AGONY AUNT
by Richard Godwin.

They called her the Agony Aunt. She knew how to help people ease their pain better than anyone. She liked to help them when their problems were out of the ordinary and needed something a little special.

She cared. She had a good heart.

She’d been helping her daughter with her marriage and was satisfied when she obtained her divorce from her husband.

She managed to convince her daughter how poor a match her husband was for her without maligning him too much and the young woman found it hard to do anything without asking her mother’s advice. She worried about her daughter, even the way she moved, so full of tenderness was she as a mother. She would stare at her daughter’s picture and wonder why she had acquired a strange lifeless gait.

‘It’s as if you have no back bone’, she said to her, as the young woman began to cry.

But she was free of her husband and that was good.

It was only a few weeks ago that her daughter had committed suicide.

She had been unhappy since the divorce and couldn’t understand why, because her mother was always right.

The Agony Aunt pushed this aside. She got on with her work, there were so many women who needed her help and who else would give it to them?

The letter she received that morning bothered her. It was signed Mary and read: 

‘My boyfriend keeps hurting me. It seems whatever I do, he just wants to cause me pain and has even started burning me with his cigarettes.’

She looked out of the window and saw the sun bristle in the blue sky. And she knew what kind of day it was going to be. 

She got what she needed and donned her white mac before walking out into the teeming street below and going straight to the address at the top of the letter.

It was still early.

As she stood outside she saw a young woman leave.

Buzzing the intercom she heard a crackle and a man’s voice.

‘Yeah?’

‘Special delivery.’

And she was in. As easy as that.

She found the door and began to paste the notices all over it.

Then the wall and the front doors of all the neighbours.

The statement was clear and she felt happy with the indictment it gave.

‘Mary’s boyfriend is torturing her.’

Satisfied, she returned to her office.

As she undressed and stepped in the shower she could smell virtue on her skin and she knew that she was endowed with unassailable goodness.

She stood under the hot water wondering why she always washed after a good deed.

The steam filled the bathroom. She thought of herself as some latter day saint, unacknowledged for all she did for women. 

As she stepped out of the shower and got dressed Mary was also dressing.

In a downtown apartment she looked at a man lying on a bed.

She adjusted her bra and winced.

‘Didn’t hurt you too much?’ he said.

‘I don’t know why I do this.’

He looked at her and she could see the hatred in his eyes.

And she wondered if she would ever be free of him and whether they would ever be found out.

She looked at the burns on her arm.

Then she stepped out into the corridor and began to sob.  

When Mary returned to her apartment she found Tommy nursing a bleeding nose.

He held up one of the Agony Aunt’s posters.

‘Some lunatic’s plastered these all over the block. That idiot at number 2 bopped me in the corridor ’

She stroked his hair.

‘I’ll tell them, I’ll put them straight baby.’

Later she spoke to the neighbours.

Most of them hadn’t paid any attention since they knew how devoted Tommy was to her. They’d never even heard them argue. 

She lay there all night feeling guilty and alone, and rose the next morning knowing she had to put it right.

And so she made her way to the address she had posted the letter to.

It was a PO Box and she waited until lunchtime when the lady in the white coat turned up to collect her mal.

She tailed her to her apartment.

She rang the bell and waited.

What she saw as the door opened was a look of such intense self-righteousness she pushed her out of the way and walked in.

‘What do you think you’re dong?’

‘Are you her?’

‘Get out!’

‘You almost ruined my relationship because you misread my letter.’

‘I read a lot of letters.’

‘I came to you for help and you put notices up all over my apartment.’

‘I was trying to get you out of there.’

‘I don’t want to leave him.’

‘I know it’s hard.’

‘Tommy’s not the one doing it to me.’

‘I hear this sort of thing all the time.’

‘You’re not listening.’

And with that Mary smashed her in the face. 

It was a hard punch that knocked the Agony Aunt backwards against the sofa. When Mary hit her again she removed her recent bridgework. 

The Agony Aunt opened her mouth with the look of a native idiot who has forgotten how to speak. Her rehearsed act of benevolence fell away and she stood up seething.

She was about to strike out but Mary was too quick and reached for the paper knife that lay on the table by the unopened mail.

