REMEMBRANCE by : Nargis Lal.Bavarian coffee

REMEMBRANCE  

 

Virtue’s English Dictionary, Encyclopaedic Edition

Gay: merry. Given to pleasure. Often to vicious pleasure.

 

   Vicious pleasure? In the old Georgian sense, perhaps, but what a definition. Her childhood dictionary had transfixed Rumana for years. It had landed in her parents’ bookcase by accident, left behind by a colleague of her father’s. From the School of Oriental and African Studies, where Riz lectured in political science. The search for definitions, the discovery of unknown words, fuelled Rumana’s love of reading and followed her into adulthood. By which time gay meant something else. Sexual and very specific. The dictionary, published long ago, survived the cull of possessions when the house was sold. Along with her new wave records and her brother’s stash of albums by The Clash. It was still with her when she heard of lesbianism, and looked it up. Lesbian, and homosexual, were nowhere to be found. Did such people, therefore, not actually exist? Were they merely making themselves up?

 

   Rumana placed the dictionary on her shelf, alongside her books on the First World War. She was pretty much an expert now on battles and artillery. She worked in museum education and had endless questions to answer. From fans of Michael Murpurgo. From the great grandchildren of soldiers and evacuees. From children whose parents had fled modern, contemporary wars. She learned about wounded soldiers, and the true effects of shrapnel and gas and grenades. And, to keep herself from falling into weapons talk, she read the War Poets. To try and humanise the horrors.

 

   If only she’d known, in school, that Wilfred Owen was gay. They’d taught the Great War in language that she failed to relate to. She, 16 and Asian. Owen, white and remote. In an age she could make no sense of. Of colonialists and discrimination. Today she showed children how to make poppies. Little children, proud and excited. And she wore her own poppy to commemorate the fall of Japan, with its implications for her family. No fan of empire, for sure, but fully aware of the fallen.

 

   She was not sure if she was gay herself. Discovery of this had come late. She’d loved her ex, Seb. That was certain. But had it been sexual love, or romantic - almost platonic - love for a very sensual and wonderful man?  She was greatly aroused by Käthe, her German teacher, and this confused her. Being gay, or bi, had not been an option when she was growing up. Feelings for women were crushes. Men were the real deal, preferably in marriage. Not that her parents were in any way traditional, or even role models. Her mother read all kinds of literature, but failed to tell her daughter about Virginia Woolf. Nusrat was an artist. She painted in bold colours. Scenes of life in Karachi and London. In her private studio, where she also painted Julian.

 

   Until she was fourteen, Rumana had no concept of her parents as sexually active human beings. This dissolved when she found out the truth. That Riz was shagging his colleague Louise at the university and had fathered her child. Rumana’s older brother Sohail said he’d known for a while, and that Nusrat too had been at it for years.

‘I wish they’d just split up,’ he said furiously. ‘They’re staying together for other people.’

He presumably meant family in Pakistan, because Riz and Nusrat had no interest at all in the emotions of their children. Their marriage had been a disaster, despite its early promise. A clinical, sterile home awaited Sohail at his birth. And his sister’s arrival added nothing. The siblings wondered, as adults, why Nusrat had bothered to have them. She told them once, after too much sherry. ‘To shut your Nani up.’

 

   Riz and Nusrat had plenty of sex, but not with each other. Always secret, and alluded to in couched terms. Rumana considered their marriage to be transactional. It was therefore not her parents, but society, that influenced her sexual choices. St Ursula’s School for Girls, in Finchley, where the only talk was of boyfriends and marriage. A girl named Amanda joined her year. She was funny. Good at hockey. Long legs, and fair, plaited hair. Each felt shame at mutual, shocking, attraction. Rumana, hearing sniggers on the sports field. Amanda, scared to respond to unwanted and disgusting desires. Each shunned the other, afraid to explore this new longing. Kissed boys to feel and appear Normal. It was the eighties, after all, and they were fourteen.

