Donna

When she turned the key in the lock and stepped into the house, her new home, the one she'd paid for, the one she owned, Donna had expected to feel satisfied, proud of herself, like she was an achiever at last. To her surprise, what flooded through her was a mixture of joy, relief and grief. Joy that at last she had found her place in the world, relief that this particularly part of the journey was over at last, and grief for all of the pain and turmoil that had gone before.

She allowed the feelings to flow through her, then wiped the tears away and set about the slow process of making this place her own. She had a single suitcase with her, and she carefully packed her clothes into the wardrobe and placed the porcelain animals inherited from her great-aunt on the mantel.

Then she went to the kitchen and made herself a simple meal, sitting at the table, washing the bolognaise down with a glass of water from the tap, and looking forward to filling the house with plants, paintings and music.

She went to bed early, enjoying the silence, and slept better than she had in years.

For the first couple of hours at least.

In the small hours, she woke disoriented, unsure at first where she was. She reached for a bedside lamp that wasn't there, then fumbled for her phone... and then she stopped. There were noises downstairs.

Donna froze, her breath held. All she could hear was her own heartbeat, her pulse as the blood rushed past her eardrums, and beyond that a muffled scuffling noise, of feet moving on the stone floor of the kitchen.

And then she heard voices, coming at the same time from the kitchen beneath her and from very far away. Children and adults, singing.

"Happy birthday to you!" they sang. "Happy birthday to you!"

She struggled to hear which child they were singing too, but the name in the song was hidden by a barking dog in a nearby garden.

Donna woke to bright sunlight on the bed from the curtain-less windows. She went to the toilet, then made her way downstairs.

In the kitchen, she filled the old-fashioned whistle kettle and placed it on the stove... and then she stopped.

The hiss of the kettle built as the water began to warm.

Donna turned.

There, on the table, was the mashed remains of a birthday cake, a single extinguished candle stuck in the icing, crumbs strewn everywhere.

The dream came flooding back.

She reached out to touch the cake, to check if it was real.

The wick of the candle sparked, then burst into flame.

Donna gasped.

The candle burned on.

The kettle whistled, the water boiling.

Donna broke from the mesmeric hold the birthday cake seemed to have on her, and turned away, taking the kettle from the stove, burning her hand in the process.

"Goddamn it!" she cried, and ran her hand under the cold tap.

As the pain eased, she turned back to the table...

A curl of candle-smoke hung in the air above the place where the cake had been, but the table was empty.

Carla and Joe

The rain on the window and the drone of the air-conditioning combined to create a white noise that made the humans in the room feel strangely disconnected. Joe checked his instruments one more time, and then he started.

"How old are you?" he asked the figure seated facing him on the far side of the huge mahogany table.

"Two-point-three years," the figure said, and Joe wrote the number down.

"When is your birthday?" He watched the dial in front of him, looking for the tell-tale flicker.

"Excuse me," said Carla.

"When is your birthday?" he asked again, ignoring the young woman seated beside him.

"I'm sorry to interrupt," said Carla, "and I know I'm only the work experience girl, but..."

"What is it?" Joe hissed.

"Well, he's a robot, isn't he?"

"I need to run the test," Joe said, turning back to his apparatus.

"But you can tell from the voice," said Carla.

"What do you mean?" buzzed the figure across the table, and Joe realised that there was indeed a metallic quality to the subject's verbal responses.

"That evidence will inform the final decision, but I really do need to run the test, so if you’d just be quiet for a few more - "

"Also the big metal head. And body," she said, and he glared at her.

But she was right, he could see that, the figure across from him was kind of... angular. And the glint from its bare head was somewhat more metallic than perhaps would be normal for a human.

"Also the antennas."

"Antennae," he said.

"Only for insects," she said. "For radio receivers the plural is antennas."

"She's right," buzzed the robot.

"Let me run the test, please..."

"I admit it, I am a robot."

Joe sighed.

"Great. Just great."

"Sorry," said Carla, then jumped as Joe pulled the trigger on the weapon he held beneath the table, retiring the robot with a single shot.

Gunsmoke curled in the air.

