The problem with having little legs is you keep getting left behind. Shorty was so lost he just laid back his head and howled. But missis never heard him. He sat on the cold pathway shivering in the thin rain.

Then a gruff voice spoke.

“Are you lost, little chap?”

Shorty whined. 

“Ain’t passed anybody back that way…”

He picked Shorty up and his legs moved so fast they would surely catch missis soon.

When Shorty heard her voice calling desperately, the man speeded up. 

The advantage of having little legs is that big men rescue you – and missis too…

©️jj 2020

Maybe by Jane Jago and E.M. Swift-Hook . Sometimes we walk the edges of realty…

The scene looked more solid now, as if it had come into focus, there was a stall selling canydfloss just opposite and two children with balloons bobbing on strings ran past, groups of teens and families. There was something strange about them, most of the young men had longer hair, the girls wore a lot of ethnic look clothing and they all seemed to favour jeans with flared boot-cut legs. 
“Come.”
Jess glanced at Annis who was reinforcing her request by taking hold of Jessica’s hand and pulling on it’
“I’m not sure it’s a good – “
“Come!” Annis was frowning now. “Show you.”
Reluctant to leave the relative sense of security this enclosed place gave her, Jess found herself gripping the hand of the child quite tightly. She was not able to avoid a gasp as the huge felines slid out of the door ahead of them. Annis paused in the doorway and looked back.
“You not talk, the Old One hears you. Not hear me.”
“What is this Old One?”
Jessica recalled the cold feeling she had felt before when Annis had made her hide with the cats. Even their warmth had not stopped her shivering. 
“Old One is ancient – is Blood Eater. Come.”
Jess still resisted the tugging hand.
“Blood eater? You mean blood drinker? Like a vampire?’
And that was what Annis had called Roald. For some reason the idea fitted with him well.
“No,” Annis said, almost crossly, she was getting impatient as if driven by some urgency. “Blood Eater. It eats you.” Either the girl had no real idea of what she was saying or she lacked the vocabulary to say what she wanted, because she pulled again at Jessica’s hand. “Now come, not talk.”
Jessica gave in and followed the girl, her mind full of Bram Stoker and HP Lovecraft. It was not a very comforting state of mind to be in as they left the sanctuary of the small cabin Annis had made her home. 
This time there was no twisted tangle to clamber over, this time there was a ladder and the space above their heads was filled with looping rails, not lit up like the rest of the rides and booths around them. Annis led the way to a gated barrier and produced a key from somewhere to open it so they could get through. There was a sign on the outside of the gate which declared the roller-coaster closed for… Jessica would have read more about it, but Annis was pulling her hand again, finger to lips to remind her not to talk.
It was a dream, of course. She had fallen asleep in the car, in the carpark and was dreaming all this. It wasn’t real, it couldn’t be. It just felt real. But then Jess had lucid dreams sometimes, like the one where she was naked on the clifftop and –
“Jessica! Jess!”
Roald. She could not see him but his voice was close by. It did not sound like an: ‘I’ve just spotted you’ attention grabbing shout, more of a call in the hope that she might hear and answer. 
“Jessica! I know you are going to be frightened, but it’s alright. I can protect you. Come to me, my princess, I’ll keep you safe.”
It was strange though, that his voice carried over the noise of the fairground music, the sirens that wailed about the start and end of the rides, the thunder of the machinery itself and the cheerful shrieks of the crowd. But despite the noise, his voice sounded clear to her. Almost as if she was wearing an earpiece. Then he was there. Right in front of her and she froze.

Jane Jago and E.M. Swift-Hook

Part 9 of Maybe will be here next week…

The pathway
Back to her
Shone gold
He turned his face
For home
Ere he grew old
The route
Across the sea
Called soft and low
The way
To love. To home
Where the soft winds blow

