Tag: short story

Categories
Adulthood Non-fiction Stories Writing

In a crazy world where good things happen.

3.

From about 3pm onward recently I have found tiredness getting in the way of my smile and upbeat enthusiasm. I’m done. It’s as if the business slows along with my energy. It is during this time period when good stories get me through.

The other day I was getting faded when a lady came in adhering very strictly to the social distancing measures. I get it. Everyone is being careful but some are certainly stricter and way more scared than others. This is no time for judgement. I simply went with it a reached as far as my arm would let me in order to take the note from her and then had to semi chuck the change back into her hand.

Apparently I wasn’t being as subtle as I had thought as she cottoned on to my confused expression.

It turns out she works for the NHS so witnesses this pandemic through a very different perspective to me. I admire them all.

We got chatting. She was telling me how awful the supermarkets are and because she is in the vulnerable category as well as working longer hours, she is trying to get deliveries rather than physically going shopping.

She was telling me how difficult it is to find slots available despite having a reason to be classed as a priority customer. We were discussing how ludicrous it all is.

I asked if she had our number, ensured she lived locally (as in not in Manchester or something drastic when delivering would be insane) which I knew she would, and explained how we would deliver if she ever needed.

She was delighted and didn’t realise how much we stocked. Nor did she realise that we offered to deliver.

That was one worry off her mind, she said, and happily left.

Another happy tale.

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Categories
fiction Stories Writing

Dalliance (Part 3)

He was the first person to decide things for her. He was the first to control when she got up, what she did in a day, what time she left to go home and what time she would be going out again. He didn’t much care for fashion and particularly liked her style, it was one of the things he pointed out at the early stages when he was still trying to chat her up, but if anyone decided fashion for her then it was him. He controlled everything and in waiting on his command for them to leave the field she contemplated when and how it had happened this way. For the first time since her eyes clocked him in the office three months ago, part of her felt ashamed for letting this happen.

‘Ok, now we can go,’ he instructed.

‘What if I want to stay here a little longer,’ Lisa replied, with a flirtatious tone to her voice, not meaning a word of what she was saying.

‘Then you can stay here on your own.’

Sometimes Lisa got frustrated at how Darren held so much control over her and she thought about this as they walked hand in hand back into the city, knowing that this action must stop when they reached the second bridge. As they walked the same feeling that filled Lisa whenever in Darren’s company trickled through her body. A smile covered her face and warmth was felt in her heart, his hand strong in hers. The temperature of the air felt hot on their skin too as if they were on holiday in Barcelona and heading for the next bottle of under-priced wine.

The memory of how perfect their evening had been deflected all of this frustration and she forced herself to allow the worry to leave with it and merely enjoy the moments that they had left before they both returned home. Home to their individual apartments on different streets with different families to care for. It was gone ten, but Lisa would still have to contend with Mollie’s nightmares that were happening on repeat lately and Darren would return to a peaceful household, ready for his one-year old’s morning cries at around three o’clock in the morning.

Categories
fiction Stories Writing

Dalliance (Part 2)

Tonight’s spot was a darkening skyline, an empty field and spiky grass on their bottoms. They had forgotten a blanket, or rather they intentionally didn’t bring a blanket for fear somebody would notice their plan and follow them. They always wished to be alone on these special occasions.

The sunset had been and gone in its deep orange glory and they had both captured it on their phones, purposefully not capturing an image of the two of them gazing into it and ensuring that they posted the pictures online at very different times. They felt a sunset post on Instagram looks far less suspicious than a selfie of the two of them, plainly stating their actions, but the memory of a wonderful time would still be there, captured on their phones.

‘Come on, Daz, we really should get going,’ said Lisa, noticing the dark and pre-empting the questions that she would receive on her return home.

‘Please. One moment more.’

Once again Darren’s authority had won her over and she remained seated for half an hour longer than she would have done if on her own.

Lisa had always been such an independent individual and never relied much on anyone else. Throughout her education she was thoroughly organised and depended only on herself for answers. She had a perfected morning routine from the age of ten which included making her own breakfast, her own lunch and her parents a cup of tea each, just the way they liked it. This ritual wasn’t even instigated by her parents because by the time she reached the age when they would have encouraged independence she already had so much so didn’t need their guidance.

