All in Realistic Fiction
Who is it? was the question unspoken; the light of dawn would illuminate who was missing. But until then, only one dorm knew who owned the voice, bundled up in shadows and carried far below, where the rats gnawed on the pipes and some mysterious, terrible dish awaited.
If you went far enough down, you could actually hear the silence. That was what they said. Werrinbae didn’t think it was true at all, and no-one went deeper than him.
He was contemplating whether to risk the staff toilet, affectionately called the Toilet of Doom by everyone who had ever had to use it, and so was surprised when the door chime announced the arrival of a customer. Roscoe glanced up, and then stiffened and stared like a deer in headlights, his brain frantically grinding gears as it tried to deal with the fact that Chadwick Smithson had just walked through the door.
Cloves and cardamon and fresh grass mixed with damp loam like a symphony as they all clatter to the car - shouting over who gets front, who gets back, youngest pulls second-youngest’s hair, but he gets his seat, as he always does, despite the howling and stamping.
I don’t remember much about my dad, but what I do remember was that, no matter what, he always had some sort of work to do. He’d be on the phone or locked in his office or rushing out the door, papers under his arm and a kiss on the cheek for mum.
The sterile white walls, the pale green curtains ringing the bed, the faint smell of bleach and soap and alcohol hand sanitizer that clung to his clothes for days and lingered even longer in his mind - he hoped Sam’s dreams were full of better things.
This house holds memories, twined in the dusty sunbeams floating through sparkling windows and in the creak of its settling bones. Where to start, in this time-bound building filled with the recollections of those who have walked its halls?
Her footsteps were the only noise in the gilded corridor, the tiny sounds of her heels echoed and amplified until it became the tread of a fateful army thundering in her ears. As the grand doors swung open, she swallowed the acrid bile that rose in her throat and flashed a smile at the assembled guests.
The receptionist wears a sunny smile whatever the weather, although sometimes she must want to smack some of the people that walk in complaining. There’s a fish tank. Even the fish look bored, as if they’ve seen everything before.
Schools of memories in whirling, gleaming whorls and twisting dances scattered at her advance, flashing into darkness with bursts of light that illuminated, for the briefest of moments, their attendant thoughts until the dusky river swallowed them whole.
