A Christmas Countdown by Julie Blaho, cappuccino

Five Christmas cookies under my highchair. I squealed with delight as I hurled your careful creations. You handed me another with a smile and let me enjoy it my own way.

Four long minutes to tie my shoe in the parking lot before Christmas mass, but you didn’t try to do it for me. You crouched in the cold snow with the hem of your dress dragging in slush, and sang: “Over, under, pull it tight. Make a loop, but not too light.”

Three red diaries tucked under my Christmas quilt. Filled with friend drama, crushes, and copied homework confessions, I didn’t ever worry. I knew you wouldn’t peek if you found them.

Two tender earlobes pierced for my sixteenth Christmas, even though you hated the idea. And when they got infected, you never once said, “I told you so.”

One Mom. A thousand ways to love. There’ll never be enough Christmases with you.

 

About the author

  

Julie Blaho is a creature-crazy country girl who divides her free time between teaching kids to ride horses and writing. She writes in Italy and has work published in Flash Fiction Magazine, 101 Words, and The People's Friend. www.julieblaho.com / Instagram: felicione_farm 

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Mammyhood Today by Sharon Keely, cappuccino

 She moved through the fair with the song in her head but she felt nothing like that sunlit beauty and no one could at this fair. Puck Fair 2023.

It was too hot for the goat to stay atop his scaffold pillar and preside over the revelry below in 2022, so this year the committee ran a contest for a human replacement. Three humans to do the work of one goat; the third prize winner would sit atop the pillar from 10:00 AM till 1:00 PM, the second from 1:00 PM to 4:00 PM and first place got the 4:00 PM till 7:00 PM shift. She'd been on the committee that came up with this genius idea and voted against it. The only other woman on the committee, Ethel O’Dwyer, was enthusiastically for it. She was enthusiastically for any position Raymond O'Donoghue adopted, in or out of committee, on account of he was a cousin to the county's T.D. Realy-Hay and could get her broadband, a new road, a new sewer… next she'd be asking for Gaeltacht status for her bloody Reek, then the place would have access to every grant going.

Ethel’s sons were cute hoors too, no chance of them making fools of themselves attempting to be a goat for three days. But her own son…. not even having to get his hair cut, like the goats did, put him off. It didn't bear thinking about. Though it was hard not to, knowing he was up there now smirking down at her and the whole fair thinking that gave them the right to squeeze her shoulder and say ‘Gas man,’ ‘Great sport.’ One even had the audacity to say, ‘Chip off the ould block.’ He was anything but, unless the fella meant his long-gone father. She wouldn't mind at all if Johnny did a runner too, especially after this. He'd been such a cute baby. But that was the trouble. She’d doted on him too much, indulged his every whim, paid money she didn't have for all his arty farty classes; he didn't stick with one of them.

A roar from the crowd and all heads turned to look up. He was dancing away - stomping and jumping, more like it - on top of the pole and now the whole crowd was jumping with him. The roughest surged towards the barricade around the pillar, shoving and pushing. She’d said they should get those concrete filled yokes they put around the outdoor dining in the COVID. But oh no, too expensive they said, though Ethel had murmured ‘good idea’ before Raymond vetoed it, no doubt thinking she could stick them outside her tax dodge of a café afterwards to make it look as if visitors really did eat there.

The two Bean Gardai who'd been standing back in the doorway of a boarded-up shop came forward now, weighing up whether to sidle off on a break or wade in. Catching her glare decided them. “Would you get the DJ to turn the music off Mrs. Lenahan?” one said. She felt like she was in one of Johnny’s Hieronymus Bosch paintings, skirting skirmishes and trying not to step on body parts of the already comatose as she navigated the five yards to the DJ. He declined to stop the music despite the bottles sailing over the heads of the crowd, which looked like an Aran cable of jumping and punching. She literally pulled the plug from his rig, but the thumping and roaring went on a bit longer, enough for the Bean Gardai to feel the need to cosh all around them. The pillar started to wobble with the crowd surging into it.

“Get down you amadán, you useless, good-for-nothing feckin’ eejit! I rue the day you were born! You are a gobshite even as a goat!” she roared, not that he could hear her. He just stood there like Daniel O'Connell, fist in the air.

In under two minutes she was all over Twitter, and the video was on the RTE News that night. ‘The State of Mammyhood Today’ was the headline in the Examiner. She was gratified to see a handful of mammies commenting she had every right, they would have done the same, but most commented that it was her ilk that were driving the youth to drugs – ha! - sapping their confidence and giving them all kinds of complexes.