She plunged it deep into her chest searching for a heart but she found only bone, as if the organ was redundant to her.

‘Agony, enough agony for you? You nearly destroyed my relationship.’

She watched as the figure fell to the floor and lay without moving with a vacant expression on a face lined with hatred.

And then she left the apartment.

She dumped her boyfriend and went home.

Tommy was waiting for her and she put her arms round him.

She began to feel a whole lot better. 

BIO: Richard Godwin is a produced playwright whose stories can be found at many magazines such as A Twist Of Noir and Disenthralled, as well as in the anthology 'Back In 5 Minutes' by Little Episodes Publishing and 'Howl' by Lame Goat Press. His crime novel will be published later this year. His portfolio can be found here: http://richardgodwin.wordpress.com/

Where The Young Die
by Matthew C. Funk

I wished the four-year old was dead when I arrived.

“Not much bigger than one of those fucking dolls.” Morane tugged up a belt that didn’t just need tugging; it begged it. Our badges feel heavier by the day.

“Not much of him left.” I said. I almost wished it so. There was enough left in him to broadcast the pain swimming through his fishbowl eyes. The parameds were already peeling off their bloody gloves and packing the ambo, though.

“Wasn’t much to begin with.” Morane lit a smoke. They make the dying go faster. “Looks like…what are they called?”

“What are they called?” I didn’t know. I didn’t care. I scanned the black faces of the crowd for a sight of something other than the usual expressions of soul-crushing grief and curiosity.

“Cabbage man dolls?” Morane was talking louder because the four-year old was gurgling.

“Cabbage patch.”

“More like eggplant patch.”

“Funny.”

“Look at these yo’s.” Morane chucked a chin at the crowd. “This is acceptable to them. Just a three-ring fucking circus.”

He didn’t want to see the four-year old go out. He wouldn’t allow himself. Neither would I. I locked the crowd in a look and refused to let go. The fish would stop swimming without my having to see it.

“So who’s today’s ringmaster?” I asked.

“Well,” Morane made for the cruiser on the double time. “The bike cops can get their fill of dumb looks from these witnesses. Let’s just hit up Deanie’s and then run ballistics.”

I got the door open and the yellow stench of rotting food and filled ashtrays and printer toner put a fitting perfume of decay around the sticky air.

“Yeah. We’ll run the gun.”

“Not that it’ll matter.”

Only this time, it did.

* * *

The dead don’t rest in New Orleans. They just make more dead.

Jeezy’s apartment stunk of this fact in all the smoke that throbbed from its stained walls. Weed smoke; Kools smoke; burnt food and burnt candles and baking soda seared into cocaine—Jeezy had all the smoke in Florida District haunting his walls.

“Why the fucking po-po up in my shit?” Jeezy asked, as if we needed an excuse. Where there’s smoke in New Orleans, there’s fire. And there’s always smoke in the houses of Florida District.

“Why, Jeezy?” Morane put his scuffed shoe on a stained scale perched on the cinderblock-and-clapboard that served as a coffee table. “You’d have cleaned up a bit if you knew you were having guests?”

“Maybe.”

“The place is a fucking crypt anyway.” Morane’s foot knocked the scales over. He was right. The only difference between the low-rent shotgun house sties Florida’s people lived in, and the tombs across the way, was a paint job.

“We got a match.” I told Jeezy and Jeezy, he just looked sad.

“Then you can light my motherfucking cigarette.” Jeezy said.

“The bullets that did in the kid down on Law today was from your Beretta.”

“The fuck it was. I done ditched that gun after I got cleared for that dirt on them Third Ward niggas.”

“That’s not what Lex says.”

“Lex a lying faggot.”

“Where’s the gun, Jeezy?” Morane pressed and Jeezy squirmed. He leaned for his left. He looked at the back room.

Something in the backroom creaked a floorboard.

I can’t even tell you how my service pistol got in my hand so fast. It was just there. Morane, he went for his cuffs.

“Heads over your fucking dome, scumbag.” Morane watches a lot of TV. If he didn’t, he’d be speechless in this situation. Adrenaline does that to a vocabulary.

“Nah, nah!” Jeezy was talking fast and doing everything with his hands except putting them behind his head. My gun was waving between him and the backroom.

