The Happiest Day(When the Storm Forgot Your Name)

     They said it would come quietly.

Not with trumpets. Not with forgiveness. Not with answers neatly folded into the corners of your life.

Just a thinning of the noise.

The storms didn’t end all at once.

They receded. Like something embarrassed to have been seen.

The sea was breathing again—slow, deliberate, ancient.

Each wave touched the shore as if it had something to confess, then thought better of it.

You stood there, not triumphant, not healed, just… still.

It was almost silent.

The kind of silence that makes you aware of your own edges.

The kind that asks: what are you, now that everything has been taken or left behind?

You thought about walking into the water.

Not dramatically. Not as an ending.

Just… slipping in. Letting the cold take the heat from your thoughts.

Swimming toward that dull, sinking sun like it might explain something.

But something inside you, older than your grief said no.

Not yet.

Keep going.

The best is still waiting 

And for once, you listened.

Your father is dead. 

Oh. 

It sits there, blunt, immovable. No poetry in it.

Your mother is somewhere, nowhere, dissolved absent..

A ghost without a haunting.

The children are gone. Not lost, not taken, jusy gone forward.

They’ve outgrown the gravity of you.

And him..

Ravaged by the crab.

That quiet, devouring thing that eats from the inside and leaves behind a stranger wearing unfamiliar skin.

Where he is now, no one says.

Maybe no one knows.

Maybe it doesn’t matter anymore.

You push yourself up from the sand.

It clings to you, fine, invasive—sticking to the salt-dried tracks on your face.

Tears have their own residue. 

You brush yourself off, but not completely.

Some of it stays. It always does.

The walk back feels longer than it should.

Or maybe you’re just noticing it now.

The house waits like it always has.

Unimpressed. Unchanged. Watching.

Something moves.

Not physically. Not visibly.

But you feel it.

A shift.

A breeze that doesn’t belong to the open doors or the sea air.

It passes through you, not around you.

You stop.

Because you know.

Not logically. Not provably.

But with the same certainty that told you not to walk into the water.

This is it.

The wind of change doesn’t ask permission.

It doesn’t explain itself.

It just arrives.

And then..

Sleep.

Deep. Undisturbed. The kind you haven’t known in years. No dreams. Or maybe too many to remember. The doors are open. The sea breathes into the room.

You don’t care.

For the first time, you don’t guard yourself.

He finds you like that.

Of course he does.

Not through the door. Not like a man should.

He’s just… there.

Solid, but not right.

Familiar, but fractured.

He laughs, raw like no time has passed.

Like nothing ever broke.

“Hey you,” he says, slipping into your space, into your body’s memory, an arm around your neck, playful, careless, claiming something that doesn’t belong to him anymore.

“I didn’t see you for ages. Come, come with me. I want to show you my paintings.”

And you go.

Because part of you always goes.

The paintings are wrong.

Not amateur. Not meaningless.

Worse than that.

They mean too much.

Figures split open from the inside.

Faces layered over faces, screaming without mouths.

Limbs where limbs shouldn’t be.

Eyes that follow, not with intention, but with accusation.

It’s the kind of work that doesn’t ask to be understood.

It infects.

Belle Vue. The farm. 

You think of it without wanting to.

Those corridors. That quiet institutional rot.

The minds that didn’t break cleanly.

“How?” you ask, though maybe not out loud.

“How did you get this far like this?”

He shrugs. Or smiles. Or glitches between the two.

“How did no one see it?” you press.

But you already know the answer.

They did.

They always do.

They just name it something softer. Something manageable. Something polite.

Your brother, but...

Locked away.

Categorised.

Contained.

A problem with a file.

And you?

You hover just outside the lines.

Functional enough to pass.

Fractured enough to recognise what you’re seeing.

“I know,” you say.

Or think.

Or feel.

And he looks at you, not surprised, not offended.

Just… equal. Just knowing. 

Because here..

On this thin layer between sleep and whatever comes after..

There are no diagnoses.

No histories.

No roles to perform.

Only this:

You.

Him.

All of it, stripped down to its raw, unlabelled state.

And somewhere, faint but persistent, in the distance..

That same voice.

The one from the shoreline.

The one that told you to keep going.

You’ll be alright.

Not because anything has been fixed.

Not because anyone has been found.

Not because the past has released you.

But because something in you has stopped waiting for permission to exist beyond it.

Tiny Fair—

You feel it too, don’t you?

On the Astral plane,

we are all equal.

The Weight of Sunlight

 

     They didn’t walk him out with dignity. There was no ceremony to it, no quiet closing of a chapter. Jimmy Senior was pulled forward by his wrists, the metal biting deeper each time he stumbled. The officers—silent, indifferent—held him not as a man, but as a thing that needed moving.

The sunlight hit him like punishment.

It wasn’t warmth. It was exposure. It was accusation.

He squinted, sweat forming instantly along his brow as the heat wrapped around him, thick and suffocating. The island had once felt like paradise—soft winds, endless blue—but now it pressed in on him, watching, remembering.

The van waited.

Rust clung to its edges like disease. The doors opened with a tired groan, and he was shoved forward, his footing gone, his body folding awkwardly as he hit the wooden bench inside. His skull cracked against the metal siding with a dull, hollow sound. No one reacted.

Three men already sat there. They didn’t look at him.

