The sunset leaks behind her head, a clot of purple. Smile. She takes the selfie five times – still not right. Happiness shouldn’t be this hard to capture. An overweight pair further along the terrace crack up and clink beers – some private joke? The mood shifts.

A surge of guests, now, arriving in navy kimonos, gliding, schmoozing, and chattering like an outdated modem. She puts on her sunglasses, orders a mojito at the bar, and taps her finger distractedly at a menu. The bar’s TV blares showbiz news – another stale, red-carpet pageant, wannabes dazzled by photographers’ lights. No one she even knows. Then some too-pretty comedian is faking her own meltdown. The noise swells on the terrace, unceasing and urgent. Her breath tightens.

She flees towards the spa suite, striding down long labyrinths of passageways. Uniformed staff pass by, buffing the floor with contraptions that hum contentedly, clearing guests’ tracks. The hotel will accept no lingering trace of her presence; soon, her recovery will shrink to a residue of memories and botched photographs. Even when anonymous in a foreign country, the shadow of her old life will not leave her.

At the margin of the spa, guests skitter to and fro through glass doors. A keg-bellied man rasps a feral snore in a Lullaby Chair. A willowy blonde towels her limbs, bending a leg against a bench as if her thighs feel compelled to confess how lithe they are. Other guests buzz with war stories of vigorous treatments. She slips inside, shunning the hive.

She chooses a footbath and slides her heels in. The water is arctic-cold. Garra rufa fish gather round her feet, nibbling skin. At her heels, her toes, mobs of them congregate – little grey hunger-machines. Their tails ripple quickly side to side, squirming in gratification, relentless as they feed off her flesh. And yet she feels no more than a tickling. How they devour her, these affable parasites!

She withdraws her feet – tender, a raw shade of pink. She pats them with a towel, walks on virgin skin through the corridors back towards her room. What craving did those creatures have for her body? For once, desire was welcome. This is surely what retreat means: reduce, peel back, until the new version emerges, delicate and sore.

But soreness is already there, breath tensed in her chest like a throat-trapped bone. The paparazzi – would they have stopped, would they have flayed her till she bled?

As the passageway tilts, something flits about her, feasting, flicking its tail in pleasure.

Michael Loveday’s novella-in-flash Three Men on the Edge (V. Press, 2018) was shortlisted for the 2019 Saboteur Award for Best Novella. He also writes poetry, with a pamphlet He Said / She Said published by HappenStance Press (2011). Website: https://michaelloveday.com/

Image via Pixabay

Mama placed small bags of popcorn on the coffee table while Father set up the new-fangled television—the first in this town of 113 citizens. Five-year-old Wendy skipped around the living room, dropping napkins on every seat until she fell over the footstool and into her father, almost toppling the Motorola off its stand. He grabbed her arm, smacked the back of her legs three times, and ordered her upstairs to bed.

She didn’t go to bed, and though she wasn’t allowed in her parents’ room, she stood at their window, clutching and twisting the curtain as chattering grown-ups crowded through the front door, their kids squeezing by them, shouting until her father’s voice boomed, and everyone quieted. Lively music chimed through the floor boards, the new TV switched on.

Wendy released the crumpled window lace and tiptoed into her own dark room to creep under the blankets. For her, there would be no playmates, no popcorn, no I Love Lucy.

*      *      *

After moving to Oregon, Wendy and her folks drove back over the Rockies each August, the Dodge sweltering with windows up, ice melting in the tiny air cooler. Still, she was glad. She would be ignored in the Midwest, her father thankfully distracted by relatives and long-time friends.

Inside her grandparents’ clapboard house, she slept in the attic, read books, drew pictures, and when her folks went visiting, she spent time with her grandmother, feeding wet laundry into the washing machine ringer while they sang “Are you sleeping, Brother John.” She trailed after her grandfather through rows of vegetables, feasting on peas straight from the pod, breathing in the rich smell of soil and tomatoes and corn.

But once in a while, her father insisted she go visiting with them. One of the families had a simple wood-frame swing set in the backyard, two plank seats on long chains. The kids challenged each other to see who could swing highest. Wendy took her turn against one of the boys. He was bigger, stronger, so she pumped with all her might, the breeze cooling her face, the chains beginning to jerk. The others cheered “higher, higher” until Wendy felt grass rushing toward her, the kids yelling “jump, jump.” She leapt off just as the wooden contraption tipped to the ground. The boy broke his arm. Her father blamed Wendy, his anger hurting more than the pulsing pain in her sprained ankle. Her mother sat silent.

*      *      *

Even in the kitchen, on the opposite side of the old Victorian from where her father slept, Wendy and her mother spoke in hushed tones about Wendy’s community college classes, her newly-made friends. Wendy washed the breakfast dishes, her mother dried, until a skillet slipped and clanged onto the tile floor. They froze, eyes locked.

He didn’t always wake to noise, but still, they held their breath until they heard him shuffling down the hallway. Wendy turned back to the sink, splashing water. Mama nudged glasses in the cupboard into precise rows.

“What the hell!” He was in his underwear, big hand swiping his bed-lined face, barking, “Can’t you two shut up?”

“I’m sorry. Clumsy me.” Mama gave a flustered laugh, then asked if he wanted coffee or a grilled cheese sandwich since he’d slept through breakfast.

His mouth twisted with disgust. “You pinheads are useless,” he said and scuffed back to bed.

Mama silently closed the cupboard door. Wendy drained the sink. They no longer talked.

*      *      *

Stalled on a railroad track, her parents were killed by a train, leaving Wendy alone in the thick forests of coastal Oregon where fog and cold seeped into their drafty Victorian.

Her father’s sister called from the Midwest after the funeral to see if Wendy wanted a box of her father’s memorabilia. “You know, pictures, diplomas, that kind of thing.”

Wendy surprised herself and said, “I have vacation time. What if I come for a visit?”

“That would be lovely.” Aunt Dinah was pleased.

“But I don’t want his stuff.”

In Indianapolis, in the small tract house where her aunt now lived, they reminisced about the farm, egg collecting, hiding in the hayloft, riding cows with her cousins.

