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The Reader Berlin
presents
TALES FROM ANOTHER COUNTRY
Edited by Victoria Gosling
Published by The Reader Berlin in association with Another Country bookshop.
Text copyright © individual authors 2014
published by: epubli GmbH, Berlin, www.epubli.de
ISBN 978-3-7375-0601-4
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Designed by The Curved House
CONTENTS
The Cellar Quiz by Sophie Raphaeline
The Inheritance by Neil Bristow
May 1st by Johanna da Rocha Abreu
A Guide to Shoplifting in Berlin by Brittani Sonnenberg
The Preparation by Marcus Speh
A Sexually Provocative Short Story by Ambika Thompson
Another Country – Some Short Histories by Sophie Raphaeline
The Dream of a Library by Victoria Gosling
Tuesday in the Basement by Bronwyn Carter
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book is very much a team effort. It would not exist without Kenny Macleod, Sharmaine Lovegrove, Jennifer Hewson, Sophie Raphaeline, Anna Marijn Koppen, Jane Flett and Annabel Brady-Brown.
With special thanks to epubli and The Curved House.
THE CELLAR QUIZ
Sophia Raphaeline
Where questions, tossed like thistle spears,
prick the attempt, the gasp of secret knowledge, leavening
the slow outbreath that fills a room unanswered by the word.
A cornucopia of knowing, a wine of truth,
flush cheeks out with the fill and rush of it,
as Circe’s pets, puffed up, bay out the law
of sweet sophistry from the basement’s maw.
A knocking at the gate; the intention
of visitation raising such questions that tempt,
that lead me to a different part, another play
and played upon… Come, court me now,
with scents and smokes and seals, with dusty hands and heels,
call me to accounts – Where? Who? What? When?
Conjure my beating heart again.
FOREWORD
Victoria Gosling, The Reader Berlin
Welcome to Tales from Another Country, an extension of that strange realm, the Another Country Bookshop. Showcased here are the winners of The Reader Berlin’s 2012 Short Story Competition. From Neil Bristow’s “The Inheritance”, which went on to win the competition and be published in The EXBERLINER, to the marvellous tales dreamt up by Ambika Thompson, Johanna da Rocha Abreu, Brittani Sonnenberg, Pippa Anais Gaubert and Marcus Speh, it has been a pleasure and a privilege to discover the work of such talented writers.
This project has been in the pipeline for some time now – time moves more slowly in Another Country – and since then The Reader Berlin has hosted all kinds of workshops and events in the creative writing sphere. It’s wonderful to see that Berlin continues to foster and attract authors from all over the world.
Some of our courses take place in the bookshop and I never come through the doors without experiencing a thrill of pleasure that such a place exists. It is, after all, the kind of bookshop one finds in books: ramshackle, pungent, full of odd finds. The librarian is herself a magical creature – part sphinx, part oracle. She of the roast bird-in-a-bird and dazzling non-sequiturs. You can eat, drink, smoke even, and there is a gratifying lack of signs telling you not to touch something. On a pile of books, papal purple, clasped tight as a rosebud, is a cabbage intended for Friday’s supper. Someone is having a nap by the radiator downstairs. Sophie busies herself creating questions for the quiz as customers recline in armchairs or roam the shelves.
Once upon a time there seemed to be more of these places, small kingdoms run according to the owner’s passionate enthusiasms, that you couldn’t imagine making a profit and yet which seemed to be there year after year. There is something magic about them, and these days we are less comfortable with magic – perhaps it reminds us too much of what we have lost – which is perhaps why they grow scarcer.
I would like to thank Sophie personally, not only for her support for The Reader Berlin, but on behalf of all of those who have over the years found in the bookshop, not only a source of reading matter (or, at the other end of the scale, sexual partners) but welcome, haven and society. She once told me with cheerful acceptance that not everyone who comes through her doors – for a book, or a workshop, or a Friday night feast – becomes a bookshop person, but I would like to imagine that they do, that that is the spell Another Country casts, and that no matter where they go and what they do, her customers will remain bookshop people, and I hope that this particular book will help them remember that.
THE INHERITANCE
Neil Bristow
Daniel sat in the corner, next to his bag, watching the man in the corner who was watching him. Several decades divided them, and on the floor separating where each of them sat was the generation in between. They were mostly men, old enough to be Daniel’s father, or the sons of the one observing him, but here and there a woman stood too, idly smoking or drinking, bemused, not quite fitting in. From time to time they would step aside and the eyes of Daniel and the man would meet. Then the people would cross back over, blocking the view, and the two again would have to wait. But they would not wait long, this much Daniel knew. He looked again at the man and thought: