shortest stories

14

I.

In this way, I am able to tell you about the lies: half-lies, good-intentioned lies, lies with no thought in them whatsoever, which were therefore perhaps the most malicious of all.

I am able to tell you about hands, crossed and tangled in any hint of cover, and the story of her hands, to which I applied much imagination: Her hands dark-skinned by the sun, palms softly roughened from cartwheeling on tarmac, and the future of her hands befuddled by images of the present – holding a child, picking blackberries, still ringless in the right places,

always a glance away from contact.

I am able to tell you about car mirrors and stolen dinner-table moments and the feeling that, oh, you know more than I could say, and I’ve come home.

II.

But let me not ignore the truth, the truth of one long lie lived not in complete ignorance; the truth of a bastard son whose torn heritage caused him to split, not once but many times.

Yet with tears shed on my behalf that I would rather wish away, still truth’s retribution has not caught me, and I wonder if grace has spared me.

If so, can I live in the grace of a goodbye kiss stolen between the mirrors in the bathroom, this very morning, that felt to me as much a gift as a parting.

For yes, the look of parting in your eyes came after, and I hope I don’t forget it.

13

I remember coming down to this house in the midst of winter when the trees were stripped naked and the roads of the city were frozen through. Felt like I’d stepped into a fairytale world, shaped by heroin and wasted dreams, everything broken back to the barest bones. Knee deep in strange language that you’d just see everywhere, tossed around crude and careless, hanging empty upon the walls. The house, too, was empty, and lonely for lack of ghosts. Thought it was so damn big. It’s not so big any more, though I’m yet to go everywhere.

12

I smashed a wine glass.
I crushed it into my hands.
In my hands were blood red grapes.
I smeared grape juice under my eyes.
It clung to my lashes and made me blind.

11

Some nights, you can imagine that time has stopped for all eternity. Everything is quiet, though from afar you may detect a distant hum, the muted chaos which exists at the borders of any unshakable stillness. The sky has been painted a thin, leering grey, tinged with orange.

Life has been left just as it was - a car parked slightly askew, washing hung on the line, the light left on in an empty room - but life has simultaneously departed. Nothing moves on the streets, and from the ground at your feet to the roof of the globe you can hear the tiniest echo of the murmur of your heartbeat, all that remains of motion.

10

If you were going to walk beside the river as the afternoon came to a close, why would you not first pay a visit to the small church above the shipyard, the church called St. Gluvias, with the red bench in the corner and the black gate set into the rear wall?

 This summer, the garden and cemetery were most overgrown. I walked the path to the black gate, stooping under branches and spiderwebs. The gate was locked with a little blue padlock. It has always been locked, so far as I can tell. I stood there for some minutes before returning the way I had come.

 As I strode past the graves, I noticed a strange flower growing in the long grasses. It resembled a rose, but its petals were silver-grey, and it bore no thorn upon its stem. Moreover, it was less than an inch in diameter, so small, indeed, that I was surprised at myself for having spotted it at all. I knew better than to pick such a flower, of course, but I picked it nonetheless, clutching it softly between the forefinger and thumb of my right hand.

 I walked down to the riverside. The sky was weary with clouds, but the air was warm. I felt as if asleep, with the river drifting blindly beside me. The soles of my shoes were thin, so I could feel every pebble on the foreshore. I made my way onto the bar. In a few hours there would be water all around, but at that particular hour the tide was out, and had left only a few shallow pools strewn with seaweed and rotted wood. I crossed the bar and back onto the foreshore. It was at this moment that I heard laughter, faint but persistent, coming from the path behind the trees.

 I edged forward, stumbling my drowsy feet occasionally on the uneven floor. The laughter continued to rise and fall, like waves on a calm day, spilling in and then out of hearing. I twirled the grey flower between my thumb and forefinger. It briefly occurred to me that I should put it down, and leave it for someone else to find.

9

You can’t just fall in love with a slug. That’s what Sara told me, but she was wrong. I met a slug called Beatrice and she had beautiful eyes. She might not’ve been a slug. What’s one of those creatures with a shell and lots of neck? Anyway, Beatrice was the most wonderful person I’d ever met, but she told me she already had a man, a proper gent, a darling, fifty years of age and none the worse for wear. His name was Jet, short for Jet Black, which was the colour of his shell, and he smoked Cuban Cigars and read Neruda to her in the bath.

When I told Sara about Beatrice, she scoffed. In all the books I’ve read, she said, I’ve never heard about a slug with a shell and lots of neck. Perhaps you mean a snail? she inquired, Perhaps you mean a lobster? No, Sara, I know the difference between a slug and a snail. We drank tea, and I bemoaned the fact that Beatrice would never love me, until it all got too much, and Sara slapped me across the cheek. What you need, she said, is a grip. Go outside, and don’t come back until you’ve got one.

