The Daily Tale

The winkle

2009-05-04T10:56:00.000-07:00

Well, I said I would be posting something when inspiration struck me - didn't think it would take this long. I have finally written something, so thought I'd post it...

A small boy on a beach ran to me last week and gave me a winkle. A winkle, such a strange and sad little object. I shook and then brushed the sand from it. Poor creature, I thought.
I took the shell and listened but I could not hear the sound of the sea blowing from within. Instead, I fancied I heard crying. Yes, there was a dry sob, sob, sob coming deep from within.
So strange. I immediately wished to smash the shell, to dash it on the deck like a greedy gull, but fought the urge. One thought was playing in my head, like a record, jumping and stuck on the same syllables; like a drifting soul song trapped in purgatory. "Plant me."
"Plant me," it spoke.
"Plant me."
So I did. I scrabbled in the dirt, tossing the clods and broken earthworms aside. In my bluster I'd chopped these worms in half or worse. No matter, I thought - they'll grow anew. Regeneration you see - I'm creating new life and new worth.
Dropping the shell into the moist hollow I carefully recovered the jumble of soil and cloven earthworms, imprisoning the gentle winkle.
And then I waited. I waited for it to grow.
And the rains came and the sun shone down and the winds blew the blossom from the boughs. All seemed but in requiem to the sad little shell.
The thought dawned upon me, smiling grimly, spreading icily across my body like electrical current. I had not planted, but had rather buried the poor creature. Now, beneath the dying pink flowers, it was lost to me.
I must be mad, I thought. Really, I must now be insane.

Catch up with me at Twitter

2009-02-13T17:33:00.001-08:00

Hi,

Just thought I'd say, you can catch up with me on Twitter. I'll be posting random bits of writing here:

http://twitter.com/paulbernard

Cheers,

Paul.

The Daily Postcard

2008-07-15T10:54:00.000-07:00

Hi guys,

Well, I returned from my week away from blogging refreshed and considering my next move.

It's been six months since I started The Daily Tale and I thought it might be a good idea to freshen the format up, try something a little different. So I have created a new blog called The Daily Postcard where I will do my daily blogging from now on.

The Daily Tale was an unexpected success and I'd like to thank everyone for taking the time to support me by reading the stories and leaving such great comments.

However, I think the format had gone as far as it could and I was chomping at the bit to try something a little different. I'm quite into photography and wanted to devote some time to that, along with writing. So that's kind of what the concept of The Daily Postcard is - a photo and a short tale to accompany the image.

I hope it will become something the browser can either just dip in and out of when they feel like, or alternatively let their imagination become swept up in the twin assault of the image and the words.

My reasoning for starting it on another blog site was so that I could leave The Daily Tale blog here as an archive for anyone who wanted to flick back and read their favourite stories again. When I've finished my Postcard project I will seek to do the same with that too.

So that's all, I think. I hope you'll join me in The Daily Postcard. See you on the other side...

Please follow the link to The Daily Postcard:

http://thedailypostcard.blogspot.com/

aperture, break, gap, interruption, interval, lacuna, lull, pause, time off

2008-07-07T15:15:00.000-07:00

Hello all,

I am taking a short hiatus from my Daily Tale-ing. I will be on holiday for a week and then, when I return there will be a revamp in order for my daily blog.

I hope you'll be back in a week to experience it...

Paul.

Fourth of July

2008-07-04T15:27:00.000-07:00

" 'Cos I heard it in the wind and I saw it in the sky,
And I thought it was the end, I thought it was the fourth of July "

Chris Cornell

I saw a firework, dead, burnt, on the street. I reflected on how sad its resting place, how briefly it had burned and now how ignominious its fall.
At one time it had potential. Potential to explode and cause delight. Always while it had potential it was a special thing. A device of magic, waiting to bring wonder. In its short life of usefulness it was above us all. It could fly, it could shower us with metallic petals of light. Great golden arcs that would shard in the sky.
And then, dropping black and crippled onto an unlit street corner it could now only move if kicked or gusted by a force of nature.
Still, at least it had fulfilled its potential.

The Vision

2008-07-03T14:25:00.000-07:00

She looked at the image long and hard. She scratched her head to show him that she was thinking about, thinking long and hard. She moved her head around to jaunty angles, ways that she almost never moved her neck.
No matter what she did, or how she considered the possible illumination of the piece of artwork he displayed proudly before her she couldn’t ascertain any relevant meaning from it. It really was just a mess of paint to her.
She contemplated telling him this. Maybe he’d appreciate what it said to her, but she bit her tongue. She bit her fingernail as well and then stopped in case he was looking at her.
He wasn’t looking. He was sat on an old red sofa, spotted with paint and ripped open in places so that the stuffing poured out like fat. The sofa was turned away from the easel, away from where he worked so that he could at least try to switch off from his mind’s displays for a while.
The radio was on at that low volume that is as annoying as too loud. He was thinking, this artist, about something someone had said to him earlier. He stared at the music coming from the radio.
He found that he often realised that something interesting, something insightful about another person, had been revealed to him in conversation and he would only pick up on it later. By this time, the conversation had long faded to dust and there was little chance to query the interesting party. Another wasted opportunity.
“Celine,” he called without taking his eyes from the stereo. “What do you think?”
She stopped looking at the splurge on the canvas before her and bit her nail again. “Well, I loved the funny picture of the radioactive clown,” she said. “Very surreal!”
He smiled and nodded. He was pleased enough, but he found himself fighting not to ask her about the latest piece, the work he was proudest of.
“I’m glad you liked it,” he said. “Honestly, I am.” She moved uncomfortably in her jeans. They were just a little too tight and she felt it now as she walked back to the couch. The room was lit by just the spotlights pointing on the two easels and as she stepped away from these she felt more confident.
She picked up her long drink and nibbled the edge of the glass. There was room to sit next to the artist, on the couch, but Celine opted for a leather armchair facing him. She sat down slowly with her knees together and sipped her drink. The spotlights flared in her ice-cubes as she tipped the glass back.
“It’s a shame,” said the man, “that you didn’t like The Vision.” He referred here to the title of the strange abstract painting, and not in some grandiose way to his overall method or philosophy of painting.
The girl gulped her drink hard and swallowed an ice cube. It stuck in her chest and made her entire body tense up. She gritted her teeth against the cold.
“It’s not that I didn’t like it,” she said. “It’s that I didn’t understand it.” She fumbled now as the ice moved on away from her chest, “I’m sorry, sorry about that Robert. I just didn’t quite get it, maybe.”
“It’s a shame for us both, that you preferred the clown,” he said.
His words barely hung there for a second before her reply: “Why, Robert?”
Robert shook his head, then dropped it to the side a little and raised his eyes to look at her. His eyes looked softly and sadly upon her. “Maybe you don’t know why yet. But you will later,” he said.
They didn’t say anything for a minute or so. Just looked.
A buzzer sounded at the door. A man spoke.
“It’s David,” Celine said. “Shall I tell him to come up?”
“No, it’s fine. I have to finish up here. I’m tired. Goodnight Celine.”
Celine stood awkwardly and put down her glass. She looked down at Robert for a moment and then turned and stepped carefully across the wooden floor to the door, unbolted its latch and pulled hard. The great old metal door swung on creaking hinges.
“Goodnight Robert. I really did like your pictures, you know?”
Robert nodded.
“Don’t forget to lock the door behind me,” she said, stepping out of one world and into another.

The octopus

2008-07-02T12:22:00.000-07:00

A man standing on a beach casts his pet octopus into the sea.
He holds it by three of its legs and swings it in dizzying circles before letting go to send it flinging back into the sea where it was spawned. As it plops into the water, a red ball, he hopes it’s the last he’ll see of that octopus.
Sinking into its new home, the octopus lingers in the swell, growing accustomed to the new tastes and sights, but soon it spreads its legs and swims off into the deeper waters, in search of dark rocks and things to eat.
The man sits down on the sand. He has had that octopus for three years. It was a treasured gift of a former lover, now gone.
The waves break ever so gently on this shore. So gently, in fact, that the short breakers have created a tiny shelf at the point where the sand remains dry and full. Upon this shelf climbs a green crab. It has come from the sea, allowing itself to be deposited there by the tide.
It sidles towards the man, unnoticed, then nips at his sandals and toes.
“Woah!” the man lets out expressions of concern. He looks for some flotsam to flick this crab away or something heavy with which to crush its shell. But before he can find this he hears a voice.
“Brian, what have you done?” He stares down at the green crab. “You have cast away your only friend.” The crab speaks. And it addresses him by name.
“Strange creature,” says Brian. “How came you to speak so, and know my given name?”
The green crab replied that he was one of the great seers of the sea, and with the lobster, the ray and the narwhal, views all that occurs both above and below the waves.
“The cockles sang to me, from the rocks over there,” continued the green crab. “And then the sprats and starfish whispered to each other that the octopus had returned to us, before his time.”
The green crab explained that the octopus was a great talisman, a conduit between the realms of sea and land. Such creatures were placed in homes throughout all the continents of the world, allowing the seers to get a clear view of the airy world above them, helping them make decisions and policies for life under the sea.
“Even your partner, Selkie, was put into your life by us. Once she thought a bond had been established between you and the octopus she knew she had to return to the ocean.”
“Now, you must go and retrieve your octopus, Brian. You must try. Only you can find it.” And with these words the green crab motioned with its right claw, beckoning Brian towards the sea.
Brian stood up, proudly and with purpose, now. He had to do this, he knew, though it seemed impossible. He would swim and swim, and search and search, until he found his red octopus once more.
He stepped into the light foam of the surf and pushed on until he was waist deep. Then he turned back towards the crab and waved. The green grab seemed to be waving too. Brian lifted his legs from the sandy sea bed and started to swim and swim.
It was difficult to move his arms though, and his legs cut sluggishly through the water. He looked to his arm as he tried to take it from the water. Fifteen small octopuses of various colours were clinging to it, dragging on it.
As he stopped swimming he felt the myriad suckers of a thousand tentacles attaching themselves to his body. Hundreds of octopuses grappled with him and he began to feel sharp stinging sensations across his body. A larger tentacle then wrapped about his head and Brian slowly disappeared beneath the blue waters.
The green crab, safe on the shore, stopped waving and skittered off across the wet sand, feeling satisfied and looking out for a warm rock pool to hunt in.

Reunion

2008-07-01T16:45:00.001-07:00

The three lads, bounding through the weeds at the trackside stopped for breath.
Johnny, the youngest, legs wobbling with the effort, wanted to sit down but he fought that feeling with all his might. He was out with his dad now.
His brother, Michael, stood up as straight as he could, sucked in a lungful of air and puffed out his chest proudly. His father patted his head rather heavily.
Dad had come to see them today and their mother had rolled her eyes. It was their uncle’s birthday, their dad had said, and so he had thought of something for them all to do. ‘A family outing’, he called it.
They’d crawled under wire fences, scrambled down dirty banks and jumped from heights that Johnny had previously thought impossible to survive. These were all things his mother and his teachers had told him never to do, but here he found himself, on an overgrown railway embankment, with his father, watching the trains go by.
“Not far to go now, guys,” said Peter. He was revelling in his new found role of leader, a figure to be feared and obeyed. “Just round the next bend,” he said, “that’s where it happened.”
They hacked onward with their feet until they came to a brown stone wall. Peter led them slowly down the bank and onto the gravel at the side of the railway track. A curving tunnel opened cavernously before them.
“Right,” he said. “When I say the word we’re going to run for it. There shouldn’t be another train for 10 minutes anyway, but we’re better safe than sorry.”
Michael looked a little incredulous at this, but Johnny pushed in front of him, eager to race away into the darkness at his father’s command.
“Now come on, son. Michael’s first up and then you follow him on. I’ll be close behind you, okay?”
Johnny nodded; Michael said nothing and just stared ahead into the gloom and then at his shoes.
“Alright go,” said Peter, but Michael didn’t move.
“Come on Mike, head up and run for it.” Michael’s body moved, almost imperceptibly, but again he held himself back.
“For God’s sake Mikey, fucking go for it you prick!” His father raised his voice and his hand and Michael was away.
He ran blindly into the darkness, stumbling upon the rail and then vanishing. His father screamed after him to bear left and not to trip on the tracks, his voice echoing about him in madness.
Peter held Johnny by the shoulders as the child strained to follow his brother. As soon as his son stopped struggling, Peter plunged ahead of him onward into the tunnel.
He found it curved round gently and then light flooded back into its far mouth. Out into the daylight, not far up the track, Michael sat on the rail, crying.
Peter ran on, out of the tunnel towards his eldest son but his mind was gripped by responsibilities and he turned around to see what he’d forgotten. Johnny came then, whimpering out of the darkness, rubbing his red eyes and peering at his father with that look of fear and disappointment that can tear at a man’s chest.
Peter strode towards him, picked the boy up with one arm and then stumbled across the thickly piled gravel at the railside until they reached Michael.
He resisted the urge to grab the lad roughly with his spare arm, instead holding out a hand to him. “Come on,” he urged, adding: “I’m sorry.”
Michael looked up graciously and took the hand. Soon they were all sitting on the grass bank looking back at the railway.
“This is it,” said their father. “This is the spot where your uncle Mikey died.”
They all stared at a spot on the track and imagined it happening there. Noticing there were two different sets of tracks before him, Johnny spoke up with a sniff: “Dad, which side was it, that uncle Mikey got hit by the train?”
His father looked long and hard at the two sets of track and didn’t answer for a minute. He realised he couldn’t remember. He had no idea any more.
Peter scratched his beard a little, turned to his boys and pointed at the track nearest them. Three pairs of eyes converged on that point.
A horn sounded in the tunnel and a train rushed by. “It’s early,” said Michael.

The dream box

2008-06-30T16:21:00.000-07:00

At 3am I was awakened by the sound of struggle.
The TV whistled to the sound of static and its glare lit up vague bookcases filled with things I may have read. The couch stank with the droppings of a day and night spent filling oneself with carbohydrates and poisons.
I stood groggily. A tiny fly buzzed by my hand. The curtains stood open and I saw mellow streetlamps fizzing on the other side of the road.
I could hear Sarah in the bedroom. Her twisting movements on the mattress caused the sheets to whisper and the springs to croak. She spoke, but too quietly to be heard between walls.
My mind moved slowly, as if through water, like a mill-wheel or the great paws of a bear. She must have come in sometime after eleven. She mustn’t have wanted to wake me. But why didn’t she turn the TV off at least?
I sensed objects moments before I crashed into them or stubbed my toe. The buzz of the fly and the TV faded to the tune of Sarah’s breath. She swallowed air like she was drowning somewhere.
I made it to the hallway and could see that the door to the bedroom was open wide. I slid over the passage by stretching my arms forth and allowing them to catch my weight as I dripped across the space. There I held myself, crucified within the wooden frame of the door, staring at Sarah.
The curtains were drawn tightly in there and it took perhaps a minute for my pupils to compensate for the freshness of the darkness. And there she struggled, against the whims of her mind, against the heat of the morning, against the suffocating covers that she gripped like a lover.
Collapsing then, into the room I loomed over the foot of the bed like a spreading ghoul, a watching phantom delighting in his handiwork. Using the edge of the bed as my guide to her, I moved around keeping Sarah always in my gaze.
She spoke to someone, entreating them. Such a helpless thing she was, and as I saw the sweat trickling from her brow I moved to wipe it clear; moved but slipped to my knees at her side.
And there, in a small box floating perpendicular to the bedside I could see her dream; sparking, cold and full of fear. All life and colour was being drained slowly from the screen before me. Inside it, Sarah floundered in the midst of a muddy veil as black shapes, amorphous clouds of soot, flitted about pushing down this grey net around her so that it began to cut into her lips and gums when she screamed.
I tried to get to my feet, to turn myself off from the horror I was viewing, but in either field of my vision I could see separate Sarahs writhing in synchronized agonies and I was transfixed.
I sat there, watching those demons plague her until the light from the dream grew as dim as the room. As the final drop of colour and the last pinprick of light faded from the dream box, my head slumped against the mattress. Soon I joined Sarah in dreams again, and my head whirled there until morning.
When the daylight lifted my eyelids several hours later I was damp and shivering and crawled into bed beside her. She’d discarded the quilt and was now sleeping coolly in a loose ball. I dragged the covers back on with my last drops of strength and sanity and snuggled in behind her.
Time stabilised soon after, our temperatures aligned and our bodies took on that soundless motionless sleep; the sort of sleep that adults envy in their children, as they watch them in fear and awe each night. They stand there helpless wondering where their child has gone to, what they are seeing and how they can possibly protect them there.

An ode to lunch

2008-06-27T16:28:00.000-07:00

Finishing the week, with some symmetry, and following on the poetry theme, here is a paean to that time in the day when we put down our tools and briefly run wild: lunchtime.

Well, how sounds the call to arms that dost the luncheon bring?
Can any man amongst thee lay a feast befits a king?
Women tell in hush-ed corners that the sandwiches are near;
While men they rush and falter, just an hour to sup their beer.
Oh the midday hour, and hunger's power, it doth a madness start,
Whence gluttony meets lunacy and pulls one's sense apart.
But me, I stroll oblivious as I pass the gawpers by,
And I shall greet thee, starkers, eating lettuce from a pie.

Lakeland (part three)

2008-06-26T10:52:00.000-07:00

Rose stole into her mother’s room and peered about it. The curtains were drawn but daylight seeped about the drapes.
After a moment she could see the strange shape of a figure upon the bed. It was naked and its body bulged in places her mother’s didn’t. Everything was bigger, from the arch of the back to the width of the arms.
Rose’s mouth opened slightly, but she bit her bottom lip and kept herself standing there.
Beneath this mass of flesh writhed her mother. She whimpered, as if she was being crushed against her will but had finally succumbed to the inevitability of oblivion.
Everything about this scene was unrecognisable to Rose. The room had changed from the place she had known. It had never been a joyous place, but it had been a place she recognised and felt safe in. Now it was tainted with strange noises and unfamiliar scents.
Afraid of waking the great beast that was draining the life from her mother, Rose whispered: “Mummy, are you alright?” At no response from either figure she raised her voice so that it became a bizarre croak, a sound unlike any she’d ever emitted before.
Her mother seemed to open her eyes at this point and become aware of the monster, squeezing the vitality from her. But instead of fighting it off and comforting her child, scolding words were issued forth and deities were called upon.
“Oh my god, Rose! Get out of here, get out now,” shouted her mother. The creature atop stirred now, to see what the commotion was all about. Its face lifted to look at her mother and then turned slowly to regard the little girl.
Rose saw the face of a man staring, almost without comprehension, into hers. At this point she let out her scream and darted back through the door.
Her mother called after her as she fled down the stairs: “An hour. An hour was all I asked for, Rose.” The slamming front door separated a mother’s cries from a daughter’s tears.
Rose ran blindly from the house and across between the rows of perfect little cabins until she reached the grassy meadow. Here the wet grass rubbed her face mixing clinging rain water with salty tear drops.
She strove on through the tall grasses, until she fell through the last of the thicket and landed in the shallow stream that runs out into the lake.
In the summer, her and Chester would wade through here chasing brown fish and splashing each other with the cooling water. Today she just sloshed through it, soaking her knee socks and ruining her shoes. She dragged her little legs on through the stream toward the lake, sobbing hard so that it was difficult to catch breath.
Through her bloodshot eyes she saw the great expanse of blue water fanning out in front of her and Rose wanted so much to become a part of that beautiful tranquil scene.
Through her splashing she became aware of another pair of feet crashing through the water, coming towards her. She slowed down and soon felt an arm around her shoulder. She wanted to sink into this person, whoever they were, but she held still and let them turn her around.
It was Chester and as she hugged him there in the stream all her fears and strange thoughts flowed seamlessly away through his arms and into his chest.
Rose’s big brother sat her down on the grass bank of the lake, took her socks and shoes off and rubbed her feet to keep them warm.
She’d stopped crying now, but her voice wavered still. “We have to stay out here a little bit longer,” she said, shivering a little. “We’re not to go back in the house just yet.”
Chester looked into his sister’s eyes and nodded gently. He sat down on the bank too, put his arm around her shoulders and they looked out together across the lake at the boats and the ducks, the green hills and the slowly greying sky.

Lakeland (part two)

2008-06-25T16:04:00.000-07:00

Lakeland Estate was a grouping of twenty-four log cabins, set on the shores of one of the Lake District’s favourite stretches of water.
Many of these cabins were sold as holiday homes or timeshare properties, but Rose, Chester and their mother lived there all year round.
It was often a very lonely experience, especially in the winter when few people visited. It was cold too. Their mother felt the cold bitterly.
In summer it was better. There were always other children to play with, though they rarely stayed longer than a week at a time. Rose and Chester formed more firm friendships over the course of one summer season than many children managed in their entire youths.
Sometimes, when Rose grew tired of gazing at the bobbing boats or the dabbling drakes, she would turn around and stare at the grouping of the cabins, laid out perfectly before her. Each cabin had been placed in a spot an exact distance from the next, and that pattern was repeated on the row behind, going back up the hillside. Each cabin was offset to the side of the one in front of it, so that each had a forward view of the lake. It was all of a pleasing fit.
And then the cabins themselves, they too were made to an exacting design. From a distance it almost seemed like they couldn’t or shouldn’t possibly be able to stand up, without the tree trunks buckling and falling apart, scattering the insides of the house all over the front lawn.
But these too interlocked and joined in a perfect design, as if nature had decreed it so. The strange 3-D jigsaw of a genius giant.
It was their house, the fifth property (the first cabin to the left on the second row of properties) that Rose now approached, and her eyes flicked about the front windows for signs of life. She saw no movement.
Gingerly, she stepped up the single metal step outside and tugged ever so gently at the door so that it made almost no sound as she clicked it open.
Looking at the clock Rose could tell that she’d been outside for just over half an hour. That would just have to do.
On the kitchen table she spied a familiar sight. An empty bottle of red wine lay on its side there, its last drops spilled like holy tears. Upstairs she heard music playing.
At once, Rose was struck by some unfamiliar feelings. She felt uneasy in her own house, as if the rules of normality had ceased or at least been changed. She had an urge to go upstairs and see if her drunken mother was alright. But the blood froze in her veins as she thought about mounting the first step on the staircase to her mother’s bedroom.
She hesitated and held there, one brown shoe seemingly nailed to the stair carpet. Her ears, her entire body strained to hear movement or a voice up in the room, her mother’s room. While by no means off bounds to her, Rose didn’t like to go near her mother’s bedroom when she was drinking.
After what seemed like ten minutes, there on the stair (it had really been just two), the little girl began her climb in steady earnest.
Deftly and with some experience she avoided the creaking stair. The music, blaring from the radio, got louder with every step.
Outside her mother’s open bedroom door she hesitated. Looking past it, down the landing, she could see the door to her safe, pretty room standing slightly ajar, beckoning and welcoming her.
Rose proudly ignored the lure, the temptation to run, and listened for noise in the room. She heard the rustling of the bed sheets and the sound of laboured breathing from within. Fighting her cold blood once again, the girl stepped into her mother’s room.

...to be continued...

Lakeland

2008-06-24T14:52:00.000-07:00

A blur of blue and white, the two children in their very best clothes ran down to the shoreline.
There, they picked out stones and pebbles, the flattest ones all the better for skimming the furthest.
The two siblings, Rose and Chester battled furiously. Each strained to flick their arms quicker, harder, stronger than the other.
Chester caught a good one. Two, three, four, five, six. His broken piece of slate hopped the small waves breaking on the lakeside and whizzed on like a rotor blade toward the horizon.
Rose managed just a couple of small leaps before her stone sploshed into the clear shallows at the side of Derwent Water.
Chester was buoyed by his skimming success. “Maybe I can hit one of the boats out in the middle?” he cried, jumping with excitement.
Rose turned and walked to the grass bank at the edge of the small pebbled beach. She plonked herself down and looked up at the afternoon sky, scudded with cirrus, scraping the day clean.
“How long will mummy be?” she asked Chester, with the hint of a whine. “I’m bored already.”
Her older brother let out a brisk ‘tsk’ noise. “She said to play out for an hour or so,” he replied. “Come and throw some more stones.”
Chester was trusting of his mother, and happy to play out at the lakeside and in the nearby woods until the sun began to make its first dip beyond the Cumbrian hills. But Rose was not an child spirited by the idea of adventures into the hills, climbing the tall trees or swimming in the lake, come summer. She sought the comfort of her favourite chair, her books and her bedroom.
“I’m going to the meadow to pick flowers,” Rose said with a sniff, turned her back on her brother and began to march in the direction of the wild unkempt grasses growing to the side of Lakeland Estate.
She knelt and the long plants bowed under her weight, protecting her knees from the wet ground. It had rained earlier and the spring leaves were dappled-down with sunlit dew. Rose watched one of these leaves for five minutes, until she witnessed one of the water droplets successfully detaching itself and falling into the thick undergrowth below.
Nature fascinated her. She loved to collect frogspawn and watch the tadpoles grow. She would stare from her bedroom window with wide-eyed fascination as lightning flashed across the lake during a summer storm, while poor old Chester quivered beneath his covers.
She liked to look at it, but she hadn’t learned to love it yet. She grew quickly tired of being outside, she was cold and bored now. It was time to head home.

...to be continued...

Ode to a shop girl

2008-06-23T13:29:00.000-07:00

Another poem-tale for you verse fans...

Oh lovely
Is the girl,
Who sits upon the till,
She fights the out of
Circulation coinage
We use still.
She has kind freckles
And a smile that nibbles
Sweetly at her cheeks,
Her blouse encases
Freshly ripened bosoms -
Unclimbed peaks!
I imagine her
Getting ready,
She's late for work some mornings;
When she arrives
They've stocked the shelves
And opened all the awnings.
Yet her hair
Carries the breeze
And managers forget the time,
Imagining spending
The night with her
In bed with poppies and red wine.
But me, I gaze
With thoughts resting
On her secret ways,
And I'll sleep with
Her vision burnt there
Until autumn days.

Dedicated to the pretty girl in Boots who serves me during lunch...

Voices in the city

2008-06-20T16:45:00.000-07:00

Click. The VHS turned off. The image returned to a soap opera called Emmerdale Farm, except it was tough to see the cows for the blood covering the screen.
The room was thinly lit but with a turn of a dimmer it shone to reveal a bubbling wound upon a body black with blood.
A detective would later assume that the blood covering the TV set and some of the far wall was caused when a blade was used to open the artery of one Jonathan Gerne, late of Henley-upon-Thames. The reason for his visit to and subsequent murder in a Soho bed-sit was still unknown and would be for several weeks. However, as the wound still sputtered forth a little, a heavy-set man with a mullet haircut sloshed towards the TV set and bent down to eject the video cassette. As the shunting device ejaculated forth the hard black box through its cassette flap the words Hard Knocks could clearly be read on the label by any ghost standing in the room.
The man put the video cassette in his pocket and left the room and then the flat. The TV buzzed on as the blood clotted over the green fields like cream.

Somewhere in the city a sickness crawled. It plunged on through walls and pavements and minds. It was devastation breathing fumes, a substance that swallowed light and tricked the sun into death. And someone was tracking it.
Evidence was hard to come by and impossible to present, at least to Scotland Yard. Enough whackos leading them down blind alleys as it was. Taylor knew he was a whacko too. Associated with whackos, learnt from whackos, used whackos. He sensed things though. Sensed the good in some, the churning nipping bitter mouths deep within others.
He could hear the tiny voices that told them, told everyone, what to do. Maybe it was because he could distinguish these sounds from all other background noise that he could ignore them. Society had noticed them - named them conscience, mind, or even soul - but society thought these noises originated within them, whereas Taylor knew they certainly did not.
This realisation had caused him to act noticeably differently to the average person in the average situation. He would actively disobey the voices; the guiding voices, the commanding voices, the desperate voices. Sometimes this would get him into trouble, would cause him to be a bit of a whacko.
Taylor saw the second murder. Knew it was the second when he saw the papers. Knew there would be more when he heard the voice.
He didn't know if it was one booming disparate voice from the gloom or many chattering furies, but they were whispering above the city and sometimes they would rush down and grow louder. He could hear them right now. They were below him, somewhere along the canal towpath.
He had got this close but fear gripped him. He wanted to vault the brick wall and get a glimpse of his quarry, but his limbs were locked and all he could do was listen to the cacophony of rage.
The domination of the voice echoed over the stagnant water. It was blasphemous in its meaninglessness, yet it was compelling someone. A flash of moonlight danced near a mooring. A scream clashed with the howl of the behemoth voice and then both were silent. The padding of footfalls moving off to the north won the fight of sound.

Underneath the canal bridge there were plenty of good people fallen on hard times. There was plenty of bad luck, hard luck, tough luck. Too many stories ending the same way. Greatcoats of bin bags, weak fires, fingerless gloves. It was cold.
There was a wheezing haunting the damp corners and other invisible sounds creeping through the darknesses. The sounds that the police could feel as they picked around looking for clues. The sounds that kept them sharp and scared. Chief Inspector Tonne was even affected by it.
Someone nearby was not affected though, not in the slightest. Someone was sitting with his eyes closed, listening to the voices. Listening to the moans and the screams, the whispers and the laughter.
With his knees pulled up tightly to his chin, sitting upon a bed of thick cardboard, someone was deep in communication with the voices.
All around were stacked videos and books, old stereos and towers of comic books, surrounded. Someone had brilliant blue eyes and a dirty blonde shower of hair in ringlets and straights uncontrollable. A wide grinning mouth was filled with lucid pointed teeth.
'What a whacko.' Smith says, nudging a couple of arms. A few policemen turn to see him and feel the same way. A whacko. They're looking for answers and they're looking for a killer. The kind of killer who likes the sight of blood.
Smith starts to swagger: 'I'm going to ask him a few questions'.
'Excuse me sir? Sir?'
Eyes straight ahead, he keeps on rocking.
'I'd like to ask you a few questions about what happened here last night, sir. Do you know what happened?'
No answer. Smith tries to push on: “Sir, can you please -”
Someone’s mind moves - rustling all around in the dark. Restless.
“He can't hear you.”
“He's just a crazy mute.”
“Leave him alone.”
Smith takes a step back. Looks at the small crowd and Taylor in the middle of them. Walks away. Someone was watching.
Tonne, he saw it all and he felt it, ugly and strange. This was the beginning of his fear.

Thanks to Paul for help and inspiration here.

