The Thing of the Past
 

Every night, there was a monster in the road outside my house. I knew this because I was an insomniac and one night, upon impulse, I peered through my bedroom window. And there, dog-shaped in the gutter, was what I assumed to be a monster. It seemed the obvious thing to assume.

 

From time to time, the head reared on its neck and then flopped down again, as if it couldn’t be bothered to frighten anyone, even me.

 

Or was it too frightened itself to move?

 

So, every night since then, during those inevitable hours of sleeplessness, having had my fill of real dreams, I staggered over to the tattered curtains and, through a keyhole-shaped slit, fastened my cooling eyes upon that pulsing mound.

 

Each night a smidgeon larger than on the night before.

 

#

 

“Are you awake?”

 

Someone was making a hell of a row upon my bed­room door. I had fallen into a fitful sleep, which I usually managed to do Just before dawn.

 

“No! Go away!”

 

And whoever it was did.

 

The previous night had been the seventeenth time I had watched the monster. It was strange that I could recall the exact number of sightings, but not make comparisons of size between the first and the last of them - if, Indeed, it were the last sighting. Like all of life, finalities only emerge in retrospect. Middles unmea­sured. Beginnings often unanticipated and unrecognised.

 

That voice at the door began to haunt me. It was not familiar: a female one, but with undercurrents of masculine depth. Probably a passer-through. Squats are like that.

 

Eventually, I dragged my scrawny body from its pit. I frequently wish I could refer to myself without the use of the first person singular. I is so definitive. Makes escape impossible.

 

I needed breakfast. But the cupboard was noticeably bare. Whoever had disrupted my belated sleep had evidently filched a bellyful. And scarpered with it. With no bye or leave. In hindsight, the food must have been disappearing over a period and only today did I notice this since the cupboard was finally empty.

 

I needed a gulp of air. Tentatively, I opened the front door. Not even a tell-tale stain in the gutter where the monster had seeped its innards for most of the night.

 

The cleansing-cart came early to these parts during those most sleepful moments.

 

“Hey!”

 

On the other side of the road was that stranger who had earlier accosted my bedroom door. I waved curso­rily. I had been brought up to acknowledge people. Politeness bred to the very bottom bone.

 

He or she was crossing the road, apparently to have a talk with me close-up.

 

“Yes?” I asked, in the hope of getting at least one word in edgewise.

 

“Big news! The place is going under the hammer today.” He or she pointed at the squat whence I had just emerged. This was not exactly big news as bad. It foreboded the end of an era.

 

“How do you know?” I need not have worried about the allowances made by the stranger for normal conver­sation. In fact, the only reply to my question was a tap to his or her nose.

 

I shrugged. I had heard such stories before. People often delight in bringing bad news, even if the news isn’t true. Then, I recalled the bellyfuls of grub pilfered from my larder-cupboard.

 

“Hey! Did you pinch my food?”

 

The stranger smiled.

  

MUCH LATER:

I have forcibly dragged the cuplrit to my kitchen and prodded my longest finger as far down its throat as I could. What lies on the linoleum makes me think that there will not be an eighteenth sighting of the monster.

 

Sleepless nights are sure to be a thing of the past thankfully.

  

(Published ‘Carnal Chameleon’ 1993)

 

Baffle 40

Too many baffles make a log-jam in God’s filter.  Like an army of soldiers in a grave meant for one, raspberry spread as they claw ever deeper for their own share of the sandwich filling.

Chattering Waves
    

The evening strained to eke out the scorching afternoon.

The day-trip families abandoned the beach, leaving just

silence to recall the excited chatter of children - amid the

crumbling sandcastle souvenirs.

Yet not onIv silence. A solitary young woman was taking

photographs of the encroaching sea.

I felt so alone myself, I nearly asked her to talk to me - but that would have been cheating.

Eventually, she told me about herself, things, presumably,

she could only tell a stranger.

Then I murdered her with my bare hands to put a stop to

this never-ending life story.

I left the camera beside the body with the relentless

tides trapped within.

   published 'ramraid extraordinaire' 1996 

One Up

 

The building looked to me as if it had been there forever. The ridiculous thought was not that ridiculous, for just around the corner I had aeen a statue of King Arthur. “How did they know what he looked like?” 

The question drifted up into the sky like a skinless balloon of air. Evidently, I was not alone. The pavement was crammed with late shoppers. None of them paid any heed to me, but who can blame them, I was paying less heed to them, than I was to myself. My wife said I was a selfless man… or was it “selfish” she said? ... perhaps she meant more by ‘selfless’ than met the ear.

