E.g. Tommy reflected on his past as a dock worker....
The story should be no more than 4000 words.
Deadline: 10th November 2013
AM
Tuesday, October 8, 2013
Story Idea 10
Choose a famous song from the 1980's and turn it into a short story without revealing the title of the song.
E.g. Tommy reflected on his past as a dock worker....
The story should be no more than 4000 words.
AM
E.g. Tommy reflected on his past as a dock worker....
The story should be no more than 4000 words.
AM
15 To Go
Kidneys kidneys everywhere and not one for mum.
Mum, don't make me an orphan. Don't die for want of an organ. I suppose if you did my name would fit, Little Orphan Annie. Except I wasn't so little, and I was 40 and grey as a Wizard. I watched mum breathing shallowly, her skin greenish, she'd need dialysis soon . I watched people walking around the hospital, watched their backs. Kidneys kidneys everywhere, but not a spare for mum. Not only that, there were fifteen wastes of space before her, don't tell me how I know they were wastes of space, I just know, I have intuition, I have powers. They would have burned me for a witch back in the day, and I would have deserved it.
Mum got her dialysis and we went home, she'd be okay for a day or two, before the green started coming back, It should be me that was green, a natural hue though, witch green. I'd be proud of mums deepest lime, if I could get that colour I'd file my teeth to points, just to complete the look. When we got home we drank tea and talked about nicer times. She was sweet my mother, she saw the little things in life, the budding trees, the droning bees. She saw the clouds fleet in wonder, and I couldn't understand. To me it was all a whoosh and the spinning world, spinning like my head, dark corners and cobwebs and fear and hate. Why had this fair lady given birth to a witch like me? She didn't deserve it, she deserved a loving son, or a version of her. A daughter that could sit still with her and sip tea and marvel at the little things.
When I got home, I went straight to my books. Black books, bound in leather. Gothic and smelling of night. Death spells, I wanted death spells. I needed 15, or at least 12. Throughout the night I gathered the information I needed, and in the morning I went into the countryside to find ingredients. I needed mandrake and juniper berries, hawthorne and hazel. The hedgerows provided for me, as they did my ancient sisters. Passer bys smiled and nodded, curious, respectful because they thought I was foraging for food, which was more than acceptable these days. It seemed it was okay to peel a rabbit off the road for dinner, something to do with cooking shows. I did scrape up a hedgehog, but not to eat. I nipped of sprigs of comfrey, I plucked white Bella Donna, into a jar I placed deep red yew berries. I got three types of mosses, six types of fungi and at dusk, I found the last thing I needed, the blood of a child. It is easy to trick a child, and when the little boy came to look at the squashed hedgehog I held out at him, I pierced the back of his hand with a quill, I didn't need much, just a drop and his suddenly watery eyes brightened when I told him it was the luckiest thing in the world to be spiked by a hedgehog.
I got back to my apartment and lay out the ingredients, all looked good, all looked evil, as a collection. In corners shadows scuttled and the lights flickered. From the deepest shadow my familiar padded, Mr Ruth, who slinked up to purr darkly. I quote scripture to my familiar :
" Behold, I will make thee a new sharp threshing instrument having teeth: thou shalt thresh the mountains, and beat [them] small, and shalt make the hills as chaff."
I laughed hysterically, raising my arms and stretching out my fingers like two solid branches ending in curved twigs. Mr Ruth recoiled slightly and I gleamed for a moment before saying "Come on cat, I've got work to do."
I laid out a dozen death spells, all missing the DNA of the target. Correction, I knew one of the targets, but he would not be my first choice, being family. Uncle Bert had a crap kidney but it was all his own fault. He admitted it with a toot and shake of the head, "the bottle dear, I always loved the bottle." Well die then, I always thought.
Uncle Bert it was. I easily got hold of his essence, for I cut his hair every other week.
"How's it going love? what's the news? Oh for a drop. How I wish I rationed out the drop. I could have got it just right, matching my last swig with the moment of death. Instead I have bludgeoned my kidneys."
"Oh Uncle Burt you will grow new Kidneys!"
