Dusk Read online

  First published in UK 2018 by Arachne Press Limited

  100 Grierson Road, London SE23 1NX

  www.arachnepress.com

  © Arachne Press 2018

  ISBN:

  Print: 978-1-909208-54-4

  ePub: 978-1-909208-55-1

  Mobi: 978-1-909208-57-5

  The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

  All content is copyright the authors. Individual copyright details on page 3

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form or binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Except for short passages for review purposes no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior written permission of Arachne Press.

  Printed on wood-free paper in the UK by TJ International, Padstow.

  Copyright 2018 in all cases:

  16:30 © Katie Evans

  A Calligraphy of Starlings © Aziz Dixon

  A Female Blackbird Sings © Ness Owen

  After the Sun Before the Stars © Jane Aldous

  Afterglow © John Bevan

  all this © John Richardson

  Arrival © Bridie Toft

  At Sky’s Edge © Helen Slavin

  Breadcrumbs © Lucy Grace

  Calling Them In © Kelly Davis

  Cape Cornwall © Jackie Taylor

  Crow Haibun © Alison Lock

  Daylight Savings © David Hartley

  Decoration of a Fermented Season © Alice Tarbuck

  Dhusarah © Elizabeth Parker

  Driving to Blackpool to Visit My Sister © Jeremy Dixon

  End of Ramadan © Michelle Penn

  Factory © Joy Howard

  Flick’ring Shadows © David Mathews

  Four Beaches © Rob Schofield

  Gloaming © Mandy Macdonald

  Granda’s Plan © Sherry Morris

  Here © Samuel Wright

  I am Dusk © Alannah Egan

  In-Between Dog © Pippa Gladhill

  MacFarquhar’s Bed © Alex Reece Abbott

  Magic Hour © Nicholas McGaughey

  Match Girl © Lisa Kelly

  On the Evening Train © Fiona Salter

  One Two Three, One Two Three © Rosalind Stopps

  Red Coat Wolf etc © Katy Lee

  Roost © Sue Birchenough

  Some Times a Black Cloud © Nigel Hutchinson

  Starling Time © Laila Sumpton

  Summer Evening © Lindsay Reid

  Summers Ended in Sweetness © Martyn Crucefix

  Sundown Breath © Gabrielle Choo

  Tempus Erat © Kate Wise

  The Dusk Runner © Cath Bore

  The Sea’s Wedding © Carl Griffin

  The Shortest Day © Sue Johnson

  They Said there were Pirates © Kirsty Fox

  Threshold © Katerina Watson

  Wolf’s Head © Penny Pepper

  Words on Paper © Rob Walton

  Yes, Twilight © Math Jones

  Contents

  Stories

  MacFarquhar's Bed

  Alex Reece Abbott

  Breadcrumbs

  Lucy Grace

  Granda's Plan

  Sherry Morris

  In-Between Dog

  Pippa Gladhill

  They Said there were Pirates

  Kirsty Fox

  Yes, Twilight

  Math Jones

  Wolf’s Head

  Penny Pepper

  Flick'ring Shadows

  David Mathews

  Here

  Samuel Wright

  Words on Paper

  Rob Walton

  One Two Three, One Two Three

  Rosalind Stopps

  Daylight Savings

  David Hartley

  Four Beaches

  Rob Schofield

  On the Evening Train

  Fiona Salter

  At Sky's Edge

  Helen Slavin

  The Dusk Runner

  Cath Bore

  Threshold

  Katerina Watson

  Cape Cornwall

  Jackie Taylor

  Poems

  Gloaming

  Mandy Macdonald

  End of Ramadan

  Michelle Penn

  The Shortest Day

  Sue Johnson

  Factory

  Joy Howard

  After the Sun, Before the Stars

  Jane Aldous

  Decoration of a Fermented Season

  Alice Tarbuck

  Crow Haibun

  Alison Lock

  Tempus Erat

  Kate Wise

  all this

  John Richardson

  Starling Time

  Laila Sumpton

  Match Girl

  Lisa Kelly

  Summers Ended in Sweetness

  Martyn Crucefix

  Roost

  Sue Birchenough

  Red Coat, Wolf, etc

  Katy Lee

  16:30

  Katie Evans

  A Calligraphy of Starlings

  Aziz Dixon

  Calling Them In

  Kelly Davis

  Summer Evening

  Lindsay Reid

  Afterglow

  John Bevan

  Some Times a Black Cloud

  Nigel Hutchinson

  Dhusarah

  Elizabeth Parker

  A Female Blackbird Sings

  Ness Owen

  Driving to Blackpool to Visit My Sister

  Jeremy Dixon

  Magic Hour

  Nicholas McGaughey

  The Sea’s Wedding

  Carl Griffin

  Sundown Breath

  Gabrielle Choo

  Arrival

  Bridie Toft

  I am Dusk

  Alannah Egan

  MacFarquhar’s Bed

  Alex Reece Abbott

  The spring nor’wester blows steady and chill in MacFarquhar’s face, but the early evening air is honeyed with golden gorse.

