Reality

There she was. The girl of his dreams. He had been waiting for days to see her, having been waiting years to ask her out. And there she was. She had come all this way to see him, he thought, and he was so excited he couldn’t see anyone else. The crowded platform turned to a blur of colours at the periphery of his vision.

He had to look at her. Really look at her in case she should evaporate into thin air, or just walk on by. He knew he had to look at every individual aspect of her body and character. He looked at her feet, pretty and petite, being clutched by a pair of tan-brown, single-strapped sandals. Her red-painted toenails protruded from the end. His eyes spanned her legs and he thought they went on for longer than the moment itself. Her thin white skirt fluttered Monroe-esque in the breeze and the steam and the heat. He couldn’t help but look at her legs once more, somehow bronzed by God or man in the meek and mild weather that followed her throughout most of the year. A red top, cut low underneath her neck, billowed away from her mid-riff. There was no doubt she was thin. She was strung out like a stalk of corn, with crevices and ridges laid out at appropriate intervals. Her arms were long, thin, and speckled with freckles. Hands rested at the end of her arms, barely hanging on. And the hands held fingers with rings that sparkled in the midday sun. Her fingernails were grass green, painted to match her eyes. And his eyes were drawn to hers. The sharp bridge of her nose was an arrow. Her drawn-on eyebrows stood back to give the eyes breathing room.

Her eyes sent him back to a time when he was just a watcher. An admirer from afar. One lunch-time in school, he remembers, he was on his own at the far-end of the cafeteria, near the kitchen. He always got on well with the dinner ladies and, as a result of this, they always gave him his meal first, and at a discounted price, and treated him to their daily gossip:

‘That girl, Sandra. God bless her.’ 

‘Which one, Maggie. You know I don’t know which one you’re talking about you move on so fast.’

‘The one at the table to the left. You see her? With her pretty blonde hair tucked behind her ears?’

Sandra nodded. The girl was unaware. She was entirely focused on her Chicken Curry, pulling spoonful after stringy spoonful to her lips, blowing it twice, and slowly placing it on her tongue. After every bite she looked up, smiled, and laughed.

‘Well, I heard from Andrea that she’s having problems at home.’

‘She looks alright to me, Maggie.’

‘She hides it well. You see, her auntie, her father’s sister, is in Andrea’s spin class. She says her father came back late one night, God knows what he was doing, and was told to pack his bags and go.’

‘No way.’

‘Hasn’t spent a night there since.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘Rumour is he has a bit on the side, and he is just waiting until the divorce comes through to make it official.’

When the boy left the cafeteria that day he had every intention of talking to her. Telling her he knew what it felt like, and asking if she would like to go see a movie. He had the speech planned out. He knew what her responses were going to be. He was sure she would agree to a date:

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I wanted to,’ he said. ‘I wanted to ask,’ he said

Her eager eyes waited. His palms were sweaty. It had to have been a warm day, he thought. There had to have been a reason for his perspiration. But it was a typical December day, cold and dry. 

‘I wanted to ask you,’ he said, biting his lip for a second and looking towards the ceiling, ‘if we had any Maths homework for tomorrow?’

‘Maths homework?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think I forgot to take it down.’

His hands and face were now dripping with sweat. It would have been easier to ask her out, he thought. He would have felt better. He had always been uncomfortable around girls, and they could tell.

As he walked away he heard the girl talking. He was almost certain she was talking about him. ‘Yeah, he is kind of cute,’ he thought he heard her say, ‘but I’m pretty sure he’s gay.’ Each of her words flew like a carrier pigeon and perched beside his eardrums. The pigeons whispered the words softer and softer each time, right into his brain, until they were impossible to forget. Sculpted onto the tablets of his mind.

He looked at the girl as she dragged her feet down the platform. Her hair was tied in a ponytail and wagged as she walked. She blew air up towards her nose and rolled her eyes as she approached the boy. For a moment his stomach began to flutter. She had come to see him. They would talk and laugh about how awkward they were in school and how it was so much better these days. No homework to distract them. She waved at him, her hand close to the side of her face. He smiled without showing his teeth. And then she put her head down and brushed past him. He turned in time to see her hug a girl he recognised from school. A girl he knew to be her best friend.

