Fiction: Witching Hour Downloads

By Ian C. Smith

His cry lurches him into wakefulness, heart thundering like a horse galloping through a windswept night surrounded by dread.  Sleep now in abeyance, drawn to the past’s feints and parries, he assays Google, typing a school friend’s name only to learn he has long been dead.  The raw details: name, date, in cemetery records of the place where he knew his old contemporary last competed in sport stun him.  As boys, their chief concerns had orbited their peer warrior status.

A photograph of their muscle-clenched school team floating in memory, digitally hunting those with the more uncommon names, he finds a life member of something, also deceased, as is another who owned a store selling sports equipment, not straying from their common juvenile connection unto death.  In Images he sees a veteran cop honouring a fallen comrade, the former chubby-faced boy lean and tall, stooped.  He can’t find any likeness to the youngster who had once jousted with him, his old cop’s face wreathed in sorrow, perhaps a mirror of foul wrongs witnessed.

Crusoe cloaked on an island of his own design, he leaves graveyard business, deciding to draft an email reply to his teenage granddaughter he has never met who has made contact.  All his cleverness deserts him like swallows flown from a barn at summer’s end, heart clogged, mind thwarted by doubt.  His neighbourhood swathed in silence, he is scarred by estrangement, bedevilled by disapproval.  Should he ask after his daughter, this granddaughter’s mother who has split with the girl’s dull father?  Perhaps not, perhaps self-deriding banter instead.

Trembling fingers type Dear, respecting capitals, spelling, punctuation without mistakes.  He has made enough mistakes to last his weirdly wasted lifetime.  Brooding through re-writes he considers the word Love, mentally hovering over Delete thinking this would have been a handy metaphorical key once upon a long shrouded story ago.

Back in bed he fixates in the dark on private, perfect things in those helter-skelter times when the only decisions of importance whistled across the sports field’s whiff of mown grass under a huge sky where fresh-faced models of men-to-be tested themselves before their grins faded forever.

Ian C Smith’s work has been published in BBC Radio 4 Sounds,Cable Street,The Dalhousie Review,Griffith Review, Honest Ulsterman, Offcourse, Stand, &, Westerly. His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide). He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island.