 

   One year earlier, before Rumana had periods and a bra, she heard gossip in her parents’ living room. A newly divorced neighbour had been unearthed as a lesbian. Local mothers, whose children played in this woman’s home, were banding together to make her leave the street. To be rid of what Riz brazenly described as perversion. Her father’s hypocrisy grated on her later, when she figured out that he’d already slept with Louise. As for Nusrat, the free-thinking, liberated artist, lesbians were ‘seeking attention.’ They were even giving birth through artificial insemination. To what everyone, in wider society, referred to as Freaks.

When Rumana was eighteen8 her parents made the break, and the house without love was emptied.

 

   Listening now to Käthe talking about verbs and declension, Rumana felt a stirring that she wanted to explore. She’d been in this class for weeks now, and her spoken German was improving. It was the writing that was hard, and practice was needed. She found Käthe vibrant and passionate. Keen to get everyone chatting – in German, of course – and quite open about her sexuality. She had girlfriends, she told them, but no one special. She didn’t have children. Rumana guessed she wasforty, maybe forty-five. She imagined lying with her, making love. The mechanics of it. Thoughts she’d forced herself to suppress, when she’d longed to kiss and touch Amanda.

 

   Since joining the museum, with her Masters in Holocaust Education, Rumana had expanded her reading. Her job made her brain swim with facts, conveyed to school parties on a never-ending loop. It was why she wanted to learn German. The history of that nation. The Holy Roman Empire. The Weimar Republic. The Nazis. The Holocaust team was full, and they started her on War and Empire. She searched the museum bookshop and picked out a novel. ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’, by Erich Maria Remarque. A curious name. Intriguing. She may as well try it, and aim to read it in German in a couple of years’ time. She’d only just joined the class and her crush made her feel stupid. What if Käthe noticed how she felt, and asked her to pull herself together? She began to make an effort, focusing entirely on the lesson and fantasising after. She told Sohail and he laughed out loud.

‘Don’t tell me you’re gay now. After all that stuff with Seb.’

 

   Seb, her Romanian ex-lover. Sohail had loved the joke. Rumana. Romania. He’d liked Seb and was sorry when the relationship came to an end. At the time, Rumana was in love. She still loved Seb, unconditionally, but what she felt for Käthe was voracious. She had certainly loved Seb with her body, and this left her confused. Maybe we’re all a little bit ‘bi’? We’ve just been conditioned not to be. The young had no hang-ups. They found it all totally normal. She watched them scrolling all day, affirming all kinds of love and offering their pronouns whole-heartedly. It was beautiful, she thought. A freeing of the body and soul. Friends of her age were not so liberated, and she was lucky to have her brother. An open-hearted guy with no complications. They’d had each other’s back since childhood. Negotiated stepparents together. The departure to Australia of their father, from whom they’d become estranged. Frequent altercations with their mother, who had split from Julian long ago and lived with a sculptor.

 

   The book by Remarque plunged Rumana into grief and led her to Wilfred Owen. This was when she discovered that Owen was gay. Frustrating, she thought, that they didn’t tell us this incredible fact. I would have wanted to read his poems. To consider what we had in common, as victims of prejudice and assumption. It was normal and rational, when Rumana was growing up, to use offensive words. To yell out racial abuse. To spit at women in sarees and push dark children off their bikes. Streets where you wouldn’t walk. Wilfred Owen would have understood that. Gay-bashing. Can’t have been much different. Remarque had survived the Great War, but Owen died in battle. She told children that all the time. That the Armistice had been one week away.

 

   It turned out that Blighty came from an Indian word. Bilayati. Foreigner. Rumana was shocked to read this, to discover the role of Indians in the war. She now had a link to that time, and to Remembrance Day itself. A day of no significance in her family home, but maybe that was an error. She lay on her sofa with one book after another. Books from many genres and cultures, which taught her to travel. She wondered what Käthe thought about the British Legion, and the poppies on sale at Charing Cross station. They’d walked there together after class one evening, and both had felt a spark. What were Käthe’s feelings about the Great War, and of course about the Nazis? It never came up in class but didn’t everyone share the revulsion? Class was no place for politics, but they often joked about Brexit and the Indian-heritage PM. He and his mixed Cabinet, and their Stop The Boats obsession.

