Category: Fiction

The rural hospital where her father languished was brand new, a sparkling edifice improbably situated like some medical temple in a cow pasture. It was such a young building to house the old. Dr. Christine Hartford hurried to locate her dad’s room. She’d been given directions in the social worker’s melodious Outer Banks drawl. Finding Joe would be easier for Christine than accepting his condition. read more

In undergraduate school Carly spent the night before the first day of classes going through textbooks, reading the introductions. She told herself that in order to succeed in business, she needed to experiment. They had been told, hadn’t they, that social relationships would be the most important thing to their success in business school. She would be someone else now.

I knew my whole life I was meant to be alone though I never had been, not ever, with him fifty three years, imagine. I was the oldest of six brothers and sisters. As each one came along, I shrank more and more into the background of the family but where somebody else might have felt bad about it, being left out of things, being last, being an afterthought, I was actually glad of it. We grew up and all lived near each other except the one brother who joined the Navy and stayed out west.

My sisters and I saw each other at least once every week and were in telephone contact daily.

This went on for years and years and years knowing the details of each others lives, what we put on the table, how the children gave us pleasure or worried us, our husbands’ quirky ways.

Then they both died, one demented, out of her mind and puffed up with anger and she had been the smart one, the one who married a little money, who saw the world and let me know it oh did she ever. Wait till you see Canada, she’d say, wait till you’ve seen France. Yet she died first after carrying on one Christmas Eve to my face oh why oh why did her husband die and mine, mean and unloved, live on and on. Who would have dreamed she’d be so cruel to ever say such a thing but I didn’t really mind, had even wondered it myself the unfairness of it but just was surprised she actually came out with it after all this time. My younger sister, the youngest of all of us, the prettiest, the one who kept the peace and funny too, went next, bone cancer, the only cancer in all of our family including in-laws and cousins. That was a surprise and a sad one. Two of my brothers went next, one after the other, from heart disease, both overweight and heavy smokers but with good dispositions, though one had a conceited wife who never stopped bragging about this surgery and that surgery and lives on to this day.

I trusted my sisters. I never had a friend I trusted that way without even thinking about it. I could say anything to them. I didn’t but I could have. And when they went, one right after the other like that, well, I knew I wouldn’t ever be able to, not to them or anyone, and something dropped out of my life. How often do you come across people you feel that way about? It’s inborn. My sons are something else. They’re always going to be my boys but if I were ever to really rely on them I don’t think I’d be in a very good position. I’m not even sure I would know how. One is young and very selfish, he can’t help it and you can’t help noticing it. The other one lives far away. I don’t ask for what I’m not going to get. I’ve got myself. I’ve got my cleaning lady. I’ve got the superintendent of the building. They know my name in the deli downstairs and that I go for the Post and the 2% skim. My doctor is nearly as old as I am, a brilliant man formerly a chiropractor. You’re fine he tells me every time. I am. Oh my hands hurt but I can still make dinner for myself and wear a pair of high heels when there’s a gathering.

My brother moved into an apartment down the hall with his wife. I introduced them originally. I first knew her years ago when we worked in the shipping department of Mallory’s. We’re like sisters, she says and it’s true that she’s my closest friend in the world now that I have no one but it’s not the same. I have always had my suspicions about her. She loves costume jewelry and can’t buy enough, wears pearls big as marshmallows, rubies the size of cherry tomatoes and a face to match, two big circles of rouge on her cheeks and blue eye shadow at her age.

We talk about everything. She insists on being right. My brother never intercedes because he’s a good husband who loves his wife and better be on her side if he knows what’s good for him.

He’s afraid of her I can tell. Our father was afraid of our mother, so. I never argue with anything she says. It’s not me. I have no one else but her and my brother and I’m lucky they live right down the hall. We meet in front every morning then get in their car and shop. On Friday he takes us to have our hair done. I would never go without that and Rick really knows how to give it body. I come out of that chair and feel like a million. She still colors her hair. Red. Isn’t that the limit? It’s not my business to say anything but how lovely how smart how young. I don’t like to make a fuss or stir things up because what for?

Then of all things the wind knocks me down. Go figure. One minute I’m standing in front of the building waiting for my son, I mean Mickey, Joe, I mean Joe, my brother! to bring the car around. I’m wearing my wool coat with the fur collar because they said it was going to snow and thinking about getting a nice lamb chop for dinner that I could make in the toaster oven and I hear a snap and the trees are swimming and I’m upside down. Hip. Hospital. Rehabit… rehabitate… that’s where the animals are! My sons are very nice about it. One of them is here every day all day the other ones lives somewhere else the south but he comes when he can I think yesterday he was here or, no he called. My sisters also come and….no no that’s a dream, that’s right I know that. They’re both gone, that’s very sad. The nurses are adorable. No fat ones except that Wanda one at night who is and then she’s gone.

In my apartment the girl comes and wakes me up but first there’s no milk or but no, sometimes it’s sour. OK I don’t mind that much but my son gets red in the face and then there’s another girl she kisses me when he’s here but I don’t think he knows. I don’t ask her to do anything. She’s a nice girl but oh the stories about her family. The one child has a mental problem and the daughter dropped out she’s pregnant. Her husband beats her…the one in jail, no not now not in jail now, the one who comes over who I met. He picks her up after work. He has a key. My brother’s wife pays me a visit in the afternoon to check on me. She always has something to say. No apples? No pears? No fruit at all! What does she have to check on me for? We’re strangers. What is it her business?

He can’t talk my brother any more. He can’t make any sense. Oh it’s very sad. He looks at you he listens but he’s shaking his head you can see in his eyes he doesn’t know what you’re talking about, so no more driving, no more shopping. She puts him on a leash so he can’t wander away, then she’s ashamed. And now all of a sudden he’s in a wheelchair. He can’t walk! The man can’t walk! She wheels him around talking as if he can understand. Then she puts him away. My own brother! I go to see him in the home. It’s nice. They’ve redone it, it looks like in Miami. And then the next thing is, what happened is, I’m staying there myself in a room with another girl. My one son insists I would burn down my house. When he comes to see me I put on some lipstick and a string of pearls. I tell him I’m ready to die.

I call out from my room to my brother. I tell him to get out of that wheelchair he’s embarrassing us. He sits at the end of the corridor staring out the glass door. He’s all slumped over. On my way to my room I pass his room I look in then I look away. I can’t stand it he’s all slumped over staring at his shoes. One of these days he’s going to fall over on his face! Who ever thought we would live together like this?

