Fall - A Collection of Short Stories (Almond Press Short Story Contest) Read online

  Fall

  • • •

  Winners of the Almond Press

  Short Story Contest 2012

  almondpress.co.uk

  Published by Almond Press, 2013

  Cover art by Kevin Beresford

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in

  any form or by any means without permission of the publisher.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual

  persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  ASIN: B00BCSY8B6

  •

  Contents

  Foreword

  Carrier – by Samuel Dodson

  Two Esthers – by Corrina Austin

  La Morte de La Résistance – by Holly Ice

  Drip, Drip, Drip – by Zena Hagger

  The Fall – by James Watson

  Young Adam – by Jennifer Etherton

  The Dreamer and the Dreamed – by Michael Rumery

  Fear of Falling – by Adrian Hallchurch

  After Spring Comes the Fall – by Javier Moyano Pérez

  Vague in Coversation - Mahalia Solages

  Top of the World – by Patricia Pribolova

  Dark River – by Thomas Brown

  Watching the Falling Leaves – by Hannah Lavery

  Impenetrability – by Adam Ley-Lange

  Joint Account – by Neal Mason

  Fall – by Elizabeth Richards

  Winners of the Almond Press Short Story Contest 2012

  Foreword

  Fall - for some a word that denotes the time of year when trees shed their leaves, for others a season that passes with pain - a fall from a roof - a fall from grace; whilst even others embrace a time of joy – falling in love. So time passes... falling from season to season, embracing the emotions of our existence - pain, healing, love, joy, maturity, until in the footfalls of those who have gone before us, together with the world we live in, we enter the autumn of life...

  Welcome to the Fall Short Story collection. Here you will have the chance to read 16 of the best short stories among close to 200 submitted to the first contest organized by Almond Press, all chosen for their intellectual and emotional appeal. International in scope, this collection represents the richness and variety of the human condition in a profound, and at times provocative way. Each of the 16 authors in this collection represents a different writing style, a different approach to storytelling, and an original interpretation of the theme.

  It is our hope that you will find that these stories are not merely good but moving and memorable. Enjoy.

  Carrier – by Samuel Dodson

  Their truck followed the road along the plateau of an escarpment. His eyes felt sore as they adjusted themselves to the sharp early light of an autumn morning. Below, a dark, thick and billowing ream of poisonous smoke rose from the fields in the valley into the sky. The charcoal-choked plumes, so immeasurably deep and vast, that the true source of them became obscured and hidden. All that could be seen were fields, grey and cancerous, spotted with slinking figures, working on some unenviable business.

  “What is that?” He finally found the words to ask. He looked first to his father, who he saw was preoccupied with the turns of the road. His mother kept her gaze away from him. She was crying.

  “The sky is falling.” His brother whispered, grinning foolishly beside him.

  An enveloping silence took hold of them, as their mother turned, reached a hand through the windowless hole at the back of the truck’s cabin, and struck his brother across the face. Her eyes were bloodshot, glazed with some unnatural sense of loss. She quickly tore herself away, returning to her original posture.

  “The sky isn’t falling,” his father told them. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  He looked at his father, his mother, then back out toward the voluminous pillars of smoke. As the truck turned a corner and began to descend a hill, hedgerows and bushes rose up, and eventually the smoke was lost in a canopy of leaves and branches which stretched overhead.

  They came to a halt just before the final turn in the road that would take them onto their land. Though he strained to hear it, the shifting foliage above them did not rustle or whisper, and he found in this silence a kind of absence, or hunger in his stomach that brought with it a thoughtful anxiousness.

  Men in dark rubber suits, faces obscured by masks, came round the corner of the road toward their truck. They carried strange metal hoses, empty blue plastic boxes and a crate of objects he could not identify for lack of light. They stopped a few meters away, and one raised his hand and gestured for them all to step out of their truck.

  His father stood on the road, raised his hand out, and he and his brother used this for balance as they hopped from their seats. His brother immediately ran to the side of the road, and kicked his feet into the mud as he waited for the family to join him. The men came closer, walking quickly, and his mother gathered her arms about him and swept him up, taking him to the verge where he struggled to be set down.

  Three of the men joined them where they stood, and placed what they were carrying on the floor before them. The objects in the crate were cheap wellington boots, and the blue plastic boxes were not empty - he was mistaken - but instead full of some foaming liquid.

  “You’ll need to put these on your feet and stand in this disinfectant for a minute or so.” He was told.

  “What shall we do with the boots we are wearing?” His mother asked.

  “You’ll need to throw them away.” One of the men replied. “They’ll need to be disposed of.”

  “Will the boots you’ve brought here fit our feet?”

