-FICTION IN A FLASH-
Helen Laycock
200-words
...up to 250 words
Father's Day
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I’m going to make him happy.
Today Millie didn’t dawdle. Her rucksack bounced rhythmically on her back and the carrier bag flapped against her legs as her little feet slapped along the pavement.
‘S’cuse me. S’cuse me.’
Millie felt as though she were running into the sky, a bright blue space ahead of her. She pictured a vivid scene – a chequered tablecloth spread across parched grass, a wicker hamper full of triangular sandwiches and butterfly cakes… and her, spinning around Daddy, giggling, and chasing him, trying to catch the tail of the kite.
She quietly turned the key and crept into the cool, dark interior. The curtains were still closed, the air stale and pungent.
The sound of snoring led her to her father. Naked, except for his dirty shorts, he was strewn on the sofa, his mouth open and one hand resting across his heaving paunch.
She knew she shouldn’t but –
‘Daddy?’
He jumped violently and swung at her.
‘Stupid bitch. I was asleep.’
She held out the bag. ‘I made you something, at school.’
In a second he had yanked out the kite and snapped the struts. He closed his eyes again.
‘It was for Sunday,’ she whispered.
Too Much
My tongue is a dry, swollen sponge; it has become parasitic, attaching itself to the roof of my mouth for replenishment. Skinned by the ripping heat, my face is tight and sand-whipped. Not even a droplet of sweat provides temporary relief. As it is born, it is snatched with the speed of a lizard fanning its frills.
The thought of water, silken, lubricating, swilling, swirling down my gritty throat,
splashing crystals, consumes me. Tipping it from above in an endless cascade, feeling it thread through every lock of hair, meander down my back, saturate my clothing and clamp it against my radiating body.
Pouring it on to my face, catching my breath at the cool shock, relishing the spike of my eyelashes and the sting of my eyeballs, parched as ancient drumskins, letting it fill my open mouth and spill over.
Prised away, my tongue scratches over the indentations of my pitted lips; they flake like a spent chrysalis.
I trudge through an unchanging landscape. All is perpetual – the scorch which encloses me from every quarter, the ochre, the azure.
Then, finally. A watery haze swims ahead of me. It is over.
Shades of Black
The moonlit silhouette of the rattling carriage funnelled into the night.
‘Take the path through the woods,’ the driver had rasped. ‘The big ’ouse is just beyond.’
Thankful for the swinging lantern, Bessie lifted her skirts and picked her way around knuckly tree roots. Branches, like clawing hands, snagged on her shawl, jarring and spinning her. Frightening her. Trees whispered papery secrets and she felt that evil was scuttling around her boots.
At the clearing, Bessie stopped. Holding her flickering light at arm’s reach, she swivelled around. Trunks shouldered trunks, caging her.
Which way? Which way?
Hoping for a glimmer of light from the house, Bessie put down the lantern. The flame drunkenly swayed, then collapsed, drowning in a pool of liquid wax. Bessie allowed a little gasp to escape.
Then she heard it. A tiny tinkle.
She spun at a tap on her shoulder. A manservant from the house!
‘Widow Dempsey sent me to find you.’
‘Widow?’
‘Aye. The Master was buried right here Tuesday last.’
Bessie was glad of the company as they reached the path.
Below ground, nailed in his coffin, Master Dempsey, exhausted, rang his bell. Surely someone would hear it and save him?
White Light
I suspect that soon we will have to part company. Not that you’ve ever really been aware of how much of myself I’ve invested in you. Did you even notice me? I have been with you throughout your living memory. I have made you what you are.
In youth, I allowed you to share my light. To dazzle. But now your weariness is confining me.
I have never changed. I am still what I am: magnesium-bright, perpetual, intense, but trapped in this black enclosure, this fickle cradle. You are caging me as I vibrate and pulse.
I do mourn your demise. I watch you wither and rot. I see the darkening of your organs, the slackening of your muscles and your bones as brittle as sapped twigs. I cannot halt the daily decay. Although I blaze, I am helpless.
I sing a silent lament as your colour leeches, and, as the ticking stops, I shrug you off like useless debris. A bag of dry elephant folds. As they watch, some see me slip away as I leave your body. A soul must be boundless and now, unveiled and untethered, I am free to soar.
Dead End
‘Carrie, can you look at me?’
Her eyes, fish-dead, were locked onto the chipped skirting board. She continued to rock, back and forth, back and forth. Her hands lay in her lap like a limp bouquet.
Dr Jarvis gently touched her scarred arm. A momentary flinch and she resumed, picking up the metronomic rhythm like a desk toy that has been interrupted.
‘Carrie?’
Dr Jarvis’s brow dropped as he watched her. Her cheekbones were sharp and her eyes seemed to be sunk inside bruises. Her face was milky-white. The hospital gown resembled an oversized paper bag. Empty. There was nothing of her.
