I entered this last year. It's actually called the Sci-Fi London Challenge, and the rules are pretty simple. They give you a title and a piece of dialogue plus an optional clue and you have to write a story in 2,000 words or less (I did it in 1,947). It opens 11am Sat and closes 1pm Mon (hence 48hr flash fiction). That's London time, so in reality it's from 8pm Sat to 10pm Mon Australian Eastern time, but it can easily be written in a day if you've got the bit between your teeth, otherwise you'll probably never do it. What I mean is either something comes to you or it doesn't, and if it doesn't then you're probably wasting your time.
Title: Where the grass still grows
Mandatory dialogue: Did you deliberately set out to make as much mess as possible?
Optional cue: New psychotropic drug creates telepathy/telekinesis
Getting the dialogue in was not a problem, but the title is a bit obscure. I allude to it in a very obtuse sort of way. Don't let a bad title get in the way of a good story, is what I told myself. The optional cue gave me some ideas but I went off in a completely different direction, as I tend to do.
Like last year's entry, this is not true sci-fi, more like Twilight Zone, which is appropriate given when and where I set the story. Personally, I think it's better than my last year's entry, but it's for others to judge.
Now some may think this a bit autobiographical because I grew up in a country town in this era and I was a science nerd in high school. Also we did have an eccentric science teacher who was really good with all kids, the bright ones and the ones who struggled. There was never any after school lab experiments but he did run extra classes for the lower level kids, not the high achievers. I still think that was rather remarkable. He failed me in chemistry in my final year to get my head out of my arse and it worked. But my fictional characters are all pure fiction. In my mind, they don't resemble anyone I know in real life. Characters come into my head like melodies and lyrics come into the heads of songwriters. That's my secret. Now you know.
Short stories need a twist in the tale, and this is no exception, except I didn't know what it was until I got there. In other words, I didn't know how it was going to end, and then it surprised me.
The formatting gets messed up, especially for dialogue, but I make the best of a bad situation. The submission manuscript is double-line spaced and it has proper formatting, with paragraph indentation, like you'd find in a novel. Below is my entry.
Davey lived alone with his mum, Irene to her friends; he had no memory of his father and he had no siblings. His mother never remarried. The favourite topic amongst his school friends was who was best: Elvis or the Beatles?
His best friend at school was Kevin; they were in Form 10. He secretly liked Penny, a girl in the year behind him, and on the rare occasions he had spoken to her, she was nice, but deliberately ignored him when her friends were around, so he avoided her.
His favourite class was science. The teacher, Mr Robotham, always wore a white lab coat that was stained by experiments gone awry or possibly not; no one asked. He was thin and hawk nosed but was friendly and helpful, both to kids who were bright and kids who struggled.
Mr Robotham liked Davey, who was always asking extra-curricula questions, and he even lent him books, providing he told no one else. Mr Robotham sometimes allowed Davey to stay back after school and perform experiments, which he did most weeks, usually Wednesdays when everyone else was playing sport, and occasionally Kevin would join him.
On this occasion, Davey had assembled a massive apparatus, of tubes, beakers, flasks with stoppers and spaghetti-like hoses joining everything together. When he believed he had everything in order, he put one of the flasks, full of a yellowy liquid, on top of a Bunsen burner and started heating it up.
Kevin looked a bit worried, ‘Do you know what you’re doing?’
‘Of course I do.’
‘So what are you making?’
He looked at Kevin with a wicked grin, ‘Let’s find out.’
Kevin watched the liquid boil and stepped back, while Davey put on a pair of safety glasses and watched to see if the liquid went up the tube as he hoped. Mr Robotham always made them wear safety glasses, no matter what they were doing in the lab, so it became second-nature.
Bang! The stopper in the flask went straight up and hit the ceiling and Davey found himself covered in the liquid.
‘Shit’, Kevin said.
Davey looked at his friend, whose eyes seemed to want to depart their sockets, and then down at his clothes covered in yellow goo. ‘Mum’s not going to be happy.’
Kevin couldn’t believe him. ‘Your Mum? Shit, what about Mr Robotham.’
‘I reckon he won’t be too happy either.’
As if to confirm his second-worst fears, Robotham came running into the lab. He must have heard the noise, Davey thought.
Robotham looked at Davey and put his hands on his shoulders, half-kneeling, ‘Are you alright?’
‘I’m fine. Sorry,’ he said in a small voice; he really wasn’t sure how Mr Robotham was going to react.
Robotham looked around at the aftermath, ‘Did you deliberately set out to make as much mess as possible?’
Davey looked up to him, ‘I’ll clean it up, Sir.’
But Mr Robotham surprised him, ‘No, you go home. Your mother is going to be so angry with me.’
Davey didn’t understand, ‘Why?’
‘Just go home,’ he looked at Kevin, who had been trying his best invisibility impersonation, ‘Both of you, before I change my mind.’
When he got home, his mother was so angry she didn’t say anything at first. But when she found her voice he surprised her, ‘My God, wait till I see Mr Robotham.’
‘It wasn’t his fault.’
‘Wasn’t it now? You go and run a bath. These clothes may be ruined for good.’
They ate their tea in silence and he wasn’t allowed to watch TV, so he went to bed in his room at the back of the house, next to hers. He found it hard to go to sleep.
At some point he woke up and found himself hovering above his bed; his sleeping form, on its back, below him. He could actually see himself breathing, yet he didn’t find it disconcerting; he found he was perfectly calm and he wondered if he had died.
