The Greening of Big Bessie

It had been a dare. Much like the others. The tip offs. The phone calls.

Not meant to cause harm. They chose him because of Joxer, the mongrel. He was to wait till midnight, slip up the entry, placate Joxer, scale the side gate and do the deed.

They didn’t say they’d be there too.

The light from Big Bessie’s bedroom cast a spotlight onto the footpath as he crept up the gable length entry. Big Bessie with her big ears who could swot a boy with the back of her fingernail. He should have waited longer, but they’d said midnight. They hadn’t reckoned on the maiden aunt.

He heard Joxer shaping up, a low growl that would soon escalate to a high pitched bark. But the mongrel must have smelt him or something, the way dogs do, the way they know it’s not the enemy. Poor bugger! He reached the dog and palmed out his offering. Enough goose fat to have him farting for days.

Sure enough the washing line was strung with laundry as they said it would be. Monday. Wash day. Prod and Teague sheets like shrouds. Strung out for half a mile along the row of council backyards.

He prised the lid off the can, watched it flip in the air, land on the mongrel and set him off yelping.

Shutters clicked. The boy crouched. Eyes panned from her watch tower. They hadn’t thought enough about Big Bessie.

He heard the whoosh of the blinds raised and the metallic rip of a window flung ajar.

“Get the hell outta there, ye fenian bastards!” she roared.

Figures sprang from the shadows. The boy and paint pot were upended and Bessie Johnson opened her back door to a green boy, a green backyard and a green dog.

Copyright with Cathy Leonard 2019

Aftermath

Another piece of flash fiction. This one was published in the Fish Anthology 2013.

For details of the Fish Competitions, courses etc see link

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AFTERMATH

I  never knew for sure what woke me. The sound of car tyres screeching towards Coalisland or the pick pock of pebbles thrown at a window? A hand gripped my chest. My own. And coexistent with the hand and the pebbles and the screech, a silence as of snow; a blanket of it thrown over the street. And through the silence and the sound of receding, spluttering exhaust pipe I sensed the presence of aftermath.

I threw back the woollen blanket and slipped my bare feet onto the vinyl floor. Foot soles arched. Pit pat towards the bedroom window, elbows cupping hunched shoulders. My finger on the venetian blind that clicked as it dipped and shaped itself into an eye.

Outside on the street someone lay slumped over the steering wheel of an Austin Cambridge; his head was bowed as if in prayer. The car horn wasn’t blaring; it should have been. Below me our next- door neighbour Wee Johnny, was stepping over his gate; not taking time to open it.

Pebbles. Tyres screeching. A figure slumped over a steering wheel. A car askew. And silence; but not the silence of snow.

I didn’t see Wee Johnny open the car door and release the body of Andrew Kirk from his bowed embrace.

When I opened the front door I saw him standing in the ragged gap in the hedge that separated our row of houses from the street, where others like me were hovering on door sills. Silence engulfed everything as we watched his arms, raised and flapping, telling us to back off.

Then someone turned up the volume and the waving arms told their story. The pebbles thrown had been gun shots. Andrew Kirk lay riddled in them. And the Troubles weren’t about to end anytime soon.

Copyright with Cathy Leonard 2016