Tag: short fiction

Faces and fringes

~ janeishly ~ Leave a comment

I’m a bit late posting this as I wrote these last Wednesday evening during Cat Rambo’s writing games session. But I’ve spent the intervening time working on the third piece, which I shan’t be posting here, as I liked it so much I’m going to submit it for publication!

Here are the other two pieces, with the prompts that generated them:

  1. What I saw in the mirror was not what I expected.

Over the years of Switching, I’ve got used to seeing other people’s faces looking back at me. There’s always that moment of shock, of readjustment, before my brain reasserts itself under the influence of the spell and I think “Right, yeah, that’s them but it’s not me, I’m just here to do a job. And somewhere, at a far deeper level, there’s something of the other person looking back at me, seeing exactly what they’ve always seen. I don’t know how that works, so don’t ask me, but there’s always a faint sigh of relief that things are as they should be. They aren’t, of course, so whatever it is that’s feeling it must be something pretty primitive.

But I digress. When I looked in the mirror this time, what I saw was not myself inhabiting someone else’s body. It was someone else inhabiting my body. This time I was that primitive something lost under the layers of someone else’s consciousness. And they were looking back at me and grinning.

2. This image (embedded here, but follow the link to the original Twitter posting).

A telegraph pole with wires, all of which are covered by fringes of short icicles

Originally tweeted by Isabel Salvasilha (@salvasilha) on January 25, 2023.

On Elvis World everything has white fringes. No, I’m not kidding. Everything.

Look, here’s a picture I took of a telegraph pole. Or is it an electricity line? Anyway, you get the idea. Everything – and I mean everything – has white nylon fringing hanging off it. The sheep don’t look too weird, but the cars were most peculiar, and you don’t even want to know about the toilets. I mean, that can’t be hygienic, no matter how many times a day they fill in the little card to say the facilities have been cleaned. And refringed.

But at least you’re never far away from a defibrillator. There’s one in every cubicle. Not just in the loos, like next to the tampon dispenser or something, but actually in each cubicle above the cistern. I suppose it’s statistically possible for two people in adjacent toilet cubicles to have heart attacks at the same time, and for two defibrillators to be required simultaneously in close proximity, but it can’t be very likely.

Apart from that? It was OK, I suppose. I mean, you’d really, really have to like Elvis to pay to go there rather than winning tickets like I did, but I think, if you were a fan and you wanted to add to your rhinestone-covered Elvis funko pop collection, you’d be in heaven. I was extremely glad I’d remembered to take my noise-cancelling headphones, though. And I don’t ever want to see another peanut butter and banana sandwich as long as I live.

Three prompts become one

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Firstly, I probably ought to wish you all a Happy New wossname, and all that jazz. Personally, I’ll settle for this year being rather less bizarre than the last few. Boredom is my goal. Lots of lovely nothing interesting happening, interspersed by large and well-paid translation projects, please.

While awaiting another 360-odd days of mundanity, I remembered to join in with Cat Rambo’s writing games this evening, and set myself the task of writing a single piece to incorporate all three prompts. The first two were relatively easy, but the last one had me stumped for a moment.

Here’s what I produced this evening (prompts in bold).

 I arrived in the city and you met me at the station, smiling in a way that made me frightened.

“What are you planning now?”

“Me? Nothing.” You grabbed my bag and hailed a taxi, innocence radiating from you like a cloud of angels’ wings. Oh shit. This was going to be really bad.

When we drew up outside the Waldorf, I knew it was going to be worse than bad. And when we arrived in our suite – the Presidential Suite, no less – my knees were so weak I could barely stand.

After the terror of the anticipation, discovering what you actually intended to steal this time, and the insanely risky method you intended to use, was almost a relief.

“Chuck’s containment breach of terrifying horrible horror.”

You grinned at me as if expecting a reward.

“You want to steal…” I had to pause for a moment and search for words. “You want to steal the mythical portal to an eldritch realm populated by immortal lizard people?”

