Trapped

Mum’s crying again. That’s how my days go now, thinking she’s talking to her comatose son, but in reality I’m right here, locked inside my own body, fully conscious but unable to move or speak. I braced myself for her routine onslaught of confessions as she wiped the tears from her eyes and adjusted the stiff hospital chair.

“Oh, Danny, it’s just so hard,” she began, her voice cracking. “I’m working night and day, and when I’m not working I’m cleaning. I love Mark dearly but I wish he would just once take something off my shoulders.”

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Dreamland

There is one sensation that stays the same through all your days, from the day you are born till the day you die – it’s waking up from sleep. Just before you open your eyes, you float in the nothingness, feeling like you can be anywhere at all, and everywhere at once.

I walk the darkness. I explore it, and I can choose where I’ll eventually wake up. All my days are scattered here, just waiting to be picked.

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Schrödinger’s Baby

She rests the plastic stick upside down on the sink as carefully as possible, as though disturbing it might disrupt the chemical reaction of hormones in the pregnancy test and somehow change the result. Then, just as gently, she lowers the toilet lid and perches on the edge.

Five minutes. That’s all she has to wait. It scuttles by like a mouse when you’re having fun, but she knows how leaden time becomes in this particular situation. She’s been here too many times. She’s tried distraction – scrolling mindlessly through Instagram (bad idea. Baby photos and smug pregnancy announcements everywhere); counting the mosaic tiles on the walls (4,820); and muttering prayers. She’s even tried watching the test continually, waiting for that second pink line to bleed through the stark white window, on one occasion even convincing herself that she could see it. But it was just a trick of the light. No matter how she passes the time, it always ends the same way. Tears. An argument with Gav, because he never says or feels the right thing. Another month stretching out like a desert before her.

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LIMBO LIMBO

Young Tommie Lewis was the apple of his mother’s eye, always a dainty boy with short dark hair, a  little snub nose, large spectacles and a skinny build. School days were hard for Tommie. Sports day he would run, his arms and legs spinning as fast as he could, but he always came last. Nobody ever picked him for football. He usually sat on the sidelines wishing he could be first at something. In the juniors gymnastics became the bane of his life. Once he was made to climb the monkey bars. Getting to the top he froze. A teacher had to climb up to fetch him, handing him the rope to lower himself down. Poor Tommie just slid down the rope, causing blisters on his hands and legs; his mother played merry hell. So Tommie was forced to join the girls away from hazards.

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Hiding Place

Was the ferry late? She checked her watch. It should be coming around the head by now. That sense of foreboding again, as if her body were being gripped by a huge fist.

            She’d been calmer across at the Tesco mini-store, looking for cars with Irish number plates, reading which county each was from. One or two accents floated over: your man was from Cork, your other, might that be Kerry? What’d brought them to Wales? Had any of them had to flee like her?

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The Obmil Annals

What with the encircling memories crowding in, Engineer Ozob completely forgot to recalibrate the composter. The consequences, cataclysmal, are well-documented in the journals recently unearthed, an appropriate descriptor, given the tons of earth mixed with meteor fragments that had entombed the Obmil Annals. 110 year-books, carbon-dated 5630 AD to 5740 AD, then silence.

The previous evening, prior to Ozob’s dream, Deputy Toidi had reported, “Composter one’s out again.” with that smug look that said “You must have it done it wrong again.

“I’m onto it. Good timing; a new rubbish cloud is orbiting.”

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