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The last ten days are a blur of disorientating images and sensations – flavours seen, sights heard, sounds tasted. An experience whose strangeness stems from the sense I had, throughout, of having stumbled into another’s narrative, of making my way not through the districts of a city, but the pages of a story. Streets I had visited in poetic passages suddenly manifested

themselves ‘in person’. Words and phrases first encountered in text now emerged from the mouth of a bus conductor or tobacconist. And there were signs, signs everywhere: a novel frag-ment reproduced on a building facade. A poem graffiti’d onto the pavement. The stencil portrait of the national poet, Fernando Pessoa, winking at me from the back of a garbage truck as it heaved its way slowly into the night. I glimpsed these images, fleetingly, while crossing streets, while looking out windows, while walking a city that was not my own.

And now London. The persistent feeling that accompanies me as I walk home from the tube station dragging a suitcase twice as heavy as the one I left with, as I enter the house and greet my flatmates, as I set about re-inhabiting my old life with an ease and immediacy that scares me, is a desire to ‘fix’ those impressions.

I have brought back books. I have brought back food. I have brought back postcards, maps, two memory cards’ worth of photos, and a notebook of phrases copied from every monument, billboard, street sign and shop window I came across. Please let this assemblage be enough. Please may these objects continue to exhale life. May they provide breath for me to blow back into my already deflating memories – those structures that like some kind of marquee of the imagination appear already on the verge of collapse, falling in upon themselves mere moments after they have been constructed. Please let these souvenirs help me souvenir.

Souvenir. An object that recalls a certain place, occasion, or person; memento. From the Latin subvenire: to present itself, to come to the rescue. To steal or keep for one’s own use; purloin. To come to mind.To keep in mind.To recall.To recollect.

I want Lisbon to remain impressed upon my brain. I want a trace of its contours to be visible

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prose

VAGABUNDEARby Rachele Dini

Whatever you’re looking for, you’ll find it in this issue, from philosophical debates through raw emotion to plays with language.

All these short stories have a distinct style that carries its own voice, while employing prose that reads with simplicity and eloquence.

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PROSEthe moment I shut my eyes. I want my memory to rescue it – to re-collect it, gather it up in my arms like a foundling.

I want to continue seeing anew.

There is a Paul Simon song I used to love as a kid. I’d beg my dad to put it on the record play-er, then I’d spin around and around the living room while it played, spinning until I fell down.

‘A man walks down the street’ it goes. ‘It’s a street in a strange world. Maybe it’s the third world or maybe it’s his first time around.

And then: ‘Doesn’t speak the language. Holds no currency. He is a foreign man. He is sur-rounded by sounds. Sounds. Cattle in the marketplace. Scattering rings of orphanages. He looks around – around – he sees angels in the architecture.

Spinning in infinity.He says Amen Hallellujah.’

I was that man. As a child in my parents’ living room, and now, again, in Lisbon.

I looked around –around – and what I heard was the sound of a language that privileges the sssshhh and oisshhh. I saw streets named after states of being, and after the tradespeople whose shops originally lined them. Rua dos Cegos. Rua dos Sapateiros. Rua dos Douradores. Streets for blind people, shoemakers, gold merchants. I walked through signs. On one building façade I read: Penso mas nao existo – I think but I don’t exist. I spoke to others through ges-tures, smiles. I learned to widen my eyes to convey the strength of what I was feeling. By the second day, my eyes were perpetually escancarados.

On the flight back from Lisbon, I was reading the London Journal of Flora Tristan, 1842. The epigraph that introduces the third chapter, ‘On the Character of Londoners’, is an extract from ‘Great Britain in 1833’, by the Baron d’Haussez. Who is the Baron d’Haussez? I have no idea. Who was Flora Tristan? No clue. I had picked up the book in a café in the Bairro Alto on my first day – there it was, amongst ten-year-old Lonely Planets, earmarked mystery novels and the French (Spanish, Italian, German) versions of Harlequin romances. Unappetizing, perhaps, and yet offering the incitation to take one and, should it strike a particular chord, to make it your – my – our own. It was a veritable invitation to take, to feed, on words.

