Girlfriends

He crosses the road, narrowly avoiding getting hit by a zipping cyclist and a passing car, when she catches his eye. He is so busy in the daze of the Friday night shuffle home, the battle-wearing walk of the long week, that were it not for the momentary pause the traffic causes him to take he would have missed her. 

She stands on the opposite side of the street, and as he looks up she catches his eye , and in the split second before his foot hits the pavement and he is returned to solid, reassuring ground he thinks he knows her. 

Leila. That's her. He can tell by the way she nervously tucks her long hair behind her ear and the way that her fingernails, while painted a deep red, are bitten. He remembered telling her to stop it repeatedly as she shredded the manicures she so dotingly gave herself on long summer evenings to pieces with her little teeth. The same teeth nip her bottom lip as her mouth slowly opens to smile. 

Sarah. No he was wrong, it's Sarah that he's looking at. Sarah who used to have a charming pixie cut that she loved, but he secretly hated, longing for the luxuriant wave of hair she had in childhood photos and yet here she is. He can tell by her smile, so distinctive. One corner of her mouth rises first, the other staying flat, like the Jack in a pack of playing cards, only letting one half of the world in on the joke. She is wearing a long summer dress, wrapped tightly at the waist to emphasise the curves of her body.

No, he thinks, he's wrong. As he takes another step forward he realises it's not Sarah. It's Lauren. Sarah always wore heels and this girl is wearing flat shoes, flat brown lace ups that smack simultaneously of school teacher and head girl, painfully sensible, but better equipped for trekking through the long grasses in the park to find the perfect picnic spot, before spreading out the blanket she had lovingly cradled from home to here and assembling the picnic before him. Feeding him samples of cheese and fruit and meats from the local farmers' market. 

Suzi never ate meat, or cheese. And yet as he takes another step and the sunlight temporarily appears from behind the cloudbank the light catches the fine cheekbones and the delicate slope of Suzi's neck. Her summer dress is unbuttoned a touch too low at the front and he can just glimpse the top of a bra which, with a jolt, he realises is part of a set she wore for him. Navy blue, with a little pink bow on the waistline of the matching knickers and pink bows on the bra straps. He remembers sliding one strap gently off her shoulder and kissing each freckle, which she got from lying too long in the sun when she was younger. 

But of course, he remembers as he closes the final distance between them, this is Jane's neighbourhood, and indeed it is her standing before him, with her laptop bag hanging off one shoulder and her giant handbag hanging off the other. A book, or possibly two, and her full-to-bursting day planner that he teased her mercilessly about until he realised it was full of all the dates that were made to avoid making them with him. 

Her eyes continue to hold his as he stops to stand before her. His heart is bubbling in his chest as his mind frantically shutters through the pictures in his mind, the revolving door still spinning, the faces still rolling in a carousel before his eyes. As the carousel slows to a stop, she opens her mouth. 

'Excuse me, sir, do you have a light?'

Love Nest

It was getting expensive, buying a new mattress every time she brought a new man home. 

Some small superstition in her crammed each mattress up, back into their cellophane, like body bags. She would dispose of them properly; the ghosts would not bother whoever got them next.

But to her, like the old suits, the rogue socks, the phone numbers and the leftover toothpaste, each mattress held a story. Had held and cradled their love story, supported them in fights, creaked and squeaked reassuringly under them and had stood solid, silently waiting for them during the day, for their love to come back home. 

She looked forward to the day when she could buy the very last mattress.

(Conceived and written in less than five minutes, using Dead Hearts by Stars as a prompt/timer.)

