Flash
Tim Love

Photo Credit: Rachel Beer/Flickr (CC-by-nc)

I watch our grandson from our kitchen window. He’s not used to a long back garden like ours. He’s crawled right to the end and found a piece of wood that he’s pushing to and fro making BrrmBrrm noises.

He likes playing down there, in his own little world, winter and summer. “This was your dad’s,” I tell him, giving him a racing car I found in the loft. There’s a coiled spring inside so when he pulls it back and lets go, it surges forwards across the grass. “Wow, thanks Gran!” he says, doing it again and again. He doesn’t seem to care that he’s getting no closer to the house.

Now he’s made the car all by himself out of Lego and is pushing it through the unmown grass, screeching round daisies. When he pushes down, wheels come off. He patiently mends it and continues towards me.

But the radio-controlled jeep lurches too fast, veering wildly into the rosebushes halfway down the garden. “The controls are too sensitive,” he says. “I’ll let the batteries run down”—turning the jeep on its back and revving. His grandad would have hated the whine.

The rest happens so quickly. In no time at all he’s back in the house. “Come on, Gran,” he says, lowering me into my wheelchair. “On your marks. Get set. Go!” He tilts me, kisses the top of my head, then wheelies me out to his new car, each little bump agony though I don’t say. My case is already in the back. He lifts me onto the passenger seat, wheels the chair back into the house, locks up, and sits beside me, resting a hand on my knee. “Dad’s waiting for us there. It’s not far. Ready, then?” he asks.

I nod, not looking back at the house that has been my life, that I know I’ll never see again.

“It’s electric,” he says. “Just feel the acceleration.”

Tim Love’s publications are a poetry pamphlet Moving Parts (HappenStance) and a story collection By all means (Nine Arches Press). He lives in Cambridge, UK. His poetry and prose have appeared in Stand, Rialto, Magma, Unthology, etc. Twitter: @TimLoveWriter | Facebook | Instagram: @timlove136

Flash
Tim Love

Photo Credit: James Jordan/Flickr (CC-by-nd)

At dawn she’s still asleep beside me. She’ll be asleep for hours. Not wanting to leave her, I start YouTube on my iPhone, decide to search for “Wish You Were Here.” I didn’t realise there were so many versions—by tribute bands, street musicians, even Guns N’ Roses. I choose the original.

In my teens I taped a friend’s Pink Floyd LP. I used to listen to the recording lying on my bed, my head sandwiched between loudspeakers. I played it loud. I didn’t care about anyone else. I miss those crackles and scratches now.

I get up to stop waking her with my sobs, watch the landscape learn the language of light—first scattered specks of frost, a background murmur rising from the horizon, plains surfacing from silence as syntax chains glint to glint, a surging chorus of fields and roads leading into the past, the land brighter than the sky.

Minutes must have passed. I look back. I want to touch her to see if she’s still breathing, like I did with our firstborn. The sun cures nothing, shining like the moon. She’ll take vitamin D pills instead, stay inside, use me like the weather—something to talk about when there’s nothing left to say. I’m the rain from Blade Runner, the Teletubbies sun, the note she’ll find on the breakfast table saying “Sorry, I’ll be back.”

Tim Love’s publications are a poetry pamphlet Moving Parts (HappenStance) and a story collection By All Means (Nine Arches Press). He lives in Cambridge, UK. His prose has appeared in Cortland Review, Connotation Press, Dogzplot, Forge, Stand, Unthology, etc. He blogs at Litrefs. Email: tl136[at]cam.ac.uk

Flash
Tim Love

Photo Credit: Lorenia/Flickr (CC-by-nc-nd)

“Now your hair Jenny,” she said, glumping shampoo onto her daughter’s head.

“Do I have to?”

Her mother moulded Jenny’s hair into a cockscomb. “There, Roadrunner.”

Jenny looked at herself in the mirror. “Again!”

Her mother pulled on each side of Jenny’s head. “Two big ears. You’re Mickey Mouse now.”

“What shape did you like when you had hair?”

“Roadrunner and Mickey Mouse were all my mother could do.”

“Was she nice, your mummy?”

“Yes.”

“Look,” Jenny said, squashing her hair flat, “You!”

Tim Love’s publications are a poetry pamphlet Moving Parts (HappenStance, 2010) and a story collection By All Means (Nine Arches Press, 2012). He lives in Cambridge, UK. His poetry and prose have appeared in Stand, Rialto, Oxford Poetry, Journal of Microliterature, Short Fiction, etc. He blogs at Litrefs. Email: tl136[at]cam.ac.uk

Flash
Tim Love

Photo Credit: juicyrai

Her father used to work on battleships, said how they had more than a million parts. She showed him her iPhone, saying that it had over a million parts too.

During a punting party her mobile sinks into the river. Friends take turns to feel for it with the metal end of the pole. When they tap something hard a boy dives in, follows the pole down through the murky water and retrieves it. She shakes it out, opens it, leaves the pieces in the sun to dry. An hour later it’s fine—“it needed a clean,” she said. There’s a new message for her—from the boy, asking her out.

Later they share a flat. While he’s off at another conference, she takes his precious bicycle apart, down to the last little bolt, puts everything into a cardboard box, adds some bits from his spares to confuse him, then gift-wraps it.

Some people—and he was one of them—see metaphors everywhere. He liked the idea of probing the depths for a way to communicate with the person beside you, of reconstructing the present. He promises not to spend so much time studying alone or cycling on Sundays with his club. She feels guilty. Perhaps he was right, perhaps she’d not got over her father’s death.

And yet she doesn’t help him with the bicycle. It takes him a whole afternoon. He’s drunk by the time she returns from shopping. She doesn’t like to see him like that—nowadays he only does it to stop himself getting bored or angry.

“What do you think?” he asks. “It would have been easier with a manual but it’s good as new now. You ok?”

She unpacks the groceries.

“The club’s cycling to Broxton tomorrow. Maybe you could meet us there in the car?”

She’d cleaned each little part of his bicycle with a toothbrush.

“Follow the A14 until you see the Broxton sign,” he says. “You can’t miss it.”

Even with a map she misses it by miles; he phones, failing to get her.

Tim Love’s publications are a poetry pamphlet Moving Parts (HappenStance, 2010) and a story collection By All Means (Nine Arches Press, 2012). He lives in Cambridge, UK. His poetry and prose have appeared in Stand, Rialto, Oxford Poetry, Journal of Microliterature, Short Fiction, etc. He blogs at Litrefs. Email: tl136[at]cam.ac.uk