There was no more shoulder squeezing, she was given a wide berth. ‘Single-handedly brought disgrace to Kerry,’ she heard, though there wasn’t one in the county that hadn’t said exactly the same words to their sons and daughters, and for far less. She resigned from the committee rather than give Raymond the joy of telling her to go. Ethel’s café was finally on the map – dark tourism, it was called. Meanwhile, on the strength of the cheekbones revealed by his goat’s haircut, and his new fame airing his mother’s dirty laundry on moronic talk shows, Johnny got a modelling assignment in Dublin and stayed there. It really was an ill wind that blew no good.

 

About the author 

Sharon Keely looks first for the used bookstores in every new place she visits, and immediately feels at home if she spots an Irish or U.K. writer's work on the shelf. Some day she hopes to see her own there. @sharonkeely.bsky.social 

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Kindred Spirit by Donna Gum. hot cappuccino

Alone, she stood barefoot on the cold tiles, immersing herself in the portrait. She wiped the tears that kept welling despite herself.
 

His large brown eyes looked at her with the quiet wisdom and love she'd known for years. The gray strands touched his black hair. She remembered how soft it had felt. He'd fought the end as she'd tried to make it easier for him. They’d spent most evenings together in the living room. He’d insisted on sharing meals with her up to the end.
 

His breathing rasped as he walked. He’d come into the bedroom with her as she went to the bathroom. 

When she'd come out minutes later, she'd found him lying on the faded bedspread, his beautiful eyes staring, unblinking. His labored breathing ceased. She’d thought he’d improved that evening, but wasn't there a rebound of the old self before the end?
 

She gulped back a sob and reached out to straighten his image in the ornate frame on the wall. Fourteen years they'd been together, the most loyal dog she owned.

About the author 

Donna Gum began writing in non-fiction and ghost-writing, but couldn’t resist the call of fiction. She enjoys writing flash fiction in the Appalachian Mountains. Her latest fiction was published by Borderline Tales in December, 2024.

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Alien Stalker by Elizabeth Kirwin, a triple cappuccino

 Imagine my surprise when I went out back to clip the elm tree I was performing bonsai on this winter – and I found this alien pod wedged in the tree beneath my bedroom window. 

Next morning at nine, I hopped in my car to go to the dispensary – and there’s the alien pod – riding shotgun. Driving down the highway, I opened the window and threw it out.  The alien pod came right back in the blink of an eye, riding shotgun again.

Waiting in the hour-long line at the dispensary can be tedious.  So I whipped out my cell phone and started fiddling with it.  Out of the corner of my eye I saw something moving on the lawn near the line of people. The alien pod was rocking back and forth.  I thought I left it in the passenger seat.  But no, this alien pod will not be left or ignored - or thrown out the window of a moving car. 

Trying to keep cool in the line at the dispensary, I grabbed the alien pod from the lawn where it seemed to be performing for the crowd. I attempted to swaddle the alien pod in my pink hoodie.  Some hippy saw me doing this and demanded to know what I was hiding.  I admitted I had a new alien species on my hands. Suddenly, the alien popped onto the lawn and showed itself to those waiting at the dispensary.  As a thick crowd of people gathered around to take in every feature of the alien pod, it disappeared again.

Nope.  This alien pod won’t be studied – not even by a crowd of bored out of their mind’s stoners. At first it reveled in the attention. Then it got busy pulling that vanishing act.  

Maybe this is the last I’ve seen of it.  I tried to wish the alien pod away while I made my purchase inside.  When I climbed back in my car, the alien pod was sitting shotgun.  It telepathically demanded a hit from the vaporizer.  So I complied.  I blew a hit down the long air tube to the alien's overlarge head. 

When I finally got home, I was exhausted.  So I just parked the car and left the alien pod in the passenger seat. 

That was a mistake.

After waking from a nap later that morning, I saw from my bedroom window the alien pod had hopped over the neighbor’s back fence and was creating havoc with the two dogs.  I rushed downstairs and outside to the fence where I leaned over onto the neighbor’s property and nonchalantly plucked the alien pod from their yard and brought it back into my universe.

I felt a pang of motherly love for this alien pod. It was more than a curiosity to me.  It was like I gave birth to it in my dreams, then found it the next day in my garden.  The alien pod was mine!

The alien pod got wind of my possessiveness and disappeared – again.  It wasn’t something you could hold onto.  It only popped through when it wanted to.  This alien was aligned with my frequency – oh yea.  But I was soon to find out that it was a selfish alien pod, whose needs always came first.

It’s easy to see the alien pod has original thoughts on things, like crowds at dispensaries for instance.  The alien pod knows exactly how to make a seamless and invisible exit and entrance.  Isn’t that convenient?

