The Notion of Limbs

Fiction by K.M. Elkes

On a midweek, midsummer afternoon, a man waits for his train home. He carries the same bag as always, stands on the same length of platform as always, enters the same carriage by the same door to sit in the same seat as always. This man has a wife and a daughter. He has a small house with a garden that overlooks low, wooded hills. He keeps birds in an aviary. He sometimes finds himself staring through the wire mesh of the aviary, at the low, wooded hills. He loses time easily.

As the train dawdles from the station, he sees butterflies rise from a suddenness of blue cornflowers on the embankment. A cat arches and resettles on a rooftop. The train sidles between factory yards and the debris of neglected things, mossy stacks of pallets, rusted machines, tyre piles, and crushed boxes in a stand of nettles. Reaching everywhere are long fingers of bramble.

Then something drops through the gauzy edge of his vision. Dark against the deep afternoon blue. Faster than a bird. A notion of limbs. He thinks it descends behind one of the warehouses, into a scrapyard beyond. It is over so quickly he blinks and swallows and wonders if he saw anything at all. The train slows, then halts. On the bank outside, yellow grass stirs.

He looks around the carriage and wonders why no one else has reacted. Did they not see that? The couple in the seat opposite ponder a crossword. A woman behind speaks into her phone: “Three of us? Then get extra milk...”

He looks out, but sees nothing in the shadows where he thought it (whatever it was) fell. A forklift truck emerges from a nearby building, and in the distance, cars creep at rush hour slowness across the flyover. The train shudders and moves again. He cranes his neck to look back, but embankments rise on either side, and the trees shuffle dark-light, dark-light, dark-light.

At his station, he steps off and tarries while the other passengers hustle through the barrier. Within moments, they are gone. There’s a single, sharp whistle blast, then the train eases round the long curve of track until it vanishes into the heat haze.

Should he tell someone? The stationmaster? The police? But tell them what? That maybe he saw something falling though no one else did. That whatever he saw landed in a scrapyard, but he’s not sure. And perhaps, just perhaps, this something was a person, falling from a clear, empty sky.

No. No need to inform anyone. Yet even as he walks along the lane that leads home, even as he snorts at the absurdity of it, he holds doubt like a small bird in his hand. The sun’s heat is a pulse in his head. There’s a thick weight to the air and the smell of sweet, putrefying silage. When a creature scuttles through the dark tangle of the hedgerow, he flinches and moves to the middle of the road.

His wife and daughter are in the garden when he arrives home. His daughter is learning to ride her bicycle. He watches them gladly through the kitchen window, but when he fills a glass with water, his hand trembles enough to make ripples.

After dinner, he goes down to the garden swing with his daughter—a ritual they have made together before she goes to bed. He pushes her up into the burnt orange dusk, again and again, until the sight of her black ponytail, flailing against the sky, makes him stop.

“Push, Daddy, push again!” his daughter insists.

But he steps away, says it is enough now, that it is time for bed.

“You’re no fun,” she says, jumping off the swing and running back into the house.

He walks down to the aviary and stands in the half-darkness among birds that shuffle on their perches, shine-eyed, watching him. He looks out over the hills but sees nothing except dark limbs at the edge of his vision, convinced now what he saw was no bird, or plastic bag, or floater in his eye.

He cannot settle in the aviary, so he heads back to the house. The curtains in the lounge are still open, and for a while, he watches his wife laugh at the television, then turns away and sits on the sun lounger. He swipes his his phone for news, switches on the radio, and waits for bulletins. Later, his wife brings him a drink and smooths her hand along his arm.

“Are you okay? Is everything okay?”

He says he is fine, just tired, a long week.

“Something’s taken you away,” she says, then lies beside him.

He dials the radio down to a murmur and lies quite still, listening instead to a long shrill note, narrow and rising within himself.

There is no news on the radio or the television the next morning. On the train back into the city, as they pass the place where he saw the faller, he moves across the aisle to look out over the factories and the scrapyard beyond. He bends low and looks up at the sky, pressing his cheek against the cool glass so it leaves a smudge. He sees this and presses again, circling his head, making the smudge larger. When he moves back to his seat, he is aware of other passengers watching him.

He drifts and fidgets through work until an hour after lunch, then feigns sickness so he can catch an early train home. As soon as he gets back, he goes down to the aviary. The birds are skittish, darting around his head. These birds, he thinks. What are they for? Why does he even keep them? He picks up a feather and lets it drop, and when it begins to drift to the floor, he bends and blows it higher again. He does this many times, cursing whenever it passes out of reach.

He sets the timer on his phone. One full minute. If he can keep the feather up for one full minute, he can leave. Not until then. But when he reaches the minute, he resets the timer to two full minutes.

It reaches six full minutes before he stops. He is slick with sweat. His suit, filthy with dust and bird droppings and wood chippings. The knees of his trousers are soiled and his knuckles cut where he has thrashed against the aviary’s wire mesh.

He goes to the house, unfolds four sheets of newspaper into a neat square, then strips. He wraps the ruined clothes and drops the package into the bin. In the shower, he thinks about the package in the bin, how his wife will ask questions. So, after dressing, he retrieves the package and takes it to the fire pit. He sprays lighter fluid over the bundle, then drops in a lit match. As smoke rises, he wonders why he feels so very guilty, such terror that his wife and daughter might catch him.

That evening he searches for news with combinations of keywords: ‘Faller. Scrapyard. Sky. Body. Black.’ He checks flight times, but finds no answers. He reads articles on emergency doors that pop in-flight, of frozen stowaways found curled around landing gear. He wonders who it was, his faller. He wants to believe that they were dead long before they hit the ground. He wishes, and then doesn’t, for a face.

