Flash fiction: A Time of Darkness

It doesn’t repeat. But it rhymes

I hadn’t thought about that day for a while. But I’d never forgotten it, or what he’d said. I knew so little of him, then in a few sentences he told me everything – and just for a moment he showed affection, something he never did.

I told Mom about it and what he’d said, not then but a month or so later, when he’d left us, as we all knew he would.

“That’s quite something for your father,” she said. She emptied an ashtray and a little ash landed on her black mourning dress; she flicked it away. “Put those paper plates in the trash, please, honey. How did folks make such a mess in here, you’d think they’d be tidy after a funeral.” She picked up an empty Schlitz can. “Jesus, how many of these did your damn cousins drink?”

“Mom, we’re German,” I said. “Sausage and beer. It’s how you get through a Lutheran funeral.”

She chuckled. Then she frowned. “He never showed emotion.”

“Never?”

“Never.” She looked out the window at the tall trees and the darkening sky. “They had no tears left, you see. They shed them all early.” She turned towards me. “What did he tell you?”

“About Vinnitsa,” I said.

“Oh,” she replied.

*

So anyway.

It’s 43 years later and I ain’t 17 anymore; I’m 60 with grey hair, love handles and sagging tits, and I’m sitting in the same spot on the back deck of our house amid the wreckage of my life.

I’m a medical billing specialist. Well, that’s what I was this morning, anyway. I drove down to the office at Main and 14th like I always do – well, did – and parked on the empty lot next door, and went up to my desk on the third floor. It’s by the window. It’s the envy of the others, who work in cubicles and get no natural daylight, just the fierce glare of the striplights. “You got a great view here,” someone said once and I guess I did, right out over the carwash, Luigi’s Pizza on one side of it and the sleazy fried chicken joint on the other. Luigi’s is OK. I get takeout from it now and then. I’ve got to know the guy who owns it. “You Luigi?” I asked him once. “Nah, the name’s Vladimir,” he said. “Vlad’s Pizza ain’t got the same ring though.” I’ll give him that. The pizza was good though and they had loads of guys working in back. The chicken joint was busy too but I never went in there. “What do you get with your chicken wings in there?” I asked someone. “Salmonella,” he said. I passed. But now and then I used the carwash. Not the automatic rollers. I’d leave the car with them and three or four small, nuggety men with dark skins and high-pressure jets would fall upon it and clean it within an inch of its life and vacuum the inside and get rid of the dust and candy wrappers and empty Cheetos packets that I’m too big a slob to remove.

U.S. Customs and
Immigration Enforcement

Well, this morning I sat down at my workstation and switched on my PC and checked my phone and my email for messages. Nothing from my Ashley. I was hoping she’d come by soon, haven’t seen her for a month or two, but she’s kind of busy, she’s a single mom like I was and the father’s a useless P.O.S. just like her own was before him. I texted her. And I texted Maria. She hasn’t shown up now for two weeks and the house is a mess. I don’t know where she is.

Then I started processing a claim. Appendectomy. We have a list of cost codes and it’s just been updated. I open up on screen and start adding everything up. A day and a night in hospital, and it comes to $7,776. I gulp and go back through the figures and then I pick up the phone to my boss.

“Bob, I got an appendectomy and the wound dressings come to seven hundred bucks,” I say. “Are we kidding them?”

“Gimme the CPT code.”

I do.

“Nope,” he says. “We’re not kidding. Charge it up.”

“Is that OK? Who’s gonna pay?”

“Relax. His health plan will pay,” he says.

“Someone pays in the end,” I say.

“Yeah, I know that, you know that, all God’s chillun know that. How long you worked here, Greta?”

Too damn long, I think. I hang up. I look out the window and the sun is quite high already. I work on through the billings, checking the CPT codes, changing some here and there to lower the bills a little. Now and then I check my phone. No Maria. No Ashley. The buildings I can see through the window are a series of concrete cubes and neon signs, baking under a pale blue sky. I long for my back deck and my garden and an ice-cold beer.

I’m still looking out the window and daydreaming when a bunch of black cars pull up. Big ones, Ford F150s and Ford Explorers and a Suburban, all with tinted windows. They screech to a stop outside the car wash and Luigi’s Pizza and the Salmonella House and these guys in flak jackets and combat pants leap out and they’re armed and they’ve all got ski masks covering their faces. Jeez, they must be hot in this heat is my first thought, and then I see the letters ICE on their jackets and realise what they’re doing.

“F**k,” I yell out. Everyone looks round. Bob and several others are standing by my desk looking down at the street. “Go get ‘em, guys! Go! Go!” Bob yells. “Send ‘em to f**kin’ Salvador.”