An elegy

2008-06-19T16:07:00.000-07:00

Today he saw a face from his past; a face he could never forget. The face of Philippa.
They met while studying Latin. Neither of them were that hot at the language, but the poetry brought them together. Those Romans could sure write a love poem.
Elegy it was called, and elegy tells, usually in a poetic form, about a loss or a death of something. It can be wistful, nostalgic and mournful. It can also be the most beautiful feeling in the world.
This boy’s study of romantic elegy coincided with its birth within him. He soon found that the longing for a love that couldn’t be had created a singular internal stirring that becomes almost addictive.
This feeling can be easily evoked, perhaps by certain songs or pieces of music, also through powerful literature and film. Imagine these feelings now, feelings which can successfully transport you to a magical place of all-consuming passion; feelings that can never be sated, that can never truly be shared.
Rather than feeling empty and depressed, though, his elegy filled him with bittersweetness and this is something which can keep a heart enthralled.
Let me share with you this elegy of mine.
I once sent a note to a girl whom I was friends with, but who had a boyfriend. He was a real idiot; of course he was.
It was at university, but he wasn't attending the university. I was really taken with this girl and we had a good relationship, though I guess she was just enjoying the flirtation, the attention.
Her boyfriend lived nearby. We were away from our homes and families for the first time, but there he was every few days. He so regularly visited, like a nightly ghost, and he was everything I thought a boyfriend shouldn't be: a burping, puking, insulting, child.
I didn't understand the attraction on her part and, as I had met the girl soon after we started at the university, I figured this relationship was simply a hangover from a school romance. A lingering crush. The last puss from a teenage spot.
Two years down the line and I am proved very wrong. He remains; lingering, stale in the air around me.
Is she just weak, what power has he over her? I decided I needed to act. Galvanised by a recent night out, a dance, that connection still and the spark; I posted a note under her door.
I told her things: that she was special. You might say it happened on a night of the soul. Music, writing, solitude.
My actions were unwise, silly, ultimately destructive. The creak outside, the rustling at the door, the note sliding through. Whether it woke her up or she found it in the morning, it doesn’t matter. The entire exercise appears creepy in the light of the morning. All she can think about is a man, standing outside her room, in the wee small hours.
When next we met, the ugly embarrassment was paining her pretty face. It took weeks until we could begin to talk again, but our relationship had changed. She could no longer feign innocence. No longer pretend to understand what I really saw when I looked at her.
Her boyfriend greeted me with huge toothy grins from then on. He never mentioned the note, but he was pleased he'd won. Perhaps he respected the gall of my actions, but in his victory I was more sickened by the sight of him touching her.
However, I wasn’t downcast. I couldn’t again go near, yet the taste in my mouth made me smile. It still does.
When I saw her today, she was alone. She walked with purposeful grace, and the same red glow in her cheeks. But some zest was gone. Some divine spark of hers seemed washed away, perhaps forever.
I stopped where I was, and allowed my gaze to follow as she walked by on the other side of the street.
I thought about going over there, and speaking to her. Asking if she remembered me, was she still with him. Endless futures seemed possible for those few seconds. But the elegy, the elegy gnawed at my stomach some more and demanded to be fed.
So my eyes closed heavily, taking and holding one last image of her. Flowing brown hair, walking away from me once more, beautifully, forever.

Fluffed

2008-06-18T15:59:00.000-07:00

Does anyone really know
How the stuff that we call fluff
Gets in my belly-button?

It seems to gather in the day
And at night, while I'm away
Asleep, it makes its journey.

Such a sojourn shouldn't happen
Logic unravelled, fluff travelled
To my blow-hole.

Why does it gravitate?
And will it just once abate?
I have sat and sat to fathom.

Some people think me rude
But I do not watch my crotch,
I'm just gazing at my navel.

So next time you clean it out,
With your finger in the spout,
Stop and think of me.

The red dragon

2008-06-17T14:44:00.000-07:00

As I look now, out of my second floor window, I can see the first mountains of the ancient kingdom of Wales, climbing into the horizon.
They are out there, across the railway tracks, down the road of terraced houses, across the dunes and over the estuary.
Today I can see white crests breaking out where the river meets the sea and, still further out, crepuscular rays beam between cracks in the cloudscape, illuminating foreign beaches or sand banks.
Wales is a whole other country, and I can see it from my lounge. I’ve never been there and yet it appears quite a walkable distance away; drowning in mud, quicksand and saltwater not withstanding.
It seems a place of mystical and magical possibilities. What secrets might it hold? What ancient power may still be locked within those mountains? Their national flag has a picture of a dragon on it! How much more mystical can it get?
When last I thought like this, I resolved to journey there.
In order to aid my flight to this land, I spent all evening watching the dance of the insect-chasing swallows as they glided over red-tiled roof-tops and swooped at speed across the road below.
Then I watched the glossy winged gulls as they flipped and flapped their huge spans and took off from chimney pots and railway sidings. And I spied the arcing flight of the pigeons, glancing branches and telephone lines but still flying straight and true. If these rodents of the skies can do it, I reasoned, then why not I?
So, once the sun had descended into its nightly cradle and the moon was safely ensconced behind the sinewy clouds, I slid open wide the huge window in my lounge and clambered out onto its narrow ledge. Someone had painted the ledge cream, and I found that comforting.
I took in deep lungfulls of air and bent my body backwards, stretching my arms out as I went. I then began to move them in a routine flapping action and my joints cricked and cracked under this unusual motion.
I then held one of my deep breaths, counted to three and prepared to step forward, off the ledge. I strained and I struggled but each time I tried, something, some primal fear deep within, wouldn’t let me go. Wouldn’t let me leave the ledge. I felt like some fledgling who couldn’t depart the feather-lined nest.
Perhaps it was for the best, I thought. I’d probably just collapse, sprawling, in the garden below.
But then a remarkable thing happened. Through a crack in the ever-shifting night clouds, I saw a strange shape flit across the face of the moon.
“A dragon!” I exclaimed and, without second thought, leapt into the summer night.
What happened next is still difficult for me to understand or make clear in my head. I remember though, quite distinctly, my body rising up, and it just kept on climbing.
The railway and road went by in a flash, and I was soon swinging out towards the river. My shadow fair whizzed across the beach and I felt the air temperature cool as I reached the water.
All I could do was flap my arms and head on towards the far side of the estuary and the north-east coast of Wales.
I must have been mere minutes from the Welsh border when suddenly the temperature around me rose quickly. Flame crackled close to my head and I was forced to dive down, close to the spraying sea.
I twirled and wheeled my body like it was some top secret fighter plane and was amazed to see the scaled body of a great red dragon flapping above and snorting its fiery breath in my direction.
For a large beast it flew superbly and soon headed me off in my quest for the coast. A crackling wall of death halted my progress and I banked sharply as my progress to the sandy shores of Talacre was blocked by this boiling curtain of flame.
As I scrambled to avoid a scorching end, my course brought me into the path of the ancient beast itself. The dragon reared and roared at me, swinging a blistering claw in my direction. Its breath, all sulphur and inferno, wilted my resolve. It landed a bloody smack and my body sailed backwards at an astonishing rate, across the ten or so miles of water that separates Merseyside and Wales.
And that is the last thing I remember about my encounter with the red dragon of Wales, the great guardian of its borders, repeller of English invasion.
I awoke the next morning, scratched and sore in the branches of the apple tree that grows in my front garden.
I was lucky to survive my encounter with the dragon, that’s for sure. But every now and then, when I gaze from my lounge window, I still get the urge to make that short trip across the water to visit those Welsh shores.
Not by air, though. Next time, I’m going to swim for it…

Clouds

2008-06-16T15:36:00.000-07:00

The feeling of floating above the clouds is a queer one.
If you let it, it can take you over. You could get lost in a kingdom of cloud, see castles with soldiers and dragons attacking. Something about these fat mountains, wisping into new dimensions before your eyes, turns one’s head back to childhood dreaming.
I once took my grandfather with me on a transatlantic flight to New York, to visit my sister. It promised to be an uncomfortable journey; a long flight interlaced with stilted conversation and awkward silences. Still, there were always the clouds.
I remember the first time I flew in a plane. I was an adult yet I was stuck to the window in delight as a million synapses fired at once, relaying memories of candy floss and ginger beer, chasing pig-tails and climbing trees, mud seas and bloodied knees. And now I was above all that.
I travel by air routinely now, but it still stirs up some of those feelings, and it did that day flying with grandpa. I looked away from the clouds when I heard the clinking trolley of the air-stewardess but my grandfather, in the window seat today, stared on at the rolling white ocean below us. The stewardess had to touch his shoulder to see if he wanted a drink. She may have been checking to see if he was dead, too.
Then, as we enjoyed an in-flight brandy or two, my grandfather began to speak.
He told me how he had longed to fly above those clouds in his youth; and how he had loved flying above them in his adulthood.
“I would take every opportunity available to me to taste the higher air,” he said, “And get closer to those white angels dancing in the fluffy sky.”
He didn’t look at me many times while he recalled his time amongst the clouds, and at times I couldn’t tell if his memories were real or fantasy. His words were laden with romance and it seemed as though he had at one time managed to grow wings and flown like a migrating swan to reach the heavens.
The war was raging and there he was, a flying delivery boy transporting whatever was needed to wherever he was told.
He said how lucky he was to be able to fly so often back then and recounted a tale from those days:
“Often the sky would run black with smoke and man-made clouds would burst my white castles and set them aflame.
I would stay calm by searching out any little speck of white in the distance and focusing on it and striving towards it with all my might. Anything to leave behind the grey reek of the flak.
I was doing a similar journey to the one we’re on right now, in the June of 1940, when one of my engines caught fire during an attack on our convoy. It spread to the wing so my co-pilot and I bailed out.
In a way, I’d always longed for the chance to jump, the opportunity to step onto the clouds. It almost made me cry when my body flashed through them like they weren’t even there.
They might look substantial, like a dream taken form, but they’re really just clouds of water vapour.
I thought about this as I plummeted, and I didn’t want to open the parachute, not for a long time. But something in me, maybe when I saw those blue Atlantic waters rushing at me, something made me relent and I pulled the ripcord and slowed sufficiently to hit the water safely.
I bobbed around there for a few hours before a passing trade ship happened to spot me. I looked up, helpless once more, and saw the clouds turn to white again.
And as I looked up at that colossal sky I was thinking, ‘Maybe I just picked the wrong cloud? Just the wrong cloud to walk on?’ ”
He finished his drink and then didn’t say anything for a while. I looked and saw that he’d fallen to sleep.
He was back in the land of dreams now, where anything can happen. So when the stewardess brought our dinner I asked her not to wake him.
We let him sleep awhile longer. We let him sleep there in the sky for as long as we could.

The sight of summer

2008-06-13T15:20:00.000-07:00

Lillies and rosemary dappled her hair, his lady blossomed in the sunlight. He reached out his hand to help her and she stepped down three garden stairs onto the dew spattered grass.
They were welcoming the dawn in summer, the solstice was upon them.
It was the 21st day of June and they had sneaked over a high wall using a borrowed wooden ladder. They balanced along the tops of the thick brick wall that housed one of the many gardens of Hanley Hall, until they reached a sturdy trellis they thought they might use to descend.
Though it creaked and it strained, these two lithe creatures did not break the wooden latches that allowed tangled vines and creepers to flow upwards, closer to the glowing sun.
And then, running through the Victorian garden, barefoot upon cool morning stone, their clothes and locks flowed with the movement of their youthful grace, their joy and love, like wild ponies prancing.
He bounded now, ahead of her, and jumped through the open gate (left unlocked the day before) into the wonderful hillside meadow at the edge of Lord Hanley’s estate.
Before him the beautiful patchwork of the English countryside cascaded down to the valley and villages below. An amazing sight, the sight he had come to see, paying true homage to the first rise of the midsummer sun.
It was then that he turned around. Turned around and saw his love standing in the gateway of the old garden, staring not at the view but at him. Her eyes told him this was the view she’d come for. Not the first auburn flares of the seasoned sun; not the field and hedgerows, birds and foxes, bathed again in the magical warmth of midsummer. She had come for him.
And as he helped her down into the meadow’s thick green grasses, even he, this lover of the dawn and worshipper of the ever travelling sun, could not unlock his gaze from the wonderful reflection of her eyes.

Stormy weather

2008-06-12T15:25:00.000-07:00

Imagine if you spent time labouring over every decision you ever made, every step which took you in a new direction, every person you looked towards.
That was Colin, this was how he was, how he approached most situations.
You see, Colin thought about the future. Colin realised that when he boarded a train he needed to be careful. The decisions he made could change the entire course of his life.
The correct choice of carriage might offer something as simple as a pleasant and quiet place to sit and read. This was important. But then, upon boarding, which side of the carriage to sit on? One may contain that boring guy from the office that Colin always tries to avoid; or it may be holding Chris, who owes him money.
Then, choice of seat is important too. Sitting in the right seat may give the opportunity for some eye contact and subtle flirting with a girl. She might be the girl he’s going to marry, or she might just be willing to sleep with him. Either way, he realises that choice of seat is imperative.
Of course, if he thought about this for too long, and in too much depth, his brain would start to frazzle a little as he realised that stepping inexplicably to the left at any moment might take him out of the path of some unseen falling masonry, or bird shit at the very least!
The difference between a clean and excrement covered shirt might be the difference between a job offer, an interesting conversation with a stranger, perhaps a woman noticing him.
But he realised, almost immediately, he couldn’t live his life like that, constantly second guessing what nature and physics had planned for him. And even if he did, like in the case of the train, realise that his choice was stark and potentially meaningful, should he set himself a rule for decision making such as ‘always go with your first instinct’, or perhaps ‘always do the opposite of what you first consider’? Would such a rule even help him to choose what was the right thing to do?
In the end, all this pondering left him with the realisation that we are all whims to the breezes of fate. Who knows if the right people are going to blow into our lives or not; who knows if we will blow into theirs, and at the right time to affect them?
Colin didn’t believe that luck was anything more than a superstition, but good fortune could be described as having these whimsical breezes work out for you, once in a while.
As Colin sat in the middle carriage, to the right of the train doors, in the second row of seats, first seat on the left facing the direction of travel, he wondered if he was sitting in the eye of a whimsical hurricane.
He stared at the drunk brunette sitting across from him for a few seconds before she stood up and blew away from him forever.

Too much salt

2008-06-11T15:56:00.000-07:00

Sienna played with her food. Her pasta tasted too salty, there was never enough pepper on it. She ground out some more and sniffed at the food so that tiny granules of pepper dust tickled at her nostrils. She tried to see if she could stand the tingle, ignore it and control the temptation to sneeze.
She held herself perfectly upright and waited. She blew a little air out of her nose, snorting like a bull. She was calm and in control of her body. She stared with burning concentration out through the kitchen and down the hall where her husband lay.
She’d pushed him down the stairs earlier.
After the palpitations had stopped and she was no longer shaking, she plucked up enough courage to descend the staircase and see if he was still alive.
When she reached the hallway, taking care to step over his body, Sienna found it difficult to be certain of his state of health. She always had difficulty taking a pulse, so she didn’t bother with that. He may have been breathing, shallowly; all she could be sure of was that he was unconscious. He was definitely unconscious.
It was at that point that she realised she was quite hungry. She thought she may as well prepare some pasta. The pappardelle softened and flowed around in the bubbling water on her stove like seaweed or huge tapeworms.
She strained it before it got too soft, added a tomato sauce and grated mozzarella on top. It smelled delightful, but she couldn’t eat it. Just too salty for Sienna. It was always something with Sienna, she would always be complaining about something, always whingeing and moaning and asking her husband for something. No wonder he got angry with her.
Outside her husband groaned. Sienna sneezed.
Her left hand was shaking a little so she pushed her fork slowly into the skin on her left forearm until the shaking stopped. Then, rising purposefully, she moved around the edge of the kitchen table, passed through the open door and stepped along the hall.
Her husband’s head jerked spasmodically and his hands seemed to be reaching, slowly, for the bottom of the balustrade.
She sneezed again and this time she saw him open his eyes and look right into her.
Time hung around her like a curtain made of bridal silk. She was lost in her life for a moment, lost in her youth and beauty, lost in the words he had said to her.
She remembered every time he touched her.
Then time came crashing down around them both and she peeled her eyes from his, allowing them to rest instead upon the baseball bat they kept by the door: ‘to deal with intruders’.
She didn’t even take the time to think of the best place to hit him, in order to keep his injuries consistent with a tumble down the stairs.
Stifling a sneeze, Sienna just swung away.

The right thing

2008-06-10T15:55:00.000-07:00

We ran like wolves in the morning air and the farmer chased us home.
Diving over stone lain walls and through fair thickets of gorse, we flew, Joey and I.
I looked back at him as we raced through Crockett’s Field; my little brother, carrying a pig under his arm and still bounding away from the pursuing farmer like we were racing in play. I smiled back with pride and he smirked - we were nearly at Crockett’s Wood and the farmer would never find us in there.
Before we reached the tree-line, the cruel farmer stopped running, readied his weapon and squeezed off both barrels of his shotgun. I immediately slowed and turned around to make sure Joey had made it. He careered on by me without a care in the world and I gestured my disapproval towards the farmer with my right hand, while picking up a hard grey stone with the other. The farmer readied himself to fire again as I ducked into the cool dark of the wood.
Joey was nowhere to be seen, but I could hear the squealing of the baby pig issuing from the woodland depths. “Kill the damned thing,” I hissed through gritted teeth, “stick it now!” Up the slow roll of the sloping field trudged the farmer, gun-toting and steely.
There was little time to find Joey and silence the swine. We had a chance to escape the hot buckshot by using the tree cover, but the idea had been to climb and hide in silence. Now this small animal threatened both our lives.
I skipped between the trees, my eyes on the ground, my ears pricked for the piglet. Bounding over the ageless roots that grew like twisted tumours in the ancient recesses of the forest I heard the cracking of twigs and the shifting of branches that said the farmer was not far behind. When this was followed by the report of a weapon and the sound of shot thudding into a trunk, I had to end my pursuit of Joey and climb the nearest tree for sanctuary.
Heart pounding I scanned the forest floor below for signs of movement. The pig whimpered on somewhere nearby, but I could not see it or my brother below.
And then came the farmer into the scene. I remember him, a brooding presence in cap and weather-beaten coat, his face was never clear. He seemed to have locked onto something now and advanced with stealth and purpose, gun poised and pointed at some large green ferns nearby. As he came towards my tree I pulled out the cold grey stone from my pocket and held it over the edge of my branches, waiting for the target to pass underneath.
I was sweating so much and felt that the noise of my pounding heart would surely give away my position at any moment. Still, he was beneath me now and all I had to do was open my hand and put him down.
“Drop it, drop it now,” the words ran repeatedly through my head, but I found myself fighting them hard. It wasn’t me, to do this. I couldn’t maim this man, no matter what harm he had suggested to do me.
As he passed by safely, without hope of return and another chance of falling under my stone, I remember being struck by such pangs of guilt. Yes, I had avoided the possibility of causing serious injury to this man, but I had left him to my brother; I had deserted Joey.
I find it hard to describe this feeling, but it was like something nearly frozen was being pumped all over my body, that’s all I can say about it.
There he was, the farmer, parting the ferns now with the end of his shotgun, getting ready to catch and then punish my poor brother. I sat there though, remained in my tree and did nothing while the scene unfolded, while the farmer slowly prodded inside and the pig began to squeal. He then stamped the ferns down flat and I closed my eyes, waiting for the scream.
But no more noise came.
I opened half of one eye and squinted to see the farmer bending down to retrieve a lone piglet. He rummaged around the rest of the thick vegetation but found nothing. Joey was nowhere to be seen and relief flooded my senses, melting my juddering body.
He soon gave up and, with a stern look about him, the farmer marched away from the ill twilight of Crockett’s Wood.
I waited up there, in the tree, for what must have been five minutes before risking the drop to the floor. Once on the ground I crouched and gave our secret call - three croaks and a twitter - like the woodcock. Suddenly, Joey crashed to the forest floor behind me.
“I dropped the pig, I’m very sorry Henry,” he said and looked like he was going to cry. “I did try hard to find him again, very hard, I swear I did.”
I wanted to hug him then and tell him how scared I was for him and that I was sorry I didn’t do a better job of protecting him, but my brain was numb and I couldn’t order my thoughts any longer.
So I just grabbed him by the collar and turned for home, dragging him through the forest with contempt.
He was my little brother, you see. I was wretched and he was my responsibility, so we just always did what we did.
Somehow, this always seemed to be alright.

The curse of Berabenar

2008-06-09T16:55:00.000-07:00

Berabenar had cursed himself. A transformation spell gone horribly wrong, his body was in disarray surging into uncontrollable creatures, shapes and other ungodly things. Only the Green Witch could help him now, could stop his bodily flux. So he set off on a tiring and bewildering journey to her door, as his body pulsed into everything you (or he) could imagine.
Great boils pockmarked the wizard's flesh, before it became bark and the boils were simply gnarls in the wood. He had been walking for a mere thirty seconds before his legs, at once horse and lizard, became pond weed and he collapsed like harvested corn.
His fingers oozed, but every now and then they became solid enough for him to drag his infinite carcass another step or so along the road. The night was as black as the soul of Azamoth, and he was thankful that the sun's tyrant master had sewn up the very eyes of the stars so that no light could illuminate his grotesquery.
He oozed ever onward. Two hours had passed and his blasphemy had ailed Berabenar. Longing for sustenance, he saw that his form became more gelatinous, more able to spread across the dark lane. A huge spider happened across his path. His teeth were leaves but his tongue was of a frog and he lashed the spider with horrible force and spontaneity. It retracted into his beak, biting horribly at his feathery cheeks, and then it was gone, crushed into the lava of flesh and fauna beyond.
He guessed he was still an hour's slide from the door of Hulldimble, the Green Witch of the North Pastures. She lived on the village's north-eastern edge so he needn't risk detection and certain immolation by passing through the streets of Casterdale.
Then, growing the strong legs of some giant tarantula he found the strength and speed to scuttle onward to his goal, the spider had burned in the furnace of his body and revitalised him. As he approached the village boundaries his legs began to pool. They flowed like ugly syrup now, and he felt himself collapsing into this sludge. A horse whinnied and he looked in horror as a lone rider approached him.
The shadow of the forest canopy provided cover from the eyes of the rider. A strong man, probably travelling home after some secret assignation, rode as quietly as possible over the cobbled ground. He hushed the horse, who no doubt smelt the rotting of a creature in the forest before him. The wizard had no control and his tongue slithered greedily and flatly across the forest carpet to the edge of the sturdy Casterdale pathway.
The horse stepped onto the simple slime that was now Berabenar and reared up. The rider caught hold of the reins and steadied. The horse bucked and turned around, its legs seemed to sink into something acidic and it cried out. Thrashing frantically the steed loosed the rider and gained the strength to bolt away though its limb twisted and broke and the horse collapsed into a verge.
The rider had fallen face-first into the puddle of moss and scum. Ferns grew and twisted around his head so he could not scream, would never scream. Roses grew through his body and leech like arms attached themselves to his body or vanished into orifices. His body convulsed in seeming agonies but no cries could be heard.
At last the flesh formed again and engulfed the man. The wizard took on a truer form, though he was now eight feet tall and carried the bulk of a man who had feasted on man. Replenished, and in some control of his flux, he staggered onwards. Torches now flickered in the village, stirred by the neighs of the broken horse. The wizard faltered, sweating, but his path was straight now and time evaporated until the moment he crashed through the door of Hulldimble's cottage.
She was feeding a serpent from her breast. She looked up and smiled…

Thanks to Matt for the inspiration for this tale.

From 'The Ballad of Sir Ravenscroft'

2008-06-06T13:32:00.000-07:00

I'm away for a few days so thought I'd post this strange little horror/fantasy tale. A group of friends and I were taking turns to write the next part of a story. The scene set is of a knight returning home to see his castle beset by strange creatures. It's silly, but offers a little escapism, anyway...

From a distance of perhaps 100 yards the gallant knight watched as his loved ones were thrown to the death giving ground below them. In a fraction of a second he witnessed a pair of leathery wings flop across the infernal scene and snatch a falling carcass, which was borne away over the encroaching forest and soon into the cloudscape. The other figure hit the inner bank below the castle wall and rolled slowly into the slim black moat.
Sir Ravenscroft sped on foot towards the base of the east tower. In the oily, fetid stream he spied thick black hair, growing heavy and sinking fast. He reached in, aware that his arms could be ripped from his body by some demoniac mouth beneath the surface. But it was little relief to drag from the stinking mire the broken body of his lady fair.
He traced her purple lips with his gauntleded finger. They seem burned and lacerated by a blasphemous kiss. Her clothing was torn and her body showed infinite signs of torment and torture at the sport of damnation. Blood dripped thickly down her legs and he fell hard on her chest in untold agonies, anguish his soul had not known could exist, despite witnessing the full horrors of Moorish battle.
The impact of his weight drew a sudden, sharp, agonising breath from the body of his wife. "John," she spoke in gurgled guttural tones, "Leopald, I tried to save Leopald. He lives yet." Sir Ravenscroft longed to look into the beautiful eyes of his wife once more before her life ebbed to a close. He expected to see horror and fear there and wished to insist they saw only peace before she met God. Yet as he brushed back her bloodied hair he gazed only upon two blistered sockets, scolded and torn with worms burrowing holes into the softest fleshes within.
The last thing his poor wife would have heard was the sound of her husband retching and heaving in paroxysms of revulsion.

A feeling for falling

2008-06-05T15:13:00.000-07:00

Gum
On the street.
Looking down from windows
At aerial photographs,
New roads seem cobbled;
Victorian retro
Smoothed by feet.

Tom was pottering in his flat. His windows were open in the summer sunshine and light was pouring through as small clouds passed.
It was like in some cheap advert for washing powder; the freshness really was coming in, injecting his entire room with the scent of pollen and wild grasses.
He allowed himself a moment to enjoy this, to be infected by the season, before looking at the images he’d set in front of him.
Scattered scenes, in a square format, these nine prints were laid out in even rows of three on the table. Each photograph measured six by six inches and their arrangement, on the floor, became a pleasing square of squares.
Each colour image represented a different view, a window on the world, captured by Tom, of a view of the ground directly below, taken from a variety of heights.
The overall appearance of these various bird’s eye views, when seen together on the floor, was of falling through several spaces at once, towards a multiple of floors.
The first time Tom had stood over this strange world of gravity and seen all these different ways to fall, all these different grounds to rush forward and catch a brittle body, he was quite shocked and had to sit down.
A little later he viewed it with awe, later still and he was pleased with the work he had done. Vistas, opened up with snapshots.
He had sucked these images from the world over the past year of his life by taking a vintage camera with him, virtually everywhere he went, and looking out for interesting windows.
Once one was spotted, an estimated reading for distance and light had to be made and then, quite carefully, Tom would reach a slender arm out of the window, point the camera’s lens directly at the earth below and open the shutter.
The process was a little ‘hit and miss’! Without the luxuries of auto-focus, a light-meter or range-finder, the shots would often appear out of focus or incorrectly exposed. And there was always the wind to contend with.
Still, nine pretty decent images were the result. Interesting individually, Tom felt they created a powerful whole. Jennifer was coming over soon, to view the finished article, and Tom was quite excited at the prospect.
They were now ready for framing. He’d spent hours deliberating over their order, their suitability in place of about four discarded others, and the effect of the ‘overall’. Now, he felt it was almost finished.
Slowly, Tom picked them up, print by print and slid them into a frame he’d had specially made with nine perfectly spaced and separated mounts fitted.
As he sealed the frame, placed the completed artwork on the wall of his flat and stepped back to look at it, he was not struck by it as he first had been. In fact, he was not struck by it at all.
There was no feeling of falling, there was little in the way of synchronicity, flow or a majestic whole; there were just nine disparate images staring back at him. Nine snaps of broken concrete slabs, black bobs of hair and thin spikes of wire and cable criss-crossing it all.
Tom looked at the frame, and then his watch in a dazed panic. Rushing to the window, Jennifer’s bobbing head blurred into view, sliced by myriad railings. Time stopped moving for Tom until a buzzer sounded on his door and awaited his usual reaction.
Defeated again, Tom plodded towards the door. As the latch clicked open, somewhere a vintage camera slipped from a hand and was obliterated, smashing to a hundred tiny pieces on a hard and greedy street below.

A quiet

2008-06-04T15:30:00.000-07:00

I love it when the night melts away,
Silently seeping into dawn.

Those serene still hours that fade like a dream.
Moments when nothing happens
That are some of the best of our lives,
Some of the most memorable.

Those times when one no longer knows what time it is…
The watch face fades and the ticking joins the calm
Of the warm still night air.

To float with those lost hours -
The soul quiet, the body so relaxed -
Heightens all that we need not force:
laughter,
sleep,
tears,
and love.

At these times we lie unmoving and understand;
The closest we will be to peace on Earth.

In this state of bliss, its very concepts are challenged,
Channelled through the dim light of lamp or candle.
Its slow spark, electric, eclectic,
Travels short distances… which is enough.

All are close at this time.

The works of Stranger Tom

2008-06-03T15:53:00.000-07:00

Stopping at the blistered door,
The dwarf explained what lay in store:
‘A stranger man than I’, says him,
‘Called ‘Stranger Tom’, resides within.
With mouth of claw and hand of tongue
A statue, made by gods gone wrong,
Then given damned life,
Abomination, scales and strife…’

Tom had taken to writing poems about himself.
In these he would always manifest as some type of ghoulish creation, a grave robber’s nightmare come to life.
He couldn’t say what had brought out this new found affection for the romantic poet in him, nor why he saw fit to so distort himself within the verse. But, as he scribbled away on the page, he would find himself contented; and when he would read them back to himself later, he would be smiling. ‘This can only be a good thing,’ he thought.
Earlier that day, Jennifer had taken her place at Tom’s side in the canteen for lunch. Tom was enjoying a rather fine salad of gruyere and cherry tomatoes with avocado and wild rice. It was a strange combination of his own dreaming and he thought the flavours complemented one another, perfectly.
Jennifer baulked, as usual, when he peeled back the blue plastic lid of the Tupperware container. She’d say things like, “oh my”, or “quite ghastly”, in a manner, so clichéd, Tom believed she must have borrowed it straight from Austen. Of course, that was a prime reason why he was so fond of her.
Jennifer stroked her long brown hair with affectation. Bending her neck back as she did so, Tom realised he was supposed to notice something: “I see, you have a new necklace - very fetching, Jennifer.”
“Oh this? Do you like it, Tom? Do you, really? Oh, why, it’s nothing really. My little Arnold bought it for me, actually. Brought it back from the East recently. It’s jade.”
The mention of Arnold’s name frustrated Tom, always, but he always let it pass without showing a flicker of emotion. If Jennifer had worked out how much it annoyed Tom then she was certainly a cunning psychologist and a keen manipulator of men.
Tom stared at Jennifer’s beautiful neck and sighed. His eyes flickered and held there, not daring to look lower in case she might be watching, daring him to embarrass himself with a brief inspection of her cleavage. The temptation burned him for many seconds until she mercifully relaxed and let her hair pour back down around her shoulders.
“So, how are things between you two then?” asked Tom, as uninterestedly as he could muster. He picked up his pen before continuing, “Is the ground still a little shaky?”
“Oh no, not at all Tom, dear. Well, at least not any more,” she replied.
“Well, I mean, I know we don’t talk that much - like you and I do - but there’s something about him that still drives me wild,” she went on.
“I mean, you’re such a pretty and handsome thing, poor Tom; but he’s a brute, raw and animal. Drives me quite delirious, sometimes, I can tell you.”
Tom’s teeth ground and his face wrinkled, ever so slightly, but his eyes remained stoic. He started scribbling in his notebook.
“Ah now, Tom, what on earth are you writing there?” she asked. “It’s nothing,” he replied, “just some verse.”
“Oh gosh, poetry? Let me read it Tom, please won’t you let me?”
Tom hunched over his work, as if trying to hide it, but he left a corner of the paper exposed and didn’t stir when she grabbed and pulled it from under him.
Her eyes opened wide and she devoured the lines, hungrily. Tom gripped hard his pen and watched as her entire head seemed to roll along and then spill over each of his syllables like they were the crests of waves.
“Oh dear, how frightful!” she exclaimed, grinning.

