You Can Fly
Winning Entry by Al's Mam
You Can Fly
"Fly me to the moon," she said as she perched drunkenly on the edge of the parapet.The Indian ocean sparkled in the night air behind her as she threw back her long black air into the shape shifting breeze which ruffled the twilight hour before dawn.
"You can fly" he said looking at her amusedly as he fingered the long stem of his fluted champagne glass. There were no tourists around the old Kasbah at this hour but by sun up the bustle of the quays below as traders loaded and unloaded the consignments of spices for market would be gloriously alive.
He brought up Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata on his phone and took her arm as he led her into the centre of the rooftop. Giddily she let his fingers move between hers and disentangle them from her champagne glass dropping it to the ground. It rolled away on an impish wind which carried cigarette butts and unswept up tourist tickets over the edge of the wall leaving no trace of the previous day behind.
They had met here yesterday in the blinding white heat of the afternoon.She was shy around him at first and he was forthright telling her how much he had admired her first novel.They had only met through mutual friends three weeks ago and already it seemed as if an eternal present had manifested between them.She loved the lemon and sandalwood scent of his aftershave, the thrill of his touch, the haughty fire in his whirlpool brown eyes. Because he was Muslim and already betrothed he couldn't be seen with her in his home town which was seventy miles up the coast.Yes he would soon marry a virtuous young women wearing a burka whose thoughts and feelings were subservient to her creed. But she didn't mind being his harlot. They were both twenty-one and feeling very unvirtuous.
Her flight was in the morning to Madrid and a return to her life on campus at the University of Seville fought to return to her consciousness unsuccessfully. You should get a first her tutor Manuel assured her with the light of love in his eyes.She had shied away from him. Married men were trouble, her elegant divorced mother warned her strenuously, and somewhere in herself she found the truth of this.
Betrothed young Muslims were far off then, on her never-ending radar of dreams. But the life force in her always drew her dreams to her. They moved closer together and as he held her in his arms and stroked each tendril of her luscious hair, she merged her wild heartbeat with the reassuring cadences of his. The dawn wind played with them raising goosebumps on their bare arms. "I feel I love you," he said a little sadly and then unexpectedly pushed her out from him. He turned his back and she felt the blade of his silence before they heard the Muzzein call. Though he had no prayer mat he fell to his knees to face a sensuous sun sliding up over the ocean below. She was pierced by the call and suddenly longed for home.
"Fly me to the moon," she said as she perched drunkenly on the edge of the parapet.The Indian ocean sparkled in the night air behind her as she threw back her long black air into the shape shifting breeze which ruffled the twilight hour before dawn.
"You can fly" he said looking at her amusedly as he fingered the long stem of his fluted champagne glass. There were no tourists around the old Kasbah at this hour but by sun up the bustle of the quays below as traders loaded and unloaded the consignments of spices for market would be gloriously alive.
He brought up Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata on his phone and took her arm as he led her into the centre of the rooftop. Giddily she let his fingers move between hers and disentangle them from her champagne glass dropping it to the ground. It rolled away on an impish wind which carried cigarette butts and unswept up tourist tickets over the edge of the wall leaving no trace of the previous day behind.
They had met here yesterday in the blinding white heat of the afternoon.She was shy around him at first and he was forthright telling her how much he had admired her first novel.They had only met through mutual friends three weeks ago and already it seemed as if an eternal present had manifested between them.She loved the lemon and sandalwood scent of his aftershave, the thrill of his touch, the haughty fire in his whirlpool brown eyes. Because he was Muslim and already betrothed he couldn't be seen with her in his home town which was seventy miles up the coast.Yes he would soon marry a virtuous young women wearing a burka whose thoughts and feelings were subservient to her creed. But she didn't mind being his harlot. They were both twenty-one and feeling very unvirtuous.
