The Magic Spoon

I’m working on my Red Hood, tonight. I found a lovely little girl’s coat, the softest fur you could imagine! It’s going to line the cloak’s edges, and the hood. I have always wanted a lovely hood, lined with scrumptious plush! If I have enough left over (as I am dearly hoping) I will be [...]

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 [...]

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.

Your swallowing motions tell me all I could possibly need to know. Won’t you come to the shore with me? I cannot imagine anything better, truly. I don’t think I should like anything so much as your love and approval. Failing that, your blood soaking the sand should do.

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. “ I. No-one past graduation thought it was worth a damn, but the fireworks were going ahead. Important to keep morale up, the [...]

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 [...]

But then he had to grab her and swing her around the small dingy rooms in an awkward dance. And then he had to go and kiss her as if he liked her (really liked her!) and be an idiot and say adorable things. And that was far scarier than spending another night in the flop house on Granada and Two.

“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, [...]

“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.”

I wrote this little vignette for Remittance Girls’ Slip of the Lip challenge, and it was subsequently put out in the Ebook. Thanks to Remittance Girl for her support of this story, and encouraging me to write it. She’s a fantastic writer, but an even better pal.
The full e-pillow book can be downloaded from ERWA in pdf format, for free! Go and read it, and then support the writers therein.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

When the first wave came, we were ready.  We had anti-radiation agent, and we holed up in the basement.  We  weren’t worried at all.  The government would come through soon with scan-raids and life would get back to normal, like it always did.  Only this time, the trucks didn’t come. We ate the animals  first, after the stores were emptied.  A few [...]

“You smell like…”  his nose was pressed into the crease where her hip met thigh, and she bit her lip – hard – to stifle a giggle.  It tickled. “I smell like yer mama’s perfume.”  Her voice was harsh with stolen cigarettes, but he looked up with awe and thought it beautiful.  ”You didn’t!”  But he took a long whiff [...]

Lowri ran in the hills and killed sheep and ate them for her breakfast.  According to Dafydd, his sister had bested pirates on the shore, bandits on the road, and robbers at the hearth.  She’d run to the Gower and back, she’d swum in the ocean and scorned the tides, she’d caught a mermaid by the tail [...]

Jack and Ben: PUNK ROCK LOVE By the by? This is so ridiculously full of symbolism and allegory and trope and oh my god, all that good stuff that if I even tried to annotate it, the annotations would be tem times as long as the story. If there’s anything that catches your eye and [...]

“So what’s this shit do?” “That just makes ya feel all…all gooey. S’nice.” “And this shit here?” The darker stuff? That’s the good shit. Like rambo-speed only no crash, s’great.” “What makes it darker?” “Fuck should I know? S’got somehtin’ on it. Think it might be the beetles. I always see ‘em on it…” “Betcha [...]

Too Much is a little piece I wrote about Moll and Theo, two characters from The Victorious, one of the settings on Clockwork Lullabye.  Is flowed out of my easy and sweet, and I’m a bit fond of it.  As it’s filed under ‘erotic fiction’, I expect anyone who oughtn’t be reading it not to. [...]

When clouds come twogether… …in a symphonic sort of broo-hah-hah and ie stand amaxed, thoughraly watching, wah-cheeng as they gl+eyed a cross the mainstage uv my vizun and I oneder if theh no and if eye could sea what they were dooihng ware they ahr going swoosh! swish! ahnd thi cloud-horses righd and thi clowds [...]