New Visions

By Steven Harris

"If the short story is an art, then Steven Harris understands that and has made use of a wide palette in creating his ‘New Visions’." Louise Crossley. From the author of "Fiction Burns" comes this latest collection of short stories, New Visions. With the introduction by Louise Crossley, there are twenty eight stories in all, some previously included in his 2009 anthology "And Other Stories", others completely new, but all uniquely Harris. Steven Harris is a human man of slightly less than average height for his size. He plays with words a lot because he retired from being a musician (except for Sundays). The worlds he creates often look like the world you live in mixed with the things you dream of. Or they look like something else, somewhere new. He has never been a member of a heavy metal band. He lives in Devon with an imaginary cat.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 14, 2015
• ISBN: 9781326247119

Book preview

New Visions

New Visions

Steven Harris

2013

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All work copyright © Steven Harris 2013

Steven Harris has asserted his right under the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

ISBN 978-1-326-24711-9

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

Acknowledgements

Mondays, Sample Specimen, In Digestion, Tin Can, Stream, Germs, And Other Stories, The Act, Market Forces, www.wegottheanswers.com, Monkeys Under The Bed, The Boys From the Ak Stuff, Pants On Fire, Pleased To Meet You & Indirect Speech originally included in And Other Stories anthology in 2009.

Market Forces was shortlisted for the Happenstance Short Fiction Prize in 2009

Original cover photograph © Steven Harris 2011

Cover Design © Susan Omand 2013

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Dedicated to Tony and Dawn,

two of the finest humans I know,

and to Darcy,

their equally fine non-human companion.

Introduction

By Louise Crossley

If the short story is an art, then Steven Harris understands that and has made use of a wide palette in creating his ‘New Visions’. From the dystopian, and all too readily believable, eponymous piece; through the amusing charm of his rather archly twisted take on impending fatherhood in ‘Pleased To Meet You’; to ‘Line’ which opens onto wide vistas of descriptive writing in stark, evocative cinematic quality, each story is pleasing, fresh and singular.

In the title story Harris takes the theme of scientific tampering with nature in a bid to revolutionise both work and how the world is perceived and turns it into a view of a revolutionary future, which is both clever and disturbing in equal measure.

‘The Ghosts of the Gods’ is an elegant, yet troubling little tale of gods and man in symbiosis and the resultant degradation as one patterns its behaviours on that of the other, the resulting destruction, and the rather haunting outcome.

My particular favourite, ‘Mondays’ is an anarchic, troubling recurring nightmare in which very little makes sense, but the ride is so full of energy and imaginative descriptive diversions (who couldn’t be enthralled by the idea of breakfasting on roasted armadillo in a honey and banana sauce?) that I really didn’t care, and didn’t want it to stop.

‘Indirect Speech’ can be summed up by Harris himself: all the words I have are words. To read ‘New Visions’ one can’t help but be struck by the astute philosophy therein, and the effortlessness with which the messages are conveyed. But first and foremost, it is a collection of funny, touching, inexplicable, baffling, endearing, clever tales. Read them.

Louise Crossley is a member of Swindon’s BlueGate Poets, writing mostly poetry and some critiques

Things

Once upon an I don’t know when, things happened. But things are always happening, you say, and you’re right to interrupt. But who’s telling this, me or you? If we want to be picky we ought to say that I am relating some form of narrative, filled with words and images which have a meaning for me, but that you will have different meanings for some of the words; the interpretation will not match the images in my head. There is no unifying truth. I remain locked in my memories and implications and you stare at me from inside yours. Your tongue is half hanging out and it reminds me of spittle on a schoolyard window. You will never know why.

But, seeing as we’re here, and there’s a great deal of time to be filled up between now and when we die (it is to be hoped) I may as well sort of narrate and you may as well probably miss the point.