“That’s right.”

“The mythical portal we don’t even know exists, it being mythical and all that?”

“I have proof.” Your grin faltered only slightly. “Well, kind of proof. I know someone who knows someone who has proof it exists.”

I was not going to be deflected.

“The mythical portal through which, if it does exist, immortal lizard people might emerge at any moment?”

This you were ready for.

“Nobody’s come through it for nearly five years, and none are expected. It’s perfectly safe.”

My final argument, I knew, was unbeatable, but still my voice became a little shrill by the end of the sentence.

“The mythical portal with the immortal lizard people that’s owned by King Charles, guarded by 84 Beefeaters and kept in the Tower of London, one of the most secure places in the world?”

At last, your face fell a little.

“I do have a plan,” you muttered. “It’s a really good one.”

“Iksie is a violet planet with a humidified atmosphere. It has 3 moon(s) and is metallic. It is a textile planet.”

You read from the Wikipedia page in a tone that implied every word was a lucid explanation of how to pilfer an interdimensional portal owned by one of the richest men (or possibly lizard people) on the planet, instead of a description that read like something from an 8-year-old author’s first SF story.

When you had finished reading out the brief introduction to the entry on Iksie, you looked at me expectantly.

I sighed. I’d long since grown used to the weirdness of your ‘planning stage’, and had developed a little more confidence that the disparate threads would finally pull together into something that became a heist worthy of the name. But this was obscure even for you.

“No?” you said with disbelief.

“Maybe just a little more detail?” I said, trying not to sound apologetic. Dammit. I was beginning to be drawn in, interested to see how you’d pull this one off. And what the result would be. I knew the portal would be a steal-to-order job – they always were – so it would go off into some other rich person’s vault and never be seen again (at least, I hoped it would). But at least I’d know. I’d know whether the British royal family really were lizard people from the planet Zorg or wherever.

You smiled beatifically, and this was probably your most scary expression yet. This was the one that said “I’ve got you and we both know it”.

And as I felt the fear turn to curiosity-fuelled excitement, you zoomed in on one image in the Wiki article, and displayed it to me with a flourish.

“Tapestry!” you declared. “We get ourselves made into a tapestry and presented to the king!”

Breathing into your writing

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I’m just out of another Cat Rambo writing games session (this time ably hosted by Jennifer Brozek), and once again I’m astonished by the creativity you can stimulate from your writing brain with a few simple prompts.

Today’s exercise was simultaneously very simple and very complicated, but it goes like this:

  1. Take a sentence. Jenn suggested three: one about making coffee, one about taking your pet for a walk, and one that apparently came from one of Cat’s ‘story seeds’, which immediately spoke to me. “The ghost of a nurse walks the streets of Glasgow.”
  2. Spend 15 minutes writing a paragraph that expands on that sentence.
  3. Spend another 15 minutes writing a number of paragraphs that expand on that paragraph.
  4. Use each expansion to tell the reader about the character, the environment, emotions, motivation etc.

I’d add a sub-instruction here, which is “5. Do this exercise using a keyboard because otherwise you have to write the text out twice so you can fit things in between the original lines.”

Anyway, this was a lot of fun, and immediately brought to mind a ghost mediator I’d conjured up from somewhere when I did the Iowa writing course waaaay back in the mists of time. He’s one of the watchers in the expanded version. Maybe one day I’ll string these various fragments together and give him a longer story.

Original sentence:

The ghost of a nurse walks the streets of Glasgow.

First expansion:

The ghost of a nurse walks the streets of Glasgow. The hem of her dress brushes the cobbles as she walks. Her clothes are well cared-for, but far from new, and her only outer garment a thin shawl, scant protection against the raw chill of a Glaswegian October night. The woman is of medium height, medium build, with medium brown hair and medium grey eyes. Her boots are neither holed nor squeakily new. She holds herself with confidence, but not arrogance. No easy target, this, but equally not a fighter. Her name is Mary, baptised like hundreds of others in the city for the Holy Mother. There is absolutely nothing remarkable about this nurse from Glasgow Royal Infirmary. Save that she is dead.

