Tall Stories
The Other
Sorry I've not been around much recently - busy busy busy (and maybe just a little bit lazy). Anyway, to keep you entertained, here is a story I wrote to order for a writer's group I've joined recently. Sleep well, my pretties...
He told me that it's over between us. He says he can't cope with the lies any more and he is choosing her. I smiled and told him I understood. Not for me the histrionics of other women. There are better ways to deal with a situation like this.
It's all about research and knowing your enemy. I enjoy this part of it. I know quite a lot already: who her friends are, where she goes on a Thursday afternoon, what her favourite drink is. The challenging bit is working out how to get close enough to her to use this information. It's a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Finding some common ground. If you find the right 'in' then it's easy. In this case, it was as simple as joining her gym and going to the same swim class as she does. I'm the only other woman there under the age of 65, so it was natural that I should strike up a conversation with her. She thought nothing of it - why would she? It was a short step from there to going for a quick coffee and before long she was confiding all her secrets to me.
There are ways and means of getting rid of somebody. There's a certain excitement in the up-close-and-personal nature of a bullet to the brain, but it's far from subtle. Poison is infinitely more attractive. The classical connotations of it appeal to me. Finding a hemlock plant in her garden was a stroke of luck. She had no idea what it was. I harvested the roots carefully and waited for my moment.
In the event, it was easy enough to administer; she is both hypochondriac and untrusting of conventional medicine. All I had to do was tell her the drink I was offering her was a restorative herbal tisane and she gulped it down like an obedient child. Watching the process was fascinating. The one worry that I had was that she would vomit the poison back up before it had been absorbed. I therefore mixed an anti-emetic into the solution and so the first sign of the poison working was the convulsions, which were spectacular. Who would have thought the woman had so much energy in her?
The wonderful thing about hemlock poisoning is that the brain remains functioning throughout. This is one of the reasons given for its popularity as an execution method in Ancient Greece. The victim had plenty of opportunity to think on, and potentially repent, their sins as they died. After the initial stimulation, the poison begins to work its way through the system, slowly paralysing as it goes, before eventually the respiratory system fails and the subject dies of suffocation. It took a few hours; hours in which I let her know exactly what was happening to her, and why. She had no idea of what she had done. The stupid fool had believed him when he said he was divorced. I laughed in her face when she told me that. She's not the first to fall for his lies.
Once she was safely dead I forged the suicide note. Years of practice have made me very good at this bit of the process. Simple and to the point, I was pleased with the final result. Now that she is out of the way he will come back to me.
He always does.
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Angel
An exercise in brevity, inspired by Dan Rhodes' Anthropology and a story about Jason Orange in last night's Metro. He’d known it as soon as he saw her. Long, dark hair, piercing green eyes, and a heartbreaking smile, along with one of the dirtiest laughs he’d ever heard. She was his perfect woman.
Now she was pressed close to him, and every other man there was casting jealous glances and muttering, “How the hell did he manage that?” “Lucky bastard.” He smiled the smug smile of a man who knows his guardian angel is working hard and turned to whisper to the beautiful girl laughing next to him.
The tube doors opened and she was gone. He’d missed his chance.
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People-watching
She is adenoidal, snuffling like a pug, lumpen with grey skin and violet shadows beneath her eyes. She struggles with technology, unable to work her pretty pink camera, swearing softly under her breath as she fails to get to grips with the unfamiliar buttons. * * * * * Swaggering stiff-legged, overtly pursed lips drawing hard on her menthol superking, she is a middle-aged maneater in mediocre sweat-pants. * * * * * The schoolgirls sit at the back of the bus, singing in harmony, casting contemptuously hopeful glances at the man in the expensive jeans and trendy haircut, who could just be the record-exec that will give them their big break, spiriting them out of Willesden and into the West End.
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Stormclouds and secrets
A mini-story for you today, at the instigation of Cigs . Go read his stories too - they're much better than mine.
We mostly talked about the weather. All other subjects seemed off-limits, somehow. Strange, when we’d been so intimate. I guess that’s what a broken heart does to you. So much to say but no way of saying it. So we sat and discussed the grey stormclouds gathering above us, like perfect strangers. I zoned out after a few minutes, watching his mouth move; that mouth that had once whispered sweet nothings to me. And suddenly I realised that he wasn’t talking about the weather at all.
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