Two Birds One Stone by Amanda Fleming (Short Story Competition: Third Place)

This story was awarded third place in the Boar‘s 2014 short story competition.


Two Birds One Stone

Cecily talks into her hand. Desperation does curious things to you.

Those hands have killed things, birds mainly. By proxy, you understand, but in effect they have. She has in the same way that saying to pull the trigger of a gun is to kill someone with your hands: it’s the gun that kills them, but you are the one with the gun. She held the stone that hit the bird, she aimed her sights and threw it, but it was the stone itself that killed the creature. ‘Severe cerebral adema’ or ‘blunt force trauma’ was what Cecily thought had occurred. Her mind ran away with her sometimes. The bird didn’t suffer, she imagined.

That was just it: she imagined. She made believe and that made her mad.

This is where we begin. You know her story.

Part One: Hummingbird.

A woman enters, pressing the button for the ninth floor, and stands beside Cecily in the lift. She is uncomfortably close given that she is the only other body in this claustrophobic box. Cecily doesn’t pay any attention to the space around her because she is too busy running her palm across her mouth and muttering against it. She is conscious of her perfume for a moment, but that moment passes and she relaxes a little. The older woman blinks sedately and undoes her necklace with ease, exhaling heavily as she does up the top button of her dress. Cecily can’t hear the dull music that fills the silence between them, nor the clink of the necklace as it is dropped to the floor.

hummingbird - flickr Danny Perez Photography“Choose your poison: blonde or brunette?” She speaks without facing Cecily. Her elbow brushes by Cecily’s handbag as she slides her hands down her hips to run the creases out of her dress.

“Blondes always have more fun.” The tannoy crackles into the lift, interrupting the docile music. Cecily pulls her headphones out of her ears, briefly startled by the noise behind her.

“Hm?” She utters, looking at the woman with curiosity.

“Blonde or brunette, which you rather?” She raises her voice. Cecily pauses and folds her headphones into the shape of an eight in her palm.

“Which would I rather be, or which would I rather in a partner?”

“Neither.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Which would you rather-” The woman turns, pausing, and tries to touch Cecily’s waist. She flinches and swats her hand away immediately. “-to push you up against the wall-” She doesn’t even know Cecily’s name. The woman traces her fingers along Cecily’s arm and to her throat before she can instinctively stop her. “-and bash your head in.” Cecily chokes as the heel of the other woman’s hand is pushed into her windpipe, forcing her back against the wall. Her mind doesn’t move fast enough to think to fight back.

“Get off–” Cecily is flustered and breathes in in a panic, dropping her bag as she flails out. Her heart races as the older woman slams her head into the metal wall.

The dull, numb thud of the collision subsides instantly as her eyes close and she doubles over like a rag doll. Blood runs out of her mouth and drips onto her blue court shoes when the woman lets go of her head. The other woman crouches and picks her necklace back up, putting it on as though it had just fallen. Cecily is unconscious when the woman adjusts her dress at the waist and leaves unaffected at the next floor. The lift is quiet for a second: no one else gets on or off before the lights black out and the tannoy repeats a call of ‘Emergency. Fire.’. She is stuck in mid-air, with her thumping heart and her head trauma.

Part Two: Duck.

“What goes bump in the night, darling?” The electric hum of the tannoy cracks into the sounds of Cecily wheezing. “Say it, after me.”

“What goes bump in the night-” She is hesitant but obeys. She was a broken doll and now she is a dying bird.

“You’re a murderer. You’re obsessive, you’re mad.” And isn’t that the point? After all, when she was herself she was bored and wanted more. Now she has that, and that in itself drives her mad. She was pulled too tight: an elastic band about to snap, letting both ends touch for a bitter, brief moment in the recoil before hitting the floor.

It is a sad thing, desperation. It does strange things to you. Madness, then, is worse.

“What goes bump in the night? What’s in the dark-the dark-the dark-the da-shut up!” She is mumbling to herself and the walls. It’s no different to a stand-up comedian and is just as funny as some. She’s dying for the crowd behind the camera.

Cecily struggles to undo her jacket and pull it off her shoulders in order for her to fully remove it. She uses it as a sort-of cushion to lean her aching head against. The lift tannoy opens to a woman’s voice first, and then a man’s; she is beginning to tell the difference.

duck - flickr Connor Mah“You see, this is because you weren’t fast enough.” The woman’s voice over the tannoy is oddly soothing.