Her flight was in the morning to Madrid and a return to her life on campus at the University of Seville fought to return to her consciousness unsuccessfully. You should get a first her tutor Manuel assured her with the light of love in his eyes.She had shied away from him. Married men were trouble, her elegant divorced mother warned her strenuously, and somewhere in herself she found the truth of this.
Betrothed young Muslims were far off then, on her never-ending radar of dreams. But the life force in her always drew her dreams to her. They moved closer together and as he held her in his arms and stroked each tendril of her luscious hair, she merged her wild heartbeat with the reassuring cadences of his. The dawn wind played with them raising goosebumps on their bare arms. "I feel I love you," he said a little sadly and then unexpectedly pushed her out from him. He turned his back and she felt the blade of his silence before they heard the Muzzein call. Though he had no prayer mat he fell to his knees to face a sensuous sun sliding up over the ocean below. She was pierced by the call and suddenly longed for home.
Featured Entry by Halliwell S. Reed
First, Fly
Rise.
Constrict.
Collapse.
An infuriatingly terrifying experience
witnessing my brother's chest rise
sending bubbles of hope
to melt the knot of despair and hopelessness
living in my deteriorating skull
only for it to constrict and fall.
Only for my heart to plummet
alongside my constant thoughts
emitting from my unravelling psyche
of potential conclusions to this situation
barreling toward a plunging darkness.
The incessant apprehension
is due to the potential of what will eventuate
of a man that is in possession
of a soul fragment that he helped me mend.
The machine is suffocating;
not letting him breathe without its controlling presence;
not letting me breathe without thinking
he may never say anything again,
and I'll never get to listen.
I'll have a conversation with my siblings
about the life he led and how we have to
navigate the gloomy wasteland of how to live without him
until it's brighter,
not such a painful place to reside anymore.
My words cascade on deaf ears,
hanging in the air as the ceaseless whine of the device
that grants me permission to stay in the company
of a person I love more than words can contain
permeates the space we occupy.
I travel back to the time that he sought out a second magpie
through our kitchen window
although he was grateful for the half a pair;
and he explained that at least one is here.
I don’t believe I will ever feel that way.
Without him here I will always be one magpie,
the one I associate with sorrow.
Now, he's just gone.
How can a life be taken so easily?
How can you half expect it and still be in utter shock?
I never want to reach an age
that he didn’t get the chance to.
Those magpies followed me to the hospital
and to the funeral.
Maybe it was a warning,
maybe it was a mockery.
I do know that they remind me of my big brother,
and every time I see their black, white, blue, green feathers
they make me think of a beautiful soul.
I know that he always found ways to soar.
Now, he doesn't have to stay so low to the ground.
I hope that the afterlife he so strongly believed in
and told me was true
is where he flies to first.
Rise.
Constrict.
Collapse.
An infuriatingly terrifying experience
witnessing my brother's chest rise
sending bubbles of hope
to melt the knot of despair and hopelessness
living in my deteriorating skull
only for it to constrict and fall.
Only for my heart to plummet
alongside my constant thoughts
emitting from my unravelling psyche
of potential conclusions to this situation
barreling toward a plunging darkness.
The incessant apprehension
is due to the potential of what will eventuate
of a man that is in possession
of a soul fragment that he helped me mend.
The machine is suffocating;
not letting him breathe without its controlling presence;
not letting me breathe without thinking
he may never say anything again,
and I'll never get to listen.
I'll have a conversation with my siblings
about the life he led and how we have to
navigate the gloomy wasteland of how to live without him
until it's brighter,
not such a painful place to reside anymore.
My words cascade on deaf ears,
hanging in the air as the ceaseless whine of the device
that grants me permission to stay in the company
of a person I love more than words can contain
permeates the space we occupy.
I travel back to the time that he sought out a second magpie
through our kitchen window
although he was grateful for the half a pair;
and he explained that at least one is here.
I don’t believe I will ever feel that way.
Without him here I will always be one magpie,
the one I associate with sorrow.
Now, he's just gone.
How can a life be taken so easily?
How can you half expect it and still be in utter shock?
