Author: Alexander Fawn

He hadn’t been a registered private detective for long.
The case he was on could well be the one that made his name; could get him noticed. The mother of one of the ladies had called at his office and asked if he could investigate and find out who killed her daughter. He had agreed to take the case on and she had agreed to his hourly rate. There had been a number of deaths and the papers were full of it. The police didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. Six local hookers murdered and found dumped in skips all around town.
He was parked in a side street, in the middle of town. He was maintaining surveillance. He had spent a lot of time at night doing this. He opened his vacuum flask and poured himself a coffee. He checked the time. It was well into the morning.
All was quiet. Time to pack up he thought. There’d be nothing more for tonight.
He finished his coffee and sat thinking. Wouldn’t it surprise every one, if he cracked this case?
He giggled softly to himself. No, he couldn’t do that. How could he? He looked around at the bundle on the back seat.
Another one for the skip on the way home, he thought.

Something strange was going on with the elderly gentleman living at number thirteen.
Inside the house, he gathered up all of the various medications he’d been taking. He then flushed them all down the toilet. Next, he went looking for all the old photo albums, personal diaries and even his love letters. These he loaded into the metal bin in the back garden and put a match to it. Back inside, he contacted his bank and arranged to have all of his accounts emptied, and to have the cash ready for him to collect when he called in during the morning. Leaving the bank, he drove to a local car sales yard, parked it in a visitors bay, then walked home. On the way back, he dropped his wedding ring down the grating at the side of the road, walked on by way of the local park, where he tossed his mobile phone into the middle of the pond.
Once back home, the cash went into the bin that was still smouldering, where it began to burn quickly.

This done, he returned to the house, where he made himself a nice cup of tea.
It was all very mysterious, but the bigger mystery was that nobody knew why he did it!

The tiny man in a green suit sat under the shade of a tree, thinking.
It had been a busy week in the city. He had granted wishes to several lucky people. It was a noisy place, with very little greenery and so far from home. He didn’t like it much. He was sitting in one of the few places that had a small group of trees. He was thinking about all this when, to his amazement, he saw a fellow leprechaun coming his way. This was indeed odd, because it was very rare that anyone ever saw two of them together! Anyway, this got him working on an idea that would have him return home in the quickest of fashions. He would have his newfound friend grant him a wish, and he would wish to go home, and return to the emerald isle.
He jumped up and waved him over.
After putting the idea to him, the other agreed. Without hesitation, he granted him a wish.
The homesick leprechaun stood perfectly still for a few seconds, preparing himself, before saying that he wished to go home…
Nothing happened.

There are times in life when nothing seems to go right.
In fact, in his case, the man’s entire life had been an ongoing string of things going wrong. He had often spent time going through these events in an effort to remember them all. There were too many! Besides, what did his mate tell him in the pub the other night, after he’d complained about all of his life’s woes? He suggested that he shouldn’t dwell on the effects, but rather the cause of things. He said a good long stint of self-reflection could do no harm. He said there was so much power in self-analysis. So, it was this advice, this idea, that has him still in bed on a Sunday morning, long after he would normally get up. He knew there were things about himself that probably didn’t help. He began to form a mental list.

As a kid he remembers he never did much studying or handing in homework. He knows he copied other kid’s homework and cheated when doing exams. He was always being really rude to teachers; that got him into a lot of trouble. Healthwise; he lived on fast food and take-aways, always took far too much sugar and was a heavy drinker. He was always in debt on his credit card, gambling didn’t help. He kept letting the overdraft charges build up. In short, he did have a habit of living above his means.
After thinking it all through, he couldn’t see how the cause of any of this was in any way the fault of other people… but he was sure it was!

He didn’t have many friends, which is why the few he had were so precious.
However, they had got him into trouble, more than once. He knew these had been bad things, but wasn’t going to lose his friends because of them. His parents had never liked the sound of these new mates that he’d taken up with from the very beginning. It was only when they had it explained to them by the boy that they were very special because he was the only one who could see them, that they became worried. When they were told that these friends wouldn’t appear to anyone other than him, they began looking for help. They eventually settled on a specialist, a man who, it would seem, had made remarkable progress with similar patients.
After several discussions, the boy agreed to attend the medical suite for a number of sessions.
The medical practitioner, who was very expensive, as well as coming so highly recommended, had a number of really annoying habits. These, the boy had to contend with in order to keep his parents happy. The three that were particularly hard to put up with were the way he insisted on his referring to him as ‘Sunshine, the way he would keep saying, “Yes, yes,” to himself, as though he was congratulating himself about something, and the way he would idly sit twiddling and rotating the large, green marble apple, a paperweight he kept on his desk, whenever the boy tried to fully expand on his feelings.
On his final visit, when the boy had managed to convince the doctor that he had made all his friends go away, never to return, it was met with sheer delight and a great deal of “Yes, yes.”
The man was shuffling papers in his bottom drawer, looking for a discharge form when it happened.
He hadn’t even noticed the apple being picked up…

