Author: Alexander Fawn

The two men were sitting together on a park bench.

Although they had been good friends for many years, their backgrounds, education, occupations and family lives, were all very different. There was no real pattern to the frequency of their catchups. It was usually a random phone call from one to the other that brought meetings about. The park was relatively close to the university, where one of them was a lecturing professor in the Behavioural Sciences faculty. The other laboured on building sites around the city. As said, their diverse backgrounds and lifestyles were so far apart, it is perfectly reasonable to wonder why such a strong and constant friendship could ever come about

One of their cell phones sounded; it’s uncertain which one.

After finishing the call, during which he had said very little, one of them turned to his friend and sighed, saying, “Sorry, I have to go. The camel’s got out again and this time he’s trampled all over my wife’s opium poppy crop!”

Getting up, he said, “Domesticity can be complicated.”

She woke from a sleep full of dreams.

Well, to put it simply, the same one over and over again. It was the face. It was his face that tormented her nights. She never actually knew him. No, that sort of familiarity came later. When it did, it was a photo in the local paper. Sometimes, of late, she would experience sudden flashes that would shake her. Images of it, coming as an unbidden memory, in her waking hours. These troubled her more than her nightmares. She told herself that all this would eventually fade away, despite the fact that a full year had passed since the day it happened. This was the day her life was twisted out of shape.

The day she didn’t slow down as she entered the school zone.

She was never exactly what you’d call sure about him.

You’d have to say he was a nice-looking guy and well mannered, most of the time. He’d been sort of flirting with her for several months, before actually asking her out. He did something in the loading bay at the company. She would sometimes watch him from her window. He had booked a table at a swanky restaurant. He picked her up in his car. The place was really posh and he was really polite pulling out the chair for her. It was as though he was a different person here. They chatted away while they ate. It was so much more than the few words that had ever passed between them.

When they pulled up in front of her apartment building, there seemed to be a tense moment between them. She wasn’t sure what told her to dip into her bag and grip the pepper spray. As he turned the ignition off, his hand suddenly when round the back of her neck and he pulled her violently towards her.

The hiss of the spray was loud, but it didn’t compare with his ensuing screams. He was crying as he finally sat dabbing his eyes with the constant supply of tissues, she was handing him. She felt awful. Had he only been pulling her in for a romantic goodnight kiss?

Up in her apartment, he was scooping up water from the sink with his hand, doing his best to drench his eyes, still whimpering a little. When the stinging had reduced slightly, he was given a fluffy hand towel and ushered through to her lounge area to sit. He nodded and managed to croak out a small murmur of thanks.

She was wiping the sink down, when he came up behind her with a piece of rope. As it tightened, her mind began to race; where had the rope come from, in his pocket? The spray! Where was the spray? As the room grew dark, in the fading mirror, she could see it on a shelf behind her.

The most out of reach thing she would ever know.

The woman never fully got over the unhappy breakup in her teenage years.

It was such a bad ending to what was a special relationship that it seemed to put a pattern in place. The parting laid heavy on her. For her, even casual friendships were hard to hang on to as the years went by. As a result, she had never married; never even come close to finding a partner that compared with the boy that got away. There had been something special between them all through their school years and by the time they were both working in town they were dating. That was the case until the terrible fight one evening as they left the cinema. The memory of the trauma of it had stayed with her, while the actual nature of the argument had been washed away by the decades that followed.

However, on reflection soon after and ever since, she knew that she had been the cause of it. She had been so silly. She had pushed him away, leaving her heartbroken for all the unfulfilled years that had slowly drifted by. Sometime after the incident, she heard that his family had moved away.

Almost six decades had passed, when it happened.

Yet, another jumble sale. It was one of her favourite activities. She had religiously attended every one that had been held in the town hall. It was a ritual that she went along early and set up as a seller, with a card table covered with old unwanted knickknacks, kitchen utensils and whatever oddments came to hand. It never made her enough money to cover the entry fee, but she simply enjoyed being part of the event.

Soon enough she had children looking through all her odds-and-ends. It was then that, with some difficulty, a boy managed to pick up the large, heavy paperweight. He turned it over. Something seemed to be stuck to the bottom. Peeling the piece of paper off, he held it up to her. Confused, she opened the half-folded note and stared at the handwriting. There was something vaguely familiar about it.

It read: I’m really sorry. It was all my fault. Please call if you forgive me!

The safekeeping of it had been entrusted to her on her twenty-first birthday.

This arrangement had been the case with her mother, and her mother before her. It was not known, even by the few who knew of its existence, how far the hidden knowledge went back. She carried it on her person, wherever she went. It was a tiny flash drive. Currently, and for the past two generations at least, it was disguised as an oval Saint Christopher Medallion, suspended on a robust chain of gold. It was waterproof and she never took it off. It was also only a few who knew that the nature of the secret itself was truly sensational. In the wrong hands, it would be enough to dismiss governments and bring about a totally new world order.

The woman now wearing it, maintaining the natural lifestyle of a member of the aristocracy, was holidaying in Venice, when it happened. Along with many other tourists, she and her friend were making their way through Saint Mark’s Square, when she tripped.

