Unexpected Places to Fall From, Unexpected Places to Land

Malcolm Devlin

Description

Unexpected Places to Fall From, Unexpected Places to Land crosses genres and dimensions, exploring the consequences of a rare cosmic anomaly. In the exact same moment, all possible versions of Prentis O'Rourke will cease to exist. By accident, by malice, by conflict, by illness - Prentis will not simply die. He will go extinct. These are the stories of the journeys we take and the journeys we wish we'd taken.Malcolm Devlin's second short story collection ranges from science fiction to folk horror as Prentis O'Rourke's demise echoes across the dimensions. Scientists, artists, ex-nuns, taxi drivers, time travellers and aliens - the same people living varied lives in subtly different worlds. Something unprecedented will happen, and it will colour them all.Crossing multiple realities, countless versions of ourselves, and shifting backwards and forwards through time, these are stories of forking paths and unexpected destinations - of flying and falling and getting up to try again.

Sujets

• Short story

Informations

• Publié par: Distributed by eBookpartnership
• Date de parution: 14 octobre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781912658176
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

“Malcolm Devlin dissects our everyday decisions, our individual tragedies, and summons the haunted feeling that our other selves are out there living alternate lives, and in doing so he offers the reader an unexpected and surreal consolation.”
Anne Charnock, Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning author of Dreams Before the Start of Time and Bridge 108
“Devlin writes intelligent, profound and perfect short stories. A brilliant collection.”
Aliya Whiteley, author of The Beauty , Greensmith and many more
“Acutely strange yet deeply humane, Devlin’s stories are slippery in all the best ways. This collection is a perfect demonstration of his range, wit and skill.”
M.T. Hill, author of The Breach and Zero Bomb
“I’ve been an admirer of Malcolm Devlin’s fiction for years. He writes with compassion, intelligence and precision, not just crossing but obliterating genre lines with joyful abandonment. His newest collection moved me deeply with its imagination, lyricism, and gorgeous prose—a terrific book to knock you off your jaded feet before landing you in all sorts of unexpected places.”
Usman Malik, author of Midnight Doorways
“Themes of fate and free will, choice and contingency thread through these twelve luminous and lyrical stories. Frequently, as I was reading, I had to stop, my breath taken away at the sheer quality of the writing, the ease and craft with which the narratives unfolded, the compassion brought to each individual character, the strange beauty found in the everyday. Malcolm Devlin is one of our most gifted and perceptive writers.”
Una McCormack, New York Times -bestselling author
“Devlin is a master of the new new weird, bending the genre into wild new shapes. Pay attention or be left behind.”
Gary Budden, author of Hollow Shores and Judderman
Also available from Unsung Stories
The Beauty by Aliya Whiteley
Dark Star by Oliver Langmead
Winter by Dan Grace
The Bearer of Grievances by Joseph McKinley
The Dancer by Rab Ferguson
The Arrival of Missives by Aliya Whiteley
Metronome by Oliver Langmead
Pseudotooth by Verity Holloway
You Will Grow Into Them by Malcolm Devlin
2084 edited by George Sandison
This Dreaming Isle edited by Dan Coxon
The Willow By Your Side by Peter Haynes
The Loosening Skin by Aliya Whiteley
Always North by Vicki Jarrett
Dark River by Rym Kechacha
Threading the Labyrinth by Tiffani Angus
Greensmith by Aliya Whiteley
Out of the Darkness edited by Dan Coxon
Gigantic by Ashley Stokes

