Word on a Whim

The Clock Man – flash fiction

Mr Wintle had warned me his workshop was ‘off the beaten track’ but I hadn’t expected quite so many single-track lanes. At least it wasn’t raining for a change, but I couldn’t properly admire the views as I had to keep my eyes on the road ahead. I slow down and judder over yet another cattle grid, hoping my antique clock in the boot isn’t being rattled around too much.

It was Mr Wintle’s forty years’ experience with clocks that lured me to ‘Wintle’s Antique Clock Restoration’ – that and the five-star reviews for his business. Not that there were many recent reviews, so maybe he was winding down. I smile at my own weak joke, and recall the one review that had prompted me to pick up the phone.

“Fixed up our grandfather clock grand. Nice workshop. Offered us a cup of posh tea, which I turned down, being a bog-standard milk and two-sugars man myself. Gave us a receipt for the clock and I lost it, but he remembered us. Top bloke.”

Being a bit of a tea snob, I’m curious about the posh tea, and it’s not like there’s anywhere around here to get a brew. I glance at the petrol gauge – glad I filled up at my local garage.

I see the corrugated-iron shed with the peeling turquoise paint that Mr Wintle told me to look out for, and know I’m close. Half a mile further, I slow down and suddenly see the narrow track that leads to the workshop. No signposts, but then it wouldn’t make sense to bring it to the attention of passing crooks.

Mr Wintle greets me with an expression of interest, rather than a smile. He’s small and bald on top with a fringe of grey frizz around the edges. The steady gaze of his piercingly intelligent blue eyes, over the top of his round spectacles, makes me feel uneasy. I smile a little too brightly to compensate, and start to babble enthusiastically about my clock, and how it’s been in the family for years.

He examines my clock without speaking, but the place is far from quiet with the ticking of so many clocks, and classical music playing softly from somewhere. My eyes adjust to the dim interior and I gaze along the walls and floor that are covered with clocks of all shapes and sizes. Some are overly ornate to the point of being ugly. I prefer the less fussy designs, with their beauty in the wooden grain.

I jump as a clock behind me strikes the hour and the rest follow suit in a succession of chimes. Just when I think they’ve all had their say, a melody chimes up from somewhere near the back of the room, followed by another, then another.

Mr Wintle seems amused by my reaction. “I have their times all offset, you see. It wouldn’t do to have them all speaking at the same time, would it?”  

“Urm … how come you have so many? And they all seem to be working … not broken.”

Again, his eye contact is too intense and prolonged. My gaze shifts to my own clock that sits quietly on his work bench. It hasn’t spoken for as long as I can remember.

“People tend not to come back for them,” he says eventually. “Hours of my work goes unpaid, repairing them and then here they stay. I haven’t got room for many more …” He rests a gentle hand on a grandmother clock and feels along its mahogany curves. His eyes have lost their intensity and taken on a soft, dreamy quality. I wonder, perhaps inappropriately, if there is a Mrs Wintle.

“Do you think you’ll be able to fix my clock?” I ask eventually.

He blinks rapidly, as if he’s just woken up and realised I’m still here. “Yes, yes – yes. It’s probably just the crutch that needs adjusting, you’ll have to leave it with me. Beautiful clock by the way.” I feel strangely flattered as he turns his attention to my own understated clock and gives it an admiring caress.

“I haven’t offered you tea yet, where’s my manners!”

“Oh, please don’t worry, I should be getting back, it’s a bit of a treck …” I’m starting to find the place claustrophobic, and need to get away.

“No, no – no. It won’t take a minute, you sit down there.” He points to a wooden dining chair that has been slotted between two grandfather clocks.

I listen to the tea-making noises as he hums along to the classical music, with clock noises clashing discordantly, and I want to escape.

He returns with the tea and places a cup in front of me. I ask what sort of tea it is.

“No particular sort as such. I have acquaintances in London who sell loose leaf tea. This is a blend of several. Works quite well, don’t you think?”

“Definitely. Not too fruity. Slightly bitter but in healthy-green-tea sort of way. It’s very good, thank you.”

“Now, let me write you a receipt for this clock. I’ll phone you when it’s ready.”

He takes a fountain pen from a desk drawer, and I watch him write the receipt. He hands it to me, small neat handwriting on blank white paper. The navy-blue ink is still wet, and appears to fade as it dries. It’s very warm in here and my head feels fuzzy. I blink a few times, then stand up, the grandfather clocks providing supporting pillars on either side.

