Author: Alexander Fawn

He just needed to do a bit of tweaking to get it finished.

During the early development phase he was able to make some radical improvements. For starters, he had to be careful with how the maximum load on the strudel assembly was distributed. Because the mankling assembly relied on a constant flow of air through the pandal chambers, each section of the tube would require extra spratly clips. The reciprocating action would need to remain in sync with the Armitage mobiliser. Knowing that excessive rotation of the hortling spindle would cause unwanted vibration, sprooksen mounting gimbals were set at alternating angles. It was found that the fine tuning of the crackle valves allowed for greater dreanal movement. He knew he had to be careful when aligning the stekle with the hubblings to maintain an acceptable balance. The fixing and tightening of brindling nuts to the transom’s casement had to be given the correct amount of torque, because the undongulated cycling pulleys were constrained transdusently with the infrastructure support frame.

Finally, it was done. He now had to consider the issues of putting together another one, maybe a touch more stylish, of finding a company to handle the mass production of it and a really good marketing outfit to get it out there for the punters to want it. How hard can that be?

When it comes right down to it, it’s only an electric toothbrush!

They finally cut the grass in the graveyard,

With loose grass just lying around.

The residents will have less insulation,

I guess they don’t feel cold underground.

 –

They finally cut the grass in the graveyard,

With yellow stubble now showing through.

The place looks even more untidy.

It’ll give the gardeners something to do.

– 

They finally cut the grass in the graveyard.

In one stroke they’ve sliced off the crop.

Leaving the bodies below in their coffins

That little bit nearer the top.

– 

They finally cut the grass in the graveyard.

At least it leaves a nice smell.

It’s a scent that brings thoughts of heaven.

Though considering the general neighbourhood,

Most occupants will be rotting in hell!

It started with a phone call.

He answered, only to hear a squeaky, child-like voice on the other end. Despite this, the caller seemed to be talking about some kind of ‘once in a lifetime’ deal. He checked the time. It was mid-evening and not the sort of time you’d think that these kind of phone promotions normally took place. He felt it was a prank, but continued to listen. The caller was saying that he had been selected on an entirely random basis. No money payments of any kind were involved, no products were being advertised, and the offer would only be made once. Having listened to all this, curiosity bit hard. He didn’t respond for several beats. He hadn’t switched the television on yet and he had nothing else planned…

“OK, just tell me what you’re selling,” he began.

“I’m not selling anything,” came the reply.

“But, there has to be something in it for you… or you wouldn’t be calling.”

“No. My part is only to act as a middle man, if you like.”

“Middle man,” the man repeated

“It’s simple, if you’re not interested in taking up the offer of a deal, my work is done. I can assure you that you won’t be contacted again. That’s how this thing works.”

“Ah! OK. You just said ‘this thing’. How about you tell me what ‘this thing’ is?”

“As I said, it’s simple. The deal is, if you sign the contract being offered, you will go on to live a very happy and contented life until your natural end of days.” There was a pause. “I am currently available.”

Shaking his head, he looked at the phone. He kept the chuckle to himself. A silent grin would have to do for now. This kid, if indeed it was a kid, was playing this spoof for all it’s worth. Maybe he should go along with it. After all, he had nothing else to do. Just to find out…

He heard a clicking on the phone, he put it back to his ear.

He said, “Are you still there?”

“Yes,” came the short reply.

 “OK. Let’s say I’m interested. At least to find out a bit more.”

“I’m in your area, as it happens. I can be at your back door in five minutes.”

He was still musing on the whole thing when he heard the knock. It actually made him jump.

With an unaccustomed feeling of apprehension, he walked through to the back and opened the door.

What he saw was a small, bald, dark-skinned creature, wearing only a loincloth and holding a rolled up document.

It had tiny horns.

It was her habit to watch the late night news before going to bed.

She had not slept well for a long time. In fact, she couldn’t remember the last time she got a full night’s sleep without it happening, the hovering ball, that’s what she called it. Jeepers! Now that I come to work it out, she thought, it must have been going on for over a year! She knows how run down she is, and she’s aware of the fact that her health is gradually getting worse. She knows that she needs help. They say that’s half the battle, don’t they? Just knowing that I need to overcome any embarrassment I feel, it has to be faced. I’ll make an appointment with the doctor, she thought. He’ll probably give me a referral to a psychologist or someone. I’ll make sure it’s the nice old gentleman at the practice, I’ve always been able to talk to him. Oh! Well. It has to be done. I‘ll call the surgery tomorrow.

In the surgery the following day she was telling the old man about her ongoing malady. She explained about the frequent appearances of the great hovering ball that floats over her when she’s in bed. She explains that she finds it hard to go to sleep with it there and it often wakes her up, because she knows it’s still there. She tells him that the horrible thing floats just below her bedroom ceiling. It kind of quivers from time to time, and it rotates very slowly. She says she remembers seeing an illusionist once on TV. He had a ball that he could make float. He would put a cloth over it, then hold onto the corners of the cloth, while the ball underneath would slowly rise. It defied gravity. Her hovering ball was just like that.

