Author: Alexander Fawn

She had got away.

This was her life now. This was her new life. Away from him; away from them; away from everybody, all the people she had ever known. She’d been lucky to get work in the old lady’s flower shop. She knows it was a matter of timing. The week before, her predecessor was caught with her hand in the till and got fired. That, and the fact that the old girl took a liking to her. There was no way she’d be anything but grateful. It was her salvation. Getting work so quickly. Being able to pay the rent weekly, eating regularly, and best of all, staying under the radar.

At the end of the day, she walked home from the shop. She’d brought her laptop with her. Internet and games only. No more emails. No more Facebook. They played no part in her new life. When she got in she heated a frozen dinner. She sat to eat it at the small table in the small kitchen. Then she cleared away and boiled a kettle.

It was time to break the rule. Time to allow herself a tiny connection amid all those she had cut. The one link to all that she had left behind. The one and only link to the past. She made herself a cup of coffee.

She sat quietly sipping it from her favourite mug.

The rabbit sat quietly on its favourite tree stump.

This particular spot in the garden was its regular place. From here it could see the birdhouse with its peaked roof fixed on top of a sturdy pole. The rabbit often saw a large, grey cat prowling around the garden, but where it sat, the birdhouse was high enough from the lawn to be a safe place for birds to come and go. These were mostly laughing doves. They would often fly down and pay a visit. They would drink from a small bowl of water. Next to the bowl sat a dish that was topped up with seed from time to time.

It heard a door slide open. Minutes later a man appeared, carrying bird seed in his cupped hand. It watched as the man approached. The rabbit saw it as a ritual. First the dish comes out and is shaken to remove any remaining husks, then the tiny seeds are tipped in and the dished put back in the same place. If the bowl requires topping up the man would bring a small watering can and fill it to the brim. Soon after this the birds would come. They usually came in pairs with one eating and one drinking. Often, they would swap.

The rabbit enjoyed watching all these comings and goings, and this was in spite of the fact that the rabbit was painted green with blue eyes and made of concrete!

She was excited about what she’d been given.

She ran in to tell her mother. “Look mummy! Isn’t it beautiful?”

Her mother, preoccupied with loading the washing machine, said, “Oh! Yes? Where did you get that?”

The girl waved it in the air, saying, “The old man gave it to me, he said…”

Her mother looked up suddenly. “What old man?”

“The old man with the long white beard.”

“Where was this old man?”

“In the street.”

“One of our neighbours, do you mean?”

“No mummy, but he said…”

“I don’t care what he said. You’ve been told over and over not to talk to strangers.”

“But he was nice.”

The mother said, “I don’t care how nice he was,” and put out her hand. She took it and turned it over. It was some kind of amulet. It seemed to be quite ancient, but at the same time in remarkably good condition. Without question, it was a lovely piece, decorated with an intricate pattern that was certainly striking. She said, “It looks quite valuable, why would he give you a thing like that?”

“He said I was special, and it was meant for me. He said if you stroke your finger along this twisty line here, you can enter a magic world.”

Her mother shook her head, not really listening. “I don’t know where it came from, it looks as though it’s worth a bit.” She gave her daughter a grimace as she handed it back, then putting the last of the clothes in, she said, “We’ll have to give it back.”

The girl stamped her foot. “No!” she cried, “It’s mine.”

“Look, you shouldn’t have been out there talking to strangers in the first place. You’ve brought it on yourself.”

“But we can’t give it to anybody else, because it’s mine.”

Her mother straightened and said, “That’s all very well. You’re a silly girl. I’ve told you time and time again not to talk to strangers.”

The girl pouted. She turned away running her finger across the amulet.

Then, she was gone…

I was right there when the murder took place, I saw it all.

Of course, I wasn’t there when he found the reference to the almost undetectable poison on the Internet. Neither was I there when he managed to buy it on the black market. I didn’t attend any of the police interviews where he explained about her two heart attacks. Those were a while back. I wasn’t even here then.