He walked away and re-adjusted the earphones of his music player. A band played out one of the songs of his childhood and he used his left hand to copy the chords as they were played. He pressed the tips of his fingers hard into the back of his right hand and the bones clicked with discomfort. It could have been their song. He could have played it for her as they sat in the park. But she may not have liked it, and he may have begun to dislike her for her lack of interest. In the end the girl would remain forever untainted in his memory. The girl of his dreams and that is the way it was going to stay. 

What He Would've Done

And the wind carries me on. Wahey! Up over the footbridge that takes me from where I was and drops me where I want to go. The wrong side of the tracks. You got that right. Grass is always greener? I wouldn’t be too sure about that. But would you look at me go. Arms stretched out wide. My best blue Adidas hoodie blowing in the wind, looking like a pair of wings. I’m practically flying. Up into the sky. It’s greyer than normal. Grey as the water after you’ve done the washing up.

The rain strikes me off the road. It comes driving from the right and crashes into my face. My poor wee hat was no use at all. Whoosh! It just blows right off my head. I might be able to catch it if I run but Whoosh! It goes soaring over a fence and into a garden that doesn’t belong to me. But the flowers are quite nice. Maybe I’ll own it one day. I peak over the fence and shout ‘Hat! You get back here this instant!’ the way my Dad used to shout when I would run away. But the hat just sits there. I say ‘I’m going to give you until the count of three’ the way my Dad would’ve done. ‘One. Two. Three.’ But I know it’s no use ‘cause the hat can’t count. So I leave my wee hat sitting there even more red than before against the dull green grass. It looks like the grass is bleeding. Like it fell and hurt its knee the way I did the other day. I wonder if I should get it a Bugs Bunny plaster same as what I got. ‘Goodbye then, Mr Hat,’ I say. ‘I suppose you don’t want anything from the shops then?’ I say, the way my mum always says when I don’t want to hold her hand and I would just stand there with my arms folded ‘pulling a face’, as she would say.

I’m away off to the shops to get bread and butter ‘cause I used the last of them with my toast. When I lick my lips I can still taste melted butter dripping on the soggy toast. I like it soggy ‘cause it tastes good with a glass of milk. I made a bit for my Mum too, but she didn’t eat it ‘cause she mustn’t like it the way I make it. She just sighed and her lips threatened to jump off her face from lack of use. ‘No, lips!’ I would shout. ‘You’ve still got so much to live for!’ So I made my Mum a cup of tea just the way she likes it and the lips came back to life. ‘Thank you dear,’ she says. ‘I’ll just take this upstairs while I have a wee lie down. Would you be a good wee pup and fetch us some bread and butter.’ ‘Woof woof!’ I says and she gives me the money and I grab my hat and jacket and off I go. She’s been lying down a lot since she got back from the doctor and he says, ‘There’s nothing we can do,’ with that sad, sympathetic eye like he was staring at an injured bird. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says and Mum grabs my hand and gets in the car and drives home, crying all the way. And I sit there good and quiet. But I don’t think Mum notices. It was like she had blinkers on and she just gallops on home faster and faster.

I scurry out of the cold and the wet and into the shop and shake like a stinking wet mongrel. The shop-keeper gives me a look and I’m sorry I did it. I grab the cheapest bread and I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter and give them to the man:

‘It’s terrible wet today, isn’t it?’

‘You’re telling me.’

‘Don’t you have a hat or something?’

‘Had one, but the wee bugger flew away on me.’

‘Awk, that’s a shame now.’

He puts the things in a bag and hands them to me and I give him the money. Exact change, if you don’t mind.

‘There you go, young sir.’

‘Thank you.’

‘And tell your mother we’re all thinking of her.’

‘I will aye.’

It seems like everyone’s been thinking of Mum this past week or so. Every time I tell my Mum she says ‘I wish it helped any’ and carries on watching the telly. She pretends she doesn’t care but I can see by the look in her eyes that she wants help. ‘Why can’t you comfort me like George did?’ her eyes say. ‘Say something to help like George would’ve done.’ But I can’t ‘cause I don’t know how to act like Dad. He was really smart and funny and could always make things better. And I know my Mum didn’t like it when he was gone ‘cause two lines formed like rivers down her face when she said goodbye and each new tear was like a boat sailing round the winding riverbank. And I thought of the boat tears as I wound my way home. I knew I couldn’t go back without the hat. Mum would be mad if I came home with the bread all battered, but I wanted the hat. I remember my Dad pulling it over my ears as we went to play football in the park in the middle of winter. I like it ‘cause it still smells like his fingers. Cigarettes and petrol. We played for ages until my feet were blue and my head was sweating under my hat. ‘Don’t take it off,’ he said, ‘in case you lose it.