Stranger still, he found he could move simply by will and he could travel through the wall into his mother’s room. He thought, I must be dreaming, so he wondered, in his scientifically minded way, if there was some way he could test that. He lowered himself towards the floor and looked at his mother’s alarm clock; the illuminated hands showed it was 20 past midnight. He thought of trying to wake his mother, but realised it would only scare her, so he went back through the wall to his own body and got very close to his face. He could see everything, all his pimples and the downy moustache that he hadn’t shaved when he’d had his bath. He could see his shoes on the floor, his cupboard; it didn’t feel like a dream, but he didn’t know what to do. Would he be able to return to his body? The idea of entering it by conscious will somehow seemed the wrong thing to do. He felt like he had a ghostly astral body, though he couldn’t see it, so he touched his own hand with the sense of his astral hand. His body shivered and his breathing stuttered and he realised that it was completely the wrong thing to do.
For the first time, he actually felt scared. What if I can’t return? He went back to his mother’s room and noticed that the clock now said 27 past so it seemed to confirm for him that it wasn’t a dream.
He wondered how far he could travel, so he literally went through the roof of his house and looked up to the stars above and down to the tree near their back fence. His mother had a vegetable garden and even some chooks in a yard, and he could see the back veranda and the backyard where the grass still grew. He entered the chook yard and some of them on their roosts seemed to wake as if they knew he was there but otherwise remained inert.
The stars were especially bright and he noticed that he could see everything in shades but more delineated than he would normally. He noticed that he didn’t feel the cold or the air on his astral body and it occurred to him, that since he could go through walls he must be existing in another dimension. He would normally be able to smell the dew on the grass but he couldn’t. He realised that his only sense was sight for some reason. He couldn’t even hear anything. Again, his scientific mind came to his aid. He thought, I can interact with radiation but not with matter. He knew from his science classes that matter and light interacted but were quite different. One was made of atoms and the other was made of waves. Perhaps that’s what he was now: some astral waveform.
He travelled around above the town like he was some sort of night bird or a superhero. Some superhero, he thought, I can’t even touch anything.
He couldn’t resist the urge to visit the house of his friend, Kevin. He wondered if this ghostly manifestation was a consequence of his botched experiment and if so, did it affect Kevin? He entered Kevin’s house and observed all the appurtenances that he was familiar with: the kitchen table and chairs, the canisters on the shelf, the old white stove, matching fridge and stainless steel sink under the window with floral themed curtains.
It felt wrong to enter Kevin’s parents’ bedroom, but he had little compunction about visiting his friend’s. And there he was fast asleep, with his mouth open and Davey thought he was probably snoring only he couldn’t hear it.
He felt confident that Kevin wasn’t suffering the same disembodied state that he was, and rose back through the roof to survey the town. He now felt the urge to visit Penny’s house, even though it seemed wrong. On the other hand, he wanted her to be his friend and he told himself that she wouldn’t mind. He asked himself, Would I be able to tell her about it later? And he decided he could.
When he entered her bedroom she was sleeping on her side and he felt she looked so peaceful; he was glad he couldn’t wake her even if he wanted to. But it still felt awkward so he didn’t stay. Because it was a country town there was little movement and virtually no traffic until he saw the baker and the milkman getting ready to work. He knew then that dawn wouldn’t be that far off and he decided he needed to go home.
In the morning he had to watch with increasing anxiety as his mother tried to wake him and then become distraught. She called an ambulance and he followed his body to the hospital where he was attached to various machines and doctors and nurses came and examined him. All the while his mother went through moods of stoic patience, angry berating of medical staff and occasionally going to a toilet cubicle where she could cry without anyone seeing her.
Davey, in his extra-dimensional state, didn’t know what to do but wished he could just return to his body and bring everything back to normal. Later in the day his friend Kevin turned up and so did Mr Robotham, but his mother gave him a verbal barrage that Davey could only imagine the content, although he did lip-read some choice words that she usually only reserved for newsreaders on the TV. Robotham thought it best to leave, though he was obviously very upset. Davey wished he could tell them both that it wasn’t their fault. He felt unbelievably guilty for all the anguish he had caused, even though he had no idea how he had done it and wished, beyond everything else, he could restore the balance.
Very late in the day, probably after school, he was surprised to see Penny arrive and he was even more surprised to see her cry. She said something to him which he couldn’t make out, but he was deeply moved. She left some flowers behind, with a card. On it, he read: Dear Davey, Please get well. You are a special friend. All my love, Penny.
Davey followed her out of the hospital and wished above everything else he could communicate with her. When he came up behind her, she seemed to turn her head as if she knew he was there, but kept walking, and he didn’t follow.
His mother stayed and refused to go home. The nurses brought her food in the evening, and when she laid down on seats in the waiting area, one of them put a blanket over her. Davey felt so sad and he went into the room where his body was, all hooked up to the machines, and decided it best to stay with it.
In the morning, Davey woke up to find himself in a hospital bed. Nurses and doctors came running when the machines told them he was awake and his mother came in, her face covered in tears.
He looked at his mother, ‘What’s wrong?’
She came up to the bed and hugged him and sobbed like there was no tomorrow. When she released him she said, ‘Oh Davey, you had us all so worried. We didn’t know what happened to you.’
Davey couldn’t remember anything from when he went to bed in his own house, which was, unbeknownst to him, two nights ago.
Back at school everyone treated him differently. He never did extra-curricular lab experiments again. And Penny suddenly became his newest best friend.
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