Leo pushed me for more details but I said I was tired and he left.
•
I kept having the same nightmare—the one where I came face to face with myself in a dark alleyway. Whenever I woke it was difficult to disassociate myself from the residue of my dream, the dark shapes streaking the wall with menacing intent. My mother called me. I got up, touched the keypad and the interface screen purled into life. I clipped the electrodes onto both my eyelids. There was a pop of static from the intercom and my mother’s voice became clear.
- Your father is dead. Her voice had an inhuman quality that crackled, hissed and fluctuated like what electricity must sound like as it passes through wire.
I hung up.
A few days after discovering the device the e-resource library shut down because of poor business. I was destitute. Suddenly my grandfather’s trinket seemed like an escape route…
Idle Hands
That night I took the trinket in my hand, fondled it for about half an hour. There was something about it, something dangerous, powerful. It seems ridiculous to say this, but it frightened me in a way I’d never experienced before. It was small and lightweight but had all the patterns of internal cogs and mechanisms visible through its metal frame. It had a tiny monitor that displayed nautical charts and terrestrial range radars, the detail was fuckin crazy. Course, if this really was a time travelling device then in some branching off of this reality all of this had already happened and I’d already made a decision. Right…?
My grandfather was a senile old coot who smelled of bread chemicals for some reason, a genius probably, but a boor and a heartless sonofabitch at the same time. My dad only ever knew him as this cold, withdrawn cat, always out in his shed trying to build things. I heard he made a robot boy once to replace my dad but it broke down and he never bothered going through all the hassle of rebuilding. For some reason granddad always seemed to like me, even if he didn’t show it much, he seemed to have less animosity towards me than the rest of the family. I was secretly quite pleased when he died. I think my dad was too.
Turns out the trinket worked like a drug. There was a tiny nozzle inside about the size of a pinprick and it ejaculated a clear substance in close proximity to human flesh. I fed a polypropylene needle into the nozzle and descended the plunger. The fluid glittered in the syringe barrel like burning intergalactic pulsars. My stomach was in knots but I knew I had to get a hold of myself – this is your one chance to get out of this place you crazy idiot – I kept saying. So I mainlined a vein (got that old familiar feeling, ready for a bit of ultraviolence) and administered the time travelling fluid. It’s quite a feeling, the evisceration of every particle in your body and its subsequent regeneration in a different region of time.
The Prophet of Tolerance
Hell’s Kitchen in the 2070’s was a profoundly dangerous place, especially at night, man. I knew at this rate I’d surely be spotted. Even at quarter past midnight, The Rite Aid pharmacy lights were still on, the food emporiums and arcades ever-glittering with activity. Extra-terrestrial kids played midnight baseball behind cages (or their own alien equivalent at least) and the streets and alleyways were jam-packed with nefarious Midtown West types trying to secure prostitutes or Jam-Caps. There was nowhere to hide in this part of town when you’d just kidnapped a baby.
I ducked into a narrow alley and tried to catch my breath. I clung to the screaming child with an almost maternal robustness. There was a young kid, maybe seventeen or eighteen years old, sprawled across a bed of garbage, but he was too out-of-it to pose any kind of threat. I rested the baby on my knee and tried to calm it down. A fire engine klaxon annoyed me as it hurtled past.
- Please! I’m begging you, man, just stop crying for a damn minute…
But the restless baby’s wails did not falter, man, no siree. The polytonal urban chorus was relentless. The comatose bum jolted back to life, angry that he’d been awoken from his drug-induced slumber. He started gesticulating and babbling drunkenly.
- Hey, you gotta be quiet! Listen, you want some money? You want some, man?
I tried to forward the young bum some crushed notes but the kid was apoplectic. I had to shut him up somehow, considered burying a switchblade into his abdomen, just above his pelvis – after all, who would miss a lousy derelict like this guy? Something stopped me, the kid’s face was starting to look familiar, even in the eclipsed alley; a certain oblate chubbiness to him that prickled the tiny hairs on the back of my neck.
I remembered, while visiting Elfreth’s Alley in 1723, encountering a 17 year old, and impoverished, Ben Franklin newly arrived in Philadelphia from New York. I showed Franklin a hundred dollar bill with his face on it and promised that everything would work out ok for him. The ranting hobo in my wake looked eerily similar, to the point where I actually screwed up my eyes and was about to utter the name – Ben?
Suddenly the young bum stopped his inane blethering. A puncture of blood appeared directly between his eyes and trickled down the left hand side of his cheek. The bum’s legs buckled and he fell forward, face first, into his bed of trash, his head smacking off of an egg-crate buried beneath. I turned to see a silhouetted figure in the alley.
- Arty… I got you now, you sonofabitch. There’s nowhere to go.
The Beachcomber
Mark Toner
and
Stephen Pickering
Noise and Sparks:
The Legend of the
Kick-Arse Wise Women
Ruth EJ Booth
This is how I thought it went:
You live first. You learn. You travel, explore the world, find your niche. You get the job. You find the one. You settle down, get married, have kids. Discover a whole new way of looking at things. Then – once you’ve done all that, once the kids are gone, and you’ve this huge wodge of life experience in the bank – that’s when you get to write.
And I was happy with that. Even as the rest of my childhood dream crumbled, and the urge to write became insistent, I held onto the idea that the fun of writing fiction was for retirement. You needed experience to draw on to write with authority. And besides, without a pension to support me, how could I afford the time to do it?
These sound like excuses, but this was what I genuinely believed. I’d seen all those celebrated women writers on TV – the Ursula Le Guins, the Maya Angelous – all older women. It made sense it took a lifetime’s worth of experience to write something true and universal. I was prepared to wait, if that’s what it took to be that cool.
But I’d made three mistakes. The first was confusing the mastery of older writers for the wisdom of age, not the product of years spent honing their craft. The second was giving in to my fears. And the third, arguably the most important, was this: you don’t get to choose when you have something to say.
The first will be familiar to anyone who’s tried writing fiction. It springs partly from a common misconception: writing is easy, because it’s something we all learned in school. The lie becomes obvious the moment you put pen to paper: writing takes years to master. Discouraging as it seems, it’s a liberating lesson. There are no age restrictions. You can start at any time. All it takes is a willingness to work hard.
And hard it is: frustrating, sometimes to the point of tears, to spend hours crafting the perfect sentence, only to receive rejection after rejection upon sending it out. Embittering, if you can’t resist comparing the success of your peers to your own, instead of celebrating with them. But these are distractions. There’s an intrinsic joy in the act of creation, in making something that lives in the mind and in the heart: the very root of a love of writing.
Hard work didn’t deter me. It’s strange to think of it now: in my late twenties, freelance music writing, I’d try creating the odd bit of fan fiction, even sketching original ideas, and find myself absorbed by the work. But I’d never have any intention of taking them further. That was for later. Nor was I comparing myself to others – I had no connection to the fiction scene – but, because of that, no way of challenging my beliefs either.
Feminist readers may consider my childhood image misogynistic, as only allowing women their liberty once their reproductive use has passed. What I was conscious of was needing to tick those boxes of traditional womanhood first. Really, I couldn’t wait to become one of those silver-haired kick-arse women.
But as I wrote those first tentative stories, my respect for experience warped into a mask for my fear of ridicule: less concerned that I was unready to write, more that people would know this if I tried. Respect must be earned – but surely no one could argue with experience! That was why new bands got heckled, wasn’t it? That was why young academics in my old department played games of one-upmanship with their visiting peers, right? I wouldn’t have to worry about wasting my time if I waited. They couldn’t criticize me then.
