Author: Alexander Fawn

The house was very quiet.

Slowly and carefully, he crept out from under the bed. He paused to see if anyone was around. Happy that it was safe, he scurried along skirting boards, until he came to the kitchen. There may be food here. Methodically, he scoured the floor looking for any traces of bits that had been dropped. He was concentrating on the areas around chair legs when he heard it. It was the sound of footsteps approaching the room! What would he do? More to the point, what would it do. All he could do to avoid detection, was to scamper across the width of the kitchen as fast as he could and hide under the fridge…

His mother, having entered the kitchen, only to find her son down on all fours facing the closed refrigerator door, stood for a few beats, looking agog.

It was at this point; quite regardless of any conversation that might take place between him and his mother, he knew that his attempt to emulate the activities of a Blattidae had hit a major snag.

The girl was in her bed with her eyes closed and her bedside light on.

She wasn’t asleep. She was waiting. The encounter with the boy from the next block of big houses, just a few days before, was all she could think off. She didn’t really know him. He went to a different school. She didn’t like him at all. He was such a show-off, and he had all these horrible pimples all over his face. She’d been told that his dad drives him to a posh school in the city every day in a big, expensive car. She didn’t really like talking to him, but he just happened to be there, coming out of the sweet shop with a huge bag of lollies. She nearly bumped into him, making him drop the bag. She had said she was sorry. That’s how it started, with him yacking away about how rich his mum and dad where. He was such a show-off.

That was when he told her about his teeth. At first, she thought he was exaggerating, the way boys do, but she soon realised that with his mum and dad being so incredibly rich, he was probably telling her the truth. She’s been thinking about it ever since.

It was lucky, really, that it just so happened that on this very night she had a tooth beneath her pillow. Not just her tooth. She managed to have her hand under there as well. She was waiting. She needed to have a serious talk with the tooth fairy when she came…

Her eyes were still closed when she heard the flapping of wings. As soon as she felt the movement under her pillow, she managed to grab the fairy by its tiny arm and drag it out. It had her tooth tucked under its other arm and was looking very annoyed.

Sitting up with a grin, the girl said, “Got you!”

Yanking its arm out from the girl’s fingertips, it said, “What do you think you are doing?”

She dived back under the pillow and held the coin up. “What do you call this?” she said.

With raised eyebrows, the fairy said, “What is your problem? We take the tooth and leave the money. That’s what we do.”

At this point the girl went into detail about the conversation with the horrible boy she met outside the shop. “Can you explain how this spotty kid gets twenty dollars for each tooth when I only get two?”

The tiny creature rolled her eyes. “Look kid, we just do our job. We do it without complaint, and we don’t like it any more than you.” She shook her head. “It plays havoc with our commission!”

“Commission?”

“Yes, commission. All these different rewards being handed out.” She sighed. “None of us really know what to expect at the end of the month.”

With a pout, she said, “Well, I think your system of rewards is very spotty.” She paused momentarily, thinking about how clever that was! She went on with a smile. “Well, OK. I had no idea.” She waved the coin. “Thank you,” she said.

Laying her head back down on her pillow, she closed her eyes.

Moments later, she was asleep.

He never did find out why any of it happened.

He called his best friend who also worked in the city, to tell him about it. Although they worked in different buildings, it was their habit to catch up every lunchtime for a coffee and a quick snack. Sometimes, they would miss out because of work commitments, but most weeks they would try to meet at a different café each time. It happened that, on his way home from the office by tube he got chatting with a fellow passenger. Although he couldn’t remember most of the conversation, the subject of coffee shops in the city came up and he was told of a small café down one of the lanes that had just opened for business. He was told how good the coffee was and how highly he recommended it.

The following day he had rung his friend about it. Unfortunately, it was one of those lunchtimes when he couldn’t make it. However, intrigued with the idea, he went along on his own. He found the shop. It was very small and had no customers, there was only a barista behind the counter.

The coffee was good, but again, he had only a patchy memory of the casual chat he had with the guy making the coffee. He only knew that he got back to the office very late. Instead of the usual thirty minutes, he had been away for over an hour! As it turned out, the call he was trying to make was a waste of time. It being a Friday, his friend had left work even earlier than usual. He decided to leave it until Monday.

Naturally bothered by the whole experience, over the weekend he gave more and more thought to the strange event. Although he was not usually given to conspiracy theories, he couldn’t rid himself of the idea that at least half-an-hour had been erased from his memory in some way. He spent a lot of time trying to retrieve bits of what had occurred. Most of it made no sense. There had been something about the city arcade he had walked through on the Thursday lunchtime. Was he alone? Who was with him? He had the feeling that he’d been asked a lot of questions about what he’d seen or heard at the time, but little else.

