Author: Matthew Dodd

By Matthew Dodd

It was early in the morning, and for the first time in the year, snow was falling.  Plumes danced down through the air, scattering themselves across the sky and spreading out into a soft white net over the garden. Once vibrant flowers were now dulled to homogeneity. Where leaves once sat, crystals of ice now staked their claim. As the sun rose over the garden, beams of light glanced upon the field, painting a rather pretty picture of winter. The garden made an all but perfect tapestry of the season and its associated joys. That was if one could exclude the unmissable exercise in laziness who made his temporary abode in the middle of all this. 

Angelo splayed himself out across the snow-covered lawn, a black smudge on this otherwise undisturbed canvas. Angelo – as you may have ascertained – was a cat, and was therefore accustomed to taking his time when waking up. And yet, even by feline standards Angelo was a lazy cat. He had been known to sleep for near on twenty straight hours and, on one occasion, after a particularly filling meal, had spent an entire week unconscious. However, on this particular morning Angelo struggled to keep a hold on his doze. The incessant snowfall was proving to be rather the impediment to Angelo’s lie-in. His arms gesticulated wildly in a futile attempt to tire himself out again. When this attempt proved fruitless Angelo shook his head and began to wake. He opened his eyes slowly, one at a time – in case any larger cats were waiting in his immediate line of vision – and was slightly confused to find that the world had gone all white. His amber eyes flitted around his surroundings, processing the new information. The world had indeed gone white. That was if it was the world: the living world that is. Angelo jumped up at this. For a cat, Angelo spent a lot of time contemplating death. He often wondered what would happen to him when he eventually ceased to be. In all honesty he tended to believe that death would never happen to him, he was far too special for that.

 As he considered this, Angelo became aware that the white of the world seemed to be moving downwards. His eyes narrowed. That certainly was strange. The world only ever moved like this when the great showertime came. Angelo then realised what was afoot. He was not actually dead, as he’d been quite convinced, rather it was that time of year at which the clouds started falling from the sky. Angelo wasn’t quite sure why the clouds did this, but he supposed they had rather a good reason. Angelo knew this time of year well, this being his tenth experience of it, and had come to treat it as a friend, a reminder of everything he was and had been. Humans are often surprised to learn that cats are well aware of themselves and their own temporal position but, as Angelo had often noted, humans were surprised by most things. He was up on his feet by now and, as he began to move, slowly became aware of his situation. This was the Garden. That’s what the humans called it (comprehension of the English language was another feline skill that humans seem to forget). Ah yes, Angelo remembered now. He often liked to visit this spot, this very spot in fact, to take one of his naps. In fact, now that he thought about it, he’d taken one such nap very recently. In fact, now that Angelo had thought even more about it, he failed to remember very much of what happened between his last visit and the present. Lost in his train of thought, Angelo had neglected to note the tree – into which he had just walked. Despite his stature Angelo had somehow caused the tree to shake, which caused a large snowfall atop his head, in turn inciting a helpless mew of despair. He shook virulently. Angelo couldn’t entirely recall his position towards this cloudfall. 

