The Cherry Tree in my Sister’s Room

Sophie cried when they chopped the tree down. She hadn’t realised what it meant.

She looked out the window at the tarmac where petals used to make confetti. The Neruda she was reading was face down on the window ledge, the spine split. Men in yellow jackets were chopping down the tree in the school grounds at the back of our house. Their saws buzzed through branches like wasps. My sister shook.

She stayed in her room, staring at the stump, then, she sat on the edge of my bed.

‘Touch,’ she said, ‘Smell.’

She was quivering, excited and nervous looking at the same time. I sniffed the upturned petal of her palm. It had the feint smell of flowers in the rain.

I looked at my sister closely, her smooth cheek and hands. Sophie’s skin was cherry blossom, flawlessly soft. It looked as if a wrong move would through it. If I squeezed her hand too hard it would weep and bruise.

All April my sister blushed. She was a shock of pink, swept up, out she rushed to touch the boy next door.  Mid May, bits of her started to dry up. Sophie rested by the open window in her room.

‘Why?’ I cried.

‘I wanted someone to be to me what wind is to the trees, just once,’ she said.

Sophie smiled, then, her lips, courted by a breeze, blew out into the almost summer day.

Sit with me a little

Sit with me a little, and listen with me.

I will fill you with sorrow, will dark you,

un hinge you, un understand you,

demolish you.

Together we can watch as the world

disintegrates, breaks up, dies.

We can hear the screaming.

Can you hear the screaming?

How does it sound to you?

Is it loud or is it drowned out?

There is a little clump of dandelions out there

in my garden.  Their flowers are yellow.

The cherry tree has a blight of blossom

on some of its branches.  They wave in the wind.

I want to get closer to the dandelions but

there is a square of darkness, a fall,

a cross, a burden, a thing un clean

un manageable, un spoken.

I can hear the gulls now.

They were here before

And they will be here after.

A striped towel is flapping on the washing line

and the bucket of pegs is full of water.

I want to count the dandelions,

I want to wait and tell the time with their clocks.

But there is a square of darkness, a fall,

a cross, a burden, a thing un clean

un manageable, un speakable.

Sit with me a little, and listen with me.

I will fill you with sorrow, will dark you,

un hinge you, un understand you,

demolish you.

Together we can watch as the world

disintegrates, breaks up, dies.

Sit with me a little, and listen with me,

this April afternoon.

Just Aphasia I’m Going Through

The Doctor points out the bubble-like alien parasiting my brain. Looked like an embryo was growing there. A second me. Swiping a second-hand consciousness. Paying me neither rent nor mind. Yet taxing me a tithe of my cells. The bare faced cheek of it. Tithe not shaved in a month now. To my delugeded pain receptors, the razor felt like it was scooping out the inside of my skull. He indicated that the tumours were now squatting against the language centres of my brain. Journeying to the centre of me. I say squatting, squat-trusting may be more opposite, I mean apple sit. I doughnut what I mean. Less than hole.

These days find I can’t finish my sentences. Used to finish those of others in my eagle anticipation. I was agnawing like that. The shoe on the other boot now. The ironing being others have to guest my words, to figure out what I’m trying to slay. This thing willow the death of me. Though there will no me to speak of, since I would have longing surrended any bill utility to espresso myself. The memories will be longing lost, since I will lactate the romps reculling them. I will an empty, wordless shell. Like cancel the crab, chew more up of me (that one I did on purpossum, I’m not quiet shotput yet, not when I shotput what’s left of my mind to it).

They slay I’m slearning my words. Languish is defecting me. Splaying possum. I wish langwish…

By Marc Nash

Li Shin thought about how she wanted them to find her.  She would rest her head to the side.  Her grey hair, which she twisted into a bun every morning, and held together with six small black pins and no more, would face them as they entered the kitchen.

At the doorway they would see her bun and the strawberries laid out on the table. Skin washed and leaves cut off, ready for them to eat.  That morning she was the only customer at the fruit stall.  The Japanese seller and she did not say a word as she pointed to the strawberries and he signalled the cost.  

