Free short fiction

FLASH FICTION (scroll down for the longer story Black and White)

NECESSITY 

(winner Flash Fiction, Maureen Freer Literary Competition.)

Australia 1995

"It's necessary," the boy's father explains as he hauls himself into the cab, the length of the seat separating him from the nine-year-old huddled against the far window. "If we don't cull them they keep breeding until there's no grass left for the sheep."

The entry of his father's heavy body is accompanied by the smell of man-sweat overlaid with a hint of rum.

The boy stares into the night; skeletal trees black against a star-lit sky. He feels weight shift in the back as Uncle Harry and Cousin Joe clamber aboard. The thump of a rifle stock echoes on metal. Uncle Harry will be on the light, Joe on the rifle for the first time.

"You ready? Hang on tight, it will be fun!" His father cranks the motor and slips the truck into gear. Eyes to the front, he doesn't notice the sideways shake of the child's head.

'Go get 'em Bruce," Cousin Kevin yells from the other truck as motors roar and headlights split the night.

A cacophony of sound and flickering light assault the boy's senses as they tear through the paddock, engines roaring, spotlights sweeping, locking on frozen grey figures. Eyes glare satanic red, extinguished by the bark of angry rifles.

Silver spray glitters in the spotlight as the truck smashes through the river crossing. Dirty water flies across their windscreen. "Shit!" The boy's father frantically reaches for the wipers. There's a dull thud from the roo bar and a grey blur disappears beneath the wheels.

On and on the slaughter goes as the trucks herd a dance of death until, at last, all the roos are down and they slide to a noisy halt.

Standing by the trucks, voices unnaturally loud, the men discuss the kill as the rum bottle passes from hand to hand. Even Joe gets a slug.

"Good shooting lad!" Uncle Harry puts his arm around his son.

The boy watches from the truck in silence.

"Come on son. Time to tidy up." Baseball bat in hand, his father hauls the child from the cab. "You check the pouches, I'll deal with the joeys."

* * *
Morning light; carcasses piled high; the smell of death mingles with wood smoke as they huddle around a fire. The adults are somber now, only sound the wind in the trees.

"No, it wasn't fun," the boy says into the silence.

Afghanistan 2016

No longer a boy, the man stares down at the body in the basement, the familiar copper smell mixed this time with the acrid bite of explosive.

They'd cleared the house after taking fire, killing all inside. Then, hearing a sound from the basement, the man had opened the trapdoor and dropped in a grenade.

Now, as he focuses his flashlight on the body leaking fluids into the earthen floor, a child's unseeing eyes stare into his soul.

"It was necessary." The Sergeant places a rough hand on his shoulder as he drops a pistol near the body.

MORE FLASH FICTION

FATHER AND SON

(shortlisted, Flash Fiction, Maureen Freer Literary Competition.)


I didn't want him to die!

Too bloody late. You wished it on him; couldn't wait for it to happen.

No I didn't!

Or did I? All those bitter-apple years … waiting … for what? An apology? Not bloody likely. Waiting for him to die, that's what.

No it isn't. At least it doesn't feel like it. I mean he's dead … He is dead isn't he, not playing some bloody sick game?

Of course he's dead. Here, put your hand on his face. See! He doesn't blink, doesn't flinch; doesn't even know you're here to gloat.

Do you really think that of me?

His skin is cold; the strange terrain of age, rough and knobbly.

I see it in you. You'd dance on his grave if you had the chance.

Stand in the queue? I don't think so.

Close his eyes! What's he looking at?

You, of course. All these years he's been looking and now you're here.

But he can't see, can he? His eyes are milky with cataracts and death.

Yet he sees me, I am sure of it. Sees through the carapace I've built to shelter me.

I can't bear it! Hesitantly I reach out and close each crepe-paper eyelid with the tip of my finger.

A tear rolls accusingly down his cheek.

* * *

An eternity later we're gathered round an open wound spilling red earth; myself, my sisters and my father's tribe in all their grandeur. A gnarled tree overburdened with the grief of a thousand graves gathers mist into cold tears and drips them unerringly down my collar.

As unflinching as he was in life, as incapable of change, I stand stolid as the tree before his coffin … and let the new bishop's lies wash by uncontested.

Finally it's over and they hand me the ceremonial shovel. Dust unto dust, ashes to ashes intones the bishop. But there is no dust, no ashes; just congealed mud that lands with a gratifying thud on the father I once adored.

In a frenzy I heap blood-red earth on the holy man who chose denial over the word of his son.

