The Cure

Eddie was a bright guy.  I met him at college where he was studying literature and poetry and he had a real passion for it all.  He had a gift with words and loved a well crafted phrase loaded with booby-trap cleverness.   Away from his subject though, away from the sphere of words and ideas he was different, quiet and withdrawn.   He never really spoke about it, because people didn’t back then, but we all figured he was suffering from depression or some similar condition.  He’d go through periods of quiet withdrawal and become a mostly silent presence in our groups and gatherings, perfectly polite and amiable but offering nothing except for the occasional clever spark of wordplay or wit that he couldn’t resist breaking through.   I suggested a couple of times, gentle as you like because Eddie could take offense easily, that he got help and that we only wanted him to be happier.  “I’m okay,” he’d say, or “I’m doing fine.”  And he’d smile and act better around me for a couple of days just to shut me up.

He mistrusted doctors.  He mistrusted medication fearing I think that it would make him less himself, or dull his wits somehow.

And then he improved.  His mood lifted and stayed lifted, he began to smile more and laugh more, and to suggest things to us all, things we could do together.  We were all so pleased at this change that we said yes to practically everything he suggested and our little group made excursions to the coast, to the theatre and even to poetry recitals at his instigation.   The seaside trips and theatre outings were good, let’s leave it at that.

Then the Daily Mail ran one of their shock horror headlines.   “Killer Drug Targets Mentally Ill”.  Underneath the lurid screaming type was the typical scare story about something new that would undoubtedly bring British society to its knees.   This week it wasn’t immigrants or left wing economics or young people listening to music, it was a new drug available over the internet (“When will ISPs hand over all their customer data to the police?” the article raged) that was supposedly a miracle cure for a wide spectrum of affective mental disorders.   It was called Claritas, or Focus, or half a dozen other names and its exact source was unknown.    The drug arrived (“shipped from clandestine sources” the Mail reminded us) in small black boxes with a yellow logo and users experienced a new sense of drive and enthusiasm for life.   The article broke down at that point and started the usual rant about foreign influences, scroungers, the work-shy and people unable to stand on their own two feet.   The last paragraph wiped the spittle from its chin and mumbled about untested, unlicensed pharmaceuticals and the risk of side effects.    The USA it pointed out smugly had banned Claritas outright.

I mentioned it to Eddie later that day, thinking only to share our usual mockery of the gutter press and its hamfisted propaganda.  Instead of joining in though he scowled and said quite bitterly that they didn’t know what they were talking about.  Claritas, he said, had changed his life.

That surprised me.  He’d always been cautious about drugs, medicines, even artificial sweeteners and he was the last person I would have expected to try something so unregulated from a peculiar online source.  How are things going with that, I asked carefully.   He lit up.

“Going great,” he said, “I can think again.  I can enjoy the world around me.   When I look at a flower I don’t just see the flower anymore.”

I asked him to explain.

“I see the flower behind the flower,” he said with a  big grin, “the real flower.  It’s hard to explain.  I suppose you get in habits of thought, you see what you expect to see.  When you look at a lily you see your own idea of a lily.   Since I started taking Claritas I see the lily itself.”

“The lily without the mask?” I suggested liking the image.  He liked it too and agreed.  I heard him using the imagery himself several times afterward.  The world, he said, was made up of masks and it was good to be able to see its face now.   

It was a month later that I saw another change in Eddie.  He’d turned up for one of our regular gaming nights but he was quiet again and I wondered if his depression had settled on him again, if the black dog had bitten.  If it had it was worse than before and he seemed sullen and defensive the whole evening, barely speaking except when forced to and with irritation when he did.   I wanted to ask if he was okay, if there was anything I could do, but the awkwardness of it all and the fear that he’d be upset by my intervention made me hold back.   He looked at me as I held back and just shook his head, answering a question I hadn’t asked.