Once upon a whatever you’re supposed to say, things happened. They happened chronologically but they might come out jumbled. Memory is like that. I don’t remember when they first started to happen because I was small and only interested in sucking warm, wet stuff into my mouth. But they were already happening. I remember water, all over my hands, and the glint of sunlight making me squint as it reflected from the water. And toys, brightly coloured plastic things that could be filled and emptied.

If only memory could be emptied as well as filled. If there were some way to freeze-frame the best bits, hold tightly on to them and always recall them in crystal clear, panoramic mental pictures while erasing the shameful, dirty, terrifying, dull bits. Make some space in the brain for new best bits. Or for coherent thinking.

In some ways we die every night and are born a new person in the morning. It pretty much happens every second if you look at it that way. But memory persists, wilfully refuses to be erased, to leave you freer to be a better, less shameful, dirty, terrified or dull human being.

When I was born there was a party going on. Some people are born in war, others are born in nice cosy beds with Daddy close at hand and Mummy holding us the minute the midwife stops counting our toes and cleaning off all that gunk from the womb. The party wasn’t in my house, it was in the world. There had been no global wars for some twenty years, rationing was a thing of the past, and we’d never had it so good for so long that the phrase had become a cliché. The sun shone, skirt-hems were higher than a hippy in a dope field, rock and roll was saving everyone’s soul, and butter was only tuppence a pound.

All of these things happened without my direct knowledge. Smallness and a dedication to nothing more than sucking warm, wet stuff into the mouth distract a child from knowing what’s going on around him. Yet bigness and the desire to free up portions of the brain for thinking don’t help as much as is believed either. If you follow me.

But these aren’t the important things, or not all of them are. The important things come later: joy and pain, and death and rolling down hills like a barrel. Hands holding hands and wishing they were made of gelatine or something that can melt into someone else’s hand, heart or body. Seeing the delicate fingers of your first born wiggle; and hearing the chocolate-addictive laughter of your second born. Driving through country lanes at four in the morning with the lights off. Rolling a joint and laughing because you forgot you don’t find anything funny.

There are two things in the world that are essential in order to keep existing. Food and shelter. These are more than things, they are imperatives. After that, you’re in the realms of luxury, except that we’ve been force-fed want, want, want adverts disguising themselves as need, need, need for so long we fill the brain with inconsequential things and call them our identity markers. Or call them nothing because we don’t know we’re doing it.

Wake up, desire, shower, desire, eat, desire, dress, desire, etc and so on and never stopping.

Food: provides the body with essential vitamins, minerals, fats, proteins, starch and all that crap that means we maintain a level of energy and don’t fall over in the middle of running for the bus. I eat, therefore I still am.

Shelter: delivers warmth, allowing sleep, allowing strength, alertness. Allowing you to keep your eye on the ball the following day and hopefully bestowing enough togetherness to prevent tigers, double-decker buses or muggers with horribly sharp knives from removing your presence from the planet.

Adults stop asking the essential questions that burned their souls when they were young. Most of them begin with the same word: ‘why’.

Why am I here? Because Mummy and Daddy made you, Mummy grew you in her tummy and out you popped when you were ready.

Why? Because that’s what happens when a Mummy and a Daddy make a baby.

Why were Mummy and Daddy here to make me? Because their mummies and daddies made them.

Why did their mummies and daddies…why did you just hit me?

Oh for an honest parent:

Look, you little shit, I have no idea how life began, why life began, what it is all about, where we go when we die, or any of that frightening stuff. And the more you ask me such questions the more I am forced to face my own uncertainty and dread at not knowing these answers so I lash out at you in the hope that you’ll start suppressing such terrifying questions too.

Our cultures provide nothing to help us through existential crisis. They provide plenty to suppress and distract us, for which we are expected to be truly grateful. If I am ungrateful, is there something wrong with me? Or something wrong with culture?

Mondays

I have this recurring nightmare: I’m trapped on a ship, sailing from nowhere and heading for nothing. The radio is dead – civilisation has disappeared since the ship left port; a nuclear war, ecological disaster, alien attack, I don’t know which but with dream logic I know the only human beings left alive on the planet are aboard the ship.

