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

by Corrina Austin

  Fall – by Elizabeth Richards

  They say that when you’re about to die your whole life flashes before you. That’s true, but the mistake most people make is expecting to see the life of their body whereas what they actually see is the life of their soul and for all but the very youngest of souls there is so much to cover that the images flash by incredibly quickly, too fast for most people to make anything out but a hectic blur of colours, if they notice anything at all. However Michael Henderson is a cartoonist (these days they call them animators but he still thinks of himself as a cartoonist) and for most of his life he has been creating individual images that change minutely in their detail so that when hundreds of his pictures are put together a story emerges. Therefore as he jumps from the concrete tower block and the paving stones below rush up to meet him he is able to see the stream of images that flood his brain, or soul, or consciousness (he’s not quite sure which), and make out the distinct details of each picture and the memories they evoke from some well-sealed part of his dusty unconscious.

  He begins as a slug. He spends most of his life contentedly under a flowerpot in someone’s backyard. Sometimes he likes to sit in the sun and bask in its heat and the warmth of the paving stones beneath him, but then he risks attack from any of the small birds for whom the next-door neighbour puts out bird seed, so most days he stays under the flowerpot. Over the years he grows big and fat. With time the door to the backyard warps and the other slugs discover that they can squeeze in under the door frame. It is warmer and there is better food inside. Every morning a human scoops up any slugs that she finds on her kitchen floor and gently places them back in the yard. The slugs encourage him to come with them but he likes life under his flowerpot. Time passes and eventually he gives into their persuasion but when he ventures across the threshold, instead of crumbs and dropped vegetable peelings he discovers a pile of small white granules. When he inches forward to inspect them he feels his body disobeying his commands. It is dissolving as it absorbs the white stuff. Then he sees that there are several piles of this white death around the kitchen. He uses every ounce of strength to drag himself to each heap of salt using his great, fat, expanse of a body to soak up all the death. By the time he reaches the last one he knows that he is missing most of himself, that his body lies smeared and streaked across the floor, but there is only one pile left and then the others will be safe. It takes every ounce of his will and every ounce of his strength to keep going but eventually he manages to just touch the salt with the very edge of his face and he feels the poison rush through him, draining him, and as he slips away he is content that his family, his community will be safe due to his sacrifice.

  Life as a robin is fairly simple and happy. He generally stays in a garden belonging to an old lady who puts out seeds and breadcrumbs on a bird table. She stands at the kitchen window and watches him and a few sparrows stop to peck at her offerings. Sometimes he sits on the windowsill and sings for her which seems to give her pleasure as afterwards she always gives him a little bit of bacon fat. Sometimes larger birds come to the bird table, rooks and seagulls, and they drive away the small birds. He can only marvel at their strength, their wingspan, and their talons. They come from places outside the garden, outside his world, bringing strange smells and rude manners. The old lady doesn’t like them and if she sees them on the bird table she rushes out to shoo them away immediately. She likes the little birds. She likes her robin.

  One day he sees her walking amidst sapling fruit trees and giant ferns that he had not seen in the garden before. He flies down to her in the hope of more bacon, soaring upon the breeze, glorying in the smell of autumn. Even as he hits the double glazed glass and is falling to the earth it takes him a small moment to realise what has happened: she has turned her conservatory into a garden room: he is not sitting in a peach tree being fed salty bacon fat; instead he has left an imprint of his tiny broken body against the glass.

  The seagulls rule Whitby. They are the undisputed masters. They gather in throngs to wake the inhabitants of the seaside town at whatever time they find most amusing, usually around 5 am, though sometimes they change it just to keep everyone on their toes. There’s always plenty of food around Whitby, mainly fish and chips or leftover chip butties, but the real art, at which he is the champion, is taking food straight from a child’s hands. If the humans ever gave him something of their own accord then he wouldn’t have to take it from them, but they never do. All he ever gets from them are kicks and abuse, and once someone set their dog on him. He wishes he were a dog, that he were loved and fed from a human’s hand. But he is not, he is a seagull and if the humans choose to treat him like shit then that is exactly what they get in return, delivered on a low-flying bomber run: 10 points for head, 5 for torso, and 15 if you hit the ultimate target and get them in the eye. This is the high point of his life: the taste and smell of seaweed in the breeze; the sheer delight of soaring on ocean air currents, the waves whipping up with the swell beneath him; a warm nest to return to and all the chips he can steal.

