Robert Garnham

It’s bloody cold in the Antarctic at the best of times, so I don’t even know why we needed a refrigerator. The only things we kept in it were yoghurt and penguin urine, both of which had to be kept at a certain maintained temperature, but this could very well have been achieved by leaving them out on the work surface, that’s how cold it was. I suspect it was only on the third week of the expedition that I began to have my suspicions that the refrigerator was actually my old friend Pat.

‘Come to keep me company, eh?’ I’d say, every time I went to the kitchen of the research station living quarters.

I’d pat the side of the fridge.

‘Don’t drink the lemonade, Steve’, Sandra said, for the umpteenth time.

I hadn’t seen her standing there.

I’d go to bed each night in my quarters, wrapped up against the cold, feeling kind of comforted to know that Pat was there. The refrigerator made a prolonged humming sound, and the light inside of it wasn’t very bright, and every now and then it would emit a weird farting sound. It was definitely Pat.

‘Alright, Steve?’, I wanted it to say to me. But it kept obstinately quiet. Pat was a man of few words at the best of times.

Oh, the hours we would spend out on the ice. The thrill of seeing a penguin wears off after the first half hour. Secretive bastards, they shuffle along and one day Sandra got pecked real bad.

‘Bloody thing!’

‘Hey’, I’d say to her, just to take her mind off the penguin peck. ‘If we walked inside a giant refrigerator right now, do you think it would actually feel warmer?’

‘Jeez, that thing gave me a nasty nip’.

Back in the safety of our primary coloured research station, its tin sides contrasted against the pure white snow like some kind of 1980s synth pop album cover, I lingered in the kitchen for a bit.

‘Pat?’, I whispered, ‘is that you?”

The refrigerator hummed in a contented sort of way.

‘Remember that time we played badminton at the leisure centre? Remember that? And the man on the court next to us collapsed and died . . . ‘

And we’d had to forfeit our game, not that we ever took it too seriously. I’d rolled up my towel and put it under the poor man’s head while they were pumping away on his chest. Ten minutes later I had a shower and . . Oh no . . Where’s my towel?

‘Remember how we were given a free game by the leisure centre the next week? And they put us on the same court where the chap had died. And you came over all superstitious?’

‘Who are you talking to?’, Sandra asked.

‘No-one.’

‘There’s just you, me, and the fridge . . . ‘

‘How’s your hand?’

‘Throbbing like a bastard.’

That night I looked out from the window of my quarters at the long shadows thrown by the penguins in the setting sun. I watched as they shuffled back and forth and I thought, has there ever been a more gormless creature? And then I remembered my Aunt Cindy.

I went along the corridor to the kitchen and I said hi to Pat.

‘Remember that story Aunt Cindy used to tell? I don’t know what medication she was on . . . Went to the zoo with her neighbour and her neighbour’s kid. And they had a picnic. And the kid walks off and then comes back all wet. He’s been in the pond. And the neighbour says, that’s it, you’ve ruined our day out, so they all go home, and when they arrive home they open up the kids backpack and he’s got a penguin in it. A real live penguin. So she phones the zoo, ha ha, and they say, keep it in the bath, we’ll be round in half an hour.’

The refrigerator hummed in agreement, possibly laughter.

The next day we went out on snowmobiles, me and Sandra. We were well protected against the biting cold. We took photos of a crevice in the ice where two of the glacial ice shelves meet.

‘We’ve taken a shelfie!’ I said.

‘What?’, she yelled, above the biting, whistling wind.

‘Shelfie!’

There’s a severe storm coming in, we can both feel it.

‘If this ice shelf drifts apart’, she yelled, ‘we’ll have to be rescued by a naval vessel’.

‘What’s that? A ship dedicated to belly buttons?’

‘I’m worried about you’, she said.

‘What?’

‘I said, I’m worried about you!’

The research station awaited us. There’s something comforting about it’s primary colours. Penguins frolicked beneath its spindly legs.

‘We may have to move’, Sandra told the assembled scientists. ‘If the wind changes direction, we could be cast adrift on the open sea. This whole ice shelf, it’s the size of Yorkshire, but it could just drift off at any time. We’d have to abandon the research station completely’.

