The Girl With The Wheel Barrow

We touch other peoples' lives simply by existing

JK Rowling

It’s a girl with a wheel barrow.’

I don’t know what I was expecting to hear but it wasn’t that.

‘What do you mean a girl with a wheelbarrow?’ I asked.

The whole world had been waiting with baited breath for our five minute glimpse into the US sponsored Future Scope. Mankind’s first peek into the future. Into the year 3055.

‘It’s some kind of a garden ornament Sir.’

‘A garden ornament?’

I pushed the professor out of the way and had a look for myself. And there she was, a young girl of about six staring at me with dead ceramic eyes. A hundred years in the planning and this was our result.

‘So what does this mean?’ asked the professor.

‘It means,’ I said, ‘that in the year 3055, people will still have bloody gardens.’

But I also knew that we would have to wait another 100 years to try again.

A hundred years of preparation and all we had was a stupid girl with a wheel barrow. Staring into the past with a stupid grin. And in five minutes she would disappear, taking 3055 with her.

But then I saw it. We all saw it. The smile was changing into something else. The girl with the wheel barrow wasn’t smiling but screaming. And as the image faded, we all hear the words she was screaming. I’ll never forget what she said.

HELP US

                                                       (C) Ally Atherton

236 Words I wrote for the Light and Shade Challenge and the Facebook group 500 Fiction.

Catching Thoughts

                          The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts


                                                                                         John Locke







ON A GOOD day people are walking around with bubbles coming out of their heads.



The blunter the thought, the smaller the bubble. HUNGRY and HORNY are top of the pile, closely followed by I NEED A PISS. I think every fourth person that I come across needs a piss and 1 in 10 are thinking about ways to spend their winning lottery ticket.


That's as exciting as it gets most of the time but it's the sharper thoughts with the biggest bubbles that all thought catchers worth their salt live and breathe for. But you have to be on your toes. Sharp thoughts burst quickly. Sometimes you almost have to catch them before they've had the chance to form, those sharp thoughts with big bubbles can be a handful.



Because sharp thoughts are also the heaviest.




I once put my back out trying to catch an I KILLED MY WIFE. And only yesterday I was taking a late night stroll and an

                               I NEED TO FUCK AN ELEVEN YEAR OLD


burst before I had chance to catch it. And you have to catch the sharp ones or else nothing ever gets done.






But most days are bad and bubbleless days. Bad days where thoughts cling to the cold bars of their human cages for dear life and won't come out to play unless you grab them by their small and danglies, kicking and screaming.







                                                                      
                                                                             
                                                                            (C) Ally Atherton 2015







235 Words written for this week's Light and Shade Challenge.

                                                            Why not take a look and join in? It's fun.

The Art of Laughter

                                'If we couldn't laugh, we would all go insane.'


                                                                    Jimmy Buffett







WHEN I WAS a kid my cousin had a Bugs Bunny on a chain. You pulled the chain and he'd start yapping.




They don't make toys like that anymore. Things don't come on a chain. But sometimes I wonder if my life would have been easier if I came with a chain because since it happened I find it hard to get my  words out, in the right order. The Doctor told my mum that I had Meccano Words. It was his clever way of saying that my words don't come out fully assembled and that you need to screw them together to make any sense out of them. But if I had a chain you wouldn't have to do that.

It wasn't the words I was worried about. At least I had words even though they came out broken and people had to put them together for me before they could use them. It was years later when I discovered that I had lost the art of laughter.





Bugs Bunny had a box inside his chest that contained every word he ever needed to say. They never fell out of his mouth. People didn't need to catch them with butterfly nets. You didn't need a Screwfix catalogue to work out what the hell he was saying. But it was his laugh that cracked us up. We used to pull that chain over and over, cutting him off mid sentence so we could hear it. I can hear it now.


Whenever I go to see somebody I get the same words thrown back at me. At night I imagine those words on a big wheel and sometimes it won't stop turning. Occasionally the wheel stops on a particular word like cognition or desensitisation or rape. I have lost count of the amount of times I've tried to grab hold of that wheel so that I can open my bedroom window and throw it out into the cold night air. A cold night air full of people without chains. Where childhood and adulthood are well oiled machines. Where laughter doesn't slip from your fingers or live inside a rabbits ribcage.








