A miracle; no other way to describe it. After the washing-up of Sunday lunch, she and Freddie had either taken a left out of the front gate and walked towards Mam’s parents, or turned right over the railway bridge to Dad’s. Attempted recall techniques had included a retracing on Google Maps of as much of the route as could be remembered by a failing 90 year old brain and cajoling her granddaughter to drive her on their weekly car trip along every exit of every roundabout in the town. Pris was giving up hope. There were over a hundred roundabouts and at least five hundred possible exits. Some she recognized; some not. Road realignments, estate clearances and the ripple-out expansion of shopping centres, had remodelled the once familiar. Every now and then something – the sight of an old industrial chimney, a stretch of stone wall, the metallic nose of rusting industrial archaeology blasting through the car’s air vents – promised to tug a distant memory chime, only to muffle, return into the unrecognisable and remain silent. Did she have 10 years?
Continue readingCategory Archives: Feb 2023 – The Stain
Back from holiday
“Fantastic imagination your kid’s got,” the emergency plumber said. “Reminds me of my two when they were ‘is age. Always makin’ things up. Really convincin’ too, told our vicar that the people next door was wanted by the coppers! That took some explainin’, I tell you…”
I smiled, mostly to hide the grimace at the amount it had cost to get him out on a Sunday morning.
Continue readingThe Aftermath
Jack was woken up by the sound of his mobile’s bleep. Bleary eyed he raised himself off the bed. His mother’s voice message jolted him awake.
‘Jack love, I know its early but I thought I’d better let you know, we’re coming home a day early, problem with airline strikes tomorrow. Just giving you the heads up. Put the hoover over will you. Bye love.’
Continue readingBe Careful What You Wish For
They say curiosity killed the cat, well my curiosity is well and truly dead. Here I am standing in a multi storey car park looking at a patch of wall with an orange stain on. The whole place stinks of human waste, petrol fumes and damp .What brought me here you may well ask.
Having lived a comfortable life with my grandparents, I quickly learned not to ask about my real parents. All they ever said that was they were dead to them. Years passed and, as with all things, the grandparents passed away. Now I was the owner of the house and with sufficient money to keep me in comfort, I set about making the place my own.
Continue readingThe Stains of Life
Reticent is a good word to sum them both up. Not shy, not shy at all, yet in each you could sense a certain unwillingness to reveal more personal information than necessary.
When the pair, Ellie and James, arranged a meal out in a smart Italian restaurant, it was cause for some mirth and speculation amongst their small circle of friends.
‘He’s bound to slurp his spaghetti and get it all down his front,’ someone suggested.
And this wasn’t an outlandish idea, because James was well known to be rather clumsy.
Continue readingThe Myriad Benefits of Darjeeling Tea
“Go into business with your twin,” they said. “It’ll be fun,” they said.
If you call sweating in a café, cleaning up after customers while your twin sister’s gallivanting overseas in pursuit of new teas and coffees to sell, “fun,” then they were right.
I sigh. Where to start with this clean-up operation? I watch the stain spread across the pale wood floor, seeping into the grain. It was her idea to get wooden floors, of course. Wood the colour of her platinum blonde hair that she insists on bleaching to look as different from me as possible. “Mousey,” she calls our natural hair colour. “Classy,” I always reply.
Continue readingHi, I’m Lucy
Cold seeped into her limbs as the breath from her sobs erupted in clouds of vapour curling under her hanging head. She wasn’t sure if she could take any more, but going back meant facing him. An icicle stabbed through her.
“You okay, chick?” A woman’s voice. Jian looked up. Standing opposite the bench on which she sat was a tall white woman. She seemed to be made of shadows, all darkness and shifting folds of fabric, except her eyes, which were gas-flame blue. The woman stepped forward into the light cast by the row of takeaway shops on the other side of the low railings surrounding the park. “Hi, I’m Lucy. You’re Jian Zhang and I’m here to help.”
Continue readingThe Cardigan
The cardigan with the paint stain on the elbow that she could never wash off: why had she kept it so long? She remembered touching up the sitting-room door, brush in one hand, Sylvie in the other, when a blob of gloss had attached itself to her sleeve almost as firmly as her baby’s fingers.
The uncomfortable wooden armchair that guests sat on, or rather, hovered above as though it were a large hedgehog. The enormous ghetto-blaster like a plastic-armoured beetle squatting on the windowsill. Rachel’s drum: memories of a small child marching around the sitting room like an infant platoon, noisier than a massed military band. She ought to let all this stuff go.
Continue readingThe Stain upon the Wall
It was a national shame. A blot on the pride of the land. The symbol of their strength and unity was ruined.
The wall. Their wall. That grand monument was smeared by the stain.
Allow us to explain, in the City of Derleth there lay a white wall. Five miles long and a thousand feet tall. Impassable, thick, smooth, and clean. It had stood for seven hundred years and might stand until doomsday.
When sunlight radiated off its surface, the wall glowed like very heaven. And the tales of older times spoke of its practical purpose as a brilliant defence. Of how barbarian hordes tried and failed to penetrate this angelic barrier, leaving the city protected and unconquered.
Continue reading