Fall - A Collection of Short Stories (Almond Press Short Story Contest)

by Corrina Austin

  He watched the birds opposite his flat as usual that evening. At some point he must have fallen asleep, for he woke quite suddenly with night pressing at the window. Night, but not darkness, the city illuminated below. And caught in those lights, as every night, was the row of birds.

  Except for one. The last crenulation across the rooftop, which seemed to peel off before his eyes and fall like a piece of ragged cloth into the night and then blow quite suddenly and purposefully towards his window.

  He stepped back from the shape, which had tossed itself into the wind, not once daring to blink, in case it met with the window and came crashing into his flat.

  The silhouette fluttered closer, inspired perhaps by a sudden gust of air. It grew large before the window, pressed against the glass, engulfing it like a bin liner, and he threw himself back. He fell to the floor. The carpet burned his cheeks.

  When he looked back, the window was empty. The glass was unbroken. The row of birds remained unchanged, though he could never be sure again how many silhouettes he had seen that night.

  III

  Light spots pop into his vision. He begins to slow down. His legs are burning. The muscles are hard, tight; he can almost feel them rubbing against the bones in his calves. There is no pain; he is beyond that. He longs to rest, though he cannot just stop running; like a thing dying he must wind down first. The slower he runs, the heavier his legs become. He is dragging his past with every step. He fancies if he stops and turns he might see himself, as he used to be, clinging with crooked, claw-like fingers to his ankles.

  He shrugs off the thought, as though shrugging off the imagined hands, and sinks to the grass. The trees in the distance grow taller, seeming to stretch into the sky. His chest rises and falls. His breaths ravage his throat. He curls up, like the crisp husk of an insect, and succumbs to sleep.

  For many days after he saw the silhouette that had appeared at his window that night, he pondered its nature. At first he thought it was a nightmare. Certainly, he had been sleeping at his post. But it had been too vivid, the burns from the carpet too hot against his face. He wondered if it was indeed a bird, saved at the last second from plummeting through his window. But the shape that had dropped from the rooftop, then careened towards him, was too carefree, and like no bird he had ever seen.

  Then he remembered the sparrow that his wife had unearthed, and he grew anxious. He began to doubt his sanity, his peace of mind. His thoughts dwelt increasingly on life and death.

  When he was fourteen, or fifteen – he forgets exactly when – he saw a girl drown in the river. He remembers her name well enough. He remembers the girl, too. They attended the same school together. There was only one school in the town. She did not get on well with other children; she was quiet, introverted; plain-faced and dull-minded. In the playground, when the other girls chased each other and skipped over ropes, she would stand by the playing fields and arrange her name in little stones. She would do this over and over until the try-line was littered with her name and the teachers told her to stop. Michael Jameson cut his head on one of those stones once, when playing rugby after school, and held a grudge against her ever since. They called her Ghost-Girl, because she rarely spoke. She never cried, or smiled either, but continued to make her name in other out of the way places. In the summer she used daisies, and fed pieces of bread from her lunch to the birds.

  It was not far from Cattle Corner that she slipped into the water. He saw her with his own eyes, as did a number of other children playing by the river that day. She simply slipped and drowned, as happens when things fall into the river that cannot swim.

  She cried out. Thrashed a little. From where he lay in the grass he saw splashing and flailing. The others screamed. Some ran for help. In her last moments, the river had granted life to that quiet girl. Then, just as quickly, it had taken it back. He ran to the place where she had vanished from the bank, but she was already far downstream. She was not moving but floated just below the surface, her white dress like a trail of flower petals or a shed skin around her.

  He stood quite alone, watching her until she vanished from sight. Then he looked down at the girl’s name, arranged from smooth, wet stones in the mud by his feet: Alice.

  Only when he remembered that day – the warm afternoon light on the dark, glossy waters of the river – did he make a connection between the water and the shape he had seen at his window. He recognised the ripples, the fluid fluttering, the velveteen blackness of the shape, which he had mistaken for a bird, or a plastic bin bag, and he realised he had seen something of the river that night, and that it was calling him back.

  With the dark, dulcet sound of the river in his ears, he dreams many things. Fragments come together, accumulating like fine silt on the river bed. They form many shapes, which grow like castles from wet sand.

  In his dream he is standing in a hospital ward. There is no sign of the river, or anything he would associate with it then, save the sluice of liquids into his wife. She is lying in the bed beside him. Her skin is pale as the sheets beneath it, except for her cheeks, which are flushed. She is his Snow White. He is her Prince.

  Somewhere in the hospital their baby girl is fighting for her life.

  He knows the dream well. He knows how it began and how it will end. Despite this, there is nothing he can do. The dream is immutable, in that horrible, fantastic way dreams always are. He has relived it again and again; a lifetime of torture to a man who has done nothing wrong but lived.

  Except this time is different. Not the dream; there is no changing that. But the circumstances, his situation. He runs and sleeps by the river now. He knows that this is the last time he will endure the dream.

