Gary McMahon

“All of us are dying,” said the thin, sweaty-faced man on the screen, his grim face staring resolutely at the camera. Even though the fellow seemed agitated, he didn’t blink. Not once.

Etchison glanced at the screen, taking in the tail-end of the rushed report. It was another commentary from some far-flung third world country, where lanky dark-skinned strangers were dropping like flies because of AIDS, malaria, typhoid, starvation, thirst…but he remained unmoved. He was used to seeing this kind of thing on the TV news.

On the dusty screen, hovering Red Cross helicopters dropped packages onto the heads of desperate children, huts burned, diseased cadavers were piled up next to deep pits in the parched earth. Etchison turned away; he was bored by the whole thing. He picked up the remote control, switched the channel to some bright and breezy Hollywood action flick where death was portrayed in a much more entertaining manner.

“All of us are dying!” screamed a blood-drenched commando, mad blue eyes slitted against the glare of expensive pyrotechnic explosions, drug-muscled body rippling beneath artfully ripped army fatigues.

Etchison turned off the television. Put down his glass; the beer had grown warm, and was leaving an unpleasant residue on his teeth. He rubbed at his greying beard, scratched his gut, and stuffed the rest of the greasy sausage sandwich into his mouth, tasting nothing. He wasn’t even hungry, but he ate it anyway. Night fell in shades outside the windows, sodium streetlights fizzing into life in an attempt to halt its progress. But the night is always stronger. It wins the battle every time. Soon, he thought, it will win the war.

It was getting dark in the house, but he didn’t want to turn on the lamp. The interior darkness was cool, comforting. Made him feel something substantially more, or less, than alone.

Etchison sat in the armchair for a long time. So long that he lost track of the passing hours.

So when the teenage boy cracked open the kitchen window with an iron tyre lever, and slipped carefully inside, he was half dozing, and barely even registered the sharp dry sound of the window frame cracking and splintering.

The boy padded softly through into the hall, his hooded top covering his face and causing shadows to cluster around his chin. The tyre iron was held loosely in his left hand; he wasn’t expecting trouble from the fat old soak who lived here. Everybody knew that the drunken idiot was always flaked out by 10pm, and it was gone three o’clock in the morning. The guy used to be some kind of famous writer, and the entire neighbourhood gossiped about the money stashed somewhere in the house.

Etchison’s eyes opened in a single rapid movement, but the rest of his body remained unnaturally still. He was like a statue there in the dark; cold, immobile and lifeless. He watched dispassionately as the boy tiptoed into the room, opened drawers and cupboards, raked through stacks of once-important papers without making any noise at all. This one was good; quiet; stealthy.

The boy didn’t even see his attacker when the blow fell; just felt a short hard jolting sensation across the side of his face. He went down in silence, dropping his clumsy tool, hands clutching at empty air like gasping mouths. Black blood flowed like spilled treacle from the deep gash in his temple.

Etchison stepped back, lowered the bayonet. It was a relic from WWI. A souvenir handed down from his great-grandfather, who had coolly prised it from the icy grip of some dead German officer on a distant French battlefield with an unpronounceable name. But it was still sharp. Still heavy. Still thirsty for violence.

He sat back down in his seat, sipped his warm beer. Stared at the blank TV screen as the boy choked and writhed and expired on the worn living room carpet.

“All of us are dying,” he whispered, and then he kissed the long blue blade, wishing that he could cry for, or even understand, what had gone away.

After a short while he stood and crossed to the scarred writing desk that stood, squat and daunting, in one corner of the room, and riffled through the dog-eared A4 pages that were stacked there. He finally found a clean sheet, picked up a pen, and sat at the desk and began to write.

The title, when it appeared on the clean, creased page, was obvious.