More Short Stories to Read on a Bus, a Car, a Train, a Plane (or a comfy chair anywhere). Colin Palmer
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he tried desperately hard to discover how he could have been so wrong four times.
Four.
His father passed away after a short illness and he became occupied for some months helping his mum to sort out the family home. He saw the sadness, and more importantly, the loneliness his mother displayed after the grief began to slide away. The grief disappeared first, the sadness took much longer but the loneliness never seemed to leave her. Amongst many questions he’d broached during this time, he asked one he wished he’d asked forty years earlier. How did she and his father manage to stay married together all those years? Sprinkled amongst her many responses was a recurring theme to which he scoffed, but never forgot.
Love.
Love. Such a fallacy, a fairy tale perpetuated by books and movies. Novelists were full of crap and movie makers were driven by the almighty dollar and none of what they produced had anything to do with reality. Love, ha!
Four.
Four times he’d tried it and apart from the emotional blackmail of the second, he thought he’d been in love. Even that second failure he’d been willing to try and when the baby arrived, he felt he had fallen in love – but with somebody that wasn’t his to love.
Love, phooey!
Seventy years old, retired and living in his old family home now after his mum died a few years ago having never got over her loneliness. He spent his days doing odd chores around the home, occasionally visiting or being visited by old friends, doing the necessary shopping but always, always occupied with his thoughts.
The walk to the shops wasn’t far – there was a big mall only a block away but he usually chose to walk in the opposite direction, to the corner store his family had patronised ever since he could remember. It had changed hands many times over the years but successive owners had stayed true to the spirit of what a neighbourhood store should be, except malted milks were replaced by slurpees and redskin lollies by chup-a-chups, plus the large windows and entry door were sealed after hours behind roll down steel shutters these days.
On this particular day, his walk to the store was like many before it, the sun was shining, the birds were singing, the traffic on the relatively quiet suburban road hummed slowly by. The sounds were natural and normal and unheard as he walked, until a loud screech of tyres prompted attention. His eyesight wasn’t as good as it used to be of course, and he had to squint against bright sunlight and the halation off the windscreen of a car now stalled in the street.
He heard rather than saw a woman loudly shrieking, and he hurried toward the sound as he made out her silhouette in front of the vehicle, evidently hers. As he approached, only a few meters from her now, he saw the body of large dog lying on the road in the shadow at the front of the vehicle. The woman continued to shriek and he was aware of other people coming out, looking over fences or through windows but he was the closest. He glanced quickly at the dog which hadn’t appeared to move so he grabbed the woman to draw her away from the scene, and as he did, realised she had her back to him surveying the relatively minor damage to her car and not looking at the dog at all! She let him drag her off to one side before she turned to look at him.
Her eyes were twin, dancing, blue flames, full of venom and anger that he didn’t understand, until he managed to interpret her muted threats at the stupid mutt that had spoilt her day and damaged her car. He released her and stepped back away from this thing full of her hate, shaking his head to clear the vision she’d imprinted on him, an image he was sure he’d seen somewhere before.
He turned his attention to the dog which was now feebly attempting to lift its head. He quickly knelt by her, cradling her head for support and to stop her from trying to stand. She was a large breed, Newfoundland or something similar, and knew it would be impossible to lift her on his own. Her big head lay still on his forearm and he thankfully saw no blood but never having owned a pet of any kind before, he had no idea what other damage she might have sustained. The weight of just her head was considerable on his old arm so he slid one leg underneath to provide more support. As he did this, her long tongue slid out and licked his hand, her way of showing appreciation. He gently patted her with his other hand and she moved a little to tilt her head, then opened her eyes and looked up at him. Her gratitude was evident but there was something else as well, something beyond pain, something he thought he’d never seen before but recognised nonetheless.
He closed his eyes as his mind wandered to the hate, loathing and disgust of the woman who stood nearby, now screeching loudly to others who had come to either help or from curiosity – heard her heinous and scathing comments about dogs roaming loosely and how it had received its just desserts, and he could feel her eyes again, those horrible eyes which twigged a memory, the memory of seeing his own eyes many times over the years, peering back from a mirror as he questioned himself about the sad choices he’d made. The answer had always been there but he’d been too selfish to recognise it, too self-centered to understand but this graphic and tragic demonstration had finally shown him, after seventy years, seventy long years, how wrong his own perspectives had always been.
He opened his eyes and the dog still looked at him, patiently waiting as if it knew his internal suffering – he sobbed and did his best to change what seventy wasted years had mistaught him … looking back with all the love he could generate from his old but inexperienced heart. She licked his hand one more time, a gentle slow tickle against his skin … and then was still.
========= THE END ========
W153 – I saw it before it was broken
BEFORE
They moved along the neat aisles stopping briefly at each casket to punch a code into individual panels on the clear canopies. They made no discernible noise, every movement was silent. The great hall was silent too except now, as the caskets activated, a soft hiss of gas could be heard from where the silent drones had begun their task. The drones ignored or were oblivious to the sound, hovering onward to their next assigned casket.
The great hall was seven hundred meters long and four hundred meters across, from floor to the centre of the domed ceiling, a distant ninety-nine meters. The brochures stated the ceiling height was exactly one hundred meters but budget manufacturing had saved some time, money and a massive amount of material, massive because the great hall was only one of sixteen such halls in this, the greatest cruise ship ever designed and built.
The caskets themselves also hovered like the drones, their neat lines perfectly symmetrical vertically and horizontally, for they were stacked twenty deep up to the soaring ceiling – their magnetic fields secured them to an exact position. In total, there were five hundred thousand caskets in this great hall and in each of the others for a grand total of eight million … and each and every casket was occupied, nearly two million being crew members of the ship but the majority, paying customers for the maiden voyage.
The designers, marketers and owners had been overwhelmed with the public interest shown in the project. There had been over three hundred million initial applications for a berth on the first voyage, the lucky customers selected by random lottery. The vision of the creator had been clearly justified.
Sadly, the creator himself had not made the journey because he had died some months before the project completion. His name however, was evident inside and outside the ship, on the drones, every piece of equipment, each casket and the uniforms presently hanging in a myriad of personnel lockers. His name was etched everywhere, on cutlery and utensils, on crystal glassware in public and staff bars, even embroidered into every chair, lounge, napkin and towel. The name was less numerous from the outside but what was there was visible for tens of kilometers because of their size, the largest situated on each flank of the huge ship. Each of these letters was fifty meters high and the name stretched almost two hundred meters along the sleek elegant hull.
TRUMP.
There was a time in human history that this name was synonymous with hate, greed, social and race discrimination, and some historians remained convinced