Postcard from... Waterford

By Paul Scraton:

In Waterford, the shops were doing a busy trade in the run-up to Easter. Dunnes Stores was heaving with people, their trolleys piled high ahead of the holiday weekend. Chocolate eggs and multipack bags of crisps. Beer and wine. Meat for the barbecue, for the weather forecast said there was a chance it might be fine.

A few steps away, there was one shopfront that had nothing to offer the people of the city. P. Larkin was closed, and looked to have been for a long time. The door was locked. The display shelves in the window were empty. Looking inside, it was possible to see an old cash register and a jacket hanging behind a door. A calendar turned to a month that was long gone. Meat hooks and refrigeration units told us that this had once been a butcher’s shop. But there was nothing for the barbecue here.

Someone had pinned photographs to the inside of the window. Pictures of a different time, in a different era. A man in a white jacket, standing in the doorway, meat hanging in the windows. So time had passed. The man was gone. The shop had closed. This is not an unusual story. In towns and cities across Ireland and beyond, local independent shops struggle in the face of supermarkets. But there was another story here, something altogether more intriguing.

A newspaper article, itself a decade old, weather-faded but legible, filled in the details. The last piece of meat that had been sold from behind the counter left the premises in 1983. Michael Griffin, who had lived at this location on Blackfrairs since he was born, had decided to stop trading as a butcher with Ireland’s accession to the European Union as he felt it was no longer possible to get the same quality of meat.

“I couldn’t get the quality cattle that I wanted so I stopped selling,” Griffin explained to the reporter from the Waterford News. And yet, despite having effectively shut down his business, he continued to open the shop each day, sitting just inside the door and welcoming those who still popped by to say hello or have a chat. By the time the reporter came to visit, it had been around thirty years since he’d hung up his white butcher’s jacket. 

“The good old days are gone and there’s no going back now” Griffin said. “People wonder why they have to put an Oxo and Bisto in their meat to make it taste of something… People will look back and see how right I am.”

We stood outside and read the article, looking once more beyond the dusty window to see what clues there might be to what happened next. There was no further information to the story, nothing to fill in the gaps of the last ten years. One day, Number 2 Blackfriars will be renovated. When the shop re-opens there will be something to sell. But hopefully there’s still someone around who remembers the quirky story of the butcher’s shop without any meat, and the thirty-odd years when all that was on offer was a bit of conversation. 

***
Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place.

Plum Cove

By Emma Johnson Tarp:

The beach is smaller than I remember and it’s high tide and the water is so blue it stings my eyes, the back of my nose, the back of my throat and there, I see them:

Three boys climbing out on the big rock, their hands finding the same cracks, cracks they know on instinct, like breathing, from summers and summers of swimming-climbing-jumping, summers of returning here just as I return here now but not like that at all because I don’t know those cracks and it stings in my eyes and nose and throat that I don’t and look—

They pull their small, hard bodies up and out of the seaweed,

One tall and dark, too big for his trunks—

One compact, a square all-over—

One slight with a shock of blonde hair that glows against his sun-brown skin—

And they jump into the water and they don’t come back up 

Until 30 years later when they return with me for the first time and we will wade through the seaweed together, my blue-white skin on edge from it all and their skin now lined, lungs lined, with sand and sun from endless summers right here and one that never really did end at Desert Shield and they will find the cracks— cracks they know on instinct, like breathing— and they will stare at their hands like they are magical instruments then lay them on me, pulling me up to join them.

***

Emma Johnson Tarp writes stories about devotion, bodies, and liminal space. She studied literature and religion at William & Mary and lives in Minneapolis with her husband and two rebel-hearted cats.

Podcast: The Adventure Podcast

By Paul Scraton:

There are many ways to have an adventure. For some of us, it means climbing to the top of a mountain or exploring a remote island. For others it means pushing ourselves to our physical and mental limits. For yet others, it means challenging our perspectives or our beliefs through learning and discovery, by searching out the stories of people and places, and sharing them with others. All of these forms of adventure are the subject of The Adventure Podcast, a series of conversations hosted by the filmmaker Matt Pycroft.

Many of the interviews are with people who might fit your preconception of what an “adventurer” is. These are men and women who have done things that are barely imaginable to most of us, people who have travelled to extreme places. They are mountaineers who have summited K2 or crossed Antarctica, people who have climbed trees in the Amazon or trekked the desert. I discovered The Adventure Podcast through the edition featuring Chris Bonington, one of the world’s greatest mountaineers. The next I listened to featured Dee Caffari, the first woman to sail solo, non-stop around the world in both directions. These are the type of people whose stories have long fascinated me, precisely because they set out do those very things I would never be able to do myself.

As I listened on, getting deeper into the archive – 62 editions at the time of writing – I saw that Pycroft’s understanding of adventure was as broad as the range of guests he invited to speak to him. In a two-part interview, Sophy Roberts spoke eloquently about how, over the course of six trips and many thousands of miles, she gathered the material to write her book The Lost Pianos of Siberia. I listened to the absolutely fascinating tale of Emma Crone as she tracked down the father and son who were known as the ‘last poachers’ in England – and a reminder that distance, when it comes to adventure and discovery, can be as much a matter of time, place, culture and class as it is miles or kilometres. And I found myself stopping on a walk to scribble down some notes as Michael Turek reflected on how a deep personal connection to place informed his photography, and why photographs are perhaps the closest thing we have to time travel. 

