Anna ended the call and looked at Patsy, who raised a cheeky smile although she was starting to look cold and a bit shocky.
“Did I hear you dobbing me in to Jimbo?”
“You most certainly did.”
Patsy gave her a thumbs-up.
Valentina smiled at them. “You two are such good friends. Are you really sisters?”
“Only in our hearts.”
A rather frightened looking nun poked her head into the room.
“There are some very large men at the front door. They say they are called Cracksman, and can they please come in.”
Yuri nodded and the woman scampered off.
A minute or so later, Rod ambled into the rapidly cooling room.
“Blimey,” he said with some feeling, “that effing boomer was excessive.”
He bowed courteously to Valentina.
“Shouldn’t you be somewhere warmer ma’am. You seem to be shivering.”
Which brought the atmosphere back to the everyday, and got some pretty impressive results.
They were very soon in a room without broken glass, with hot chocolate to drink and an efficient young nun picking bits of metal out of Rod’s face with a pair of tweezers.
“You weren’t joking about picking Range Rover out of your teeth were you? How come nobody else is wearing metal make-up?”
A man somewhere between Rod and Jim in build, who to Anna’s certain knowledge hadn’t uttered a syllable since the car had collected him that morning, snorted out a laugh.
“Metal make-up. I like it,” the man spoke fluent English albeit with a Marseillais accent. His grin, however, was all Cracksman. Then he sobered abruptly. “My baby cousin got a face full of flying shrapnel because he was on watch. Even so he was better off than some innocent bystanders. At least one dead.” He spat. “I’d truly like to get you hands on whoever was responsible for that clusterfuck out there.”
“Pats shot one of them. Both arms. Now Gospodin Stephanovitz’s boys are asking him some searching questions.”
“Good.”
Patsy was in low-voiced conversation with Valentina Stephanovitz, and Anna felt a peculiar reluctance to go and join in. Instead she sat beside Rod and held his big hand in both of hers.
He squeezed her fingers, but was prevented from talking by the young nun.
“Be still.”
When his face had been de-shrapnelled and stitched here and there, and he was smelling strongly of antiseptic, Rod put a big arm around Anna.
“You holding, mate?”
“By the skin on my teeth. I badly want to go home. But I’m guessing it will be a while.”
Rod shrugged massively. “I’ll try what I can do, though it rather depends on how many powerful friends your new chum has.”
“He ain’t my chum. Although he does have a soft spot for Patsy.”
“It’ll be the big blue eyes.”
“Or the gun. Speaking of which.”
Anna dragged the small pistol out of her pocket and handed it to Rod, grateful to be rid of the thing.
He took it from her and tutted.
“Don’t tell me you’ve been toting that thing around in your pocket without even putting the safety catch on.”
“What safety catch?”
“Jeez Anna, you could’ve shot your own foot off. And how would I have explained that to Sam.”
But he smiled reassurance and she felt warmed.
Patsy beckoned, and Anna went over to where Valentina sat. The Russian woman smiled tiredly.
“I am being sent to bed, but I wanted to say goodbye to you first.”
Because it felt right, Anna bent and kissed the thin cheek.
“Sleep gently.”
“Thank you.”

Jane Jago

The chainsaws growl and fart
Among the branches tall
The great tree’s torn apart
And branch by branch it falls
While grim-faced men below
With hooks and metal chains
Make the log pile grow
And all the while it rains
It’s rotten is that tree
It must come down, they said
And sadly only me
Feels grief because it’s dead
The chainsaws growl no more
The men have all gone home
I sit here on the forest floor
Silent and alone…

©️Jane Jago

Agnes had been the Easter Bunny for so many years now that even the teeth didn’t bother her. Way she looked at it one day of frantic egg hiding beat three hundred plus in any other job.

Okay, maybe the belly and the ears weren’t exactly attractive. But hey, she coulda been a flower fairy condemned to droop around dressed in bits of colour and freezing cold for most of her life. Or, even worse, the tooth fairy. The very thought made her gag. Picking up rotten bits of children’s mouths every night. 

No. All in all chocolate was best….

©jj 2019

Where the goods trains used to run
Spring has come
With primroses and violets
Smiling at the sun
Celandines like yellow stars
Trees all dressed in white
You and I have found a morning
Sparkling with delight

©️ jj 2019

Home town, whose twisty walls and little alleyways were a world away from her luxury apartment overlooking the sea in Monaco. 

Why was she here today, she wondered, observing an unnaturally still and silent street through half-closed eyes.

There were people about, but all stood still and mute as a funeral cortège made its stately way along the otherwise traffic-free street.

She idly wondered who was important enough to stop the traffic for, and peeped into the flower-bedecked hearse.

She saw an old woman in a glass coffin and understood.

They had brought her here to rest.

© jj 2019

Sometimes I wonder if my maternal parent is indeed all she claims to be on that account. Could it be, perchance, I was secretly adopted and hail from a genetic line in which the aesthetic principle is celebrated more absolutely? Alas no. The results of the DNA test were pretty clear on that point.

But you will understand my confusion, nay – my utter bafflement at the birthday gift I received from Mumsie last year. I had hoped it would be yet another copy of one of the vibrant tomes by She Who I Am Not Worthy To Name, but instead it was a children’s book – in Latin. When I challenged her choice, suggesting that whilst I was ipso facto her child, I was no longer in childhood, quod erat demonstrandum. But she was not impressed.

