The icon on the map says airport, but there are no airports in Zamalek. There are lights in the sky though, from over the river at Salah Salem to the Marriott where westerners eat ful. Helicopters, flares and buckshot bring fireworks. The reports say the streets are filled with protestors and their cars – taxi horns blare incessantly through the night. The code remains the same: one blast of the horn, possible danger; two blasts, imminent tragedy; three, almost too late. We are almost too late. The horns never stop. The bronze lions of the Qasr Al-Nil Bridge avert their gaze.
100-Word Fiction: ‘Where Oceans Meet’
At the place where two oceans meet a white foam forms a rough line on the surface. We encounter light and dark, warm and cold.
Outside the hotel room the sky was grey. On the TV the skies were all blue. Microphones were pointed towards a grimacing face. In the corridor, staff brought room service to guests. I washed and changed my shirt.
In the hospital machines were wheeled out. Condolences were offered. At the airport where families rushed in the engines blared.
The correspondent says critical but stable.
I would come to think of this as a sea change.
100-Word Fiction: ‘Welcome to Suffolk’
Outside the bookshop, where you bang on a can to buy Nathalie Sarraute and a map of the Lakes, and get offered tea and coffee from a man wearing a headscarf, the drakes bask and preen round the pond near the pub, and cabbages dot the garden of a small terraced house next to a café that seems always shut, down the road from the heath where the church bells stopped chiming and succumbed to the sea, where lobster pots are sunk down the coast, where a company sings opera on a pebble beach – and the mist, does it roll?
100-Wird Fiction: ‘No Mountain High’
That a life builds, grows
Is what she had heard.
But it sometimes felt
The opposite.
It was as if a life
Started with a mountain
A mass of granite
Immovable, vast
And then things happened:
Events, thoughts. The mountain
Was chipped away at
Incrementally.
Tiny etchings, furrows –
Surfaces scuffed, worn –
From the corrasions
Of many histories.
All that stuff that happens –
Happens to – as if
A man had no part
In events, that they
Were inflicted –
That he was a victim
When no, no.
That man is no mountain.
He built his own downfall.
He deserves what he gets.
100-Word Fiction: ‘The Storming of Beake Street’
A thin blue line unravels through the back streets, broadens, becomes a gushing force, a flood, across the hunting fields where gelders and nailers worked, land then acquired by the Queen’s Messenger Thomas Beake, by the old houses intended for tradesmen and lower middle-class occupation, whereat the Venetian painter Antonio Canaletto lodged in a room of cabinet maker Mr Richard Wiggan’s, and, more precisely, towards the very building that architect J Dixon Butler, in an approximation of the style of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, erected for the Metropolitan Police in 1909–10, which is due to be reincarnated as luxury flats.
100-Word Fiction: ‘(Slight Return)’
‘When you leave you never go back, even if you think you might: it’s impossible.’
With these words he left: took a job somewhere abroad. He never visited, or if he did he kept it quiet. Of course we saw updates online: places he went; achievements; petty squabbles.
‘All as the world turns,’ an old friend once said.
I have grey hairs.
‘There is no such thing as “close of business”.’
That’s another thing I heard.
When he finally returned there was little fanfare, just raised eyebrows.
He hadn’t come back, he had tried to catch hold of a shadow.
100-Word Fiction: ‘Like Pollen’
Cow parsley, she calls it. Hollow green stems rising out above lush green grass. I had always known it as Queen Anne’s Lace. White caps of tiny flowers like little parasols, umbrellas.
The May rains have come and gone.
We take the dogs out down the lanes. They know the hawthorn and the giant rhubarb near the river: smell it all. They know every stretch of our routes – but not as well as she knows them. She is hiding something beyond the obvious. She squints at blossom, nettles in flower.
Something is buried: a secret like pollen in the air.
100-Word Fiction: ‘Plato Laughed’
Argue it hard, said Socrates, puffing on a pipe. Argue it well. Argue it endlessly. Because they will forget. They will muscle in ideas, weedle out flaws, overstate detail, underestimate the nuances. But most of all they will forget. They will forget the logic, deny experience, erase memory, bury the truths of our lives. They will squander knowledge, decry society, berate individuals, make tragedy of our success, rewrite the symposium, wreck the republic and denounce our love.
Plato laughed and kissed him:
I will write that we loved and that love is indivisible, he said.
The sky was ashen, grey.
100-Word Fiction: ‘Abstinence’
Not obese, not even chubby, he decided to commence a diet plan, not for health or vanity reasons but because he thought the world overly plentiful with, as he put it, junk. He committed to two days of abstinence from food a week. He felt great. Then he turned his attention to his job and went part time, 21hrs. Then he told his girlfriend he needed space. She went back to hers. He took no visitors. Then he gave away his TV and began to live in silence. He discovered freedom. Finally, he slowed down his breathing and listlessly died.
100-Word Fiction: ‘A Physical Geography of Celebrity’
Attrition: erosion of celebrity caused when new information distributed by the media collides with the narrative of a particular personality and shatters it to pieces.
Collapse: when a great celebrity ‘falls’ after a loss of support from peers and public following media revelations.
Corrasion: gradual wearing away of celebrity.
Fault: a large crack in public estimation of a celebrity caused by a sudden breaking news story.
Bedding Plane: a hitherto unseen celebrity narrative separating two different personas – one resistant to media attacks, one much weaker. The layers, deposited years ago as celebrity is formed, tilt towards scandal as weathering occurs.
MW Bewick 