Anthony

His bags are packed, his hat set straight. He checks his watch. The train is late. Everything was planned, had been planned to the letter. Timetables checked, the parked car filled with precisely the amount of gas he needed so as to get him to his destination without wasting excess money on fuel. They would need what he could spare them.
It is precisely 4.43 am on a cold January morning. Snow drifted gently across the tracks, onto the abandoned platforms, settling on his shoulders, illuminated in the soft lamplight. Good. It would cover his tracks. Two minutes. Two minutes until the train.
He checks his pockets on more time, certain that he's left his chequebook, the majority of his bank cards, his pocketwatch. The picture of his wife and children is still in his breast pocket, and he pulls it out, to glance at it briefly. 'Molly, with Sam (7) and Elsie (5), Summer 1992'. They had taken a train from this very station down to Barnstaple, connected to the coast, and spent a day on the sand. Elsie had got sunburn on her nose, and Sam had caught a crab which he'd begged them to let him keep, but of course they said no. Sam got a dog for Christmas instead.
4.44am. In the distance, he can see the lights of the train, but it's a long straight track; he has a little time yet. He grips his suitcase handle tighter. One of his shoes has a slight scuff on the toe; he bends to swipe at it with his gloved thumb. Molly always polished his shoes when he was too tired to do it. Folded his tie over the back of the chair in their bedroom. Hung his ironed shirt ready. Molly was good. Better than him.
 The train is getting closer now, he can begin to feel the rustle of the wind it generates pull at his coat. Snow drifts, catching the light from the headlamps, seem to slow time down. For a split second, as the train eats up the ground between it and the platform edge, he sees them on the opposite platform. Molly in her light summer dress with bare legs and sandals, Sam and Elsie (perplexingly) in their bathing suits. A shaft of something like sunlight. It catches Molly's hair. She looks up, sees him.
The train has made it to the edge of the station now. It should be slowing down, to allow passengers to alight, to board. But it is a goods train, and does not stop at this station. At 4.45am, he is the only person around.
Molly smiles at him from across the platform, as he takes one step out towards her, into the path of the oncoming train.

(Conceived and written in less than ten minutes, using this picture via Lorrie's blog as a prompt)

The Lie Detector

Jessie S Scotland is a compulsive, accomplished and repetitive liar. 

Jessie S was born on the 15th October 1985. It was a Saturday (it's always a Saturday, that's the one consistent part) and her mother had been preparing for a quiet afternoon in while her father went to watch the football when Jessie decided that the time was now. 

Jessie would have had a twin sister too, but the twin sister took about ten breaths of air before giving up, leaving Jessie squalling and alone in the bassinet next to her exhausted mother and confused, scarf-wearing father, still with the foam of a post-match beer on his top lip, or his moustache, depending on the day. 

Jessie S lives in a terraced house on the outskirts of Manchester with her mother, her father and two brothers, one older and one younger and both somehow looking up to Jessie, even though they both towered over her. She is slight, like her mother and her father, but her big scary imposing brothers were built like Greek gods and were the perfect tool to threaten tormentors with. Jessie S's fictional monstrous brothers were the scourge of the town. Jessie S, safe in her fantasies, was never bothered. 

Jessie leaves to study Philosophy at the University of Sheffield, before realising, quite suddenly one morning in bed that she would go no-where and switches that same day to a degree in Psychology. This is the less improbable of Jessie's facts; students are so want to switch degrees all the time and everyone knows someone who had an epiphany one morning while hungover, torn between throwing up on the stranger still in the bed next to you and throwing the sheets off and shouting carpe diem, seize the day, boys. 

So Jessie S gets her degree in Psychology, finding it far less challenging than someone with three Arts A-Levels should, and upon graduating couldn't face the terraced house in Manchester with the brothers, the parents, and the floating little ghost of the sister. Instead, like every pilgrim in a graduate gown, Jessie S and her bags and her rickety bedframe go to London, to carve out a niche in the darkest corners of the pubs in N1. Jessie works part-time in a bar (she tells her parents), then gets a job as an editorial assistant, writing fractious copy for a trendy youth magazine (she tells her friends), while combining it with a part-funded post-graduate course.
Jessie lives alone in a studio flat overlooking the park. She gets up at 6.30 every morning and runs in the park and has a travelcard and a pension and a bag full of business cards and a keyring full of keys and a phone that is full of numbers, no names, so in the night when she wakes up scared or when she lies and stares at the ceiling she reaches for the phone and picks a number at random, Russian roulette-like, risks calling a family member, a friend, a shrink, a dealer, a lover, a confessor, to break up the silence of a life so populated with falseness. A key that opens the door to a huge room or a cupboard or that leads to another door, a window, an office or a safety deposit box where her true self is kept. 

Jessie S has told so many lies that the next one may well be the truth.

Balance

The devastation is not immediately obvious, the change in the landscape is not certain. We stand, clutching our bags, in fron of what was once as solid as a rock, and look, ruminating on what we are leaving behind.
The Pole Star of the family has shifted. We two are drifting off-course.

