Other writers in this issue range far and wide. Nikesh Shukla returns, this time with a sideswipe at tourist culture as embodied in that fundamentally decadent trip, the safari. Laura Martz tackles drop-out culture in 1980s Amsterdam and Nicholas Hogg shows us a decent southern states man, swerving closer than he expected to the Mexican border, and other borders too.

We unveil works by a couple of stars too: celebrated Israeli writer Etgar Keret gives us another lonely man who turns his daily cafe breakfast into a chance to commune with all kinds of other mistaken souls – providing a sparky start to your day, too, we hope. From the other side of the world, eminent New Zealand poet CK Stead wrote ‘Auckland’, reaching back in time as well as space. And more poetry from English poet Charlie Druce also offers brief adventures in head-on encounters with animals.

Litro Classics may turn into a regular slot: we couldn’t resist including a chapter from that model adventurer Lemuel Gulliver ‘s journals to round off our compendium. This is where he meets a new race neither tiny nor gigantic, but horselike and rather intelligent… We hope you find it all strange enough to want to seek out more Swift, and indeed more adventure of all sorts. And finally, remember to look out for our August issue, whose special guest editor is a big name in the film world.

Sophie Lewis & Dena Ziari

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said, ‘I’ll take this one for now. When the other one comes, I’ll collect it.’
And I spent four, five months gazing at the brown chair, incapable of picking it up and taking it to be changed even when they began to phone almost daily from the shop.

‘The red one is here for you. You can come for it now.’
‘I can’t today. I’ll come tomorrow.’
I wrote down the job to be done on several pages covering several weeks, I went to bed many nights thinking about the chair, I often got up fretting that a polite voice on the phone would say good morning and remind me:
‘Would you like us to deliver it? We can deliver it, too.’
‘No, no, I’ll come.’
‘If you prefer the brown one, you can keep it.’
‘No, really I prefer the red one.’

And the day came to return the chair. A seventh of July like any other, except that on that day I was thirty-five. I swore I wouldn’t let the morning go by without getting the job done. I got up, resolute. I took the brown chair in my arms, I walked downstairs with it and put it into the car, in the front passenger seat, legs in the air. I sat behind the steering-wheel and set off.

I’ve always liked driving. I remembered this wasn’t the way to the shop, but I headed down the road that crossed the river, certain I’d end up in the same place. In this respect Santiago isn’t like other cities. The urban layout is an ancient one, established long ago, and from the surrounding villages you reach the centre along narrow tarmac lanes that go straight from the front doors of the houses to the covered market, and nowhere much else. The radial roads that run from the centre to the surrounding areas aren’t linked by those circular flyovers which weave the spider’s web of a great city. I drove through those patches of green country in the hope of sometime finding the short cut that would take me to the shopping centre, but a little after crossing the river I realized there wasn’t going to be any such short cut. Even so, the beauty of the road that was now taking me into wooded country made it worth going a few extra kilometres to get to nowhere in particular without looking at the clock. The brown chair was by my side, sitting with its legs in the air like a silent, sceptical companion.

I thought for a moment that this was one of the most absurd scenes of my life, a woman who on her thirty-fifth birthday runs away from home, with only a chair for her luggage, towards an unpredictable and unknown destiny. Who’d miss me if I never went back? Would the shop owner really take the trouble to find me? I drove on as I fantasized about reaching a wonderful place, a moist, green meadow where I would get out, set up my chair – the chair I should never have bought – and sit there to look at the view, the city in the distance with the outline of the cathedral, and maybe, around me, as around the oldest city centres, there would be a gradual accumulation of sundry and necessary objects that I still didn’t own and that it was high time I took into my care; in the end that soon-to-be-rejected chair would become the first stone upon which my church would be built, and beside it a man who’d greet me at the door with a kiss, the children I’d have with that man, the walls we’d build to protect them from the cold, the beds we’d sleep in, and finally the table and the chairs we’d buy to sit down and eat on festa days with our guests. The brown chair would be the first stone of my new life, a chair chanced upon, not chosen. I glanced at it by my side in the car, and began to feel sorry to be getting rid of that piece of furniture.

Suddenly, just when I was thinking about turning back, a little tired from driving for kilometres doing nothing but my imagination any good, I looked at the dashboard clock: it was gone half past one. The time when I was born, according to my mother – half past one in the afternoon, the time when all the shops close. I calculated that I was further from the shopping centre than it had at first seemed. I thought I must either rush back to change the chair before they closed or forget all about the matter. But I did the former, of course. I turned back and put my foot down. I didn’t waste time looking for short cuts, I drove like greased lightning back along the tarmac road I’d come down, and in five minutes covered the distance that separated me from the centre and that had taken me half an hour in my impromptu flight. I saw the frightened faces of the people, stepping back on to the verges, the trees I was leaving behind, the moist, green meadows with which I’d had my moment of intimacy and which were now becoming forever alien. Soon I crossed the river and returned to the city. The roads, cluttered with cars and traffic lights, led me straight to the shopping centre. They were hanging up the ‘closed’ sign when I arrived. The shop assistant looked at me, in the relaxed manner of small-town shopkeepers. I took the brown chair in my arms as if it were a sick child.
‘I’m here to change the chair,’ I said, like someone coming into casualty from a long way off, from one of those villages where there aren’t any hospitals, or any shopping centres.
The man looked at the chair and recognised it. He let us in.
‘Come in,’ he said. ‘We were just about to shut.’
The red chair was in an unsorted collection of furniture in a corner of the shop. It seemed faded.
‘Yes, that’s the one,’ I said, and handed my chair over.