  He strolls past the kirk and the sweet chestnuts that edge the town, hiking up the winding road. Every so often he turns, catching his breath and taking in the Cairngorms, still wearing their snowy caps. Cutting through the back of the raggle-taggle farm, he passes the little row of workers’ cottages, and the old stone barn, where the cows low and moan.

  He crosses the lush sloping fields, greeted by the tight-fleeced sheep and on the summit, he pauses in the soft gloaming and pulls out his brass eyeglass. The millpond Cromarty lies to his right and the Moray Firth to his left, but tonight the Moray is the sea inlet that holds his eye. On he ambles, down the avenue where the bark of the beech trees trails silvery, lichen beards. Their dark, wind-sculpted branches reach out for the sky, wild as the hair of Macbeth’s crones.

  When the town is an hour behind him, he creeps along the winding cliff, brushing by spiny gorse and boulders turned cushions by thick emerald moss. On, he traces a path that’s narrow as a goat track and slippery as soap from the day’s mizzling showers. Below him, waves drum in the new tide’s arrival, smashing on the crumbling cornelian cliffs, drowning out the skylarks that serenade day’s end. A red kite dances above him, watching his progress, hoping for a fall and fresh prey.

  Finally, MacFarquhar reaches the stony beach, edging past the shell middens left by the old hunter-gatherers. He climbs the ancient nobbled sea arch that has formed in the rust-red sandstone, until he is above the glinti
ng firth that’s blue as the slate roof of his creel.

  A pair of unblinking shags observe him, then carry on fishing; they are used to him by now. The turning tide exposes the fossil-rich outcrops, rocky fingers where fortune-seeking optimists come chancing their luck, hammering and chiselling through millennia.

  Beneath him, the ocean has carved a well, an old chapel still adorned with scraps of cloth from townspeople seeking cures for their ailments and wanting to cast out evil spirits. The fulmars mock, their cackling amplified by the cliffs. MacFarquhar agrees; he is long past such foolish superstition.

  Now he lies on the grassy outcrop bed, waiting for the dimming of the day. Some hate it drawing in, he loves it for obliterating.

  From his lookout atop the arch, he scans the firth for a sign that his contraband is sailing his way, but all he spots is a pod of bottlenose dolphins. A gliding peregrine hunts for pigeons in the caves. As the wind picks up, he draws his length of plaid closer around his shoulders and closes his eyes for a moment.

  Not all bad, he’s self-made, a pirate, a smuggler. A man who has placed his faith in faster, easier, more certain ways to improve his fortune than wishes or fossils or prayers.

  Night will fall. He embraces that certainty.

  Breadcrumbs

  Lucy Grace

  Dusk, that time between day and night when everything changes...

  The unexpected glittering took her breath, stilled her with tiny ice swords.

  ‘Wow,’ said Elizabeth. ‘It’s beautiful.’

  ‘What?’ asked John.

  ‘The garden, look, it’s all white.’

  During the night a thick hoar frost had lain down to sleep outside. Creeping in the darkness, it had flowed silently over every external surface whilst they were closeted inside, a pale, immobilising lava.

  ‘So you’ve not seen damn frost before, is that it? Always a fucking drama…’ John yanked open the cutlery drawer with a metal rattle of tray bones. At the window Elizabeth folded her arms. She noted the single mug at the boiling kettle, the reflected solitary spoon tap-tap-tapping against the worktop.

  ‘But it’s pretty, though, don’t you think?’ She didn’t know where this pleading came from.

  Her grip on the sink edge tightened as thick sausage fingers circled her wrist. She cried out when the scalding metal teaspoon pressed as a reminder onto her arm, a burning watch face on a bracelet of bruises.

  ‘What’s for dinner tonight?’ asked John.

  Crossing to the fridge, Elizabeth knelt, her eye and cheek hidden by a curtain of hair, dulled and raggedly cut.

  ‘We only have…’ but on hearing the rude click of the key in the back door Elizabeth breathed again in the relief of an empty kitchen. Through the glass lay a thread of footprints, a million tiny ice crystals crushed and melted.

  By 9.20 next morning the dirty green and urban greys had returned, the dawning wonderland disappeared. The chill window pressed Elizabeth’s forehead into a smoothed plane. She shook free of emotion as the medication began to work, rolling over her limbs like hot bath water.

  By 11.43 her tea was cold in the mug, a thin surface film adhering to the edges in a coarsening scum.

  By 14.14 the day’s brief winter sun had been and gone. Too weak to warm the earth or the sagging washing on the line, it had retreated, given up for another day.

  By 16.55 the path to the pavement sparkled once more with sharp miniature gems, crunchy underfoot. Elizabeth sat on the freezing bricks of the low wall. Starlings chattered at her from the high wires as they gathered for a noisy bedtime outside the closed eyes of the houses opposite, doorway mouths double locked and bolted against callers. Her foot hurt – the broken glass had cut a red spider web on the sole. She ate the dry sandwich she had made earlier in the day to quieten her growling stomach.

