In an effort to write so-called 'dark fiction' that seems to be disgustingly popular lately, I sat down today and (almost) finished a piece that was inspired by sleepy mind-wanderings a few nights ago.
I had intended to re-write a piece on uni-student cannibalism that I jotted down in a notebook some time last year (but making it much better, of course) but I ended up writing this instead. I'm rather happy with this as a first draft. I'm sure that it'll look better with a bit of polishing, and then will hopefully get published! And thank you to Sky who looked up a whole lot of magazines for me. Bless.
So, here's the first section. The entire thing is at the 2 200 word mark at the moment, but I might stretch it to 3 000 if I think I can make it work. It needs a bit of a tinker, but should work out fairly well, I think. Anyone who wants to have a look at the rest or wants to workshop it, drop me a comment or an email, and I'll send it over.
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The tap was dripping again. Alice groaned and began to remove the layers that covered her in bed. She shifted aside the lovingly crocheted throws and the itchy woolen blankets, taking special care not to disturb Buttercup, her Chihuahua, who was nestled into a corner. The small dog was curled up nose to tail, and when Alice stopped to gently stroke her companion’s ear, Buttercup woke and yawned, stretching while looking faintly annoyed at having been woken. Alice heaved herself out of bed and shuffled to the kitchen in the dark, carefully avoiding the coffee table that Fred had made her years ago.
When she reached the kitchen, Alice tapped the oversized light switch and padded her way over the worn linoleum to the sink. With her arthritis, she couldn’t turn the taps off as firmly as was needed, and they often worked their way loose in the night. Alice had enough trouble sleeping, despite the pills, and would make her way to the kitchen at least once every night to twist the fittings back into place. Her son Dennis had left her a light wrench that she could lift without hurting herself, which she wedged around the tap and struggled against. Alice puffed and gasped as she heaved the tap shut that extra millimeter. There, it would hold for another couple of hours while Alice got some rest. She flicked the light off and stood in the doorway of the kitchen for a moment, getting her breath. She absentmindedly patted her hair and hummed a little tune to herself. She ignored the scrabbling coming from the closet near the oven, she had put up with enough of Tommy’s mischief for one day.
The trip back to bed was harder than the trip to the sink, for Alice’s eyes had partially adjusted to the gloom. The portraits of her grandchildren sparkled in the dim room, the gaudy frames outshining their eyes. They would come over and visit a few times a year, usually bringing their problems and leaving with crisp twenty dollar notes. She would gladly pay twice as much to see them, but they looked at her only as a pitiful last resort. Rory came more often than the others, and would occasionally gift her with a dog figurine or some flowers, which she would proudly display on the coffee table. They would remind her that she was still important to somebody, even if it was just another greedy grandchild. Alice tramped her way over the immaculate carpet, eyeing an awry cushion here and there. She could clean up in the morning, after reading some more of her book. She always felt that lying in bed with a book of a morning was one of her last pleasures. Buttercup would nose her way under the coverlets, and Alice would feel her warmth on her back or side. It was a cosy enough heaven, for the both of them.
When Alice finally got back to her lonely double bed, Buttercup had vanished. Still humming to herself, Alice settled into the bed, pulling layer upon layer upon her slender body. When she was safely tucked in and could no longer hear Tommy’s pleas from the kitchen, she whistled and called to Buttercup. In the distance, she heard the barking and whimpering of a dog. It sounded much bigger than Buttercup, so even when the howling and whining seemed to come from under her bedroom window, Alice ignored it. She simply clicked her wrinkled fingers for Buttercup, and sighed with relief as the little dog jumped up onto the bed. When she had been a puppy, Alice had had to help her up, but now she could leap all the way on her own. Alice gently turned off her bedside lamp and listened as Buttercup roamed the bed, looking for a comfortable spot.
Alice flinched away from Buttercup’s cold nose as she tried to wriggle under the covers. It was a common trick. However, this time, instead of accepting her fate to sleep on an uninhabited corner of the bed, Buttercup continued to squirm into Alice’s neck. When the tiny biting teeth found an artery, Alice’s eyes widened in shock, before the flow of blood completely ruined her coverlet.