Carrie began to hum… a monotonous, single note.
* * *
Carrie did not feel the goosepimples creep across her flesh like an army of ants. She did not know that her black feet were as cold as meat slabs on a butcher’s block. The stark light did not disturb her, nor the bare room.
If she did feel anything, it was utter bleakness, a deep void with no size or shape. No edges where she could get off and run.
She stilled. With shaking hands, she clenched the sheet and twisted. She had found the emergency exit.
Like Blackfly on a Rose
The sea, the wind, the gannets. The layers of percussion pressed around Skellig in a monotonous, pulsating tribal rhythm, weaving together in conspiracy as Brother Barnabus hauled each leaden leg up the six hundred and seventy steps with his catch.
Hundreds of feet below, the waves were haphazardly plucked, resembling torn wedding veils, and, above him, was an eddy of burnt confetti as the gannets swirled like stirred mead. He felt hypnotised as he looked towards the summit where his beehive stone hut stood amongst those of his brothers.
His sackcloth flapped against his thin body and his knuckles strained against his alabaster skin. His bones silently moaned, but he pressed on.
As he approached the last fifty steps, the birds began to swoop, screeching in a deafening cacophony. Brother Barnabus flapped ineffectually at his face. Again and again, they plunged around him, targeting him from all directions. He squeezed his eyes tight and twisted from side to side on the narrow steps, the fish swinging.
Then he tumbled.
He escaped the snarling sea, thanks to a flaking ledge at the foot of the rock.
And once the fish had been swiped from his grip, the gannets feasted.
The dark water ticks as the rowing boat glides through, its lantern swinging in the pale green mist. Squatting there, a silhouette—a hunch of black—as though dropped from above.
At his feet, she lies like a puddle, draped over ropes, her face framed by lemon moonlight, her hair thickly stringed and river water bleeding into her dress. His boot is embedded into the cold cushion of her thigh.
With a clunk, the oars are hoisted and he shifts. He straddles the slurping boat, rocking them like babies. He clamps his fingers and makes shovels of his hands. She bends like a fish as he scoops, fronds of her hair stroking the bottom and her toes trailing the drenched wood like ballerinas’; she ripples over the side like a swathe of silk.
With a whispered swish, he’s swallowed by the night. She is gone – and so is the hole that opened and shut like a hungry mouth and left no seam. Her bones will dig their own grave in the river bed.
The Ferryman
Idol Dreams
With the snowfall came that mysterious evening glow which diluted the black; the town had become a sketch in chalk and charcoal.
Like a child, Charlotte felt the magic as she crunched along the back alleyway, so different from the dank, dark space of November.
When the stage door opened and she saw Jed Harborth ducking out and heading her way, she felt her eyes fill. It was actually him. In the flesh.
Charlotte stood with her legs astride and outstretched her arms. ‘Stop!’ she heard herself command with uncharacteristic confidence.
And he did.
Her hair twinkled with snowflakes as she gazed up at him. ‘Just one kiss?’
There was something so appealing about her, muffled in an over-sized scarf, that he was happy to oblige.
‘I have to go now,’ he said finally, touching her cold cheek.
‘Just one more thing? Wait!’ Charlotte ran over to a mound of untouched snow. ‘Put your handprint next to mine. As proof.’
Together they pushed down into the crystals. ‘What’s your name?’ Jed asked.
‘Charlotte.’
He carved ‘C + J’ into the snow and drew a heart around it. ‘Happy Christmas.’
Like his fame, the impressions would disappear… not so her infatuation.
The Wonder of It
In the next breath I could hurl myself at the window and plunge to certain death.
I see a vision in freeze-frames. I drink in the initial essence of beauty: shards of elongated quartz erupting in a white peacock-tailed fountain around me as I break through, bright and sunlit. Myself, a dark, formless bundle, heavy, inert, at the mercy of my forethought; or lack of it. I am just an obscure blur as I mingle for a second with the glass, like a flaw in a diamond. I cut to the final frame where I have landed with an inevitable monosyllabic thud; the last sound I will ever produce, so sudden and unresounding. I had so longed to experience weightlessness. That freedom of being suspended between all surfaces.
I will be found sprawled like a wet rag, my mouth gaping as I become outlined by a dark, silently creeping pool of warmth, its edges undulating softly, like a shroud of burgundy velvet. I will induce gasps and shrieks as mothers turn away their innocents’ heads; someone will cover his mouth as the vomit spews into his hand and bystanders will engage in conversation as strangers do in a crisis. Decisions…
The Offering
The stone wall felt almost wet. Carefully, I curled my way down the dimly-lit spiral staircase which seemed to be boring into the bowels of the earth and arrived at my round, windowless room.
