Transportation

January 29, 2015 Transportation Press fiction, Transportation

Transportation Press: Featuring the Nottingham Writers’ Studio

Over the next three days we’ll feature three poems by Pippa Hennessy, Project Director for the Nottingham City of Literature campaign and director of the Nottingham Writers’ Studio.

Quarry Beach

Do you remember the old ladder?

its broken step halfway down,

thorns scratching hands that clung

to ropes

and rotting wood.

We climbed down anyway

to where great granite eggs

make thunder under the waves.

Our bare feet took us over seaweed

and limpets

to see orange beaks

flash past, crying look at me

and we wished we could fly.

A seal swimming southwards

as usual

stopped briefly:

why do beasts with such long flippers

refuse to play with me in the waves?

One stone on another, we built

a tower to remind the sea

we were here

for a while

I sat, warming my back, hatching

an image

of the sun and the sea

and of you

Author Bio:

Pippa Hennessy has published poetry, short fiction, graphic short stories and creative non-fiction in various magazines and anthologies. She is Development Director at Nottingham Writers’ Studio, Project Director for Nottingham’s UNESCO City of Literature bid, and works for Five Leaves Publications. In a past life she was a software developer, but she’s feeling much better now.

January 14, 2015 Transportation Press fiction, Transportation

Cochineal

by Rosie Martin

Without any effort or intention, without willing it to be so, an image of a glass of water appeared in my mind. It thrills me when visual metaphors shimmer into place, for I have learned that they explain me to me in some surprising way.

Into the clear water dropped a bloodied tear of cochineal – bomb-like, turbulent, and spreading thinly, evenly, rapidly – forever changing the whole. This is what happened to my mind. In prison.

I have been doing some work in the prison. You see, I know how to teach people to read. I realise this sounds ordinary, but there is a lot of science to know, about what’s going on in the brain and mind of someone who doesn’t learn to read in the usual way. It’s anything but ordinary. I pour and pour into this work.

Two years ago I was sitting in an auditorium in which a plea was being made for volunteers to work at literacy tasks with prisoners. My colleague, who likewise pours and pours, was also there. At the end of the event, as we walked toward each other looking into each other’s faces from across the room, we knew simply what the other was thinking – we know how to add quality for these complicated souls unable to respond to regular methods of learning to read, we have the skills, we ought to be gifting this knowledge to these vulnerable men and women. In the moment my eyes met hers, I felt in my depths, a breathless sparkle like bright flow between river stones – vivacious élan which I have come to recognise as my herald of heart action.

Now, it’s a practical world that we live in and impetuous dash and ephemeral sparks have less to offer once an idea has a shape, for then of course, there is work to be done. So I rang the prison, and asked if I could come, bringing with me the skills splashed and filtered in through time in my craft, to tell about what I can do. Well – my hat is off and my shoulders are bowed – I have nought but respectful admiration for the workers in that place who consistently enabled me and showed gratitude. ‘Come, show us, tell us’, their instant reply.

Now, I’m a newcomer. Not to the work, but to this environment and this cohort. The principles to teach reading to those who have been unable to learn it are sure. Analyse each individual’s configuration of processing skills, set a plan designed for that configuration and direct-teach a hierarchy of skills at the just-right level of challenge. And all the while, honour the soul of he thus configured with warmth, patience, humour and the dignity of no judgment. These principles work. Skills can be grown. And I saw myself unfazed by the hand scans, magnetic locks and clanging doors, for a mind is a mind and a heart is a heart, no matter where they are housed. Or warehoused.

This was the glass of water in the image of my prison experience – all this, clear and contained.

But I’m a newcomer to working at the prison and it’s not dream and sparkle and vivacity for they thus housed. For many – for most – the way of things has not been like the way of my things, but more like this: I can’t read, can’t access education, can’t get work – I’m poor. And another axis: what is tender communication(?) it has touched me so rarely(!), language is weak, vocabulary and knowledge diminished, can’t get work – I’m poor. And there are many other axes of disadvantage. Smashing, shattering axes of disadvantage shocking with tortured horror and foisted upon men and women when they were but sweet and soft-cheeked boys and girls. Through no fault of their own. Ergo, therefore – made poor.

