by Create50
“I’m afraid that due to the pressures of our existing client lists, we are not able to consider beginning any new conversations at this point in time.”
“I am only concentrating on my existing clients for now, and am not looking to take on anyone else.”
“We are not considering new clients due to the pressure of existing workload. I am sorry we can’t help, but thank you for the thought.”
Bitterness building, he found four rejection emails from the boy’s mother, who was also a literary agent. In her most recent message, she had given him a few tips on how to improve his writing skills: “You should try and avoid writing on the nose – be more obtuse; and you write using too many metaphors. Perhaps, hardest of all, you must develop the discipline to kill all your little darlings – those bits of writing that you love too much. I wish you luck in finding an agent more suited to your skill.”
Even though the email had arrived over a year before, the words from the agent cut to his bone marrow. He went to the hospital and, having Googled a photo of the boy’s mother, managed to track her down in a corridor outside the children’s wing. Once he had explained who he was, the agent almost fell on him with gratitude. Over the next few days they met several times for coffee and eventually he screwed up the courage to ask the boy’s mother to read some of his work with a view to representation. The woman’s expression changed from almost total devotion to frosty aloofness. She agreed to read a script but she would make no promises. He opened his bag and gave her a manuscript for a TV series he was developing. The agent looked at the bound pages as though they were dirty laundry, but did eventually take them.
The next time the writer and agent met was when the harvesting of the stem cells was due to take place. They went for coffee and he asked the agent what she thought of his script. Looking uncomfortable, she admitted to only skim-reading his thriller. He expected little more but was still hugely disappointed. She went on to state that although he was clearly a writer of merit, she hoped he understood why she could not offer representation at this time.
The writer slumped in his chair. Despite all he was doing for her son she would still not give him a break. Dejected, he got up to leave as it was time to donate his stem cells. The agent smiled to herself as she watched him go; his shoulders hunched but his blood ripe for the taking. She had judged the man right. She knew, despite her rejection, that he would still save her son. He was a good man and a good writer but there were many good writers out there. Every day she was bombarded with requests for representation, but her reputation as a top agent was too important to sully it with anyone who was not truly of the highest calibre.
The writer did not go to the donor centre but made his way out of the hospital. For the first time he felt broken; useless, not good enough, an utter failure. Tears streaming, he wandered the streets, paying no attention to where he was going. I knew this because he rang me on his mobile and told me what had happened and how he felt that his value to the world was no more than the sum of his spare parts. As his wife of many years, I knew how much he wanted to succeed as a writer; I knew how hard he had worked to get really good at his craft; and now, despite his big heart, the cold-hearted bitch of an agent wouldn’t even give him a chance. The superior cow couldn’t bring herself to offer my husband a metaphorical lifeline even though he was offering her son, her little darling, a literal lifeline. How could she do that to him?
Later that day, I had a visit from two police officers who told me that my husband was on life-support after being knocked down by a bus. A witness had seen him talking on his mobile when he stepped off the pavement without looking. At the hospital, I stood at the foot of the bed and it did not take any medical qualifications for me to know that my husband would never recover. The donor card in his wallet had been found and I agreed that a transplant team could harvest all the organs they needed. Two people would benefit from his liver and two others would each get a kidney. Another person would get his heart and lungs; another, his small bowel and another, his pancreas. I knew that my lovely man would want to help as many people as possible.
It took two days for the mother of the little boy to find my husband. She’d called his mobile a hundred times but I’d always rejected her call. I wanted her to suffer as I was suffering. We met for the first time and I could see the terror in her eyes and then the relief when she saw that my husband was still alive, albeit on life support. I told her about the planned organ donations and then she asked me to arrange for my husband to be moved to the same hospital as her son, as he had to take priority.
I shook my head. She begged me but I had read all her emails. “You should be grateful. Thanks to you spurning my husband, the lives of seven people are to be saved.”
The agent watched as I kissed my husband goodbye and then they wheeled him away to transplant his organs before turning off the life support machine.
