STORY: ‘Where There’s Smoke’

When he opened his eyes he was on the floor and he could see dust under the kitchen table. Weird, he thought. Surely he’d already done this once today, when he’d been back in bed. This time, though, his body felt heavy and numb.

He tried to sit up but couldn’t. Arms, legs, neck, head – he tried them all but none of them moved. So this is what it’s like to be paralysed, he thought. And then it dawned on him: maybe he was having a stroke. The possibility was terrifying yet somehow unreal. He was only thirty-eight, after all. Perhaps if he closed his eyes he’d wake up again, in the right place.

It would be his luck, of course, to check out just when life was looking up. Gemma and the baby, still asleep, he assumed, in their rooms. His new job at the racecourse. The friends he’d made at the park. He’d cut down on the drinking, too, and almost stopped smoking. And yet he knew it wasn’t enough.

He was obsessing less about his dad – that was a new thing. The ex-navy pilot who’d flown his Cessna into a hillside, wiping out himself and a whole farming family. Pilot error was the finding by default. Fire had destroyed all the evidence.

Familiar feelings of shame welled up in him as he thought about it. One of the kids had been a boy his age. His dad himself had been only forty-two, four years older than him. And now here he was, trapped in his own wreckage.

He tried again to open his mouth but his jaw was locked shut. He tried to make out the time on the clock on the wall but his eyes wouldn’t focus. He wondered how much longer he had and if time was slowing down, as some said it did for those at death’s door. All the while a suspicion was burrowing in his brain, struggling to get to the surface. And then it burst out: this had happened to his dad. This had caused the crash.

He knew it was true. He knew, too, that he wanted it to be true, but this didn’t seem to matter: he knew it was true. And for a moment he was serenely happy to be on the floor, stiff and probably dying. Because at least he now understood.

Then he smelled the smoke and his memory of the morning came back. He’d run his daily routine – clothes, cigarette, phone. Made coffee, put bread in the toaster. The toaster. His heart slowed for a second before starting to race. The toaster, he thought joyously. That beautiful broken-down pop-up toaster that popped-up no more.

After that he simply lay and watched the clouds creep across the ceiling, just as he had once imagined seeing smoke stain a wide empty sky. This time, though, he knew the alarm would be raised, the fire would be stifled, and the truth would rise from the wreckage.

[Photo by Ryan Chia on Unsplash]