“Thanks very much, I’d better get going.”

“Indeed. Times cracking on!”

I smile as he uses his mobile phone to check the time, and drive away feeling distinctly weird. Hopefully not going down with something … probably just a bit freaked out by Mr Wintle and his clocks. I glance again at the receipt to check the ink is dry before folding it into my pocket, and am surprised that it’s dried to a very pale blue.

Reversing up my driveway, I hear a scraping noise and realise it’s the hedge. I let the car roll forward then try again, but the same thing happens. Did the hedge move whilst I was out? I give up and clamber out of the passenger side, let myself into the house and ricochet off the door frame before slumping into an armchair.

I look around the living room but my vision is darkening and I can only see the furniture in shadows and silhouettes. What is wrong with me?

I take Mr Wintle’s receipt from my pocket. The ink appears to have faded completely. I’m looking at blank white paper. I close my eyes, and drift …

People tend not to come back for them.

The Landlady – flash fiction

I had my reservations about sharing my home with students, yet this place is far too large for me to be rattling around on my own. Individually, they are quiet and studious – but as a group they tend to shout, rather than speak quietly to each other. Curtis even shouts, “LOL” instead of actually laughing. At least they are keeping me young with their energy, and up-to-date with the ever-evolving English language. But please not “some think” or, worse still, “summink”. The word is “something”. Surely you wouldn’t call a King a “Kink”?

Aside from the generation gap and their bad taste in music, I do enjoy their company. The better I get to know them, the more maternal I feel. Harriet is the one I feel most attached to. Some weekends, the other students go home to their parents – but Harriet is always here. I have listened to their conversations, and get the impression she was more or less brought up by her grandparents, so she must be used to older people like me. I have tried to engage with her when it’s just the two of us, but she seems uneasy with conversation and tries to ignore me. Her choice, of course. Afterall, she’s a paying guest. But she knows I’m always here if she wants to talk.

All these youngsters are paying more than they can afford. But with this ridiculous energy price cap hike I keep hearing about, they understand that it’s a fair price if they want a warm bedroom this winter.  And a hot shower if they can be bothered. I just wish they’d all help with the cleaning. The grouting is getting grubby and it wouldn’t hurt them to wave the brush down the toilet once in a while.

Thursday evening is the one time they all seem to be here. Supermarket beer and wine is flowing, and Dylan is passing round a roll-up cigarette that smells strange and musky. Then Harriet starts whingeing to her housemates that she feels nervous being here without them at the weekends. She finds this place a bit creepy.

Creepy? A little old-fashioned, maybe, but I wouldn’t call it creepy. I hope perhaps one of her housemates will take it up, and invite her back to theirs for the weekend, but no-one does.

Then Haydn, the philosophy student, starts going on about everything being nothing more than a perception – and there’s a discussion about whether or not this solid wooden table will continue to exist after they have left room. Of course it bloody will! I stifle my laughter and tell them it’s been here donkey’s years. They ignore me – except for Harriet, who looks straight at me, but without smiling.

I go upstairs and leave them to it.

Harriet spends most of Saturday doing her course work, sitting at the solid wooden table which is conveniently still existing. It’s only when I join her in the evening and sit in my usual armchair that she mutters something about the crap WIFI connection and storms off upstairs. I can’t help feeling rejected. I’d thought maybe she needed a break from her work and, if I’m honest, I liked the idea of a bit of company. I’d hoped she might put the TV on, and we could watch a film together.

I gaze up at the ceiling. It sounds as if Harriet is packing her bags. I go upstairs and hover outside her bedroom door. I can hear her crying. The yearning to go into the room and comfort her is so strong – but it’s not my place. To enter her room would be overstepping the mark.

Sunday morning, I can hear her on the phone, sounding bright and business-like. At least she’s cheered up. The kettle boils and clicks itself off. The toaster smells of burning. Those students really should consider emptying out the crumbs occasionally!

Curtis and Haydn return together, looking tired and relaxed. Harriet greets them dramatically. Her luggage is in the hallway and they struggle to get past with their rucksacks.  I watch and listen from the landing at the top of the stairs. She tells them she is moving out. Apparently, she’s had enough of this place and has found somewhere else.

