Month: May 2017

Birthday Season

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If there’s one thing guaranteed to make you do a double-take and wonder where the time went its the realisation that your children are all grown up – or at least have hit eighteen. 

We’re right in the middle of a short cluster of them with one of my neices, my daughter and my daughter’s best friend all reaching their majority within the space of a few short weeks of each other. The Charleesi is yet to have hers, but this weekend we had a gathering to celebrate her cousin’s birthday.

Surrounded by the extended family, she endured us with good grace, and it was a pleasant few hours on a gloriously sunny day.

And of course it’s a wonderful thing, but for myself and my brother B there was one short moment of looking at each other at the bar with a shared bemusement of “how did this happen?” There was self-conscious eye rolling, and a bit of shoulder shrugging, and then we got the drinks in to return to everyone else. 

I’d love to report that I was a sparkling addition to the party, but between the various strains going on and my perennial feeling of being the outsider I mostly people-watched and blended into the background. My neice seemed to be having a good time, and that was more important.

Another few weeks and, right in the middle of her A-Levels, it’s the turn of the Charleesi. We’ll see then if I’m any more used to the concept

Uncle Ranty’s Assistants Speak Up

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You may be wondering why we’ve called you here today. Some of the more alert among you may also have noticed that we’re not Uncle Ranty. It’s the hair, isn’t it? No, Uncle Ranty can’t come to the keyboard right now. We kind of wish we could say it was because he’d been locked up for eating his third least-hated editor – but there’s no evidence of that, so we’re stuck with him for now.

Truth be told, as of the last time we saw him, he’s locked himself in the bathroom with a water resistant games console to play Skyrim. His last intelligible words were: “Screw this, I’ve had enough of this garbage. I’m off to live in a fantasy world to rival that of any poxy reader of a right wing UK newspaper.”

He also said something about forcibly extracting editors’ heads from tax-evading owners’ rectums, but we’re not entirely sure what he means by that. He seemed to be deeply annoyed by the wall-to-wall intrusive horror-porn reporting on the Manchester bombing this week.

Now, that last is a bit of a conjecture because by then he was also muttering about eating a TARDIS at the weekend, and threatening to go back and cancel our mothers if we didn’t bring him pizza.

From a quiet sit down with his scribbled notes, screen captures from his phone, and some of the less colourful swearing it looks like he was going to, uh, discuss the tabloid calls for suspension of the presumption of innocence, as well as their use of the phrase ‘final solution’.

Uncle Ranty may return soon, but from the noises coming from the other room he’s preferring to shout at virtual dragons and limit his weapon brandishing to the virtual realms. We’ll keep him distracted so he doesn’t make things worse.

As his assistants, we’d just like to say: be kind to each other and yourselves, and be a force for good just like all the amazing people who have rallied to help in Manchester. Don’t be a dick, it really doesn’t help.

Fiction Fragment: Band Night

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I started this last night but wasn’t quite sure where I was going to go with it, so I’ll stick it up here as a fragment – and if inspiration wanders back I’ll develop it further:

The band played on. That was what stuck with him as a memory later. In the middle of all the unfurling chaos; the explosions and sparks, the screams and shouts; the band played on. Their clothing was pristine and uniform. Their hair gelled and teased to coiffed perfection, they looked like they had stepped off an album cover, or a promotional photoshoot.

Even when a seven foot biker was bodily tossed at the stage, the lead singer merely swayed his upper torso a lazy few inches out of the way. He didn’t break a sweat, the beat, or his rhythm. The drummer broke the biker’s neck instead as he tried to clamber back upright on the drumset.

Short Story: Things That Go Drip In The Night

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“That shower is dripping again.” It was three o’clock in the morning, and nobody was in the mood for it. I certainly wasn’t.

“I did it last time.” Kay’s grumpy half-assed voice was surprisingly clear for someone who had been snoring mere seconds ago.

“You’re nearer. Go on, won’t take a second.” I pretended to be barely conscious, slurring my words slightly.

