Outside the others moved, casting blurry footstep-shadows in the skinny yellow space beneath the door and they talked loud or made the occasional sharp apprehensive false laugh but inside it was quiet and dark. Only the clanging electro indie coming weak through phone speakers and the pale light from its screen drawing their shadows crossing over each other in grey blue on the wall marked with fresh tack scars and fresh paint, long dripping words in black and red. The posters were torn down already and burnt because it felt right and somewhere outside in the light amongst the people were the ashes mixed with the ashes of books and diaries and first drafts and flags, old clothes and old disguises. Their own clothes, the ones left were piled in the corner on the other side of the room from them with nothing but laminate floor in between. Thick with dust and marked with footprints booted and bare.

One of the shadows shifted and she lay back on the bed, the old half collapsed mattress with the sleeping bag and the skinny pillow on which her head fell, beside the phone and the screeching synths grew loud and rasping and she closed her eyes against the sound and flicked her fingers at the phone till something hazy and syncopated appeared and crawled slow and cool across her face. She opened her eyes and looked at the ceiling running with cracks and all grey. We’re not pretty enough for all this she said.

He moved up and sat over her and looked at her, earnest with big shadows beneath his eyes picked out by the phone light. The tattoos on his chest that were in the sunlight faded and old looked in that moment stark black against his pale skin lit from beneath. Misguided things from a little too long ago. He said I don’t think that’s the point is it.

Maybe not for them. She tilted up her head to point her chin towards the door where still the sounds of voices raised too loud to be relaxed could be heard then let it fall back down. But it matters to me. She shrugged her shoulders. I don’t want to look like an idiot.

He lay with his head on her abdomen looking sideways up across her body at her face and she moved her fingers across his old ink stained scars. I think you’re pretty he said and his voice vibrated up inside her.

She flicked at his skin and it sprang back elastic. I know you do she said. I am not worried that the boy with his head on my naked torso doesn’t think I’m pretty. She inhaled long through her nose and crushed her eyes tight shut again and chewed the edge of her little finger and when she opened her eyes again they were back pointed up at the ceiling. It’s everyone else.

He pushed himself up on his elbows and moved up her body and moved her hair across her forehead with his forefinger. Well you’ve got the fringe he said. And you look good in aviators. You’ve totally got the whole classic thing down. He lay down beside her and she shifted her body across and threw the unzipped sleeping bag over then moved back, rolled to her side to bring her body up to his but he stayed on his back with his shoulders straight. I mean you got it lucky he said. You’re a girl. I’ve got nothing going on.

She smiled with her mouth closed and danced her fingers down his chest again but she slid her eyes back across to the light beneath the door. The footstep shadows were stilling. Whatever. You’re you and you know that means everyone’ll like you no matter what you do.

He laughed. It was low, quiet and cynical and it reverberated deep somewhere in his chest. I don’t think everyone will like me after tomorrow.

She kissed his jaw and his cheek till he turned and she found his mouth. Well she said with her forehead on his and her eyes closed. I will. And even when they hate you they’ll like you. Just how you carry yourself. Me, I can dress the part and maybe I’ll look okay in some aviators and boots and an army jacket. But even in a mask man they’ll all be watching you.

I’m not anything.

She grinned. I know that.  It’s everyone else you got to worry about.

He kissed her back and outside the strip of light vanished from beneath the door and the voices dropped to a low murmur. Hushed and tense and with the stink of skunk creeping into the room after them. He smiled, stretched his mouth at the sides and let his eyes flick away from hers for a second and the music from his phone kept rising and falling in slow off-beat rhythms and finally he turned on his shoulder, eyes wide and pupils big in the half light and he looked at her face. She had her eyebrows raised and her mouth closed and some fixed confidence way back in her head.

The next day someone in a balaclava and body armour drew a line through a window across a street and through another window this one closed and an interior door left open to her and fired a bullet along it; and the bullet drew its own line that didn’t stop at her collarbone but went through, down at an angle cracking bone and bursting a lung and pushing a big messy edged round hole in her back and dragging her blood with it into the floor. He was standing on a desk and he jumped down as she fell, cracking his head on the low hanging strip light and sending shadows whirling in hard edged shapes across the room and he ran and got the door shut and another bullet opened a big hole in it and splinters rained down on his hair and fell between his mask and his face. He pulled it off and crawled across to get away from the door and stood and ran to her.

No one move he said to the people lying on their fronts in the middle of the floor surrounded by scattered papers and fallen computer monitors and broken glass, some bleeding from broken noses and cut foreheads and no one moved because that was who he was.

Her aviators were still on her face but she was dead already. He knelt down beside her and touched the hole in her and got her blood on his hands. He used to paint red messages and black swearwords on walls with her not so long ago and sit for a second when they were done, with coffee from a flask marked with red paint handprints and the phone paint marked too lying between them projecting some stupid synth-pop into the night through its little speaker. He moved her jacket out of the way and traced his fingers around the neat little hole in her front that had made the big tear in her back still leaking, soaking through into his jeans.

There was one other door in the room and it was glass and the wall it was in was glass too and on the other side servers blinked while they talked and air conditioners made their quiet rushing sounds and one of the others came through, wearing a red t-shirt and a gasmask and with a rifle slung across her back and a smartphone in her hand. She looked at the girl laid out with the thick spotted line of blood behind her and the new blood dripping down around the boy.

Fuck she said. Fucking fascists.

He didn’t say anything. He pulled the glasses off her face and pushed her hair out of her eyes and pulled the bandana off her mouth. Her irises were skinny. Tiny blue coronas around big black pupils.

The gasmask looked at her smartphone through her curved plastic eyes. We need to go she said. She pocketed the phone and swung the AK around and started shouting at the people in suits with her voice muffled and filtered and harsh like metal and they got up, did what she said and walked to the bullet-holed door.

Come on she said. She had her arm locked tight around the neck of a bald man in a suit and was holding him in front of her body. And find your mask.

He looked up from the unmoving face in his lap and at the cameras. Someone would have cut them or hacked them and made them dead. He touched her cut again and looked at the bright red drops clinging to his fingertips. He touched his face and felt the wetness there.

I’m not going to wear my mask he said and he laid the girl down on the corporate-grey carpet and he stood with the muzzle of his rifle swinging and bouncing off his back, and even when they hated him they’d like him. I want them to see me.

Patrick Ball is 23 years old. He was born in Sheffield and has recently graduated from University College London, where he studied philosophy. He has written prose for most of his life and has recently expanded into some poetry and drama, but he has only just begun seeking to have his work published. Two short radio plays he wrote while at UCL have been recorded and are to be broadcast on the college radio station soon.

They stood in tweed lines, rolling Scotch over their tongues into throaty laughs. Spaniels or Pointers twitched around boots, snapping at the titbits pushed into their mouths to quiet them. They had gathered at the edge of the loch, watching the tepid morning as it spread out over the heather. Each man stood with a different rifle, stroking fingers over the chambers to the stock, marvelling at the calibres. Some eagerly eyed the cusp of the hill, as others adjusted straps and camouflaged waterproofs. One man drew a thick-inked thumb across the bridge of his nose.

They ascended the hill, a cloud of spring-green moving over the brown. Each man carved their own path across the limestone, dogs held taught, worrying the earth beneath their paws. One man lifted a finger to his lips, and then laid out flat his hand, signalling the party to level out. As they reached the border they pressed their bellies into the soil, proceeding at a crawl.

First, a slender leg, then a thin nose extended from the fog. Crusted lashes mimicked beats above the eyes as they flitted over the landscape. She left indents in the wet grass. A tremor rose through her body, dispelling the beads of sweat from the base of her skull to the nape of her neck. A brittle breath rattled from between her ribs, shaking out into a cough. She coughed again, searching for something invisible.

One man bent over the hungry trigger, salivating. He waited for the other men. Each tilted a chin in approval. He ground his teeth into the spearmint gum caught between his molars, as he trained the gaze. A single shot ricocheted through the space between him and her, cracking into her flank, before spinning her off into the creeping fog. He swore under his breath, exasperated by his foolishness. A little to the left, he thought, a little to the left and it would have been a clean kill. The men surrounding him loosened, shaking off his embarrassment. They regrouped before dispersing, setting the dogs onto the trail of the wounded. For an hour they stalked, drifting through the countryside to put it out of its misery, until the risen sun exposed them. One man retreated to his 4×4, his hands raw but empty.

Evening slipped the roads into purple skies as he drove, taking corners with unnecessary speed. Their laughter hung in his ears like a stale smoke, lingering long after the last cigar had been put out. Mockery had made this one man into something less. And as though tugged out by the discord, she lurched from a hidden gutter into the road, eyes locked with the brazen headlights. In the fleeting second before impact, he thought he saw her tongue curl around her lips.

He crouched over her broken form, feeling the warmth of black blood behind her ear. He could feel the sinew pulse, and watched the dome of her eye as it began to swell. He hoisted the body into the boot, collapsing the limbs to fit into the space. And the road before him opened up as he relaxed into his seat.

A dilapidated shed stands at the end of his garden. Inside, three large freezers hum, impatient. He lifts the lid of one to reveal her head amongst the ice. He runs a cautious finger over her thin nose, smoothing beneath her swollen eye. He pushes a strand of yellow hair behind her ear.

Kathy Halliday is a 22 year old, soon-to-be graduate in Creative Writing & English Literature from York St John University. She has been published online at Pastiche Magazine, and is the founder & prose editor of The City Fox. Both her critical and creative works have appeared at Create events, hosted by York St John. Her poem advertising this year’s Create will be featured in York Press this May. She blogs over at Feathers in the Rain.

When John woke he was scratching his balls. He could hear Froth hobbling about downstairs, dragging his leg behind him like a dark crime. This was how their days began. John got out of bed, opened the curtains and looked out at the graveyard below, the steely band of sea beyond. It was still there, the hole he’d dug the day before – gaping eight feet deep – ready to swallow Froth whole.

As he listened to the old man hauling his leg along John thought back to when he’d been young and how he’d chased a life where nothing stopped him. Now here he was, old and pinned down by two Pegs – the woman he shared his bed with and Froth, the peg-leg lodger who lived in the lean-to at one side of the house. He’d shown up ten years ago and never left.

“It just won’t stop,” Peggy was saying in the kitchen as the man on television read the last of the morning’s headlines. “Rolling news, rolling on and on forever.” She set her grubby spoon to one side of the bowl, a drop of milk quivering silently on her chin.

“I’ll tell you what though – ”

John was looking out of the window and her words came over his shoulder as he stared at the leaden sky then down again at the graves.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“Those rolling news titles sound like names of the groups they play on the radio these days: The Deficit Millionaires. Toxic Legacy. Deaths in Custody.”

John slopped his plate into the sink and left the room.

Upstairs he pulled on his cable-knit pullover and an oily pair of corduroy trousers then went down to the living room, treading lightly in the hall so Peggy wouldn’t hear.

He found himself by the window, staring out at the graveyard. So Froth had seen. There he was, stick in hand, on what should’ve been his morning walk. He’d got no further than the hole though and now he was circling it slowly, sniffing. Something in the way he was leaning made John think of a golf ball about to drop.

If he didn’t fall in the hole today Froth would be drawn in and drowned anyway. They all would. The sea was stealing forward, eroding their land and soon it would take the graveyard, then the house. But did he really want Froth dead John wondered now – this man whose life would end soon anyway?

As he leaned on the sill, his nose nudging the pane, John could feel the frozen air outside pushing up against the glassy membrane, seeming to breathe back through it onto his forearms and face. Days like this were rare he thought, days when he could think. These hours when he wasn’t lost in the fug of old age that had claimed Peggy long ago. He didn’t know when he’d last had a good day but he knew he hadn’t felt this close to control in a long time. Days like this were getting rarer still.

John stopped in the hall with his hands in his pockets and stared through the gap in the doorway to the kitchen. From behind Peggy looked less than human, the mess of hair, the swirling skirts, a quilt of browns and greys. She was the botched blotch of paint in the corner of canvas the artist didn’t want you to see, the smudge of dirt in some grim nineteenth-century French landscape, all rain and spoilt soil.

He knew they’d been young once but when he thought back to their past it felt like someone else’s life. He vaguely recalled having once promised to leave her but even now the idea of it made him think he might be getting confused, like he was half-remembering a story he’d heard down the pub.