Recent editions of the podcast have included Ed Caesar, a writer of long-form essays that has taken him to the DR Congo, a Russian prison camp and on frequent deep explorations of libraries and archives in search of stories, and Cal Flyn, whose book Islands of the Abandonment led her to all manner of abandoned places around the world and discussion that included the appeal of ruins and the dangers of Ruinenlust, the many conceptions of re-wilding, and why places and their stories speak to us and can really matter. 

What all these editions and conversations have in common is that Matt Pycroft has found conversation partners who have not only done extraordinary things, but people who have thought long and hard about the places they inhabit, whether for a short period or a long while, and who have something truly interesting and thought-provoking to say. And they have found, in Pycroft, an interviewer who is skilled in asking the right questions, who knows when to challenge or discuss, but who also knows – crucially – when to stay quiet and let his guest tell the story at their own pace and the way that works most naturally for them. The result is a podcast that is a form of exploration and discovery in its own right, especially for us – the listeners. Highly recommended. 

The Adventure Podcast website
Instagram
Links to podcast feeds

The Dangerous Beach

By Fiona M Jones:

This is the biggest beach I have ever seen. We have driven miles along narrow winding roads, pausing to squeeze past the occasional vehicle coming the other way. We have parked by Goswick Golf Club and followed a path over two lines of dunes, and suddenly we are on flat sand. 

Sand and sand and sand, miles of it, and somewhere in the distance the North Sea. We head towards it. If a piece had fallen off the coast of Norway a few hours ago, a tsunami would be on its way. We’d run and run and never make it. We would DIE, I tell my niece and nephew, widening my eyes to scare them, but their father assures them there’s no tsunami forecast. I try again as we walk uphill ever so slightly: this would be a sandbar we’re standing on now. When the tide sweeps in on a stormy day you can find yourself surrounded, cut off from land. You would DROWN in the swirling grey tide as you struggle for land and find yourself only going deeper. The tide is actually still going out, someone observes, and my nephew and niece settle down to digging drainage channels and river systems in the waterlogged sand near the water’s edge. One of my sons wades in the water, looking for jellyfish, but all he finds is a partially-deflated helium balloon dropped out of air, washed up by water. It looks like a Portuguese man-o’-war jellyfish. Which can, of course, KILL you, probably with fear, if you were listening to the wisdom of your Aunty Fii, but nobody is. 

In the sand I hollow out five oversized toe-holes and follow up with an enormous artificial sole-indentation: a giant’s footprint. An imaginary monster has walked out of the sea. It will probably EAT you. The longsuffering niece and nephew help to smooth the work of my hands until it looks almost plausible. My son takes out his phone to record the monstrous footprint. We build little hills of sand, mountains standing between mini-rivers running down to the sea. This sand we’re building mountains with is the accumulated product of eroded mountains, I tell the children, who are growing in skepticism by the minute. It’s time to head homeward, exploring driftwood and flotsam on the way. The nephew forms an emotional attachment to an abandoned buoy the size of a space-hopper. Can he take it home? Will it fit through the door of his home if he does? Will there be enough room to live there if he gets it indoors? In the end he must content himself with the scrap of rope that we cut off the buoy, fatally blunting Aunty Fii’s scissors in the process. 

On the way back between the dunes, somebody stops to read the sign we passed earlier, half-obscured by dune-grasses. QUICKSAND, it tells us. And don’t touch any metal objects left over from the military training operations of yesteryear. Because they’ll EXPLODE. 

Didn’t I tell you this was a dangerous place? 

***

Fiona M Jones is a creative writer living in Scotland. She writes short/flash/micro fiction, CNF and occasionally poetry. Her published work is visible through @FiiJ20 on Facebook, Twitter and Thinkerbeat.

Beautiful Place: A novel by Amanthi Harris

We are extremely pleased to present an extract from the new novel BEAUTIFUL PLACE by Amanthi Harris. Set in Sri Lanka, this is a novel about leaving and losing home and making family, about being oppressed and angry and wanting a better life. 

‘In quiet distilled prose, Amanthi Harris takes a moment of change we all experience and brings it into poignant, evocative focus. Her story resonates like a personal and deeply felt memory.’ —Preti Taneja

***

The van followed the bay, passing through villages of houses with dark empty porches. Light shone deep inside in rooms where families had gathered to gossip and tease and worry and scold away the last hours of the night. Soon the van left the villages behind and the sea came nearer, blackly glistening past coconut groves of slanting trees silvery in moonlight. The van stopped at the edge of a grove and they stepped out to the roar of sea and cold rushing winds. Ria put on her jumper. High above her, the coconut trees swayed and bowed against a blue-black sky, the stars a dusty spray of sparkling white. 

“I’ll come back in two hours,” the driver said and gave Louis his card. “Hope you see some turtles.” 

“But where are you going?” 