I’ll tell you how it is ...  For now, the travel methods of this alien pod are beyond human comprehension. So I have to live with it. 

What does the alien pod eat?  It’s has a strange way of eating. It’s more like absorption.  At night, I place the alien pod in a shallow metal bowl and fill it with a combination of 100% anti-freeze and the grease of New York Strip Steaks.  I just let it soak in the liquid all night.  The next morning, all of the liquid is gone and the alien pod is burping and farting.  Thank God I only need to feed it every three days.  Or else, I thought, I would take it right back to that pile of half melted snow across the street from the Observatory, in Black Hawk, Colorado where it was found. It hitchhiked a ride back to New Jersey with me. Unbeknownst to me, it was stashed in one of my boxes of belongings.  Michael Scott found it on a high mountain road, at about 10,000 feet, in a late winter snow melt.  Micheal is now deceased and unable to tell his own story about the discovery of the alien pod. But I’m sure it wreaked havoc in his life. I wonder why he kept it in that room, which was his glass blowing studio?

The alien pod may even have a lengthy history of road tripping  back and forth across the United States.  But we don’t have time to get into that right now. 

Think of my story as a galactic guidebook on what to do if you find an alien pod in your garden one morning.  And, what not to do with the alien pod. 

On the subject of what NOT to do, I was undressing one night and the alien pod took a keen interest in my breasts. The alien's interest in my breasts was so irrational, he knocked the pod on its side, trying to get next to them. 

I had to scramble to straighten the pod, then run into the bathroom to finish dressing. 

When I returned, the pod was horizontal on my bed, somehow lighting up the vape pen beside the bed and taking extra-long hits on the highest setting. 

“Oh no!” I said, “this is not gonna happen. You’re gonna pay for your own weed habit.  And get out of my bed, you freeloader.”

The alien pod quickly disappeared.  It obviously detested conflict and was not interested on being challenged on its rude, dysfunctional behavior.

My cat hopped back on the bed.  She had a natural distrust of the alien pod. The problem was, she couldn’t figure out how to penetrate that seamless glass barrier.  Or she would have ripped that little alien to shreds when it first entered the house. While I was busy thinking about feeding the alien to the four cats next door, I saw it’s big, protruding eyes peeping around the corner at me from the hallway.

My heart melted and quite suddenly I didn’t want to bring harm to this creature.  I wanted it to slowly assimilate into human life, kind of like a pet. I knew pet ducks could learn to love a grass filled backyard with a tub full of water. Assimilation for the alien pod, I found out later, was impossible. There was no changing this arrogant little alien.  I suspected the alien pulled this on a few thousand humans by now, testing our boundaries and wearing each one of us into sheer exhaustion. 

The alien never slept. 

I thought maybe it was the anti-freeze it absorbed every three days. Wasn’t anti-freeze a main ingredient in methamphetamine? Besides anti-freeze and the drizzle of New York Strip Steaks, it only vaped Platinum Kush carts, no other.

Sometimes the alien pod got cold so I had to put the hoodie on it.  The hoodie covered its only air hole keeping the cold air from blowing through the pod.   The alien loved the hoodie and started wearing it around the house. I was aggravated it never changed clothes.

The alien stalker had a strange but obvious dominion over all electronic devices, It knew I was addicted to these electronic wireless devices.  When the alien got tired of chasing me around, from device to device to device – like an ADHD child – It just started to screw up my phone or my Macbook. The device would snap off for no known reason. Or, I would receive text messages generated by what seemed to be a person in my contact list, but didn’t make any sense at all. I would read something like, “Come to the fore room and provide juice for the smoking device, then pass out calmly.” My friend Connie wasn’t even in the state, let alone the house with me. When I started to get strange demands like this, it was obvious the alien was behind these communications. 

The alien stalker didn’t work at all. It spent all of its time stalking me. One day I brought it with me to the bank and I was getting money out of the ATM machine. When I was finished, the machine lit up like fireworks and  thousands of dollars ejected from the cash dispenser. I had stepped away from the machine already. That was lucky for me. I didn’t need the bank on my ass!   It was obviously pretty simple for the alient stalker to plow into an ATM machine. So suddenly - it was always flush with plenty of cash for whatever evil habit it had, or trick it was going to pull behind my back. 

There were days when I became so frustrated, I just ditched the alien pod, leaving it in my bedroom, and abandoned all of my electronic devices  - including my cell phone - and took a long walk through several of the neighboring towns.  I would saunter through alleyways behind apartment complexes, walk on the main street, take walking trails through local parks or just walk the railroad tracks and pretend I was wandering far faraway.  At these times the alien pod would leave me alone. It was contented with stalking me in the house on most days.

