Traces

The thrush bobbed out from under the Milkwood tree, hopped across the grass and stabbed at the mossy stone with its dull orange beak. Flapped off with a trapped grub which writhed a farewell wave. The sun rose on the enclosure for the midday matinee of leaf-shadows dancing and gnats rolling over each other in the air.

Beneath the damp soil a small hand brushed at the silver brooch pinned to the frayed cotton and lace pinafore. Inside the brooch, the intricate workings of a tiny clock had long-since become a matted mess of metal, trapping time eternally at 3.15.

The mulch the box had become shifted with the movement, and there was silence.

Up above, the vandalised stonework could only hint at the tragedy below, leaving the history untold. Green dipped in the cracks where lettering had once been carved, the dates alone suggesting tears and disappointment.

The blue expanse birthed a ball, which skipped across the space, bouncing off the low walls. There was laughter as a child leaped over and picked it up, and a man followed, breathing heavily. He was laughing as he sat on the grave, a smooth seat in a pleasant place.

Somewhere, out of sight and beyond the road, two crows fought over a carcass amid the criss-cross of tracks left by the hooves of the horses.

In case of glass, force out emergency

It’s hard to keep up. Not with life, because that has a habit of rolling on relentlessly.

There go the trees- well, not going anywhere- just waving their branches gently, nature’s fingers plucking a whistling breeze out of an invisible harp.

There gasps the sea, exhaling against the rasping sands, the gulls swooping in an endless loop in and out of the breakers.

There stand the mountains, saurian mounds not doing much or shifting, but forming a large grey wardrobe into which the orange orb slips when the shadow-time comes.

The small creatures rustle and fret and twitch and obsess- never discouraged from pursuing that which they need to replenish the blood in their veins. If you could see them all at once, you’d gasp at their seething masses.

Where do you turn?

To the seasons, to hope, to crises and resolution. To calm and to fear, anxiety and peace. To feasting and famine, to life and to loss.

The winds fill the flags, buffet sails and scatter ashes.

Onwards and upwards

The cart rattled slightly. It was overloaded. The man pushing it slumped over the wooden handles, barely noticing the splinters which arched through the identifying whorls of his fingerprints.

Dead. They really were. They’d fought for months, calling on every quack they knew, until finally, there was no one left, and they’d watched the tides of their lives slip away, leaving fresh, glistening sands.

Now they were lined up on the cart, their mouths gaping at a sun made amber with the smoke from the fires, the trash fires which corrupted the night air and never went out.

The man pushing the cart stopped. It was caught in a slight rut. Knowing he could explain his slight delay, he leaned over to his left, and vomited. It wasn’t the robust stream of a healthy man, but the weakened dribble of someone whose diet had suffered under the weight, or lightness, of an empty grocery cupboard.

As he approached the top of the hill, he faltered. The handles trembled in his hands as if the collective memory of the corpses inside would wrench it out of his hands.

Something felt… unreal.

With a painful twist, possibly around his ankles, he fell. The cart juddered and bounced down the hill, coming to a listing stop against the cemetery fence.

The light shone into his eyes. Two years of gloom and squinting through a chemical fog had made it hard to focus.

As he rose to his knees, the cart, the pushing, the endless nights of drudgery seemed to make sense

“Bring out your dead?”, he laughed to himself. “No, no, bring out your living…”

*Dead= unemployed

*Cart-pusher= freelancing

*Beyond= Who knows!

The parrot did it.

Henry kicked at the kerb. He wasn’t happy. There was another bill in the letterbox this morning, and it had come with a lawyer’s letter threatening action.

A parrot was in the tree opposite, plucking at a cord of string which had lashed a poster of a missing child to the rotting trunk. “Missing!” The poster had proclaimed. Eventually the cardboard had perished under the stress of wind, rain and sun, but no replacement had ever declared “Found!” so Henry had no idea if the child was safe with her family, or deep under the red soil somewhere.

The parrot eyed him with one round eye as it tugged and twisted at the string. It was a tired-looking bird, with feathers missing from its neck and a dull, chipped bill.

Bills. There it was again.

He’d had to go down to the office three times now, sit waiting on the cracked vinyl chairs for the man with the grey suit and the sweat-stained shirt to come out and hand him still more piles of paper listing demands, dates and threats of consequences. He wasn’t a sympathetic man.

