Flash fiction

On the Busby David Lynch

A BLUE-TONED tape of sliding, signless country plays in the window. The road is taut and level. Sounds distilled to the edge of the subsonic – coughing, mumbling, radio-crackle, the effluent from phones and headsets – compound to a generalised humming mesh that is itself a kind of silence. Dim lights and laptop screens leach the outer dusk. The swarming air smells ghostlike.

“There. Just there. That’s the house where I grew up.”

The human visual interface, adequate to twelve consecutive images per second, slips, at this bland velocity, its hold on the surface of things. Roadside bodies shed feature and flaw and detail as ditch and sky stiffen to static parallels and glimpsed scenes of death, dropping hawks, huddled lambs, vanish in the blankness of the schema.

“I’m sorry,” you say, “I didn’t see it.”

“In the field just past. Only stones and beams now.”

“I’m sorry.”

The reflection of the old woman’s face joins yours in the glass, translucent and pale as sliced onion. The repeated face, like the landscape, is an abstract of itself, of all faces, indistinguishable the more you stare at it from what’s spread flat beyond the window so that the worlds of inside and out seem to equalise, suddenly, with a quiet pop. She leans across you, head’s thin fleece clouding the limit of your vision.

“Where are we now, I wonder?” Her voice sounds like cigarettes.

“Not too far,” you reply. “Maybe an hour to go.”

“The motorway makes a big difference.”

Whitening and dilating, disclosing in its slow approach to the glass its grid of cracks and folds, the face might be the fallen moon’s come to roll and wheeze in the next seat. Her hand finds your thigh and you lay yours, gently pressing, on top of it.

“Sit back up, now, gran. We’ll find you a cup of tea when we get there.”

“I don’t like the tea they have there.”

“We’ll get it at Sheila’s. We don’t have to be at the hospital until morning.”

Soon streetlights will appear, hedges fade, darkness harden to city-skirts, then city. Concrete sidings and buckled metal rail close up the road. When the traffic condenses and the bus slows, you tell yourself you’ll look away, see if there’s any dribble to be wiped up, or hair to be pinned back, or if her glasses have fallen off again. Your gut rings dully with hunger. She’ll need a wash before bedtime.

“I don’t like the tea they have there. At the hospital.”

You lean your cheek against the window and squeeze her hand. You try not to think of the tyres beneath the engine beneath the floor beneath your feet, and beneath all that the relentless, slick unreeling of white lines and cat’s eyes and tiny tar-clogged pebbles by the hammered million. It makes you feel uncomfortable.

The hand leaves your thigh and the finger lifts. “There. Just there. That’s the house where I grew up.”

Flash fiction will be a regular item in The Irish Times. E-mail a story of no more than 500 words to flashfiction@irishtimes.com