When she started her first job, she never relied on her mother to wake her in the morning and in fact most of the time she was doing the wake-up rounds and getting her parents ready for the day.

She couldn’t understand when she went to university how some of her friends had a selection of meals made by their parents and stored in the freezer so all they had to do was microwave them each night. One of her friends’ mothers went as far as labelling each meal with which day of the week it needed to be consumed on, removing any need for thought there too. She couldn’t understand how people had got to the age of eighteen and didn’t know how to boil an egg. Nor did she see why they needed their mothers to ring them on the morning of an exam to check that they were awake in time. It was a different world and totally bizarre to the one she inhabited. Despite her advanced self-government skills, she was weak when it came to Darren.

Categories
fiction Stories Writing

Dalliance (Part 1)

‘I’m tired. Shall we go to bed now?’

‘You’re always tired, love.’

‘I know, but the worrying makes me so tired I get sick.’

‘You worry far too much. Chill out, it’s all going to be fine.

‘Please, honey. My eyes are literally drooping shut. I might never be able to open them again, you know?’

‘Really?’

‘Really.’

‘You do have beautiful eyes.’

‘Are they your favourite feature of mine?’

‘One of many.’

‘Stop changing the subject. Bed.’

‘Ooh. Miss dominant. Let’s wait here a little bit longer.’

‘Oh, ok then.’

Darren poured the remainder of the wine equally into each glass and spoke with such charm in his voice and that same smirk on his face that Lisa had fallen for three months ago when they locked eyes on each other in the office. Nobody noticed at the time except the two of them who spent the best part of a week staring into each other’s desk space before acknowledging their admiration and suggesting meeting outside of work.

Lisa found it incredibly difficult to disagree with anything he said so she simply went along with it all, as naughty as she felt. They would sit in the seediest spots, but it all seemed fine because she was with him and he was with her.

They rarely spoke much when in these places, they just sat and enjoyed each other’s energy pressing so closely onto their skin that it remained with them when they were apart. This could be for the next few hours, the next few days or once it was a whole week but the energy impression remained on their frame throughout the time, so it felt as though they were never truly separated.

Lisa hadn’t had many lovers in her time and certainly nobody that she loved quite in the same way as Darren. It was a different kind of love altogether. A love that grabbed her by both hands and would never let her go, she knew that. The sort that would simultaneously get you in to trouble, whilst keeping you out of it as well. It was like a friend who was a bad influence, one you knew should be ditched but you also knew your life would be significantly worse off without it.

Categories
Adulthood fiction Observations Stories Writing

The Friend

“So, that’s all we have time for on the programme this week.”

There’s a soothing aspect to having the radio on as a constant background noise. It is something that I feel strongly about and as a result, my house is never quiet. Whether I’m leaving it on so that Poppy, my Spaniel, doesn’t feel lonely while I’m out in the day, or to keep my mind focused on the words being said so that it doesn’t wander into those dangerous dark places, I always have sound.

Poppy’s favourite station is Radio 2, though she does like Heart FM on Sunday’s – musicals and love songs aren’t her thing. I particularly enjoy Radio 4 for it’s discussions and the peaceful tranquility that comes with it. I feel I learn something merely by having it playing out even if I’m not listening and, most of all, I feel like I have company when I am alone.

I find Sunday’s the hardest days to cope after everything. Sunday morning television is hideous and currently I haven’t a good book to indulge in. I love to lose myself in fictional worlds but it has to be the correct, gripping read and my taste is becoming pickier as my age increases.

Poppy lay on my lap sound asleep but in a state whereby if I move she will know instantly and pine for me to return. I can sense it and, apparently, so can she. Stroking her soft fur brings me calmness but otherwise I am fidgety and restless. What to do.

I press my phone and there is nothing. No messages, no likes or comments on social media, not even a breaking news broadcast. Nothing is going on.

