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Case

October 28, 2010 in C

By Jason Geary


Nobody said anything for thirty seconds. The only sound in the room was the clock on the wall. I picked up the photographs and looked again. It was still Helen. She was still dead.

“I told you. I’ve never seen her before in my life.”

The Detective looked at me and rolled his eyes. “Why’d she dial your number the day she was killed?”

“I don’t know.” I did know. “I didn’t answer it. I left my phone in the car while I was paying for fuel. I didn’t look at it for hours after that. Hell, I didn’t even know she’d called until your goons knocked on the door.”

‘Come on Gus; don’t make us detain you. Why’d she call you?”

“You can’t do that without sufficient evidence, which you and I both know you don’t have. It’ll take you a day to trump up something and get a warrant. So let me go or I call upstairs and you get a weeks worth of paper work for detaining me without cause.”

Another thirty seconds passes in silence.

‘I’ll be seeing you tomorrow then.” The Detective said making no effort to hide his frustration.

I picked up my hat and walked past him smiling as I did so. I could see the veins in his forehead. I winked.

I walked out of the police station to find the weather had turned. I pulled my collar up and stepped out into the street. Two cops walked out behind me, police muscle.

Twenty-four hours before they could trump up some charges and drag me back in here for a good long session.

Twenty-four hours to ditch this muscle and find out who killed Helen, the woman who’d hired me to find her son.

Tick. Tock.

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Sanction

October 14, 2010 in S

By Jason Geary


The only thing that marked the passage of time down here was the shuffling of silhouette feet past the frosted basement window. As offices went, this one was appalling. It was dingy, grey and lit by dying fluorescent tubes. The light fittings provided a dull hum that permeated through the room, acute white noise.

Occasionally Neil would sniff. A long wet sniff, like a thirsty drain swallowing the last dregs of storm water.

It was a sound that made Rodger die just a little every time he heard it. Each time the sniff finished Neil would offer a cursory “Excuse me.” These two words the made Rodger’s blood pressure instantly rise.

A dull echo came from the hole in the wall. It was a sure sign of contact from above. The cylindrical canister shot from the wall and skidded across the floor. Rodger picked it up and unscrewed the lid. Inside was a small piece of paper with tiny typing on it.

Rodger squinted; he couldn’t read it, something Neil noticed right away.

“You want me to read it?” Asked Neil.

“No. I’ll get it.” His face was screwed up as if he was trying to force the blood into his eye sockets to make up for his failing vision.

“Just let me read it.”

“It’s from upstairs.”

Neil sighed. Everything that came from the tube was from upstairs. Of course it was from upstairs. Rodger’s face dropped. He looked at Neil, then at each of their desks respectively.

“What is it?” Asked Neil.

“Cost cuts. We have to share a desk.” He said grimly.

“Oh man.” Neil said, slapping his hand on his thigh.

“We have to decide who’s will stay and who’s will go.”

There was a long pause. Finally Rodger spoke, “Well I guess mine could go…”

Suddenly four burley men burst in a removed his desk. The door closed behind the men, leaving Rodger and Neil in the buzzing white noise of the lights. Rodger sighed and grabbed the top of his chair, he tipped it and dragged it to the remaining desk, the metal legs screeched across the linoleum floor, and echoed off the wall. Before the echo had died Rodger found himself sitting across from Neil.

They sat for two minutes taking in the new vista.

Rodger offered a smile. Neil sniffed a mighty sniff and said, “Excuse me.”

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Quell

October 13, 2010 in Q

By Emilie Collyer


“So Harold, how are things with you today?”

As usual, Harold’s gaze was directed to the patch of light on the grey carpet. Most days Clara snapped him out of this anti-social habit. Some days, when she was feeling soft, she let it pass. He was a man much weighed down by life.

“Quell, thank you,” said Harold on this day. “Everything is quell.” As he spoke, he raised his eyes to meet Clara’s with a quiet confidence.

Clara cleared her throat.

“Harold, you know that quell is not the right word for this context don’t you. What word do you think you really mean to say?”

“I mean to say that things are quell. I am feeling quite as quell as I ever have and I want to thank you, Doctor, most sincerely, for helping me become so quell!” Harold’s cheeks flushed red with excitement.

The clock ticked gently and from outside Clara could hear the call of nesting magpies. Such a beautiful song for such a violent bird.

Clara cleared her throat again, flexing her fingers around the cool surface of her fountain pen.

“Now Harold, let’s try that again. So, how are you today?”

The afternoon sun danced on Harold’s silver hair as he lifted his face, stretched out his arms and smiled the broadest of smiles.

“I am most magnificently quell!”

This outburst done, silence hung heavy in the room. Clara spoke.

“It’s swell you moron! Do you hear me, You’re swell. Swell. Swell! Repeat after me. I am swell. I am swell! Come on Harold.”

Harold’s lips twitched and he glanced towards the door. His eyebrows furrowed and his tongue thickened as he tried to hang onto the magical word in his mouth. But Clara was strong and beautiful in her anger and it was only through her good work that he had come so far.

So in spite of every quell ounce of his being, and at odds with the quell confidence that had brought him to this session today – with the intention of saying good-bye, farewell and thanks to Doctor Clara – Harold forced his tongue to the roof of his mouth and pushed out the word.

“Swell,” he whispered.  “I am swell. I am swell.”

“Pardon Harold? I can’t hear you very well.”

“Swell! I am swell! I am swell!”

Some forty-five minutes later the door to Clara’s office opened and Harold exited, a swell, broken man.

“Excellent work today Harold. Things are coming along very nicely. See you next week!” Clara waved her bright, chirpy wave.

