Author: Alexander Fawn

He lifted the receiver, punched in several numbers, and waited.
Utilities Commission, how can I help you?
“Hello.”
“Hello. How can I help you?”
“Hello. I’m only seven, but I know how to use the phone.”
“Yes, how can I help you?”
“I’ve watched mummy.”
“Say again, please.”
“Mummy, I’ve watched her.”
“Sorry, are you reporting something?”
“Yes, I am saying I have watched mummy… to be able to use the phone to… to report something.”
“OK. What would you like to report?”
“Yesterday I was on my bike in the park when a dog ran up to me barking. It was barking very loud. I was very frightened. My mum was very angry. The man was very rude to my mum. They argued for a very long time. I was getting very tired. My mum explained it was because it was getting very late. It was getting very dark. We went home very fast. My feet were getting very sore. When we got home…”
“Sorry to interrupt you, but did you say you are seven years old?”
“Yes, but I am six and very nearly seven.”
“Alright, and does your mother know you are using the phone?”
“No. I think she would get very cross with me if…”
“Yes, OK. I think you should put the phone down now, and only use it when your mum says you can.”
“OK. Thank you very much.”
“You’re VERY welcome.”
Click.

When his uncle passed away it fell to him to settle the old man’s affairs.
He knew it was coming; knew that he was the only remaining close relative. This was despite the fact that he hardly knew the man. He knew that his wife had left him, apparently for another man. It had been quite sudden and completely unexpected. After this, the old man had kept pretty much to himself. Anyway, duty called and he did what had to be done regarding the legal side of things. Finally, he took a trip out to the now vacant house to look through any personal belongings that had to be removed before the place was put on the market. It was during this gathering up that he came across the list.
It was in a drawer, along with old receipts, private letters and a few scraps of paper. He was clearing it all out when he found the brown envelope marked ‘To Do’. Inside was a folded sheet of paper. Opening it up, he saw it was a list of a dozen items. It was obviously some kind of bucket list. The heading read ‘Things to Do before I Die’.
He sat down to read through the items. He noted that more than half of them had been given a tick. He smiled. He knew the old boy had been something of a dark horse, living on his own for the last several years after his wife left. He’d heard that he’d travelled abroad a few times, so he wasn’t surprised to see items like ‘Visit the Parthenon’ and ‘Cruise the Danube’ given a tick.

However, the tick next to ‘Make her disappear’ shook him up something shocking…

He was running out of things or people to blame whenever something goes wrong.

The hole in the ozone layer was a good one, but people don’t seem to talk about it anymore. Blaming the bomb use to be really great, he was very fond of that one, but things have changed so much that most folks wouldn’t know what he was talking about. Politicians were always a great target, but that was back in the day when there was just one that really stood out as an incompetent fool. There seem to be so many of them around today that this has lost its punch. Of late, he’s been using the weather as a reason that this unfortunate situation has come about or to explain why that thing just isn’t working anymore.
He finds it depressing that he can’t come up with a readymade person or thing to blame and doesn’t know who or what to blame for that!

The old man strolled into the town square to feed the birds each day.
He was a bit of a mystery. He always had a bag of bread crumbs. The birds seem to know him by sight, gathering around his feet before he opened it. He was friendly enough, always happy to chat with people about his former life. His affable nature meant that if any of the town’s folk found themselves with a few minutes to spare they would think nothing of joining him on the bench for an idle chat. Somehow, the stories he told got intermingled with stories about him told by others. Nobody knew his nationality.
Some say he used to work for the national intelligence agency of Israel, Mossad. Others said he was a man servant in the Indian palace of a Maharaja. Some believed he was a skipper on a Scandinavian fishing trawler. Nobody knew for sure.

Nobody, that is, until the day his sister showed up. She had walked there from a nearby town to find out how he was going. Despite their true past, and the actual circumstances of their lives, they had always been close.
She was only too keen to tell people how their parents had abandoned them to live on the streets decades ago.
She told her own stories.

