Author: Alexander Fawn

Mike Hike liked to jog,

His wife preferred to walk,

And so, when perambulating,

Never could they talk.

He was leaving, he’d simply had enough.

They had told him he could pull through if he really wanted to. They had told him that; the doctors, the nurses, even the orderly in the elevator as he was being wheeled back to his room. But the truth was he no longer wanted any of it. In fact, he’d rather leave it all behind. They wouldn’t understand that, would they? No, not a chance. After all, it was their job to keep all these people going; keep them alive. It was their mission, the motivation that kept them all there. He’d lost count of the number of times he’d been back in a place like this. He wasn’t in pain. Not at all. Just existing with inoperable issues was his lot. He was far from being a candidate for euthanasia. Not at all. Many of those around him were far more deserving of that.

He’d seen enough, heard enough, smelled all he wanted to smell. He’d experienced a lifetime of watching children grow up, moving house, losing loved ones, taking holidays, watching movies, reading poetry, listening to concerts, planting seedlings, looking at the stars, attending church and swimming in pools… All this had to go. He could slip away quietly in the night. He’d leave it all behind. He’d take nothing with him. Others could stay and enjoy it all; the walks through well-tended parks with their ponds and their flowerbeds, the concerts with orchestras made up of wonderfully talented musicians, all playing in harmony, the vacations in the sun with waiters serving by the pool, and the art galleries, wonderful museums and exhibitions. All those wonderful places; He would leave them all for others to enjoy.

Is it all right to simply have had enough of it all? He thought so. He wished he could explain all this to others, with the hope that they would understand. These next few hours would pass quickly enough. There would be no fuss with his leaving. When they found him in the morning he would look peaceful.

He was sure of that.

I wanted to tell you this quick joke that I heard the other day.

Well, when I say the other day, it was probably more than a week ago now, or even two. Anyway, it’s all about this guy who’s doing time in prison for bank robbery, who gets a visit from his wife; although strictly speaking she wasn’t exactly his wife, more of a partner you should say. She’s been married before and was in the process of getting a divorce. When it was all settled, they planned to marry. Anyway, like I said, she visited him in prison. The day she arrived at the front gate she was upset with herself. She had wanted to look her best for him and had dressed herself nicely in her best clothes that morning, but had accidentally caught the sleeve of her blouse as she was getting off the bus. It was now rented.

When I say it was rented, I don’t mean it was rented, you know, rented. Rented, as in hired or something. It was, in fact, her own blouse; although to be strictly accurate, the blouse was still the property of her older sister. She had left for America some years earlier with her sword-swallowing boyfriend. They were planning to start up a street double-act in New Orleans. She had to leave several of her clothes behind. She couldn’t take them all you see. It was understood that her younger sister could use whatever she wanted as long as they were all there in good condition when she returned. That made two reasons the wife was upset about the blouse being rented.

It should be pointed out that the wife’s father had not been too keen on his oldest daughter going off like that. He found the notion of them making any kind of living over there hard to swallow. Well, no, I didn’t mean it in that way; the sister’s boyfriend didn’t find it at all hard to swallow. He was really good at it! He had been taught by a master and knew all the rights and wrongs of it and how to perform. As it happens, something did go horribly wrong for the boyfriend’s master. It had happened not long after he had finished his training; maybe a month, or maybe a bit longer. The incident occurred when he was giving a performance one Christmas eve at the entrance of a shopping centre.

She went to the zoo with her parents.

It was a special opening day, with an exciting new exhibit. This would be the first time that any of these creatures were put on view. It was the first of the zoological gardens anywhere to be granted permission to show them publically. Of course, nearly everybody had seen pictures of them, along with some videos that gave an idea of how they lived in their old environment. As the family worked its way slowly around the park, the girl became impatient. Her father smiled and explained that it was just good management to save the best until last. The special, new enclosure that had been built for them was situated at the very back of the grounds.

At last they came to it. The ground cover and the trees that had been planted were all very peculiar. They had been told that there were two of them. One of each gender. A strange little shelter had been built for them. At first they could see nothing. Then, they emerged.

The girl just stared for the longest time, watching the strange way they moved about. One of them came right up close to the metal netting and looked directly at her. She was frightened by the weird look of the thing, but stood her ground. It was the eyes that held her. Such peculiar eyes and so very sad.

