The Magic Spoon

The needle flashed in the late afternoon light, shuttering up and down as Shulie’s hands moved the dark fabric under the machine’s foot with her hands.  The foot and needle both caught the light and glinted, while the black corduroy fabric seemed to swallow up the light. Black, black, black. All summer, Shulie had worn an assortment of colourful sundresses in gay prints and cheery fabrics. Now, as autumn came back around, she found herself staying up all night making herself a new wardrobe to suit her the next few months: that of a widow in mourning. She watched the needle flicker against the dark fabric, and another shining metal caught her eye: her antique engagement ring, glinting softly on her left hand. Again, thoughts of her loss bloomed in her mind, and she resolutely pushed them away, calming her mind, entering that strange, meditative state where her world smoothed out.

The feed dogs whirred, eating up the fabric under their insatiable momentum, as the needle tacked a strait, strong seam into the fabric. Shulie let her mind fly far and wide, trusting that her hands on the seam and her foot on the treadle would do the job she felt as familiar and easy as breathing. Her mind seemed to expand, taking in so many thoughts at once. The Rings. That had been on her mind lately, the lost wedding bands that Ink had carefully formed. This time, however, instead of resolutely pushing the thought away, she let herself follow it, like a shining thread stretching off through the air. The thread shimmered, flying out of the packhouse, out of the physical world as Shulie entered that strange trance that so often made the long hours of housework pass in an instant. For a moment, her mind swung far and wide, scenting and tasting the spirits of the city, the land. After a moment, a scene shimmered and resolved.

It was the wood.  Late afternoon sunlight slipped in wide bands through the treetops, and pooled in a rich dappling pattern over the clearing. She looked about the place, trying to recognise it. It was certainly local. Tall, stately trees, wildflowers growing…yes. The wood…but where? And what was God trying to show her? She pressed herself into the vision, willing the sight into clarity.  Slowly, the clearing swam into sharp focus, the rich colours and beauty of the scene filling her mind. There was something in the clearing.

A sword. It was thrust into the ground, the pommel and grip brushed lightly by the flowers growing all around it. She recognised the Harmoniser instantly. The silver thread she’d followed there wrapped around the sword, continuing down into the earth, under…under. Her heart beast fast, feeling the tug of this place, the need to be there, to need to find whatever was there, hidden in this beautiful clearing. The emotion it sparked in her tugged her out of the vision, back into that unsure place that was no-where in particular. Her mind flew back, following that glimmering silver line, until Shulie found herself back at home, sitting in front of her sewing machine. She looked down, giving a cry of dismay, seeing the effects of her brief trance. Still, her mind touched upon the clearing and the sword she had seen. She pondered it and sighed, reaching for her seam ripper. Though most of the seam was strait and perfect, there was now about a foot of tight, tiny stitches to undo.

I wrote this as a song for 50/90, which is a really brilliant songmaking community that really deserves its own post.  I worked on the song a good  few days, only to realise that it really kinda stood on its own as a poem of sorts. I am no poet, but occasionlly even that doesn’t stop me.

(more…)

This little bit of microfiction didn’t start out that way.  In fact, it didn’t start out as anything at all. You see, I’ve recently gotten a little Android tablet, mostly for pulling up Ukelele chords and recipes in the kitchen, and other such fun stuff. I was just playing about with it, getting used to the keyboard, I started tapping away, not really paying attention.  I’d done about a paragraph of this when I noticed a theme to the nonsense sentences. Enjoying the experience (experiment, if you will) I kept writing. Something like to a story came out. It was disjointed and awkwardly phrased, but I found I liked it that way.  It worked for me. I named it “The Shore” and decided to call it a tiny story.

Skip to today – I’ve decided to do everything for this story on my tablet. So as I’m using the WordPress app to post it, I realised- in a flash, if you will – that it woks with the title I’d picked out for my friend Chuck’s Booze-themed microfiction challenge. One title change later, Chuck has another story! …only three weeks late.

(more…)

night at the end of august
dusty road in dirty summer
the sweaty path to the end of salad days
and we grow sour too, over-ripe youth
(fruit of love mashed between our hungry pearls)
turn to wine, ferment and drop
sweaty shoulders and first-kiss sour and sweet smoke
for the finish

The Premise:

“I want a bitter grl and a cheeky boy and a night with fireworks just after a dance in a decade when everyone thinks the world is about to end. ” (more…)

Last night, I had a dream. In it, Che appeared; he accused me of being Middle-Class with delusions of oppression. I hung my head but secretly sulked.