They’re through the doors of all three places now and folks are streaming out and running, it’s like someone kicked an anthill. I see two ICE guys jump on a middle-aged woman and bring her down on the road and one’s got his knee on her back. There’s a short, thickset young man in a T-shirt and a reversed baseball cap and I see he’s the one who serves me pizza sometimes and now and then he gives me a wink and sticks on some extra topping. They’ve got him against the wall of Luigi’s. An older guy is marched to one of the SUVs, hands pinned behind his back, and kind of thrown in through the rear doors. Bob’s whooping like a lunatic. His secretary’s got her fists clenched and is punching the air and yelling Yeah! Yeah! like she was having a f**king orgasm. “You sick f**ks,” I yell but they don’t hear me. Then one of the guys from the carwash runs this way and I see him darting through the street door and the ICE men see him too late but they give chase, and two minutes later the door of the office bursts open and he’s standing there panting, looking around with his face set in a sort of rictus of horror and I remember father’s phrase from long ago, hunted – hunted and haunted, eyes blind with terror. Bob pushes past him to the door and yells down the stairwell He’s in here, come’n git him and he’s grinning and two of us shut the door and turn the catch, but the ICE agents are hammering on the other side and yelling Open up! United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement! We are a federal law enforcement agency! and the door bursts open and they grab him and drag him away. And I sink down into my seat.

“Bob,” I say, “you are a f**king creepazoid.”

*

It wasn’t going to end well, was it.

The HR lady sits me down in her office. “I gotta ask you, Ms Hauer. You called your supervisor, Mr Burdon, a – “ she mouths the profanity – “creepazoid?”

“I guess it was a bit mean to creeps, eh?” I say. She blanches a little. She’s very young, I reckon mid-20s, perfect makeup, a well-cut suit and just the right amount of jewellery, and I’m 60 with saggy boobs and sitting there in a tee shirt with my purse on my lap and I’ve just realised my stash tin’s poking out of it.

“Mr Burdon says there’s been long-standing performance issues,” she goes on.

“That’s because I won’t cover up for his crappy record keeping,” I say. “Or the way he tries to touch female staff. He has a thing for Latina girls, you know that? Trust me, he’s a major-league creep. You should get a life. How much did you pay for that suit?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“When I was your age, I’d flunked out of college, got knocked up at a party and had two DUIs already,” I say.

She frowns. “DUIs. I can’t see any traffic violations those on your file.”

“Oh God,” I say, and then I lose it. I tell he to go f**k herself, then do it again but sideways, then do it on the kitchen table. She blanches a bit more and tells me my health insurance will end at midnight. She takes my ID and has security see me out the building.

*

So it’s the end of the afternoon. I’m sitting on the back deck, about where I was that warm afternoon 43 years ago. I’m looking at the garden, it’s grown over with long grasses, not as he’d have had it – my God, every flower, every twig knew its place; I swear he made them parade in the morning. But I like it more like this. I saw a possum last night and there’s a family of raccoons too, and I hear their skirring in the mornings.

Nothing from Maria. But we can guess why now, can’t we.

Nothing from Ashley.

I roll a joint. It’s a big one. It’s a very big one. I’m gonna get as baked as a damn brownie.

I’m just about to light it when the deck creaks and I look around and there she is, in her denim shorts and a bikini top with her tattoos and her piercings and her bare feet and her dirty-blonde hair tousled like she just got out of bed and I wouldn’t be surprised if she just was in bed, though who knows who with. Ashley doesn’t tell me everything.

“Seriously, Mom?”

“What?”

“That’s not a freakin’ spliff, it’s a California redwood.”

“I’m celebrating. I just got terminated.”

“Oh, Mom. What did you do this time?”

“ICE raided the pizza joint and the carwash and Burdon was dancing around with glee and I called him a f**king creepazoid and he is because he’s a nasty little MAGA piece of s**t and…” I become aware that I’m crying, and I take out my handkerchief and wipe my face and blow my nose and it’s full of tears and snot. “What are you doing here anyway?” I say. “I’ve been texting you for days. Where’s Carla?”

“Guess I sensed trouble,” she says. “I got this little switch in my brain that tells me. Momma’s f**ked up again, it says. So I thought I’d come by. I got Carla a sleepover with her friend Ellie. She’s fine.”

“Well now you’re here, you can go to the fridge and get me a f**kin’ beer,” I say.

She nods, but hesitates, just for a moment, and looks at me, and her hand seems to be reaching out towards me. Then she turns and goes into the kitchen and comes back with two ice-cold bottles of beer and we crack them open and we sit there and for a few minutes we say nothing, passing the spliff back and forward.

“I did a great job with you,” I say after a while. “I raised a slutty stoner, just like myself.”

She grins. “Nah, it’s in the genes.”

“It isn’t. You never met your Prussian grandfather.”

“Grandma said he was kind of cold. Not unkind. But not much small talk.”

“He never showed much affection,” I say. “Except – there was this one time. When I was 17. A month before he died.” I get up and walk two yards or so into the garden and turn back and look at her. “I came in about this time, six maybe? – before dinner. And he’s sitting in a folding chair, right about here.”

