31 March 07 - 18:26Beggarman, Thief
The large flint stone he had prised from the ground along with the intractable buddleia root looked like a grey joint of beef. After placing it with self-consciously aesthetic intentions at the bottom of a pruned-back peach tree trunk, he speculated on how his own skull's contents would eventually shrivel and its bony carapace crumble, long before that stone had even lost its memory of forming an integral part of the earth - once organic as man himself and composite as opposite poles.
The struggle he had imposed on himself as well as on the buddleia root felt as if it had been one with the very planet: a David and Goliath contest to beat all such ill-matched contests. Yet, David had only a small stone to sling, whilst he had the whole earth to swing. And if Goliath was David, and vice versa, there were no greater foes than self against the selfsame self where one was in an ugly mood and the other even uglier. ...
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25 March 07 - 22:14A Multitude Of Sins
The brown dress was hanging on a white curtain. Diana peered through her eyes, wondering if she could ever face wearing it again. Not that she often sported curtains - except, perhaps on ‘silly’ days, fanciful days, dressing -up days.
The last time a large expanse of white material - such as this curtain - had been required was when Abel Martin had put in a special request for a bridal tableau for some artistic ‘happening’ in which he was then involved along with an actual famous artist called Calli - as opposed to Abel himself who was merely a would-be artist. For ‘artist’, please read ‘ponk’, thought Diana, as she transferred her attention to the mirror.
As she looked at and into her own eyes, she sniggered. For ‘happening’ please read ‘space mission to meet the Martians or any extraterrestrial life forms recognisable as Martians’. The white curtain had served as a very useful disguise for the silvery insides of machines that Abel and Calli had discovered in the most ...
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14 March 07 - 17:16Onion Soup
ONION SOUP
Dark brown, piping hot, laced with configurations of its main ingredient, floated upon by bites of toasted French bread and with a soupçon of secrecy as to its other ingredients, Amy’s deep platefuls of onion soup (so-called) were dished out noisily to those beaming faces around the trestle-table in Amy’s old-fashioned kitchen. Onion soup, in the particular guise of Amy’s homely and indelicate delicacy, was renowned from county to county. The accoutrements of lunchtime – involving a social affair in most rural communities – were copied between households and, then, between townships themselves, as the less-than-secret fame of Amy’s secret recipe took hold on the culinary imagination. But nobody knew for absolute whether their own versions of the onion soup were anything like the version that was Amy’s. One drawback of secrecy was that misunderstandings and confusions followed in the wake of concealment, as night followed day. ...
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11 March 07 - 23:19A Benchmark For Ghosts
Lucy and her companion stayed here for a few weeks -- in the guest space -- whilst I slept in my attic bedrooom. I had lived in Holland-on-Sea, Essex, it seemed, since its development as a resort in the Thirties. But query: was I old enough? I was, after all, only 37.
Lucy -- let me confess straightaway -- was one of those types of girl for whom I had unquenchable hankerings. She used to be a typical hysterical student who suffered a terrible series of crushes on her peers as well as lecturers ... until she settled for Dr Storme: a swarthy cove who treated her like muck.
None of this excuses such changes of style nor does it shed any light on the deceptive depth of my past -- decades of unlived time on this flat expanse of sunny, yet often cold, coast, whilst recalling within my own living memory the very chalet bungalow (in which I live) being built in 1936! And, today, the millennium approaches, when everything starts at zero ...
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08 March 07 - 18:36Padgett Weggs XIV
“All heads below the knees!”
The City streets, to Padgett Weggs, were paved with golden scales… making it slippery underfoot. It was tantamount to walking upon a Great Old One’s hide which had just been shed as soon as its owner had been born, still fresh with Mother. Since the invasion of these immeasurable creatures (that had somehow found the key to the landlocked space-time-mind monopoly and arrived within the sanctuary of Earth, eager for equalising Good and Evil), those in the City (of every livery and trade, such as barber-surgeons, costermongers, ex-Lord mayors, etc.) had craned their necks to peer into the turbulence of the roiling skies, to ensure they dodged the inevitable random off-loading of such a vasty fleet of Aliens...
“All heads below the knees? NOW LET ‘EM Go!”
Padgett Weggs was rudely disturbed from his reverie. He knew what he had been doing: dreaming again, slightly heady as he was with draining straight glasses in the Jackass Penguin hostelry. He’d staggered ...
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