen him in twenty years, but it is definitely him.
Earlier this evening, getting dressed in my cramped bathroom, I couldn’t decide which side of smart/casual to fall on for this twentieth College reunion. I hadn’t been to the tenth as my second daughter, Jessica, had just been born. At the time it hadn’t seemed important either. Now, Dave gone, reconnecting had become important. I decided on a loose, floor-length, lavender-coloured dress, which accentuated my strong shoulders and toned arms. I slipped on a long beaded necklace.
The school gym – how clichéd – is decorated with long, stretching banners and glossy silver balloons. I realise, suddenly, that the college hosts this party every year, but for different graduates.
I pick up my name badge from the table just inside the door. It’s not like people won’t recognise me, I’m still too short, too freckly, with long wavy hair. I tried wearing it shorter and styling it every morning, but soon gave up on the impracticality.
“Janet!” a woman with a perfect bob calls out. “It’s Dana.”
“Of course,” I enthuse, falsely, “how are you?”
“Great! What’ve you been up to?”
“You know, the usual,” I take a sip of the lukewarm white wine. “Marriage, kids, divorce.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” She isn’t. She tips the glass of juice allowing the light to catch the cluster of diamonds in their various settings on her left ring finger. Why did I talk myself into this? I drain my wine and say I need another. That’s an understatement.
And then he is here, in the building, in the room. My hand is shaking and I put the bottle down with a clunk. I turn and face him. Eerily unchanged. Smiling. God, we used to laugh so much together. He makes a beeline for me and I put my drink down, anticipating correctly that he’ll give me a hug. That smell.
“Janet! Look at you – you look great!”
“No, I don’t,” I slap his arm playfully, “but thanks for saying it. You look just the same.” I don’t know what to do with my hands, so I play with my beads.
“So do you.” The sudden silence hangs suspended in the air. The reasons we broke up, the pain, the years moving on.
“Is,” I look at my silver sandals, “is your wife here?” And just for a moment I pretend it will all work out. I’ll get my happily ever after.
“No, she’s at home with the boys. They’re ten and eight.”
“I’ve got two girls, twelve and ten.”
“You’re separated now?” he asks, knowing the answer already.
“Divorced.”
“Jon!” Someone whose face I don’t see claps his hands on Jon’s shoulder, and as Jon turns round to greet him, I quietly slip away.

Laura Besley

Laura Besley is writer of fiction and non-fiction. She is currently writing a daily flash fiction. Posts ‘the best of the week’ appears every Friday as well as musings on life and living in Hong Kong at:
www.laurabesley.blogspot.com

Guest Writer Wendy McTavish

A short excerpt from:
EXPAT – Opinionated memories of forty years in Hong Kong

Suburban Psycho

Flush with the image of myself as an emerging earth mother I decided to go the whole hog and get a cat and a dog. The cat we adopted from a litter down the road. I asked Robbie to name her and he chose the extraordinary name of Wilma.

‘Wilma? Why Wilma?’

‘The dog next door is called Fred so now we have Fred and Wilma Flintstone!’

Encouraged by my aunt we purchased one of these dogs. A fat white and ugly-beautiful puppy she was christened Miss Piggy for the obvious reason. Miss Piggy turned out to be extremely stupid and also most promiscuous. No clothes hanging on the line were safe from her predations. No male dog could resist her canine charms.

At great expense we erected a fence around our property to keep her inside. Bull terriers are unable to jump high because of their sturdy front quarters. However, we forgot that the neighbourhood mongrels did not have the same disability. They could jump in and they did. Miss Piggy and I went to the local vet for an ante-natal visit. However, the vet told me something of which I’d not been previously aware. If bitches are aborted they cannot give birth another day as we humans can. Not wanting to deprive Miss Piggy of the joys of motherhood and being reluctant to deprive my children of witnessing the mystery of birth, I decided that my teenage, unmarried dog should proceed with her pregnancy.

What a mistake! Miss Piggy gave birth to her first puppy at about 8 AM one school morning. After watching three puppies come into the world my children regarded it all as a bit ‘ho hum’ and wandered off to school. Miss Piggy’s twelfth puppy saw the light of day at 5 PM, after nine hours of labour. I was exhausted but not as much as ‘Miss Piggy’.

The puppies were cute and obviously had several fathers. (This is another fact of nature of which I’d been ignorant. A bitch can carry the pups of many different fathers at once.) Twelve puppies were far too many for such a young mother. Over the next weeks I would arise each morning to find a dead puppy lying beside Miss Piggy. I could not understand it as they all looked extremely healthy.

One day the mystery was solved. I put them in the back garden to gambol with their mother and went inside only to emerge hurriedly when I heard a terrible squealing. I was confronted with the sight of Miss Piggy’s big paw grinding her offspring’s face into the earth, trying to suffocate it. I guess it was an understandable reaction to a multiple birth of such proportions plus severe mastitis.

One by one little puppies were buried about the garden. When Miss Piggy started digging them up and eating them we decided that we could never feel the same way about her again and found new homes for her and her remaining few offspring.

