Author: Alexander Fawn

The crime scene was busy with the forensics people.

“What have we got sergeant?”

“The body of Tommy Tucker, the singer, sir. He was discovered by Bo Peep, the shepherdess. She was looking for lost sheep, apparently.”

“Fingerprints?”

“Yes, sir. Looks like the same serial killer. We’ve got another match with Goldilocks”

“Another one! She’s currently a prime suspect in three other cases.”

“That’s right, sir. First, there was Jack Horner, after eating a poisoned plum. Then there was old Mother Hubbard, hit with an empty food container, her dog has been taken to the pound. The third case was Miss Muffat, another case of poison mixed in with her curds and whey.”

“Have they caught her yet?”

“Not that I’ve heard, sir. Not since she was seen coming out of the house owned by the three bears. As you know, she ate their porridge, sat in their chairs and slept in their beds. When she saw them coming, she ran off.”

“Strange, considering the girl’s on a killing spree, that the bears came to no harm.”

“Yes. I thought that too, sir. Although, I have heard that when the officers questioned her mother, they were told that her daughter happens to be very fond of bears. She has quite a collection apparently.”

“Thank you, sergeant, keep me updated.”

He was eating a spam and mustard sandwich when it happened.

He was sitting on the wall that circled the village fountain. The day was pleasant enough. He was just watching people going about their daily business when something totally unexpected happened. It was snowing. He couldn’t believe it. It was actually snowing!

As the cold began to bite, he wrapped his arms around himself as he took in the surroundings, along with his new situation. He was no longer sitting on a wall, but on a park bench, looking out across an open play park, with empty, snow-laden play equipment. Naturally, there was nobody around. He was taking all this in when, with a single blink of an eye, it all changed again.

He was now sitting in a comfortable window seat looking down through the clouds at the land below. His ears began to pop as he listened to the drone of the aircraft. He barely had time to look around at the other passengers when it happened again.

He was perched on a fence looking at cows grazing contentedly in a field. In the far distance he made out a tractor, buzzing its way across the field. Looking down he saw a ditch that ran along the boundary. Then, in a moment it became something else.

It was hard to see. It was night time and the wind made him shiver. Peering down, he saw that it was a road, a city road with traffic moving along slowly. He became aware of the fact that he was sitting on the top rail of a balcony, several floors up, dangling his feet. With another blink it all changed again.

It was a deckchair, he was sure it was a comfortably padded deckchair, on the sun deck of what seemed to be a very large cruise ship. The weather was beautiful and he could smell the sun cream on his chest. He could hear children running around and laughing. Now, with the luxury of his new surroundings he found himself becoming completely relaxed for the first time. It was while he was in this peaceful state of mind that it came to him. He realised that it was the blinking that caused the changing. Knowing this, he sat perfectly still, determined to keep his eyes wide open, but after a while the inevitable happened, and he blinked.

Now, instead of sitting anywhere, he was lying. Lying in a bed in what had to be a ward, and in a hospital, no doubt. This turn of events bothered him. He certainly didn’t like the thought that he had ended up in a hospital. It gave him the uncomfortable feeling that something might be wrong with him… so he blinked. Then, he blinked again. Nothing happened.

He was repeatedly blinking like this when he became aware of the others. There were several white coats milling around in the room.

Then, he was listening to a doctor saying, “Well, I must say you have us all very curious. What’s your story?”

“I don’t know. I was eating a spam and mustard sandwich when it happened.”

He couldn’t believe it!

He found it in the rubbish bin. She had never liked it, but trying to sneak it out by hiding it right down at the bottom of the bin without him knowing… The list of things that they didn’t see eye to eye about seemed to be growing longer. He remembered coming across it at a jumble sale, a real find. It was a dinkum cowboy hat, and not the sort you’d see every day. In fact, it was unique enough that the likelihood of ever seeing one like it was extremely remote. He had fallen in love with it the moment he picked it up.

Of course, this was a long time back, before he had moved in with her. No, before he had even met her. She said it made him look silly, but this wasn’t true. Somehow, he just knew that he was meant to wear it. It had become his signature. None of his friends had ever minded him wearing it. It was just him.

