Guest Writer

Matchboxes, a Bomb, and Bleeders by Christopher Ananias

(Image provided by Christopher Ananias, a fine fine Hawk)

The explosion happened around the time Danny and his long-haired buddy Jay Michaels turned my stingray bike into a chopper. They added aluminum tubes to the front forks. I was pretty cool, peddling the town, kicked back like Peter Fonda in “Easy Rider.” I don’t know if Dad still lived at home or not? It was so long ago.

The bomb exploded three houses up a grassy alley from our house. Sound travels in strange ways, especially in one’s memory. It bounced off the elementary school bordering Baker Street, like all the kids hung their pigtails and buzz cuts out the windows and shouted, “Boom!”

I don’t recall any sirens or groups of people with hands to their faces saying, “Oh my God!” Not even a teenager smiling, saying, “Fuck me.”

The day of the explosion was warm. I was outside, playing with Matchbox cars. Matchboxes were a big thing, bigger than marbles and jacks.

I remember in second grade whipping one of those chunks of steel at Mark on the shiny gym floor. The matchbox skipped off his hand and hit him in the mouth. I froze—all the fun—gone. He was a hemophiliac. The principal warned us to be careful around Mark. A big handlebar mustache said, “He’s a Bleeder.”

Mark grabbed his mouth, and nothing happened. Just like every other time he fell or got slammed into, everyone held their breath for the unstoppable river of blood that never came. Mark seemed unaware of his condition, hanging upside down on the monkey bars and tackling people.

The season of the explosion was during summer vacation. When Danny and his friends were building tree forts, turning bikes into choppers, and someone made a bomb.

The explosion came from the largest house of the richest people in town. This house had pointed green gables and a conical tower on one end, like some kind of Dutch architecture. Later, all grown up at ten, on my paper route, I stared at it from Jefferson Street. The stigma of death must have turned off the sunshine, because it always seemed gloomy.

There was a lot of speculation around town…

“The bomb bout rattled my windows out! I knew those boys were up to no good!” said old Mrs. Pearson. She spoke to Darrel at the Mobile gas station, beside the post office.

“Tom, did you hear how he looked?” shouted Ken from the sunny porch. Tom and Ken were best friends.

“No, did you?” Tom stood flat-footed on a yellow three-speed by the fire hydrant.

“I heard, it blew the top of his head-”

“-Be quiet about that, Kenneth!” interrupted his mother from the screen door, always catching him.

“Sorry Mom… Tom, you wanna skateboard at the bank parking lot?”

“Yeah, let’s go!”

It circulated that the richest boy in town made the bomb. Others said it was a disastrous chemistry set experiment. A chemistry set that says, 16 AND UP. I had two competing images in my mind. I thought he was a mad bomber, then a scientist in a white lab coat. The town Marshall, an old guy named Milt, who also drove a school bus, didn’t arrest anyone. Not even “Pop Bottle” Pete who lived down by the railroad tracks.

Life does what it does, and I graduated from the fifth grade to the big scary middle school on the hill. A new world populated by gargantuan eighth graders who wore leather motorcycle jackets and fucked.

On one little keynote… For a moment, in this shuffling middle school maze, I became a celebrated person. When, in gym class, a wild swing of the yellow wiffle ball bat connected, shooting the wiffle ball over the bleachers. I rounded the bases to home. The big boys cheered! Pete, the tall sandy-haired eighth grader clapped me on the back and said, “Good one you little shit.” He later became my dentist.

#

Mark was with us for a while. A gang of us drank, smoked dope, dropped acid, laughed our asses off, wrecked our parents’ cars and our motorcycles. One unfortunate upper classmate, drinking before, during, and after a warm high school football game took a header off a highway bridge doing 100 MPH—splitting his car in half. This reminded me again of the boy who accidentally blew himself up, years ago on that summer day. Death wasn’t just calling the old folks.

I never saw Mark bleed the whole time. Not even when he stuck up for me when I was drunk and he hit a guy square in the teeth. Mark was a brave dude—probably only weighed 130 pounds.

He spent time in the hospital for his hemophilia throughout school—and out of school in the 80s. “Where’s Mark?” Someone would say, answered with, “Back in the hospital.”

