Wow and Flutter

 

In his kitchen, Mr Thompson silences the radio. Apparently, it’s company. Fatima, the home-help, says so. She says it’s good for him. On the wall is a calendar; the doctor’s appointments circled in orange felt-tip and visits by the home-help highlighted in yellow.

 

Through the rain-streaked window he can see the tired grey of his winter yard. Half hidden in the pyracantha growing above the wall that separates him from his neighbours, there is a blackbird singing, very softly, just to himself. It reminds him of a cheap plastic reel-to-reel tape recorder he once had as a child. He would try to record the ‘top ten’ records from the radio, but was always defeated by the recorder’s wildly erratic recording speed. It would turn the Beach Boys’ close West Coast harmonies into something that sounded like aliens from ‘Dr Who’. If you moved the tape manually across the tape heads, you got blurred noises that were very similar to the sounds the blackbird is making.

 

Today, his yard is a black and white photograph that has been coloured-in with a set of pens; orange for the pyracantha berries and yellow for the blackbird’s beak. Everything else is monochrome.

 

His phone rings and the blackbird takes flight. As Mr Thompson stumbles to answer it, he knocks something from the kitchen table; it’s a cheap set of felt-tip pens that smell of childhood pear drops, in a clear plastic wallet. The orange one and the yellow one no longer work. The red one, intended to mark visits from his family on his calendar, has never been used.

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This piece appears in 'Snow Crow', Bath Flash Fiction Volume Six