Contributor: Bruce Costello

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“Sir, I just can’t walk any further!” the soldier cried out, his battalion exhausted from days of movement and fighting in the mountainous Cretan terrain.
“Get up, lad,” the officer said, kicking the sole of his boot. “You’ve been marching in your sleep the last half hour. Stand up, go back to sleep and keep walking.”
After digging in on the outskirts of a town recently captured by Germans, the men sat down to devour whatever rations were left.
When the officers weren’t looking, Privates Arthur FitzPatrick and Wiremu Parata went scavenging.
Arthur and Wiremu had been brought up on neighbouring farms on the East Coast of New Zealand’s North Island, and were scallywags together at the same country school. A week before the troopship sailed, Arthur had asked Wiremu’s sister, Moana, to marry him.
Wiremu found a tin of raspberry jam poking out from under rubble. He opened it with his bayonet and handed it to Arthur. The pair of them scoffed the lot, hiding behind a burned-out lorry that stank of roasted flesh.
At 1800 hours, two British MkVI tanks advanced along the main road into the town with the New Zealanders behind. Savage house to house fighting followed with bayonet and rifle butt.
A heavy machine gun hidden behind a collapsed wall sprayed them with bullets. One took out the side of Wiremu’s head and splattered his brain over Arthur’s face.
The Kiwis fought their way through to the town square where, totally exhausted, they encountered a concentration of enemy in the southwest corner. It was dark. The major decided on a bayonet attack. “Forward!” he roared and charged, but nobody followed. German bullets tore him apart.
Something stirred inside Private Arthur FitzPatrick and he heard the voice of Wiremu’s old Uncle Henare, who’d taught the boys skills in using Maori weapons of war. A savage chant welled up inside Arthur and brandishing his rifle like a taiaha, he ran screaming towards the Germans.
Yelling and shouting like devils, the other men followed him into a barrage of bullets.

* * *

Back home in New Zealand, Moana was knitting two pairs of socks, one for Arthur, the other for Wiremu. Moana was a small, pretty girl with light brown hair. She constantly wore a lovely smile that was tinged with sadness. Her father had died at Passchendaele and her mother had never fully recovered.
The local postmaster was a kind man with a limp and a big whiskery face, like a garden gnome. He kept his bicycle well oiled, because he liked to travel the winding, gravel East Coast roads himself to personally deliver the telegrams around what he called “my parish.” Some days he traveled big distances.
He held Moana as she sobbed on learning that Arthur was seriously wounded and Wiremu had been killed.
A month later he delivered the news that Arthur was out of danger and could rehab at home. They both danced with joy.
Moana and Arthur married, soon after Arthur’s return, despite his wound.

* * *

Sixty years pass.

* * *

“Here, take this rifle,” Arthur had said to Moana, just before he died the previous year. “Keep it loaded, close beside you in the bed, once I‘ve gone. I won’t be around anymore to protect you and there’s funny people around these days, perverts who break into houses and do unspeakable things to women.”
It’s 2am and there are noises in the next room. With a toothless smile, Moana quietly picks up the rifle and points it at the partly open doorway. Her finger is firm on the trigger.
I’ll not hold back. I’ve nothing left to lose. Arthur’s gone. I’m over ninety years old. No reason to hold back. Nothing to fear. Not even death. I’ll meet up with Arthur again. I’ll come to you intact. No pervert’s going to get me, my darling!
She grins, and glances towards the pillow where Arthur’s bald head used to lie.
How’s that for a thought, eh, Arthur? Are you proud of me? I’ll protect it for you. Nothing to worry about.
Moana presses the rifle butt firmly into her bony shoulder. “Kia kaha, Sis!” She hears her brother’s voice. “Be strong! Kia kaha!” A picture of Wiremu flashes across her mind, his arm around Arthur’s shoulder, leaning over the railing of the departing troopship, calling down to her.
In the next room, Jason Stubbs is going through drawers. He’s sixteen years old, a big lad, doing his first burg.
Should be a piece of piss, Jason’s mates had said. Old lady, shit, she’s about 95! She’ll be deaf as anything, sure to be snoring her head off and if she does happen to wake up and see ya, well, she’s not gonna know who’s behind the balaclava is she? Ya just get ya arse outa there real quick. What are ya, a girl or somethink?
Moana fires at Jason’s crotch and he falls screaming and writhing on the bed. Then, reloading with the speed of many years practice on rats in the barn, she sends a second bullet through his head.
Within minutes, Anaru Te Whaiti, waiting with the full moon for rustlers on his sheep station in the hills behind, arrives on horseback.
“Kia kaha,” he says to Moana, hanging up the phone and wrapping a blanket around her as they begin the long wait for emergency services to travel the long road from town.
“Yes, I killed him!” Moana exclaims, gripping Anaru’s arm. “Bulls-eye! Got him! I don’t care what happens to me. I shot him and I’m glad. Arthur would be pleased, I know. Arthur was a good man. Fought for the country. Saw Wiremu get his head blown off then got so mad he turned into a ruddy hero and got himself shot! Why should some pervert rapist get what Arthur could never have after a bullet blew off his willy?”


