Flash Fiction & Short Stories

Short Story – Changing Times – Part Two

When her husband and only son had still been alive, the small family had kept together here. Before Harold had passed on (they had said it was “cumulative toxicity” a diagnosis she thought surprisingly honest) he had worked all across Europe. He was lucky, since his work carried options to travel on business from Paris to Moscow, and Edith had sometimes gone with him. She cherished vivid, child-like memories of the grand, old government charter planes, equipped to take those able to pay (or who called in favours) away from The Protectorates. Harold, with his responsibility for seeing through the effective administration of fuel coupons, was able to secure occasional holiday flights to Madagascar or Tunis, where the sky had then still shown through, as glimmers of patchy blue and shards of yellow.

That had been in the first flush of her married life, when Edith was a fresh and beautiful wife of twenty-six. Now she had walked so far into her dotage, there was great comfort in knowing that her happy days were safely in her past, for her to recall as she wished. With quiet gleaming pride, she was aware that she was almost entirely beyond the reach of the authorities, simply because she was looking in the face of ninety. An image of herself dressed in a combat outfit, brandishing her broom (the nearest thing she possessed to an “offensive weapon” and therefore liable to be confiscated by the Civilian Authority) came to mind and she chortled, a deep, happy chuckle. Although this broom of hers was so ancient that the bristles were ragged, falling out, and the shaft was pulling away at its moorings, Edith would not be persuaded to part with it for one of the “nice new ones” being offered down at the Exchange. No doubt some covetous busybody was anxious to get their hands on the wonderful wooden handle and top, but they weren’t having it, not yet. In her faded slippers Edith stepped silently about, dancing a small dance of freedom.

Her daughter, with husband and single child, came to visit each weekend, regular as clockwork. Dorothy begged, with her peculiarly earnest expression, all wrinkles and furrowed brow that guaranteed Edith would retort “No!” Poor child, reflected Edith. If she knew how much I hate that face she makes. If she would only smile, I would do anything for her. But Dorothy rarely smiled, and so mother and daughter seldom agreed on anything.

Dorothy and Aidan had been assigned an apartment (if you could call it that… Edith screwed up her face in distaste) in the new Fourth Quarter Dome. Edith suspected that there had been undertakings given to move the old woman out, which had secured a favourable deal for what was, after all, a very ordinary family. They were always arriving on little missions to try and persuade Edith how wonderful, easy, cheap and safe it was to live in a dome. Any dome, they said, as long as she was away from the rain that stung the skin, the clouds that wept ice, the debris collapsing out of the sky – people had died, didn’t she know.

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Leaving Edinburgh under a grey sky and arriving in London for the Book Fair under the same blanket of low cloud, I was reminded of this short story I wrote some years ago.

Changing Times – Part One

Here was soft, muffled silence. Elsewhere, she knew a shining sun hung suspended in a vast, clear sky of shifting blues. She hoped faithfully to see the stars again, The Plough, Andromeda, Great Cygnus. Meanwhile, Earth waited, wrapped in grey, protective cloud beyond which playful starlight hung back out of sight with the myths. Naturally, it would clear, but we had no idea when.

Months ago all the strangeness started: large moths in July that clung on everywhere, silently filling and occupying all the spaces from the ground up, so that playful schemes for summer were overlooked: the mock fishing parties, the state-sponsored harvests, the tree planting jamborees. Since all-in-one pellets had been lab-perfected, people had not worried so much at the soil, had not forced food from it. Communal gardens wilted in the grey heat, un-watered and thoughtlessly trodden over. The earth couldn’t help being old-fashioned.

Many of the old, slow, ways were bypassed in an age when constant technological advances promised the world. There was small patience and no faith whatsoever, in the halls of our technocrats. The white coats clung ferociously to their ascendancy, but for how much longer?

As she patiently got out of bed that morning, Edith puffed a little, straightened and grimaced. The itchy blanket of small aches and pains began their accustomed jig over her joints. Must ease up on the late nights, be a good girl, she thought carelessly. Creeping downstairs in shabby gown and slippers, deliberately fond of those plodding, careful things of her youth which she understood marked her as eccentric, Edith used a fifth of her daily allowance of drinking water to make a pot of tea, partnering the nondescript china with a stained tea cosy. Though plain and small, the small brown piece was her favourite, one of the few pleasing and useful items she had inherited from her mother. The gentle roundness cradled exactly in her hand, like a warm, live thing.

There was a calm slowness in the small rituals of breakfasting. The air breathed balm through her kitchen windows. Many times she had been urged to leave the shabby, peeling house, which was very gently falling apart, sliding peacefully into decay. But Edith would have missed the sweeps of wind under the grey sky, the blowing breeze that welcomed her each morning at the kitchen window. She had remained in this house for over sixty years, had moved back in permanently after her mother had gone over to the other side in 2071, and in the midst of everyday tasks, cooking, cleaning, washing and baking, she would glance up and grin at changes outside, colours that clung on within the seeping seasons which, despite the grey, slipped innocently forward with a faith that Edith always found moving.

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