“I’ll just be nearby – call me if you want to stay longer.” 

“You never said you’d be leaving us,” Louis protested, but the driver was already in the van. “Hey!” Louis cried, but it was too late, the van drove away. 

“How come there’s no one else here?” Ria said. 

“Maybe we’re too early.” 

“Or too late,” she replied. 

There was a glow through the trees from a thatch hut. They walked towards it. Over the door was a sign: ‘The Turtle Watch Museum’. An electric bulb swung from the rafters in the wind, dancing its glowering light over framed photographs of turtles lumbering onto night time beaches, digging in sand, or straining, legs splayed, squeezing out eggs. Louis read every sign, every caption, excited again. 

“This place is great – they’re a charity employing ex-convicts. They teach them about conservation.” 

“Ex-convicts?” 

“Good evening, sir-madam!” A short stocky man bounded into the hut and grinned at them. His eyes lingered on Ria. The man’s face was pockmarked and puffy, the skin yellowed and tough, the nose broken; eyebrows interrupted by the scars of old stitches. His smile though was joyful, unconnected seeming to the damaged features. 

“In our turtle watch we don’t steal turtles’ eggs – we’re not like the people down the road,” he told them. “Those people steal the eggs and grow turtles in tanks. Sometimes they eat the eggs. They’re very bad people, don’t ever go to their turtle watch, sir and madam.” 

“Where can we buy tickets?” Louis asked. 

“No need of tickets, sir – it’s all free at our turtle watch. You only pay if you see the turtles.” “Wow! That’s great!” Louis approved. 

“So let’s go and see if they come! This way, sir-madam!” 

The ex-convict came up beside Ria as they left the hut. 

“Sinhalese?” he murmured, his voice turned low and adult, a secret voice, brought out for the real conversation. She pretended not to hear. He pretended not to have spoken. 

“This way sir, follow me!” He darted away, become the happy child again. 

The ex-convict shone a torch ahead and they followed him, winding past coconut trees, their great hooves of trunks stamped in the ground. Ria took off her shoes and the sand was silky-cold and dry, slinking around her feet with every step. A half-moon cast its pale gleam over a wide empty beach. 

“No turtles yet, sir-madam,” the ex-convict declared, scanning the sea with binoculars. 

“When do the turtles come?” Louis asked. 

“It can be anytime, sir – soon, hopefully, soon! Dear God, please let there be turtles for sir and madam! Just keep watching the ocean. I will go closer and look for you.” 

He ran down to the water’s edge and strolled through the waves swirling idly in. He walked around a rocky outcrop and disappeared. 

Ria sat down on the beach, a sandy bank firm at her back. Louis sighed and sat down beside her. 

“Do you know anything about this place?” he asked. 

“No.” 

“Does your family ever come here?” 

“I’m not sure.” 

“You don’t know where your family goes?” 

“I know very little about them, it turns out.” 

There was no way on earth her family would have come to such a place – in the middle of the night, to look at turtles. 

“You should have asked Padma about this place,” he accused. 

“You arranged it!” she retorted. 

The ex-convict appeared on top of the rocks, walking a little unsteadily. He stood looking out to sea. The pale beam of his torch reached over the waves. 

“Something’s weird about this,” Louis said. 

Across the water, at the other end of the bay, lights shone in the town where life went on unknowing of them. It was the first time Ria had been anywhere so deserted in Sri Lanka, so far away from the places she knew, and everyone. The trees leaned over velvet rocks and the pale soft sand of a primal Sri Lanka, a pre-world of hushed dark beaches and a muted rocking sea sweeping the shore all through the night – long still nights, full of unknowable secrets. These were the beaches where war bodies would wash up, maimed and distorted after night-time abductions – even now, in peace-time, the abductions went on for different, more secret reasons. It seemed impossible to end the savagery; it seemed a part of the unreal beauty of the island, so spoiled and churning under the surface. 

But here was its raw splendour, its secret night-time source, potent and untainted before it was lost in the world of people. 

“Why aren’t there any other tourists here?” Louis demanded. 

“Maybe they didn’t want to see turtles.” 

He made an exasperated noise and glanced at her impatiently. 

“It’s better like this, don’t you think?” Ria said. 

“It feels like a scam.” 

“I don’t see how. We haven’t given the guy any money.” 

“Everything in this country is a scam – that’s why my friends left, they’d had enough. It was always the same: hire cars, safaris, Buddhist temples – you name it, there was always a way they could con you.” 

“But we don’t have to pay unless we see turtles.” 

Louis jumped up, full of a new restlessness, a fierceness in him. “Hey!” he shouted to the ex-convict. 

The ex-convict spun round. 

“Where are your turtles?” Louis yelled. “Are they coming any time soon? I’m getting tired, I want to go home!” 

The ex-convict tensed, his round belly turned solid, thin legs locked. Like a fat sparrow, Ria thought. But dangerous. 

“I think I might just call the driver!” Louis taunted, waving his phone. 

The ex-convict scrambled down from the rocks and came running. 

“The turtles will come, sir! Just wait and see – just a few more hours. Madam – you tell sir, to wait a little!” he panted. 

“What’s it to you if we leave?” 