They didn’t need to.

The doors slammed. Darkness swallowed them.

Then motion.

The van lurched forward like it resented the effort. Every pothole, every jagged rise in the broken road translated directly into bone and nerve. Jimmy’s wrists screamed against the chain above him, his arms dragged upward, his shoulders burning as he fought the instinct to collapse.

The others swayed with the rhythm of it, practiced, resigned.

Jimmy was not.

Each impact snapped his head sideways. Each jolt rattled something loose inside him—not guilt, not regret… something closer to irritation. Discomfort. Inconvenience.

Eighteen months, he reminded himself.

Just eighteen months.

The prison rose out of the heat like something already dead.

Stone crumbled from its edges. The walls sweated. It had not been built for this—he could feel it immediately. A place repurposed, not reformed. A military skeleton forced to house rot.

Inside, the noise never stopped.

Men shouted, screamed, muttered. Some laughed in ways that didn’t belong to laughter. Others cried openly, their voices thin and worn, as if they had been crying long before they arrived.

The smell—

It hit harder than the heat.

Human waste. Rotting food. Damp stone. Unwashed bodies pressed too close for too long. It clung to the throat, coated the tongue. Even breathing felt like participation in something degrading.

His cell was waiting.

Four men. Four mats. Metal frames so old they groaned under even the suggestion of weight. A wooden bucket in the corner, already half-full, already alive with flies.

Jimmy paused only briefly before stepping inside.

It could be worse.

He let that thought settle. Let it anchor him.

Because it could.

There were men here who would never leave. Men whose names had already dissolved into the walls. Men who had been swallowed whole by this place and digested slowly, over years.

He wasn’t one of them.

Eighteen months.

He sat, the frame bending beneath him, and let his mind drift—not to the present, not to the heat or the noise or the stench—but back.

To the bay.

To the quiet.

To her.

Pauline had looked different in the moonlight. Softer. The sharpness of her edges blurred by silver light and shadow. She had smiled easily that night, her voice playful, her movements careless.

An invitation, he had thought.

Or something close enough.

The road had been empty. The sea patient. The world paused just long enough for something to happen.

He remembered the cigarettes. The way the smoke curled upward between them, slow and deliberate. The way she had turned to leave without hesitation.

That was the moment.

Not the rock. Not the blood.

The refusal.

Everything after that had been correction.

The sound of it—the first strike—had surprised even him. Not loud, not dramatic. Just a dull, final kind of impact. But she didn’t stop. Not immediately.

So he continued. Without hesitation.  

He rifled her handbag tipping out the contents onto the long dried grass, just a few dollar bills, some change and a lipstick, the photo caught his eye (...) Oh yes, she'd mentioned leaving her two year old daughter with her mother that evening. How pretty she was, just like her mother..

He had no choice but to silence her, if he were to be uncovered for what he really was, his life would be over.

He had to finish it.

Because you had to, once you started.

Now, sitting in the suffocating heat of the cell, he could still see it clearly. The stillness afterward. The way the water accepted her without question. The way the stars reflected around her as if nothing had changed.

He exhaled slowly.

No panic. No remorse.

Only memory.

And beneath it—

Relief.

Eighteen months.

He smiled faintly to himself, ignoring the man muttering in the corner, ignoring the drip of something unseen running down the wall.

When it was over, he would leave this place behind. The island. The prison. All of it. He would return home, step back into a life that still had space for him.

His wife would listen.

They always did.

Outside, somewhere deep within the prison walls, a man began to scream. Not loudly, not wildly—but steadily. A continuous, breaking sound, like something being worn down rather than torn apart.

Jimmy lay back on the thin mattress, staring up at the stained ceiling.

The scream didn’t stop.

It simply became part of the air.

And eventually—

He stopped hearing it.

Only You

 The Mask Wouldn’t Come Off

That was horrible. Completely, utterly horrible.

I told you I was going to the town hall—to pay the bills, to keep something ordinary intact—but even then there was a fracture, a hairline crack running through everything we said. You told me you’d meet me after. You always said you would meet me after. As if after was a place we could still reach.

I was with him—the man in the marine officer’s uniform. You never liked that. Or maybe you imagined it into something else. I asked him to leave the house. I did. Because I could already feel it then, the way you were slipping away from me—not physically, but inwardly, retreating behind something harder, colder. There were jealousies where there didn’t need to be. Doubts that grew teeth. Mistrust that fed on nothing at all.

It wasn’t necessary.

My heart hadn’t changed. That’s the part that won’t settle in me. It stayed the same while everything else twisted out of shape.

You put on that mask—the impenetrable one. Iron. Not metaphorically. Not figuratively. It was iron. I could feel it when I tried to reach you, cold and unyielding, bolted into place. There was no seam, no weakness, no way in.

But we tried.

God, we tried.

He cried incessantly, a sound that didn’t belong to any one person, just grief made audible. And you—you were screaming, not words, just noise, raw and tearing at the air. Between the crying and the screaming, I thought something might give. That the pressure would crack the mask, that the locks would loosen.

But they didn’t.

We couldn’t remove it. Not the iron. Not the locks. Not the distance.

So I left.

I walked down the hill under a sky that couldn’t decide what it wanted to be—heavy, grey, unmoving. The wind cut through me, sharp and indifferent, and I remember thinking I should have worn something else. Something warmer. Something wiser. But I was only seventeen, and at seventeen you dress for the moment, not the aftermath.

