Author: Alexander Fawn

Life comes in a box,

With no image on the lid.

Fragments that fit together,

With an overview partly hid.

–

Shapes with peripheral structures,

Each doubtless designed to fit.

Their allocated placements

Emerging bit by bit.

–

Much of it invisible,

No matter how keen the eye.

Gaps emerge that we cannot fill,

Appearing by-and-by.

–

Are all the pieces present?

Could one be on the floor?

Or slipped between the cushions?

Or has it gone forevermore?

–

Like some occluded mosaic,

Unseen, it may change its form.

Bits fading to transparency,

Some straying from the norm.

–

We know so little about the box,

With fragments that make the whole.

Odd shapes of a random nature,

Leading to an unknown goal.

–

Is there something here to solve,

That brings both grief and mirth?

Leaving only what is known…

The lid comes off at birth!

She wasn’t thumbing a lift, she was just standing there.

He pulled up because of what he saw. She was only young, maybe thirteen or fourteen. It was night time and pitch black. That particular road into town had no street lights. It wasn’t much more than a lane. It was a cold night. Apart from all that, she only had a white slip on and bare feet! He wound down his window.

She looked very pale.

He asked if she needed any help. She said no but a lift would be good and next moment she was in the back seat looking at him in the rear vision mirror.

“Where to?” he asked.

“Seventeen Bancroft Avenue,” was all she said.

He knew where that was and moved off. He knew that part of town and it wasn’t much out of his way. He glanced at her reflection from time to time. She didn’t speak again.

As he entered the avenue, he began looking at numbers. He pulled up at seventeen. Letting her know they had arrived, he turned to look. The back seat was empty.

He couldn’t help but notice the cemetery on the other side of the street.

It seems that sometimes even these… whatever they are, need a lift.

He was excited about going with his father for a visit.

It had been planned for some time, but now it was going to happen. His father went into great detail about what to expect. Although he was very young when the train had derailed that day, he did have some memory of it. His father had filled in the gaps, the head on collision, the crumpled carriages and the rescue workers crawling around in the dark calling out for any responses. That’s when they had lost her. That was the dreadful night they got separated, the boy from his mother and his father from his wife. But now, they were going to meet up again!

The boy’s excitement grew stronger as the time grew close. It was a very special day for them both. They hadn’t talked to her since the night of the crash. The night they died, and she survived.

He was continually getting into trouble.

As boys go, he was a lot more unruly than most. He never seemed to do things properly. It was often the case that he didn’t seem to understand what his mother had told him. Either that, or he just didn’t remember what he’d been told. Either way, she was running out of patience with him. The boy was acting like a dimwit. She’d talked about it with her husband and they decided that it may help if one of them had a heart-to-heart talk with him; maybe hit him with a few hard facts about himself. They felt it was worth a try. It was also agreed that if his behaviour didn’t improve after that, they would have to take him to a specialist.

This particular morning she had asked him to help with folding clothes. She showed him how to do it, asked him to put them in a pile and left him to it. When she returned she found a stack of scrunched clothes. It was as though he was being deliberately carefree in the way he did things. She had lost her temper and said how disappointed she was. He hung his head. He honestly felt he was really trying. He was trying so hard to please her. He was doing his best, but she just got really aggressive and shouted at him, all because he had folded them wrong.

“Look mum, I’m only human!” he shouted.

At this point she produced a small remote control from her handbag. She selected the ‘listen only’ mode and pressed a button. The boy’s body went stiff.

She gave a great sigh. “Yes. Well. I’m glad you brought that up…”

The morning his mother dropped him off at his grandma’s he could hardly wait to show her.

He always looked forward to these days, but more so today. He had his new mobile phone with him and he was looking forward to showing her all the things it could do. He’d only had it a couple of weeks but soon found some really great games. He made himself comfortable in the big armchair, as usual, while she went back to the oven to remove the tray of Anzac biscuits she’d made. They had been her daughter’s favourites when she had been her grandson’s age. As soon as she was gone he slipped the phone out of his pocket. He switched it on; nothing happened. The screen was black! He began franticly pressing buttons. He pressed the power button, the home button, the mute and volume buttons. He pressed them all several times. The screen stayed black. He knew it was charged because he was there when his mother plugged it in and there again this morning when she unplugged it.

His grandma came back with a tray. A plate of biscuits and drinks. As she set it down she was surprised to find he had tears forming.

“Oh! Dear! Whatever’s the matter?”

“It’s my phone. I wanted to show you my phone, but it’s dead!”

“Oh! That’s a shame, dear, let me look at it.”

Wiping tears away, he handed it to her.

She sat looking at the dead screen. “Are you sure it’s charged?”

“Yes. I saw mum do it.” He sniffed. “I’ve pressed all the buttons?”

A faint smile crossed her face, unnoticed. “Let me see if grandma can fix it, eh?”

While she held the home and lock keys down at the same time for a few seconds, she thought back to a time when her daughter would show her so many things about computers, laptops and mobile phones. She remembered how her ignorance had showed and how she’d been teased about it. Of course, her daughter was a little older then than he is now. Nevertheless, something was being turned around. On the screen, the logo appeared and shortly after that the home screen sprang to life.

She revelled in the look of awe and amazement she received, as she handed it back.

It was her big day.

She had only known him for a few months, but they knew they were meant for each other. It had all happened so fast. The casual meeting in the local library where she worked. The dinner dates. The passion he had brought into her otherwise dull life. She recalled all this as she sat in front of her bedroom mirror touching up her makeup. The ladies downstairs were gracious enough to give her a few minutes to herself to quietly reflect on what the new life she was about to embark on would bring. The speed of their courtship had taken most of her friends by surprise, but they all wished her the happiness that she herself felt was meant to be.