This marks a welcome return to the blog for Stranger Tom - I'd almost forgotten about him... Here's his first appearance.

The taste of chicory

2008-06-02T16:53:00.000-07:00

Chicory hit his tongue and warm tingles of happiness touched his spine, delighting the fibrous links of his shell-like neck with hot electrical current, coursing up and down his nervous system.
It smelt strangely of death to him. He reached out again, daring to touch and to taste the frazzled mess that had been dropped before him by Lillian, earlier that gruesome day.
He loved to eat; even more, he loved to eat what she had made, no matter how burnt it was.
“Oh baby,” cried Lillian from the stove where she worked, “Won’t you eat some more food for momma?”
The man looked about him, slightly bewildered at where the sound was coming from. Lillian turned around. Her cold old face was tired, sagging like the bough of an oak. She lived now, only to satisfy her man.
Through a hole in the screen door of the kitchen, someone was looking at the domestic scene. He was at a fair distance but he focused now upon the man sitting at the wooden kitchen table, picking at a charred carcass.
It was difficult for the viewer to pin-point the sitting man's age. All he could say was that he was between twenty-five and fifty years old. For a man who liked to be accurate, this anomaly gnawed at him.
He’d seen this creature before, knew his name was Timothy, but even though he’d once walked right up to him and shaken his hand, he’d left none the wiser as to his true age. His only impression of Timothy - with his raggedy checked shirt, wild eyes and always sweating brow - was that this was a wretched man, an idiot, a worthless soul. Every breath he tasted was a waste of another’s last gasp of oxygen.
Now, this man stood in the long grasses of the field outside Timothy’s house and viewed him through the crosshairs of a magnified hunting scope. He squinted in the bright sunlight and was able to make out a fresh wound upon Timothy’s balding pate. He reasoned that this was concurrent with a wound that might be sustained during a car accident.
This man knew that Timothy’s car was still running on the lane near his farm. There was blood, fur and feathers smeared across the dirt track and covering the bumper of Timothy’s car. The car’s engine was puttering helplessly, its protective bonnet embedded in a tree. Tracks and blood led towards Timothy and Lillian’s house.
“Now you finish that off now, Timothy,” cried Lillian to him, “And I’ll get to cooking up the rest of it.”
Timothy was over the strange flavour of the chicory and had set to ripping apart the burnt flesh with his fingers, then sucking on the tender parts, extracting juice and rich flavours, before tearing chunks off with his teeth and swallowing greedily. Lillian looked on, nodding.
A single gunshot rang out across the fields and no-one stirred much. The wound on Timothy’s head bled anew. It gushed out onto the grey lifeless meat before him and Lillian cried for her Timothy then and tried to put the blood back in his head.

Whispers

2008-05-30T16:15:00.000-07:00

Just to prove it's not all dark and serious on this blog, here's a frivolous little poem for the weekend...

The other day, behind a tree,
A friend of note, he said to me
That Princess Di was alive and well
In a Nicaraguan prison cell;
Guarded almost day and night
By burly men, some black – most white.
They captured her, in quite a coup,
In a factory where she’d made a shoe.
‘Twas a publicity stunt of sorts
‘Til they gagged the press and shot her escorts.
The workers were paid for their silence and fears,
Largest amount that they’d seen in years!
And when the palace got word they employed a double,
To run the press around and avoid any trouble.
But when the palace got worried that the papers would twig,
Their efforts were doubled – the endeavour was big -
Until sooner, or later, from upstairs it was said
That somewhere, and sometime, someone be made dead.
So they wheeled out these actors for some accident deal,
Then actually killed them so the pictures looked real.
They paid off the assassins with cigars and French beers,
And then paid off the media with the country’s own tears.
So everyone was happy at the end of the tale -
Except maybe 'whatshername' locked up in jail -
And no more of interest was said to unfold,
Plus it’s all gospel truth, so my friend has been told,
But a bigger liar than him you could not hope to meet,
You see, Diana’s okay, she lives on our street.

The scream

2008-05-29T15:45:00.000-07:00

You’ve been straining for too long. The wind is lashing rain into your face now, coming down in leather straps across you. You can’t hold it in. You unleash the scream.
Drenched shoppers, already bewildered and straining to see under their hats and hoods spin round deliriously to locate the source of the sound.
Their dread faces pale when they see you, all tousled hair and see-through clothes. A child weeps, but he was crying before the tumult.
The scream, a success. Not so powerful, because you were already out of breath from your struggle with the elements, but impressive all the same. It got you what you crave more than anything else. Attention.
You flop down now, at the corner of a department store, where the rain falls in bitter torrents. The noise it made as it hit the pavement in one continual tubular splosh was heavy handed, powerful, so the excitement builds as you put your head under it. The water knocks at your skull, trepanning a hole into your soul.
You sit down for a moment, wondering how long you can take it. Your vision fades momentarily. Maybe this is the end? Ah, but someone is shouting something at you. Come on, wake up, get up, clear off.
You’re scaring people. You. You’re the scary one. And as you are kicked to your feet and moved along, your wretched vision returns and you catch your reflection in the store window, standing aghast, between two perfectly tailored shop dummies.
You really are a wretched thing, making yourself so sick. You realise now the error you made. You were inside, you were sheltered and safe, before the rains came. But you couldn’t stay in. You’re sick of in. In is the old out.
So you took the only clothes you have in the world and you paraded them across the half-empty streets where you live. Sassing through soggy gutters and tangoing down gushing alleys, you sang a song to the blind twins who threw flowers at you from their open window. It all seemed so magical back then.
You’re shivering now and you can’t feel your feet. You’re shunting disgusted people, heading for underground trains and early evening assignations. They probably hate you more than you hate yourself.
You figure you’ve got a window of opportunity of maybe twenty minutes. Twenty minutes to somehow sneak onto the underground and then get back to the room and get naked. Get undressed before you pass out somewhere, an action which will bring with it the unfortunate consequence of almost certain death.
At the barrier you hesitate for a moment. Your mind wanders. Do you really want to jump the gate and run for a train? Do you really want to go back to that room and save yourself for another night? Do you really want to see what the sky looks like in the morning?
Only you know the answers to those questions. But, whatever they were, however you tossed them around in your mind, you’ve hopped the barrier, you’re running and you’re feeling warmer already. The train has stopped and its doors are slowly sliding open for you.
This instinct, this will to survive. It’s still so strong.

Something changed

2008-05-28T18:44:00.000-07:00

Philip watched the raindrops clinging hard to the telephone wires. They spread a thick web out from a pole near his bedroom window, some sections shooting into the wall beneath his feet and then surely burrowing in and infesting it.
Slight gusts of wind tugged aimlessly at the black lace web. It was almost as if he could see the wind moving around it, being sheared in two by the thin wire.
The rain clung only to the higher wires, the ones that connected to the tops of the three-storey town houses on his street. Here the slope from pole to wall was so gradual that the rain didn’t run along the wires to escape into porous brickwork.
It seemed trapped. Looking down at a concrete street that it would seemingly never reach. Somehow it was locked, hooked, to its cabled web. Its only hope for respite or transcendence lay in a sudden, sharp gust of wind to rattle the line into throbbing life and send water droplets sailing haphazardly through the air. Or, else, for the clouds to part and the sun to suck its crystalline tears back up into the skies.
They probably shouldn’t have had sex last night. That was Philip’s take on the situation, now he’d had time to reflect.
He’d been waiting a long time, and the night was warm and the kissing as passionate as ever it had been, but now, as he gazed out of his bedroom window, he didn’t see any problem with waiting some more.
Tina felt the same way. It was the first thing he read this morning when he turned on his mobile phone, her thoughts on the sex.
He’d gone to sleep with mingling feelings of elation and maturity sending his mind giddy, and he’d woken up with a boot pushing into his guts.
He went to the bathroom and spent a good five minutes looking at his body, his face in the mirror. Maybe there might be something different he’d notice. A mark on his waist, perhaps, a certain look in his eyes or a smirk he couldn’t shift. But all seemed the same.
Down to breakfast and another quick glance in the hall mirror. He sat as casually as he could manage. His parents were finishing their cereal and swilling coffee around their mouths, the final wake-up call before the journey to work.
He waited a moment for them to say something, for them to smell something different about him; his new found reek of manliness, or her, unwashed from his body. But they strove on with their very busy lives, stuffing toast into their mouths and wishing him a good day. Feed the cat, do some homework; the things they always said.
Philip drank some pure orange juice and munched half-heartedly at a round of toast. He looked at the phone on the counter-top and thought about calling Tina. Instead, he slouched back upstairs, lay down upon his bed and inspected his penis.
It looked the same as always. Nothing seemed different about it, and it grew in his hands as he pulled and prodded at it. Soon enough his thoughts turned to some beautiful woman, naked and purring beside him. He made very sure that his thoughts did not turn towards Tina.
Outside his bedroom window a blackbird landed clumsily on a slowly throbbing wire sending raindrops scattering. One by one they plopped sadly down onto the hard grey ground below.

The routine

2008-05-27T16:41:00.000-07:00

The old man gazed up from his garden at the tenderly bruising sky.
It seemed, to him, such an imprecise cosmos. A network of constant enjambment, flowing across and into itself. There was nothing constant enough about the stars, they never came out at the same time. Tonight, the little twinkling greenish one had come out long before the large yellow point of light that usually dominated the scene above his home.
Shaking his head and looking at his wristwatch he laughed the laugh of disbelief, as men do when their morning train is delayed. Must everything in this ridiculous universe be so random and uncooperative?
He would spend five more minutes watching the stars and having a smoke before he’d go in and check on Samantha. She usually liked to have a cup of tea around now.
Samantha was propped up in bed, like always. He could rely on his Samantha. She would be sitting there with a smile for him and a hand to hold.
What was she watching? A quiz show, there’s always a quiz show on at this time. She loved to watch them and once had a very good general knowledge. Maybe she still knows some of the answers, but she never says them.
She won’t say her husband’s name anymore, either. Each time he looks at her, his heart winces a little at the thought she can’t remember his name. He puts that thought away, soon enough. Maybe she just doesn’t want to say it anymore. Perhaps that’s it. Her smile is worth so much more than a name and it heals his heart a little, for each bite that is taken from it.
They are enjoying the quiz show, tonight, until a stupid answer from one of the contestants causes the man to start shouting at the screen. Samantha grabs his arm and links hers with it, stroking at him, calming him. He looks at her for as long as he can, bites at the inside of his cheek and tells her he is going to make another cup of tea.
It takes him three minutes longer to make than usual, and he forgets to add sugar. He sits back down on the bed and sips at the tea. It is hot and bitter, but he forces himself to drink it.
Has she noticed things failing around the house? He wonders about this, often. The roof is leaking, the front door has a cracked pane of glass, the old wireless radio’s reception is so poor, and there may be mice in the loft space. Has anything in this old house changed for her?
The old man has taken to testing his arms. He holds each up in the air for closer inspection. The muscle tone seems lesser each day and he counts the seconds in his head before each starts to shake uselessly, just about staving off atrophy.
He’s smoking again. An hour later and Samantha will start falling asleep. She’s always woken back up again, in the morning. It sounds silly to think about it, but he always does.
He tells her, how much he relies on her. He holds her hand and tells her this, as she slowly drifts off to sleep. How reliable she is, the only thing he can count on in this entire world.
When he’s sure she’s asleep, he goes and showers. He feels fresh again, after the impact of the day. He puts on clean clothes and combs his white hair back.
He turns off all the lights and checks on Samantha once more. She is sleeping and she will sleep through until morning, now, just as she does every day.
Lovely Samantha. He kisses her on the forehead and then walks out the front door.
He won’t look back now. He’ll cross the road and pass three houses to his left, before knocking on the door of the first bungalow. A lady called Margaret greets him with a kiss. She calls him Frank and she takes his coat.
He fixes himself a drink and she tells him she’ll be home late tomorrow - she’s out with the girls. He shakes his head and then takes her to bed.
He reminds her to set the alarm. He has to remind her about this, every single day.
He has to be ready in the morning. He has to be there, first thing. Be the first thing Samantha sees when she opens her lovely eyes.

Summits and streams

2008-05-26T12:01:00.003-07:00

We picked our way along the gravel banks of the river, a trickle in its summer wane.
Me, barefoot in the light of the rising sun, looking around for a sturdy branch to assist my travails. Others streamed about me, reflecting the river and spilling forth along the well-trodden path leading to the summit of Mount Urnath. So many sinners, creating a fluid backbone - the black spine of God’s mountain.
In the car park below, I had taken off my socks and shoes and held the stones and dirt between my feet, as if for the first time. My two boys, Donald and Reece, were joining me today. They looked so excited by the spectacle, all these people, gathered together to climb a mountain.
The boys kept their trainers on and said they’d scout ahead for a sturdy stick. From bitter experience, I knew I’d need one.
Thousands would make the journey from the hospitable car park - where kind ladies served tea and orange juice - to the rugged peak above. Most would do it barefoot.
I chatted to some of my fellow travellers as we followed the burbling River Streath to the base of the mountain.
Donald came back with a long brown stick. It was perfect, and I told him so. A smart height to help my hobbling, and its gnarls would provide a good grip for my hands. Reece followed on behind, annoyed and bitter that he didn’t find the stick, didn’t receive the praise.
I ruffled his hair and asked if he’d tell the story of the mountain and why we were climbing it today.
He gave a beautifully flowery account of when the monk, St Neil of Urnath, first heard the voice of God asking him to go barefoot up the grey mountain, on the 16th of August, 1622.
When he reached the summit he got down on his hands and knees, begging forgiveness for his sins and promising to atone for his wrongdoings, in the eyes of God.
At this, he was dazzled by a wondrous light and a great warmth, which he said was paradise revealed to him; the peaceful heart of Christ. From that moment, the barren mountain-top around was said to have sprung to life, with all manner of mosses, lichens, grasses and trees beginning to grow.
St Neil stayed, weeping with joy for three hours, before climbing down to tell his fellow monks in the nearby abbey about the miracle that had occurred.
I smiled as he told the story, my youngest, blessed with a gift for speech and storytelling. I could tell other travellers, other pilgrims were listening too, impressed with the zeal of Reece, like a young John the Baptist or, perhaps, St Paul himself.
Halfway up the mountain, small streams burst out of the heather and criss-cross the mountain path. Donald and Reece had to carefully step past them, but I was only too happy to let the cooling waters wash and sploosh over my blistered and bloodied feet.
I’m not sure if it is best to concentrate on the pain or rather meditate about God and think only of the summit. Should I be glorifying every crippling step, remembering Christ’s path to Golgotha? Or should I attempt to transcend this purely physical process of pain and struggle?
The war in my head, created by these two concepts, usually causes my annual journey to the peak of Urnath to be one of real anguish. But then, that’s no bad thing, I think.
Donald tells me he’ll accompany me bare-foot, next year. He wants to show me he’s a man. I nod at him, though I know I won’t let him. But, one year…
We reach the summit after just over an hour’s climb. Thankfully Urnath is not the highest of peaks. The summit is packed, people are everywhere - kneeling down and begging forgiveness for their sins.
It is organised chaos, though. There are two lines, two fast moving queues. One moves towards a small covered area where a Catholic priest is taking Confession.
People need to be kept moving, you see. They need to start their journey back down the mountain before the summit becomes dangerously crowded. It seems almost like a drive-through confessional though, God forgive me!
The boys join the Confessional queue, whereas I join the line for Penance. I drag my dusty feet along towards the two robed monks, remnants of the same order of St Neil of Urnath’s.
This queue moves a little slower, though a little more certainly. Each man, in turn, removes his shirt, and kneels beside the monks. One monk washes your back with holy water. You make the Sign of the Cross, and say the Act of Contrition. Then the two monks take turns striking your back with birch twigs.
Sometimes, as the blows rain down, I look to the sky to see if paradise will be revealed to me. But today I find myself looking towards the ground.
I notice that the well-trampled summit is almost devoid of the green life God once ignited here. I notice the red streams trickling out across the brown dirt floor.
And I notice my own tears, falling to the ground, mingling easily with the dirt and the blood. Such beautiful anguish, and my mind is clear once more.

100 Tales reached...

2008-05-26T12:01:00.002-07:00

Hi guys,

I've just noticed that my post 'The end of summer' marked the 100th Daily Tale posted!

It's nice to reach a milestone. Thanks to everyone for reading them and all the great comments. Really appreciated.

Paul.

The end of summer

2008-05-23T15:40:00.000-07:00

He’d been seeing her for a month now.
Though he had difficulty remembering the night they met, he felt he could remember every moment of his life since then.
Juddering, sensual moments in her company; anxious tedious times without her. Each second of this month seemed engraved upon his mind, and would be forever after.
Long summer nights spent wrapped together. Closeness, he always wanted her nearby, despite the humidity and the natural heat. She told him once that she liked to sweat. She told him everything he’d ever wanted a woman to tell him.
And, on balconied mornings, watching the sun rise over the city, he’d open himself up to her, pouring it all free, bathing her in himself to see if she could stand it.
When she went, his sweat would turn cold. His mind raced with fear. Would she return that evening? Why would she come back? Why did she ever have to leave?
That evening he resolved to remedy this issue. His was a turbulent mind, but within it he saw a straight line heading towards clarity and followed it there. Followed it to the roof terrace with a glass of 30 year old Macallan in hand, sullied by a single ice-cube.
When she arrived, she followed his hand-drawn paper signs and arrows, through the apartment and out onto the roof terrace.
The garden was blooming with lavender and hydrangea bushes, the drone of insects was louder than the traffic, up there in the clouds.
He said he had something important to ask her, so she sat upon a low brick wall. She lit two cigarettes, one for each of them, though he set his down on the brickwork.
Then he poured himself upon her once more. He gushed, he cried a little, he got on bended knee before his proposal was done.
And she accepted, with crystalline tears streaking her own beaming face. They stood and embraced as the sun dropped lower behind the skyscrapers.
They talked and drank for the rest of the night, though she said she couldn’t stay with him - she needed to go home. To go home and pick up some things. She could not be dissuaded.
He held onto her company for as long as he could. She unclasped herself around 3am.
The CCTV cameras in the lift recorded her face, smiling broadly for the entire duration of her ride to the ground floor.
One also recorded the moment when her face turned to horror, upon the opening of the lift doors onto the lobby. A different camera watched as one gunshot pierced her breast, and another struck her temple.
Her fiancé, high up in the penthouse, was already sweating without her near. He had resolved to go after her, to retrieve her and he was already punching the button to call the elevator.
He was already watching so eagerly as the blessed machine joyously counted the floors - up, up, up - up to his high apartment.

The mother lode

2008-05-22T15:15:00.000-07:00

A cringing performance, but she felt she was in. Now she just needed to seal the deal, so to speak, and she could think about asset stripping.
It doesn’t matter where she met him, a bar, a party, a hotel lobby, they were all the same to her - all places where she might meet the rich.
She almost let him go. She almost sidled by, without even allowing him the pleasure of her smile. Just as she approached she heard him order surely the cheapest scotch they had on the bar.
What kept her interested was what was clamped to the arm he used to point out the bottle of Chivas Regal, sitting forlornly at the side of the Johnnie Walker. She admired the man’s gold watch for a few seconds. Certainly his attire spoke of money, but why go for the cheapest drink? Was he simply putting on a front? Was he grifting too?
She had to ask about the drink. Unembarrassed he laughed and said he hated it. The conversation continued and he explained that he loved fine Scottish single malts, that he loved them a little too much, on occasion. So he would always start the night with the cheapest blended whisky he could find, something to make him feel a little ill, in order to remind him not to over-indulge.
The story was good enough for the woman. She invited the man to a booth and eyed him carefully. Not bad looking, not too old, in good shape. Better than so many others. She listened to him intently and played with the collar of his shirt, almost out of gratefulness.
He overindulged that night and she took him home in a cab. Wondering if it was worth playing the long game over this one, she insisted on helping him up to his apartment. He’d said it was the penthouse, but she had to see for sure.
Sure enough, the button press came with the turn of a key and the lift doors opened upon a lavish and spacious apartment suite. She put him to bed, left her number in eye-liner on his pillow, and exited with a feeling of elation which she tried her best to dampen. She kept it in check until she opened the door to her own apartment, but by then the scream could be suppressed no longer.
The mother lode. The mother lode was going to call her in the morning.

Before calamity

2008-05-21T15:15:00.000-07:00

At street level, everything is different.
The cars whiz by like they’re trying to achieve take-off. The people zoom about like they have mere seconds to live and need to achieve their personal goals, before calamity.
She walks among them. Quite different, a purposeful stepper, stalking among the trees and bushes as she deftly moves in the direction of her target.
Spying a man waiting at a crossing, she is almost upon him when she feigns a small trip. He moves to grab her, to halt her fall. She reaches her arm about him. She peers up at him, smile prepared, no matter what he looks like. She is confident in her beauty, her radiance. It will take him in like any other.
Somehow, in that split-second, in that Gorgon-glare, she is able to reach inside the pocket of his jacket and retrieve the wallet that is bulkily protruding.
She pockets it herself as the man helps her upright. The unspoken code of personal space already broken, the man feels free to touch this woman a little more, brushing lightly at her coat as though it might somehow have gotten dirty during their collision.
Another smile, this time with a brush of the hair. Magical pheromones must dance from her curls, because the man can do nothing now but beam at her, this woman he’s saved.
Can he buy her a coffee? No. Thank you, but no. She is busy and has an appointment she must reach.
Perhaps he can split a taxi with her? After all, he has caused her lateness! (What lateness? It’s been a matter of seconds since they met!)
No, thanks all the same, but she is merely a few blocks from where she is headed.
She thanks him and bids him a good day. He shakes his head as he watches her cross the road. He can’t believe she’s walking away. Walking away from this fate, this kismet.
She can’t believe she let him look at her face for that long. Idiot! Amateur! She is chastising herself and picks up the pace. Ducking around a corner, she decides to get into a taxi after all. She feels like distance between the mark and her is what is required now.
‘Downtown’ is her spoken destination. The cabbie nods. She has no money on her person, but for whatever she finds in the kind man’s wallet.
She opens it, impatiently. It is stuffed with twenties. She allows herself, at last, a smile. She may be getting sloppy, but her instincts are still strong.
She sits back now, crosses her legs and plays with the hem of her skirt. Confident again, she’ll flirt with the taxi driver now, from here until her apartment.

High Apartment

2008-05-20T16:15:00.000-07:00

The cheap scotch nearly knocked him sick. He opened his wet mouth wide and allowed one ice cube to slide down the tumbler glass and plop perfectly between his teeth, onto his fat tongue.
There he held the cube for a moment before sending it, with a flick of the neck, to the back of his throat. The shock of the snap from the ice alleviated any feeling of nausea.
He glanced over the transcript of the latest dream. He had taken to getting up and writing down immediately, everything he could remember from his dreams, before consciousness wiped them out and they became relics of memory, or the stuff of déjà vu.
His desk, his room, was a mess. With a slight kick of his heels the chair rolled back until the hard wall stopped it. A path through the clutter had been cleared to allow this regular smooth meeting of chair and wall.
Standing, to pull up his pants, the man knocked the blind which flowed upwards, accompanied by a razzing sound, and away. Moonlight bathed the room.
The man moved a few steps, switched off his desk lamp and just enjoyed swimming in this new spotlight, this fresh ambience.
He barely touched the blind. He wouldn’t have touched it tonight, on purpose, but now that it was open and redundant he was struck by its pointlessness as a visual barrier.
No buildings were level with his floor, none higher. He could wave his penis at the window all night and who would care?
“Probably why I keep it closed,” he said aloud, tending to the fiddly process of closing the blind before he bothered to pull up his jeans.
Then he shuffled on, towards the fire-escape; towards the roof and the air.
The cool night air relaxed him and he sucked it in to his lungs. He enjoyed the sound of the traffic far below, and the hum of planes far above. He enjoyed the fact that he could hear no human voices up here; no people talking inanities, discussing the weather (which was pleasant this evening), and re-arranging the minutiae of their lives.
He thought about throwing a small piece of broken brick from the roof, or maybe a coin. He could imagine it hitting something below. But he reconsidered, as there were few people on the streets at this time of night.
He lit two cigarettes and laid them down upon a low brick wall. The man was standing amid the remains of a roof terrace that had been ripped up and conquered long before it had the chance to become overgrown. All that was left now were memories of the life that once grew here.
His thoughts were stuck on falling, that sucking hungry pull that mankind fights so hard against; the benevolent force which keeps us standing still on this ridiculous spinning flying rock of ours.
He’d read, just last week, of a woman who was killed by a man who fell through her skylight. If he wandered to the edge of his building, he wondered if he might see a skylight window below, someone who might be able to see him, or something to aim for.
He decided against looking. The wind was getting up and he hadn’t brought his shirt, he saw goose pimples on his arms and rubbed at them. The two cigarettes were about burnt out. He took these one by one, dropped each on the flagged floor and crushed them under his sandaled foot.
Then he headed back inside and down the short flight of stairs to his apartment; remembering, of course, to shut the fire door behind him.
“One more, before bed,” he said, passing into the lounge and moving towards the drinks cabinet.
He treated himself to a large one, an expensive one. With two ice cubes.

A dream I had last night…

2008-05-19T15:00:00.000-07:00

“I’m looking at a scene. A quiet scene. Everything is quiet.
It’s a hotel lobby and my view is trained on the closed lift doors. These doors take up the centre of the lobby.
I guess it must be early in the morning. A night porter shuffles bags and a trolley. The man on the reception desk is almost drifting off to sleep, yet the lighting is not subdued. People may come and go all night. That’s their prerogative.
My position is filmic. I am like the camera, the floating ghost, observing the scene passively. My view rotates, eight feet above the ground.
A couple enters the building through revolving doors. I feel like I am in an elegant hotel - perhaps in Paris or London in the 1950s. The couple laugh between each other. The man holds his woman very close to him. They wear clothes (overcoats) to protect them from the wind and rain, yet they appear dry. It will not be raining now, perhaps it threatened earlier?
Nobody in the scene has noticed the lift’s arrow is counting down the floors to Ground, but I am somewhat aware.
‘Bing’ - the bell signifies the lift’s arrival and the doors slide open. A man in a trench-coat steps from the lift. His eyes are wild, he carries a shotgun which he is pumping.
Nobody reacts quickly to the situation. I hear the first shot fired and my position moves from observation to action. I swoop into the body of the young male in that happy couple, the man with the raincoat. And I feel the shotgun blast hitting me from just a few feet away.
Perhaps it is the extraordinary surprise of being thrown into the action so suddenly, but I seem to feel the huge force of the explosion, the heat and the pain (at least some of it).
Slammed hard into my chest, I am physically moved by the blast and I see the ceiling of the lobby thrown into view.
Time passes now in slow motion, I think it has done ever since the first shot was fired.
I’m soaring on a cushion of air and I am aware of the woman who accompanies me (she is my young wife) and can tell that her mouth is hanging open, in anticipation of the fall.
Confusion reigns, for her. Which noise, which impact came first?
As my head crashes headlong into the clean marble floor, my point of view switches to the night-porter and I am feeling the blast smashing into my chest yet again.
In all I am shot three times. The animosity then fades as darkness seduces.”

Aftermath

2008-05-15T16:37:00.001-07:00

Excuses raged about inside his head, though as he attempted to speak of them he heard his conscience arguing against them and instead stayed silent.
His trembling hand slowly reached across to the grey device on the table in front of him. He felt the raised shapes on the buttons; squares and triangles.
Shutting the light from his eyes and his head, he concentrated on the reasoning going on inside his skull. Why was he fighting himself, his reasons?
The realisation came that, deep down, he knew he had always been fully aware of what he was doing. His so called reasons could not be thought of as any excuse. He was definitely guilty.
The young man tried to focus his thoughts. There was no light to dazzle his brain, but the low whirring sound from the dictaphone he fondled filled his ears, growing annoying and irritating.
He stopped holding the small rectangular device, laid it down and pressed the button furthest on its right. A short click and the whirring died. The man was alone with his thoughts.
After a period of darkness that was impossible to quantify he screamed. He said aloud: "It honestly wasn't my fault," and he seemed to be trying to convince himself. He put his head in his hands and wept, until he slept.
A buzz awoke him with a start.
The man leapt from his seat - he’d needed that sleep - and again came the short buzz, clearer and sharper now that he was more alert. His eyes snapped towards the closed curtain where daylight fought to find the slightest gap through which to gain entrance into his lamp-lit room.
His glance swung to a digital clock display. Its bold red figures screamed at him that it was now 10.30 in the morning. The buzzer sounded once more and he calmly pulled the cord that turned off his desk-top lamp. He had an idea who might be at the door. It was about time for them to call.
The letterbox on his front door rattled open, a voice filtered through: "Hello Mr James, are you at home? Just like a quick word, sir. Come along."
Silence was easily managed and the letterbox rattled shut. The door was thumped a number of times before footsteps slowly faded away into the morning.
He considered rooting out the binoculars and peeling back the curtains to spy his would-be visitor. Though he was twenty-three floors up, he feared the windows would now be watched around the clock.
Still, he felt pretty safe behind ‘Fort Knox’, the affectionate name for his front door. Not as flimsy as the original doors, his landlord had been pleased to allow him to install it. It took an age to unlock, though.
His attention returned to the miniature machine on his desk. “How technology had advanced,” he marvelled within his head. “How small things have become.” His thoughts drifted between the confession he had recorded and his recent caller.
How many were there? How long before they called again?
It was a strange thing to know you’d never safely set foot beyond your apartment again. Life become a sort of flimsy toy, one that you treasured but knew you couldn’t stitch its head back on, when next it fell off.
He began to wonder why he had assumed he would simply be able to hide from his past deeds, hide from consequence. They would not stop looking for him, they would always look for him.
Over the coming hours, more mental anguish awaited.
He remembered his normal life. He thought about the concept of guilt and tried to sneer. He remembered the darkness he worked in. His little machines. His playthings. The pump of adrenaline. The deafening noise. The screams and suffering. His powerful hands, the catalysts. And then reliving it all on the television when he made it home.
Looking around he saw another remnant of his past, his ordinary briefcase. A useful thing to carry during rush hour for a faceless man, someone who blended in. The sales pitch for this brand had been that the case could withstand the impact of a charging elephant. Its owner had never tested this claim, but he certainly hoped it to be true.
When next his doorbell sounded, he stood up, opened his curtains and unclasped the window.
About twelve hours since the last call and it was dark now.
There were to be no more buzzes. The letterbox opened and the same sharp voice from before sniped: "Open the door now, Pete. No more games, mate. What you did wasn't in play."
There was scratching at the door, and then a series of blows shook it. They would gain entry, eventually.
Sliding a lock, the briefcase popped open hungrily. He flung the pocket recorder into its maw and then shut it tight. He had purpose now. He was impressive when he had purpose.
The man hauled himself up onto his window ledge, briefcase in hand. He was doing the right thing.
There were whispers outside and then a small bang that rocked the door from its hinges.
The man smiled, patted his briefcase comfortingly and stepped out into the cold night air as his apartment exploded in a miasma of sound and light.