Then I would return home and the whole draining cycle would begin anew. 

I sought counsel in a friend named Starseed. He met the alien pod one afternoon on a visit where we smoked some pot and caught up. “How do you ever get a break from this alien stalker?” asked Straseed.  

I thought for a second, and said, “Well, I can’t stand to look at the alien pod at night, so I had to get pretty ingenious here.” At this point Starseed cast a worried look at me.

“No,” I said, “I already tried to kill the alien pod by smashing the glass ‘vehicle’ surrounding it:  it doesn’t work.”

“So? How do you quell that maddening alien pod?” demanded Starseed.

 “I call it a pleasant time out for both of us,” I said.  “You know that big Yeti Microphone I just got? Well, I took almost all the Styrofoam out and the box has a little air hole that’s perfect for the alien stalker’s long airtube.  That specially made box is like tomb for a vampire. When I place it in it, the pod has to sit upright – no lying down.”

“How exactly does it work?” asked Starseed. “I mean it seems so unwilling to take directions most of the time. It does what it wants to!”

   I pondered this a moment and shared my method of putting the alien stalker to sleep. “On nights when it’s not in absorption mode, we have a vape party and watch two episodes of Schitt’s Creek. Inevitably, the alien goes overboard on the vaping and it gets tired.  When it’s exhausted, the alien pod is more pliable.  It’s more willing to take direction from me. So, I just take it and put it in the special box and shove it up in this closet and shut the door.  I can have a relaxing night of sleep, and I know exactly where the alien pod is all night long.  I don’t have to wake up at 3 a.m. to go to the bathroom and worry about where the hell it is, and how I might retrieve it.” 

“Yea, no doubt,” said my friend Starseed. “Seems to me like the vaping helps tremendously,” he added. We both laughed until we cried. It really was a tremendous relief to have somebody sensible to talk to about this.

“Yea. I was thinking about adding this 9% microbrew to absorption mode one night and see how that works out for the alien pod,” I observed aloud.

“Seems like these habits the pod has are mighty expensive,” said Starseed.

“Yea,” I acknowledged, “thank God this MOFO knows how to plow into an ATM machine and make a maximum hit. Or I would be broke.”

“How does the alien pod do that?” queried Starseed.

“It’s beyond human comprehension,” I shot back, “or we’d all be doing it.”  

Starseed nodded and took another long inhale from his vape.

It’s nice to have a sounding board. But nobody, and I mean nobody but me knows what a drag it is to have this alien stalker trailing my ass just about everywhere.  I tried to coexist with it for 11 months. By the dead of winter, I finally had enough.

I packed my suitcase with the alien pod nicely wedged in there between warm socks and underwear. I took a direct flight to Denver and booked an SUV at the airport. I drove the hour and a half all the way up the mountain to Black Hawk, Colorado. The alien pod was asleep from too much microbrew in Denver and multiple vape carts on the way up the mountain.  I made it all seem like a great adventure.

Little did the alien stalker know it would be our last adventure.  Before I deposited him on the other side of the mountain in Black Hawk, I recalled Michael Scott, said to me, while he was still alive.  He let me know that if I ever got sick of living with this little fucker, all I needed to do was bring it back to this spot. There was federal observatory on top of the mountain with a small parking lot in the middle of the butt crack of nowhere. Michael said I needed to return here and throw it off the cliff across the street. 

Nobody actually knew about this place this but Michael Scott. He confided in me there was a portal across the street and if I threw the alien pod right down off the cliff at a 90-degree angle, I would hit it, because it was quite wide.  The best part was that the alien pod couldn’t just ‘return’ after a drop like that into a portal; it would end up in another time and dimension - and it would take it forever to get back.  Michael theorized it might take hundreds of earth years or more for the pod to return.   

Yes, this was to be my last adventure with the alien stalker. It was like exorcising a demon into a poltergeist of cold mountain air. So when we crested the mountain about sunset, I took the alien pod out of its case and put my only hoodie on it. Before it was fully conscious enough to know what was going on, I threw the alien stalker off that cliff. I made sure it was flung quite violently into the portal off the side of that 10,000 foot mountain.

I never saw or heard from the alien stalker again. Nor do I want to ever see those bug eyes on that too big head again. Humankind isn’t ready for such creatures, of that I was certain. 