This was for certain: when Froth first arrived they’d agreed to give him a month to find somewhere else. Then he’d be out. But he’d never moved his pack from the lean-to and now John knew he’d only live a life without him if Froth was to die, or if John left the house himself.

Back when Peggy still had moments of clarity too, she’d told him God’s horsemen would arrive at their door before Froth left, or the house would fall into the sea.

“It’s all ruined,” she was saying when John stepped into the kitchen.

“What is?” he asked.

“She’s gone. My favourite one, my favourite reporter.”

John knew Peg too well to reply.

“You know, the young one,” she persevered. “She’s gone – Miss Moss.”

John watched her eyes brim with tears. She raised them, looked him full in the face, and for a moment seemed almost innocent. Then she spoke.

“Rolling news gathers no Moss.”

She started to yelp with laughter and when she slapped the table with the palm of her hand the cutlery went sailing into the air. Only the rattle of the back door handle stopped her. It was Froth, Froth who didn’t have the strength to open it alone.

A month before on one of their bad days, John and Peggy had been drunk by eleven in the morning, drunk and rolling around in the laundry on the kitchen floor. That was the hour Froth usually came back from his walk but they’d not heard him scrabbling at the door. He’d been out in the rain until two when Peggy, on her way to the shed to get more booze, had stepped on him. They’d brought him in and put him to bed. His lips were so blue Peggy had said, they might have been cut from the collar of his pyjamas. John had half hoped Froth would die there and then, but afterwards he’d regretted it. Now the feeling was back – would it be so bad if Froth was to go?

“Very deep,” Froth was saying as he came inside. “Very deep.” His mouth was open, his lips lost to the white foam that gave him his name.

“What is it?” John asked, aware that on days when he could think all he did was question the other two.

Froth was reeling round the table but he stopped suddenly and turned to John. “Digging new beds is she?” he asked, flinging a thumb in Peggy’s direction. “For flowers?”

John shrugged, turned away. Silently he started saying Froth’s words back to himself, mouthing them. It was more than Froth had said in weeks.

He knew he’d dug the hole, the sores on his palms were testament to that. But he wasn’t sure why. Had he really thought he’d push this ancient thing over the edge and cover him in soil? Or had he hoped the fool would do it himself? There was nothing in his life, it was true. He lived on the stubborn vigour of his heart alone.

It had been easy when John was young. He’d park outside the station and wait for a fare. 11 Leather Lane? That was easy. Down the High Road, left on the second roundabout and onto Bracknell, then left again. Ten minutes, twenty bob, done. Later he’d moved to London. It was a bigger scale but the game was the same. Now though it was like someone had changed the rules and left him to figure it out alone. He couldn’t do directions any more. The car rusted in the front yard, its handbrake stuck stiff.

In the garden the rain had waned but everything was dripping still, as though the sky’s belly had been slit suddenly and the last few drops were filtering through. One slipped down John’s neck and he shivered. He stood over the hole as it yawned silently, unceasingly, and in the stillness he thought he could hear more of the land at the end of the graveyard falling into the sea. It stole forward fifteen paces a year. It had drowned the bells at Dunwich, its churches and cobbled streets, and soon it would drown them too. The house, these graves, all of it tumbling down in a rush of waves.

When he went back in the wooden arms of Froth and Peggy’s chairs were touching and they looked conniving, conspiratorial.

“Will we have a drink?” John asked.

“And so we will,” Peggy replied.

“Not for me,” said Froth. “I’ve not had a drop in twenty years.”

Again it amazed John that Froth was talking. He felt a warmth in his arms like Peggy said she felt that time they’d played in the laundry.

“You know there’s one thing I can’t stand,” Peggy piped up. “And if there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s people who make a show of not drinking.”

John poured an inch of sherry in two glasses and set one before Peggy.

She knocked it back and called for another with a rheumy snap of her fingers.

“That was water,” she said. “Come on, give me the real stuff!”

They’d played this game every day for five years, ever since the time John had foolishly thought he could slow her decline by pouring her water instead. She’d sniffed it and pushed it away. Two fingers for you she’d said swearing at him, and two fingers of the good stuff for me if you please. Now, even though the kitchen tap had long run dry, she re-enacted this little ritual every morning, pretending the first was water, starting the day with two drinks rather than one.

After the first swig John could feel himself falling into the old mood, his head nodding forward. He vowed never to drink again, took another gasp and set the glass aside. It was swept up in Peggy’s paw.

He remembered now.

It was morning when he’d dug the grave – yesterday, after the first drink.

Just before, he’d said, “One day Froth’ll have a fall.”

“Don’t know why you don’t go give him a push yourself,” Peggy had replied. “Old bugger. Dirty old desperate beggar.”

And this had made John so angry, so hateful, he’d gone straight out to dig a grave for Froth to get him away from himself, or from John, or from this woman. When John’s anger abated he’d stayed out digging anyway because no one stopped him. Not Peggy, not Froth. It was dark by the time he tossed the spade into the hole and stepped inside, and when he wiped the back of his hand across his face he’d tasted salt and skin and blood.

“Where’s Froth?” John asked now, looking around the kitchen.

“In the garden,” Peggy said.

He was there, circling the hole, moving closer to the ground this time. John wondered what was going round that man’s mind, what he thought the purpose of the hole was. And seeing that ancient thing hovering over nothingness, John was sure he’d made a mistake. What was it to them, he wondered, they who were so far into their days – what was it to them to carry on living with this man until he died naturally? He’d accommodate Froth. They’d make it good.

As he was turning this over, John closed his eyes. He could see two things – the sea at the end of the graveyard, getting closer and closer, rolling in and burying the slabs of stone; and then two parsons on horseback thundering over the fields in front of the house, their long coats billowing out behind and a cross raised between them. When he opened his eyes, Froth had disappeared and for a moment John was sure he’d never see the old man again. Then he heard Froth’s boot rummaging in the dirt behind him, turning over leaves.

“Thank you John,” Froth said.

“For what?” John suddenly felt cautious. He wanted to hear everything Froth had to say.

“Taking me in, looking after me. You’ve been good to me.” Froth drew level with him. He wiped his mouth clean. “When I came here I had nothing.”

“We did what we could Froth. Anyone else would’ve done the same.” None of it was true but John just knew he had to keep Froth talking.

“This will all go soon,” Froth said, stepping forward and waving his arm out at the graves, the sea beyond. He had his eyes raised to the sky.

John felt the warmth in his arms again. Froth hadn’t spoken sense in months.

“It’ll all be forgotten,” Froth said, moving further forward. “But kindness like yours won’t. People like you mean the world. It’s people like you John, who keep everything – ”

But his voice faltered when he fell into the void. There was a thump as he hit the bottom and a curtain of dust and dirt rose out of the hole before closing over it.

That was when John heard another voice behind him, Peggy’s this time.

“Froth goes forth,” she giggled, moving next to him, shaking silently. He felt her elbow in his ribs. “There’s a young man at the door with a horse, says he wants to know if we’ve asked ourselves any of the big questions.”

James Pulford lives in London. He has written for publications both top drawer (The Manchester Review, Review31) and top shelf (Cyridophobia). You can find him tweeting at @jamespulford.

Time has battered the sky, bruised it bramble. That's what Dad would say on winter nights like this. I start my car, drive south through Yarm, and take the country roads west to Darlington, my hometown. Rows of houses soon give way to hedges. Boxy estates break up into open fields. It's longer this way from work, but there's less traffic, so seems faster, even in this shit-heap. Samantha is waiting for me there because it's our fourth anniversary and we've booked a table for dinner, but by the time I turn up—Christ, it may be nothing at all.

My eyes have a film and feel sort of fat, so I hunch over the wheel and squint. I watch the headlighted cones of road for dead things, twisted tattered things that were once pheasants, foxes, rabbits or hares. Dad always told me to squash dead things, squash them flat. Back when I was a bairn and he was still around, he'd take me out in the car, show me how to drive, and he'd say, 'Yeh must think of fella drivers, Tom. Those things on road're already dead. If people as much as glimpse somethin and think it's worth savin, they'll swerve over, intuh other lane, and then—'clapping his mitts beside my ears—'BAM!' I'd jump and he'd nod, smiling. 'So squash em,' he'd repeat. 'Nowt tuh addle yeh fella driver.' Our mam never thought it was right. Inhumane, she'd say. Well, I don't know about inhumane, but I swerve all the same. I can't bring myself to do it, to hear and feel the rumble of wheels over the body. It knocks me white. My nerves go all skewwhiff.

I turn the heating up. It blasts steam onto the inside of the windscreen, and I clear it with my hand, but it only smears like grease. For a second I see my ghost in the glass, see Dad's nose, Mam's eyes. It sends a shiver through the space between my arse and balls, and my gut drops. But steak-shaped patches of steam soon reappear and shroud my ghost.

Damp on the ground is starting to freeze tonight and slick the roads. I can feel these tyres lose grip beneath me; can feel them slide like it's my own feet sliding. Besides, they're dead old, the tyres, basically bald. You could skid a mile on roads bone-dry. Sam lost her rag at me the other week for not getting them changed, called me a git, called me stingy. Comes to the point with her where I just zone out, let her bang on. Because the thing is, as long as I've known her, she's never seemed completely happy. She's always on about something or other. In primary school, it was getting custard for pudding. Secondary school, it was detention for chatting back in class. Sixth form: psychology tests or getting fat from the pill—or me. And when she'd started her cleaning job at Salutation Infants, our old primary school, it was the pay or the pervy teachers who'd once taught us—or me. But now, I reckon it's just me.

It's been better. There was a time—way before we knew this was for the long haul—when I'd look at her and my gut would squirm like a nest of mice. But that's youth for you. Now my gut—well, I guess it's my heart really—doesn't move in that way. Only now and then with nerves, with numbing worry, with frustration. Same old, same old.

The thing that hooked me in sixth form was the note she left on my locker door:

A BOILED EGG IN THE MORNING IS HARD TO BEAT THERE'S MORE WHERE THAT CAME FROM

Underneath, she'd written her number. And there was a blue scribble below the number shaped like tumbleweed, and I'm pretty sure it was hiding a kiss. So I texted her that night and she snuck me in her house, in her bed. She told her corny jokes, watched me laugh. And since then, I've never really looked twice at another lass. Never felt the need. Mates and other lads goad and ask me what I think about this or that lass but it's only talk. To tell the truth, Sam's stood by through all my shit, my bent for being cagey and kind of feckless; she's been mine all along. So why lose a good, familiar thing with messing about? But for all that, Sam seems to have run out of jokes, and sometimes I wonder if I just can't hack being alone.

I think to text Sam, let her know I'm running late, but I remember I've left my phone in the office on charge. It's too late to head back now: Mr Naisby will have locked up, gone home. And besides, if I get a move on, I can catch her at the restaurant. Only trouble is, one of the lads could have swiped the phone to muck about with. As I was coming back from the loo before leaving, they were all herded around Cooper's desk, ripping each other, making plans, belly-laughing. I asked them if they were up to much and Cooper said, 'Nowt really. Just off down Arms.' Old Rosie's cheap there, he said, and the new bewer behind the bar's got mint tits and apparently she thinks rookie estate agents like us are pretty fit. I could come along for a bit, he said—if I wanted. But there'd be hell on if I was late, never mind if I was pissed, so, 'I'll give it a miss,' I said to the lads. And, 'All right,' they said. 'That's fine.'

Smart move. I know what's in store tonight. She'll drink and bang on, plan our future, get whiney, maybe cry. She'll bring up the baby issue. She wants to adopt, to give up. She'll try to turn me around. Just get tested, she'll say. It's not me. Well, it's one of us, Tom, it must be. We've tried and tried. But I'm not giving up, I'll say. I'll put my foot down if I have to. I don't want to raise what isn't my own. That's that. End of.

I mean, I want to tell her everything. How I already got the test last month, how it's me, absolutely me, even if deep down I somehow disbelieve it, but—well…

Passing the turn-off to Hornby, I think how these roads just never stop dead, only curve into other roads with longer hedges and further fields, stretching out and out as if forever. Winter sees a thick fog swamp these fields around Dalton and Appleton Whiske. Scraps of grass that had been tall feathers of rapeseed, all gold and swaying in summertime, get bogged with what looks like silver smoke from afar. It collects around trees' branches, too, and the trees have new leafage that's sort of meshed with ghosts, a bit like an old lady's hairdo. Each tree, I imagine, is my nana's candyfloss head, turned and facing away.