He took it indoors and brushed it off. He put it down in the middle of the kitchen table and sat staring at it. Maybe this was a good thing. A sign or an omen. As omens go, this one was pretty blatant! A strong signal telling him something about the future. So strong, it couldn’t be ignored. He rang home and made arrangements. His mum would have tea ready. She sounded delighted. He packed, loaded the boot and sent his girlfriend a text saying he would pick her up after work. He did this sometimes. She wouldn’t think it was strange at all. He usually sat in his car in the car park, waiting for her. Not this time. He would go in to the office where she worked, right past all of her colleagues, and collect her.

Of course, he’d be wearing his hat.

A retreat has many aspects,

For filtering light through dark,

For filling empty vessels,

Or nurturing a random spark.

–

No rights or wrongs coming into play,

Blurred notions partly seen.

Neither retreating from, nor retreating to;

But someplace in-between.

–

Musings evoked with no shores or boundaries.

The fragile nature of undeveloped thoughts,

Allowing blindness before revelation,

With pristine notions challenged,

By unfettered imagination.

–

Beneath, some great wheel turns, stirring atoms.

Puzzled molecules searching for a home,

Some final way of bringing clarity to introspection,

Ultimate outcomes only partly known.

–

A triumph in the unmuting of fluttering thoughts,

Buzzing softly in the silence of the brain.

Past moments providing fuel,

For ordered pieces to remain.

–

A quiet corner causing thoughts to burgeon,

And yet volatile, with notions breaching.

The constant unravelling of puzzlements,

Whatever the clues are teaching.

With this special time to pause and review,

Drawn into a world of musing.

A passive struggle finding joy within,

An uplifting domain of one’s choosing.

–

Mundane mental energy renewed,

Baring witness to ideas hid in shadow.

Hatching speculations from their shells,

Thoughts that float both deep and shallow.

–

Through a tangled web of gossamer threads,

Subtleties clearly seen.

Contents unspoken, but captured,

Both on paper and on screen.

–

Views and perceptions picked apart,

While struggling to the core.

Childlike mental explorations,

Maturing more and more.

–

Within these aspects of a retreat,

Internal scrutiny apart,

Well beyond any written creation,

There is ethos… a la carte!

There was much speculation about the man and his strange ways.

It was generally agreed by those who lived in the street that the man who resided at number twenty-four was decidedly odd! None of them knew anything more about him. He rarely left the house. When he did, it was mainly to walk to the nearby centre to do a bit of shopping. Whenever his neighbours happened to see him, he always looked really twitchy. Nonetheless, this all changed the day the man at number fourteen received a letter with a name he didn’t recognise and a smudged house number. He was certain it was for the weirdo who lived a few houses up the street. Being a particularly curious sort of person, it occurred to him that taking it to the rightful recipient would be an opportunity to find out more about what made the oddball tick!

Approaching the front door, he realised that he felt just a little nervous. However, after knocking, the man who opened the door seemed positively pleased to see him. He took the letter with a grateful smile, then proceeded to thank him profusely for his trouble.

“Please come in,” he said. “Would you like a cup of tea? I was just about to put the kettle on.”

The man from down the street was taken aback by this, but he saw it as a further way to find out more about his elusive neighbour. After a brief hesitation, he said, “That’s kind of you, yes.”

In the living room, after casually discarding the letter, the man suggested his visitor take a seat while he made their drinks. Shortly after, he came back with a tray. Setting it down on a small table, he sat down opposite with an excited look on his face.

“This is a wonderful opportunity,” he began. “You being a stranger, I mean.” He took a sip or two of his drink. “I have a secret. I’ve had it for so long. You wouldn’t believe how long.”

The visitor was transfixed. He had no idea what was coming next.

His host went on. “It’s the internet, you see; and social media, of course. Everybody knows all sorts of things about everybody else; and they all think it’s perfectly normal! That’s why I’ve had to be so careful. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always wanted to tell someone.” He gave a soft handclap. “You’re it, you see? A stranger. Someone I can tell.”

His visitor, still bamboozled by what was going on, knew that his innate sense of curiosity would keep him rooted to the spot. “Go on,” he said, with an encouraging tone.

The other man’s eyes lit up. “Wonderful!” he said. “If you’d like to come with me to the back room, I’ll show you what I have. It goes without saying, it’s extremely precious. I have no idea just how much it’s actually worth, but a great deal, I’m sure.”