The lamps had been lit. On one side was a desk with an old-fashioned typewriter. The bed was strewn with rich velvet: orange, purple, green. It had a rustic charm to it, though sleeping in a converted cellar was not everyone’s idea of a luxury writing retreat. I was looking forward to the morning’s assignment – ‘Trapped’, but first bed.
Every contour of my body was cradled - the mattress and pillow were like clouds – and, surrounded by complete blackness, I sank into a deep sleep…
The clicking woke me, monotonous and clipped.
My eyelids snapped open and, though aware of a glow to my right where the typewriter was, I could not – dared not – look. ‘Someone’ was in the room.
Tap, tap, tap…
Then it stopped.
A crank. A rustle.
A weight settled on my bed. My eyes remained closed even after it lifted. At dawn, sleep-starved and terrified, I turned on the light to find a sheaf of paper with her own tale, ‘Trapped’.
Sick
The trill of the telephone hurried her along. I watched her disappear into the gloom.
Something was different. A chink in the routine.
She hadn’t turned the key.
A blade of hunger twisted in my abdomen and, fuelled by adrenaline, I tiptoed across the cold concrete to the foot of the dark open stairs, my gaze never faltering from the strip of light along the bottom of the basement door. It taunted me every single day.
I trod lightly, arms held away from my body, head turned to the side. Listening.
At the top, I pressed my ear to the wood. Her muffled voice droned in another room.
As I pulled the door towards me, I squinted against the harsh brightness.
It was still there, in the tiny vestibule that separated the basement from the kitchen.
I lifted the lid and my face was lit like Long John Silver’s as he looked inside the treasure chest.
Quickly I rummaged, thrusting my hand into an open bag and stuffing my mouth with frozen peas. Heavenly.
A rough grip spun me around.
I faced Mother. Swallowed.
‘I am not amused.’
But I was. In my pocket was a frozen sausage for later.
The Kite-Maker
He stood at his vice in the skewed square of light. So much white: the sky, long bleached of summer blue, the scrubbed floorboards, his shoes, as though dusted with cold ash, his clothes veiled, his face spectral.
Encased in a gritty cloud, he filed and whittled the bone to perfection, his nostrils flaring, drawing in the minerals in long, steady pulls.
With deft fingers, the craftsman wove intricate knots in the tendons which firmly held together the cross frame and, having applied a fine spray of adhesive, he stretched the white skin across it, curling his hands around the edges.
Finally, he attached the tail, which he had painstakingly decorated with tufts of golden hair, each drawn together in the middle with a tiny black ribbon.
Outside, the dust lifted from him like a released spirit as the keen wind coiled around him on the hilltop and, as he tossed the kite, it snatched it, too. It was the nearest she would get to heaven after what she had done.
Inside, strewn on the table, was Lena. Or what was left of her.
Clearance
The candlelight was necessary, Elachai had said, so I waded through the shadows, my hand trailing rough spines until I located him, flickering at the end of T-Z. The way that his elaborate robes skirted the stool gave him the appearance of floating.
‘I have it,’ he said, without looking up. A shaft of moonlight fell across the book. He was supporting it on open palms, and, from what I could see, it was tatty and hand-written.
‘Magical incantations. Conundrums. We must go beyond this world for answers.’
I knew what was coming. He had forewarned me.
The babble began in the depth of his throat and, within seconds, had gathered speed and volume. The bookshelves rattled, and up at the window, cloud silhouettes sped across the moon.
‘…Archangel Uriel!’ he bellowed as his crescendo.
The silence struck me first, then the glowing light from above. I dared to raise my eyes.
Sitting on top of the bookcase was an angel, blindingly bright, enormous golden wings folded behind him.
‘You summoned me?’
Elachai shielded his eyes. ‘The tables. You must translate them.’
‘A wasted opportunity. Only Archangel Michael knows the secret.’
As Uriel faded, Elachai, acknowledging futility, clutched his chest.
Killing Time for Neddy
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As long as there was time, there was hope, so he had to keep them going.
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On every wall and shelf were clocks: cuckoo clocks, carriage clocks, alarm clocks, chiming clocks, pendulum clocks.
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Neddy balled up his fists and banged his ears.
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THE TICKING!
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It tapped on his brain like mechanical drumsticks. Or hammering rain on a corrugated shelter. Too much ticking, overlapping in awkward rhythms.
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It was definitely louder now. Deliberately so.
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The grandfather clock was in charge. Always had been. And the others… they were the disciples, watching him, even at night with their luminous numerals. Eight was the one he was most wary of.
Those hands… never to be trusted… sending their secret messages in semaphore.
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Neddy covered his eyes and peeped through his fingers, the only way to remain safe: six o’clock, twenty to eleven, ten past six.