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New Zealander Bruce Costello semi-retired from his profession in 2010, retreated from the city of Dunedin to the seaside village of Hampden, joined the Waitaki Writers’ Group and took up writing as pastime. Since then he has had fifty short stories published in literary journals and popular magazines in six countries.

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Author: Bruce Costello

Contributor: Bruce Costello

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She was bearded, shabby, alone, and struggling to pick up one of her walking sticks from the carpet. The minister, young and bald, broke off his conversation with a group of relatives, picked up the stick with a cheery hello and asked if Edward, the deceased, had been a friend of hers. The old lady replied but the minister did not catch what she said.
The mourners had gathered for afternoon tea – or, as funeral directors say among themselves, ‘the after match function.’ Adults were mingling. Children were sitting or running about and being growled at. There was lots of noise, and heaps of food, including asparagus rolls and pikelets with raspberry jam and whipped cream on top.
The minister pulled up a chair, plonked himself down beside the old lady, beamed and repeated his question.
“Edward was a great old chap, wasn’t he? How did you come to know him?”
“I’d like to sit outside,” the old lady commanded, peering up at the minister, looking very directly into his eyes.
The minister hesitated, then let her lead him through the crowd of mourners to the Funeral Parlour’s outside courtyard featuring cobbled paths and a tranquil lily pond with goldfish and frogs.
It was a warm autumn day. The two sat side by side in silence until the old lady began to speak. Her voice, though cracked with age, was full of life, unlike her body.
“Edward was just a tiny boy when I used to know him. He was about seven or eight then, that was sixty or seventy years ago, and I’ve not seen him since. His older brother Arnold was my fiancé. Arnold and I were very much in love. We had wonderful times before the war. We’d go by train, Arnold and I and all his family, there were five boys in all, to Hampden, where they had a holiday home. Arnold was the oldest one and Edward was very much the youngest, like an afterthought.” She chortled. “Little Edward liked me a lot. Arnold said I was the older sister that Edward had never had. But I reckon Edward had a crush on me. Such a dear little chap he was, way back then.” Her voice trailed off. “Way back then, way back then.”
She fell silent. A fat young sparrow landed on a fence nearby and began squawking for his mother.
“He looks big enough to be feeding himself,” she chuckled.
The minister smiled, ran a hand across his bald head, and waited.
“That blighter Hitler decided to take on the world,” snorted the old lady. “So Arnold joined the Air Force and went overseas. My own mother and father both passed away around that time. Mother with a heart attack and father a few weeks later of something or other. Arnold’s parents very kindly took me in to live with them. They had four sons serving overseas then. I think I was a comfort, and I helped to look after little Edward, too. Arnold was in Bomber Command, and a Squadron Leader by the time he was twenty-three.”
“Uhuh,” nodded the minister. “Uhuh.”
“Arnold was shot down over Hamburg by a Junkers 88 night fighter flown by Staffelfϋhrer Graf Hans von Stahlmeister between 0230 and 0250 hours on May the twenty-third, 1943.”
“Eh? I didn’t quite catch that,” the minister said, with wrinkled brow, and puckered lips.
“You look constipated, dear,” observed the old lady. “Are you eating enough bran?”
The sparrow’s mother flew in with a fat worm for her big baby.
“That’s made his day,” laughed the old lady.
The minister nodded, looking around towards the entrance gate.
“After Arnold was killed, I couldn’t stay with his family anymore. They wanted me to but I just couldn’t. I found lodgings on the other side of town and kept well away, which was naughty of me. Little Edward must’ve missed me something awful. I felt very bad about that. I married another Air Force chap, a flying instructor. I never loved him, though, and soon I hated him. He left me after a couple of years and I didn’t marry again.”
“And you’d completely lost touch with Arnold’s family, and your little Edward?” prompted the minister.
The old lady nodded.
“So you have been listening,” she said.
“Indeed. Indeed.”
She began swishing with her stick at the leaves on the cobblestones.
“I have this friend Patricia who does computer classes at the Senior Citizens club. She invited me along and much to my surprise, I picked it up easily, even Facebook and researching on Google. I looked up things, like war records. About a fortnight ago, when the rest of the class was at afternoon tea, I found Edward on Facebook. He remembered me immediately. We arranged to meet up last week.”
“Heavens above!” exclaimed the minister. “Just last week! After so long!”
“On the day we were to meet, I saw his death notice in the newspaper. I don’t often buy the paper. It gets expensive when you’re on the pension, and food is so dear these days, and electricity’s going up all the time. I was really looking forward to seeing Edward and catching up on his life and talking about old times." Her eyes sparkled through tears.
“I still love Arnold. And little Edward. And I know we’ll all meet up again.”
She began to sing. ”Don’t know where, don’t know when, but I know we’ll meet again, some sunny day.”
The young minister looked towards heaven, eyes closed, and lips moving. His bald head glistened in the afternoon sun.
“The war might have ended a long time ago,” he announced, “but for a lot of folk, like your good self, its impact continues.”
“Could’ve been worse,” replied the old lady, with a chortle, tapping her stick on the minister’s knee. “At least we beat the bloody buggers.”


