A quiet moment stretches into something larger in this sharp piece of flash fiction about memory, masculinity, and the strange weight of ordinary lives.

You’re about to step out of the air lock one cold, brittle morning when you notice there’s a small bone on the doormat. You crouch down to get a better look. It resembles the leg bone of a small animal, but it’s been picked clean, exposing the translucent marrow at either end. You step out and punt it into the fake shrubberies that line your front drive.

A week later, you open it to see another bone, twice the size of the previous one. It looks like the ribcage of a bird, but with small hooks at the end of each rib. You once again kick it into the bushes and go about your day.

A week later, you open the door and gasp. Facing you with yawning eye sockets is a skull. This time, you pick it up, and the heft of the thing leaves you in no doubt that it’s real, not some reject from a high school science lab. The protuberances over the eyes and the twin sets of teeth make it hard to fit in an average shoebox, but you manage it after breaking off one of the jaws. Burying it in the back garden whilst your quickening breaths steam up your helmet, you pat it flat then try to forget about it.

Another week goes by, and you open your front door one grey and moody morning to find the entire skeleton of a mysterious, unidentifiable creature draped across the drive. Its skull is horribly distended, teeth  the size of hunting knives erupting from both jaws. It has four arms, each ending in splayed claws. Its ribcage is the size of a wardrobe, and it has a great sweeping scythe of a tail that ends in huge barbs. It looks enormous next to your modest ship. Just as you’re wondering how you’re going to bury this monstrosity in the garden, you glimpse movement near the creature’s ribcage. You flinch as your cat leaps onto the thing’s elongated skull, and flicks it’s tail across the empty eye sockets.

“Good kitty”, you stutter, reaching forwards to tickle Jonesy behind the ears. “But can you please stop now?”

The cat purrs as if in agreement, but the steely look of determination in its eyes tells a different story. You make a mental note to ring the council and ask them to increase the anti-grav shields around the pet cemetery.

By Samuel Smith

Litro Magazine

ageing interior life Loneliness masculinity memory working-class life