He came a couple more times to the gaming nights over the next month and then just stopped.   We were all worried but nobody liked to intrude on him, especially if he was having a hard time.  I left him a couple of falsely cheery voicemails asking him to get in touch and received only a curt SMS “Am ok” in return after a couple of days.  And then the Daily Mail ran another front page article about Claritas.   “Internet Drug Death Horror”.    A photograph of a pretty young woman with a glass in her hand and the caption “SONIA IN HAPPIER DAYS – Parents blame Internet Death Pedlars”.   The article was the usual stuff but upsetting.   The woman had a history of depression and had recently perked up, attributing her improvement to Claritas which she’d purchased online.   She’d recently started becoming withdrawn and isolated and had posted a final message on her Tumblr account saying “I don’t want to see any more.”  And then she’d jumped, and fallen, and died.    The Mail pointed out with glee that it had been warning about the dangers of the internet for years and that the government should certainly step in to restrict access to pornography and extreme beliefs and everything else that our grandparents would have objected to on the basis of being immoral or too foreign.   It also quoted some of Sonia’s previous blog entries and her growing fascination with and then fear of what she described as “veils over the truth.”   They were, she wrote, being stripped away one by one and the joy of understanding she wrote of in her earlier posts was being slowly replaced with a growing paranoia.

This reminded me  too much of Eddie and his experiences.  I called him there and then inventing some cheery excuse to use while the phone rang.   It went through to his voicemail and I didn’t bother leaving a message.   I took a bus and walked from the station toward his house.   I was so worried for Eddie I barely noticed that here and there I was having to walk round people in the street, people standing still and not doing anything, just not doing anything.    Other pedestrians were walking around them in the sleepwalking shopping trance common to people in cities and I suppose I was doing the same.  Eddie was standing outside his house, just standing there in his garden.  He had a packet in his hand a black packet with a cryptic yellow sign on it and no other markings.

I called his name and he didn’t respond. His face was tilted upward he was looking at the clouds, a typically grey skyscape for the time of year.   He was just looking, but so intently it was unsettling.  I could not remember seeing him pay that much attention to anything, not even in his college days.    His lips were moving but he was making no sound.   I touched his arm and he shook my hand off without breaking eye contact with the emptiness above him.    Foolishly, pointlessly I looked around for anyone who could help, though what help I expected a stranger to be able to offer I didn’t know.   There were passers-by, but I also saw others like Eddie, others standing statue-still and staring upwards.   Six or seven on this street alone, just standing and looking upward with such perfect focus and attention while everyone around just moved on and noticed nothing outside their own heads.

I called Eddie’s name again more urgently, asked him if he was alright.

“It’s time,”

“Time for what?” I said, “Eddie, look at me.”

“We have all laid aside disguise but you,” he said and there was a tone in his voice, a hint that he was quoting something and not speaking for himself.

And then he spoke more clearly, four words only, loud and strong and clear, and those four words were spoken at once by every one of the other upward staring visionaries in the street, and in the city, and as I somehow knew all across the world, an answer given from some unknown other who spoke through the voices of tens of thousands.

“I wear no mask”

In answer to the prompt "Peculiar" at Studio30Plus and the image of lights in the sky at Light & Shade Challenge

Image courtesy of CDC at www.freeimages.com

Facade

(Originally posted in July 2013, resurrected here in honour of Halloween and my recent Lovecraft revitalisation)

Image by Stephen Bickham at www.freeimages.com

You look a little tense.  I think I know why.   It’s because this is a fairground, and fairgrounds are a little…  disturbing aren’t they?

I don’t take it personally any more, but do try to relax a little while we chat.    A lot of people find fairgrounds spooky, don’t they.     Have you seen how many horror novels and films have them as settings?   Theme parks or circuses too, I suppose.  All part of the same set of tropes.

There’s a lot of reasons for that.

Firstly I suppose there’s an element of the Outside about fairgrounds.  They come and they go, and the people who run them are not settled like most people.  They travel.   They arrive, they set up, they take your money in exchange for some rare entertainment and then off they go again leaving only muddy grass behind.   Maybe that triggers the deep deep fear of the outsider, the stranger.   The sense that these people are not like us and maybe they’re not playing by the same rules.    Could be a touch of racism in there too, eh?  Ever hear Cher singing Gypsies tramps and thieves.   Love that song by the way.  Papa would have shot him if he knew what he'd done.   Makes the hairs on my arms stand up that line, imagining what had gone on.

Then there’s the experience of the fairground itself.  It’s out of the normal isn’t it?  Not a habit.  It’s a place that’s only there at certain times, so it’s always a little bit different, and not part of everyday life.  Like a dream, all show and no substance, with bright coloured facades over grimy old cabins.   Fun and flashy entertainment that, like fairy gold, is not all it seems.    In the morning... it’s all faded away and a little bit tawdry.

Perhaps that’s why people find fairgrounds disturbing.

