Category Archives: Dec 2020 – Ring of death

The ring of death

Posted on by under 2020, Dec 2020 - Ring of death
cobra

Have you ever wondered about that egg,- the one desperate Nagaina dragged with her into the abandoned rat-hole we called home? The one that Kipling doesn’t mention again. I was that egg. Now I am full grown. I’ve re-located. Living in another country you can deceive yourself that the past is insignificant, even that it never existed. In my reformulation, the story would have ended so very differently. Mostly I can forget that I was born an orphan, with 24 siblings slaughtered by that treacherous Rikki Tikki Tawi. I prefer the condensed moniker RTT;-to grace him with his full name may re- flesh memories preferred forgotten. Still, on hunting nights when the moon is waxing, I sometimes find myself involuntarily hissing it’s entirety, so magic-ing -up his mongoose wraithness.

Mom, you remember, perished but not before hiding me under the dung-enriched earth of a side alcove. Snakes,-cobras in particular,- have an excellent sense of smell and near-perfect recall. The offensive sweetness of desiccated rat-pellets mingling with the stink of jubilant mongoose, the muffled distant cries of Man as Mom was murdered, the jubilant rasping of  RTT as she lay dying, these are my earliest memories.

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A Salutary Tale of Social Death

Posted on by under 2020, Dec 2020 - Ring of death
Bad fairies

Look, I don’t have a dog in this fight. I’m just telling it as I saw things, without bias of species or kind. Everyone knows that fairies are generally delicate, helpful, magical creatures. Even so, like every species, there is a rogue element amongst the fairy community. My kindred gnome brothers and sisters have long known this. If we have rogue elephants and rogue humans, rogue fairies are inevitable (I’m not saying gnomes are perfect either).

We’ve all shouted ‘I believe in fairies’ to make sure Tinkerbell is revived and her light is rekindled. That’s a decent, humanitarian, cross species response to a kind creature in trouble; a very worthy fairy. But we also have to talk about those fairies who have fallen from grace.

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Death-Life Cycle

Posted on by under 2020, Dec 2020 - Ring of death

I think I may have been born to be wild, but it’s worn off a bit, Em Roberts thought.

            She watched her husband shambling across to the tower blocks. His body, tall but stooped, seemed to have a demolition notice on it. ‘I’ve burnt the candle at both ends, and now I’m paying for it,’ he’d whine to his lady listeners. ‘Had a motorbike when I was younger, chased after the ladies, partied till I dropped, lived for the day.’ A life of being on the razzle, and motor bike crashes, had left him as a crumbling exterior. His inside, Em believed, had been similarly gutted.

            All he did was sit at home and mope, or limp about the estate, both legs stiff like their bones had motorcycle steel embedded in them. In the summer he’d be outside a tower block, trying to impress this man’s wife, or that man’s woman, with recollections of his glorious past.  He still liked the ladies, and if you scrutinised his shambling body, and his unkempt grey hair, you might find a trace of former good looks, like a tint of blood at a road-crash decades after the event. Em had long stopped such scrutinising.

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RING OF FIRE

Posted on by under 2020, Dec 2020 - Ring of death

Trudging home from work, Billy Thomas ran into Owen Davies and his brother.

”Hey Billy, do you fancy a night out in Swansea. The rugby boys have hired a bus and there’s one seat left.”

After a moment’s hesitation Billy thought why not, he’d never been to Swansea on a night out. Rumour had it the girls were fair game and the beer was cheap.

Owen warned Billy that he would have to do the ring of fire as it was his first night out with the rugby boys.

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For Whom the Flames Burn

Posted on by under 2020, Dec 2020 - Ring of death

The first time I saw it, I was thirteen. I thought maybe I was about to have a migraine. Mum always said she saw flashing lights before they came on. It was a ring of fire, whirling like a vortex above my Grandad’s hospital bed.

“What’s that?” I said, as Mum tearfully held his mottled hand. His breathing rattled like Darth Vader.

“What are you talking about, Jake?” she sniffed, distracted.

“That circle over Grandad’s head?”

“They’re just wires. Medical equipment, that’s all,” she said.

“No! That ring of fire.” I said. It blazed larger and brighter by the second, the heat melting me, though everyone else shivered with cold.

Then the machines started beeping and the doctors came running.

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New Beginnings

Posted on by under 2020, Dec 2020 - Ring of death

Siegfried, the scout, was running out of hope and time.  His return journey home would have to be within the hour.  He pushed on a little longer and finally found his tribe’s salvation.  A remote village with a river running alongside nestled in the foothills.  He circumnavigated the dwellings in the moonlight, giving it a final check over before he returned to speak to the elders.

As dawn broke, the villagers resumed their daily chores.  The priest attended to his duties of administering help to the sick and giving the last rites.

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The ring of death

Posted on by under 2020, Dec 2020 - Ring of death

Charlie looked down at his shoes. They were scuffed with curves of light-brown roughened leather where the door panel he kicked in earlier that morning scraped across the shiny toecap. He tutted and reached into the glove compartment for his shoe-shine kit. He always kept one in there, along with a tub of hair gel and a clothes brush.

Charlie liked to look smart. He thought it gave him an air of authority, a kind of lawyerly feel, judicial even. He chuckled at that: Charlie was no judge. In fact, he never made judgements. Things were simple in Charlie-World, there were just three states of being: a problem, not a problem, and no longer a problem. Simplicity was his byword, which was just as well because having too many thoughts about his line of work could lead to problems.

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