*

This is what I told Ashley then.  About Dad. And what he told me that afternoon, in the garden, when I was 17 and had acne.

I’d been hanging out with the gang at the mall and when I came in, Mom was busy in the kitchen and I asked to help but she said, “It’s OK, honey. Go sit with your father in the garden. He likes it when you do that.”

“Does he?”

“Yes,” she said.

It was a warm day but he was wrapped in a blanket; he was near the end and very thin, and his cheekbones stuck out and his nose was like a beak and of course he’d lost most of his hair because you do, though there were a few wisps left below the crown. I sat on the edge of the deck, waving my legs to and fro.

“Where you been?” he asked. He had this gravelly voice and his accent was still strong, after 30 years in America.

“At the mall,” I said.

“What do you do at the mall? Never do I understand,” he said.

“Hang out. With friends.”

He grunted. I figured Dad wasn’t really that interested in what I did at the mall. Then I coughed, several times, loudly. “Sorry, Dad,” I said. “It’s one of those summer colds. I guess I mustn’t give it to you.”

He smiled slightly. “I do not think it makes much difference now.”

I winced. He seemed to see that he had hurt me in some way and cast around for something to say. “I nearly coughed myself to death once,” he said. “And my lungs filled up with fluid. I had pneumonia. I survived.”

“When was that?”

He frowned and I thought for a moment that he wouldn’t answer, then he said:

“The first winter after the war.  The English kept us in open-air cages. In Belgium.”

He’d never talked about the past. Somehow I’d known not to ask.

He didn’t seem like he’d say any more, so I asked him: “Were you a prisoner of war, Dad? How long did they keep you?”

“They kept me a while,” he said. “They didn’t believe my story, you see. I was a Gefreiter, a corporal, when they captured me. I was near Lübeck when the English took it. I got very sick in the cage and they moved me to a hospital. An English officer saw me there and said, he’s no corporal. He had recognised me. ‘I saw him in Heidelberg before the war,’ he said. ‘He was a student there. I am sure he is an officer. He has put on a corporal’s uniform to disguise what he has done.’ So they classified me as a C, a Nazi. And put me in a camp in the far north of Scotland. With all the Nazis.”

“Sounds like you had a blast,” I said.

I saw the ghost of a smile again.

“I got them to check my story. They transferred me to a better camp and I was even allowed out to work. Then they released me in 1947. I went back to Germany. But our home was in the East. And even in the West there was only rubble.”

“Why were you a corporal, Dad? Our family was kinda upscale, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, we had a small estate in Pomerania. Everything was lost when Germany collapsed.” He looked at me directly then, and I flinched a little, as I always did when he did that, right to the end. “I was not always a corporal. I was a lieutenant. An Oberleutnant. But I was – zum einfachen Soldaten degradiert… How do American soldiers put it?” He frowned. “Busted. Down to corporal.”

He stopped again, but I knew there was something that I needed to understand. I looked at him; he was trying to draw the blanket closer around him but his hand was thin and weak, and I did what I never did and touched him, pulling the blanket around his shoulders. I sat back on the deck.

“What happened, Dad?”

“I refused an order.” He looked at me again, and there was that faint smile. “A German does not refuse an order.”

“What was the order?”

“I should tell you, shouldn’t I.” For a moment he seemed almost to be talking to himself. “I should tell you. You must know of these things.” He seemed to be fighting for breath, then he said:

“It was near Vinnitsa in the Ukraine. We caught a family of Gypsies in the woods. My comrades decided they would have some sport, and got some horses from a village they’d burned. Then they released the family in the woods and told them to run and if they escaped they could go free. And they hunted them on horseback.”

I must have looked appalled. He looked at my face and continued.

“They got the children and shot them in the woods. The mother they captured and made to dance without her clothes, then they killed her. I wouldn’t join the hunt. So when they caught the father and brought him back to our quarters, the Major told me to kill him. I refused.”

I guess I was sort of stunned. I said nothing. After a minute he said:

“I saw his eyes. Hunted – hunted and haunted, eyes blind with terror.”

We sat in silence for several minutes. The sunlight retreated behind the tall trees and I could see him shiver slightly. Then I said:

“And they busted you, Dad?”

“Yes, they busted me. They didn’t say ‘demoted for not murdering’, of course. It was said I had shown weakness in the face of the enemy.”

He seemed exhausted and I sensed he didn’t want to say anything more. Then he said:

“Go and help your mother with the dinner.”

I stood up, and started toward the kitchen, then I heard him say: “Come here.” I did, and he pulled me gently towards him and he kissed me on the cheek. He never had before. He never did again. I drew back and saw his eyes were glistening a little.

“How could they do these things, Dad?” I asked him.

“You can’t understand,” he said. “Not now. It was a time of darkness.”