Second expansion:

The ghost of a nurse walks the streets of Glasgow. And two people watch her progress. The hem of her dress brushes the cobbles as she walks. Her clothes are well cared-for, but far from new, and her only outer garment a thin shawl, scant protection against the raw chill of a Glaswegian October night.

Her watchers do not feel the cold; their breath does not cloud the scene before them. The woman is of medium height, medium build, with medium brown hair and medium grey eyes. One of the watchers stirs as her face is yellowly illuminated by her passage beneath a gas lamp.

“She looks like me. Don’t you reckon? I think she does. Why does she look like me?”

The woman’s boots are neither holed nor squeakily new.

“How did they manage to even walk wearing those long dresses? I’d have gone arse over tip within five minutes.”

They follow her course with their eyes. She holds herself with confidence, but not arrogance. No easy target, this, but equally not a fighter.

“She’s got street smarts, aint she? Don’t meet anyone’s eyes, get where you’re going as fast as you can, but don’t draw attention to yourself. Yeah, she’s not bad. What’s her name again?”

Her name is Mary, baptised like hundreds of others in the city for the Holy Mother. There is absolutely nothing remarkable about this nurse from Glasgow Royal Infirmary.

“Bit boring, though, isn’t she? All that public service bit and slogging your way home in the rain. If she’s half as special as you make out, I’d expected something a bit more glitzy.”

There is nothing remarkable about this woman. Save that she is dead, a ghost from 130 years ago and yet alive and standing beside him, intensely curious and endlessly fidgeting, clad in skinny jeans and a puffer jacket, huge earrings swinging as she noisily chews her gum.

The memory of cats

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This one is from Cat Rambo’s writing games, as promised. The prompt is this image.

It began with Muffin. Muffin’s owner buried him in the far corner of the old churchyard. That was where the poor people used to be buried, said Mrs Green in the Post Office, but cats don’t mind whether you have money, so that was OK.

Then it was Thistle’s turn to go. Her owner had seen Muffin’s lovely cat-shaped wooden headstone, and she ordered one from Jack, who sometimes helped out behind the bar and sometimes sat at their bivvy in the woods, carving.

And then Jack’s semi-feral tabby, Kitty, went, and she had to have a marker…

And before long there was a whole cat graveyard there in the shady corner by the church.

Even when the church was sold off and turned into a glamorous new home by a local writer, the headstones continued to appear.

Archie and Pippin, Sasha and Milly, Friday and Einstein.

And in the late afternoon, when the sun slanted in under the yew trees, the live cats came there too, lazing or washing, chatting to the ghosts of cats long gone and cats yet to come, or those from as far away as the other end of the village.

A tiny ocean

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As I explained in my previous post, I’m going to be posting some writings produced from prompts from Cat Rambo’s weekly writing games.

Why not try the prompt yourself before reading further? Or you can join Cat’s Patreon from just $2 a month to write live with the group!

Prompt: A tiny ocean is in a Turkish garden. A woman writes a notebook about it.

Writing time: 10 minutes

Wooden bowl with resin ocean decoration

It makes me wonder how many of these things there are, around the world. If it hadn’t been for the owner’s unusually observant nature, this would too could have just slipped by, unnoticed.

You often hear of sinkholes, and they’re always measured in units of largeness. Cubic metres, or the width of the White House or the length of an American football pitch.

But this… this tiny ocean contains, as far as my instruments can determine, all the things you’d expect to find in a normal-sized ocean – fish, islands, coral reefs, whales, icebergs, even… but all microscopically tiny.

“It leads to some interesting questions, does it not?” says Professor Yavuz, shoving his hands deep into his pockets as he paces back and forth across the lawn.

I lean back in the flimsy folding chair and rubbing my aching neck.

“It does indeed. I’ve just discovered a shipwreck.”

