30 Days of Flash - #2 CLEAN

American flash fiction writer Nancy Stohlman has started up a useful writing prompt for those of us without the time or inclination to commit to the NaNoWriMo exercise.

FLASH-NANO gives those who've signed up, 30 days of prompts to put short stories down.

Day 2 was write a story that takes place in the bathroom.

Here's mine.

CLEAN

The baby lies in a basket beside the bathroom sink. A yellow woollen blanket over the top of the white all in one, the white boots, the white mittens and cap. The red scrunched face. The mother is barely out of childhood herself. The grandmother and an aunt are eating fries and drinking coffee less than fifteen feet away. Above the sink, a rota claims this bathroom was inspected by Debbie almost an hour ago.

                The baby sleeps.

                The mother wants sleep.

                Endless smothered pillow resting calm eternal quietness mercy please.

                A small white bin of sleeping pills in the tired hand.

                Loneliness.

                The mother runs the cold tap, feeling the water slip through her fingers like the rest of her life. She begins to cry and stops herself almost at once. She knows it will be quick, she knows that nothing takes too much time at this age.

                Outside she can hear the laughter of her mother.  Then steps.

                She picks up the baby for the last time.

                She kisses the baby and swallows hard.

                Sssssh, she says.

                Sssssh

30 Days of Flash - #1 - CLASTIC

American flash fiction writer Nancy Stohlman has started up a useful writing prompt for those of us without the time or inclination to commit to the NaNoWriMo exercise.

FLASH-NANO gives those who've signed up, 30 days of prompts to put short stories down.

Day 1 was write a story that begins at the end.

Here's mine.

CLASTIC

Whoosh.

                I think as it happens, that’s the last thing I’ll hear. The waves crashing over me, moving over me towards the shore as I plunge further into the craved sleep.

                The sky above me is blackening. The sea reflects the sky’s mood, sympathises too with my own. This is the way, the right way out. My feet shift and slip on the small stone planets, my eyes scamper and dart as they search for the right worlds to fill my pockets with, which empty moons to take me away from this rock. Each beach is a galaxy, my father once said. The pebbles are moons, the rocks are stars and each grain of sand is everything that ever lived within.

                Finally I see one. Smooth and silent slab of stone; into the barren pocket you go. Symmetry demands more; I bend and pick with care the right number to fit inside my trouser and coat. Not frantically, these stones will see me into the darkness, so I pick them with something almost like…no, not like that at all.

                Now I am pregnant with stone.

                I turn and look back at the town, the world. No one sees me. A car drives past but does not see, does not stop. The driver doesn’t get the chance to have my final conversation, to hear my final words. What will be the last thing I say out loud?    

                Angry rain upon the sea now. Each tiny drop invisible in flight and yet the sea feeds off this assault and grows and turns towards me as I, in turn, move towards the edge, the stones jagging against my cold flesh through the thin pocket, the sky’s tears rippling the fabric of the ancient sea.

                I giggle for a moment as the wave flirts with my feet. One step, then another. I am level with the end of the pier now. I check my pocket as I would have once for keys and money.

                Water past my feet, the cold cannot shock me now. Wading slowly into the darkness, into the water, the waves bristling against my shin, now my knees. My crutch damp with death, the heaviness of each step now making itself known to something deep within me. The rocks in my long nightshirt drag me and almost trip me, but not yet. I am not ready yet.

Walk a little further with me in the rain.

                A few more steps and we’ll be home and dry. An ecstatic stumble, at last the end. I gasp as someone I used to be reaches out but the waves are stronger now, rushing me down, drenching my face, and hunting my breaths. I’m falling, sinking, ready. Above me, above the sea I see a parting of cloud, a burst of sun, another wave, lightness, dark, lightness, dark. And the sea filling my chest, stuffing my lungs with water, turning my bones to stone, to air.

...and when did you first see your son?

I wanted to write something about being a dad. I'm stealing a title, of course, from the wonderful Blake Morrison.

And when did you first see your son?

I won’t mention the first time I saw you physically because in truth all I remember about that day was the crushing realisation that all of this was really happening after all. A little black and white monitor and some bizarre computer game being played upon it. And the nurse pointing out this beating heart.  I couldn’t see it myself. I just nodded, not wanting to look stupid. I remember your mum looking at me and the pair of us realising we would be seeing this game through to the end. 

            So that wasn’t the first time I saw you.

            Four minutes after you were born, sometime after two in the morning, I held you for the first time. I remember the surprising warmth and weight of the bundle. I remember the smell of the efforts of labour and the sight of your mother angry with exhaustion. A father can feel like a fraud at such moments, I did. The only thing I saw was the next sixteen years of my life spread out like a dull, sufocating blanket. I knew I loved you but I loved myself more.  That wasn’t the first time I saw you.

