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Category Archives: Short Stories

Read Me To Death – A Noir/Horror Short Story

12 Thursday Jun 2014

Posted by Martin J Frankson in Short Stories

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Crime, Frankson, horror, short stories


I wrote and revised this story several times until I reached a point where I had to let my flower go and take root in myself and the reader.

This story was inspired by a bookstore I visited in Chicago and some of you may have read this before but this is an updated version and I am reposting this for the benefit of my new followers and for my old ones who may wish to read it again. 

Don’t you get annoyed when you walk into a room and everyone ignores you? Surely books in a big dusty used bookstore feel the same?

Well, this is what happened…. Read on, if you dare…

Read Me To Death

Even if I live to ninety and end up a drooling old Grinch who has long forgotten who I am, there will be one memory, yes, just one memory that will live on and die when I do. It’s only now, years later that I can bring myself to talk about it. Bad things do that to a man. You run and run away from them, turning your back on the bomb blast behind you but someday, you get tired of running and you stop. I don’t know what it is, curiosity maybe but you stop and slowly turn around and look at the wreckage from safe distance and survey the landscape of your life that lies both behind and in front of you. There is no difference between past and future, it just depends which way you’re looking.

 

I remember that Friday night. It was a July and I kicking my heels in downtown Chicago. I was there on business for the realtor company I worked for and it was my only weekend in the city before flying home to Dullsville, Dakota.   I had spent a tedious week in meetings with tedious people, pressing the flesh and spinning bullshit and listening to even more bullshit with tubby little men in cheap suits and ties bought for them by Aunt Mamie. It was on that Friday afternoon when the conference drew to a close that a few of the guys invited me to spend an evening at a strip joint with them. I told them gee thanks but my wife was ill and had to fly home early. After the earnest nodding of heads and the ‘hope she gets betters’, I said my goodbyes, shook their hands and promised to call them and left.

 

I’m not a prude. I love a naked hotty serving me Sam Adams and fries just like the next man with broken dreams but I didn’t want to spend it with a gang of limp dicks from burbland. They weren’t unpleasant but looking back, they were too much of a mirror and I didn’t like what I saw. By the way, did I say I had a wife? Well, the truth is, I don’t have a wife, at least not since I found her cold in our library floor the year before. The coroner recorded accidental death. A broken neck and internal cerebral hemorrhaging. It seemed she fell from the step ladder while stretching too far a book. I didn’t know what book it was that killed her so I decided to punish all the books by burning them all.

 

I shouldn’t have done that for I still smell those ashes in more ways than one.

 

************

 

I returned to my hotel room and took a shower and changed into my dress-down Friday gear. Nothing special, just blue Levi’s, black tee, slim-fit navy and purple plaid shirt and a pair of scuffed off-white Reeboks. I sat on my bed resting against the headboard and channel hopped with the sound turned off, watching nothing in particular. I guess I just needed a fix of different kinds of people and different kinds of faces and landscapes but without the yakkety-yak. Where I come from, everyone is white and has a double chin and a pot belly. It gets a bit samey after half a lifetime. As darkness fell, I turned the TV off, combed my hair and left my room to hit the city. I crossed the street and took the Blueline. Minutes later I jumped off at Damon, Wicker Park.

 

The heat, wow, it’s coming back to me. That was one hot summer’s night. So hot, the night itself broke into a sweat. The streets were a beehive of the beautiful and bizarre, floating from bar to café to night club like butterflies with henna wings. I stopped to light a cigarette and took time out to watch the people ebb and flow. Every subculture; punks, steam-punks, Goths, skaters, preppies and a whole bunch of people dressed in ways I am sure there are words for but didn’t know. Life itself was alive and hiving but I felt I was watching it from the outside, like a hologram nobody could see, a lonely observer.

 

I walked further down the street and it didn’t take me long to find a bar to my liking. The Southern. I went inside and sat on a stool at the edge of bar, slowing knocking back my Sazeracs. A well dressed woman who sat next to me was having an animated conversation with her male companion about seitan. I guess it was some kind of vegetarian food from what I picked up but it seemed to be something of a big deal to them. I got a little bored and to be honest, I felt a little bad about being a fly on a wall and switched my thoughts to working out a plausible story to impress a lady with, one with a ‘wow’ factor.

 

 

But not in this place.

 

Everyone was in a group and no one looked like they needed new friends or lovers. I got up, sank the rest of my drink and left. I made my way back up towards the six corner intersection of Damen and Milwaukee. It was after midnight and most of the stores were shut. The night life was still cranking up though and I wanted to go for a ride in its engine oil. I was working out a story in my mind about being a journalist but I scrubbed that. They’re probably a dime a dozen round here and none so special neither. Art critic? I’d have needed to have read up on a whole lot of bluffer’s guides even to get off the starting block on that one. While I was thinking, I was getting thirsty again. The air was humid and my throat was cut with the dud packet of Lucky Strikes that I bought from a hustler outside my hotel a few hours earlier.

 

Then the building came into view.

 

It had a blue frontage but I couldn’t tell its name from where I stood. There were no awnings or sign but people were buzzing in and out. It looked groovy. I quickened my pace and soon enough, I was outside its front door. I looked in and was taken aback to find that it wasn’t a bar but a bookstore. A very big bookstore to boot. I looked up and finally, I saw the sign.

 

‘Myopic Books’.

 

I know stores open longer in the cities than they do in small towns like Priest River but I never saw a bookstore, let alone a second hand bookstore open this late. I could tell it was second hand. The shelves were an orderly display of disordered shapes and sizes. I decided to put my thirst to the back of my mind and go inside and explore.

 

******************

 

The air was cooler thanks to the giant fan that slowly whooshed above my head. I noticed how quiet it was. The noise from the street segued to that of a distant party on the horizon.

 

I ambled aimlessly around the store, glancing at the eye-level titles and rarely mustering the effort to crouch and pay attention to the book at my knee-level or lower. The books were like wallflowers, like pretty girls who sit at the back of the hall and hope to be picked out for a dance. At least books don’t have feelings. Within just a couple sidesteps, I waltzed from sidewalk to Sartre.

 

I heard a low muffled groan – I looked around and only saw other browsers. Judging by the looks of them, I didn’t think any of them were muffled-groan kind of people. Perhaps it was the air con but it sounded like a sick person.

 

I wondered around even more, following my well beaten path – poetry first, then travel, a bit of mystery, social history and music to the middle right. Then I would move down to the Q-T fiction section. I gravitated to this section as it was snug. I picked out a book at random and flicked through it. I forget what it was. It was some old English detective story from the 1920’s. Country gardens and vicarages, not my bag at all. I remember the author’s name. Mrs Hubert Housegoe. She sounded like a stiff. I shut the book and a small plume of dust wisped into the air and melted into invisibility within seconds. I placed the book back but I fell straight back out and landed with a soft thud on the long dead carpet. I bent down to pick up and another book fell down. I knew I was kinda clumsy but not this much.

 

I picked up the other book, checked its title and author. Gareth Hinkley. I leafed a couple of random pages but it didn’t stir my loins so I put it back where I thought it ought to go, between the other Hinkley book and the Housegoe book.

 

I heard another groan.

 

I turned around.

Nobody was there. The shop was deserted. I checked my watch. It had just gone midnight. The store wasn’t closing for another ninety minutes. Perhaps everyone got thirsty and headed to a bar. Perhaps I’m the sucker for staying behind here like a high school bookworm while the Fonzies of this world are oozin’ up to the Peggy Sue’s.

 

But there was something about this place. I plucked out random books and read the messages on the inside pages. “I hope you enjoy this George, love Melissa. December 1968” was one. It was in one of Norman Mailer’s books, “Presidential Papers”. I read other such messages but it left me with a sense of melancholy. Who were these people? Are they still around? These were once lovingly chosen gifts. Melissa probably spent hours, days even, getting into a state about what to buy George. She found the book, bought it, wrote her message inside it, wrapped it and finally gave it to George. George opened the wrapping, smiled at seeing the title. It was probably something he wanted for some time. He opened the cover and read the message and smiled. If Melissa was in the room at the same time as him, George would have turned to her and smiled. They would have embraced, kissed each other even.

 

Back in December 1973. Where did all that joy go? Did it just vanish like a fart in fan factory? Why didn’t George keep the book? That made me sad. Part of me would have liked to have turned sleuth and find George and Melissa, but that would be stupid. People bought things in cash in those days. There would have been no electronic trail. George had his reasons. Perhaps Melissa and George got married but died and the book was dumped along with the rest of his library here or across a number of such papery tombs such as this. Some of the old books still had their price tags that stuck like fossils to their spines.

 

This one didn’t.

 

Perhaps some things and some people weren’t meant to be found.

 

I put the book back and wandered some more, deeper into the back of the store. I’ve been in bookstores before but this one, my, it was like a underground fugitive hideout. Bare bulbs dangled from plasterboard ceilings like the glassy heads of hung. The shelves were very high, they rose almost two floors in height and they were too close together for more than one person to fit at a time. It was just as well no one else was here. There would have been no room. I imagine it would be pretty embarrassing squeezing past the bodies of other bookworms during rush periods. Depends on whose body it was.

 

I decided I had enough. I felt closed in, almost claustrophobic. The novelty of the hundreds of old books had worn thin. I felt I was in a mausoleum. The place reminded me of death, the worst kind when the world has stopped remembering your name or that you ever existed.

 

All those books.

 

All those writers.

 

All forgotten.

 

I bet every single one of those books was launched in a swanky cocktail party. The authors, resplendent in finery, holding court, lauded by fans and sycophants. A reading, perhaps, and questions and answers.

 

‘What inspired you to write this?’ from the audience. The clink of glasses. ‘Congratulations’, ‘Well done’, ‘Awesome’ and other varieties of felicitation filling the air. Interviews on public radio, sponsored by some dead rich white guy.

