Be careful where you draw the line that marks out ‘us’ and ‘them’
The line that cuts those you approve from those that you condemn.
For many who you banish to the far side of that line
Will share with you more qualities than those you did define.
And every time you draw to cut out what you disapprove
You also many other great attributes thus remove
You may condemn a person, a group, a crowd, a throng
Just because one single thing they hold you see as wrong.
But others draw their lines as well and something you once said
Might make them put you on the other side of ‘us’ instead
And those you feel are on your side of your dividing line
Might think that you do not belong and even so opine
When you allow ‘us’ and ‘them’ your worldview to be
That line defines just who you are and cuts you off from ‘we’.

E.M. Swift-Hook

When Alice Lancaster woke up on the morning of her twenty-third day of widowhood, she felt as if she had somehow pulled herself out of an uncomprehending fog, and into the pitiless brightness of sunlight. Although this awakening sharpened the pain she welcomed it as a sign of returning life. Alaric was gone and she had to somehow create an existence without him. She dressed herself in the unbecoming clothes that were all she currently owned, and frowned at her reflection.
During an uncomfortable morning, being watched by her husband’s family, Alice considered her options. She could remain in the family home, under the eye of Alaric’s mother, who disliked her, and his brother who liked her rather more than was comfortable. She could go back to her father’s house, but she now had a stepmother younger than herself. Or. She could stand on her own two feet.
None of it appealed, but striking out on her own, although both frightening and confusing, felt like the least of a fistful of evils. Tapping her fingernails against the wooden arm of her chair, she thought grim thoughts. Mother-in-law turned a perfectly coiffed head, atop a long neck decorated, as always, with a six-strand pearl choker – whose ruby clasp shone almost as balefully as Mama’s basilisk stare.
“Will you stop making that infernal noise!”
As this was nominally Alice’s sitting room, it would have been both easy and satisfying to snap back. But she didn’t; instead, she got up and left the room. Picking up her coat and handbag, she walked out of the front door, past the hovering porter, and down to the street corner where she hailed a taxi.
“Where to, love?”
“Hildebrand and Watkins on the Strand, please.”
When the cab dropped her outside the scrupulously whitened office steps, her courage almost failed her, but the thought of ‘Mama’s’ cold gooseberry green gaze stiffened her spine. The stiffly coiffured receptionist spared barely a glance for the hatless young woman who came in so timidly.
“Visitors by appointment only,” she barked.
For some reason, this rudeness emboldened Alice far more than kindness would have and she stalked over to a handsome door that bore the name Augustus Hildebrand LLB. She tapped twice and walked in, leaving the receptionist gobbling like a turkey in her wake.
The man at the desk looked up from his newspaper. His incipient frown changed to a smile.
“Hello, Uncle Gus,” she said softly.
“My dear Alice. Come in, sit down, and tell me how I can help you.”
Alice went to one of the wing chairs beside the fireplace and folded into its cushioned embrace. Her host wrinkled his forehead before going out to reception. His deep voice contrasted with the receptionist’s staccato counterpoint but she was too weary to even try to make out what was being said. Instead, she laid her head against the snowy whiteness of the old-fashioned antimacassar and let her thoughts drift. When she came back to herself, her mother’s only surviving brother was in the other fireside chair watching her with concerned eyes. She summoned a smile for him.
“They told me,” he said, “that you didn’t want to see me.”
“Oh. Which ‘they’ would that have been? Mother-in-law and baby brother?”
He nodded. “I rather think they are hoping to keep you under their thumbs.”
Alice pushed her hair away from her face with a shaking hand. “I’m beginning to think that myself. However, ‘Mama’ can’t resist pinching and poking at me. Thinks that because I won’t argue she can push me around. Only she can’t. And today, it came to me that I have had enough.”
“So, you came to me.”
“I’m sorry for that. If it’s going to cause trouble I will go.”
He held up a hand. “Don’t be silly. We aren’t living in the dark ages. They have no hold on you. You are of age. And besides which, even if there was trouble, you are all I have left of my dear sister so I would help you anyway.”
Tears pricked the back of her eyes. “Alaric always said I should come to you if anything happened to him.”
He smiled and his face lightened. “What took you so long then?”
“I had to get over the shock of losing him first. I rather thought he was immortal, you know.”
“He always behaved like he thought he was immortal too.”
“Maybe he did.” She sighed. “Maybe he did.”
Uncle Gus remained quiet for a while, then spoke gently. “What can I do to help you?”
“I need somewhere to live. I decided just now that I cannot spend another moment in that house.”
She waited for him to tell her not to be dramatic and to just go home and get on with it. But he didn’t. Instead, he nodded his leonine head.
“We can’t do much about finding you a home today, and I’m not exactly set up to receive guests.”
His cheeks pinked, and Alice laughed.
“Do we have a young lady in residence Uncle Gus?”
“She isn’t that young, and she’d be very insulted to be called a lady.”
“I’d like to meet her, then. She sounds as if she would be the perfect antidote to the stultifying pretended gentility of Alaric’s dreadful Mama.”
His bark of delighted amusement made Alice feel much better about herself. When he stopped chuckling, he looked at her for what seemed like an age.
“If you really mean that, then by all means come and stay with us. You would certainly be safe under Gabriella’s wing.”
“Safe?”
Uncle Gus sobered.“Yes, Alice, safe from the machinations of a woman who is already hinting that Alaric’s untimely death has left you mentally unbalanced.”