‘That’s a sensible course of action’, Professor Carver said.

‘But what about the fridge?’, I asked.

And they all looked at me.

That night, having tired of watching the penguins, I went to the kitchen to find a man sent by the research company, testing all of the electrical appliances for faults.

‘Portable Appliance testing’, he explained.

I kind of lingered while he worked. I leaned on the work surface and stared out the window at the white landscape. There wasn’t really much to say.

ROBERT GARNHAM has been performing comedy poetry around the UK for ten years at various fringes and festivals, and has had two collections published by Burning Eye. He has made a few short TV adverts for a certain bank, and a joke from one of his shows was listed as one of the funniest of the Edinburgh Fringe. He was recently an answer on the TV quiz show Pointless. Lately he has been writing short stories for magazines and a humorous column in the Herald Express newspaper.

Ali A. Ünal

I caught the kid staring at me. He raised his hand timidly and waved, not looking quite sure if I would recognize him. I smiled without showing any teeth and turned back to my dinner. The production crew, of which I was a member, had already been served. The set workers were now getting their food from the caterers. The assistant director, the cameraman, the gaffer and sound guys were eating at the table behind me. I chose to sit and dine alone. They didn’t invite me to join them anyway and why should they?

It was not them but the kid who had welcomed me when I arrived at the set two days ago. Even though he wasn’t even working for our production, he showed me around, took me to the other studios within the complex where two other shows were being filmed, and introduced me to the other set workers. He must have felt the awkward stranger in me on my first day. I was grateful to him for his acceptance and willing to be friends, but I wanted to eat alone. There was an important kitchen scene I had to prepare after the break. I had been dreading it since morning. As a guy who was hired only because I was the close friend of the producer, I thought this was my chance to prove my credentials.

Ten minutes later, though, when the kid came up to my table and asked if he could join me, I nodded and pointed to the chair across me. He wore a filthy painter’s overalls he didn’t bother to change for dinner. I watched him put his food tray on the table, unfold a paper tissue, spread it on his lap and take a large chunk off of his bread.

“Smoke coming out of your brain, Sir Galip,” he said, dipping a piece of bread into his broth. “You thinking a lot.”

The meat balls were floating freely in the broth. He kept the bread in until it was fully soaked. Then he brought it up to his mouth without dripping one single drop. He had a large nose that almost touched the bread.

“Are you from the Black Sea?” I asked.

“True, Sir,” he said, stroking the bridge of his nose. “It always sticks out. Like Pa’s. I got his nose and temper, I did. Mom says the two walks hand in hand up north.”

He grabbed the spoon to scoop as many meat balls as possible in one motion. As I watched him eat, my fork stayed submerged in my spaghetti. I didn’t have it in me to twirl the fork. He ate as if he enjoyed more than food. That was encouraging not for him, but for everyone around him, I thought.

Someone touched my shoulder. The young assistant director from the table behind us had turned sideways in her chair. She handed me the finalized shooting schedule. She said I would have to set up the kitchen scene on my own because the set workers had other jobs to do.

“Don’t be late,” she said, tapping the sheet with her index finger twice. I stared at the exact spot she’d tapped. She was marginally older than my daughter. The kid was trying to catch a glimpse of the schedule. He gave me an anxious smile when our eyes met.

“I got my orders,” I said.

“You did,” he said with a smile. I put the fork down and leaned back. I couldn’t remember the kid’s name. I was sure he’d told me when we met.

“When did you come to İstanbul?” I asked.

“Last year, Sir. Mom and I took the bus from Trabzon.”

“So your parents are here, too?”

“No, Sir. Ma went back home, Allah willing. They can never leave Trabzon… Stubborn as a pair of mules. I’m staying at my uncle’s in Dudullu. Do you know Dudullu? … A shithole of a neighborhood, if you ask me … The power cuts off all the time. Roads are bumpy as hell, too… People say we’ll be better off when the government transfers better houses and roads.”

