A man buries a sealed box in his back garden.
A woman put a dark wig over blonde hair in a train station bathroom.
There’s a red Toyota Carina. The front door is open. My best friend is slumped over the steering wheel, his brains leaking onto the vinyl dash. In his hand is a toy gun.
The man sitting next to me on this aeroplane is sweating. He’s wearing a bulky woollen jumper, unusual, in June. He’s staring dead ahead, blank. We roll towards take-off. He starts to pray, quietly.
My mother was dying. Holding my hand, she told me there was a secret in our family. She said it went back to my grandfather. She said I was the only one who would understand, and that my brother must never know.
It was the first summer we rented the beach-house. This was before it got bad, before we started to see the boats come in. Your sister still had both her feet…
The voices would come late at night. They came through the streets, past the church, and the small school, to the house. They came up the stairs, and down the hall. They would wake the children, always with the same insistent tone. The children cried - they did not like to be reminded of what happened on The Darkest Night (the children always called it The Darkest Night, when they whispered about it). The voices did not care. They continued to ask - what happened us? where did we go?
Sgt. Velasquez opened the hatch between the two ships. The cooling systems hummed. The dashboard twinkled in soothing green. All four EVA suits were stowed in their compartments. A warm vac-pot of coffee stood on the table, with the remains of four rehydrated meals gently steaming. The life-support systems showed that the ship was completely empty. Velasquez stood still. The mayday signal still pinged through his headset.
Joanne’s father showed her how to listen to the numbers stations - secret broadcasts from Moscow, London and Washington, beaming coded messages over the airwaves to lonely agents, far from home. The numbers station on LW205.4 had broadcast the same pattern for thirty years; A recording of a woman with a light Russian accent would read out twelve numbers, then there was a burst of recorded waltz music. The woman would then call out twelve letters ‘yankee, echo, zulu...’ and finally more waltz music. For thirty years, through boarding school, college and the lonely times after she moved to London, Joanne would tune in most evenings to hear the faint, authoritative russian voice cut through the static. She was dozing gently, when the waltz cut out, and an unfamiliar man’s voice, live - not recorded - started to call out urgently - numbers, letters. The same sequence of three, over and over.
I turned sixteen the day Dr. Schneider shot himself. It was a golden Buenos Aires summer afternoon, and we were on the avenida, us guys and some girls from my class. The guys smoking and passing around a bottle, the girls - my god, the girls - giggling and dancing. Not yet the women they would become. Juanma had his transistor radio, and we were listening to American rock and roll. We heard the shot over the music. It was weeks before we remembered the fidgety Austrian, who had asked around the neighbourhood - looking to make an appointment with the doctor.
I opened the fridge - inside, my tupperware. I knew as I picked it up - To be honest, I knew before then - the chicken fillet was gone. A sarcophagus of rice and congealed curry sauce kept an imprint of where it had been. My note, authoritative in biro on post-it, stating: ‘Niamh’s lunch’ now a mockery. I looked around. They were no longer my colleagues. They were my suspects.
Adobe Acrobat reader hasn’t changed functionality in at least ten years. The upgrade requests arrive without fail. I have decided to ignore them. No bad can come of this.