I’m watching TV where you have to know the word and what’s her name…the one with the baseball cap…she has the nerve to tell them I stole her roasted nuts! Can you imagine? They’re on the table in a little jar right between my bed and hers so why is she leaving them out like that? I don’t even like nuts! I like Chiclets. Then she passes me in the hall and under her breath curses me. The nerve of her! Bitch. You heard me. I don’t care.

The peas taste like paste. Oh they’re awful. The peas aren’t even green. They’re like mush. They taste like paste. The chicken has white paste on. Everything needs salt. Why can’t I have 7up? The red haired one sits with me sometimes with some special spoon oh it’s so special to her all right throwing paste wiping my face she never wanted me to do better than her and now she’s glad I can see that.

And all of a sudden it’s warm! How do they do that? He wheels me out into the…plant thing, the…green… What is that….it’s a…it’s a… Don’t tell me it’s…a red… Oh… a breeze. Oh that’s nice. I feel good. My hands don’t hurt. So what do you think? Should we go in?

They say me stop screaming.
… my sisters…
I want 7Up!
…my baby the old man.

Gbye. Done forget me.

Barry Jay Kaplan’s stories have been published in Descant, Kerouac’s Dog, Bryant Literary Review, Upstreet, Talking River, Storyglossia, Apple Valley Review and others. read more

Down in the hollow – sensing that he had reached the point where the space widened out into a concavity like the bottom of a kettle, the master bedroom of their little hiding place – he lurched his legs around in front of him and sat upright, whispering; “Leo, Leo.”

“I don’t know why you’re whispering,” the strong voice came back from somewhere nearby. “There’s no one here. There’s never anyone here.”

Kurt thought about that for a moment. He listened for the low rustle from deeper in the forest, and for the breath of the breeze skirting the frozen crust of the snow beyond its perimeter, but soon he found even that had gone. He strained his ears into the silence, feeling suddenly panicked, as if the whole thing were a sleight of hand trick pulled by some conjurer, and that when the shroud was removed they would be robbed and naked, stripped of everything that had carried them this far from where they should be, and of the forlorn hope that it could carry them on to safety.

Leo heard the fidgeting as Kurt moved across the cracked, waterless surface beneath the briars. He called out “what the fuck are you doing now?” and Kurt was suitably shamed. He arrested his panic, came to terms in that moment with the perfect blackness that had been pulled across their vision and with the night that seemed somehow more soundless, more bereft of life and mercy, than any that had preceded it.

“Nothing,” Kurt whispered, “just thinking, that’s all.”

Leo sighed.

“You might as well share it.”

“How long have we known Gabriel? Four months or so?”

“It’s not so much how long, it’s what has happened. That’s what makes up the time.”

If what Leo said was true, than all of time could be compressed into those four months since Gabriel had appeared in the regiment, transferred in as part of a raft of reinforcements ready for another push eastwards. He’d stood silently in line on the parade ground, looking as benign and placid as the angel that bore his name, but from deep beneath all that, from some piece of ephemera swaddled in the hastily-stitched brown uniform and buckled tight in leather, was something that told the others he had seen action.

What action he had seen, he never spoke about. In those early weeks, he barely spoke at all, responding to orders handed to him down the chain of command in a voice a little softer than those that barked complicitly back at the drill sergeants from his left and right. It was a rare voice, quiet and fragile but still retaining some hidden depth in its timbre that neither Kurt nor Leo could fathom. At first Kurt thought that only he had been unsettled, had had emotions shaken within him that he long presumed deadened by the monotonous terror that reigned all around them, and so he kept his thoughts to himself until, reclining at ease on the firing step of the main trench one evening, Leo made his feelings known.

“Something not right about Gabriel, something I don’t like.”

Kurt acted as if he thought nothing of it, nonchalantly drawing information from his comrade, refusing to let anything slip until he knew more about what his friend was thinking.

“Just a feeling, puts me on edge.”

From then on it was as if Gabriel knew. He opened up after that, as if moving into the next phase of some mystical game, the rules of which only he was privy to, moving chess pieces into advance positions and releasing only the information he knew to be necessary. Leo and Kurt learned about Gabriel’s life before the war, his work as a farmhand on a patch of land near Ingolstadt, in a place so obscure and inconsequential that it bore no name on any map, and was referred to locally only by its position behind the village of Kaifeck.

“Imagine living in a nowhere place, just the backend of some other place,” he told them one night, gazing into the fire which licked over the last shards of dry wood salvaged from the back of the storage bunker, “what’s a place without a name?”

They learned too about the family that occupied the land; the old woman and her son, her son’s wife and her granddaughters, his long and painful courtship of one such granddaughter – she the latest in a long line of Bavarian land owners, disgraced and ejected from the feudal chain some four generations before her own birth, but still possessed of the pretensions of grandeur and aristocracy; he the son of no-one, a vagrant, heir only to the stack of cowshit he was granted for fuel each winter and the pittance he drew for each month of labour – and their eventual marriage in the old Lutheran chapel at Kaifeck. In between these tales, Gabriel spoke of the way the sun shone low between two ancient oaks on April mornings, the way the crisp light shattered infinitely in the meadow, each drop of dew on each blade of glass its own jewel in the crown of the dawn, and of the way the mare lay sleepily in the hay after she’d foaled, and the way the newborn had taken its first ginger steps into the world.

These were idyllic words, words full of the colour and vigour of life in the countryside, but they were delivered in such a way that they were stained. They became heavy and sombre, drifting out of Gabriel and settling somewhere in the dark beneath the three as sparks from the fire rose above and disappeared in the black. The unsettling nature of this delivery, the icy shiver with which each word was imbued, disturbed Kurt and Leo, but it also compelled them, and both men found themselves drawn closer and closer to the strange fellow with the shock of blonde hair and with the eyes that spoke more than could ever be said.

Like glowing metal in a foundry, like the residues of dead wood petrified deep in the heat and pressure of the ground, the connections they formed were subjected to such unnatural conditions as to galvanise them, reinforcing and strengthening them in the midst of unmitigated destruction. Patrol after patrol chipped away at the men in the platoon, the body of which was whittled sharp and keen by sniper bullets, ambushes and friendly fire which picked off the unwary and the foolhardy and the tired, until what remained was bonded stronger than ever, shining hot and bright and compacted by forces stronger than love and brotherhood, forces which were unspeakably primal.