            Taxi home from the hospital; you in the Moses basket on my lap. In the thirty-six hours since you were born I have sterilised the house or near as dammit. I have vacuumed, polished, scrubbed, aired, fumigated, cleansed. It is a museum not a home. My parents are there to greet us all, excited at the new generation of our family getting under way. They coo and they aah at the appropriate junctures. My dad’s brought flowers and champagne. I coo and I aah at the appropriate junctures.

            Over the next 18 months your eyes opened more, you crawled, took your first steps. Our days were adventures in growing up for the pair of us. Nappies and inoculations for you; responsibility and domesticity for me. However, my evenings were mine. I couldn’t wait to say goodnight. I could have read to you. I rarely did.

            A few days before your first birthday you were rushed to hospital with suspected meningitis in an ambulance with a police escort. Meningitis is big news round here right now. Some tiny lad round the corner died only the week before. And now we’re in a hospital drama, being wheeled at high speed to some special room where I have to bend you and somehow ignore your screams whilst they drain fluid from your tiny spine.

            Anxiously we wait for some guy in a lab upstairs to call down. No news is bad news. You didn’t have meningitis. You would live.

            I cried that night because I was angry at you for making me cry.

            The rest of that time is textbook. Parents too young. Unplanned child. Thwarted dreams. Poverty and rows. The inevitable split. Your mother getting custody.

            Before that, not long before that, maybe a week or two earlier, I saw you for the first time.

            A miniature village green that acted as an excuse for the cul-de-sac we lived in. A February morning, short on sunshine. What light there is is watered down from months of winter, the birch trees stripped and thin against it like angry veins, tired fingers. The pair of us padded up in thick coats on the wet grass. An impossibly red football in front of your little fat corduroy legs. You are running towards the ball, running, properly running for the first time in your life. You kick at the ball and pleasingly, it shoots away from you a few yards. You chase it. We chase it together. Kicking and running and chasing the rest of the morning. These are the greatest minutes of my life and I don’t yet know it. This is the first time I see you.

Digging

It's a story. I never knew quite where I was going with this. The idea, or at least what passed for an idea back then, was to write about the idea of family trees, roots etc.  But it's still better than Dan Brown, right? Right?

Digging

My dad’s been digging all day. And not just today, he’s been at it for weeks now apparently. A huge hole at the bottom of the garden with the discarded earth behind him rising, becoming quite the little mountain. My mum just takes him out tea and sandwiches. She walks out with the tray and the torch and hollers down into the deep that there is refreshment. Then she starts with the pulley.

            All hours he’s out there, digging.

            When she called me over for lunch I knew that there was something wrong. My parents don’t phone me; apparently it’s my job to phone them. If I don’t call at least once a week then I can expect to be on the receiving end of several doses of low-level emotional blackmail.

            “Just ring her up once or twice a week, mate. It’s not hard.”

            “Well, I know you’re busy but I worry. Five minutes is all.”

            I didn’t know about the hole till today.

My brothers are both there when I arrive. I’m the youngest of three and I’m thirty five in a month. This, I sometimes joke, is better than being the youngest of thirty five and being three in a month. Ben’s a year older than me, runs a garage about ten miles from here. It’s called Ben’s Garage. There’s a huge neon B in the kind of font they have on American vaudeville posters. A big B hanging out above the road off the roof of the garage. A little part of me dies each time I see it.

            My older brother is called William and I have no idea what he does but it earns him enough money to live out by the sea and drive a car that will cost more money to insure than I’ll ever see in my bank account.

            I am an obituarist. I write obituaries to order for national papers. Someone famous dies, the phone rings. That’s how I make a living.

            Ben and William, of course, ring my mother every day. They seem oblivious to the great crater our dad is making at the end of the garden. They sit there and drink their coffee and read the sports pages.

            “How long has he been doing this?”

            “Couple of months,” says William without looking up.

            “Why? What is he doing?”

            “He’s just digging a hole, he’s happy enough.”

            Ben starts humming La Cucaracha. My mum joins in whilst she peels potatoes at the sink.

            I leave the three of them to it and make my way into the garden.

I hear the echo of my own voice before I see how deep the hole is. One syllable, the second I ever learnt, dropping deep beneath the earth and repeating itself. At the lip of the hole there is the first of what appears to be several improvised ladders. I turn my gaze to the flanks of the garden and notice that the trees are all stumps, amputated limbs from the garden war.

            I start to climb down the first ladder.

            “Dad,” I call again.

It was around the time of the third or fourth ladder that I started to really worry. Christmas lights stretched down from the extension lead from the shed. Rather than getting thinner, the tunnel started to widen the further I descended. The ladders became stronger, the lights brighter. Further and further down I climbed, calling my Dad’s name all the time until I reached a well-lit platform.

            A few yards in front of me there was a door. Behind I could hear voices, one of them my father’s clearly. Several male voices, all familiar to me somehow. A lot of laughter and the clinking of glasses, somewhere beneath those voices I could hear distinctly strains of music.

            Swallowing hard and trying to keep my breath at a polite volume, I knocked the door.

