Henry Bladon

Almost Gone

by Henry Bladon

It won’t be long before I’m gone

and there is nothing I can do.

it all started with my legs

which disappeared overnight

and then I noticed my hands were not there

where they should have been.

Then I lost my liver.

My heart will soon stop beating.

Now my gut is gradually eroding

being eaten away by a mysterious cause

which means I can no longer eat

my favorite food or anything at all.

Soon my bones will melt away

and not long after that

when my head disappears into my neck

all of me will be gone forever.

Kafka Museum

by Henry Bladon

We found the Kafka Museum opposite the rustic Czech restaurant where they served enormous meat dishes hanging from fearsome-looking hooks. We had been walking about all morning, and couldn’t make sense of the map, or the street names. When I asked the woman in the restaurant where the museum was, she walked me outside and pointed. My friends didn’t go much on the idea, despite my attempts to woo them with tales of Kafka’s brilliance. They left me and went to have a coffee in the café where they serve really stinky fish. I continued through and paid my money. The lady explained everything in English and gestured to the entrance. The place was dark. I turned around to thank her, but she had disappeared. I went into the corridor and up the odd-shaped staircase. I read some manuscripts and looked at some pictures. There were filing cabinets and telephones. I didn’t want to keep my friends waiting so decided to leave. There was no sign of the exit. I had to admit I was lost and couldn’t find my way out. And by the way, I’m still here.

Counter-intuitive

by Henry Bladon

He picked up the box of purple hair dye

from the shelf where the offer said, “One for Two.”

Lewis thought about this on his way home.

He pulled up his collar and splashed through the puddles,

as the rain hammered into the pavement.

He concluded he was confused by the marketing ploy

which seemed to him to be counter-intuitive.

“Everything seems to be counter-intuitive,” he said to his wife

when she arrived back from work.

“At least let me take off my shoes first,” she said.

“And did you get my hair dye?”

Lewis nodded and offered to make a cup of tea

as the rain splashed onto the patio outside.

“No, I’ve given up caffeine,” she said.

“Do you think we should we call the gutter-cleaning people?”

All Points from Zermatt

by Henry Bladon

Hermann the hitman from Zermatt

owns a Glock 9mm handgun,

he has a grand piano in his kitchen

and Fauvist paintings on the walls,

he eats tea cakes

and bathes in seaweed,

on the weekend he writes elegiac poetry

in memory of his late mother.

Hermann believes that incognito is a term

best reserved for reluctant spies.

His purple Mercedes has a red leather interior

and a nodding dog on the dashboard

which is appreciated by his cat, Herr Hoffmaier,

who likes to tease the toy as if it were a mouse.

At school, Hermann’s English teacher wrote, “judging by his essays,

Hermann is likely to become a psychopath.”

Hermann thinks it a shame that his life script

became thus predetermined.

Lost Letters

by Henry Bladon

It was uncharted waters. The super-rich writer from Sarajevo was troubled about his lost love letters. They were produced by the same typewriter on which he writes his gripping domestic thrillers, but they were never sent. They were written with his usual flair and spoke of the hinterland of his sexual liberation. His anxiety was starting to spiral out of control. He looked in the usual drawer where he kept them (along with a pack of spare pencils for emergencies) but they were nowhere to be found. He had moved to this community of craftspeople (who wore waxed jackets and drank spiced rum), for privacy (hoping, he thought, that he might avoid the flashy headshots that used to appear in the papers). Now he was about to be embroiled in a scandal. He went to the bathroom to think, where before long he discovered the letters, remembering that he had stored them in the toilet gadget bag (the one that had the nose hair trimmer and the hemorrhoid cream). The relief felt like a gold medal win at the Olympics.

Henry is based in Somerset, in the UK. He is a writer of short fiction and poetry, with a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Birmingham. He is the author of several poetry collections, and his work can be seen in Poetica Review, Pure Slush, Truth Serum Press, Lunate, and Yellow Mama, among other places.

Henry Bladon is a writer of short fiction and poetry based in Somerset, in the UK. He has a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Birmingham. His work can be seen in Poetica Review, Pure Slush, Truth Serum Press, Flash Frontier, and O:JA&L, among other places.