28 September 07 - 13:14Green Twist
Published 'Return of the Mutant Starfishman' 1999
Arfi spent most of his waking hours doing jigsaw puzzles. It never crossed his mind that he might be wasting his life, for he found the whole activity relaxing, absorbing, generally civilised and, yes, cathartic.
He became so expert, he speedily progressed from the large chunky pieces designed for the short-witted, towards those that numbered their pieces in thousands. Then there were the ones with bits bearing malformed joints or pseudo-stellar appendages. He even had puzzles which eventually formed pictures in scales of life to life and larger...
As the carriage clock on the mantelpiece kept the silence in rigorous shape and, with the heavy-duty curtains half-pulled across the net-choked window, Arfi propped the huge ...
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16 September 07 - 14:37Tale With An Unknown Collaborator
TALE WITH AN UNKNOWN COLLABORATOR
If I recall correctly, this was written around 2000 through the auspices of Jon Hodges (who then masterminded blind collaborations between writers).
I really don't remember if I ever found out who I was collaborating with and now I would like to know. I'm not sure even if it's finished, although it does seem finished. A rather impressive piece if I do say so myself!
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The sitting-room, with a large looking-glass on one of the beetle-green walls, was gradually crowding up with various relatives. Christenings were times of happiness - but most of the old dears were as glum as mythology.
The proud parents weren't able to attend this reception (nor the newly baptized baby), a fact which, in Margaret's discerning eyes, seemed to defeat the whole ...
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15 September 07 - 18:54Raw Rain and Used Wicks
Known as the Wick Man because, being a purveyor of items which threaded, almost a Patron Saint of things-that-go-through-other-things, it was the most suitable name for him - or so thought the inhabitants of a City winding along the banks of the River Tiddle, a City called Abrundy.
Dressed as a Red Indian from the Old Wild West (but, of course, it was not Old nor, for that matter, even forthcoming), a twin tail of coloured feathers hanging from his headband and tossing brightly down his back, the Wick Man knew that festooned poultry legs extruded from the collective dreams of all his his Abrundy Tiddle customers.
Despite the gaiety of his demeanour to catch the unsuspecting eye, his was a humourless mind. He feared retribution if he should joke because, surely, life was circumscribed (like a wagon train) by the warmongering of Birth and ...
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11 September 07 - 19:42Vow of Contrition
Alan was ankle deep in something he’d’ve preferred to have avoided. Yet Alan, when he realised that -- to obtain Rhona’s forgiveness -- he needed to negotiate some slimy spillages she’d left in her wake, decided to remove his sock and shoe with the aim of hopping towards her known location.
This wasn’t an alien land. Nor was it home. It was a cross between two worlds: the first being the sane environment of Earth where he’d been raised into its logical effects, the world of his earliest memories of being bred by similar critters to himself; and a second world, one with barely predictable motives -- the motives of the environment itself, of its inhabitants, even of visitors to that world as they became slowly absorbed by infesting (or being infested by) it. These two environments had merged in Alan’s mind and he had ceased to be aware of exactly which world he now inhabited. Was he at home or was he visiting? ...
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01 September 07 - 20:19My Own Step-Father
Published 'Peeping Tom' 1992
But let me tell you, the backyard was a real eyesore. There were rusty tin baths stacked up against the disused outside jacksy, a moulderlng ladder with most crossbars completely stepped through, a long corroded apparently purposeless iron girder sticking through the lopsided gate into the public ginnel behind and, finally, the washing wringer, its heavy-duty roller-barrels grimed up with green fungus, its brown crank-handle pathetically poking out for use, its iron gridstand previously used on a treadle sewing-machine, by the look of it…
It all brought back memories of my mother. I don’t know why exactly, except perhaps because she often used to be found in the steamy kitchen, a large apron hiding the huge shapelessness of ...
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