And Harold stepped out in the street, eyes to the pavement, muttering his way into the spring afternoon.

“I am swell. I am swell. I am swell.”

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Glimpse

October 11, 2010 in G

By Jason Geary


Ever since we’ve met I’ve known her to wear scarves. Some so plain they are barely worth mentioning, others so beautiful that it would be an injustice to attempt to describe them.

It doesn’t matter what season it is, what time of day or night, what occasion. She will always wear a scarf.

I’ve quizzed her on this of course. Half jokingly, half serious.

“Do you have something wrong under there. A birthmark or perpetual love bite? You not living with a Vampire are you?”

“No.” She answered dryly, “I just think it best I keep it covered. It’s easier that way.”

Easier? I let it go. She obviously didn’t want to talk about it, even to me.

Last week I saw her neck. It was quite by accident, she was sleeping in the car next to me. We were on our way to a mutual friends wedding a long distance out of town. She adjusted her position in the seat, craning to find the head rest when her scarf dropped open. I was stunned. It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Her neck was milky white with a gradual curve at the nape that a European Master couldn’t perfect. It took my breath and warmed my heart. It made me fall in love with her. I couldn’t look away.

A sudden vibration shocked her awake and she instinctively covered her neck as she adjusted herself upright. I’d let the car drift off onto the shoulder of the road.

“What’s going on?” She asked as I corrected the car.

“I drifted off.” I said clumsily.

“You want me to drive for a bit?”

I thought about it. “Yeah, yeah I think it’s best.”  I pulled the car over and we swapped.

Ever since, I’ve not been able to forget what I saw, like staring at the sun. I’ve not said anything of course; I know it makes her uncomfortable. Not a day goes by that I don’t wonder what happened to make her realize the power she held and whether I’ll be lucky enough to see it again.

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Obsessed

October 7, 2010 in O

by Tal Brott


So creative is his obsession, he could even divine some connection to her in this sentence.

He often closes his eyes and sees her in three dimensions with a clarity that exceeds that if she were right before him, because his mind’s eye doesn’t have the refractive aberrations of air to distort her form. In fact, if he were to actually see her, he would be both shocked and repulsed at the stunning inaccuracies that her actual form embodies. Reality is such a lie in all its impurities.

It is only her smell that he can’t reproduce. Eyes closed, he tries to evoke her odour, he sometimes may catch a fleeting glimpse of scent that is almost exactly like her smell, but like an elaborate elusive dream forgotten on awakening, it’s frustratingly fucked off.

When he meets women now, he immediately sees how hopelessly flawed they are by the very deviations that compare to the woman that left him. She is a template that hovers above, then overlays every person he meets. The most horrible women of all are the ones that are almost like her. Because they are a sad, twisted caricature of something perfect. They offer a mocking reminder of what he once thought he had.

His understanding of her is completely removed from who she really is. He has mapped a fantasy person onto her that is not even she. So even she is an impostor of who he thinks she is.

He has become a mono-dimensional being. He has channelled all the shades of complexity a man can have into one terrifying fixation that has compressed his character into a sliver, a huge two-dimensional plane that rotates and when we see it’s profile edge, it disappears, it’s vastness vanishing into void.

He blocks from his mind the times spent with her. Why spoil the memory by placing her into the context of a relationship or experience? Her behaviour, feelings, self and spirit were never indicative of her anyway. She was superior to all that. Better she be an abstract entity, a pure platonic form. She is a sphere. A pyramid. A cube. Timeless.

One day he will write a story about it, and by ‘story’ he really means a kind of pretentious character study. But by then she has long since forgotten him. She grows old gracefully, a lioness surveying the land protecting her cubs, surrounded by the legacy of her loins and beyond. While he is alone and destitute, desperately trying to fabricate memories of memories, a withering trace of a trace, dying concentric circles rippling out into nothing.

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Labyrinth

October 4, 2010 in L

By Dave Bloustien


It oughtn’t be possible to lose one’s car in a car park this empty. Sarah scanned the rows of empty spaces, her eyes tripping over the occasional Range Rover, but nothing was familiar. Could her car have been stolen?

A distant, dull scraping echoed off the concrete pillars, trailing into a low metal moan. Shit. Security, closing the gates, no doubt. She would be locked in here overnight.

The empty white lines fishboned back and forth across the bitumen. Did she park on P3 or P4? Did she even drive? The metal scraping sounded again, closer now, with hungry intent.

Striding purposefully, with a confidence she didn’t feel, Sarah headed back to the lift: her loud heels, clacking on the blackened ground. It must have been P4. Must have been. Shitshitshitshitshit. Not another soul left on this level, but all the same Sarah clutched at her handbag and looked nervously over her shoulder

Crack! Sarah’s right ankle shot out from underneath her, her shoe slipping on a patch of rusty motor oil, and snapping the shoe off at the heel. Only that wasn’t motor oil. And that soft purring motor breathing exhaust on her neck didn’t sound like that of any car she’d ever heard.

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Buskin

October 1, 2010 in B

By Vicki Kyriakakis


Of an empty sock erradicated. Internal to the noun of shoe. Of a type. Only tragic and empty. Like the sock. Fullsome. Strappy. Exacerbating of corns. Blister inducing. Heat releasing. Sweat-ifying. Slippery to the foot. Posing like a dramatic actor; but not one holding a skull. More alike to something ancient and Aristotelean. A veritable Antigone of a shoe, that rises up the thigh in concert with the great King himself before diving into an Homeric despair. Fancy but not fanciable. Worn by those with airs but no graces; with swords but no shields. Open to the world, and to itself a mystery.

How nice it would have been to have seen it on a Versacean heal. How fitting.

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