Author: Alexander Fawn

The boy sits alone on the bench.

This is what he does most days. He watches the other children run around the playground, laughing. They have never wanted to play with him; only poke fun at his funny face; the birthmark on his cheek. He has never been told why it was there. It had been with him from birth. Lots of doctors had looked at it. As far as he could tell, only his parents loved him for what he was. Although they had talked about something called laser treatment. It had always been a challenge, just coming to school. Only he had ever fully understood his own sadness.

That night, he had trouble getting off to sleep. Finally, when sleep came, he had the most amazing dream… he was at his uncle’s farm again, but this time he was on his own. He was stroking Betsy, their pet lamb. Was this the lamb of God that his teacher had talked about? Suddenly, it licked his cheek. It was the warm sensation of this that woke him with a start. Moments later, he closed his eyes and fell back into an even deeper sleep.

In the morning, he woke early. He lay thinking about his dream for a while. Then, he quickly jumped out of bed and ran into the bathroom.

It had gone!

The shock of it kept him frozen for several moments. To be normal. To look normal. How would people take it? His parents, the kids at school, the doctors… anyone who has ever known him.

As he stared into the mirror, despite his young age, he knew that the new challenge ahead of him would be far greater!

He had always regarded that particular uncle as a nasty piece of work.

He had been a man that he simply didn’t like. He had been a crude man with an overpowering presence. He was a brute; a wealthy brute. He obviously didn’t like kids. He had none of his own. He had never married. He owned a great deal of property in the city. All of this had meant that for many he had been regarded as some sort of special relative, but not for the eight-year-old boy who tried to hide whenever he knew the man was about to visit. He would be rough with him and nobody complained. As a boy, he had never liked watching grownups treat him with the respect he didn’t deserve. His riches seemed to make him welcome wherever he went. To a degree, even his own parents had accepted his oafish behaviour.

On one of these unwanted visits the man had pressed a fifty dollar note into his hand with far more force than necessary. Nobody seemed to notice the discomfort he felt, only the impressive value of the gift. This, he had scrunched into a tight little ball and put in an oddments shoebox he kept under his bed. At that young age he had decided that he wouldn’t’ spend it, because it had no value for him. It, like the man, was a burden.

Now, as a teenager a decade later, with the uncle’s passing away and having attended the funeral service that day, he stands at the back of the garden. It is late at night. His family is tucked up in bed. The small oil drum used to burn off garden rubbish sits behind the shed. It only has a thin layer of ash in the bottom. From his pocket he takes out the ball of paper. He opens it up to its original shape. He strikes a match. The corner catches and it burns almost to his fingertips. He lets it fall and watches the final moments of its destruction.

He stands for several long minutes, considering the significance of his private ritual. He would not share it. He thought about the man who had given him the note. He wondered if there were others that would understand. Regardless, he was resolute in his conclusion that whether others shared his view of it or not was entirely irrelevant.

He went to bed that night knowing that a chapter had been closed.

It took several months before the police realised that they were dealing with a serial killer.

All across the country baristas were turning up dead. It appeared that a number of similar cases were being reported where a café worker had finished for the night and at some point had been bludgeoned to death either in the car park when they had gone to their car or at some point on their way home. They had all suffered from the same method of despatch, a single blow to the back of the head. Local police in each district made enquiries at each café, to get a list of customers that had been there on the day. The task force that had been set up to catch the killer received nearly twenty such reports and began searching through them to find a repeat sighting. In the main, they rarely had the customers’ names, but they did have descriptions.

One description stood out as a repeating person. Combining the list of descriptions, they came up with a man in his mid-twenties, short, Caucasian with light brown hair, stubble on his face and wearing wire-framed glasses. From this, a composite was drawn up by a police sketch artist. Copies were posted online and café owners’ were advised to be on the lookout. It was at this point that the detective in charge of the task force had an unmarked envelope left in his mail box at home. Inside, he found a single sheet with a short message. It read: ‘All is well, now. I have found a barista who can make a decent cup of coffee.’ The message was made up with words that had been cut out of magazines and pasted. He immediately put it into a plastic bag and took it in the following day.