  “All sizes are in that crate, you will need to try each pair on to find out which fit your feet best.”

  The three men stepped away and joined the others who were gathered about his father, speaking in hushed tones. He watched them curiously as his mother shifted through the boots in the crate, picking up one pair after another, and holding them up to her eyes as she scrutinized which sizes would be best.

  “They all look the same size to me.” His mother said as she knelt and lifted his foot from the ground. He instinctively reached his hand out onto her shoulder to support his weight. “Perhaps they will feel different once they are on your feet.”

  With his new boots fitted, he was picked up and placed in the liquid. He tried not to breathe through his nose, for the smell rising from the disinfectant stung his eyes, nostrils and mouth.

  “Stay there while I see to Eoin. Do the boots fit all-right?”

  He nodded, but his mother’s back was already turned and she did not see him. He watched as his father stepped backward several paces and the strange men lifted their curious instruments toward the truck. A dazzling spray of hissing droplets cascaded across their vehicle. The pressurised vapour dashed against the metal and quickly formed puddles on the tarmac.

  After a short while, the men deemed the truck to have been suitably cleansed, and they went about picking up the bits and pieces of their equipment which lay about the place. They upturned the plastic boxes and let the disinfectant spill to the floor. His father sat back in the dr
iver’s seat, and his mother told him and Eoin to sit in the passenger’s seat with her, since they were almost home.

  “You’ll need to be careful.” One of the men said as the others started walking away, back up the road. “You’ll need to make sure you go through decontamination every time you leave your farm or return home. If you see any signs of disease, you’ll need to report it immediately.”

  His heart seemed to pick up some irregular beat as the truck began to move again. They turned one last corner and the road fell away, replaced by the gravel and dirt of their driveway. Out ahead of them, the wind brushed through grass tipped with frost which ran up to their rusting barn. The domed metal roof protruded from one of the sporadic clumps of woodland which spotted their land. Barren tree branches were beginning to appear with the onset of winter, and as they pulled to a halt outside their house, he felt a rush of coldness come over him. Any heat in his fingers and palms dissipated, and he thrust his hands into his trousers for warmth. He thought it sad to see the seasons change into winter, hated to see the leaves crumple and die. Sometimes he would find the bodies of animals that didn’t manage to find a safe place to keep warm. A body of a rabbit, maybe, or a rat or vole. And their fur would twitch a little in the breeze and make it look as if it were breathing, like it was something alive.

  Eoin leapt from the truck and ran toward their house, knocking his fist against the front door as he reached the thin wooden awning their father always meant to repair, since it was riddled with rot.

  His mother took his hand in hers, and made to drag him inside. He squeezed hard and sunk his fingernails into her skin. As she gasped her grip slipped and he stumbled, almost tripping, away from her. He half-skipped over to his father’s side, and tagged along beside him as he rounded the corner of their home.

  Thick wooden stakes were stacked beside countless coils of chicken wire. He did not know this to be here, did not know how these materials came to be propped against the stone wall. His father placed both hands on one of the stakes and pulled it toward him. He felt it with his hands, tapped his fingers against it, before setting it back with the others and taking a cigarette from the packet in his pocket.

  “You can’t start on your own.” His mother came and stood in front of him, facing his father.

  “I won’t be.”

  His father’s words brought a fierce sense of excitement. Some natural entitlement was taking place, a rite of passage. Eoin and he would set out with their father today, this moment! Time could not be wasted; they must set out to do what must be done! His mother could not see that he and his brother were no longer children; they were men! He moved from behind her legs and looked into her eyes as she looked down at him by her waist.

  The scent of tobacco brushed against him as his father moved passed him and his mother. They followed after him, failing to keep up with his stride as he moved into the house and through the kitchen. His father seemed oblivious to Eoin, opening tin after tin of sardines and emptying them into a clear glass bowl. His footsteps continued on through the house, eventually disappearing upstairs.

  “What have you done?” His mother wailed as she advanced toward Eoin, who backed away and shrunk down into the corner of the kitchen, his back against the cupboard beneath the sink. She stared at the row of empty tins, tried to shift some weight from her shoulders and failed. Her hand suddenly shot up to her face and she cupped her chin in her palm, whilst placing her fingertips in her open mouth and dragging her jaw down. Obscure muscles he did not know existed grew out of his mother’s neck, pulling her skin tightly around them as they contracted. He thought the sound of sobbing came from Eoin, but with the taste of salty tears on his lips, he realised it was him.

  Everything became bright and re-defined. He saw everything for what it was and what it wasn’t. Dimensions merged with one another, perspectives shifted and what was true and what was real fell apart and twisted back together in strange new forms and margins. Light fell in on itself and he seemed somehow to be weightless, as he fell toward the stone tiled floor and was caught and lifted by his mother.