“It was my favorite place,” said Wendy. “I always felt so free there.” They were sitting at the old oak table brought from the farmhouse.

Aunt Dinah reached out and took Wendy’s hand.

“I’m sorry we couldn’t go to the funeral,” she said. “My broken hip—”

“That’s okay,” said Wendy. “I didn’t expect you to come.”

The aunt leaned closer. “I loved your mother, you know. And I know how hard your father was on the two of you.”

Wendy felt her eyes prickle and asked a question she didn’t know she would ask. “Why was he so mean?”

Aunt Dina leaned back against the chair. Sighed. “He was always like that. He didn’t get along with me or your Aunt Eunice. I guess it was because he was the youngest and the only boy.”

“So, they doted on my father? Spoiled him?”

Aunt Dinah looked surprised. “No. Not that. It was the opposite. Your grandfather beat him every day of his life.”

Wendy frowned. “Beat him?” Her grandfather has always been so kind to her, she never suspected him of doing anything mean. She stared at her aunt. “Every day?”

The older woman shook her head. “Maybe not, but it felt that way. He never touched me, but he’d get drunk and pound on your dad.”

The sun streamed into the kitchen, a car horn honked on the street, and Wendy squeezed her aunt’s hand. “He never hit us, my mother or me.”

“There’s that, at least.”

“That’s a lot when you think about it.” Wendy studied the grain in the table, its dark and light golden swirls. Something was loosening. She glanced at Aunt Dinah and said, “Can we look at that box? The one with my father’s stuff?”

Gay Degani has a chapbook, Pomegranate, a full-length collection, Rattle of Want, and a suspense novel, What Came Before. Most of her publications have be published in online journals including Atticus Review, Smokelong Quarterly, 3 A.M., Yellow Mama, Gone Lawn, and Fictive Dream.

Image via Pixabay

Week 1

Keith is woken by the bleeping of monitors. He must have nodded off for a second. Why do they make these rooms so stiflingly hot? For a second his brain fails to recognise where he is, then it all comes back with a gut punch: The ambulance, the blood, the bustle of people pushing him aside. The complex mixture of emotions; guilt that he wasn’t there, worry that it will be too late, the sheer helplessness of having no option but to give up his wife to a roomful of strangers. Kathleen’s still sleeping face is half covered beneath an oxygen mask. Keith hopes her brain has shut down into something like a low power mode. Conserving its energies for essential functions. He squeezes her hand. ‘Breathe,’ he whispers.

Week 2

Keith has moved out of the family accommodation. Their new home is on Fraser Ward; a bright bay down the far end of a mint-green corridor with six beds, each with a semi-conscious occupant. The nurses in their plastic aprons and bright blue tunics swish to and fro like damselflies, never alighting for long in any one spot. Kathleen sleeps most of the time, seemingly oblivious to Keith and her surroundings. Keith prefers this place; the pace here is more restful, less frantic than the cacophony of the ICU. There are visiting hours that must be observed, mealtimes and drug rounds that occur with reassuring regularity. Keith feels his shoulders relaxing, Kathleen has survived the stage of immediate danger, he reasons. If she was going to die she would have done it by now he reasons.

Week 3

Keith pulls into his parking spot opposite the yellow Mini. He has found it easiest to go straight to the furthest car park from the main building rather than spend time circling for a space. The walk allows him some exercise on his daily trip to Fraser ward. If ever there is another car occupying his space, an irrational sense of outrage sweeps over him. The yellow Mini is always there before him and acts as a landmark on his return journey. He has never seen the owner of this car. He wonders if maybe its former occupant parked up one day feeling unwell, went into the hospital and never came back out again. It would be easy to get lost in there, to follow the arrows down the windowless green tunnels, through doors and down stairwells, before collapsing exhausted into a side room labelled ‘sluice’.

Week 4

Keith eats on the move now. Evening meals are whatever packaged sandwiches are left in the shop. Lunches are Kathleen’s leftover sponge puddings, washed down with tea the colour of brick dust. The puddings come in lidded steel dishes, four varieties served in rotation: syrup, marmalade, chocolate and spotted dick. The lunch supervisors give one to Keith, knowing that Kathleen won’t eat hers. He knows them all by name now. His favourite is Jenna with the blue hair, her unconventional colours add some much needed gaiety to the surroundings. These are the things he notices now. He does not notice how his trousers hang from his frame, how his face has become drawn and tired. There is no one to remind him to visit the barber or to change his slowly greying shirt. If he looks into a mirror at all, it is only to reverse his car.

Week 8

Keith’s birthday has come and gone, unmarked. He does not take account of dates anymore. He registers the days of the week, but not how many have passed. He doesn’t notice that the car is beginning to smell like a bin that hasn’t been emptied in a while. The back footwells are filling with sandwich packets, coffee cups and parking tickets. A warning light flashes on the dashboard. Keith knows only that it is Wednesday. The library trolley comes through Fraser Ward on Wednesdays, usually pushed by Sheila who wears her glasses on a purple chain around her neck. Keith has been reading the latest Maeve Binchy to Kathleen, although she has slept through most of it. Lately he has taken to staying on the ward until 10pm, an hour past visiting hours, but nobody has commented.

Week 10

The nurses have started talking to Keith about moving on. This feels like a personal affront, like he has been caught busking outside the town hall, though they are quick to assure him this is not the case. There are visits from social workers and therapists, ‘assessments of needs’, and talk of placements, facilities, specialist rehabilitation. Keith does not know what to say to these people. His mind feels like it has been filled with expandable foam – it cannot process this new vocabulary. His heart beats faster when they approach with their folders. He nods and smiles in what he hopes are the right places, hoping they will see that neither of them are in a fit state to move anywhere.

Week 12

A new doctor visits Fraser Ward. She pulls up a high-backed chair and searches out Keith’s eye. She makes sure Keith has a cup of brick-dust tea when Cheryl comes by with the trolley. Keith cannot remember the words she uses, just that the irises of her blue eyes were ringed with a golden brown, like the colour of the tobacco he used to smoke before Kathleen decided he should stop. The doctor asks Keith to sign some papers about not resuscitating Kathleen in the case of cardiac arrest. There didn’t seem to be an option not to sign them.