 

All now long forgotten echoes, thinned and melted into invisibility within the ever growing growl of the hungry hurricanes of time passed. The bouquets, crushed. The glasses, long lost or broken, melted down and recycled into ten for a dollar tumbler deals at Walmart for Joe the Plumber to pour Bud Light into when feeling in an uptown mood. The champagne, long drunk and urinated, now rain water or in reservoir. The people now well dressed bones under marble headstones.

 

I had to get out. I needed to breathe.

 

I walked back the way I came. As soon as the counter and the front door came into view, ‘Thud’. My way was blocked. The shelves on either side had suddenly closed the gap in front of me. I looked around to find another way out.

 

There was none.

 

*************

 

“Hello? Hello?” I called out.

 

I was greeted with silence.

 

I heard a snigger, from the back. I went back but there was no one there.

 

I called out again.

 

Nothing. If there was anyone there, they didn’t hear me.

 

Or didn’t care.

 

I pushed each of the shelves that were bolted to the walls but there was no give. Some books fell down and I peered into the gaps they left behind. I stuck my arm into the gaps but I felt nothing but brick. I kicked the shelves and the books but nothing. I took out my cell phone to call the police. Silence. No bars, a dead zone.

 

I called out again. I started to panic. “Can anyone hear me? I’m trapped. Can someone get me out?”

 

“Yes, eventually” said a voice…

 

I turned around. By the counter stood a young man. He wore a trimmed beard, brown turtle neck sweater and a pair of flared Levi’s. He looked like a bien pensant organic celery soup and good causes liberal cliché.

“Thank God for this” I said. “I swore someone was playing a trick on me”

 

The man smiled.

 

“How so?” he asked

 

“Well…” I said, “I feel like a real goof-ball saying this but as soon as I was about to leave, those two shelves there just behind me, closed in on me, blocking my way. The thing is, I have to go now, and I’ve friends to meet across the road at the Earwax Café…”

 

A lie. I had no friends in Chicago. I had no friends in Priest River either.

 

The young man crossed his arms and blinked like his eyes stung. He didn’t reply.

 

“Well, I was wondering if you could let me out” I asked, filling the awkward gap where the young man’s reply should have been.

 

“Yes, I can let you out” he said.

 

“Great! Thank you”.

 

I stood there expecting him to move or walk somewhere or do something but he didn’t. He just stood where he was, smiling at me. I started to feel a little cold. The temperature dropped yet a film of sweat formed on my back and my forehead.

 

“Could I leave now?” I asked. “I have to really leave now”

 

“I’m afraid you can’t” he said.

 

I freaked a little.

 

“Listen here mister, I have to fucking go now and you let me out of here. You’re holding me against my will. That’s a crime the last time I looked”

 

I lunged at him, aiming to grab his lapels but as soon as I grabbed them, he vanished. My fists held nothing but frustration and clammy air. Cold sweat oozed from every pore. My heart beat a crescendo, I could even hear it. Heartbeats freak me out at the best of times, even the beeps of proximity sensors when I reverse my car into a tight space but this one, boy. I turned around.

 

There he was again, but now standing where the gap in the shelves has been. He lowered his head, staring at me with his cold blue eyes. He was still smiling an assassin’s smile.

 

“What the fuck is going here, who the fuck are you?”

 

He cleared his throat.

 

“We don’t like being ignored and we’ve had enough” he said.

 

“I don’t understand, who doesn’t like being ignored?” I asked

 

He raised his hands and moved them from side to side.

 

“Us, my friend. The books. We are tired of being ignored. We sit there, day after day, week after week, year after…you get the picture. People come in and browse. They glance at us, that’s a match one. Get plucked off a shelf, match two…”

 

He started to walk around, circling me.

 

“…flick through us, match three. Take us to the counter and buy us, well, that’s a lottery win”

 

I decided I had enough.

 

“I don’t know who you are but you are not a book you freak. Just get me the fuck out of here” I grabbed him. He didn’t vanish this time. He felt solid, real. I started to laugh.

 

“I know what this is” I laughed. He smiled. “This is some TV show. You’re a magician. You’re like David Copperfield” I laughed again. He mimicked my laughter. I thought I rumbled him. Any second now, the shelves would roll back to reveal a television crew and a round of applause from the staff-in-hiding and bystanders. Some toothy body to die for presenter would stride up to me and put her arm around my shoulder and shove a mike in my face. I’d blush and feel foolish for a while but laugh it off before the ad break.

But none of that happened. No TV crew, no presenter, no nothing. Just me alone in an empty mouldy bookstore with no way out.

 

I grabbed his lapels and we both laughed like hyenas but he floated off into the air, waiving at me as he looked down at me, gliding upwards until he stopped hovering a foot from the ceiling.

 

“My friend” he chuckled. “You believe what you will to help you get through this”

 

**********

 

“Come down here, what is this?”

 

He put his right finger to his lips like a ham actor.

 

“Strictly speaking, I am no friend of yours, my… friend….ha just kidding. But you are the best possible friend I could ever have, or anyone of us here could have”

 

“What do you mean, ‘anyone of us’. There’s just you and me”

 

“Look around you” he said. “Your friends are all around you. The door itself is all around you”

 

Then he vanished.

 

I felt a tap on my shoulder. I jumped and turned around. He stood behind me.

 

“And the keys are all round you too. We just want attention, that’s all. The books. We the books. We all like attention, I bet you do too. How would it feel if every girl in every bar you ever walked into, just looked through like you didn’t exist? You stop at the bar and say hi but they don’t listen. They don’t even look at you never mind listen. How would you feel if this happens with every woman, in every bar, every night? Hmm? It either makes you want to stay at home, or….”

 

He paused and started to walk around me. I tried to turn around too to keep my eye on him.

 

“Get even” he rasped in my ear like old man with a tracheotomy.

 

“You can’t blame me for everyone ignoring you, it’s not my fault”

 

“Ah but you are the personification of the Reader. It is unfortunate though. We did sense a higher than usual degree of empathy from you. When you picked certain volumes off the shelves, we felt your pain. You blamed us for your wife’s accident. In fact, this is the first time you visited a bookstore since she fell off the ladder trying to fetch a copy of…well…that would be telling. We decided that you would be the one”

 

“I be the ‘one’ what?”

 

“You will be the one who reads us all. One by one, you take us down, open us, caress us, blow away the dust from every one of our yellowing crumbling skins and read every single word of every single line of every single page. Then you put us lovingly back where you found us and take down the next one, and the next one and the next until there is no next one, until every single book in here is read”

 

As soon as he finished speaking, he vanished. I looked around. He wasn’t to be seen. I ran around the shelves, looking in every direction but I was alone. Then I heard his voice. It was as though his voice was dipped in darkness and echo.

 

“Until every single one is read. Then you leave” said his voice. It seemed to come at me from all directions at once.

 

Silence fell.

 

***

 

Time passed slowly like grit through clinched teeth.

 

I paced the aisles. I shouted for help. I kicked shelves, wrecked the counter and banged on walls. I checked my cell phone again but it was no use. I succumbed to sleep in the end, more out of the self-induced balm of narcolepsy that wholesome tiredness. I fell to the floor and curled up in a ball and cried myself into a deep dead sleep that felt like an induced coma.

 

***

 

The next morning, I woke up where I lay. I rubbed my eyes and looked around. I hadn’t moved. I was still there, still in the bookstore. I jumped to my feet and called for help. I looked at my cell phone. The battery was dead. Then I remembered my Zippo.

 

I’d burn my way out. Why didn’t I think of that?

 

I reached inside my jacket and whipped out my lighter and rubbed metal on flint. An orange and yellow plume of flame shot out like a long ephemeral feather of a bird of paradise. I grabbed the first book that came to hand. I didn’t give a fuck what it was. I set the flame to a handful of pages and waited for them to take light.

 

But they didn’t.

 

The paper didn’t even singe. I flicked the flame off and felt the paper. Perhaps it was damp but no. The paper was as dry as the eyes of a rich widow. I threw the book down and tried to set another one alight. And then another and another until I gave up. Nothing took light.

 

Then the voice.

 

“We’ll let you off this once but if you damage one single page of any of us, you will never leave. Never leave”

 

I shouted things like ‘Fuck you’ and roared until my throat hurt but it was like shouting at some twisted ambivalent God. It didn’t make me feel any better I have to admit but I had to let it out.

 

I walked around the aisles and that was when I found a ladder. There was nothing for it but to start at the back, top left shelf and begin reading the first book then the next.

 

I cheated sometimes. I skimmed several dozen pages at a time but the books always seemed to know. I would hear a sign before the book would flick its pages back to the start, making me read it all over again. Days passed. There were no windows, no means of keeping track of day or night. My watch had stopped working and I had long since dispensed with it. I flung it in a fit of rage against the counter and it smashed to bits.

 

Beyond repair.

 

Irrational I know but I wasn’t in the mood for winning Nobel prizes in reasonable behavior at that time.

 

Strange things then happened. Well, it’s strange what becomes normal after a while but every day when I woke up, a loaf of bread and a jug of water was left by my feet. At the far corner, a chemical toilet and bidet. Whatever or whoever was doing this to me didn’t want me dead or leaving turds all over the joint. This was what I ate and drank. White bread and water, just like prisoners in bad cartoons.

 

I read one book a day at first until I found a book about speed-reading, which I thought was useful but I couldn’t quite master it. I practiced it but it felt like skimming and looked where that led me. I progressed to reading two and sometimes three books a day.

 

I became militaristic about it.

 

I closed the world, my old world, out of my mind. Just one man and his books. I saw myself as just having landed on the Normandy beaches. Each book, a field between here and Berlin. I had to fight my way through each and every single one. There was no shortcut, no chopper or freeway or jeep to suddenly take me to the end.

 

Months passed. I was resigned to having had lost my home and my job. Even if I was released how would I explain my absence? No-one would believe me. I’d have to start from scratch all over again somewhere else.

