Time

Time

"Thou Shalt not Kill"

2^nd August  2018

What a difference a day makes! This evening I am literally bursting with excitement to tell someone, anyone, what has happened! Last night could not have been more different.  I was sure that my time had come. I was sure that I just could not carry on. I saw no way out. But today – well, today is a different time. 

And that word time is all I have to tell you about. That word time will never be the same again. Nothing will ever be the same again. But I think I’m moving too fast. Just for perspective (when you start reading today’s joyful diary entry later on) I want you to read what I wrote last night in the depth of my despair:

1^st August  2018

I am a sick man. My illness may be viral. It may be bacterial. It feels terminal. I suppose terminal is when hope is hollowed out; when it becomes just another word. I am almost there.

This is the problem: I am a time traveller. For the past few months I have been travelling to the past. I travel to the past of wherever I happen to be about once every seventeen hours.   I stay there for about thirty minutes. I do not control it. It controls me. Sometimes the gaps between the ‘timeshifts’ (I have to call them something!) are short; sometimes they are longer. The shortest interval was about two hours; the longest over two days.

An important thing: when I am transported into the past I can see but I cannot be seen. This was almost as big a surprise as the shock that I was suddenly travelling through time itself. It is the nature of the beast, though:  I can wave, I can shout, I can leap into the air like a jumping jackass but strangers, people I know, are oblivious to my presence. No matter how much I shout into my parents’ strangely youthful, un-lined faces or grab my classmates (exactly as I remember them at seven or eight years old!)  by their lither, lighter shoulders and try to shake them into just for a moment seeing me, I cannot connect with any of them.

No-one knows about what has happened to me. Who would I tell? I am not sure that time travel is something I can openly discuss with anyone. So I'll write this: A diary entry. To be honest, it's starting to feel more like a suicide note.

I don’t trust doctors; give them a pretext like this and they’d have me filleted up for dissection before I could say temporal displacement. 

Oddly, given my atheism, I trust priests. Maybe I can talk to a man or woman of God?  For all I know this window that has been opened is proof of the existence of God? Maybe I need to discard that casual, faux-urbane assertion that ‘I am an atheist’ and just submit myself to the ministrations of the church? I don’t know. I mean, even if I have become a prophet or seer this gestalt disturbance has been going on for a while now – months – and I have not seen a message, a sign, a miracle. Oh, you say, is not this new vision itself a gift from the Lord? All of that may well be but that’s the thing – I have no faith whatsoever and besides I can’t for the life of me work out the point of this whole time-disruption thing so, God, if you’re listening, choose someone else to be your servant.

The first time it happened it was early morning.  I was waiting for a bus. There I was; one of five people standing around in vague proximity to the bus stop in that haphazard way that people do in Dublin when there was a soundless explosion of white light, just like that footage of the flash of a nuclear explosion that used to appear on TV during the cold war to terrify children. The saturation was soon broken up as the spectrum returned to normal. 

Obviously I was stunned.  My first thought was just that – a nuclear explosion. Soon, however, I could see that life was still going on around me; People and traffic, buildings and a mushroom cloud-less sky.  But while I was still on the same street everything on the surface of things had changed completely! The colours were all wrong – dull browns and blacks, greys and deep greens where before there had been  brighter shades. The buildings had changed, too. Shop signs were muted, doors were narrow and wooden where before there had been chrome and glass. Where was Starbucks? And the Texaco? The background noise was lower, too. There were fewer cars on the road but the pavement was choc a bloc. Men, women and children, all of whom wore shades of grey, black and brown, stood, walked and rushed up and down the street. 

I must have been standing there with my mouth open for ages when a little girl of about 6 years old, wearing what looked like a communion dress knocked into me and I fell over, winded.  I was about to apologise when a foot landed on my face and I felt a sharp stab of pain and the taste of blood in my mouth. I put my hand to my mouth and saw I was bleeding. I looked around and saw a little boy, perhaps the girl’s brother walking away from me through the crowd. Neither of the two children bothered to stop or to see if I was hurt.  I was about to get even more hurt. I tried to get up but I was knocked down again, this time I felt the sharp pain of a kick in my lower back and I fell flat on my face. I shouted in outrage and I turned about ready to fight - but there were so many people around me, above me, that I could not see who had kicked me.  Now I was being trampled! An old woman stood on my hand, a younger woman walking a dog kicked me in the balls, while her dog just scampered over my chest!  “Let me up, you mad bastards!” I howled at the mob. They carried on regardless. I managed to get onto all fours, all the time getting kicked and shoved in the side and face and legs and arse. “Stop!” I shouted again, but the punishment continued. I eventually managed to get to the side of the street where I stood warily, ready to jump out of the way of this torrent of this human flotsam.  

Once more I tried to get my bearings.  It goes without saying that I was distressed. As you can appreciate the enormity of what had taken place forced me to take things in gradually, in small bits and pieces. I noticed there were more bicycles than I remember (no-one wore florescent or rain proof clothes and the bicycles were all huge, black iron affairs that moved in a ponderous jerky spurts). The buses were black and white! I mean, I remembered these dimly from my childhood but here they were: queues of the dirty, noisy, heavily laden monsters of my early memories of this city. As you can imagine my brain was reeling. My first ‘explanation’ was that I had been clubbed over the head and somehow had been enlisted as an extra in a costume drama. I’m not sure if I even articulated it all that clearly – I was not in any state of mind to process what was taking place. Who would have been? 

The actual measurement of time was beyond me at that stage. I do remember cowering against the wall for a long stretch. All I could do was watch the insanity unfold. I saw two men wearing heavy, knee length woollen coats and trilby hats walking towards me. As they approached I got a snatch of their conversation, I distinctly remember one saying to the other “the water is very turbid” and I still don’t know what ‘turbid’ means,  but that is ‘by the by’;  I tried to ask them where I was but they walked past me as if I was not there at all. As I said, this pattern was going to repeat itself in the weeks to come: no-one can see me, no one can hear me, I do not exist.