  I entered the swing doors. The commissionaire asked me what I was up to. He had taken one look at my garb and decided that I was a suspect. Once, I had been in a pub when a dog padded in through the open door and did his business on the beer-stained carpet. Today, I felt like that dog. 

My wife always used to tell me that I needed to stand up for myself. So I did. I divorced her. No grounds, they shouted. No need, I replied, pointing to the stuff she left on the pavements. I digress. 

The commissionaire looked askance when I said I had an appointment with the chairman of the company.

 “You have an appointment, sir?” he queried in his ex-serviceman voice, “can I have your name, please?” 

I cringed at the grease in his voice, as he riffled through a big black book on his high desk. 

“Course I know my own name. Why do you ask when it’s written in that book?”

I pointed towards the lists of appointers and appointees, ending with a name that looked half right from my upside down point of view. 

“Ms Ample Clavinty?” The commissionaire’s eyebrows had now disappeared up into his hair as his question mark drove deep trenches into the name he’d read from the page. 

“That’s me,” I said, raising my voice an octave or two.

  “Oh, is it, sir?” 

He was evidently a sarcastic bugger. He went on: “The next thing you’ll be telling me is that you’re Queen Guinevere!” 

I breathed in hard, audibly. I would stand no more nonsense from this jackanapes, I vowed. I looked at the chap’s chin, the opening for the mouth, the humourless eyes, the intensity of his self opinion. It seemed he had been standing guard in this reception area since time began.

I could not think of a rejoinder.  I left the same way as I had come in.

  

(published ‘Dig My Dogma’ 1989)

Baffle (34)

A bellow in my hard of hearing ear was a way to alert me to a beneficial secret.  The secret, you see, was an uncoded clouded Baffle.  Near stone deaf, too.

Baffle (15)
The inch inched nearer to an inch, ever a measure short or long of perfection. So tantalising, it seemed I'd died but my life was still incomplete.

THe Fanblade Fables

The links to the ten fanblade fables:

http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/fanblade_one.htm

http://weirdmonger.mindsay.com/fanblade_two.mws

http://newdfl.bloghorn.com/114

http://expressblogs.com/blogs/index.php?cat=1077&blog_ID=Simonymous

http://free-blog-site.com/denemoniser/archive/2006/10/11/99398.aspx

index.blog?entry_id=1588221

http://free-blog-site.com/denemoniser/archive/2006/10/11/99378.aspx

http://www.seo-blog.org/432_newdfl/archive/68773_fanblade_eight.html

http://weirdmonger.livejournal.com/2006/10/12/

http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2006/10/fanblade-9.html

http://weirdmonger.blogdrive.com/archive/190.html

http://simplon.blogspirit.com/archive/2006/10/14/hiver.html

Fanblade Fables (6)

A fable that has disappeared when it’s its time to be read and be absorbed and tested for truth or for life’s applicability is a fanblade fable. Yet when one can hear it sighing flickeringly in the background like Debussy injected straight into the vein, it becomes soon enough une jalousie sur le vent de la mer..

 

< Anything in French is a fable without even reading it! > thought Hiver Jawn, if he became a grown-up thinking back to when he was a child, and the sea was his real mother and his bedroom’s venetian blind a rattling that he never heard because it was always a rattling.

Laughter In The Distance

LAUGHTER IN THE DISTANCE  (previously published ‘Lost Pages’ 2005)

     The room was unaccountably quiet – in a way that made it seem more spooky than it was.  Charlie sensed that there should be more  noise, as he watched the people in it miming conversations.  They were trying – very successfully as it happened – to keep quiet for someone who was ill upstairs.  Charlie knew this fact because Susie – he thinks her name was Susie – told him that this was indeed the case.    

“Who’s ill?” Charlie had asked.  He asked it again because he was now talking – whispering under his breath – to someone else.  This time he didn’t even guess her name.

  

“I thought Susie already told you,” this new girl answered – so quietly that Charlie had to read her lips.

  There were at least twenty people in the room.  Some were still coming in, others leaving, a few neither.  A ghostly gathering – and growing ghostlier by the minute, Charlie thought.  He laughed to himself.  It was hard to explain the purpose of the room, let alone of the meeting itself.  The room was a cross between a lounge (or what they used to call front room, sitting-room, drawing-room or parlour) and a neutral waiting-room at a doctor’s or dentist’s surgery.  The electric fire with too few bars actually seemed to make the room feel colder than if it weren’t there at all.  Psychological, Charlie assumed.