Louis stood taller than the ex-convict. He looked down with a cold angry smile at the ex-convict’s pitted fleshy face. Louis’ hair shone in the moonlight, swept back from his fine-boned face, the perfect lines of jaw and chin and lips. Ria looked away from that perfection, winning so easily above the beaten face below. Louis was so much stronger, so much luckier than the fat-sparrow ex-convict. Louis started to type a number on his phone. 

“No sir! Please sir, stay!” the ex-convict cried. “The turtles will come! You just have to wait – how can I know what time they will want to lay eggs?” 

Louis went on typing then put the phone to his ear. The ex-convict grew still, watching in silence – no more pleading, no more explaining about the turtles. The torchlight made his cheeks seem waxy and hard. ‘Tourists missing from Turtle Watch Beach’ – Ria could already see the headline. A small square of text with their names, ages and occupations and an inaccurate account of what had happened. 

“The driver will be back in an hour, let’s just wait till then,” Ria insisted. 

“Yes, wait!” the ex-convict agreed. 

“Maybe the turtles will come later,” Ria added. 

“Yes, later! The turtles will come later!” 

“Yeah, right.” Louis ended the call and sat down again, looking away. 

The ex-convict jogged away to a distant spot at the water’s edge. Ria sat down beside Louis. He didn’t look at her. She watched the sea alone, feeling his silence for the first time and him closed to her. He checked his watch. His arm touched hers and she felt the muscle hardness of him under the softness of cashmere, and he felt apart and other. He would always be other, separate from her; she would never truly know what he was thinking – why he had smiled at her that first afternoon on the veranda, why he had asked to join her for dinner. How did you ever know when you knew someone, when it was safe to allow that last private door inside you to open? She understood now why people had horoscopes read before marriages – even the arrangements of stars in their constellations were a comfort faced with the unknown of another’s mind. She watched the night-time sea surging in surly bursts onto the beach.

“The sea looks so different at night,” she said. 

The waves slicked back in an oily sweep, receding into themselves – another sea altogether from its joyful, spraying, sparkling, sunlit self, dazzling all day. 

“It looks so pure in the mornings,” she reflected. 

“You shouldn’t have undermined me in front of that guy,” Louis said. 

“What are you talking about?” 

“You should be on my side, not his.” 

“I didn’t want to antagonise him.” 

“It was up to us when we left. What could he have done about it anyway?” 

“I don’t know . . . He might have friends nearby. Or he might have a knife or a gun – who knows? I didn’t want to risk it.” 

“That’s crazy! You’re always so afraid of everything!” His eyes were a scornful pale glare in the tan of his face. 

She glared back at him. He turned away.

***

PHOTO: Maxi Kohan

Amanthi Harris was born in Sri Lanka and grew up in London. She studied Fine Art at Central St Martins and has degrees in Law and Chemistry from Bristol University. As well as her novel BEAUTIFUL PLACE, her novella LANTERN EVENING won the Gatehouse Press New Fictions Prize 2016 and was published by Gatehouse Press. Her short stories have been published by Serpent’s Tail and broadcast on BBC Radio 4.

Beautiful Place - Salt Publishing (UK)
Beautiful Place - Pan Macmillan India
Amanthi Harris’ website

Between the villages

By Paul Scraton:

Tarmac becomes cobblestones becomes sandy soil as the old road leads out from the village towards the forest. At this end it is named for the village on the other side of the woods. Over there, it is named for this village. The way to… has linked the two communities for centuries, even if now the main road cuts through the forest away to the north and the railway to the south, leaving this track for those who travel by bicycle or those who make their way on foot, like in the old days.

At different points between the villages there has been artwork placed by the track, sharing the space with the pine and silver birch, oak and beech of the forest. They are sculptures of metal or plastic, glass or steel. They have been created to reflect the stories of this place, of this landscape. A pack of fake wolves, ghosts of the past to remind us of what was lost, placed in the woods only a few years before the real thing returned across the border to the east. A doorway to nowhere, to remind us of the lost villages of the region, abandoned to nature. Metal crates to remind us of… what? Of caged animals transported from shed to slaughter house? Or the way that dice falls, of how life changes. People move on. Others take their place. 

He rides his bike between the villages daily, ever since they closed the pub at the end of his street. Now, for his beer and schnapps, he has to ride the old way through the woods, past the fruit trees and the artworks, through the forest and across the fields. Tarmac and cobblestone. Sand to trap his tires. There’s always a stretch where he has to stop and push. He chooses not to ride on the road because it is too busy, with cars and farm vehicles, and the lorries that use this cut through between the motorways, shaking the village houses as they pass. It takes him about forty minutes on the track, often only meeting others within a short distance of each of the villages. He often has the section through the forest all to himself.

If he made the journey on weekends he would meet more walkers, out from the city to hike between train stations, ticking off the artworks as they go. Because he is elderly now, and wears his old working boots all year round, they look at him as if he is an exhibit himself, a bit of local colour, a genuine country dweller on his genuine country bicycle. They don’t know that he also came out from the city, all those years ago, to work in the brewery. That he found life so dull and strange in the country, a feeling that he never noticed leaving him until one day it was completely gone and he realised he was here to stay. He couldn’t have imagined it. 