Upon further examination of the garden, Angelo deduced that he’d only been asleep for at most half a night since the sun was only now rising over the garden fence. That was good for Angelo. This meant that he could go and be there to watch his human wake up. He loved his human more than anything in the world. Even more than he loved napping. Angelo couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t loved Human. Human was to him what the earth was to the moon. Both entirely wrapped in their own existence yet eternally dependent on the other. The Moon rises and falls with the Earth. The Earth may even one day be able to be without the Moon’s complementary being, but the Moon will always need the Earth, and in the same way Angelo will always need his Human. He slumped down against a tree and let memory flood over him. Memories of Human and Angelo together, Human and Angelo apart, and Human and Angelo reunited. Years stretched out in Angelo’s mind, with this Christmastime (yes, Angelo recalled, that’s what Human called it) being the one constant. Other humans had left Angelo’s Human over these years. Angelo had slept on the laps of countless others during the cold months. But Human had always been there. Angelo had even seen Christmases when Human was alone, and Human was sad, and so Angelo was also sad. But Angelo had watched Human find new humans, and be happy again, and that made Angelo happy. Angelo remembered, there was another human that spent some three Christmases with Human. It was a human with brown hair and big brown eyes who used to spend hours with Angelo, stroking him in the spots behind his ears where only his Human knew. Whatever happened to them? Angelo struggled to remember. In fact, he struggled to remember many details these days. Angelo was getting old, he didn’t have time to remember all the sad things. He preferred to spend his thoughts on the happy times he and his friend had shared, rather than dwelling on those awkward in-between times. Human had smiled and laughed in the company of others, and there were times when Human hadn’t. What was the point in trying to dissect the sadness when you could be enjoying the happiness? Angelo slunk forward through the garden towards the house’s back entrance. As he crept, he caught sight of a robin sitting on a tree-branch, rather content with the leaf he was picking at. It pricked its head up and peered at Angelo before returning to its leaf. Angelo made to greet the robin, only for it to fly away, leaving its leaf behind. How fickle and rude that bird is, he thought to himself.

By Matthew Dodd.

In a deckchair under the late afternoon sun, he sat lazily writing in a worn leather pocketbook. A pale blue linen shirt fit loosely over his torso, setting off the darker blue of his linen trousers. His deckchair stood a little off-centre on the balcony of La Porte Ouverte, one of the finer hotels that overlooked the River Loire before its destruction by a German bomber, which was to prematurely eject its load en-route to Tours at the onset of the war. This would not happen for half a decade yet; he had no notion of staying that long.

In the pocketbook he was, with a fervent energy, composing passionate declarations of love to women he’d never met nor had any intention of meeting again. By this point in the afternoon (a large antique clock over the balcony entrance informed him, and twelve other patrons, that it was twenty-six minutes past four) he had completed one hundred and twenty-five such declarations in pieces that ranged from single sentences to polemics spanning a dozen pages. The object of this practice was unclear, but it evidently engaged the man deeply: his attention had hardly left the pocketbook since lunch, save short trips to the bar to order gin rickeys. By the bank of the river, a small child reached her hand out to feed a heron which had landed a metre or so into the water, only to tumble unceremoniously into the mud before her. Nearby, her parents did not seem to notice. They were, at that moment, preoccupied with the task of cutting a few slices of brie. 

The balustrades that enclosed the balcony were ornate with various vaguely Grecian images – an all but unrecognisable figure of Perseus that was recovered from La Porte’s wreck now takes pride-of-place in a local museum – and were spaced evenly as to allow guests an ample view of the river below. A single hollow chime announced the arrival of the half hour. At this, he set the pocketbook down on the table by his deckchair and got up, setting off once more on his familiar pilgrimage to the bar. The book, whose once black covers had grown brown by continued exposure to sunlight, displayed two open pages of an impassioned message to one Miss Delilah June. It was not one of the stronger pieces in the book but nevertheless exhibited the finely tempered prose on which he prided himself. At the end of the address he had written in a delicate hand: ‘With my love, which clings to you like climbing hydrangea, Frankie Oregon.’ 