I never want to reach an age
that he didn’t get the chance to.
Those magpies followed me to the hospital
and to the funeral.
Maybe it was a warning,
maybe it was a mockery.
I do know that they remind me of my big brother,
and every time I see their black, white, blue, green feathers
they make me think of a beautiful soul.
I know that he always found ways to soar.
Now, he doesn't have to stay so low to the ground.
I hope that the afterlife he so strongly believed in
and told me was true
is where he flies to first.
Featured Entry by StephenStephen
Human Trafficking
In a jar an odious treasure is
Shut by the gods’ wish:
A gift that’s not everyday
It’s 2026 and dinosaurs rule the world. Humanity is a food-stuff. Labs produce human meat on an industrial scale. Eating humans alive is illegal, and long prison sentences await dinosaurs found farming humans free-range for live consumption.
The metal dawn was the genesis of humanity’s downfall. This was when human ingenuity birthed general artificial intelligence, or what they called the machine. In minutes, the machine discovered that dinosaur DNA contained the source code to cure numerous human diseases. The dinosaur resurrection programme started the next day. The machine was harvesting cloned dinosaur DNA for medical purposes by the end of the first week. Unknown to humanity, the machine subtly altered the dinosaurs genetic code, imbuing them with human level sentience and intelligence. The resulting global war didn’t last long. While humanity put up a fight, the dinosaurs outmatched them.
Aboard Flight 2491, La Paz to Miami
My name is Fred. I am a T-rex. In modern parlance, I ‘identify as tyrannosaurus’. Today, I’m flying economy from La Paz to Miami. Flying Pterosaur Air is always a literal pain in my ass, because they cram seats into their planes like those gross idiot’s cram hotdogs into their stomachs at county fair eating contests. Did you know the average dinosaur stomach can stretch to three times it’s normal limit, if required? I watched a clip on the internet that illustrated in disgusting detail how elastic a stomach can be under duress. Anyway, these seats, they suck. Unfortunately for me, I fly with these sons of bitches regularly enough to know that their tagline – Saur in comfort with Pterosaur – is total baloney. Especially for a T-rex. I’m all wheels and no guns, no matter how many times I skip leg day. But the tickets are cheap in comparison to Ter-Air-Daktyl, and I’m all about maximising profit.
I notice the plane is near-full as I stomp towards my assigned seat. I’m surrounded by my fellow passengers’ shuffling, groaning and overhead luggage. Life in motion. My noise cancelling headphones are a salve, but not a cure. Yes, they render children’s screams impotent. But dulling one sense heightens all others. Like what they tell you about blind dinosaurs being really good at sex. My sense of smell turns nuclear when I have the headphones on. This is sub-optimal, given that today I am spending many hours on an airborne fart canister.
I reach my row. Middle seat, raw dog, let’s do this. The fat Saltapotamus lady sitting in the aisle seat makes a big deal of getting up to let me sit down. Like I’m the sole cause of her shitty life. I console myself in the knowledge that she hasn’t seen her own junk in many moons, and probably never will again. The girl on my left is resting her head against the window. She is in full ‘fuck-off- and-deny-my-existence’ mode, wearing huge silver headphones and a large silk night mask over her eyes. I respect that. I lower the brim of my hat, taking a leaf out of her book. As we wait to take off, I think about the sequence of events that led me being wedged on this plane.
I work for a global criminal enterprise known as The Scorpion. For my employers and I, the next forty-eight hours is mission critical – and will mean success or failure following many years of hard work. This is when we ship product and collect payment. The Scorpion operates from the top floor of an unremarkable, dusty apartment block in La Paz, Bolivia. Only a very small cadre know who the CEO is, and I am not one of them. Our business model blends animal husbandry with meat packing. Our product lifecycle begins in green fields high above the clouds in Los Yungas, a subtropical valley close to La Paz. This is where we employ selective breeding processes to birth and raise livestock. Our work includes day-to-day care, management, production and nutrition. Once livestock are mature and ready for consumption, The Scorpion delivers our products to buyers. This is where I come in. In layman’s terms: I smuggle humans for a living.