 

Time wore on. I felt I was Sisyphus, or a spirit trapped in a boulder in the middle of a stream, waiting for the stone to be sufficiently worn thin for me to escape. Someday it would happen but it wasn’t to be soon. I put such debilitating thoughts to the back of my head and just ploughed on. Every subject you could think off, every title too. Some I actually enjoyed reading; some were like wading through setting concrete with a hangover. Still, I had to keep going.

 

Eternities do pass in their own humdrum way and eventually I was on the final shelf. I counted one hundred and twelve books. I got into a rhythm of reading three average sized books a day. I arranged the remaining books in order from longest to shortest. This would help me psychologically. The more I progressed down this shelf, the more books I’d be able to read due to their diminishing thicknesses, thus the quicker I’d get to the end.

 

**

I’ve just got to the final page of the final book. I’m scared now. What if I get to the end and nothing happens? What if I’ve missed a book? I don’t think I have. I was fastidious in making sure I didn’t jumble anything up. I was methodical; I chose each shelf in turn. I didn’t skip a book, why would I? The books were smart. They’d know if I ignored one of their gang. What if the books just didn’t give a shit about me and just let me languish here?

 

I got to the last paragraph and read each word aloud and slowly.

 

The final sentence.

 

The final word.

 

Period. All done. I had completed my task. I jumped up.

 

“I’ve finished, I’m all done, I’ve finished. I’m through”

 

I waited for a response.

 

How I waited.

 

 

*******

 

“Indeed you have” said a voice. It was a voice I recognized but hadn’t heard in a long time. It came from behind me.

 

Voices always seem to do.

 

I turned around and it was him; the young bearded man.

“And now you are free”

 

He held his hand out and a blinding light flew from his palm. It was so bright that I squinted hard. I thought he’d fired a fire cracker at me. It then went dark and quiet.

 

Several seconds later, I opened my eyes. I was back in the shop. Customers were there, browsing. The bearded man was behind the counter, serving an attractive young lady in tight blue tank top.

 

“Hey, hey you” I shouted. People looked up, some gave me worried looks as if I was a bum. I didn’t care. I ran up to the counter.

 

“Hey, what the fuck is going on here. What was that for?”

 

The bearded man sighed and raised his eyebrows and put a book into a shopping bag and handed it to the girl.

 

“Sir, can you keep the noise down, this is a book store. I don’t have to remind you a second time and by the way, I’m serving a customer”

 

I looked at the girl. She had a pleasant face, large eyes and a mass of curly brown hair. She wore a little pork pie hat which was very fetching. She smiled at me, despite the brou-ha-ha I was causing.

 

“I’m sorry miss but I need to speak to this guy”

 

“That’s ok” she said. “I can tell it’s pretty important” she said. She turned to the bearded man.

 

“George, see you later at 8”

 

“See you later, Melissa”

 

George and Melissa? Those were the names inside the cover of that Norman Mailer book I’d found all those months ago, before my imprisonment. But surely, not, it’s a coincidence.

 

The man leaned over the counter.

 

“Why the fuck did you do that to me?” I said

 

“Do what to you? Are you crazy?” he asked.

 

“I was kidnapped and trapped over there in the back and forced to read all your fucking books, one by fucking one. I must have been there for months. You appeared. You spoke to me. You told me you were the spirit of the books. It was you. I recognize you”

 

He looked at me. “I’ve something for you. Wait there” I stood there, watching him leave the podium behind the counter and out the back into the staffroom. A little queue had formed. I was embarrassed about turning to whoever it was standing behind me. If they heard any of that, they would have put me down as a crazy man but this town’s full of crazies.

 

One more wouldn’t hurt them.

 

Time passed and the queue got longer and people were tut-tutting. The young bearded man still hasn’t returned. Then the staff door opened and another young man came out. He took a look at the queue and looked pissed off.

 

“I’m really sorry everyone, I’ll be as quick as I can” he exclaimed. I was first in line.

 

“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting sir, how may I help you?” he asked me.

 

“Actually, I am being served already?”

 

“Oh really, by whom?”

 

“The other young guy, the one with the beard and shoulder length hair. His name’s George”

 

“George?”

 

“Yes, George” I said. “I know that because he was talking to a girl and he called her Melissa and she called him George”

 

The young guy looked puzzled.

 

“Sir, I have these others customers to serve but can you do me a favour and wait here. I think we need to talk”

 

I nodded and I waited. After a while, the queue had dissipated and the young man stood down from the podium behind the desk and came to speak to me.

 

“Sir, did you say you were being served by a guy called George?”

 

“Sure, George, he went out the back into the staff room and never came back”

 

“And he was talking to Melissa?”

 

“Yeah, where the hell is he? I need to talk to him”

 

The young man twisted his mouth and felt his chin.

 

“This isn’t the first this has happened. How can I explain it? George was a guy who used to work here. Melissa was his fiancée. They died in 1968. Cops shot them outside the Democratic Party Convention. They weren’t even protesting. Just the wrong place and the wrong time.”

 

“But I’ve just spent the last several months trapped out the back, forced to read every book in here. George wouldn’t release me unless I finished my task, say what date is it?”

 

“July 3rd 2010 sir”

 

“It couldn’t be, that’s the date I came here at”

 

“Come here” He ushered me to the counter and picked up a copy of the Sun-Times.

 

“Look at the date, July 3rd 2010”

 

I never felt such relief.

 

“You’re not shittin’ me are you?”

 

“Why would I do that?”

 

“But I was trapped out the back over here” I pointed to the back. He looked over.

 

“All I know is that I saw you come in here half an hour ago and now half an hour later, you say you spent the last few months kidnapped out the back?”

 

“Yes, the books, they made me, they made me…”

 

But I let my sentence tail off as I became aware of how foolish I was sounding. I took a deep breath and thanked the young man for his time and I ran out the door.

 

It was Friday night. I asked several bystanders what date it was, just to make sure.

 

July 3rd.

 

Same reaction each time. Reticent looks on their faces, eyes focused on my hands, making sure I wasn’t about to spring a gun or a knife. They would tell me the date and scurry off like spooked antelopes down the street.

 

I didn’t care. I took out my cell phone. It was back on full power. I phoned my hotel to make sure I was still checked in. It was. The lady asked why I was asking. ‘Just making sure’ I said.

 

I walked and I walked, sucking in the magic and liberty of the night air of a living city. Hours went by like this, grinning like I was high for I was high until I felt tired. I hailed a cab to take me back to my hotel.

 

When I arrived, I walked through the lobby.

 

“Sir, we hope you had a nice evening” said the lady

 

“You could say that”

 

“I forgot to tell you about our new amenity to the hotel”

 

“Sure, I’m all ears tonight”

 

“It’s the new hotel library, it opening tomorrow but we’re letting our guests have a sneak preview…”

 

“It’s ok, I think I’ll pass on that one, but thank you anyway” I said.

 

“You’re welcome” she said, casting her eyes down to her paperwork, casting me out of her attention.

 

I went to the elevator and pressed the button. I looked up. The digitized floor reading was changing swiftly. ‘Ding’ and the doors opened. I went in and pressed 4. The doors closed and up I went. Seconds later, the doors opened and I stepped out and walked down the long airless corridor back to my room. I slid my key into the lock.

 

“You sure you don’t want to read anything?”

 

I turned around. It was George.

 

In his right hand, a book.

 

In his left hand a gun.

 

I took my chances.

Goofy Shit – Or ‘Love in a Bus Station’

18 Saturday May 2013

Posted by Martin J Frankson in Short Stories

≈ 2 Comments


Sunshine and picnics and goofy shit like that, I see that kind of thing from afar and it all seems very nice.

But that’s for other people. These days, I just observe. I haven’t participated ever since I lost my script. I never thought of looking for a new one. I found the role I was born for but someone else pipped me at the post at the audition. It was then I decided to take a bow and leave via stage-left. I took my seat in the stalls, watching the play from a distance.

It’s ok.

Truly.

I like it here.

Ok, I’m not that ecstatic but I never get that sad and that’s the deal I’ve cut. Pretty girls may come, but pretty girl always go. That’s as sure as shit in a baby’s pants.

I remember that morning clearly, almost twenty years ago now….

*

I woke up that morning and was full of the broken promises of spring. Dead weeds and rusted supermarket trolleys fill my yard.

That’s just how it is.

I was supposed to go into work but I couldn’t be fucked. Eva was my manager and she was on always on my case. She never liked me ever since I refused to do a dumb mains check one day. This entailed crawling under every desk amongst the dust and rat nests of cables, making sure the date-label on each plug matched that of the device it was attached to.

It was unnecessary bullshit and I pointed this out but no one wanted to listen. Some even hated me for it.

I guess some people just like the security of a steady ship, regardless of its direction be it north, south, east or west.

Or even downwards.

I worked there for a year before my final year at university where I studied computer science. Sorry, I didn’t say – I worked as a junior computer programmer for BT. knew the gig was a sick one from the moment I started. I remember that first day as clearly as that time I nearly drowned when I was seven. That first morning, around ten o’clock I think it was, the entire new intake sat around a table. I looked around.

I never saw such a sorry circle of wet bags in one gathering that didn’t have the banner ‘Baptist Youth for Christ’ outside the front door.  Short back and sides, glasses and blue shirts and good old Ulster standard-issue double-chins a plenty.

A manager, Mike Lee sat in the middle.

He reminded me of then Home Secretary, Michael Howard. He did have something of the night about him too.

He laughed at his own lame jokes. His eyes darted from side to side. He was one of the scariest people I had ever met. His head looked like a shark that pulled the skin of man’s head over itself.

I then noticed everyone’s suits.

All dark.

Well cut.

Identical.

Unlike mine.

I was bumming around home that summer and hadn’t two farts of a starved rat to rub together. After a hot and heavy June and July spent chasing my best friend’s sister, a letter arrived from BT’s Engineering Centre.

Dear Mr Paulson, your employment will commence on Monday August 2nd. Please arrive at Royston House at 9am sharp.