Devilish eyes peep through the snaking hedges ahead. A car nears, passes, yellowing a slice of mist in the field. I scan the roads again, wondering what was actually inhumane about squashing dead things. In a way, Dad had a point: they're not human, just roadkill, dead stuff. But I wish I could've asked our mam what she'd meant while she still had her voice. Or asked my dad before he cleared off. They both feel distant tonight, but in different ways. Mam's dead, rest her soul. And Dad—well, who knows. Not long after Mam passed, he fucked off without a word, left our nana to take care of me. One day he put me on the bus to school, and then—simple as that—he wasn't there to pick me up. Nana said she saw it coming, said he's been a coward much longer than he'd been a husband. Something like that.

Now and then I think about why he left. But that sort of thing's impossible to fully figure. Unless I look for him, of course, but that probably wouldn't do anyone much good. I reckon he just got scared, nervous, and that outweighed any kind of guilt. Seems simple, really, almost forgivable.

The window's down and my arm, prickled by the cold, dangles out. I light a fag and wheeze away, spurting tangled fists of fume. My nerves die down. I roll my head from shoulder to shoulder, eyes shut. A shaving rash fizzes under the skin around my throat. I use a trimmer, always have, but Sam made me shave last night with her razor. 'Make an effort,' she'd said. 'Mam told me tuh always make an effort and look pretty. Got me wearing a bit of slap before I needed a bloody bra.' I asked her what her dad thought of that and she just said quietly, 'Nothing.' So I took to my face with her razor, and the whole time I was thinking, who says looking like a ten-year-old looks good, looks manly? It's daft. Not what other lasses find fit, I'm sure.

I gear down for a steepish hill and watch a spray of light from over the brow as it angles at me in full-beam glare. Wincing, I flash my lights, but the glare keeps on. 'Prick,' I say, flashing again, 'haway.' But after the glare practically blinds me, the car shoots past. I follow it with my head, call out the window, 'Prick!' and feel like a doyle for doing so. I snap my head forward, gear up, but by the time something has reeled in my pelvis like a buoy in water as the car crests the hill, it's too late: I've already felt the heavy thwack, and the sound echoes through my head.

Slowing the car, sighing, 'Shite…shite,' I pull in to a narrow lay-by. All noise suddenly seems to fade until there's just the engine's mumble. In the mirrors, there's only the dark road winding away. And through the face of my reflection in the passenger-side window, I see the spindle fingers of the hedge, brittle-looking with a film of frost.

The radio clock tells me I should be at the restaurant by now—but it's another ten-minute drive to town. Once I kill the engine, I get out the car to smoke and check damages. Lighting up, I reach for my phone, then remember, and cringe to think that one of the lads from work is getting calls and texts from Sam. I imagine that monkey-hanger, Dixon, thumbing through my texts and photos, showing the rest, laughing; or sending pictures of his cock to people, maybe Mr Naisby, the boss. No matter what I'd say, Naisby'd never trust me with those gated five-beds on Denevale. He'd give them to Cooper, his favourite, his stepson.

I think about driving off, getting to Sam, but I know I should look for it, whatever it is—the victim. It's not a pheasant, fox, rabbit, or hare—Christ, not even a badger could've made a noise that dense. Skulking around the front of the car, I notice a deepish dent above the front wheel on the left wing, as high as the buckled bonnet's rim. That's a good five-hundred quid, I think. A holiday to Tenerife, three season tickets for Darlo, or Sam's Christmas present. Gone.

With my breath smoking forward, I tiptoe along the grassy track by the road. Ahead, I hear frantic snuffling. A fitful body jolts, rustles. I can see it, but dimly, just the dark shape and size of a silhouette. At the sight, I hesitate, still as a gravestone. A white moth comes out of the night, flitters by, flickering light and dark, before disappearing in the hedge. I toss the burnt-out fag to the hard ground and squash it with the heel of my shoe.

The snuffling comes in bursts now, louder, with a raspy sort of grunt. I see gusts of breath from the hedge, and start to think I can smell the breath, imagine it tart and sickly, like cider. But I can only smell the earth, the winter night. Inching forward, a wind-rush groans around my ears and neck. Then the hazy moonlight reveals it, all snarled up in the hedge. A deer.

I frown to see how battered it is. There's what looks like a gash above the haunch, around its pelvis. The hipbone's probably smashed, and maybe an artery's shred. Hot black blood steams and gushes, glistening moonlight.

'Poor lad,' I say. It's done for.

But no, I think, not lad. It's too small, its frame's too dainty, legs too spindly. What look like its legs could be the twigs of the hedge for all I can tell. So a lass, then, a doe. Still a bairn with those soft white spots on its side: Nana once told me they fade with winter. Fled from Raby Castle, I reckon. Must've outgrown her mam's guidance, but gone way too far, too rashly. Must've been scared, and so cold.

I step back, off the grass, but a car nears. Headlights blaze and blink and swing. Light tears night. The car swipes past, noise rolls. I shiver—always do when something moves behind me—and turn to watch its red brake lights veer into darkness. Not fog—just darkness. The dew on the road must be a little too warm for fog to form; it gets thinner the closer it gets to the roads, until—puft—like that—all clear. But farther out east, where the fields become knolls, all cold and hard, and those knolls rise somehow into Roseberry Topping, the tallest thing I think I've ever seen—well, I imagine the fog out there is real dense and as vast as an ocean.

Looking down at the doe, I think back to when Nana would take me up the deer park around Raby Castle. They open the grounds in spring and summer for people to wander about. I remember one time walking along the wooden fences. It was May, I think, or June, just before my tenth birthday. The sun quickly scaled the clouds, got hot, and the sky changed from having this buttery-looking glow to a sort of milky sheen. The air was fuzzy with dandelion seeds. Head-bowed deer chewed at the uncut grass around an old tree in the distance. Nana wore a black scarf. She'd clutch it with one hand and snuggle her chin into it. Her other hand, gloved in black leather, had hold of mine. When she squeezed my hand I felt her bony knuckles creak and crack, and her fingers felt like twigs around my squishy veins. She stared across the field to the surrounding forest.

She said, 'Yeh mam loved it ere, an all. Every summer when she were a kid, she'd come up ere with me. Her last day out—we all came ere, didn't we? Even yeh dad came. She had fun that day. Remember, Thomas?' She horseshoed her mouth, pinched her papery eyelids against a breeze.

I didn't answer. But I remembered Mam's last day out. Let me think…Nana and Dad were walking through the flower gardens, wheezing fags, creating clouds, just ahead of our mam and me. I was pushing Mam's wheelchair over the gravelly paths. I always pushed—though I couldn't see over the back of the seat on my tiptoes—until I got tired. Then Dad would push and I'd sit on Mam's lap, all curled up like a cat.

So clearly I remember that day. But little details stick out. Like bees thrumming around these enormous yew hedges, solid as concrete walls. And tulip trees with plump yellow flowers, branches holding hands. Crowds of lavender gossiping, and sooty heather looking on. How my palms stung from where the wheelchair handles had rubbed. The soil and gunpowder smell of old baccy smoke, and then the warm coconut smell of sun cream slathered on our mam's head, which was bald as a pearl, and the scrunch… scrunch… of the wheels rolling over gravel, and Mam saying in a small voice, 'Don't knacker yehself pushin, Tom. Dad can always do it.'

The rest of her days were bedbound and sleepy.

Now I think about stamping the doe's neck—to put it out of its misery. And I wonder how to tell its misery and life apart, wonder if it'll be better off dead, sooner.

I check my—well, my dad's watch. Not left for me, just something he left behind. I'm half an hour late, but I don't believe it. So maybe the watch has finally conked out for good.

I pocket my hands, and look down the road to where it curves into darkness. I try to look past the darkness to the fields and hills beyond, to wherever my dad might be, the millions of possible places; and look even farther, to where cloudy cotton-grass grows in moorland bogs and where my mam is scattered, where she's the dusty heather-scented fog that climbs the Cleveland Hills.

Only once before have I seen a deer this close. It was one of those times Nana took me to Raby Castle, less than a year after Mam died. As Nana chattered with a groundskeeper, who'd been a mate of my runaway granddad, I wandered across the field. I heard Nana's machinegun laugh behind me. Looking back, I saw the bloke light Nana's fag, laughing too, all chuffed with himself.

I waded through grass that came up to my knees and noticed a pocket of flattened grass nearby. A little deer, a fawn, was nestling there. At first it kind of frightened me: it was odd-looking and scrawny, sort of like an alien, I remember thinking. I looked around for the other deer, its family, but the field was empty.

So I crouched and scooped the fawn in my arms. I'm not sure why, but I cradled it like a baby. It was heavier than I would've guessed and trembled the way guinea pigs tremble when you hold them. But I didn't mind how big it was, or how heavy it was, or how awkward it was to hold—and I kind of liked the way it trembled. So I called over to Nana, I said, 'Nana, look! Look what I've found!'

But I knew I'd done something wrong because that groundskeeper booled toward me, shouting, flailing his big, long arms.

I cuddled the fawn like a teddy.

The groundskeeper screamed, 'Oi! Drop it! Drop it now!'

So I dropped the fawn, and it slumpled at my feet.

The groundskeeper shoved me away from it, his hands large and heavy on both my shoulders. He sort of whispered in my face, but I knew he wanted to scream. He said, 'Y'know what appens when yeh touch a fawn like that? Do yeh?' He towered over me, fuming. His breath was warm and strong and reeked. He said, 'Well, your smell stays on it. And that smell scares off the mother deer. She mightn't come back tuh it now. And if not, the thing'll die. Yeh'll have killed it. Because it hasn't been abandoned, y'know. D'yeh get it? Do yeh?'

I snivelled. Stupid kid. I should've bat the cunt instead.

But Nana came over, saying, 'Canny on now. He din't know any better, did he?' And he began to mouth off, but soon shut up. Nana told him where to go. Then he shook his head and stormed off through grass that barely tickled the top of his boots. Nana patted my shoulders, shushed me. I tried to look in her eyes but mine were soaked and sore.

Loads of summers passed before I went up to Raby Castle again.

A couple of years into our marriage, the year Nana died, I asked Sam if she wanted to go and see the deer sometime. But she'd just sneered and said with that snotty whinge I hate, 'A deer park? You'll never get close enough to see em. You'll just scare em off. What's the point?'

Now I look in the doe's eyes. They're dark, and sort of marbled with moonlight. She can see me; she knows I'm here, over her. In her final throes, she writhes her head and gasps, baring her tiny wet teeth. I stoop to smell her breath. It's rank, salty, but a bit like buttermilk. I pat her coarse fur, and my fingers feel the warmth of her body, her compact muscles. In better light, I think, her eyes would look conker brown. I itch my neck, stand up straight, bite my fingernail, biting off too much, until there's pain. I groan. I vice-grip my jaw. Then I stamp my foot on the doe's thin neck—then again, and again.

I stop when my thigh gets tired. I pant and my breath smokes, but the doe's not properly dead. Her body's not twitching anymore, or at least I can't tell if it's twitching, but I can hear her still trying to breathe. She sort of gargles and hiccups; reminds me of Mam's breathing when she slept. Toward the end, the cancer spread down her throat and it pretty much choked her. Any last words she'd wanted to speak were hedged in her mind, unable to get out.

My skin is cold and heavy. For the first time I feel night in my clothes. My throat sort of thickens and I choke. But crying's not my thing. I hold it in, between clenched teeth.

Fog has spread across the road now, hedge-to-hedge. I can't see my car in the lay-by ahead. It's all around me, I know, but it sort of seems like I'm in a pouch of clear air because I can make out the hedge and the doe below. But that's daft: someone by the car would think the same, not being able to see me. When you're in fog, you're in fog: seeing your hand in front of your face doesn't always mean you're in the clear.

I hear my dad's voice from someplace years and miles away: These things're already dead, boy. Just roadkill, dead stuff. Not a living thing. Can't make em more dead, can yeh? So don't matter.

I stand and watch the doe's life glug out in gunge. If only I could understand her terror, I think, all those wordless feelings clattering about her head…But I just don't know—how her mind must be mad. Never seen anything so alone in the world.

