Furious Horses

>1. Lovebirds belong to the genus Agapornis. If lost, please return here.

2. Some anagrams that should never be used in the place of “Lovebirds” include: Vibe Lord, Bled Visor, Solid Verb, Slob Diver, and Devil Orbs.

3. The Madagascar Lovebird should not be held on or after 1990.

4. Do not attempt to teach Swindern’s Lovebirds algebraic topology, as they are generally confused by the universal coefficient theorem due to their monomorphic sexuality.

5. A Lovebird must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

>She started off in her pyjamas, as usual. Loose summer cotton that flapped open everywhere and probably squiffed noisily as she moved but who was she to care? In her world, in the confines of her dark-clad home, nothing mattered but the actions of a small part of the human anatomy.

She flipped on the television, and tried to guess whether it was to be an ad or a programme. It was an ad. Bright colours and flashes of furniture. She was annoyed by this. She wanted a challenge first up. Tonight she had to be on her game. Her fingers toyed with a closed packet of pretzels, swiping loosely at the heat-sealed pack. She wasn’t hungry, she just needed something to do with her fingers.

It was the end of the sitcom that came before her show, and she read the faces on the screen easily. They were hammy faces, acting up like this amounted to humour. Their mouths gurned shamelessly, presenting grotesquely simple visemes; reading them was like reading the fat sure strokes of a child’s painting. She knew when she could have laughed, if it had been at all funny.

But then the credits rolled, and her show began. She wriggled further down into her couch, an unashamed joy filling her deeply. The logo came up, a deep marine blue. Her show was a cop drama. The hero McGurk, was a detective with the uncanny ability to see four hours into the past, a quirk of psychology that allowed him great insight into human behaviour, but often caught the ire of his superiors. But that was not why she watched the show. She watched it for its lengthy expositions, its background scenes. For one particular part of the background.

When her uncle had come around to install the gorgeous flatscreen TV, he’d set up the supertext, so she could read what was being said on the screen. She thanked him, but as soon as he went, switched it off again. She never wanted to be insulted that much. She knew how much supertext missed, or cribbed, or got just plain wrong. She had trained to lipread, and she was not going to get better at it reading words.

She watched McGurk stride across a windblown wharf. She waited for the body to be hauled from the water, trailing seaweed and fishing nets and whatever else bodies were meant to get caught up in. She watched McGurk’s face convulse as he touched the body, as his mind sped back four hours. A flash of colour, perhaps some mis-stepped shapes, but never quite enough to tell the killer.

After the next ad break, McGurk interviewed his first suspect. The victim’s estranged boyfriend. They met in a bar, the same bar McGurk used nearly every four episodes. Normal people weren’t supposed to notice this, she thought. To confuse them, they might play a different song in the background, shoot it from a different angle. But she knew. It was the same bar, because the same extras were sitting in it. Because the same woman with the jet-black hair sat talking at the bar. This was the woman you only noticed if you just happened to suffer from acute bilateral sensorineural hearing loss, and just happened to watch a ratings-ailing police drama religiously just to catch a glimpse of one woman with the most perfect mouth in the world.

She ripped open the packet of pretzels, and focused her mind on the woman’s mouth. Every other person watching the show, she knew, would be focused on McGurk and the suspicious boyfriend, combing their speech for clues, but her eyes were fixed on one point in the background, where the action was much more exciting.

Extras in TV shows, she knew, didn’t even say anything to each other. They mouthed their words, so even the person they were talking to didn’t know what they were saying. And they said some wonderful, strange, shocking things. She had grown to like the black-haired woman, who told the world her pains and desires when she was sure no one was listening. But one person understood her silent, public confessional.

Tonight, the black-haired woman stared across the bar at a young man in a light green shirt. The man saw her, pretended they were talking, laughed along. Later, after the day’s shooting ends, the young man will ask the black-haired woman what she was mouthing, and she will say “Kombucha bitches unite!” like it’s nonsense, like she was having light fun on the job.

When in fact, it’s something else entirely. From the comfort of a couch, with a pretzel rolling salt into the cracks of her fingers, someone who reads lips says, inside her own head, “Come, take your pictures tonight.”

>It was a small town, and as such, by the time Rev Harvey came panting up to the mayor’s door—the door to the mayor’s home, mind you, not her office—it could reasonably be guessed that already twenty people knew the exact words that were about to exit his mouth. Already, certain neighbours had their curtains pulled back, dusters in hand; already certain families from Rev’s own street had taken the opportunity to sprint out the door with a bemused dog or child dragging behind.

