Contributor: Samantha Memi

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I got the call at four in the morning. “Steve, get up! We’ve got a job.” That was the last thing I wanted to hear. Some kid had got himself drowned in the river. Jed was on his way to the station. I’d have to meet him there. As sleep drifted away my first thought was Mary; I saw her running down the street towards me, felt her arms around me, her warm breath on my neck as she whispered “Who’s the most beautiful woman you know?”

Getting out of bed was the hardest part. My breath stung the air into cloudy reactions. Two hours before sunup the earth held the cold. What if some crazy kid was floating down the river? Hurrying now wouldn’t help him. I needed to fix the heating.

I had forgotten to buy coffee. I couldn’t function till at least two coffees. I found a pack of ready ground in the back of the cupboard. It was unlike Mary to have overlooked it, perhaps she had kept it for an emergency like this. I smoked my last two Luckies and set off for the station.

The sun was just peeking over the horizon as I arrived. The chopper was fuelled and ready. Jed explained that Davie couldn’t come because he had been fixing his old flat-bed Buick and it needed new piston rings. He said we would manage okay between us, I wasn’t so sure. We took the cargo hoist and tongs with the idea of winching him up as neither of us could go down and hook him.

When we got there we could see why they couldn’t get a boat to him; he was stuck on a rock in the middle of a spring torrent which had washed away most of the bank and left vicious peaks sticking up from the frothy water. Bruce was there already looking mighty important standing on the bank, his car behind him with the door open and the red light flashing. Jed kept going on about how the Packers beat the Bears and how Rodgers was the greatest quarterback since Favre. But all I heard was Mary clumping down the hall dragging her old-fashioned heavy case I had told her to throw away years ago, and her words ringing in my head, “Don’t touch me, don’t touch me.” Why did she scream like that? I had never hit her. What had gone so wrong to make her believe I would do that? Why did she leave? I told her I’d find a better job. I even promised to give up drinking.

The tongs wouldn’t hook in right. I hadn’t used them much before. It was Davie who did them mostly, but with his busted piston rings I supposed he deserved a couple of hours lie-in. I just wished I had stripped my motor down. It needed it. So did I.

Then the boy got caught. I tugged him tight and the tongs swung him up into the air. Everyone on the bank was waving, except for some guy staring into the water, close enough to get wet. Bruce radioed to bring the kid in, said the loner was his dad. Jed took us directly over him and I dropped the kid at his feet. Simplified identification I reckoned. Then we shot off. Jed had to get his daughter something for her birthday. I had to kill a Jim Beam.


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Samantha Memi is a patisserie chef in London. Her recipes for a happy life can be found at http://samanthamemi.weebly.com/

