September 2025: ‘Heavyness’ & a REMAINS magazine discount code

I was very pleased when Andy Cox and Richard Wagner returned to publishing this year with REMAINS, following Andy's retirement in 2024 and the shuttering of TTA Press, longtime stalwart of genre short fiction publishing in the UK.

I first came across TTA’s horror mag BLACK STATIC in a newsagents by the Level park in Brighton, something it’s hard to imagine happening nowadays; and in BS #31 Andy gave me my first paid sale, for ‘Sister’, which later become the oldest story of mine collected in I Would Haunt You if I Could. That was in 2012, which feels so long ago.

The earliest BLACK STATIC story I remember loving was Nicholas Royle’s ‘The Obscure Bird’, in #18, later collected in Royle’s superb collection Ornithology. The magazine gave me a target: I wanted to write something good enough to appear in its pages.

Some stories, as I was writing them, would straightaway feel like Black Static stories, and Andy would accept three more over the next eight years: ‘Out of the Blue’, in #64; ‘Other Houses’ in 2019’s #71; and ‘The Turn’ in #74, in 2020. Each of these would found find a place in Haunt You, and I think they amounted to the first stories of mine in which my writing had begun to feel like my own.

I’m very pleased to say I’ll be making my REMAINS debut in issue #4, in January, with a novelette spun out of idle fantasising about some kind of exoskeleton that might assist me when my ME/CFS symptoms are bad. The story develops my interest in a certain motif, which I won’t mention here, and sits alongside some other work I think of under the umbrella title strange families.

I suppose all families are strange.

I’d quite like some kind of exoskeleton today. Pain and fatigue and some of the subtler symptoms of my illness have been playing minor havoc with me over the last few weeks. I had planned to include some short reviews of the things I’ve been reading, and had hoped to show pictures of the second prototype of the zine I’m making, but planning is for people without chronic illnesses.

Anyway, here’s an excerpt from ‘Heavyness’. It’s quite a long excerpt, but it’s a long story, and I think this ends it at a good point. At the end of this post, you’ll find a code for a 25% discount on a 4-issue subscription to the magazine, courtesy of Andy Cox, should you wish to subscribe. 

‘Heavyness’

1.     Prefatory remarks – my sister’s death – our environs

On the Tuesday I collected my sister’s ashes from the funeral directors on Lewes Road. That it was an ordinary Tuesday, overcast and constantly on the verge of rain, felt remarkable. It seemed that a change so immense in implication for my own affairs should somehow mark the world beyond it, as if Esther had borne a Royal title and grand formal displays of mourning ought to have interrupted the course of everyday life. That things should proceed as normal felt scandalous. Of course we were not royalty. We live –  had lived –  small and modest lives, bound together since infancy, Esther eight years older than I.

Outside the funeral directors, a disreputable little company in a mean, narrow-windowed building by the name of Hermann & Sons, a constant flow of traffic made its din. The Lewes Road, one of the main arterial routes into town, is always clogged with double-decker buses, Heavy Goods Vehicles, private-hire taxicabs, motorcycles, and those private cars that grow more monstrously engorged with every year. My sister and I had sometimes talked of moving away, because the pollution is bad and the environment increasingly rowdy with that racket that seems daily to penetrate deeper into every aspect of life, but such a decision would have been quite unlike us. We live – had lived – between downland and coastline, in a valley in which pollution pools, darkening buildings and blackening lungs, in a house that had belonged to our family for generations. 

There are numerous funeral directors along this stretch of Lewes Road. Esther once joked that, just as a fishing village grows up along the coast, so too do the businesses of death sprout along a river of fumes. That she herself should succumb to a lung condition ought to have come as no surprise. She had suffered from asthma and debilitating allergies for many years. I knew this, but knowledge is useless. Though the brain might grasp the truth of things, we do not think with our brains. Thought is a matter of the gut and heart. On those levels I had never accepted that my sister was mortal, that she would die.

As I walked home from Hermann & Sons, bearing a chintzy, nasty little urn of poor workmanship, one I would be sure to quickly replace, I marveled at the weight Esther appeared to have acquired in death. Some believe the spirit weighs in at 21 grams, which the body is supposed to lose upon the expiry of its animating force: doubtless, a fanciful idea. Carbonised, as was her desire, Esther seemed to have lost mass but gained in pounds, densely compacted into that feeble vessel. Perhaps there was something psychosomatic in this sensation – an irony my sister would have enjoyed.

From the corner where our street branched off Lewes Road, I was compelled to hurry, for the durable plastic ‘bag for life’ in which I carried her remains was threatening to tear. The vision of her urn smashing on the ground, to disperse her ashes across the pavement, was too horrifying to contemplate. When I had finally triple-locked the front door behind me, I was red-faced and panting, and enflamed with that pain that likes to dance from place to place across my body.

With difficulty I removed the respirator from my face, then placed it up on the coat hook by the door. From the adjacent hook Esther’s own respirator dangled still. Of course these were custom models, designed several decades before by our immensely capable father. As I stared at Esther’s respirator, the thought that she would never wear it again overcame me, and I felt suddenly weighed down. I thought of the heavyness, as she had called it. Outside it had started to rain. 

2.     A novel illness – doctors – suited & booted 

While I shared some of Esther’s sensitivities – to malt, apples, certain synthetic fibres – I was not myself asthmatic. Instead, from the age of twelve, I had found myself afflicted with joint pain, migraines, sensitivities to sunlight and heat, and bouts of debilitating fatigue. I had always been triple-jointed, capable of feats of contortion that would cause others immediate alarm, and from that year of my life I also became prone to dislocations. It seemed at any moment my body might just decide to disassemble.

In this matter my parents gained little assistance from our family doctor, a portly man who rode a motorcycle and looked to my young eyes like Father Christmas in civilian clothes. After a slow examination in which I was poked and prodded, made to stand and made to sit, made to turn and lean, to jump and crouch, in which my temperature was measured and my ears and throat inspected and my armpits and testicles vigorously probed for abnormalities, that kindly fellow referred me to a psychiatrist. Said head-doctor, an enormously tall man, very thin and wan, whose single hoop earring, a dandyish affectation, for some reason commanded my attention, declared me a most remarkable case of somatisation disorder, a dubious honour indeed. I would leave his dark, low-ceilinged office in a rather unwelcoming Gothic pile, a curious place in which to treat the psychically disordered, issued with boilerplate advice to rest, hydrate, and ensure my stress levels remained low. A subsequent course of physiotherapy led only to the exacerbation of my symptoms.

Following these fruitless efforts to enlist the help of specialists, my parents resolved to support me as best they could themselves. In this they would prove remarkably successful.

For my mother, such support initially consisted in the provision of a high-protein diet. In due course she would exclude anything that wasn’t meat from my intake; eventually, only red meat, especially blood pudding and liver, washed down with milk, preferably raw, remained. I more or less follow these strictures to this day – although I permit myself the indulgence of the occasional scotch egg, a substantial meal in itself – and it has served me well. My father’s efforts, on the other hand, led him to the workshop that was his private den at the end of our little garden.

There he began to devise and manufacture items of what might be called clothing in leather, cotton, polymer, and metal: sheaths, braces, stirrups, slings, and things resembling corsets that somehow incorporated a slew of the preceding accoutrements into their design. If these sound like heavy, awkward constructions, unpleasant and unhelpful to wear, then in the early days they were awkward and unpleasant and unhelpful to wear: but my father had the bit between his teeth…

Have you skipped straight to the end for the discount code? I’ll forgive you. Many thanks to Andy for the this offer, and for finding a place for the story. The code is ‘Heavyness’.