Beyond The Fence

I stole this one from part of one of Robyn's letters she sent this week (sorry, Robyn). We'd been talking about meditation and this part just cried out for a short story:

"… after swimming, when I relaxed … and focused on the sounds I could hear beyond the fence. I couldn't see any of the noisy things—the air conditioner, the chain saw, the highway."

I loved that phrase: "the noisy things …"

Anyhoo: 500 Words:

Beyond The Fence

The sky must have been blue, not that she could tell. She lifted her sunglasses and blinked up at it through half-closed lids. From where she lay it was so bright it seemed like all the colour had been burned out of the world. The sky above her had no colour, or at least no colour that she had a name for. Her daddy had once told her that the ancient Greeks possessed no word for blue; their sky was bronze. She felt she knew what they meant. A country that had so much sea and so much sky; so much blue; why bother with a name for something that was everywhere? Homer's sea wasn’t blue; it wasn’t any colour; he called it wine-dark. She liked that.

A slight breeze raised goosebumps where the pool water evaporated from her skin. The slap and gulp of the filter blended with the other sounds.

She couldn't see beyond the fence; the noisy things: the air conditioner, the mowers, the highway. Somewhere off a-ways somebody had a chainsaw going.

She inhaled and closed her eyes, watching the patterns form. Sounds of the highway.

The sun's heat rippled over her body. Breeze tingling.

The highway …

She watched the lights at night. Each set of lights a person or people. All going somewhere. She had no idea where or why or who but the lights had a fascination all their own. They spoke of escape, just as the sounds of the highway called to her now as they mingled in her ears with the sound of her own breathing.

Escape from what? Or probably more pertinently, TO what? Her life was nice enough; most folks would think her well off. Yet the highway called out to her and in the long dark watches of the night something deep inside her howled like a wounded wolf. For what? For the road?

The journey or the destination? She decided it must be for the journey; she had no interest in the destination. Wherever it led she would still be herself. Still carry these thoughts. This place; that place. It didn't matter.

Sounds of the highway.

The chainsaw had stopped. A distant plane roared. Vapour trails, white against white. Pool filter: slap, gulp, slap. Her skin hot now. The fence white against white. The black asphalt on the highway would be shimmering; sticky. Three o'clock. Mid-summer. You could fry and egg on it or so folk said. She drove on it most days. There and back. There and back. Never just 'there'.

Never just 'there'.

One day …

Maybe.

One day she might just take off and not come back. As long as she never settled on a final destination she'd be fine. She'd be free.

White on white.

She closed her eyes again.

Watched the patterns.

She listened to the noisy things: the air conditioner, the mowers, the highway.

The pool filter: slap, gulp, slap.

Somewhere a kid yelling.

One day …

Not today, though.

Breakfast On The Day That It Happened.

The current assignment was to write precisely 500 words based on the photograph below.

Breakfast On The Day That It Happened.

Deux crèmes et deux croissants, s'il vous plait.

Breakfast of champions.

I sit.

Here's the tray. Smiles. Merci.

A deep breath, inhaling coffee and letting it out in a long, shuddering sigh.

Watching Clothilde at work is always a pleasure. Her smile infectious and unbreakable, even faced with the dismal onslaught of old JD.

JD's the butcher from across the street. That's him, sitting glumly in his usual seat, keeping a baleful eye on his premises before opening time. As if someone's going to break the shutters down and steal a pig's head.

Of course, being christened Jacques Derrida never helped with his mood. I remember his scowl the day I leaned across his counter and asked him "Jacques, must not structure have a genesis, and must not the origin, the point of genesis, be already structured, in order to be the genesis of something?" I'd been hoping for a torrent of creative profanity but all I got for my trouble was "What of it?"

I shrugged and bought some boar sausages. Maybe Jacques Derrida hasn't died but has assumed a new identity as an elderly deconstructivist butcher.

Who knows?

JD sits glaring, staring over his coffee, inscrutable as a whelk.

I check my watch. Check the street. Shrug.

Breaking the end off my croissant reminds me of shelling prawns; that lovely fat crescent, crispy at the tail, as soft and warm as a woman within. Clothilde's croissants are invariably perfect.

I eat.

Whelks, prawns, I must buy fish before the best of the day's catch is gone from the market.

Black, blue, grey. Parisians at work. An occasional bright colour. The flash of a scarf.

She's late.

As always.

I frown.

Not because she’s late but because the radio behind the bar starts playing an old song: Scritti Politti’s “I’m in Love with Jacques Derrida.” Embarrassed that I’ve got that on vinyl somewhere, I look at Jacques. He’s out on the street tables so he can’t hear the lyrics. Probably just as well.

Sip.

First coffee of the day. All’s right with the world.

Except that she’s late.

Again.

Thierry is stacking pomegranates in le Palais des Fruits.

The Clash. That’s better. Rock the Casbah. In England I listened to French talk radio; here Clothilde plays old British music.

I finish my coffee and start on hers.

Scrape of chair legs on cobbles. Jacques grunts, stretches, rolls his neck around until it cracks, nods in his desultory way toward Clothilde, lurches across the street to unlock his shutters.

Clothilde cleans his table and pockets his tip.

I check my watch, shrug, slip her croissant into my bag. The butter makes a see-through patch on the front of le Parisien.

Counting coins onto my saucer. I call to Clothilde on my way out. Merci, au revoir.

Crossing the street I buy three pomegranates from Thierry.

Here she comes at last. Breathless. Kisses. Couldn’t you wait?

I’m sorry, I drank your coffee.

I offer her the croissant.

And then it happens.

Tango

The current assignment was to write precisely 500 words based on either the photograph in the previous post or alternatively on a quotation from a Jorge Luis Borges' short story, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius."
The quotation is "Some limited and waning memory of Herbert Ashe, an engineer for the Southern Railway Line, still lingers in the hotel at Androgué, among the effusive honeysuckle vines and in the illusory depths of the mirrors."

Tango

Some limited and waning memory of Herbert Ashe, an engineer for the Southern Railway Line, still lingers in the hotel at Androgué, among the effusive honeysuckle vines and in the illusory depths of the mirrors. The hotel itself, like the station and the houses surrounding it, was imported wholesale from England during the boom of the late nineteenth century; the bathroom fittings and doorknobs, the mirrors and the honeysuckle, indeed the very bricks themselves, shipped the length of the Atlantic as the Great Empire turned its eye southward.

With them came Engineer Herbert Ashe, tasked with linking Buenos Aires to the vast and fertile cattle country of La Pampa and Rio Negro, and eventually to Rio Gallegos via La Trochita, the narrow gauge steam railway that a century hence was to achieve fame as The Old Patagonian Express.

Unlike the Scots and Irish labourers shipped over with them - who, on completion of the railway would become ranchers and leave a trail of Celtic names scattered across the pampas - the English engineers never intended to stay, least of all Engineer Herbert Ashe, whose limpid fiancée Daphne pined 'neath Lympne's bailey awaiting her consummation.

Engineer Herbert Ashe, however, would never return to the twin bosoms of Daphne and England. The telegram his distraught fiancée received informed her of his tragic death in a blasting accident on a Patagonian mountainside but delicately avoided the truth.