 About the author

 

Elizabeth Kirwin is poet, fiction writer and performance artist. She has been published in The Oyster Boy Review. Kirwin is owner and editor of www.FairiesInAmerica.com. She has written for magazines on art and culture, travel and education. Kirwin lives and works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 

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Swimming by Dominik Slusarczyk, cappuccino

 

I speed down the slide so quickly the blue plastic either side of me is a blur. Suddenly the blue of the sky is above me and I am dumped into a pool. I drag myself to the surface and emerge, spluttering, from the foul chemically liquid.

 

---

 

“I want to go every weekend,” I say. Mum laughs. She reaches over and ruffles my hair without taking her eyes off the road.

“We can’t afford to go every weekend,” she says. “We can only go on special occasions. Because we only go on special occasions we can go for pizza afterwards.”

I eat three whole slices of pizza. When I am done I am so full I can hardly move. We sit there and chat for an hour with the table between us covered in rubbish. By the time we leave it is getting dark outside.

 

---

 

“I’ll come next time,” Dad says. He is still wearing his army uniform. Normally he takes it off as soon as he gets home but today he got home so late he just came straight into the kitchen.

“You always say that,” I say. “And you never come. You’ve got to come and play on the slides with us.”

 

---

 

My little rubber ring bobs casually on the slow moving water. I have been all the way round the rapids ten times and I am still not bored. It is calm, relaxing, peaceful; nothing like the exhilaration of the flumes.

 

---

 

“You really want a whole pizza to yourself?” Mum asks.

“I can eat a whole pizza,” I say. “I’m an adult: I’m thirteen now.”

“Well, if you’re sure,” mum says. She orders me my own pizza. I only manage to eat three quarters of it but I think that’s a pretty good job. We take the last two slices home for dad.

 

---

 

“Swimming is stupid,” I say. My voice seems to get more low and grunting every day. “Swimming pools are for kids. I don’t want to go anywhere with you anyway; I want to go out with my friends.”

“Then go out with your friends,” Mum says. “It’s your birthday. Do whatever you want.”

I call Barry and James. We meet under the bridge next to the cycle path. James stole some vodka from his mum’s alcohol cupboard and somehow Barry managed to buy some tobacco. We drink and we smoke and we talk about how parents are stupid.

About the author 

 Dominik Slusarczyk is an artist who makes everything from music to painting. His fiction has been published in various literary magazines including moonShine Review. His fiction came first in The Cranked Anvil Short Story Competition and was a finalist in a number of other awards. 

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Writers I Have Known by Michael Barrington, double cappuccino

As a shy fifteen-year-old schoolboy, I was often the unfortunate victim of having to stand before the class and read my short stories out loud. At that time I was living in a boys only boarding school in the Lake District- not the fun loving Hogwart’s School of Harry Potter- where the focus was on academics and turning men into boys. This included regular three mile runs at 6:00 AM then having to wash in cold water. Discipline was strict with almost every minute of the day regulated, and even then, I thought, quite unnecessary so. Classes were followed every evening by long study periods including on the weekends. On a Sunday morning after we had all trooped out of church, there was an hour of essay writing. I loved that time and knew even then, I wanted to be a serious writer. It was a place where I could let my imagination soar and for a brief period each week, it took me outside my incarceration. 

The consequence of my mental dalliance was the inevitable of having to stand before the class once our essays had been returned and read my work. In an all-boys school, there are all kinds of internal hierarchies,  mysterious initiations and a secret code of behavior. Being singled out by a teacher was an absolute ‘no no’ and I paid for it by being made fun of and discouraged from doing the one thing that I loved  and knew, even then, I was good at, telling stories. But my stubbornness won out and eventually as I gained some seniority, the harassment stopped. And I continued to dream and write.
 

Amid all of this, during the winter and spring, the top two classes were allowed to go to Grange Over Sands, where our nearest small town hosted an amazing speaker program.  I got to meet amazing people from all walks of life; Princess Ileana of Romania, Douglas Bader the most decorated pilot in World War II who lost both his legs then learned to fly again, and Edmund Hilary, the first man to climb Mount Everest.
 

But my favorite presenters were all writers and since we knew the lady who organized the series, (the sister of the college taxi driver), she made it possible for us to meet them afterwards and we usually collected their autographs.  
 

Over the space of just a few years I spoke with Kingsley Amis, later Sir Kingsley, poet, critic and teacher. He wrote more than 20 novels,  Lucky Jim was his first and won the Somerset Maugham Award for fiction. It was followed by I like it here and Take A Girl like you, which Amis read from and with great humor. I was thrilled and excited with his style and in your face prose but completely shocked at his characters causal approach to sex. It was a revelation. In a college where no sex before marriage was religiously preached, this novel exposed a world that I and my friends had no experience of but secretly hoped it existed. And it was exciting.
 

