Two Women and Some Books
Above,
On wings,
A flight achieved
Beyond
The reach
Of human scope,
Clouded
Skies embrace
The solitary spirit.
Dreams
That lift
The humbled mind
Endure,
And ride
The silent wind
Forever,
Through clouds
Imbued with gentle grey.
Howdy again,
It is I, your inspirational instructor in the arcane literary arts, Moonbeam Farquhar Metheringham IV. Again it falls to me to remind you of my impeccable credentials as the author of ‘Fatswhistle and Buchtooth’, once described as ‘amazingly….written….incredible….story’. One comes to you this week, bright-eyed and bushy tailed. If a little physically worn. One comes to you in the full flood of joy. One comes to you in the full knowledge that one is becoming a better and more sensitive writer day on day. One comes to you replete, but still hungering. One comes to you with reluctance but determination. A teacher must teach, I tell myself. A teacher must teach. So teach one shall.
Today’s lesson concerns a literary device about which one has mixed feelings, but one it is unwise to ignore as its usefulness cannot be overstated, although it can be overused. Of what does your beloved pedagogue speak?
Ah yes. The cliffhanger. Those little hooks of anticipation one sets in the flesh of one’s besotted readership leaving them like the cocaine addict without his fix, like the lover deprived of an adored one’s skin, like half of a loving pair left suddenly alone. Craving. Craving….
Properly used, the cliffhanger can ensure that one’s readership awaits with baited breath the next instalment. That they turn the page with shaking hands barely able to contain the excitement that one’s literary efforts stir in their innocent breasts.
Improperly used, the cliffhanger becomes as the drumbeat of the music that ends each episode of some trashy soap opera or another. It becomes as the dying fall at the end of a popular melody. As the cawing and rook-like scratching of the comic-book hero who will live to fight another day be it limbless or headless.
Beware the crass and sensational.
Compare and contrast.
I rest my case as I rest my head as on a lover’s breast.
I leave you to consider the use of the cliffhanger with an example from my own literal life.
Last time one left you in the knowledge that some great and cataclysmic occurrence had brought a newness and brightness to one’s life. Now read on.
It was nine of the clock and the front door of Myrtle Villa was flung open with such force as to throw it back against the fading floral print of the wallpaper with a reverberating crash.
“Moons, I’m home…” Mumsie’s voice was slurred almost beyond recognition and I readied myself for either maudlin sentiment or vicious physical attack. But it was neither of those things. It was much worse. “I’ve brought the gang along. We’re going to have a welcome home Moons party.”
One quickly gathered together one’s papers and secreted them in the depths of a cretonne cushioned ottoman before assembling a welcoming smile and turning to face the doorway. The usual gang of halfwits, deadbeats, alcoholics, out-of-work whores, and accountants began to dribble into the room. And each found it necessary to greet one either with loose-lipped and unpleasant kisses or by slapping one painfully about the back and shoulders.
And then IT happened. Just as suddenly as that. One minute one was cringing in the corner. The next instant…
What?
You will find out next time. Perhaps…
Until then. Hasta la vista muchachos!
I was:
Fifteen when I first set eyes on him.
Seventeen when he fed me red wine, popped my cherry and walked away.
Thirty-one when he walked into a very boring cocktail party. I recognised him immediately; he was even dressed very much the same in faded blue jeans and a black shirt with the sleeves rolled up his brawny forearms. He scanned the room with his denim-blue eyes and I was immediately transported back fourteen years to another party in another world.
He had materialised at my elbow with a glass of red wine in each hand.
“I can’t bear to see a pretty girl not drinking.”
It was so vivid that I could even smell the crushed grass underfoot in the marquee.
I snapped back to the twenty-first century in time to see those eyes skip over me, then back, narrowing in recognition.
I put down my glass, walked quietly out of the party and hailed a cab.
Three days later I received a text.
Three days after that I was in his bed.
I rolled over and gave him my best slumbrous look.
“You wanna play a game?”
He was intrigued enough to fall in with my plan.
Three hours later he was tied naked to the bed and I was writing uncomplimentary things about his sexual prowess on his torso with a sharpie.
The photographs were an internet sensation.
Oh yes, revenge is a dish best eaten cold…..
Time is certainly a tricky thing. Mumsie seems to have scant grasp of it for sure. The amount of occasions she has declared she would be visiting the local tawdry tavern for ‘a quick one’, vowing to return within the hour, only to roll back inebriated post-midnight, are too numerous to count.