The obvious conclusion for me was that I was dead. I felt nothing. It meant nothing. In fact I remember thinking. So this is the afterlife? Dame Street circa 1970? Why? I mean why not Pericles’ Athens or Hugh Hefner’s Mansion? What a lost opportunity. The next thought was an obvious one and in fact, a more sensible one. This wasn’t heaven. This was hell. “Oh, shit” I said aloud “I knew that I shouldn’t have stolen that money from my Auntie”. 

From about ‘stolen that money…’ onwards I said the rest of that sentence in the present day. I was back at the bus stop. It was morning and the same five people were there, exactly where they’d been when I ‘left’. I know that I fell flat on my face and let loose a string of profanity that would have shamed a docker (had there been any dockers in Dublin in 2018) I got to my feet, still swearing. I was bruised and confused, and in no mood for any more annoyance so I scowled at one of the other commuters – a twenty-something bearded fool in skinny jeans  -  when he dared to look askance in my direction and I said “What the fuck are you looking at you dopey looking prick?”. He looked away, his nose twittering in disgust. The bus arrived, I got on and headed off to work for the day.

At first, the hardest thing was to plan ahead. For example, one morning, not long after this whole phenomenon had begun I went out for the newspaper and a litre of milk. It happened halfway to the to the shop. The flash of light came and slowly cleared. Wherever – sorry I should say whenever but it just feels unnatural  -  I ended up it was bitterly cold and I was in the middle of an icy rainstorm. Great. The street was now just a muddy, rutted trail. There was a lot of cow shit, no houses or people; a ditch punctuated by trees ran on one side of the trail while a meadow ran down a valley to the left.  At the bottom of the valley I could see a settlement of some kind shrouded in mist. There were no paved roads or motorised vehicles leading down to the town/village so I guess I was somewhere in the middle ages. That’s as far as my speculation went.  I had to get shelter.  In my present it had been a fair morning in June and so I had gone out wearing a tee shirt and shorts. Now I was getting soaked by rain that already fallen about a thousand years ago. I waited for twenty minutes under a tree until the episode had passed. Then I was back in the present - inexplicably soaked through to the skin and sniffling. I continued on to the shop, got what I had set out to get and hurried home. I spent the next three days in bed with a cold. Sure, the time shifting continued but I told myself that my bed was a safer platform from which to view the past.

Soon, though, I learned to be prepared for the vagaries of time travel.  I never go out without an inconspicuous khaki rucksack containing the items of my survival kit:

1 pair of black waterproof trousers

1 black waterproof jacket.

A pair of thermal gloves

A Thermal hat

A fleece.

A pair of sunglasses

A bottle of sunblock

50 pounds in pre-decimal cash and coins.

A change of socks.

A tee shirt

A shirt

A pair of light trousers.

A pair of unfussy shoes.

A toilet roll

Wet wipes in a plastic bag

A bottle of water

Paracetemol

Antiboitics

A Stanley knife

I fear, however, that this survival kit is not going to save me. There is nothing in that rucksack that can minister to the sick feeling I have right now. I have no control over my life any more. My brain and my body are victims to the whims of some inscrutable, and I can only conclude, vicious intelligence. I am at breaking point already!

You know, if you’d told me before all of this happened that I’d become a time traveller I would have been chuffed. Time travel has always been my number one, all time fantasy. I was brought up on a diet of TV shows like The Time Tunnel and later, Quantum Leap and I was transfixed. Maybe I was always a precociously nostalgic child – I remember one day when I was about nine or ten years old crying because I knew that I could never go back to an earlier stage of my childhood. I mean what business did I have crying over lost time at that age?– but for as long as I can remember the past has been a vital, exciting place.

Not anymore.  The past is beginning to bore me senseless. I never arrive back to see the discovery of America or the birth of Jesus. I don’t get the chance to intervene in history. A quiet word to the wise in Captain Smith’s ear as he sets sail in the Titanic? Going for a walk with Adolf Hitler (I mean, if you had thirty minutes with Hitler and you knew that you were going to be lifted out of there would you hesitate to throw him under a tram?) Forget it.

As I said, no-one can hear, see, feel or, I guess, smell me. But that is not the real problem. Who or whatever is making this happen has seen fit to land me at the most unremarkable, idiotically banal moments in the irrelevant wastes that make up the lives of history’s most unremarkable people. 

Why can’t I meet Elvis? No, just some crappy busker murdering ‘Ground Control to Major Tom’ in the early 1990s on Grafton Street. Even De Valera would do. Not a chance – some hick counsellor scabbing votes from the parishioners outside Finglas church sometime in the late 1950s is the closest I’ve got to rubbing shoulders with greatness.

I guess if Ryanair did time travel it would be something like this. I get to where I’m going (the location is identical so I don’t actually go anywhere) but there’s no telling what year I’ll arrive and I can be taken at any moment in the middle of my day. I arrive back at the moment I left. I guess to others I have become a very strange fish altogether; prone to sudden bodily jerks, random bruising and bleeding, inexplicable, dazed looks and weird, occasionally terrifying non sequitur utterances, grunts and squawks.

I can’t say my eyes haven’t been opened!  A few weeks ago I arrived back in 1982. The housing estate where I grew up was raw and unfinished; scruffy children were all over the place but what I saw in Mrs Halpin’s house changed my view of my childhood. There she was, a woman notorious for her devotion to the Catholic Church and aggressively forbidding of sin of any kind in others, bent over performing fellatio on Father Roche, the local parish priest. I swear, between the slurps and moaning I could hear him reciting decades of the rosary.

