Author: Alexander Fawn

When the new general manager was appointed it was obvious that things were going to change.

The company had been doing well, but the new man felt things could improve. Moving around the various departments, chatting to staff, there were a few complaints. He felt that there could be a greater level of satisfaction within the company. Based on these findings, he issued a directive stating that a programme of increasing staff satisfaction would be implemented over the coming weeks. A policy was drawn up and posted on all floors within the building. Staff Satisfaction Forms were produced and issued to all staff, where individuals could rate their own personal level of satisfaction on a scale of one to ten. These were to be filled out daily. Each floor had an appointed monitor whose job it was to collect all completed forms at the end of each working day and distribute new ones first thing on the following morning.

The manager decided that the project should run for a month followed by an overall review. An employee was given the job of taking the information provided on the individual forms and entering it into a dedicated database, where results could be analysed on a daily basis, with weekly reports going to the manager. The staff had mixed feelings at first, but this went downhill rapidly. It was at the end of the third week that the programme fell apart.

On the Friday, as a result of a general consensus among the entire company’s staff, satisfaction forms were used to give each staff member’s immediate notice to quit.

It was meant to be such a beautiful, perfect life, moving towards a happily ever after.

Of course, that should have been how my life story played out. Somehow, things just got in the way. I guess it all started when I was expelled from school. That was just a couple of weeks before my parents were killed in a car accident. Then came all that delinquency trouble in the institution. Later, things started to look up when I got a job, managed to get a house, buy a car and got married. Probably the best few weeks of my life. Then, she left me, I lost my job, the car was stolen and the house burnt down. It was just after this that I was diagnosed with an incurable disease. I was living on the street when my dog got run over. Begging didn’t go well. Burglary didn’t work out either. It upset local criminal gangs. Several mobsters were out to kill me. Most of the houses I broke into didn’t have much worth stealing. The police didn’t see it that way. I’m really not enjoying prison life.

You know, I had no idea how truly dreadful prison life really is.

He was a longstanding member of the nation’s top aerial display team.

Of course, along with the other five highly trained aviators, he always had to be in tip-top condition both mentally and physically prior to a show. In some strange way, the fact that he hadn’t slept very well for several days and had many peculiar visions, both during the day and night, was of no concern. Some of the imagery that had continually played out was quite enjoyable, like watching his bedroom ceiling pulsating, for instance. He found this to be positively fascinating. Watching his furniture change shape and colour was another thing that had kept him amused. However, the hands that constantly came up out of the floor, trying to grab his ankles, weren’t so much fun, but he was kind of proud of the fact that his agility meant they had never succeeded in dragging him down through the floor.

Anyway, none of this seemed to be an issue as he arrived at the venue. He was pumped up and ready to go. Apart from the occasional odd look from other flight team members, everything was hunky-dory.

It never did occur to him that any of this had anything to do with the mushroom casserole that the lady across the street, with the barking dog, had surprisingly baked for him a few nights ago, to show that she had no hard feelings about the nasty things he had said about her lovely ‘Boofy Boy’.

Although, as he climbed into the cockpit of his plane, a minor belch did remind him of it.

She knew that she had fallen again.

That’s all she knew for sure. Maybe it was the painkillers that the paramedics had given her. There was a lot of pain when they answered her call. One of them said it could be her hip, but he wasn’t sure. The ambulance seemed to be going very fast. The attendant sitting next to her was filling out a form. They had both been very nice. She began to feel drowsy again. She was rocking about on the bed. She had been thinking about things recently. Life was changing for her. She was on her own. That was her life now. From the time her cat died and it was decided, by somebody, that she shouldn’t take on the responsibility of owning another one. That had made her very sad. She could remember that. She wondered who it was that had said that. Was it the vet? She couldn’t remember. There was so much that she couldn’t remember.

She sighed softly to herself. None of the children know where I am right now, she thought. It was amazing that they should all live so far away…

The ambulance came to a halt. Things would be on the move again.