For Engineer Herbert Ashe had found himself one morning gazing into the illusory depths of those hotel mirrors, gratefully inhaling that effusive honeysuckle’s fragrance, when darting betwixt reflected vines he glimpsed a flash of eyes, a tremble of lace as black as the heart of darkness and was himself ensnared.
Unable, indeed unwilling to escape the mirror’s pull he stepped forward and found soft fingers stroking his own, enticing him deeper into lush foliage and heady aromas; on through verdant gardens she led him, ever on until at last the vibrant colours swirling around him resolved themselves into the streets of La Boca, the beating heart of Buenos Aires. La Boca: the Forbidden Quarter; rank with Criollo bordellos, replete with opium dens and, more seductive still, the sinuous rhythms of the Tango.

The authorities were never able satisfactorily to explain the presence of Engineer Herbert Ashe in a blood-filled bathtub on an upper floor of a dockside whorehouse in La Boca district, entwined as he was with the body of a beautiful Criollo prostitute, both of them naked and shot through the heart with the pistol that dangled still from the Englishman’s hand.
How could they know the pull of that rhythm, the allure of those kohl-rimmed eyes, the flashing scarlet of her lips, the whirlwind of lace as her hips ground against his to the breathless, frenzied strumming of guitars? How could they ever understand the intoxication of her perfume, the passion of her kisses, the wild ecstasy of endless nights in her arms?
How, in all honesty could he, Engineer Herbert Ashe, ever go back?

With Gods On My Side

This month's assignment was to write precisely 500 words based on either the following photograph or alternatively on a quotation from a Jorge Luis Borges' short story, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius."
The quotation is "Some limited and waning memory of Herbert Ashe, an engineer for the Southern Railway Line, still lingers in the hotel at Androgué, among the effusive honeysuckle vines and in the illusory depths of the mirrors."

For this story I chose the photograph rather than the quotation.

With Gods On My Side

So what happened to the old Norse gods? Whither the Greek and Roman pantheon, the myriad local pagan deities of wood and water, starlight and love, upon the terrible rise of monotheism?

As belief waned, so did their power, and yet the gods being immortal have not died, but simply faded.
Many, embittered, are reduced to hiding car keys or making underwear ride up. The more malevolent deities have naturally gravitated toward bureaucracy and government.
Yet not all have fallen so low, for as I have discovered there live still the gods of joyous Misrule.

Hearken, dear reader.
The twin naiads, Capucine and Clothilde, have in recent years chosen to dwell in the window of a bookshop on the Quai de Valmy in Paris, overlooking the canal that joins the Bassin de Vilette to the Seine.
Their self-assigned rôle is to pluck a single thought from the mind of each passer-by, simultaneously replacing it with one from another person. Whether gift or curse depends upon their whim, one twin being good, the other evil.

I discovered their existence quite by chance when one evening I found myself in sudden and unaccountable possession of a passable facility with conversational Turkish. Retracing my steps toward the point of this revelation I observed the following: as people walked past a certain window their expressions changed, some to delight, others consternation, but most to momentary bafflement before they walked on.
The window merely displayed a selection of volumes on twentieth century art. From a certain angle, however, and fleetingly as if viewed through a blind spot, an image appeared of two girls in sylvan parkland, elegantly attired, masked and beautiful.

I was still reeling from this apparent trick of the light when a woman passed the window and to my horror, the twin apparitions appeared to reach inside her head.
It was only for an instant. The woman paused momentarily, her expression one of confusion as if losing her thread of thought, before regaining her composure and walking on as if nothing had happened.

From my vantage point on the canal path I stood transfixed, observing a dozen passers-by endure the same strange ritual. At last I could withstand the mystery no longer and crossed the street, determined to pass the window myself, to pause at that very spot and divine the truth.

I have since passed that window at every conceivable opportunity.
Their strength returning with my growing belief, the goddesses have favoured me, ridding my mind of clutter and junk, of painful or unwanted memories and redistributing them among a baffled population, replacing them in return with snippets and snatches of other people’s minds; their experiences, abilities, memories and emotions, their most intimate delights and desires.

I hereby bequeath my soul to the goddesses Capucine and Clothilde in the hope that upon my death all that is me; every last scintilla of my conscious and unconscious mind will be gifted, thought by thought, to the collective consciousness of Paris.
Heaven indeed.

An Englishman In Paris

This month's assignment was to write precisely 500 words based on the following photograph:

An Englishman In Paris

Smythe paced.

She was late, but he had always believed that to be a woman's prerogative. "Fashionably late" she would call it when eventually she arrived, high heels awkward on the ubiquitous kitty-litter with which all Parisian parks are inexplicably paved, a breathless kiss rouging his cheek.

"Meet me in the Tuileries, by Rodin's ROFL" she had whispered.

His expression of helpless bafflement was sufficiently eloquent for her to add, "Look at the statues and figure it out for yourself, silly. God, you are so square it's adorable."

And then she was gone.

Smythe paused in his pacing, glancing down at his shoes. Immaculate only minutes before, the shiny black leather was now sueded grey with dust. The godawful muck might well be kinder to horse's hooves than cobbles or asphalt but this was twenty-bloody-eleven and he shuddered to think what chaos might ensue were he to ride a horse to the Tuileries through Parisian lunchtime traffic. It must be a conspiracy by Paris cobblers and boot-polish manufacturers. He was grateful the stuff was dry; on rainy days he had to chisel his shoes clean.

For a moment he considered standing on the grass but this was not allowed by park ordnances and Smythe would never dream of transgressing such authority. The grass was for the statues to roll about on; mere humans were forced to trail through the cat-litter.

An Englishman in Paris, he mused, was always a fish out of water. He had lived here for most of his life but would never be Parisian. It was much the same for the English in America. There were Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, African-Americans, even a few Native-Americans, but never – ever – English-Americans. He would always be “an Englishman in America” just as he was “an Englishman in Paris:” a small and misunderstood island of quiet desperation with a slight air of Dickensian fustiness, a constant twenty years behind his immediate surroundings.

He checked his watch: almost half an hour late. That was well within the bounds of prerogative and he was happy to wait. Scattered throughout the park, casual groups of empty green chairs held mysterious conclave but he was loath to sit in one. Some part of him knew that it would be inelegant to be caught seated when she arrived. It must appear as if he had just got here himself. The Englishman again. A Parisian would have been sprawled in a chair for ages by now; indeed would probably have charmed a passing girl and disappeared, reeking of Gauloises and stale coffee.

He waited, feigning nonchalance as he scanned the paths for her, determined not to wave like a gauche American but to pretend he had not seen her until she startled him with her presence.

The statue caught his eye. What had she called it? “Rodin’s ROFL.” The phrase drifted through his mind and he tried to picture what kind of person might really talk like that …

She arrived, fashionably late, but Smythe had fled.

Parking For G

A big thank you to Petrea for helping me get 500 Words going again after a long period of creative constipation.

This time around, the story was based on her fabulous photograph from her equally fabulous Pasadena Daily Photo blog (reproduced with her kind permission):

If you're new to 500 Words, you might want to read a few previous "Bartleby" stories before reading this one as Mackinson is a character who has developed over some time now.
The links to other participating writers are in the sidebar.


