*
Radio Girl
All lines in this poem were taken from articles and interviews published after the death of Dorothy Young, Houdini's stage assistant, aged 103 (March, 2011).
I was hidden under a cloth inside the wireless box.
It was six feet by six feet.
He never locked me in a cabinet, tied a rope around
my body or tried to cut me out of a box, like some of the others.
Some had bruises on their bodies and rope burns around their wrists.
Me, all I was ever asked to do was dance.
Waiting under the cloth was exciting; I was seventeen years old.
Radio Girl was my first number.
He opened the radio: front, back, top; lifted out the working parts–
showed there was nothing there - no girl, no dancer, nothing but electrics.
After he closed the radio, I heard it. "Now we'll tune in...
Miss Dorothy Young doing the Charleston..."
I popped one foot out of the radio, then the other.
I kicked my feet together, jumped up and curtsied.
Then Houdini would take me by the waist and lift me down.
And I would go into a Charleston.
It was only a year like this, just a year of being in his show.
He'd say: "I'm going to put her in the dark."
My other number was Slave Girl; that came later in the night.
The big stage was empty and there was just a pole in the middle of it.
I came out with my hands tied behind me, wearing a little skimpy burlap costume.
The undergarments were always made of silk; they felt good against my skin.
He'd say, "She's been a naughty girl, so I have to tie her up."
So he tied me to the pole from my throat down to my ankles.
And then: "She has been very naughty, so we'll have to put her in darkness."
He would press a button, and the curtain would fall to the floor.
I would come out in a gorgeous butterfly costume on my toes
and do a ballet number.
He wanted to disappear, I think. I don't mean it as a pun.
Who really knows?
The one thing I know for sure is that he was in charge.
I would disappear on cue; then emerge, slowly, gracefully.
I would hide, then step out and dance.
Radio Girl, Slave Girl, whatever he wanted.
I was lucky to be a part of it.
It was beautiful.
Dan Coxon
Image by Denis Tarantola.
Among The Pines
The scream comes from outside. A coalescence of the darkness and the solitude. Janie says it's a coyote, maybe a wolverine. We trust her. It swells, and fades, and rises again for almost an hour, circling us. "Just a coyote," she says between spoonfuls of watermelon sorbet, delicately whorled shavings of candied Mexican lime peel. "Just a coyote." We drink wine and pretend to be at ease.
-
The retreat is Margot's idea. Seven days in a luxury cabin, the days spent writing and meditating, the evenings a bacchanalia of wine and fine dining. I'm recently out of a bad relationship and the idea sounds like therapy. Something to purge my poisoned soul. I have a history of messy breakups. We bring supplies with us, raiding the delicatessens and artisanal bakeries before we abandon civilisation. No campfires, no barbecues. Three cars piled high with Italian Gorgonzola, Spanish ham, French pâté. We will eat, we will write. We can return home a week later refreshed and fattened, gorged on poetry and decadence. "Lord Byron would love it," Chris joked. I remember laughing too hard as we packed the cars.
The cabin belongs to Janie's uncle, a New York financier who rarely makes it out West anymore. He suffered a breakdown four years ago. Hospitalised for two months, still wearing the scars in two jagged lines along the insides of his wrists. The cabin was his place of retreat. Surrounded by pines and hemlock, their tops crooked and cracked, their roots buried in decades of silent history. Only one road leads there, twelve miles of dirt track culminating in four bedrooms, three bathrooms, a fully fitted luxury kitchen. A partially-stocked wine cellar. Spa baths and open gas fires. It should have been easy to forget the seclusion.
Janie arrived a day before the rest of us, cleaning the dust from the countertops, releasing the comforters from their plastic wraps. We follow her lead. Our two cars hopscotch in convoy for five hours, watching the traffic dwindle around us. Through the windows I can see the forests rising as we head inland, their trunks thickening, the houses shrinking in their shadows. With one eye on my watch I count eleven minutes between gas stations, then twenty-two. By the time we crawl to a stop in front of the cabin, the sun bleeding low and heavy between the trees, it has been almost an hour. The last sign of civilisation was a shack twelve miles back, little more than a shed with a carport tacked on as an afterthought. As we drove past I saw the roof through its windows, as if something massive had crushed it underfoot, caving it into the interior.
Janie steps onto the porch as I unfold myself from Curt's car, my legs bloodless and numb. She holds an open bottle. Behind her we can see candles flickering on cut glass, a table set for five.