So I did. Or rather, I bit into the epigraph – swallowed, then choked. ‘There must be some kind of defect in the character, domestic arrangements and habits of the English, for they are not happy anywhere’ it read. ‘They care little for their comfort as long as they are somewhere else. That variety and diversion which other nations seek in the territory of their imagination the English seek simply in going about from one place to another’.

Standing in the café, half-leaning against that bookcase, I felt my face grow warm, as if I had caught someone scrutinising me deep inside. I’m not even English. I spluttered to no one in particular. And then: There is nothing wrong with my domestic arrangements. And then again, My imagination is plenty varied.

Imagining I was silencing the voice that had first uttered those words, I thrust it into my bag, and left the café,thinking, I am fine just where I am, in this place between places. And when I got to the Mirador de Caterina, I stopped, felt the heat of the sun on the nape of my neck, and

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said to no one in particular, Pleasure resides precisely in this going from one place to another.

Pleasure resides in imagining one’s self em outra parte.

It was on the flight home that I pulled the book out again, reading the narrator’s own diag-nosis of a people who, in her view, had lost their sense of place, resigning themselves to a life of relentless wandering and searching, an aimless quest to find that displaced – what? Home? History? Destiny? Surely it wasn’t – isn’t – only the English who felt, or feel, this way? It was, after all, the words of the ever-wandering, ever-seeking, Alvaro de Campos that first captured my imagination – that spoke to my restless state before I even set foot in Lisbon: ‘Não posso es-tar em parte alguma. A minha Patria é onde não estum.’ (‘I don’t belong anywhere. My country is wherever I’m not’). And ‘Eu não vou ficar muito tempo, pois eu nunca ficar muito tempo’ (‘I won’t stay long, for I never stay long’. And again: ‘Giro, rodeo, eu engenho-me’ (‘I turn, I spin, I forge myself’).

Since the flight back, the phrase ‘She cares little for her comfort as long as she is somewhere else’ has continued to echo in my mind.

As long as I am somewhere else. As long as I can re-capture Lisbon – take those small, still-frame images I can still recall, and

transfer them carefully, one by one, onto the landscape, the objects, the things that surround me here.

I will superimpose images of Portuguese tomate, pepinos and pimentos onto the vegetables in the Sainsbury’s produce aisle. Over each pallid tomato will go one whose vivid colour re-affirms all that should be. I want to hide the taste of sardinhas up inside the roof of my mouth.

This is possibly the reason why, in the eight hours between landing and going to bed, I did everything but write. I woke up in the middle of the night, looking at the silent walls around me and resenting them for not reverberating with the movement of lumbering trams or the sound of that old garbage truck, I turned to books already written. In Pascal Mercier’s Night Train to Lisbon, I hoped to find those motifs already fully formed – transposed from city to page, ready for me to re-discover.

But they weren’t. Or rather, they weren’t enough. It wasn’t my experiences that I read. And it wasn’t the Lisbon I remembered that I found: neither the one I had first encountered, in the poems of Pessoa and the stories of Antonio Tabucchi (texts read sleepily in my grand-mother’s reading room in Italy one summer years ago,), nor the one that met me as I stepped off the plane, hurling itself at me in a bombardment of colours and sounds. 300 pages and no feeling. No spirit. And – ironic, for a novel so concerned with the proclivities of the mind and intellect and the longing of the soul – it didn’t have the necessary depth. The espessura. Espes-sura: density, depth, volume. Oh, the wonders of a language that has a word that both denotes the concentration of content, and itself re-enacts that concentration! A word that both conveys substance and elicits a desire for it…

I am drunk on Portuguese. I am subsumed by a language I barely know. In my hand I hold five or six words. I hold

them, touching them gingerly with the reverence you reserve for those things you still can’t

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believe you’ve found. And they, oh so few, hold me.