 

 

He felt as if he were the only person of substance in the whole place.  The others acted so low-key, he wondered if they existed at all, barely negotiating the bad reception on a TV screen as they came and went. 

  

Charlie recalled he had earlier met a lady called Isabel Barnett – a name that sounded slightly familiar to him but he wasn’t old enough to check out a sufficient length of past time to judge whether it were a name that prefigured his own tenuous existence.

  

This Isabel Barnett was in fact the hostess who had greeted Charlie at the front door – a heavily made-up face with billowing gold-trimmed drapes below.  A mouth like a brightly pursed rose-bud  rather than one that was defiantly clamped shut behind lip-stick.

  

“Come in, Charlie,” she had said.

  

He remembered her welcome like the back of his hand…

  

***

  

“I thought Susie already told you,” the girl repeated, bringing Charlie back to the present moment.

  

“Told me what?”  he had forgotten.

  

“Who’s ill upstairs.”  This time her voice was not even silent miming.  Pursed lips had become gritted teeth, merely with the implication of articulated words.

  

***

  

Charlie was in the kitchen.  He was used to spending most of the time at parties in the kitchen talking to those who happened to be passing through to get a drink or some more food.  Charlie found the kitchen the best place at any party.  A sort of Way Station. 

  

This was not one of those parties, however.  It was a gathering of hushed whispers, some bordering on a silence beyond silence itself.  Even the silence of the grave was subsumed by shifting earth or the conversation of worms.  There was no music coming from the waiting-room or lounge.  And there was no booze, only cups of tea that clinked on their saucers like percussion instruments in a fastidious invisible prelude.  A delicate intaglio of glances and tunes underhummed from some memory of a signature tune in ancient wireless days.

  

Charlie soon returned to where most people found themselves.  As soon as he realised this wasn’t a party as such, the kitchen and its passing inhabitants lost all their fascination.  Mutual, he thought.

  

Isabel Barnett smiled at him from where she was standing alone.  Susie had vanished, probably to the kitchen, now that Charlie had left it.  What was the point, he asked, in holding a party where someone was ill upstairs?

  

Suddenly, as if in some oblique reply to his question, he heard laughter in the distance.  The distance was vertical … which was strange as, more often than not, distance tended to be horizontal.  Vertical in this case was, however, unclear whether it arrived from above or below – but it certainly was laughter.  Unmistakeable as it cut through the studied silence, despite its own tones of snigger and ponderous giggle.  So ponderous, perhaps, it was beneath the threshold of most normal hearing.

  

Charlie guessed this was the ill person laughing upstairs.  Laughter is a much better deal with death than groans of pain.  He laughed at his own thoughts and found himself suddenly in the company of Susie again.  Every girl here was called Susie, or was that just his imagination?  But imagination more customarily multiplied than reduced.  Isabel Barnett was more a single lady than a girl – yet still a mother figure – and Charlie could often see her fading into the background whenever she was caught watching him … watching him watching her.

  

“Who’s ill upstairs?”  This time it was a question, rather than Susie telling him he’d already been told who exactly was ill upstairs … or downstairs, depending on the floor where the questioned was asked.

  “How should I know?” said Charlie.  This was obviously not the same girl as he was talking to earlier … or even the nameless girl before Susie who had, reportedly, told him who was ill upstairs.  

Susie offered a kiss.  At first, Charlie assumed it was destined to be a mere peck.  But it was more than this – and indeed at-close-quarters was where one was supposed to be at parties, Charlie knew.  Yet he was shy.  Nevertheless, he allowed her to press her breasts into his chest – and both of them snogged and petted with barely perceptible gulps and gurgles and intermittent excuses of breath-taking or coughs on bodygas or embarrassed laughter.

  

Isabel Barnett stared at them.  Charlie knew this fact instinctively and he remembered, with a shiver, who exactly was ill upstairs or even near to death, in fact – as he continued to hear laughter in the distance.  It amused him, placated his worries.  He had to grasp the nettle, take life in both hands, as he  led the girl called Susie upstairs – away from Isabel’s increasingly distant clucking.  Not even in two minds about it, he wanted to hear Susie’s laughter louder still.

 

  No point in being in a Whodunnit if you knew who was about to do it, thought Charlie.  Stifled laughter as the mystified ghosts dispersed from around both culprit and victim.

 

DFL's Baffles - No. 5
Inching towards being called a fable, the baffle slipped and became an allegory too short to be called anything.