More Fantasy in the City

Raindrop

(This little short was inspired after reading Tyne  by tristam_james.  It's a lovely piece that makes me want to raise my game after reading it.  What follows is a little experiment)

Follow the rain drop.

Falling free through dark night, it is buffeted by its neighbours, conjoining liquidly, haring earthward with unrelenting valour. Watch it strike hard upon a Welsh miner's hard won slate. The caucus explodes across the surface, reforms, trickles and gathers weight, becoming globular again as it hangs swollen from the lip of the grey stone. Obese, unable to cling on, the drop falls, bursts apart once more, joins with other, similar, watery vagrants on the slate below, journeying from trickle to rivulet to tributary. The unheeding mass wends its way down the steeply sloping roof of Mr Khan's curry house to the long broken gutter that hangs at a crooked angle, tipping its load carelessly into the dim alley beneath.

By some accident of fate and physics, the drop escapes from the stream of falling water and streaks downward, orange-hued from sodium street lights, independent of its fellows trapped within their mesh of intermolecular forces.

And splashes unseen, and unremarkable, onto the greasy sleeve of Ted Evans, the nocturnal habitué of Mr Kahn's reeking bins. The water soaks instantly into the grimy fabric of Ted's acrid mackintosh, a trophy acquired long ago in another lifetime. There it filters into the mac's fibres yet achieves little in dislodging the accumulated layers of filth that cling stubbornly to the worn out Gannex.

Protruding from that sleeve like arthritic twigs, nicotine-stained fingers delve deep into the discarded detritus of the busy kitchens, seeking out the choicest scraps still drenched in their fragrant masala. Bristle-shrouded, split lips suck the cold flesh from cracked fowl bones as Ted devours the feast he has unearthed, careless of e-coli or onion skins, mindful of the few teeth he has left. The post-pub pickings of the curry house's Friday are rich and the aromas unspeakable, yet Ted cares little except for a full belly on this one night of the week.

His hunger sated, the old derelict shuffles into the darkest recesses of the rain-drenched alley, seeking the one dry spot within the deep-cut door frame at the rear of the Methodist chapel that calls Khan's its neighbour. He sits on a bundled pile of newspapers he placed there earlier, cushioned against the concrete doorstep and gazes back down the crooked passage, top-lit by a single lamp, momentarily illuminating each falling rain drop, a cosmos in finite free-fall.

There in the distance, at the end of the alley, he catches a glimpse of the world that passes him by as if in a dream. It is not his world. This plane of existence is cluttered with late night revellers passing to and fro. There it goes: jollity and brotherhood, the comfort of friends and family, boozy smiles and shared laughter, hail-fellow-well-met, sharing selfies, exchanging numbers, embraces in the shadows, sudden anger and punches thrown hard. All are as far from his understanding as a fish knows of flight.

His isolation is complete. His secrets are safe. No-one knows. No-one cares.

Content that he is alone, he draws his Precious from a frayed pocket, slick with ingrained grime. Holding it close in cupped hands, Ted peers at the glittering wonder within.

A black bubble, flecked with miniscule pale blue motes, impossibly smooth and resistant to Ted's inquisitive, probing fingers, lies on his streaked palm. He does not know what he has. It is a pretty thing, the only pretty thing in his life. It captivates. It holds his bleary gaze with its own unrelenting glare.

The bubble swells suddenly in an undulating convulsion and Ted starts back in alarm, feet slipping out into the falling rain, scattering the sludge of sodden fast food wrappers that has gathered beneath the door step. The object has grown from the size of a marble to that of a tennis ball in an instant.

Its true nature is unknown to this shambles of a man, as he crouches in the urine stench of the stained threshold, stroking the bauble. The burst of high energy radiation that it emitted when it increased in size will affect him in due course but it goes unheeded now. In fact it is likely that Ted will never truly understand what has happened, his drink befuddled mind has long given up the ghost of reason. If a doctor ever gets near him, which is unlikely, they could never hope to explain to Ted the symptoms of radiation sickness. Ted will just be sick, as he has been on many other occasions for many other reasons, and will self-medicate with Dr Smirnoff, if he can get it, or Dr Meths if he can't.

He holds in his hand a quantum divergence. A new offshoot of our own universe, snagged in some unimaginable way, branching away from it's parent's continued expansion with a separate reality, a new set of rules. Small within Ted's hand, endless within its own boundaries, it is a grain of creation. Beneath his gaze, cosmic matter coalesces. Stars form, galaxies emerge, a flash of searing light flaunts a supernova's flamboyant display. Time within the bubble careers along on a path at a rate far different than Ted experiences.

Cooing soothing platitudes to the infant universe, he is in turn calmed by the swirling sparks drifting deep within the infinite depths. There is no enlightenment on the nature of space and time for Ted among the diminutive stars, but there is solace. The companionship he once had, that he barely remembers as some kind of golden dream, is compensated for with his magic bubble. All those bright lights call him friend. He looks on with love and longing, lost in his dream, his birth children forgotten before this gaudy, new life.

In this world of falling rain and broken lives, it cannot be explained how this bubble of potentiality, a possibility of infinite dimensions, of immutable constants markedly different from the laws of Ted's own world, came to be in the possession of a man with a vodka-fueled, deteriorating grasp of reality. It just is.

Bone marrow disintegrating, blood cells breaking down, he caresses the bubble in his dark sepulchre. Weariness enveloping him with its dark shroud, Ted closes his eyes. For a moment he is confused and fearful. A mewl escapes him but the comforting weight of his wondrous, deadly treasure soothes his panic. Ted relaxes, the wash of radiation warming him to the core, his mind dull to the danger. A great lassitude fills him, then, abruptly, drains away, leaving him empty and cold. His body sags against the door at his back. Head hanging low, hearing the all encompassing sussuration of the deluge fade, Ted passes quietly into the night.

A orb of water forms at the end of one rain-soaked sleeve and oozes down a loose thread. It hangs for a moment and then drops, dotting the stained concrete with its epitaph.

The rain falls on.

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