  He sees less of his later years when he is old and mangy, covered in lice and living under a railway bridge with a few demented pigeons. The younger birds have chased him out of the centre of town. Now he’s trawling people’s bins and fighting other rodents for leftover KFC in a parking lot. When he dies his body lies in the gutter for a week before some kids take it and set it up for target practice with their air guns.

  He remembers being born. He remembers warmth and soft fur and someone licking him. Then there are rough hands which yank him from the warmth. He hears whimpering and he is unsure whether it is his own or someone else’s. Then he feels a moment of weightlessness before falling into a surging heap of wriggling fur. He is knocked from the centre of the heap and feels rough fabric against his skin. Then there is a feeling of suspended movement as the world of the heap sways in motion. This does not last long before icy water rushes in through the fabric walls. He panics and struggles, and so does the rest of the heap but the cold saps their strength and they get nowhere.

  His family is and will always be Emily and her family, ever since she was given to him as a Christmas present when she was just five years old. They grow together, learn together, play together, and laugh together. He accepts the responsibility of having a human and always ensures she is safe, happy and feels loved even though this means having to learn a lot of complicated human rules about such things as when it is, and is not, acceptable for him to “do his business”. There are cold autumnal days sniffing his way through mounds of russet leaves while Emily searches for green spiky pods that, when she cracks them open, reveal smooth, shiny brown seeds. He tries eating one and then spits it out as his mouth fills with the taste of soap.

  The first time he encounters snow it is a six inch drift by the back door. He bounds out into the mysterious white landscape, a little confused as to why the world has changed but excited nonetheless, and finds that he has sunk and the white world is cold and wet and soaking the hairs on his belly. Emily laughs at him and helps him out and they go to the garden where the snow is less deep. She plays fetch with him. He watches the ball leave her hand, arc through the air and land on the ground but when he goes to the place where it landed he cannot find it. Once this has happened several times he becomes disconcerted and barks at Emily. He wants her to know that he is trying to uphold his end of the game and return the ball but he can’t find it and he worries that if she throws any more she won’t have any balls left to ever play with him again, or worse, she won’t want to play fetch with a retriever that can’t retrieve. Then she hugs him and shows him how the snow falls apart upon impact and he understands the joke and knows he is loved.

  On a hot summer’s day Emily and her friends are playing in the garden. The sun is scorching and she is wearing her swimming costume as they run round the garden jumping through the hose and the paddling pool to cool down. He lies in the dappled shade of an ancient o
ak tree, reluctant to move, bemoaning his inability to remove his thick fur coat. The heat makes him drowsy and he is just about to drift off when a sharp scream pierces his reverie and melts the fog of sleep. In a second his eyes are open and he’s on his feet. How could he have been so stupid? How could he have left her unsupervised when she was his responsibility? Emily is lying sprawled on the grass, her arm at a strange disjointed angle which he has only ever seen on a broken Barbie doll. He must let her family know. He must tell them. But he can’t leave her not while she is vulnerable; he must stand guard. There is no time for indecision, he must act. He guards, standing over her but barks as loudly as he can, even though he knows that he will be reprimanded for it, for disturbing the neighbours, for being a nuisance, it doesn’t matter to him, all that matters is Emily and that her parents come.