He never stopped eating as he spoke. His enthusiasm for survival was riveting. A friend of his came and handed the kid his hammer he’d left on the second floor. The kid thanked his friend, propped the hammer against the table, and went back to eating his pasta, twirling the strings majestically.

“Were you a painter back in Trabzon, too?”

“Me? No, Sir. My uncle is a painter himself, so he learned me how to do it… I’m his pupil, you see. May Allah bless him… Or I’d haul cement bags on construction sites for peanuts.”

“You didn’t go to a college, then?”

He smiled an embarrassed smile. There was a hidden joy in his eyes as if he was also proud. “I’ve got lots of friends who been to school, but they ain’t better than me. Some of them doesn’t even have a job.”

If it were another time and if I were the man I had been, I would have embarrassed him in front of everyone for coming to the cafeteria without changing his overalls. I would have called him out as yet another misguided “country man” who came to İstanbul to pursue his dreams, but ended up destroying it. I would have reminded him that İstanbul wasn’t his little town anymore; this was the metropolis he’d decided to migrate to, so he had to follow its rules like everybody else.

I kept my mouth shut. I let him be and eat peacefully. The production crew was now smoking in the special area designated for smokers, throwing glances at me and talking among themselves. I wanted to go there and yell at them that it was okay not to go to college for Allah’s sake; stop being a douchebag for once.

“How old are you, Sir?” the kid asked. He was done with the main course. He pulled the dessert bowl in front of him.

“I’m a lot of years, kid.” I gave a beat and added. “Sorry. I’m 40. Married, or about to get unmarried. Whatever. I have a daughter. I’m 5 foot 5. A mechanical engineer from İstanbul, but here I am, being an assistant to the art director for reason I don’t even know.”

“Did you quit being an engineer because the money wasn’t good?” he asked.

“I quit being me,” I said. Because I wasn’t any good. He nodded. I wondered if he really got it. If he did, I could have asked him to explain it to me.

“You’re like my Pa. He is 39, and I’ll turn 18 this summer, Allah willing. Then they’ll start paying me 20 liras a day. Now I make 15.” He shrugged. “Better than nothing, Sir. The job has lots of benefits. Social security, pension plan, catering, shuttle, and all. Thank Allah, ain’t complaining. İstanbul gives, always gives.”

He ate his rice pudding while throwing furtive glances towards the schedule. I was sure he would have done a better job than me. I could simply grab his hammer and hand him the schedule. I could quit being an assistant just as easily. I was cheap, I had turned cheap. Perhaps, we’d both be better off. After all, I was always a better destroyer than I was a builder. Nobody could now say I was the product of rampant nepotism in the TV industry, either. It would be a fair exchange.

“İstanbul takes too,” I said. “There’s going to be an earthquake in İstanbul, the big one. Almost half the buildings will be demolished. We all might die.”

“It ain’t gonna happen in another fifty years. So science people say.”

“They say that, don’t they? Hope we won’t have to wait that long.”

He looked bewildered for a second, then let out a cheerful and loud laughter. A few people glanced at us. I didn’t care. I joined him to laugh as loudly. I wasn’t going to eat my pudding, so I gave him mine. He beamed.

“You’re like me, Sir,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “I help people, too. Allah sees helpers. We’re blood brothers, eh?”

I was not like him, I was not. I was not even like me. I went to college to become a mechanical engineer and had other people paint my houses. I was once happily married. I didn’t migrate to İstanbul, but was born in it. Alas, we were not alike. The kid was just about to start being a man whereas I had to destroy this lump of meat.

When he went quiet, I took the pen, turned the schedule paper over and explained to him what an engineer did even though he hadn’t asked. An engineer designed systems and tolerances so that people like him could drive by bus from Trabzon to İstanbul safely to look for something larger than themselves. Thanks to engineers like me, I told him, he’d stay warm inside his uncle’s apartment in winters, or cool in summers. I demonstrated with arrows and speech bubbles that mechanical engineers built things in a world that was being destroyed constantly by itself. We were walking paradoxes.

He was nodding, but I sensed he was not there yet.