 

   Term ended for a break at the end of October. A few drinks in the nearby bar, and a definite frisson. Rumana felt Käthe’s hand stroking hers and flushed.

‘Which way are you walking?’

‘Whichever way you are,’ Rumana whispered.

Corny. Absurd. Have a little sophistication.

‘Okay.’ Käthe smiled. ‘Do you want to come back, for a – coffee?’

Reply slowly this time, with decorum. Don’t rush ahead.

‘Maybe. Where do you live?’

‘Holland Park. Central Line.’
‘I don’t know it but I’m in Stratford. On the same line.’

‘Useful.’

Käthe felt for her fingers under the table.

‘I’m not your teacher tonight. And we are full adults.’

 

   Doubt, mixed with anticipation. Is Käthe the one? Was Rumana reading too much into Käthe’s warm and open smile. Her desire to chat as class came to an end. Waiting to walk together. Now, on the tube, hands touching. Too late for poppy sellers to be out at this time. Books, on every shelf. What a paradise, Rumana thought, as she entered the Holland Park flat.

‘I don’t know if you really want coffee right now,’ Käthe said.

‘I don’t think so –’

Overwhelmed, both, with desire. They fell onto the sofa and began to kiss, feeling for one another. The first sight of the female body, after all this time without knowing. Thumping heart and trepidation. For weeks the fantasy. The auburn hair. The chance to stroke it, and to feel the skin of this woman. Käthe laughing, afterwards, at the way it had unfurled.

‘I wanted to make a move,’ she whispered, ‘but I didn’t want to be unprofessional.’

 

   Coffee and sliced bread for breakfast, and a traditional honey spoon. A very German affair. The familiar food of many trips to Berlin. To Munich, and to the Black Forest.

‘Have you had boyfriends?’ Käthe asked.

Rumana thought of Seb, of his generous words when they split:

‘It didn’t work out, but it was incredible.’

 He was a space scientist, a man of unparalleled intelligence. They’d met at another museum and she’d told him she didn’t get physics.

‘I can tell you about rocket science,’ he laughed. She wondered how he’d feel if he saw her now, with Käthe. But he’d always been open minded.

 

   The coffee was strong and they left for work with reluctance. They parted on the tube and Rumana made her way to the museum. A museum of war, which she wished could be re-named. To National Museum of War and Remembrance. She’d been here now for two years, fielding the children’s obsession with weapons. Occasionally she filled in at workshops on Holocaust education, and today she watched some Year 9’s in the permanent Holocaust exhibition. She’d been here with Seb, thinking of their hero Elie Wiesel. Today there were quite a few older children heading that way, persuaded by their teachers to take a look inside. All of them were of South Asian appearance, just like her. As a group they pretended to titter. They were scared of showing emotion. They gazed at the Nazi uniforms, mesmerised and embarrassed. You weren’t supposed to admire things in here. It was spelt out in the subsequent rooms what those uniforms had done. They left the gallery feeling sick. Like the feeling you got after a funeral.

 

   They behaved quite well compared to some school parties. They exited quite fast and Rumana made her way to the poppy workshop to meet the under-10s. They grilled her about the Blitz, and compared it to life in Gaza and Ukraine. Their school was in Mile End, not far from where she lived. Not one of them could have had a relative in the Blitz but they understood about war and child evacuation.

‘My friend’s Ukrainian, Miss,’ a boy said. ‘His dad had to stay to fight the Russians.’

She’d chosen not to have a child, though Seb had been persuasive on the subject of adoption. She still considered it sometimes. She thought of Käthe and pictured her as a mother. Teaching their adopted child, of mixed or unknown origin, to speak and write German. If they adopted together she’d be a mother too. A better, more loving, one than Nusrat had ever been.