The forensic people found nothing to help identify the sender. There were a number of discussions about it within the task force, with some finding it rather funny, and many of them suggesting it was a hoax, perpetrated by somebody that had nothing better to do but cause trouble.

Although officially the case was never closed, no more victims ever came to light.

It was a moving ritual, he had done it before.

It was a quiet place, where no one went. He laboured for a while with his small campers spade, then crossed the field to where he could find broken branches.

Snapping a piece off, he returned. He carefully lifted the shrouded form and lowered it in. More shovelling and a patting down of soft earth was followed by a moment’s silence. This brief pause was respectful and in part satisfying. He was putting to rest a loving pet. A stick in the ground was all that was needed. A simple marker to mark the occasion. There should always be something when this time came.

He had needed to do it before. He looked around at the other markers. Each one commemorating a lost friend. All thirty-five of them.

He hated dogs.

The Chief Librarian had never been a people person.

In short, he was rude. The man sitting at one of the small reading tables turned the page of a reference book he considered borrowing. He occasionally looked up and watched the librarian; remembering. He remembers a time, a decade earlier, as a boy, borrowing books for his school projects. He was uncivil and dismissive of all youngsters who wanted use the library back then. He remembers how he’d seen a schoolgirl cry on more than one occasion. He was obnoxious with adults too. He had often wondered exactly what it was that allowed such a horrible person to keep his job. You wouldn’t expect anyone as nasty as him to remain in a role where he continually deals with members of the general community.

Voices were raised as the man in question spoke roughly to a staff member. He hadn’t changed. This proved the case that he was still getting away with his bad behaviour. The man got up and returned the book to the shelf. He stood looking at the man through the open shelf, while an idea began to form. In a way, he was surprised that such a notion should occur to him, especially in such precise detail. Had such a proposal been brewing at the back of his mind for years? It was possible. He knew the library held a very large collection of jig-saw puzzles and he knew where they were kept.

His sudden and unexpected motivation to put the idea into action surprised him. Had he really just been subconsciously biding his time? Maybe, but it was on! He looked at the clock. Only twenty minutes before closing time. He took another book back to the table and waited. Then, just before the library doors were closed he went to the toilet. There, he lifted the latch on the widow, just enough. He casually strolled out.

It was around two in the morning when he returned. It would be a while before the full implications of what he was about to do would come to light. That was OK. His would only be a token act of revenge. He climbed in through the window, made his way to the shelves crammed with jig-saw puzzles and spent the next two hours removing a single piece from each.

He had always had trouble putting the right words together.

His wife had always been very supportive. She had gone to adult speech pathology classes with him. She had worked with him through several books for the improvement of articulation and for speaking with greater confidence. Apart from these practical efforts, she had always been patient with his slowness to form words, from the first day they met. He knew how lucky he was to find someone with so much understanding.

Although throughout the years he had made a good deal of progress, the impediment remained.

Today, he knew how important it was to get it right.

He looked directly at her and said, slowly and carefully, “My darling, I love you very, very much.”

He stood back while the viewing room attendant carefully replaced the coffin lid.

He was on time and feeling good about it.

He wasn’t really comfortable with the idea of arranging the evening’s bind date, but he would do his best to not show it. She seemed like a really nice person through the dating service. The bus would get him there a touch early, but that would be a good start, he supposed. This would have been the case, if it hadn’t been for the old guy stepping out in front of the motorbike. It happened just as he was getting off the bus. The bike swerved just in time to avoid him and the rider went on his way, probably oblivious to the fact that the old man had fallen over. It had been a close call.

He got to him quickly and helped him up. At first it looked as though he was only shaken, but it was soon evident that he had a great deal of pain in his arm. There was a good chance that it was broken. Pulling out his phone he called for an ambulance and minutes later he was being put on a stretcher. Watching the vehicle take off he noted the time. The bus had dropped him only a block away from the restaurant. He hurried on.