Months later, John Braine discussed his Room At the Top which I had just read. One of my more daring friends had secreted a copy into our dorm and it was doing the rounds in lightening time. I devoured his unadorned use of everyday language, that both shocked and excited me. For a group of young men with raging hormones, it was amazing, daring and titillating material! Here was a writer with strong Irish Catholic roots describing male female relationships that seemed to be so honest, natural and real, but in a way that would bewilder any priest. (The real shock would come a few years later when Shelagh Delaney wrote her Country Girl, and the book was actually banned in Ireland.) Braine seemed a little surprised that we had already read his book and asked us with a knowing smile and in his broad Yorkshire accent, “Well, did you all enjoy it?”
 

Alan Sillitoe left school at age 14 and never went to college, which made me wonder why my parents were spending so much money on my private education, and it was only while in hospital with tuberculosis that he became an avid reader of literature and started to write. He worked closely with the poet Robert Graves, and eventually wrote Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Influenced in part by the stripped-down prose of Ernest Hemingway. The book conveys the attitudes and situation of a young factory worker faced with the inevitable end of his youthful philandering. As with John Braine’s best seller, while it was essentially a social protest, it was the daring sex scenes and female relationships that were a far cry from Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, Vanity Fair and even Tom Jones the staple college literary diet, which riveted our attention. But when I heard him speak, he had also just published his short story collection, “The Loneliness of the long-Distance Runner,” I was smitten. Awestruck would be an understatement, and I wished I could write like him. I also learned, but didn’t know it at the time, that reading a work and having it read to you can be a totally different experience. A charming man, he spoke to us (we were a small group of five) as if we were adults and answered our schoolboy questions as if they had been posed by a gaggle of eminent professors.
 

But my most memorable lecture was by the Australian writer, Russel Braddon discussing his war time heroics in his bestselling book, The Naked Island. As a Japanese prisoner of war for three years, he was tormented by the fact he couldn’t remember how to solve Pythagoras’ theorem nor the second movement of the Bruch violin concerto. Ever ready to help, I quickly scribbled down the theorem on a sheet of scrap paper and when we met for his autograph, I presented it to him.
 

‘Sir,’ I remember saying politely, ‘I too want to write and just in case you haven’t had time to catch up with your math, this might jog your memory; but I can’t help you with the Bruch.’
 

He looked at it quizzically, smiled, shook my hand, said thank you, carefully folded and placed the paper in his inside jacket pocket then signed my autograph book.
 

I had read The Naked island which I thought was engrossing, but he went on to write more than thirty books of a very uneven quality I would hasten to add. Other than just a couple of them, Nancy Wake and Cheshire VC, I was not impressed by his style. Years later, purely by chance, I happened to hear him being interviewed by the BBC and he recounted this incident of when he met with a precocious or as he put it ‘a snotty nosed schoolboy who wanted to be a writer!’
 

The bell started to ring, the head boy shouted it was time for lunch, and suddenly I was jolted back to reality with a bang. Essay time was over for another week. As I closed my notebook, I tried to slow down my imagination, but it was already planning my next story. Perhaps I would be the owner of a hidden collection of short stories that would surprise the world.

About the author 

Michael Barrington, is an international writer specializing in historical novels: Let the Peacock Sing, The Ethiopian Affair, Becoming Anya, The Baron of Bengal Street, No Room for Heroes. His 40 short stories and articles have been published in the USA & UK. He also blogs on his website: www.mbwriter.net. Did you enjoy the story? Would you like to shout us a coffee? Half of what you pay goes to the writers and half towards supporting the project (web site maintenance, preparing the next Best of book etc.)

END OF THE LINE by Mario Marcinko, cappuccino

Following yet another failed night of forced unrest, I leave the comforts of my sheets, ready or not to face the day. The greyness of life begins its attack on my sensations before I open the window upon skies curtained with leaden clouds and streaked streams of rainfall. What glorious reinforcements of my disillusionment with the dull lethargy of this routine.

After a bland breakfast, I spruce myself up to accommodate the bare visual demands of any decent desk job. As public transport takes me to the place where I earn the financial fuel required to sustain my Sisyphean support of a Kafkaesque cage, I feel watched, though I dismiss the anomaly as a trivial phenomenon of urban habitation, a less than unorthodox symptom of a life that surrounds the perpetuation of duties and chores for their own sake.

Greetings are amiss at the reception, like any attention from my cubicle neighbours. Integrity trumps fake politeness, anyway. As I sit, a black flash washes over the office space for a fleeting moment. I jerk my head to the window, though my sight falls on nothing out of the ordinary, nothing but that depressing thirteenth-floor skyline behind a decrepit grain silo.