It was past lunchtime when I got home. The door in front of me opened by itself, as if in a hurricane, as if someone had sensed me climbing the stairs. Behind the door, young blond children welcomed me expectantly.
‘Happy birthday, Mama.’
I walked with the chair through their shouts and their turmoil to the dining-room, where the brown chair had left its empty space. A man sitting on the sofa folded the newspaper he was reading and came to kiss me.
‘Happy birthday, my dear,’ he said.
I tried to act normally. I put the chair in its place. I went to my diary to cross out the job I’d just done. I asked those people what they wanted for lunch.

Luisa Castro is a poet and novelist. Her career began as a poet in the1980s. Her volume of poetry in Galician, Baleas e baleas (Esquío Prize, 1988), is considered a seminal work. Since then she has written exclusively in Spanish, apart from some short stories, such as this one. Castro has published several novels and one collection of short stories, Podría hacerte daño (Ediciones del Viento, 2005), which was awarded the Torrente Ballester prize. She contributes to El País, El Mundo and ABC, the three most important Spanish newspapers, and to La Voz de Galicia, the most important Galician one.

This story is included in From the Beginning of the Sea (Anthology of Contemporary Galician Short Stories). www.foreigndemand.net

Avichai spent a lot of time watching the people at the other tables. He’d eavesdrop on conversations, read the sports supplement or inspect the ups and downs of the Israeli shares on Wall Street with an air of detached concern. Sometimes someone would come over and ask for a section of the paper he’d finished reading, and he would nod and try to smile. Once, when a sexy young mother with a baby in a stroller walked over to him he even said to her, as he gave up the front page with the banner headline about a gang rape in the suburbs: “What a crazy world we’re bringing our children into.” He thought it sounded like the kind of statement that brings people closer together, pointing as it did to their common fate, but the sexy mom just glared at him with a half-angry stare and took the
Healthy Living supplement too without asking.
Then one Thursday a fat, sweaty guy walked into the café and smiled at him. Avichai was surprised. The last person who’d given him a smile was Maayan, five months before she left him, and hers had been utterly sarcastic, whereas the fat guy’s smile was soft, almost apologetic. The fat guy gestured unmistakably that he’d like to sit down, and Avichai nodded back almost without stopping to think. The fat guy took a seat.

“Meir,” he said “I’m really sorry I’m late. I know we said ten but I had a nightmare morning with the kid.”

It crossed Avichai’s mind that maybe he ought to tell the fat guy he wasn’t Meir, but he found himself checking his watch instead, and saying, “What’s ten minutes? Forget it.”

Then neither of them spoke for a second, and Avichai asked if the kid was okay. And the fat guy said she was, it was just that she’d started a new kindergarten and every time he took her there she had a hard time letting him go.

“But never mind,” he stopped short. “You’ve got enough on your plate without my problems. Let’s get down to business.”

Avichai took a deep breath and waited.

“Look,” the fat guy said. “Five hundred is too high. Give it to me for four hundred. Know what? Four hundred and ten even and I’m good for six hundred pieces.”

“Four hundred and eighty,” Avichai said. “Four hundred and eighty. And that’s only if you’re good for a thousand.”

“You gotta understand,” the fat guy said. “The market’s in the shitter, what with the recession and all. Just last night on the news they showed people eating out of rubbish bins. If you keep pushing, I’ll have to sell high. You’re pricing me right out of the market.”

“Don’t worry,” Avichai told him. “For every three people eating out of rubbish bins, there’s someone driving a Mercedes.”

For some reason, this sentence made the fat guy laugh out loud. “They told me you were tough,” he muttered with a smile.

“I’m just like you,” Avichai protested. “Just trying to keep body and soul together.”
The fat guy wiped his sweaty palm on his shirt, then held it out. “Four hundred and sixty,” he said. “Four hundred and sixty and I take a thousand.” When he saw Avichai wasn’t reacting, he added: “Four hundred and sixty, a thousand pieces, and I owe you a favour. And you know better than anyone, Meir, that in our business favours are worth more than money.”

This last sentence was all Avichai needed to take the outstretched hand and shake it. For the first time in his life, someone owed him a favour. Someone who thought his name was Meir, but still. And when they’d finished eating, as they argued over who would pick up the tab, a warm feeling spread through Avichai’s stomach. He beat the fat guy to it by a tenth of a second and shoved the crumpled bill into the waitress’s hand.

From that day on it happened almost routinely. Avichai would take a seat, place his order and keep a look-out for any new person who came into the café, and if that person started searching the tables with an expectant look, Avichai would quickly wave and invite him or her to take a seat.
“I don’t want to have to take you to court,” a bald guy with thick eyebrows told him.
“Me neither,” Avichai conceded. “It’s always better to settle things amicably.”
“Just remember I don’t do night shifts,” a silicon-lipped bleach blonde announced.
“Just who do you think you are? Do you really expect everyone else to do night shifts, except you?” Avichai grumbled back.

“Gabi asked me to tell you he’s sorry,” said a guy with rotting teeth and bad breath.
“If he’s really sorry,” Avichai countered, “tell him to come and tell me himself. No middlemen!”
“In your email you sounded taller,” a skinny redhead complained. “In your email you sounded less picky,” he snapped.

And somehow everything worked out in the end. He and baldy settled, the silicon lips agreed to ask her sister to baby-sit so she could do one night-shift a week, the bad breath promised Gabi would phone, and the redhead and Avishai agreed they weren’t quite right for each other. Sometimes they picked up the tab, sometimes he did. With the redhead, they went dutch. It was all so fascinating that if a whole morning went when nobody took a seat across from him at the table, Avichai’s heart began to sink. Luckily, this didn’t happen too often.

Almost a month had gone by since the sweaty fat guy when a pockmarked man walked in. Despite the pocked face and the fact that he looked at least ten years older than Avichai, he was a good-looking guy with loads of charisma. The first thing he said as he sat down was: “I was sure you wouldn’t show.”

