Plot Medics 

This story was written by picking from the "Creative Block" by Lou Harry. I got the word "naked", advice about limiting choices, and "a man walks into a bar".

Also, I'm still stuck on bad puns this week. I'd say I'm sorry but I think we all know that's not true.

Trouble, a Bruin (989 words)

I wander into the bar still trailing fen grass around my bare ankles. The men in there, and it is mostly men, look confused by a woman starting out the evening naked. A fire is roaring and lamps are lit.

I lean against the counter. “A whisky, if you please. If you can make it hot, so much the better.”

The barman looks me up and down. “You got money? I don’t see no pockets.”

Trouble looms in though the door, upright on his hind legs. Outside the fog is thick as cream and beads of water gleam in his shaggy black fur. He’s been paying off our ride. Men eye him slant-ways. They might’ve seen a Bruin before. They’ll definitely have heard stories.

Trouble unslings our money bag. “A beer. A good one,” he growls, making the barman jump.

The man hustles with our drinks. “Come from the other side of the Fens?”

“Shortcut,” Trouble snorts. He glares down his muzzle at me. I shrug. I’d always wanted to see whether the stories about the Fens were true. Turns out, they are.

“Lucky this time, Serena,” says Trouble.

“Oh, stop griping. The Gillymen spotted our distress flare and here we are. Everything’s fine.”

“Undress flare.” He huffs, which is his way of laughing.

Trouble can usually sniff his way out of anything. But when the fog came down five days into the Fens, we stumbled about, falling into sucking, sludgy pools and having to ditch most of our kit to get out. The fog does something funny to your head; even Trouble lost his sense of direction out there. Our trail back was gone, the other side too far to scent. No use sitting tight and waiting for sunshine, either. A Grand Slinker can hang around for weeks. We had some oil, and a flint and steel, but the only combustibles left were my clothes. A Gillyman on a raft, poling towards us at speed, had been a most welcome sight.

A bosomy waitress shoves a smelly blanket at me. “Put that round you, or you’ll piss Suzy off.” She nods to a small stage where a woman is flashing her frilly knickers under a short skirt.

“Thanks.”

“Blankets ain’t free,” she says. “Twenty big ones.”

That’s all we’ve got left. “For that I’ll take a shirt, a coat, trousers and boots, thank you.”

She pouts, but leaves me wrapped in the blanket and goes off. The barman settles his face into a blank expression. That is when I know we’re in trouble. The waitress is talking to five bulky men in the corner. Twenty big ones is a chunk of cash around these parts, and I must be touching hypothermic to own up to having it. People will pay a lot of money for a slave Bruin, no matter what the law says. And I’d be another tragic accident in the Fens.

Trouble flicks his ears at me. He’s quick to my mood changes;  he says he can smell them. I can see him running through his options. “Lot of people here,” he says to the bartender, but for my benefit. “With guns.”

I nod to show I understand. We run or kick off and we’re likely to get perforated.

“The Gillies come out of the Fens in the fog,” says the bartender. “Take some smoked fish now and again. Guns scare ‘em off.”

Trouble orders another beer and I poke him in the ribs.

“Don’t get settled in. We’ve got to get back out there and find the rest of our haul - er – stuff.”

He grunts, looking puzzled.

“You lose something?” says the bosomy waitress. She hands me a bundle of clothes. The leather coat is suprisingly good apart from the bullet holes.

“We dropped some of our things out there in the Fens. Valuables. Trouble should be able to sniff them out. Maybe some of you folks could help us look? We’ll pay you, of course.”

“Sure,” she says with a broad smile. “We just love to help out.”

I go into a back room and dress. I take the blanket too, and we all head out into the fog.

Trouble leads the way, loping along on all fours, pretending to sniff at the ground. When he glances up at me I give him a signal and we drop, roll in opposite directions, and take off running.

“Get them!”  a man shouts and there is a lot of splashing and swearing.The fog is now more cheese than cream, but some idiot still lets off a gun, and everyone yells at him.

