Thanks to Harriet L Oakley who sent us this submission!
This is a story, and it starts off like any other. A man walks along the pavement with a heavy determined stride; thick leather boots smack onto the icy pavement. A loose shoelace flicks at his ankles as he moves. His name is Jack. Jack anybody… Jack somebody. Names are essentially irrelevant. He could have had any name. He could have been ‘Desmond’, maybe a ‘Mark’, or even Isaac if he were to be that kind of eccentric character – ‘Isaac’… yes – Isaac is a good name… A man walks along the pavement, heavy stride, his name is Isaac. His water darkened swade boots smack onto the icy pavements. The slush gradually soaks through to his socks. Feathers of heavy snow fall unknowingly down towards their fate in the ever thickening slush – Pathetic fallacy; or maybe it could have even been some kind of intense metaphor, as though some unnamed narrator were sifting desperately for meaning among the inanimate words. Or maybe it was just snowing.
The weight of a few days rushed mornings marks his face, dark hair unkempt, invading his vision. He pushes it away from his face to reveal the almost lines of his forehead. He has dark brooding eyes, and a shadow of stubble. He is twenty seven: he worries he is getting old. Picture the male perfume adverts, Diesel, Boss, maybe even Levi jeans. Perfect in his imperfection, the modern day Heathcliff; the flawed romantic; the tragic hero… like I say – he could have been anyone.
He diverts his path into the road; dodging the slow moving traffic while the brake lights illuminate his face in a morbid orange. A bell rings as he pushes through the door of the off licence; buys a lighter, a pack of cigarettes – like everybody else, he had been trying to quit. He promised her he would. He can feel in his pocket the hypnosis CD she had brought him. He hadn’t even opened it yet. On a second thought he turns back and asks for a pack of Nicorette gum. At least he can pretend to try, even if only to fool himself.
He pushes his wallet deep into the pocket of his jacket along with the gum and fumbles with the lighter. He leaves the shop. The cold hits him like the stereotypical slap in the face; his fingers are burning from the change in temperature. A cigarette hangs from his bottom lip as he cradles the lighter from the cold, the small flame flickers in the cave of his cupped hand like a tiny beacon, or pocket of resistance against the snow. He steps off the pavement. There are no brake lights. The lighter falls still lit from his hand as his feet are swept from under him. In the distance he hears the screech of skidding tyres and maybe a car horn. For a split moment he thought he had woken from a dream that he did not even know he was having. And then he did not think anything. For only a moment, several pairs of eyes followed the fall of the tiny flame, like a single insignificant spark thrown out from a bon fire. Then the flame went out as the lighter clattered to the floor and skidded across the road like a spooked animal and disappeared down a drain.
Across the road a woman stops and stares at the air where a split second ago a man had been standing. In her peripheral vision she can see the broken body in the road. Later on when the ambulance arrives it would be found that his back had been broken on impact and he would be pronounced dead at the scene.
And you thought he would be the main character…
And do you feel deceived?
She felt as though she stood next to a double of herself. The shock had caused a momentary dissociation of self – and she had become the both the passive observer; the flesh and the eyes and the ears who stood adjacent to the thinking feeling terrified human being. She became aware of a burning sensation spreading across her head, like fire igniting all of the nerves in her body one by one. Her hands shook but yet she felt strangely above it, like she were reliving a memory, or simply watching herself from a far. She felt like she had bypassed something important. She had been transported forward, had accidentally time travelled in the moment of the accident and so had not really been there. Like a cut, so clean and quick that for a few moments the parted skin forgets to bleed – forgets to feel. And in the moments following the thick shocking red blood escapes the skin and burns down your hand.
She had always imagined something significant to happen in the moments following death. Something not quite tangible to mark the passing. But yet nothing happened. An instant turned into a moment, and the moments followed each other, birds flew across the grey sky above. It was not long before time was passing again. Where their once had been a man, a dead man lay in the middle of the road. The world did not stop. She could not quite comprehend it. Flesh and bone, hair and clothes, all still present; the cigarette still hanging sardonically from his lips, and yet something irreversible had happened.
She stares blankly into the air and began to come back into the moment, like when you look up from reading the ending of a book and you are surprised that the world is still there. Somewhere she hears a scream, although she did not think that anyone had made a sound. It was as though it had emanated from the situation itself. It seemed to be appropriate anyhow. Absent mindedly she removed a tissue from her pocket and blew her nose. Her name is Catherine. …She will be the main character.