Red Peter

August 2008
Contents:

Finding Lunula – Kevin O’Cuinn page 3

A Shape – Sarah Stodola page 6

Four Poems – Haidee Kruger page 9

His Story – Melissa Mann page 15

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 Finding Lunula – Kevin O’Cuinn

She chewed at her fingers and her fingers bled. From across the
classroom I watched her smear blood across the tip of her tongue then
sit back, calm for a while. The others showed no interest, their faces in
their books and out the windows. She was new, showed up from a place
she never mentioned. Mentioning wasn’t her thing; neither talking nor
mixing; she was though, it seemed, a cutter. She’d catch my stare and
stop, her teeth still deep in cuticle; she’d hold my stare and tear further,
pull back more skin till one of us looked away.

When I approached her in the corridor, outside class or in the yard,

she’d swerve and blank me, maybe raise a raw finger and hiss through
crimson teeth, one time she held a finger to her mouth and gagged.

One Friday when I couldn’t stop myself anymore I followed her to the
gate of her house and stood in her way and pulled up my sleeves. Blade?
She asked. Knife, I said and opened the hand where it sat. Blade, she
said, What you need is a blade to get it flowing.

It became like me and her were a population of two.

We went to hers after school and drank pints of aspirin, Thins the blood,
she said, Pints of Aspiring. Then we’d scratch and bite. She’d point here,
me there and that was it. She’d say stirring me was easier than stirring
coffee and bite me till I bled. So it went till one of us said Stop, till
someone said ’Nuf. Then we’d lie on the bed and smoke fags as if we’d
been screwing.

It was weeks before she told me about lunula. We were smoking and she
was examining my fingers as she often did. You’re going to be okay, she
said. You’re going to lead an enchanted life. The fuck you on about? I
said. Your whole life is written on your nails, she said—Look here, your

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lunulae. My, huh? Lunula, she said. The half moon at the bottom of the
nails, it dictates how well you’ll deal with crap and yours is fuller than
any I’ve ever seen. Bollocks, I said, The fuck did you read that? You’ll
see, she said. And then she held her scarred fingers to my face. None;
the skin was chewed back further than was good for her but no half-
moons. Weird, I said. Yeah, said she, Fucking right, like a sky without a
moon.

I didn’t step up to blades right away. That first day she came back from
the bathroom and held it up. Dad’s, she said, Unused, and placed it
beside the fishbowl where it lay for a month. What are their names? I
asked. Fish don’t have names, she said and squeezed a drop of blood into
the water.

Then, that day. She picked it up, said, May I? Course, I said and lay back
on the bed and she started tracing the veins on my arms with her nail,
then with the blade, parallel to the veins like a blood bath on a dual
carriageway. Usually I went home by dark but that night things got late.
Time escaped out the window and into the sky and the last thing on my
mind as I lay there having my arms opened was my mother but there
she was when the door opened, stood on the landing with fuck knows—
her old man, I think, brothers, and the lot of them shrieking their gills
out and tearing at their hair. That’s what started us too, and what with
the drama, the blade twisted deeper.

I came to, hooked up to a drip and strapped down. Pale bedside parents
not looking like they’d had much sleep. The fuck? I said and my mother
up and left in tears, the old man behind her. The fuck? I said again and
good thing the brother was there. Did we have a suicide pact? he wanted
to know. The fuck? She lost it when she thought she’d done me in, he
said, and, well, ended it, end of story. Nearly. There was one more stop,
the funeral parlour the next evening. She looked different, don’t know,
larger, just different. Some knob had wrapped a rosary beads around
her hands, her fingers. The fingers looked well, probably touched up
with something. I held her face and blew a hair from her eyes. Her
cuticles had retracted in death to show them—her lunulae. They looked

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like surfboards and flying saucers and hand grenades and I thought and
wondered, and wished she could have been there.

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 A Shape – Sarah Stodola

People always tell me I am pretty, although I wouldn’t know. Just the

other day, while I was sitting in a café eating a croissant and drinking
my coffee, a man approached me and told me that I have one of the most
beautiful heads of hair he’d ever seen, then there was an awkward
silence and he apologized for maybe seeming forward and excused
himself. It’s usually more subtle than that, or less.

An example of more subtle: a friend will say something about how she’d
do anything to have my [insert body part]. It’s usually the legs or the
nose.

An example of less subtle: A kid who lives down the street once whistled
as I passed and then said, “That’s the one hot piece of ass who won’t say
‘no’ to me the minute she lays eyes on me.”

Another example of less subtle: People have often told me that I am

pretty for a blind person.

And that makes me wonder what it is about a blind person that makes
them less attractive, and do I possess that bit or not.