But the predominant mode has been fear and pain. It is really getting me down. This episode is typical: 

One evening I was sitting down in front of the TV to eat a pizza and crack open a beer. I had just - three hours previously  -  been back from a terrifying thirty minutes in the frozen wastes of the Palaeolithic. I spent most of this time hiding up a tree to escape from some kind of giant carnivorous monkey (how come  there are no fossil records of such a beast?!) and so I was not really expecting another timeshift. But, one minute pizza and beer in 2018, next I’m standing on some kind of pyre in the middle of a Viking fertility rite. On fire. I roared in agony, leapt off the pyre and hopped into a pond. When I got out I was quite seriously burned on one leg and my pyjamas had been burned straight off my body.  Poor me: the unfortunate souls  who’d been up on the pyre with me were still burning – their frenzied gut wrenching screams of agony were joined  by a chorus of side splitting guffaws, and a sustained, fanatical volley of abuse from the Norsemen  to make an overall cacophony that will haunt me to the grave. By the time I was shifted back to my pizza and beer I had lost my appetite.  And I had third degree burns.

And some of the stuff I come across is just macabre. I was in the cinema  with my girlfriend when all of a sudden I wasn't in the cinema  with my girlfriend. I was standing outside in complete darkness. The kind of darkness where you can’t see the hand in front of your face. That kind.  I tried to see my hand; I was waving it, I couldn't see it. “Oh, for fuck’s sake” I said aloud, exasperated, “where…I mean…when am I now?”   I could see nothing, as I said, but I could feel the weighty heads of some kind of barley-like  grain crop knocking against my palms as I reached out and hear a light breeze rustling around. There didn't seem to be much to do but wait so I crouched down to rest. However, almost immediately I heard voices. They were men. They were speaking Irish (I think) and were, from the rustling sound of their passage, moving more or less towards me through the barley. The movement stopped. Of course, by this stage I knew I could not be heard so I walked towards where I’d heard them last. At this stage of my time travelling career I knew the score; I knew that I couldn’t be seen or heard. Nonetheless I was racking my brains for some words of Irish as I went. I had just formulate something like “gabh mo leithscéal” when I saw faint light about twenty metres ahead. It was an oil lamp. 

As I got closer I could just make out two men dressed in rough brown shirts and leather trousers working together to dig a hole. Next to where they dug I could see another man lying on the ground. He wasn’t moving.  I walked up to the men and they were, of course, oblivious to me.  I could see that the man on the ground was dead. I could also see that he was wearing a red uniform. A dead British soldier, I assumed. The two grave diggers worked on in silence, occasionally speaking in Irish but mostly concentrating on the job in hand. Next I was back in the cinema with my girlfriend. I don’t remember what the film was. I knew that there was a dead body under the cinema. Who would I tell? The Gardai?  How would I start? “Someone was buried under this cinema about two hundred years ago; I think he was murdered by the Fenians”?  Right, so. Shut up and eat the popcorn.

The more I have gone on the more I have become freighted with partial yet at times, portentous knowledge. Did it matter that this knowledge was about people who didn’t matter, living lives that were limited and cramped? Yes, it did matter because I did not have the historian’s training that would have shown me where to store these snapshots. I didn’t know where to put them and so I took them with me. Mrs Haplin and Father Roche, the giant carnivorous monkey, the entire family sacrificed to Odin, the dead soldier, that fucking busker. The detritus of history. They all haunt me, they remind me with each of my breaths that one day, very soon, those breaths will stop;  I will expire and rot. What gormless time travelling clot will be watching me at that time, just as I watch others in their muddling through the time allotted to them – who’s watching me now?

Then at times I think everyone is like this; we all exist out of time, sensorily isolated from the people we encounter, invisible to them, a blind spot that never goes away.

And what if I just throw myself under a train? Believe me, if this goes on much longer I will start to consider it. Who then will see what has happened? Is it so important that I be sent to see these things? It’s not as if I will ever share what I have seen. It’s not as if I can affect the lives that I see given the voracious effect of time – even on those very much still alive. My death would close a portal to the past that has no meaning. In fact, I think I’m just going to kill myself. There. I’ll do it first thing in the morning. After breakfast – wherever/whenever that is.

2^nd August  2018

I’ve read over yesterday’s diary entry/suicide note. What a miserable swine. Who would want to read such tripe? Well as I said at the outset it will give you some perspective on today’s news:

The day started just like the others have done recently; I awoke cowering, clutching my survival kit to my chest. Opening my eyes I could see that I was still in 2018. Getting dressed without taking off my survival rucksack is a pain but I have learned to do it. I put some clothes on and went to get some breakfast. I had planned to kill myself as soon as I had eaten.

I got as far as filling the kettle when I was visited by the by now tiresome melodrama of light saturation. When the light faded, however, it seemed as if I had not travelled far at all. I was still in my kitchen holding the kettle. Except that the identical kettle was on the counter in front of me. Almost identical. I held ‘my’ kettle up against my ‘other’ kettle and noticed that the ‘other’ one was oddly two dimensional. When I looked at its side it became invisible – not instantly, mind you, but it sort of faded away from sight. I moved my head back to where it had been at first and the face of ‘other’ kettle came back into view.  I soon discovered that the rest of the kitchen and the house was the same – each object was two dimensional. I was in a film-set version of my own house where all of the props were holographic projections rather than cardboard or wooden cut outs. The front door opened. I had gone upstairs so I leant over the bannisters. There I was.  I was walking down the hall towards the kitchen. I ran downstairs, into the kitchen and stood face to face with myself. I noticed that I had fresh burn marks on my legs – the burns that I had got two months ago on the Viking pyre! I was very puzzled to see that I was in some kind of trance. My eyes were closed though I could see them moving spasmodically in REM jerks. My arms and legs were twitching as if I were being electrocuted. My mouth was open and I was producing sub-verbal noise as lines of drool trailed from the corners of my lips. What was this? I moved closer and, I don’t know why I was shocked by this but it seemed that this ‘other’/’two months ago’ me was two dimensional – just like everything else in this house! I circled myself. 