How the dice fall. 

This has always been a land of exiles, a landscape of settlers. A thousand years ago they came from the west, possessors of the right religion and skills to work the sandy soil. Later, the refugees of war and the economies of elsewhere. He himself had come for work, for better prospects than in the city. After him came the hippies and back-to-the-land dreamers. And later still, sleeping five to a room in an old factory dormitory on the edge of town, those fleeing more modern wars. 

The pub in his village has closed. The brewery where he worked for thirty years, has long been abandoned. Now the beer is brought out from the city by lorry and the warehouse where he spent his days slowly crumbles, roof open to the elements and trees growing out of the brickwork. But he has to admit: the beer is better now, better than what they used to make. It wasn’t their fault. You can only work with what you’ve got. 

Those visitors, those weekend walkers, they like to think the countryside remains fixed, that while their city neighbourhoods shift on uneasy foundations, out here things stay the same. It is a comforting thought, but it has never been true. A thousand years of comings and goings. Villages that take their names from long forgotten languages, the traces of religions that have no more followers. He has lived it through his life since he left the city, and still it continues. In the pub he reads the local newspaper headlines. Old businesses fade into memory as new initiatives are launched in hope. Bands from a country that no longer exists get together for one last show. Beetles and fires ravage the forest. A new bridge is built to help the animals cross the motorway. He sees the changes on every ride between the villages. Trees are felled. The brewery crumbles. The wolves return. Only the the track stays the same. At some point, he always has to get off and push.

***

Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of two books published by Influx Press: Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic coast (2017) and Built on Sand (2019), a novel set in Berlin and Brandenburg.

Crimes of Miami

Miami Beach Neon by James Walsh is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

By Linda Mannheim:

I used to joke that Miami was the kind of place where, even if you weren’t a writer of crime fiction, you wound up writing crime fiction. I arrived there in the late 1990s. The drug wars of the 1980s were over. Edna Buchanan recalled Lincoln Road shootouts and the 5,000 violent deaths she covered for The Miami Herald in her memoir The Corpse Had a Familiar Face. But by the time I arrived, Lincoln Road was lined with art galleries and gelato parlours, one of Miami’s few good bookstores and buzzing German tourists.

And still there was something explosive in the air. In New York, people screamed at one another on the street, but the aggression didn’t mean anything – they moved on. In Miami, a man hinted he was going to pull a gun out of his car when I dared to challenge his idea that he had right of way when he was turning. Street harassment thrived in the tropical heat. South Beach was supposed to be the city’s most gay friendly neighbourhood, so why were so many men bothering me? The straight men are trying to show they’re straight, ventured a friend. My attempts at solitude were usually interrupted by smacked lips, sonorous sexual pronouncements, whispered profanity. 

I was alone in Miami. Or so it seemed to me. I lived in a little art deco apartment by myself that was mostly one big room. There was a separate little kitchen whose old linoleum tiles frequently came unstuck. Sometimes lizards climbed the walls and a ceiling fan in the main room slowly stirred the air. An old air conditioner drowned out the sounds of neighbours in the courtyard downstairs. When the window was open, you could hear everything – even the guy who lived underneath me complaining about how long it had been since he’d last had sex. You could hear the palm fronds rustling in the breeze. Salty air from the sea drifted over. The beach was only two blocks away.

The mythology of private eye stories and film noir is that the protagonist is always alone, unable to trust anyone. And I, in that place and time, was indeed alone, having discovered exactly who it was I couldn’t trust. And like the protagonists of shadowy black and white films, I’d been betrayed by the person I trusted the most. So it was perfect to be there --  in that city of heavy heat and wide streets, in that city of exiles, that city of unpredictability, that city of breathtakingly blue skies and glaring sunlight. The turquoise sea and the white sand seemed a consolation on some days. On others, the beauty was painful to see because there was no one to share it with. Miami was the perfect place to have a broken heart.

And yet, the fact that I’m still in touch with friends from that time means that I couldn’t have really been as alone as all that. And within weeks of being left, someone new had come along, so my loneliness couldn’t have been as constant as I remember it being either. But being carless meant that it was never easy to socialise. There was one trainline running through the town, a maze of unreliable busses all converging on the Omni Center in the middle of the city. Most people who rode busses stood outside the Omni Center at least twice a day. But when I tried to get friends with cars to meet me there, they had no idea what I was talking about.

Why don’t you buy a car? Asked a gee-whizz-voiced acquaintance. I knew the kind of car I could afford – the kind that broke down, left you by the side of the road, left you stranded. I wasn’t going to buy a car.

The city had brutal past and present. Car jackings, cocaine distribution, and corruption remained part of daily life even after the homicide rate went down, and whether you profited from this or were injured by it depended on who you were and where you lived. Did you live in the bright suburbs that looked like something out of E.T.? Or were you exiled to the bleeding rows of derelict motels lining the main drag of the bashed up downtown? Were you among the agua, fango y factorias of Hialeah? Or were you living in a Fisher Island mansion accessible only by a residents’ ferry others couldn’t board? Money was all that mattered in that time and place, and how that money came to be in your hands didn’t matter to the people that money mattered to. 

