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."