The rivers of blood came. I just never saw them. Sometimes the bleeding is on the inside. When I was nineteen, he started disappearing before my eyes. His Def Leppard and AC/DC shirts looked too big, like heavy metal gowns. He never said what was wrong. Mark had always been skinny, but this was something else…

The day of Mark’s funeral, I rode shotgun, in a strange bubble of isolation with my half-ass friends dressed the same way they always did. I watched the cut down cornfields clipping by, in a sort of fog, riding in Ken’s rusty blue Gran Torino. Drinking warm Budweiser and taking lackadaisical hits off the constant joint. A hand in the bag of Seyfert’s Potato Chips

Ken jumped the railroad tracks at the steep hill by the “Doll House.” Where they sold fishing equipment, bait, and big weird Dolls with human hair on their heads. My ass lifted off the seat! The car crashed like “The General Lee” in “The Dukes of Hazard.” We laughed hard like we used to, but our connections were already coming apart. I was coming apart.

We arrived late at the funeral home with beer on our breath, brushing potato chips off, and stinking of pot. People were upset with us. Mark’s best friends had a role to play.

We lined up by his casket, like deserters who came back to the battle, and walked him to his grave. Then we got back into the Torino and fucked away another day.

THE END

Christopher J. Ananias enjoys wildlife photography. He likes to walk along the railroad tracks, dodging the trains. His work has appeared in Flash Fiction Magazine, Grim and Gilded, Dead Mule of Southern Literature, Literally Stories UK and others.

The Solemn Rules by Christopher Ananias

(Image provided by Christopher Ananias)

(Editor’s note: Today and tomorrow and Wednesday we welcome Christopher Ananias, who is a first rate writer and photographer. Christopher takes a good look at the world and returns with honest first rate prose. His biography appears at the bottom of this post.–LA)

And the words, like a kind of conjuring, brought the ladies from the sheets of rain. Like they all rode together in the same car or dark cloud. One held the door for the other three, as they hurried inside, fine heels clacking, and the door shut. Their perfume and rain drops mingled together, and it was strong and pleasant, but it made Vanda dizzy, thinking of death. A death lay before her.

Vanda stood over Randall and the other three young women gave her a moment. She wore the dark shawl of a mourner. Her companions watched and observed the silent ritual, then they chatted. The conversation became louder, and for a raucous moment, it seemed they had forgotten the solemn rules.

Vanda imagined wearing a black veil. A veil that is reserved for widows, and not young ladies who fall into traps with older married men. She touched the glossy black casket. Her long white fingers looked starkly bright in contrast. The casket felt as though it had sat in a cold basement, instead of a carpeted funeral home with a furnace huffing in its bowels.

She looked at Randall. He looked very attractive to her, and the urge came on strong, and she wanted to climb on top of him. Make necrophiliac love. A moan slipped from her. Did her shopping companions, and confidants, who even accompanied her to the funeral of her adulterous lover, hear that lustful moan? I’m way out of line, thought Vanda. What right do I have to be here? And to think these sick thoughts!

What shoes did he wear? Were they his slick brown office shoes, doubling for—forever shoes? Her fingers pulled at the lower lid and it creaked. She glimpsed his bare white toes and dropped it with a thump! The jarring acrid taste of fear turned in her stomach. What am I doing?

Vanda looked over at the window and the water streamed down in cold beads. She could see the drab cars on the street. They were in a certain order, except for one. Her flashy red sports car, which they crowded into. It looked impossibly bright, and beautiful, somewhat like her own flashing beguiles of full lips, white teeth, and shapely aerodynamic curves. And wrong. It looked too fast, drop your pants without underwear fast, too ritzy, among the subdued and stoic Nissans and Toyota Camrys.

She could feel the fear of being outed, out of decency, out of my mind, you’re out-of-order, Miss! She watched the rain bead down the window, and in the gray light, her body became as still as the corpse in the casket. Who died, in a sudden cardiac arrest, riding a stationary bicycle with a blown heart to eternity. She thought again, what am I doing here?

Vanda had lived for two years in the shallow grave of discovery. Randall claimed his wife went on sniff and fluid patrols and dug through his clothes, and scanned his phone looking for traces of the other woman. Her.

