Gently, with the reverence he deserves, I lift Uncle from the makeshift operating table. He is so frail and light! And yet so uncomplaining -- there was, after all, no anaesthetic administered for his operation!

I am drained, almost exhausted by the evening's work, but determined that my perseverance will bear fruit before the night is through. It cannot wait. Sitting in the big armchair by the fireplace, I allow Uncle to rest upon my lap. His legs dangle so limply. He too is exhausted.

Very gently, very kindly, I say to him, "How do you feel, Uncle Charlie?" The mouth knows how to behave in such a delicate situation. "Would you like something to drink?" I ask. I know he must be thirsty after such a lengthy wait.

The fire has gone out while I've been at the hospital and the room has turned chilly. Still, that can be attended to in a moment and Charlie can sit next to me in the chair and we can discuss plans for our future entertainment long into the night. Explore routines and engage in dialogue.

I wait.

The mouth is set, fixed, worried about Charlie's continuing silence, his failure to answer my questions. Yet.., yet I know he will answer me, that he is about to reply. I must give him a little more time. It was a major operation after all. The amygdala must be allowed to recover itself. I try to change my expression while I wait, but the mouth will not let me. Sardonically, it is frozen and I know this is how it must remain -- upper row of teeth a fraction exposed, resting on a slightly withdrawn lower lip, a little half-smile -- in order to allow Uncle to respond properly.

Now it's coming!

Now...

I can't move for the intense antic.i.p.ation that is inside me, twisting my innards. The mouth holds me motionless, staring. I wait as seconds tick audibly from the face of the mantle clock.

But...

Something's wrong. There is something wrong!

The brain, the brain is faulty! The amygdala must be r.e.t.a.r.ded. I am aware of this because of the way the words are going to be spoken. Imbecilic is the term! But how could I have foreseen that the brain became damaged before I got to it? That it was, in fact, the brain of a r.e.t.a.r.d! Even as the last second ticks, I realise with bitter disappointment that Imust begin all over again. Despite the truth of this, the mouth will not end its actions and salve my agony and frustration! It insists on allowing Charlie to respond.

Which he does. Determined to answer my question, he is.

"A gottle of geer," he says, mouth clacking dementedly as I support him from inside his back, "a gottle of geer, you gugger and ge hucking kick agout it!"

[Originally published in Kimota 9, Autumn 1998].

SIMPLE BALLET.

by Nicholas Royle.

Lennox walked into the hotel and went up to the reception desk that floated in a pool of shadow at the far end of the lobby. He had been feeling tired and had decided to check into the first hotel he came to. He had no luggage. All day he'd been driving and driving was all he had to look forward to tomorrow. Driving until he got to where he was going.

"I need a room," he said to the desk clerk.

"Sir." The clerk indicated with a weary gesture, revealing dark circles under his arms, the bank of pigeon-holes behind him. Most of them had keys in. The question was implied. "Which room?"

"Anywhere," Lennox said. He just wanted to get his head down. On the last stretch he had fallen asleep at the wheel, though only for a split second. He shook his head vaguely at the clerk who turned and plucked a third-floor key from its resting place. Lennox woke up for a moment. "Don't you have anything higher up?" he asked.

Frowning, the clerk replaced the key and reached up to the top row of pigeonholes. He offered the new key to Lennox who accepted it. As he moved, his shirt felt damp in the small of his back. It had been a hot day and the plastic car seat upholstery had not helped. The car was a new model, mid-range, the best they' d had at the depot back east.

In his room on the fifth floor Lennox dropped his keys on the dresser and sat on the end of the bed to recover his breath. In his shirt pocket was a photograph of a girl, a kid about seven or eight. The edges of the photograph were furry and had started to curl over. He took it out and looked at it as the sunlight fell directly through the west-facing window. Motes danced across the golden screen. The carpet was worn through in several spots. The mirror above the dresser, in which Lennox caught his reflection and briefly shivered, was beginning to turn scaly. He placed the picture on the dresser leaning it up against the edge of a small tortoisesh.e.l.l box. And sat looking at it for a few moments before lying back on the bed with his hands clasped under his head.