I am reminded that miserable souls were transported to Pt Arthur bound in body and mind with the chains of events sprung of poverty. I’ve imagined those cold and wretched men. And all these years later, I stand in the gaze of souls transported to Risdon, also bound in body and mind with the chains of events sprung of poverty.

And here bombed the bloodied tear that suffused my mind in prison. Not enough had changed in two hundred years. Souls born into crippling vulnerability were then transported behind bars – and they are still being transported behind bars. These bars, the materialised versions of those already built into their minds and lives through too little of the salve of society’s tenderness upon their developing beings and impoverished stations. Bloodied poverty. Bloodied lack of compassion. The ruddy tear swept through me.

Yet I note that time settles and changes the discernment of murky waters. For I see that my community now imbues the wretched of Pt Arthur with esteem and affection – a response of compassion two hundred years too late for those lives. Their odour and base mouths are not so much now forgotten, as that without the revulsion of sensory impact, these unsavoury qualities are not even considered when convicts’ stories are told. Judgement of their crimes, likewise, is not now forgotten, but rather is barely considered; for absent now is the unclad emotion of the perpetrated and the foaming of the virtuous. Now, only the mistreatment and the humanity of those hapless are left for us to see. And they are found wretched, and heroes; revered for their human worthiness.

Time does indeed settle and change the discernment of murky waters. For I also note that the respectable of old London and Hobart towns have not withstood the judgement of time quite so well. Popular hindsight now finds heartless fault in these of the ceiled and comfortable houses, clean and cologned, sending wretches to the end of the earth for the loss of a fop’s handkerchief. Now, as we appraise, their humanity seems to have been absent and their stories are imbued with stony hardness; the London cold upon their hearts.

But it is me I see surveying the glinty image in my mind. Bloodied tear to rosy clarity. My standing and my Chanel are respectable in my era. My insured wide-screen, the fop’s handkerchief. My aversion to human pungence, the pharisaic disgust. My lack of compassion, the lock upon the chains.

Tenderness, compassion, warmth and forgiveness are in the full-blooded cochineal concoction to pour and pour upon poor – to recolour with beauty the crippling abhorrence of smell, filth and profanity; and eventually even to ease the slicing agony of the pared and naked emotion which rises in the anguish of offence. Poverty to the end of the earth I say, not the poverty-stricken. Lest we all be destined to poverty in the wholeness of our beings.

This rosied glass is not new. I’m just the newcomer who teaches people to read. Yet I’m clear that I know this: the tools of my craft – warmth, patience, humour and the dignity of no judgment – are amongst the simplest tools of the empowerment of humankind. They and their stable mates, some with much loftier names, have been written of for centuries. Many shimmering images in the minds of many have brought forth wise words pointing toward these strong and gentle tools, well-oiled. We know how they are used because we have felt them at work in our innermost beings. They are the underrated means with which large change must be crafted. If we can be courageous, and feel their weight, their fit within our hands; and use them, even when it takes grit of the heart to do so – for love is a verb. A doing word. And a mind is a mind and heart is always heart – no matter where housed.

Writers’ bio:

Rosie Martin is a Hobart-based speech pathologist specialising in intervention and support for people of all ages with literacy impairments and social communication impairments. She has recently founded a benevolent organisation, Chatter Matters Tasmania, to assist with bringing these supportive services to the most disadvantaged in our communities.

January 13, 2015 Transportation Press fiction, Transportation

London

by Adonis Storr

London is the Great Beast; and through the injection of an aeroplane one is swept up into her blood stream, losing the identity of the individual to be a single blood cell, one part of an enormous creature. And one is pumped through tunnels underground – the veins underneath the skin; coursed through lines like biological systems and, churning in the swell of the other cells, bubbling up further to erupt! Gushing out through tube station doors and swept onto steps worn down by millions of steps over hundreds of years.

And you are born onto the streets looking up – into the light that peaks through the gaps, of peaks that dwarf you in their shadows as they reach up to the length of their stretch. And below, on the ground where we are, there is chaos from all sides as the hordes of suits and tourists blunder passed curbside salesman spruiking incomprehensible town-crier pitches. And there are a thousand signs – you can’t read them all, all bright and loud and demanding that you need whatever it is that is on them.

