Oz Hardwick

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End Credits

Music swells, and the cast take their final positions. The tragedies and misunderstandings have made everyone stronger, and now it’s time for gazing into eyes. We’re all done with words, and the stars have already signed their scripts and listed them on eBay, while minor characters have added them to the mounds of accumulated recycling or laid them in the bottom of budgie cages. Of course, you don’t see domestic caged birds like you used to when we were children, which is all to the good, and the few you do come across are word perfect in movie roles of which their owners can only dream. Strings surge, and it’s all about lights, camera angles, post-production, and those names that skid across the screen long after the punters have left. I was once an extra in a film shoot, though the scene was cut from the rushes. I once bought a signed script of my favourite movie, though there was no way of confirming its authenticity. I once saw a budgie in a cinema, pecking at spilled popcorn and grumbling about how it could have been a contender.

Nocturne

While the black dog sleeps at the foot of the bed, the flat man slides under the door. He leans like a tombstone or a broken tooth, suited elbow scuffing mantelpiece dust. It’s a long time since there was a fire in here, he says, in a voice that could as easily be accusation as mere observation, and he looks at you – because this is your room, not mine – with poorly photoshopped eyes which look like they belong to a dog. He strikes a match and touches it to the bookcase, illuminating words, and the flame skips from Aldiss to Zamyatin in half a beat of a flat heart. There’s no more time for the future here, he says, and the black dog’s poised at his heel, wide awake, flames where his eyes used to be.

Guests at the Mansion

The gates grind open with all those fright night sound effects, squealing like rusty cats. Up close, the inhabitants look less like beasts and monsters, less like the threat we’ve always been warned against. By the light of our torches, their faces look – if not like ours, then like those we have known and cared about for as long as we can remember. Their barks and howls, it transpires, have been nothing but tricks of dark, distance, and an inculcated unwillingness to recognise the contours of our shared language. They offer us tea and delicate cakes, and we share identical stories of growing into unremarkable lives. Thank you, we say as the clock strikes twelve, and we unwrap our stakes and hammers.

Oz Hardwick is an award-winning European poet and academic, focusing mainly on prose poetry, who has published “a dozen or so” collections, most recently the chapbook Retrofuturism for the Dispossessed (Hedgehog, 2024). Oz is Professor of Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University, though he wishes he was bassist in a Belgian space rock band. www.ozhardwick.co.uk

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