Two Women and Some Books
A thing of the moment
Available now
Harnessed by magic
Or some other how
Twenty-six letters all jumbled and torn
From table to fable
Yet somehow forlorn
A thing of the moment
Ephemeral fine
As thin as a cobweb
And frozen in time
The story it crouches and snarls in its cage
A thing of the moment emboldened by rage
The circus wagons move from town to town, with the brightly-arrayed creatures tumbling and dancing about them – animated only by the strangely compelling music of the singing oil drums. And all the while, the masters collect money in their horny palms.
Do we ever feel the joy of the dance? No. It is not permitted. We must remain with the freak show, alongside the moustached lady who flaunts her tattooed self and the strangely misshapen beings whose birth was unfortunate and whose lives have rarely been more than burdensome.
We sometimes wonder if we were born as we are now. Truth to tell, we do not know. Although we sometimes speak of where we might have come from none of us has even an idea of before we were as we are.
But our life isn’t hard. Not now. Not if we can manage not to mind the staring eyes.
We speak of that, too, in the quiet of the night – understanding that, hate the eyes though we might, they are less troublesome than the hurled rocks and stones that were overwhelming us in the only other place we can remember. We still feel the hurt to our bones, and the strangeness of relief when the masters drove our persecutors from us with cudgels and harsh words. They removed us from the place and we understood that we became their possessions from that day on.
Our present owners are never truly unkind, although they think of us as animals who have no more comprehension than the heffalumps and the prancing unicorn.
So we stand in our wagon, and those with a brown penny to spend come to look and enjoy their own revulsion. Sometimes those with coins of silver or gold pay to come into the place where we are. They are permitted to do certain things to us. Things that are unpleasant, but never as painful as the rocks of those who sought our deaths. We endure, and are rewarded for our stoicism with treats of honey and brief walks in quiet woodland glades.
Sometimes we think of escape. If we ever get a chance.
Opportunity comes to those who are patient, though, and ours knocked in a most unexpected way.
It was a hot summer night and the circus was leaving town in a hurry. There were whispers of inquisitors in the district and the dark ones had no mind to lose any of their pets to the heavy hand of such as those. The procession hustled along as fast as was possible given the need for discretion. The only sound to be heard was wagons softly creaking in the darkness, while the rising dust clogged our nostrils and besmirched our robes. Nobody capered in a foolish dance, and no music heralded our movement. All was tight-lipped quiet and care to be unobserved.
At a certain place in the deepest shade of the trees our party left the road and turned its face to the hidden ways, where the old trees moved their limbs aside making a path between themselves for the swaying wagons.
We judged it to be coming towards dawn when the wagon beneath us lurched and broadsided itself across the barely discernible byway. There came a horrid cracking sound and we shuddered to a stop.
“Blasted, buggering axle.”
The master who had been driving the patient burden beasts swore in a bitter undervoice. For a few moments there was sufficient chaos to awaken the hungry flesh eaters in their shiny cages. But the masters are resourceful and they soon regained order although we feared certain of the chattering ones would have felt the lash of a stock whip before they quieted.
And we?
We stood in our customary quietude whilst they argued the best way forward.
“Leave them. We can return for them tomorrow night.”
“Leave them, and have them run away? What foolishness is this.”
We knew that cold, harsh voice. It belonged to the ringmaster, who was heavily handsome in the way of humans, and whose anger all the circus feared. Or almost all.
Around him, the talk subsided, until only one was left to brave, or foolish, enough to argue. It was the old one. The one whose voice rustled like last years desiccated leaves and was so discordant as to make our mouths and throats feel as if we had been thirsting for many a day.
“Have them run away? Think again grandson of my son. Where would they go?”
The silence fell heavily cold into the breathless heat of the night, but then he laughed. “Where indeed.”
In a very short while they were gone and around us there was no sound save for the noises as the forest herself awoke. Emboldened by our unaccustomed aloneness we sat swinging our feet over the sides of our broken home.
The air grew cooler and the scent of grass came to our nostrils.
“Such beauty,” one of us spoke into the softly verdant air.
We watched as the sun rose and the creatures of the day took over from the night fliers and crawlers.
Another of us spoke into the pinkness of the dawn.
“Do we dare?”
“Do we dare what?”
But we knew. We knew that if we would ever leave the wooden prison in which we dwelt, now was our time.
Nobody moved, though, and our hands stroked the smooth wood of familiarity.
It must have been high noon before yet another found voice.
“After all. Where would we go?”
