Tag Archives: her

Escape Clause

Posted on by under 2024, May 2024 - Escape
Man and daughter stand before a vault deep in the bowels of the Earth

Tobermory held his daughter’s hand as they walked along the corridor, their footsteps echoing from the stone walls. He sensed her looking up and gave her a little squeeze.

“Don’t worry, daddy,” Eleanor said, “I’ll be okay.”

“I know, Pumpkin,” he said, displaying a sad smile. “We’ll all be okay.”

“Did you bring Flibut?”

Tobermory pulled the stuffed, one-eared camel from his bag. “Yes, he’s here.”

“Because I couldn’t go without Flibut.”

He looked down at her earnest features, a pixie face in a halo of red curls. Just five years old, he thought, how could there be a god?

He could have scooped her up right there and bounded back down the corridor. But he knew the guards would pick him off before they got out. And a stranger would make the long walk with her.

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A chance to make it home

Posted on by under 2024, April 2024 - Ruin

Alyria stood, tears pricking the corners of her eyes.

“Fuck,” she whispered.

All the sacrifices she’d made to get to this point, all the favours traded, the coin expended, the hard graft… it was all for nothing. Before her, the ruins of the gateway taunted, its rubble strewn over twenty square metres. With a wordless, throat-ripping howl, she sank to her knees.

Even the breeze through the dusty ravine seemed to mock her, whispering “too late, too late, too late” over and over until it became almost torturous.

Three long Earth years she’d travelled to get here, following rumours and sotto voce conversations in bars she thought she’d never get out of. The laser pistol at her hip had seen more use than she’d hoped – slavers, kidnappers, and perverts had all stared down the barrel, and more than once she’d barely escaped with her life.

And all for this. For nothing.

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Memories

Posted on by under 2024, April 2024 - Ruin

‘Don’t you remember?’ her daughter asked in an exasperated fashion. ‘That trip in June when we went to the beach and made friends with those people building a fire?’

Grace’s recall was not the same since the bleed but as this memory was so important to Dahlia she decided it was worth delving into that scary, cavernous place they called the hippocampus. She rarely visited it these days due to the destruction that lived there.

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Words of Mass Destruction

Posted on by under 2024, April 2024 - Ruin

“Can you draw your voice, Theo?” says the therapist. She gestures to the felt-tip pens, screaming with artificial brightness on the table.

I want to shout in her smug face. “You think I’m going to draw a bird in a cage or some shit like that? A bird of prey, too dangerous to set free? Forget it. I’m thirteen, not three.”

I don’t say it, of course. But my eyes must tell her because she sighs and stares at her ugly vegetarian shoes.

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ANGELINE’S FRIEND

Posted on by under 2024, April 2024 - Ruin

Walking through the early morning mist, I remember years ago thinking I was walking on clouds. When the mist was higher it would wrap itself around me pulling me to the old mansion. 

It all started with a dare that I could not refuse: entering the local haunted house. I pulled the board from the entrance and an earthy musty smell raced out, as though it had waited too long to escape, and disappeared into the undergrowth. Opening the entrance further, I caught my first glimpse of the damage inside. Stairs were misshapen, lurching this way and that. Rustling erupted, balls scurried into the depths away from the light. Once inside the dust swirled around my feet and a breeze caressed my cheek like fingers, but I didn’t feel threatened.

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Faith, Hope and Clarence

Posted on by under 2024, March 2024 - Tomorrow

Clarence had been a disappointment to his mother from the day he was born. He had been expected to be a she, to fulfil the prophecy of the seventh daughter to the seventh daughter.

            Throughout his life, she had never forgiven him for spoiling her dreams. His sisters on the other hand, were delighted that they didn’t have a sister who would rule superior over them. He grew up, being showered with their love and also all the things they didn’t want to undertake themselves.

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Tomorrow and Tomorrow and the Day After

Posted on by under 2024, March 2024 - Tomorrow

The mirror in Selina’s bathroom was a focal point for her rich theatrical dreams. It was surrounded by small lights, much like a glamourous dressing room make-up mirror; it was Selina’s confessional.