After listening patiently while she talked about her constant nightmares, the elderly physician asked, “I see. Can you describe this ball in more detail for me?”

“Sure. It’s like I said, it’s an ugly ball and it has these hideous little spikes sticking out all over it.” She looked uncomfortable. “I suppose you can recommend a suitable psychologist for me?”

He sat back with a smile. “I don’t think that’ll be necessary,” he said. “I think I can help you there.”

She lived in a flat, just a short bus ride from work and close to the shops.

Under normal circumstances, you would say it was pretty much ideal. It would be, if it weren’t for the really nasty guy who was one story up and directly above her. He spent every evening until late practicing on his French horn. Very often his notes were flat and that really grated on the ears. She bought earplugs, but that didn’t work, the vibrations were always there. In the end, it got too much for her. She called on him one evening and being as polite as she could possibly be, she asked if he could drop the volume a bit, as she was having trouble getting off to sleep. He stood smirking for a bit, then was extremely rude, using filthy language and laughed as he slammed the door in her face. After that, he played louder!

Quite naturally, this made her very angry. Despite the fact that she was just about flat broke, she bought a lottery ticket in the hope that it could make her life a little easier. Remarkably, it was drawn the next day and she won an amount just short of a million!

On the following day she handed in her notice at work and advised the landlord she was leaving at the end of the week and settled up. She went out and bought a new suitcase and an airline ticket. She also worked out her plan. There were three stages to it; the break in, the junk yard and the drop off. She would have to go flat out to get it all done in the short time she had before her flight.

The first part was easy. When the troublemaker was out, she broke in and took his wind instrument. The second part involved taking a taxi out of town to an auto wrecker’s yard where she arranged to have the instrument placed under the crusher. The guy wasn’t keen at first, but when she told him it was for an art project she was working on, he became quite enthusiastic. There was a flat fee, cash of course, for jobs that didn’t go through the books. She was happy to pay it. When it came out it was still recognisable as a French horn, despite it being no thicker than her smallest finger at any point. She was delighted with the result.

On the final day, she was on her way to the airport when she had the taxi driver stop at her old building, just long enough for her to leave a parcel on the front door step. It was the reshaped horn, wrapped in brown paper with its owner’s flat number written on it. It goes without saying, that the instrument inside the parcel was no longer playable.

It was truly flat.

He was turning his head, nestling into the soft cushion when he heard the voice.

At first it was barely audible, like words floating around in a dream state. This murmuring went on for some time before the voice took on a new clarity and a sense of recognition.

“Ah! Yes. There you are!”

Startled by this, he tried to open his eyes, but without success.

“Good morning,” the voice went on. “You imagine that you are laying on a sun lounge besides a swimming pool. You think you are on holiday, staying at a hotel on the Spanish Costa Brava. You are totally convinced that you are there for a week, enjoying the warm weather. This is an illusion.” A brief silence. “We can now explain that this scenario is false and put in place to enable us to keep you completely relaxed while we carry out our Earth Species Testing Regime. You were, in fact, transported to our ship several weeks ago; your time. All tests have now been completed.”

He gripped the sides of the sun lounge and waited.

“Normally…” the voice went on, “well, normally we would return you to your bed and make adjustments to your time period. This would allow you to wake up with the certain knowledge that you had experienced a particularly strange dream. Normally, that is.”

A long silenced ensued while the man, as warm and comfortable as he was, considered snapping himself out of it and looking for the waiter. He could do with another rum and coke. His eyes still refused to open.

The voice started up again. “Resistance, yes, understandable in these circumstances. The situation is not normal. As I have said, you could wake up in bed with all memory of what has really happened to you being completely erased. However, there is a choice here. It is one for you. Our testing protocols do not allow us to take you without… without your permission. We would like to take you back for further testing. This is very rare. We would need you for approximately three of your Earth years. After this, the same return and time adjustment would be made. This would all be carried out, but it would be followed by one major difference. On waking, you would find yourself in possession of a lottery ticket that would bring you a substantial fortune. One that would provide comfort for your remaining years.”

He wished he could open his eyes.

“You can open your eyes and give us your answer.”

He looked around. It was dark. It was a huge space. He lay on a hard table. He felt sure that he was naked under the sheet.

“Your answer?” The voice boomed now, filling the cavernous void.

His lips parted. “Yes.”

Moments later, he was fluffing up his pillow and nestling his head when he became aware of the ticket.

He sat up, switched the bedside light on and stared at it. He only had a vague memory of buying it. He would check the paper tomorrow.

Meanwhile, with the pillow comfortable, he dozed off back to sleep.

She was just one of those people who always managed to land on her feet.

