I realised that I'd not written a story for a while, so here's some flash that I knocked up in my lunch-hour.
The Good Old Days
We’d only been in the house for
three days when my son stopped eating breakfast.
“Eat up,” I’d say, “it’s
marmalade, your favourite.”
He’d yawn and look at me with bleary
eyes. “I’m too tired to eat.”
My wife said that it was the new
house, the change of surroundings, the quiet country air after the bustle of
the city – That he’d be fine after he’d settled. I wasn’t so sure.
He shook his head when I asked
his why he couldn’t sleep, he seemed almost embarrassed. I wondered if puberty had hit him early and
he was ‘keeping himself awake’ into the small hours.
Over the next weeks things got worse, we had a
call from his teacher to say that he’d been behaving oddly. I immediately assumed that she was going to
tell me that he’d been falling asleep – but it seemed that he was using words
that you wouldn’t expect such a young child to know and that he had developed
some strong opinions on subjects that he probably shouldn’t have encountered. I
asked her for examples, she talked uncomfortably about things like population
control.
I mulled it over for the whole
afternoon until he got home and demanded a ‘sammidge’ from his mother.
Once he’d been fed, I called him
over and got him to sit down on the sofa next to me. “I had a call from your
teacher today.”
He stopped eating and looked up
at me.
“She said that you’re very
clever, you have some very adult ideas.”
“Uh-huh,” he said, looking past
me for the TV remote.
“She wonders where you get them
from.” I tried to sound as matter of fact as I could, not wanting him to think
he was doing anything wrong.
“You know, from the guys.” He
looked at me out of the corner of his eyes.
“At school?”
“No… in my room. They wake me up
talking to each other every night – But sometimes they ask what I think. I don’t always understand what they mean.
They say the world used to be different, fewer people. They call it the good old days.”
“Are they outside your window?”
“They sit on my rug.”
“Are you scared?”
“I can’t really see them clearly,
they’re kinda fuzzy.”
My mother had been ‘sensitive’, she
could see things that other people couldn’t. I wondered if her gift had skipped
a generation. “Maybe you should ask them to leave you alone?”
He shrugged and started watching
cartoons.
I awoke with a start, according
to the clock on my bedside table it was 03:47.
My wife’s gentle snores were the only sound, until the bedroom door slowly
opened. My son’s pale face stared at me
from the darkened landing and he slowly entered the room; his eyes never
leaving mine. He crept along the side of
the bed, quietly so as not to wake his mother, and leaned down to whisper in my
ear.
“Why did he tell us to go away?”