Flash fiction (27): Off the latch

Written for 2minutesgo, JD Mader’s writing blog. Head over there to write, read, comment. It's open all weekend. So go do your thing! Have a groovy weekend.

Off the latch

John never said where he was going. He didn’t dare. He didn’t want anyone to know the pull of the thing, the shadows twisting in the moonlight. The claws making zigzag lines in air. They were his alone. They followed him out, trailed him. They knew his scent by heart, and they had been his playthings since he was a kid with cut-off shorts and a string vest, skidding in the dirt, coming home with holes in his knees.

Boys will be boys, his dad always said, as his mum opened endless packs of plasters. He still carried the scars. He’d roll out a list of names to his parents, same old, and they never asked questions. His dad was the most antisocial man on Earth and his mum was too embarrassed by their poverty, their sparceness to ever want anyone to venture inside their home. So the shadows never had to meet them. They’d take him places and show him things, and he never had to tell, unless he wanted to, and he never wanted. 

So life went on. He became a loner as a teenager, the weirdo at the back of the class with the oversized clothes and skinny frame whom no one spoke to, but some secretly stared at in awe. He seemed to know things that were beyond most people. He excelled in maths without revising and just sat there in class staring out into space. A prodigy. That’s what they said when he went off to university far too early. And it was a relief to leave.

Now he was a professor at that same building, teaching in the exact same rooms he once sat in, stuck at the back of the class, the loner. It didn’t matter now. It was almost expected that he should be a person apart. He was too intelligent for the rest of them. And he didn’t want to engage. The shadows had moved with him. They never left him alone. And now it was time. They were pointing outside. At her. The girl walking. And they’d already told him what they wanted him to do. He didn’t need to tell anyone where he was going.

Copyright Vickie Johnstone, May 16, 2020

Flash fiction (26): The chill

Written for JD Mader's 2minutesgo website. If you fancy writing or just reading, head over there this weekend.  This one took longer than 2 minutes! :) Cheers

The chill

Rain. Drained. Time chimed. It spoke, but it didn’t. It flew, but it stayed low. He felt it and yet it didn’t move him. He couldn’t say that it really did. Rain. The chill of it seeped into his skin, even though he watched it from a place of warmth. It spied into the insides he kept hidden, protected, even a mystery to himself, fearing he couldn’t feel anything.

Perhaps when he was a child. That might have been the last time. Him and Keith would take their bikes up the steepest hills, trudging up panting, so tired at the top that they’d collapse, leaning forwards on the handlebars desperate for a breath. But the view. The view was always worth it. Always worth the silent trudge. There was no breath to spare for speech. And then the reward. Over much too fast. Seconds really, if they counted it.

They didn’t. They never counted it once. The reward was enough. Whizzing down so fast that your throat ate your heart and you didn’t die. That adrenalin rush was something he’d never been able to capture since, although he’d damn well tried. Even the lines of Keith’s body, sighing slightly as it slept, didn’t rustle up the same rapture in him. His mother had been right all along. Make the best of your childhood because things are never the same. You grow up, and you have to grow up fast or you’ll get left behind.

And he always felt left behind. In his career, his painting, even his pace, which had shuffled down to a crawl. Even if he’d wanted to take his bike all the way up that grand old hill, he’d have collapsed halfway. And laughed, probably. Well, Keith would have laughed. He’d suck the whole seriousness out of it, spit it out without a toffee coating, and keep things as they really were, no embroidery, no exaggeration.

“Can’t you sleep?”

Ben twitched and leaned behind him. “No, I was thinking about bikes.”

“You don’t have a bike.”

“When we was boys. The Bridges Hill. Down by the school.”

It was Keith’s turn to laugh, pulling the covers as he turned over, wrapping himself up like a sausage. “You always beat me up that bloody hill.”

“I sure wouldn’t now. Huffing like an old man.”

“It’ll pass. It’s a big thing, surgery. You need to give yourself a break. You know that, don’t you? You’re not Superman.”

“But you are,” said Ben. “You always were.”

Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 3, 2020

Flash fiction (25): Harry

Written for JD Mader's 2minutesgo website. If you fancy writing or just reading, head over there this weekend.  This one took longer than 2 minutes! :) Cheers

Harry

Harry never wanted to be normal, do the usual things, the average humdrum walking-through-life-not-seeing-it-really kind of normal. So he did everything in the book to prove he was otherwise. He grew his hair, got some tats, even a facial piercing or two.

