Ten Journeys Read online

  Legend Press Ltd, 2 London Wall Buildings,

  London EC2M 5UU

  [email protected]

  www.legendpress.co.uk

  www.twitter.com/legend_press

  Contents © Cassandra Parkin, Dave Foxall, Guy Mankowski,

  Alistair Meldrum, Paul Burman, Ari O’Connell, Josie Henley-Einion,

  Brendan Telford, Anne Devereux, A.J. Kirby 2010

  The right of the above authors to be identified as the authors of

  this work has be asserted by them in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available.

  ISBN 978-1-9065581-9-2

  All characters, other than those clearly in the public domain, and

  place names, other than those well-established such as towns and

  cities, are fictitious and any resemblance is purely coincidental.

  Edited by Lauren Parsons-Wolff

  Set in Times

  Printed by J. H. Haynes and Co. Ltd., Sparkford.

  Cover designed by Gudrun Jobst

  www.yotedesign.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  Contents

  Interview #17

  by Cassandra Parkin

  I’m afraid to fly...

  by Dave Foxall

  The Willows

  by Guy Mankowski

  The New Head of Deaths

  by Alistair Meldrum

  At the Rawlings’ Place

  by Paul Burman

  Ukini Nageni

  by Ari O’Connell

  Dear

  by Josie Henley-Einion

  Angel Wings

  by Brendan Telford

  What If You Slept

  by Anne Devereux

  Curious Case of Jenni Wen

  by A.J. Kirby

  The Short Story Reinvented series

  Legend Press’ unique short-fiction series, The Short Story Reinvented, is designed for today’s busy, but discerning, reader. Short fiction is a perfect answer in a world where everyone wants things to be easily accessible, sleek and tailored to fit their needs.

  High-quality, thought-provoking short fiction can perfectly fill what before may have been an enforced gap of ‘dead-time’ in a daily routine. Dipping into short fiction is not as daunting as delving into a thick novel on a commute or during a lunch break, when you know that you might soon be interrupted mid-chapter; yet the subject matter in this popular series is weighty and meaningful, providing something new to think about and feel inspired about for the rest of the day, week, month and year.

  Legend Press receives hundreds of submissions for the collections, from all over the UK as well as from all around the world. The successful entries for each book are chosen so that all stories combine and contrast compellingly to make the most varied, yet at the same time the most cohesive, collection possible.

  A Note from Legend Press

  Not only this short story series but Legend Press itself, at the very beginning of its journey, began with a visit to a local shop one bright afternoon in London. There occurred the thought of how interesting it would be to have a glimpse into the minds of each person rushing, or strolling by, no doubt packed with their dramas, concerns, hopes and opinions – probably more fantastical than any fiction.

  The collection became a flag-bearer of the importance of the short story and its relevance and enjoyment for a society now seemingly pressed to rush more than ever, bombarded with images, adverts and promotions; and harried away from the never-dying power of storytelling.

  Five years on, its relevance and fit for the modern reader is as strong as ever. And the diversity, power, depth of the collection seems to have grown and grown.

  We want to say thank you to everyone who has worked on the series – special mention to Gudrun, who has produced all of the covers, apart from that first one. Most importantly, thanks to all of the authors that have submitted and those that have been included – whether those such as E.C. Seaman, who have become regulars in the series, to those that have provided one memorable and brilliant story.

  Since starting the series, there have undoubtedly been strides – for instance, large competitions – to boost the short story. These have been welcomed, although there is still a way to go before collections are on those front-of-shop bookshelves, deservedly basking on bright afternoons.

  We really hope you enjoy this celebratory fifth collection, and in your own way add your voice in support of the power of the short story.

  Tom Chalmers

  Managing Director, Legend Press

  1

  Interview #17

  Cassandra Parkin

  Author

  Cassandra Parkin holds a Master's degree in English Literature at York University and now works as a senior brand manager for a Healthcare company in Hull. She has been writing fiction on and off since she first learned how to write, mostly to order as Christmas presents for family and friends. She has never lived in Idaho, never worked on Wall Street and never bankrupted a major corporation. She went to New York once, and thought it was very nice.

