“You’re drawing me again,” she said. A simple, flat statement of fact which remained unacknowledged. She continued to stare out of the window and his pencil continued to drift across the paper, settling down to create borders around the soft off-white, shaping her face.
Continue reading A Blank
Two Wheels Bad
They came overnight, and we did not notice. Not at first, no, because their brothers and sisters were already here, a discreet phalanx of unobtrusive invaders. An expeditionary force, embedded deep cover in our towns and cities. Our villages. Everywhere. Waiting for the signal.
Seeing Things
“Mate,” he said, not looking at me. “Mate, come on. It’s just up here. In this pond.” Pond, I thought. Maybe that’s a local name because it looks like a lake to me. But then again, I’m no fisherman. If I was, I probably wouldn’t be here. I’d be somewhere safe, a long way away.
Fit for swine.
Don’t eat that.
What? Why not? What’s wrong with it? Poison? It’s poisoned, isn’t it? All my food is poisoned these days. The great tragedy of being Emperor for life is how short other people want to make that term of office. Bring out the Food Taster, come on. Where is the dispensable little fucker?
No, not poisoned. Just not good.
Nope. You’ve said it now. BRING OUT THE FOOD TASTER for the love of God, what’s keeping him?
All the fun.
The lights burn holes in your eyes if you stay out too long in front of the curtain. They say you can tell the long-time performers by the glimmer of darkness nestled in their gaze; the spots have punched their lights out. It’s not a sad place to be, not when you’re up there. The wash lights warm your skin and melt the greasepaint into your mouth. The performance becomes you, if you want. There is no mask but your face, a painting with those terrible black holes in the centre.
As manager, it doesn’t touch him. He closes his eyes and feels the performance thunder through the boards. The crowd roars, heckles, squeals with delight. It kicks up dust and sunlight as the day starts to vanish and the evening shows begin, the crowd changing timbre as the dark closes around them. The edgy, half-contained violence of a mob is always part of the spirit at the Fair and it gets harder to push back into the bottle as the drink flows.
Everyone knows not to mess with the manager, though. He sits at the front, just outside the idiot stare of the lights, and listens. The sway of the throng creates the breeze that plucks restlessly at his flat-combed hair, he tastes it like a snake. His face is unreadable, but after all these years he is tired and he is sad. He has seen and felt too much. He opens his eyes and stares at the light.
Settled Dust
Takes a lot to get me to notice things. I’m hoovering the rug one morning and it didn’t even occur to me that there was no table on it. What had happened to the coffee table? Then I started thinking maybe we’d never had a coffee table but no, there were the dents in the pile although they were fading and filled with dust.
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Bad Faith
Where the music ended and the screams, the applause, ended was impossible to say. A solid wall of heat radiated from the audience to the stage, adolescent lust breaking in foaming waves around his feet. I stared up at him, my eyes glazed with that same longing, damp with frustrated tears. He was so perfect.
Losing grip
Gravity is such a weak force. Anyone could defy it with the least effort, pulling bodies free with every step. Yes, we sent rockets pummelling out of the atmosphere on columns of concentrated fire, but a child could break the bond with a leap. It’s the smallest thing, and it took almost nothing for it to fail.
Dew
So early in the morning it was still night, out in the deep grass where the deer have held court since the days of the Tudors. The mist dragged across the world, milky white cataracts. What we were doing was wrong, but there was no option.
Crow Drop
In the old terms, it was a Crow Drop. Something deniable, a dead drop for the Devil’s agents. An unobserved, unguarded corner of nowhere that accumulated unbought souls. No-one had bargained for them, no-one had cleaned and accepted them, they fell from the meat of a body when the light went out and were picked up by those of a mind to notice.