The inequality of Miami was part of its design. When the Miami was founded in 1896, it, like other Florida cities, designated a section where black people were permitted to live. That part of Miami was later named Overtown. Count Basie, Nat King Cole, and Billie Holiday were not allowed to stay in Miami Beach when they performed there; they returned to Overtown at night. Liberty City started out as a middle-class black neighbourhood, a housing development that was part of Roosevelt’s New Deal. Early films of it show pristine buildings sparkling in the sun, gleeful children leaping into swimming pools. When South Florida’s biggest highways were built, they cut right through Overtown, displacing generations of families and destroying Overtown’s heart. Liberty City succumbed to a deteriorating economy, disinvestment, and drug battles. In its early days, it had been surrounded by an eight foot high ‘segregation wall’ separating it from the white areas.

Don’t go on the public transport at night, I was told. Don’t go anywhere after dark without a car. Don’t leave your part of the city and go the other part. Don’t go through Downtown, or Overtown, or Liberty City. No offence, said the man on the phone, but you sound white and you should know this is a black neighbourhood. Don’t go wandering if you don’t know where you’re going. Don’t let anyone know you don’t know where you are. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

I was stuck in South Beach at night. South Beach, one of the few places in Miami where you could walk; it had sidewalks. And I walked everywhere.  I walked past the plastic-faced shoppers and rough sleepers on wide carless Lincoln Road, up to shabby Alton for the breakfast taco and coffee special, over to Fifth street past the gym where Muhammad Ali once trained, down Collins Avenue where the aspiring pretty wives went to get their hair done and buy expensive clothes, and back over to Alton for Pollo Loco’s yuca frita and black beans. I walked up Ocean Drive where the cars gunned at night and the college students gathered outside of nightclubs on the neon bright streets. I went up Washington Avenue where the Nicaraguan diner served café con leche to the old men wanting someplace to sit, and I went back to the beach where the men with tattoos who waxed their chest hair off eyed other men in the outdoor showers beneath the burning sun.

And I rode my bike. I’d bought a cheap, fat-tired ten speed at Target – the cheapest bike they sold. I bought a good bike lock. The lock cost more than the bike did. Bikes were snatched easily, even with two locks on, disappeared fast, were rumoured to be put on boats at the marina and shipped off immediately. I used to ride my bike down the roads and down to the beach and right onto the sand, ride on the damp, flattened down sand along the shore. 

And, one day, while I was riding along the shore, I remembered a joke that a man and I used to have. He’d once told me, ‘I’d do anything for you.’ And I’d goofed back, ‘I want you to kill my husband.’ And then we laughed and started riffing on the dialogue of noir films, kept pretending we were characters in it and laughing. And I thought, that would be a good opening for a story. What if this couple started playing around like that and then things got serious?  And then, like every writer who had come to Miami, I started to write crime fiction.        

***

Linda Mannheim is the author of three books of fiction: Risk, Above Sugar Hill, and This Way to Departures. Her broadcast work has appeared on BBC Witness and KCRW Berlin. She recently launched Barbed Wire Fever, a project that explores what it means to be a refugee through writing and literature.  Originally from New York, Linda divides her time between London and Berlin.

This Way to Departures will launch in London on 3 October at Burley Fisher Books and in Berlin on 12 October at The.Word.Berlin. You can find out more about these and other events on her website.

Vindstille

By Ian C Smith:

I have my memories, some award winners
even if they lack the charm of a Doisneau
also, mementos of trepid exploration.
One, an example of good composition
always a comfort, I keep near my bed.
A woman stands on a jetty of rocks
holding an infant, her back to camera
motionless, facing a lake, or sea.
Clouds bank behind a distant boat.
The silence is a perfect example of art
in this early Scandinavian monochrome.
Mother and child.  Journey’s end or beginning.

I bought it in Denmark, driving from Norway.
Later, just off a ferry, near Lübeck
I captured heavy holidaying Germans
in a vast caravan park where it rained.
My tent humid, gear now locked in the car
I plodded around puddles to the laundry
where I tried to translate instructions.
I ended up screaming at a machine.
Watching hausfraus, obese twins, sniggered.
Ja, ja, I muttered, thinking of Arbus
as I bundled up my pathetic smalls.

My decrepit car tracked history’s map crabwise
amusing Europe’s posing border guards
their sneers echoing those lumpen twins’.
I cut myself opening a can of beans
bad news buzzing me again in the fast lane.
When I was no longer the slowest driver
East German police tailed me over potholes
past Leipzig’s cindering orange haze
after I shot their helicopter in a car park
my thoughts by then U-turning for home.
Was it Auden who said photography
brought a new sadness to the world?

With my precious lenses in leather pouches
and the knowledge that when the eye blinks
it sucks part of someone else inside it
as well as part of himself at that moment
I carried that woman and child in my pack
wrapped like my equipment and damaged hand
a talisman during those Sturm und Drang days.
It encourages me when opportunity lurches
as I round a corner of the human map.
I concentrate on the miracle of light.
Yes, that, and timing and silver emulsion.  