Parking For G

Her sudden sob startled Mackinson and he turned, involuntarily jerking his camera upward so the first photo merely showed the man's feet and the garage wall. He nodded at her and turned back to the task in hand, framing and focusing.
Click. Another one for Bartleby's album.
"What now?" she asked.
The man looked peaceful except for the growing pool of dark blood haloing his head, and of course the mess where his face had been, but in Mackinson’s opinion that was a decided improvement. He pocketed the camera. He never questioned Bartleby's instructions, nor asked for reasons. Of course he presumed there must have been a reason why Bartleby wanted this man dead, but not knowing what it might be Mac added a couple of his own for good measure. Anyone who called themselves "Bubba" and wore white socks with brown loafers deserved all they got, he mused. And anyone who did that to a woman …

"Chert will dispose of it." He said.
Gavroche shook her head. "I meant what now with me?"
It was a good question.
Mackinson held out his hand and she passed him the gun. She was shaking hard now, teeth chattering. He wiped off her prints. Holding the warm barrel in his handkerchief he placed the pistol in Bubba’s unresisting hand.
Chert walked around the side of the garage carrying a tarpaulin.
Time to go.

Cigarettes and alcohol make good nurses. An hour’s vigorous application and Gavroche had the tears and shakes under control. She sat scrunched tight on the motel bed, her fingers kneading the candlewick.
Mackinson refilled her glass.
The question was too big. It burned him. What to do about this woman?
Bartleby would not have hesitated. Gavroche was a complication and Bartleby liked simplicity. Mackinson, however, liked elegance. Bartleby’s simplistic mentality of ‘kill until there are no remaining witnesses’ offended his sensibilities.
Which still left the question.

And the complication.
Mackinson liked elegance. He also liked Gavroche, and that was the problem: a familiar problem in his solitary, fucked-up life, but a problem nonetheless. Mackinson was well aware that his own sense of detachment from reality left him vulnerable to vulnerable women. He needed to be needed. Finding Gavroche bound, beaten and bleeding in Bubba’s garage changed a simple job into an emotional quagmire. She had clung to him sobbing out her story. He had handed her Bubba’s pistol and watched her empty the magazine into the man’s face. That act: that first step toward reclaiming herself had formed a bond between them.
And the complication.

Gavroche shuddered as the raw scotch seared her throat. She had killed a man. Taken a life. And a part of her was glad. She didn’t know if that was good or bad but it wasn’t going to go away.
And now this man: her deliverer. She felt drawn to him and sensed his uncertainty.
Would he kill her? Seduce her? Let her go? Or what?
The question hung in the air between them.

Some Sage Advice For Students

This week's sentence was taken from 'Barchester Towers', by Anthony Trollope.

The sentence was:

'There was nothing poetic in the nature of Mrs Quiverful.'

Some Sage Advice For Students

It is an immutable law of the educational universe that all colleges possess a Mrs Quiverful. She will usually be found tucked away in some dusty room at the end of a little-used corridor, lying in wait like a vast, baggy spider in tweed skirt and cardigan for the unwary student to get just a little bit too curious.
Indeed it is in just such a room at the end of just such a corridor that we find the subject of our own cautionary tale.

There was nothing poetic in the nature of Mrs Quiverful. That at any rate had been the confirmed opinion of all who survived the sequential sensations of initial amusement, increasingly concerned confusion, sudden alarmed realisation and final crushing despair that comprised her creative poetry classes. How she had managed to obtain her professorship in the first place was a topic of much fevered debate among the traumatised few who made it through the academic year.

Yet there she was, and there, it seemed forever, she would stay. Over the decades Mrs Quiverful’s classes produced a string of highly successful accountants, bankers, insurance brokers, politicians and the like, whose generous donations to the college ensured her sinecure.
That there was nary a poet, nor indeed a single person with a scintilla of creativity, conscience or compassion among her old students went regrettably unnoticed. As did the fact that those particular professions adopted by Mrs Quiverful's creative poetry graduates held in common the peculiar requirement that a successful practitioner possess no poetic soul.

Yet such creatures are not born soulless. It is a truth self-evident that no sane person would ever aspire to a career in say politics, banking or insurance. None but the deranged and psychopathic would choose to work in marketing or HR.
No, these people are born as normal as you or me, but at some point in their formative years have fallen victim to a Mrs Quiverful and have had their souls torn screaming from their bodies and sucked straight down to Hell.

It is Mrs Quiverful who is responsible for the plague on the world that is the suffering caused by the Soulless Professions. For this is where we get the condemned: those pitiless proto-dæmons who stalk the earth spreading misery and despair among the living before taking up their pitchforks to torment poor sinners in the afterlife.
This is where bankers come from. This is where Big Oil comes from. This is where we get the agrichemical industry, personal injury lawyers, political lobbyists, waterboarders, Republicans, junk food, arms dealers and daytime TV.
This is Hell on earth.

So, dear student, be wary of that seemingly simple course of lectures, of that dusty and obscure corridor, of that nice, tweedy old lady with the twinkle in her eye. Be ever watchful for Mrs Quiverful.
Should you doubt me, simply look into the eyes of an insurance salesman and witness the horror within.
Then turn and run.
Run as fast as you can.

Crazy Little Thing

This week's sentence was taken from Emily Brontë's 'Wuthering Heights.'

The sentence was:

'The minute after, she had sidled to him, and was sticking primroses in his plate of porridge.'


Crazy Little Thing

For a while now Clara had been furtively eyeing up the empty space on the bench beside Harold, taking tentative half-steps and then retreating, panicked, into the shrubbery. Finally she seemed to make up her mind. The minute after, she had sidled to him, and was sticking primroses in his plate of porridge.

'Do you think we all get to rediscover that innocent, joyous thrill of first love again when we lose our marbles?'

Rebecca pouted at me. 'Don't mock. It's kind of sweet.'

Over on the bench, Harold was grumbling and trying to protect his porridge from Clara's amorous assault. It was indeed kind of sweet, which made a nice change; working at the care home was pretty shitty most of the time.

'Besides,' Rebecca continued, 'first love is always a big, messy mistake; something that Clara's about to discover if Harold tips his porridge all over her.'

I chuckled and wandered over to intervene, gently disarming Harold.

'Not finished!' he yelled at me.

'Harold, it went cold ages ago and you've not been eating it anyway.'

Reluctantly he let go of his plate and I left the lovebirds to their courting.

Rebecca followed me inside, sitting on the counter and swinging her legs while I scraped Harold's cold porridge à la primrose into the waste.

I had to ask: 'So what made your first love such a messy mistake?'

'He was five and had a permanent wet booger hanging from his nose. He was always trying to kiss me with that thing bubbling and swinging around.’

‘Sounds a real charmer. So how old were you? Eighteen? Twenty-five? Ow!’

Rebecca was deadly with a wet tea towel. She grinned. ‘I was five as well, you goitre!’ She brandished the towel again. ‘Quid pro quo, Clarice. Dish the dirt on your own first love. I’m not afraid to use this, so fess up, buster.’

I’ve learned never to argue with a woman who quotes Hannibal Lecter, especially one as skilled in domestic weaponry as Rebecca.

‘I was twelve. She was older. A vision in white with hairy doughnuts stuck to the sides of her head. It was a long time ago …’

‘… in a galaxy far, far away. Yeah, yeah, I know. We’re not talking about your crush on Princess Leia, you saddo; we’re talking real, messy, traumatic first love here. Now spill. You’ve got one more chance before I slap your fat ass round the garden with this towel.’

