Category: Fiction

Scar Tissue

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It was her hands that triggered it.

The way they were folded over one another as though she was clutching at herself in disbelief or shock.

It was strange to see how smooth the skin was. It looked plump and youthful, pumped up with a chemical waxiness that allowed the death to somehow drain from it, but at the same time remain there.

That dead grasp of her hands. I’d seen it once before, only then it had been a fleeting thing. A stiffening, uncontrolled scratching, a reflexive clutching at sheets. All rhythm, all movement frozen. Little pinpricks leaving us rigid and taut. Each gasp a brief prelude to all of this.

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Midnight Rowing

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Twenty four attempts. That was the total for the year and it was a record.

At least five of them, he knew, could be accounted for by Gregg Sullivan. Five times that fool had gone under, and five times he’d somehow been hauled to the surface. One of the attempts he’d managed to scupper himself, and he remembered wondering at the time whether Gregg looked around first before jumping, just to be sure that someone would hear him hit the water, see him go under and would rush to help him.

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Tea and biscuit days

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He’d been dead a long while now of course, your dad. But that didn’t stop you thinking about him.

Looking at the photo, it was easy to bring him back. Easy to remember him. Crisp cream trousers, with a neat, stylish pleat. Cool white shirt, long sleeved. Braces and belt. Black leather. Brown sandals with a big thick buckle and clean white socks somehow. A cigarette always in his hand, wrapped between yellow-stained fingers, a permanent feature. That would get him in the end, those cigarettes, but he never knew it then that day when the photograph ws taken, his hair slicked back, all glossy and black, and only just greying at the sides. A beaming, cheeky grin, sparkling eyes, alive and grey. That was your dad, all of this.

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