“This place is haunted, I’m sure of it! I can’t stay here another day!”

“Haunted?” says Curtis.

Haydn shrugs and gets a beer from the fridge. “I guess it’s just a perception …”

“Haunted?!” I laugh out loud at the idea, and Harriet rushes away, slamming the door behind her.

I’m sorry to see her go. Harriet was the only one I felt really in tune with. And of course this place isn’t haunted!  I should know – I’ve been here more than two hundred years.

“The Fog Horn” by Ray Bradbury – a lost treasure rediscovered.

I have always been a lover of lighthouses and, as a kid, had a romantic idea of being a live-in lighthouse keeper.  In the last year at middle school we studied a short story and then had to write a poem on the theme of loneliness.   The short story was set in a lighthouse and I loved it so much and was so moved by it that I kept the printed handout it was typed on, instead of giving it back.

Some years later I looked for it amongst my junk – it was only about five pages and must have been inserted in a book that got charity-shopped, because I never found it again.  I tried, a couple of years ago, to find it on the internet with no luck.  I hadn’t taken any notice of the name of the author, and I thought the story was called “The Sea Monster”.  Today, having an hour or two to spare, I looked again on the internet; typing in snippets and phrases from the story that were still stuck in my mind after thirty-seven years and I found it!  “The Fog Horn” by Ray Bradbury.

It was a surprise to discover that it was written by Ray Bradbury – I had pictured some old Cornish gent as the author.  I read it just now and I love it all the more – with a better understanding of the themes as an adult.  As a kid I only cried over the poor sea monster.  A link to a PDF is below.  Read it if you’ve got time – it won’t take too long and I think it will stay with you long after you’ve read it.

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28/05/16 – I see from my stats that this post is still of interest but the link to the .pdf no longer works.  Therefore I am pasting the story below.  I’m sure someone will let me know if I am breaching copyright:

THE FOG HORN
by Ray Bradbury

OUT there in the cold water, far from land, we waited every night for the coming of the fog, and it came, and we oiled the brass machinery and lit the fog light up in the stone tower. Feeling like two birds in the grey sky, McDunn and I sent the light touching out, red, then white, then red again, to eye the lonely ships. And if they did not see our light, then there was always our Voice, the great deep cry of our Fog Horn shuddering through the rags of mist to startle the gulls away like decks of scattered cards and make the waves turn high and foam.

“It’s a lonely life, but you’re used to it now, aren’t you?” asked McDunn.

“Yes,” I said. You’re a good talker, thank the Lord.”

“Well, it’s your turn on land tomorrow,” he said, smiling, “to dance the ladies and drink gin.”

“What do you think McDunn, when I leave you out here alone?”

“On the mysteries of the sea.” McDunn lit his pipe. It was a quarter past seven of a cold November evening, the heat on, the light switching it’s tail in two hundred directions, the Fog Horn bumbling in the high throat of the tower. There wasn’t a town for a hundred miles down the coast, just a road, which came lonely through the dead country to the sea, with few cars on it, a stretch of two miles of cold water out to our rock, and rare few ships.

The mysteries of the sea,” said McDunn thoughtfully. “You know, the ocean’s the biggest damned snowflake ever? It rolls and swells a thousand shapes and colours, no two alike. Strange. One night, years ago, I was here alone, when all of the fish of the sea surfaced out there. Something made them swim in and lie in the bay, sort of trembling and staring up at the tower light going red, white, red, white across them so I could see their funny eyes. I turned cold. They were like a big peacock’s tail, moving out there until midnight. Then, without so much as a sound, they slipped away, the million of them was gone. I kind of think maybe, in some sort of way, they came all those miles to worship, Strange, But think how the tower must look to them, standing seventy feet above the water, the God-light flashing out from it, and the tower declaring itself with a monster voice. They never came back, those fish, but don’t you think for a while they thought they were in the Presence?”

I shivered. I looked out at the long grey lawn of the sea stretching away into nothing and nowhere.

“Oh, the sea’s full.” McDunn puffed his pipe nervously, blinking. He had been nervous all day and hadn’t said why. “For all our engines and so-called submarines, it’ll be ten thousand centuries before we set foot on the real bottom of the sunken lands, in the fairy kingdoms there, and know real terror. Think of it, it’s still the year 300,000 Before Christ down under there. While we’ve paraded around with trumpets, lopping off each other’s countries and heads, they have been living beneath the sea twelve miles deep and cold in a time as old as the beard on a comet.