And so during the fall back from that patrol, the patrol which exacted such a heavy cost that each had subsequently sought to erase it from the narratives of their existences, the remnants of the platoon – four, five, six of them, it didn’t seem to matter – breathed and moved as one as they fell pell-mell across the Ukrainian soil. Leo was just ahead, the grey fabric of his great coat becoming one with the vertebrae beneath his starved flesh, one with the clods of dirt that clung to his boots as they pounded the earth, one with Kurt himself, and one with the heavy breathing of Gabriel just behind; a whistling, seething train of any number of men, all still – seemingly – residing on the correct side of the black curtain that had been drawn across the platoon, trapping so many of their comrades irrevocably beyond it.

Kurt had never thought it would be like this. The chaos he’d expected – hoped for, even – never came. The abandonment of everything in favour of a frantic lurch in the direction of survival; that would have been easier to deal with. Then he would have been free and unencumbered, having transcended all bounds of responsibility or concern. Instead, as the platoon collapsed even further in upon itself and the rattle of gunfire and the hot teeth of shellburst laid itself upon the nucleus of men that remained, everything had suddenly drawn much closer, not falling away at all but binding itself inextricably to them, closer than the fibres of the clothes that clung to their limbs. And this was why such things as numbers didn’t matter now. There were no names in that fall back – no division where one human ended and another began – just the mad scramble of a unified body of men, each now carrying the entirety of their history – all they had ever owned, felt, or experienced – in a neat, communal bundle. And it was then that they become truly aware of one another, each sharing an equal portion of the load, each borne by the same frenzy of panic, each blessed with clarity and level-headedness in this community of escape, each component of the train sensing that they were henceforth bonded until the end, however soon or late that end might come.

Finally, appearing from out of the darkness, the rotted planks of the gangway that led down into the maw of the bunker, and the two banks of earth that rose on both side to provide cover to those entering and exiting. Between these two banks of earth that reached up to embrace the returning soldiers Kurt had felt the breathing behind him recede and disappear into the blackness. Or perhaps the breathing that receded was his own? Perhaps the curtain had been drawn around him, right there in the mouth of the bunker, and he had never even noticed?

Kurt had turned then and seen Gabriel, alone now, caught and momentarily blackened in the yellow of the shellburst, appearing nailed fast like Christ to the bedlam of colour that lay beyond his shoulders, then cut loose once again like a spent marionette, bones strewn loosely across the rotted wood of the gangplanks. Then arms clasped around Kurt’s shoulders and he became a part of that community once more, assimilating into the organism as he travelled backward through the aperture and the steel shutters swung closed with a yawning, aching sound. Breathing in the darkness, listening to the bolts screaming in their rivet-holes as the shutters absorbed the worst of the worst of what the Tsar’s guns could throw at them – blasts that would have ended each and every one of them, broken up that little parliament of souls for once and for all – Kurt had suddenly thought of Gabriel, thought of that silhouette tacked up to a wall of horror, arms spread wide ready to embrace whatever it was coming his way, and he spoke his name in a whisper.

“Gabriel, he got it.”

Then, between the breathing, a low voice;
“Got what? I’m here.”

Gabriel.

And so the six or seven or eight men stood in silent contemplation as shells reached down to shake the artificial hill of steel and concrete they had wrapped themselves beneath. Trickles of dust fell onto helmets after every roar from beyond the shutters, and each man worked noiselessly backwards through the recording of what they had just witnessed, like marauders occupying a trench, stalking resistance and quickly, brutally, nullifying it, erasing it from the tablet of existence like they had trained themselves to do.

But not everything can be erased. Putrid memories leave their residue, residue that has the habit of bleeding back through the walls of our consciousness from time to time. And so, slowly, it bled into the thoughts of each of the men, colouring each utterance until every word spoken became as dark and heavy as the words which had emanated from Gabriel on those nights around the campfire.

Except, it seemed, for Gabriel himself.

While the remnants of the platoon sank into the new life that the fallback from the patrol had prepared for them, Gabriel seemed suddenly unfettered by whatever it had been that had dogged him before. He was untroubled; fresh and clean and new. He never spoke about the patrol – just as none of them did – but it was evident that those moments that stretched out like hours and that frantic singular movement back to the bunker in which each man had seen more than could possibly be processed in a lifetime, did not weigh upon him as it did the others. They would see him crouched by a frozen boot print, admiring the fractals that spread across the virgin ice in the dawn, or simply smiling despite himself at his sentry post, watching the crows arc among the handful of shattered, leafless trees in no-man’s land or wheel above the Russian line. But it was the levity in his voice which disgusted the others the most, and quickly Gabriel became ostracised from the platoon as the men exercised the only power that remained. They couldn’t hurt him physically, they couldn’t rob him, or chisel away at the kernel of hope each had long since dispensed with, so they took away the only thing that kept them all alive; human contact.

All turned their backs apart from Kurt and Leo. To them, the lightness with which Gabriel spoke was a relief rather than an affront, a respite from the unremitting darkness that lay around them. His words were messianic, leading them onwards towards a shared destiny, and they craved his company, listening to him talk about nothing as they watched the embers of a fire burn away and savouring every morsel from his angel’s lips.

It was out of these meetings – in which Gabriel would hold court, his face losing all trace of humanity as the light and shadow of the fire played across it – that the plan was born. From then on, the die was cast, the wheels set in motion for the beginnings of an existence beyond this one, at some indeterminate point in the future that neither Kurt nor Leo had even dared to imagine for many years now. When the Russians came – and all agreed it was a ‘when’ rather than an ‘if’ – and when this fire-forged composite of men was scattered across the hills to the west, they would move from the midst of chaos and begin their long trek back to Bavaria, to Ingolstadt, and then to Kaifeck, and, finally, to the no-name place that lay beyond it.

It was here, in the place without a name of its own, that the plan would be enacted. Now the magic of Gabriel’s words wove itself profoundly around the two listeners, as the strange blue eyes flickered and the tongue spoke of wealth, of robbery, of making a clean break. “They may have been spat from the feudal chain, but they’re not hard up,” he said as Kurt and Leo watched, rapt by Gabriel’s oration. “They don’t want for anything. Why should we?”