This story was inspired by the image created by Paul Biddle
If I ruled the world,
Though I’d never wish to,
With banners unfurled
I’d gift it to you-
To you who are poor,
Who are lowly and weak,
To you who have nothing
And never dare speak
To you who have knowledge
Who’ve seen what’s been done
Who study this world
And know how it’s run
To you who ask little
And suffer so deep
Who’d care for this world
and it safely keep
Then maybe I’d sit back
And know that these lands
Were shared and protected
And in very good hands
But for now is this world
Torn by folly and greed
And lusting for power
Trumps all our need.
Listen to Granny because Granny always knows best!
Reality television is a concept that leaves much to be desired, though I suppose it’s relatively cheap to make and panders to the human love of schadenfreude. But it’s so getting on my nerves. To the extent I’ve started only watching live football and people making pots.
But what has so wound granny up?
I will elucidate.
Me and Gyp happened to turn on the flat screen the other night in time to be ‘entertained’ by some old guy doing the splits on ice and persuading a diverse panel of celebrities to jump through a hole in said ice and halfway drown in water colder than my late unlamented’s feet in bed. All of which is, apparently, going to help with their mental health. Excuse me if I cry bullshit…
Then there’s a show where a swearing man decides who he is going to help start up a catering business. Which involves a shitload of swearing and posturing by the very annoying host and a load of challenges designed to make the contestants look inept. I have some advice for whoever wins: run away as fast as you can, or you will have swearing man sitting on your back like a monkey until the day you go bankrupt.
We can follow that with the chance to be mentored and invested in by a short, tetchy man with fat fingers. This is a programme in which a group of dislikable young people vie with each other to see who can be the most unprincipled, being whittled down one by one until only the truly least admirable remains. That floats doesn’t it…
But it’s not a patch on the social experiment that sends couples to stay in a fairly grim looking ‘hotel’ where a ‘life coach’ encourages them to ‘experiment sexually’ under the eye of a camera or two. Even Gyp brought up his doggomeat.
My final example of televisual inanity comes in the form of a show where a contestant picks someone to go on a date with, based on the visual appeal of their genitalia. It almost makes me long for the days of ‘Blind Date’ at least the contestants thereon spoke – even if what they said was mostly embarrassing and clumsy innuendo.
My conclusion?
I really don’t have one, except to say I’m sometimes very glad to be old and not to have misplaced the tv remote.
Don’t have nightmares
A darkling drabble offers a shiver of horror in a hundred words…
A ghostly fairground on Walpurgis Night. The girl pressed on through the sights and smells, careful to touch nothing in her passing. She knew her goal, and music pulled her onward to the place that would test her fortitude and prove her a true witch. There it was. The horses pranced and the music screeched and groaned. Each waltzing horse had a laughing child on its back. Until you looked closer and saw that the pink mouths were stretched wide by agonised screaming, not laughter.
Moved to pity, she was glad of an empty stomach as she stood and endured.
When our chance to run away finally came, we almost missed it. Had I not awoken with a full bladder, we would have been herded into the panic room with the rest of the breeders. But I did, and glanced from my window before getting back into bed. I saw lights moving in the hills behind the woods outside the garden wall. For a moment they meant nothing to me, but then I came fully awake with a start. I scrambled into my running clothes, put the little red book and my own book of herbal remedies in my pocket, then crept along the corridor to eight’s room.
I shook her awake, but put my hand over her mouth to ensure she made no sound. She sat up and eyed me warily, then realised I was fully dressed. She dressed herself in silence and, together, we slipped silently up the attic stairs. Not a moment too soon.
We grabbed the contents of the old trunk, then I stood on eight’s shoulders to reach the trapdoor leading to the roof, pulling her up behind me. As the trap closed behind us, we heard the sirens start. We crept carefully along the apex of the roof, until we reached a bank that of chimneys where the roof of the main building met that of the kitchen. We concealed ourselves among the brick chimneystacks, from where we could observe the goings on below us.
For the first time eight spoke. ‘How did you know?’
‘Very luckily. I woke with a full bladder. Looked out of the window on my way back to bed. Saw lights. Fortunately, I was awake enough to make a connection.’
‘You were only just in time.’
‘I know. And now we watch.’
We huddled in the shadows, waiting to see from what direction and in what numbers the raiders came. Firstly, the lights beyond the woods resolved themselves into snarling all-terrain vehicles, then we heard the strange high-pitched whine that denoted the presence of aircars.
This was no random raid by local toughs. This was a big one. The all-terrains raced to the front of the building, three aircars landed in the garden, and two more took station outside the walls. We heard the sound of splintering wood, as some sort of weapon split the front door. Well, we knew our direction of escape, and now was the time to go.
From The Barefoot Runners by Jane Jago.
Writing made easy – if you don’t mind the bumps!
The wit, wisdom, joy and frustration of a writer’s life summed up in limericks…
One wonders from which secret place
Wise words will emerge, at fast pace
One’s fingers and thumbs?
