The Fall Of Light

My friend Kid in the Front Row asked for a story featuring bacon, a Jack Lemmon poster and crazy hamsters.  All right, Kid, here you go!


The smell of the bacon burning woke Jack up. The sunlight making slatted shapes on the wall was in the wrong place. Jack’s model airplanes slowly turned on the breeze from the window, flying in trapped circles with the dust motes. Even though the smell of the bacon burning was horrible, his stomach growled.

He sat up.

‘Mom?

There was no answer. Jack threw back the sheet and stood on the bed, holding his pyjamas with one hand. He walked to the end of the bed and measured the distance to the door. As always, he tried to build up his energy to explode across the dangerous space near the end of the bed where cold hands or tentacles could wrap around his ankles. He jumped and waited when he landed for the sound of his mother downstairs. The thump of his landing usually generated a shout from the kitchen. Silence.
He opened his bedroom door and looked up. He saw a hamster’s feet and belly pass over the top of his door. The hamster tubes ran all through the house. His mom didn’t know how many there were now, because they were breeding in there. In the strange silence of the house, the noise of their feet racing through the tubes was creepy. He hated the hamsters. He was old enough to know that his dad had hated them too.

He stepped out into the hall. Even though he knew they were all contained in the tubes and hutches, he still watched where he walked. Sometimes the tubes came apart at one spot or another and some of them escaped.

The smell of burning was stronger out here. He hurried down to the kitchen. The room was full of smoke. He opened the back door and turned off the cooker and went back into the hall to wait. He was standing there for a few minutes, listening to the hamsters scurrying over the walls before it came to him that his mother might be lying on the floor, sick or knocked out by the smoke.

He opened the door again. The room had cleared enough to show him the whole area. She wasn’t there but her bag and keys were on the counter. He looked out the window over the sink. The car was in the driveway where she had left it last night, one wheel on the grass. Beyond it, the tiny road led away into the trees.

She never cooked breakfast anymore, even on Sundays, not now there was just the two of them. Jack opened the fridge. There were eggs, sausages and milk. He stared at them and then at the still smoking bacon, blackened in the pan. Fear, up to now only a flicker in his stomach, blazed up and he yelled for her.

The silence was total. The shout had made the hamsters freeze. When they started moving again, it seemed like the walls were breathing.

Jack hitched his pyjamas higher and ran into every room in the house, afraid to call her, searching in silence. He approached her bedroom last and slowly. He wasn’t allowed in there unless she called him in. He put his hand on the door and pushed it in. There was a funny smell, like aftershave and rust.

The door opened onto darkness, made deeper by one slash of light falling across the tumbled bed. The cream bedspread, caught in that fall of light, was red, like a bloody wound on pale skin. Jack backed away and felt something soft under his foot. He screamed and fell against the railing of the stairs, almost missing it. He felt the empty air pull at him and clung to the rail. A hamster ran for the darkness of the bedroom.

Jack ran downstairs, his bare feet trying to trip over themselves. He went into the sitting room and leapt onto the sofa, pulling his knees up to his chin. The television was on with the sound muted, familiar images playing.

When his dad was still around, Jack used to lie awake listening to them fighting. His mom would turn up the sound of those old movies she liked but Jack always felt the vibration of the fight, even if he couldn’t hear the words. Hours of darkness passed in the company of black and white voices from the TV.

He hugged his knees tighter. His mother’s favourite looked down at him from a framed poster. Jack was named for him because The Apartment was her all time favourite movie. Jack sat there looking at the poster for a long time but no one came. There was only the silence where his mother had been and the sound of the hamsters running.