I jumped the fence. Wahey! I flew over the fence just like my hat and glided to the middle of the garden. ‘It’s going to be alright,’ I says. ‘This is going to heal right up.’ So I took my hat and put it on my head sopping wet. It felt like a Giant was sucking the top of my head like I was a hairy lollipop. I bent down and took the Bugs Bunny plaster off my knee. It only stung a little. I put it on the grass where it had been bleeding and hopped the fence again. Wahey!

 But I land on the loaf. Squelch! And I catch my hoodie on the fence and it rips. Part of the right sleeve vanishes taking one of my Adidas stripes away. I don’t have time to care though. I look at my invisible watch and decide I’m late. Very, very late. So I leave the bread and butter sitting in a puddle and I run home. This time the wind is against me and I’m afraid I’m going to fly away. So I hold on to my hat with both hands and make my legs heavier. I think they are made of steel and will never let me fly away. I close my eyes tight like the doors of an airplane and splash in every puddle on the path. I know I will be cold in the house but I don’t care. I will curl up in a ball and shelter myself in a cocoon of blankets and I won’t come out until I’m big and strong like the ‘man of the house’.

When I get to the house I make-believe I’m a fighter-jet coming in to land. Whoosh! I take both my hands off my hat and head straight for the door. I put both my arms out like wings and swerve from side to side. But my hat flies away again and I catch it before it gets too far. My plane is out of control. It’s lost a wing and is coming in to crash land. Bang! I slam against the door and try the handle. But I’m too late just as I thought and the door is locked. I knew this would happened ‘cause it happened last time. So I left the front window open just a bit. And a pile of blankets sitting on the sofa. I somersault through the window like an Olympic gymnast. Ta-dah! I curl up in my blankets and hide myself away with the telly still on from earlier. The sound of shooting from the telly is in time with the pounding raindrops trying to break the window. My mum will be upstairs for a while. Then I’ll tell her what the man in the shop said and what happened to the bread. I’ll wait to tell her the bad news. I’ll wait. 

A Waste of Oxygen- Chapter 1

Foxy got his lunch before everyone else. He had done so ever since he told the guards he had diabetes, and got a doctor’s note to prove it. He took his Lasagne and sat down at the far end of the long middle table. There were three long tables in the dining hall and this middle table is where all the big players sat. Foxy got by on his stories. His tall tales and his cockiness made up for his lack of any real physical build. It was partly because of his looks that he got the nickname Foxy. He had a thin nose, upturned at the end to show two nostrils no bigger than the marks on the face of a die. His cheeks were sunken and his lips looked like he was continually sucking a boiled sweet. Two sharp cheek bones jutted out to give his head a light-bulb shape. His chin was stencil thin and carried a permanent goatee, even though the rest of his jaw line, and upper-lip, remained hairless. He had a broad forehead, wrinkled by the constant look of surprise he wore in his eyes, which led to a hairline that was constantly pulling further and further back. His hair was light brown and formed a point in the centre of his head that resembled a page in a book folded over for later consideration. He stirred his Lasagne, a watery mixture of red and white that had begun to resemble a Jackson Pollock, and waited for the others to arrive.

‘What the hell’s the matter with you?’ said the Muscle as he sat down. His real name was Fulton but on one of his weaker days he got christened the Muscle. ‘Your face is so long I could see it before I even walked in.’

‘Yeah. You look like the Moaning Lisa or something.’ Borut cut in with what little he knew about the language and culture of the Western world. ‘Am I right?’

‘It’s called the Mona Lisa,’ said Foxy, using his left hand to support his heavy head and form a peak over his eyes. ‘Not the Moaning Lisa, you stupid Dutch bastard.’

‘I am from...,’ Borut used his hand to count the syllables as they left his mouth, ‘Czech Re-pub-lic.’

Sal, a lanky man with a scoured face and no hair to speak of, sat down opposite Borut. ‘Czech, please,’ he said, making a tick sign in the air.