©️jj 2019

He heard the whispers as he strode the echoing corridors of that grey, weed-choked castle perched on the very edge of the sea
“A hero,” the sibilant voices declared. “A hero.”
The young man preened himself and puffed out his chest. It was always nice to be recognised, even if it was only by the ghosts in a backwater like this. His steel-clad feet rung on the stone floors and rattled on the worn and slippery steps of a spiral staircase. As he walked, he wondered what the assignment would be. Perhaps there would be a sleeping maiden, or a crone at her spinning wheel, or a queen labouring under a geas, or a dragon. He enjoyed dragons. One killed dragons and moved on. Women tended to be needier. If one kissed a maiden she rather expected one to stick around, and the tears and tantrums when it became apparent that wasn’t happening wore on the nerves more than somewhat. Then he became aware that he had reached the apex of the staircase and pulled his awareness back to the work in hand.
Loosening his sword in its scabbard, he laid his hand on the huge wrought iron latch.
The room at the top of the tower was a fantastical octagon, with pointed stained glass windows in every wall, and delicate flying buttresses made of carved white marble. For a moment the hero thought himself alone in that place, then his ears caught the sound of slow breathing. He lifted his eyes and saw her, seated on a plain wooden chair on a mezzanine high above him, wrapped in velvet so black it seemed to leach the light from the room and with burnished auburn hair falling to the floor. She might have been beautiful but it was impossible to see as her eyes and the top half of her face were wrapped in gauzy bandages.
‘Aha,’ he thought, ‘a geas’.
“Who comes?” The voice was low, musical and pleasing.
“One who will break whatever enchantment holds you lady.”
She laughed, a sound like the chimes of silver bells and rose from her chair. “Come hither. And we shall speak of this…”
He all but ran up the intricately carved and smoothly polished wood drawn by the excitement of the quest, and by somewhat else. By an undefinable pull to the very centre of his being. By the elusive perfume that he somehow knew came from her velvet skirts. And by a furtive fantasy involving a rope of red-gold hair.
When he reached the head of the final staircase, he was surprised and a little embarrassed to find himself breathless and flushed of cheek. He felt anger that a mere female should so disturb the composure of on so far above her and he frowned direfully. The lady appeared not to notice, moving to a side table on whose mirror bright surface reposed a silver wine jug and a tray of long-stemmed glasses so finely blown as to look like bubbles on twisted stalks.
“Wine, good sir?” The lady’s voice was mild and he felt himself relax in the face of such politeness.
The lady poured wine the colour of blood and brought glasses for herself and her visitor.
“Will you not sit?”
He sunk into the cushioned comfort of a chair that the cold analytical side of his brain insisted hadn’t been there a moment before. For a brief scintilla of time he stayed his hand regarding the glass in his hand with deep suspicion. The lady raised her own glass and drank and he watched the movements in the white column of her throat with an emotion any other man might have recognised as lust. She laughed, low and intimate, and he raised his eyes to the gauzy veil that enwrapped the top half of her face. To his surprise he found it was dissolving as he looked; he was enraptured and forgot his misgivings as his blood rushes unbidden to his loins. He raised his glass and drank, noticing as he did so that the lady’s eyes were the colour of rain-washed violets. The wine flowed down his throat as sensuously as a caress and he wondered what rare and fine vintage it might be. When it’s syrupy sweetness hit his stomach he dropped the glass from suddenly nerveless fingers. The sound of it shattering into a million shards was the last thing he was to hear for some time.
When the hero awoke, his first thought was that he was naked and cold, and then it came to him that he could not move. For the first time in his life he knew the meaning of fear. He opened his mouth to cry for aid but no sound would come.
“He is with us.”
The voice was familiar and he managed to swivel his eyes to where the lady stood regarding him with a peculiar expression in her eyes.
“He is,” she said musingly, “passing fair. Perhaps it would amuse me to keep him for a while.”
Someone laughed and it wasn’t a pleasant sound.
“Domina. Do not be so cruel.”
The lady came over and leaned down into the hero’s face. She moved suddenly and he thought she might have been going to kiss him. But she did not. Instead she bit the fullness of his lower lip, licking the blood away in a manner that made him think of a kitten lapping milk. He closed his eyes, unaccountably distressed and unable to understand what was happening to him. He was a hero. Invulnerable. Undefeatable. Fearless. And yet…
While his befuddled mind was struggling to process this strangeness the sound of sliding silk alerted him to who knew what and he opened his eyes to see the now naked lady climbing onto the bier where he lay. She straddled him and he thought there was mocking laughter in the back of the eyes that studied him.
She leaned forwards until her breasts all but touched his face.
“I’ve never had a pretty hero before.”
Then she leaned back and he saw the dark glimmer of the obsidian blade she held in her hands. He saw it and knew it for what it was only a second before it slashed his throat from ear to ear and his eyes grew dark. He never felt the priests rip his still beating heart from his chest, nor did he smell the disconcertingly edible aroma as they threw it onto a fiercely hot brazier…
A hero died. A lady laughed. And somewhere a dark god smiled.