For discerning (and extremely wealthy) dinosaurs, fresh adult human meat commands a high price. In today’s world, frozen, lab grown human meat is widely available, but cultivating and consuming live humans is strictly verbotten. A small, but highly lucrative black market for delivering live humans to dinosaur dinner tables for consumption exists. Live meat is unparalelled in terms of freshness. Also, the ability to torture the human and inform them of their demise prior to consumption improves the taste. A cortisol spike in the minutes before clinical death gives human meat more acidic and gamey notes. This is a highly sought after effect. Keeping the product alive until consumption makes trans-global transportation extremely challenging. But life always finds a way.
Ironically, The Scorpion smuggling methodology relies heavily on old human techniques and technology. Our pre-metal dawn history books tell us that humans used to produce and consume illegal drugs to cope with their existential terror. When smuggling drugs on airplanes, they relied heavily on one piece of equipment: the condom. Well, so do we. Before leaving La Paz, I did some meat packing in my hotel bedroom. This involved transferring four live humans from their cage into lubricant covered and airtight condoms, before swallowing them. To keep them alive in transit, we fitted each human with full scuba diving equipment, including extra-large tanks keeping them supplied with oxygen for the flight duration. We also gave them waterproof telephones with an encrypted messaging application, so they could contact me with any potential issues during the flight.
So, here I am. Flying through the air on this fart rocket, stomach stuffed with four fully grown, conscious and condom-bound humans. As we take off, I wonder if they'll serve peanuts on this flight. With any luck, the fat hag sitting to my right is allergic.
We are barely in the air ten minutes when the communication app on my phone pings. The message I read freezes the already cold blood in my lizard veins. It’s human no.3, one of the males.
No.3: Repentance, Fred. It’s time for you to repent.
Me: What are you talking about bro? Is everything okay in there?
I feel a faint, cool pressure in my stomach. They’re moving around a lot in there.
No.3: Can you feel that, Fred? I’m running the flat side of a blade over your life, bro. We’re not brother’s, bro! You are a fucking idiot.
Me: What are you talking about? Your jokes are not funny.
The vague pressure transforms into an electric, blinding agony. Something is poking me from the inside.
No.3: You feel that? You think I’m joking with you? Don’t you remember the Pepper trees you put in our cages? You wanted us to feel right at home, you said. Just like Los Yungas. You think you’re the only one capable of smuggling contraband? I have a wooden shank in my hand. We all do. We hid them in our prison pockets, in our damn asses. Now it’s time for retribution, Freddy.
Me: ...typing ...
The pain overcomes me and I am unable to finish typing the message. Trembling, I imagine the scene inside of me. Lights from the humans’ head gear intermittently illuminates everything as my stomach contracts and ebbs, creating a strobe light effect. The humans grip their make-shift knives, stabbing enthusiastically, ripping through the condoms and my stomach lining. Their wooden blades are soaked with stomach juices, making them shine black and obsidian.
As the plane continued to soar, I knew I was going to die. I was mortally wounded. Despite this terrible fact -- my emptying heart and the foam collecting at the corners of my mouth –I felt euphoric. And as I died, I’d never felt so alive. Epiphanies came, hot and fast. I realised we are all uninteresting entities, living meaninglessly. Get rich, get married, have kids and shut the fuck up, my dude. Make money to spend even more. If you work really hard, maybe one day you can drive a car with silly doors.
The stabbing continued and I could feel the blood gushing through my internal wounds and into my stomach cavity. It felt like a warm blanket was draped over my midriff. My revelation continued. I realised that the life I had been chasing was an empty vessel. Lamborghinis and Ferraris are mass-produced. Owning things doesn’t make anyone like you more, least of all yourself. When you pull off at speed, Pirelli tyres skrrting, no-one sees you. They only see the hole in their own facade where a Lamborghini should be. We walk through life attached to a mirror that shows us our newest wrinkle, the blossoming fat deposits where our abs should be, our dirty Toyota.
