Steven Earnshaw

Unpaying Debts

At the time it wasn’t much to ask me for monies for something like the house down-payment or to help with the car. Actually, I’m not sure that’s true. Didn’t I think it was a lot of monies and Drago blackmailed me into it? That must be nearer the truth seeing as how I’m here like this and there’s no escaping this trap.

Are you ready?

When is that voice? Of course I’m ready to give into monies now after all we’ve been through and will go through. Of course that was some time ago and now all that time in-between is what we said we would go through, ups and downs, we knew that much, without knowing what the rollercoaster of the future would be. Of course we didn’t share a seat on the bifurcating rollercoasters after that end we moved in parallel thinking about each other. There must have been things, people, events, the past, still connecting us. The dog was ours and then it must be imagined somehow it becomes his and those other women, one after the other. What was the dog’s name? Or is it still alive? Perhaps that wasn’t the last time I saw Merchant. ‘Will you give me the fucking monies, or not? What’s it to you? You’re rolling in it’ he vired towards me. It will have been the last time I saw them together, Drago and Merchant.

Don’t forget your dog

Merchant is a Norfolk terrier, like a brown Westie, a beautiful little dog, from puppy up until the last time we are all together. ‘You do not love Merchant as much as me’ one of us was very angry. Some things are hard to remember straight. I do remember the monies though, even if not the moments behind monies and who loved Merchant most or loved human more than human. Why didn’t Drago have the monies? ‘After all we’ve been through’. I do remember that, I do remember that, saying it to him.

Your senses working

Why did Drago need the monies? I said to him that he could have monies for they do not own me. Where were we at then? Why did I think such nonsense? Was that already an end, were we after the end of what we’d been before and the monies had no emotion in them after that end? We didn’t foresee before monies would be separate from our emotions. Did Merchant sense things? Merchant had a knack for sniffing the future, could sense creatures out there none of us could see they shoved all those financial receptors in his schnozzle. Yes, Merchant is the key to this, because somehow the dog senses the emotional investment.

Your place

On seeing Merchant again something will crack inside. To be honest, things will not go well since the monies episode, if we will have called it that. Merchant will make me have seen as much. It’s not easy living in this place habitually, and this place and this destitution is not what any of us could have foreseen. Is it Drago’s fault? Yes, totally. Drago is doing well for himself until he’s dead. You’re a long-time dead. He has taken all monies with him, apparently, an effect of delaying payment which means the dead will win and the world will collapse under the weight of future owedness.

Not an empathic dog

There will be another revelation next day which will entail going back over all that might have happened or did will happen. It’s to do with Merchant it will be and a shared belief in bank notes. They are like meat to something like Merchant. Or has he not been fed? The dog has the ability to transfer funds without any change in pulse-rate which is truly amazing. Drago had all the monied emotions so – and this is looking back really only obviously – had to die. But I am emotional too have become emotional wasn’t before and want very much the debt cleared by Drago’s estate which so all foretell will be next to negligible. When will the monies return?

Or did it return and I missed it?

Drago’s remains. What remains. In the space of the blink of the eye somehow there is a mood change which can be observed in some of the more will have been recent sentiments. You know, other debts they have been forgotten and were forgotten so long ago but this, this one, not this one, not now, not then, not ever. Well and in another moral sphere the question will be put, perhaps at the Pearly Gates, we can give you back Drago or we can give you back the small monies which obsess you so which will it be for there is a moral equivalence in your mind the justification for Drago’s death is that he has own all your monies took from what was ahead the remains of your owned life to point of demise. On the tip of the tongue what you will want to say is to the effect that Drago was already dead to me must always remain in the future dead to me – my affections are elsewhere on the intervening rollercoasters rebound backlash – what is not dead to me is the poverty-stricken self now. Give me monies over the sentimental times it’s direct.

Bio

Steven Earnshaw’s short story collection, Memory Clinic, was published in 2016. His work has appeared in various magazines such as Thrice Fiction, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, and Tears in the Fence. He is also author of The Existential Drinker (2018). He lives in Sheffield (UK).