This drew a laugh from the rest of the group. Even Foxy managed a smile. As he raised his head to join the conversation he caught sight of his friend from the neighbouring cell. The old man sat in the far corner of the room on his own. The old man smiled and made eye contact with Foxy. He attempted to drink his water, but most of it fell out and waterfalled down his chin. Foxy averted his eyes downward once more, and resumed stirring.

Fulton, having noticed that Foxy was looking over his head, surveyed the room and he too caught the eyes of the old man. ‘Ah, I see why you’re so goddamn miserable.’ Foxy raised his head as Fulton gestured over his shoulder with his fork. ‘You let Gripes get to you again, didn’t you? He’s a world class asshole, Foxy. He only makes those goofy speeches to give us the shivers. Goddamnit he’s been here long enough to know how to get under a man’s skin.’

‘I know Muscle, I know.’

‘It seems like every other week I have to give you a pep talk, Foxy. I’m having to give you some story to make you leave happy, and I’m getting pretty damn sick of it.’

 ‘That’s ‘cause your stories are never true.’ Sal believed he had gotten the gist of the conversation.

‘They don’t call you Muscle,’ said Borut, ‘because you speak well.’

‘Exactly,’ continued Sal. ‘No two stories is ever the same. Shit, even Foxy’s tales have more truth in ‘em. I don’t think I’ll ever know how the Fox got locked in here with us, but I’ll damn well believe each and every story. What was the last one, huh? Bank robbery? Pimping? It don’t matter. I’ll believe Foxy was a mother fuckin’ multi-millionaire serial killer arsonist before I swallow your tripe.’

Fulton had finished his Lasagne. He had to force Foxy towards the wall to accommodate for his large frame. His prison jumpsuit, fluorescent orange, had the sleeves torn off close to the shoulder. The guards didn’t like it, but he said he had to let the muscle breathe and they were too scared to stop him. His arms were white. Clinically white, like the walls of a doctor’s surgery. Same as the rest of his body. His neck was the width of his head, and his head was massive. A concrete block. All of his features were squared-off. His jaw was hidden behind a full brown beard, and rotated clockwise every time he chewed. He wore a curly mop of dark brown hair that covered his forehead and touched his eyes. His eyes were dark brown too. That shade of brown that, when viewed from the right angle or in the right light, looked deeply black like the darkest depths of a forest on a moonless night. His eyes, to Foxy, looked black now, and were staring straight at Sal.

‘You know why I finished that so quick, Sal?’

Sal shook his head.

‘Because I was going to punch you but I didn’t want to be dragged back to my cell hungry. But then I decided,’ he ran his left hand over his right fist; ‘I like my knuckles too much. Your goddamn sharp head would only dent them. So, you know what? I’m going to tell you another story. But this time it’s 100% true. I heard it straight from the goddamn Lord Gripes the day I got thrown in here. I wouldn’t have believed it so much if I hadn’t heard so many things about it on the outside. He started bawling his eyes out when he told me. There’s something about an old man crying that fucking gets me. Hits me on the sweet-spot and sends me for a Home-goddamn-Run. So I’m going to tell you what he told me. And you best believe this is the truth.’

Years ago Gripes was playing for time out in Mississippi. He had a run-in with the law in Florida over a stolen motor vehicle. He never told me what it was or why he took it. Anyway, he flees to this small town in eastern Mississippi called Enterprise. There ain’t no-one that’s gonna find him because nobody’s ever going to look near Enterprise. It’s a small dead-end town. Barely any people at all. And anyways, the cops in the south are afraid to cross state-lines. But he knows he has to go back eventually, you see? His sister is in Florida and she’s all the family he’s got. He just has to wait 5 or 6 months for the heat to die down. Enterprise seems like as good a place as any to dispose of the evidence and lie low.

‘I could live here,’ he says, ‘if only there was something to do.’ He told me the people were friendly. No drug problem at all, except for everyone enjoyed a drink. There were 3 bars in the place and they were all laid out just the same. The bar itself was a stage in the middle of the room. There were no chairs near the door. Only a juke-box up against one of the walls. There were tables at the far end. About 4 of them, with room for 4 or 5 people at each. There were stools placed all around the bar. You would have thought they were manufacturing them in the store-room. They were always being broken or stolen, but more would just keep appearing. The bars were narrow. About the width of these tables pushed together. But they were long and never seemed to get too full.

