18 May 07 - 08:25Dead-Ends
DEAD-ENDS
First published 'XIB' 1993
Pete kept meeting dead-ends. Yet, the city was easy to negotiate during the day which he had in fact accomplished more or less regularly before tonight. However, with the hours of daytime drawing shorter these days, he was almost certain to be caught out sooner or later.
He had been delayed on the telephone, by an ugly customer - though Pete couldn't be sure just how ugly. The others in the office had turned off almost all the overhead strips before heading for home. They had then filled all the lifts and staircases with clambering bodies - like crabs in a fisherman's basket.
Pete's desk-lamp, gleaming waxily across his yet untidied papers, spotlit his hallowe'en mask of a mask of a face, while he tried to put paid to the hard-buy customer at the other end of the telephone. ...
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05 May 07 - 19:27A Long Tail
A LONG TAIL
First published 'Weirdmonger Tales' (Wyrd Press) 1994
Lanky Brig eventually killed himself by choking on his prayer-beads.
His initial ploy was to string them round his fingers, entwining the beads so that his knuckles became a street-fighter's weapon. Having realised that any amount of pummelling of his own head would be the least efficient method, he eventually unravelled his bunch of fives, but only to wrap the knobbled nuggetted lace around his neck in two or three love-biting loops. Then, having failed to tug the throttle-tourniquet, there being little strength left in his arms, Brig resorted to dangling a throat-tantaliser via his tusk-beaded mouth, gagging upon the hard pellets.
They found Brig in the morning. Sarah was the first to scream, raging at her own loss rather than sorrowing at his. Muriel, Sarah's sister, told her to sit down while she called the Authorities. ...
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01 May 07 - 12:55Nancy's Mother
NANCY'S MOTHER
First published 'Uneasy Reading' 1998
As I watched a tomcat on the whisker’s edge of pouncing at an unsuspecting blackbird, I suddenly remembered Nancy’s mother.
Nancy told me that her mother was dead - “Gone with the angels” being her childlike way of putting it. This reminded me of when a much-loved pet cat was squashed under my father’s car and my own mother told me that “Tuppence had gone to Cat’s Heaven.” If Tuppence had died peacefully in its sleep, such a notion would certainly have rung true - I could have imagined those gentle white shimmering, wing-folded figures stroking it and then feeding it heavenly cat’s meat from white, round lipped bowls. But, doing this to a squashed cat? Tuppence having become a lump of red and black meat, plastered to the ground, the ministering angels would need to spoon God’s milk into its many moons. No, never that!
So, as I said, Nancy (who, in the ...
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