"Not kidneys love, liver yes, but not my fucking kidneys. I'm on the list, just like your Ma." I shrugged hoping it looked sympathetic, then slipped a lock of his greying hair into my pocket. That night I made the first death spell. I did have a moment of fear for as the ingredients merged through hammer and salve, the shadows shuddered in their corners and Mr Ruth yowled, the front door banged open but I smiled, I knew whatever worked the door was going out, not in.
I had worked three other death spells before my mother asked me about Uncle Burt. "Poor Burt, he fell down dead. I saw it, it was like the door burst open and fingers reached in to snap his heart between thumb and forefinger. It was horrible."
"Heart attacks are Mum, poor Uncle Burt."
"No I mean, the door really did bang open." I looked at Mum, she knew I was odd and her expression was questioning. I had to shrug in that way I do, dismiss her as if she were a child and then say something.
"Up to number 11 in the list of kidneys mum! Wont it be great when you don't have to come in to hospital to have your blood cleaned!" She looked at me, looked at her hands, then looked back and said:
"Just as long as it's clean dear." I hated those words, they chided me.
"Kidney soon mum, kidney soon."
Number nine was a battle. Unbeknownst to me, she was also a witch. When I scratched her, pretending to be a clumsy nurse, her eyes flicked onto mine like magnets of green.
"What are you up to cunt?" Her teeth were showing as she breathed heavily. Her eyes, so green, flamed and her nostrils flared. "Do I know you?" I gave my shrug and she screamed in understanding. Real nurses bustled in and I backed out, feeling her skin under an index finger's nail. Shadows in corners cheered and recoiled in unison. I had to work quickly. The dying witch woman would want to cast spells too. I had to send her a powerful execution. I smeared a mixture of Yew Berry and Boys blood across a splinter of flint, then drove it under my thumb nail. The pain was terribly exquisite. My own blood and pain joined the concoction, and from my thumb burst a dark genie, he looked back at me with supreme confidence then smoked under the door and to my dark sister, kidney number nine.
With disregard to safety, I wanted to see the occurrence. I muttered a phrase, and a sparrow came. Within its soul I boarded, and we sped to the hospital on clever brown wings. The witch was gnashing her teeth, her hand clutching her side. She looked from left to right, she made shapes with her hands. She knew. The door did not bang open, under it came the spirit. He made smoke solid in the form of a Neanderthal, a kindly one that smiled as he closed her mouth with massive hands. He sat on her, and waited, a jowly grin that seemed to say he was doing her a favour. When she stilled, he fell apart, but not before he looked at the sparrow, suddenly frowning. Had I done something wrong? Was the frown a warning or was it displeasure at me for watching, was I being narcissistic? Who cared, I was down to just 8. Pleasure coursed through me at the prospect of more death spells, that was only slightly dented when I learned the next morning that number 1 on the list had got his donor kidney, someone had died in a car accident.
It is very taxing creating spells that dish out murder. The work the inner spirit must perform is immense, and at that coal face primeval couplings bat at each other like sea and land, forest and field. One swings one way, to be taken back by the next, to swing again like a pendulum of existence. I was laid up for many weeks and could perform no spells. Some darkness was being fought, perhaps the spirit of kidney number 9. When I felt the battle over, and my spirit bright again, I went straight to work but to my horror the spell were barren. I collected new ingredients and ruthlessly took the blood of a child by pushing one over and dabbing at the scraped knee . Nothing, no power in the spell. The ability had been robbed of me, and I was reminded of the genies displeasure at my voyeurism.
I was fucking furious. I had no time for my mother for which this was all about and with dreadful realisation I knew it was really all about me and my penchant for witchcraft. I had justified my murders by saying I was the champion of Mum. So what, I thought, I lied to myself, so what. Darkly, I went to the books. If Death Spells would not do, then there was something else, something much more awful, ancient and calamitous that I could call on, even if it ruined me. Shape Shifter.
