[Fiction] His Old School

Read the winning entry for our week of February 23, 2025 prompt, The Uncanny

His Old School
by Jimmy Kavanagh

It was long after arriving on site that Daniel realised the building he was set to demolish was his old school. He hadn’t set foot here in 25 years, not since the year he turned 13 on the same day that the summer holidays began. He had run out of that building, excited to never read a poem again, to never stand in a line again, to begin his apprenticeship as a demolition man.

It had always been Daniel’s dream to be part of a wrecking crew. His mother had been a bricklayer and his father ran a construction business, but Daniel wasn’t interested in building things. The world had enough buildings, he thought. There was a roof for everyone’s head and then some, in his somewhat uninformed opinion. No, Daniel was much more interested in knocking things down. The transformation of a towering y-axis to the flat plane of an x-axis thrilled him. He wanted everything to be flat, to return to the Earth from which it had sprung. Any building higher than three storeys was pure hubris, any field left fallow was a paradise.

It was also really fun to watch things fall down.

Arriving on site, Daniel didn’t recognise the building straight away. There was something familiar about it alright, but it was banging a dim gong before it rang a bell. As he inspected the corridors, searching out load-bearing walls and structural pillars (or as he called them, targets), a lost sense of remembrance swelled in his chest. He knew this place. He had walked these halls before. Only…. something had changed about them: they had been warped, squashed and stretched into a new, unrecognisable shape. The halls he knew were longer: much longer, the rooves he knew were higher: much higher. Daniel reached his arm above his head, stood on his toes, and felt his fingertips brush the mineral fibre ceiling tiles.

Turning the corner, he found himself standing outside a tiny office with the name MR. LAFFEY emblazoned on the door. Of course: Mr. Laffey. That had been the name of his old principal. He was standing outside Mr. Laffey’s office, a place he had spent many an afternoon, banished from classrooms for being an undiagnosable nuisance.

This was his old school, and although it had been slightly warped by the ravages of time, the mainline warping had taken place on his own body. The six-foot-three frame of a demolition man viewed the world in a much different way to the four-foot-nine reluctant schoolboy.

Daniel held his walkie-talkie to his lips and pressed in the side-button: “Callback Jake.”

Jake’s voice crackled back: “Go for Jake.”

“We’re delaying the demolition by fifteen minutes. I’m doing a lap. Over.”

“Fine by me. I’m dying for a cuppa. Over and out.”

Daniel spent those fifteen minutes exploring the strange halls of his memories, those tiny corridors that were once his whole world.

He could not stop smiling as he knocked it to the ground.

A Note From Our Guest Judge, Emma Stephenson

I think flash fiction lends itself well to character studies, and this one just blew me away. I don’t know much about this man who loves to watch things fall, but I do know him. I was hooked from the beginning but the gorgeous sentence “The transformation of a towering y-axis to the flat plane of an x-axis thrilled him.” clinched it for me. This is the kind of challenging, inexplicable human being that I come to literature to discover. Fantastic on the sentence level and left me mystified at the human condition, which is the best way to feel after reading a flash piece in my opinion.

About Jimmy Kavanagh

Jimmy Kavanagh is an Irish writer based in Edinburgh. He primarily works in alternative comedy and children's theatre, and is currently working on his debut children's book, Puddle of Slime.

This piece was written in response to the prompt The Uncanny.