prose

pieces of flash fiction, short stories and (coming shortly) extracts from longer works

Rites of Spring

chapter from flash fiction novella, Agnes

 

So, I’ve got an arm round Connor on one side and on the other I’m holding Mummy’s arm and that’s making me feel safe. I’m as tall as her now and we’re a pair of Amazons towering over Dad’s family who are all midgets. Connor’s shorter than me too but he’s hard, he plays rugby, my attack dog. His body’s all muscle up against mine and I can almost hear his energy growling, like a motorbike engine, it excites me. I couldn’t of come here without him. It’s the first time I’ve seen any of them since it happened, more than a year ago, now. When Mummy said I should come, I said, ‘No way, why on earth would I?’ She said it would help, stuff about closure, laying it to rest – literally! Then Connor said he’d come and we could dance on her grave and that made me laugh.

So, there’s all of us standing round this hole in Betty and Ted’s front garden. Betty was kind when we arrived, came up and gave me a hug and said it’s lovely I’ve come, I look beautiful and I’m an important part of the family. She might be bullshitting but it felt like she meant it. Ted’s there and a few people who were at the party. Nobody my age which I think’s unfair seeing as how I’m the one she was horrible to.

Dad’s holding this plastic tub thing with her in it, her ashes, and they’re going to put her in the hole and plant a rose bush on top. Nobody seems to know what to do first so Betty says stuff about how Agnes liked this place, she was born nearby and you can see Bury from here.

‘She’s going to have a job seeing it from where she is now,’ Connor says under his breath and I have to bite the inside of my mouth to stop from laughing.

Dad pulls the lid off the tub with a snap, nearly spilling the lot and pours the ashes into the hole. It’s quite pathetic, this bit of white powder all that’s left of her. More impressive to have a coffin burial.Although that means your body’s lying in a box underground which is quite creepy. Ted has a spade and puts soil in the hole while Betty holds the rose bush which is a bunch of bare sticks with vicious-looking thorns. Appropriate for her if you think about it.

Ted stamps the soil down and Connor says, ‘Is this where we start dancing?’ and Mummy shushes us but I can tell she’s smiling inside. After that, Dad pulls a bit of paper out of his pocket, coughs and reads this poem.

‘Do not stand at my grave and weep,’ he starts and I can tell Connor’s wanting to say something, we’re both shaking with giggles and I’m still biting my lip.

Dad finishes up with, ‘Do not stand at my grave and cry; I am not there. I did not die.’ 

And bloody Connor whispers, ‘She’s coming back,’ and I have to pretend I’ve got a coughing fit. Luckily that’s the end of it and we all go inside for a cuppa tea and the usual bloody egg and cress sandwiches. Connor says he’d kill for chips. They’re all standing round coming out with stories about things she did and said, and I couldn’t care less cos all I can think about is the one thing she did and said to me. It wasn’t only what she said – everyone agreed that was so untrue – but why she said it, like she wanted to attack me. Why would she want to hurt me when I needed her to be my gran?

After a bit, Connor and I go outside for a fag, not out the front with her and the thorns but round the back where there’s vegetables and a shed we go behind and you can see for miles. And he says, ‘You alright, chick?’

And I realise I’m welling up because I feel we missed the chance of something. The stupid old woman pushed me away when what she wanted was to be respected and listened to. I would have done that. I loved her stories and her recipes. But she threw it away.

‘I’m very alright,’ I say. There’s a freezing East Anglian wind as usual slicing across the fields but I’m warm inside and strong, kind of invincible. She gave me her worst shot and now she’s dead and I’m still here. It does hurt, like I was stabbed but in a weird way I get strength from it. It’s like it’s given me a choice: I can let it destroy me or not. After everything that happened in my life I can’t just get over it; it’s always going to be with me. But I think, okay, shit happens, it’s a pain but there’s a bit of me deep down that’s indestructible. I’m fucking Superwoman, me.

‘Right now,’ I say, ‘I feel like fucking Superwoman.’

‘You’re not turning lezzer?’ Connor says and we crack up and I have to explain.

‘She was born a century ago,’ I say. ‘Agnes not Superwoman. And my life will go on till the end of this century, probably. God knows what life’ll be like when we’re old. So between her and me we could stretch across two hundred years. But she’s history and I’m the future.’

