Nightmare Carnival

Thoughts of her woke him up. The screen dissolving, her abnormal breath in his face. Three nipples pressing against him. A wet ruin down below. He bit his lip as he came, then reached for a tissue, cleaned himself, then crushed the damp paper in his fist. Waste to be crushed and burned. He could do that, they couldn’t stop him. Now he was whole, he could do what he fucking well liked. She had it coming. The other bitch too, the procurer. He’d go back and end it. No one would blame him. He reached for his lighter, a cheap plastic job from a garage, flicked it on, and stared at the orange flame with its dull blue heart. Then he lit a cigarette and sat in the dark, breathing smoke. Marlboro. Carmel smoked the same brand. It was a sign. Finally he dropped the stub in the ashtray, lay back down, and felt peace creep over him like a blanket.

His father was drinking every night. Sometimes it made him late for work. He needed a woman. That was what you did if you were normal, you loved someone and married them. His mother had left a couple of years ago, gone to live in West Bromwich on her own. Mark didn’t know what was wrong with her. At least there were no more arguments. They used to keep him awake half the night, screaming at each other. Then he’d sleep and dream the house was on fire.

The fair looked like it was packing up. Blank-sided lorries were parked in the central area; some of the tents were already gone, though others were still open for business. Mark wondered what else might be on offer here. Too late to worry about that now. He patted his zip-up jacket, the pockets over his chest: two cans of lighter fluid wrapped in pieces of rag, each a small bomb that could burn down the thing’s tent. That morning at the job centre, as the rain had whipped its grey sheets against the building, he’d remembered the showers after games lessons at school. The staring, the whispering, the awkward silences. And the names. Bonetit. The Phantom. It’s Alive. The rain was still falling, but it was lighter and, for some reason he didn’t understand, slower. The drops around each lamppost seemed to trickle down a glass wall, rather than drop through the air.

The rapturous face on the tent wall was scarred with rain. The board was still outside, and there was a dim light in the doorway. Mark slipped to one side, walking slowly around a parked van, and approached the back of the tent. He felt in his side pocket for the lighter, and put a cigarette in his mouth as a prop. He’d have to be quick. Just as he was about to flick the lighter and whip the first cloth-wrapped can out of his jacket, a dark-haired girl in a blue coat approached the tent and paused for a moment, looking at the sign. Then she walked through the entrance. It was Carmel. She hadn’t seen him.

Mark spat out the unlit cigarette and turned away, running between the lorries at the end of the park and through the gap at the end of the fence, back onto the road. He ran until the pain in his chest made him slow down, struggling for breath. Rain clawed at his face. When he reached the industrial estate near the dump, where seagulls mewed in the dark like airborne cats, he took out one of the cans of lighter fluid and unscrewed the cap, then inhaled the cold fumes. He’d last done that about six years before, not quite a teenager. A wave of nausea hit him and he staggered against the wall, fell to his knees, inhaled again. And again. Slowly, the fear eased. He could see the rain falling, but not feel it on his face.

There was nothing to worry about. He and Carmel would go to bed together, and it would be perfect. Because they would be. He closed his eyes, breathing deeply, and imagined the two of them making love in the clouds, high above the city’s orange crest of light pollution, their bodies locked in a silent arc, falling together like angels.

A SMALL PART IN THE PANTOMIME by Glen Hirshberg

Ah, there’s our Africanist,” Bemis says over the rim of his gin glass, through his beard, as Jalena Russell enters the outsized office. The other four, who’ve apparently been there awhile, look up from their drinks or turn from their bored perusals of the Great Douglas Green’s legendary bookshelves. Over by the window, Alexa Frazee even nods.

Jalena stops. She can’t help it. She knows that what she hears, every time they greet her that way, isn’t what they mean, or even what they’re thinking. What she hears is in the word itself.

Africanist. Our African.