She asked, “Will they be alright?”

“We hope so. They’re not sure how they’ll adapt to this environment.”

“Are there many of them?”

“No. Not many. The Elders haven’t given out many details yet. Only a few were saved. These are the lucky ones.”

“What are we going to call them?”

“Well, it seems that some of their records did survive the global nuclear annihilation, so they’ll probably be called what they used to call themselves… humans.”

Both were criminals, but with different skill sets.

One was an arsonist, while the other an enforcer. The former sent to torch the place. The other, charged with keeping an eye on the property. It was a large warehouse, empty save for a recent, and extremely large shipment of drugs stacked in one corner under a tarpaulin, waiting for distribution. The firebug had dowsed the place thoroughly and had rigged an incendiary device with a timer. He was covering it back up when he heard something. He looked around to find a man entering through a small door at the far end of the building. As he approached, he pulled a hefty looking hand gun from his jacket pocket. He held it up at shoulder level, pointing it directly at the other man, as he made his way towards him, maintaining eye contact.

When he was only a dozen or so metres away, his foot caught something and quite suddenly he was stumbling forward. As he went down the gun flew out of his hand and rattled across the floor. He jumped to his feet quickly and saw where the gun had ended up. The torch man also saw where the gun had ended up.

The two men stood, gauging the distance. There was nothing in it. The weapon had slid to a halt midway between them. They stared at it, transfixed. It was certain that if one of them moved, they both would. There was no going back now, it would be him or him.

One of them took off and they both went. Like two charging bulls they met head on, literally. The sound of their skulls cracking together echoed around the warehouse. They both went down, out cold.

A few minutes later, the device exploded with a thunderous boom. The shipment was burning ferociously in an instant, while the two corner walls collapsed outward, weakening the roof structure. Moments later the entire roof began caving in. Several minutes later, when all emergency services arrived, the whole building was flattened and still burning.

In pragmatic terms, it was hard to put any real value on any of it.

I was sick and tired of being mistreated.

The girl was forever stretching me to a point very close to breaking. She never used me properly. I was just something she could mistreat. Sometimes I’d be shot across the room. Then, one day she dropped me as she got off the bus and a boy picked me up. His family had been picnicking in a park. I went into his pocket and jiggled around until he dropped me onto a kitchen table.

I heard a woman say, “What’s that?”

I heard him say, “Found it.”

She said, “Is it clean?”

He said, “Looks OK.”

She said, “Just run water over it and dry it with that towel, please dear.”

I was suddenly wet for the first time in my life! Then after the towel, I was twisted twice around several handles.

She said, “Just the job, no more cutlery getting lost in the bottom of the picnic basket, eh?”

The basket has been put up on a high shelf, I don’t think they go on picnics very often. I hope not. It’s nice here. My tension feels about right, in keeping with my purpose.

All in all, not a bad life for a hair tie.

It started as a minor incident while he and his girlfriend were camping.

He thought a lot of her and felt they were made for each other. It was going to be a brief getaway for the weekend. A couple of nights in a tent, going for long walks, enjoying nature. It was when they were on one of these that they discovered the cave. He was the first to go in; she followed slowly.

He commented as they entered, “You’re being very brave.”

“Am I?”

“Oh! Yes.”

“And you know this, how?”

He looked around, “I’m not sure, but I know you’ve been afraid of caves since you were a toddler.”

She was startled by the statement. “How could you possibly know that? I’ve never told you about it.” She thought about it for a while and said, “You’ve never met my parents, so you couldn’t have found out that way. How did you find out?”

He wasn’t listening. “There’s something very special about this place,” he said, running his fingers over the bare rock.

She looked around. “It’s just a cave…”

“No. No, it’s not,” he said, jumping in. “I’ll prove it.”

He stood still with his eyes closed for a full minute. He opened them to find her staring at him with raised eyebrows and a grin.

Not to be put off, he said, “Around that time, when you were a three or four, you fell over behind the shed, where your mother kept all her fancy flower pots and saucers, together with lots of glass pickling jars. You were told not to go there. You knew how angry she could get. Your knee was bleeding. You wiped the blood off as best you could and made sure it stayed out of sight. You kept it clean until it healed, but you never told your parents.” He dropped his head to one side. “You’ve never told anybody.”

