Surprise! I have a short story out in the world today!

GLUE - issue #2 has gone to the printers. The dynamic duo who run the zine have given me permission to share an excerpt of my tale, Systemic. I wrote it as a response to my ten fellow contributors’ inspiring pieces across a variety of mediums - fiction and non-fiction prose, poems, essays, illustrations, photography and more! True to the issue’s theme of Systems, I tied everyone’s contributions together into a flowing whole, using their ideas, imagery and even borrowing some great phrases!

I also wrote this piece with no guarantee it would make it into the full release, so I’m honoured and so thankful that GLUE HQ chose to include Systemic, my first non-self-published fiction, as the end of the issue.

GLUE, issue #2 - PRESALE! | GLUE

Whether it’s the Wood Wide Web or the World Wide Web, skeletons, water cycles, garderobe plumbing in Medieval castles or the networks ants dig with...

Systemic

A dot.

A point, in the cycle.

A never-ending line, an ever-spinning web, an infinite net.
Roots, breathing lungs in the earth. Lapping worship to sunlit thought.

Foraging for nutrients like a search for knowledge, a thriving community.

The soil hears the tree, the breeze, the birds. Movement, snuffling black and white badgers, sprays of red, squirrels, foxes, deer.

Cycles of carbon, connection. Walking, talking, making marks, making meaning, figurative.

Handprints, humanity painting hunting magic. Art.

An evolving culture.

Engraved creatures on Cretan cave walls, Minoan colours in labyrinthine courts, Hellenistic sculptures in gleaming temples. Ancestors, heavens, underworlds and mountains… cloud-piercing gradations of blues and purples in the stone and snow, reflected in perfect lake mirrors, reflected in the silver sky, in the clear streams, the life-green, grass, moss, the mulch of myth. The wrath of Zeus and the speed of Hermes. Weather and wings. Warriors and monsters. Odysseys sailing the seas, quests, wars, trades, networks.

It is into this world of fallible gods and legendary landscapes that Solinus sets off for Aquae Sulis in Britannia. For healing. The road is long, across the known world by all imaginable means of transport. It will be worth it.

Endless days on rocking vessels or cramped on a cart through the cold are worth it.

When he passes through the gates of the city wall. When he stands in her sacred space.

The paving beneath his feet seems already to vibrate with the energy of the place, the heat and healing from the sun, from the holy waters. Divine building blocks of life, surrounded by divine buildings. Incredible how he’s travelled so far and the same architecture, the colonnade of the temple courtyard, embraces him.

There’s the altar, remains of sacrificial meat and liquids, the temple on its podium, a local Gorgon-water-spirit on its pediment. He loves the blending of spirituality across the Empire, the commonalities between all peoples, united in their beliefs, their names and aspects and local wonders, all the same divinity. After all, he is here for Sulis Minerva.

And there she is, between the altar and the temple. He moves towards her, passing by the big double door to the domed and vaulted sacred spring complex to face her. Her face of light, perfectly captured, gilded goddess, life-giving nurturer, healer, healer, healer.

He feels like falling to his knees and never rising.
He’s here, in her sacred space, and she will heal him. Her holy waters will wash it all away.

Solinus moves towards the baths when—

He bumps into a child, a local family. The little girl cries out, the parents shuffle away. Oh, coming here, being allowed into the complex had been such a negotiation. He was so caught in her golden glory that—

“Curse you, and all of your blood.”

No.

The heat of the waters that heal Solinus, allow him to find love and settle in the city of his imaginings, also curses him and his progeny. Words scratched into lead in the local language, their meanings lost to time, echo for eternity like ripples that lose their shape. Solar systems of retribution for that one slight. Gravitational. Burning orbits of justice. Rays…

Solinus loses his sight before he can ever see his firstborn’s face. Darkness.

The curse meanders like a stream through generations.

Darkness. Empires retreat and new raiders and kingdoms arrive.

In place of garrisoned forts and city walls, castles are built. Baileys are surrounded by stone edifices ten metres high and eight metres thick, impenetrable strongholds. Impenetrable by creatures of the earth.

When Fitz arrives at the castle overlooking the river Gwy, he doesn’t know his family’s curse, its legend lost in the darkness, will soon strike. He’s a little scared in the dank chambers.