“But we agreed to meet,” Avichai answered.
“Yes,” said the pockmarked guy with a sad smile, “except that after the way I yelled at you on the phone, I was afraid you’d chicken out.”

“So here I am,” Avichai said, almost teasingly.
“I’m sorry I yelled at you on the phone,” the guy apologised. “Really, I just lost it. But I meant every word I said – you got that? Now I’m asking you to stop seeing her.”
“But I love her,” Avichai said in a stifled voice.

“Sometimes you can love something and you still have to give it up,” the pockmarked guy said. “Listen to someone a little older than you. Sometimes you have to give it up.”
“Sorry,” Avichai said, “but I can’t.”
“Yes, you can,” the guy shot back. “You can and you will. There’s no other way. We both love her, but I happen to be her husband and I’m not about to let you break up my family. Got that?”
Avichai shook his head. “You have no idea what my life has been like this past year,” he told the husband. “Hell. Not even hell, just one great big stale chunk of nothing. And when you’ve been living with nothing for so long and suddenly something turns up, you can’t just tell it to go away. You understand me, don’t you? I know you understand me.”

The husband bit his lower lip. “If you see her one more time,” he said, “I’ll kill you. I’m not kidding either. I’ll kill you.”

“So kill me,” Avichai shrugged. “You don’t scare me. We’re all going to die in the end.”
The husband bent down across the table and socked Avichai in the jaw. It was the first time in his life that anyone had hit him so hard and Avichai felt a hot wave of pain surge up somewhere in the middle of his face and spread in every direction. Seconds later, he found himself on the floor, with the husband standing over him.

“I’ll take her away from here,” the husband kept shouting, as he went on kicking Avichai in the stomach and ribs. “I’ll take her far away, to another country, and you won’t know where she is. You’ll never see her again, you got that, you rotten piece of shit?”

Two waiters jumped on the husband and managed somehow to pull him away from Avichai. One of them yelled to the barman to call the police. With his cheek still glued to the coolness of the floor, Avichai watched the husband run out of the café. One of the waiters bent over and asked him whether he was okay. Avichai tried to answer.

“Do you want me to call an ambulance?” the waiter asked.
Avichai whispered that he didn’t. “Are you sure?” the waiter insisted. “Your lip is bleeding.” Avichai nodded slowly and shut his eyes. He tried as hard as he could to imagine himself with that woman. The one he’d never see again. He tried, and for a moment he almost succeeded. His whole body ached. He felt alive.

Etgar Keret is a leading voice in Israeli literature and cinema. He has published four books of stories and novellas, most recently Missing Kissinger (winner of the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize) and Kneller’s Happy Campers (in 2006 this became an award-winning feature film called “Wristcutters”) and four graphic novels. His books have been published in twenty-six languages. A new film co-written by Keret will be released in 2009.

“Healthy Start” was first published in Tin House magazine. This is its first publication in the UK.
Miriam Shlesinger was born in the United States and has been living in Israel since 1964. She is the translator of over thirty plays from Hebrew into English, as well as an interpreter, and lecturer at Bar-Ilan University.

child in the night

to hear the huge rain

beating on iron.

No fibre-glass muffle -

only that raw rough

sleep-inducing

din.

We’ve eaten the 12

jars of plums

I stewed and froze

at Christmas.

Now it’s the season

for early apples

autumn dowsings

and olives.

A good crop

they drum down

into the bucket

like ancient rains.

From Collected Poems by CK Stead, published in 2009 by Carcanet Press (www.carcanet.co.uk)CK STEAD was born in Auckland in 1932. He has published thirteen collections of poems and two of short stories, eleven novels and six books of literary criticism. His best-known critical work is The New Poetic (1964). His literary awards include the Katherine Mansfield prize for the short story, the New Zealand Book Award for poetry and the King’s Lynn Poetry Prize. Stead was awarded a CBE in 1985 for services to New Zealand literature.

Biking through Rajasthan on a Royal Enfield Bullett is said to be one of God’s great rides, like doing Route 66 on a Harley or Paris-Dakar on a BMW, but take heed, because this ride can be even more hazardous than delivering pizza in Rome on a Honda C50. For the uninitiated, the Royal Enfield is a bike stuck in the 50’s with a kick-start and infuriating gearbox. But hey, relax, this is India!
You don’t have to be Ewan McGreggor to experience the joy (or pain) of touring part of this mighty country. If you’re in the money and prefer company, by all means join an organized tour and stay in luxurious converted palaces of the Mughal Empire. But if that’s not you, then hire a Bullet in Delhi and stay in backpacker hotels and survive on cashew gravy and a parantha washed down with sweet lassi on the way. If you go November-March you won’t need air-con and the few mosquitoes can be chemically repelled.

Before you get the bike, though, enjoy the madness of Delhi because you sure as hell won’t enjoy it afterwards. Leave the white jacket and panama at home; wear muted colours. You’ll still be seen as a westerner but you’ll be taken for a resident and so avoid the worst of the scams. (Like the shoe shine who sidles up and points to the blob of goose-crap that has miraculously appeared on your shoe – how did he do that! When he’s cleaned it off he’ll ask for an exorbitant amount for his trouble. Then his mates appear and the real fun begins. But never surrender!)

To read more travel tips from… Get Up and Go! (£4.99) is available now in bookshops and from Oceanmediauk.com

“Blythe,” he said to the empty passenger seat, shaking his head.

Then he slammed the dashboard so hard he split the plastic casing.

He drove on with his knuckles scuffed and the blood pounding through his hand, dragging the U-Haul trailer all the way to the very line between California and Arizona, his new Border Agent station.
For the first week he practically ignored the other agents, considered them rookies, young and stupid. Aged thirty-five, he was a veteran. For the last three years he rode the fence at Tijuana, patrolling the beach on an ATV. Black goggles and flak jackets. Agents in teams of four like mechanised horsemen of the apocalypse churning up sand or watching with binoculars the bikinied senoritas across the Mexican border. Countries divided by a mesh fence where families came for Sunday picnics and husbands talked with wives and kids through chain link.

