Super-short fiction #3

I've been a bit slack lately - I blame the heat; it's been over 40°C (110°F) on most of the days over the last two weeks, and that's made me sluggish. Well, more sluggish. Anyway, here are 3 more very short stories.

The only plant that survived was the cactus; all the others had withered and died within a month of her leaving him. He tried to keep them alive, watering them, giving them nutrients; he even started talking to them—all to no avail. He didn’t know what to do with the empty pots, so they sat where she had left them, an array of shapes and sizes, terracotta and porcelain, plastic in black and brown and white. He stared at the cactus, a little green sphere with a fuzz of pale thorns, in a greyish-white porcelain pot.
‘She’s not coming back,’ he told it.
It didn’t reply.

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It was Christmas once again. Brian loathed Christmas – not the presents part; that was okay – but nearly everything else about the holiday made his head hurt and his stomach cramp up like the time he’d eaten too many Easter eggs. The part he hated the most was the trip to Grandma and Grandpa’s house. He liked seeing his grandparents; they were nice, but they lived in another town, out in the country, and it took three hours to drive there. Not only did that mean three hours of listening to Mum and Dad singing along to the awful music they put on the stereo (Brian firmly believed that music recorded before 1990 existed only to torture children) but it also meant three hours with his cousin Gerald. Gerald was fat and loud and smelt like cat food and soy milk, and wore his shirts tucked into his pants - a serious faux pas in Brian's eyes.

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He found the poison in the garden shed, behind the bags of blood-and-bone, next to the slug pellets. It was rat poison; the silhouette on the bottle was of a fierce-looking rodent with claws and massive incisors. The only rat Patrick had ever seen was at his class’s show & tell, and that was Brenda Henderson’s pet rat, which was big and fat and white, with a long pink tail and beady pink eyes. It wasn’t fierce at all; it just sat there twitched its nose. A few of the girls had screamed, but Patrick hadn’t thought it was out of any genuine fear. Girls, he suspected, just liked screaming for the sake of it.