I’m watching Al’s fingers lift his chess knights in the day room of a maximum-security ward at the Forensic Psychiatric Hospital for the criminally insane. Al’s an older patient just out of seclusion. Pasty white cheeks, grey stubble, slack mouth, intense brown eyes, with lids that drop unexpectedly, and flutter, and open once again. His fingers hold a castle’s head, then release it. He moves to a pawn, lifts its top.
The town fidgets on a rock outcrop spouting with springs. Only a few decades ago its salient features were a few old-time stringband musicians busking on the pavement, a minor moviehouse, a tractor showroom, the teaching college and the big Baptist church that owned the majority. Some of those old boys and girls are Grammy winners since, but the theater awaits refurbishment and the tractor palace is a coffee shop, the university is open to everyone and the Baptist Church is at most number two on the scene. The university has become the largest landholder in town. It owns almost everything. Another two thousand students and it can advance to a higher football division. Football has cleaned up the town.
I’m a packrat from the word go, have been since I was a kid, even these days people see me in my daily walks, stop, retrieve some object from street or gutter, and stick it in my pocket.
You weren’t yourself, that night.
Usually, when you got back late, you went straight to bed. I’d wait for ten minutes or so, until you’d finished clattering about up there, then creep up the stairs and slip into bed beside you. And then lie awake, staring at the ceiling. Listening to the clock. Tick. Tock. Trying not to wonder where you’d been, and with whom, and what you might’ve got up to.
Leila has done me the honour of choosing one of my scribbles – Thank you.
Continue reading “Literally Reruns – A Special Sort of Day by Diane M Dickson”
These postings come up quicker every week and here we are at Week 230.
I’ve given up trying to find any interesting facts about numbers as they are mostly pish. If we reach Week 667, that could be entitled ‘The Neighbour Of The Beast’. T-Shirts give me some ideas! I’m looking for a way to work in either, ‘I poke badgers with spoons’ or ‘I’m not mad, ask my invisible camel, Stephen.’
Distraction by Sharon HajjIn the morning, I like to bury my dreams under the pillow so I can immediately check my to-do list:
I sit in silence amid the scattered, worthless rubble of what were the symbols of your life’s bright flashes and triumphs that you hold so dear. These shattered remains lay in tribute to unbridled, hate-filled rage, spawned from the union of betrayal and deceit.
Jane couldn’t keep her clothes on.
She’d been arrested a few times on public decency charges but when the authorities witnessed her prison togs repelling themselves from her, the charges were dropped.
She was referred to experts on everything but there were no experts on spontaneous clothing removal by the clothing itself.
The thing about parallel universes is that there might be somewhere where you exist where you are a better person. But then there has to be another place where you’re the worst version of yourself.
literally stories 