“I could never hate you.”

“You could. I could make you.” Yet finally, finally, his lips curled into a smile. It was a slow, heated smile; butter melting on hot toast, a square of sunlight through a window on a fall afternoon. With it his own godhood showed through the shell of this rascal, this backwoods carnie. Something burning and beautiful, so uncompromising that it evaporated everything it touched. Even the glimmer he allowed through made the air around them buckle and shimmer. Then again, her shadowy tendrils were reaching out too, curling around him. He saw then that he could annihilate her, and let himself be consumed. She could strangle him, he could impale her. Her shadows could choke all his bitterness and exhaustion, his shards of brilliance could pierce and rip to shreds all of her doubt and sorrow and longing. He smiled then, and it was a beautiful and terrible thing. He leaned down, pressed his lips to her ear, and blew these thoughts into her mind.

Very old, and I’m still not sure how I feel about it. I was pretty proud of it back then, though! So here you go.
(more…)

“What is the greatest evil?” he asked her one night, an hour before grey dawn. She pressed her lips tight, her black eyes inspected him.

“To murder love.” she answered, voice even.

“Heaven take me.” He moaned, face against his leather gloves. “I have done so. You have touched my sin; just so.”

Avialle stood, golden chain clinking delicately on the stones behind her. She threaded her long, thin fingers into his hair, noting with muted shock the deep vein of jealousy that flared up at his words.

“You’ll spend every drop of your years trying to touch half of mine.” she said, to comfort him.

She wasn’t anyone I knew.

I met her once, in a bar on fifty-second street.  You know, one of those places where everyone orders gin & tonics, because at least you know that will taste bad in a way you’re used to, and all the other stuff behind the bar has labels you’ve never seen before, tequila complete with a worm five years dead.

We were dancing to the jukebox, Iggy Pop was playing.  He’s really hard to dance to, I don’t know if you know that. We gathered up all our pennies, poured them into our two pairs of cupped hands; we fed them into the aged jukebox one by one by one. She flipped through the options, even though there were only five and four of them were Travis Tritt or someone who looked and sounded just like him. The little mechanical arm extended, plucked up the album, fed it into the slot, and those vomitous guitars and arrhythmia drums started up: a musical tribute to late nights, too much drinking, sickness and decay.  The kind of explosive life that never comes easy, because you’d never ever want it to. We looked at one another, and I saw we both liked him for the same reason.  Iggy Pop wasn’t afraid to let brilliance be something ugly and disgusting.

We were both  tired of pretty things and pretty music, see.  I think that’s why I remember her: she rolled her eyes at Cyndi Lauper, she had nothing good to say about any of the pop starlets that put out videos on MTV, no matter how creative or original they were.  She wanted her music mainlined, she wanted it to make her afraid. She wanted to live and die running for her life. It could be something told me that, even then, but I doubt it would have changed anything.

In the end, we decided that Nightclubbing was too hard to dance to and oozed our sweaty bodies into a booth, the cracked naugahyde catching on her lace skirt and leaving long scratches on my bare thighs.  We ordered a pitcher of some disgusting mexican beer, and drank it fast so we wouldn’t have to taste it. The stuff still made bile rise in my throat. I slid a few safety pins across the table, for her skirt. She asked if I wanted something to eat.  I looked her straight in the eye and said “Maybe you.”

She wasn’t anyone I knew. We danced to Iggy Pop, this one time, and the only picture of her in my head is her smeared mascara as she let the early morning chill hustle her onto the train. I still vomited when I heard the news; I didn’t cry.  I like to think she would have approved.

It was a hot, sultry evening as the carriage made its way north to Bristol; the sort of night that gave birth to strange, vivid dreams and stranger imaginings when one looked up to the huge, luminous orange moon. As the carriage bumped and shook it’s way along the coach-road, the landscape became wilder and more beautiful – moors replacing cultivated fields, and trees that hugged to the road, throwing odd shivering shadows on the road, distorted by it’s bumps and wagon-tracks. One lonely coach ambled down this road, though it had miles and miles to go before Bristol came into sight. The coachmen expected that the first rays of dawn would light the road into the city, and he tucked his hands under his armpits to keep them warm. Inside the coach, a young woman read by the light of one swinging lanthorn, one hand clutching her rosary and the other shoved up under her skirts.

The attack came suddenly. The coachman hardly had time to cry out before his body fell into the muddy ditch, and there were cheers and hoots as the carriage’s door was wrenched open. A sandy-haired head popped in. There was an impression of a wide grin and white teeth, and then he spoke. “Ah! A woman.”

