Dribbles and Drabbles and Hemispheres

I had a couple of micro-fictions published in June and July: "Measures", a dribble-and-a-half at Paragraph Planet, and "College Fund", a drabble-and-a-half at The Pygmy Giant. It was New Zealand's National Flash Fiction Day on 22nd June. A write-in on the day sought flash from both hemispheres, to which I contributed "To Catch a Falling Leaf".

And in other writerly happenings, last week I managed to attend the Bristol Blackwell's launch of Pangea, an anthology of short stories from authors around the world. One of its editors and authors, Rebecca Lloyd, is based in Bristol, as is another of the authors and key PR person of the book, Sarah Hilary. With excellent readings from Vanessa Gebbie and Tom Remer Williams, I managed to get a thoroughly signed copy of the book. The wine and nibbles then flowed into an evening meal next door, with a number of authors — what's the collective noun for authors? an anthology? — including locally based Tania Hershman and Jonathan Pinnock.

Shifting to performance art, I ended the evening by meeting up with Sam Aaron and other members of Live Notation Unit for a drink. As it coincided with the Olympic opening ceremony, I wasn't able to catch all of the live coding performances at the Arnolfini the following night, but some of what I saw was ingenious and inspiring, and makes me want to see more.

Flash Fiction: Tracking Elephants

"Tenineightsevensixfifour-"

"Slow down, Rajiv!"

"OK, auntie, but I really want to press the button — like in the movies."

"Does there have to be a countdown?"

"Yes — like a rocket!"

"In which case you should do it properly. You need to count down the seconds, which is a lot slower."

"Ten-"

"And you should start by saying 'T minus' because that's what they use for real launches."

Sucheta was regretting her decision to bring her nephew into work. Her sister had thought it might help spark Rajiv's interest in science. Sucheta had some calibration runs booked with the synchrotron, but Rajiv had shown little interest in protein structures. He was, however, excited by the facility's main building, a circular structure that housed the synchrotron, a flying saucer that had somehow parked itself discreetly in the English countryside. Its medical and materials science applications held no interest for him, but he was very taken with the idea of the synchrotron as a particle ray gun or some kind of futuristic propulsion system.

"T minus ten... nine-eight-seven-six-"

"Still too fast. Try counting elephants."

"What?"

"Pardon," Sucheta corrected. "Saying 'elephant' makes the interval around a second. T-minus ten elephant, nine elephant-"

"Shouldn't you say 'elephants'? We did plurals at school."

Sucheta's glare sent a message. Rajiv got it.

Besides being his aunt, what did she really know about children? How was she supposed to know that you shouldn't let kids have energy drinks? Her sister had never said anything, nor had any of her colleagues with children ever let slip this vital information. The countdown seemed superfluous: he was already in orbit. She certainly couldn't return him home until he'd landed.

"T minus ten-elephant-nine-elephant-eight-elephant-"

"Rajiv, that's a stampede not a countdown!"

"Auntie, I have the best elephants! They are fast."

"Let's take turns. You take the numbers, I'll herd the elephants. And let's start from five." She did not believe his anticipation could be contained for a whole ten seconds.

"T minus five..."

"... elephant, ..."

"... four..."

"... elephant, ..."

"... three ..."

"... elephant, ..."

"... two..."

"... elephant, ..."

"... one..."

"... elephant...."

"Blast off!"

Now she could start calibrating. About an hour since the drink? Probably another hour to go.

"Tracking Elephants" was published online with Flash-Fiction South West and then included in the Kissing Frankenstein & Other Stories anthology. More background here and here.

Flash Fiction: Lucky Pants

"Good morning, sir. Can I help?"

"I wish to buy lucky pants. Girl I chat in bar yesterday say 'no' when I ask… you know. She laugh and say Dmitri not wearing lucky pants. I did not know. Is shame, very shame."

Tina pepped her professional smile. Dmitri's accent suggested his handicap was idiom, not idiocy. Idiom and optimism.

"Men's underwear is second floor."

"Yes. Man there say ask you."

Darren. Bloody Darren. Bloody childish. Anything he could do to wind her up. He still couldn't accept she'd turned him down.

Her smile straightened out, paused a moment in thought… and revived, a little sharper, a little less professional.

"Could you take these and show them to him?"

She took a pair of knickers down from the display and wrote on them: "Mmm, thanks Dmitri. I got lucky. Love, Tina."


"Lucky Pants" was first published online with Flash-Fiction South West and then included in the Kissing Frankenstein & Other Stories anthology. More background here and here.