He was clever in the way he had explained about her chest pains and their realising that she could finally go if she had another attack, but I wasn’t there for that either. But I was there when the murder took place.

I was there, sitting in the armchair, when he brought the coffee in.

Naturally, had I been asked, I couldn’t have told them anything, being a cat, but even if I could, I would have said nothing.

I had never liked her.

I had always liked him.

It was the snoring that actually caused the problem.

Had he not snored, had he just slept quietly at the back of the lecture hall, the entire incident would have unfolded in a different way. As it was, the professor felt that the student was taking up a place in the university that so many other more worthy applicants would have benefited from. This particular lecture was, as was totally recognised by the rest of his attendees, a pivotal one. Whether it was the feeling that the young man was depriving someone of the opportunity or simply the embarrassment he felt when the sound from the back of the room turned heads and caused a low titter around the room, was debatable. Either way, he made sure his annoyance was voiced when the last slide finished and students began making their way out.

He approached the student, who seemed to be slowly taking in his surroundings. He berated the young medical student the way any professor of medicine would. Pointing out what a waste of space he was and how important it was to attend lectures in a fit state. He also forcefully explained that it was also the professor’s importance in this student’s life that was not fully recognised. The admonishment went on until the student became teary, at which point the professor felt that he had said enough. In an angry mood he abruptly left the lecture room, leaving the offending student to gather up his books. Some of which had fallen to the floor.

It came as a shock to the professor on the following day to note that the student was missing from his class, being convinced that his hefty dressing down would have had quite the opposite effect. It was not until late in the afternoon that he had an even greater shock when he received the news that the student in question had passed away.

After making enquiries, he learnt the student had suffered from a medical condition. It had been sickle cell anaemia, a case of irregular sickled cells blocking blood vessels causing tissue and organ damage, along with a number of symptoms, including daytime sleepiness.

The professor asked himself whether he had been too harsh. Did this in some way have an unseen effect on the boy’s health or did the medical condition simply run its natural course? He came to the conclusion that the latter was bound to be the case.

At which point, he decided that he would keep telling himself that.

The sleeper stirred in the bed, groaning softly.

In his dream he was a soldier. There was a lot of noise going on, and he was running across an open field waving a flag. When he tripped and fell it had woken him up. He was now waiting at table. He glanced across at the Eifel Tower. He was a French waiter taking an order from English-speaking tourists, he was thinking that their accents could be German when a departing customer bumped into him. This caused him to wake and find that the pigs that surrounded him in the pen were making so much noise he could hardly hear what his young daughter was saying. She came closer and shouted that lunch was ready. He was obviously a pig farmer. He waved as he closed the gate. It came down on his thumb and it jolted him awake.

Now, he stood listening to a strange noise that he didn’t recognise. He looked around. A gush of wet concrete began to pour onto a metal grid. He was holding a shovel, and like several others was about to spread it out to create a floor. He was a construction worker on a building site. No sooner had he started spreading another man’s shovel clipped his leg. The pain snapped him wide awake for him to find that it was night time and the torch he’d been using was beginning to flicker. As a security officer, he was checking that the doors around the outside of the building were locked. When he tried the next one it opened, setting off an alarm. The piercing sound of the siren shook him back to consciousness, where he discovered that a train had pulled into the station and passengers were getting off. He was holding a small red flag.

He was aware that as a station guard he had to wait until everybody was clear before waving the all clear to the driver. When this was done and he was returning to the guard’s room he tripped on something and fell forward. He put out his hands to save himself and the impact with the ground brought him out of his sleep. He was still lying on the ground, but this time he was crawling under a car. When he reached the spot he needed to be at, he turned over and started to use the spanner he held to check that several nuts were tight. As a motor mechanic, he knew how important this was. As he was checking the last one the spanner slipped from his hand and fell, hitting him on the forehead. This caused him to wake with a start, to see his room! His room, yes, he was finally, properly awake and back in his room.

