Dark Times: Three micro-fiction short stories

The Gap

She left him after dinner. Not straight after, but soon after. Niceties befitting two people who were sleeping together had been exchanged but she was not willing to stay for the night.

He acted casual, said his goodbyes, kissed her forehead, and then watched from the crumbling archway of his house as she drove away into the cold, dark night. He raised a hand in farewell and felt dread sink into the pit of his stomach, like a rock thrown into deep water sending up bubbles of drowning air as it descended down, down, down.

He was so down.

The whiskey bottle was in his hand before he could think that he was three weeks sober, that he was working the next day, that the alcohol and Prozac in his system would fight one another until he was sick.

"Fuck it," he said, gulping down that burning liquid, the alcohol a hot cleansing exorcism running like milk through the Promised Land. Except this was no promised land for him. He flopped onto the bed after a couple more chugs.

"Good night, chief?" his housemate, fresh from working at the local, covered in the smell of chip fat, has popped his head round the door.

His lips crease as though the words have stung him, "It was alright, nothing to write home about."

The housemate nods back at him, "We're heading out if you want a-"

But he need only shake the whiskey bottle in response.

"I'll see you in the morning then," the housemate bustles out the door.

The conversation, although brief and menial, has plugged the gap for a time, the gap between his hell and his reality. The two merge in time and he descends quite literally into the fires.

Nothing can plug the gap forever. Not drink, not a conversation, not the Prozac he takes twice a day. Not even the comfort of the warm, soft woman, her elegant lips, her velvet auburn ringlets cascading like a waterfall of fire down her back.

He would always feel like this. He would always feel down. Down, down, down like the weight of that rock nestled in the pit of his gut.

He would always be hopeless.

He finishes the bottle, climbs into bed, and waits for the whiskey to knock him out cold. He feels the embrace of that warm, comforting liquor, the numbness of it, smothering him with sleep when a noise breaks his descent into unconsciousness. It’s the doorbell.

She's come back. She's staying after all.

She’ll plug the gap for a while.

Brave Little Boy

Brave little boy, my brave boy, that’s what she’d said time and again, what his mother had always said.

He pressed the cold metal against his arm, felt the nip of it tugging at his skin, and pulled. He gasped as the blood-filled the rip in his flesh, as the crimson trickled down his arm.

Brave, he’d always been brave. He had always volunteered first to read out loud in primary school. He’d always put himself forward for the lead roles at his youth theatre group. He’d always been the only one to challenge his tight-lipped university professors over the Empire of England thesis or their beliefs on the Ottoman Empire as the ‘sick man of Europe’.

He was brave. His mum had said so.

He pressed the knife to his arm and pulled. Each cut was a cleansing tear. A visceral, almost cathartic release like the blood had to be drained away, like the hopelessness and the anger and the blinding, crushing shame had to be leaked out.

“Brave,” he gasped, his mouth dry, his breathing coming heavy and ragged between the throbs of pain like the ebb and flow of the tide. “Brave, you’re a brave boy.”

But he was a man now. A man with his shirt rolled up so he could rake his arm to ribbons and feel the tension eased like a popped balloon, feel the hurt inside replaced with a hurt on the outside. And that made him a coward.

He pulled again.

A brave man would take the only way out he could.

He pulled, harder this time, gasped as the blood splattered. It hurt, it stung. He couldn’t do it properly because that would hurt too much. He squeezed at the wounds, felt the blood beneath his fingers. He wasn’t brave, he couldn’t even do this right, couldn’t even hurt himself enough.

“Just do it,” he whispered, pressing his forehead into the bathroom mirror, the cold harsh metal fogging up beneath his skin. “Just end it, be a brave man, do it.”

Brave, always my brave boy.

But he couldn’t.

He would add this to a long and growing list of his failures, another tally on the wall chart of his disappointments. The hurt outside always faded, the scars remained, unable to touch the hurt that clawed and scratched and gouged at the man within. The man who was not brave enough to end the pain.

He still heard his mother’s voice, the soft, floating tones, the caring, soothing words. Brave, my brave boy.

In Difring

The pain came and went. It permeated and seeped into the fabric of my skin like a stain. Bubbling and spreading like an expanding puddle that consumes and drowns any who dare peruse its depths.

I needed to find him. I almost wanted to find him. I wanted to be with him. He was to be my end and my glorious beginning. A rebirth, a new page, a fresh canvas. A life bleached white, without the marks, without the lines, without the scratches and the scars and the mistakes.

His embrace would be divine.

Down through dark halls is where he lives, that’s what they told me. They say a lot in the darkness of those halls, whispering untruths and singing sad songs.

I visited that forsaken place long ago. I silently crept down the sloping path to my own end, scared of the jagged blackness around me. I was eager to find him, apprehensive at our impending meeting, mystified by the tales that shrouded his visage.

Could he truly be what I had sought for so long? Could he truly envelop me in his crooked arms? Take me into the folds of his cloying breath?

These thoughts led me blindly through the endless tunnel of night; until I came to the door. It had no lock nor handle and was lit only by a dim candle casting its sad yellow glow.

I knocked.

It opened and I stepped into the room.

There were no candles here, only the dying embers of a fire, orange amongst white coals, illuminating the face of an old man.

It was him. I knew that, not by his appearance but by his feel. His aura stunk of the end, spoke of the collapse, it was fetid with the corpses of those who had taken their early exit.

His eyes shone dark and placid like the still water of a lake and his rough face haunted me with bared white teeth in that hallowed place.

"What do you want?" he asked.

"To stop the darkness, to stop feeling this way," I answered back.

He pursed his age-old lips at that. Huffing and fussing until he could no longer find distractions in not answering my plea.

"It's not your time yet," he said. "It is not your time, the light lives whence you came from, it is still there. You have only to find it."