flash fiction

– First published in The Storms, Issue 2, February 2023

“So, did the pandemic affect you much?”

“Well,” he said, taking a slug of his pint, “I mend harmonicas for a living.”

He pulled the cream from his moustache with his lower lip and a sigh that could equally have been satisfaction or despair.

“Ah, busy enough the whole time so,” I said, idiotically.

He looked at me, weighing me up. A half smile.

“Busy enough for me anyway,” he admitted.

Most people come west for the sea. I had come for the sky, for that vast expanse of blue and black, stars and storms. Reminding me of my insignificance.

Neil lived in the old lighthouse. The light still worked, but he didn’t work it. 

“Ah, it’s all automatic now. My father was the last real lighthouse keeper here.” 

Still, I was eager to see it from the inside. And whatever a harmonica repair shop looked like.

I had rented a little cottage about as close to the edge of the world as I could get. From the front door, my view of the horizon was interrupted only once. Neil’s lighthouse stood, some way out, protruding into the skyline. Black and white and red all over, like a bad joke. 

We met one evening at the pub. He showed me his home the next day.

My own cottage was empty, lonely, but not lonely like the lighthouse. Neil had every nook stuffed full to the brim with clothes, books, mugs, newspapers, useful things, useless things… And yet there were gaps you couldn’t ignore. A photo frame stood photoless. A woman’s coat hung, dusty, on a rack. A set of bowls sat on the floor for a pet I couldn’t see.

“What’s your dog’s name?” I asked.

“Bobby,” Neil replied, without hesitation.

“Is he here?”

Neil shook his head. 

I said no more.

He showed me the light. Thick panels of glass looking out at eternity, and a disused switchboard like a fuse box.

“They send someone out if there’s any issue. I don’t have much to do with it, really; I only live here now.”

There was a picture on the wall by the switchboard. A man and a woman in sepia, and a smiling boy, standing proudly in front of the lighthouse.

“Is this you?” I asked, nodding at the boy.

“It is, yeah. The three of us.”

His workshop was in the basement, at the tail of the spinal spiral stairs. 

There were lots of harmonicas. I don’t know why this surprised me or what I was expecting. Like the rest of the building, it was packed full. A work bench was covered in fiddly screwdrivers and parts. There were a couple of old stools, a series of lamps, a stack of packaging and a stack of packages, a computer in one corner.

“They come here from all over,” he said, gesturing to the queue of little mouth organs, each waiting their turn for attention, for a gentle hand and a careful eye.

We went outside, smoking cigarettes at the edge of the world.

He played his own harmonica for me then. Notes shining, stretching, longing. The sound of it almost touching something long gone, or far into the future. Out of date and out of time. Exquisite. Godforsaken.

I had never heard the like of it.

Later from the cottage, alone I saw the light from the tower slice the darkened sky and I heard the cry of his harmonica again. Pained and divine. 

Its aching song bending the stars, reaching into oblivion.