A Perfect Place To Be

Another new morning in Deal. I haven’t checked the telephone, and I sure as hell haven’t switched on the TV with all that news.

 

So I lie there and wonder if my lucky dip has won the Lottery, and I decide that it has. Until I find out otherwise. So I will buy that villa in Barbados and the flat in the city. And I can see the smiles on my pals’ faces as I hand them cheques for lots of money.

 

No one I know is sick or unwell. They have all recovered during the night. Friends and family are all happy to a soul. Nothing is out of place. Nothing sad has occurred.

 

The sun is shining brightly and a gust of wind shoots in the window with a smell of the sea and takes my breath away. I feel at peace.

 

Another new morning in Deal and (for now) the world is a perfect place to be.

 

bobby stevenson 2023

#bobbystevenson #flashfiction #life #love #dealkent

1977

 

 

 

Christmas that year had been sad and disappointing. Sad, because it had been the first one without his mother, and disappointing because his cousin, Fred, in England had promised to ship a copy of the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind The Bollocks and it still hadn’t arrived. 

 

He’d have to hide it when it arrived since his father had become real religious since his mother had been taken. His father had wanted to cancel Christmas, but his aunt had made sure there was food on the table and a little present for each of them. In front of his plate was an envelope. It didn’t seem promising. In it were three tickets to something called Star Wars, due out of the 27th. He smiled a token smile. ‘Thank you’. 

 

What the hell was Star Wars? And today, as on old man, in 2023, he thought back to that Christmas and the tears ran down his face. If he’d only known back then what Star Wars would mean to his life, he would have jumped from that table all those years ago and kissed his aunt. 

 

bobby steevenson 2023

 

#bobbystevenson #family #starwars #starwarsfan

YOU'LL MAKE IT

 

 

 

 

You’ll make it, I know you will,
You’ve come too far and now is not the time.
If only you stopped and thought about it all
The walls you’ve climbed, all the troubles crossed
All the failures faced, all the little victories
And one day soon you’ll make it across
To where you can start again
I know you will
You’ve come too far, to stop.

bobby stevenson 2023
 

THE UNLOVED

They knew you see; they had always known.

 

They had come from somewhere out there. Some folks said they had lived underground; others had said that they were from Atlantis.

 

One guy went on the television and told the world that he had been abducted by them and that they came from a star second from the right and straight on till morning. But we all kinda knew that he was plain crazy.

 

What wasn’t crazy was the fact that they came for people. Sometimes in the middle of the night, a soul would hear a knock on the door and there they would be.

 

And here’s the strange thing, I heard that they came to hunt down the Unloved - and that would naturally get you thinking that they were talking about the homeless, or the lonely or the suicidal, or whatever.

 

But it wasn’t, sometimes they knocked on doors where large families lived, they’d asked for the soul in question, and they would hug them and hug them until the sadness had been squeezed right out of them.

 

What those strangers knew was that folks could feel unloved anywhere. They knocked on the doors of the rich, and the poor alike. The well fed and the hungry. The married and the single. The saint and the sinner.

 

You couldn’t tell that someone was unloved just by looking at them. Some hid their sorrow behind the grandest of smiles or would give the impression of being the most confident son of a gun going. But they weren’t - and they never had been.

 

So, friends, if, or when, they come knocking on your door, it might be that they are just coming to hug the sadness out of you.Let them

Sleep well.

 

bobby stevenson 2023

#bobbystevenson #flashfiction