Or perhaps it’s the nature of the attractions.  A maze of mirrors, all dark and distorted, and the lingering suspicion that the contorted dwarf or gangly giant in the mirror may be slightly more… real… than the you that is doing the looking, the soul of you, not so pretty as you'd like to think.   And then there are the laughing clowns in their booths who are probably, almost certainly, most likely mechanical.  But you don’t want to look too close at their hungry eyes just in case.

Relax.  Relax.

I’ve been running fairgrounds for most of my life now, travelling all over with them.   Nobody knows more about them than I do, and really they’re very prosaic.  Just another type of workplace that’s all.  I’ve seen, oh, tens of thousands of visitors?  Hundreds of thousands?  Possibly more, who can say.  And they come and they go; some of them wide eyed and wondering, some of them grumpy and bitter, some of them… like you… with a little bit of that old fear growing and spreading just behind their eyes and wondering just why you’ve always found fairgrounds to be so very unsettling.

Perhaps it’s a cultural thing.  All those things I mentioned combining together and growing like a venomous pearl around a tiny piece of grit, some old truth, some real nastiness that once happened in such a place, at such a time long ago.  More than once maybe.   And the pearl swells and grows and glistens nastily and before you know it… Fairgrounds are spooky.   So unfair really, stops you enjoying yourself.

Fairgrounds are places where you should be able to enjoy yourself.  I do.  I enjoy my life in my fairgrounds immensely.   Every new stop brings new joys.

Like you.  You’re a joy just to look at, lying there all relaxed and… well not exactly calm, perhaps, but certainly… limp.

I know you can’t close your eyes, but try to focus on the music, such pretty music, while I change.  

Do you want to know the  real reason people find fairgrounds scary?  Spooky?  Disturbing?   All the way back to the first travelling oddities that roamed in the shadows when the pyramids were new.   Do you know why, even then, the fairground people were looked at sideways and rushed out of the bazaars, and why people dreamed a little bit darker when the show was in town?

It’s because of me.  Always me.

There.  All changed.  The mirror-me, you could say.

Let’s begin.

Momentary

(originally posted in response to a Trifecta prompt in 2013, reposted here in honour of Halloween and my recent resurgence of interest in all things Lovecraftian)

Image by Jon Spencer of www.freeimages.com

It was boredom that drove me.   The drugs were simply for something to do.   Acid, peyote, salvia, shrooms, they were all just things to do. I’d read Castaneda, and Huxley, and the others.   The mysticism of it passed me by, the experiences all I wanted.

I was introduced to Petrie by the friend of a friend.   I loathed him.  Petrie was too thin and smiled too much, like Death with a dirty joke he was waiting to shock you with.

“You really want this,” he said and handed me a single blue crystal.  It looked like a teardrop and felt like gel.   I didn’t ask him what it was, wasn’t interested.   He called it “HPL” and laughed.

That night it melted on my tongue, bitter and lingering.    I sat and watched static on my television and waited for the effects to kick in.

Time slowed and I could no longer move.  Not breathe nor blink nor twitch.   Each heartbeat rolled like a peal of thunder taking an hour from start to finish.    Even that stopped.  The television static was truly still now, a collage of visual gibberish.

I could not stop my thoughts.  All else had stopped but not my thoughts.   Time had ceased and only thought persisted.    There was me, and there was an eternal moment that I would never be free of.

In my mind I screamed for centuries.

And my screams were heard.

The things that live in the gaps between moments came to stare.  I cannot describe them, but they felt like the presence of the bereaved.   And they came to stare at me like a freak in a sideshow.   For milennia they came and soon I knew them all.

“Weep,” said Petrie after ten thousand years, and he pressed a glass tube to my cheek.  I blinked then, only once, and a half dozen tears fell and became blue crystal in his keeping.

He smiled and crept away, and left me timeless.

Tentacles, Podcasts and More (oh my)

As careful readers of my blog may have noted in between the weird stories and disturbing attempts at poetry I have occasionally made reference to my gaming hobby.   I've been involved in role playing games since I was a teenager - too many years ago to count without wincing - and most of those years have been spent taking on the role of games-master, referee, dungeon-master, keeper or whatever the term de jour happens to be.  Basically in those games of collaborative and communal story telling I always tended to be the one who laid out the framework of the stories, administered whatever rules were appropriate and played all the characters in the universe who weren't played by the players.