Lunch break, sitting in my spot, recharging with the cheapest ramen from the market. A coworker is using the coffee brewer across the room. As he sips from his mug, the bloom radiating from him briefly brightens the desaturated ambience. While I am curious to learn whether he has wits to match, we have yet to exceed sporadic exchanges. Should I speak up? I’ve been staring for too long. Is he smiling? Friendly. Feigned? Whatever, I return the smile, not in mockery, but in what I hope to be read as positive sympathy. Okay, I’ll get up and-

Out of the blue, a poorly acquainted colleague asks me to take over his Saturday shift. Sure, why not? The whole week will be appropriately muted in colour. I return my gaze to-

Gone, he is. Just my luck. Well, four more hours of human exploitation to go.

My afternoon ordeal is paused by a sharp sting of anguish. The headache soon stops, allowing me to clock out and leave the restricting arena of the endless game for the bus, where I sit between reflections and shadows. Are their lives more fulfilling? I like to pretend.

Back home, I make use of my scarce culinary skills for a final burst of nutrition, before I take care of my basic hygienic needs and engage a new attempt at rest and relaxation.

#

I wake up from… what, exactly? Another night of no recovery, my mind accustomed to the insomnia, my body accommodated to remaining fatigue. I throw a glance out, the sad excuse for weather unchanged, save for a raven, seated on a branch of the tree near a window. It observes me with a striking expression of curiosity; intriguing a break in my daily circles. I play with the palpable idea of staying in bed for today. However, my rationale prevails.

Eat breakfast, go to work, have lunch, clock out. My actions have become automated, my mind is on autopilot, guiding be back to my doorway in the frigid mists of autumn.

‘You seem lost, my friend. May I help you?’

My trance of apathy broken, I swerve around to locate the inexplicably familiar voice, only to find nothing on eye level. The vapor out of my mouth blocks everything underneath.

‘Ordinarily, I dislike people looking down on me, but I must request this incivility.’

I lower my eyes to a bird on the cobblestone; the same specimen from my window? Its eyes meet mine in a way no animal should, satiated with the implication of sapience.

‘You are… a raven,’ I mutter to the creature looking up at me.

‘Perceptive.’ Its haughty tone and delicate pronunciation make it sound sophisticated. In a humorously human curtsy, its wings act as both arms and a robe.

‘A… talking raven?’ I stress, pleading insanity in my inner court.

‘And that is so strange for you, my friend?’ it wonders, inquisitively tilting its head.

‘Well… I’ve never heard of talking ravens before.’

‘So absence refutes their existence?’ The beak moves alternates habitually between two frames, open and closed, but the perfectly formed words somehow seem utterly normal. ‘Every cosmos transcends human’s capability of comprehension. In a hardly distant future, one will travel to stars as fast as you to commute. I assert a talking raven will seem trivial.’

‘Put into that perspective-’ I admit, speaking as I would with a person, then stumble. ‘Wait, how do you know how long it takes me to go to work?’

‘I happen to see you sometimes.’ The bird extends defensively placating extremities. ‘Ravens have a lot of time on their hands…’ It regards its feathery arms. ‘…or wings.’

‘Okay, granted.’ I shrug, reckoning that nothing on earth should faze me anymore.

‘Besides, we famously fly in pairs, yet my better half has yet to fill a gap in the stars.’

‘This is not real, right? You are saying what I want you to say, as I need a diversion.’

‘Then what are you doing here? Back to your safe harbour, where the storms and tidal waves of this terrible sea will bother you no more! If I am but a figment of your imagination, a product of your creative consciousness, go rest well and conjure me at a better time.’

‘Good call. I’m clearly overtired. And likely insane. So, you know, see you around.’

Said to a raven, a poetic philosopher in the form of a darkly feathered animal. At least now I have an excuse to take a break from work. I have lost the last traces of my already fragile mind and now I need get cured, meaning that some change may finally come about. The head leans to the other side as the right wing rises for a comical military salute.

Nonsense. Of course, I pursue the only path at my meagre disposal. But did those few minutes at the doorstep earlier today really happen? Was it really- No, just ignore it.

While watching TV with my plate of zero-effort dinner, my head tunes out the news. I talked to a damn animal, denial begone. A glance out through the glass shows empty night. Well, time to enter the realm of cushions and sheets for another chance at needed recreation.

#

The struggle to visit Morpheus and leave him in one session has never been greater. This time, I feel a lighter sort of fatigue, as if in simultaneous deprivation and rejuvenation, defying logic and rationality. Of course, a raven is sitting on his throne of wood and leaves at my window, awaiting my waking. The bird flies away right after I notice it, as if just ensuring I would open my eyes. The daily grind resumes its course until I return to my comfort zone. Yet I notice the tree’s occupant before reaching the door, having expected it on instinct.