Oregon wasn’t really his name. It was only the first name that his grandfather’s father had seen when he poked his head out from the boat on which he had stolen a trip out of Manila. And so it became his name. When it came time for him to pass his name on to a son – who would in turn pass it onto another son, who would then pass it onto Frankie – the suggestion of a family name preceding Oregon had evaporated. That life in Manila, and whatever name it was attached to, had been lost. Great-Grandfather Oregon was a man of few words and had never felt his own history to be worth wasting them on, so the memory of his life had died with him. By the time that Frankie Oregon was sat on the balcony of La Porte Ouverte, working on his second gin rickey, he had no family in either Manila or Oregon as far as he knew. The few relatives that he was aware of were scattered randomly about the world, on ranches or living in sensible two-bedroomed apartments. The River Oregon had no clear mouth and Frankie hardly cared to seek one out. As far as he was concerned, all that he owed to his ancestors was the odd flower on a gravestone, if he should happen to pass it by. Beyond that, he was content to be a singular, floating person. He had drifted all over the world in this way. Europe, Africa, Asia – oceans to oceans and coasts to coasts. He had briefly stopped in both Manila and Oregon but had felt very little in either. Indeed, very few places elicited a response from him merely by the fact of his being in them. Of course, he remembered the Parthenon and the Taj Mahal and, of course, he could itemise and expound their many intricacies and resonances – he had taken courses in both history and architecture – but, excluding those, the places meant practically nothing to him. For him, there was nothing in between the lines.

While Frankie was sitting on the balcony, head poised immovably above the pocketbook, a telegram arrived at the hotel’s front desk addressed to him. It was an invitation to the wedding of his sister, Evelyn, in Syracuse. Frankie would not read this message and the paper on which it was printed would one day join the unrecognisably charred rubble that had once been this fine hotel. The concierge who was on duty at the time of the  arrival of this telegram had, most peculiarly, just received one himself. In it, he learnt that his uncle had passed away from pneumonia at his home in Nantes just last weekend. As such, the concierge, whose name was Antoine (although everyone called him Tony), abandoned his post for the first time in his decade at La Porte Ouverte and ran off in the direction of a nearby bus station.

Outside, Frankie was nearly finished with his gin rickey. The next morning, he would check out of La Porte Ouverte and take a car to Orleans where he would likely find yet another hotel, or perhaps a café, and another deckchair to sit in. For now, though, he persisted in his scribblings. Behind him, in the hotel’s quite extravagant dining hall, tonight’s dinner service was being prepared. A bearded and bespectacled old man in a gravy-stained apron was yelling directions at a fleet of young chefs who, as a rule, wore far tidier uniforms than their superior. This evening, they would be serving a Chicken Fricassee, a dish La Porte’s kitchen was renowned for, with a crab bisque for its starter. In a few hours, Frankie Oregon would take the staff up on both these dishes, as well as a Crème Brulée which he would take once more on the balcony. By all accounts, he would enjoy them. After dinner he would drink a glass of neat scotch in his room and be in bed by eleven; he might even dream. 

As the clock’s larger hand moved towards the Roman numeral V, Frankie noticed something. His pocketbook was full. By a stroke of sheer coincidence, Frankie found that upon completing a plea of gentle longing to an unattached book clerk in Somerset, he had reached the book’s exact end. There were now precisely one hundred and thirty-two full messages in the book. Without exception, they were signed by the author, although the specific nature of his closing remarks differed throughout. The final words of his last message, and by extension the whole book, were uncomplicated: ‘with love, Frankie’. If he’d known these were to be his final words, perhaps he would’ve thought of something more exciting, but he hadn’t, so he didn’t. 

Upon finishing, he closed the book and placed it in his left trouser pocket. From his right, he produced a silver cigarette case out of which he drew one white cigarette. He raised it to his lips and, with a gold lighter he’d picked up somewhere in Warsaw, lit it. After taking two drags he began to walk towards the edge of the balcony. A gentle wind blew through a poplar tree across the river. Frankie gripped the banister with one hand and gazed down at the Loire as it passed below him. With the other he took the cigarette out of his mouth and tossed it off of the balcony, aiming vaguely for a small outcrop of thrushes on the riverbank. After a few moments he reached into his left pocket and took out the pocketbook. For a matter of seconds he observed the book, turning it over once, then twice, in his hands before casting it deliberately over the banister. It spun wildly in an arc through the air, its covers splayed to give the impression of a bird fruitlessly attempting to take flight. After a journey of some seconds it landed noiselessly in the river and was borne immediately by the current downstream, where it soon passed a small girl feeding some cheese to a heron, before disappearing ultimately and irretrievably into the dark recesses of the water.