The ingredients were laughingly banal and available in most refrigerators. It was like buttering bread, literally. With just one unusual topping. The animal I must become, would have to sniff it, reject it, then piss on it. But how? I bought a camera trap and placed the buttered bread on the back lawn. The bread was always eaten by a fox. I would love to become the fox, but, as I say, it always ate the bread. A hedgehog gave it a few bites but didn't urinate on it, and the rabbits had a nibble. Eventually, the animal I was to become slinked up through darkness, sniffed it, then sprayed a fine mist of piss all over the offered bread and butter. Of course, it was the cat.
That night, with the list of the last 8 on a table in front of me, I gobbled down the bread and butter cat piss sandwich and with disgust and nausea awaited developments. I looked at number 8. Catherine Tigerlilly, nice name, a woman in her twenties, poor minx, genetically bad kidneys. She lived in Purfleet, how appropriate I thought as the table suddenly towered over me. There was no pain in the transformation, just a sudden sense of danger. I wasn't a human sized cat, I was a cat! How on earth could a cat commit 8 murders., it would surely take all 9 lives.
By Andy Parker
Mum, don't make me an orphan. Don't die for want of an organ. I suppose if you did my name would fit, Little Orphan Annie. Except I wasn't so little, and I was 40 and grey as a Wizard. I watched mum breathing shallowly, her skin greenish, she'd need dialysis soon . I watched people walking around the hospital, watched their backs. Kidneys kidneys everywhere, but not a spare for mum. Not only that, there were fifteen wastes of space before her, don't tell me how I know they were wastes of space, I just know, I have intuition, I have powers. They would have burned me for a witch back in the day, and I would have deserved it.
Mum got her dialysis and we went home, she'd be okay for a day or two, before the green started coming back, It should be me that was green, a natural hue though, witch green. I'd be proud of mums deepest lime, if I could get that colour I'd file my teeth to points, just to complete the look. When we got home we drank tea and talked about nicer times. She was sweet my mother, she saw the little things in life, the budding trees, the droning bees. She saw the clouds fleet in wonder, and I couldn't understand. To me it was all a whoosh and the spinning world, spinning like my head, dark corners and cobwebs and fear and hate. Why had this fair lady given birth to a witch like me? She didn't deserve it, she deserved a loving son, or a version of her. A daughter that could sit still with her and sip tea and marvel at the little things.
When I got home, I went straight to my books. Black books, bound in leather. Gothic and smelling of night. Death spells, I wanted death spells. I needed 15, or at least 12. Throughout the night I gathered the information I needed, and in the morning I went into the countryside to find ingredients. I needed mandrake and juniper berries, hawthorne and hazel. The hedgerows provided for me, as they did my ancient sisters. Passer bys smiled and nodded, curious, respectful because they thought I was foraging for food, which was more than acceptable these days. It seemed it was okay to peel a rabbit off the road for dinner, something to do with cooking shows. I did scrape up a hedgehog, but not to eat. I nipped of sprigs of comfrey, I plucked white Bella Donna, into a jar I placed deep red yew berries. I got three types of mosses, six types of fungi and at dusk, I found the last thing I needed, the blood of a child. It is easy to trick a child, and when the little boy came to look at the squashed hedgehog I held out at him, I pierced the back of his hand with a quill, I didn't need much, just a drop and his suddenly watery eyes brightened when I told him it was the luckiest thing in the world to be spiked by a hedgehog.
I got back to my apartment and lay out the ingredients, all looked good, all looked evil, as a collection. In corners shadows scuttled and the lights flickered. From the deepest shadow my familiar padded, Mr Ruth, who slinked up to purr darkly. I quote scripture to my familiar :
" Behold, I will make thee a new sharp threshing instrument having teeth: thou shalt thresh the mountains, and beat [them] small, and shalt make the hills as chaff."
I laughed hysterically, raising my arms and stretching out my fingers like two solid branches ending in curved twigs. Mr Ruth recoiled slightly and I gleamed for a moment before saying "Come on cat, I've got work to do."
I laid out a dozen death spells, all missing the DNA of the target. Correction, I knew one of the targets, but he would not be my first choice, being family. Uncle Bert had a crap kidney but it was all his own fault. He admitted it with a toot and shake of the head, "the bottle dear, I always loved the bottle." Well die then, I always thought.
