Writing, mostly.

First published at 330 Words, August 25th, 2011

Lucy looked down at the headstone and wished she could have sent flowers.

“Henry Smith, 62. He made us all look up.”

She smiled.

“Husband to Katy, Father to Lucy and Aaron.”

She could have cried.

Lucy had spent her life listening to stories of far off nebulae and second moons. She’d been a rebellious Starbuck to his kindly Adama as they watched old sci-fi and built rocket ships.

Had there ever been a father / daughter team up in sci-fi? She couldn’t recall; her memory was sluggish but she knew they’d hoped one day to be that team, speeding their way to the stars, fuelled by arguments and misunderstandings on a mission to reach strange planets and inevitable reconciliation.

It was a childish dream, and now so far away.

Space begins sixty-two miles out but the furthest they’d ever reached, with their kit rockets, wouldn’t get them to the nearest MacDonald’s. Henry told stories about Icarus and claimed it for their genre. He encouraged her, enthusing on how each launch would take them further and bring them closer. As the years went by, this encouragement seemed to become more for him than her.

“One day we’ll put a hamster in. Then your baby brother, just to be sure. Then our adventure can start.”

Her last test was scheduled for a Saturday and, distracted by memory, Henry had left his little girl priming the launch, not noticing she had long grown out of believing space was the only frontier.

After a late Friday night and with rocket fuel cocktails slowing her down, Lucy made that one simple mistake which sent parts of her and the rocket up into the sky, leaving Henry holding a useless trigger.

In the twenty years between Lucy’s death and his own Henry continued to look up, hoping to find the star his daughter had reached but knowing that in the countless drift of interstellar matter it was all too easy to become lost.

First published at 330 Words, July 5th, 2011

“It’s the most perfect shade of blue, isn’t it?”

Maureen didn’t think so but she knew better than to offer an opinion. When Edmund started in on one of his observations nothing could interrupt or contradict him. Mountains would move before Edmund Jenkins admitted he was wrong.

“This must be the most celebrated view in all the world. It must be. The only reason Wordsworth never wrote about it was because it humbled even him.”

More likely, Maureen thought, was that the view just wasn’t worth writing about. It was barely worth stopping for and yet, year after year, Edmund did just that, unscrewing the thermos and leaning against his stick for a good hour or more whilst he talked. And talked. Year after year he talked about daffodils and imagination or some other Lakeland theme he’d unearthed from a National Trust leaflet.

Not that Maureen knew more about this place. She was a city girl at heart and didn’t much care for the hills or the weather this time of year always brought with it, but she had accompanied her husband regardless, visiting gravesides and churches and garden centres and listening, always listening.

There were many things Maureen might have said to her husband but on the subject of the grey sky, the tumbledown fence or the car park she kept her peace just as she had in the forty years of standing in the same spot listening to the same talk on the perfection of Nature.

If only they had walked to one of the many places with a bench. That at least would have eased the pains in her legs. But those places had been claimed for other couples, all of them dead.

Two years on, Maureen Jenkins continued to visit that same spot and look across that same view. Her crumbling hip was glad of the bench she had paid for with its single name and long awaited sense of peace.

“He wrote poetry.”

“No, I mean what did he do during the war? Did he fight or tell other men to fight? Or did he stay at home like, you know, one of those conscious people. My grandad says…”

“I know what you meant, James.”

James liked that she called him by his proper name. Everybody else called him Jimmy. Made him sound like a baby. May didn’t. May said “James” like he was some kind of king. Or a gentleman. She treated him like a grown-up. Like a friend.

Ever since the old lady first smiled at him, James saw her as a friend. Asking how his morning had been as he hurried home she had quickly become a part of his lunchtime adventure. She would offer him drinks, a biscuit and, eventually, a seat at the little table in her back room. The room where dainty tea cups and freshly baked cake fought for space against bottles of sterilised milk and jars of buttons.

That’s why he could ask her anything. Once he’d asked what nipples were for. His friends were so wrong and he told them so, relaying her perhaps slightly too detailed explanation. But they didn’t seem to care, preferring the myths they had created to the repeated wisdom of an old lady.

