Flash fiction (27): Off the latch

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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