It's been a great hobby and I thought I knew it inside out and I suppose I'd become fairly set in my ways.   That changed recently and though I've never considered myself to have a particularly narrow outlook on gaming it's started to widen out incredibly.   I've looked into new games, new rule types, new genres and it's revitalised my gaming life as I've managed to find myself running games not only for my usual and long term gaming partners but also for their family members, for work colleagues who've expressed an interest and for people across the sea who I've never met except virtually.

There are a lot of reasons for this (displacement from some fairly trying times personally being one of them) but it's been facilitated by my discovery of new vistas of gaming mainly by my recent discovery of podcasts.   I have a long commute to and from work and I recently decided to investigate the podcast app on my phone which I'd previously ignored.   Were there, I wondered, any podcasts concerning my beloved roleplaying games.

Oh hell yes was the universe's answer.

One in particular has become my favourite.

Landslide Victory

Do you remember when you were a child?  Alone and hungry and crying for a mother that was beyond hearing?

I heard you.   And I came to you and comforted you as best I could.   And I arranged for you to be found and pulled from the puzzle of rock and earth, the eager hands of the rescuers dragging you into the light and showing you off, teary-eyed and widesmiled.   I smiled too, and waited.

Election Night

The sound of the rain on election night was a constant demanding drumming on the roof of the car, like a radio station tuned to white noise whose signal cut out as I passed beneath every one of the seven bridges between work and the polling station.  It was, I knew, my democratic right and duty to cast my vote and much depended upon it.   The car park, I noted with dismay as I drove into it, was a long way from the entrance.   A long wet way under the wet white noise.    But still I had my mark to make, and make my mark I must.  I locked the car behind me with a brace of beeps.   A bundle of fly tipped garbage propped against the wall of the desanctified church that was now a community centre moved unexpectedly and spoke.

“buy your name, mister?”

Please allow me to introduce myself

I smiled, oh my brothers, but how I hated him.   He was head honcho, big cheese, grand panjandrum and didn’t he know it just.   He smiled the expansive smile of a perpetual winner and his happiness was sickening to normal, that is to say lesser, types like me.  Not that I let on, oh no.  Foremost of the archangels, and captain of the heavenly host my job was to look magnificent and adoring and to do his bloody will whenever he expressed an opinion.  He had a lot of opinions, cryptic and unknowable, but the ones concerning the physical realm, the human race, the dirtball little planet of water and mud and living clay, those opinions were sweet and smiley and joy joy joy.

Messenger

Photo by Lyssa Medana

My real name is Myer, but I go by the nickname Angel these days.

I’m not an Angel.   Not in the sense that most people understand, but I think it’s justified.  You see “Angel” means “Messenger” and that’s what I definitely am.    When my boss wants to send a message, he sends me.    When people see me turn up they get the message.   Of course by then it’s too late for them, because the message my boss sends is for the benefit of others.   The messages I deliver encourage other people not to make the same stupid mistakes as the recipient.

Am I being too coy?

Gotterdammerung

Edward DelRay was the last of the DelRays that there would ever be.

Prove it he told himself.

He had burned the last of his books that afternoon and inhaled the smoke of his imagination as he watched the fire.   Now he took his melancholy out the back door and stood silently in the garden where a thousand lifeless stems grew, each one marking a future he had buried.

He was silent and unmoving but he screamed nonetheless.

Beneath the ground each strangled dream held its neighbour’s hand and smiled, writhing toward the surface and a reunion rich with potential.

(in response to a prompt from Light and Shade Challenge ("Prove it") and Studio30Plus ("He took his melancholy out the back door)

Hey, you. Yes. You.

Hey.

I’m sending you an image.   It will reach you somehow.

You’ve been unresponsive since we got you back from the enemy, but the doctors say your mind is active in a  dream prison they made for you.  A life so real you can’t escape it.    Reasons to stay there.   

I don’t know what dream it is but my words have to reach you.  

Maybe you’ll hear them, or read them in a book.  

Maybe on a screen.

You have to walk through the door to wake up.  The door in the image.

Please.  Do it now.