“Yes it’s an old world.”

“Come on. I got something special I’ve been saving up to tell you.”

We ascended the eighty steps, talking and taking our time. At the top, McDunn switched off the room lights so there’d be no reflection in the plate glass. The great eye of the light was humming, turning easily in its oiled socket. the Fog Horn was blowing steadily, once every fifteen seconds.

“Sounds like an animal, don’t it?” McDunn nodded to himself. “A big lonely animal crying in the night. Sitting here on the edge of ten million years calling out to the deeps. I’m here, I’m here, I’m here. And the Deeps do answer, yes, they do. You been here now for three months Johnny, so I better prepare you. About this time of year,” he said, studying the murk and fog, “something comes to visit the lighthouse.”

“The swarms of fish like you said?’

“No, this is something else. I’ve put off telling you because you might think I’m daft. But tonight’s the latest I can put it off, for if my calender’s marked right from last year, tonight’s the night it comes. I won’t go into detail, you’ll have to see it for yourself. Just sit down there. If you want, tomorrow you can pack your duffel and take the motorboat into land and get your car parked there at the dinghy pier on the cape and drive on back to some little inland town and keep your lights burning nights. I won’t question or blame you. It’s happened three years now, and this is the only time anyone’s been here with me to verify it. You wait and watch.”

Half an hour passed with only a few whispers between us. When we grew tired waiting, McDunn began describing some of his ideas to me. He had some theories about the Fog Horn itself.

“One day many years ago a man walked along and stood in the sound of the ocean on a cold sunless shore and said “We need a voice to call across the water, to warn ships; I’ll make one. I’ll make a voice that is like an empty bed beside you all night long, and like an empty house when you open the door, and like the trees in autumn with no leaves. A sound like the birds flying south, crying, and a sound like November wind and the sea on the hard, cold shore. I’ll make a sound that’s so alone that no one can miss it, that whoever hears it will weep in their souls, and to all who hear it in the distant towns. I’ll make me a sound and an apparatus and they’ll call it a Fog Horn and whoever hears it will know the sadness of eternity and the briefness of life.””

The Fog Horn blew.

“I made up that story,” said McDunn quietly, “to try to explain why this thing keeps coming back to the lighthouse every year. The fog horn calls, I think, it comes…”

“But-” I said.

“Sssst!” said McDunn. “There!” He nodded out to the Deeps.

Something was swimming towards the lighthouse tower.

It was a cold night, as I said; the high tower was cold, the light coming and going, and the Fog Horn calling and calling through the ravelling mist. You couldn’t see far and you couldn’t see plain, but there was the deep sea moving on it’s way about the night earth, flat and quiet, to colour of grey mud, and here were the two of us alone in the high tower, and there, far out at first, was a ripple, followed by a wave, a rising, a bubble, a bit of froth/ And then, from the surface of the cold sea came a head, a large head, dark-coloured, with immense eyes, and then a neck And then-not a body-but more neck and more! The head rose a full forty feet above the water ona slender and beautiful neck. Only then did the body, like a little island of black coral and shells and crayfish, drip up from the subterranean. There was a flicker of tail. In all, from head to tip of tail, I estimated the monster at ninety or a hundred feet.

I don’t know what I said. I said something.

“Steady, bot, steady,” whispered McDunn.

“It’s impossible!” I said.

“No, Johnny, we’re impossible. It’s like it always was ten million years ago. It hasn’t changed.. It’s us and the land that’ve changed, become impossible. Us!”

It swam slowly and with a great majesty out in the icy waters, far away. the fog came and went about it, momentarily erasing its shape. One of the monster eyes caught and held and flashed back our immense light, red, white, red, white, like a disc held high and sending a message in primaeval code. It was as silent as the fog through which it swam.

“It’s a dinosaur of some sort!” I crouched down, holding to the stair rail.

“Yes, one of the tribe.”

“But they died out!”

“No, only hid away in the Deeps, Deep, deep down in the deepest Deeps. Isn’t that a word now, Johnny, a real word, it says so much: the Deeps. There’s all the coldness and darkness and deepness in the worldin a word like that.”

“What” we do?”