So Gripes, being the man he is, decides there’s no better thing to do than just drink his time away. He has made just enough money to get him a place to sleep, and enough left over to enjoy himself every day.

There was a problem with that though. He got more bored than he thought he would and there were some days where he would sit in the bar all day drinking beer and whisky. On his worse days he would blow a fortune on the juke-box. God knows what he went about listening too. He would never tell me. In basic terms he went dead broke pretty quick. He says it was less than a month till there was nothing in his pockets ‘cept lint and tobacco. He needed to find a way to make money, and the locals didn’t make it easy for him.

They wouldn’t take him on the farms. Cotton, cattle, corn. They saw him as the town drunk. Unreliable and reckless. They would never take someone who liked liquor as much as Gripesy did and stick him behind the bar. It would have been way too risky. But Gripes got this idea in his head. About one of the only things he was good at was fighting so he says to the bar-man at The Dusty Bowl one day:

‘How much would you pay me to start a fight?’

‘You’ve been in so many fights in here,’ said the bar-man, ‘I’ve lost count. You’re one fight away from being banned for life. You always drive the customers away.’

‘I’m not talking about starting a fight HERE,’ says Gripes, doing that stance he always does where he rubs his hands and jitters one of his legs. You always know he’s up to no good when he starts with that. ‘I wouldn’t dream of starting a fight in HERE, if you catch my dime? But what if I were to go into The Toad Shack across the street there and flush them out for you? Huh? Do you get me? I would just go in there, cause a commotion, and you just pay me a few bucks for each guy who comes your way with a fat lip and a girl on his arm. Huh? You just stash ‘em in back one of the tables and pay me out front. What do you say?’

‘I say you’re nuts!’ the bar-man says to him. ‘A goddamn certified lunatic. You just go over there and see how you get on,’ says the bar-man, not thinking old Gripes will be back to bother him any time soon.

But Gripes marches over there, goddamn furious at how little he has had to drink that day, and kicks down the door like he’s Billy the Kid or something. He spots his targets. 3 guys on stools at the front of the bar chatting up a couple of ladies. None of them are regulars. He can tell. They’re only out for a good time so he supposes they can get it somewhere else. He marches up behind the guy on the left hand side of the bar. A young man who he notices as the son of the man who owns the cattle farm he was turned away from. He pulls the stool away by the bottom of the legs. Crash! The guy hits the ground and starts turtling around with his limbs flailing. He uses the stool to catapult the next guy halfway to the door. The two girls are screaming. No-one in the bar moves a muscle. They just keep on drinking. The music’s loud and fast and Gripes waits for the next guy to make his move. The last guy looks at his friends lying aching on the floor and decides to take a swing at Gripes. But Gripes is waiting for it. He blocks it with the stool and sends his knee crunching into the guy’s dick. He knees him so hard it must have retreated a couple of inches, climbed back into its hole like a fucking rat. So he grabs the guy’s drink and pours it over him. He holds the stool in the air in front of his chest and gives it a shake. ‘This here,’ he says as he sets it down. ‘This is my seat.’ And the guys leave with their cocks sandwiched between their thighs. And their girlfriends go scampering off after them.

About 5 minutes later Gripes gets back to The Dusty Bowl, says ‘What ‘id I tell you?’, collects a bottle of whisky and a couple of bucks and goes back to his room ready to do the same the next night. He’s lying there thinking he’s a goddamn genius.

It’s a good system and it works for him until they catch on to him at The Toad Shack. The next time he starts a fight in there their getting the Sheriff involved. And that’s the last thing Gripes wants. So what he’s gonna have to do is go to the last bar in town, and pray he sends the people running to The Dusty Bowl. The last bar, The Leopard’s Tongue, was the toughest place in town. Men as hard as steel forged in the sun. They were no strangers to a fight, and all of them were regulars. But he was going to have to front them up, even if he was tired and sore from a couple of blows he had taken the night before. But he didn’t even make it through the first round. The first guy he tried to rough up was twice his size and knocked him out with one swing of his mallet-sized fist.