***

Ian C Smith’s work has appeared in, Amsterdam Quarterly, Australian Poetry Journal, Critical Survey, Live Encounters, Poetry New Zealand, Southerly, & Two-Thirds North.  His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide).  He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island, Tasmania.

In the Back Seat

By Anna Evans:

In the back seat you observe the journey from a different angle and your eyes are free to wander from the road ahead. The space of the back seat is exactly the right size so that you can lie across it if you want to, and pretend to sleep.

In the back seat, the time is not now; it is unending horizons, the space of a snowflake. The map isn’t an accurate one, but a blend of the real and imaginary, where different journeys can merge together and become one. In the back seat you are always travelling home, the sky darkening around you.

In the back seat you are transported. It is the perfect mode of non-navigational travel. Protected and vulnerable, the fuzzy blanket of childhood, the one which lets you dream in peace, the window framing images of the world passing by.

The back seat is the site of stories and of daydreams, the ones which come without being summoned, like a ritual to trace over the back of your hand. The speed and the motion allowing glimpses, partial and unformed, always passing and never fully realized. From the back seat I am always looking for places that will tell me stories.

From the back seat you watch the road in a different way, through the side window. Counting the boundaries along the road as they flash by swallowed up, each the same as the next, never to be seen again. The road signs going past so quickly, but looking back means being left behind, means missing the next one… The names of places take on a mythical aspect. The Devil’s Elbow…

My favourite journeys. The ascent to the moors, that gradual climb, the winding roads, the fields, the dry stone walls, the lost villages, the farmhouses which become more and more spaced out. It is breath taking to look around, to see below, laid out like a memory, the valleys, and to feel transported from it all.

The ascent to the moors. And when you’re up there it’s like a plateau where time feels different. Slowing down for the sheep walking along the road. Always wanting to stop and give them a hug. Looking through the window at those hills which always seem out of bounds somehow, they are boundless.

With my eyes I follow the trails, the trodden paths fading away to nothing. A place to be on the run, a fugitive landscape. Bleak, high and unyielding, this landscape without shelter, where only sheep could live, boulders next to the sky. A place where people seem out of place, those tiny walkers and climbers, a place to get lost in. The sheep, already prepared with their solid feet, their warm and waterproof coats. Even the footpaths look out of place somehow, as if you would drift away from them, bidden by some siren song, away into a parallel landscape far from anywhere.

- Tell us about the time when mum got stuck in a bog!

In the back seat, I listen to stories of walking up here and straying from the footpath. Imagining my mum stepping in the bog, her foot sinking, my dad trying to pull her out….

- Oh no, please don’t tell that story…

No, don’t tell it, but do… because it fills me with trepidation and excitement all at once. Imagining what it must be like, the foot caught, being pulled downwards into the bog, sinking into the earth. Like a trap laid by the hills themselves, to warn us away and keep us from venturing too far. Imagining the bog a living entity. How would you know it was there? How would you stop yourself from sinking?

In the back seat we make up stories about the passers-by, the lone runners and cyclists become fugitive too. Where are they going? They are criminals for sure, escaping the scene of the crime.

The forlorn houses on the edge of the hills seem like the last outposts, just below the clouds, or at the edge of an ocean. Waking each day to their desolate spectre, misty ocean, stretching as far as the eye can see. Full fathom; acres of rolling seas.

The part of the road where it feels like you’re flying - long and straight through a ravine cut into the hills. Scammonden Dam on a school trip. The sun shines and we draw sketches of pond skaters, and they tell us about the village sunk underneath the reservoir. This takes on mythical proportions for me, as the story of Pompeii.

- Look there’s Damian’s house.

- Who’s Damian?

- A friend of mine. He lives in that little house by the water. Hello Damian!

- Does Damian really live here? But doesn’t he get lonely?

- There he is, look he’s waving. Hello Damian!

- Can we meet him?

- Well, he is very shy.

Sometimes getting out of the car and knocking on the door of the wooden shack next to the water, and peering through the tiny windows calling out ‘Damian, Damian’… sometimes driving past and waving.

- Can we visit Damian?

- Damian isn’t in today.

The reservoir, high up and dramatic like a coal black furnace, the clouds dark grey with fury, or sad and open, the land of twilight blue. The cast of the hills above Meltham dark and alone, rain clouds the view towards them.

The backseat on the way home at night. The lights of the towns and the strange psychedelic lights of the motorway, sometimes well lit, high up, laying out the wasteland below them in empty, white, measured light. Sometimes the roads have barely any visibility, and it is then that you follow the red taillights in front, and the lights of the oncoming cars, creeping stealthily through the shadows. What can and can’t be seen conjures up a thousand travelling possibilities, the countryside spread out in darkness, the cat’s eyes in the road reflecting back our own intrepid lights. Let me tell you about cat’s eyes, you say…

The darkening sky marks the inside space of the car out as mysterious, and the driver into further reaches away. Silence is the place where the flickering miles creep by. I must remain awake, alert. My job is to monitor the surrounding landscape and I keep a vigil, keeping my dad company on our journeys together. While the inside of the car is shrouded in mystery, the seats, the objects; I can form a silent communion with the outside, familiar but cast anew. I am reflected in the window, my own features becoming one with the scenery outside, the recognisable call of the forehead, nose and lips, the eyes. Blinking lights fall into them and are swallowed up. Following the road of my own thoughts as you would trace the line of a headland. Like existing with your own ghost beside you; the self which ends and is endless.