I had no suit and I had no tie.

Dad lent me a few hundred quid and within days, I was back in Belfast, with a holdall and my Dad’s old grey suit.

The same old grey suit I now wore. It’s hard to say how I felt except I felt like a twenty-one year old man wearing an ill-fitting suit that belonged to a sixty year old man who was born in the 1930’s.

I stuck out like a poor thumb.

A series of senior computer programmers then came into the room to give very austere messages about the hundred and one ways I could be fired.

I listened intently for all the wrong reasons.

After a buffet lunch of finger food and stilted conversations, a series of managers came into the room to claim each of the new intakes for their own. One by one, I saw each of the mice being carried off in the talons of a grey suited hawk to some even greyer part of the building where they eagerly started a life of waiting for retirement and death

It’s the done thing.

It’s called aspiration.

Then Eva came in. She was one of the few women in the joint but to say she was a rose in a garden of thorns, well that would have been a lie. I used to nickname the office The Cactus, full of sap on the inside, full of pricks on the outside and my golly wasn’t she the sharpest prick of them all.

She never did take to me.

I was her second assignment. The first one under her charge was a born-again silver-spooner and the sun of Christ did shine from his perfect little arse. I was a rough cut and I didn’t fit into this beach of bland sand and smoothed down pebbles. She spent the rest of the year throwing acidic comments at how wonderful he was whenever I was in earshot. I guess she was trying to sprinkle my path with broken glass but she didn’t bank on my wearing Doctor Martens.

Sometimes, only sometimes, I felt something sharp but I never looked down. Pain goes away in the end, no matter how deep it is.

My first task was to write a price comparison program that compared the price of business and domestic phone calls between BT and Mercury Communications.

Nothing I did was ever good enough and holes were picked where there was no fucking fabric to pick a hole in. My year was spent pretty much in this vein of having my self-respect being slowly sucked into this vortex of soul destruction.

It was November when I met Sharon.

I was down visiting my folks in my hometown that weekend and it was the Sunday night bus back to the big city. My Dad dropped me off and sped on. I wanted to be there early to be first in the queue and to smoke a few Marlboro lights and have a good think. Most of my thoughts were about leaving but I was the first in the family to go to University and leaving would have broken my mother’s heart. Poor mother. She thought I was a little Bamber Gascoigne or a Stephen Fry, dressed in tweeds having erudite conversations with high minded people in the ante-rooms of libraries. Little did she know I was heading for a first class honours degree in alcoholism, debt and playing Russian-roulette with VD.

I had smoked a few cigarettes while sitting under the plastic hood of the bus shelter when I realised that it was only five minutes to departure. No one else was in the queue. It didn’t seem right. By now, the place would have been heaving with students and strange looking men with grey drawn faces who looked like they had cut out their trouser pockets and liked to sit beside young men.

But I was alone until Sharon arrived.

It was freezing cold. I was wearing a shirt, a jumper and a thick grey coat but the cold, like ill-will, always finds a way inside. The first thing I noticed about Sharon was how ill-dressed she was for the weather. She looked like a pretty icicle. She wore a skimpy white blouse that looked more like a christening gown and a thin PVC bum-freezer. I never saw a girl look more innocent in my entire life.

Looking back, I think I just wanted to meet an angel.

I asked her if she’d like a coffee and she said ok. The town was still a stranger to Sunday opening so the only place that was open was the Royal Arms Hotel, right in the middle of Main Street.

Inside the lobby, I remember how reassuringly brown the whole place was. The carpets, the walls, the furnishings. No-one objects to brown. It’s the colour no one loves. Funny how lowest common denominators are never really that common at all. It’s what’s left when what everyone really wants is taken away.

We talked about the music we liked. She liked Blur. I liked Depeche Mode. She didn’t like them because they wore leather jackets. I let it go. God knows what leather jackets reminded her off. I was old enough to realise that foibles are never chosen. We talked about the friends we had and what we did and what we wanted to do when we grew up. I was twenty-two and she was nineteen. To be frank, nearly twenty years later, I’m still waiting to grow up.

I checked my watch. Time had slipped quickly like a drunken bum in an ice-rink. It was nearly time for the bus. We hot-footed it to the station and boarded just in the nick of time. It was packed out and there were no double seats left so we had to sit on different parts of the bus for that ninety minute journey.

I have to tell ya that those ninety minutes felt like a thousand years. I kept looking behind me to where she was sitting to see her face. She must have been staring at me the whole time for every time I looked over my shoulder, there she was, looking right back at me.

When the bus pulled in, I made my way out onto street and waited for her. Down the steps she came. I asked her if she was cold. She said she wasn’t but I know a shiver when I see one.

So I took off my grey overcoat and draped it over her shoulders. She looked up me from under her eyes, smiling a thank you to me.

You’re welcome, angel I smiled back. Sometimes words break the spell. There was little magic in my life and I was damned if I wasn’t going to bottle that dust-devil of a feeling.

This was the early nineties and mobile phones were still the stuff of the TV show Tomorrow’s World. I lived in shitty shared house in the student quarter but at least it had a landline. We swapped numbers but she told me she lived in Bangor, twenty miles away. Neither of us owned a car but there was a decent enough train service so we agreed to meet the next day. I walked her to Botanic train station and we waited only fifteen minutes until her train pulled in. We embraced and kissed before I had to let her go.

Man that sucked.

It was a Sunday and I realised that I hadn’t booked the next day off but I hadn’t taken any sick days so I thought fuck it and spent that evening in my room smoking weed and listening to Radio One, counting the seconds until I fell asleep so I could time travel to Monday double quick.

Around midnight, after Bob Harris whispered good night, I crashed out.

The next day, I phoned in sick, using the best dreary woe-is-me-phone-in-sick voice I could muster. No-one talks like that when they really are sick. I hammed it up so much I nearly tasted bacon. Eva said see you tomorrow in a downbeat I-know-you’re-bullshitting-but-I-don’t-care kinda voice.

I ran down the Stranmillis Road, through Botanic Gardens and all the way down to the train station. I was forty minutes early for the train but I couldn’t wait. I chain smoked like a chimney on fire.

The train pulled in and I hopped on. It was 10:40am. There weren’t too many people on the carriage apart from myself. A well dressed elderly man in green corduroy trousers, checked dark twill shirt and matching tie and brown tweed jacket was reading the Newsletter. In the seat to my left across the aisle was a fat dude in a tracksuit, deafening himself with that rave racket that passed for music. No harm to him but he looked like he would do himself a favour by losing the map to Mickey D’s now and then.

The sound of thump-thump leaked from his ninety-nine pence headphones like an aural oil-spill and it was rapidly drowning the cormorants of my good humour.

I cast him a glare.

He returned a smile.

He then started nodding his head in time to the music and closed his eyes and sank into chav-reverie.

I sighed and resigned myself to the train-travellers hazard of Other Passengers and looked out the window as the train cut through the city like a voyeur’s knife, passing by endless rows of unkempt backyards and curtainless windows.

Half an hour later, the train pulled into Bangor train station. I glanced over at the raver dude. He was reading a book. It looked quite thick. I was impressed. I got up and I noticed the edges were coloured gold.  He looked up and smiled again.

Fuck me; this dude wants to be my friend. He lifted the book and showed to me while removing his headphones.

“The Bible” he lisped.

“Uh huh”

“I’m a friend of Jesus”

“Uh huh”

I grabbed my bag and scurried off like a mouse in front of a dozy cat. Strange country.

Her you can find Jesus in the strangest of places. They should twin this hellhole with Alabama and be done with it.

I found a cluster of BT and Mercury payphones inside the terminal building so I went to one of the Mercury ones on principle. I lifted the handset and rummaged in my pocket for a clatter of silver and shoved a bunch of ten and twenty pence pieces through the slot. I then reached inside my jacket pocket and took out her number that was written on a folded white envelope.

I memorised it and dialled.

“Hello” answered an old lady.

Sharon boarded with an old lady.

I said hello and introduced myself and asked to speak to the girl.

“I’m sorry but she moved out last night”

I explained that I only met her the day before in my hometown and that we arranged to meet.

“I’m sorry young man but she’s moved in with her friend Chris on Dufferin Avenue. I can give you her address if you can wait a moment”

My mouth dried up. I think all its moisture went to the palms of my hands. I felt sick.

“She never mentioned this”

“She never mentioned it to me neither. She told me this morning after breakfast. She packed her case and called a cab and off she went. I have to admit, I was a little surprised. She is usually quite a sensible girl for her age. She came downstairs, had her toast and cup of tea like she always does. Then she told me. I didn’t know she had a friend Chris. Do you know him?”

“No, I don’t”

“Oh, well, I hope he’s good to her but I do worry. Well, she left a forwarding address. Let me go to my address book”

I thanked her and waited.

Dufferin Avenue.

Nicknamed Sufferin’ Avenue. Twinned with Skidsville. A lost soul of a street full of the lost souls who wash up on its rocks from their shipwrecked lives. A half-way house between here and hell. Runaways, dropouts, on the runs, ex-children’s home kids who make the mistake of turning eighteen and have stopped being cute.

And my angel face.

What the hell was going on I wondered. I repeated this question to myself like a neurotic mantra.

The old lady returned to the phone and gave me a house number.

21c

Dufferin Avenue. To this day it’s the kind of place where every address ended in a letter.

I thanked the old lady and slammed down the phone. I didn’t bother retrieving the change. I heard the coins fall into the tray like a win on a fruit machine but I sure didn’t feel like a winner.

Anything but.

I couldn’t waste a second.

I ran out of the terminal building and saw a taxi rank to the right. I jumped into the cab at the head of the queue and gave the driver the address.

Minutes later I was in Dufferin Avenue. I had never seen it before but its notoriety preceded it.

Now it was in front of me.

Jesus Christ. The Devil has a colony.

