Harvey didn't really get ill. Just colds, upset stomach. That kind of thing. He tried to remember the last time he'd been to the doctors but couldn't. He'd never taken any medication, never had an operation.
Just the kind of man that dropped dead one day for no good reason at all.
'Harvey Ships,' came a voice from a round black speaker set into the ceiling. 'Room Three.'
Slowly, carefully, he pushed himself from the tall chair and slowly made his way to the doctor's room. He knocked before going in.
The doctor rose and offered his hand. 'How are you?' he asked, as they shook hands like old friends. The doctor's English was heavy with an accent that Harvey couldn't place, but the name on the door (which he'd already forgotten) was something Spanish, maybe Portuguese. Maybe South American, thought Harvey, but dismissed it. It was pretty unlikely that a doctor would come all that way to tend to the sick and wounded English when they could probably get paid more in their own country, or maybe in North America.
Spanish, or Portuguese.
'Not bad, thank you,' said Harvey. Which obviously wasn't true, but that was what English people said. The doctor understood this. He was, after all, a doctor. People didn't often go to the doctor because they were fine.
'What can I do for you?'
'I'm not really sure. I've got a bad foot. My heel.'
'Would you take off your shoes and socks, please? Let's have a look.'
Harvey took of his wet shoe, just the left one, because it would have been weird to take off both shoes. Water sloshed from his training shoe onto the beige, cheap, carpet in the doctor's room. His socks were clean. He'd made sure to find a pair without holes or dirty soles. Wet, a bit smelly with rain, but clean enough. For some reason, taking his sock off, Harvey thought he smelled the sea. That briny kind of stink that you got in docks and seaside towns, rather than the fresh, nostril cleaning air you get at a nice stretch of beach or out in the deeper seas.
For a second, he thought it odd. But there was a piece of seaweed in his sock, he saw. Green with bubbly bits that would pop if you walked on them.
That would explain why he could smell the sea.
The doctor didn't mention it, so perhaps Harvey was only seeing things. He didn't want to ask the doctor if he could smell the sea or see the seaweed, because he didn't want to sound like a lunatic.
'Would it be easier for you to lay down?' asked the doctor while Harvey stared at the seaweed in his sock. Harvey looked up. The doctor indicated the bed. It was covered in long tissue paper.
'No,' said Harvey, thinking about getting from his nice comfortable chair beside the doctor's desk and hobbling across the room to the bed.
Instead, he rested his left foot across his right knee so that the doctor could get to his heel.
Harvey didn't need to tell the man which part of his heel hurt. When the doctor touched the spot - gently enough - Harvey howled.
The doctor frowned as he sat back.
'What?' said Harvey, worried. Doctors shouldn't frown.
The man gave a peculiar Latin kind of shrug and tucked his top lip underneath his bottom lip and thought for a moment while Harvey convinced himself that he was dying. Why else would he be smelling the sea and seeing seaweed in his socks and...
'There's something stuck in it. In your heel.'
The doctor's surgery wasn't on the coast. There was a street to one side, a car park out the other. Harvey should be looking out at the roofs of parked cars, amassed like multihued turtles come to some sandy beach, en masse, to lay their eggs.
But instead, he looked out of the window and saw a galleon. At least, he thought it was a galleon. Masts, sails, gun ports, made of wood. A ship, for sure, and an old one. One that didn't sail anymore and certainly shouldn't be in the car park.
'What?' he said, trying to ignore the ship in the car park.
'There's something in your heel, Mr. Ships,' said the Spanish doctor.
Spanish, for sure. Harvey noticed that the doctor was missing an eye. There was a ragged dark hole where his left eye should have been. Why hadn't he noticed before?
His foot was really throbbing.
'I'd like to cut it out,' said the doctor.
'What?'
'Do you want something to bite on?'
'What?' said Harvey. He should really stop saying 'what', but for some reason his mind had gone entirely blank. That ragged hole in the doctor's face was covered up with a grubby brown leather patch now. The doctor wore fat gold earings in both ears. Harvey hadn't noticed those before, either.
