All stories

That night they had steak cooked by a chef who rode in from town on a snowmobile. Slick with his precise instructions, how he wanted it blue, charred on the outside, but not black, coloured as though it was seared by the flame of a campfire. Their travelling chef was called Claud. He brought with him a large chrome toolbox packed with his own knives and pots, and he had with him a tall wooden box with twin doors at the front that opened to reveal ranks of herbs and bottles of sauces.

With one eyebrow lifted, Claud said, 'You like it bleu?' and so Slick, with a sigh explained in great detail how it was an idiom, a way of describing meat served rare. And then he went and explained that rare meant it should run with blood in the middle. As the chef began to unpack his pans Slick said to Colin, 'Country boys,' but his big glass of red wine half gone made him loud. Claud's whisper soft pans now began to ring.

With Slick and Eddie gone through to their lounge diner Colin relaxed a little, trying his best warm smiles each time that Claud shot him a look. It was good to watch the skill of the man, knife blade a blur, each down stroke finished with a tap, the sound of it running together into a sharp hum. Each time the blade neared fingers Colin held his breath but each time the knife popped safely back to the start like a typewriter being moved to the next line.

He waited until the vegetables were diced before he approached, then he counted out fifty dollars Canadian, laying them down on the granite surface.

'Can I have mine not like his?'

Claud stared at him for a moment, then with a curt nod, said, 'Oui,' and scooped up the notes.

The tension was gone from the kitchen, and perhaps so should have Colin, but that meant going next door to his friends and listen to their bullshit. He could hear them, Slick and Eddie, city dentists transformed into frontiersmen after one day on the snow, Slick proclaiming he was like the mightiest oak in the forest, a tree that would never fall. Eddie then got in on the act – the next bad snowstorm back home, or if his car wouldn’t start? He could just hike it into work, it was no problem.

Colin sipped his own wine, and snorted. ‘One day,’ he said. ‘They’re out here one day and now they’re Davy Crockett.’ Colin felt a great wave of melancholy wash over him. One day with a high-powered hunting rifle and Slick had got lucky, took out a mighty ram with one fluke shot. One more heart never to beat again.

Colin asked Claud had he ever cooked ram. Or elk, or deer? Claud shook his head to each one. Claud cooked beef, sometimes salmon, but not once in six years driving his snowmobile to five different cabins a night had he cooked anything brought home by a weekend hunter.

He paused from his slicing, lay down the down the knife with its worn handle but still razor-sharp blade and looked up at Colin.

Claud said, 'If ever they bring anything back it's the head. What's good to eat from that?'

Afterwards he remembered the night only in flashes. The vibrant sparks of the red and yellow leaves carpeting the sodden ground; the acrid tang of wet asphalt in his nostrils; the tree’s shadow that fell across the road; the crash of the panic and the ghastly, stretching, endless silence that followed.

The appalling slickness of the girl’s wet skin under his fingers in the rain.

He had had a headache. It was a miserable evening after a terrible day in the office. He’d watched the streetlights flicker on and been depressed when his watch said it was only four-thirty and decided to call it a day. He’d forgotten his brolly, so had to sprint across the car park in the rain. By the time he’d climbed into the driver’s seat he was soaked.

And then the engine wouldn’t start. Come on, come on, he thought desperately, turning the key in the ignition, forcing it round. You can do this.

But it was no good. Kevin from Estates had had to come out with the jump leads and it was gone six before he managed to get away, wet, cold and thoroughly pissed off.

Traffic was dreadful, as usual, all stop-start the whole way out of the city. When he finally turned onto the Lake Road with no traffic lights, it was like stretching his wings and taking flight. He allowed himself to relax with the pull of the car, the autumn trees flashing past the window in fiery bursts like flaming torches along the roadside.

And then everything became fragmented, his memories like a jigsaw he couldn’t put back together again afterwards - he could see bits, but never the whole.

He remembered being jerked violently from his reverie by the crunch of metal on metal. Remembered something luminous flying past his window. A shout. The screech of brakes. A dull thud, then that terrible silence.

He climbed out of the car and she had just been lying there utterly still as the rain fell on her upturned face. Her bike, a crumpled scrap of metal on the ground.

For three breaths he just stood there, staring. And then he was touching her face, shaking her shoulders, shouting at her to come on, come on. You can do this. But she didn’t move.

He didn’t remember calling the ambulance, though he must have done it, or moving her bike out of the road. He didn’t remember putting his hazard lights on, or how cold he must have been in just his work shirt and trousers in all that rain.

Instead it was the tight elastic of her raincoat as he forced his fingers inside to check for a pulse that wouldn’t come that had stayed with him. The coldness of her skin under his fingers; the cold blue flash of light tearing apart the darkness and taking her away in an impossibly white blanket.

