So week 148. Who would have thought it? Probably any normal…Nay, individual who had read Week 147.
That’s a nod to Nik as he likes Frankie Howard although I should have typed three ‘Nays’. (I hate the word normal. I hate the idea of normal even more!! We are all individual! And I only wrote the word to make that particular point which I have done on many occasions but it needs repeating every now and again)
Continue reading “Week 148 – GMT, Halloween And Who To Blame For Everything.”
We sat at the desert inn, at the window which afforded a magnificent view onto Monument Valley, awaiting our luncheon orders. She sipped desert mint tea sweetened by hummingbird saliva and I lapped pomegranate wine, a divine concoction of pine sap sweetened by cactus rind and desert rosehips with a drizzle of wild honey, harvested not from the hive but from the beaks of mountain owl.
Emilio is sitting across from me. I can barely understand his broken English as it mixes with his native Italian tongue. They sometimes overlap. He makes a new language of which I understand very little. He is going on about something, something about a child and a woman. He is talking fast and touching his face and tapping his mouth with his finger. I’m thinking that I am the woman that he is going on about and that he is trying to describe. The child, I do not know. Emilio is talking fast and I’m giving it my best effort.
It did not come with electricity or a smash of static on the air, but it was there. Braelin Cordelis, five minutes into the darkness of a new day, a streetlight’s glow falling through his window like a subtle visitor, was caught on the edge of his chair. Knowledge flowed to him, information of a most sublime order, privacy, intimacy, all in one slow sweep of the air; his grandson was just now, just this minute, into this world, his only grandson. He could feel him, that child coming, making way his debut into the universe, and his name would be Shag. And for this life he and Shag would be in a mysterious and incomprehensible state of connection. This, in the streetlight’s glow, in the start of a new day though dawn not yet afoot, he was told.
We have now reached week 147. I have sometimes used the number as an inspiration and this was one of the more obvious ones.
Continue reading “Week 147 – Snooker, Dalmatians And Dead Frogs”
Enrique studied the faces around the table. The purchase committee dispensed their limited resources with utmost care. It was no surprise that the investment in another “staff” member should arouse such discussion. They didn’t object to using androids in schools, especially in the internment facilities, where the headcounts of students exceeded all conscionable limits. Within the southeast sector alone, an android already functioned efficiently as a janitor and two, female in aspect, doled out cafeteria food. The machine vetting the kids’ thin, government-issued bags at the building entrance possessed some enhanced intelligence. Three monitored the scrappy stretch of ground called a play area. But to order one with a limp, for the lower grades…
The first time the piano teacher walked up the two flights to our apartment, my mother rushed to help him. “Thank you, but I can manage,” he said as he tap-tapped his way up. He wore the thickest glasses I had ever seen. His eyeballs, massive behind the lenses, wobbled and darted – not quite focused on anything in particular. Tallish and round, he always wore a suit. His big shoes were shiny. Before he even entered the room, I could smell his cologne – heavy and manly. When he opened his mouth to speak, he sounded airy, womanly. Sometimes, when I’d play, he’d sing along in a shrilly opera-singer voice. I’M a yankee doodle dan-DEE…
Week 146 is a very special posting for me. It’s my hundredth. I started at week 46 so that makes 101 but Nik covered for me when I was on holiday.
It’s strange trying to get your head around the inclusive numbers so that 46-146 is actually 101. It’s like the days of the year, I still can’t work out why we have 365 (Forget the leap years.) There are fifty two weeks and there are seven days in a week so that adds up to 364. It must be a bank holiday that employers don’t tell us about and more importantly, don’t pay us for!
Continue reading “Moses, Stevie Wonder And A Hundred Pieces Of Pish”
We went as far as his car would take us, driving past the smoking blue mountains of north Georgia and Tennessee, the hickory sweetness invading the cracked leather of our 1995 Chevrolet Cavalier, which was an indistinguishable red-brown-orange depending on which angle you looked at it from. We sped through the once-treasured nightmare of Detroit, the neglected chaotic sunset of Dallas. Yellowstone, freshly scorched and withered from its latest cleansing.
literally stories 