As a child, Keely was told the matroshka had been in the family for generations. That just because your surname was ‘Jones’ didn’t mean the family tree might not have aristocratic exiled Russian ancestors, who had aggrieved Peter or Catherine the Great and whose daughter had fled clutching her treasured toy.

It made for many romantic imaginings and Keely always held her head a little bit higher knowing the family secret the nesting dolls attested.

Until one day she had the mysterious Cyrillic on the bottom checked out by a Russian speaker who told her it said ‘Made in England.’

E.M. Swift-Hook

‘Much Dithering in Little Botheringham’ is an everyday tale of village life and vampires, from Jane Jago and E.M. Swift-Hook.

Dumbfounded.
Such a good word, Ginny decided. It was almost onomatopoeic as a descriptor for the way she was feeling.
“But, vampires aren’t real,” she protested at last when she saw from the expressions of the two women sitting at the table with her that they really weren’t joking. They genuinely believed what they were telling her. 
And there was the minor fact she was alive and uninjured after that terrible incident in the church with the vicar.
Memory of which suddenly pushed even the ludicrous idea that she was now a vampire out of her mind for a moment.
“The vicar,” she said, “was a giant rabbit.” 
Em just nodded as if it was the most natural thing in the world to have a giant rabbit as your local clergyman.
“Oh yes,” Agnes said. “A wererabbit as it turns out though I had a side bet with Lilian that he’d be a wererat. Would have suited him much better, in my opinion.”
Ginny gave a brittle laugh which she could hear had a distinct edge of hysteria to it. “Oh it all makes so much sense now. We women are vampires and the vicar was a wererabbit. Silly me.” She put her hand to her mouth to stifle a sudden sob.
Em reached over the table and squeezed her hand.
“It is a bit much to take on board all at once. Normally we’d have a careful selection and interview process for a new Sister, but it was something of an emergency in your case.” She wore a bright encouraging smile, as if willing Ginny to perk up. “I’m sure you’ll have a lot of questions. Agnes and I can answer some now, but you don’t need to tackle this all at once. You have plenty of time.”
Plenty of time.
Of course.
Vampires were immortal.
Weren’t they?
Ginny suddenly found a slew of questions overwhelming the mixed up emotions, all pushing forward to be answered first. It must have shown in her face, because Agnes stood up quickly.
“I’ll make coffee, you’d better take Ginny up to the Office.”
“Good idea.” Em got to her feet and Ginny followed her back upstairs, along the landing from the bedroom she had been in and into a bijou study with walls lined with bookshelves and just enough room for a desk facing the window, which commanded a view over the churchyard. Ginny was wondering where she should sit and taking in the range of Em’s literary tastes – Jane Austin sitting next to JK Rowling, and James Joyce jostled in beside EL James – when Em pulled a large, leather bound tome (could it really be a Bible?) slightly forwards, and one of the shelf units swung back to show a modern looking teak and steel spiral staircase going up.
“I always wanted one of those,” Ginny admitted as she stepped into the attic area which turned out to be a spacious and comfortable room.
“What? A spiral staircase? A pain to clean I can tell you.”
“No. A secret door in a bookcase.”
Em laughed.
“So did I. It’s why I had that one put in.”
Ginny took a seat and found herself staring at a large map of the village pinned to the wall. Each house had a small label stuck onto it with just two or three words. Things like ‘arrogant wanker’, ‘spiteful gossip’ and ‘mostly harmless’. She found herself looking for her own little cottage and just before Em blocked her view by sitting in front of it, she was almost sure she read ‘wet hen’.
“Ask away then,” Em said, leaning back in her chair.
Ginny decided to start with the obvious.
“This whole blood-drinking thing, do I…?”
“You can survive very well on regular food most of the time, but we need blood to support the extras of being a vampire – heightened perceptions, healing, that kind of thing. And go too long without and you will become quite ill.”
“So I have to…to…bite people?” Ginny struggled to even think it let alone say it.
Em waved a dismissive hand and smiled.
“Oh goodness me, no. We don’t live in the Middle Ages any more. We get deliveries from the local blood bank. So even your vegetarian ethics shouldn’t be too offended as those were donations made freely by people who wanted to help others.”
“I’m sure that wasn’t quite what they had in mind when they went to give blood.”
“Probably not. But they all wanted to save lives and they are helping to do that. Besides which, we purchase what we get so we’re not stealing from the system.”
It was a rather loose ethical take on the situation, but Ginny decided it was a lot better than the alternative.
“So with the blood drinking, am I – er – are we immortal?”
Em considered for a moment before she replied.
“That depends what you mean by ‘immortal’. We can be killed by most things that would kill a regular human, like accidental beheading, being run over by a combine harvester or whatever, but we are immune to human illness, we heal much faster and we don’t age. Oh and we are fine in sunlight as long as it’s not for too long or too intense.”
“As long as we have enough blood?”
Em smiled warmly
“You’re getting it.”