When I came 180 degrees around I reappeared again but the back of my head was flat and glassy. I touched the surface.  It lit up. A screen. I touched it again and, of course, there was a scrollable menu of icons: “Full Sensory Mode” “Motor Disable” “Sight Mode” “No Pain Mode” and some others. I touched an icon “Temporal Mode” and it gave a series of sub options “Time Random” “Place Random” “Time and Place Random” “Full Temporal Control” and so on.  I navigated back to the first menu of icons. My finger hovered over the option “Exit TimeApp”.

Of course I didn’t switch it off. I went back into the programme, selected “Full Temporal Autonomy” “Integrated Temple Dashboard” and “No Pain”.  I tapped “Apply Changes”. Not a moment too soon. I was back in ‘my’ 3-dimensional kitchen again! I checked everything just to make certain. Sure enough, one blink of my right eye and I could see the Temporal Dashboard!  I scrolled through the options with a few more flicks of my eye: “Select Time and Date”; “Select Place by Coordinates”; “Duration Settings”;  “Emergency Shiftback Settings”; “User Manual”; “Historical Narrative Display”; “Historical Safemode” 

(I pointed to that one to get a description: Historical Safemode once selected will prevent you from interfering in history in such a way as to give rise to Temporal Paradoxes;  for example, killing your own grandparents would entail a logical contradiction where the agent of the action  - the temporal operative – would no longer exist due to the action undertaken. It is highly recommended that you select this option unless you are fully cognisant of the implications of your actions in any given historical epoch. Please be aware that the personal and, indeed global consequences of actions undertaken without Historical Safemode selected are potentially catastrophic)

I will switch that one off for sure.  This is going to be a real adventure.

The Sunflowers

The Sunflowers

Thou shalt not steal

Maria was standing at her bedroom window. She looked over her garden to where the Kruks’ sunflowers stood in serried yellow and russet banks. How they swayed! “They’re so beautiful!”, she whispered, as she traced with her fingertips tiny circles against each flower in the distance. 

The flowers had appeared overnight. Surely they hadn’t been there yesterday! Maria certainly did not remember seeing them when she and Magda had walked past the Kruks’ fence on their way to and from volleyball practice.

But Maria had been expecting them. Ever since last year’s crop in the Kruks’ fields had hypnotised and enchanted her she had been looking out, waiting for them to raise their ponderous, melancholy-joyful heads. 

The tightly - wound spring uncoiled inside her. She bolted away from the window, stumbled out of her night clothes and into her tee-shirt, shorts and sandals and ran down the stairs and out onto the street. She would stop at Magda’s house first. Then the expedition.

As she walked along the dusty, compacted mud path that ran alongside the broken asphalt of her street Maria’s mind was racing. She had to do it; she had to get one of those beautiful sunflowers for her teacher of Polish, Miss Cichosz. 

Time and again over the past months – ever since her mother had told her that she couldn’t invite Miss Cichosz to her ninth birthday party – Maria had thought over this plan. Most nights as she lay in bed, or in any available quiet moments, she had pictured in precise detail the scene: standing together in Miss Cichosz’s yard under the towering flower trellises that framed a path up to the red front door (none of the flowers there were sunflowers, Maria knew), her beloved teacher wearing a long, pale blue dress that cooled her bright yellow hair like an ocean under the sun, taking the sunflower from behind her back and handing it to Miss, telling her “this is for you”, watching her starry blue eyes light up with pleasure. 

For Maria, this moment had already happened in her imagination hundreds of times and with each succeeding iteration the meeting had become more vivid than life itself.

The outcome of the meeting had expanded, too. Not only would Miss Cichosz invite her inside her big house for tea but she would certainly come to visit for her tenth birthday party. Who knows: wasn’t there even a chance that Miss could come to stay for a night or a weekend at her house? 

And, once, when Maria was in the garden under the kitchen window, hadn’t she heard own mother saying to her father that Miss Cichosz was in danger? “That one” Maria remembered how her mother had spoken – as if she were angry and laughing at the same time - “she parades around as if she was some kind of tramp – she won’t be happy until she has every man in the village knocking at her door in the middle of the night – then she’ll be in for some trouble, let me tell you!” Maria felt sure that if Miss was in danger there was no way that her own mother could refuse letting her live with them in their house!

Maria arrived at Magda’s house. They were best friends but Maria was not going to tell Magda about the reason for today’s ‘expedition’. Magda had a nice little dog, she was good at volleyball and they had lots of laughs together but she was not great at keeping secrets. Maria knew that not everyone would understand her plan to give a sunflower to Miss Cichosz so it had to remain a secret.

Magda’s mother opened their door and invited Maria inside. Maria didn’t enter. She didn’t want to go inside because Mrs Kozak always seemed to smell of fried onions and Magda’s brother, Pawel had tried to kiss her last week – “Ugh” she thought remembering his ugly little face and his open mouth with its disgusting little reptile tongue approaching her. 

Most of all, though, Maria wanted to get going; if they left it too late there would be more people working in the Kruks’ fields and that was what they had to avoid! 

“Um…Hello, Mrs Kozak”, Maria said, standing on the porch “Can you tell Magda that I’m here? We are in a hurry…we have…ah…something important to do!”. “Ooo” said Mrs Kozak through her oniony mouth, “that sounds very mysterious!” Maria felt the first tremors of panic in her tummy. She could feel her face changing colour, could feel her mouth turning dry. “Oh please” she thought “don’t ask any more questions!” 