  And so it begins, with his wife in the hospital bed, surrounded by pink lilies, orange roses and floating lisianthus. The bouquets say ‘Hope’ and ‘Happiness’; celebratory flowers, on this days of celebrations, which has turned into a different kind of day. Their fragrance adds a floral scent to his sadness. He has never been so frightened, surrounded by such beauty.

  The fox cubs totter from beneath the bed, their short fur rubbing against the sheets. He stares at them, questioning their presence, then accepting it. Of course they would be here, in this place where wild things are born. They nip his trousers and slink between his feet. Their muzzles are dark with rabbit’s blood.

  His wife murmurs in her sleep. She turns, her head rolling, and seems to wake for a moment, although she does not speak. Her hand finds his. She grasps him tightly. Her hand says more than words ever could.

  The baby is premature. She has arrived two months earlier than expected. His wife’s screams signalled her emergence into the world; a tiny, ragged shape, red and bloody. He had never seen anything so delicate before. He still hasn’t, although he remembers the bird, which he cradled so carefully in his hands. It seems it is the fate of such things to die; the delicate have no place in the wild world.

  The fluorescent hospital lights bear down on him. White encroaches on his vision. The brightness is unforgiving. He sees every detail of his wife’s sleeping face: the pain, the anxiety, the physical exhaustion etched into her features. She is sleeping again. He knows this from the rise and fall of her chest. Her grip on his hand is no less tight. He wishes for darkness, so that he does not have to see.

  The door opens and closes behind him. He turns and sees a doctor; their doctor, the man into whom they have placed their faith, for whatever it is worth. The doctor speaks to him, but he does not hear after the first few words. He hears only the cubs at his feet, who are chirping and barking, the whites of their throats exposed. He thinks they are crying. One springs onto the bed, where it plants itself on his wife’s chest. Still chirping, it lies down and dies.

  The doctor continues to speak but he looks past the man of medicine to Alice, who is standing behind him. He has not seen her for many year
s. Not since the day she slipped into the river. She is as plain-looking and unassuming as he remembers, and yet he feels a rush of feelings for her that he has never known together: sympathy, regret and gratitude, over the life she lived and the way she died. She reminds him of another girl, a girl who might have been, but is not.

  His wife is awake now. As she screamed bringing their baby into being, so she screams at its passing. She cradles the pup in her arms, then clutches it as the others are swept away, dragged back under the bed by an invisible current. Other objects are moving, as though pulled by that same force: the monitor, the drip stand, the doctor and the bed. They all begin to drift, slowly at first then with increasing pace, caught in the current.

  He hears the river again, dark and delicate in his ears. The curtains that surrounded his wife’s bed become curtains of willow branches, long and lank. His feet find grass and he wakes on the bank where he fell. For the longest time he cannot move. He sits and listens to the water.

  IV

  He is at peace, running beneath the trees and by the river. The wind blows against his cheeks, which ache from smiling. This is the world as it is, as it should be for everyone; the sound of water in his ears, leaves in the air and beneath his feet, the wet, regenerating smell of soil suffusing his skin and bones. No therapy or religion can rival this. The realisation is transcendental. He thinks of how he found his way here; through the foxes and the sparrow and the night-time silhouette of birds on the rooftops. He hopes others will find the river, as he has found it. It is in their blood, to breathe the air as it is meant to be breathed, to see the sky as it is meant to be seen, to run barefoot through the day and the night with the howls of the dogs and the prickle of sweat down their napes.

  Reduced to his base senses, there is no upset, no regret, no doubt, only the sights and sounds of the river, which is both a home and a grave, which gives both life and death, which is at once beautiful and terrifying.

  Watching the Falling Leaves – by Hannah Lavery

  I have a rocking chair, a nursing chair, I bought it when I was pregnant with Alice. I have it facing the wood at the back of the house. I give her afternoon feeds here. I have sat here, every afternoon, for almost a year. I have watched the leaves change colour as my daughter has stretched out and grown stronger. She can almost walk; she can almost do a wonderful array of things and it seems as she has learned to move; I have learned to be still, to sit, to watch, to wait, to name.

  I have sat here in this well planned nursery for 11 months and ten days. I have sat here and watched the changes. The large tree that hangs its branches into our garden is, I think, an oak tree; although, I don’t really know. I suppose since it is only us, it can be whatever I name it. I named this fall, depression but as I watch the falling copper leaves I wonder is this not at times, at certain times, just how we are supposed to feel?

  I have taken to walking in the mornings, long cold walks, with her wrapped up in her pram. I walk to the sea. I walk slow and let the cold enter my bones. I try to freeze out the panic; turn myself numb.

  We had not really made the decision to have a child. We never talked as other couples seemed to. I have begun to think we spend much of our time avoiding talking like other couples do.

  I watch those copper, dried up leaves, falling free to the ground.