On the beach

2008-05-15T16:37:00.000-07:00

Contorted into a frown, the moon rose high above the summer beach.
A lone hound, prowling the sands, sniffed out crabs settling on the fine grains as the tide flowed away once more. He caught one deftly by the canines and held it up to the moonlight, it’s snapping pincers dancing just out of range of the dog’s sensitive nose.
With a snap of the finger and a crack of a chemical reaction, a round was projected, streaking into the raised head of the animal and sending it sprawling.
And what a shot! It may have been a still night, but the visibility was not great. This marksman was working with shadows and experience. He was an excellent shot.
The crab crawled back towards the sea. From his craning eyes he saw only unfathomable distances of sand, the crashing sea and the mighty mountains of the dunes. Somewhere in that morass a sniper lurked, but a crab could not be expected to care.
The sniper however, kept guard of the beach. His lookout was constant. Nothing would safely pass his sights.
Between the morning hours of three and five, just one more animal crossed the beach. That animal was the elusive fox and it was worth taking down.
The fox’s name was Joshua, and he was so dubbed by the name chiselled carefully onto the round that eventually ended up in his side. The rifleman had so inscribed each of his rounds, in order to baptise his quarry with a funereal title after each golden shot; a blast and a name to help them gain swift access to the kingdom of the dead.
Ah, but the fox! The fox turned to face the dunes; to face the rifle that lined him in his sights. And, strangely, the shot skimmed the creature’s snout and ploughed deep into its midriff.
The fox, it shook and rolled - blood spilling onto the yellow sand, making a sad mockery of the light green colouration of the smiling seaweed.
Seeing the unkind accident, the hunter now stirred and gave away his position for the first time. The creature was barking and writhing in agony. What an idiotic thing to let happen. Why does boredom make fools of the idle?
The young man in the dunes considered the beach for a moment. He looked up and down its long lengths for signs of life. There was nothing moving in the dark. He even looked out to sea, in case some watching eyes might have spied his ignominy. But, all was clear.
So the young man clambered up from beneath the cool sand covering that made safe his position and hunched forward, low to the dunes, moving towards the site of the wounded fox.
Undulating and moving beneath his feet, the strange young man stalked the sand slowly to the edge of the beach. Here the moonlight passed from cloud cover and lit up the scene once more.
In view: a sad, wretched little creature, an animal, pawing at the ground, kicking trails of sand towards oblivion. The man gave one quick glance about him and pulled a pistol from his pants. Cocking the trigger, he pointed the barrel at the fox’s head and squeezed slowly. He did not miss.
From somewhere in the channel, a cruising gunboat spotted the moonlight reflecting on the weapon of the sniper. Seconds later, a shell was delivered with great accuracy to the point of this reflection. On contact with the ground the sand was lifted many metres in the air and flung about the old golf course that lay behind the sand dunes, as if some old duffer had played a rather poor bunker shot.
The body of the sniper would be found the next day, lain daintily upon a larger dune; prostrate, like a king shot by an archer upon his castle walls.
The body of the fox somehow remained, untouched. An impact crater lay not a foot from its motionless body.
In the morning, a small boy would find the perfectly auburn body of the fox and pronounce the day of his find, the most special, the most unforgettable ever in his short life.
Later, he would find the charred remains of a sniper upon his favourite dune. He would hardly be able to contain himself.

A small victory

2008-05-14T15:32:00.000-07:00

Picking up the coaster, Cesar inspected it for damage.
Square, solid looking and with the words ‘Mocha’ and ‘Cappuccino’ running through it, he could detect no cracks or chips anywhere about its glassy surface.
He wiped away the condensation that had seconds earlier caused the coaster to bond momentarily with his glass of lemonade. Once that bond between moisture and two sets of glass had taken hold, there was little the four rubber pads that kept it still on a table could do to keep it on the ground. In fact, it is in such a moment when one realises just how weak the force of gravity is. Even a man can jump free of it for a second, or scale a wall or cliff and stand at its peak for hours, in rapture, glowering at gravity, like a king to the rabble beyond his castle walls.
That this sturdy square of glass could be freed from the ever engaging hands of gravity for a while, by an almost supernatural ability to fuse with some cooled water vapour, was a small wonder of this world. Gravity won in the end, but it should almost have been blushing after almost being bested in this manner.
Cesar moved to restore the coaster to its idle place on the windowsill. Before placing it down, though, he spied through the translucent surface of the coaster a tiny beetle, about a centimetre long. He examined it there, within the window of the coaster, picking out its miniscule legs and pincers, its carapace shell and the small red dots that peppered its black armour.
Then, Cesar moved the coaster sharply and pushed it down. And then he lifted it back up. The beetle twitched for a moment and carried on nibbling at the dust it had found.
Cesar nibbled at his bottom lip with his incisors and considered carefully his next move. He estimated and then pushed down, lifted up and saw the beetle munching away. He turned the coaster over and examined it.
The four half balls of rubber it rested on curved enough to save a tiny beetle unless one’s accuracy was perfect.
Sure of his strategy now, Cesar pushed down quickly and then lifted, took a visual reading and pushed down again.
On the third push he heard a satisfying crack and felt a tiny body giving way to his will. He was a proud Goliath then, and basked in glory for a moment before worrying that the little creature might have made a mess of his nice coaster.
Cesar turned over his glass weapon. The inert beetle was crushed, but had generally retained its coleopteran shape. ‘How much mess can a little one make, anyway?’ wondered Cesar to himself.
And then, still feeling like a giant, he brought the wielded coaster up close to his face, inspected the remains for a moment and licked the foremost rubber foot, taking the dead beetle into his mouth.
“Yum, yum, yum!” Cesar intoned in his best booming voice, and then settled back to enjoy the sound inside his own head, as his tiny enemy was mashed between his molars.

Our second fight

2008-05-13T14:57:00.000-07:00

She starts to dig, to pry, to cajole, and I try to keep my cool - just remain. I try to give her a little of what she’s after, but keep doing whatever it is I’m doing.
Sometimes it’s fine, just fine. And then, sometimes an unknown, a hidden gear, clicks into place and her mind whirrs at a speed thought previously impossible.
And then, ‘something wicked this way comes’.
That’s how it was, second time round. Me and Rachel, drinking at home.
I never really saw it coming, I’ll be honest about that. She’d say later, you knew what was going to happen, you knew what you were saying. But really, what the hell did I say anyway? And you’re about to ask her that question and then you’ve got to stop yourself quickly and make with more hugs and kisses, before fight number three kicks off.
She’d been telling me about her day. I’m watching TV and I’m tired. The drink makes me a little more sleepy I guess and, I suppose, it loosens my tongue a little too.
Maybe I let the first round off? Maybe it was my fault? Saying something about how I’m trying to relax here and not think about work. That was pretty much it – and also I said something like, if I wanted to be bored to death I would have just become an accountant too.
I can imagine you reading this. The men might be laughing or putting their heads in their hands. The women, well...
Now that I read it back I realise how inflammatory I was being, but I guess I really wanted to watch whatever it was that was on the TV.
So she’s straight back at me. Sticking the knife in about my boring job, about how I’m always so tired at the end of the day, that my job is ruining her life. That’s what she said. Unbelievable, really.
I’m just there, throwing a few comments back at her, but mainly just watching the way she’s rocking that scotch glass around in her hand as she speaks, seeing her eyes going grey and her face all screwed up so she’s almost unrecognisable as my Rachel.
I say something about her friend from work, the dumb one, and she suddenly unloads. This glass comes right out of her hand, flies by my shoulder and shatters on the wall behind me.
I jump up from the couch, scream some obscenities and remind her that this is a rented house and to look at the state of the wall.
She sits there for a few seconds, looking at the single malt running down the cream painted lounge wall, down behind the leather couch, surely ruining the carpet, and then starts to sob. I look at her and she’s shaking. Her arm is still locked in the same position as when she was holding the glass.
Her face is still contorted but I can see my Rachel there again and I get that feeling where everything drains out of you except for this cold fire in your throat and an enveloping feeling of concern for this other human being, this creature that you’re staring at.
With my every sinew I wanted to protect her from this world and bring her back from whichever nightmare her mind was playing out right then.
She let me sit by her. She seemed helpless. Her mouth hung open and her eyes were wet, but she hadn’t drawn enough breath to really cry. I grabbed her, hugged her hard, holding her head and rubbing her back like it might start her up again.
Eventually she took that breath and bawled and lay her cheek on my shoulder, gripping me so tightly. Soon I could feel her warm tears through my t-shirt.
And when the crying died down, she slowly stroked the back of my head, brushing away all the fragments of broken glass that had gathered and stuck there in my thick hair.

-----

This is a follow-up piece to an earlier tale: Our first fight.

The hill of the psychopomps

2008-05-12T16:22:00.000-07:00

Slipping through cracks in the floor, the spirit landed and the brown dog drew him on.
Brown dog did not have reins, but he had teeth and a temper. He strove up the steps and through the cellar door. He drove out through the maddened crowd jeering at the doorstep (they didn’t see him go) and on by where the demons gather, on the hill ‘neath the churchyard.
Charging forth, the spirit leased the hound, snarling and chomping at the hellspawn, grovelling near graves, waiting for souls of their own to grapple with and descend.
The spirit nimbly skittled beyond the hanging tree and avoided the grasping fingers of the souls trapped therein. He sailed softly by and the hollow tree moaned so.
Brown dog was waiting at the edge of the copse. Hair ever-shocked by the presence of death, its eyes stalked with menace, yet the steed waited patiently for its spirit rider.
Blood red eyes watched for the hands of hell, as the hound bounded out across the threshold. And, as he passed with speed through ectoplasmic fogs and dense clouds, lifetimes wide, the spirit he carried caught wonderful glimpses of parents, friends, lovers and children. All time and every memory existed both at once and never more. If spirit could smile, he smiled then.
“Press on, press on, press on.” Thus spake the wind into the corners of brown dog’s mind. The whispers of the dark soul-gatherers grew more shallow as brown dog continued his ascent of the sacred hillside. His burden was heavy, and the hillside so steep, that his weary path would wind around the hill four times, before sight of the summit.
In the lower pastures were the horses, strong brave white steeds with golden manes and eyes of fire. The dog was weary and stopped by a fast-flowing stream to drink. His spirit dismounted and walked a way, amongst the wild horses that whinnied and pranced about him.
A bald man sat below a silver birch tree, at the edge of the harass of horses, drawing in the dirt with a stick. As the spirit approached, he dropped his tool and looked up, asking: “Yes?”
The spirit spoke: “Where is this?” And the shepherd replied: “Why, the hill of the psychopomps.”
“Here graze the carriers, the soul guides, the great mediators between the worlds of consciousness and the beyond.”
Spirit felt wonder and awe, but he stood impassively, and the last dregs of these feelings passed from him forever into the green ground of the hill.
“See, there flies the sparrow and, hark there cries the whippoorwill. Drive on, to the very crest of the hill, and you will spy all creatures who burden themselves with gifts to the netherworlds.”
Then brown dog was again at spirit’s side and spirit climbed upon his back so that the pair flew onward, parting the frolicking horsekind and sailing on, higher up the hill to where the harts played and rutted; where the ravens fought the owls for unfortunate bones.
On the third circuit of the magnificent mountain, spirit dared to look back; glanced at the world he was leaving far behind. While on the ground it looked monstrous, insurmountable; from here it looked pitiable, fragile even.
What couldn’t have been accomplished upon that flat ground? What couldn’t have been toppled or climbed? Spirit realised and tried to cry. The last of his feelings fluttered out from his flowing locks and were caught by dancing sparrows, who reeled and chirruped on the breeze.
And then, the last rise. The peak was gained and brown dog lay down panting. Spirit stood up and allowed himself a glimpse of all that surrounded the hill. Times past, present and yet to come mingled with time that had been lost. Each time was bathed in its own peculiar shade, but it was the brown of lost time, time that could never be regained, that held the attention of spirit.
He bent down to brown dog, gazed deeply into his eyes then stroked and held him until his hair no longer stood on end. Brown dog then yapped and ran around and around spirit for a minute or so before disappearing back down the hill.
Spirit watched him go before turning towards the hilltop. A pool or wellspring burst forth there and spirit walked slowly to it. He realised, for the first time, that he was truly naked now, and allowed his foot a dip into the pool. He imagined it felt so cold, but he felt nothing.
The water looked at once colourless and then every colour, as if a think curtain of oil graced its surface. Spirit took his own hand and led himself into the pool. As he stood there, he noticed the pool turn a muddy brown colour. All he could do was nod a nod of acceptance and acquiescence.
The brown water then began to reach up, to reach up and coat and cover his legs. As it did so, his form slowly dissolved, slowly became part of a brown wave. Soon that wave was a torrent, gushing up to take every remnant of a life both spent and wasted.
And, in the trees below, the whippoorwills called to tell the world of another soul softly passing.

Exposure

2008-05-09T16:33:00.000-07:00

When the weekend comes it’s a treat for everybody.
I heard them earlier, on the radio. So bright and shining; they’re looking forward to everything.
Debbie and Mike are going canoeing on some big lake; Cassandra is attending a pottery workshop tomorrow; Robert is just looking forward to getting home to his beautiful wife and a cold beer or five.
I’m sitting in a smoky basement, choking again. The guys are coming over soon, but so what? What am I looking forward to this weekend? What does the weekend mean to me?
I’m just glad not to be in work for two days. That’s what the weekend means to me. But I find myself spending these twin days of freedom in free-fall, worrying about the onrushing ground, the return of the routine, the inescapable ‘Monday’.
Some people see the dawn as a rebirth, a resurrection of life and warmth and existence, I suppose. But I don’t know.
There have been some hard nights. The sort when the darkness never seems to end, and phantoms are plaguing you. I’ll admit, I’ve prayed for the dawn to come. But who’s to say that dawn brings anything better than the cloying darkness of the early morning?
I’ve been reading a lot of war poetry lately. Wilfred Owen, mainly. My son was studying it at school. Left the book here one night after he’d been sleeping over, so I picked it up.
I didn’t love it all, but so much of it grabbed my attention. I was already thinking about how the weekend is just a break in the monotony of existence, as night is to day. I wonder if Owen would have agreed with me? Here’s the quote that really got me:

The poignant misery of dawn begins to grow...
Dawn massing in the east her melancholy army
Attacks once more in ranks on shivering ranks of gray,
But nothing happens

“But nothing happens”. That’s how I feel, and I reckon that’s how most people feel, but they would never admit it. I can hear their voices now coming through my open window.
Filtering out the traffic noise, I can hear the clinking of glasses, laughter and raised voices coming from the nearby beer garden. The long dark of winter has ended and they’re out enjoying the light again. Yeah, they love it all so much that they’re going to drink until they can’t remember the things they had to do this week.
I’ve decided, I don’t think I feel like seeing anyone tonight. I think I’ll tell the guys I feel like a night in, on my own. Tired after a long week. Something like that.
Me and Wilfred Owen, we’ll be alright. We’ll keep each other company, and we’ll sit there together on duty. Watching and waiting, until the sun goes down once more.

Burning

2008-05-08T16:52:00.001-07:00

A heatwave, an eight hour shift and hard work in a take-away place. My day, in a nutshell.
My hell on Earth is over, for today. I’m standing outside the Sun Star Grill and I’m looking for the breeze to come and reach under my blouse a little and cool down my burning flesh.
Jesus, I am hot. Please help me to cool down.
They wouldn’t let me take a drink from the chiller. All day long, while I was grilling cheeseburgers and slicing up the donner meat, these drinks were my temptation: one hundred cans and bottles of Sprite, Coke, Diet Coke and Fanta. I don’t get paid until tomorrow and so I didn’t have any money to buy one.
Sam kept saying, “Water, water is free. Drink the water. Here’s a cup. Drink the water, won’t you?” And I drank it, but it was so warm. So warm compared to those big bottles of Sprite, all sitting there so cool in the cabinet next to me.
A girl I know called Katie came in around 3pm to buy some chips. She also bought a can of Coke. You should have seen the way the condensation started to drip down the side. From the very moment I took it from the fridge I couldn‘t stop looking at that can. Katie gave me a pitying sort of look as she paid for her food. She must think I’m so strange. Strange and fat and ugly.

I met Katie at Bible Class. Every Sunday afternoon since I was nine years old, my parents have taken me to the Evergreen Centre on Sandy Lane where I’ve been taught the lessons I need to live my life. The lessons they don’t teach me in school. Miss Templar, one of the best leaders there, says that her lesson plans are devised by God.
It always makes me smile when she says that.
At first, when I used to go, I would cry a lot. We all would, even the boys. The leaders made us realise how much sin was in our hearts, you see. Yes, we all said we were Christians, but did we act like it? Did we keep God in our hearts 24/7? Or were we hypocrites? Sinning along with our friends every day in school, using foul language, listening to secular music?
Every Sunday, the first fifteen minutes of those early sessions, we spent them in tears. Our tears, said Miss Templar, were like the waters of our baptism washing our sin away.
I hope one day that the Lord Jesus will speak through me. Lots of the other children will convulse and speak in tongues most weeks, but it never seems to happen to me. I will shout and jump with the best of them, but it always makes me so hot and tired. Maybe that’s why the spirit never enters me? Maybe it is because I am too fat and lazy to truly hear God’s word?

My cousin Liam came in at lunch time. He’s older than me and he drives a van delivering the local papers to all the newsagents in town. He’s not a believer and he laughs at me, though I always turn the other cheek.
Liam told me he saw a hypnotist on TV convince a group of Jews that they should become Christians. He just told them all what to do, put his hands on them and the next thing they were all blessing themselves and praying to Jesus for forgiveness from the wicked lives they used to live. Some of them were crying, he said.
That bit always made me feel a bit sick, and I would say a prayer then, and one for Liam too so that he might also be saved, one day.
Liam ordered two plain burgers - halfpounders - and went outside to smoke while I cooked them. I slapped the raw slices of ground beef down on the griddle and they immediately started to smoke. The black coals beneath the grill glowed red as the fat and grease dripped down from the slowly blackening burger. They landed, plopping down with a satisfying hiss…

I’m cooler now that I’ve been outside for a few minutes. Dad should be along soon to pick me up. He won’t ever leave me standing in the street for very long.
I’m looking forward to Sunday’s meeting. We’re having a barbecue.
Miss Templar has asked us all to bring in a copy of a Harry Potter book. Any that we can find - from a friend, neighbour or whoever - and we’re each going to come to the front of the hall and then toss the book into the fire.
As Miss Templar says, “Harry Potter is a warlock, and the Bible says that a warlock should be put to death.” She thinks he would have been burned at the stake, if he’d been real.
It’s still so hot waiting out here, and it’s only the start of summer. I hope dad will let me put the air-conditioning on. I hope he gets here soon.

Keeping hold

2008-05-07T16:08:00.000-07:00

Remember that fearful age, that point in time when your father said you should be riding a bike?
And remember the fateful day when he screwed you down into the saddle of just such a bike and made you ride?
We’ve all seen that now clichéd scene played out… “Don’t let go, dad!”
“Don’t worry, son. I’ve got you.” And then, “Look son, you’re riding, you’re doing it on your own!”
What did it feel like, that moment when your parent let go of you? Did you feel your blood coursing through your veins? Did you see the world and its endless possibilities suddenly open out before you and feel like you could fly above it all?
Or did the full weight of this world, all its possible dangers and endless responsibilities, suddenly climb on behind you to make your bike swerve and wobble? Did hitting the ground that first time feel like your umbilical cord had severed once more? That innate trust and protection you’d always counted on, suddenly comes with a healthy dose of mistrust.
Who knows which of those two types of people are the lucky ones? But Kevin, he loved to ride. Even today, if you’d looked out of your window at about 4pm you might have seen him.
He’s got a great bike. A Burner 2 BMX in Midnight Black with internal Gyro and 48 spoked wheels, alloy V-brakes, freestyle saddle and two pegs.
He knows the specs off by heart because he read them so many times when he was looking at the bike in the catalogue. It’s not the best bike in the world, far from it. But his parents told him how much they could spend and he picked the bike accordingly. What’s more, the other kids don’t make jokes about it, which is helpful.
Today Kevin is riding in great loops of his neighbourhood. He started with a small loop, along his road and then a quick dart into the alley that runs behind all the gardens. He pedals down here as fast as he dares, knowing that any moment a dog or a neighbour might appear and cause a small wreck!
After the successful completion of this stage, it’s a ring right around the houses, taking in Arbour Avenue along with Kevin’s own street, Daleside Close. Once he’s successfully completed each stage, Kevin looks for the next route, the bigger challenge.
He’s still wearing the knee and elbow pads his mother laid out for him this morning (knowing his BMX-inspired plans for the day) but he’s cast off his helmet, chucking it over the fence into his back yard as he whizzed down the alley earlier. Let’s face it, no-one looks cool in a helmet.
At school, the teacher told his class a story about a boy, of about Kevin’s age, who received a brand new bike for his birthday and rode it along the street that very day. This boy hit something (a rock, a tin can, who knows?) and was sent sailing from his saddle onto his head.
The teacher seemed to take great delight in describing the spinal injuries suffered in the crash, and the fact that this boy of boundless energy was now capable of riding only a wheelchair.
“And what item of safety wear could have saved him?” The teacher would ask this to the class, and the class would have to repeat as one: “A HELMET!”
Maybe this story was the sole reason no boy in Kevin’s class ever wore a bicycle helmet. Not that the tale didn’t make an impression on him, but how many kids are riding round in a wheelchair because they didn’t wear a helmet?
At some point, on the final stage of his fastest ever loop of the High Street/Kendal Lane/Melling Road/Daleside Close circuit, Kevin swerved away from a reversing neighbour and clipped the kerb.
His Midnight Black Burner 2 with internal Gyro flipped over a wall and embedded itself in a hawthorn bush.
Kevin himself came over the handlebars and landed on his right shoulder. If you could have watched his crash in slow motion you would have seen his arms reaching out in desperation to break his fall. And you would have seen his body half-somersault so that his arms could never quite touch any part of the ground before his torso did.
He scraped his back and legs pretty badly, and his collar bone was broken, but his head, neck and spine were unharmed.
Still, Kevin didn’t know that at the time and he was pretty scared. All he knew was that he couldn’t get up and there were people standing gravely around him.
Kevin had tears in his eyes and he was crying out. Crying out for his dad: “Get my dad, he’ll know what to do. Someone get my dad.”
And soon his dad came, and his dad knew what to do this time, just like he’d known what to do that first time when Kevin had swerved, wobbled and fallen.
When the overwhelming fear of responsibility and lone struggle had gripped his young mind and brought him crashing to the ground, his father was there running towards him with healing arms and that strange habit of always knowing exactly what needed to be done.

Wisdom and Merchurio (conclusion)

2008-05-06T14:40:00.000-07:00

Merchurio’s introduction is accompanied by the movement of his hand to his bare chest, his tunic hanging open.
He leans back so that his long grey hair almost reaches the ground. We are not invited to sit, but I feel it’s safe to do so, and Leda follows as always.
Twin lanterns hang from poles spaced evenly across the tent and flash their twinkle across our host’s face as the breeze slowly sways their flames. Our senses buzz with strange fumes and odours reeking from the pipe and the decades-old hides. Leda told me, years later, that at this moment she felt she had been swallowed by some great lizard and was trapped in its foul stomach.
Sitting in here, in the mouth of mythology, with us was Merchurio. It seemed he had been appraised of our plight, of our dream of flight from possessive parents, and of matrimony blessed, despite our young ages.
He considered the situation for some minutes while staring hard into my face and then at the visage of my beautiful companion. My love, my Leda.
Eventually, he sighed, took a full draught of his pipe, breathed out a cloud and spoke to us. “Fine families,” said he, “would never agree to the marriage of two so young.”
“Perhaps,” he continued, “the girl could be made ready for a man, for who can say the true age of the magical creature that is ‘woman’?
But a boy, a boy who has barely hair on his chin? Why, how can he be fit for anything but a gentleman’s amusement? Even a whore would laugh at his manhood, though she would take his fortune, nonetheless.”
He took another small puff and choked a little. He looked down and wiped away the mucus that had caught in his beard.
“No, you come for my advice - and there is no advice deemed greater to the people of your city - and it is this: do not attempt to marry. It will only lead to anger, hatred and eventual poisoned bloodshed between your two houses.
Wait out your years, boy. Do your duty by your father, your mother and your city. Then you may marry; if not this girl, then some other.”
We looked at each other in horror. There had always existed between us such a fear of similar dismissal; a worry that nothing could be done, that there was no solution to our woes. Perhaps the current strength of our bond had grown so, due to the external; the ancient weight of society, of manners, of tradition, that sought so hard to rip us asunder.
I appealed to our host, I appealed to the wise and revered Merchurio. Surely there was something could be done? Surely there was some path for us to choose other than our bitter separation? But the old man sternly shook his head and looked at me as though I should be ashamed, having come to him with this matter.
He sat staring blankly at us, unmoved by the great globular teardrops streaking Leda’s angelic face. Numb, I attempted standing and almost crawled from the tent of the great seer, collapsing into the forest clearing.
Mere moments passed but, with horror, I came to realise that Leda had not emerged with me. I hovered there, in a haze of shock, no idea of what to do next. But, eventually, such moments passed that I felt re-entry necessary. I moved again towards Merchurio’s lair.
At once the pockmarked man who had been our guide slithered from the side of the tent and barred my way. This time he was expecting my dagger to be drawn, spinning me around and reaching my arm up behind my back until I let the weapon fall with a cry of wincing pain.
And here he held me, in sweating minutes of agony while my mind raced with the evil possibilities that might be happening mere feet away, within the awful tent before me.
My imagination reeled. Time lost all meaning and relation. Then, presently, she came again. Leda, emerging through the smoke, and wearing a crown of white feathers that Merchurio had bestowed upon her.
She came close and kissed me soft. My arm was released from its snare.
I saw now, in the moon’s glow, that her face was transformed. Where she wore tears, now her complexion was rosy. Where she bore a frown, her lips were now pleated in a smile.
And then she spoke. She spoke such words that even now I can't believe they came from her lips. Lips that had just that day planned and communicated such an immediate happiness for us.
“I cannot return with you,” she said in a slow, purposeful tone. “If we cannot wed, I will soon be promised to a man with whom my father does business.
But the wise Merchurio and I have spoken, and he has agreed to keep me here, hidden among the green of the canopy, where only Apollo or Diana themselves may choose to find me.
Go now, my brave love. Return to your father and mother. Seek for me only when your service is done.”
And, with those words, I was unduly dragged from that place of strange wonder and a sack placed upon my head. Once more, I was led by my hateful guide out of the rich majesty of the woods, and into the clumsy sprawl of the city. Away from the tents and the clearing, away from Leda, away from the great Merchurio, and belched back upon the steps of my family’s residence, steps I had descended hours earlier on a quest that I felt sure would shape my life’s happiness.
And, as the great oak door swung wide, I looked up at the cold grey stone staircase that led to my family’s rooms. It seemed to stretch on forever. The foreboding staircase of my future, it seemed an impossible climb.
With Leda’s image before me, ever beckoning me onward, I lifted one foot before the other and began my arduous, heartbreaking climb.

Wisdom and Merchurio

2008-05-05T14:40:00.000-07:00

We stepped through shadowed doorways below the eaves of a city. Spindling pathways, interconnecting veins slicing communities, marking unseen borders; such paths we followed. Me leading, she grasping my hand so tightly and following close behind.
We used the eventide well, to cloak our movements through these old corridors, these thick passageways between buildings, where the walls have been laid so close to one another that it appears there is no room to proceed. They close in, such walls, upon two lonely children running together away from families and light; avoiding sentry and night-watchman; breaking curfew and command.
Somewhere, a darkness calls us, and we go to him. This man, so enshrouded, has waited almost half an hour longer than agreed. He is angry. He wishes to be paid double; paid double to take us to Merchurio.
I give him all I have and he sneers and spits on the ground. He has a face like lemon peel, and hair grows from his every wrinkle and sore. The creature eyes Leda, attempts to paw her and ask her name. I pull forth my dagger and brandish it close to his hand. He laughs once, and turns his back to me. I don’t know if I’m winning or not. Leda’s grip advances up my arm.
He beckons us on, through streets where fetid streams wash away the sins of gin-soaked sleepers, dead and bloated on the cobbles. He beckons us on, toward Merchurio.
To the east, the city drifts downhill and flattens out at its borders with the forest. There is little change from picking our way through the claustrophobic maze of streets and buildings to dodging huge trees and overhanging branches. And it is just as dark here. The moon finds it as difficult to prick the shadows of nature as it does the shadows of man.
“Soon enough,” says our odious guide, “soon enough,” as though answering our unspoken questions as to our arrival in the house of Merchurio.
As the dense canopy appears to give way to a clearing ahead, I fancy I hear the roar of the dragon and the snort of the bull nearby. Through the trees, the moon is able to illuminate gilded spectres dancing in the forest glade. Are these satyrs and devils? Do the gods walk abroad in this place? I slow my pace, and Leda holds me across the chest, burying her head in my side. But we strive on.
As we break the treeline, an assortment of a strange and fearful kind cast their eyes towards us for a moment and then go back to their business. They are people, not faeries, demons or other and they are revelling with ale, laughter and flame. Beneath the shelter of the larger tree boughs are sat huts and skin-tents. We are not pointed in the direction of the largest of these abodes, but rather to a battered erection covered with stitched hides, where smoke drifts aimlessly from a small vent and strange lights dance within.
A flap of skin is peeled back and we are bidden entry to this hollow of madness. Inside, smoking a small pipe, sits Merchurio.

...to be concluded...