And then he travelled. Everywhere. On a shoestring. And not the usual; the stuff that involved scaling mountains with one hand or hand-gliding in ill-advised weather, giving goofy looking pigeons a run for their money. And money was something he really didn’t have much of, or crave. He didn’t want the wife, Volvo and two-point-three kids, so he bought a guitar and played gigs for a bit, and took up painting houses. But then being skint got boring, so he got the only job that truly scared him: stuntman.

Ah, relationships. Well, he’d had more than his fair share of those. And fair they were, to be sure. Back in the day, he didn’t have to try too hard, there was always someone; always someone who took a shine to him, and whom he took one to back. It wasn’t that he wasn’t picky, he just loved women, and he fell in love or lust frequently. Of course, it wasn’t his fault that these things never worked out. He just never met the right woman who got him where you’re meant to be got. And when he’d finally given up on that, he met her.

Bang! Slap in the middle of town, outside the bookies, walking his so-not-normal dog. The one everyone crossed the road to avoid. His grin was like a graveyard of jagged canines, looking to rip your head off. But no, she bent down and stroked him, coo-ed and ahh-ed, and had the soppy old sod eating out of her hands in no time – both of them. One thing led to another and they married (not the dog). But even Martha couldn’t tame him. She came close, but that wandering spirit couldn’t be rested.

Thirty years of wedded bliss and then came ‘the affair’. It wasn’t even an affair to remember, but she couldn’t forget it. And he could never forget that she left. But he had the most wonderful daughter. She forgave him, still spoke to him. Harry read an article once, claiming people who could never settle, moved a lot, had the wanderlust, had many relationships, carried a special gene. He forgot the name, but some of the world’s greatest explorers had it. How he’d love to get tested for it.

It was just like him to be a stuntman, Martha always said, and “can’t you get a proper job?”. He’d never meant to make it a career. It just looked fun. A pitstop. A break in the road. But a whale of a time it was. He never meant to get a little bit famous, but that happened too. Some might say that’s almost normal, but he managed to put a crazy spin on it. Until the accident, the one that brought him here, to this bed in this ward, this piss-coloured place. Who chose this damn paint anyway?

“Grandad?”

Harry glanced down at the little face staring up at him through a shagpile mop of hair. “Did I drift off again, son?” he asked.

The boy nodded. “Were you daydreaming? I do that all the time.”

The old man laughed, knowing that dreaming was the start. “Yes. And I have some advice for you, son. Be normal!”

The boy screwed up his face.

“Be normal. Don’t stand out. It’s easier. No one will question anything you do. And everyone will understand you.”

The boy bit his tongue and shook his head. “But Mum will kill me!”

Harry turned to the bonnie, red-haired woman holding his hand on the other side of the bed, her eyes creased up in amusement. “He’s a chip off the old block, Dad. It’s too late now! Look at the example he’s had!”

“Well, I never approved of all your tattoos, Joy. Wait til you’re eighteen before you get one, son. These things stick with you for life.”

“Uh-mm, okay, granddad. Can I get a ring in my nose like you instead?”

 Copyright Vickie Johnstone, Friday, 13 December, 2019

Flash fiction (23): To fading

I wrote this today for JD Mader’s writing site. If you fancy writing some flash fiction or poetry, and getting/giving feedback, or just reading other people’s creations, head over to JD Mader’s 2minutesgo website. It’s a great place to go and write whatever is in your head. Cheers.

To fading

I give you nothing in the eyes of this sacred summer; a cold distancing you need to get you through this night. It will breathe, the truth, resurrect you in a blink, deliver you from the evil you bang on about. Yet you love it so, inhaling its dank breath; relishing this reality, this true relationship, the deepest one you’ve ever shared with another – behold, the biggest loss you’ll feel when claws wrench it away.

I watch you. Like a child you sleep, breathing the nether, the empty, a time of bliss and quiet, and still, so still. A sculpture, palest cheeks carved into the pillow. I’m scarcely aware that you exhale. Do you? Are you real? I sometimes wonder.

The way you tilt your chin and look at me in that way you have when you think I’m not seeing you, it makes me weary now. Weary of tomorrow. If only you could stay like this, simple, away from the world you find so difficult to trudge through. It starves you of what you need. You never tire of telling me this. Reminding me. Informing me why the creative inside of you is dead.

They killed it, you say. And sometimes you cry. But you know I can’t bear to see a man cry. Your endless desire for empathy is a drowning. You would have steered me away from you, dragged me across a lake, pretending you could walk on water. And now you disintegrate into dreamtime, the only safe crossing for you.

What if you don’t wake up? What if you just stop? What if? This second is the longest and I keep the door ajar for you, waiting. Outside an owl sounds and I know it echoes here for you.

Copyright Vickie Johnstone, July 6, 2019

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