Keith holds Kathleen’s cool hand on top on the bed sheet. There is an angry red bruise covering most of it where a new cannula was inserted yesterday. There were no sponge puddings today, but Keith found he didn’t have an appetite anyway.

Week 13

Mick the gay porter delivers a new patient to Fraser Ward only an hour after Nigel the surly porter took the previous occupant elsewhere. He says hello to Keith who raises a limp hand in response. The nurses and their assistants come and go. Barb comes round offering newspapers and snacks. Keith shakes his head. He wonders if anyone will notice if he does not go home tonight. After the last visitors leave for the day, he leans back in his chair, slips off his shoes, and closes his eyes. The bleeping of the monitors is strangely comforting.

Week 14

It is Monday morning and Staff Nurse Andrew is doing her last observations of the night shift. She reaches the last bay of Fraser Ward and checks her watch; her shift finishes in ten minutes. Kathleen Harris is sleeping. Nurse Andrew checks the drip and notes the observations on her chart. She registers that something is missing from this cubicle but cannot think what it is. But there is something extra that wasn’t there before. Next to the vinyl covered high-backed chair, is another chair; a dirty grey colour, the upholstery is worn and smells faintly of hospital dinners. Next to it is a pair of man’s shoes. Nurse Andrew wonders where the chair could have come from and makes a mental note to bring it out on the next hospital ‘dump the junk day’. She touches the forehead of Kathleen Harris and moves on to her final patient.

Rebecca Field lives and writes in Derbyshire. She has been published online by Riggwelter Press, Spelk fiction, The Cabinet of Heed and Ellipsis Zine among others. Rebecca has work in the 2018 and 2019 UK National Flash Fiction Day Anthologies and tweets at @RebeccaFwrites

Image via Pixabay

It is one hundred steps from the spine of the hill down to the big house, and the view is east. Out over the deer park’s remains, out across the Republic. Over the ocean to unambiguous England. To Italy, where your husband’s grandfather found inspiration for this garden.

Seven terraces, graduating to sea. A lapsed geometry: yew hedges, wild strawberries bursting terracotta pots. Father-in-law planted rhododendrons; now the garden is feral. You salt the walks, tread the weeds. Move down, one step at a time.

From the ruined stable block you see mussel fishermen, hoisting barrel floats. The smaller shells are cut adrift to pepper the seabed. The bigger shells, constrained in mesh, swing like tuberous legs. They are sent back into the water to kick their heels until harvest. The symmetry of grey plastic floats reminds you of graveyards.

On the final terrace, four cannon are aimed west. Out over Fastnet, Ireland’s teardrop. Long ago, French frigates came here to shrug off the English. Pity no one thought to tell the locals, who hid their cattle, fled into the hills. One frigate sunk, the rest blown out of the bay by a freak wind. Independence might have come so much earlier, but for a wind.

Turnstones surge the shoreline. Brother-in-law tells you that their recorded food includes human corpses and coconut. In a country where one is never more than five miles from a site of human massacre, the corpses are understandable, even ecological, the turnstones doing their bit. It is the coconuts, the notion of exotic incomers bobbing into this bay, that stays with you. Today a local woman stands in knee-deep water, scooping jellyfish with her bare hands, hurling them to a desiccating death on the shore.

Your mother once asked: when the tide is out, do you forget the sea? Wind forces salt-tipped hair into your mouth.

Your husband’s family gave the locals away to the governors for generations – yet they were permitted to live, their big house to stand undisturbed. You can’t think why. The house is decaying now, open during the season to paying tourists.

Sinking. Turnstones. But for a wind.

When your husband dies, you move down the hill to the gatehouse. Its exterior walls are overspread with tiny maidenhair ferns. They would grow in your eyes if you stood still long enough.

Gail Anderson won the 2019 Scottish Arts Trust Story Awards, placed in the top three in the Fish Publishing Flash Fiction competitions for both 2018 and 2019, was shortlisted for the 2018 Bridport Prize (Flash), and won the 2018 Winchester Writers’ Festival Poetry and Memoir Prizes. In 2019, her work has been published in Ambit, Crannog, Strix, the Fish Anthology, the Aesthetica Creative Writing Annual, The Southampton Review and elsewhere. Weekdays she does communications for the University of Oxford; weekends she can be found in her boat on the River Thames.

Image via Pixabay

Frank can’t quite believe it was two years ago. Really? Two years? As ever with these things he does a double take, tries to relate the whole incident to some other event. Definitely after Harrison and Annie married. Had to be, since he met Klara at their wedding. So ok, when was that? Ah bollocks. Two? Really? He checks Klara’s expression. She’s looking at him like he should have ticked off the hours since what she has just now started referring to as ‘last year’s catastrophe’.

“Then show me.” Klara reaches out for his hands clasped behind his back.

His mouth is clammed as tightly shut as his hands are held behind him.

“I insist,” she says.

Yeah, right. Like when was she promoted to a position of being allowed to insist?

“Oh joy,” she says. “I’m dealing with a two-year-old.”

Definitely before Christmas, Frank decides, the one just after Harrison and Annie’s wedding, which, hey, must be over two years ago because they now had a puppy.

“After all,” Klara has this snaky quality to her right in this moment, almost cobra like, “you did get me one, didn’t you?”

Frank’s head nods. Oh yes indeedy, he has got whatever is clutched behind him for her. Must have since today is the grand anniversary of ‘last year’s catastrophe’ so how could he have his hands clenched any purpose other than holding something for her. Something that will definitely fix ‘last year’s catastrophe’.

She steps towards him and breathes against his neck, her hair grazing his cheek, her scent doing that thing that it does. His scrotum tightens.

“Hmm?” she says.

The thing that is surely behind his back is a mere grab away now. He shoots his hands up high. She giggles.

“I knew you wouldn’t forget,” she says.

Their shagiversary? How he would like to protest that no way could he ever forget that momentous event, at least not two years in a row. Their shagiversary, for God’s sake! Since when was that a thing?

