The Willies

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The Willies
Hamish MacDonald
Creative Commons Commons Deed
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 UK: Scotland
For more information on this license, please visit:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/scotland
British Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The Willies
MacDonald, Alistair Hamish
Printed and bound by the author.
ISBN - 1-59971-489-2
? 2006 Hamish MacDonald
The Willies
Hamish MacDonald

Chapter 1
Doing laundry always reminded Hugh of his mortality. One day he would die, and probably while trying to fold a fitted sheet. Or doing what he was doing now: tucking his socks together, making nice little pucks out of them. There was something satisfying about getting them square, with a little tongue hanging out, so that when he needed them all he had to do was give a pull and a matched pair of socks would pop open.
All those years of evolution culminating in tight sock-pucks, he thought.
He finished folding and hanging his clean clothes, then went to the kitchen of his small apartment. He took a square glass from a cupboard and held it under the tap. Water whirled through the filter and sloshed into the glass. Everyone had a filter nowadays; drinking "city water" straight wasn't a good idea.
He sat on the couch in his living room and looked around. There wasn't much to see: bare, beige walls, no bookshelves, no magazines. Moments like this were difficult, alone in the apartment with nothing to do. But the alternative was worse, having little bits of junk information stuck in his head -- a radio jingle, an ad from the subway, the whole text of last week's TV guide.
Hugh never forgot anything. Everything he'd experienced or given his attention to -- even things he would rather forget -- stayed in his head.
The mere thought of buying a radio started a song playing in his head, one he'd heard once in a mall a year ago -- every word, every drum beat and guitar chord. At least he could remember the end of the song and cure himself. He sat, tapping his foot against his coffee-table, watching the bonsai there wiggle.
When the song ended, he crossed the room to his patio door and went outside. With the passing of winter, the sun was starting to work again, warming the air slightly, though the sky still had the stark grey of whites and darks washed together. He felt none of the enveloping humid invitation of a summer Sunday.
Hugh rested his glass on the concrete ledge of his patio and took a folding lawnchair from its spot against the wall. He pulled its spring-loaded jaws apart and set it down on the grass -- an unlikely square patch of it on the veranda that was also the roof of his downstairs neighbour's place. The complex he rented an apartment in looked like a child's blocks poured out sideways, except that the blocks each overlapped in some way, forming a patio-roof combination here, a stairwell between them there.
Sitting in his lawnchair, Hugh could look out at the harbour or sideways at the Toronto skyline. He appreciated what the developers had tried to do for the waterfront in the decades since the turn of the century, like putting a giant bowl-shaped marine aquarium at the base of his building's east side -- albeit a half-finished aquarium. Its tanks sat dry: who could find a spare whale these days?
He stood up and leaned on the cement ledge, looking out at the lake. His drink slipped from his fingers and landed with a clunk on the ledge. Hugh gasped, reacting too slowly to have caught the glass had it fallen. He picked it up carefully and placed it on the grass before returning to his spot, leaning out to see what his glass might have hit.
This was Sunday, time off. He took a deep breath and tried to relax. The breathing felt nice, but he couldn't help wondering what he was breathing in from the city below. He tried to still his thoughts. Nothing to do. Nothing to busy himself with. Nothing but him.
This was not the desired effect. Instead of feeling peaceful, he was unnerved, as if he'd spent the whole week sleepwalking and this was his first waking moment. His own company was too raw a thing to experience, too alien, like the sound of a word repeated twenty times until it became nonsense. My name is Hugh Willard. I work at a law firm. It all sounded completely foreign to him.
He took another deep breath and sighed out loud to snap himself out of this thought-whirlpool. Sundays weren't peaceful at all. They were the most dangerous day of the week. He would gladly turn them over, let someone else live them out for him.
The phone rang inside. Saved from himself, Hugh ran in and found the phone in a corner of the couch. He picked up the little