From Alice’s Choice by Jane Jago

Nobody prays here now, she said
The altar candles are long dead
Nobody breaks the communal bread
And the music plays no more
Nobody hears the children cry
Nobody remembers quite why they died
Nobody cleans the brass with pride
And the wind whistles under the door
Nobody loves this place she said
As her lily white hands smoothed the hair on her head
The roof’s only left because there’s no lead
And the music plays no more
Nobody sees me or looks at my face
Nobody thinks that I died in disgrace
Nobody cares for the ghosts in this place
And the wind whistles under the door
There is no praise for the lord or the beast
Nobody remembers the men from the east
While the stones cry dry tears for want of a priest
And the music plays no more

©jj 2021

Namaste you wonderful, desirable and aspiring individual! This bijou blog is here to help you achieve your best ever ‘you’. Here, I offer my help and assistance in reshaping your shape and doctoring your decor internally and externally, to bring your lifestyle into line with your aspirations.

Rites of Passage

It has been shown that celebrating rites of passage, such as entering teenage, leaving school, starting to drive and so on has a profound and healthy effect on the psyche. It enables the individual to recognise themselves and their place in their community and facilitates the community in recognising the individual and their transition from one stage of life to another.
Rites of passage have an outward, external, community oriented side and an inner, transformative and profoundly personal side.
They are good for you and good for those around you.
Having established that, it is time to consider how you can add to the rites of passage at present practiced and so reap an even greater harvest of benefit from them. What other profound and meaningful transitions occur in your life that you can use as pivot points in your personal and social growth?
In many ways the best approach is to make your own list. After all you know yourself what these meaningful moments might be better than anyone else. But here are a couple of suggestions for rites of passage we could all adopt more widely in the modern world.

Ordering a first take-out
This is a truly life-altering moment for any growing individual. It carries with it the awareness that from now on one is no longer tied to the apron strings of home provision. One is now free to sally forth and hungryly devour the entire world of exotic food. I will assume if you are reading this you have already crossed this threshold, but here is advice for any you might be inducting into this stage of their life.
How to mark the moment: Make sure the moment is perfect by ensuring the candidate approaches it with virginal purity. Do not allow them to so much as peek at a site prior to the event Invite at least half a dozen of your young postulants chosen companions to attend the event. They should all sit in a circle and chant their chosen order whilst the celebratee sits in the middle with their phone app and has to get every order right before they can order their own.
It will be one of the most memorable events of their life!

The first major relationship argument
We are all left battered – yet bettered, by this transformational moment. When we realise the most adored life-partner with whom we are soul to soul, has in fact some major imperfection that has led to a major crisis between you.
How to mark the moment: Embrace that it has happened and once the dust has settled summon your closest and most individually partisan friends and family.
Whilst the principles are withdrawn, individually and apart, to better focus on regenerating the acrimony that spurred the real event, be sure that everyone has a good glass of their preferred alcoholic beverage inside them and one in hand. Then when all is ready, have the assembled companions draw to either side of the room, to stand behind the individual to whom they are most closely aligned.
Then the couple should act out the events again, being sure to not neglect even the most hurtful and hateful things said so they can be purified and transmuted by the rite of passage into a new energy each will take forward with them in life. The gathered supporters can cheer and boo to make the reenactment even more potent.
At the end there will be an utter catharsis and a truly life changing resolution!

You begin, I am sure, to see the many promising and poignant possible prospects for such rites of passage.