*

We’re sitting on the deck still. It’s getting dark. We’ve finished the joint and Ashley has her arm around my shoulders.

The Gypsy Girl Mosaic of Zeugma

Gazientep Museum of Archaeology

More flash fiction from Mike:

Evolution The world is turning

When Time Stands Still A hurricane lashes Pershing Square

A Man For All Seasons Net zero.The Stranger's Bar. And a three-line whip

A History Lesson Why do we study it?

Parallel Worlds Heat pumps and lentils. And a nice glass of Marsala

The Creatives Meeting a tech bro

Homecoming A sort of love story

Solitude A Cold War memory

Rhodri Hactonby's Maps A question of social geography

Hiraeth A yearning…

Strange Places A spirit in the sky 

A Sideways Journey Things might have been different

Displaced Encounter on E94th Street

Belonging Do you? Where?
Leaving Home A house has memories

Mike Robbins’s latest book, On the Rim of the Sea, is now 

available as a paperback or ebook. More details here.

Flash fiction: Another Time

A tear in the fabric

He was unpopular so they gave him Louise.

“She’s pretty weird,” said his boss, Sam. He was on a Microsoft Teams call with the Regional Sales Manager.

The latter glared back through the screen, fiddling with the very small, very expensive earbuds that had arrived that morning and kept falling out of his ear.

“And he’s so dull I am surprised the clients can bear to see him,” he replied. “Total nerd. That Dr Who stuff. And his voice. Listening to a sales pitch from him must be like hearing the Beijing phone directory read by a sedated sloth.”

Delabane/Creative Commons

Sam wondered if Beijing had a phone directory, or sloths. Out loud he said: “Well, maybe they’ll cancel each other out. Either he’ll bore her to death or she’ll have one of her turns and frighten him to death.”

“With luck,” said the Regional Sales Manager. “In fact she sounds rather …worrying. Why is she so damned odd?”

“I don’t know,” said Sam. “I think her mother was French.”

“Oh dear. Well, I shall leave it with you.”

He screwed his earbud back in one last time and his image faded. Sam called Ben in from the outer office.

“We’re giving you Louise for the next few days,” he said.

“Oh,” said Ben. Then: “I think I can manage on my own, actually.”

“Nonsense. You need a sales engineer with you. Clients always ask for something to be sorted while you’re there. Let’s go and find her.”

They saw her from behind, walking up the corridor. Ben didn’t recognise her; she had recently been transferred from the Darenth office, having been moved in quick succession from Eastbourne, Sevenoaks and Tonbridge; strange tales pursued her. She was quite tall, slim, with a long glossy ponytail of blonde hair, and from behind she looked elegant and rather graceful.

“I say, Louise!” called Sam. She stopped, and turned, and Ben took a step backwards, for her eyes were ice-blue, like a glacial lake, and something turned over in his stomach.

*

BEN put her out of his mind that night. His mum made spaghetti bolognaise and he always liked it when she did that, and then he wanted to check and clean his metal detector. He had noticed his route for tomorrow would take him close to the site of a medieval village and hoped he might have a spare half-hour. When he had done that, he took Tardis for a walk then watched the episode of Dr Who he had taped the previous Saturday but could not make head nor tail of it. “It’s gone all funny, hasn’t it,” said his mum. “It’s all since they had a black bloke as Dr Who. It’s woke, that’s what it is.”

“But we don’t really know what colour Dr Who was anyway, do we?” said Ben. “I mean, it’s a bit like Jesus really.” He went out to plug the charger in the car.

The next morning he picked Louise up at seven and they drove to their nine o’clock appointment in the Midlands. He looked at her from the corner of his eye and could see no meat-cleaver concealed about her person; she sat there calmly enough and seemed happy with the morning news on Radio 5 Live. She even gave a cry of amusement when she saw the little plastic Dalek stuck to the dashboard. Now and then he ventured a remark and she replied politely – in fact, she seemed friendly. But she said little.

At length they turned off the A34 and down a broad approach road to an industrial estate. Ben noticed what looked like a small obelisk at the entrance.

The call went well enough. Carter & Co Wholesale Distribution had been happy with their system but now thought it might need upgrading. Ben and the owner watched as Louise sat down with the IT manager and went through each gremlin. She treated him with an easy warmth. There was no sign of oddness. And the client was very happy to be told that they need not upgrade the system for now and that every issue could be resolved. After a cordial leavetaking, they drove out towards the access road.

“You seemed to deal with everything in your stride,” said Ben. “They were very happy.”

“The problems were very simple,” she replied, and laughed. “They often are with Linux servers. They were just out of space on the disk, you know! I showed him how to monitor disk usage and clean up outdated files, logs and data. He just needs to run ‘du’ from the command prompt.”

“You didn’t make it sound that simple,” he said.

“No. There is often something the client should have done and didn’t but you do not make it sound simple because if you do that you will make him feel like an idiot.” She thought for a minute. “Especially if it is a he. Which it often is.” And she looked at him and gave him a brilliant smile.