She had always liked the series… books for dummies.
They were extremely practical. She had read these on Networking, Photoshop and Sewing. The latest was Life Improvements for Dummies. Most of it was very interesting, but she was surprised to find that section seventeen was titled Losing Your Partner. However, it wasn’t about grieving, on the contrary, it was a chapter devoted to describing ways to see your partner off! Once she was over the shock of finding it in the book at all, she began to study it with fervour. It would definitely solve a number of ongoing issues that have been troubling her of late. Some of the ideas were truly thought-provoking. Solution five seemed to be the most promising and had the advantage of not making too much mess and the follow up addendum on disposal comprised of a series of easy-to-follow steps.
On reflection, she had always wanted to try oil painting, but he had always hated the smell of the turpentine used to dilute and mix paints and for cleaning up. He said that it always made him instantly nauseous.

There was a book, Oil Painting for Dummies.
It was comforting to know that from where he was in the back garden, the smell in the kitchen would never bother him.
She had always liked the series… the books were so practical.

He had always been a nervous child.
People thought it was strange that he wanted to spend so much time indoors. Nobody understood his preference for staring out from his bedroom window on the second floor. He had a good view from there. He would sit, looking down at the kids playing in the park that backed onto their house. He could watch as people walked dogs, children ran around kicking a ball or just chasing one another. He really liked the dry, sunny weather because it guaranteed that there would be plenty of activity down there. He was looking down when, as had happened in the past, he suddenly felt the urge to join them.
He got up and walked towards the door.
Once again, the invisible thing beneath his bed, the thing that he couldn’t tell anybody about, stirred.
It whispered yet again, “You really need to stay in. You’re safe with me.”
After a moment’s hesitation, he went back to his chair by the window, and watched…

The voice whispered that it was here.
It asked where that was, and the voice went on. It said that it was a planet that has seventy percent of its surface covered in water, of that, only three percent is fresh, with the remaining salty. Two percent of the fresh water is frozen. It is not round, but an ellipsoid flattened at the poles. It said that it consisted mostly of iron, silicon and oxygen. It rotates with a tilt of around sixty-six degrees. It was formed over four and a half billion years ago and currently has seven continents and one hundred and ninety-five countries. Its population is over seven and a half billion.
The voice went on to say that the inhabitants only evolved around three hundred thousand years ago. There are more than seven thousand languages being used by its people. There are approximately four thousand different religions. There are political, cultural and religious differences that challenge the inhabitants and there are more than two dozen wars being fought currently. There are also concerns about the way the climate is changing…

The newcomer asked, “Will I like it here?”
The answer came. “Hard to say.”

He had been known to actually argue with the voice that came out of his satnav.
He felt quite sure that there were occasions when the woman had simply got it wrong! When it came to telling her that, he never held back. On this particular trip he was in a coastal region that he was unfamiliar with and found himself relying on her directions far more than usual. He had needed to take issue with her a couple of times, but nothing too serious. That’s how he saw it, anyway. Although he wasn’t too sure about her. He thought he detected just a touch of frustration creeping into her voice. It certainly felt as though there was an edge to it. All this antagonism seemed to come to a head when she had said that he needed to turn right at the next intersection in fifty metres.
This had to be wrong because he could plainly see that the road ahead was just a straight run of at least five hundred metres with nowhere to turn. There seemed to be something positively insidious in her tone when, after a long spell of complete silence, she gave fresh directions.
The day was coming to an end and it was getting dark when this last message came out of the satnav speaker.
All of a sudden the road turned from bitumen to gravel, and he never saw the cliff edge coming up…

The unpleasant job of emptying the desk fell to the most recent member of the crew.
He figured that he was asked because no one else wanted to do it. He had known the Fire Chief since he was a lad. They went to the same school. Their families knew one another and they lived just a couple of blocks apart. There was little difference in their ages, but he had only joined the fire service a couple of months back, whereas the chief had joined up straight from school and had given fifteen years of service. He had only been chief for a year or so, when his predecessor retired. He was very popular with all who worked at the station. He was known for his sense of humour and his fairness. It was with a great deal of sadness that he was packing all of his boss’s personal belongings into a cardboard box.

It was not the case that he had perished in a house fire while trying to rescue some elderly home owner. He didn’t die falling from a ladder. He didn’t die from electrocution. He didn’t die when a roof collapsed. No, he didn’t die from any of these things.
In fact, if his wife hadn’t been staying with a sick relative in another town he would still be alive today.
If she’d been there he would never have got away with smoking in bed!