I didn’t know any better.

I needed someone to care for me. That much I understood, even then. A need so simple it should have been easy to answer. But it couldn’t be you anymore. Not with the mask. Not with the screaming. Not with everything you refused to take off, to lay down, to let go.

So it had to be him.

But he wouldn’t stop crying.

And then you came back into it—like a storm that refuses to pass. You spoiled it all. You ruined everything, not with violence, not even with anger, but with that quiet, unapologetic certainty.

You said you loved me.

And I couldn’t allow that.

Because love, from you, didn’t come without the mask. It didn’t come without the locks. It didn’t come without suffocation.

So I returned to the house.

Or what was left of it.

The walls had fallen down—not broken, not shattered, just… gone, as if they’d given up holding anything together. There were no lights. No shadows even, just absence. The people had left, their voices still echoing faintly, like something remembered badly. The music had stopped mid-note, leaving a silence that felt staged, deliberate.

And the party—

the party was over.

Not gradually. Not gently.

Over.

The Inheritance of Shadows

     Hey Tiny Fair! New information just in, and it doesn’t sound good! 

It never does, does it?  It's all like a leaking diaper. 

Dr Jimmy’s father, Jimmy Snr, he was arrested a few years back for impersonating a Doctor, yes a Doctor, inside the hospital, white coat, stethoscope, the full performance, but not for prestige, not for ego, looks like it was for access, narcotics, controlled drugs basically. 

When they caught him it wasn’t just what he had on him, phials, substances, scalpels and hypodermic syringes,  it was what sat waiting outside, a sawn off shotgun, cable ties, a hunting knife, not impulse, not panic, but preparation, intention. Like what the hell? Five years, that’s what he got, five years for something that doesn’t sit neatly inside a sentence. What was the motive? What did he need the stolen stuff for?

Abd Frency, prison doesn’t erase men like that, it doesn't rehabilitate them,  it sharpens them, distills what’s already there. But yes, why did he need the tools? To get rid of his wife is my guess.

So, he gets out of jail, he moves, new place, same man, and then, the body in the Bay. He was less than a minute away from the victim!

A woman, known to him?

Yes! Not random, not chance, she’d been in his home, late night drinks, his wife away, her husband busy at the office... a quiet setting, familiar, almost too familiar, and the next morning? He asks the maid to check for blonde hairs on the furniture.

Not worry.

Not regret.

Erasure. There was a plan, a plot..

He didn’t get her upstairs in his house, well maybe, maybe not, but proximity is enough, familiarity opens doors, no need to break them down.

Then the bar, the last sighting. They were laughing, enjoying the convivial atmosphere.

But now he’s spiralling, he's thrown out by his wife, his constant lies, the unpredictable violence  he can no longer keep contained, he’s in a cheap hotel across from the Bay, weekly rates, no questions asked, people come and go, no one looks twice. People of no discernable character.. Just blank faces to a tired and jaded receptionist who's seen it all before.

One minute from the bar. The hotel.

One minute.

No car, the wife had claimed that, but he didn’t need one, he had the motorbike, red, sparkling clean, visible yet unseen, he knew where she lived, the victim,  knew her movements, knew enough.

Did he lie in wait? 

The attack says something, not clean, not quick, a rock, her face, repeated, personal, excessive, belongings scattered, looks like chaos, looks like theft, but feels wrong, staged, like an afterthought.

She’s found floating, face up, as if even the water wouldn’t hide what had happened,  but something doesn't sit right with me. It's the hand bag. It's her profession (...)

Which was what?

She was a journalist for the Evening Sentinel,  she would have covered the daily court sessions.

But a bit extreme? To kill someone to stop your name appearing in the local rag? Unless there was something else going on.. 

And him? Now in jail for something completely unrelated?

In jail.

Theft, fraud, a chop shop running quietly, eighteen months, just enough, just enough to sit behind a wall when the questions start.

Not a suspect.

Not even considered.

Convenient.

Another man dies in prison, claiming innocence to the end, a neat ending for someone, whether it fits or not.

So now the question, the one that doesn’t go away,

Do the sins of the father run through the son?

Because Dr Jimmy didn’t come from nowhere, none of us do, he watched, he learned, not just blood, behaviour, patterns, quiet lessons in the background.

What did he see?

A man who could become someone else.

A man who wore authority like clothing.

A man who cleaned up, removed traces, avoided consequence.

A man who was never truly caught for the worst thing he may have done.

That doesn’t disappear.

It stays.

It teaches.

So when you look at Dr Jimmy, really look,

Is he creating something new?

Or finishing something that was already in motion?

—End—

But it isn't,  is it?

The Blue Gate

     She looked at me that day as though the world had just begun.

She was younger then—of course she was—light seemed to gather around her without effort. The sun found her eyes first, pale blue and almost translucent, before settling into the soft strands of her blonde hair. It wasn’t just beauty, though that would have been enough for most. It was promise. The kind you only recognise properly once it’s gone.

He stood beside her, equally striking in his own way. Confident, assured, carrying the quiet arrogance of someone who believes life will bend to his will. I remember thinking I understood it instantly—the pull between them. It wasn’t reckless, not then. It felt inevitable. Like gravity.