Klara tugs. It’s no good. Frank is forced to lower his cupped hands.

“This,” he opens his empty palms, “is all my love.”

Klara’s a little bit stunned, a little bit suspicious. She tries to check behind his back in case whatever gift she has imagined is appropriate for such an occasion has been left there.

“I give it all to you.” He places his hands against her heart.

“Fuck,” she says and swallows. “Why do you always do this, you bastard?” Then she smiles, then she’s crying and laughing. “You totally lovable bastard.”

Why is everything so complicated? Frank finds taking care of Frank hard enough, let alone holding in his head a clock with all the alarms set in unison with Klara’s. And now he’s got to try to prevent next year from being a catastrophe huger than ‘the year before last’s catastrophe’. He’ll simply have to remember today’s date. Just has to. Whatever it is.

Ruth Brandt’s short fiction has appeared in publications including the Bridport Prize Anthology 2018, Neon and Litro. She won the Kingston University MFA Creative Writing Prize 2016 and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions. She lives in Surrey with her husband and has two sons.

Image via Pixabay

I’m not exactly sure when I developed the obsession with the man on the porch across the street, but it was sometime after the incident with the bicycle. Admittedly, I’ve got a lot of time on my hands due to the fact that my boss considered my job to be redundant, and decided to downsize. My wife wants me to embrace the empty hours as a period of self-growth, and I am trying. I wake up early to go for a run by the river. I spend the afternoons drinking coffee, searching the internet for job opportunities, staring at my resume wondering how to improve my appeal to prospective employers.

The bicycle, a bad idea as it turned out, had been stored in my garage for ages. With all this time to kill while Sheila worked, I thought cycling might be a pleasant distraction. I dragged it out from behind a stack of rubber totes and parked it on the driveway. Like a kid on summer vacation I soaped it up, hosed it down, polished it until it shone. Hoisted my leg over the seat and took it for a test drive. Rode around the block, enjoying the feel of the breeze on my face, gaining enough confidence to sit up straight and let go of the handle bars. When I curved around the corner, expecting to glide smoothly into my driveway, the front tire hit a rock, the back tire flew up, and I pitched forward in a heap. I landed hard, legs on the road, arms splayed on the lawn. I quickly stood up and scanned the area to make sure there were no witnesses, and that was when I saw him.

He sat in a plastic garden chair, one long, denim clad leg elegantly crossed over the other. The pointed toe of his black boot dangled, a lit cigarette wafted smoky fumes from between the index and middle finger of his hand. His combed back hair was dark, sideburns extending down over the side of his gaunt cheekbones. He wore mirrored aviators and one of those thin plaid shirts with the pearl snaps, like a country and western lounge singer straight from Vegas.

Our houses are corner lots, facing each other like two opponents. Mine, a low bungalow built in the sixties, is fairly well maintained. The one across the street resembles a misshapen farm house, sort of rambling with its wooden siding and mismatched windows. In recent years it’s become increasingly dilapidated, neglected by various renters. The street numbers sprawled in red spray paint over the mailbox, which hung crookedly by one screw. The overgrown gardens mingled into the unmowed lawn. The place had been vacant for a few months, so when I noticed the man on the porch, curiosity overtook me.

The porch was not much of a porch really, more a small concrete pad on the left side of the house with an iron railing and two steps down to the sidewalk. And yet, when he appeared there, it was as though the whole place took on a different personality, an aura of assuredness. Embarrassed because of my fall and also because of my baggy track pants and too small t-shirt, I grabbed the bike, hauled it back into the garage, and disappeared inside to peer out the front window through the blinds.

The morning after the bicycle episode, I skulked around inside the house, reluctant to show my face to the man on the porch. I stood, coffee in one hand, the sheer fabric of the curtains clutched in the other, watching. He was there again, but now there was also a girl. A woman, maybe. Both of them sitting on those plastic chairs, him smoking, her scrolling through her phone. She wore a summer dress, her hair was long and shining black. From my perspective she could have been anywhere from eighteen to thirty. And for that matter, the man himself seemed similarly ageless. He might be forty, or even fifty. My mind pored over the implications of these ages. Was the beautiful girl his daughter? His wife? His sister? It was, I told myself, none of my business.

Sheila and I went away that weekend, and returned Sunday evening to the sight of a new fence complete with privacy lattice along the side yard of our neighbors’ property. Someone had scrubbed off the spray paint and placed a quaint number plate beside the straightened mailbox. Potted plants stood on either side of the step. “Wow, what an improvement,” Sheila said, “I knew that house had potential. Have you seen the new people yet?”

I blushed, inexplicably. “I have.”

“The other day,” Sheila continued, “I was talking to Mrs. Romano about that skunk that’s been prowling around our street, the one that sprayed her dog. She told me she met the girl, said her name is Rosanna.”

Mrs. Romano was a retired school teacher and always aware of everything that occurred on our street. “Oh really?” I asked, trying to sound casual, like I had never given these people a second thought. ” And the guy?”

“I think she said his name is Eli.”

“Eli” I repeated, trying out the sound of it, to see if the name suited the man in my mind. “Anyway”, I said, “I can’t figure them out.”

Sheila arched an eyebrow. “What’s to figure out?”

“I mean, I don’t know what their relationship to each other is.”

She huffed. “I don’t think you need to worry about it. You should be more concerned about finding work, or at least getting rid of that skunk.”

The days bled into each other and still I couldn’t get a job. Only so much time could be spent drafting cover letters, and invariably my mind would wander to the mystery of the house across the street. A shiny, expensive looking red pick-up truck had appeared in the driveway. How could Eli afford something like that? The front door, freshly painted, glistened while he sat and smoked the afternoons away. Where did he get the money for all these repairs, and who was doing them? Not once had I seen him coming or going, in or out of the house, or leaving the property. I certainly hadn’t seen him doing any work. The repairs all seemed to happen when I wasn’t looking, like magic. The woman, Rosanna, sat perpetually, serenely swiping through her phone. Toddlers tore across the front yard, seemingly more of them each day. Once I even saw a baby, bouncing in a jolly jumper in the doorway. To whom did these children belong? Eli didn’t discipline them, and Rosanna barely lifted her face up from that screen.

