Page 5 – Short Stories
Short Stories
Two examples of short stories written by J. H. Mackey are:
The Gallery Visit
Every Saturday afternoon they went to the gallery. She liked to go there, so of course he had to accompany her.
It was a small gallery, so they always looked at every painting in it. They didn’t speak. They would start with the first painting to the right of the entrance door, then slowly move through the gallery. When it was time to move on to look at the next painting she would prod him with her umbrella. If she especially liked a work, she made a sniffing sound. If she especially disliked a work, she glared at it, frowned and shook her head a few times.
The gallery rarely changed the arrangement of the paintings, or added new ones, so the routine was the same most weeks. After the gallery had been toured, they always silently hurried home, walking briskly. Their habit was then to have tea in their lounge. He had his tea black, she had hers with milk. She would give them each a digestive biscuit.
While the tea was brewing in the pot she would go into the next room for a few minutes. He was not sure what she did, but she always returned with the newspaper for him to read while they had their tea. She would refill his cup once. When they had both drunk two cups of tea, she would put the tea things on a tray and take them to the kitchen.
This Saturday, as he stood in the gallery looking at one of her favourite paintings, he could reassuringly feel the tiny little bottle in his vest pocket. He had paid a lot of money for it. He had been assured its contents were tasteless, quick, and left no trace. The doctor’s report would say “heart attack”. He was looking forward to the tea brewing in the pot, and he was very glad he did not take milk with his tea.
The Bay
At the turn of the century people, people called it global warming, when they should have called it climate change because some places actually got colder. Back then, most people had expected Britain to get warmer, but it didn’t, instead it froze.
Before climate change, our family farm was on the western side of this bay. Everything looked very different then. The bay had long sandy beaches behind which were green grass and wildflowers, and there were also marshy areas with lots of birds. The grass stretched about two miles inland, then disappeared into wooded hills.
When most of the world’s glaciers and ice fields melted, the sea here slowly rose until it covered all the bay’s sandy beaches, the marshes, and the grassland, including our farm. The sea level rise along the British coast was so gradual that it took years, but the big freeze happened suddenly ten years ago, in 2030. The warm sea movement from the Gulf of Mexico abruptly stopped coming to Britain. It was something to do with climate change altering the saltiness of the sea. Who would have thought.
Previously, the government had told the British people that everything was okay, the climate was just going to slowly get warmer. The government ignored the scientists when they told them something very different was going to happen, Britain was going to suddenly have a big freeze, a sort of ice age. Probably the government didn’t want people to panic, so it kept quiet about the scientists’ prediction.
In the first winter of the British big freeze most of the animals and birds died. Lots of people also died, including my parents. My younger brother managed to survive by eating dead animals and birds.
These days, people in Britain are used to the horrific storms and endless freezing temperatures of winter. The summers aren’t as bad as the winters, but they’re still cold and there’s snow on the high ground. As you can see here this summer, there’s snow on the hills. Almost all the trees have gone, except the pines, and they’ll probably only last a few more years.
When the big freeze first happened, I was studying in Australia. With all the subsequent global wars and problems, this is the first time I’ve been able to return home to Britain. I wanted to see my bay again, but it was a mistake to come back. Seeing the change here just makes me feel desperate and angry.