Black Static #56 (January-February 2017) by 2017 Jan-Feb (retail) (epub)

Author:2017 Jan-Feb (retail) (epub)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Dark Fiction and Film
Publisher: TTA Press
Published: 2017-01-20T00:00:00+00:00

STANISLAV IN FOXTOWN

IAN STEADMAN

At night, lying in my bed, I sometimes fantasise about murdering Mr Sharples. If he were less imposing I might strike out, solving with violence what I can’t verbalise in my clumsy English. But Mr Sharples isn’t the kind of man you start a fight with. His hair is cut close to his head, his nose swerves left towards a stubbled cheek. His polo shirt stretches tight over his chest, the stitched puma leaping across his pectoral muscle as if it’s scaling a mountain. Next to him, I look as if I am built of chicken bones. My arms are thin like twigs, my ribs visible like a brittle hand stretched across my chest. Loose flaps of skin hang under my arms.

This life is not what I hoped for. My house – yes, I have a house – clings to the better end of the Marsh Estate. It has glass in three of its five windows. The other two are taped up with plastic sheeting that cracks and billows like sails in the wind. The living room is comfortable as long as you ignore the black bloom of mould across one corner of the ceiling. The shower squeezes out little more than a miserable trickle, but the bath is wide and deep. It is in this bath that I soak for an hour each night, topping up the hot water when it grows too cold, eyes half-closed against the cobwebs and the cracks. It is the only way to get rid of the stink of the chicken fat, and even then it sometimes lingers. My red-brown hair has become so lank that it looks almost black. When I step out of the water I see iridescent ripples on the surface.

“Stan, no slacking today,” Mr Sharples says every morning, as he wipes a steel brush around the edges of the fryer. “I don’t pay you to stand around gawping. No one in this country ever made it by staring into space, you hear me? We like to work you here. If you want a roof over your head, you have to earn it.”

I want to say that my roof is missing more tiles than I can count, that the morning after a storm I find new puddles of damp on the bedroom ceiling, terracotta shards spiking my front yard – but the words never come. On the hairy middle finger of his right hand, Mr Sharples wears a silver signet ring in the shape of a British Bulldog. I once saw what looked like dried blood in the cracks of its mouth and its eyes. I think of it splitting the skin of my cheek, leaving its animal imprint on my flesh. It is enough to make me swallow my discontent. I nod, bending my back into the work. My hands are covered with small wounds from the oil splatter, the worst of them a festering sore the size of a one-pound coin. When I look at them, it is easy to imagine that I might have some terrible disease, a resurgent medieval plague.

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