There’s nothing wrong with this charming woman, he thought. He steered up the approach road and saw again the small monument, three or four feet at most; behind it was an area of old decayed concrete, grown with shrubs; it looked strange in the anodyne estate.

He was about to remark upon it when he heard a terrible sound, half-scream, half moan; turning, he saw her bent below the level of the dashboard, her head cradled in her arms. He stopped the car. “Are you all right? My dear, are you all right?” he asked, then realised that HR might feel ‘my dear’ was over-familiar. Then she raised her head and he saw that her eyes were wide and staring with horror and then she started to cry.

“What is wrong? Do you need a doctor?” he asked.

She shook her head several times. “I will be fine,” she said, and wiped her eyes. “Please do not worry, Ben. This happens to me sometimes.” Then she said: “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” And somehow he understood that she wasn’t talking to him.

*

They drove on. She redid her makeup in the vanity mirror, and she took a pill. They spoke little. So it’s true, thought Ben; she’s weird. But by the time they came to the next call she was quite composed, if a little subdued; and she joined Ben in a discussion with the client on the renewal of service-level contract, due shortly. He pushed her ‘turn’ out of his mind. They paused at a Tesco Express to buy lunch; a pasty for him, a plastic bowl of mozzarella and sun-dried tomatoes for her. They ate in the car park. Two more calls followed. At four he turned the car for home. The late-summer sky had darkened, and threatened rain.

“There’s an archaeological site I’d like to have a quick look at. Can we stop just for a few minutes?” he asked.

“Do you have your metal detector?” she asked. Her face was rather pale, but she was smiling.

“You know about that?”

“Yes, everyone does, and your collection of Dr Who annuals,” she said. Her eyes laughed and to his surprise she reached out and touched him lightly on the arm. “Of course we can stop, Ben. What is the site?”

“It’s probably a medieval village, abandoned in the 14th century. No-one is quite sure why. Some were deserted because the population rose very high about then and the soil was exhausted, and then there were the Acts of Enclosures.” He had relaxed now, his anxiety for her eased; he prattled on about metal detecting. She listened with evident interest. They drew up in a small gravel car park with a National Trust sign. Beyond a low earthwork was a rough pasture with striations just visible in the earth; here and there, there was a low mound. They were alone. The sky was a livid grey and the air had become thick and dirty.

They crossed the earthwork and looked around. Louise stood still and her eyes, opened wide, were strange. Then she closed them, hard; she started to breathe heavily, swayed and sank to her knees. She gave the eerie half-scream, half-moan she had made before, then covered her face and bent it to the earth. Then she brought her head back and cried with fierce pain, and once again her ice-blue eyes were wide open, staring, and she had gone quite white. She was sweating, and breathing rapidly.

“Louise! For God’s sake!”

He took her by the arm and raised her up; she took great lungfuls of air as he dragged her across to the car and eased her back into it, and then there was a rumble of thunder and the rain started to fall.

She was bent over again. “Pray for them,” she said. “Please.”

He looked at her then reversed away into the lane. “We’ll get you a hot drink,” he said, desperate. “There’s that Tesco’s. We can stop there.”

She nodded. “Don’t be afraid,” she said. “I will be all right. I will be all right now.” But she was fighting for breath.

He drove the ten minutes or so to Tesco’s, glancing at her fearfully. Her breathing was still heavy but calmer, and after a few minutes she sat up straight and clipped her seat belt on; the staring expression had gone and he felt somehow that she had come back.

The Tesco car park was next to a fuel station beside a busy main road. It was raining heavily now. He got them cardboard cups of tea with plenty of sugar. Then he got a blanket from the boot and made her wrap herself in it and she looked back at him, her face a bit clammy, her hair a little matted on her forehead, but with the beginnings of a smile.

“What a nice warm blanket,” she said.

“It’s a bit doggy I’m afraid,” he replied. “It’s Tardis’s.”

“Your dog is called Tardis?”

“Well, sometimes he seems to be bigger on the inside than… Yes, well.” He cleared his throat. “I hope the tea is all right.”

“You’re very English, aren’t you?”

“I suppose I am.” He smiled back, uncertain. “What happened, Louise? Are you all right?”

“Yes. I am sorry I frightened you,” she said. “Ben, I wouldn’t bother with Dr Who. Or the metal detector. Other worlds are much closer than you think. I don’t know what happens. I suppose human distress burns pockets in the fabric around it and they remain, and sometimes certain of us, we stumble across them and we can feel, see, another time. Do you understand?”

He frowned. “What did you see?”