And you wonder if you lived here would you become one of them – would this define you? This city? For being a traveller I see people totally absorbed by this place; and I am superfluous to their requirements; London appears often indifferent to one’s presence and from all sides confidently reminds one that you need London; and London will most certainly survive without you.

And there’s a thousand accents and languages and dialects and incomprehensible colloquialisms and funny people and sad people and animated people and shy and rich and lavishly boisterous and poor and begging and lost and homeless and celebrity, lawyer, policeman and prince. They could be sitting next to me, some sort of royalty, but I don’t read the newspapers, nor do I watch television; and I treat everyone equally; and my occasional online glances are for conversation only.

And through the deep surges of passion and apathy echoes a warm glowing sensation occurring within – this feeling of being apart of something large, grand even, the feeling that one might heave on an axis and turn millions of people into a different direction entirely; being at once almost inconceivably small and magnificently important.

London. Her body divine – of bricks, cement, metal and glass. Shot up from the ground – buildings like flowers. London. Your old skin speaks without words – of the years and bodies and stories. London. Whose epitaphs – obelisk-esque – stand tall, elegantly iconic, endlessly inspiring, yet still – looking up, then looking down, one can not unnotice the wondrous gap between the dirty old stone floor; and the glorious and golden shiny peaks.

And the mirage is three hundred and sixty degrees wide; and it forces you around chasing your tail, coming back to similar places – the old haunts.

London. All your roads are full. All your doors are open. You’re Sinatra’s New York. You’re a place to make it. To be somebody. You’re a one hundred year old lemonade and there’s only one left. You’re a restaurant that specialises in mashed potato. And there’s the thought that the longer you walk the more roads become large rivers of cars and doors, one-by-one, close forever. Almost like you might wander round London, only to one day look in the shiny reflection of a shop front window and notice that you’ve become old; and wonder how it happened.

And you make a loyal friend at the Society Club, surrounded by the portraits – all leather-bound paper and ink, of Burroughs, Joyce, Wilde, Woolf and Bacon. And you write yourself in here, over a latte; and the background chatter, minimal dance, the coffee machine and staff. And we’re all here – at the Society Club; and everyone is reading, or writing, or planning. And the girl making the coffees gives you a look.

And you know as you sip your coffee, these moments will pass into eternity and will mean nothing at all very soon. And in the Society Club it could the 50s, or the 60s, or the 70s, but not the 80s, 90s, or now. We exist in a past tense – here, now; and we drown sweetly in Vintage, and Retro, and Nostalgia.

And as the dogs fight in a dance in the middle of the room, you think that the floor tiles should look like a chessboard. And you sit in a brick building that was constructed a hundred years before you were born; and you wonder at the history and stories the walls could share. And my coffee and the words come closer to the end. But the coffee will flow forever, and the words will never stop.

London. You beautiful maze that has a thousand million masks, that is a mirage upon each corner, who holds ghosts in your leather-tough hands. London, whose magic I found, whose feet brushed history, whose mind mingled with royalty. London. My city, my capital, my friend.

Writers’ bio:

Adonis Storr is an English-Australian Poet, Author, Event Organiser, Master of Ceremonies and former Radio show host. He created Tasmania’s ‘Silver Words’ which has hosted an incredible array of literary talent and has been published by the Society Club in London. He toured regularly in Australia including venues like the Cygnet Folk Festival, The Festival of Golden Words and Passionate Tongues Poetry.

January 11, 2015 Transportation Press fiction, Transportation

Meta Gray days

by Stephen N Johnstone (Poet Musing)

I am caged,
locked up for thinking
Thinking without speaking,
I have been tailed.

Too many leaked ideas,
Synaptic exchanges,
I could not refrain,
My mind has been read.

the voices say
a cracked cranium
a pneumatic drill
Unresolved problem

It’s there of course.
Next to Truth.
The truth will out.
It must.
To ease the pressure.

That’s when they nail you,
Aah, We thought so?
Your thinking is banned!
Inside and Out
Understand !

Stay in your cave and behave.
My cave is too small and I am too tall

So I go, round in circles,
Jumping through hoops
waiting for the fuse to detonate.

Dance around the walls.

Talk out loud,
As my mess climbs.

Time to be clear.
Again ?
I am always clear.
Inbetween gray.

What do they want ?

