The most beautiful courtesan in the Jade Palace was flawed. Her feet had never been bound… 

When the old Emperor died, his seventh son waded through blood and entrails to ascend the Lion Throne.

He had Wei brought to his bed. Afterwards she sat with her feet curled under her.

“If you had a daughter. Would you bind her feet?”

Wei shook her head and the young Emperor embraced her enthusiastically.

In due time, the Emperor took Wei as his principal wife. 

The shockwaves reverberated around the palace when the Empress walked to the throne on her own two feet…

©️jj 2018

I have no wings to fly, she said
Nor any legs to walk
And if I pass they close their eyes
Ignore me when I talk
I have no home to call my own
No place where I am safe
If you speak truth you stand alone
Unheeded in your grief
I may be just a wingless bird
Faced by a crocodile
But still they cannot stop my words
Nor kill me with their smile

©️jane jago 2018

I greet you my devoted disciples, adoring fans and anyone else reading this.

I have the most thrilling of announcements to make and am shivering with excitement at the mere thought of telling you about it, eagerly anticipating your mews of delight and shrieks of pleasure as I reveal this.

You will, of course, already know that I am the much praised and feted (well the local fete did ask me to run the tombola last summer), author of ‘Fatswhistle and Buchtooth’ an expository exemplar of the science fantasy genre. But soon I shall be bursting forth into publication once more, bringing my wit and wisdom to your Kindles, iPads and smartphones.

Those two endearingly obliging ladies who run this blog have said they will assist in the endeavour as my publisher and Mumsie will be my editor – invisible and unheard, of course as a good editor should be.

[Some hopes of that you pompous little prat. Somebody has to point out what a hippopotamus you really are. And, besides which, if I said nothing I’d probably expire from the weight of spleen. Jacinta Farquar, ashamed mother.]

So soon you will be able to hold in your hands an electronic device which contains the entire sequence of lessons I have presented here entitled ‘How To Start Writing A Book.’

Oh, I can just see your excited faces turned up to mine, like baby-birds, seeking the nourishment of literary knowledge. This, dear disciples, is my gift to you – my gift to the world. My legacy in the archives of literary education.

But, alas, there is much to be done before that moment can come to pass and I, your proud pedagogue, must be retired from public professions on this blog for a time so that I may work to finalise this, my encapsulated masterclass for creating the literary giants of the future.

As they say in the popular press, watch this space for more information.

Until then, mes petites, à bientôt.

Moonbeam Farquhar Metheringham IV

“Bet you can’t.”

“Can’t what?” The voice, although making a brave attempt at dignity, was slurred and obviously inebriated.

“Can’t put three darts in the bullseye.”

The drunk man got up, and slowly staggered across the crowded bar. He stood at the oche swaying and blinking owlishly.

“Three darts in the bullseye, you said?”

“Yeah. I’ll even give you nine darts to do it.”

The pub fell silent, as the clientele waited.

The man at the oche grinned before shambling forwards. He stuck the three darts in the middle of the board.

“You never said I had to throw them…”

©️jj 2018

The water in the crumbling wells is sweet, and in the time of our mothers’ mothers, women of incomparable grace fetched that water in the dawn light, balancing the ewers on their slender shoulders. But the world changes, and as time went on, water was piped to the village, after which the two-mile hike to the wells rather went out of fashion, with only a few of the older women clinging to the belief that well water tastes better than that from a pump in an a tap house at the centre of the village.