Then two months ago, after his ex-wife got about twice as much as he thought she would in their divorce settlement, there was an incident, ‘excessive force’.

And this was before the gambling, the online blackjack sessions, new credit cards maxed in a single evening.

From a two-bed condo in San Diego to a row of one-storey houses trailing into the desert. Mesh fences sectioning the grassless yards.

His second night in Blythe he picked up a local girl. Raylene was inked on her sternum. “I’m guessing that’s not your husband’s name,” Tate joked, sliding on to the next bar stool.

The third time he slept with her, realising she was getting attached, he had the notion it would be a more honest transaction if he picked up prostitutes.

For those first and only two weeks Tate worked nights alone, played blackjack till midday, then slept till his next shift.

Above his desk at the station hung a map of the border from Calexico to Nogales and running north all the way to Phoenix. Grids dividing desert, scrub, rivers and creeks, trails littered with trash from the footfall of nation crossers.

Tate scanned the vectors to find his patrol route. “Son of a bitch.” He had been assigned to one of the new recruits.

He went into the locker room, buttoned up his shirt, adjusted his holster and checked his spare magazine. Then he took his flak jacket from the hook and fastened it over his chest.

“Yo, Tate,” hollered supervisor Martinez. “I’m gonna be pissed if you’re late to meet my new blood.”
“I’m already there.” Tate shut his locker and walked to the training room where six new agents fresh from the academy stood to attention. Martinez read out and matched their names with the more experienced agents, Tate included, paired with a skinny kid he hoped would be assigned to another officer.

“Agent Huffman, pleased to meet you.”

Tate shook his hand and they walked from the air-conditioned station into the smouldering dusk. Temperature just below a hundred. A redness in the west, bats flickering over agents loading rifles onto gun racks, kicking tires and checking radios.

Huffman was frantically padding down his shirt and thrusting his hands into empty pockets.

“You got a problem?”

“Lost my pen.”

“Your pen.”

“Must be in the office.”

“Here.” Tate tossed over his. It was the kind of pen you get free at off-track betting windows. Huffman dropped it on the tarmac. He scrabbled under the fender and came up red and flustered with it in his hand.

“Got it.”

Tate opened the door. “Listen, Huffman. It’s not your fault. But I ain’t in the mood for babysitting. So just do what I say, and keep your shit together. Cause no one’s gonna wipe your ass but you.”
Tate had the Explorer parked facing Mexico. Not that you could see where one country ended and another began. He and Huffman sat either side of the mounted radio unit, a roll of toilet paper speared on the emergency brake lever. Separating the front and back seats was a black mesh divider sealing off the holding pen. Attached to this was a shotgun rack.

Huffman turned his hat in his hands and fingered the brim as he scanned the starlit desert. He sat forward in his seat and eyed every plant and shrub. “This a quiet night?”

Tate twirled a .40 calibre round along his knuckles. “You complaining?”

“Just wondering if we’re going to see some action.”

Tate took his feet down from the dashboard. He had driven off the Interstate and bumped along the dirt road and barely said a word. Now he unfastened the magazine from the Glock and clipped back the round. “What do you want to know?”

“Sir?”

“Tate. When it’s you, me and the stars, plain Tate.”

“Yes, Sir. I mean Tate.”

“We’re not even two hours into the shift. Only got dark an hour ago.”

“So it’ll be busy later?”

“Some nights you’d think it was a crowd coming home from a football game.”

Huffman took the binoculars from the dashboard and scanned the vista of stars and sand.
“Must be extra time.”

Tate almost laughed. “So, why do want to be a Border Agent?”

“Wanted to for a while now.”

“Since when?”

“Since I worked a summer on my uncle’s ranch in Cochise County. His place was overrun with Mexicans. We’d ride out every morning to fix fences they cut in the night. The horses and cattle would go running out after the Mexicans came in.”

“So what’d you do if you come across Sancho with a pair of bolt cutters?”

“We carried rifles. My uncle had a twelve gauge. That scared ‘em pretty good till Border Patrol got there.”

Tate looked at Huffman then checked his watch before asking, “You hate Mexicans?”
“Nope. I just love America.”

Tate had the key in the ignition. He paused. “Aint that the problem?” Then he fired up the Explorer and reached into the glove box and handed Huffman the flashlight. “See that?” Tate pointed through the windshield at a strip of smoothed sand running along the edge of the road.

“I see it.”

“That’s the drag. We got all this technology. Satellites. GPS. Night vision goggles and sensors hidden in the cactus. But nothing better than sign-cutting. Truck comes out around dusk, trailing five tires on a length of chain. We got our drag. And all you have to do is keep the beam on that patch of dirt and holler when you get a print.”

“That’s it?”

“Till we get something.”

Tate pulled away. Bugs and cactus in the headlights, moths swirling like shreds of paper.
Within five minutes Huffman shouted, “Yo. Footprints.” He aimed the beam at a scribble of marks spoiling the smoothed sand and opened the door.

“You need to take a whizz?” asked Tate.

“Checking the drag.”

Tate laughed. “If you catch who made those prints you better have two pairs of cuffs.”

“What?”

“Pair for the hind legs, and a pair for the front.”

Huffman looked again and this time saw paw prints, drops of blood and feathers. “Damn coyote.”
Tate drove on while Huffman swept the beam back and forth across the drag. He stared beyond the sand, the glare of the headlights. He stared beyond wheeling stars, the swirling universe, and saw his ex-wife as naked as she was the very first time he saw her so.

Tate got home as the sun rose. He pulled open the torn screen door, switched on the a/c and smelt rotting garbage. From the refrigerator he took a carton of cranberry juice and gulped and only breathed again when the carton was empty.