Shakespeare ?
RP English?
A hidden code,
for moral censors ?

Pain is clear,
Angst is clear.
Hurt is clear.
Social Justice is clear.
Being human is clear.
Gray is clear,
The truth is here,
The truth is clear

A cathartic purge does not cross the t’s.

See between lines,
Write as you Speak.

Look between gray.

Good day.

“They are coming to take me away

Stephen.N.Johnstone (Poet Musing) is a professional , who works with Wood,Words,People and Plants in caring,resourceful and creative ways. He likes to stretch boundaries, metaphors, vistas and understanding and is committed to Social Justice and the plight of the disadvantaged. He is always ready to help.

A critical analytical thinker who strives for understanding yet, comic, quirky and funny. Quack.
Facebook name – Poet Musing, also has videos on You Tube.

January 5, 2015 Transportation Press fiction, Transportation

lines from the underground: writers respond to Tony Thorne’s illustrations

COUP

by Darren Lee

He was a Sentinel.

The Sentinels didn’t have names, at least not in the human sense. If he could have picked something for himself he would have settled on “Metro”; a name he kept seeing on the masthead of the free newspapers that the humans liked so much. The word stood out on the front page, bold and constant; he aspired to these attributes.

It was with the newspaper that Metro found a kindred spirit; like the strange, papery object he too spent most of his days loitering on the tube. This was his beat. He sat for most of the day, absorbing the rhythm and rattle of the carriage, observing closely the behaviour patterns of his fellow travellers: aloof, restrained and noncommittal. The humans hid behind their sheets of newspaper, hungrily devouring it with their darting eyes, before throwing them over their shoulders to litter their vacated seats. A fickle bunch, thinks Metro. Ripe for a takeover.

He coughs and a small specked feather escapes from his mouth. He had been briefed about this: nothing

to worry about, Control told him. The disguise had yet to be perfected. The rest of the Bakerloo passengers conform to type and don’t register anything untoward.

Metro is learning the Humans’ reading habit, but he mostly looks at the pictures: glittering people waving as they walk into a cinema, a plastic-faced man holding a battered briefcase aloft, a bloodied child crying amid rubble. As a Sentinel it’s Metro’s job to learn what he can and these abandoned items are good tidbits for his report; all nourishing breadcrumbs for a curious intellect.

On the way to Charing Cross he puzzles over a picture of a human female; he has seen her image before and is aware that she has elevated status within human society. She is showing her posterior to the camera. Metro doesn’t understand this and ponders if the backsides of the rich do not fulfil their original purpose; are they purely ornamental? He makes a note. This is something to brood over later with Control.

There is no danger of Metro going native. Control had warned him about that too: previous expeditions had turned and lost their avian nature. Metro thinks he saw one once in Regent’s Park. She was in the form of an old woman who sobbed openly as she tore up hunks of stale bread which lay uneaten at her feet. Her former brethren watched indifferently from the trees, forbidden to descend and peck at the tainted crumbs.

Metro is quiet and unmoving for most of the journey. It’s best for him to sit still; the disguise chafes his breast and his folded wings regularly cramp. There is some release when he reaches Charing Cross and he settles into the task of piloting his human shell to Trafalgar Square. His steps are tentative at first, but he eventually settles into a pattern, a stroll which syncopates with the bustle around him. Of all human activity, it’s walking that puzzles Metro the most. How did they cope with being
so earthbound all the time? Maybe this was why they distracted themselves so much with the rear ends of the great and good?

Metro bounds up the stairs to Trafalgar Square two at a time. He is showing off, trying to make a grand entrance. The crowds, too absorbed in taking photographs of themselves, fail to notice him. The birds sense his presence straight away; they immediately land and a silence spreads. They all look towards the corner where Metro is waiting.

A fat pigeon descends from Nelson’s hat and circles it’s way down the column, swooping over the silent brood. The pigeon gracefully lands at Metro’s feet.

Metro bends down and offers Control his hand. The pigeon rests upon his palm and is slowly elevated level to Metro’s face. The Sentinel launches into his latest report. After being confined to his disguise it feels good to revert to the old language once again.

Control listens patiently, processing all he can, hoping that among Metro’s theories on celebrity and transportation may lie the seed that grows into the humans’ final destruction. His flying army is ready, stationed on rooftops everywhere throughout the capital, ready to swarm as soon as the chink in the armour is revealed. Until then, the Sentinels arrive and share their knowledge.