©️jane jago 2018

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe
She’d long lost its partner, so what could she do?
She didn’t have money to buy her another
She didn’t have family, sister or brother.
She lived all alone and slept under a bridge
And ate what she could from the soup kitchen fridge
Because she was never there to get her food hot
She had no one to care if she ate or did not.
She was found, I heard say, on a bench in the park
She’d been sitting all day – but had died in the dark.

E.M. Swift-Hook

Bonjour mes petites,

And as I place my fingers upon the keyboard to reach out to you, dear Readers Who Write, I feel a certain powerful link has now been established between us. I, your pedagogue, creator of the seminal classic science-fiction opus, ‘Fatswhistle and Buchtooth’, and you my disciples, minions of literature, striving to bring to birth your first fumbling fantasies.

What, you may wonder, led me to this pivotal point of realisation in our ongoing relationship? Well, it was that I received a missive from one Adoring Fan, asking – nay pleading with me, to come to her aid. And so, moved by her desperate plight, I shall don my metaphorical armour and ride to the rescue on my white charger.

Dear Ivy,

Sometimes my characters do things that I don’t mean for them to do and it affects my plot. What should I do?

Regards,

Melonie.

Dear Melonie,

How I feel your pain and anguish! It is such a grief when those very characters which you have nursed and nurtured within your own bosom, turn on you like ungrateful lovers and spite your best intentions.

But you must first remember that these characters are brought to birth by the delicate insemination of the Muse into the fecund womb of your own creativity. These are the delightful love-children of Calliope and as such they are bound to challenge your parental authority and demand their own way in all things.

Now, there will be those who will say ‘Be firm!’ and insist you impose your will on these unruly offspring. It is your story and these characters are mere brain-foibles – figments you have postulated to carry the plot. Force them to do what you demand and be done with it!

But to such, I say ‘Fiddlesticks!’ and I say ‘Phooey!’. Those who take such a view understand nothing of the higher levels of authorial inspiration. To them is forever barred the inner sanctum of creative intimacy. They will never know the delight of engaging with the fruits of their literary loins. No, dear Melonie, I counsel you quite otherwise.

Be bold and invite your rebellious muselings to meet with you. Remember, these are not mere stirrings in your synapses, these are real and pure individual characters, formed from the life-breath of your soul.  So then, in an atmosphere of trust and empathy brought about by your deep familial bond, open your heart to them and show them the reasons for the choices you wish to make about their lives. And more, you must listen! Listen to their dulcet voices, their tones of appeal, their hopes, their fears, their aspirations. If well done, with the love and compassion every creative parent owes to the true and legitimate heirs of their art, then – and only then – will you reach a consensus and be able to progress.

Regards,

Moonbeam Farquhar Metheringham IV

PS. Please do not address me as ‘Ivy’ again that is a privilege I reserve only to my close and intimate friends and you do not qualify. Unless you happen to have written an incredibly popular fantasy or science fiction book of course, in which case I will send you my contact details by return and we may be able to enter into some form of carefully modulated acquaintanceship.

If you have a literary problem you may avail yourself of one’s wisdom by posting to my Facebook presence.

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.

Snow. As white as a silken sheet. Falling from the sky in silence. Landing on my shoulders like fairy kisses. I catch flakes on my tongue glorying in their cold purity. 

Throwing my arms wide, I dance in the moonlight whirling and twisting with my feet making the complicated patterns of the ballet I have known all my life. 

How good it feels to be young again and dance in the falling snow without the pain of twisted limbs. I laugh for joy and look behind me at the virgin snow.

No footprints?

Then I understand. And dance some more…

©️jj 2020

‘Dragon Riders’ by Jane Jago just one of over twenty Game Lit stories by as many authors in Rise and Rescue – Volume One.  All profits from the Rise and Rescue anthologies will go to support wildlife devastated by the Australian wildfires. 