                                                                                        (C) Ally Atherton 2015











359 Words written for this weeks Light and Shade Challenge. 

The Art of Blinking

 I STARTED OFF with smaller things. Books, cups, napkins, those kinds of things. Things that were relatively easy to sweep under the carpet when nobody was looking.



With practice I developed my own technique where I could blink inside my head so that nobody would notice me doing it. I blinked out many things. The books, cups and napkins were only the beginning. Because of my blinks I was never a bored kid. But my family never noticed things going missing so I couldn't rely on them for entertainment purposes. Even when the dog disappeared they didn't even notice. It was a mistake that one. An oversight on my part. He never came back and I've been trying to bring him back ever since.

 But I don't know where they go. Maybe there is a spare room inside my head where they all end up. A junk room as it probably is by now. I imagine my dog lying lifeless on top of the pile. Or does somebody feed him?


When I got older I found that I could blink out things collectively.


It was a difficult skill to master but eventually blinking out one lamp post took away all of them and in one foul swoop I managed to wipe out the humble goldfish. I checked my encyclopedia and as I expected there was no sign of the aforementioned Carassius Auratus Auratus. That's when I learned that I had to use my gift sparingly but unfortunately things like Goldfish, elephants, vinyl records and motorbike helmets didn't make the cut.




Sometimes when life gets me down I feel like erasing everything but I think most teenagers feel like that a lot of the time, but they just lock themselves in their room, they don't have an option to make everything else disappear as well. You see I have to be very careful when I get angry. I've already lost one teacher and two classmates. It's as easy to make a slip of a blink as it is to make a slip of the tongue but obviously the repercussions are much worse. I nearly made mum disappear once. But she's still there. She gets on my nerves all the time and she's always moaning about how I shouldn't be out in the dark seeing as there are no lamp posts and all.




                                                                                   (C) Ally Atherton 2014




391 Words


                             
                                           Written for this weeks Light & Shade Challenge

Dream Catcher

Dreams come true. Without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.



                                                        John Updike







I will bag your dream before you even notice it's gone.




I'm a professional dream catcher. Sleight of hand is important but your desire to cling onto your dream is the deal clincher. Some dreams are like limp handshakes. I don't even bother with them anymore, trying to grab hold of a limp handshake dream is like trying to eat soup with a sieve whilst wearing Floyd Mayweather Jr's boxing gloves.



I stick to dreams that are practically flashing their panties. Dreams that are so desperate to escape their human host they will sell their soul to Fred Phelps. Then they come easily enough. A cuddle is all it takes. Or sometimes I will feign a stumble, bump into somebody that is carrying a dream on their back that is making their knees buckle and their souls shrink. Sometimes unrequited dreams make people so miserable their dreams can't wait to jump into my bag. I call them jumpers.



It's a fact that some dreams have longer legs than others and some of them have no legs at all. Some dreams are all mouth. I can hear them from miles away. Some are howlers and some are screamers. Howlers are more common and the likelihood is that there is one standing near to you right now or maybe you have your own howler inside you. Desperate to burst out of a soul that is struggling to stay upright. Desperate to jump into my bag before your dream eats you from the insides and spits you out again.





                                                                      Ally Atherton (C) 2014




256 words







Written for this week's Light & Shade Challenge. Take a peek. It's fun. As usual I appreciate any comments, any feedback, any critique.

Dark Entry Yard

      


                            Last night my wife was unborn.





And you can't bury the unborn just like you can't brush your teeth in your sleep no matter how many times you go to bed clutching your toothbrush. And I know there isn't a therapist in the world I can convince that my wife and my entire non existent family have disappeared into a hole in my bedroom wall.


                          Lyssa. The girl that arrived into my universe wearing a bomber jacket and a pair of monkey boots. The girl that once told me that success has eight legs and a hairy belly and that all you have to do is decide whether to be scared of it or to smash it over the head with a rolled up newspaper. I know she would have put up a fight if she hadn't been sleeping. I'll give the bastards that much. Either they were doing me a favour or they knew what was good for them. But they got her in the end like they got the rest of my family.