‘Okay. Her name was Amy and she broke my heart into a thousand pieces.’

‘Attagirl!’

‘I loved her all through school, enduring the pain of seeing her date every other boy in class. Then the very day I was going to ask her out her family emigrated.’

Rebecca almost fell off the counter laughing.

Outside in the garden, Clara was discovering what I already knew: that love is crazy and love is blind and that the greater part of the love in this world goes unrequited.
But it’s still worth it.

Beach Blanket Blitzkrieg

This week's sentence was from H. G. Wells' classic, 'The War Of The Worlds.'

It was:

'There was something fungoid in the oily brown skin, something in the clumsy deliberation of the tedious movements unspeakably nasty.'

Beach Blanket Blitzkrieg

There was something fungoid in the oily brown skin, something in the clumsy deliberation of the tedious movements unspeakably nasty.
It made guttural sounds, belched and turned over.
‘What the fuck IS that?’ Candice blinked, reached for her glasses and then gaped in disbelief.
‘A German naturist. Every summer it's the same around here: Fritzie and his fraü get all nostalgic for the Third Reich and invade the rest of Europe. Only these days they do it naked. Makes me kind of miss the days of blitzkrieg.’
'Certainly puts you off bratwürst for life.'
'And a whole lot else besides. By lunchtime this beach will be filled with fat flesh and geriatric German genitalia roasting floppily in the sun. I think it's time we fled the scene of the crime. What say we take refuge in a coffee?'
'Good idea,' Candice removed her glasses again to save her eyes from further assault. 'I need some caffeine to get over the shock.'

The café terrace gave a nice view of the Atlantic, blue under clear Lusitanian skies. Mercifully a low wall hid the naturist from view.
Arnë sipped his espresso and took a long, admiring look at his companion. Candice smiled, happy to be an object of adoration, if only for the length of her vacation. She reflected that the two of them looked somewhat better naked than the German on the beach.
She had met Arnë just yesterday and this morning had woken up in his apartment, their bodies lost in a tangle of sheets, the sea breeze cooling them deliciously. Sure, he was a little older than she would have liked, and a little flabbier, but he had a nice smile and after all, Candice herself was, let's be honest, a pretty plain, bordering on frumpy, late-thirties myopic typist named Tracey, out for one last attempt at the Shirley Valentine experience. Tracey could lie about Arnë all she liked when she got home but for now, "Candice" was out for guilt-free, casual holiday sex, and lots of it.

Her first day back, Tracey rushed round to see her sister and insisted on regaling her with every lurid detail of her "non-stop shag-fest" with "sexy surfer Arnë." Jane had begged her for pictures but Tracey said her camera had been stolen at the airport. Better her sister didn't know the flabby, middle-aged truth.
Jane was pouring a second coffee when the doorbell rang.
‘I’ll get it!’ yelled Tracey.
She froze in sudden horror on the doorstep. There stood Arnë with a huge bunch of flowers. Her jaw dropped. How had he found her? Was he some kind of creepy stalker? And how in heaven’s name could she get rid of him before her sister saw him.
Jane dashed from the kitchen, beaming.
‘Tracey, I’d like you to meet my boss, Andy. He’s back from a business trip. I suppose I can tell you the big secret now: we’re engaged to be married!’
‘Oh, fuck.’ said Arnë.
‘Oh, fuck.’ said Candice.

Wormold Makes A Choice

This week's sentence was from Graham Greene's 'Our Man In Havana.'

It was: 'Wormold felt an enormous bewilderment.'

Wormold Makes A Choice

Wormold felt an enormous bewilderment. For a split second his mind considered alternatives before concluding that bewilderment was indeed as concise a definition as it could muster.
At least at such short notice.
One moment he had been wrenching his bag free of the damned ticket barrier and running pell-mell down the platform toward the conductor who was about to lock the doors.
And the next.
Well that was where the bewilderment came in.

Most things in life bewildered Wormold. He confessed that women especially were a complete mystery to him. Come to think of it, just about everything that had happened to him over the last fifty-something years had baffled him in some way or another.
Summoned into being in such a bizarre and traumatic fashion as to refute the existence of any benevolent deity, he discovered that life came equipped - rather shoddily in Wormold's opinion - with neither user manual nor "undo" button. Even a manual filled with gibberish, such as the one that came with his Moskvich car and which he was convinced had been translated by someone who spoke neither Russian nor English nor had ever seen a car, would have been better than nothing. But nothing was what he got.
From that first breath to this last he had lived, like the rest of us, by winging it and hoping for the best. And now, after a lifetime of not knowing what was going on or why, came the biggest bewilderment of all.

Wormold supposed that now was as good a time as any to consider the afterlife. Look at the possibilities. Browse the catalogue, as it were.
Most religions' afterlives were out of bounds to him as a non-believer, but he still had options. He had been raised a Christian, but would be happy to discover he had been misled. An eternity of hellfire and damnation didn’t sound a bundle of laughs but it was decidedly more appealing than a heaven filled with self-righteous god-botherers sucking up to the kind of deity who considered the penis an ‘intelligent design’.
Wormold had flirted with Buddhism as a teenager but now reincarnation seemed way too much like the lottery. A glance at the numbers told him that the laws of probability ensured that just about everyone on the planet would come back as an insect. Bugger that!
The only afterlife that really held any appeal was carousing in the halls of Valhalla. Wormold was sure he had some Norse blood in him somewhere and wondered if he might qualify.

But no. Oblivion was the way to go. To simply cease to exist. Nothing bewildering about that. As a bonus, existentially speaking, the moment his own consciousness, and therefore the entire universe he knew, blinked out of existence, so would everything and everybody else. Including the bloody train company.
As his body fought for breath that wouldn’t come and pain tightened across his chest, Wormold smiled. And the universe and everything and everybody in it ceased to exist.

Disappointment And Ketchup

This week's sentence was taken from John le Carré's short story, 'Call For The Dead.'

It was: 'Miss Adam herself dispensed the nastiest coffee south of Manchester and spoke of her customers as "My Friends".'

Disappointment And Ketchup

Turn off the Wash Road at Guyhirn and drive for miles out across the endless godforsaken peat-black plain. If you have committed sufficient sin in your life you might well find at last looming through the fog a dismal, yellow-grey building of squat, unappealing proportions surrounded by clinging, coal-black mud and fronted with a peeling-painted wooden sign: 'Pub Food. Car Park. The Greyhound. Polly Adam.'
Inside: Stygian gloom. Formica and brown linoleum. Faded. Worn through in places. Twelve tables. Forty-eight wooden chairs.
No two legs the same length.

Signs prohibiting:
coach parties,
spitting,
food not bought on the premises,
credit,
back-packers,
Mrs. Arbuthnot,
Kevin.

Promised exotic delights:
steak'n'kidney pie,
chips,
gravy,
peas,
scampi in a basket,
lemon meringue pie,
and ominously: "more".

The reality:
congealed fat,
gristle,
uncertain wobbly brown things,
watery gravy,
burnt bits,
disappointment
and ketchup.