Isobel was pressed against the far wall, but she didn’t resist when the highwayman took her hand and pressed a smacking kiss to her trembling fingers. She opened her mouth but could not speak, and he took her silence as invitation. In a moment his muscled arm was wrapped tight around her waist, and his mouth pressed to hers. He did not kiss her tenderly, or sweetly: he kissed her as if he’d like to eat her up. It was not her first kiss, but it was the first that flickered with lust. She hadn’t remembered to close her eyes, and when he pulled away he saw her looking at him dumbly. He gave a grin that might have been meant to be dashing, but it seemed sheepish and fond. She spoke then, and started at how shrill her voice sounded.

“Really…really, you mustn’t!” and he pulled back, the bravado gone out of him. She looked at her silk slippers, and blushed. “I must get to Bristol by morning. I must! I..I’m to be married to a merchant.” and waited for him to blush and apologise. He didn’t. “It..it’s a very sensible match, you see.” she finished lamely, her eyes on his, imploring (though for what she’d no idea). Her hands clutched the French novel she’d been reading, hiding it under the edges of her skirts. He nodded then, but slipped like oil between her knees. She was about to protest – oh really, sir, how could you! – when she heard the splintering of wood and the scrape of his knife behind her calves, and realised that the only reason his chin (scarred, she wondered how) was resting on her knee was that he was opening the secret panel to get at her dowry. She sighed with relief, and mayhap a little disappointment. So, he wasn’t planning to ravish her after all.

She heard the jingle of heavy coin as the loot was tossed out to his men but didn’t look up – she was reading her novel again, by lanthorn-light. Then he was kissing her (quite suddenly) and with a whimper against his mouth her book fell from her hand to be crushed under his knees as he pressed close to her. His tongue slid along the seam of her lips and she sucked in a breath, and the shock of a tongue that wasn’t her own against her teeth almost made her bite it. His hands were sliding over her bodice now, and she imagined she could feel the heat of his palms even through the heavy brocade. His lips plucked at hers, his tongue stroked hers, he swallowed down her moans. Their teeth clicked. She felt he was somehow delving deeper and deeper into her, his tongue a wriggling fish that would follow the rushing stream of her lust to its source. She wondered where it led, but had a good idea: that part of her was feeling much less dry than was typical. He was stroking her now, one hand on her stockinged knee and the other palming one small breast through her bodice. She moaned into his mouth, tipped her head this way and that, trying to seal to him perfectly. Overcome by boldness, she thrust her tongue into his mouth. He is just like a character in a novel, she thought, and with that his conquest was complete.

It was later, much later, that the moon looked down on him helping her onto his horse. There was a white cloth blindfolding her eyes, but she didn’t much mind. “And to think,” he told her, tilting her head back to once again plunder her lips, steal her eager kisses. “To think, I would have left the dearest prize behind.”

Imagine, if you can, a silence that is not the absence of sound…
Let me start again.
Imagine a silence that is not nothing, not what they call a ‘vacuum’, but a collective hush. Every being, animated or not, green and growing or fast and flitting or hiding in the muck of the ocean; imagine every creature and thing that lives holding its breath. A silence so profound, so…
I-I am no orator, my words are too weak. I am made for walking and waiting, and sitting through long nights, and bearing all with patience, and tending fires. I would leave matters of passion and art to my brothers and sisters, they are the ones men tell stories of. My tongue is clumsy; I never thought to explain myself. Yet… There was a young woman: she stopped me walking one night and asked me questions. She said she worked for…some paper, or…well, I cannot remember, I was too shocked that she saw me at all. I sat with her; we spoke. She was very beautiful: her belly was firm and round, her hips wide, breasts high, skin smooth and she moved as if she was about to burst, wrapped around so much life, so much need for the future. She blew her nose into a faded blue cloth. I remember that in detail.

She told me I looked so tired, so worn, so faded and grey. I told her yes, I am. She touched my hair, curled a tangled bit of it around one finger. It broke like dry straw. She offered me no shelter, no succour or aid – as others have – but sat and talked with me, and somehow I was more grateful to her than I have been to all of those that helped me over the years. I have a clumsy tongue, not many have the patience to hear my story. This lantern, this walking stick, this tiny feeble flickering thing that rules me. That a contraption of metal and glass could rule a goddess: it seems like a very good joke! She listened, unlikely as it was. She listened until the end, when I told her why I devote my existence to this absurd little lantern, why its embers are to me a god, as men have gods.