She‘d had her doubts about the marriage from the beginning. Most of these misgivings were centred on his obstinate streak. He always insisted on doing things his way, whether he knew what he was doing or not. Despite this, she was willing to give it a go, on the grounds that it might improve as time went on. It didn’t. In fact, it got worse. The original idea was to get a place out of town, in a quiet rural setting, but this got shelved when the house they moved into came onto the market at a very attractive price. It was no dream home. It needed a lot of fixing up. Naturally, he considered that he’d watched enough DIY shows on TV that he didn’t need to get tradesmen in for anything.

In the first few months he spent most evenings and weekends stripping old paint and repainting, fixing broken sections in their garden fence, replacing several roof tiles and so on. As time went on it became obvious that the work he was doing was pretty shoddy and wasn’t improving the place at all. She was getting really fed up with this state of affairs when he said he thought some of the house’s wiring needed to be replaced. She had her doubts about this and said so. She suggested that he at least hire an electrician for this part of the renovation, but, of course, he insisted that he could manage it. He was up in the loft poking around in the wiring when she heard a loud bang. She went to the bottom of the stairs and looked up to see sparks were still drifting down from the ceiling hatch.

With the unexpectedly high life insurance policy’s payout, she bought a nice little cottage in the country.

No animal sounds break the stillness.

All creatures were taken, along with humankind, by the same radiation poison that eventually blanketed the globe. Mother Nature is slowly repossessing, with global warming cooling, with coral reefs and forests thriving.

But it is a silent world. A silent planet. Only the sounds of nature persist. Winds whistle and waves crash around and beside empty roads and buildings. Cities crumble with decay. No development, no expansion, no maintenance of what remains. No machines buzz or conveyor belts rattle, no pumps surge, no clocks tick. No servers humming. All digital technology dead. All forms of energy generation long gone. All stored energy depleted. Power stations and processing plants, silent. A dead and decaying world. A barren planet.

Hard to imagine; and not one single living soul remains for the telling of it.

This must be fiction.

He was returning to his car in the shopping centre’s open carpark when he spotted her.

He last saw her a decade ago. That would have to be around the time his family moved away. He was back now, just visiting for a couple of days. He stood watching her as she opened her boot and began loading it from her trolley. As he looked on, he remembered. He thought about those days. Days close to the end of school. Days of being together. A time when they, as teenagers, talked about the future and what they wanted. He remembered a place. He looked across the carpark to where the trees lined the road. He was surprised at his own hesitancy about making himself known. How could he not say hello? He would regret it.

He approached, calling her name, and she turned.

The meeting went much the way any kind of catch-up of this sort was meant to go. It was about long time no see, and what are you doing now, how’s the family, and whatever happened to what’s-his-name?

After chatting away like this for several minutes, he said, “Look, I’d like to show you something.”

Her eyebrows went up.

He said, “It’s something close by and it literally would only take a couple of minutes.”

She didn’t reply.

He smiled with the smile that he hoped she would remember. “Please?”

She shrugged. “OK. Just a couple of minutes.”

He pointed across the carpark. “It’s not even as far as the road, honestly.”

They began to walk.

Half way across, she asked, “What is this thing you’re keen to show me?”

“It’s an arborglyph?”

“What’s that?”

“You’ll see, any moment now.”

When they reached the spot at the edge of the car parking area, he pointed to one of the trees. “Do you remember that?”

She pulled a face. “No. Not really.”

He stepped to the side of the tree and rested the palm of his hand on the trunk. “Arborglyph,” he repeated. “A carving made on the bark of a tree.”

She stepped forward and stared at the heart. She saw the initials carved inside… their initials.

He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “We did this long before anybody thought about building a shopping centre on that piece of land.”

She nodded slowly. “Yes,” she said in a dreamy voice, “I remember.”

They stood looking at the tree for a moment.

“Any regrets?” he asked.

“None,” she replied.

“Me neither,” he said, and they walked back to their cars together.

During their final year at school they dated.

They got on really well. During the week they often spent time drinking chocolate milkshakes in the café between school and their bus stop. It was sad for both of them when her family moved to another town. She began as a trainee hairdresser while he considered studying chemistry, but decided it would be too much effort. He left home, got a couple of part time jobs that didn’t work out and ended up homeless, sleeping rough. Despite this he managed to keep in touch for a while, but this gradually dropped off.

Five years later, she was back in her old town, where she’d been visiting an old school friend. She was on her way back to the carpark when she saw him across the street. He was sitting in the doorway of a closed-down shop with a cap in front of him, waiting for loose change. She was really shaken by the sight of him sitting there, begging. She had a thought. She had time…

He was almost dozing when he heard something drop in front of him. His cap had something in it. He leant forward and picked it up. It was a paper bag containing one hundred dollars in tens, with a note. It read: Hi, I spotted you today. I knew you when you looked better. I hope things look up for you. Use the money wisely. Buy yourself a chocolate milkshake, maybe? Pay me back when you can. I hope you still have my email address.

It was signed: Your girlfriend from our last year at school.

His face lit up when he read it. He looked around, but she was nowhere to be seen. He was shaken by the thought that he had sunk so low in just five years. He thought about the idea of turning his life around, that would be wonderful, he thought.