Which is where the nightmare really begins. Besides me there are five other people. There should be a few hundred; it’s an enormous cruise ship, the kind I’ve never stepped onto but always had vague fantasies about doing a trip on one day. But there aren’t several hundred people, there’s only me and five others. The kid who shoved my head down the toilet at school when I was eleven; the bitchiest, nastiest one of quite a few bitchy, nasty women I used to clean a hotel with; the ugly, one-eyed pervert who accosted me in a public toilet when I was fifteen and said he wanted to touch my penis; Margaret Thatcher and the ex-girlfriend I would rather rip my own toenails out than have to ever talk to again.

Every night I dream this dream and every night I make a friend of the same one of them to stop me from going insane, cast adrift on my floating personal Hell: Thatcher. I wake up screaming when she strips off naked and pulls me to her wrinkled and partially rotting flesh.

England, my country, the home of the socially inept and the soulfully unadventurous. We talk about inconsequential things. Nobody seems to have a type of weather they actually like. When it’s hot it’s too hot. When it’s cold they want it to be hotter. When it snows they rub their hands together in exaggerated fashion and make that irritating brr! sound. Secretly perhaps they all love the rain. It gives them a permanent subject of complaint. We have a few adjectives for hot weather; we have scorchers or blistering days. But we have so many more descriptions for rain. It buckets. It cats and dogs. It sheets. It drizzles. Rain can be fine, it can be heavy, it can be torrential. It showers, it squalls, it floods. If human beings are seventy per cent water, we must have an affinity with the wet stuff. We began in primordial soup and progressed into creatures that eventually crawled from the seas. Maybe this ancestral connection to liquid incites our perpetual obsession with the state and effect of droplets of water tumbling from the sky to the earth.

Monday. It’s not raining. I wake up screaming from my nightmare. Breakfast is a tense affair involving a reluctant toaster and shaky hands. I phone work and tell them I’m not coming in. They don’t seem bothered either way. I walk to the doctor’s and describe my nightmare. He suggests sleeping tablets but I tell him they make it worse because I can’t wake up and the dream only ends when I have performed vomit-inducing acts with the putrefying corpse that is Thatcher. He can’t help me, he says. Why don’t I try a psychiatrist, he says. I’m not convinced he’s taking me seriously.

Back home I scan the telephone directory for therapists, find one with a name I deem appealing and, forgetting that this is a method for backing horses in the Grand National which has never brought me a placing, much less a winner, in seventeen years, ring up and make an appointment for Monday week.

You’re considered weird if you don’t have a television set. I ceremoniously dumped mine from an upper floor window of my house four years ago. Some have interpreted this as a fit of madness on my part but it was a planned ceremony, one I got my friend Simon to record on his camcorder for posterity. It was the day I liberated myself from one source of social indoctrination and I was proud of my stand. No-one understands that it is a stand against socially negotiated identity confusion; they just think it makes me a weirdo. This is no doubt why people mostly talk to me about the weather: I have removed their other topic of conversation. To begin with, when people don’t know I don’t have a television, those water cooler moments run something like:

Did you see Death Quiz last night?

No, I don’t have…

Oh it was really good. You know Nigel, the reigning champion? Well he got seven answers in a row and…

I don’t have a television. I’ve no idea who Nigel is. I’ve never seen the programme and I have no desire to watch it at any point in the future.

There is usually an uncomfortable silence before they ask what sort of programme I do watch. By the third time I have told them I don’t have a television set they finally have to accept that they did hear me correctly the first two times. They then ask the inevitable question.

But if you don’t have a television, what do you do in the evenings?

You know those things called books? They’re really incredible you know. They have stories inside.

So you just read?

No, I go for walks, I have conversations about things that actually happened to me, rather than to four inch high figures on a flickering screen, I listen to music, I watch the sunset, I go to the theatre sometimes.

How very interesting. There was a character like that in this series I saw the other week…

If I haven’t screamed or walked away by this stage they