The Mirror

2008-05-02T17:06:00.000-07:00

In the slickest corners and cavities of the mind lies vanity, waiting.
I see him as a wolf, teeth bared, hair on end, snarling; but others may find him calling in other, less vicious guises.
Take my friend Laura, for one. She visits me once a week, usually on a Thursday, and in the morning we talk over coffee.
A few weeks ago she was telling me about this one guy she was seeing, Paul we’ll call him, and how this guy has mirrors everywhere. She says it’s so he can see himself, turn himself on, while he’s in the middle of things, with her.
At first it didn’t bother her. It was like something from an 80s movie and she even admitted to finding it a little bit sexy. She didn’t even mind that it was his own masculinity that was doing it for him, as much as her perfect little body. They were both using each other for the same ends.
So he asks her, afterwards, if she is freaked out by the whole mirror thing. She says she’s not, says she quite likes it really. And that was the catalyst for him to go and do something pretty dumb.
Next time she’s over (just the other week) he tells her he has a surprise for her. “Come on, it’s in here,” gesturing towards the bedroom. So, he’s installed a mirror, above the bed. I mean, who is this guy, Patrick Bateman or something?
She’s a bit freaked out, Laura, but she’s come a way and it makes sense to stay over. He doesn’t seem like he’s a psycho or anything and the night continues as normal, only, she can’t stop looking in the mirror. In this huge sheet of glass he’s suspended over the bed.
In the end, this guy, (Paul, we said his name is) ends up getting annoyed, rolling over and snoozing much earlier than usual.
But Laura is transfixed. She can’t sleep because she’s looking at this amazing, beautiful creature, smiling dangerously back at her. And every way she moves, every time she’d stroke her leg or brush back her hair, this dazzling thing in the mirror did the same.
She said she fell to sleep dreaming of herself, and when she awoke she remained a long time on the bed, when she should have been getting ready for work.
Thursday, just gone, was the last time Laura came round to mine. That’s when she told me all the latest about Paul. I said: “He sounds crazy, he sounds like a psycho. You said yourself, just last week, you thought he might have been a psycho.” But she just laughed at me and said I was silly, and I forgot about the conversation and started tickling her.
I haven’t got a mirror over my bed, just a skylight and a long sloping roof. I live on the top floor of the building. Nowhere for me to fit a ceiling mirror.
In the morning, though, Laura was acting strangely. She asked if we could take our coffee in bed. She’d booked a day’s leave and wanted a relaxing Friday morning, instead of the usual panic with deadlines and suppliers, etcetera.
I kept seeing her, glancing up towards the roof, looking for something. We talked though, almost as usual (except that we were still in bed) and, when I had finished my coffee, I explained that I had a few people to meet and some things to buy, but if she stuck around I’d come back and buy her lunch.
She agreed. She said she was just fine lying there on the bed, and that I was not to worry. With her lying fully back now, I was able to roughly follow her gaze and saw that she had positioned herself so that she was able to see a partial reflection of herself in the skylight glass. Honestly, she was transfixed.
I put on my coat and walked out the door. But instead of heading on downstairs and across the street to the underground, I decided I would play a little trick on my proud little Laura.
Heading up the stairs I pushed open the fire doors and blinked in the morning glare. The city honked and shone before me. Slow reflections of God’s fingers reaching up towards the clouds.
Climbing a short metal ladder, I clambered the narrow platform that ran in between either side of the sloping roof. It’s not as dangerous as it sounds because there’s a railing on either side, for workmen to hold onto.
When I got to the edge of my skylight I readied myself, preparing to give that preening beauty below a sight she was certainly not expecting to see.
I steadied, counted to three and then leaned over, with a terrible snarl on my face and shouting: “Hey, Laura, what the hell are you looking at?”
The next moments passed in staccato. I saw her scream with very real shock, turning to horror. I’d put my hand down for support and it had gone straight through the glass. I reached out with my other hand for the safety rail but gravity was doing its work now and my body tumbled lazily forward through the skylight.
I remember the feeling of falling, and the sound of glass and wood breaking at the same time. I heard Laura screaming and I heard slicing.
My full weight poured down like mercury upon her perfect little body.
It was agony, pulling my impaled body off her crushed shell. I staggered about bleeding bitterly from my chest, my blood mixed with hers.
I stared at her there, stared at the crimson bed. I couldn’t really see it, but I felt I needed to.
I opened my wardrobe and pulled out my old SLR camera. I managed to fire off the flash bulb about 10 times before the blood loss dropped me.
Somewhere, in the sickest corners and cavities of my mind, the images wait to be viewed.

Deserved

2008-05-01T17:54:00.000-07:00

I hit her lightly at first.
Stupid old cow, she'd gone and wasted her money on some stranger. Lavishing that cash I'd been waiting for all my shuffling life on some fool companion.
Like she needed any company. She had so much money she could have bought a fucking slave to do whatever she wanted, say whatever she wanted it to.
She could have even bought a friend if that was really necessary. But why couldn't her money have been friend enough? It would have been friend enough for me.
So now its pretty much gone. He has as much right to it as anyone, or so she says. I hit her again when she laid that remark on me. Cheeky whore; like I haven't waited in kind and honourable patience for all that I deserved. Who else would put up with her inane chatter and piss stained shoes?
Joe would. She took great delight in telling me this. She was positively shrieking his name. I had to grip her throat tightly to make her stop. I always thought she'd have died before this. Five years ago would have suited me perfectly.
I was on top of my game and the money would have set me up for prolonged excellence in my chosen field, namely, living life to the fucking full.
Then came Joe. Old fucking Joe. Fucking smelly Joe. I imagine he banged the old girl too, if he was even up to it. He looked like he was rotting where he stood.
When she was dead I kissed her on the cheek. I then went to the brook behind the house and threw some stones in, like when I was younger.
I waded in and followed the brook downstream as far as I could, until I couldn't tell if it was spray on my cheeks or tears. My clothes must have been heavy with water because eventually I was lying down; soaking skin raw, pained cold, tongue lolling.
And that must have been when you found me.

The true form of Daphne

2008-04-30T15:57:00.000-07:00

Amongst statues and vases, great gold gilded frames, fine masterpieces of the renaissance and some worthy modern art I found a portrait of my mother.
The painting was entitled: ‘The true form of Daphne’ and came from the hand of an artist named Reinhart Shultz. A large white sign on the wall told me this.
The information on this sign told me almost nothing else about the work. Perhaps the card’s text was yet to be finalised, or maybe the museum officials knew little more about the work, than its title and painter?
Later I wondered why they had bothered to hang a piece they had so scant a knowledge of. But my initial thoughts were concerned with how an image of my mother came to be on display here, in York Art Gallery.
There was an interesting blend of styles to enjoy, throughout the various rooms. I came for the Turner, enshrouded in a curtain-covered cabinet to protect the oils from the light, but I never made it to that fabled corner. I never made it past my mother.
Her image is indelible now. Indeed, it seemed seared onto my retinas for a time. Not that it was an image of horror, far from it. But to see your own mother presented as an object of great, if not divine, beauty - hanging there, a portal of sexuality - well, it uneases one’s mind.
He had her, Reinhart, posed in the middle of a sparse room, bathed in a single beam of light coming down from the top left of the image, as if through a skylight. The room itself seemed completely wooden: brown, rough and unpainted. And there, in the centre, he had perched Daphne.
Naked, of course, the light tricked over her wet lips and danced across her pert bosoms. And the artist painted her entirely, leaving little to the imagination.
She stood, placidly, posed as the tree. Her legs firmly together, her body leaning back a little towards the fullness of the light, her arms reaching out and upwards in a strange crooked fashion. And there, upon those slender limbs that passed for branches, Shultz had draped her more personal items of clothing.
An amazing and dreadful thing. I stood, agape, for perhaps 20 minutes while other patrons filed past in moments.
But I’m forgetting things, there was a date too. Well, a year, at least. 1957 - three years before my birth. I asked a passing member of staff if they could tell me more about this painting; I said I thought it was a portrait of my mother.
The woman I was unlucky enough to have halted looked at me with suspicious eyes, which seemed to doubt that a man such as myself could be related to the goddess, so depicted.
Eventually, I received the answer that ‘research was ongoing into this piece, which had been recently discovered in a personal collection and subsequently praised for its “eager sexuality and firm empowerment of woman”.’
I nodded and handed her my business card. She assured me the museum would be in touch, should any more information come to light.
Upon escaping the gallery, I was inclined to take four large gulps of air and sat for a minute on a bench beneath the Roman Wall while the cooling rain poured down about me. I then took refreshment in the refectory of nearby York Minster and pondered the various leaflets about the cathedral’s great history and how even this great edifice was once struck and burnt by a bolt of lightning.
I pondered cleanliness and godliness.
Once I had finished my refreshing tea and two shortbread biscuits, I visited the crypt where there was a small display of medieval Christian art. I spent an hour among the Icons and Madonnas and, when I was quite ready, I stepped back out into the air and the incessant rain, hugging the cathedral wall until a break in the deluge.

Moth

2008-04-29T23:56:00.000-07:00

I burnt myself yesterday, an accident of sorts. Trying to keep up with the others, the golden flame enticed my hand.
I put it out, killed it in all its beauty. My reckless fingers. My filthy hands.
The rosy waves, they softly lapped my fingers. The flame, its wings fluttered and engulfed. And I couldn't feel it.
No pain inflicted to worry the birds, or stir animals that might feed on me. No cry or scream of anguish. It was all quite brief, quite sudden.

I think of myself as a moth. Perhaps we are both moths and we hatched from wardrobes too close to one another.
Two lifetimes spent bumping into bright lights in shadowed rooms. Lifetimes pressed hard against windows that trap and goad with the beauty they offer. And we’d fly so fast sometimes, almost blind.
Wings crushed and aflame, we met. Singed, flesh melting, we fell falling, spiralling. Downwards, ever aching, towards cooling waters, breaking.
One missed the pool below, burned for hours, survived.
The other broke the meniscus, soon cooled and sadly drowned.

And so I write, in fingers black with soot, on an ashen paper cup, ‘here lies the silken body of a once proud moth’.

Night Terror

2008-04-28T23:59:00.000-07:00

Always, Jim would try to hold on.
Sometimes he'd be outside of himself, running down the hill underneath the fly-over. He could see hands grasping, white and twitching and his own head trying to peep over the parapet: the concrete and seashell composite wall, the thick crash barrier.
And as he strained with all his might to force himself, by sheer intensity of will, to almost psychically power more strength into the weary arms of the Jim on the wall, he would always trip and stumble forward. He would then roll, roll, roll down the hill until his head collided and burst against the concrete wall; a wall that had saved many a motorist from plunging into the cold river, far below.
As soon as Jim's vision faded, as soon as a veil was drawn across the eyes of the self that had careered head-first towards a blunt head-trauma, he would be there inside the other body. Switched and slipping from the other side of the skull-splattered crash barrier, looking alternately at feeble fingers and whirling waters.
Inevitably, he'd cry out and fall with that sickness – remember the first drop of your first roller-coaster ride – and, as in dreams of this kind, panic overtakes his body long before it reaches whatever awaits below.
And there wakes Jim, in a dark room, in a soaking bed, still clawing at the covers for any handhold that might have saved him.
He starts to relax. After a few moments, at least, he is calm again. Jim lies flat on his back, his body feels so heavy. He notices his fiancé stirring beside him.
She rolls over onto her side, she is used to his nightmares now.
There comes, then, a scratching. A small noise, of tapping, perhaps, like the claws of a rat. Then comes creaking. It is the floorboards on the landing outside; they always creak like that.
The scritching is louder now, close to the bedroom door. It sounds as if something is slithering along, or is being dragged across rough carpet. The floorboards creak again, and then so does the door.
It's time to sit up; to get up and investigate. But Jim can't move his arm to prop himself up, and no amount of forceful instruction from his brain is causing his leg muscles to so much as twitch. The only part of his body that seems to be engaged is his optic nerve and the muscles which allow the movement of his eye.
The door is open fully. Jim can see more of the room now that his eyes have adjusted to both its darkness and its hints of light. Something is shuffling, scraping and pawing at the foot of his bed. He can hear it, it is breathing. A horrible, rasping whine like its lungs are thick with mucus.
Paroxysms of terror, apoplexy, catatonia.
Jim is so gripped as a form as strange and shapeless as the cloak of night hauls itself upon his useless legs. The darkness has hair and drags itself across his body with a weight that crushes Jim, like he's sinking deep into the bed.
Then hands push upon his face and his neck. The thing is propped upright, its full weight bearing down upon his chest.
How can he breath, how can his heart beat with this burden upon him?
Strange wisps of hair pass away and hints of a face are revealed. Repulsive, shredded, hanging; repellent in every way, all Jim's senses are straining against this creature.
And it just stays there, on his chest, sapping his strength, rising his panic. He can't quite believe this has happened again. How long now, before it ends? 'Til his body is his own once more?
His eyes flick, so wide with desperation, across to his fiancé, across for salvation. She is sleeping, so placidly, so peacefully, as always.
Oh, and how he hated her then.

-----

Something tiny

2008-04-25T17:35:00.000-07:00

Everything passes by so swiftly, everything ends before you even realise it’s begun. That’s why I don’t get suicide. Suicide is impatience.
I know a few people, friends, who’ve died. Most sad, their deaths aside, was that they barely knew they were alive. I mean, they barely thought about it: this thing, existence.
So, is living a reckless pursuit? Should we think more about it, consider every option, enjoy every painful second? I’m not saying I have the answers, I’m just saying: think about it.
I know it’s scary - hell, it’s a massive thing, too big sometimes for a human mind to cope with, to massive to comprehend. Not just where we are, and why – mere specks in the shifting universe – but everything here and hereafter. Time, infinity, the breathlessness that awaits us all one day.
What next? Hmmm, have you thought about that?
Next time you feel something, think about it. Then maybe you won’t ever think like Vanessa, because every day I miss her. And every day she’s missing something. It maybe tiny, something she never even thought was special; but maybe all I had to do was make her realise how special that thing was. Maybe that would have been enough?
My friend Patrick was a valet at some swanky hotel. He was driving a great new car, an Aston Martin. And then he crashed it. He wasn’t even going that fast, they reckon, but he died all the same. He felt like James Bond driving that thing, so he rang up to tell me. He sounded so charged, so vital. It’s sick, really. The owner of the car was distraught; the Aston Martin was written off.
My Aunt Susan was a painter. Now she loved life, or at least she loved the opportunity life had given her. Not just to notice the tiny things around her – the flower growing through the concrete, the butterfly landing on a brown autumn leaf, the moon shining through the mist – but to love it, to suck it all in and feed off it, and to capture it and share the bounty with others.
Aunt Susan found she had a brain tumour. First it affected her hands, so she couldn’t hold a brush. Later she couldn’t see. And that’s cruel. It’s cruel to take away something so loved and so needed, you know?
Anyway, just remember that. For me. Okay?

Dining on Crash Street

2008-04-24T18:41:00.000-07:00

She had the squid and I opted for the duck. Sarah and I, dining out on Crash Street.
You couldn’t see through the windows in there; they were blacked out and re-enforced with steel grills. To be honest, it was pretty dangerous just to walk down the street, but the food was good and the restaurateur knew it.
So, he benefits from cheap rent, we benefit from cheap cuisine and all anyone has to do to enjoy the benefits, to reap the salty rewards, is avoid the guys playing chicken on the road outside.
Everyone new to the town, we tell them: ‘grab a bite at Hong King Kong’s and then go for a drink at The Strange.’ People from outside don’t know what’s hit them, but they catch on pretty quick.
I followed one of them, you could tell he wasn’t from round here. He asked me the way to Crash Street. I told him and then dawdled some way behind.
They stand there, just stand there gawping at Crash Street. Where do they go from here? That’s what they’re trying to work out. There’s busted up motors lining both sides of the street. Some scrap-collector might be there, making fast money. All the shops, all the bars, all the restaurants are boarded up. But they’re open. They all have a sign on them saying “Welcome”; “Come inside”, “We are open!”, “Half-price on everything!!”.
It’s a great street really, but get there either before three or after five, because there’s a lot of boys meeting between those times and they’re looking to get pretty messed up.
Still, some people have just gotta eat, or drink, or get a cheap sofa during those hours. Some people’ll walk their kids home from school that way. You see it all the time.
We’re a defiant bunch. We accept things the way things are. Why do anything about it? Crash Street wouldn’t be so cheap if it was safe. Wouldn’t be so special.
And the duck. The duck is out of this world!

-----

This post is a continuation of ideas that began with the following tale: Drinking in The Strange.

Shackled and whingeing

2008-04-23T22:27:00.000-07:00

I don’t care if it hurts. Honey, I just don’t care.
You’re laughing at me now, I can feel it. Needles, sharp pins and wounding pincers… in your mind you’re dissecting me.
So I’m dissecting you.
When you saw me first. When you saw me three days ago - did you think I could be like this? Did you foresee the twist of the arm behind your back? The thick rope to tie your hands? The hand-prints I left on your stomach?
You’re grinding your teeth now, is it burning my dear? I’ve more to give you, so much more. Do you feel the valleys and chasms of your soul opening up, torn apart by tremors, fused again by magma?
I love you. I didn’t say that aloud.
“When I saw you, sweet mistress, and we came together; the emptiness, the desolation of mind, I felt it between us. We were kindred in our vacuum. So we loved for hours and then you punished me.” I’m singing this now. I’m singing our story like I’m Madonna. Like I’m a virgin.
And she’s singing too. Did I mark you, my dear? Are you singed? Tell me lightly, keep the melting fresh for me. Keep everything sallow.
But I hear the birds singing outside the window. And God’s light. His light it streams through where the masking tape is peeling from my windows. He gets everywhere. I can’t escape him and it makes me want to open my head and turn off the light. “For What Is Daylight? For What, For Which, For Whom?”
I remember the light when I was young. Transient, it would pass over me as I lay in bed. Grave, with fever. Grave and transient. Giving succour to the skin. Lending power, warmth to the blankets.
“When one knows sweat, one knows hell.” She laughed at that. Sweet angel, I think she’s perfect for me. She asks me to hurt her again. But what more can I do?
I bend over to kiss her lips. They glisten, salty and wretched-bitten. We enjoy the contact for a second and then we each slice down.
Ah! The sudden pinch, the blood on my vest makes me hard. There’s blood on her neck, soon on her breast, soon on her breast, soon.
“Delight me!” she screams. And we’ll do this until the warmth of the day fades away. She wants me to lie there now. She wants me to sweat for her, shackled and whingeing.
“I’ll shiver soon. I’ll quake.” I speak to her. I whisper into her dirty blonde hair as I untie her straining limbs. I move to embrace her. I’m ready again.
She chops-chops and her hand connects with windpipe and panic. I gasp for life on the soaking sheets as she binds me again. The rope burns my arms as much as my lungs are roasting.
With a roar that lifts my body clean from the bed I have filled with air and exhaled once more. I thought sensation may never again come. I can see again!
She is standing over me and she bares her nails. I’m so in love. Am in utter awe. Can’t believe have known her but three days. She is my everything and I pledge her my spirit.
Bring forth your slashing arm, Delia. Bring forth with Eros’ guidance.

The Great North Wind

2008-04-22T23:49:00.000-07:00

“Seventeen times the Wind blew but never once did it cut Somerled down. He just kept on leaping and twisting, dodging the great gusts of air that the cold North Wind was throwing at him.”
The children listened intently to the golden story, a patchwork history of the ancestry of the teller, the storymaster, Ranald MacLeod.
He’d told this tale to so many generations of children, it was part of their heritage too. The story he was currently telling (greatly amplified and injected with sublime levels of fantasy) was the story of his grandfather, Somerled MacLeod, and that man’s journey from the Scottish mainland to the Isle of Skye, where he settled and raised a family. This family became a settlement of which the assembled throng were the latest brood.
“Leaping, so he was, from crevice to cliff-top, every footstep was precarious. Old Somerled, finding himself on a stable outcrop, he balanced on one foot and waited.”
“The wind had one more breath left in him, and then he would be drained. Somerled stared at the squall as it took aim. Below him, far below him lay the valley floor. Its rocks and boulders leered up at him like vicious knives, waiting to stab his body if it fell.”
Ranald MacLeod was himself an old man now, and it wasn’t hard for the children to believe that Ranald was, in fact, describing his own life of adventure.
He had long white hair and a well kempt beard. He wore a brown tunic and firm leather boots. He looked every inch the once-great hero and he paused his tale for a moment, building the tension, feeding off the wonder that he saw in the faces of every child gathered there.
“‘Oh great North Wind,’ called Somerled to the spiteful spirit of the storm, ‘My name is Somerled MacLeod, and I have bested you. I have dodged your gusts and gales seventeen times, and I can see you have but one breath left in you,’ so said the proud and fearless Somerled to the great North Wind.”
The children gripped onto their knees now, or they clenched their two hands together so the skin turned quite white.
“Now Somerled, he was clever and he was weary. He doubted he had the strength to leap back up the cliff face to safety, should the wind make one final attack. So he used guile, to try and outwit his enemy.”
“‘Oh, North Wind, lord of the clouds and the rains, I beseech you, call off this assault,’ called Somerled with booming voice from lungs filled with air. ‘You know I will best you again, and I have no desire to see your fine breath extinguished.’”
“But with this the wind seemed to pick up once more. It whistled around him, picking up leaves and twigs, dashing small stones onto the ground, many feet below.”
“‘I, the mighty Somerled MacLeod, will soon leave Scotland, land of my birth. And, with your own ancient approval and aid, shall fly from this mystic realm, across the sea to the fertile land of An t-Eilean Sgitheanach, there to start a new and proud race.’”
“At this, the wind began to howl in Somerled’s ears. A bitter, hollow whine, like that of the wounded stag. But Somerled stood there, bravely. He stood on his one leg, on his great perch, high above that Scottish kingdom which had cast him out, and faced down the wicked wrath of the North Wind.”
“‘In return for safe passage to the Winged Island,’ Somerled continued, ‘I hereby swear that this man here before you, and all of his many descendants, thereafter, shall give worship and make the relevant sacrifices to you, the great North Wind, for your benevolence and omnipotence.’”
The children shifted now, some stood up. They didn’t understand all the words they heard, but they understood from the slow and careful pronunciation of their storyteller that these were grave and important incantations. These were words to be in awe of, words which were written into every aspect of their culture, their society, their history.
“And as the lightning flashed and the full force of the gathering storm approached the mountainside with a final grimace and roar, Somerled closed his eyes and held up his hands to the coming cloud of darkness.”
“And at this act of utter faith and true self-sacrifice, the great North Wind relented and its brooding storm-clouds parted.”
In the circle, around the fire where Ranald was sitting, the children relaxed. They were pleased, relieved. They looked at each other and whispered words to friends.
The story would continue a little way, they knew. It would continue until Somerled climbed down from the mountain, ate and then rested. But they had all heard their favourite part and were now exhausted.
Ranald looked upon them and smiled from the corner of his mouth at the small yawns and the slight rubbing of eyes from tiny hands.
“And that’s all of the tale we’re going to hear for today,” he said. “But we all know, don’t we children, that Somerled MacLeod had many, many more adventures before he reached An t-Eilean Sgitheanach, and settled here in Trotternish.” They nodded as one sleepy whole.
“Well then, perhaps we shall hear another story tomorrow. Now goodnight children, go on to your mothers now.”
There were a few groans, but all the children got up, albeit in a slight daze, and wandered off back to their parents, their families and their beds.
Ranald was left there alone, on his wooden stool, backlit by the roaring fire at the centre of the settlement. Content, he let the fire warm his back as he gazed through the twilight at the village before him.
He looked up at the sky and saw the few dark scudding clouds rolling on safely by. “This is how it is,” he said aloud, to himself. “This is how it can be.” And, in his head, he offered a prayer of thanks to the great North Wind.

Gordon loses

2008-04-21T23:45:00.000-07:00

So, I'm a bit of a loser. But even losers have standards.
I was talking to my friend Jacques about it. He said, "Gordon, you're going to have to set your sights with more accuracy."
What the hell does that mean, really? I asked him. He just pointed, at this mark on the wall of his bedroom where feet had scuffed it.
Nice. He's a nice man.
The reason for this attack on my high standards was triggered two days earlier when I came into contact with a girl named Emma. A beautiful brunette with honey eyes and olive skin. I bruised her.
I bruised her quite badly when I knocked into her. It was unfortunate, and I dropped a lot of my shopping on the floor of the supermarket. Sometimes bad things happen to good people. That's what I say to myself when bad things happen.
I scrabbled around for my tins and cheese. She handed me back a loaf of bread. I handed her back a pack of steaks. "You might need them for your eye!" I managed this joke and attempted to laugh, but I hadn't bruised her eye, just her leg as I was swinging my basket, like normal.
"Oh yeah, thanks." She was quite friendly for a girl I'd just attacked with tinned food.
"So, er, well this is awkward." I was about to ask her who should sort out paying for the broken jar of pickled onions that had fallen from my basket. Instead, I seized on an opportunity that is scarcely afforded me, the opportunity to speak to a beautiful woman.
"So, would you like to come and get a drink with me?" I asked her, pretty well, I thought. "Or maybe grab a bite?" I tagged that quickly on the end.
She was umming and erming, shifting awkwardly, trying to find the words to get away. I didn't notice this at the time. "Yeah, let's go crazy. Let's just throw our baskets down on the floor, right here, and just go and blow the money on Italian food and red wine. Hey? What do you say to that, missy?"
She bit her lip and then prepared to speak. I smiled into her golden eyes. She said, calmly: "Look, we've both just thrown our baskets down once, and it's got us nowhere. All I plan to do now is to get out of this shop, go home, eat a meal I can throw in the microwave, put some ice on my leg and then go to bed."
She didn't say it implicitly, but I understood she didn't want to involve me in any of these plans. She excused herself and walked down an aisle to the check-out. I stood in silence for a few seconds and then my eyes focused on the broken jar of pickled onions. The vinegar had pooled around my feet and the silverskin onions sat plumply on the tiled floor. I realised this was a health-hazard and looked around the store for the next ten minutes to find a member of staff to clean it up.
I explained how it had happened and they didn't make me pay for it, for which I was quite glad.
Jacques later told me this all happened because I was a loser, and losers can't make anything good happen for themselves. A handsome, suave individual could have turned that situation into something more; even wound up getting a month's worth of sex out of it. But all a loser is going to get out of it is a bruised ego and the clinging reek of vinegar about his person.
Jacques then said that Lilly quite likes me, though. Why don't I try my luck with Lilly?
I had previously thought Lilly beneath me. Small, spotty, perhaps hairy - I'm not sure, but she looks the type. I could always think of a reason why Lilly was not worth bothering with. But, lately, I've been thinking maybe even Lilly wouldn't bother with me. I mean, what have I got to offer her except vinegar shoes? So, I passed on Lilly.
I couldn't be bothered with cooking last night so I went to the take-away. It was run by a Chinese gentleman and he offered a good range of cuisine. Tempted by egg fried rice, I instead opted for good old, traditional, fish and chips.
"Salt 'n' vinegar?"
"Yes, please!"
While I was walking home I crossed to the side of the street that was not lit by street lamps. There, in the dark I spotted the tell-tale glint of smokers; the new lepers of the pubs and bars, gathering like refugees in doorways.
Coming towards me was the shadowy shape of a full-figured woman. A huge creature, from a few feet away I knew I had to change direction slightly in order to avoid brushing her as we passed.
As she came near enough for the available light to show her face, I realised that she was looking right at me, and that she was smiling. I smiled back, though more as a reflex, unaccustomed as I am to having to return the smile of a woman.
Well, this was quite a turn up for the books. Granted, she was grossly overweight, but all I needed to establish was whether she might have found me, in some small way, attractive.
I decided to call Jacques for his opinion on the fat woman. Down the phone he enquired: "You had on your vinegar shoes, you say? And you were carrying a take-away? Could that have been why she was smiling at you?"
I bid Jacques a good evening, put down the phone and tucked into my fish supper.

To black stump - Epilogue

2008-04-18T17:46:00.000-07:00

A man is walking slowly along the edge of the Stuart Highway.
The road, known also as the A87, is running down the back-bone of Australia, slicing the outback in two. Conquering the unconquerable, a passage through the wasteland.
The man’s name is Walter Seddon. People tend to call him Walt.
If you could follow his trail – and there are footsteps still to follow through the dirt – you’d find your way to a place known as black stump, but you might never realise you’d arrived there.
Black stump is a place like any other. It’s miles out in the bush. There’s nothing there. Just a long dead tree and memories.
A truck’s coming along the highway now. The sun is beating down. In a few minutes the driver’s going to see the weary traveller and stop to ask if he’s okay. The traveller will smile and say he’s doing just fine. “Bonza”, he might say that.
He’ll be invited to climb aboard. He’ll say thanks and introduce himself as Walter. The driver will tell Walter that he’s pleased to meet him. And he is, very pleased.
The driver’s name is Bill and he hates to travel alone, without conversation. Never thought he’d see a hitchhiker out here though.
Walter will ask Bill if he’s ever heard of a place called black stump. He’ll reply that everywhere around here, to the left and right of the highway is out past black stump. Walter will nod and tell him he’s quite right, and maybe the story won’t go any further.
Bill is heading up to Darwin, on the north coast. Walter will spend much of the journey considering his next move, after Bill asks him how far he wants to go. Alice Springs is the name buzzing around in his head. But another name in there is Pattie.
We’ll leave them here now, leave the truck to roll on north. They’ll be okay now, Bill and Walt.
Let’s go back, instead, right across the great sweeping vista of the red sands, green-brown bushes and skeletal trees. Back to a place known as black stump.
There’s a man there, in a clearing, sitting. He’s perched there, upon black stump.
The man’s name is Derek Tanner. He lives in a place called Wilder’s Creek. But the outback is also a home to him, and his favourite resting place, his favourite seat in the whole damn country, is something which he calls black stump.
He’s smiling now. He’s just sitting there and smiling.

The End

To black stump - Part IV

2008-04-17T23:47:00.000-07:00

I don’t realise it yet, but I’m camping near to black stump.
Every day I have wandered this landscape, almost unchanging, and each evening I have come to a spot within about half a mile of black stump.
On the second day I was walking slowly. Sipping my water, not really looking where I was going. Just thinking about my lot. My life’s direction, my eternal soul.
On the third day I was stumbling about. My skin was drying, even blistering. I was dabbing the water onto my lips now. The billabongs all stagnant, the creeks almost empty. But I was in a reverie and I was obsessing about the infinite. At one point I sat down on the broken carpet of this sacred land, crossed my legs and lifted both hands up in praise to the immense sky. After a few seconds its magnitude bore down on me so hard that I toppled backwards and had to cower before it. I covered myself for fully ten minutes until the concentration of the sun on one part of my body began to scorch.
Each night I have slept near to the embers of my fire and dreamt deep of black stump. Perhaps the smoking remains of the burning twigs and branches felt a kinship with their brother, that black corpse of a tree, that charnel stump? Whatever, some magic pulled me away and each night it began the same.
I was lifted, carried almost, from my slumber and I floated with the wisping smoke trails, across the shapeless desert towards black stump. Always towards black stump.
From the ground, the stump was easily lost among the myriad scrambled residue of the Outback. But, from the air, it was easy to see.
Each morning, the start of my dream or my memory of it would jump and skip about, like a cherished record the needle could barely read. On the first day, for example, I recall no descent to the stump - I would simply have appeared there. Then, yesterday I found I had fallen (or been dropped) upon the ground nearby and needed to pick myself up from the dust and walk on a little.
During my first night’s slumber I met my-ex, Pattie, at black stump. It may be a little strange, but I was quite unsurprised to see her there. I was pleased, and immediately inquired after her and her family. Our conversation was polite, always polite.
I noticed she wore little, but a white robe. Her hair was more golden than the blonde I had known and her face seemed to shine. She was an angelic vision and eventually I found myself unable to speak, so captivated was I by her form.
She said I must speak to her, I must continue to search. Her face began to shimmer and glow white, at this. She asked why I came to black stump, why did I call her here? I tried to speak, but it was as if my tongue had grown wings and flown for the moon.
The longer I failed to speak, the more she was transfigured. Her robes sparkled and her skin was bathed in the glow of absolute purity. When I could see nothing but the fizzing whiteness of her open soul, my mouth engaged and words spat forth: “This is how I’ve always seen you.”
As the light receded so did my dream. I was then allowed to wake and remember.
On the second night it was my mother who was waiting for me there, at the blasted stump. Her eyes shone green and her black hair dropped in glossy flows about her shoulders. Her pursed lips were cherry red. She seemed some way between the benevolent Madonna and the blaspheming witch. I was cautious, though she bade me sit.
Questions raced through my head, things I thought I should know. About her, about me, about my father. They had all seemed so important, so fundamental to my life, to how it had turned out, to how it had reached this moment.
But as we sat and eyed each other from our seated positions, I realised there was nothing to ask my mother. There was nothing I needed to know.
In a moment of a dream, my head was dissolved of a lifetime of ponderings, recriminations and insecurities. Fat tears rolled down my cheeks and my mother opened her mouth to sing. From deep within her came a rich baritone, singing in a dead language. A powerful theme with notes slow and long, rising and falling gently like the soft undulations of the landscape about.
After a minute or so of song, she rose straight up from black stump. A graceful ascension into the night sky, the rumble of her voice echoing in the distant hills, and then… awake.
And so to tonight, the night I find black stump.
My dream tonight began quite differently, because it began by being awoken. A tap on the shoulder brought me from my body. I was standing, looking down on my sleeping form. No flight to black stump upon the smoke of my campfire tonight. I could walk.
A man, a tribesman, a stereotype of my mind, perhaps; with long clumped hair, a loincloth, a painted body and a stick or spear waited for me. He led me on a path, which curved like the S of a perfect snake, between five ironbark trees. Trees, somehow managing a hint of life and sustenance in a harsh world.
At the end of the path was black stump. He pointed and I understood. He put words, ideas, images into my mind. He offered me something that night, he suggested it was sanctuary.
I saw a picture there, inside my head. In the image I stepped upon the sacred stump. I understood that this stump was all that remained of a cursed man, turned into a tree and struck repeatedly by the wrath of heaven, until it was sated.
The charred tree and I were then joined. Fresh bark grew up from the stump and new roots flowed down from my feet. I would soon be encased in this new life. An ironbark eucalyptus tree, grown anew in the wilderness.
It was a wonderful sight. Such light and joy in the midst of a desert. But I never needed a moment more to consider his offer. Instead I bowed to the man, turned slowly and retraced my steps back to where my body slept.
Now, I’m almost there. All that remains for me to do is wake myself and recall the route. The route to my journey’s end. The route to black stump.