Maria was about to betray herself with a stammering lie about going to volleyball that had shamed her before she’d uttered even a single syllable when Mrs Kozak turned around and shouted for Magda to come to the door. Maria’s relief was followed by the sound of footsteps on the stairs inside and the arrival of her friend on the doorstep. 

Seconds later they were making their way down the path, Maria leading the way at pace lest Mrs Onion or lizard tongue Pawel tried to capture them.

As it turned out Maria didn’t have to disguise or for that matter, invent a reason for stealing into the Kruks’ farm to take sunflowers. Magda was immediately in love with the idea: “Yeah!” she’d said in response to Maria’s proposal that they go on an expedition to the sunflower fields, “we can get some flowers and put them in water”. For Magda it was a simple mission to decorate their bedrooms with the bright yellow flowers, and as far as Magda was concerned, that’s all that it was for Maria, too.

The two girls followed the stream behind the Kruks’ farm for a few minutes. Maria wanted to get as far away from the Kruks’ house before they made their approach. “Here” whispered Maria pointing to a gap in the old rough-hewn plank fence, “we can get through here”. They crawled along the dry, grey dirt, through the gap in the fence, scrambled down and up the irrigation ditch, sprinted across the darker, damper soil of the field and dived into the dark green covering of the forest of tall sunflowers.

The girls crouched together in the semi darkness, their eyes slowly adjusting, their ears straining to hear an approaching footstep or vehicle behind the undulating swish of the flowers moving in the gentle breeze. “What will we do now” asked Magda in a whisper. Maria realised that her friend was scared.

She realised that she was scared, too. Both of the girls had heard stories about Old Man Kruk – the “Scarecrow” as people called him (but not to his face) – that he chewed rocks with his enormous teeth and that he kept a dragon in his attic to which he fed cats and even children. Sure enough, hadn’t Mrs Konwicka’s cat gone missing last year? And what about Mr Kaminski’s son, Rafal? Hadn’t he gone missing around the same time?

Of course, Maria had seen Mr Kruk at the dog show in the school last year and out of curiosity had gone up to where he was speaking with their teacher of Mathematics, Mr Jankowski. “Yes, indeed, Mr Jankowski”, Mr Kruk had said in a surprisingly small voice, much like a woman’s “I think we can all say that you are as pure as those dogs here”. Maria had seen Mr Kruk’s mouth moving, she had looked inside, terrified, but she had not seen teeth that looked like they could chew stones.

Despite this, her fear of the Scarecrow was engulfing her as she waited in the sunflower field.

“Maria!” Magda was speaking again, but Maria could not connect the voice to the place where she was right now. She was paralysed. She closed her eyes and waited for the Scarecrow to come. A pin prick of light shone in her mind. This pin prick expanded and as it did she recognised the familiar scene that she had rehearsed and nurtured for so long. She could see Miss Cichosz’s beautiful, smiling face, her warm, loving voice, her smile as Maria held out the sunflower. The sunflower. Its simple cartoonish beauty struck her and she was brought back to the present moment.

“Maria, I can hear dogs” Magda was crying. Sure enough, Maria could hear dogs, too. She had to act “Ok, here, help me pull this up” Maria said as she gripped the cable – like stalk of a sunflower. The girls pulled the sunflower stalk and it came out easily. “Let’s get out of here!” Maria shouted to her friend as she grabbed the sunflower in one hand, Magda’s hand in the other and ran out of the dense mass of stalks into the blinding sunlight.

The girls ran for the ditch and fence. Maria, pulling her crying friend with all her might got to the edge first. She stopped and looked up and down the path and irrigation ditch and saw nothing. Perhaps the dogs had been in her and Magda’s imagination? But then she heard them again. Definitely closer this time. Maria pushed Magda ahead of her down the irrigation ditch. They jumped across the water at the bottom, clambered up the other side, found the gap in the hedge and ran frantically along the stream behind the Kruks’ farm with the sound of the dogs behind them fuelling their panic. Maria had almost arrived at her front gate before she noticed that the sunflower she held in her fist had long since broken to pieces.

Maria didn’t want to cry in front of Magda but she couldn’t help it; she simply started and then couldn’t stop. Magda, however had recovered from her own tears. “My God!” Magda said “what a laugh! I can’t believe we got away from those mutts!” To Maria, Magda sounded like she was asking a question, like she was still too terrified to believe that it had been a laugh; as if she needed Maria to agree with her. Maria could not answer her friend. With tear-heavy eyes she saw Magda home and set off to her own house one hundred metres away.

Maria’s day ended in shame. Opening the back door to her house she saw, with astonishment and utter horror, the Scarecrow sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee with her mother. The two adults looked at her as she stood frozen in the doorway. Mr Kruk spoke first in his light voice, far too small for his bulk. “Ah there she is” he oozed with disgusting over familiarity “I saw you earlier, young girl, I saw you”. Maria could neither speak nor move; she was skewered in place by the farmer’s eyes. “Ho ho ho yes” he went on, all the time looking at her with a smile on his face that made Maria feel like she needed to go to the toilet and vomit at the same time, “I saw you, yes indeed, I saw you, and my dogs, oh they were hungry, let me tell you! But my dear, I have something for you!” Maria looked at what was in his hand. A bunch of sunflowers. He stood up with a waddle (the man was quite fat) and held out the flowers - how they swayed! – to her.

“Well, Maria” Maria’s mother spoke as the Scarecrow held the bunch of flowers out to her “aren’t you going to apologise to Mr Kruk for trying to steal his flowers? And he has been so nice as to bring you some!” Maria could hear these words but they had no sense. All that filled her ears was the torrent of blood that raged through her head. She could see the flowers that the neighbour was holding out towards her and in a reflex she raised her hand to take them. 