He came awake suddenly, sitting up on the bed, his mouth coated with some bitter residue. How long had he been asleep? Seconds or hours? He glanced at his watch and remembered it had stopped before he'd even reached the hotel. The light seemed to fall at the same angle as if he'd been asleep only a few minutes or less. Or 24 hours. His shirt and pants were damp with sweat, but then they had been already. He looked at the picture of his kid on the dresser and waited for the fug of sleep to clear from his head. The window opened with an upwards tug. He rested his hands on the ledge and leaned out. Briefly he caught a sharp, almost metallic smell. He couldn't identify it and then it was gone.

He pulled his shoes on, collected a few things and made for the door, his joints aching. Downstairs in the lobby there was no sign of the clerk. Lennox wandered into the bar. There was a short guy with a dark moustache standing by the bar, a whisky tumbler tilted to his lips.

"No one around, huh?" said the man with the moustache, drawing his freehand across his mouth as he sat his gla.s.s on the counter. "You wanna drink? I'll get you a drink. I'll get a gla.s.s."

The man had an accent but Lennox couldn't place it. He wanted to go back up to his room, or out into the street, he suddenly wanted to be anywhere other than in the company of this man who even now was coming back round the bar with a clean gla.s.s. He poured out a measure and handed it to Lennox who felt compelled to accept the honeyed container.

"Another?" The man proffered the bottle. Lennox shook his head. "Guess not,if you're driving."

"What's the time?" Lennox asked, but the man just chuckled to himself and knocked back another slug of malt.

"Why don' t you go check on your car?" the man said, looking up from the bottom of his gla.s.s. "If you can remember where you left it"

Lennox was beginning to get a headache. The man with the moustache followed him out of the bar and stopped in the middle of the lobby while Lennox proceeded to the exit. As his hand met the cooler bra.s.s of the door handle and prepared to grip and twist, a voice emerged from the shadows at the end of the lobby. The clerk had reappeared.

"Your key," he said tersely, holding a cigarette in front of his mouth.

Lennox's hand fell from the door and dug into his trouser pocket for the d.a.m.ned key. Where the h.e.l.l was it? He found it in the breast pocket of his shirt, next to the photo of his daughter. His finger brushed against the creased surface of the print. Poor kid.

The clerk accepted the key without a word and Lennox moved back to the door, his eyes sliding over the conceited figure of the man with the moustache who had lit a small fat cigar and wedged it in the corner of his mouth. The door wouldn't open. He checked for a latch but the door was locked. He turned and looked at the clerk, shoulders sagging. The clerk spat a shred of tobacco out to the side and remained impa.s.sive so that Lennox had to walk up to the desk and demand his key. The clerk expelled two long thin stamens of smoke through his flared nostrils and then flowers bloomed like something on a speeded-up film in front of Lennox, slowly dissolving into the air. Through the shadows Lennox could make out the clerk shaking his head slowly from side to side, and all the drive and determination seemed to leach out of Lennox. His legs barely carried him back over to the elevator, which took several seconds to arrive. The doors wheezed open and within minutes Lennox was lying on his bed again, photo in his top pocket, and some undefinable sense of calm making him feel it was okay to kick back and relax. He'd not taken the trouble to lock the door previously because he'd not been intending to return to the room, but now he felt as if he could stay a week, make up for lost sleep.

He didn't actually tumble into sleep as expected, but surfed its upper layers and after an inestimable length of time he arched his back, stretched and got up again, crossed to the door and stepped out into the gloomy corridor. He followed the distempered wall toward an open doorway where a dripping tap announced the latrines. He stood for a while holding his thing and felt only mild surprise when he realised it wasn't going to happen. Turning to the washbasin he splashed his face with cold water and watched in the mirror as the rivulets seemed to cling to his skin before swinging free. As he left the bathroom he walked into the man with the moustache who was standing in the middle of the corridor with one hand in his trouser pocket and the other in front of his face attending to the needs of his cigar.