 ‘That’s a headfuck,’ says Connor and we start snogging. He’s coming on strong, I’m trying to push him off and he says, ‘We could do it on the grave,’ and that sets us off again. Then Mum’s shouting that it’s time to go.

 

See Bookstall for PDF of Agnes.

In the Wetlands

A prostate story 

 

Voyaging through the wetlands of East Anglia, I am, as usual, busting to go. The roadside is no shelter, not a bush or hedge in sight. Shy of doing it in front of people at the best of times, here on the long straight roads I’d be seen by drivers, sight-seeing passengers, children with faces pressed to the rear windows, and their teddies. Way ahead, a clump of trees: I clench and press on. But arrival reveals a house in the trees, no privacy. Fenlandia stretches to the horizon in all directions, black earth and shining water meeting the big sky. Water, water everywhere... the crisis intensifies. It actually would be a relief to wet myself. That warm, disastrous, yet strangely comforting sensation remembered from... when? early toddlerhood? It’s decision time.

A railway bridge across the Great Ouse, appropriately next to an old pumping station, at last provides shelter for my very own little ooze. Needless to say there is a car parked there. And people. And they have not only a camera but a video camera. And a drone, for god’s sake. But by now I don’t care, I could piss in Piccadilly Circus. And it’s decided: gotta see a doctor.

My male so-called friends are delighted to tell me gruesome prostate examination stories – how they put a camera up you, and not the back but the front. I wince. But the reality, when the day arrives, is quite different. The slim, handsome young doctor looks as if he is straight out of medical school. Or possibly, school. Why is it that, growing up, doctors were always middle-aged men, avuncular but gruff, while now they seem to be the age of my grandchildren, with rosy cheeks and wonderful bedside manners. How can I get him to my bedside, I wonder? And yes, I have to drop them. Some time since I had the chance to bare myself in front of another man. It’s all very discreet, with drawn curtains, back turned, professional eyes averted. In fact, I’d be flattered if he had a quick look. My prize possession is of course suffering from false modesty but retains the eternal male desire for self-exposure. At this point he even offers ‘a chaperone’ and I refrain from saying that it might be he who needs one. As instructed, I roll on one side, knees up and he slips in a latex-gloved finger to size up the gland. This is the male G-spot and I ponder what the G is for? The Go-to spot? The Glory hole? The ‘Gee honey, I found it’ spot? In fact, it’s named after its discoverer, Ernst Grafenberg, a German physician and scientist. Well, that’s a passion killer. In any case, there’s no passion or stimulation with my young medic, although the inquisitive finger is a bit of a thrill. The most action I’ve had for a while, if the truth be told. Afterwards, instead of a cigarette, he offers me a drug: Tamsulosin. Tamsulosin the Great, I have come to think of it, after Marlowe’s similarly named all-conquering hero. Within hours the pumping station throbs into action and the taps are full on. What a relief: life is back.

                                                                                                                                  Dawn near Fordham, Cambs

Journey to the Centre of My Room

short story published in La Piccioletta Barca, Sept. 2021

Published in Hallozine by Coin-Operated Press, October 2022

 

All Hallow’s Eve, and the young demon Mogg hurtles across Hell, racing with his peers like a flock of bats through subterranean courtyards and down tunnels to the exit. Tonight newly-ordained demons are allowed out for the first time to maraud in the realm of mortals, an occasion for which they have trained for aeons. Mogg’s witch-mother, Magg, has taught him the techniques by which to terrorise men, women and their younglings.

‘Go for the vulnerable,’ she’d say, ‘the sick, the poor, the addicted. They say, there’s no such thing as devils; we say, there’s no such thing as society. Remember the three Fs: Fright, Freak, Fry. Scare them until they doubt themselves; freak them out so they start thinking you actually exist…’ (Mogg can never get his head round this one—surely, he does exist.) ‘Finally, when you have them for eternity, fry them, roast them, skewer them, whatever you like. This lady’s all for burning.’

Passing out of the glowering portal of Inferno, he circles, viewing for the first time the legendary motto carved above the gateway: Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here. With a screech of glee and anticipation, he rises on silky black wings and speeds northward, over woods, mountains and lochs.

 

Gliding down towards a sprawling metropolis, he avoids motorways with their roaring carriages, and shopping centres with teeming crowds, and alights in a shadowy side-alley. The choking fumes of the streets and the sulphurous glow of lamps are comforting and familiar. He edges his way into a thoroughfare where a sign on a pitted, peeling wall says, Argyle Street. Human-shaped figures shuffle along, moving with the wingless, earthbound gait of mortals. It’s time to start work.