Homens and mujeres. Ciudade. Dessossego. Extraviado. Abstraiendo-se. Amor.

In Italian, my mother tongue, the word for ‘wandering’ is vagare. A vague person is vago; a person who wanders vaga. He ‘vagues’. The Portuguese equivalent is vagabundear, like the Italian vagabondare. In other words, to vagabond. I know this not from the pocket dictionary I carried with me, but from an Italian biologist I met on my last day in the city, in the sort of encounter you only have on holiday. When your mind is already creating stories – when the people around you have started to appear as improbable and mystifying as the signs you see on buildings.

I had been walking in the Jardim Botanico, the botanical gardens, when it started raining – suddenly, the way it does at the end of summer when the season is ready to turn. There we were, in the middle of the Jardim, by a moss-covered fountain full of goldfish, and with only trees for shelter. Drenched within minutes, we stood under the trees and smiled foolishly at each other, expressing little beyond a kind of mute solidarity. We watched the rain strike the surface of the water while the fish underneath continued swimming, unperturbed. It seemed rude, in a sense, for one of us to leave the other there – and yet for my part, I was too embar-rassed to actually look at him. It was only when I saw the book in his hand – a mystery novel with an Italian title – that the awkwardness broke. I could say something.

And so it went: Sei Italiano? Anch’io. Nervous, then relieved, laughter. E di dove? (From where?) E perché Lisbona? (And why Lisbon?) And why the Jardim? And why this rain? And, after all, why not the rain? What a perfect place to be caught in it, no? And then the shared enthusiasm at being caught unawares. Of being away from home, without a plan, vagando.

He had just returned from a year abroad, at the University of Texas. He would have to go back to Siena to do some teaching, yes, but he had no intention of staying long.

‘Like you’, he said, ‘I am vagabundeando.’ We talked. He took a photograph of me with my camera, grinned as I squinted through the

showers. Then, while handing back the camera, he pointed out a plant, just inches away from my foot.

‘See that?’ He asked, crouching down by my feet. ‘It’s a gameophyte Psilotum. They’re not-quite-ferns’. He touched one, gently. ‘You see? No true leaves, no true roots. It’s why biologists used to see them as primitive. The way –’ he smiled. ‘Perhaps the way the first American set-tlers viewed the nomadic tribes. Inferior beings for what must have appeared to them as a lack of place, or “community” in their sense of the word’. His smile broadened. He fingered the wet plant, then straightened up.

‘Except scientists found out, more recently, that these early plants are far more complex than they had originally thought. They have this structure, this vast’ he splayed his arms wide, ‘ this vast, branching, underground structure. They are rooted – but more like –’ he paused again. ‘Have you read Deleuze?’ I shook my head.

‘No but tell me’ I said. Thinking – this is not happening. He smiled. This man’s face, when he smiled, was so open.‘Deleuze sees nomads as more fixed than anyone else. Their fixity, so to speak, lies in their

always moving between places. That is what centres them. And for Deleuze, societies, and knowledge, should be modelled less like a root-tree structure, and more like a – ’ He spun his wrist around and around, opening and closing his fist, ‘more like a rhizome.’

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I didn’t ask what a rhizome was.He knelt down again, at my feet, at the plant’s feet, and plucked a miniscule bulb off its top.

He looked up at me. ‘It’s okay,’ he smiled, seeing my look of surprise. ‘It’ll grow back.’He stood up again and handed me the bulb. ‘I look at these plants and I think this is how we

should be. Like Deleuze says. Like these plants have known for centuries. Growing – evolving – by vagabondear.’

I nodded – stunned. And then we watched the rain. When it stopped, we smiled at each other, exchanged emails, and went our separate ways. Before parting, he squeezed my shoul-der, briefly, as if we had known each other a long time, long enough for it to be difficult to say good-bye.

