Author: Alexander Fawn

She hadn’t seen her best friend since her husband took off.

They went back a long way. It was a sad day for her when her friend and her husband moved out of the area. They kept in touch of course; emails flew back and forth regularly, so her friend knew all about her failing marriage and the constant fighting. Her friend also knew he was out of the picture now, but she didn’t know the details. This visit would be her chance to find out how it happened. Either way, it was a good thing. The marriage had been going downhill for some time and it was becoming physical. Her visit would bring her up to date. When she arrived, they hugged at the front door, but quickly settled down in the lounge.

“What can I get you?” she asked her friend.

“Nothing,” she replied, “I had a drink at the shops. Besides, I want to hear all your latest goss. I mean, it’s wonderful isn’t it, that he is finally out of your life?”

“It is. He didn’t want to be here anymore and I just wanted him gone.”

Her friend nodded. “Your last email didn’t say much, how long’s he been gone?”

“It’s been well over a month now.”

“Did he go quietly?

The woman took on a strange smile. “You could say that.”

“Do tell.”

“If I tell you what happened, you’ll be the only person to know the real truth, other than myself.”

“Hey! You know you can trust me to keep anything you tell me to myself. After all, when you think of all those naughty little secrets that go back to our childhood days.” She giggled.

“I know. I know I can trust you, but if I tell you what happened you may not believe me.” She puffed out a long breath. “Not only that, if you did tell anybody about it you’d probably be labelled a looney!”

“Oh! Come on. Out with it.”

“OK. To start at the beginning… it all happened one evening. He was acting really strange when he came home from the pub. He was drunk. Which wasn’t unusual, and this usually meant he was going to get violent, but that didn’t happen. He was excited about something, but wouldn’t tell me what it was. He rushed off and booted up his laptop. He spent a couple of hours on it.”

She paused and sat thinking for a bit, while her friend waited patiently. She took a deep breath and went on. “When he’d finished messing about with the computer, he told me about the crystal. He showed it to me. It was only a small thing, yellow, about the size of a sugar cube. He said he’d bought it from a guy in the pub. Told me it had magical powers. He was raving about it. Said it could take you to wherever you wanted to be. Well, I just figured he’d finally snapped. He said he was going to use it to get away. Of course, I thought the whole thing was ridiculous, but I went along with it anyway. I mean, if it works, good riddance, right?”

“Absolutely!”

“Anyway, he had the thing in his hand, clutched to his chest. He walked down the hall and opened the door to the linen cupboard. I just stood there. I watched him walk into it and close the door behind him. After a few seconds I heard him call out goodbye, and that was it. When I opened the cupboard he was gone!” She let out a long breath. “Of course, I never told the police any of that, only reported him as missing.”

“Wow!”

“I mean, people just disappear sometimes, don’t they? I guess a lot of the time it’s a case of them simply not wanting to be found. They want to take off and start afresh somewhere. But this was different. This was instant!”

Her friend raised her eyebrows and said, “Right!”

“Naturally, once I’d got over the shock of it, and at the same time come to terms with what a blessing the whole thing was, I jumped on his laptop to find out more about what had happened. He only said that he needed to hold the crystal, enter a dark place, close his eyes, and think of where he would rather be.”

“And?”

Her face fell. “You can imagine, I couldn’t make head nor tail of it. Plus, a lot of it was password protected. It’s left me feeling so curious, you know?”

“I bet it has. Couldn’t you get some computer person to have a look at it? They can get stuff back somehow, I’m pretty sure they can.”

“Not really”. She looked across at the table where the laptop had been.

“The next day, while I was at work, the cheeky sod came back for it!”

She was watching the gentle flow of the stream as it occasionally stirred dead leaves from the embankment.

It was a place that they had always come to, just to chill out. To catch up with each other, as they were doing now. To share secrets. She seemed to have so many to tell this time around and nothing was going to stop her talking. She confided that she had reported the creepy guy from dispatch to her boss for his making lewd remarks. Nothing more was said, but she noticed that he has stopped doing it. She’d read in the paper that the CEO of one of her charities, the one for the homeless, had been charged with embezzlement. She crossed that charity off her list and would give more to the cat haven. As for the neighbour’s dog that keeps fouling her front lawn, she hit him full blast with the hose the other day and he’s not been back since.

She stood on the bank in silence for a while.

She thanked her friend for listening and whispered her goodbye as she slowly tilted the urn above the running waters.

It was not unusual for him to wake up momentarily during the night.