“No. Your turn. I told you to fix it when you got in and you wanted to curl up on the sofa instead.” Kay’s back was curved aggressively at me as she hugged the armful of duvet to her chest and exposed me to the night air.

“Ahhh! Bitch!” I yelled – though only half-heartedly – as goosebumps broke out up and down my skin. I tried without success to haul the covers back, but my wily woman had already rotated like a spindle to cocoon herself. She glared sleepily out at me, face framed by tousled hair that was well on its way to being the poster-child for bed head.

“Go on Dorian. You can have the covers back when you’ve sorted it.” She affected a stern tone, and then promptly ruined the effect with a giggle and by sticking her tongue out at me. I sighed dramatically and pulled my t-shirt back down to at least try and preserve some body heat. At least the carpet was warm enough when I swung my legs round and sat up.

The ensuite bathroom was only a half dozen steps or so away as I walked round the end of the bed. In general principle I tried tugging the end of the duvet as I passed, but Kay drew her feet up and there was no give in the material. I pulled a sad face at her on my way past; she farted in retaliation.

“Charming!” I called, and flicked the light on in the bathroom suite. All the better to glare at the shower head which was stubbornly dripping every twenty three seconds. I knew that because I’d been lying in the dark counting the intervals for what felt like the last half hour or so. I’d been having a particularly nice dream about an ex just before waking, so that hadn’t put me in the best of moods to start with. I certainly wasn’t going to throw that into the debate about why I didn’t want to get up either.

In the warm light of the spotlights it took me a moment to spot the tiny water elemental curled in the tray of the shower. Each drop that fell replenished the mass lost to the drain in a slow pulse in the battle of surface tension against gravity. I sighed and turned the shower head on and off, making sure to tighten the valve properly this time. The small puddle of water at my feet seemed to grin through its ripples in response.

“Right,” I said, “no more of this, it’s making us both cranky. You can stay the night if you’re quiet, but it’s straight down the drain in the morning. – sooner if you wake either of us before dawn.” I reached to the shelf by the shower hose and selected a large pink sponge. I placed it right in the middle of the puddle and made sure it overlapped where the drips had been falling. Then I stomped back out into the bedroom. Kay had already restored the duvet evenly over the bed and was busy snoring again.

“I’ll call a plumber in the morning.” I said. I curled up to spoon behind her and kissed the tip of one pointed ear.

“Thank you darling.” She said, and squeezed my hand. Sleep came quickly.

Short Story: In At The Deep End

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On the seventh day after gaining physical access to humanity’s shared subconscious, the contractors announced that they had killed God. Of course, three days after that he rose again and forgave them, and from there on out it started getting strange. Well, stranger than it already was.

The whole thing had been designed as a preemptive strike to mold the general populace into something more malleable for the big businesses sponsoring the project. The discovery of applied branches of multidimensional mathematics and physics in the banking sector had taken a while to be smuggled past non-disclosure clauses and appropriated by rival research teams in a number of agencies. It hadn’t then taken long before productivity consultants had begun to get very excited about concepts such as description theory and psychodynamic modelling.

The thought of being able to edit their own workers, let alone potential customers, had been a siren call to the usual suspects. Given the projected financial gains, the research teams working in these fields were showered with budgets and carte blanche unseen since the Space Race and the Cold War. The Information War soon outstripped the simplicity of fake news and net traffic manipulation into far more esoteric realms.

As usual, nobody wondered what was watching from those realms. The shadows of these computations played like firelight on the walls of these sideways cavern’s and fields and curious intellects answering to alternative laws began to huddle round the brightest spots to push back.

In retrospect we can ask why nobody queried the higher incidence of unexplained phenomena like temperature changes or visual distortions in the research labs. Perhaps they did, but they were quietly edited out of the recorded reports dutifully spooled out to corporate masters. Nastier minds than mine have suggested that such editing may have come from The Other Side, just as the research teams were affecting things Over There.

