Custard for Mr. Stevens
‘Custard for you, and you, and you, and for Mr Stevens.’
Giggling.
‘Thank you.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Very tasty.’
‘Mr Stevens says thank you as well. He loves custard.’
‘Mr Stevens is smelly.’
More giggling.
‘He stinks.’
‘Sssh, you’ll hurt his feelings.’
‘He doesn’t have feelings.’
‘Sssh, Amy. He does. He loves his custard. See, he loves his custard.’
Tommy feeds Mr Stevens his custard and makes happy eating sounds.
‘I don’t like custard,’ says Kyle.
‘There isn’t anything else.’
‘Cook me something else.’
‘Not until you’ve finished all your veggies.’
‘There aren’t any veggies. You didn’t give me.’
‘Custard for breakfast,’ shouts Tommy.
Amy laughs.
‘Veggies are good for you,’ says Kyle, folding his arms. ‘And I want some.’
‘Sorry, the chef is very busy. The restaurant is full.’
‘It’s heaving,’ says Amy. ‘If a restaurant is full my dad says it’s heaving.’
‘Mr Stevens, do you like veggies?’
‘Very much,’ Tommy says, putting on a deep voice.
‘What else do you like?’
‘I like nuts and bananas and custard and cream and sleeping under bushes and telling people off when they talk.’ Tommy frowns to show Mr Stevens is angry.
‘Mr Stevens always tells Amy off for talking.’
‘I like talking,’ shouts Amy. ‘We should all talk all the time. I hate Mr Stevens.’
This is too much, even though he isn’t there, and Amy knows it.
‘OK, I don’t hate Mr Stevens, I don’t hate him, but sometimes he’s mean.’
‘He isn’t mean but he has to be mean sometimes and he has to tell people off.’
‘Telling off doesn’t mean being mean. My mum says you tell people off when you love them. And Mr Stevens never shouts.’
‘Mr Stevens doesn’t love us.’
‘He does shout,’ shouts Amy, ‘he shouts all the time.’
‘Guys,’ shouts Tommy, ‘Mr Stevens can hear you. He’s right there.’
Grace, in a quiet, serious voice, says, ‘You shouldn’t call him Mr Stevens. That’s not Mr Stevens.’
‘It’s a game, Grace. But you don’t know how to play.’
‘Mr Stevens stinks, just like the real Mr Stevens,’ says Kyle, but this time less giggling.
‘You should put him back, Tommy, where you found him. He’s dirty.’
‘He’s not dirty,’ says Tommy, ‘he wants more custard and veggies. He’s not even tired.’
‘He’s dirty, Tommy. That’s why he smells.’
There are some flies. Mr Stevens is rigid as a board. His little black eyes are cloudy and almost closed.
‘Look at his weird tail,’ says Kyle. ‘He’s a beaver.’
‘Beavers live in rivers. He isn’t a beaver. He’s something else.’
‘He’s married to a beaver.’
Lots of giggling.
‘Mr Stevens has a wife and she is a beaver.’
‘Real Mr Stevens doesn’t have a wife,’ says Grace. ‘He has a husband. I saw them after school. They were holding hands.’
‘My mum says they shouldn’t do that in front of people,’ says Tommy. ‘She doesn’t like that.’
‘Put him back. Put him back in the bushes. He’s finished eating and he really smells.’
‘You can get sick from stuff like this,’ says Kyle, shaking his head. He hasn’t touched his invisible bowl. ‘Maybe he should go.’
‘You’re scared of him,’ shouts Tommy. ‘You’re scared of him.’ He is triumphant and annoyed.
‘We’re not scared, he just smells and let’s do something else.’
‘I’m not scared.’
‘I don’t like Mr Stevens. His fur is all dirty and there are ants in his eyes.’
‘I didn’t see the ants,’ screams Amy, jumping up from the grass and wheeling her arms backwards like propellers. ‘In the bush, in the bush,’ she starts to chant.
‘Throw it, Tommy. Throw him away.’
‘I don’t like it.’
‘I’m not scared, but I don’t like it.’