The whole thing came about as a result of a casual conversation in the school library.
It turned out to be their first date, after a fashion. They were both in the same year but in different classes. Around the table the chat was about spelling. She had said how much she enjoyed playing scrabble and he chimed in, agreeing, saying how great the game was and making the point that it was a good teaching tool for spelling. Before the day was out, she had invited him around after school. On the following night he turned up, obviously raring to go. He said hello to her parents, then went through to a back room where the board was already set up.

In next to no time they were both fully engrossed. It went slowly, each not being rushed, but carefully maximizing the points they were accumulating. The game got to a point where he seemed to be taking a very long time before taking his turn.
Then, suddenly, after looking intently at his letter tiles once more, he blurted out, “Wow! Just you watch this!” He began putting tiles down, mumbling at the same time. “On the star, triple there, up there to a double… look at that! OK Here we go.” He pointed at the board. “That covers that, and I get extra points there, that links to that and that links to that.” He began adding up points. “This is going to be one huge score, let me see… that’s a total of… wow! I guess that wraps up the game.” He sat back looking satisfied.
She stared at the board. “What’s that?”
“What’s what?”
“That.” She pointed to the word ‘trocoline’. “That’s not a word.”
“Yes, it is.”
“You’ve got to be kidding!”
“No, that’s trocoline; its full name is trocedioetholine.”
She smiled and looked over at the dictionary.
“Oh! Come on,” she said, smiling and picking up the dictionary, “I’ll challenge that.”
“Go for it,” he said, full of confidence.
She began turning pages. “Did you mean tricoline, spelt with an ‘i’?”
He shook his head. “No.”
“You sure? I can only find ‘tricoline’. It’s the Portuguese word for cotton.”
“No, trocoline. It’s a chemical raising agent; when added to baking mixtures it reacts chemically to release carbon dioxide; like I said, its full name is trocedioetholine.”
She shut the dictionary. “Well, it’s not in the book, that’s all I can say.”
He frowned. “How old’s your dictionary?”
Opening it, she said, “OK. Let me see. Yes, here it is, 2012.”
“Well, there’s your answer. Your dictionary’s out of date!”
“Yes, but only by a few years.”
With raised eyebrows, he said, “You should update it really. Anyway, trocoline was only discovered in 2018, so it wouldn’t be in there, would it?”
She thought about it. “I suppose not.” She stared at him for a moment, then asked, “Are you making all of this up?”
“What, about trocoline, you mean?” He looked amazed. “No, not at all,” he said.
They cleared the game away and he thanked her parents. They made their way to the front door. As he left he said, “Same time next week, then?”
“I’ll think about it,” she said.
She went in… and went straight to her laptop.

The mood; it just swings back and forth.
He knows what it is, knows that there is an understanding of it. He is told that it is far more common than you might think. This doesn’t help. He experiences heightened feelings of abundant energy, he is bursting with creativity, riding on a cloud of euphoria. Then, he is falling into a deep low of agitation and anxiety, withdrawn and sullen, worthless and unable to cope. He is capable of absolutely anything. He finds everything a chore. He is invincible. He is worthless. Happy. Sad. Happy. Sad. Sometimes he doesn’t notice, doesn’t see the shift; doesn’t feel the swing from the high to the low and back again. Surely, he thinks, every one of us must be just a little bit bipolar, although the experts say no.
He only knows that the pendulum swings.

More so for some, less for others.
Go figure…

It was Sunday and they were both lounging.
She was sprawled on the living room couch, studying. He came in looking for something.
He asked, “Honey, have you seen the television magazine?”
She stirred a little. “…there are those among us, who, when finding themselves in any strange or unexpected situation, are more likely to lose all sense of time and place…”
He froze. “Is that your answer?”
“Eh?”
“The TV mag?”
“No. Sorry! I was reading this treatise. I was just reading it out; thought you might be interested.”
Ignoring this, he said, “I’ve looked all over.
She lowered her papers. “Don’t you remember, we decided to cancel? We said it wasn’t worth getting.” She raised her eyebrows. “Don’t you remember?” she repeated. “We talked about it.”
Disappointed, he shrugged and said, “Vaguely.”
She grinned. “You see? Time and place.”
“What?”
“The treatise… time and place.”
He stood frowning.
“The mag,” she went on, “cancelled a week ago; time. Not here; place.”
He took on a pained expression. “Bit of a stretch, wouldn’t you say?”
She shook her head. “Not really. I could go further.”
“Go on.”
“OK,” she said, obviously enjoying herself, “TV mags; telling you when stuff is on; time, and what channels to go to: place!”
“Right,” he said, and left her to it.
In the other room, he whispered, “I must ask when her Open University finishes, but not now.”

