Zoe Gilbert’s and Jarred McGinnis’s ‘Keep Your Miracles To Yourself’ is bizarrely serene I think that’s why I like it, a quietly endearing love story. Scratch Books, run by loveli Tom Conaghan, recently published eight short stories each by two authors ~ Duets (2024). ‘Keep Your Miracles To Yourself’ (no. 2) opens “I leaned over the railing, looking into the green glass of the canal’s water. A mobility scooter and a traffic cone […] lay at the bottom like Pompeii lovers. Beautiful and gross in the way only cities manage honestly”. Hook. Ex-alcoholic narrator Martin nervously anticipates telling wife Jo he’s been fired, especially cos they’ve just had a little bébé (born by emergency caesarean into a “grey island”). He takes a walk. Cue gorish-dead pigeon “Event” then maddo happenings. An agent from firm “Auricle” with nails “black in a style called Stiletto” and “earrings like small chandeliers, which plinked and tinkled” (I wish it said “plinked and tinked”) and a perverse aspiration to eat lead from a special “gold propeller-pencil” forcibly installs a singing mouth into “Chosen One” Martin’s belly, visible thru glass portal abit like Teletubbies. Martin returns after the belly-installation to Jo and “rubbed her back and told her it’s alright; we’ll be alright”. Martin’s belly performs at the South Bank Centre’s Festival Hall (a disaster) and the resulting celebrity means Martin gets his job back and he and Jo live happily ever after, reading bébé to sleep. Triumphant. In the margins I’d scrawled Sophie Ellis-Bexter’s ‘Groove Jet’ (2000) had been playing whilst I was reading it ~ apt !

Second of eight stories in DUETS, Scratch Books 2024