Twirling as it arcs its splendid course across a sheen of sky, the ball (which would in life have been apple-red, but here is the brown of sun-baked earth) has become fixed. Pickled. It will never achieve its singular purpose, which is to demolish the row of stumps jammed stoutly into the carpet of grass. The bowler, comically splay-limbed, is equally rooted to his spot of ground. One foot—the left—is planted flatly in its white plimsoll, while the upraised right gives an effete little flick behind him. His body, clad head to foot in white, looks as though it has been caught mid-cartwheel, arms and legs windmilling, trapped in motion, a miracle of sporting precision. And then we have the batsman, poised, hunched, his gloved hands curled lovingly round the bat's handle. On each man’s face a mask of astute contemplation.
Turning the sepia-tinged photograph over you will find in the top-right corner, inked in a neatly cursive hand, the legend: “Arthur and Peter, August 8th 1946.”
"Peter" is an unknown quantity, no doubt long dead, but Arthur is very familiar indeed.
"It’s nice," says John, passing the photograph back to his sister.
"It’s my choice. It’s what I’ve chosen." Julie slips it into a pocket of her leopard-print handbag then looks up crisply, expectantly.
"Well, here’s mine," says John, and he shows her the revolver.
This is a curious project of theirs, dividing the spoils. There is little in the old man’s trunk to interest them, but they have made it their mission to choose one object to keep, to encapsulate their memories of him.
A great-uncle. What use are such creatures? And now he is dead at the Cowslip Country Nursing Home, ninety-nine years young, a yellowing corpse in the chapel of rest and the only signifiers of his existence scarce enough to half-fill a small leather trunk.
It is typical of Julie to choose a photograph. A tiny 2D window through which the sun of a seventy-year-old summer always shines. She will most likely frame it and keep it on the mantel in her flat, and explain its presence to visitors: "That’s my great-uncle Arthur. He died not long ago, and the photo is all I have to remember him by."
She makes no comment when John shows her the revolver. He knows she considers him little more than an oversized school kid, still playing cops and robbers. He will probably keep it under his pillow and whip it out on occasion to frighten his elderly neighbors.
Standing there in a dead man’s room he imagines the gun when it was new, a fresh silver murdering machine, barrel gleaming, handle neatly curved for the trigger man’s hand. Now, of course, it is chipped and clogged with grit and grease. It may no longer be fit for purpose. And yet there is a certain something which flickers inside John when he holds it. That chilly weight in his hand.
On his way home he can still feel it. He is standing on the bus, breathing shallowly amid the throng of travelers. But the weight hangs there in his jacket pocket. There is a hazy smile on his face as the bus rounds the bend and his block comes into view.
The block is called Mapleview. The reason for this (rumors have it) is that from a certain window on the eighteenth or nineteenth floor—which John himself has never managed to find—it is possible to see the tip of a distant maple spiking up from a patch of inner-city parkland. This seems a little unlikely to John. It implies that names have meanings.
He gets off the bus, crosses the foyer at Mapleview, and steps into the lift. The weight of the revolver is still there, and in his other pocket the box of bullets.
There is so much that he could do. Channel Five documentaries with names like Those Who Kill have filled his head with images of cataclysmic destructive power, of striding along streets and corridors picking off whoever gets in his way. But these are drowsy, pleasurable fantasies, the sort of images that console him when he lies awake at four in the morning. The revolver holds six bullets. Only six.
When he gets up to his flat, he sleeps for a couple of hours. Exhaustion washes over him in a languid tide.
He is tired of everything, every last bit of it. He is tired of how, when he wants to know the time, he must consult not just one clock, but every clock in the flat, how it has become a compulsion to him to count the hours and minutes and seconds as they tick away. He is tired of the streak of blood in his spittle when he brushes his teeth. He is tired of the hairs clinging to his pillow each morning. He is tired of the black mold surrounding his window frames, which seeps and spreads like creeping death. He is tired of lengths of cord, not quite long enough to reach the socket. He is tired of overripe bananas bursting their yellow-brown skins. He is tired of drawers filled with burnt-out light bulbs. He has been subsumed by petty annoyances. He is drowning in them, they clog his mouth and throat, he chokes on them.