  Ah, take a hike, you patronising, nosey son-of-a-bitch. I told you last time. I don’t give a good god-damn about your project, and I certainly ain’t tellin’ you the story of how I got here.

  You think there’s anything worthwhile down here in the gutter? I told you, boy, ain’t nothing here but damage and horror, and lost, desperate souls. Take your lousy college project your fucking liberal compassion and your I just rilly feel like there’s a story to be told here, sir, bleeding-heart West-Coast bullshit and get the hell outta here. You again? Got some cojones on you, aintcha? No offence. And don’t think I don’t know why you’re comin’ after me so desperate and hopeful-like. I know what they told you. Talk to Tom, he’s got a vocabulary of thirty-eight thousand words, even if half of them are fuckin’obscenities. He’s the exception. He chose to be down here, he coulda been anything if he’d wanted. Tom, he’s doing penance.

  You’re only here talking to me because you reckon I’m more like you than I am like them. You want to hear about how a man starts out cradled in his momma’s arms and ends up rotting away down here?

  Go talk to Ron instead, down under the bridge. Charming fella if you happen to catch him in the right phase of the moon. Paranoid schizophrenic; self-medicates with booze. Half the time he’s shouting at the sky, the other half he’s layin’ in the mud... now there’s a fascinating fucking journey for you if you want one; it’s got everything. Tragedy. Pathos. Unexpected bouts of extreme violence. Yeah, I had you pegged for a goddamn pussy the first time I laid eyes on you. What is it this time? Oh, right, now you’re gonna try and buy me off, huh. Well, I ain’t for sale, and neither’s my life story... what did you bring? Glenfiddich Ten-Year-Old Single Malt, are you shittin’ me? You bought a bottle of well-aged Scotch whisky to a down-and-out bum living on Skid Row? Ah, knock that off, would ya? I ain’t dying, you loser, I’m laughing. You finally managed to do something entertaining. And civilised. I hope you brought glasses. You can’t drink this stuff outta the bottle... You did bring glasses. Huh. Well, OK. I’ll make a deal with you. I ain’t gonna tell you my story. My life journey’s my business, and that ain’t for sale. But I’ll tell you a fable of the streets, a true morality tale for our times; a story every wet-behind-the-ears starry-eyed idiot oughta hear, at least once.
This is the story of a man who managed to get himself a ticket for a ride on the Money Train. This story is about a man called Jack.

  Jack English was a farmer-boy, grew up in the bible-belt of Idaho. Classic smallholding, the kind there ain’t really room for no more in this fine and copasetic country of ours. Father was killed in one a them bizarre industrial accidents farmers are strangely prone to. You know the ones I mean. Jack’s daddy went through a potato washer. Came out in lumps, apparently.

  So anyway. Daddy went through the wringer; the farm went to the wall.

  Jack, he was a college boy, great with numbers but a hopeless farmer, didn’t have his daddy’s magic touch with the soil. I guess these things sometimes skip a generation. Saw disaster crawling over the hill towards him, black and inevitable. Did everything he could to hold it off, but he didn’t have it where it counts. Farming ain’t bean-counting. You can’t grow the crops or get the hens to lay, you ain’t never gonna make it work.