You could almost forgive him for leaving everything behind.

A family traded for a dream. A known life for an imagined one. A distant land waiting like a blank canvas.

And for a while, perhaps, it worked.

You can picture it—their early days. Sunlight spilling across open land, laughter echoing through rooms not yet filled with silence. Wine shared for pleasure, not necessity. The blue-painted gateway standing proudly at the edge of it all, less a boundary and more a beginning. They must have believed they had stepped into something permanent.

But permanence is a fragile illusion. Nothing is permanent. 

Now the years have settled heavily on them both. The light has changed. It always does. What was once lush and green has thinned, dried out, the soil cracked beneath the weight of time and unspoken things. The air feels different there—thicker, harder to breathe.

They drink more now.

Not together, not really. The same bottles, perhaps, but for different reasons. She drinks to soften the sharp edges of what never came—the absence that echoes louder with each passing year. No child. No small voice filling the spaces. Just a quiet that presses in from all sides.

He drinks too, though his reasons are less clear. Maybe regret. Maybe habit. Maybe because silence demands to be filled somehow.

He has laughter still, but it doesn’t belong to this place. It comes from elsewhere—from  grandchildren he did not build this life with. A reminder that something grew, just not here.

That’s where the resentment lives.

Not loud at first. It never is. It seeps in slowly, like damp through old walls, until everything carries its weight. He shouts now. Sharp, sudden bursts that seem to come from nowhere and everywhere at once. She doesn’t answer. She drinks instead.

And when the house becomes too small to hold it all, she walks.

Always to the same place.

The blue gate.

Time has dulled its colour, but not its meaning. Once, it was the entrance to everything they wanted. Dreams hung on it like decoration. It was possibility, painted bright and bold for the world to see.

She stands there for a long time before trying the key.

Maybe she already knows.

The metal resists, stiff from years of neglect. She forces it, just a little more, just enough—

—and it snaps.

A small sound, almost insignificant.

But final.

The broken piece remains lodged inside the lock, unreachable. The rest sits useless in her hand. For a moment, she just stares at it, as though something might undo itself if she waits long enough.

It doesn’t.

Behind her, the house. The shouting. The silence that follows.

In front of her, nothing but a gate that no longer opens.

And for the first time, perhaps, she understands:

It was never about leaving.

It was about where they arrived—and what they brought with them that no place could ever change. 

Everything they dreamed of they already possessed,  but now it was gone.

They destroyed it themselves. 

Grey Stones: Where the machines still hunger

Grey Stones was never meant to be found again.

Not like this.

Not with the light fading so quickly, bleeding out across the broken windows as if the place itself were trying to swallow the last of the day. We shouldn’t be here this late. Everyone knows that instinctively, even if no one says it out loud. The grounds are too vast, the buildings too many—silent monoliths scattered like gravestones across a forgotten empire of cruelty.

But we came for the machines. We came to absorb the madness.

They always come back to the machines Tiny Fair.

They said unmarried women were brought here—girls, really—branded, discarded, erased. Their babies taken, repurposed, used. The poor, the desperate, the hungry—locked away for crimes as small as survival. And when they were no longer useful…

Disposed of.

That word echoes louder than anything else. Dispose.

We must move faster.

But I can't breathe...

The administration block looms ahead, its windows like hollow eyes. Inside, the air is thick—stale, unmoving, like it hasn’t been disturbed in decades. There’s a theatre here. Rows and rows of seats, all facing a stage that no longer exists. You can almost see them sitting there—bodies upright, minds gone. Chemically softened. Electrically quieted. Watching nothing. Feeling nothing. All dressed in the same pale grey robes, tattered by years of being laundered in bleach. Blank faces staring into nothingness. 

Or maybe I'm  feeling everything, trapped inside.

Don’t stop. Don’t look too long. Keep moving.

We run.

Out into the open again. The weeds claw at our legs, brittle and dead, crunching underfoot like bone fragments. The path crumbles beneath us, fractured by time, by neglect, by whatever happened here that no one will admit to. The sky is dimming faster now—too fast. Shadows stretch unnaturally, clinging to corners, pooling in doorways.

The next block.

This has to be it.

Inside, the temperature drops immediately. Not just cold—wrong. The kind of cold that feels intentional, like something is still being preserved.

“Basement,” I whisper.

Of course it is. I can feel it.

The staircase is concrete, spiraling down into echoing darkness. Every step reverberates, too loud, too exposed. It feels like announcing ourselves to something waiting below. The walls are painted a sickly pale green, peeling, blistered.

Then we see it.

Graffiti. Fresh compared to everything else.

MORGUE with an arrow sprayed in black paint a little too conveniently. 

The word hits harder than it should. Like confirmation. Like a warning we’re too late to heed.

We descend anyway.

Because we came for the machines.

At the bottom, the air thickens. Metallic. Rotten. There’s a smell here that never left. It clings to the back of your throat, settles into your lungs. You don’t breathe it—you wear it.

And then—

There they are.

Not what we expected.

Worse.

Long, narrow structures. Industrial. Functional. No attempt to hide what they were for. No dignity. No humanity. Just process. Input. Output.

You understand it instantly, without wanting to.

“They fed you in… here,” Frenchy, my voice breaking.

And at the other end…?

You don’t need to see it working to know. Your mind fills in the motion, the noise, the inevitability. The tearing. The stripping. The efficiency.

