The sea looked like molten steel, shining so brightly it hurt. Under her feet, the pebbles felt harsh and unforgiving, but she kept walking.

Once the water was up to her waist she began to swim, glorying in the coolness and her own strength.

When a hand grasped her ankle and pulled, she sunk into the monochrome depths. Laughing as she went down.

They surfaced together, one fair head and one dark. That kiss seemed to go on forever.

Much later, she swam back to shore and found her shoes.

The worry lifted from her husband’s face as she smiled.

©jj 2019

Ageing is trendy at ten,
But when you hit thirty, not then.
Though if you survive
Until you’re ninety-five
You’ll find that you’re quite cool again…

E.M. Swift-Hook

You can also listen to this on YouTube.

‘Starship Troopers’ was not a book that one had any intention to read.

Ever.

The blurb made it abundantly clear it was about boot camp and killing insectoid aliens in great quantities and the antithesis of everything that represents fine literature. To one, such as oneself, raised upon more the most sophisticated themes and rarified tomes by She Whose Name One Is Unfit To Mention, it seemed like being asked to enter into a rugby scrum only after ensuring two weeks of torrential rain have softened the pitch.

So why would I do such a thing? One hears the single nonplused warble resonating from my myriad readers. You can be sure, gentle people, it was through no choice of oneself.

This is a cautionary tale that tells how karma always finds a way.

Last month I was prevailed upon to join the local literati gathering – or ‘Ben’s Book Club’ as it is is listed on the Community Centre noticeboard. Mumsie had declared that it would be of great value to my own written words were I to take more time to peruse those of others. She also threatened to evict me from my writing sanctuary and turn it into a hell-hole brewery for her own vile alcoholic distillations if I refused.

So, perforce, enforced by force majeur, I went. The torrid event occupies an entire afternoon each week, filled with in-depth and avid discussion and dissection. Then, once the local gossip is dealt with, the group spends a few minutes at the end considering whatever book Ben has chosen for the week and being assigned one to read for the next.  The first week I went it was Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein.

The Review

A young man goes to boot camp and learns how to fight insectoid aliens so he can vote. The rest of the book describes the fighting. Spoiler: he doesn’t vote at the end of the book.

Stars: Four – for allowing me to learn sufficient juicy gossip from Ben’s Book Club members to blackmail Mumsie into letting me keep my writing sanctuary.

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.

Shining Raindrops was dancing for the shogun. 

Lord Shen was dark and heavily muscular, with flat, emotionless eyes, and she found herself a little afraid of that which might follow if she pleased him.

The musicians finished and he motioned them away.

Raindrops held her pose, hoping that she could keep as still as tradition demanded.

The assassin came through the rice paper wall. In one motion he cut the shogun’s throat from ear to ear. Even as thickly, scarlet blood pumped from the wound, the ronin was gone, with the limp form of a fainting geisha over his shoulder.

©jj 2019

A short story by Jane Jago from Pulling the Rug IV. You can listen to this on YouTube.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that an ageing rockstar in possession of an eight-figure fortune, must be in want of a nubile young woman to supplant his no longer appetising wife…

Eric Scoggins, the lead singer of The Wobbly Pebbles lay naked on the enormous bed in his Miami hotel and regarded his skinny, wrinkled body with sour amusement.
“I dunno about you,” he remarked to his sleeping penis, “but I reckon the only reason anybody wants us now is the fame and the money.”
For a moment he smiled as he remembered back when he started out in the business. Things felt different then, and groupies had seemed like an amusing way to chart the band’s rise to fame and fortune: the richer they got, the prettier the girls became. And, if pushed, he would have to admit to sampling a few along the way. But now he was almost seventy he would honestly prefer a cup of tea and an early night.
He sighed, and his thoughts grew sombre. The business of a farewell tour was exhausting enough without the necessity to run from the rapacious claws of the young and greedy. He wasn’t remotely interested, but these girls were unrelenting and he was beginning to feel like the quarry in a very bloody hunt.
To cap it off he was lonely, and only one person could help. He speed dialled a number in England and spoke to the person who had been the centre of his life for some forty years.
“I miss you. Please come.”
“Okay.”
Three nights later, as the band played its final encore ever, a particularly persistent blonde bribed a hotel desk clerk for a room key.
Blondie let herself into Eric’s palatial suite, and slipped out of her clothes before disposing herself decoratively across the wide whiteness of the bed. This, she thought with a smirk, would be almost too easy.
It was more than an hour later when she heard the door to the suite open. Carefully tousling her blonde curls she sat up in the bed and plastered on a seductive smile. Almost at once her smile became a frown as she heard voices. What was going on? The old fool never brought anybody upstairs with him. But there was somebody with him now. Somebody who could wreck all her plans. Her smooth pink hands curled into claws.
The first words she could make out were spoken in the distinctive gravelly tones of a voice that had broken a million hearts.
“I’m going out on the balcony for a smoke. You coming?”
“Yeah. I will. But I need the bathroom first.”
The sound of what could only be a kiss pushed Blondie’s patience almost beyond its limits, but she managed to wait until she heard the balcony door slide and the sound of heels crossing to the bathroom. Quick as a flash she streaked across the corridor to where an ordinary looking, and far from young, woman was sitting on the john.
“Clear off,” Blondie snarled, “it cost me five thousand dollars to get in here and I’m not having some used up old tart ruin my chances.”
The woman looked at her incuriously. Then she laughed. “I have a better idea. You clear off.”
Blondie led with her nails, going for the older woman’s face. But she was caught from behind and her wrists were held in an iron grip. She wriggled and kicked but all to no avail. The woman got up off the pan and disappeared for a second, coming back with a bundle of clothes.
“You have two minutes to dress and leave. If you aren’t gone in that time I’m calling security.”
Blondie looked from Eric’s determined face to the bland expression of the woman who stood at his side.
“I don’t understand,” she said fretfully, “why don’t you want me? Everybody knows you are ripe for a wife upgrade.”
Eric shook his head.“Just get out.”