Selina  loved the theatre and was a member of the town’s am-dram soc.  It attracted all the local luvvies and a fair few from towns further afield who enjoyed a strut round the green room, and huddled round pieces of gossip like barnacles on a boat. Selina, having unglamourous theatrical skills, enjoyed a rather peripheral am-dram life. She offered services such as box office duty and prompting.

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Sweet Little Lies

Posted on by under 2024, March 2024 - Tomorrow

Mother and daughter, Dilys and Martha, sat around the kitchen table. Sian and Gareth were playing in the other room. An argument broke out. Martha sighed and, calling them into the room, gently chastised them, explaining they should love each other not fight.

Dilys snorted, watching them leave the room, pinching each other out of sight of their mother. She was thinking she didn’t approve of this soft love, as Martha called it. Loving her grandchildren, she realised that times had changed but in her opinion not for the better.

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Crossing the Road

Posted on by under 2024, Feb 2024 - Crossroads

At times of maximum danger, panic may seem like a rational response.  Jess didn’t panic for long, but she was aware of an urgency. She wasn’t the only one facing this dilemma. There were a number of MS sufferers like her (and others who were slow walkers or who needed aids like sticks and wheelchairs) who viewed navigating the hectic road and cycle lane to reach the shops, community and health centres with trepidation.

There was already a zebra with a middle island but this depended on the speed and courtesy of drivers. What with cars parked on pavements and few ramps, life was fraught for those with mobility challenges. So, Jess was on her way to discuss what could be done to make the act of crossing the road less of a problem.

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The Chimes of Freedom

Posted on by under 2024, January 2024 - A winters tale

‘Which one of us would do it?’

            ‘He targeted my daughter. It should be me.’

            ‘You’d really…?’

            ‘Could I actually just go in there and…? Let me think. Smother him? Yes, yes I could.’

            ‘We might not need to, Natasha. I’ve not been feeding him.’

            ‘You’ve been cutting back on his meals?’

            ‘I’ve not given him any food in seven days. Just water.’

            ‘He’s looking very gaunt, Annette. Do you mean you’ve been deliberately…?’

            ‘I want him dead. I hate him. This way we just say he wouldn’t eat, we say he…’

            ‘Refused food… we say he didn’t want to live any more with the pain of the cancer… we…’

            ‘We wait two more days. He can’t last out if we starve him.’

/

            In his studio they looked at the paintings, many of them of themselves in the first flush of puberty, thin, uncomfortable, unhappy, all naked. Natasha remembered him painting Annette many times, then her turn came. She didn’t quite know what was going on. It’s art, darling, her mother insisted, keep still for Daddy and stop complaining. Her mother had practically pimped her. Creation from exploitation? That wasn’t art. Post-Jimmy Saville his reputation had crashed. Now he was reviled by many, his works removed from galleries. Quite right. Burn them all. A vile paedophile.

His sister though believed they had aesthetic value, said each haunted portrait revealed her mixed feelings: fear of her father and her unbreakable connection to him.

/

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Short days, long dreams

Posted on by under 2024, January 2024 - A winters tale

“Tell me how it started, Doctor Frost,” she said, leaning close.

“It was the winter of ’57 when I first opened my new eyes and saw the world as it really is.” I replied. The garlic on her breath irritated but I would not give her the satisfaction of knowing my objections. “Of course, I would not have been able to process the wealth of visual inputs I then had, but for the expanded processing capacity I’d installed two years previously.”

“But why go so far?”

I decided I hated her face.

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All-in

Posted on by under 2023

“Do you remember… our games?” the old man struggled to speak. “I used to call you… Miss Fortune”.

On his first night at the casino, he was eager to play with the money his father gifted him. That’s when they first met. That night, as all nights that followed, she wore red: a slim-fit dress, high heels, and vibrant lipstick to match it. She was the goddess who joined them, mere people.