 

   She wondered if Käthe would want to meet again. She’d been afraid to ask, and dared not look at her phone. If only she could be more spontaneous. Seb was always jumping into love, and he’d finally cracked it. He had a partner now whom Rumana saw on his various social media profiles. A space psychologist named Mariella.

Her phone pinged as she went to lunch.

‘Dinner tonight – and more?’

 

   They lay in bed together, she and Käthe, at her flat in Stratford. They giggled a lot as they drank.

‘Your books are – eclectic,’ Käthe smiled. ‘Space exploration, the Vietnam War - and the Nazis. And you have a lot of different novels.’

‘So do you. But forget the books,’ Rumana declared. ‘I love you.’

Shocking herself. This had to be the gin. Käthe kissed her, a little tenderly.

‘I’m falling in love with you too.’

‘Have you – ever slept with a man?’

Käthe, so free and upfront about her sexuality. Even she had denied her first instincts.

‘I slept with a guy at university. I thought I was a freak, when I didn’t – perform. You understand? And he wasn’t that gracious about it.’

‘So how – when did you realise?’

‘I fell for a beautiful woman, a musician, at a party. She guided me. That’s when I found out.’

‘But I – I’m mixed up. This, with you, is fantastic. But I’ve enjoyed sex with guys.’

‘Don’t put a label on yourself. Just have fun.’

 

   And this was how it flowed. Rumana moved classes, to another night and another excellent tutor. Love, unlabelled and beautiful. They reached the late autumn of 2024, with a new government that didn’t seem so full of hate, and the poppy sellers were out again. It was their first year anniversary and they were on their way to meet Sohail, and his new partner Natalie, for a drink.

 

   Walking to the station. Holding hands. Past a tiny cabal of people with Jesus Loves You placards. Gospel music on a phone. A glare from a woman with a poppy on her coat, following them with a young girl.

‘Don’t you ever end up like that,’ she instructed her daughter.

Her voice clear and bitter.

‘Excuse me,’ Rumana exploded.

‘Jesus died for you,’ the woman said boldly. The child fixed Rumana and Käthe with a curious stare.

‘Jesus would have held our hands,’ Käthe laughed. ‘He would have celebrated our passion.’

‘Are they lesbians, Mum?’ the girl said out loud.

‘They’re two very sick people. We’ll pray for you,’ the woman replied.

‘A gay man called Wilfred Owen died for you,’ Rumana said.

 

   The woman scoffed and moved away but Rumana held back. The child. The child could not hear this and be left without the truth. And the child didn’t want to move away. Back to the staring Jesus lovers. Her brain was seeking an answer. An explanation. Rumana looked into her eyes. Year 7, she guessed. An age to rebel. She could be at the museum one day, reading Wilfred Owen’s poetry. Learning about humans, shot into pits by degenerate, blind-drunk hooligans. She could turn now into the future, or shuffle along with the poison. With the senders of hate texts. The transphobes.  

 

   ‘We’re just two people in love,’ Rumana replied. ‘It’s a lot better than hate, isn’t it?’

 

   For a moment the child kept looking. At the women holding hands. At their obvious joy and unison. Then she smiled and nodded her head. Watched the women in love moving on, towards the Central Line. Into the crazy mix of London. 

about the author

 

 

 

 

Nargis Lal is a new writer. Her achievements include: Short-listed for Cranked Anvil Flash Fiction Prize with ‘VIRGINITY’ Long-listed for Fiction Factory Short Story Competition with ‘MATRICIDE’ and ‘WALTHAMSTOW VILLAGE’ She is British Indian. Her stories deal with sex, race, politics, and relationships 

 Did you enjoy the story? Would you like to shout us a coffee? Half of what you pay goes to the author the other half goes to expenses e.g. Maintaining the web site and setting up The Best of Café Lit book each year.

Blue Ridge, White Satellite By Mike Lee, Dr. Pepper

          the car slowly pulled into the driveway. A man in all black, his silk shirt open at the collar, his jeans stuffed into cowboy boots, slowly closed the car door behind him, walked furtively to a car parked down the street, and drove away into the gloaming grayness before dawn.