On this occasion he saw movement across the room. It wasn’t much more than a shadow. He could only just make her out. He felt or his glasses and put them on. She was just standing there looking out. She was obviously having trouble getting off to sleep. This wasn’t uncommon, but it rarely ended up with her actually getting out of bed. She was probably worrying about something, he thought. He knew that she could be a terrible worrier at times. He wondered what she was concerned about this time. He couldn’t think of anything that could be troubling her, but that didn’t mean anything. He knew she could get worked up about the most trivial things. He was tempted to ask, but this could lead to them both being awake for ages.

He sat up quietly, not wishing to disturb her. He watched her for a while. In the darkened room it was hard to see, but he got an occasional glimpse of some slight movement. After several minutes of doing this he felt sleep creeping up on him. Eventually, he realised that he’d have to whisper something that would not make her jump, but at the same time would stir her enough to get her to climb back into bed.

He took a sip of water from the side table and softly cleared his throat. In his quietest voice, he asked, “Are you OK, Pet?”

The bedding behind him moved. Slightly annoyed, his wife replied, “Yes, of course. Do try to get off, dear.”

He knew every road and lane in the city.

He had to, he was a bike messenger. He worked for a courier company, carrying and delivering items around the city, and as such he’d received a few scrapes, cuts and bruises over the three years, mainly from getting bumped by the occasional car. Coming off his bike was like getting brownie points with the girls. They always liked to hear the details of any collisions, and if he had scars they were always keen to see them. He was always more than happy to oblige; he certainly had a lot of them. It transpired that this aspect of his job had, over the years, resulted in him accumulating more steady girlfriends than he knew what to do with.

Unhappily, this particular lifestyle came to a very abrupt end the day that the slightly haughty girl from behind the counter in the jewellry store, being somewhat foolishly convinced that she was the only one, found out that she wasn’t.

He was on one of his regular runs, heading down the main street when he saw the car cross into his lane, and coming straight towards him. It seemed to be picking up speed. He may have had the presence of mind to make a sudden, last minute manoeuvre, had he not taken those last precious seconds to recognise and fully comprehend why he was looking at the face of the of slightly haughty girl from behind the counter in the jewellry store…

She was struggling with some of her school work.

She came home with a school report. Her day hadn’t been good, but she found a letter waiting for her when she got home. She was looking forward to reading it. It was sure to cheer her up.

Her mother sat looking at her report card shaking her head. The youngster was never any good with numbers, so trying to remember the dates of historical events, like battles and the reigns of kings and queens, was a major problem for her. Her mother wasn’t happy with her poor results. She was told to go to her room and study for next week’s test.

After a while she called out, “Mum. You know you said that getting dates wrong was never a good thing?”

“I do, of course, yes.”

“My letter from my pen pal in America has a problem with the stamp.”

“Oh. Yes?”

“Yes. The year showing on the stamp; it’s so wrong.”

“Wrong, dear?” She came into her room. “Show me.”

“It has next year’s date in the corner. We haven’t got their yet.”

“Well, I never! You’re right!” She thought for a minute. “This could be worth a lot of money.”

In an instant, her mother was happy to be made wrong.

The traveller emerged from his time machine.

The machine itself was built in the form of a small armchair. It had a hood at the back that could be pulled over the person sitting, much like those used in convertible sports cars. The inside of this hood had a small flat screen with a series of dials and switches beneath, for time navigation purposes. However, all this clever instrumentation was of little help on this occasion. He now had no idea where he was. The time indication display had gone blank moments before the chair stopped shuddering, letting him know it was no longer moving through time. He switched on the power cell charging unit. The screen remained blank, telling him nothing of his where or when. The recharging would take several minutes.

He slowly lifted the hood and looked around. There was hardly enough light to see much, but he sensed he was in a room. He took a pencil torch from his pocket and scanned his surroundings. It looked as though he’d landed in somebody’s drawing room. It looked dated somehow, probably Victorian. He found a light switch. He stood looking around. He wondered about the sort of people who lived here, it was certainly a very nicely appointed room. There was an ornate free-standing privacy screen in the corner, which he opened up and placed around his time machine. He was admiring the design on its panels when the door opened. A frustrated looking man with a clipboard came in.

“Oh! You came today!” He looked at his clipboard. “You’re the guy here to do some measuring, I presume?”

He hesitated, “Eh. Yes.”

“OK. What’s your name?”

Without hesitation, he replied, “Ernest.”

