30 November 06 - 11:20THIS FLIGHT TONIGHT
THIS FLIGHT TONIGHT
A collaboration with Gary Couzens
Ten minutes before he died, Andrew James Crichton selected a drink from the bar. A single Southern Comfort with ice. He pushed away the remains of his in-flight meal and gazed out of the window at the deep blue of the sky. At 30,000 feet he could look down at the clouds, thick and drawn up into ice-cream peaks, or single tufts like cotton-wool.
Five minutes before he died, he continued to sip at his drink. He switched on his laptop. Two minutes later, feeling distracted, he gazed up at the seatbelt sign, which was unlit. He was lost in a reverie for a minute and a half before he returned to the laptop.
He was so engrossed, all he knew was a loud roaring in his ears, intense heat and splintering, and a sense of infinite space around him as he fell.
*
Statistically more people are killed every year on the roads than in the air, but air disasters are more ...
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27 November 06 - 17:15FATHER OF THE HEAD
FATHER OF THE HEAD
Her belly was a ripe pumpkin, stitched by a map of stretch-marks. She encouraged me to lay my hand where the baby's head should be. Swallowing my repulsion, I was strangely thrilled by the odd kick my hand was given.
"That can't be his head, dear," I said.
Our bedroom was glazed with light - the brilliant white sky that had been prevalent for the last few months turned the net curtains into pleats of waterfall ice. The weather man on the television had explained the phenomenon as temporary, but I had wondered what lay behind it all. Even my literal-minded colleagues at the office were seen walking around with bemused expressions on their faces, almost (but not quite) questioning the nature of reality ...
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22 November 06 - 17:03LADIES (part 1)
LADIES (written 1990)
The pain started in his elbow, since the bones thereabouts felt no longer suited. He wondered whether it would fade as quickly as it welled up, since bodies were strange creatures — no accounting for some of their idle tricks and idiosyncracies.
The young man believed most pain was in the mind, in any event. Not that he would go as far as Faith Healing, of course.
He could not recall knocking the elbow. So, the pain must have been home-grown. Luckily, he was in his bedroom, thus enabling him to strip off and have a butchers at the offending area. There was a small red mark, like raw meat, between the ligaments, too neat to be a random abrasion, forming, as the mark did, an almost perfect Isosceles triangle. ...
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20 November 06 - 18:26Baffle (23)
Fanblades can whisk yester-eggs into oubliettes of spent imagination, making today tomorrow. I sit in the carrel deep in study of how baffles work in catheters. So engrossed-out, I fail to notice what I had in mind when I wrote the first sentence. Perhaps I am my own walking oubliette.
14 November 06 - 11:36The Apocryfan (24)
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Continued from: http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/the_apocryfan_23.htm
When Dr Laurence Dumond looked at the wounds on Claura Gill’s body, he did wonder, at first, whether she was already dead. But somehow he knew that – without needing a doctor’s skill to fathom such matters – corpses do not usually have wounds that continue bleeding so generously. Parts of the body’s upholstery were missing where these wounds met flesh at raw-edged encounters of violence with long-term growth as a woman. The bones suddenly moved, a ratchet twist or twitch, as if the bones themselves regained consciousness intermittently … a series of startled awakenings. The scenario – at least up to that final point – reminded the doctor of a similar nightmare, when one of his own daughters had been brought into his surgery’s consulting room all those years before. ...
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08 November 06 - 18:22The Apocryfan (18)
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Continued from: http://free-blog-site.com/denemoniser/archive/2006/11/08/100311.aspx
Detective Sgt. Gus Hogg stared at his hands. They were the hands of a wonderful human being. Short, squat fingers like teats but sporting elsewhere life-lines a student of palmistry would likely kill for. He then stared up at the slinky hot ‘blancmange’ of the portakabin’s temporary canopy rippling in a rare breeze: temporary prior to someone building a less temporary, yet still temporary, roof. He always thought portakabins were meant to come complete at outset!
“This is a fucking hellhole!” he shouted into his over-sized walkie talkie.
The heat was not filtered out by the ‘blancmange’ (if that was what it was): a cooling gel steeped into the canopy’s weave with a process of overnight marinade by cold storage. ...
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06 November 06 - 18:05Why Behind The Fence?
WHY BEHIND THE FENCE? (first published 'Lost Pages' 2005)
When I took the house, near the city airport, I did not quite expect the future to blot out any memory of why I decided to take it in the first place. Whether the family I called my own was always my own, I suppose now has taken on a blinding irrelevancy, bearing in mind the events I am about to impart. Two girls, one boy, with large gaps of time between - and a wife whom I could not recall marrying, so perhaps the knot had yet to be tied.
The many rooms in the house were tangential to a quite unfathomable maze of corridors. A gawky building that had several storeys, and in between each of them were weak floors more like garden fences than stable platforms. Despite being a city dwelling, it had a rather large garden, mostly overgrown, but peppered with tiny plots which my three children maintained as a fitful hobby. My wife, though, spent all her time indoors. She was ever painting the Forth Bridge of ...
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05 November 06 - 14:51Baffle (9)
The Ninth of the fabulous Daffles
When B turns to D then C shakes its head. Letters never really caught on again after emails. That was a real shame, with electronic communication just about catching what people said, but never what they meant to say.