‘D…I…E’ Neddy spelled out to himself. Those three mantel clocks were the worst.
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Just in time, he turned the hourglass, then jumped as the cuckoo was spat out of his Swiss chalet seven times, his tweet a semi-tone down, and slurred.
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So much time, but so little hope.
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It was already too late for Neddy.
Newton's Third Law
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Consider the propulsion of a fish through the sea, or the flying motion of a bird. The pushing of water. The pushing of air. The way that the forces MUST act and react equally, but opposite to each other.
In pairs. Always in pairs.
The irony!
I always think of physics as a kind of Karma. I believe in give and take.
You always mocked my philosophy. You were one-sided. One-dimensional. A taker.
Your right side is scored with hash tags. I smile. Do they number infidelities? And your cheek is pocked with gravel, like – it comes to me quickly – the marks of infection. You liked your shirts pressed, your shoes shiny, but you are not neat. You are scuffed and roughened.
Your asymmetry, though unnatural, is pleasing to me. I am intact. Physically, anyway.
So, where were we? Yes, forces. Consider the motion of a car. The wheels spin, they grip the road and push the road backwards. The direction of the force on the road (backwards) is opposite to the direction of the force of the wheels (forwards).
My foot slipped. You were in my path. But, on balance, I think we can say we’re equal.
Neat Freak
First, bulky: toilet rolls, kitchen rolls.
Next, the heavy stuff: dishwasher powder, wine, tins (tomatoes together, soup together, baked beans together), salad dressing.
Toiletries.
Boxes.
Biscuits.
Vegetables, fruit, eggs, bread.
She moved the biscuits.
‘Need any help with your packing?’
‘NO. Thank you.’ Alice dashed to the end of the belt and bagged everything up. Just so.
It was all about order. With order, nothing could go wrong. Alice just couldn’t understand how most people lived in such disarray. It was why she could never stay anywhere. Especially if the pillowcases were not matching.
She drove home carefully, staying exactly parallel between the white lines and the kerb. Tom’s car was on her side of the drive. How many times…
‘Hi, love!’ he called from the kitchen. ‘Coffee?’
‘No thanks.’ Alice stopped dead in the kitchen doorway. She dropped the bags. Tight-lipped, she breathed through her nose, watching as Tom shoved the coffee jar onto the cereal shelf.
There was a crack as she swung the bag of ‘heavy stuff’ at his head. She lined him up with the tiles and put everything EXACTLY in the right place.
She tutted. Balsamic dressing dripped off Tom. The floor would need washing.
Papering Over Cracks
There it was again.
Shelley stopped scraping and tilted her head towards the grille. The old house creaked and a moth rattled against the dusty pane, but that was all. There was still a draught coming from somewhere, Shelley realised; like a drunk ghost, her shadowed outline swayed across the ugly wall. Above her, out of reach, the lightbulb swung.
She wrung out the cloth in the bowl of lukewarm water and crunched through the yellowed curls of paper to the next garish patch to be removed. There was something about the smell of damp walls – it was as if history was being released. She stooped to peel off a strip of paper which clung to her bare heel and a trickle of cold washed down her body as the maniacal laughter was expelled from the grille straight into her ear.
It made no sense. There were no neighbours out here on the moor. She turned on the paint-spattered radio.
Nothing but white noise.
What did they say about night time? Everything seems worse. She would finish this one wall and get to bed, if you could call a camp bed that. Daylight would be better.
Like ugly confetti, layers of paper rained down, lodging in her hair and burying her feet. The smell intensified. It was hard to breathe. Shelley furiously scraped.
What were those markings?
The laughter continued as, one by one, she uncovered the words: LET. ME. OUT.
The lightbulb fizzed and popped.
Blackness engulfed her.
Entanglement
‘NOW!’ The word ripped across the back of Kendall’s throat but could barely be heard against the roar. Sprawled across the slippery rock, his sodden clothes like a second skin, he strained every muscle as he reached out with his good arm to Esther, fingers trembling and body juddering.
Esther’s mouth opened like a fish’s, gulping air between swathing veils of white water, eyes fluttering with the fear of trapped birds, blanched skin behind a net of hair. Her fingers dug into the rock as it if was sponge.
She was going to be taken away in a rush, tumbled amongst the smoothed boulders…
No tears! He needed to see. To be ready.
A twig waltzed around her; it hurtled towards him.
He could catch her.
‘NOW! Let go!’
Would she?
Water slapped the length of Kendall’s body and shifted him across the downward slope of the rock; momentarily, he looked away from Esther. When he looked up again, she was gone.
In an instant, he glimpsed her dark head being dragged towards him. Clawing his hand, he bowled the icy water, dredging emptiness.
Numb, his fingers suddenly caught in her hair. Her beautiful hair. His beautiful wife. Saved.