[In case you’re wondering, that gorgeous bowl is by Ilka Abbé, price 75€.]

I did it! My book of Manx fairy tales is now available to read

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As those of you who’ve been following this blog for a while may remember, some time back I wrote a series of short pieces in response to writing prompts based on a box of Christmas tea sachets. Those stories turned out to be set on the Isle of Man, where I was born and grew up.

Together with other short stories, flash fiction and fragments, they are now available as A Manx Daisy Chain and other stories. You can buy the title as an e-book or paperback, currently on Amazon (here), and I’ll be adding it to other platforms according to demand.

So if you like fairy tales, or fancy the idea of stories about robot dinosaurs, Bake Off in space or why translators need to be really careful about the assignments they accept… you might enjoy reading it!

Look at the pretty cover design!

HDIS

~ janeishly ~ 2 Comments

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m rather partial to the music (and other audible outputs) of the band 65 Days of Static. Last week during a listening party for one of their albums, a few of us came up with what I thought was a rather creepy prompt for a story. I started it, but it got away from me and went in a direction I hadn’t intended (a bit ironic, given what it’s about). But tonight there’s another listening party, and I was determined to wrangle it back into place.

Here it is.

When the sinkholes first started appearing, I didn’t take much notice. I mean, a remote peninsula somewhere in Russia? I don’t even know exactly where. But anyway, it wasn’t of interest to me. I’ve been to Moscow, of course, but the Russians are tricky blighters. Hard to trade with. The food’s terrible, and if you don’t drink vodka, which I don’t – give me a decent gin any day over that paint stripper – well, there’s not much point being there at all. You can do all the useful stuff online. You hardly need to subject yourself to actually being there.

Right yeah, so I just didn’t pay that much attention, you know? The sinkholes were thousands of kilometres from anything. If a few reindeer herders fell in them, so what? And actually, even when they began moving west and getting more… what’s that phrase they keep using? Coordinated? Organised? it didn’t really register. I was in the middle of a big deal with a very sensitive client in Saudi Arabia, if you know what I mean. I simply didn’t have the time to keep track of what was happening in Siberia, for God’s sake.

Sinkhole in Siberia

I know all of it now, of course. I’ve had plenty of time to check back on how it started. How the sinkholes were random to begin with. They’d been appearing for years. Maybe something to do with global warming, that was the theory. But something happened. Or… no, I can’t think about that, it’s too utterly ridiculous. And they seemed to start moving deliberately westwards. Yekaterinburg. Other places. I remember that one name because I once dated a woman called Katerina.

Anyway, it wasn’t until that news report came out that the whole thing really got through – you know the one, the Moscow one. You’ve seen it a hundred times. We’ve all seen it a hundred times. You can probably reel off the commentary just like I can. That Russian scientist – a woman, and not half bad if you’re into that whole Slavic vibe – sitting in a TV studio and just flatly saying it outright.

“No one knows what is happening. There is a lot of danger out there. Thousands of refugees are fleeing before the sinkholes. The city and its infrastructure are descending into the Earth. Nobody knows why. Buildings just started sinking and we can’t do anything about it.”

But even then it didn’t seem all that serious. I mean, Moscow? It’s a long way from London. Ask Napoleon. Ask Hitler. And even what that woman said, and others. It was too ludicrous. Like a 90s low budget horror movie. You know, you expected there to be monsters. “A smooth black shape is emerging from the ground…” and, I don’t know, huge tentacles or something.

All the same, I realised I was starting to mentally cross that area of the globe off, as if there was a famine going on. Not the kind of place you want to visit.

And then… Well, again, you’ve seen those graphics. Plotting the path of the sinkholes. Random at first, scattered all over the middle of nowhere, then about two months ago they began to make patterns. Pairings. They started to look like… No point being coy. You already know it anyway. They started looking like footprints. Like giant fucking footprints. Like the footsteps of a huge fucking invisible giant.