“Hands up!” I yelled.

“Nah, it ain’t like that—they was homies!”

“Don’t ‘nah’ me, spook!” Morane grabbed Jeezy’s left wrist and made to snap it behind his head. “I will blow those words back out your head!”

Fast—it all happened so damn fast; fast as fire. Maybe it was what Morane said that sparked it off.

“Nah, don’t shoot!” Maybe it was what Jeezy screamed. Maybe it was something I did. Or maybe it was just that in this city, in my city, the dead just make more dead. Fire’s got to burn.

Gunfire came from the doorway to the backroom. I can’t tell you how loud it was. I can’t tell you how flashbulbs of adrenaline feel. I can just say that there was fire, so I fired back.

I put three through the door, clustered, like I’ve done so many times in my dreams and on the range that it was as reflexive as Morane’s cheap dialogue.

Nothing happened for a moment. Screaming from Jeezy, sure. But nobody hears that shit in Florida District.

Then out of the backroom doorway dropped a body.

“Nah…they was just homies playing…” Jeezy sobbed. “Just playing…it was an accident.”

The body was just the size of one of those Cabbage Patch Dolls.

“There’s our Beretta.” Morane said as I walked up to get it. The hand that held it looked too small for fingernails. The emptiness inside me was too big to ever be filled.

“Medic or meatwagon?” Morane asked, but I couldn’t answer at first. The badge was pinned right through where my heart should be and was too heavy. It reminded me what I should have learned long ago about wishing in New Orleans.

“Morgue.” I said, remembering that wishes sometimes are cruel enough to come true.

BIO: Matthew C. Funk is a professional writer in marketing for corporate America, a writing mentor and the author of several manuscripts that illuminate the beauty of human extremes. A graduate of the Professional Writing MFA at USC, his online work is featured at sites such as Powder Burn Flash; Thrillers, Killers and Chillers; Twist of Noir; Pulp Metal Magazine; Flash Fiction Offensive; ThugLit; Six Sentences Volume 3 and his Web domain.

The House on Dover
by Abdul Malik

Everywhere I went, I found traces.

Small pieces of something or other, here and there. I would touch an object that I know I held, once. Some people would look at me, and just for a second, I would think they look familiar.

Places that feel prosaic. A world of Deja Vu. Cities of habit. New experiences that feel conventional.

And everywhere I went, fragments of memories stirred into thoughts that begged to become half formed. Ideas and flashes of thought and memory that attached to each other, reconstructing damaged goods, joining together in tangles that struggled to make sense. And all of them turned and twisted to lead me to the house on Dover:

It was empty. Deserted.

The shed, with all its equipment, dust and rusted tools strewn everywhere; walls covered in black blood that has long been dry. Lighter colored markings line these walls, where the old wood was clawed out. I took one look and stepped outside. Nothing to see here.

The house, every room looking as crisp as the day I had first walked in, with nothing but a fresh layer of grime over everything. The kitchen, a cabinet still open, remnants of a broken glass on the floor, a chair knocked over where they had rushed in to drag her out. No other signs of struggle. Our food, long rotten, sat on the table. No being had touched it. Nature had chosen to ignore it. Nothing had been here. Nothing had touched my old home.

The wood still gleamed through the dust, and the lights still came to life as weakly as ever, a bare yellow glow that stained instead of illuminated. I left the kitchen and went to the living room.

A flash of memory. A boy. His eyes dark, covered by a fringe of long raven hair. He was walking. Running, even. His cheeks were still framed by baby fat.

He had been grounded the week we left. The television was still unplugged. Next to it, chopped kindling, gray with dust and age, still sat in the fireplace. My foot lightly touched something on the carpet. Looking down, I saw a glass roll away from an amaranthine stain, stopping at the coffee table, where a bottle of years old wine sat, uncorked and empty. Behind the television was the bay window, opening out onto a deck, weathered with age and rotting. Beyond the deck was a small dusty parcel of ground, and beyond that, sheer cliffs that looked onto a grey, turbulent sea.

I moved into the hallway and slid past a picture of a happier family in happier times, in all its precious splendor. And another. And another. This whole house was a bygone remnant of my bygone world.

