Cafe Aphra: An Online Community for Writers

The girl - the other girl - is pushing the stripy pushchair along the pavement. Aldi carrier bags swing from both handles. She almost walks into me. The baby is playing with its feet. The eyes of the child in the pram are his eyes, green and bright.  Those are the eyes that I once fell into, coiled together on that old sofa with the stuffing bleeding out, our hands exploring one another for the first time. Their baby has snot snaking down towards its lips. They’re his lips, too. His warm lips on mine on that sweaty sofa, the teenage mingle of sweat and aftershave, stolen from his dad’s bathroom cabinet.  I’ve replayed this scene a thousand times – bumping into him, or bumping into her, bumping into them both. Showing him I’m fine, I’m over it. I’ve done all right for myself, thanks. But the baby, this baby with his eyes and his lips has stalled me. He was a big fish in our small home town, once. He reeled me in, threw his affection around for a while. Before un...

Sarité is dead again. Nearby, a mother kneels at the side of the road in loud lament for the shattered child in her arms. An old man leans in the doorframe of his soot-blacked house, watching me. Leaning is the best option after the landmine took his leg and his livelihood. Images surface when I’m not looking, in idle moments when I’m tempted to believe the world is a safe place again. But it never was. I see Sarité again, turning to smile at me as she walks away, adjusting the child on her hip. “See you tomorrow,” I call out, but she doesn’t answer. Perhaps she knows that I will see her in an eternity of tomorrows, but not she me. The moments fade, stealing my energy like a receding wave sucking sand off a beach, and I am left incredulous that life is mundane. I move through each day, get on with my life like I’ve been told to. I get up, I do my job, I drive through endless stop-start traffic. A car backfires in the middle of Reading and I’m in Baghran again, running, stumb...

There will be a pile of sand flanked by 31 stones where a sister died. She was carrying coloring books and boxes of crayons in her backpack when the bomb came, her final breath a question, not a goodbye. She was carrying them for those who died before in similar blasts and fear. Now there are lies, speculation, calculations. What'll happen when it comes here. A girl on the subway cups her hands to alert her mother she's hungry. A boy plays with a toy machine gun. In each I see postures becoming prayer, notes for us who haven't yet fallen. Photograph: L.M. Hurtado by Carl Boon

Ellie stared from the stands, dreaming of the goalkeeper. He was diving around, squelching the mud into his body. It wasn’t the first time she’d gone to watch him play; she knew there was something about him, something that entranced her. A tap on her shoulder broke the spell; she'd forgotten that she wasn’t here alone. Ellie could tell Chrissy didn’t want to go watch a local football game in a soggy field; she’d been promised shopping and calamari. “Which one is he anyway? The one you fancy.” “I never said I fancied him; he’s just, he’s interesting.” Ellie pointed as discreetly as possible at the goalkeeper. “Him.” Chrissy huffed. “He’s a six, a seven at best - what’s so interesting about him?” “Just watch.” They watched him in silence. He jumped and floundered; he wasn’t a good goalkeeper, and he was getting desperate. He was letting in goal after goal until one rebounded straight off him like a cannonball be...

‘A penny for them,’ Agnes says, just as she had some thirty-plus years ago when out on their first date. She’s said it many times in between too. It became their thing. And whenever she said it, Jimmy’s thoughts returned to the icy winter night of big city bright lights – to the Italian restaurant – to the night he tried a little too hard – to the night he got himself into a tongue-tied tizzy that caused the wrong words to come out in the wrong order. Jimmy had retreated to the sanctity of his shell, sure only of one thing: that he’d blown his chance.  He felt marooned sitting there, alone amongst a hubbub of happiness. So they ate in silence.  It was Agnes who broke the spell. ‘A penny for them,’ she said, ‘for your thoughts.’ To anyone else he would have replied with a little white lie: ‘Oh, it’s nothing… really… I’m fine… just a little tired.’  Her voice was gentle, soft, and calming, so he told her the truth. Agnes listened, and her eye...

In my mind there is a bed, starched and white and you lie there, stirruped. I can’t look. Standing at the window my eyes fumble for a view, and fake a movie cityscape: the glamour of a highrise Hong Kong skyline, non-specific urban sprawl; hanzi hurled across the fishstink of a market- place in alien humidity. They have sapped your strength, tapped you with their needles, drugged you blind in this British military hospital. The pain is a balloon; you let it go, watch it bump across the tide-washed sands of Perranporth, puddled huge with sky, float over the black rocks at Gwithian, the littoral of home, hang at the limit of a cliff edge, where the thrift cling on for dear life to their babies bonneted in pink. It is September; those lanes - bordered with a cross of hedge and granite bank - are beaded red with bryony; sand between your toes, walk down them now and knock. It is tea-time at Trevalga and they wait to hear the answer: boy or cheel? ...

They mill around the desk, crotchety wasps, all of them, calling to the receptionist, making caustic asides, until finally relieved of their luggage by capable young men in tall hats, they stretch their livid lips into smiles and cross-fade to their rooms. I do not smile. I’m waiting for Dylan Thomas. Feeling distanced from my own narrative, as if reliving a demoralising flashback, I’m waiting for a poet whom I love more than life itself, in order that we can speak, soul to soul, artist to artist.  Yesterday, the managing editor of Mademoiselle introduced Candy Bolster to him. To Dylan Thomas! Over lunch they talked poetry and the rights to Under Milkwood. Candy mentioned all this with a breathless flourish in the elevator at eight this morning and a sob crawled from my throat before leaping, lemming like, into the space between our feet. Tears brimmed as I slid through the yawning lift door and sped towards the restroom. I’m in the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel, waiting....