There is an old carriage lane behind those houses across the street that runs from our part of town straight down to the coal docks. I took to walking there late in the evenings after dinner on nights that Sheila went to yoga class. The lane, sort of gravelly and overgrown with wild flowers, provides a back entry to those yards. Many places have wooden gates, a few have installed new wrought iron ones. From that vantage point, when I reached Eli’s house, I could catch a glimpse through the bushes into his back yard. His new fence remained unfinished, the back edge of his property still lined with old chain link, the gate broken and leaning inward. This gave me a clear sightline to casually observe, to glean information about my new friend, as Sheila referred to him.

“Your friend Eli fixed those broken shutters on the second story”, she might say, or “looks like Rosanna likes lilacs, your friend put in a lovely new bush.” This teasing irked me, but I ignored her. I didn’t want her to know how fixated I had become, how unanswered questions woke me in the middle of the night. I mean, how did Eli make a living? And when? I never saw him lift a finger. How old was he, really? Was he retired? Independently wealthy? Were those his little kids scampering around the property, or his grandkids? Were they some kind of cult? I pictured him stretched out on a sagging mattress, all pale skin and thin limbs, Rosanna’s cheek resting on his chest. They share a cigarette, he blows smoke rings and she laughs, slides on top of him, long raven hair spilling over her breasts. I mean, what did this guy have that made him so special?

Tonight is Thursday, which means Sheila goes for drinks with her yoga friends. A perfect opportunity for one of my carriage lane reconnaissance missions. I stroll in the twilight, past familiar backyards, wave to Mrs. Romano who is lounging on a patio recliner reading a magazine. I approach the back of Eli’s property, slowing my step. The scent of marijuana wafts towards me on a cool breeze, Eli must be smoking weed in his back yard. I peer through the branches of a large bush and sure enough, he is there. Standing on the discolored patio blocks, inhaling deeply on a fat joint, aviators pushed up onto the top of his head, plaid shirt unbuttoned. He is lit up in profile by rays of moonlight, as though about to perform a soliloquy. The yard is deep, and there’s a potting shed between us; I don’t think he can see me. He turns, stubs out the joint with his boot, heads into the screened-in back room of the house. A light in the upstairs window comes on, and Rosanna is illuminated, brushing her hair. Overcome, I step through the broken gate, insert myself through leaves and branches, burrowing further until I’m actually standing behind the potting shed. Peeking around the corner, staring at Rosanna as she moves through the upstairs room.

The screen door slams and boot heels click on the patio blocks. I freeze, the realization that I am trespassing on private property causing my heart to accelerate until it pounds in my chest. I hear the brisk cracking sound of a can opening, and Eli sips on a cold one while I press myself flat against the back of his shed. I inch myself back, closer to the bushes, wedge my way into the patch of darkness between two tall Catalpa trees. A low whistling sounds across the lawn, and a shadow extends itself, lengthening, coming in my direction. Oh god I think, what am I doing? I watch as Eli slips past the shed and turns to face it, his back to me. I distinctly hear the sound of a zipper, and then a light trickling as he takes a piss. I am mortified. If I stay very still he won’t notice me, won’t catch me, won’t beat the shit out of me. Eli, I imagine, is skilled in the art of the fist fight. He would pull back one slender arm, slow and graceful, then clock me. I would spin out, dazed, while he took another sip of his beer and smiled rakishly.

Instead, he continues to whistle as he hitches up his pants, then opens the door of the shed and steps inside. I see this as an opportunity to escape, but just as I’m about to retreat to the carriage lane, I hear the snapping of twigs very near to me, and there, ambling out from under the leaves of an elephant ear hosta , is Mrs. Romano’s notorious skunk. It’s a big one, very round, with only a thin white stripe. When it’s about a foot away from the toe of my sneaker, I am on the brink of making a dash back to safety, but then Eli strides out of the shed with a bag of garbage. He grabs the metal lid of the bin and tosses the bag inside, thud.

The thudding sound coupled with the clank of the lid being put back in place agitates the skunk. It lets out a low growl and begins to stomp its feet, the tail straightens and points upward. I stand, rooted to the ground with the trees surrounding me. Eli leans forward slowly, cautiously takes a few steps in our direction. “Shoo” he warns, “go on now, get lost.” This is the first time I’ve heard his voice, soft and low, alluring, in spite of everything. He clicks his tongue and takes one more step. “There’s nothing here for you,” he calls gently into the shadows. I’m not sure who he’s talking to, me or the skunk, but I turn tail and run as the pungent odor of skunk spray fills the carriage lane behind me, and permeates my skin.

Sara Dobbie is a fiction writer living in Southern Ontario, Canada. Her work has appeared in Re-Side, The Spadina Literary Review, and is forthcoming in Ellipsis Zine, Crab Fat Magazine and Read More. Follow her on Twitter @sbdobbie.

Image via Pixabay

London was different then: the streets narrower, the alleyways darker, the lamps dimmer. The houses shabbier, the slums seedier. The clatter of horse and carriage over cobbled roads, a sound loud enough to mask a scream. Not a place to linger after dark, not even in the more gentrified quarters. The air thick with smoke and mist, most of it drifting up the Thames, the sea-cold fumes and the rolling soupers like galleons of the dead. Ideal cover for a Spring Heel. For the phantom we had all come to dread.

The constabulary was out in force that night (goaded on by a mutinous citizenry) and I was one of their number. Almost younger now than I can remember. Too young for what lay ahead.

Already primed for the hue and cry, I heard the whistles as soon as they pierced the air, strange sounds for a dockyard city, and started to converge on the alarm. Not again. Not another one. Terrified of what I would find, hoping I wouldn’t be the first one on the scene. But I was.