In the corner of sweaty-man’s office was a shrine of framed photographs. They showed him in holiday mode, posing next to various animals and birds. Even the animals appeared to be leaning away from his acrid smell in the pictures. He didn’t look as relaxed as you’d expect in the holiday snaps, but a little ill at ease, as if he wasn’t sure how to act. Perhaps if he’d been threatening the animals with community service or prison time he’d have felt more at home.

As Henry turned back to the house, he heard a voice. “Henry”, it called. “Henry, Henry”.

He looked both ways up the street, but the kids at one end were engrossed in trying to set fire to something- probably an ant’s nest, and the only other person around was an older woman who appeared to be leaning on her front gate, framed by honeysuckle plants, although he suspected her back was bent with the weight of seventy years and advanced osteoporosis.

That only left the bird.

“Henry”, it called.

He turned and crossed the street, wondering if perhaps the extra whisky he’d had last night had not been soaked up by the boiled eggs he’s choked down with toast, despite the post-binge gagging he’d felt.

The bird cocked its head and stuck out its tongue. Lifted its wings like an angelic chameleon.

It flew a few metres and rested on a fence. He followed.

It flew again, this time settling on the grille of the storm drain. The heavy rains had lifted it from its frame slightly, and a torrent surged below, a churning mass of filthy brown water. Foam gathered on the bars.

It was a river of, of, of BEER! Henry laughed to himself, as he pushed the parrot to one side. Stripping down to his underwear, he lifted the grille.

The parrot seemed to grin at him as it nodded, happily. “Bye, Henry!” it said.

Henry eased himself into the foaming mess and drank deeply. The current caught him, and he let himself disappear under the road. As the daylight fizzed into darkness, he thought he saw a little girl looking down at him and laughing. He could almost hear her, and he was happy, as her laughter drowned out the mantra of bills, bills, bills which he’d had playing through his mind for what seemed like... forever.

The Pigeons Return to Death Hotel

There’s the hotel full of crazies. The manager is finding it hard to keep everything running smoothly, and, when no one is looking, he likes to slip into his office and slide open the middle drawer of the desk. Inside, where the catering bills are starting to collect, he hides a bottle with just enough in it to keep the edges smooth.

He has to keep an eye on all corners of the hotel, and, even though he shouldn’t go there, explore all of the personalities he’s hired so that he can coax them into productivity.

There’s the cleaning team. They have to make sure that things don’t pile up and become offensive. They must be trusted, as they methodically enter each room and rearrange it the way it would appear on the website. They can’t mess with the guest’s belongings, so there’s faith involved.

Without them, the hotel would, in all probability, collapse.

There are the guides: The bellhops who move things around, from the entrance to the top floor. They like tips, but they’re also proud of the way they can “fix” things. Someone has to know which corners can be cut, and what the fastest and most cost-effective ways are for getting from A to Z.

The guests? They aren’t meant to be around permanently. There’s a rhythm to their arrival and departure, and a certain amount of predictability in their activities. Every now and then, a rock band will blow in like a tornado and leave a trail of broken furniture to replace, and, occasionally, there will be someone who arrives depressed, drinks too much from the mini-bar and needs to be coaxed back from a window ledge, but, for the most part, there is order.

Business people breeze in with a lack of interest in the surroundings. Just looking for a place to recharge themselves and their gadgets.

Lovers leave a tangible haze in their wake- a cloud of perfumes and the smells of lovemaking- the drooping heads of red roses nodding over emptied champagne buckets.

Occasionally, a disgraced husband will arrive, his red eyes and thousand-yard stare gazing into a future of weekend-parenting and mounting lawyer’s bills.

There are conventions. Industrial equipment salesmen and their clients. Book publishers and their newest titles, billed as best-sellers before they’ve even hit the shelves. Once, the manager even accepted a group of people, mostly in their twenties, who swore that the science fiction novels of a particular author formed sufficient foundation for a lifestyle. The lifestyle appeared to encourage long black coats and poorly-managed facial hair growth.

The manager doesn’t mind. He likes to have something new going on all the time. He enjoys that he directs life here; that he has harnessed the predictability of hotel life.

His biggest fear is the lifts. They're designed to keep everything moving. The music he has piped into them is unbearable for anything more than the two minute’s duration of the trip, and that’s what he expects. In. Out. Up. Down. Nobody on earth wants to be stuck in a lift for even a few minutes. He makes sure to have them regularly maintained.

In one of the rooms there is a stain. A stain so deeply ingrained that he’d had to order a kilim from one of the passing salesmen to cover it up. A stain which tells a story of bad decisions and worse consequences. Fortunately, though, few people ask for that room, as it looks out over the local bar, and the unrelenting neon advertisements and driving rock music make potential guests ask for a different suite almost immediately.

