Ad Hoc Fiction

Telegraph

First came men with stakes and measures, next the hole-diggers, then the pole-setters, last of all the wire party. Ox-wagons, heavy with felled trees, shook the dust from the earth.

The workers had such a thirst she feared they’d drain the well. Her silent husband counted the bills they paid him into the strongbox under the bed.

A young Irishman showed her the tiny machine at the head of the line. It clicked like a locust, devouring words.

They rumbled onward, straight, across the plains. She shaded her eyes until all she could see of them was a dot. Her husband flattened her, then, for talking to the Irishman.

Now, while he harrows the fields, she leans against the pole, one hand on her swelling belly. She listens to the wind humming through the wire, imagines the words chattering up and down, the swarms of unseen people in cities faraway.

On The Wire

There’s a whisper.

That’s what he says. Every day. Drenched in sweat, refusing to stay in from the burning rain. I touched him once, just for a moment. He flinched, but not before I felt his skin and flinched back.

Old Ma says he’s got demons in him now. He wandered too far out into the void. No one ever spent a night out and came back. Not till he did. Now they all think he’s gone mad. They tell him to shut up.

Still.

He’s got me thinking. I run my hands along the receiver, feel the smoothness in its metal shell. It’s unlike anything else in this place. All cut up and jagged, ripped and ruined.

I catch him staring at me, chilling me to the bone. There is a crackle as the receiver speaks again. No one pays heed.

There’s a whisper.

This time I hear it.

Death Rattle

He’d begun to defragment sounds so he could distinguish each single click of friction. His razor over morning stubble; if he could decelerate so that each hair was ticked off like the stubby little pins in a music box. The butter knife over toast; if he could smear each crumb one at a time. The metal drum on his cigarette lighter; how deliberately could he thumb it and still get a spark? He took the milk bottle from the fridge without a scrape. Could he insert the spoon in the sugar without the phlegm of a spade in shingle? Stir his tea without clinking the side of the mug? He could hear the scrub of her toothbrush and the static of her hairbrush. Her shuffling walk. He winced, his teeth on edge.

The Light Show

He finds it very hard to branch his thoughts, which meeting him, you would not guess. Works shifts around his studies, parties on the weekends and Going Up in the world. Unusually well-adjusted. He talks so fast, hands rounding and quivering the air like he’s catching at the tails of something swarming there, ideas quick-linking, expansive; fetching him beyond his short stretch of years and making you forget that student-budget suit, chafing at the collar. You do not peer beyond the patter.

On the train home that night, he reads a book called ‘Lost Histories’ and fiddles with his phone, the carriage so up-lit he cannot catch a glimpse of flashing darkness past the lurid face at the window. But the lights inside are losing connectivity. Five years behind, a gangly teenage boy with poetry in his pockets and a playlist called ‘Forever’ is crying to him, silently.

The Disappeared

It is curious that Evelyn would unknowingly find herself lost on a walk she had completed a hundred times before. But what is most curious is that she would join a search party for herself without the slightest clue she was both lost and not lost at all.

The missing persons alarm was raised some time around eleven on the eve of Evelyn’s routine walk and by half past, the search party had covered considerable ground. It wasn’t until midnight, however, when Evelyn joined the party herself.

The disappeared was now in their midst; unawares and unidentified. Evelyn was suspicious she was the missing person but sceptical about speaking up. Surely they would know by now. What was the catch? As the search dwindled, she no longer felt like Evelyn but, instead, a searcher. Their torchlights licked the earth and the thick smattering of rain soon drowned out any voices.

1. This Is The Title

2. You work at the Central Library.
3. You’ve worked there too long.
4. It's driving you crazy (see No. 8).
5. [You may copy/paste a better metaphor under No. 4 later.]
6. It is your job to classify, number and order books.
7. Apart from the bible, very few stories are numbered.
8. That’s a fact.
9. You find this is a drawback, because you can’t refer back (see No. 8).
10. You're writing a numbered story about your life as a librarian.
11. You don’t have to be a good writer to become a librarian.
12. You do need to know a lot about writers and books. And about readers.
13. Did you know that some people like to read the last sentence first?
14. Those people probably don’t like surprises.
15. This story ends with No. 4.

Smoke Screen

He pulls a tin of bait from an old canvas bag, faded to murky green. During the week, the tin of bait sits in the fridge, maggots wriggling in confinement alongside lettuce and a block of cheddar.

She lets go of the rod to get out the red tartan Thermos. Sharing a hot, strong tea from plastic cups that taste like summer picnics, they silently watch a duck’s feather float along the surface of the water.