...to be continued...

To black stump - Part III

2008-04-16T23:21:00.000-07:00

The first few hours of my journey to black stump were soundtracked by swarming insects.
They seemed to surround and penetrate my head, as if one had burrowed into my ear and called the others to follow. Very soon the howls of distant carnivores were lost to me and all my brain could maintain was the chirrup of the scratching crickets and the buzzing wing-beats of great beetles as they feasted on the darkness of morning.
I was walking in a straight line, away from Derek’s place. A straight line, as best I could, in the direction he pointed me - straight out the door, and keep on walking.
Things were crawling on my clothes, in my hair. Things nipping at my skin and drinking deep of what goodness I had to give. Who was I to deny them that pleasure? I just looked at the ground before me, and measured each step, carefully, by the milky light that God had blessed me with.
The sun started to rise after just over two hours of walking. It was coming up behind me, so I figured I was heading west or maybe north-west. For the first time I noticed the colours. The sun blessed the landscape with colour.
You may think you know what a sandy or rocky landscape looks like; but to stand alone here, in the midst of what is a colossal ancient seabed and see the light creeping across the scattered rocks, bushes and hardiest of trees - to see the sand first begin to glow red with the pride of day - that is a blessing too few have had.
A rise of hills lay in the distance and arced off towards the north. This at least kept me penned in, kept me hunting in an area my brain could almost comprehend. I shifted my course, more to the north and tried not to disturb the lizards of day, before their prey did.
Birds called now and the insect drone gave way as the fat, delicious creatures of night looked for sanctuary. I’d stumbled into a long dry watercourse and was following its wake without thought, back towards the hills. I could leave this journey to itself for a while, so I put my hat on and I thought of Derek. I considered his words, his stories about black stump.
He told me that black stump was both a real place, and an imagined one. That it existed physically, at the site of a burned out old eucalyptus tree, but that it also existed spiritually and was a place of particular significance to the indigenous peoples of the area.
The Arabana tribe, he said, had many stories of powerful experiences near black stump. Rain was said to flow up from the sand, or fire might grow in the bushes and even inhabit the animals, round about.
These people would perform dances at the black tree and sing to the spirits of the air. Aboriginal travellers through the region said they had encountered dead friends and relatives, and even spoke to them. The shaman would come to the stump to ask questions of the ancestors, decipher the whispered truths from the lies of the dead.
To non-Aborigines, the notion of black stump was thought simply a part of mythology and local folklore. Lots of people said they’d seen it, but who could be sure it was the black stump of legend?
Of course, every weird event or crazy story, told by anyone who travelled through this stretch of bush, was at once attributed to black stump.
“Did you cross black stump on your travels?”, “Ah, you must have been passing near to black stump.” This place existed as clearly in the local imagination now, as it did in the traditions of the indigenous tribes people, and as it did in the vivid experience of Derek.
For Derek’s part, he told me he once found himself out in the bush, at the dead of night. Figured he’d been sleepwalking and had come to, miles from his home - maybe 50 miles. And there, about 20 yards away from where he was standing was his father, blood streaming from his ears and eyes, smiling at Derek, squatting there upon a charred black stump of wood.
They talked some, that night, and then Derek turned around and followed his footsteps home. He’s been back, he says, but every time he’s had to go a different direction. A new route, every time, to find black stump.
I'd like to believe him, I'd like to believe all of it, everything about black stump. I'd like that, so much.
So, as the sun’s heat waned later in the day, I stopped thinking about Derek and the stump. I just stopped thinking at all. I climbed out of the stream bed and veered north-east towards a distant billabong and I camped pretty nearby that night, but far enough away not to be bothered by mosquitoes.
That night, as the sun set behind the hills, I knew I wasn’t quite there. I might even have gone way past it, but it didn’t matter because I knew I wasn’t ready to find black stump. Not yet.
Something told me I still had a couple more days to go.

...to be continued...

To black stump - Part II

2008-04-15T23:41:00.000-07:00

Let me tell you a little something about me, seems as how we’ll be travelling together, today.
It happens that my name is Walter; Walter Seddon, actually. Yeah, people pretty much just go with Walt, so why don’t you?
Guess I’m kind of a bum. Got kicked out of every place. First my mum kicked my dad out. Then she kicked me out when I got older so I guess I take after him, there.
I lived with a couple of guys - friends, you know? Lived with a girl, she was nice. Pattie. I’ve got her photo somewhere in my pack. I’ll get it later.
Anyway, kind of had to move out, move on. If you’re in someone else’s place you’re in someone else’s hair, that’s how I see it.
I mean, I’m happy for the couch or the floor or wherever, but you got to be ready, you got to prepare yourself, mentally, for that look in your direction, that whispered conversation. You’ve always got to be thinking about the door.
I’d like to find my own place one day, but I dunno where yet. I’m still looking, looking for someone or something to tie myself to. Put down roots or whatever it is people say.
You say you’re from Port Augusta then? Well, I’m an Adelaide boy, 24 years. Never did drive up to Augusta myself. Good fishing round there, I hear. Looked nice as the coach pulled in, anyway.
I take it you’re going on up to Alice Springs? Just sightseeing? Or you trekking on after that? Well, if you stick around there a bit, I might catch up with you. Could only afford a ticket to Marla, you see. I could stay on, but they’d just catch me at the next changeover and I’d be just as stuck.
But Marla, that sounds like a nice place. Like a girl’s name, or something. I’ll be able to find a ride in Marla’ll get me further north, or in Wilder’s Creek. I’ll be seeing you in a few days mate, I’m sure of it.
Or maybe I’ll see me a bit of this beautiful country of ours? Look at it, both sides of the highway, stretching on for bloody miles it is. Might get me a lift in some bloke’s Ute, head down to the local watering hole.
Ah yes. See this ancient land of ours. It’s gonna be sweet. Bet my old mum never thought I’d be, erm, ‘communing with nature’ in the middle of the bloody bush.
Nor Pattie neither. I never did show you a photo of her, did I? Hang on a sec. I’ll just get her out.
She’s nice, yeah? Pretty? Smart too. Too smart, really.
Well, we’ll be stopping soon. I’ll be getting off. Out of your hair. Heh!
You have a good one, mate. No, you keep the picture. Keep it for me. I’ll get it from you when I catch up with you. You know, in Alice Springs.
Yeah, g’day. See you soon, mate.

...to be continued...

To black stump

2008-04-14T23:45:00.000-07:00

After three days of travelling I found myself at black stump.
In the Australian vernacular, “the black stump” is an abstract place, known to everyone and nobody at all. It’s like saying “the back of beyond”, or “the middle of nowhere”, except this place, black stump, it seemed to be describing something worth looking for. A marker, something you could find, something you could hold on to in this arid wilderness.
Derek, a bloke in the pub near Wilders Creek, told me I could find black stump. Said it was a place I needed to find. Derek reckoned I was lost already; searching for black stump would be nothing in comparison.
From most men, the suggestion to go off and find an imaginary blackened stump in the ground, somewhere within a wilderness area covering hundreds of square miles, would have quickly rung up a polite “screw you, mate” followed by a wry smirk as you finish your beer.
But because of the fierce but genuine intensity with which Derek’s eyes burnt, I listened to what the man had to say.
And maybe it also had something to do with the mood I was in that night. I’d lost pretty big at poker in the pub. Couldn’t get another drink until Derek offered to buy me one. I was frustrated by everything and I thought the beer would calm me down.
But Derek doesn’t do calm, and he somehow instilled in me a desire to find a place that no-one in the town could even be sure existed. Well, he knew it, so he said.
He told me amazing things about black stump and how I could find it. I sat there on a bar stool, listened and drank.
After a couple more beers were drained, we left the pub and I slept on Derek’s floor.
Derek lived in a little cabin on the edge of the settlement. Well kept, but small - enough for one, I suppose. The front door opened onto the main street of the town. The back door, onto a small allotment and then nothing. Nothing, just the great Australian Outback - the bush.
At 3am I heard movement in the kitchen but there was no light on. Then a cupboard door opened. Rattling, pulling, something fell down. Then nothing. I waited for the next sound. I heard no doors open, no footsteps’ tread, but I knew Derek was sitting on the couch beside me.
“It’s time to go,” he whispered.
“Strewth, it’s still dark. What’s with all the noise, Derek,” I asked. “Is there a bloody snake in the house or something?”
“Yes, there’s a snake, in the house. So you’ve got to go now,” he said. “I’ve put supplies in your pack. You’ll be fine to black stump.”
“You can leave by the back door,” he said and opened it. So I stepped out into the cold, pitch morning and the door closed behind me. I looked back at the door for fully twenty minutes waiting for him to open it again. I thought it must be a test.
Eventually, I realised my test really had already begun.
I looked to the moon, and the dingo’s howl. I looked to the horizon and set off for black stump.

...to be continued...

The incalculable dove

2008-04-11T23:32:00.000-07:00

It flew for fun. It was purity released and it flew straight and true. Its feathers were heaven and goodness shone from its wingtips. People looked up from their work and smiled as it passed them. A flash of glory, a white jet of hope. Halcyon days to come, drenched in peace. Everywhere it flew it dropped feathers of redemption on the cold grey landscape.
The white dove sped on. A rarer and rarer site in England, it seemed to be racing time, outpacing extinction, but only just.
It whizzed across fields now. A buzzard stirred from its perch on a telegraph pole but the huge raptor was incapable of catching such a fine prey as the incalculable dove. So on it strove.
The landscape changed now as the road widened. Countryside turned to village and village turned to town. There were lamps to avoid and intercrossing wires chained buildings together. And the traffic. The traffic hummed everywhere.
The bird banked sharply and swung into space. Then, its body thudded into a window. Stunned, its beauty twitched on a black step. The brown boot of Pap Frung came down on its belly and forced its stomach out through its beak.
Skelhorne helped him over the remaining stair and into a warm reception. "Come along girl," barked Frung to the spinster at a desk before him. "He needs to see me."
The air in the room changed now and the woman said nothing in return. She fixed her eyes on Frung and pressed the intercom firmly, as she had done time and time before.
"Pap Frung to see you, doctor."
An audible intake of breath came through the loudspeaker. Time stood still.
Eventually; "Send him through, Miss Semple."

-----

This piece is an old story, part of a larger tale about Pap Frung that I started writing with my friends Paul Craven and Tom Allen. If we finish it, I will post it somewhere. I include this today, because I have man-flu and am not up to writing.

The pull of the tide

2008-04-10T23:47:00.000-07:00

Flowing very softly, like the trickling of melting butter, the tide came in around their feet.
They were sleeping, naked on the warm secluded sands, Stefan and Magda - each dreaming of the other.
In Stefan’s dream, Magda was a ghost. She came to him as he turned out the last light in his house. She was brilliant white, with mouth aflame. She reached out to him and he stood his ground for her touch. She kissed him and the flames spread across his body in waves.
In Magda’s dream, Stefan was a cruel master to her. She worked hard for his care, but whenever she displayed the weakness one has when they can’t help but reveal their love, he would attack her with words so barbed, she felt each syllable snagging on her heart.
Magda, mercifully, woke first. Her hands shook and her eyes were grey. She looked at the beautiful body of Stefan, almost glowing like an angel in the midday sun, but he was tainted now. Magda wanted so much to wake and hold him, for this all to go away, but the power of the dream still gripped her. So she just sat up, pulled her legs into her chest and sobbed into her knees.
Though they were inches from each other, their minds reeled, whole universes apart. Stefan’s dream was bringing him such joy, his body had no wish to escape the sensation. The spirit of Magda flowed through his entire being and his veins pumped with vitality.
And then, above the slowly melting tide came the first of the white water, the first gush that signals the world has turned and the tranquillity of the beach must be reclaimed.
As it splashed this fresher, colder water across Magda’s calves, the nagging grip of her dream was broken. She looked at the frothing waters and opened her legs, to allow the next wave to surge through her.
The wave broke, fizzing across their bodies, and Magda leaned her head back into the surf, her hair dabbling in the foam. This last sea wash woke Stefan with a splutter and a cry.
He looked at his lover in confusion, but she smiled sweetly at him in return and stroked his wet face. Then she pulled herself on top of him and kissed him as the surge crashed into her back.
They made love there, in the tidal waters, fighting a valiant last stand against the inevitable. They strained with every inch of their beings for these seconds on their sand and their beach, before the tide came.

-----

There's more love, longing and sand in this tale: On the beaches, far away.

Chasing pennies

2008-04-09T23:55:00.000-07:00

I have always thought of myself as a man with an open heart and a sober mind who can find deep joy in the chase for pennies.
From my earliest years, the glistening sight of jewellery excited my childish eyes. The crinkle of notes or the clinks of my father counting his coins was enough to send me to sleep amid the most fabulous dreams of laden riches.
Growing up, my father instructed me in the ways of book-keeping from an early age. He would pay me a meagre wage for the task of looking after the family’s accounts, which he would then check over, quite laboriously, as though it were a vital examination at school.
Of course, he was teaching me the fine art of accounting, a charming life skill to have at one’s disposal. I thank him now for the effort he put in to me, just a child. The very real effort he put in as a father.
These efforts, I hope, he would feel have been rewarding. He cannot tell me this, for he lies six feet below the ground, but any can see the rewards have been great. I’m sure he would have felt a great pride, or at least a sense of satisfaction in what he has created in me.
Not long ago, my book-keeping enterprise reached new heights. I no longer have to be the man who works through the night to balance his client’s monies. Others do that now. Trusted employees; fine men.
One cannot be seen, as the principal of a respected firm of accountants, to be doing the work of a mere book-keeper. My society, my learned friends and colleagues, the peak of Manchester’s political echelons; they would not lend me the same respect I command now.
And yet, I miss the chase.
The chase, let me explain, is something I see as eternal. Oh yes, you may find the missing monies, you may locate that lone numeral that had somehow eluded your imprecise eyes, but the chase does not end there. The chase goes on because trade never ceases, so money never sleeps. Accounts constantly writhe, thrusting capital forth or gladly accepting an injection of funds within it.
And this, all this, it fills my mind, so that I find it hard to speak of much else. When I attend my dinners and gay social dances, I find the conversation difficult to hear. The swollen words of the princes and oligarchs of this growing industrial city have no room in a mind that favours the simplicity and absolute beauty of numeric perfection.
So I tend to sneak back, back to the firm’s apartments on Moorgate Place, back to the old counting house. I’ll light the lamp, take a chair, and pore over the pages, the ledgers, the statements and receipts.
These are my children, these great books of ours, these are my pride and my joy. I’ll stay here, until first light, chasing pennies ‘til I sleep.
I’ll stay here, gladly, and hope I wake before the clerks find me, in the morning.

-----

If you enjoyed reading the tale, try this one: Skimming the mire.

The confidence of faith

2008-04-08T23:58:00.000-07:00

By the nineteenth year of his life, Dante felt he was cursed. Whatever he thought about, at least, whatever he imagined to be, it never came to pass.
He would sit alone, music bathing his ears, low lights filtering out what he didn’t want to see in the room. He would try, try very hard, not to imagine a thing, maybe not to think about anything at all. That way, he could be sure that his imagination would not destroy the possibility of the future.
When Dante was a child, his burgeoning life was filled with possibilities. He would imagine what he was going to do when he grew up. The careers he would have, the countries he would visit, the great love affairs he would enjoy.
He saw his life stretching out before him - a rich platter, a joyous miracle to come. He thought about it, almost daily, as his teenage years gathered momentum. What times were to come! The excitement sometimes left him giddy. He’d sit there, sit in his room with the music filling his ears, lie back and stare at his dreams.
When he was eighteen he left home for the first time to attend a university. The road of the life he had forseen, he was now travelling.
He saw Beatrice on the third day of his first university semester. A voluptuous vision of hope, the first step on the road to his envisioned life.
That night he sat in his dormitory and imagined their first meeting. His vivid mind planned every nuance of the conversation - the speech that would make her fascinated by him, the ideas that would entice her passion for his precious soul, and later the words that would bring their entwining.
On Friday, the fifth day of the first university term, she was there as he had imagined, leaving class alone. All the confidence of faith, a faith built up across the divide of almost nineteen years spinning upon this human planet, carried his legs towards her and allowed him to begin the conversation he had rehearsed so many times this week, and pictured almost infinitely throughout his recent adolescence.
The first barrage floated with perfection from his lips. She gazed intently, focusing on every syllable. Her first reply, however, was alien to his mind.
Her voice, the very structure of her sentences, moved freely and independently of all his thoughts - of his entire constructed experience.
A crumbling edifice, his rhetoric was as dry as his tongue. His mind, as empty as his mouth.
Beatrice shrugged and said ‘bye’. Dante barely encountered her again.
A retreat to his room. A final hard look at his imagination. A real fear came upon him.
Dante knew now, he knew nothing about the world. Everything was an uncertainty. If he stepped from his room, he could never be sure, again, that the floor would support him.
A film of panic clung to him. He shook a little. The cold realisation of how hard his future would be. The realisation of how much easier life could have been had he discovered this truth, years ago. This realisation clawed at his heart.
Dante stared hard at the handle on the thick wooden door that separated his dormitory from the outside world. He tried to imagine what was on the other side, but all he could see was a world with no floors and many, many opportunities for him to fall.

-----

If you enjoyed the tale, try this one: The blonde man.

Drying out

2008-04-07T20:26:00.000-07:00

People were noticing they were drinking more.
Always, when paying an impromptu visit to the flat, would there be an offer of a glass of wine. “Red or white? We’ve got both open,” he’d say. That poor, unfortunate man.
Tina, Brian’s wife, would be drinking too, cajoling him, opening another bottle for him, but she always seemed to stay pretty sober. It was like she could just drink and drink, and keep on drinking without feeling the effects of the hedonistic grape.
But Brian, Brian would get in a hell of a state. A hell of a state and he’d keep on drinking. And she’d be there, Tina, opening another bottle and pouring him another glass, and then one more.
His friends saw him pass out on numerous occasions and it was lucky that he did his heavy drinking in the comfort of his own home. They rarely seemed to go out anymore but, when the couple did, Tina seemed quite able to control their drinking. One couldn’t help but wonder if they were just saving themselves for when they got back home. Back home there was lots of wine.
Christmas and New Year had been quite a time. Full of partying and misbehaving. Lots of drinking.
On the third day of 2006 Brian woke from a prolonged stupor that had presumably lasted since New Year’s Eve. Glancing at the watch on his left forearm he was surprised to see a network of thin veins had risen up across his arm. The veins seemed full of vitality but their prominence was made all the more unusual by the slightly greenish tinge to both them and his arm. The skin pigment had lessened in terms of usual colour and had even become translucent in places.
Nausea, caused by a combination of this sight and his woozy head, made Brian attempt to stand and reach the bathroom before he threw up. His legs, though, were less than useful and seemed to flex and bow when he put weight on them. As he staggered forward he felt some pain around the knee and heard a sickening noise, like flesh tearing. He collapsed into an armchair.
Looking down at his leg he expected to see his trousers covered in blood. Instead he saw a damp patch running down his inside leg and a small puddle on the floor.
“Ah shit!” He thought he’d pissed himself.
The urine smelled sweet on the floor and the scent greeted his nostrils with a kick that brought a sharp acid reflux up to his gullet. He choked and then vomited all over himself. The sticky liquid that covered him was as clear and sweet as that which now pooled around his feet.
Confused and feeling feint, Brian gathered what he could of his brain, of his working senses, breathed deeply and cleared his head. His crotch was pretty dry, so he reached down and slowly rolled up the sopping leg of his trouser.
His lower left leg was now a beautiful fleshy green - quite the ripest looking lower leg you’re ever likely to see. And there, close to the knee joint, where the pressure from the rest of his body had caused his ankle to squash and pull at the tauter skin of the knee, was a thin tear from which was trickling this beautiful sweet juice.
Brian looked down at his leg in bewilderment, looked down at the sugary juice running into the veins of the wood floor, looked and saw another pair of feet standing next to his.
His wife was standing there with a glass of chilled white wine in her hand. Condensation dribbled down the stem of the glass.
“Nearly done Brian,” she said. “You just stay right where you are though. Don’t want anymore accidents, eh?”
“What is this? What have you done?” hissed Brian, his fat flopping tongue making it difficult to speak now, or at least be understood.
“Hush now, dear. You’ll be ready soon. Nice and ripe for tomorrow,” she said. “The family are all coming round for dinner, so you drink up your wine and be good, ok?”
In response, Brian managed an expletive and then knocked the glass from her hand. She punched him hard in the face so that he bit his tongue, which hurt a little and then seemed to deflate. His mouth filled once more with sweet warm juice and then Brian tried, but failed, to cry.
She stamped down on his foot. He heard it pop and burst, but he didn’t really feel anything.
Tina then forced his mouth closed and made him swallow everything that he could feel was in there. He looked into her eyes and saw nothing but seething rage. He was little more than a fattened pig who had bitten the farmer, come to slaughter.
Brian then passed out, his body drowned in sweetness.
They roused him, as best they could at 3pm the following day. His sticky eyes opened enough to make out the shape of his wife and her family standing around him, holding long thin straws. His mother in law smiled at him, punctured his stomach and drank deeply.
Brian’s sticky eyes meekly sealed again.

-----

This story has a similar premise to this piece: The Green Man

On going mad

2008-04-04T22:28:00.000-07:00

It was when I realised that I stared at people’s faces on the train that I first realised I might be going mad.
The train was cramped. Sweat stuck bodies pushed up closer than they should ever be while clothed.
I moved down the carriage, away from the doors, just like the recorded voice of the polite and well-spoken women told me to. I stood and held myself against the swaying of the train by grabbing onto the top of someone’s seat.
They eyed me uncomfortably, uncertainly, but what could I do? I looked away.
Everyone tries to avoid eye contact on the train. You don’t want to be the one who is unfortunate enough to make eye contact with the stranger, the mad one who wants to make some sort of stilted, pointless conversation.
So people look elsewhere. At a book or newspaper if they’re lucky enough to have one. Otherwise, it’s the window for them. Safe, so long as you don’t find yourself looking past someone else, because that person might think you’re actually looking at them!
I think I noticed everyone was doing this at the same time I realised I was staring right at the head of a woman seated below me. I was looking at how her grey hair was thinning. I noticed the tight lines running into her eyes and the make-up she thought might hide them.
She may have noticed me out of the corner of one of these eyes, but thankfully she kept up the pretence of reading.
I thought this a quite strange thing for me to be doing. There’s no way I wanted to speak to the woman, no chance that I found her attractive, so why was I staring at her so intently?
I glanced around the carriage. Faces looked familiar. I realised that I’d stared at many of these people before. The colour of their blouse, the hair on their arms, the scar on their lip, the way they bent their knee.
Had they noticed me doing this, when it had barely registered with me? Did they think I was mad. “Oh no, there’s that mad staring guy. Hope he doesn’t sit… too late!”
I asked a girl about this, over dinner. I was lucky because I remembered her name, unlike the last time I went out. It was Samantha.
I told her all about it, about what goes on - on the train. Was I quite mad? I thought I was mad, I said. Have I been doing it tonight, to other patrons of the restaurant we were in? To her, even?
She shifted uncomfortably. She tried to change the subject. She could tell she wasn’t going to get away with it, so she offered a little of herself.
“Well, this might sound a little bit strange too, but I’ve never been on a first date before.” I looked at her, squinted a little and bit my bottom lip.
“You know,” she said, “like on a proper date with someone, before.” My squint faded and my lips changed shape so that it was impossible to bite them anymore. I started laughing, in quite a hearty manner. She had tickled me with that remark.
“You’re thirty-two aren’t you?” She nodded and looked at her lap. This made me laugh some more.
After ten more seconds she went over to the maitre d’, asked for her coat and left.
I don’t know whether it was the fact that she’d never been on a date before that made me lose it, or whether it was because she thought telling me about it would make me feel better.
I suppose, it could just be that I’m going mad. I might leave it a few days and then call her and see what she thinks.

-----

If you liked the tale, have a look at this one: Stranger Tom.

The carcass

2008-04-03T23:18:00.000-07:00

“No, Heather. A Dunlin is another type of bird - not an Olympic event.”
Greg was taking a twenty-strong class of mostly ten year olds on a school nature trip.
“Now, there are lots of other birds we can see on the sands at low tide, so be on the lookout for curlews, oystercatchers, redshank and plovers.”
The school, Holy Trinity Primary, was within a five minute walk of the sea dunes. The dunes took only another five minutes to cross.
And then, there was the beach. A few miles of golden sand, leading north until the estuary turned it to mud.
“Anyone know how we would categorise these specific birds?” asked Greg. There came silence, and perhaps a giggle. “No? Well they’re all wading birds, okay everyone - they’re w-ay-ding birds.” Greg explained the pronunciation of this classification to the children as simply as he could, but he never thought to explain what the verb ‘to wade’ actually meant.
Greg wasn’t much of a teacher. He’d suggested this morning trip to the beach because it would get him out of the school for an hour. School was the place where he was monitored. School was the place where he could be exposed as a charlatan.
One thing he was sure he knew about, however, was birds. He had already dropped into staff room conversation his knowledge and love of nature and biology. If he could instil some knowledge about these winged creatures into the children then it could benefit him immensely. He couldn’t fail to look good if another teacher heard a member of this young class comment on the ringed plover or the grey heron they had spotted earlier.
“Mr Cedar taught us that.” That’s what they’d say…
The kids, meanwhile, listened and waited quietly, merely in eager anticipation of him turning around. When the tall man turned around they could continue their journey across the beach; continue to kick and shlump through the wet sand. They all had their wellies on.
One of the girls got her boot caught in the sand and started crying. Greg called: “Hang on,” and then went back to help her. He was thinking that maybe he should have brought another teacher along.
As he pulled the child up to her feet, he realised that some of the other children had continued to walk along the beach, unsupervised.
“Stop right there, all of you!” he shouted.
“Sorry Mr Cedar,” came the sing-song chorus of replies.
“Mr Cedar, Mr Cedar.” Two boys were calling him and pointing back towards the dunes.
“Look sir, look. There’s a dead thing on the beach.” Greg looked, and saw that indeed there was a strange mass of flesh about 150 yards away from them, on the drier sand.
Greg scanned around the beach but saw that it was deserted, at least on this stretch. The children had already cooed and yucked at the thing. The braver of the group were beginning to ask if they could go and see what it was.
“Yes, children. Now wait for me.” Greg had made up his mind to investigate, before the questions came.
The teacher slowly led the way to the fleshy mound, a line of children following after him in a snaky line, walking in pairs.
Part-covered with sand and receiving the attention of a number of flies, there lay a strange creature. The blobby shape before them did not have the appearance of any creature Greg had ever seen. It seemed to have been well stripped of flesh at some points, as if every fish in the ocean had had a nibble!
The children were suitably amazed, and they stood in silent awe long enough for Greg to circle the beast. There was no mouth or eyes. Just some grey-white skin, rank mounds of fat and what could once have been a tail.
“What is it, sir?”
“Is it a sea monster?”
“I think it’s a mermaid.”
It was difficult to tell how long this thing was. It really just looked like a blob. That’s all Greg could think it was. A blob.
The children were getting anxious for an answer. Some of them looked upset by the corpse before them and a couple of these children were often prone to tears. Greg eyed them with particular concern. He had to speak now, with reassurance and authority.
“What this is, children,” spoke Greg, with a degree of nonchalance that managed to surprise him, “is nothing more than a great gilled blobfish. It’s quite common, they wash up all the time on UK beaches.”
“A blobfish?” The name whispered around the group. Some, now reassured, fished mobile phones out of coat pockets and began snapping the strange dead animal on built-in cameras. Greg soon moved the children on, calm and collected, back to the shore and the wading birds.
Greg wondered if the children would tell anyone about this trip and the wonderful wildlife he’d shared with them.
Later that week there were photographs in the local paper of the strange creature that had washed up. Marine biologists (so said the article), had confirmed that the remains of a pilot whale had washed up there on the beach.
The paper had, apparently, first called in the experts after parents of local schoolchildren forwarded images from their children’s mobile phones, taken of a strange creature found on a school trip. This creature, according to their biology teacher, Mr Gregory Cedar, was called a blobfish.
There were many calls to the school after the article was published, and the name of Mr Cedar was mentioned often in the course of these conversations. Some calls suggested he be sacked, some calls just ridiculed him. A national newspaper even picked up the story, leading with the headline: “How can we trust what is taught to our children?” - it certainly made for an amusing morning read.
It was later decided, in a joint meeting between the headteacher and the school governors, that Mr Cedar should not be sacked. Rather, he should be supervised and monitored at all times over the course of the next six months. At the end of this period, a decision on his future would be made.
Mr Cedar received this notification by letter marked ‘Private and Confidential’. After a short period of consideration, Gregory Cedar decided it would be prudent for him not to attend school the following day, or any day after that.