That set me off thinking, which was a brief but effective distraction from the heaviness of my heart. The problem was, I wouldn’t know a grip if one hit me in the face. I hadn’t the slightest idea what I was looking for. Despair caught me up and then overtook me, I fell down on my knees in the dirt and wept, and I never did go back to that kitchen.

8

JOHN was a cosmetic surgeon who specialised in turning old people into young people, and vice versa, but really it was just an illusion, because they were still old (or young) inside.

JOHN fell in love with SANDY. SANDY was his twenty-fifth patient, she had lovely auburn hair and grey eyes. She wanted to look thirty again but JOHN loved her just the way she was. SANDY, YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL he told her.

DO YOUR JOB, she replied, so JOHN put her under an anesthetic but he couldn’t go through with the procedure so he put her in a rug and put her in his van and drove her to Dover and when she woke up she was on a ferry with him halfway to Spain.

7

Vince has steely square glasses. If he ever took them off, I’d flick him in the eye.
‘Hello Vince.’
‘Hi.’
 That was the extent of our enthralling conversation earlier today.

 I have always found Vince hilarious. There’s something about the name Vince, isn’t there? I could just say it over and over, Vince, Vince, Vince, Vince Vince Vince Vince Vince. It never gets tired. It’s a stupid name. What’s more, Vince looks exactly how you’d expect a Vince to look: steely square glasses, big forehead, dark curls, frown lines.

 I have been here for about a year. Vince was here a year before me, and took it upon himself to instruct me in the workings of the office. This goes here, that goes there, put more paper in the photocopier when you’re done, and so on. Since then, he’s reverted to one-word exchanges with me in the corridor. For example, 
‘Hi Vince, how’s it going?’
‘Great.’
or,
‘Hey Vince, nice hair today.’
‘Thanks.’
or,
‘Hey Vince, where’d you get that hawt shirt?’
‘Uh… Shop.’

 Needless to say, I wanted more. I began devising elaborate schemes to bring out the full flavour of Vince’s character, and I wanted to do it so that he wouldn’t know I was involved. I convinced a friend of mine to majorly hit on him outside the office one afternoon, but she couldn’t get him to drop the one-word routine. Another time I spilled a mug of coffee down his pants, by total mistake I should add, so he went out and came back five minutes later with an identical pair. I began to think that Vince was some kind of a robot. It all made sense, if you thought about it, which I did.

 Just when I started wondering if Vince was an impenetrable fortress, a code that could never be cracked, I broke through in a simple but nonetheless ingenious manner. I wrote him an email, posing as a (female) company employee from another town. It was a small prank, one that I hadn’t intended to go any further, but I detected something in his reply that I’d never witnessed before, not even when he was showing me how to open the resources room on my second day. This fictional employee had something that Vince liked, which had caused him to open up just a little bit, so I kept her alive, I fed her and watered her and gave her a mouth and breasts and a beating heart, and somehow she and Vince became internet lovers. It’s sickening, isn’t it, and yet I too became engrossed in the whole process, to the extent that if either Vince or Sophie (she’s called Sophie, the imaginary girl) were to disappear, my entire world would feel as though it had been irreparably damaged.

5

I walked home cursing the pavement. There was little else to curse. Whenever a car sped by, I cursed it, and I even dared to curse a rustling plastic bag after it scared me half to death.
The walk home is almost entirely downhill, which is particularly satisfying at 1am, when it feels as though the whole world is your own, and each step that you take is an act of claiming it.
I passed McDonalds, where the road begins to level out. I had some momentum, so I took my chances stepping out in front of a silver Micra doing three times the speed limit. The Micra sprang away like a startled antelope, and zipped towards the roundabout.

When cars go around the roundabout, there is a point at which they vanish. From inside the car, no doubt it seems barely a few seconds, but when you are alone on a silent suburban street, it can feel like hours. Not only does the vehicle disappear from view, but all of the sound goes too, as if sucked up into a vacuum. There is a mystery dark spot behind the roundabout.

I walked north, with the warehouses on my right. I cursed the nearest warehouse. I cursed the blacked-out window of the warehouse, through which a few steady beams of light were filtering.
My interest was suddenly aroused.
I cautiously left the roadside and climbed down into the yard, and ran full pelt across it until I clanged against the warehouse wall.

I so enjoyed the clang that I began to beat upon the wall with my fists, again and again, drumming up a tribal swell that echoed far around. The light from the blacked-out window blinked steadily.
I placed my hands against the cold wall. I began to climb, inch by breathless inch, twenty or thirty feet up until I was level with the window. I edged over, and peered through one of the tiny holes in the black cloth. I held on tight. I could not hear a thing.

A man sat on a chair. The floor was shiny, laminated wood. The man bounced a tennis ball at irregular intervals, from the shiny floor to his hand. Another man stood far off, facing away from the window. He may have been wearing sunglasses, but it is possible that those were added later by my imagination.

My hands were cold. I could not hear a thing. I slid clumsily back down the warehouse wall, skipped across the yard, and carried along my way.