  By 17.05 Elizabeth was dressed in the warm clothing she kept in the bag with shoulder straps, hidden in the alleyway of number 45. She would miss her kind neighbour. Lacing new trainers with stiffening fingers she rose and brushed herself down, crumbs falling from the hand-knitted wool.

  From the bag she took out the orange purse with the sixty-two pounds in it, and the train ticket to Greenwich paid for by her sister. A single. Elizabeth supposed that she was, now, and she set off up the darkening street.

  Granda’s Plan

  Sherry Morris

  Granda died in his armchair, with a tartan blanket over his legs and a book on his lap, while listening to Radio nah Gaidheal in front of the sitting room fire – just as he planned. He must’ve known his time was coming because earlier in the day he got out the buttons and had me repeat step-by-step what to do with them.

  ‘Keep ’em handy. Don’t forget. And make sure you place ’em right,’ he instructed while placing the three buttons in my hand, then folding my small fingers over the large circles. They were twice as big as two-pence coins.

  ‘One on each eye. And one on ma mouth.’

  As many times as he’d told me, I didn’t see how I could forget. I was 10 years old, but I understood things. Especially important things. Like keeping Granda’s soul from the faeries.

  ‘Otherwise…,’ Granda said, his voice trailing off.

  Time and again he’d explained how he needed my help as he couldn’t very well do it himself. He couldn’t count on his daughter – Mum called his beliefs ‘Highland hooey’ – Granda said she’d once believed, but that ever since Pop did a runner, she’d had time only for the realities of putting food on the table, clothes on our backs and a roof over our heads. I spent most of my time, even the time I shoulda been in school, with Granda learning the old ways and listening to his stories of the creatures who lived all around us. Granda knew I’d help him, because I believed his stories.

  They always started like this:

  ‘Faeries born and bred here in the Highlands match the landscape and the desolation. They’re dangerous. Not just moody, downright evil. You don’t mess with one, unless you got to,’ and he’d tell of Beira the Winter Queen, the hag healer Cailleach, and kelpies. But one evening, he said he had something to show me.

  We were sitting in front of the fire. Just him and me. He’d drawn the thick curtains over the windows and doors to keep out the draught – and all the things it carried.

  ‘You’re too young to know the story of the wee bairn, but you’re old enough to understand the lesson…’ he began.

  He took three coins out of his pocket. At least I thought they were coins. Copper-coloured, shiny with a date and a face, they were unusual in size, each with a small hole through the middle. He placed them in my hand. I felt their weight.

  ‘Where’d you get these from, Granda?’ I asked.

  He shrugged.

  ‘How much are they worth?’

  ‘Good question, Calum,’ he said, giving me a close look. ‘You could say a life.’

  Then he told me a new story.

  Once there was old man and his daughter gathering the autumn harvest. The daughter had a young son she brought with her to the field and placed on the grass nearby. The morning mist was rising, taking with it the creatures of the night. The child began to cry and whine in an odd way. The daughter went to it, but her father stopped her, saying this was not her child– the faeries had taken it and left an old-man faery in its stead. If they touched this crying creature, they’d never get the child back. Returning to their work in silence, they ignored the cries.

  Dusk arrived: the time of the faeries. The old man, who was experienced in these matters and possessed the faculty of second sight, took three coins from his pocket, jingling them while chanting old words. He dropped them in the pocket of the crying faery man-child. Coins such as these brought great favour with the Winter Queen. More favour than a child. The faeries emerged with the child, exchanging it for the man-faery and coins. Safely back home with the child, the grandfather explained he’d tricked the faeries. He hadn’t given them coins, but buttons that looked like the ones coveted by their queen. So th
at they should not attempt to steal the child a second time, the grandfather had the daughter sew similar buttons onto the child’s blanket ’til he grew too old to be carried away.

  Granda fell silent. There was only the sound of the fire and the wind.

  ‘I was the bairn you saved,’ I said, staring at the button coins in my hand.

  ‘Aye,’ Granda said. ‘And worth each precious penny, no matter the torment they’ve planned for me in the afterlife. But they’ll mind these last three buttons. Just put ’em like I told you – on ma eyes and mouth – and I’ll rest in peace.’

  I closed my hands around the buttons, but Granda said he’d keep them ’til it was time. I asked how the faeries would torment him, but all he said was, ‘That’s not fit for young ears. I saw it in m’dreams. Don’t want you to.’

  Then we went through the plan again.

  The evening passed as usual. Mum had already gone to bed, leaving Granda listening to the radio while I read in the sitting room. Before turning in, I put more wood on and said good night. His hug seemed a little tighter and longer than usual.

  On Sunday morning, we found him in the chair, his head slumped to one side, still wearing his glasses with a book open on his lap. Granda couldn’t have read by the faint light of the fire – which had gone out – but I understood the book’s purpose. I studied his face. He looked peaceful – his decoy had worked. Now it was my turn. I insisted on being with him at all times, watching while Mum and Aunt Jenny washed him, dressed him in his best, then laid him out for folk to say their goodbyes. Mum said we had to put him to rest before the ground got hard, setting the burial for the next day. I’d place the buttons on Granda just before closing the coffin at Dusk.