Then he checked his mail. Banks and credit card companies asking for their cash back. Threats of the repo man knocking down his door. And a letter from his ex-wife. Tate sliced it open with a knife and sat down before reading the single sheet of paper which warned that the next letter he received might cost him money as it would be via her lawyer.

Tate drank, slept, woke and showered, rode his motorbike to the station, changed into his uniform and carried into the car park his hat and a pump action shotgun. Huffman carried two gallon water bottles and opened up the Explorer and set them in the cooler along with two chicken burritos wrapped in foil.

“Daytime shift a whole lot different from nights?”

“About fifty degrees different.”

That first night they had arrested 17 illegals. 15 Mexicans and two OTMs. The Other Than Mexicans were a pair of Nicaraguans with nothing in their pockets but a scrap of paper with the scrawled address of an auto repair shop in Michigan.

Walking from the locker room Huffman had said, “These guys are gonna keep coming at us till they find a hole.”

Tate thought about the ease these men seemed to leave one life to start another, no more baggage than a handwritten note.
Then he ordered Huffman to fill the five-gallon jerrycan with water.
“We already got two gallons each.”

“It’s not for us.”

Huffman went back into the station. Tate set the shotgun on the rack. Before he lifted the hood to check the oil his phone buzzed. He flipped it open. It was a California number. Perhaps it was one of his old friends? More likely it was that son of bitch lawyer threatening to bring him up before the judge unless his ex saw some money in her account.

“We good to go?” asked Huffman, slotting the five-gallon can into the top box.
“We’re ready to go,” replied Tate, snapping shut his phone. “Put it that way.”
They drove directly to the drag.

“Another hot one.” Huffman pointed out the temperature gauge hitting a hundred. “Damn, and not even eight o’clock.”

Around mid-morning Tate told Huffman to pull over. He jumped from the cab to inspect barely discernible right angles marked in the dirt. Both men squatted on their haunches.

“I don’t see shit.”

“Foamers.”

“Foamers?”

“Guys tie squares of polystyrene to their shoes. All that’s left are these little corner dents. Better get on the radio.”

Huffman informed agents patrolling the next drag north. Within minutes they had found the tracks.
“Agent Huffman, Patrol Echo 4.”

“Huffman, go ahead.

“These guys are long gone. Bug tracks over their prints, and the Interstate only a couple miles. Next time.”

“Hell,” said Huffman. “Like they just stepped off that foam and vanished.”

They crawled the drag for another hour, focusing on a few square yards beneath the expanse of sky. Even through sunglasses and a tinted windshield their eyes hurt from squinting at the glare. And if it were not for his cup of coffee, Tate might have slept bolt upright in his seat.
“She used to keep me up all night,” he suddenly blurted to Huffman.

“What?”

Then Tate quietened, not wanting to cheapen the memories of his ex with bragging.
After the shift Tate treated Huffman to a burger and fries at a diner because he was afraid of going back to his shack of a home.

“Hey, thanks Tate.”

“First and last time. Make the most it.”

Huffman asked him about getting demoted. “If you feel like telling me.”

Tate finished his burger and wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. “The day after seeing my ex in court I had a twelve-hour shift watching Imperial Beach.”

“I guess watching the waves wouldn’t be so bad if you hadn’t just got divorced.”

“Till I get some joker on a surfboard, riding a wave over from Mexico.”

“Broad daylight?”

“Broad daylight. These round-ups are easy. You know they’re not armed because they’re wearing swim shorts. And nothing but open beach for five miles. We come flying down the dunes, and I’m glad to get some action after stewing about how she can walk away from a marriage like that. Full throttle I’m first into the surf. Then this guy’s board shoots out and cracks me on the kneecap. About drops me. I see him running so I go after him. And I’m pissed. I tackle him in the waves and he comes up spitting seawater in my face. That’s it. I crack him across the nose then grab him by the hair and put him under. Luckily the other guys pull me off him, probably save him from drowning.”
“Kind of thing gets put on you tube and causes riots.”

“Turns out the surfer’s some American college student on his spring break. His dad knows a congressman. The next thing I know I’m shipped off to the edge of the Sonora Desert counting rattlesnakes.” Tate shook his head. “Sometimes I don’t know how we do it.”

“Do what?”

“Enforce a law that’s got more holes in it than a hunk of Swiss cheese.”

“No papers, no entry.”

“No housemaids or fruit pickers. Someone to stand in a refrigerated warehouse and gut fish all day.”
Huffman crunched on his last fry.

Tate drank the rest of his coffee. “Though I guess it’s better not to think about things too much.”
The next morning Tate was called to see supervisor Martinez. When Martinez swivelled around in his chair Tate saw he had a mottled and decayed arrowhead in his hand. He rubbed his thumb across the blunted point. He studied it closely like he might read where it had once flown.

“This is a small town, Morgan.”

As soon as he heard that, Tate had no need to hear any more.

“And the law is on the side of the repo man, Border Agent or not.”

When Tate got home from work he opened the cupboard and took out a can of coffee. He flicked the water on, then off. Then he put the coffee back in the cupboard, gulped down a cold beer and took his Glock from the holster and tucked it into his waistband. He filled his pocket with a handful of rounds that were loose in the bottom of his gun box then went into the garage and kicked his bike from the stand and fired it up. He thudded under the highway bridge and flushed swallows from their nests. He rode past irrigated fields, crops grown on veins of the Colorado River. He dropped down the gears and swung into a dirt road that turned into a creek bed. When he got to a refrigerator dotted with bullet holes he pulled up and killed the engine.