  Had to sell the land off, piece by piece. First the arable – Jack was always more of a people person, and a cow’s closer to human than a cucumber. Then the pasture, along with those pretty-eyed ladies Jack was so attached to. Cows can be quite attractive, you know, in a big-tits-long-eyelashes kind of a way. Day the sale went through, Jack watched as his Jersey girls, his daddy’s pride and joy, went wandering down to the milking shed as usual, only the farm hands hitching ’em up to the milking machine weren’t working for him no more. The great cycle of grass, lactation, machinery and cow-shit kept right on turning without missing a beat. But he wasn’t part of it. He’d never been part of it; he was just some damned idiot who couldn’t hang onto what he’d inherited. He watched those ladies lining up, listened to them lowing in pleasure – hey, you don’t think it feels good to get milked, you ask any nursing mom. He rustled the banker’s draft in his pocket, and he bit his lip until it bled. Then he drove into town, found a bar, and got drunk. Pass that bottle, will ya? I notice you ain’t drinkin’ yours. Don’t worry on my account, I ain’t gonna freak out at the sight of someone else drinking my booze. It may or may not surprise you to know that I ain’t actually an alcoholic. I mean sure, I’ve been drunk every time you’ve been down here, and the first time you found me I was so completely pissy-eyed I could hardly speak, but that ain’t because I got to be. Alcohol ain’t never been my poison; I just really, really, really like to drink. Well, take a look around; living here, who wouldn’t? I’m what you might call a contextual drinker. Down here, I’ll drink every drop I can get my hands on. But take me outta this particular context you happen to find me in, put me somewhere clean and decent, and I can leave the booze alone with the best of ‘em.

  Although I admit my liver probably don’t know the difference.

  There’s all kinds a drunk, you know. Down here we mostly like to indulge in the drinking to forget drunk; although the drinking to stop the voices drunk’s kinda popular too, with a certain discerning clientele. But in the world above the gutter, there’s thousands of ways to get acquainted with the bottom of the bottle. There’s the fun drunk, where the gang’s altogether and the food’s just grand, and everybody’s so fuckin’ witty you can’t even believe it. There’s the summer-afternoon drunk – ah, that was one a my favourites, back in the day. Sitting in the shade with a couple a six-packs, watching the sky and the grass and the water, waking up just as the sun slips behind the hill. There’s the meaningful drunk, when halfway down the bottle, damn if that ain’t the secret of the universe, who fuckin’ knew that was it all this time? Only you can’t quite get the cap off the pen, so you have to let it go, and when you wake up the next morning all you can remember is how righteously good it felt to know how the world fits together. The sloppy drunk – sprawled all over your girl, begging her to marry you, so god-damn horny you want to do it right there on the bar-stool; only the booze takes all the starch out of you, and she has to carry you up the stairs and put you to bed in the spare room. The mean drunk, where you catch a glimpse of your reflection and try starting a fight with yourself. Right now, you and me are having an educational drunk – that’s where one of you sits in respectful swinish silence and gobbles up the pearls of wisdom cast before you. So many kinds, so many kinds... I gotta take a leak. That’s better. Where were we? Oh, yeah, kinds a drunk. Well, Jackie boy, he went on an epic drunk, genuinely Homeric in scale. He drank and he drank, and he ranted and raved, and waved his arms around, and stumbled around the room. He was a cabaret, a floorshow, an entertainment all in himself, better’n anything you’d see this year in Stratford, little old England. People actually stayed there to watch him. He did this whole speech on the inequities in the modern capital marketplace that meant that just when you most needed help with your cash-flow, all the checks and balances the money-men had in place would automatically kick in and prevent you from getting it, and how the perverse incentives of Wall Street would bring the whole system crashing down around our ears one day… Kinda prophetic, huh? Well, when you’re looking in the rear-view mirror, everyone’s a friggin’ genius.

  Then he got started on the cows. Took out his wallet, started showing everyone a picture of this one damn cow he’d hung onto. “This is Genevieve.” Slurring his words, barely able to stand up. Everyone nodding respectfully. “All I got left... that and an acre of land to graze her on... ”

  Other end of the bar, there’s a guy on a different kinda drunk. The steady, mean-eyed, drinking-just-to-get-drunk kind. He’s working his way down a bottle of vodka, shot after shot after shot, not speaking. Jack catches sight of him. Their eyes meet in the mirror.

  “Wh’r you?” slurs Jack, sliding onto the barstool. The man shrugged.

  “I,” he said carefully, “am a financial wizard. I’m a giant of Wall Street. I have made and lost more money for myself and my employers than you could dream of… And I would trade the whole damned lot for a life I could be proud of.”

  “I’m drinking,” said the man, every word enunciated with the care of the truly shit-faced, “because I have just been to the memorial service of a man who used to work for me. He wasn’t a friend, mind you. He was a salesman; they never have any friends. Just golf buddies and drinking partners. He was killed by the system.”