Short Story: Remembrance of Things Past

It has been years since I last made this journey. I am slower and more easily tired. My footfall is not as sure as it used to be, but nor is it as bitter, as sad, as resigned.

Up the slope, near the edge of the rock, the crowd has gathered. They stand along the ridge, waiting without conversation, silhouetted against the late-afternoon sky. I am joining them.

The ground is dusty, sandy with scraps of sun-browned grass, like the dunes before a beach.

Taken two months before today, the now faded photo on my desk records our last family visit to the beach. Madeleine looking out from beneath the sunshade of her hand, her light smile overseeing the girls. Nell in her purple star sunglasses and pink flower hat, her mouth drawn in shadow — a preview of adolescence between the giggles and play. Where Nell's sandcastles are numerous, ordered and well-formed, Cathleen's are few and careless. Squinting and sunburnt, her sunglasses and hat wilfully thrown aside, she beams a big camera smile, all teeth and gaps.

Perfect in so many ways, imperfect in so many others. The eyes are hidden. I imagine I remember their glint and colour, but I check other photos to be sure. I recall the sound of sea, but can I recall the sounds of that shoreline, those waves, on that day? Voices are easier. I can recall the mutter of idle nothings and words of comfort, although the words themselves are gone. And where, where are the smells? Of sea, of suncream, of Maddie's hair. Smells hide in memory, found only with a map that is also the key that is also the trigger. Perfectly locked, perfectly lost.

I reach the top of the slope, catching my breath in the still air. No ocean, only scrubland and rocks and a road. The smell is of desert.

The crowd is all gathered, all but one. Madeleine and the girls will be along soon. We will watch them pass, these different ages of me. Compelled to migrate, we return to this past as our present is marked out by anniversaries, birthdays and other remembrances.

We will watch the accident and wonder the same things. Was it the fading light? Was Maddie tired after so long behind the wheel? Were the girls squabbling, distracting her? Was there something on the road? Or perhaps a fault with the car? Was there anything we had missed? Something we could do to change the outcome, anything to alter time and replace tomorrow.

Across the crowd we each wear age differently — the haggard and the kempt, the mawkish and the resolved, the resigned and the hopeful. Chasing possibility, three scan the road with binoculars while three others pore over notebooks of lists, figures and calculations. Each looking for the overlooked. Each hoping for a contradiction to be confounded, to be unravelled to reveal an alternative.

But hope is not common among us. A few look only at the ground in front of them. Most gaze across the desert at the darkened foothills and fading mountains. I catch momentary glances and a few stares. I remember being those others looking at this older self, noting the one in the crowd of selves obviously older and frailer than the rest, none older.

The last to join the crowd is walking up the slope. There are thirty years between us. His journey is the first I made to come to this rock, to watch the accident from afar instead of attempting intervention. He sees me. He pauses, fists clenched. I remember the resentment, the feeling of being boxed by fate, of wanting to lay blame at the feet of who I am now for what I had told him — words of comfort, words of despair. He looks away and takes his place in the crowd.

The car is seen before it is heard. Everything is leading towards that moment, the moment I have seen, heard and felt so many times. I know how it plays out, how it feels.

A figure is running towards the road. His is the first time I made this journey. The technology had worked, but not with the precision I had hoped for or relied upon. I was running to recover lost time. Running to reach the road, to stop the car, to change everything.

But I was not alone. There were others running towards the road. I heard them and turned, hesitating, shocked, unable to make sense of these apparitions of myself.

I believed I had fooled causality. I had found a way to pass through the surface of the present into the past. But it was a sting.

At the last moment I look away to watch the faces of the crowd. Some look, others turn. Despair is written on the younger faces. The older ones cannot be read. The air carries and thins the cries of those running towards the road.

We each remember the phone call, the interruption before we were due to present our paper, pulled away from the conference and weekend together that Maddie and the girls had been driving across states to reach. The hotel, the departure, the hospital, the identification. Moments blurred together in an instant that took forever.

There is nothing to be done, nothing to be said. The crowd disperses. Some linger, some rush away. Out near the road they do the same. But one of them looks to the horizon rather than the ground or the wreckage. Singled out by the sunset, he catches sight of movement, of figures on a distant rocky edge.

I will wait for him.

What has happened has always happened and always will have happened. Time is like a river, but frozen not flowing. Eddies, pools and falls are fixed in place, timeless and immutable.