It didn’t me long to find 21c. The front door had seen better days. It was once painted blue but now long chipped and weather worn. Two of the six glass panels were broken and replaced with cardboard. One of them had the Kellogg’s Frosties logo facing outwards. I couldn’t help thinking of the policeman’s elbow that punched the glass in to enter the building on the way to find a body.

It has been known.

Bangor, a glamorous ex-beauty-queen of a sea-side town who no-one has had the nerve to tell that the pageant ended years ago. It sits on the Ards coast like an aging divorcee in a party-dress with a moth-ball still stuck to its hem.

The grand old townhouses had long since been degentrified. The wealthy had moved up the road to Cultra and Helen’s Bay and the vacuum was filled by property developers with a hard-on for multi-occupancy and Housing Benefit cheques. Each building was divvied up into a rat’s nest of bedsits and studios. A plastic sub-city of blue and black council bins sat outside each building on the street like an out-door mausoleum of punk-rock penguins.

Litter would have looked better.

I looked for the buzzer for 21c.Beside the lock was a plastic mount with each of the flat numbers written on a small piece of light green cardboard.

I buzzed and waited.

Seconds later, I heard a door opening from inside the building followed with a shamble of voices, followed by the sounds of feet thudding down a thin-carpeted stairwell. The shape of a person fell upon the opaque glass panels on the front door.

The door opened.

It was angel face.

She looked at me as if I was February the thirtieth.

“What, I mean, how did you find me?”

“Your landlady told me”

She pursed her lips and looked uncomfortable.

“She told you about Chris then”

“Uh huh. News to us both”

She looked so sheepish she could’ve grown wool.

“Chris, he’s upstairs. Do you want to come in?”

“Is he your boyfriend?”

“No” she whimpered, looking down at her feet.

Disappointment has morphed into curiousity. I wanted to meet this Chris character and see what he had to offer that I didn’t.

She led me upstairs, and I remember more than anything else..

The Smell.

It was a dog’s cocktail of old takeaways, rancid booze and damp. A bomb would have been an act of mercy. The staircase was as I imagined, 1970’s remaindered carpet and peeling wallpaper. We turned a corner and she led me into her flat.

And that’s where I met Chris. A fine figure of a man if you are thinking of the number 8, font size thirty.

Comic Sans Serif

He sat on the sofa in a tee-shirt and boxer shorts eating noodles from a paper plat. The TV was on at a low volume. The cheerful sunny English voices of the presenters provided much needed dissonance to the situation.

“Jack, this is Chris”

“Hi Chris”. Those words dragged their feet from my throat like hungry soldiers returning to a losing war.

He still didn’t speak. He just stared at me and then looked at the TV. I looked at angel-face.

“What’s going on?”

She didn’t say a word but the silence said it all.

I nodded a silent goodbye and saw myself out.

*

Later that day I returned to the city and sat down by myself on a park bench in Botanic Gardens. I opened my bag and took out the picnic I made for two. I spent the afternoon people watching, thinking and smoking.

I noticed the flower beds. They were pretty but flowers are only beautiful when you’re happy.

The daffodils seemed peculiarly vulnerable; their bright yellow heads sitting on long tall stalks like the refined heads of refined women on refined necks that begged for hungry, hungry kisses.

I was starting to get hungry and I looked at the food I had prepared but it didn’t seem right to eat it.  I didn’t prepare it for me.

It was for me and her.

I left the lunchbox on the bench, looking around to make sure no one saw me. I didn’t want some well-meaning stranger chase after me shouting ‘hey, your lunch box’. I didn’t want the lunchbox. I filled it with hope and now its contents had gone bad.

Disappointment.

That’s one smell I never did learn to wash away completely.

It hangs around like the smell of a lonely guest with nowhere else to go but your spare room.

I went home and flopped out on my bed and fell asleep.

*

The next day, I returned to work, back to what I know.

Back to a land of benweed and nettles.

At least I know they’re real.

I never did see Sharon again. She’d be in her late thirties now.

I hope.

Heavy Clock

22 Sunday Apr 2012

Posted by Martin J Frankson in Short Stories

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

flash fiction, short story, The Heavy Clock


The heavy clock.
It never felt heavier.
Bea only ever held it a couple of times; taking it off the shelf for dusting and what have you.
Now she held it in both her trembling hands, hoping to drop it, to break the spell she cast for herself.
But she couldn’t.
It wouldn’t.
The heavy clock felt even heavier, fused to her under a dark annexation.
Shivers and heat fought over her skin. Everything was so still as she stood fixed to that spot in that hallway in that house.
At that time.
Time ceased to tick for her. She doubted it ever would again.
She needed to breathe. Fresh air was only feet away but she needed to walk to the front door.
Holding the heavy, heavy clock, stepping over a heavy, heavy man who lay at her feet.
Where the world once lay
 
Photo Claustrophobi by Cati Kaoe reproduced with kind permission from her website

Brown Mushrooms

22 Thursday Mar 2012

Posted by Martin J Frankson in Short Stories

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

brown mushrooms, flash fiction, Martin J Frankson, Noir, writing


He checked his watch.

5pm.

A rather serious programme on Radio 4 about council tax rebates had just finished  He felt drained and rather uninspired. It was Radio 4 or nothing and Radio 2 just would not do.  He turned the radio off but the seconds of thick silence that followed stuck in his windpipe.

Panic.

He shot his hand over to the wall-socket and turned it back on again and changed the station to Classic FM.

But it was all so quiet.

He didn’t hear a thing.

He turned up the volume to ‘Max’ and sat down on the chair beside the kitchen table. It was still quiet. He wondered if he had broken the volume control. As soon as he got up, cacophony and mayhem ensued.

A blatter of blind oboes and the caterwauls of strings broke the silence into hundreds of pieces of anxious moments that lay invisibly on the floor.

He ran over and switched it off.

Bloody classical music, he thought. Either as loud as the cracks in the sky of judgement day or as quiet as plotters in the alcove. He liked classical music but he always found listening to it on the radio frustrating.

Too wide a symphonic range.

Heart pounding, he checked his watch again.

It’s around this time he made supper for both himself and his wife. He went to the fridge and took out a packet of rindless bacon, eggs and a punnett of mushrooms and set the food down on the worktop next to the sink. It was then that he noticed that the mushrooms were turning brown around the edges. He peeled back the torn cellophane and held the packet up to his nose and sniffed a few times.

Detecting nothing noxious nor foul, he removed ten mushrooms exactly and nipped off the brown bits with his finger nails.

He sliced the bacon and chopped the mushrooms and fried them for about five minutes before adding the whisked eggs. Five minutes later he served the omelette onto two warmed plates and laid them down on the dining table.

 “Freda!” he called out.

Freda and he were not on the best of terms. They had an almighty row only a couple of days earlier and hadn’t spoken since. It was over something stupid. Freda wanted to watch Coronation Street. He wanted to watch the History of Mathematics on BBC4.

He sat down to his supper and tucked in, wolfing it down.

Omelettes get cold so quickly.

Before he knew it, he was nearly done. Freda’s plate remained untouched

“Freda! Your dinner’s getting cold”

Within seconds he finished his meal. He lifted Freda’s plate and touched the omelette with his fingers. It was more luke than warm. He placed it in the microwave without turning it on for sake keeping.

Knock. Knock .Knock

On the front door.

 He sat still, not saying a word.

Knock

“Who is it?” he shouted

“It’s Gertrude”

He ran out of the kitchen and down the hallway to greet Gertrude.

He pressed his left ear, his best ear to the door.

“What do you want?”

“I want to see Freda; I’ve come all the way from Huntsville you know”

“I don’t know where she is, let me go and find her. You wait there a second”

“Oh”  she said.

He turned around to Freda .

“Do you really want to see Gertrude while you wait for your omelette to be heated up?”

Freda smiled but she was smiling for days.

Freda lay still and quiet on the hallway floor, smiling but without knowing it.

“It’s nice to see you so cheerful love”

He bent down and kissed her on the lips.

“You’re very cold, dear. Let me get you a blanket”

Gertrude knocked once more

“Let me in this once”

A film of sweat formed on his back, sucking his shirt towards it to form a second skin. He lifted a porcelain clock from the occasion table and held it in his hands. It was a wedding present but had suffered minor damage just a couple of days earlier but nothing that anyone would notice close up.

He held the clock with his left hand,behind his back and reached over to the latch with his right.

“You can join Freda very shortly!” he said.

He turned to Freda, caressing her limp yellow hair.

“Gertrude is coming to stay with you. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

 Image ‘Black and White Photo of a Bench in Elizabeth Park in West Hartford, Connecticut, at Night: Photo by Sage Ross’ courtesy of http://www.annedarlingphotography.com

The Life and Soul Girl – A Short Story of an After Life….of sorts

05 Monday Mar 2012

Posted by Martin J Frankson in Short Stories

≈ 10 Comments


the author writes:

“This story was inspired by a wake I went to where the deceased was being subjected to more criticism than fond reminiscence by those present. I didn’t sit well with me and then I thought about what fun he would have had if his ghost could have moved around and listened in.

Perhaps he did”

Tanya the Teenage Queen of Parties and Bad Magazines went to sleep under a thicket of blue red eye shadow that remoulded itself above her eyelids. She moaned a bit and writhed a bit before finally giving up the ghost on her friend’s sofa.

She was such a terribly young candle to have had her flame peter out so soon.

Tanya’s mom and sister cried a lot.

“Whole life ahead of her”

“What a waste”

And various other tributes were uttered dutifully. That’s not to say they weren’t meant but the older amongst them had heard such utterances before, usually at the funerals of other young tragics who had passed on at the wheel of fast cars or drugs. It didn’t make it less sad, only less imaginative.

Tanya, despite being dead, found herself able to attend her own funeral. At first she was tentative as she turned the corner of St. Martin’s Avenue to where the church was. She stopped for a moment, seeing the black cars parked outside the doors. There were lots of stony faced men in ill-fitting black suits, perfunctory badly ironed white shirts and poorly knotted black ties.