When I close my eyes now, it's harder to prise the lids apart. Braying my mind is the fact that I've not had a mam pretty near twice as long as I had one. Something in me's lost weight, I think, sort of sealed up and gone smooth. I feel hard. Hard shoulders, hard arms. But Mam doesn't feel so distant as I think about this enveloping fog, because I imagine how it's formed in some tiny way by her, how she's blown down from the Cleveland hills, how she's never really gone anywhere, she's here, now, and it's just seemed like she's gone from where I am. Like the past, I guess—sort of preserved in traces, remnants, memory. So with stinging fog filling my lungs as I walk back up the road to my car, leaving warm tracks of black blood in my wake, with wind scraping through the fangs of hedge, and with the past suddenly seeming to bloom and blend with now, I think maybe how we don't simply move through time, slapped about by it, separately, with things waiting ahead and things falling behind, but time's what we're made of, and every moment's like a wound in time that scars, and—Christ, who knows?—maybe we just are time somehow, it is us, and we're a part of it, and it's a part of us, inseparably, always, forever. And nothing dies.

In my car, twenty-six minutes late, I watch Sam leave the restaurant across the road. Her body is hunched against the cold, the gusts of icy rain. Her brow looks stiff and heavy with hate. She wouldn't have ordered anything, just sat there, waited. Not even wine. She's got lip, Sam, and won't hesitate to put me right, but she likes me to order for her when we go out. I hear the echoing clip clatter of her heels across the pavement. Orange heels I've never seen before. I watch the chalky skin of her tensed up legs, imagine goosebumps on the cobbley ridge of her shin, raw with shaving, tight with cold. One hand grasps her handbag to her chest. The other is clenched into a white fist and pinned to her side. This fist looks like a tiny skull. She's wearing some kind of tight-fitting trench coat. It's orange, too: she's a shard of orange through the mist. And I imagine all the things she had planned to talk about.

She gets in a taxi that drifts past me down the road. Ghosts of mist dissolve her, every last bit. And it dissolves me, too. We'll never see each other clearly; that's just the way it is; that's just me and her. But we'll talk tonight. I'll bring up the baby issue. I'll listen. And we'll go from there.

I touch the stubble above my lip, smell dirt and fur. A tiny pain screws in my gut. But it's hunger, I think, not nerves. I know I'll never fully muzzle guilt, but now when I shut my eyes to sleep, I imagine my nerves will sort of lift and dissolve in wisps through darkness that's always somewhere clear and calm.

My fingers squeeze the ignition key, turn it, and I listen for the engine to kick.

Nathaniel Ogle was born in 1991 and grew up in Darlington, Co. Durham. He is an undergraduate at the University of Manchester in his final year. He will be studying for an MA in Creative Writing at UoM come September. One of his poems has appeared in Aviary Magazine Presents, but this is the first piece of short fiction he has published.

It was no place for a fifteen-year-old, even before what happened. When I asked my father if I could go, he was only half-listening. He was busy poking the cat with his toe, while it purred irritably. My friend got lost within a few minutes, leaving me alone, walking slowly, trying not to gawp. I remember the clash of too many music systems, the ragged stage curtains, the hordes of women in sequined panties. One of them stroked my chest, many spoke in languages I didn't understand, one had a bulge in her crotch. The ground was cluttered with cans and broken glass. The mud had swallowed shoes. Everywhere I smelled the sweat and the smoke breathed from different mouths. She was in the middle of a group of the sequin girls, bored. The kind of exaggerated boredom meant to deter people. "I'll fuck you with the enthusiasm of a blow up doll", that's what her expression said.

I was a virgin then. I'd brought money, and clasped it in my pocket with a sweating palm. Some of those girls made me ache, but all I spent it on was a stick of kebab meat. At intervals some sour man or other would grab a girl's arm and they would walk off together. Someone called me "young'un," it seemed a strangely old-fashioned word. I ignored him, and the hand that stretched towards my food.

When a body hits the ground from that height it makes a strange sound. Not one that should ever come from a human being. I was so close I had to sidestep the lines of blood and urine that crept outwards. She didn't scream when she fell. Before the crowds washed me backward, I cast another look at her face. The boredom was all gone. "I can't remember what the ground feels like." That was the last thing she said, while she hung over the edge, looking at the grey-hooded man above her. She said it wistfully, staring into his unreadable eyes. Because of him she fell peacefully. Over ten years would pass before I knew this.

People panicked. I heard someone got crushed in the stampede that followed. My knees and knuckles got scuffed from the tumbles I took. By the time the police arrived, her body was gone. My father never found out what happened, although he asked once why I'd become so quiet. I palmed off his curiosity and he turned back to the cat.

The technology to plant voices in the ground was not witchcraft, as I first suspected. This I found out when I started digging the fields, in search of a woman's voice that came from the mud. It came from speakers, encased in waterproof plastic, connected by webs of wire. Each speaker said something different. I never heard them repeat themselves. The discovery of the wires might have been sufficient proof of my sanity, had I chosen to share the secret. I was twenty-six. My wife would greet my gaunt, spade-carrying figure on each of my returns. I didn't tell her when I found the source of the voices. Nor did I tell her when I met the man in the grey hood. He told me to dig deeper, and I obeyed.

My remaining teenaged years were quiet ones. Often I thought about her sullen lips and the dip of her waist. I had wanted her so badly it made my breath shallow, but I didn't have the courage to barge through the crowd and hand her my money. Maybe I could have saved her. Once I dreamed she was walking through the corridors of my house and she came into my room. When I woke I had to change my sheets.

For a while in my early twenties I discarded her memory, along with the rest of my teenage angst. I found a girlfriend who didn't charge for twenty-minute sessions. My father died, leaving me with the cat and the house and all the money he'd saved. His last words were mumbled and I didn't understand them, they made him chuckle though. The cat scampered through the empty rooms, chewing lightly on my socks while I watched TV. My girlfriend became my wife.

The talking in the ground started one evening when I was sitting in the living room, my wife was visiting her parents and the cat was cocooned in a beanbag. I thought it was the sound of next door's television coming through the wall. I couldn't distinguish the words, only her wistful tone. From then on I heard her every night, first in the walls, then in the garden lawn, then in the paving stones of the street. Sometimes I understood what she said, but not often. And of course I knew who she was. I asked my wife if she heard anything. She told me I was going mad and ruffled my hair.

My philosophy teacher at school had once told us about ghosts. He was an easily distracted man and the right question could keep him talking for a whole lesson. He talked about different world religions, about the arising of global consciousness, and who exactly was Beelzebub? He told us about ghosts casually, as though they were his uncles and aunts (as perhaps they were.) "Talk back to them if they talk to you," he said. "Don't run away, you'll only piss them off."

Sometimes when I'd talk back to her she would pause for a second of two. But soon I realised she would pause every so often whether I spoke or not. The voices didn't keep me awake, in fact they were melodic and could send me to sleep when I was halfway through breakfast, or tying my shoelaces, or sitting in the bath. I went to the doctor, he sent me to the audiologist, who sent me back to the doctor. The doctor then sent me to a psychiatrist, but I didn't keep the appointment. Instead I went to the hardware shop and bought a set of chisels, a hammer and a spade. First I set to work on the bedroom wall, but my wife stopped me before I got deep enough. Instead of upturning the lawn and blaming it on moles like I'd planned, I packed up my tools and drove back to where she'd fallen. The tower blocks were empty, so were the fields and the car park. I began where the ground looked softest. After three weeks I hit the first wire. The network extended into the concrete and even tree roots, and every foot of earth I had the strength to dig. Each speaker was the size of a penny, but they projected loudly. Some of her voices seemed meek, as though she was talking to a memory, others were hyped like inane girl-to-girl phone conversations. Mostly she spoke in a repetitive wistful singsong.

The night I met the man in the grey hood was the same night of the first bomb. The war sprung up around me, a background rumble that I barely noticed. People were fleeing, the streets became rubble. In some parts the road was blown open, exposing more webs of wire, more speakers. I don't know if he had begun the war, but it helped me dig deeper. Our house survived, my wife fled with the others. The cat remained. During my long absences it worked out how to open the fridge.

The man in the grey hood told me to dig until I was the last one left in the town. Once everyone had gone the ground would be lighter. I didn't understand him. The mounds of earth from my digging only grew to a certain height, and then remained the same. This also happens with dust, when you stop cleaning your house, as I discovered on my brief returns. My back and legs were aching, and my hands were swollen with blisters, I asked him what I was digging for. "Balloons," he said.

One evening when he thought I'd returned home, I hid amongst the wreckage. I heard him talk to her, she stopped and listened. "You should never have followed me," he said. She answered in too many voices to understand. A few nights later I hid in the same place and listened. He seemed more human when he spoke to her.

When I dug up the first balloon I turned to look at him, but he was gone. Then I knew I was the last one left in the town. It was spherical and grey and rose up into the air, tugging the wires after it. The speakers hadn't said a word all day. I levered the wires with my spade, until the network lifted a few centimetres, and another balloon popped out. They rose up slowly, with a force stronger than their size. Once the third appeared, they ripped up the ground all on their own. I staggered back as wires cut through undug earth. The fourth and fifth came at once, then more in clusters.

My house was the last to be destroyed, it happened sometime in my last days of digging. I was walking back just before midnight, spade slung over my shoulder, when I saw the cat darting between slabs of concrete and twisted wire. I slept on my flattened front door, dreaming about the arch of her shoulders as she walked away from me.

When the balloons broke through, I ran until I reached the top of the furthest pile of rubble. And from there I watched her being lifted out of the ground by a tangle of wires, clumps of earth falling from her body. The whole web slid out from under the town and followed her upwards. So high that I blinked and forgot where to look.

Kit O'Conor was once a wayward child, who took joy in nothing but annoying his teachers and playing FIFA 97. Through much bullying from his parents he learned to read and soon fancied himself as an author. Aged 11, he made his first attempt at writing a novel – it was not quite the masterpiece he had hoped. Despite this, Kit continued to write and throw scrunched paper in a broody fashion. Recently, he completed his first novel, which is in the process of being published. His style can be surreal and edgy, and often aims to explore the more perverse elements of human nature. Sometimes he tries to be funny, which can be awkward. But he does his best, so be nice. Due to being busy writing novels and whatnot, “Balloons” is one of the few examples of Kit’s short story writing. If you were wondering, his novel is a little bit like this, but longer and naughtier and with more talking. Currently he is travelling the world, teaching English and seeking inspiration (and other fun things).

One of the cages that I saw seemed very interesting so I stopped and stood in front of it for a while.

Inside, there was a small bird that was covered with bright green feathers.  It seemed nervous.  It moved around quickly – the way that a lot of small birds move – and made occasional little noises – like small birds make.  It was a small, green bird.

But, unlike most small birds, the little green bird in the cage had a very big shadow.  It looked like the shadow of a far bigger bird than the one I was looking at and, moreover, even though the bird in the cage was standing still on a perch, the shadow looked as if it was in full flight.  It was the shadow of a much bigger bird.

I looked at it for a while and it looked at me.  Its shadow circled over the wood chips on the bottom of the cage in a way that made me feel as though I was alone in the desert or tied to the top of a sun-baked rock somewhere that no one could find me.

The small green bird tweeted,

“Tweet.”

After a while, a keeper came by and I asked him what was up with the little green bird’s shadow.  The keeper really cared about his job and spent a lot of time trying to make sure that everything was as perfect as it could possibly be.  He said that the bird was called a Dark Mandevil Bird and that it was extremely rare.

Its rarity, he said, he could not understand because Dark Mandevil Birds seemed to thrive wherever they went and did well despite any bad conditions they might be exposed to.  He had no idea why there weren’t Dark Mandevil Birds everywhere.

I asked him again about its shadow.

“What’s wrong with it?” asked the keeper.  He sounded a bit annoyed.

“It’s far too large,” I said.  “Can’t you see?”

The keeper looked at the shadow.  It was a look that was more for show than anything else.  The shadow was, if anything, even larger and more obvious than when I’d first noticed it.  It was more like a parachute than a shadow.  It sat preening its black feathers on the wood chips at the bottom of the cage.  It didn’t care about me.

“That’s just how they are,” said the keeper after a while.  “Big shadows.”

The Dark Mandevil Bird cocked its head and tweeted.

“Tweet.”