Randall, the handsome sandy-haired accountant with designer glasses had the exact answers to the balance sheet of adultery. He would stand in his underwear, his flat 41-year-old workout stomach with a hint of a six-pack on view. Vanda watched his rituals still nude from her fluffy and deeply comfortable bed. He rolled the lint remover over his office clothes. “Look Vanda, that’s a long one.” He showed her the roller. A long blond hair, matted against the sticky surface, doing two laps. “Penny would go apeshit if she found that one! She’s got her Dad’s old Walther Pistol too…”

Sometimes as they lay in the afternoon sun. His phone would chime, sending ice sickles up Vanda’s spine. WIFEY lit up in red letters on the large iPhone screen. It was an invasion of her inner sanctum. Her sanctum of them. She watched his cool fingers typing with the energy of a man that has his cake and has just got done with it too, and might have another piece.

Randall had a second phone for their relationship. A cheap burner like he was a drug dealer clocking out by the concrete blocks on South Street. The relationship revolved solely around his time schedule. Vanda knew her friends thought she was a fool, as she dialed each one after some broken plan.

The Colts game became one that got seared into her primal cortex. Vanda saw Randall and his family on TV in the stands! Randall’s arm is around his dark-shiny-haired wife, wearing a blue Colts jersey on her buxom chest. She looked strong and beautiful and Vanda was afraid of her. Afraid of her righteousness, and that gun. Randy Jr. sat basking in the light of his loving parents that was as real as her own misery. She got all of this from one little eye-popping pan of the TV camera that landed on Randall.

Randall’s little boy whom she heard about a million times, added a dark layer of guilt to this adulterous cake. Vanda felt like she was committing attempted murder against the fable of his happy family.

She looked out the window again in the foggy gloom ever so fitting for a funeral. The widow and little Randy Jr. came up the sidewalk, and Vanda slipped out a side door, where several shiny caskets waited on biers like boats for the river Styx. Her three friends got a group text. “Meet me outside.”

And the words conjured them into a downpour and into the red sports car with a cat emblem on the hood. Packed to the ceiling, with four beautiful babes, cascades of shiny wet hair, sleek young arms dripping on the door panels, and shiny shaved legs in skirts cocked up into the dash and bald knees pushed into the back of the seats. Their voices were full of exclamations and laughter like they came from the sunshine of good times instead of a rainy funeral parlor.

#

Later that evening Vanda laid on her sumptuous bed in her Randall-less boudoir, and dialed Randall’s widow, WIFEY. Unbeknownst to each other they were at that very moment each, smelling one of Randall’s dress shirts. The phone rang three times. Vanda thought, What am I doing? I don’t have any right to call her. I’m way out of line. Something rekindled inside her like the excitement of the affair.

“Hello,” WIFEY sounded perfect to Vanda. Like a strong, complete woman.

Vanda raised up, dropping the shirt on her naked waist, covered in Randall’s scent, and said, “I-I.”

“Who is this?”

“I found your dog, the uh, black Yorkie.” Vanda felt like she was reading a line from a terrible play, which she mostly forgot.

“We don’t have a dog.”

“I found little Randall’s dog. The black Yorkie. His name is…uh,” Vanda glanced around the room landing on the blank TV screen. “His name is Sanyo.”

“I told you we don’t have a dog.” Then the phone went silent. “Did you say my son’s name?”

“He’s a good little dog, Randall Junior will miss him.”

“It’s you isn’t it? The whore.”

“Sanyo wants to come home. Please let me bring him to you and Randall Junior.”

“I saw your little red sports car outside the funeral home.” Her voice rose. “How dare you? You have no boundaries. You filthy whore!”

“Sanyo loves little Randall, very-very much. Please.”

“Look I’m going to say this so you can understand. If you come near my house or Randall Junior. I will blow your fucking head off. I might anyway.” WIFEY dropped the phone and jammed Randall’s shirt into a trash sack lumped with his other clothes.

“But what about the reward?” said Vanda into the dead air. Then she masturbated.

THE END

Christopher J. Ananias enjoys wildlife photography. He likes to walk along the railroad tracks, dodging the trains. His work has appeared in Flash Fiction Magazine, Grim and Gilded, Dead Mule of Southern Literature, Literally Stories UK and others.

And Now For the Good News….by Michael Bloor

(We conclude this week’s run of tales by Michael Bloor on what happens to be his birthday. Anyone who has been reading knows why we hope to publish more of his work in the future. Happy Birthday Mick!)

Davie Millar paused in the middle of the Faery Bridge, leant on the rail and stared down at the Blackwater. Like a few other things in the town, the Faery Bridge was misnamed. When it was built, it was first called the Ferro-Concrete Bridge, but ferro-concrete had been an unfamiliar concept in the town a hundred years ago.