Part 19 of Much Dithering in Little Botheringham by Jane Jago and E.M. Swift-Hook, will be here next week.

Battleship of red plasteel from Alpha Centauri
Making warp speed easily above a dead star
With a cargo of human slaves
Rarest furs, jewellery
Golden lace, silver shoes and racing cars

Supersonic cruiser coming from a black hole
Slipping through the galaxy without time to stay
With a cargo of statuary
Painted whores, exotic goods
Platinum, sapphire rings, and velvet grey

Grungy earthling trader with a pockmarked dark hull
Crashing through the atmosphere and killing trees
With a cargo of tractors
Isotopes, scrap lead
Diesel, uranium and prosthetic knees.

©️Jane Jago 2020

My name is Hepzibah Landless and I’m old, toothless and so skinny my bones near to shows through my skin. Even so, I’m called Earth Mother by The Brethren, and I’m treated with reverence as the bearer of great men. I guess I’m lucky to be cherished above all other women, though that wasn’t how it started out to be.
I look at my twisted and gnarled hands and I know myself for a spoilt old crone, but inside I’m still the dirt ignorant little girl I was all them years ago. The girl what kept her mouth shut at all costs. 
I ain’t a girl no more, though, and I knows I have to to write down what happened on that sunny day when the world took a lurch to the side. Nobody will see it until I’m gone ahead. I’ll make sure of that, ‘cause when they do…
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I need to begin at the start.
It was Sunday, Temple Day, and we was going home between services to care for the beasts. The rest of the family was socialisin’ and eatin’ barbecue. But not us. Me and my brother Eli, and the hired hand, Zeb, what was a hard worker if not too bright, was given a sandwich to eat on the way  and told to be back by three o’clock service or face a thrashing. 
Eli was driving the buckboard and complaining.
“Three Sundays in a row now. Three Sundays in a row…”
I listened for a while but then I got bored with him moaning. 
“I bin being sent home between services every Sunday for the last three months. I ain’t seen none of Ma’s sticky ribs since about February. What you got to gripe about?”
“Yeah,” he said smugly, “so you have. But you’re a girl and ripe for marryin’. You gotta be kept pure.”
I musta made a rude noise because he laughed, not unkindly, and pulled my braid. But at least he give over moaning.
We had just breasted the rise that is the last hill before home when it happened. There come a light from the sky like nothin’ I never seen before nor never since. The horse reared and bucked and it was all Eli could do to stop him from bolting off into the forest. He hauled on the reins while Zeb jumped out and grabbed ole Chestnut by his bridle.
“Whoa boy,” he said softly and gentled the frightened animal with his hands. “Whoa boy.”
I don’t rightly know what happened next. All I can say is as I woke up somewhiles later laying on something soft with some sort of a person standing over me. 
“It’s awake.”
The voice was gentle and I dared to open my eyes. As I stares at the face above me I hears Eli.
“Her is a she not an it. And her’s my kid sister.”
“What means ‘she’, and ‘sister’?” The voice was now interested.
Eli done his best to explain. “Critters of all sorts is he’s and she’s. That how little ‘uns comes about. And sister means we got the same Pa and Ma.”
The face looking down at me kinda creases as it tries to understand what Eli means. Another voice speaks from behind me.
“Take it from the small one’s brain. It is the more intelligent. I begin to wonder if we did wrong leaving the other behind.”
I couldn’t help myself. “If’n you thinks Eli is dumb youda been drove mad by Zeb. He’s a good boy but he don’t understand nothin’ beyond his supper.”
