Goldfish Tears

By Curtis Ackie

A perturbed bachelor is beleaguered by his misbehaving shadow; a reclusive alchemist builds a machine to right his wife’s disfigurement; the sun forgets to rise over a sleepy town in the middle of nowhere. Equal parts haunting and outlandish, Goldfish Tears is an enchanting collection of short stories by Curtis Ackie, a young British-born author concerned with the magic of dreams as escapism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Curtis Ackie
• Release date: Mar 7, 2012
• ISBN: 9781465907400

Curtis Ackie

Curtis Ackie is a young British-born novelist, short story writer and poet, based in Zagreb, Croatia. His fiction is primarily concerned with the magic of dreams as escapism.

Book preview

GOLDFISH TEARS

Curtis Ackie

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Curtis Ackie

Smashwords Edition, License Notes.

Thank you for downloading this free eBook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form. Thank you for your support.

Books written by Curtis Ackie can be obtained either through the author’s official website:

www.poutingbear.com

or through select, online book retailers.

Table of Contents

Ordeal by Water

The Bath of Mary

A Harrowing Descent

Birthmark Like a Scar

The Colour of Nothing

Undone

Shadowplay

Oh, Blue Hag

A Dark Sky Over Poutington

Luminary Luna Dairy

The Culpable Pair

Impatience

Zerkalo (Our Saviour)

Carnival Evening

ORDEAL BY WATER

Karin wakes with a suffocating stiffness in her limbs. Her gaze travels warily from the ominous box of static, to the book which is just out of reach on the sofa; if only she could move her arms. She doesn’t remember falling asleep. In fact, now that she thinks about it, she has no idea what she was doing before she found herself like this. The book is open, but she can’t recall reading it. She strains to get a closer look, but her neck will not budge and all she can pick out is a name at the top of the nearest page: Zipporah, it stirs no remembrance.

She must have left a window open, for a rude breeze is teasing her hair and flinging it about, increasing her difficulty in assessing her milieu. Her futile attempts at moving leave her short of breath, so she folds in frustration.

She wonders if she is being held against her will, but cannot think of anyone who would want to keep her captive. The chafe of rope or bite of chains are telling in their absence; something else must be hindering her movement, perhaps it is psychological.

She has read many articles on the subject of hypochondria, but never has she heard of it inducing paralysis, and what she is experiencing doesn’t match the definition anyhow. Though only her eyes are capable of movement, she can still feel the fleecy fabric of the sofa beneath her and the uneasy wind as it molests and muddles her crown. This tactile awareness is far from helpful; Karin struggles to ignore an itch behind her left ear.

She’s helpless in the face of this torture, and the frustration is bordering on unbearable when something else captures her attention. There is cool water brushing the soles of her feet, even though she doubts someone would have broken in whilst she was asleep just to tamper with the taps.

Between her toes the water ripples, furrows and folds onto itself. She closes her eyes, the sensation is pleasant, and the sacchariferous ebb and flow prompts a recollection. Scant at first, the nostalgic sound of a rustling blanket teases her ears with its sketchy echo. As the memory expands, the water at her feet seems to swell and swelter.

As a child, she had left the city in which she lived to visit her grandmother in her village home. Holding tight to her mother’s hand, everything seemed so different to what she was used to. The first thing she noticed was how few shops there were; the only one they passed sold shovels and spades, she wasn’t aware the two were different, and had hoped to find a place where she could spend her pocket money on confectionery and books. Coupled with large areas of open space, there was also a lack of any palpable human presence; it all made her feel awfully small.

An imperious sun towered above them; she recalls the smell, clean air suffused with the turbid aroma of mud baking in the sweltering heat. She kept giving it the evil eye, longing to reach up with her childish fingers and pluck the terracotta coloured pit out of the sky.

In front of her grandmother’s redbrick home was a garden, roughly the size of her playground at school, and at its centre stood the most handsome tree, an array of ripe apricots hanging from its branches. This excited her not only because she was fond of the fruit, especially when dried, but also because it meant she’d have a place to sit and read, whilst the adults engaged in their monotonous intercourse. She’d had, at the time, a rather extensive extended family, who were all invited and would arrive shortly, but sadly none of them were her age.