Their mountain guide landed at head of the column. He was a green dragon of elegance and purpose and his rider was young woman dressed in skintight leather. She carried a sword whose scabbard rode across her back. The dragon-head hilt that showed over her left shoulder gleamed with gold and precious gems – although Adam was willing to bet that the blade would be razor sharp steel with a blood channel running from hilt to tip. It came to his mind that the stark plainness of his own short sword with its gleaming blade and leather-wrapped hilt threw the difference in their status into sharp relief  – even if his armament, along with his utilitarian leather breastplate, greaves and vambraces, should have told anyone with eyes to see that he was a fighting sort of soldier. 
The dragon rider stepped lightly to the ground and Adam saluted. The woman grinned tautly.
“How many?”
“Twenty-five, madonna.”
“You got them all here in one piece then. Well done sergeant. Do they know what happens now?”
“No ma’am. Which is one of the reasons I got them all this far.”
The dragon rider’s grin grew positively vicious. “This could be where we get our first dropouts then.” She turned a pair of eyes as green as her dragon on the preening acolytes. “Right then. This is where we stop pussyfooting around. Here’s the deal. Brightstar and I are here to guide you through the mountains. But…” She managed the dramatic pause so well that Adam thought it practised. “But. There will be tests along the way. Starting right now. Dismount.” The last word had quite the cutting edge of a sword and all but one of the acolytes scrambled to obey. The dragon rider curled her lip.
“Is there something wrong with your hearing?”
“Give me one reason why I should obey a mere woman.”
She sighed, and her dragon stretched his neck so that his blunt, saurian head was close to the face of the arrogant priestling.
“Dissssmount,” he hissed, “my rider sssspeaksss for me.”
The acolyte fainted. One of his peers poked him with a toe.
“He’s down now.” 
But nobody laughed.
The dragon rider carried on as if there had been no interruption. “From here on you walk. Anything you need, you carry.” She took something from the back of the dragon and walked among the staring young men dropping a backpack at the feet of each. “You have five minutes to pack. Starting now.”
After a second of stunned immobility there was an undignified scramble.

Rise and rescue – Volume One is available for preorder now

The life of an elderly delinquent in limericks – with free optional snark…

I am old, and my face is a mess
It looks like a crushed cotton dress
It’s wrinkled and broke
Stained badly with smoke
And my wattles hang down on my chest

© jane jago

The rapturous applause ringing in her ears, Zhang Xiu Ying stepped off the podium and returned to her seat. Although it was wonderful to have the sense of support and approval for her unpublished and un-peer-reviewed paper at this symposium, her thoughts were already on the submissions process to the few scientific journals respected in her field.

In the audience, Krish Anand thought the Chinese girl who had been speaking looked cute and he posted a picture of her to his social media. As an afterthought, since he did not want anyone assuming he was sexist, he added a few words about what she had been saying.

Her news blog needed livening up, so Florencia Quezada put the picture of the pretty Chinese academic on her page, read the words Krish had put with it and – as she didn’t really understand it – added some thoughts and ideas of her own to make it into something a bit more substantial.

It was a quiet day on RadioNews247 and Bjorn Olafsson had been searching the internet desperately for something to feed the ravenous maw of twenty-four-hour news coverage. There had been no terrorist attacks – or at least none in any place the 247 audience would have ever heard of or cared about; the politicians’ tweets had been banal to dull and lacking in controversy and he was at his wit’s end. Then he saw it. Grinning with triumph he wrote a few lines to go in the next ‘On The Hour’ bulletin and started phoning a couple of people he knew would be free and willing to comment on air.

Zac Wade had the radio on as he was driving home. He didn’t like TV as that meant you might get noticed somewhere by someone. No cell phone for the same reason and no computer neither. Life off-grid was safest. You could keep out the government and defend your own land. The news bulletin made him put his foot to the floor of his battered old Dodge cab-over pickup. Them aliens was invading – said so on the news.

Waiting to board her plane home, Zhang Xiu Ying glanced at her newsfeed ‘Chinese Scientist Proves Aliens Are Invading’. There was a picture of a narrow, hairless face with black olive-shaped eyes. Clickbait crap. She scrolled on without really thinking more about it. She was just happy her article speculating on tiny anomalous ferric inclusions in a layer of Pleistocene clay as being extra-terrestrial from a meteor shower was being considered for a quality geological journal.

E.M. Swift-Hook