As death gripped me, I looked left at the girl in the window seat. She was still asleep.
In a jar an odious treasure is
Shut by the gods’ wish:
A gift that’s not everyday
It’s 2026 and dinosaurs rule the world. Humanity is a food-stuff. Labs produce human meat on an industrial scale. Eating humans alive is illegal, and long prison sentences await dinosaurs found farming humans free-range for live consumption.
The metal dawn was the genesis of humanity’s downfall. This was when human ingenuity birthed general artificial intelligence, or what they called the machine. In minutes, the machine discovered that dinosaur DNA contained the source code to cure numerous human diseases. The dinosaur resurrection programme started the next day. The machine was harvesting cloned dinosaur DNA for medical purposes by the end of the first week. Unknown to humanity, the machine subtly altered the dinosaurs genetic code, imbuing them with human level sentience and intelligence. The resulting global war didn’t last long. While humanity put up a fight, the dinosaurs outmatched them.
Aboard Flight 2491, La Paz to Miami
My name is Fred. I am a T-rex. In modern parlance, I ‘identify as tyrannosaurus’. Today, I’m flying economy from La Paz to Miami. Flying Pterosaur Air is always a literal pain in my ass, because they cram seats into their planes like those gross idiot’s cram hotdogs into their stomachs at county fair eating contests. Did you know the average dinosaur stomach can stretch to three times it’s normal limit, if required? I watched a clip on the internet that illustrated in disgusting detail how elastic a stomach can be under duress. Anyway, these seats, they suck. Unfortunately for me, I fly with these sons of bitches regularly enough to know that their tagline – Saur in comfort with Pterosaur – is total baloney. Especially for a T-rex. I’m all wheels and no guns, no matter how many times I skip leg day. But the tickets are cheap in comparison to Ter-Air-Daktyl, and I’m all about maximising profit.
I notice the plane is near-full as I stomp towards my assigned seat. I’m surrounded by my fellow passengers’ shuffling, groaning and overhead luggage. Life in motion. My noise cancelling headphones are a salve, but not a cure. Yes, they render children’s screams impotent. But dulling one sense heightens all others. Like what they tell you about blind dinosaurs being really good at sex. My sense of smell turns nuclear when I have the headphones on. This is sub-optimal, given that today I am spending many hours on an airborne fart canister.
I reach my row. Middle seat, raw dog, let’s do this. The fat Saltapotamus lady sitting in the aisle seat makes a big deal of getting up to let me sit down. Like I’m the sole cause of her shitty life. I console myself in the knowledge that she hasn’t seen her own junk in many moons, and probably never will again. The girl on my left is resting her head against the window. She is in full ‘fuck-off- and-deny-my-existence’ mode, wearing huge silver headphones and a large silk night mask over her eyes. I respect that. I lower the brim of my hat, taking a leaf out of her book. As we wait to take off, I think about the sequence of events that led me being wedged on this plane.
I work for a global criminal enterprise known as The Scorpion. For my employers and I, the next forty-eight hours is mission critical – and will mean success or failure following many years of hard work. This is when we ship product and collect payment. The Scorpion operates from the top floor of an unremarkable, dusty apartment block in La Paz, Bolivia. Only a very small cadre know who the CEO is, and I am not one of them. Our business model blends animal husbandry with meat packing. Our product lifecycle begins in green fields high above the clouds in Los Yungas, a subtropical valley close to La Paz. This is where we employ selective breeding processes to birth and raise livestock. Our work includes day-to-day care, management, production and nutrition. Once livestock are mature and ready for consumption, The Scorpion delivers our products to buyers. This is where I come in. In layman’s terms: I smuggle humans for a living.