Then there was revision, a dark undercurrent snaking its way into the idyllic narrative they’d both heard over and over again, a river of darkness and deceit that stretched all the way from the bloody soil of Eastern Ukraine and plunged deep into the heart of their bucolic Fatherland.

The stories they’d consumed seemed to play out in reverse, no longer cleansed and pure but now putrefied like the residual memories of the fallback from ambush and of the brutality of that shroud that snatched so many of their brothers away. It will come, he told them, riches, comfort and a new life, all they need do was wait. And so they did.

Down there in the pitch dark of the hollow kettle-bottom, Kurt couldn’t help but think about the momentary disconnect that occurred between the two banks of earth that rose up like arms in the darkness, as what felt like all the guns in Russia spat their fire on top of them. He’d seen it, clear as day; Gabriel, nailed to his invisible cross like a martyr, arms splayed, rifle loosed from open hands and tumbling away from a body torn from behind by shrapnel and fire and death.

He’d seen it, there was no question; the shroud pulled quickly and tightly around Gabriel, drawing its fabric over him and spiriting the breath from his frame. And he’d heard the voice and he’d recognised it, they all had, just as they’d all seen Gabriel in the hours that followed, each man wrapped in his own cocoon of forgetting apart from the strange figure with the shock of blonde hair who nonchalantly smoked a cigarette and then slept like a baby. But what had happened between those moments? What had happened to facilitate such a profound change? What Gabriel had lost, the others had gained.

How could he articulate this to Leo? Leo, who lay on his back beneath the briars and looked up into nothing with open eyes.

“We’ve come this far, Kurt,” Leo said, “it’s a funny time to lose faith now. What do you suggest…”

But Leo’s voice fell silent as both men heard it: the whip crack of footfalls puncturing the snow that covered the meadow, each louder than the one preceding it as the figure moved towards them across the space.

John Burns is a writer and teacher originally from Nottingham in the UK. As a child, he fostered a love of reading, writing and language, something which led him to a career in journalism and subsequently teaching English literature. He is the author of Homesong, a self-published novel, and has had short fiction published by Ink, Sweat & Tears and Jungleland amongst others. read more

But he had taken a chance that his boss would not miss him and had walked back from Prinsep Street to his office. He needed to work off the dull feeling lunch had left in him. The path led through the Bas Brasah Complex, a place he hadn’t been since hunting for used books in his student years. He wandered into one of those crammed bookstores.

The owner of Second Round Bookstore was devoutly Buddhist, to the extent of defying city ordinances and keeping an altar to Guan Yin, with burning incense, behind his cashier’s desk. It was in that row–the row with the desk and the altar–that Malcolm came across Vistas of Upper Sekiei with its beautiful frontispiece of the Indigo Glacier. Enchanted by the picture, and wondering why he found the name familiar, Malcolm thumbed through the book, only to discover, wedged between pages 348 and 349, the gleaming edge of a Pokémon card.

Not just any Pokémon card–a Pokémon Plus card.

Manufacturers are constantly claiming to have invented the ultimate playing/collecting card. But every boy knows the truth: only the cards of his childhood are the real ones. For Malcolm the cards were Pokémon Plus. The sight of the card: the distinct curve at the corner; the silver laminate that was rumored to be the real thing; the heft of it; even the smell of new packaging that clung to it like fairy dust–together opened a gate of sinsemilla in Malcolm’s brain.

The sense of joy and deep, soul-vibrating anticipation only increased as he began to collate the perceptions of his senses with the memories of his brain. The card was in perfect shape, lacking even a single crease mark in the laminate. And it was, wasn’t it–yes, it was! that elusive Articuno Lampansé, the legendary icy blue bird, the holy grail of his childhood, the card that was discussed in hushed whispers on the schoolyard. No one had ever seen it in any 7-11 in Singapore, although a classmate of Malcolm’s had claimed his cousin had seen it once in the mama shop on Tampines Avenue 3. But the cousin’s story went no further than that: his mother had refused to allow him to buy the card even though he had thrown a tantrum to end all tantrums.

And now, many years after he stopped realizing how much he longed for it, Malcolm had, purely by chance, found the card, perfectly preserved in a hardcover travel book. Chance had dealt it to him, and chance was something with which Malcolm had had little experience. Until now.

“Can’t play today, Arif. My mom’s waiting. I’ll play you for those cards tomorrow.” Malcolm’s voice, as loud as his ten-year-old frame was small, rang across the schoolyard. He dashed out of the school gates to where his mom was waiting, stony and silent.

“What are you wasting your time and money at now?” Although Malcolm’s mother had a petit frame like her son, her voice was quiet and fierce, hardened by years of adversity.

“Just a game, Ma,” Malcolm replied in Chinese. “Arif and I play it. It’s with cards–see?”

“I didn’t leave my country to bring you to Singapore and give you a nice English name and work all day and night so you could play games of chance and waste your money on silly cards. You do your schoolwork first. When you’re grown up and have a good job and your children all have good education and I’m dead in the grave, then you can play these silly games.”

“Yes, mother,” Malcolm replied, in English.

“You know I do all these things because I love you, so don’t you be ungrateful for it.”

“No, Mother. I’ll study very hard and get good grades for you.”

Malcolm kept his promise. He packed his Pokémon cards away into a small box and, to prove his worthiness of his mother’s love, he crammed every answer he could into his young brain, practiced every old exam paper he get his hands on, and accepted every tongue lashing she gave him. He presented her with a distinguished Public School Leaving Exam score of 271 (along with a Distinction for Higher Chinese) and a scholarship to the prestigious Hwa Chong Institute. He never looked back.

He had no chance to do so. Until now.

“Pei Ling, dear, where did we keep that box of my… stuff?” Malcolm called from the civil defense shelter they had converted into a storage closet.

“What box?” his wife answered distractedly. She was in the middle of updating her Facebook page with pictures of their Pekinese’s latest salon treatment.

Malcolm took a chance. “You know the little box you wanted to throw out but we made an agreement we could keep if you could keep your Girl Singapore back issues?”

“Don’t know. I haven’t seen those issues since we renovated. Look! Su Yi just posted a video of a cat meowing ‘I love you!’–so cute! You have to come see.”