            It was a wonderful few hours we spent sitting round that table. My great-grandfather was a hoot; he had us in stitches about his time at sea. His own father was also present; several generations of my family were there. Just the fathers mind. We talked about raising children, politics and women. One of my really old ancestors told us about the time he slept with one of the Brontes. I can’t remember which one now but it was a good story.  My dad just sat there laughing, turning to me and smiling occasionally as he poured another round of drinks. Every now and then I would feel myself starting to panic; my dad would reassure me with a hand on my shoulder.

            A guy with exactly the same jaw as my dad was halfway through a story about hiding from Oliver Cromwell when my dad looked at his watch and said it was time for us to go.

            “Nice to meet you all,” I said.

            They all smiled politely, raised glasses, and wished me the best.

My dad held out a hand as I negotiated the last few rungs to the surface. I brushed a little dirt off myself and made my way into the kitchen. Will and Ben were sat there eating sandwiches. I made my excuses, kissed my mum goodbye and got into my car.

Tomorrow I will plant a tree in my garden. Maybe after that, as long as nobody I’ve heard of dies, I’ll phone home.

Stickers

So this is the first of a bunch of bits of writing I did at some point in the past, I'm not going to get it together to do anything else with it. This is a piece of semi-autobiographical writing. I was seven when I discovered death was real and actually happened to ones you loved. I've patched together that and a few random memories from the same time to try and make something bigger than is probably there. But feel free to tell me it's shit and you hate my guts or you loved it and now want to build shrines to my memory.

Stickers

We were on the back seat of my uncle’s Ford Cortina. Outside there was a storm and my Dad had run inside the hospital to see if Nanny Cuckoo was awake. It was a strange hospital, very quiet. No flashing ambulances, no orderlies running about like they did on the telly.  Nanny Cuckoo had been awake when we’d seen her the week before and I’d sat on her bed and asked about her eye and when she was coming home and we talked about school. We ate loads of grapes and my Granddad insisted on driving us back. It was a quiet journey.

Now I was telling my Mum about my day at school. She’d asked me but she was worried about something else. I could tell that much. 

“Here’s your Dad”.

I glanced outside and saw my Dad and his brother running towards us. They clambered breathlessly into the front of the car.

“Nana’s not up to visitors today mate. We’re just, you know, going to drive home and we’ll sort something out. Ok?”

My Dad was turned towards us from the front seat and trying to address each of us at the same time. I was upset; I wanted to see my nana. We drove home, the windscreen wipers struggling all the way with the weather. 

Dad was gone all the next day. He’d left pretty early even though he didn’t work Saturdays. Mum didn’t seem to know where he was, just out. But he’d left a present for me and one for my sister. My sister had a doll and I had a sticker book.

I didn’t know anything about football except it was what my friends now did at playtime. We didn’t play superheroes or Top Trumps anymore, all my mates played with a bright orange ball initialled GB that belonged to Graham Broad who hated losing. I used to read comics in the corner instead. I liked Hulk and The Fantastic Four best because they were on telly and I could read the speech bubbles in the voices I knew they had.

Occasionally the ball would ping its way towards me and I’d try to join in but I was rubbish.

If it was raining and we had to stay inside then football still dominated proceedings – all the boys bar me had a sticker book and spoke dementedly of swapsies and gots and needs.

Now I had a sticker book with loads of teams in it and ten packets of stickers to start me off. When I’d finished putting all the stickers in, my Mum sat us down on the sofa and said she had something to tell us. I knew what she was going to say because she was crying. It was the first time I’d ever seen her upset. People only cried on telly when people died.

It was my first dead person and it was Nanny Cuckoo. She was called Alice really and had gained this nickname because of a ritual conducted between us when I was a toddler. We'd visit her flat and I'd knock on the door and she'd call out Cuckoo. I'd call Cuckoo back before being let in.  My Nan who looked after me at weekends and gave me 10p to spend on sweets every time she came to visit. My Nan who said “Presently” instead of “In a minute” and who had a plastic chair in her bath. I cried for as long as it takes a seven year old to cry themselves to sleep.

We didn’t see my Dad till the next day and we didn’t get the chance to say goodbye. We had a couple of days after the weekend off school and then when we went to school on the Wednesday my mum spoke to my teacher, Miss Hope.

I’d been quiet, quieter than normal. I could see the teacher and my mum looking at me in that way that parents sometimes look at children when they’re ill.

I had my sticker book and my swapsies in my little Gola bag ready for playtime. Graham Broad had forgotten to bring his football and so the two of us and some other boys formed a circle like Chinese gamblers did in films. The names being read in solemn incantation as the swapsies were announced.

Joe Jordan. Ray Wilkins. Bristol City. John Wile.

A mumbling chorus of declarations from the marketplace. 

Got. Got. Need. Need.

My eyes stung as I looked down at my stickers and realised I was speaking the mantra too.

Got. Got. Need. Need. Need.