The visitor got up and followed him, with only a surprisingly mild sense of foreboding. At the door, from his pocket, the man produced a key at the end of a chain. He unlocked the door and they entered. Switching the light on, he crossed the room and took down a small oil painting, revealing a safe. After slowly working the dial combination, he opened the door and removed a large metal box. Placing it on a small side table, he began entering numbers on its digital keypad. This done, he opened a drawer in the table, took out a pair of white, cotton gloves and pulled them on.

It was at this point that the visitor became fully aware of how much he was enjoying what he was witnessing.

Opening the container, the man produced what looked like a yellow sheet of A4 paper. He held it up, by the top corners with his fingertips.

“You see? This is the original document. The one and only copy.”

The visitor squinted at the fine handwriting.

He explained, “You may not know, but this all began in the eighteenth century, in Tamil Nadu, the home of the Tamil people.”

He held the paper higher.

“From the Tamil language, which has to be one of the longest surviving classical languages in the whole world!”

He holds it closer to his chest, while tears begin to well up.

“This is the very first written copy, translated into English,” he says.

“What is it?” asked the visitor.

“The original recipe for Mulligatawny soup!”

At first, she figured it was just another irritating message with no caller ID.

Although, the fact that it was only comprised of five letters, with two of them the same and sitting together, did make her wonder. They weren’t exactly letters, more like symbols or characters from some foreign language, maybe. She didn’t know very much about this kind of thing. As it was, she was struggling with English at school. The more she looked at the word, if it was a word, the more curious she became. She went on searching for the strange symbols on the World Wide Web in the evenings for a number of weeks, with no joy. It seemed that they were completely unknown. She knew the man next door spoke several languages and worked at the observatory at the edge of town; she wondered if he could help.

When he saw them he was instantly intrigued. He admitted that he’d never seen anything like them before. She forwarded the message to him so he could show one of his colleagues, who happened to be a keen code-breaker. Opening the message’s properties, he commented that the URL didn’t make any sense. He said that it looked more like coordinates than an address. He said he would check that out for her, using the observatory’s super browser for finding planetary locations and in due course, he would let her know.

It was quite a while before she heard back from him. What he had to say didn’t help much. He said that the address was certainly a space coordinate, but not one he could identify. The equipment he used told him it was a location beyond anything the observatory was able to track. In his opinion it was spam. He suggested it was some kind of elaborate prank sent by someone with a degree of knowledge regarding astronomical distances. As for the message itself, his friend was still working on it.

Looking back, the whole thing had taken place during her school years, but it had never been entirely forgotten. She was now in her late twenties and married, when she was contacted by the man who had been relentlessly working on the symbols. He explained that he had finally managed to crack the code. He said the word that had been sent was hello. He provided her with what he called an extrapolated alphabet that she could use, if she wanted to reply. She thanked him very much for all his trouble.

It was after discussing this unexpected and most exciting new turn of events with her husband, despite him telling her that in his opinion it was all a load of poppycock, that she decided to reply to the message…

Shortly after, on the far side of a distant galaxy, the pair chatted.

Roughly translated into English, one said, “It looks like I managed to break into planet Earth’s text message system.”

“Oh! Really? That’s pretty exciting isn’t it?”

“Nah.”

“Why not?”

“Well, I said ‘Hello’”

“OK. What did they say?”

“They said, ‘Hew is this?’”

“That’s good isn’t it?”

“Not really. It took them fourteen years to reply and they spelt the word who wrong!”

They stepped down from the hover bus at the front of the museum.

The old man and his grandson rode the travel-path to the entrance and walked in. There was no charge for entry, such things had been banished from society a very long time ago. They began to follow the floor arrows that would guide them through several sections that contained examples of objects that were no longer used by people. The youngster was fascinated; he’d wanted to visit the museum ever since his teacher had told the class about how things used to be done long before the era of virtual technology had changed the way people lived their lives. On that occasion she had brought a pencil in to class to show them. She said it was extremely old and quite precious. They weren’t allowed to touch it, but could file past her desk and take a closer look.

As they moved through the museum he was amazed at all the things he had never seen before. He had seen pictures of some of the items in their glass cabinets, but not all of them. Some things were older than others. They were about half way round when the boy was intrigued by the next sign.

“What’s a writing implement?” the boy asked.

Pleased to see how interested the boy was, the other said, “Let’s have a look, shall we?”