It was nice to just spend time thinking about things, she thought. Maybe it was the painkillers.

As the doors swung open, she thought, I hope my hip’s all right…

The old man didn’t hear the ghostly hearse arrive at the front of his house.

He was in the bathroom at the time, taking more of his useless medication. The gentle tap at the front door became louder. He went to the door and opened it. The great hooded figure that stood there raised the scythe and ran a bony finger along the length of the blade.

In a low menacing voice it said, “Greetings, mortal.”

“You’re late!” shouted the old man.

The figure was rattled. “Greetings…” it began again, only to be rudely interrupted.

“Sod the greetings. You’re late!”

The reaper looked around, as if he were seeking help of some kind.

“I’ve been waiting weeks for you to turn up. Well overdue, you are. It’s an absolute disgrace! Ever since that fool of a doctor prescribed what he called the strongest painkillers available on the market.” He snorted. “Useless, they are. Just like all the others I’ve been given. Well, don’t just stand there, do something!”

The angel of death hesitated.

“You see? You’re just standing there, right? Not sure what you’re doing, right? Well, that’s the problem isn’t it? I mean, that’s why it’s taken you so bleeding long to get here.” He pointed at his chest. “I’m in a lot of pain here.” He smirked. “But you wouldn’t know anything about that, you wouldn’t even know what pain was, would you?”

The cloaked figure looked as though he was about to answer.

“No, of course not! What do you care, eh?” He waved his arms around. “You would have no idea what it’s like to have your body racked with pain morning, noon and night.” He looked down at his feet. “Riddled with arthritis, I am. Riddled, I tell you.” He peered into the skull’s hollow eye holes. “I mean, all this pain ends when my life ends, right?”

The figure shrugged.

“I hope so, anyway. Not that it’s been much of a life, I can tell you that. Pretty bloody miserable, most of it.” He held his arms out wide. “Well? Now that you’ve finally got here, let’s get on with it, shall we? What do you want me to do?”

The figure, not wanting to risk being cut short again, made a silent sweep with its arm and pointed at the waiting hearse. The old man pushed passed, complaining more about his medical condition without taking a breath, all the way down the garden path.

With all of the excessive babbling, the reaper suddenly realised that he’d completely forgotten something.

He swung the scythe.

Moments later, everything went quiet.

She was sitting quietly reading a magazine when her fairy godmother appeared.

She was surrounded by a great glow of rainbow colours. She held a silver wand. This she shook gently to allow stardust to float away. She smiled with an abundance of loving care at the girl. She lifted her arms dramatically, and said, “I have come to provide you with an adventure that will provide you with all those things that you most desire.”

The girl raised her eyebrows.

The fairy godmother continued. “First, I will summon a magnificent carriage pulled by a team of white horses. Then, with a little magic, I will transform your clothes into a ball gown more beautiful than anything you ever saw. The carriage will take you to a truly splendid costume ball being held at the palace, where you will meet the prince. There, you will dance with the prince all night, but you need to be back home by midnight. If not, all the finery and magic will disappear.”

At this point the fairy godmother had a sheepish grin. “Of course,” she went on, “if you should leave it too late and in rushing away leave one of your crystal slippers behind, well if this were to happen, the prince, having fallen madly in love with you, will search the kingdom for the foot that the shoe fits.”

She pauses for effect.

“Here’s the exciting part. When he fits the shoe to your foot he will ask you to marry him. You will, naturally, and you will both live happily ever after!”

The fairy godmother lifted her head and laughed.

“So, what do you think of that? Isn’t it wonderful?”

The girl just shrugged. “Sorry, not really my sort of thing.”

With that, she picked up the TV mag and switched the telly on.

The one thing that could be said about the writer was that he was a bit finicky.