Larry woke up early and walked out to the porch. He had slept poorly, fraught with anxiety. Since the record came out, this had become typical: a fear of what failure might do for him and Ellie.

They were young, married, and living in the city where they grew up in the Appalachians. They wanted children and spoke about having a girl and a boy. They lived in an old house, where they played music in the parlor. Larry’s grandparents were still alive, and earlier that week, he had met with his great aunt, worried that his grandfather was due for another coronary.

Then he turned and saw it.

The Plymouth Satellite convertible was parked behind the red Toyota pickup on the gravel driveway.

The car was white, with a red top. Everything was in mint condition, including the red leather interior.

Larry stood in disbelief, then walked to the vehicle and pulled out the note attached to the side mirror.

It read: “Congrats on stirrin’ the shit. You did all right, kids.” The note came from the man who had sat in on the recording session, watching Larry and Ellie cut the tracks for the EP that was released. One song was always playing on the radio.

Larry touched the hood, running his fingers along the side. He saw the car keys and recognized the attached fob. The man drove it here himself, all the way from Tennessee. He could still be in town, or he could be on the road back with his assistant. Either way, Larry was amazed and couldn’t fully comprehend the gift.

But that key fob, man. He opened the car door and got in, sinking into the red leather.

The fob was a gold double eagle. He noticed the man had it on his keychain when he drove Ellie and him to the hotel they were staying at.

Ellie yelled from the porch. “What the fuck?”

She came down. “Where’d you get this, baby?”

“The man gave it to us.”

Larry pointed to the fob. “He also gave us this.”

“Oh, my God.”

“Get in and let’s give it a drive. I got my wallet on me.”

Larry turned the engine on. The Hemi 426 roared.

Ellie reached over to run her fingers over the customized cassette deck. She punched in the FM station in time to hear More Than This by Roxy Music.

Larry slowly pulled out of the driveway and roared up the hill, turning left to start on a morning cruise. By the time they hit the main drag, their song was playing.

Larry walked toward Haver Street, the two-lane blacktop straddling the forested hill to the Carver Road intersection. In the 1950s, a developer bought the hillside with plans to build another housing subdivision; however, geologists deemed the ground prone to landslides. So the city bought the land at a loss.

The city considered turning it into a park. However, due to an agreement made during the Great Depression, when spending was restricted to prevent defaulting on city bonds, no improvements were made.

Instead, the green space was undeveloped and became a playground for the neighborhood, with generations of kids playing games before growing into teenage heads getting stoned in the urban wilderness. The southern pines stood sentinel to more than sixty years of stupid shit and survived a couple of small fires set off by lightning and discarded cigarette butts.

It was the place of a couple of dozen immaculate conceptions, most notably his own.

The pine forest was the remaining wild area on the south side of town; after Loop 100A was constructed in the mid-1960s, the piney woods on both sides of the highway were developed into strip malls, gas stations, and themed fast-food restaurants.

All that remained of the old wilderness in the city was the pines of Haver Street.

Larry met her while hiking through a rocky, dry gully that ran through the center of the forest. When it rained especially hard, water rushed from a metal drain opening at Haver to what had now become a sizable creek, flowing into the ditch next to the highway. In winter, snowmelt turned the gully into a trickling brook.

It was spring, and the weather was warm and humid for the time of year. Larry’s sweat stained his white T-shirt, and climbing over the rocks in his black dingo boots wasn’t easy.

The drain opening lay about 20 yards ahead. Stepping close, Larry could hear banging sounds from inside the drain.

When he went into the opening, he saw a girl playing with a lunchbox. Larry saw her turn it at different angles, reflecting light to various points against the corrugated metal.

He crawled forward toward her. As he did, the girl turned to look at him.

“Hi. Do you see the lights? It’s like I made a kaleidoscope.”