It was the autumn, and the total official number of UK Covid deaths (including Davie’s granny) had exceeded the Hiroshima bomb fatalities. But that wasn’t why Davie was so woeful: he was sorrowing because he was on his way to meet Big Andy McBride, the town loan shark. Big Andy was barred by the betting companies (Davie could guess why), so it was natural for Big Andy to ask Davie to put a bet on for him. Fifty quid at 25 to 1. Davie, of course, hadn’t been in a position to refuse. Big Andy’s piggy-pink eyes had narrowed slightly as he handed over the fifty quid. ‘Dinna mess wi’ me now, Davie. The last guy that did that wis left tryin’ to pick-up his broken teeth wi’ a broken arm.’

‘Nae worries, Mr McBride.’

It was Davie that was worried. Last night, he’d had just enough cash to take Melanie to the Bond film, but when she’d wanted a (ridiculously big) bag of popcorn, he’d had to break into Big Andy’s winnings. And once that terrifying Rubicon had been crossed, it had seemed a minor matter to blow quite a lot more of Big Andy’s winnings on a couple of rounds of drinks at the King of Prussia and a taxi home. Considering the risk that the events of last night were now posing to Davie’s life and limb, Melanie had proved disappointingly lukewarm. He had to face up to the likelihood that, compared to Seb, the lead guitarist in the regular band at the Abercrombie Hotel, Davie was running a poor second in Melanie’s affections..

Watching a couple of ducks fossicking about in the Blackwater shallows, half a dozen lame excuses of the dog-ate-my-homework variety ran through Davie’s head. He sighed, turned away from the rail and headed across the bridge towards the old mill. His granny had worked at the mill til it closed, like some much else, in the 1980s. Now the building had been converted into bijou flats. The closure and conversion had happened before he was born and he suddenly realised that he had no idea what the mill had produced before it produced Edinburgh commuters. All he could recall being told was that it used to produce a lot of dust, which had eventually killed his grandad. The recollection didn’t improve his mood.

His pace slowed as he headed up the hill to the council houses. He was surprised to see an ambulance parked beside Big Andy’s BMW. He stopped fifty yards away and watched as two ambulance men manoeuvred a stretcher into the back of their vehicle. Davie turned to a nearby neighbour: ‘Is that Big Andy on the stretcher?’

‘Aye, Covid. Serve the bugger right: never wears a bloody mask in the Co-op.’

As the ambulance lights dwindled in the distance, Davie turned back towards the Blackwater. By the time he’d returned to the Faery Bridge, he’d realised that the remainder of Big Andy’s winnings would be more than enough to buy that elderly Alfa Romeo saloon on the forecourt at Macrae’s Car Sales (the unique noise from the Alfa Romeo engine block was one of the sweetest sounds on Earth). Apparently, when Seb The Guitarist needed a car, he had to borrow his mummy’s Ford Fiesta.

And he could maybe make a few quid delivering for the Chinese take-away. The two ducks were now battling gamely upstream.

Biography:

Michael Bloor lives in Dunblane, Scotland, where he has discovered the exhilaration of short fiction, with more than a hundred pieces published in Literally Stories, Everyday Fiction, The Copperfield Review, Litro Online, Firewords, The Drabble, The Cabinet of Heed, Moonpark Review and elsewhere (see https://michaelbloor.com).

The Unsung Freedom Fighter by Michael Bloor

It was a shock when old Andy Baranov died. Sudden deaths are always a shock: it was a car crash – brake failure on the steep, winding descent of the Braeport, near his house in Dunblane. As well as a good neighbour, he was my favourite opponent at the chess club. Although over-the-board chatter is frowned upon, the club is a friendly place and we had become firm friends, continuing to play at each other’s houses during the summer months, when the chess club was closed. Naturally, I went to his funeral at the crematorium.

Gordon, the chess club president, was also at the crematorium; we sat together. Gordon was surprised that the service wasn’t at the Orthodox Church. I explained that, although Andy was the grandson of Russian refugees from the Bolshevik Revolution, the family weren’t members of the Orthodox Church. They had fled the revolution because they were social democrats, opponents of both the bolsheviks and the church-and-state czarist regime…

Gordon muttered, ‘OK, gimme the history lesson later.’

