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artist, specializing in wildlife, but also doing science fiction.       
     
    He also writes science fiction/fantasy/horror stories. He has published two story collections, Slijepe ptice (Blind Birds — 2003) and Božja vu ica (The Divine She-wolf — 2010), and a book on cryptozoology. He has published his stories and texts all over the world. He’s also an editor.
     
    Aleksandar Žiljak has won six SFERA Awards for his science fiction writing, art and editorial work.

 
    John doted on the elite French touring car he’d devoted much of his time to restoring. Can his dead wife teach him there are other things worthy of his attention too?
    THE RESTORATION MAN
    by Simon John Cox
     
    John doesn’t stay long at the wake.
    It’s held upstairs at the Dun Tap, round the corner from the crematorium; just trestle tables and sandwiches and a hundred quid behind the bar for the mourners, who flock in after the service and croak their grief like ravens. He arrives last, circulates amongst them beneath heavy beams that smell of dust: lovely service, very respectful, it’s what she would have wanted. Someone gives him a beer. It feels heavy, and he drinks it too quickly. He leaves as soon as he feels that etiquette will allow.
    “Still in shock, I expect,” says a steel-haired aunt, and she smiles briefly after him before returning to the carcass of the buffet.
    At home, in the house where they lived, he is overcome by a feeling that she is nearby. Every time he walks into a room he feels as though she has just left it, senses that she is in the very next room, tells himself that if he can only get in there before she leaves …
    When he reaches the bedroom he pauses, stands and looks at the urn in his hands for a long time before finally placing it amongst the black-framed pictures on the narrow mantel, sliding them left and right to make room. Past selves smile out at him in grainy colour and black-and-white, and he suddenly realises that he can’t remember the last time he looked at any of these photographs. He picks up one of them and tilts it so the light from the lamp can help him to pick out the detail. His eyes aren’t what they were.
    They are on a beach that yawns away beneath a dark strip of sea. The sun is low in the sky and she is smiling broadly. She looks so young. His hair is thick and his forehead is smooth. It’s years ago.
    Brittany. He remembers it. He’d picked up a lead on an exhaust in Rennes, and she’d suggested that they make it a long weekend away, so they’d taken the car over on the ferry from Portsmouth. After they’d picked up the exhaust and politely admired the man’s mausolitic fleet, they’d driven back through low countryside bruised with heather and found a sweltering room at the tiny Hôtel Petit Bretagne , then they’d eaten, slept and walked together until the sun was long dead. They were young then, not long married. He remembers enjoying the weekend.
    He picks up another photo, but in this one she isn’t smiling. Not properly. She’s trying, but the sun is in her eyes and her hair is being whipped across her forehead by one of the winds that scour in off the Channel. The smile’s there, if you look, but she’s wearing it like a uniform. Where was it taken? Brighton? Hastings? He doesn’t remember.
    Was he even there, behind the camera? Or was he in a van, being bullied by Parisians on the Périphérique , on his way to beg and barter a headlamp or a carburettor out of some pinched, mean-spirited collector?
    Something begins to nag at him, a vague feeling that refuses to solidify and remains perceptible only on the fringe of his awareness.
    Before he goes to bed he lays out a skirt and blouse on the back of the chair, like she used to before the chemotherapy dredged the strength from her limbs, and he wonders why he’d never done it for her before. Outside, a dog barks. He lies down, then he turns to the side and says goodnight to the space in the bed where she used