Lennox grunted in annoyance but the man with the moustache angled his head in the direction away from Lennox's room, clearly intending that he should follow, which he did dumbly, at a couple of steps' distance. Instead of turning left or right into either of the rooms at the end of the corridor, the man with the moustache opened the fire escape door and stepped out on to the iron platform. Lennox, curious now and fighting his natural antipathy to the man, joined him. The man with the moustache was rank with sweat, which Lennox attempted to block. The man with the moustache took the cigar out of his mouth with his right hand and used it to point towards a gap between the nondescript buildings on the opposite side of the street.

"See that?"

Lennox wished the man with the moustache would put his arm down. He was a short man but the moist stench from his armpit reached Lennox's nose without difficulty.

"What? No. I don't see anything." He rubbed his eyes.

"As far as you can see and then further. See the brightness? The reflection of the sun."

Lennox squinted and nodded, partly because he dearly wanted to be back in his room on his own and partly because he could just about make out something like a dusty star on the horizon. Had he walked all that way?

"Catch that?" asked the man with the moustache, his head tilted back, nostrils dilating. "Did you smell that, just a whiff?"

"No, sir."

"Let's go," the man with the moustache said. "There ain't much time. Ironically." So saying, he turned and clattered down the fire escape, at a surprisingly nimble trot. Lennox acquiesced.

They kicked up dust as they walked across the street and turned right over a patch of waste ground to reach the highway.

"So where were you trying to get to?" asked the man with the moustache.

"Home," replied Lennox, having given up the fight.

"Where were you coming from?"

"Place I was staying at"

"Home from home?"

"Kind of. I guess."

"Your wife?"

"We were never close. Her folks..." Both men knew it wasn't true and that all the love he'd ever felt for his wife had been diverted to the daughter. She got it all but it was too much and on his infrequent visits she cowered. Sure, his wife's family had made him a pariah. A salesman, they had said. We're all selling something, he said to his wife later. But she never repeated it to them. He left and missed the kid. He missed his wife too but wouldn't let himself know it. So it all went to the kid. All his frustrated love. The gla.s.s ball of his emotions. Hers to play with, but it was too dangerous. He was never there. And when he was he was always going back.

"Your circ.u.mstances have changed?"

"They locked her up. My wife. Locked her up last week. For her own protection, was how they put it to her folks."

They wanted to look after the kid themselves, but State law said the kid was his, and so she was. He fingered the picture in his pocket, felt something catch in his chest, blinked at the brightness up ahead and wrinkled his nose against the smell which was growing stronger with each step.

"Know what that is?" The man with the moustache stopped for a moment to take the cigar out the corner of his mouth, inspect the chewed end of it and put it right back. He puffed out a small blue-grey rose. How come the cigar never got any shorter?

"Guess not."

The man with the moustache, fingering it with his left hand as if it were false and he were concerned about its unsteady perch, was walking again, his cigar trailing petals of vapour. The sun beat down like a hammer on a sheet of gold and the smell increased to a harsh, metallic stench. The air sang with blinding reverberations and seemed to become thicker the closer the two men got to the cars. The man with the moustache adapted his pace naturally. The light that struck the windshield of the car in front and slightly to one side of Lennox's was refracted through a prism of time, scattering vague, vivid shreds of rainbows in the air about the first car. Above everything, more powerful even than the dull keening sc.r.a.pe of metal on metal where no solid parts had yet made contact, was the soon to be overwhelming raw reek of time. The man with the moustache failed to realise that Lennox had come to a halt, had stopped to watch this slow, simple ballet, the impossibly graceful duel between time and s.p.a.ce.

