Fionn MacKillop
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Stories (3)
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A knock at the door
A knock at the door, possibly. Not really a frank, unambiguous knock per se, more like a rap or even a scratching sound. Almost as if one of the bare, spindly tree branches you can see through the window had slowly clawed the plastic screen door. A strange sound really, come to think of it, and you are not expecting anyone. You rarely are, to be honest. To the point where switching into social mode, the give and take of greetings, half smiles and other required acting feels rustier and rustier.
By Fionn MacKillop5 years ago in Fiction
Dog poo bag
‘The bloody bastards did it again!’. It was bin day in the neighbourhood, and I walked over to the curb to collect my yellow (recycling) and blue (general waste) bins. It was late in the morning, the bin collection having occurred, as per usual, around 7.30 AM—I knew from the sound of the big, lumbering waste collection trucks that barrelled down the too-narrow, sleepy suburban streets, dodging cars parked on both sides, doing their usual halting shuffle of stop-start-extend-weird-mechanical-arm-thingy to grab bins, up and down the streets for the better part of the day.
By Fionn MacKillop5 years ago in Criminal
Mistreatment
The treatment was helping to smooth things out. Definitely. Since managing to snag the job at the Centre, JP had been taking the fine, powdery compound daily in order to prevent the ‘mishaps’ (his mother’s words) that had him in and out of Corrections on a regular basis. Everything was OK now, he said to himself, like a mantra, as he felt the tightening and warmth in his chest, the hard, nodular jaw muscles, and the sensation of choking in his throat. Anxiety, as he had eventually learned to name the ponderous, suffocating, yet confusingly fleeting creature. ‘It’s not the anxiety itself, it’s the way you think about it’—JP’s therapist, Mx Stakowicz, was nothing if not diligent about getting their points through, even if they sounded a bit like Therapy for Dummies. That was the problem with being smarter than most people, smarter than yourself, really. How did you trick the mind into believing it was OK? It was relatively easy to do with most people, since they were generally absorbed in their own reverie, and mostly just pretended to listen (yes, even paid therapists; maybe particularly the latter, actually, so jaded had they become, and so used to thinking in categories rather than relating to individuals). And most other people were just stupid, or generally unworthy of being interacted with. It made one question the guiding principles, and principals, of the Great Rebirth Plan promoted on every social media, wearable and legacy support (even the oh-so-precious and rare paper!) that could be mustered by the Board.
By Fionn MacKillop5 years ago in Fiction