Metro finishes his report and goes back to the tube.

Control flies upwards to his perch and defecates on Admiral Nelson. He continues his watch, making sure the world ends not with a bang, or whimper, but a bloody coo.

Tony Thorne’s illustrations, sketched while in London, travelling the iconic underground rail system will feature throughout the upcoming publication Islands and Cities, a collection of short stories by Tasmanian and London based writers. To celebrate this cross-cultural exchange, writers from the publication have each been assigned an illustration by Tony Thorne to respond to, for publication on our website.

December 15, 2014 Transportation Press fiction, Transportation

lines from the underground: writers respond to Tony Thorne’s illustrations

by Ian Green

About the size of a packet of cigarettes, the cheap plastic of the Buddha machine fits snug in my palm. It is simple- a speaker, a volume wheel, a switch, a red LED, a headphone port. A few basic circuit boards sit encased in what was once pristine white. I turn the wheel of the Buddha machine to its full volume and a loop begins to play in my ears. I close my eyes. Thirty seconds of gentle tones expanding and contracting, and then it repeats. I could turn the switch and another loop would come, but I am lucky. My breathing synchronises effortlessly with the ebb and flow of this first loop. I open my eyes.

It’s close enough to winter that the trees past the train windows are gilded with ragged leaves. People are wearing jackets, but not yet scarves or gloves. Everyone is too hot in this carriage. Past the noise of the Buddha machine, I can feel the train vibrate, I can almost hear voices. The loop is ambiguous- every noise that sidles past the headphones is incorporated until the train is breathing with me. Across the aisle men gesticulate and smile and talk. A girl is reading a book. A grey haired man looks pained as he casts his eyes around, oppressed by the weight of life pressed into the carriage. Beyond him in the gloaming I can see lights burning in office buildings.

We stop. We accelerate. We continue. We decelerate. We stop. We accelerate. We continue.

It feels as if there is a larger pattern, as if the loop is changing, as if it draws out – there is not. The change is in the train and in the passengers. This loop is thirty seconds long. The man next to me is reading a free newspaper. I am tired.

We reach my station and I step out onto the platform and the train keeps going, and the loop repeats.

December 5, 2014 Transportation Press fiction, Transportation

Peel Island

by Jamie Collinson

An island in London inspired me to write a book. Well, that and the idea of killing a flatmate I lived with for a while. Perhaps that came first. The killing, then the running away to an island.

The book ended up being set on another island, in a very different part of England. This other is real, too, although I’ve never seen it. I spent a huge amount of time on it though, on the page and in my head.

Other books are set there, too.

The island in London that inspired me is in Victoria Park. It’s the one reserved for wildlife that you see as you enter the park from the Old Ford Road side. Forget the re-sculpted one with the rude red pagoda that you can actually walk on. This was pre-clean up, when the park provided a physical manifestation of the mess inside my head.

On Sunday mornings, in the generic sort of life I once lived in East London, I would pause and regard that island. Hungover and often very guilty, I’d briefly entertain the fantasy of living on it. I’d take a tent, I imagined; wade out at night, live amongst the geese, ducks, herons and trees. I’d wonder how long I’d last.

Afterwards, I’d walk along the canal with a person I would disappoint in every way. I’d make promises to myself, and to that person, that I would fail to keep.

That place still features in my life. Whenever I come back to our ruddy little English island, I live within its orbit. It is different, and I am too.

My desire to kill that flatmate was converted into fiction. I poured all the rage out like hot bile and it cooled into a scene.

A while later, on a street not far from the island in Victoria Park, the man in question asked me what my book was about. I could tell he already knew.

The island that part of the book is set on is in Coniston Water in the Lake District. I think I was wrong to say I’ve never seen it; I must have, once, because I’ve driven past that lake. Can the memory of being a child, sitting in the back of a car and promising to buy it for my grandmother, possibly be real?

I can’t remember it though, not as it truly is. On maps and in pictures it is shaped like a comet, fading out into a rocky tail. Its trees sprout from it like a tuft of pubic hair.

Peel Island.

Wildcat Island, in the other books.

