Author: Alexander Fawn

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.

She was dusting the photos along the shelf when she picked one up and paused.

It was a picture taken of her uncle just a few weeks before his funeral. She had never been one of his favourites. She remembers how he would bring a small present, all nicely wrapped, for her older sister, whenever he visited. Never anything for her. He would give her sister pocket money sometimes, saying that she was a little too young for that yet. Although, as time went on, this didn’t change. Always something for her sister, and nothing for her.

A sneer crossed her face. She spat on the picture, then cleaned up the glass with her cloth. She thought about him. He had died of some sort of food poisoning. It was never really determined what it was that killed him. She sighed and thought about it. Thought about how he was quite old when it happened. She shook her head.

She should have done it earlier…

It has to be said that he had an obsession with taking selfies.

This, in itself, could almost be regarded as normal behaviour, but what he had discovered by trawling through the dark web was something else entirely. The apparatus he ordered was more than just the regular infinity mirror, which was basically just a couple of mirrors that faced each other. When you stood between them the reflection would not only become smaller and smaller, but gradually ebb away into what seemed to be infinity.

There was a room like this on the pier. People walked in through a series of cleverly positioned mirrors. However, what he was looking at now was not like this. No, this was different. This promised the ultimate selfie. If the instructions were followed carefully and to the letter, he could move beyond the image, way past the restraints of three dimensional space and time, move into the limitless expanse of perpetuity and the boundless continuum of endless infinitude.

When it arrived he spent a lot of time reading through the complex series of instructions before considering how he could put it all into practice. Then, it came to him. He realised he could take the device into the photo booth at the end of the pier. Nobody would take any notice. Visitors to the small seaside town were always popping in for a holiday snap. Who would notice him using it? Who would care? Nobody. He would need to strap all the paraphernalia to his back. He needed to build a simple harness of some sort.

When all this was done, he made his way to the end of the pier, passed the amusement arcade, looking like any other holidaymaker. He casually entered the booth. It took a few minutes to set it up. Then, with mounting excitement, he pressed the button.

The flash was much brighter than usual.

He never came out.

The boys were identical twins.

Nobody could tell them apart, not even their parents. They had always had great fun pretending to be one another. They often used this to trick people, especially their teachers and school friends. It was this constant sharing of these playful deceptions that brought them close together. For this reason they deliberately combed their hair the same way, wore the same outfits and more generally maintain similar body language to the degree that it made it just about impossible to say which one was which. These deceptions, many of which went by unnoticed, were played out over a number of years. Being activities that gave them both a lot of entertainment, they happily kept them going. Over the years they shared this common goal of keeping people guessing.

However, the enjoyment and the camaraderie that these pranks afforded them came to an abrupt and troublesome end when they were in their middle teens. One of them, it has never been established which one, asked the other to buy a lottery ticket for him while he was at the shops. When it was drawn, the ticket that had been purchased won first prize; a huge jackpot figure. It was a life-changer for one of them. It should have been a time of celebration. Instead, it became an issue that would cause a great deal of anxiety and anger for their parents, many of those around them, and themselves. It was never determined which one of them actually paid for the ticket.

As deceptions go, it did bring to light the fact that, for them, sharing has its limits.

Hub-a-tub tub,

Three drunks in a pub,

What are they each about?

A plumber,

A slater,

A crane operator,

Throw all the boozers out!