“Do? We got our job, we can’t leave. besides, we’re safer here than in any boat trying to get to land. That thing’s as big as a destroyer and almost as swift.”

“But here, why does it come here?”

The next moment I has my answer.

The Fog Horn blew.

And the monster answered.

A cry came across a million years of water and mist. A cry so anguished and alone it shuddered in my head and my body. The monster cried out at the tower. The Fog Horn blew. The monster roared again. The Fog Horn blew. The monster opened its great toothed mouth and the sound that came from it was the sound of the Fog Horn itself. Lonely and vast and far away. The sound of isolation, a viewless sea, a cold night, apartness. That was the sound.

“Now,” whispered McDunn, “do you know why it comes here?”

I nodded.

“All year long, Johnny, that poor monster there lying far out, a thousand miles at sea, and twenty miles deep maybe, biding its time, perhaps a million years old, this one creature. Think of it, waiting a million years; could you wait that long? Maybe it’s the last of its kind. I sort of think that’s true. Anyway, here come men on land and build this lighthouse, five years agao. And set up their Fog Horn and sound it and sound it out towards the place where you bury yourself in sleep and sea memories of a world where there were thousands like yourself, but now you’re alone, all alone in a world that’s not made for you, a world where you have to hide.

“But the sound of the Fog Horn comes and goes, comes and goes, and you stir from the muddy bottom of the Deeps, and your eyes open like the lenses of two-foot cameras and you move, slow, slow, for you have the ocean sea on your shoulders, heavy. But that Fog Horn comes through a thousand miles of water, faint and familiar, and the furnace in your belly stokes up, and you begin to rise, slow, slow. You feed yourself on minnows, on rivers of jellyfish, and you rise slow through the autumn months, through September when the fogs started, through October with more fog and the horn still calling you on, and then, late in November, after pressurizing yourself day by day, a few feet higher every hour, you are near the surface and still alive. You’ve got to go slow; if you surfaced all at once you’d explode. So it takes you all of three months to surface, and then a number of days to swim through the cold waters to the lighthouse. And there you are, out there, in the night, Johnny, the biggest damned monster in creation. And here’s the lighthouse calling to you, with a long neck like your neck sticking way up out of the water, and a body like your body, and most important of all, a voice like your voice. Do you understand now, Johnny, do you understand?”

The Fog Horn blew.

The monster answered.

I saw it all, I knew it all-the million years of waiting alone, for someone to come back who never came back. The million years of isolation at the bottom of the sea, the insanity of time there, while the skies cleared of reptile-birds, the swamps fried on the continental lands, the sloths and sabre-tooths had there day and sank in tar pits, and men ran like white ants upon the hills.

The Fog Horn Blew.

“Last year,” said McDunn, “that creature swam round and round, round and round, all night. Not coming to near, puzzled, I’d say. Afraid, maybe. And a bit angry after coming all this way. But the next day, unexpectedly, the fog lifted, the sun came out fresh, the sky was as blue as a painting. And the monster swam off away from the heat and the silence and didn’t come back. I suppose it’s been brooding on it for a year now, thinking it over from every which way.”

The monster was only a hundred yards off now, it and the Fog Horn crying at each other. As the lights hit them, the monster’s eyes were fire and ice, fire and ice.

“That’s life for you,” said McDunn. “Someone always waiting for someone who never comes home. Always someone loving some thing more than that thing loves them. And after a while you want to destroy whatever that thing is, so it can hurt you no more.”

The monster was rushing at the lighthouse.

The Fog Horn blew.

“Let’s see what happens,” said McDunn.

He switched the Fog Horn off.

The ensuing minute of silence was so intense that we could hear our hearts pounding in the glassed area of the tower, could hear the slow greased turn of the light.

The monster stopped and froze. It’s great lantern eyes blinked. Its mouth gaped. It gave a sort of rumble, like a volcano. It twitched its head this way and that, as if to seek the sounds now dwindled off in the fog. It peered at the lighthouse. It rumbled again. Then its eyes caught fire. It reared up, threshed the water, and rushed at the tower, its eyes filled with angry torment.

“McDunn!” I cried. “Switch on the horn!”

