Free Cecelia Ahern Short Stories by Cecelia Ahern

dirty them, leave them out in the rain and make them sit down and drink imaginary tea. Eventually they’d be forgotten about or lost.
    The cigarette smoke sent a few whistles out of tune, that’s for sure, caused a few coughs. I looked up at the window at Big Brother and wondered when he was gonna give up. He slowly unfolded his arms, beckoned to me, calling me up. Ah, victory at last. I’d finally won. I’d lost absolutely everything.
    I knocked on his door and entered. He was sitting in an expensive leather chair behind an expensive desk looking fat and rich and unhealthy. He looked at me with his twinkling blue eyes, rosy cheeks and a red nose—all the signs of someone who’d drunk far too much all his life.
    ‘Want me to sit on your knee, Nicholas?’ I asked sarcastically, taking a drag of my cigarette.
    He laughed heartily. He wasn’t supposed to and that annoyed me. So I stood before him while he told me a story. A story about a man who worked so hard, cared so much about people he didn’t know, that he lost his family and friends, drank himself to oblivion, ate all the junk in the world and got a belly so big he could rest a cup of cocoa on it, and I stood there fuming because I thought he was talking about me. But it turned out to be his own story and he told me that he looked out that window every day at me and thought he was looking at himself in the mirror. A mirror with a time delay. I didn’t realize it at the time but it seemed that, watching him, I’d been looking in a mirror reflecting the future.
    Later, after his retirement, from the windows of that very same office, I kept an eye on the enthusiastic hammerer and watched as he let it all slip away. He would be next. I changed my name, settled into my new job where obesity and unhealthiness was a virtue and where parents smiled and took photos when you put their kids on your knee. Suddenly, I was more welcome in every home around the world than I’d ever been in my own. I had a wonderful assistant, Mary, who made a list of my clients and I checked them twice.
    I filled the boots of a great man and in turn became a great man. I may have lost everything I ever owned and loved, but in return I was given the world.

7 Celebrating Mum
    A spoon tapping against a champagne glass silences the bubbles of conversations. Voices simmer and then calm.
    My eldest son George takes his place at the head of the room, the ringmaster, as always, ready to direct proceedings. My husband, Fred, and I are surrounded by our entire world, cocooned by the generations we had a hand in creating. Fred and I sit beside one another, everybody else stands with a drink in their hand. I eye the quickly disappearing whiskey in the glass in Fred’s hand and vow, again, as I did as a young woman at the top of the altar over fifty years ago, to keep an eye on him tonight. I prepare to be spoken about as though I’m not here, the centre of attention for tonight. Oh, how I hate that, but they all mean well, I know.
    ‘I was trying to think when was the last time so many of us gathered together and I think it was again for Mum, when we celebrated her seventieth birthday three years ago,’ George begins.
    Nods of agreement, memories flashing back, quiet murmuring.
    ‘She’s always been such an attention seeker, isn’t that right, Mum?’ Edward shouts out and everybody laughs.
    ‘Do you remember that birthday party, Greg?’ George calls to the baby of the family.
    Forty years old this year, my baby Greg. I watch him fondly, at how his face reddens as they taunt him. Ever since the day they’d formed words on their tiny lips, they’d never stopped teasing. How cruel siblings can be. I’d always hated their carry-on as children and teens, each of them so precious to me that one insult flung at them would hit me ten times harder than it ever would them. But siblings are impenetrable, each mock only adds another layer of thickened skin. When should a mother step in? I questioned