When my lungs are burning, and I’ve climbed out of a few pools, I wrap myself in the blanket, lie down and wait. A Gillyman paddles by silently with webbed hands, eyes as wide as the moon.  I listen to the townsfolk sloshing and stumbling. There’s no way they can catch Trouble.

Even out here, soaked and wrapped up, my scent will carry. Trouble looms out of the mist on quiet, padding feet. When he’s hugged me warm, he starts sniffing his way back along our trail to the town. We run into another Gillyman on a raft and he agrees to take us further down to a friendlier settlement.

 “See,” I say to Trouble. “Your options aren’t limited to fight or flight. There’s negotiation and deception too.”

He makes a rude sound.

“Oh come on, grumpy boots. I’ve got some clothes now, and a blanket.”

“Huh.”

”But you understand how that worked, right? They think we’re stupid. I give them a reason not to kill us in the bar, lure them into the Fens with lies of ill-gotten gains. Even if they don’t buy that, we’re oblingingly walking to where they can kill me out of sight, and drug or chain you, but first they’re going to make sure there isn’t any loot....”

“I remember for next time.” He huffs. “Perhaps tomorrow.”

We're joining in with the Friday Flash challenge for altered film titles this week. Gaie's playing along too so we've got a double dose of flash for you. We wrote our stories without any consultation, but strangely they both feature a bad harvest and alternative muscle power.

I owe a big nod to Jasper Fforde for my story. But it's also partly the fault of "The Secret Life of Elephants". The story's going out pretty raw.

From Tusk Till Dawn (923 words)

I heard this story once that the green parakeets in London were all descendants of a pair Jimi Hendrix let out to brighten up the place. These days they’re so common that people don’t know they haven’t always been here. So you’d think that we’d’ve learned by now  - let life get a toehold in the great outdoors and there’s no shoving it back in its box.

I lived in the city for a while, but my ambition was a sickly, undersized thing, that withered in the light of boardroom politics. I drifted sideways to this half-way house of a satellite town, to my telecommuting job and one bedroom starter home and regulation-sized garden that will keep one diligent person in vegetables.

The early summer light lingers on the horizon, orange under deep blue. I pick up a folding chair, and a torch, and take it out to the strip of front garden. A warm breeze blows by. Sally and Andy, my neighbours, are out there already. Andy has got an air horn from somewhere. Melissa on the other side has her three red-haired kids with saucepans and metal spoons. Should I say something? A man was killed two days ago, further down the route. Yeah, he’d been an idiot, but still. I’ll keep an eye on the kids. People are settling in all along the road. Andy pops a cork on some home-made blackcurrant wine and hands me a glass over the fence, and suddenly it almost feels like a festival.

They made the pygmy ones first, back when I was wearing pink frills and pigtails. But even a pygmy mammoth isn’t all that small, you’re still looking at 900 kilos of animal for a full-grown adult. The oil crisis, the increasing divide between the rural poor and the techno-industry city rich – that was the justification. Take deep-frozen DNA, add a dash of elephant for zest and voilà, an endless supply of biofuel and muscle power adapted for our climate. But really, they did it because they could. Then they made the big ones and expected them to stay where they were put.

When the kids next door thunder up and down the stairs, trailing a stream of Melissa’s “No!”s behind them, my dad’s phrase always pops into my head “like a herd of elephants”. Now I see I’ve been unfair to the mammoths. They appear on soft shuffle feet, swaying gently. This is the very first migration to pass our way and we stare in silence. The  matriarch carries curved tusks high, the arc of them like the prow of a viking ship. A tiny calf bumbles beside her with that half-falling over its own feet baby gait. The very last of the light glows in their shaggy copper fur.

I realise I am standing with my mouth open. They are so big, so unreal, against lamposts and garden gates.The matriarch lifts up her trunk and snuffles through it and everyone in the street holds their breath.

Our terraced houses, jammed shoulder to shoulder, shelter tender pea plants, corn and beans behind them. Sullen wet summers and late frosts have had the poorest of us eating plain rice and pickled cabbage for months. And there are alleys that lead round to the backs of the gardens. Nobody wants to be the first to shine lights, make noise. They guy who died swung a baseball bat. I don’t even want to move. We hold our breath in silence as the mammoth sniffs the air.

