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Gutterman

by Michael John Grist

I found him one mad marsh-walking night.  I was out in the bogs, I don’t know why, crossing wet rivers and wading through peat mulberry patches, dashings of filth worming their way into the cuffs of my suit turn-ups, smidgeons of muck smudging up and under my fingernails.  I must have trekked two thirds of a golf course and the circumference of a lengthways lake when I hit upon the road.

It was just an ordinary road.

It had double yellow parking lines and gutters and manhole covers, and it had curbs and sidewalks, and that central white line, dash dotted.  It had lights too, tall curving streetlamps, blotching out yellow glow like a line of fairy lights in the dark of the fens.

It was an ordinary road, except it went nowhere.  I could plainly see that, from my dell in the darkness.  It began from nothing to my left, ran down for 4 streetlamps, arcing like bare back ribs from an all eaten feast, then it ended, a neat line, and back onto the marsh grass and stalky reeds of the night, lit up white like a front row of soldiers in a firing line, floodlit and waiting.

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Waterfall

by Michael John Grist

I cut open his brain because he needed help.

“Help me,” he’d whispered, banging at my fly screen in the middle of the night, his wet shirtsleeves slapping against the cracked glass of my back porch slide door. “I need help.”

So I’d let him in. Set him down. Listened to him talk.

“There’s a waterfall,” he’d said, lying there in the dark kitchen slumped across my table. “I see it when I dream. And the dark creatures. There are dark creatures in the waterfall. Slithering in the cold, behind the falls.”

“Oh?” I’d said, keeping my voice low and steady and calm. “Is that so?”

“And there’s fish,” he’d said. “In the water. Falling down the falls. And they think they’re happy. Hoop de hoop. They think falling in this water is so much fun fun fun. But when they pass the cave, the cave behind the falls, it’s not so fun. They start to panic, they flail and twist, because they know. And sometimes, yes, they do die. The dark creatures, they reach out, and they catch the fish.”

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The Sphinx

by Michael John Grist

The Sphinx asked me its questions.

I ignored the Sphinx. It had the head of a lion, and the body of a man and woman combined.

“Where are you from?” it asked. “Why are you here?”

The Sphinx touched me with its hips.  It edged closer to me.

“Stroke my hair,” it said. “Then you may pass.”

“I don’t want to pass,” I said.

“All want to pass. Just touch my cheeks. Stroke my back.”

“I don’t want to. I’m fine here.”

“It’s the desert.”

“It’s where I’m meant to be.”

“Kiss my eyelids. Stroke the soft skin of my fore-arms.”

“No.”

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Pendolino Lane

by Michael John Grist

Despite Cray Upson’s best efforts, Milo Pendolino refused to sell him a home on Moresca hill. He always claimed the homes were already full, but Cray knew better, so he plotted out a plan. He knew Milo owed the bank thousands for his construction costs as well as the mortgage on the land itself. Plus he had no outside income. He only had the homes he’d built, way up there on Pendolino Lane with the simple gravel track running up the side of the hill, and they never sold. Pendolino’s follies, they called them down in the town.

Cray checked. Milo’s homes were unlisted with real estate agencies. They were all wooden structures hand built by Milo himself. He was known as an excellent craftsman, dovetailing his homes into jigsaw perfection, but he never once tried to sell them. Cray heard reports of visitors trudging up the hill to look at the homes, and marveling at their outright beauty. 8 Victorian style homes arrayed along the cobbled Pendolino Lane. When they tried to view them, walk the Lane, Milo would appear from nowhere and shake their hands warmly.

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The Squinching of Ricky Shay

When the orders came down that all the gold was to be digested by the end of the day, Efren couldn’t believe his ears, despite their unusual and rather floppy size.

“All the gold?” he asked his co-consumer Ricky Shay, the fattest stupidest pig in the sty. “I mean, that’s some heavy stuff right there.”

Ricky Shay ignored him, mostly. Ricky Shay was stupid, and didn’t understand English. He could grunt, and he could eat gold, and when it bust out through his system, it was, yes, it was thoroughly what it should be. But he didn’t speak a lick of English. Sometimes Efren felt he was working with an idiot.

“I mean,” said Efren, speaking in his piggy grunts. “That’s some heavy stuff.”

Ricky Shay said nothing. The orders stood. The gold before them stood, mounting up to the ceiling with nuggets as big as your fist. Efren, an optimist, shrugged his haunchy shoulders and tucked in.
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Brand New Day

TODAY

She wakes up slow, opens her dull eyes expecting the new day to glow in, but no. It’s still night. She blinks, yawns into her pillow, stretches beneath the duvet. It’s the pig bedspread, the one her mother made. Her dozy palms bobble over the linen pigs stitched onto the cotton, sleep-weakened fingers catching in the felt swirls of their curly pink tails. She pulls one out gently, lets it tug back into place, and smiles.

In the distance, muted by the thick velvet curtains swaddling her second floor window, there’s the sound of drunken students calling out on the spine. Back from the Carleton probably, she muses, fresh off the Uni bus and trying their hardest to act like louts. 3, 4 in the morning perhaps.

She rolls over, arches her back, sighs dreamily. Nudges a foot out from under the duvet, snuggles a hand underneath her double pillows, and slowly drifts back to sleep, only vaguely wondering why she woke at all.

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