An Extract from This Month's Release: Crickets
Crickets
Written on December 2, 2015, for the March 15 entry of 366 Days of Flash Fiction, this piece was inspired by the very loud cricket chorus going on outside my back door, one Canberran summer night.
The crickets were singing so loudly, I couldn’t hear myself think—and that was a problem. The crickets were singing so loudly that, not only could I not hear myself think, but I couldn’t hear anything that might be approaching… until they got close enough to make the crickets stop. And time was short.
They were coming, and I had to be gone when they got here, even if I was sneaking out the back, when they came in through the front. That was the joy of working in a highly competitive business.
I worked my way through the files. It should have been easy, a matter of clicking on one folder after another, but it wasn’t. Sable had favored the old-fashioned method of keeping records—paper, and big-ass filing cabinets that weighed two tons, so I was pulling out each file and scanning the contents as fast as I could go.
It was too big a job for one person, and it wasn’t going to take a single night. It was going to take several, and that wasn’t going to happen. I was going to have to be content to get what I could before the other crew arrived, and then to get out. Good thing the client was paying per file. One minute I was scanning to the background hum of cricket song, the next the night was silent as the grave.
A key turned in the lock, and I lifted the five files I’d stacked beside me and stuffed them in my pack, then I was down the corridor and out over the fire escape, into the snow.
Usually, I hate snow. It’s soft, and slushy and slows a person down—and, worse, it marks where you’ve gone. Today, I didn’t hate is so much. It was soft, but it was still snowing, covered where I landed in very short order, let me get back under the fire escape and listen to the guys who stuck their heads out the door wondering where I’d gone.
I waited until they went back inside, and slipped through the doorway under the stairs. There were reasons I’d taken this job. The second one was the silent alarm that went off whenever the fire escape was accessed. Whoever it was behind me, they weren’t gonna get too big a pay day. In fact, I thought, as I felt the ground vibrate to the tread of heavy vehicles, they’d be lucky to get any pay day at all.
That thought kept me warm as I ‘borrowed’ someone’s skis and took the quiet way out of town.
Cover art is by Jake at JCaleb Design, and links to 366 Days of Flash Fiction can be found on Books2 Read at: https://books2read.com/u/b6MrN0
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