“Mate,” he said, not looking at me. “Mate, come on. It’s just up here. In this pond.” Pond, I thought. Maybe that’s a local name because it looks like a lake to me. But then again, I’m no fisherman. If I was, I probably wouldn’t be here. I’d be somewhere safe, a long way away.
Category Archives: Short Stories
Fit for swine.
Don’t eat that.
What? Why not? What’s wrong with it? Poison? It’s poisoned, isn’t it? All my food is poisoned these days. The great tragedy of being Emperor for life is how short other people want to make that term of office. Bring out the Food Taster, come on. Where is the dispensable little fucker?
No, not poisoned. Just not good.
Nope. You’ve said it now. BRING OUT THE FOOD TASTER for the love of God, what’s keeping him?
All the fun.
The lights burn holes in your eyes if you stay out too long in front of the curtain. They say you can tell the long-time performers by the glimmer of darkness nestled in their gaze; the spots have punched their lights out. It’s not a sad place to be, not when you’re up there. The wash lights warm your skin and melt the greasepaint into your mouth. The performance becomes you, if you want. There is no mask but your face, a painting with those terrible black holes in the centre.
As manager, it doesn’t touch him. He closes his eyes and feels the performance thunder through the boards. The crowd roars, heckles, squeals with delight. It kicks up dust and sunlight as the day starts to vanish and the evening shows begin, the crowd changing timbre as the dark closes around them. The edgy, half-contained violence of a mob is always part of the spirit at the Fair and it gets harder to push back into the bottle as the drink flows.
Everyone knows not to mess with the manager, though. He sits at the front, just outside the idiot stare of the lights, and listens. The sway of the throng creates the breeze that plucks restlessly at his flat-combed hair, he tastes it like a snake. His face is unreadable, but after all these years he is tired and he is sad. He has seen and felt too much. He opens his eyes and stares at the light.
Settled Dust
Takes a lot to get me to notice things. I’m hoovering the rug one morning and it didn’t even occur to me that there was no table on it. What had happened to the coffee table? Then I started thinking maybe we’d never had a coffee table but no, there were the dents in the pile although they were fading and filled with dust.
Continue reading Settled Dust
Bad Faith
Where the music ended and the screams, the applause, ended was impossible to say. A solid wall of heat radiated from the audience to the stage, adolescent lust breaking in foaming waves around his feet. I stared up at him, my eyes glazed with that same longing, damp with frustrated tears. He was so perfect.
Losing grip
Gravity is such a weak force. Anyone could defy it with the least effort, pulling bodies free with every step. Yes, we sent rockets pummelling out of the atmosphere on columns of concentrated fire, but a child could break the bond with a leap. It’s the smallest thing, and it took almost nothing for it to fail.
Dew
So early in the morning it was still night, out in the deep grass where the deer have held court since the days of the Tudors. The mist dragged across the world, milky white cataracts. What we were doing was wrong, but there was no option.
Crow Drop
In the old terms, it was a Crow Drop. Something deniable, a dead drop for the Devil’s agents. An unobserved, unguarded corner of nowhere that accumulated unbought souls. No-one had bargained for them, no-one had cleaned and accepted them, they fell from the meat of a body when the light went out and were picked up by those of a mind to notice.
No presents?
No presents. Something needed to be done, so here I am in the back yard of a house far from home, dressed in black and carrying a crowbar. I wait. I’ve been here three nights in a row and I know to wait. The lights on the tree switch off and still I wait. Give them half an hour, 45 minutes to be sure.
In at the window, splintering the wood to wrench up the sash. In. No light but a streetlight a few yards down, doesn’t matter. Everywhere is the same in suburbia. I roll the balls of my feet across the parquet floor, balloon my legs silently across to the tree. There, gifts. Too many for this small family, they sha’n’t miss a few. I pull off and pocket the tags. Someone shifts upstairs. A child sighs in their sleep. I think of Jo, sprawled on the rug, hollow-cheeked and sad-eyed. No presents. Could I disappoint her?
The presents are wonderful. Jo will be happy, maybe she will smile for the first time in months… but something nags at me. A sigh. A tag sat in my pocket. Something needs to be done, or I will never feel well.
So here I am again, in another yard. Waiting for the lights to go off, waiting to go in and take not so many gifts. No need to replace like for like. Then tomorrow; another house, a few less, to make up for this. And then tomorrow.
Thought, experiment.
I have taken great pains to be exact in my report. However, said report is on my desk and here we are far from my desk. Well. This is the best I can do for you from memory and from some notes made on my phone when I didn’t have a pen and paper to hand.