The robot's cogs whirred to an ever-lasting halt.

A spring sproinged.

"Next!" said Joe.

Carla stood, crossed the floor and opened the door to the waiting room. "Next!" she called, and the next test subject rose from its seat and trundled into the room.

Won't someone please think of the children?

For the past year I've been living in France. I was very proud of them when recently they passed a marriage equality law, but I was astonished at the vehemence (not to mention the vitriol) of a sizeable proportion of the population who mobilised to oppose it.

"We're not homophobic, we just don't want gay people to have the same rights as everyone else."

Now, the French are good at mobilising to oppose things - laws, politicians, current economic conditions, and, in at least one famous case, nothing at all, just a general desire to say "non!" - so it's not that surprising that there would be marches in the streets from a loose coalition of conservative Christian groups (some indirectly financed by the Catholic church in France, others more directly by evangelical groups in the US), far-right extremists (whose violent attacks on Femen counter-protestors must have revolted anyone who saw the videos - if you weren't revolted, you're an asshole), and Muslim groups, led by a nutjob former comedian and satirist by the pen-name of "Frigide Barjot", who struggled to hide her own bigotry almost as much as she struggled to manage the latent racism, misogyny and predilection for violence of some of her co-protestors.

Two cute straight girls kissing in front of some stuck-up French biddies.

What was surprising was the clever way in which the protest was framed. Adopting pink (with a smattering of baby blue) for their promotion material, the "Manif' pour tous" (Demo For Everyone) was presented as an all-embracing protest to protect the entire population from the dangers of same-sex marriage, on the basis that the new law would remove the intrinsic human right of a child to a mother and father, and open the door to adoption of children by gay couples, thus threatening the very fabric of childhood. Of course the same people who hit the streets to protect children from married gay people seem to have stayed in their homes when it came to protecting children from institutionalised abuse, but which of us can say that we are completely consistent?

Now, setting aside the ludicrous idea that a child has the right to a mother and father, which would leave many children of single parents scratching their heads and wondering who to sue, the idea of "gay adoption" is worth addressing.

First, we shall set aside the assertion that gay adoption shall create more gays on the basis that (a) only an imbecile could believe it and (b) even if it did, then so fucking what?

So let me switch track here. Let me talk about my wife's family, and our daughter.

Pomme is six weeks old. (Her name is Juliette, but she looked like a cooking apple when she was born, and the nickname has stuck.) She's adored by everyone around her, as you'd expect. She has a father (me) and a mother (my wife) and a four-year-old big sister, her grandmother, great-grandmother, step-grandfather, great-aunts, cousins and a godmother... and that's just in the area. Elsewhere she has two grandfathers, another grandmother, more cousins, an aunt and uncle and another great-grandmother, all of whom love and care for her.

One of those cousins (actually my wife's cousin, and also her godfather) is a 50-year-old man who lives with another man. (I'm going to call him "Raoul", because my wife hates that name.) Raoul used to be married to a woman. He has a son of his own - a fine young man in his early twenties - and also stepped up and was father to the two daughters his wife had had from an earlier relationship. He still fills that role, despite being divorced from their mother for close to a decade now. He's a gay man, and a brilliant father.

But it's not "Raoul" that my wife was thinking of recently as she nursed Juliette. It was her grandfather Yvan, who died a year ago.

A difficult man at the best of times, Yvan was born between the wars in southern France. The how of Yvan losing his parents is a whole story on its own - his mother died in childbirth and his father (a soldier who went on to become a radical communist, fight in the Spanish civil war, take part in a mutiny on the Black Sea and spent time in early Soviet Russia before returning to France and trying, without success, to find his adult son) was refused permission to keep him - but suffice it to say that very shortly after his birth Yvan ended up in an orphanage.

Growing up in an institution, baby Yvan was denied the love that Juliette is now getting. It's no wonder that he became the man he did. If there's a human right that children can lay claim to, it is not that of a mother and father, it is the right to be loved by someone good.

If Yvan could have had a father like Raoul, or two fathers like Raoul and his partner, he would have been a happier, gentler man, and the world would be a better place. This is why, bigotry aside, we need marriage equality, and why marriage equality should open the door to adoption equality.

