Fiction

Here we go! he said as he revved the engine and started off, the car lurching behind like some sort of glowing, metallic creature of the deep. Soon we had it by the roadside and were standing near the truck. Perhaps sensing my queasiness, and speaking again over the grinding winch and the horrorshow scream of metal on metal, he said, Funny thing. There was no body, and nodded at the car. 

Older now than the gods who had died long ago, Sisyphus rarely left his head. One day he imagined himself as Tantalus, standing in a lake with water up to his chin; another Zeus, the infinity on the edge of things. But most of the time he imagined himself as Sisyphus. The Sisyphus he imagined was slowly building a wall from large stones he pushed up a hill. The wall grew with the passing years, high enough that he could no longer scale it, and so long he could no longer see where it began nor remember why he was building it.

Yes, well, the Christmas tree incident has rather introduced a tension of sorts into the family, but I think when we objectively look at the evidence leading up to it, it is clear that Daniel provoked me. Why give me socks with strawberries on them when you know I am deathly allergic to strawberries? Why chuckle as I’m opening it?

There comes a moment when they both fall silent as her daughter takes a long shuddering breath, and that’s when the memory drops into Caro’s consciousness, perfect as a drop of water off a stalactite. Down it smashes, tiny but insistent, into a little pool of something calcified and secret. ‘I got stung by a wasp when I was about four years old,’ she says to her daughter. ‘It really hurts, doesn’t it?’

When Federico wakes up, the sun is beginning to make its descent towards the horizon. He looks at his watch. It is 5 o’clock. Amore, how could I have slept for so long? He looks across and sees Gina sitting on the bench. In the late afternoon light, she is radiant in her floral dress and hat. Gina? Is this really you?

I thought it was a stone at first, the scrape of metal against clunk. Kept digging and turning and if it wasn’t for the sun I would have missed it. But it caught itself a ray; yeah, Emily, a dazzle, nothing gradual about it, fleeting and blinding me quite still with its thin silver shaft. The spare key for the car – the one he lost last summer, he searched for it high and low but not here, not in the potato patch. When all the dirt was scraped out of the grooves, it grew warm in the palm of my hand.

James stares at Max and Max stares at James. Each has a red mark under his left eye that will be dark blue by the time they get home. The boys step towards each other. Max raises his left hand, James his right, and their fingers twine together. They each place their empty hand in the small of the other’s back and begin to move their feet in counts of three. Max then James. James then Max. They tighten their grip, knowing this is the only time they have, and take turns facing the water as the sun begins to set.

I sprinkle food into the aquarium. It is a delicate job. One fish died last week, and that was unfortunate. It floated to the surface at a pathetic tilt, its disappointed mouth open. I used a coffee cup to lift it out and lay it on a table napkin borrowed from the restaurant. I had a hunt through the lost property box for a glass marble to poke through the puckered mouth of the goldfish. I knew I had seen one in there. The marble was enough to weight the dead goldfish to the floor of the tank. The other goldfish dove down to inspect it. Flashes of orange and slow gulping mouths.

You would have said, remember that the opening exchanges are just rituals: how you are, what you’ve been up to, the weather, the traffic – it isn’t all that important what any of you say, it’s just the saying itself that matters. It’s not seeking information but just signalling safety, how you show each other you belong, that you’re friend not foe. You would have said, you’re basically just dogs sniffing at each other’s butts. No. Not that bit, actually. You would most likely have remembered that no one ever takes that well.

Your friend, your handsome friend, he speaks on the screen, stands next to your beaming face and describes parts of you I have never seen, he knows more than me, I who made you, of your sorrow. He makes a joke and people in the room laugh, people whom I have never met, never will and who understand the joke and whose eyes crinkle above their cloth masks. They are pleased for the release. I could attack them, I could bite down on their bones, I am a rabid dog jawing the air.