In the foyer, I considered going up the stairs and into the bedrooms, but somehow I already knew what would await me. An empty master bedroom with a box of shells strewn across the floor, a bucket filled with dried vomit, an empty glass of water, and a bed that probably still stank of sweat. One of the other bedrooms would have some children's toys and a dresser full of secondhand clothes. The third bedroom would be empty.

Instead, I slipped through the forward entrance and into the world outside. Standing in the doorway, looking at the expanse of dead earth ahead of me, I smelled the air for the first time that day. It was the essence of sea air, overpowering everything else. A salty scent that ran through my nostrils, ever so slightly wrinkling my nose.

I stepped out the doors and onto the hard, weathered ground. In front of me, a dead field of nothing and the road back to town. Behind me, an old house and the sea.

I touched the faint scar on my temple, running my hand to the steel plate in my skull. A headache was coming on. I started back towards the village, not bothering to look back.

There was nothing to see.

BIO: Abdul Malik is a sixteen year old aspiring writer from Ontario, Canada. He can be reached at mrmajesta@gmail.com

Federal Plaza
by Calvin Seen

What a day, I am graduating, top of my class in chemistry and electronics and it’s my birthday. Feeling like I am capable of anything, I attend the ceremony for a few minutes and then drive off in to the forest to a latch on the ground. I open it and jump in to my private workshop and start working on my project. A few hours go by and my project is completed. It is time to pick my daughter up from school. After picking her up, we laugh as we invent jokes on the way home.

Upon arrival at home, my wife hosts a party for my graduation and birthday. It is crudely interrupted, when my door is rammed down by uniformed men as my wife and daughter shriek. With rifles aimed at us they yell: “On the floor!” and we all did as they confiscate my firearms. When they were done it looked like a tornado went through my house. Angered by the hostility of the government, I remember how I use to be proud to say the Pledge of Allegiance, believing in my country and its values of freedom. After they removed the right to bear arms from the Constitution, I regret ever serving my country as a soldier.

Deciding that I need some time alone, I hug my terrified wife and daughter and stop by my workshop again to dress up and finish my party on my own at Federal Plaza. I exit the taxi and fold a piece of gum in to my mouth. Chewing my gum nervously I look up at all the windows of the twelve story federal building towering over me. What a beautifully constructed building, I commend the architects who constructed this structure. In awe of what a human is capable of, I watch crowds of people walk by.

On the outside I look like a business man. But under my suit is a vest with hooks and twisted wires stringing together bricks of semtex strapped tightly around my chest. Years of education and hands on experience have allowed me to build such a remarkable device.

With enough explosives to destroy the frame of the building so it crumbles, I become nauseated by the responsibility and puke on to the floor. I regain my composure and fix my tie, surprised at how my vest is unnoticeable. Sweating profusely and trying to focus on the mass murder of federal agents and the disintegration of the building, I forget that it’s my birthday and remind myself to take it easy.

Now forty feet away from the building, I think about the deaths of women and children in the plaza; does sending this message out to the nation, that I will not tolerate violation of my rights, justify their deaths? Then again collateral damage is all a part of war. I look for the most effective spot to detonate my vest and try to imagine the blast radius.

The sun sets behind the building, tinting the entire plaza grey. As I swallow my spit I head towards the spot.  Halfway to the spot; I wonder: will I go to heaven or hell? After my final step, my thumb hovers over the detonator. A mother and daughter pass by me and my own family flashes into my mind. I can’t do it. What if they were my wife and daughter?

Turning my back against the building I walk away when SUVs screech to a stop in front of me and I am surrounded. They open there doors and aim their guns at me, “Federal Agents! Hands in the Air!” as civilians run away from the scene. I can see the barrel of a rifle sticking out of the high rise window across the street. If I raise my hands to surrender they will see the detonator tied to my palm and the sniper will surely shoot me in the head. What choice do I have now? Either way I am going to die today. I smirk and sing: “Happy Birthday to me…Happy Birthday dear…”

BIO: Calvin Seen has been writing for several months. He would like to mention the site: http://www.flashfictionforums.com where they have friendly members and in depth critiques.

If My Time Were To Come Again
by Matt Barden

If my time were to come again, I wouldn’t change a thing. I have no regrets: it’s been a terribly good ride.