Nobody thought too much about the wells until one Sulieman, son of Sulieman, a handsome smooth-skinned, well-to-do young man of little conscience but some local importance, bought the field next to the wells from old Ibrahim. This young man had some entrepreneurial ambitions, and declared the wells his property too. He informed the village that from now on water would cost one Lek per ewer, and that he was going to build a bottling plant and sell crumbling wells water in the city. Even this would have bothered nobody much, had not one of the old women who still regularly collected the cold sweet water been the mother of the village headman.
To say she was furious was to understate the case enormously, and she berated her son as a coward for allowing such a thing to happen. He shrugged and did nothing, as men will. His mother carried on going to the wells every morning, until the day a crowd of hired bravos blocked her way and beat her with bamboo staves until her face was running with blood. For the first time in sixty years, Fatima returned to the village without her water. The whole village was in immediate uproar that such a venerable lady should be so mistreated. They forgot how spiteful Fatima could be in their anger at her bleeding face and limbs. She allowed herself to be fussed over and fed the villagers’ indignation with a show of uncomplaining bravery. It wasn’t until after dark that she gathered certain things together and began to work her malice.
The elders sent for Sulieman. He appeared in front of them with a somewhat truculent expression on his smooth, round face. To his surprise, no mention was made of Fatima’s injuries, instead he was told that as the owner of the wells he was responsible for repairing their crumbling brickwork. Until such time as the repair work was carried out to the satisfaction of the whole village no charge for water could be made. The young entrepreneur bridled, but the elders stood firm. They would fetch in a law writer from the city to enforce their ruling if they were ignored. Sulieman knew himself outmanoeuvred, but determined that he would not be beaten.
That night Fatima, and a lush-bodied young girl Sulieman had used and discarded, made their way to the place of the wells. They were there for some time.
Sulieman called in a family of well diggers from a neighbouring village. They looked at the wells and promptly declined the job. Three more groups declined the contract, before a family from many days’ walk away accepted the job unseen. They arrived at the wells and were obviously shocked by what they saw. They sat together on the dusty ground and pondered. In the end, they packed up their tools and left. Sulieman stood in the middle of the road and tried to stop them leaving.
‘You cannot go. You agreed.’
‘You didn’t tell us about the curse.’ Then the oldest of the well builders shut his mouth firmly and led the way back through the forest to his own village.
While all this was happening, many, many people decided they now wanted to drink well water and a steady stream of containers was filled every day. It started in the pearlescent light of dawn with the old women and their pottery ewers, and carried on all day as the more modern ladies fetched water in plastic containers balanced precariously on the seats of foul-smelling mopeds. Sulieman watched helplessly as his dreamed of profits slipped through his smooth, oiled fingers.
Greatly discomposed, he dipped deeply into his pockets and called on the services of a professional curse-lifter from a town many miles away. The old man arrived in a battered minivan, accompanied by two of his wives and a live chicken. He strode into the place of the wells with confidence writ large in every inch of his scrawny frame. He was back within two minutes with a white face and shaking limbs. He got back into the minivan and drove away. Sulieman never saw the man again, or his money.
After spending ten days alternately ranting and sulking, Sulieman did what he should probably have done in the first place, and made a visit to the holy man who inhabited a modest cave in the foothills of the great mountain two days’ walk from the wells. Of course, Sulieman didn’t walk, indeed the two-hour climb from the road to the hermit’s cave was almost too much for him and he reached the holy man on his hands and knees. He wasn’t there long, returning to his waiting jeep at great speed, slipping and sliding and snarling. His driver and guard both kept closed mouths and Sulieman sat biting his nails as the jeep sped back along the dirt road. Nobody cared to ask him what the hermit had said. Whatever it was it had dire consequences.
Sulieman’s luck went bad. His goats sickened, his fields bore no crops, his fiancé found somebody she liked more, and even his hair started to fall out. He stood this for one half of one year before calling a meeting with the village elders at which he apologised for any misunderstanding in the matter of the crumbling wells and withdrew all claim to the wells and their water. Then he packed a small bag and left the district never to return. Fatima burned the doll with his hair and fingernails in its belly, and life in the village returned to normal.

The water in the crumbling wells is sweet, and women of incomparable grace still fetch that water in the dawn light.

©️ Jane Jago 2016

“Am I dead?”

“Definition of dead,” the winged entity muttered.

“Is there more than one?”

He unbent a little.

“The last body you inhabited is perhaps ‘dead’. You are in the place of choice.”

“Choice?”

He indicated three staircases.

“Heaven, Hell, rebirth.”

“Heaven? 

“Paradise, angels.”

“Hell?”

“Eternal Ibiza, cocktails, noise, sex.”

“And there’s a reason why that’s hell?”

“Eternal…”

Then I noticed his body was hiding a small door.

I wanted that door, so I pushed past him and squeezed through the aperture.

To find myself laying on hard cold ground, with my husband holding my hand.

“Don’t leave me…”

©️jj 2018

“The spell is ripe,” the shackled woman whispered.

Alisan and Armant regarded her with bright, vicious eyes, as the fetish stood up.

“Madam. What is your desire?”

It was Alisan who spoke. “We want Mother’s head.”

The creature disappeared with a bang and a whiff of decay. Moments later it returned, dragging something by a rope of pale hair. Alisan slit the old witch’s throat with his saw-edged knife as his brother snatched at the hair.

Horsehair. Attached loosely to the head of a hungry demon. It gnawed their living bones.

The spirit of the witch they tortured laughed. 

©️jj 2018

Why do you send your babies out
Crying trick or treat?
Do you truly think it safe
For children on the street?
When all around the air is full
Of things not kind or sweet
As from the earth the dead things rise
A gibbous moon to greet
Things that touch their chubby hands
And trip their little feet
Things that want to suck their souls
And eat their brains like meat
This is the night of the living dead
Who only wish to cheat
And steal away the children
Left to wander in the street

©️jj 2018

The Hysteria Was Real is a short story by LN Denison we reproduce it today to commemorate the 80th anniversary of a very famous radio broadcast...