To my shame it wasn’t the body on the ground that caught my eye, terrible though that was, an essay in mutilation written on a butcher’s block. It was the tall figure that was already turning to leave, already half-hidden by the white vaporous air, that brought me to a halt. The Penny Dreadfuls had got it right: a real gent, top hat and cloak, as if on a night about the town, which (god help us all) he had been. A man in black, save for the silver red lining of the short cape.

The eyes I shall never forget, as black as the grave, and the glint of light on the well-used blade. And the moment when time seemed to stop and we looked at each other, eye to eye, no more than twenty feet apart. The fog took him before I could even shout. I gave chase as soon as I had the wits to follow, but he was already gone, back into the Whitechapel maze he knew so well.

I know I saw Jack that day. To the best of my knowledge, I am the only one who ever did.

And lived to tell the tale.

Mark Stewart is very much a champion of the short story in all its forms, including micro and flash fiction. His other literary passion is the essay, and many of these overlap with themes covered in his short stories. The themes include nature and the environment, history and speculative fiction. His website can be found here: https://markdestewart.wixsite.com/thescreamingplanet

Image via Pixabay

The reason maggot-racing was so exciting was because maggots have absolutely no sense of direction. Your maggot might be wiggling along strongly – well clear of the rest of the field, with a nice, clean, economical action, and plenty of fuel left in the tank – when, suddenly and inexplicably, s/he executes a 180-degree turn. And that was your chance of scooping the jackpot blown for another week.

The maggot-racing during the Thursday morning tea-breaks was the only good reason for working at King’s Wholesale Grocery. The wages were crap. The work was tough: no stacker trucks, no lifts. And there were just seven workers being ordered about by three (yes, three) bosses. There was old Mr King himself, gaga and terrifyingly unpredictable (or just plain terrifying), and his two grotesque sons – ‘Mr Geoff’ and ‘Mr Adrian.’ And that’s not counting Briggsy, the slippery and snide under-manager. Strangely, it was the maggot-racing that proved to be Briggsy’s nemesis.

Back then, in the Sixties, King’s was the only place in town that still smoked its own bacon – a product much loved, especially by the older generation. Our butcher, would prepare a side of bacon for the smokehouse on Thursday morning. The first step in his preparations was always that of laying-out the side of bacon on a sturdy wooden table and thumping it up and down its whole length with a heavy wooden mallet. The blows of the mallet would propel the maggots out of the meat as if they were jumping beans. And the dispirited workforce would be transformed into happy punters as they gathered round to select their potential champion maggots.

Each of us would contribute a sixpence to the pot, and the competing maggots would then be placed in the centre of a four-foot-wide chalk circle, drawn on the cement floor of King’s backyard, where we were accustomed to drink our mugs of tea and smoke our fags. The owner of the first wayward maggot to wiggle out of the circle would scoop the pool and have the bragging rights til the next Thursday.

My fellow-workers were a kindly crew: Roger, the butcher; Taffy, the van driver, for the afternoon deliveries; Ian, the gentle strongman ex-borstal boy, who was the foreman; Weird Willie; and Tank Thompson. The exception, of course, was under-manager Briggsy (Taffy: ‘That Briggsy’s from Planet Zog. He’s probably got completely different genitalia’). Briggsy wore a white ‘slop’, in contrast to our mucky brown slops, and – as conscious of his status as any army corporal – waged a constant verbal battle to assert his social, moral and intellectual superiority over the rest of us.

For example, if the conversation turned to the fortunes of the town’s football team (then in its glory years), he would interrupt with a report on his own favourite sport of ten-pin bowling: ‘You’re not right in the head, you lot. Fancy shelling out good money to stand on the terraces in the rain, when you can spend a whole evening in the warm, bowling.’ If we sought to question the wisdom of human-chaining the hefty boxes of firelighters all the way to the warehouse’s top-storey, Briggsy would allude mysteriously to a new storage plan allegedly being hatched by Mr Geoff in the front office: ‘You lot, you’ve no more understanding of economics than my granny. Mr Geoff wants ‘em all upstairs for a reason.’

Nevertheless, Briggsy could never quite conceal his enthusiasm for the maggot-racing: he was just as enthralled by circuses as the rest of us slaves. On the day that was the start of the trouble, Briggsy was particularly wound up because he was going for a hat-trick, having owned the winning maggot on each of the previous two Thursdays. He’d already upset Weird Willie (not weird at all, just a bit out-of-step) by reminding us all of Willie’s previous misguided attempt to nurture a champion maggot, taking it home from work in a matchbox. You could sense the tension in the yard, as we all waited for Roger, the starter, to give the word to release our maggots into the circle.

Briggsy’s maggot had a definite early lead and was making brisk progress when, as so often happened, the maggot veered abruptly away from the circle’s edge and finish line. Taffy’s maggot then put on strong spurt to come in just ahead of Tank’s maggot, who seemed to be finding the going heavy. Briggsy, however, was furious, claiming foul play because Willie had been leaping excitedly about on the edge of the circle, shouting encouragement to his own maggot (named by him, as always, as ‘Curly’). Briggsy argued that his maggot had been put off by Willie’s antics (‘Fatally distracted. Totally irresponsible behaviour.’).

Briggsy wouldn’t let the matter rest and Willie was getting visibly upset. To calm and distract, Tank suggested holding a Stewards’ Enquiry. Tank’s dad and uncle regularly went to Uttoxeter Races, so we wrongly assumed that he knew how the Enquiry should be conducted. Tank appointed himself Chief Steward, with Roger as his Deputy and Clerk of the Course.

Tank and Roger set up their Enquiry on a couple of packing cases in the corner of the yard, with Tank wearing a broken mop as a wig. They called for witnesses to appear individually. Briggsy affected to regard the proceedings as tiresome and took the hump when Tank asked him to demonstrate for the Enquiry the alleged threatening nature of Willie’s hopping movements. But what really got Briggsy’s goat was Taffy’s evidence, where he expressed the view (silently held by the rest of us) that Briggsy habitually released his maggots off-centre, giving them all a potential head start. Briggsy (tall and thin) and Taffy (short and fat) were squaring up to each other and who knows what would have happened next, if Ian the foreman hadn’t then waved his watch and declared the tea-break over.

