Short story: Why I Wasn't There By Karl Whitney - - - - He looked at his watch, and realised that just then – at that exact moment – he should have been somewhere else, doing something else. He should have been in a creative writing class on the other side of the city. He could get up from where he was sitting and quite easily cycle there; he would be late, but he would have got there nevertheless. But he chose not to. Instead, he preferred to consider what his absence implied. Somewhere, in a room in a large concrete university, someone, probably a teacher, would have a list with his name on it. At the start of class it would be called, and no one would answer. It would be noticed that he was not there. Or maybe no names would be called out, and there would be a slim possibility that others would think he actually had been there and had sat amongst the other students for the duration of the class. Obviously, this was not the case. He was at home. He hadn’t gone to the class. He would go next week. He thought of his alter ego occupying thin air miles away in a classroom. There but not really there. Occupying paper more than thin air, really. Like anything else: his degree, his school reports, his bank account. Names and dates and numbers. On paper, filed away. You want to know where he was on this day? Attending a creative writing class here. Or was he? The twist in the tale, the case of mistaken identity, the watertight alibi. His business partner dies in mysterious circumstances, after changing his will, leaving everything to him; the business, everything. At that very moment that he was attending a class in the university. Definitely? Possibly… Yeah, he was here; didn’t say much though, the first week anyway. Absence is the highest form of presence, he thought for a moment, then thought better of it and resolved to attend the class next week. -------- Stories | Home | About This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.