Organs removed.

Nothing wasted.

What remained—what little remained—sent straight onward.

To the furnace.

It’s not history here. It’s not past.

It feels… paused. Like the machines could start again at any moment if someone just flipped a switch.

You take a step back.

Then another.

Because now the silence isn’t empty.

It’s watching.

The walls feel closer. The shadows thicker. That smell—stronger now, as if disturbed by our presence. As if something has noticed us noticing.

“Imagine being pulled through it.”

 “Like a jet engine… no control… no stopping… Fucking hell..."

"That’s enough!"

"That’s more than enough."

"Run!"

Up the stairs, too fast, slipping, stumbling, hands scraping against the walls. The word MORGUE flashes past again, but it looks different now. Warped. Alive. Mocking.

Out into the open—but it’s darker than it should be. The last light is gone. Completely gone. No twilight. No easing into night. Just—

Darkness.

And the buildings don’t look abandoned anymore.

They look occupied.

Watching.

Waiting.

Grey Stones doesn’t keep its secrets buried.

It keeps them hungry.

"Tiny Fair, I  have a feeling this is the birthplace of Dr Jimmy."

"But he didn't get fed into the machines?"

"Not yet he didn't. But his mother certainly did."

The Light Through the Tear

     You can hide from authority. People do it all the time. Papers disappear, names change, stories get rewritten until even the past starts to feel negotiable. You learn the angles, the timing, the careful distance between who you were and who you pretend to be now. You become practiced—convincing, even.

But hiding from yourself is a different craft entirely.

That’s where the cracks begin.

It starts small. A hesitation. A glance held too long in the mirror. A question your partner asks—innocent, undeserving—and you answer too quickly, too sharply. She doesn’t know you. Not really. And the worst part is, she trusts the version you’ve given her. She lives beside a carefully edited man, and she doesn’t deserve the omissions.

The tear in your fabric widens.

And then—of all people—he appears.

A name from years ago. A schoolyard echo. Someone who knew you before the edits, before the performance. He reaches out, casual, friendly… but you know better. He’s a retired cop now. That changes everything. Or maybe it confirms everything you already fear.

What does he want?

Reunion. Drinks. Laughter. Old stories dragged back into the light. You can already see it: the dim room, glasses clinking, nostalgia thick in the air. You’ll loosen up. You always do when the past starts calling your name. Melancholy will creep in, soften your guard.

And he’ll be there.

Listening.

Not just hearing—listening. Watching the pauses, the slips, the things you don’t say. You imagine a recorder in his pocket, or maybe it’s worse—maybe he doesn’t need one. Maybe your words will be enough.

You start rehearsing conversations that haven’t happened yet. Defences against questions that haven’t been asked.

This is where the nightmares begin.

They don’t announce themselves. They bleed into sleep, into the fragile space where control slips. Images come slowly at first, then linger. They don’t rush. They linger. Like they want you to see every detail, every consequence, every truth you’ve buried.

You wake drenched, breath sharp, heart hammering against your ribs like it’s trying to escape you.

And it doesn’t stop there.

The fear follows you into the day, wraps around you like something alive. Anxiety hums beneath everything—every conversation, every silence. Paranoia becomes your constant companion. Faces in crowds linger too long. Voices sound like they’re talking about you, even when they aren’t.

You wear it all like a coat—a coat of a thousand colours, stitched together from dread, memory, and the quiet certainty that something is coming.

You lie still sometimes, completely still, as if movement might trigger something irreversible. Frozen. Waiting. Watching the images pass behind your eyes like a slow-motion film you never agreed to watch.

And then—

Morning.

Light spills in. Real light. Honest light. It touches familiar things: the room, the street, the ordinary world that continues without accusation. For a moment, you breathe. For a moment, you believe in the possibility of distance from it all.

Daylight is merciful.

But it is temporary.

Because you already know what waits.

Darkness doesn’t forget. It doesn’t forgive. It follows. Patient. Relentless. It doesn’t need to chase you—it knows you’ll come back to it, every single night.

And beneath it all, there’s a truth you can’t outrun:

This isn’t something being done to you.

This is something you built.

Carefully. Quietly. Piece by piece.

A private hell.

And now you live in it.

How bloody smart of you.

The Making of a Murderer

     Dr Jimmy wasn’t leaving the house the same way he’d entered it.

The broken window pane—jagged, whispering with the risk of noise, blood, and exposure—was no longer an option. Entry had required urgency. Exit demanded control. And control, above all else, was what defined him.

Luck, or perhaps something darker that followed him like a shadow, had intervened. A key left casually in the back door. Carelessness. Trust. The small, human oversights that made everything possible.

He moved without hesitation.

Down the pebbled driveway he went, each step measured despite the uneven crunch beneath his shoes. The night wrapped around him—thick, damp, and indifferent. A darkened alleyway stretched alongside the property, a narrow artery leading him away from what he had done, away from what he had become. He slipped into it like something returning to its natural habitat.

Waiting at the end: his car. Silent. Obedient.

The hammer—still wet, still speaking its unspeakable truth—was tucked beneath his coat. Hidden. Controlled. Just another object again.

It was only once he was seated, door closed, engine humming low, that he saw himself.

The rear-view mirror caught him in the fractured glow of a streetlight.

And there he was.

