Cracked Actor M. A. Toothill   © Copyright 2025 by M. A. Toothill

Graphic courtesy of the author.

At first, that seemed poetic, fanciful, or as if Bob Vale had taken leave of his wits. Then one evening a second Bob Vale appeared. The same quiet voice, same downy-brown hair, same remote politeness. He stood in the queue next to the original Bob Vale in the corner shop, both buying the same tin of corned beef and pack of rusks. When people enquired about the reason for this new found doubleness, they both sniggered and said, “efficiency.”

Then there were four of him, then eight, all shimmering slightly, as if the air around them was hazy and warm. People noticed that when they moved their outlines flickered and wobbled. The Coalman said he saw right through one of them once. Right through his body, like pink smoke in trousers, pretending to have bones and ride a bicycle.

The Bob Vales kept shrinking. Every day, smaller copies went about the neighbourhood performing increasingly smaller errands: miniature Bob Vales sweeping dust off counters with fine paintbrushes, mowing lawns by sawing off individual blades of grass, going in and out of keyholes like chimney-sweeps. The original Bob Vale, or what everyone believed to be the original, could be discovered on his balcony, enthralled by his shimmering legs. He once whispered down to a passerby, “each division reveals another version that’s ever more quintessential.”

By week’s end, the neighbourhood was infested with microscopic Bob Vales. They floated around like particles on sunbeams, all the while chittering like clever little mice. Scientists arrived and attempted to study them, but the Bob Vales were tricky and elusive; they slid through microscopes like sand through a sieve. Some people reported waking to find thousands of them positioned above their fireplaces, multiplying and rehearsing a clandestine geometrical jig.

Then came the night when the air turned pale indigo and smelled of burning hair. On every window-ledge, street corner, cobblestone, and in every raindrop, tiny Bob Vales winked into existence. Billions of them, each smaller than the last. They began to divide again, splitting themselves faster and faster, the light quivering toward invisibility.

Neighbours reported a faint rumble, like an engine far beneath the ground, and then darkness and silence. The indigo shimmer vanished.

In the morning, the flat window was dark for the first time in years. No one found any trace of Bob Vale - not a bicycle pump, a piece of cheese, an overcoat, not even a record of his tenancy. But sometimes, when the sunlight shines through the soot, people still say they see him; infinitesimal, dividing himself into fractions too fine for measurement, somewhere between the photons, vanishing by degrees.

*****

My brief bio is that I’m a resident of the North East of the United Kingdom. I studied English Literature, work in the drug and alcohol field, and have pieces of online fiction published on websites but never in print.