Donald Campbell died beside it. His last words were:

‘Straightening up now on track… I’m getting a lot of bloody row in here… I can’t see anything… I’ve got the bows up… I’m going… oh…’

I was listening to the radio one day, before I wrote the book. The presenter said that Peel Island’s pub had lost its landlord, and needed another one. It was an important tradition that there was a landlord in the pub, and that person was always known as the King of Peel.

Of course, there is no pub on Peel Island. For years I thought I must have imagined the story. Writing this, however, has revealed to me the existence of Piel Island.

Islands within islands within islands.

No one lives on Peel Island, Coniston Water. A character called John tried to for a while, but he didn’t last very long.

transportationbook.com submissions:

Please send us short fiction, between 500-800 words for consideration for the website to transportationalmanac@gmail.com

December 3, 2014 Transportation Press fiction, Transportation

Invisible Women

by Zane Pinner

Bearing dust from distant lands, the petitioners sit on Calvino’s cool slate floor or stroll about his bare prison yard. They tell him stories in many languages, languages mostly incomprehensible to them – languages known only to Calvino.

The faintest hint of temple incense from the gust of an envoy’s cape describes, to the great seer, the piety of some distant city where unclothed skin is frowned upon and the church bells ring in exacting unison on every turn of the hour. The sunburned eyelids of a new guard illustrate an island village where drunks sleep on the beach wrapped around their brown guitars, where wild boars are cooked over fires built from dried banana leaves. The guarded silences of a dark pilgrim recount, to the great artist, the oft-remembered blows of leather and metal endured in a bonded childhood and the sound of waves slapping against the side of an airless hull.

From this opaque, dense dialogue, Calvino feeds his gift – his vision – and does not go mad amongst the flat grey walls of his prison. But while he is grateful to his patrons for the emissaries they send, grateful for the pilgrims who simply want to meet him, it is not enough.

In sentencing Calvino to a lifetime of remote isolation, the Emperor’s instructions were simple and explicit: no female visitors.

Accordingly, it has been many years since the visionary has known company of the fairer sex. While his extraordinary imagination helped him stave off loneliness for many years, the memory of sweetness eventually turned stale. Now the great lover has almost forgotten the embrace of a woman. It sickens him to think that he might go to his unmarked grave without any memory of that sweetness.

His sentence was one of life. His sentence is almost spent. He turns his great vision to the afterlife – and finds himself alone. It is too much to bear. His throat raw, Calvino considers the insignificant noise of his spirit amongst the echoes of time – a minor note, an anguished quaver.

It is during such a moment that the Marquis first lays eyes on the venerated artist.

The ingenious foreigner spent many months searching for the desert routes that would lead him to the prison. A gypsy charmed with luck and wit, the Marquis has travelled hard to come and bid for the great artist’s lucrative affection. Now that he stands in this legendary cell, a situation that so many throughout the world might dream themselves in, he would have Calvino’s attention.

The Marquis perceives, at a glance, the cause of the great artist’s pain. For the singular purpose of distracting of the revered seer from his brooding, the Marquis begins to describe women encountered on his most recent journey.

In a universal language of sighs and winks, yawns and ovation, the emissary summons the women one by one to Calvino’s hankering imagination.

The effervescent change that overtakes the Marquis’s manner as he describes each woman, the degree of lust in his eye and vigor in his hands, tells the great artist more than his lilting tongue alone ever could. Through gestures both subtle and ostensive, through the dancing motion of his shoulders and the delicate rolls of his tongue, the Marquis conjures spirits for Calvino to apprehend.

***

Sophronia uses skin as a costume and joins the parade. With all eyes on her, she twists unselfconsciously and gasps for air, her costume livid. Blood barrels through languid veins, sweat beads down the arc of her spine and she pulls the hair out of her face, eyes flashing, gasping the sulfuric fire of a she-devil.

***

Penthesilia watches the traffic from between iron bars. White-knuckled fists grip the wooden arms of her chair while she counts the pieces of dust on her tongue.

There is water in this old woman’s dreams. She can swim further than a scream can carry, swim until the coldness is above her head, filling her lungs, filling her eyes. She is overjoyed at the dark water drifting past her ankles. Her frozen knuckles are whiter than the belly-up fish that slowly float by.