“Sure,” Miss Fortune replied, sitting beside his bed in the hospital. “And you were right.”

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Miss Fortune

Posted on by under 2023, Dec 2023 - Misfortune

There was a dame sitting at the bar.  She was attractive and alone. I decided to take a chance. I slid onto the stool next to her and asked if she wanted a drink.

‘My name is Alice’ she said, ‘Alice Fortune. Miss Alice Fortune.’  I noticed her beautiful smile as she shook my hand.

As our fingers met, I felt something pass between us.  My sixth sense was screaming at me but I took no notice, I was hooked.

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Not yet a shooting star, baby

Posted on by under 2023, Nov 2023 - Fireworks

Red and gold, green and yellow. Riotous explosions of colour, searing through the night skies against a backdrop of the universe.

“They’re beautiful, Momma,” she whispers, bundled up in her best winter coat, with mittens keeping her fingers warm, holding hands and staring in wonder.

“I know, baby,” I say, checking my comm bracelet, anxiety spiking. It’s linked to his.

“Where’s Daddy?”

Thinking back, we should have expected it really.

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Rip Rap

Posted on by under 2023, Nov 2023 - Fireworks

It is notoriously difficult to swim through pancake batter, so Emmie settled for floating on her back. Her eyes opened briefly after a staccato rattle, followed by a piercing whistle, a loud bang and a cascade of spitting bright star fragments. A war must have started. Emmie was dimly conscious of being shot in the middle somewhere; blood everywhere, lots of pain. Best get back to the pancake batter. She re-submerged.

Her eyes crept open again on hearing voices.

‘She’s coming round. Are you OK love? It’s Mum here. You had us worried’

Emmie was pleased to hear this because she too was starting to be worried.

‘What’s the fighting about out there? I think there’s a bullet in my belly. It really hurts a lot and I keep falling into a thick lake. And…’

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I Am Lucy

Posted on by under 2023, November 2023 - Fireworks

A new message flashes. The little icon with her photo, all Bambi-eyes and dimples, sets his heart racing. And then there’s that other feeling. The one he shouldn’t have for someone her age. The one that twists his stomach and clamps his jaw tight.

The curtains are drawn, as always. His secrets fester like bacteria in the stale air, seeping into the furniture. They clutter every surface, filthy as the plates that litter his room. He cannot risk them spreading beyond the confines of this house. Not like they did in the old neighbourhood.

These new neighbours seem friendly. They posted that ‘Welcome’ note through his door, with the link to the community Facebook group. That’s where the fireworks display was advertised. And where he found the laughably easy to access local youth chatroom. Honestly, this lot could do with some internet safety training.

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That Wretched Mr. Linklater

Posted on by under 2023, Nov 2023 - Fireworks

The locals of East Hardwick made a habit of not burning a certain Catholic terrorist come the fifth of November as expected, but instead set alight whomever they disliked.

Mrs. Monks burnt a copy of her cheating husband, Charlie Lanker burnt a dummy modelled after his schoolteacher, who in turn set alight a many headed hydrae, bearing the faces of her worst students.

On this Guy Fawks night, Kevin Warick had built, a perfect likeness of the dreadful Mr. Samuel Linklater, down to that self-impressed, almost snarling smile.

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God save us

Posted on by under 2023, October 2023 - The Curse

The storm clouds are gathered just to starboard, forcing us further and further west. The sun, lurking around the horizon and casting golden and amber hues, hasn’t set in what feels like eleven hundred days, although it’s tough to tell. We’ve given up counting, after the crude marks we’d scratched into the deck mysteriously vanished.

Time hasn’t frozen, so much as slowed to a crawl. The fluttering and rustling of the sails proves there’s still a tailwind; the creaks and groans of wood as waves lap around us, and the swells of the waves we ride, are enough to evidence that. Our crew, fractious at the best of times, had initially turned on each other, tensions increasing until it spilled to violence. Men were thrown overboard, beaten, and blades drawn. It had only stopped after a voice had cut across the melee, singing; pure, clean, and melodious.

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