Nov
28

Friday Flash Fiction: Remembering Lisa

This week’s flash, feedback – as ever – is welcomed:

Remembering Lisa
By Neil Beynon

You’re always most tired before you die or so all the uploads used to tell me. That was back when I worked on the Nets as opposed to living on them. Actually, I guess I probably spent more time on them when I was alive – I used to dream about them. Now, when I dream, it’s not about the Nets. Why dream of endless night punctuated by blazing blots of binary? People go mad in here, they told me that as well – I didn’t believe them and I don’t expect you will.

In the dreams I have these days it’s not the Nets I see but Lisa raising her sleepy-eyed face from the pillow, the flower of trapped heat blossoming across one cheek and a cascade of curls falling over her bare shoulder. In other dreams it’s Vikki and Joe running across the beach towards the ocean, their shrieks and laughter lifting the seagulls into the sky, I can smell the brine.

I don’t know why I keep dreaming about things that never happened. I never – to my memory – recall seeing Lisa in the morning because I was always up first, never willing to sleep too long. As for Vikki and Joe…well they never existed, I made them up. Why? I have nothing better to do in here and you can’t help wandering down the avenues of what might have been, fingering at the ifs: if I’d worked less, if I’d listened more, if I’d realise she was sick or if she’d told me. ‘If’ is too heavy for such a small word.

Those aren’t the only dreams I have. The one I hate the most: Lisa in bed, her slender frame emaciated to the point of being skeletal, her breathing a shallow rasp broken by too long pauses, like she was being dragged a little further away. At the end there are always choices: to medicate or leave alone, to pull the plug or carry on, to be there or not, to upload or fade away.

I never understood Lisa, not really. I didn’t get why she wouldn’t wear all one colour or that the duvet had to be tucked in with the buttons at the bottom or why she liked her toast on the side rather than under her beans. I wondered why she liked hip-hop and glam rock but loathed soul. And I was utterly bewildered by her love of Dickens whom I always found depressing. Most of all I never understood why she chose not to upload.

We never discussed it and at the time she said no to the technician I was too shocked to say anything. They only ask once. I suppose I should have asked but I didn’t, there was so much to do and so many other things unsaid. I ask the others but they either don’t know or don’t care or are beyond understanding. It’s not all bad, there’s plenty of new information on here every day, the world still turns for now and as long as it continues we’ll be here. I trawl the feeds for possible answers on Lisa; I haven’t found any yet. Give it time – I have plenty of that.

In the dream I hold her hand as she goes and that stops it being a nightmare. In reality I didn’t and that’s how I always know it’s a dream – when I wake it’s dark and there’s no one to hold my hand until the next burst of light.

Nov
14

Friday Flash Fiction: The day the aliens came

Still quite under the weather with my eye infection but managed to extract this from my head. I fear it may have been in there too long again but it tested better than I thought and so here you go. That I hope you like it should go without saying although it’s worth repeating; feedback as ever is welcome:

The day the aliens came
By Neil Beynon

Pat was in the bathroom the day the aliens came. In between washing her hands and drying them on the towel, her mind dwelling on the meeting she’d just left, she noticed her reflection in the mirror. Pat wasn’t given to spending much time looking in the mirror because she didn’t like what she saw there: eyes were too small, her eyebrows a little too thick, her nose slightly crooked and hair that would not behave whatever she did. She couldn’t have told you why she stopped to look in the mirror and, if you’d asked, she would have explained it away as her noticing how grey her hair was getting at the front, or how she’d noticed more lines around her eyes but both would have been lies.

She stopped because the reflection was not her own.

That is to say it was her: she could see the too-small-eyes she had inherited from her father and the prematurely greying hair she’d got from her grandmother and the neckline that was her mother’s legacy. Yet it wasn’t Pat that looked back from the glass but someone else.

The shock of it was like a fist in her chest and her heart fluttered around it like a startled bird as Pat leant on the sink staring at the mirror, wanting to look away and not able to. Somewhere in her head –behind one of her eyes perhaps – something moved, unfurled and stretched along a section of her mind. Pat did not cry out. She couldn’t, her mouth wouldn’t respond to her command and so she just stood there gawping at her reflection while inside her skull she screamed.

She willed her limbs and her mouth to move but like she was coming out of a deep sleep early she couldn’t move at all. Her fingers dripped water down the side of the sink and onto the marble floor. Part of her noted that it would make the floor dangerous, another part of her warned that she’d been gone from the meeting for quite a long time and that she was risking her job by remaining.

And loudest of all was the thought she’d gone mad. But she was wrong.

The thing in her head continued to unfurl and stretch. It slid into her memories and began rifling through them searching for the connections it needed for what would happen next. Pat saw her eighth birthday party when all of her friends had dressed as characters from the old west and she’d accidentally shot her friend Pete in the head with an arrow, the smack she’d got for it stinging through the years. She saw her laughing in the snow with her father the day before he fell down clutching his chest and didn’t get up again. She saw herself running away from Sylvia after finding her with Steph and the little bar on the corner of Wardour Street where she’d spent the evening talking to an honest-to-god Pulitzer winning author, Michael somebody or other. She saw herself as Best Woman at her friend Nick’s wedding, she saw the beach near her mother’s house and the first interview she ever got, the first time she got fired. Her memories rolled by like a rolodex and something began to paw her emotions.

Pat’s head tilted and she had not willed it to happen. She felt tired now, though her eyes were wide open, and she was having trouble stringing her thoughts together, there was an overwhelming sense of sliding down a slope that would be impossible to climb again. She dug her heels in and willed her hand to the mirror, to the edge of the reflection that wasn’t her. Someone banged on the door of the bathroom, in the distance she could hear what sounded like an air raid siren but couldn’t have been because the war ended seventy years ago. Pat fingered the reflection of crow’s feet around her eyes and the silver around her hair before she lost control of her hand again.

Her last thought was how old she looked and how she wished she’d spent more time on the beach by her mother’s house. When we made the last connection we didn’t realise what we’d done and it took a long time for us to work out that she wasn’t there anymore. After all, we looked the same in the mirror and we could still walk, talk and breathe but when we went to that little bar on Wardour Street it was just a poky little room with a slightly sticky carpet. When we visited the grave where her father lay in the dirt it was just a shard of rock planted in the earth in a quaint echo of the primitive culture that spawned our host. And when we went to the beach by her mother’s house it was entirely too cold.

And that’s what happened on the day we arrived.

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