The Magic Spoon

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.

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.

Imagine us, together, with our big picnic basket. Don’t worry yourself about a thing. That?  Why it is only the wind. This is a place for rest and ease and healing. This lemonade is freshly-made. Shh, just lay back, there’s a good love. The doctor said the seaside would do you good.

I rather think we ought to listen to the doctor. Don’t you?

Don’t sulk, my love. No-one likes the silent treatment.

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 radio said. So barbecue charcoal spread its scent through the neighbourhood, and in the firefly-fussed evening the kids and dogs and parents came out of their houses, to pay homage to the patriotic display. Perhaps it was the last rally in a doomed battle, perhaps it was a modern try at banging pots and pans to keep night-haunts away. Whatever the reason every face tipped up, every pair of eyes to the south sky that smokey summer evening. After all (said the silent voice in every head) even with the fireworks, the sirens are plenty loud enough to hear.

II.

It was cold. The girl was cramped, and she was cold. There was metal above – smooth and cool. Concrete below – solid, bonechilling. To either side metal, and a wall of damp, crumbling plaster. She crouched there, calves cramping and knees aching; she was listening to sirens out the window and her own quick breath. The sirens wailed a slow song, a song that would take years to resolve into a tune. They had been going on for centuries.
There was a scuffling of feet – she pressed hands over her ears and screwed her eyes  closed tight.
III.

The air hung heavy; maybe it was the summer humidity or the smoke from burning leafpiles or the threat of utter annihilation, but he didn’t feel it. Saw it, pressing sweat into the skin and dogs back onto their haunches flattening smiles into thin-lipped masks – but he didn’t feel a thing. Immune or fool-headed he was lifted up by a greater force than even The Atom, one only a teenager in love could tap. Busted sneakers and ratty shoelaces left on the verdant lawn, bare feet took him tenterhooked to her door. Three knocks (no more) and there stood the Knave: big goofy gap-tooth grin topped with a smear of freckles, eyes full of promise armed and ready.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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 people were crushed in panic or killed in the night.  Them next.  We joked about it.   ”You can get anything down,” we said “with enough salt.”

We started a lottery last week.  In the corner my three year old is crouching over a spilled cabinet, eating salt.

“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 and there it was, that cloying scent of orchids and baby powder.  He looked over at the dresser where the bottle sat – not as dusty as it usually was.  The sheer insanity of the day made him want to….
“I did.  And y’know what else?”  Her hand edged down, lifting up her shirt for him to see.  And he didn’t know who would have done it, there was no way she looked eighteen.
“You didn’t”  he breathed, though the proof winked at him from her tummy-button, garish and gold and glittering.  She smiled at him, licking off a little of her bright pick lipstick.
“I did.  Can we do it now?”

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 and lived to tell.

Many of the villagers laughed at the boy’s stories, but young Dafydd knew that even if they weren’t exactly factual, they were still a perfect reflection of the reality he alone knew:  that Lowri was beautiful and fierce, and would someday have the world in her pocket.