Tag Archives: us

Conspiring to return

Posted on by under 2024, May 2024 - Escape

I love a conspiracy theory, don’t you? Say what you like about them, mine is the best. It’s about…well let me take you to our inaugural meeting to hear believers and the yet-to -be convinced shouting the odds…

Newbie 1: You’re saying Earth is a penal colony used by several peaceful and well run planets to deport their undesirables? Well that makes complete sense to me. I’m in. Who do we have to kill?

Newbie 2: Where did you get the information? Q Anon are very clear about their origins.

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Ruin

Posted on by under 2024, April 2024 - Ruin

I’ve developed a grudging respect for my disease, it’s merely  fighting to survive same as me; both of us were unwitting guinea pigs of doctors  who misdiagnosed us, then prescribed inappropriate treatment, courtesy of the deplorable Sackler family.  It was an osteopath in the end  who felt the adhesions under my skin, with more skill in her fingertips and common sense than the scores of medics who had assessed me before. What precisely are they trained for if they can’t spot a disease as common as diabetes that only occurs in women?

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WELL MET AT MIDNIGHT

Posted on by under 2024, Feb 2024 - Crossroads

The interesting thing about crossroads, well to me anyway, is that they take many forms. The physical, the metaphorical, the emotional. Sometimes you don’t even realise you’re at one until it is too late.

The defining characteristic of all of them though is choice, the temptation to stray from your originally chosen path to explore pastures new.

We found our own personal crossroads in a previously unexplored area of the galaxy called The Midnight Quadrant, no charts to guide us, seeking our fortune. The sensor probes we’d sent out had returned nothing but dust for weeks, and we were just about to leave when the onboard AI threw a visual up on the holographic screen and proudly announced that there was an anomaly worth investigating. His enthusiasm was somewhat wearing and, not for the first time, I wished he’d chosen a female-presenting form and voice. I hated the 1930’s suit, hat, and guitar.

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The Christmas Eve Party

Posted on by under 2023, Dec 2023 - Misfortune

It had been very kind of him to take us in during a raging snowstorm on Christmas Eve, but I wish Joel would shut up about it. We’d been travelling along the edges of Białowieża Forest, trying desperately to get home to see family, when the car had broken down.

There was no mobile signal, of course, so we’d sat in the car, after the inevitable argument, shivering. Then, like the light of the Angel Gabriel, twin beams of a 4×4 had sliced through the blizzard, and Joel had been out in the road, waving his arms, trying to get a lift. Fortunately, the driver had stopped.

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The End

Posted on by under 2023, Dec 2023 - Misfortune

The novel, set in an indeterminate ‘past’, concerns love across the social divide. The hero is a wealthy (en)titled gentleman in love with a serving girl from a local tavern. The girl’s mother opposes the match. Chapter three, where the plot thickens, was the point at which the novel had been set aside, mainly for lack of a discernible plot.

Unfortunately, the planets were not fully in alignment for Melinda Thistlethwaite’ s most recent flirtation with the arts.  She was confident, however, that she would eventually achieve success, once her talents had coupled with artistic destiny.

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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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Mirror’s Eyes

Posted on by under 2023, March 2023 - Waiting

We wait, biding our time.

Such patience tests us, but this interlude is worth it, especially considering the prize on offer.

You barely even acknowledge us; we are the passing glance in the morning, the image used to check that makeup is applied correctly, or your necktie is straight, before you head out of the door to your dreary, coffee-fuelled, miserable, worthless lives.

We are your reflection in more than just the shallow sense of the word; we mark the passing of your years, day by day, second by second. Yet it is only in moments of occasional lucidity that you see us, shake your head critically and wonder where the twenty-eight-year-old that still lives in your head has disappeared to.

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a butterfly frolics

Posted on by under 2022, Sept 2022 - The End

THE END 

a tale foretold. ‘The crowd’s on the pitch. They think it’s all over. It is now.’

Touch, a so missing after trauma,  so they tell us, and so I must consider you know don’t you too my mind latched on to but was it ever anything else. and indeed There is something to be said that our contemporary lives invest too much into being ‘happy,, by showering ourselves with happy smiles and emojis that become addictive self smugness of, of well of loony-bin Reality Shows for a start,  making  us believe that is all there is to life. and STOP us imagining alternatives. and well is writing and engaging with it – literary fiction that is –  does this.  So, am I here writing this to resolve and maybe dissolve lies I have told myself.? Can I then ‘face up.’, create my and your better life. Give us integrity, enabling skills, perhaps like literary devices, eh Joe?

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