Uncle Bert it was. I easily got hold of his essence, for I cut his hair every other week.
"How's it going love? what's the news? Oh for a drop. How I wish I rationed out the drop. I could have got it just right, matching my last swig with the moment of death. Instead I have bludgeoned my kidneys."
"Oh Uncle Burt you will grow new Kidneys!"
"Not kidneys love, liver yes, but not my fucking kidneys. I'm on the list, just like your Ma." I shrugged hoping it looked sympathetic, then slipped a lock of his greying hair into my pocket. That night I made the first death spell. I did have a moment of fear for as the ingredients merged through hammer and salve, the shadows shuddered in their corners and Mr Ruth yowled, the front door banged open but I smiled, I knew whatever worked the door was going out, not in.
I had worked three other death spells before my mother asked me about Uncle Burt. "Poor Burt, he fell down dead. I saw it, it was like the door burst open and fingers reached in to snap his heart between thumb and forefinger. It was horrible."
"Heart attacks are Mum, poor Uncle Burt."
"No I mean, the door really did bang open." I looked at Mum, she knew I was odd and her expression was questioning. I had to shrug in that way I do, dismiss her as if she were a child and then say something.
"Up to number 11 in the list of kidneys mum! Wont it be great when you don't have to come in to hospital to have your blood cleaned!" She looked at me, looked at her hands, then looked back and said:
"Just as long as it's clean dear." I hated those words, they chided me.
"Kidney soon mum, kidney soon."
Number nine was a battle. Unbeknownst to me, she was also a witch. When I scratched her, pretending to be a clumsy nurse, her eyes flicked onto mine like magnets of green.
"What are you up to cunt?" Her teeth were showing as she breathed heavily. Her eyes, so green, flamed and her nostrils flared. "Do I know you?" I gave my shrug and she screamed in understanding. Real nurses bustled in and I backed out, feeling her skin under an index finger's nail. Shadows in corners cheered and recoiled in unison. I had to work quickly. The dying witch woman would want to cast spells too. I had to send her a powerful execution. I smeared a mixture of Yew Berry and Boys blood across a splinter of flint, then drove it under my thumb nail. The pain was terribly exquisite. My own blood and pain joined the concoction, and from my thumb burst a dark genie, he looked back at me with supreme confidence then smoked under the door and to my dark sister, kidney number nine.
With disregard to safety, I wanted to see the occurrence. I muttered a phrase, and a sparrow came. Within its soul I boarded, and we sped to the hospital on clever brown wings. The witch was gnashing her teeth, her hand clutching her side. She looked from left to right, she made shapes with her hands. She knew. The door did not bang open, under it came the spirit. He made smoke solid in the form of a Neanderthal, a kindly one that smiled as he closed her mouth with massive hands. He sat on her, and waited, a jowly grin that seemed to say he was doing her a favour. When she stilled, he fell apart, but not before he looked at the sparrow, suddenly frowning. Had I done something wrong? Was the frown a warning or was it displeasure at me for watching, was I being narcissistic? Who cared, I was down to just 8. Pleasure coursed through me at the prospect of more death spells, that was only slightly dented when I learned the next morning that number 1 on the list had got his donor kidney, someone had died in a car accident.
It is very taxing creating spells that dish out murder. The work the inner spirit must perform is immense, and at that coal face primeval couplings bat at each other like sea and land, forest and field. One swings one way, to be taken back by the next, to swing again like a pendulum of existence. I was laid up for many weeks and could perform no spells. Some darkness was being fought, perhaps the spirit of kidney number 9. When I felt the battle over, and my spirit bright again, I went straight to work but to my horror the spell were barren. I collected new ingredients and ruthlessly took the blood of a child by pushing one over and dabbing at the scraped knee . Nothing, no power in the spell. The ability had been robbed of me, and I was reminded of the genies displeasure at my voyeurism.
I was fucking furious. I had no time for my mother for which this was all about and with dreadful realisation I knew it was really all about me and my penchant for witchcraft. I had justified my murders by saying I was the champion of Mum. So what, I thought, I lied to myself, so what. Darkly, I went to the books. If Death Spells would not do, then there was something else, something much more awful, ancient and calamitous that I could call on, even if it ruined me. Shape Shifter.