Again, I felt as though I was trapped in a desert or tied to a rock.  This time, I felt much smaller and more confined – like I was at the bottom of a well.  The bird’s shadow looked as though it could get out of the cage whenever it wanted to.  It made me feel very vulnerable.

I asked the keeper whether the Dark Mandevil Bird was dangerous.  It certainly felt as though it was dangerous.

The keeper looked at me.

Like everything, he said, the Dark Mandevil Bird could be dangerous.  It really depended on the situation.

He hesitated.

I wanted to hear more about the Dark Mandevil Bird so, while he was hesitating, I waited.  The combined effect was very quiet, but also very heavy.  It was like an unplayable piano being delivered to a top-floor flat.  We both noticed it.

The Dark Mandevil Bird broke the silence for us.

“Tweet.”

“So,” said the keeper – finally sitting down at the piano.  “Sometimes you do hear bad things about these birds in the wild.  In captivity they’re different – this guy’s no harm to anybody – don’t worry!”

He patted my shoulder to help me stop worrying.

“Tweet.”

“The birds are pretty rare, so it’s not like you hear a lot anyway but, still, some people will tell you that they can be dangerous.”

I waited for the keeper to carry on.  In the cage, the shadow was getting all worked up over something.  It looked as though it was trying to use its claw to remove something that was stuck in its beak.  Every time it got close to getting it out, it lost its balance and silently flapped its black wings.  I tried to ignore it.

“The last time that one was reported in the wild,” the keeper said.  “It was in the news.  This little boy was out with his mum and sister when they saw one.

“They were down by some train tracks picking wild garlic.  They were down in the South somewhere.  I don’t know.  The story said it was a really hot day and that they were picking the wild garlic and that, every time a train came along the tracks, they all had to stand back and get out of the way.  I remember reading it in the paper because I’m interested in Dark Mandevil Birds and I wanted to know more about them.  I remember thinking that the trains sounded much more dangerous than any bird could be.”

I looked at the small green bird in the cage and, for the first time since seeing it, I smiled.  The keeper was right.  There was no way that that bird could be as dangerous as a train.

“They were perfectly happy, down by the tracks, and were having a nice day in the sunshine.  They picked a lot of wild garlic and counted a lot of trains.  The boy was particularly happy; the paper made a point of mentioning that.

“It was in the afternoon that the little girl reported seeing the Dark Mandevil Bird.  She described a small, green bird sitting on the branch of an apple tree.  According to both the girl and her mother, the bird was very small, very green and chirped the way other small birds chirped.  It also, according to their statements, had no shadow.”

I looked at the Dark Mandevil Bird.

“This one’s got a shadow,” I said.  “You said yourself, that’s how they are – they’ve got big shadows.”

The keeper looked at his shoes.  He looked at them for a long time.

I once had a music teacher that spent a lot of her time looking at my shoes.  She hardly ever looked at my face when she was talking – always my shoes.  Her name was Miranda.  One day I wrote ‘Hello Miranda’ on one of my shoes in Tip-ex.  She never looked at my shoes again after that.

While I was thinking about this the keeper must have looked up from his own shoes and started talking again because now he was in the middle of telling me about possible tricks of the light that the paper said might have made it appear as though the little green bird had had no shadow.

“They looked at the bird for ages,” the Keeper said.  “Before one of them realised that the little boy was no longer with them.

“They freaked out and started shouting and calling and looking for him everywhere.

“There was a little pile of wild garlic lying on the ground where, presumably, he’d dropped it, but the little boy was nowhere to be seen.  After a while, they were just searching blindly, checking the same places two or three times or looking for him in really unlikely places, like under rocks or up trees.  The little green bird stayed where it was, sitting in the apple tree, and watched them curiously.

“Anyway, they found him in the end.  He was down by the train tracks, next to the mouth of a tunnel.  He had his face on the ground, really calmly, like he was kissing it, and he had his neck resting on the track.

“They started shouting and ran towards him.  They didn’t know when the next train would be coming through.  When they got a little closer, the girl said that they saw the shadow of a very large bird circling the little boy on the ground.  In the paper it said ‘wheeling’.  I don’t know if that’s a very good way to describe it.  It’s too noisy.  Wheels squeak, and when things wheel they squeak too.  I don’t know.  There was no noise though.  The paper said that the shadow ‘wheeled’ around him but that there was no sound at all, not even normal sounds like the gravel crunching, and that, when they looked up, there was nothing in the sky but the sun.

“They rushed to get him off the tracks and he was fine.  He didn’t even try to fight them.  The shadow of the big bird went away and all the little boy wanted to know was where his garlic had gone.  He couldn’t tell anyone why he’d behaved the way he had – not even the doctors afterwards could work it out.

“They got him checked out and he was fine.  There was nothing wrong with him.

“As soon as they mentioned the bird, though, it became a newspaper story.  A passing doctor had heard something similar about the Dark Mandevil Bird and, after hearing their description of the bird, suggested that this might have been what the mother and daughter had seen.  I can’t believe you haven’t heard about it!”  He said.  “It was in all the zoo keeping magazines for months afterwards.  The story ran for ages with people trying to trace the bird.”

All the time I’d been listening, I’d been pushing some of the gravel on the floor around with the toe of my shoe.  Without thinking about it, I’d dug a hole about the size and shape of the Dark Mandevil Bird.

“So it was the bird’s shadow that made him behave that way?”  I asked.  I’d had no idea that shadows, let alone birds’ shadows were able to do that.  It wasn’t an idea I liked.

The keeper shrugged his shoulders.

“It’s just a story,” he said.  “All sorts of normal things become weird if the papers get hold of them.  They’re rare birds and there was a little boy involved, so, naturally, people got all worked up about it.  I mean, they’re not magic.  They’re not predatory or vicious.  They’re just stupid birds.”

The keeper said this in a very affectionate voice.  I felt as though he was defending the bird in the cage from the story he’d just told.

“This one’s been with us since he was a chick,” he added.  “And he’s never caused us any trouble.”

The Dark Mandevil Bird sat on its perch.  I don’t know whether it was very interested in what we were saying.  It didn’t seem to be.  Its shadow looped around the floor of the cage as though it was a black kite.  Either that, I thought, or it was like a bucket on the end of a piece of string, doing an experiment on centrifugal force.

“Tweet,” said the Dark Mandevil Bird.

Josh Thomas is 24 and is trying very hard to be a journalist. He makes websites and pictures and stories and lives in a valley in South Wales. 

Twenty-four-hour gyms are where insomniacs go to die. Isolated treadmill junkies rocketing nowhere, watching their own blank faces bob in the windows. Obsessive iPod-cyborgs mouthing rap lyrics as the weights rattle and clank. A desperate deadlifter whose steroids are slowly turning to fat.

All of this was illuminated with hospital-white florescents, stage lighting for any cars on the dark fresh-paved road outside, for any 12:33 AM drivers who might want to worship a pantheon of sweating gods. During the day, when it was full, the gym was like one big machine of flesh and metal. During the night, the cogs kept to their own devices.

Ty, for instance, alone at the chinning bar. His grip was wide, pronated, magazine-approved. He pumped up and down soundlessly, with back muscles skimming just under his skin like sharks. A tattoo of crossed keys was imploding and unfurling at the base of his neck. The rack was boxed in by mirrors, and each one showed a Michelangelo. One also showed Jonny come in wearing a rumpled suit and jumped up on speed. Ty watched him wander past the runners and sneer at the lifters.

"Look at you," Jonny said, taking position directly behind him. "Like a Greek god. You spend too much time here, you know that?" His New Zealand accent was thicker than usual.

"What's up?" Ty asked, still bobbing.

"Found us something to do, mate." Jonny slapped a tree-trunk thigh on its way up. "Some easy cash. Have a look at this." He had a tablet tucked up under his arm, and now he whizzed over it with his finger, grinning down at the screen. With a soft "Aha," Jonny shuffled around the side of the rack and held the tablet up waiter-style.

"Cute," Ty said. Jonny flicked through a few more photographs, all of a girl with fake-blonde hair making a typical webcam pout, Myspace poses.

"Isn't she?" Jonny rubbed a hand through the black hair that shot off his forehead in spikes. He grinned like a wolf. "That's the premier's son."

Ty stopped at the top of his pull.

"Yeah, the bloke with the fucking signs everywhere," Jonny continued. "Do you see where I'm leading you, Ty? Are you using those cancerous biceps to pick up what I'm laying down?"

"Details," Ty said, resuming. His bookcase shoulders were straining now.

"Not here, mate." Jonny gave the gym a contemptuous scan. "Let's grab a bite to eat. You know, once you've finished."

"I'm done." Ty made another slow pull, then another. Gravity had found the brash offender and was focusing all its attention on him now, fighting him back to Earth. Ty quivered. Dropped. Mopped his face with a towel.

"Man, why do you come here?" Jonny asked. "Not a bird in sight. And those jokers by the punching bag, bet they've never broken knuckles in their life. I mean if they got in a scrap with a, a rowing machine or something, maybe they'd come out top-wise." He stared at the tanned bodies with disdain. Jonny was bones and tendon, built like a ferret.

Ty was stuffing two sacks of Jell-O into the sleeves of his thermal. "Self-improvement, Jonny. Maybe you'll go in for it someday."

"Oh, I'm fine," Jonny said, eyeing an ape doing butterfly presses. The man gave him a dead eye. "Oi. Some kind of gangbanger here in his mum's shirt, Ty."

"Don't start shit." Ty was staring at himself in the mirror, grimacing. Jonny hopped impatiently from foot to foot. Then Ty flipped off his reflection, as was custom, and started for the exit.

"Go get your chest waxed, you pussy," Jonny said to the back of the butterfly machine. The man pulled his earbud and swung around. By that time, Jonny was slouching down the stairs and all that was visible was the mountain range of Ty's back. The fight chemical got all crossed up with the flight one and the man did not get up. People usually didn't where Ty was concerned.

Neon and grease. They had moved the conversation to a fast food joint staffed by bored Filipinos. It seemed like a natural progression. Sweat was sticking Ty to the Lego-colored seat. Across from him, Jonny was reassembling his cheeseburger.

"Blackmail," he said, dumping his fries onto the patty.

"The premier doesn't know? About, uh."

"About his son's little hobby? Don't know, man. Doesn't matter." The ketchup packet burst like a pillbug. Jonny licked his hand edgewise. "What matters is, nobody else knows. None of his voters. He's a bloody Conservative, man. Two words. Family. Values." He drizzled the ketchup. "Gay son, that doesn't look so great for him, you know?"

Ty dipped a brace of fries into mayo. "You don't know that he's gay, Jonny."

"The fuck? He's a fairy, no doubt about it." Jonny frowned. His eyes had circles under them. "Dressing up as a girl and putting little cocktease videos on the web? What else do you call that? Oi, you want the pickle?"

"I'm good. How do you know it's him?"

"Never forget a face, right?" Jonny slapped the top back onto his burger. "Saw one of those big advertisements, premier and his family sitting all nice and WASPy. Middle America and all that shit. Very same night, I see this."

The tablet was skewed between them. Jonny didn't seem concerned with the ketchup smeared on it. Ty had another look at the photos while his friend attacked the cheeseburger.

"And you saw this video why?"

Jonny swallowed. His grin smelled like onions. "Ask me no questions, and I'll tell you no lies. Or whatever." He made a curt gesture under the table. "Any case, this stuff is golden. I put the screen caps through a little facial recognition comparison. It's him. He's been at it for a month or so. And his daddy is up for re-election. Bad, bad timing."

"You want to blackmail the premier."

"Fuck yeah, man. Easy cash. Easier than some other shit we've done."

Ty found the rest of his fries were cold. He pushed them across the gritty table and thought. "It'll ruin the kid's life, Jonny."

"Mate. The kid would've ended up doing odd things at a truckstop for fivers anyway." Jonny scarfed the last of the cheeseburger down. "How often's an opportunity like this going to drop right in your lap? One in a million here, Ty."

"But it's not. I mean. Anyone could find that website."

"Yeah, they can find it, yeah? But will they know who it is? Not bloody likely." Jonny tossed a balled-up napkin from hand to hand. "We give the premier the web address. He'll get the little fairy to pull it the videos down, delete the account, all that. Then he has it on our good faith that we get rid of the screen caps."

"Good faith."

"Well, he'll have to, won't he." Jonny grinned. "And if he's lucky, none of the old pervies with it saved to the spank bank are, eh, deeply invested in regional politics."