Clang! Melissa’s smallest kid, Poppy, smacks her saucepan with a spoon. She manages to do it a few more times before Melissa grabs her arm. The matriarch swings her giant head towards the noise. I vault over the wall to stand by Melissa, and we drag the kids behind us.

The middle kid, Ben, falls over in the panic, and while we’re soothing him, Poppy dashes around us, still gripping her spoon and pan. The little calf trots straight up to her, and Poppy bangs the pan again. The matriarch rumbles at the back of her throat and follows, right through Melissa’s low wooden fence and into the tiny front garden. I look up, up into beady eyes. I grab for the back of Poppy’s T-shirt as the matriarch reaches down with her trunk. Fearless Poppy holds out the wooden spoon.

The matriarch wraps her hairy trunk around it, and gently pulls it from Poppy’s grip. She whisks it up into the air, and it brings it down, smack, on the saucepan. She’s done it softly enough that Poppy doesn’t even drop it. Poppy just laughs. “Do it again!”

The matriarch drops the spoon and raises her trunk. The wind is blowing from the oil seed rape fields to the north of the town, and the air is heavy with the pollen. The calf fumbles his trunk around the dropped spoon. I pick it up and hold it out, and for a second his trunk brushes my hand. Then the martriarch rumbles again, turns back into the street and the stately procession moves on. All of our gardens are safe, but I’m sorry to see them go.

Later, I look up the migration path on Google Earth, cutting a swathe through our little plots and boxes of surburbia and up into the wild Scottish Highlands. I picture them there,  great dome heads and curved tusks a primal silhouette against the rising sun. I think about them a lot. And I’m hoping they come this way again next year.

Due to the vagaries of public transport, I ended up sitting on the DLR for an inordinately long time, on a wet, dark morning, on my way to being horribly late to work.
 
This is the result.

The Remains of the Clay (600 words)

The rain is still falling.  It has soaked through my heavy woollen coat at the shoulders.  A good coat, well-greased, but it can’t keep out the rain of this winter. 

My father made me take it.  “I’m old,” he said, “the rain’s never managed to kill me
yet.”  No, it wasn’t the rain, in the end.

He was a good man.  Stubborn as a brick, absent-minded, exasperating, but a good man.

His studies were meant for everyone’s good.  His clocks and engines, his toys and mechanisms, and finally, his monster.  “Think of it!”  he said.  “My darling girl, think!  No more bodies crippled by toil.  No more days and nights of brutal labour.  And think,” he said, waving his spatula and spattering the walls with wetness, “of what can be achieved if we have no need to work for our mere bread!”

I looked at the cat.  She had no need to labour, as she lived well on our leftovers, and caught mice only, it seems, out of habit.  I didn’t notice that she’d achieved a great deal, but she seemed happy enough.  Humans, on the other hand, are not so simple.  Even at fifteen, I knew that much.

Some of it was the winter.  A wet, thin harvest.  Sickness.  Pirate raids along the coast.  Young men back from yet another war, too crippled to earn but still hungry.  But some of it…some of it was just people. 

Father laboured over his beloved creation, and led it out into a dank grey morning with all the pride of a man whose child is learning to walk.  Its huge, blocky body and nearly featureless face had some of a child’s solemn concentration, though it was never going to laugh with delight if it triumphed, or weep if it fell.  In my own way, I had become strangely fond of the thing.  I stood out of the way, as was my habit, and watched, smiling.
 
“Look!”  Father called to the neighbours.  “Look, this will free you of all your toil and hardship!  Look!”

I don’t know who first cried ‘witchcraft!’ though I know that Spitty Lumer, whose hands I’d been fending off since I was ten, joined in early and loud.  Then they closed in.

One of Father’s few friends grabbed me and clapped a hand over my mouth, dragged me out of sight.  When it was over, nothing left but my father lying silent, with his eyes staring puzzled up into the rain, surrounded by thick grey shards, he let me go and told me to get away before they thought to look for me.  I suppose I should be grateful.