When she had finished, she sat gazing into her reflection, remembering the day he had walked towards her counter in the library, book in hand. She thought about his winning smile and his softly spoken comments about other books by the same author.

Her reverie was broken with the shock of seeing a figure behind her in the room. She was sure the door hadn’t opened and closed. The fear that ran through her was like nothing she had ever experienced. Apart from her body shaking, she didn’t move. She was transfixed, waiting. She wasn’t sure what she was waiting for, but knew something was coming. It did, when the figure raised his hands, put his palms together in the way of prayer and stepped forward.

The figure spoke. “I beg you not to marry him.”

She spun around. “Pardon?”

He moved a little closer. “For pity’s sake, don’t do it.”

She was still trembling with fear when she asked, “Sorry, I don’t recognise you. Who are you?”

“I’m your grandson,” he whispered… and vanished.

The Chief Inspector had asked all members of the household to join him in the study.

This included the estate’s ground staff and several family members and guests that had been present at the time of the murder. Before long, more than twenty people had entered the room and found somewhere to sit. Apparently, he had cracked the case and was going to explain how the murder of the lord of the manor had been committed and by what extremely cunning means it had been carried out. As a result of the corpse’s blueish skin colour it was established that it was a case of nitrate poisoning.

However, the perpetrator would never have been suspected and found out if the inspector had not been called in on the case to bring to bear his many years of experience. The carrying out of the crime was so unbelievably devious that only a full explanation of how it was done would put all innocent parties at ease.

Unfortunately, he had hardly opened his notebook when his face turned blue.

The young man on the bus was reading his lecture notes.

He was currently studying for a master’s degree in philosophy with an emphasis on what the great philosophers thought. He was shaking his head. He felt that they had never really got to the nub of the thing. The thing being life, and the way we live it. The entire system is based on structure; it is built on levels of status. Everything, from beggars to kings. We even have celebrities! Get it? Celebrities, I ask you. He thought this as though he was telling somebody about it. He knew that his disillusionment was giving way to bitterness. He went back to considering his options with regards to moving to another area of study, when he saw the flash.

Suddenly, there was a man sitting next to him on the bus. The student jumped. The visitor had the window seat, and he certainly wasn’t there before!

“Sorry about that,” said the man. “It comes with the job, I’m afraid.”

The student blinked a few times, in a daze, he said, “Yeah. OK.”

The visitor, just another quite ordinary looking passenger, said, “We gave ‘fading-in’ a go for a while, but we got even worse reactions.”

“I can imagine,” said the student.

The visitor looked out of the window. “How does it all work?” he asked. “How do they make it all work out there? You know, the people, what they do, how they manage?”

The student recovered quickly. “Oh that! It’s not complicated.” He shrugged slowly. “It’s all about conformity really,” he went on, voicing his previous thoughts. “I’m sure that around ninety-eight percent of the world’s population are in a comatose state, but they wouldn’t know it.”

“That many?”

“Oh! Yes, and all of the right conditioning is in place, for the life cycle.”

“Tell me more.”

“Well, again, it’s pretty straight forward.”

The visitor showed his interest by nodding.

The student said, “Look out there; what do you see? Young people like me going into workplaces, well, most of them, anyway. They work right through their lives, then they get too old to do whatever they were doing and get put into homes… where they die. It’s a cycle, you see?”

He heard the visitor whisper, “Yes, fascinating.”

The student let out a long sigh.

When he turned, the visitor had gone.

And like so many other things in his life, he had missed his stop.

She was still feeling groggy when she parked the car.

She’d been working overtime and the rest of the family were already there when she got home. Because of her obvious injuries; bruised arms and neck, swollen eye and a couple of sticky plasters on her face, they all gathered around while she slumped into the nearest chair. She was still dazed and couldn’t tell them much, only that she’d called in at the supermarket on the way home from work. She remembers waking up in the manager’s office. They were very nice to her, giving her a cup of tea and a biscuit. They let her sit for a while before she was able to stand up. Although she kept being asked what had happened, she was too traumatised to recall anything clearly.

“If it’s alright,” she said, “I think I should just go up and lay down.”

They all agreed.

As her husband was helping her out of the chair, it suddenly dawned on him to ask, “This was at the local supermarket, was it?”

“Yes,” she replied weakly.

“What did you go in for?”

“Toilet rolls.”

He never really wanted to study social science.

His parents did; he didn’t. It had started within a couple of years of leaving school. He should start taking small yet positive steps, they said. Steps that would have him eventually climb the ladder of success. It was impressed upon him never to look down, always up; constantly up to a higher goal. You can rise above it all and reach lofty heights, they kept saying.

When the time came, he found himself at the local university, studying the social sciences whether he liked it or not. Generally speaking, man and society was of no interest. Man’s interaction with others didn’t score much better. The way man decides how to govern sections of the populace was nothing short of boring, and he couldn’t care less about the way past events are recorded. On that basis, economics, sociology, social science and history were all out. When it came right down to it, he couldn’t give a fig for any of it.

The only subject of any interest at all was demography; mainly dealing with the statistical study of human populations, their sizes, their distribution and density. To some degree it analysed the grouping of dense populations in blocks of flats and housing estates. The high populations found in tall office blocks was of particular interest. With this in mind, very gradually, his awareness concerning his own lack of independent thought began to take hold.

When this newfound self-confidence had fully emerged, he quit university and got a job as a crane driver.