Category: Writing

He held his full weight against the oak of the door and waited for his breath to return to normal, his bare feet were thumping along with his heartbeat, the run had not been premeditated. By the time he stabilised he could hear them going from room to room, each door giving way with a sickening crunch like twisting bone as it was sprung from the lock, it was only a matter of time.
‘I can’t let them catch me’ he said, which he internalised to mean ‘I’m not facing up to what I’ve done’.
Freeing himself from his held position he looked around the room for an exit, a way out, there was a single window that shot in the light of the near-full moon, it was the only option. Jumping up on one of the twin beds he went to open the window which was split down the middle by beading and a latch. It was locked. On the windowsill lay the key, gently rusting where it hadn’t been moved in so long and had just sat in a pool of condensation. He picked it up with some difficulty and then shaking took three attempts to penetrate the lock with it.
By the time they kicked open the door he had swan dived to his death.

Last month Dazed & Confused ran a competition to write a short story (less than a thousand words) based on a lyric. I wrote and submitted two (neither of which it appears were chosen to be published). This is based on one of my favourite lyrics, from one of my favourite songs by one of my favourite bands, a lyric I liked so much that earlier this year I got tattooed on my right arm.

I was ready to go, but I couldn’t tell anyone because they were doing everything within their power not to think of it, not to even entertain the idea, they were physically trying to stop it from happening, preventing the inevitable. They hadn’t actually taken the time to ask me what it was that I wanted to do because everyone always assumes that you want the opposite of the decision I had made. I couldn’t tell people how I felt because if they knew there was only one earthly term for it – giving up. It was human nature to hold out, to keep going but after everything that had happened I didn’t feel particularly human, and in fact I was ready to go.

It had been eighteen incredibly difficult months for us all, for me and my children and my grandchildren. It would be much easier with me going, it would close the chapter, it would settle affairs and balance life out again, I would be comfortable again. It had been eighteen months since I had watched my husband die, torn from me by the same disease that now tore through me. I’d had quite enough of it, I wanted to be back with him, to dance with him, the one I love. There was only way I could get that to occur though. I had to let go. I had to unlock myself from my body and set my spirit free. I forced my eyes and tried to do it, to release myself. I let my aching and tired self relax onto the raised arc of the hospital bed and tried to drift off but there was a noise and I jumped back to life. The door was ajar and one of the nurses whose name I hadn’t bothered to learn had her beaming yet concerned face angled around it, and in at me. I smiled weakly at her, feeling the loose, aged skin of my cheeks tighten momentarily. This was enough for her, she had done her duty, ensured I was still with them in the land of the living, just another tick as she made her rounds, once satisfied she left again. It annoyed me that they checked on me in such a way, it felt so itrusive, that they couldn’t give me a chance to get on with it. I decided this was the time, I had a gap of two hours to get out before the next check, to set my spirit free, I was going to be the contortionist hero of my childhood Harry Houdini, I would find a way out of my many binds and I would break out of this world that calls darkness light.

I didn’t squeeze my eyes shut again, I just let them fall down with the weight of my life, those seventy beautiful years and then I took a deep breath and I started to drift like a dream, swirls of light ebbing like a dance. I felt myself rise up from the bed, but not make it onto my feet, I just rose as a line, as a horizon. I lost all of the weight and the pain, the tests and the notes, the tubes and the uncomfort, and I felt the space where my empty stomach had been roll over in the excitement of it all and I kept on rising. I gathered speed and specks of light that could have been stars transformed themselves into beams rushing past me as I gathered momentum. It was everything I had hoped for, and beyond anything I could have read of the experience or anything I could even describe. I felt refreshed and anew and then I reached a plateau where the light gathered together and shone in a brilliant circle, there was nothing else, just the pure wonder of white, it became me and I became it and I flattened out, tipping up onto my naked feet. I opened my eyes.

It wasn’t angels and it wasn’t clouds, it wasn’t pearly gates and it wasn’t choirs, there was just him, in a ballroom under candlelight and we danced, oh how we danced.

She watched the pavement slide by when she should have obviously been paying attention to the road. It was gone midnight and the only people out were too pissed to even find their car keys. Rain bounced off of the windshield like cups of water thrown down a marathon runner. The gun lay on the passenger seat. Each time she negotiated a corner she carefully placed her hand over it to stop it sliding on the cream leather. She had one more job before she could go home.

‘But when will you be back’ she asked, clinging to the bannister.
‘I’ll be back when we win’.
He kissed her curtly on the forehead as he always had done, shifted the weight of his rucksack from one side to the other and walked out the door.
She took a moment to herself before returning to the running of the house. This involved sitting down at the still-crumbed breakfast table and dabbing a single leaf of tissue paper at the corners of her eyes whenever they threatened to ruin her make up entirely.
Years down the line she would remember this moment, it was the last time she would ever see him.

He only came to as a drop of blood slid off the lowest point of the knife and splashed on the linoleum. It had all been a beautiful dream to him and yet when he had kicked that state away he was still there, he was still in it. He didn’t know the body, but he had known the girl, the girl who had made him too angry, she had been warned against him enough times but she thought love conquered all.

He wiped both sides of the now red knife on her skirt which clung unnaturally to the pale skin beneath it. For some reason he couldn’t stop himself from shaking so headed into the family room to pour himself a stiff drink from the decanter his in laws had bought him for Christmas.

He lifted his knees and rolled through ninety degrees in the chair to let the woman by. Why she insisted on taking the window seat he would never understand. It would be a much better system if everyone sat in the order they were due to depart from the train he concluded to himself. He returned to his normal position and readjusted the book he had been reading before she awkwardly passed by. He couldn’t switch off from it though. He’d suffered for forty five minutes with people bashing his knees as they passed, and swinging bags in his face but it should have all been her fate. If his system were in operation she would have suffered at the hands of the commuters.

He realised then that he was deviating, and what really mattered was that he hated his job.

The puddle was higher than he had anticipated when he began wading through it with absolute abandon, in fact it coursed over the leather lining of his boots and through the eyelets to join the natural damp of his feet, he didn’t care, he was offroading to his mind. He watched the preened faces under umbrellas slink by, patent leather shoes punished up on tiptoes to avoid the dips in the pavement where the rain had pooled, dry-clean only shoulders hunched up into the parasol completely oblivious to the eyes of those injured by its passing prongs. They don’t care though, look after number one; that’s the rule.

A woman slides sideways off her bike at a crossing, falling into the gutter, into the wet, people look, they look out from under the comfort of the Mail hoisted above their heads, they rubberneck as they make their way to their shitty middle management job that they’ll be stuck in until the eventual stroke, nobody steps up to offer a hand. It’s dog eat dog out there apparently.

‘Are you okay’ he asks, pulling the hood of his parka back to expose himself to the refreshing rain.
‘Yeah’ she laughs, she laughs away the pain, can’t cry about getting a booboo anymore, isn’t accepted. She hobbles off. He looks up at the bus that courses past, catching the edge of a puddle and spraying the majority of it at him.
‘We Are In Drought’ the message from Anglian Water reads on the side of it.