Author: Alexander Fawn

The program was well underway during the pandemic.

It was the year 2020, when the covid strain was on the rise, that brought about their greatest challenge. Nobody actually liked wearing the masks, especially him. Despite this, the intense training they had received regarding detection avoidance, along with their highly advanced skills in cosmetic applications, would ensure success. Like the rest of them, he had to be patient. Along with the others of his kind, he had to put up with the disgruntled looks from people for not wearing a face mask. None of them knew with any certainty how long the program would need to keep running.

Their venerable leaders, back home on a dying planet, in a distant galaxy, had estimated that by 2035 enough of them would be in place. These chosen ones would hold enough of those specifically targeted roles within human society to take over.

She was half awake when the alarm sounded.

It felt as though she had been only dozing all through the night. She really needed to improve her quality of sleep. Laying there, still tired, she decided to call in sick. She would do some serious research on the subject of sleep. She struggled to get out of bed. A few minutes later, coming out of the bathroom, she had a plan. She decided to get dressed, then go straight to her room with her computer and begin searching for answers. Still feeling a bit drowsy, she booted up. Once on the internet, she began looking at ways to improve her quality of sleep.

She was looking at sites that talked about the advantages of contoured pillows, the softness of bedsheets and how to stop snoring. Despite still feeling dopey, or because of it, she found herself getting sidetracked by a fascinating item about memory improvement techniques. She read about how remembering things can be made easier by thinking of things by using pictures.

The site gave the example of the way to recall the three things, a mouse, a door and a table, when asked about them at a later time. It went on to say that a person should imagine opening a door and finding a mouse sitting on a table.

Still yawning, this reminded her that she’d promised her neighbour to get the collapsible card table from the junk room and have it ready for her to borrow on her next visit…

She was wondering just where she had put it, when she fell asleep.

The great puzzle of life; dealing with what is here and now.

For some… they look for what is lost. For some, the endless toleration for something not there. For some, there is something not quite right with the great cosmic order. A missing piece, one might say. A certain lacking in the great assembly of things. The shop has sold us a mega multi-piece jigsaw, with just one piece missing. More of a concern… the fact that it was not stolen; not taken from the box. The plastic bag that holds all of the pieces is intact, still sealed. This item was never there. What terrible fear this brings for some. Knowing that what is missing will not be found. Its invisibility being its attribute that ensures this. For some, there is a great unfairness to it all. Something that was never complete; never completely right within its foundation.

A mystery for most; its constant lack of presence remains unhindered.

So many maladies, all turning on the one unseen pivot.

When they met, mid-afternoon, they should both really have been elsewhere.

He was embarrassed by the thought that he’d snuck out from the office for a break. She, on the other hand, had taken time out before delivering the papers she’d been asked to hand in at the solicitor’s office. He felt they should have some kind of cover story that would avoid awkward questions. In fact, he said he had worked out what he would say.

“Go on,” she said, with a concerned smile.

“I’ll explain that I’d been in town shopping for extra-large lengths of balsa wood,” he began, “I would say that it was material that I needed for the full-size model of the cockpit of a combat-ready fifth-generation, Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor fighter jet, that I am building in the spare room of my flat. Which is going really well, by the way. Yes, I would say that when I saw you about to enter the solicitor’s office across the street, I felt compelled to run over and ask you if you’d like to take time out from your busy day.”

She nodded, slowly.

“What would you say?” he asked.

Slowly putting her empty cup down on the saucer, and knowing that this would absolutely never happen again, she said, “I’d say that we met in a coffee shop.”

The crime was a strange one.

Although basically a break-in, there were peculiar aspects to it, and despite having a brief description from a neighbour, they never actually found the perpetrator. It began when the Bair family, the parents and their son, left their house and went out for their regular morning walk. They would do this during the Winter months, when the weather allowed. The idea was to take a brisk walk together around the local streets for twenty minutes or so, then return home to a hot breakfast. On this particular occasion, when they entered the house, they were surprised to find that things had been disturbed.

First, they found an empty bowl. It would be Mrs Bair’s habit to prepare three bowls of porridge oats soaking while they were out. Returning, she would microwave them. The bowl in question was still warm and only contained a used spoon. It was also noticed that the oven door had been left open.

Next, when things had been put right and they sat down to their hot food, one of the chairs toppled over because one of the legs had been broken. It was then that the mother had got angry and shouted at her husband to call the police. Before he had a chance to do this, they all heard noises coming from upstairs.

At this point, the three Bairs climbed the stairs together. In the main bedroom they found the window wide open and signs that someone had been asleep on the bed.

What did the Lead Detective on the case think.

“Yes, as you say, looking back, it was a strange case. It seems that on that occasion, the family, that’s the parents and their son went out without locking the house. We suspected at the time that the girl who was seen entering, was just a street person, sleeping rough, when they saw the opportunity to go in. Not much of a description except she had a shock of golden hair. The girl didn’t do much really just ate a bowl of porridge, broke a chair, then had the cheek to fall asleep on one of the beds. We were asked at the time how she got away. We were never really sure, but suspected the commotion going on downstairs by the three Bairs, when they found the empty bowl and damaged chair, woke the culprit up. She probably went out through the bedroom window, climbed down the drainpipe and legged it. We spoke to a number of homeless people. Most of them said what a nice kid she was. One of them told us she had died her hair. As you know, she was never caught.”

He spent night after night in the shed at the back.

The time machine he’d been building was finally ready for the much-awaited test. It was something of a personal disappointment for him that it was not able to take him back in time, but the fact that his calculations were telling him that travel to the future was available, made up for it. Climbing in, he set the dial for a mere seven days. He wanted to take it easy at first. With an intake of breath, he thumped the large red button that he was particularly proud of, and both he and the machine disappeared. It was when he clambered out at what appeared to be the very spot that he’d left, that he had grave doubts about whether he’d accomplished anything at all.

Moving across to the bench where much of his technical equipment and experimental pieces of apparatus were spread out in a jumble, he caught sight of himself in grandma’s full-length mirror stored in the corner. Knowing that he was only twenty-eight made it all the more preposterous that he was looking at a man in his late fifties!

He stood wondering for several minutes about what had happened. Obviously, going forward for a week in one reality had taken him forward a couple of decades in another. This didn’t sit well with him at all. He didn’t like the idea of being robbed of such a large chunk of his life. When he got back, he would need to focus on the issue of these dual realities.

Climbing back in, he hesitated for a moment, thinking about the fact that he was not able to travel back to the past, but could certainly return to the point in time when he left. Because of this, it was critical that the return setting was painstakingly accurate. Knowing this, he spent several minutes before satisfying himself that the exact time had been entered before pressing his beautiful button.

The resulting coming together of time machines from the two quite distinct reality modes did not go well…

The explosion was enormous.

The piece of ground simply smouldered.

The shed was gone.

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.