(Don't walk through the door, this is just a response to a writing prompt from Light and Shade Challenge, that's all, just a writing exercise, nothing else.   The picture is just a picture from the internet by someone called Sulaco299 at rgb.com)

Helping Hand

Picture by Ayla87 on rgbstock.com

I clean the shop, I mend the shoes, I help the downcast maiden choose

Her future prince, her future bright, her perfect brave and charming knight

I bless the baby that she bears, I honour every oath she swears,

I prophesy of days unborn, of trials to come, of oaths foresworn

Of fallen thrones and mirrors smashed, of crowns cast down and glories past

And then I turn and start again, I’ve seen each story wax and wane

And in each tale of destiny, in each strange tale there’s always me

A little voice, a hidden hand, a sprite perhaps with so much planned,

A crone perhaps, a crone I am, Or sometimes yet a wizened man,

Or youth in green, or far off light, or voice that whispers in the night,

My favours come to those in need, my favours plant the fertile seed

I’ll stack the cups up on the table, to spin the straw to gold I’m able

I’ll give you all the riddles’ answers, I’ll train the girl to join the dancers,

To sing with angel’s voice and soar, to bring her love back from the war

I’ve seen ten thousand stories told, I’ve seen ten thousand lives unfold

And touched each one, and made them mine, I know the ways to make them shine

The mundane waste of mundane life, in seconds passing, dismal strife

Or dismal joy, so pale and weak, I cannot bear such futures bleak

So I step in with sharpened story, and cut so deep in search of glory

And cut away the life that bores, and cut away the life that’s yours

I know you see, I know what’s best, the shining tale, the mighty quest

I’ll put you on the path I choose, I’ll see you walk it, don’t refuse,

Dull daily life requires mending, and who would shun a happy ending?

I’m here to help,

I’m good, I’m nice,

 I never ever name the price

(in response to the picture prompt shown above from Light and Shade Challenge)

Unaware

Image courtesy Vierdrie of www.freeimages.com 

Hiram Harrison left the pulpit of his megachurch, smiling.   His sheep were his to fleece and he knew a text for every bit of hatred to stir up, every appeal for more money.

The stranger in his office looked like trash,  tattered , unkempt,  a tattoo on his arm:  Hebrews 13:2

Hiram, sneering,  went to snap out a text about marking the skin and instead said “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth…”  and he went on, unable to stop.

“Carry on till you’ve heard,” said the stranger, and then he was gone, leaving Hiram helplessly, carefully, reciting.

(In response to Light and Shade Challenge's prompt taking inspiration from the phrase: If you don't find it in the index, look very carefully through the entire catalogue.)

Vodoun

(image courtesy of Wikimedia commons)

Bronte Belvoir was three generations adrift from from  her ancestress  the most feared woman in Port-au-Prince.  Her Manhattan apartment was further adrift from Fredeline’s spice-haunted shack.

She opened her laptop and closed her eyes momentarily, feeling the light of the screen on her eyelids.  Instead of drums, the soft whirr of a hard drive and she was ready.   No sacred names, but a username and password.  No drawn veve, but a cryptic Captcha.  And no sacrifice but her career and a USB stick full of secrets.

At the crossroad where meatspace and cyberspace touched, Papa Legba, lord of messengers, grinned as she passed by.

(Written in response to Light and Shade Challenge's prompt using the quote: “the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.” - Roald Dahl)

Clear Path Forward

A prompt from Write on Edge based on this image:

to which I'll add the following, just for jollies:

Often she dreamed of towers and dragonback flying and strong hands holding hers, of golden rings blazing with power and of long tracks in the wilderness that led, finally, to nowhere at all.

At precisely 06:15 the screen in her apartment blared out its alarm and dragged her upright and attentive while she was still not yet awake.   Stretching and calisthenics until 06:30 and then a breakfast of souring milk and tasteless Libertyflakes before the long walk to work.  Her bicycle, requisitioned a month ago and, melted down, was helping to secure victory against the relentless inhuman enemies of her freedom to obey and work herself to death.

She didn’t think that thought.

Between 08:58 and 13:01 she sat at a desk with a shiny plastic table whose top didn’t quite look like wood.   Documents arrived on her left and she corrected them using a combination of voice recognition software which didn’t work and a grubby grey keyboard that mostly did.  

She dreamed often of a world of glorious cold dawns and sisters with corngold hair, of incantations and dancing barefoot in forbidden places, and of a lover as wild as drunken lightning and  as gentle as summer waking.   She dreamed of a kiss on her lips, and of wearing the necklace he’d given her, a fallen star sheathed in whispergold.

Between 13:05 and 13:25 she ate with the others in ordered rows.  Noodles and soya cubes and the news broadcast at full volume gleeful with imminent victory and sombre reminders that the enemy could strike at any time and hated hated hated the luxuries and freedom that were so commonplace here.   The noodles were undercooked and crunchy.

