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Stories for Daily Flash Fiction Challenge. And DRABBLES. And other stories! |
The ducks were the first thing people noticed in town. They stood in every shop window near the sea. Rows and rows of them. Old ones, new ones, bright ones, faded ones. Some wore little cute hats. Some had small painted faces. All of them looked out onto the street with the same empty smile. Most of them were plastic. All of them colorful. Ewan McQuire upped his pace every time he passed those shops. He didn't so much hate the ducks as he hated his own reflection in the glass window panes. There was an early childhood memory of him as a kid looking at his face in a spoon. He was shocked at what the distortion of the image did to his psyche. He was never the same after that. An ugly dude, everybody agreed, and Ewan himself was no exception. He believed it, he knew it. They bullied him because of it in kindergarten, and continued in high school. For this reason, he took a job as a janitor after graduation and began a life as a hermit. In the after-hours, he cleaned buildings. Always on his own. Day in, day out. He had one friend, a relic from the past—an abandoned toy he had kept for 30 years. A ten-inch blue rubber duck. Ewan was eleven years old. The garden shed had shrieked and hollered in the blowing wind at the end of some paired overgrown lanes in the communal allotment behind his house. Two by two meters, made of old saturated wood held with big rusty spikes, some planks were missing, giving it the worn-out look of a sea wreck stranded at the shore—a big ugly pimple without a roof. Blackish-battered paint, colorless after surviving years of neglect, was grey-mottled by the cluttering of moss. The front door partially opened, with the swinging, clattering tapping of wood against the metal thumping in a senseless rhythm, conveying the secrets inside. A table with two chairs in the middle, rain, and wind pummeled, was left in a hurry by its owners. The tin coffee mugs were still on top. Two big dead rats on the grassy ground, white by decay, worms wiggling, still giving their putrid smell despite the holes in the carcass of the shed. The dark clouds in the sky enhanced the eerie atmosphere of abandonment. And then it started to pour. Thunderstrikes lit up. With gushes, the timbered structure was overtaken once more by the elements. The boy found the worn-out, blueish duck in the corner, on the ground. He nearly missed it. It stared at him, and he took it home. He named him Roland, after his grandfather. The lonely lad talked a lot to his newfound friend. About home, school, the bullying, and his fear of his own face that kept growing uglier and uglier during puberty. And one day, the duck talked back. Ewan and Roland were inseparable from then on. At age forty, Ewan still took Roland everywhere with him. Tucked inside his lunchbox, he even brought him to his work in the empty office buildings late at night, where he mopped floors and cleaned windows. There were no conversations anymore. That had stopped long ago. A silent bond between the two had replaced it. That particular night, he was working again at a slightly different location than usual. The meat shop at 205 Lane, number twenty, had seen better times. Neglected by pedestrians, hurrying towards school or home, it was located slightly off the road. The wooden plaque at the brown entrance still stated that the shop was open, showing the names of the proprietors, Mr. and Mrs. Domghali, with a phone number in case of emergency. Graffiti with hellish black and green letters, MUGCITY IS HERE, all over the glass window next to the door. Ewan could barely see through the cracked glass in the corner of the facade. Inside a room of twenty square meters, white-washed tile flooring and a cash register in the middle. There was still a display of items on the shelves on both sides. A few cardboard boxes, a greenish stuffed cast of a pig’s head with flapping ears, and many scattered newspapers gave the place an unkempt and abandoned feel. If he watched carefully at a certain angle, the animal looked him straight in the eyes. He almost could hear him shrieking in pain while the shop owner chopped off his head with a butcher’s knife, spilling red blood on the floor. But the beast was dead and forgotten, the sole caretaker of this empty shop in the middle of the town. The landlords wanted to rent again, and it was Ewan's job to clean the place really well so the restoration could start. It was almost midnight. Stormy clouds packed above the town. A slight drizzle left the sky. Ewan polished the final pane outside, working by the light of the street lamp. He shivered in his summer jacket. It was cold for the time of year. A creepy silence. Impending doom. The ducks across the street watched, magnified in the glass behind him. Then a faint quack echoed. Squeak! Squeak! Roland jumped out of the lunchbox and landed in the doorway. Ewan froze. Chills up his spine, his pupils dilated, he was breathing heavily. In the reflection, his face softened, then melted, and his appearance rearranged into a duck’s painted smile. Behind him, nothing moved. In the glass, Roland grew bigger, its beak opening up. “You wanted another face?” it whispered. Ewan turned; the shop was empty. The window was not. At dawn, passersby noticed a new duck showcased inside the shop—orange, ten inches tall, with Ewan’s frightened eyes. Its smile pulled wider, cracking softly. WC: 955 |
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