Author: Alexander Fawn

He was back home and glad to be there.

He had spent yet another stint in hospital. His daughter would come by soon to see how he was doing. He looked around his tiny living room, thinking about how much nicer it was than the clinical environment of the ward he’d been in. Here he had all his personal things, pictures, photos, bits and pieces. So many of them held bad memories. All in all, he’d lived a sad life. The old man thought about all of the things that had gone wrong in his life. Looking back, he had been the one that had done what he did, but in truth, he’d had a lot of bad breaks. The bad marriage and the workplace accident were prominent among them, but there seemed to be so many!

He was shaken out of these thoughts by the sound of the front door opening. She came in, and after a brief kiss on his head she sat across from him. She asked if he had all of the medications he’d been sent home with. He pointed to the sideboard. She got up and went over to the cluster of containers. She stood reading the labels. She shook a large bottle, noting that it was nearly empty.

She sat back down with it, saying, “These are analgesics, they are painkillers.” She looked at him questioningly and said, “I thought you said that the pains you had were all gone now.” She rattled the bottle again.

“Yes. I know,” he said. “I’m taking them for my memories.”

They were staring into one another’s eyes.

He took her hand, producing a nervous smile and said, “I like you in your coat with the fur collar.”

She replied, “You do?”

He said, “Yes.”

She said, “That’s nice, dear.”

He said, “It brings out the colour of your eyes.”

She said, “Really?”

He said, “Yes, definitely.”

She said, “But, my eyes are blue.”

He said, “I know.”

She said, “My coat is brown.”

He said, “I know.”

She said, “Well, I can’t see how my brown coat can bring out the colour of my eyes.”

He said, “Why aren’t you wearing it?”

She said, “What, here, do you mean?”

He said, “Yes. You should have it on… for the eyes.”

She said, “But, we’re inside. Why would I have it on in here?”

He said, “For the eyes. Are we having pasta?”

She said, “What?”

He said, “Pasta. Are we having pasta?”

She said, “Sweetheart, you’re not making much sense.”

The doctor comes to the bed. “No. He won’t for a while. Not until the effects of the anaesthesia have worn off.”

The three men who lived and worked in the city were all writers, of one sort or another.

The first had a prestigious occupation working for a law firm where he prepared legal documents. The second held an important position as a copy editor for the city’s newspaper. The third had an enjoyable career as a freelance writer who wrote children’s stories for a publishing house. They were all friends and single. They had known each other since their school days. They would regularly catch up at their favourite café during the day. Although they lived in city apartments, they all shared a common desire to live in a house by the sea. Over time they each made plans to build their dream home at a chosen location along the nearby coast.

The first man thought he would be innovative and decided to have a straw-bale construction used. This was a building method that uses bales of straw as structural elements, as well as providing natural insulation. The second man decided that the popular timber frame construction would be best. It was basically a large carpentry job with a relatively short construction time and needing little in the way of heavy tools or equipment. The third man went for the common brick and tile house. This would be a conventional brick veneer construction with brickwork on the outside of the building, with the roof covered with overlapping clay tiles. Eventually, all three homes were built and the owners took possession.

However, not long after this, a storm came in from the ocean with gale force winds causing damage to properties along the coast. The first man had his house literally blown down. This was followed a few days later by a much greater storm with even more powerful and destructive winds, bringing even worse devastation in the form of damage to coastal properties. The second man had his house flattened.

When the third man, who lived in the brick and tile house heard what had happened he arranged for all three to catch up for a coffee. They met at the Wolf and Pig Coffee House, as was their practice. It was there that the third man’s proposal was discussed and accepted.

The others would move in with him, pay a reasonable rent, and live happily ever after!

The twelve year old scientist at number twelve was excited about his project.

He had been tinkering with his matter-transfer machine for several weeks, and was only too happy to explain the intricacies of it to anyone prepared to listen. It involved the very careful placement of a cardboard control panel, an old TV antenna, a large grapefruit and several elastic bands. When the elderly couple from number fifteen showed a passing interest in what he was doing, he was only too pleased to tell them about it.