I took the time to explain how our universe moved towards chaos since its conception and there was no way to stop the decay. It was called entropy and found in lakes, craters, marriages. Earthquakes were a part of that, too. TV shows. Breaking hearts, cheatings, many departures. When a wine glass was shattered into pieces, the kid couldn’t have it back; when he cheated his wife and broke her heart one day, and he would because he was becoming a man, there would be no way to mend it; when she kicked him out of her life, and she should, he’d never be able to return to his original life where everything made sense. Even for the engineers, things were irreversible, earthquakes were destructive, film studios were fraudulent. There would be nothing new. The old would be recycled, I told him. It was called entropy, not a mistake, and it was out loud. Fraudulent men was inevitable.

My arrows, words, schematics on the paper looked like a comedy. I folded the filming schedule and put it in my pocket.

“You know Ma digs your dating show,” he said as he finished the second helping of pudding and leaned back with a sigh. “I tell her it’s a ruse, those couples are just actors and all, but she won’t listen to me. She texts votes all the time.” He started picking his teeth. “This work, I’m telling you, Sir, is tough. Real or not, ruse or not, it’s rough, that’s for sure. Cracks even the best man. Be prepared. You work day and night, sometimes two days without seeing your wife and kids and your people. Family goes first.”

Such a graduate of the manhood, such a bright young man. I wanted to shake his hand and welcome him to his bitter world.

The assistant director came back. She was marginally taller than my daughter, but I still couldn’t warm up to her. She said that I should probably head back to the studio and start setting up the kitchen scene, or we’d all fall behind the schedule. Nobody would want that, didn’t they?

“I gotta go back to work,” I said to the kid. “It was great talking to you.”

“Me too, Sir Galip,” he said. “I’ll be upstairs after midnight. I already talked to Yakup. The albino kid, remember? You won’t miss him. Red eyes, snow white, like a vampire. I carry garlic in my pocket, haha. Anyway, find him if you need anything. He’ll fix it for you.” I thanked him. “Of course, Sir. Don’t even mention it. And just don’t fret on things too much. You’ll beat it.”

He went out to the smoking area, walked up to the handrails, and lighted up a cigarette. He propped himself on his elbows and smoked there, all alone. He’d again forgotten his hammer.

Our studio was empty when I got back. I sat at the kitchen table and went over the schedule. Seven couples had already been eliminated on our date show, leaving the final two couples to fight for the ultimate prize of marrying for 500,000 liras. This would be the episode where the vote count would determine the winning couple. The assistant director had written “the kitchen and the dinner have to look impeccable.”

All the windows in our studio were covered by thick black tarps to prevent the outside light from seeping in. The fake windows around the kitchen table had cardboards of the Bosporus Bridge behind them. They showed a bright İstanbul and the morning traffic. I made a mental note to change them to the evening Bosporus traffic for dinner.

The studio was not only empty, but eerily quiet. Even the boom mics dangling from the ceiling like puppets couldn’t record this silence. That was fine. I always liked those unruly mics. They always did their work well and behind the curtain. A bit like engineers. But sometimes, especially with wide lenses, they could get in the shot and ruin the fiction. A director worth his salt would never stop the camera roll, though, because post-production editors could get rid of those mics later by a technique called drawing an eyebrow — one black strip along the upper edge and one black strip along the lower edge, and puff… Mics would become invisible in the frame.

Apart from ours, two other TV shows were being filmed on this side of the complex — one was a historical series on the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the other was a True Blood rip-off. Through the open door, I caught the sight of the cast and crew members of those shows, running back and forth; 17^th century janissaries and post-modern vampires, sometimes joking with each other, sometimes furious or confused, ready to rule or bite. I also saw the kid several times as he walked past in his messy overalls, always carrying a ladder on his shoulder like a memory he couldn’t shake off.

I hadn’t told him that “transferring houses and roads” probably meant urban transformation, which would ultimately destroy his uncle’s apartment and all the others in that dingy, poor Dudullu. It would be done ostensibly as part of the preparation for the big İstanbul earthquake. The aim was actually to force the poor migrant families to go back to their hometowns or at least push them out to the fringes of İstanbul so that luxury apartments could be built for the rich. The kid didn’t need to hear that. He was so kind, cheerful as he ate the second helping of the pudding. Besides, he was going to turn 18 soon. He was going to be a man. He didn’t need to be destroyed just yet.