Ty studied his knuckles. "How much do you think we can take him for?"

"Oh, he's loaded. Got a swimming pool. Drove by the place." Jonny leaned back and tongued some beef out of his molars. "Fifty thousand fast cash. That's him getting off easy."

"Split down the middle." Ty said it so casually it almost slipped by.

Jonny slapped the table, making the cold fries jump. "Holy God, man, you aren't even doing anything!"

"I am." Ty folded his arms to a portcullis. "Or you wouldn't have told me."

"Eh." Jonny smiled ruefully and shook out his shirt cuffs. "The premier's a sizeable bloke. Former policeman, too, so I'm thinking he has a few guns to pick from. The gay apple fell far from the tree, as they say. So you come, maybe come packing, and it all goes down very peaceably, right?" He fingered a spike of his hair.

"For half," Ty told him.

"For half, because you're my best mate." Jonny wrapped the second burger back into its greasy paper. "You know why these taste so fucking good? Chemical engineering. They engineer them to taste like this. Natural versus unnatural for you."

"You should go home." Ty shrugged his aching shoulders and stood up. "Get some sleep."

"Holy God, Ty," said Jonny. "You know I don't sleep."

They drove instead, Jonny surfing the wireless from stoplight to stoplight and trying to pack a bowl at the same time, Ty at the wheel with his foot tired on the gas pedal. The gray compact skimmed along the empty road, alternately purring and snorting. They looped onto the highway. Dotted white line ate away under Ty's window like a zipper sealing shut. Comets whizzed by on top of lamp posts.

"Password, password, everyone's got a fucking password now." Jonny put the tablet away as they sped out of range. "So, time to find ourselves a phone booth."

"Yeah."

"What's got up your arse, Ty?" Jonny found a lighter on the dashboard and pinned it down. "You're being more quiet than your quiet self."

"Pass me that," Ty said. He steered with his knees and lit up. The smoke went down smooth.

"I mean, yeah, it's illegal," Jonny said, taking it back. His thumb snapped once, twice on the lighter. The bowl flared in the dark. "But so's jaywalking. Or nicking a film off the internet. We just do a little cost-benefit analysis is all. And fifty grand, well…" He tried for a smoke ring. "Well."

"You want me to talk, right?"

"Accent's a fucking curse." Jonny put one loafer up on the glove compartment. "Except where the women are concerned, that is. I'll fake an Australian any day for pussy."

They merged back into the city main, snaking through residential areas. Wooden fences slid by, manicured lawns where the automated sprinklers chattered to each other. It took a long time to find a phone booth, and neither of them remembered how much change they needed. Ty was feeling the weed by the time he got out of the car. His head was light but sharp.

"Short and sweet, Ty." Jonny was punching the number in. He held the receiver out and Ty took it from him.

Two rings.

Three.

An irritated voice. "Hello?"

"How well you know your son, Mister Premier?"

"Who is this? Is this a prank or something?"

"I'm going to quote you a URL," Ty said. "What you see might be, uh. It'll be surprising. And if you don't want your voters to see it, you'd better cover your ass."

There was static on the line, then: "What's this got to do with my son?"

"Ha, say we kidnapped him." Jonny, stifling a giggle.

"Need to keep an eye on your kids' computer," Ty said. The words seemed to be coming out on their own, now. It was like he was in some gangster movie. It felt silly and smooth at the same time. Ty motioned at Jonny for the web address, then read it aloud into the phone.

"Got that?" Ty asked. The silence was a long one, and it stopped feeling like a movie. Ty's fingers slackened around the phone. His stomach was guilty.

When the voice came back, it was loaded with shock. "What do you want?"

"Fifty grand." Ty read it off Jonny's lips. "We'll get it at your house. Tomorrow night. That's it."

"This is fake."

"Ask the kid," Jonny broke in. "Please, don't tell me you never guessed at him being light in the loafers. Needs a fucking haircut, too—"

Ty shoved him away. He mouthed the haircut bit again.

"Not fake," Ty told the receiver. "Put it through, uh, facial recognition. If you want. Be there with the money tomorrow night."

Another long silence.

"And don't touch the kid," Ty added. The line went dead, so he hung up. They trooped out of the phone booth and back to the car. Sirens from an ambulance gave them both a jolt, then died away. Ty slumped back in the seat and started the ignition.

"Not bloody likely," Jonny laughed suddenly, slamming the door. "He's going to kick the shit out of him. Know I would."

"Yeah, well you'd be a piece of shit father," Ty said.

"Woah, let's not get serious." Jonny stabbed around in the bowl with his thumbnail. "We just earned ourselves insane money, Ty. Relax and enjoy the feeling."

They smoked enough that the headlights of distant cars and the glow of street-lamps became the same thing, an abstract yellow kind of symbol, some sort of machine code, and Ty's hands began burning and freezing on the steering wheel.

Jonny was laughing, head thrown back, about a story he'd remembered from the old days, and would tell, if he could stop fucking laughing. Lazy circuits through another neighborhood, a classier one. Jonny balancing the tablet on his knees. Ty thinking about the photographs, the girl, the angle of her chin and the dress she was wearing. Bought? Or stolen from mother's closet with shaky fingers?

And then they were parked slantwise in the middle of a deserted street, leaching wireless from an invisible hotel, looking at the site and reading the capslocked comments to each other. Something about hormone costs and early transitioning. Another bowl, but this was the last of it. Jonny said that, not Ty.

Then: looking at the screen caps again. Would you be fooled in a bar? How about on the street, though? Man, that's a minor. Jonny kept asking and pushing the tablet at him and Ty kept wincing at it and pushing it back. When Jonny dropped it Ty felt relieved and achy at the same time.

He cranked the seat back and buzzed somewhere between awake and asleep. "When you can't walk away from what you want, you have to run," he said.

"You're high as a kite, motherfucker," Jonny said back.

The bowl was pooched. Jonny said he could drop a hit of speed right now, get sharp again. Ty found a case of knock-off energy drinks under the backseat. They swirled lukewarm sugar in tingling mouths instead and they rambled about familiar things. Professional sports. They were paid too much, weren't they? But still, what a fucking life. Jonny complained about a lack of rugby. Then it was the autoshop where Ty worked. Any new beauties in there? And then girls they had fucked back in school. Ty invented names.

And then, eventually, the world turned dull and cold again. Ty drove Jonny home. When he arrived back at his own apartment, he stripped down and went into the bathroom. For the first time in a long time, he showered in the dark.

"Alright, let's do this." Jonny shouted it over a car stereo pushed to breaking point. "Hop in, man. Shit, you're looking big. Just from the gym again or what?"

Ty climbed in and dropped the volume. "Yeah."

"Holy God." Jonny drummed a tattoo on the wheel and they pulled away. Ty'd slept badly with plenty of old dreams. They were like a stain when he woke up. The gym had been the only solution for it. He was better now, and he'd figured out his game plan. He felt ready to extort money from a local politician again.

They pulled in against the corner of the street. The premier's house was just visible, a big brick and smoked glass behemoth that screamed money. It was getting dark, but they'd agreed on eight o'clock as an arbitrary doorbell time. Five minutes to.

Jonny was nervous, and so he was talking. "Why do you hit the iron so much? I mean, really. Why? You have someone you need to shit-kick?"

Ty hadn't thought of it that way. "Sort of. Sort of do it to exorcise."

"Yeah, yeah." Jonny snorted. "Smart ass. I know." But he didn't.

Both of them watched the dashboard clock like a time bomb. When it hit eight, Jonny hissed through his teeth and keyed the ignition. They crept out and forward, down the street. The premier's house had a wide driveway. Pristine basketball hoop. Aquamarine glow from the back, where pool lights were just switching on. Ty looked up at the windows and wondered whose room was whose. Jonny shoved a wooly ski mask into his hands.

"Only tug it down at the door," he suggested.

"Alright."

"Just up and ring the doorbell," Jonny said. "Like Halloween. Trick-or-treat. That's a big thing over here, right? Dress up? You ever go as a burglar?"

"A cowboy," Ty said. "Every fucking year."

He pulled the ski mask onto his head and went to the door. Jonny kept the engine running. When he came back to the car with a grocery bag full of cash, they peeled away like bats out of hell.

Ty caught him on the way to the city bus stop. He was small and skinny for seventeen. Twitchy-looking, but nothing that made it easy to imagine him sitting with lip gloss on in front of a laptop, or telling anonymous screen names that he wanted out, at least to his mother, but wasn't ready.

"Hey, excuse me. Need to talk to you for a second."

The kid turned around. His bookbag migrated to the other shoulder, where it would be harder to snatch. Ty was used to that. The kid was wearing makeup, liberally applied, but the blue bruise showed through.

"You need money for hormone replacement, right?" Ty asked.

His eyes went wide. He smoothed a hand along his hair and cast around, like someone else might be listening with a clipboard. "What?"

"And to get out of the house. Your dad beat on you pretty hard. Don't take that shit."

The boy's fingers flew to his eye. "Who the hell are you?"

Ty gathered up his guts and pulled the wad of cash out of his jacket. "If this is what you really want, take some cash. You have someone to stay with? Like, safe?"

"Yeah," the kid muttered. He stared at the cash, hand on his hair again. "I've been, um, talking to my cousin. She's on the coast. Who the hell are you?"

"I gave up on solving that right about when I hit six feet and grew stubble."

Understanding flashed onto the boy's face. "You?" Surprise, and a needle of scorn that Ty wanted to slap out of his mouth.

"Yeah, me." Ty grabbed the bookbag and stuffed the money inside.

"But, you—" The boy stared into the bag. "Oh. I just, you know, I wouldn't have guessed."

A pause.

"Good luck," Ty said gruffly. He wanted to say more. It was a gamble, and maybe the kid was picking wrong. Maybe Ty'd picked right, and a few more lifts would make him perfect in another way, a better way, and he could forget everything else.

Ty didn't say more. He put his earbuds in and forgot that he had ever seen the kid in his life.

Rich Larson was born in West Africa, has studied in Rhode Island, and at 20 now lives in Edmonton, Alberta, where he was a recent semifinalist for the Norman Mailer Poetry Prize and recipient of the 2012 Grant MacEwan Creative Writing Scholarship. In 2011, his novel Devolution was a finalist for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. His short work and poetry have since appeared in Word Riot, >kill author, Bartleby Snopes, Monkeybicycle, Prick of the Spindle, AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review, DSF, Lightspeed, Beneath Ceaseless Skies and many others, including the anthologies Here Be Monsters and Futuredaze: An Anthology of YA Science Fiction. He reads for The Adroit Journal. His self-published work can be found at Amazon.com/author/richlarson.

Every day it rained. And every night. Life was underscored by a white noise, a never-ending drum roll; as if the world were waiting for something. The soft creak of the twisted tree in the middle ("To make it more homely", my mum said), the trudge of muddy feet and the chatter of two hundred bunks of humans; the noise of laughter, arguments, eating, sleeping and…other things, part-hidden by a privacy curtain slung across the side, though sometimes not ("Some people have no shame", my mum said). Beneath all of it, was the rain.

There were some places you could escape it. Like the Underground market at Blackfriars. Here, the noise was purely human (and sometimes animal). That was where I was when it happened. I hadn't gone for anything in particular, just to loiter among the crowds, watching. Dad said I was weird, spending so much time on my own, doing nothing but watching. Mum said I was sensitive, in a good way. Whatever it was, I needed to get out of the 'house. I stood watching as two women fought over the last bag of spuds. They clawed at each other, tearing hair and skin. One of them won. Two men strode in, steaming from the rain. They threw down a fresh sack of veg. Carrots. The fight started again. The men shivered as they crowded round an open fire someone had set up by the stairs.

When the people of the market had ceased to excite me, I made my way back. It should have happened by now, anyway. I pulled my hood up over my head and looked down at my feet squelching through the mud of the tunnels. I didn't like this bit. I tried not to look. Families huddled together either side of me, almost invisible against the grim blackness between the gas lights. I trudged onwards, keeping my eyes firmly on my feet, all too aware of the eyes on me. A strip of bright light came ever nearer. I was there. I fumbled my pass card from my pocket and swiped it. The light went green. I slammed the gate quickly behind me. The stale white electric lights of the 'house greeted me with a reassurance that I could forget all I had just seen.

