“Oh, dear God,” Abe clasped his hands to his face as he looked at his emails.
“What’s up?” Shoshana asked poking her head around the door.
“We have been invited,” said Abe rolling his eyes, “to another bloody Zoom cocktail party.”
“Fuck,” Shoshana said, “who is it this time?”
“My boss,” Abe responded, he ran his hand through his thinning hair, “which means we can’t cry off, can’t leave early, and definitely can’t turn up in dressing gowns.”
Continue reading
The Fairy Godmother arrived in a puff of smoke and surveyed the chaos.
“What the hell is going on here?”
Cinderella opened one eye, still lying in bed dressed in last night’s clothes. Empty wine bottles and a month’s worth of washing-up littered the floor, the dirty clothes pile reaching the ceiling.
“What time is it?” she muttered.
“Mid-day. Why are you in halls at Swansea University instead of at the palace?”
“Oh, I left the boring prince ages ago. Decided to come to Uni, but now we’re in lockdown and it’s no fun anymore. Can you believe those vile ugly sisters happened to be on the same corridor as me?”
Continue reading
I can feel the depression setting in
I feel the dark days closing in
I’ve got the Lockdown Blues
Don’t know if it’s the same for you
My mama phoned me just the other day
I told her my guitar I couldn’t play
My girlfriend has run off with my dog
I just can’t see through my fog
Continue reading
You fumble for your mobile. “Boss. I’ll there in about 10 minutes. Sorry. You’ll never guess what I’ve just seen”
Working last night up to 1 am was too much. Shouldn’t have to take the accounts home – not after a 10 hour delivery day.
You hear a grumble, see a spray of earth flume upwards as the paving-stones lift corner by corner. With a creak and snap of cables, the telephone booth upped on points and pirouetted on one corner.
Continue reading
Billy Thomas sat red-faced, eyes lowered, as the new preacher ranted about the demons the devil placed in all of us, then glared at poor Billy; sins of the flesh sent to tempt us into evil doings.
Friends of Billy’s persuaded everyone to go skinny dipping in the river. Old Mrs.Pugh had come across them, screaming at them that the Lord would strike them down for their sins. Personally, Billy thought Mrs Pugh had a demon, as she had stood watching them for ages according to Huw Parry. Off she went to tell the preacher and our parents, hence we all had to attend chapel to renounce our sins.
Continue reading
Driving from Cardiff to Swansea, Lloyd found a passenger in his car.
‘Who are you?’ he said, slowing.
‘Your inner self,’ came the reply.
The guy certainly looked like him: older, more haggard, greyer. It could be him.
‘You’re on the wrong road, Jim,’ the passenger said, ‘every day commuting a ton of miles to that vehicle licensing hole.’
‘It’s a job.’
‘So’s being a galley slave. How about jumping ship?’
Port Talbot steelworks skittered by, its Meccano limbs tangled against the grey sky as if in agony. The other Jim had vanished, gone in a spurt of yellow steelworks gas.
Work went badly. Workmates faces resembled those of ghouls. The phone calls, a hundred ways of asking the same thing about car tax, lapped in his brain with a disturbing echo. He felt outside everything.
Continue reading
I read a lot, stories mainly, it helps to pass eternity. One idea that regularly catches my attention is the advice that you should always be in charge of your own stories: never let others tell them on your behalf or you will inevitably come out badly. So very true, and excellent advice for we demons who have suffered greatly from such blatant cultural appropriation down the ages.
I mean, you’ve heard the one about the Gadarene swine? Completely Fake News. Where was the demonic voice in that tale? Suppressed, and completely rewritten to make demons look really bad. As well as all those artists like Fuesli, another really atrocious exponent of anti-demon propaganda is Salman Rushdie, who ruthlessly exploits the demonic repertoire for his own profit. It makes me weep the way demons have come to be associated with wickedness.
Continue reading
Everyone on first meeting Lucinda thought she was a delightful little girl, with her long blonde hair and piercing blue eyes, she seemed such a perfect little Angel. She lived with her parents and her younger brother, Damien in a nice large house in the countryside. The family pet was an old retriever named Goldie, who faithfully followed Lucinda wherever she went.
In school term, there was a nice easy-going atmosphere in the house as everyone had a definite routine to stick to. Lucinda went to ballet and gymnastics after school, and Damien had swimming lessons, not that they did him much good. The weekends were usually pretty booked up with sleepovers and camping trips.
Continue reading
It started off like a game. Lucy passed me her piece of cake under the table on Mum’s birthday. It felt funny singing happy birthday when half an hour ago Mum was crying, and Dad wasn’t living with us anymore. But I got two slices of cake and that made me smile.
Then she started putting all her lunch in my lunchbox. I didn’t know what to do with it.
It wasn’t only the food. She shouted all the time and she was always in her room. Mum said it was just teenage behaviour, but I didn’t think so.
Continue reading
“Hey Belial,” Lilith shot the demon a furious glance, “will you quit your beatboxing, or I swear to Dog I’ll beatbox your ears.”
His single, vein-etched eye widened as she swept a taloned claw inches from his snout and he tumbled backwards in mid-beat into a vat of moral turpitude soup.
“Watch it, mam,” he coughed, picking lumps of jellied depravity out his hair, “you nearly had my eye out then.”
She skewered him with a look that would have frozen sunspots.
“What,” she snarled, “do you think I was TRYING to do?”
He tensed expecting another wave of maternal violence; she was always grouchy at this time of the millennium.
Continue reading
It brought tears to my eyes when the hospital staff clapped my Dad’s discharge from hospital. My Mum and I clung onto each side of the wheelchair as the porter wheeled Dad out. As we neared our house, all of our friends and neighbours had turned out to welcome Dad back, cheering our return.