“In a sec, dear.” Malcolm had just caught a glimpse of small, slightly deformed cardboard box. He shifted the old computer packaging, shoeboxes, and unused gifts that were crushing it. Each time another portion of the box–a former Follow Me shampoo box he had taken from his mother’s cupboard–appeared, Malcolm was flooded with musty but still fresh memories.

“Michael Jackson!” Arif exclaimed when Malcolm opened the Follow Me box with a shyness boys exhibit when sharing their prized possessions. The two of them crouched in a corner of the schoolyard. Arif let out a slow whistle that was mostly breath. “That’s the best Pikachu. Play you for it!”

“No.” Malcolm grinned. Actually, he didn’t realize until many years later–when he was in the storage closet, in fact–that he had never taken chances with his cards. Pokémon Plus had not been envisioned by its inventors as a game of skill. There were only three ways to stay ahead: by chance; by spending your money carefully; or (in the card manufacturers’ wildest dreams) by spending with abandon. As a child, Malcolm had always veered between the later two.

He had only been friendly with Arif a short time when they started sharing cards. Arif was the “with abandon” type–he bounced between playing with abandon and buying with abandon. He was shorter than Malcolm, but not slightly built, which came in handy when Malcolm needed defense from schoolyard bullies. He still bullied Malcolm, but he didn’t do it unkindly, except when he was about to lose.

They were boys, not girls, so they never professed undying friendship. Arif wasn’t a good enough student to go anywhere like Hwa Chong, and Malcolm, sitting in his civil defense shelter, could not remember where he might have ended up.

“I’ll take a chance on this,” Malcolm announced to his colleagues. It had become his mantra in the few months since he had found the card and his original box.

“You sure, now?” Malcolm’s co-workers were proud–in an apologetic way–of their cautious nature, and his growing thirst for uncertainty terrified them. “This company so small one. How they supply us like Mitsubishi?”

“They grow. Especially when we give them orders. With this M.O.U. we lock them in now, while their product is still cheap. All play safe, nobody win.”

His colleagues sighed but didn’t sabotage him. Yes, Malcolm took chances, but he wasn’t yet drunk on them. A surprisingly large number of his chances paid off.

Malcolm kept the Pokémon card in his desk drawer, as a kind of talisman. In truth, he longed to play Pokémon Plus one more time, with the abandon he had never used as a child. There just didn’t seem to be a way to do so. For adults his age, it was a child’s game, and for children these days it wasn’t a game at all.

But everyone’s best friend is on Facebook, and, after some exploration of dark and strange alleyways, Malcolm was able to find a Facebook page for Pokémon card collectors. That lead him into the seedier districts of blogs, forums and even that most ancient of communication paths, the bulletin board system.

The internet forums also led Malcolm on an increasingly esoteric route, as he separated himself from those who thought Pokémon Plus were a manufacturing ploy to corrupt the true orthodoxy of Pokémon (Original), from those who ranted that Pokémon Gold were the age in which the true quality (i.e. the double-layer lithography) of the card was first manifest, and finally from those who thought Articuno a closet homosexual who would never have been included in the parthenon if he hadn’t allowed the main characters to “f***k him in the ass”, about which there was a surprising amount of fan fiction.

He fended off collectors who tried to downplay the value of his card, or who tried to persuade him to trade it for the equivalent of magic beans. He argued–until he realized arguing was useless–with the purists. But he never found anyone that actually wanted to play Pokémon with the cards.

In his daily life, meanwhile, Malcolm was descending from test-tasting chance through tipsiness and outright drunkenness to binge-drinking, where in one day, he closed three thirty-million-dollar procurement orders with three competing companies, negotiations which would have failed the moment any knew what he was saying to the others.

It was in the late afternoon of that day, in fact, that Malcolm came across the Playright Social Club. He found it on Page 34 of his Google search for Pokémon+Card+Players, at the point just before which Google descends irretrievably into pornographic and virus-infected links. He took a chance on the link, even though it showed no mention of “Pokémon” or “Players” or “Card” and gave no indication the social club was even on the same continent. But the moment the screen came up, with its Web 0.5 style of plain blue background and big yellow text, he knew he had crossed the lost horizon.

Playright Social Club was actually located in Singapore, somewhere in the northwest, which Malcolm didn’t know any better than he knew the Hangzhou of his infancy. But a phone call to the listed number yielded a working answering machine.

“I- I’m Malcolm and I’d like to know if someone there might be interested in playing Pokémon cards with me,” Malcolm said, the nervousness making his voice sound like that of a little boy. He left his handphone number and terminated the call.

About two days later he received an SMS: will play pk plus w u anykime malcom call me–and a number. Malcolm couldn’t remember if he had said Pokémon Plus or had used his real name. Even at that point he had a suspicion who Playright Social Club really was. He took a chance.

“Alamak! Mister Malcolm Chen! It’s been a long long long long time.” Arif’s gleeful voice floated over the line. “You still playing Pokémon Gold, jialat!” He sounded the same, just a little more gravel in his voice. “Hey, you still owe three cards I won over you.”

“I’ll play you for them.” Malcolm said. He felt the thrill of a gamble rising up his spine. “Just tell me when and where.”

“You still have the cards?”

“Not only them–I… I picked up some special one.”

So it happened that, on a Tuesday night, Malcolm SMS’d Pei Ling to tell her he had a late meeting at work. It bothered him to lie to her like that. Not only had he been taking chances with work, he had been taking chances in his romantic life. As a result, Pei Ling was five months’ pregnant.

From his office, Malcolm took the train line west by northwest, something he hadn’t done since his student days. After each station, the reflection of his face in the train window appeared to be growing younger, and the glimpses of Singapore behind it–for the train had emerged from the earth and was riding a viaduct–appeared more foreboding. Even the golden statue of Guan Yin at Clementi Station looked vaguely malevolent.

Malcolm alighted the train in the midst of a derelict field with abandoned construction on one side and ongoing destruction on the other. He threaded his way cross a muddy field to catch the bus Arif had set out for him. He carried his box of cards in his backpack, tucked safely under his arm, and wondered if he should send an apologetic message to Pei Ling.

Before finding the card, Malcolm would have said his meeting Pei Ling was “by chance”; now he realized that was not what chance was all about. His mother had chosen the tuition center near Coronation Road, and it was not by chance Pei Ling needed as much help in Chinese as Malcolm needed in Science.