“You can’t outrun water. You can’t outsmart nature. You can’t stop dominoes once you’ve started them falling. You can’t cheat this, you little bitch!” The man’s voice is sharp and hateful.

She kneels down, pressing her body into the flat carpet. Cecily begins talking to herself, knowing that the camera is watching her.

“I bet you’re getting tired of this scenery too, tired of the same old views every day. It’s so tiring, so boring; poor you, poor me, poor everybody.” It’s the same sorry speech that she repeats every day. It doesn’t make her situation any better, but isolation is not improved by a sense of perspective. She practices it as though she’s in front of a mirror.

She gives them the show they want as she loses her mind. She doesn’t know why this is happening to her, but she doesn’t know anything.

The taunts continue as her head pounds and she crawls further and further inside herself for safety.

Blondes always have more fun. Cecily had been sick of hearing it since her decision to go blonde a couple of weeks ago. She needed a change and, for the second time in three months, bleach would help her make it. Plus, Cecily decided as she pulled her stockings up from her ankles, red lipstick looked so much better on blondes.

She wasn’t fond of darker lipstick: it did nothing for her thin face and never looked quite as professional as red did. Perhaps it was the sharp contours of her cheekbones contrasting with her average pout that made plum lipstick look so bad on her, but she loved the way that the red would smudge on their skin and blur into saturated shades of deep pink. It reminded her of a fresh bruise. She enjoyed the colour of skin sucked to the point of light internal bleeding, perhaps dug in with teeth; it made her job more exciting.

Simple pleasures are often the greatest weakness.

She was done for the night, collecting the tardily folded bundle of notes from the dresser by the door as she left. Hotels were dirty but it was dirty work that she did, in all meanings of the word. ‘Somebody has to do it’, she told herself by way of justification. It consolidates the guilt she feels when she falls asleep most nights. ‘It’s a job, and it’s the money that matters.’ Cecily was in it for the anonymity: a new name every night and a face no one bothered to remember. The less it was about love, the better. Contractual feeling and torn pound notes outweighed the attraction of sweaty palms and nervous kisses for her now, because they had to.

As she left, she lost her footing walking out of the hotel lobby in her beige woollen coat, catching her heel on a patch of ice by the door. The woman at the desk hurried across the carpet tiles to help Cecily, offering to call her a taxi after helping her up.

“No, thanks.” Cecily replied as she pulled off her high heels. The woman from the desk smiled curtly, running her eyes up and down the young woman. “Have a nice night.”

The voices of her attackers behind the tannoy do not let her be.

Part Three: Sediment

The ground is hard beneath the thin carpet tiles, she can feel it. Cecily feels as though she is being pulled through the floor of the lift. Her body is just heavy.

speakers - flickr BlueAndWhiteArmy“I shouldn’t be here.” She whispers to herself. She has lost the will to move already. Cecily watches her fingers twitch with idle and slothful amusement as she becomes aware that she is giving up. The emergency lights lull her into a false sense of peace as she closes her eyes just to be startled by the harsh crack of the voices behind the tannoy talking to her. She starts to cry.

“You’re cheap and dirty.” Cecily’s head hurts and she can’t stop it. She is tormented and can do nothing to appease her tormentors. “I will ruin you.” The mad have no sway with the insane.

It’s insignificant that she killed a bird with a stone when she was ten.

“Why do we kill anything?” The tannoy clicks on after minutes, the voices behind it sounding calmer than before. “Because we can. Because we like to show off. ‘We buy things we don’t want with money we don’t have to impress people we don’t like’-who was it who said that? Because he was right.” It’s cruel how she lies down and takes it. “We’re passing the time.” The woman spits down the tannoy for the last time. The man she never met laughs.

Have a nice night.”


About the author

Amanda Fleming is a first year English and Theatre student who enjoys writing things that push boundaries, and walking that thin line between profound and pretentious. She was inspired to write ‘Two Birds One Stone’ after a particularly deep discussion about Beckett and the futility of existence. She hopes to try her hand at play-writing one day.


Image Credits: Header (Flickr/liquidnight), Image 1 (Flickr/Danny Perez Photography), Image 2 (Flickr/Connor Mah), Image 3 (Flickr/BlueAndWhiteArmy).

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