Larry and Ellie met when 10-year-olds could wander along big highways. Just kids, walking,

Ellie wore a floral top and a pink rayon skirt, gladiator sandals, and thick glasses. Her dark hair was tied with a clip at the top, like Pebbles from The Flintstones.

Larry wore hand-me-down Farah slacks and a rayon short-sleeved dickey. Black Keds and ugly red socks. He needed glasses, but his mother couldn’t afford them.

They went to the Dairy Queen and bought a couple of large Dr. Peppers. They sat cross-legged on the concrete stoop, waiting for the city bus to take them downtown.

Ellie took a long sip. “Ahhh, so refreshing and effervescent.”

She smiled at Larry, reached out, and pecked him on the cheek. Her eyes were bright as peridots, and her smile invited you into her world, which was often mysterious but still open to exploration. They spoke without words, relying on instincts. When they were older, they learned about dyads. That explained the kaleidoscopic afternoon with the lunchbox and the reflections in the storm tunnel.

Ellie’s favorite color was purple. Larry is basic black. Ellie played the cello and a little guitar, and taught Larry basic open major chords at a downtown guitar store near the pocket park in the city center.

They watched folk musicians play the music of the Scots-Irish mountaineers, as men and women danced on boards to provide the rhythm. The banjos were plucked by aging fingers that knew experience and history, some good, but mostly hard times.

That afternoon, a man asked if they knew how to play. They nodded, but Ellie said they weren’t experienced enough.

He was in his twenties, with long black hair and a devilish goatee. “Doesn’t matter. I can see your hearts in your eyes, and y’all found your place here.”

Ellie was handed a battered old Martin dreadnought while Larry got a Silvertone acoustic with F-holes. Larry was left-handed but could play open chords upside down. They played a song they had made up together, and the man nodded along with the others, clapping in rhythm while the banjo player provided accompaniment.

Afterward, they taught them some easy songs and instructed them to return next Saturday.

Through high school, they were inseparable. People were jealous of them. They teased them. Ellie and Larry didn’t care. We were alone, they told each other, and it helped that Punk arrived in time for first year.

Patti Smith, The Ramones, The Sex Pistols; hundreds of bands featured in magazines like Rock Scene and Creem. When the record store wouldn’t order what they wanted, they bought records by mail order with the money they earned bussing tables at a diner. They sat in front of Larry’s old Sears stereo, nodding along, entranced by the tribal beat and the intensity of the complicated willow down to three chords and a cloud of indignation.

The recording studio was in Austin, Texas. The producer chose it for its affordability, and Ellie and Larry agreed that the cedar paneling resonated during rehearsals. Jimmy, a drummer they met in Atlanta, was accompanying, while Ellie’s friend Kathy joined on bass.

As they finished the rehearsal, the producer clicked on the intercom. “You guys stick around. There’s someone you should meet.”

The producer turned to his left. “He heard your demo.” He got up from his seat and shook the man’s hand.

The door opened, and the man walked in. He stared at them like someone who belonged in that room.

The four musicians stared in disbelief. Ellie later remembered that she wanted to throw up; she was so scared. Years later, the man told her he was damned scared, too. They laughed.

The man strapped on an acoustic and stepped up to a waist-high microphone. “Play that first song from the demo--Blue Ridge. I’ll take rhythm and do a fill I thought of during the bridge. Just go for it and be folks.”

Shaking, Larry switched from his acoustic to his Gibson ES-335 and flipped on the switch to his Fender amplifier.

The producer sat at the control board and announced.

“Blue Ridge. On four.”

The clicking metronome countdown seemed longer than the first run-through of the song.

They laid down the track in three takes. No one spoke, but the man stood before them, staring, playing guitar, knowing everything about them as much as they knew him.

After the take, Larry and the man shook hands.

“You certainly have a way of saying hello.”

The man smiled and held up three fingers. “That’s how we got it done in three takes.”