Tan Pei Ling was from a more established Singaporean family whose family dialect was Oxford English, so she naturally found her scholastic requirements for Mandarin onerous. Unlike Malcolm’s mother, who believed in the triumph of hard work over chance, she had abiding faith in Destiny’s ability to keep her safe. She knew when her parents signed her up for tuition that she would destined to receive the smartest, cutest boy as her tutor.

Thus it was not chance that Malcolm, who had no natural learning skills, would be assigned to teach her Chinese. In return, Pei Ling, who had no natural teaching skills, took over the task of getting Malcolm his needed distinctions in Math and Science. Through their early battles, they came to understand they each needed the other, and, like many young people, confused mutual dependence with love.

They dated each other through to the end of university, if you consider “dating” to include common study sessions. After graduation, they felt secure enough in their beliefs not to be adventurous, and pledged their troth to each other.

Comfortability is only one kind of love, and it was not until Malcolm had started taking chances that either of them knew there were other kinds. Just as they had at the beginning of their relationship, they fought regularly, until the passion took hold. And now Pei Ling was pregnant.

Malcolm gripped his backpack with the cards more tightly as the bus wended its way into the night. Each turn awakened new memories in him, vague childhood memories as the blocks around him were still the old style he remembered from his childhood, and yet different in an intangible way.

Those vague memories seemed to draw him back into the fears of his childhood. Malcolm started to feel his heart beating faster, the rapid heartbeat of a small child. But, just as a sip of the bottle gives a drunkard courage to take a chance, Malcolm’s taking a chance gave him courage to uncover his fears.

Once, when Malcolm had been in Singapore only a few months, he had boarded the wrong bus and had promptly fallen asleep. The driver hadn’t noticed the small boy curled up in the back, and, when Malcolm awoke, the bus was already parked in a remote depot.

The bus drivers had probably thought themselves kind as they hung on to the boy and teased him until his mother could be contacted and someone could ferry him to a connecting point. However it was for Malcolm a searing moment of trauma, which left him evermore reluctant to take strange bus routes or to breathe the odor of kretek cigarettes.

Yet here he was, on a strange bus, heading into the night, with only a vague idea where he was going, and no one who knew he was going there. But he didn’t worry. He tapped his ragged box of cards once, for luck.

All the streetlights seemed to be out at the bus stop where Malcolm alighted. The entire area was under construction. Both the bus stop and the lighting were temporary and provided only the minimum effectiveness.

Malcolm threaded his way along a hoarded detour to find an unlit row of shophouses. Most were now empty or abandoned; each had a dusty orange notice foretelling their destruction, and on the notice a date which had already passed. Foreign workers in loose yellow garb were greedily eying the sidewalk to see where they could plant hoarding stumps.

But the address plaque beside the old wooden door was correct. Beside it a faded plastic signboard announced: PLAYRIGHT SOCIAL CLUB. GAMES AND MEMORABILIA BOUGHT AND SOLD. Then, in small print: STUDENTS WEARING SCHOOL UNIFORMS WILL NOT BE PERMITTED.

A single power cord came from somewhere else, passed through the transom, and spun off a single bulb, which lit the second floor corridor. The sign had been recently wiped of its coating of dust. He was expected.

Most of the old wooden doors on the second floor were as dead as petrified trees. The power cord, however, squeezed its way through one on the left. Light leaked out from the gaps in the frame. Malcolm cradled his backpack protectively, and pushed on the door.

What greeted him was not Arif but an absolute mess. Detritus from the whole history of games, from Wei Chi boards to broken X-Box consoles lay scattered about the room or stuffed in huge old display cupboards. Light was provided by a single light bulb, the old, incandescent kind, hanging by its wire from a coat hanger on one of the display cupboards. Possibly, someone lived here: Malcolm glimpsed pots and pans in small kitchen half-hidden behind a dusty curtain.

He cleared his throat to call out, but only a croak emerged. Just at that point though, he heard the sound of water behind another curtain. Moments later, Arif appeared through the curtain, shaking the moisture off his hands.

“Malcolm!” He looked Malcolm up and down. “Michael Jackson! A tie, now! Handsome dude, what!”

“Arif!” Malcolm said, but he could not think of much else. Life had not been kind to Arif. Apparently he had some hidden congenital defect that surfaced after he and Malcolm had lost touch, for he was still the same height as Malcolm had known him, but infinitely more aged and gnarly. His hair was no longer sleek and black, but flecked with grey and, in its uncut state, full of kinks. His nose, always full-fleshed, had grown bulbous. His cheeks were now cut deep with rivulets, giving his face the careworn look of an Australian aborigine mixed with the primitive wildness of a Borneo tribesman. He walked with that awkward, rolling gait that signified painful bone trouble. But his smile was just as mischievous as always.

“You brought your cards! Can I see?”

Malcolm slipped the box from his backpack. “They’re mostly just the old cards.”

“Sure, not! I heard rumors of a legendary Articuno with infinite immunity. So I sez ‘that’s got to be my old friend Malcolm!’ Lemme see!”

Malcolm placed his box on the rickety linoleum table, slipped off the rubber bands and pulled out the card. He held it up for Arif shyly and wouldn’t let him touch it.

“Michael Jackson,” Arif breathed reverently. “It’s the real thing. Almost as good as my companion card.”

“Companion card?”

“Oh yes. Someone mailed it to me. It’s a genuine Moltres Guardant. You know that Moltres is considered by many to be the consort of Articuno.”

“I think the expression is, Articuno can f**k Moltres’ ass any time of day.”

Arif giggled. “How about we play you one for the other. No immunity, we don’t let the cards get dirty. But winner gets both. Can?”

“Twenty cards. Can!”

“Haiyo! Twenty cards! Well it’s your funeral.”

Malcolm had the advantage at the start, because Arif still thought him a timid player, and Malcolm had no qualms about playing to that assumption. He let his power level dwindle down to sixteen while Arif played gleefully and revealed far more about his strategy than he should have. Then, with a whoop, Malcolm gambled a red Kameil power-up against Arif’s blue Hitokage, and won the entire deck.

“Alamak!” Arif wailed, in awe approaching terror. “I need a drink.”

“Aren’t you a Muslim?” Malcolm asked, for he had noticed the Arabic calligraphy at the appropriate places.

“Oh yes. Devout. Allah be praised, I found this great website which explained the Quran with great insight. It showed me how,” he said, as he pulled down a bottle from a high shelf, “according to the right reading of the Arabic, only beer is haram. You can get drunk on anything but beer and still go to paradise. Gauliang?”