If it were to go out, I told her, everything stops. Imagine a silence that is not an absence, but a great hush as everything that lives waits at once to be undone. There is nothing after: the credits are over, the tape runs out, the curtain falls, the Red King wakes up, everything…ends. Of course I am a slave to this tiny glow, of course I am. I trudge, and suffer, and grow more thin and pale and faded and pitiful with every sundown. Of course I keep it safe, of course I do.

She asked me: do you ever want to just throw it down, stamp it, smash it apart? I could not answer; I fled.

Do I dream of shattering glass and dying coals underfoot? Of course I do.

Of course I do.

She was careful as she picked across the rubble to where he lay gasping, spurting his life. “If you thought me delicate then, I was.  Not fragile, no, that was what you made me.”  She touched him sweetly, leaving the scent of rose and resentment behind her.

Love wasn’t something we planned for, you must understand this. It swept in uninvited, a great wind that destroyed our taste for the past.

He’d fretted long: hand-wringing, brow-wiping. In the end it blurted out. She froze, spoon of applesauce halfway to her mouth. She’d never been so beautiful; he’d never felt so ill.

As the days went by, Zinnia found herself more and more taken with the idea of being a wife. She hadn’t yet come to the idea of motherhood yet, but skirted around the edges of the idea as it began to timidly tiptoe into her mind. She bent to her studies and correspondence with renewed zeal, entering into a whirlwind of research and for the first time taking an assistant. All the while her sisters marvelled and her brother laughed, and Zinnia knew for the first time that no matter how much they teased her, it would slip from her like water from an oiled palm, and leave her just as happy as before.

Today….

My hands are coming off. I can walk to a cupboard I have in a tiny little room behind the kitchen….and after I slip through the soft whispering curtain, the little room makes my nose twitch as the dust motes and smell of cinnamon settle on my tongue. It’s warm in here, not too much, just warm enough to make my fingers swift and my breath heavy, wanting to duck back out into the light that will make my eyes wince, just a little bit. The light in here…it comes from the cupboard doors, as musty and tired as the air in this room.

There’s a tiny key hidden under the cupboard…my quickened fingers find it easily, even though I hide it in a different crevice every time I visit this little room. It’s a tiny, tiny key, filagreed and etched with designs my mind has forgotten but my breath remembers. Slipping it between my fingers, I close my eyes for a moment, only a moment, and slip it into the cupboard door. Turn. Tiny tap, tiny clink! The key turns it’s delicate mechanism, and the door slides open, revealing my cupboard’s contents and offering them up to my slipping hands. My box, my clockwork kit! It’s pressed cosy against my tummy now, held to me precious and strange, and I close the cupboard doors, already holding my breath to duck back out into the cooler, fresh air of the kitchen. even so, there’s still that itch of cinnamon in my nose…Sniffle, Snuffle!

There’s a chair behind this house..through a different door and only a little hidden under the branches of a draping willow. It’s here I sit myself, comfy and settled nice with my dirt-black feet tucked under me. This comfy chair will lull me to sleep on sunnywarm summer afternoons, with the willow leaves brushing my cheeks…but today I tuck my feet and open the inlaid box still held close to my body. Every time I take out this little kit, the design on the cover is a different picture – today a fox, today a bird! The first time, it was a little snail, twisting and twirling colours dancing on its abalone shell. Today it’s a linden tree, with a little clockwork nightingale singing from it’s branches. Of course, I can’t see the tiny bird in the picture, but that’s okay because the tiny tinkling notes it sings will keep my company, here in my chair under the willow tree. It’s nice to have music when I have a task to do…and today, it’s time to take off my hands.

This was written for Clockabye.  It’s horrific and dark and I don’t know if it’s particularly well written, but I fretted over it for weeks, so there you go.

Be warned: There is death in this, and some sex, but that’s peripheral.  There’s blood and gore and what I wouldn’ t consider cannibalism, but you might. So…if you don’t like your fiction dark and disturbing (as this was meant to be) better to avoid it.

(more…)

No-one really knows Mister Claypole’s first name. If you asked anyone who works under him in the theatre, any of his managers of patrons or whores, they might scratch their heads and speculate.  George?  Andrew?  Donald?  For some reason they will all give you the names of saints, and they will all forget to ask him if they are right.  It’s been so long since Claypole has had anyone use his name that when he reads old love letters from his first and second wives (which he does instead of attending church), he always sees it with a tiny bit of surprise.