  “You’ve a fierce fever.” His mother placed the back of her hand against his forehead. “You’ll need to rest. Come now, my darling, up we go, come on.”

  His mother called for her husband, and together they carried him upstairs, his head in his arms, his legs in hers. They pulled blankets and duvets over him, and propped his head up with thick cushions from the guest bedroom. Eoin brought water and cloths and waited with them in the doorway. The world was no longer spinning, though he felt further away from it all.

  Alone in his room, he watched the quality of light change as it sifted through the curtains covering his window. Oxygen bubbles clung to the glass of the water jug beside his bed. He reached out a hand, intending to tap it against the glass and thereby free the bubbles, so that he could watch them spring to the surface. Yet his perception of where the jug stood was skewed and he knocked it over, spilling half of its contents before he jumped from his bed and righted it. He lifted his feet one after the other as the water spread around his toes, and he quickly stepped away from the pool on the floor. He waited, half-crouched, by the window. Listening for the inevitable sound of steps coming toward his room.

  No-one came to his room, and he could hear no footsteps inside the house. He rose and waited for his breathing to settle, before peeling back a corner of his curtain and peering outside into the dusting light of dusk.

  Orange light spilled out from the front door onto the driveway. His father passed in and out of this light as he loaded small pieces of wood, tool boxes and other manageable items onto the back of the truck. His mother leant against the driver’s door, watching him work.

  A sound from outside which he could not hear in his room caused both his parents to look down the drive toward the edge of their land. Approaching headlights illuminated parts of the nearby fields as two trucks, towing trailers, came into view. He recognised that they were from his uncle’s farm. As the vehicles approached, he watched his mother walk up to his father, clasp hold if his hands and and lean in to kiss him. Yet he moved his face a touch, and withdrew his hands slowly from her grasp. Something dropped away between them, and they peered down to the stone-littered floor.

  The trucks stopped. Though the vehicle’s headlights were left shining, his father’s brothers stepped out onto their farm. Both wore the same cheap boots handed out by the men in strange suits. His father walked out to meet them, and they clasped hands and nodded without saying anything, anything at all. They immediately set out round the corner of their house, and between them carried the coils of chicken wire and wooden stakes over to the trailers.

  He did not catch sight of his mother disappearing into the house before her husband’s brothers could see her. Nor did he recognise that she left the front door ajar, so that it made no sound as it closed. He was so caught up in the movements of his father’s family, that the footsteps ascending the stairs outside his room startled him. He plunged toward the bed, leaving the curtain swaying slightly - as some evidence of his being there - and pulled the covers around his body.

  Trying not to turn or move, he lay with his eyes half-closed and watched his mother watching him. After several moments, she paced toward the window and straightened the curtains. She turned, and a shift in the light caught itself against the pool of water on the wooden floor. She squatted down beside his bed and glanced at him. She stretched out a finger and at first seemed to move it toward him, but she reconsidered and touched her palm in the water, before placing her dripping hand on her forehead.

  His mother eventually stood and stepped out of his room, leaving the door open as she went to fetch cloths to clear away the spilled water. He knew she would be back quickly, and without warning, so he waited in his bed for her to return. Yet each passing second seemed slower than the last and soon he was not sure whether
he was awake or dreaming.

  It was only when Eoin, leaning over him, pulled his eyelashes upward in order to open his eyelids, that he was drawn back to consciousness. The world was shrouded in the metallic hue of a moonlit night.

  “You need to get your clothes on.” His brother told him. “We need to go help father protect our farm.”

  His body followed the new authority in Eoin’s voice, quickly bringing itself out from beneath the bed covers to stand at attention.

  “I’ve already got clothes on.” He replied, trying to pull the creases out of his night shirt and trousers. “Although mother has my socks and shoes. No wait, we’re to wear those boots the men gave us, aren’t we? I’m not sure what became of them, either.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Come on.”

  As they passed outside their mother’s room, he thought for a moment of opening the door and peering into the private life of his parents. He knew his father was not in there with her, but did not have time to consider this further since Eoin was calling to him in hushed tones and he found he only wanted what his brother told him to want.

  “Our uncle’s went out into the fields before our father.” Eoin whispered as they drifted through their home and passed outside the house into the night. “He waited outside for maybe an hour. He kept kneeling down and picking up fragments of stone in his hand. He’d look at them, inspecting them for a short while, before tossing them to one side: as if he knew the stone he was looking for and none of them were it. He kept inching forward, looking over these stones until I could no longer see him in the dark.”

  He didn’t say anything, and Eoin suddenly stopped, turned round to look at him. His face seemed to say come on, don’t you get it? It’s easy.