Getting drunk on liquor clouds your mind, so it became a race to see who could make his opponent drunker, faster. Malcolm was at a disadvantage because of his lack of body weight, but he was in a zone, and all his senses went into sensing, through the haze, what was that perfect chance.

As the hour became large and then small again, the two young men were so absorbed in their game they paid no attention to the ominous sounds around them–sounds of rattling chains and Tamil staccato shouts. Malcolm played his last card, and a deviously tricky one, but his power level was over 90 now.

With a shout of rage, Arif threw down the Moltres card. “I claim immunity!” he yelled.

“Cannot! We agreed those cards are not in the game!”

“Play it!” Arif roared. “Fire always beats ice!”

Just then the single light bulb flickered out.

Arif swore some words that even Michael Jackson didn’t know. But that was just a cover. It is never really night in Singapore, and he knew exactly where he kept his parang. And Malcolm knew exactly where the Moltres card had fallen.

“Now! Give me my card!” Arif cried with an amok yell. The parang glinted in the floodlight of an approaching crane. He slashed at Malcolm’s startled fingers, missing them by a fraction of an inch, but cleaving the table in two. The building shook, and both men, in their drunken rage, did not question how it could be anything but the physical manifestation of that rage.

Malcolm scrambled out of Arif’s reach. There was something slimy and hot on his sleeve. It was possible the parang had not missed his fingers by a fraction of an inch. He didn’t dare look. Arif was advancing towards him again. The parang flitted in and out of the shifting light.

By now he was so used to taking chances, he didn’t even think about it. Instead of backing towards the door behind him, Malcolm splashed the remaining Gauliang at Arif’s face and made a desperate lunge for the parang.

Now this is a curious fact about old Chinese shop houses, which was discovered during the great Taiwanese earthquake of 1999. Due to the lack of structural support and to the desire to maximize commerce on the main floor, the shop houses, instead of crumbling under the force of the quake, simply collapsed, almost completely intact, one story down.

So did this shop house when hit by the ball of a wrecking crane.

When Malcolm regained consciousness, he was on the ground floor. Detritus of the Playright Social Club covered him up to his shoulders. He saw Arif’s arm protruding from a pile of rubble where a wall, and only one wall, had collapsed. His dead hand still clutched the parang, now covered in blood.

The bare light bulb that had refereed their game had smashed, and, had somehow kindled some of the old promotional literature in the cabinets. Its pale smoke hovered on the ground like incense, and caused Malcolm’s eyes to water.

Malcolm became slowly aware that the detritus on top of him included a cabinet full of Angry Birds toys. He struggled to extricate himself, but the cabinet was too heavy. The alcohol kept him from determining how much pain he was in. Stars danced in front of his eyes, but they turned out to be dust dislodged by the wrecking ball’s continuing attack.

Malcolm realized at that moment how much he loved Pei Ting. He was sad that he might never see her again, and might never get to hold their child. But he trusted in chance and in the Pokémon cards safely ensconced in his breast pocket. You see, in the Pokémon world, no one dies. They always turn out to have been safely, luckily, somewhere else at the time.

A blinding spotlight appeared above Malcolm’s head. From its light a wrecking ball lowered itself gently into the room. On it, gently grasping the tether, Malcolm perceived a tall, slender, hooded lady. Dust did not hide the whiteness of her robes.

“I know you!” Malcolm said. “You’re…”

“I am Guan Yin, Goddess of Mercy,” the woman replied, in perfectly enunciated classical Chinese. “It is I you have been following until now. For I am also the goddess of chance.”

“But,” Malcolm whispered, for the Qi was draining from his body into the velvet of the Angry Birds. “But, why?”

“I, too, love to play Pokémon,” the goddess replied. She leaned over and delicately lifted the two cards from Malcolm’s breast pocket. Their lamé sparkled in her hands. She smiled and Malcolm knew all had been set right in the universe.

In a final gesture of mercy, Guan Yin reached down with her other hand, gently, and closed Malcolm’s eyes.

D. M. Kerr is Canadian writer currently living and working in Singapore, where he teaches IT and game-design, and writes on the side. He likes to write fiction about cultural issues and anything else that strikes his fancy, including science fiction and young adult fiction. His work has been published, under various names, in 34th Parallel, Linden Avenue Literary Journal and Joyful Online. He formerly served as the secretary for the Society of Singapore Writers, and is now a member of the British Council’s Writing the City writer’s group. His work focuses on the relationship between what we believe and how we act.

Midtown. St. Sterling cemetery laid out almost before me. Yet as I walked towards it, it receded as if some hands somewhere strongly objected to me attending the funeral. My black coat had carelessly sprawled polka dots on its downward edge, polka dots caused by fresh splashes of muddy water that occurred as I half-ran to beat the receding speed of the cemetery.

People. People gathered around the graveside of the man called my father. I stood between my mother and my brother James. The brilliant sun reflected largely on the white sepulcher. Not even the blackness of our mourning coats could dull this spectacular sight. Reverend Frederick continued reeling praises laced with obvious sycophancy about the deceased but it rang true. James gave my left hand a gentle squeeze, a gentle squeeze to welcome me . Yes, I finally came for the funeral of an honourable gentleman.

“Sir Maynard was a good man, had a heart sprinkled with care, Godliness, hope and humility….” Reverend Frederick must have memorized those words because they flowed out of his mouth with an enviable eloquence.

Mother. Mother’s eyes pierced through me. She monitored every move I made. She glared at me each time I did not join in chorusing the numerous Amens. It was that same glaring of eyes that I imagined piercing through the telephone receiver when I told her that I could not visit the man called my father at St. Theresa hospital. Her shaky voice still twined around my head even now. “He has dementia! Clara, he has dementia due to the brain cancer! What in the heavens did Maynard do to you?”

“I can’t come and see Da’, I can’t.”

Disconnect. Mother cut me off as usual, the way she always does. She did not even bother to notice that I stopped calling the man called my father “Dad”‘, that I called him “Da”. She was always up about her marriage, how perfect it was that she could not see below her nose. Out of persuasion, I decided to pay the man called my father a visit. He lay there, dressed in the popular blue print hospital gown.

“Yes, Clara I have been wanting to see you,” he half whispered into the empty space between us.