On the Monday morning, he took a slightly longer route to get to his building. He had the odd notion that he should walk past the café to make the event more real. When he arrived there, he was hardly surprised to find the place boarded up, with ‘Closed’ and ‘For Lease’ signs on the door.

During the morning, he called his friend. He decided to say nothing about the incident, but arranged a place to meet at lunchtime. He would discuss it when they met. His friend agreed, saying that he’d had a peculiar incident on the weekend that he’d tell him about over a coffee.

After putting the phone down, he could feel the hairs on the back of his neck bristle. He was sure that their two stories were connected.

In the café, his friend said that he’d come into town on Saturday to shop. He said he’d got talking with a man on the bus about coffee houses, who told him about a new one that had recently opened. Because he raved about the quality of the coffee, he visited the shop before returning home. He only meant to spend a few minutes there, but when he got to the bus stop, he checked the time of the bus he meant to catch. At first, he thought there was something wrong with his phone’s time settings. He had then asked someone if they had the time. He was amazed to discover that his phone was correct. Somehow, he’d lost forty-odd minutes out of his morning!

Having listened patiently to all this, he then told his friend his own story. He explained that he had a vague memory of being questioned about their walk through the arcade. He also pointed out that the café in question had been closed. He ended by saying that he believed they had seen or heard something that they shouldn’t have, and that part of their memories of when they had walked through the arcade had been wiped.

His friend listened with interest to his story. He then raised his eyebrows and chuckled, saying, “Well now, that’s a very interesting theory, but to be honest, I don’t believe a word of it.”

“Well,” replied the other, “of course you don’t. You’ve been wiped!”

Even things on the other side can go wrong.

A case in point was the time, not easily forgotten, when the Reaper’s apprentice stuffed things up, big time. On the night of the scything, the greenhorn from the netherworld had swooped down on and along the street, reading house numbers as he went. Arriving at number twenty-seven, he drifted up to the bedroom of the young woman whose time was up. As the unsuspecting recipient of the approaching end of days was in a deep sleep, thankfully, her passing was without trauma. This event would have been just another demise, had it not been the case that it had occurred in Granfield street, and not Garnfield street.

All of this would have just blown over if it weren’t for the ramifications that cropped up years later. Bearing in mind that the usually accepted concept of the phrase ‘years later’ had no real meaning in the netherworld, in other words, the mishap was discovered ‘toot sweet’.

On its return, he was tapped on the shoulder. It was explained that the woman in question was supposed to meet and marry the man who worked in the dental laboratory on the other side of town. His brother was meant to babysit her oldest son several years later when the cyclone hit… at this point, the Grim Reaper didn’t go on.

Should anybody have feelings of sympathy for the newbie responsible for all this, they should try to understand that this was perfunctorily followed by the confiscation of both scythe and cloak, before being sent to the endless abyss, a little-known destination within the confines of the netherworld.

This being the standard procedure, in all such cases.

These things do happen.

As a kid he was crazy about Superman.

His bedroom was covered with posters and the shelves were crowded with merchandise, found in shops and bought online. There was the colourful blanket for his bed. Of course, there was the t-shirt and the mug. The fad hung around all through his school years. Later, during his early working life, he found a shop that sold large, self-adhesive stickers which led to the drivers-side door sporting the emblem. Smaller versions were tattooed on his upper arms. Then, somewhere along the way he fell in with the wrong crowd. His parents could see that they weren’t super people. They did their best to encourage him to find better company, but their advice fell on deaf ears.

His latest forearm tattoo was his poor attempt to hide the needle tracks. When the time came, it was said that his passing could be put down to what was described as a ‘bad batch’.

He was wrapped in his superman blanket before being placed in the coffin.

For his parents, there was nothing super about it.

As we look along the shelves,

Such colourful varieties are put on show.

Weighing up the pros and cons

Throughout the store, row by row.

Does our pursuance of self-nourishment

Provide a feeling of success?

Selecting from a vast array.

Getting it right, more or less.

–

An exposure to a myriad of stuff,

Coerced into complex decisions.

Selections made, both good and bad,

Notwithstanding past traditions.

–

Do we see the producers’ foibles,

In the packing they offer?

It’s all left to the humble shopper,

To accept the complex range, they proffer.

–

Is this a retreat from bygone hardships?

A time before the plenty.

A time of rationing by the book.

With larders mostly empty.

–

What are we doing to ourselves?

This weekly foray, these ongoing trials.