And behind the bar:
Miss Adam herself dispensed the nastiest coffee south of Manchester and spoke of her customers as "My Friends."
Smeared glasses and stale ale served warm and flat joined the dreg-rich stew of her bitter, brackish, days-old coffee. Regulars wiped the oily film from their top lips between sips and spoke, when they spoke at all, in hushed monosyllables.
Polly Adam ran, with iron discipline and a grease-grey pinnie, the only pub (in fact the only social establishment of any kind whatsoever) for forty miles around. Locals grew up on her foul fare, and knowing no better, accepted it with the same grim stoicism that allowed them to live out here in this soulless, mirror-flat, drenched wasteland.
Miss Adam had inherited the place, and her dubious culinary skills, from her parents, who had in their turn received the same blessings from Miss Adam's grandparents, and so on down into the dim, damp and decidedly Dickensian distance.

Not conventionally attractive, even to the untrained eyes of the local lads, schooled as they were in more porcine pleasures of backfat and bristle, in her youth she had for one brief and wonderful week thrilled to the throes of wild romance, surrendering her innocence to the smarmy wiles of Mister Eve, a middle-aged travelling seed merchant whose own seed had mercifully not travelled, though he himself had, with unseemly haste upon discovery of his dastardly deception.

Now past her prime and fading fast it had begun to dawn on Polly Adam that the true love she longed for might never find its way out here to her cold haven in the bleak and empty fens. That perhaps her own Mister Darcy was not going to appear suddenly in the bar one evening and sweep her into his arms. That maybe it was time to start collecting cats.

Midnight. The last of the Greyhound’s regulars squelches disconsolately away into the inky mist. With a sigh, Miss Polly Adam locks up and climbs the twisting stair to her room. Afraid of what sleep might bring she sits weeping long into the night, shoulders softly shaking, salt tears falling, pat, pat, pat into her lonely lap.



Background note:

The Greyhound at Guyhirn now sadly no longer exists. Unlike poor Polly Adam, however, it was not fictional.
I stumbled upon it one foggy evening, lost on a forty mile detour after an accident blocked the only decent paved road across the flat, featureless fens: that endless dank pismire of squelchy peat bog and empty misery.
It beckoned in much the same ominous manner as a bat-bestrewn castle might in a Transylvanian thunderstorm, but at least it promised something different than the usual greasy-spoon roadside cafés and it has exerted a perverse fascination on me for years afterward. I was genuinely sorry to see it closed down.
The description in the story is pretty much spot on. I ordered a coffee and a sandwich and quickly regretted it, settling later for a flat, stale beer and a packet of soggy, out-of-date crisps. I left as precipitately as Mister Eve, though not - I am glad to say - for the same reason.

These days, the only remaining rest facility on that long, lonely levée stretching despairingly across the unending bleak waste is a tacky filling-station "Caff" dispensing chalky burgers to bored lorry-drivers. I stopped in once for coffee and petrol (not an exotic local cocktail … the coffee was to drink; the petrol for the car), returning from a conference with my old boss, Terry, who had refused to believe my tales of Guyhirn being the kind of place that would scare the crap out of the banjo playing backwoods freaks of 'Deliverance.' We were served by a girl of around fourteen with one eye and not many more teeth (every word of this is true), who took a fancy to Terry and kept leaning on him and giggling, offering up her gap-toothed grin to tempt him away from the outside world and into the nightmare haunt of fenland folk.
Needless to say we got the hell out of Dodge.

Guyhirn is now by-passed by an almost decent road so nobody from the real world need visit any more, leaving its denizens to live out undisturbed their lost and lonely lives of furtive incest and pork porking and whatever the hell else they get up to there. It truly is a place of palpable aching despair; driving past you can feel it clawing at you with a terrible emptiness that chills the heart and leaves damp, smeary fingerprints lingering in your soul. My own theory is that Guyhirn exists as the result of a sharp corner of our own universe accidentally puncturing the lowest circle of Purgatory (the one next to Hell). The suffering souls have been leaking into our reality and populating that part of the fens for hundreds of years. They now haunt the place, wailing and weeping as they wait in the sodden, mist-shrouded peat-bogs for Judgement Day to come at last.

Bob Has A Good Day

This week's sentence was taken from Henry James' 'Pandora.'

It was 'Then she has got her sister staying with her: Mrs. Runkle, from Natchez.'

Bob Has A Good Day

'Hey, Frank.'
'Hey there, Bob! Come on in, neighbour. Artemisia not with you?'
'Heavens, no. She's having one of her tornado days. The kids have brought the grandkids over for dinner, and they all brought their damned dogs, too, so it's a madhouse over there. Then she has got her sister staying with her: Mrs. Runkle, from Natchez. We don't get along. I just had to get out of there, Frank, so I'm throwing myself on your mercy and asking for asylum for an hour or so.'
'Of course, buddy. C'mon in the kitchen and I'll brew up. Abigail's out at her mother's all day so you're welcome to hide here as long as you like.'
'Ah, you're a lifesaver, Frank.'
'Say, I didn't know Artemisia had a sister.'
'Mrs. Runkle, yeah: Hortense, though she never lets me call her that.'
'I'm curious I've never heard tell of her before.'
'That's because we get on like cat and dog. We never visit one another; Artie and her sister don't really write 'cept for Christmas and birthdays. She's only here because of all that kerfuffle in Natchez.'
‘I must have missed that on the news, Bob.'
'It’s Ralph, her dumb schmuck husband. "Unkle Runkle, the children's entertainer." At least that's what he was until last weekend. As if it weren't bad enough having a goddamned clown for a brother-in-law, the police have gone and arrested him for fiddling with the kiddies.'
'Oh, my lord, Bob!'
'He always was a creepy bastard. We shoulda seen that one coming. Anyways, the damned press are camped out on Runkle's doorstep so the old bat sneaked off over here to make my life a misery.'
'She's that bad, huh?'
'Bad? She acts like she's some kinda southern royalty because Runkle came from old money. Expects to be waited on hand and foot, even though there's not a red cent of that old money ever came our way.'
'She sounds royal alright; a royal pain in the ass.'
'Heh-heh. You ain't kidding, Frank. She always resented the fact that her sister married a nobody; said I brought shame on her family. Now she’s gonna have to cook up a whole mess of humble pie before I’ll think of being civil to her.’
‘So if her husband is old money, how’d he end up working as a clown?’
‘Fool gambled away the entire fortune, and with a brain like his it was either that or stacking shelves at Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart woulda been a better option after what he’s done to those kiddies.’
‘So what happens now? Sounds like you’ll be stuck with Hortense for a while.’
‘Nope. It’s payback time for Mr.Nobody. I called the press before I came over. They’ll be here soon and the old bat’ll be over the back fence like greased lightning and out of my life at last.’
‘Bob, you always were a sly old dog. Here’s your coffee. Let’s sit out on the porch and watch the fun.’
‘Cheers, neighbour!’

Milwaukee’s Finest

This week's sentence was taken from line 532 of Beowulf ("beore druncen ymb spræce …"), using Seamus Heaney's translation:

The sentence was: "But it was mostly beer doing the talking."