For discerning (and extremely wealthy) dinosaurs, fresh adult human meat commands a high price. In today’s world, frozen, lab grown human meat is widely available, but cultivating and consuming live humans is strictly verbotten. A small, but highly lucrative black market for delivering live humans to dinosaur dinner tables for consumption exists. Live meat is unparalelled in terms of freshness. Also, the ability to torture the human and inform them of their demise prior to consumption improves the taste. A cortisol spike in the minutes before clinical death gives human meat more acidic and gamey notes. This is a highly sought after effect. Keeping the product alive until consumption makes trans-global transportation extremely challenging. But life always finds a way.
Ironically, The Scorpion smuggling methodology relies heavily on old human techniques and technology. Our pre-metal dawn history books tell us that humans used to produce and consume illegal drugs to cope with their existential terror. When smuggling drugs on airplanes, they relied heavily on one piece of equipment: the condom. Well, so do we. Before leaving La Paz, I did some meat packing in my hotel bedroom. This involved transferring four live humans from their cage into lubricant covered and airtight condoms, before swallowing them. To keep them alive in transit, we fitted each human with full scuba diving equipment, including extra-large tanks keeping them supplied with oxygen for the flight duration. We also gave them waterproof telephones with an encrypted messaging application, so they could contact me with any potential issues during the flight.
So, here I am. Flying through the air on this fart rocket, stomach stuffed with four fully grown, conscious and condom-bound humans. As we take off, I wonder if they'll serve peanuts on this flight. With any luck, the fat hag sitting to my right is allergic.
We are barely in the air ten minutes when the communication app on my phone pings. The message I read freezes the already cold blood in my lizard veins. It’s human no.3, one of the males.
No.3: Repentance, Fred. It’s time for you to repent.
Me: What are you talking about bro? Is everything okay in there?
I feel a faint, cool pressure in my stomach. They’re moving around a lot in there.
No.3: Can you feel that, Fred? I’m running the flat side of a blade over your life, bro. We’re not brother’s, bro! You are a fucking idiot.
Me: What are you talking about? Your jokes are not funny.
The vague pressure transforms into an electric, blinding agony. Something is poking me from the inside.
No.3: You feel that? You think I’m joking with you? Don’t you remember the Pepper trees you put in our cages? You wanted us to feel right at home, you said. Just like Los Yungas. You think you’re the only one capable of smuggling contraband? I have a wooden shank in my hand. We all do. We hid them in our prison pockets, in our damn asses. Now it’s time for retribution, Freddy.
Me: ...typing ...
The pain overcomes me and I am unable to finish typing the message. Trembling, I imagine the scene inside of me. Lights from the humans’ head gear intermittently illuminates everything as my stomach contracts and ebbs, creating a strobe light effect. The humans grip their make-shift knives, stabbing enthusiastically, ripping through the condoms and my stomach lining. Their wooden blades are soaked with stomach juices, making them shine black and obsidian.
As the plane continued to soar, I knew I was going to die. I was mortally wounded. Despite this terrible fact -- my emptying heart and the foam collecting at the corners of my mouth –I felt euphoric. And as I died, I’d never felt so alive. Epiphanies came, hot and fast. I realised we are all uninteresting entities, living meaninglessly. Get rich, get married, have kids and shut the fuck up, my dude. Make money to spend even more. If you work really hard, maybe one day you can drive a car with silly doors.
The stabbing continued and I could feel the blood gushing through my internal wounds and into my stomach cavity. It felt like a warm blanket was draped over my midriff. My revelation continued. I realised that the life I had been chasing was an empty vessel. Lamborghinis and Ferraris are mass-produced. Owning things doesn’t make anyone like you more, least of all yourself. When you pull off at speed, Pirelli tyres skrrting, no-one sees you. They only see the hole in their own facade where a Lamborghini should be. We walk through life attached to a mirror that shows us our newest wrinkle, the blossoming fat deposits where our abs should be, our dirty Toyota.
As death gripped me, I looked left at the girl in the window seat. She was still asleep.
Follow us on Twitter
Follow us on Instagram