Short Fiction
Issue #1
A Temporary Sense of Hope
*
‘And you feel – what? – that your suffering is in some way inauthentic?’
‘Yes. It can be. Yes’
*
The fluid sound of the sirens, now swelling, now receding, seeps into the slow piano music coming from upstairs. These moments of beauty are transitory. Their bare limbs glowing, they are born of mastery and the mundane. These blind buds: it is very cold. The children come in brown cloth, playing the ukulele; they take me outside into the snow. This clean snow.
I watched the children in the swimming pool. I watched the lifeguard watching them. I liked it best when they swam underneath the water, when their forms were indistinct, segmented by ripples. The artificial blue, the voices trapped by the transparent roof. The lifeguard, breathing into the dead mouths, choking like fish. Filmy with chlorine water, born too soon. I watched my feet, pressed up against the wooden benches. Brown shoes sensible and safe.
No one can say that what I did was wrong.
*
I had a wife, her name was Sylvia. She was very ill, she lay in bed the hot blood heavy in her veins. She put my hand between her legs. Can you not see I am burning? she said. She died quickly, she was gone, I found her ashes in the bed. With a ten pound note I breathed her in. I play videos
to pass the time. I carry round inside me those I love. It has always been like this. When we were married I turned away to get undressed. Sylvia’s white breasts stared at me.
*
That morning, it was raining. Eloise put on her Wellington boots, which were green, with yellow eyes above the toes and a thin red line of lizard mouth around each foot. At school the children were given injections. Gymnasium, awash with bodies, crying out in pain, an underwater sense of detachment. The fishtail floor sucked down in the centre, smooth black hole where all blood flows, the white socks sagging around tired ankles. The children eager to participate in this, a simulation of their own mass deaths. Eloise returns to the empty classroom, opens her tray, marked by a butterfly symbol. Her assignment is to draw this crisp packet. From the hall come soaring, indistinguishable whoops. They echo like a swimming pool. Eloise has lost the green.
*
I dreamed our bed was full of litter, candy wrappings, magazines, endless, accumulated flyers, an overused tissue. I pulled the covers back and was amazed. I dreamed that cataracts bloomed in his eyes, watching those films, he turned his cloudy eyes on me, saw nothing. These atrocity films, their grainy images, hard to make out at first, then bodies would crystallise out of blurred pixels, shadows for eyes, their counterparts of blood. Up close, the thin white lines of the television set.
Then a jerk in the images, watching the bodies fall again. He turned the voice over down low. And then the succession of frozen photos, smiling, showing gappy teeth: their haircuts rooted in specific years, their bright school jumpers and their names. He wrote them down, kept a list. Matching the names to the photographs, he read aloud at night. Nicola, Kylie, Lucie, Ben.
I pulled the plug from the sink. I watched the red blood sink into the plughole, leaving behind a slight stain on the white. The sirens throbbed, swelled and receded. Outside, kids were playing in the street.
***