  There is a new addition to the family, a strange creature that smells of talcum powder and vomit, and wails all night and most of the day making sleep impossible. He is not allowed anywhere near it and is rebuked soundly if he tries to investigate. It doesn’t matter particularly to him what it is but he can sense in Emily a strange mixture of love and interest for it and resentment and loneliness because of it. He feels grateful to it as Emily now spends more time with him than ever before but he wishes she were happier. In a little while the “thing” begins to move on its own and no longer needs one of the family to carry it. He has been instructed that he is not allowed near it but it would appear no one taught it that. It follows him, stalks him, backs him into corners so that he can’t get away from it and then sticks his tail in its mouth and chews on it, but somehow when he barks it too makes noise and the family come in and he is to blame. One day he finds that it is at his dog bowl and is eating all his biscuits. It sits, with black charcoal goo dribbled all over itself. Its tongue is black, its mouth is black, its face and hands are black and then it reaches with its black little hands for his golden tail and he sees the cavernous little mouth coming with them and for the first time in ages he is truly terrified. When the family answer his barking for once it is not his fault and he is even praised. He has not been replaced by the thing; although it crawls it is not like him it is like them and he needs to look after it as a part of the family.

  Emily is crying. He has learned how to differentiate between her cries over the years, but this is not one he recognises. This is an unending, heartfelt wail that he has never heard before and it frightens him. He’s not allowed to go upstairs but at the moment he doesn’t care about the rules, Emily needs him. So he noses open her bedroom door and breaks the cardinal rule of “Never get up on the bed.” She is lying there facedown upon the sheets, her back and shoulders shaking from the paroxysms of tears. He steps over her and lies down upon the soggy sheets which taste of salt lick, nestling beside her so that she can feel his warmth and know that all his love is being transferred through the touch of fur on skin. They lie there for hours until she cries herself out and then she tells him something about a boy at school. He doesn’t know all the words but that doesn’t matter because he can tell from the tone of her voice that she is calmer now: when she started she was gulping back sobs midsentence and swallowing the ends of words and now she is even taking pauses to dry her eyes and blow her nose. Eventually she falls asleep and he lies still beside her, unwilling to move lest he wakes her from her much-needed rest. A few hours later the door creaks open just enough for her mother to stick her head round and observe her daughter’s sleeping form. She spots him on the bed and he spots her spot him. A look passes between them. She understands why he is there, and he understands that it is only permissible this once.

  He is growing old. He comes back from his morning walk wheezing and tired and remembers when he rushed off to investigate each and every interesting smell that wafted on the breeze and then would rush back to check on Emily and then rush off again and how squirrels were fair game to chase but never to catch (he always had to let them get to the tree so they could pretend that they had beaten him and he could pretend he would have eaten them if he had caught them). Now, even though Emily lets him off the lead he rarely strayed from her heels. Somehow spending as much time with Emily as possible is very important, at least that is what he tells himself. Parts of him hurt now and he never manages to eat all the food that is put out for him. When the family comes home with a small black bundle, all ears and feet, that turns out to be a black labrador puppy, he does not feel replaced. He knows that he does not have many years left and is grateful that he has the chance to teach his successor how to look after Emily and her family once he is gone.

  When his wheezing is so bad that he has trouble even reaching the garden, let alone going for a walk, he is taken to the white-walled, chemical-smelling domain of the V.E.T.. He knows that V.E.T. spells vet but he used to get so anxious about going to the vet when he was a pup that he would get terrified even by the mention of the word for fear it meant painful injections or pills that tasted worse than anything he had ever tasted in his life and he’d tried a fair few icky things, so the family had started talking about the V.E.T. and he had realised that it was upsetting them to know that he was upset and he resolved never to show the fear he felt for the vet ever again. He knows what the diagnosis is from the way Emily’s mother’s lip trembles when the vet talks to her and the way Emily starts crying. He tries to cheer them up, lick their hands but that only seems to make it worse. That evening he is allowed to have scraps from the dining table and Emily sneaks him upstairs to her bed and when her mother spots them she pretends she didn’t notice. The V.E.T. comes to the house in the morning and he lies on the kitchen floor with his head in Emily’s lap and there is no resentment towards the vet when he administers the injection; his only sensation as he falls asleep is his undying love for Emily.