He woke up on the sidewalk a couple of hours later with a girl bent over him. She had this sponge and a basin filled with tepid water and she starts dabbing him with it and the water in the basin starts to turn orange, then red. He looks down and sees that his shirt’s been changed. It’s clean and white. And he knows there’s something about this girl. Something in the way her long black hair eats up the moonlight. Something in the way her eyes, blue as the water off the coast of Florida in the summer time, never look in his direction. Something in the way she never speaks. There’s something as well about how low her top is cut, and how her knees hover effortlessly less than an inch off the ground. He tries to resist, but he can’t. He kisses her right there, right on her pale lips, and that night they make love and she moans endlessly and the sheets are covered. He knows it’s going to be one hell of a job for the cleaner but in that moment he doesn’t care.

Gripes went to sleep that night with that gapped grin you see every day in this stinking place. He has a girl in his arms and he’s happy. But when he wakes up the girl’s gone and so is his smile. There’s someone banging on his door and he dare not open it because of all the commotion outside. He looks out the window and the whole crowd are looking in, crying for his blood. The black haired girl is on the far side of the street crying her pretty blue eyes out. The Sheriff bursts through the door:

‘Don’t you know what you’ve done?’

It turns out the girl was only 14 and it didn’t take her dad long to find out what she had been up to, and who with.

‘We gotta get you outta here!’ screams the Sheriff. ‘They’ll try you across the state-line, but they’ll kill you here.’

So he jumped out the back window, hot-wired a beat up old Ford and drove away into the break of day.

‘They put out a warrant for his arrest in every state in the surrounding area. He headed east past Alabama and Georgia and was caught right here in North Carolina.’

‘Why’d he steal the car in Florida?’ asked Sal.

‘I never said it was a car,’ said Fulton. ‘And I don’t know why he stole it.’

‘Why’d he head east?’ asked Foxy, eager to understand his neighbour.

‘Nobody knows why,’ said Fulton as he stood to leave. ‘My best guess is he was heading back to his sister in Florida before he remembered he was wanted there too. He probably decided Canada was the best option after that. God knows he couldn’t go back through Mississippi.’

The 3 men who had stayed to listen sat in silence for a moment.

‘It’s time to head back to your cells now, boys,’ shouted the guard.

‘You heard the man,’ said Fulton. ‘It was nice of these guys to let me finish my story, even if no-one believes it.’

A Waste of Oxygen- Prologue

‘What’s that out there, son? Can I ask you that for something?’

‘What’s what,’ the young man replied, running his hands over his stubbled chin, ‘old man?’

‘What’s outside these here bars?’ said the old man, springing to his feet and moving with jumpy insecurity across the cell. He grabbed two of the many lines of blackened metal that separated the two men, framing his face in between. ‘That’s all I’m asking? Do you know much?’

‘I know some,’ grumbled the young man as he picked dirt from his fingernails. ‘I know what I want to know. The rest of it is left out on purpose.’ He took off the shoe and sock of his left foot. The slap of the hard sole and wet cotton reverberated throughout the whole of Block D. ‘But I’m sure you’re gonna tell me some anyway.’

‘I’ll tell you what it is. What I been telling myself for years. What I been unfortunate enough to see on two too many occasions.’ He showed his teeth as he laughed and spittle shot out through the large gaps. He caught most of it in his hands, wiped his mouth on his arm, and ran his hands back and forth against his jeans. ‘Ain’t that the truth? Uh-huh. Yep. You bet. That’s the world out there. You know that? The whole goddamn world!’

‘You’re kidding.’ In a style akin to that of a cartoon cat, the young man rubbed his eyes and slackened his jaw. ‘Serious? No foolin’?’

‘Uh-huh. You bet. The whole world.’ The old man nodded and folded his arms. ‘Trees and birds. And the sky. The real sky. The one straight above. And air that ain’t mixed with nothing. And fish to catch. And water that you can drink right outta the stream.’ He noticed he was smiling. Grinning from ear to ear. A cat that had just come across a bucket full of lovely white mice. He stopped smiling and walked away from the young man.

