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front cover image here... when I finish it.aaaaargh.

prose

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This is the last issue for some of us (snif, tear running) but we are all real-

ly proud of having been a part of The Note-book, especially as it gave us a chance to discover so many wonderful pieces! We are as equally proud of this sixth prose section, which includes two great new authors and Patrick Davidson who’s faithfulness and cre-ativity we thank!

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”FLORENCE

by Patrick DavidsonA big part of Florence is to do with shelter. A lot of the

words are, too, but they come second to the roofs and treaties, walls, church altars and the shifting of power from Guelf to Ghibelline, to white to black to Borgia and back. In and out of the Medici and influence, out to Rome and to Alexander's feet, but always back to Florence and the shelter from rain and ruin.

Our train wasn't until seven that evening, and we'd got in from Arezzo close to ten in the morning, so there was time for shelter. And need. I never imagine it to rain in Italy, but it does. Not the ordered rain (from three to four) that happens in Florida summers. Nor the pissing stuff which irritates, when crossing Euston Road. Splitting for a while, the three of us wandered different places.

Sant Andrea wasn't an option, though this was more to my inabilities. It's not that far away – Machiavelli was never banished like Dante was kicked, no bonfire was wait-ing for him if he came back, but I'd imagine the shoulders to wince at the city, after the drops, six drops from the roof. Six drops from the strappado didn't get a confes-sion, but then there was nothing to confess. I don't say this lightly; three drops had been enough to get a lot from Savonarola, and it was more than he knew before be-ing winched up. Anyway. It wouldn't have been that hard to get out to the country house, but no one's spoken my Italian since the people were dropping from ceilings. Medieval Italian is a bit like cinnamon, in that it's never really useful these days but you hear it was once all the rage.

Dante lived around here, though what he must have thought of the tourist stalls is beyond the rima to say. Every step became a drop in itself, now that I'd thought of winches and cells, and the rain carried on coming down. The poncho I'd bought, or had borrowed once bought, was flapping like robes must have flapped. Except for

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PROSEthe weight, but that’s what I’m saying; these things don’t carry weight any more.

In the Dante house, it all slants up. Stairs, a lot of stairs. And very little mention of the poems, but then they weren’t written there. This is shelter, in a way, the stairs around and up the walls. The underneath to stairs are covers, and that’s Hell the other way around. There’s little shelter in the Inferno, it’s a book of exposure, and I suppose that’s what the words mean:

thou shalt by sharp experience be made awarehow salt the bread of strangers is, how hardthe up and down of someone else’s stair...

...well shall it have been preferredfor thee to have made a party of thyself alone...

These were not words in Florence. Nor in Hell. These were words of Ravenna, and Par-adise. But if heaven became enclosure again, then I suppose Dante must have missed his house. The hooding of the bannisters call Ku Klux Klan to mind, but his ideas of covering were female, or sublime. Ravenna’s an uncovered town, Hell to him, though he stays there. Were all these alcoves, nooks and crannies, his ideal of heav’n?

Back into the streets, the rain’s got paler. Still coming down, but the light’s screwing with its rhythm, and the poncho’s making too much noise, so I doff the hood. Some-one’s parked a usual-supsects’ mob of statues under a porch, the square’s alive to watching, but no one can do it silently in a place which burned men quiet.Niccolo had a problem with Florentine indecision, which flatters me into thinking that buying both beers in the café was a way of making one. But really it’s more to do with the beer, the water I control; I’ve spent enough time in the rain in Florence, and the rain has rendered me cold. People seem happier indoors here, shelter again, but not from the rain. It’s easy to imagine medieval Florence. A place of rushing from shelter to shelter. Asking Cesare to come and guard, then Lucrezia, once he’d rotted away. Alexander was gone, too, by then, so it was more towards Lorenzo but Spain and France and warring states... The flux here isn’t like the rain, or the rivulets wrapping the cobbles. The flux here’s to do with freedom, but the indecision’s killing whatever that freedom meant. Stretching the fingers around a beer bottle, the fingers never quite touch, and Florence always seemed to be that tiny speck of label uncovered by finger. Kings tried, Popes tried, Dukes tried. Whole families poured their energies into ruling or holding onto the town. But the people wanted shelter, and they still do, that day in Florence was about shelter.

