The Briefcase

The mariachi band had left a briefcase in his bar. They had slept on the stage after the gig and left early in the morning, packing everything away except the briefcase. He put it behind the bar and got on with things, thinking they’d come back for it or call. It troubled him. It was a pretty ordinary suitcase. And very light - almost as if it didn’t have anything inside it. He tried the catches on it, but it was locked shut.

As the day went on and turned into evening, he realised he kept touching the briefcase absentmindedly as he served customers. He nudged it with his knees, stroked a hand across it when he bent down to pick up glasses. When he finally locked up the bar shortly before dawn, he decided to take the briefcase home with him. It didn’t want to be left alone, he felt. When he was home, he placed the briefcase in the middle of the bedroom floor, so that he could see it from his bed, which he climbed into and fell fast asleep. When he woke up he discovered he was holding the case in a tight embrace against his chest.

This was odd, he thought. Not too healthy. He decided to track the mariachi band down and return it, rather than wait for them to come back for it. He tried calling the number he had booked them through, but the line was dead. He got in his car and travelled to the small town they had said they would be playing next. He went to all of the bars in the town and asked if the mariachi band had played there. Eventually he found the one that they had played at. The owner told him where they had been going next. He got back in his car and travelled to the next town they had been going to. Again, he did the rounds around the bars until he got the information he needed.

He ended up driving up and down the country, trying to catch up with the mariachi band, but never quite managing it. He slept on the back seat of his car, clutching the briefcase for fear of losing it. He carried on looking for the mariachi band, but found himself taking it slowly, not really wanting to find them so much anymore. His thoughts became less coherent. His beard grew long and his armpits grew smelly. Eventually, as he drove across the desert, his car ran out of petrol. There was nothing for miles around. He would never get anywhere on foot.

He took the briefcase and sat down on the ground a short way from the car. He decided to see what was actually in the briefcase, if anything. He took a rock from the ground and spent a while trying to break open the catches. After a while he gave up and decided to rest. He woke up a few hours later, very red faced and burnt. He would have cursed his stupidity, but his mind was still too drawn to the briefcase. He tried the catches again. To his surprise, they opened without fuss, as if they had never been locked.

He opened the briefcase wide. Neatly lined up inside were stacks of waffles covered in Nutella, melting in the heat. One by one he picked out the waffles and slowly ate them, not pausing until every last one had gone. He sat there in the sun, face smeared with chocolate, smiling a very large smile.

I Rubbed the Surface of the Pebble in My Pocket

As I stood surveying the calm sea, thinking how nice it was not being able to see any signs of civilisation, I noticed something rising in the water. It was a black dot around fifty metres away. My first thought was that it might be a seal, but as it moved towards land I could see that it looked more like a bowler hat. Rather than float as you would expect, bobbing on the waves, it moved steadily in a purposeful straight line. Where the water started to become more shallow, the bowler hat rose and revealed a head underneath it. A smartly dressed business man gradually emerged from the water. He was very dignified, despite his sopping wet clothes and the water leaking out of his briefcase. As he passed me he lifted his hat slightly and bid me good day. I turned to watch as he disappeared amongst the sand dunes.

Another Letter to the Broken Pavement

He sat down in the soggy pile of leaves and pulled them round him. He hadn't meant to. He had been on his way to the shops and had seen the leaves piled next to the park railings. There was a memory somewhere telling him to do so, but he couldn't remember what. He didn't care. The feel of the wet leaves on his cheeks was delightful.

Some Kind of Spirit

Some kind of spirit rose from the river and spoke to him. He didn’t understand it. They were both frustrated. The spirit was reluctant to go without having successfully conveyed its message, but it eventually had to give in. He felt bad, as if he had failed the spirit. He wondered what it had been trying to say. He knew it wasn’t his fault that he couldn’t understand, but that didn’t stop a cloudy feeling of guilt lurking behind him for the rest of his walk.