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New Zealander Bruce Costello retired in 2010 and began writing to avoid housework. Since then, he’s had 49 stories accepted by mainstream magazines and literary journals in six countries. He still does housework.”

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Author: Bruce Costello

Contributor: Bruce Costello

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Another sleepless winter night. The sky is huge from my veranda, the stars luminous, the moon near and motionless. The trees are buried in slumber, not a movement, not a sound. The fields, bathed in silver, stretch to the hills with here and there the gleam of a pond.

It’s hard to believe that nature can be so still. The stars gaze down with tenderness, as if there’s no unhappiness and all’s well in the world.

They say you should close the clinic door and switch off to the voices of the day.

I was a high flying psychotherapist, well-known and in demand. I thought I was forever. But my brain became a sponge for the pain of troubled people. Day after day with patients, night after night with a troubled husband whose needs I failed to satisfy, whose constant, punishing putdowns were badgering me into becoming what he accused me of being.

My mother died. One straw too many. I gave away my practice, left my husband, fled the city and came to live in this ramshackle cottage that I bought over the internet one sleepless night.

Here there are no discordant voices. The dishes sit on the bench and dry themselves. There is no carpet to vacuum and no lawn to mow. I see few people. I have no telephone.

I took up writing. My computer and I created a new world of fictional people that I can change or eliminate with one stroke of a finger. Back space or delete key, my choice.

Each morning I make syrup for the birdfeeder. Some days I sit for hours watching and listening:- blackbirds, thrushes and waxeyes, in tune with their world as I have never been with mine.

A black dog visits. He rolls onto his back, stretches out his legs, so big he fills the room, wall to wall. I rub his tummy. He licks my hand.

Yesterday, a woman called Lynette knocked on my door. Said she’d heard about me and wondered if I’d like to serve on some committee. For the community. No thank you, I said, as I hurried her down the garden path.

From my veranda I watch as the stars dim and the sun rises. Over the river hovers a haze. A streak of sun touches the trees on its bank and races to the far-off hills. I see a grassy meadow. I would like to lie on it or touch it with my hands. Today I will walk there.

*

Summer arrives and I am starting to feel human again.

On a stroll one day, I came across that woman, Lynette. She was gazing up into a tree, while her dog on a pink leash was peeing against a gatepost.

“Hello,” I breezed. “Look, I’m really sorry about how rude I was that time you called around, you remember?”

Lynette stared at me.

She was about my age with blonde hair and intelligent blue eyes. It was early in the day and we were on a country lane, miles from anywhere, but she was smartly dressed, and her breasts stood out perky and attractive in a tight, red sweater.

I had been slopping around without a bra for months.

“Oh, it’s you, Jennifer,” she said, pointing to a pair of pigeons flapping up from a branch. “I was just watching those birds.”

“Lovely, aren’t they!” I answered, and we began to talk.

In the weeks that followed, Lynette and I became friends. She was a gentle soul, the first person I’d felt safe with since my burn-out. We shared meals and went on walks. She loved to read the stories that I wrote. Her comments were perceptive and encouraging.