The ingredients were laughingly banal and available in most refrigerators. It was like buttering bread, literally. With just one unusual topping. The animal I must become, would have to sniff it, reject it, then piss on it. But how? I bought a camera trap and placed the buttered bread on the back lawn. The bread was always eaten by a fox. I would love to become the fox, but, as I say, it always ate the bread. A hedgehog gave it a few bites but didn't urinate on it, and the rabbits had a nibble. Eventually, the animal I was to become slinked up through darkness, sniffed it, then sprayed a fine mist of piss all over the offered bread and butter. Of course, it was the cat.
That night, with the list of the last 8 on a table in front of me, I gobbled down the bread and butter cat piss sandwich and with disgust and nausea awaited developments. I looked at number 8. Catherine Tigerlilly, nice name, a woman in her twenties, poor minx, genetically bad kidneys. She lived in Purfleet, how appropriate I thought as the table suddenly towered over me. There was no pain in the transformation, just a sudden sense of danger. I wasn't a human sized cat, I was a cat! How on earth could a cat commit 8 murders., it would surely take all 9 lives.
By Andy Parker
He Will Provide
(Excerpts from Annie’s Reynolds journal)
27th June 2013
It’s been days since I found out and I can’t stop crying. Even now tears are blurring my vision and smudging these words. All my life I’ve heard people talk about heartache, I even thought I’d had it a few times, but this feeling, this horrific pain, couldn’t be summed up by such an innocuous sounding word. The pain in my heart is unrelenting. The only reprieve I get is when I wake in the morning and for just the briefest moment my mind is blank, the pain; absent. Then I remember and in the blink of an eye its back. I can’t fathom how such a perfectly healthy organ could be causing me so much pain.
I’m worried about how it will be at the end. I don’t think I can endure any more than this.
I’ve been trying to control my tears around Mum. She keeps saying I’m crying like she’s already dead. I just can’t get passed the fact that I believe she won’t survive. She’s fifteenth on that heart transplant list and she’s only been given six months to live. When I spoke to the nurse she said some people waited for years. This pain comes from the knowledge that she’s not going to make it. I’m sure of it. She will leave and my world will never be the same.
30th July 2013
Mum’s been on the list for thirty three days. During that time one person has come off, having received a donor heart, and one person has been added. Apparently they are a higher priority than mum so she remains in fifteenth place. I told the doctor this wasn’t fair. How was mum supposed to work her way up the list if people jumped the queue? Mum said, "It’s God’s will. If he wants me to live he will provide."
I’m having a hard time with the religious thing. I’ve always let her be with her beliefs before, assuming no harm could come of it. Now I know I was wrong with that approach. Instead of clinging to life (and me) with a positive fighting spirit, she is quietly accepting, trusting in some plan a fictional character has for her. It makes me want to tear my hair out. Yes I want to be a supportive daughter and I want her to be comforted but I am sick of sharing her heart with a myth.
4th July 2013
Went to visit mum today, her face is swollen from the meds and her skin has taken on a greyish hue. I faked a sore stomach and went and cried in the toilet. My mum is fading away and there is nothing I can do.
6th July 2013
It’s 3am and I still haven’t slept. I had a thought earlier and it won’t leave me alone. What if mum was further up the list? The people ahead of her are just as sick, if not sicker, than her, what if their hearts gave out? Mum had been warned to avoid exercise and undue excitement – what would it take to make a fragile heart stop? Is it considered murder if you scare someone to death? I don’t think it is.
7th July 2013
I got the list! I can’t bring myself to write down what I had to do to get it, but I got it. The Hippocratic Oath doesn’t hold as much sway these days as I hope it used to.
10th July 2013
Today the pain in my heart is almost bearable. There’s an excitement building in me that is masking it nicely. I’ve taken action and that has given me the illusion of control. I had a moment, as the envelopes left my hand and disappeared into the red post box, when I was assailed by doubt. The contents of those envelopes could mean the end of someone’s life. I knew this, that was my intention, but once those envelopes left my hand I began to think of my potential victims as people and not just names on a list. People with families that wanted them to live as desperately as I wanted mum to. I can’t think like this – yes, they are people but they are not important to me, all that is important is saving mum.