Dante never came back, the thought occurs. He wanted the place in the ground, never forgave the city. But you can still buy his head for a fiver a pop, and then go and pay something more to the tomb where the one who came back smiles, sheltered, from the pouring of rain and years, this afternoon.

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KOKOMO by Nikkitha Bakshani

Alice could not remember the exact date of the first phone call, which was weird. She loved dates. Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo on Sun-day, 28 June 1914, at 1:15 PM, give or take a few min-utes. Alice could say that unconscious. She kept note-books in which she wrote dates of events over and over and over again until they clung to her memory. The blue ink looked like the outcome of a 50’s grade school punishment, with its dizzying uniformity. But the ability to pinpoint a moment in numbers comforted her. And as a History student at the university, it worked to her advantage.

What she did know is that the phone call happened on a Thursday morning, between 4 and 6 AM, because that’s when she has her weekly radio show. Everything in the station room is the color of burnt sepia, so as to amplify the retro milieu as much as the music itself. She had fallen asleep on the chair, her head nestled between her forearm and her upper arm, which was flattened like on the tabletop like rolled dough. “Kokomo” by the Beach Boys was on repeat. Aruba. Jamaica. Ooo I wanna take ya. Bermuda. Baha-- The phone rang. Though the acoustics of the room was such that every noise sounde pre-recorded into the current song, the slight change woke Alice up, because that was not how the song sounded in her memory. She wiped off the smear of drool near her lips with her t-shirt sleeve. “Hello?” She murmured into the telephone, trying to sound cheerful. “I’m pretty sure Brian Wilson will rise from the dead if you play ‘Kokomo’ one more time.” The voice on the other end was male, and sounded present in the room, rather than squeezed through many telephone wires. Alice hesitated. “I’m pretty sure Brian Wilson is still alive. But I’ll change the song anyway.” She wanted to end on that note, because less conversation is more fashionable in the self-consciously trendy world of university radio, but proof of other people being awake in those hours was so rare that something prevented her from hanging up the phone. “Sorry,” the voice said, “I just thought I would be cool and name-drop.” “It’s OK,” she replied, “I had to look ‘Brian Wilson’ up on Wikipedia anyway.” Lie. She was perfectly aware Brian Wilson is the lead singer of the Beach Boys. She just thought her statement would perpetuate the conversation, and it did. “Kokomo” con-tinued to play on repeat, its chords engulfing their conversation, but no one called to complain.

Off the Florida Keys. There’s a place called Koko-- He always called the radio station when this lyric of “Kokomo” arose, because he knew Alice loved to sing the first stanza in staccato (Aruba. Jamaica. Ooh. I wanna. Take ya.), and hated other people hearing her sing. Alice played the song once every

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“Don’t you sleep?” She asked him once, eyeing the clock. “Sporadically during the day, but never at a set time. I want to experience every type of minute in a commonplace way.”

They would talk about that kind of stuff, the VIP guests of everyday subject matter. No one knew when or how or why their friendship spontaneously gener-ated, but the mystery gave it intrigue. Secrets were better-protected in the shadows of their interaction than the ear of a more tangible friend, or the lines of a notebook. And they were both addicted to the peculiarity of their circumstance. They were not individually lonely in a pathetic way. They have friends with faces and bodies, but those friends never leave enough room for enigma.

Identities, numbers, exactness became unnecessary. Why should logic be sus-picious of a perfectly human exchange? Not everyone has the time to relax on foreign beaches with their lovers and solve life’s equations one step at a time. Sometimes, talking into a germy devise to a voice whose holder you cannot picture once a week in odd hours of the morning works just as well. But only sometimes.