When he wakes, the revolver is in his hand. It is loaded, though he cannot remember having done so himself. He realizes what his plan has been all along.
He is just testing the water. The muzzle is in his mouth, unthinkingly he fellates it, a thin trail of saliva dribbles down toward the butt. He closes his eyes.
Then he slips his thumb around the trigger and squeezes.
The bullet tears through him, exiting with a splatter, then whistling across the room and puncturing the thin window glass. Then it is away and free, crescenting the charcoal sky as John’s body drops with a thump.
The bus eases to a halt in Delingpole Street and the doors slither open with a somnolent hiss. Zoe steps off, swinging her carrier bag and heading for home. It is a walk of less than five-hundred yards and should take no more than three minutes.
In the bag is a small plastic bottle containing medicated shampoo; Zoe has picked this up from the supermarket pharmacy on her way home from work. It’s not for herself, but for her daughter Laura, who is twelve years old and a spindly, sickly creature. Recently Zoe has been biting her tongue against verbalizing concerns about Laura’s rapidly depleting weight, and the lengthy periods she spends in the bathroom directly after a meal. Her hair has started falling out too, peeling away from her in sad little swatches, and this is why Zoe has gone out of her way on her route home to pick up the shampoo, which is to nourish, to strengthen, and to revive.
Zoe considers herself (and has sometimes incautiously described herself) as a single mother in all but name. That is to say, she is not single, though she may as well be. Frank works nights. And whenever they do cross paths, at least one of them is bloodshot-eyed and bleary. To Zoe this husband of hers is becoming little more than a snoring, farting, sweating mass of flesh on her bed, not to be moved or touched.
But she is not thinking about any of this as she walks home. She is thinking of nothing at all.
The pain might first be taken for a bee sting. But then Zoe sees the blood. It dribbles down her front in a warm stream. With a shaky palm she dabs at the wound, which is just below her collar bone. The palm comes away red.
And suddenly the agony is on her, as though a fist has punched through her chest and then withdrawn, leaving a clear tunnel through the flesh. She drops to her knees.
Then comes the dread. She tries to look round, but can see no one. She is alone, and yet someone has tried to kill her. She props herself against a crumbling nearby wall and tries to reconcile herself to the fact that she has been shot, that whatever happens to her from now on, she will never not have been shot.
She is breathing quick gulping breaths as she leans over and, with her left elbow, starts dragging herself along the pavement. Then, sidling along on her buttocks, she manages to position herself in the shadowed porch of the nearest house. She is gasping, panting, and sobbing. She is thinking about nothing at all. Her heart is in her mouth as she waits for the second shot.
Summoning her last fizz of energy, she hammers on the door with her palm. Then, sliding to the ground sideways as her eyelids flutter dreamily, she looks up at the bloody hand print and prays for a light to come on in the dim hallway behind the frosted glass.
At this point it is unclear if a link will be drawn between the two events. This unlikely collision of fates. The bullet may be traced back to its source, to the small flat half a mile away where it commenced its fierce parabola. Or it may not. The odds against such an event are astronomical.
But the shot has not gone unheard. It has racked the silent corridors of Mapleview. The door to John’s flat has been forced open less than five minutes after he squeezed the trigger. He is found, flat on his back, his face a crimson mask; the grotesque gaping hole in its left side gouting blood onto the carpet, onto his clothes, everywhere. But his eyes are open and alive; there are tears in them.
Pajama-clad neighbors buzz around him as though he were a community event; some fete or tombola. Voices bicker over who should call the ambulance. His limp right hand is relieved of the pistol and he is propped upright by two seventy-year-olds: an unwise move that spills pooled blood from the smoking hole where the left side of his jaw used to be. People shudder, on account of the shock. Either that, or the chill breeze sluicing through the penny-sized hole in the window, from which a crack has spread out across the glass in a Daedalean web.
Tom Mead is a UK-based author of short fiction. Previous examples of his work have been published by Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, Litro Online, Glassworks, Open: A Journal of Arts and Letters as well as various print anthologies.