Flecks

When this afternoon I found my fingers settle on the keyboard in readiness to flick some spittle at a disagreeable commenter on an online forum I paused for a moment. Did I really want to commit to this? 

Fluddy_Beads could have been anyone. 

I had been watching a teaser trailer for upcoming film The Martian starring warm-hunk Matt Damon and some other people. This was to be a survivalist yarn following Mr Damon’s travails after he is stranded on the moderately-forgiving planet, Mars. The viewing platform was YouTube, known scourge of fingerwagglers of ill-repute. Though I rarely slipped down into the comment thread I needed to know how warm-hunk Damon was being received.

And after two rolls of the scroll-wheel I came across:

Fluddy_Beads - 1 hour ago

I'm sorry, but the parallels to Interstellar may throw people off. It even has two of the same cast members.

A primitive lobe of my brain found itself engorged with thought-giving blood. “Right, that’s it,” it rasped “No more films set in space because Fluddy_Beads has deemed that the scenario may give rise to confusion amongst watchers of moving images. And actors must limit themselves to one film of each genre lest there be the assumption that they are playing the same character in different films, telling details notwithstanding.”

My fingers twitched on the keyboard. Fluddy_Beads should be made aware of his silliness.

But Fluddy could have been anyone.

A man is walking from work. He carries a briefcase in one hand and a shopping bag heavy with woodshavings in the other. There is a small tear in the shopping bag and flakes and coils of the shavings flit out into the street without him realising. Their exit is so timed that no noticeable pile accumulates in the bags’s wake.The spillage is so gradual that the loss of weight is imperceptible. 

The man arrives at a dour-bricked, semi-detached on the edges of the commuter belt. Pricking his way through the overgrown garden he tugs a key from under a breezeblock. Studs of ants bristle and filter out. One of them climbs the key to his finger where he holds it to his eye - the greylined horizon behind. He watches the ant’s antenna probe its options. After a short while it retreats down the man's finger and across to his arm where he forgets about it. He pushes the key into the door and pushes the door into the house. 

The place is dark and smells of damp tins. He climbs the stairs - his knees now sore on the inside  - and walks across the landing to a small bedroom. He puts his briefcase on the floor besides a chest of drawers and sits on the edge of the bed. Only then does he see that the shopping bag is down to only a fistful of shavings. He curses under his breath and carefully orients the bag to prevent any further spillage. He smooths it out flat on the floor. That might be enough.

The man takes off his shoes and feels the still, soft carpet on the soles of his feet. His old secondary school textbooks are fanned out next to the pillows, as he left them. He’d always intended to return them but after thirty years, even the gesture, what would he mean by it?

He lays back onto the bed and closes his eyes.

The house didn’t feel quiet, not anymore, not after the silence off his youth. Everyone had to respect each other, that was the way a house should be run. His father would sleep with earplugs, he could at least trust the sound of the blood flow in his own head. They had even tamed the house: it wouldn’t shift in the night or stretch out in the summer. Maybe his father wondered how long it would take for the sounds to return. When he finally left.

The man opens his eyes.

Looking to the window he meets the empty glare of his gerbil on the sill below. It is bolt upright in its glass tank and preening its whiskers. It had finished all the dry food and water. It had reduced toilet rolls to napkin rings and mulched down an empty packet of after eights. 

Fluddy sinks back into his bed and rubs his eyes with his thumbs. The gerbil scurries its forepaws frantically against the glass of its tank. Fluddy watches it. How long would it take for a gerbil to dig through glass?

He pulls out his iPhone and watches a teaser trailer for The Martian.