A STORY by LEIGH LOVEDAY
Put the Knife Down
“That damned photograph again,” huffs Fenchurch at breakfast, slamming the laptop shut with one claw. “You can’t browse crab-related affairs for more than five minutes without seeing it.”
“The one with the knife?” asks Penelope mildly.
“Entirely unfair. A single moment of high emotion and you’re branded for life.”
“You just need to go viral for something else, father,” proposes Gwen from the other side of the table. “To make people forget about the knife attack.”
“The– it wasn’t an attack, Gwendolyn! I was defending my honour!”
“I know, father,” sighs Gwen, eyestalks swaying with teenage world-weariness.
#
Fenchurch attempts to go viral for something else.
He squeezes into a blue shirt to play keyboard exit music, but is unwilling to play anything more lowbrow than Chopin’s Prelude No. 4 in E Minor, which just isn’t that catchy.
He heads out hiking, but double rainbows elude him, and sobbing over the spiritual significance of cumulonimbus density elicits nothing like the same response.
He pays a human to run through a park shouting his name while he scatters a herd of deer, but even his most aggravated nipping can only convince two of the accursed animals to move.
Exasperated, he gives up.
#
That night, Gwen wakes him, saying she’s heard voices in the study. “They sound like violent criminals, father. Please! Fetch the shotgun!”
He does so, then clatters down the stairs and crashes through the door into the study with a yell, brandishing the gun wildly.
Propped up on the desk is Gwen’s phone, recording. She scuttles into the room behind him and hoots with glee.
Fenchurch turns to her in horror. “You wouldn’t,” he says.
Leigh Loveday (he/him) grew up in industrial south Wales and now lives in the English Midlands, editing videogame blurbs by day and writing fiction aggressively slowly by night. Find him clinging to the dry husk of Twitter/X @MrLovelyday.