The service was pretty grim. Afterwards, Gordon and I felt obliged to accept the family’s invitation to the Drummond Arms for afternoon tea. I have a weak bladder (age-related) and was fiddling with my half-empty tea cup, wondering when I could decently leave, when Andy’s daughter, Sophie, came up to have a word. Gordon and I were giving her our condolences, but she cut us short. Addressing me, she said, ‘It’s Frank, isn’t it? I was hoping to catch you here, I have to travel back to London tonight. Dad wanted you to have this…’

She fished a book out of her capacious shoulder bag, handed it over, and moved on. The book was Harry Golombek’s account of the World Chess Championship, between V. Smyslov and M. M. Botvinnik held in Moscow in 1957*. Gordon and I stared at the book, rather underwhelmed. A hardback, with its original, but torn, paper cover. I turned a page or two: Andy hadn’t written anything on the inside of the front cover. The book recorded all those 1957 world championship games in the old descriptive notation. A simpler algebraic notation had been universally adopted in 1981: for example, a pawn move to the fourth square on the king file changed from ‘P-K4’ to the simpler ‘e4.’ Only a few old-timers like me were still familiar with the old notation. So the book had little intrinsic interest or value. Gordon shrugged and muttered, ‘Well, at least it’s a memento of Andy.’ I nodded, slipped the book in my jacket pocket and asked Gordon if he thought we might leave.

When I got home, I changed out of my suit because I was planning to go down to the allotments and and sow some peas. As I was hanging up my suit in the wardrobe, the jacket slipped off the hanger and fell on the floor. When I picked it up, Andy’s book (already forgotten) fell out of the pocket and landed, spread open, on the bedroom floor. I picked it up and noticed what I perhaps should have noticed before, namely that a folded piece of paper had been sellotaped to the inside of the spilled paper cover. I separated the folded paper from the cover and spread it out. It read as follows:

Dear Frank,

I write this in haste. If you receive this book from my daughter, it will be because I have died suddenly, possibly violently.

I know you are a supporter of Russian freedom (even though you are a misguided follower of Kropotkin, rather than Kerensky). I have left a memory stick, hidden in an old spectacle case, at the back of the chess club cupboard at the kirk hall. Please take the memory stick and catch the 10.10 to Glasgow from Dunblane on May 1st. Board the second carriage at the door nearest the engine and take the second seat on the left. Push the memory stick into the seat upholstery. Leave the train at Stirling. A friend will recover the stick and pass it on to those who can make most use of it. Please do this in the cause of Russian freedom and as a token of our long friendship.

With every good wish,

Andrei Baranov

Shit!

I was shivering, and not just because I was in my socks and underpants. ‘… a supporter of Russian freedom… a misguided follower of Kropotkin’?? As an undergraduate botany student sixty years ago, I’d read Kropotkin’s book, ‘Mutual Aid,’ a Pelican paperback, a scholarly corrective to the popular view of Darwinist evolutionary theory: Kroptokin had pointed out that evolution was not just a competitive struggle of all against all, there were plenty of examples of the importance for survival of co-operation both within and between species. I’d enthused about the book to Andy one night in the pub, after the club had closed. And I’d then been surprised when Andy told me that Kropotkin had been an anarchist revolutionary who’d escaped from the Fortress of St Peter and St Paul in Czarist St Petersburg, and had written ‘Mutual Aid’ in exile in a London suburb.

I didn’t think that having read Kroptkin’s book made me an anarchist. Similarly, I wasn’t a fan of President Putin (who is?), but to describe me as a devotee of Russian freedom was quite a stretch.

Why me, Andy? Why the hell pick on me?? OK, Andy and I were the only key-holders to the chess club cupboard. But as a 75 year-old retired botany lecturer, I was hardly a match for the Russian security services.

I struggled to think clearly. I poured out and drank the last of the bottle of Highland Park, left over from my birthday. Then I realised I was still in my underpants and put some more clothes on. May 1st was tomorrow. Logically, the first thing to do was to find the memory stick. When I stepped out the front door, I couldn’t help looking cautiously up and down the street. As I walked off to the kirk hall, a builder’s van suddenly pulled away from no.22. I spun around like a whirling dervish, but it simply drove past me, down to the Perth road. Truth to tell, I then went back home to change clothes, as I’d wet myself.