“The people in that village,” she said. “They never left it. It was the plague. It must have been the Black Death. They were reaching out to me, crying for me to help, and their limbs were disfigured with terrible black swellings that bled and suppurated, and these great waves of horror and pain came over me, and – helplessness – always there’s helplessness, there’s nothing you can do. And when we went to Carter’s, I didn’t feel it at first. But it was an airfield once, wasn’t it? And there was this young man trapped in burning wreckage and he was screaming to me for help in this mixture of English and I think it was Polish and he was so young.” She looked up at him, clutching the blanket around her. “I haven’t told people any of this. They couldn’t take it. Except one. My mother’s family priest at their village in Normandy. He knew us all from childhood and he loved us, and he didn’t think I was mad; he did listen.”

“Well, I suppose the bloke’s in the supernatural business really, isn’t he,” said Ben, a little at a loss.

She chuckled. “Yes, he knows how to run supernatural server routines from the command prompt. Doctors were useless.”

“What did he say?”

“That he did not understand God’s purpose but perhaps He had given me an excess of His compassion, and I must have courage.”

“I suppose that helped a lot, didn’t it,” said Ben with feeling.

“In a way it did.” She reached out and touched him on the arm again. “You didn’t think I was mad either, did you? Everyone else does. That’s why I can’t tell them what happens. But you just seemed frightened for me.”

“Yes. You don’t seem mad. Yes, I was afraid for you.”

“Maybe that’s because you’re a Whovian,” she said. “Because that’s weird too. Although it’s sort of nice.”

They were silent for a minute or so, then she said: “This has been happening to me since I was a child, but it is getting worse. I do not think I shall survive it.”

It was dusk and raining heavily, and the light was very soft and grey. He forgot HR guidelines for a moment and reached over to hug her, and she responded. They stayed together for a minute or two.

Then she said, “You will be late for Dr Who.”

So he drove away. As he steered down the A34, it grew dark. But now and then they entered a lighted stretch and he glanced to his left and saw her, exhausted, curled asleep in the blanket; and he felt fear, love and awe.

Plague pits, St Catherine's Hill, Hampshire

Andy Scott/Creative Commons

More flash fiction from Mike

A Time of Darkness It doesn't repeat. But it rhymes

Evolution The world is turning

When Time Stands Still A hurricane lashes Pershing Square

A Man For All Seasons Net zero.The Stranger's Bar. And a three-line whip

A History Lesson Why do we study it?

Parallel Worlds Heat pumps and lentils. And a nice glass of Marsala

The Creatives Meeting a tech bro

Homecoming A sort of love story

Solitude A Cold War memory

Rhodri Hactonby's Maps A question of social geography

Hiraeth A yearning…

Strange Places A spirit in the sky 

A Sideways Journey Things might have been different

Displaced Encounter on E94th Street

Belonging Do you? Where?
Leaving Home A house has memories

Mike Robbins’s latest book, On the Rim of the Sea, is now 

available as a paperback or ebook. More details here.

Flash fiction: Evolution

The world is turning

It wasn’t press night but she could still be late home. Sometimes the Weekly News would send her off on some errand that might not turn up a story at all and she would clatter into the flat at seven or eight in a scratchy, liverish temper and the food he’d kept warm would not be well received. Tonight the downstairs door slammed way past dinnertime and she came up the stairs with more than usual vigour. It’s going to be one of those nights, he thought, and wished it wasn’t as he’d spent his day repairing the inlet manifold on a Vauxhall Corsa that should have been laid to rest three or four MoTs ago. Sometimes he hated having his own workshop, taking as he did every job for fear of missing income.

M.Robbins

“Is that you?” he called.

“No, it’s Putin, you pillock.”

“Oh.” He went on looking at the screen. “I should’ve made borscht then. Next time.”

“You could at least turn the volume down when I come in.”

“Sorry. Third Test from Headingley. They’re following on.” He looked round. “Shall I peel you a grape, dear?”

“Perhaps you’d better.” She slumped down on the sofa. “I had to go to Market Sinking.”

“You mean Market Deeping,” he said.

“No, it’s sunk. It’s like Wisbech but worse. Anyway, I went to interview this old engineer bloke in a care home, he’s a hundred.” She flipped through her notebook. “Had to get his life story. Didn’t understand half of it. I asked how he started off and he said” – she looked at her notes – “in 1938 he was apprenticed at 14 to King’s Lynn Shed, whatever that was, cleaning B12s, whatever they were. Then in the war he was servicing Beaufighters in the western desert, whatever and where that means. Then he mentioned something called sleeve valves which were jolly awkward.”

“The B12 was a steam engine in the eastern region that used to haul trains to Liverpool Street, back then,” he replied. “The Beaufighter was an aeroplane. Its engines had sleeve valves, which go round and round instead of up and down.”

“That’s illuminating,” she said.

He looked at her and sensed an unusual mood. “I fancy a Broadside if you do,” he said.

“I would love a Broadside.” She kicked off her boots, sat back and watched as he went to the fridge and opened two bottles of beer. “He said something that made me think about you,” she called. “About the workshop. He said guys won’t work on engines and things the way he did, soon.”