They arise at night from the waters like toads, humanoid but in an amphibian variety of colours. Thick-jawed and heavy-browed, stocky and ridged all over. Orcs, goblin spectres from the poems of the world before the present light, demon corpses from ancient imagination, on present consciousnesses.

Orcs ooze and bulge and bash their way into the castle. Fitz, quick-thinking kennel master, sets the hunting beasts loose. In the darkness and their barks, he creeps away, the sole survivor.

Only the hawks have any other hope of escape. They fly above the carnage and find new masters, like the hounds, in the soon Orcish Castle Coogeldan. A castle which, to the outside world in a mythic mist, continues its routine as normal.

Birds are struck from the walls, their feathers used to fletch more arrows in the armoury, their bodies hung, cleaved, like the kitchen stands alone from the keep. Roasting on spits, they’re served in the communal banquet hall to the orc king… whose candles burn on human skulls.
When the supply of human meat runs out and the birds grow wise, the orcs send out hunting parties, venturing into the world of humanity.

And it is only when others see these brutish monsters that Fitz, cursed with guilt and the terrible knowledge, is believed. He becomes an advisor, the only one who saw the enemy up close, and with knowledge of the castle’s concentric defences, with all the king’s forces behind the siege, the orcs return to the realm of legend.

The curse meanders like a stream through generations.

Another millennium is long enough for the inventive curse on Solinus’s line to flood irony into its cycles, when Charlotte travels across the country to the legendary healing waters of Hotwells in Bristol. Her ailments have grown as tiresome as the too-tight corset or too-baggy hoop skirt of her dress.

Curse tablets and orcish nightmares are buried memories for her family, who could afford to send her in a cushy coach, to pay for a room at the spa. The face of her saviour is all grey pillars, but inside it’s all sky blue and wood panelling, fountains and statues and the nice man at the desk even offers her some samples of the waters.

Sitting, reading, the contents of the labelled little bottle taste… rich. But isn’t that its natural remedy charm? Stripping down in her room, she knows it’s not enough. With a hand to her face, she knows she needs to bathe in its salving embrace.

When Charlotte floats like a star in the pool, free hair blissfully trailing the tiled edge, she stares at the ceiling and starts to see shapes. Her eyes feel heavy, as heavy as her bloated undergarments suddenly feel in the water.

The shapes morph and the ceiling is hazy and she can’t feel her body—panic—

Bliss. Is that what healing feels like? She closes her eyes and dreams of honeyed life, fit body, running through meadows with a love, dancing with children, peace… in her last moments.

Charlotte’s sister eventually visits the nearby Strangers Burial Ground with her young son, the next bearer of the family curse. The curse that polluted those healing waters, tainted toxic for all who came after Charlotte. The death toll knell bell over rang any identities to the bodies.

Unknown souls, cast aside in their deaths, a nest of lost names, lost lives and every memory that made them. Charlotte must be amongst that mosaic map of forgotten shade, visited only by curious animals, and other strangers.

The curse meanders like a stream through generations.

Holly’s squashed amongst strangers on the screeching Tube. Every journey through the muddled map, the web of colourful spaghetti, feels like a curse, like a banshee’s followed her family for generations and is targeting her now because of her comfortability in playing the cogs of conformity.

It’s like a bear’s constantly chasing her, or like it’s already caught her and is weighing her down, constant notifications of grief, crises, politics, paralytic. Stuck like a lightning-struck tree in a crowded forest, no sun. The rain on everyone’s coats, the puddle splashes on everyone’s shoes, the sweat, the humidity in here is like a greenhouse.

GLUE, issue #2 - PRESALE! | GLUE

Whether it’s the Wood Wide Web or the World Wide Web, skeletons, water cycles, garderobe plumbing in Medieval castles or the networks ants dig with...

That’s where I’ll leave the story on here… in the present, and yet there’s still lots to discover.

If you like what you read, please consider supporting indie creativity and purchasing a copy of the zine! Not only will you be able to find out how this short story ends(!), but you’ll receive twelve more beautiful deep dives into systems of all sorts (including a poem, a poetry photo comic and a collaborative Roman curse from me!).

With endless thanks to my GLUE friends:

Laura Estiveira-Bishop, Emily Read, Aan Tailor, Alfie Sylvester, Betty Freeman, Cadan Welch, Cordelia Gulbekian Faram, Freya Marr, Innes Henry and Michaela-Jay Appleton.

And thanks to you, for reading!