than going hungry. But soggy pink had seeped all through it.
‘When I took it home to show her she laughed in this vague, distant way and said, “What a silly Mummy.” No shit, I opened my lunchbox the next day and she’d put a rock in it. A rock! And she’d buttered it! Maybe ‘cause I’d pointed out the bread thing along with the raw friggin’ meat, I don’t know.’
Brac stifled a laugh behind her hands. Those eyes said clearly that she knew it wasn’t funny.
Bric nodded. ‘Sounds silly now, but I cried so hard. All those other kids eating lunches from parents who loved them, and there was me with my buttery rock.’
Now I snorted too, but I hoped my face was full of sympathy.
Sanjay clapped Bric on the shoulder. ‘Lad, anytime you’re peckish on my watch just say the word. Nobody does good work on an achy belly.’
‘Much less a kid. I certainly wasn’t getting much out of classes. Stopped even looking in my lunchbox. Safer to just hold it open over a bin and turn my face away from the things that came thumping out. Whatever I heard, I couldn’t look.
‘It got worse when Dad started acting up, too. Might be brushing his teeth or something, and suddenly he’d start trying to do it backwards. Had his lips sealed over the drain trying to suck back the foam. He froze there and goggled at me until I finished walking by, like I was the one freaking him out.
‘Started watching me at night, too. I’d wake up and he’d be just standing there in my bedroom. In the dark. Watching me. His eyes were wet and I could find the gleam if I looked hard enough, from the little light that crept under the door. Staring. On those nights I don’t think he ever blinked.
‘And I always blinked. And then he’d be standing somewhere different in the room. No sound. I’d have to find those wet gleams all over again.
‘That’s when I started staying home. Slept during the day so I could keep up at night, keep Dad out. I couldn’t stand him staring at me any longer.
‘And that’s when I felt it. The cold. A big blast of ice coming through my bedroom wall from next door, like they had the mother of all air conditioners pointed right at me. But you could only feel it here, you know?’ He put a hand over his heart. ‘I was so relieved when I realised. It meant my parents did love me after all. It was the ghost doing all this to them.’
He paused, looking down, until waiting became unbearable.
‘And ..?’ I urged.
‘That morning, come sunup I marched straight to Dad and told him we had to move. That there was a ghost next door, and it was messing everything up.
‘Dad nodded in this slow underwater way. Deep down he must’ve known something was skewiff. He was just waiting to be told which way to jump.
‘Before the day was out my family was piled in the car with everything we owned, heading off down the street.
‘Looking about, it was suddenly obvious to see all the neighbours had gone. We were the last to leave. Being a dumb kid, I took a glance out the back, one final look at home.
‘I swear, the ghost house’s window had handprints on it like somebody was watching me back. The rest of the pane all dark and burned looking, and two tiny handprints outlined in frost.’
Sanjay gave a low whistle, shaking himself to work the jeebies loose. ‘Well I don’t know about you lot, but that’s the most disquieting shit I ever heard.’
‘Cover your ears, then,’ Bric continued miserably, all of it tumbling out like poison. ‘The worst came when we made it to our new house.
‘Mum and Dad were already warming back to normal. Dad got started on a special dinner right away, to make up for all those missed lunches. Mum, well, for days I couldn’t open my mouth without her trying to cram food in.
‘I ought to have been happy.
‘But there in my new room, when I went to unpack my toys they came out of the box with long rusty nails driven into their faces. Each and every one. Every toy I loved.
‘I did that. I did it. And to this day I’ve no memory of doing it, or where I even got the nails. None at all.’
Whoa.
I’d have kept that last to myself.
For a while Bric’s swimming eyes looked set to bestow the ultimate in tender sympathy, but now … now she looked sick. We all did, and couldn’t settle on where to look. Certainly not at Bric, sickest of us all, who must’ve spilled more than he meant to.
It took a stern sense of reality to return to the hazy friendliness of the bar. Or irreverence.
Raising his glass, John toasted whey-faced Bric. ‘To ghosts, hey?’
The others scowled but I hoisted my own drink enthusiastically. ‘Neck deep in ‘em!’
Going down, the tears of fools scalded like fire.
Lunchbox
Ideas that start out small don’t always stay that way.
As it appears here at 2,261 words Lunchbox was initially a short piece. Instead of doing what it was told and staying small, it preyed on the mind even after its exorcism onto paper.
It eventually put down roots and grew to become part of the novel Something for Everything.
For more information, more stories or to stay in touch visit the website www.bpgregory.com,
follow BP Gregory on Twitter, or Facebook,
or subscribe for updates by emailing
[email protected] with the subject line “subscribe.”
Also by BP Gregory
New Novel Coming Soon
The Town
Novels
Something for Everything (Automatons Book #2)
Automatons (Automatons Book #1)
Outermen
Novella
Only Skin
Short Story Collections
Orotund, Collected Short Stories Volume Two
Cacophony, Collected Short Stories Volume One
Long ago humanity retreated into migrating cities, leaving the landscape to monsters. Within the safety of walls the caste of Surgeons are denied human touch to preserve their skills.
A Surgeon must not be touched. The city can never stop. Comforting truths to live by. But the other cities have fallen silent. Fear stalks the streets. And John the Surgeon craves touch more than anything.
Monsters, machines and roaming cities, insanity, betrayal and lust: centuries later, the seeds of grim legacy sown in Automatons have borne strange fruit indeed...
Kate knows what she saw: a burned out ruin. But the evidence is gone, and nobody else believes the town was ever there.
She knows the town exists. Determined to prove it at any cost, in poking around the outback Kate risks exposing herself and her friends to the slew of horrible urban legends, reticent locals, and too many people who vanished over the years with nowhere to go.
A paroled monster, a prostitute and a policeman all see a little girl lost, but this isn't the start of a joke. An isolated, frail old man trapped in his apartment; what possible threat could he pose to the sociopaths next door?
Take time for a stroll down humanity's eerie back alleys and enjoy BP Gregory's newest short science fiction, urban fantasy and horror stories neatly packaged together in Orotund: Collected Short Stories Volume Two.
Horror! Sci-fi! All manner of strange happenings! Writer and avid reader, BP Gregory was always the sort of oddment compelled to justify even the most terrible things. With such tales, you shouldn’t always feel comfortable or safe.
For more information, more stories or to stay in touch visit the website www.bpgregory.com,
follow BP Gregory on Twitter, or Facebook,
or subscribe for updates by emailing
[email protected] with the subject line “subscribe.”
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