Author: Alexander Fawn

There is wonder in the void,

The vastness of it, daunting.

There is mystery in the void,

The conjured image, haunting.

–

Its existence in the universe

Or deep within the brain,

Seen as something missing,

Shows neither loss nor gain.

–

It is neither dark nor empty,

No colour, weight or heat.

A glimpse of comprehension

Shows a nothingness complete.

–

A space full of absence,

Its parameters hard to frame.

It is both within and without,

They are but one and the same.

–

Seen as two quite separate states,

For ease we divide it.

The only way to see it all

Is to huddle up beside it.

When he arrived at the rank, there were no taxis.

After around ten minutes or so, this little, old lady shows up. She starts yakking on about her daughter and how she’s in hospital with something really nasty and nobody knows what it is and doctors are doing tests. In a way, he felt sorry for her, and to a degree, for her daughter, but he had problems of his own and would have preferred a quiet time at the rank with his own thoughts about the court case, the lawyer’s fees, the new evidence that’s about to be submitted by the prosecution, probably more of his customers coming down with food poisoning. He knew he’d been cutting corners when it came to food safety standards. Now this. He’d been trying to save money by not doing the right thing in his shop. Now, with so many of his customers falling ill, he could very well lose his business.

He was turning the potential consequences of all this over in his mind, when a taxi pulled in. They were both going into town, so he agreed they could share the ride. After all, the old girl was worried about her daughter and, knowing which hospital she was in, it was the least he could do. He knew there was only a couple of blocks between the hospital and the district court building. She would be dropped off first.

They both got in. She was still going on about how worried she was about her daughter. By this time, he had switched off. Her complaining was beginning to irritate. It wasn’t until the phrase ‘must have been something she ait’ came up, that their individual concerns about their circumstances came together in his mind.

As they pulled up at the hospital, she thanked him for letting her share the ride. He said he hoped that her daughter gets well soon.

He felt it was the least he could do!

He was a nighttime shelf-filler at the local supermarket.

He wasn’t very good at it. He kept putting things on the wrong shelves. After several warnings, they let him go. This event led to his girlfriend packing her bags and leaving. However, this downward spiral of his personal circumstances took a sudden turn. In fact, his life began to change radically when his severance pay came through. He couldn’t help suspecting that it was much too generous, but he didn’t feel like complaining. This was soon followed by a nice letter from a venture capital investment company in the city, thanking him for his work and saying how sorry they were that he’d decided to leave, and letting him know that they would be happy to re-employ him at any time in the future. The envelope had his correct address, but he noticed that although his first name was right, his family name was spelt wrong; nothing major, the letter ‘i’ had been used in place of an ‘e’. With all things going digital, he wasn’t surprised.

Things escalated after this.

His latest bank statement came up on his screen. Again, everything was correct, except for his last name. It had an astonishingly large balance! That was when he began to dig deep into the person that he was incorrectly being taken to be. He soon found out that the other was a person of around the same age, single, wealthy, and the owner of a holiday home in Madrid, Spain.

He thought long and hard about how he would handle the situation…

Would he call a halt to the position that this tiny digital error had put him in, or would he go with plan ‘B’?

Although an ex-shelf filler, he had always had natural cunning that was simply bursting to come to the fore. The alternative plan was rather dicey, but doable. He would pay his landlord the remainder of the week’s rent in advance, pack and take the earliest flight to Spain. When there, make arrangements to quickly sell the holiday unit. Fly to the Canary Islands, buy an apartment and lie doggo.

What could possibly go wrong?

He told himself this was Kama, and it was just the way things were meant to be.

He went with plan ‘B’.

For her, the funeral was a sad affair.

It wasn’t so much about the day being overcast with occasional rain, or the sombre sight of the pallbearers making their way up the steps, or the queue of people paying their respects by each pausing, one at a time, at the open coffin, or the flowers that had been placed nicely, nearby, or the pungent smell of the incense, or the sermon that extolled her late husband’s virtues, or the fact that she was surrounded by so many solemn faces, or all those sympathy cards waiting for her at home. No, it was none of these. In fact, the whole thing had left her with a feeling that she’d been wronged. This was definitely an injustice that she’d have to live with.

The truth is that she could have gained her freedom from this miserable swine much earlier if she’d only known that an undetectable poison had become available on the dark web almost ten years ago!

He knows that he is an addict.

Returning once more to his room, he wonders again how much better is this, than being driven by the physical need for substances like alcohol, opioids or any of the great range of hallucinogens? Such things can produce a wide range of altered states of consciousness. One may think that the results from using those stimuli can be, in some way, compered with his own emotional compulsion to capture thoughts and ideas by writing them down. Taking up his usual posture; the chair, the screen the keyboard, the surrounding paraphernalia, with a photo or two, folders in a tray, and a clock that shows the temperature. He looks around and asks himself what it is that pulls him in here?

What emotions, as opposed to physical altered states of consciousness, come into play here? Is there no lesser range of mood, perception and thought being experienced?

He knows only that he is grateful that the force that moves him gives so much pleasure.

It’s a story about love.