I managed to get to the house before it occurred to them to look there; I collected the cat and some of Father’s books.  I didn’t run; I found a cellar to hide in.

I came out at night.  Someone’s taken Father’s body, I don’t know where to, and it hardly matters now.  The rain hasn’t let up: what’s left of the golem has sunk to thick lumps and smears of clay.  I grub it up, cold and gritty-slick in my fingers.  Some of Father’s blood is mixed with it.  That will help.

It was very easy to smash, for all its size.  Father made it gentle, made it to serve these people, this rain-drenched pen of slinking cowards and murderers.

I have enough.  I wrap the clay in my skirts, to take back to the cellar where I hide, with my cat, and my candles, and my books.  I can make it again.

But Father was good.

I’m not.

I was without an idea in my head last night, rang Sarah in a panic, and she had the brilliant idea of reading song titles from a CD to me in the hope they would spark something.  Fortunately it was a CD by They Might Be Giants, thus providing plenty of weirdness.  I recommend the method. Kudos to anyone who can guess which TMBG title set this story off...

Dummy (990 words)

The shop has yellow cellophane in the windows to cut the bleaching sun; Ralph hasn’t seen that stuff for years, not since the ‘ladies’ boutique’ in his parents’ village, with its two headless mannequins in powder-blue twinset and pussycat-bow, cream rayon blouse.  He puts his hands against the glass and peers, but the only thing in the window is an old-fashioned ceramic doll’s head with a chipped mouth and its wig slipping; the window is closed off from the shop by louvers which are probably cream, but in the cellophane’s glow they are the colour of processed cheese.

In Ralph’s childhood, a new window display in that ladies’ boutique was an event for excited gossip. He’s made a career poking fun at that life.  He even had a sniff at a television slot, but he didn’t get it.  His agent says his material is becoming dated, and Ralph, resentfully, agrees; his village-green, women’s-institute references, a sophisticate’s jabs at the rural doom he’s escaped, are no longer enough. Ventriloquism, presumed dead, is undergoing a revival; and if he wants to ride the wave, he needs a surfboard.  He wants to ride it all the way to a studio and his own series, where he can sneer at his younger, softer, kid-friendly  rivals.  Idiots, the lot of them.

So he’s looking for a new dummy.  Blue-haired Winifred with her jam-making and unintentional double-entendres, cardiganned Clive with his slow-voiced, garden-shed pronouncements on human behaviour, are the past.  So is the man who made them; an old-school craftsman, who lived alone with his children of wood and cloth, and reviled humanity with a piercing cynicism that supplied Ralph with reams of material.  Sometimes, in the chill small hours when sleep is stubborn, Ralph thinks of him dead in his chair, surrounded by random limbs and stray eyes. 

Ralph could order a new dummy via the internet, but he wants to find a personality that works for him, and he can’t do that at a distance. It’s taken him months to find this place, and he’s beginning to think he should have ordered online after all.  He pushes his way in.

The door has a bell over it.  Its chime falls flatly into the yellow gloom. 

The shop is tiny, and incredibly crowded.  The walls are lined with shelves, and another set runs down the middle of the room.  The shelves are populated.  The dummies swing their legs like schoolchildren on chairs too high for them.  Unmoved by the weight of their silent stares, Ralph walks along the row.  Looking back at him are queens and clowns; slaves, burglars, tarts, tramps.  It’s a hell of a collection, but all these are too obvious.  He wants something more subtle.  “Hello?” he says.

He thinks he hears a faint shuffling from somewhere in the back, where, presumably, there is a counter, a proprietor, maybe even, if he’s very lucky, equipment modern enough to handle his debit card; but no proprietor appears.

Ralph ventures further into the shop, past bishops and witches and lions.  No.  There’s something, to his mind, faintly perverse about animal dummies.  Further in – the shop is bigger than he thought - it gets better.  There’s a city type in a bowler – but still too old-fashioned, he hasn’t seen a bowler in years.  A plump middle-aged woman, with a small hairy brown dog under her arm; he considers her for a moment, but though she doesn’t resemble his Winifred she’s of the same type.  He needs to get away from that.