Soon, I will no longer wake up at night, attuned to the slow heaving sigh of a garbage truck as it trundles its way through the alley below my window with the deliberation of a mule. I will no longer expect to hear the shattering of glass bottles against the pavement, or of garbage col-lectors vociferating amongst themselves. The phrases that had become second nature will no longer spring from my mouth without my needing to recollect them. I will once again go back to ‘Please’ and ‘Thank you’. I will forget to look up Deleuze. My emails to the biologist will, very likely, remain unsent drafts. But before that happens –

Antes –Antes –Antes –Let me get this all down.And once I have, let not me, but something – someone – somewhere – else translate all of

that which I have seen… into all I have yet to see.

And may it allow me to maintain alive this new-found desire to vagabundear.

PROSE

When I was thirty years old, a man called out my name from across the street. I had been carrying an embodied scarf for a girl receiving communion that morning, and thought, in passing, the man had been her father. I waved, recognizing—with a sudden, nauseating dread—my brother’s face.

There are moments when caution compromises curios-ity; such was this, and I did not stop. I attended communion, shaken, but otherwise composed, and presented the scarf to Celia. She thanked me and, wrapping it twice around her neck, kissed my cheek. Degas, I decided. As fluid as a pale pastel, she was meant for display at the Louvre. She flicked the scarf over her shoulder with one of her soft, little hands, and smiling, moved toward a table of sweets.

That evening, I drank. It was a cool night, where mayflies were born and sank in the

same moment. I stood on the balcony, flicking coins at boats as they crept down the Thames. A woman in the flat below was humming an aria from Carmen.

THE KINGFISHER

by Katie McGinnis

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My brother was at the railing, dressed in a formal wool jacket, with a pocket watch dangling from his belt. He smoked a cigar, puffing with round lips, and the full, red cheeks of his youth. There was no coming; he was simply there, as though he had always been.

‘Molly,’ he said, ‘you can see the stars tonight—every single one of them. They’re pretty things, aren’t they?’

I was too ashamed to answer, and looked away. It seemed a terrible burden to me, to need to explain how life continues through the church bells and funerary hymns. He pressed the glowing butt of the cigar against his sleeve.

‘Don’t be sour, sister. You should be smiling.’

We sat in the study and drank. At his request, I had tea, while he finished a bottle of brandy. My tea was over-steeped, and I began another cup. My brother took a book from my shelf and opened it to the title page. He was sincere and I knew, in my heart, that he was not reading, and the words must captivate him in the same way explorers wonder over hieroglyph-ics.

‘Molly,’ my brother said, closing the book, ‘I want to convince you this isn’t a trick. Take my hand.’

‘I don’t want you to try to prove anything to me, for fear I’ll realize the trick. Don’t judge me, Samuel. I enjoy your company.’ I set my cup down, and reached for the sugar. ‘You died when I was only a girl, and couldn’t understand anything, especially death. You’ve given me a second chance.’

‘I didn’t die.’ ‘Yes, you died in war, as all men do. ‘All the youth wasted in the young. All the young

wasted on war.’ That was what mother said at your service. You should have seen her. It was dreadful.’

‘I don’t remember it, Molly. I’ve been sleeping.’ ‘You’re a silly boy.’ He smiled and there was sadness in his eyes. It was a childlike innocence, a stillness I

could not pinpoint. I remembered how he had, as a boy, captured a wren and teased the family dog with it. When he let the creature go, it was torn to pieces.

Samuel had been the unfortunate mix between a groomed gentlemen and all the oppo-site; he was, in all telling, a polite beast—what every conqueror, of any historical notoriety, demonstrates at some point during childhood. This was it. My brother was destined for war. I knew this, and my mother, and my father had before he died. It is the same way some artists are born, or unworldly prodigies, who manage concertos before they can guide their feet into stockings. He gave up his studies and demanded the history of war. War, war, war. Our tutor assigned him a book on Caligula. He gave it to me. ‘I can’t read this,’ he’d explained, ‘so you will read it and tell me about this man.’