I had just emerged among the white noise and bunk beds when one of the Cockneys told me. He seemed almost pleased about it. My dad was dead. He'd finally shivered to death, which was a relief for everyone else scared of catching their death from him. And it meant a proper London family could have a bed, instead of us Northerners.

I went over to our corner. The new family were already making themselves at home. What was left of our possessions had been dumped on my bed, the rest had been scavenged. I didn't make a thing about it, there was no point, I wouldn't need it anyway. I climbed up to my top bunk, shoving the family junk to the ground. Let them have it. I sat watching my new neighbours. They were thanking God for their salvation; a home at last, away from the rain. My little sister, Libby, used to say that the rain was God's tears, like Noah's Ark or something. 40 days and 40 nights…it's been over 40 years and still no sign of stopping.

I remember when we first came here. I was young, maybe five or six and my sister was still a baby. I remember hiding from the rain under a tarpaulin as our boat chugged along the Thames. It hadn't been as easy to find a new place to live as my dad had thought; we had spent hours trawling London and were met with nothing but slammed doors and cursing. We were getting desperate now, as our little motor boat stuttered down the sewage-clogged river. The old flood barriers moaned in the distance. Walls of sopping wet sandbags lined the banks in a futile attempt to hold back the water. There was one more place my dad had been told about, an old warehouse by the river that had been converted into a permanent shelter.

I remember I didn't like the man who met us. I don't know why. Maybe it was that he took most of our money, my mum's jewellery and the keys to our boat in exchange for a couple of bunk beds in a massive room full of total strangers. I remember my mum and dad shouting.

*

I could usually drown out the sound of the rain, except on nights like tonight when I couldn't. I needed to be asleep but whether it was the rain or the anticipation of the next morning or the Lord's Prayer coming from my new neighbours, I don't know. I lay in my bunk staring at the rain-spattered skylight listening to them, clinging to their Bible, praying for desert as hard as their ancestors must have prayed for rain. I used to dream of deserts. Miles upon miles of warm, dry sand, like in the stories Mum used to tell us. About when she was little and how they used to go play at the beach. Back when the sea knew its place. The twisted tree in the middle creaked in the draught, adding to the symphony of noises keeping me awake. I'll never see the beach, not like my mum did, except in my head. In my head I can go anywhere and do anything I like. I could be a doctor (I took care of dad well enough). Or a scientist (I'll figure out this rain). Or a politician (bet I can do better than that lot, sat up there in their towers). I could go anywhere. I could do anything. I could save the world. Or I could try. I just need to get free of here, free from just surviving. Dad said I have an over-active imagination. It's not as if there's anything else to do here. And what did he know, anyway?

I reached under my pillow. The reassuring lump of my rucksack sat waiting. Good. I'll go in the morning. Wish I could sleep.

*

I heard wailing and screaming. It wasn't supposed to be like this. I'm sorry dad.

I woke up. People were dashing back and forth in panic. The warning siren blared out from above. Fear gripped my stomach.

I bolted out of bed, dragging my rucksack after me. As I tumbled clumsily to the ground, I spotted my new neighbours lugging sandbags. They joined a group crowding round the exterior door, and added their bags to an already growing heap. It took a moment to register – they were blocking the exits! I ran over to the door but there was no way out, the sandbags were already piled too high. I started to climb them. I pulled myself up to eye level with the thin strip of window above the door. It's too thin to climb out of but I could just see the Thames. Huge waves of mucky water, swept over the edges. The red warning lights of the flood barrier flashed in the distance. A siren blared. I jumped down from the wall. I stood in shock. The experts had said it wouldn't happen for a couple more months at least. I had to get out.

I pushed back through the crowds. There was a chance I could still get out through the Tube. I ran for my life.

I'd had it all planned out. They'd said it wouldn't happen yet. They'd said I'd have time.

I arrived at the gateway to the Tube. A crowd was gathered on either side of the gate, one side begging to be let in, the other ignoring them as best they could as they stacked more and more sandbags between them. I fought against the waves of people, trying to get through, but it was no good. The wall continued to grow and grow. The cries from the other side became muffled and finally blotted out. There was no escape.

I dashed back to the main hall. There must be some way out. I was convinced of it. I couldn't just be trapped there. Not because of him. But there was nothing; just walls and walls of sandbags blocking our way out. The water would still get in though. It always did. I could have used a boat; a shame that he sold ours for this beautiful place by the river. We've been stuck here ever since and I'm still stuck here. Mum and Libby died here and so did he. But not me. I couldn't let that happen to me.

The old tree creaked in agreement. I looked up, watching it claw towards the skylight and freedom. Before I knew what I was doing, I lunged at the tree and started shinning my way up the painfully smooth trunk. I edged up and with a stretch I caught hold of the first branch and pulled myself up. I climbed higher and higher. The tree groaned under my weight. I looked up at the rain-spattered skylight; I was almost there. I could make it. I had to make it. A branch creaked. Snapped. Suddenly I was falling.

His mistake. I was here because of his mistake. The sins of the father. ("He knows what he's doing", my mum had said.) Dad never did admit he was wrong. Not even after all that happened. Not even after people started dying and the water kept on rising. London is where the rich are so London is where we shall be. Never mind that they're all up in their towers while we were down here. Idiot. And then he got sick. And I was supposed to take care of him? Well I did. In more ways than one. What else could I do? Sins of the father.

I awoke on the ground to angry voices. To them I was a stupid kid messing around. I got up, slowly. I was sore but nothing seemed broken. I trudged over to the tree once more. If I couldn't reach the skylight, at least I'd be safer up there. The angry voices suddenly turned to congratulations. One of the crowd praised my great idea. My hopes rose a little; then I was dragged away from the tree. Several people armed with axes and saws stepped into my place. They were cutting down the tree for barrage material! Once more I fought against the crowds but they held me back. Within a minute, the tree fell away from the sky and was toppled on to a line of now-unused bunks. Not sparing a second, the crowd was on it; with weapons and bare hands, they stole its limbs to better seal our tomb.

So I sit here on my bunk, trapped on a sinking island, and scribble down my story. The rain still beats down and the water still rises. Soon the Barrier will burst and this may all get washed away. The rich and powerful will be alright, up in their high rises and helicopters. It'll just be us down here and all those people in the Tube…and the rain. I had so many plans.

Michelle Wilkinson is 26 years old, originally from Bradford but currently living in Edinburgh, where she studied for an MA in Screenwriting at Screen Academy Scotland. Her short film, Buskers, has been selected and screened at several festivals internationally. She was also a member of the West Yorkshire Playhouse young writer's group, where her short play My Right Versus Yours received a rehearsed reading.

1

He wasn't your ordinary customer, thought the store assistant, as Paul left the pet shop. Most of Chesterville's natives were conscious of a queerness in the man's character. Not dangerous, certainly not. Physically slender, meek even, without a hint of hostility. No one had ever seen him lift a finger against that dainty Italian. And those children, how lovely, how charming! It may be the residents of Chesterville were deterred by the seriousness of this solemn enigma; the Englishman who never laughed. His dark eyes, weary around the edges, were deep and evocative. Some profound knowledge or distressing torment.

A notorious sufferer of mouth ulcers, he bored anyone kind enough to hear his complaints. He felt hard done by since his malady evoked not a shred of sympathy from contemporaries. Come on, Paul, grow up, we all get them. But he alone understood the torturous reality; at any given moment three or four sores would sizzle in his flaming cage of a mouth, making speech problematic and limiting him to a diet of water and overcooked, soggy pasta. His oral mucosa was the surface of the moon and Paul dreamed interminably of biting through the painful craters and filling in the hollow gaps with creamy cement. Soft and flat like the head on a pint of ale.

Paul had earlier disrupted the casual quotidian of the shop assistant. He had sneezed, and the man had unconsciously offered a customary 'God bless you sir' that accompanies any inspiring sneeze – and Paul's were nothing if not inspiring. His retort was plain: "Does he?" Then he went on his way, carrying a large sack of dog food under one arm.

Once back on the street, he headed home. The heat was rough, and he was unable to prevent an enquiring tongue from poking, triggering an electric twinge. Ah fuck.

2

She was difficult, Viola. Originally from Pisa, they met while studying in the south of France. How impractical it seemed at the time, how French. There were still sporadic bouts of passion, but in the States their relationship became a flavourless, endless routine of spats and squabbles. Their passion was mellowed by the machine-like monotony of the town, far from the wine and debauchery of the Mediterranean coast. Though a sense of fervour was occasionally aroused by their disputes, the topics were so lame as to be drained of import.

They found an American residence from which they surveyed the neighbourhood. At first, they were content. They huddled up by a fire in the evenings and met new, affable faces from the area. The two of them felt very much a part of it all. There was the local bar, Le Jazz, where Paul would watch American sports while Viola conversed with the other wives. The town's inhabitants were satisfied with their new Anglo-Italian neighbours. The couple took it upon themselves to return a hospitable welcome by hosting dinner parties and cheese and wine soirées.

Yet once the freshness fell away, Viola felt their new home gave off something of a rotten, ghostly impression. The parties died down and the sheer vastness of the place sickened her. On hot summer evenings she was consumed by black, noisy nothingness as the crickets played on. She felt like a rootless tree.

They mechanically produced a boy, Charlie, and a girl, Sarah. The children loved when their parents fought for their favour and goodwill, secretly using it to their advantage in a somewhat mischievous manner typical of most young rogues. They were otherwise well-behaved and well-liked. Charlie embraced rather than resented his mother's infrequent linguistic slips and rolled Rs, as much as Sarah adored her father's villainous Surrey accent. Their happiness was a divergence from their parents' anesthetized marriage.

3

Viola was against moving to the States, Paul recalled, as he continued along the burning pathway. Come back with me to Pisa, we'll live by the sea. But he resisted, fighting off the prospect of foreign offspring. She countered by shattering his dream of a large house in Oxfordshire filled with impressive dogs and laughing children. Their marriage would shimmer in glorious parity; a new beginning for the two of them on equal terms.

If his children had to be foreign – an Italian-English-American hybrid – they would at least share his language. Paul made every effort to familiarise his children with all things British. He indoctrinated Charlie with his football values. In this respect, England became a sort of idyllic homeland. And while it was effective, and Charlie became a Watford Football Club fan 'til I die, the boy would eventually refer to the sport as soccer. Otherwise there were English cartoons imposed on the child, such as Charlie & Lola when very young, before they progressed to the quintessentially British Bob & Margaret rather than The Simpsons. But Paul could not stave off the inevitable Americanisms that burrowed their way into his son's vocabulary. It was something that could be retarded but not prevented.

When he told his wife he loved her it was never real. She knew all about amore but nothing of love. On one occasion, after coming back late from Le Jazz, Paul gently pulled back her thick, black hair and whispered ti amo in her ear. She smelled yeast and decay on his breath – the stench of a night out with the guys. The touch of his thick, rough fingertips on her earlobe made her recoil. The reality of their commitment was made clear to her in that one distasteful moment. She smiled awkwardly and told him in English that she loved him too. Language had protected her from reality, a force field clumsily penetrated by her foolish husband.

As the years passed, she longed for mislaid Italian customs, and he missed England terribly. Resentment festered within.

4

Paul turned a corner. Half-blinded by the sun, he spotted his house – white house and picket fence, green lawn, reflecting dazzling daylight. As he approached, he was plagued by doubts to which he was by now accustomed. The concerns ranged from theological, since, after all, what does it all mean, to temporal matters: is this the life for me? What am I doing in this backwards town with an Italian I met in France and two American kids?

Once inside, Paul took a long hard look at his wife and then studied his hands. The pain from his throbbing ulcers was unbearable in the heat, and his mouth was dry from all the poking and chewing. But those fingers…Spindly and meek – an emblem of his father's disappointment. Ah yes, daddy despised him. Paul internalised this revulsion, applying it to his frail physical appearance. He longed to be powerful, strong, aggressive. A real man. The tip of his tongue began locating the sores. That would show the old-timer, yes, then he'd be proud. His teeth were machines, tearing through the pot-holed road of his mouth. This godforsaken town and its backwards inhabitants will witness his fury! He licked, he bit, he bled, he thrashed and strangled with those scrawny hands and he laughed. Oh what a delight!