The other raised an eyebrow. “Really?”

The time traveller had the feeling that things were about to go bad for him. “Well, yes it is. Why, is that important?”

The other went wide-eyed for a moment, then he burst out laughing. When he finally managed to recover his self-control, he said, “OK, very good, but you need to be out of here shortly. We start shooting in ten minutes.”

“Shooting?” He asked.

As he left, the man said, “Yes, ten minutes.”

As quickly as he could, he moved the screen back, dropped into his chair, checked that everything was fully charged and programed his return to the basement of his home. It was there, with all his equipment working that he was able to determine where and when he’d been.

It turned out that at that precise location and time he’d been in a television company’s recording studio. He’d been on the set of the drawing room, where they were about to film act three of ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’.

The story began to write a story.

This was most unusual. It flailed around looking for a subject. It suddenly occurred to it that the writer usually wrote the story, and that being the case, why couldn’t the story write a story about the writer? Straight away it realised that it knew very little about the writer. It knew from its personal experience of watching stories being written that the writer needed to have a firm grip on the subject to create a good story. So, it decided to hold off for a while until it was able to observe the writer, writing.

Unfortunately, the writer couldn’t come up with a subject to write about. This meant that the writer didn’t write a story, leaving the story with nothing to write about. This, in itself was a disappointment, but having often witnessed the writer experiencing the same lack of subject matter, it didn’t feel so bad about it.

In fact, it decided that the story should stick to what it was, a story.

They had run out of milk and she suggested he try the fridge in the shed.

Neither of them were at all hopeful, as they couldn’t remember the last time they’d used it. She was sure that it had a carton of long-life in there, not opened. He went looking. The first thing he saw was the door sitting partly open. Not a good sign. As he approached, he noticed that there was no light on inside. Obviously the power supply had fused or something. He’d look anyway. When he opened up he found a family of mice, all gathered around a large plate. There they were, mum, dad and two little ones. In its centre stood a large block of cheese with much of its plastic wrapping peeled away. Scattered around the plate’s rim were dozens of tiny cheese crumbs. This had been deliberately managed so that the family could take up their allotted crouching spots and eat in relative comfort.

He was immediately impressed. It all looked so terribly civilised, he thought. He couldn’t help thinking about lunch time in the canteen at his place of work. The elbow-jostling queues lining up with plates being held out for food to be served.

One of the mice, he took it to be the father of the brood, looked up and appeared to wink.

He returned the door to where he’d found it and made his way out quietly.

Outside, he realised that he hadn’t even looked for the milk. Never mind, he thought, if there was any in there, they would need it. After all, they were a growing family…

The elderly patient in Ward 7C was extremely popular.

She was always very polite. Whenever she needed to press the bell for attention, she would apologise for the inconvenience the moment they appeared. Everything they did for her was greeted with a sincere thank you. She was so nice that out at the nurse’s station they would fight over who would go to her.

When the small group of doctors came making their rounds she apologised for there not being enough chairs. Each time she was asked a question, she would answer very politely, followed by a thank you. When the wooden paddle was placed on her tongue, or when her pulse was checked, or when they shined a light in her eyes, she would apologise if she saw the slightest hint of dissatisfaction on any of their faces. She apologised for being unable to offer them tea or coffee.

When they had finished she made a point of thanking them all once more when she said goodbye. As they left she called out that they should feel free to visit again anytime they wanted to.

Whereas the nurses loved the old dear and accepted her for what she was, the doctors held suspicions that she was taking the mickey…

They met in a quiet bar in the city.

He was smartly dressed in a suit, having worked late and had come straight from the office. She was wearing a skirt and blouse, having gone home and changed before coming out. Neither of them were shy, exactly, but both had quiet temperaments. It just so happened that they were sitting next to one another at the bar. They both couldn’t help noticing that they had the same drink. This got them chatting about cocktails and how important it was to get the ratios of ingredients right, especially when making a Blood and Sand; particularly the quantity of orange juice. They then went on to talk about other things. Things they liked and those they didn’t. This was how they quickly discovered that they had so many things in common.

They seemed to share the same interests and tastes in favourite household pets, movies, food, travel, sport, reading music, and so much more. The two hours slipped away while neither of them noticed. Then, there was that magical moment when the music that had been playing softly in the background moved on to the next track. Their eyes met instantly and they both knew immediately that this was their favourite song! They just had so much in common.

Another thing they had in common was the fact that they had both made the exact same and really huge mistake in their lives.

They had both married other people.