The house itself was much larger than anything she had seen before, and infinitely more splendid; it looked as though it had jumped out of one of the illustrations in her books. Three storeys, each with enormous windows, and most of the brickwork was covered in ivy; she half expected Rapunzel to appear and hang her hair out of the attic window.

Wearing an apron covered in flour, and smelling of biscuits and jam, her grandmother came to greet them at the door, planting a wet kiss on Karin’s forehead.

So astounded was she by her yet to be bustling surroundings she had tiptoed about, out of a sense of reverence, afraid to disturb even the tiniest tot of dust. Her favourite place was the kitchen, strangely located in the basement. Her grandmother would pull up a chair, so she could watch her bake and lick the bowls when she was finished with them.

That night, sharing a room with her mother, she experienced darkness unfamiliar to a city dweller; a yawning darkness she feared would gobble her up. No cars whizzing past, no sirens, not even a dog barking; a cumbersome soundlessness accompanied it, all she could hear were her own thoughts and her heart thumping in her chest. She hoped her mother would make a sound, even snoring would have been welcome, just something to certify she was still alive.

By day, the room was used for dining in, and a couple of makeshift beds were made up for them, one on each side of the room. She couldn’t see them in the dark, but could imagine all the sinister looming pieces of furniture. She especially disliked the cabinet where all the good china was kept, perhaps because she wasn’t allowed near it, and in the darkness her hatred for it grew. She was sure it housed a family of spindly-legged fiends, which only came out to feed at night. A friend at school had told her that spiders liked to crawl on sleeping faces, and would very often get swallowed in the process. She shuffled down into her bedclothes to hide from the imagined minibeasts, and the hefty blanket broke the silence as she moved; the crinkle and rustle rousing the stiff air, stirring up a discomforting surge of commotion. As if the sound had woken up the furniture in the room, what followed was a chorus of creaks and groans, which frightened her so much she barely fluttered an eyelid until dawn.

That was no mere recollection; it was as though she were back there, in her grandmother’s home. Still unable to move, Karin blinks repeatedly, and attempts to blow on her nose to cure yet another itch. The water has risen, now it shivers about her knees. The static on the television has been replaced by her reflection, it obviously shorted out. The remote floating in front of it is useless now, and the breeze must have picked up, for the water has got choppy, it bubbles and churns about the room. She suspects there will be unsightly watermarks left on the walls, and once this is over she’ll have to redecorate, but that is the least of her troubles right now. Another memory balloons to the surface; the quivering and expanding derangement presently snatches her attention.

She had found it difficult to decide if the way she was feeling was on account of a string of carefully placed traps on his part, or if she was allowing her jealousy to get the better of her. Were the ghosts she was seeing a product of his lies, his vague versions of the truth? Or was there in fact a part of her longing for the prickly pain which worked its way down from her throat to the pit of her stomach, at the rattle of his words? She could see the sadness in his eyes, coupled with a withering guilty tint; pleasure has always come at a price, at the expense of another’s wellbeing. Maybe she was wrong and he wasn’t revelling in her misery, but she just couldn’t shake the thought that he gained some form of amusement or satisfaction from her discomfort.

As they stood opposite each other, at the back of the auditorium, they could feel time lose footing and slip away. The place wasn’t very well lit, it was easy enough to find a dark corner in which to hide, and aside from the three disinterested students behind the bar, nobody witnessed the devastation. What had begun as an innocent conversation fast deteriorated into something noxious to their relationship. The sticky floor made her shuffling all the more uncomfortable; she looked down at her shoes, unsure of what to say.

An awkward scrap of a moment; neither was in control. They hadn’t wanted to wound each other, at least not fatally, but there was a feeling of inevitability to it all. On stage, at the front of the vast hall, the show was still going on, but they couldn’t hear any of it; they could only lament their hastily dissolving affinity.

There are tears in her eyes, but she cannot wipe them, neither can she do anything to halt the water’s agitated ascension. She panics; it is up to her chest now, if it continues like this she’ll soon drown. Looking at her face, its expression fixed and frozen, one wouldn’t be able to discern the crushing hysteria thrashing about beneath; unable to open her mouth, she cannot scream or call out for help. She breaks out in a sweat; incapable of wiping the