Briggsy stalked off with a face like raw bacon. Shortly afterwards, he was seen, panoplied in self-belief, entering Mr Geoff’s office (it was best to enter Mr Geoff’s office in the mornings, as he got pissed in the afternoons; it was best not to enter Mr Adrian’s office at all). Nothing more was said, but Briggsy didn’t join us in the yard for his tea-break that afternoon, or on the following days.

On the following Wednesday, I wondered out loud whether there would be the usual Thursday morning maggot-racing. Tank caught Ian’s eye and Ian nodded: everything would proceed as usual. Tank then changed the subject, asking me when I’d be starting back at college.

The arrival of the sugar lorry, first thing on Thursday, kept us busy: we’d only just finished unloading it when Ian called break-time. We trooped into the yard to gather our preferred maggots. Briggsy was once again absent, but Tank had brought a guest competitor into the yard. A few minutes later, we were all happily bent or squatting around the circle, shouting encouragement at the maggots and insults at the other owners.

Three men then burst abruptly into the yard – Briggsy, Mr Geoff and Mr Adrian. They looked like they meant business. A stocky figure in a suit then straightened up on the far side of the maggot circle. Old Mr King – still gaga and terrifyingly unpredictable – waved enthusiastically to the new arrivals:

‘Hello boys. Come to join the racing?’

Michael Bloor is a retired sociologist living in Dunblane, Scotland, who has discovered the exhilarations of short fiction, with more than fifty pieces published in The Cabinet of Heed, Everyday Fiction, The Copperfield Review, Litro Online, Firewords, The Sea Letter, The Drabble and elsewhere.

Image via Pixabay

We had forgotten to close the curtains so our bodies looked sickly in the burst of orange streetlight, the duvet domed like sorbet. It felt like only a moment had passed between falling asleep, and you pacing the room like a caged animal, yelling “Don’t move! Don’t move, you hear!”

I followed your orders.

“You just-,” you said, “lifted.”

“What?”

“You lifted. Like- levitated.”

I thought of lettuce. “Let’s just sleep.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You goin’t’ stay there?” I pressed my face into the pillow on your side. (It wasn’t your pillow, because we were at my house.) I figured you’d had a nightmare but I didn’t feel comfortable comforting you. We’d only slept together three times.

By the time you came back, the sky was mauve. I stroked the side of you and you shuddered. You did it again when I asked: “What was up with you?”

“I’m not joking. You levitated.”

This time I didn’t think you said lettuce- I thought you were mad.

The following day crashed over me like breakwater, but I stayed unmoved. I checked my phone then my work emails replied to the emails then checked my phone.

I had told you I worked in a travel agent but nothing else. I hoped you thought I was adventurous, ambitious. I didn’t tell you my recent clients were a group of eighty-year-olds booking a coach trip to Llandudno. I didn’t tell you the agency’s slogan was Twilight Travellers: It’s never too late!

Since we’d started dating I’d let a few things slip; I hadn’t updated the booking spreadsheet in weeks, I hadn’t been pushing extra excursions, bee-keeping, pot-holing, wing-walking, learning the art of nose-to-tail cooking.

Just after lunch, I received an electronic meeting invitation from my boss. I was stressing about it when you called and asked if I was busy after work and I said No. At 6 pm we would meet in a pub around the corner. By 5.30 pm I had signed out of my computer and was doing my make-up behind my monitor.

That night you wedged your hands under my back and bum like you were trying to lift me. Your signet ring dug into my tailbone. After you held me tight, your heart beating faster than mine. You snored, your belly made noises.

Then,

“Get off me, get the fuck away!”

I was on the edge of the bed, legs hanging over the side.

“I felt you, I fucking felt you.”

“I didn’t- I don’t know-”

“You were up there!” you said pointing to an invisible platform above the bed, “and then you were-”

“Look!” I said, pissed off because I was tired and the sex was good and why were you ruining things? “What is going on here?”

You didn’t seem to know how to answer. I wondered if I should hug you.

“You did this, not me.”

I laughed dryly, scratched my face.

“You a witch?”

“Fuck off!” I said and threw my pillow. You caught it, chucked it back. I laughed, you didn’t.

I lay back down, pulled the duvet over my head. “It’s late. Come on, you Mormon!”

“What?”

“Moron!”

“You said-”

“Whatever.”

When I came back from the shower you’d gone. A note on the pillow. Got a call and had to run. Speak soon x

I boiled the kettle in the office kitchen and I thought about who could have called you; your friend who worked in an internet cafe, the one who dated a private investigator. I hadn’t met any of your friends.

Callum swung around the doorway drinking from a plastic water bottle that had a lump of charcoal bobbing around inside. “Alright?” I nodded and cut up some lemon. “Heard Chrissy wants to see you.”

“We’re having a meeting, yes.”

“She’s off sick today. You’re in luck.”

I rubbed the base of my spine.

“Do something to your back?”

“No.”

“Sleep funny?”

“No!” I dropped lemon into the cup and watched the skin shrivel.

That night I didn’t turn the lights on, just crawled straight into bed. I prayed my sleep would be interrupted by you, but you never called. I can’t remember falling asleep but I must have, and it must have been fitful because I woke up on the floor with my arm twisted behind me. Pain ripped the threads of my shoulder. With gritted teeth, I brought myself to my knees, kept still my arm and called you with the other.

I was early but you were earlier. You looked at your feet when you saw my arm in the sling, held doors open. We were seated by the window, candlelight flickering in the glass. I wanted to tell you I thought you needed professional help, with your sleeping and what you imagined. I guessed you’d had a traumatic childhood experience.

“I’ve messed you around,” you said.

“I deserved better.”

“I know. You just scared me.” I hoped you meant I had been too keen, you’d sensed my neediness and become afraid, could tell I’d imagined our wedding, our children, our deaths. “I’ve just never seen someone fly before.”

I took a long sip of my wine.

“Have you ever researched it? Had a proper look at your- ancestry?”

“Are you fucking serious?”

“Yes.”