"Welcome to paradise. Abandon all cares, ye who enter here."
-
The screaming begins early, piercing the half-darkness. It's Curt who calls her on it. It feels close. In the silences unseen leaves rustle like static.
"That's no coyote, Janie. I know you know these woods better than us. But I've heard coyotes before. They don't sound like that."
She washes the glasses and the knives as we speak, the dishwasher gurgling beneath the countertop. Margot and Chris are in one of the two lounges, battling their way through the final throes of a game of Scrabble. It seems ridiculous to be arguing in the midst of such comfort. But we all feel it. The uncertainty, the fear. Something out there is in pain.
"Maybe not a coyote then," Janie says, her hands beneath the suds. "But you know it's just an animal, right? These woods, they're home to all kinds of critters. It's just the sound of the wildlife. Doing what it does. Being wild."
"Damned creepy is what it is. Did the rest of you sleep through it last night?"
Neither of us speak. I'd heard someone opening the fridge door in the small hours of the morning, while the noise continued to circle outside. We all know that nobody feels at home. We're city folk, acclimated to sirens and gunshots, the sound of engines growling under street lights. I almost wish for flashing lights outside, the comforting presence of badges and shoulder holsters. Here, the air smells of dirt and rotting wood.
"If it's not a coyote, it's an owl. I've heard it can be pretty unnerving if you haven't heard one screech before. Just pour yourself another glass. You'll sleep better, I promise. What could be more relaxing than this?"
Curt relents, eventually. We're supposed to be on vacation. But lying in the dark, a digital clock casting a green glow over unfamiliar sheets, I replay the argument in my head. Curt leaning over the counter. Janie with her hands beneath the water. There's an air of menace, as if her hands are holding something down, pushing it deeper, deeper, until it drowns. I imagine her slicing at her wrists beneath the surface. The
water frothing red.
A scream cuts the silence, so close it could almost be in the room with me. So close it might be in my head.
-
I slip into Margot's bedroom while the others eat breakfast. It's the morning of our third day. We once had a thing, Margot and I. We dated for two weeks. She wouldn't return my calls for almost six months after that. Even now she avoids being alone in a room with me.
The small table in the corner acts as her desk, its surface scratched and gouged as if someone has used it as a chopping board. The varnish almost entirely worn away. There's a stack of paperbacks, and two identical pens, lined up alongside a notebook. When I turn back its black leather cover the pages inside are blank. I don't know what I expected. Not this. Something, but not this.
I mention nothing when I join them at the breakfast table. But I keep an eye on Margot as I chew my alder-smoked bacon.
-
Curt suggests a trek through the woods. Janie excuses herself, as he knew she would. She's deeply entrenched in a biography of Shelley, there's no way she's surfacing now. He gives me a look as he asks me to join him. I don't know what to make of it. I agree anyway. Chris and Margot come too. They've grown close while we've been away. To ask one is to ask the other.
Once we're outside Curt motions for me to stay back, to let the lovebirds push on ahead. He whispers beneath the murmur of the pines.
"I thought it was about time we got to the bottom of all this. Don't you think? Those screams at night. We all know there's something out here. I want to know what. Are you in?"
I nod. I've barely slept for three nights. Last night I thought I heard two cars pulling up outside, despite there not being a living soul for miles. I can feel my eyeball ticking in my socket sometimes. I'm wired, running on caffeine and adrenaline.
"Good. Keep your eyes peeled for anything weird. Whatever it is, it has to leave a track, or a mark, or something. It's best we find it, before it drives us all crazy."
The path we follow is barely a path at all, nothing more than an animal trail between the trunks and brambles. As if the forest has decided to part a little, to lean back and let us in. I smell something that may be animal musk, or fungus on a tree stump, or maybe the smell of my own unwashed body. I always kept myself scrupulously clean when we were in the city, but it occurs to me that I've only showered once since coming here. It may only have been days since we arrived, but those days stretch behind us like an oily river, deep and uncharted.
I'm not sure when I break away from the group. We're only loosely following the same path, but without warning I find myself alone. I stand still, close my eyes. Let my ears roam the woods around me. There's a constant whisper of sounds, the mutterings of breeze and branches and desiccated leaves, but nothing human. I have lost them, or they have lost me.
