Fantasy

Hi all, I’ll be honest, this one might be a bit too weird for some of you. But it’s short too. So: swings and roundabouts. Enjoy!

He popped another zinc tablet against the sniffles, but was fast coming to the conclusion that it was more like an allergy to Berlin. He hadn’t been able to shake off the running nose since moving. The dirty air.

He kept his lederhosen, in keeping with the local style he now had a tote bag as well, slung over one shoulder. He kept Evie in it: his inflatable sheep. He had to be careful she didn’t burst.

It was usually okay during the day when the city was mostly sober, but at night people shouted at him. Not always bad things: it was surprising how many offers he got to come around to someone’s house for a drink. Everyone wanted to take a selfie with him, but he didn’t like attention. He just wanted to be back in the countryside.

If it wasn’t for Evie, that’s where he’d be.

She’d seduced him and no mistake. He’d let himself be seduced. He was weak when it came to women.

When his doorbell rang at six in the morning, he knew who his visitor would be. Evie’s father barely fit in the hallway. He was with his eldest son. They had to let air out of each other before they could pass through the door. The ceilings were high, but the doors surprisingly narrow in some of these buildings.

“You know why we’re here,” said Pappa Baa-baa.

“I love her,” said Karl.

In the bedroom Evie listened to what was going on.

“It gives us no pleasure to do this,” said Pappa Baa-baa.

“I’m ready.” Karl wouldn’t struggle. He’d do it for Evie.

The eldest son—and Karl still didn’t know his name, wasn’t that silly?—brought him to Pappa and Karl took his lederhosen off. Pappa held Karl down. The eldest son looked at Karl. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But this is the only way you can be family.”

Karl had always wondered what the little nozzle was that hung out the front of him. When he drank too much piss came out, but he’d always felt it must have a purpose beyond that. This was it.

The eldest brother got on his sheepie knees, took the nozzle in his mouth, and started to blow. Karl’s stomach swelled, and Karl’s skin lifted off the bones, and he swelled and swelled, and the pain of his stretching skin was too much to bear, until Evie came and stroked his forehead to comfort him. His forehead squeaked.

Once Karl was full—almost as big as the eldest brother, and about two cubic metres smaller than Pappa—he tied the nozzle of the Karl balloon off, and they floated off together through the French windows, and over the balcony and away from Berlin to the mountains where they had come from.

“One for the road?”
I hate that expression. I don’t quite know what it means.

He poured. The purplish wine formed a tongue against the inside of my glass as it filled. I lit a cigarette and held the smoke until he went back to the bar.
I had been coming here every night for the last week, much as I disliked it. The Gaststätte was deep in the woods, yet it was the nearest place to me. The ‘town’ was merely three narrow houses clustered around a Church. The mistress of my rooming house started drinking at breakfast, for which she was jovial and entertaining. By the evening, she was angry and desperate for attention. On my first evening I had mistakenly assumed she would surely soon pass out and had been quite savagely manhandled by her. So now I went to the Gaststätte, when the day’s work was done.
I tossed off my wine and paid. One of the waiter’s eyes was larger than the other but perhaps did not see too well for all that. It hung immobile, perhaps fixed on matters that most of us could not see, while the little one darted around the material world.
“My greetings to Mrs Harber,” he said.

The door closed after me. The dizziness of alcohol can do strange things to time, and I soon worried that I had chosen a wrong turn somewhere. The trees rustled around me in a way I, as a city man, did not like. Finally, I glimpsed the glow of the candle that Mrs Harber put in the window so that I should find my way back.

The door was locked when I reached it. I cursed. Every other night I had been able to get in and reach the safety of my room without waking her. But the rustling was getting louder. It was cold, and I had paid for a room. I knocked. And again. Hoary feet on floorboards inside the house answered me. I would be quite firm when she opened.
She wouldn’t look at me, and I passed quickly through the downstairs room to the stairs. I lay fully clothed on my bed and was quickly asleep.

I examined myself carefully the next morning in the sliver of mirror that was provided with my shaving water. I looked pale and felt poorly. Mrs Harber ignored me when I came down for breakfast.
There was a knock at the door and my friend the waiter came in.
“Come on,” he said. He fixed me with his big eye. I followed him back to the Gaststätte for another day.

I recently read a book of fairy tales (Angela Slatter’s A Feast of Sorrows, very good) which I think might have rubbed off on me for this one.

Hi all,

here’s a new piece of writing prompt fiction for you and it’s topical. Who knew I could write topical fiction, eh? You can find the prompts below the piece. Enjoy!

