Author: Alexander Fawn

It had all seemed quite silly at the time, but it wasn’t.

They’d been going out together regularly for several weeks, before it happened. They were strolling through the local park one weekend, just spending time together, when the dog ran towards them. It didn’t look right. It was growling and slobbering. It stopped in front of them looking decidedly vicious. Then, all of a sudden, it turned and slouched off, whimpering. She had seen him make the strange hand gesture before. This time, he had definitely made it toward the animal, and as a result, had questioned him about it. He decided that he was comfortable telling her the truth about the matter and chose a bench, where they could sit and talk. It was then that he explained that his grandfather had been a Great Wizard and that he had headed a secret society.

She said, “I’ve seen you do that before. You seem to contort your fingers in a strange fashion, then raise your arm up at your side.”

“You’ve noticed.”

“I have.”

He nodded. “It’s all about kinesics really. That’s the business of body movements and gestures. Commonly used as a means of communication, but for my grandfather and his followers, a lot more than that, of course.”

“So,” she said, “he showed you how to do that, your grandfather?”

He nodded again. “Yes. As a young lad, this was the only thing he ever taught me.”

“Oh! Really? Why was that, do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

That was how it began.

They eventually married, had jobs, had a family, and lived a perfectly trouble-free life.

Over the decades, both used the hand sign, which they kept very much to themselves, with reliable results. All calamities were warded off. No near-death experiences, no traffic accidents, dog bites or bee stings. Not even the occasional mosquito bite.

It was in these later years that they fell to discussing it, yet again.

Their conversation ended with him telling her that the old man had said, “It’s all very well being in the hands of a few, but it would be a completely different matter if it became commonly known.”

“What do you suppose he meant by that?” she asked.

He shook his head. “You know, I have absolutely no idea!”

They’d been waiting for the plumber for over a week.

He was very popular because he always did a good job and he was very good at cleaning up after he’d finished fixing the problem. When they first discovered the leak, he’d crawled under the sink to take a look. From what he could see, it wasn’t something he could fix himself. He just didn’t have the proper tools to do it. When he talked to her about what he’d found he got the impression that she was unjustly disappointed. After all, if he tried to do it himself, knowing that he could make matters worse, she’d be even more annoyed. He knew he’d have to put up with her being grumpy about it until it was fixed.

She’d just finished mopping up again when he walked into the kitchen. Rather sheepishly, he said, “How is it?”

She glared at him. “Getting worse, that’s how it is.”

He sighed.

She got up and looking at the clock, said, “When you phoned him, you said he may get here today.”

“Well, no. What he said was he might get here today.”

“Oh! Don’t be silly. What’s the difference?”

He got out his phone and stood tapping at it. “Well, they’re both auxiliary verbs, I know that,” he mumbled.

More tapping.

“Yes, may is used to express opportunity or permission. It can also be used to express a wish or a prayer. That’s probably more apt in the present circumstances.”

He looked up with a grin, but couldn’t read the expression on her face.

He began tapping again. “Might, on the other hand… it’s another auxiliary verb, like I said. It’s also used to express possibility, but in the case of might, it is used when making a polite request for permission.”

He looked up.

She was still just standing there with her jaw dropped.

He raised his eyebrows and said, “I’m just telling you what is says.”

“For heaven’s sake!” she shouted. “Just get out, will you?”

As he left, he wondered, what had he done wrong?

Then it came to him.

He had walked into the kitchen!

Every morning it was the same, as soon as he woke up, it started.

He would hear them; the voices! The same appeals for mercy. They went on and on. Later, after taking in his delivered newspaper and having settled down with his morning coffee, trying to read it, they were still there. Pathetic pleas; all much the same. Men and women, young and old, the same urgent requests for what? Some kind of leniency? He never had the authority, or the actual desire, to disregard the terms of his employer’s contract. It had simply been what he did; what he did for a living. Knocking people off had paid well, but now, in retirement, the continual ‘you don’t have to do this’ and the ‘I can pay you to say you couldn’t find me’ and the ‘let them know, I’ll never tell anybody’. Would it never end?