  “Whatcha talkin’ ’bout?” mumbled Jack.

  “The system,” repeated the man calmly. “The system you were railing against just now. It chewed him up and spat him out.

  “Y’re all a shower of bastards,” said Jack indistinctly. “You and y’r damned rules and y’r freakin’ cash flow projections.”

  “Indeed we are. A shower of heartless bastards, all of us dressed in expensive suits and red suspenders and Rolex watches, and not one god-damned soul between the lot of us. I’ll trade you.” Jack looked blank. “I’ll trade you,” said the man, looking straight at Jack. “I’ll trade you that house, and that acre of land, and that pretty-eyed cow of yours.”

  “What do I get in return?”

  “I will give you a reco... a recomm... ” the man sighed. “I will give you a recommendation to my manager, who’ll be frantic since receiving notice of my resignation and desperate for a replacement. I will call in the morning and give my personal assurance that you are a fine young man, deserving of a chance to prove yourself. Oh, and the keys to my apartment.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t wanna be like you,” growled Jack. “Money men took my farm, the farm my Daddy spent his life building up, won’t do that to anyone else, there should be a better way.”

  “Perhaps. But, as you so correctly observe, we are all a bunch of robbers. Who’s going to change the world if the good guys won’t come and work for us?”

  “What makes you think I’ll even be any good?” Jack asked, baffled.

  “I have no fucking idea,” said the man calmly. “And I couldn’t care less. But I want out, and you want in. The rent’s paid for a month. After that, you’re on your own. Do we have a deal?”

  Jack squinted across the top of his glass. “Why’re you d
oing this?”

  The man looked into his vodka for a minute, and shuddered. “Because,” he said, “the system eats people. It eats us from the head down, chews us up and discards the empty husks. It is a carnivore, with a predator’s instincts, and I do not intend to be its next victim. And since you’re so angry and determined to get us all, let’s see what the system makes of you.”

  “I’ll show ’em all, you know,” said Jack, swaying. “I’ll be decent. Ethical. Not like the bastards who took me down. And if they won’t let me... I’ll fight the system from the inside. I’ll take ’em down. I won’t be a corporate whore.”

  “Yes you will,” smiled the man. “Yes, you will. Here.” He put a bunch of keys on the bar, then a business card. On it was a name, and a corporate logo. Red Giant Investments Ltd. Jack’s ticket to board the Money Train.

  “’Kay,” mumbled Jack, and shook the outstretched hand. Then he slid off his stool and passed out.

  Was I the Red Giant financial wizard? Ah, just give over, wouldja? Ain’t no point trying to work out where I come in this story, cos I ain’t in it anywhere. The men in this story, they’re all dead now. Chewed up by the system.

  Jack’s mother, ah, she was mad. Selling off your birthright, completely insane, chasing dreams, not the man your father was, you know how it goes. And how do I figure that one out? On account of your wastin’ those hard-earned college dollars, trailing up and down the country collecting stories off people like me, that’s how. Don’t try and tell me your folks are thrilled by the path you’ve taken. Anyway, Jackie boy, he shouted her down for once in his life. He was like a man possessed; he’d been given a strange, singular chance, and damn, he was going to take it. He packed up his car, his mother and his underwear, and set off to take a bite outta the Big Apple.

  New York crashed into Jack like a series of divine revelations. It shook the heart outta him, left him gasping and lost. First revelation was the architecture; ornate fingers of glass and concrete that pierced the clouds. Visited St Patrick’s to ask for God’s blessing on his new life, felt uneasy, couldn’t work out what was wrong. Finally figured out it was the scale. God’s house is supposed to be the biggest place in town, but Wall Street residents bow their heads down at somebody else’s altar. When he realised that, he had a moment of panic. He actually went back over to Grand Central and looked at the departures board. Looked again at that bit of card in his hand, that ticket for the Money Train. No contest. The Money Train won. Always does. Jack turned right around and headed back into town.