Shannon and Kara

When Shannon was down and lacking faith, Kara was the one to lift her up. "Another mile, Shan, another mile!" she'd yell, her on the bike, a quart of whiskey hidden in her bag, Shannon slogging on, feet pounding the asphalt, the morning rush around her as the drones went to work, soon replaced by the old people at the bus stops and the young mothers on their way to wherever it is young mothers go.


In the afternoons they'd hit the gym, and Kara would keep talking, careful not to let the booze show in her voice, barking words of wisdom and strength while Shannon battered the bag or sparred with some of the young guys from the projects.

On the day of the fight, Kara wound Shannon up as the day progressed, bound her fists, punched her in the shoulder, and sent her out to the roar of the crowd.

Shannon won the fight, dropping the American girl in the third, Back in the dressing-room, Kara was gone, a note on the slab. "Happy birthday," it said. "I knew we could do it."

The cramped apartment seemed large and empty when Shannon returned. She dropped her bag in the kitchen, drank milk straight from the bottle, staring out the window at the downpour over the city.

In a bar down-town, Kara lifted her glass to her lips. She held it there for a long time. Rain streamed the glass, blurring the lights on a passing Cadillac. Kara put the glass down. Before the barman could see the tears on her cheek, she stood up, put her coat on, and walked out into the rain, looking for the bus home.

Stephen

Murphy followed the woman to a sprawling apartment complex on the west side of town. He tailed her through the labyrinthine gardens to a ground-floor condo, where the woman crossed the patio and let herself in through the French doors. She closed the doors and pulled the drapes behind her, and Murphy stood in the shadows and watched.

An hour later, a man arrived. He was dressed preppy, but carried himself like a street stiff, and from the shadows Murphy could see the man's eyes darting, left and right. The man pressed the doorbell at the front door of the woman's condo, and as he waited he scanned the gardens. Murphy shrank back into the shadows, and the man did not see him.

The woman opened the door, the man went inside, and Murphy's stomach muscles tensed. He took his hand from his pocket and placed it behind his back, and carefully traced invisible patterns in the air. Old juju from his days in the Orient. Superstition. Murphy smiled to himself at the stupidity of it, but he felt his gut relaxing all the same.

Four hours later, the French doors opened. The man emerged from the condo and headed for the exit. Murphy waited for the man to pass, then detached from the shadows and crossed the twenty yards between them.

"Excuse me," said Murphy, as if about to ask for directions, and as the man turned, he forced a wadded kerchief over the man's mouth and the tip of a stiletto into the man's back.

"For Johnny," he whispered, and drove the knife home.

He lowered the body to the path, the last gasps of life hissing in the man's throat, the man's hand twitching, as if chasing random patterns in the air, searching too late for his own juju, or perhaps just reaching out for help that would never come.

Murphy took a small striped red-and-white candle from his pocket, and placed it in the man's hand. The man clasped the candle and stared at Murphy, who met the man's gaze with his own stare. The time for talking was done, Johnny was done, and now Johnny's killer was done too.

Blood pooled on the cement. The light in the man's eyes faded and died. Murphy walked away.

Sticking to the alleys and the many vacant lots, he walked the three blocks back to his car, then he drove home, taking the long way around as the adrenalin wore off and the jitters came. He took a shower, went to bed, and did not sleep.

In the morning two policemen came to the door of the ground-floor condo. One held a photograph of a dead man, and the other pushed the doorbell. The woman answered, and the policeman showed her the photo. Inside, later, having recovered from the shock, a detective asked the woman if she knew whose birthday it had been yesterday. "Yeah," she said. "Yesterday was Johnny's birthday."

French bureaucracy, part un

You must wear Speedos in swimming-pools in France.

Or some generic brand of trunks. You cannot, under any circumstances, wear board-shorts.

Okay, so the reason given is "hygiene". Which is obviously complete bollocks (excuse the pun). No, the REAL reason - and I am in no way (I am totally) speculating here - is there are too many bureaucrats working in the department of public health and safety (or whatever it's called here) and they have too much time on their hands.