There’s no way of knowing for sure what time it is, because of course there’s no clock in my cell. There are no barred windows here in solitary confinement either, so I can’t see any stars or moonlight to hint at how long I’ve got left. But my years here have given me a circadian intuition meaning my body is used to the peculiar rhythms of prison life. I sense it has past eleven o’clock and I’m expecting the jangle of keys and banging of a truncheon on the iron door any minute now.

Some of the guards tried to convince me to see Father Kennedy today. Apparently he could says prayers for my soul and ask God for forgiveness. I declined the offer. Any religious beliefs that I had been encouraged to harbour died with my teenage innocence almost a half-century ago in the hills of Vermont. That naïve young priest- the prison’s own pastor- wouldn’t have succeeded anyway, for forgiveness would require some form of guilt or remorse, neither of which are emotions that visit me very often. Okay, I am guilty in the lawful sense of the world, but there’s no conscientious or moral guilt for me; I raped, tortured and killed and that’s that.

I take a look around at the cell that has been more of a home than any address at which I’ve resided in my current life. Such is the choice of the eternal criminal, cast from families to orphanages, from churches to the streets and to the bosoms of whichever unfortunate women I could hoodwink. Six times these damned whores have offered their bodies in exchange for the promise of a better life; six times their bodies have been left mutilated in some wilderness. A short spell would follow during which I would disappear or run, before resurfacing in another city, circling the dark recesses of the urban squalor like a vulture hovering over the desert.

I inspect both sets of chains that bind my limbs. I smirk as I recall Bernadette lying on the bathroom floor with a bicycle chain around her throat and blood gushing from down near her kidneys. The chains are tight and cause a constant irritation, but only hurt when I try to sleep. I sit down on the flat, bare shelf that passes for a bed and wait.

#

The room is surprisingly noisy. Several guards are on duty, their dark blue uniforms gloomy in the shadows from the intense lamps that illuminate the chair. They mutter to each other, a mix of mindless small-talk and shop floor gossip. I overhear one of them describe me as a worthless shit. Is that all they can come up with? Mullins, the most senior of them, glares at the rest to be respectfully silent, but the specialist team create further noise as they prepare the chair and undertake their final checks. I notice Kennedy sat in the corner, grasping some beads and mouthing prayers. I wink at him; his look of astonishment brings a smile to my face. One of the guards approaches me with a blindfold. Now that I can’t see I begin to ignore the preparations around me.

Claire was one of my favourites. She was a pretty young girl from Detroit, who was not yet twenty when I first met her working in an inner-city bar. I was on the run from New England and was disguised as a war veteran. She had a charitable heart and was keen to help this jobless hero. Actually she was too pretty by far and had a stream of young folk courting her. Many of the boyfriends chose to ignore the charming, brooding ‘Nam pilot, but one of the bastards started asking too many questions of me and my time in the war. Claire found me bundling his tarpaulin-clad body into the trunk of her Ford. Her pale blue eyes never blinked as the jack smashed her button nose inwards and the blood sprayed over her shiny white washing machine. Actually, that is something I regret. I feel my own blood rush to my dick as I remember her naked body and wish that I hadn’t broken her face before I had the chance to fuck her; it made the act rather more joyless than usually was the case.

I know that midnight is approaching and with it my death. It is only at this point, where it is inevitable and imminent and the next life looms over my shoulder, that I allow myself to remember my previous lives and deaths: each episode ended in a timely demise where the pain was negated by excitement of what was to follow. I start to reminisce: executed by firing squad in Russia, and before that hung from gallows in London. Any moment now I can add electrocution to the list.

#

For a time there is nothing. Like every time before there is an odd feeling that the void lasts for an eternity, but the calendars show that it is merely a split second, a momentarily sense of being bodiless. I emerge from the dark womb and start screaming in the bright light. My new mother looks proudly at me but already I find her abhorrent. I am pleased that she has lost blood during my birth. Long may it continue; I’m already looking forward to the age when I can bite at her breasts and draw blood when she offers me milk.

My time has come again, and it’s going to be fun.

BIO: Matt Barden is an Englishman currently living in Wales who plans towns for a living but writes about fictional lives as a means of escape. He has been published by Six Sentences.