In Tokyo she did not interact with the Japanese outside of their stores, though she had once been in a ballroom filled with Americans, British and a few other Chinese.  Her son, in his uniform, had taken her hand and told her how beautiful she looked as she followed his lead, in a bright green dress, around the room.

Since her daughter in law arrived from Shanghai, Li Shin spent almost all her time inside.  She cleaned and prepared meals and listened to their talk.

When the war ended, Li Shin ran out onto the streets with her neighbours and cried and laughed and screamed.  It had been years since she stepped outside without rubbing her face with dirt or excrement.  When she died, she left her face clean, untouched, in Japan.  She thought of her son’s life here.

Karla Ch’ien

That Tearing

By Bernise Marie D. Carolino

Let’s read a story you say with the book open on your lap as you sit me down next to you and we turn the pages and as we are reading we are also writing the story as we go along and as the papers rustle they echo strangely in this empty room and it is all a lie because the book is on the table and my hands are on the pages and they are all mixed up because at some point the book got so worn it lost its spine and its order and you say let’s read a story but you were lying and I am lying to myself and you aren’t here anymore and I crumple the pages and I fold what I can’t bear to discard and I know I will hide them all over the house so that I can forget them and keep finding them for years to come and so maybe I still can’t forget you completely but the point is a paper that’s open and unfolded is so much more easily torn.

Him & Her.

‘I’m falling apart’, he joked, rubbing his throbbing left wrist.

She didn’t laugh. She didn’t even look up from the television that blared out like a wall between them.

He sloped off to bed and slept, despite the noise from the room below and the jolts of pain shooting down his left arm.

She went to the pantry and returned with the gingerbread man and bit down.

He awoke screaming. His left hand was missing, like it had never existed in the first place. The skin had perfectly sealed the stub of his arm.

Her tongue licked at the gingerbread crotch.

He produced an exuberant erection.

She continued.

He cried for his missing left hand, but couldn’t resist reaching down to touch himself with his right.

She bit the gingerbread man’s right hand clean off.

He thrashed and shrieked and shouted as his right hand disappeared before his very eyes.

She yanked up the volume on the television.

He wept like a deserted baby.

Her teeth chipped off the icing mouth.

He couldn’t scream or shout any more.

She ate it all up until it was just a head with confectionary eyes.

He took up significantly less space in the bed.

She picked the eyes off, one by one.

He was left in the dark.

She finished him off with a crunch.

Silence.

She walked upstairs.

He wasn’t there.

She brushed the gingerbread crumbs off the sheets.

He had fallen apart.

She finally laughed.

These endpapers were designed by Ryan Gillard and Kiera Kinsella for Crushed Mexican Spiders by Tibor Fischer, an Unbound book. We spend 3 times as much on production as a traditional publisher will spend on an average hardback, to make sure that each book is beautiful and long-lasting. 

Crushed Mexican Spidersis a set of two dark, clever and funny short stories from Tibor Fischer, a modern master. In the title story, a woman returns home to discoer the key to her Brixton flat no longer works. And in the second one, Possibly Forty Ships, an elderly eyewitness is tortured to reveal the true story of the Trojan War.

Available now from Waterstones, The Book Depository, Amazon UK, Amazon US.

Unbound: Tibor Fischer
by Rob Alderson, 16 December 2011

“We’ve been following the fortunes of crowd-funded publisher Unbound for a few months but for the first time this week we saw a copy of one of the books.The double bill of short stories from Brixton-based Tibor Fischer presented in flipbook format dropped through our letterbox and we were thrilled to see the finished article is worthy of this potentially gamechanging literary phenomenon.

Writers can submit an idea for a book and if enough people pledge funds to make it a reality then Unbound publishes it – with all donors’ names recorded in the book and special copies/treats such as lunch with the author for those who really dig deep to make it happen.

This is the second book published by Unbound since it launched in May, after former Monty Python member Terry Jones’ Evil Machines. The two stories presented here – Possibly Forty Ships and Crushed Mexican Spiders are both uncomfortable modern morality tales, one focussing on a young woman ground down by metropolitan alienation and the other a torture scene related to the Trojan war…”

Click here to see the rest of the article and for more photos.