30 October, 1938: the day of the CBS radio broadcast of ‘War of the Worlds’

It’d just turned 10:00pm, eastern time. The streets of Grover’s Mill were filled with people panicking about a series of news bulletins that’d been broadcasted between the times of 8 and 9pm, warning of alien attacks all over the world. I took no stock in the ramblings of mad men. It wasn’t as if they hadn’t been warned, that what they’d been listening to was a work of fiction, nothing else. They’d been told countless times during the broadcast that it wasn’t real, but still they chose to create mass hysteria as they ran through the streets, waving their arms frantically in the air.

I found the whole scene highly amusing and tried to stifle a laugh as I walked by. I mean, how gullible can some people be to believe in symbiont creatures from Mars, coming to our little planet and trying to occupy us. It was a ridiculous notion: one I took great pleasure in dismissing straight away. It didn’t matter how many times I heard it, I still didn’t believe that there was life on Mars. With that thought in mind, I carried on with my nightly constitutional, removing my head from the game for a few moments. I took in the same surroundings, as I did every night.  Maybe, in hindsight, it wasn’t such a good idea going through the cemetery that night, not with so many crazies’ out and about. The moon cast eerie shadows over the gravestones, which gave me goose bumps, and forced me to hurry along, as the bitter night chill snapped at my face.

I climbed through the hole in the wall the other side of the cemetery, and headed in the direction of home, almost going full circle. The sky was clear, to the point of seeing every constellation in all their glory, shining down on me as I stared up at Ursa Major. My concentration was suddenly broken, as I spied a shooting star in the corner of my eye. I hadn’t seen one in a while, and this one was a doozy; larger than life and full-on. I watched, and waited for it to disintegrate into the atmosphere, but for some strange reason, it carried on burning, hurtling towards the Earth’s surface. That’s no shooting star. I needed to follow it. Could it be that I was wrong all along, and there was life beyond planet Earth? I let my curiosity lead the way as I followed the descending streak.

My heart began to race, as I kept an eye on what appeared to be a fiery, egg-shaped vessel heading towards Grover’s Mill. With wide-eyed terror, I realised that the object was heading straight for my home, no one else’s, just mine. I ran as fast as I could, keeping my eyes locked on the trajectory of the ball of fire. I suddenly realised that all the kooks and crazies, weren’t so kooky and crazy as I first thought. And what was supposed to have been a radio play, read by a twenty-one-year-old actor by the name of Orson Welles, was actually a reality. Orson Welles was not a name that I was familiar with, but he had managed to convince the majority of Grover’s Mill, that the threat was real, and now, I too was beginning to believe that Alien lifeforms existed.

I rounded the corner, and watched as the ball of flame made its final, speedy descent, which was then followed by a crashing, shattering sound; then a billow of smoke. I knew that whatever it’d hit was now a pile of rubble, how could it not be otherwise? I turned into my street, only to have my worst fears realised. I placed my hand over my mouth in horror as I looked upon the object, and the pile of rubble where my home once stood.

A few minutes passed, more people had gathered around the object, which on looking at it, was a diameter of around 100 square feet. Then suddenly, the top of the vast object began to unscrew; groaning and scraping as it slowly twisted open. With a clang, the top fell to the ground, followed by a plume of steam. The silence from the crowd was deafening. We all waited for something else to happen, and then it did. What looked like a periscope, slowly ascended from the steam, swivelling its head this way and that. It appeared to be scoping its surroundings, scoping us. A strange glow started to manifest as the machine rose higher, vacating its holding cell, letting out a piercing, deafening screech, which began to cause me a great deal of discomfort, perforating my ear drums, and everyone else’s around me. Was this to be our end? I was beginning to think so.

The Alien machine had completely detached from the belly of the beast, and began to buzz into action. Laser beams shooting in all directions, vaporising anybody that stood in its way, indiscriminately, mercilessly. Was I next? I was going to make sure that I wasn’t. I started to run back towards the cemetery, but it would seem that I wasn’t fast enough, as I felt the Alien being’s ray start eating into my skin, disintegrating my flesh and bones. Suddenly, I felt nothing, the burning had stopped, for some reason I’d been spared from the ray’s penetrating beam, but I didn’t know why. I truly thought I was a goner, and then I woke up, startled by the sound of Orson Welles voice. The broadcast of the War of the Worlds had only just begun.

LN Denison is a writer of near-future dystopian sci-fi. You can catch up with her on Goodreads, Facebook and Twitter.

“Remind me what we’re doing here.” Tina rubbed the spot at the top of her thigh where the little fat man had pinched as she pinned on his poppy.

“We lost a bet. But we get to knock off at six. In ten minutes.”

The clock was striking as Tina pinned the last blood-red reminder onto the lapel of yet another leering ‘suit’.

She felt a hand at her thigh and turned to see fatso was back. 

The last sonorous ‘bong’ signalled freedom. 

Just in time for her to kick the little man. Hard.

“Off duty now,” she grinned.

©️jj 2018