Stuck on selecting this or that,

Trapped in potholes between the isles!

This story is all about pretence.

Believe it or not, it begins in a place that doesn’t’ really exist, and at a time that is purely fictional. It involves a number of people who are entirely made up. This all starts to happen when those imaginary people only pretend to do things and only talk to each other in a make-belief way, about situations that also simply don’t exist. It is really hard to believe that an illusory storey such as this, based completely on concepts that are unreal, invented and totally fanciful, could in any way be truly part of what is an apparently real world.

Whether you like it or not, it probably all begins in the whimsical mind of a writer, who, as it happens, is also imaginary.

The young girl sat in her room looking at all the stuffed toys on her shelf.

Again, she looked at the monkey that sat at the end. He was new. Well, no, he was the latest. In fact, he was very old and worn. She’d been told that the old lady who lived on her own, in the cottage at the end of the street, had given it to her mother the day before. She said that her daughter might like it. In fact, she knew how much her daughter liked such things. Although surprised at receiving the unexpected gift, her mother was moved by her kindness and suggested that she be grateful and put it with the others. So, this is what she did. Of course, the girl had no idea that the toy was in fact a sentient being…

The first inkling of this fact came about when, on the following morning she discovered it, not at the end, but in the middle of the shelf.

From that point on, each morning she would find something had been moved; a chair, a book or a pencil case. Then, finally, it spoke. By this time, she wasn’t at all surprised at this. In fact, over the following days the girl and the monkey struck up quite a special friendship. It was at this point that she conveyed all these events to her mother. She felt that her mother didn’t really believe her.

Her parents, not actually being taken aback by the imaginings of their daughter, discussed the situation anyway. She had suggested a visit to a child psychologist, while he thought the whole thing was perfectly natural and would simply pass in time.

Meanwhile, the monkey, feeling that he could trust his newfound friend, had shown her how the panel at the back of her small clothes closet could slide to one side, revealing a set of descending stairs. It was down there that she discovered several more stuffed animals, all of whom could speak and move about at will.

After several visits to the basement with the monkey, she wondered whether she should tell her mother about it.

After much thought, she decided against it.

He began to make a mental list of all the things he’d really like to do.

He had already thought of a couple of things, before he realised, he was concocting a bucket list. He had often wanted to write a poem, just a short one, and the thought of going bungee jumping had always excited him, it looked dangerous but it must be safe. He would like to milk a cow; that sounded silly, but he would. He wasn’t sure why, but he would like to learn how to knit. He would also like to take piano lessons and learn about photography, take horse riding lessons and learn how to waterski. He would really like to cross a wobbly suspension bridge, go ziplining, attend a pop concert, go on a cruise ship, complete a one-thousand-word jigsaw puzzle, go cave exploring, go up and come down landing on water in a seaplane.

He would even like to go for a ride in a gondola in Venice or maybe go and see the pyramids in Egypt!

He would stop dreaming about such things

He knew full well that frogs couldn’t do any of that.

He was thumbing through the pages of his magazine when he found the advert.

He was sitting up in bed, not wanting to get up, reading his latest science fiction review. It was something he often did. The ad for the very latest time device had him really excited. Today, he decided, he would text the boss to say that he was sick. He would say that he needed to rest up awhile before coming in. This would give him time to look into what the transportation company was selling. He tapped in the message and received an OK to take time off. Although time travel machines had come a long way in recent decades, most of them were large and pretty clunky. This, on the other hand, was a small device that can be worn on the wrist. He decided he would get up, wash and shave, before sitting down to give proper attention to the details of what was on offer.

Sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee, he soon found that the item was very expensive. In fact, it would clean out nearly all of his savings. The ad gave an internet address for more information. Setting up his laptop, he began to read.

It was immediately obvious that the thing came with a lot of red tape. On the screen, he waded through seventeen pages of instructions! He considered that he understood most of it. After a few more pages of warnings and disclaimers, he came across a section that said he would need to sign and return a waiver, before it could be sent. He was determined not to be put off by any of it and set about making the purchase.

A few days later, and surprised that his manager had not harassed him about his absence, the tiny parcel came. He unwrapped it without hesitation. It was amazingly small, just as the website had described it. It was about the size of a smart watch. Flipping the back cover off, as instructed, he looked at the three dials and the two positional switches. He was keen to get it up to standby stage. He manipulated the controls from what he could remember.

Satisfied that it was ready to operate, he strapped it on and pressed the power switch.

At that moment, a whisp of acrid smoke began to rise from the device, followed by a loud ‘pop’!

He was thumbing through the pages of his magazine when he…