He handed her a bottle. “No,” he said. “We won’t.”

She looked up.  ”You say that too?”

“Oh yes. I should never have bought the workshop. What did he say exactly, anyway?”

“That everything’s evolving. Hang on, I’ve got the quote here.” Like most young journalists now, she knew no shorthand; but she took out her recorder and wound back the file. “Listen to this.” And he heard her voice say: “How have things changed over the years?” She had kicked herself as she said it; it had seemed so trite. But his voice answered clearly enough, if a little quavery.

“Young lady, tell me how you will start your car when you leave here.”

“Oh. Well, I shan’t,” she said. “They key is in my pocket and it talks to the car. As I come up to it the door handle will come flip out and when I get in and touch the brake, all the systems will turn on.”

The old man looked back at her, smiling, one of his eyes watering a little. ”Now, my first car, I went out and started it with a starting-handle,” he said. “There was a self-starter, but it never worked.” He thought for a minute. “If that car was still with us it’d be 105 years old.”

She laughed.

“Thing is, your car now, it doesn’t even have an engine, does it?” said the old man’s voice. “Just an electric motor. And that’s as it should be. Think about an engine. Each piston begins its cycle by sucking in fuel on a downward stroke, compressing it on the upward stroke, being driven down by combustion on the next stroke and then expelling the waste gases on its exhaust stroke. With four such pistons, there are one hell of a lot of moving surfaces, all going in different directions at any one time. So the cylinders that are moving a large surface area that constantly changes direction, meaning that it must also accelerate and decelerate a great deal of mass. And there are belts or chains from the crankshaft will drive the shafts that open and close the valves at the top of the cylinders, and will also turn the water pump that cools the engine and will drive the alternator.”

“Gosh,” she said on the tape.

“Now, let me tell you,” the old man went on. “Good engineering gets simpler. Not more complicated. But petrol cars are very complicated. The most modern of petrol cars is a demented Heath Robinson device that flies in the face of physics. An incompetent child might make one with a Meccano set.” He paused briefly again, then said: “Things evolve, see? They change. They’re changing now.”

“If you were still a mechanic, would you stay one today?” she asked.

“Bless you, no,” he said, and she remembered his smile. Then he had fallen asleep.

She stopped the playback and looked at her partner. He nodded.

“I wanted my own workshop so badly,” he said.

“I know.” She took a gulp of beer. ”But the world is changing, isn’t it? We got to change with it. I will, too. The Weekly News is nearly dead. People post their own news online now.”

“I guess we’d better evolve then,” he said. They were silent for a few minutes, then he glanced at the screen; he’d muted it. “Been a crap season for England,” he said.

“Well some things don’t change, do they.”

He laughed, then frowned. “I’ll sell the workshop,” he said. “We’ll do some thinking, you and I. We’ll be all right.”

“’Course we will.”

He didn’t turn the sound back up; instead they sat there in the quiet as it grew dark. They felt oddly happy.

More flash fiction from Mike

A Time of Darkness It doesn't repeat. But it rhymes

Another Time A tear in the fabric

When Time Stands Still A hurricane lashes Pershing Square

A Man For All Seasons Net zero.The Stranger's Bar. And a three-line whip

A History Lesson Why do we study it?

Parallel Worlds Heat pumps and lentils. And a nice glass of Marsala

The Creatives Meeting a tech bro

Homecoming A sort of love story

Solitude A Cold War memory

Rhodri Hactonby's Maps A question of social geography

Hiraeth A yearning…

Strange Places A spirit in the sky 

A Sideways Journey Things might have been different

Displaced Encounter on E94th Street

Belonging Do you? Where?
Leaving Home A house has memories

Mike Robbins’s latest book, On the Rim of the Sea, is now 

available as a paperback or ebook. More details here.

Flash fiction: When Time Stands Still

 A hurricane lashes Pershing Square

That night I went to meet Cara, it was October and it was raining. October is great in New York City; the humid heat of summer is gone, fall’s not here in strength yet and the sun and skies are mellow. But now and then in September and October there’s a tropical storm or a hurricane in the Caribbean and it moves up through the Mid-Atlantic states and on to New England. That’s where hurricanes go to die sometimes. But they’ll lash out, full of spite, one last time on the way and it’s us that catch that.

M.Robbins

So I walked from my office to the cocktail bar at Pershing Square, right opposite Grand Central. The rain was like horizontal and the wind whipped at  my umbrella, it was one of those small ones you buy for four bucks at the newsstands, and it blew inside out and of course I couldn’t get it straight again.

I do love Cara. I always did. I met her in the eighth grade. I was little, short, nerdy. She’d grown fast and was adult height and strong and all the boys were after her already for her deep grey broad-set eyes and high cheekbones and even then she moved like a dancer. I guess I was always dazzled, always in awe.

But she’d be rough sometimes.