...Her hand, the stalks, his face, her heartbeat – the burning shame of being a thief – her heart and the sound of the blood rushing through the veins of her head as her hand held the stalks of the flowers that she had taken from the Scarecrow, as her body trembled with the shame of being caught stealing the broken flower that she had taken from the field...

For an instant Maria had a flash of the idyll that she had imagined on Miss Cichosz’s doorstep but she refused it – how could she pollute that vision with this filthy ending to the day’s expedition? No. She could not. Maria took the flowers and went to her room.

The next day in school Maria could not look at or speak to Miss Cichosz. And so it continued in the days, weeks and months that followed. As time passed Maria thought less and less of the day in the Kruks’ field and the scene in her kitchen. Maria still enjoyed her classes with Miss Cichosz -who else could read Pan Tadeusz so wonderfully? Who else played Chopin’s Nocturnes in her classroom as the students read? Who else – and this was knowledge that Maria gained as she grew up to be a teenager and young woman – could dismiss the moral conventions of the small town in which they lived, moral conventions that Maria realised her mother had been referring to on that day she’d spoken about a queue of men outside the teacher’s house at night, with such elegance, such grace, such pride?

Some lessons are learned explicitly. Those most fundamental to any individual’s character are learned between the lines. There is irony, therefore, in the observation that the best teachers are those who appear not to teach, those whose lessons find their targets in the darkness of a field of sunflowers.

So, years passed and Maria went to study at the University of Warsaw. As a child of a farming community it was natural enough that she should enrol as a student of veterinary medicine. Towards the end of her training she went to work on a placement in her own village. The work was repetitive – of course, how else could she become proficient in dealing with bovine parturition, equine parasitology, large and small animal diagnostics, to say nothing of the personality skills needed to cope with hysterical cat owners and brutish farmers.

One day in early summer - when the sunflowers are first in bloom – Maria answered the phone at the practice: “Hello, this is the Moc Veterinary Practice” she said. The voice that answered was viscerally disgusting, instantly recognisable: “ Ah hello there, young girl.” It was him. “I’ve been having a problem with my dogs! You see, like any bitches they just keep looking for it! They place is overrun with their little bastards. I need to get them fixed!”. Maria took the name and address, though she knew well who and where he was, and arranged to have his three female and three male dogs neutered at the clinic two days later.

The dogs arrived on time, though Maria, wanting to be certain that he would not see or recognise her arranged to be out of the clinic. Later in the day, she arrived back. They were good dogs: Blackfoot, Tracker, Hunter, River, Racer and Gnasher; Maria spoke to them lovingly, reassuringly: “Good dogs, don’t you worry, I’ll make sure everything is ok!”.

So, days passed and Jacek Kruk could not contact the veterinary surgery. He needed his dogs and so the time had come to take action. He got into his car and set out for the Moc Veterinary surgery. As he drove along the road that ran parallel to his fields he looked with contentment at his rows of sunflowers – how they swayed! – and then his eyes fell - as was their wont – on the pretty girls that were out on this beautiful summer’s day. “Oh yes” he slimed “I can see you! I can see you!”

Farmer Kruk arrived at the veterinary surgery. He parked his Syrena (a warning!) in front of the building, switched off the engine and got out. The first thing that struck him was the emptiness; there were no cars at all in the parking lot. “Surely they’re not on holiday” he thought. He walked over to the door. Sure enough, his first and worst fears compounded, there was a notice on the door that announced that the practice was closed for summer holidays. “That fucking cunt” he hissed to himself, “just like all of them, can’t rely on a word they say. Why didn’t she tell me they were going on holidays? I gave them my dogs two weeks ago”.

Kruk was irate. He wanted to get his dogs. “They have to be here” he thought. He moved away from the notice on the door and went to a fence at the side of the main frontage. There was no way he could scale its 2 metre height. When he touched the fence, however, it gave easily.

He went into the yard behind the practice. He could hear whimpering. He could smell dog shit and something even more vile; decay. When he got to the cages where his six dogs had been imprisoned with plentiful water but absolutely no food he vomited. 

So emaciated were his dogs that he recognised them only by the names that were pinned to their cage: Blackfoot, Tracker, Hunter, River, Racer and Gnasher. Kruk walked to the cage, furious and appalled. “This is why you can’t give a woman a job – they’re just so unbalanced!” These were the last words he uttered.

He opened the cage and his dogs, driven insane by the hunger, wasted no time in falling as a single, six-mouthed beast on their erstwhile master, devouring him, ripping him limb from limb, burrowing into the fat hollows of his enormous bulk and savaging his liver, his intestines, his heart, his lungs, his genitals, the bones beneath the fat, his brains.

Not too far away the sunflowers in the Kruks’ fields stood aloof, following the sun and swishing, swaying  - how they swayed! - in the wind.

Galaxy Quest

Galaxy Quest

Honour your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you.

Jay had been playing Galaxy Quest for so long that it had become his only reality. Well, of course he got up from his games console every now and then; to answer the call of nature, to eat or sleep, even occasionally to look out the window of his bedroom at the rain, or sun, or whatever meteorological irrelevance was passing. 


But all of that paled before his eyes in comparison with Galaxy Quest. For, in the world of Galaxy Quest, Jay was no longer Jay. He was Lance Cosmotron, an interstellar knight of the Zargon Trading Collective’s elite fighter wing, worshipped by every lusty maiden in the Quadrant, envied by his fellow jocks and feared by the slime sucking vermin of the Arachno-Pirate horde. Envied and feared with good reason; his kill tally was enormous. Lance Cosmotron was a ruthless assassin with an unfailing eye for inflicting maximum damage with the pulse cannons of his trademark deep crimson Tigershark Interceptor.