The story goes that the woman who arranges flowers and sweeps the floor in the florist shop loves the man who works in the park, tilling soil and planting out flowerbeds, who loves the lady with the frizzy hairdo who smiles a lot in the post office, who loves the woman who sits at the reception desk in her doctor’s surgery, who loves the mechanic who whistles while he services her car, who loves the lady who sells souvenirs at the entrance of the art gallery, who loves the man who advises her about spices in the delicatessen, who loves the girl that works behind the counter at the bakery, who loves the chemist that helps her choose from the medications he stocks, who loves the woman that helps him find books in the library, who loves the man who sells her cakes at the bakery, who loves the woman who works at the fast lane checkout at the supermarket, who loves the man at the café who uses the barista machine to make her coffee, who loves the man that gives him advice when buying things at the DIY shop, who loves the girl who wraps the food at the fish and chip shop, who loves the man who checks her shopping bag at the department store, who loves the girl who sells art materials at the craft shop, who loves the man at the convenience store where she buys her magazines, who loves his wife.

The last time he dropped in, he’d felt the tension between the couple was getting worse.

He found it embarrassing. If the truth be known, although he liked his old school-mate, he couldn’t understand why he hadn’t divorced her within the first year of their marriage. This had been going on for the best part of three years now and he hadn’t found any improvement over the time of his visits. He remembered the conversation, last time he visited; how she had taken him to one side, saying when the arguments happen, she almost loses it. She told him that she gets all sorts of ideas, horrible ideas, in her head. She had gone on about this other world that she lets herself into. This place where everything is coming up roses.

She said she closes her eyes, without him seeing it, of course, and counts very slowly, up to ten, sometimes a lot longer. When she does this, she feels herself just drifting along as if she were walking in a meadow with tall poppies and other colourful flowers that she can touch as she walks through it. She went on to say that it acted like a sort of gasket.

When he asked her what she meant by that, she said that it allows her to interact with him, be at one with him, to enjoy her life with him, without all the pent-up anger spilling over. At the time, he had told her that if this was the way she handled the situation, he could only wish her well with it. This was how it was until the day he had popped in on the way home from work.

He’d been sitting down drinking the coffee she’d cheerfully made for him for a minute or two, before looking around the room and asking, “Where is the man?”

She sighed heavily, saying, “He’s in the bedroom, lying down.”

“Oh? I’ll look in on him.”

She just shrugged and said, “Sure.”

After a few minutes, he came back into the room looking pale. He said, “He’s not breathing!”

“I know.”

“Surely! What about this gasket you told me about?”

“It leaked.”

The man in the pub had a story to tell.

He was badly shaken when he arrived, ordering a double whiskey instead of his normal pint of ale. He was obviously quite traumatised. He was immediately surrounded by the few regulars who knew him, and soon joined by those who didn’t, the moment he began to speak. The man in question had been working on the new high-rise building in the city. His boss had asked him to work overtime, fixing a problem with the building’s air-conditioning system. The lighting up there wasn’t the best for carrying out repairs at night, but it needed to be done in order to run a full system test in the morning.

He’d been on the roof, twenty-five stories up, working on the air extraction unit in question. He said he was crouched down looking at what he was doing, when he heard something on the roof. Looking around, he saw a figure dressed in white clothes standing by the far wall, looking out.

He said he stood up and tried to get the figure’s attention. The first time he called out, he asked what the figure was doing up there. The second time, he told whoever it was, that they really shouldn’t be there at all. Getting no response, leaving what he was doing, he walked across the roof to confront the person. He knew that he would have to be responsible for seeing them safely through the door that led down to the top floor elevator.

As he approached, he could clearly make out the man’s head of dark hair together with his fall-length white robe that went from his shoulders to the ground. It seemed to have a faint glow about it. The figure was just standing there, looking out across the city, but the worker, although not able to explain it, knew that he was actually looking out across the world!

When he arrived at the figure’s side, it turned its head and looked the worker full in the face. He said that at that moment, memories of so many religious pictures he had seen of this man cascaded through his mind.

At first, he was gripped by fear, but within moments of looking into the other’s eyes he felt a calmness sweep over him.

At this point, he seemed to be given the courage to ask the strange figure a question. He asked him if he was anything to do with ‘the second coming’.

In response to this, the man in white winked and disappeared in a puff of smoke!

It goes without saying… nobody believed a word of it!

Sing a song of sixpence,

With birds all flying high.

Four and twenty blackbirds,

Swooping in the sky.

–

As the wind grows stronger,

They circle in a ring.

People on the ground all say,

“Now, there’s a funny thing!”

It would probably turn out to be a chance meeting.

Both he and she were both part of a group of thirty-odd guests. They had all been invited to a private viewing of the artist’s latest paintings. These were about to go on show the following day. It was a fairly grand affair. He was taking a drink from a waiter’s tray, when he saw her. Immediately, he could see that she was an extremely attractive woman and definitely classy. In that moment he began to consider what would be the best way to go about asking her to join him for dinner that evening.

owever, when you consider his bad manners, his lack of common decency, the fact that he is both sarcastic and arrogant, his having a self-centred attitude, his jealous nature and dishonesty, his impulsive behaviour, his being depressingly apathetic about everything, his being a natural born coward, his inability to empathize, his being argumentative, weak-willed, totally irresponsible, generally foolish, together with his being both impatient and lazy…

All this, together with his bad breath and constant flatulence…

Well… he probably shouldn’t bother.