NEW SHORT STORY

BLACK AND WHITE

Johannesburg, South Africa 1975
It's dark. Not inky-black, you understand. Just city-dark; the darkness of stone-shattered streetlights.
I can still see the road, stretching wet and away; defined by glimmers of reflection. Pavements are lost; the bins and the garbage; the things that lurk on the fringes; the soft splash of foot in puddle.
I'm invisible where I sit on the kerb, damp working its cold way through my body. From beanie to sneakers, I'm enveloped in pigment. God made me this way, or so I'm told: black and evil; a synonymous synchronicity, mama said before she left.
It sounds cool but I'm stuffed if I know what it means.
Eyes aching, I search the shadow-sounds.
When I look to the road again she's there, walking towards me.
Electric freeze-frame; a light flickers on.
White dress, white face.
Pigmentally challenged, mama would have said.
There's a frilly ribbon in her hair. A ridiculous apron with embroidered red hearts hangs from her neck; she's been baking.
White flour on a brown board. Essence of cinnamon and lemon.
The dark sees her. Things scurry, footfalls, shadows, movement.
Nothing sees me.
'Hello Toby,' she says, reaching down to take my hand. 'I've brought you a cinnamon bun'.
Her hand is gentle against my calluses, white-bread soft as it guides me up from the damp; her eyes dark holes in the pale of her face as I rise to tower over her. Were there a moon my darkness would plunge her into shadow.
'Come.' I draw my love into the night.
* * *
Destined never to meet describes us perfectly, hers a world of bright colours and shiny white, mine shades of grey and black.
Fittingly, perhaps, we met behind a dumpster; hiding from the police and their dogs, choking on teargas as they dispersed a protest against Apartheid.
‘I can’t be arrested,’ she said, terror in her voice. ‘Help me! I can’t be arrested.’
Why? I wanted to ask as we ran, hand in hand through the backstreets. You’re white, they won’t lock you up.
It was only later, the dogs and the shouting muted by distance, that she explained.
I should have taken her home then, back to wealthy white heart of Johannesburg – but fear had bonded us. Fear of the dogs and the police, but more than that; she terrified of her father’s wrath; and I from the knowledge that arrest would cost me my future; my scholarship at Fort Hare University.
So there, in the shadows of our fear, she reached up, placed her shivering white hands on the black of my face and kissed me, on the lips, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
I had never been kissed by a white girl before.
* * *
Now buildings brittle-edged in the dawn stand guard over a form discarded among urban waste; alabaster face, incongruous hearts on a white apron garishly splashed with red. Unseeing eyes stare at a half-eaten cinnamon bun boot-heel-crushed into the asphalt.
Alien forms in creaking white plastic don blue nitrile gloves and overshoes, voices muted. 'A teenager … no track marks … sexually assaulted … time of death … ' the language of the law.
Unseen, I watch from the window above; the scurrying white bugs foreshortened as silent tears slither from my eyes.
'Why me,' I'd asked last night as we lay entwined, the sweat of our lovemaking chilling on our bodies.
'Because you're my obsession,' she'd whispered, her fingers gently tracing the architecture of my body. 'You’re beautiful and good and kind; my lover; my protector.'
Noble words that lie and confuse when you're black as the things that walk the alleys and as evil as Satan-spawn; or so my mother liked to say.
The time and place of our meeting is evidence of God's cruel humour. Johannesburg at the height of Apartheid, the consummation our love an offence under the law1.
Why then did He send her to fill my dreams with visions of the impossible?
And why, when the impossible had become possible, the reality a gift greater than anything I could imagine, has He taken love and hope and dashed them to shreds.
I walk her home. Always – so why didn't she wake me before she left last night?
I can't go into her home of course. But I always walk her back from where we exchange our love. And we say our goodbyes in the shelter of the wall, where the security lights won't be triggered. Then she runs across the lawn in their angry glare to the door she's left unlocked.
I heard her father once, his voice rough with authority. 'You can't go into the garden at night Eleanor,' he scolded. 'It isn't safe.'
But still she came; risking so much more than walking the garden at night.
So, last night, when it was time to go, why didn't she wake me?
Satiated by sex, I'd fallen asleep in her arms, the warmth of her body a comfort washing our relationship clean.
The brutal howl of sirens jerked me awake. A raid?
'We have to go …' I reached into the space where she wasn't. I think I knew it was over then, long before I groped my way to the curtains and saw her lying splayed in strobes of red and blue, a discarded mannequin amidst the debris of yesterday.
Cockroaches scurrying to a feed, they descended. Ambulances first, then police, sirens unwinding at last into silence.
I have to go to her; take her hand; close her beautiful eyes so she cannot see the cockroaches surrounding.
Instead, I cower in the room, seeing our love through the eyes of others.
'Maak Oop!' The voice of authority, of terror. There are three of them, guns pointing as they crowd through the door. They are all white.
'Op die vloer, Kaffir2.' The skinny one's voice is shrill. Despite his gun, he's afraid of my size; my blackness. Meekly I drop to my knees, scared he'll pull the trigger.
'Lê, hande agter jou rug,' commands the largest of the three, holstering his gun as I lie face down and allow him to place the cuffs on my wrists. He ratchets them tight.
From the floor, I watch as they tweezer evidence from the unmade bed where our love defied the law. One holds up the red ribbon I’d so gently untied to watch her hair cascade across the beauty of her shoulders and breasts.
* * *
The interview room smells of misery, once-white walls stained with what could be blood. I sit on a metal chair bolted to the floor, hands cuffed to a steel hoop on the table. There's no heating and I shiver in my t-shirt and shorts, bare feet absorbing cold from the concrete floor.
Opposite, a grizzled veteran in the uniform of the Special Branch stares at me for an eternity.
‘Why, Kaffir? He asks eventually.
‘Why would you choose to rape the daughter of the Chief Prosecutor?’


Footnotes
1 During the years of Apartheid the Immorality Act prohibited sexual intercourse between "Europeans" (white people) and "natives" (black people). The penalty was up to five years' imprisonment for the man and four years for the woman.
2 The term "Kaffir" was extensively used to disparage black people during Apartheid.
3 Fort Hare University in South Africa’s Eastern Cape was one of very few tertiary education options for black people during Apartheid and had no white students.