So. Mass panic, mass hysteria, mass evacuation… mass everything, pretty much, but no answers. None that made sense. Thousands of theories, billions of gigawatt hours of electricity going into trying to come up with something. There was an invisible giant striding across the surface of the planet, starting out somewhere in the back end of Nowheregrad, and nobody had the faintest fucking clue why, or how, or whether we’d all just died and this was some particularly bizarre form of hell.

Those creepy round footprint sinkholes, hundreds of metres across, but always two of them, making a series of punctuation marks along a linear path…and getting bigger, the footprints, yeah, but the stride too. Like the giant was growing, sucking up energy from what it destroyed. Exactly like that, apparently. Fuck knows how they were measuring it, I’ve never understood all that science stuff. Ballistics, yeah, but not electromagnetic waves or whatever.

I mean, I don’t know why I’m telling you this. You know. You were there. Glued to your screen just like the rest of us. Mentally eating popcorn if you were in Los Angeles or somewhere, a bit worried if you lived in the Middle East, but absolutely fucking terrified if your screen happened to be located in Europe. Maybe trying to go on with your everyday life, but with one eye constantly on that map. Fleeing for your life if you were in Belarus or Poland. And then one day, at least if you lived west of Dresden, you breathed a sigh of relief. Because the footsteps, those huge giant footsteps, those sinkholes that were now several hundred metres deep… they turned around. And headed back the other way, south east, and suddenly everyone in the Middle East was a whole lot less smug and the Bosphorus looked like someone had poured petrol on an ant’s nest. I don’t remember how many people died in Istanbul, but it was a lot.

And, see, the weird thing – well, yeah, I know, that’s a whole load of weird fucking things right there, but the weird thing from my perspective, and it’s me doing the telling… Well. I watched that shift in direction with a bit more self-interest than most of you. Unless you had family in Istanbul, obviously, but anyway. Because I’d been in London, watching the footsteps get closer. Going home every evening and chain smoking on the balcony and trying to ignore the columns of flame and smoke rising up into the sky south of the river. What with the conspiracy theorists and the crystal botherers and the religious nutters there was a lot of unhappy people, all with their own theories about what we needed to do to placate the… whatever it was. The media tried to give it names, but for some reason none of them stuck. Everyone just called it It.

Where was I? Oh yeah. Well. I’d been in London. And then I had to fly to Jerusalem. Even with some fucking invisible thing terrorising Europe, business still had to be done. More so than ever, for some clients. And Israel… well, they like to be prepared. Liked. I had a bit of a soft spot for the Israelis, been there many times and had a lot of fun in between some pretty hefty business meetings. But nobody’s going to be doing that again. Not ever.

I don’t think it would have done them much good, even if we’d had time to deliver what they ordered. The Russians had tried everything short of a thermonuclear device (and if you believe the rumours about what happened in Udmurtia they didn’t stop there either). Didn’t work. The electromagnetism chaps said it just ate the energy, whether kinetic or nuclear or whatever. Just helped it get bigger, stronger. Faster.

What was I saying? Jesus. How long has it been? Well, I got to Israel, did my deal and got out of Jerusalem airport just as it was obliterating Nicosia. Had to call in a lot of favours even to get on a plane, but I did it.

And then… the fucking thing did its business in Israel – really went to town, like it was an angry toddler in a sandpit, stomping all over the place and smashing it all up. It looks like the surface of the Moon now. All just craters. Sinkholes. Footprints.

So I’m back in London, feeling a bit like I’ve had a close call, even though, you know, that’s ridiculous. And I get a call from another client, and he’s in Guernsey for something, I forget what, and he wants me there yesterday. So I nip over to City Airport and as we’re waiting to board the map changes, the map that’s been running constantly on every screen for months now, inset into the top corner. And it’s changed direction again. West again, now. And…I mean… I can’t help it. I start to think “It can’t be. There is no way in a million fucking years that it’s after me. I mean, I know I’m a pretty impressive guy but what the actual fuck?”