Further back.  And here he starts to get excited.  These look like people.  A man with limp grey hair and a Big Issue.  A plump, weary policewoman who looks as though she’s spent her day dealing with drunks and domestics. “Well,” he says.  “Let’s have a look at you.”

There’s no resonance, as though silence has thickened the air somehow; his voice tumbles flat among the dummies. 

He reaches up – the shelf is a little high for safety, he thinks as the policewoman tumbles into his hands.  The weight makes him stagger; she’s almost as heavy as a two year old child.  The dummy next to her, a teenager with unpleasantly realistic acne, tilts forward, and before he can free a hand to stop it, hits the floor with a thud.  Heart racing, Ralph props the policewoman against the shelf and checks the fallen girl.  The teenager looks undamaged, but her heavily-made-up eyes stare accusingly. 

No proprietor rushes out to see who’s interfering with his goods.  “Hello?” Ralph says again, ready to prepare his defence, but there is no response.

He lifts up the teenager dummy to put her back on the shelf.  She’s even heavier than the policewoman, it’s ridiculous, no-one could work with something that heavy.  He grunts as he tries to haul her back to the shelf, but he can’t reach.

He feels silly.  He got the policewoman down, he should be able to get the teenager back up.

But the shelf is too high.  He can’t even reach it with the tips of his fingers.

“Uh?” he says.

He looks down at the policewoman.  Her head is tilted back, and her weary eyes look past him.

Rudely, he grabs her, but she’s impossible to lift.  Her jointed limbs flop.  Ralph looks up at the shelf that’s now high above his head.  He whimpers, and turns for the door; but his legs betray him, going loose and strange at the knees.  Sprawled on the dusty carpet, he reaches down with numbing fingers, and pulls up his trouser leg.

Somehow, he knew that the limb beneath would be plastic.

Ralph tries to crawl towards the door, but his arms won’t work.  He feels a strange, dark, emptying sensation; the small of his back is collapsing inwards, making a hollow.  Levers and hinges form and lock into place.  He hears something shuffling towards him.   I wonder if I’ll get on television, he thinks.   
 

Another idea that's been with me for a while. I'm hoping that using up the old ones is making room for lots of new ones.

Lame (825 words)

Of course she didn’t really believe him. But it was Friday night and she was a little bit pissed and he was the sexy new American manager at work and he looked so worn out. So she put her hand over his, had to be her left on his right apparently, and repeated “I willingly take this curse from you”.

He turned up at her little flat the next morning, with a pile of books under his arm. He talked about guilt, but a smile lurked around his lips and his steps were dancing.

“The curse can’t be taken back,” he said. “Only passed on, and you know how to do that. The thing travels slowly, on foot everywhere, and it follows your path. It never sleeps. It never stops. Never.”

“And what happens if it catches you?” she asked, laughing.

He shrugged. “Who wants to find out?”  He shoved the books at her. “Diaries. Some stuff on ritual magic and demonology. No help to me, but you never know. And here’s some atlases and maps. Get to know your oceanography; the Marianas Trench really slows it down.”

“So all you’ve got to do it stay ahead of it until you die. Can’t you think of something scarier?”

“I’d get going if I were you.”

“Whatever.” She shut the door on him. As a joke, or a hoax, it was totally lame.

She worked, she hung out with her mates and she ran on the treadmill at the gym. After a few months she felt itchy and jumpy. Her stomach got upset, and she’d be sitting in the pub and her heart would pound until she could hardly breathe. Stress, said her mates. It only made sense to take a holiday. She didn’t have much money, but Greece was cheap and she’d always wanted to go. The white ruins, bones of buildings against a delphinium sky. She brought back ouzo and cooked moussaka for her friends.
 
She felt better for a couple of months, and then it started again. This time she went to see the Northern Lights in Rejkyavik. The fluttering electric ribbons in the sky were worth the last of her savings. She listened avidly to folktales of elves and trolls and bought some anthologies to read at home.