Funerals, weddings and court appearances.

She saw her brother Darren. He was in the same black tie he wore to fancy dress parties dressed as Mr Black from Reservoir Dogs. The women where cloaked in veils, like shy dervishes, moving slowly on high heels, clip-clopping up the steps and into the church like little horses in dark dressage.

But on hind legs.

This being her first funeral since her own parting and first public appearance, she was worried that someone would see her but the voices told her not to be so silly. She took a deep breath and walked towards the mourners and with a steely burst, mingled amongst them.

They didn’t see her.

Tanya sat at the back wearing a dark blue frock coat and a pair of black doc martens. She was invisible to everyone because she was a spirit. The powers that be let the spirits back on ‘funeral leave’ to see and hear what everyone thought about them.

Tanya itched to tell her sister that she had fucked Jimi Hendrix and Rimbaud the previous night. 

What a party that was Tanya thought.

She blushed to think of the things she let John Donne do to her body and he was from the middle ages too! It was the ‘Getting to You Know You’ party held once a week for the newly dead. The next day held no hangover and she shared a spliff with a ploughman called Huw who came from 11th century Devon. Huw didn’t say much but his breath stank and he kept leering at her bosoms. Women’s bosoms weren’t as shapely back then but it was heaven after all. God let the souls do what they pleased.

And it pleased them

After the service, all Tanya’s friends and family piled into their black limousines and ceremoniously drove home in convoy back to Aunt Chrissie’s house.

Tanya hopped a ride on the roof of her mother’s limo and after 20 minutes, all the cars were parked and everyone went inside. The door closed on Tanya’s face but she glided through the wood and glass and into the living room.

The crying stopped. Tanya’s dad put on a Chas and Dave CD and before you know it, the mourners were lifting up their trouser legs and hitching up their skirts to dance to ‘Gertcha’ and ‘Knees Up Mother Brown’.

Mum came down with a family album, stuffed to the gills with badly taken family snaps. With a flourish, she held the album over her head and tipped the photos on the ground.

“Come on, let’s all dance on Tanya”

Everyone danced on Tanya’s old photographs. Uncle Pete had taken a framed picture of Tanya from the sideboard, broke the glass, took out the picture and stuffed it in a sausage roll before eating it. His youngsters stood around him egging him on.

“Oh, you’ve been waiting a long time to eat young Tanya, haven’t ya darlin’ croaked his fat wife. Everyone rolled around laughing.

Tanya was horrified. Nobody seemed one bit in the least sad. Everyone was having a good old time. Everyone seemed glad that she was dead. Even her friends were taking part.

She walked around the room, short of breath, eyes red with the sting of tears still fresh on her cheeks. She saw her sister Agatha drawing a moustache on a school photo of Tanya. The felt-tip pen had run out and Tanya’s mother pulled out a fresh one from her handbag and gave it to Agatha to continue the defacement.

“Hold up love, she aint’ ugly enough, lemme have a go”

“Alright mum, go for it”

Tanya’s mother produced a blue pen and drew large pieces of acne on Tanya’s face on the photo.

“Look everyone, look at the spotty dead girl”

Everyone laughed. Tanya was beside herself. Someone had remarked that it was an improvement.

Tanya went up to her mother and started to throttle her from behind but her hands went through her neck like it was thin air. Tanya fell forward with the force and her head landed inside the brickwork. It was odd seeing her old house from the inside this, Tanya thought. No-one has much of an opportunity to put their head inside something impregnable like a brick and have a good look without their skull being bashed in.

One of the advantages of being dead was that no-one could physically harm you anymore but psychologically, she was as sensitive as ever.

Tanya thought that this might be how it should be. After all, the mind is the seat of the soul, if the soul lives on, so might the personality. But the sound of a really loud Jam record interrupted her erudite train of thought and thoughts of revenge came back. She got up and dusted herself down and went into the kitchen and picked up a knife but the knife couldn’t be lifted. Tanya felt like a toddler who couldn’t express what she felt. She screamed again

“Why the hell are you doing this to me? What have I done? Does no-one I ever loved miss me at all ?”

She crumpled up like a crushed doll and cried bitterly. She felt she would cry for ever. After a minute, she felt a hand on her shoulder. She froze. This was the first time she felt touch since she died. Tanya looked up and saw her beloved grandmother looking down at her. Grandma Wilkes had passed on only five years earlier  but she looked more alive than ever. Her face, although wrinkled seemed luminescent, her eyes were deep like a mountain lake and her hair was more silver than grey.

“Come on Tanya love, stand up now”. Tanya clasped her Grandmother’s hand and helped herself to her feet.

“Grandma, why are they doing this to me? What’s going on”

Grandma smiled beatifically at Tanya and gently caressed her cheek.

“Oh love, you must understand, you’re seeing them as they really are. This helps you to move on and leave them all behind. Flipping heck, I’m starving, look and learn love, here’s a little trick”

Grandma turned to the crowd and shouted “Woooo, looks who’s here”

The crowd turned around and began to throw sausage rolls and pickled onions at Grandma. She kept her mouth open and scoffed the lot. After she swallowed, the crowd went back to their original stances and chattered merrily amongst themselves.

“Heaven might be full of your rock stars and gold and makeup but I tell you, there’s not enough food to go around. You have to come down to Earth and get your grub. Funerals and wedding are best, lots of people and lots of nice party food and you never put on any weight! Look at my ass. I used to have a big fat one. I don’t any more”

“Gran!, don’t talk like that, it’s embarrassing”

She looked at the room once again. Family members and friends were getting progressively pissed and telling tall tales about Tanya. Tanya was overcome with a wave of altruism and felt sorry for them. She walked up to her mother and looked at her face. For some reason, Tanya noticed her mother’s eyes focussing on her own.

“Tanya?, is that you ?”

“Yes, mum, it is”

“You’ve seen and heard all this then, haven’t you?”

“Yes mum, why?”

“Well if you can’t make fun of the dead, who can you make fun off?

“But I’m your daughter. It’s not right. You should be crying”

“Oh you want your dear old mum to cry do you ? You always were a selfish little girl. Now, I’m getting me another glass of wine, oh I forgot, does God exist?”

Tanya smiled.

“No, he doesn’t. There’s a heaven alright but no God. It’s just one big giant party. A bit like this one.”

Her mum stood there, staring into her glass of warm Tesco’s merlot.

Tanya smiled and faded slowly away.

She never returned again.

The End

Image entitled ‘Streets of Madness’ by Evelina Kremsdorf http://fineartamerica.com/featured/streets-of-madness-evelina-kremsdorf.html

Short Story : Dark Introduction

29 Wednesday Feb 2012

Posted by Martin J Frankson in Short Stories

≈ 1 Comment


Hello.

It’s been fourteen years since I was relieved of my liberty.  In a way, it’s cosy here.  No taxes, free accommodation, meals, laundry, education, heating.  I’ve never felt more free.

Are you one of The Nice People who wouldn’t dream of hitting someone who fucked you off in case you lose your job and your home? Do you shudder at the thought of spending time inside or meeting someone like me? A jail-bird, an ex-con.

I’m not the kind of man you’d like your daughter to bring home. That’s ok. I don’t particularly like your daughter much either. Well if you’ve come this far then I think you like me or perhaps I intrigue you. Don’t worry about getting too close. I’m at a safe distance. My grasping outstretched arms and overgrown finger nails will get nowhere near your wincing body. It’s ok. I’m behind bars.

But right now I’m also behind your eyes.

I am logically minded but in a round the houses way.  I could circumnavigate the globe to end up in a village that was only a few miles away from the point of departure.  My mind takes odd diversions. You may have gathered this by now. I jump from idea to idea, a flea in a world of dead dogs.

I am not one to take the easy way.  Even as a child, my teachers said I would take twenty steps at something when only four would do. Everything seemed so complicated. I had no mind for mechanical things or remembering details. In fact, I always found the world overly complex, more so than needs be. I smashed up a radio once to see what it was like inside. It was all wires and things and blood. I did smash it over my brother’s head because I wasn’t allowed near my father’s toolbox so I couldn’t find anything to unscrew it with.

They told me I shouldn’t have done that. My brother died three days later and my parents divorced two years after that. I lived with my father. I think he lost the toss of the coin with my mother. He kept telling me that his real son was dead and that I was just his act of Christian charity.

The court ruled misadventure. I was only seven.

He was nice like that. He even bought me a Kylie Minogue tee shirt and cassette tape for my seventeenth birthday. She had split from Jason and become a pop singer.

I liked her. I wrote lots of letters but she never replied until one of her friends replied on her behalf asking me to stop writing to her. I wrote back asking why but I never got an answer. I carried out asking why and one day a policeman came to our house to tell me why in person. My father was livid and he asked me to leave the house. He didn’t leave me high and dry though. He gave me three hundred pounds and arranged for me to live in a lodgings house with Muriel who happened to be the aunt of a lady he knew from work. He worked as a teller in the Allied Irish bank.

So I moved out and into a bedroom that smelled of mothballs and old ladies. I spent most of my time in the room looking at pictures of girls in magazines. Muriel caught me one day and ran downstairs and made a phone call. It must have been to my father because he arrived at the house a little over twenty minutes later and hit me and called me an unhealthy little runt and that I needed to get outside into the world and meet and work with real people who would knock me into shape.

Whatever that meant I still don’t know.

So he got me a job as a junior clerk in another branch of the Allied Irish bank but in the same city. The staff knew my father though and they gave me funny looks and kept themselves to themselves. They seemed very shy like that but not with each other I noticed.

It was monotonous work but it paid the bills as they say.  One of the army of triangle packed sandwiches guzzlers. The padded cell of the coffee break, quarterly personal performance review, targets, goals, core competences, meetings, minutes, personal time off and  thinking about sexual encounters in the photocopying room..

That’s when I met Leopoldina.

Yeah, I thought the same myself.