After he stuck the target of a cartoon hoodlum to the door he walked back across the creek and pulled the Glock from his waistband and emptied the magazine into the face. Squeezing off the noise. Once reloaded, he emptied the gun into the heart. All the shots passed through the paper and through the refrigerator before pounding into the bank. A torn hole in the chest. He carried on pulling the trigger even when the gun was spent and somehow the metallic click of the empty mechanism rang louder than the caps exploding in the chamber.

And now the sun was in the creek.
And he was sweating.
By the time Tate had gotten home his wife’s lawyer had left a voicemail on his answering machine. And a hand-delivered letter from the credit card company lay on the doormat.

He neither listened to the message nor read the letter. He was due at work in under an hour. Due to catch men coming over the border to make money to send home to their wives.

Twenty minutes before his shift, a mile from the station, Tate swung his truck off the highway and took a rough farm track, zigzagging boulders and trenches. Then he pulled from the track and drove desert, steering between saguaro and ironwood, careful not to get a puncture on the sharper stones heated by a sun that somehow became a foreign sun this close to the line. And he carried on driving cross-country until hitting a little-used sealed road that headed south and only intersected with I-8 at the border.

Then he parked on the sand, close enough to the road so that he could ride his motorbike off the truck bed without leaving a tire track, and hauled himself out and stripped off his uniform and pulled on a pair of jeans, a t-shirt.

Then he hefted his bike upright, kicked out the stand and wiped his brow. Nothing but heat shimmer, telegraph poles and sagging wire all the way to Mexico.

Before Tate pulled on his helmet and revved up his bike and launched himself across the border he screwed up his uniform and slung it as far as he could into the glaring desert.

Nicholas Hogg won the inaugural New Writing Ventures prize for fiction. His novel, Show Me the Sky – “An assured and gripping début,” BBC Radio 3 – is published by Canongate. www.nicholashogg.com.

its lie a freeze of symmetry and curl

amongst the stones and scruffs of heather.

I remember feeling sure that the cleft it was

sunning in was going to be my next hold,

a craving to match the core of its stillness,

and the quick sense of being singled out,

not by a stumble of chance,

but as if the earth was letting me in.

How I turned, a mile into peat bogs and lochs,

wanting to find someone there to show it to!

But from the moment I retreated to put a yard

or two between us, the adder was merging back

with lichens and rocks, and the snug fit of its markings

had begun to fade; that just as it found me,

the earth was closing me out.

Charlie Druce has lived in London since 1987 and works in TV production. He grew up in rural Worcestershire and finds the deep rooted sense of that is never far from the surface. Human relationship with the environment and its nature drives much of his writing.

‘Adder’ was first published in the poetry and prose anthology A Shake of Stars (Morton Press, 2008).

from his road kill hunt, oblivious.

As if we had called him into the beams

to break our cover, not his,

wanted the shock of him loping through.

Charlie Druce has lived in London since 1987 and works in TV production. He grew up in rural Worcestershire and finds the deep rooted sense of that is never far from the surface. Human relationship with the environment and its nature drives much of his writing.

‘Adder’ was first published in the poetry and prose anthology A Shake of Stars (Morton Press, 2008).

“Blond,” said Margriet, who had an electric-red mohawk herself. “You’ll look just like Billy Idol.” It was the ’80s and everything was different back then – Amsterdam, and underground fashion, and me.
“Exactly the problem,” Raf chuckled, without looking up from the joint he was rolling. “Black, for sure.” His own head was shaved.

Just then I looked down the canal and hallucinated my brother, Brian, walking towards me. And I hadn’t even smoked anything. I blinked. Lots of tourists looked like Brian. A million obedient American squares in button-down shirts and khaki shorts. They all looked the same. That was because they all were the same – thought the same, never questioned or experimented. Every squatter knew that.

The vision reminded me that I was feeling torn about more than my hair. I stared back out at the water. Bigger questions lurked under the surface and one day soon they’d emerge for good and insist that I answer them. Was I going to stay in Amsterdam? When and how would I pay back my parents’ loans? And mainly: What was I going to do?

The thought of Brian galled me. He was in his last year of law school back in the States and working part-time already. He had it so easy. Straight, boring, happy to appease. Soon Mom and Dad would pinch shut the teat and end my travels. And even I knew I couldn’t drink beer in the sun for the rest of my life. I was only 23, and that would probably be a long time.

Another boat glided by. I wondered about the people inside, even though I knew they were just consuming, polluting, tranquilised fools. Then two legs stopped in front of my face. I looked up.
“Hey, bro,” said my brother. “Surprise.”

His hair was even shorter than usual, in a crew-cut – but it was him. His plaid short-sleeved shirt stood out in the capital of all-black-all-the-time. I felt disoriented, giddy. And then I laughed. I didn’t recall ever finding Brian amusing before.

He was gawking. I guessed my piercings were freaking him out. Back then, in his America, nose studs and lip rings would get you beat up. Conscious of the tableau – the striped, commandeered Black and White, its steps draped with punks – I suppressed a grin. He should only know! Margriet made her living as a dominatrix. Raf was known around town as the guy who pried open empty buildings for others to squat. And then there were our other two housemates, Wolf the biker and Cathy the performance artist, who let her own blood on stage and smeared it on audience members to make a point about Western imperialism. Both of them were sleeping with Margriet.

I’d often marvel to myself, aware I’d never have met people like these if I hadn’t run away and joined the metaphorical circus. I’d look at them and think: What can’t you do on this earth? You can do anything. Leap into the ozone. Visit the stars. No limit.

The squatters were staring at Brian. I could feel it.

“No tourists,” Wolf spat, his Teutonic voice so icy I cringed.

“What are you doing here?” I asked Brian, poised on a high wire between hostility and brotherhood.
“Unexpected vacay,” he said, plunging his hands in his pockets. “Come on, I’ll buy you brunch at my hotel and we can catch up.”