Outside is cold but sunny and bright which brings envy towards my friends with kids and perfect families, probably playing outdoors or off out for lunch at a country pub that they saw recommended in the paper. I rarely envy children having made a conscious decision not to have them, but times like this I do.

Breathing in slowly and out deeply relaxes me further but only for a second when a car pulls up onto next doors driveway causing Poppy to bark loudly in attempt to warn possible intruders off. She fails to realise that they live there and it is perfectly within their rights to park up.

I tune back into the radio that has been playing throughout my morning and chuckle slightly at the comedians. Even though I don’t find them very funny at all, I feel I should at least try to laugh on occasion today.

The day suddenly feels huge with an expanse of time to fill in which I have no plans and nobody to plan with. I pick up the paper and attempt the crossword to add productivity to my day. At least I will have achieved something that way.

The first clue. Seven down. I can’t do it.

The door rings. Jenna.

“Oh hey darling, I was just checking in. See if you’re alright. Martin has gone out with the kids. I wanted some time to myself.”

Imagine that, I think, wanting some time to yourself.

“Lovely to see you.” I say, genuinely so grateful for her presence.

“Here, look. I brought a bottle. It’s up to you but I really fancy one.”

“It is the weekend after all,” I agree, pretending I’ve got it all together with my normal, upbeat response.

I take the perfectly chilled bottle from her, my thumb prints marking the icy casing and put it on the kitchen side while retrieving two glasses from the cupboard.

“I’d usually not consider drinking before 1pm,” I say with a smirk.

“This isn’t a usual day,” replies Jenna, reassuringly but making me question her mental state as well.

I pour equally generous measures into the glasses and smile at the sound. I smile at the sudden buzzing feeling inside me. A feeling I’d forgotten about.

“Cheers to friends,” we both say simultaneously.

The first sip and I am reminded how lucky I am.

Categories
fiction Stories Writing

The Divide

Jamie stood shivering as he awaited her arrival.

“The train from Manchester Piccadilly is delayed. It is expected to arrive in twenty three minutes on platform 7B. We are very sorry for any inconvenience caused.”

His nerves seemed to wobble more at this announcement which was given in such a mundane and unapologetic manner. The usual excitement was also present but currently nerves took over.

He tried to notice things to sway his focus from the bitterly cold air but his teeth continued to chatter. A couple to his left greeted one another with a simple peck on the cheek and an unenthusiastic hello which indicated to him that they had been married far too long.

Some children were running to get a train, fretting in their own chaos. They had probably never been left to their own devices until now, he thought. Bless them.

Two guards were stood chatting to the side, not doing much signalling. One had a litter picker in his right hand but he was more using it for the gestures that accompanied his story rather than picking up rubbish.

As he glanced around he saw many happy couples together, perhaps travelling to relatives, travelling home, heading into work or possibly out for the day, but they would all have their own story. None would be as private as his. He was sure of it.

Fifteen minutes had passed when he saw the lights of the approaching carriages, hoping that it would be the one and looking to his fingertips to see if they had begun to turn blue.

The train edged towards the platform until it came to a halt and he tried very hard not to cheer. Finally.

Among a mass of people exiting the doors, it was hard to spot her. Most looked disheveled from obviously a stressful journey south. Some looked furious and he wondered why they had stuck at it and not given up.

Butterflies began to outdo the nerves as he waited while racking his brains for a decent bar to start their time together. He always lover their time together though it wasn’t very often these days.

A couple barged him out of the way rushing to catch their connection that they would have had masses of time to catch if it wasn’t for the delay.

“Sorry mate,” the man said in a friendly manner, while the wife dragged him in the right direction huffing as they went by.

He looked to his side and caught eyes with an elderly man, obviously waiting for somebody as well and waiting more patiently than most people on the platform. He smiled at him and the man smiled warmly back.

As his eyes returned to the focus of the door he saw her. There she was in her neat blonde glory, stood with her bag in one hand and her opened purse in the other, the photograph of her children almost falling out with a photo of her husband tucked behind it.