Well, I didn’t really meet her. I just saw her every day from a distance, buying her scones and doughnuts from the sandwich man every morning at quarter past nine on the fifth floor. She was striking, but not in a conventional sense. I remember she had a  dark complexion, dreamy eyes and braided auburn hair with a wide parting in the middle.

She must have worked in an obscure part of the building because no-one seemed to know her. I never saw her in the canteen or at any of the social functions that punctuated Her Majesty’s Stationary calendar.  The coward within didn’t have the bottle to strike up a conversation.  It’s hard to raise the spirits of conversation with someone who has just walked past and momentarily brushed your shoulder without one helluva subterfuge.  I am pristinely logical but not quick of the tongue.

We danced this silent pirouette for quite a few weeks. I followed her without her knowing about it too. I saw her going out at lunchtime for walks with a man she held hands with and kissed a lot. I also saw her meet other girls for coffee. Sometimes she bought clothes in the women’s section of Dunne’s Stores.

Then a man was murdered.

Joseph Kerrigan, aged 54. He was stabbed by his son during a family row over them sharing a prostitute they both fell in love with. The IRA and the UVF had just stopped killing people that year and everyone was so pleased that Kerrigan was killed by someone who wasn’t in the IRA or the UVF.

An ordinary decent murder they called it.

But I remembered his name. Joseph Kerrigan. I didn’t have to ask him his name. The lady on the local news channel told me and I didn’t even have to ask her.

The next day I went upstairs to the fifth floor at ten past nine as I usually did and waited for the striking looking girl with braided auburn hair. I needed to know her. And like clockwork, she did.  She made her way to the sandwich man, counting the loose change held in her left hand and waited in the queue.

That’s when I took a deep breath and walked straight up to her and stuck a knife straight into her throat

Time seemed to stop yet speed up at the same time. I couldn’t really explain why. Her coins fell out her hand and she crumpled to the floor, gasping for air. People screamed. Men tried to help her. Some men threw me to the floor and kicked me. Some men threw them off me and sat on me making sure I didn’t move. I had no intention of moving and someone should have thought to ask me in the first place as it was all no unnecessary.

Later on, the police charged me with the murder of Alice Dawes of18 Wicker Lane.

She wasn’t called Leopoldina at all.

That’s just what I called her.

But at last, I found out who she was. Her name was Alice Dawes.

A nice policeman told me that.

Sometimes I look in the mirror and see a man of a peaceful face stare back.

I wonder who he is.

Image entitled ‘Sadness 8’ courtesy of http://scarabuss.deviantart.com/

Trapped in Myopia : A Short Story : Episode 7 : The Finale

26 Sunday Feb 2012

Posted by Martin J Frankson in Short Stories, Uncategorized

≈ 5 Comments


 “Indeed you have” said a voice.

  It was a voice I recognized but hadn’t heard in a long time. It came from behind me.

 Voices always seem to do.

 

I turned around and it was him; the young bearded man from the start of this nightmare.

“And now you are free”

He held his hand out and a blinding light flew from his palm. It was so bright that I squinted hard. I thought he’d fired a fire cracker at me. It went dark and quiet.

After some time, I opened my eyes. I was back in the shop. Customers were there, browsing. The bearded man was behind the counter, serving an attractive young lady.

“Hey, hey you” I shouted. People looked up, some gave me nasty looks. I didn’t care. I ran up to the counter.

“Hey, what the fuck is going on here. What was that for?”

The bearded man sighed and raised his eyebrows and put a book into a shopping bag and handed it to the girl.

“Sir, can you keep the noise down, this is a book store. I don’t have to remind you a second time and by the way, I’m serving a customer”

I looked at the girl. She had a pleasant face, large eyes and a mass of curly brown hair. She wore a little pork pie hat which was very fetching. She smiled at me, despite the brou-ha-ha I was causing.

“I’m sorry miss but I need to speak to this guy”

“That’s ok” she said. “I can tell it’s pretty important” she said. She turned to the bearded man.

“George, see you later at 8”

“See you later, Melissa”

George and Melissa? Those were the names inside the cover of that Norman Mailer book I’d found all those months ago, before my imprisonment. But surely, not, it’s a coincidence.

The man leaned over the counter.

“Why the fuck did you do that to me?” I said

“Do what to you? Are you crazy?” he asked.

“I was kidnapped and trapped over there in the back and forced to read all your fucking books, one by fucking one. I must have been there for months. You appeared. You spoke to me. You told me you were the spirit of the books. It was you. I recognize you”

He looked at me. “I’ve something for you. Wait there” I stood there, watching him leave the podium behind the counter and out the back into the staffroom. A little queue had formed. I was embarrassed about turning to whoever it was standing behind me. If they heard any of that, they would have put me down as a crazy man but this town’s full of crazies.

One more wouldn’t hurt them.

Time passed and the queue got longer and people were tut-tutting. The young bearded man still hasn’t returned. Then the staff door opened and a different young man came out. He took a look at the queue and looked aghast.

“I’m really sorry everyone, I’ll be as quick as I can” he exclaimed. I was first in line.

“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting sir, how may I help you?” he asked me.

“Actually, I am being served already?”

“Oh really, by whom?”

“The other young guy, the one with the beard and shoulder length hai. His name’s George”

“George?”

“Yes, George” I said. “I know that because before me, he was talking to a girl and he called her Melissa and she called him George”

The young guy looked puzzled.

“Sir, I have these others customers to serve but can you do me a favour and wait here. I think we need to talk”

I nodded and I waited. After a while, the queue had dissipated and the young man stood down from the podium behind the desk and came to speak to me.

“Sir, did you say you were being served by a guy called George?”

“Sure, George, he went out the back into the staff room and never came back”

“And he was talking to Melissa?”

“Yeah, where the hell is he? I need to talk to him”

The young man twisted his mouth and felt his chin.

“This isn’t the first this has happened. How can I explain it. George was a guy who used to work here. Melissa was his fiancé. They died in 1968. Cops shot them outside the Democratic Party Convention. They weren’t even protesting. Just the wrong place and the wrong time.”

“But I’ve just spent the last several months trapped out the back, forced to read every book in here. George wouldn’t release me unless I finished my task, say what date is it?”

“July 3rd 2010 sir”

“It couldn’t be, that’s the date I came here at”

“Come here” He ushered me to the counter and picked up a copy of the Sun-Times.

“Look at the date, July 3rd 2010”

I never felt such relief.

“You’re not shittin’ me are you?”

“Why would I do that?”

“But I was trapped out the back over here” I pointed to the back. He looked over.

“All I know is that I saw you come in here half an hour ago and now half an hour later, you say you spent the last few months kidnapped out the back?”

“Yes, the books, they made me, they made me..”

But I let my sentence tail off as I became aware of how foolish I was sounding. I took a deep breath and thanked the young man for his time and I ran out the door.

It was Friday night. I asked several bystanders what date it was, just to make sure.

July 3rd.

Same reaction each time. Reticent looks on their faces, eyes focused on my hands, making sure I wasn’t about to spring a gun or a knife. They would tell me the date and scurry off like spooked antelopes down the street.

I didn’t care. I took out my cell phone. It was back on full power. I phoned my hotel to make sure I was still checked in. It was. The lady asked why I was asking. ‘Just making sure’ I said.

I walked and I walked, sucking in the magic and liberty of the night air of a living city. Hours went by like this, grinning like I was high for I was high until I felt tired. I hailed a cab to take me back to my hotel.

When I arrived, I walked through the lobby.

“Sir, we hope you had a nice evening” said the lady

“You could say that”

“I forgot to tell you about our new amenity to the hotel”

“Sure, I’m all ears tonight”

“It’s the new hotel library, it opening tomorrow but we’re letting our guests have a sneak preview…”

“It’s ok, I think I’ll pass on that one, thanks anyway” I said.

“You’re welcome” she said.

I went to the elevator and pressed the button. I looked up. The digitized floor reading was changing swiftly. Then ‘Ding’ and the doors opened. I went in and pressed 4. The doors closed and up I went. Seconds later, the doors opened and I stepped out and walked down the long airless corridor back to my room. I slid my key into the lock.

“You sure you don’t want to read anything?”

I turned around. It was George.

In his right hand, a book.

In his left hand a gun.

I took my chances.

********

This story was inspired by my many enjoyable visits to the Myopic Bookstore, in the wonderfully boho Wicker Park/Bucktown district of Chicago, USA. It opens late into the night but not as late as I mentioned in the story (license my friends!) and is the most cavernous and well stocked second-hand bookstore I’ve ever been to and believe me, I’ve been to one to two!

 I got the idea for the story when I started to contemplate the sheer volume of books there were in the store, and in the world to.

I started to wonder if all the books would ever been read again or would they be condemned to a life of dusty anonymity. This made me feel a little melancholic and thus, the seed of my story was planted. What if the books got fed up being ignored and kidnapped a hapless soul to make him read them and not let him go until he was done.

When this plot formed in my head, I beat a hasty path to the door and out onto the street.

PS : I have returned since.

If you ever want to visit and say hello to George and take some quality time out of your life, then you can find Myopic Books right here:

http://www.myopicbookstore.com/

1564 N. Milwaukee Ave Chicago, IL 60622
Conveniently located near the Damen Blue Line CTA stop.

Trapped in Myopia : Short Story : Episode 6

24 Friday Feb 2012

Posted by Martin J Frankson in Short Stories

≈ Leave a comment


Time passed slowly like grit through clinched teeth.

I paced the aisles. I shouted for help. I kicked shelves, wrecked the counter and banged on walls. I checked my cell phone again but it was no use. I succumbed to sleep in the end, more out of the self-induced balm of narcolepsy that wholesome tiredness. I fell to the floor and curled up in a ball and slept deeply.

The next morning, I awoke. I rubbed my eyes and looked around me. I hadn’t moved. I was still there, still in the bookstore. I jumped to my feet and called for help. I looked at my cell phone. The battery was dead. Then I remembered my Zippo.