That was how I got to know her. She’d never seemed to notice me but then Gina the class animal had me in a corner and was stealing my Metro card and I was going to have to walk home, and it wasn’t the first time and I guess Cara must have noticed because she came over and she pinned Gina against the lockers and spoke to her very quietly and I didn’t hear what she said but Gina had this look on her face like she was just about to be dragged down to hell. She never laid a finger on me after that. Cara didn’t say much then but I sort of felt she was always there and as we grew older we became friends. But she was out of my class. Just such looks and charisma. The guys clustered round her like flies and she loved that, and she was always full of attitude. Me, I just got nerdier by the month. The boys passed me by.

But she had time for me somehow. Not always. She was a people magnet. But now and then she’d shake everyone off and find me in whatever quiet corner I was in and just hang out. She’d ask me how I was doing. When we were in sophomore year at high school I was confused and upset and desperate and I knew she was already having sex and I asked what I should do and she said “Nothing till it happens. You do you”, and hugged me.

Now and then she came round to our place on the Upper East Side and my parents always liked her and said how pretty she was, but she never said much when she was there. I knew where her folks lived, between Amsterdam and Columbus around 100th St on the West Side. I never went there. She never asked me. And now and then I sensed a hole in her armor but I never searched it out, why would I. People do that, don’t they? They search out each other’s weak points, even when they love them. I do that. But I’d look at her and remember that animal Gina backed up against the lockers, her eyes open wide as she stared at the demon that was about to disembowel her, and I’d think no, this one’s on my side.

Then we graduated high school and I went off to Wellesley. Mom and Dad were pleased I suppose, though they didn’t really say so. Not proud or anything, they just sort of felt that going to Wellesley was what one did. Hillary Clinton went there, and Madeleine Albright, and Nora Ephron. Good for the strong Democrat woman they’d brought me up to be. Then I got this job with the Senator. Cara went off to a college somewhere in the Midwest, dropped out and came back to work in sales. She moved into real estate and did OK. Not great, but OK. But she was always in some scrape or other, often with someone else’s husband. I can’t blame them I guess. She got more and more beautiful as she reached 30. And somehow her life got more and more chaotic.

Anyway, that wet night I got the wait staff to put me by a window. She was late and I looked out at the sheets of rain blowing under the Park Avenue underpass. I got stuck into a margarita, and then a second. I’d sort of drifted away when suddenly she sat down opposite me. Then she half-rose and leant over to kiss me. She leaned back and I saw she’d tinted her hair, a mild mauve on top and green down the sides where it fell on her shoulders, and her skin was a perfect ivory and her mouth strong and funny and her eyes seemed bigger and greyer than ever though there were slight creases at their corners that I hadn’t seen before. She asked for a glass of red wine.

“You want small, medium or large?” the waitress asked.

“Enormous,” she said.

“You got it.”

We made small talk for a minute or two, but there was something on her mind. She looked at me. “I just got fired,” she said.

“Oh God, again? What for?”

“Bringing my employers into disrepute,” she said. Her wine arrived quickly and she took a big slug.

“Oh Cara. What have you done this time?”

“I had sex with a client, his wife found the pictures, she put them on Porn Hub and sent the link to the other clients,” she said.

“Oh God,” I said.

Fact was, Cara sucked at life.

“Cara,” I said, "you suck at life.”

“I suck at life,” she said.

We looked at each other and started laughing. She drained her wine. The waitress reappeared. “You want another big one?” she asked.

“Humungous, please,” said Cara.

“Sure,” said the waitress. “You want I use a fire hose?”

“I hope the pictures were good,” I said.

“They were epic,” she said, and laughed. And then she didn’t.

“You loved me for something good I’d done,” she said. And her face sort of froze, and she put her glass down, and she looked at me and that mouth was out of shape and that’s when time stood still as I wondered if she would get a grip, not caring about anything, as she never did; or if something was different this time. It was different. I suppose we stared at least other for thirty seconds max but it felt much longer, and then she was all right.

“You should worry. No-one would put me on Porn Hub,” I said.

“You’d be surprised,” she said. And we both laughed but we knew we were different now, and she needed me.

M.Robbins

More flash fiction from Mike

A Time of Darkness It doesn't repeat. But it rhymes

Another Time A tear in the fabric

Evolution The world is turning

A Man For All Seasons Net zero.The Stranger's Bar. And a three-line whip

A History Lesson Why do we study it?

The Creatives Meeting a tech bro

Homecoming A sort of love story

Solitude A Cold War memory

Rhodri Hactonby's Maps A question of social geography

Hiraeth A yearning…

Strange Places A spirit in the sky 

A Sideways Journey Things might have been different

Displaced Encounter on E94th Street

Belonging Do you? Where?
Leaving Home A house has memories

Mike Robbins’s latest book, On the Rim of the Sea, is now 

available as a paperback or ebook. More details here.