Fewer and fewer vampires ran the corridor. There was also less war. I hadn’t seen the kid in a while now. The evening shift must have started. Our crew was still nowhere to be seen. There were three cameras set up around the dinner table for parallel shooting and reaction close-ups. The main camera was facing me.

The whole floor was devoid of any sound or movement. Not even time would pass, it seemed. I checked the Bosporus Bridge and yes, it was still morning, and yes, the cars still weren’t moving. I should start arranging the plates, forks and spoons according to my impeccable entropy sketch. I should start building the chaotic kitchen scene. I should change the Bosporus Bridge cardboard soon and made the cars move. I should start building something.

The hammer was sitting on the table. It was a beautiful piece of tool with a nice heft to it and a red handle where the kid had chiseled his name: Hasan. I turned it in my hand — the tool of chaos. I felt home. I was part of it. I was it. I was Hasan, the youthful agent of entropy.

I walked to the door and checked the corridor. All empty. I closed the door and locked it. When I turned to my back, I saw an old man from İstanbul, sitting at the kitchen table, his back hunched over a piece of paper. I was sorry for him. I pitied him. The cars were moving on the cardboard, the Bosporus Bridge was bringing the city’s two sides together, the main camera was rolling, and the mics were recording. The fraud was on.

I tightened my grab around the hammer’s handle and started towards the old man. He would not hear coming. I would surely get in the shot, but didn’t mind. The editors would know what to do. I hoped Hasan’s mother would appreciate the scene and vote for me.

ALI A. ÜNAL is a writer from Turkey. He received his MFA in creative writing from University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He has several publications in his native language. His first publication in English, “Everybody Needs Some Saving,” has appeared in the Quarterly West. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in English at University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

K. Noel Moore

After Nellie started working at the Wisteria Street Preschool, they gave her a grace period of two months before they sent Remy home with her. That was a long time, Greer told her. Most new hires didn’t get that long. If she wasn’t used to the idea of Remy by then, it might be best for her to find a different place of work.

She wasn’t used to the idea. In fact, it creeped her out more than it had at the start. But there was nowhere else willing to hire her, so she played along. She agreed to be the little ghost’s mother, just for one night.

The Twos class at Wisteria Street had eleven children in it, but no teacher other than Nellie would acknowledge that fact. Twelve seats were put out for snacks, twelve cots for naps. Twelve heads were counted at recess. Twelve names were called out as parents arrived — ”Look who’s come to see you!” Sarah, Alexei, Natalie, Emi, Grace, Tanner, Oliver, Roman, Tavien, Luke, Jonathan. Remy. On her lunch break her second day there, Nellie Googled mass hysteria on her phone. She Googled communal grieving rituals and death rituals worldwide to see if there was any place where this practice of pretending the dead were yet alive was normal. (There was; there were several, in fact. In certain parts of Indonesia, for example, families might keep treating their dead as living for twenty years. Giving food or clothes to ancestor spirits was the norm in the Eastern world; in the Western world, one only saw it a few times a year, on Day of the Dead or Samhain, but one might see it.) She decided her coworkers were crazy, but she was willing to play along. She had nowhere else to go.

It took about three weeks before she started to go crazy along with them.

Nellie had never believed in ghosts, but this twelfth child wasn’t a ghost, exactly. He couldn’t be. Even an apparition had presence, it took up space; little Remy was an absence. He was a hollowed-out space in the air where a child should have been. If you looked closely, maybe you could detect light bending, a shimmer like movement. Otherwise, he was only felt, as a nagging sensation that something was missing from the room.

The day she was to take him home, Nellie Googled tulpa effect. She Googled explaining hauntings and found plenty of examples.

She felt him as she bleached every surface twice and rearranged shelves of toys. Emi was the last to go that Thursday. Emi’s mother was German, and she spoke with a thick accent that sometimes made her incomprehensible, but Nellie liked her best out of all the parents. She was calm; she was kind. She didn’t ask too many questions or set too many rules for her daughter’s caretakers.