Her look was something he hadn’t seen before.

That’s how it started. He couldn’t help thinking that this could open up a great future for him as some sort of modern day oracle, like the Greek thing, with people coming to him. He could put a mat down and sit cross-legged. He could charge for his services! He thought about all this in the hours that followed.

However, that night he woke abruptly with the realisation that people didn’t want to know about the past, they wanted to know about the future!

He tried to snuggle back down into his sleeping bag, but it didn’t work. He had a bad night.

The next morning they packed up and returned to their respective homes. It was late when they arrived, so he only dropped her off, then made his way home, situated in the next town.

Naturally, he was pretty upset that his grandiose plans had come to nothing on reflection.

He was equally upset when he never heard from her again…

Barber Blenkinsop

Have you any hair?

Yes sir, lots sir.

In the boxes there.

One’s for the wig man,

And one’s to pad a chair,

And one’s for the witch’s spells,

The rest we can share.

The young detective was assigned to wade through the case files of all seven victims.

This was despite his begging the police chief to give him an active role on the case. Unfortunately, his earnest request had backfired on him when he had stood his ground, saying that all his time on the force, plus his recent up to date training made him perfectly capable of being a real benefit to the current investigations. This had gone down badly and as a consequence he was relegated to working his way through all of the paperwork in the files that were almost thrown at him. It was certain that the police were dealing with a serial killer. Although it had been decided to withhold such information from the public for fear of starting a panic, each of the bodies had a small, red asterisk stencilled under the chin.

After several hours of wading through material that in the main shed no light on the case at all, he suddenly realised that he may have found a tenuous link between all seven victims of the recent crime spree. It seemed that five of the victims, and probably the remaining two, had recently had dental work carried out. The surgery in question was one that the detective was familiar with, but he had never used their services. He felt sure that this was a really viable lead to follow up on. After careful consideration, he decided that making the discovery known, following the argument with his chief, he would receive little thanks for his contribution.

He decided that to get to the bottom of the affair on his own would be the best way of proving himself. With this in mind he called the surgery and made an appointment for the following morning.

His body turned up a couple of weeks later, with a small, red asterisk stencilled under his chin.

The ex-police superintendent dozed peacefully in the well-worn armchair.

When he came to, he found himself in his old office in the city. It was dark outside, obviously late at night. He went to the window and saw the lights of traffic crossing the familiar bridge. As he looked on, the lights seemed to swirl around making strange, coloured patterns that rose slowly into the air. After a while, a great shimmering platform of these hovered immediately outside the window. With no contact from him, the window swung open. As though it were a perfectly natural thing to do, he climbed out and stood on the illuminated mass and continued to take in the view. Gradually, the structure beneath him moved away from the building and rose up even further into the night sky, taking him with it. Remarkably, none of these strange events caused him any concern at all. As the moonlit clouds above grew closer he could see within them structures, and people moving about.

Then, in a blur, he found himself in a room. It was a large room with several tables having numerous items carefully laid out. Although this was not a place he recognised or had any memory of, so many of the items it contained were all too familiar. He spotted his old handcuffs at once, along with his original typewriter. He stood looking at them with a wistful smile. Moving around, he found that one table was full of items recovered from crime scenes and house searches carried out over so many years. He took his time passing among the exhibits. There were letters and envelopes used in evidence, newspaper clippings of old cases, pieces of rope, knives, guns, parts of homemade bombs, inert sticks of dynamite, pieces of recovered shrapnel, a number of gloves and masks that had been used in the commission of crimes, bottles of poison, tablets, several forgery implements, and all manner of containers used for smuggling.

At the far end he found a long, narrow table with a series of mug shots lined up. As he walked along the row of photos, they seemed to move of their own volition. They became faster and faster, until they created a passing animation of black and white and grey. As he watched, he too started to spin. His vision became hazy, then cleared.

He was back, slowly returning to ground level peering down at a small assembly.

It was the sight of his own coffin being slowly lowered into the freshly dug grave and the familiar faces, and the uniforms of those gathered around it, that enabled him to come to terms with the fact that he was dead.