James cared, though. He liked the details. Which was why he wanted to know what her brother had done during the war.

“That was what he did, James. He wrote poetry. Lots of men did. And those who didn’t wrote letters or sketched or sang or told stories.”

The little boy eyed the sponge cake, lying uncut beside the tarnished knife.

“But they couldn’t all have done that. Some of them must have killed people.”

“Yes. They killed people. But that wasn’t what they did, James. That was what they had to do. People have to do all sorts of things but they don’t see those things as what they do. My brother wrote poetry. You can read it if you like. One day.”

Giving his talk in class wasn’t going to be easy. He couldn’t very well stand up in front of his friends and the girls and tell them that his friend’s brother went to war and wrote poetry. Nobody would be interested in that. Even if, truth be known, he found it interesting. It would be like the nipple thing all over again.

He decided to try something else.

“So what do you do?”

“Ah James,” she said, placing one hand on the table between them, “I kill people.”

Dedicated to two aunts, and the little boy they killed by dying.

First published in an edited version at 330 Words, March 17th, 2011

It’s my turn as Death and I’m standing by the body of Rupert Murdoch.

The rules to being Death are quite simple. They have to be, otherwise the whole system breaks down. We have just one Planck time to learn the rules, grab the scythe and make the journey to the next person.

That doesn’t leave a lot of time for sub clauses and alternate options.

The chain mustn’t be broken. That’s one of the rules.

I extend an astral arm, a remnant gesture, a residual concept.

It’s surprising, the things we cling to.

“Welcome, Mr Murdoch. Has it been worth it? All the money and deals and the power, especially the power, knowing it doesn’t mean a thing?”

I added the last bit out of spite. I’ll admit that. I’m one of the people who had a history with the man. Quite apart from the fact I’d died reading a copy of the Sun.

I’d like to go further. To add all my anger, my preconceptions, my judgements on everything the man had ever done. I’d like to have been his judge and jury and been the sort of Death I’d expected to be rather than the fading whiff of memory I have become.

But to do so is against the rules.

And even if it wasn’t, did I change much in life? And when it’s all done (as it is now) did he?

I have no more time for questions and he has no time to waste on answers. He’s learning the rules and preparing to push away the hand that pulled him from his body.

The electron stream has slowed to a halt against his dissipated life. Retrospection is a pastime and, paradoxically, we are the future.

* * *

It’s Rupert Murdoch’s turn as death and he stands before someone he has never met before and asks his own question:

“Was it worth it?”

First published at 330 Words, February 14th, 2011

A man is sat having a coffee with his wife when suddenly he reaches forward in time and pulls a flower from her hair.

“What’s this? He’s giving you flowers? He knows we are married, right? Is he trying to be obvious? Are you? You must have known I’d find out about this one sooner or later.”

The anger in his face shakes her, punching through her defenses.

“I, I, I’ve never seen that before.”

“No, but you will. You fucking will.”

The woman relaxes slightly, understanding, and presses her cup to her lips. Something changes her mind and she lowers it slightly.

“You’re playing with Time again, aren’t you? That flower is from the future.”
A dozen counselling sessions, past, present and future, now blocks his way and the man, having lost the catalyst of an answer and the fuel of an argument, becames even angrier as he attempts to stoke the embers of his suspicion.

“Where I got it from isn’t the question. Where you will get it from, is.”

It seems lame, this turnaround, and he knows it. All of the flowers, the unanswered telephone calls, the bruises on her naked body, all of these clues from the future tease him but his wife never relents. Not once has she ever been shocked into confirming or denying his accusation.

The man lowers his head, hoping, perhaps, to find a man lying beneath it with a flower in his hand.

He finds only more evidence of the unreliability of the future.

“Let’s go.” he says, eventually.

The woman, his wife once more, places her coffee cup on the table; a rippling black period at the end of their conversation. She smiles.

“Yes, I’d like to go by the library on the way home.”

Later, waiting outside and reflecting upon his outburst, the man notices a flower seller. I’ll make it up to her, he thinks, reaching back for his wallet.