Indeed, it was whilst awaiting her return one such evening that I came upon a slender tome, a mere novella, which claimed to be a true classic of speculative fiction by a gentleman who preferred to be known by his initials, as is now such a modern trend. I recalled reading some platitudinous parable by the same author when I was at school, the story of a sighted man who discovers a country where everyone else is blind. But this, the cover blurb assured me, was no such. It was science fiction!
So to the review.
A man makes a time machine and is doing a lecture tour about it. He uses the device, goes hundreds of thousands of years into the future and lands in a social allegory. Here the effete and pretty Eloi (think elves) are hunted by the troglodytic Morlocks (think orcs). Our hero completely messes up when he tries to save the day, loses the girl (who is killed) and runs off in his time machine. He then stops at a couple more pointless and empty places on equally ridiculous timescales, before he somehow winds up back where he started in time for his next lecture.
One star for encouraging the entrepreneurial spirit by advocating lecture tours for scientists.
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“Left a bit.”
*Baaaaa-chink*
“Right – no left. LEFT!
*Cree-chink!*
“Shit! You guys suck at this. Gricks, get back round and we’ll – ”
*Froooo–rooo—jik”
“WHO THE – ?”
“Sorry Boss. Thought I was in with a pretty good -”
“Shut up Gricks! Just get back and we’ll give it one more try.”
*Foooooooo-rooo—jik*
*Cree-baaa-creeee-baaa*
*Clunk*
*Clunk*
*THUNK*
“Yeeee-Haaa!”
“Wooooo-woooooo!”
“Way to go people! Grats – we all just made a million creds.”
“Squeeee!”
“Yea – you too Gricks! Just get it in the salvage bay careful like, right? This is a piece of centuries old human history you got there, not some of your people’s modern space junk!”
From Dagger of Drani, the new book in the World of Drani series by Melonie Purcell.
A sharp pain in her arm made Taymar gasp. She opened her eyes and stared in horror at the blood dripping down her arm. Another stabbing pain shot through her hand and a new stream of blood trickled onto the table. Taymar glanced up in dismay at the blue Shreet who was now staring at her in confusion. But that was all it was. Confusion. Not shock at seeing her suddenly bleeding and no rush to see what was wrong. Only confusion. Why?
A new slash appeared on her arm. Taymar wanted to scream out, to clasp her hand over the cut and stop the bleeding, but the Shreet’s utter lack of response kept her still. It isn’t real. It’s my own mind doing this. Just like in the corridor that day. But how? Was it the exact same way Taymar used other telepath’s thoughts to trap them? Or some version of that, perhaps? Making them think it was real, making them believe they were trapped. The result was, they created their own prison. But this time, it was the other way around. Rydon was using Taymar’s thoughts. And not just to trap her. She intended to kill her.
As complete realization hit her, she stared down at her arm once more. This isn’t real, she told herself. Another stab of pain shot to the surface, but Taymar grabbed hold of it with her thoughts. It felt alien in her mind and she smoothed it out until it didn’t exist. It took a second to quiet the panic in her mind, but once she did, a feeling of perfect control filled her thoughts—her entire being. She watched with satisfaction as the gashes and blood faded away.
Taymar glanced up at the blue Shreet again. They made eye contact and from the back of her mind, she saw him elbow one of the older Shreet who was bent over her band on the bench. It didn’t matter, she would handle that later. Right now, she needed to deal with Rydon.
She closed her eyes and gathered the tiny blades still hanging in her thoughts into a solid molten ball. If Rydon could manipulate mental images, Taymar could as well. And she could do it better.
Another rush of panic washed over her, but this one didn’t come from Taymar’s own mind. Rydon tried to pull away. The ball in Taymar’s mind formed into the creature that had attacked her in the corridor. Its jaws snapped and bit as it tried to claw its way out of Taymar’s mental grip, but it no longer held any power over her. Taymar knew the secret now, and she wasn’t going to be fooled again. In her mind, she reshaped the beast, melting it back into the strings and ropes of thought that she was used to dealing with. The creature’s eyes grew wide as it struggled to hold its beast form. Gleaming yellow eyes stared straight at Taymar and she knew what she was really seeing was Rydon. And if she could see Rydon, she could teke her.
Holding Rydon’s mental gaze, Taymar used her telekinesis to shove the woman away. She just needed a moment of unconsciousness. A few seconds was all, and she would be free to wind those threads into a twisted ball that would keep Rydon silent and hopefully give Taymar time to find the memories of the Yarnit’s intentions and erase them.