***

Despira displays one face to the newcomer and a different one to he that is leaving.

The newcomer sees stability, a smile that welcomes his fingers, warmth that smells of fire-baked custards and cooing infants, sturdy shoulders and hips ready to care for boy and man alike.

He that is leaving sees in her entropy, knuckles splayed over red knees, burnt iron brandished in cotton gloves, a gentle storm in an iron cup.

Despira straddles borders and is made of glass.

November 26, 2014 Transportation Press fiction, Transportation

Bulbowen

by Fiona Lohrbaecher

The giant Bulbowen was as high as the sky and as old as the hills. For him years were as seconds, centuries as minutes, millenia as hours. When he walked the earth shook and when it rained his footprints filled with water to make lakes.

One day, after years of walking, Bulbowen grew tired. He had walked from one side of the earth to another and was weary. He sat down, yawning and stretching. He lay down on his back and closed his eyes. The warm summer breeze caressed his eyelids and whispered lullabies in his ears, weaving a warm blanket of sleep around him. For years Bulbowen slept. For centuries he slumbered. And as he slept the wind blew dust across him. Year upon year, layer upon layer, the dust grew thicker and thicker, turning into soil. Birds dropped seeds on Bulbowen and, watered to life by the gentle rain, plants grew, spreading out their roots to hold the soil in place.

Millenia passed and, eventually, people came to the area. They noticed the shape of the mountain; its outline resembling the silhouette of a sleeping giant. They named the mountain Bulbowen, after the great giant of ancient legend.

The first people hunted on Bulbowen’s slopes, sleeping under trees or in bark shelters, moving on when the weather grew cold. After many centuries they started building houses and farming in the flat land around the mountain. A village grew up. Children went to school. People were born, grew old and died, all in Bulbowen’s shadow. They took their recreation on the mountain, walking in its cool forests, skiing in winter and mountain climbing, although nobody ever climbed the highest peak, known as Bulbowen’s nose. Legend promised disaster to anyone that tried.

Then, one day, the earth began to move. The first tremors were small, barely discernible. Windows rattled, crockery clattered, pebbles danced on the ground. The quakes increased in intensity. Buildings shook, trees bent and swayed in an eerie dance. The people were frightened. They ran out of their houses, workshops and schools. The ground was moving violently beneath their feet now. Boulders bounced down the side of the mountain and trees slid down in flurries of earth. People grabbed their most treasured possessions and ran for their lives, across the plain, away from the mountain but still the rocks bounced around them and the tremors could be felt for miles. They ran and did not stop running until they were sure they were quite, quite safe.

The mountain shook and heaved. Every tree toppled and tobogganed down its slopes. Great landslides were stripping the mountainsides bare. Slowly, slowly the mountain changed shape. It seemed to spread out for miles, then great tranches of land stretched up to the sky. The top half of the mountain rose skywards as the giant Bulbowen rose to a sitting position, stretching and yawning. He looked around him in mild surprise at the ruined houses, the fallen trees, that lay around him. Then he rose to his feet, shook the last remnants of soil from his hair and beard and continued his walk.

When the people returned to rebuild their ruined houses they found a vast new lake where their mountain had been. A new layer of fertile soil was spread across their farmland and hundreds of fallen trees lay scattered around to be used for the rebuilding. So the people changed from skiing to water-skiing, and their recreation pursuits all centered on the lake. They swam, fished, boated and wind-surfed in the vast body of water they called Bulbowen’s Bath.

transportationbook.com submissions:

Please send us short fiction, between 500-800 words for consideration for the website to transportationalmanac@gmail.com

November 20, 2014 Transportation Press fiction, Transportation

Slight delays on all services

by Ian Green

“Sfuloo?”

“Nah, Rose, listen- it’s Cthulhu. CUH-THOO-LOO, yeah?”

Rose frowned and kicked at a pebble with her battered hi-tops.

“And you reckon it’s him in the underground?”

They were down a side street south of Waterloo station, far from picturesque skylines. The surrounding warehouses loomed in the tarnished glare of sodium streetlamps.

“Not IN,” Keith said, smiling, “UNDER. A three hundred metre tall octopus-elephant-beast-god-monster. You saw the badges, yeah? Something’s down there, and I reckon these guys are keeping him asleep. ‘Cos if he comes up it’s like end of the world-Armageddon Ragnarok APOCALYPSE level stuff, right?”