Categories
fiction Stories Writing

Flight (part 3)

One more visit to the hospice before my flight and I know this will be the hardest visit yet. I am borrowing our neighbour’s car because mine is back in England and we sold Mammy’s once she got too poorly to drive. It was an impulse decision which we clearly hadn’t thought about properly because it would have been very useful to have over the past month, a lot more useful than the two thousand euros that we got for it.

I load my gigantic backpack into the boot ready for Mary to take me to the airport after my visit and mentally prepare myself for one of the hardest goodbyes to date. Not one bit of me is feeling excited in this current moment. In fact, every bit of me is questioning whether this is the correct thing to be doing at such a helpless time. Then I hear Mammy in my ear telling me to go, spread my wings, find whatever it is I need in life and come back with lots of stories. I stop everything and smile for a minute.

I have done the journey to the hospice so many times that I don’t have to concentrate on the directions because I know the route off by heart. In fact, it scares me once I arrive in the car park and turn off the engine that I can’t remember half the journey as I was totally spaced out and unaware of my surroundings – my mind was elsewhere.

I carefully place my chip in my pocket and choke at the two-euro charge to park in a place where everybody is visiting somebody who is dying. It’s a lot better than the extortionate rates that they charge on the hospital side. I suppose you’re unaware in that case how long your relative will live so they may as well rinse you for as much as they possible can. It makes sense.

Mammy’s room is on the ground floor with a beautiful view of the bright yellow Wicklow gorse all in bloom outside in the courtyard. When she has fallen asleep during visits I have taking every pleasure in watching people walking around this space, savouring the last precious moments with one another. Be it husbands and wives, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, they all look content in a beautiful final scene.

I walk down the long corridor to room seven where Mammy is. A nurse squeezes out of the door quickly before I can get in. She must be new because otherwise she would have greeted me. We all know each other now because I have spent so many hours in here lately.

I look over to Mammy’s bed and see a sight I have been imagining but hoping would never actually happen. The whole room stops for a moment and all goes quiet inside my head. Perhaps Mammy has been moved to a different room.

I gasp in shock though it is the inevitable. It is real. A nurse runs to me in attempt to comfort me with a hug, but I want to go over to her. To touch her. To give her one last kiss and say my final goodbyes. Real goodbyes not temporary.

The staff respect my privacy and leave the room telling me to take my time and call them if there is anything that I need. I sit on the bed next to Mammy in a space that is as if she had planned my visit and left for me. I lean over to kiss her cheek and see Jenna’s body out cold on the floor, a needle in her wrist and marks on her neck – dead.  

Categories
fiction Stories Writing

Flight (part 2)

That was the great thing about this happening to a person like my Mam. She is such a strong lady that she made her cancer some sort of joke. A joke for her anyway. She’d constantly go on about how much we’d all miss her because she is possibly the greatest person to walk this earth.

Of course, she was exaggerating, she didn’t love herself like most politicians out there or celebrities who have been born into fame and constantly told by people around them how perfect they are. The hilarious thing about these situations was how everyone around her would be hysterically crying, genuinely sad tears and she would just laugh it off and tell everyone to man up. That was easy for her to say. She was the one that was going to die.

My mother’s dealing with her stage four diagnosis was what made the horrific scenes at the hospital easier. The tubes going in and out of each and every vein. The photos Daddy sent me after her first few rounds of chemo and the news that it wasn’t working. The more upbeat photos of her sat with a large gin and tonic in the hospice more recently. It was all of this that encouraged me to book my flight to Paris on September 4th. Today.

However, today is different. I’m not feeling as cocky in my ability to handle the loss of my mother which will inevitably happen. Initially I thought that exploring Europe would set me free from the pain that is about to come but then I feel the pain will creep up on me sooner and I’m not ready to handle it alone.

I have had such an intensely beautiful month spent in Dublin with my family, visiting Mammy every day and making memories that I am going to hold on so tightly. The same way a toddler would squeeze onto their Mum out of jealousy while she was breastfeeding their new born brother. So many memories yet not enough. I am not ready to go.