The years passed into decades. Ellie left after the band completed a UK and Scotland tour, where “Blue Ridge” had sold best, and returned to college. Reece replaced her. Larry had known him since elementary school. He lasted a year, then moved on. Larry and Ellie hadn’t heard from him since the 1990s.

Kathy and Jimmy stuck with them and got married after their tour with REM in 1988. After that, they all called it quits. Kat and Jimmy settled in West Asheville, a few blocks from Ellie and Larry. Their kids grew up together, and they all profited from the royalties, which surprisingly stayed constant, just enough for all of them not to find a real job, though the man pointed out to them on one of his visits that they didn’t need a job, just a calling, and they had that.

And that was enough. The man called several times and asked to record with him. Those kept the calling alive.

One day, Larry decided to climb the old Georgia Pacific tower, rusting at the abandoned lumber yard out by the Swannanoa River in Azalea on the outskirts of East Asheville.

After reaching the platform, he heard the man shout from below.

“Hey, let me come on up there.”

The man stood by a vintage red Cadillac convertible. It looked so good, as if he bent time and space driving it from the showroom to the tower.

He yelled, “Just throw me your keys.”

“What?”

“C’mon. Do it.”

Larry reached into his pocket and tossed the keys. When the Double Eagle fob left his fingers, it transformed into magical tape, and the man climbed up without using the stairs.

Larry wasn’t sure what to say.

“Glad to see you.”

“Happy to be here.” The man paused and pointed toward the north.

“That’s Mount Mitchell, right?

“Yes, sir. Behind you is Pisgah. Shrouded in the clouds behind her is Cold Mountain.”

The man stared off southward. “This is an ancient land. I read that the Swannanoa flows into the French Broad, one of the oldest rivers of Earth.”

The tape had coiled back into the Double Eagle. The man handed the fob back to Larry.

The man wore a black shiny suit with a bolo. He straightened his lapels.

“I went to see Ellie before you. I sat with her on the porch, and she told me where you were.”

“I know why you are here.”

“I’m just a part of you and Ellie’s personal mythology. You have kids now, and you will tell them that.”

“You changed our lives, sir.”

“I was just there when it had the greatest impact on your lives. Finding that girl with the lunchbox in the storm tunnel was what changed your lives. All I did was show up in the studio with my gitfiddle.”

They laughed and hugged until Larry’s arms held only the air.

Larry looked below to see that the Cadillac was gone, leaving no tire tracks.

Beside it, sitting on the hood of the white Satellite was Ellie, with their children Johnny and June sitting at her side. Johnny is a senior at Reynolds and has already been accepted to Duke. June is a sophomore and a left-handed guitar player like her Daddy. She has straight red hair that cascades down her shoulders and aspires to be a writer and musician. Applied to the Sewanee Young Writers’ Program for next summer.

They all go to Pritchard Park on Saturdays to jam. Nobody from their childhood remains. Ellie and Larry are the elders, teaching a new generation while busking for fun.

Ellie published a book about their experiences, but mainly she teaches music workshops in the community.

She has the same smile as when they first met. Brown hair with gray streaks, but still the same girl trying to figure things out on her own—then sharing what she learned.

With both hands, Ellie holds the lunchbox. She holds it up, moving it with both hands, reflecting the sunlight onto Larry, just like she did in that tunnel that time they met.

As the lights bounced off the metal above him, Larry sang the song that got them here: Well, they’re all right. In the Blue Ridge, drivin’ a White Satellite.

About the author

 

 

  Mike Lee's work appears in or is forthcoming in Literary Garage, Bristol Noir, Roi Faineant, Wallstrait, BULL, and many others. Also is in the latest Cafe Lit anthology, and his story collection, The Northern Line, is available on Amazon and other online booksellers.

