On Monday mornings, I send out a story via email: ultra-brief tales of 1,000 words or more, usually in genres including horror, science fiction, and the supernatural. Those stories collectively are called Once Upon A Time. I’d love to have you as a subscriber to the weekly free story. You can subscribe via email here. Unsubscribe any time, from the link in every issue.

You can also get the entire collection of stories as a set of epub files for your favourite reader device: an overall collection, and also genre-specific volumes!

Here's story 269, of 288 so far.

Please note: permission is expressly denied to input any part of the story below into a machine learning (ML) or artificial intelligence (AI) or Large Language Model (LLM) system in any form.

Donkey

Everyone in the neighbourhood avoids the boy in the wheelchair.

If it’s clear weather, he’s outside for most of the day, wheeling himself up and down the shabby street, back and forth, following the patches of whatever meagre sunlight reaches the ground. The chair rattles when it goes over the kerb and its wheels squeak from time to time, and the bus drivers have learned to watch out for him, because he doesn’t do the same for them.

He’s from one of the run-down houses at the far end; from a “bad family”. You don’t associate with that sort by choice. The kind who are known to the police, and known to social services, and known to the local drug dealers. The ones who arrive at the local drinking hole and then the place mysteriously becomes half-empty, like in the old westerns. And the boy was very much the type to darken the doors of a saloon.

Most people in the town have a vague recollection of seeing the story in the local newspaper about the night he took too much of something, or more than one kind of something, and then collapsed. Up until then he was just another of the thugs-in-training, getting drunk on street corners in the afternoons, ripping the wing-mirrors off parked cars, and screaming semi-coherent abuse at anyone who happened to be passing. His exquisitely awful laugh had earned him the nickname Donkey, which he accepted with a mean-spirited, mindless pride. He relished the instinctive fear that his braying inspired in the younger children and senior citizens of the community as he swaggered by. All of that behaviour came to an abrupt halt after he hit the ground.

An ambulance took him to hospital, and another one brought him home again two weeks later, paralysed from the waist down, slack and drooling on the left side of his mouth, and blind in his left eye. The day he came home was just three days before his 14th birthday. His mother was seen in the pub the same evening, drunk and belligerent, threatening violence on various bystanders, as if anyone was truly to blame except herself and perhaps the boy’s biological father who had never even met him. It was the very next day that the boy’s ritual patrolling began, always alone, and as regular as clockwork.

Since then, his only conversational gambit has been a shrill cackling and a slurred exclamation that “You’re an ugly one! An UGLY one!” to anyone who comes too close to his mobile metal perch. Those who get near enough to look at him find themselves the subject of an unsettlingly intense scrutiny, and then they quickly move away, the hair on the backs of their necks standing on end. And if they glance back, as animals are wont to do when assessing whether they’ve escaped, they’ll find him still staring, with a maddening and lop-sided grin that they will struggle ever to forget.

The other kids of his age, once his comrades in arms and his feral lieutenants, will cross the street to go around him now. He’s creepy, they say, and the adults privately agree, though they of course preach inclusion and sympathy. But they can see the strange light in his one functional eye. How he looks at them with the keen focus but detached enthusiasm of an entomologist, or perhaps a serial killer.

To encounter him during the hours of darkness, which happens frequently enough, is a matter of dread for all of the younger children who live nearby. The street itself has become almost shunned, with those who do not absolutely have to go there finding themselves making detours. At least one street over, on either side, and they unconsciously lighten their footfalls at the junctions, always listening for the rattle and the squeak. More than one child has wakened its mother, tearful and shuddering, at the sound coming in through the window. And if the mothers in question go to the curtains to look furtively out, they might see the boy in the chair out there, in the shadows between two lamp posts, peering back up at them.

The boy is insane, of course.

The fact would not be news to anyone in the town, certainly not to the police, or his immediate neighbours, and least of all to his mother who spends much more time drunk than sober now. She rarely sees him, and she’s glad of it, and for his own part the boy doesn’t miss her at all.

The accident took away his motor control of the lower half of his body, but that seemingly-dead eye can see through time. He knows the manner of each person’s death; the how and the where and the when. He knows the who and the why, too, when those are the circumstances. He sees it immediately, as soon as he casts his good eye upon any living being.

His mother will immolate herself accidentally with a cigarette and a skinful of cheap vodka, in less than a year. The little girl across the street will be taken straight from the school playground, and it will be two decades before her remains are located and identified. The postman’s heart doesn’t work propely, and he won’t discover that until he tries to lift his suitcase from the baggage carousel in a foreign airport next summer.

But Donkey also knows the nature of the final end of this entire world, and he watches it happen every hour of every day, in an endless private screening which he can never pause or stop. It’s there in front of him, like an overlay, visible to the twitch of perspective brought about by closing one eye and opening the other.

He’ll be glad to be hit by the supermarket delivery van four months from now, driven by the man who will not live past his thirtieth birthday, because then at least the future will once again be hidden and silent.

JINX

KESTREL face a new and terrifying enemy: an all-seeing mastermind who already knows exactly who they are, and many of their deepest secrets. Nothing stays hidden forever, and the line between privacy and liberty is razor-thin…

Book 3 in the KESTREL action-thriller series.

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