The mayor answered the door eventually, dressed as she was in tracksuit pants and T-shirt, having just that minute stepped off her treadmill. She still had a walkman clipped to her waist, dragging the grey fabric of her tracksuit down so that Rev could make out the noses of tiny silver stretchmarks on the mayor’s hip.

“Rev,” she said. “To what do I owe?”

Rev stood a moment longer, hand braced against the mayor’s door. He was a man unaccustomed to running any great distances, and it was his heels that burned, for some strange reason, more than any other part of him.

“Beryl,” Rev said, catching his breath. “It’s huge. This thing.”

They mayor pushed her hair back, fastened it with a clip. “What’s the all the commotion?” she asked. “Why’s everyone moving so much on a Sabbath? Day of rest, don’t you know.” The mayor swept her eyes across the street, noting the number of people. Her smile faded. “What’s huge?”

“The Mill,” panted Rev. “Me and Vern were down there painting up some sheds and there’s this godawful noise,” Rev burst his hands together, “like trees falling over, ’cept there’s no trees around there.”

“What was it then?”

Rev’s voice dropped. “That’s the thing. I don’t know. Neither does Vern. We was just there and then there’s this noise and then we look over and there’s this hole in the side of the Mill.”

“Hole?”

“Like I said. This hole. Right up one side of it, like someone’d swung a wrecking ball.”

“And you didn’t see anything make the hole.” The mayor felt sweat prickle her hair.

“That’s what I said. Must’ve been something awful big though. I mean, maybe.”

The mayor sighed. “Maybe it wasn’t one thing,” she said. “Anyone been inside the mill?”

“No, I mean I come right here, and Vern’s gone to the police station. But, I mean, someone might have gone to have a look. Word travelled, uh, travels fast.” Rev cast a glance at the four locals who happened to be checking their letterboxes at that particular moment.

“The Professor,” said the Mayor flatly. She saw no point in dancing around it.

Rev nodded. “Seems to be he’d have something to do with it.”

“And Vern’s rousing Constable Harris?”

Rev nodded again. “Damn nanobots,” he muttered, and a chorus of agreement rumbled up and down the street.

>Let me drive. Let me concentrate on this road, curving ever to the left, determined, it seems, to take me away from this city. Your city. All the jetsam of my four-hour trip builds at my feet. Badly refolded maps, roadhouse sporks, CD cases. Wasted diversions, really. But then New York is suddenly in view. Ellis Island. Statue of Liberty shimmering in the heat like a collapsed cube of ice.

When I get to Canarsie, my hands start to shake. I picture you, in the frame of your front door, head tilted, smiling in that half-surprised way you had. I picture us, hours later, out on the pier at Jamaica Bay, smoking, laughing. But I can’t picture the in between. Where you forgive me, where we touch longer than we should, where that part of our past you’ve walled up somehow crumbles.

I stop and park in a dead-end street until the sun finally rolls away, until I realise I’ve tried and failed. And I’m left alone with the presents I’ve brought you: a photo frame, The Collected Works of Shakespeare, and a humble useless apology.

>We didn’t really worry about it until Rauf put his hand down on the bed and the blanket sort of broke, flaked off like bark. I let out a little yelp, like we had killed something, but mostly it was because I suddenly realised how old the room was. We were sugar high and had burst through warning tape and sealed up doors to get here, hormones splitting atoms somewhere beneath our skin.

This was where he slept, that was all I could think of, even as Rauf pressed his hand against my thigh. The bed groaned under our weight. The walls sang with history. This was where the thought first entered his head. The possibility, however small, that there was something summing up nothing at all.

>Our love is simple. It’s a crystal glass on a black marble counter. It’s a shopping trolley left out in the rain that accidentally gets clean. It’s the twelve bar blues.

Mother shakes salt over our potatoes. They don’t need salt, but then again, maybe they do. The golden rule in our house is that things can always get better. Mother asks me what I’m going to do today and I say that I’ll probably put the car up onto blocks and take a look at it. She nods, and she doesn’t have to say that it’s good I’m doing this because I know this is what she’s thinking. Ever since Father slipped off the road on a rainy afternoon and went down into a valley because of faulty brake cables, I have taken it as my responsibility to make sure our new car is safe. Father was one thing, but I don’t want Mother going down into a valley as well.

