Gavin Turner

Listen to Gavin’s story – read by JP Relph

I keep my phone on silent mode most of the time, except at night. Early calls are always emergencies or death related. Why should my issues add to the deluge of pollutants filling the night air with their inane chatter and mumbles, grumbles and stumbles. It is like catnip to them, these night sky things, twisting their scraggly heads and rushing to the source of the sound. I don’t know what they want. I don’t know why it draws them to me. I am frightened they might attack at some point soon. Yesterday, one of them got so close I could feel its fluttering heart, floating on its breath. Their hearts flutter, they don’t beat. Their hearts are panicking wings. 

My father once took me to the fens in Norfolk. He told me it was the best place to see murmurations. I watched those stunning starlings cascade in the sky, roller-coasters on the slightest breeze, rocking and flocking, blackening the low winter sun. Instinctively, they knew each other’s path, never bumped or shunted, never hurried past. They were perfectly synchronised, a singular twisting beast. That was the last time we stood together, my father and I, amongst the thin yellow stalks of damp dead grasses, watching a last natural miracle raise itself out of the frozen ground like an agonal breath.

Another day passes and I put the phone back on charge. The curtains are closed of course but I know it is raining. I can hear the steady drip from the gutter, slipped from its bracket under the weight of debris. It offers comforting normality. The things that need fixing, that now will never be fixed. It is dry and warm in my room. If I close my eyes, it could not be today. It could be any day of my choosing. I always choose the day of the murmurations.

When they eventually come for me, which I know they will, I will hold as still and quiet as I can. Not that it will matter, they will smell it on me, within me. The hatred, the hurt I caused, the guilt, a delicious cocktail of settled scores and sweet regrets. I almost felt the taste of anger once, just like I imagine they do. It focussed my attention on that solo walk back through the soft stubbled land. It was sour and sharp as lime.

We all feel this isolation, fragmenting our social brains, deconstructing us day by day. The temptation to make a call is overwhelming at times, to make a connection, to hear a real voice. This is why I know that my phone could ring at any time. The tinny tone is the sound of another one of my friends breaking the unspoken code, reaching out. The number of calls have dwindled down.I think I know why. Still, perhaps they have stayed strong, perhaps they haven’t.

At night I can hear the things outside in the garden, shuffling across the mossy paving stones. Their fluttering hearts become a thrumming hum of white noise, flocking and swarming just like the birds used to in the sky. I wish they were people again. I wish their hearts would beat the same way as mine does. Sometimes at night, I wonder what it would be like to be part of their murmuration, and to not always feel alone.

Gavin Turner is a BOTN nominated writer from the UK. His short fiction and poems are published with JAKE, Punk Noir, Voidspace, Dark Horses and Roi Faineant press. He has released two poetry collections, The Round Journey (2022) and A mouthful of Space dust (2023).
You can reach him @GTurnerwriter on twitter.

Read more from Gavin:
Here on Trash Cat Lit – ‘Light the Fire’
Roi Faineant – ‘Restoration’
Punk Noir Magazine – ‘Drowning in Sin’