The young guy that lived at number seventeen got a kick out of creating a flowerbed.

Although he and his friend were only renting, he’d found that spending time preparing the patch of ground at the front and choosing a variety of plants was a relaxing hobby. His daily grind at the pharmacy, preparing prescriptions was a full-on job and the gardening project had been just the thing to provide an enjoyable distraction. That had been the case until the old guy across the street, who lived on his own, decided to get a dog for company. It was a Jack Russell Terrier. From day one it had been regularly finding its way into the garden where it spent time digging up the flowerbed! Despite all attempts to keep him out, the offending animal kept finding a way in. Naturally, he’d been across and explained what was happening to the owner. This had fallen on deaf ears. In fact, the grumpy old man had been positively rude to him.
That afternoon, his flat-mate found him peering through the curtains.
“Something wrong?”
“No. It’s just the guy across the street, calling for his dog. It’s been gone all day.” He snorted. “The little bugger won’t be digging up my flowerbed in a hurry, I can tell you that.”
“He won’t?”
“Nah. I fixed it.”
“How’s that?”
“I knocked him out.”
“You what?”
“Don’t mean literally, just gave him a nice long sleep last night.”
“How’d you do that?”
“Crushed up a few pills, slit a sausage open and laced it with the powder. He loved it!”
“How’d you know how to do that?”
He grinned. “An Applied Science majoring in Chemistry helped.”
“What d’yer do with him?”
“Put him in the boot and drove out to the truck stop. I found a Ute with an out of state registration. It had a tarp pulled over a pile of stuff in the back. I just released a corner and dropped the bugger in.”
“Ouch! That was a bit cruel, wasn’t it?”
“Not really. I’m sure somebody’ll give him a good home, wherever he ends up.”
He shrugged and shook his head.
“Just hope for their sake, they don’t have a flower bed.”

The old man who used to live at number eighteen had always had strong views about taxes.
In fact, although it seems quite impossible, he went through his entire working life without ever paying any of them. He was always adamant about the notion that everything would tick along perfectly well without them. Of course, just like anyone else, he received demands. Whenever he received one of these he would send off a lengthy letter, explaining in a great amount of detail why he shouldn’t have to pay. This always went the same way; it always resulted in him receiving no reply. He imagined that whoever received it couldn’t handle it and put it in some ‘too hard’ basket that was probably labelled ‘pending’. Whatever the case, he was able to ‘fly under the radar’ year after year. This had been the way of it right up to the point when the van showed up.

It was a little after six in the morning when a white van, similar to an ambulance, pulled into his driveway. Two burly young men wearing white coats got out and rang his doorbell. They did this several times, because this actually brought the old guy out of a deep sleep. It was some time before he answered the door. The woman opposite, always an early riser, watched the goings on from her front window. An activity that made her the centre of attention for several weeks that followed.
As soon as the door opened, the men quickly disappeared inside, causing the front door to slam as they did. Shouting could be heard briefly, then it stopped. Moments later the old man appeared, still in his dressing gown and supported by the two men either side. He was loaded into the back of the vehicle. After making an obvious effort to shut the back doors as quietly as possible, the men jumped in and drove away soundlessly.
Put simply, he was never seen or heard from again…

The security agency knew it had a mole.
It had to be one of their top three operatives. The director had a solution. It was a full proof way of weeding out the agent that had been leaking agency information. The assistant director wasn’t happy with the plan, but the director went ahead and called the two men and one woman to his office. He handed them each an envelope.

Each one contained the name of one of the others. They were told to go down into the basement and wait. They were there for a few minutes before the lights went out. Gunshots could be heard, then silence.
Shortly afterwards, an unhappy assistant director entered the director’s office, saying, “They’re all dead!”
“I know,” said the director, “but it had to be one of them.”