  Life is brutal, cold and hard. There is only light when the man opens the cellar door to put food down and then there is never enough food for all of them so they squabble and fight, climbing over each other to get to the bowl. Either bite food or bite fur: that is the rule they live by. The weaker ones die when the nights get cold and get put out with the rubbish. Sometimes they aren’t quite dead when this happens. He grows fast and he grows strong. The food portions shrink as they grow fewer in number, so there is never enough food to feed all of them and even when there are just two of them left they still have to fight but by this time it is not a question of dying from hunger or cold, their jaws are strong enough that they can kill outright.

  He is taken from the cellar and thrown in the back of a white van. His feet scrabble at the wooden floor trying to gain purchase with his claws but he still slams into the side of the van as it corners sharply. He whimpers and narrowly avoids the boot that is thrown as response. When the van stops moving he is allowed out and put in a makeshift sandpit ring surrounded by shouting men. There is another dog, a pit bull crossed with something else. Its jaws slaver but its eyes are dead. It goes straight for the throat, no bark, no warning. He pulls back, frightened, and the pit bull’s teeth close on the fur of his shoulder. He knows there is blood; he can smell the salty, acrid stench. He needs no further encouragement. He stops thinking and fights. His muscles flex and strain as he feints and weaves, clearly the more agile of the two. Rather than aiming for an instant kill he goes for the pit bull’s left hind leg, the slow one. He feels and hears the bone snap at the same time as his mouth fills with the taste of someone else’s blood. Once the pit bull is wounded he is slower: an easy target. He worries it, taking bites of flesh now here, now there, letting the pain and loss of blood wear it down. The pit bull’s owner is shouting and waving frantically: he wants to stop the fight, concede before his dog dies. But the men are too carried away by the thrill of the kill. Their faces all betray their longing to hear the final snap of the vertebrae as the pit bull’s body slumps, a useless piece of meat. He is enjoying it himself. He is triumphant; he has the power of life and death and it feels transcendent. This is
what he was born for, what each muscle and sinew moves for, and he does it well. Even if the men heeded the pit bull’s owner he doubts that anyone could stop him in that moment from breaking the pit bull like a twig. As it is, they have to haul him away from savaging the body.

  There are other fights, all much the same. One breaks up early as news arrives that the police are on their way and he is yanked away mid fight with the kill still in his eyes. He snaps at the man but is knocked senseless by the back of the man’s hand before he can even close his teeth. It is a blow that makes the world swim before his eyes. He is not fed that night. He wins his fights. Not all result in death; some are stopped when the other dog is a mangled heap of tattered flesh, but still breathing, just. He takes injuries himself: cuts, sprains, etc. The man cannot take him to the vet for fear of questions so a friend at the meets stitches him back together. He knows that it is only a matter of time before he loses and is thrown out with the rubbish or buried in a shallow grave in a dirt plot. He hopes he will have actually stopped breathing when this happens as he doesn’t trust the man not to get rid of him in such a way if he becomes too injured to be able to fight again. He hopes his neck will break and it will be quick.

  He’s slowing down these days. He’s older than any of the other dogs and he looks it. He can’t remember when he lost his left ear but he doesn’t miss it. He looks at each dog and wonders if they will be his last. He’s on borrowed time. He is fighting a rottweiler. It’s smaller than him but much faster. It seems little more than a pup, not even fully grown and it has no fear: it has not learned what that is yet. It has already taken a large chunk out of his tail and each time he moves he leaves a trail of blood behind him. He is not used to being on the defensive. He knows the rottweiler is worrying him, wearing him down: that used to be his trick. He does not even need to look at the man: he knows he won’t intercede for him. This is it. He fights to the last but as the rottweiler’s teeth close round his neck he feels towards it nothing but gratitude.