‘How was your day, friend?’ the affably smug voice tunes from below.

‘Same, same,’ I mutter, hardly deigning the amiable avian a look. ‘Not a spectacle.’

‘Does not strike me as particularly intriguing,’ the raven reckons, head tilted aside. ‘Do what you enjoy. Read a book. Watch a movie. Work out. Improve your health plan. Even better, call up a friend or four. Why not go for a drink? Or take a road trip?’

‘Stop patronizing me,’ I all but yell in my ire, forged under the weight of isolation.

‘Forgive me for egging you on a bit. But sometimes, all it takes is a little push.’

‘That’s the point: Why push? There’s no prescribed purpose or sense or meaning.’

‘So why not just see the beauty in a senseless universe, full of smoke and mirrors?’ The raven leaps in jovial frivolity. ‘You were given free will. You are the king of your world. This reign of yours is a matter of cosmic curiosity to me, but I will not dictate your highness.’

‘I mean, I wish I had wings like yours, so they could carry to other worlds, but well.’

‘A wish can be a wonder,’ the raven sings. ‘Or just smoke and mirrors?’

‘Well, I’ll walk inside along the Yellow Brick Road and sleep over this magic show.’

‘May you enjoy a night of peace and quiet, friend!’ A wave of wings. ‘Until soon.’

Instead of contemplating the overly lively creation of my cerebellum at my doorstep, I cook dinner, all without a single troubling thought plaguing my mind. I eat in the same calm and careless state. And I go to bed with an inner peace that I have not felt in a long time.

#

Darkness surrounds me. I see nothing, hear nothing, feel nothing. Then there blows a breeze of change. The night takes shape, the void making way for tangible forms I can see, for whispering winds I can hear, for the sensation of solid soil beneath the soles of my feet. As perceivable surroundings gradually manifest, the familiarity I feel grows so comfortable that it strangely mirrors a home. Eventually, I stand on firm ground, see the hills and the sky, smell the serene rush of winds. Such a vivid dream, so clear and sound and true on my skin…

‘Hello, friend. Pleasure to see you again.’

I turn and face… an upright person. Man or woman, I cannot say, but it is familiar.

‘Where am I?’

‘Why, in a dream. Or am I in the wrong? Is it not always smoke and mirrors, after all? You know the truth. In a world as real as the dreams from which you wake morn after morn, a world where every moment alive feels like death, tell me the value of the difference.’

‘So, this is it.’

‘I regret to be the unfortunate messenger. Brain aneurysm. Happens to the healthiest, they say. Yet you were anything but healthy, living like a dead man, only now your body has finally followed. A lack of will, corroborated by physical and mental pressure, is a potentially lethal mixture, as sadly demonstrated in your case.  You would be amazed how few mourn their own death, after a bleak, dry life. How about you? You hardly seemed happy.’

‘Well, not right then, but I would definitely go on!’

‘That is precisely the point, my wise friend. The abstract oddity that you call life must cycle between day and night, night and day, for how could you appreciate light without dark? Who could learn from the fear of the night without the rewarding warmth of a caressing sun? This game is all about cherishing and learning, my friend. Never give up and keep pushing. No matter how much you might disagree, you are no more a failure than I am a raven.’

‘What are you, then? Certainly not merely a product of my own lost mind?’

‘I know many things, my friend. Thus, to lie would be a waste of precious wisdom: While I indeed am a segment of your subconscious, I also belong to the greater cosmic skies. I am a central necessity in the existence of every living thing in past and present and future, like every coin has a flipside, every track has its end. And I have been waiting for you there, because ravens always fly in pairs, never long alone. You, too, know me: I am your friend.’

‘I understand now.’

‘It is important that you do. Only then may you accept. I see that I am done here.’

‘What happens next?’

Suddenly, the vista blows open like a canvas, the rapture taking its inhabitant along, revealing an open sky – one full of trustworthy shadows, afloat in vigil of the world below. And every person I see on the streets below is guided by their own midnight guardian.

‘Why, you fly with another lost soul. And when you are done, we will meet again.’

So, see you at the end of the line, my feathery friend.

 

About the author

Mario Marcinko started writing during his master’s program in English Literature. Two short stories were accepted by Tint Journal, an Austrian online magazine for ESL authors: a Lovecraftian period piece and a homage to Dostoyevsky. He explores psychology and philosophy with his sentimental portrayals of character-driven arcs. 

 

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