McDunn fumbled with the switch. But even as he switched it on, the monster was rearing up. I had a glimpse of its gigantic paws, fishskin glittering in webs between the finger-like projections, clawing at the tower. The huge eye on the right side of its anguished head glittered before me like a cauldron into which I might drop, screaming. The tower shook. The Fog Horn cried; the monster cried. It seized the tower and gnashed at the glass, which shattered in upon us.

McDunn seized my arm. “Downstairs!”

The tower rocked, trembled, and started to give. The Fog Horn and the monster roared. We stumbled and half fell down the stairs. “Quick!”

We reached the bottom as the tower buckled down towards us. We ducked under the stairs in the small stone cellar. There were a thousand concussions as the rocks rained down; the Fog Horn stopped abruptly. The monste crashed upon the tower. The tower fell. We knelt together, McDunn and I holding tight, while our world exploded.

Then it was over and there was nothing but darkness and the wask of the sea on the raw stones.

That and the other sound.

“Listen,” said McDunn quietly. “Listen.”

We waited a moment. And then I began to hear it. First a great vacuumed sucking of air, and then the lament, the bewilderment, the loneliness of the great monster, folded over upon us, above us, so that the sickening reek of its body filled the air, a stone’s thickness away from our cellar. The monster gasped and cried. The tower was gone. The light was gone. The thing that had called it across a million years was gone. And the monster was opening its mouth and sending out great sounds. the sounds of a Fog Horn, again and again. And ships far at sea, not finding the light, not seeing anything, but passing and hearing late that night must’ve thought: There it is, the lonely sound, the Lonesome Bay horn. All’s well. We’ve rounded the cape.

And so it went for the rest of that night.
The sun was hot and yellow the next afternoon when the rescuers came to dig us from our stoned-under cellar.

“It fell apart, is all,” said McDunn gravely. “We had a few bad knocks from the waves and it just crumbled.” He pinched my arm.

There was nothing to see. The ocean was calm, the sky blue. The only thing was a great algaic stink from the green matter that covered the fallen tower stones and the shore rocks. Flies buzzed about. The ocean washed empty on the shore.

The next year they built a new lighthouse, but by that time I had a job in the little town and a wife and a good small warm house that glowed yellow on autumn nights, the doors locked, the chimney puffing smoke. As for McDunn. he was master of the new lighthouse, built to his own specifications, out of steel-reinforced concrete. “Just in case,” he said.

The new lighthouse was ready in November. I drove down alone one evening late and parked my car and looked across the grey waters and listened to the new horn sounding, once, twice, three, four times a minute far out ther by itself.

The monster?

It never came back.

“It’s gone away,” said McDunn. “It’s gone back to the Deeps. It’s learned you can’t love anything too much in this world. It’s gone into the deepest Deeps to wait another million years. Ah, the poor thing! Waiting out there, and waiting out there, while man comes and goes on this pitiful little planet. Waiting and waiting.

I sat in my car, listening. I couldn’t see the lighthouse or the light standing out in Lonesome Bay. I could only hear the Horn, the Horn, the Horn. It sounded like the monster calling.

I sat there wishing there was something I could say.

New Year’s Eve

Christmas had been a miserable time for Ella – searching frantically for her engagement ring yet trying to be discreet so Jim wouldn’t catch on that it was lost.  Well, it wasn’t lost – of course it wasn’t… it had to be somewhere…

The living room being so cold had done nothing to improve her mood but she couldn’t turn on the gas fire because a bird had come down the chimney on Christmas Eve.  Since then, its intermittent futile fluttering had become a fixation.

“At least we’re saving on the gas,” said Jim.  “Hey, turn it on if you’re cold.  The fumes will either kill the bugger or make it fly away.”

Ella had turned on him. “Don’t you think the poor thing would fly away if it could?  Anyway, the gas man’s coming some time today to take the fire out-”

“On New Year’s Eve!  How much is that going to cost?”

“I don’t know! It’s not like it’s a bank holiday. I just hope he manages to get here today.”

Hearing the tears in her voice, Jim left it.  Pre-wedding nerves, no doubt.  His own nerves were frayed only by worrying about how they were going to pay for the event.

Ella could remember taking off the ring to make mince pies…

“Lost something?”  Jim startled her as she knelt on the kitchen floor, yet again sweeping a runner-bean cane beneath the gas cooker.

“No… I just thought I dropped a sprout down here on Christmas Day – it will stink if I don’t shift it.”

Jim stooped to kiss her briefly.  “I’ll see you this evening.  I guess you’ll have to wait in for this gas man.”