Basically, you could say that it was a simple fall. Her partner at the time, certainly an athletic type, was only a few paces behind her when she tripped and fell. It has to be said that at great speed; he made up the distance between them and knelt down beside her to help her get to her feet.

Neither of them realised in that moment that the chain had been broken when he brought her up to a sitting position. It was another second or so before her hand flew to her neck. Knowing it was missing, she looked around frantically, just in time for her to see the last piece of chain slide into a grating.

The full ramifications of this event are not known.

He only ever had eyes for her.

She was unaware of him staring at her across the breakfast table; just watching her. It had always been that way. Ever since that evening at his friends birthday party, all that long time ago. Was it his eighteenth? He couldn’t remember. He could remember her arriving that evening, unaccompanied. My word, she was lovely! She was more than just pretty, but radiated a loveliness that had him staring at her from across the room. The thrill of that moment when she became aware of his attention and smiled back. That was it, the moment she looked across and smiled. He knew in that moment that his life was about to change…

She looked up and he snapped out of it. She smiled that same smile. “Is everything all right, dear?”

Momentarily, his eyes glazed over.

In that moment, thoughts began to tumble through his head. The kids are gone now. It’s just them. Two pensioners trying to make ends meet. Her snoring that has never let up. Her pills: the daily ritual of counting them all out. Her overprotectiveness and showing so much affection for her toy poodle. Her taking so long in the bathroom…

“What’s wrong, dear?”

“Oh! Nothing. Just a bit slow waking up. Would you like another tea.”

There was that smile again. “Yes, please.”

The two men sat chatting.

Their meeting was both surprising and unusual. The room that they occupied was not known by either. As to the time they met, that too was quite irrelevant. The Greek, as a philosopher, was regarded as a foundational thinker, with his bringing about the concept of a theory of forms, while the Italian, regarded as a political philosopher was undoubtedly best known for his political treatise. The Greek was saying that the others notion that it is far more effective to rely on the attributes of virtue and prudence rather than allowing fortune to take its own course, to be quite thought provoking. The Italian, on the other hand, found the idea of there being three parts to the soul, with each one having its own object of desire, most interesting.

At first their conversation was quite amicable, with both conceding that the other had made huge advances in their own fields of study. However, this didn’t last…

Within only a few short minutes the tone of their discussion became positively acrimonious.

It should be noted that many modern-day scholars, should they be asked for an opinion, would say that they considered that the two men had philosophical views that were diametrically opposed.

It seems that Plato and Machiavelli would never really have hit it off!

The elderly couple sat in the small cafeteria in one corner of the hospital.

They were holding hands across the small table and talking quietly. The young intern sitting nearby was watching them. After a while, he saw tears well up. Wanting to make a good impression, without being too intrusive, he got up and as he was passing their table, he paused and said, “The doctors here really are the best you know.”

The man looked surprised at first, then chuckled. He said, in a whisper, “We’re not here for treatment, although we do live locally.”

“Oh! I’m sorry. You looked upset and I thought…”

The man held up his hand. “No. That’s all right, we were talking about our cat that got hit by a car last year, that’s all. We were very fond of it.” He smiled conspiratorially. “We only pop in on the odd occasion.”

He pointed across the room. “Do you see that barista over there?”

The intern looked and nodded.

“He makes the best cup of cappuccino in town”.

He was sick to death with everything that was going on.

He missed his chair, back home, in the corner of his green garden. This place was so white! Outside of visiting hours, it was hard to find anybody wearing everyday clothes… it was all uniforms. Naturally, he wasn’t thrilled about having an inoperable tumour, or being told that surgery wasn’t a treatment option. Hearing long descriptions about the size and location of his unwanted growth wasn’t much fun either. He wasn’t even going to think about some of this other stuff… there was nothing exciting about chemotherapy or radiation!

It was all becoming too much for him.

Then, on top of it all…

He wasn’t allowed to smoke!

He was settling down for the night when it happened.

The weather was cold and he was swaddled in two blankets. With his warm, woollen beany pulled down tight, only his eyes could be seen. As rough sleeping spots went, this one, nestled between the two large rubbish skips and out of the wind, was one of the city’s best. The lane was fairly long, with a number of large bins running down both sides. Most of them took the waste from several eating places along the main street. At night, the lane was rarely used. Although it didn’t bother the man settling down for the night, the unpleasant odours that this caused was another reason that nightwalkers generally gave it a wide berth.

It was for this reason that he was kept from getting off to sleep by footsteps approaching. These stopped close by and two men could be heard whispering.

“Are you sure they are still in the office?” said the first.

“Positive. It’s just the boss and his two henchmen in there at the moment,” said the other.”

“OK. You can make yourself scarce,” said the first.

“Roger that,” said the other, then quickly walked back the way they’d come.

After listening to footsteps fading away, the man in the blankets snuggled down. It was only a couple of minutes later, when he was suddenly woken by three rapid gun shots. He lay awake listening to footsteps returning back down the ally. He watched as the man paused for a moment to wipe the gun, then toss it into a skip on the other side. He was about to move off when he saw two eyes peering up at him.

After a moment’s hesitation, the gunman raised a finger to his lips.

The homeless man, being something of an expert when it came to survival, slowly pulled down the blankets. With a smile, he copied the gesture. With this, a mutual understanding was implied.

The man walked on and the other went back to sleep.