They came to a large cabinet that was filled with examples. Each one had a small card saying what it was. The man started to point them out. “That’s a writing quill, made from a feather. The cut end is the nib that’s dipped into that little pot with ink in it. That one’s a fountain pen, with a metal nib and filled with ink inside. This one here is a ballpoint pen, it has a tiny ball at the tip that rolls around getting covered with ink.”

He nudged the boy’s arm with his elbow. “And that one there is a pencil. You know about that one don’t you? Is it like the one you saw at school?”

“Yes, but that one was orange with black stripes. This one is blue.”

“That’s interesting. Anyway, like all of the others, it’s just one more thing that people used to write with.”

The boy moved around the cabinet. He was gazing at a small silver-coloured, metal block. The small description card had fallen over. He was moving around the showcase further to see that the hole through the middle was big at one end and small at the other. There were rippled patterns on either side, with what looked like a small blade screwed to the top.

He pointed. “What’s this funny looking thing?”

The old man chuckled.

“Why are you laughing, grandad?”

The old man explained that he had never actually seen one of these before, but many years ago he’d seen a picture of one.

He said, “I know a pencil sharpener when I see one.”

Things hadn’t gone well for him that day and they weren’t getting any better.

Quite suddenly, he found himself at the end of a long queue. Up ahead he could see the entrance to the place. He couldn’t help noticing that not everybody was being let in. Finally, it was his turn and he stepped forward to where an elderly gentleman with a long white beard, wearing a white robe, stood at a lectern with a large leather-bound book. Nodding, he opened the ledger and slowly scanned the pages. The other, obviously getting impatient, was shifting from foot to foot and occasionally sighing loudly. Eventually the old man found the pertinent entry and began reading. He paused, frowning up at the newcomer. Then went back to reading.

The man said, Look, “I’ve been queueing for almost an hour, can we just get on with it?”

The old man became instantly indignant. “These are the pearly gates,” he turned and waved a hand, “and this is the kingdom of heaven.” Frowning, he said, “This is not a hotel where you just book in.”

At this point the man produced a large hand gun.

“Yes, I see sir, and what would you like for breakfast?”

I must say that the people at number eighteen have been very good to me; since it happened.

There I was, at the grand ‘fifty percent off everything’ sale, along with hundreds of others. I had queued up and gone in looking for a bargain. Specifically, I wanted to replace my old winter jacket, preferably for one that had a comfy fur collar. Last winter, my old, thinning coat over my school uniform just wasn’t keeping off the cold. I saw the sales as the answer. I quickly made my way up three escalators to the men’s and boy’s clothing department. It was already getting busy. I fought my way through and found racks of suitable items. There was so much choice! There were certainly some great bargains on offer. The whole place was swarming with eager shoppers.

It was then that I saw it. I pushed my way through the crowd. It was exactly what I wanted. It was the perfect jacket with a fur collar.

I was feeling the material when the whole thing was tugged in the opposite direction. I looked up to see this woman scowling at me. It was an old face, gaunt with black eyes that seemed to be all pupil. She gave another violent tug, but I was determined not to let go. It was at this point that this weird looking stranger lifted a gnarled finger and whispered something that I couldn’t quite make out.

It was shortly after this altercation that a very nice young girl saw that I came to no further harm.

For my parents, who live a few blocks away, it was never fully explained why their only son, a bright schoolboy with a passion for veterinary studies, never came home that day,

Nevertheless, this is how I was turned into an angora rabbit.

The painting is nearly finished.

From the beginning he knew that this would be his finest work. He would make it so. In the attic, where the light is best and at its most natural, the easel is turned to face the sky. He stands, applying oils to canvas. This will be a tribute to the woman of his dreams. Although trite, this is how he thinks of her now. Since the gods had removed her from his life, his dreams have been filled with happy glimpses of her smile. For him, there is a sadness that will fade, and he will come to terms with her early passing, as surely as time itself passes.

He lowers the brush and stands back. He has caught her likeness. She wears her favourite dress. He steps forward and searches out details. The eyes are truly perfect. The smile is captured as being the something that it is, a thing that is not altered by time, it lasts forever, unchanging, eternal.

He sees movement in her eyes and a subtle motion of her hand. He looks on with little surprise or wonder as the gesture grows and takes on a reality that needs to be acknowledged. He blows her a kiss. Her hand moves faster, as if to show that the kiss was received. Slowly, the fingertips come through, then the hand, the arm extends. The fingers stroke his cheek, the way they always did, the way they always will.

Some things never change…