I’m not a fan of fruitcake. Maybe it’s the rum or the sheer density of the thing. An absolute brick. For 30 years my mother baked and shipped a fruitcake to special people on her Christmas list. She’d buy candied fruit in colors not naturally possible—yet they were the fruit, the foundation of the fruitcake. The cakes probably weighed 11 pounds once wrapped and ready to mail. I remember Dad lugging a couple of these to the post office. Nowadays I recognized this devotion as love. With both Mom and Dad gone, the fruitcake is a memory touchstone.
Yellow pinpricks dotted the dark oppressive shroud above. Spears of sunlight pierced the choking dusty air, creating dancing patterns on the black dead earth. Pale, emaciated, but alive, we gripped each others hands and just stared in awe as the light broke through. I grinned uncontrollably, whilst beside me my son and daughter both laughed and wept uncontrollably.
It had been 17 months since the asteroid struck and finally the sun had returned. Miraculously shapes of other people materialized in the dusty sunlit haze as a small bird took flight into the sky soaring high above us. Survivors. The train tracks empty, they wait for someone to pass through their present. The lush summer trees, overgrown and sporadic obscure the brown rail. The sea breeze rocks the leaves like a swing back and forth until they land beside the track. On the water, far off in the distance, floats a lone sailor on his boat. The romantic fool heads back to land where he believes a woman to be waiting, wandering in the woods of memories. So he crosses from sea to land and arrives on the empty tracks soaked in his desire to remember once more.
Ffinch was a disordered chap. He’d received a slow cooker as a Christmas gift from his sister the year before and decided to cook this year’s turkey in it. But now his confused state took over as the clock ticked: his sis and her brood would arrive in under an hour. Ffinch whined at the slow cooker, “I wish you would hurry up.”
He was that sort of guy – he’d put his hand in front of his face and see his foot. At the surgery he’d greet the doc, 'How are you?' Tell you what, Ffinch would fail his metaphysical. How adjusting the day month and year on my digital watch facilitated time travel is beyond my comprehension. However, by taking countless steps forward and backward in the temporal dimensions, I have arrived at a preference skewed to a predictable past rather than an unknowable future.
Another surprise was whatever actions I took in the past did not dramatically alter the present I traveled away from. A case in point, is of the now hundreds of beautiful women I married in the past, every marriage inevitably ended in divorce. Even so, I keep traveling back and proposing a doomed union. She lays them on the dining table, always in the same order, always painstakingly attentive.
A photo from a chinese restaurant; father, mother and daughter, noodles hanging from their mouths like beards, perfectly matching their wavy yellow hair. All three are trying hard not to laugh. Her mother's wedding ring with "ONLY YOU" engraved on the inside. A tiny bear holding heart;mother's name spelt in gold. Each evening, as my husband's daughter summons the ghost of her mother, my serenity shatters. The first wife, whose departure will never be final, dines with us, eating up what's left of the day. “Found you, Grampa.”
Gun in hand, he motions the old man out of the closet. “Don’t hurt me. Mister. I give you anything you want.” “How about that money you’ve socked away, Gramps?” They go outside to a hole in the backyard. “It’s way in there.” “I can reach it, Gramps.” He points the gun. “You stand over there.” He reaches into the hole, immediately screams, and flees, trying to dislodge the creature that has clamped onto his hand. Talking to the sheriff later, the old man observed, “Pound for pound, there’s no meaner animal on earth than a wolverine.” Ted sighed since his e-mail inbox was overflowing with messages. Between personal notes, mailing lists, and promotions, he could never reach that magic number of zero new e-mails. But, what to do?
He knew he wanted to read everything, so ignoring messages wasn’t an option. He decided to sign up for a speed-reading class, to increase his productivity. Trouble was, he then read so quickly that his momentum sent him sailing to Pluto, never to be seen on Earth again. “Popularity’s great, but I miss home,” Ted sighed. “At least I escaped the online madness, with no e-mail on Pluto.” The last day of the holiday. No one had actually TOLD him. But he knew. The cases were in the back of the car.
“Strawberry ice cream as a special treat, please Viv.” Fobbing him off, eh? “Here you are, Denis.” Nose up; no, shan’t. “Denis…?” Nose down; shan’t! “Perhaps he doesn’t like strawberry?” “Nope, he’s sulking.” “Never!” “Prove it to you. See you next holiday and we’ll try again…” Six months later: “Strawberry ice cream, please Viv. There you go, Denis.” Mmmm... Yummy. “Well, I never thought a Rottweiler would sulk at the end of a holiday!” Crisp autumn air touched their solemn faces as they stood in the gloaming, gazing at the mist-laden outline of pine trees across the lake.
"He's no better, then?" asked the brother, down from the city. "If anything, he's worse. The morphine injections don't help much. I can hardly stand to watch the suffering in his eyes. A loon's sudden laugh floated mockingly across the lake. "Then it's time." "Yes," she said, choking on her words. "Oh, yes." He gently patted her shoulder, gave her a small bottle of pills, and they returned arm in arm to their father's lake house. Two tourists stumbled through the burial ground, snapping photos. Sand swirled them in a capricious breeze.
She spat and made a face. "Ugh! windy and dirty!" "Good place for souls to lie through Eternity." "I wouldn't want to lie here," she said in that grating voice that irritated him so. His hand twitched as he swung the shovel, knocking her into a large opening. "We don't always get to chose where we'll spend Eternity," he said, stuffing her farther into the hole and packing dust about her. He took her rings, which should bring many pounds in the marketplace. They had it surrounded.
The monster had one tiny brown eye that long dark nights had made almost redundant. Its legs – short left, longer on the right for side-of-mountain running – had disappeared under its own enormous weight. Surely it was defenceless now? The captors wore protective clothing: monsters such as these could be dangerous. However Mr Yellow, a veteran of such hunts, showed no fear facing it down. But the hunters had underestimated their prey. Seconds later the monster had simply grown, enlarging to incorporate the entire posse and become one even larger haggis. It was all over in seconds. |
"Classic"
|