Yellow Mama E zine

Space and Time Measured

 

by Paul Radcliffe

 

           

        Loving someone and being oceans apart is like keeping a vampire in a spare bedroom. In sunlight you can forget about them. After sunset, love assumes form and there is no forgetting. Love and vampires. Both spring to life after dark. She is pale and thoughtful. I tell her about my favourite films. The magic of cinema. Being bewitched by what you see. The stories that draw you in.

           Lake Mungo. A story about grief and loss and things unseen—the things that were always there. . . . She knows something about this, taught by the years.

           November . . .  fanaticism and keeping the world from spinning into darkness. . . .

           The Diving Bell and the Butterfly . . . courage redefined in adversity.

           And so we drank golden Marlborough Sauvignon, which serves to assail the senses, drawn from soil and stone.

            Love is fate. It has power. It is as immortal as anything that spread its wings and flew from the Carpathian Mountains to terrify the local villagers. Love ignores distance and once it has visited it does not leave. Calendars become meaningless. In that cinema, love and the undead rise and they are ever present, even when the sun shines and the villagers fall to sudden silence. If love sits next to you nothing can be done. There never was. I just put my arms around it and even after the film, when the cinema closes and the streets are quiet, it follows you home and its portrait smiles at you from the wall. And you are held firmly. And you cannot distinguish between night, and dreams, and love, and vampires.

      

 

        Paul Radcliffe is an Emergency RN. In the past, he worked in an area where children were sometimes afflicted with sickness of Gothic proportions. Some are ghosts now. As a child he visited an aunt in a haunted farmhouse. This explains a lot. Paul has worked in a variety of noisy places unlikely to be on anyone’s list of holiday destinations. He is also a highly suggestible subject for any cat requiring feeding and practicing hypnosis.

​

      It's well known that an artist becomes more popular by dying, so our pal Steve Cartwright is typing his bio with one hand while pummeling his head with a frozen mackerel with the other. Stop, Steve! Death by mackerel is no way to go! He (Steve, not the mackerel) has a collection of spooky toons, Suddenly Halloween!, available at Amazon.com.    He's done art for several magazines, newspapers, websites, commercial and governmental clients, books, and scribbling - but mostly drooling - on tavern napkins. He also creates art pro bono for several animal rescue groups. He was awarded the 2004 James Award for his cover art for Champagne Shivers. He recently illustrated the Cimarron Review, Stories for Children, and Still Crazy magazine covers. Take a gander ( or a goose ) at his online gallery: www.angelfire.com/sc2/cartoonsbycartwright . And please hurry with your response - that mackerel's killin' your pal, Steve Cartwright.