Atherton Gardens

He checked his watch; it was 6pm. He had been walking for two hours. His stomach growled. He was starving and cold. Between two tower blocks to the north, the sun was dipping low, casting long black shadows. The sky looked bleak and threatening. A wind was starting to pick up; curling yellowed newspapers in little eddies around the empty entrance ways of the buildings. He then felt the first few spits of rain. A storm was coming in. His purloined overcoat would provide little cover. Despite the rising sense of dread at being lost in a storm in a veritable shit hole, he tried to calm himself. A storm would hamper the authorities' search. Witnesses were hard to come by when the wet set in.

He passed a giant slab of concrete jutting up from the parkland where it had violently been embedded. Peering up, he saw a huge cavity in the side of a building where it had come loose and crashed to the ground. Now it just lay there. Weeds were growing up through the cracks in its surface, covering the buckled metal framework exposed beneath. No effort made to clean it up or to repair the naked section of building that remained. He could see the shadows of people moving around in the shell of the room. They were tending a small fire, feeding it foam sections of a smashed-up couch. Their shadows rose and fell in the dim light.

He passed an overturned shopping trolley. Two of its wheels had been wrenched off and its wire frame was being slowly corroded by rust. In the middle distance he saw a children's playground. The jungle gym lay on their side in a distorted mockery of its original intent - a twisting mass of metalwork. Several rungs rose up from the ground as though making one last attempt to regain their former structure before abandoning the idea and relegating themselves to a fate of damp soil and weeds.

Icy water started to drip down his neck, and run down his spine, sending chills to his core. Shivering, he pulled his overcoat more tightly around him. Puddles were already forming on the walkway. Water cascaded in falls down the vertical sides of the buildings and splashed up from the over-worked drains. As he walked around the buildings, he noticed a basic system of ordering. Each building had a giant red letter painted on its north-south corner. He was nearing ‘Sector G – Atherton Gardens’.

- from a work in progress, working title ‘The Tect’.

The Grey Dawn Caper

It lay there on the bed, a note carved in blood. I didn't need to read it, I knew what it said. Instead I walked purposefully to the bedroom curtain, tore it open, and there she was, two floors below me. Flash of cherry blossom lipstick, smeared across her cheek, her hand pressed against the rear windscreen of the black car, palm towards me, the life lines indistinguishable. Then the engine was gunned, and the car tore away, the tailpipe spewing exhaust which merged with the gray morning fog. She was gone and that was that. I let the curtain fall back down, smothering the outline of my own palm left on the cold hard window pane.

The Finest of Species

She was the finest of species. A magnificent find. Too rare even for a zoo. I kept her in the front room. I admitted no guests, such were the precautions. Food was optimum, the finest caviar, the purest of oils and sweet meats. A delicate combination of yoghurt and medicinal herbs. I cried for an entire day when the mutation took hold. Her disposition changed, became frightful. The last night I awoke just after midnight. She had gnawed through the wall of the bed chamber. Her bite, a pure anaesthetic, meant I came to consciousness when it was already too late - she had entered through my trachea and moved swiftly until wholly feasting on the jugular. As I faded I dreamt of angels and dead branches in snow.

Two No Trumps

The tea tasted acrid. Mr Jengles smiled, 'Do take another sip. Really draw it down.'
'You've poisoned it,' I replied.
'But of course,' said Jengles. 'It's time you were removed.'
He was right. I gulped it down, my Adam's Apple bobbing. I smiled back at him, my teeth stained with blood.
'I think I want to kiss you,' I told him. Mr Jengles looked alarmed, his manacles quivered.
'But... the poison...'
'Exactly. My disappearance is a trump, it takes one equal with it.'
'And that equal is...'
'Exactly.' His eyes were clenched tight as I spat the stagnant blood in his face. He died a minute later. I'd swapped his antidote for spider venom the evening before as he played Bridge on the upper deck.

The Italian Fruit Addler

The phone rang. El Chico, my Mexican contact. He had news. There'd been a fly-over the night before, two of the boys had been pinched, and the third was halfway across the border by now, heading to a hook-up with his family. They'd left a semi-circle of lemons around the body. Lemons without skins, perfectly peeled, freshly preserved. It had the locals spooked.

Priorities

I couldn't remember when I had last shaved. Looking in the mirror, I barely recognised myself. My eyes were dark, sunken rings. My skin was dry and aged. My stubble was flecked with gray. My work had cost me so much. So much more than I realised.