Either way, nobody’s talking. Certainly not these days, anyway. The breakthrough event had a body count as the contrasting laws of competing realities twisted and pretzelled around each other’s event horizon and scythed a zone clear each side to a distance of precisely ten kilometers radius. We know this because the gateway on our side was in the heart of Wall Street. In that moment, we all knew we’d need something more effective than Ghost Busters to push back.

Given the generally pugilistic nature of both politics and corporations in search of recovered revenues, it wasn’t too surprising that a military response was made, despite the pleas for a more scientific investigation. A rapid corporate tendering process resulted in an outsourced security bidding war breaking out, and then the troops went in.

Human minds, even bolstered by drones and telemetry are not equipped to interpret other-dimensional spaces. Our brains are designed to approximate inputs they have no frame of reference for, so the intelligences on the other side were reported in terms that the troops brought with them – as the gods and devils that they believed in below their ostensibly rational fronts.

Over there apparently can be the nearest thing to heaven or to hell, even within a few steps of each other, so when someone tagged Over There as being our subconscious, it seemed to stick. The standing instructions from the corporate owners of the security teams became a mission to take down anything that might inspire the masses – which is why the biggest entity they could find was codenamed God, and taken down with extreme prejudice.

Of course, the entities over there were as affected by us as we were being by them. That’s why God rose again, a near infinite number of virgins began camping outside the Staging Area, Kali began reaping lone travellers, and new arrivals are now interrogated by Ganesh.

Suffice to say, all involved are desperate to find a way to disengage from this holy mess, church attendances are up again, and mathematicians are now on hit lists around the world. Strange times are back; now can I interest you in some prayer beads blessed by Buddha and Pikachu?

Blurt Boxing

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“Be Your Own Super Hero” Starter Kit

Between Lady M’s current health, my own sideways brain, and some other things that have affected us on a personal level over the last month or so, we’ve needed something to cheer and distract us. 

A sponsored post on my social media field caught my eye last week – so I invoked my personal mantra of “What’s the worst that could happen?” and ordered a Blurt Foundation Buddy Box.

If you’ve not encountered the Blurt Foundation, they’ve been sending out monthly care packages for a while now. A British charity set up to support, help and inspire people affected by depression – whether as sufferers, or their supporters – they raise money by selling subscriptions for little care packages of… nice things to distract and inspire. They’re usually themed, and everything I’d seen suggested they were fun. I just didn’t necessarily fancy taking out a subscription.

The advert I saw though offered the option of buying a standalone box as a one-off. This particular advert had the tagline of being your own superhero, and being the unashamed geeks that we are, I knew this would make us both smile.

We weren’t disappointed in any way. It’s simple enough in some ways – printed cards, a bath bomb, a scented aromatherapy spray, a small booklet, and a sewing kit with instructions for making your own superhero (sleep)mask – but there’s some clever and positive use of language that has indeed put a grin on both our faces.

And this is the great thing about this box. At no point in the process of ordering, receiving or opening it has the language and tone in any way felt condescending, or sickly, or anything other than a slice of positivity. It’s been nice just to sit down together and coo over the contents as we unboxed it and read bits to each other.

And sometimes that’s all we need: a little distraction, a little levity, something to engage creativity and inspire.

Eyestrains and Exhaustions

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I’ve hit one of those lulls in productivity recently that we all get from time to time. In part this has come from needing to take a breath from the sheer pace of short stories every day. I’m sure there are those on my social media feeds who are glad of the  respite. 

That said, I am still writing things every day. I’m just learning to not beat myself up if they aren’t complete (or even coherent) pieces. I’ll likely do a few fiction fragment posts for some of them rather than labelling them as complete items. The goal of the challenge is to write every day, so while I would prefer to create whole pieces at a time, I have to be realistic about my time, energy, and other commitments.

I’m also forcing myself, on a related note, to be kinder to myself when my weird and wonderful brain decides to go non-linear for a while – mostly because that isn’t helping as I ebb and flow between having focus and energy, and dullness and lethargy.

I have also had to admit to myself, in the same virtual breath, that my tendency recently to write stories and blogs purely on my phone has been hamstrung a little. My recent retinopathy test highlighted that my diabetes is now starting to affect my eyesight, so I forced myself to have my first eyetest this last weekend.

