This piece of flash-fiction is just under five hundred words - two minutes of your time, if you have it!
And if you have another minute to spare, I'd love to know if you thought it was worth the first two minutes!
BETWEEN
STATIONS
The announcement on the train apologized for the
delay. Power cut. Obstruction on the line. Obstruction? Months earlier, in Monkstown, I’d seen men in
reflective jackets, with bin-bags, combing the tracks. Body parts, muttered
someone, gravely.
Feeling servile in the tight-fitting suit I wore
only for interviews and funerals, I went over what I’d say about the gap in my
employment, what I had to offer, why they should hire me. There’d be a panel, I
was told. Deep breath. Time enough. At least there was a view of Killiney Bay.
Maybe I’d spot the dolphins. Oh, to be a dolphin.
Porpoises, Cornelius, not dolphins. Only Charles
called me Cornelius. On the way into Dublin last year, he sat regaling me with
prophesies of doom. Ignorance is slavery, he lisped, stuffing a bunch of photocopies
into my reluctant hand. Warnings of an imminent nuclear war were highlighted in
yellow, validated by incomprehensible astrological events to which obscure
notes and numbers were added in neat, meticulous handwriting. Keep it under
your hat, he advised, solicitously. People
aren’t ready for it.
Fellow-students from the seventies, it was the
first time I’d seen him in years. It
surprised me that he’d even recognized me on the platform. All his life he’d
remained a teetotaller and non-smoker. His shirt collar was frayed, albeit neat
and spotless. He had no watch, no phone, no e-mail, no debts, no cards, no mortgage,
no dependants, no responsibilities. At all. I suppose it must have been his integrity that
evoked in me a certain admiration for Charles, envy even, if truth be told. Before he got off, he scribbled the address of
his bedsitter on the margin of one of the dispatches. Greed will be our demise,
were his parting words, uttered with a chuckle.
Would he have actually welcomed a war? A nuclear winter? A windswept planet of
insects and grasses? And if so, why? Sour grapes?
The vindication of his predictions?
The utter destruction of his loneliness?
I decided to visit him months later, November, I
think it was. I wanted to tell him, I wanted to reassure him, that despite
everything, despite all the terrible harm we have done and are currently doing to
ourselves and to the planet, this life, this astonishing, ephemeral life of
ours was just bursting with potential and joy.
A woman with a baby answered the doorbell. She pointed
to a door in the hallway. The tenant, in his vest, also from abroad, drawing
heavily on a cigarette, had known Charles only to see. He remembered a skip, a
mattress, old clothes, old books.
A pair of fins surfaced and dipped in the bay.
Dolphins! I almost shouted it out. The near-empty
train shuddered once, then glided smoothly along the tracks. I wiped the tears
from my face, loosened my collar, stretched out my legs and broke into laughter.
It was true, I conceded, laughing. Life was just bursting with potential and
joy.
Gregory Rosenstock
Non-fiction: Be In Me (2013)
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