Tommy takes Mr Stevens by the tail. ‘Bye Mr Stevens, no one wants you.’ He hurls Mr Stevens over his shoulder without looking. The little body loops soundlessly through the air, lands in the bush with a rustle that no one hears. The children scream and cheer. Only one of them stays quiet.
I want to go driving with my brother
I want to go driving with my brother. We could fight over the wheel. Spin. Spin. We could brake suddenly. In a field of barley and knee-high sedge, we could hit a wall, high as the sun.
We’ll watch boats drift slowly down the Stour. So slow. They will look like trays of smoke. If smoke barely moved. I want to write ‘witness’, but ‘watch’ is a sensible word. You can stir the surface of whatever you think it is, with your eyes. Mist over Alton Water as anglers cast their lures. Green plastic wishes, engineered to resemble grubs. Whipping the air. Morning before anyone’s awake.
There’s a photo of my brother petting a barn owl. He and the owl have the same expression. Are they impressed with each other? Behind them: a fourteenth-century clock tower, falconry displays, toads on flags in the wind. Fluttering reels of nearly asleep. Battle standards. Almost songs.
We never watch films together. We picture the outer regions of space in a pair of single bedrooms. I want us to be good aliens.
He will say, “Isn’t that where the house was?” and I’ll say, “You never leave the house, how would you know?”
We stop to get petrol and he stays in the car like a smell. From the kiosk, I steal a cheese and pickle sandwich, a granola bar, a T-shirt with a picture of an owl. How do I get away with so much? There are cameras, but people estimate between 80 and 90% of public cameras are just empty boxes with imitation lenses attached, and the lens is made of plastic, not glass. Which lens were you talking about, just then?
My brother drives us all the way North, to a town where he stayed in his room for three years. He refuses to drive. There was a plague. Our home county eroded and drifted clockwise into the Channel. Our house floats south-by-south-east. Now, the sediment is part of the next county along, the next country. One day, that too will be somewhere. Beyond each of us, continents.
My brother, from his room, from his box, takes a photo. The image he produces and then shares is of an astro-turf pitch next to a row of terraced housing. Scarborough. February. The astro is covered in frost, but the angle of the rising sun is such that the chimneys and gables and roofs of the terraces obscure the sun in gradients. The sun lifts, sky high. The frost on the pitch melts in a pattern of chimney-stacks and brick piles. “It’s the other way around,” says my brother. “The frost lingers a few minutes longer in the shade, leaving shapes of buildings. It’s the ground around it that melts.” Glistening silver, sharp, then dulled, then gone.
People build beaches then storm the beaches. This happens in regions we can’t fathom. People threaten to build houses. I talk about fathoms, everywhere, at all possible times. People feel pressure from houses that haven’t been built. I watch him refuse to eat.
We will stay in a tent in the garden and argue under the trees. Leaf cutter ants in our sleeping bags, on television, dismantling the screen. There is no bottom to our slowest of boats. See-through, far as you like. Stir smoke. Lick paper so it sticks. One day I will hand my brother a spliff and he will toke it three times without coughing. Am I impressed? And then he vanished. He was in his room, buried under satellites. Who sends him these missives from other worlds? I said I would build him a star-gate. Hell. I lied.
We ride back with the radio on but the sound turned down. There will be construction work, all the way, leading to a land even flatter than here. People threaten to build holes in the ground. It never quite peaks from where it’s hidden. Can anything be as flat as the foam beyond the sea, beyond the wind turbines with their winking red lights? They used to draw dragons in the corners of nautical charts.
I’m putting out a chip-pan fire. The fire-extinguisher I use has instructions in a language that’s entirely my own. The label says don’t do it this way. My brother instructs me. He has locked himself in. Fire. He says, fire.
So I park the car in a field we haven’t seen. Two suns, high enough to climb. Both walls, a single room. We’re here now. Where do you want to go?
Cornea
“One of my eyes is bigger than the other,” said Neve. “Three times the size of its neighbour. I’m measuring it now. I measure, it grows. A green stain on a white table cloth. A spill of moss on a winter’s day, sped up. They call it a field of vision. And red aphids cover my field. These must be veins, but why not bugs?”