Whether it’s due to diabetes or age, I now know that I need reading glasses – at least for close-up writing and drawing – which explains some of the blurriness and throbbing aches in my eyeballs I’ve had recently. One big gulp and a perusal of frames later, we put in an order…

When they’re delivered, I’ll no doubt post a reasonably appropriate selfie and start practicing my “angry writer/library manager” glaring over the top of his spectacles pose.

In the meantime I shall continue my current side amusement of posting pictures on Instagram and Twitter of the covers of books that have caught my attention. They can be found on Twitter under @timmaidment and Instagram as ludd72 – come take a look.

Short Story: See What’s There

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The first time I met Dorian, I was hiding in the branches of a holly tree, tucked in a space at its centre behind the sharp leaves. I was hiding from the elves who had taken to playing in the wide fields beyond the edge of our garden. If that sounds a wonderful thing, then you’ve never seen elves play.

They are curious about how things are put together, but they define any living creature that isn’t an elf as a thing. While they are creatures that provoke wonder, you don’t want them to play with you. They had, just on this afternoon alone, taken apart a wheelbarrow, the remains of an old bedstead, a family of squirrels, and my pet rabbit when he escaped his cage run and squirmed over the stones of the low boundary wall.

The other problem was that the fields at the end of my garden weren’t always there, so telling my parents or indeed any other grown-ups about the elves was difficult as they weren’t there when I dragged anyone along who would listen.

The elves knew I was there. When my parents turned their backs on the wall to tell me off again about wasting their time I would see their faces in the trees and bushes. They would smile, revealing sharp teeth in wide mouths, and beckon to me. My parents thought I was trying to hide tears of childish remorse rather than tears of terror.

The doctors told me it wasn’t real, and I really wanted to believe them. I tried to agree with them and deny what was right in front of me, but I know they could tell I was lying to them. They wanted to give me pills, but my parents refused to let them, and I wasn’t sure if in that moment I loved or hated them more for it.

So there I was, hiding in the holly bush one afternoon because the elves were right next to the wall and I didn’t want them to take me away to play. I could smell the copper taste of fear, adrenaline, and blood in the air and felt frozen in place.

And Dorian walked into the garden, accompanied by my parents. I didn’t know who he was of course, he was just a tall thin grown-up in a suit, with short hair and a slightly floppy fringe. My parents were talking to him in the serious way they did with the doctors which told me everything I thought I needed to know; and he was nodding in that slow way the doctors did.

He looked straight at me, through the camoflage of the holly tree, and then did something the doctors never did. He winked at me. Then he did something no other adult had. He looked at the elves, and he frowned.

And you know what? The elves looked at him, and took a step back from the wall. They’d never done that before.

My parents retreated back towards the house. They were still in the garden, but far enough away to give us space. That’s why, when Dorian waved to me, I crawled back out onto the lawn and went over to him.

“You see them?” I said, and I couldn’t keep the suspicion from my voice.

“Oh yes,” he said, in a soft voice that made me think of my mum’s voice when tucking me in bed at night, ” and they’re not going to frighten you any more. Promise.” He held his hand out to me and after a glance at my parents, I took it.

The world shivered a little around us as we turned to look at the fields and the elves in it. The sun and clouds looked different on their side of the wall, more like a Summer’s day than the early Spring that kept threatening rain.

“They want to play because you can see them. It’s not something that many people remember how to do when they’re not babies any more. You’re right not to trust them though.”

“They’re horrible. I don’t want to see them any more.” I said. The elves were watching us, hands resting on the hilts of their wicked knives. Dorian crouched down to talk to me, face to face.

I can make them go away, or I can make sure you don’t see them again. Which would you prefer?”

“Are you going to give me medicine? Is there something wrong with me like the other doctors said?”

“There’s nothing wrong with you, no. You’re better at paying attention and seeing what’s really going on if that’s any better?” For some reason I just felt that I could trust him. I nodded, slowly.

“They’re scary.”

