Poltergeist - (Flash Fiction - 333 words)

Giles straightens the sheets sometimes. He tucks them in tight under the mattress, the way he used to, and he sends small gusts of wind to smooth out the wrinkles on the duvet. The pillows are always stacked, one neatly behind the other.
He rubs away the rings of tea and coffee on the desk, on the bedside table, in the kitchen. He would wash the dishes if he could, but it takes too much out of him.
The spaces between the tiles in William Shaw’s bathroom are always, and will always be, grout-free. He struggles to control the damp in the basement, but William probably wouldn’t notice if that changed at all.
He doesn’t mind doing it, really. Not like he did when he was alive and kneeling on top of the counter with a bucket of diluted bleach and a sponge, scrubbing at the stains on the walls or the spores of mould yet to come. He likes to help. He wants to help.
But when William comes home from a long day of teaching and switches off the radio, shells off his shoes, discards his coat over the loveseat and finds his bed perfectly made, he pauses. And his brow furrows and his lips part and he exhales in one low, slow hiss, as if there’s a distant ache from a long-healed scar that he can’t quite ignore.
He goes downstairs for a handle of something- whiskey, gin, bourbon, whatever’s there- and if he doesn’t fall asleep in his chair, he trudges back up to his bedroom and doesn’t even let himself look at the sheets or the duvet or the pillows. He pulls them down in one firm movement and gets into bed. The next morning, he leaves everything in shambles. A dare of sorts, asking him to prove his existence again and again and again.
Giles isn’t sure what’s worse - reminding him every night of what has been lost, or pretending that he isn’t there at all.

So I went to buy it, yeah, and it was just me and Alex and we step inside and it’s a clusterfuck of bras and pants. Like, any other day, any other day, I’d take my sweet time- yeah, you know- but the women behind the counter are staring at us and I’ve got shit to do and Alex is bright red – shut up, not being funny, I was there, you were – and we head right to the back, eyes on the prize yeah – and mate, that shit is expensive. They can’t just do with a sock like you can – yeah, I said it – so everything buzzes and twitches and I never wanna see that many disembodied dicks again, but seriously, right, seriously, no, shut up, I’m telling the fucking story, it became an issue of budgeting. Savvy shopping. Bein’ reasonable with money and shit. We closed in on this sparkly pink dildo with all sorts of ridges and bumps and shit and were checking the price and seeing whether it was – shut up – a good deal. And I did the maths and you could buy eight inflatable sheep from the pub for one of them Rampaging Rabbits, so we left and went for a pint instead. We’ll fill his back garden with sheep for the same price and it’ll be fucken’ great. You’re welcome.

I’m telling the truth. I’m just telling the truth, and it’s going to happen. It’s been all over the news here for months. They announced it – they did – I’m telling the truth, I swear. You have to promise me – just promise me – I’m being serious here, I am.

They wouldn’t announce it if they didn’t plan to do it. You need to promise me.

You promise?

Shake on it?

Good. Thank you.

There’s something comforting in getting it right, and that’s likely because I don’t see maths as a science. Science is mutable – one revelation means that everything needs to be revisited and retested to still mean anything. If I finish a problem properly, and I usually do, it’s sealed off and safe from whatever might be discovered in the future.

I don’t really know why it matters to me. It just does.

The Dam and the Brazos River

When we were at Lake Whitney last weekend, Cathy took us to the Brazos River. Cathy is probably the most maternal person I’ve met in Texas, and she’s a foul-mouthed chain-smoking former-flower-child, and the mother of my brother’s best friend, Stevie. We got pulled over on the way for flicking cigarettes out of the car window. Even though it had poured down with rain yesterday, there was a burn ban and it was littering and why in heaven’s name would we litter in the Great State of Texas? Surely we knew better than that? 

The cop took Cathy out of the car after she didn’t have her license on her, only had expired car insurance with her and she’d stubbornly provided a false birth-year, which meant that they couldn’t find her in the system (even in front of police officers, she refuses to let her kids know how old she is).

Meanwhile, we had hidden Chloe, Cathy’s sixteen year old daughter, under a towel and a pillow in the hot Texas sun with the windows down and the A/C off. The car had been too crowded for her to have a seatbelt and she was a minor - and Cathy hardly needed to get into any more trouble as it was.

Whenever Cathy spoke to the officer (“I don’t want to take you to jail.” “Good, I don’t want to go to jail.” “Have you ever been to jail before?” “Yeah.” “County jail?” “Dallas County.”), Chloe would peek out from under the towel and take a few sips from a McDonald’s cup full of ice water before hiding herself again. Austin and I had to lean casually on her when the officers came back, and Stevie was asked to drive because he had his license in the back of the car.

An officer accompanied him, and at that time, I had no idea that the bottle where he and my brother kept their weed was in the trunk. Officer asked if there was anything he needed to know about in the back and Stevie told him about his hunting knife. The officer liked that particular brand and had always wanted one himself.

Cathy got a court summons for her ticket, and Stevie drove the last leg to the Brazos River. We figured that ‘littering’ was getting off easy, considering.

We waded a bit, not much but a bit, and Cathy found some fresh moss from Saturday’s downpour, which she saved in an empty McDonald’s cup. She wanted to go to the other side of the river and see the dam, so we drove along the two-lane road to get there (“a cattle chute”, according to Stevie, “every fucking road in England” according to me).

The dam looked like the inside of a military compound - the kind that you see in terrible films sometimes - all cement and hard angles and fences lined with barbed wire. There were a few flights of stairs to walk down to reach a grated walkway at the bottom, about 20 feet above the cement chamber that connected to Lake Whitney. The water puckered and blistered deep like a fresh burn, and it swelled and spat. If you squinted, and I did, you could see the thin silhouettes of dead fish being pushed through the heavy currents.

Fresh burn, fresh burn, fresh burn - the sirens could sound at any fucking minute and if you didn’t make for higher ground, the Lake would push through the gaps and show you exactly why the markers where we stood on the walkway reached forty feet and then some. Fuck you and your aspirations. That water could easily snap your fucking neck and leave you to stink up the waterside, like a bloated fish waiting for the buzzards. 

[freethought] Brambles

I was writing down every significant event that happens in The Secret of Platform 13, so I can restructure and cut accurately for my adaptation.

However, in the process, I finished my notebook!

It currently holds the first few pages of my Tales of Beedle the Bard adaptation, chunks of my dissertation script about feminism, political apathy and time travel, countless unexplored concepts and a year’s worth of everything I learned as I grew as a writer.

And with that, goodbye, 2011/2012 screenwriting notebook! You have served me well.