He’d had babies born there, brides deflowered and even one or two deaths. Unanswered knocks on the door leading to the disappointing discovery of the ends of lives. One, a sleeping pill overdose, another, a man who had enjoyed sleeping so much, that he’d chosen it for eternity. Death wasn’t as terrible as it seemed. Discreet paramedics slipped the bodies into the servant’s elevator, and then the cleaning teams simply changed the mattress and sheets.

The manager prided himself on his decisiveness: He couldn’t afford to dither over minor details, and yet, his decision-making miraculously seemed to pay attention even to these.

Sometimes, when he is hiding in his office, the grating lid of the bottle twisting in his hand, he liked to read his own motto that he’d made into a sign. He’d printed it out, laminated it, and stuck it behind his own desk:

“If you’re just sitting on the fence, stand up. You’re bound to fall one way or the other.”

Then he’d laugh a little to himself, as he imagined teetering and toppling into the unknown. As if that would ever happen to him.

* * *

And so it went on, year after year. On the roof, the pigeons nested, cooing as they strutted about the concrete. Their droppings built up over the top of the lift shaft, paste and then dust, slowly eroding the aging rivets. No one could see them up there, but their presence would, in the end, inspire a spectacular end to the manager, the hotel, and several of the guests.

The call of the oven

You’re close. Just on the edge, in fact. The wrong word, a song on the radio- hell, a TV ad, even, can send you over into freefall.

That’s not all. If it’s bad, a phone call can have you striking at walls, shouting.

A balloon filled to its limits, a tooth, hanging by the thinnest sliver of gum.

The blood rushes through your neck, and collects somewhere near the top of your head.

A balcony is a threat, an oncoming train, a whispered invitation.

There it is: The inverted white casket in the kitchen, calling out.

Ugliness and shame is unveiled at every step. Love songs, played backwards.

Munch caught it.

Ingrid Jonker heard it, just beyond the breakers.

Van Gogh flicked his brush in its direction, but was caught by the old adage, “always check your weapon”, before slumping over in the wheatfield.

Too many naked roasts with their bland whiteness dripping blood came out of the same oven which told Plath its jokes.

Then, an earsplitting sunrise, with the call of nesting birds and the energetic racing of motors outside the window: Everyone’s going somewhere.

The oven’s just for cooking.

The oven’s just for cooking

Paisley Curtains

The gentle curls became sinister shadows in the dark. Scott sat with his action man against the wall on the side of the room farthest from the window. The toy was anything but active, though; it just sat with its lightning blue eyes glaring into the gloom.

The sounds were bad. The wind hissed in breathy drafts which lifted the skirts of the curtains and the dressing gown on the back of the door. It could have been a cat, Scott thought, that he heard padding across the roof. Yes, he decided, it must have been a cat.

But it was the curtains which terrified him most. The paisley fabric turned into thousands of eyes, watching, and mouths with razor-sharp teeth which seemed… hungry.

Scott tried to burrow even deeper under his duvet, but he recalled the warnings. Donald’s mum had insisted that they’d be smothered if they put their heads under their duvets whenever he slept over, and he knew the panic of pushing the boundaries- feeling the air grow moist and warm as he converted it to carbon dioxide.

He made a tube, a breathing hole so that he’d make it. Felt a little like that explorer he’d seen on television- the one who had gone in search of Tarzan, and slipped, instead, into a pool of quicksand. The reed he’d used as a straw to breathe through was left on the surface next to a pith helmet.

He could hear his little brother sleeping on the lower bunk, and the tick, tick, tick of his Hong Kong Phooey watch on the chest of drawers.

Downstairs, the house was silent, but the fridge shuddered every now and then, as if shivering from the cold it generated.

The streetlamp was lukewarm amber, and couldn’t penetrate the gloom. He listened more carefully. Somewhere in the house, he was almost certain he could hear crying.

A daddy-long-legs brushed across his face, and Scott whimpered. How would things be, when they moved to another country? Would there be quicksand in Africa? Would he have to sleep in a hammock, with the calls of jungle cats echoing in the distance? Would the curtains and fridge- the objects of fear for him now- even be there to comfort him when they climbed off the aeroplane?

The Action Man was ready. He sat in his World War II Arctic Fatigues, and prepared his rifle, the one which shot matches. He’d protect Scott. It was his pledge.

#FlashFiction