Author: Alexander Fawn

He was sitting on the edge of his bed reading a comic.

They would always see that he got his favourite comics; every week. He noticed the date on the one he was reading. Tomorrow was Mayday! It used to be his favourite day of the year, when he and the other kids would stand on the corner, outside the village post office, to watch the parade go by. There would be lots of people. A May Queen was always chosen. Again, one of the local girls would be dressed in a traditional costume and wear a crown made of flowers. She would be carried on a sedan chair with side poles, carried on the shoulders by four of the men, all the way through the streets. Everyone would follow the parade, ending at the village green. They would all gather there. There would be lots of colourful flowers and dancing around the maypole.

Would she let him out this year?

He ran the side of his tin cup across the bars of his cage to get her attention.

He would make a point of asking her very nicely…

He remembers the endless nights he spent on intense study periods, every evening.

These guys have it easy now. To become a taxi driver back then you needed to have The Knowledge. Literally, more than two thousand streets, businesses and landmarks to commit to memory. He remembers it all well. Nowadays every man and his dog have got a good old satnav! Just press a few buttons and away you go. Nothing easier. Then of course, came Uber. Just about anyone can download the app and sign in for free. You may have to layout a little to meet any ridesharing requirements for the local authority, but that’s it. A piece of cake. Everything made so easy.

His own taxi days were cut short when he turned the wrong way into a one-way street doing well over the speed limit and ran two people over. One survived.

Of course, if he’d had a satnav…

If nothing else, you’d say that the boy was a dreamer.

He loves playing with sand. Every chance he gets, he happily digs out holes with his bare hands. He builds up small piles, creates channels and forms walls. There’s no end to the things he can make. Sometimes he has done this with his dad or his older brother, sometimes, even both. Always good when that happened. Never his younger sister. She would complain about getting her hands dirty. With none of them around, he had uninterrupted time to build something; something really big… It didn’t have to be a sandcastle; it could be anything. He dreamed about using water to mould the damp sand, bit by bit, to make handfuls. He could then use each clump to build a mighty tower!

He sat, looking around.

If it weren’t for the fact that he was in Chechnya, he’d have done all that.

He had been buying lottery tickets from the time he was old enough to do it.

Now, as a young man thinking back, he realised that the amount of money he must have forked out would have been substantial. He recalled how a few years back he had questioned the wisdom of laying out so much on a game of chance. It was soon after this that he’d seen the news item, reporting the fact that some lucky sod had won nearly two million, it kept him going. After all, he’d often thought about how he would spread his winnings around. He imagined how much personal satisfaction he would get out of sharing his good fortune. Naturally, this would include his immediate family and friends. They would all benefit from his long-term investment.

But this…

He straitened in his kitchen chair and looked down at it again. He was holding a winning ticket, worth one hundred and fifty million!

It changed all that.

How was he going to deal with the family, his friends, when they all find out?

He opened his laptop and began searching for tickets to Canada.

His father had always been brutal with him.

At one time his mother had been around to do her best to keep the physical abuse to a minimum… for both of them. When she got ill and finally passed away with cancer, the beatings happened more often. The old man had always been a drinker, but this was now becoming a great deal worse, and long before the opportunity came about for him to leave home, his plans to bump the old man off were forming. He began keeping meticulous notes on his mobile phone with regards to the method. The day after the final and particularly vicious beating, he left home. As a young man, independent and making a life of his own, several years passed with no return visits to home. Instead, he perfected a foolproof plan that would allow him to poison the old man and get away with it.

He had the poison he required, a ready excuse for his sudden return, the method of arriving and leaving without being detected, and his alibi regarding his whereabouts on the evening in question. It was all in place.

Arriving at the house on the appointed evening, he found it all in darkness. Being careful, he moved around the house checking doors and windows. If he was there, his dad didn’t want any visitors. Either that or he had moved. He had to go away and think about his own next move.

The following day he made enquiries by ringing around some of his old mates. He soon discovered that his father had died a few months ago of alcohol poisoning.

The deep sorrow that he felt and the tears that he wept were not about the loss of his father, but brought about by the fact that he’d been cheated!

As the centuries passed, the beginnings of the Darkism movement became less clear.

What had, over time, become completely lost was the fact that its origins can be found in the great revelation that was bestowed upon the man who regularly drove the bus that serviced route 328b. Quite predictably, those who found it difficult to understand why the Almighty should choose him in particular, only strengthened their arguments against the new religion. It had come to the man one evening while walking home from the bus depot to his nearby accommodation. Being still single, with no one waiting for his return, he sauntered through the streets with no idea that God was about to talk to him. This fact, coupled with the idea that he’d always regarded himself to be an atheist, made it even more surprising when he was approached by the Great Creator coming out of the late-night convenience store.

