Sometimes we walk the edges of reality…

Annis stood, still holding the gun, her young face puzzled, shaking her head.
“No. No, You must stop it. Jessica. You must.”
The Old Ones moved to a single command, an ancient voice from primordial times. The voice that had once summoned humanity to leave the ways of the gatherer and hunt for flesh. Dark and potent, it summoned now the myriad aspects of itself, the feasters on fear and the eaters of blood, drawing them back to the place where it would Be once more.
“No!” Annis cried aloud, her body being pulled out of shape as if by an unseen pressure.Her face changing, as if under the distorting brush of an artist.
“No,” Jessica heard her own voice, but it was not her own. It was more than a cry of desperation, it was a cold assertion of denial and as she spoke the single syllable, the world seemed to slow. Someone stepped out of her and then turned to face her, kirtle, belted at the waist and long hair braided. A mirror image. She picked up the ugly knife that lay on the stone and in her hand it gleamed silver, catching and reflecting the light above the throne and casting it into the shadows. Then she held it out on an open palm.
“I can’t do this, Jessica, it has to be you.”
The eyes, so familiar, held nothing but expectation.
Jessica reached out and took the blade.
In a single movement the other, had stepped back and lifted the sprawling body of Roald into her arms, her touch transforming him again from monster to man. His eyes flickered open and widened.
“Hild?”
The woman shushed him as she might an infant, then looked back to Jessica.
“This is not my time, it is yours. Do what you must.”
Then both were gone and time reprised. It was like a dream within a dream was over and Jessica was plunged back into the nightmare, but this time alone. Annis screaming, the Old Ones creeping back to become once more the single malevolent, life-destroying, malice that they had been, which grew in strength and power with each moment as it flexed its presence and reached out, turning its focus upon the figure that stood at the confluence of every point of its progression.
JESSICA!
The name shivered through the underworld like a curse.
Alone and vulnerable, defenceless. Feeling again the hard blows, the brutal, pounding body, the shrill and silent scream of panic, as bound and gagged, she was hurled from the car to roll on the rocks.
That is who you are. That broken, beaten and weak creature, Stand aside and I will spare what remains of you. Resist and you will relive that for eternity. I can trap you as I have trapped the others, locked in your own private nightmare, playing it through, forever.
The knife in her hand gleamed, it’s obsidian blade as sharp as any metal, carved from the congealed blood of the earth itself. Jessica stared at it, images of blood and fear and agony, twisting her thoughts. She could refuse and know that in neverending darkness, or shed her own blood and bind herself to oppose it. 
And then she knew.
“No,” she said quietly, her voice simply determined.
She gripped the stone knife and raised her hand, then with a single blow she struck the blood-drenched stone and it shattered as if hit by a pile-driver.

Part 16 of Maybe by Jane Jago and E.M. Swift-Hook will be here next week…

Things that make us go poop…

Granny and the ‘ladies’ darts team of The Dog and Trumpet alphabetically collate their collective contempt for the inhabitants of the twenty-first century.

As a woman of a certain age, I had kind of hoped that I’d seen humankind at its worst. But then along came the internet.
Home of mildly amusing memes, pictures of pets, jolly banter. And vicious bastards.
I’m not going to call them trolls. That trivialises the damage they do. They are unprincipled assholes, probably with very small penises, most of whom hide behind assumed names and pretend faces to drip their evil on the world.
In my youth if you disagreed with someone you mostly sorted it out in the pub – possibly with fisticuffs.
Or, if you were a middle-class twat, you wrote to the Times.
Today, though, you can sit behind a keyboard and fire salvos of ill-informed downright nastiness at anybody who it takes your fancy to abuse.
I’ve had a few attempting to get under my skin. They really don’t like it when I just ignore them. Life is too short to engage with any asshole who combines extreme political views, with misogyny and a side order of complete f*g stupidity.
However, I’m not fragile, and I don’t give a shit. But.
When I read some the uninformed opinions of some utter wanktard who calls himself something like ‘Mister Macho’ or ‘The Moral Major’, or ‘The Voice of the People’, I find myself offended.
I don’t know whether the media personality they are all slagging off was suicidal or not.
But what I do know is it ain’t up to me to decide.
I don’t know which of two warring ‘celebrities’ is right.
But I do know it ain’t up to me to decide.
And it’s not up to the court of the internet neither.
All I have to say is if you want to drip vitriol at least do it in your own name, with your own face and accept that someone might want to punch your head…

Things are not quite how you might remember them in the 100 Acre Wood for Christopher Robin, Pooh Bear and their friends…

***** ***** *****

Jane Jago

“Louwina, I – I can’t live without you,” Woul stuttered, his eyes holding an acre of desolation and his sharp fangs glinting in the moonlight as his six-pack flexed in his distress.