Rex growled and Tom put the plate on the ground. Rex inspected it. He said, ‘There’s only one piece left.’ He ate it.
‘That was a big piece,’ said Bono.
Rex flicked his pink tongue around his snout, then lay down and closed his eyes. Bono gave a half-hearted whine and let his brown and white body fall, spine against the base of the couch.
The food was just this side of rotten, Tom complained but Bono and Rex liked it. Flavoursome. Tom’s food had used to always be bland. Any smell it might have dulled further by the refrigerator. But since the lockdown he’d been eating with them. Sharing the scraps they’d normally get for themselves. Rex didn’t like it.
Bono flicked an eye to Rex, gave a timid shake of his tail to show he wasn’t thinking about becoming top dog. That was Rex. Bono stood and shook himself at the patio door until Tom roused himself to let the dog out. Tom was thinner. His polo shirt hung from his shoulders instead of stretching over his belly. In the garden Bono found a spot that was relatively free from crap and did his business. From everywhere came the scent of Rex’s business. Reminders of who was boss. Bono sniffed around for a while but there was nothing to do. No cars, no people. Just a gusty wind that told him things weren’t better anywhere else. This was the new normal. They were in deep trouble. Bad time to be the lowest dog on the totem pole.
He came back in and sat listening to Rex’s breathing. Rex was getting angry. He was bored and hungry and that made him hateful. The room slowly darkened. Tom’s belly growled. Rex growled back.
Tom stood. This was Bono’s chance. The couch had been gifted to him: he sprang onto it. His muscles quivered in excitement. When Tom came back he could sit on the floor. Rex was watching carefully. Rex is a Good Boy, he thought and wagged his tail. He didn’t want to be top dog, he just didn’t want to be bottom dog. Tom came back. Started eating little flakes of pulped corn that he usually ate with milk. He hadn’t noticed that Bono was on the couch. Bono pushed his snout towards the plate. Tom pushed it away. Bono had to tell himself that that wasn’t the way things were going down any more. He managed to lick a few of the sweetish flakes off the plate. Tom pushed him away. ‘Hey!’ Habit told Bono not to do it again. But he had to. He darted forward, managed to knock the plate over. Tom went down on his knees after them, scrabbling to get as many as he could before the dogs ate them.
Rex was making his own calculations. Bono was happy. He’d gotten the couch and had Tom eating off the floor. It was pretty obvious who the bottom dog was. Rex didn’t care about the tasteless flakes. He was looking at Tom, his behind in the air. Thinner than it had been but still…. A long pink tongue rolled slowly out of his mouth. Bono waited. Rex gave him a look. They would have to do this together. Hunting. Real dog stuff. Bad time to be the lowest dog on the totem pole. Rex pounced. When Tom tried to get away so did Bono.
Afterwards he slept on the floor. He was back to being the lowest dog on the totem pole. He looked over. Saw Rex watching him.

The prompts were the random title ‘Perpetual Longing’ and the following five words together with the picture of a man and his two best friends at the top of this page.

gifted
rotten
deep
gusty
hateful

Hi all, here’s another piece of writing prompt flash fiction. I’ve switched from using one random word for the title to two random words for the sake of variety and ended up with a winner on my first go. Toe suit, eh? Yeah, I can make a story out of that!

Enjoy!

Beatrice waited on the beach. Her hair was braided and she had the dress that she knew he liked. And the sun went down and there was no sign of him.

The servants didn’t like doing her hair, and her eyes were quite red from staring into the sunset and into the wind which blew off the Corsican Sea day after day. And it pained them to see her soft skin grow slowly tough when it had used to be soft and downy. But she wanted to be there when he returned and the King and Queen didn’t know what else to do with her: it was their son she was mourning. Because she surely couldn’t believe that he would return after all this time.

And when the King died and the Queen died she still sat on the beach. It didn’t bother anyone too much, the clever men in the kingdom had made sure they were in place to make decisions and look after everyone. And they made a good thing of it too, though there was a melancholy air about the whole place.

The young people said that even if he could come back he surely wouldn’t, for she was old and her skin was as tough as a horse’s hoof. If he was alive he would be under the waves with the mermaids, everyone knew that their skin was soft where it wasn’t scales. Others said they ate the men and nobody knew which was true. Beatrice never said anything any more but went to the beach every day because she knew he would return.
For her servants it was a funeral march: mourning her husband, the King and Queen. And Beatrice herself, who had arrived from a country in the north long ago and had aged here under the Southern sun but still believed her husband would return. And the young people couldn’t stand the melancholy of Pistali on the coast, with its fertile fields and olive groves and abundant seas. And it was dangerous to fish, who knew what would happen to the fisherman who caught her husband’s body—the king’s body—in his nets and they left for the mainland and the island grew quiet.

And one night he came back. He may have been a ghost or he may have been alive but he had spent time in the sea. That much was certain for his toes and fingers and his nose had been removed by crabs, the torn wound nibbled back to neatness by the lips of fish. He strode from the water, straight to Beatrice and picked her up and before they could do anything—what indeed should they do? this was their king—he had returned with her to the water. Some of them said that the horizon was jagged with the claws of crabs and the hands of mermaids, which were smooth after all.

And the people of the island took Beatrice’s place on the beach and waited for them both to return. For if one can then surely both could. And the servants braid the hair of the women and dress the men and no one goes fishing, for fear they catch the toes and the fingers of Beatrice and her husband.

An air of peace surrounds the town of Pistali on the coast and people remove a toe and a finger once each year. The servants lace the toes together to hang around their necks and put them in their pockets. The men who run the kingdom invite young people from other areas to till the fields and manage the olive groves and fish the abundant waters—on the far side of the island, where no one can see them. And the old people wait for their queen and their king to rise and take them under the waves, where the crabs dance and the mermaids’ hands are as soft as anyone could want.

I reckon this story could really benefit from some proper editing, unfortunately that’s not allowed for my writing prompt flash fiction, as you know. Despite judicious deleting and re-punctuating quite a few sentences are actually quite vague. Hopefully you got so caught up in the story that you didn’t notice? Usually I keep my prose tight and sentences short but I really liked the long, looong run-on sentences here and felt they added to the fairy-tale mood.