My family had become ghosts - swathing in and out of focus, they mouthed silent words at me. I stood at the kitchen counter, scoffing burnt toast, talking via video conference with the Board of Directors. They were all wearing spotless white Keffiyehs with black bands.

The next day I awoke before dawn. I lathered my face and shaved myself clean. I dressed in my best suit and matching blue tie. I kissed my wife, her body warm and kind, and then left the house as the sun was cresting the rooftops of the nearby houses.

I walked briskly, whistling, swinging my umbrella. My mobile rang away in my pocket, but I never once made the effort to answer it.

I took the express lift up to the top floor - the electronic lift numbers whizzed by in a blur. Every wall in my office was made of polished glass. I could see the harbour and the neon street lights far below. The first commuters were bustling down the wet oily pavements.

The glass gave way with the second swing of my leather and chrome chair and I let the momentum of it carry me out. I watched the myriad glass shards suspended about me and I watched how my chair did was buffeted in the air currents as I hurtled down.

I hoped that the news of my death wouldn't upset company productivity in the long term.

Third-World Country

The delivery van had one unusual aspect – that of a small-scale satellite dish. I watched as it tracked my movements. I’d take three steps forward and it would rotate and adjust its telemetry accordingly. I moved backwards, it followed. I crept towards a tree and hid myself behind its meagre foliage. The dish followed. I furtively slid beneath a vacant park bench – I watched in awe as the dish locked in my position by lowering its y-axis. I was apprehended not three minutes later. The border police had been onto me for sometime – they’d picked up Franco, my border compadre on a trumped-up weapons smuggling charge – and I didn’t stand a chance with the grenades and light-arms bag I was carrying.

“Mr Markovich.”

I arrived to find the house empty, darker than an ace deck of spades. There was no sound, except the caw-cawing of a crow perched on a nearby fence post. Rusty barbed wire ran along the ground half-buried in the sand, a grim reminder of some dark past the house was yet to surrender up to me.

I rapped on the door, once. The second time it creaked open, cobwebs tearing apart, and dust falling in the dim light from the windows. Dusk was on its way. I pulled out my torch and holding it up at shoulder height, I made an inspection of the downstairs landing. A dusty antique chest on chest, riddled with termites, stood on the verge of collapse, to the left there hung a picture, yellowed and flaking in a cracked frame. Studying it under torchlight I could see it was Mr Frankenheimer. Before the war. He was smiling at the camera, as he shook the hand of another man whom I didn’t recognise. The man had a monocle and a scar that ran from the corner of his mouth up to his eye. The scar pulled his smile back in a contortionist’s rictus. I’d sooner shoot and ask questions later. I got the distinct feeling that this man I was peering at across the passage of time was the man behind this whole set-up. It was an instinct, a crying out in my gut but I’d long learned to listen to those cries. I fingered the wound still red and raised on my forehead – a reminder of the last time I’d ignored such instincts.

The door behind me banged shut. There was a click of a gun being cocked, and a match being struck simultaneously. I turned, my hooded eyes falling on the blackened shape of a man, wide shoulders under a fedora.

‘Mr Markovich I presume,’ the shape spoke.

‘Who’s asking?’

‘From where I’m standing you’re in no position to be asking such questions. You seem to value your life at a low premium. All the better for me then for I am here to extinguish you.’

‘How much for the liquidation?’ I asked, stalling, my hand curling around a candle stick holder balanced on a side table behind me.

‘Oh, that’s quite enough of the questions. Here,’ he threw me some rope. “Tie your wrists.’

Image courtesy of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordi_Bernet

Five minutes to five

It was now five minutes to five. The disc jockey stretched back in his chair, the back creaking under his weight. The record played its song and three minutes passed in a mellow drum and thumping jazz beat, the trumpets occasionally cutting his thoughts in two.

He corrected his sunglasses as the last refrains soared, sustained then faded. He lent over and grabbed the desk mic.

“It’s two minutes to five and the air is alive with electricity no one turned on. The sky is alive with anticipation. Could this be the night? Could this be the night they come? You’re listening to XRR and I’ll be your host for this evening.”

The handprint

The handprint was painted in dried blood. It had congealed and set by the morning. It marked a passing, a suspended moment in time since gone. A reminder of human umbrage. It was stark and contrasted against the pale fading white of the wallpaper. There was no leading trail or gentle sliding off at the fingertips of the print. Set in blood in solid primitive form. I really had to get my kids some proper oil paints next time I was down at the art store. Perhaps on Saturday…