13th July 2013
I am becoming obsessed with the obits. I’m buying every newspaper out there and scanning for the names on the list. Today three of them appeared. I thought I’d be consumed with guilt but I wasn’t, I was thrilled - it was like seeing my numbers come up in the lotto. Still, as I read the sympathy messages an uneasy feeling settled in my gut. It helped to dehumanise them and think of them as the numbers they were on the list. They are just obstacles in my path. It helped even more when I realised that the fake scratch cards I’d sent were only responsible for two of the deaths; numbers twelve and four. Number twenty six had died in a car accident.
14th July 2013
Took mum for check up on her pacemaker today. Her Doctor told us she had moved up two places on the list. I said "Fantastic!" Mum said "God will provide."
How can she think that? If she believes in God’s will then surely he was the one that gave her the heart disease in the first place!
I want to tell her what I’m doing, how I’m providing for her, not God but of course I can’t.
15th July 2013
Today I paid two of the teens from the council flats down the road to dress in ‘Scream’ masks and target the list members in ground floor flats. They jumped out at them when they neared their windows. One of them had a retractable knife that he hit against the windows. I’m not sure how fruitful this action was, from where I was hiding I heard screams but none of them were followed up by ambulance sirens. I’ll have to wait to see what shows up in the obits.
17th July 2013
I’m concerned. Three more people have died from the list, though not in mum’s favour – numbers nineteen, twenty-three and twenty five. The obits sighted their causes of death to be car accidents. This just doesn’t feel right to me. Four people from the list have now died in car accidents. What if someone has had the same idea as me? If so, their loved one is lower on the list than mum which puts her in the firing line. I’m probably just being paranoid – Oh God, I don’t think I am!
20th July 2013
I’m scared. Number twenty four has died in a car accident. The funeral is tomorrow and it’s open so I’m going to attend and see what I can find out.
21st July 2013
I really don’t know what to do. I managed to talk to number twenty fours cousin and the police are suspicious of her death. She didn’t have a drivers licence but she’d been found dead in the driver’s seat of a stolen car; the apparent victim of a hit and run collision. The suspicion came from the traces of a substance around her mouth which may or may not have been chloroform. I’m now convinced someone is murdering these people but I can’t go to the police without exposing my own intentions with the list. I can’t just wait until they try to get at mum, I have to do something.
23rd July 2013
I think I’ve found him. The first victim was number twenty six on a list of thirty, leaving me three possible suspects. Number twenty eights brother was extremely over protective of her when I rang acting as a nurse from the hospital. He demanded to know what "we" were doing to save his sisters life and intimated he was the only one looking out for her interests. I’m going to go and talk to him. Maybe I can convince him to spare mum.
(Charing Cross Hospital 23rd July 2013)
Doctor Brown rushed into the consultation room where his patient was waiting. He knew she would be in shock, having had the news broken to her by policemen on her doorstep and then rushed over to the hospital. He noted her hands were shaking and he regretted he couldn’t give her time to deal with her grief but they were racing against the clock.
"Mrs Reynolds, I am sorry for your loss, but this gives us a great opportunity."
"I don’t understand." Mrs Reynolds cut in with a weak voice. "Annie couldn’t drive. She applied for her provisional years ago but she never learned. How could she have been driving that car?"
Doctor Brown cleared his throat, wishing he didn’t have to rush this fragile woman so much.
"I realise this is all a big shock for you but that’s what I wanted to talk to you about Mrs Reynolds. On Annie’s provisional license she left the organ donation check box clear. As her next of kin you can authorise the donation of her heart but we have to move fast."
Mrs Reynolds blinked at him and then smiled slightly. "No Doctor."
"No?" Doctor Brown frowned.
Again, that slight smile. "Doctor Brown, if God wants me to live I’ll move up that list of yours, I’ve already gone up two places. I’m not going to jump the queue. God will provide Doctor. Give that heart of my daughters to someone that needs it more. That’s what Annie would’ve wanted."