Namaste!
Lucida the Liminal Lifestyle Coach

“Go for a walk on the beach, sort this thing out in your head.” He lay in their bed and smirked at her. She resisted the temptation to attack him and pulled on shorts and a disreputable tee-shirt.
An hour or so away from the cabin it all became clear. If he could do that on their honeymoon.
The only remaining question was how far away she could get before he noticed she had gone.
Picking up the pace to a mile eating jog she showed her teeth in a feral grin.
At midnight he realised he was alone…

©Jane Jago

Next morning, at two minutes to nine, Gribble strode into his office to find the geek chair. Empty. He peered out of the door carefully looking both ways along the corridor. There was nobody in sight and he permitted himself a thin smile. His new geek was going to be late. How perfectly splendid. He was sure there was a clause in the contract that covered lateness; he even rather wished he had read it. Positioning himself in the doorway, he pulled his dwarf-made timepiece from his pocket and stood ostentatiously studying its ornate face. The University bell bonged nine times and a bored imp poked its head out of the casing of the timepiece in his hand.
“Nine of the clock. Midweek day. Climate a little uncertain. Some chance of precipitation.”
The head disappeared as quickly as it had appeared. Behind Gribble somebody coughed politely. He spun around as if he had been shot. The geek desk was now occupied.
“What? How? Who?”
His new geek smiled, showing far too many teeth.
“Good morning, Professor Gribble. Belladonna Handyman at your service.”
As she spoke the pieces began to fall into place in Gribble’s distraught brain. The bastards had given him a non-human. He pulled himself together and considered the evidence. Belladonna bespoke vampire or shifter heritage, whilst Handyman was a dwarf name. It just wouldn’t do, so he strode towards her sneering, only to be halted in his tracks by a small gout of flame from somewhere beneath the desk at which she sat.
He squeaked in a most unmanly manner, and stared at the desk.
“Who? What?”
Belladonna smiled. “Oh. That’s just my brother, Eric.”
“Brother?”
“Same father. Different mothers. Only difference is while my mother was hunting the shape-shifting bastard to cut off his balls, Eric’s mother ate him. Oy, Eric stick your head out and say hi to our new employer.”
A square reptilian head poked around the corner of the desk. “Hi.” Then the creature belched another small flame.
“Isn’t he a bit? Petite? For a dragon?”
“Oh. Not really. He’s in his condensed form right now. If he wasn’t he’d not fit in this room.”
Gribble tried to summon a threatening frown. “I wouldn’t entirely mind if he wasn’t in this room.”
Belladonna smiled, it was a vaguely patronising expression. “Oh he’s in the contract too. Where I go, he goes.”
Even an egocentric, unimaginative academic knows when he has been outmanoeuvred and Gribble shook his leonine head in recognition of defeat. “Very well. To work then.”
By the end of the morning, he was forced to admit, if only in the quiet vaults of his own mind, that this was the fastest and least emotional geek that he had ever encountered. She was also the most irritating, as she looked at him with the kind of amused tolerance that scraped on his nerves like fingernails against a chalkboard.
He was dictating a list of questions about the content of an obscure Assyrian incunabulum when the clock struck noon. As the last tocsin sounded the geek disappeared. For a second or so Gribble’s mouth carried on speaking, unwilling to believe the evidence of his eyes. He swore sulphurously, and Belladonna’s face appeared in the air in front of him.
“Lunchtime,” she said brightly.
Gribble showed her his teeth, but she just smiled and disappeared. At one-thirty on the dot Launcelot Gribble’s geek reappeared. She wiped her mouth on a red napkin and belched delicately. Under the desk her saurian sibling also belched and a tongue of flame licked the leg of the desk which sparked briefly.
Gribble leapt into the air and squeaked before collecting himself and dragging up a sneer. “Now the bloody dragon is only setting fire to the sodding furniture.”
“Language,” Belladonna murmured, before settling back into work as if she had never been away.
They worked all afternoon, but at the stroke of five the desk became empty and an infuriated Gribble found himself talking to thin air.
He went home a confused and bothered man and snarled his way through the evening before spending a disturbed night throughout which he dreamed of flames and toothily grinning females.

From Gribble’s Geek by Jane Jago which is only 0.99 to buy throughout November.

The colonists landed safely on Alpha-Eight-Six-Zero, but something had gone wrong with the storage AI. Most of their desperately needed food supplies were contaminated.
The botanists ran tests and declared only a few seeds they had brought from Earth would grow here – let alone thrive.
The elected leader had to break the bad news.
“We may not all make it through the winter,” she said.
Careful management and strict rationing meant none starved, though all went hungry.
A year later, after they had finished unloading the last harvesting bots, the colonists of Alpha-Eight-Six-Zero voted to name their new home ‘Thanksgiving’.

E.M. Swift-Hook

… or ‘How To Speak Typo’ by Jane Jago

ahrd (noun) – inconvenient erection

down’t (adjective) – pale and needy as in children and rejected lovers

greay (adjective) – of civil servants, properly impassive

editititing (verb) – titting about when you should be editing

flookingorward (verb) – catching flatfish with a pole

garcen (noun) – french child with a speech impediment

goig (noun) – zit on the end of the nose

manged (adjective) – of old men looking like a dog with a skin disease

miseray (noun) – a bloke called Raymond in a bad mood

prominenet (noun) – contrivance for collecting hormones from urine

ratehr (noun) – bossy person who works in ‘human resources’

sceince (noun) – calling up the spirits of the dead by means of the microwave oven

specail (noun) –  vegetable with the colour and texture of vomit

tidey (adjective) – prone to the influence of the moon

waery (adjective) – of hair, prone to spring out at unflattering angles

Disclaimer: all these words are genuine typos defined by Jane Jago. The source of each is withheld to protect the guilty.

