short story (250 words)

Inside, Out

Caterpillar tracks wind between the graves, leaving long ridges of churned mud in the winter grass. It's twenty years since Tom dug a grave and he can't help wishing he'd had one of those then.

He dug a crumpled pack of cigarettes from the breast pocket of his denim jacket. He'd been told off for wearing it in his youth. 'Disrespectful,' his boss had said. How much more disrespectful was a mechanical digger tearing through the cemetery? Jim Chantry, the driver, had been well trained but he'd still knocked over a headstone or two and the fiasco with the unmarked graves still cropped up in the local papers from time to time. You wouldn't have had that trouble with a real gravedigger, not when they remembered the burial plots with or without a marker stone. Not that anyone read papers anymore.

“Got one of those for me?” Jim wore his customary green council overalls.

“Sure.” Tom passed him the pack and lit his own with a cheap disposable razor. “You ready for this?”

“If I'm not now I never will be.” Jim borrowed the lighter and ducked away from the wind. “Where's the grave, then?”

“Over here.” Tom led the way to his wife's grave. Everyone had witnessed the burial but not a soul had thought to check the coffin. “Two point four million in gold bullion.”

“And your wife?”

“Nah.” Ted pointed to an equally old grave. “She's shacked up with Charlie Hendricks.”

short story

Suicide Note

She practices his signature. Tight loops, more like the output from a demented ECG than the cursive hand of an architect. What right has it to be illegible? Is it because of the careful block lettering on his drawings of houses and the recreation area between two blocks of flats, where kids are supposed to find amusement in old chip wrappers and discarded needles, and never mind the falling Budweiser bottles from the seventeenth floor. If the kids weren't brained outright they suffered explosions of translucent green shards sharp enough to peel the skin from their faces.

She scrawls his name over and over, filling the yellow pages of a legal pad with signatures of every size. Pages and pages of mnemonic scribbles. After an hour her loops become lighter, more fluid. After two hours she stops seeing the letters in her head, trusting her cramped fingers to respond to muscle memory. After three hours she signs the document.

His body is already cool to the touch, the incisions along his wrist bloodless valleys along the lines of his arteries. She dips a corner of the document in red-stained water, just enough to smudge the date, wraps his fingers around the pen.

His was the selfish act, his desire to be with the women he loved outweighing his responsibility to his fourteen year old daughter.

At least she'll get to keep the house, now.

Rolling In

Bernie stood at the very edge of the water, where the waves barely brushed the tips of her Oxfords before drawing back, staring at the white horses at the edge of the bay.

Mel crossed the wrack line and approached, her sensible flat shoes making little impression in the damp sand. Reaching Bernie, she stood in silence for a moment, hoping she didn't have to speak first. She was afraid the tears would start and never stop. After another minute she realised her hope was doomed to be dashed. “I'm sorry,” she said, finally.

Bernie looked at her then, her gray-green eyes turning the emerald hue of the channel. “You've nothing to be sorry for.”

“What will you do now?”

“Anything I like. Travel, maybe. Nothing to keep me here now, is there?”

“I'm still here.”

“Only until July, then you're gone as well.”

“You could come to Manchester.”

“What is there for me there? I'm a country girl, remember?”

“You never know what you'll find. It's a new age. The dawn of Aquarius.”

“Whatever happened to free love?”

“It was never free. Someone always had to pay for it, in the end.”

“Too right.”

“Come to Manchester, just for a few weeks. You can stay at my mom and dad's.”

“And do what?”

“It's 1973. Who knows what the future holds?” Mel smiled. “Besides, there's this blues singer I want to introduce you to, in Canal Street.”

Even the Holes

“Why are all the windows different?” Bernie rotated on the spot, pointing out the features. “That one's stone framed, that one's leaded, that one's stained glass, but in a completely different style.”

“This is an artisan's workshop, or it was, once.” Bryn rubbed a spot of rust from a stove so ancient it looked as if it hadn't been touched since the turn of the century. “It would have started off as one room, perhaps with a loft for the family to sleep in, then as the years passed, the house grew an extra room and the builder would add his own touches to display his ability to customers.” He stepped over to the stone window, reminiscent of a church nave. “This is the oldest, indicating a stonemason built the original building, then the place was a smithy, then a glass craftsman's.”

“And now it's an odd-jobbing builder's.” Bernie grinned, linking her arm into his to show she was only teasing. “So what will your addition be? Plastic framed double glazing?”

“Dunno about the plastic frames but I'm going to double glaze everything.” He put his hand to the window. “It's the middle of a sunny day and there's ice forming on the inside.”

“That's because the house was built upon an ancient portal to Annwyn.”

“To where, now?”

“The Underworld.”

“Ah.” Bryn scuffed at the stone flags with his boot. “Vampires and shit.”