“Moons,” she told me, “stop pratting around. Your father paid for you to have an expensive education so use it. Read the book.”

Needless to say ‘Harrius Potter et Philosophi Lapis’ still sits unread in my writing den where it’s presence is discreetly muted by shadows. However, so I could convince Mummy I had read the blasted thing, I was compelled to procure an English edition.

My review of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rowling.

A boy who is being generously raised by distant relatives, shows extremes of ingratitude and against their wishes takes off for boarding school seduced by the blandishments of those who try to persuade him he is some kind of messiah.

The school, called Hogfarts or something similar, is the educational facility of a secret cult which regards normal people as an inferior breed and calls them ‘muggles’, whilst endeavouring to promote a master race of magic users. Hogfarts uses a hat to choose which house a pupil should be in and the unfortunate child, who is called Harry, is not selected for the superior house and thus has to make do with some rather second-rate companions.

Amongst his adventures, Harry finds a mirror, a dog and a chessboard. He turns out to be quite good at sports, which was not something I had expected as he seemed the geeky sort. He also finds an invisibility cloak but uses it for the most boring things like sneaking around the school. Harry eventually succeeds in stopping a two-faced individual from getting hold of some pebble, but despite his dramatic victory he still finishes the book back where he started.

Two stars for being available in both Latin and English and thus sparing me Mumsie’s scathing vitriol.

Moonbeam Farquhar Metheringham IV

You can find more of IVy’s profound thoughts in How To Start Writing A Book courtesy of E.M. Swift-Hook and Jane Jago.

They struggled and stumbled through the baying catcalling crowd, each dragging the instrument of his own execution behind him. Three men, who breathed and bled and defecated like we all do.

One convicted murderer.

One convicted child trafficker.

One son of god.

They reached the brow of the hill and those whose business it was bound them to the wooden crosses before setting each in the hole in the ground which awaited it.

The sun beat down and slowly bones dislocated and organs collapsed.

Three men died in slow agony.

Was one the son of god? Only faith can decide…

©jj 2019

The most photographed woman of her generation looked at him politely, and offered a practised smile. It was frustrating, but he chose not to show that, instead he searched for another way to to shake her out of her self-possession.

“Does it not worry you?” he asked in his deep, hypnotic voice. “Are you never a little afraid?”

“Afraid of what?”

“That the old superstition is true, and every time you are photographed you lose a little of your soul.”

She regarded him limpidly.

“Perhaps. Perhaps I have been photographed so often that I am just a graceful shell.”

He looked into the serene depths of her remarkable amber eyes and allowed his frustration to boil over.

“Well maybe I should photograph you like that,” he snapped with sudden viciousness. “As an empty vessel remarkable only for the elegance of its window dressing.”

She made no reply, so he stared again into the depths of his imaging device – looking for something to distinguish his pictures from the thousands of others that flooded the Internet and colonised every glossy magazine on the planet. As he concentrated it seemed to him that those famous eyes grew even wider, and clearer, and that they slowly filled the viewfinder as bit by bit they dragged his soul into the abyss that lurked in their depths.

He screamed just once, and the woman smiled the secret smile he had been looking for…
©️ Jane Jago

She awoke in a strange body. Hurting and being carried by a being that smelled unpleasantly of mammal flesh and its own exertions.

“Do you reckon her a virgin?”

“I dunno. But her won’t be.”

The coarse sounds were what she was beginning to be aware of as laughter. 

Not too much later she was dropped onto something yielding.

“Now us waits for her to wake up.”

She opened her eyes. Two hairy creatures looked down at her. One held her throat and the other lifted her single garment. It was to be their last action under earth’s pitiless sun…

© jj 2019

“I’m sure you weren’t expecting me.”
The stranger stood in the shadows just outside my door, his face partly hid by the hood of his cloak. His hand gripped around a traveller’s staff, the sort that could be used both for walking and a sturdy defence. I’d have taken him for some vagrant were it not for the large ruby ring that I could see on that hand.
“I can’t say as how I was expecting anyone,” I told him, wondering if I’d be wiser just to shut the door in his face. When you live alone and your nearest neighbour is the other side of the fell, welcoming a stranger into your home after dark is not so wise.
“Can I come in? I just need shelter for the night.”
Now, you can call me a superstitious old woman but I know as well as the next that most all the magical beings you can name from brownies to vampires need to be invited into your home before they can touch you.
“If you need a place to sleep there is the barn.” I nodded to that old ramshackle building my grandfather raised. It’s outlived its name and its purpose long since, but the roof keeps the wind and rain out – mostly.
“Thank you,” he said and dipped his head in a sort of bow, like I was a noble lady or something.
I still don’t know why I did it, but later that evening I took a bowl of my stew and a lump of seed bread out to the barn. I saw a sort of red glow coming through the cracks in the walls and very nearly dropped the tray in fright. Instead, I crept close and peeked through one of them cracks and as I’m standing here today, I swear I saw a red dragon three times the size of any man curled with its nose on its tail and staring right back at me with ruby eyes.
I don’t mind admitting I ran back to the house and bolted the door. Not that would have kept out a dragon, but what else was I to do?
I went back in the morning at first light. The barn was empty. First I thought I’d imagined it all, but where that dragon had been curled I found this very gold piece…

E.M. Swit-Hook