Author: Alexander Fawn

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.

He was strolling through the small pop-up market, killing time.

His bus wouldn’t be there for another twenty minutes. He liked perusing the various bits and pieces these temporary markets had to offer. He stopped at the second-hand stall, it had mainly electrical goods on display. The laptop caught his eye. He picked it up and turned it over. The vendor spotted him showing an interest. He moved closer.

“Nice one, eh? Good model, that,” he said, looking hopeful.

The man nodded.

“Top quality piece of kit,” he said, “comes with a full-sized keyboard, Windows 10 in S mode, dual-core Intel Celeron processor, 64 GB storage, high-definition display, SuperSpeed USB Type-A at 5Gbps.”

He cocked his head looking pleased with himself.

“It’s MU-MIMO supported,” he went on, “with dual front-facing speakers and drop box cloud storage, SD and Micro SD card reader, Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth 4.2.”

The man shook his head, saying, “I couldn’t possibly buy it.”

The seller looked perplexed. ”Why not?”

“Well, to put it simply, receiving stolen property is a crime.”

The man behind the stall looked edgy, he said, “What do you mean?”

“Mind you,” the man continued, “the far greater crime of selling it knowing that it’s stolen, carries a much greater penalty, along with a prison sentence, of course.” He turned it over, pointing to the smiley face with one curly strand of hair standing up. He smiled. “Scratches that on everything, my son does. Cute eh? It was stolen from his school bag only a couple of days ago.”

The seller looked around. “Take it!” he said.

The man grinned. “Can’t do that,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, here’s the thing. If I were to take that, knowing, as I do, that it is stolen goods, I would be putting myself on the wrong side of the law.”

The other stood speechless.

“Unless…” said the man, with raised eyebrows.

“Yes? Unless what.”

“Unless there were some sort of incentive, regarding the risk I’d be taking, that is.”

The seller nodded his head slowly. “What sort of incentive?” he asked.

“Oh! Fifty should do it.”

The seller scowled and dipped into his tin. He held out a fifty note.

Pocketing the money, he picked up the laptop.

“Have you got a bag?” he asked, with a perfectly straight face.

She had always been a crazy, risk-taking, kind of a kid.

Her young playmates had always loved her for it. It was nothing to see her walking across the roof of their house, or in the nearby playground, at the top of the tallest tree, swaying around on the thinnest of branches.

Her mother said that Wagner had a lot to do with her aggressive, carefree nature. The girl had been taken to an opera when she was young. Without understanding much of it, she loved the idea of these heroic female warriors being given special treatment when they were taken to the afterlife. Her father was only too keen to pass on all of the lurid details. From that time on, her expensive poster hung on her bedroom wall. The warring figure waving a mighty sword, sitting astride a great white horse, its wings spread wide, carrying the warrior into battle.

At night, she would dream of entering the hall of the fallen, taken their by Odin’s attending maidens, to be honoured as a chosen warrior. These fantasies became more and more real and it was around this time that the drugs really took hold.

As she grew into her late teenage years she bragged openly about being able to cheat the grim reaper. Her friends listened wide-eyed to her boasting, always giving the impression that they shared her feelings. However, it was that delicious mixture of absolute dread and the elation of pure ecstasy coming together as one that drove her on. Only she could properly understand it.

Then came the scooter; not powerful, but pretty nippy. She refused to wear the helmet her parents had bought her. Nordic riders didn’t wear them, and that was that!

On that wet Saturday evening when both wheels slid sideways at the same time, she fell so heavily that she barely saw the truck.

Valhalla wasn’t at all what she’d been expecting.

He had no idea why or how it had happened to him.

He hadn’t asked for it; not any of it. The day it started he was tilling soil in his back garden. A fairly insignificant activity, you would suppose. He was doing the final rake over, just to leave it looking nice while giving himself time to think about what he would plant there, when he felt the vibration. At first, he had the nonsensical thought that he’d hit something electrical, despite the fact that the rakes handle was made of wood. He dropped it anyway. It was then that he realised that it was the ground beneath his feet that was shuddering. It only lasted a minute or two before stopping abruptly. This incident left him feeling a little strange, so he gathered up his garden tools, put them back in the shed, then went back in to make himself a cup of tea.

That’s how it started. What followed was undeniably astonishing, but not necessarily a good thing. In a way he was glad he lived on his own and didn’t have to share the events that occurred over the following days. To put it simply, he found that he was suddenly in possession of a couple of super human powers. After a brief period of denial, he slowly allowed himself to put these newly acquired abilities to the test. He did this by going out of his way to pay attention to the news and weather forecasts, together with getting out and talking to people. In this way he confirmed for himself that he was, in fact, both a seer and a telepathist.

A seer or fortune teller because he had woken up with the strong feeling that he knew the name of the previous evening’s unlikely winner of the World Championships Snooker final. This was despite the fact that he had never followed the sport and knew very little about the game. He only had a name in his head. A trip to the newsagents had settled that. A telepathist or mind reader because while buying the newspaper he had disturbed the shop owner’s peace of mind by asking him whether he had decided to plant Nasturtiums or Sweet Alyssums along the border in his back garden. He never received an answer owing to the fact that he had left the man in a state of shock.

As it turns out he was a quiet person, a widower and retired botanist, and all he ever wanted was a quiet life. He also had the good sense to know what a ghastly burden these new powers could easily become. He quickly made plans.

The first thing was to purchase the winning ticket in the giant super lottery, then to put his house on the market, to have his winnings transferred to a Swiss bank, to book a flight to Martinique, sometimes referred to as ‘the island of flowers’, to book into a hotel and look for a suitable property, an finally… to keep quiet about it.

Anybody who knew her would tell you what a truly nice person she was.

However, there was this singularly persistent weakness; this one fault, like a flaw in a diamond. She was, and always had been, truly naïve. This propensity to believe everything she was told or read had so often caused a problem. However, her personable nature together with her natural charm had always lessened the impact of it. This being the case, her tendency towards gullibility, had always been offset by those who knew her showing their understanding, and so the abnormal quirkiness was mostly allowed to pass with little comment.

On the day that it happened, she was sitting in her dentist’s waiting room, along with several others; they were obviously running behind. She was giving up part of her lunch break to get her regular check-up. Her boss was strict about timekeeping and she had to keep an eye on the clock. It was then that she read it. She had picked up a current copy of the local newspaper from the magazine table and to her great astonishment, found herself reading her obituary. There it was, as large as life in black and white, all correctly spelt, with the obligatory ‘untimely taken from us’, at the end, in a light script text. At first she simply sat in a daze.

After a spell of deep contemplation, she got up quietly, still clutching the paper, and left. Outside, she crossed over to the park and found that her favourite bench was unoccupied. She sat reading it again. At first glance, there was no mention of how she had died. She read through several entries before finding a second, lengthier description. According to this she had been hit and run down by a car in this very town. It took a long time and a lot of deliberation and logical analysis of the situation to make a decision; breaking with this habit of a lifetime, this hindering tendency of believing everything regardless.

She wasn’t dead. She obviously wasn’t dead. What the paper said was plain wrong. She said this softly to herself. In fact, she felt that the paper should be held accountable for printing these things without checking. Their office was only a block away. If she hurried, she could go there straight away and confront them with their mistake, and still return to the office in good time.

Naturally, it goes without saying, that she never saw the car coming…