So Speedo comes along and takes them out to lunch and, you know what, we have this conference on public health and hygiene in Marbella next month, would you like to come? We're happy to pay for your expenses. Plus your wife's. Plus your round of golf each afternoon.

Looks ridiculous, right?

Then at the conference they make an hour-long presentation over champagne on how Speedo's revolutionary fabric design improves the hygiene in public pools and MAY ACTUALLY SAVE LIVES! And the bureaucrats all nod and look at each other and say "wow, that totally makes sense" and then they finish their glasses and toddle off to the golf course, and on Monday when they get back, because they've nothing f***ing better to do, they start putting together regulations on what people are and aren't allowed wear in public - and also privately-owned in the case of hotels and resorts - swimming-pools, and what do you know? You have to wear Speedos.

Of course you can wear any brand of "speedo" you want, but guess who has by far the biggest chunk of the swimming costume market in France...?

Look, it's probably not true, but it's a good a reason as any. And it's exactly how the pharmaceutical industry works.

Áine, Ciara and Colin

They crept closer to the cliff's edge, careful not to send a wayward pebble tumbling to the beach below.

"Can you see anything?" whispered Áine, peering down into the pre-dawn gloom.

"Shhh," said Ciara, staring out to sea, where a long, dark shape seemed to rise from the water, a protrusion in the middle of it, like a single candle on a massive birthday cake. It was calmer here, she knew, in the shelter of the headland, and she wondered if...

"Oh my God that's a submarine!" Colin said, almost shouting, then "Ow!" as Ciara punched her in the arm.

"There's something happening on the beach," hissed Áine.



The three girl detectives craned to see down onto the rocky shore below. There was something happening on the beach alright. A group of men carried boxes from the water towards the cliff-face, where the girls knew there was a cave, deep enough to be dry, and above the water-line.



And with a grinding noise they saw, the light a little brighter now, a boat push off from the beach, and two men with oars, sculling it out into the cove towards the unmistakeable long shape of the submarine.



Then Colin leaned out too far, and her spectacles, which had been placed in the pocket of her pinafore for safe keeping, tumbled out and fell.

For a moment everything stopped but the glasses, pinging the rocks as they descended, then smashed on the beach.



"There!" came the shout from below, in a strange accent they had never heard before, and the girls knew they had been rumbled. Colin, her mouth agape, looked around to see Ciara and Áine already sprinting for the stile, racing for Uncle Poppy's farmhouse as fast as they could.



Colin hitched up her skirts and ran.

Claire

Everyone was dead set on hanging the man.

He could hear them outside, gathered afore the jailhouse stoop, the lawyer-man exhorting them to give their verdicts, one by one. "Guilty", they said. "Guilty". And the lawyer-man called on the sheriff to open the door and let them in, to turn the man over to his peers so he could face justice in the shape of a noose.

"Come on out of there, Sheriff!" came the lawyer-man's barrack, and to the man in the cell it seemed impossible to resist such a force of will and convinced righteousness. So the man turned to the sheriff, who held his fate in her hands, the question unasked but dangled there, the silence marred only by the angry voices outside and the scratch of her pen upon the paper.

What was she a-thinkin' she might intend to do?

She sighed once. Looked up from the page at the man, wide-eyed in his cell, him wanting to know and yet not wanting to know. She put her pen down. Tapped the desk once. Twice. And then she spoke.

"Well this is a fine happy-birthday-to-you", she said.

The man blinked. He hadn't known.

"Happy birthday", he spluttered. "Uh... to you."

She held his gaze as outside the lawyer-man hectored on. The light from the torches carried by many of the townsmen flickered through the bars of the windows, and the man searched her stare for knowledge of his fate, for the knowin' of if'n he would he see the dawn or no.

Until she gave him a nod, a curt thank-you, lowered her eyes to the page, lifted up her pen, and began again to write.

"Happy birthday, dear Claire," he whispered, low so's not to disturb her, but loud enough to close the circle in his own mind, as it were. "Happy birthday to you."