It's only by chance that I stumble across the camp. I'm following a dry streambed, hoping that it will somehow lead me home. I've already marked ten trees with the Sharpie I had in my bag, drawing crude arrows on their bark to show the way I've come. It was meant to warn me if I accidentally doubled back. Instead they are swallowed by the woods. It occurs to me that I might have passed within ten feet of them without knowing. In a fit of frustration I throw the pen into a dense thicket of nettles and weeds.
It's as I stumble after it that I see the clearing. The trees stand back and allow the light to filter down, its dappled spots playing over the ashes of a fire, a pile of rusted cans. Then I see the branches stacked up against a fallen trunk, their lattice interwoven with strips of torn plastic, the remnants of old shopping bags. A makeshift roof to keep out the rain. A home of sorts built up from the dirt.
"Hello?"
My voice dies among the undergrowth but it reaches far enough, and when I hear nothing in reply I step into the open. The camp changes as I draw closer. The fire is scattered and cold, weeds starting to push up through the blackened earth. The cans are fused together into a single mass. Even the hut is falling apart, the plastic bags gradually disentangling themselves from the branches. There are holes large enough to push a fist through. Large enough to let the wild back in. I ignore the smell that lurks just beyond the camp, a sweet stink of human decay. Instead I stare at the large black arrow drawn on one of the trunks, pointing past the fire, past the lean-to, into the blackness of forest beyond.
My Sharpie lies at the base of the pile of cans. I pick it up and tuck it into my backpack. Then I turn and push my way back through the weeds.
-
The others berate me for wandering off, but when I tell them about the campsite they look confused.
"Dude," Curt says, "we only lost you for a few minutes. Five minutes, max. How lost did you get?"
Margot laughs, but her eyes glance across at Chris. When she sees me watching they drop to the floor.
Over a dinner of smoked paprika-rubbed salmon and Israeli couscous Janie explains that her uncle used to have the family to stay during the holidays. The kids would sometimes spend the nights camping out by the creek. That must have been what I found, she says. There's no one else around here. They never realised it at the time, but one of the adults would spend the night nearby too, watching over them. There were bears, after all. Sometimes wolves. There are probably camps spread throughout the woods, marking those old family gatherings. Nothing more sinister than that.
As for the screams, Curt has found a book on owls on one of the shelves. The Barking Owl has often been reported to sound like a woman screaming, he says. Like someone in pain. Margot mentions glimpsing what she thought was an owl in the trees and everyone relaxes.
"I told you," Janie says. "Not a coyote, but I was close. The call of the wild. Freaks out us city folk every time."
They smile and laugh, but something inside me shivers. The screams I heard were nothing like a woman.
-
I make no attempt to sleep that night. I still turn out the lights, but my eyes stay open. The screams are never-ending now, a wail that rises and falls but never stops, a siren that could tear down walls. It's not out there any longer. My eardrums rattle from the inside out. I don't know if they can hear it, and I will not ask. They will call me crazy again.
I wait for an hour, until I'm certain they're asleep. Then I creep out into the blackness of the cabin. As quietly as I can, I lift the two biggest knives from their drawer, sliding them into my backpack. I take a can opener too, and as many cans as I can carry. Beans, tuna, corn. Who knows how long I'll be gone. The door creaks as I step outside, but if anyone hears me they do not rouse. When I turn back to look at it the cabin seems smaller than before. Little more than a rock among the tree roots. It's not hard to imagine a time when it wasn't there, or a time to come when it will have worn back down to sand and stone. I watch it until the screaming becomes too loud to bear.
There's no way to tell where I'm going. The moon is thin, and through the canopy of trees there's barely enough light to see my feet. I watch them as I tread lightly over the brambles and fallen branches. I let my ears guide me, the screams pulling me onwards like a bloody trail through the trees. They are so loud now that I fear I may go deaf. I feel sick and giddy, swaying in place.
Then they stop. Suddenly, without warning. The last scream I heard was directly above me. I close my eyes, waiting for something to drop. There's the crack of a breaking twig, the rank warmth of human breath on my fa
ce. I wait until I can bear it no longer. Then I open my eyelids and look into my own face, aged but unmistakable. My own eyes, the whites bloodshot and rubbed raw, my cheeks sunken and streaked with dirt beneath the fields of stubble. My mouth open in voiceless agony. And without speaking I turn and lead myself deeper into the trees.