“Yes they are. Hiding in the holly bush was a good idea. There used to be hawthorn bushes along that fence weren’t there? I’ll tell your parents to plant new ones. Now, how about we tell them to go away?”

“They won’t listen.” I’d tried shouting at them before. It never worked. Dorian smiled at me.

“They’ll listen to me. Trust me.” The strange thing is, I did. I gripped his hand as tight as ten year old me could. He looked across at them. “Hey! Longshanks, Knifenose, and Prettyboy! You know who I am, so go away. The wall’s going back up and you don’t want to get caught in it.”

There was a moment where I thought they were going to come and get us, and I really needed to go to the loo all of a sudden. I crossed my legs. The shiver in the air around us got stronger, making me feel like we were a plucked guitar string.

“Don’t make me call the missus.” I heard him say, and then, just like that, the shiver stopped, the field was gone, and so were the elves and the blood. Rain had started to fall at some point, so we all went back indoors and I was properly introduced to Dorian, who had been hired as my counsellor.

My parents did replant the hawthorn bushes after that, and the elves and the field never came back. Nonetheless, Dorian and I did talk about the elves, or at least about my memories of them and how they had faded like old dreams over the following weeks.

He’s teaching me how to focus on what’s really there and to tell the difference between that and what most other people see, but I’m not noticing the difference much these days. Dorian always seems a little sad around the eyes when I say that, but mum and dad are happier that I’m not seeing things any more, so that’s what’s important.

Isn’t it?

Short Story: A Short Trip

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We tumbled down the grassy slope together, sliding and rolling out of control, pulling and being pulled by our own intertwined limbs and the demands of gravity and momentum. The sun beat down on us with a dry haze that threatened to transform lush grass into harsh hay. We didn’t care. Birdsong trilled somewhere above us; a skylark protesting our intrusion here. In that moment it was just a detail to be recalled later, rather than a signpost or warning.

Over and over we rolled. Sometimes it was fast, with the shocks of our bouncing bodies forcing air from our lungs in exulted protest. At other moments our journey threatened to stop, and we consciously hauled ourselves forward to start a further burst of tumbling.

Over each other, arms locked, and legs flailing, challenging dare accepted and yet regretted. Somewhere above us our respective parents were probably either praying that we didn’t ruin our clothing or break each other’s necks. Rueful expectations of bruises and shouted promises of deprivations to come did nothing to dissuade us from our erratic downward trajectory. The threat of early bed barely registered in the face of our adrenaline rush.

Down and down, until the slope became steeper, and old molehills and the soft tussocks conspired to separate us. We bounced and rolled faster, and perhaps in that moment we remembered fear and the stone wall waiting at the bottom of the field. Topped with barbed wire and seated in churned mud that was surely mixed with sheep dung from when flocks roamed here, we hadn’t thought about it until now.

And then we stopped rolling, breathless and muddy, with scraped knees and scuffed shoes. Our shirts were smeared and ripped, and at some point we must have gone through nettles because painful blistered welts were visible on our exposed skin. The tingling pain began to filter through, but the blood racing through our veins was pounding too hard for either of us to care.

Something silvery flashed on the slope above us – and we remembered the teatray we’d started our descent on mere moments ago. It felt like years. It probably felt even longer for our parents up there at the top of Box Hill.

A Day In Town

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I’ll admit it was a bit of an impulse, but we decided to break with tradition and actually do something with our day off. I suggested the Victoria & Albert Museum, mostly because I’ve never been before.

With Lady M’s resurgent interest in dress design and cosplay, it seemed as good an excuse as any to look at the design elements of fashion and the items around us – and we spent hours happily admiring beautiful things.

The V&A is a huge building; I hadn’t appreciated how much they have on display. From silver reliquaries and stained glass windows, to consumer electronics and protest posters, by way of a history of fashion over the last four hundred years or so it was a visual feast.

It was too much to take in, and we’ll have to go back for targeted, bite-size, repeat visits. Was it a grand day out? It was fascinating. It’s also given me a few prompts for stories, so there’s an added bonus…