It was an uneventful sortie. Lance was leading an escort detachment guarding a convoy of 15 Heavy Freighters across an area of space notorious for Arachno-Pirate activity. Inside the bubble canopy of his Tigershark, he checked his instruments. The Scanfield display was clear. All other readings – fuel, ammunition, comms  -  were normal. Lance was alert, though. He scanned the star system visually. Arachno Pirates were notorious for switching off (Contrary to a whole series of Zargon-Arachno treaties) their transponders. And then there was this latest generation of stealth ships. A pair of eyes – a pair of sharp human eyes was the most important instrument in this job. Relying on technology alone could mean death very quickly indeed!

The stakes were high. Lance didn’t ask what the freight in the convoy was. His was a soldier’s job, and that was a job that required total concentration, total commitment, and absolute professionalism. So the question of what he was protecting was irrelevant next to the imperative that he lead, that he execute his mission, that he see this sortie through to the end. He was not an insensitive man, of course. He was fully aware of how the Zargon Outposts badly needed the supplies carried by this convoy if they were to hold out against the onslaughts of the Arachno-Pirate scum. But his faith was such that he left philosophical questions – such as those he’d heard whispered about the possibility that they were transporting Arachno Whore Slaves and even, biological weaponry to the Zargon outposts – to others with lives sufficiently trivial to allow them the time to ask them. He kept his mind on the job at hand.

Still nothing.  Scanfield was clear. Not a blip. All other readings were nominal. He looked to the starboard quadrant and saw two silver Tigersharks cruising in formation; he looked to port and saw two more; with his own deep red vessel at the point of the ‘V’ he was satisfied that he was leading an effective deterrent to any possible Arachno-Pirate assault on the convoy.  

His satisfaction was fleeting, though. Lance Cosmotron was not a man to allow satisfaction any rein at all. A man who rested on his laurels was a man who let his guard down. A man who let his guard down was no man at all. There was no way that was going to happen so he remained in a state of razor sharp alert.

Lance’s heightened awareness was sent screaming. A woman’s voice came over the comms: “Jay, are you still up there?”. Lance keyed in the transponder code for full detachment alert. The voice again: “Jay, what are bleedin up to?” What was this? Lance had made it clear that total comms silence was a tactical must for this mission. There had to be no deviation from this. What was happening now was a potentially catastrophic breach of protocol – whoever was using the comms was putting the whole mission, the convoy, even the survival of the Zargon Outposts as risk! He looked right and left and saw that the four other Tigersharks had assumed full combat spread. Squadron transponder read Weapons Orange for all five, shields were projected in a standard Alpha Web configuration and while each of his pilots – Harry Glowman, Gerko Wall-Ace, Frances Hucknall (the only woman in the detachment) and the android, Den1 MH0N – had acknowledged the full alert, none of them showed green for comms. So who had broken comms silence?

Lance did a lightning fast inventory. Was it Glowman? Harry had a reputation for comms diarrhoea but that was usually well within Zargon space. He would never put the mission at risk. Never. If nothing else it would have jeopardised the one thing that Glowman cared about – cubits. It was all money for Glowman; what he lacked in killer instinct he made up for in greed. He would never have been the one to mouth off. Surely?

Perhaps it was Wall-Ace? Gerko was, well…a fanatic. He went on these missions with one goal in mind: to kill as many Arachno-Pirates as possible. Wall-Ace’s pure hatred of the oily, dark-scaled Arachnos was an unvarying, white hot source of murderous violence that Lance rarely unleashed. Only under situations of near-desperation did Lance call on Gerko to blaze into a dogfight. It was a reassurance to know that his wanton thuggery was there to be unleashed in a crisis but Lance knew that there would always be collateral damage in that case. Had his trained pitbull grown resentful of the leash and decided to pick a fight? But wasn’t it a woman’s voice that he’d heard?!!!

That narrowed it down, didn’t it? Frances Hucknall or Den1 MH0N. Hucknall was a woman but Den1’s android software was capable of articulating at feminine frequencies just as well. Which of the two? 

Frances or Franny, had beaten the odds to become a Tigershark jock even though she was a woman. So few women managed to get through the rigours of basic training. But Franny was almost robotic in her determination and capacity for hard work. Sure, there were the whispers: that she had swallowed a lot more than Professor Dempsey’s lectures on flight theory at the academy, that she had serviced half the mathematics faculty in her wife’s (Franny was officially a lesbian) massage pod on Athyus 9. Could she be trusted? Deep down, Lance would never have doubted it before now: If nothing else, Franny was not a risk taker. It would go against everything that made her who she was. Besides, she didn’t have the imagination to see how the squadron, let alone the convoy could survive the mass assault of of Arachno Pirates that breaking comms silence in this sector would most likely cause.

So that left Den1 MH0N. The plastic bastard. Deep down Lance had always felt funny about going into combat with these fucking glorified laptops. Let them vacuum the floor, make the dinner or, at most, peddle their cyber-arses on the streets or in the Phoenix android whorehouse. Anything more was a step too far. Give these machines responsibilities such as taking the stick in a Tigershark and next thing you know, they’ll have betrayed us all. Then again, these things only did as they were programmed to do. Den1, indeed had been mapped with Lance’s own cognitive signature – he was capable of performing only within the limits set by the aggregate of Lance’s past experiences up to the moment of the most recent cognitive signature transfer two lunar cycles ago. In short, Den1 was a clone. There was no way that he would have broken comms silence because it was something that Lance himself would never have dreamed of doing.