Published by Unsung Stories
3 Rosslyn Road
London E17 9EU, United Kingdom
www.unsungstories.co.uk
First edition published in 2021
First impression
© 2021 Malcolm Devlin
Malcolm Devlin has asserted his right under the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of their Work.
This book is a work of fiction.
All the events and characters portrayed in this book are fictional and
any similarities to persons, alive or deceased, is coincidental.
Paperback ISBN: 9781912658169
ePub ISBN: 9781912658176
Edited by Dan Coxon
Proofreading by Jonathan Oliver
Cover design by Vince Haig
Text design by Cox Design Limited
Typesetting by Vince Haig
Printed in the UK by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.
contents
We Are Now Beginning our Descent
•
The Purpose of the Dodo is to be Extinct
•
Walking to Doggerland (1)
•
Finisterre
•
We Can Walk it off Come the Morning
•
Five Conversations with my Daughter (Who Travels in Time)
•
Walking to Doggerland (2)
•
The New Man
•
The Knowledge
•
My Uncle Eff
•
Walking to Doggerland (3)
•
Talking to Strangers on Planes
To Mum & Dad
For helping me take off.
To Helen
For helping me land.
“Nevertheless so profound is our ignorance, and so high
our presumption, that we marvel when we hear of the
extinction of an organic being; and as we do not see the
cause, we invoke cataclysms to desolate the world...”
— Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
“I know death hath ten thousand several doors
For men to take their exits; and ’tis found
They go on such strange geometrical hinges,
You may open them both ways...”
— John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi
We Are Now
Beginning our Descent
I have always dreamed I would die in an aeroplane crash.
It will be a big plane. A commercial flight. I will be seated in economy as normal. On this flight, the dice will have rolled against me and I will be trapped in the middle of a row. There will be a businessman on my left: he will be portly, balding, busy with a briefcase. His tie will have been loosened with a nervous tug of a crooked finger, and beads of sweat will have started pebbling his forehead before the cabin doors have even closed. To my right, there will be an elderly woman who will spend the majority of the flight tottering up and down the aisle to the bathroom and chewing the teeth that do not quite fit. Reading her complimentary tabloid, she will tut over the stories of benefit frauds and immigrants; she will linger over the nudity with a mournful fascination.
We will attend to the ritual incantations of the air stewardesses as they perform the hallowed sign of the emergency exits and direct our wandering attention to the airline safety catechism located in the rear pocket of the seats in front of us.
In the unlikely event of loss of cabin pressure, oxygen masks will fall from the overhead compartments. You use them like this, like this, like this.
It will be too late for all of us, and I’d like to think that somehow, we will know all of this in advance. Terrible events don’t need portents; we retrofit them afterwards, as though by making them inevitable, we can make them digestible. Accidents have always been a part of the world, we will tell each other. This is unavoidable. This is written .
As we fall, we will see the engines blossom into fire, lighting the cabin with a private sunset. Our heads will be pressed deep into the foam of the seats and even without looking through the windows we will know the plane is pointing downwards. We will give ourselves to gravity and the rush of it will be delicious. Together, we will cast ourselves at the brittle sea with such a force, it will make salt of us all.

A dream, then. One I have had many times during my life, since before I ever set foot on an aeroplane in person. As a child, I would cast my toys down the stairs or into the bath, until they fell apart and were confiscated from me. It was not because I was tired of them, as my parents believed, but because it seemed a more fitting conclusion to the games I played. It would end with fire, with twisted metal, with broken parts skittering across the kitchen floor.
Through my dream, I have always known how to fly. Because I knew it would be the end of me, there was peace in that understanding.
My wife always promised me she understood.
‘Sometimes we only appreciate the places we are,’ she said, ‘once we’ve determined the manner by which we can escape them.’
My first flight was a shuttle from London to Edinburgh, barely an hour in the air. I was fifteen and we could have taken the train, but I had begged for the opportunity to fly for the very first time. My father had agreed, because he believed he might be the one to show me something new.
I let him pretend the experience was his to teach. Even at that young age, it felt known and unsurprising. The ritual of it reassured me while my father tried to mask his fear. He had been born soon after the war and had grown up among the ruins of cities razed by the enemy’s aircraft. He flew infrequently if at all.
For me, the plane was as warm and familiar as the womb. The dip in the gut as the plane lifted its nose from the runway, the thick, granular roar in the ears, the sharp and sinus-scratching coolness of the processed air. I had dreamed all of it, and even as the plane bucked in turbulence prior to landing, making my father clutch at the arms of his chair, I was never afraid.

I should be clear. My dream has never been a nightmare.
There is comfort in the perception of five hundred people enacting the exact same emotions at the exact same time. There is comfort in being part of something greater than yourself. There is comfort in dying in company rather than alone.
Those who die in aeroplane accidents are granted famous deaths, but also anonymous ones. For a brief time, your flight number will be on the front page of every newspaper back home, and there won’t be a single member of the informed public untouched by the news. But your face will be lost in a grid of casualties and no one will see it unless they are looking. No one will see you unless they know who they’re looking for, tracing their fingers over the matrix of blurry portraits like an old woman working her way through the Sunday wordsearch. There you’d be, surrounded by strangers. A smile intended for someone else, a photograph you’d have been too embarrassed to share when you were alive, but one that someone, somewhere, thinks represents you in the way they want to remember. Perhaps there’ll be a memorial? That must be a consolation. Who hasn’t dreamed of leaving their name carved in stone in a public square, open letters weathering the human years, outlasting us all?

I grew up and flew up as much as I could. Business and pleasure, long weekends away. At first my wife was flattered by my extravagance, then frustrated by my excess. We flew too much, she would tell me. Think of how much it’s costing us. Think of the environmental impact.
She was a patient flyer. She would sit in the light of the cabin window and read one her paperbacks, unmoved by the alien tilt of the horizon beyond the glass. She would smile flintily at the security staff and avoid eye contact with the passport officials. It was only when we landed that time would catch up to her. She would sigh with impatience by the baggage carousel and check her watch as though it might hasten our belongings. Air flight was never more than transpor