The weather kept changing abruptly. This didn’t help. It had been sunny in the morning, now cloudy. The sun kept coming and going as it pleased. If he went home it would come out, he was sure.

Later, he was still walking despite the sun having decided it really wasn’t in the mood for being out any more. He had got lost in a thought which had meandered into another and it had been a long time since he’d paid much attention to where he was and what he was doing. He was walking by the road now. His attention was hooked and dragged back into reality by a passing scooter. Another two passed soon after. Must be friends, he thought. A few more passed. Then more. Must be some sort of scooter society.

There weren’t any more for a couple of minutes, just cars, a few vans, a couple of buses. Then there was a another scooter. And another. A long unbroken line of scooters passed by. He wondered whether it would end. It didn’t seem like it. He got lost in another side-thought and when something wrestled his attention back to his surroundings, he discovered there were no more scooters.

How dull and ordinary they had looked under the grey sky. How much more glorious they would have looked if the sun had been shining.

Ants

He sat cross legged on the patio. It was hot and he could feel the sun on his back through his shirt. He held a magnifying glass, which he was angling carefully, trapping ants within the heat of the magnified light, burning them and making their insides bubble. He was mesmerised.

He hadn’t done this since he was a child. He hadn’t even thought about it. There had been something about the light of this bright day, the way the garden had looked from his study window that stirred the memory from wherever it had been sleeping.

As a child he had purely been fascinated at the power of the sun and the way that he could borrow it. Now he felt guilt too. The ants weren’t causing him much trouble. Not enough to deserve being burnt alive. He still carried on, however. And the ants kept coming from between the sandy cracks in the pavement. They were unaware of the fate of their friends.

The sun soon took its toll upon his head. It felt as if someone had been holding a magnifying glass above him, as he had above the ants. He stood up too quickly, almost blacking out. He had to wait for the dizziness to pass. When he had recovered he went back indoors. Instead of returning to the study he went to the kitchen. There he placed the magnifying glass on the side and took a can of beer from the fridge. He took it into the living room, where he sat on the sofa. He opened the beer and gulped it down. He soon drifted off into a light doze, the sort he’d wake up from in half an hour or so with a bit of a headache and a dry mouth. Outside, the sun kept shining on the little dark specks that were once ants, their corpses dotted across the patio.

Sandwiches

I met the Beatles on the boat to Hades. They wanted sandwiches. They were sitting on a bench on the top deck, all squashed together. They looked pretty ill. Their skin was pale and yellowing. It hung saggy from their bones. The bags under their eyes had long forgotten sleep.

I greeted them.

“Have you got any sandwiches?” said Ringo.

I apologised and said that I didn’t.

“Not any cheese and pickle?”

I shook my head.

I asked them how they came to be on the boat to Hades.

“Got any sandwiches?” said John, raising his voice as if I were hard of hearing.

Again I said that I didn’t. The Beatles exchanged glances and rolled their eyes.

It was funny, I said, all four of them here at once.

Paul leaned forward and said slowly, “Do… you… have… any… sandwiches?”

I said that I hadn’t bothered packing any sandwiches.

I looked away and out over the grey sea. There was no sound at all. After a while I looked back at them.

“You don’t, by any chance, have any sandwiches, do you?” said George.

Instead of responding I walked further along the deck. When I was fifty or so paces away, I looked back. The Beatles sat there together staring out to sea, motionless.

Parcel

The first parcel arrived on a day in May. It was a medium sized cardboard box. About the size of a fat curled up cat. Very light. The writing on the top was neat. Curious, I opened the package. There was nothing in it. Just air.

Following this I would receive a parcel every week or so afterwards. They were always the same - same size, same weight. Same nothing inside them. Never a return address.

They were an oddity, but I got used to them. There were no messages, nothing horrible inside. Just nothing.

So I carried on as normal, quietly getting on with it. Going to my job, eating, sleeping and so on.