For years, he had unknowingly convinced himself that he didn’t have a conscience.

He really couldn’t take much more of it.

There was an answer.

He went to his desk, opened the drawer and stood, looking down at the tool of his trade…

She had always used the online marketplace with its home delivery feature.

The idea of having all manner of items being shipped to a consumer directly had always appealed to her. She was continually ordering stuff on line, with at least two deliveries a week arriving at her front door. This love of things being done easily for her was probably as a result of having the kind of life she had previously lived. That was before emigrating and making her home in a new country. Although it was most unlikely that any of her newfound friends or acquaintances would know, but in truth, she did have a shady past. However, this was all behind her now.

This was the case until she was surprised to hear her doorbell sounding during the middle of the evening. She wasn’t expecting visitors and it certainly wouldn’t be a delivery at this time of night. Nevertheless, she felt uneasy as she cracked open the door, leaving the safety chain in place.

Peering through the gap, despite the poor lighting, she could make out that the man was dressed like a delivery person and his van was parked in the street.

Having stood waiting patiently for a few beats, he said, “Delivery!”

She unlatched and opened the door. She immediately recognised the company’s name on the package and knew what it was she had ordered. After signing for it and taking it from him, she started to close the door. This was when he coughed.

“Just one thing…” he said, as she was closing the door.

She half opened it again.

“Before I go,” he said, “I just wanted you to know that we are fully aware of the bad things you have done in the past, madam. Goodnight.” With that, he returned to his vehicle and drove off.

It would be hard to describe her emotional state during the days that followed.

Suffice it to say that regular shopping would now be the regular thing.

He was preparing the ground before planting a row of radishes.

During this particular autumn he decided to till a section of his garden that had never been used to grow vegetables. This made it a special project to begin with. However, it was this decision that led him to a mystery that he would never be able to solve. He was turning the earth over with his spade when he struck something metal. After carefully clearing the ground around it, he was able to bring it up. It was a small, rusting, metal box. It didn’t have a lock. He pulled the lid open with difficulty and peered inside. At first, he thought it might be a time capsule, but this wasn’t the case. It was a piece of heavy paper, folded to a quarter, that had greyed and become mostly unreadable over time. Most of the writing was completely lost through mould, and in places, the paper had completely disintegrated.

Leaning on his spade, he began to read what he could of it. At the top, he could just make out the words, ‘The True Identity of …’. Whatever came next was illegible. Although, what had been an A4 page, almost full of writing, there was not much left that was discernible. Scanning through it, he was able to read fragments of it. The longest sentence in tact was, ‘born in 1947 to Scottish parents, being the oldest son, he married the daughter of the…’ It ended there. Other lines, like ‘further police investigations’ and ‘international crime syndicate’ and ‘in hiding from’, were legible, but little else.

He thought about it. Whoever buried it had obviously wanted to conceal the identity of someone at that time, but for their own reasons was happy for the truth to be unearthed at some distant, later date. Should he pass all this on to the police? What could they do with it? How involved would he have to be in any new investigation that was started? He thought very carefully about all of this, before making his way back down the side of the house and dropping what he had found into the rubbish bin.

Being something of a pragmatist, he decided he would rather spend his immediate future watching his radishes grow.

It must have been an overnight delivery.

It was just sitting there by his mailbox, when he went out to pick up his daily paper. It was a fairly large wooden crate with a single address label. There was no sign of any courier company’s logo. It was quite heavy, but he managed to carry it in and put it on the dining table. The sticker certainly had his address on it, but the name was hard to read. With building curiosity, he went out to the shed and returned with a heavy-duty screwdriver. He managed to lever the lid off. Inside, something was wrapped in bubble wrap. He lifted the thing out, and placing it down next to the crate, unwrapped it. It looked like some piece of electrical equipment, twice the size of a regular video player. It seemed to have a lid, much like a laptop computer.

He stood looking at it for a while before lifting the lid. It was obvious that it was a mis-delivery. He hadn’t ordered anything for ages, besides, nothing like this! Opening it, he found a complex array of electronic controls, some sort of dashboard.