But I tell myself not to be ridiculous, and the plane boards and I go to Guernsey, and it turns out he’s not actually there yet, but he’s flying in from Dubai in a day or so, his mother’s sick or something so he’s been delayed. So I check into my normal hotel that evening and sit there, trying to keep my mind off the map by chatting up women in the hotel bar and one of them says “Yes” and before I know it three days have passed and the fucking thing’s in Stuttgart.

And I think “Fuck this”, and I’m just about to get back on a plane and head for… I don’t know, Washington or something, when the client rings and he’s in the UK, but he’s on the Isle of Man. I guess one tax haven’s as good as another. So I’m straight on the next plane, you can fly direct, only when I land at that ridiculously small patch of tarmac they pretend is an airport, I’m not really paying attention because I’m trying to get my phone to connect so I can check the map. And I go arse over tip down the steps.

And I woke up an hour ago, and I’m in a hospital bed, I’ve got both legs in plaster up in those suspension things and I can’t reach to get out because my back’s in a brace, and there’s nobody about. I shouted for a bit, but nobody came. And then the noises from outside, from the corridor and from outside the building… Well, I stopped shouting. I don’t really want anyone to come here and find me, strapped into this fucking bed and only able to move enough to thumb type frantically into my phone.

I don’t even know why I’m bothering, only I need to do something to stop me looking at the map. Because of course they’ve left the telly on.

It wiped out Liverpool about an hour ago.

Writing exercise #18 – Filling pages

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On the dangers of telling someone to write what they know….

I do it dutifully, every night, and in the morning. I fill my pages as I’ve been told.

“It’s very useful. It’ll loosen you up, help you flex your writer’s muscles”, says Ken, my writing tutor, and everyone else in the class always seems to be fine with this. One of them has already had a story published, for God’s sake, that she first wrote during her daily pages. “It only took me an hour to write it. I just couldn’t stop once I’d got into the flow”, she simpered. I hate people like her, Sylvia, with her exotic looks (half Chinese, half Spanish or something), and her cute little pink notebooks with cartoon animals on them and her always perfect hair.

In class, when she announced her publication news (in a magazine I’d even heard of too – she didn’t even have the decency to be published in the Wisconsin Monthly Advertiser or something equally obscure) I’d sighed and looked down at my latest attempt to fill pages – three half sheets from one notebook and a piece of kid’s stationery found marking a recipe for meatballs in a second-hand cookery book, all framed by my equally scruffy hands; chewed nails, torn cuticles, scratched from trying to tame the feral cat that lives in the empty house down the street.

My sigh had been so loud that everyone around the table had turned to look at me and I’d had to explain that I was thinking about something else.

“Yes, remember that too folks; inspiration can strike a true writer anywhere, anytime”, trilled our tutor, and everyone laughed at me. I think it was about then I decided to kill him.

Since then I’ve actually had no problem filling my pages. I bought a tidy notebook with elastic to keep it shut when I’m not plotting his demise. Actually I’ve bought two – the ideas just come thick and fast, just like he always said they would. And I’m struck by plot ideas all the time – on the subway, hanging upside down during my pole dancing class, under water in the swimming pool (injection of air into a vein, strangulation, drowning). So I suppose just because a lot of his trite ideas did finally come true I should let him off. But I’m not going to. “Write what you know”, he says, over and over again. Well I want to write a book about a murderer and I don’t know how my character feels as she kills her victim. So he’ll just have to die for his craft.

Writing exercise #14 – Open skies

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Part two of the text I posted on Friday. Maybe the start of something longer?

Teej shouted as her dart was fired away from the building by the catapult. Shouted with that half laugh, half exhilarated terror she always felt when the Gs hit her. That was one hell of a launch though, using actual hand wound springs to send them zipping off into the clear air. Anything to save power, and they needed what they had to charge the darts. She had about two hours’ flying time now, but that had to include getting back to the tower. Landing was somewhat less fun, consisting of aiming at a massive patch of sticky webbing strung between two of the tower’s decorative projections – and hoping that the retrieval crew got to you with their hooks and winches before the sticky wore off and you just slipped down the side of the tower. She wondered whether one day the fear of that landing process would drive her from the sky.