‘Something wrong there, friend?’ The young man chirped in, nose peaking through the bars. ‘I was enjoying hearing about all those fantastical things ever so much. Tell me again.’ He rested his head playfully on his hands. ‘I wanna hear all about this “real sky”’

‘That’s not the point!’ Interjected the old man whose voice had turned to that of a teacher scolding an irksome pupil. ‘The point is that we’re not out there because it’s wrong. We’re not there because it’s all too real. So they built us our own little pocket and shoved us in like stray hands. But this is the best place to be. Don’t you get it? They have a corrupt government, so we make one that is safe and secure, hidden from the public. They have their mindless soul-sucking little boxes, while we keep our minds occupied with poker and chess. They lie, cheat and steal for a wage, whereas we get slop and a dirty rag for nothing. Don’t you see? They can have their trees if they’re gonna cut them down. And they can have their fish if they’re gonna kill them with chemicals. And they can have their real sky if they’re gonna fill it with smoke. We’ll take that slither of sky between the smog and the rooftops, and love it all the more for the little we get. They can celebrate their Christmas with presents; we’ll make do with a lump of coal if that’s what it takes to be happy.’He pushed his cold hand onto his forehead and ran it down his face before settling it on his chin. ‘And do you know what the funniest thing about it all is? The gristle on the char grilled steak? None of it’s even going to matter anyway. And why’s that, Foxy m’lad?’

‘Because we are all going to die in the end.’

‘Because we are all going to die in the end.’ 

And the City Streets Would Sing

Arthur had not been home all day. Maybe his wife would have cared, it is possible his daughter would have worried, but he had outlived them both. The only family he had left, that he knew of, were two grandsons, but they sat on the far side of the great Atlantic Ocean. He wondered how old they were, or if they had children of their own.

Arthur was a relatively short 5 foot 7 inches, and shrinking still. His hair was a light, fading grey and pulled away from the front of his head like a petulant child trying desperately to escape its mother’s grasp. Shimmering glasses hid lifeless eyes. His hands, now rough and wrinkled, were stuffed firmly in his hip pockets. Freshly polished, bright black shoes stood out underneath moss green trousers two inches too short. His face was scoured. A vinyl record with marks and lines all moulding into one continuous groove that framed his key features. His nose was a cloudy amethyst chiselled in a hurry. His lips a weather-beaten cliff ready to crack and crumble.

To his right lay a dark passageway which was home to two garbage dumpsters, two parallel doorways, a wired fence, and a poor unfortunate young man concealed by a faded red hooded sweatshirt. A large bottle of cheap bourbon lay half empty close to his left hand.

Taking pity on this sad individual, Arthur took several steps into the alley and placed the sum of $3.30 beside the bottle of bourbon, still pouring out onto the cold ground. He walked away, intent on making it home for the ten ‘o’clock news. ‘And the rest of it, if you don’t mind.’ The swift, harsh tone shocked him and brought him to a standstill as abruptly as if he had collided with a solid brick wall.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, turning to face the offender. ‘Are you talking to...?’

‘You heard what I said, grandpa.’ Again the voice lacerated the air and cut straight to the core of the old man. A steel blade dangling in mid-air, hovering patiently, radiated the light and heat of the restless and familiar city. ‘Hand over your cash.’

‘That’s all I got,’ fumbled the old man as he threw a quarter, two nickels, and a penny at the poor unfortunate attacker. Both men doing what they believed was necessary to preserve an equilibrium.

 ‘Now what, in the name of God, is that going to buy me? Huh?’ said the attacker, waving his blade menacingly in front of the old man’s chest, his eyes on fire with the hurt of a million childhood traumas. ‘I just want to get home to see my family, man. Ok? I mean, you know what it’s like. Shit. Just a little taxi fare. To get home to see my kid.’ He started shaking. ‘Yeah, I got this kid, you see? Small boy, ‘bout three. He takes after me, man. You know what that’s like? A little version of you? You gotta let me get home, man. Just hand over the money. Ok? I ain’t killed anybody in a long time, man. Give me money, man. Help me change, man. Please!’ The attacker was now giggling uncontrollably. Hysterical, the tears poured from his eyes like acid rain. The knife still held firm, pointed with pinpoint precision at the old man’s sternum, ready to split the brittle bone and shatter it in an instant. The old man threw up his hands and waited for death.

As the knife entered no blood pored, but the pain of a hundred years thundered from his heart in buckets. The blade plunged in and the fist of the poor unfortunate met the old man’s chest with a thud, sending Arthur back onto the gum-covered pavement where he had been safe just moments ago. In his final moment, Arthur thought of this poor lost soul. Probably never witnessed a church service in his life. Never heard the voice of God echoed through the mouths and souls of a congregation. Resonating off the walls and reaching the highest ceilings. He wondered if this man really had a kid. If the pain and misery of a diminished life really had tainted another young soul, and damned him from the start. He considered the blade. The blade that was still protruding from his chest and shining in the glow of a nearby streetlight. The blade that was just a tool, an implement of death and destruction if placed in the wrong hands. As he finished this last thought his head cracked open like an egg on the kerb and a stream of dark red memories was running into the gutter.