So, when they expressed a degree of thinly disguised doubt, followed by tiny smirks, the kid from across the road knew that he was being ridiculed yet again. He also knew that a demonstration was in order. He told them he could transport them to a planet in the Horsehead Nebula and proceeded to twiddle a number of bottle caps pinned to the control board. Asked if they were ready they nodded their consent without a second thought. They were patient enough to go along with it.

In the blink of an eye they found themselves standing in a vast, flat landscape of very loose, dark grey sand, close to what appeared to be an open pit. The air was cold and moist with an unusual odour that seemed to be drifting up from the hole. Despite the fact that they were finding breathing difficult, they made their way forward and peered down into the blackness. Suddenly, they were looking at two very large, bright orange, evil-looking eyes looking up at them.

As the slimy cold tendrils slid up over the edge and tethered their ankles, the elderly neighbour did her best to scream. This caused whatever was down there to begin tugging at them…

The youngster was exploring his environment.

Each time he left his mother’s side to go sightseeing he would travel a little further. There was so much to see and he came to realise that his domain, or what he could see of it, was truly vast. When he returned, his mother was waiting. She looked as though she was going to give him the big warning lecture again. The one about the danger signs that a youngster should know about. He was right.

She was saying, “Just beware of the other world, the one up there,” her eyes rolled up as she said it. “Those that inhabit the upper world are wicked. They are evil monsters that will use deception and trickery. They’ll do whatever it takes to find us and kill us. There have been rumours that they actually eat us!”

The youth looked nervous.

“Yes, I know,” she said, “every mother has to explain this to her young.”

He looked away.

“Yes, you can go now. Just remember what I told you.”

Later that day he was weaving his way through the tall greenery of his world when he saw it. He saw the worm. It was wriggling and looked tasty. It was pinned to something metal. He remembered his mother’s warning. He swam closer and looked up, and there it was, the line she had spoken of. It went straight up and out into the other world.

He swam on.

The man on the river bank gripped his rod a little tighter and cursed as he watched the fish swim away.

It was amazing how quickly he was thrown back to an earlier time.

The pop song had been very popular and extremely meaningful to him in his early teens. He remembered her. Her smile and her laughter. That wonderful way she had laughed; it had been contagious. When she laughed, others joined in. Now, in this place, this all but forgotten love song had barely begun to play, when the tears started. He had no idea this old number had been chosen. With eyes squeezed shut, he began to sob. His sobbing grew louder…He felt her hand grip his elbow. Tears ran down his cheeks as he opened his eyes. He took out a handkerchief and wiped his face. He did his best to smile as he looked around at all the wedding guests, then back at his bride. She was frowning. The priest coughed.

“Sorry. Hay fever,” he whispered.

He paused momentarily at the window, watching the man across the street.

The man, who was dressed in an expensive suit, was obviously agitated. He had rushed to come to the address and was now standing with his back against a shop window, catching his breath. He was checking the time and looking up at the detective agency. It was evident that he considered it important to arrive at the office on time. The man seemed to be twitching, continually looking around nervously from time to time. Together, all of these things pointed to a person who was in serious trouble. He was living on his nerves. Beneath this there was a reluctance to turn to a stranger. The observer noticed these things in his line of work.

After a couple more minutes and checking the time again, the man carefully crossed the street, straitening his tie as he came forward to the entrance. The man at the window nodded with satisfaction seeing that the visitor was intent on giving a good impression. He could tell. He could also determine that it was a very personal and possibly embarrassing mission that had brought him here.

Moments passed. Then, behind him, the elevator squealed and the doors slid open. The gentleman in question emerged. He stood, looking around for a moment.

He said “Paragon Agency?”

The man at the window said, “Along the hall, second door on the left.”

As he watched him go he smiled knowingly.

He dropped his chamois leather into the bucket, squeezed it out and returned to cleaning the window.

He was perfectly content with his job, he liked gardening.

He’d been the gardener at a local school for some time. He found the work rewarding and would be paid the occasional compliment about how nicely the grounds were kept. He also liked reading, mainly books about the sciences. He was always searching out television documentaries on the subject. It was on one of these evenings when he went to bed quite late after watching a science show. He woke with a start in the middle of the night. It hadn’t been a nightmare. It had been a dream. He was wide awake with questions running through his head. He got up and sat on the edge of the bed remembering quite clearly the questions from his sleep. He began to recount them.