In any case, that was not today. She was skimming along silently, climbing to about 3000 metres, just about to cross low marshland of the coast and head out over the sea. It was a crappy mission, really, the first reconnaissance of that sector since Jared had failed to return from a mission a month ago, but she was still relishing the sky. Because that’s what fliers did. Even if your lover – and, she’d thought, maybe future husband – disappeared while flying. Even if she saw his crumpled dart on a hillside below her, she’d still be a flier. And she knew suddenly that she’d never fear the landing more than she loved this.

The darts were small, one person craft with not much in the way of comforts. But as a flying machine using minimal power in an uncertain world, they were unbeatable. Light and manoeuvrable, almost invisible until you were right on top of them even before they deployed their built-in dazzle mode – and such sheer fun to fly. It was the closest humanity had ever come to being birds, and maybe that was why she always felt so giddy at the start of a mission.

She checked her heading, checked the transponders of the other darts – just six of them, now that Jared had gone. Everyone was in formation, and they were perfectly on course. She checked her heading again, rolled her shoulders and grinned at the blue sky, at the sparkling water and the uneven green bumps of the Scatter Islands running not quite left to right in front of her. She’d done her mourning, and no doubt would mourn some more yet, but just now everything felt perfect. Jared would have understood.

Whatever had happened to him, he’d gone while he was flying, and he’d always said that was how he wanted it to be. So had she, if it came to it.

An hour later, as she fell away from her dart and down, down, away from the blue sky and towards the sea where it crashed against the cliffs of Big Skerry, she wasn’t so sure she still felt the same way.

Writing exercise #12 – Along the canal

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A rather self-referential piece this time. By this point in the writing challenge I’d spotted the violent theme and was wondering where it came from.

He walks along the towpath, looking for inspiration. The sky is pale blue with shreds of white cloud, and the almost leafless poplars make it look like a Monet painting – one of those ones of canals that don’t really have a subject and were maybe just painted out of exuberance, the joy of simply being able to capture something.

Just like he can’t. Well, of course that’s not actually true, in fact. He can capture stuff – there’s nothing wrong with his actual style – it’s just that what he writes about is all so gloomy. No matter what he starts writing, it always ends up with at least one and usually more characters suffering a violent death. Which would be fine if he was writing a whodunnit, but he’s not. Years ago someone – Martin Bell, probably – suggested that there should be more reporting of positive news, and he’d always wholeheartedly agreed with that.

He’s long since pruned his social media feeds of any sources of negativity; he doesn’t have a telly; he doesn’t read the newspapers. He only really hears about stuff if someone down the pub is talking about it. And yet his writing oozes death and disease and violence and misery.

Take this canal, for instance. It doesn’t take much of an imagination to picture the dead bodies floating in it. After all, Morse and his ilk seemed to spend their entire careers fishing corpses out of the water. Or what about if it was frozen and some teenagers were skating on it and one of them went through the ice. Just an accident – or is it? All those rampant hormones running wild. Lovers trysted by canals (suicide, murder, quarrels over abortion). Anglers might fall in by accident (it couldn’t be easy swimming with waders on). The one that didn’t get away.

And then there’s the canal – often deserted and usually running through a dodgy part of town – as the scene of ambush. Or what about the emotions and hidden jealousies in a group of people living moored up near each other on narrowboats? Arson would be a neat way to rid yourself of a troublesome neighbour. And then there are the cyclists; suicidal/murderous loonies using the towpath like a race track. Motorcyclists, too. Or canal bridges with collapsing walls or run into by a car… Even the power lines spanning the water in the distance are potentially lethal.

He sighs and looks at the far off hills. Maybe tomorrow he’ll walk there, try to get some positive vibes. After all, surely hills are less threatening than a canal? Though of course someone could have fiddled with the brakes on your car…