When he entered their agreed meeting place, he looked around for the table he’d booked. He was doing this when a waiter approached asking if he was supposed to be meeting a lady. Saying that he was, the waiter informed him that she had just left and ushered him to a table where she had left him a note.

He sat and read the short message. It said she had left owing to the fact that she wouldn’t tolerate lateness.

He ordered something to eat and reflected on the evening’s events. He wondered if she would have preferred it if he’d walked on past the old man and been here five minutes early? She probably would.

Wow! Two close calls in one day, he thought.

It was a quiet day in the gallery with only two people sitting in the main room.

They both sat looking at the same picture. It was a beautiful, idyllic scene. Although strangers, they both agreed that it was a great picture that managed to tell a story that the viewer could immerse themselves in. It was a large canvas depicting a country scene. It showed a haystack in a field with a small cart beside it filled with loose hay. It shows a sunny day. A boy is lying on his side at the base of it with a pitchfork beside him. The scene shows that he has filled the cart to take some hay away and decided to take time out for a knap after working in the heat. He is waking from his sleep with one eye partly open. He is looking straight ahead as though seeing the person looking at the painting.

It just so happens that, unlike the woman, the man has been visiting the gallery since he was a small boy and has always stopped to look at his favourite painting. His life has led him into a professional career with many responsibilities, all of which were occasionally weighing him down more and more as life went on. He found it quite therapeutic to regularly visit and spend time enjoying these moments, losing himself in the painting. He got up and approached it with his focus, as always, on the boy’s half open eye. He stood, allowing himself to enter the scene as he so often had. This time was different. This time he wished with all his might that he was that boy.

He was laying on his side looking sideways in to a large room. It was the usual room, painted white with a number of oil paintings along the wall. It was a quiet day out there. The room was empty, save for a woman who was rising from her seat, looking intently in his direction. As she approached, he could see that she was distraught. She had an expression of shock and bewilderment on her face. She was walking closer.

She seemed to be looking for something…

Since she was young, clothes had always been a problem for her.

She would spend ages going around clothes shops, trying things on, taking them off again, and always finding it so difficult to find something she really liked. Then there was the washing of them.

She spent so much time at the local laundromat, finding she was a sock short or had brought back something she had been there and washed the week before. Keeping track of her clothes was an ongoing nightmare. She tried really hard at home, organising her wardrobe, labelling hangers and doing the same with the drawers. As for washing everything, she bought the most expensive washing powder and fabric softeners, but nothing ever felt comfortable…

That is why she joined the local nudist colony.

For her, science had always been a real joy.

Not only did she like teaching science, but the subject of light transmission was one of her absolute favourites. With her back to the class, she was explaining how the transmission of light was simply a case of electromagnetic waves moving through a material. More interesting, she was saying, was the fact that selective transmission comes about when different amounts of light pass through a medium, depending on their wavelength and their visibility, they then cause the media to appear in the form of different colours. She had been so engrossed in her subject, with her carefully penned diagrams that now almost covered the entire white-board, that she hadn’t noticed the silence. She was thinking she would ask for examples of selective transmission when she turned back to the class. What she saw made her gasped audibly.

In the few minutes that she’d been preoccupied with her meticulous sketching of illustrations, she hadn’t noticed that not a single pupil out of fifteen normally very bright boys and girls, was actually listening. Instead, without exception, they were all staring wide-eyed into their mobile phones.

With her hands on her hips, she called out, “Class!”

No one moved. It was as though her pupils had all gone into some sort of trance. She was aware of the fact that what she was seeing had her trembling in a state of nervous confusion. She had never experienced anything like it in more than a dozen years of teaching.

Moving forward, she became aware of a colourful flickering that was emanating from every screen, but before she had the chance to look more carefully at this she saw the eyes of the closest pupil. Eyes, or more precisely, the lack of them. She looked closely in horror at what she saw. No pupil, no iris, just a white glistening ball from eyelid to eyelid.

She snatched up one of the phones to look more closely at the images that were having such a devastating effect on her class. She stood studying the colourful pattern for a moment.

Her eyes went white…