She backed away from the head of the shifter clan, eyes wide in disbelief. Why was he being so mean to her? She knew at sixteen she was nothing special with her stick like body and bulgy breasts. Her hair was never exactly fashionable as it set her distressingly even featured face in a halo of golden curls.

She backed into the tall, muscular figure of Girald, the new boy in town who all the popular girls yearned to date.

“No, Louwina, your secret heritage calls to me. We are meant for each other,” he said, looking down lovingly into her eyes, sprinkles of fairydust falling like dandruff from his hair.

“My – what?”

“Well, you know how your parents both vanished mysteriously on the day of the eclipse and how your granny has that weird book engraved with the words ‘My Family’s Book of Ultra-Secret Witchcraft’?”

“Yes, but that doesn’t mean anything, she never lets me read it.”

The gorgeous hunks looked at her with longing and desire, adoration clear on both faces.

“You are the Chosen One and my chosen one,” Woul murmured, smirking.

“You are my chosen one too,” Girald echoed, his eyes sparkling in the starlight.

Louwina stood stunned by the revelation. She was the Chosen One? So that explained why everyone at school hated her and why her life had been so miserable so far. And now she had to choose between these two, equally gorgeous, half-naked eighteen year olds, who made her feel all warm and tingly in places she had never thought much about before.

But which one?

Louwina rolled her eyes.

How was she meant to choose between a Vampire Weresheep and a Fae Weregiraffe?

E.M. Swift-Hook

Telling an entire story in just one hundred words…

The forest path was crosshatched with shadows and sunlight. Lithe trees clad in pied silver, stretched up, twig-fingers touching above me, leaves dazzling peridot in the sunlight. Patterned foliage against the sky, dappling the ground in muted emeralds, and faded jade where shadows fell.
Bird song, from many feathered throats, was music for my passage.
Then came a low buzzing, like a million bees swarming in anger, lifting in pitch and adding a whine, finishing with a biting choke.
I arrived as, with a cracking cry, another tree fell and the roar of the chainsaw started on a fresh victim.

E.M. Swift-Hook

Ponies and Progeny or the graceless art of equine management as envisaged by the pen of Jane Jago and inspired by the genius of Norman Thelwell (1923-2004)

Today we consider cross country events…

***** ***** *****

April wears a bright green dress
Embroidered oe’r with flowers
She never fails to impress
With sunshine and with showers.

And although sunny days do come
Within her weeks’ purview
The cold and blustery showery ones
Are often with her too.

But April carries all the hope
And all the dreams of spring
And as the days through April lope
The thoughts of summer bring.

Then when April passes by
You’ll hear the old folk say
The April rains that made us sigh
Will bring a blooming May.