Closed curves in time allow my presence here and now; temporal entanglement demands it. But the logic of time loops is self-consistent and cannot be hacked.

I will take all this to my grave. This knowledge. This technology. This curse of impotence and reliving. The lid will close and my work and all the sadness it brings will be gone. The only markers will be an early paper — unpresented, obscure and seemingly little more than speculation — and the curiosity of my cancer — a novelty and a puzzle and, eventually, a memory for the doctors who gathered round and sampled and discussed.

I turn. He is coming up the slope.

I cannot remember exactly what was said, but it was words of comfort, words of despair. He walks to the edge, just along from me. He looks at the wreckage and the road. He looks at me, to me. Troubled. Uncertain. Desperate. He walks over. He wants to ask. He wants to plead. He needs to know.

I take his arm. Whatever I say will be the right thing. It will have been the same thing. Nothing can be changed. Words of comfort, words of despair.

"I know. It's OK. There is nothing you can do."

"Remembrance of Things Past" was first podcast at Litro and the text was first published at The Fabulist. I took the photo in Salt Lake City, August 2011. More background here and here.

The Last Chinese POSA

A recent trip to Hong Kong reminded me that I hadn't matched the announcement of the translation of Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture, Volume 4: A Pattern Language of Distributed Computing into Chinese with that of its slightly younger sibling, Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture, Volume 5: On Patterns and Pattern Languages, both translated by Xiao Peng. I received my copy last month:

Both volumes started life in the early years of this century as a single volume to be co-authored by me and Frank Buschmann. By the time we completed the manuscripts in 2006 (September for POSA4 and December for POSA5), it had split into two tree-felling volumes and we had invited Doug Schmidt on board as co-author. Both volumes were published a month apart in 2007 (March and April, respectively), but the translations into simplified Chinese have been later and further apart.

Flash Fiction: Three Moments of Defeat

Doors should not be designed like that. It was unfortunate.

Gina's head drooped. She sighed defeat. It was a sound defeat, total and resounding.

True defeat, complete defeat, has three parts. Three movements. Three moments. The first moment is requisite, the act that brings about defeat. The second moment is recognition, the awareness that defeat has moved from possibility to present to past. The third moment is resignation, acceptance of all that defeat brings — and all that it takes.

A day with William was never short. Today began at half past two. And then again at quarter past five — a time not even acknowledged by children's TV. Gina filled the shortfall with supercharged coffee and slapstick breakfast. One clean-up operation later the TV was on and filled with the carefree smiles of childless children's TV presenters.

Two years and counting and still no sign of sleeping like a baby. God, how she hated those newly mums with their two-month-old full-night sleepers.

Gina wondered when and where today's tantrum would be. How far through the day would it be? Would it be at home or when they were out? William's tantrums were one of life's bedrock certainties, but they were not so well calibrated you could set your watch or size your shopping to them.

Today it was at the shopping centre, sprawling, crawling and caterwauling in the aisles. The choc chip cookie of appeasement had probably postponed the tantrum by ten minutes. Enough to get William past the toy shop, but not enough to have finished shopping for unstained clothes, overseen by posters of angelic identikit toddlers.

He gave his body fully to the tantrum. And now he needed his nappy changed. The look of surprise on his face at freshly realised discomfort. Every time. If nothing else it drew the tantrum to a close and gave Gina an exit. To search for the toilet that promised facilities for baby changing, yet always disappointed, always left her with the same one.

The toilet was multi-purpose and multi-access. It was for those with disabilities, including age and children. Shopping bags carefully propped against one another, Gina and William found the eye of the storm in the ritual of changing.

Now it was her turn. She sat down on the toilet seat, looked down at the floor and closed her eyes. A moment of relief. A short moment, but nonetheless a moment. A moment before...

Ker-klunk. First moment.

She looked up. There was William. On the concourse. It was busy. He looked back through the open door with his cherubic cum chocolate come-get-me smile. It was unfortunate that ease of access in meant ease of access out, able or disabled, old or young. It was unfortunate that ease of access meant the toilet, the door and the concourse all lined up. She could look out at the passers-by just as easily as they were now looking in at her. Second moment.

Gina's head drooped. She sighed defeat. It was a sound defeat, total and resounding. Third moment.

Somehow she now had to recover. To recover her dignity from the knickers around her ankles. To recover her son from the concourse filled with passers-by and the now not-so-passing-by. To recover her keys, drive home and fight William into bed for a nap.

She would accept her defeat crashed on the couch. She would toast it with tea — or possibly G&T — and doze to the murmur of childless daytime TV.

