| SPRING 2003 |
flashquake Fiction |
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A neighbour realised something was wrong. The newspapers couldn't be jammed through the letterbox any more, and were starting to mount up outside old Mr. Krant's front door. And everyone knew he never went away. 
When the police came, they couldn't force their way in downstairs at all. Both the front and back doors should have opened inwards but wouldn't budge, and the spaces behind the windows were blocked with piles of newspapers. The fire brigade had the same problem when they tried to get in the upstairs windows. A small attic skylight was the only possibility. A slim fireman managed to crawl through it, and shouted back that that the whole space was strewn with newspapers and cuttings, but wasn't impassable. The trapdoor down to the landing was like an oasis of calm in the desert storm of recent world events. It had to be forced open, of course, as the bolt was on the underneath. Landing, two bedrooms and a bathroom — all entirely filled with newspaper. The only way they could search for Mr Krant was by fighting their way to one bedroom window, and gradually emptying the first floor of newspaper through it. The work became quicker as they gained more windows. But he was not upstairs. So they cleared the staircase in the same way, and eventually reached the hallway, just six feet from the front door. By moving paper back up the stairs they could clear their way to the door, and then the work became easier, as they could clear the rest of the ground floor into the front garden. They eventually found Mr Krant in the back room, pressed up against the wall behind columns of paper that had tilted over onto him. His arms were wide open holding The Independent, presumably from the day he died, but the coroner couldn't be sure on that point. Pages 5 and 6 were moulded onto his face, and his nose was buried in those little stories hidden down the side of some pages, which most people never read, each with a jokey little caption. Yet they are often the only bits of the paper worth reading. In fact, Mr Krant became the subject of one such mini-story himself, entitled "Column Inches." My wife pointed it out to me, else no doubt I would have missed it.
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