I know first hand that my skin is smooth and I have asked and been told
that this translates into pretty skin. Same with my hair, although
people have told me that it isn’t just the sheen, but also this color, blond,
that is a color that only hair can possess, never another object, like a
shirt or a house.

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I am told that I am tall and thin, and that these are important traits to
possess. I have felt a fat person before, and the thing confuses me a bit,
because the fat person feels comfortable and safe and therefore to me he
feels pretty. I have kissed men both taller than me and shorter (so it
doesn’t make much sense that people tell me that I am the tall one),
which is easy for me to understand, because I do respond to gravity, just
like everyone else. I know which way down is, but why that way is
unattractive is another story and a mysterious one.

A man once told me that in spite of, “you know,” he felt he could see into
my eyes and right through to my soul. To which I answered that I was
quite sure that my soul lay somewhere quite unconnected to my eyes.
He said he was sure I wouldn’t say that, if only I could see my eyes with
my own eyes. To me, that man was beautiful because I could feel the
shapes of his muscles. Very firm, almost like a sculpted piece of wood.
Other women have told me that they, too, find such things appealing.

I am happy when people tell me I am pretty, even though I don’t know

what pretty is. Even though it means nothing to me, I can tell that it
means great deal to them. And so I do what my mother and sister and
girlfriends tell me, and I go to the salon, and I let people do my makeup
and pick out clothes for me. My friends know what kind of person I am.
They never pick out clothes that they say fit my body, only that fit my
personality, which wouldn’t you have to agree seems counterintuitive?

One time another man told me I was beautiful, which set off a
conversation on the topic of what beauty is, and a week or so later he
had built a kind of light that projected the shape of a star, because he
knew that I can just barely, sometimes, pick up on light if it is very, very
bright, and he wanted me to understand. He said that he’d acquired a
special lighting system, so that the outline of the star shape would be
extremely sharp and bright. He sat me in front of it and turned it on
and told me to look straight ahead, which I know means don’t strain the

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neck, just let your head sit naturally. At first I couldn’t make anything
out, so he turned it up, and then up some more, until finally, I did start
to make something out. And he had set it up so it was symmetric, and
he explained to me why it was so.

“Do you see it? Isn’t it beautiful?”

And I told him, “Yes, yes, I think I see now.”

But I didn’t, not really. I sort of saw, but I didn’t see, as in understand.
Because I still can’t figure out what something like that might have to
do with something like me; it’s just a shape, just a line here and a line
there that I can barely make out. I’d rather not think of people that
way.

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 Four Poems – Haidee Kruger

walking at night in winter

this is the second. the

first is remembered
inside it, a
death undone, buttoned to
the chin. it is not
the same. but.

but. the body

is a net for dredging:
molecular gasp of an organism without
the scabs of streetlights,
unused to absence
saturating the skull.

it was necessary then.

it is necessary
now to imagine.

to imagine eyes,
dark shapes in hedges,
insidious intent, even if
the street is just there,
lying on the earth like limbs at
the end of love.

love. there must be, there

was then something
watching. someone to see.

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to see my hair in the wind,
the trees, my bones climbing through
my skin, the sea pouring over
the edge of the world.

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curretage

In a swimmingpoolgreen room
I am
a white starfish on white marble under a white ceiling
freezing into five points measuring the distance to

dead centre

as I leach colourless jelly into

my veins fossilising like dry rivers
until

I fluoresce out in strobes clinging to

the voices, the steel ebbing against my back,
the weight of my
b e l l y
then

_________________________________________________

I emerge on
the other side
into rain evaporating off hot tar.

I have been cured of

my body.

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the Body rearranges

the Body rearranges

itself around
the other. points of entry and exit,
embraces. Embraces. the
thrill of skin. density
surrenders to Liquid. semen, blood,
mucous, milk. the Body yields to

its double. it takes One into,

lets One out. it breathes only
in reflection. in between,

the Body grows into

the swell of a question mark. then.
Then.

pain pinballs echoes,

cell to amnesiac cell. the Past fleshed
unexpectedly. the Body

is a superconductor, pure
light leaping. Time pours
out of it, a warm rush of
presentness. Inhale. the beating
world. Exhale.
Again. Again.
Again.

and after
the Body shrinkwraps
loss, ties it with red ribbons. the Body

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rearranges, leaks, empties
itself of
Itself. demands to be
mopped up. staunched,
stoppered. yes. Yes.
the Body returns to

the shape of a comma. a breathless

Pause.

