The Dark
There was no light.
That was precious knowledge. The realisation of which had cost her more than she would have thought possible, if she had but known.
Everything needs a context. And for the darkness to mean anything there had to have been a memory of light. The memory was fading fast.
It would happen, and then, more often than not, happen again. Sometimes there was more than just the tentative awareness that, in it self, did not always register.
She couldn’t remember.
It would come back to her, things usually did. She always remembered didn’t she? But she couldn’t remember.
Time was something she had an eternity of, milliseconds were like millennium here.
Here?
Wherever here was? Time’s last foundation had fled, leaving her where?
She remembered. What was it? She had it a moment ago. But what was a moment? Something about light, whatever that was?
She could have wept but there was nothing to cry with; nothing, period. There was no sensation, or physical awareness. Nothing but the perpetual dark.
Horrors crawled just beneath the thin veneer of consciousness.
The Impossible Girl
The lean and lanky Ryan Connor jumped out the back of the 4-ton truck and landed in the wet mud with a soft thud. It sucked at his wellies as he moved off toward a large pit, and the reason they were all there. He turned just in time to see his Corporal, Jack Blase, a man in his late 20s, man-handle himself out of the truck like a 60 year-old. Working bomb disposal did that to a person.
“Come on, Old Man, you’ll be late for the party.” Jack flashed him a look that said, ‘don’t mess with me.’ Ryan cocked his head to one side, fixed his Service-issue woollen hat further back on his head at a jaunty angle, and grinned. He waited for Jack, William ‘The Bagman’ Herschel and their lieutenant, Sandy ‘Shingle’ House, to catch up with him. He turned back toward the gapping maw of the pit. Workers had been hand digging the area up until yesterday when, as it happened all to often in this area of Hanover, a perfectly preserved and unexploded 1000 pounder had been unearth.
It was one of theirs, that much was for sure. Someone had taken the time to write on the pointy end, ‘a gift from Ol’ Blighty’.
Connor pulled out a pack of smokes from an open top pocket and made to light one.
“Not here, you bloody idiot.” Connor turned just as Herschel dumped two bags and a couple of shovels at his feet. Connor shrugged and slid the smoke back into the crumpled packet and re-pocketed it.
“You really are dumber than a spud,” the man continued bending to retrieve something from one of the bags. Connor made a sour face at the man’s back and walked off toward the lip of the pit, scrambling over loose earth, cracked brick and rubble. It was ten years plus since the war had ended but still, people were unearthing unexploded ordinance. It was their job, as part of the British Royal Air Force’s bomb-disposal task force, to clean up the mess. Connor wondered why there were no German teams scouring London doing the same thing for them, and shook his head. He would, of course, ask Jack.
Obituary
BILLY RAY MELNIK (aged 13) of Pensacola, Florida, died today, March 6th, when his DNA registered his final act of stupidity and terminated his existence under the Statute of Evolution regulations, section 7(a) para 1(b). Which states that, no entity can forthwith continue its existence if deemed to be in violation of watering down the Gene-Pool.
Termination occurred on the corner of 12th and Main, as, spray-cans in hand, Melnik engaged in the vandalous act of graffiti
A bio-hazard clean-up crew for the city managed to collect enough of the gelatinous remains to fill a funerary pot. An interment service will be held Monday at the Pensacola City cemetery.