Hearing the snorts, I suppressed an impulse to run inside and wash and change. If I did, when I got back, the locks probably would have been changed and my magical, suspended life here would be over. I stood up. “Come on in. I’ll get us some coffee.”

The old house’s front room was our bar. It had that sleepy sun-baked-ashtray smell, laid over the eternal stench of beer. I waved Brian toward the exploded Naugahyde sofa and poured us coffee from a pot Margriet had made sometime during the long stretched-out morning, morning in the squat being everything before 5pm.

“Sugar?” I asked him. “Soy milk?”

“Nah. Your buddies aren’t too friendly.”

“I know. Sorry.” I sank down beside him; the sofa gave its customary fart. I sipped my burnt coffee. Brian lifted his to his nose, then set it on a crate.

“So, you here with friends?” I asked. “Where’s Donna?”

He sighed. “We broke it off.”

So. My perfect brother had hit a pothole. They’d already sent out the wedding invitations, too, so everyone would have to know. I felt a swell of schadenfreude.

Raf drifted in and paused in the archway leading to the hall, looking at us – at Brian. My brother stared back.

“Hey,” they said at the same time. Raf nodded and said, “I’m upstairs.”

I panicked, guessing he was summoning me for a humiliating anarchist scolding. Who the hell is that? You don’t let the Man in the house. Poseur, infiltrator, informer. Get out! For the moment, though, he melted away. A relief.

“Whatever,” I said to Brian. “So, you get in this morning?”

“Yesterday.” He looked down at his hands, twisting an unfamiliar silver ring marked with multicoloured stripes. Rainbow stripes! Didn’t he know that meant gay?

Abruptly turning his gaze out the window, Brian muttered, “I met that guy in a bar last night. Just so you know.”

“Huh? You mean Raf?” He didn’t answer, but when I looked at him, he nodded.

Funny. Raf only went to one bar, a gay one, Hell for Leather. It was a running joke in the house.
“Listen, Chris,” Brian said. “I was hoping maybe I could stay a while. Things at home are kind of… But your housemates…”

I had to think. Just for a minute.

So this was Brian. My brother. Black and white stripes turned to all the colours in the rainbow.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s cool, bro. I’ll handle it.”

Laura Martz makes her living by the written word, but this is her first published piece of fiction. She has seen the inside of more than one 1980s Amsterdam squat.

Arrived in Nairobi and I’m freezing. I thought this was Africa, but no, I’m wandering around in the hoodie mum insisted I pack for emergencies. It’s loud and full of people. It’s weird cos I’m more moved by poverty here than in London cos everyone here’s black and it kinda looks like one of the more sombre parts of Comic Relief. Is that racist? I got my safari all booked. It leaves tomorrow. Tonight, I’m going to a restaurant called Carnivore with some Americans tonight. Apparently they serve ostrich balls, warthog burgers and zebra kebabs. Awesome! Can’t believe I’m in Africa! Can’t believe you were born here!

*

Yo dad,
This safari is mind-blowing. We left Nairobi in this army jeep with a trailer behind us carrying all our food. I’m in the jeep with a German pastor who only dresses in orange; her lesbian partner, who lectured me about Baroque music for hours when I told her I play guitar; and this long-haired hippy type called Matthias who’s trying to chat up the American girls. They don’t understand his accent at all. Our driver, George, is hilarious. He keeps telling jokes and cool stories about growing up in the slums, and he has all these mad animal anecdotes.

Anyway, we drove up past Mount Kenya to this safari park called Samburu. It’s really dry and hot. Better than Nairobi. Finally, t-shirt and shorts weather. We drove into a safari park and immediately saw a sleeping lion. The car has no sides so it was like we were stood right next to this majestic beast. The German pastor woman was sharing all her knowledge about Kenya with us. She’s lived here for years and she seems to know/have done everything. She told us how she found lion cubs in her safari tent once, the mother outside growling for them. She had to throw the cubs out of the window to get them out.

Before we got to Samburu, we stopped in this little town, my first rural outing in Africa. I got out to buy some water and ended up getting lost in a market where they sell all this junk, all these second-hand clothes from all over the world. They still had price tags on them from British Heart Foundation or Oxfam and I realised that these were relief clothes sent out from the UK. All those big containers outside supermarkets that we dump clothes in, they end up here, and instead of clothing the locals, they’re sold for money. I found these t-shirts I had given to a charity shop years ago so I bought ‘em for old times sake. I ended up paying like two quid for them both. I also bought water for the stall cos they kept asking me to buy them lunch as well as pay for the t-shirts. I got back in the jeep and the German pastor was telling me off for buying them water. It was getting their hopes up because the water will run out. I thought she was a Christian. She didn’t talk to me for the rest of the day. She told her friend/partner (in German) that salvation was better than false hope. She called me a spoilt rich kid. I didn’t tell her I speak fluent German.

So yeah, Samburu park. We were staying in these dinky tents in the plains in the thick of the park with who knows what around us. I had a shower (my first in days) in a wooden shack with no roof. It was weird being naked outdoors, looking up at the blue sky while freezing water refreshed me. We went for a drive that afternoon. I think it was the start of tourist season because there were a lot of trucks and jeeps in the park. All over the place, crawling around like beetles. We interrupted a cheetah hunt. We were sat there in the car, watching these cheetahs stalk an impala and then loads of trucks drove up to see what we’d found. Suddenly, there were 10 cars around us, all revving engines, pushing past each other for better views. The tourists with the biggest camera lenses were the pushiest, forcing their drivers to break them through the barrier of cars to get that important shot. All we were doing was observing, but no, the people with the cameras seemed to have priority. Drivers were pushing off the tracks and going off-road to get closer. I mean, the impalas, when they saw all the cars and excited yelps and click-clacks of cameras, ran off, leaving the cheetahs foodless and pissed off we had spoiled their dinner, so they just lay down in the long grass till no one could see them.

