The Lego catalogue has a rather splendid troll warship, but everywhere the trolls are mentioned in the description, they are "evil trolls". Seems a bit unfair to slap that label on an entire mythical race just because you only hear about the club-happy ones.
Fantasy Date (718 words)
Remember, you have three minutes for each date. I’ll ring the bell when your time is up. Ladies and gentlemen, take your seats. #
You’ve got to be kidding me. You’re a troll. What are you doing here?
I crossed the border some time ago to -
I mean here in this room.
The invitation was made to all the fey in London. We too are part of the fey.
Yeah, the big, green tusky part.
I have heard tell of the courtliness of elves. It is justly famed.
Do you know the hot chick on the next table? She looks like my type.
Yes. Jenny took the fancy of the King, once. She is also green, all the way to her teeth. She would eat you for breakfast.
Heh. If she was lucky. I might even stick around for breakfast with that one.
Do you like to read?
What?
We have three minutes. We may as well pass the time in conversation.
I don’t know. I don’t really... Hey, are you vetting me?
I have not spoken to another fey in some time. You do not wish to talk?
Have you seen me? What else do you need to know?
Sigh. What brand of shampoo do you use?
#
Ladies keep your places. Gentlemen, move one table widdershins. #
I’ve never done this before.
Your first time? I will do my best to help you enjoy it.
I’m an ogre. You can probably tell. Heard you trolls can see straight through a glamour.
That is tr –
You won’t get any nonsense from me. I’ll come straight out with it. So, what are you doing over here?
I came to get away –
On holiday eh? I’m here on business myself. Import and export. I spend one month here, one month back home. I’ve got a big castle out in the Wildwood, acres of land, plenty of servants. I’m looking for a woman to share it all with me, someone I can spoil. All the dresses and shoes and shopping you want, never have to lift a finger. Got to be better than lurking around under a damp old bridge.
I live in Balham. In a studio fla–
Got any hobbies? I like to run. Won the seven leagues race five years in a row now, got the medals to prove it. A healthy lass like you doesn’t want a slob, eh?
I like origam–
Healthy body makes for a healthy mind. It’s all about the regimen. Early to rise, and a good diet. None of that fee fi fo nonsense with the state of humans these days. Far too much fast food, full of saturated fat. What you want is lean organic chicken breast, plenty of fruit and veg. Now, what else do you need to know about me?
I am sure you will tell me. There is nothing like good conversat– #
Gentlemen, move on. #
Well met, my Lady.
Well met, sir phooka. Is not the city too tame a place for you?
I have never favoured freezing my assets on a lonely mountain top. I heard there were many fey in the city. I came here seeking – something.
I believe we have met before. You wore a different form then.
I did not think you would remember.
I would not forget such a service. The King will bed whom he wishes and I did not wish to be dosed in my sleep with tincture of pansy. Your warning gave me a choice. I chose to come here.
You would have been in love, and happy.
Deliriously so, I believe. Dose an indifferent other and he is your slave. Dose yourself and burn with passion for your comfortable, dull husband. An instant remedy to all problems of the heart. I wonder why I do not trust it.
It is no reflection on your charms to say that the King’s butterfly fancy has flitted elsewhere. So why do you stay?
Sushi.
I do not understand.
It is raw fish, prepared in the Eastern style. Also, action movies, with many explosions. Broadband connection. The Tate Modern. And the city itself. It has its own life and character. There is much to explore.
I look forward to exploring the secrets and hidden places.
But not until our third date.
This started out as one idea, about all the people who don't want to go to work in the morning getting their wish, and being stuck forever in a frozen commuter hell. But it changed on me. Sometimes things work better when they do that.
Headlines (940 words)
Mid afternoon. Gunshots, screams; an explosion, not nearly distant enough.
I’m pissed. Dulls the edges. Reduces the concentration. Not that it helps – maybe if the whole world got pissed, stayed that way for a week...
When did it start? No-one knows, any more than you can pinpoint the first ever case of anorexia or AIDS. Perhaps there was a time when we could have stopped it; but by the time we realizedit was happening at all, it was far too late.
See, when we began to be human, we were scattered tribes, all with different ideas about the way the world worked. A storm darkened the sky and thunder rolled; was it the roar of a jaguar, the beating of giant wings, the breaking of the jug that holds the rain? They believed, but they believed different things.
But we bred (boy, did we breed) and made cities, and began to live in big, big groups. Still there’s a wide range of ideas. So even if you've got, say, a million people all going, "the world is flat...." it won’t be. Something, some essential force, keeps it round.
The rise of literacy. All very civilised, I'm sure…but it was another step. Eventually, there’s the rise of electronic media, and we were half-way to fucked. English became a universal language. Even the French gave in – how I wish those arrogant bastards had held out. It might just have saved us. But now, you don't even need the pathetic level of literacy required to send a text message. If you can say it, pretty much everyone can understand it. Charities getting cheap computers to the third world. Universal communication, baby. Deadly.
There are lots of theories; I’ve heard them even though I don’t watch television or go on the net any more. Or talk to anyone. But you can’t avoid the information. That’s what did for us. Some think it was the population hitting some kind of critical mass; some claim it’s the Apocalypse – or they did. Last thing I saw on the news was that newsreader. He looked like guilt had him by the guts and was strangling his sleep with them. The arsehole on the discussion panel starts raving about how it’s the end times, and just what we deserve – and the newsreader up and shoots him, right there.
The two politicians and the sociologist on the panel just blinked the blood out of their eyes, and then they applauded. Not that it helped, but hell, all of us felt a little better for maybe five minutes. Because things were bad enough without the Four Horsemen joining the frigging party. The newsreader shot himself, too.