Further down the pavement Simon and Amy had escaped the clutches of their parents moments before Arthur had come stumbling out of the alley. The children laughed and played even after he fell, but the laughter stopped and the playing ceased when they saw a crimson pool form beside his head and a steaming stream flow endlessly into the clogged and clotted city street drainage. Tears formed in Amy’s eyes. Her face contorted like a stress ball absorbing the ill feeling of an over-worked businessman. Lines began to cut deep into her young face and tears lost their fight with gravity and her brother would have noticed if his eyes weren’t forever fixed on the lifeless stranger. Simon’s jaw hung loose. The blackness he revealed with his mouth wide open matched the darkness that crept out of the alleyway. Simon could just about see a chalk-white face peering out of the dark. Looking at the wound in the old man’s chest, and seeing the light of the city bound off the cold metal blade, Simon knew what this man had done. A wet patch formed on his jeans and he too began to cry.

By the time their parents had pulled level with them, the children were lost to a world with no mercy. The father could not believe his eyes. Moments ago he had been talking to his wife about their wonderful children and a wonderful night out. The food had been great. The movie, even though it was for children, had a few adult jokes that had made it manageable. But now the night was ruined. His wonderful children were broken and bemused. A mixture of urine and tears stained their good clothes. The taste he had acquired from the venison he had enjoyed and the popcorn he had forced down was gone and replaced by the sour taste of anguish and confusion. ‘Holy shit’, he muttered before wrapping one arm around each child, forgetting to cover their eyes. The children sunk their heavy heads into his shoulders and nuzzled him like little lost kittens looking for food and reassurance. ‘Why, daddy? Why?’

While this was going on, the mother had let out a shrill siren’s song that alerted everyone in the city to the ongoing tragedy. A police siren sharply followed.

A large crowd began to gather. Flashes like bolts of lightning cut through the scene and preserved the misery. The people that congregated could barely keep their eyes on the gruesome scene and yet they still raised themselves onto their tip-toes and craned their necks like giraffes. They scrunched up their faces from time to time and turned their heads away from the alleyway and the pavement and the man and the blood, but they could only keep up this act for a few seconds before turning to look again and craning their necks even further.

The police did arrive and an ambulance followed. The killer crumbled and fell to his knees. The ambulance could do nothing to help. His face looked puzzled and begged for help from his mind that had made him do the deed. Why did the old man need to die? He asked the ground and the crowd and the police with his enslaved eyes. The handcuffs went on and cut deep into the dull red scars he had left there before. No-one in the crowd dared to touch the man as he was led stumbling towards the police van. He was a leper, a gangrenous limb that needed to be amputated. Nobody would miss him.

But he would get his picture in the paper. The children, too, would be famous for a day. Arthur would remain as a faceless name. His distant letters would stay forever surrounded by an abyss of stark whiteness, blankness. The toils of his life would be for nothing. 100 years of happy and hopeless memories wiped out in a moment. His apartment on the other side of town would be raided and ransacked for its plunder; television, antiques, money. But the things that mattered most to him wouldn’t mean a thing to anyone else. Maybe his books would go to a charity and be adored by someone younger who would understand them more. The photos, however, and the paintings he himself had created would most likely be black-bagged and left on the kerb with the rest of the rubbish.

Even so, everyone in the crowd would remember Arthur, lying there cold and dead as the pavement below him. Out beyond the crowd the restless city would continue to buzz unhindered. The bar he had left less than half an hour before his death would celebrate regardless. Men and women would laugh and frolic and drown their sorrows without knowing or caring about a man they had seen in passing and whom some had talked to briefly. Clubs would open and hum vitality. The youth of the city would come to life and fill the streets as convenience stores would continue selling and takeaways would make their best business of the day.

After all, people had died all over the world in that same minute, and others were born, that the people who surrounded Arthur had not heard or cared about. Families would mourn and celebrate for many reasons that night as rain began to fall on the scene. But above the dark grey clouds where God should have sat lay a diamond studded blanket that did little to keep Man warm. The stars, the sun, and the universe changed little that night as a crescent moon beamed, never once breaking its smile.