Memories of Embarrassing Moments (or, The Time-travelling Cringe)

In my first job, when I was 19, I worked as a graphic artist in a printer's. There were a few of us kids working in various departments, and one Friday after work we took over the plant and printed up a bunch of fake business cards. Mine was, I thought at the time, super-clever.

Devin Doyle.
Gynaecologist.
At your cervix.

Hilarious, right? Anyway, I had about 500 of them, and one glorious weekend I passed all of them out. In pubs, on buses... okay, just pubs and buses. (An Irish social life). And then forgot about them.

So ten years later, I'm dating this new lady, I'm 29, she's in her early 30s, and I'm nervously meeting her friends. "Everyone, this is Devin." "Hi, everyone." (That was me, trying to seem cool, and sophisticated, and interesting.) And one of my date's friends peers at me.

"Devin?" he says.

"Devin Doyle?"

"THE Devin Doyle?"

"Uh... I guess... yeah."

"I have one of your business cards. I found it on a bus..."

Ian and Aideen

A light appeared, so small that at first neither of them was sure it was real. But it persisted, a constant, unwavering point, which told them that it wasn't an hallucination, that it wasn't their atrophied eyes playing tricks on them.

But they didn't trust the light, so they continued to sit there, and watched it to see what it might do.

After a while, it had done nothing, so Ian rose to his feet, never letting his gaze fall from the light. It did not react. Nor did it seem lower than it had before.

"It's far away", Aideen whispered.

"Yes", said Ian.

She rose. They stood beside each other for a long time, minutes or hours, waiting for the other to take the first step, and in the end each found the courage at the same moment, and they took that step together. And then they took another, and another, and soon they were walking, crossing the void, with the tiny light their only point of reference, but their hearts lifted by this sense of movement, this new experience, this purpose.

They walked for a long time, a long way, in this place where measure meant nothing at all. Aideen was first to wonder if the light was receding as they walked, for it didn't seem to change in any way, as it should were they approaching. Ian was the first to voice the thought.

They stopped walking and watched the light.

There. "I... think... I think I saw it flicker".

"I... think... I saw it too."

They walked on, faster now, and soon they saw that they were right, the light did seem to flicker, to grow, and they broke into a run, filled with a lightness in their hearts, a joy they had never before known, as the light grew larger, and brighter, and then separated, it seemed, into many smaller lights... and they approached, in awe, a bejewelled sparkling circle of tiny flames, a constellation they could hold within their hands.

And they saw, below the flickering lights, that each flame had a tiny, narrow column supporting it, and the column stretched down into the darkness to some sort of base, and Ian reached out and touched the base, and the surface gave way, and when he pulled his hands away the stuff came with it.

He raised his fingers, the better to see in the flickering light, an urge came over him that he couldn't resist, and before he could think he had plunged his index into his mouth...

She waited for him to die, but he just smiled, his eyes closed, a moan of pleasure on his lips. And she smiled too, relieved, and together they cupped hands around the flames and they just were.

But in the darkness, they knew, was a force that moved through like a terrible breath. She was the first to hear it build, and he knew from the startled look on her face that it was coming, and then they could hear it, onrushing, and the flames began to flicker and the air - if that's what it was here in the void - moved on their skin, and the breath in one great swoop became a blast, and they closed their eyes...

Often in the coming aeons they would remember the flickering flames, and the desolation that swept over them when they opened their eyes to find the light extinguished, and they both knew the darkness was rendered forever darker by their having once seen the light, but neither spoke of it.

Andrea, Steve, Mo and Raja

The villagers tracked the gang for many days, until they had crossed the tundra and reached the river, and there they found their camp, the killers ready to cross into the grasslands on the other side, where they would be lost forever. The villagers tamped their powder down and loaded the shot - one ball and hunting piece for each of the men who had so casually and callously destroyed their lives, and one spare in case the first should miss. Quietly, in the pre-dawn shadows, the villagers surrounded the camp.