I’d burn my way out.

I reached inside my jacket and whipped out my lighter and rubbed metal on flint it. A long orange and yellow plume of flame shot out like an long ephemeral feather. I grabbed the first book that came to hand. I didn’t give a fuck what it was, as long as it had paper. I set the flame to a handful of pages and waited for them to take light.

But they didn’t.

In fact, the paper didn’t even singe. I flicked the flame off and felt the paper. Perhaps it was damp but no. The paper was as dry as the eyes of a rich widow. I threw the book down and tried to set another one alight. And then another and another until I gave up. Nothing look light.

Then the voice.

“We’ll let you off this once but if you damage one single page of any of us, you will never leave. Never leave”

I shouted things like ‘Fuck you’ and roared until my throat hurt but it was like shouting at some twisted God. It didn’t make me feel any better I have to admit but I had to let it out.

I walked around the aisles and that was when I found a ladder. There was nothing for it but to start at the back, top left shelf and begin reading the first book then the next.

I cheated sometimes. I skimmed several dozen pages at a time but the books always seemed to know. I would hear a sign before the book would flick its pages back to the start, making me read it all over again. Days passed. There were no windows, no means of keeping track of day or night. My watch had stopped working and I had long since dispensed with it. I flung it in a fit of rage against the counter and it smashed to bits.

Beyond repair.

Irrational I know but I wasn’t in the mood for winning Nobel prizes in reasonable behavior at that time.

Strange things then happened. Well, it’s strange what becomes normal after a while but every day when I woke up, a loaf of bread and a jug of water was left by my feet. At the far corner, a chemical toilet and bidet. Whatever or whoever was doing this to me didn’t want me dead or leaving turds all over the joint. This was what I ate and drank. White bread and water, just like prisoners in bad cartoons.

I read one book a day at first until I found a book about speed-reading, which I thought was useful but I couldn’t quite master it. I practised it but it felt like skimming and looked where that led me. I progressed to reading two and sometimes three books a day.

I became militaristic about it.

I closed the world, my old world, out of my mind. Just man and books. I saw myself as just having landed on the Normandy beaches. Each book, a field beween here and Berlin. I had to fight my way through each and every single one. There was no shortcut, no chopper or freeway or jeep to suddenly take me to the end.

Months passed. I was resigned to having had lost my home and my job. Even if I was released how would I explain my absence? No-one would believe me. I’d have to start from scratch all over again somewhere else.

Time wore on. I felt I was Sysiphus, or a spirit trapped in a boulder in the middle of a stream, waiting for the stone to be sufficiently worn thin for me to escape. Someday it would happen but it wasn’t to be soon. I put such debilitating thoughts to the back of my head and just ploughed on. Every subject you could think off, every title too. Some I actually enjoyed reading, some were like wading through setting concrete with a hangover. Still, I had to keep going.

Eternities do pass in their own humdrum way and I was on the final shelf. I counted one hundred and twelve books. I got into a rhythm of reading three average sized books a day. I arranged the remaining books in order from longest to shortest. This would help me psychologically. The more I progressed down this shelf, the more books I’d be able to read due to their diminishing lengths, thus the quicker I’d get to the end.

**
I’ve just got to the final page of the final book. I’m scared now. What if I get to the end and nothing happens? What if I’ve missed a book? I don’t think I have. I was fastidious in making sure I didn’t jumble anything up. I was methodical, I chose each shelf in turn. I didn’t skip a book, why would I? The books were smart. They’d know if I ignored one of their gang. What if the books just didn’t give a shit about me and just let me languish here?

I got to the last paragraph and read each word aloud and slowly. The final sentence. The final word. Period. All done. I had completed my task. I jumped up.

“I’ve finished, I’m all done, I’ve finished. I’m through”

I waited for a response.

How I waited.

Trapped in Myopia : Short Story : Episode 5

23 Thursday Feb 2012

Posted by Martin J Frankson in Short Stories

≈ 3 Comments


“Come down here, what is this?”

He put his right finger to his lips like a ham actor.

“Strictly speaking, I am no friend of yours, my….only joking. But you are the best possible friend I could ever have, or anyone of us here could have”

“What do you mean, ‘anyone of us’. There’s just you and me”

“Look around you” he said. “Your friends are all around you. The door itself is all around you ”

Then he vanished.

I felt a tap on my shoulder. I jumped and turned around. He stood behind me.

“And the keys are all round you too. We just want attention, that’s all. The books. We the books. We all like attention, I bet you do too. How would it feel if every girl in every bar you ever walked into, just looked through like you didn’t exist? You stop at the bar and say hi but they don’t listen. They don’t even look at you never mind listen. How would you feel if this happens with every woman, in every bar, every night. Hmm? It either makes you want to stay at home, or….”

He paused and started to walk around me. I tried to turn around too to keep my eye on him.

“Get even” he rasped in my ear like old man with a tracheostomy.

“You can’t blame me for everyone ignoring you, it’s not my fault”

“Ah but you are the personification of the Reader. It is unfortunate though.We did sense a higher than usual degree of empathy from you. When you picked certain volumes off the shelves, we felt your pain. We decided that you would be the one”

“I be the ‘one’ what?”

“You will be the one who reads us all. One by one, you take us down, open us, caress us, blow the dust of us of all those dead forgotten years from out skin and read every single word of every single line. Then you put us lovingly back where you found us and take down the next one, and the next one and the next until there are nothing is next. Until every single book in here is read”

He vanished. I looked around me. He wasn’t to be seen. I ran around the shelves, looking in every direction but I was alone. Then I heard his voice. It was as though his voice was dipped in darkness and echo.

“Until every single one is read. Then you leave” said his voice. It seemed to come at me from all directions at once.

Silence fell.

Trapped in Myopia : Short Story : Episode 4

20 Monday Feb 2012

Posted by Martin J Frankson in Short Stories

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Crime, dead zone, Frankson, Myopia, Myopic Books, Mystery, Noir, priest river, turtle neck sweater, writing


“Hello? Hello?” I called out.

I was greeted with silence.

I heard a light snigger, from the back. I went back but there was no one there.

I called out again.

Nothing. If there was anyone there, they didn’t hear me.

Or didn’t care.

I pushed each of the shelves that were bolted to the walls but there was no give. Some books fell down and I peered into the gaps they left behind. I stuck my arm into the gaps but I felt nothing but brick. I kicked the shelves and the books but nothing. I took out my cell phone to call the police. Silence. No bars, a dead zone.

I called out again. I started to panic. “Can anyone hear me? I’m trapped. Can someone get me out”

“Yes, eventually” said a voice..

I turned around. By the counter stood a young man. He wore a trimmed beard, brown turtle neck sweater and a pair of flared Levi’s. He looked like a pleasant liberal cliché.

“Thank God for this” I said. “I swore someone was playing a trick on me”

The man smiled.

“How’s that?” he asked

“Well…” I said, “You won’t believe this and I feel like a real goof-ball saying this but as soon as I was about to leave, those two shelves there just behind me, closed in on me, blocking my way. The thing is, I have to go now, I’ve friends to meet across the road at the Earwax Café…”

A lie. I had no friends in Chicago. I had no friends in Priest River neither.

Needs must.

The young man crossed his arms and blinked like his eyes stung. He didn’t reply.

“Well, I was wondering if you could let me out” I asked, filling the awkward gap where the young man’s reply should have been.

“Yes, I can let you out “ he said.

“Great! Thanks” I replied. I stood there expecting him to move somewhere or walk somewhere or do something but he didn’t. He just stood where he was, smiling at me. I started to feel a little cold. The temperature dropped somewhat yet a film of sweat formed on my back and my forehead.

“Could I leave now?” I asked. “I have to really leave now”

“I’m afraid you can’t” he said.

I freaked a little.

“Listen here mister, I have to fucking go now and you let me out of here. You’re holding me against my will. That’s a crime the last time I looked”

I lunged at him, aiming to grab his lapels but as soon as I grabbed them, he vanished. My fists held nothing but frustration and clammy air. Cold sweat oozed from every pore. My heart beat a crescendo, I could even hear it. Heartbeats freak me out at the best of times but this one, boy. I turned around.

There he was again, but now standing where the gap in the shelves used to be. He lowered his head, staring at me with his cold blue eyes. He was still smiling an assassin’s smile.

“What the fuck is going here, who the fuck are you?”

He cleared his throat.

“We don’t like being ignored and we’ve had enough” he said.

“I don’t understand, who doesn’t like being ignored?” I asked

He raised his hands and moved them from side to side.

“Us, my friend. The books. We are tired of being ignored. We sit there, day after day, week after week, year after…you get the picture. People come in and browse. They glance at us, that’s a match one. Get plucked off a shelf, match two…”

He started to walk around, circling me.

“…flick through us, match three. Take us to the counter and buy us, well, that’s a lottery win”

I decided I had enough.

“I don’t know who you are but you are not a book you freak. Just get me the fuck out of here” I grabbed him. He didn’t vanish this time. He felt solid, real. I started to laugh.

“I know what this is” I laughed. He smiled. “This is some TV show. You’re a magician. You’re like David Copperfield” I laughed again. He mimicked my laughter. I thought I rumbled him. Any second now, the shelves would roll back to reveal a television crew and a round of applause from the staff-in-hiding and bystanders. I’d feel a bit foolish for a second or so but I’d also feel really relieved. I grabbed his lapels and we both laughed like hyenas but he floated off into the air, waiving at me as he looked down at me, gliding upwards until he stopped hovering a foot from the ceiling.

“My friend” he chuckled. “You believe what you will to help you get through this”

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Recent Posts

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  • Off The Cuff Part 12 : Literary Conversation with Dietrich Kalteis, Sam Wiebe & Samantha J Wright
  • Off The Cuff Part 7 with Dietrich Kalteis, Robin Spano and Martin J Frankson
  • Off the Cuff : Part 6 with Dietrich Kalteis and Martin J Frankson

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