Helen Addy
Image by Jennifer Fenton.
The Inhabited Shell
In display tanks lit an impossible blue,
divers give tentative thumbs-up,
dogfish are stroked and fed.
On the bench, a couple hissing in Italian,
cast their tanned arms again
and again into the gloom.
Suddenly, a gasp of English -
What do you want?
That.
She spits and points at my heavy bump,
then rises, heels treacherous on the stairs.
He whispers an apology and follows her,
a veil of sweat on the back of his neck.
A hammerhead can hold
a manta ray down with its skull
and bite it to pieces.
Moon jellyfish float like drowned brides
in a foreign harbour.
I flinch electricity,
my baby wheels in her water,
she won't be upturned yet.
*
Displacement
The hooded figure
at the back door,
is a pile of cardboard boxes.
His body consists of shadow,
pockets of dark
waiting for the items
he'll carry elsewhere.
When the door opens,
he shakes his head,
light furrowing his brow,
his empty eyes lowering,
not meeting mine.
*
The Purple, False Fingernail
On wet days, it floats in a puddle,
spinning with the wind,
bubbles nestling in a ragged crack
down its middle.
In dry weather, it rests on the path,
the brightest colour anywhere.
I dream the fingernail
is tapping on my shoulder,
its brittle surface softening into wings.
It hovers beside my face,
whipping the air into a word
I can almost hear.
Contributors
Image by "Martin_SS".
Paul Ebbs is a writer of children's fiction (under a pseudonym) and screenplays for television. He has worked on Casualty, The Bill, EastEnders and Doctors. He has written comedy for Radio 4 and Doctor Who fiction for the BBC and other media.
Leo Hunt is a student of the Creative Writing program at UEA. His previously published work took the form of messages written in blood on the walls of his hometown, for which he received national media attention and a brief custodial sentence. Read more of his work here: [https://coldstarharbor.tumblr.com/]
Simon Collings has been writing for thirty-five years - stories, reviews, poems, journalism. He has work online and in various papers and magazines. He lives in Oxford, and works for an organisation that advises renewable energy businesses in Africa. Read more at: [https://simoncollings.wordpress.com/].
Michael Hemmingson's collection, Pictures Of Houses With Water Damage, is available from Black Lawrence Press. Other books include Hard Cold Whisper (Black Mask), Wild Turkey (Forge) and The Comfort Of Women (Blue Moon).
CJ Opperthauser currently lives and teaches in Cincinnati. His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in dislocate, Scapegoat Review, and Midwestern Gothic. He blogs at [https://thicketsandthings.tumblr.com/].
Amy Schreibman Walter is the author of the chapbook Coney Island And Other Places, published in January 2013 by Lulu Press. Her poems have appeared in various online and in print journals, including Metazen and Elimae. She lives in London, England.
Dan Coxon is the author of Ka Mate: Travels In New Zealand, and the Non-Fiction editor for [https://www.litro.co.uk/]. His writing appears in Salon, Gutter, The Weeklings, Spartan, and Daddy Cool. Find more of his work at [https://www.dancoxon.com/], or follow him on Twitter: [https://twitter.com/DanCoxonAuthor].
Helen Addy is from Forres, in Morayshire. She has been previously published in BUGGED, Snakeskin, From Glasgow To Saturn, Shetland Libraries' Bards In The Bog project, Indigo Dreams' Heart Shoots, and has a poem forthcoming in The Lumen. She is currently working on a first pamphlet.
Sarah Katharina Kayß is winner of the manuscript-award of the German Writers Association for her poetry and essay collection Ich Mag Die Welt So Wie Sie Ist (2013). She edits the bilingual literature magazine The Transnational and works on her doctorate at King's College London.
Supporters
This issue of Neon was made possible by the kind support of:
Saffron Flynn
Lindsey Gordon
Andrew Ritchie
Rebecca Cook
Paul Ebbs
John Irvine
JV Birch
Marcella O'Connor
Dimitrije Medenica
Kelcey Wells
koreangrindhouse.blogspot.com
Alison Mattu
Dennis Bensie
Sherlock's Daughter
John Ciarmello
Lisa Haag
www.writeoutloud.net
Jo Day
Victoria Gemmell
Wenonah Lyon
Clarice Mersi
Dr James-Dunbar
Sam Nicholls
CC Russell
Jennifer Fellguth
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