Rose smiled. She had seen the badges. They had spent days riding the underground checking members of staff. Each wore a little pin on their chest, a single point the size of a button with eight lines curving out from it. Most were silver, some gold. Keith swore he saw a jet black one on a guy at Marble Arch, but Rose hadn’t seen that. Sat in Keith’s flat, it all seemed fun, like signalling saucers from Primrose Hill, or trying to sneak cameras on tours of masonic halls.

Keith stopped in front of an anonymous steel door and consulted a battered A to Z.

“This is it,” he said. Rose leaned over his shoulder and looked at the map.

“Jubilee, Circle, District, Victoria, Northern,” Rose incanted. They had spent hours poring over maps of ley lines drawn by pagans. When you overlaid the ancient lines of power and the underground map, well… Rose was the one who noticed the nexus; one point circumscribed by the Jubilee, Circle, District, Victoria, and Northern lines- the point just south of Waterloo.

“The deepest point of the London underground,” Keith had said, and they had grinned.

“What do you think is down there?” Rose asked. Keith’s eyes sparked.

“I’ve got my ideas. I need to check some sources. I’ll tell you when we go down…”

This was what they did for fun- Rose didn’t drink, not after seeing her dad drink. Keith wasn’t good with people. So they followed clues, they tramped across the city. It filled time, it was fun, and it hurt no-one. They had spent a month tracking the grave of the Hampstead vampire and had ended up lighting some candles and leaving garlic and crosses over their top suspect’s tombstone. They had spent weeks conspiring to steal the London Stone, before Keith decided it was too dangerous— if the Stone left London, the city would fall. This was the way it had been, for years now. Rose wanted was to be part of something bigger- Keith helped her.

The tube strike was a blessing. No trains to worry about, no people, no electrified lines. The door was unlocked, swinging open onto darkness at Keith’s touch. He grinned at Rose and held a finger to his lips and they began the descent.

Seventy feet down and two hundred feet south they heard the footsteps. Keith grabbed Rose and pulled her tight to the wall and they turned off their head torches.

Silence.

Footsteps.

“Transport police— stop right there!”

Suddenly there were torch beams crisscrossing their paths, blinding their eyes. Rose tripped on a railway sleeper and fell, her face and hands landing in rough gravel inches from a rail. Would that rail be electric? She didn’t know. She was breathing so hard she thought she might burst. She could hear Keith scuffling behind her. She stared at the rail until she was roughly picked up.

“What’re you up to?” asked one, whilst another leafed through Keith’s A to Z. He stopped on a page and showed it to a few of the others. They stared at Keith and Rose then, and their faces hardened.

The officers walked them further down the tunnel and refused to be drawn out by pleading or questions or apologies. Finally they came to an opening, an arched vault where a dozen lines crossed.

Keith saw it first, and began to scream, swearing, shouting, struggling. Between the tracks there was hole— darkness thicker than ink, an onyx maw. An absence of light— a presence of darkness. Not brick or stone or mud— something organic. Rose’s eyes widened and she looked around for salvation. She saw the pin on the lapel of the British transport police officer holding Keith— a solid black point with eight curved lines spreading from its centre. Rose stared at it and then locked eyes with the officer.

“What’s down there? Sfuloo?” she heard her voice ask. Keith had stopped screaming, had started crying. The officers forced them to the precipice. Rose couldn’t stop herself from looking- blackness and darkness and endless depth and something else far below.

Movement.

The man holding her gave her shoulder a squeeze.

“Sorry love,” he said. He pushed, and Rose tumbled into the black, toward something bigger.

You can read, Water Birds, by Ian Green in the upcoming publication from Transportation Press, Islands and Cities, for updates on the release subscribe to our newsletter.

Writers’ Bio:

Ian Green is a writer from Northern Scotland. His short fiction has been performed at Liars’ League London, LitCrawl London, the Literary Kitchen Festival, and published in OpenPen London magazine. His work can also be heard on The Wireless Reader literary podcast and will feature in the upcoming short story anthologies Broken Worlds by Almond Press. His story Audiophile was a winner of the BBC Opening Lines competition 2014 and was produced and broadcast by Radio 4.