Still curious, he spent time on the internet, describing the apparatus in as much detail as possible. Alarmingly, his research had repeatedly come up with the fact that he was in possession of a nuclear trigger device!

He went into the kitchen and put the kettle on.

After giving the thing serious thought, and on the basis that he would prefer to keep his involvement minimal, he returned to the dining room. There, he closed the lid, wrapped it back up, placed it in the crate and secured the wooden lid. He smudged out the address to make it unreadable, then made up a second label, saying, ‘Not known at this address. Return to sender’. This he taped next to the original sticker and put the thing in the boot of his car. Later, when the post office was closed, he’d drop it off at the side, where the vans usually parked

Then, he’d keep his fingers crossed…

The young boys simply loved climbing the fence and exploring the rubbish tip.

They were brothers, with only a year between them. They shared a passion for rummaging around in the town’s rubbish dump. They would enter the tip on the far side where they could not be seen. There was always a fascinating variety of stuff people had thrown out. They never seemed bothered by the terrible smell or the chance of catching some horrible disease. In fact, they would spend as much time as they could picking over the items, some of which were partly buried. Because it was some distance from the manor house where they lived, they assumed that the stink on their clothes would be gone by the time they got home. Their mother, who suffered from having only a partial sense of smell, never seemed to notice.

Their father, however, being the mayor and rather stuck up, if he knew… there would be a completely different kind of stink!

If there was ever one thing that he really hated… it was hornets!

Since he was a youngster, he’d been warned about them, especially the Asian Giant Hornet. He’d had nightmares about those. These guys were big, really big! He’d been told that these fearsome looking insects could grow to a couple of inches in length. As for their stinger, this weapon was around a quarter of an inch long… it gave him goose bumps, just thinking about it. What they could do to an Asian Honey Bee wasn’t something you’d like to dwell on. Apparently, their hard outer shell is impenetrable to bee-stings. He’d heard stories. He’d been told that these monstrous creatures steal the young larvae of honeybees, then they feed them to their own offspring. Yuk!

If that wasn’t bad enough, if these murderous things ever manage to get into a hive, well, it’s carnage!

One may wonder why all this is going through his head, right now.

It’s because he was looking directly at one, right now.

He needed to slip away without being noticed.

The fact that he was an Asian Honey Bee, didn’t help…

He was something really big in the city.

He most certainly lived a short but charmed life. His mother had always said that he would really make something of himself. She wasn’t wrong. Financially he went from strength to strength. His stocks and shares were all going gangbusters. His holdings in real-estate in many countries around the world were mindbogglingly substantial. As for his cryptocurrency wallet, this was growing exponentially day after day. Good fortune had followed him throughout his lifetime. He became a multibillionaire at the age of thirty-two. He was thrilled to little pieces; the day he received confirmation that he had made it to the Forbes Richest People in the World list.

He was most definitely charmed, when you considered the fact that it was only two days after this well-earned and exciting news that a meteor, just a little bit larger than the planet, struck with unbelievable force, the impact of it wiping out all life forms.

His wife was suffering from a viral infection, probably laryngitis.

She woke up with a throat that was very sore. It was so bad that she was unable to speak. Her husband, obviously the inventive kind of chap, devised a comprehensive system of communication they could use. It boiled down to her being able to tell him things by the number of blinks she made. It started simply enough. For example, if he asked her if she would like a cuddle, she would blink once for ‘no’ and twice for ‘yes’. The number of blinks that should be used continued in this fashion, to cover most everyday things that they would normally talk about. It was a most elaborate system and she was required to spend over an hour becoming familiar with it.

Soon after they’d had breakfast, she had a question for him. It required twenty-seven blinks…

She had to go through it twice, with him counting and at the same time asking himself whether the whole business was far too elaborate!

Finally, he said. “Twenty-seven, is that right?”

With a sour face, she nodded.

“Have I fed the cat, yes?”

With a sigh, she nodded.

“No,” he said, with a sigh of his own, “I’ll do it now.”