The Good Samaritan
Flash Fiction Story
by Tony Dawson
The call came in at 2:00 am., a desperate voice sobbing down the phone: “I can’t cope anymore. This job is so exhausting (sob) adolescents are impossible to control. How can I teach the subject I love (sob) when the pupils are playing up all the time (sob) and they create such a din (sob) I’m at the end of my tether and feel suicidal (sob) Please help me!”
Deborah, the Samaritan at the other end of the line, responded soothingly. She had been doing this kind of work for some years and knew exactly how to handle her distraught callers. She began by asking the teacher her name, which was Sarah, and then began to calm her down, gently suggesting to the young woman that she should take deep breaths, sit down, and clear her mind. Help would certainly be provided. There was nothing to worry about.
“Tell me where you live, Sarah, and I will drive there to make sure you receive all the help you need.”
“I’m not at home.” Sarah caught her breath. “I live with my parents, but I didn’t want to upset them.” There was another pause. “I’m in a large shed in a field about half a mile away from my parents’ house.” Deborah could hear her sobbing still.
The Samaritan noted down the directions the young woman had supplied, jumped into her car, and set off.
When Deborah found Sarah, she was shaking like an aspen leaf, perched on a bale of hay in one corner of the shed.
“Maybe I’m suffering from SAD, you know, Seasonal Affective Disorder.” Her words came out in staccato bursts.
Apart from the bale she was sitting on, the only other item in the shed was a rickety old chair. A long rope was hanging over the back of it. Deborah looked up at the roof and noticed the rafters.
“I can see why you picked this venue to end it all. It’s just perfect.”
With that, Deborah told Sarah to get up and stand on the chair. Even though Sarah was puzzled, she did as she was told. She wondered if it was a Samaritan technique designed to frighten suicidal people into changing their minds. Meanwhile, Deborah picked up the rope, stood on one end of it, threw the other end over a rafter, made a noose, expertly slipped it over Sarah’s head, pulled it tight round her neck and hauled her up in the air, all in the twinkling of an eye. Sarah clutched at the rope above her head to stop herself from choking.
“What are you doing?” she gasped.
“Helping you, of course. I assumed your call was in response to the recent headline in the Guardian newspaper that ‘Teachers thinking of suicide should seek help’. It’s well known that people contemplating killing themselves often don’t have the courage to go through with it, so seek help to carry it out. That’s why I am here. Coincidentally, I’m with the section of Samaritans that is also called SAD, the Samaritans’ Assisted Dying scheme.”
The Tell-Tale Boots
Creative Non-Fiction
by Tony Dawson
My father, José Antonio Rivas Carballés, was murdered when I was six years old.
One day a group of men wearing blue shirts and red berets burst into our house in the parish of Santa María de Fraialde in Pol, a tiny village in the province of Lugo, Galicia, in the northwest corner of Spain and dragged him away. I remember that it was at the end of the summer in 1936. My distraught mother told me later that they took him to Portomarín and shot him. A number of our neighbours rescued his corpse and transported it to the parish of San Mamede do Río where they buried him outside the grounds of the church. This happened about six weeks after the Spanish Civil War had broken out.
I couldn’t understand why anybody would want to murder my wonderful father. He was simply the local clog maker, as far as I was concerned, but in the political turmoil of the time, his admiration for the 1917 Revolution carried out by the Bolsheviks in Russia and reflected in his decision to name me Lenin and my sister Igualdad (Equality), made his political leanings too obvious. Unusually for a man of his station in life, he was exceptionally well-read, having acquired quite an extensive library of political works. By the 1930s, although he had not joined any political party, my father had become a staunch Republican sympathizer,
***
In 2010, during an archaeological search, carried out under the auspices of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory, a pair of sturdy leather boots were dug up from an unmarked grave. They were made of calfskin and in remarkable condition, considering they had been in the earth for more than seventy years. I was accustomed to seeing my father wearing a pair just like them every day, no matter what the weather was. When the exhumed boots were scrutinized more closely, the bones of his feet were found to be still inside.
That news travelled fast across the Atlantic. I flew back to Spain from Argentina where my mother, my sister and I had been allowed to emigrate following my father’s murder, but only after the Fascists had forced my mother to change the names of her children. I was baptized Ramiro, in honour of a Nationalist hero-martyr assassinated by the Reds, and my sister, Igualdad, was baptized and renamed María Digna, an avocation of the Virgin Mary.
Naturally, in 1936, the children living in the village were completely unaware that the Falangists (for the murderers in the blue shirts and red berets belonged to that right-wing militia) and the Church had collaborated in the killing of my father. Nonetheless, seventy-four years later, those same children, by then octogenarians, claimed to remember his calfskin boots. And that is how my father’s sparse remains were finally given a secular resting place.
Tony Dawson is an English writer living in Seville. He took up writing during the pandemic and has since published about a hundred poems both in print and online in the USA, the UK and Australia. He has recently published three small collections of poetry: Afterthoughts ISBN 9788119 228348, Musings ISBN 97819115 819666 and Reflections in a Dirty Mirror ISBN 9781915819949 as well as a selection of flash fiction, Curiouser and Curiouser ISBN 9788119 654932.
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