Finished drinking, shaking the droplets into the grass verge, she reaches into her jumper and pulls out a ten pack of Marlboro’s from under her bra strap. She knows he ain’t been near there in years, so it’s a safe hiding place.

Taking pity, she lights one from her own and holds it out to him between yellowed fingers. He takes it, and they sit together in silence, smoking and fishing.

Just a Moment

…he pulls, and this time papa raises a blind and bloody bundle, suckling into cold light, seeking hot skin and beating heart, and papa reveals tears, and fears, and godly thoughts and thank-you’s, and when from behind papa’s pillared legs the infant peeks round, grappling for papa’s clever hand, well… from under papa’s skin bursts a proud shield, bearing ironed-out dents, patched holes, and a new bullet-proof coating, and this life-time’s work shelters junior as he steps forward, reaching for coloured spools, stitch after stitch, he weaves seven sorrows and sins, ecstasies and wonders, until a young man, stands, still and tall, he understands, and spins his own creation, procreation, discovering tender-lust, and the twining and binding of love and lives, for life, a beating, systole-diastole, through the umbilical-thread to mama, till it’s time, and she pushes…

29

Signe rose from cupronickel sleep into her 29th year. Raw, newly ored.

The trick this year was to stay malleable. Last year, her nickel year, she was hard and slow to react, drawing others to her without melding. Signe’s village neighbors had all passed through their copper year before her, and Signe had been hungry for it: the freedom to be verdigris—beautified by weathering, protected by corroding.

The year ahead was open as a prairie, an endless age before she brassed into her zinc year, a bitter and brittle one to be sure.

Placing a penny in each shoe, Signe stepped out of her cottage and into the wet winter fog. She followed the dirt road, which after a time became a paved road. Into the city, into the shining city, dreaming of some tin soul to bronze with, some livewire to plate herself around and conduct into electric night.

White Noise

I met you on the longest day, believing the time we had together was interminably elastic.

Now the edges of hours shorten and shrink, curling inward like discarded sweet wrappers. As the minutes fast forward into night I forget you. I recall the planets; Jupiter, Saturn, Mars. The names of constellations you taught me drip off my tongue; Andromeda, Orion, Cassiopeia. I know there are 27 bones in the hand that brushed the hair from my face. I can recite the alphabet backwards, searching for clues. But I can’t remember your name.

Seconds boil down to nothing as the kettle whistles. I stir milk into my tea and memories splash around my head. Who spoke first? Who initiated the first kiss? Grasping for answers, there is only a blank space where your smile should be, white noise when I try to remember your last three words.

Hindsight

They cartwheel through his dreams, legs splayed, eyes open. Sometimes together, sometimes one at a time. Fabric unfurls around them, golds, blues, reds and greens. When he wakes, heart fractured, he can still see the colours on the back of his eyelids.

In the early morning darkness he walks to the restaurant, his hands in his pockets, cracked from hours in the cold soapy water. He’s left Tariq asleep on the mattress in his sister’s sitting room. Later the boy will watch cartoons on TV and laugh. He’s already forgetting his mother and sisters.

When the great wave came, he caught Tariq by the belt, but Meyra and the girls in their silky hijabs slid through his hands like fish. He still feels the boat buck and plunge beneath him as he walks, wishing now he’d pulled Tariq close and tipped them both backwards into the vast dark water.

Cyclical Thoughts
I picture the inside of my brain. Uncooked pink bobbly sausages piled into my head. I can imagine it sounds sort of fleshy-cavernous; echoey like the shout from inside Moby Dick. These tunnels of nothing but muscly mass weaving around the space inside my thick skull and thin skin are faulty.

I plant an idea that rattles to a halt, no more use than the fingertip-sized plastic spinning top from last year's Christmas cracker. I have to keep having ideas. I have to sow even just these small dry seeds.

Memories though, they're abundant, if unsympathetically filed. Today, the easiest to reach are flashbacks to failed careers and next, the fattening bad parent folder. And so to counter the bleak deluge, I twist another idea into the fleshy warren.
Cyclonic enthusiasm.
Cyclical.
Fading.
To a.

Stop.

Mrs King
I have forgotten the five kingdoms of the classification system and what multicellular organisms consist of and where chlorophyll is found and how glucose is made and what xylem tissue delivers and what phloem tissue does and what happens in spongy mesophyll or stomata or palisades but I will always remember Mrs King tucking her hair behind her ears and choosing a chalk and drawing a broad bean on the board with its root burying downwards and its shoot growing upwards in one unbroken line.