The doctor handed Harvey a small chunk of driftwood. 'Bite down on that. It'll make it easier. It'll still hurt, of course. But, well...'
Harvey took the wood and jammed it between his teeth. He bit down as best he could - the piece of wood was a little too large for his mouth. The Spanish doctor turned his back for a moment, turned around, and flourished a wickedly sharp scalpel with a grin that glinted. His front teeth were all gleaming gold.
'Going to make a small incision on your heel, Mr. Ships. No cause for concern. Bite down, man, bite down!'
The room lurched. Harvey felt queasy, suddenly. He looked to the window again, searching for the horizon. The waves were high. The doctor, the Spanish doctor, the scalpel. Wasn't a scalpel anymore.
It was a dull looking curved kind of sword. Cutlass. A cutlass.
'Wait!' said Harvey, spitting out the wood onto the cabin floor. There was a terrible tearing sound. Wood splinters filled the air as a black metal ball flew through the hull of the ship. The ball carried right on, taking off the ship's surgeon's head just as the cutlass fell onto Harvey's mangled leg and cut the dead flesh away.
He screamed and bit down hard, smashing his own teeth against each other. Blood splashed across the wooden floor and over the surgeon's gown. The surgeon, Harvey saw, still stood. He had no head, but he still stood.
Harvey lost his fight with consciousness. He didn't fight very hard.
He drifted down with the ship. The waters were shallow and the sun was bright. Murky, underwater, yes, but he could make out his foot, drifting in some kind of underwater current. A small fish nipped in and out, in and out, after his dead flesh.
Underwater, an honest sailor had no need to breath. His dead severed foot slowly sank down to the sea bed - sandy, still, in the shallows. Harvey heard no sound. His ears were full of the sea. But he imagined his foot clinked as it hit the soft sea bed, like a stitched leather purse full of doubloons; a pirate's bounty, or a sailor's wage.
There was gold there, within his flesh. His leg was nothing more than a purse. The skin was just a simple sack. No bones, or muscles, or blood. Just gold. From the knee down, the part which the surgeon severed, was full of gold coins. Old coins, Spanish.
The wreck of the ship, peppered with canon-shot holes, fell to the sand where the sea ended. The surgeon with no head bumped against the broken wooden boards. Sailors, broken and torn from battle and canon, sank to the bottom, too. Harvey dragged his foot, full of doubloons, along the sea bed. He didn't need to breath and he didn't need two legs.
He dragged his bounty up and out. Water poured from a ravaged toe, but the hole wasn't large enough for the gold coin to drop through. On a beach, somewhere. He didn't know where.
His leg stung from the salt water, but the surgeon's stitches were holding the remaining flesh and bones of Harvey's thigh in place.
He was on a barren island. A man alone, washed up on the shore. One leg was shorter than the other. There was nothing to eat but gold or his own skin.
He cried. The tears were full of salt. They stung like the sea as they dripped onto the stump where his leg had once been. That good old leg that had hurt and been taken away and was full of heavy gold doubloons that wouldn't do a dead sailor, lonely on an empty beach, any good at all.
The End
This is another of those rare 'do it for the hell of it' stories. Didn't have a publication in mind, and never sent it out. But it's sweet, in a wa
y. Well, my sweet and your sweet might not gel, but you know what I mean...
Pour your Beer Slow
Sweet honey. Smells like sweet honey.
Is there any other kind?
Fields of lavender and bees. And there, standing against the long flat sky of the Anglian fields in summertime, a white house with a black roof.
The man walked through the lavender, not minding the bees and loving the smell that reminded him of England in the summer, when he'd been young and the sky brighter and clearer.
The scent filled his nostrils, bolstered his old heart with youth and yearning. Innocent yearning of childhood, not the darker loathing that came later, in his teens. A time before loves and heartbreaks and pain and failure.