“I will do anything you say. I will sell all your husband’s scripts. I will make him famous. I will make him the writer he always wanted to be, the writer he deserves to be.”
She wept, she begged me, she told me that she would do everything in her power to honour his talent.
I listened, I made her wait, I led her to believe there was a chance I would change my mind and then I delivered the crushing blow.
“I hope you can appreciate why, on this occasion, I must concentrate on my husband’s existing recipients and reject your application for his stem cells. I wish you luck in finding another donor.”
A few weeks later, her little darling died.
A Christmas Story
By Matt Lewis
The two girls were in the house. Alone. The house was in the snowy wilderness. The snowy wilderness was surrounded by forests and mountains in a country on a planet in the path of a hurtling comet. The comet was greenish-blue.
No-one alive could remember the name of the comet, and they wouldn't have liked it if they could. Astronomers didn't see it coming. The news didn't broadcast it. No-one preached about it. No-one dreamt about it. No plucky super-powered teenagers found it was their destiny to stop the planet from becoming a cosmic cautionary tale about the importance of a well developed space-program. It was a full stop to a lot of stories.
Fortunately, the comet whooshed straight by the planet. Close enough to twitch a tide or two and shake loose some snow-dust from the trees, but it went unnoticed by the girls who were in the house, on their own.
The greenish-blue comet was, however, an omen. An omen of rising. The rising of a terrible, dark, and slithering nightmare. A sneaking, drooling, pungent horror with more tentacles than teeth and lots and lots and lots of teeth. And tits. And stingers, and claws and wobbling things, rattling parts and things that might have been mandibles, rasping breath, grasping tongue, clutching-your-ankle-from-under-the-bed bits, sucking appendages that went for your face, folds of wet flesh acne-spotted with frantic, maddened eyeballs, sudden noses that came and went, ripened blisters, sodden clumps of bearish pelt and the hooks? It had hooks. More hooks than it needed, really.
And it had envy. It envied everything and wanted everything, especially flesh. Wanted it bad. Could taste it on its thirteen tongues and its five sad, straggly things that were a bit like tongues. It was a fucked-up, patch-work, horrific, oily bastard of a monster and, quietly, as quiet as the soul of a sinful mouse slipping away with a final sigh through the whiskered gates of mouse hell, it bubbled up and upwards.
Up through the cracks in the ground, up through the damp earth and the concrete foundations, up through the crumbling brickwork, up and up and up some more until it was just a wasp stings' width away from the cracks in the floor boards above which were the bare, pink, fleshy little feet –
Of Frederich Liebscher, the fat and jolly hat-maker who lived in a delightful bungalow in Frankfurt.
Frederich was sitting on his bed, yawning, his chubby toes searching in morning blindness for his slippers and was about to, very sadly because his wife had put a
lot of effort into it, miss breakfast.
Frau Liebscher's wasted cinnamon strudel rolls, salami, cheese, apple slices, toasted and butter-soaked bagels, chilled orange juice and steaming black coffee would have been enjoyed by the girls who were alone in the house in the snow. A hearty breakfast would have been nice for them. All things considered.
Unknown to poor Frederich, the girls had received a letter from him not two weeks ago. Its handwriting was somehow urgent, hissing and repugnant. To them it smelt only of hope. There was drool on the page that had corrupted and withered holes through the paper. The girls had put this down to moths. They didn't get out much.
The letter said:
My dears,
It's been exceptionally silent about my house without the sound of sisters playing. The clock ticks and ticks and I make hats upon hats and, yes, I am fat and I am rich and content. Yet I sense something is missing. Something simple. Something sisterly and sweet.
I am sorry I have long since lost contact with my only sibling, your late father, and, as a consequence, yourselves. I understand your situation in the foster home is brutal. I wish to make amends for my absence and extend to yourselves an invitation. I have a Summer home, though it is Winter now, in the woods beyond the city. Come stay with us, be one with us, we will play as we once did. There will be smiles and laughter. And eating.