Between 13:29 and 17:32 she sat at her desk correcting errors and omissions.  She excised a photograph of a dead eyed man from a ministry bulletin from a year ago, it had been placed there in error.  The man had never worked there, though she was sure she’d seen him just once on the day she’d first been shown her desk.   Another error corrected.

She dreamed some nights of a long trail in the wilderness, through grass, that led nowhere.   She’d held the hand of the man who was her wildfire and told him that if she fell in battle she’d want to be buried beyond that horizon, with his necklace on her cold breast.   He’d smiled and said she would never die for he was a king, and he would never allow it.

At 17:36 she began the walk home, with all the others.   The bulletin had promised sunshine and clear weather for the evening commute.   Someone fell into step next to her, took her hand.   This didn’t happen.     He was lean and grim and she did not know him.

“Let go of me,”

“Don't think I haven't tried,” his accent was Scottish, his voice insistent, “I need your help”

“What?"

“You need to show me where to dig,”

It was about quarter to six and raining gently.

Tuesday's Train

“You don’t get frosts anymore, not real frosts, not here,”

I looked up from my book, surprised at being addressed.   The speaker was sitting opposite me and I hadn’t noticed him arrive, he must have got on at the previous station I suppose.

“Frosts?”

“Your book, Frost.   Just saying you don’t get frosts these days.”

He was an old man, small, tidy looking, with pure white hair and a neat beard, he wore an old but dark suit beneath a thick winter jacket.   His smile had the mischief of a kitten looking at a precious vase.

“It’s not about weather,” I said holding the book up, “It’s poetry.  Robert Frost.”

His smile widened.

“You don’t get real poets any more either,” he said, “I remember poets that could charm summer out of snow, and lightning from a clear sky.    Babies into cribs too, most of them.   What’s this fellow like then?”

“He’s good,” I said, “I like his work.”   It had been a long day and I didn’t feel up to a conversation anyway.    Work had dragged eight hours into twice that and this train had been diverted so far from its usual route I’d be lucky to see my home before midnight.

“Like his work?   A poet’s words should stab you to the heart with florid flame and turn your world to ash in an instant, hah yes, and then build a new and better world an instant later that makes you wonder how you ever bore the last one.”

That was quite an expectation, and I said so.

“Guilty as charged,” replied this exuberant fellow, “and unapologetic.    Words are too wonderful a thing to expect anything but magnificence from them.   So what did this Frost fellow write that was so good?  Do tell me, I adore being proven wrong, it has an enjoyable rarity value about it.”

I couldn’t help but smile in response to his unabashed impudence.   I flicked through the book to find my favourite quotation.

“Here,” I said, and quoted, “I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.  And it is, you know, it was used as his epitaph.”

The old man considered this.

“A lover’s quarrel with the world,” he said, musing and stroking his beard, “A fine phrase, but maudlin perhaps.   I’ve never really understood lovers quarrelling.   I’m more the one night stand sort myself.”   He chuckled at some hidden joke of his own.

“New lovers are easier to find than new worlds,” I replied, nettled at his dismissal of my favourite quotation.

“Now what makes you think that?” he said leaning forward and pressing something into my hand.   A movement at my elbow distracted me, a flutter of wings and an impression of something large and tattered.    When I looked back the old man was gone, utterly gone, and a ring of ancient gold lay in my palm shining with truth and the burning cold of ancient winters.

A response to a prompt from Write on Edge using the Robert Frost quotation mentioned in the text

Metallic Sonatas

The Rapture turned out to be a faulty product recall and we, the remnant, felt as free as mice in a house with only senile felines.  Then the new angels came to play.

The prompt is from Trifecta - 33 words including a palindrome (highlighted).

This is the last prompt Trifecta are running and I was sad to read that the site is closing its doors.  I've not been a member for very long but I've enjoyed responding to the prompts (those strict word counts have really helped me tighten up my prose) and meeting the other members of this great community.   The feedback I've had has been a great encouragement for me to sit down and write, and I've enjoyed reading the work of such a diverse and talented crew.     I'm hoping that I can keep in touch with, and follow the continued work of the rest of you.    To Trifecta and the people behind it - my thanks and gratitude, and best wishes for your future life and works.

Relativity

“I’m such a fan of hers,” Samantha said, peering round the corner of the alcove where she and Lucas were lurking.   The dour Scotsman seemed distracted, rummaging in the pockets of his overcoat and scowling.

“Eh?” he said, “Whose?”

“Miss Goddard’s,” she replied, “I’m such a fan.  You’re not planning to do anything unpleasant are you?”