Milwaukee’s Finest

Bass River Motel. Route 542. Jersey.
Piney country.
Kent insisted on these "night out for the boys" sessions after work; he felt the need to go over all the details of the day and look for ways to improve things. You got the feeling he would have liked to bring a flip-chart into the bar if he could. But it was mostly beer doing the talking. As the evening went on Kent would get progressively more maudlin until Mackinson would have to half-carry him back to the motel room and leave him to puke out his remorse.
On nights like these, Mackinson slept in the car.

Kent called for another round, sluicing down the remains of his fifth bottle, whining and pining after some trailer trash waitress who’d served them breakfast that morning. Mackinson just nodded and ignored him. He was a scotch man, beer made him bilious. After two shots he’d stick to water and let Kent ramble on and get it out of his system, bottle by bottle. It usually took about an hour for Kent to wander off topic and start hitting on the barmaid. He never got lucky. Drunk, miserable and boring is not generally what a barmaid looks for in a man, though it’s pretty much all she gets to see.

Kent bored the shit out of Mackinson. He also worried him.
Take today, for instance. The hit had gone smoothly, but as always Mackinson felt Kent enjoyed his work a little too much. A single shot to the back of the head would have sufficed, yet Kent insisted on shoving his gun in the guy's face, feeding off the terror in his eyes before blasting away like Clint fucking Eastwood.
And then the drunken remorse afterwards.
Distasteful. Inelegant. Amateurish.

He had made his feelings clear in debriefings: Kent was a liability. Mackinson preferred to work alone, but now here he was again, holed up in some backwoods motel room with a drunk and weepy psychopath. It was getting like a broken record.
Mackinson fetched a glass of water from the basin. Kent was hunched over the toilet bowl, puking up a gallon of Milwaukee's finest.
'Jesus, thanks, Mac. I'm sorry. I don't know why the fuck I always do this.' Kent took a sip, rinsed his mouth out and spat it into the pan while Mackinson wrapped a towel around his pistol and shot him once in the back of the head. The towel muffled the gunshot and caught the blood spray; the rest went down the toilet. Mackinson threw the body in the bath and let it bleed out while he fetched the cleaning products from the trunk of the car. He hummed while he worked: Roy Orbison's 'Only The Lonely'.
Bartleby had an arrangement with a meat packing plant outside of Hammonton. By morning, Kent would be shipped out in the latest batch of gourmet pork sausages. Maybe he’d get inside that barmaid after all.

The Envelope

This week's sentence is taken from volume II of "The History Of England From The Accession Of James II" by the incomparably entertaining and insightful Thomas Babington Macauley (read his histories and essays together with any written work of a modern-day politician and weep at the decline and fall of intelligence and wit over the past 150 years or so. We are truly Neanderthal in comparison).

The sentence was: "The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out."

The Envelope

The heavy clank of the outer door lock was always louder than he expected, echoing round the cool brown semi-darkness of the lobby. The post boxes here were still mahogany; he liked that. He felt somehow safer or at least more at home in older buildings. As expected the envelope was waiting for him. A4 manila, nothing written on the outside. Incongruous flashback: Mackinson recalled his mother would carefully save old envelopes for re-use, the same way she used to keep and iron flat any salvageable scraps of wrapping paper at Christmas. She would have loved this envelope: unmarked, crisp and pristine, sealed only with red cotton wound around a brass stud on the back.

The elevator was as old as the building but still fairly reliable, yet Mackinson always walked up to his fifth floor apartment. Like his office it was a deliberate throwback to the nineteen-thirties, a look that had cost him most of the considerable sum of money he had earned in his first year working for Bartleby. Art deco was now 'chic' though that was not the reason he chose it; he would be happier when it fell out of fashion again. He pulled down the blinds, preferring the half-light to the harsh morning sun that now cast crisp shadows of window frames onto cream canvas.
The leather chair creaked as he sat. His collar loosened, a large crystal tumbler holding a small amount of good scotch on the desk by his side, he savoured the silence for a moment. It was time.

Unwinding the envelope's cotton fastening, Mackinson opened the flap and extracted a single sheet of cream-laid paper, noting the airline tickets and money still inside. Typewritten. Double-spaced. No signature. He knew there would be no fingerprints, either. At the top the quotation from Macauley:
"The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out."
Allegedly this was engraved in a plaque on the wall behind Bartleby's desk, not so much as a measure of the man's character, but rather the opposite: a reminder that everything - and everybody - in the organisation was deniable. Targeted assassination, extortion, smuggling drugs, arms and people, espionage (sometimes against your own country), and so much more; with Bartleby you could - and would - get away with murder.
For the thousandth time Mackinson measured his own character and for the thousandth time was reassured by the knowledge that he was bound straight for hell. A man of real character would refrain from any and all temptation. Mackinson fell way short. Every time.
He re-read his instructions, then picked up the tumbler and breathed in the malt fumes for a while, not drinking. Starting again from the top, this time he read between the lines.
He selected his 'Berlin' suitcase, checked the guns then burned the sheet of paper in the grate, crumbling the ashes. Retrieving his passport from the desk Mackinson placed the empty envelope carefully in the drawer and left.

The Gentleness Of Bees

This week's sentence was taken from The Inaugural Address of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

It was: 'We must act, and act quickly.'

The Gentleness Of Bees

'Janine?' Ted leaned across the counter, waved and hollered, 'Keep 'em comin' sweetie.'
'You got it, hon.'
Truth be told, nobody needed to yell in here, but some of Janine's older regulars tended toward deafness and a surfeit of caffeine with the excitement of the sports pages didn’t help. Ted and his gang spent most mornings here, putting the world to rights and reminiscing about their imaginary pasts, the stories growing taller with the telling.
Janine poured Ted’s refill without interrupting the flow of debate down at the ladies' end of the room which currently concerned itself with the advisability - or otherwise - of orange plaid slacks on a woman of Beulah's build. 'Otherwise' seemed to be the way the wind was blowing, but then Beulah was currently across the street at Krystal's Kurlz having her roots done and so not privy to the conversation.

Janine smiled. She loved the chatter of her regulars, the drone of conversation as it rose and fell like the reassuring song of her other 'children' going about their busy lives around the neat row of hives in the orchard out back.
Their honey flew off the shop’s shelf quicker than her beloved bees taking flight in the early morning sunlight.

Everett had never understood the gentleness of bees. Anxious, impulsive, rarely satisfied with anything for long, it had been his idea that they use Janine's mother's inheritance to buy the coffee shop.
'We must act, and act quickly' he'd said. Everett, as ever, had wanted a change and thought that this would be it, and so a few hectic weeks later Janine was proudly serving her first customer at The Hive ("Come on in and get your buzz on").
Not long after that of course, Everett realised the change he really wanted and took off for Florida with a girl fresh out of high school. Janine, after a period of adjustment, found she had never been happier.

"Mornin' ladies!'
A chorus of 'Beulah, your hair looks beautiful, honey. Love your slacks'.

Janine checked her watch. Carole would be in soon to help with the lunchtime rush. Carole, whose wild hair was dyed a shade of red not usually seen outside a circus; Carole, who had that kinda Stevie Nicks gypsy thing going on with her clothes that kept the men ordering top-ups they didn't really want just so they could watch her willowy hips sway across the room or peek down her top as she leaned teasingly over their table.
Carole, whose fingers had brushed across the back of Janine's hand one evening with a touch as soft as the flutter of a bee's wing and sent a thrill through her the like of which she had never known. Janine remembered that moment of pure terror, the sudden realisation, the overwhelming 'yes' from her heart; Carole’s nervous smile widening as their eyes met and stayed locked together; that first, hesitant, devastating kiss.
And after that it had all been good. Boy, howdy, it was good!