Or the hole in one’s bum?
Although never the hole in one’s face.
“I suppose there is a reason for this, Bard?” Bryn’s assessing gaze held accusation. His greying hair was kept back from his face by a simple thong. He looked so much more the true Briton than Dai although his blood was mixed with Roman and every corner of the Empire. “Up at the crack of dawn, dogs and full detail. Looking for a girl you have sleeping under your own roof?”
Dai tightened his lips into a straight line.
“Are we not all good men of Britannia?”
Bryn’s expression changed.
“So your pet praetorians…?”
“Should be doing their job – as you do yours, Investigator Cartivel.”
“That is merda,” Bryn spat in the grass. Beside him were three of his team piloting short-range drones to scan the surrounding area. It was their second stop and they had four more to make to cover the area Logan had suggested.
“I prefer to call it ‘the truth’,” Dai said, shielding his eyes against the autumnal sun to watch one of the drones.
“Ah, so we have sunk so low as that. Next it’ll be justice and then where will we be.” Bryn sucked in his cheeks as if something tasted sour. “It is strange, because I was thinking it is more about you dressing up lies in gladrags. I was also thinking it means you are walking into the line of fire without any back up because you don’t want to let anyone else take that kind of risk.”
Dai glanced at him, but Bryn was staring out over the bucolic landscape as if that was all that held his attention.
“You don’t know-”
“I know when you are being a stubborn, stiff-necked, pure-blooded Celtic spado.”
Dai shook his head and sighed.
“Do you think I could face your Gwen if anything happened to you through me?”
“She’d be sure to put a curse on you,” Bryn agreed and looked back at Dai. “But I didn’t move out here away from the bright lights of Londinium and into the wonders of rural Britannia just to watch roses growing and sip mead. And my Gwen knows that. Besides, she’d take it ill if I started hanging around the house and pruning just yet.”
For a moment, Dai tried to marshal all the arguments he had been rehearsing since the previous afternoon. But as he met Bryn’s gaze they all retreated, broke and ran for cover. So, instead, he smiled and felt a sudden deep gratitude, together with something that could even have been relief.
“Well, we are both good men and good Britons, it would not be fair of me to keep you from your chance to join the cause.”
From Dying for a Poppy by E.M. Swift-Hook and Jane Jago.
A darkling drabble offers a shiver of horror in a hundred words…
Jack was a soulless parasite who specialised in marrying lonely middle-aged women. His latest fiancée was a satisfactorily wealthy soul whose adoration he enjoyed almost as much as her money.
When she wasn’t at the front door to greet him, he called her name. There was no reply, only a single drip, drip.
Thinking of plumbing he looked upwards only to be hit in the face by a splatter of blood from the partially decapitated body hanging over the banister.
He screamed and ran.
Into the arms of his last but one wife.
Who had found him.
At last…
What happens when the hunter becomes the hunted…
“Well, yes, you are right,” the unknown woman said, treating Cista Tyran to a condescending smile. “That was one of the less salubrious acquaintances Kahina achieved in her long career. And interestingly, that also brings us to the project which led to her downfall: Future Data — a predictive behaviour suite which was indeed highly promising in its early trials, but fell down so badly in the final real-world field test that those working on it renamed it ‘Futile Data’.”
She stopped, no doubt expecting laughter, then went on quickly when none came.
Perhaps, thought Grim, that kind of thing had them rolling in the aisles at political conventions. Would explain a lot about politicians if so. He listened politely as the woman explained how Future Data, in which a large amount of public money had been invested, had not only been shown to be faulty, but Kahina herself had contrived to mask the failings by some increasingly desperate measures, even eventually employing a hit man to try to make her predictions come true. Though who she had been targeting was unknown.
Now that little gem was not something that had come out in the trial.
Grim stirred slightly, his professional interest tweaked. This was his field of expertise.
“Do we know who she hired?” The woman smiled at him as she might at a very junior journalist asking an unnecessary question at an unwanted press-conference, a smile that was cold, impersonal and put upon. Enough to convince Grim that this was not a topic on which she wanted to share.
“A man called Archanbor Drummer, I believe, but it isn’t relevant to this briefing.”
Grim nodded and let it go. He knew someone who could tell him if Archanbor Drummer, a.k.a The Drum, had taken on any work in the last couple of years. He was just surprised that news of The Drum making another kill had not filtered through his grapevine at the time. It was the kind of thing that should have auto-qualified for the top line of his personal alternative newsfeed.
From Iconoclast: Mistrust and Treason a Fortune’s Fools book by E.M. Swift-Hook – which is only 0.99 to buy for a limited period.
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