“How are you, Nellie?” she asked. “You look tired.”

“Ich bin ein bisschen müde, Frau Kellerman,” she replied. Nellie had taken German in high school. She didn’t remember much, but the Kellerman parents appreciated her efforts at small talk anyway. They appreciated that Nellie was teaching Emi’s little friends to count in German. Eins, zwei, drei, fier, fünf….

Elf Kinder. Zwölf Kinder. Eleven children and Remy.

“More than a little bit, I think. Have the children been giving you much trouble?”

“The usual. You know what that feels like, I’m sure.”

Frau Kellerman laughed. “Yes, I do. Believe me, I do.”

Nellie wanted to ask her about Remy. Had she ever taken him home? Did she know when the custom had started? Did she believe in ghosts, or did she think it was insanity, or did she accept it as a legitimate communal ritual? But these were personal questions, and far beyond what Nellie had the vocabulary in any language to ask.

She waved goodbye to Frau Kellerman and Emi, then crossed over to the corner where she felt Remy’s presence. Thought she felt it. She took a deep breath and reminded herself to go with it. What you think you feel, you feel. What you think you see, you see. You can hypothesize about tulpas in the morning. Tonight, if you want to keep your job and your sanity, everything is real.

“Ready to go, sweetie?” she chirruped. “You’re going to stay with Miss Nellie tonight. I think we’ll have fun together, won’t we?” Nellie extended her hand.

She gathered his bag and his car seat (who had they originally belonged to?), and walked out with a closed empty fist hanging at her side. The seat barely fit in her tiny Spark.

“You’ll be okay, Remy,” she cooed as she wrestled it into the backseat. “It’s only a short drive. You’ll be just fine.”

She drew the seatbelt tight, and she drove him home.

Nellie had no trouble cooking dinner for a child; her diet was already the rough equivalent of a ten-year-old’s. She cooked up buttered noodles and carrots — Remy’s she steamed and mashed, but hers she ate raw. She wondered what to do with his food. Eat it? Or leave it untouched, like an offering to the gods? (Come to think of it, what exactly did people do with offerings to the gods?)

In the end she left it. She didn’t even clean it up; she decided to do it in the morning, when Remy was gone. In case he wants it later. When he was gone — when someone else had him — she’d throw the food away.

There was nowhere in her tiny home for him to sleep. She made up a cot for him out of blankets, and decided she’d sleep on the floor next to him. Nellie couldn’t bear the thought of laying a child down in such an uncomfortable bed, while she slept on a mattress herself. At least on the floor he couldn’t roll around and hurt himself — could he? Maybe he could. Remy had once died from SIDS. (No, he hadn’t. That was a fact unspoken, and a fact unspoken was no fact at all.)

Nellie knew she wouldn’t be sleeping much that night.

For a preschool teacher, Nellie’s knowledge of lullabies was sorry. The simple nursery songs didn’t stick in her head the way other teachers complained they did. They washed right over her. When the time came to rock the baby to sleep, then — after playing blocks with him after dinner — she turned to the classics her father had sung to her. “Bye Bye Blackbird.” “Sweet Georgia Brown.” “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love.” Hummed half-remembered versions of Sinatra and Dean Martin. Nellie’s father had never known many nursery songs, either. (The man could sing, though. He sang like he should have been on Broadway.)

Nellie sat with him, rocking him in her arms and swaying. They fell asleep like that, with Nellie lying on her back, Remy on her chest. Her fears were assuaged, in the end: when she woke, the weight that wasn’t quite a child remained, unreal and alive as anything, on her chest.

K. NOEL MOORE is an Atlanta-based genre writer and poet. They have two historical fantasy novellas, ‘Undertown’ (July 2018) and ‘Incendiary Devices,’ (December 2019) up to buy on Kindle, and work available to read 100% free all around the journal-sphere. You can find them on twitter @mysterioustales; feel free to ask about their weird and wild experiences with ghosts, children, or any combination thereof.