-----

If you liked this tale, have a look at this one: Stephen's Ward

Benny and Selby

2008-04-02T23:47:00.000-07:00

"Keep Kinging it!" That's what Benny said to me, right before Selby smacked him on the kisser.
Selby was a ringleader, a strongman, a fleece-artist. Benny was a joker, a heel, a coward. He'd tell anyone what to do, so long as he didn't have to do it too.
Several days later though, Jake gets word to me that Selby's in the hospital. Seems someone plucked up the nerve to take a 9-iron to his skull. That day, my view of Benny changed forever. He's still a snake, sure. But he's a snake that's stopped rattling and learned to bite. That's a dangerous combination.
I was going to go and visit Selby at the hospital. He was kind of my friend, at least he offered me work. But I had to visit my brother and pick up some dry-cleaning, so it kinda never happened.
When I get home the answer machine is flashing and beeping at me. It’s Selby on the message, giving it his best gangster shtick. It always makes me laugh when he does that, like he’s in The Untouchables or something…
“So, okay kid. Listen, do me a favour won’cha? Tell Slick Molinsky that Selby the Flangeman's been looking for him. And make sure Benny don’t find out about this!
“You know Slick owes me doubles for the downlow on the big Honoloolie shipment? Well, someone's been telling Pratelli about the move too. You know how it is in the import racket, and someone's been playing the game without a net, if you catch my meaning?
“If it’s Benny then we’ll deal with him but, for now, keep away from that goon.”
Then there’s a beep and the message is done. Click, and the tape stops rolling.
I fall asleep wondering if there was actually a job hidden in that message. Something in there that I was meant to do. I worry about it a little, but not enough to keep me up.
I wake in the night. The phone’s going - must be 2, maybe 3am. I don’t pick up and it’s Selby’s voice coming through the machine’s speaker, leaving his little message.
“If you do catch up with Slick, check out the flooze hanging off his sleeveolas. Hip Benny told Tosca the Grouch that the hot panini is some junkie he won in a dice game. Looks like he scrubbed her up well. Wouldn't mind injecting into that marrow, if you catch my meaning?
“Until whenever, comanche.”
That’s it. That’s all he says. I wonder if he’s lost it, gone crazy or something. But I’m more worried now because maybe there’s something I need to get done and I’m lying in bed, not doing it.
I make the decision that I’m going to go to the hospital, later in the morning, and speak to Selby face-to-face. Try and see if we can’t work out what’s to do here.
So I get to the hospital early, say around 10am. I’m tired ‘cos I’ve been woken up in the night. I ask at the nurse's station where Selby’s room is, and she tells me that Mr Selby is no longer to be found at this hospital. That Mr Selby has been moved to a location where he can be cared for and given the specific attention he needs.
I’m pretty stunned. I thought he was losing it a little, but I figured he had enough sway, enough friends to save himself from being sectioned - no matter how hard Benny hit him with that club. Then I see something that made me realise the whole town’s turned on its head.
The nurse sees I’m concerned and offers to show me Selby’s papers, releasing him to the institution. There, in black ink, scribbled crudely at the foot of the form is the signature of Benny Maroney.
I leave the hospital in a daze. I feel like the whole world has changed overnight and I sit in my car and wonder what the hell I’m going to do for a minute. Soon my mind beeps and flashes that it’s ready, that it knows what to do.
First, I punch the wheel and swear a few times. Second, I put her in gear and set off round to Benny’s, to ask him if there’s any work going.

-----

If you got a kick out of this tale, try The Caveat.

Dragons

2008-04-01T23:59:00.000-07:00

I remember the dining room in my parents’ house.
Growing up, there had been a beautiful upright piano standing against the white wall. One had to pull the chairs away from the dining table in order to gain enough space to play the thing.
I remember the upholstery on the mahogany stool, covering the seat cushion. An ornate design, it was almost oriental in its floral pattern and, as a young girl, I would trace the stitching with my small fingers. I would do this while I looked at and learnt my scales.
My mother would sometimes come and watch me at the piano. This would last a short while, before she would idle to the window and stare at it all, that green world we’d cultivated.
I can see her now, a never quite finished cup of coffee hanging loosely from one of her fingers. On Sundays she may sit instead, with a glass of red wine.
I would watch her while my hands leafed through the sheets of music my teacher had set for me to learn. She would never stir unless I stopped making noise, so I always made sure to accentuate any rustling of papers, any shuffling of my bottom on the seat.
My father never came into the room while I played. I was never sure he heard me play yet, often, as I would retire to my room while the table was set for tea, he would call out to me upon opening the dining room door: “Bravo, Lizzie. Bravo.”
And that would be enough to send me racing upstairs to curl up on my bed, my smile beaming, my little heart dancing. To see my father was something rare and, to be acknowledged by him, rarer.
One summer, when I was just eight years old, I was taken ill with a fierce fever. I was aware of very little during those two weeks and mother told me, years later, how I had come close to death.
I had often thought I saw a dragon in those days. I remember, a dragon whose shadow blistered the walls. Whenever he came, the room choked in heat and I would perhaps see the black slither of his tail, or his nostrils blowing out arrogant trails of smoke.
It was after one such struggle with this dragon that my father came alone to sit by my bedside. My mind had cleared and I was quite lucid, though too weak to raise a hand or open my mouth.
He sat there, just staring. Staring at me for a long while. His poor eyes seemed to be tracing every inch of my blanched face, mapping the contours of my cheeks and the patterns of my freckles.
I raised my eyes to meet his gaze with recognition and saw plump tears slowly well there, then trickle across his face and drip down onto his lap.
He sat there, perfectly still and upright, as if he were attending an important speech, or meeting a client in his office. Every inch of him remained stoic and exact, except for the slow-filling pools of his eyes.
My little heart danced there again, and I longed for him to hold my hand and stroke my hair, and not to stop until I fell fast asleep.

-----

Hope you enjoyed the tale. This one is not unrelated in subject: An unquiet

Broken bodies

2008-03-31T23:56:00.000-07:00

Outside, the rain lashed against the window pane and Jacqui would not look out, not for anyone.
Some time ago, the last time the moon shone, she’d seen a beast at her door. She watched it snaffle around for half an hour in the dustbins below her apartment and destroy much of the communal garden.
Later, on an internet forum, she described it as a brown furred creature, about two feet tall, quite happy standing on either two or four legs. The thing was said to have grunted regularly and seemed to be scavenging for food. When on two legs it hopped. When on four, it crawled and scraped with its sharp front claws. Spotted - so the post said - on Reliant Drive, Greathays, LL57.
And, just over a fortnight later, it returned. Jacqui sat near to the window and drank whisky from a shaking hand, listening to it scraping around outside. She listened until listening made her vomit.
The next morning the rain sprinkled a lazy drizzle upon her scalp while she bravely ventured outside to check upon the damage. Fantastic paw prints marked the flower beds but the eternal rain had washed clean the blood she expected to find on the concrete paving.
It was the neighbour’s cat she sought. Jacqui expected to find its broken body somewhere in the garden, so she didn’t bother to call out for it. Her search proved fruitless.
What a noise it had made last night. What a noise! I’d heard it myself and I live just across the street. Not the frustrated and frankly annoying evening call of a cat in season, or even the screech of a fighting Tom. No, this was the sound of evisceration in action.
It is by no means unusual for unknown creatures to be spotted at night. Since the last time it stopped raining I’ve viewed over one hundred weird sightings of quite bizarre biological specimens, all sadly online, however!
I’ve never been lucky enough to see one of these creatures in the flesh but, it seems, they are now common to our suburban streets, perhaps as common as the fox once was.
Soon after witnessing the painful demise of Timmy (a small grey feline of no particular breed who resided, at least some of the time, at 52 Reliant Drive), I was online and messaging Jacqui. Alerted, over a week earlier, by a link to a strange sighting in the same postal area as myself, I had been amazed to find both the close encounter and the spotter based on my street. A few posts later and Jacqui and I were emailing. Several emails on and we had moved to correspondence via instant message.
Strangely, despite our easy textual relationship, Jacqui never suggested a meeting, despite our living so close to one another and the general lack of one-to-one contact enjoyed by most adults today.
That said, two evenings after the cat had unleashed its unearthly howl I found myself invited to supper with Jacqui and, later, to share her bed during the storm-broken night. She clung to me then, shaking.
I had blood on my hands, but the rain soon washed it away. Lucky she never dared peek to see me that night, standing there beneath her window, the lightning exposing my drenched face. Standing there with Timmy and a hunting knife, and a desire to meet someone. A desire just to touch someone else in this life.
Now, is that really so unforgivable?

-----

Enjoyed the tale? Then try this one: The hands of Mitch Gregory

No refunds

2008-03-28T23:57:00.000-07:00

He was practically having to drag his heavy limbs up the old staircase that led from the station platform to the high street.
Lucas’ body didn’t seem to work anymore. Occasionally, he fantasised about returning it. He would demand to see the manager in order to request an explanation as to why he’d been given faulty goods.
Sometimes the poor shop assistant would shrug and shake her head, confusedly asking how she could possibly help him with the problem of his failing limbs. Other times she would grow angry and threaten to call the police or, worse, extract an axe from behind the counter and offer to remove the offending extremities herself.
This last fantasy would always bring him out of his bitterness with a wry grin. “Lucas,” he’d say to himself, “it’s high time you got over yourself and learnt to be happy again.” After such reflection, he might smack his shin with his cane and continue the difficult walk to wherever it is life had dictated he needed to be going.
The staircase at the station was always a struggle. Of course there was a ramp to the side, for women with pushchairs and cripples in wheelchairs. But Lucas would always forego the leisurely stroll that took one under the high street and then slowly up a sheltered ramp to reach the town’s bus terminal.
His friend, Elizabeth, told him that he was just a stubborn man, a stubborn man who wouldn’t accept the help that society was prepared to offer him. But, to Lucas, the prospect of the long walk up the gloomy concrete ramp was a pointless exercise - a waste of his valuable time. Why should he go out of his way like that only to have to double back, practically right back to the station entrance, so that he could then begin his journey home in earnest?
No, better to take the shortest route, the route any other clear-minded individual would surely opt for. Expert use of his cane, the hand rail, and his legs would soon see him to street level.
All this week, the road outside the station’s ticket office was being resurfaced. For this reason, orange plastic fencing had been set up along the edge of the road, beyond the head of the stairs, where Lucas usually crossed the road.
He usually crossed the road where it was safe to do so - at a designated pedestrian crossing - the only one on the long high street. Without this aid, crossing the road had become more of a climb for Lucas than the old staircase.
Lucas was a man, a grown man, with 35 years’ experience on this planet. Surely he could cross a road, without the assistance of lights that stopped the traffic for him.
The station entrance had an ornate shelter extending out from it that might have dated to before the Second World War. Lucas hovered at the edge of this awning and allowed the many shoppers and commuters to brush and bump him. He regarded the plain grey sky. He regarded the dark tarmac road. He watched the puddles still drying from yesterday.
This man, Lucas, then strolled out into the late afternoon and followed the flow of life as best he could, wending its way down the street.
He stopped, every now and again, to examine the traffic and the chances offered to cross the tarmac river before him. Here a young boy darted between the stop-start cars, there a lone woman stepped out into the street and put her hand up against the movement of the wheels and metal, parting them Moses-like. Lucas shook his head and coughed into his cupped hand.
A bald man shunted by Lucas with two young girls on his arms, dragging behind him. He was eager to cross, and they were dallying, fearful of the road and the bald man’s need to reach the other side. Lucas saw that these children knew this just wasn’t the way to cross a road.
So he sat down. Sat down on the kerb and waited. He picked up a twig and drew patterns across his reflection in the puddle he found there in the road.
A homeless man tapped Lucas on the shoulder and asked if he was okay. He said that he was. That he was just waiting.
So that’s what he did. He waited, and he thought damn hard about how he might go about the difficult process of one day returning his body.

-----

If you liked the tale, you might just enjoy this one too:
The downpour

Turning the girl

2008-03-27T23:58:00.000-07:00

I went to a party the other day.
As a party it was a failure because nobody turned up except, that is, for the hosts and an unusual couple. One was a fat guy with a shaved head, the other an attractive woman with nice breasts.
Did I mention that she was a lesbian? Well she was, apparently, gay as they come and yet it still came as quite a surprise to me when I found out that she wasn't actually going out with the fat boy on the couch next to her.
Well, as the night went on, the girl and I drank and ate and grew warmer towards each other. We sang songs on a karaoke machine. It was fun; we duetted, we duelled.
She pulled me up and demanded I dance with her. She wanted us both to spin round in a certain way. I wanted to grab her and waltz. We did both.
Later, in the kitchen, that male friend of hers was trying to flirt with her as he had surely tried every day since he met her, thinking: "one day, one day I'll turn her!"
But she picked me out again, came close and whispered how we were the best singers in the room, and how we both knew it. I agreed, though I hadn't paid much attention to her voice.
She came to me again, complimenting me on my singing, asking after a band she'd heard I was in. I said I just did a bit of backing vocals - nothing much. At this she scorned me, complimented, castigated and cajoled me. Sought me to go further, to do more, to fight my way to the front and really perform.
She asked me to show confidence. How she knew I lacked this I'm not sure. I mean, I showed no reticence at singing in front of these strangers earlier.
"And no drinking!" she exclaimed. Dutch courage, it seemed, was not a part of her plans.
Yet all I was thinking was how close she came, how she touched me, how she regarded me. Like there was no-one else in the room.
Ah, I see, you say she was drunk - and so she was. Of course, you're right! That's all it was.
She asked me if we could sing one more song together - Unchained Melody. We didn't need to read the prompting words, we simply looked and sang into each other's eyes. It was beautiful and we were rightly applauded.
When it was time for me to leave, I said my goodbyes and sought her out. She was in the garden, smoking. I said goodbye to her, bent to her face and kissed her slowly, gently, on the lips. She smiled, told me I'd be famous when next we met.
I left the house thinking: one day, one day I'll turn her.

-----

If you enjoyed the tale, have a look at this one: Silver.

Spring awakens

2008-03-26T23:56:00.000-07:00

It was to be a happy day for our family, a joyous morning. In the night, my mother had given birth and I found my baby sister sleeping soundly in my father’s arms as I descended the stairs for breakfast.
Such a beautiful and pure sight, this nameless gift bestowed upon our family. As a young girl I stood in silence, my face inches from where both babe and father slept, and allowed my senses to drink deep the new life before me.
Just as my nose was about to brush the forehead of my tiny sibling I realised my father had stirred. His stern, sad eyes told me to return to my room and let the household rest, for now.
It was spring today. I could tell from the buds forming on my favourite tree, which snaked across the window of my bedroom. Looking out onto the fields to the front of the cottage I noticed that the furrows of the soil, often crisp with morning frost, were clear and brown today.
Some way north of the cottage, perhaps a quarter of a mile into the vast network of fields was a drainage ditch. This was somewhere father told us never to play near because it was a dangerous place, a place that could suck you down forever. I stared hard today at that ditch, because slowly clambering forth from the hollow was the body of a small girl, about my own age.
It was difficult to see if she was clothed, but even from this distance it seemed her body was tinted green, like the summer grasses. With childhood wonder I pinched at my skin and rubbed at my eyes: two more children, two boys, were following her from the ditch. Each carried the same strange green hue.
I planned to watch their antics some more but froze and tingled with juddering spine as I noticed the girl staring at the cottage, at the window, at me.
I remember now, that stare seemed to bore right into me, encouraging my pulse to pump the blood faster throughout my entire body. Adrenaline flooded my brain and thoughts and sounds pulsed in my mind, strange enticing thoughts. I opened my bedroom window and stepped onto the ledge.
The spring breeze of morning seemed to whisper to me to hop onto the friendly bark of my tree. Though I was no climber, I managed the difficult clamber along and among the branches and down to the dewy ground. Through the main window of the house I saw my father and sister asleep, but they seemed very far away now and getting farther by the second.
I was skipping at first, joyously bouncing towards the murky ditch in the middle of the crumbly fields. Running, with joy in my heart, to meet the green children.
“It is spring, run, jump to us,” came their voices, clear now in my head. “We awake unto new life. We hunger. We are sorry.”
When I cleared the last of the sparse hedgerows I came upon them, standing in a line, expressionless. I found that I knew their names. Petandral, the oldest boy; Leanlo, his sister; Gerrent, the young brother.
Without sound, I was instructed to lay myself in the soil before them. They placed their green hands upon me. The cold flame of winter that passed through me then saw me howl like a soul in the pit.
Slowly my eyes readied to close for the last time as the children stripped the life from me. As peace descended upon my body, the blooming scent of lilies and white daffodils filled my nostrils. The ice chill at once departed and the warmth of summer filled my bones. I saw my mother stood next to me and she offered me her hand. The green ones had retreated and were waiting patiently at the edge of the ditch, their eyes fixed only on me.
“Go home Sophie, quickly now,” said my mother, and I nodded. As I ran home a thick fog descended from the moors to the west of the fields and the rooks cawed their approval.
It soon engulfed the fields behind and our own small cottage ahead, but I knew the way home and the cries of Leanlo bidding me return to her were easy to ignore.
As I passed through our front door I was at last able to scream. The thick fog had dared to pass a little into the parlour with me, but dissipated as my newborn sibling woke and shrieked.
My screams only subsided when I dived onto my bed and bit the pillow hard. I shed such tears, tears for my dead mother that day. Such fearful tears of the cold she had passed into.
Father and I never spoke about the night my mother died in childbirth. There was an understanding that nothing would be said between us.
But it is a horror unknown to children that I endured every day of my adolescence. To know the temperature of the hollow hand of death, and understand how it would all have felt to my mother, at her last moment and perhaps ever after...
It is an almost unbearable knowledge that Leanlo and her brothers cursed me with on that first day of spring.

-----

This tale is a sequel, of sorts, to my very first tale... Winter Quakes

Dinner with Dean

2008-03-25T21:32:00.000-07:00

I picked Dean up from work today. I figured I owed him that much for how he’d been with me and, besides, him and Angie had just split up and I knew he could do with the company.
I emailed him in the day and said I’d buy him dinner later. Would pick him up around 5:15pm. Don’t be late, I said.
He wasn’t late. There he was, standing in the cold without a coat on. He didn’t recognise the car and I realised I’d never driven him anywhere in it before. We’d always met up on the train or in bars, never needed a car before.
I pulled up close to the kerb, facing the oncoming traffic, and wound down the window. It was still light, but the sky was a dishwater grey and the rain had begun to fizz down. Dean said later that the raindrops felt pretty cold on his face.
He seemed surprised to see me, did old Dean. Said he imagined I’d have a bigger car, a silver one. I replied that I only needed a small one, and the colour didn’t matter to me. He sloped round the back and got in the front passenger seat. I didn’t know how he’d be, and I suddenly worried I wouldn’t know what to say.
He saw that we were facing the wrong way. “Has this thing got full airbags?” That’s the first thing he said and I cracked up, just like if we were at a bar, or on the train going out to meet our girls. He started laughing too and I turned the car around when the road was clear enough.
“You want to come back to mine?” I asked him. “There’s not much in, but we could order a pizza, watch TV, hit the Playstation maybe?”
He shook his head. “Mind if we drive for a bit, drive up to Southport?” I didn’t know what there was to do in Southport, but it was only half an hour away, so I agreed.
On the way I tried to talk to him a bit, asked him what he was up to in work, did he see the game on Sunday? He answered but he could barely tear himself away from the side window. I don’t know what was so interesting out of that window.
When we got to Southport the rain had eased off and the sun was doing that thing with the clouds that makes it look like heaven’s coming through. I parked by the seafront.
The tide was out, but it was coming back in. We both got out and held onto the red metal rails in front of the beach and braced ourselves against the wind.
Gulls were weaving and filling their wings like sails so that it seemed at times they were flying backwards. We pointed things like this out to each other and then wandered along the front to where the van selling burgers was parked. We asked the man there for extra onions and mustard, to give the food some taste. Then we strolled back to exactly where we were before but braced ourselves with one hand now, ’cos we were eating.
The heavens opened as I was finishing the last of my burger. We had to scramble back into the car. We got extra wet because I couldn’t find the button which opens all the doors.
Inside the car I could see that Dean was crying. It took me a few seconds, but I heard him sniffing the tears back. I asked him if he was okay and he said he was, but he kept crying. I looked at the steering wheel and thought about putting the keys in the ignition. I put them in, but I didn’t start the car.
Instead, I turned to Dean and hugged him for as long as he wanted me to.
He said some things in that time, some of which I heard, some I didn’t. Then, when he was ready, he somehow made it clear that I could break off.
On the way back we listened to the radio. I dropped him off at his mother’s house. As he got out he looked back in and thanked me for dinner.
“It was only a burger,” I called back, but he’d turned round already and gone on into the house.

-----

If you enjoyed the tale, you might like this one... The Kraken Sleeps

We sinister saviours

2008-03-24T22:45:00.000-07:00

On a fully thick and glutinous night, I set out to find Him.
The college needed a specimen of such importance that I was charged with accompanying the resurrectionists this time.
They were the darkest of thieves. I’d paid them before for their finds; spied them huddled in doorways and crouching under the city’s many shadows, their bodies covered always in long coats and reeking.
Boldly would they drag their wares through the finest of London’s streets - past properties whose residents would shudder and turn green should they guess what was carried on their backs - and visit myself or like-minded colleagues under the pitchest cover of night.
These people were fairly despised, but they were efficient workers and would be paid handsomely for the best specimens. We’d take whatever they offered though, and children would be paid for by the foot.
This night I walked down St John’s Street until I reached Islington Back Road. Here the gang seeped from a side passage, death enshrouding their furrowed brows and cursed hands, and swept me southwards across the river to the parish graveyard of St Saviour’s.
“My old woman’s been at the church today. Seen the funeral of the baker’s lad, James Reed. Just dropped yesterday, so he still looks right. Should be what you want.”
I nodded and they creaked open the great rusting doors guarding the cemetery. As the metal hinge whined we winced as one. Our group then poured through the gate, into blasphemy.
I followed close by the leader and as we neared the burial mound I saw the flash of blades drawn by two of the gang who circled some bushes and met the grave from the side. “Sometimes there’s resistance,” said the leader, who was perhaps a father, working with his sons and their friends.
“A loved one might wait and guard the grave against the likes of us, and the likes of you, I suppose, sir. Don’t want damnation for their husband or wife, see, by you chopping ‘em up and seeing how they work.”
I tried to fix him with a poisonous glare for the affront, but this was his kingdom and I wilted as he smiled.
The skilled gang set to work on the fresh grave with wooden spades. While toilsome, these tools were silent and wouldn’t alert a watchman or local. They worked without noise for five minutes until one of the number whispered: “There’s straw in the ground here, Jack. Damn them.”
“Keep at it lad, nearly there,” came the leader’s reply. Business must have been poor for this baker, or else his father cared little for him, because his grave was laid little over one foot deep. The body snatchers dug a tunnel down to the head of the coffin, deftly hooked their implements under its lid and snapped it back to reveal the corpse.
At once splendid and awful, this man was revealed to us in all the power of death, with all the beauty of life. He was soon hauled from his tomb and stripped of his burial garments. A wedding ring was also removed and the pile of worldly goods dumped back into the coffin.
It may seem surprising to you that such vile criminals as these would show the respect of returning a wedding ring to the grave, while not flinching from extracting the flesh which wore it. But rest assured, the act is merely one which governs the safety of the gang from the full weight of the courts, for as long as they do not remove a man’s possessions or property from his person, then no laws have been broken by this robbery!
With the tunnelled earth recovered and replaced, it barely looked as though we had been there. The body snatchers wrapped the corpse in sacking and spread the weight between them, throughout the long journey to the college.
We stole through the narrowest, the dankest and the fetid-most streets. I swear, that night, I walked through regions of the city that never before existed. What netherworld we’d stumbled upon I dreaded to contemplate, but often I shivered to expect a confrontation with the foulest of demons or the devil himself.
But perhaps we had protection that night, for we had business with the divine.
On arrival at the college I paid the men the sum of £50, with the promise of a further £150, should the specimen prove as useful as they had suggested.
A servant rang the bell, which called the senior physicians to the operating theatre. We surgeon anatomists have a grisly reputation, as dealers in death, but we are merely in the business of saving lives. Firstly, however, we need to understand. To understand every one of you - every one of God’s dear creations - by opening you up to see how you work!
This body, though, was different. He had been acquired for a quite singular purpose and no analysis of his tissues and organs would be attempted. He must appear perfection.
On the floor beside the bench lay a six foot wooden cross. The body was immediately lain upon this structure. His arms and legs were arranged in the manner of crucifixion while I was handed the dreadful nails and the crushing mallet…
We raised the structure together, set it in place and stepped back to view the scene. Some were open mouthed in awe, their eyes shuddering; others simply shook their heads and returned to their beds.
After rigor mortis had fully set in, I understand the body was removed from the cross, boiled and the skin flayed. It was later transferred to another cross, which was erected in the drawing room of the Royal College of Art.
And here the body of James Reed has remained for forty years. A still-life study in the anatomy of a crucifixion. The model of utter realism for the finest painters of the 18th century to depict an anatomically precise image of the passion and death of Our Lord, Jesus Christ.
The baker’s son. He was a perfect specimen.

James

2008-03-21T23:50:00.000-07:00

In the weeks after I ran that kid over I was a bit of a mess.
Friends came round sometimes to see how I was coping, but from the smell and the state of the place they could tell that I wasn’t coping well.
“Are you eating?”, “Have you been out much?” Everyone sounded like my mother during those weeks.
James, his name was. The little boy.
I saw his photo a few times in the newspaper. He had green eyes, he had brown hair that seemed to curl up at the ends and he was smiling. Maybe he smiled a lot, maybe it was just for his mother when she took the picture?
When I used to look at the photo of him I would imagine being in the room too, looking around the edges of the frame, seeing if his family were there too. Was this an occasion? His birthday, perhaps?
Sometimes I would have to slap myself hard to stop looking at his damned dimples.
On the night that it happened I hadn’t had anything to drink. Nobody would believe me afterwards but, honestly, I was dry.
At the inquest I looked over at his poor mother. I swear she sobbed the whole way through. Poor thing. Poor both of them - James and her.
I cried too. I still do. But who cares about me? Penitence is useless when you have a three foot coffin on your conscience.
So now, here I am, living on the second floor and spending all day gazing out of the window at the cars going by in the street below.
I’m still able to drive. All a horrible accident, so the judge said. Could have happened to anyone.
But that judge never saw a small boy with curls in his hair disappear under the bonnet of the car he was driving.
I can’t go out now. I can’t get in that car. James is with me and he’ll always be here.
That little boy, always smiling and laughing. James, with the brown hair and the green eyes. Always smiling.
James.

Our first fight

2008-03-20T23:57:00.000-07:00

“Here’s the thing,” I said to Rachel. “You think that I think I’m better than you.”
She eyed me incredulously. “But that’s not why you hate me. Here’s why you hate me.” I paused for dramatic tension. “You think that I’m better than you.”
It took her a second to process the information and then WHACK! She caught me hard on the jaw.
I wasn’t expecting to get hit. Well, maybe just a slap if I’d really got to her, but the surprise of the fist to the chin brought a tear to my eye.
Then she got on top of me and tried to wrestle me to the floor. We were in a bar called Shandy’s. The lights were fluorescent and the drinks were mostly cocktails. The music was chillout and dub, while the mood was generally blissed out.
And there we were, a couple of hyenas, cackling away at each other and scratching at each others skin, trying to bruise and gain advantage.
I had hold of her hands, so she couldn’t do any real damage, but she managed to shift her knee across the top of my thigh and wedge it down close to my groin. She was getting pretty near to real damage now.
As she dug her fingers in to scar my wrists, her knee finally reached its target and I jerked forward. My forehead crashed into her nose and she fell backwards towards the glass table.
I managed to grab her body back from the edge and we both slid sideways, off the bench seat and onto the carpet, the main thoroughfare between the bar and each of the booths filled with patrons.
I placed her carefully down and waited for her to open her eyes. She scrunched her nose like a child or a mouse and then smiled, showing me her straightened teeth.
I smiled too and we kissed and rolled about there on the rich blue carpet for what seemed like hours.

Drinking in The Strange

2008-03-19T23:00:00.000-07:00

The announcer said this might be the first rocksteady track ever recorded. It crackled on and then filled the background. The lights blared while the music soothed.
One man alone in a shared house. A glass of brandy slipping from his grasp and the music and lights hummed on.
That’s when I decided it a good idea to go out.
There were several bars within a three minute walk of the house and all of them were full of the kind of people I wanted to meet.
“Buying or selling, guy?”; “What limbs you got for me?” Men in leather jackets wanted to know. They jostled me as I made my way through the front door and on to the bar.
“Treble brandy, splash of lime, hun.” I said that to the barmaid. She looked like a cross between Lulu and Bob Dylan. I gazed at her as she got my drink. I wanted to sleep with her.
“Sell me your face,” said one of the men at the door. They were weird in here. Everyone was allowed to be strange and riddlesome, it was encouraged and expected.
Next door, the bar was Sleazy. Everyone in there was filth and they letched and groped all night. Across the road was the Arrogance Café. Sometimes we’d go in there before we drank, or maybe we’d end the night in there. It was good, because there were no seats in there.
Tonight, I paid for my drink without looking the girl in the eyes. “Can you show me Babylon with your hands, Sarah?” I spoke to her now.
“Just follow the rivers, don’t follow the palms,” she came back quickly. I could see in the mirrors behind the bar that she was smiling at that.
I drank half of my drink and then placed it down on the bar. I asked clearly for two cubes of frozen water, and then I went to the toilet.
Inside, a guy asked me if the crows were being born starlings this year. I told him they were all being aborted by owls, then asked him if he were looking forward to when the scarlet wings he was growing were ready to fly. This made him laugh and I shook my head with disdain.
Back at the bar I was already growing bored. No-one took this at all seriously except for me, of course.
“For plastic’s sake. Are we done yet, Sarah?” I cried. She nodded and went to get her coat.
I cracked my knuckles and scratched lightly at my crotch. I was ready and looking forward to going next door for a drink.

Mary's day

2008-03-18T23:58:00.000-07:00

A broken pencil, an empty spreadsheet and three doodles completed.
She rubbed at her glasses but only wound up smearing them with the moisturiser she forgot she’d applied to her hands.
“Time for a break,” said Mary aloud. She seemed to be speaking to the computer monitor.
Mary went over to the counter and poured herself a glass of vino. She waited, her bottom perched on the work surface, as she nibbled the edge of the wine glass, as if considering whether or not to drink. She then allowed the liquid to slip down her throat in one smooth gush.
She was a pretty woman, Mary. All the men told her so, after one too many beers, whenever she went to those evening social occasions with work. She always made an effort you see, with herself, with other people. She liked people too much.
Mary’s hair was perfectly blonde. She wore a tailored suit, different shoes each day and fake tan to work. Mary worked from home.
At Powers & Fleetwood LLP she had enjoyed seven intimate relationships with work colleagues. Four of these were married and one of those was a woman.
One day her immediate boss, Peter Edgeware, called her into his office and suggested she work from home from now on. He said Mr Powers himself had made this suggestion. Mary said she could understand why he thought that and agreed.
She was offered a new job title and her salary was raised by £20,000 per annum.
Peter would ring her most days to see how she was “getting on”. Some days she would answer more quickly than others. Today when he rang she sat on her window seat and watched the men digging up the road.
Once a week Peter would phone on his mobile. He would be gauging her state of mind and she knew it. She would pretend she wasn’t drunk and that she’d been working hard and then maybe, just maybe, he’d say he was coming over. Coming over today, to see her.

Jam and Freddie

2008-03-17T19:28:00.000-07:00

I hate jam.
The way jam gets stuck all over your knife. How are you meant to clean it off? What do you do when you need to spread your butter all over the bread and the jam has encrusted it and will either deflower your tub of butter or mix ruefully on the sandwich you're preparing?
My cousin Freddie, had just such a problem recently. He had a friend, always clinging on to him. Everywhere he went (Johnny we'll call him) there was Johnny, sticking to him like that jam. Seeds, annoying you, lumps of fruit you couldn't spread away. Sugary, sticking your skin together.
Freddie asked Johnny how come he would always be there? "Why are you always around me? Are you gay, are you high?" Johnny would always say the same thing when reproached in this way: "Wanna play pool? You rack 'em, I'll buy the beer."
And Freddie would say: "Okay," and shuffle over to the pool table. Thing is, Freddie liked pool, and he liked beer. That's all.
I take a lot of comfort from that.