Author Wendy McTavish

Wendy McTavish

Poem

Old Lovers
by Mary Jane Newton

We are old lovers now.
Like rancid butter we drip
All over the sheets.
We smile at
The mutiny of our bodies
And we lie, holding hands.
We know we both
Remember the full moons
During which we chased
Our scents like unruly hounds,
During which we burnt
Ourselves up like cheap candles,
During which we played gently
Each other like instruments,
Read each other like Braille,
Watched each other
With closed eyes.
Now we lie here,
At once regretful and reconciled,
Holding hands
Under the duvet.

Mary Jane Newton

The Buddha that Cried

Excerpt from Novel The Buddha that Cried by Andy Smailes

Fragley isn’t Irish, but he looks as if he ought to be.
We exchange small talk. The dockyard, the boats. Fragley’s a crane operator on the dockside. He won’t be far off sixty, I guess. He doesn’t have any direct contact with the boats and their cargo, so he doesn’t smell of fish. The ambience of the pub doesn’t seem to bother him too much, though. He’s here more or less every night.
I wouldn’t say he loves his work; it must be a very solitary existence up there in the crane’s tiny cockpit at night. I guess he’s one of those guys who just gets on with it, and grows gently and benignly old. If he didn’t have his crane, his eagle’s eye view over the docks, the ships and the sea, the drinking and camaraderie of the pub, I think he would just fade away. He doesn’t seem to live for anything else, that’s for sure.
“Did you know Hoosey’s closing down?” Fragley has turned and is busy lighting up again. He chain-smokes when he’s at work, too; just himself and a pack or three of Bensons for company in his cockpit up in the sky.
*
Fragley looked older tonight, old and pinched, as if the cold had got to him; as if the warmth of the pub was unable to filter through. The lines of his face, cutting through his cheeks to the angles of his mouth, were deeper, harsher. He turned away from me to cough, hacking away into a tissue. He crumpled it up into a ball and flicked it into the open brass fireplace, but not before I’d sneaked a quick look at it. The stuff he spat out was greyish-white, the phlegm of a chronic smoker, and it was spotted with little flecks of blood.
No, lad, this won’t last forever. I remembered his words from the night before.
“I feel everything’s slipping away,” he said. “Most of me life I’ve worked in this place. And for what? Night after bloody night by meself up in that crane, sleeping away the days… Sleeping away me bloody life, that’s what. What’s the point of it all? Got no money stashed away…no sons to live on after I go…why live at all? Why even bother to bloody exist?”
I’d never seen Fragley down like this. He had always been so determinedly cheerful. I wondered if I could give back some of the empathy I’d had over the years.
“You’ve been here thirty years, man. This is your home…you might not have kids, but you’ve got family here. You belong here. Just walk into the bar, and you know it…you can touch it. There’s a thousand dockers here who’ll shout for you, man…”
“Aye, and what good will that do?” His voice was deep, then, deep and grim.
Only then did it sink in. I noticed he wasn’t smoking any more. Instead, he was drinking hard. Drinking as if there was no tomorrow.
“Given up on the fags, have you?”
“Aye, well…” He shrugged. “I might as well save me money.” His face as he turned away was unreadable.
I bought him a beer. “They’re on me tonight,” I told him. I bought him half a dozen, and his mates as many more. But still it didn’t change his mood.

Author Robert Andy Smailes

Shakespeare Garden New York

Shakespeare Garden
by Indra Chopra, travel writer

Located in a corner of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Brooklyn, New York is the ‘Shakespeare Garden’, a green tribute to the Bard of Elizabethan England. Designed in English cottage garden style with flagstone path-way, fountain and a lone teak wood bench, the garden, features nearly 80 species of flowers and herbs mentioned in William Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets. The use of Shakespearean or common names, special quotations and graphic descriptions help to identify the plants. I recognized parsley (photograph); the poppy (photograph ) and the garlic (photograph): everyday plants infused with literary qualities.

The original 1925 Shakespeare garden was a gift of Henry C. Folger, founder of the ‘Folger Shakespeare Library’ in Washington, D.C., and his wife Emily. Henry Folger felt that “the poet is one of our best sources, one of the wells from which we Americans draw our national thought, our faith and our hope” and by helping fund the Garden brought Shakespeare closer to the people.

The present Garden was relocated to its existing site in 1979 to give it more space to blossom. The best time to visit the Garden is late May when the flowers are in full splendour, especially the roses.

Poems

Poems from Betty Bhownath

LIFE

Life

A life bled dry of all colour
Except for a growing grayness
Dulls my days, dampens my spirit,
Etches a frown on my forehead,
Makes frail my heavy heart.
Tedium, in itself, is tiresome
But a life bereft of colour
Stamps out optimism,
Kills enthusiasm

TIME TRAVELLERS

Time Traveller

I’m boxed in, bound and gagged,
Frail-hazy images fly past
Flung briefly into memory,
Splintering….
Then, dissipating into blackness-
Save for quiet breathing,
I stand frozen, blind staring
Into the pock-marked face
Of a stranger.
Cold fingers touching mine,
Intimate…….indifferent –
Motionless….MTR mates.

Poet, Artist, Writer, Educator Betty Bhownath