There were times when he would spend several days going back over and over a mere paragraph. This could well be a single group of words, numbering a hundred or so. Over extended periods the writer would be constantly getting up and walking away, then sometime later returning to his laptop and starting all over again. Over time it would be picked apart, with tense changes, adjectives modified, words swapped around, sections added, phrases deleted, and so on. There had been occasions when whatever he was fussing about would finally be deleted entirely.

It was during an impasse of this nature that things finally came to a head. He was yet again going through a period of self-torture when it happened. It was the day he decided that less fastidiousness would definitely bring about an overall increase in his wellbeing. This particular bone of contention was a sentence comprised of some seventeen words that was contained in a one-hundred-and-thirty-two-word paragraph. Finally, in sheer desperation, he shaded the contentious sentence with yellow highlight, and as usual, he got up and walked away to give himself time to think about it. On his return he found a red bordered box in the middle of his screen that contained a message.

It read: For goodness sake! Do you want to delete this sentence or not?

For years he had put up with it.

He used to think of it as the street from Hell. He had always regarded it as amazing that so many noisy families could end up in the one place. It really was against all odds. People were forever working on their cars; revving the engines, checking whether their horns still work. As for the dogs! He had never been able to count how many there were. At night, it only needed one to bark and one by one the rest would join in. The other night-noise was the kid that lived two doors away that practiced regularly on his set of drums.

The worst of it was the borrowing.

That seemed to be never ending. It was as though all the needy people from around the district had descended on the one street. Could they please borrow a cup of sugar, a couple of teabags, or just a drop of milk until they could get to the shop? There seemed to be a constant banging on his front door. He often wondered if they were doing it deliberately. It was as though they took some sort of tacit enjoyment from incessantly imposing on him. Was he just being paranoid? They no doubt saw him as just a grumpy old man.

Then, things changed. A whole new life opened up for him. He saw the opportunity to free himself of the cacophony, the scrounging, in fact, the whole ghastly business.

He moved into a tiny cottage at the very end of a quiet lane… behind the cemetery.

His neighbours never bothered him.

He wrote stories and poems.

Since he was a kid he’d been writing them. He never got tired of dreaming up and setting down new ideas for his literary pieces. All this was true, but it wasn’t until he was in his late fifties that he realised that putting them down on paper just wasn’t enough. It became apparent that what he actually wanted was an audience. He had thought about creating a website and posting them, but this didn’t fulfil his need. He needed to have them listened to.

Eventually, his change of employment solved all of this.

Those that were there with him on any given nightshift never interrupted him when he sat reading aloud his latest offerings.

It turned out that morgue work was the perfect answer…

The truth was, he had got away with murder.

He thought the trial would never end. Day after day, it went on. The victim, as they kept calling him, had it coming to him. He was a nasty, cunning man, always trying to short change him. He had never felt comfortable in his presence. What had been against him was the fact that he’d been seen so often arguing with the owner of the convenience store, and by so many people. What he had going for him was the extraordinary ability to carry on as though he was as mad as a hatter! At the end of the trial, the latter won out. The insanity plea was accepted and he was committed to the district sanatorium. It was a ruling that suited him well. Being completely sane, he was able to fully appreciate how well he’d played his part. As for the mental facility, he liked it there and settled in very quickly. He really liked the comfort of his room. It was so much nicer than the one he had back home.

All was going well up to the day he saw the latest patient being checked in. He couldn’t believe his eyes. It was the shop owner! He hadn’t really died. They’d saved him somehow and he’d been put through that long trial for nothing! It had been a clever trick they’d played on him. Now, they had arranged to have him come here and taunt him. They had seen through his ploy and were now getting their own back. Little did they realise that he could put the situation right. They had no idea how smart he really was. He would soon have the last laugh. He knew where the knives were kept in the kitchen. He saw them being put away. He would wait until lights-out and he would make sure he didn’t fail this time.

He knew about the double jeopardy rule. He couldn’t be prosecuted twice for the same murder.

He would be safe in his room.

It was so comfortable.