Free Too Cold For Snow by Jon Gower

not.’ And with those words his number was well and truly up. On a cue from the floor manager Kylie and Charlene wheeled the familiar wooden contraption into place in front of the band area where its members were donning sou-westers and rubber coats.
    The audience broke into spontaneous braying.
    ‘The stocks! The stocks!’
    Zombified by shame, Marty was led to the stocks where his hands were slotted through the holes and one by one, in a curiously sombre Indian file, the audience members walked up, row by row, to hurl buckets of food-swill at him. Not a frenzy. All controlled to ensure that he was still being drenched as the credits rolled. They intercut shots of Dirk being sick in a huge brown bag.
    In a house on the southern rim of the city a priest was watching the box to fill his mind after what had happened after choir practise – another young life besmirched-like wiping an oily rag across an innocent cheek.
    Even though he had been warned about the deadening effect of television, a very young Somali was resting awhile after his feats of memory, watching the buckets being hurled, embarrassed that his grasp of English wasn’t sufficient to understand all of Johnnie’s badinage.
    In a house in Canton a man switched off the set and went to piss in a bucket because he didn’t have the energy to climb the rope to the bathroom.
    As the announcer’s voice went into the ‘same time next week’ spiel, Luther opened a bottle of champagne and punched in the numbers of Brennan’s mobile so he could congratulate him for a job well done. His girlfriend Tristar cut a couple of lines of coke, her long, black painted fingernails clacking on the mirror surface like crows’ beaks. The Bolivian marching powder was high grade. It would be a night of manacles and sweat.
    In his dressing room the star of the show took off his jacket and put it carefully on a hanger. He thought to himself about the wares he peddled, which pulled people together, brought them close. This virtual community in a world going mad. This flickering lamp, lighting the faces of the brain dead, who’ll go on watching even as the stars descend and the cities burn. Watch it in widescreen, watch it on plasma screen. Watch it any which way. Johnnie knows.

A Cut Below
     
     
    Despite a whirling wind which threatened to throw the rugby posts into the air like chopsticks Keiron Lye put in another performance of a lifetime. Yes, another performance of a lifetime, outstripping even his own abundant excellence, in the face of a mid Wales monsoon, where the rain and wind hurled buckets of water into the players’ faces. They were drenched in a way more profound than any one of the bedraggled supporters could remember. It was wetter even than that fabled trip to Nantyffyllon where Hughie the prop almost drowned in a ruck when his head was forced down into a huge puddle on the half way line.
    Holding his head up as best he could in a wind which wanted to bend his spine into a sickle, Keiron scythed in from the touchline, cutting through the defensive line like heated cheese wire through margarine. There were so many flailing arms reaching for him he felt like a man snorkelling among octopuses. Four very experienced players were made to look like lumbering dolts as he jigged and weaved through the spray. Keiron finally palmed off Resolven’s full back, who fell down in an awkward pantomime motion.
    There were old men in the crowd who thought they would take their last ever gasp watching Keiron play. He was excitement on legs. Their hearts raced at the mere sight of him. One of them had to clutch his chest cage, so severe was the thrill of one of his tries, catching a grubber kick from one of the centres and making a dummy pass before outflanking three men in a line by running the long way round them, leaving him with a good five clear yards between his touchdown and the nearest trailing opponent. He was a player with southern hemisphere skills: you couldn’t laud