And then the silence as he was left alone in the dark again, the terrible image of her still, pale face, slick with rain flashing behind his eyes with every blink.

It’s been fifteen minutes since my heart stopped beating and they’re still pumping away at my chest. It’s the most attention they’ve paid my body in months and it’s being executed just as ineptly as anything before. I watch as my blood spreads across the ice, a slick that will need to be cleaned from whatever wildlife might stumble into it before it congeals, or freezes I suppose. I wonder if they have volunteers for this sort of thing like they do for the oily beaches.

Their breath rises into the air above us, mine does not.

Our car rests against the unyielding tree which so abruptly arrested the movement of everything except me. I’d already removed my seatbelt in hope I might expedite my exit somehow. I guess I got my wish. I remember watching as they groggily tried to reignite the engine and reverse out. I wonder how far they might have got before they realised I was no longer sitting next to them.

Their tears freeze as they splash onto the solid water beneath us. I have not cried.

Our final words had been screamed, or at least the last ones we exchanged were. They’ve snivelled a few more barely-intelligible cries as they’ve tried to beat and blow a response out of me but, since the bang, I’ve remained silent; save one long wheeze which was over before they even reached me. I don’t think I had anything more to say, anyway.

Their chest rises and falls at an unhealthy pace, in a disconcerting rhythm.

Of course, the words of the argument had been about the last glass they’d drunk before we’d started home. About how that was bad enough, without the weather, without the way the roads are. That’s not what we were fighting about though, we were fighting about the same thing we always are.

A voice drifts from their phone, which rests against my hip. Help is too late, but they don’t know it yet.

Finally, they relent their assault on my limp frame and admit what had been obvious from the start. It’ll take them a while to get their breath back after wasting so much of it on me. They lean down to kiss me. They aim first for my lips before thinking better of it, lest the blue be catching I suppose, and place their now dry mouth on my forehead instead.

As they lift away I will them not to say what I know will be infecting their mind but, as they draw air through their nose, I know it won’t be stopped.

‘You can be with her now,’ they close my eyelids with a palm. ‘She won’t be alone anymore.’

I know at least the first part isn’t true, as I feel myself fading to black.

If you follow the narrow road out of town, up past the bridge there is a beautiful old oak tree that arches over a sharp corner in the lane. The road is slick and wet with fallen leaves in the autumn. The thick branches stretch out like crooked arms waiting patiently to ensnare the oncoming vehicles. It should have fallen over years ago. But it will not fall.

Sian hates the early starts, lonelily waking in the dark, never really awake until she gets to work and has a coffee. She sprints out of the house, through the rain to the car. She turns the key but the engine splutters. It will not start at first. Now she is running late, as always.

It has taken Jake all night but he is finally packed. The last of his things rammed tight. Laura will be back in an hour and she does not want to see him still there. He is so sad and tired but he feels for the first time, in a long time, like he is free. He starts his car and heads out into the rain.

The Oak’s crooked back seems impossibly heavy in the relentless October wind. In the distance a car begins to brake as it approaches the corner. It is inevitable. The tyres slip unstoppably across the slick pool of leaves. The car dances and spins like a leaf before settling into the trees’ waiting embrace. The sound rocks through the earth, but no-one hears it.

A few minutes later the splutter of another engine approaching. The car pulls to a stop as it nears the wreckage. The first mangled vehicle is just beginning to burn. The Oak now seems to shrink into the shadows as the flames climb out and climb higher.

Sian opens her car door and runs towards the vehicle. In amongst the havoc, she sees a broken body lying across the seat. Urgently she pulls and heaves, racing the flames. All the while the branches whip around her, reluctant to release its embrace.

The body lies in the lane now. Sian bent over pressing down again and again. She is a nurse. She knows she can help. If only she had got here earlier she thinks. Now she is exhausted. Her compressions are firm and regular. But the heart will not beat.

The tree is burning now. The new dawn light choked by the smoke. The tree croaks and cries as the flames stroke its ancient skin.

Sian’s clothes are soaked. Jake lies in the thick slick mass of wet leaves. Sian’s hands are filthy. But she doesn't notice. The ambulance will be here soon she thinks. She tries not to look at his face. The soft slope of his brow. A gentle smile resting on his handsome face. She decided she would of liked him. She will like him.

She thinks she hears a siren. Maybe. But with a look she realises it is the Oak that screams. The heat and the rain create a dischord of chaos from the very heart of the arched tree. And slowly but inexorably it begins to fall.

As the earth trembles from the impact, she doesn't feel the flicker of movement. Sian turns away and cries into her aching and bloodied hands. Too late she thinks. As always.

But then a hand brushes against her leg and she turns in shock to see Jake’s smile turn to a grimace. Sian has never been so happy to see someone frown. She doesn't know it but she arrived exactly on time.