Come.
Sincerely,
Frederich Liebscher
P.S. The address is enclosed.
Consider the snow. The snow buried everything. It didn't give a shit. It turned what might otherwise have been endless rolling meadows, with cows in it, into a howling, empty snowy desert (with cowsicles). It was, in fact, so howling and so vast and so utterly bereft of simple human touches, like docudramas or tin-foil, that a particularly vigorous gust of its lonely wind was known to tug the wits straight out of the ears of any man foolish enough to tilt his head and listen to the howls. Perhaps because they sounded like voices, or the cries of two lost girls.
Which was, funnily enough, exactly what had happened to the sharp-suited and shivering man with the one cracked spectacle, strangely runny face, and an axe. Who'd found a house, on its own, in the snow.
What the wind blew out, the rising dark had filled. With creeping thoughts that coiled around brain parts and jerked the body into motion. A motion that carried it relentlessly through deep, uncaring snow, through the unlocked door and into the unprotected Summer home buried in the Winter.
"My dears," says Frederich's voice over the drag and thump of axe on floorboards. "I am here. Your uncle Frederich? Why don't you come to me so we can play? Come running to me children! I have seen it will be so! Come to my welcoming arms! I do not have an axe. I am taller now, but it is I. Listen to my voice. Oh! I have missed you! Millinery is not all it's cracked up to be. I crave family. Old bloodlines. Are you there?"
Old bloodlines and old blood, the rising dark knows, are like a key in a lock. But it must be young blood, it has learnt, not rusted by the world like poor Frederich's. When blood is a key and the mouth is a lock, the body is a door that that can swing open to allow black and boiling thoughts made flesh to pour into the world like water into a submarine. The sisters, though they will never know it, are Plan B.
Peeking and poking and nosing around, calling in dead Frederich's voice for the two lost girls, the man with the cracked spectacles searches cupboard and nook, kitchen and cellar. The lower floors are empty, save for a steaming and fragrant bath the thoughtful sisters have drawn for him after his journey. He rolls his eyes upwards.
"Are you up there, my dears?"
A pair of girlish giggles from above. Innocent, playful and delicious. What might be the man's soul, which coils where his stomach once was, rumbles.
"Hide and seek, uncle! It's so good to hear your voice! We are winning!"
He smiles a smile so wide the top of his head flops off backwards and he takes a moment to flip it back with a clack of teeth. Tooth splinters pepper the floorboards.
"I am coming! Ready or not! I will find you!"
Still smiling, he ascends the stairs. The axe, now part of his hand, is hidden behind his back but scores from the wall curls of flowery paper. He is careless now, hungry and too full of predator to sense when he is prey.
At the landing, he sees movement and enters the room opposite. Against the far wall, the sisters stand before a painting of a snowy scene, side by side, bite-sized and smiling.
"You've found us!" says the oldest and stamps her foot with a premeditated amount of adorableness.
"Is he supposed to look like that?" the smallest whispers out of the side of her smile.
"Shut up. Do the thing."
"He's icky."
"Just do it."
The sister hold their arms out for a familial embrace.
"Yesss! My sweets! My keys! Come to me!" exclaims the man with the one cracked spectacle, striding forward from the shadows of the hall into the light of the room. The oldest girl's face falls when she sees him, just as the man falls when he steps on the rug.
With a howl like a retired wolf that has just lost at bingo, he falls through the hole sawed through the ceiling and into the large ornamental bath tub below. Which contains more than just water; the sisters have been busy.
In a peal of giggles, the girls sprint down the stairs and wrap the chains around and around the bath as the figure inside struggles and sizzles and melts. They stand back to avoid being splashed and consider the show before them. The smaller one picks her nose as she watches.
"How long will this take?", she says, hiding behind the larger. "He's making such a fuss."
"I'm not sure," says the larger sister. "The old letch will drown in a minute or two and then he'll probably be dissolved by tomorrow."