He recognised him straight away; the white robes, beard and the phosphorescent glow that surrounded His giant frame left no room for doubt. It was at this point that they strolled along together until arriving at his pokey little flat where he made himself a strong cup of tea and settled down to listen to what the Lord of Heaven had to say. It was explained that the King of Kings had made a mistake. It was made clear that when creating everything, He had slipped up on one single, but crucial point.

Over a long evening, the Absolute Being did his best to explain how it had all gone wrong. The man struggled with what he was being told and at the suggestion of the Deity, he made a lot of notes. The error occurred on the first of the even days of creation. Looking down on the great empty void, the Divine Being had brought into being light out of the darkness instead of darkness to cover the light. Everything that followed, like the land and the sea along with all manner of living creatures, was carried out without a hitch, except that it was all done in the light. This wasn’t what He wanted at all.

As the years and decades went by the great majority of peoples not only adjusted to the mode of darkness, but could well see the advantages of what the Great Maker had in mind. Despite the obvious problems associated with blocking light out wherever possible, the relaxed atmosphere taken up by all Darkismists was a great improvement generally. In the new world of total darkness there was very little crime, no fashion industry and a society that moved at a slower and a far more comfortable pace. Through this long period of adjustment, the newly found lifestyle became the norm.

However, having described all this as best as possible, although more recent, it remains even more difficult to put into words how the Great Reversal came about…

The stool she is standing on, to reach the top shelf, topples and she falls.

Meanwhile, the stock market plummets, a local tv show’s ratings drop when the main actor is replaced ,the morning dew drips from the leaves on the tree in the back garden, a boy dives into a nearby backyard swimming pool, a tree in the neighbourhood is brought down by the wind, hopes for an injured bird’s full recovery sink when a vet inspects the damage, the price of potatoes takes a plunge after a good harvest, a quake causes a number of loose boulders to tumble into an open crater, and the temporary shelter made by trekkers collapses in the storm.

Uninjured, she repositions the stool and carefully climbs back on.

The boy liked tinkering with stuff.

He liked to mend things when he could. He’d had success with an alarm clock and a couple of portable radios. You can imagine his delight when he came across the item in the local jumble sale. The man who sold it to him let him have it for next to nothing because it had never worked. He said he wasn’t sure where he got it from, but over the years he’d try to get it going by putting new batteries in. That hadn’t worked. He thought it might be good for using some of its parts. He was obviously pleased to get rid of it.

The boy saw it as a challenge and began working on it the moment he got it home. It looked much like a transistor radio, but not quite what you’d expect. He had all the tools for the job in his room and started by removing the back cover and replacing the battery with a new one. It had an unusually large screen on the front, but it didn’t light up when he wiggled the on-off switch. He began to delve deeper.

It didn’t take long to find a loose wire that had come adrift from a small terminal block. He reconnected it and found to his great delight that throwing the switch made the screen light up. It came up with a digital display of two sets of strange numbers, symbols and letters. He had no idea what he was looking at, but he felt his excitement growing with what he had found.

Beneath the screen there were a couple of knurled dials that changed the sequence being shown. After twiddling these around for a while, he stared at the characters 31.4482° N, 109.9284° W, left showing on the screen. They made no sense to him.

Annoyed about that, he turned his intention to the button on the side, that he’d noticed earlier. There didn’t seem to be anything to indicate what its function was. After staring at it for a while, he decided to press it…

Of course, had he known that he was meddling with a Global Location Transporter, he would know that he now stood in the poorly-lit basement of a museum in Bisbee, Arizona.

Suppose you were to spontaneously jump in the car and take off quite early one morning.

Suppose you just headed for the hills. Suppose it was a warm summer day with visibility really good and when you reached the top of the escarpment you pull off the road and walk along an unsealed pathway that takes you to a spot where the trees give way to an open and splendid view of everything down there, all the way to the sea. Suppose there was a small outcrop of rocks. Suppose you climbed them slowly and carefully until you reached the highest point, where the surface was flat enough for you to sit cross-legged with your eyes closed, and there you cleared your mind of all your daily doings. Suppose you were to find, in that exquisite moment, a peace of mind that you hitherto had never before experienced!

Let’s suppose you actually did all this.

What would you do then?

Nobody in the street actually liked the man from number thirty-four.

When, to everyone’s relief, he drew his final breath… well, that’s when the rumours started. Those unlucky enough to live in the same street would all give thanks, knowing that his time was over. The mood throughout the houses slid quietly into one of grateful celebration. Even the young children and the elderly felt so much better about being there. Rumour has it that each time he returns to Hades, and apparently, this happens on a regular basis, he gets the red-carpet treatment. It has been said that he and the boss down there are the best of buddies. When ever he returns, he takes on some sort of role like he’s the head prefect or something.

Old Nick is always pleased to greet him personally when he gets off the ferry; it seems that they go back a long way.