What We Did On Vacation

This week's sentence was taken from Bram Stoker's 'Dracula.'

It was: 'I am alone in the castle with those awful women.'

What We Did On Vacation

Jesus, Maggie pick up the goddamned phone. I know you can hear me. Where the fuck are you? I spent the past half an hour searching high and low and now I find the car's gone. I mean storming off is one thing, but taking the car and leaving me here like this? I'm alone in the castle with those awful women. Your mother and her shrill fucking harridan sister and poor bloody Arlene. Jesus! What do you expect me to do? This is the middle of fucking nowhere. How the hell do I find a taxi in the arse end of the English countryside? And you've got my wallet in your bag. I'm stuck here with the three of them. Thanks a bunch. Some fucking vacation this is turning out to be. Your mom and your aunt both hate me and they know we've had a row and now they're hunting me down. There's only so many of Henry the Eighth's goddamned bedrooms I can hide in. I mean what the hell am I going to tell your mother? Eh? Answer me that. Sorry, mom, but your daughter's run off with the car and she's got my wallet so we've got a fifty mile fucking walk back to the hotel?
Shit, Maggie, pick up the damned phone, will ya'? Look, I'm sorry, okay? I'm sorry, but talk about getting the wrong end of the stick. I mean, what the hell do you think was going on? Me and Arlene? Jeeesus! You got it all wrong. I mean would I make out with your cousin? Would I? And more to the point, would she make out with me? For crying out loud, Maggie, I was only trying to comfort her after the thing with Ted and that bitch secretary. You just walked in at the wrong fucking moment, that's all.
For Christ's sake, Maggie. Pick up! I know you're listening. Just bring the fucking car back here and fetch your mother and your goddamned aunt. You can leave me and Arlene to walk if you want but just get back here. Jesus, I know what it looked like but it wasn't, okay? It just wasn't. Nothing happened. I mean my hand slipped but that was just the shock of you walking in on us. I was just comforting her. You know how upset she is with that cocksucker of a husband of hers. That's all the kissing was. It meant nothing. It was just comfort. Honest to God, Maggie. Come on. Please pick up your fucking phone. You know it's you I love. Not her. D'you really think I wanna spend the rest of my life with Arlene? For fuck's sake. That woman’s as dumb as she is ugly.

Oh, crap.

Arlene? I didn't mean it. You know I was just trying to calm Maggie down. Arlene! Come back!
Oh, Jesus. Maggie? Arlene's run off in tears now. I hope you're fucking happy.
Maggie?
Pick up the fucking phone!
Maggie?

Claire

This week's sentence was taken from James Ellroy's 'The Big Nowhere'.

It was:

'Claire chain-smoked and drummed her nails on the dashboard.'

Claire

‘What the fuck am I doing here?’ he thought.

‘Okay, other than the obvious.’ He looked down at what was left of the bed and the tangled car wreck of his own body and Claire’s.

‘I mean, do I love her? I’m pretty certain she doesn’t love me. I’m just kinda convenient whenever she wants something. The rest of the time she’s out with her screeching harpies or yammering down the phone at them and I might as well not exist.’

He sighed, quietly so as not to wake her, and tried to figure out how the hell he got in this situation in the first place.

Sure, she’s young, sure she’s pretty, sure she’s … er … spectacular in bed, but what else was keeping him here?

Claire grunted, turned over and started to snore like an asthmatic horse, leaving a sizeable pool of drool in the hollow of his collarbone.

‘How do I love thee?’ he mused. ‘Let me count the ways …’

Numero uno: Claire snored. Fair enough, so did he.

Claire spent eighteen hours at a stretch in the bathroom. God only knows what she did in there but it always took him ages to clean up afterwards.

Claire chain-smoked and drummed her nails on the dashboard. Plus she spilled that whole Chinese meal between the car seats that time and he never got the stink out.

Claire chewed her food with her mouth open and all she had to do was walk through a room to trash it like the aftermath of a frat-house kegger. She was dumber than a box of rocks and her voice scraped the surface off the inside of his skull.

And yet …

He closed his eyes, knowing full well that the sight of Claire naked - even with the snoring - would outweigh all his arguments.

‘Men are so fucking weak.’ he thought. ‘One glance of a boob and our brains run out our ears leaving us drooling idiots.’

He looked down at the pool of drool Claire had left him.

‘And don’t even get me started on her inbred fuck-up family.’

Claire’s mother was a bed-bound four-hundred pound mountain of bitter regret who, when she wasn’t yelling and swearing at him was bawling her eyes out and pleading with them to give her grandchildren. Her snivelling alcoholic moron father had run up a debt that would scare a small country. Claire’s brother was the only one with any sense. He’d run away to Mexico with a waiter.

‘Is this what I really want?’ he thought. ‘Am I happy?’

Claire started up a tractor and he shifted a thigh to try to stop the noise, only for her to change to an impression of a yak gargling.

A sudden snort and she was awake, rolling over and giving him the full benefit of those eyes that could give a saint a hard-on for a week.

And he knew he loved her.

‘I’m leaving you.’ She said.

Prelude To An Incident On Somerleyton Marshes

This week’s sentence was taken from L. Frank Baum’s ‘The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz’.

It was:
‘Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached to the edge of the sky in all directions.’

Prelude To An Incident On Somerleyton Marshes

Blindingly bright shivers of light sparked off the water, breeze-ruffled, disturbed by the passage of mallard and water vole. Green-mottled beneath the surface shimmer lurked a sly old pike, invisible in the weeds, cold as the death awaiting unwary stickleback or perch.
Lacking the patience of pike, the boy raised his eyes from the river and the world swept to the horizontal.
Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached to the edge of the sky in all directions. Only the broken brick stumps of windpumps, mostly long-derelict dared raise their heads above that endless ochre ocean, their graceful white sails long since replaced by diesel pumps hidden in nasty little fletton boxes alongside the myriad dykes and ditches of this trackless world of bog and fen.
Black peat oozed black water over the boy's boots as he walked, filling his footprints, leaving a trail of miniature lakes in his wake.
The soft squelch followed him, yet the vast expanse was far from silent. A cacophony of song from warbler, coot, moorhen and mallard accompanied him. Across the marsh came the low boom of a bittern, and far above the water meadows a single skylark trilled it's brilliant song to the world. The boy craned his neck and squinted into the sun until he spotted the tiny dot. It must have nested on the riverbank, the thin ribbon of short, duck-cropped grass snaking through the crowding, hissing reeds.
The breeze gave the marsh its sibilant voice and brushed its fingers softly through the surface sending waves, sea-like flowing across the reedbeds, hypnotising the boy into daydreams of pirate ships and the cries of gulls.