Lance fingered his plasma rocket trigger. Maybe I should just blast all of them out of the stars straightaway? Maybe it doesn’t matter which of them did it; I’ll kill them all to make an example. If the Arachnos descend on us I’d fancy my chances on my own almost as much as I would with these guys with me.

This whole inventory took a fraction of a second in real time. Lance thought quickly because he knew that out here there was only the quick and the dead.

The voice came again. “Jay, will yeh come down yeh dope!” Lance scanned all systems. All clear. He looked to port and starboard.  Standard formation. His mind was racing. He knew that he had to act. He had given this enough thought. He went Weapons Red, locked on to each of his four wingmen and opened up with a full, devastating salvo from his plasma cannons. In an instant each one of them had been vaporised. At a certain point, he realised, a true leader has to cut his losses and walk away. Who knows – who cares­ – who the traitor was. Such indiscipline was a cancer that had to be cut out. The safety of the mission was paramount. He knew that the convoy was better protected now. One good man was better than a whole squadron infested by a fifth column.

But horror of horror, the comms erupted again: “Jay, if I have to come up there I’m going to fucking bate yeh”. Lance was stunned. Could it be? Could it be that the traitor was among the convoy? A wolf in the fold? It could only be. As before, Lance took action. His reflexes took over but his mind was clear. One by one he vaporised the reactors on each of the freighters. Shards of hull casing, twisted girders, clouds of fuel vapour and mushrooms of flame filled all that he could see. There were bodies and body parts, too! Instantly frozen faces on decapitated heads, plumes of frozen red mist, jagged entrails of guts and organs, sad hocks of meat with protruding bone all spun out into space. Lance had no remorse. The convoy had obviously been compromised but Lance had saved the outposts from the fate that was to be visited upon them by this Trojan Arachno-horse.

“What are you fucking doing you dope?” No! Lance heard the voice over the comms again but this time he felt a ghostly hand on his shoulder. His spine chilled. The last thing he felt before he lost consciousness was an intense downward g-force. Somewhere in a corner of his brain he realised that his Tigershark’s ejector system had been activated.

Lance opened his eyes. A dirty ceiling. He closed his eyes. He could hear music. It was slowly coming back to him: the escort mission, the voice on the comms, the suspicion, the killing, the voice again, the hand on his shoulder, the ejection….he opened his eyes and in an instant he was on his feet. He was looking at a thin, vaguely familiar-looking woman with a puffy hairdo and bad skin. Lance was on his guard. He backed away from her. The Arachnos were perfectly capable of body snatching, of assuming human appearance. 

She, or, rather, it, spoke:  “Jay, you’re going to have to stop playing that bleeding game; all that you ever do is sit up in that room.” Lance froze. It was the same voice he’d heard over the comms. He was face to face with an Arachno imposter. He put his hand to his belt to find his Cobalt pistol. Nothing there. Of course; they would not have left him with his weapon. He looked around. There in the corner. A plasma staff. He had to get it. The Arachno-Thing was speaking again: “What are you doing, Jay, Jesus, there’s a bleedin mad look in your eyes  - are you on drugs or something?” 

Lance was not listening. With the plasma staff in his hand he advanced on the Aracho-bitch. He pressed the handle. Just his luck. Out of plasma. But he had committed himself to attack and all that remained to him was to use the weapon as a club. He raised it over his head and swung with all his might. The staff struck the alien square across the back of its head and it fell to the ground in a heap. 

Standing over the prostrate body of the Arachno-imposter Lance swung the staff again and again, making devastating contact with its rapidly imploding cranium. At last the voice stopped.

Lance’s face was wet and hot. His vision was tinted red. He could feel pieces of the Arachno-Corpse’s innards all over his face. He straightened himself up to his full height, opened his throat ad roared: “Behold the filthy corpse of the Arachno-Demon!!!!!!!AAAAAGGHHHHH!!!!!”

Somewhere in the distance, over his shoulder perhaps, Lance heard another voice: “Jay? Jay? What in the name a Jaysis is going on here?” Another one. Still holding the inert but serviceable Plasma - Staff, Lance turned around to see a vaguely familiar looking old man. The Arachno-Body Thieves had been busy, he could see. 

The Arachno-man seemed to be crying. What duplicity! How dare it assume the emotions of a human being! As if it could ever be anything more than a filthy lizard!  The beast was still feigning humanity: “What have you done, son?….No! Nooo!” Lance was outraged. What a pathetic form of life this was. One of its kind lay dead on the ground and all it could do was whinge and whine! 

“Defend yourself!!!”, Lance bellowed into the creature’s face. “have you no pride, no respect?” “Wha, son, what are you talking about!” it blubbered. “Enough, you filthy wretch,” Lance commanded “Defend yourself or submit to your Arachno – fate, you piece of cosmic shit!” 

Lance thrust the shaft of the Plasma - Staff javelin-like straight through the thing’s windpipe, out the back of its neck and deep into the wall behind it, impaling his victim right up off the floor. Its fat legs were dangling and twitching  as a spout of pink arterial blood gushed from the wound all over Lance and its eyes slowly glazed over and its mouth curled into a hideous rictus. Slowly the Arachno-father’s body stopped twitching and it silently, finally went limp.

Lance knew that it could be some time before the Zargonian fleet picked up his distress signal. He knew there was no time to waste. Where there were two Arachno-parents there would be more. Light was slowly fading as Lance boarded up the windows of the house, and prepared for the long wait. He would wait and he would prevail. His training had prepared him for every eventuality. Even this. 

As night fell in that sticky, flyblown sepulchre, Jay crouched down and waited frantically. He stared into nothing, his empty, empty eyes were black pits. A heavy, wrought iron spike lay across his gore spattered lap. His hideous, sneering mouth shaped the words "Mama, Papa, Mama, Papa...." over and over and over again.