Andrea chose the leader, the one who had laughed at her horror, for the satisfaction it would give her to see him die. Mo Murphy chose the mute, the grinning freak who had left his partner Clinton in such a terrible state that Murphy himself had despatched the injured man with a kerchief held over his mouth and a pinch below the bridge of his nose. Steve chose the Mexican, the one they called Ben (although Steve suspected he was really a Pablo or a Miguel), and prayed for the man's mortal soul, and for the courage to relieve him of the pain of this life. And Raja chose the woman, not out of any particular hatred for her, but because someone had to and it may as well be he. She had not partaken in the attack, but she had stood by and not prevented it, and she had profited in the aftermath, and as he watched her down the barrel of his musket, he saw that she was wearing his dead wife's coat, and this steeled his resolve.

The gang finished their coffee and threw the grounds to the dirt, then stood, and Andrea knew it was time to do the deed, before they could move close enough to their tethered horses to escape should the first shot miss. She gritted her teeth and ignored the empty maw that opened in her gut, and was bringing the required pressure to bear on the trigger when the gang stopped. She watched, hearing their voices but not picking out the words, as the gang shared out whiskey, and the leader raised his dirty tumbler in a toast. She watched, trigger half-way pulled, unable to reconcile this human moment with the monsters she sought to destroy.

At this point her trigger finger may have slipped, or the mechanism may have failed, she'd never know the truth other than the shot rang out from the unaimed musket and the glass shattered in the leader's hand, the ball passing through both it and his flat palm, blood and whiskey mixing with the shards, and he saw this happen even before the sound of the report had carried across the glade.

Murphy shot the mute through the abdomen and the mute fell to the ground. Raja shot the woman through the shoulder and she fell to her knees, watching the blood blossom on her stolen coat, and in the same moment the Mexican broke for the river, and as he reached it Steve's shot took him down and he fell face-first into the water, his last thought fixed on what had possessed him to flee that way when he knew he could not swim, and that last thought had passed and gone and he did not feel the cold as the river embraced his corpse. Raja took up his second gun and shot the woman again, and this time she went down for good.

The leader witnessed this without moving, and he scanned the scrub for the shooters, knowing there were many, and as Andrea brought her second rifle, little more a rabbit gun, to her shoulder and drew a bead, the leader found her, and their eyes locked, and he bared his teeth in a grin. "It's my birthday!" he roared across the forty yards between them. "Happy fuckin' birthday!" and as he shouted he drew his pistol but before he could bring it to bear she had shot him clean through his forehead an inch above his right eye.

Smoke drifted through the saplings. The leader's body twitched once and was still. The river flowed on. The villagers emerged from their hides. They would go home, they knew, but a part of them would not. A part of them would lie here with the bodies of those they had killed, and though none of them would ever regret the deed, they never spoke of it again, even between themselves. None of them would again shoot another living thing, and although they would feel pride that they did not rest until the job was done, that they did not take the easy path and carried the deed to the finish, all four would hold the pain of their violence in their hearts for the rest of their lives.

Julie

Julie stepped onto the stage, knowing this was her moment. She played the role to the hilt, flashing that smile, turning her head just so, so that her hair would fly and the light from the camera flashes would catch her eyes and make them sparkle. Marilyn had bailed on the gig a half hour before, slurring her words over the phone, and Julie knew that she might not get another chance like this. She reached the podium, and the crowd hushed. Two spotlights fell - one on her, and one on the man for whom she was to sing. And for a moment... she was lost, a five-year-old girl, standing on the back porch looking down towards the river, calling her father's name, and listening for a reply that never came. That five-year-old girl closed her eyes, drew breath, and began to sing. "Happy birthday to you," she breathed, and her thoughts went to the only birthday party she'd had as a child, her fifth, when her father had won on the poker table the night before and there was just enough money for a plain cake, walnuts in the middle and a walnut on, no icing. "Happy birthday to you," she sang, husky, remembering her father singing, the smoke in his voice and the whiskey on his breath, his arm slipping around her mother's waist. "Happy birthday, Mr. President..." and she left a gap here, one in which she knew the man in the spotlight made love to her in his mind, but in which she beamed up at her father, this smiling scrawny man who would soon be gone forever. "Happy birthday... to you." And then it was over, the crowd was on its feet, the flashlights were popping, a whole new life had begun, and her five-year-old self wondered if he was out there somewhere, watching, and if he was proud.