As I sit and pack the last of my survival kit into a bag that already looks too big to lug around station after station and up numerous sets of hostel steps, I stare at the photo of Mammy and I from graduation. The proudest moment of my life so far and one of hers. I look to the right of me at Jenna and consider where it all went wrong. I wonder what she is doing right this minute and a part of me wants to speak to her. Though it was her decision to leave, to allow her life to go off track, she still may silently need her older sister.

Categories
fiction Stories Writing

Flight (part 1)

It is the big day I have been looking forward to for so many years. For so long have I wanted to spread my horizons further than London’s south bank and the memories that I have of Dublin as a child. A place that I recently felt urged to return to yet I didn’t really know why so I booked a cheap Ryan Air flight number FR115 a month ago and headed home for the first time in thirty years.

It wasn’t only to visit Mam in the hospice because that didn’t need to be done for a month continuously. I have been preparing for the outcome since her diagnosis and realistically could get there when needed to say my final farewells. There was something pulling me to my home town, like a gust of gravity that whooshed like a tornado over London grabbing only me and taking me over the Irish Sea to my place of birth.

I am off to Paris tomorrow on an adventure around Europe. I booked my interrail pass the day after I found out about Mam’s cancer as if to stick my two fingers up to the world for cutting another life short to that awful disease. Though travelling had always been at the back of my mind, at the bottom of my to-do list, I had always been waiting and making excuses about why not to go. Not having anybody to go with was usually the main one but for some reason also the world seemed a bit scary, scarier still each time I started browsing flights and hostels.

Receiving the painful news about Mammy removed this fear because nothing is worse to fear than death, the fear she had been instantly faced with, which could crop up at any time. On that day I headed straight to the nearest travel agents and paid one hundred and eighty pounds for my ten stop Euro rail pass inside three months.

‘Don’t you think you should wait until…’ Uncle Jimmy had remarked on the phone once Mam had told him my exciting news.

‘Wait for what?’ I replied. ‘My mother to die?’

I felt harsh saying this and even more so when Jimmy began to sob on the other end of the line, but I knew that Mammy wouldn’t have wanted me to wait. She’d have wanted me to go out and explore knowing that I could return at any time when things got really bad. She never wanted me to put my life on hold for anybody not even her and she was even more persistent about this after her diagnosis.

‘You’re twenty-two.’ She’d say. ‘Don’t hold out for me to die. It won’t be easy and no time waiting in expectation is going to make it easier.’

Categories
fiction Writing

Missing (Part 3)

I walk around the side through the conifer trees so that I can hide behind a trunk if anybody should step outside. This route also gives me the option to peer in through the bifold doors to see where they all are in the house. A thought passes through me as to why I am being so secretive when I have done nothing wrong but then if Mum knew of my intentions, she would never let it happen. Knowing whole heartedly that it is a bad decision to drive in the current mental state that I am in, I turn on the ignition, exit the driveway and bolt down the A64 heading towards home.

I have always loved this road and enjoyed many drives on it, the sun gleaming onto the windscreen, windows open, our hair sweeping in front of our faces. Sarah’s beaming grin lighting up the rainier days and her beauty outside and within brushing off onto my miserable frame. The laughter filling the car so that no trouble in the world could get in between us. Each moment with her is total bliss.

The road reminds me of holidays and how life with Sarah has changed my entire view on them. I used to live for getting away. For weeks where all my cares and worries vanished along with the mundaneness of and everyday working existence. Nowadays, my happiness comes when driving in the opposite direction down the road heading home. There is no happier place for me, and I no longer continuously wish to be away from it. Home is a good place and my life is a constant vacation whenever I am around Sarah.

My mind slips back into reality when I glance to the passenger seat to see yesterdays newspaper with our story on the front page. I look up, slam my foot on the breaks causing the car to screech to a halt upon seeing police cars by the edge of the road, signalling traffic to go around them in an orderly and safe fashion. My vision blurs as I look at other drivers throwing their bodies around in anger and frustration. Others merely pause to stare before zooming off into the distance. More than one emergency vehicle usually attracts viewers from the prying public, but four flashing police cars makes even the most uninterested passer by glare over their shoulder.

I slowly approach the scene and begin to veer round following the cones, but I swiftly ignore the police signals after seeing what it is that they have found.