Through Fresh Eyes By Jane Spirit,A toy cup of tea

At some point in my early childhood, someone must read ‘The Tale of Two Bad Mice’ to me, though I had completely forgotten the story. Then, during a recent visit to Beatrix Potter’s house near Windermere, I encountered the real dolls’ house that had been the inspiration for it. Some of the author’s illustrations from the book were displayed in large lit panels alongside it and I found myself transfixed by one of those images which I knew again with all the intensity of childish fascination. This illustration showed some of the toy foods from the doll’s house in their moulded perfection, alongside their little storage box with its straw packaging spilling out. Each dish was presented on a tiny gold edged porcelain plate to which it was presumably glued. Just like the mice characters as they explored the diminutive house, the child in me was entranced by the unfamiliar foods represented. I knew about pears and oranges of course but had generally only experienced them in tinned form as part of a fruit cocktail with evaporated milk. The other items in the picture represented a class of eating totally beyond my experience: a whole fish ready to be baked; a complete ham ready to be sliced; two bristly lobsters presumably freshly prepared and, most impressive of all, the pudding. I knew instantly that I had once studied that dessert intimately; with its mesmerising indications of piped cream round the edges of a rounded form that suggested sponge and was topped by a red haze of fruit or jam. To me it epitomised a feast; a carnival of consumption.

Seeing that image as an adult, I could identify all over again with Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca as they broke into the doll’s house and became angry when they went to slice the ham and found that they could not devour the meat, the fruits, or the fish. Nor could they eat the pudding for all its colourful perfection. Then, in the heat of their anger, they had smashed the plates, wreaking havoc on all that they had coveted and making the most awful mess. After rioting, they had moved on to pillage their favourite objects from that grand house, bearing them back to their mousehole home to add a touch of comfort and style to its draughty precincts. The resulting mayhem was only to be ended by the return of the young human owners of the house; Lucinda and Jane. Then the mice had fled and order had been restored eventually.

Why had that story made such an impression on me, I wondered, feeling a powerful emotional attachment to the illustration as I studied it again, sixty years later? Perhaps it was because I could think of myself as the little girl in it who shared my name and who also shared a doll’s house with her older sister. I could share in their distress when they found all those broken pieces of furniture and smashed food, but I could also take comfort in knowing that their little house would be back to rights in no time.  Eventually, the naughty mice would even try to make restitution for their wayward behaviour; Tom Thumb by placing the crooked sixpence he had found under the hearthrug in one of the girls’ stockings; Hunca Munca by returning from time to time to sweep the doll’s house with the little brush and dustpan that she had looted from it. The two girls remained firmly in control, and, in the end, it seemed that the mice were content to keep to their place below stairs.

On the other hand, growing up as I was in a tidy house, with orderly mealtimes and set routines, the little temporary madness and greed of the mice must have appealed to me. Their destruction of their betters’ property, their anger that the exotic food was only for show, shocking as it was, would also have been very understandable to a small child. It must have been good to feel myself to be on the side of the rebels, throwing their tantrums and veering towards criminal behaviour whilst knowing that after a period of what might be termed  ‘mild threat’, domestic stability would be restored every time the book was read to me.

Seeing that illustration again, I thought about how the world, my world, had changed since the early sixties when I was being nurtured and my parents were working their way out of poverty towards middle class comfort. I relived that paradox for a moment; a child’s joy in dissent and subversion so long as the return to a familiar order could still be guaranteed. I thought also of the adult artist who had painted the image of that false food. I wondered how much the story, which first appeared in the early 1900s, had prefigured aspects of her life to come. Surely, the writer had had no choice but to be cast as a disruptor when her parents forbade her even to visit, let alone marry, her publisher, the widower Warne with whom she was in love. When he died suddenly in 1905, just a few weeks after proposing to her, had her parents somehow expected that Beatrix’s rebellion would be over, and their customary parental authority seamlessly re-asserted? Did they assume that the old domestic order could survive the grief that ripped apart the illusionary fixtures and fittings of their daughter’s former life? It was in that same year, 1905, that Potter bought her first farm at Hill Top. She was never to return to London life with her parents again.

About the author 

  Jane lives in Woodbridge, Suffolk UK. With the encouragement of the local creative writing class which she joined in 2021 she has been writing stories ever since, some of which have appeared on Café 

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