In the back seat it is always the journey home at night and looking outwards becomes looking inwards. Crossing the high dark moors, the scattered lights of the houses seem fragile, the road seeming to melt once more into the hills as it is engulfed by the descending blackness all around.

About the author:
Anna Evans is a writer and researcher from Huddersfield in the north of England, currently living in Cambridge. Her interests are in migration and literature, cities and movement, and she completed an MA in ‘Writing the Modern World’ at the University of East Anglia in 2017. She is currently working on a project on the places in Jean Rhys’s fiction.

Letter to a Stranger

By Shawna Bethell:

The thing I didn’t tell you was that I met your brother on the ferry. He was looking for you. Your father wanted you home. To this moment, I’ve never told anyone that I met either of you. I felt it would be a betrayal of sorts, though I didn’t even know your names. But I knew your stories, two parts of a whole, none of us expecting I would cross both your paths. Yet I did, within a half-dozen hours or so. Harris is a small island, after all.

I was sitting alone on deck watching grey waters when your brother approached and asked to sit. Together we watched sleek arch-backed porpoises rise and fall as they swam alongside the ferry. We watched a low sweep of rock appear in the distance, growing until it became an island large enough for a port, a village and a road up the coast that would cross a narrow isthmus to another stretch of gneiss known as the Isle of Lewis.

Eventually, he started talking. Told me more than he probably should have about your family, but he spoke with earnestness, and I couldn’t help but listen. He had tracked you to that slab of stone sprawling in the distance and hoped you were still there. In time, we disembarked and as I walked away, he asked me to dinner. I declined and wound my way up the hill, unknowingly, to you.

It was later that evening, in a hostel full of travelers, when our paths crossed. I was rummaging in the kitchen when you came in and I asked you where to find a knife for my vegetables. You were a large man, with long blonde hair bound back by a leather cord and gold wire-rimmed glasses that framed blue eyes. From the leather sheath on your hip you pulled that gracefully thin filet blade with a round wooden handle and passed it to me. I still remember how caught I was by its elegance. Casually, you also opened the cupboard and offered spices from your cache saying I’d likely not find anything but salt and pepper in the communal kitchen. Then you quietly paced the cramped space, crowded with washer and dryer and Formica table, while I sliced in silence. When I returned the knife, you left.

That night, as a woman from Skye cranked open the window above our bunk and slept comforted by familiar cold air blowing in from the sea, I was left sleepless by the same damp chill, so I took my laundry back to the warm kitchen, made a cup of tea and sat down with my journal.

I hadn’t realized any one else was around when you walked in from the TV room and spoke. As before, you paced the perimeter of the room past the washer and dryer, along the counter and back before pulling out the chair across from me to sit.

You said you were from Finland and had worked a lucrative desk job as expected by your father until a few months before. Then, with no word to anyone, you left. You landed on the island and hired on at a fish cannery off the rocky shore. You said you liked the physical labor, liked the men you worked with. You said you weren’t planning to stay on the island, but had no plans to go back either. 

We talked a lot about family and expectations. I told you about the Midwestern United States, where people were rooted by generations of family loyalty, a pull so strong that I felt my choices in life were abdicated before I was old enough to know I had choices to make. I loved my family, but when I finally left the Midwest, it was with a sense of escape. I landed in a mountain town in the western U.S. populated with out-of-work miners, scientists, artists and travelers. It was a place where people accepted you as the person you presented yourself to be, and it was where I gained the freedom to be the writer I wanted to become.

In the dark early hours of morning, you put on your jacket and went outside, cigarette in hand, and through the window I watched the orange tip burn as you paced the walk out front. Shortly you returned, explaining you had to catch the ferry for work in only a few hours and needed to get some sleep. I don’t remember that we even shared a ‘good-bye.’ You just walked away through the drafty, concrete-block hallway, and I was left to pull my clothes from the dryer and stuff them into my pack. Then I followed the hallway to my own side of the dorm where I fell easily and unexpectedly to sleep.

By daylight you were gone and I caught a ride north, jotting a quick ‘thank you’ and tucking it into your spice cache before I left. We never did exchange names. It didn’t seem necessary, I guess. But I still think of you, and I wonder if your brother ever found you. I wonder if you ever went home. I did, eventually. For better or for worse. Sometimes, I’m still not certain. But that strange triumvirate of love, loyalty and obligation will call even the most wayward of us back.

Wherever you ended up, I hope you went there by choice and without regret. I hope you found the life you wanted. I wonder, though, if you ever knew, if either of you ever knew, if you ever talked about that woman you both happened upon, who carried two men’s stories back out to sea.

Shawna Bethell lives in the central Midwest of the US. Her work has appeared in the Denver Post, The Mountain Gazette, High Desert Journal, and This Land Magazine among other publications.