The society that we forged prior to the pandemic encouraged us to battle for first place. Think of the streets of any major city – there was always someone pushing to get by, squeezing in, or chewing on the shoulder of any pedestrian who moved too slowly. Today, this form of close quarters aggression will serve only to perpetuate the spread of the virus. We’ve been asked to stay approximately 6 feet or 2 metres apart. But the greater implication of this request is that we need to care for the wellbeing of every passing stranger. We must realise that we have the same potential to infect them as they do us. With this in mind, it becomes clear that mutual respect and benevolence are key factors in beating this pandemic. Politicians may continue to tell us that we are fighting a war, but it is perhaps more important to find our peace with one another.

StepAway Magazine‘s lockdown issue is published with the intention of developing a shared understanding of what it feels like to be in lockdown. Our writers examine the peculiar gamut of emotions individuals from across the world are experiencing right now, ranging from fear to boredom; loneliness to hope. Our wish is to create a sense of unity at a time when we must be apart.

This issue will remain open to submissions throughout the duration of the coronavirus pandemic, and when this difficult time comes to an end the names of all contributors will be added to our cover.

Thank you for your time. Stay safe.

Darren Richard Carlaw
editor@stepawaymagazine.com

Her son has slept, unrefreshed, in a warped single bed unused to taking his weight for longer than a weekend.  She bought him new linen and curtains last year, but the walls are still little-boy blue.  They always meant to spruce them up – probably something more neutral – but death got in the way.

This is the room where her son slept, the night after his sister lost her life. This is the room where her son slept, the day after the terrible news about his father. There’s still a Mouse Trap game in the cupboard. Lego. Operation.

She pops in with a mug of black coffee and a ginger choc-chip cookie. Her son is talking into his headset in low, calm tones, ironing out his accent for the benefit of his Southern colleague. He is wearing an open-necked Oxford-collar shirt, with Dress-down Friday slacks. Her son’s best teddy watches, with amazed, glassy-plastic eyes.

She wants to say “Here you are, Treasure.” She wants to touch her son on the shoulder. The proximity and the distance tantalise her. She sets the cup and plate down on the window ledge.

The street looks strange from her son’s room, too. The white Spring sun hits next-door’s conservatory at a painful angle. Their cat patrols the bare pavement, unchallenged. A muffled rumbling forces its way through the double-glazing. She hopes it is the sound of the sea and not more flaring of the stacks at the last remaining chemical plant. No tell-tale orange tinge to the sky. She catches a glimpse of choppy, steely waves between the semi-detached rooftops. The tides are still turning. The world is still turning.

She has promised her son that she will not sing during office-hours: usually, she fills superfluous domestic silence and space with her ladies’ choir harmonies. The songs have not been coming to her, anyway, of late. Everything except gnawing unease has gone.

Everything except her grown-up son, who is back in his bedroom. She would have moved to a bungalow by now, if she’d had the energy to tackle the loft, but this family-sized house almost fits again, now that her son is in it. She finds herself glad of the cocoon of the familiar, however faded.

She finds herself glad that her son picked up on her silent beseeching and called off his foreign trip. Home, instead. To her. Just in time. She feels guilty to be glad at all at a time like this but she is glad that her son got locked down here. With her.

She is sorry he didn’t redirect his mail and that his houseplants won’t survive. She is sorry he didn’t pack enough clothes for such a long stay, but she will wash and iron the ones he has without complaint. She will never complain again, as long as her son stays safe.

Please, no more loss. She knows she has no power but she will try to pay back the gods with selfless, neighbourly deeds. She is making donations to all the causes. She knows not everyone is as lucky as she is. It is a long time since she has felt like the fortunate one.

She hovers until her son hangs up. She whispers “I love you.” He winks, then turns to take another call. When all this is eventually over, she will have to let her son go, all over again.

Helen Victoria Anderson

Listen to the sounds of your own voice, hum a tune to test how the different rooms of your house change the timber and tone.

Distrust the news from the mainstream, twiddle your thumbs and shoo your ghosts out to roam the emptied streets.

They have been learning obscure languages to glean the truth from the horse’s mouth, from the puppet play of crows, the deeper secrets of stone.

When they return they will gather in the back bedroom to enact their pantomimes, you will need a torch or a candle at least to watch their shadow plays

And you will weep a little from the ache and longing for what you always assumed was real, the things you took for granted.

Things like places, comings and goings, meetings and encounters, the uninhibited touch of others.

Whenever you take the plunge to venture out your solitary footsteps insist on stretching before you then lagging behind, they’ll sweep one way then the other with the fluidity of tides.

Inmates will watch you with suspicion through their windows and the bolder sort may demand you justify what is essential.

Queuing is a new art form of occupying silences, observing proximities and scouring the gaps on the supermarket shelves.

