Daniel is poised on the edge of the flat roof. His view down – way down – comes to an abrupt end some ten metres below with a smooth expanse of freshly set black tarmac.

“Daniel!” His mother calls, the only one left to stick by him. “Come away from there, darling.” Her cry is plaintive, scared; pathetic. “Please.”

He looks back at her, but it is a brief glance, and meaningless. His attention returns to the ground below, his vision spinning with an almost intoxicating desire to fall… to fly. Another cry from his mother, and he is wrenched sharply from that lulling, tantalising possibility into a jagged-edged place of fear and dread.

“Please, Daniel.” She sounds exhausted.

But it’s like the time – although he was too young to remember, really – his devout aunt had taken him into the Notre Dame Cathedral during the Vespers service. They’d crept in late, and she’d told him to be silent, but that nasty urchin lurking inside of him had wanted out, and he had let forth an inhuman wail at the top of his lungs, lapsing into a fiendish giggle as she dragged him out by the collar, blushing under the glares of the congregation.

It’s like the time he’d just reached out and run his hand up the branch of the monkey puzzle tree in his nana’s back garden, even though he knew why it was called that, knew it would hurt. He does remember that, remembers watching the blood ooze up through his skin, hoping the urchin was satisfied with these ruby jewels he held out in his palm.

And it’s like the time on the beach, when he dropped the rock on his father’s sleeping head. He really should have known better at that age, but always, always, there was the urchin that inhabited him, his whiny demands derisive, relentless until Daniel eventually gave in. His father’d gone to hospital for that, and Daniel to his room for a month.

A breath susurrates coaxingly around him.

Jump, whispers the urchin.

Daniel thinks how odd it is that the urchin’s whisper is only that, a whisper, yet it can drown out his mother’s pleas, which should be deafening from the terror and love in them.

Jump, murmurs the urchin.

Approximately ten years from now, in a flash of clarity, Daniel will remember this moment suddenly, and look up from the passage he is reading on the theory of relativity, out onto a calm expanse of impeccable lawn dotted with zombies and their minders, and wonder if there is an answer in it for him.

In twenty years, Daniel will find himself vomiting into a cracked toilet bowl, the result of participation in yet another drug trial for which he did not entirely, not explicitly, give his consent.

Jump, hisses the urchin.

Jump, mocks the urchin.

And Daniel jumps. In that brief, beautiful moment between sky and earth, he exults in the bliss of the silence that fills his ears.

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This story was written as an inspiration piece for Mash Stories, a short story competition which gives writers 3 random key words or phrases, and a 500-word limit, to create their best pieces of flash fiction. The key words for this piece were: monkey – cathedral – relativity.

‘And don’t forget,’ mum was yelling on her way out, ‘you both have appointments at the dentist on Friday!’

‘Just go, already!’ we yelled back in unison from either corner of the house. We heard the door slam, then calm slowly descended as the dogs and the dust settled.

‘Don’t forget,’ I grumbled, heading downstairs, ‘Half-bowl morning and night for Hector, full bowl for Hutch—’

‘—but only in the morning.’ Drew met me in the hallway – my twin, non-identical but still able to complete my sentences, and not just those drummed into us rote-fashion by a mother leaving on the trip of a lifetime.

‘Blah, blah, blah,’ I added for good measure. We laughed at her, though really we were proud: last year, the news of her disease had transformed her. Where others would have crumbled, she became a fearless explorer. She’d already travelled to The Yukon to witness the aurora borealis; now she was on her way to Arizona for the American Astronomical Society’s Annual Meeting, telescope in tow. Her flight to a Nagano observatory to see the Andromeda in a few weeks would complete her Trio, and then, she said, she would settle down and deal with her final months in a more conventional manner.

Her example was impossible not to follow: insistent, infectious positivity. We’d grown up on it, but last year she’d lit the nitro and really kicked it up a gear. At only fifteen, we’d been praised by the doctors for our outlook. But to be honest, now it was mostly her meticulous planning that was holding us together: there was simply no time for misery.

*     *     *     *     *

Later, the kitchen TV was droning the early evening news while we messed around with dinner, a die-hard habit from when granddad was still with us.

‘Where’s the appointment card?’ Drew asked me. He was at the fridge, leafing through the thousands of notes and reminders stuck to it.

‘No idea,’ I replied absently, following recipe instructions with a floury finger.

‘Need to know what time on Friday.’ He always was the more organized one.

‘…continues on whether Russia’s democracy—’ sound from the TV cut suddenly.

‘—We’re just getting news in of a train crash near Heathrow,’ a familiar news anchor’s face appeared. I froze mid-stir, looked across at Drew to see that he, too, had paused to stare at the TV. I went cold as footage of a mangled train rotated on the screen. The reporter was talking over pictures of a battered, shredded tube of metal, bent up unnaturally like a broken bone poking through skin.

Drew cleared his throat, tried to speak. ‘Where did mum put her itinerary?’ His voice came out much more quietly than usual.

We looked at each other. Then I dropped my spoon, and we were scrabbling through the papers on the fridge, emptying drawers, frantically trying to find the detailed plan of her journey that she said she’d leave us.

And just then, the telephone rang.

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This story was written as an inspiration piece for Mash Stories, a short story competition which gives writers 3 random key words or phrases, and a 500-word limit, to create their best pieces of flash fiction. The key words for this piece were: Andromeda – democracy – dentist.