Pulling on another pair of jeans, I wondered if I shouldn’t try and pass this whole thing over to Andy’s daughter, Sophie. But she would be already on the train back to London, I didn’t have any contact details for her, and I knew from chats with Andy that his only child didn’t share his interest in family history and politics. The obvious people to deal with this were the British security services (not that popular opinion viewed them as a match for the Russian security services), but I imagined I could only contact them via the local police. And I knew I’d have a better case once I’d found the memory stick. I set out again for the kirk hall.

I got there just after five o’clock. The door was locked. I pressed the bell – no response. I pressed the bell again, for several seconds. A large, elderly lady appeared and wanted to know my business. I explained I needed to retrieve something from the chess club cupboard. As I said it, I could see that I ought to have dreamed up a story which implied an urgent and important errand. Did I mean the cupboard in the large meeting room? Yes, I did. The Kirk Presbytery were currently meeting in there to discuss the accounts: I would need to come back later. This was said in a tone that brooked no dissent. I went round the corner for a pint in The King of Prussia.

Fortified by the pint, another whisky, and a plausible cover story, I returned to the kirk hall half an hour later. I rang the bell and I rang it again. Then I realised there were no lights on. Damn it, of course, they’d all gone home. Befuddled, I stood for a minute outside the kirk hall.

A helmeted and black-leathered motor-cyclist rode slowly down the street, stopped and parked the bike twenty yards away, and started fiddling with some straps. I panicked and walked quickly away. I thought about heading for the police station, despite lacking the memory stick. But home was nearer. And in my panicky, befuddled state, home seemed safer.

Jeez, what a pig’s breakfast I was making of everything. I set the alarm, though I was sure I wouldn’t sleep a wink. But of course, as an exhausted 75 year-old, I slept like a baby til I woke up bursting for a pee, had a pee, and then slept like a baby again.

I was at the kirk hall at eight o’clock the next morning – I thought there might be a cleaner there. But the door wasn’t unlocked til just after nine, by the beadle. I explained I needed something from the chess club cupboard. He followed me to the meeting room, but seemed satisfied once I produced my key to the cupboard. There was a lot of stuff in there – chess sets, chess boards, chess clocks, score sheets, old minute books, old photos – but I found the spectacle case eventually. I put everything back, locked up, shouted my thanks to the beadle, and headed for the station.

Dunblane is a terminus for Glasgow commuter services. So the 10.10 train was empty when it drew up at the platform. I was the first person into the second carriage and bagged the second seat on the left. Four other people entered the carriage and I found myself scrutinising them as they entered and walked past me. I discounted a mother with a toddler, and an elderly lady with a walking stick, but I fancied that a powerfully built middle-aged man with a shaved head gave me an apprising look as he walked past. I was uncomfortable that he was sitting behind me, where I couldn’t see him, but I didn’t dare quit the designated seat.

As the train drew out of the station, I laid my raincoat beside me and, under the cover of the coat, pushed the memory stick into the gap in the upholstery. The ticket-collector arrived; he didn’t even look at me or my raincoat, just at my ticket. Then I got a shock: I’d completely forgotten the train stopped at Bridge of Allan before it got to Stirling. Several girl students came into the carriage and one of them came and sat opposite me. I felt sick, my mouth was dry and I couldn’t swallow.

She ignored me and sat swiping her phone.

The train pulled into Stirling station, where there were a score or more passengers waiting to board. I got up, picked up my raincoat, and noted that the memory stick was invisible, nestled in the gap in the upholstery. The shaved-headed guy also got off the train. I didn’t linger at the station for a return train to Dunblane, I headed straight for the taxi rank – an extravagance, but I would’ve given half my pension pot for a quick getaway. To my shame, halfway home, I had to ask the taxi driver to stop so that I could pee into a hedge.

A year’s gone by. I haven’t been on a bloody train since.

*H. Golombek, ‘World Chess Championship 1957,’ London: Macgibbon & Kee, 1957.

Biography:

Michael Bloor lives in Dunblane, Scotland, where he has discovered the exhilaration of short fiction, with more than a hundred pieces published in Literally Stories, Everyday Fiction, The Copperfield Review, Litro Online, Firewords, The Drabble, The Cabinet of Heed, Moonpark Review and elsewhere (see https://michaelbloor.com).