A Bite of... Taymar of the World of Drani series.
Question One: So, Taymar. You can move things with your mind. What’s that like?
Really? That’s your question? I’ve been close enough to a Shreet to smell their breath and you want to know how I pick up a glass? Okay. You know how when you pick up something, you reach out and grab it with your hands and lift it up? Yeah? Well, it’s nothing like that at all. Now, what else do you want to know?
Question Two: Okay. Well then tell us about the Shreet. What are they like?
You know what’s weird, they’re just like us. Okay, that’s not exactly true. They have a flat face, and their nose is sort of a squished up slit on either side of their face, and their lips face inward, and their eyes are freakin’ huge, and they have these hair-braid things coming out of their heads like a bunch of snakes, but when you talk to them, they’re like us. They just want a place to call home and people to care about. I mean, yeah. True. They don’t really care if someone is already living in that place and has to be kicked out so the Shreet can move in, but at their core, it’s a basic need, right? They also have this really amazing claw thing on the back of the leg. I so wish I one of those.
Question Three: Who would win in a fight between you and Nevvis?
A fair fight? Me. All day. Have you seen him fight? He’s slow. That’s why he cheats. If he didn’t have his Dran telepathy to help him, I’d drop him in ten moves… maybe less. Although, he did hold out longer than I’d have thought possible against Kellin. But I’d still win. For sure.
You can meet Taymar in Shield of Drani which is only 0.99 at the moment and then follow her adventures in the newly released Dagger of Drani.
About Melonie Purcell: As a Las Vegas native--a rare species to be sure--Melonie grew up riding horses in the Nevada desert, camping and fishing her way through the state of Utah and chasing reptiles in Arizona. As an adult, she still traipses around the desert and the mountains, but now she does it in cooler shoes, a better backpack and usually carrying a camera. Author of the children's fantasy Hand and Talon, you can find Melonie on Goodreads, Twitter and her own website.
They set out for Brighton bright and early on Saturday morning, and Sam found himself more nervous than he was willing to admit, although he didn’t quite know why. A rather giggly lunch in a tiny pub on the downs, where Anna and Bonnie were obviously well known, did a good deal to restore his equilibrium, and he was able to sit back and relax as Anna drove the last few miles to Downsview, and their meeting with Ted.
Sam hadn’t been to sure what to expect a private facility for the care of dementia patients to be like, and he was pleasantly surprised by the homely look of the place. They parked the Audi, and a large young man came quickly over to the car. Anna opened the door.
“It’s only me Pete.”
The man smiled.
“Sorry, Miss Marshall. I didn’t recognise the car, and we’ve been having a bit of trouble recently with prying eyes.”
“Bastards. This is my partner Doctor Henderson. Sam, this is Pete Moss, who stops people from making money by publishing stuff about the folks who live here.”
“Pleased to meet you, Pete.”
“Likewise. Doctor? Of medicine?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you do sewing? Justine has cut her hand badly, and the local NHS dragons are refusing to send anyone out over the weekend.”
“Sewing is my forte. I’ll get my bag and have a look.”
Sam followed Anna and Bonnie towards the noise of a small disturbance inside the big, rambling house. There seemed to him to be entirely too many people in the room.
“Clear the room please, Anna. Ideally just me and Bonnie.”
Anna swung into action, and the room cleared. Sam went in with Bonnie at his heels. He saw a very lovely woman with blood dripping from her left hand. She seemed to have that hand clenched around something, and he set about getting her to let him look at the damage.
“Hello Justine. I’m Sam. Me and Bonnie have come to see to your hand.”
“Bonnie. Bonnie come.”
Sam signalled, and Bonnie stayed at his side.
“Bonnie doesn’t like the blood on your hand. Let me clean it up and then she’ll talk to you.”
Justine extended her hand and slowly unclenched it. He saw a large piece of glass embedded in her flesh. Opening his bag he donned surgical gloves and took out a dressing pack.
“Okay Justine. Bonnie and I are going to clean you up now.”
He used disposable forceps to remove the glass from the wound, then swabbed the hand with strong disinfectant. Bonnie wrinkled her nose, but stayed still beside Sam.
“Good dog” he whispered.
The hand was bleeding sluggishly, and he decided it definitely needed stitches.
“Does it hurt, Justine?”
She thought for a moment.
“No.”
“Can I sew it up then, so Bonnie will come and give you a cuddle?”
“Sew. For Bonnie.”