A young boy, running through a field of lavender just like this, running toward his home. The home he hadn't seen for over fifty years. A home with white old walls and a black thatch roof, just like this one.
'Pour your beer slow,' the old man said.
That first taste of lavender beer, and later, of lavender honey.
*
The door was hanging loose and open against the hinge. Drunks leaning on walls, men in bars, women in bars. Never had mattered.
Now, returning home, he stood at the threshold of his family home, knowing his father and mother both were in the grave, and frightened, still, of nothing. Of everything.
Of himself.
'Mum?' he called. 'Dad?'
No reply. The place was long empty and long dead, just like his mother and father. He'd seen the old parents into the grave. Seen his brothers both, his sister, too. Never did have kids, but he'd buried three dogs and a cat he'd never liked.
Little breeze in the field, low sound, like shuffling in the fields at his back, but just bees and the lavender, swaying.
He pulled the old wooden door (painted black) a fraction wider, and the rusted hinges finally gave in. The door came away in his old man's hand, and fingers angled away from his thumb couldn't hold the weight. It fell with a dry thump against the overgrown shingle path.
His hand hurt now, from stupidly trying to hold onto something too heavy for him.
The interior was dark. The windows were shuttered, like a French farmhouse, not like an English farmhouse at all. Cool, inside. He could feel that. And kind of musty.
He looked at the painfully bright sky above, caught sight of birds' nests in the roof.
The sun beat against his bald skull, burned from the long walk to this dead place in a field of purple flowers and dancing bees. Nothing here but memories.
So why come? Why walk five, six miles, on old hips and knees, through fields and down forgotten country lanes?
To remember the old days? To say goodbye?
'No,' said the old man in the doorway.
Just a taste. A slow beer, poured down the side of a glass, and to sit and watch the sun slide down.
*
The cottage was rotted, badly, from winter's damp. It was built to last, but also, to last, a thing needs to be maintained.
It hadn't been. Hadn't been touched since the death of his parents, and as such, the spores and dust and beasts and spiders had made the old wood and textiles their home. It was a little spooky, stepping through the webs to the kitchen, crushing moist mushrooms beneath his leather soles.
It hadn't been ransacked. Just ravaged, and only by time.
Yet, in the kitchen, in a horribly warped Welsh dresser, were three filthy glasses. Pint glasses, so dusted and mildewed that they were green rather than transparent.
And in the cupboard under the sink, where they'd always been kept, a brace of cloudy lavender beers.
Meagre light to see by, and as he reached for the beer with the hand not holding the dirty glass, something scampered beneath his outstretched hand. He didn't mind. He was the interloper. Not the rodent.
At least, he figured rodent. Sounded small. Probably more frightened than him.
He wasn't afraid. He was more than ready to die. A mouse didn't scare him.
What scared him?
Fucking up this one last beer. Fucking it up and rushing it. A beer years in the making, years in the waiting, drunk from a rough-polished glass on his hot wool suit jacket while the sun went down on the world.
*
The man found a plastic lawn chair that was serviceable in a broken wooden shed. He took the chair out into the field, placed it among the lavender.
He polished the green glass on his suit, not minding the grime on his clothes at all, because it didn't matter in the slightest. Some things were important. Some weren't. An old man's suit wasn't on the important list.
He put the glass in the dirt at his feet and took the beer bottle from his pocket.
He didn't have a bottle opener, but he had damn fine dentures. Simple enough to open a beer with good false teeth.
A slight hiss, and a damn, damn fine smell.
'Pour your beer slow,' said the old man, sitting right there beside him, in the garden, like it was.
His brothers and their families sat on a new bench, like they had long ago, family gatherings common back when, way back.
His sister smiled, standing at a barbeque made of an old drum, or made to look like it.
He could smell the beer, his family, the kids. The lavender fields and the meat sizzling on a summer barbeque.
His mother came from the house with a tray full of glasses and bottles. She put it on a long table resting on sawhorses.
He began to pour the old beer, the memories of the dead surrounding him with their smells and laughter and life.
