drawn badly in soot, and she made a promise to them, and to the night. She dragged her finger across the sharpness of her shattered tooth, letting her bad blood bubble up, and painted a crossed out circle with it on both of their brows, marking them, then leaving them to their final slumber. In the attic her bleeding finger stroked his little sparrow head, following the gentle curve, bones so light she could hardly feel them. She cried for the last time the tears of the innocent, and then fell out of the world.
Angela slept a blank sleep until the morning came and peeled it off her. It was time. Time to change everything. She dressed and took her bag and the meagre money they left her to do their shopping with and went downstairs, but not before she took her best bird friend from the perch at the foot of her bed and dropped him in it. He looked confused, but then, he was just a bird. Tip toeing through the kitchen she was careful not to wake her snoring uncles, her torn red leather shoes padding quietly on the cold flagged floor. She opened a window and let it swing on its hinges then decanted a little petrol into a jar before lowering the canister onto its side, where it quietly vomited its contents. The thin liquid darkened the grey flags and she pulled the door behind her, sealing them in, and sealing their fates.
The day hit her face. It was sunny but cold and she walked through the back streets to the one behind the butchers and knelt there in the shade. She took the bird out into the thin blue light. He had changed during his time in the bag, as if he had learned something in the dark. He didn’t resist when she dipped him in the petrol, and he didn’t flinch when she struck the match, and when she lit him on fire he seemed to know that he had one last job to do and flew up into the air, burning wings leaving a cough of filthy black smoke in the clear blue sky as he made his way home.
Little Angela ditched the empty jar in the undergrowth and was ordering Sunday’s chicken from a man in white when the house around the corner exploded.
ONE HAMMER
She is in the corner of her life. The light from the candles she lit touches the edges of the things she’ll miss when she’s gone. She sees a beach, tastes the salt.
“Knock knock knock”
It’s 11:25pm. She’s early, of course.
Through the texture of the opaque glass in the uPVC back door she recognises Veronica’s shape, though she’s torn at the edges. Angela pats down her short, dirty, nightdress and opens the door to let her in, and to put her back together. There she is, whole again. My goodness, how’s she missed her.
“Come in”
“Do you want a cup of tea?
“No, I don’t. I want to get this over with and I want to go home to bed”, Veronica said.
Angela was surprised at the tone in her voice. Didn’t she realise what was at stake?
“And let’s put the bloody lights on shall we?”
“No!” Angela said, leaving her seat and getting between the woman and the switch.
“No. I don’t want the neighbours to know I’m up.”
“Sit down, please”
“No, I prefer to stand.” Veronica held her hand to her crooked hip, “I’m not staying Angela.”
“Now what have you got to say?”
What did she have to say? For all her planning she had thought very little about how this might actually play out, and she hadn’t expected her to be so touchy. She expected her to be at least a little happy to see her, ask how she’d been doing perhaps, but that definitely wasn’t the case and it was clear that she wasn’t in the least bit interested in Angela, her life, or her loneliness.
“Well, I saw you the other day. The day I left work early”, she started. This was awkward. Angela didn’t have the words to describe the things she saw in that grubby little cubicle without showing some emotion and playing her hand.
“Ok. And what did you see?” Now Veronica's
Leen Elle
Scott Westerfeld
Sandra Byrd
Astrid Cooper
Opal Carew
I.J. Smith
J.D. Nixon
Delores Fossen
Matt Potter
Vivek Shraya