The face above me creases up some more before I feels a pair of cool hands on my face.
“Sleep.”
What I remembers of the next while would be frightening if’n I wasn’t looking back on it after better than seventy years – at the time it about turned my bowels to water. It seems to me, even to this day, as if a tall shining person took me by the hand and walked with me through my memories. Sometimes we stopped and the personage spoke to me, asking that I explain something, or why such-and-such was so. I done my best and I guess it must have been okay, because when we got to the moment where old Chestnut reared up his fool head and tried to light out for the hills I felt a touch on my face and I was back sitting on the softness in the bright lights of wherever I was. The place was like nowhere I ever imagined, and as well as me and Eli there was three tall shining people with wings on in the room. Two were sitting just watching me, while the other was fiddling with something that bleeped and flashed. It made me think of Cousin Beulah and her typewritin’ machine, only faster and more frightening.
  I think I would’ve bin scared right out of my wits if it wasn’t for Eli. He come over and set himself down next to me.
“You okay Hepsie?”
“I guess. I got a headache some, and I wish I knowed what was going on.”
One of the shining figures come and kneeled down beside me. “You have pain?” it asked softly.
I nodded, and it put two hands on my head a bit like a hat. In a minute my headache went away and I felt good. 
“Thankees.” I said. “Now I’m hungry. I never did get my sandwich.”
The one who I thought walked through my head with me brung a bowl and a spoon. I et the stuff, but it was mighty strange, kinda smooth and sweet and cold. Eli grinned. 
“They says it is called ‘ice cream’, seems to me to be one of them things the Brethren calls sinful.”
“You have never tasted it before?” One of the winged ones seemed surprised.
“No sir, not neither one of us.”
With my headache gone and my belly full, I grabbed a handful of brave and asked the question what was right at the front of my mind.
“Are you angels?”
All three on them laughed, but it didn’t feel like they was being unkind. The one with the beeps machine turned away from his work to face me.
“You can think of us as angels if it helps,” he had a deep, calm voice and it come to me that I could trust him with my sanity if I had to, so I spoke the truth.
“I dunno if it do help much. If’n you’m angels then me and Eli is dead. Only I don’t feel dead.”
“Oh, you re most certainly not dead. In fact we will return you to your people soon.”

©️Jane Jago

Part Two of Hepzibah’s Deposition will be here next Saturday.

We had jam yesterday
And we’ll have jam tomorrow
But today is a day when the jam has gone away
A day to scrimp and borrow.

We had peace yesterday
Maybe peace comes tomorrow
But today is a day when the warmongers make play
A day of strife and sorrow.

We had love yesterday
We’ll still have love tomorrow
Because love is here to stay, come whatever come what may,
And will last through every morrow.

E.M. Swift-Hook

Granny’s Life Hacks – Hot tubs 

A man with a very strange accent phoned me today. He seemed to be under the misapprehension that he could sell me an outdoor bath. That wasn’t what he called it, but what else is a fecking great tub of hot bubbling water in the garden…

It would, he assured me, be just the thing for family parties. And simply super for romantic evenings with my significant other. He was so enchanted by the picture he was painting that I put the phone out in the garden and went back to watching some halfwit trying to cook a hugely complicated chocolate sculpture – of which more another time. 