When the feelings started again she saw her doctor, who referred her to a counsellor, who taught her relaxation techniques and meditation. She put a chain on her door and tried a protection spell from a book. But she still slept uneasily.

When she heard the thump-shuffle on the stairs in the night it was almost a relief. She cracked open the bedroom door and peeped. Something snorted, a blast of heat and stink. She became instinct and reflex. Her next thought was as she dangled and dropped from her bedroom window – shit I’ve left my purse. She didn’t notice the pain in her ankle as she stumbled into the road, shouting for a car to stop. She screamed once, in casualty when they reset the break. It left her with a shade of a limp.

She terminated her lease without ever going back to the flat; her parents collected her things. She had enough money for a ticket to Amsterdam. Everyone spoke English there anyway, there would be something she could do, and it was a place to start.

She didn’t talk about it until Tokyo, drinking beer in a little mirrored bar in a forest of neon, staring at her reflection and wondering who it was. A guy plonked himself down opposite, handed her another bottle and asked why so sad and she told him the whole thing, deadpan. Of course he didn’t really believe her. He reached out to put his left hand on her right. As he started to repeat the words, she jumped up, spilling beer and knocking over chairs as she bolted.

After that, she found she was lingering in places, long enough for the feelings to get strong. She came back to London, but her old friends bored her. When she wasn’t working, she wandered the city.

She heard the sound again on a dense, foggy night on the Embankment with the cold mud smell of the Thames in the air and the glowing balls of the Victorian lights hovering in the mist. Thump-shuffle. A towering shape shambled in the fog. She curled her hands into fists in her pockets and forced herself to stand fast. It dragged one crippled leg as it came. Silver droplets sparkled on its brindled shaggy fur. Two pairs of horns curled from a dog-like head, blocky and blunt like a Rottweiler’s. She looked into its bronze eyes, and they were a thousand years weary.

It never sleeps, she thought. It never stops. I doubt it chose this.

The demon held her gaze, dipped its head in an odd little gesture, but it still came on. She nodded back, then she ran.

I was going to write something vaguely festive, but I'm feeling a little Christmassed out, so instead I used one of the writing exercises suggested this month (well, last month now) and went to http://www.wefeelfine.org/

The title was about the third quote to come up. 

I feel food about all of it so far…(357 words)

When he left I was burnt toast.  Scalded, smoking, scraped raw, then dumped in the bin with the used teabags.  Damp.  Squashy.  Rubbish.  Nothing but crumbs and seepings.

In self-defence, or sheer retreat, I turned into a bag of ice.  Chunks of nothing, kept in the back of the freezer, unable to thaw out, waiting for the special occasion when I would be able to be something again, waiting for someone to throw a party and fling me back into life.

Eventually I stopped waiting for the party and threw myself into the drink.  It thawed me out, a little, but it wasn’t champagne, it was shampagne, a false celebration, empty bubbles.  And afterwards, dregs, urine-yellow in the morning light.

I started trying to go out again, but I was unleavened bread, flat, saltless, I bored even myself.  I added a little salt, and became olives.  Sharper, a little more interesting, but too bitter for many.  Not to everyone’s taste.

Not to mine, it turned out.  Cynicism ceases to be interesting once it’s become a habit; at that point it’s just spreading the misery.  I added some cheese, mellowed out a little.  Amazing what stupid music can do for your emotional state.  When I found myself dancing around the living room perfectly sober but for the endorphins, I realised perhaps I was on the way to recovery. 

Then I got a little sugar. Oh, boy, does a girl benefit from some sugar.  That rush, that sense of self indulgence. But after the first bites there was nothing under it, it was candyfloss, and so was I; all colour and surface, no substance. 

Going, perhaps too far the other way, I became potatoes; solid, earthy, substantial.  Nourishing but plain.

But I kept moving.  I became crisp at times, a little bit tart; a Granny Smith. Goes surprisingly well with cheese, I found.  Threw in a few olives.  Bread; but leavened, and pleasant enough when there’s something with it.  Now and again a little sugar, now and again a little champagne.  Life’s about balance, and it helps if you remember to rescue your own toast before it gets burned.