Lynette had separated from her husband after twenty years of marriage. It took her that long, she told me, to figure out that no amount of love and forgiveness was ever going to make him better or stop him abusing her.

She studied for a teaching degree, then landed a job as a college English teacher. After three years she suffered a major depressive episode. She went onto an invalid’s benefit, left the city and bought a country cottage, close to mine.

Lynette took charge of her own recovery. She kept herself busy in the garden and in community affairs. To maintain morale, she told me, she liked to dress well. She walked lots, both for health and for the sake of her figure. Her cottage garden was a wonder.

“It would’ve been so easy,” she told me one day, when we were strolling through the forest, looking for mushrooms, “to let myself go and turn into a frumpy hermit.”

“Like me?” I said to her.

Lynette laughed and whacked me on the backside. She was fun like that.

*

We were on my veranda one evening, sipping red wine, watching the sky as the peace of night enveloped the earth around us. The conversation had lapsed into cosy silence. A bird called out as it flew low overhead.

“Do you recall,” I said, “that first time we met, months ago, when you came to my door, and I chased you away?”

Lynette nodded.

“Was that very upsetting for you?” I asked.

She glanced at me, then looked down and turned away. I moved across to her, took her hands and pulled her to her feet. We hugged.

“I’m so sorry,” I said, my voice breaking.

Lynette sighed. We held each other. For the first time since mother died, I experienced the soft intimacy of another woman.

The moon smiled and the stars gazed down tenderly on our world.


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New Zealander Bruce Costello semi-retired from his profession in 2010, retreated from city to seaside, and has now had forty stories published in literary journals and popular magazines in five countries.

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Author: Bruce Costello

Contributor: Bruce Costello

- -
Alice the writer, in green jeans, with wet and wild eyes, lurching,
bottle in hand, onto the footpath, into the night,
muttering, muttering...

"It seems I was not your destination.
I was words that heard...
I met a man who walked on paths untrodden before.
How did he get there? How did he find the way? How can it be... that he does not love me...anymore?
I was hands that healed...
Listen, can’t you hear me, silently, in every part of you that I have touched?
I was lips that loved...
Can’t you taste my open mouth, moist eyes, my love that soothed your long held fears?
I was a heart that cared...
How dear you were, a delight of joy, light and laughter, a feeling that overwhelmed me and was me, the I that was me with you, a warm bath on a cold day, a cool drink when the tongue is hot and dry.
I was eyes that saw...
See how they cry,
♫ See how they run, see how they run, they all runned after the farmer’s wife, she cut off their tailsssssss with a carving knife, did you ever see thuch a thing in your liiiifffe.......♫"

Alice empties the bottle, stumbles on, trips, and picks herself up with a howl of hurt and rage. A dog leaps from a gateway, snarling, ready to lunge. Alice whips out a knife, slashes the animal’s face, laughs hysterically and staggers on.

The bitch’s car is in his driveway.


- - -
New Zealander Bruce Costello semi-retired in 2010 and took up writing to avoid housework. Since then he's had over 30 short stories published, is seriously afflicted with Submission Addiction Syndrome and still does housework.