Key Workers have become the envy of all, kings and queens of purpose, who still possess minutes, hours, even days of the week.

Everyone else marks the passage of time through the ritual washing of hands, holidaying in the kitchen then voyaging across the Great Laminate Plains in search of the remote control.

Patience is the new black and should be decorated as you would a Christmas Tree with fairy lights and baubles, place presents at its feet and worship it as your saviour.

Dismiss urban myths of warlords who live in fortresses of toilet rolls and who eat nothing but pasta, some of them supposedly have unicorns in their gardens adorned in the flags of old nation states.

Within your cocoon you must digest yourself into protein-rich soup, disintegrating all of your tissues except for the imaginal discs, those discs use the goo of your previous existence to fuel the rapid cell division required to undergo a radical transformation into a new physical form and a somewhat different personality after instances which would normally result in death.

Bob Beagrie

Powerless to change the path
they blindly hide a growing wrath
and follow where the frightful flee
to dark and stormy sky.

The wet of April’s cruelty
descends like crazy mist at sea,
and hangs like clouds, invisibly
like death upon the morn.

Breathing somehow weaponized,
conspiracies all realized,
a nightmare angry world devised
to stop us fast in place.

Network anchors broadcast fears,
the poison enters in the ears,
the city bathes in painful tears,
a baptism too late.

While crooked whys attack the chorus,
harrowed lies soak into porous
minds that can’t escape the horrors
of the sudden void.

They pray to gods of cold sweat morn
to guarantee another dawn,
and wake from endless nightmares on
the screens both large and small.

For every loss a blanket tossed,
a ganglia of nerves crisscrossed,
no sleep allowed as solitude
becomes a traitor’s tell.

Vicious wishes echo back
the loveless moans of all we lack,
the ignorance that can’t distract
from facts we can’t ignore.

Hell says hello, welcome friend,
as restlessness extends a hand.
We’re bound up in a devil’s plan
from which there’s no escape.

In the dream about insomnia,
the plague invites hysteria,
awake we run but get nowhere,
the future’s not assured.

Gary Glauber

spits out gum – man-all-in-blue – where’s his helmet? – how do you do?
wearing my coat – bumblebee – flirting with her – [windowpane groan]
face into rain – dripping bald – heel spikes and top knot – wasp
spider, glistening on glass – jump into puddle – panting jogger – plastic wrapper
misguided moustache – I loaned Joan the dog – lurch and limp

still-holding-hands

gloves out of season – empty bags – scowling man – hornet
all-in-black mourner – a couple, spaced – resting on the wall
out of breath – hornet

hornet

hornet

horsefly

Caroline Hardaker

crossed Tottenham Court Road   esoterically
Southampton Row silvered   seashell   calcite
auric funerary art   Russell Square darkens

Once settled   vergissmeinnicht   Brunswick Gardens

Julie Hogg

We wake to a world unclothed due to a pandemic
out of control, out of our control.

Where did it begin? Perhaps the wrong question
to ask when it is already here, knocking on every
door that it can knock on.

We keep inside to stop the spread. We look outside
to remind ourselves of what is possible–that we can
walk and go wherever without the fear of infection.

But the sun will come, and when it does come,
it will greet us with a warm hug.

Elvis Alves

Linda M. Crate

As loneliness seeps into my quarantine,
I just want to see. Anything. Anything at all.

I cannot bear an empty Times Square.
Shuttered Paris. Paralyzed Rome.

So I settle on Galway. Shop Street
is as sad as the others, but at least

a breeze is blowing colorful flags above the lane,
cold spring sun stretches across bricks.

Wrapped in flannel, I sip on bitter tea
and watch a trickle of humanity

walk around and away from one another
or in pairs, stagger careful distance, suspicious.

I put on a sorrowful soundtrack,
cannot stop watching.

A boy on a red bicycle weaves with abandon around
a dangerous gaggle of girls who cannot smell pox in the air.

A man in a black cap walks backwards
as if he can unwind time.

Oliver Wendell Holmes comes to mind,
“I claim the Christian Pagan’s line,

Humani nihil,—even so,—
And is not human life divine?”

I watch the man go in reverse, on and on
across my screen, into shadows, disappear.

Gina Williams

Alone I lie awake; I have become
like a frail bird without its flock.
At times loneliness haunts me;
Those who know me are now distancing.
I eat takeaways as my nutrition,
and mingle my drink with tears
because of my urban isolation.
My days are like an evening shadow;
Having entered it I’ve lost myself.

I am like the trailing sigh of the destitute;
None is yet to hear my guess,
That for future generations,
When all this is over and done with,
And new days are cast out of sorrow,
That in spite of the quintessence of them
Life cannot be as it were,
And can be locked down when necessary,
For reasons that might vary.

Francis Bede