The Second Letter by Michael Bloor

Charlie Robertson had spent his entire working life on the Kilblane estate. When he’d retired as head gamekeeper back in 2015, Sir Ewan had presented him with a silver watch and made a rambling but heart-felt speech about Andy’s knowledge of, and love for, the wild places. So it had been a shock after Sir Ewan died, when Charlie got a letter from the new estate factor, telling him that he’d have to quit his cottage. The estate was putting the cottage up for sale: someone from Edinburgh or London would likely buy it as a holiday home.

Charlie mentioned it to Willie Forbes, the postie, when Charlie asked Willie into the cottage to stand on a chair and change a light bulb for him. And then Willie mentioned it to the minister in the village. The minister was a nervous young man who’d previously served in the Castlemilk housing scheme in Glasgow: he explained to Willie that, once Charlie had actually been evicted, he’d then qualify for a council flat. The minister and Willie both knew what Charlie’s life would be like in a council flat in the town; Willie reckoned he’d be ‘like an auld lion in a circus.’ They agreed it was a bad business: Charlie would be much better off staying with a member of his family, but he’d never married and had no close relatives.

And that was how matters stood, on a warm spring day, when Charlie took a stroll up the glen, to see the primroses in full yellow bloom beside the burn as it tumbles and splatters over the boulders. Buoyed in spirit, on his return to the cottage he decided to open yet another official-looking letter that Willie had delivered two days previously. It was from a London solicitor and its contents took Charlie back fifty-odd years…

#

As the estate’s under-keeper back then, young Charlie had been despatched to look for the ponies that would be needed for the next day’s shoot. The head keeper had predicted (wrongly) that they would’ve taken shelter in Glen Ducheron (aka Gleann an Dubh Choirein, the Glen of the Black Corries). Charlie had wasted the whole afternoon walking the length of the glen without seeing so much as a hoof print. It was dusk as he returned to the mouth of the glen, and the track back to the shooting lodge. That was when he heard frantic shouting, but could see no-one. Then he spotted an arm waving above the dead bracken on the bankside of the Ducheron Burn. It was a woman, unable to stand: she had smashed her left knee when she’d slipped on a rock, trying to cross the burn. She was wet through and shivering.

Charlie took off his coat, wrapped it round her, and told her he’d hurry off to the lodge where there was a phone. She begged him not to leave her. Was it the hours of loneliness she’d already endured, the throbbing pain, or the sinister bellowing of the rutting stags that had drummed through the glen all afternoon? Maybe all three: at any rate, she was insistent and Charlie complied.

A few yards away downstream was a mature spruce plantation; Charlie quickly gathered two branches for a leg splint and a stouter branch for a crutch. In the early evening dark, huddled together for support, they set out on the two-mile walk to the lodge. The path, at first, was uphill, but at least it wasn’t uneven or stepped. Charlie’s auntie was the local midwife and so he knew about the soothing importance of distracting questions and chatter. He learned that her name was Millie and that she was a postgraduate archaeology student.

They paused for a breather. ‘And what were ye doin’, out on the estate in the middle o’ November?’

‘Well, there was once a Roman camp down at Callander…’

‘Ah, ye were lookin’ for the Roman ford?’

Surprised out of her pain and exhaustion, she looked up at him. ‘Yes, that’s right! How..?’

‘Well, yer no’ the first tae come lookin’. Robbie, the head gamekeeper, told me that a couple o’ Edinburgh professors were here afore the war, lookin’. The Romans made a cuttin’ in that steep bank beside the burn and lined the cuttin’ wi’ stanes. There’s a lot o’ history in these glens, if ye ken where tae look.’

The moon was now up and he saw her smile and give a vigorous triple nod. They set off again.

When they reached the lodge, the housekeeper phoned for an ambulance, put them in front of the kitchen range and fed them warm milk and oatcakes with loganberry jam. Away from the moonlight, Charlie could see that Millie’s eyes were brown.

A few days later, he received a letter from Millie (sent care of Mrs Laing, the housekeeper), with her repeated thanks and apologies, plus two pounds to pay for dry-cleaning Charlie’s coat. He kept her letter and wrote a letter in return, but got no further reply.

#

And, as Willie the postie told his audience in the public bar of The Drummond Arms Hotel, that was that.

[dramatic pause]

Until Charlie got the letter from the solicitor telling him that the Archaeology Professor had died and left Charlie her wee house in London, which the solicitor had valued at in excess of nine hundred thousand pounds.

So, that was why Charlie was buying his cottage off the estate. Willie had got a lot of quiet enjoyment out of telling the story to the new factor’s wife, when he’d delivered a parcel to the factor’s house that morning.