“Da’, you will soon be dead. However, your death will be like Christmas in July.” My voice was void of pity.

“Death? No, the doctor said that I have metastasis of brain cancer. I can’t die, Sir Maynard cannot die!”

“Da’, you seem not to have changed at all.” I could see it clearly; he had not changed so far.

“The only thing I crave is for my daughter to call me Dad and not Da’,” the man said it in a way that sent flakes of chill that penetrated my marrow.

“Do you know I only go to church to pray for your death,” I said this at the brink of tears.

“Church? What is church again?” Pity. That was one word I did not have for Sir Maynard because he did not deserve it.

Standing there with James and mother beside his graveside hearing the cleric’s constant blaring of how the deceased was more Christian than Christ, I was feeling lightheaded now, smudged purple shadows hung above my hazy eyes. From those shadows I saw the shady word written on the small blackboard that hung in his study. The word was; behave

BEHAVE.

That word still stuck in my memory. I was five and James was seven. We would kneel on the soft carpet in his study. He had offered to teach us, in his own words, “behaviour”. I was too tender to see how obscene it was. He would tell me to reach out for the “lollypop” hidden underneath the fly of James trousers. I could not recall what happened next but I remembered him moaning softly, standing in front of us. Those same moans that escaped from the bedroom door when he and mother had their evening prayers.

Twelve. When I clocked twelve, he; the man called my father, told me that I had attained the age of glory. To that effect, he stopped James from attending the lessons he gave us in the study. I would lie down on the carpet, wearing my birth suit with my mouth gagged. He would caress the pointy lumps on my chest that had just emerged from puberty and would lay over me satiated with streaks of whitish liquid strewn all over me as if a careless child spilled a glass of milk.

I would then walk out of the study and exchange knowing glances with James who always stood by the doorway. We never talked about the terrors that lurked away in the study. Mother was too busy attending Women Conferences, teaching other women how to manage their homes while her’s was in tiny fragments that sailed through the air and filled one up with nothing.

Pain. Pain was a gross underestimation of what I felt. I had to start calling him Da’. It was a very small punishment. I held tenaciously to the last ‘d’, he does not deserve to be called a father. He made me dread each time mother left for her conferences. With dark burns embedded below my eyes, I would still lie naked on the carpeted floor of the study. He would turn on the television and switch to the station that broadcast mother’s conferences where she always the lead speaker.

“Isn’t she adorable? Exactly like you, isn’t it Clara? Dear Clara keep yourself pure for my satisfaction and my satisfaction alone….”

Violation. It was beyond violation. I felt raped, owned, raped and owned again. I would sit by the window in my room and watch James sitting on the stairs and wishing away the time. James blamed me for shielding the secret that lurked away behind the deep brown Mahogany door of the study. I recall walking into his room one day to find him convulsing in the sexual spasms he selfishly gave himself.

“You know, since you have stopped licking my lollypop, I had to find alternative means.” The way James said it as if it was my fault that the man called our father stifled and shriveled his sexuality.

Derrick. I was fourteen when I met Derrick. His family just moved into the neighborhood. We would go to the nearby park and sit on the bench for hours without talking to each other. Inhaling the cool air and basking in the luxury of chirping birds; that was how we shared our intimacy.

Just like me, he was different from others in school and was weird in his own way. The thick lenses of his spectacles were like the circular base of a coke bottle and his boots were always muddy. He rarely spoke, even to me, unless he wanted to go home. It continued like this, unruffled and undisturbed until he, the man called my father, found out.

“What were you doing with him?” The man called my father asked demandingly.

“Nothing, I swear nothing.” What was he expecting me to answer?

“No he cannot, he cannot take your innocence. Nobody can take your innocence except Sir
Maynard!”

Penance. That was what he called it, the punishment he gave me. It was all different that day as his many shades of perverseness merged into callousness. Down below I could feel the sharp razor razing through the tufts of my womanhood. I had allowed the hair to grow so much because it served as the only shield I had in that study. With tears in his eyes, which now I still wonder why he was crying, he gathered the golden tufts that were on the floor. At least that was the last thing I saw before he dug the fingers of his right hand into me.

“I will take your innocence and when you wake up you will say that it was Derrick. Do you know why it has to be Derrick? Nobody would believe that Sir Maynard would violate anyone not to talk of his own daughter.”

Wet. I felt wet when I worked up. Mother and James were crying in one corner of the study, the man called my father was cleaning my body with a moist towel. “I saw her lying in the park naked. It must have been that boy; Derrick.” How he sounded so sure!

My parents sued Derrick’s family for extreme sexual and multiple physical abuse. They paid for damages that made them mortgage their house, forcing them out of the street. The man called my father used the money to stage campaigns against vulnerable sexual abuse; the Sir Maynard Foundation.

Dreams. Even after Derrick was sent to St. Thomas Home for Delinquents, my dreams were still haunted by his teary face. That same face he had when he looked at me intently in the courtroom and screamed; Why?! I was helpless, an invisible cold hand kept me mute. It still surprises me how I bottled up all Sir Maynard did to me for all these years.

James had shown up at my house sometime last year to recommend a therapist that helped him get over it. All mother could shriek about was how I scorned the man that stood up for me, nurtured and loved me up until his dying day.

“Clara, Clara,” the voice jolted me to reality, “it is your turn for the dust to dust and ashes to ashes.”

Present. I opened my eyes gently as my pupils dilated to accommodate the dazzling light. James was handing over the shovel to me. I took it with the grace of someone who had Parkinson’s disease, scooping some dark earth. Should I or should I not pretend that all went well with Sir Maynard? After all, dead men should not be judged?

Then across the street I saw a man wrapped in an old blanket, it was Derrick. He was still shouting; Why?! Little children jeered and hurled stones at him. The resonance at the back of my skull was much too heavy. I could not even feel the shovel slipping through my hand. I guessed I passed out during the funeral of an honourable gentleman.

Innocent Chizaram Ilo is a young Nigerian writer and blogger (owner of www.youngandflawless.wordpress.com) where he preaches the gospel of flawlessness. He has been published in Expound magazine and was the second runner up in the YMCA Africa Short Story Competition. Innocent loves reading, writing, watching movies and spending time with family. The most magical thing writing has done for him is to make him exist in many bodies and making those bodies come alive. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is his strongest inspiration. Twitter handle @MaxiFlaws