For now let us examine the idea that my life might be completed by the addition of a ‘hot tub’. There are so many holes in that hypothesis that I’m not even sure where to start. Let’s just jump in at the deep end shall we? 

*Laughs immoderately at her own joke and lights a ciggy*

Number one: romantic with my ‘hubby’ as the geezer on the phone referred to the late Mr Granny. The late rather points out the little

difficulty here.  Besides which, even if he was still favouring me with his presence and the occasional uprising of his wrinkled willy, what woman in their right mind wants to share a tub of hot water with a person who is going to fart in the water to make his own bubbles…

NB. My current significant other is a Jack Russell terrier whose water aversion is only equalled by how hard he bites anyone trying to introduce his rotund little person to anything wet.

Number two: family parties in a bubble bath? The thought of the bodies of most of my family without significant amounts of fabric coverage is sufficient to frighten the stoutest of heart. And those who aren’t already wrinkled and wobbly are young and randy.

Think about young and randy for a moment and consider what such persons might find to do in a tub full of hot bubbling water.

Precisely.

And then ask yourself how long young and randy’s bodily excretions might possibly live in warm water.

I rest my case.

I’m now off to rescue my phone from the flower bed…

To celebrate our third birthday at the beginning of July, the Working Title Blog held a drabble writing competition.

As it is our third birthday competition we have three Honourable Mentions. This one is from Joyce C. Mandrake.

As disguises went it was not too bad. Easy to apply, easy to cake on, the smell was earthy with a bit of something Relefe could not put her finger on. Smell was important as the Clicks had an extraordinary sense of smell, relying upon it as their eyesight was poor. Relefe was certain her partner might have been taken. Told to stay close as they fanned out from the ship, Nelee ignored the commands. She jumped at a touch, Nelee was invisible completely covered with his earthy, muddy mixture then he wiggled in next to her to wait.

Sam Nero PI is the creation of Jane Jago and a denizen of The Last City. A place where the past and the future come face to face as a prohibition-style private eye walks the mean streets of a dying world

Katie Scarlett took a sip and inhaled the icy vapour.
“Sam,” she said and her voice was kinda soft and appealing, “am I ugly?”
I looked at her assessingly allowing my eyes to caress her creamy skin, and I was rewarded by a rosy blush that spread up her long throat and mantled her cheeks.
“No,” I said, “and you know you aren’t. But that’s not the question is it?”
She met my eyes bravely. “It isn’t. You know what the question is.”
“I do. But I promised your daddy that I wouldn’t explain.”

We finished our drinks in silence, and I looked at my watch. I was just beginning to think I would have to ask for a few more moments when the cellphone in my pocket bleeped. I pulled it out and the readout was what I was waiting for. I stood up and offered Katie Scarlett my arm.

She looked puzzled for a second then put one red nailed hand on my sleeve.  I signalled Myk and Zig to follow us and we made our way to the private elevator.
“Where to?” I could feel the waves of puzzlement coming from her rigid figure.
“Your daddy’s apartment.”
“Okay, but we won’t be able to get in.”
I lifted one eyebrow and Katie gave a small moue of defeat. She put one slim hand to a palm plate.
“Daddy’s apartment.”
The elevator moved with a silky smoothness that spoke volumes of money and maintenance. The doors hissed open and the four of us stepped out into a white painted foyer with a thickly carpeted floor. Opposite us was a set of double doors, painted to look like wood, but if I’d have been a betting man I’d have put the farm on them being plasteel.

I took the card out of my pocket and applied it to the almost invisible plate beside the doors. Katie Scarlett opened her mouth, but I forestalled her with a finger across those delicious red lips. It almost went without saying that the door which slid open wasn’t even in the same wall as the imposing looking ‘entrance’. I chuckled inwardly as I shepherded Katie and the twins inside, the door closed behind us and we found ourselves in another elevator. It was a quick trip, I guessed one floor only.