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Author: Bruce Costello

Contributor: Bruce Costello

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Douglas the black cat watches. With unblinking eyes and twitching nostrils, he probes the atmosphere around the meal table. His dear Shona has invited a perfumed woman to dinner. And Douglas is a very intuitive cat.
On the mantelpiece a wisp of incense curls from a burner.
“Will you ever try again?” Missy asks, leaning forward, blue eyes smiling beneath dark eyelashes
Shona screws up her face.
“I’ve tried enough,” she murmurs, gesturing with open palms. “Each time I hold a bit more back.”
“Men hurt us,” Missy sighs. “But sometimes you have to take a risk in love.”
“But not too soon?”
“Of course not. When you’re ready.”
Shona closes her eyes, wrinkles her brow, and shakes her head. A few minutes pass. Neither speaks. Celine Dion stops singing.
“Shall I put the CD back on?”
“Ok.”
Missy stands and crosses the room.
“All right then!”
Missy spins around. Shona’s hands are gripping the table as she pushes herself back in her chair.
“Okay! If I thought a man loved me and didn’t want to just use me, I wouldn’t hold anything back. I would take the risk!” Douglas stirs and mutters to himself.
Missy returns to the table and sits without a word. Her hands press hard on the arms of the chair, her fingers showing white against her scarlet nail polish.
She blinks, sniffs and turns away, with a glance towards Douglas, who is staring at her, eyes wide with suspicion.
“What on earth’s wrong?” asks Shona.
“I’m sorry, my dear,” Missy breathes, clutching her breasts, looking up through tears. “I went to a specialist yesterday. He gave me a diagnosis. And a prognosis.” “Not.....?”
“Ohhhh....”
Shona tiptoes around the table, kneels beside Missy’s chair, takes her hands, holds them to her cheeks and cries.
Douglas springs into the air. “She’s on heat! It’s a trick!”
“Stupid cat’s gone demented,” says Missy.
“I’ll put him outside.”
...
A panic attack jolts Shona awake. ‘Deep, slow breaths,’ the therapist had said. ‘Remember your dreams. We must explore your unconscious fears.’
It’s three AM. Shona creeps out of bed and changes her sweat-drenched nightie. She goes for a pee, and then to the kitchen, makes a cup of black tea, and sits at the table. The dream has vanished.
And that other thing the therapist said, what was it, you want something real bad but you’re scared what’ll happen if you get it, so you settle for something else, a compromise solution? What was that all about?
Shona returns to the bedroom, slips into bed, and wakes later to a stroking on the back of her neck.
How nice. How lovely.
The city is dawning, cars honking, sparrows farting. Visions of the everyday leap into Shona’s mind - traffic, the checkout, endless grumpy shoppers.
Anxiety rises, like reflux. She turns, pulls the other to her, touches her shyly down there, marvelling at the response, then feels profoundly content as the woman raises herself on an elbow and smiles down at her.
“We’ll be fine together, my darling,” whispers Missy.
***


- - -
Bruce Costello retired recently and took up writing as a pastime. So far, he's had modest success and lots of fun

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Author: Bruce Costello

Contributor: Bruce Costello

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Once upon a time during the Nixon reign, two men stood side by side at a country bus stop. One was young with an ugly scarlet scar and a dreamy look on his face. The other was old and bald, wearing a scruffy ex-army coat and an intriguing hook where most people have a right hand.
The young man with the scar, a history student, while continuing to face straight ahead, was twisting his eyes sideways and downwards, examining the hook as discreetly as he could. It was grey and fierce-looking, reminding him of an illustration from a favourite boyhood book: Captain Hook in a vivid red and blue pirate’s coat, wearing a black cocked hat with white skull and crossbones, holding an evil sword in his left hand while thrusting at Peter Pan with his horrible hook.
The hook’s owner seemed about 70, unkempt, unshaven, and probably unloved, too, thought the student. But, who knows, he could have been a dashing soldier once, wounded in battle. Perhaps a booby-trapped cigarette case left by the retreating Germans in Italy. A sniper’s bullet in Normandy? Shrapnel on Guadalcanal?
Pretending to look down the road for the bus, the student now stares directly at the old chap, and sees a young soldier in war-torn battledress running crouched across a jungle clearing through bursting shells towards a crashed and burning aircraft. The pilot is still alive. The soldier hears his screams through the smashed perspex and sees him, panic-stricken, struggling to free himself from the leaping flames. The soldier reaches the scene, leaps heroically onto the burning wreck and pulls the pilot free, as the shells burst close, closer, ahhh! too close! The soldier falls. Blood spurts onto the jungle floor.
The bus pulled up with a squeal. The student stood back to let the other board first. The old man stopped in the doorway and began to fumble for money in his coat pocket, but the driver waved him on with a grin. He shuffled to the back of the bus as the student bought his ticket.
“Do you know that old guy?” said the student to the bus driver, who seemed a friendly sort.
The driver laughed. “Simple Sam? Everyone round here knows Simple Sam.”
“Simple? But what happened to his hand? Did he lose it in the war?”
The bus driver laughed again. “That’ll be the day. He lost it in the river, mate, when he was a lad. Him and his brother, fishing with dynamite.”
The student thanked the driver, found a seat near the front and settled back with his eyes closed, but the scene from the jungle had faded. He smiled to himself, then opened his eyes and, looking up, saw the man with the hook standing there, staring down at him.
“Pardon me for staring,” said the old man politely. “I seen your scar back at the bus stop and I been wondering. Was you in Vietnam?”
*


- - -
Bruce Costello recently retired and took up writing to keep his brain ticking over. So far it's working, although there are signs of surface rust appearing behind his left ear.

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Author: Bruce Costello