‘They probably shot me,’ he confessed, after I had poured another cup of tea. ‘I don’t remember. It is likely that, if you say I died, I did. You are much older, and the war is finished.’

‘The war has been over for some time. I imagined you under a white cross, in a white field. It was a pleasant idea.’

‘I woke up in a bog.’ ‘A bog? There are years of history trapped in the bogs, like nats in amber. It wouldn’t be

the same if they could just crawl out.’ ‘Nonsense,’ he snapped, pulling a new cigar from his breast pocket. ‘Good God—this

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matter has truly affected me. I don’t think I want to be a person anymore.’ He set the book back on the shelf, and stood up. ‘Molly, how is papa’s fruit shop?’

‘It was sold after mother died.’ ‘Sold the shop—aren’t you married, then? If you’re a widow, you must have some sort

of inheritance. There was no need to sell our shop.’ ‘I never married. I hated the idea of growing old in a bed.’ ‘You’re so picky,’ he scolded. ‘You’ve always been picky. It’s too late now—nobody will

have you. You’ve been a fool, selling the one thing I was fond of.’ ‘We could marry, Samuel, as you’re dead, and alive, and no longer a brother. You’re

fond of me. We’d get along well.’ ‘I don’t want to marry you.’ He lit his cigar. ‘You’ll take me to the fruit shop, Molly. I

don’t care if it’s a brothel. Don’t treat me so cruelly.’ ‘I will. Things are torn down, and things are built up—you should understand this,

Samuel. The fruit shop is no more.’ ‘Name your price, Molly, and I’ll give it to you.’ ‘Fine—you’ll offer? I’d like the young girl, Celia, who received communion today. A

pretty daughter like that; I’d have her learn French, dance, and the piano. I regret not having children—imagine, growing old with nobody! And all you can bemoan is a lost box in an alley.’

‘I can’t give you her—that’s much too complicated.’ ‘I know. You can’t do much, after all.’ I offered my hand, but he wouldn’t take it. ‘Did it

hurt when you were shot? Try to remember.’ ‘It probably did.’ ‘Yes, I imagined so. You should have come to me in another form—not human. It’s

strange to look upon the dead, to have to accept it so quietly. You’re flesh and blood, love. I’ll believe it.’

My brother set the bottle of brandy on the table, and leaned forward. I could smell the sourness of his breath. He took my hand and kissed it. There was no pain, only a warmness, and a flood dreams, of wrens and robins and snapping jaws. I placed my hand on his lap, and my brother, letting go of my wrist, began to weep.

I slept in the study that evening, with Samuel beside me. When I woke, he was gone.

Dawn came hesitantly, through shadows and clouds. The air was smoky and I remembered the war and the trenches and the lithographs, and thought about Samuel, nestled in a bog, the pocket watch still ticking, the heart still beating, the testament of humming nats as clear as the cries of men.

There was a knock at the door. I answered. Cecilia stood in a nightgown, with her eyes closed. She held a birdcage, with a bouncing, teal bird, tripping over two ribbons attached to its feet. She mechanically offered me the cage. I took it.

‘Go home, Celia.’ I said. For my eighth birthday my father had given me a coloured book of exotic birds; parrots,

cockatiels, amazons, hammerkops. At the end of this book there had been a fantastic painting of a kingfisher hovering over a lake, its head, neck, body and tail curved into an inverted horse-shoe. I wondered how the air carried it. Here was a kingfisher, with its curious oversized beak, the flamboyant guise. I held the cage in level with my face. The bird calmed, ruffled its feathers, and turned its head to watch me.

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‘Too-loo, too-loo,’ I cooed, carrying it out to the balcony. The bird became very still. I held the cage over the railing, memorizing its colouring, every curve of its delicate body, and let the cage fall. There was the soft parting of waters, and quiet.