Sex, death and a snake in the grass: 19 linked short stories, fiction for the Internet. Read in narrative sequence using the left-hand menu or follow characters through the in-page links
11
Most people, Dan believed, had a basic view of nature. It was all red, tooth, claw - that sort of thing. And in a world that loved the next big thing it was only the big things that mattered. The leopard with the most kills, the eagle with the longest wingspan: the fights, the battles, the winners.
He - Dan - liked the 'ordinary miracles'. The blue tits nesting in the garden, the kingfisher motoring away along the canal bank. He liked the small, the everyday. He liked the big things, too, but only in their proper place.
Sometimes Dan became very worried about the problem of small people.The word 'small' has nothing to do with size here. No, the tall girl smoking an angry cigarette around the back of the bookies is 'small'. The boy in the wheelchair drinking a solitary and morose pint at the end of a Saturday night is small. Hurt, humiliated, sad people. Lonely people. Or so Dan thought.
Dan always remembered one 'small' boy from school. Terry WAS small, as it happens. Also thin and freckled, with mousy hair. He didn't tell jokes, he wasn't fast with his fists, and he didn't have money like the big people. He might have been born to be the class 'small' person.
They all, including Dan, used to laugh at some of the things Terry did to get big people's attention! There was the time in the changing rooms before PE when he whipped off his shirt to reveal an impressive thatch of chest hair. He was 12 years old at the time. That was funny. Turns out he'd cut it from his head and sellotaped it down. God, they roared.
There were the other stories, too. Such as when a couple of years later Terry'd boasted about beating up a blind man in the street. For a final insult he'd kicked the poor man's cane away. Wasn't that hilarious? Well, anyway, it kept the big people amused for a little while.