Not the clean-cut medical student. Not the polite, well-liked young man of exemplary character. Not the one who smiled easily, who listened, who blended seamlessly into lecture halls and quiet conversations.

No—this face was something else entirely.

Red.

Completely red.

Blood masked every feature, soaked into the lines of his skin, clung to his hands as though it belonged there. For a moment—just a flicker—he stared. Not in horror. Not in disbelief.

But in recognition.

A problem had existed.

And now, it didn’t.

His breathing slowed. His mind, sharp as ever, began its quiet calculations. There would be noise soon. Panic. Sirens. Questions. The town would reel under the weight of what had been done.

But who would suspect him?

He almost smiled.

He was the last person anyone would imagine. That was the beauty of it. Reputation wasn’t just a shield—it was a weapon. Carefully built. Patiently maintained. And now, it served its purpose.

No clues.

No mistakes.

Nothing left behind but confusion and fear.

He pulled away from the curb, the car gliding into the sleeping streets as though nothing had happened at all.

Yet what fascinated him most wasn’t the act itself.

It was what came next.

The investigation.

The theatre of it.

The interviews. The suspects. The shifting suspicions. He could already see it unfolding—detectives circling the truth without ever quite touching it. Ordinary people placed under extraordinary pressure, their lives dissected, their words analysed, their faces watched for cracks.

And he would be there.

Not hidden in the shadows—but standing near the centre of it all.

Listening. Watching.

Learning.

It had happened so close to home, after all. Close enough to observe without ever being seen. Close enough to feel the pulse of the investigation as it tightened and twisted.

Close enough to enjoy it.

Because this wasn’t just an ending.

It was a beginning.

Not driven by madness, not by impulse—but by something colder. Something patient. Something that understood the value of restraint as much as release.

This was the moment a line had been crossed—quietly, cleanly, without hesitation.

This was the making of a murderer.

The Anatomy of Division

     “Define a pathological liar for me, Mr Big Cop.”   Why the constant lies? Do they know they're lying? Explain me, explain me like I'm five years old. How does a white lie, become someone who tells frequent lies... How do they become a pathological  liar?

That’s how it begins Tiny Fair  —not with a question, but with a seed. The initial lie. A seed planted quietly, deliberately, in soil already softened by trust. A pathological liar doesn’t just lie. That’s too simple, too blunt an instrument. No—he curates reality. He edits it, trims it, feeds it back to you in fragments until you begin to doubt your own memory, your own instincts, your own people.

I remember when he told me everyone I knew was a liar.

Not casually. Not as an aside. He explained it—carefully, almost clinically. He described how they lied, the little tells, the imagined betrayals, the hidden motives. But he never answered the most important question: why.

At the time, I didn’t understand. I thought it was insight. Experience. Authority speaking.

Now I see it for what it was: architecture.

Divide them.

Isolate them.

Make sure no two voices align long enough to compare truth.

Because comparison is fatal to a man like that.

If we had spoken—really spoken—notes would have been compared. Stories would have overlapped. Cracks would have formed. And behind those cracks, the rot.

So he lied to each of us individually. Tailored lies. Personal lies. Lies that ensured silence between us.

And in that silence, he became the only voice.

The only authority.

The only truth.

But what does it cost to live like that?

What does it feel like to exist in a world of your own fabrication?

To wake up every day and scan the horizon—not for opportunity, not for connection—but for threat.

Flashing blue lights.

A knock at the door.

A hand on your shoulder while you’re collecting your takeaway, heart stopping mid-beat, breath catching in your throat.

Always en garde.

Always listening.

Always calculating.

There’s no rest in that life. No stillness. No quiet moment where the mind unclenches. Just a constant hum of vigilance, like a wire pulled too tight, ready to snap.

You don’t live—you hover.

Between exposure and escape.

Between control and collapse.

And then the question lingers, heavy and unsettling:

When it finally ends—when the mask slips, when the truth surfaces, when the world sees what he is—what does he feel?

Fear?

Shame?

Or something far stranger…

Relief?

Because imagine it—the running stops. The watching stops. The endless calculations fall silent. No more lies to maintain, no more threads to keep from tangling.

Just… exposure.

Your face on every front page.

Serial killer arrested.

A label, final and immovable. A truth no longer negotiable.

Would that feel like annihilation?

Or freedom?

But men like that rarely leave it to chance.

No. He won’t let it get that far.

Because control is everything. Even at the end.

Especially at the end.

There will be a plan—there’s always a plan. An exit mapped out long before the walls begin to close in. And it won’t be surrender.

It will be disappearance.

Permanent, deliberate, final.

An escape that ensures no interrogation, no courtroom, no unraveling under fluorescent lights.

No one gets the full story.

No one gets closure.

And so the last question drifts, almost poetic in its darkness:

If there is a reckoning—if there is a descent—where does he land?

Which circle claims him?

The deceivers?

The betrayers?

Or somewhere deeper still, where truth is stripped bare and there’s no one left to lie to… not even yourself.

Because in the end, that’s the only audience that ever really mattered.

Not a Man Anymore

      The streets at 4 a.m. have a way of stripping things back to their barest truth. No crowds, no noise—just the quiet hum of streetlights and the soft hiss of rain settling into the pavement. It’s the hour where everything feels suspended, as if the world itself is holding its breath.