                                                                  ~



I'd swap places with Ebenezer Scrooge any day. What I would do to wake up every six months with The Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come's decapitated head floating over my headboard. I'd settle for a poltergeist in training. I'd sleep with an incubus. Anything but Dark Entry Yard.



It appears on my bedroom wall every six months, in the middle of the night, whether I like it or not and I don't. I then have one minute to chose a blood relative and if I don't make my mind up quickly I lose them all. My whole family. So over the years I have had to draw up a list of every member of my family in order of preference depending on who I want to become unborn first.


                                                            ~


Uncle Bill had the unfortunate honour of going first. Which was sadly ironic because the poor guy had never come first at anything in his whole life. But his name just popped into my head. Uncle Bill. A guy that had one foot in 1977 and the other in Ladbrokes. A guy of few words and even fewer redeeming qualities. He would have bet on the outcome of a full frontal lobotomy if somebody had let him. He was an easy pick but my choices would get more difficult.


My cousin Marlowe was next. I hadn't seen him since he was ten and I remembered him being all lugholes and teeth, but when they dragged him away he was a big pile of tattoos and triceps. He didn't go quietly and I can still hear him screaming now if I close my eyes. Most of them scream. The screaming kills me. And the screams drown out the sounds of the hooves and the teeth and the breaking flesh.






Then the hole closes for another six months.The hole in my bedroom wall that leads to Dark Entry Yard. A hole that Enid Blyton would have been proud of if she had been given a personality transplant. If she had ever woken up on the wrong side of the bed and decided to give the Secret Seven a suitcase full of AK-47 assault rifles.












                                                           (C) Ally Atherton

                                                                    2014





538 Words







Written for the Light & Shade Challenge. Why not take a look and join in? They have reached their sixmonthanniversary and it's a great challenge for any writers.


As usual I'd appreciate any comments and feedback.

 

Thinking Into the Stone

                 Image courtesy of Janssenfrank and taken from Wiki commons


                     



                               

                      Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be



                                                            Robert Browning







           


                           'Slept with her yet?'




That's how abrupt he was. But I had grown accustomed to his ways in the short time I had been visiting him. He didn't want to know what I'd had for breakfast, he wanted to know if I'd fucked her yet.


'No.'


His silence betrayed his disappointment so I placed my hands on his cold grey shoulders and let him have it.




'What's that?'


'Strawberries,' I said.


'What?'



The miserable old bastard could get what he was given. I wasn't about to stop eating all the things I wanted just to please him but I think he enjoyed it because his gravestone had gone blank. He was wordless for once and that only happened when he was eating or drinking or thinking of something shitty to say.



'You never had Strawberries?'


'Of course I fucking haven't,' he said, 'In my days you were lucky to get bread and butter for supper and a slap on your backside for dessert.'



I didn't argue, he was probably right.


'What else have you got for me?'

I thought for a moment. Then decided to do it.




'A kiss.'



'A kiss?'


Now I knew he was interested. Women and ale was all he was ever interested in.



'Go on. Do it,' he said.




I closed my eyes and thought about last night.



Mary's lips that tasted of the strawberries we'd been eating from the basket at the back of her Aunty Veronica's house. Her rosewood hair that would never do anything she wanted it to when she wanted it to. And then her tongue. Her tongue finding mine for the first time. And my hand wandering nervously down the crease of her back. Slowly downwards. Mary closing her eyes. Mary gasping. Mary's gap-toothed crooked smile.




That would do. I removed my hands from his gravestone and turned to walk home.


Let him stew for a while. Dirty old git. That's all he was getting.





I got as far as the gate at the end of the church yard and looked back to see what he had written on his stone. I had to squint but I could just about make it out.





'Thanks Son.'






                                            


                                                      (C) Ally Atherton

                                                                    2014







 364 Words








Written for this Monday's Light & Shade Challenge. Take a look and join in if you like.