Alice thought about him more frequently, because just thinking about him made her feel like the girl “Kokomo” was written for. That dreamy look in your eye, give me a tropical contact high. He couldn’t see any look in Alice’s eye through the telephone, and the station room had too many buttons and names and dates to re-semble any kind of beach. Which is why Alice wanted to leave, see him outside of the costume that fit so perfectly in her hand. “Can I ask you a question?” “Shoot.” “How old are you?” “Are you trying to clarify that I’m not a middle-aged pervert?” “Let’s meet.” She immediately regretted being so abrupt. She knew he couldn’t be a middle age-pervert. He didn’t sound like one, and putting together the jigsaw of all she knew about him, she could infer that he was around twenty and attended the same college as her. The awkward silence wheezed through the room. “Sorry,” said Alice, embarrassed. Silence. “Did you know 8% of all Asian men can trace their lineage back to Genghis Khan?” There was quite literally nothing Alice wouldn’t say to ease the tension. “That’s

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show, but only when she stopped being groggy enough to have a decent conversation. There was no flip of hair, shortness of skirt, or ebullient smile to help this stranger’s opinion of her, so her skills in flirtatious-yet-intelligent conversation had to be in shapely condition. Sometimes it was after the first hour, but never in the last half hour because that is never enough time. She did not tell any of her friends about the phone calls because she did not want them to judge her quirky relation-ship with this stranger.

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hole-punched the sky. She wishes it could be one of those moments illustrators love to put in children’s books, with all the stars so desperately yellow you can see the pencil marks. But it was too cold. And she knows that “Ben”—if that was actually his name--was not going to show up. Alice had looked up some information to impress Ben with a few hours ago, when they were supposed to meet. Kokomo Island is now called Sandals Cay, which is a part of a privately-owned company. The resort banned homosexual couples until 2004. And that’s all “Kokomo” became. Data and an old, sold-out song. Maybe that was all it was supposed to be. As far as she knew, Ben could have just been playing a cruel joke, even though he is supposed to be her friend of odd hours, and possibly more. It is too painful and useless to think why she was sitting alone, her fingers white and immobile. The phone conversations were boundless, were, because she will never play that damn song on the radio ever again. It’s not the song’s fault, but it is easier to blame something that can’t fight back than realizing the truth. Since the truth refuses to be defined by numbers and rote memorization, Alice won’t bother. She might have even imagined it all. History can be reduced to dates. If only Alice could remember the date of that first phone call, it would disappear into one of her notebooks and become significant-ly less important than World War I or Genghis Khan, and most importantly, over.

PROSE

ELEMENTARY, MY DEAR.

by Melanie Lyn

If you could freeze time for just a moment, you could dam up the waterfall of rushing and gushing vowels and consonants that spurt out of this river of thoughts, joining hands and tumbling down to their death through my parted lips, leaving puddles at your feet; faint traces of drowning articulation.

I can feel your eyes upon my lips, studying the smudge of red colour, and I feel like yesterday’s girl playing the woman of tomorrow with her mother’s makeup; and I can feel you stare at the sad shade of burgundy bleeding into the cracks of chapped skin, mosaic bite marks and sun-kissed farewells.

moon speechlessly. It looked like a self-assured crystal ball. Or like someone half-

“We’ll get there fast and then we’ll take it slow,” he said. “Excuse me?” “That was corny. But I guess that means yes.”

Blackish clouds roamed the skies like predatory birds. Alice watched the

.05% of—”

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expense.But I just keep spitting out words like my mouth has a will of its own.

It’s the silence I fear; the devastating sting of the taciturn waves; when I’m vulnerable to the cold and the dark, and the gloom of doubt and the windy howls of loneliness creep into my ears and you’re slowly engulfed by the night. It’s your silence I fear.I’m scared I’ve fished the pool of words empty, leaving you with nothing but the chill of the still water, the icy blue colour of your eyes. It’s this stillness I fear.

The stiffness of your gaze, the lids of pity you shut upon me.If you could freeze time for just a moment, please do so.So you could shield the flickering flame of desire in my eyes from the cool, rambling winds.So you could hear the stifled heat of passion, trampled by cold-hearted words.And you could suffocate my renegade mouth with the pillow of your kiss.And my lips will be sealed, waiting for your resuscitating breath.

My heart is racing at an industrial pace; the nervous workers print rows of words which all seem to come out wrong. The whiskey is to blame.The words aren’t right, they don’t fit, and they don’t function properly.Freeze time, please – don’t let me waste another drop of coaly confidence at your

Don’t fly too close to the sun, or your waxen wings will melt and fail. Don’t fly too close to the sea, or your lightweight feathers will be burdened with the salty spray.I’ve never been a good listener.