Your eyes seemed softer somehow. You’d been nice when you’d rescued me off the floor, taken me to a&e. But honestly, I couldn’t believe what you were saying. I tried to catch the waitress who was leaning over the counter scribbling on her pad. I raised an arm, forgot it was the bad one.

“Shit, you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I hissed.

The candle licked the space between us. Shadows moved across your concerned face, eyebrows knotted together, looking back at me, the broken woman sat opposite. Or were you looking beyond me, at the waitress who had just placed two menus under her arm and was floating across the floor towards us?

Image via Pixabay

She is there one minute and gone the next; it’s startling at first but you get used to it. Truth is she’s not really gone anywhere else, it’s just your perspective that changed, and if you lean slightly forward or step back, she appears again.

I heard her before I first saw her, a quiet sobbing coming from the back of the library. “Hello?” I called, looking around for somebody else to make it their problem. “Hello?” There was no reply, but the crying stopped. I found her with both hands outstretched, fingertips caressing the book spines, and when she saw me, she turned sideways and disappeared. “Where did you go?” I said softly, for she wasn’t the first paper girl I’d known. When I explained this to the space where she’d stood, she turned back, and her face reappeared, crinkled due to tears.

I guessed she was 14 years old, the same age my sister Sarah was when we lost her. We had been camping on Dartmoor, which had been her birthday wish. The wind picks up so fast there and we reacted too slow. In my dreams I still see her outstretched hand flying away. It makes me so angry that someone so beautiful was made so delicate. When I met the girl in the library, I knew immediately what I had to do, and I knew that mum would love her.

The Girl Made of Paper lives in the space we created for her. Sometimes she cries and I want to comfort her, to tell her she’s strong but the lightest touch could tear her fragile skin. Instead, I lean against the glass until rage wears her out and she folds into sleep.

Carla Halpin is an editor who lives in the New Forest where she writes poetry and flash fiction. Her work has appeared in Anti-Heroin Chic and A Story in 100 Words. You can find her on twitter @CarlaHalpin where she posts regularly as part of the very short story community.

Image via Pixabay

And don’t forget the cat! She was shouting from the front door.

I won’t! He was mumbling to himself.

You always forget the cat!

And she was gone.

He’d been forgetting a lot of things recently. Numbers were disappearing. Keys, birthdays, the names of capital cities, all evaporating from his mind leaving him blank as an unaddressed envelope. A year now, since they let him go. Since he’d picked his clean-shaven jaw off the boardroom floor and started systematizing cupboards and watering rhododendrons for a living. If his wife would only watch where she was going, he wouldn’t have to worry about being under her feet. Angelica, was a prudent woman, conservative in her square heels and suits and though he loved her profoundly – those twinkling green eyes, that vivacious laugh – she had, over the years, become about as compassionate as a crab and looked at Harry’s depression as if looking through frosted glass; trying to discern some recognizable shape or movement but failing frustratingly, to understand him. He got it though. He didn’t understand himself either. Harry had had friends and invitations, but unlike the swallows, they stopped coming. He got that too. He got it all; but wanted none of it. He was benumbed and he always forgot the cat.

Today he would drive over early. His daughter, a sharp-featured always-on-call veterinarian, lived in a small duplex across town. Her cat, ‘scrubs’, was epileptic and needed a daily dose of Phenobarbital to control the seizures. Entering the flat, Harry called out a couple of times but there was no sign of scrubs. He noticed the bedroom door slightly ajar and stepped inside. He realized he hadn’t been in his daughter’s bedroom since she was fourteen years old. It was pink then and well-ordered. Here, he felt like a storm-chaser happening upon a small town devastated by a violent multi-state tornado. Clothes, towels, shoes, personal hygiene products were strewn about the room in the aftermath. In the middle of it, lying on a red kimono on the floor of the en-suite bathroom: scrubs, confused and overcome, waiting for a benzo to bring her back to life. Harry picked her up, brushing his hand against the smooth silk kimono and liking how it felt. He opened the container on the bedside locker and shook out a few pills. He put one as far back into the cat’s mouth as he could. Sitting on the edge of the bed he petted the tabby until she was able to stand up on her own. Harry went back to the bathroom. He picked up the kimono. It was delicate, soft and silky and seemed to sing as he rubbed it between his fingers. He held it to his cheek without thinking and stroked his face gently with it. His skin tingled. He felt different.

Is that you, scrubs? He heard the flap shut. He closed the bathroom door and began slowly unbuttoning his shirt. He left it on the side of the bath and put his arms into the kimono’s wide sleeves. It felt lustrous, momentarily cool, like someone blowing an even breath across his shoulders and down his spine. He wrapped himself up in it like a cocoon, imagining what silkworms feel like, feeding on mulberry leaves and spinning their silky nests, the finest threads in China. If angels exist, he thought, they are surely made of silk. He admired the elaborate cherry blossom pattern in the mirror, its deep red background, the fabric draping gracefully over his body. He watched himself. Really observed himself and for the first time in fifty-four years Harry recognized what he saw.
Looking in the mirror had always been so painful. It seemed to smear his sense of self, forcing a disassociation from his reflection, like he was being forced to see someone else. When shaving, putting in his contacts, brushing his teeth he’d mastered the art of blurring, of unfocussing his eyes somehow. But here, confronting the mirror in his daughter’s bathroom, wrapped in the radiant warp and weft of a bright and finely woven silk kimono, he could at long last look at himself without feeling ugly. In fact, he felt sexy, powerful. Not sexual but more excited, like he was a child again and he was being brought to see the circus, with all its marvel and mystery and anticipation.

There was a Dior lipstick on the shelf beneath the mirror urging him to pick it up. He leaned in and slightly suggesting a kiss, puckered his lips. He painted his cupids bow exactly as his wife did it. He used to enjoy watching her and she knew the effect it had on him. Harry kept going, covering up his beard shadow with some translucent powder. He blushed his cheeks and found some dried out eyeshadow at the bottom of his daughter’s make-up bag. He dropped the tube of mascara and reaching to retrieve it, thumped his head on the rim of the sink falling unconscious to the floor. He was still lying there when his daughter came home later that evening.

Image via Pixabay