It is a truth less universally acknowledged that some ageing rockstars might even love their wives…

Jane Jago

Ssith lifted his head out of his bowl of mead.

“What I don’t understand is the obsession with virgins. Do they taste any different?”

The bardragon flicked a dirty cloth over the meadstained wood. 

“Don’t arst me. I’m a vegetarian.”

An oldster at the end of the bar belched a gout of flame. “It ain’t obsession, youngster, it’s the law.”

“The law?”

“Yes. Stupid. The law. Stops young sprigs like yourself depopulating the country.”

The suit of armour in the corner lifted its visor. “That, and dirty old buggers like the king have an excuse to shag the prettiest girls.”

©jj 2019

.... or 'How To Speak Typo' by Jane Jago

chellenge (verb) – the action of drinking a pint of Very Fizzy beer in one go

consonentn (noun) – the bit in the bottom of the marmite jar you can’t reach with any implement, including your fingers/tongue

disturn (verb) – of barbecues the act of forgetting to turn over the burgers thus presenting one side raw and one charcoal

eggro (noun) – fight caused by somebody being a big head

farder (adjective) – of corporal punishment the act of being administered with a rolled up newspaper 

gung (noun) – the lickings in the bottom of a mixing bowl having been used to create chocolate cake

histpry (noun) – an old woman who sticks her nose in everyone’s business

immersian (noun) – native to the island of Immers (somewhere near the centre of Lake Titicaca)

messgae (noun) – a man who cooks but don’t clean the kitchen after (mostly just a man, then)

munge (verb) – to mix together foodstuffs until of a homogeneous texture and uniform khaki colour

persoanl (adjective) – of or pertaining to the bum crack

proverbail (noun) – legal terminology meaning the release of a story after payment of a large sum of money

remmeber (noun) – small burrowing rodent of the genus fartus fartus renowned for the unusual odour it leaves behind it

skart (noun) – garment worn randomly somewhere between the waist and the knees

vesnion (noun) – bright yellow garment worn by cyclists and elderly dog walkers

whsiky (noun) – a type of alcoholic drink beloved of those already too inebriated to speak properly

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

Six-year-old Connie broke her nose. Pa couldn’t afford a doctor, so it was left alone. From that day, nobody saw anything but her bent and flattened nose.

Other girls were bought flowers and ribbons. But not Connie, who smiled her lopsided smile and got on with life.

The day a tongue-tied sheepherder arrived at the back door with a bunch of cornflowers and put them in her hands she blushed rosily.

“Why me?” she asked.

“Your eyes,” he whispered, “are as blue and kind as a summer sky.”

Their daughter had blue eyes – and a tiny nose.

©jj 2019

The start of the story Tongueless Caverns by E.M. Swift-Hook, a Fortune’s Fools story from the Inklings Press anthology Tales From The Underground. You can listen to this on YouTube.

Sanity slept in one of the wells below the deepest workings of the abandoned mine.
Yris knew because he dreamed of her often, dressed in pink froth and smiling with glass eyes at the abyssal dark. She had left him so many years ago and she had left the child with him. Perhaps she thought it a fair exchange, but she was wrong. Without her, he found being had long since become more than a burden. But he had continued to be, even so.
One hundred years to the day.
Nothing reached out from the past to offer solace. Only the weary shades of loss and bitter disappointment – of hopes raised only to plummet, like burnt out comets no longer trailing their glory and fire. The uncertain light flickered on the marl-plastered wall which held the record of those years. A private diary of his humiliation. Half his life lived out in these caverns.
Yris ran a hand over the protruding notches of stone he had set in the wall at the end of each year, the last still warm to the touch from the rock-melting heat of the energy weapon he had used to fix it in place. He thought about the final vial of life, cradled in its hiding place and wondered if he was right to wait longer.
“Will you at least eat?”
The voice made him turn, startled, but slower than he should. His ears, even with the deft enhancements he had created, no longer warned him of quiet footsteps on the cavern floor. He felt himself a fool for his moment of panic. The child was now a woman, this woman, who held out a bowl of something edible. He had long since stopped asking what. Her expression held pity. It perturbed him.
He should pity her, one who had lived out her whole life in the dark here with him,one who had no haunting memories of sunlight and open skies. No haunting, taunting, memories, echoing with the long silent voices of a lost time. And the laughter. He did remember the laughter – the taunting laughter – and sanity crying.
“You should eat, Gran’pa.” She put the bowl on his table, the one not covered with broken and disembowelled technology others had scavenged so he might build yet another wingless hope. Now she came over. Close to, he remembered this was not the child grown to a woman, this was the child of that woman’s child, also now grown. He could see nothing of sanity in her. His legs weakened as that realization grew stronger.
One hundred years.

E.M. Swift-Hook

Her errant husband moved out and cat moved in. Sarah was lonely, and its arrogance amused her.

The months passed, and it was noticeable that any man who came offering ‘consolation’ seemed to fall foul of the cat.

One tripped over him and broke an ankle, another developed a serious allergy, a third got his face badly scratched.

Sarah rubbed the broad ginger head.

“I could almost think you wanted me to stay single.”

The cat purred loudly.

The day Adam walked back through the door, cat disappeared. Sarah looked into her husband’s green eyes and understood.

“Bastard,” she said.

©jj 2019