It was a moment that Mum and I didn’t think would happen. The last two months were our private nightmares, each of us afraid to answer the phone, expecting the worst. But now, finally my Dad had come home.
Mum and I would never forgive ourselves, blaming his symptoms on man flu. It was Dad himself who had phoned the doctor in the end. I was surprised they even had his medical records, I don’t ever recall him seeing the Doctor. The ambulance had been at the door within twenty minutes. They took dad off leaving the two of us bewildered on the doorstep. I didn’t see my Dad again for twelve long weeks.
Continue reading
Symptoms. Appointments. Tests. Diagnoses. Differential diagnoses. Treatments. Drugs. Drugs to counteract the effects of earlier drugs. Surgery? No surgery. And finally, a rejection of a medicalized interpretation and an emphatic setting aside of drugs, treatments and advice.
What I really need is fresh air, gorgeous surroundings and free space to ramble about in. Derbyshire maybe. Or the Lakes.
Yes, I can see the benefit of a complete change, but what if something bad happens and you take a turn for the worse? I mean, will you even be able to walk in all that free space?
I’d rather take a turn for the worse somewhere beautiful. Please, just load the tent and stuff in the car and let’s go.
Continue reading
Punting down Wind Street, Jess’s thoughts turned to the Wales On-Line headline 2nd August 2020,-“The areas of Wales set to be underwater in 30 years due to climate change”
“WAY too long. My choice:- Climate Catastrophe;-Wet Wales Underwater in 30 and include a virtual reality video. But out by 4 years only, – pretty good.”
Back then aged 23, it was the imminent re-assignment surgery rather than a career in politics which excited the trainee multi-media reporter.
“Or floated my boat!”
Continue reading
It was the elders visiting for the third time this week that alerted me. The elders and the whispered words that blew across the yard, chilling my spine. “Ten cows.” “Wedding.” “Kutairi” (the cutting).
No-one speaks of my big sister, Amidah. But I remember. I remember the fifty-year-old man to whom she was promised, for a dowry of nine cows. The Ngarida (cutter). The rusty blade. The way they held her down and told her not to scream. The blood spreading over her white dress.
And afterwards, how her body was thrown into the Bush, where the wild things are. My beautiful sister. Fourteen years old to my seven. To escape the Lawalawa curse, there was to be no burial. No mention of her name.
I stopped speaking.
Continue reading
After a long journey by train, standing on the platform, looking up into the blue
sky, I decided to walk to the farm. A bit of a trek but I was wanting to tune back into the countryside, the winding lane and all its treasures.
Hedges bristling with new growth, smelling wonderful after years of living in the city. Breezes gently caressing my face, a smile appeared, my shoulders dropped, all tensions fading away. Birds chirping as they flitted about in their endless search for insects, animals grazing in the meadows bleating and lowing.
Continue reading
They closed the bridge on the Welsh side. Drivers already on the bridge going westwards beat furiously on the dashboards of their halted vehicles in the hot midday sun, then tuned-in to Radio Wales to discover that ‘the virus’ was the reason. ‘It’s coming from the east,’ a politician said, too diplomatic to blame ‘England’. ‘We’re not letting it into Wales.’ The three lanes east were now empty; all traffic from Wales had ceased.
At the far end of the bridge traffic police made vehicles reverse into England, the outside lane first. After a long boiling hour, the middle lane began to go backwards and then stopped. Each driver tuned into English radio stations to hear a politician with a plummy voice say that due to the ‘prevalence’ of the virus in Wales, the Prime Minister had closed the bridge in ‘both directions’.
Continue reading
When Jack was a kid, his family drove from their home in Dade County to his grandparents’ farm in Seminole County. This meant three small boys sitting in the back of a 55-Chevy for over three-hundred miles. It was a long, miserable trip: seven or eight hours of brothers’ elbows, mother’s scolding and potholes testing the suspension.
Colquitt was the last town they went through, and there they would stop to get refreshments. They sat for half an hour in the shade of the Tower Hotel on North Main Street, mama sipping her peach tea, the others ice-cream sodas.
Continue reading
In the ongoing dialogue between the Me that I am today and versions of my earlier self, one outstanding feeling is of embarrassment. How could I have worn that dress, for goodness sake? Why on earth would I say that? Did anyone hear me, or worse, remember it? Does anyone have a photo of that disaster of a night out and which is going to appear on social media at any moment? Yet I sympathise, empathise, with these junior versions. They have melded into who I am.
Sometimes you read letters, or articles made to read like letters, from people giving advice to their younger self. Great advice. Sensible. It’s always to a person of fixed age, usually just starting out on independent living. The tone is kind, wise and reassuring. I can’t do that. I’ve been embarrassing myself since I was born, so Previous Versions skip between ages, each with its capacity to compromise dignity. Anyway, I wouldn’t have listened to good advice (thereby avoiding social calamity) at any age. Social calamity seems to be my default.
Continue reading
A local radio station, a golden oldie slot, and they were playing his song in the empty pub. He sipped his lunchtime lager, waiting for the kick that would numb his sense of who he was. He wiped the froth of beer from his mouth and wished he could wipe away the froth of memory the tune stirred up. His reflection in the glass behind the bar showed a puffy, beery face, thinning brown hair, and eyes as lifeless as those of a corpse.
Continue reading
Ann and Pat had been friends since childhood, often meeting for a meal and a few drinks. Such it was this evening at the local pub, catching up on the goings-on in their lives.
Suddenly a record came on. Looking at each other a smile led to giggles, singing along as they had in their younger days.
”What a blast from the past,” Ann laughed, reddening. She remembered those days. ”To think that was my first love, Jamie Adams.”
Pat roared with laughter: ”Lust more likely!!”
Continue reading