By Dayv Metcalfe
The List
It didn't matter that it was a heart.
It could have been a lung, or a liver. Anything, that without for some period of time, she could no longer survive and would slowly, or perhaps quickly die. But a heart made sense, was life itself and no-one could doubt its necessity. Some people can live without a liver can't they? For a while, and there's folks out there with only one lung.
Annie's mother needs a new heart. It's serious and Annie has been worried. Every day on her way to her mother's room in the hospital she walks down the stark corridors, dragging her feet on the tired linoleum and making syncopated squeaks with the toes of her sneakers. She glances through flapping doors into forbidden worlds of things that have gone wrong and the worried faces of those trying to put those things right again. Even where the babies are, there's always something to worry about.
Annie knows her mother won't see Thanksgiving. The doctors say this, but they offer hope in the form of a transplant from a suitable donor and Annie's mother is number fifteen on the list. Getting there seems an awfully long way off. Some distance point way beyond the time she has left to live Annie thinks.
In the room her mother is oddly free of foreign devices, tape and wires. As if, if she wished, she could sit up, swing her legs across the bed, slip to the floor and walk straight out of the hospital and hail a cab in the street to take her home.
But she is pale, and breathes with difficultly. Annie imagines her mother's tired and failing heart, wheezing and spluttering in her chest with every beat like an idling badly tuned lawnmower. She speaks to Annie quietly, with effort, and tells her stories of when she was younger, what a good girl she was and how she nearly didn't make it into the world because the cord got wrapped around her neck starving her of oxygen until a quick thinking nurse grabbed some scissors and cut it from around her neck and tossed it aside like a dangerous snake. Of how in the first few weeks she wouldn't feed, and this made Annie's mother feel helpless and worried. That her baby may die because then so young so new, it didn't know that it had to eat to survive and some reflex that should be there wasn't there. And unlike now with their immutable connection, their mother daughter bond, baby Annie couldn't understand her mother's desperate pleas.
Annie stroked the back of her mother's hand, taking care to not touch the green plastic butterfly where the intravenous cannula had been inserted. She ran a finger around the transparent edge of the plaster holding it in place and wished it didn't pinch her mother's skin so. Annie speaks to her mother and tells her all the things they will do when she is well.
They will fix things in the house and visit places they used to before this room became so unhappily familiar. Annie's mother's new heart will let her swim again, at Choke Canyon and in the gentle waves at Rockport beach. But it's so hard to imagine it now with her like this, shrunk and on hold, slighter than she really is. They imagine from whom her new heart will come, and they pray for someone young, and strong and please god Annie says, immortal.
Annie couldn't wait for fifteen other people on the list to be saved. Fifteen perfect arcs to occur before her mother can be promised a mere chance of life. Annie knew she must reduce the list but hadn't worked out the details of how. Not the chemistry or butchery or whatever it would take to see the heart, their heart cupped in a surgeon's hands ready to reanimate her dying mother. The task was daunting and irrevocable and it would take courage.
Annie's mother lived for another twelve years after the transplant. She ran eight marathons in that time and swam in the ocean every week in Rockport. She hadn't particularly wanted to blaze these trails preferring to perhaps tend her garden, read and take gentle day trips to the lakes. But she felt that she owed it to Annie to achieve something that would be extraordinary even for someone of her age who hadn't undergone such a life changing surgery. To know that Annie would be proud and had not acted in vain she couldn't rest, just exist to live an ordinary life.
She visited Annie almost every week, taking the three bus journey to the facility. They treated her differently to the other visitors. Subtle things, sometimes just a look but it wasn't a judgement, more of an acknowledgement of the terrible circumstances and of what she must be feeling for her daughter.
Annie killed nine of the people on the list before she was finally caught and incarcerated in the Mountain View Unit in Gatesville. Her mother was there when they gave Annie the lethal injection, saw her daughter's life taken because her own had been saved.
The press were there from every continent. The story was a sensation around the world, with its tragic Shakespearean plot exciting the public and eliciting much debate.