"And then we can sieve out his jewels?"
"One hundred and eleven percent, sis. Today is not the day I disappoint you."
Because the sisters think that all fat and rich people carry jewels around with them. They don't get out much. By a strange coincidence, there are some black and cursed jewels in the stomach of the man, eldritch bezoars the sisters will sell before the curse stains them. These stones will lie waiting in tomorrow's green and nasty goop, next to an axe-head, some teeth and a pair of cracked spectacles.
Outside, the wind shrieks and moans as something dark in its eddies soaks back into the crevices and crannies of the world and settles down, annoyed at itself and feeling a bit stupid, to wait for the next comet. Not long, in the scheme of things. Not long.
The Naughty Room
By Charles Maciejewski
I shut the door behind me and lean against it, gasping. Bloody stairs! Up or down, makes no difference. Not at my age.
I wait for my eyes to become accustomed to the gloom, and take the inhaler out of my dressing gown pocket. Two puffs. Breathe in. And wait.
The solitary window lets barely any light in. The blackout blind is ragged, with a few holes and rips, but still does the job.
Spent many an hour here during the Blitz. Didn't like the room then. Don't like it now. It's not just the cold that makes the hairs on my bare legs stand out.
The dark. The noise. The shaking. Being alone.
Nursing my wounds.
Barely audible sounds reach my ears. Sounds like kids. Playing.
Bloody kids. Bane of my life. No respect. Not like in the old days. You respected your elders then. And if you didn't? Well, you deserved what you got, didn't you? That's what the old man always said, may he rot in hell.
Breathing a bit better.
Shuffle forward a couple of paces, slippers scuffing on the floor. Stop, and catch breath. Eyes accustomed to the dark now.
Picture still on the wall. Cockeyed. Glass cracked. The proverb covered in mould. Unreadable. Unforgettable: Spare the rod, spoil the child. Had to stare at it whilst the old man leathered me. Mum in another room, too scared to intervene. I stared at that picture a lot, then.
There's the
bed. No mattress. Rotted away years ago. The smell of wet rot and stale piss still remains. Seventy year old piss. Sideboard, leaning to one side, top drawer half open. Empty. Except for the belt. Peeling wallpaper. Bare floorboards. Dust. The whole room looks faded. Like my scars. But not my memories.
Now where the hell is. . .
Ah. There.
In the far corner. Jumble of stinking soiled sheets and blankets. Hated those blankets. Horsehair. They scratched my bare skin.
Breathing more ragged, faster. Bloody fags. Bloody inhaler.
I look down at the jumble in the corner, my breathing hoarse and rapid. Angry. I nudge the jumble, once; then again, harder. The jumble moves. The sheets and blankets slip down.
And show the kid. White faced, terrified, red rimmed eyes. It looks up at me.
Bloody kid. Stinking little shit. Insolent little shit.
Stupid old fart, am I? Am I? AM I?
"I want my mummy," sobs the kid.
A Deadly Countdown
By Mary Stone
The sticky red rivulet flows steadily from his mother’s fractured skull across the linoleum floor, under the shuttered pantry doors, and pools around ten tiny toes. Warm and wet.
Blinkered by darkness, he gazes through the slats. He can just make out the line of her prostrate body twitching a little in the light of the silently ringing mobile phone on the floor. Her pale face, glimmering with sweat, is turned towards his hiding place; the tiny cupboard that smells of instant coffee and ogorki kiszone where she stuffed him only nine minutes ago.
The retreating light from her unblinking eyes whisper their final command: “Don’t make a sound, no matter what.” It will be another eight minutes before the police arrive.
It’s seven in the morning and December dark.
Six intrepid neighbours meet for the first time in the street outside, shivering in coats pulled around half-dressed bodies. Drawn into coalition by the cries of an unknown woman, they take in the broken door, the footprints in the snow, and the silence. Words are whipped away by the wind. Their bravery dissipates. Nobody moves.