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never mistake

never mistake
slipped for sliding . to find

the sweet damp fleshy knot of

knickers , stomach , tongues , you need
the chafe of loop over cord ,
noose over wrists , nylon down legs ,
body in body – bent tautline underhand slide
into bliss . however ,

once doubled over

itself ( slipped , stoppered ,
dressed ) the seam sets into
calloused bight , forever
looped , spliced ,
sutured –

hitched right down

to the bitter end .

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 His-Story – Melissa Mann

This is a story with no beginning or end. There’s just a woman, old,

staring up at the bedroom ceiling of her council flat in Manchester. A
woman seeing her death flash before her eyes. And then there’s me here
in this closet, the place where secrets you can’t let go of live. I’m on the
floor at the back wrapped in a quilt, waiting for an end to the past I
know isn’t coming.

Outside the closet it’s early evening, the day’s shadow turning into the
vast black shape that is night. There’s light coming under the door, that
sudden kind of light you get from a bare glass moon hanging itself from
a ceiling. Her head’s all you can see, the rest of her embalmed in a pink
candlewick bedspread with daisies carefully embroidered along the top
edge. Her hair, draped across her skull like centuries-old cobwebs, is
fanned across the pillow. She’s lying there, eyes pretending to be eyes.
Slowly, patiently, she’s learning how not to be here anymore. She’s still
substantial though, a definite shape on the bed. Death has not
diminished her yet, content for now just stealing the shadows to become
itself. And there are plenty to feed on thanks to the clutter in the room –
cardboard boxes, piles of clothes, stacked furniture. They give the
impression she was in the middle of packing for her death. It won’t be
long now. I know this the way some people know it’s about to rain. I can
feel her coming to me…

… she’s coming to me like a reflection walking out of a mirror. Here I

am, mother. But she knows this of course, she knows exactly where I
am; I’ve been here for years. Every time she opened the box, she dug me
up. I’m her baby, an old baby now, an old baby that died of young age.
I’m the product of a stolen fuck, a fuck stolen from a shy fifteen-year-old
in the middle of an air raid. I’m the stillborn child a child gave birth to
alone in a shed at the bottom of a garden. I’m both her son and her
brother.

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But I’m not a ghost. I am bones that once had flesh and a full head of
hair, black hair she snipped a lock of and slipped inside the silver locket
with her mother’s picture. Think of me as conscious bones, bones that
never stood or walked or ran. She carried me into the house in the
newspaper her father used to wrap the lettuces, newspaper that for the
rest of her life would always be the feel of death. She carried me inside
and buried me here in this shoebox. Buried me, yes, but never laid me to
rest, not really. How could I be with her constantly there, pressing her
fingers to my lips, missing the breaths I never took? How could I rest
with her lifting me out the box all the time, whispering, ‘if you loved me
you’d come back to life’? Mother made a life’s work of my death, every
day giving birth to the past with her remembering. Yes, I am conscious
bones, bones with a conscience because although mother is dying in the
room next door, really she died of me 68 years ago.

Not much longer now. There’s a chill in the air. I can feel it despite the
quilt I’m wrapped in. Mother made it for me. It’s a memory quilt made
from bits of material she collected over the years: white satin from the
sleeve of her mother’s wedding dress, the pocket from a favourite
cardigan she used to wear, a piece of the skirt mother was wearing
when she gave birth to me. She’d sit for hours, sewing the quilt, the
fingers she broke shaped like the scullery steps her father threw her
down. She’d sit on the end of the bed, closet door open in front of her,
sewing memories together to make a life. I could hear her, the snap of
cotton between teeth, the crisp precision of the scissors trying to cut out
her grief in squares of fabric. But it was the kind of grief you only ever
get round, never over.

We’ll be together soon. I can feel the ghost of mother’s hands touching
mine, holding me tight. I’m all she has. There’s no one else, never has
been. For mother, everything had the potential to leave and so she
never let it arrive. She’ll not be missed, not really. In time her absence
will be noted. By the woman at the post office perhaps who used to chat
to her through the glass. Or the butcher where she’d go each week for
her corned beef. Yes, her absence will be noted but not for weeks,

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perhaps longer. Eventually, when the council set about clearing her life
away, evidence of mine too, however brief, will come to light. But I shall
be long gone, my heart beating somewhere else. I’ll be with mother,
reminiscing about the life we would have lived if we’d both lived. Poor
mother, such a waste. Perhaps when she sees me though, she’ll be
reborn. Perhaps by seeing me I’ll give birth to her and at last she will
live.

Yes, eventually they’ll find me in this closet, they’ll find me here in my

cardboard grave. But they’ll never know my story, how it began, how it
ended. They can only guess.

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required to reproduce their work. Using material from the Red Peter e-book pdf without permission
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