The weight

2008-03-14T22:37:00.000-07:00

Several stars shimmered over Simon's left shoulder. Somewhere a world was coming to its end. His finger was sore. In the grass behind him a lizard bit a cricket in half. Simon picked up the stone again. How far could he throw it this time?
Today at school his friend Peter had thrown the stone almost a half a football pitch. He knew he could never match the throw, but he picked it up on its retrieval and did what he always did. He tried.
The stone felt smooth to the touch, but there were some sharp edges. It was quite slim and easy to grip. He strained his arm like he'd been taught and powered it forward in a sudden thrust combined with a sublime flick of the wrist.
After the initial elation of the projectile successfully leaving its human catapult, dismay bit hard as the stone began to shake hands with gravity. The grass began to beckon a distance short of the half way line.
As Peter raised his arms to celebrate his victory the stone landed, hard and spinning. It bounced up again, surprisingly high, and continued on over the victory margin. Once more it returned to the earthly arms of its mother and once more she rejected her son. The stone continued its journey, bouncing and spinning as if Ezekial were watching from the sidelines.
From a distance Simon saw the strange dance of people running to the fallen girl. The stone's trajectory had taken it into a collision with her temple. There's no way he could have thrown the stone that far. No-one would believe it was him.
And as people looked around for the culprit, it was true to say that nobody peered in his direction. The freezing blood in his veins made it difficult for him to move, but he did begin to walk towards the fast forming crime scene.
He couldn't see much of the girl behind the caring onlookers, but he wasn't looking for her. Feet were constantly shifting and from under a pair of brown boots appeared the stone. The same hand that had pushed events this far now reached eagerly and precisely between two legs. His hand clasped the prize as the boot slid onto his index finger. He waited in panicked seconds before he was able to retrieve the weapon. Thus pocketed, his clothing hung heavy on him and he shuffled off the field to the toilets to be sick.

The Picnic - a poem

2008-03-13T18:38:00.000-07:00

I took lunch alone today, upon the lakeside grass.
Remember the patch, it stays dry throughout the noon?

Whereupon, I unlatched my hamper's clasp,
Smelled and spied wonders to the spoon;
Roasted grebe, caught upon this very mere,
Salted meats that were animal until speared,
Washed straight down with thick black beer.

And in the water's reflection a face appeared:
A stranger to my eyes, the face afeared,
Warped by ripples and upon my vision, seared -
White froth clinging to the fronds of his own white beard.

Keeping out the cold

2008-03-12T23:55:00.000-07:00

I nursed her there for three weeks.
The winter was starting to come in. A bold stand, by rags and papers at the window, was being fought. What little heat I could generate I gave to her. At night I lay so close to her I would awake in fear that I had crushed her frail limbs. But whatever energy spilled out of me, I didn’t waste.
Here lay a once proud and beautiful woman. At five feet and two inches she somehow managed to stand taller than many of the other women around. In her prime.
She lay in a once proud and beautiful home too. A place people liked to visit; a place that naturally created warmth.
Now the cabin creaked all night and the wind twisted at every piece of wood, every pane of glass, trying to turn the old house in on itself.
My wife lay, desperate. Some days she would call for me and ask to see the baby. Others she would just lie awake and look at the leaking roof, or the whistling window, or the rotting crib.
I kept the crib by the window, where the cold came in. She used to hold the baby and try and make it feed. She tried that for a number of days after she’d stopped bleeding, but the baby wasn’t hungry.
I told her: “He likes fish paste. Fish paste right off my finger. And honey too.” She would nod and pass the child back to me to feed. But the kid never really moved his lips and I’d just smother some jam or whatever I was eating on his lips and hope that it would kind of drip in or he‘d eat it while I wasn‘t looking.
The next time I would check in on him it would all be gone and I figured he must be eating it, he must like it. Then one day I saw the cat was up there on his chest, licking the food away from his face. The baby never moved. That was when I moved the crib over to the window.
One night in that third week, Debbie started bleeding again. I woke up with it stuck to my legs, and my legs stuck to the sheets. I was a little frantic. I threw the sheets back and woke Debbie up.
She asked me to bring her the baby. I wrapped it up pretty tight and put it on the pillow beside her. She rolled over to face it and just kept looking. I put on my pants and boots and stepped out into the storm.
I haven’t been back since.

Stephen's ward

2008-03-11T11:04:00.000-07:00

A ward on the ground floor? What’s the point of it?
Stephen pondered this as he sat in a flimsy NHS dressing gown and looked out at the people filing past his window occasionally looking in at all the sick people.
There was little else to do. An old man snored in the bed across from him. An old man coughed and moaned in the bed next to him. Other old men made other low noises across the room. They were the sort of noises that stopped you from doing other things, things that required some concentration, things that actually passed the time.
The television was on all day. The nurses would use it to wake everyone up by putting on the breakfast news at 7am. But it seemed to only wake up Stephen. The nurses might have to shake some of the other men. They might tell the nurses to get off them. They might ask them to give them a kiss. Some nurses would laugh at this; tell them they’re a dirty old dog. One nurse got angry and took a man’s breakfast away.
At the moment it was 3pm. The television was dreadful. It seemed stuck on ITV1 and a presenter - perhaps it was Des O’Connor - flirted with a girl a third his age and seemed to wink at the watching audience, and smile like he was just a teenager.
Along with the main entrance doors to the ward, there was a room where the orderlies seemed to go and chat, perhaps sip tea. Perhaps they did some form of work in there, but Stephen had never been in to check, nor seen them working whenever the door was left open.
He had taken to standing at the window, mid-way between the two lines of beds on the ward and the rear door to the orderlies’ room. He did this in order to attempt to interest, entertain or otherwise amuse himself during the remainder of his stay on this ward.
He heard snatches of conversation. Football talk, thoughts on the different nurses, how bad they thought their jobs were, what they were getting up to later that evening. It was all quite dull, but less so than watching Des O’Connor.
While he was pretending to look out of the window (which he might pretend to do for stretches of about 20 minutes at a time), he had begun to notice that more wildlife than simply the families and friends of the sick and dying were scurrying past the window.
All manner of crows haunted the hospital grounds. Rooks, jackdaws, magpies - they lighted on fences, cars, earth mounds and huge waste bins. They scrabbled around for whatever would sustain them. He might see a few sparrows, maybe a blackbird or a robin (its red breast was fading at this time of year).
Some days he would see something that would actually get his full attention. He’d stop listening to the orderlies whining, he couldn’t hear the old men coughing and dying anymore. Even the sound of the dread TV would be blocked out. On those days, he would watch the ugly scampering of a huge brown rat.
The rat would use the shelter provided by the industrial-sized waste bins to plot his skirmishes into enemy territory. This open ground contained a wide range of debris, discarded food, paper, stones, small beetles. The rat would dart out to inspect and sniff at it before perhaps putting it into its mouth and then darting back into cover.
While Stephen was utterly fascinated by the exploits of the rat, he was also thoroughly disgusted by it. Today, as he watched the rat he noticed how close it was roaming to the hospital edge, how fearless it had become. He also noticed that one of the orderlies was going back and forth through the ward with sacks of refuse, passing through an open double door (probably a fire door) in the orderlies’ room and taking the sacks to the giant bin. The rat didn’t seem to have retreated to the safety of its bin lair and was instead waiting and watching underneath a Ford Fiesta that was parked near to the windows of the next ward along.
It would be easy for the rat now, easy to invade and spread disease through the shiny hospital. Stephen felt uneasy for the first time since hearing he was very ill. Sweat was beading on his spine and his legs were suddenly very weak. His white knuckles clamped onto the window sill. His head whirled as the rat flew from under the car and out of sight, close in to the hospital wall. Stephen collapsed and his vision thickened with cloud.
He awoke in his bed, he had been sedated. He tried to alert the nurses or the orderlies that a rat, that death carrying creature, might be here, in this very room, clambering up onto sterile equipment and urinating into the cups that hold the medicine.
But all he could do was drool. Drool and flop. Flop and drool, and watch Des O’Connor and his willing female wink and smile, smile and wink back at him.

How it happened...

2008-03-10T23:58:00.000-07:00

Spent so much time waiting for it to happen.
I was grovelling in groping darkness for some salvation, some end to the decay of hope.
When you came your eyes offered me an escape from soil, from soggy undergrowth.
The connection was transcendent and I awoke atop beautiful spires of decadent confetti, lost in your freckles and lashes.
An arrow pointed me to the rocks where you were sleeping.
I found you there, sleeping in the dawn.
It was already warm.
The sea tingled my feet.
Your blood mingled with the tide and turned the foam pink.
It made me smile.
I kept kissing your hair; the bubbles were abundant.
Lots of little fishes, gathering all around you, kissing you, like me.
I congratulated myself on bringing you this far, on making you accept this fate, this closeness to me.
Several drops of rain applied tears to my cheek…
I realised what had been done; done to you; you were lost to everyone; everyone dies.
There, in the treeline, at the beach edge, slunk death: clawing at the dry sand, hissing deliriously, gnawing its own eyes.
I watched the ancient force of death shimmering in the shadows at the edge of reality.
At intervals, it seemed he would shiver and expand across the beach like a sheet of black plastic, wishing for me to flit into his net like a migratory bird.
Instead I kissed your hair some more and pulled your body further from death, further out into the lagoon.
Further out into the warm seas, far from evil ends, out to where the dolphin hurdles and the turtle plays.
And the shark - the shark, you called him to me!
You, dripping his invite like sweat on wet skin; me, floundering in thick waves.
“He was delicious,” thought the shark and you smiled. Your gleaming treachery was the last thing my eye punctured.
Then thrashing and more bubbles and more little fishes. And you kept smiling.

Axe grinding

2008-03-07T23:59:00.001-08:00

Flooding through the minds of the assembled throng, the guitar took wings and circled above the heads of the crowd before devastating them with an explosion of thunderous axemanship.
Sweat from the guitarist, sweat from the crowd, sweat from the instrument itself - an intense workout for the mind - expanded by this aural tribute to all senses. Except none of it was real.
It had all been recorded onto a mini-disc and primed to play perfectly along in time with a backing track coming through a midi-sequencer. The guitar volume was set so low, no-one could really hear what was coming out of it. He could widdle around on that thing for hours and nobody would notice it wasn’t him playing it - they were out of their minds, living for the moment, thrashing into the dawn.
But Lydia saw what was going on. She had a guitar and it didn’t make these kind of noises when you did what this guy was doing. If you put your hand in the air, it didn’t usually play by itself.
So Lydia strode through the crowd and asked the guy just what he was doing, she demanded vehemently to hear what he could really do.
At first, Mr Geetar just laughed and carried on with the business of entertainment - he had a job to do, after all. But when the girl didn’t go away and began screaming loudly in his direction he did what he felt he had to do and asked her if she wouldn’t mind fucking off.
At this the girl climbed on stage and disconnected the lead running from the guitar to the amp. There was no audible difference in the song and the stunned band gamely played on. The audience cheered the stage invader but cared nothing for the unveiling of the guitar fraudster.
Turning to bask in the warm glow of her victory and seeing that the band still had the upper hand in this battle of wits, she shoved the guitarist out of the way and shouted into his mic: “He’s not really playing! This is all fake! You are being lied to.”
At this the audience laughed and cheered and danced all the more. The lead singer gave the guitarist the kind of look that tells you to do something about the goddamned mad bitch on the stage. The axe man responded by pushing said girl off the stage so that she fell forward onto all fours.
She turned back from this indignity, like a penitent puppy, and knelt before the treacherous guitarist. She watched as he twirled the volume knob on the body of his instrument and pushed it to the limit. Her eyes widened as the unknown maestro unleashed a face peeling solo inches from her prostrate position.
When he’d shown her the true extent of his powers she found that she was weeping bitterly into the beer drenched floor.
Everyone else was having a great time. She realised she may have had a little too much to drink. It was time to go home.

Another evening

2008-03-06T19:10:00.000-08:00

She dropped a card off for my mum today. I found it when I got home. It seemed sweetly scented by her hand – probably just my imagination, but I continued to sniff it, standing there on the doorstep to my house.

---

I needed a cup of coffee. The crushed, freeze-dried aroma as the boiling water hit the mug drew applause from the senses. Out on the street I spied a woman pushing a baby. My mind took a photo of that image, framed by the bay window. The woman was small and hunched slightly over the frame of the pram as if to shield or even sensor her child’s existence in this world. In this pose, she looked like my mother now. This thought made me cry so I invited the television to entertain me, rather than the outside world.

---

I’ve just had my dinner. The memory of microwaved curry has impregnated the walls of my house, it seems. I settle back into a high-backed leather chair with a magazine I’d half-read. It covers new-technologies, gadgets, big boys toys, that sort of thing. The reek of chemicals clung to the page. Some people appreciate the nostalgia trip that inspires - of new school books and marker pens – but not I. It just makes me feel sick. The curry makes me burp and the rice is sitting heavy on my chest.

---

I go to bed. The sheets are cold tonight, but I’ll soon warm them up. I sleep on either side of the bed, one night after the other. That way I’ll get maximum wear from the mattress. The bedsheets seem to stink of me. I might leave the lamp on tonight.

The big dig

2008-03-05T23:47:00.000-08:00

They started work on the road last week. A churning mess of digging and dumping down at the bottom of my street.
Anyway, they send everyone on the street a letter explaining that the work is going to be happening over the next fortnight and that, in order to reduce problems to the flow of traffic through the area, all work will be done between the hours of 12am and 5am.
“We apologise for any inconvenience that may be caused to residents.”
‘Inconvenience’ - that’s a good word. It is inconvenient that I won’t get much sleep for the next couple of weeks. ‘The first night will be bad,’ I thought to myself as I sat on my newly covered blue couch - it was comfy and I usually felt luxurious reclining on it. ‘I will be blasé about the noise and then when I close my eyes and try to sleep, no rest will come - or it will be only in small bursts.’ This came to pass and, while I slept better next night - perhaps through exhaustion - the following few days passed painfully in a fret of anxiety, thinking about the terrible night to come and how I would function without the sustenance of sleep.
I functioned poorly, and I became quite hysterical with rage at night after three hours of trying, trying, trying to get to sleep. You know how it is when you try to ignore the snores of another, sharing your room or bed… You think, I’m a civilised human being and they really don’t know they’re snoring, they can’t help it - they’re not doing it out of spite. But that’s exactly what it feels like - spite! There they are, enjoying the bountiful pleasures of energy restoring sleep and, as if to rub it in your face that you’re not drinking from the same pure well, their physical actions, the emanations from their body, are the things that stop you from reaching the very nirvana they currently inhabit.
Yesterday was a Sunday night and, drunk with fatigue, I threw the bed clothes from my bed and left my apartment by the front door. I was sweating from tossing and turning under two winter duvets, multiplied by frustration at a factor of six!
I calmly stepped down the communal stairs of the building and into the main hall. As I went to open the main door I caught sight of myself in the reflection of its glass panels and was embarrassed. The shame, to go out into the world in just a t-shirt and boxer shorts. The indignity of it all.
I stood there for thirty seconds before I forgot why I was standing there in the first place. I opened the door, leaving the lock on the slip for easy re-entry, I didn’t have my key with me, of course.
Looking left from the garden wall I could see the end of the street was closed off and very brightly lit. I thought I was getting it bad, but the people on the corner would have light pollution poking through their blinds and curtains, mixing with the clogging sounds and making a person, a family, choke.
I wandered along the street, sticking to the pavement, despite the lack of cars using the closed road. I realised I might cause consternation in any workmen who saw me like this but I barely cared. I just stumbled along towards a huge truck that blocked much of the extra light that was being shone onto the road.
Shimmying around some cones - I was shivering now and the wind was up - I went and stood in the main thoroughfare that my street runs into - the main site of the necessary maintenance work.
I looked from one end of the long shopping street to another. Death was the correct description for this usually thriving oasis of retail. All along, the place was dark. Darker than ever because all the streetlights were off. I looked up and waved to the CCTV cameras outside the entrance to the station.
Right slap bang in the middle of the road, surrounded by three bright lamps, powered by who-knows-what, there I stood. Alone.
Not a workman could be seen. The noises came from great machines of industry - a cement mixer whirling along on the kerbside, a digger rattling away in a gutter, a sputtering generator powering the huge lamps. The lorry that was parked here had been left running. Its lights were also on, and from inside its cab came the sounds of its stereo system, broadcasting the song of spanners and screwdrivers clinking, the odd mallet clanking, background chatter and an occasional whistle.
I climbed up and slid in through the truck’s open window. I reached for the keys, turned these with a click and then slid them from their housing so that the sounds died away. I turned off the lights, but allowed myself five minutes inside the warm cab.
Climbing down, I visited each piece of equipment in turn and learnt how to stop its noise and motion. Lastly I turned off the clanking generator and peace fell upon the world again.
A slow walk then, back to bed. I enjoyed listening to the howl of the wind.
An open letter to residents came the next day. The work on the road had apparently been finished in excellent time. There was a sincere apology for any disruption to normality.
I folded the letter away and thought about buying a new mattress.

Still life

2008-03-04T23:04:00.000-08:00

A part of me has died, though it is a part of me I never knew.
It is a part I never met, never touched, never heard. A part I never hugged, never carried, never played with, never spoke to.
I wouldn’t have minded one-sided conversations, or early morning wake-up calls. Then walking together, learning from each other, ‘phoning me up from God knows where...
But I’m looking too far into an impossible future. Why did I never look before?
It isn’t that I won’t love you, and I suppose I’ll create my own memories. The hardest thing was that I saw you, so real, so human. Yet so pale, and so still.

Hronocsh passes

2008-03-03T18:52:00.000-08:00

Floating on mithril rivers, above shadow throwing star-hung peaks, the Hronocsh rides.
A cosmic semblance of the dreams spat out into dark spaces between worlds; the jetsom of the universe, reformed and given life, Hronocsh returns to make its dreamers tremble.
Hear it hare along the ancient byways of the air, until the stagnant castles of dead, cratered worlds groan again with fear of re-destruction.
Slicing over cliff-grey moons and singing lullabies to super-novae, the entity is growing.
He comes nearby, near enough to throw a crown to him, every fourteenth century of the Earth’s time. During this desolate hour the virgin cries of a billion children are lost to the agony of the Hronocsh as he siphons their inert souls before conception.
He descends through the soul regions into the spirit clouds, where he drinks astral projections from the creases in the sky.
Next, he will slide lower - ever pulsing, a form in flux - convolving upon the merry dreams and terrors of thought and sleep. A body is almost visible at this time. Gaze upon his reflection in a still lake, from a water’s shore, at the third hour of the new day.
Squint your eyes, squint like you’re peering at the noon sun, and there, glowering like a rotted whale you will spy the wasting Hronocsh sifting through every reflection, every impulse that has come to pass since his last tarriance on our Earthly shores.
Then, within the hour, his wake will pass. A golden wash across the blackness followed by the stain of loss and the monotonous drumbeat of time.
Hronocsh has shimmered on.

The folk hunter

2008-02-29T23:59:00.000-08:00

“One of the Green Angels was born in a dell somewhere in the north of the Lake District, or so I’m told.”
I was sharing a pint with Joseph, a local farmer and part-time folklorist. His beard was still thick - ‘winter plumage’ I called it. His eyes were wide with childhood’s wonder as he recounted his latest tale, gleaned while on holiday in Keswick.
“A witch, known locally as Deira, apparently saw the child fall to earth in a dream,” he continued talking, animating his words with his hands and fantastic facial expressions, “and, upon waking, immediately sought out this valley - which she was able to recognise from her dream.”
I beamed with delight. It was a real pleasure to have Joseph back. A joy to have a drink and a chat with him again.
“Did your contact show you the place where the angel fell?” I asked him, with real interest.
We met up every Friday night at The Old Barghest Inn, sampled whatever guest ales were on, and talked about all things strange and olde - the great secrets our ancient country holds that are sometimes uncovered. It had only meant us missing one Friday night get-together, his trip to Keswick with wife Miriam, but the weeks had dragged awfully, in between.
“Well, it was actually Shaun who I met up with and not Robin, in the end. You know him, what’s he called again? Erm, RedRune.” Joseph was talking about the web forum we frequented, ‘Local Mysteries (Yorkshire)’ on the Lost History website. I was called ‘Herne31’. He was called ‘The Barghest Follows’.
“I’ve read a few of his posts, but he doesn’t come on the Yorkshire forum much,” I explained. Joseph was much more interested in local folk tales, hauntings and the like, than myself and frequented all the regional Local Mysteries forums. I was fascinated, but I would never devote more than a few spare hours a week to the topic. Joseph, it’s fair to say, was obsessed.
“Well, anyway,” said Joseph, “Shaun says there’s a few different valleys that it could have been. They’re all much of a muchness, you know - waste of time looking. ‘But,’ he says, ‘I can go one better.’ ”
“Deira’s place.” I said it like a statement, though it was almost a question, but I wanted to sound wise, like I was right there with him on where the story was headed.
“That’s right, that’s bloody right - I was so excited, you know?” I nodded and smiled in a way that made my bottom lip slightly cover my upper one.
He continued: “It was about three o’clock at this point and we sets off on foot from this pub called The Fieldfare. Took us some time to get there, like, and we must have been walking three while half-four, until we gets to this field with a wood behind it.” I’m all nods and engaging eyes.
“It were a pretty scene, with the sun quite low in the sky and the mountains going red in the distance. On the edge of the wood there’s these timbers scattered and burnt, and the remains of this stone hut, right nearby.”
“ ‘A group of farmers got together and came for her, one night,’ says Shaun. ‘Heard she’d taken a baby, this time, and that was too much. They tied her up inside the house, got the child out and then burnt the whole place down. Burnt some of the trees up, too.’
“Well, that’s the usual story anyway, but we know that baby wasn’t normal. Who’s to say it didn’t start the fire when they tried to take it? And what became of it afterwards?” I was captivated by Joseph’s tale, I was there with him as the two men strode purposefully towards the shell of the witch’s dwelling, I could feel the coldness of that spot and the fear caused by the domination of the dark woods, getting closer.
“When we were only about eight or nine hundred yards off old Deira’s cabin, Shaun stops dead and puts his arm out in front of me, like he’s trying to stop me walking out in front of a car.
“ ‘There’s someone there,’ he says. ‘There’s someone in the cabin.’ So I follow along to where he’s staring and, honestly, I can see something just inside the doorway. A shadow maybe, an outline, but it’s there. We both know it, something tangible, lurking, maybe watching us.”
This was too much to bear. “What the hell did yer do next?,” I cried, splurting some of my beer onto the table. “Who was it in the house?”
“I’ve no idea,” he laughed. “We both turned and ran for it, back up to the path and the fell road without stopping. Seasoned ghost hunters as we are…”
I joined him in the laughter now. Guffaws and big rolling tears, now that the tension of his story was gone. A wonderful man, Joseph. So interesting, and so very kind and attentive to his Miriam.
A wonderful man.

The Owl Who Stole the Apples From the Tree

2008-02-28T20:19:00.000-08:00

Tom lived in a house, with his mummy and a cat called Pickles.
Like most little boys, Tom liked to play in the garden – running and throwing and kicking his ball.
In Tom’s garden there was lots of tall grass and a big tree with shiny red apples growing on it.
Every day Tom would count the apples on the tree. 1, 2, 3, 4 – 4 apples on Tom’s tree.
One night Tom was woken up by a strange noise out in the garden. “T-wit-t-woo, t-wit-t-woo” it went.
His mummy told him not to worry. It was just a little owl who sleeps in the daytime and wakes up at night.
The next day Tom played in the garden as usual, but when he counted the apples in the tree he got a surprise.
1, 2, 3 – 3 apples in the tree. Where had the other apple gone?
That night Tom heard the little owl calling in the back garden, “t-wit-t-woo, t-wit-t-woo.”
The next day he played in the garden and counted his apples. 1, 2 – only 2 apples now in the tree. Where had the other apples gone?
That night Tom heard the little owl again, “t-wit-t-woo, t-wit-t-woo.”
When Tom woke up he ran out to the garden to count the apples on the big green tree but there was only 1 apple left.
“Where have all the apples gone?” thought Tom. “Maybe the little owl has been stealing them from my tree?”
That night Tom listened for the sound of the little owl and sure enough it called out, “t-wit-t-woo, t-wit-t-woo.”
In the morning Tom went out to see if the owl had stolen the last apple from the tree.
He was right, there were no apples left on the tree. Tom laughed and danced around the garden and then ran and told his mummy.
“Mummy, mummy,” he said laughing, “the little owl has stolen all of the apples from my tree.” His mother smiled and laughed too.
That afternoon, Tom was throwing his ball high into the sky. It bounced on the ground and rolled into the long grass beneath the tall apple tree.
Tom searched through the long grass to try to find his ball. He reached in with his hand and found something round. “Here it is,” he said.
Tom was amazed when he pulled a shiny red apple from the long grass, instead of his ball.
Tom kept searching and found more apples. He lay them on the ground and counted them, “1, 2, 3, 4 – 4 apples.” Tom ran to show his mummy.
“So the owl didn’t steal the apples from the tree,” said his mummy, “they just fell out of the tree and into the long grass because they were ready for eating.”
Tom’s mum put the apples into a big and tasty apple pie, and after their tea they both ate a piece of the pie covered in thick custard.
After Tom had eaten his pie he asked his mummy if he could have another piece of the delicious apple pie.
“Well, just a small piece,” said Tom’s mummy. “It’s not for me,” said Tom and he took the slice of warm apple pie to the garden.
“It’s for my friend, the little owl,” he said to his mummy. “I’m sorry I thought you stole the apples from my tree,” called Tom and left the piece of yummy pie in the garden.
“T-wit-t-woo, t-wit-t-woo,” answered the owl. “That means ‘thank you’,” said Tom to his mummy. She kissed him and he went to bed.

The End.

The Caveat

2008-02-27T17:07:00.000-08:00

Jake put a caveat on everything. Everything he did was conditional upon the outcome of something else. He would drink only water for a week on the condition that his girlfriend drank only whisky. When driving, he would change gear whenever he saw a bird fly by. He agreed to stay away from Greenside if Harry drove his Pinto to Salinas for repairs and passed a cheque to Dale "as you'll be in the neighborhood".
Harry hated driving, and that was exactly the point of the caveat. "Get people indebted to you and then get them to do something they find uncomfortable or undesirable." Jake's words, not mine.
Wise words they proved to be 'cos Jake had the respect of most people in town, and he'd agreed to stay away from everyone else (if they stayed away from him too).
Harry was already feeling pretty uncomfortable on arrival in Salinas when he had his eye socket shattered by Dale. "This cheque's no good, man." Dale's voice speaking here. Dale's fist too.
So Harry didn't pay for the repairs to the Pinto and he took it back with him to Greenside. After a couple of days Jake wondered where his car was. He figured maybe Dale killed Harry, but when a bill for the repairs came through his door he realised he was going to have to take a trip up to Greenside.
Jake was buried three days later in the Coven Street cemetary. He had been beaten by what police believed to be "a number of men". He'd also taken some blows from the butt of a shotgun which it seemed he had then used to commit suicide.
Jake "lived and died" by his caveats. His words.

The blonde man

2008-02-26T23:50:00.000-08:00

The fire boiled with reckless savagery as the blonde man threw powders about it.
The blonde man - firm of face, handsome like men only ever seen in photographs - stood up and spoke to the flames. His shirt he removed and cast also into the fire. Upon his feet he wore the caked sand of a day spent among the dunes. His only clothing, torn jeans, cut into loose shorts.
A cheer went up among us, his rabble, as the flames bit the cotton of his discarded clothing. He carried on with the powders. Strange chemicals that drew different colours from the bonfire we had made on the summer beach.
The fading light threw the last of its beams at the shore and they reflected in his eyes a horrible rainbow of deceit as he looked upon us, but not at any of us.
He would keep most of the gang happy until September, with alcohol and whatever pills he could conjure forth, with the excitement of the road and the trembling fear excited whenever we marched through sleepy coastal towns, but maybe I was the only one who sensed this couldn’t last forever.
The fact that I thought about the future at all was probably proof enough that I didn’t belong in this motley band. When it would come time to wash the scum from our bodies and return to our winter lives, our hibernations, they might see that I had barely a stain on my skin. Not mud, nor spittle, nor blood - mine or another’s. I felt little more than an observer, an undercover journalist - always pointing out futilities and irrelevancies - the butt of all jokes, the outsider within the outsiders, the rotten heart within the corpse.
But of all the group, the one who tolerated me most, even liked me, respected my opinion was the most important, the most revered. The blonde man.
The blonde man listened. He kept me by his side. Sometimes my words would countermand his, sometimes he would grimace or fix me with a basilisk’s stare, but he would be looking right at me; right into my living eyes.
How two people could be so similar and so worthy of each other’s respect, and yet so differently regarded by the populous was hard for me to understand at the time.
Now I see it clearer. I see that he pandered to them, like a dull parent who demands nothing more from a child than that they like them, that they are happy to see them because they know they will have fun and get their own way.
The children know they are not being led until the time comes when they are no longer sure what they want. The inexperience of the many allows for the exaltation of the one who is decisive.
He remains the leader providing he knows when to lead, and when to let himself be led. That is why my best friend, the blonde man, had to tell them to take me one night from my sleeping bag, break my legs in the back of a truck and leave me to wash up the next day in the morning surf.
I’m not built to be a leader.

Three and a penthouse

2008-02-25T23:58:00.000-08:00

A grey throbbing landscape, growing higher with every tick of the clock. The buildings giving birth to one another, and shot so full of steroids that they nearly take off.
It was at the top of one of these new sky-rise apartments that she held his heart out over the balcony of her penthouse and threatened to let it fall.
Greasily squidging in her paws the entrails seemed to writhe and grasp to be reconnected with a body, perhaps yearning a direct link with the radial or ulnar arteries of her wrist.
I’m not sure what he agreed to, out there on the ledge, but she threw him back his heart with a full laugh: eyes closed, head rocking.
He grasped it firmly and thankfully. I was worried he would not hold it and it would slide silently from his grip into the cold dawn, now breaking. Stephen was poor at catching.
But hold on, he did, quite easily. It was amazing watching the difference in his complexion and demeanour as the heart re-attached itself and the gaping hole in his chest sewed and meshed itself back together.
His hands released their death grip on the safety rail, out there on the roof terrace, and he was able to enjoy the red dawn as if from the tranquillity of a hot air balloon.
Angela sidled over to him and blew a soft kiss into his ear. His entire body relaxed. I fancied that he wanted to cry with relief. She slid open the adjoining door, smiled sweetly to me on the couch, then span dramatically to close it behind her as if it were a curtain hiding a corpse.
Then she strolled smoothly across the room, the dress she’d been wearing all night still pristine and maintaining its purpose of hoovering in greedy male eyes.
As she approached her bedroom she turned so that her gaze struck my head like it had been punched and beckoned me with a short sharp snap of the finger.
“Come on,” she said and entered the room, leaving her door tantalisingly ajar. I stood slowly and moved on gingerly, as if I usually used four legs. At the door, I could hear clothes being shed.
I took a deep excited breath before entering; eyes closed, head rocking.