“What is it honey?” his wife asks when they go to bed.

“Let’s put on the news.” he says. They huddle together, watching stories of distant wars. There is the usual – sobbing children, soldiers ducking into doorways, rubble, and smoke. In every report, he notices the sky. How it is always clear.

“This is too sad,” says his wife. “Can't we watch a film instead?"

There is something in her voice that makes a flush of rage move over him. He wants to smash every piece of furniture in the room, shred the bedclothes, shatter the mirror, and scrape the shards along his arms, along his chest, and across his face. He gets out of bed and stands in the middle of the room, breathless, clasping his hands together.

“What’s happening?” his wife asks.

He looks at her.

“Don’t,” she says. “Don’t look at me like that again. I won’t have that look.”

“I’m sorry,” he says, his rage dissipating as quickly as it formed. “It’s a strange mood. Just a strange mood.”

His wife turns off the light and settles down with her back to him. He is exhausted now but pulls away from sleep like a startled horse each time it comes near. He is afraid because it is like falling into his own shadow. He forces himself to stay awake until there is thin dawn light at the window and only then does he let go.

That morning, he gets ready as usual, kisses his daughter as usual, catches the train at the usual time, sits in his usual seat. But when it stops at the small station near the scrapyard, he gets off.

The roads around the station are narrowed by rows of dusty vans and flatbed trucks. A smell of steel and oil oozes through the lanes. The thud and din of hidden machinery rise through his feet, a thick heave of sound.

He wanders between the factories and the warehouses, unsure of what he is looking for. What did he expect to see? What did he want to see? There is nothing but sunlight and shadow and pigeons swooping into the road, a knot of men in blue overalls smoking in silence. He feels out of place, intimidated when the men turn to watch him walk by. In the distance, he glimpses the flyover and heads towards it until a turning in the road reveals the high gates of the scrapyard. Beyond are towers of old cars, neatly stacked. The tang of metal in the air makes him scrape his teeth together.

He crosses the yard to an office building and goes through the half-open door. The walls are papered with old newspapers, browned by nicotine. There is a car seat in the corner of the office with a basket of clean, white washing next to it. A young woman sits behind a desk. Her hair is blue, her skin doll-white. She glows in the dull office light.

“Are you dropping off?” she asks. “Or is it spares?”

He doesn’t know what his own question should be. He doesn’t know how to fit the extraordinary into something that would sound normal. A couple of days before, he says, was there by any chance an accident in the yard, a faller perhaps?

“Where are you from?” she asks.

He feels foolish with his dishevelled clothes and dirty shoes. Next to her, he feels unclean. He tells her he is no one and that he’s not from anywhere important.

“A faller? What does that even mean?”

He tries to explain. The slow train, a fast shadow coming down from the sky, the shapes it made, the plummet of it. How round a corner somewhere, behind a tower of rusted cars or by some oil-filled ditch could be a person, broken and half-buried within the crust of black filth that covers the yard. The young woman frowns, her perfection cleaved.

“Nothing’s happened like you say. What sort of person comes in and asks that if they don’t even know it’s true?”

He feels a static charge of discomfort grow between them. She picks up her phone, and he wonders if she intends to call someone. Her boss? The police? Then she puts it down again. She steps out from behind the desk, and he sees she has a leg that will not bend properly, that she leans on the chair back for support. “Are you in a bad way? Do you need someone to help you?”

He wants to confess to this young, fragile woman that something has opened up between his world and another. That the faller, the fluttering mass of their body, landed, broke through, sent him spiralling up in response, losing his tread on solid ground, rising towards an inevitable emptiness of thinning air, where he will open his mouth so wide he will be filled until he has dissipated, no more than a shower of rain, impermanent and sudden. And that all his life, he has known the dread of such untethering. He wants her absolution and her blessing.

Instead, he gets up, buttons his jacket, and tells he was just checking, about the faller, out of interest. That he is sorry. No need to worry. No need at all. As he leaves, he smells the clean washing, the false scent of spring.

The young woman shuffles after him, stands in the doorway as he crosses the yard: “It’s alright—nothing happened here. No one fell,” she says, and then: “You take care. Look after yourself.”

At the gates, he watches the huge claw of a scrap machine lift the carcass of a car, swing it over a crusher, and lower it in. He hears the scream of metal and turns away, not wanting to see the dense brick that will slide from the machine, not wanting to see how tightly packed it will be, how very small. Instead, he finds nearby a small triangle of green between roads and sits for hours, watching traffic on the flyover, until it is time for the late afternoon train.

His wife is in the kitchen when he reaches home. He kisses her on the mouth, she squeezes his arm. She asks about work, and he lies. When his daughter calls him outside to the swing, he goes to her. And when she shouts from the top of her arc that she is flying, he lies again and says yes, yes she is, then pushes her as high as she wants to go.

BIO: K.M. Elkes is the author of the short fiction collection All That Is Between Us (Ad Hoc Fiction). His flash fiction has also won various competitions, including Bath Flash Fiction Award, Reflex Fiction Prize, and the Fish Flash Prize. He is a Pushcart and Best Microfictions nominee.

He has been longlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award and individual short stories have been successful in the Manchester Fiction Prize, Bridport Prize, and the Royal Society of Literature Prize. 
His work has appeared in numerous literary anthologies and journals, and featured on school curricula in the USA. He is currently editing his first novel.