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Author: Samantha Memi

Contributor: Samantha Memi

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I was walking along the street on my way to see a friend when I noticed something sparkling in the grass of the verge. I picked it up to take a closer look. A bracelet, which seemed to be gold, a pattern of entwining hands, encrusted with turquoise and what I thought might be rubies. Good, I thought, I’ll sell this. Just as I’d decided to be my usual dishonest self, a woman ran down the road towards me. She looked around frantically then turned to me, desperation in her face, and asked,
“Have you seen a bracelet?”
I gripped the bracelet tight in my fist, determined not to give it back.
I tried to say ‘no’, but the word stuck in my throat.
I felt the bracelet burn in my hand, and she glanced at my fist and back to my face. Her eyes narrowed. The bracelet wanted honesty.
“Yes,” and against my natural instinct I showed her what I had found.
Joy blew her panic away. “Oh my bracelet,” she exclaimed, and took it from me.
“It must be worth a lot,” I said, “it looks like gold.”
“It’s not the intrinsic value. It's sentimental. My husband bought it for me. When I saw it in a jewelers, I fell in love with it. It said buy me. I dragged my husband to the shop. When the manager took it from the window, he said, ‘this was my daughter’s. It was given her by the Caliph of Baghdad. She went to Egypt for a holiday but she was kidnapped by some kidnappers. There’s a lot of them in Cairo. As they were bundling her into a car they were seen by one of the Caliph’s servants who took a photograph and showed it to the Caliph who immediately fell in love with my daughter, Anna was her name – such a sweet little thing – and he instigated a search and found my daughter bound and gagged in a carpet warehouse near the port.
After she spent some time in the Caliph’s palace – and God only knows what happened to her there – she was always an adventurous girl, if you know what I mean – he gave her this bracelet, and said, ‘My mother gave this to me and she said, ‘One day you will be the Caliph of Baghdad, and you will need this bracelet because it will protect you, but only if you have pure thoughts. Be warned; if you think badly of anyone or allow anger or jealousy or bitterness into your heart, the bracelet will mirror your thoughts and fate will turn against you,’ and my daughter took the bracelet and the Caliph told her, ‘the bracelet brought me great fortune and my kingdom expanded, but one day I caught one of my wives with a courtier. Enraged I had her whipped then beheaded; her lover was drowned in pig’s urine. Two weeks later my kingdom collapsed when the revolutionaries took power and I was deposed and forced to seek sanctuary in Egypt.’
My daughter loved the bracelet but was wary of it, though she always had good luck – she was such a sweet girl – she married and had children – oh you’ve never seen such grandchildren as I have – but her husband left her and she wished him a nasty death. The very next day he was crushed by a machine at work. Shortly after that she developed awful headaches. She saw all kinds of specialists but no one knew what was wrong with her. Just before she died she gave me the bracelet and said, ‘Sell this to someone honest, or throw it away’.”
A breeze lifted paper from the street. The brakes of a bus screeched. The woman looked at me.
“And even though we knew its history I so loved the bracelet my husband bought it for me, and we’ve both had an idyllic life together. Without a trace of anger or suspicion or jealousy. But tell me, you wanted to keep the bracelet?”
“No no,” I lied.
She looked at me suspiciously.
“I think you did,”
Then she walked away without even a thank you, and I wished I’d kept it.
As she was crossing the road she turned to give me a look which said, I hate you.
At that moment she was hit by a car which scraped her body 30 yards along the tarmac.
I thought of rushing to her quickly and tugging the bracelet from her hand, but I realized I’d never had a pure thought in my life, what the hell would the bracelet do to me.


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Samantha Memi is a patisserie chef in London. Her recipes for a happy life can be found at http://samanthamemi.weebly.com/

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Author: Samantha Memi

Contributor: Samantha Memi

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I was born into an ordinary family in Berlin in 1938. My father was a stick of celery, my mother, a tomato. I was a grapefruit. My father sometimes queried the origin of my birth. My mother never answered.
‘Never had a grapefruit in the family,’ he would say. She stayed silent.
I went through the state education system and more by luck than talent I arrived at university to study Vegetable Bake for Amateur Cooks. I wasn't happy, I couldn't understand why anyone would want to treat vegetables so cruelly. I left during the first year. I drifted, hung around in grocery shops, got in with a bad lot of spinach. It looked like my life would turn out bad. Then I met a gorgeous Maris Piper potato, He was new but, despite that, could find his way round the supermarket shelf. We married, had a baby carrot, I was so pleased.
Then one day we heard marching bands. We looked out the window and saw what we later learned were stormtroopers. Two weeks later the door was smashed in and my husband was arrested. I heard later he'd been boiled and mashed. Didn't they have souls, these people? he was a frying potato.
I was alone with my baby carrot. Everyone stared at me in the street. I realised it was because I was fruit and my daughter was vegetable. What gave them the right to judge me.
Then we were put in a camp where I was forced to chop up leeks and cauliflower for swarthy arrogant soldiers. It was a horrible job and I was warned that my daughter, who was too young to work, would be old enough to bake in a pie. I met a leek from the escape committee, he said they could help my daughter escape. They couldn’t help me, they only worked with the vegetable community. It was heartbreaking to say goodbye to my little carrot.
‘Mummy,’ she cried, ‘don't leave me.
You'll be safe where you're going I said and stroked her topsy-turvy leaves, and then she was gone, driven off in a van painted as an ambulance but full of veg.
I was distraught. Friends said I had to continue working otherwise I'd be steamed. But I was so depressed I thought a good steaming might be better than the miserable existence I had.
Then other soldiers arrived. They killed our captors, and freed all the fresh veg. Some of the elderly couldn't be saved, but at least I was free. We had a party. I got sliced into segments and tipped into a fruit salad. A melon pip told me my daughter had married a handsome young cucumber. I hope she is well.