Slow, he poured. Cloud at the bottom of the dusted rotten bottle, and the beer?
Slow.
Down the side of the glass. Even warm and very old, the beer was good. A little head, but gently, slowly, he poured the perfect beer, full of memory and love and above all, made by family.
He held the beer up and looked at the small fragments of ancient lavender floating in the beautiful liquid. Nodded at the setting sun as the meteor hit the other side of the world and took a long and languid pull in the dying light.
The End
This is one of my favourite stories. Not my absolute favourite - that's like picking your favourite kid (there's a story about that later, 'Playing Favourites'). But I like it a lot. It's also one of the reasons I tailed back on submitting stories to traditional publications.
I sent this to maybe five or six markets. Pro markets, and semi-pro markets. Shortlisted three times, and uniformly good feedback...but no acceptance. I think (I could check, but I won't, because I'm lazy) that all told, the submission process to those five or six markets took over two years.
Hence, KDP. KDP can be a wonderful thing. It's a good story, but because three people liked it a fair bit, six people liked it a little, overall, does that mean it should never see the light of day?
Don't know...but I don't think so.
People need People...to Eat
It wasn’t the sun or the moon or the stars that brought about the end of the world. It wasn’t nuclear. It wasn’t some catastrophic magnetic shift, or a biblical flood.
The Mayan’s didn’t know a damn thing about the cold, but they knew about famine, well enough, and apocalypse, and prediction.
In the twenty-first century, people knew about famine. At least they thought they did. A few million people starve to death and it’s on the news.
The world starves to death, it’s not news. It’s not news because there are no broadcasters, no printers.
Newspapers and the Internet and mobile phones don’t work when there’s no food, because people die when they don’t eat, and when they can’t eat, when all the people are dead, there’s no one left to tell you how it went down.
Things don’t grow when there’s no sunlight. That’s just the way it works. Maybe, somewhere, under the earth, things like mushrooms grow. Maybe under the sea the kelp forests still wave up at the dead sky.
But on land the earth is dead, and
all that’s left is people, because we’ve eaten all the animals, we’ve eaten all the tins and packets.
It took a while. My granddad remembered eating a tin of beans. My dad doesn’t. He never ate beans, only people. That’s the way of things. People need people.
*
My name’s Sharpie. Really, it’s Ruibin, like Reuben, but spelled kind of funny, like it’s a Scottish thing. But it’s not. It’s just a stupid spelling. Something my Dad thought was funny, maybe.
I call myself Sharpie, on account of my teeth, which’ll cut through most things. That’s good, too, because I’m hungry all the time.
I ate Dad three weeks ago, the girl three days ago, and I haven’t had a meal since.
It’s cold, too. Since the sun went dark and the winter came and the food all died, we’ve been grubbing about, looking for some kind of mother lode. I met a girl three days ago who told me there’s a city out there in the frozen wastes. She must have just walked up the drive to the manor where I live, calm as you please, like she’d forgotten there were two kinds of people – those who run from and those who run toward.
She said they have heating, and artificial light, and power. All the things of the old world. She said there’s a bunch of scientists. My granddad told me about scientists. Said they made things like tins of beans. He told me he’d eaten beans, way back when he’d had teeth.
Granddad was a mean bastard, but me and Dad, we ganged up on him and took him down. Dad didn’t seem sorry to see his old man go. He ate him happily enough. We shared him out equally, because Dad loved me the best of all his children, which was also why he hadn’t eaten me.
It was cold and there was snow on the ground and I could see her footsteps running up the driveway. The girl on the doorstep must’ve been running to keep warm, because when I opened the door to her she was wearing a skirt. I made sure it was night because the daylight was sick and could burn. My Dad let me outside one day, to prove to me the sun was dangerous. I was naked and he left me outside all day and I burned so badly my skin turned a raw red and then fell off. It grew back, but I still remember how much it hurt.
Dark Words (Horror Short Stories): Collected Short Fiction Page 3