He walked through it like a ghost.

The rain had soaked through his clothes, but he barely noticed. Each step felt automatic, mechanical, like something wound up and set loose. The orange glow of the streetlights stretched his shadow long and thin ahead of him, a distorted version of himself leading the way home. Or perhaps away from it. Even he didn’t quite know anymore.

What did he feel?

Not what you’d expect.

There was no triumph. No satisfaction. Those ideas belonged to stories, to headlines, to the way people try to make sense of something senseless. The reality was quieter. Emptier. A kind of dull, echoing absence where something human should have been.

Because the moment itself—the act he could never name out loud—was never really the point.

It was the build-up.

The prowling.

The watching.

The slow tightening inside his chest, like a storm gathering pressure.

And then… release.

But release never lasted, although he would relish the news headlines, smiling,  congratulating himself on not getting caught.

By the time he found himself back on those rain-slick streets, it was already fading. What replaced it wasn’t guilt, not in the way most people understand it. It was something colder. A creeping awareness that nothing had changed. That whatever he thought he was feeding, silencing, or satisfying was still there—unchanged, unmoved, waiting.

He passed a row of darkened houses, each one sealed shut against the night. Behind those walls: warmth, sleep, ordinary lives untouched by him. The thought irritated him more than it should have. Not envy. Not quite. Something closer to resentment, like a wound that never healed properly.

Old habits drifted through his mind. Excuses. Methods. Ways in. A knock on the door. A voice softened just enough. A lie polished to sound like truth. He turned them over lazily, not because he needed them now, but because they were part of him—reflexes, almost.

But even those thoughts felt… thinner tonight.

He stopped under a flickering streetlamp, watching the rain fall through the light in slow, golden streaks. For a moment, there was something close to clarity.

He wasn’t becoming anything.

He already was.

Not because of one night, or many. Not because of drink, or anger, or the past he clung to like a justification. Those were excuses he wore like a coat—something to pull tight when the cold crept in.

The truth was simpler. Harder.

He had crossed something a long time ago, and there was no crossing back.

A figure moved in the distance—another early riser, or a late wanderer. He watched them for a moment, head slightly tilted, curiosity flickering… then fading just as quickly. Not tonight.

Tonight, there was only the walk.

Only the quiet.

Only the long walk home that never really felt like one.

And as he moved on, swallowed again by the dim glow of the streetlights and the endless rain, one thing followed him more persistently than any fear of being caught:

Not remorse.

Not relief.

Just the hollow certainty that whatever drove him would be waiting again— patient, unchanged (...)

The next time the streets fell silent. The next time, he was going to pay the old couple in the house on the corner of the road a visit. Their happy, warm loving home was soon to become a blood bath.

The Theatre of Ramona

 

     I’ve been inside your mind at least four times.

Long enough to know the layout. Long enough to recognize the creak in the floorboards before you hear it yourself.

Who is that by the door?

That’s Ramona.

It’s her party—though no one remembers when it started. The music loops without rhythm, laughter echoes from rooms that are now empty, and the air smells faintly of something sweet that’s turned. She puts on a very strange show, Ramona. Always has.

Her makeup is perfect at first—painted confidence, sharp edges, a face that dares you to look closer. But time is cruel in this theatre. It fades. It always fades. And when it does, she slips away to the mirror, pressing trembling fingers to her cheeks as if she can hold herself together by force.

She notices it before anyone else does.

Her friends are long gone.

That’s when she turns to you.

She won’t say it directly—not at first. She’ll laugh, pour another glass, adjust the lighting, restart the music. But her eyes will follow you. Always. Measuring the distance between you and the door like it’s a wound opening.

She will want to keep you from leaving.

And when she can’t pretend anymore, she will cry. Not loudly—no, Ramona doesn’t break like that. Her voice cracks in quiet places. She will ask what went wrong, over and over, as if the answer might change if she phrases it differently.

I know her.

I was her perfect he-whore—her reflection, her distraction, her proof that someone would stay, even if it was only for a while. Long enough to make the illusion believable.

And then there’s Loretta.

Sweet Loretta.

She exists in a different wing of the same theatre. Softer lighting. Cleaner air. She kept herself untouched by the chaos, or at least she tells herself she did. No drugs, no reckless nights—just the sparkle of Moët and the careful preservation of innocence like it’s something you can bottle and save for later.

She watches the show, but she doesn’t join it.

Not really.

But there is something else in this theatre.

Something that doesn’t belong to either of them.

In the dark wings, beyond the reach of stage light, there is a figure who never applauds, never speaks—only watches.

Doctor Jimmy.

Not a man in the way the others are. More like a presence. A phantom stitched into the velvet curtains and the shadows behind them. He waits there, patient, as if time has no meaning to him at all.

His eyes don’t wander.

They lock.

Always on the same thing—the quiet glow of people who still believe they are safe. The innocent aura of happiness shared between two bodies standing too close together, laughing too easily, unaware of the cracks beneath their feet.

A false sense of security.

That’s what draws him.

Not noise. Not chaos.

Calm.

He studies it like a weakness.

Slowly, almost ceremonially, he opens a bottle of gin. The sound is small—barely a click—but it echoes in the dark like a signal. His hands are steady, practiced. But tonight, something is different.

He feels it again.

That strange pull beneath the skin. That crawling awareness that something inside him is waking up.

