'Colour Vision' by Noemi Scheiring-Olah

The door creaks as Natalie enters. Stale air and dust dims all the colours inside.

“Hello?” She squints through between two shelves of pale books, goblets, bird cages, wires, and chemical tubes, all melted into colourlessness.

She makes her way in through the veil of earthy powder and notices a woman sitting at a desk, head down. Her hair is also colourless.

“Hello there,” Natalie folds her hands behind her back.

The woman looks up. A rolled-out papyrus drapes off her desktop. Natalie can’t see anything written on it. The woman scans her from head to toe. Grins. The cardboard-coloured wrinkles on her face deepen. Without saying a word, she stretches a hand towards the back of the antique store.

Natalie gives the woman an uncertain nod and walks deeper into the haze.

After a few steps she glances back, but the woman isn’t there anymore. Natalie shrugs and reaches out to a shelf.

Her arm is absent.

She chokes in shock and looks down. Morsel by morsel, her once blue jeans are losing their colour, quickly becoming transparent.

She screams and turns, but another shelf blocks her way.

“Help!” She races left to right, but can’t find the exit.

“Please…” Invisible tears roll down on her white cheeks.

A bright yellow colour blinks at her through the fog. She rushes towards it. It’s a book, an unnamed book, glowing on a colourless shelf. She touches it with the last shadows of her fingertips.

A beam of light coming from behind the book blinds her for a second.

The contours of an open door takes form. Clutching the book to her heart, she rushes out.

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'Muscle Memory' by Audrey Niven

There is a cine film of me, the overwhelming colour of which is orange. I am turning a cartwheel. Or maybe it’s someone else in the film. I don’t remember ever being able to turn a cartwheel and I’m not about to try it now, just to check if I have any muscle memory.

What I do remember is an orange glass dish. I am looking for it in the film when the cameraman, my mother’s uncle I think, sweeps round showing us the table and the picnic rug. There are Tupperware boxes of filled rolls and tinfoil parcels of cooked meat. You can’t see any of the vegetable salad but I know it was there because I can taste it, the orange and green and white of it, the bits and pieces squashed between teeth and tongue. There must have been lemonade. I want there to have been lemonade, but we were never allowed it.

The orange dish I am remembering had trifle in it; swiss roll, tinned fruit and jelly. It tasted of love.  It had no place at a picnic. I am probably remembering wrong, mixing up Christmas and cartwheels on the beach that actually might just be a back garden. I don’t know all the adults that were there.  One of them died not long after. One Aunt went back to Canada and we never saw her again. The other children, our cousins, grew up and away. 

There must be a video somewhere that isn’t orange, that has our children turning cartwheels too. And eating picnics on beaches that are gardens. I don’t know who has that old orange cine film now. I’d like to see it again, just to see if I am in it after all.

'Yearning' by Joe Cody

For once a clear night and low tide collude, allowing him, in his stolen nocturnal walk, to feel he’s breaking free from suffocating communal island life.

Vast silent sands reach interminably back to the ocean that deposited them, to which he also tilts his silhouette form.  Striding purposefully toward the abyss, his figure glides between the pinpricks of starlight above and their reflected forms beneath his feet.  The diorama mocks his insignificance.

He stops.  Searching the horizon, his gaze settles as a point of light more vital than the rest resolves itself into the mooring beacons of a container ship.  His gut stretches out across the water, a vertiginous yearning that pulls him insistently to adventure, the imagined kaleidoscope of other places.  Any other places.  He stands, transfixed with longing.

*

Climbing empty-handed from the smoky mess-room poker game on rusted steps, his footsteps lost in the immensity of the void, another stops to draw breath beneath the bridge, is assailed by tang of salty diesel oil from tired engines. 

He stumbles from cheap vodka, universal currency of the sea that forges fickle manacles of comradeship between shifting tides of itinerant sailors; instinctively, he clings to the deck rail.

Beyond the vastness of this silent nothingness, warm, orange lights, intimate and inward looking, glimmer on the shore.  Sickening of rootless peregrinations in a brutal existence which promised adventure, but now derides his need for purpose, he fixes his eyes on the glittering mirage of community, familiarity.  It hovers, eternally out of reach.