That night was magical. We sat under the stars and listened to nothing. I found this homemade instrument near the benches and asked what it was. It’s called a chamunke, and the guy who had made it (out of old drawers and brake cables) showed me how to play it. The weird German Baroque expert stood over me the whole time tutting at my every mistake. I couldn’t really concentrate with her scrutiny so I let her embarrass herself. Then the guy who made it played it to us and it was so magical and beautiful sat there under the stars listening to Kenyan folk songs. I lay down to sleep in absolute silence and absolute darkness absolutely alone. I had these mad dreams where I was Spider-man being chased by a lion, by a dark figure, by vehicles. I woke up and felt really alone and still and bursting for a piss. I tried to ignore it for ages but couldn’t make it disappear, my bladder was swelling with pressure and I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t really want to walk to the toilet in the middle of the night in case any creepy crawlies got me, or any nocturnal predators ate me. But I was desperate. I unzipped the tent, saw the moon glinting above me like Camembert and it looked so tranquil that I relaxed and felt release and I started to piss. I stumbled forward and started pissing in front of the tent, not hiding myself, flapping proudly in the night breeze. It was the most peace I have ever experienced in my life. The sound of the stream and the sand mixing was soothing; I started to fall asleep upright, transfixed by the stars twinkling at my relief.

*

Pops,
We just left another safari park and it was horrible. The landscape is sparse, vast and beautiful and yet there are all these white creepy crawlies leeching off the land spreading petrol fumes. We are raping Africa. Sorry to get all Geldof on you cos you said to me tourism was such a vital part of the economy, but it’s ruining Kenya. I know it’s like one of the safer countries to visit. It’s not like Sudan or Zimbabwe or anything. But the empire never ended. It’s strange to imagine you were born here as a child of the Empire, and now years later, I’m walking around in its aftermath.

We saw some amazing stuff but it’s just the way people treat the sanctity of nature. Everyone is desperate to see everything at whatever cost, even if it means driving off-road which is a no-no. But it’s not even as if they want to sit there and watch these animals, no, that’s too normal. People are desperate for the photograph. They want to spot something, take a wonderful photograph of it and display it on their mantelpiece or screen-saver so they can tell people ‘Ya, ya, ya, I took that in Africa’ (pronounced ahh-frica probably). They couldn’t give a toss about what they’re photographing; they just want the photographic evidence.

We were driving around this safari park in the early morning. Everyone was tired and we were trying our hardest to watch intently for animals. We turned a corner into a little vantage point where you usually get a really good view of the whole park. There was a herd of elephants grazing there. We all peeked out of the top of the roof and gazed at the elephants. There were 4 other cars there. More were arriving loudly, clattering into the clearing with no regard for the animals or other cars. The leeches poured out of the tops of their roofs shooing us out of the way for the perfect shots. George told us to remain still and quiet as the elephants were looking agitated. We sat down in our seats and watched the elephants out of the windows. One car, without thinking, boasting loud, moustachioed, bare-chested Americans, reversed and nearly hit a young elephant puppy. Its dad stormed over and tried to tusk the car. The cars immediately all fought with each other to get the hell out of there, while the other elephants all stopped what they were doing and started to converge on our vehicles. We left pretty sharpish. I mean, how do you take such little care you nearly run over an elephant? How are you so desperate to keep your tourists happy and snap-tastic, that you seem to forget the basic rules of being a safari tour operator?

‘Ya ya ya, now what I want you to do is: be angry, show aggression, move that tusk down a bit, front paw aloft… show me sexy… show me Dumbo!’
We heard over the drivers’ radio that there was a leopard spotting nearby. We asked if we could go see it. George is very diligent and cares about the animals and said maybe we should wait till the crazy rush was over. But we insisted. We had seen everything except a leopard and so were really excited. We rushed over to the west of the park and found ourselves at the back of a really long queue to see the leopard. The leopard was in a tree hanging out. There were two queues of cars converging in front of the tree and they were having trouble moving out of the way of each other. Plus the people at the front weren’t moving anytime fast and were clicking away, trying to get the perfect shot.

We waited patiently, then decided to drive away but we were blocked by cars in both directions. There was no choice but to wait it out. A truck tried to inch forward and lost control, nearly careening into nearby grazing elephants. The jeep in front of us broke down and had to be towed away. Eventually on the other side of the tree, we looked back to see 17 cars all snapping away at this beautiful majestic, bewildered creature and its cub, while the mauled leg of a dead gazelle hung off the branch they lounged on. Their tails twitched and claws tensed with every click, whoop and red-faced tourist cry of wonder. They sat patiently while we took our turns snapping away. We’re supposed to be bringing the world closer together, when all we’re doing is sitting in our cars being life tourists, not experiencing anything unless it’s reflected through media. I lived this because I photographed this, I saw this because I blogged it, I’m friends with her… on Myspace or Facebook. The internet, the availability of information, nothing being a mystery, it’s all driving us apart. And we sit and we look at a wonder of the world and we marvel and we worry about whether we got a decent photograph. The circus safari.

*

Nearly home. Can’t wait to see you guys and show you the photos I took of your old stomping ground.

On our penultimate night, we drove through the desert and George stopped so we could watch the sun set over the flat desert plain, dropping off over the edge of the world. It was so red and alive, it looked like a pulsating Strepsil. It was the most serene and breath-taking thing I’ve ever seen. I have no metaphors or flowery language to describe it. It was just simply truly amazing.

Nikesh Shukla is a writer and rapper caught between the cityscapes of Bombay and the land of London. His writing has been featured on BBC2, Radio 1 and 4, Resonance fm, and he has performed at the Soho Theatre and Glastonbury in his quest to destroy the perfect metaphor. He recently completed his first collection of short stories, I’ve Forgotten My Mantra.