Ad Hoc Fiction

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.

Before the Fall
“Rock!”

Frrrrddddhhhh...

A fist-sized stone whistles past my shoulder. “That was close!”

Frost is your friend on the Eiger Nordwand, cementing shattered blocks to the face. Last night we bivouacked beneath a pelmet of icy tassels. Come dawn, meltwater spattered our sleeping bags as a cloud blanket nuzzled up with treacherous warmth.

As we climb, the bombardment continues: some of it speculative, like grenades tossed into a trench; the rest targeted, like sniper fire. A sulphurous smell hangs over this tilted no man’s land.

We could retreat, abseiling down our spider threads to green pastures, then stroll shamefaced past Grindelwald cemetery where the fallen stay forever young. Instead, we advance – not as conscripts but as regulars, compelled by manly duty.

Now the sky darkens from a fusillade of tumbling cornices, columns and corbels. A cathedral collapsing on its worshippers. Prayer is futile. 

“Rock!” my climbing partner yells, out of habit.

It's A Small World After All
They say the world is getting smaller.
To my daughter, it is massive. 
I bought her a globe and she can sit for hours, spinning the planet on its axis as she slides her fingers across cities, countries and continents. 
She skips vast oceans with a single leap of her digits and asks which country it is she has landed on.
There is no hot or cold. 
There are no borders or prejudices.
There is no terrorism or fear.
There are colours and names of exotic places and a fascination in her eyes as she sees it all with a simple turn of her palm.
She is an omnipotent observer with a future of dreams, the world literally in her hands.
The world is the same size that it’s always been and always will be.
But to my daughter, it sits on her desk and is as vast as infinity.

Hindsight Party Invite
To: 

Date: That summer night, katydids and the shimmering air, and when I came to the door, you a "plus one" in a red floral summer dress standing rosy cheeked from the sinking sun, gift in hand. 

Time: Minutes brought bodies, brought heat and all moved like molasses through the night, you a red blur in and out between dancing strangers, their hair sweat-stuck to glistening foreheads. Your date left the party late with the thinning crowd, drunk and mad that you did not follow.

Place: My fetid house chased the stragglers out to the pool where you sat, feet dangling. I handed you the whiskey, you pushed me in and followed. And when it began to rain we danced drenched on the lawn to the The Beach Boys and Glen Miller till the sun came up.

R.S.V.P: You were there. I wish I'd asked you your name.

Fuji
When I knew Kay, she used to say she lived three blocks from Tokyo. That is, we lived three blocks from the train. Take the train all the way out to the airport, take a flight to anywhere. 

We would stand on the bridge over the expressway and watch the passing traffic. "One day, I'll leave," she told me. "Get on a jet, fly away. I'll walk down Harajuku. I'll watch the sunrise over Mt. Fuji, someday." 

She walked down Paris runways. Her face sold perfume and champagne. Now, I look for her in the lights of the city, watch the jets come and go. Who knows where she's living now? The trains run everywhere.

Undelivered
They call us for breakfast in the half-light. Four more empty chairs today, Ma.

We scramble first around seven, back, refuel, rearm. They bring us sandwiches. We scramble again, then a third. At dusk, those of us who are left stay on readiness. They want us to fly at night now we are so few. Porter nodded off in his cockpit. When I do sleep, my mind still flies.

Peter presses his wedding ring into my hand. “Send her this,” he says. “I know I won’t be coming back.” 

I visit Harry. His feet are burnt, and his hands are burnt. His nose, eyes, lips. 

I watch Burrell nosedive into the waves.

We say we’re not scared, but who in England ever prayed for bad weather? We pray very hard. The sky stays blue as eternity. 

I will never send you this, Ma.

Glorious weather. That’s all I can say.

The Box
My father kept Ireland in a sealed tin under his bed. We weren’t to peek. Blue grass grew there and tall brush crops, a dejected wind beat ‘til that tin were fit to burst. The chocolate voice of a fiddle played dark tones, lonely tones and I saw a baby in tannin-stained rags dumped on a church doorstep in The Diocese of Kerry. I saw a jigsaw of boy-shaped pieces. A bearded man drank bitter in a welfare club, finger-painting surnames in spilt amber slops. An old woman with the same blue eyes as his, she shook her head, closed her door. I saw the man drunk, fallen in slant rain. The bride at his wedding put him in the doghouse, bent him, muddied him with blackberry bruises. Three babies got lost, small as your pinkie. My father kept Ireland in a sealed tin under his bed. I never peeked.

My Wife's Perfect Pitch
My wife has perfect pitch: flush a toilet, she’ll tell you what key it’s in. So when she of all people said she thinks my voice is breaking again, in the other direction, there wasn’t much point protesting. Especially in my embarrassing new falsetto. It’s like one of those snakes in a can, leaps out when you’re least prepared. Since she spoke up, in her even, adult tone, I can no longer ignore the way my colleagues flinch when I’m on the phone to clients. I can’t unsee Des, at the next desk, whose right eye violently tics whenever my jaw drops to speak. 	
	My wife runs a hand over me under the duvet. She tries to make it seem affectionate but I know she’s feeling for smoothness that wasn’t there yesterday. Cups here, gently brushes her fingertips there. I moan a little, politely. The manliest moan I can manage.