He looks down.

And for a moment—just a flicker—there it is.

Blood.

Not fresh. Not flowing. Just the suggestion of it, blooming across his hands like memory refusing to fade. He turns them slightly in the dim light, as if expecting it to drip, to speak, to accuse.

A private haunting.

A whisper of Lady Macbeth—that same futile attempt to cleanse what cannot be undone.

But Doctor Jimmy doesn’t scrub.

He doesn’t panic.

He simply watches… and waits.

Because in this theatre, everyone is performing something.

Ramona performs desperation.

Loretta performs purity.

You perform detachment.

And Doctor Jimmy?

He performs nothing at all.

That’s what makes him dangerous.

Don’t ever lose control in this place. That’s the rule no one tells you until it’s too late. The acts are forbidden for a reason. The show is black—dark in a way that seeps into you, stains you, makes it hard to tell where you end and it begins.

Ramona will hold you when you try to leave. Desperate. Fingers digging into your sleeves, your wrists, your resolve. She’ll beg without words, her whole body leaning into yours like gravity has shifted.

And then—

when you finally reach the door,

when your hand is on the handle,

when the outside air almost touches your face—

she’ll say it.

“Thank God. I thought you were never going to go.”

That’s Ramona.

Needing you and resenting you for staying.

And Loretta?

With her, you were always one step ahead. You never belonged to her world, not fully. You played the part—lightly, carelessly. For fun. You counted your lovers like numbers on a scoreboard, each one meaning less than the last.

Hundreds.

Then fewer.

Then none.

Because that’s how it ends in this theatre.

Not with a grand finale, not with applause—just an empty room, the echo of who you thought you were, and the slow realization that somewhere along the way, something in the dark had been watching you too.

Learning you.

Waiting.

I’ve been inside your mind at least four times.

And every time, the show is the same.

Only now…

you’re not sure who’s in the audience anymore.

Inside The Unquiet Mind

     Frenchy, explaining things in a way ordinary people may understand, in a manner that the FBI won't come breaking through the door, who is he? 

Who is Dr Jimmy?

Who is he?

Tiny Fair (...) There is no neat doorway into a mind like his. No threshold you can step across and say this is where it began. It is more like a corridor with flickering lights—some doors locked, some swinging open at the wrong moments, all of them echoing. 

He was not born monstrous. That would be too simple, too comforting. Monsters that arrive fully formed let the rest of us feel safe.

He was shaped.

A boy praised too loudly and held too tightly. Told he was special, exceptional—the golden boy—yet never truly seen. His mother hovered, suffocating in her attention, correcting, demanding, loving in a way that felt like control. His father, distant, dismissive, present only in fragments—an outline of authority without warmth. Between them, something fractured early.

Love became confusion. Approval became oxygen. And rage… rage became the only thing that felt entirely his.

As a child, he saw things children should never see. Violence not as a concept, but as a living, breathing force. Raised voices, breaking objects, perhaps worse—moments that carved themselves into him like scratches on glass. No one explained. No one softened it. The world revealed itself as cruel and unpredictable, and he learned one quiet truth:

Control is safety.

But control never came easily.

Inside him, something stirred—an animalistic pulse just beneath the surface. Not constant, not always visible, but there. Waiting. A tightening in the chest, a buzzing behind the eyes, a heat that rose too quickly and left destruction behind it.

He grew into himself the way storms gather—gradually, then all at once.

On the outside, he could still wear the mask. Charming when needed. Calm enough. A man who could pass through a room without drawing suspicion. But inside, resentment fermented. Not just anger—something colder, sharper.

A fixation.

Women, especially, became symbols in his mind. Not individuals, not human in the full sense, but representations of something he could not name without unraveling himself. Control, rejection, expectation—threads tied back to his earliest wounds. The overbearing presence. The unreachable approval. The suffocation disguised as care.

And somewhere deep inside, a quiet hatred of happiness itself.

The image of a perfect family—laughter, warmth, ease—felt like a lie. Or worse, an accusation. Proof of something he had been denied, or perhaps something he believed never truly existed. He did not want it. He wanted to dismantle it.

Because if it wasn’t real, then he wasn’t missing anything.

He kept objects. Not trophies in the theatrical sense—but tools. Hidden things. Practical things. A hammer from his father’s garage, heavy with memory. Cold metal, simple purpose. It carried weight—not just physical, but symbolic. A connection to the man who had been absent, now repurposed into something far more present.

He did not think in terms of plans the way others might imagine. There was no grand design, no elegant pattern he could articulate. Even he might struggle to explain why one moment tipped into another. Why a passing irritation could ignite into something irreversible.

His “method” was not methodical.

It was instinct.

A build-up. A trigger. A release.

And afterward, silence.

Not peace—never peace—but a temporary quieting of the storm. As though something inside him had exhaled. Only briefly. Because it always returned, coiling again, tightening, demanding.

He does not fully understand himself. That is perhaps the most unsettling truth. There is no clean narrative he could offer, no tidy confession that would make sense of it all. Only fragments:

A child praised too much and loved too poorly.

A boy who saw too much and was told too little.

A man who cannot separate control from violence.

And beneath it all, a question he would never ask out loud:

Was I made this way… or did I choose it?

The corridor remains. The lights still flicker. And somewhere in the distance, another door is opening.