Do we need to know more than the fact that living things are required to interact in order to maintain life? Do what we call sociology, economics, philosophy and religion promote this? Do we need to look beyond these to understand that life is about chemical reactions? Do biology, geology and astronomy give us a greater understanding of this? Do these subjects further our understanding of why particles form molecules? Are physics and chemistry telling us why particles, forces and fields interact? How heavily are we relying on the fundamental science of physics?

Why should such questions be so important to him? There was obviously some kind of unfulfilled need going on. During the day he gave it a great deal of thought, while making sure he concentrated on his work. However, being a lone worker without any direct supervision certainly gave him both the time and the opportunity to think.

That evening he used his computer to get information about how to study with the Open University. He soon recognised his need. He would study online for a degree in physics!

There was simply no accounting for it.

It all began months ago. The irony of it was that she knew the exact moment it had started. It was in late November, she remembers the incident clearly. It was on one of her Thursday evenings. One of those times she would regularly set aside for what she liked to call her random reading. This being the one activity in her highly ordered life of working in the strict and methodical environment as a means test assessor in the city’s tax office, that wasn’t organised. She privately enjoyed the whimsical nature of it.

On this particular occasion she had approached her multi-shelved bookcase with her eyes closed. She had pulled out a book at random and settled down in her comfy reading chair, as was her custom. She opened the book, it happened to be the King James Bible, giving no thought as to where it would open, and began to read.

At Genesis 19 she read with great interest how two angels had visited Lot in the city of Sodom. How they had told him to take his wife and daughters out of the city before it was destroyed, and how they were told not to look back, and how his wife looked back and was turned into a pillar of salt. Following her reading session she sat down to supper, only to find that her life was about to change radically. She became really sick.

Over the following months she had grown weaker, with her immune system gradually shutting down day by day. During this period she had several doctor’s appointments, a number of expensive visits to Psychiatrists and two CT scans. Despite all this medical analysis, it remained a complete mystery how this collision of synapses within the brain had brought about the life-threatening condition. A strange and unknown malady that was rapidly taking her to an early grave. The entire affair was a complete mystery, both to her and to the dozen or so medical professionals.

How could a simple passage from the Bible bring about such an unexpected and life-threatening allergy to pepper?

Ever since his schooldays he had developed a real passion for précising.

The teacher would come up with a paragraph that contained a hundred words and would ask the class to précis it, using around a third of the words to do it. He probably enjoyed it more than the rest of the class. This interest in finding text and making it shorter and more precise stayed with him into his working life. Despite the fact that his job didn’t lend itself to practicing his favourite pastime, he found plenty of opportunity to put it to work in the world around him. He found examples on notices that were pinned to the information board in the office, public notices on the train, recipe instructions on food packaging, and even the occasional blurb on the back of a paperback.

In fact, he was in a bookshop doing this very thing, when he met her. She was putting new books on shelves when they got chatting, and the next thing you know they were dating. Although at first she was mildly interested in his desire to reduce the number of words used for just about anything, she didn’t share his interest with any fervour. It was a fact that their communications were mainly carried out with text messages. They in themselves being generally short and sweet suited them both fine although not giving him much in the way of a challenge.

As the days went on they regularly caught up, each time arranged by text. They hadn’t been going out for very long when it happened, but long enough for him to know that she was, surely, the girl of his dreams. It was on their third evening out together. They had been to the cinema and watched a movie they both really enjoyed, then followed up with a meal at a restaurant, where they spent the whole time talking about it.

Finally, he was driving her home when he realised he hadn’t asked her how her day at work had been. On the ten minute drive she told him all about it.

It was when he pointed out that she had used one thousand and twenty three words and he felt sure that he could have done it with less than two hundred, that she went quiet.

When they pulled up at her place he didn’t get a goodnight kiss. Instead, she simply got out and went in. The following day he sent her a text asking if she’d like to catch up for a midday coffee.

The single word, ‘no’, was the last text she ever sent.