Being unsure whether or not his patient was on any medication, Sam opted to try and suture the cut without local anaesthetic. He called Bonnie a little closer then tried a stitch. Justine didn’t flinch, keeping her eyes fixed on Bonnie’s elegant, black face. Sam heaved an inward sigh of relief and set another dozen stitches as quickly as he could. Then he cleaned Justine’s hand again, and wrapped it in a clean bandage, fixing the bandage in place with elastic strapping.
“You’ll do. Now Bonnie will come and see you.”
He motioned the dog forward and Justine buried her face in the soft black fur. Anna re-entered the room followed by a big loose-limbed man and a uniformed nurse.
“You were brilliant. Nobody could get her to even open her hand.”
“I had Bonnie.”
Then he turned to the nurse.
“Is she on any medication?”
“Nothing.”
“Any allergies?”
“No.”
“I’ll give her a shot of penicillin then, just in case. It looks clean, but a shot wouldn’t hurt. I’ve put in self-dissolving sutures, so you won’t have the problem of getting them taken out.”
He turned to Justine, and taking a syringe from his bag he rolled up her sleeve and neatly popped an injection into the muscle. Justine didn’t twitch, but Bonnie regarded him approvingly.
The man beside Anna spoke.
“Thank you very much, doctor. I didn’t think they were sending anybody.”
Anna laughed.
“They didn’t. This is Sam. Sam, this is Ted.”
Sam drew off his gloves and put them in a disposal bag with the bloody swabs, used needles and other detritus. Then he held out his hand to Ted.
“Pleased to meet you.”
“Ditto. And even more thanks. Justine can be very difficult to deal with, but you handled her beautifully.”
“I had Bonnie.”
“You did. And she also has a weakness for handsome young men.”
Sam laughed.
“Not guilty. I reckon it was all down to a sagacious hound.”
After that the time passed easily. While Anna and Bonnie visited with Justine, Sam and Ted took a walk in the grounds. For a while they walked in silence then Ted cleared his throat.
“There were a lot of things I was going to say to you about Anna, but I don’t know if I can now. I saw the way you dealt with my poor empty wife. I saw kindness mixed with professionalism. Then I saw the way you looked at Anna. I think you two have a shot. Don’t lose it. Don’t lose her.”
“I won’t. I had a lousy marriage. It ended. I managed alone. Then I met Anna. I’ve got a second chance. I won’t do anything to jeopardise that. And I love her.”
“Then I hope we can be friends. I think a great deal of Anna, and I’d like to keep her friendship.”
“I don’t have a problem with that. And I do know that you were lovers. I don’t have a problem with that either. I just wanted you to know that Anna and I have no secrets.”
Ted coloured, then grinned.
“I’m glad you know. But I wasn’t using her.”
“I didn’t think you were. She wouldn’t be as fond of you if you were.”
A voice from the building interrupted their talk, it was Anna. “Come in, you two. Justine wants a tea party.”
If you would catch a husband, they said
You must be compliant in bed
But once in the sack
He just lay on his back
So she made him a sandwich instead
The first time he had seen it, from above, Stin thought the far-spreading sprawl of low rise, square, flat-roofed buildings looked like someone upturned a truckload of children’s play blocks. Or not. The shapes were too uneven. Maybe more like a skip full of builders’ rubble, emptied out in the middle of nowhere.
The buildings were all shades of ochre, the newer ones more brown or orange, the older ones yellowed and greying. Some close pressed along narrow streets. Others, more segregated in their own patch of land with courtyards and walls. The double dome of the tiny spaceport bubbled up, incongruous, in the midst of it all and anywhere else in the galaxy there would be ninety million health and safety regulators screaming that the residential buildings were too close. Here, though, there was no one with sufficient authority to object – even if anyone had actually cared. From the domes, a street ran to the main square and then continued pretty much straight on until it came to the only other building of real substance. Dominating the mud-brick built housing and offering a kind of low-tech counterpart to the spaceport domes, the stone-built citadel stood as a testament to local architecture, with its odd half-cylinder tower and its own microcosm of courtyards and housing gathered around the curtain wall.
This was the city of Keran. The planetary capital of Temsevar which was surely the most grimly benighted world in known space. It stood – or more sort of slumped – in a vast plain which stretched, dizzyingly, as far as his eyes could see in every direction, bleak and empty with nothing taller than knee-high bushes and an odd grey-green grass which grew all over.