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Samantha Memi is a patisserie chef in London. Her recipes for a happy life can be found at http://samanthamemi.weebly.com/

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Author: Samantha Memi

Contributor: Samantha Memi

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I was lying in bed wondering if the hotel would remember to wake me in the morning when a gecko came in through the window and walked along the wall.
I was too tired to shoo it away.
“You won't hurt me will you, Mr Gecko.”
“I'm looking for roaches, big fat juicy roaches. What would I want with the likes of you.” and he continued his journey on the wall.
Just as I was drifting into sleep he started whistling. There's nothing worse than a whistling gecko when you're trying to sleep.
“Do you mind not whistling?” I asked.
“What's with all the complaining?” he replied, “you get on with your life and I'll get on with mine.”
“Yes, but your whistling bothers me.”
“You're breathing bothers me. Do I complain about it? No. Why not? Because I believe in letting others live their lives the way they want to. But not you. You want to dictate to others how they should live.”
He stopped whistling. I drifted. I needed to get to the train station early to ensure I got a ticket.
He started singing. It was a song about a cockroach who fell in love with a grasshopper and wooed her with many gifts and just as they were about to marry both were eaten by a gecko. I asked him not to sing.
“What? you wanna run my life for me? I can't do anything because big fat Miss Human thinks she can tell me what I can and can't do.”
“I want to get some sleep.”
“I'm not stopping you.”
“You’re singing.”
“I like to sing. You don't like singing and that gives you the right to stop me.”
“I do like singing, but...”
“You like Mozart?”
“That wasn't Mozart.”
“I didn't say it was, I asked if you liked him.”
“Yes.”
“You like Don Giovanni?”
“I have to get up in the morning. I just want to sleep. This is my room.”
“Your room? So I'm not allowed in? Is that what you're saying? Do I tell you not to climb my tree? No. And you know why? Because I don't have a tree. Did you ever see a gecko struggling along with a backpack? No. You know why? Because we’re free. We're not enslaved by possessions and all your stupid this is my room, this is my bed, this is my space. You should learn how to live.”

This was too much. I had to see Janine tomorrow. I got out of bed.
“Hey hey hey,” screamed the gecko, “I know you're bigger than me. But there's no need to resort to violence. Why don't we settle this matter amicably.”
I picked up a newspaper and shooed him out of the room. I closed the shutters and the window, and lay down. Without the cool breeze it was too sticky hot to sleep. The hotel sign squeezed intermittent orange and green through gaps in the shutters. I listened to the crickets. Then from the window I heard a squeaky song:

The grasshopper and the cockroach they wanted to wed.
But sly Mr Gecko, he ate them instead.
And selfish Miss Human, she lay on her bed.
Thinking and dreaming that he would be dead.
But a gecko so lively, it has to be said,
Could outwit a human without any dread.

Sleep was out of the question. I went down to the bar.
“There's a gecko in my room.”
“All the rooms have geckos.”
“It's singing.”
“Opera?”
“It's keeping me awake and I have to get up early to buy a train ticket.”
“I can sell you a ticket. Where are you going?”

Ticket in hand and no thought of queues in the morning, I went back to my room and opened the window.
The gecko stood on the window ledge.
“Oh, it's you,” he said.
“Do you know the duet of Don Giovanni and Zerlina?”
The gecko coughed and cleared his throat, he stood on his hind legs and looked at me. In perfect Italian he sang:
Lá ci darem la mano, lá mi dirai di sì
I stood by the open window bewitched by the sunrise gradating into the purpling sky and sang:
Vorrei e non vorrei, mi trema un poco il cor
The gecko stood on the ledge, his slit eyes gazing at me, and our hearts came together in Mozart, and I forgot about queues and train stations and lived for the moment, not for tomorrow.


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Samantha Memi lives in London. Her fictional life can be found at http://samanthamemi.weebly.com/

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Author: Samantha Memi