Plenty of people blamed them; the media, I mean. The journalists, the gatherers, and those who just passed it on. But I blame us too, because we bought it. We guzzled up those screaming headlines and the shocked reverent tones of the pundits. I read somewhere that we're hardwired to respond to threat, it's in the old lizard hindbrain; if we see something that yells danger we have to pay attention. But did we have to believe it? Did we really have to buy it all?
I think the thing that finally did it was the switch to World Time. It was supposed to save us from sliding further into recession – don’t ask me, I don’t believe economists really knew how the economy worked even before everything went to hell. But that was the Big Idea, that was going to save the world. World Time. All the markets operating at the same time, not a minute of financial grubbery wasted. Which meant, for the first time ever, pretty much everyone was awake at the same time. Thinking at the same time. Hearing stuff at the same time.
Believing all the shit we got fed.
We hit critical mass about a year ago. Consensus reality, they call it. Civilisation’s hanging on, somehow – though some parts of the world are worse than others. There’s a great smoking hole where Utah used to be.
Everywhere single mothers lie in the streets, babies crawling from them – two or three in an hour, sometimes. The babies grow up right before your eyes into feral, hooded teenagers. Still dripping with birth-blood, they develop clothes and knives, band into packs, and start attacking passers-by. And then there’s the terrorists. You can’t go out in the street without some screaming bearded guy with a rucksack appearing from nowhere, shrieking about Jihad and then exploding. They all look identical, of course. Paedophiles – always solitary, slightly grubby men in ancient brown coats, with shifty eyes and dirty fingernails – whisper in alleyways, offering sweets and puppy dogs. I mean, there’s like ten of them in my street.
There’s only one thing that offers me hope, if that’s the word. Before the shit hit the fan, there were rumours of a pandemic. A virus that would wipe out a huge section of the population. The rumours kind of got swamped in all the other stuff.
But if enough people believe it…well, you see where I’m going with this. If we can only make it true for long enough, there won’t be enough of us left for the consensus to work any more. This fucked-up reality we’ve built will fall apart.
It does mean millions will die. Possibly including me. Cynicism’s no defence, as I’ve discovered. But it might just be the saving of us.
All the information networks, somehow, they’re still there – maybe because we believe in them so much. So terribly much.
I’m going on the net now. I’m going to start a rumour.
The basic idea for this has been with me for a long time. I had a whim to write something seasonal, and grey skies and bare trees worked for this story. Despite the title, it's not very festive.
A Gift (695 words)
Brinn straightened slowly from chopping firewood, and rubbed the small of her back. The bare black thorn bushes around her garden scratched at the watery yellow and grey sky. A crow scudded overhead. Near dark. Time for someone to come up from the village if they wanted to scurry back to the the herd before it was full night. Sure enough, the bell at the gate clanged.
She rubbed her fingers together. Never could get warm, this late in the year. Ha! This late in life. The old injury on her ear throbbed in the wind. She hoped they’d left something spicy tonight, something with plenty of fire in it, plenty of meat. The cold had sunk into her bones in a way that spelled danger. She loped round the winding path to the gate, and then stopped. Whoever had brought the food was still there.
They were supposed to leave it and go. It had to be one of the little ones, on a dare or a game. Sometimes they just looked. Sometimes they threw stones. It made sense. Their parents threw stones if she got too close to the village. Sometimes they wanted a story. One day, one of them would ask the right question.
Brinn crept a little further, crouched painfully. A scrawny boy, a knife in his belt. Old enough to be fancying himself a man. Even now, she could see the way to be on him and snap his neck before his knife cleared its sheath. The beautiful economy of movement, the angles, the pressure needed. What he’d expect her to do, what she’d make him expect, and how she’d strike him all unfurled before her, with the clarity of a fine engraving. She knew too, how to pull the fire up from her depths to power the actions, even with these old bones. She’d always known. It was a gift. But soon she would be too weak, she knew that too.
“I want some gloves,” Brinn shouted, making the boy jump. “Some other things to keep me warm. Tell them that.” He backed away a few steps as she approached. She grabbed the pot left on the shelf by the gate, took the lid off and sniffed the steam.
“You’re old,” the boy blurted. “But they said you killed the raiders only three years ago.”
Brinn shrugged. She didn’t need or want conversation. But she had to see if he’d ask the question. She unlocked the gate and went into her cabin with the casserole. She could hear the boy shuffling his feet at the gate. Brinn ate and waited. After a while, he came in.
”You’re not even that big,” said the boy. “They said you tore them up with your hands.”
“Yes.” Ah, that’s when she’d last been warm. The fire blazing through her. The blood singing from their torn flesh, washing her arms and face in its heat. The raiders would come back. They always came back. And she would be too weak.
“They said you killed Rachel Turner’s uncle. That’s why you live up here.”
“Yes.” The first time. A blazing June day, and she had been chilled to her bones. Elfric Turner leaning against a tree, laughing with his head thrown back. The fierce joy as she beat his skull against the bark until it cracked. So easy then, so much strength. They’d branded her and sent her up to this cabin with the daily offering. When the old man shuffled to the gate, she’d asked the right question. After that, for Brinn, the raiders didn’t come often enough.
“I suppose you want to know why I did it,” said Brinn. “Or how.”
“They say you’ve got a demon.”
“Ha! They like to think that. Some of them could do it. Maybe even you.”
The boy smiled. “I want to know - what did it feel like?”
Before the boy knew it Brinn had him pinned to the wall by the neck. She ripped a small chunk from his earlobe with her teeth. His eyes were wide, but not with terror. She tipped her head back to expose her throat.
“Find out,” she said.
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