When she spoke to the mirror she heard someone else respond. An older thing. It came from beneath the glass, beyond reflected space.
“You really can choose your life,” it said. “We’re surrounded by ever more. It’s hard. A flush of noise. Expanding circles. People. Billions, compressed inside orbital rings. You have to believe in lunar dust, but how do you know? And then…” and the voice was somewhere else.
“But I didn’t choose anything,” said Neve. “I want to be free of other organisms, but there’s a millipede in my left nostril, size of a fisherman’s grub. It’s having its own inconceivable experience. It sticks its head out when it’s bored, when it lacks oxygen. That’s just one example. A head emerging from a nose. Look, right there. It curls like a hook. Then it revanishes. Into the vibrissae. Fairy-tale forest. Willows and bug bears and ooze. Help me.”
“You choose by describing what you see,” said the older thing.
“But not my eyes,” said Neve. “How could I choose these eyes? These light bulbs, utterly mismatched.”
The bathroom was completely sealed. Did someone want to come in? Outside, beyond no windows, a closing of snow. A house in a patchwork of yellowing land, from here until all the way there. Neve saw nothing outdoors any more.
She had a theory: the mirror concealed an audio speaker, high fidelity, mist-proof. Despite what appeared to be a solid, flat surface, there were tiny holes to let the sound through, small enough not to disturb the reflected image.
Or perhaps they’re so numerous I can see through them, she thought. Perhaps there is no reflection, just infinite perforations in the glass. Maybe I’m seeing the picture beneath.
“Rheum!” she shouted. She pointed at the small, then the larger eye. “A gooping of weight after sleep, like me. Sloppy, golden crumbs. Wet dream remnants. A nest at the edge of a pair of swamps. But how many nests? I thought there were two, but one? There. Eye crust. Proof I wasn’t awake but now I can. My face. A freckled field. Fields again. All the way to the sea. My hair is a crabnet. I can see everything living. I poke and I poke. I poke holes in the condensation, and there I am.” She wanted the other voice to hear.
“You’re choosing this,” said the mirrored thing. “Your vision. The life that surrounds you. Have you ever thought of the eye as an egg?”
When no one was speaking, the speaker under the mirror played a recording of the room outside the bathroom. The room outside the bathroom contained the entire house. The recorded noise was of many people speaking over each other, and someone, an usher, waving their arms, smiling impeccably, but furious, trying to shush them all, but the noise had reached a critical mass. When one person noticed the usher and stopped, another started talking. A wave of no one being quiet. And when Neve spoke, the recording under the mirror paused, and the older, other voice responded, and then the recording resumed. The recording of the room outside started from the beginning each time it was interrupted.
A spider gave birth in the bath. The babies were red.
“Why can’t you describe what you see? Why are you choosing this, instead of this?”
“You said I could choose my family,” said Neve. “And if thine eye offends you, pluck it like a bud before it grows, before it becomes an in-grown thing. That’s what you said. Isn’t that what you said?”
But she decided to let the green stain be. It spread like an over-filled bowl. She combed her cheek with the back of her ring fingernail. It was like combing a distant field. What happens to sight when it’s preserved? How far can you keep it?
Someone knocked on the door, but this was also part of the recording. It always happened, fifteen seconds in.
Is that all it’s been? Neve thought. And if I ask another question, we’ll have to start all over again.
Someone put their head under the door.
“What’s happening to your eye?” they said. “It’s growing. Dysplasia. God. There’s barely any room.”
“It’s hungry,” said Neve. “If I chose, it wasn’t this. This wasn’t part of the plan. Can you bring me a plate, an empty plate? I didn’t get to choose. It’s not for me. Is there even any left?”
Rob Yates is a British writer hailing from Essex. He is currently based in Charlottesville, where he is completing an MFA at the University of Virginia. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has had work appear via Agenda, Bodega, DMQ Review, Envoi, Flash Frog, SmokeLong Quarterly, and other literary magazines. Some of his work can be found through rob-yates.co.uk.