Sadder than I thought I was, I take the last bag and stare one last time up at the bedroom that used to be mine, that will soon have someone new in it to tolerate the cracking plaster, the south-facing windows that turned the room into a summer sauna, the view and the cupboard with the heating pipes that my mum, the Christmas before I was born, had to sit by with a hairdryer, defrosting the pipes in the kind of cold December that doesn't happen any more.

The time we got burgled. The constant fear I had of a tree falling and destroying the glass roof of the conservatory, and the confusion as to whether that did happen, whether my young mind muddled it out. The much-loved pets buried in the back garden. The falls down the stairs. The parties and the stains on the carpet. The time that the handles were removed from our doors so we couldn't close them.

As the Pole Star lifts and takes root within each of us and we go our seperate ways, the house seems to shift, giving up the ghost. Like the mythical lightening of the body when the soul leaves it, the insubstantial but also so heavy memories bank themselves in us. The house stares, glassy-eyed, back, offering nothing any more.

Taking a piece of the Pole Star each, he and I split, depart. I feel in my back pocket for my keys, and feel a jolt to my heart of panic when my keyring only has one key on it. The key to my flat back in London. The keys to this place are gone. The chapter is closed. The day is ended.

A rented flat. A series of rented flats. A series of bin liners and boxes and my trailing roots, like a lone jellyfish drifting out at sea, with nothing but a big blue expanse ahead.

I am not scared. I have not called this house my home for a good few years, and I'm ready to make my own. But as I walk down the hill, mentally ticking off all the change-of-address forms I needed to fill in, considering a little more what kind of flat I would like to move to next, and that maybe I should speak to that mortage adviser again on Monday, I mentally scrub the forever-remembered phone number and the postcode I could recite on my deathbed from my mind. I grow up in one quick instant when I realise the only permanent address I now have is myself, and the memory bank of my own brain.

The jellyfish drifts off, trailing its roots.

NB An unsuccessful submission to 1000words.org.uk, where every story is inspired by a picture. I chose this one. My parents are selling the house I grew up in. I think the problem with this story was I tried too hard to make the picture fit my story. I did it before in an 1000words submission with greater success. I'll post that one another time.

Dinner

At the end of the night, just as the bar was due to close and the last waitress was clearing her tables, the door opened and a man walked in. Tall, dark, in a black overcoat and pointed boots, a hat, glasses, sideburns, glinting eyes.

'A table. A glass of red wine. A steak, rare with mustard in a seperate dish. Spinach. And a chocolate souffle.'

Two minutes and a lifetime of dirty looks later, the man sits at a table, eyeing the wine and listening to the sounds of the bar, of the chef (still in his outdoor shoes by the sounds of it) swearing as he warms the pans and the waitress tapping her foot.

There had just been one tonight. It wasn't as good as usual, and his notebook would be a frustrating read the next morning. 

The wine is decent; they know his preference for French and keep it, uncharacteristic for steak, thick and syrupy, overly fruity yet still with a faint smell of cork.

The smell of memories, and of a night well spent. 

The steak is good, the knife cutting through it easily and unlike the charatans that hack at their meat without care his cultery carasses it slowly, like a lover, like a a conoisseur, adoring the animal before gently removing one morsel and relishing the hot blood spilling over his tongue and the powerplay between the animal muscle and his grinning teeth.

She had been an accountant and she wore peculiar purple shoes. 

The spinach keeps him vital, keeps the new blood pumping and the mustard wakes him up, puts the spark back in his eyes. The hair on his chest, as parents might say to children fighting against vegetables. He knows the value of good nutrition. He is clinical in his habits and tastes and pursuits and he has studied, long and hard, at his crafts. He sips the wine, remembers the taste of the fruit and the scents of the night in his nose.

Someone had tried to stop him as he walked away, but he brushed them off as one might a fly. They were uncouthly drunk on beer, and would not remember a man in a black coat. 

The plate still bears the remnants of the animal's struggle with his unyielding hunger as the waitress clears his plate and, knowing, replaces it instantly with the souffle. Dark, decadent, pert, with the smallest dollop of very fresh creme fraiche. A spoon to one side. The scent of the bitterness of the chocolate rises. He inhales, his eyes roll back as the scent seduces him.