Someone made a movie about it. It did so-so at the box office.
By Darren Seeley
It could have been a lung, or a liver. Anything, that without for some period of time, she could no longer survive and would slowly, or perhaps quickly die. But a heart made sense, was life itself and no-one could doubt its necessity. Some people can live without a liver can't they? For a while, and there's folks out there with only one lung.
Annie's mother needs a new heart. It's serious and Annie has been worried. Every day on her way to her mother's room in the hospital she walks down the stark corridors, dragging her feet on the tired linoleum and making syncopated squeaks with the toes of her sneakers. She glances through flapping doors into forbidden worlds of things that have gone wrong and the worried faces of those trying to put those things right again. Even where the babies are, there's always something to worry about.
Annie knows her mother won't see Thanksgiving. The doctors say this, but they offer hope in the form of a transplant from a suitable donor and Annie's mother is number fifteen on the list. Getting there seems an awfully long way off. Some distance point way beyond the time she has left to live Annie thinks.
In the room her mother is oddly free of foreign devices, tape and wires. As if, if she wished, she could sit up, swing her legs across the bed, slip to the floor and walk straight out of the hospital and hail a cab in the street to take her home.
But she is pale, and breathes with difficultly. Annie imagines her mother's tired and failing heart, wheezing and spluttering in her chest with every beat like an idling badly tuned lawnmower. She speaks to Annie quietly, with effort, and tells her stories of when she was younger, what a good girl she was and how she nearly didn't make it into the world because the cord got wrapped around her neck starving her of oxygen until a quick thinking nurse grabbed some scissors and cut it from around her neck and tossed it aside like a dangerous snake. Of how in the first few weeks she wouldn't feed, and this made Annie's mother feel helpless and worried. That her baby may die because then so young so new, it didn't know that it had to eat to survive and some reflex that should be there wasn't there. And unlike now with their immutable connection, their mother daughter bond, baby Annie couldn't understand her mother's desperate pleas.
Annie stroked the back of her mother's hand, taking care to not touch the green plastic butterfly where the intravenous cannula had been inserted. She ran a finger around the transparent edge of the plaster holding it in place and wished it didn't pinch her mother's skin so. Annie speaks to her mother and tells her all the things they will do when she is well.
They will fix things in the house and visit places they used to before this room became so unhappily familiar. Annie's mother's new heart will let her swim again, at Choke Canyon and in the gentle waves at Rockport beach. But it's so hard to imagine it now with her like this, shrunk and on hold, slighter than she really is. They imagine from whom her new heart will come, and they pray for someone young, and strong and please god Annie says, immortal.
Annie couldn't wait for fifteen other people on the list to be saved. Fifteen perfect arcs to occur before her mother can be promised a mere chance of life. Annie knew she must reduce the list but hadn't worked out the details of how. Not the chemistry or butchery or whatever it would take to see the heart, their heart cupped in a surgeon's hands ready to reanimate her dying mother. The task was daunting and irrevocable and it would take courage.
Annie's mother lived for another twelve years after the transplant. She ran eight marathons in that time and swam in the ocean every week in Rockport. She hadn't particularly wanted to blaze these trails preferring to perhaps tend her garden, read and take gentle day trips to the lakes. But she felt that she owed it to Annie to achieve something that would be extraordinary even for someone of her age who hadn't undergone such a life changing surgery. To know that Annie would be proud and had not acted in vain she couldn't rest, just exist to live an ordinary life.
She visited Annie almost every week, taking the three bus journey to the facility. They treated her differently to the other visitors. Subtle things, sometimes just a look but it wasn't a judgement, more of an acknowledgement of the terrible circumstances and of what she must be feeling for her daughter.
Annie killed nine of the people on the list before she was finally caught and incarcerated in the Mountain View Unit in Gatesville. Her mother was there when they gave Annie the lethal injection, saw her daughter's life taken because her own had been saved.
The press were there from every continent. The story was a sensation around the world, with its tragic Shakespearean plot exciting the public and eliciting much debate.
Someone made a movie about it. It did so-so at the box office.
By Darren Seeley
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