—

Madlan Goring will someday be a staunch, respectable woman.  She will have steely grey hair and speak sternly to her servants, and she will be adored and only a little resented by her children.  And scandal will not touch her, and gossip will roll from her, because she will have pride.  Pride is your backbone, her father told her.  And as she pulls her laces loose, as she watches her petticoat crumple to the floor and hears the gasp from the bed behind her, her back straitens.   She keeps pride in her backbone, and compromises everything else.

—

When they were little, Lowri and her brother Daffydd found a cave.  A little pregnant ewe led them to it, and it was just big enough to crawl inside, and it was nice and cool that blistering summer.  And now they’re in London with it’s bewildering strangeness, still looking for a place to hide.  All they have to crawl inside is one another.

—

There are men in Gianni’s camp that had never heard the word ‘Giacomo’ before they knew him.  He uses it daily, to excuse himself or to protest his sincerity, or any of the thousand things that beg for his pontification.   And to be a fool is a great and heavy thing, but it’s better than being a sinner.

—

There was a plague that went through London, and Emm still remembers the twisted faces, the crowded graves, the plague masks in some dark corner of her mind. Very little matters to her nowadays, she finds it hard to convert her indifference into reform.  Lime and sand and the dead cover her in her nightmares, and the panting bodies of two brothers in her dreams.

—

Knives and forks have been the fashion for how long now?  But old and tried works best; Jim Holly still eats with his fingers and his knife.  His teeth are sharp, his eyes are sharper, and his mind has a jagged, brutal edge.   His knife is the only thing he carries, and the only thing he makes up stories about.

Lindsey is a stage magician, at least he was.  Now, he’s starting to suspect he may be a conduit for infernal secrets, but hasn’t let himself think about that enough to be properly alarmed.  Before, he was a proper sort, if somewhat scattered.    And sometimes he is that again, if he leaves his jacket (and what’s in his jacket pocket) on the train.   Of course, his jacket pocket always finds its way back to him, sooner or later.

—

You’ll see Valentine skulking in shadows, or perhaps as a dark shape moving between drops of rain at night.  He doesn’t show himself much, trusting whispered secrets in sleeping ears to achieve his purposes.  But soon, soon.  Soon you’ll see Valentine walking down the Evil Quarter Mile, without a care in the world again.  Wise men would caution not to meet his eye.

—

Redjack Ryan is missing a tooth.  A canine.  The left one. Or was it the right?  Doesn’t matter, what matters are the stories of how and why and what happened after.   The stories are important, are fascinating, give the lie to anything that might be hidden by that grin.

—

Watches must be wound just right.  Not enough, and they won’t keep time.  Too much, and their tightness weakens the springs. Or at least that’s what J.Q. Fiddich thinks, when he winds his ornate watch every night.  It has many functions (stars, calender, compass…), but never does seem to set exactly to the time on the high church tower.  He thinks this might be a metaphor for life, and keeps his watch well polished just in case.

Desire is a strange thing. Time can sharpen, dull, and twist desire, but want never dies. In three millenia of life, this is the only lesson Lucky Welles has ever learned.

—

Euphemia Horbruth is grand, imposing, out-sized. Her favorite niece has always, she thinks, been the contrast to her – small somehow, retiring, a pretty wallflower with a pretty smile. “But,” she’ll say to her ex-husbands, “There’s a tart in there somewhere, mark my words. I just hope it’s her husband that finds it.”

Clock lives inside his Engine. His Engine lives inside a large warehouse with thick stone walls, but Clock doesn’t live in the warehouse. He sleeps under the timekeeper and he reads the morning paper under the database wheels, and he sometimes lays across a board set over the large system of pedals that control various functions and systems, and sketches a woman with charcoal pencils on scrap paper. The woman is always the same woman, though she looks different every time. He does nothing with these sketches except to fold them carefully, and hide them in his Engine’s heart.

—

Payne loves needles more than anything else. The pinch, the pain, the blood. It clears her head, and it makes the world separate for a moment into neat little slivers. And she likes it that way. People, people who would be better off not speculating, like to say she loves drugs and tattoos and pain. But she wouldn’t notice any of that, if they weren’t all delivered on the cold, uncaring, perfect promise of a needle.

—

Sam is in a punk band.  It’s called Dead Kitties, and the one before that was called Armistice.  He’s the bassist for Dead Kitties, and he writes all the songs.  Nobody knows that though, because he’s the sort of bassist that stands at the back of the stage and watches their singer Lab Rat get all the free drinks and their guitarist Davey – even though he’s Welsh – get all the girls.  But it’s copacetic, because after the show Nika’ll probably launch herself at him and scream “YOU WERE SO AWESOME!” into his ear.