Tiny stained patches of dull green-black alder carr stitched the join between the flattened disc of dull gold and a sky far bigger than the world.
There above him spanned a monstrous arch of universal unreal blue, intense as lapiz lazuli on Tamurlane’s domes in far Samarkand. The boy gazed upward in awe, his dreams now sent flying by magic carpet into the worlds he loved: of exotic Arabian nights and tales of caravanserai along the ancient silk road.
That great bullying, overbearing sky pressed down on him and on this land flatter than freshly ironed linen, dwarfing the world, squeezing it into these few square miles of waterlogged flood plain where he wandered twixt mead and mere, an insignificant ant traversing a devastating emptiness.

Up ahead he heard at last the swish and crackle of scythes through Norfolk reed and the low mardling of Habbo and Roly in their flatboats cutting bundles for thatching, their harvest soon to gleam gold on church and cottage roof, lovingly entwined with hazel spars. The thatch would be good for another eighty years of blazing hot summers and those bitter Norfolk winters that lashed down from the arctic, their bellies replete with invading hordes of swan and tern.

Habbo looked up as the boy waded closer.

Sometimes That's All You Need

This week's sentence was taken from Willa Cather's 'Death Comes For The Archbishop'.

It was:
'Muerto,' he whispered.

Sometimes That's All You Need

Tharp blinked funny.
His right eye always seemed a little ahead of his left. Or perhaps it was the left eye that was slower than the right. Either way, people found it hard to talk to someone whose blink was out of sync. Before long they would become acutely aware of what their own eyelids were up to, which left them kind of distracted.
Tharp's sequential blink rolled across his face from left to right as you looked at him and your eyes couldn't help but follow the movement off to one side, somewhat in the manner of a typewriter carriage, with the result that you found yourself constantly flicking your gaze back to meet Tharp's from a point somewhere above his left shoulder.
People got the impression he was doing it deliberately, which of course he wasn't. Or at least you thought he wasn't until you next met him and then you couldn't help but have your suspicions.
Oblique by nature, Tharp liked to live in profile, more comfortable at counter than table. As long as you could only see one eye at a time he was pretty good company. Errant eyelids aside Tharp was as normal as you or me, although knowing you and me that might not be as reassuring as it sounds.

He had worked at the mortuary all his adult life. The dead don't care how you blink at them. Tharp felt that his charges respected him more than the living so he cared for them with skill and tenderness.
His one real friend among the living was his boss, Stent. A much younger man, Stent had married a beautiful but simple girl whose closest approach to academic achievement was to obsessively search for the image of Jesus in her food. Their life was idyllic yet Stent craved from Tharp the conversation he could not get at home. Tharp was older and wiser and loved to talk.
And so they got along.

Somewhat superstitious, Stent could never bring himself to mention death in his native tongue and substituted Latin or Spanish when the subject raised its grisly head, which at the mortuary was not an uncommon occurrence.
'Muerto,' he whispered.
Tharp blinked at the figure on the slab. Stent's diagnosis was, as usual, concise and accurate.
'So what was yesterday's count?' Tharp asked, as he did every day before they got down to work. Stent didn't look up.
'Three,' he said. 'One burned into the toast at breakfast, one in a pork chop and a particularly good one in her mashed potato.'
Maria posted photos of her edible saviours on a blog. She had quite a following.
The conversation strayed to last night's radio adaptation of Chekhov's 'Seagull,' meandered on into politics, books and the entertaining collection of tattoos adorning the elderly lady who no longer felt any sense of shame at the ministrations of these strange men on her naked body.
They worked on, happily. Tharp liked Stent. Stent liked Tharp.
Life was good.

Misrememberie

This week's sentence was taken from E.M. Forster's 'A Room With A View'.

It was:
'It tasted partly of the paper in which it was wrapped, partly of hair oil, partly of the great unknown.'

Misrememberie

It was a small room and very dark after the dazzling sunshine. The intense blues and greens of the square outside were replaced by smoky browns, massive dark-wood dressers leaving only squeeze-room around the big family table, spread with a dull orange plastic tablecloth. I saw why Ana's parents had chosen to greet me outside; there was no room in here for their ubiquitous and effusive Lusitanian hugs and kisses.
We sat. Rosalinda, painfully Portuguese; small, fat, black-shawled, grey-haired and very likely the image of her tall, slim, beautiful daughter twenty years hence. José, his English worse than my Portuguese, dashed into the kitchen, returning with a small parcel wrapped in newspaper.
Ana conspiratorial: 'Don't act grossed-out! It's pig's ear in jelly. Pãe makes it himself.'
The old man leaned forward, urging me with gestures to open the package and devour its contents. I decided to play along; the foolish foreigner falling for José’s favourite joke. After all, I like pork; what could be so bad?
With a display of reverence, I unwrapped the parcel. There on a bed of sodden grey newsprint, glistening in a coating of gelatinous ooze that looked suspiciously like semen but which I hoped was merely pork jelly, nestled what was unmistakably a whole pig's ear, mercifully sliced into bite-sized pieces. Anticipating José’s laughter I picked up a piece and put it in my mouth.
If it was a joke, he was playing it to the hilt. His expression was one of genuine concern as to the quality of his gross offering.
Not wishing to give offence, I felt compelled to eat the damned thing. It tasted partly of the paper in which it was wrapped, partly of hair oil, partly of the great unknown. In texture it was not unlike tough raw squid, if ever a squid harboured such a disgusting quantity of gristle, but I fought back a wave of nausea and chewed doggedly on, nodding and smiling in such a way as to hopefully satisfy my host's expectant expression as to the incomparable deliciousness of this most rare and delicate morsel.
Saved by the old man raising a glass, I eagerly joined him, the lubrication allowing me finally to force down the revolting gobbet.
I grinned widely and nodded my thanks, praying that my demonstration of enthusiasm would not produce a whole barrel of pork gristle from the kitchen.
I need not have worried. The ice broken, great bowls of avocado salad and piri-piri prawns materialised on the table, accompanied by José's home-grown pink olives, marinaded in orange and herbs and a small mountain of the fabulous local bread, chilled vinho verde and (with a cackle from José) a bottle of throat-stripping aguardente.
Lunch over, Rosalinda beamed at her daughter and dragged her into the kitchen. José slammed a carved box down on the table, opening it with great ceremony to reveal his personal, home-made set of dominoes: teak with inset brass dots.
He grinned. I had become part of the family.


This is a deliberate mis-remembering of two separate meals, one in Cascais and one in Sintra.
My first meeting with Ana’s parents (Mãe and Pãe: Rosalinda and José) involved José sacrificing one of his scrawny chickens, which he grilled on a workman’s brazier in the road outside. It was one of the best pieces of chicken I had ever tasted.
Even though I was vegetarian back then the Portuguese had no understanding of the concept (we’re talking late 1980s) and so chicken, pork and fish were on all the vegetarian menus and I didn’t want to abuse their hospitality.
The pig’s ear was part of a feast laid on by João and Carla. They presented us with Feijoada, which is a traditional festival dish including (heaped on a gigantic platter) black beans, bacon, smoked ribs, trotters, tail, various sausages made from the more adventurous parts of the pig, and of course the ears. It was fabulous apart from the ears, which were pretty much as I described them in the story.

I still have Pãe’s infamous dominoes, which he presented me as a gift. I soon figured out the reason he was unbeatable: the handmade teak dominoes are beautifully grained and all slightly irregular in shape and he had simply learned what each one looked like from the back so always picked the pieces he needed to win, the sly old fox.