Creeping in the shadows, Mogg identifies a potential victim: half-sitting, half-lying by the wall, so thin it’s well on the way to being a skeleton, a hood masking its face. Already halfway to despair, it's a soft target to begin the night.

Coiling himself, Mogg leaps in front of the figure, arms raised, clawing the air with his talons, spreading his baleful, batlike wings, baring sabre-like teeth and emitting a throaty hiss.

A pale face peers from within the hood and glazed eyes attempt to focus. ‘Hiya, pal,’ it says cheerily, holding out a small vessel. ‘Any spare change?’

Not understanding the earthy, gutteral syllables, Mogg steps back. Crouching, he gives a menacing growl.

‘Nae worries. Hae a nice evenin.’ The head droops, it pulls the hood back over its face.

Not as easy as he thought. He half hops, half flies further along the street, stopping in front of an imperious, intimidating edifice. Grand steps sweep up to a colonnade supporting a graceful portico. It reminds him of the temples and graceful architecture he'd seen when the apprentices were taken from Hell to the Other Place to show them what they were missing. Across the front of the building, a pink banner displays a motto:

PEOPLE MAKE GLASGOW

It seems unfinished. People make Glasgow what? Great Again? Better than Edinburgh? Mogg sneers—how can mortals make anything? Everyone knows, only gods can do that. Devils certainly can’t—though they’re wicked at destroying things—and he’s pretty sure these creatures can’t either.

 He sidles towards another figure standing by itself, its fellow earthlings making detours round it. More robust this one, a hairy, grizzled creature, advanced in years, at an age when they tend to weaken, giving in to fears and delusions. Ripe for picking. It holds something in its arms that reminds him of the lyres he heard in the Other Place. He recalls their pathetic twanging.

With his best bloodcurdling shriek and a blast of flaming breath, he flies straight at the earthling.

‘This is my patch, son,’ it growls, starting to beat its lyre with the vigour of Hell’s blacksmiths and yelling at a volume that makes Mogg’s screaming sound thin and feeble:

 

I… CLANG, CLANG, CLANG

I WILL BE KING… CLANG, CLANG, CLANG

AND YOU… CLANG, CLANG, CLANG

YOU WILL BE QUEEN… CLANG, CLANG…

 

Mogg reels back, head ringing. Attuned to the hammers, bellows and screams of home, this racket takes it to another level. With a wail, he scrabbles on all fours into a side-alley, a dark doorway. Gasping for breath, he calms himself with lungfuls of fumes from the carriages and the rank, weedy smoke that hangs in clouds around certain lurking figures.

Soon, the sound of high, piping voices alerts him to the approach of a cluster of younglings—a small skeleton, a half-grown devil, a werepuppy and a baby ghost. This is more promising, they’ll be wide-eyed, gullible.

‘Trick or treat, mister?’ they call and he leaps high, swirls, hanging in the air, shrieking and landing crouched in front of them, flashing his eyes, red and green.

‘Haha, that’s wicked. Nae bad costume.’

‘Celtic'r Rangers, pal?’

Mogg freezes. He’s no idea what they’re saying, but smells no fear.

He opens his mouth and a whiney, strangled sound issues from it.

‘Y’English or what?’ says Werepuppy.

He croaks some more and spits a sizzling gob of blood-coloured goo at their feet.

‘Them’s ma noo feckin’ trainers, pal.’

‘E’s aff his heid.’

‘Wha’ a bampot.’

They push past, jostling him and he lands face down on the cobbles near a sour-smelling splatter of regurgitated curry. Lying there, humiliated, with not even the first of Magg’s three Fs achieved, Mogg knows he has to gather his last strength.

He gets up and runs, extends his wings and rises above the streets, setting his course for home. Sounds carry through the restless autumn air: the buzz of voices chatting, waves of uproarious laughing, bottles clinking, the whirling music of a funfair, the last clangs of ‘We can be heroes...’. Warm sounds of people making the most of it. Mogg hesitates, circles, wonders if he wouldn't after all be happier throwing in his lot with this fearless, feisty tribe.  

Gliding along by the river, he passes a wall that carries the same motto he saw earlier but this time spray-painted in bulging, fluorescent letters:

People Make Glasgow … Fierce, Fun and Fuckin Fabulous