Countdown, Short Stories

By JR Hughes

A stained carpet, a boy’s love of a cat, a dopey scientist, a treacherous river, these four new short stories from JR Hughes range from love to cats, from family life to death.
“Snow followed the atomic meltdown. Before that was the tsunami which came after the earthquake. And that was just Japan.” Will this turn of events help an ex-Rose of Tralee win the heart of a slow but genius scientist?
“Everything must have contrived to get us to the river that night.” A woman and her philosopher lover grapple with their move to a new country.
“The food was blue. Too blue. I said it out loud by mistake. Slap of a car, tore me down, left me for dead.” A boy pays a high price to be cool.
“Dad tuts to himself - not, apparently, at the splotch, but at the untimely interference of the women.” Some spilt Bordeaux makes an impression on New Year’s Eve.

• Language: English
• Publisher: JR Hughes
• Release date: Aug 29, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310925689

JR Hughes

I was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1973 to an artist mother and scientist father and currently live in a hut made of woven coconut palm leaves in India.I have a BSc in Natural Sciences and during a successful eighteen-year career in communications I wrote and edited numerous articles for award-winning websites including Science.ie, PrimaryScience.ie and TinyBuddha.com. I have also worked in business and management and in 2007 helped set up renewable energy company, Cool Power Products, with which I worked for several years until it was sold in 2012.Much of my writing inspiration comes from travel. I have spent time working and writing in Ireland, England, Spain, Germany, Australia, Hong Kong, Spain and India. In 2012 I spent three months in silence - and completely out of touch with the news and the outside world - in a lay-Buddhist retreat centre in Devon, an irreplaceable experience to have.I have since finished my first and second novels, Southpaw and Hibernia, and am continuing to focus purely on writing - in particular completing my third novel and finding a publishing deal for all three. In the meantime, to help pay the bills, I do some proofreading and article writing and sell some artwork.Like many women I seem to have permanently cold fingers and toes so in 2013 I left Ireland for the warmer shores of Ibiza, then India, where I can write without getting chilly. I now live in Goa in a one-roomed hut with one socket, two light bulbs, three cats and my graphic-designer husband.When not squinting at manuscripts I can be found running, hiking, swimming, learning a few words of the local language, painting and turning bits of coconut palms into artworks that I can sell. I'm also trained in krav-maga, the hand-to-hand combat system used by the Navy Seals and Israeli Defence Force.

Book preview

COUNTDOWN

by JR Hughes

Smashwords Edition | Copyright © JR Hughes 2014

Published July 2014

Ebook version 1.0

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CONTENTS

COPYRIGHT

1. TRIBUTARY

2. SLAP OF A COOL BLUE CAR

3. COUNTDOWN

4. SOZZLED

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

KEEP IN TOUCH

READ MORE

TRIBUTARY

Last summer. I am swimming up above the main course of the Eden river in a cold turfy brook that feeds into it with all its coppery tannins. I swim in the goosebumped vellum of my skin, swallowing water. It is cold in my throat. I grimace, lips taut against icy teeth, my tongue feeling large and hot in comparison, tasting metal and sheep and stone from upriver.

When I climb out, wet leaves stick to my legs and a small leech has fixed itself between my toes. I pick it off, leaving a smear of blood, and walk away, my flip flops pinching between my toes as I walk upriver along a path. A flip-flop comes off and the mud squeezes like pasta between my toes. Further upstream, deep down in the waterworn valley of the River Eden, there is a dead sheep. Its body flaps up and down below where I stand on the bank, most of its flesh bleached and dissolved by water. Now it is just raw and pink, coated in stinking sour skin, caught in the crook of a branch where it probably snagged by its curling horns and drowned.

Wet wool, wet bark, wet water. Black rocks, copper river.

I think back to the last week when it must have drowned. What was I doing then? Had I come this way at the time, would I have climbed down to free it, release it from that slab of cold water, grabbing handfuls of its water soaked wool until my nails broke. Thrusting my fingers down to its lanolin soft skin to drag it out to the bank. The wool that drowned it letting me save it. Would I have had enough strength?

This is the river Eden, it snakes through my garden after it tumbles down the rocks of uphill. The garden is the garden of Eden, it is not mine. Fifty feet from its banks, across my sward of green lawn is my sitting room with its french windows, and my thick sheepskin rug which I sit on in winter when it is too cold to swim. When hot showers, Ugg boots and Radox baths are the only thing. The sheepskin rug which I have made love on - a winter thing too - to the man, my philosopher, who once swam naked with me in the Eden. Until the day last winter when it overflowed its banks and whispered across the grass, making the garden its