This time the door opened into a big room, with floor-to-ceiling windows and a view over the rooftops of Level 39 to where trees and grass grew in the only municipal park in this level.
“That you, Nero?” a voice called from what I guess was the kitchen.
Katie Scarlett swayed like a leaf in the wind and I braced her with my hands around her slender waist.
“Yes it’s me. And I have your daughter with me.”
O’Halleran barrelled out of a door to our left and grasped Katie Scarlett in his brawny arms. I signed to Myk and Zig and the three of us went to enjoy the view. The low-voiced conversation behind us went on for some time, and it seemed to me that Mister Aitch was having some small difficulty pacifying his little girl.

From Sam Nero and the Case of the Disappearing Daddy.  You can find it and other Sam Nero stories in Sam Nero PI by Jane Jago

Pearls of wisdom from an octogenarian who’s seen it all…

Glassware

On the very occasional ‘special occasion’ one has been known to slap on the razzle and do the whole ‘let’s do it and fuck the expense’ thing. 

One such occasion arrived last summer, when number one son reached retirement age. A splash was called for and a large table was booked at a suitably expensive eatery. 

Knowing the family propensity to lateness and disorganisation we agreed to meet in a trendy bar for pre-dinner drinkies. I rolled up and ordered a Negroni, which arrived. In a jamjar.

All I can say is What The Actual Fuck. And just NO…

“We call it PhrAInology,” Professor Gross said proudly, the slides on the screen behind him flashed through a sequence of pottery heads their skulls marked into a mosaic each section labelled with an attribute such as ‘Ideality’, ‘Benevolence’ and ‘Sublimity’.
The watching journalists were all wondering exactly what “philoprogenitiveness” was supposed to be. A few looked up ‘phrenology’ on their smartphones and frowned to find it was a long-discredited pseudoscience.
“Ever since Franz Joseph Gall realised that the shape of the head could reveal the psychology of an individual in 1796, we have been striving to perfect this technique,” Gross was saying a glow of pride in his eyes, “and now we have.”
There was a murmur of expectation as Goss called up the next slide showing a facial recognition scan turning the head into a mesh-like simulation.
“PhrAInology can use regular facial recognition software on security cameras and take things up a notch.” The screens showed a man wearing a hoody walking along an alleyway behind some shops, shoulders hunched. then he looked quickly around. The screen froze and zoomed in on his face and a rapid animation showed the graphic processing going on. It finished with his face being surrounded by a flashing red outline.
Goss was smiling now as if PhrAInology was a child of his who had just done something clever.
“See? PhrAInology has identified this man as a criminal which means we can now act to prevent him from committing any more crimes.”
On the screen, a spray of bullets could be seen apparently issuing from the camera and the man was thrown back, his body jerking spasmodically, in eerie silence as there was no soundtrack to the video.
“We are presently working on a version that can be used in reception and nursery classes in schools,” Gross told the shocked audience. “Soon criminals will be a thing of the past.”
The lights on the stage shifted and revealed three men sitting on barstools to one side of the stage.
“Now to show how effective PhrAInology really is, I have given some of the journalists in the audience the chance to run PhrAInology for themselves.” He gestured to the three men who all looked well presented. “Here we have three people, one of whom has a criminal background and two do not. I challenge those journalists to tell me which one is the criminal.”
After a couple of minutes of excited speculation, the results came in, flashed up on a screen behind the three men. All had chosen the man in the middle who then got off his stool and admitted he was indeed a convicted criminal.
As the applause died away, Gross said he would take a few questions and most were concerned with possible applications of PhrAInology, but one young woman from an independent-minded news source had a different question to ask.
“Professor Goss, are you a criminal?”
The Professor laughed and shook his head. “Next, question.”
“But Professor Goss, I just ran PhrAInology on you and it says you are.”
Like phrenology before it, PhrAInology proved that the shape of your face and the way you look says nothing about your criminality – or any other aspect of your personality…

E.M. Swift-Hook