This morning, my algae soup tasted even blander than usual. Lifeless. Flavourless. Purposeless.
“Seems familiar,” I mused, granting myself a rare indulgence – not washing the bowl. Why bother? It joined the stack of unwashed dishes, each marking days of the same hollow thought.
Outside my house, I stood before the only soul who would have cared. She would have made me wash up; she made me a better man. Kneeling, I placed a small metal flower upon her makeshift grave. Its subtle blue hue was a stark contrast to this monochrome underground world of dirt and metal.
‘Could I actually just go in there and…? Let me think. Smother him? Yes, yes I could.’
‘We might not need to, Natasha. I’ve not been feeding him.’
‘You’ve been cutting back on his meals?’
‘I’ve not given him any food in seven days. Just water.’
‘He’s looking very gaunt, Annette. Do you mean you’ve been deliberately…?’
‘I want him dead. I hate him. This way we just say he wouldn’t eat, we say he…’
‘Refused food… we say he didn’t want to live any more with the pain of the cancer… we…’
‘We wait two more days. He can’t last out if we starve him.’
/
In his studio they looked at the paintings, many of them of themselves in the first flush of puberty, thin, uncomfortable, unhappy, all naked. Natasha remembered him painting Annette many times, then her turn came. She didn’t quite know what was going on. It’s art, darling, her mother insisted, keep still for Daddy and stop complaining. Her mother had practically pimped her. Creation from exploitation? That wasn’t art. Post-Jimmy Saville his reputation had crashed. Now he was reviled by many, his works removed from galleries. Quite right. Burn them all. A vile paedophile.
His sister though believed they had aesthetic value, said each haunted portrait revealed her mixed feelings: fear of her father and her unbreakable connection to him.
The wind bayed relentlessly as it had for the last three days. It forced its way through the cracks and crevices to send darts of ice through the cottage.
Megan huddled under the blankets cuddling up to her siblings on their pallet in the rafters. Her grandfather lay shivering on his bed in the alcove besides the hearth. Their fire burnt low as the peat was running out. They would soon be dependent on the droppings of the animals in the byre.
Mother and father spent most of the day trying to clear a way through the snow to provide water for the animals before the water froze over again. Desperation was etched in their faces. They would have to slaughter some of the animals if the snow did not stop soon, something they could ill afford as they kept food on their table .
“Tell me how it started, Doctor Frost,” she said, leaning close.
“It was the winter of ’57 when I first opened my new eyes and saw the world as it really is.” I replied. The garlic on her breath irritated but I would not give her the satisfaction of knowing my objections. “Of course, I would not have been able to process the wealth of visual inputs I then had, but for the expanded processing capacity I’d installed two years previously.”
It had been very kind of him to take us in during a raging snowstorm on Christmas Eve, but I wish Joel would shut up about it. We’d been travelling along the edges of Białowieża Forest, trying desperately to get home to see family, when the car had broken down.
There was no mobile signal, of course, so we’d sat in the car, after the inevitable argument, shivering. Then, like the light of the Angel Gabriel, twin beams of a 4×4 had sliced through the blizzard, and Joel had been out in the road, waving his arms, trying to get a lift. Fortunately, the driver had stopped.
Dimitri walked the beaten path from his small town in Hostre, to the familiar fields of grain that he’d admired since childhood. The fresh dew sat lackadaisically on a blade of grass; its slumber abruptly disturbed by the compression of Dimitri’s leather bound foot. His impact paled in comparison to the indelible impression bestowed upon the wider area. During the previous season, the land had been disturbed by heavy machinery, the earth turned over and upon itself, revealing the darker soil below.
“Big machines, operated by large men, led by those with gargantuan egos.” He pondered aloud.
His fixation upon his outer surroundings caused a momentary lapse in perception. Dimitri’s foot discovered a deep puddle, which had been considerately filled with fresh rainwater. His right foot and shin now completely submerged and subsequently sodden.
There was a dame sitting at the bar. She was attractive and alone. I decided to take a chance. I slid onto the stool next to her and asked if she wanted a drink.
‘My name is Alice’ she said, ‘Alice Fortune. Miss Alice Fortune.’ I noticed her beautiful smile as she shook my hand.
As our fingers met, I felt something pass between us. My sixth sense was screaming at me but I took no notice, I was hooked.
This was it. I’d had my share of bad luck. After decades of caring for my ailing parents and alcoholic husband, then losing all of them, one by one, it was time to put myself first. Midlife, I decided, would be a new beginning. The mid-point of a novel, after all, isn’t the end of the story, but the moment the protagonist takes charge of their own destiny.
Where better to kick-start a change in fortune than Las Vegas?
“What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas!” Nina slurred, and we all clinked glasses.
“Don’t look now,” she shout-whispered into my ear. “Hot guys, by the Blackjack table.”
I cringed. “We’re old enough to be their mothers!”
The novel, set in an indeterminate ‘past’, concerns love across the social divide. The hero is a wealthy (en)titled gentleman in love with a serving girl from a local tavern. The girl’s mother opposes the match. Chapter three, where the plot thickens, was the point at which the novel had been set aside, mainly for lack of a discernible plot.
Unfortunately, the planets were not fully in alignment for Melinda Thistlethwaite’ s most recent flirtation with the arts. She was confident, however, that she would eventually achieve success, once her talents had coupled with artistic destiny.
Red and gold, green and yellow. Riotous explosions of colour, searing through the night skies against a backdrop of the universe.