Someone told Stin that before the spaceport, the settlement had just been a trading post centred on the citadel. Back then, it had only a scant handful of permanent residents and a high turnover of the weird tattoo covered nomads, whose tribes ranged the plains around, moving all the time to avoid their livestock over-grazing the sparse foliage. In some ways, he reflected, nothing much had changed – only the city had grown and now the nomads came from beyond the sky and were much fewer in number.
During the short summer the locals told him Keran was a dust bowl and throughout the long winter, it was a frozen hell. For Stin, it was all alien. A place of exile. First impressions always count and he had been left here in the winter. Adjectives that sprang to mind when he thought how he would describe it to people when – if – he got home again were: bleak, desolate, barren and bitter – like finding himself stranded in a gigantic cold-storage compartment. The memory of standing in the vacant dock looking at the empty space that had been occupied by the ship he arrived in earlier that same day, was still vivid. And that of the voice behind him full of friendly sympathy.
“She left without you? Well, no worries, it happens here. You’re not the first and I’m sure you won’t be the last. You’ll get off in a year or two, just might have to earn yourself a bit to pay the passage.”
He turned to see the speaker, a short man with a round face and a balding fuzz of dark hair.
“I don’t know why she – “
The round face broke up into a gnomish smile.
“You’d not be standing here if you did, would you? Anyway, I’m Agernilio Tavi, but everyone calls me Gernie. I’m the one-man band who keeps the port here running.”
“Stin. Stinian Sabas. I’m the dumb fool who just got dumped by his girlfriend. Now I guess I’m stranded.”
“You and me both, only I’ve stuck it out here the last two and a half decades. Oh man, your face. Don’t look so worried – I chose to stay.”
Gernie, he discovered, was the unofficial deity of the spaceport. He ran the place as his own private business venture and that made him the most important person in the whole of Keran. He was the gatekeeper. The one who controlled access to the rest of the galaxy, the one who could arrange for cargos to be shipped in or out.
Everything offworld was prized here – as long as it wasn’t high-tech dependent. The most highly sought after offworld items were weaponry and medical supplies. These would be purchased or exchanged for whatever local trade could offer – exotic food and drink, art and artefacts, some semi-precious stones and metals. Most of what was traded out didn’t come from Keran or even from the same continent. Most trade came – and went – on the backs of the local beasts of burden. These ponies were ugly beasts, with short, stubby ears, broad backs and thick coats, but had peculiar looking split-hooved feet which could spread and grip on soft ground or ice. They would carry trade goods in pack trains, along the single broad road which stretched to the seaport of Vinbrith, just out of sight over the horizon.
Stin went to Vinbrith the once. It had a pretty sounding name and looked totally picturesque from a distance, the cute cottage-like dwellings clinging to the cliffs above the harbour, the little ships bobbing on the tide and the huge wooden wheels turning slowly. It was perhaps only when you saw the wheels, used to lift the cargos on wooden platforms up the sheer cliff face, were treadmills with three ranks of six men chained in together, that the illusion began to fall away. That and the stench. Pretty as a picture from afar, but close to Vinbrith was worse than Keran – and that was saying something. But from there, wooden-built sailing ships carried goods of all sorts to and from the other continent of the planet, which, Stin had been told, was ruled by someone they called ‘The Overlord’ and held the vast majority of the planet’s population and most all of its resources.
Gernie found him the work. There were a lot of things that needed doing which the locals lacked the technical skill to achieve. It wasn’t good pay, but at least it would earn him passage offworld – eventually. Stin was roped in to help keep the port functional and to spell Gernie manning the archaic transceiver which was set up with the one solitary comms satellite in orbit above the planet.
The system was so primitive that it couldn’t even access regular link-based FTL transmissions. That meant that the only real contact the planet ever got with the rest of the galaxy came via the few ships that visited Temsevar each year. But those incoming ships had to communicate through the satellite as the spaceport couldn’t talk directly to them, it was too far behind modern link technology to do so.
It was when he learned that particular fact that Stin finally realised this place wasn’t just at the back of beyond like most Periphery worlds, it was actually a good few kiloparsecs behind the back of beyond.
From Haruspex III: A Walking Shadow part of the Fortune's Fools series by E.M. Swift-Hook.
Do you think the planet minds
if you live or die?
Do you even think it feels, your tears
if you should cry?
You may be glad, you may be sad
that is your own choice
For no one in the firmament
has pity on your voice
Do you think it helps you out
to cry and sigh and moan?
In case an angel hears your tears –
it won’t, you’re quite alone
Do you think the planet minds
in any shape or way?
I don’t, so I’ll just live my life
as happily as I may