So we finish our breakfast, which to you might sound strange, but Mother believes that breakfast should be the big meal and besides I’ve gotten very used to eating meat and potatoes first thing in the morning so I clear away our plates and then go out to the garage with the big auto manual I borrowed from the library and start jacking up the car so I can slide underneath it on a little trolley I made and make sure everything’s running okay and is clean. Mother has her musician friends over this morning, which is why I make myself scarce, because Mother’s musician friends are also members of her jazz band, and they don’t like any “extraneous noise” interrupting them when they’re playing.

They’re a three piece. Mother on piano, one musician friend on drums, and the other on double bass. They build songs, this is what they often tell me when they finally take a break after one good long jam and come out to the garage to smoke and maybe have a cup of something. They are powerful, my Mother’s jazz band. They are pure. Like our love.

>All up the street, there was a sound like stillness. Not just the general silence of a Sunday afternoon, but the kind of quiet that only descends after a whole lot of noise. A policeman was walking down the street just at this moment. Only he wasn’t in uniform. He had just finished his shift and had changed into a shirt and shorts for the walk home. He found that people hassled him less if he wasn’t identifiable. Not that he was against helping people, only that everyone had to have some downtime. Even cops. And, for the moment, this 35-minute walk was his only downtime. Paperwork, dullness and under-appreciation—that was what faced him at work. At home, he had the pleasure of passive-aggressive emasculation and an unending presence of deep doubt.

His wife, his wife of only three months, had decided to effect changes to both their lives. Not just new bed sheets or purchase of a pet—which is what he would have settled on—but wholesale improvement of their personalities, a process that seemed to require an endless stream of 8-disc DVD sets, slogan-banded paperbacks and long inverted conversations deep into the night. It was truly horrible. But he loved her, and that was the worst part.

The sun was still up, and still had enough heat to warm the policeman’s neck. He remembered his wife’s hands, strong, thin-veined guitarist’s hands. Back when she was that exotic, black-eyed creature. Her fire, her spirit, now dulled to shoe-shine. He listened to his own breathing. Heavy. Except it wasn’t his breathing. His shoe struck it before he saw it.

The boy’s hand, still small enough that the fingers were nearly triangle shaped. The policeman had learned the smell of blood. The toddler’s face hidden by cellophane sheets of it. The bite-marks at his arm. The dog close by still, somewhere. The policeman kneeled down next to the boy, placing on hand onto his chest to calm him. Okay, he said to himself. Okay.

>Thin strips of dazzlingly luminous middle-round steak are laid on a long Amoroso roll, using bright layers of oil to separate the steak from slices of intense provolone. When cooked, this cheese steak offers an elegiac vivacity and a unique three-dimensional appearance. Unmissable.

>I was born in a time of tails. Cast across the front pages were pictures of babies with strange appendages and inexplicable conditions: thick screaming headlines belying their flimsy newsprint. We weren’t a family that kept clippings or scrapbooks, but still, there they were, newspapers stacked high and wide, from kitchen to bathroom, informing our lives, our view of the world. These newspaper babies had crocodile’s eyes. They were joined together two, even three at a time. If the infant were lucky, it would force some grumbling editor to grant colour printing. I imagined early morning debates in newspaper staff rooms, weighing up a monkey’s tail against lobster claws. It was somewhere in those days I learnt that in the wee hours men with thick arms would start a printing press and a newspaper would be “put to bed”. I thought of all the babies being fed through the printing press, flattened out and copied.

I was born normal, or what was begrudgingly called normal in those times. I had all my limbs in the right places, I had the correct number of holes in my head, and they appeared just where they were supposed to be. My parents looked happy in those photos I saw years later, holding Me the Tangled Newborn Mess in their arms, but in later photos, when I was cleaned up and examined, I could sense in their eyes a disappointment, that no reporters rushed to their hospital room, that no eager photographers flashed bulbs like fireworks.

I was taken home, wrapped in a blue blanket I still have to this day, my perfect green eyes peeking out the top, and put under a lamp. My parents examined me themselves, closer and closer, making sure the doctors hadn’t missed anything. They checked bones and creases, nails and folds, but nothing could be found. I was disgustingly, symmetrically, perfect. And I supposed they still loved me—as nature compelled them to—but even then I felt a distance begin to grow. It’s ridiculous to say I remember this, but sometimes memories are more than photos snapped in a mind’s eye: they can be feelings, deep down body feelings that germinate and grow. When you know those feelings fully-grown, when their roots are buried at the very start-point of your consciousness, you can easily return to where they began, and feel them again.

>Which was terribly confusing for the townsfolk.