He laid still for several minutes. He was looking up at the bedroom ceiling trying to shake off all the images from his dream. Of course, he wasn’t any of those people, all of this had been a silly dream. All these different personalities had been conjured up by his imagination. However, he was suddenly shocked by the realisation that he couldn’t remember what he himself actually looked like! He stayed there even longer, trying to figure out how it could be that he had absolutely no memory of that!

Now, fully awake, he got up and stretched. This strange state of affairs could be solved in an instant. He went into the bathroom, switched on the light and looked in the mirror.

To his utter astonishment, he was a rather tubby, grey-haired woman in her fifties.

The first is the first of twenty six,

And this is easy enough,

But looking for two that appear at noon,

Is when things start to get tough.

–

You may say “Oh! Gee!” when looking for this.

Phonetics play a big part.

While seeking a pair in a vacuum,

Try not to pull them apart.

–

When looking for this,

It’s not so easy to miss,

Just how common can you get?

And what is to come,

Although rather humdrum,

Is the nastiest of them yet.

–

So, when digging so deep

Into what nexus we keep,

It’s hardly worth the fuss.

The statistical measure of the linear relationship

Between a dependent and an independent variable

Can be simply represented thus.

For most of his working life he had been a dedicated employee.

For twenty-seven years he’d been with the company, working in their large production facility. He was always on time never arrived late, never left early, and rarely took sick leave. He did the cleaning, sweeping on the workshop floor, and spent most of his time cleaning the toilets. There were a lot of them. He dealt with the terrible smells, the slippery floors, and the complaints from staff when they have to be temporarily closed for cleaning. All of these issues he handled in a most polite and professional manner. However, all these ongoing problems paled into insignificance compared with the issue that he confronted every Friday.

On this day each week, he made his way down to the large noticeboard fixed to the wall near the main offices at the far end of the building. It was titled, ‘Employee of the Month’.

His name was never on it!

He was thinking about her as he made his way home.

They weren’t happy thoughts. They never were. Truth to tell, it wasn’t long after their marriage that he realised what a horrible mistake it had been. Two people, agreeing to share the rest of their lives together really had to think long and hard about the commitment they were making. Sounds simple, he thought, despite knowing how wrong they themselves had got it. It wasn’t until they were living together that their differences, in other words the things they didn’t like about each other, started to show up.

For him, it was probably the bathroom thing that had started it. It was the way she would always leave the bathroom in a mess, specifically, leaving her towel on the floor when there was a towel rail right there. As for the cap of the toothpaste tube, she didn’t use it, never put it back on, would leave it sitting on the side of the sink.

Also, she was such a noisy eater and often talked with her mouth full. Then there was the really annoying habit she had of tapping her shoe against the kitchen’s table leg. Then there was the way she was always exaggerating the most trivial matters. The way she spent too much time on the internet, and too much money placing orders on it, for stuff they simply didn’t need. The way she would sit continually clicking her pen. When they were out, the way she would leave her shopping trolley in the middle of the car park. The way she would stop and hold a conversation right in front of a doorway. He didn’t want to think about how many years he had put up with it.

As he opened the front gate, he told himself how much he hated it when these acrimonious thoughts came tumbling in.

However, as he unlocked the front door and entered the house, all these negative and disturbing thoughts where quickly blown away, as was often the case, with the comforting realisation that the woman was dead.

People ask, is it a place you visit?

An accounting, while passing through,

Part of some endless cycling thing,

Where you move on, after paying your due.

–

Do we want to know the truth of it?

Could the answer be divine?

Is our questioning even relevant?

Are we just searching for a sign?

–

Do we go to an endless sleep;

To a mortal’s final rest?

An instant state of oblivion,

With no pause for a moral test.

–

Are we meeting life’s deadline?

Doubts are commonplace.

Do we struggle there on hands and knees?

Or, do we walk with grace?

–

Is the final journey a lengthy one?

Do we need to cross a border?

How are we judged, if at all?

Is there a weighing of chaos and order?

–

What kind of judgment waits?

Is it a balance of love and hate?

Who made the reservation and when?

Do we want to know the date?

–

When the man with the scythe whispers,

As he does, again and again.

You can make your own enquiries.

You’re bound to find out then.