“They’re beautiful, Momma,” she whispers, bundled up in her best winter coat, with mittens keeping her fingers warm, holding hands and staring in wonder.
“I know, baby,” I say, checking my comm bracelet, anxiety spiking. It’s linked to his.
“How was it?” Alfie screwed his eyes in concentration and anticipating the usual sotto voce response, leaned forward in his riser-recliner. He had declined the invite to the Council’s Annual Fireworks Display. Storm Ciarán was rolling in.
“Brilliant!; not the wash-out expected.” Fiona’s explosive response caught him unawares. Hovering on the remote (retaining maximum control over his environment was important), his hand reacted in a surprised tremor. The chair, rented courtesy of his son, responded to the manual “rise” command; Alfie slid to the floor, pinned under the strategically placed wheely frame, a gift from his daughter.
“Fuck Me… Save me from this hell.” On his back, glasses dislodged, Alfie surveyed the intricate cornicing and central rose of the “small lounge.” The tantalising mistiness of detail recalled to mind that entertainment he and his late wife had so enjoyed at the Couples Parties before any of the seven veils had been removed. Sporadic pyrotechnics of private parties continued outside; Roman Candles, Peonies, and Diadems were corralled in raindrops as they burst across the uncurtained picture window.
The locals of East Hardwick made a habit of not burning a certain Catholic terrorist come the fifth of November as expected, but instead set alight whomever they disliked.
Mrs. Monks burnt a copy of her cheating husband, Charlie Lanker burnt a dummy modelled after his schoolteacher, who in turn set alight a many headed hydrae, bearing the faces of her worst students.
On this Guy Fawks night, Kevin Warick had built, a perfect likeness of the dreadful Mr. Samuel Linklater, down to that self-impressed, almost snarling smile.
As a hybrid Goggapod /Cockaigian, Chief Prommy was trapped in a dual awareness. The cull wasn’t working as expected. The Goggapods, who regarded themselves as The Legitimate Inheritors, were as innovative…. and devious…. as ever,- hiding in the tunnels of Plurian’s moons: shape-shifting so expertly that even with A.I. advance diagnostics they were routinely identified as unalloyed Cockaigians: using non-galactically recognised W.M.D: in short evading all efforts of obliteration. The new order was unambiguous, one word, “Annihilate.”
Comply or Defy,-.that was the dilemma. The sensation of Goggapods crawling over the proximal tendril’s communication device was a by-now familiar precursor to the resultant odour of a singeing short circuit. Of course the Goggapods were not actually crawling, but to The Cockaigne Higher-ups, and in a half-hidden corner of Prommy’s own consciousness, it confirmed the presence of doubt, possibly treason.
How stupid do you have to be to fall down a well? Pretty stupid, I’m sure.
When I was eleven I did the very same thing when collecting water with my brother. Even after my mother, peeling and chopping a pile of potatoes over the sink, apron soaked with water and littered with small potato skins, warned us.
“Careful round that well,” she declared, eyes stuck to the potatoes. “You remember what happened with Dorothy’s poor wee lass.”
The storm clouds are gathered just to starboard, forcing us further and further west. The sun, lurking around the horizon and casting golden and amber hues, hasn’t set in what feels like eleven hundred days, although it’s tough to tell. We’ve given up counting, after the crude marks we’d scratched into the deck mysteriously vanished.
Time hasn’t frozen, so much as slowed to a crawl. The fluttering and rustling of the sails proves there’s still a tailwind; the creaks and groans of wood as waves lap around us, and the swells of the waves we ride, are enough to evidence that. Our crew, fractious at the best of times, had initially turned on each other, tensions increasing until it spilled to violence. Men were thrown overboard, beaten, and blades drawn. It had only stopped after a voice had cut across the melee, singing; pure, clean, and melodious.
As the bell rang young Billy Thomas barged his way out. Racing off he headed into the woods above the school Megan’s words echoing in his head: ”I’m sorry Billy we can’t be friends anymore.”
She had just walked away from him.
Gasping for breath he threw himself onto the floor. What had he done? He and Megan had been like brother and sister. They had played together for as long as Billy could remember.
The postmistress had a bad reputation and specialised in being irritable with everybody. She was perhaps in her fifties, but almost of a geological age. You were put in mind of a slab of granite behind the serving hatch in the corner of the mini-supermarket. Her face was stony, her resentment hard.
‘NEXT!’ she barked from behind her counter. ‘First or second? Put it on the scales. ON them, not under them. Where’s it going? WHAT? Gib-raltar?’ She pronounced the word as though it were the most awful place on the planet. Then she forked the parcel off the scales with a plump paw, eyeing her customer in the manner of a prison guard with a felon.
She proclaimed in her base voice that Angus, Sean, and Ian would never see their twenty first birthdays.
“You’re all going to die,” she cackled.
And sure enough, they did.
Angus was the first to go, dropping dead in Spain, whilst partying with his college chums, Sean meanwhile died during his missionary work in China. Both croaked at the stroke of midnight on the eve of their birthdays.
Brian knew a good deal about Eric’s life story from the first research interview. What he didn’t know was that Eric’s life (but definitely not his story) was going to reach its final destination in one hour and thirty minutes. Nor did Brian know that Eric’s account of his past in the next forty-five minutes would contain (if anyone cared to listen and adequately interpret) the answer to why he died. This, the second interview, began at 2:30 pm Eastern Time in a small room in Krill Bay’s large central library.
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