"Three Moments of Defeat" was first published at Fiction365. More background here.

Flash Fiction: Underwater, Overwater

I can feel my heart beating.

A-BEAT.

"It's OK, you can jump in."

But I can't. I can't swim. It looks deep. I'm afraid.

"Everyone's enjoying themselves, see?"

Yes, splashing and shouting and swimming. Messing about, having such a good time.

My armbands are inflated. Against the encouragement to get in their pressure is oddly comforting.

My brother is filled with life. Underwater, overwater, smiling at me. I know he wants me to join in and play. But I just can't do it.

My mother's at the poolside in front of me, smiling, urging.

"Come on Edward, I'll hold you."

A-BEAT. A-BEAT.

I see my brother again beneath a sky whose blue I thought lived only in colouring pens, a sea I have only ever seen in pictures and an island whose name is too unfamiliar, too foreign for me to remember at this age.

Traffic, tourists, ruins. Two days in Athens, the three of us. Hot, bored, bothered. And then escape to the sea, away from the city. Not simply the coast, but to an island away from the overflowing beaches, bars and bistros, away from the nationless front of the Med.

"Come on Edward, pretend you're an outboard motor! Get in and hold onto the lilo. We can both kick. We'll be back to shore in no time. Mum won't even notice we're gone!"

But I can't do it. It's too deep. I'll be in over my head. It's not like swimming in a pool. Maybe it would be enough if I dangled my legs slightly over the side? We try that, but my splashing doesn't add enough to counter the current. We're drifting out of the bay and the waves are picking up. The shallowness near the beach lured us in, pulling against caution.

"Edward, be careful. Don't go too far or too deep. Charlie, the same for you. And keep an eye on your brother — remember, he can't swim as well as you." My mother's concern.

It was hours before the wayward current delivered us back. And, of course, she did notice we were gone. A notice that rang in our ears and kept us from the beach for days after.

My brother's optimism and sense of fun is laced with an edge I don't have. It's why we're drifting out to sea in the first place. It's why we get back. It's why he finds some kind of thrill in being grounded while I just brood.

"OK, Edward, I don't think kicking's going to work, but I think I know what might."

We scrabble back onto the inflatable, exhausted, on our fronts, sun-coloured backs against a felt-tip sky. My brother rolls over, still catching breath, feet dangling in the water. He stares into the sun, squinting, his face caught between a thought and a grin.

"I heard... instead of swimming against the current, you should just go with the flow. The waves, the tide, the undertow... they'll take you along and back to shore... eventually. It can work both ways."

This sounds too good to be true. It doesn't make sense to me. But neither does seemingly still, shallow water pulling us out to sea. My brother's face breaks a full grin.

"You know why it's called the undertow?"

I don't. I don't even know what that is.

"Because it pulls you from under your toes!"

At least this makes sense. My brother laughs.

A-BEAT. A-BEAT. A-BEAT.

Always water.

The last time I see my brother is by a waterfall in New England.

He's home from university. He's just finished with his girlfriend. More convenient than trying to keep the relationship going over the summer. Apparently. We're off to greyhound across America, zigzagging from California to the north-east. Highways, motels, hotels, camping, floors, family friends, friends of his friends.

He's at the edge of the pool, I'm holding him. We're soaked through. I can hardly hear my sobbing against the white noise. My tears never get a chance to take hold. My face is already wet. The spray washes away anything I might add.

I tried to save him. We were both messing about, having such a good time. We're near journey's end. After Maine we were going to head down to New York, catch our flight back to England. The campsite is not far from the waterfall, so we went searching for it after pitching the tent. He wanted to get close to the edge.

A-BEAT. A-BEAT. A-BEAT. A-BEAT.

I can feel my heart beating.

Underwater, overwater, breathe.

Underwater, overwater, breathe.

Underwater, underwater, swallow, struggle, overwater, gasp, underwater.

A-BEAT... A-...A-...BEAT... A-BEAT... A-...

Dark. Can't see. Can't breathe. Night? Yes, night. But darker.

The car? The car. The car and the bridge. The bridge and the river.

Heading home? Yes... no, visiting my mother. Late. Long drive.

What will she do? Dad. Charlie. Me.

A-...BEAT... A-...A-...BEAT... A-...

Rain. So much rain. Couldn't see. Can't see.

It's always about water. Always water.

Underwater, underwater.

A-... BEAT... A-...

A....


"Underwater, Overwater" was first published in Word Gumbo. More background here.