Elanor Swift-Hook

Sometimes we walk the edges of reality…

CHAPTER FIVE: JESSICA

It still did not seem real. How could it. This was not any kind of real world. But it was not a dream either. Somewhere between the two was an intersection of experience where none of the verities of reality could be assumed, but the utter chaos of dream was somehow still held at bay.
It  happened as she walked to the throne. She felt the rightness of it as if some deep part of herself was nodding agreement with her actions. It was as if a flow of wisdom welled up in her psyche.
“I can do this,” she thought, mouthing the words as she took her seat on the throne. The strange sense of self-and-yet-other, intensified and she realised it was almost as if two of her was seated on the throne. One herself, wearing the flared jeans and purple polo-neck and the other wearing long skirts, a mantle and a cloak, the fabric pooling at her feet. 
There was no sense of separation or dissonance, just the flowing of one into the other, like two tributaries of a river joining to flow on together to the sea. But Jessica had no time to consider the significance of it, or even to question what she felt about it. As her hands curled over the serpent heads of the throne, the serpents writhed beneath her touch and cast coils around her arms, acknowledging her right to be there, embracing her not restraining her.
From where she sat it was as if every part of this strange catacombic underworld was visible to her. She could cast her thoughts up and see Annis, arms round her cats, watching and wondering. She could reach out and sense the shifting depths of darkness where the Old Ones moved beneath the earth. She saw the pinioned vampire and as if at her unspoken command, the creatures around him slithered back into gloom.
No longer restrained Roald, pushed himself up from the slab of dark stone and stood staring at her, something of both yearning and desperation in his eyes. Jessica watched as he seemed to flicker between the handsome human form and the bone-grey near skeletal one she had seen in the fair. She realised then that was why Annis had taken her from the safety of the Sanctuary. In the midst of the fair he could not hold his human form against the powers of life and death which met there. She had needed to see it, see him as he really was, if she had not then she would still see him only in his gorgeous human form.
The other part of her knew only the viking Roald, clad in fine furs and wool, his braided beard and golden, on bended knee. Beguiling and beautiful. Telling her how the gulls themselves saluted her  as they wheeled over the headland. The high headland where he tried to…
The sunken cheeks and cold-burning eyes filled her vision. He was impossibly fast, impossibly strong, impossibly no longer on the other side of the cavern, but there infront of her, black withered lips pulled back from the row of shark teeth, jaw impossibly wide to close on her throat.
The shots sounded like thunder, booming across a charged summer night and the grotesque head flung back and away, old blood, dark and slow as if in part congealed, fell in liquid clots onto the stone and deep within the core of the earth itself, something sighed in delight.

Part 15 of Maybe by Jane Jago and E.M. Swift-Hook will be here next week…

Things that make us go poop…

Granny and the ‘ladies’ darts team of The Dog and Trumpet alphabetically collate their collective contempt for the inhabitants of the twenty-first century.

So. Who the feck invented holidays or vacations as the French and our colonial cousins call them?

And to what purpose?

I mean. Pack a suitcase with your most impractical clothing, load up your kindle with romantic novels (pauses to evacuate the bit of sick in the back of throat), leave your best mate in kennels, sit in a tin can in the sky, then spend two weeks beside a pool crammed alongside half a thousand red, sweaty people.

Why?

Can somebody just tell me why?

• My house is nice, so why would I want to leave it?
• Gyp is excellent company, so why would I want to leave him?
• I can cook. I have a dishwasher and a hoover and a washing machine. Sometimes I even use them.
• I hate hot sun. I hate sangria. I hate swimming pools. And I’m not too fond of the human race.

So please why?

Maybe I can just about get it if you are a working person.  Some time away from the grindstone I can understand. Though you could have that in the comfort of your own home, you know. Also, the allure of having somebody do your chores for two weeks must be enormous. But with what you spend on a holiday you could probably afford to have somebody come and do your chores every week. (Just saying.) 

What I can find no justification for whatsoever is the likes of my neighbour – who we will call Mabel to protect the innocent – who regularly packs her roll-along and gets on a coach with fifty or so other crumblies and heads off to the delights of Skegness, or Blackpool, or Weymouth, or… 

What the heck is that all about? Hours and hours in a tin box that smells of breath mints, mothballs and haemorrhoid cream – with the added delight of a courier in an ill-fitting blazer (with mismatched dentures and a very sketchy idea of the holiday itinerary and any places of interest en route). Hotel rooms with brushed nylon sheets. All-you-can eat lunchtime buffets. Cream teas with stale scones. Three-course ‘evening meals’ with canned soup and arctic roll. Not in this life.

Two years ago a well-meaning (but stupid) granddaughter-in-law bought yours truly a ticket for a coach trip up the Rhine valley. I have since forgiven her. Just. And, as it was Mabel’s eightieth, the ticket didn’t go to waste.

In essence then. Holidays are the province of the bored, the feckless, and those whose lives don’t suit them.

 My advice? Forget the costas. Spend your money on booze, fags and good food – and sort your frigging life out.

I’m now off to the wine bar where it’s grab a granny night…

Bottoms up!

Things are not quite how you might remember them in the 100 Acre Wood for Christopher Robin, Pooh Bear and their friends…

***** ***** *****

Jane Jago