5

Some time passed – perhaps thirty seconds. Blood slithered down his chin. He watched the red droplets expand into the white of his shirt, as though blood were slowly erupting from holes in his chest. An invasion of red. He tasted it flowing down the back of his throat. A metallic tang, mixed with conquest, having succeeded in biting off half of his lip. The rest of his mouth throbbed, but it was a numb ache, something pleasant.

…

Slowly and gingerly given the circumstances, Paul removed his tired, ghostly hands from around his wife's broken neck. He was startled by the distinction between his ashen knuckles and her crimson face. After some time, her panic faded until Paul realised she was in fact laughing, and it was infectious. And so it was that laughter diffused into the room, penetrating the walls. Even the little green and yellow trees on the wallpaper could hardly contain themselves. They exploded as they shed their leaves and bent all out of shape. He cackled wildly and, yes, the world laughed with him. What a riot! Even Charlie and Sarah, who stood in silence by the stairs, were elated. How well-behaved, my children!

In his excitement, Paul tore apart the bag of dog food by his side and fed his children, who were understandably hungry and exhausted after all the hilarity. Once they were placated, Paul put them to sleep in his own particular way, and all was finally calm.

He sat contemplating on the bed. But his bloody, throbbing smile never faltered, even as the wooden floor violently parted and the red flames swallowed him up.

Andrew Gold is a journalist from London who did English Literature at the University of Leeds. He also studied in Montpellier for 18 months before working in book publishing in Bordeaux for half a year and then HarperCollins London. He has written sitcom pilots and prose which focus on identity and nationality. Inspirations include Louis Theroux, Kurt Vonnegut and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. A collection of his work can be found at http://andrewgoldjournalist.wordpress.com.

‘You’ve been searching for yourself in other people’s eyes.’

 Thom frowns down at the Radio Times in his hands, purses his lips a little in that way he sometimes does and scratches at a dry patch of skin at the corner of his mouth.

 ‘It’s a quote,’ he says. ‘Five down. “You’ve been searching for yourself in other people’s eyes.” Five letters, then six. It’s a name: the name of whoever it was who said that, I guess.’

 Beside him on the sofa, Ali just shrugs. Then, as if catching herself doing something she shouldn’t, she pulls her eyes away from the TV screen and peers over the edge of the page.

 ‘Nope. No idea, sorry.’

 ‘Come on,’ Thom says. ‘It’s the last one!’

 It’s true, it is the last answer they need. The rest of this week’s prize crossword is done. They have the answers – hypothermia, nautilus, Private Pike, toxin, patchwork quilt – filled into the black and white grid in Thom’s neat capital letters. The one empty line of boxes is glaringly obvious, slap-bang in the middle of the page. It’s not a huge stretch of the imagination, Ali thinks, to see it as a bright, raised middle finger. They aren’t good enough to finish the crossword; the Radio Times knows this and is mocking them. Ali goes to say this aloud, then she stops. No. She can see the signposts. This way madness lies. She watches Thom closely as, frowning in concentration, he absentmindedly attacks the page with the Bic biro in his hand, tapping first the C of cordial, then, without apparently meaning to move, the O.

 Ali shifts her gaze back to the TV, shuffles about until her feet are safely tucked under her. She’s in her jammies already even though it’s only about half eight. She does this sometimes: changes straight into comfies as soon as she gets home from school instead of changing from work clothes to home clothes for the few hours between dinner and bed. She can’t relax otherwise. If she’s had a particularly bad day, one of those days when the kids just refuse to listen or she has to fill her lunch hour with more meetings than are humanly possible, she brings that stress home with her in her clothes. Or this is how she sees it, anyway. As if the stress is caught up in the fitted shirts she wears, in the tightness of her pleated black work trousers.

 On the TV – Ali’s choice – a documentary. Supersize vs Superskinny. She’s a sucker for documentaries, especially ones about the body. She watches Embarrassing Bodies near-religiously and cringes whenever they have a particularly personal problem come on. A swollen, inflamed foreskin. Anything described as ‘seeping’. She can’t deal with it. And so she tests herself by watching the program every Friday, and she spends most of the hour hiding behind her hands. She is, Thom has said many times, probably the most squeamish person he has ever met (sometimes he’s smiling and sometimes… well…). At least once a month he tries to trick her into watching one of the Saw films with him. It’d be sort of a social experiment, he says. But she won’t do it. She won’t watch them. She’s told him she won’t do it and she meant it and she’s sticking to that.

 On screen, Dr Christian is talking to this week’s super-fat fat man. He is twenty-three years old and weighs twenty-seven stone. His BMI is 54. He routinely eats five packets of crisps and a whole packet of biscuits as a midnight snack. Ali, wide eyed, can hardly believe it. She’s still trying to work out the physical mechanics of this when Thom nudges her – his way of letting her know she’s not paying attention to something he wants her to pay attention to.

 She sighs. ‘OK,’ she says. ‘What letters have we got?’

 He shows her. ‘Only an E and an A,’ he says – because apparently she’s not trusted to read for herself anymore. ‘Blank, E, and three more blanks. Then the second word: blank, blank, A, blank, blank, blank.’

 ‘Not a lot to go on then.’

 ‘Not a lot,’ Thom admits. ‘Except it’s got to be a celebrity and the clue’s something famous they once said.’

 Ali bites her bottom lip, tries to think of the famous quotes she’s got stored away in her head. ‘Life is like a box of chocolates’ is the first one that springs to mind. Fucking hell. Is she really that predictable?

 She tries again. ‘Nobody puts Baby in a corner,’ she thinks. ‘Life is a terrible thing to sleep through.’

 So far: nothing. All she can think of is film quotes, and that can’t be what they’re after. She turns the quote over in her head, as one might inspect a key they’ve never seen before that they have just that second found under their own welcome mat. ‘You’ve been searching for yourself in other people’s eyes.’ She looks at each word, then puts them together. As soon as she does this, her mind goes blank. She can’t think of any quotes. As in: can’t think of any at all.

 ‘Maybe,’ she says. ‘Maybe…’

 ‘Maybe what?’

 ‘No, sorry. I had a thought, but I lost it. I don’t know.’

 For a minute they’re both silent. Thom sits straight-backed without a cushion. He taps his pen again, then he lifts one leg, balances his foot on the other knee and starts tapping that too, vibrating his size eleven Converse against Ali’s knee in a vaguely insistent way, but out of sync with the tapping of his pen. Ali takes a deep, yoga-inspired breath.

 ‘Anything?’

 ‘Nope,’ Ali says. ‘Still nothing.’

 ‘Me neither. Nothing that works, anyway. The only quotes I can think of have got to be wrong. They’re all about other people, not actually spoken to them. Nothing like this one.’ He pauses. ‘Maybe it’s something from a TV programme?’

 They think about this. Well, Thom thinks about this. Ali pretends to think about it and instead sneaks a quick minute of Supersize vs Superskinny.

 ‘Maybe one of the letters we’ve already got is wrong?’ Thom says.

 ‘What are they from?’

 ‘The A is from Family Fortunes, the E from lithe.’

 ‘No, they’re both right.’

 Ali doesn’t hesitate; lithe and Family Fortunes are both her guesses from early on, gut instinct ones, and she knows for certain that they’re right.

 ‘I was just about to say they look right,’ Thom says.

 ‘Yes. That’s because they are right.’

 Again, a wall of silence falls between them – not that there’s much room for it on the sofa, which was (how many times have they told each other this in the last few months?) all they could afford at the time, and is good enough for the two of them really, at the moment, in a flat which, let’s face it, isn’t exactly big enough for anything else. Thom starts doing the vibrating thing with his foot again, brushing Ali’s calf. She looks at him pointedly, but he doesn’t seem to notice.

 ‘Could you please stop that?’

 ‘Oh. Yeah, sure.’ He lowers his foot to the carpet, frowns. ‘“You’ve been searching for yourself in other people’s eyes”,’ he murmurs to himself. Then he murmurs it again, quieter, but still more than loud enough for Ali to hear.

 ‘Repeating the clue isn’t going to help; I still don’t know what the answer is.’

 ‘It might help me,’ Thom says.

 ‘Oh. OK then. Good.’

 Suddenly, Ali feels antsy and trapped. She takes another deep breath. She’s warm, too warm; after a few seconds she has to stop thinking to remind herself that she’s not actually claustrophobic.

 She looks at the TV screen. Anna Richardson is talking to a fifty-something-year-old woman who’s had so much plastic surgery she’s basically a life sized doll. What the hell is this? Ali thinks. But she can’t concentrate; can’t take it in. She leaps up (Thom looks at her) and goes through to their little square space of a kitchen. Clicks the central heating off. Pours herself a glass of water. Drinks it slowly, in sips, while she stares at the washing up strewn over the worktop, the crusting wok left abandoned on the hob. It’s Thom’s turn to do the washing up tonight, but she can’t say anything to remind him or he’ll accuse her of going on. She just stands there and looks out of the window at the house next door. The light is on in the bathroom and there’s steam pouring out of the spigot on the side of the house, pure white in the twilit purple of the night sky. Ali watches it for patterns. Then, suddenly, she has an idea. A voice in her head says, ‘You’ve been searching for yourself in other people’s eyes’. And she can see who’s speaking and – at the same time – she can see who it is this person is speaking to. She puts her empty water glass with the rest of the washing up and goes back through to the living room.

 Supersize vs Superskinny has stopped for an advert break. That Lloyds TSB advert is on, the one that makes her think of Tim Burton. (‘It’s the music. The music is really creepy.’) Thom is sitting exactly as she left him. She opens her mouth; he sees her.

 ‘What kind of fucking useless clue is this anyway?’ he demands. ‘“You’ve been searching for yourself in other people’s eyes.” What kind of useless crap is that, just a quote with nothing else to go on?’

 ‘Well, it is supposed to be a hard clue isn’t it?’ That’s what Ali wants to say. She wants to say ‘It’s a clue for…’ and tell him what it’s a clue for. Then, hardly half a second after that, she very much doesn’t want to tell him that at all.

 ‘I don’t know,’ is all she says. ‘I don’t know.’ Then: ‘Someone must’ve thought it was a good clue for whatever it’s a clue for.’

 ‘Whoever,’ Thom corrects her. ‘Whoever it’s a clue for. And anyway, this “someone” is obviously shit at their job.’

 Deep breaths.

 ‘You can’t take it out on them just because you don’t know the answer.’ Ali sits down at the desk, opposite Thom, and looks at him with a neutral, almost blank expression on her face. Her legs are out in front of her, braced. The pattern on her pyjama bottoms is of paw prints and bones.

 ‘You’ve been working with kids too long,’ Thom says with a sort of snarl curling the corner of one lip.

 ‘What? What the hell, Thom? I was just saying…’

 ‘What? What were you just saying?’

 ‘I was just saying there’s no point in getting yourself in a pissy with the Radio Times just because you can’t guess one crossword clue. You got all the other clues right. Well: we did.’

 ‘That’s the point though. We got all the other clues, so now we just need the last one to finish the crossword.’

 ‘Yes. Well done. I’m glad you worked that one out. But it’s not like it matters if we don’t finish it, does it? You’re not even going to send the crossword off!’

 It’s true: Thom never does send the crosswords off to the Radio Times people. They fill the prize crosswords in, but never, not once, have they sent off to try and claim one of the prizes on offer, the DVD player and the complete series of Agatha Christie’s Poirot boxset or the HD-ready thirty-six inch flatscreen TV they had last week which, if she’s honest, Ali would actually have quite liked to have. She’s asked Thom before why he never sends them off and he said it wasn’t the point. ‘Nobody ever wins these things anyway.’ And then he frowned and got all cross when she accused him of being cynical.

 ‘Sending it off just isn’t the point,’ Thom is saying now. ‘The point’s in doing the crossword. The mental exercise of it. And it matters that it’s finished. It matters to me. It’s the principle of the thing.’

 Ali just sits and looks at him.

 ‘OK,’ she says at last. ‘It matters to you. OK, sure. It’s important to you. It matters to you.’ She pauses. ‘I get that, Thom. I do. But it is just a crossword. And I still don’t know the answer.’

Peter Clarke was born in Oxford in 1987, graduated (MA Creative Writing, with Distinction) from the University of Southampton in 2010, and now writes stories set in and around both cities. His stories have been published in University of Southampton affiliated anthologies and magazines. He is currently writing the last sequence of stories towards a collection while working full time.