Her eyes had been big bottomless pools, and he had allowed himself one last look at them before he walked away. 

He contemplates the surface of the pudding for a long time, not wanting to disturb its fragile beauty but at the same time desperate to destroy it, like a child with a sandcastle might. To make his messy mark, to wreck it. But that is not his way. Gently, with only the slightest bit of force, his spoon sinks delicately through the surface, releasing the heat. He puts the spoon to his lips, inhales, takes a taste.

She hadn't worn perfume - this is good; the ones who wear scent or cologne are similarly uncouth, unhonest. She smelled of printer ink and coffee granules and overheating wires and hope and roses. Always they smell of a flower. She smelled of roses. 

The bitterness floods his mouth, the pain of a taste that you do not expect brings a tear to his eye, and he swills the wine in the glass and takes a long drink, and a mouthful of souffle and soon it is gone before he knows what to do, he is spooning it down like a man who hasn't eaten in weeks.

The struggles, the resistance, the screams, the pain, the upset and the dislodging of clothes, the muddying of shoes, the knocking off of glasses. The disarray. The glorious, glorious disarray. The chaos. He is greedy, caring not for the waitress and her stares and the wine spilled. Drinking and eating in the memory of the evening. Making the scent of bitter chocolate, rich syrupy wine and roses cling to him.

The lights go off in the kitchen as the chef leaves, angrily abandoning the dishes for the potboy the next day. The waitress waits by the till, eyes the door.

The man regards the empty plate, the empty glass of wine with the splashes on the table, the mess he has made. Then slowly he returns every item to its place, lines up the plate with the spoon, the glass with the plate. He wipes his mouth, dabs at his face and catches his reflection momentarily in the spoon. He looks, takes off his glasses, polishes them.

His head snaps up. 'The bill, please.'

A Confession (Postscript)

It is with great regret that I have been forced to classify my experiment as a failure. 

My challenge was simple - I am a medical man, a clinical person and possessed of an incredibly inquisitive and curious mind, and in an age where man feels he can overcome any challenges, I was intrigued to pit the parasiticly resilient human spirit against the sheer overwhelming terror of modern existence that occupies us. 

My subjects (there were five in total - two male, three female, ranging in age from 17 to 89, one regrettably a mother of young children), sadly, all succumbed to the phantom illness which I planted in them - a dual illness combined of despair and hope. Between them they selected varying methods to bring about their demise, from the benign and delicate (sleeping pills) to the Bronteian (exposure to the elements) to the not entirely surprising old age. But die they all did. 

Frustratingly, I feel the youngest may have survived - I interpreted that wild, animalistic run that unfortunately juxtaposed with the trajectory of a car with faulty breaks, not as headlong into death but headlong into life. The jubilant sprint of a creature clinging to life, running for the horizon. The parasite I tried to awaken. Cruelly aborted. Perplexingly unresolved.

And thus, my experiment is deemed a failure, and all those who know me and my work regard me as a devil. Deserving of the fate that awaits me. But they misunderstand my purpose; I never meant to be the devil. I merely showed the subjects the path that led to their own destruction, asked them to map their own fate. I nudged. But I did not push. I did not kill them. 

I do not classify my experiment as a failure. It is notable that all of my patients, regardless of the fact that they succumbed, chose to take control of their final moments. I did not wish them to kill themselves; that was not my intention. I wished to see how they would deal with the news they all thought that they wanted to hear. It comforts me to know that, as so many people pass through life afraid of the end, delaying it, five individuals took the hand of the Reaper and calmly walked into the Hereafter. I feel that that is what I gave them, what I gave the world. A second look at the inevitable. 

Therefore I conclude my experiment, and my practise. I am no longer a doctor, nor am I a free man. I am the nation's most hated individual. And yet, strangely, I feel like I have given it the hope it needs.

I remain inquisitive, optimistic, and hope to find peace.  

Dr F A Lacey, 24th October, 2011

(deceased)

(Originally published on Flash Flood Journal, in celebration of National Flash Fiction Day)

N.B. This story is called Postscript because it was originally intended to be the Postscript of a full-blown novel that I planned in detail, but only ever managed to get this part down on paper. Watch this space for further attempts.