There was a lone driver in the first car, his head and shoulders no more than a dim outline behind the dusty windshield. The second car, set on a collision course with the first which had slewed across the blacktop at an angle of 40 degrees, was empty. It was the hire car Lennox had picked up back east. He felt his throat constrict. A trickle of bitter juice entered his mouth and he swallowed. He licked his lips.

The smell, now like burnt toffee, old, tarnished chrome and scorched carpet, was almost unbearable. Over the acompanying noise of the cosmic rending Lennox heard the voice of the man with the moustache.

"You can see what's about to happen. You're sitting in your car, just driving, no problem. Then this guy loses it in a big way. Is he having a heart attack? Did he fall asleep? Whatever. To you it's irrelevant. You see what's going to happen. It's inevitable and, for precisely that reason, you relax. You can't do s.h.i.t Just watch it happen. Everything is calm."

"I can move the car. Push it out the way," Lennox spluttered.

"No, sir. That car is doing 50, maybe 60 miles per hour. You couldn't move it an inch."

As they stood there talking over the din, Lennox could see the gap between the two cars narrowing infinitesimally slowly.

"Who the h.e.l.l are you?" Lennox shouted. "Where do you get off on all this?"

The man with the moustache chewed the end of his cigar.

"You wanna think about your little girl," he said, standing near the first car. "Time's up, feller."

Lennox looked at the gap. The man with the moustache was right.

He grabbed at the door handle on the hire car and swung into the driver's seat. The grinding racket and the nauseating stench of time's brake pads, the pounding heat of the sun and now his own naked fear mounted a joint a.s.sualt, but he gripped the wheel for the sake of his kid.

As Lennox yanked the wheel to the right, the car in front, which had drifted sufficiently into his path to make avoidance impossible, took a sudden lurch to the left, and his car flashed right past without the expected impact. He applied his brakes with a shaking foot, brought the car to a shuddering halt and slumped over the dash to sweat out his panic and his relief.

And his terror.

When he replayed the moment on the movie screen in his head he saw the same thing: the sudden appearance in the other car of a second man to wrench the wheel from the driver.

Slowly Lennox turned round to look through his rear windshield at the other car.

[Originally published in Kimota 7, Winter 1997].

WAY BACK WHEN.

by David Price.

We all have our own dragons to fight. No horse, no sword... no fire-breathing dinosaur: but dragons of the psyche, the kind you have no option but to face.

I hadn't seen Mair Monaghan in nearly five years. We'd been an item once: nothing serious, but it had been fun while it lasted.

"Jamie Teale," she greeted me, "And a fine figure of a man you are in that kilt."

Same sense of humour, same sparkle in the eyes. It was a fine Hogmanay night... a pig roasting on a spit, virgin-white-clad Maids handing out haggis on paper plates... fine malt whisky in plastic tumblers: Pipers playing a refrain on the bagpipes... and a bonfire (to dance around) keeping the chill at bay.

And Mair, Mair, a maid so fair.

"It's been a long time, Mair."

"It's been no time at all, Jamie. And what clan would you be from?"

"Why don't you find out?"

"And how would I be doing that?"

"Easy: stick your hand up my kilt... and if you grab hold of a quarter-pounder, you'll know I'm a MacDonald."

Mair laughed, throwing her head back and bellowing at the top of her voice. She liked a good laugh, did Mair.

"Walk with me, Jamie Teale, and we'll talk about auld times."

Snow had fallen in abundance over the Christmas period of 1975. I'm from a rare Scottish family that celebrates both periods, and on the eve of that particular yule-tide I was walking through the woods, gathering holly and listening to Greg Lake singing 'I believe in Father Christmas' on the radio at my side.

And that was when I saw Mair for the first time.

"You fair made me jump out of my skin, sneaking up on me like that."

"You'd not have been so afeared of you hadn't been poaching from yon farm."

"I was not poaching. I was just taking a short cut when I spotted that rabbit dead in the trap."