The door clunked shut behind him and she slumped back against a kitchen unit and gave way to tears of frustration. She had succeeded in losing a little weight to look good on the wedding photos and the ring had become too loose.  It could be anywhere.  The bird fluttered again from behind the gas fire…

A van pulled up outside and she hurried to the door.  “I’d almost given up on you!”

“Oh? Sorry, it’s been a busy few days…”

“Look, I know I should have asked when I phoned you – but what do you charge, you know, for birds?”

“I do birds for free.”  Noticing her fleeting anxiety – a glance at her ringless finger, he hurried on, “I mean… we all have to do our bit in whatever way we can.  But I suggest you get a cowling, you know, over the top of the chimney.”

“Oh!  Yes, okay.  We’ll do that next year.”

He pulled out the gas fire and caught the bird easily; gently cupping his hands around its body to prevent it from flapping.

“A Magpie.  Poor thing. Shall we put it out in the garden – give it some water maybe?”

Ella sorted out the water and some fat off the ham in the fridge.

“Erm, if you don’t mind seeing to him it’ll give me a chance to clear out all that muck from behind the fire … before you put it back in place… thanks.”

From the kitchen window she watched as he placed the Magpie on the shed roof and then slowly retreated whilst it took a moment to gain its bearings then flew away.  Gas man clocked Ella’s smile, grinned back at her and returned to reinstall the gas fire.  Finally, she saw him out, handing him a litre bottle of Magpie.  “We had expected to pay you, but … well … we happened to have this.  Happy New Year!”

When Jim finally returned, she was kneeling by the fireplace smiling happily.  He stooped to kiss her but over-balanced and rolled over on the hearthrug, pulling her on top of him, laughing merrily as she told him about the Magpie and all the dirt she had cleared out from behind the fireplace.

Jim was about to kiss the engagement ring on her finger then hesitated with mock-disgust.

“I do hope you took this ring off before clearing out fifty year’s worth of bird shit!”

“The Snow Cock.” – Flash fiction

It was no great surprise to Mr Petrov when he looked out of his bedroom window and saw a huge snow cock in the front garden next door.  His neighbours were artists.  Olga was a sculptress who chiselled erotic shapes out of lumps of stone, whilst Luigi painted landscapes – mostly white.

Mr Petrov marvelled at the anatomical correctness as his eyes wandered from the asymmetrical testicles, up the shaft to the skilfully crafted knob.  He had always found Olga’s sculptures bizarre and grotesque, but this one made him smile.  He was still smiling as Olga crunched through the ice to load yet another of her stone sculptures into the van.  It looked heavy.  She was a tall and well-built woman, but surely her husband should be helping her?

By the time he had made it to the sub-zero outdoors, Olga was going by again with yet another sculptured lump of stone, bigger and heavier than the last.  She had to stop for a breather …

“I’m sorry I can’t help you with that, Olga.  You know I would if I could.”  He leaned on his walking stick, already shivering with cold but noticed she was sweating from exertion.

“Don’t worry, Mr Petrov, I can manage.  Hey, did you know we were moving away?”

“No?”

“Yes … to a faraway country where the climate is warm.  I am leaving tonight.”

“So soon?  So suddenly?”

“Ha!  We have not been good neighbours for you … I hope you will get better neighbours next time.”

It was true that Mr Petrov had not enjoyed listening to the arguments next door …  Luigi was a small, fiery Italian and Olga seemed to thrive on lighting his fuse.

“But why isn’t Luigi helping you with this?”

“Luigi?  He has gone already.  Gone to the hotter place.  His landscapes now will mostly be red!”

Mr Petrov shook his head.  How selfish of Luigi to leave his woman to clear the house.  He didn’t know what to say …  “Well, they forecast that it’s going to be warmer this weekend.  We’re expecting a bit of a thaw.”

“Really?”  Olga glanced with regret at the magnificent snow cock she had created.  “But of course I will be far away by then.”

It was no great surprise to Mr Petrov when he looked out of his bedroom window and saw that the sun was shining and the snow cock had begun to shrink.  But what was that mark on the top?  By the time he found his binoculars and focussed them it had expanded.  Mr Petrov dropped the binoculars and fell back on his bed.  The knob had melted away to reveal a mop of short black hair.

🙂