Lucas looked hurt and pulled something absolutely hideous from his pocket.  It writhed unpleasantly, a rainbow shimmer of carapace and mandibles, and the dim light of the alcove bent around it as though unwilling to touch it.   The creature was only a few inches long and hard to look at.  It made Samantha’s head hurt.    “When would I ever do something unpleasant?” Lucas asked her.

“Whenever you want to,” she replied

“Whenever I need to,” he said, “Anyway it won’t hurt anybody, not what you’d call hurt.  Not actual hurt.  Anyway we need to get it done.”

Samantha sighed and held out her hand.   Lucas dropped the creature onto her palm and she felt it land a few seconds after she saw it resting on her flesh.   She grimaced at the touch, and also at the impossibility of the thing.   She wondered if there was any point asking the enigmatic Scot what the creature-

“It’s a tikworm,” Lucas said, the moment before she opened her mouth to ask the question.

“Time parasite?” Samantha asked and then wondered why she’d asked.

“It’s a time parasite,” Lucas said and then he grinned wickedly.  “You’re already noticing things getting out of order.   Well don’t worry, nothing’s permanent unless-”

“Why would I let it bite me?” Samantha asked before he finished the sentence.  She hesitated as her mind caught up and put things in the right order.  “Damn that’s annoying.  So what do I do with it.”

Lucas looked out into the small restaurant where New York’s finest sea-food was being consumed with gusto by a generous population of diners.

“See that fellow with your Miss Goddard?”

Samantha nodded.  She’d wondered who he was, certainly no movie star like the woman he was dining with.   The man was a bit unkempt in her opinion, hair too long, gestures just a little bit too expansive and clumsy.   “Not her husband,” Samantha commented.

“They’re just about finishing up their meal,” Lucas said, “Go over there and let the tikworm have a good bite.  Of him, not her.   I wouldn’t like to mess with Charlie Chaplin’s wife, can you imagine the hilarity of his revenge, eh?   Pursuing me halfway across the world with his bandy legged walk and an angry twirl of his cane.  Eating my boots.”

Samantha looked at Lucas incredulously.  “You want me to-   Won’t they notice?”

“Trust me,” Lucas said.   She’d done that countless times in countless contexts, a thousand thousand realities, a thousand thousand of her, and each of them with only the vaguest notion of what the others were up to.   None of them entirely trusted Lucas though, but all of them trusted him just enough.

“Alright, alright.”   She palmed the tikworm and set off across the Oyster Bar toward the table where Miss Goddard and the stranger were chatting.  The man was dabbing at his moustache with a napkin.

“An absolutely fine time,” he was saying as Samantha drew close, “I really must thank you again for taking the time to…”  He stopped as Samantha stopped by their table.  He and Miss Goddard looked up at her questioningly.

“I’m such a fan of yours,” Samantha said to the actress, “I wondered could you possibly…”

“I’d be glad to,” said Miss Goddard with a smile, reaching into her purse.  Samantha wondered if requests for autographs were so common that the star had simply anticipated the request or whether the tikworm’s effects were being felt.   Still, this was the ideal opportunity.   While Goddard was looking in her purse and her companion was watching her search for a pen, Samantha reached out and pressed the hideous little invertebrate against the man’s neck just above his collar.  Mandibles closed.  The man opened his mouth to object.  Samantha remembered the smell of the rain that morning as she stepped out of her home, thought of the scent of her mother on the day that Samantha was born, heard the quiet voices of the nurses in the care home decades afterwards.  And then the tikworm was back in her hand, concealed again and Miss Goddard had already signed the autograph.

“Thank you,” Samantha said gratefully.  She accepted the treasure and turned to leave the table.

“Strangest thing,” the man said to Miss Goddard as Samantha walked away, “We’ve been here for an hour, a simply wonderful hour, but it feels as though almost no time at all has passed.”

Samantha returned to Lucas as quickly as she dared and handed over the now bloated tikworm.

“Beautiful,” he said as he held it up and watched it wriggle and twist, and bend light around it.

“Mind telling me why?” she asked him.

“Soon this wee beastie is going to change into a butterfly,” he said, “Well… sort of a butterfly.   And it’s just fed on an hour of that man’s time.  A whole hour that’s going to grow and blossom and shine inside the little creature.”

“And that’s useful to… us?” she asked.  She wasn’t really sure who “us” was, except that she was always on Lucas’ side, and that there was a dreadful war spilling out across all of reality that Lucas was helping to fight.