He only went through the door because Livy was convinced they would find Narnia, whilst Kate was sure there was a secret garden.
Neither was right, although there was a garden of sorts, and there were wolves and beavers. Unfortunately the beavers didn’t talk and the wolves rather fancied child flesh for dinner.
To his surprise, he could fight better here than at home and the girls became brave instead of femininely timorous.
When they had fought their way back to the door, Mother waited just the other side of the wall.
“Thou art a man now,” she said proudly.

©Jane Jago

Imagine waking up one day unable to recall who you are or where you came from – only to find you are serving a sentence as a convict conscript for crimes you have no memory of ever committing…

“Then what makes you feel you are entitled to enjoy a normal life now, soldier? What makes you think you can ever pay that back?”
“I can’t, sir.” The answer sounded bleak. “I know I can’t pay any of it back. And I know I will never have the kind of normal life which involves a family. I have forfeited that right. I carry the burden of responsibility for actions I can’t recall or even conceive of myself ever committing.”
Again Vane noticed dissonance between the idea of this man, able to speak in such a way, and yet having no memory before his time in the Legion. Could it be possible he had somehow fooled the system? Vane knew the intensity of monitoring Revid had been placed under and made himself dismiss the idea. With difficulty.
“You are telling me you are not the same man?” he asked.
“I am the same man, sir. I am not the same person.”
The green gaze met his own, disconcertingly steady. Vane looked away, his need to read the instructions flashed up by the unwelcome observer, helped him convince himself he was not backing down from a challenge. He found the next question easier to ask.
“What are your plans if you are discharged?”
The answer this time sounded well rehearsed, maybe too well.
“The Criminal Rehabilitation Department has arranged a new identity for me. They have found me approved accommodation and allocated employment as a production operative in a reclamation plant on one of the Middle Worlds. One called Thuringen, sir. For which I am grateful.”
Vane knew the form. The Criminal Rehabilitation Department gave a discharged Special the same deal they offered to any convict upon release: a dead end job, since no decent employer would accept them, with a room in a doss house paid up until their first paycheque. That, together with two sets of clothes and enough money to buy a couple of decent meals, remained the CRD’s standard offer to every ex-con. This man would get the same, except his notoriety required he be given a new identity too. Most released convicts, wisely, did not take up the CRD’s offer. Most had family who would take them in. Those with no other choice but to take the official hand-out were notorious for their high rate of re-offending.
Vane sighed and shook his head.
“Yes, the famous CRD package and how many manage to stick with that?”
He meant it to be a rhetorical question and the reply came back sounding glib.
“Not many stick through five years in the Specials – sir.”
Vane found himself glaring at Revid and looked quickly back to his screens.The whole idea of letting this creature loose into the community disturbed him.The man was too suave, too quick with his answers. Setting aside the idea they were dealing with a conscious and cunning mass-murderer, undeserving of any clemency, there remained an even more unpalatable reality. Even if Revid was indeed an innocent abroad, even if he had no conscious connection with his past history, it did not alter the fact his memories were filled with violence, war, obedience and institutionalisation. There was nothing of any value or relevance to draw on when faced with the demands of everyday life. At large in society, unsupported, Revid would be a walking time-bomb.
Whichever way Vane looked at it, turning him out on a CRD package was destined to end in disaster. Whoever conceived the crazy idea, was at best grossly misguided and at worst incompetent. But words were flashing up again, impatient and dismissive: Grant the discharge and let’s all get out of here.
Vane pretended not to see. He refused to be bulldozed by another agency whose agenda was clearly ticking boxes on a checklist, not considering the full facts and their implications. He returned his focus to Revid, still standing rigidly at attention.
“What makes you believe you have what it takes to live in the civilian world when you have no knowledge of it?”
He noticed no hesitation this time.
“I had no memory before I joined the Specials, sir. I had to learn how to live in this environment, meet and exceed the expectations placed upon me. I did so. I believe I can learn what is needed to fit into the civilian world in the same way.”
“But that is the problem, soldier. Before, your memory held nothing for you to draw on, or so you tell me, but in becoming a civilian you would bring to that the expectations and reactions you have learned in this unit. Unlike any other Special I might approve for release, who can convince me they are ready to go back to society, you would not be ‘going back’. You have never lived in society.”
The green eyes remained focused on the middle distance and Revid said nothing.

From Trust A Few – book one in Haruspex, the second Fortune’s Fools trilogy by E.M. Swift-Hook – which is only 0.99 to buy throughout November.