  We lived once in this beautiful Victorian Flat, it had a huge sunny kitchen. We would gather over endless mugs of tea. We were friends, proper friends, we laughed. We danced like fools across the polished sanded floors. We would go out on week nights and the next morning, bleary- eyed, we would down espressos and go to work stinking of the night before, the booze, the lusty sex. We were properly in love and happily irresponsible. Later, I grew convinced it was an almost pretence, an almost play, an almost flawless performance of a love affair and when we moved out here, someone, somewhere far out on the horizon shouted, “cut!”.

  We got married when Alice was two months. It was a homemade, on a shoestring, flowers picked from the garden, hall lit with tea lights from Ikea, music provided by our iPod, the perfect ‘best you have ever been to’ wedding. Everyone trying so hard and it was perfect, beautiful but I had grown ugly.

  As I walked down the garden path to the little bower my mother and her friends had made, to the sounds of my cousin on her violin, I became convinced I didn’t love him. He was not what I wanted but at the same time I knew I had no choice, that it was a play I had a leading role in and that the show must go on. I cried when I was supposed to, I was the happy bride but from that moment I carried this new ugly truth with me.

  I think it went sour when we announced the engagement, when we became official, when we had to really become part of each other, because before we were married, before we had her, our families, our parents and even ourselves, were in the abstract.

  I never went with him when he went home, he never asked and I never thought to go. When his mother phoned I was always polite but I would only really take messages or get him for her. We had been together for the best part of two years but to them I was no more than a flat-mate. I was fine with that.

  My family would visit but he was just another boyfriend. We would all go out for tea but it was strained and polite and when I went home, I went home without him. He was not what they had hoped for.

  Now, I am part of the family and he is part of mine. We are all expected. We are to be spoken to and understood; we are under constant scrutiny and now I realise, how badly matched we are.

  His family are this huge West Coast clan; noisy, nosey, brash, overflowing, overwhelming and with a strong sense of bullshit about them. His father is proud to the detriment of everyone and I find myself frequently, in the firing line for his ‘banter’.

  Last Easter, we bundled ourselves up, she, like an angel, slept in the backseat. We were visiting for a whole weekend; it was our first weekend away as a new family. We were proud, looking forward to showing her off. I had spent the week carefully, choosing her outfits. He was full of news and so thrilled to bring home his little family. We drove across the country bursting with our happiness.

  I am not sure when it started to go wrong; perhaps, when I attempted to breastfeed her and was bundled off to a freezing back bedroom or when I tried to tell a joke at the dinner table and was publically hushed by his father, flush with red wine. It seemed after that he was on a mission to assert his dominance over me and his son. I watched him humiliate Lewis in little asides and in the dismissal of all he had been aching to share with him. I boiled for him, I imagined we would curl up together and bitch our way through the night but when we finally turned off the light and rolled towards each other. I misjudged something in the dark and he turned on me, closed ranks. I had it wrong, I was too sensitive, paranoid, I didn’t understand. Two days later on the drive home we barely talked. We have been barely talking ever since.

  My mother has never hidden her disappointment. I think she hoped I would have married Tom. She had really loved Tom’s intelligence and easy charm. She was a little in love I think and she had hoped Lewis was a rebound, a little bump on the road. She was quietly devastated by my choice, she did her best to come to terms with it, she reached out but he gave her nothing. He was as silent as the night and left her in the dark lashing out at him. I fell in her admiration. I was so much less than she had hoped for but she made the best of it; and I begged him to make an effort but he turned Les. Dawson and laughed at her behind her back and made her, me, a caricature for his friends, for his family and for his father; who laughed the loudest.

  We moved to an old cottage in a seaside town some twenty miles and a world away from the city. The city we had so loved but now we were parents and although, she was still to wean we were concerned about the schools she would attend, the friends she would make. The cottage had no sea view we were not flush enough for that but it did have a wood at the back and we were so in awe of th
e peaceful view we overlooked all that was wrong with the house. This was going to be our family home. We would grow here as parents and maybe things would get better between us. I pictured us falling in love again in front of the open fire.

  Not long after we moved here, our neighbour bought two cats. Rescue cats that I figure have seen too much of life. They prowl my fence, looking for a kill. I have stopped putting out the bird feed and the birds no longer come. I resent these two; vandal and cranky and I want to throw things at them. I bang on the windows when they come into my garden but they sit defiantly on my window ledge looking in. I have looked up plants and devices to repel them but know they would fail, nothing I do will stop them sitting on my window ledge and watching things unfold. I wonder where the birds go now and wish I had a bought a book so I could have named them, so I could have missed them properly.

  My stomach is now a wobbly sea. I lay her across it after feeding her at night and she sinks back into me. I look at my body and it is no longer one I know. It has done an extraordinary thing and is battered and forever changed by it; at first I loved the changes, the stretches, the looseness, the full breasts but now I am trapped in it, I can’t control it. I feel abandoned in my flesh which moves in new ways and leaves me hiding in the covers, rushing for my clothes. I look at his still beautiful, unchanged body and I want to mark him, scar him, leave him branded the way motherhood has branded me. I hate him for his physical freedom, for his ability to love her from a distance whilst I am forever mixed up and tied to her.