‘UNCLE FRIDAY’ & ‘THE CARAVAN MOVES ON’

N.J.J. Smith is a photographer, electronic musician and philosopher based in Sydney, Australia.

UNCLE FRIDAY

Running a sleeve over his face, blood from his nose smears his cheek, the smell of it making his
stomach churn. Climbing to their flat eight storeys up, he curses the older boy who’s made vicious
sport of waiting for him outside their building, Jakob’s malformed lip an irresistible fixation for the
thick-faced bully and his entourage. With blood dripping from his nose into the dimpled channel
above his lip, Jakob coughs as he climbs, misting the concrete walls in a queasy pink spray.
On the landing below his flat, he stops, realizing it’s Friday—visiting day. The idea of another
nameless uncle wobbling about their flat brings a fresh fury; spitting like an asp, he settles on the
stairs, head between his knees, arms over his head, watching the blood splash between his tight
secondhand shoes. Squeezing his fists, he waits for the bleeding to stem, for the anger to ebb. But
when he hears his mother’s voice echo in the stairwell—unintelligible, her drunken cackle punctuated
by her visitor’s slap to her backside as they slur their prolonged goodbyes—he bites his lip to restrain
a wail that, if unleashed, would splinter every atom in its path.

When the door finally slams shut, Jakob’s temples throb to Uncle Friday’s heavy tread; his
breathing, loud and labored, accentuates his every step until they stop directly behind Jakob—his
shoes squeaking, the breath from his open mouth thick with the gin and cigarettes Jakob’s mother
serves up as a prelude, as a pretense. As Friday steps around him, Jakob peers over his arms to watch
him stagger, clutching at the railing as he turns back. Jakob recognizes this Friday’s uncle as the older
man who visits more often than the others, the one who always brings a sad-eyed smile and little
dime-store gifts. Catching his watery eyes, Jakob tucks his head back under his arms.
With Jakob’s mother’s scent still wafting from his skin, Friday offers a salutation.

“I want to wish you a very happy birthday tomorrow, Jaapje. And I want you to always
remember this: we’d never know a good pear if we’d never tasted the bad.” Getting no response, he
sighs. “I’m just saying you’re one of the good ones, Jaapje. Stay that way.” Still getting nothing from
the boy, Friday shakes his head and turns to resume his unsteady descent.

Lifting his head again, Jakob watches Friday’s greasy hair gleam under the fluorescents until he
disappears into the well. Having forgotten the date, the idea of another birthday party for two brings
his fury back to a boil as he stands to trudge up to their flat. Pausing at their door, all those birthdays
past rush to assault him again, one after another: the black pits of her eyes; the twist of her mouth; the
heat of her breath; the determined grind of her hips, cleaving away any distance he struggles to put
between them. His lip curling into a snarl, the taste of blood metallic in his mouth, he takes a deep
breath; opening the door, he enters silent as snow.

Framed in the open French doors that let out onto their tiny balcony eight storeys above the
Kleinevossenplein, she wears a short t-shirt that covers none of her nakedness from the waist down.
Waiting for Friday to step out into the street below, muttering to herself, she doesn’t sense Jakob
moving behind her, his arms stretching out before him as she leans over the railing to shout down to
Friday, now lurching from the building into the deserted Kleinevossenplein. Hearing her vulgar
sendoff, Uncle Friday chuckles; stopping to look up, he blinks as the smile freezes on his face,
entirely unprepared for the terminal velocity of her graceless farewell.

THE CARAVAN MOVES ON

The grey landscape stutters by like movies Samil remembers from before everything changed—images
cast upon taut canvases spanning horse-drawn carts, the silver apparitions flickering for gatherings held
rapt in the luminous dusk. Those silent ghosts had ignited the twilight, quavering for a congregation of
the mesmerized. Today, though, it’s the horizon shimmering with strange light as a mute cargo lurches
into every bump and jolt shuddering through the bus’s chassis. Today, crossing the cratered floodplain,
Samil and Eyal are being taken to a depot from where they’ll be freighted back to a place once called
home. But home means nothing to Samil now—just a mournful word denuded of everything but the
fading spectres of what might have been.

Watching lightning spider behind the virga of a summer tempest whorling through the far-off
Dinara, he’s trying to remember his mother’s face, how it creased when she spoke of the sea—of
where the earth fell into the waves, of where the tides rose and fell with the breath of time. Smiling,
she had promised that one day they would journey there together, all of them. But some promises,
Samil has since learned, are doomed from the making.

Turning, he watches Eyal’s fingers pick vacantly at his shirt, at that ever-alien mark burned into
his forearm. Mimicking the tic, Samil’s fingers trace the contours of his own stain, buried beneath the
tattered sleeves of his sweater. He knows his mother never imagined this sea, the one in which Eyal is
slowly drowning—lost to a different tide, the one dragging him deeper within by the day.
In those final hours that he’d believed his last, Eyal’s mind had finally pushed out the horrors it
could no longer bear, severing itself from the temporal world. Wife and daughters lost, he collapsed
inward, his psyche indiscriminately stripped of both its wretched debris and any remaining shred of
hope. Samil had been stripped away, too, that black tide leaving his son as alien to Eyal as the brand
on his arm.

Now, staring out at the ravaged plateau, it finally sinks in for Samil just how alone he really is:
his father now his charge, their roles reversed, left to scratch and beg their way through this savage
new world. Leaning into Eyal’s absent slouch, Samil sighs, their quailing future looming before him
as he begins to calculate everything that he and Eyal have already lost against the uncertain value of
the precious little they still have left to lose.

Cor de Wulf divides their life between the Pacific Northwest, Normandy, and the Netherlands. Their short fiction has appeared in Club Plum, Coffin Bell Journal, Flash Fiction Magazine, Bright Flash Lit, The Writing Disorder, Every Day Fiction, Ink in Thirds, and Blood Tree Literature. Their work has also recently been nominated by editors to the Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize 2025 Anthologies.