Biography:

Michael Bloor lives in Dunblane, Scotland, where he has discovered the exhilaration of short fiction, with more than a hundred pieces published in Literally Stories, Everyday Fiction, The Copperfield Review, Litro Online, Firewords, The Drabble, The Cabinet of Heed, Moonpark Review and elsewhere (see https://michaelbloor.com).

The Forensic Psychiatrist’s Tale by Michael Bloor

Bob Duncan, like a lot of ex-policemen, is of a philosophical turn-of-mind. He reckons that the Inverallan Allotments are a bit like the army in the days of the old National Service, where all sorts of people had to learn to mix in together. Misunderstandings might occur across the class barriers, disputes might flare up from time to time, but we all learn to jog along together in the common struggle against Mother Nature and the bloody weather. He was enlarging on this to Willie Brown and myself as we all took shelter from a sudden, vicious shower in the old allotment summerhouse.

Willie laughed: ‘All sorts, Bob? Well, I havena’ seen that Beyoncé on a plot yet. Nor the Duke o’ Buccleuch… Unless he’s that new fella in the blue floppy hat that’s got old Ellen’s plot, over beside the railway.’

‘Talk of the Devil,’ I nodded towards a man in a blue floppy hat hurrying through the downpour to the summerhouse.

He shook himself and gasped out a greeting as he came in the door. I shifted an old seed catalogue off the bench to make way for him. He introduced himself as Andrew MacSorley – a large man with a florid complexion. To be sociable, I asked him how long he’d been on the waiting list before he’d got a plot.

‘Two and a half years. I’m pleased with the plot, though. Especially the fruit bushes.’ He spoke with the long drawn-out vowels of the Scottish boarding schools. ‘And I was lucky, because I got the plot in October, just a month before I retired.’ This struck a chord and we all then spent a few minutes in a collective hymn of praise to Retirement. Then Willie asked him what he’s done before he’d retired. He replied that he’d been a forensic psychiatrist.

There was a moment of stunned silence and then I, rather lamely, said: ‘Wow. Interesting job!’

He stretched out his legs from the bench: ‘Terrible job. Before you ask me why, I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you what was the final straw…

‘You’ll maybe know that an important part of a forensic psychiatrist’s job is that of assessing for the courts whether or not arrested persons are fit to plead. Well, this case I’m going to tell you about wasn’t all that untypical, but it was just one case too many as far as I was concerned.

‘He was a lad in his late teens. He’d gone into the toilets in the square in Crieff, the ones where you pay the attendant 30p. When he went into the Gents, the attendant noticed that he had a chisel sticking out of his back pocket. Well, there’d been a rash of graffiti and minor vandalism in the toilets, and the attendant got suspicious when this lad was a while in the cubicle and not coming out. There were a couple of cops on foot patrol in the square, so she called ‘em over to investigate.

‘Apparently, he took a bit of coaxing to get out of the cubicle and when he came out he still had the chisel. Now, there was no damage to the cubicle, but when the cops asked him what he was doing with the chisel, he said it was to protect himself from man-eating spiders. If he’d said he was an apprentice cabinet-maker – no problem. But to ward off man-eating spiders?? So…

‘They booked him – possession of an offensive weapon. When I saw him he’d already been in the jail for a fortnight, on remand. Was he in a good state of health? Emphatically, he was not. In his terms, he was caught in a giant spider’s web.’*

He paused. ‘Ah, the rain’s almost off, I see. Nice to meet you lads!’

Bob and Willie and I watched him go. Thoughts of jogging along with his fellow-allotmenteers seemingly suspended, Bob turned to me: ‘So whit wiz the polis supposed tae dae? Help the lad fight off they man-eating spiders?? Forbye, that’s nae the reason he’s nae longer working. Ma niece cleans his flat: he wis suspended cos he turned up fo’ work pished…’

*I heard the radical psychiatrist, R.D. Laing, tell the story about the man-eating spiders at a meeting in Cambridge in 1968. It’s stayed with me me ever since.

Biography:

Michael Bloor lives in Dunblane, Scotland, where he has discovered the exhilaration of short fiction, with more than a hundred pieces published in Literally Stories, Everyday Fiction, The Copperfield Review, Litro Online, Firewords, The Drabble, The Cabinet of Heed, Moonpark Review and elsewhere (see https://michaelbloor.com).