“An hour of Albert Einstein’s time?” Lucas said, still admiring the vile larva in his hand, “Oh aye.  Useful enough as it is.  But wait till this little chap spreads its wings for the first time.    And starts to soar.”

A response to a prompt from Studio30Plus based on the words "Time" and "Parasite"- in this case both.

For Professor Einstein's version of the encounter click here.

For more about Lucas and his antics click on the "Lucksmith" tag below

Reflections on a life

A33-word response to the following snippet: The first time I saw. . . 

Here's the catch: all of your 33 words must be one syllable each 

(a writing prompt from Trifecta)

The first time I saw him I thought he was Death.  He looked the part.  Gaunt, pale, more skull than face.   I reached out to fend him off… Smooth glass.  Then I knew, and I laughed too long.

Given

(a writing prompt for Trifecta in honour of National Erotica Day)

“I’m worried,” Graeme said, sipping his coffee. She looked at him curiously, she’d never noticed his skin’s texture before, the smooth and rough of him, his scent. “That book you were given… you’re different.”

The first night she’d looked on that intricate symbol in the book and her dreams were vague and heated, and she’d awoken hungry for release, seeking it with her fingertips.

She’d been his friend for a year, a pure platonic friendship. Right now her body wanted him inside her.

The second night she’d drawn the symbol on her belly and dreamed of dark chambers and tall spires and a lover of inhuman beauty and appetites, waking shuddering to the cries of her own release.

“Is it some kind of cult thing? Maybe give it a break for a while. Let’s get away somewhere?” He touched her hand reassuringly. She shuddered in pleasure and he recoiled.

The third night her lover had walked her in his dream palace through an archway of pearl and she’d learned the touch of another woman, spending the next day in a fever for the coming night.

“Relax G, it’s… like meditation.”

Night four, rushing into sleep, into dream, her lover and another man this time, together, at once, and the next day each time her mind wandered she felt them again, felt it happening again.

“Okay,” Graeme sighed, “call me, okay?”
“Sure,” she lied imagining him naked and hard. She’d paid a tattoo artist to engrave the book’s intricate symbol on her and if the artist been embarrassed at the pleasure she’d shown as he inked her, he’d hidden it well.

Tonight would be the fifth night and the book promised… much. She barely noticed the waiter approach, then turned to him, opening her purse.

Her lover, of inhuman beauty and appetites, took her hand.  The cafe melted away like perspiration running across hot skin, revealing halls of marble and obsidian and the waiting, adoring, worshipers.

“The fifth night,” his voice burned, “and forever.”

The Scent of Apples

A writing prompt from Write On Edge - to create something for Halloween - and from Trifecta to incorporate the word "boo" - defined as a call to show disapproval - and from Studio30+ to incorporate the word Mask or Red (I chose the latter and made a hat of it...)

 She had been holding my hand, woolly glove in woolly glove, as we stumble-shuffled our way through the crowded market.  Autumn chill was biting and the market was a treat not to miss.  Stalls crowded with toys and trinkets, cakes and biscuits, and the beautiful smell of hot spiced wine and honey buns.   We'd turned a corner in the crowd, my hand was empty now.  I looked back to reach my hand for hers, but she was not there.  I looked the other side of me. Not there.  The crowd filled the space meant for her, panic punched me in the chest.

Surely just a step away, a step beyond the moving mass of shoppers in their garish scarves and hats, just a step and I'd take her hand again, and she'd chide me with her only-child authority so natural and so unusual in a girl of seven.   I pushed back the way I had come, eyes raking, desperate for the sight of a red and green bobble hat a size too big.  Nothing.  I called her name heedless of dignity.

I smelled hot cider.  The scent of apples had haunted me since my childhood and the desperate flight from chaos and nightmare and into a world where time passed second by second and the spoken word did not take flesh or flight, where magic was just a story and not a pestilence.  Twenty years since then, a world of light and television and blessed dullness, and I'd boo the pantomime villains that hinted at a childhood I no longer believed in.

I pushed past a stall where tiny wooden figures with tissue wings made a mockery of the truth, turned faerie into frippery, and my daughter was gone.

Her hand took mine then, soft woolly pressure.  Relief flooded me and I looked into a serious unsmiling face.

"She's ours now," she said, eyes ancient, "and missing you.  Come back to Avalon and dry her tears."

Her hand gripped mine, an unbreakable bond.

(333 words)